The Postcolonial Sublime: the Politics of Excess

from Kant to Rushdie

Brett Nicholls
BA (Hons) Murdoch University

This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Murdoch University
1999

i
I declare that this thesis is my own account of my research and contains as its main
content work which has not previously been submitted for a degree at any tertiary
education institution.

Brett Nicholls

ii
 Abstract

This thesis shows how the discourse of the postcolonial disrupts the processes of

Enlightenment Reason. In attempting to establish the authority and the dynamism of

reason, the Idealism of Kant and Hegel sets forth the notion that reason, as a faculty of

mind, is forged in and through its mastery over the conscious excesses that characterise

the sublime. The necessity of the sublime in the process that established the authority of

reason, signals that reason is at once the master of its conscious domain, and yet

vulnerable, since its mastery is established in the face of the possibility of its collapse.

The possibility of reason’s collapse is a crucial moment in the discourse of the

postcolonial. I would wish to employ the term, ‘the postcolonial sublime’, to account

for the political nuances of this moment.

I argue that the discourse of the postcolonial cannot be understood in terms of

the postmodern sublime, as read by Lyotard. In reading Kant, Lyotard utilises the

sublime as a site of radical indeterminacy that opens up the “possibility of possibility”

in itself. His work, as a consequence, fails to account for the authority of reason. In

the discourse of the postcolonial, the sublime (which is utilised to establish reason’s

authority) is taken up as a conservative form. The adoption of the sublime in its

conservative form is in response to a colonial desire for a global authority based upon

the principles of reason. For the discourse of the postcolonial, the sublime thus emerges

as a critical site upon which the authority of reason is written. To disrupt this authority

it is necessary, therefore, to unleash the sublime, its unpresentable excesses, from the

shackles of reason’s processes. This strategy of disruption is what is at stake in the

postcolonial sublime.

I will examine reason’s processes by taking up the Kantian sublime, and

situating it in relation to key postcolonial figures such as Fanon, Bhabha, and Rushdie.
iii
The politics of these figures is marked in its insistence upon occupying structures of

conservative authority in order to exploit reason’s vulnerable moments, to disrupt, to

transform the terms of such structures. The ‘postcolonial sublime’ thus emerges as a

critical term that marks this process of occupation as one in which the sublime is

wrested from its conservative trajectory, and utilised to disrupt colonial desire. The

postcolonial sublime interrupts a postmodern politics that fails to adequately account for

reason’s processes, and proposes that a more effective political strategy can begin when

reason is taken up in terms of the dynamic processes that are crucial for its authoritative

construction. In connecting the sublime to the postcolonial, the thesis contributes to

critical discussions concerning the postcolonial object (the hegemony of Western

reason), and provides a useful frame for understanding the strategies that the discourse

of the postcolonial employs in order to exploit the instability that lies at the core of

reason’s processes.

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 Table of Contents

ABSTRACT ______________________________________________________________________ III

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ___________________________________________________________ VII

PREFACE: READING THE POSTCOLONIAL SUBLIME _____________________________ VIII

TITLE __________________________________________________________________________ VIII
OBJECT __________________________________________________________________________ IX
CONTEXT ________________________________________________________________________ IX
PRETEXT _________________________________________________________________________ XI
THIS THESIS ______________________________________________________________________ XI
AUTHOR ________________________________________________________________________ XIV
NOTES _________________________________________________________________________ XIV
CHAPTER ONE: THEORISING THE POSTCOLONIAL SUBLIME________________________ 1
POSTCOLONIAL DISPUTES ____________________________________________________________ 4
Subaltern Studies _______________________________________________________________ 11
Edward Said ___________________________________________________________________ 13
Homi Bhabha __________________________________________________________________ 15
Frantz Fanon __________________________________________________________________ 17
THE DISCOURSE OF THE POSTCOLONIAL ________________________________________________ 18
LOCATING THE POSTCOLONIAL SUBLIME _______________________________________________ 24
UNSETTLING KANT ________________________________________________________________ 31
NOTES __________________________________________________________________________ 45
CHAPTER TWO: KANT, THE SUBLIME, AND THE RULE OF REASON _________________ 53
THE EXCESSES OF THE KANTIAN SELF __________________________________________________ 59
THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN: CRITIQUE OF JUDGEMENT _____________________________________ 71
SUBLIME CONTEXTS: THE BRITISH TRADITION ___________________________________________ 78
Three Sublimes: Empirical, Mystical, Rational ________________________________________ 82
Sublime Art and Culture __________________________________________________________ 85
THE KANTIAN SUBLIME _____________________________________________________________ 92
CONCLUSION: THE COLONIAL SUBLIME ________________________________________________ 98
NOTES _________________________________________________________________________ 105
CHAPTER THREE: FANON AND THE PROBLEM OF HEGEL’S MASTER AND SLAVE __ 113
HEGEL AND KANT ________________________________________________________________ 115
FANON IN FRANCE ________________________________________________________________ 125
HEGEL’S MASTER AND SLAVE _______________________________________________________ 132
FANON AND HEGEL _______________________________________________________________ 139
NIETZSCHE’S MASTER AND SLAVE ___________________________________________________ 148
FANON AND THE DISCOURSE OF THE SUBLIME ___________________________________________ 154
CONCLUSION: THE SUBLIME POSTCOLONIAL BODY ______________________________________ 163
NOTES _________________________________________________________________________ 168
CHAPTER FOUR: INTERROGATING THE LYOTARDIAN SUBLIME __________________ 174
LYOTARD AND KANT ______________________________________________________________ 176
ART: THE AVANT-GARDE AS SUBLIME EVENT __________________________________________ 180
POLITICS: THE DIFFEREND __________________________________________________________ 187
CONCLUSION: LYOTARD AND THE DISCOURSE OF THE POSTCOLONIAL ________________________ 203
NOTES _________________________________________________________________________ 209
CHAPTER FIVE: HOMI BHABHA’S THE LOCATION OF CULTURE ____________________ 215
BHABHA, FANON AND HEGEL _______________________________________________________ 217
THE POSTMODERN QUESTION _______________________________________________________ 220
THE TIME OF POLITICS _____________________________________________________________ 225
BHABHA’S INFRASTRUCTURES _______________________________________________________ 230
CONCLUSION: BHABHA AND THE POSTCOLONIAL SUBLIME _________________________________ 249
NOTES _________________________________________________________________________ 260

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CHAPTER SIX: RUSHDIE’S POLITICS OF EXCESS __________________________________ 265
RUSHDIECRITICISM ________________________________________________________________ 266
AHMAD AND THE POLITICS OF EXCESS ________________________________________________ 274
MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN AS ESSAY ON THE POSTCOLONIAL SUBLIME _________________________ 283
A Politics of the Spittoon ________________________________________________________ 290
Contaminations, Leakages, Negotiations ____________________________________________ 301
Failures ______________________________________________________________________ 306
Connections, Border Crossings, Possibilities ________________________________________ 310
CONCLUSION: RUSHDIE’S ART _______________________________________________________ 320
NOTES _________________________________________________________________________ 329
CONCLUSION ____________________________________________________________________ 337
NOTES _________________________________________________________________________ 341
BIBLIOGRAPHY _________________________________________________________________ 342

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 Acknowledgments

The debts incurred in the writing of this thesis are immense. Vijay Mishra’s belief in
me, and intellectual direction made this project possible. Horst Ruthrof provided the
inspiration to read Lyotard, and engaged me in useful discussions concerning his work.
Among others who engaged me in the discussions to which the thesis is addressed are
David Wellbourne-Wood, Debbie Rodan, Rama Venkataswarmy, Abdollah Zahiri, Lee
Kinsella, and Stephanie Donald. I am particularly indebted to my friend and colleague,
Vijay Devadas, with whom I have debated throughout my candidature. The ideas of
this thesis have been forged in productive discussions with him. I am grateful to the
staff at the Rare Book Archive at the University of Western Australia for their
assistance in locating eighteenth-century texts.

My heartfelt thanks to Jane, who has endured the pain and pleasure of thesis writing
with me. And many thanks to Josh, Zach, and Ashleigh. Your complete disregard for
the sanctity of scholarly work kept me sane.

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 Preface

Reading the Postcolonial Sublime

... world history appears to me a sublime object. The world, as an historical subject

matter, is basically nothing but the conflict of natural forces among themselves and with

man’s freedom; history reports to us the outcome of this battle.1

Title

In contrast to the Kantian sublime, which establishes the authority of reason, the

postcolonial sublime is the unpresentable excess that remains after reason’s unifying

teleology has done its work. To establish the authority of reason, the Idealism of Kant

(and Hegel) is built upon the notion that reason, as a faculty of mind, is forged in and

through its mastery over the conscious excesses that characterise the sublime. The

necessity of the sublime in the process that established the authority of reason, signals

that reason is at once the master of its conscious domain, and yet vulnerable, since its

mastery is established in the face of the possibility of its collapse. There always already

remains in the discourse of reason’s processes an unaccounted for excess that opens up

the possibility for a politics of disruption and contamination. This extra excess opens

up the possibility of the postcolonial sublime.

To connect the trope of the sublime to the term postcolonial is to go to work

upon both the sublime and the postcolonial, to read one against the other. The

postcolonial cannot ‘explain’ the sublime as the sublime cannot ‘explain’ the

postcolonial. The thesis is not concerned with what is postcolonial about the sublime, if

such is possible, but with what the postcolonial does to/with the sublime. The title of

the thesis suggests that the sublime can be taken up in a different form, or more

viii
accurately, the Kantian sublime can be pushed beyond the conservative limits that Kant

established.

Object

The sublime is the object and the subject of the discourse of the postcolonial.

The discourse of the postcolonial takes the Kantian sublime as a conservative object and

pushes it to extremes. Whilst the sublime in Kant establishes reason’s authority, it also

marks the excessiveness of consciousness, the experiential plethora upon which reason

goes to work. The Kantian sublime thus opens up a vulnerability, a possibility, a

question mark: what if reason fails to bring unity to the experiential manifold? The

postcolonial sublime reveals what Idealism could not countenance: this failure is an

always already condition of reason.

Context

I write in the shadow of the vastness of postcolonial literature and theory. My

aim is to bring a philosophical concern to this vast field. If it is the case, as John

Thieme puts it, that postcolonial literatures “exist at the interface of different literary

and cultural traditions” which are “hybridized; and ... ultimately trans-cultural”, I would

wish to ask: how might we understand his assertion that such a cultural

condition/location opens up “the possibility of dismantling previously maintained,

hierarchized notions of centrality”?2 In other words, how might the political effects of

such a dismantling be understood? For Thieme and the increasing volumes of

collections of postcolonial literary theory, postcolonial literatures develop in the shadow

of empire, and through a process of intermixing and hybridisation transform the English

canon, and the English language.3 I do not wish to take issue with this assertion upon

the surface. Rather, I would wish to draw out the nuances, the scandalous nature of the

transformation of the English canon. What is lacking in postcolonialist accounts of the

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process of hybridisation, is that sense of transgression, the pungent political edge that

marks the hybrid in the context of (neo)colonialist sensibilities. This thesis seeks to

chart this political edge.

As publications of collections of postcolonial literature and critical theory

continue unabated,4 and signal what Christian Moraru calls “the urgency” of continual

“retooling in the wake of [the] socio-cultural and political redeployments of [the] late

twentieth-century”,5 this thesis can be understood as a gesture toward the (colonial)

moment to which this flurry of publication returns. Such a return is paradoxical.

Ultimately the discourse of the postcolonial looks forward by looking back. Not

convinced that colonialism is dead and buried, it seeks out its vestiges, its ghostly

manifestation in the ‘socio-cultural and political redeployments of the late twentieth-

century’.

In a political climate that is becoming increasingly conservative, the thesis takes

up the central tenets of Idealism as a metaphor for the structure of contemporary politics

in the West. Such tenets are the object of Žižek’s indictment of the dominant discourse

of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism, Žižek writes, is an “ideal form of ideology”.

Whilst it seeks to promote difference and individual interest, it actually becomes the

‘new’ master narrative through which the myth of nation is imagined. In other words,

multiculturalism upon the surface promotes the racial and cultural particular, and

suggests that cultural ‘roots’ are valid, but is a strategy that subordinates the particular

under the universal. Multiculturalism, Žižek tells us, “conceals the fact that the subject

is already thoroughly ‘rootless’, that his true position is the void of universality”. As a

strategy of concealment, multiculturalism thus diverts attention away from the myth of

nation and its Capitalist logic, and focuses upon the issue of cultural difference. As a

consequence, Žižek explains, “the basic homogeneity of the capitalist system remains

intact”.6

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 If we follow Žižek, it is the case that contemporary conservative politics replays

what is a central problem for Idealism: the possibility of subordinating the particular

under the universal. The postcolonial sublime takes up this conservatism, the claim to

have united the particular as excess under the banner of the universal myth of nation,

and reveals the impossibility of this process. As framed by the thesis, the discourse of

the postcolonial is thus endowed with a pungent political edge, one that disrupts,

contaminates and alters the structure of Western hegemony.

Pretext

The thesis is the product of an oscillation between two crucial thoughts:

Lyotard’s theory of differend and Homi Bhabha’s much used notion of hybridity. In the

context that I have imagined, each is concerned with the politics of excess, the too much

cultural meaning that resists being subordinated to a single rule. They question the

terms in which universalist systems are drawn up. My original plan was to connect

Lyotard’s differend with Bhabha’s hybridity, to utilise one in order to explain the other.

But I found that Lyotard and Bhabha could not be reduced to the order of the same. I

was thus forced to consider each in his own terms in the context of what I perceive is

the increasing momentum of a conservative politics in the West. In this thesis I take up

Bhabha’s contaminations as opposed to the singularity of Lyotard’s phrase events. The

oscillation between them, however, remains far from settled.

This Thesis

The thesis will examine the philosophical underpinning of Western hegemony

by taking up the Kantian sublime and its role in establishing the authority of reason.

And, in situating the Kantian sublime in relation to key postcolonial figures such as

Fanon, Bhabha, and Rushdie, the thesis will chart the political pungency of the

discourse of the postcolonial. What is crucial is that these key postcolonial figures

xi
occupy structures of conservative authority to exploit reason’s vulnerable moments.

They thus disrupt and transform the terms of such structures.

Structured as a kind of drift, chapter one explores the architecture of the

discourse of the postcolonial, and establishes a link between its architecture and the

discourse of the sublime. By drawing upon Christian Moraru’s ‘refiguration’ of

postcoloniality, I argue that the discourse of the postcolonial opens up an

incomprehensible and disturbing space within the authority of the metropolitan centre.

Chapter two begins the task of mapping the postcolonial sublime. I undertake a

reading of Kant’s architectonic system in terms of the location of the sublime within it,

and connect the nuances of the Kantian sublime to the European desire for global

centrality. The problematic that inhabits Kant coincides with this desire for centrality.

Through an engagement with Gordon Bennett’s painting, I argue that the European

desire for centrality is the object of postcolonial disruption, and (paradoxically) that the

processes utilised to establish this centrality also provides the basis for such disruption.

Chapter three outlines the first stage of the terms of such a postcolonial critique.

I take up Hegel’s dissatisfaction with Kantian thought, in order to further establish the

European desire for centrality, and then turn to Fanon’s complex engagement with

Hegel as an important instance of the postcolonial sublime. I show that in Hegel’s

critique of Kant, and the philosophical system that he constructs, there emerges a

vulnerability that Fanon exploits. The Kantian sublime with its noble intentions is

subverted by a base and despised sublimity, the black body.

Having located Fanon’s critical position in relation to Idealism, the thesis takes a

short detour in Chapter four to consider the postmodern sublime as set forth by Lyotard.

This detour serves as a counter-point in my discussion concerning the postcolonial

sublime. I argue that the discourse of the postcolonial cannot be understood in terms of

the postmodern sublime, as read by Lyotard. In reading Kant, Lyotard utilises the

xii
sublime as a site of radical indeterminacy that opens up the “possibility of possibility”

in itself. His work, as a consequence, fails to account for the authority of reason.

Chapter five turns back to the postcolonial sublime. I take up the work of Homi

Bhabha critically in order to open up the important location of the postcolonial sublime

within it. Bhabha’s discursive concerns seek to disrupt the authority of reason by

unleashing the sublime from its shackles. In tracing Bhabha’s infrastructures I show

how a politics of excess plays a crucial role in the disruptive capacity of the

postcolonial. I also defend Bhabha’s discursive concerns against the charge of

pantextualism. In connecting Bhabha to the material excesses in Fanon, my contention

is that his work seeks to open up a transgressive material desire in the discursive

domain.

Finally the thesis turns to a lengthy exploration of Salman Rushdie’s seminal

work, Midnight’s Children, and the critical concerns that have been drawn up around

his work generally. I outline what I consider to be an important assumption concerning

the social framing of Rushdie’s literature. ‘Rushdiecriticism’ is caught in a Romantic

literary model, that either denounces or celebrates his work on the basis of its

complicity in the myth of a heroic literature. I contend that his work resists at every turn

the romantic model that dominates Rushdiecriticism. I then turn to Aijaz Ahmad’s

denouncement of Rushdie as an irresponsible postmodern, as a way ‘into’ Rushdie’s

texts. We find in Ahmad’s propensity for a systematic approach a leakage, a moment of

excess that exemplifies, perfectly, the strategies employed in Rushdie’s sublime

resistance to neat categorisation. In response to Ahmad I then undertake a reading of

Midnight’s Children in order to chart the political possibilities that Rushdie opens up.

Finally the chapter takes up Rushdie as artist, and with his own statements concerning

the public necessity of the artist in mind, I theorise his work and its disturbances in

terms of what I have called the postcolonial sublime.

xiii
Author

The author is not a philosopher. I don’t pretend to be able to explain the

discourse of the postcolonial. It is precisely the inexplicability of the postcolonial that

promotes that yet-to-be-decided feeling that has led me to the sublime. The thesis

represents an attempt to open up the feeling of incompleteness as a productive site. In

terms of my white masculine cultural history — its undeniable conservative inscriptions

— incompleteness has been considered an enemy that urgently needs to be done away

with. The thesis seeks to interrupt the structures of the necessity of this expulsion, in

order to seize its impossibility as an affirmative moment.

Notes

1
Friedrich von Schiller, On the Sublime, trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: Frederick
Ungar Publishing, 1966), 206-207.
2
John Thieme, ed. The Arnold Anthology of Post-colonial Literatures in English
(London: Arnold, 1996), 4.
3
For a provocative articulation of this point, see Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and
Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995),
7.
4
See for instance Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Post-colonial Theory, India,
and the Mystic (London: Routledge, 1999); Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism
(London: Routledge, 1998); Dennis Walder, Post-colonial Literatures in English:
History, Language, Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); Chris Bongie, Islands and
Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literatures (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1988); Bruce King, ed. New National and Post-colonial Literatures:
An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Susan Bassett, Harish
Trivedi, ed. Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 1998).
5
Christian Moraru, “Refiguring the Postcolonial: The Transnational Challenges”, Ariel:
A Review of International English Literature, vol. 28, no. 4 (1997), 171.
6
Slavoj Žižek, “Multiculturalism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism”,
New left Review, 225 (1997), 44, 46.

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 Chapter One

Theorising the Postcolonial Sublime

With what appears to be many entrances and exits, the term ‘postcolonial’ can

be considered as an uncanny presence on the contemporary critical scene. To enter this

critical terrain is to enter a labyrinthine architecture with endless corridors and

staircases, seemingly infinite rooms, and cracked leaky walls. As Omar in Rushdie’s

Shakil mansion found the mansion’s seeming infiniteness terrifying — the organisation

of its contents did not seem to follow established rules and principles — in many ways

‘postcolonial’ remains elusive and unfamiliar. Indeed one walks into this critical terrain

upon an old worn carpet that has been trodden upon by a disparate host of theorists,

writers and activists. And with the haunting sounds of the ghosts of the colonial past,

the theorist of the postcolonial must struggle in self-conscious spaces that are uncertain,

indeterminate, and transgressive.

This accent upon unfamiliarity suggests that the referents of ‘postcolonial’ —

the condition of postcoloniality, the political strategy of postcolonialism, and the

postcolonial self (to tentatively name a few) — remain obscure. As Stephen Slemon

astutely puts it, postcolonialism “de-scribes a remarkably heterogeneous set of subject

positions, professional fields, and critical enterprises”. The term evokes a sense of

confusion, since it has been utilised, Slemon continues,

as a way of ordering a critique of totalising forms of Western historicism; as a

portmanteau term for a re-tooled notion of ‘class,’ as a subset of both

postmodernism and post-structuralism … as the name for a condition of nativist

longing in post-independence national groupings; as a cultural marker of non-

1
 residency for a third-world intellectual cadre; as the inevitable underside of a

fractured and ambivalent discourse of colonialist power; as an oppositional form

of ‘reading practice’.1

Thus well worn questions concerning the legitimacy of critical discussions that utilise

the term, and the ‘reality’ of its referents, always already inhabit such undertakings.

The term and its referents are seemingly always in dispute. This is why a critical self-

consciousness always already accompanies the use of this term.

Moreover, it is also the case that any employment of ‘postcolonial’ is at once

bound up in its specificities, as it is immediately employed, and also a part of much

broader theoretical discussions. It is perhaps a condition of contemporary theory that to

write is not only to deal with specificities, it is to be drawn into much larger structures

of similarity and difference. Contemporary theory obeys the logic of what T. S. Eliot

called “tradition”. “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone”, Eliot

declares, “you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead”.2 We can

add the living too. From this compulsion to contrast and compare there seems to be no

escape.

The difficulty that I have suggested marks the term can also be attributed to the

term’s relative newness on the critical scene. And without a master text (no

‘Architext’), though clearly there are key figures, ‘postcolonial’ as a critical term

appears as a recent arrival upon what is in many respects a well established critical

terrain: the interrogations of Idealism and Humanism that began in the works of Marx,

Freud, and Nietzsche. For many critics this ‘lateness’ and lack of a coherent centre is a

sign of critical incompleteness, even naivety. Indeed, as Jasper Goss, lending some

sagacity to the term, puts it, “postcolonial analysis require[s] a thorough reworking

before postcolonialism can be used for radical and progressive projects”. The basis for

2
this assertion lies less with political motivation than with the “theoretical vagaries”, that,

as consequence of this overly full signifier, give rise to a “lack of clarity”.3 In the wake

of such critiques ‘postcolonial’ can be read as an eager but naive migrant, who has

struggled to blend into the adopted landscape.

But I would suggest that ‘postcolonial’, precisely because it is such an unsettled

term, can be characterised in a much more productive manner. It seems to me that the

discussions that it has provoked, and continues to provoke, signal that crucial issues

concerning the social and political formations of the late Twentieth Century are being

productively contested. Edward Said’s politically attuned description of Subaltern

Studies serves as an apt exemplar of such productive disputes. He writes:

[Subaltern Studies] is in fact a hybrid, partaking jointly of European and Western

streams and of native Asian, Caribbean, Latin American, or African strands.

None of the Subaltern Studies scholars is anything less than a critical student of

Karl Marx, for example, and all of them have been influenced by many varieties

of Western Marxism, Gramsci’s most eminently. In addition, the influence of

structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers like Derrida, Foucault, Roland Barthes

and Louis Althusser is evident, along with the influence of British and American

thinkers, like E. P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and others.4

Whilst Goss deplores what for him are ‘theoretical vagaries’, Said locates the exponents

of ‘postcolonial’ in a dynamic field of practices and ideas. What is striking is Said’s use

of the term ‘influence’. In situating non-Indian thinkers in a dynamic relation with

Subaltern Studies, “what we have here”, he contends, “is the sharing of a paradigm,

rather than slavish copying”.5 ‘Postcolonial’ can thus be understood as a term upon

which several analytical and political strategies and concerns converge. Despite its

3
“astounding built-in heterogeneity”,6 to borrow a phrase from Moraru, the term belongs

to a political, cultural, and philosophical engagement in the dismantled colonial empire.

It is also utilised, as a consequence of its link to colonialism, in critiques of the

intellectual life that defines itself, antagonistic or otherwise, in relation to, what could be

called, an imperial consciousness. As such the discourses that employ ‘postcolonial’ are

a part of the critique of the West’s critique of metaphysics.

Postcolonial Disputes

David Spurr advances a succinct understanding of ‘postcolonial’ as a critical

term. I would wish to take this up. He explains:

‘Postcolonial’ is a word that engenders even more debate than ‘colonial’, in part

because of the ambiguous relation between these two. I shall refer to postcolonial

in two ways: as an historical situation marked by the dismantling of traditional

institutions of colonial power, and as a search for alternatives to the discourses of

the colonial era. The first is an object of empirical knowledge — new flags fly,

new political formations come into being. The second is both an intellectual

project and a transcultural condition that includes, along with new possibilities,

certain crises of identity and representation.7

Two important issues emerge here. The first concerns the initial tide of the political

dismantling of the world’s Empires after the second World War. The devastation of the

War upon Europe,8 as Hobsbawm contends, “fatally damaged the old colonialists”. In

the context of the strong momentum of the independence movements in the colonies,

the impact of War signalled “that white men and their states could be defeated,

shamefully and dishonourably”. Despite a demonstration of military strength and

national unity, the victories of the war ironically rendered “the old colonial powers ...

4
too weak ... to restore their old positions”.9 The war revealed an economic and psychic

vulnerability, one that the old colonial powers were forced to deal with. Unable to

continue along the lines the empire had charted, the old colonial powers altered the

political and economic landscape.

It is upon this altered landscape that postcolonial theory is (characteristically)

written. Clearly the impact of the war altered the destination of Europe. But the

question of the power of the West and its relation to the former colonies remains far

from settled. It may be that new strategies of advantage have perniciously been called

forth. Thus whilst debates concerning the formation of nation-states are drawn up in

terms of the necessity of invented spatio-temporal traditions (Gellner, Giddens,

Hobsbawm, Anderson)10 that appear to be decidedly European in form and purpose,11

the independent national status of the former colonies, in the light of the changing

fortunes of the ‘old colonialists’, remains ambiguous. As Partha Chatterjee contends in

his Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, the problem of the nationalisms of the

former colonies stems from the alliance of Enlightenment reason, capitalism, and native

elites.12 Whilst the native elites successfully contested the West’s assumed authority

and its civilising mission (anti-colonialism), they failed to dislodge Western reason’s

entanglement with capitalism. As Nehru marginalised Gandhi’s ruralist and

decentralised modes of organisation (which included Gandhi’s desire for the

dismantling of the India Congress after independence) in the name of ‘Post-

Enlightenment rationalism’, India was catapulted onto the global economic arena.

Nehru’s Congress, for Chatterjee, effectively assumed the status of a player upon the

scene of global capitalism. Post-colonial nationalism can thus be (re)read as an attempt

to negotiate and accommodate global capitalism. Forged in and through a desire to take

up the status that global capitalism promises, to adopt, as Chatterjee puts it, “the

distinctively modern, or 20th century, way of looking at history and society”,13 there

5
thus remains unresolved tensions between ‘capital’, as represented by the state and its

complicity with the West, and ‘the people’ who have been co-opted into this complicity.

With capital as the dominating principle of the state (and increasingly so), administered

through terms such as ‘development’ and ‘industrialisation’, any form of oppositional

community is considered anti-national, and consequently is (violently) suppressed.14

In the light of Chatterjee’s analysis, ‘postcoloniality’ emerges as a condition that

is marked by the failure of the nationalist endeavours of the formerly colonised nation-

states.15 Rather than deliver the colonies from the tyranny of the West’s power, the

former colonies plunged, through the guidance of the native elite, back into the hands of

the West. The last decade has been marked by such a disturbing irony. As Goss

insightfully writes, it has “demonstrated the failure of those projects of Third World

national liberation”. As the “‘flag raising’ reinforced the new states’ position in the

world ... their existence as nations … meant their interactions were formed and

adjudicated by the same groups they had rejected”.16 The recent Asian currency crises

reinforces Goss’ thesis. Asia’s dependence upon the West has become increasingly

marked, firstly, through the IMF, and secondly, through the notion that Asian

governments are incompetent economic managers.17 This suggests that the national

liberation struggle of the native elite in effect was a struggle waged on the coloniser’s

terms. ‘Independence’ thus became closely linked to the capacity for self-governance,

and as such, served and continues to serve as a basis for, as Chatterjee’s discerning

analysis reveals, the West merely retaining its assumed authority over the former

colonies, who appear as Western nationalism’s dark side.

It would be an understatement to say that writers who utilise ‘postcolonial’ have

grappled with the implications that the failure of nationalist independence movements

have effected. The issue of failed nationalism is a moot point. It has fuelled the critical

interrogation of ‘postcolonial’ as a vagrant term, and perhaps is one of the causes of the

6
disturbing heterogeneity that marks it.18 If prominent thinkers utilise ‘postcoloniality’

in order to foreground nationalism’s ‘inventedness’ and its violence, critical opponents

refuse to abandon the political predicament of ‘Third World’ nations. Rather than take

up what Ernest Renan calls the “brutality”19 of national unity, Ahmad and others

contend that the postcolonial critique of nationalism overlooks the condition of global

capitalism as the cause of the failure of national liberation struggles. Among the

thinkers that offer a critique of nationalism we find the work of Homi Bhabha, who

reads the contemporary global condition in terms of questions of agency, as opposed to

the discursive structurations (effects) of nationalist signification (as in Said’s

Orientalism). As such he restages native resistance as less a nationalist movement than

the seizure of the ambivalent (discursive) effects of localised colonial authority. And

Gayatri Spivak discloses the overdetermination of colonial power by evoking race,

class, and gender differences, and also in foregrounding the problem of political

legitimation, accounts for the irreducible figure of the subaltern woman, who occupies a

cultural space that can be neither excluded from, nor represented in the discourse of the

nation (Spivak is thus at odds with Bhabha).20 Among the opponents to such a critique

we find Aijaz Ahmad. Contra Bhabha and Spivak, Ahmad contends that the

postmodernist and poststructuralist theoretical positions, that have been taken up in the

postcolonial critique of nationalism, in effect mean that the impact of colonialism can

never be established. Its subjects — the colonised, colonisers, postcolonials — remain

ambiguous. “The fundamental effect of constructing this globalised transhistoricity of

colonialism”, he contends, “is one of evacuating the very meaning of the word and

dispersing that meaning so wide that we can no longer speak of determinate structures

such as that of the postcolonial state, the role of the state in reformulating the compact

between the imperialist and the national capitals, the new but nationally differentiated

labour regimes, legislations, cultural complexes, etc.”.21 Similarly, Dirlik argues that the

7
current status of both postcolonial theory since the 1980s, and its main protagonists

upon the academic scene, are directly related to shifts in the nature of global capitalism.

This is a moment in which, he writes, “for the first time in the history of capitalism …

the capitalist mode of production [finds itself] divorced from its historically specific

origins in Europe. … The narrative of capitalism is [thus] no longer a narrative of the

history of Europe; non-European capitalist societies now make their own claims on the

history of capitalism”. This “economic fragmentation” corresponds to a “cultural

fragmentation” that bears more than a casual resemblance to the central premises of

postmodernism. The postcolonial, for Dirlik, refuses to consider itself in terms of this

global capitalist condition. It thus “is designed to avoid making sense of the current

crises and, in the process … cover[s] up … a global capitalism of which …

[postcolonial intellectuals] are not so much victims as beneficiaries”.22

These disputes obviously draw upon and engage in what has been a central

critical debate between poststructuralism/postmodernism and variants of historical

materialism on the academic left for some decades. The critical interrogations of

postcoloniality by Ahmad and Dirlik, that I have outlined, draw upon the

poststructural/postmodern pejoratively in order to denounce Bhabharian forms of

postcolonial analysis.23 As such the tenuous link between the postmodern and the

postcolonial continues to be debated,24 and, given the ambiguity of the independence of

the nation-states of the former colonies, the issue of the validity of the ‘post’ in

postcolonial as designating ‘after’ colonialism has been a contentious issue.25

It is not my intention to deal directly with these debates (though the thesis takes

up the possibilities that Bhabha’s work affords). It will suffice to say that Dirlik’s claim

concerning the relative autonomy of non-European capitalist societies, in the context of

the current Asian economic crises, needs to be significantly rethought. In regard to the

question of the ‘post’, I would argue that there is no reason to think that ‘post’, ‘after’,

8
as a temporal moment signifies a new radical freedom for the formerly colonised. The

thesis takes as its point of departure the notion that ‘post’, in this context, signifies that

there has been an historical shift in the relations of power between the coloniser and the

colonised that demands new modes of critical thinking. As Prakash usefully puts it,

postcoloniality marks “a new beginning, one in which certain old modes of domination

may persist and acquire new forms of sustenance, but one that marks the end of an

era”.26 I would wish to locate the scope and aim of this thesis in relation to this shifting

terrain. My position on the postcolonial and the postmodern will thus become evident

in due course.

To move onto Spurr’s second point, in the wake of the dismantling of empire, a

condition of transculturation arises. Clearly colonialism, global industrialisation, and

emergent nation-states, produced large scale migration. The contemporary world is thus

marked by change, movement, what James Clifford calls a “cultural problematic” in

which, years of “colonial encounter ... effected a process of pollination and

transplanting”.27 I would wish to contend that this problematic, one that increasingly

disturbs the efficacy of Western nationalism, is one of the most urgent issues of our

time. Clifford continues:

We are seeing signs that the privilege given to natural languages and, as it were,

natural cultures, is dissolving. These objects and epistemological grounds are

now appearing as constructs, achieved fictions, containing and domesticating

heteroglossia. In a world where syncretism and parodic invention are becoming

the rule, not the exception, an urban, multinational world of institutional

transience — where American clothes made in Korea are worn by young people

in Russia, where everyone’s ‘roots’ are in some degree cut — in such a world it

9
 becomes increasingly difficult to attach human identity and meaning to a coherent

‘culture’ or ‘language’.28

In the context of the failure of nationalism, and the debates that this has effected,

this movement and overlapping of selves complicates what it means to be a citizen in

the nation-state. If, as Poole succinctly puts it, “Nationalism comes on the scene when

the idea that a people is constituted as a political community through a shared cultural

identity enters political discourse, and a large (enough) number of people come to

believe that this identity takes priority over others”,29 then clearly the ambiguous

nationalism of the former colonies, migrants, and the culturally displaced, in spite of

their different political predicaments, complicate the nationalist capacity of nation-

states. To continue with Spurr, the postcolonial self emerges in that difficult space

between possibility and crises. Rather than an existential problem, this space opens up

questions concerning cultural authenticity and political legitimacy. As the former

colonisers are forced to deal with the First World now appearing in the Third (South

Korea, sections of Bombay and Santiago) while the Third World grows in the first (Los

Angeles, Brixton and outer Paris),30 the monolithic national myths that hover over the

contemporary nation-state are becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.

Thus far the disputes that draw the muddy term ‘postcolonial’ into their critical

orbit, seem, as Spurr’s succinct definition reveals, to employ the term as the political

goal to move beyond and outside colonialism. This goal, as Chatterjee shows, has been

tainted by the failure of nationalist liberation projects to usher in the new freedoms that

their strategies promised. Conversely, the term also describes the condition of

transculturation, that has been effected by the processes of colonialism. Postcolonial is

utilised as both a project and a condition. The former relates, seemingly, to the former

colonies and their relationships with the West. The latter relates to the West, or at least

10
to the Western ideals that arise as obstacles to immigrants to the West, and those that

have found it difficult to be inscribed into the nationalisms of the former colonies.

Central in both undertakings of the term, is the notion that fixity, or the unity that is

expressed in monolithic nationalist discourses, is the enemy of political freedom. The

political focus of postcoloniality is precisely the fixity of Western nationalism, culture,

and philosophy. In order to chart what is at stake in the discourse of the postcolonial,

this thesis connects this fixity to the processes of Enlightenment reason.

With this emphasis upon what I have called the fixity of Western national,

cultural, and philosophical forms in mind, I would wish, at this point, to chart some of

the key figures and ideas that have contributed to the formation of ‘postcolonial’ as a

prominent critical term. I will begin with the Subaltern Studies group, which placed the

question of nationalism firmly upon the agenda of postcolonial dispute.

Subaltern Studies

By drawing upon Gramsci, and some aspects of poststructuralism, Ranajit Guha,

Gayatri Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and others, have critically contested imperialist

and nationalist accounts of Indian history. Chakrabarty contends:

nationalist history, in spite of its anti-imperialist stance and substance, shared a

deeply embedded meta-narrative with imperialist accounts of British India. This

was the meta-narrative of the modern state. If the British plotted Indian pasts in

terms of a movement from ‘despotism’ to a British-inspired ‘rule of law’

(instituted by the colonial state), nationalist history-writing portrayed all anti-

imperialist struggles in India as steps towards a sovereign state, a state that would

one day stand on the very foundations that the imperialists themselves had laid.

The life of the people was thus subsumed within a hallowed biography ! which

is what this history was ! of the (nation-)state.31

11
The central aim of Subaltern Studies is to open up the possibility of transforming the

prevailing understandings of the historical location of Subalterns within Indian

nationalist discourses. Guha, who could be considered as the intellectual ‘origin’ of

Subaltern theory, contends that the “historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long

time been dominated by elitism — colonialist elitism and bourgeois nationalist elitism”.

This means that Subalterns have been represented (by the elite) as the simple followers

of the Indian elite’s nationalist liberation movements. Such elitism, Guha argues, “fails

to acknowledge, far less interpret, the contribution made by the people on their own,

that is, independently of the elite to the making and development of this nationalism”.32

Crucially this critical undertaking faces an important conceptual difficulty. As

Gyan Prakash explains, Subaltern Studies “seeks to undo the Eurocentrism produced by

the institution of the West’s trajectory, its appropriation of the other as History”.33 This

means that rather than take up, what could be considered, conventional critical tools in

order to mount a challenge dialectically, Subaltern Studies seeks a strategy for

dislocating the Other from the Eurocentric narrative order in which the Other had

already been located. Despite some Subaltern scholars’ scepticism concerning the

capacity of postmodern and poststructuralist forms of analysis, the strength of this work

lies in its capacity to problematise, and to question the very terms of such a critique of

the Eurocentric order. To unproblematically claim the space of ‘other’, of the

‘Subaltern’ as a fixed subjective space from which to launch an attack, is to merely

replay the negative effects of the European and Indian elite’s imagination upon the

writing of Subaltern selves. Subaltern consciousness thus emerges as a problematic

term, but a problematic that turns out to be critically productive.

For Spivak the strength of Subaltern Studies lies precisely in its foregrounding

of, what she calls, the ‘problem of Subaltern consciousness’. Whilst she concedes that

12
the group is susceptible to “recovering a consciousness ... within the post-Enlightenment

tradition”, she also finds another “force ... which would contradict such a metaphysics”.

What Spivak points to, in this regard, is a situated, material notion of consciousness, for

“consciousness here”, she continues, “is not consciousness-in-general, but a historicized

political species thereof, subaltern consciousness”. Thus by drawing on the post-

structuralist language of ‘subject-effect’, Spivak reads “the project to retrieve the

subaltern consciousness as the attempt to undo a massive historiographic metalepsis”,

since “the texts of counter-insurgency locate ... a ‘will’ [of the people] as the sovereign

cause when it is no more than an effect of the subaltern subject-effect”.34 Subaltern

Studies thus seeks to disrupt the elitist assumption that the texts of counter-insurgency

are effects of the subaltern as subject. It assumes the reverse to be the case. But this

reversing gesture does not pave the way for Realism: ‘this is what the will of the

Subaltern actually is’. Instead the relationship between the Subaltern and the texts of

counter-insurgency can be rewritten, as Spivak contends, in order to “‘situate’ the effect

of the subject as subaltern”.35 What becomes crucial is the disjunction between subject

and Subaltern that Spivak’s formulation foregrounds. The two are not necessarily

synonymous. If ‘Subaltern’ is a discursive formation, then it is possible to locate the

Subaltern as an effect whilst at the same time disavowing claims to an authentic

Subalternity. There is more to the Subaltern than the discourse on and of the Subaltern

can account for.

Edward Said

Edward Said’s Orientialism presents another important moment in postcolonial

theory. Perhaps the most significant reworking of Foucault’s discourse analysis, the

work interrogates the category ‘Orient’, specifically the political effects of its discursive

construction through Orientalist scholarship. Said contends that rather than objective

science, Orientalism (aesthetically) produced and perpetuated the binary opposition,

13
East/West. The West defined its civility in relation to an orientalist other, who

embodied all that the West was not: irrational, war mongering, devious, lazy, sadistic,

oversexed degenerate, slave trader etc. As “an accepted grid for filtering through the

Orient into Western consciousness”, the outcomes of Oriental scholarship structured

interchanges between the West and the West’s perceived others. This structuring of the

West’s relation to the Orient allowed for the West’s “flexible positional superiority,

which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient

without ever losing him the relative upper hand”. 36

Said’s important critical contribution can be found in that moment in which he

seeks to define and disrupt the structure of the East/West binary. He asserts:

we need not look for correspondence between the language used to depict the

Orient and the Orient itself, not so much because the language is inaccurate but

because it is not even trying to be accurate. What it is trying to do, as Dante tried

to do in the Inferno, is at one and the same time to characterize the Orient as alien

and to incorporate it schematically on a theatrical stage whose audience, manager,

and actors are for Europe, and only for Europe.37

This formulation foregrounds the discursive effects of imperialism as a pedagogic

mechanism that claims to tell its subjects who they are. Said thus mounts an

epistemological challenge to this assumed pedagogic authority. As a system of

discursive knowledge of the Orient that is quoted (almost) endlessly from writer to

writer, Orientalism emerges as less an exact science in the service of imperialism than a

system of tropes repeated constantly until it reaches canonical status and becomes

‘truth’. Orientalist truth is thus a fiction, a forgotten metaphor (Nietzsche).

14
 What we are left with as a consequence of Said’s critical epistemology is a more

general moment in which the task of writing culture is problematised. The work implies

that representations of culture can only be fictions. This means that a self-reflexive

writing practice is required. Perhaps Said is suggesting a foregrounded politics,

whereby the political positioning of the writer in relation to the object of study is

critically examined as part of the work, and constantly brought into question.

Homi Bhabha

The work of Homi Bhabha also occupies another important place in the

postcolonial canon. In working upon Lacanian psychoanalysis and Derridean

deconstruction (among others), Bhabha’s critical accent can be described in

transcendental (Kantian) terms. Rather than a dialectical approach to culture, which

would emphasise, for example, class, Bhabha seizes subjectivity in terms of cultural

location and psyche in order to alter the destination of discussions on colonial discourse.

Bhabha clarifies his critical position in relation to the epistemological effects of

imperialism raised by Said:

My shift from the cultural as an epistemological object to culture as an enactive,

enunciatory site opens up possibilities for other ‘times’ of cultural meaning

(retroactive, prefigurative) and other narrative spaces (fantasmic, metaphorical).

My purpose in specifying the enunciative present in the articulation of culture is

to provide a process by which objectified others may be turned into subjects of

their history and experience. ... Postcolonial and black critiques propose forms of

contestatory subjectivities that are empowered in the act of erasing the politics of

binary opposition.38

15
This emphasis upon the temporal moment, the instant in which identity is played out,

deviates sharply from Said’s politics in Orientalism, which locates identity in

Orientalism’s discursive (pedagogic) effects. Whilst recognising the violent impact of

pedagogic discourses such as Orientalism, Bhabha seizes moments of ambivalence — in

“the production of the nation as narration there is a split between the continuist,

accumulative temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of

the performative”39 — as expressed through critical terms such as hybridity, mimicry,

sly civility, subalternity, translation, and time lag, in order to foreground the complexity

of colonial discourse. As his stated aim reveals, his work draws upon, what is

considered, the (local) location of selves, that is to say the temporal moment in which

the performative (the self as agent) puts the pedagogic (the nation’s claim to tell its

citizens who they are) into doubt. Thus, with this emphasis upon the temporal and the

local as the site in which identity is played out, Bhabha challenges universal notions

such as nation and race.

Bhabha seems to draw upon postcoloniality as a condition (of being) that is

located in and against the colonial, rather than as a project that seeks to formulate the

possibility of a condition beyond and outside colonial discourse, as is the case with Said

and the Subaltern studies group (for instance, Spivak’s strategic essentialism).

Crucially, Bhabha seizes migration as the defining trope of the time, and, unlike Said,

seeks to open up the political possibilities that migration gives rise to. Whilst the

productive split space of the pedagogic and the performative can be understood in

transcendental terms, there is a sense in which this transcendental condition’s most apt

occupants, if I can use such terms, are migrants. Since culture and politics are played

out in the relationship of the coloniser and the colonised, the nation and the citizen, the

pedagogic and the performative, the psychological predicament of migration, for

Bhabha, intensifies the ambivalence that characterises that split space between what-

16
was-and-will-be and what-is, and opens up the performative as a politically productive

site.

Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth have

been incisive texts for thinkers such as Said and Bhabha. Fanon’s struggle with the

psychological predicament of the colonial self, through a range of theoretical platforms

— Lacan, Marx, and Hegel — have opened up a wide range of critical debates and

concerns.40 For Fanon, postcoloniality is at once a psychological and cultural condition

and an historical moment that marks a shift, as I have suggested, in the relations of

power between the former colonisers and the formerly colonised. The postcolonial

moment gives rise to a particular psychological problematic — as Fanon contends,

historically, “the Negro steeped in the inessentiality of servitude was set free by his

master. He did not fight for his freedom”41 — that opens up a gap between the

coloniser’s what-can-be and the colonised what-is. Crucially, in seizing the space of

what-is, Fanon reveals the impossibility of the what-can-be, and thus opens up the

necessity for finding and articulating new modes of thinking and being that exceed the

colonial promise of what-can-be. This disjunction between what-can-be and its

impossibility demonstrates that colonial discourse, rather than producing an ‘other’ as

the same, actually opens up a space of dislocation, of ambivalence. Bhabha in seizing

Fanon’s use of Lacan thus contends:

as Fanon attempts such audacious, often impossible transformations of truth and

value, the jagged testimony of colonial dislocation, its displacement of time and

person, its defilement of culture and territory, refuses the ambition of any ‘total’

theory of colonial oppression.42

17
 This emphasis on dislocation is set forth in many sections of Fanon’s work. One

example is articulated thus: “the fact that the newly returned Negro adopts a language

different from that of the group into which he was born is evidence of a dislocation, a

separation”.43 The transformative play here reveals the impossibility of retracing an

original state, and demands the task of, in his more humanistic moments, of finding new

modes of thinking and being, and in his more critical moments, opening up the political

possibilities of the performative in order to disrupt the dialectical basis of the pedagogic

apparatus. I will deal specifically with the performative disruptions of Fanon in chapter

three.

The Discourse of the Postcolonial

Despite the differences that can be seen between these key thinkers, this

postcolonial archive (of sorts) constitutes the tenuous framework of what could be

called the discourse of the postcolonial. Several important consistencies can be found.

Firstly, each undertaking attempts a radical critique of Western hegemony in its various

forms. In the words of Radhakrishnan, each seizes the notion that:

it is important for postcolonials of the diaspora to reject patronage, containment,

and ghettoization and to insist rigorously that their internal perspective is equally

an intervention in the general scheme of things.44

Secondly, such interventions call forth crucial questions: How can such a

speaking subject be characterised? How do we think about agency? Political

legitimacy? In what could be called the postcolonial problematic, these questions are

less ontological than fluid sites that continually open up possibility. Caught between

the possibility of constituting a politically legitimate speaking subject and the necessary

disavowal of such a constitution, postcolonial critical strategies inhabit a problematic

18
that entails a productive failure. Against reproducing the representational strategies of

colonialism, that are, as Said asserts, “always governed by some version of the truism

that if the Orient could represent itself, it would; since it cannot, the representation does

the job, for the West, and faute de mieux, for the poor Orient”, postcolonial critical

strategies can be situated in a representational problematic in which, as Said goes on to

explain, “there is no such thing as a delivered presence, but a re-presence, or a

representation”.45 Thus rather than close down debate in the name of an essential,

‘higher’ truth (Ontology), ‘postcolonial’ comes to the fore through the notion that its

object remains always already in dispute. In seizing the object of representation as

dispute, postcolonial strategies are able to critically challenge hegemonic

representational effects, and produce productive possibilities.

Thirdly, the discourses of the postcolonial draw the complex relationship of the

former colonisers and formerly colonised world into questions of identity and agency.

This is an issue I would wish to pursue at length. Two crucial moments (that contradict

each other perfectly) can be charted. The first challenges the notion that colonialism

can be understood simply as the imposition of a dominant culture upon an empty native

other. As Rattansi usefully puts it:

postcolonialist studies takes as a premise that the cultures and psyches of the

colonizer were not already defined, and only waiting, as it were, to be imposed,

fully formed, on the hapless victims of the colonial project. ... the postcolonialist

contention is that what was involved was an even more complex intertwining of

identities-in-formation, in which the Others against whom European identities

were played off were not only outside but also inside the nation-states of the

centre.46

19
The ‘intertwining’ suggested in Rattansi’s thesis cannot be taken to mean that the

coloniser and the (post)colonised are somehow equal contenders on a level field of play.

What is at issue here is the political nature of this ‘intertwining’. If colonised selves,

from the perspective of the colonisers, can be located in what could be called a space

outside-inside Europe, resistance to, and the nature of, colonial dominance must be

understood, in its most basic form, through the trope of Hegelian ‘mutual dependence’:

the colonial self is defined in relation to the native as a radically different Other.

The second possibility can be found in Christian Moraru’s provocative

‘refiguration’ of postcolonial critical strategies. In what can be read as a challenge to

Rattansi’s thesis, he writes:

modernity represents a moment of growing demographic circulation and imperial

dislocations in multiple directions; while Europe was busy Occidentalizing ‘new

worlds,’ the ‘Orient’ was in the process of ‘Orientalizing’ Europe. On different

scales and with varying political bearings, the two processes should nonetheless be

accounted for in their parallel unfolding (my emphasis).47

Thus rather than the mutual dependence that lies at the core of the ‘intertwined’ former

coloniser and former colonised of Rattansi, Moraru contends that this relationship can

also be staged as a much more oblique and politically disruptive one. ‘Parallel

discourses’, running as it were in opposite directions, suggests that colonial and

postcolonial nationalisms cannot simply be understood in terms of a dialectic of self-

consciousness. In another sense there is also ‘something happening’ that occupies

spaces outside and beyond the mutual recognition that is implicit in the ‘intertwined’

metaphor. What Moraru opens up is the possibility of thinking of the colonisers and

their relation to the colonies and former colonies through metaphors of

20
incommensurability and agonism, rather than antagonism or consensus. I would

contend, along with Moraru, who explains that the ‘Orientalising of Europe’ has been

staged ‘on different scales and with varying political bearings’, that the possibility of

this Orientalisation, precisely because of the inequality of (post)colonial relations, arises

as a disturbing threat to the authority of the colonial. Such disturbances are less

antagonistic challenges to pedagogic authority, or consensual cultural ‘sharing’, than

cultural excesses that disrupt the structural terms of that authority. In this regard,

Bhabha’s thought is indispensable. The pedagogic authority of the (former) colonial,

expressed through the myth of nationalist unity, thus contends not just with the

structural necessities of self-consciousness but also with the possibility of a disturbance

to that structure. Incommensurabilities signal the untenability of pedagogic authority.

Conversely, Rattansi’s model, which we can read as a strategy that seeks to

disrupt the assumed ‘fixity’ of the colonisers, is not as politcally pungent as is claimed.

Rattansi assumes that Western reason, which is the bedrock of fixity, always already

proceeds from a fixed base, a unified epistemological and moral self, and then proceeds

to impose that self upon the native as Other, or at least constructs itself in relation to the

native as Other. To disrupt this process is thus to disrupt the possibility of fixity. But

Western reason may be much more dynamic than Rattansi presupposes. This is a

crucial issue. It seems to me that the unity of Western reason is a process, rather than a

pre-given site from which knowledge and social action proceed. I will pursue this issue

in chapters that deal with Kantian and Hegelian thought. If as I have suggested the

postcolonial cannot look away from the horror of the colonial past, it is necessary to

chart what it is that the postcolonial looks at. I would wish to contend that it is in this

return to the colonial past that the cogency of the discourse of the postcolonial begins.

It is through Moraru’s model that the disruptive possibilities of the postcolonial can be

charted. Rather than mutual dependence, which does not seem to be a serious problem

21
for Western reason, Moraru evokes slippages and excesses, points of uncertainty that

expose and exploit reason’s vulnerability. How might this vulnerability be thought? I

would wish to suggest that in order to engage in this question we need to turn to the

discourse of the sublime. I evoke the sublime as that moment of uncertainty, of

wavering, of the time of politics, as a way of reframing what I would wish to call the

affirmative disturbances of the discourses of the postcolonial.

This thesis can be located in this difficult problematic. In the parallel relation of

the coloniser and the (formerly) colonised migrant the postcolonial sublime can be

staged. As a moment in the ebb and flow of global capital, as postcolonial nationalisms

menacingly drift across traditional national boundaries, the postcolonial sublime

emerges as a threat to the processes of the Western imagination. In what Anderson calls

“long-distance nationalism”, the “transnationalization of advanced capital” has effected

a situation in which “migration has moved not, as in earlier centuries, outwards to

peripheries in the New World or the Antipodes but inwards toward the metropolitan

cores”. This, in addition to the “communications revolution”, he continues, “has

profoundly affected the subjective experience of migration”. I would wish to take up

the literary and the political implications of Anderson’s observation. Thus as Anderson

interestingly charts this experience from the perspective of the nation-state, rather than

in terms of questions of agency and identity, as the formulation suggests, I seek to prise

open the figure of the migrant that appears here as both a necessity and a disruption to

“the classical nation-state project”.

Illustrated through the example of the destruction of the Babri mosque in

Ayodhya, which was supported by “Indians living overseas”48 Anderson, however,

pessimistically contends:

22
 in general, today’s long-distance nationalism strikes one as a probably menacing

portent of the future. First of all, it is the product of capitalism’s remorseless,

accelerating transformation of all human societies. Second it creates a serious

politics that is at the same time radically unaccountable. ... Third, his politics,

unlike those activists for global human rights or environmental causes, are neither

intermittent nor serendipitious. They are deeply rooted in a consciousness that his

exile is self-chosen and that the nationalism he claims on E-mail is also the

ground on which an embattled ethnic identity is to be fashioned in the ethnicized

nation-state that he remains determined to inhabit.49

In addition to a lamentable capitalist global order, we can hear what for Anderson is a

problem of setting the limits of the migrants’ connection to homeland. The violence

that is implicit in the extremist nationalism that Anderson writes about allows us to nod

in accord with his conclusions. But at the edges of this thought the figure of the migrant

emerges as a problematic figure. The problem of belonging ‘here’ and speaking for

‘elsewhere’, speaking, as it were, free from the limits of accountability, is the center

piece of Anderson’s argument. Rather than affirming what is for many a liberating

‘communications revolution’, we find an insistence upon its more sinister possibilities:

the contradictory formulation, unaccountable citizens. Of course in the context of the

nation-state, for Anderson, with perhaps a Hobbesian accent, unaccountability equates

to irresponsibility, and by extension, violence. In conflating unaccountability and

violence his “Exodus” thus fails to deal adequately with diaspora.

As Ghose writing of the space of the Indian diaspora in Britain suggests:

I stir the water with a finger until

it tosses waves, until countries appear

23
 from its dark bed: the road from Putney Hill

runs across oceans into the harbour

of Bombay.50

One can only conclude that the free flow of information, as embodied in the figure of

the migrant, across national boundaries disrupts the homogeneous national form as set

forth in Anderson’s canonical Imagined Communities.51

In the context of the ‘First World’s’ increasing dependence on the economic and

figurative status of the ‘Third World’, in its constructions of its own economic and

national identities, what Anderson pessimistically opens up are questions concerning the

politically disruptive capacity of transculturation. But, crucially, do the pessimistic

overtones of Anderson’s argument mean that migrancy always already signals a bleak

national future? It is interesting that Anderson’s pessimism concerning the maintenance

of myths of the nation, its disruption, is the very thought that prevails in uses of

‘postcolonial’, though in affirmative tones. But what exactly is being disrupted? How

does this seeming disruption figure in the context of the Enlightenment thought of

which state-hood and the national spirit are a vital part?

Locating The Postcolonial Sublime

In Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses we find two possibilities concerning the figure

of the postcolonial migrant as threat. Saladin Chamcha’s post-fall transformation into a

goat represents the first. The image of Gibreel Farishta as migrant conqueror is the

second. What is at stake here is the question of the social meaning of the figure of the

migrant as monster. I would contend that two different versions emerge. The first is the

figure of an essentialised other. The character Saladin Chamcha can be read as an

articulation of the relation of the migrant to the host nation. The second is much more

disturbing. The migrant emerges as less an essentialised other than an

24
incomprehensible entity. Such an incomprehensibility leads us the postcolonial

sublime. I will take up the first migrant image through the work of Franco Morreti, and

then I will explore a much more disturbing image of the migrant through the work of

Todorov and Kristeva. In my attempt to theorise the political cogency of the discourse

of the postcolonial, I would wish to take up Moraru’s parallel model. I contend that

such a model suggests that there is ‘something happening’ in the relationship of the

coloniser and the colonised that a dialectic of self-consciousness cannot wholly account

for. It is this ‘something happening’ that this thesis seeks to explore. As I will show,

the ‘something happening’ can be understood in terms of the disturbances of what I

would wish to call the postcolonial sublime. The following reframes Ratttansi’s and

Moraru’s formulations of the postcolonial, and suggests why Moraru’s model needs to

be taken up.

In his discussion on the social meaning of the monstrous Other, Franco Morretti

draws upon Marx and Freud to interpret Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula as

mythical reproductions of economic, social, and sexual fears. We can draw Saladin’s

monstrous form into Morretti’s interesting discussion. Morretti understands the

relationship of Frankenstein and his created monster in terms of the relationship of

capitalists and the proletariat. As an object of fear, “born precisely out of terror of split

society, and out of the desire to heal it”, Frankenstein’s monster can be read in the same

breath as ‘Ford worker’. “Like the proletariat”, Morretti writes, “the monster is denied

a name and an individuality ... he belongs wholly to his creator ... he is a collective and

artificial creature ... not found in nature, but built”. This desire for the ‘containment’

and dependence of the working class, is thus confronted by the monster’s

“reformist/Chartist” demand for individuality, ‘happiness’, and an equally marginalised

wife. The possibility of the thriving marginalised community that is implied in the

monster’s demand is an unbearable nightmare for the scientist and, by extension, the

25
capitalists. The image of the proletariat as a “‘race of devils’” thus “encapsulates”,

Morretti asserts, “one of the most reactionary elements in Mary Shelley’s ideology”.

The monster “once transformed into a ‘race’ ... re-enters the immutable realm of

Nature”, and becomes an “object of an instinctive, elemental hatred” that is able to

counterbalance the “disturbing force unleashed” by the monster’s individualist

longings.52

Dracula, on the other hand, represents both the threat of the ‘blood-suckers’ of

monopoly capitalism and the fear of the figure of the castrating mother. “In Britain”

Morretti explains, “at the end of the nineteenth century, monopolistic concentration was

far less developed ... than in other advanced capitalist societies”. Monopoly capital is

“something extraneous to British history ... a foreign threat”. Dracula as the figure of

monopoly capital is thus thwarted by an ethical (British) version of capital as

advantageous for all: “money that refuses to become capital, that wants not to obey the

profane economic laws of capitalism but to be used to do good”.53

As a metaphor for monopoly capital Dracula’s defeat transforms the fear of a

crushing foreign ideology, and justifies British capitalism. For Morretti this

justification operates subtly, on a subliminal level. Social consciousness finds it

difficult to admit and face its own fears. Thus the subliminal meanings of Dracula as

metaphor are “subordinated to the literal presence of the murderous count. They can be

expressed only if they are hidden ... by his black cloak”.54 It is under this sinister cloak

that Marx and Freud converge, for ultimately Dracula represents not just monopoly

capital but also the repressed Victorian libido that threatens the stability of the

bourgeois family unit.

Morretti’s thesis concerning the social meaning of the literary monster advances

the notion: “it is fear one needs: the process one pays for coming contentedly to terms

with a social body based on irrationality and menace”.55 What is striking in this

26
formulation is the ‘contentedness’ of the process of dealing with the objects of social

fears. Rather than radical disruptions, the monster for Morretti functions ideologically.

Social transformation in this scheme equates to the capitalist seduction of the

proletariat. We can thus read Rushdie’s utilisation of the trope of the monstrous as

migrant, the narrative tension between the postcolonial migrant and his imagined ‘host’

culture, and the ‘resolution’ of that tension (albeit an open one) — Saladin overcomes

his monstrous form through anger, and is able to begin to deal with the homeland from

which he was trying to escape — we can read the outworking of this monstrous trope,

its foregroundedness, as a critique of the conservative uses of the figure of the monster

that Morretti unpacks. Rushdie’s text performs Morretti’s critical reading of

conservative ideology.

In another literary setting, Jameson also explains the social meaning of the

monstrous Other. In what is essentially a reworked version of Hegel’s theory of the

master and slave relationship, Jameson’s argument concerning the figure of the

monstrous Other can be read as a radicalisation of the contented process of social

transformation that we find in Morretti. Jameson asserts:

Evil ... continues to characterize whatever is radically different from me, whatever

by virtue of precisely that difference seems to constitute a real and urgent threat to

my own existence. So from the earliest times, the stranger from another tribe, the

‘barbarian’ who speaks an incomprehensible language and follows ‘outlandish’

customs, but also the woman, whose biological difference stimulates fantasies of

castration and devoration, or in our own time, the avenger of accumulated

resentments from some oppressed class or race, or else that alien being, Jew or

Communist, behind whose apparently human features a malignant and

preternatural intelligence is thought to lurk: these are some of the archetypical

27
 figures of the Other, about whom the essential point to be made is not so much

that he is feared because he is evil; rather he is evil because he is Other, alien,

different, strange, unclean, and unfamiliar.56

If we bend this accent upon the radically ‘other’ as evil toward the figure of the

monstrous migrant, this radical otherness has a social function that equates to the

contented transformations of the economic, social, and sexual fears that we found in

Morretti. The figure of the migrant as the incarnation of evil, like Morretti’s monster, is

necessary for establishing the boundaries of the psycho-social bond. This means that

we can read the situated monstrous Saladin Chamcha as a necessary moment in the

construction of British identity. Rushdie’s text bears this out. In that moment in which

national identity became an urgent issue, despite his anxious cry to the British police,

“‘I’m not one of your fishing-boat-sneakers-in’”, the “proof” of Saladin’s national

unbelonging is confirmed by his monstrous body. “‘If it’s proof you’re after”, the

police proclaim, “you couldn’t do better than those.’ ... there at his temples, growing

longer by the moment, and sharp enough to draw blood, were two new, goaty,

unarguable horns”.57 Saladin, the model colonial subject, thus ironically emerges not

through the unthinkable, the unspeakable, the unnameable trope of the sublime, but as

the essentialised, contained Other, the basis for the you’re-not-one-of-us of the equally

essentialised English self.

Jameson and Morretti thus present useful literary models for dealing with the

social implications of the figure of the monster. But Rushdie’s text does not remain

content with such formulations. It demands that we move beyond the dialectics of

Morretti and Jameson. Significantly, Chamcha as goat poses no real ‘threat’ to English

identity. His monstrous form remains neatly contained in a self/other dialectic.

Saladin’s “metamorphosis”, the text explains, amounted to nothing particularly

28
threatening or scandalous: “this supernatural imp — was being treated by the others as

if it were the most banal and familiar matter they could imagine”.58 Whilst the

monstrous Saladin represents the wholly Other, that self that is drawn into a dialectic of

mutual dependence, a far more threatening other, who cannot be reduced to the order of

mutual recognition emerges at the edge of the narrative action. As Saladin remonstrated

with the police, Gibreel Farishta “came downstairs in a maroon smoking jacket and

jodhpurs, chosen from Henry Diamond’s wardrobe. Smelling faintly of mothballs, he

stood on the first-floor landing and observed the proceedings without comment”.59 As

the scene’s marginal figure, Gibreel represents that ‘other’ more threatening migrant

moment. His unnoticed hybridity, his silence and elevated gaze, can be understood only

in terms of the possibility of a disturbance that appears to be lacking in Saladin’s

dialectical situatedness.

I would contend that Gibreel’s disturbing presence at the edge of this scene can

be read in terms of what I have called Moraru’s parallel model. Gibreel’s fantastic

arrival on the British beach, for instance, is articulated through the trope of the migrant

not as monster but as invader:

‘Rise ‘n’ shine! Let’s take this place by storm.’ Turning his back on the sea,

blotting out the bad memory in order to make room for the next things, passionate

as always for newness, he would have planted (had he owned one) a flag, to claim

in the name of whoknowswho this white country, his new-found land.60

Thus instead of the confrontation that is entailed in the figure of the monster as Other,

we find the scandal of transculturation, the notion that the postcolonial migrant can be

constituted as both an ‘other’ that marks the edge of Western civility, and a threat to the

constitution of that civility. How might this threat be understood?

29
 The scandal of transculturation as it emerges in the figure of Gibreel can be

understood in terms of what Todorov has called the fantastic. He explains the fantastic

as follows.

In a world which is indeed our world, the one we know, a world without devils,

sylphides, or vampires, there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the

laws of this same familiar world. The person who experiences the event must opt

for one of two solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a

product of imagination — and laws of the world then remain as they are; or else

the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality — but then this

reality is controlled by laws unknown to us.61

What of the effect of Gibreel’s marginal location in the scene? We find this hesitation

that marks the fantastic, that moment in which the self is forced to decide what

constitutes reality.

Hisser Moaner Popeye turned eagerly towards Gibreel. ‘And who might this

be?’ inquired Inspector Lime. ‘Another sky-diver?’

But the words died on his lips, because at that moment the floodlights were

switched off, the order to do so having being given when Chamcha was

handcuffed and taken in charge, and in the aftermath of the seven suns it became

clear to everyone there that a pale, golden light was emanating from the direction

of the man in the smoking jacket, was in fact streaming softly outwards from a

point immediately behind his head. Inspector Lime never referred to that light

again, and if he had been asked about it would have denied ever seeing such a

thing, a halo, in the late twentieth century, pull the other one.62

30
The confused Inspector Lime experiences the momentary hesitation that marks the

fantastic in his encounter with the figure of the postcolonial migrant in English garb. It

is this crucial momentary uncertainty that is missing from Morretti’s and Jameson’s

accounts of the figure of the monster. In similar terms, the mutual dependence that is at

the core of Rattansi also lacks Inspector Lime’s hesitation. I would contend that such a

hesitation, that momentary lapse of certainty, of disorientation, opens up the possibility

of the reverse Orientalisation that Moraru’s parallel model proposes. Through

momentary hesitation the processes of reason’s stability are able to be brought into

question. In the postcolonial context, the opening up of the space of the question is the

moment in which a politics begins. The fantastic Todorov explains, “occupies the

duration of this uncertainty”. The fantastic exposes the fragility of the limit between

matter and mind. It is “that hesitation” that calls an assumed stability into question.63

I would wish to propose, building on Moraru, that postcolonial disruptions

necessitate and foreground the fragility of the limits of Western being. In order to

account for such a politics it will be necessary to turn to the sublime, that trope that has

been utilised to define (Western) being in terms of its rational limits. It is my

contention that this necessary play upon the limits of (Western) being signals that

Western authority, whilst this play is necessary, is always already vulnerable. It is this

vulnerability that is crucial. I would wish to explore its structure. In exploiting the

sublime and the possibilities that it opens up, the discourse of the postcolonial disrupts

the authority of Western reason.

Unsettling Kant

How might the ‘something happens’, that fantastic moment that I have suggested

marks the political cogency of Moraru’s parallel model be theorised? I would suggest

that in order to deal with this question, it is necessary to begin with Kant’s influential

31
Critique of Judgement, and his notion of the sublime.64 For Kant the sublime presents

itself in that moment in which the imagination — which functions in terms of space

and time — is confronted by an object that is too large to express, too overpowering to

be adequately represented. This failure of the imagination demands the momentary

suspension of Reason, so that the Ideas — Reason’s ultimate faculty — can furnish the

mind with a concept that is able to grasp what is essentially ungraspable. I turn to this

eighteenth-century formulation of the sublime, because I find that the issue of the myth

of nation is a vital part of its processes. In the context of the emerging capitalist

expansion of the Eighteenth Century, this capacity of the mind to present the

unpresentable was an integral component in the emergence of European nationalisms,

and Europe’s assumed authority upon the global stage. What is essentially a

philosophical problem in Kant — the possibility of the unity of the self — becomes the

trope of European elitism. The possibility of the collapse of the self (the failure of the

imagination), and the establishment of the capacity of the self to ‘overcome’ that

collapse in the sublime moment, is a crucial marker in the European assumption of

global superiority. Thus whilst the European self of Kant teeters on the brink of

collapse, the capacity to negotiate such a predicament, to achieve the unity of the

conscious self, signals what was considered to be the greatness of Europe. The

European emerges as a tightrope walker, defying the destructive dangers that lurk

beneath.

What this teetering suggests is that the ‘something happens’ of Moraru’s parallel

model is prefigured in the structure of Western thought itself. There is no strength or

power without accomplishment, without overcoming a threat of some sort. Western

thought is thus at once confident concerning its accomplishments, and fundamentally

anxious concerning the foundations for these accomplishments. Moraru’s model draws

attention to this anxiousness.

32
 The resonances that surround the anxiousness of the self have furnished Europe

with the tools to lay a claim to the virtues of national unity. In this typical early

twentieth century imperial formulation, James Garvin, apologist for the League of

Nations, in pointing out the remarkable achievements of the British Empire, asserts:

[humanity] can only be served through strong nations. ... ‘Humanity’ is nothing

but the individual men and women composing it, and the worth of the aggregate is

determined by the value of the units. But the soul of a whole people seems to

strengthen or decay with that sense of national vitality and national achievement

which — like the electric helix, giving energy to what was before the dead weight

of a soft iron bar — raises to a higher power the faculties of its component

individuals. ‘Humanity’ can do nothing for ‘humanity’, and races do most for

other races by the example they give and the ideals they pursue in the process of

their own development.65

Apart from the troubling circular logic here, at the edges of Garvin’s extolling the

virtues of national unity, we hear an anxiousness concerning the possibility of the

collapse of the ‘I’. Garvin’s argument, which returns to the economic principles of

Adam Smith to shore up British colonial supremacy against its economic competitors,

amounts to the old yet troublingly familiar cliché: let’s-all-tighten-our-belts-and-work-

together. It is this anxiousness, crises that can be found in all nationalisms, that

animates the beneficial outcomes of the unifying myth. Tinged with a British

nationalist spirit, in this instance, the benefits of maintaining national unity amounts to a

plug for the necessity of the cultural and economic supremacy of Britain. Thus the

confidence and surety that underpins the human benefits of national unity is a

confidence only insofar as the object of ‘decay’, which is not really an object, is in place

33
so that it can be overcome. This means that the condition of ‘decay’, as the object of

overcoming, in its mythical form is abolished in that moment in which unity is attained.

But in order to sustain the necessity of the national illusion, it can never be abolished

outright. It occupies that space at the edge of the nation, that always already sublime

threat that calls forth the national vigilance that Garvin evokes. In the sustaining myth

of the nation, ‘decay’ (read as sublime threat) is thus always already on the inside of the

national myth, albeit at the edge, a kind of outside/inside.

In addition to what I have called the outside/inside of the sublime in the myth of

national unity, Garvin’s early twentieth century work reveals the British desire to be the

central character on the global stage. The crises that Garvin evokes in order shore up

this position against Britain’s colonial competitors — France, Germany, (and

interestingly) USA — for whom, according to Garvin, Britain had paved the way,

reveals, in the context of the logic of capital, the desire of the West to dominate the

world’s economic affairs. The animation of this desire, or at least the tools that work

hand in hand with the logic of capital, and which reveal that colonial desire is both

economic and cultural, can be found, as I have suggested, in the sublime moment. The

colonial nationalism of Garvin is predicated on the necessity of the sublime moment,

and on the necessity of the sublime not taking hold and spinning out of control. The

nationalism of Garvin thus evokes a vigilance concerning the disruptive capacity of the

sublime, and also a vigilance concerning the necessity of that disruptive capacity. The

sublime thus emerges as an always already threat that sustains the necessity of the myth

of the nation.

Remarkably following the Great War, as British economic stability suffered

further blows that even the national tightening of belts could not overcome, what

becomes crucial for Garvin is the maintenance of a much broader Western unity. Under

the sustaining myth of impending crises, with the heading, “Co-operation or Chaos”,

34
Garvin asserts the necessity of forging a British and American “partnership” through

The League of Nations. Such a union would ensure that the world would be able to

withstand not just the impact of an historical event, such as war, but also the ever

imminent threat of what can be found at the terrifying core of being itself: “the

confusion of ideas and desires” that were unleashed “against all that is called control or

restraint ... in this outbreak of all the war-repressed impulses of the natural man” (my

emphasis).66

Thus a nauseous Garvin teeters at the edge of being’s terrifying abyss, and

frantically back-pedals. If we continue with the disturbing ‘something happens’ that

Moraru suggests, and which is prefigured in Western thought, the discourse of national

unity opens up a crucial vulnerability. In what could be described, to bend Freud a

little, as the fort/da or repetition-compulsion of nationalist discourse, in the context of

Western rationalism the sublime moment can be described as that necessary and

distressing predicament that is an unpleasure for one part of the psyche and a pleasure

for another. Indeed the latter Freud of “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” found the

unpleasures of the repetition-compulsion a serious theoretical problem. Whilst “there

exists”, Freud writes, “in the mind a strong tendency towards the pleasure principle”

there are “certain other forces or circumstances” that “cannot always be in harmony

with the tendency towards pleasure” (my emphases).67 For Freud the pleasure in the

unpleasure of these ‘other forces’ suggest a governing principle, or perhaps the lack of a

governing principle ‘beyond the pleasure principle’. He thus asks, what can possibly be

gained in the repetition of unpleasure? With the dominance of the pleasure principle in

doubt, as I read it, Freud promptly set about showing how the repetition-compulsion

relates to, and is constantly reinforced by, factors governed by the pleasure principle

(whether or not the pleasure principle ultimately remains in tact is a matter of dispute).

In the first instance, repetition-compulsion is staged as a function of the ego. In

35
children’s play, repeating “unpleasurable experiences” enables the child to “master” that

unpleasure “by being active” rather than “merely experiencing it passively”. In the

second instance, however, the repetition-compulsion evokes “an obscure fear ... with its

hint of possession of some ‘daemonic’ power”,68 that ultimately signals a new

theoretical analysis, the constitutive dualism of the death instincts and the life

instincts.69 For my purposes, rather than taken up repetition-compulsion as a neurotic

condition, what emerges as crucial is the energy and the sense of mastery that emerges

in the compulsion to repeat, in the unpleasures of abjection. Thus as Freud grappled

with the theoretical disruptions of the pleasure of unpleasure, Garvin returns from the

abyss energised, with a sense of purpose and anxiousness at once.

Kristeva’s provocative remarks concerning abjection lend an immediacy to the

sublime, and the dynamic fort/da of culture that the discourse of the postcolonial opens

up. The abject, Kristeva tells us, as opposed to the subject and object, “has only one

quality of the object — that of being opposed to I”. Abjection is that which “disturbs

identity, system, order. ... does not respect borders, positions, rules. ... It is death

infecting life. ... the place where meaning collapses”.70 Crucially such a place inhabits,

for Kristeva, the ‘core’ of social being. In what can be read as a transcendental

condition after Kant, the abject emerges as both an intimate and necessary threat, that

“something rejected from which one does not part”.71

There is nothing like the abjection of the self to show that all abjection is in fact

recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is

founded.72

36
The structural necessity of this moment becomes evident, as Kristeva attests, through

the figures and acts that can be located on borders of culture, and which, as a

consequence of this border condition, draw “attention to the fragility of the law”.73

The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal

with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a saviour

... [the exile who asks] ‘Where am I?’ instead of ‘Who am I?’”.74

In foregrounding the fragility of culture’s limits, the abject shares an affinity

with the sublime. Neither has a representable object, both ‘permeate’ being, and both

negate order, I, borders, and rules. But whereas the abject animates want — which

Kristeva locates beyond the unconscious: “if one imagines ... the experience of want

itself as logically preliminary to being and object ... then one understands that abjection,

and even more so abjection of self, is its only signified”75 — the sublime calls forth

action, creativity. In drawing a distinction between the somatic symptom and

sublimation, she writes:

In the symptom, the abject permeates me, I become abject. Through sublimation,

I keep it under control. The abject is edged with the sublime. It is not the same

moment on the journey, but the same subject and speech bring them into being.76

The move from the abject to the sublime, is thus a movement from a structural

permeation that opens up a recognition of want to a creative shaping of the limitless

possibilities that abjection’s disrespect for boundaries opens up. Of course for Kristeva,

rather than rationalist possibilities, the sublime opens up the mystical and the aesthetic.

37
 The sublime ‘object’ dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory ... the

sublime is a something added that expands us, overstrains us, and causes us to be

both here, as dejects, and there, as others and sparkling. A divergence, an

impossible bounding.77

But there is another possibility. Whilst Kristeva celebrates what for Lyotard would be

the genuine sentiment of the sublime, novatio, in which the unpresentable form in itself

continually opens up new possibilities for thinking and being, Kristeva’s account of the

sublime carefully ignores the sublime’s dark side, nostalgia, in which the unpresentable

becomes an absent content.78 As the former leads us to the postmodern, the latter leads

us, in its most extreme form, to fascism.79

What Lyotard’s distinction thus suggests, and this is an issue that I would wish

to take up directly, is that rationalism, and by extension the nationalism of Garvin, can

be read as a romantic project. Rationalism in the face of the groundlessness of being

emerges as less an ontology than a particular kind of artfulness that gives shape, albeit

nostalgically, to what is essentially the formlessness of existence. The aesthetic

possibilities of formlessness contained in the logical framework of nationalism, for

Lyotard equates to totalitarianism. It is interesting, however, that the great theorist of

the sublime, Kant and his majestic architectonic system, according to Lyotard, is not

guilty of such a charge. The radical incommensurability of the faculties in Kant means

that ethics can never be reduced to the aesthetic. The sublime, that abyss between the

faculties, attests to the impossibility of such a reduction. Lyotard’s controversial

reading of Kant thus brackets the sublime, as an aesthetic moment, in order to celebrate,

what is perceived as Kant’s failure to reconcile freedom and necessity as the Critique of

Judgement intends. The ‘analytic of the sublime’ as an appendix cannot be taken as an

integral component in the system. “The ‘mere appendage’ to the critical elaboration of

38
the aesthetic”, Lyotard contends, “by natural finality ... takes a menacing turn. It

indicates that another aesthetic can be not only expounded but ‘deduced’ according to

the rules of critique”.80 This deduction of the sublime, given its menacing location in

Kant’s architectonic system, becomes, for Lyotard, the most apt analogy for (re)opening

questions concerning art, justice, and politics.81 In what emerges as Kant’s cognisant

failure, the continual opening up of this failure as novatio in art, and differend in

politics, radically disrupts the nostalgic core of totalising discourse.

The thesis nods in agreement with Lyotard’s call for the disruption of

totalitarianism. This is an urgent and necessary project. But the thesis questions the

disruptive capacity of the Lyotardian sublime, which assumes, as much postcolonial

theory does, that metanarratives are pre-given sites from which epistemological and

social being proceeds. I would suggest that Lyotard has overestimated the capacity of

metanarratives. The bracketing of the sublime, in order to foreground Kant’s failure to

reconcile freedom and necessity in the aesthetic domain, in the context of what I have

called postcolonial transculturation is difficult to defend. It suggests that we read

Garvin’s nationalist fervour as an invention, a kind of nostalgia, that can, as Lyotard’s

insistence upon the productive failure of Kant’s aesthetic, be disrupted in terms of

strategies of novatio and bearing witness to differends. This means that the

postcolonial critique of Western hegemony can be understood in terms of Lyotard’s

bracketed aesthetic — novatio — which calls forth, as I have suggested, a politics of

either/or. In the in-between spaces of transculturation, the movements, excesses, and

contaminations, I would contend that there are more productive possibilities.

What I am suggesting is that the ‘something happens’ of Moraru’s parallel

model refuses to read Garvin’s nationalism in essentialist terms. As a politics of

either/or, the Lyotardian sublime seems to perpetuate such terms, as I will show in

chapter four. In contrast, the discourse of the postcolonial is driven by the necessity of

39
opening up the anxiousness that lies at the core of the national project. It desires to lay

hold of the abject in order to unleash its sublime possibilities as the sublime. In other

words, rather than attempt to open up new (pure) sites, the discourse of the postcolonial

seeks to wrest the sublime from its trajectory, to contaminate its path in the structure of

Kantian reason.

I take the notion that the sublime is a threatening excess as the key concept for

the thesis. For Lyotard this excess presents two possibilities: a contained aesthetic

(order, the modern), or a continually open aesthetic (avant-garde, the postmodern).

Lyotard assumes that the avant-garde is fascism’s opposite. I would wish to propose

another route, one that seeks to wrest the sublime from this either/or logic. I would

argue that Lyotard’s insistence upon novatio can surely be read as a gesture no less

totalising than the nostalgic demand for order.82 My contention is that if we are to

consider what kind of politics the sublime effects, it needs to be situated in the

structures of its use. The bracketing of the sublime, as in Lyotard, as an end in itself

fails to adequately engage in rationalism’s use of the sublime. To take up the failure of

representation as an end itself, as if the incomprehensible somehow beckons the

structure of Reason to collapse, is to underestimate Reason’s tenacity. It is to miss

Morretti’s provocative recasting of Reason as Dracula, the bloodsucker that feeds upon

the image of the monster. Just as Saladin Chamcha poses no threat, the avant-garde as a

dialectical other, can be read as an opposition that merely furnishes Reason with the

tools to establish the necessity of order.

I would wish to take up the sublime as a functional trope. Rather than an end in

itself, as in Lyotard’s avant-garde, the sublime is an excess that has been put to use in

various ways, for a variety of purposes. In keeping with the tenor of its historical use, I

would wish to consider the sublime as it emerges in the service of European Reason. It

is my contention, that in order to disrupt reason the discourse of the postcolonial seizes

40
the sublime and pushes it beyond its Kantian limits. My reading of the postcolonial

sublime draws upon Kristeva’s provocative formulation of abjection. For whilst she

champions novatio, what emerges is a sublime that functions less dialectically than in

terms of crossings, movements, connections.

In this regard my understanding of the postcolonial sublime is more akin to what

we find in Derrida’s reading of Kant in The Truth in Painting. Derrida reads the

‘analytic of the sublime’ as appendix according to the logic of the supplement, rather

than the logic of the event (Lyotard), in order to refigure the incommensurability of the

faculties. If for Lyotard the faculties remain always already irreducible, for Derrida this

irreducibility is dependent upon a paradoxical reducibility, the impossibility of

maintaining the purity of the faculties, the frame, the parergon. Thus Kant ‘fails’ to

produce a purely aesthetic space to undertake the task of reconciling freedom and

necessity. But rather than suggest that this task is always already untenable, Derrida

suggests that it is this untenability that enables its cultural workability. The sublime, for

instance, as opposed to the beautiful exemplifies this necessary impossibility. Set forth

in terms of the absence of the frame — magnitude, great power, “overspilling: it

exceeds cise and good measure”83 — the sublime emerges as that which is

uncontainable, and which negates order. But, as Derrida points out, this absence of

frames actually functions as a frame. This frame can be formulated through the

question: “Why is the large (absolutely) sublime and not the small (absolutely)?”.84

Since the “measure of the sublime has the measure of this unmeasure, of this violent

incommensurability”,85 as Derrida puts it, it can be said that the sublime as the limitless

thus requires a (quasi)limit. For my purposes, this thesis asks: why is the sublime a

noble and not a base trope? And asserts that the sublime as a noble trope is structured

by cultural desire. In the context of Derrida’s study of Kant, what this question

suggests is precisely the difficulty of taking a position on Kant, especially in relation to

41
the question of art. The aesthetic emerges as less a discrete domain, in the case of the

sublime the purely limitless, than a site of contaminations, border crossings, impurities,

that are at once transgressions and necessities in the context of Kant’s architecture.

Thus in the margins of Derrida’s text, in the question of the difficulty of maintaining a

distinction between art and philosophy (the subject of The Truth in Painting), we can

hear the cultural resonances that invade Kant, the old cliché: ‘size does matter’, or more

specifically, the figure of desire, the anxious phallus.

The sublime functions, as I have suggested, in a narrative sense in a fort/da

structure. It arises as a necessary paradox in the formation of Reason’s cultural

authority. To use the language of Kant, Reason demands the possibility of its demise, it

exists in a dynamic, even antagonistic relation with the other faculties. This necessarily

antagonistic structure suggests that Reason paradoxically remains always already

dynamic, rather than fixed and stagnant. The encounter with the limit opens up the

possibility that it is not always possible for Reason to re-establish itself in the same

terms.

It is this vulnerability that opens up, what I would wish to call, the postcolonial

sublime. In this space of vulnerability it is possible to speak less of what Lyotard calls

the “abyss between heterogeneous phrases”,86 the ‘eventalisation’ of history, than the

“abyss of abjection” (Kristeva),87 with its contaminations, border crossings, leakages,

movements. The postcolonial sublime arises in that moment in which the boundaries of

(Western) being are in the process of (re)formation, or to follow Freud, the disturbing

compulsion to repeat. Indeed in Bloom’s work on Freud, which attempts to find literary

moments that exceed the infantile repressions of the uncanny, in his turn to the excesses

of “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” he finds a ‘great shock’ that is akin to what could be

called the necessity of the West’s ‘flirt’ with the abyss of the abject. According to

Bloom, Freud “verges upon showing ... that to be human is a catastrophic condition”.

42
Freud’s passage into the sublime arises when he writes: “It seems, then, that a drive is

an urge inherent in organic life to restore an earlier state of things”, and then, as

Bloom notes, “slays his beloved trope of ‘drive’ by disguising it in the armour of his

enemy, mythology [Tasso’s romantic epic, Gerusalemme Liberata] in order to assert:

“the aim of all life is death”. For Bloom the wounding of “his figuration of ‘drive’”,

reveals Freud “in a truly Sublime or ‘uncanny’ fashion”.88 Thus as the great theorist of

civilisation and repression in his ‘literary’ moments reveals, ultimately the compulsion

to repeat, rather than repress and contain, opens up the disturbing force of the sublime,

of the ultimate sublime moment, the abyss of death (the nothing happens), as the most

apt ‘site’ upon which social being is forged.

Thus the uncanny, which is forged, as Bloom contends, in a theoretical tradition

that “is necessarily antithetical to nearly any theory of the imagination”,89 and which

offers only a partial psychology of the sublime, appears like the sublime to be a

narrative of leave and return, of loss and (re)gain. But unlike the sublime the uncanny

arises in an encounter with the unfamiliar, “that class of the terrifying”, Freud tells us,

that “leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar”.90 The sublime

object (after Kant) is excess, surplus, the uncontainable spillage, the ‘too much’ of

phenomenological experience that threatens the stability of Reason, or in the case of

Freud, the pleasure principle. The sublime thus cannot be understood as a particular

kind of content. It is an object only in the sense that it is a threat to objectivity, an

excess that negates, collapses, disrupts. Reason’s movement in what I have called the

fort/da of the sublime, whilst upon the surface may attempt to reinstate the familiar,

must necessarily open up the disruptive capacity of unpleasure as a signal of its own

dynamic capacity. This means that the ‘return’, or the resolution of the struggle

between Reason and its dissolution in the face of the sublime, may not be the same.

The return to order that can be seen in Garvin, though energetic, has been forced to shift

43
its terms. The sublime is pure negation, vertigo, collapse, the disorder and confusion

that arises when the libidinal excesses surface and signal that meaning is no longer

possible. Such a moment demands shifts, transformations, yet such is necessary in

constructing a dynamic culture. This means that ultimately Reason’s grounding in the

unified Kantian self is fluid, in process, productive rather than fixed and stagnant.

This space of excess and contamination that threatens and reveals authority is

the terrain of this thesis. It is my contention that nationalist myths of unity (Renan) are

always forged in and against some kind of crises. Whilst it is the case that the object of

this threat can be said to play into the hands of the colonial (as in the case of Kant), it

can also be said that this opening up of the space that threatens unity always entails the

possibility of its disruption. In attempting to define the limits of the nation — through

the trope of Us and Them — nationalist discourses bring into being an ‘outside’ that

represents the base, the detested, the hybrid, the grotesque, the uncanny. Here we find

the figure of the postcolonial, who occupies that dark side of the nation-state that cannot

be made to fit into nationalist social norms. Thus at the edges of Western being we find

a site that is at once necessary and repulsed. The myth of nation entails within its

formulation the possibility of its disturbance. In this regard I follow both Hegel and

Derrida, for whom culture is transformed qua culture.

I have suggested that Moraru’s parallel model, which evokes slippages and

excesses, points of uncertainty that expose and exploit reason’s vulnerability, leads us

directly to the discourse of the sublime. Thus, as in all theories of the sublime, I am

taking up the problem of its object. What is the object of the postcolonial sublime? I

would wish to resist the notion that the sublime is fundamentally a natural condition, a

particular conscious mode that applies to all conditions and all times. This is a major

problem concerning the Kantian sublime, which, assumes that the sublime is somehow a

natural effect. If we were to follow such thinking, the postcolonial sublime would

44
emerge as an effect, of a particular kind of object, that would distinguish the

postcolonial sublime from all the other sublimes. But in evoking the postcolonial

sublime as a critical term, I would wish at the outset to stress that there actually is no

unique sublime object of the postcolonial. There is no postcolonial sublime in the strict

sense. Since the discourse of the sublime is entrenched in European art and theory there

seems little point in extracting a comparable quid pro quo from the discourse of the

postcolonial.

Far more interesting, and this is what I would wish to take up, is the notion that

the discourse of the postcolonial goes to work upon the discourse of the sublime. As I

will show in chapter two, the sublime has been a crucial trope in the discourses of

colonial expansion. The sublime thus emerges as a problem for the discourse of the

postcolonial. The postcolonial sublime can be defined as a critical problem, in which

the processes of Europe’s pretension to order are contested. In attempting to establish

the authority and the dynamism of reason, the Idealism of Kant and Hegel sets forth the

notion that reason, as a faculty of mind, is forged in and through its mastery over the

conscious excesses that characterise the sublime. The necessity of the sublime in the

process that established the authority of reason, signals that reason is at once the master

of its conscious domain, and yet vulnerable, since its mastery is established in the face

of the possibility of its collapse. The possibility of reason’s collapse is a crucial

moment in the discourse of the postcolonial. The sublime emerges as a critical site

upon which the authority of reason is written. To disrupt this authority it is necessary,

therefore, to unleash the sublime, its unpresentable excesses, from the shackles of

reason’s processes. This strategy of disruption, of unsettling Kantian confidence, is

what is at stake in the postcolonial sublime.

Notes

45
1
Stephen Slemon, “The Scramble for Post-colonialism”, in The Post-Colonial Studies
Reader, ed., Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1995),
45.
2
T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, in Selected Essays (New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960), 4.
3
Jasper Goss, “Postcolonialism: Subverting Whose Empire?”, Third World Quarterly,
vol. 17, no. 2 (1996), 240, 242.
4
Edward Said, “Foreword”, in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed., Ranajit Guha and
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), x.
5
Said, “Foreword”, x.
6
Christian Moraru, “Refiguring the Postcolonial: The Transnational Challenges”, Ariel:
A Review of International English Literature, vol. 28, no. 4 (1997), 172.
7
David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 6.
8
I am not suggesting that colonialism suddenly disappeared without a trace after the
war. My reference to the post-war period as constitutive of what might be called
postcoloniality, is based on the (perhaps Western) notion that the course of the world’s
economic and political domains were radically altered after the war. Such a course,
with its twists and turns, continues to the current day. What this suggests is that the
deviation in the direction of Europe’s empires after the war is a crucial factor in any
consideration of the current economic and political landscape. Thus rather than isolated
enclaves that suggest that all this talk of postcoloniality is fraudulent, the ‘postwar
empires’ such as the former Soviet Union, which continued colonising well into the
seventies, should only be understood in terms of their economic and military relation to
the postwar global formation. In a theoretical sense, in this regard I draw upon an
interesting observation made by Christian Moraru, in his provocative, “Refiguring the
Postcolonial: The Transnational Challenges”. Moraru points out that “the last empire to
fall apart was the former Soviet Union. … For two decades [60’s and 70’s] this regime
did its best to follow through the plans of Soviet imperialism. These plans entailed the
whole repertoire of ‘classical’ colonialism”. This obviously means that the postwar
period did not signal that colonialism had been dead and buried. Moraru in this light,
however, does not call for an abandonment of the postcolonial canon outright. Instead
he suggests what I take to be an acknowledgment of the necessity of postwar criticism.
“This study”, Moraru explains, “invites first and foremost a radical reassessment of the
postcolonial in the new, postcommunist and post-Marxist context. … I am envisioning
an updated postcolonial paradigm, able to build on the ‘classical’ postcolonial critique
as well as to evolve and address head-on the dynamic of transnational exchanges” (175,
176-177). See also Carol Breckenridge, Peter van der Veer, ed., Orientalism and the
Postcolonial Predicament (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 1-3.
9
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991
(London: Abacus, 1995), 216.
10
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University
Press, 1983), Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 1985), Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780 (Cambridge:

46
Cambridge University Press, 1990), Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
(London: Verso, 1991).
11
Ross Poole, “How European is Nationalism? A Response to Philip Gerrans”, Political
Theory Newsletter, 7 (1995), 60-66.
12
See also Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967).
13
Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (London: Zed Press,
1986), 140.
14
See also Basil Davidson, The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the
Nation-State (London: James Currey, 1992). He argues that the nation-state brings an
alien set of institutions to Africa, that the legal-constitutional frameworks on which
decolonised states were/are based failed to draw traditional structures of authority into
modern state structures, leaving people ‘affectless’ in their relationship with
bureaucracy. And Nicholas Dirks, ed., Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1992). He writes: “Claims about nationality necessitated
notions of culture that marked groups off from one another in essential ways, uniting
language, race, geography, and history in a single concept. Colonialism encouraged and
facilitated new claims of this kind, re-creating Europe and its others through its histories
of conquest and rule” (3).
15
Jasbir Jain in Problems of Postcolonial Literatures and other Essays (Jaipur:
Printwell, 1991), defends the use of the term ‘postcolonial’, rather than ‘post-
independence’ as an adequate description of the current cultural condition in India, but
uses the term pejoratively, rather than as a marker of radical independence. For Jain the
colonial attitude remains in tact despite political freedom. This is manifest in India’s
continuing adherence to the West. Jain writes, “the colonial period not only created a
sense of alienation from the native cultural tradition, but also ingrained an attitude of
subjection” (3). Subsequently cultural domains, such as literary criticism, continue to
look to and embrace Western theory, rather than taking up the challenge to develop
modes of interpretation within the Indian framework. Attempts which do seek to
develop ‘Indian’ cultural theories usually look back to India’s mythical and utopian
golden age as a conceptual model, and fail to address current sociopolitical needs. Jain
concludes: “to free ourselves from the postcolonial structures, it is necessary perhaps to
overcome nostalgia, and to interpret our reality as it confronts us” (13).
16
Goss, “Postcolonialism: Subverting Whose Empire?”, 243.
17
See Chris Patten, “Of Tigers, Bulls, and Bears: Collusion and Cronyism Cannot be
the Basis for Sustained Economic Growth”, Time (2 February, 1998), 60-62. Patten’s
colonial disposition also characterises the West’s view of economic failures of the
former USSR.
18
It would also be possible to contend that this heterogeneity characterises the demands
of contemporary scholarship generally. In something like what Lyotard has called the
postmodern condition, it now seems inadequate to not draw upon a wide range of
disparate critical concerns. This is exemplified, for instance, in Ali Rattansi, who
asserts that a “properly ‘postcolonialist’ analysis … requires the acknowledgement of a

47
set of processes in which cultural formation is dispersed along a number of axes of
potentially commensurate importance ! class, certainly, but also sexuality and gender,
racism, familial relations, religious discourses, conceptions of childhood and child-
rearing practices, and requiring therefore also an understanding of underlying processes
of psychic development and ‘deformation’” (“Postcolonialism and its Discontents”,
Economy and Society, vol. 26, no. 4 (1997), 482).
19
Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?”, trans. Martin Thom, in Nation and Narration, ed.
Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 11.
20
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Rani of Sirmur”, in Europe and its Others, ed.
Francis Barker, (Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1985), vol. 1, 128-151; “Can
the Subaltern Speak?”, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson,
Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinios Press, 1988), 271-313.
21
Aijaz Ahmad, “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality”, Race & Class, vol. 36, no. 3
(1995), 9.
22
Arif Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global
Capitalism”, Critical Inquiry, 20 (1994), 350, 353. For similar critiques, see: Benita
Parry, “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse”, The Oxford Literary
Review, vol. 9, no. 1-2 (1987), 27-58; Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Progress:
Pitfalls of the term Post-Colonialism”, Social Text, vol. 31. no. 32 (1992), 84-98; Ella
Shohat, “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial’”, Social Text, vol. 31, no. 32 (1992), 99-113; and
Patrick Williams, “Problems of Post-colonialism”, Paragraph, vol. 16, no. 1 (1993), 91-
102.
23
See for instance, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Editor’s Introduction: Writing “Race” and
the Difference It Makes”, Critical Inquiry, 12 (1985), 1-20; Ania Loomba,
“Overworlding the Third World”, Oxford Literary Review, vol. 13, no. 1-2 (1991), 164-
192; Stan Anson, “The Postcolonial Fiction”, Arena, no. 96 (1991), 64-66.
24
Martina Michel in “Positioning the Subject: Locating Postcolonial Studies”(Ariel,
vol. 26, no. 1 (1995), 83-99) argues that the postcolonial makes a significant break with
the postmodern (the celebration of the fractured subject as an end in itself). Whilst
subjects are constructed through discourse, there is an agency set forth in the
negotiation, or awareness of the self’s positionality, in/of the various discourses
involved in that construction. This means that the postcolonial, unlike the postmodern,
privileges subjectivity and its construction/negotiation. See also Kwame Anthony
Appiah, “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?”, (Critical Inquiry, 17
(1991), 336-357), which charts a connection on the basis that the post in both
theorisations can be read as a “space clearing gesture” that works towards challenging
“earlier legitimating narratives” (348, 353); Simon During, “Postmodernism or Post-
colonialism Today”, Textual Practice, vol. 1, no. 1 (1987), 32-47. During argues that
“the concept postmodernity has been constructed in terms which more or less
intentionally wipe out the possibility of post-colonial identity” (33); Arun Mukherjee,
“Whose Post-Colonialism and Whose Postmodernism?”, World Literature Written in
English, vol. 30, no. 2 (1990), 1-9; Vijay Mishra, and Bob Hodge, “What is Post(-
)colonialism?”, Textual Practice, vol. 5, no. 3 (1991), 399-414; and Linda Hutcheon,
“The Post Always Rings Twice: the Postmodern and the Postcolonial”, Textual
Practice, vol. 8, no. 3 (1994), 205-238.

48
25
Deepika Bhari, “Once More with Feeling: What is Postcolonialism?” (Ariel, vol. 26,
no. 1 (1995), 51-82) in grappling with the meaning of independence contends: “it may
be misleading and, worse, unhelpful to think of “postcolonial” issues as only those
marked by European imperialism; nor is it always useful to conceive of the
“postcolonial” as an adequate descriptor for the diverse experiences of the many
nations/cultures thus described. Nor, alas, as Spivak, among others, has observed, is the
present moment in these nations “post” the colonial in any genuine, or even cursory,
sense, as covert mercantile neo-colonialism, potent successor to modern colonialism,
continues its virtually unchallenged march across the face of the earth, ensuring that the
wretched will remain so, colluding in, as they did before, but now also embracing, the
process of economic and cultural annexation, this time well disguised under the name
modernization … The continuing and, in fact, increasing economic and cultural
dependence of these nations in the new world order make a mockery of the assumption
that, by a certain political rubric, independent status has been achieved … on the basis
of a signed document. So, too … do the growing tribalism and sectarianism in the
many trouble spots around the world mock the very idea of the nation” (58-59).
26
Gyan Prakash, “Introduction”, in After Colonialism, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton,
New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995), 5.
27
James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1988), 45.
28
Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 95.
29
Poole, “How European is Nationalism? A Response to Philip Gerrans”, 61.
30
Mark Berger, “The End of the Third World”, Third World Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 2
(1994), 267-268.
31
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Subaltern Studies and Critique of History”, Arena, no. 96
(1991), 110.
32
Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India”, in
Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 37, 39.
33
Gyan Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism”, American Historical
Review (December 1994), 1475.
34
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography”, in
Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 10-11.
35
Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography”, 13.
36
Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1991), 7.
37
Said, Orientalism, 71-72.

49
38
Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 178-179.
39
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 145.
40
Blackwell’s recently published Fanon: A Critical Reader (1996) attests to the
richness of Fanon’s work.
41
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Constance Farrington (London:
Penguin, 1967), 219.
42
Homi Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition”, in
Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams, Laura
Chrisman (Hemel Hempstead, England: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 114.
43
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 25.
44
R. Radhakrishnan, Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 178.
45
Said, Orientalism, 21.
46
Rattansi, “Postcolonialism and its Discontents”, 482.
47
Moraru, “Refiguring the Postcolonial”, 178.
48
Benedict Anderson, “Exodus”, Critical Inquiry, 20 (1994), 321, 322, 326.
49
Anderson, “Exodus”, 327.
50
Zulfikar Ghose, “This landscape, These People”, The Loss of India (London:
Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1964), 21.
51
Anderson, Imagined Communities, 37-46.
52
Franco Morretti, “Dialectic of Fear”, trans. David Forgacs, Signs Taken for Wonders
(London: Verso, 1983), 83, 85, 86.
53
Morretti, “Dialectic of Fear”, 93, 94.
54
Morretti, “Dialectic of Fear”, 105.
55
Morretti, “Dialectic of Fear”, 108.
56
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 115.
57
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (Dover, Delaware: The Consortium, 1992), 140,
141.
58
Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 158.

50
59
Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 141.
60
Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 131.
61
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans.
Richard Howard (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973), 25.
62
Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 141-142.
63
Todorov, The Fantastic, 25.
64
Samuel Monk in his influential study, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in
XVIII-Century England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), suggests that
all theories of the sublime return to Kant (6).
65
James Garvin, “The Maintenance of Empire: A Study in the Economics of Power”, in
The Empire and the Century (London: John Murray, 1905), 140.
66
James Garvin, The Economic Foundations of Peace: or World-Partnership as the
Truer Basis of the League of Nations (London: Macmillan & Co., 1919), 77.
67
Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, trans. James Strachey, The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVIII
(London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), 9-10.
68
Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, 35, 36.
69
Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, 53.
70
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New
York: Colombia University Press, 1982), 1, 4, 2.
71
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.
72
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 5.
73
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4.
74
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 4, 8.
75
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 5.
76
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 11.
77
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 12.
78
Jean-François Lyotard, “Answer to the Question: What is the Postmodern?”, in The
Postmodern Explained to Children, ed. Julian Pefanis, Morgan Thomas (Sydney: Power
Publications, 1992), 23-24.
79
Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey

51
Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 104.
80
Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth
Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 53.
81
David Carroll, Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida (London: Routledge, 1987),
173-184.
82
In this regard I follow Meaghan Morris, “Postmodernity and Lyotard’s Sublime”, in
The Pirate’s Fiancee: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism (London: Verso, 1988), 223-
240. See also Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1993), 184-187.
83
Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington, Ian Mcleod
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 122.
84
Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 136.
85
Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 129.
86
Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den
Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 143.
87
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 209.
88
Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1982), 106-107.
89
Bloom, Agon, 96.
90
Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”, Collected Papers, trans. Joan Riviere (London:
Hogarth Press, 1925), vol. 4, 369-370.

52
 Chapter Two

Kant, the Sublime, and the Rule of Reason

... even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his

slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over

him. The universe knows none of this.1

Gordon Bennett’s Painting for a New Republic (The Inland Sea)2 locates the

colonised self in an oblique relation with the colonial promise of Enlightenment order.

Looking out from a swirling, violent, and fractured experiential world that bears no

overall organising principle — including: the Union Jack, a colonial boat, skulls and

bones, a pyramid, a floating bloodied head, skeletons, Western desert patterns — we see

the promise of a golden ordered world, occupied by the text of the great master of

Idealism, Kant. The jarring disjunction, radical reversal, of the subjective self and the

object here disrupts the Rationalist preoccupation with a priori unity. The pure promise

of an Enlightened ordered world does not find its way to this subject, and remains as a

consequence an empty illusion, a matter of cultural production, colonial desire. But this

disjunction is interrupted by an image (the face) of this internally fractured self in a

mirror (that owes less to Kant than to Lacan). In this space of reflection the

contradictory spaces of Idealism’s promise of an ordered world and the turbulent

subjectivity of exile converge. In the words of Ian Mclean, Bennett’s work exposes “the

shadows of official ‘history’”, but refuses to situate the confrontation of these selves —

Kant and the exile — in a dialectic. Rather than “directly oppose one type of history

with another”, in the context of the painting a spatial opposition in which the colonised

self, rather than disrupt the coloniser, could be said to actually reproduce the coloniser’s

53
assumptions, Bennett “maps the oblique paths by which these different conceptions of

history and their applications to Australia, might cross over”.3

From this space of the ‘cross over’, a sort of in-between, Bennett intervenes in

Australia’s conservative racial and ethnic politics. Whilst it would be tempting to argue

that this convergence in the space of (self)reflection should be understood in terms of an

identity crisis — who am I? — much more disturbing, in the context of Australia’s

conservative national history, is the question of (cultural) exile: where am I? (Kristeva).

Such a questioning opens up what Bhabha has called the split space of the pedagogic

and the performative in the discourse of the nation.4 In the performance of cultural

exile, that temporal space caught in-between and outside the remembrance of the past

and the forgetfulness of everyday life, the pedagogic in-this-place! is interrupted. The

mirror of convergence inserts into Australia’s history (an)other time, a colonial

remembering, rather than the (Idealist) European myths of triumph against great odds.

This other time in its convergence with the myth of nation arises disturbingly and

changes what it means to be a nation. To be a conservative is to attempt to erase what

this self in the mirror calls to remembrance. Painting for a New Republic (The Inland

Sea) attempts to clear a space (of questioning) in which national myths are always

already open to disruption, always already vulnerable to a contested rewriting, the

possibility of altered destinations.

But there is also another important moment here. Bennett’s refusal to occupy

the dialectic of resistance interrupts the notion, of the postcolonial canon generally, that

Kantian philosophy (the golden order of Enlightenment), its fixity, is the given of

colonial desire. Staged in relation to its opposite, the violent chaos of the figure of

cultural exile, the colonial desire for firm epistemological, moral, and social foundations

emerges within the postcolonial as a myth of origin. Colonial logic begins at a fixed

point, the transcendent Ideal to use the language of the critical Kant, and then proceeds

54
to make this fixed Ideal an actuality. Yet the radical disjunction of the exile and the

promise of Kantian order reveals that the chaotic, whilst it appears as order’s opposite,

is actually a condition of that order. In other words, what emerges is the notion that

Kantian Reason establishes unity, rather than proceeds from a fixed point. Unity is

Reason’s goal, never its starting point. Unity is Reason’s teleology. This means that

the sublime lack of order of the displaced consciousness, and its political possibilities,

need to be re-thought. Rather than a threat, it could be that the displaced, and the hybrid

actually serve the purposes of Kantian Reason. As I argued in chapter one, the figure of

the monstrous migrant (explored by Rushdie) takes two forms. The first emerges as the

essentialised other that the equally essentialised metropolitan centre utilises to define

itself. The monstrous Saladin Chamcha is such a figure. His goat-like form merely

symbolised what the metropolitan centre was not. I contended that Rattansi’s

intertwined model exemplifies the Hegelian terms that constitutes such a relation

between the metropolitan centre and the postcolonial migrant. Conversely, I contended

that the figure of Gibreel Farishta represents a second, much more disturbing image of

the postcolonial migrant. His disturbing figure exploits the anxiousness, the underside

of the confidence of the metropolitan centre. The figure of the postcolonial migrant

thus emerges as an invader of sorts. This thesis seeks to theorise this image of the

migrant as (monstrous) invader through the trope of the sublime. My contention is that

where there is Western confidence there is also an anxiousness that can be understood in

terms of the discourse of the sublime. In its insistence upon disturbing Kantian order,

Painting for a New Republic (The Inland Sea) thus also demands that we (re)turn to the

work of Kant,5 in order to deal with what I would wish to call the anxious dynamism of

Reason’s teleological process.

My aim in this chapter will be to re-read the Kantian sublime in the light of

Bennett’s incisive painting. I would wish to show that the Kantian sublime (which is

55
utilised to establish reason’s authority) is essentially a conservative trope. For the

discourse of the postcolonial, the sublime thus emerges as a critical site upon which the

authority of reason is written. To disrupt this authority, to take up the political

possibilities of the image of the postcolonial migrant as invader, it is necessary,

therefore, to consider the sublime, its unpresentable excesses, and its location in relation

to reason’s processes. My tactic will be to inhabit the edges of Kant’s thought, in order

to draw out the social and political implications of the architecture of the Kantian self.

The necessity of Bennett’s intervention from the space of ‘in-between’ is foremost in

this undertaking. How is it possible to think this space of intervention, its time, its

politics? In order to inhabit the edges of Kant’s thought, I would wish to take up his

‘aesthetic’. Rather than the “science of all principles of a priori sensibility”6 as it

appears in Critique of Pure Reason, I take the term in its second usage, as it emerges in

Critique of Judgement: as ‘the critique of taste’, or ‘the philosophy of art’. The former

accounts for ‘determinate judgement’, the latter introduces another form of judgement,

the ‘reflective’. The peculiar principles of ‘reflective judgement’ — the movement

from the particular to the universal — have opened up a rich palimpsest of ideas and

contestations. As Schopenhauer notes, “we are bound to wonder how Kant, to whom

certainly art remained very foreign, and who in all probability had little susceptibility to

the beautiful, in fact probably never had the opportunity to see an important work of art,

and who seems finally to have no knowledge even of Goethe ... was able to render a

great and permanent service to the philosophical consideration of art”.7 Though clearly

framed by the principles of pain and pleasure, authentic life, common sense, tradition,

and harmony, as well as its remarkable ambition, reflective judgement seems to remain

indeterminate.

Whilst recent readers foreground what is considered Kant’s failure to unite the

theoretical and the practical, liberate the aesthetic from what is considered the tyranny

56
of logical philosophy, and underscore the indeterminate basis for questions of art,

politics, and justice (Lyotard, Arendt), my reading will inhabit the edges of the more

Romantic Kant (which can be detected in all of the three Critiques). Kant’s remarkable

claim in the third Critique is that the working union of knowledge and morality is not

possible without art. Bennett’s rejection of the possibilities of the Kantian promise of

order is thus all the more compelling. In discourses dealing with the constructedness of

the figure of the nation, which is my (postcolonial) concern, Kant’s aesthetic occupies a

central place. In critical concepts such as Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’, and

Gellner’s and Hobsbawm’s emphasis on the nation as invention,8 the romantic character

of reflective judgement is indispensable. The location of the dispossessed self in the

spaces of the in-between, can be read as an attempt to problematise Kant’s aesthetic

claims. In the light of Reason’s dynamism, as I have suggested, my concern throughout

the course of the thesis will be to explore how the discourse of the postcolonial disrupts

Reason’s teleological processes.

Following Chatterjee, I will link my discussion on Kantian Reason to

nationalism’s desire “to represent itself in the image of Enlightenment”.9 I would wish

to re-read, what for Chatterjee is the failure of this desire — epistemological unity and

moral order — in terms of the dynamic that Bennett opens up, his insertion of the

question of exile into the Kantian equation. Whilst Chatterjee stages the Enlightenment

in terms of an impossible desire, in which the slippages and contradictions of discourse

always already thwart a pretension to order, I would wish to read Kant’s remarkable

ambition to unite the theoretical and the practical in terms of a particular dynamic that

renders the slippages and contradictions of his discourse as both indispensable and

necessary for Reason’s smooth operation. In other words, the notion that Enlightenment

culture is always already hampered by an impossible fixity, as it appears in much

postcolonial theory, does not take the necessary excesses, movements, and changes that

57
lay at the core of the West’s sense of progress into account. It seems to me that

Enlightenment culture is built upon a dynamic of excess and slippage that renders its

disruption difficult and complex.

What I am suggesting is that the staging of what was and is a colonial

consciousness by the West is essentially a process in which excesses and slippages,

rather than being an enemy to the cause of its Enlightenment thought outright, are

actually structural necessities. This means that if we are to take up the disruptive

capacity of the postcolonial, we need to turn to consider the discourse of the sublime

and its part in the literary construction of a colonial consciousness. The assumption of

the superiority of Western Reason, which marks colonial consciousness, is inseparably

linked to that moment, as Weiskel puts it, “implicit in the act of ‘joining’ with the

great”,10 and acting in the world of objects as if this is the case. This is not to say that

Europe is great, or that transcendental greatness has, or can be attained. Neither is it to

suggest that we ought to consider European domination in homogeneous terms as the

gathering of the great around a single unifying term. It is to acknowledge that in the

working out of a ‘superior’ European consciousness the aesthetic metaphor of the

sublime is crucial. It seems to me that Reason, which emerges in Enlightenment

thought as the ultimate authority, is able to assume such a status precisely because the

metaphor of the sublime, the transcendental dynamic that it opens up, is utilised at that

moment in which its legitimation is dramatically called for. This means that rather than

a fixed content, which, as a consequence of its impositional inadequacies is doomed to

fail, Reason emerges as a dynamic, structural principle that is less content orientated

than hegemonic.

Without colonial expansion, and the venturesome risks that it affords, Kantian

Reason is a hollow emptiness. Without some kind of idea of what constitutes the grand,

the great, the powerful, the heroic etc., and some measure of its exploits, the discourse

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of Reason is a blind tautology. It seems to me that the Kantian self, ruled by Reason,

draws into its formulation the character of the coloniser, who, in the form of the heroic

discoverer and civiliser goes forth in order to impose its limits upon the ‘objective’

world. It is in this sense that we can locate the work of the sublime. Kant in his

endeavour to proclaim the supremacy of Reason, and the possibilities for such a self

(Sapere aude!),11 also sought to anchor the authority of Reason in an idea, more

accurately a feeling of greatness via the sublime. My aim will be to unpack the nature

of this greatness, so that it can be juxtaposed to the interventions of Bennett and the

discourse of the postcolonial. I would wish to contend that the Kantian sublime

emerges in the context of European expansionism. I will begin exploring the Kantian

sublime by outlining the philosophical basis of the Kantian self. I will then socially

locate this self, in order to underscore the social implications of the Kantian sublime.

Foremost in my inquiry is the issue of what I have called Western anxiousness, the

underside of Western confidence. As it is articulated through the discourse of the

sublime, I would wish to show that this anxiousness is a necessity for reason, and also

an instant in which reason’s vulnerability is exposed. My contention is that the

postcolonial sublime is opened up in the moment in which such a vulnerability is

exploited.

The Excesses of the Kantian Self

We can begin to chart this vulnerability by examining Kant’s theory of the self.

The Kantian self begins in the radical reformulation of the relationship of the object of

sense to the cognitive faculties. Whilst it is impossible to determine whether ideas

inform processes or whether processes inform ideas, the exigency of this radical

reformulation of selfhood coincided with Europe’s capitalist and colonialist expansion.

The traditional theories of the self, as Joyce Appleby explains, that “begin with the

person as a member of society born into a complex of obligations and identities”,

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clearly lacked the desires that lay at the core of expansionism. Theories of the self thus

shift to focus upon the basis for an expansionist desire. As such, Appleby continues, in

the context of capitalist expansion, theories of the self stress an individual need that

coincides, strangely, with a “common set of needs”.12 For Charles Taylor, the erosion

of the socially obligated self can be understood as a process of ‘disenchantment’,

whereby theories of the unified natural self, the “ontic logos” as he calls it, have

disappeared. In the debates concerning Aufklärung, “theories of ontic logos cease to be

meaningful … The world consists of a domain of objects to which we can respond in

varying ways”. The “disengagement from cosmic order” meant that “the human agent

was no longer to be understood as an element in a larger, meaningful order”. The self’s

“paradigm purposes are to be discovered within.”13

In keeping with the revised theories of the self that Appleby and Taylor outline,

Kant’s ‘radical reformulation’ of the self arises in response to what he understood as

two philosophical dangers. Upon the first, the disturbing spectre of empiricism had

attacked the basis of rational reflection. Condillac asserted in his Traité des Sensations,

for instance, that reflective possibility is simply a habit that has been formed in time.

The mind in the process of learning, and therefore by extension becoming

knowledgeable, merely replays what has been derived from sensory experience, the

memories of past perceptions. Concerning the (annoying) imaginary statue, utilised

throughout the work to show how the senses produced ideas, Condillac contended that

“I have formed the habit of certain judgments which refer my sensations where they are

not. ... Thus the statue is nothing other than what it has acquired. Why would the same

not be true of man?”.14 Upon the second front, the Leibnizian metaphysical tradition, of

which Kant was a part, had unleashed a philosophical excess that effectively

destabilised the certainty of knowledge. In keeping with the individualism around

which debates concerning Aufklärung had gathered, Leibniz argued that every

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consciousness (‘monad’) in essence requires no need of a world of objects to function.

His famous phrase, “the monad is windowless”,15 meant that perceptions can never be

brought about by action from outside.16 They must, in some sense, be generated

spontaneously within the monad itself. This means that the relationships between “all

created things”, rather than conflictual and effective, are determined by their inner,

universal principles. The “interconnection, relationship ... of all things to each

particular one”, Leibniz writes, “and of each one to all the rest, brings it about that every

simple substance has relations which express all the others and that it is consequently a

perpetual living mirror of the universe”. The problematic relationship between the mind

and the body, perhaps the central philosophical issue of the day, was thus claimed to

have been resolved. According to the logic of monadology, the resolution is that there

is no relationship, there is merely a coincidence. Leibniz asserts, “the soul follows its

own laws, and the body likewise follows its own laws. They are fitted to each other in

virtue of the preestablished harmony between all substances, since they are all

representations of one and the same universe”.17

Kantian Reason begins in a dynamic atmosphere of philosophical and social

debate. His reformulation of the self should be read in the context of the European

expansionism of which these philosophical and social debates are a crucial part. Kant’s

work establishes the power and authority of Reason, that faculty of mind that,

ultimately, marks the individual. It is in and against the notion that the universe is a

machine in which human thought and action can be reduced to “how system into system

runs”,18 as Pope put it, that Kant writes. In such notions the empirical self is a kind of

victim, helpless and absurd. Questions concerning the moral worth of the individual, if

we are to follow thinkers such as Condillac, and to certain extent Hume, are essentially

meaningless.19 Kant also sought to rescue metaphysics from its dogmatic excesses, its

lofty idealism, so that an authoritative account of Reason could be found. In a “realm

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beyond the world of the senses”, Kant explains, “where experience can yield neither

guidance nor correction ... our reason carries on those enquiries [God, Freedom, and

Immortality] which owing to their importance we consider to be far more excellent, and

in their purpose far more lofty, than all the understanding can learn in the field of

appearances”. But the metaphysics that “confidently sets itself to this task” does so,

Kant argues, “without any previous examination of the capacity or incapacity of reason

for so great an undertaking”.20

Precariously caught between the poles of vertigo and an inexplicable excess, it is

significant that Kant set about, as he puts it in the “Preface to the Second Edition” of the

first Critique, “discovering the path upon which it [reason] can securely travel”.21 This

path is expressed thus. In its theoretical employment:

Reason is never in immediate relation to an object, but only to the understanding;

and it is only through the understanding that it has its own [specific] empirical

employment. … Reason has … as its sole object, the understanding and its

effective application. Just as the understanding unifies the manifold in the object

by means of concepts, so reason unifies the manifold of concepts by means of

ideas, positing a certain collective unity as the goal of the activities of the

understanding.22

This means that the goal of the understanding by means of the concepts (a unified

experiential knowledge), as situated by the Ideas of Reason, effectively demolishes the

empiricist emphasis upon the self as a clean slate upon which nature writes its

immutable laws.23 Moreover, the ‘risky’ Leibnizian practice of separating the Ideas

from the conditions that make experience possible, in order to make dogmatic, yet

foundationless assertions, is also laid to rest.

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 Rather than replay Kant’s theory of knowledge, I would wish to focus upon

what I understand as the exigency of reason’s ‘security’ (sicheren). In what I have

called the anxiousness of Western reason, ‘security’ as a metaphor for engendering

reason is particularly nuanced. In order to argue that the discourse of the postcolonial

seizes the Kantian sublime and pushes it beyond its limits, it will be useful to chart such

nuances. The metaphor directly relates to European expansionism, and the European

self as an authoritative agent. What does ‘security’ in the context of expansionism

mean? Kant argues that the coincidence of reason’s ideas and the thing-it-itself (since

they are both part of the same universe, as Leibniz claimed) is simply a (dangerous)

mistake. The self’s limited (sensory) view of the world means that it is impossible to

know the thing-in-itself absolutely.24 We can never see the world as (a) God. But there

is more at stake here than what is clearly Kant’s pious anxiousness concerning the

capacity of the self to rise above his or her meek station in life. The possibility of a

solid foundation for knowledge is also a crucial issue. If Reason’s unfounded claims

can be distinguished from its more secure employment, then it is possible to establish

knowledge as a certainty, rather than as empty speculation. It would be possible to

confidently know that what is known is dependable. Such a solid domain, Kant

describes as “an island, enclosed by nature itself within unalterable limits. It is the land

of truth ... surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean”.25 ‘Security’ is thus inseparably

linked to surety, in the context of Reason’s theoretical employment.

As the metaphor implies, this demand for a secure knowledge means that the

possibility of uncertainty is an ever present danger for theoretical Reason. Kant’s work

is built upon an anxiousness that arises in relation to the question of the authority of

reason. His important distinction between phenomena and noumena thus attempts to

ward off uncertainty, and to establish an authoritative basis for knowledge. Phenomena

(‘sensible entities’) as the objects of experience — the system of the world as

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experience reveals it — are the basis for an empirically based, that is to say, a certain

knowledge. Kant argues that the “principles of pure understanding ... contain nothing

but what may be called the pure schema of possible experience”. All “concepts, and

with them all principles, even as such as are possible a priori, relate to empirical

intuitions, that is, to the data for a possible experience. Apart from this relation they

have no objective validity”.26 Theoretical reason legitimately employed makes

‘inferences’ that are based upon what the understanding supplies, and this alone.27 The

unity of experience is established via the ideas, which work upon the understanding,

empirically employed.28

Noumena, on the other hand, can be defined as the objects of thought that have

no direct link to the experiential world of the understanding. This is the domain of

metaphysics, which, Kant interestingly claims:

is to be looked upon as given; that is to say, metaphysics actually exists, if not as a

science, yet still as natural disposition ... For human reason, without being moved

merely by idle desire for extent and variety of knowledge, proceeds impetuously,

driven on by an inward need, to questions such as cannot be answered by any

empirical employment of reason, or by principles thence derived.29

In the constitution of this self, there thus exists an unrestrained desire for what will

become the elevation of conscious thought over the immediate world of the senses. But

in the domain of knowledge, for Kant such impetuosity, with its excesses and sense of

unbridled freedom, almost lawlessness, will never do. Against this ingrained character

of reason, in which the transcendental ideas “seduce the understanding by an

unavoidable illusion ... which, though deceitful, cannot be restrained within the bounds

of experience by any resolution”, the pedagogic Kant sets forth what he describes as a

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solution. Such a solution is made possible “only by scientific instruction and with much

difficulty”.30 Reason’s security thus emerges as a great achievement carried out against

what seems like an insurmountable excess.

In the context of the debates concerning Aufklärung, Kant’s sober reminder

concerning the limits of theoretical knowledge is directed at the rationalist philosophers

who made unfounded conclusions concerning the big questions — noumena: God,

Immortality, Freedom. As I have stated, noumena do not correspond to appearances,

but, like the monads of Leibniz, arise outside and beyond sensibility, all verifiable

phenomena. But in the context of this discussion on reason’s ‘security’, which seems to

be crucial for the Kantian self, the unbridled capacity of noumena signals that reason is

ultimately undetermined, that is to say, free. “For we cannot”, Kant asserts, say “of

sensibility that it is the sole possible kind of intuition”. Noumena are, therefore, not

dismissed outright by Kant’s deliberations upon knowledge. Instead they serve a useful,

albeit negative function, “to curb the pretensions of sensibility”.31

In the light of the ‘dangers’ that surround it here, Reason emerges as a voyager

upon an ocean of perils. What is significant concerning Kant’s metaphor, however, is

the source of this impending danger. For whilst perilous voyages imply that reason

leaves its homeland and ventures away, the dangers that it encounters do not come from

a space beyond its borders, but from its own ‘natural’ inclinations. What this suggests

is that Reason’s legitimate theoretical employment is always already marked by a

capacity that far exceeds that employment. Reason thus in many respects sacrifices its

own capacity in order to function legitimately. The excessive possibilities of noumena,

whilst always already a danger to reason’s surety concerning its sensible objects, “is not

only admissible”, Kant asserts, “but as setting limits to sensibility is ... indispensable”.32

The nature of this sacrificial gesture, the excesses that enable it, and the sense of

authority that accompanies it, are crucial. In view of the capacities that it sacrifices,

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reason’s legitimate theoretical employment can be considered all the more authoritative.

The issue of reason’s ‘security’, which has been my concern thus far, directly relates to

certainty, and by extension, the capacity of the self to make authoritative claims

concerning the state of the world. Security equates to sure authority — the I knows that

the known is true. Backed by reason, the Kantian self in the context of colonial

expansion thus makes a claim for the authority of his knowledge.

For this thesis two crucial issues concerning the security of reason emerge.

Firstly, the objective authority of reason is inseparably linked to the irrational. In short,

the irrational enables Kant to establish reason’s theoretical limits. Secondly, since

reason’s authority is always established in relation to what can be called sublime

excesses, excess emerges as a problem for the discourse of the postcolonial. If excess is

a necessity, how is it possible to disrupt reason? I would contend that the necessity of

the sublime in the process that established the authority of reason, signals that reason is

at once the master of its conscious domain, and yet vulnerable, since its mastery is

established in the face of the possibility of its collapse. The possibility of reason’s

collapse is a crucial moment in the discourse of the postcolonial. It opens up a space for

a cogent politics to begin. To disrupt this authority it is necessary, therefore, to unleash

the sublime, its unpresentable excesses, from the shackles of the Kantian dialectic.

If in Critique of Pure Reason Kant is anxious to ward off the dangerous excesses

of Reason, in its practical employment the vulnerability of reason is particularly

marked. The ideas which had been kept under check by a sacrificial logic in reason’s

theoretical employment become much more tenuous. I draw attention to the ideas in

order to underscore both reason’s authority and its vulnerability. As I will show in

subsequent chapters, my contention is that the disruptive capacity of the discourse of the

postcolonial is built upon a seizure of the vulnerability of reason. Having claimed to

have demolished a purely empirical basis for knowledge, and to have dispelled the

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grand illusions of rationalism, Kant further radicalises his theory of the self in his

engagement with the issue of morality. In the Critique of Practical Reason we find pure

reason in its practical form refusing to subordinate moral action to sensuality, and to

sensual knowledge. The freedom that was a major problem for theoretical reason, as

Kant’s concept of noumena revealed, now becomes central. If reason found it necessary

to willingly resist the lure of freedom in its theoretical employment, in its practical

employment “the possibility ! indeed, the necessity ! of thinking them” opens up the

possibility of thinking of the moral law and its relation to freedom. For practical reason,

Kant contends, the moral law “does provide a fact absolutely inexplicable from any data

of the world of sense or from the whole compass of the theoretical use of reason, and

this fact points to a pure intelligible world ! indeed, it defines it positively and enables

us to know something of it, namely, a law”.33

In what appears as almost a reverse of the function of the ideas of reason in its

theoretical employment, the ideas function without limits in its practical employment.

This is crucial, it reveals the disturbing indeterminacy of the ‘grounds’ upon which

reason is built, its vulnerability. Functioning in Reason’s ‘pure’ form as heuristic

principles,34 the ideas act like objects yet at the same time bear no relation to such.

Kant writes, there is “a great difference between something being given to my reason as

an object absolutely, or merely as an object in the idea. In the former case our concepts

are employed to determine the object; in the latter case there is in fact only a schema for

which no object … is directly given”.35 As the rules of the Reason’s legislative powers,

the ideas can be considered to be authoritative, that is to say legitimate, simply because

they are able to perform the task at hand: to bring unity to the manifold. What this

means is that there is no sense in which ideas can be considered legitimate because of

the content that they convey. Their legitimacy is understood in performative terms,

since they provide the structure that organises the manifold into a totality. The Ideas, in

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reason’s legitimate theoretical employment, merely work with what the understanding

makes available. As such there is still a sense in which the sensory faculty limits

knowledge, as it does in empiricism.

But since Ideas do not correspond to an object, there is always the possibility

that they can exceed the bounds of the understanding in order to operate purely in their

own (transcendent) terms. Perhaps this would be madness. Perhaps Leibniz was mad.

Yet the possibility of this excess is a crucial component in Kant’s masterful self, as I

will show. Significantly this sense of mastery is set forth via a theory of morality,

rather than knowledge. Mastery has to do with the acts of the self, which, as Kant

explains, “depends upon freedom”. In defending the moral basis of Plato’s Republic,

Kant declares, “it is the power of freedom to pass beyond any and every specified limit.

… where human reason exhibits genuine causality, and where ideas are operative causes

(of actions and their objects), namely, in the moral sphere … Plato rightly discerns clear

proofs of an origin from ideas”.36 And again, there “is in man a power of self-

determination, independently of any coercion through sensuous impulses”.37

But there is also a logic of sacrifice at work here. Though in this case reason

sacrifices the senses. It is in the humbling of sensual motives that the possibility of

moral action arises. In pietist fashion, the concept of the ‘highest good’, the ideal of

moral action, emerges solely from the idea of moral perfection in itself, which Reason

formulates a priori, and which is inseparably linked to the concept of freedom, rather

than the wayward passions of the body. In this instance the ideas have been

transformed and put to a different use, namely the relation of Reason to the will, as

opposed to the relation of Reason to the object, as in the case of Reason’s theoretical

employment. Again the problematic draws upon the supremacy of Reason, which in

this instance determines the will in terms of the concept of freedom.

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 If in Reason’s theoretical employment we find certain limits, as tentative as this

claim may be, it is only through moral action that Freedom can be set forth. Kant in this

regard is an indeterminist. The self is free to act in agreement with its choices, since

actions are not determined by sensory data in any shape or form. Whilst I am not

concerned here with long standing debates concerning freedom and causality, it will

suffice to say that what is crucial for Kant as an indeterminist is the notion that the self

is morally dynamic. Hume had argued:

the same motives always produce the same actions; the same events follow from

the same causes. Ambition, avarice, self-love, vanity, friendship, generosity,

public spirit ! these passions, mixed in various degrees and distributed through

society, have been, from the beginning of the world, and still are, the source of all

of the actions and enterprises which have ever been observed among mankind.38

But action for Kant is considered to be always already moral, since it presupposes a

freedom that transcends empirical causes.

Kant tells us, “pure reason alone is practical of itself, and it gives (to man) a

universal law, which we call the moral law. ... The fact just mentioned is undeniable”.

The remarkable thing about the moral law is that it doesn’t exist in isolation as an

abstract entity hovering above the deeds of the self. Rather, Kant continues, “the law

has the form of an imperative”,39 which is derived from the subject alone. Duty to the

moral law thus arises in the relation of action to the autonomy of the will. The practical

law and freedom “reciprocally imply each other. … it is the moral law which leads

directly to the concept of freedom”.40 The self acts, but in order to act morally such

action must be free, since the concept of freedom implies the moral law. If the self acts

immorally, say out of sensual pride, or anger, or lust (in Kant’s day irredeemably

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immoral), such actions imply a determination other than freedom; in the examples cited:

sensual appetites perhaps. Actions which are compatible to the autonomy of the will are

thus deemed moral, actions which are not, since a determining force other than freedom

is in play, cannot be free. The will whose maxims are necessarily in harmony with the

condition of freedom is a ‘holy will’, or an absolutely good will.41 In the dutiful action

the self enters a relation not to external necessities, but to the freedom of the will, as

expressed by the ideas.

I have suggested that reason’s authority in both the theoretical and practical

sphere emerges in performative, rather than metaphysical terms. For Kant there is no

rigid basis for the self, other than the capacity of the self to produce knowledge and to

act morally. I have also suggested that the confidence of Kant and his knowing and

moral self, is constructed in an ‘atmosphere’ of anxiousness. Kant sought to rescue

reason from the dangerous sea of excess, to provide it with a stable homeland, an island

from which to establish its authority. We have encountered Kant the philosopher

revealing the transcendental principles that provide the conditions of the possibility of

the self’s knowledge of the object, and the self’s moral dynamism. It is interesting that

the basis for these transcendental principles, however, is not built upon the detailed

philosophical critique of Hume that we find in the Prolegomena, which painstakingly

qualifies and brackets his “critical idealism”.42 Neither is it the philosopher preoccupied

with actualities, the truth. Instead, listen to Kant as the animating principle of the reign

of the reasonable self over the object begins to emerge. Remarkably we find Kant

simply appealing to what we might consider to be a simple ‘utility’: this is the ‘easier’

way. In the “Introduction” to the Critique of Judgement he writes:

if we were told that a deeper or wider knowledge of nature derived from

observation must lead at last to a variety of laws, which no human understanding

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 could reduce to a principle, we should at once acquiesce. But still we more gladly

listen to one who offers hope that the more we know nature internally and can

compare it with external members now unknown to us, the more simple shall we

find it in its principles, and that the further our experience reaches, the more

uniform shall we find it amid the apparent heterogeneity of its empirical laws.

For it is a mandate of our judgment to proceed according to the principle of the

harmony of nature with our cognitive faculty.43

It is crucial to note that Kant is not concerned with refuting, in this instance, the

notion that ultimately the understanding always already fails to grasp the object of

sense. In fact he is content to agree with this proposition. But at the same time this

resignation and perhaps nihilistic pessimism that attends to it, however, is overturned in

favour of a possibility that offers hope. Kant seems unshaken in his confidence

concerning this hope, which has as its object a unified experience. But this confidence,

which animates what could be considered Kant’s flirt with the possibility of

meaninglessness here, appears, abruptly, without consideration. In this moment the

philosophical text ceases and is invaded, contaminated, by cultural desire. What is

important for Kant is the possibility of an authoritative, masterful self. The third

Critique appeals to the necessity of a conscious unity, despite, what could be, the

meaningless state of the actual world.

The Jewel in the Crown: Critique of Judgement

I have staged Kant’s work in terms of what I have considered to be his

preoccupation with constituting an authoritative conception of Reason. My contention

is that knowledge and morality are both effected in the self in that crucial moment in

which Reason comes into play in order to legislate the experiential manifold and to

determine social action. Each employment derives its authority in and through a

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relation with another aspect of self-hood, the transcendent ideas and the sensuous

desires that arise as a threat to reason’s authoritative employment. Kant claimed to have

found a new ground for asserting an autonomous self, a ‘transcendental ego’ equipped

to impose its desires upon the random acts of experience. I have shown that the

necessity of the Kantian architectonic system is written against a backdrop of crises,

what was considered to be the moral vertigo of empiricism, and the excesses of

rationalism. Importantly these impending crises were located as parts of the Kantian

self, rather than objects that threaten from the ‘outside’. Reason is constituted in its

various forms through an antagonistic struggle with its own dark desires, its lofty

idealism, its bodily passions. The crowning jewel in the Kantian self thus arrives when

Reason’s theoretical authority is established in relation to the possibility of its

dissolution. Conversely, this self’s practical dynamism remains impotent without the

possibility of the condition of freedom being brought to bear upon the objects of

knowledge.

In light of the excesses upon which reason is established, and the simple utility

that animates the ‘hope’ that the Kantian self offers, I will turn to the question of the

sublime. In the following my aim will be to demonstrate the conservative basis of the

Kantian sublime, and that such a conservatism is inseparably linked to the European

desire for centrality upon the global stage. The sublime as excess arises in order to

define reason’s limits. The sublime is the object that reason overcomes in order to

establish its authority. It is my contention that it this conservatism that the discourse of

the postcolonial works against. In wresting the sublime from its conservative trajectory,

the discourse of the postcolonial interrupts the basis for reason’s authority.

It is in the sense of a securely knowing and morally accountable self that

Critique of Judgement works. At this point we encounter the famous abyss between

freedom and necessity. Whilst many have contended with this abyss as a philosophical

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problem, I would instead wish to consider it a political one. If the Kantian self is to

truly soar above empirical experience authoritatively, which as I have suggested is at the

core of Kant’s colonial desire, it is necessary to structure consciousness such that

freedom and its association with mastery becomes the condition of not only morality but

also of the self’s entire being in the world. It is in this sense of moving beyond

limitations, in the name of mastery, that the Critique of Judgement attempts to unite the

moral self and the knowing self through the judgement (aesthetic and teleological). The

philosophical failure, or success, of this attempt is not my concern here. My

‘habitation’ of Kant’s edge is much more pragmatic. I write in the shadow of over two

centuries of Kantian thought. My concern is with the ‘Kant effect’, rather than ‘Kant in

itself’.

Critique of Judgement sets as its task the problem of carving a space between

theoretical and practical Reason, the terrain of the first and second Critiques. Kant tells

us, “an immeasurable gulf is fixed between the sensible realm of the concept of nature

and the supersensible realm of the concept of freedom, so that no transition is possible

from the first to the second”. But this transition is necessary, Kant continues, since the

“concept of freedom is meant to actualize in the world of sense the purpose proposed by

its laws”44. In other words, the problem of the possibility of practical reason, or more

precisely the moral law, to preside over empirical experience, the domain of pure

reason, is central in Kant’s critical pursuit here. The necessity of this transition is thus

driven by a desire for the ultimate supremacy of practical Reason, as it is attended to by

the concept of freedom, over the entire architectonic system. We thus find in Kant’s

problematic a language that is preoccupied with hierarchy. Kant’s system situates

Reason at the top of the pyramid as a kind of master over the domains of knowledge and

moral being.

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 In order to achieve this crowning moment, Kant utilises reflective judgement,

the third faculty, that is situated between Pure Reason and Practical Reason, and which

functions according to a principle in which only the particular is a given, and the

“universal has to be found”. Reflective judgement begins with the particular, the

immediate, and then “ascends”, as Kant puts it, in order to establish a universal frame.

Kant tells us, that this process of ascension (I take note of this terminology) operates in

terms of a principle, “the purposiveness of nature”, which is characterised as a

“particular concept, a priori, which has its origin solely in the reflective judgement”. 45

As such the reflective judgement has no determined object. Kant explains this as such,

the aesthetical judgment contributes nothing toward the knowledge of its objects,

and thus must be reckoned as belonging to the critique of the judging subject and

its cognitive faculties only so far as they are susceptible of a priori principles, of

whatever other use (theoretical or practical) they may be. This is the propaedeutic

of all philosophy.46

We can thus think of reflective judgement as that moment in which the mind turns

inward and becomes conscious of its own working. This self-consciousness is the

ground upon which Idealism writes itself. Without such there is no world, no self, no

art, no philosophy, and certainly no national(ist) spirit.

Reflective judgement is divided into two basic operations: the aesthetic and the

teleological. I am mainly concerned with the aesthetic, which functions in two distinct,

yet interrelated ways, in terms of the beautiful and the sublime. If we recall the basic

task of the Critique of Judgement ! to unite theoretical and practical reason ! we find

that this is accomplished in a straightforward fashion. Practical Reason is united with

Pure Reason via the work of the beautiful and the teleological in relation to the (pliable)

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Ideas. The feeling of pleasure that is attended to by beautiful forms in art and nature

implies an Idea of the similarity of nature and reflective thought. Kant calls this a

“subjective purposiveness of nature for our cognitive faculty”.47 Conversely, the

similarity that is implied in the feeling of pleasure also directly relates to the Idea of an

objective finality of nature for freedom, which is the object of teleological judgement.

The theoretical and the practical are thus united via the relation of the Idea to nature.

Kant tells us that the “beautiful arts and the sciences which, by their universally

communicable pleasure, and by the polish and refinement of society, make man more

civilised, if not morally better.” Since the Idea of nature as subject to the understanding

and the Idea of nature as art demands the supremacy of the supersensible concept of

freedom, the beautiful and the teleological “win us in large measure from the tyranny of

sense propensions, and thus prepare men for a lordship in which reason alone shall have

authority”.48

It is significant that the unity of the self is set forth solely in terms of the relation

between the Ideas and the beautiful and the teleological. It is here that the logical

necessity of Reason’s authority is established. But Kant does not seem to be ultimately

satisfied with this authority, since, it could be contended, the beautiful and the

teleological establish merely a subjective authority for Reason that ‘prepares men for

lordship’. This means that the Kantian self, whilst built upon the principle of strength in

unity, remains untried in the world of human affairs. Kant does not seem to be content

with the authority of this moment in purely performative terms. Thus, whilst there

appears to be no need for the sublime moment in establishing the necessity of a

conscious unity ! which leads Lyotard in his Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime to

conclude that the sublime thus emerges as a dangerous threat to Reason’s supremacy49

! I would argue that it is in the sublime moment that Kant’s unified self soars with

authority as an actor in the social world. What I would wish to suggest is that from

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Kant’s social perspective, to borrow a phrase from Schiller, without “the sublime,

beauty would make us forget our dignity”.50 It is precisely the possibility of threat that

enables Reason to establish its authority, its dignity. Such a proposition is in keeping

with myths of unity generally, which are always already established in and against some

kind of crises. It is in encountering the sublime, with its disturbing excesses, that the

Kantian self is able to be rescued from the clutches of oblivion — unified yet not an

actor — and in which Reason is ultimately able reign supreme in the social domain. For

embedded in the Ideas is the always already sense in which Reason itself is unlimited,

perhaps infinite,51 as the transcendent ideas suggest. Having established the possibility

of the impact of supersensible freedom upon knowledge and art via the Ideas, Kant

deals with what makes us susceptible to the ideas and their excessive possibilities in the

first place.52

This ‘susceptibility’ warrants investigation. The implication is that Ideas don’t

simply derive an authority in purely performative terms. Whilst the Ideas function in a

limited fashion, the notion arises, since no object can be found, that Ideas are actually

unlimited, and that any sense of limitation is self imposed. Thus to glimpse an Idea in

its unlimited state is to glimpse what is absolutely great. It means that greatness

inhabits the self, who, because of the necessities of life, chooses to live a limited, yet

higher, existence. This notion relates directly to the discourse of the sublime, as I will

show.

Kant’s aesthetic is structured by the division between the beautiful and the

sublime. Such a division is drawn up in terms of the direction of subjective

purposiveness. If directed toward the understanding the aesthetic judgement is

concerned with the pleasure attended to by judgements of taste. If directed toward

Reason itself the judgement’s concern becomes sublime, since it is preoccupied, in this

instance, with Reason’s ultimate task, namely to bring unity and freedom to bear upon

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the experiential manifold. As such the Kantian self is split. Whilst Kant reveals the

impossibility of knowledge of the thing-in-itself, in order to function the self is forced

on the one hand, to impose its knowledge upon nature, and on the other, to overcome

the subjective resistances to this task. In other words if unity is the supreme principle of

reason, the self in order to find unity in nature, must at the same time produce a unified

subjectivity. Thus we find the necessity of an aesthetic moment which champions the

cause of reason. Kant tells us:

Susceptibility to pleasure from reflection upon the forms of things (of nature as

well as of art) indicates not only a purposiveness of the objects in relation to the

reflective judgment, conformably to the concept of nature in the subject, but also

conversely a purposiveness of the subject in respect of the objects according to

their form or even their formlessness, in virtue of the concept of freedom. Hence

the aesthetical judgment is not only related as a judgment of taste to the beautiful,

but is also as springing from a spiritual feeling related to the sublime.53

This susceptibility thus arises through, what could be called, a dissatisfaction

with nature. Nature is not necessarily unified in terms of the immutable laws of the

divine, it is produced by the self in the subjective world of appearances. Already built

into Kant’s architectonic system, is the notion that nature, matter, is hostile to the self.

In this revival of Platonic thought, a unified consciousness of the world does not flow

‘naturally’ from sensual experience, it is set forth as a mandate that flows from the

feeling of pleasure to the understanding, as it manages, under the auspices of the ideas

of Reason to unite the manifold in terms of a single unifying principle. But unity as a

logical necessity implies that the condition of chaos is also necessary. Sensory

experience bursts into consciousness formlessly, and as such there is a sense in which

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the imagination and the understanding are always in conflict, since the imposition of

unity, the sorting out of the manifold by means of the categories and ultimately the ideas

of reason, seems to be selective. This means that there is always a sense in which

something remains in excess of the understanding, something that only becomes

apparent, seemingly, in the mathematical and the dynamical sublime. It is thus possible

that both the feeling of pleasure occasioned in the act of bringing unity to bear upon the

manifold (the beautiful), and also the feeling of pain and pleasure, as Reason itself

becomes conscious of this subjective task (the sublime), are in play simultaneously.

Both the sublime and the beautiful are thus crucial moments for the Kantian self.

Each moment presupposes the other. Thus rather than a radical opposition, for

eighteenth-century aesthetic thinkers, of which Kant is no exception, the sublime was

considered a species, if not a (pre)condition of the beautiful.54 The sublime as a

precondition for the necessity of the beautiful thus directly relates to Reason and its

legislative capacity. Just as Reynolds, who, in his pyramidical system of the self,

situates sublimity at the “pinnacle, or ultimate point”, of the self, “forming in the

imagination the figure of a pyramid”,55 Kant finds in the sublime moment Reason’s

ultimate extension as it exercises finally its supremacy over nature. This moment of the

self’s reckoning arises only in situations which threaten the existence, perhaps

possibility, of the unity of sensory experience. The Kantian self is thus built upon the

sublime moment, which is both a necessity and a threat.

Sublime Contexts: The British Tradition

It will be useful at this point to digress for a moment to consider wider

discussions concerning the sublime. This will enable us to contextualise Kant’s work,

which is a product of its time, and furnish its utilisation of sublimity with some

important details in my argument concerning Reason’s use of the sublime. I am

particularly interested in the confidence that the sublime threat engenders. I will focus

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upon the British tradition, since Kant seems to be well acquainted with its ideas. What

emerges is the implication of the sublime in what could be called the emergence of

British national pride. In taking up the sublime, Kant does not seem to depart from the

nobility and sense of dignity that the sublime brings to British national selves. I draw

upon this connection between the sublime and the emergence of British nationalism,

because I would wish to underscore the conservative nature of the trope of the sublime.

In the context of an expanding Europe, the sublime opens up a sense of nobility. Excess

for eighteenth-century Europe presented nothing less than lofty possibilities. Following

Longinus’ important work on the sublime, eighteenth-century British theorists defined

‘sublime’, in the words of James Beattie, as denoting “literally the circumstance of

being raised above the slime, the mud, or the mould, of this world”.56 Such a

circumstance, John Baillie would go on to explain, “raises the mind to fits of greatness,

and disposes it to soar above her mother earth; hence arises that exultation and pride

which the mind ever feels from the consciousness of its own vastness”.57 The sublime

is derived from that sense of the self who seeks to escape and transcend the limits of the

body, the imperfection of matter. Despite an empiricist understanding of the self in

some instances, the sublime is always already haunted by that stoic self that Plato

announced in Phaedo, who “manifests his efforts to release his soul from association

with his body to a degree that surpasses that of the rest of mankind”.58 We also find

Holbach’s insistence in La Système de la Nature upon the oppositions between sensory

fear and rational knowledge, and the savage and civilisation.59 The discourses of

elevation that draw upon the sublime are driven by a lack, a discontent, a feeling of

limitation, and strive to find meaning above and beyond immediate experience. The

sublime opens up the possibility of resisting the nihilistic resignation of the mundane. It

is to demand more of the immediate, and the sensory, to live with the constant need to

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supplement presence with an absence that transforms the meaning of things in

themselves, as the self is elevated to a higher purpose.

Thus the idea of the sublime is drawn up around the question of the

unpresentable. Its function in eighteenth-century Europe, as Beattie and Baillie reveal,

directly relates to the capacity of the self to confidently exploit the unpresentable. As

opposed to the failures, disruptions, interruptions and indeterminacies of recent

discussion on the sublime, eighteenth-century Europe seemed to be preoccupied with

the sense of ‘elevation’ that the unpresentable authorised. The capacity to give form to

the unpresentable, served as a crucial measure of both the moral and intellectual worth

of individuals and, ultimately, the myth of nation. Felton’s early eighteenth-century A

Dissertation on the Classics exemplifies what was at stake in discourses on the sublime.

He writes:

The noblest Sentiments must be conveyed in the weightiest Words: All

Ornaments and Illustrations must be borrowed from the richest Parts of universal

Nature; and in Divine Subjects, especially when we attempt to speak of GOD, of

His Wisdom, Goodness and Power, of His Mercy and Justice, of His

Dispensations and Providence, by all which He is pleased to manifest Himself to

the Sons of Men, we must raise our Thoughts, and enlarge our Minds, and Search

all the Treasures of Knowledge for every Thing that is great, wonderful and

magnificent: We can only express our Thoughts of the Creator in the Works of

His Creation; and the brightest of these can only give us some faint Shadows of

his Greatness and His Glory. The strongest Figures are too weak, the most

exalted Language too low to express His ineffable Excellence. No Hyperbole can

be brought to heighten our Thoughts, for in so sublime a Theme nothing can be

Hyperbolical.60

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The sublime theme, as Felton reveals, opens up the issue of the adequacy of prose to be

able to represent its object. Indeed in this work which seeks to chart what constitutes a

‘just composition’, Felton’s strained language on the subject of representing the divine,

discloses the authoritative legitimacy of discourses on the sublime. On matters as

weighty and serious as the divine, language fails. But, crucially, such a failure is able to

be marked, as Felton’s ‘rules’ attest, by a certain style of composition. This marked

representational failure, precisely because it is a failure, renders such texts culturally

and socially valid. The unpresentable is able to be represented formerly. But the

content of Felton’s sublime texts, always already exceed such a form. This means that

it is the unpresentable excess that marks the text as culturally valid, rather than the text’s

formal limits. Ultimately Felton invites readers to take up texts on the divine as

inadequate, and incomplete. Felton foregrounds the fragility of formal limits. There is

a sense in which the object of the text actually begins beyond the text’s formal frame.

Whilst it could be argued that Felton’s insistence upon the formal inadequacy of

prose in some respect prefigures contemporary discussions on the sublime — Felton’s

reading of the sublime implies that texts on the divine necessitate misreading as reading

— in the context of eighteenth-century Europe Felton’s discussion, and development of

the ‘rules’ for marking representational failure, opens up the possibility of marking out

cultural validity. Thus the discussions derived from Felton’s early eighteenth-century

work on representational adequacy61 utilise the sublime, and what amounts to the

adequacy of markers of representational failure, in the construction of European

superiority. In Edward Young’s influential Conjectures on Original Composition, for

instance, what emerges in discussions on adequate representational practices, is the

notion that the English poets — Shakespeare, Milton — are greater than the ancients.

It is a “compliment to those heroes of antiquity”, Young writes, “to suppose

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Shakespeare their equal only in dramatic powers ... There is at least as much Genius on

the British, as on the Grecian stage”.62 In this comparison with the ancients, an

eighteenth-century preoccupation, the figure of Genius, as marked in discourses on the

sublime, takes on a national character.

Three Sublimes: Empirical, Mystical, Rational

It is in light of the formation of a national character, and the capacity of the

unpresentable to elevate its subjects, that we can begin to unpack the nuances of the

eighteenth-century sublime. My aim at this point will be to briefly show that it is in the

rationalist sublime that the issue of the national character of genius is ultimately forged.

The sublime object emerges, however, through three distinct understandings of the self:

the empirical, the mystical, and the rational. In the first, the self seeks that moment in

which nature and art determine the feeling of elevation.63 Richardson exemplifies what

is at stake in this way of thinking. In the language of the feminine, the sublime

moment, he writes, “Elevates the Soul, gives her a higher Opinion of her Self, and fills

her with Joy, and a Noble kind of Pride, as if her self had produc’d what she is

Admiring”.64 The sublime moment thus emerges as an illusion for empiricists. It is an

‘as if’, a pretence which ultimately fails to transcend matter, and instead signals the utter

dependence of the self upon sensory limitations. Burke’s sublime too, buys into the

illusory nature of the moment. Whilst he introduces the idea of ‘terror’ to discussions

on the sublime, and with it the pleasures of transgression (pain), his work ultimately

reduces the sublime to the sensationalist distinctions between pain and its association

with self-preservation, while pleasure “enlists the social passions”.65 Burke contends,

that when at a safe distance “the ruling principle of the sublime” produces “an idea of

pain and danger”66 such that there is a kind of willing suspension of the power of

Reason. The consequent confusion in this liminal moment produces a kind of delight, a

sense in which the boundaries of reasonable being have been suspended, or

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transgressed. But this transgression is never real, in the sense that Reason is afforded

the kinds of demands that Kant makes. Reason thus remains, after Burke, untouched.

There is a sense in which the Burkean sublime renders the self subject to the

unpresentable — in his text, God — rather than empowered. Hume, likewise, conceives

of the sublime in direct relation to objects, in the sense in which this “opposition not

only enlarges the soul; but the soul, when full of courage and magnanimity, in a manner

seeks opposition”, and proceeds to reduce this ‘enlargement’ of the self to a discussion

concerning the force of gravity upon matter.67

In contrast to empiricism’s insistence upon the object of sense, as the sublime’s

cause, the mystical sublime renders the self an object of a greater power. In one

rendering, represented by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, the

sublime begins in Nature, but rather than appear as an opposition to be overcome

(Hume), it is understood as the manifestation of a greater power. Cooper argues, all

“Nature’s wonders serve to excite and perfect this idea of their author … How glorious

it is to contemplate him, in this noblest of works apparent to us, the system of the bigger

world!”.68 Here nature mystically appears as the manifestation of the infinite divine,

which passes over the mortal self, who also occupies this natural space. In

contemplating this moment, the self, as Needler would put it, “refines and elevates our

affections; and inspires us with a certain dignity and virtuous pride, which makes us

despise the low pleasures of sense, and raises us above this transitory scene of things”.69

But perhaps the most stark example of the mystical sublime can be found in Usher, who

denied the possibility of contemplation upon nature, in favour of a feeling of awe that

exceeds the limits of sensory knowing. In championing nature as a supernatural power,

Usher writes:

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 In the disorder and confusion of seas in storms, or when lofty woods struggle with

high winds, we are struck with an humiliating awe, surprize, and suspense: the

mind views the effects of boundless power with still amazement: it recoils upon

itself in a passion made up of terror, joy, and rapture, and feels in sentiment these

questions: who is the author of this? What is he to me? Is he the object of my

eternal curiosity, of my mighty fears and hopes?70

Usher situates the self’s elevation in the space in which the mortal self encounters the

passing over of a great yet unknowable power. The self stands in a giant shadow, and,

due to its immensity, is unable to determine its cause. A feeling of elevation thus

attends to this moment. This unconscious excess signals that the self has been touched

by a great object, perhaps the divine himself, as Usher would have it. It is significant

that Usher, whilst he uses Christianity’s personal pronoun to signify this supernatural

greatness, ultimately declares that such a power is unnamable, and cannot be confined

to Christianity alone. As such he defends polytheism: “The imagination found the

divine idea rising before it in a variety of circumstances, and worshipped it under the

several distinctions in which it appeared”.71

Whilst the empirical and the mystical sublimes sought an external object, upon

which the sublime feeling could be staked, the rational sublime fully adopts its Platonic

roots, and situates the self as the supreme agent in a world of corrupted matter. I would

contend that the sublime doesn’t actually arrive fully until we find it in its rationalist

form. Empiricism in its insistence upon the reign of the sensory is ultimately unable to

elevate the self above the limits of nature. Likewise the mystical sublime, whilst it

makes what could be considered an intermediary step in dislocating the senses, still

locates the self as an object of the “intruded influence of a mighty unknown power”,72

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as Usher put it, an external force. The rationalists, in contrast, attempted to break

through all barriers, in order to allow the self to soar to new heights.

If Hume had argued that the object presented the self with an opportunity to be

an ‘overcomer’, rationalists on the other hand refused to grant the object a status, and

instead focussed upon the deeds of the self. It is in this sense that Addison writes,

“because the Mind of Man requires something more perfect in Matter, than what it finds

there … it is the part of the Poet to humour the Imagination in its own Notions, by

mending and perfecting Nature”.73 Rather than an opposition, the object thus emerges

as a mere site upon which the autonomous imagination freely writes itself. The

rationalists thus championed the imagination as the determining force in human affairs:

Akinside in awe of “the eloquence and graces of Plato” grappled with the powerful,

perhaps dangerously excessive “influence of the imagination on the conduct of life”;74

and Reid considered Homer’s mind sublime, as it “conceived great characters, great

actions, and great events”.75

Sublime Art and Culture

I have attempted to locate the question of the sublime in the relationship

between the subject and the object, mind and matter. The sublime reaches its

penultimate moment when the subject considers itself a determining force, when the

object is subject to the subject. In literary and art criticism this preoccupation with the

supremacy of the subject found form in the idea of the boundlessness of the

imagination, the poetic life, and the relation of the boundless imagination to the work of

art. As such we find characteristics such as novelty, surprise, originality, the new and

the uncommon being championed in both art and life. Critics such as Richard

Blackmore, for instance, valorised epic poetry as the artistic medium in which the

imagination’s unlimited powers could be revealed. He writes:

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 novelty … is the Parent of Admiration; and it is for this reason, that the

Sentiments in Epick Poetry, which by their Beauty, Strength and Dignity, are

rais’d above the Level of vulgar Conceptions, and are always new, either by

themselves or the uncommon Turn given to them by the Poet, act powerfully upon

the Imagination, and surprize the Soul with pleasing astonishment.76

Jonathan Richardson reveals similar notions in painting. He declares:

a painter should not Please only, but Surprize. … He that would rise to the

Sublime must form an Idea of Something beyond all we have yet seen; or which

Art or Nature has yet produced … Nor must he stop Here, but Create an Original

Idea of Perfection.77

Addison drew these artistic qualities into life in general. He writes:

Every thing that is new or uncommon raises a Pleasure in the Imagination, because

it fills the Soul with an agreeable Surprise, gratifies its Curiosity, and gives it an

Idea of which it was not before possest.78

Baillie adds:

admiration, a passion always attending the sublime, arises from uncommonness,

and constantly decays as the object becomes more familiar.79

These thoughts upon the sublime reveal the eighteenth-century Romantic

preoccupation with the possibility of an intellectual moment that exceeds the bounds of

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past influences and the existing social order. Thus we find that pervasive emphasis

upon originality and the new in both art and life. The sublime emerges as a

transgressive, and creative force. The capacity to present the unpresentable thus plays a

crucial role in constituting authentic culture. It is striking to find that in this emphasis

upon the possibilities of transgression such a strong confidence in the capacity of the

subject to thrive in encounters which would otherwise be strange. In fact it almost

seems as if such encounters were considered a prerequisite for what we might think of

as an authentic cultural life. Newness for these thinkers affords a mere opportunity for

the powers of the imagination to be extended. Culture thus emerges not as a sphere of

life to be protected from the threat of the unfamiliar (as it appears presently in some

contexts), it is precisely in this ‘threat’ that cultural life is productively forged. As such

for the eighteenth-century Romantics culture could never be considered stagnant,

timeless, or homogeneous. If authentically in touch with the power of the imagination,

culture was to be dynamic, constantly unfolding in its encounters with the new and the

strange.

In the language of Edward Young the productive power of the strange is usefully

staged. He writes:

Our spirits rouze at an Original; that is a perfect stranger, and all throng to learn

what news from a foreign land: and tho’ it comes, like an Indian Prince, adorned

with feathers only, having little of weight; yet of our attention it will rob the more

Solid … if an Original, by being as excellent, as new, adds admiration to surprise,

then are we at the Writer’s mercy; on the strong wing of his Imagination, we are

snatched from Britain to Italy, from Climate to Climate, from Pleasure to

Pleasure; we have no Home, no Thought, of our own; till the Magician drops his

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 Pen: And then falling down into ourselves, we awake to flat Realities, lamenting

the change, like the Beggar who dreamt himself a Prince.80

Whilst liminality is explicit in Young’s understanding of the aesthetic experience — art

as dreamlike — at the same time, however, in this insistence upon the excessive,

unbounded capacity of the imagination we find the trope of homelessness, which in this

instance marks authentic aesthetic experience. This valorisation of both formal and

cultural excess, of unbelonging gives rise to the sublime in its most pervasive form.

This sense of unbelonging finds its own form in the figure of that most

Romantic of figures: the Genius. The figure of the Genius emerges as the cultural

embodiment of the Eighteenth Century demand for the elevation of the self. The self

that is seemingly caught in the trap of sensory limitation, the body in social space, a

“flat reality” as Young put it, finds a moment in the imagination of a chosen few an

Archimedean point outside the limits of the body, which is able to be expressed, for the

benefit of others, in artistic forms. The Genius, Young goes on to explain, “is a Master-

workman” with the power to accomplish “great things without the means generally

reputed necessary to that end”. Remarkably the “unexampled Excellence” of genius,

lies outside “the Pale of Learning’s Authorities, and Laws”.81

The Genius par excellence, at least according to Thomas Blackwell, is of course

the epic poet Homer.82 In Blackwell’s celebration of Homer’s imaginative powers we

find, as I have suggested, the Genius located outside, and in excess of, the common

nature of the everyday. Blackwell reveals the political cogency of the excesses of

genius. In staging Homer as an example of authentic being, he emphasises Homer’s

unbelongingness:

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 in Homer’s days: Arms were in Repute, and Force decided Possession. He saw

Towns taken and plundered, the Men put to the sword, and the Women made

Slaves: He beheld their despairing Faces, and suppliant Postures; heard their

Moanings o’er their murdered Husbands, and Prayers for their Infants to the

Victor. On the other hand, he might view Cities blessed with Peace, Spirited by

Liberty, flourishing in Trade, and increasing in Wealth. He was not engaged in

Affairs himself, to draw off his Attention; but he wander’d thro’ the various

Scenes, and observed them at leisure.83

Blackwell seeks to reveal the tumultuous disorder of the ancient everyday. This

disorder means that social being exists in a constant state of change, ruled as it were by

the yet-to-be-decided, rather than an imposed social order. Homer’s detachment from

this disorder, as observer, enables in the first instance a knowledge of social life that is

not afforded to the self that is caught up in the immediacy of events; and in the second

instance, this knowledge confronts the poet and demands the imposition of an order

that comes only by way of invention, the exercise of the imagination. Of course the

epic form for Blackwell is the upshot of Homer’s unique thought, which is able to be on

the one hand, detached, that is free from social determination, and on the other hand, is

able to rise above the tumultuous disorder to exert the imagination in order to describe

and define the wanton object. We thus hear echoes of Kristeva’s ‘abject edged with the

sublime’.

Significantly Blackwell sets the trope of the Genius, as set forth in his work

upon Homer, against the European civil state. It seems the state, in imposing civil order

has at the same time denied the possibility of the new and the creative. Blackwell

contends:

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 The Marvellous and Wonderful is the Nerve of the Epic strain: But what

marvellous Things happen in a well-ordered State? We can hardly be surprized;

We know the Springs and Method of acting; Every thing happens in Order, and

according to Custom or Law. But in a wide Country, not under a regular

Government, or split into many … the Manners are simple, and Accidents will

happen every day: Exposition and loss of Infants, Encounters, Escapes, Rescues,

and every other thing that can inflame the human passions while acting, or awake

them when described, and recalled by Imitation. THESE are not be found in a

well-governed State, except it be in a Civil War.84

Blackwell implicitly champions a kind of social anarchy, or at least insists upon the

suspension of the ‘tried and true’ — the “well-governed” — as necessitated in moments

of crises, since such moments demand the extension of the Genius’ imaginative powers.

This is perhaps Genius in its most extreme form. As such Blackwell’s implicit anarchy

bears a close resemblance to Nietzschean tragedy. But Blackwell’s Genius in its

extremity, is still representative of the Genius in general, as discussed in eighteenth-

century aesthetics. The crucial thing about the Genius is that this is a unique self, “the

enviable … chosen few”85, as Kierkegaard put it, who is able to invent, experiment, to

search for a form that is able to accommodate nature’s chaos in a new and compelling

manner. For the Genius nothing is a given, and it truly takes a special kind of mind to

break through existing forms, in order to map contingent meanings. Such a mind, in its

excesses and refusal to be bound, acquires a status on the basis of the sublime, which

ultimately, since any law giving body seems to be antagonistic to the power of the

Romantic imagination, emerges as a law unto itself.

I have dwelt upon the figure of the Genius in order to show the lawlessness and

the contingency that lies at the core of this understanding of the self. But the Genius

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emerges as a kind of paradox: on the one hand this self is a rebel, and yet at the same

time this rebel commands a reverence. In this rebellion and remapping of the real there

is therefore a political power. Sublimity in this context is thus in many ways a

politically driven concept. But it is not a political power whose form imitates the state,

rather the Genius emerges as a kind of social misfit, almost victim to the forces within

that drive the capacity to invent, who, because of this trope of the misfit, commands a

reverence that parallels any priesthood, and exercises exclusive rights over the creative

power of the imagination.

But it is also crucial to note that it is this kind of social misfit that lies at the core

of the West’s myth of progress, and which is fully realised in Hegel’s Phenomenology

of Spirit. I will take up this issue in subsequent chapters. For the moment what I would

wish to suggest, is that the figure of the eighteenth-century Genius emerges in, what

could be described as, a split and ambivalent space. The Genius is a rebel that is

utilised in the service of Reason, and ultimately the myth of the West’s superiority. I

would thus suggest that what the Genius signals is less radical transgression as an end in

itself, than the notion that art and the artist in the capacity to engage the unpresentable

open up sites for what I have called the fort/da of the myths of nation. In other words,

what the eighteenth-century Genius becomes is that abject other upon which the nation

is able to write itself. The accommodation of such a figure marks the myth of Western

progress and democracy. What Kant does is to take this figure as a model for the

Western self in general.

Having established the social location of the discourse of the sublime, I will turn

to the Kantian sublime. As I suggested, Kant takes up the sublime as a noble trope. My

overall purpose in drawing attention to the dignity that the eighteenth-century sublime

engenders, is to show that a postcolonial sublime must be considered in relation to the

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sublime as it emerged in Europe. The sublime is both the object of the discourse of the

postcolonial and a site which opens up the possibility for a cogent politics.

The Kantian Sublime

Kant tells us that the sublime cannot be deduced from an object,86 it is a state of

consciousness that concerns the ideas of reason and their relation to the experiential

manifold. Kant writes:

no sensible form can contain the sublime properly so-called. This concerns only

ideas of the reason which, although no adequate presentation is possible for them,

by this inadequateness that admits of sensible presentation are aroused and

summoned into the mind. Thus the wide ocean, disturbed by the storm, cannot be

called sublime. Its aspect is horrible; and the mind must be already filled with

manifold ideas if it is to be determined by such an intuition to a feeling itself

sublime, as it is incited to abandon sensibility and to busy itself with ideas that

involve higher purposiveness.87

Following his British rationalist brothers, Kant declares:

We call that sublime which is absolutely great … great beyond all comparison. …

if we call anything … absolutely great in every point of view (great beyond all

comparison) … we soon see that it is not permissible to seek for an adequate

standard of this outside itself, but merely in itself. … It follows hence that the

sublime is not to be sought in the things of nature, but only in our ideas.88

The sublime moment proceeds from the conflict between the imagination and

reason. In the case of the mathematical sublime this conflict is set forth via the problem

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of the infinite. The infinite number exceeds the limits of the understanding — it is

ungraspable — and as such becomes a problem for reason, since reason’s task is to

make, as Kant tells us, a claim for “absolute totality”.89 The infinite emerges as a

problem because it poses a threat to the capacity of Reason, and in doing so raises the

notion that nature is actually more powerful than the self. In this moment the possibility

of the total breakdown of Reason is effected. Pascal’s boast, which opens this chapter,

collapses. But in contrast to the mystical sublime, which insists that in this breakdown

itself there is a feeling of elevation, Kant rather than being crushed, defeated, and given

over to what he would perceive as blind superstition, or what Holbach called the

“savage … just like the dog who gnaws the stone … without recurring to the hand by

which it was thrown … unaccustomed to reason with precision”,90 embraces this pain

and finds in it the possibility of the final elevation of the self over the senses. He

triumphantly announces:

there is in our imagination a striving toward infinite progress and in our reason a

claim for absolute totality, regarded as a real idea, therefore this very

inadequateness for that idea in our faculty for estimating the magnitude of things

of sense excites in us the feeling of a supersensible faculty.91

The possibility of this sense of excitement in the face of the possibility of a miserable

defeat, arises in that moment in which Reason is able to be aesthetically employed in

order to furnish the understanding with an idea of the infinite. In other words, where the

senses fail Reason is able to triumphantly demonstrate its great power. Kant declares

that the sublime reveals:

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 the mere ability to think which shows a faculty of the mind surpassing every

standard of sense.92

For Kant there is thus a faculty of mind that is comparable to the infinite. In

Kant’s Christian context, with its insistence upon the finiteness of the self, and the

overcoming power of the mystical, this celebration of the infinite capacity of the ideas is

radically subversive. But in the context of the development of a national

consciousness, however, the subversive capacity of the Kantian self is put to a different

use: namely, as its logic implies, the supremacy of the European self.

The feeling of the sublime is thus constituted by both the feeling of pain,

“arising from the want of accordance between the aesthetical estimation of magnitude

formed by the imagination and the estimation of the same formed by reason”, and, in

the same instant, a feeling of “pleasure … arising from the correspondence with rational

ideas of this very judgement of the inadequacy of our greatest faculty of sense”. 93 The

upshot of this seeming crises merely affords the self’s recognition of its own grand

status in relation to the objects of sense. Remarkably the failure of the imagination,

which I have suggested is always a possibility since sensory experience is in itself

formless, simply occasions Reason’s aesthetic employment, in order to ‘mend’ the

imagination’s weakness. We hear echoes of the sublime as it was celebrated in Britain.

Reason elevates the self above the mud and the slime of this world. It relishes in its

encounter with the excessive, since such moments merely occasion the unlimited

capacity of the Ideas of Reason. As such, Kant tellingly continues:

it is a law for us to strive after these ideas. In fact it is for us a law (of reason) and

belongs to our destination to estimate as small, in comparison with ideas of

reason, everything which nature, regarded as an object of sense, contains that is

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 great for us; and that which arouses in us the feeling of this supersensible

destination agrees with that law.94

The failure of the imagination thus serves a useful, perhaps necessary, purpose.

Reason reveals its remarkable power in, and only in, those moments in which its own

capacity to function is threatened. Reason’s aesthetical employment emerges when

there is a challenge. Having set forth the mathematical sublime in order to underscore

the infinite capacity of the ideas, Kant then turns to the dynamical sublime, which

emerges not just as a threat to knowledge, as in the mathematical, but to the freedom of

the self.

In the dynamical sublime nature is regarded as might, as an object of fear which

poses a threat to the self. Kant locates the sublime moment in the possibility of resisting

the fear that nature as might effects upon the experiential manifold. Rather than flee the

danger, Kant argues that it is possible to “regard an object as fearful without being

afraid of it”. This possibility again concerns Reason’s capacity to exceed the objects of

sense. To overcome fear, which is the task of the dynamical sublime, it is necessary not

to physically resist, but to think resistance. The example furnished by Kant involves,

what he calls the virtuous man, who “fears God without being afraid of Him, because to

wish to resist Him and His commandments he thinks is a case that he need not

apprehend”.95 What is at stake then is the idea of freedom, which arises in the capacity

of Reason to be dutiful to the moral law, as an exulted disposition, since the self in

relation to the divine is able to resist this obligation.

But as Kant puts the issue of freedom on the line, which is threatened by nature

as might, the possibility that nature has dominion over the self produces a language

which becomes increasingly preoccupied not with the idea of the Romantic artist, but

with the idea of the heroic conqueror. Of course I must point out before we proceed any

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further, that this sense of the conqueror, strictly speaking, relates in Kant to the ability

of the self to conquer the fear that is furnished by the senses in the face of a fearful

object. But having made this necessary qualification, it is important to consider what

these fearful objects of consciousness might be. It is in this sense that we find the

language of the colonial.

I suggested earlier that the necessity of the sublime in Kant’s architectonic

system is drawn up around what makes the self susceptible to the Ideas. I would thus

contend that this susceptibility arises in that moment in which Reason is faced with an

obstacle, a threat that demands to be overcome. Without the possibility of the failure of

the imagination, and a threat to freedom, Reason merely functions as a sleeping giant.

The Kantian self without the sublime would be like Plato’s Republic without the cave,

and that sense of elevation that underpins the notion of the state as the apogee of human

civilisation:

It is for us then as founders of a commonwealth, to bring compulsion to bear on the

noblest natures. They must be made to climb the ascent to the vision of Goodness,

which we called the highest object of knowledge.96

It is thus significant that in the threat posed upon the self by an excessive might, Kant

speaks of “resistance”, “courage”, and the “superiority” of the self in relation to the

immensity of the object.97 Here we find the heroic figure, “the man who shrinks from

nothing, who fears nothing, and therefore does not yield to danger, but rather goes to

face it vigorously with the most complete deliberation”, as Kant put it. Significantly it

is the soldier that embodies this quality, more so than the “statesman”, since “his mind

is unsubdued by danger”.98 We thus find in Kant a disturbing insistence upon war,

crises, and the possibility of the suspension of civil order, as an indispensable moment

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in the formation of Reason’s authority. Without such, Kant concludes, the reasonable

self begins to be ruled by a “cowardice, and effeminacy” that “debases the disposition

of the people”.99

In addition this valorisation of the man of war, Kant qualifies this quality, and

contends that in this capacity to overcome danger, we find the bedrock of civilisation.

Culture, understood in that old fashion Arnoldian sense as the best that can be thought

and known, arises in the development of moral ideas. Without moral ideas, Kant

contends, “that which we, prepared by culture, call sublime presents itself to the

uneducated man merely as terrible”.100 The sublime thus emerges as a marker of a civil

sensibility. It clears a space for society to be able to consider itself free from the

threatening determinations of its enemies, and able to be reasonably defended. A

certain nobility is thus afforded in the sublime moment. It is worth quoting Kant at

length. He writes:

The idea of the good conjoined with [strong] affection is called enthusiasm. This

state of mind seems to be sublime, to the extent that we commonly assert that

nothing great could be done without it. … aesthetically, enthusiasm is sublime,

because it is a tension of forces produced by ideas, which give an impulse to the

mind that operates far more powerfully and lastingly than the impulse arising

from sensible representations. But (which seems strange) the absence of affection

… in a mind that vigorously follows its unalterable principles is sublime, and in a

far preferable way, because it has also on its side the satisfaction of pure reason.

A mental state of this kind is alone called noble; and this expression is

subsequently applied to things, e.g. a building, a garment, literary style, bodily

presence, etc., when these do not so much arouse astonishment … and this is the

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 case when ideas agree in their presentation undesignedly and artlessly with the

aesthetical satisfaction.101

I have contended that the sublime is built upon, after Longinus, that need for the

self to feel more purposeful than the objects employed in daily existence. The capacity

to present the unpresentable in literature signals that a ‘higher’ purpose has been

attained. In its extreme the pain and pleasure of the sublime enables an understanding

of the mind as the determining force of the actions of the self, rather than the lifeless

matter in which the self dwells and of which the self consists. Crucially the

boundlessness of the aesthetic imagination, with its ability to call forth, in a divine-like

fashion, the new, to be creative, emerges as that moment in which sublime possibilities

are opened up. These possibilities are realised in the figure of the Genius, who, in

embracing a poetic life, possesses an original, irreducible, universally valid quality of

mind. But the aesthetic imagination cannot be confined to art alone. To confine the

poetic life to art is to miss what has been central in discussions concerning the sublime

since its inauguration, and its political cogency for a thinker such as Kant. For not only

does the aesthetic concern art, it also, and in most instances without distinction, refers to

the capacity of the self to rise above danger and overcome threats. The sublime can

thus be heard in celebrations concerning war and acts of empire.

Conclusion: The Colonial Sublime

After the French revolution Kant dominates thinking upon the Romantic

endeavour to carve out a specific social space for Art.102 “It was not until Kant that the

realm of aesthetics assumed its own rights,” Ernst Behler points out. The romantic self

set forth by Kant, “brought about a new appreciation of artistic creation — a

glorification of creative imagination — and made of the artist a spokesman for the

godhead, an orphic seer, and prophetic priest”.103 For M. H. Abrams the ‘Kantian

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revolution’ involved a change from a mimetic theory of art to a Romantic theory of art

as self-expression. Rather than being a ‘mirror’ reflection of nature, art became a

‘lamp’ which illuminated the ‘dark world’ of experience. Instead of attempting to

represent nature, the artist attempts to give an outward form to the self’s inner life.104

But whilst the Romantic self that was set forth in the Eighteenth Century is

celebrated — as Samuel Monk in his important The Sublime: a Study of Critical

Theories in XVIII-Century England105 argues: eighteenth-century British aesthetics, in

seizing Kant’s insistence upon the disinterested nature of reflective judgement, paved

the way for ‘Kantian autonomy’ and the Romantic revolution in art — what Bennett

points to is that other dark metaphor that lurks within the corridors of thinking on the

sublime imagination. This is, as I have suggested in my engagement with Kant, the

reality of the eighteenth-century sublime as a violent, colonial metaphor. One of the

most striking things about discourses on the sublime is that at every turn they abound

with salutary images of: “the clash of numerous Armies, and the voice of War”;106 the

hero “travelling through a Country uninhabited”;107 “the spirit of travellers and

adventurers; gallantry, war, heroism”;108 the “pursuit of conquest … Power and

fame”;109 “riches … noble superiority to things external … patriotism … universal

benevolence”;110 “the war-horse, ‘whose neck is clothed with thunder’”;111 and

“military glory”.112

In locating discussions concerning the sublime in terms of questions of

consciousness, I have attempted to show how the sublime’s emergence is inseparably

linked to a problematic that attempted to open up a particular way of defining reason’s

authority. This much has been said concerning Romantic art (Coleridge, Arnold), but it

can also be stated in the context of European capitalist and colonial expansion. The

sublime insistence upon the sacrificial willingness of Reason effectively establishes the

European self as a legitimate political and economic conqueror. The remarkable

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assurance that accompanies the images of war and the heroic conqueror suggests that

this is the case. There does not seem to be any question that the violence that is implicit

in these images of sublime thoughts and deeds are in any sense defective, or unjust. In

the problem of the relation between virtue and power, as in John Baillie’s influential

“An Essay on the Sublime”, the sublime merely emerges as all the more powerful, since

Baillie asserts that “sublime passions, when virtuous, are so by association and

accident”.113 This means that truth and virtue do not necessarily correspond. Whilst

there is the possibility that power can be abused, as in the case of Caligula

“commanding armies to fill their helmets with cockle-shells”, and “Alexander laying

level towns, depopulating countries, and ravaging the whole world”, a truly sublime

power, for Baillie, emerges in and through what could be considered power in itself, the

subtext being, the establishment of an Empire. He asserts, “the absolute authority of a

master over his slaves, is a power nothing grand, yet at the same time authority in a

prince is sublime”, since the prince’s authority extends “to multitudes, and from nations

bowing to his commands”.114

The eighteenth-century sublime is thus as much a colonial apologetic as it is the

state of the mind of the artistic Genius. One wonders why Baillie is so careful to avoid

conflating power and virtue. Given the colonial self that haunts discussion on the

sublime, I would suggest that this careful avoidance arises simply because the

conflation of power and virtue robs the sublime of its most important ingredient: a

boundlessness which is paradoxically framed by European expansionism. Yet at the

same time, to impose a willing limit, such as virtue, is to be even more sublime than

abject expressions of unlimited power. As such the virtuous prince, who exercises what

seems like unlimited power over the nations, in being a creature of virtue, of

benevolence, is only all the more sublime. Kantian freedom, which emerges via duty to

the moral law, is sublime precisely because there is always the possibility that this duty

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can be subverted, not in terms of a sensory determination, but in terms of the unlimited

capacity of ideas themselves.

We find this moment of self-control powerfully set forth in James Beattie’s

Dissertations Moral and Critical. Here the figure of Ulysses, the prince, embodies

Baillie’s valorisation of Empire, and ultimately, by extension, provides a useful

metaphor for thinking through what is at stake in Kant’s conservative use of the

sublime. Beattie writes:

Ulysses, who in the hands of Polypheme was nothing, is incomparably more

sublime, when, in walking into the palace, disguised like a beggar, he is insulted,

and even kicked, by one of his own slaves, who was in the service of those rebels

that were tempting his queen, plundering his household, and alienating the

affections of his people. Homer tells us, that the hero stood firm, without being

moved from his place by the stroke; that he deliberated for a moment, whether he

should at one blow fell the traitor to the earth; but that patience and prudential

thoughts restrained him. The brutal force of the Cyclops is not near so striking as

this picture.115

Ulysses possesses what seems like a limitless power, at least in this context. Disguised

as something that he clearly is not he must be content, if he is to reign upon the throne

that belongs to him, to bide his time. The Kantian self with its sensory limitations

possesses a faculty of mind that is not determined by that body, with its visceral

demands, its finiteness. Reason stands firm, refusing to be moved by that finiteness,

yet, whilst disguised as a beggar, willingly works upon those limits.

It is in this sacrificial sense that the sublime becomes a crucial moment in the

structuring of the European self’s assumption of global supremacy. The European is a

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human with a body, yet not simply that. The colonial self is ‘powerful’, yet a reluctant

servant. Whilst the subtle movements of thought in Kant are set forth via a language

built upon a problematic whose major aim is to draw up a chain of command, to find an

authoritative space for the reign of Reason in human affairs, Reason ultimately utilises

sublimity to engender its authority over the senses, danger, and the strange and

unfamiliar. As such the Kantian self coincides with the emergence of European’s

understanding of itself as the most significant figure of humanity on the global scene.

As difficult as it may be to determine whether ideas form the process, or whether

the process determines the ideas that would justify it, it is the case that capitalism

coincided with the emergence of the sublime self that Kant championed. Armed with

reason’s sublime ideas, the Kantian self was staged in the context of eighteenth-century

Europe searching for foreign markets. It is thus a timely self in the sense that it

provides an impetus for Europe to reign supreme in what was, essentially, the

beginnings of a rapidly changing world. It is in this sense that it is possible to conceive

of the sublime, despite its seeming revolutionary fervour against authority, as a

reactionary metaphor.

In Kant’s day we find, as Harry Magdoff explains, Europe’s desire to

overcome the object: “penetrating the interior of foreign continents” in order to

create markets “through the breaking up and restructuring [of] noncapitalist

societies”; and creating “plantation colonies”, and “white-settler colonies” in order to

boost “demand for manufacturers to meet the needs of the settlers in both”. Magdoff

continues:

At the heart of this wave of expansion was the slave trade. The prosperity of the

extremely profitable sugar plantations was based on the import of African slaves

… In sum, the Industrial Revolution germinated in this period — in the boom of

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 export markets and the trade in merchandise and slaves, under monopoly

conditions secured through war, control of the seas, and political domination.116

In this light, Kant’s critical problematic occupies the contrapuntal convergence of the

autonomous self and European capitalist expansion.117 If empiricists grappled with

(hankered after?) finding a moment in which it was possible to overcome the object,

Kant takes all of the issues that emerged in these discussions, disconnects the aesthetic

from the object, and opens the door for Reason’s artful domination of not only

consciousness, but the acts of the self in the world. The empirical hero attempted to

overcome the world, the Kantian hero creates one. There is lurking within discourses

on the sublime a certain logic, which demands that encounters with difference are

encounters in which Reason is afforded an opportunity to assert its supremacy and to

establish its laws.

I began with what I understood as Gordon Bennett’s interruption to Kant’s

judgement upon a disordered subjectivity. This interruption, as I suggested, functioned

in two ways: on the one hand, the mirror opened up a space for questioning the figure of

the nation, on the other, the mirror can be understood as an insertion of the question of

exile into the process of Reason’s grapple with what it considers its dark side. I have

taken the latter path and inhabited Kant’s edges in order to draw out the pragmatic

excesses of his logical philosophy. I would thus wish to hold up this pragmatic excess

as a problematic object for the postcolonial. Kant, whilst obviously not the only key

figure in the emergence of the European Enlightenment, stands in for a particular mode

of thought that is preoccupied with structures of authority, hierarchies, pyramids. The

most scathing critique of such thinking in Bennett’s Painting for a New Republic (The

Inland Sea) emerges inside the subjectivity of the dispossessed self. Residing over

carefully laid out skulls and bones — the horror of genocide — we see the pyramid of

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logical thought, its violence laid bare. Thus what Bennett calls forth is a re-reading of

Kantian thought as a violent social force. But this violence emerges as less a fixed

disposition than a dynamic process, in which slippages and excesses, reason’s dark side,

are a vital part.

The in-between mirror of the dispossessed self can be read, in terms of its

questioning capacity, as a search for a space from which to speak. It is significant that

Bennett looks upon both the space of Kant’s dynamic, in which the figure of the exile

emerges as an object of sublimity, and the confused space of dispossession, as

insufficient for this purpose. The identity of this dispossessed self emerges in the in-

between space of convergence, the space of questioning. What we have is a question

inserted into the Kantian equation. As Kant establishes the moral and epistemological

authority of Reason, the dispossessed self is able to confront Reason’s inner

preoccupations with its own dark side. What basis for a secure authority is this? The

excesses that Reason seeks to overcome, in such a question, emerge as less natural

residues of the Enlightenment self — the rationalism that teeters on the brink of

madness and the bodily desire that reason sacrifices (which nevertheless remain as

important markers of what reason is not) — than the products of reason’s own process.

In other words, rather than a golden order (culture) established in relation to a hostile

and confusing nature, Kantian thought emerges as a violent force itself. Bennett’s

refusal to contend with Reason as a fixity, and focus upon the conscious obstacles to

reason’s legitimate employment, its excesses, means that these excesses are not the

products of nature, but the products of reason’s discourse itself. Here an interesting

possibility emerges in our discussion on the postcolonial sublime. Bennett effectively

wrests the sublime from its natural status in the Eighteenth Century, and makes it a

social issue that belongs to today. It will now be necessary to move on to consider the

postcolonial in relation to what I have called Kant’s conservative sublime. In order to

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undertake this task, I will turn to the work of Frantz Fanon, specifically his complex

engagement with Hegel.

Notes

1
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin, 1966), 95.
2
Gordon Bennett, Painting for a New Republic (The Inland Sea), (Perth: Art Gallery of
Western Australia, 1994).
3
Ian Mclean, and Gordon Bennett, The Art of Gordon Bennett (Roseville, East, NSW:
Craftsman House, 1996), 71.
4
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, (London: Routledge, 1994), 145.
5
In my research I also considered the work of Conrad as a ‘way into’ the texts of Kant.
He certainly relies upon the centrality of Idealism in his attack upon European civility.
Ultimately, however, such a critique remains flawed. His evoking of the centrality of
unpresentable moment (the sublime), cannot be separated from what preoccupied
eighteenth-century literary theory. As I will show in chapter two, the capacity to
present the unpresentable through various formal strategies was central in the
construction of the national character of Genius. It is difficult to find a moment in
“Heart of Darkness” that contests this notion. One of the difficulties with Conrad is that
his work foregrounds and reinforces the necessity of conservative aesthetic
constructions. At the edges of the novella there is a nagging Kantian aesthetic, that
would render the social world an aesthetic rather than a material problem. It could be
that ultimately Conrad is ‘more Kantian than Kant’ in his insistence upon the power of
the imagination. For further discussion on the difficulty of Conrad, compare: Chinua
Achebe, “An Image of Africa”, Research in African Literatures, vol. 9, no. 1 (1978), 1-
15; Benita Parry, Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary
Frontiers (Houndsmill: The Macmillan Press, 1983); Sarah Cole, “Conradian
Alienation and Imperial Intimacy”, Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 44, no. 2 (1998), 251-
281; Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology (London: Verso, 1976), 135; Hunt
Hawkins, “Conrad and the Psychology of Colonialism”, in Conrad Revisited: Essays for
the Eighties, ed. Ross Murfin (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1985), 86;
Ezekiel Mphahlele, The African Image (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 125; and D. C.
R. A. Goonetilleke, Developing Countries in British Fiction (London: Macmillan,
1977), 1.
6
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London:
Macmillan, 1933), 66.
7
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F J. Payne
(New York: Dover Publications, 1966), 529.
8
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991); Ernest Gellner,
Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 56; Eric Hobsbawm, and
Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1983), 7.

105
9
Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative
Discourse (London: Zed Press, 1986), 17.
10
Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of
Transcendence (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 11.
11
Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’”, trans. H. B.
Nisbet, in Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), 54.
12
Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order (New York: New York
University Press, 1984), 36.
13
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1989). 187, 193.
14
Etienne Bonnot Abbé de Condillac, “A Treatise on the Sensations”, trans. Franklin
Philip, Philosophical Writings of Etienne Bonnot Abbé de Condillac (Hillsdale, New
Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1982), 332, 339.
15
Gottfried Wilhelm Von Leibniz, Monadology, trans. George R. Montgomery (La
Salle, Illinois: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1902), §7.
16
Leibniz, Monadology, §17.
17
Leibniz, Monadology, § 56, § 78.
18
Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, in The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed.
John Butt (London: Methuen & Co, 1954), vol. 3, part 1, 61.
19
See Kant’s controversial Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793), trans.
Theodore M. Greene and Hoyte H. Hudson (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), in which
he insists that the moral nature of the self should be derived via “the subjective ground
of the exercise (under objective moral laws) of man’s freedom in general”. This
insistence upon freedom is driven by the failure of empiricism to provide a basis for
moral accountability. Kant argues, that the subjective ground which determines moral
action “must itself always be an expression of freedom (for otherwise the use or abuse
of man’s power of choice in respect of the moral law could not be imputed to him nor
could the good or bad in him be called moral)” (16-17).
20
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 45-46.
21
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 17.
22
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 532-533.
23
See John Locke’s foundational An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2. vols.
(New York: Dover Publishers, 1959). This ‘inquiry into the original certainty and
extent of human knowledge’, sets forth what could be considered the law of the
formation of human ideas. The work begins by rejecting Descartes’ suggestion that

106
ideas are innate “characters, as it were, stamped upon the mind of man, which the soul
receives in its very first being; and brings into the world with it ” (vol. 1, 37). Instead
he proposes that ideas arise either as the direct product of sense impressions - as a
photographic film responds to light - or as the reflection of the mind on such evidence
as the senses provided. The former is deemed the ‘sensory’ faculty of the mind, the
“senses [that] ... convey into the mind several distinct perceptions of things”(vol. 1,
122), whilst the latter is deemed the ‘reflective’, “the perceptions of the operation of our
own mind’s within us, as it is employed about the ideas it has got”(vol. 1, 123). For
Locke, “these ... contain our whole stock of ideas ... we have nothing in our minds
which did not come in one of these two ways”(vol. 1, 124-125). Locke thus presents
the mind as a blank slate which contains no a priori structures. Human subjects, as
Claude Helvetius concurs, are considered to be “born without ideas, without passions,
and without other wants than those of hunger and thirst, and consequently without
character” (Claude Adrien Helvetius, “Men are Reasonable”, in The Portable Age of
Reason Reader, ed. Crane Brinton (New York: The Viking Press, 1969), 262).
24
I follow Bernard Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1978) on this point. For Williams Descartes’ assumption concerning
knowledge’s foundation in his own mind leads him into an unreliable subjectivity. To
establish knowledge as a certainty it was thus necessary for him to rise above sensory
experience (I note the sublime at work here) in order to find a standpoint from which to
deal with the thing-in-itself as it actually is. This sense of elevation can be understood
as the ‘absolute’ perspective, which only the faculty of Reason can provide. For
Williams this is the ‘hidden’ meaning of Descartes doctrine of ‘clear and distinct’ ideas
as it appears in Principles of Philosophy (particularly the first part). Descartes assumes
that the thing-in-itself is actually as it appears to reason. Kant takes issue with this
doctrine.
25
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 257.
26
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 258, 259.
27
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 176.
28
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 472.
29
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 56.
30
Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics that can Qualify as a
Science, trans. Paul Carus (La Salle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company, 1902),
98.
31
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 271, 272.
32
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 272.
33
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (New Jersey:
Prentice Hall, 1993), 44.
34
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 545-546.

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35
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 550.
36
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 312-313.
37
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 465.
38
David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), ed. Charles W.
Hendel (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1955), 92-93.

39
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 32.
40
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 29.
41
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 32-33.
42
Kant, Prolegomena, 49.
43
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner
Press, 1951), 24-25.
44
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 12.
45
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 15, 16,17.
46
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 31.
47
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 191.
48
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 284.
49
Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth
Rottenburg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 50-56.
50
Friedrich von Schiller, On the Sublime, trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: Ungar
Publishing Co., 1966), 211.
51
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 98.
52
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 104.
53
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 28-29.
54
See for instance Hugh Blair’s, A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the
Son of Fingal (1756, reprint. New York: Garland, 1970), 120.
55
Frances Reynolds, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste and of the Origin
of Our Ideas of Beauty (1785, reprint; New York: Garland Publishing, 1972), 5.
56
James Beattie, Dissertations Moral and Critical (1783, reprint; New York: Garland
Publishing, 1971), 606.

108
57
John Baillie, “An Essay on the Sublime”, in The Sublime: A Reader in British
Eighteenth- Century Aesthetic Theory, ed. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 88.
58
Plato, Phaedo, trans. R. Hackworth, in Greek Philosophy: Thales to Aristotle, ed.
Reginald E. Allen (New York: The Free Press 1991), 162.
59
Paul Henry Theiry Baron d’ Holbach, The System of Nature; or the Laws of the Moral
and Physical World, trans. M. De Mirabaud (London: R. Helder, 1821), vol 2. 6-116.
60
Henry Felton, A Dissertation on Reading the Classics and Forming a Just Style
(London: Jonah Bowyer, 1713), 125-126.
61
See also John Constable, Reflections upon Accuracy of Style, (London: Henry Lintot,
1731); John Mason, Essay on the Power of Numbers (1749, reprint. New York: Garland
Publishing, 1970); and William Kenrick, Introduction to the School of Shakespeare
(1749, reprint. New York: Garland Publishing, 1970).
62
Edward Young, Conjectures on Original Composition (1759, reprint. Leeds: The
Scolar Press, 1966), 79.
63
Eighteenth-century empiricists had set themselves the task of finding what object
corresponded to, and gave rise to the sublime feeling. In the wake of Longinus’
influential work on the sublime, which fails, as John Dennis laments, to “directly tell us,
what the sublime is”, and instead “takes a great deal of pains to set before us, the effects
which it produces in the minds of Men” (John Dennis, The Advancement of Modern
Poetry: A Critical Discourse (1704, reprint. New York: Garland Publishing, 1971), 47)
the empiricists produced a mass of writing preoccupied with what constitutes sublime
objects. As such, natural formations such as, mountains, the ocean, the vastness of the
night sky, and the formal qualities of epic poetry and prose, were championed. Kant’s
response, however, to what he understood as empiricism’s failure, namely the
impossibility of both the elevation of the self that is attended to by the sublime and its
natural determination, was not to reject its effect, it was to allow the feeling of
elevation, as Longinus had proclaimed (See Longinus, “On the Sublime”, in Classical
Literary Criticism, trans. T. S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), 100) to soar to
new heights. Kant takes this problem concerning consciousness of the object, and
merely recasts the sublime moment, in Idealist fashion, as a problem concerning the
subtle movements of consciousness itself.
64
Jonathan Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting (1725, reprint. Menston:
Scolar Press, 1971), 256.
65
Graig Howes, “Burke, Poe, and ‘Usher’: The Sublime and Rising Woman”, Emerson
Society Quarterly, no. 31 (1985), 174.
66
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime
and The Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958),
58, 51.

109
67
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1888), 434-435.
68
Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, “Characteristics”, in The
Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth- Century Aesthetic Theory, eds. Andrew
Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 74-75.
69
Henry Needler, “On the excellency of Divine Contemplation”, in The Sublime: A
Reader in British Eighteenth- Century Aesthetic Theory, ed. Andrew Ashfield and Peter
de Bolla, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 81.
70
James Usher, Clio; or, a Discourse on Taste (1769, reprint. New York: Garland
Publishing, 1970), 111-112.
71
Usher, Clio; or, a Discourse on Taste, 122.
72
Usher, Clio; or, a Discourse on Taste, 113.
73
Joseph Addison, The Spectator (No. 418, Monday, June 30, 1712), (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1965), vol. 3, 569.
74
Mark Akinside, The Pleasures of the Imagination: A Poem (London: R. Dodsley,
1744), 102-104n.
75
Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785, reprint. New York:
Garland Publishing, 1971), 732.
76
Sir Richard Blackmore, Essays Upon Several Subjects (1716, reprint. New York:
Garland Publishing, 1971), 36-37.
77
Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting, 257, 259-260, 261.
78
Addison, The Spectator (No. 412, Monday, June 23, 1712), vol. 3, 541.
79
Baillie, “An Essay on the Sublime”, 91.
80
Edward Young, Conjectures on the Original Composition (1759, reprint. Menston:
The Scolar Press, 1966), 12-13.
81
Young, Conjectures on the Original Composition, 25-28. See also Usher’s Clio; or,
a Discourse on Taste, 105-106 , in which Usher employs the trope of the Genius, who
finds “little satisfaction in the philosophy of colleges and schools” to legitimate his
work upon, what I have called, the mystical sublime.
82
See also William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius (1767, reprint. New York:
Garland Publishing, 1971), 150-179.
83
Thomas Blackwell, An Inquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735, reprint.
New York: Garland, 1970), 23.
84
Blackwell, An Inquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer, 26-27.

110
85
Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, ed. trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H.
Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 326.
86
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 83.
87
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 83-84.
88
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 86, 88.
89
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 88.
90
Holbach, The System of Nature, vol 2. 96.
91
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 88.
92
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 89.
93
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 96.
94
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 96.
95
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 100.
96
Plato, The Republic, trans. F. M. Cornford, in Greek Philosophy: Thales to Aristotle,
ed. Reginald E. Allen, (New York: The Free Press, 1991), 228.
97
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 100-101.
98
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 102.
99
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 102.
100
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 105.
101
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 112-113.
102
See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
Biographia Literaria, vol. 7, ed. James Engwell, and W. Jackson Bate (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), part 2, 13; and Matthew Arnold, “The Function of
Criticism at the Present Time”, in Prose of the Victorian Period, ed. William Buckler
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), 425, 429, 433, 440-441.
103
Ernst Behler, German Romantic Criticism, ed. A. Leslie Willson (New York:
Continuum, 1882), viii-ix
104
See M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical
Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1953).
105
See Samuel Holt Monk, The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century
England (Ann Abor: University of Michigan Press, 1960).

111
106
Hildebrand Jacob, The Works of Hildebrand Jacob (London: R. Dodsley, 1735), 425.
107
Joseph Addison, The Spectator (no. 417, Saturday, June 28, 1712), vol. 3, 564.
108
Cooper, “Characteristics”, 77.
109
Baillie, “An Essay on the Sublime”, 19.
110
Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste (1759, reprint. New York: Garland Publishing,
1970), 15.
111
Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and belles lettres (1785, reprint. New York:
Garland Publishing, 1970), vol. 1, 148.
112
Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 600.
113
Baillie, “An Essay on the Sublime”, 26.
114
Baillie, “An Essay on the Sublime”, 20, 21.
115
Beattie, Dissertations Moral and Critical, 628.
116
Harry Magdoff, Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1978), 103-104. It must be pointed out that Magdoff’s
historical survey of this period of capitalist expansion, whilst useful, ignores the
indentured labourers taken from India, to work in the sugar plantations of Fiji and the
West Indies.
117
Kant’s text attests to this. In the Critique of Judgement we read what appears to be
an innocent anecdote that seeks to exemplify the subjective cause of laughter. Kant
writes: “if a wag … describes very circumstantially the grief of the merchant returning
from India to Europe with all his wealth in merchandise who was forced to throw it
overboard in a heavy storm, and who grieved thereat so much that his wig turned grey
the same night, we laugh and it gives us gratification” (Kant, Critique of Judgement,
178). What we find here is a direct reference to Europe’s capitalist expansion, that
remains, in the context of the work a mere, innocent, exemplification of a philosophical
point, precisely because Europe’s emergence as a dominating power is taken as a given.
This social structure must be in place for Kant’s example to work in this instance, and it
so unquestionably.

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 Chapter Three

Fanon and the Problem of Hegel’s Master and Slave

As long as we have what satisfies the will or only promises satisfaction, we never

reach the production of works of genius … Only when desires and hopes come to

nothing, unchangeable privation shows itself, and the will has to remain

unsatisfied, do we ask ourselves: “what is the world?” … Suffering is the

condition for the effectiveness of genius.214

The previous chapter on Kant and the sublime demonstrated that reason is not a

fixed entity with a specific content but can be considered a dynamic process that is

directed toward a certain end. I maintained that the capacity of reason to establish a

subjective unity in the face of the sublime engenders its authoritative status. In the

context of an excess of sensory experience and the lofty susceptibility of the Ideas,

Kant’s claim to have established subjective unity as a basis for epistemological and

moral certainty equates to authoritative being. I also maintained that this authority

coincided with the rise of European individualism and colonial desire. This means that

the trope of the sublime emerges as a conservative discourse in the service of reason.

At this point in the thesis it will be necessary, therefore, to continue mapping reason’s

outworking. It is my contention that a postcolonial critique of Western reason demands

to be understood in terms of the dynamic that the sublime brings to the establishment of

its authority. In the terms that I set forth in chapter one, a postcolonial critique must

take reason’s processes as its object, rather than reason in-itself.

In a critical climate in which the sublime has been taken up as a crucial

moment in constructing postmodern critical strategies (as I will show in the following

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chapter), I would wish to question such strategies. The notion that the sublime is a vital

moment in establishing reason’s authority suggests that the postmodern fails to account

for the political nuances of reason. I would contend that within the orbit of postcolonial

discourse an alternative politics can be found. In order to map this politics it will be

necessary to turn to the work of Fanon, specifically his work on Hegel. What Gordon

Bennett’s work underscores so strongly is the notion that Kant’s use of the sublime is

part of a logic that does not seem to be able to distinguish between effects and

processes. It seems that Kant has taken reason’s violent effects as a pre-given

condition, as that which precedes reason. But as Bennett shows, rather than a logical

necessity, such an assumption actually obscures Kant’s cultural inscription. The

sublime emerges in the context of cultural desire, one directly implicated in Europe’s

colonial expansion.

The discourse of the sublime thus does not end with Kant, since it opens up the

possibility for the assumption of European superiority on the global stage. It is

significant that Kant’s formulation of the authoritative reasonable self was subject to a

constant reworking. Despite charting the limits of the knowing self and the dignity of

the moral self, Kant’s work in its use of the sublime also opens up the anxiousness that I

have suggested occupies the core of Western confidence. Such an anxiousness

concerning the authority of the Western self is nowhere more apparent than in Hegel. In

his work the aesthetic of the sublime and its relation to reason takes a dramatic turn, and

attempts to prop up the Kantian self, to establish the social authority of this self. I

would contend that Hegel’s discontent with Kant is animated by a desire for European

superiority. And since such a desire is driven by what I have called an anxiousness,

Hegel’s work also reveals the vulnerability of the Western imagination. As a critique of

Kant, Hegel’s work presents crucial possibilities for the discourse of the postcolonial,

specifically for what I would wish to call the postcolonial sublime. Through Fanon’s

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critique of Hegel’s critique of Kant the postcolonial sublime begins to emerge. Fanon is

particularly pivotal in this regard. His engagement with Hegelian thought opens up a

complex critical formation that exceeds the formulations of Idealism. In contrast to the

quiet confidence of Kant’s use of the sublime and Hegel’s anxiousness, the excesses

that Fanon evokes can be understood in terms of Moraru’s parallel model as the

postcolonial sublime.

If Kant’s thought seems to be unsuitable for articulating what is at stake in

liberation struggles, Hegel, as I will show, will be much more profitable. But rather

than take up Hegel as a theoretical framework that provides a basis for political

thinking, I would wish to trace, what can be considered, Fanon’s ambivalent relation to

Hegel. The famous master and slave relationship, to which I will turn, appears as a

crucial formulation of the dynamism that marks reason’s outworking. Here Fanon’s

direct engagement in Hegel provides a useful basis for marking out what is at stake in

the discourse of the postcolonial, its grapple with Western reason. Fanon works through

and problematises the metaphor of the Hegelian slave. In this chapter I would wish to

draw out the sublime as it appears in Hegel’s work, the cultural and social nuances that

surround it, and then turn to Fanon’s complex and provocative engagement in it. Whilst

Hegel continues the task of Idealism to establish an undertaking of a dynamic reason

that is in keeping with European individualism and colonial expansion, there emerges a

vulnerability, a site, a problematic that is utilised by Fanon, and which is crucial in

thinking through what is at stake in a postcolonial sublime.

Hegel and Kant

Before turning directly to the master and slave relationship, the site upon which

this construction of the postcolonial sublime will begin, I will foreshadow my reading

with a general consideration of Hegel’s basic philosophical aim. I will then turn to

consider Hegelian desire, and the conflict of the self that was crucial for Fanon. In the

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context of the thesis ! mapping the postcolonial sublime ! Hegel’s reformulation of

Kant can be considered as a re-situation of the sublime. If in Kant the sublime relates to

the problem of conscious unity, in Hegel, as I would wish to show, the sublime is a

social problem. Rather than radically depart from Kantian thought, Hegel’s sublime can

be seen to be a reformulation of Idealism’s central aims. As Žižek astutely argues,

“Hegel’s position is in fact ‘more Kantian than Kant himself’ — it adds nothing to the

Kantian notion of the sublime; it merely takes it more literally than Kant himself”.215

Concerning Kantian thought in general, Hegel declares:

This philosophy ... made a start at letting reason itself exhibit its own

determinations. But this attempt, because it proceeded from a subjective

standpoint, could not be brought to a successful conclusion. ... The critical

philosophy ... was overawed by the object, and so the logical determinations were

given an essentially subjective significance with the result that these philosophies

remained burdened with the object they had avoided and were left with the residue

of a thing-in-itself, an infinite obstacle, as a beyond.216

For Hegel, Kant is fundamentally a formalist. In the concern with the a priori structures

of thought, from Hegel’s perspective Kant had produced the situation in which the

thing-in-itself was actually alienated from the thought of the self. This means that

reason’s authority, whilst it is subjectively valid, remains in some respects stunted. In

the context of European individualism and expansionism, Kant’s subjective authority,

based as it is upon the world of appearances alone, and the work of the aesthetic

judgement, does not seem to account for the outworking of reason in the social world.

Hegel thus asks: how is it that reason is able to produce political, epistemological, and

moral systems? In extending subjective unity, Hegel is interested in articulating how

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such an (obvious) unity is made manifest in the social world. In such a manifestation

reason emerges not just as a legislator of consciousness, but as a power that is able to

transform the world. It is clear that Hegel has Europe’s ‘great’ cultural and political

attainments in mind here. The necessity of reformulating Kant is animated by Hegel’s

desire to ‘keep up’, as it were, with the pace of Western progress. He writes, Kant

“considers logic ... to be fortunate in having attained so early a completion before any

other sciences; since Aristotle, it has not lost any ground, but neither has it gained any”.

But in embracing what was considered the advanced state of European Reason in

comparison to the ancients (a thinking strategy that was crucial, as I showed in chapter

two, in the construction of British national pride) Hegel declares, “if logic has not

undergone any change since Aristotle ... then surely the conclusion which should be

drawn is that it is all the more in need of a total reconstruction; for spirit, after its

labours over two thousand years, must have attained to a higher consciousness”.217

In order to undertake mapping the great attainments of reason, Hegel challenges

Kant’s insistence upon the distinction between the thing-in-itself and the world of

appearances. He asserts that the two worlds are inseparable. Thus rather than two

distinct spheres that have no direct relation, as it appears in Kant, Hegel argues that the

thing-in-itself and thought on the thing-in-itself constitute a complete whole. If Kant

had sought to limit the capacity of the Ideas (they work merely upon the concepts of the

understanding), for Hegel the “Idea is what is true in and for itself, the absolute unity of

Concept and Objectivity”. Rather than an abstract entity teetering, as Kant thought, on

the brink of madness, “the Idea”, Hegel asserts, “is essentially concrete, because it is the

free Concept that determines itself and in doing so makes itself real”. This means the

Hegelian self is caught up in its materiality, its body, its desire for the object. Escaping

this materiality into a bodiless world of lofty and esoteric thought is an impossibility.

The problem of the self for Hegel is, therefore, less a problem of impending madness

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than a problem that concerns the body, and the possibility of bringing the body into the

unity of thought. The ideas accomplish such a task. Therein lies their authority, their

truth as truth. As Hegel puts it, the “Idea can be grasped as reason ... and further as the

Subject-Object, as the unity of the ideal and the real, of the finite and the infinite, of the

soul and the body, as the possibility that has its actuality in itself”.218

Thought thus cannot exist without the thing-in-itself, and vice versa. Like two

sides of a coin, thought is the thing-in-itself and the thing-in-itself is thought. This

means that consciousness is constituted in terms of a dialectic. Thought is always at

odds with the thing-in-itself as it is presented to thought. This is a conflict that the

Ideas, as I have shown, seek to bring to unity. Hegel writes:

For consciousness is, on the one hand, consciousness of the object, and on the

other, consciousness of itself; consciousness of what for it is the True, and

consciousness of its knowledge of the truth. Since both are for the same

consciousness, this consciousness is itself their comparison; it is for this same

consciousness to know whether its knowledge of the object corresponds to the

object or not.219

This comparison, disjunction of the thought upon the object and the object of thought,

produces a condition of conflict, which consciousness, as far as Hegel is concerned,

must somehow resolve. As Kant refused the possibility of knowing the thing-in-itself,

Hegel seized the notion that consciousness is fundamentally conflictual. Interestingly,

the conflictual nature of consciousness as set forth in Kant’s antinomies, is one of the

redeeming features of Kant’s architectonics.220 The condition of conflict means that

resolution is both necessary and immanent. Built upon what could be considered

Idealism’s central tenet, the notion, in the words of Friedrich Schlegel, that there is an

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“intrinsic dualism and duplicity … so deeply … rooted in our consciousness, that even

when we are … alone, we still think as two, and are constrained as it were to recognise
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our inmost profoundest being as essentially dramatic”, Hegel’s Idealism unfolds in

the dramatic conflicts that constitute consciousness. Such conflicts enable a theory of

consciousness built upon the dramatic as a kind of dynamic structure that produces a

powerful image of reason as a great human attainment.

Having located Kant’s architectonic system in a cultural problematic

preoccupied with the possibility of the autonomy and the authority of the European self,

it can be seen that Hegel works toward the same end. This means that Fanon’s

engagement with Hegel is particularly useful. In the context of my discussion

concerning the postcolonial sublime, Fanon’s work seizes the vulnerability that I have

suggested is at the core of Western reason, and disrupts the basis for its ‘great

attainments’. As I will show, Fanon wrests the sublime from its conservative trajectory

in Hegel and puts it to a disturbing use.

For Hegel the condition of conflict means that selfhood is not stagnant, but

marked by transformation, change, progress. Hegel writes:

If the comparison shows that these two moments do not correspond to one

another, it would seem that consciousness must alter its knowledge to make it

conform to the object. But, in fact, in the alteration of the knowledge, the object

alters for it too, for the knowledge that was present was essentially a knowledge

of the object: as the knowledge changes, so too does the object, for it essentially

belonged to this knowledge.222

In the slippage between knowledge and the object, consciousness through time is able to

reach higher stages of development. The Kantian a priori, which is confined to

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proceed, if it is to function legitimately, in a legislative fashion, in Hegel has been given

over to a transformative dynamic in which the concepts are flexible. This dynamic

process, however, culminates when Reason arrives as the final resolution, that historic

moment in which the object and knowledge of the object form a perfect unity. “Reason

is the certainty of being all reality”, Hegel writes, it “is the first positivity in which self-

consciousness is in its own self explicitly for itself, and ‘I’ is therefore only the pure

essentiality of the existent”.223

Herein lies Hegel’s concern. Kant’s subjectivism does not seem to be able to

account for historical transformation, for Spirit’s (Geist) great attainments through time.

In the context of an expanding European desire, it is clear that Hegel’s thought equates

to a valorisation of the superiority of European thought and culture. Dissatisfied with

the Kant’s subjectivism, Hegel asserts that “the liberation from the opposition of

consciousness ... lifts the determinations of thought above this timid, incomplete

standpoint and demands that they be considered not with any such limitation and

reference but as they are in their own proper character, as logic, as pure reason”.224 The

celebratory tone at work here signals that Hegel is concerned with the possibility of the

liberation of thought from the fetters of Kant’s caution concerning the limits of

knowledge. For Hegel, Kant had failed to overcome the vertigo that lies at the core of

empiricism. In The Encyclopaedia Logic he contends:

Critical Philosophy has in common with Empiricism that it accepts experience as

the only basis for our cognitions; but it will not let them count as truths, but only as

cognitions of appearances.225

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As a consequence Kantian thought emerges as stagnant, and inadequate to detail, what

Hegel considered, the process of reason’s progress to great heights upon the global

stage.

The importance of Hegelian thought in the context of Europe’s colonial

expansion, and, therefore, for the discourse of the postcolonial, with its emphasis upon

conflict, liberation, is immediately apparent. Hegel takes Kant’s legislative accents and

transforms reason’s dynamism, via its conflicts, into a social force. Hegel’s theory of

the self is drawn up around one basic problematic. Proceeding from the assumption that

Absolute Spirit (unity) is greater than the individual self, it becomes the task of the self

to overcome the unknown darkness within, in order to be at one with the Absolute.

Whilst Kant argued that the Absolute perspective is impossible, and remained content to

locate reason’s dynamism in relation to reason’s dark side, for Hegel the absolute

perspective is as necessary as it is indispensable in reason’s historical teleology. This

history marks the progressive movement of human consciousness from darkness to

light, from the obscure to the axiomatic, from slavery to mastery. For Heidegger it is a

conscious movement analogous to the possession and conquest of the land. “That

land”, he declares, “is the self-certainty of mental representations in respect of itself and

what it represents. To take complete possession of this land means to know the self-

certainty of self-consciousness in its unconditional nature”.226 As such self-

consciousness emerges as a vital link in this unfolding process. It is, as Heidegger

reminds us, “a passage way” between “consciousness and reason, which, when

developed as spirit, is the true absolute”.227

One of the most striking things about this passage from the individual to the

universal is that it is, as I have suggested, extremely conflictual, and as a consequence is

essentially painful and difficult. The self in Hegel’s economy is torn between its own

immediate experience and knowledge of the object and the possibility of subordinating

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that immediacy to a universal perspective, the Absolute. Yet as is characteristic of

Hegel’s thought, within this difficult division lies the possibility of movement and

change, the progress of Spirit. At the core of this painful conflict is the figure of desire.

For Fanon the struggle of desire, its toil in a sense, animates his intervention in the

black consciousness that seeks a unity through the idea of whiteness. I will turn to this

in due course.

If for Kant the unity of consciousness is established through the aesthetic

structuring of the faculty of Judgement, for Hegel the unity of consciousness is

established in and through the struggle of desire. Hegel writes, “this unity must become

essential to self-consciousness, i.e. self-consciousness is Desire in general”.228 Desire,

as a structure of apperception, is the feeling that drives, animates, and structures the

struggle to overcome the divided self in order to establish an identity (‘true essence’).

The figure of the desiring ‘I’ is, as Alexandre Kojève insightfully puts it, “an emptiness,

greedy for content.”229 Desire in this context is thus a bodily metaphor. It is that

visceral aspect of being — hunger, thirst, sexuality — that initially enables the self to be

aware of self, that there is something present that is not the object outside. Selfhood in

Hegel begins with the sensations, the feeling body. This body will become crucial for

Fanon, and the discourse of the postcolonial. Hegel’s philosophy seeks to chart the

progress of Geist from a simple bodily experience of the object to the detached absolute

knowledge of the object. The process is one in which the body, its baseness in this

economy, is gradually overcome by reason, its objective power. As a crucial

postcolonial thinker, Fanon seizes the body in order to disrupt Hegel’s philosophical

system. I would wish to contend that Fanon’s seizure of the body is an important

instance of the postcolonial sublime.

In Hegel the outworking of the struggle of Desire is manifest toward the

outward object. This manifestation he calls “Life”. He tells us, through “this reflection

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into itself the object has become Life”. Life is defined as “the pure movement of axial

rotation … the simple essence of Time which, … has the stable shape of Space.”230 The

desire for life is thus the desire to be filled with, to be satisfied in the fluxes and flows

that is being alive. To have Life is to actively dominate the objects of nature, in this

scheme. It is to find a bodily satisfaction in our acts upon objects. In other words,

desire is satisfied when the fluidity of the world’s objects are made to fit the form of

that desire. The action that desire produces negates the material world. “By negating

it”, as Kojève explains, “modifying it, [and] making it its own, the animal raises itself

above this given. … and reveals its superiority.”231

It can be seen that the discourse of the sublime, the concern of this thesis,

inhabits Hegel. In Hegel the sublime emerges initially in that most basic aspect of the

living self, the biological drives. The Hegelian self at its core, if we can use such

language for the purposes of illustration, is fundamentally born into a process of

sublimation. At the most basic level, what Kant called a natural disposition remains in

Hegel, in whom the self emerges in stages via the capacity for elevation above the

thing-in-itself, the slime and the mud of this world. But for Hegel the sublime is much

more fundamental than Kant would allow. If Kant isolated the possibility of sublimity,

as we found in chapter two, and opened it to a select few — Genius, the morally

purposeful, the educated, and the Cultured — Hegel effectively intensifies this elitism,

and puts it to work at the most basic level of being. In Hegel sublimity lies at the core

of existence itself. To take up what might be called a postcolonial sublime it will be

necessary to overcome the social implications of the Kantian sublime, in order to take

up what is much more fundamental to being, the bodily desire of Hegel. It is crucial to

note that Hegel is concerned with social formations, and this is why he proceeds to

theorise the social in terms of the problem of the bodily desire. In terms of the question

of social transformation, Hegelian thought can be seen to be more productive than

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Kantian subjectivism. Fanon’s intellectual context, as I will show, bears this assertion

out.

The individual desire, which is crucial for self-certainty, effects the problematic

that establishes the possibility of culture and society. Desire opens up possibility, but

desire as pure possibility is a problem that demands to be overcome. Desire doesn’t

seem to be able to distinguish the difference between people and objects. This desire is

thus essentially violent in nature. It can be characterised as pure sublimity, a boundless

necessity. If left to a life merely driven by this desire, and nothing else, Hobbes’

nightmare would take on epic proportions. An unchecked sublime energy needs to be

tamed. This taming is reason’s task. As such this boundless violent energy remains a

vital component in establishing reason’s authority. In Hegel desire functions in its

relation to reason, much like the failure of the imagination in Kant. Hegel’s reworking

of Kant takes the sublime in the same manner as Kant, as a violent yet natural force, and

puts it to work. Reason soars once again upon the wings of the sublime. The most

dramatic and crucial moment in establishing this lofty status takes place in a social

setting, in the encounter of desiring selves. For the desiring self in its pure sublime

form in encountering other desiring selves has a major problem to overcome. I will turn

to this in due course. For the moment, however, it will be necessary to take stock, before

turning to the work of Fanon.

Several crucial issues have emerged in my account of Hegel’s reformulation of

Kant. Firstly, the sublime object in Hegel can be understood, in simple terms, as the

body, its seemingly boundless desire for the object. For Hegel the body in-itself is a

seething mass of violent desire. It is destructive; yet it opens up possibility. The body

as pure desire is the object that consciousness must overcome if reason is to be

established. Secondly, what this notion of reason as an overcoming consciousness

reveals, as I have maintained throughout, is that reason is forged in a dynamic process.

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The sublime is a crucial component in this process. It is the despised darkness within

that establishes the necessity of reason, and marks its accomplishments. Thirdly, since

desire as the sublime object functions in Hegel in the service of reason, this presents the

discourse of the postcolonial with a complex problem. How useful are the conflictual

and transformative aspects of Hegel’s thought? With this in mind it will be useful to

introduce Fanon.

Fanon in France

In a recent foreword to Frantz Fanon’s path breaking Black Skin, White Masks

Homi Bhabha contends that “as Fanon attempts such audacious, often impossible,

transformations of truth and value, the jagged testimony of colonial dislocation, its

displacement of time and person, its defilement of culture and territory, refuses the

ambition of any ‘total’ theory of colonial oppression”.232 It is significant, however, that

having located the fragmentary and unresolved tensions that characterise Fanon’s texts

— for Bhabha “the emergence of a truly radical thought … never dawns without casting

an uncertain dark”233 — Bhabha nevertheless manages to find a privileged moment. He

contends, “it is through image and fantasy — those orders that figure transgressively on

the borders of history and the unconscious — that Fanon most profoundly evokes the

colonial condition”.234 Whilst this insight into the productive difficulties of Fanon is

very useful, ultimately, however, to privilege the split structures of psychic

identification and desire over other critical moments, as Bhabha does, is to render those

other moments null and void. In fact Bhabha, in order to keep his reading of Fanon

‘pure’ in a sense, goes to great lengths to ward off the contaminating influences of

Fanon’s more humanistic moments. For Bhabha this humanism is simply discarded as a

‘lapse’, an ‘overcompensation’ that unfortunately emerges “despite Fanon’s insight into

the dark side of Man”.235 This desire for an uncontaminated Fanon obscures his

complex struggle with thinkers who have had a profound effect upon critical thought,

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such as Hegel. Despite rightly pointing out that Fanon ultimately refuses the “Hegelian

dream for a human reality in itself-for-itself”,236 Bhabha’s purity passes over the

nuances of this moment, and as such misses Fanon’s important philosophical

contribution.

At the opposite end of the scale, Renate Zahar’s important Frantz Fanon:

Colonialism and Alienation approaches Fanon’s work from the standpoint of critical

Marxism. Zahar critically unpacks Fanon’s emphasis upon violent liberation in terms of

Marx’s concept of alienation. For Marx the inner intimacy that marks Idealism’s

dualistic self gives way in the modern world to a radically divided self. The self in

being denied the possibility of being at one with his or her work, “in the very act of

production” estranges “himself from himself”.237 Thus as Zahar weaves what turns out

to be a tortuous path from Marx’s alienation, which is economically driven, to the

condition of colonial oppression, Fanon’s insistence via Hegel’s notion of recognition

upon the violent emancipation of the consciousness of the colonised actually falls short

of the Marxist mark. For Zahar it turns out that Fanon, if he is anything at all, is far too

Hegelian in his insistence upon the transformative powers of violence. Zahar thus

anxiously suggests that Fanon’s Hegelian fervour be toned down: “violence as such

merely furnishes the basis for achieving emancipation; emancipation itself can only be

the result of a socio-economic process”.238 Zahar’s rigid approach, which usefully

teases out a model of colonial oppression in terms of alienation, ultimately conceals a

lament: Fanon fails as a Marxist. This reading of Fanon is thus marked by its complete

failure to deal with Fanon’s complex critical engagement with Hegel.

I would contend that Fanon’s contribution to critical thought can be found in his

disturbing insistence upon the juxtaposition of the psychoanalytic and the ontological,

and in his refusal to remain committed to a sense of finality in terms of the latter.

Working as a psychiatrist during the Algerian revolution against French colonialism in

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the fifties, and experiencing life as a black man in postwar France, Fanon used and

abused (in the active sense) all of the available critical tools in order to establish the

possibility for the radical liberation of the oppressed. In terms of the ontological

moments in Fanon’s oeuvre, which are my concern here, it is crucial to note that Fanon

wrote in an intellectual climate that was essentially preoccupied with Hegel. Michael

Kelly’s useful study, Hegel in France, underscores this preoccupation. Hegel’s impact

upon “existentialist and phenomenological currents of thought”, Kelly contends,

“caught the attention and imagination of the postwar Parisian intelligentsia and the

international intellectual community after it.”239 In the decade after the second world

war, in which Fanon’s Peau Noire, Masques Blancs appeared (1952), publications

dedicated directly to Hegel by far outweigh the number of publications from the

previous forty four years.240 Fanon wrote in an intellectual context that was grappling

with the possibility of a liberated self, and at the same time France’s own colonialist

chauvinism in Algeria.241

This (French) search for self-liberation is nowhere more apparent than in the

work of the influential Russian emigrè Alexandre Kojève.242 Kojève’s work can be

understood in terms of Hegel’s reworking of the Kantian sublime. In many respects

Fanon’s engagement in Hegel is an engagement in Kojève’s Hegel. Kojève’s influence

in France in Fanon’s day (and upon current critical trends) cannot be understated. As

Shadia Drury’s insightful The Roots of Postmodern Politics argues, Kojève’s reading of

Hegel — with its influence upon the contemporary French criticism of Foucault

(“Folie”), Queneau (“Heroics”), and Bataille (“Revolt”), and the American criticism of

Leo Strauss, Allen Bloom, and Francis Fukuyma — is crucial in the development of

what she calls postmodern irrationalism. In indicting the violence that marks this

irrationalism, Drury contends that it is in Kojève’s utilisation of Hegel’s central premise

concerning the supremacy of Reason over human affairs, that postmodern thinking

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begins to emerge. In order to overcome the rationalist instrumentality at the core of

Reason, and as a consequence the estrangement of social being, Kojève sought modes

of thinking and being that would disrupt Reason’s supremacy. As such, Kojève’s

critical endeavour can be described as a romanticism that seeks to bring forth an

experiential excess, the scandalous aspects of the self that occupy the edges of thought

that Reason banishes: passion, instinct, disorder, madness, etc. Kojève’s romanticism

thus effects a thinking that is preoccupied with what Reason has banished. And it is this

preoccupation, for Drury, underpinned by the notion that Reason disarms the fluid,

creative, artful self, that gives rise to postmodern thought.

Fanon takes up Kojèvean modes of thought and reveals that the privileging of

class as the basis for social analysis, as Kojève does, remains difficult for the discourse

of the postcolonial. Kojève brackets Hegel’s master and slave, since, according to his

thought, this relationship embodies what is at stake in human existence. For Kojève the

master and slave relationship is as essentially a hierarchy of dependence that structures

the way the self thinks and acts in the social world. This structure is inescapable. The

self is established in and through the interplay of this dialectic of domination at every

turn. A Marxist dialectician, Kojève bracketed what he considered the most

commanding moment in Hegel, and romantically celebrated slavery as the most apt site

from which to transform a reason governed world. He argued that Hegel’s slave is

analogous to the proletariat. The proletariat inhabit a condition of oppression that

contains the means to break free from reason’s authority, to transform the social world.

Kojève’s rendering of the Hegelian slave is at once revolutionary in its intent,

and romantic in its assumptions. Hegel’s bracketed slave exceeds, for Kojève, Hegel’s

system. As opposed to the master, who Kojève contends is unable to “change,

progress”, the slave who “did not want to be a Slave. … is ready for change”, since “in

his very being, he is change, transcendence, transformation, ‘education’; he is historical

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becoming at his origin, in his essence, in his very existence”.243 Kojève’s celebration of

slavery is driven by a vision for a dynamic self that is based upon an unleashed bodily

desire, the sublime core of the self. The slave’s power occurs in that moment in which

the sublime is able to be unleashed in order to disrupt reason, and to affirm the value of

Life. The possibility of the sublime essentially separates the master and the slave. The

slave unlike the master is able to seize the sublime as disruptive since it is reason’s task

to tame its violence. Herein lies Kojève’s important contribution to French thought. In

bracketing Hegel’s slave he declares:

the Slave has every reason to cease to be a Slave. … the experience of the fight

that made him a Slave predisposes him to that act of self-overcoming, of negation

of himself. … laborious Slavery … is the source of all human, social, historical

progress. History is the history of the working slave.244

As in all discussions concerning the sublime, the feeling of terror in the face of a

great power that threatens the self’s existence, or the self’s reasonable faculties, is

central. Whilst Kant and his British precursors established a theory of the sublime in

terms of the opposition of the subjective and the natural, nature being the source of

terror, Kojève implies that the sublime is essentially a class based question. Masters are

the source of the terror. The task of the subjected self is, in face of this social terror, to

overcome, to transcend the limits that such terror imposes within. The remarkable thing

concerning Hegel’s theorisation of the master and slave relationship is that it at once

rejects Kant’s musing’s concerning sublime mastery, the subject of chapter two of the

thesis, and legitimates the struggle of the oppressed. The space of the slave emerges as

the most apt site from which to transform the world. Clearly the Kojèvean sublime

lends itself to a revolutionary politics.

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 Kojève’s formulations find their way into Fanon’s texts. In Peau Noire,

Masques Blancs, for instance, Fanon writes, “The black is a black man; that is, as a

result of a series of aberrations of affect, he is rooted at the core of a universe from

which he must be extricated. The problem is important. I propose nothing short of the

liberation of the man of color from himself”.245 L’An Cinq de la Rèvolution Algérienne

likewise proposes the radical restructuring of the self in terms distinctly Kojèvean.

Fanon contends that the revolution, as an act of agency, necessitates a confrontation

with cultural tradition that radically restructures social being. “This trial of strength”,

he writes, “remodels the consciousness that man has of himself”. Since the revolution

began, Algeria “is no longer the product of hazy and fantasy-ridden imaginations. …

There is a new kind of Algerian man, a new dimension to his existence”.246 Similarly in

Les dammés de la terre, which outlines powerfully the economic and psychological

discomposure of the oppressed,247 and finds in the violent fight for freedom the

possibility of overcoming this discomposure, we find explicit suggestions concerning

the possibility of a liberated self as radically ‘new’. Fanon writes:

Decolonization is the veritable creation of new men. But this creation owes

nothing of its legitimacy to any supernatural power; the ‘thing’ which has been

colonized becomes man during the same process by which it frees itself. … The

native knows … that he is not an animal; and it is precisely at the moment he

realizes his humanity that he begins to sharpen the weapons with which he will

secure its victory.248

The subtext of Kojève becomes immediately apparent. But I would contend that

this subtext, and its (misdirected) Hegelian fervour, remains far from settled in Fanon.

It seems to me that Fanon’s engagement in Hegel, whilst the liberatory celebrations of

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Kojève loom large, ultimately refused to bracket the master and slave off from Hegel’s

whole system. This means that Fanon seems to be ambivalent toward Hegel. Whilst a

revolutionary potential is evident, he seems to be working in a political context that

cannot be reduced to the issue of class alone. As chapter one revealed, the discourse of

the postcolonial is embroiled in a mass of social configurations ! gender, class, race,

nationalism, to name a few ! and a disparate host of theories and ideas to deal with

colonialism and its effects upon the contemporary world. Indeed the doubleness that I

suggested attends to the term ‘postcolonial’ in chapter one, with its unsettled

architecture, its gaps and irreducible conflicts, reveals the resistance to systemisation

that marks Fanon’s work. Such a resistance, I would contend, leads us directly to the

sublime. In charting a postcolonial sublime, as the thesis intends, Fanon’s ambivalence

toward Hegel is a crucial moment. It will be useful, therefore, at this point to turn

directly to Hegel’s theorisation of the master and the slave relationship, before making

our way to Fanon’s productive engagement in it. My aim, as in the case of Kant, will be

to inhabit the edges of Hegel’s architectonic system. I thus resist the temptation, unlike

Kojève, to bracket the master and the slave relationship, to disconnect its function from

the system as a whole.249

A reading of Hegel, in the context of my argument, is directed toward the notion

that Fanon is primarily concerned with the sublime desire of Hegel. Rather than the

class based Kojèvean sublime, and its revolutionary implications, in the ambivalence of

Fanon the sublime emerges through the figure of the desiring body, the terror within

that consciousness must overcome. The master and the slave are set forth in Hegel in

order to open up the possibility of transforming pure desire, its conflict, in order to

produce a social world governed by reason.

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Hegel’s Master and Slave

My reading of Hegel is directed toward tracing the use of the sublime through

the figure of the slave. As in the more formal consideration of the sublime in

Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, I would contend that the sublime is most persuasively

played out in Hegel through the figure of the slave, as it appears in The Phenomenology

of Spirit. In this regard I follow an interesting observation from Paul de Man’s

Aesthetic Ideology. In finding in the Aesthetics an underlying and unacknowledged

analogy between the order of the human and the divine that puts into play the

fundamental aims of the Hegelian system, de Man connects the sublime to the figure of

the slave. Drawing upon Hegel’s reading of Aesop, the “misshapen humpbacked

slave”, Hegel writes, in which “prose begins”,250 de Man contends that “Hegel’s

Aesthetics, an essentially prosaic discourse on art, is a discourse of the slave”.

Crucially for de Man the result, of what appears upon the surface to be a performative

oversight on the part of Hegel, is that the work becomes “politically legitimate and

effective as the undoer of usurped authority. The enslaved place and condition of the

section on the sublime in the Aesthetics, and the enslaved place of the Aesthetics within

the corpus of Hegel’s complete works, are the symptoms of their strength”.251 I would

wish to interrogate this discourse on the slave.

For the thesis the discourse of the slave is crucial. Through my engagement

with Kant I have opened up the notion that the sublime is essentially a conservative

trope. Its noble formulation belongs to what can be described as an elite basis for

Culture, civility, and the myth of the nation. Hegel’s intervention relocates the sublime,

and gives its work over to the oppressed, the slavish underling. The liberatory

implications that lay at the core of this relocation become immediately apparent. But I

would wish to suggest that we need to be wary of the liberatory possibilities that Hegel

opens up. This is because, as Fanon reveals, Hegel remains fundamentally

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conservative. What he opens up is the basis for the conservative myth of progress. The

postcolonial sublime thus hinges upon the conservatism that lies at the core of the

Hegelian slave. As I will show, Fanon’s difficulty in taking up the Hegelian slave as a

model for (post)colonial oppression suggests that he has a different understanding of the

sublime in mind, or at least, if we are to take the postcolonial sublime in the context of

Fanon’s thought, the conservative sublime must be disrupted. Fanon’s work wrests the

sublime from its conservative trajectory and puts it to a more disruptive use. This thesis

seeks to chart the disruptive capacity of such a sublime.

I will turn now to that famous section in the Phenomenology of Spirit to draw

out Hegel’s conservatism. The theorisation of the master and slave relationship can be

considered a transitional stage (the establishment of determinate being) that lies

between Being (sensory knowledge) and Being-for-self (reason). Reason is able to take

flight upon the wings of the master and slave. In the shifting relationship between

consciousness and the object, Hegel’s concern, the master and slave mark the transition

from a simple knowledge of the object of sense to reason’s reign over the objects of

sense. If in Kant the judgement performed a bridging task, in Hegel the master and the

slave serve such a purpose. I would contend that it is no less an aesthetic moment.

The theorisation of the master and the slave begins when the desiring self meets

another self. The desiring self, as I have shown, with its boundless appetite finds an

awareness of self in the consumption of objects (Being). But as soon as this has taken

place a problem arises. The act of consumption, in whatever form, does exactly what it

sets out to do, it consumes the object. As banal as it sounds, if desire is the basis for

self-hood the consumed object no longer exists, and the self no longer has the means for

locating self-certainty. For Hegel this means that the only way that the self can

ultimately exist with a reasonable self-certainty is if the object of desire somehow

resists being consumed. For self-certainty to be possible the object that resists must be

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able to assert a desire comparable to the consuming self. The only object that is capable

of such an assertion is another self. As such Hegel breaks through that radical

subjectivism and relativism that marked Kant, and situates reason’s dynamic processes

in a social context. Through Hegel reason thus enters the social domain.

Since, as I outlined above, selfhood is structured by the principle of desire (the

bodily satisfaction that emerges in overcoming the object) the meeting of two selves

produces a problem. Both selves seek from the other the necessary fulfilment that a

violent desire demands. In Hobbesian terms, as a consequence of this violent desire the

encounter between selves is essentially conflictual. Hegel then asks: how is social order

possible? The basis for self-certainty — the intermediate step in establishing a

reasonable order — must, therefore, be established by overcoming the sublime desire to

negate the object. The possibility of the social emerges only when this being-for-itself

is able to be transformed into an independent consciousness, being-in-itself. In the

terms set forth by Jean Hyppolite’s existential reading of Hegel, this is a transformation

that frees the subject “from the only slavery possible, enslavement to life.”252 The

passage from the individual to the universal can be understood in terms of the

eighteenth-century preoccupation with the sublime, as the demand for overcoming the

natural, the bodily, the biological in the name of a greater power, a greater self. Of

course that greater self is a reasonable one. For it is Reason that emerges in that

moment in which the self overcomes the mundane consumption of objects, overcomes

bodily desire.

The most undeniable and compelling test of this moment comes in the face of

death, the possibility of the complete annihilation of the body. The willingness to face

death, to risk losing the capacity to desire, shows that there is a being, a human essence,

a will, that exists above and beyond material desire. It is the sublime moment par

excellence: the self must overcome his or her inner fears in the face of that great and

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unknown power, death. Interesting and disturbing is Hegel’s passing over of Kant’s

subjective use of the sublime, his insistence that it is this sublimity that informs and

structures the social. The relationship between people, desiring selves, is at its base, for

Hegel, a battle to overcome the fear of that ultimate marker of the sublime, the greatest

of threats, death.

The willingness to risk life, the object of desire, in this way opens up the

possibility for an independent consciousness that is not bound by life’s physical

constraints, the world of a simple sensory knowledge. Hegel writes:

it is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won; only thus is it proved that

for self-consciousness, its essential being is not [just] being, not the immediate

form in which it appears, nor in its submergence in the expanse of life, but rather

that there is nothing present in it that could not be regarded as a vanishing

moment, that it is only pure being-for-self. The individual who has not risked his

life may well be recognized as a person, but he has not attained to the truth of this

recognition as an independent self-consciousness.253

But this sublime moment takes an interesting turn. For the possibilities of desire

do not leave us without problems. It seems that desire cannot be done away with that

easily, and the problem that we encountered through the consumption of objects

emerges again. The survivor of the battle to the death is left with no basis upon which

to establish a sense of self, in the same way that the consumption of objects leaves the

self with nothing to satisfy desire for life. Combat to the death destroys the condition of

reciprocity, of mutual recognition, which has been set forth as the necessary condition

for self-certainty. The only way that this can be resolved is for the combatants to

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survive the battle. This means that there is someone left to recognise the self, despite

the fact that the basis for this relationship is a conflictual and violent one initially.

There are winners and losers in battle. Thus two paths to the absolute emerge.

Here we find the master and the slave. In this equation the master is the one who is able

to risk life, and thus establish an independent consciousness. The slave, on the other

hand, is unwilling to risk life, and is bound by both the material condition of Life

(desire), and the master, who has seemingly transcended this condition.

In their outworking the master and the slave thus face very different kinds of

problems. The master, who is the proven subject, rules by means of this transcendent

state. In other words the master is in the position of certainty, surety, and therefore able

to reasonably rule. The slave is the object of this rule, and thus, according to the

necessity of mutual recognition as the basis for self-certainty, the master gets

recognition from the slave as the slave obeys. But at this point the Phenomenology

makes an interesting turn. After having valorised the capacity of mastery to overcome

desire, Hegel rejects mastery as a legitimate basis for reason. The master, who seemed

to overcome the sublime and thus earned the right to rule, ultimately does not get

satisfaction, or in other words, an adequate return in the recognition stakes from the

slave because inequality prevents it. The obedience of the slave does not provide

adequate recognition for the master, who thus emerges as the figure of the unfulfilled

ruler, an extreme embodiment of the cliche, ‘it’s lonely at the top’. The master faces the

problem that we have encountered in several different forms previously. That is, if

there is no return from the other then the self loses the basis for self’s existence.

Mastery thus becomes, as Kojève puts it, “an existential impasse.”254 The master in

winning the right to rule paradoxically embarks upon the road to no where, as far as

self-consciousness is concerned. The slave, however, embodies that sense of the self

upon which Reason is able to assert its authority. This is something that Nietzsche

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would later invert, rejecting ‘slave morality’ in favour of ‘master morality’, in order to

set forth ‘the will to power’ as the marker of authentic human experience. For Hegel,

however, it is the slave, the one unwilling to risk life, who is finally able to overcome

desire and transform the condition of inequality that was effected by the fear of death.

The slave opens up the possibility for an autonomous sense of self, and thus establishes

a path to a free self-consciousness. In producing goods for the master, which are

consumed only by the master, the slave is able to project him or herself onto a concrete

other. This means that the fear of death and the constraints that come with it are

overcome, albeit through (an)other path. In short, and this is a matter that would

become crucial for Marx, the slave discovers him or herself through work. Hegel

writes, through “service he rids himself of his attachment to natural existence in every

single detail; and gets rid of it by working on it.” This means that the slave is able to

become “conscious of what he truly is.” For “consciousness, qua worker, comes to see

in the independent being [of the object] its own independence”.255

The master in the equation thus functions not as the site for progress, but merely

as the means for effecting a condition of injustice that would produce the necessity of

the slave working upon the object in order to overcome desire. The slave whilst

oppressed has an advantage in the consciousness stakes, and ultimately in working

transcends the desire for the object. Subsequently, the eighteenth-century

preoccupation with Genius, that revered Archimedean point outside and in excess of the

social, and occupied by a select few, is overturned by a gritty sublimity that inhabits,

and seeks to transform, the social world. It takes work to overcome the sublime, work

upon what initially appeared a harsh and hostile environment. This necessity marks the

legitimacy established in that age old notion: that it is from conditions of adversity that

the triumph of the human Spirit rises, from which this chapter begins. It is the slave

who must find an explanation for the unequal conditions of life. It is the slave who

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appears to be in touch with the reality of being, and as such emerges as the voice of

legitimacy, the marker of authentic being. Such a task, despite Kojève’s Marxism, lies

at the core of conservative traditions, which are built upon the triumph of Spirit,

reason’s historic dynamism in establishing the nation-state. The conservative aims of

the master and slave relationship are nowhere more apparent than in Hegel’s Berlin

Phenomenology. As he puts it:

The servant ... works off the singularity and egoism of his will in the service of

the master, sublates the inner immediacy of desire, and in this privation and fear

of the Lord makes, — and it is the beginning of wisdom, — the transition to

universal self-consciousness.256

Thus far I have argued that rather than a problem of consciousness, as in Kant,

the Hegelian sublime draws upon an image of the body, its boundless desire for the

object. This body takes on the character of the sublime object in Hegel. I have also

drawn a distinction between the Kojèvean sublime, its revolutionary implications, and

the Hegelian sublime, which renders the master and slave relation as less revolutionary

than conservative. In insisting upon valorising the great labour of reason, the master

and slave are utilised to underscore the legitimacy of reason’s just authority. I would

suggest that Fanon’s work can be located in this gap between the sublime as a

revolutionary force, and the sublime as the basis for conservative myths of progress.

Such a division marks recent theory, as we shall see when I turn to consider the work of

Lyotard in the following chapter. I would suggest that Fanon is fully cognisant of this

division. It lies at the core of his ambivalence toward the thought of Hegel. In the

context of this thesis, Fanon’s engagement in Hegel can be read as a powerful statement

concerning what is at stake in the discourse of the postcolonial. With Western reason in

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its critical sites, what assumptions concerning the self will enable the target to be hit

with precision? It will be useful to turn, at this point, to Fanon for a tentative response.

Fanon and Hegel

It is in the final moments of Peau Noire, Masques Blancs that we find Fanon

dealing directly with Hegel. The work, as Fanon explains, in examining “the black-

white relation” seeks to open up the possibility for “the liberation of the man of color

from himself”. Working from the basic premises (‘facts’ as Fanon puts it) that “White

men consider themselves superior to black men” and “Black men want to prove to white

men, at all costs, the richness of their thought, the equal value of their intellect”, Peau

Noire, Masques Blancs with its interruptions and conflicts radically disrupts the painful

consequence of colonialism: “For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is

white”.257

The section entitled “The Negro and Hegel”, which is a subset of the chapter

entitled “The Negro and Recognition”, emerges as the final moment in this critical

examination of the black-white relation. Here Fanon wears a philosophical hat.258 The

section begins with Hegel’s famous assertion in The Phenomenology of Spirit:

Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it also exists

for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.259

The possibility of this moment — “human worth and reality” are constituted through,

and only through, “that other being”260 — in keeping with Hegel’s emphasis upon the

social nature of being, arises in and through the conflict of desire and the necessity of

maintaining the object of desire. This is Hegel’s great contribution to critical theory,

and it is this contribution that marks Fanon’s lament concerning the plight of black

consciousness in France. For Fanon it is precisely the lack of conflict, the short

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circuiting of the possibility of struggle, that has issued the fatal blow upon black

consciousness. In order to articulate the tormented nature of black consciousness, it is

significant that Fanon draws the struggle of desire, against which reason’s great labour

is staged, into a discussion concerning the master and slave relationship. He argues:

Historically, the Negro steeped in the inessentiality of servitude was set free by

his master. He did not fight for his freedom.

Out of slavery the Negro burst into the lists where his masters stood. Like those

servants who are allowed once every year to dance in the drawing room, the

Negro is looking for a prop. The Negro has not become a master. When there are

no longer slaves, there are no longer masters.

The Negro is a slave who has been allowed to assume the attitude of a master.

The white man is a master who has allowed his slaves to eat at his table.261

A post-colonial condition, in the complete sense of the term as a total historical

break, for Fanon hasn’t actually arrived. Whilst in that moment in which, as Eric

Hobsbawm contends, faced with the decline in the possibility of a masterful sublimity

“the old colonial powers were patently too weak, even after a victorious war, to restore

their old positions”262 (as I discussed in chapter one), Europe gradually relaxed its

colonial status and granted what could loosely be called a political freedom to its

colonies. The granting of this emancipation, however, at least in Fanon’s context (the

situation is different for the black struggle in the USA), was set forth as an act of

mastery. Rather than a toppled empire, besieged, unable to ward off the resistance of its

subjects (this is not to say that there was no resistance), and finally overcome, the

empire hasn’t actually ceased playing the game of mastery, it has merely changed the

rules of the game. As such, for Fanon, the emancipation of the colonised peoples, set

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forth in the guise of simply abolishing the master/slave dialectic, merely writes them out

of an equation that in some sense provided an opportunity to confront the injustice of

colonialism. In having their status as slaves removed there is now no longer a position

from which the formerly colonised is able to legitimately speak, since such a category

from the perspective of the former empire no longer exists. For the colonised it is as if

the rug that provides a speaking position has been pulled-out-from-under-their-feet. In

being granted a freedom that effectively erased a history of colonial injustice, colonised

peoples lost the basis for carving out an independent sense of identity. As Fanon tells

us, the “upheaval did not make a difference in the Negro. He went from one way of life

to another, but not from one life to another”.263

Upon the surface it appears as if Fanon attempts to deal with this problem in

Hegelian terms. At its core is the problem of self-consciousness, as it is attended to by

questions concerning freedom and independent being. He points out that the formerly

colonised, caught up in the frustration of this imperialist rug-pulling tactic, “needs a

challenge to his humanity, he wants conflict, a riot”,264 the possibility of forging a

selfhood upon that conflictual terrain of human desire that preoccupied Hegel, and

Kojève after him. Despite what appears upon the surface to be freedom from slavery,

there is a sense in which the former slave still desires to speak as a slave in a dialectic of

domination. Hegel’s presence in Fanon thus marks at its most basic level the problem

of finding a legitimate space from which to speak. Fanon’s world is marked in its

incapacity to clearly define, to categorise, and to label social spaces. He thus poses a

crucial question: is the impossibility of the clearly defined an empowering moment for

the oppressed?

It is in this sense that the pervasiveness of Hegel’s theorisation of the master and

slave relationship can’t be ignored as a critical lapse (Bhabha). The slave metaphor

emerges in the political struggle against colonialism as an empowering moment, a

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position from which to speak. Thus the figure of the slave turns up in these terms in

Julie Dowling’s painting. Her scandalous Julie Clampett seizes the figure of the slave

as a legitimate space from which to claim some kind of social justice. In text at the

edges of the image of aboriginal woman we read:

Our Black, Ancestor, Women Were Really only SLAVES265

Such a claim signals that colonial imposition has erased its injustices by erasing the

figure of the aboriginal as slave from its history. Thus to claim such a figure is to

confront the colonial West with what it has produced yet denies, its violent

exploitations.

What Dowling rightly recognises is that the issue of slavery has been a moot

point in the outworking of Enlightenment thought. Indeed the British parliament prided

itself, as opposed to the practice of “barbarous countries”, on its active rejection of

slavery and the slave-trade. The slave issue provoked a brutal civil war in America, and

produced a racist apologetics that would never be realised in Britain. D.W. Griffith’s

influential film, The Birth of a Nation: or The Clansmen (1919), is a case in point.

Britain’s active involvement in anti-slavery campaigns served as a measure for its own

‘civility’. To evoke the figure of the slave, as Dowling does, is thus to evoke this ‘civil’

conscience, one that would work its way into European thought generally.266 The 1837

“Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aborigines”, for instance, declares:

GREAT BRITAIN has, in former times, countenanced evils of great magnitude,

— slavery and the slave-trade; but for these she has made some atonement, for the

latter, by abandoning the traffic; for the former, by the sacrifice of 20 millions of

money.267

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In order to make a claim for justice in the Australian context, Dowling’s utilisation of

the slave metaphor emerges as particularly pointed because the issue of slavery in the

British parliament was essentially an African one, or at least related specifically to

‘other’ cultures that had not attained the civility of the British. To suggest that the

British produced slaves is to suggest that Britain’s ‘civility’ is inconsistent, false. On

the edges of Julie Clampett we can hear the brutal disparities of civility: “this state was

founded by Invaders, not Settlers! And ... to this very day Aboriginal people still cry

Injustice. Every Family had a baby taken”.

It will be useful to turn back to Hegel to explore the structure of this political

empowerment. It is in this grapple with Hegel that Fanon’s postcolonial politics begins

to emerge. Interestingly it is in Hegel’s The Philosophy of History, in the text that

disturbingly excludes the African from world history, that the problematic of the slave is

initially set forth. In Hegel’s expulsion of the African from world history, he announces

the hope that is opened up as a consequence of the slave trade. I will quote three

sections from The Philosophy of History that appear in the introduction in order to

reveal Hegel’s hope.

Negroes are enslaved by Europeans and sold to America. Bad as this may be,

their lot in their land is even worse, since there a slavery quite as absolute exists;

for it is the essential principle of slavery, that man has not yet attained a

consciousness of his freedom, and consequently sinks down to a mere Thing …

Through the pervading influence of slavery all those bonds of moral regard which

we cherish towards each other disappear, and it does not occur to the Negro mind

to expect from others what we are enabled to claim.

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 The only essential connection that has existed and continued between the Negroes

and the Europeans is that of slavery. In this the Negroes see nothing unbecoming

them, and the English who have done most for abolishing the slave-trade and

slavery, are treated by the Negroes as enemies. … we may conclude slavery to

have been the occasion of the increase of human feeling among the Negroes.

[Slavery] is itself a phase of advance from the merely isolated sensual existence

… a mode of becoming participant in a higher morality and the culture connected

with it. Slavery is in and for itself injustice, for the essence of humanity is

Freedom; but for this man must be matured. The gradual abolition of slavery is

therefore wiser and more equitable than its sudden removal.268

Obviously the notion that slavery, from the perspective of that well worn and still

widely accepted European cliche, ‘did the natives a favour’, is profoundly racist. Yet

there is a sense, as Fanon in his complex engagement in Hegel reveals, that cogent

possibilities are opened up in that moment that this metaphor is reinscribed into a post-

colonial politics. The metaphor of the slave thus becomes a position from which to

speak, and its difficult and disturbing location in Hegel’s thought demands the

questions: what kind of speaking position would this be? what kind of legitimacy does it

grant? what kind of speech does it enable?

The hope for the African that is set forth by Hegel reveals the importance of the

master and slave relationship, not only in the context of Hegel’s ‘world history’ but also

in the political strategies of the discourse of the postcolonial. In the first instance we

find the notion that a consciousness of freedom arrives only in and through the

condition of oppression. Slavery for Hegel opens up the possibility for movement,

change, and crucially, since he is concerned with consciousness, a progression that is

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able to deliver the self from a slave like consciousness, that is a slave to life, to embrace

the possibility of the Absolute. There is thus the romantic sense that it is in the

condition of slavery that a more authentic understanding of being is established. Since

no idea of freedom can be forged outside an inequitable situation no idea of freedom

prevails. It’s a simple case of the self not knowing what freedom is until freedom has

ben won in the face of unfreedom. The idea that freedom is something to be attained,

worked for, underpins this notion. The possibility of the Absolute is opened up only in

the labour of the self in overcoming the desire for Life, in a process of sublimation.

It would seem that this slave sublime has much to offer the discourse of the

postcolonial. But at the very moment in which readers await the climax of a text

dedicated to destroying oppression and outlining the key to black consciousness and

political struggle (the triumph of the human spirit awaits!), something quite remarkable

happens. The reader turns the page upon which Hegelian defiance has begun to carve

out a solid base from which to rise, and finds Hegel banished to the margins of the text.

Whilst Hegel holds out a great hope, seized by Kojève, the possibility of the sublime

moment for the slave, in which the condition of slavery is transformed, the master/slave

dialectic exceeded, has not had the chance to arrive. I quote the note in full:

I hope I have shown that here the master differs basically from the master

described be Hegel. For Hegel there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the

consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but

work.

In the same way, the slave here is in no way identifiable with the slave who loses

himself in the object and finds in his work the source of his liberation.

The Negro wants to be like the master.

Therefore he is less independent than the Hegelian slave.

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 In Hegel the slave turns away from the master and turns toward the object.

Here the slave turns toward the master and abandons the object.269

Hegel’s presence in Fanon’s text thus remains opaque and difficult. He is

asserted it seems only to be crossed out. Fanon’s relationship to Hegel’s thought can

thus only be considered as a kind of strange paradox. It was Hegel who in setting the

scene for his grand outline of the history of the world, The Philosophy of History, found

it necessary to include Africa only in order to reveal its exclusion from the main body of

the work: ‘world history’. Africa, Hegel tells us, “is no historical part of the World; it

has no movement or development to exhibit”. In keeping with his goal as an Idealist,

this blatant exclusion is justified simply because the “Negro … has not yet attained to

the realization of any substantial objective existence”. This means that for Hegel the

African is thought to exist in a “completely wild and untamed state”, exhibiting

“nothing harmonious with humanity”.270 Fanon seems to be reversing this disturbing

violence upon the African. Where once the African was hastily passed over, gotten-out-

of-the-way-so-that-the-real-work-can-begin, or maybe included merely to give the work

the appearance of scholarly thoroughness, Hegel now emerges in the text not to receive

accolades, but instead to be critically located in a manner that defies the very fabric of

his philosophical system. The complexity of the text’s (ab)use of Hegel signals that

Fanon understood too well the difficulty of his own critical speaking position in relation

to Hegelian conservatism. There is a sense in which his own critical endeavour is

inhabited by exactly the problem that his work seeks to abolish: the problem of

recognition. So whilst being indebted to the articulations of Hegel, Fanon finds it

necessary to resist this most European of philosophical masters. It is impossible to be

both master of one’s destiny and yet at the same time a slave to European philosophical

thought, especially thought as conservative as Hegel’s. Fanon inhabits Hegel only to

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gesture toward the possibility of a future free from the dominating dialectic that is at the

centre of Hegel’s self-conscious progress to the Absolute.

Thus, in having crossed out Hegel, remarkably Fanon leaves him behind and

turns to thought that seeks to exceed the conservative limits that the master/slave

dialectic imposes. In quick, perplexing succession Fanon evokes the work of Mounier,

Fichte, and Nietzsche, in order to set forth the possibility of a being beyond the

structures of dependence. Through Emmanuel Mounier, the controversial Catholic

reformer of the forties and fifties, he writes: “The young Negroes whom he knew” in

Africa “sought to maintain their alterity”(my emphasis) .271 Fichte emerges as a thinker

who sets forth the notion that the “self takes place by opposing itself … Yes and no”.

Fichte’s post-Kantian contention was that the thing-in-itself exists only in thought, in

the I am I. To act is thus synonymous with the production of an I. The I is, effectively,

the spectator of the self acting in the world of objects. As such Fichte finds an absolute

space from which to construct a world, with the absolute power to do everything, to

create and to destroy.272

Clearly Fanon’s violent textual manoeuvres betray a desire for the possibility of

a being beyond structures of dependence, a being that acts rather than reacts. The

discourse of the postcolonial, as Fanon would have it, is marked by the difficulty of

taking up a dialectical location from which to ‘fight’ for freedom. Herein lies the basis

for the postcolonial sublime. Fanon’s resistance to the conservative aims of the

Hegelian dialectic, and search for modes of thought that exceed the terms of dialectics,

signals what lies at the core of the postcolonial sublime. As a consequence of the

process of decolonisation, a dialectical basis for politics is no longer tenable from the

perspective of the former colonies. As the processes of reason continue to dominate

social and cultural politics, the postcolonial, as an ambiguous entity, demands that a

new politics of resistance to such a teleology must be found. The postcolonial sublime

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represents such politics. Its excess defies the possibility of bringing unity to bear upon

the cultural differences that mark the contemporary nation-state.

With the difficulty of dialectics in mind, it will be useful to follow Fanon and

turn to the thought of Nietzsche, who I would wish take up in some detail. Fanon

declares, “Man’s behaviour is not only reactional. And there is always resentment in a

reaction. Nietzsche had already pointed that out in The Will to Power”.273 It will be

useful to dwell upon Nietzsche, in order to draw out the implications of action, as

opposed to reaction, in the context of our consideration of the master and slave

relationship. It is in Nietzsche that the possibilities of moving through and beyond the

master and slave dialectic are opened up. Does Fanon utilise Nietzsche fully?

Nietzsche’s Master and Slave

The possibilities of a movement beyond dialectics, emerge in Nietzsche through

the figure of the wandering (wanderung) self. It is this self who discovers and presents

a genealogy of human morality, and a theory of the master and the slave relationship.

This is a self who has been uncluttered by the demands of a stagnant time and place, a

self who is free to seek an enlightenment, and thus able to speak with authority as one

that is ‘world wise’, and in touch with the true excesses of the over-abundant nature of

life. Nietzsche’s wanderer evokes the romantic trope of the holy traveller — Buddha,

Paul the Apostle — or perhaps even the prototype Hollywood Western hero. The

wanderer dispels the myth of the ‘tried-and-true’ perspective, in the name of a creative

intervention that speaks from the uncertain and excessive flux of phenomenological

experience. In the context of Idealism, Nietzsche’s thought seeks to establish a basis for

knowledge upon what Idealism rejects, the body. If for Hegel the body with its sublime

desire demands to be tamed, for Nietzsche it is precisely this body that opens up the

possibility of ‘authentic’ being.

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 Given this insistence upon the sublime body, it is compelling that Nietzsche

produces a theory of the master and the slave. He sets his master and slave forth, like

Marx (though I suspect that Nietzsche never read Marx), via a class based theory of

morality. He declares, “I finally discovered” that there are “two basic types” of human

morality, “and one basic difference. There are master morality and slave morality”.274

Upon the surface it appears that the social conditions of life precede and determine

human thinking and action. Moral categories such as good and bad seem to appear as

epiphenomenon, they merely reflect class structure. This means that “good and bad ...

[are] for a long time the same thing as noble and base, master and slave”.275 Morality is

born out of a response to this material division. As Nietzsche states, “moral

designations were everywhere first applied to human beings and only later, derivatively,

to actions”.276 Thus the tragic legitimacy of the slave of Hegel’s Phenomenology is

radically disrupted.

Instead of the slave, Nietzsche champions the noble master. From a position of

privilege and power, the master proudly sets forth a morality based upon the autonomy

that such a material position enables. Despising the underclass, the master’s strength

lies in the power of autonomy, in other words, in the power to decide for self above all

other selves in a manner that does not depend upon existing moral categories. The

master has the power to declare this knowing in a transcendent artfulness, and possesses

the power of requital.277

Interestingly the underclass, from the perspective of the noble, are considered as

“the doglike people who allow themselves to be maltreated”. These are “the begging

flatterers, [who are] above all the liars”278since they hold to the illusion of the

transcendent authority of the divine. Here we find an echo of Hegel’s slave-

consciousness, which is formed in those who are not willing to face death. But rather

than the transformative power that Hegel finds in this moment, Nietzsche argues that

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slave-consciousness produces the kind of nihilistic morality that his work seeks to

obliterate.

The underclass, in response to the powerlessness that is linked to modernity’s

slavish existence, sets forth a pessimistic, sceptical and suspicious morality that

attempts to relieve the pressure inflicted as a consequence of the need to survive. The

slave thus produces a morality of utility which bears more than a casual resemblance to

Christ’s teachings. The slave produces a morality “to ease existence for those who

suffer: here pity, the complaisant and obliging hand, the warm heart, patience, industry,

humility, and friendliness are honoured — for here these are the most useful qualities

and almost the only means for enduring the pressure of existence”.279

For Nietzsche the problem with slave morality is that it is an existence that is

constantly preoccupied with the idea of freedom. This preoccupation thus signals that

there is no real freedom in a slavish existence, because ultimately the artful existence

that Nietzsche demands is negated. The slave must necessarily project an idea of

freedom in order to cope with the stress that the condition of slavery brings. Like Marx,

Nietzsche thus argues that real freedom can only be found in the moment in which

freedom itself is not an issue, in other words, in the moment in which freedom is an

always already condition. But unlike Marx, Nietzsche never considered just how the

transformation from a slave to a master morality might be possible. This is a problem

with Nietzschean thought, one that is crucial in the discourse of the postcolonial, which

is forced, as Fanon’s work will reveal, to be always already located in a political

struggle.280

But given this emphasis upon the artful and nomadic nature of being in

Nietzsche, the problem of how to think through the observations of the wanderer in this

instance becomes crucial, rather than the issue of social transformation. Like Fanon’s

Hegel, Nietzsche’s theory of morality evokes questions concerning the legitimacy of

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such a speaking position. Can these observations be read as objective propositions

concerning the condition of the world? Or are we to take what appears to be

propositional as a kind of art, a creative intervention, an artful interpretation? If the

former, then Nietzsche’s claim to truth here works against the diseased nature of

language,281 and the wanderer’s desire to escape nihilism. If the latter, and I suspect

that this is the case, what becomes important is not so much the content of the

observation, but the authority, or the authenticity of the judge in this artful intervention.

A close inspection of the text reveals an anxiousness concerning a reading which would

make this inattention to the possibility of social transformation, and celebration of the

master as the basis for a rational defence of social inequality. Nietzsche writes:

There are master morality and slave morality — I add immediately that in all the

higher and mixed cultures there also appear attempts at mediation between these

two moralities, and yet more often the interpenetration and mutual

misunderstanding of both, and at times they occur directly alongside each other —

even in the same human being, within a single soul.282

Thus an anxiousness emerges concerning the finality of this observation. In the context

of Fanon’s ambivalence concerning the systematic science of Hegel, an interesting

problem emerges that remains consistent with Nietzsche’s critique of Idealism in

general. The too many variations to be captured in a single statement, the excesses that

cannot be contained, thwart any demand for the systematic. The excessive nature of the

material world renders the wanderer’s discovery as an artful intervention, rather than a

propositional truth, and means that its ‘solutions’ do not belong to the processes of

reason’s logic. The wanderer, in touch with the unpresentable magnitude of experience,

presents an idea which is linked to the messy and muddy world of the everyday,

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precisely the world that the discourse of the sublime seeks to transcend. Any

representation of morality is plagued from the beginning, ‘immediately’, with a crises of

representation. Nietzsche’s observation is not a reflection in the mirror of nature. There

is no pure instance of the referents of this writing.

This anxiousness concerning representational accuracy ultimately works to

valorise the speaking position of the wanderer. Thus Nietzsche opens up the possibility

for ‘artful interventions’, as opposed to grounded ethical negations. The wanderer

speaks, but from the messy space of uncertainty. The object emerges as an opaque

construction. The morality set forth moves beyond the empiricism that Marx demands,

to be framed as a creative reading, an intervention which draws upon the autonomy,

creativity, and artfulness that the text champions. The text presents a double movement,

it simultaneously sets forth a theory of morality, and at the same time collapses the

distinction between the wanderer as narrator and the valorisation of the master’s

autonomy. The upshot is a textual effect which valorises the creative judgement of the

wanderer, whose unbelongingness allows the possibility of escape from the nihilism

that slave morality implies.

Cultural intervention, for Nietzsche, is thus staged in terms of the nomadic,

masterful self, the artful moment beyond good and evil. This intervention as a creative

act is synonymous therefore with the pure force of the will, or, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘the

will to power’, that Fanon champions as an actional, rather than reactional subject

position. The will to power is a radically realist, perhaps ‘hyper-real’, take upon life. It

is equivalent to every possible thing that happens in experience. It is to occupy the

space of the sublime, to draw the sublime in its most excessive form, in this case the

plethora, the experiential excess that comprises thought and being, into the fort/da of

Idealism. Nietzsche writes, “the world is the will to power — and nothing besides!

And you yourselves are also this will to power — and nothing besides!”283

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 The will to power radically disrupts any sense of an essential subject behind the

world of appearances. There is no essence, or substance, or ground behind the power,

or force, that effects the division of self and other, and of subject and object. The will to

power emerges as the plurality, the excess, of forces upon which identity is arbitrarily,

and artfully constructed. Values and morals are thus built upon the excessive field of

contradictory forces that Nietzsche calls the will to power, and must be affirmed, rather

than discovered ‘in themselves’ as belief in transcendent systems presupposes. The will

to power has no origin or purpose, and no beginning and end. Reality for Nietzsche

consists of selves caught, though not to their detriment, in a world without teleology,

endlessly moving and mobile, a world in the flux of constant and indeterminate

transformation. This indeterminate condition sets forth the possibility for “the

enjoyment of all kinds of uncertainty”, and opens the door for an “experimentalism, as a

counterweight to ... [the] extreme fatalism” that the suppression of God’s eulogy effects.

The indeterminate calls forth the “abolition of the concept of necessity ... [and the]

abolition of the ‘will’” as the ground for understanding and action. It also calls forth the

“abolition of ‘knowledge-in-itself’”,284 the notion that knowledge somehow transcends,

and is distinct from, the world of everyday experience.

Nietzsche’s theorisation of the master and slave relationship radically rejects

Hegel’s celebration of the possibilities that slavery opens up. Given this, it is rather

perplexing to find an endorsement of Nietzsche’s sensuous and autonomous

individuality, in a section that is devoted to Hegel. Of course it could be argued that

ultimately Fanon’s crossing out of Hegel amounts to nothing less than a complete turn

to Nietzschean modes of thought. But this implies a total break from Hegel, a break that

Black Skin, White Masks, and indeed Fanon’s work generally, in its valorisation of the

necessity of conflict, refuses to validate. Moreover to claim that Fanon ultimately

endorses Nietzsche is to miss the anxiousness in that textual moment in which

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Nietzsche appears. We find him at the end of that rapid movement through Mounier to

Fichte, that resists, in its sheer pace the notion that everything culminates in Nietzsche.

Fanon and the Discourse of the Sublime

I would contend that Fanon’s foray into matters autonomous, perhaps with a

future vision in mind, hardly constitutes a complete turn away from Hegel. For even

though Hegel has been crossed out (too late!) there is a sense in which his haunting

presence remains. If Fanon’s gesture toward Nietzsche radically rejects the possibilities

of the romantic slavery of Kojève, the valorisation of mastery void of any consideration

concerning the possibility of transforming the condition of slavery, is equally

problematic. Fanon appears to be caught between the possibilities that Hegel’s

theorisation of the slave opens up, since it deals with the question of emancipation that

Nietzsche’s thought fails to deal with, and the possibility of a future free from structures

of dependence, as Nietzsche attempts to open up. Rather than rigid critical positions,

Hegel and Nietzsche present temporal extremes that ultimately remain illusive. As

Fanon declares:

The architecture of this work [Black Skins, White Masks] is rooted in the temporal.

… Ideally, the present will always contribute to the building of the future. And

this future is not the future of the cosmos but rather the future of my century, my

country, my existence. In no fashion should I undertake to prepare the world that

will come later. I belong irreducibly to my time. And it is for my time that I

should live. The future should be an edifice supported by living men. This

structure is connected to the present to the extent that I consider the present in

terms of something to be exceeded.285

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It is in this space, that moment caught between the present and the possibility of the

future that Fanon’s work emerges. In the context of Hegel’s thought, with its

preoccupation with the idea of progress, this temporal in-between refuses to fit into

Hegel’s system, its unifying illusions, and its romantic nostalgia for the slave as hero. It

is a presence that has been temporally relocated, drawn into a politics for which it is

always already too late. As such Hegel becomes a strategic moment, rather than a rigid

base upon which to declare the truth of being. Despite the claim that decolonisation has

abolished the dialectic of domination, Fanon is thus condemned to speak as if that

dialectic is still in place. As far as Fanon is concerned, Black consciousness desperately

needs to be set free from its white destination. Hegel thus provides a strategic position

from which to speak, but it is a position that demands to be erased in the moment that it

is effected. Hegel is thus asserted at that moment that he is crossed out. What this

means is that in rejecting Hegel Fanon actually embraces that contradictory moment

concerning the sublime slave without assuming an ethical essence. There is no yielding

to the labour of reason here, only Nietzsche’s defiant mastery. His gesture toward the

possibility of a future free from structures of dependence occupies a critical space that

speaks as a slave, but also attempts to cross out that speaking position. This is what is

unique about political strategies that seek to overthrow oppression. It is a critical

position that is legitimated through the experience of oppression. Yet it is a critical

position with a politics that seeks to abolish that moment of empowerment. Fanon can

thus never speak with the subversive assurance that occupies the ethical sublimity of

Kojève. And he also remains ambivalent about the negritude of Senghor and Cesaire

for precisely the same reasons.286

Fanon’s gesture pushes the Hegelian slave beyond the limits marked by that

thought. Caught strategically in-between a past hope and a future vision, Fanon’s is a

gesture that ultimately posits Hegel against Hegel. The violent relocation of Hegel

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effectively sets the Phenomenology to work against The Philosophy of History. Africa’s

exclusion from world history, and the hope that slavery opens up, when juxtaposed to

Hegel’s conviction concerning the power of the slave in his theorisation of the master

and slave relationship reveals a contradiction. Hegel in celebrating the slave of the

Phenomenology, in a sense, interrupts the excluded slave of the Philosophy of History,

and renders the latter slave a power that Hegel’s racism refused to afford to the African.

According to the logic of the Phenomenology it would be possible to construct a rival

history that moves from Africa to Europe, rather than from Asia to Europe, as Hegel’s

‘world history’ would have it. The self in order to overcome the unknown darkness

within, to subordinate that individual bodily desire to the universal, must pass through

the condition of slavery. The African slave, in having been excluded from world history

thus occupies a disturbing place at the edges of Hegel’s thought. In having written the

African out of world history, the Phenomenology positions the slave as the most

legitimate location from which to engage in questions of culture. The figure of the slave

is thus at once both inside and outside Hegel’s system. Here lies the terms of Fanon’s

ambivalence concerning Hegel, and also, as the thesis demands, the discourse of the

postcolonial that seems to be condemned to be caught between the possibility of

constituting a politically legitimate speaking subject and the necessary disavowal of

such a constitution.

It is in terms of this ambivalence that the question of what is at stake in the

postcolonial sublime can be staged. I would contend that in such a staging the aesthetic

moment that underpins Hegel’s system is unleashed. From the hidden spaces that mark

Hegel’s system, there emerges a threatening ‘other’, that defines what is at stake in the

discourse of the postcolonial perfectly.

It would be possible to contend, therefore, that Hegel always had Hobbes in

mind when he celebrated the capacity of slavery to effect the progress of Spirit. A fear

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of death is the pre-requisite for the necessity of law and order in Hobbes.287 It seems

logical that the master’s abandonment of the fear of death is hardly a basis for

constructing an ordered state. And it is also in keeping with a conservative ideology,

which emphasises the development of the tried-and-true, the look-where-we-came-from

as a legitimating strategy for the modern state. But I would contend that in crossing out

Hegel, Fanon opens up the doubleness that haunts Hegel’s celebration/rejection of the

slave. For despite the seeming Hobbesian logic that animates the necessity of the slave

in the Phenomenology, that disturbing gesture toward the African in The Philosophy of

History remains at the edges of this celebration. Why celebrate one and not the other?

It seems, however, that this doubleness that I have suggested emerges in Fanon’s

ambivalence toward Hegel, can be found in the Phenomenology itself. For the slave

passes through two distinct phases that cannot be reduced to the order of the same. I

have suggested that Hegel’s basic problematic is animated by the desire to subordinate

the particular under the universal. This is effected through the gradual process of

overcoming individual desire, in the name of the universal. It is an ethical task that

seeks to make known what is hidden so that universal reason is able to dominate

selfhood, as the absolute. The interesting thing about the slave is that initially the slave

does the opposite, and refuses to allow the desire for life to be subordinated to the

universal, and yet it is the slave, despite Hegel’s system which rewards that

movement,288 who provides the spark that keeps the system moving. As such, the

system relies upon a double moment that exceeds the logic of the system. The slave’s

paradoxical reward reveals a thinking that is much more aesthetic in its enunciation than

Hegel’s system as a science demands. It is this aesthetic task, one in which hiddenness,

perhaps more accurately, the force of pure desire, the uncontained, that which precedes

and calls forth the necessity of system, reason’s opposite, is permitted to thrive. The

Phenomenology thus utilises what is hidden for its purposes. The hidden, the

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unreasonable force of bodily desire, becomes the sublime object upon which reason’s

ultimate authority is able to be staged.

It is Aristotle’s Poetics that provides a clue as to how it is possible to deal with

the problem of the slave’s doubleness. Aristotle draws the problem of recognition into a

discussion concerning the dramatic. As he proposes:

Recognition, as the name indicates, is a change from ignorance to knowledge,

producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad

fortune. The best form of recognition is coincident with a Reversal of Intention,

as in the Oedipus. … the recognition which is most intimately connected with the

plot and action is … the recognition of persons. This recognition, combined with

Reversal, will produce either pity or fear; and actions producing these effects are

those which, by our definition, Tragedy represents.289

What Aristotle reveals is that wherever recognition is in play, there is also a prior

hiddenness. In the dramatic of recognition the plot’s tensions emerge. It is upon

hiddenness that dramatic tension is built. Hiddenness creates suspense, and animates

the plot structure; it is that missing something, the scandal that remains to be disclosed

in the dramatic climax. Tragedy as such depends upon hiddenness, it promotes it,

rewards it, and seeks to carve out intricate structures around it. Hegel’s master and

slave relationship is played in terms of such a dramatic tension. The hiddenness of the

slave drives and animates the unfolding of the master and slave relationship, and it is via

a hiddenness that the slave ultimately defies the master’s desire for disclosure, and is

able to carve out the possibility for transforming the limits of being. As a moment in a

philosophical system the master and slave relationship thus seems to owe more to the

logic of aesthetics than to the logic of a systematic science.

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 The possibility of Hegel’s celebratory claims concerning the power of reason, is

established when this hiddenness is made known. It can be seen that Hegel makes

reason’s task greater, for in Kant the excesses of reason, even though seductive, are

always ‘visible’. Reason in Hegel makes known what was formerly unknown, or at

least leaves the unknown behind. Knowledge progresses from darkness to light, from

the what was hidden to what can now be made visible. All is yielded up to the self-

consciousness reign of reason. In Hegel the manifestation of this progress can be found

in reason’s capacity to systematise. In other words, rather than a chaotic desire beyond

understanding, the capacity to bring order to such a manifold establishes the possibility

of knowledge. To cite Hegel:

thought … becomes at home in abstractions and in progressing by means of

Notions free from the sensuous substrata, develops an unsuspected power of

assimilating in rational form all the various knowledges and sciences in their

complex variety, of grasping and retaining them in their essential character,

stripping them of their external features and in this way extracting from them the

logical element — or what is the same thing, filling the abstract basis of Logic

acquired by study with the substantial content of absolute truth and giving it the

value of a universal which no longer stands as a particular alongside other

particulars but includes them all within its grasp and is their essence, the

absolutely True.290

Reason’s authority is thus drawn up in terms of its capacity to unite disparate elements

under one system. Here again it is not reason’s fixity that is at issue. Rather it is

reason’s capacity to produce a unity from, what appears at first to be, a multiplicity

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(perhaps something like the discourses of multiculturalism). System(isation) is the

marker of reason’s power.

Now listen to the voice of the colonial as the multiplicity and the diversity of

empire is unified under what is essentially a self-conscious principle:

These nations and races, divided by space and civilisation, by religion, policy,

language, colour, with no common Church or Parliament or Army, are united by

the lines of allegiance which converge from every part to the throne. Not

otherwise could such an Empire be held together.291

Both Kant’s confidence and Hegel’s drama reveal that the sublime always

already emerges as an excessive object that demands the necessity of some kind of

clarity. In the case of Kant, reason establishes an experiential unity. In Hegel this

excess is contained via reason as system. But the problem of the slave of The

Philosophy of History remains to haunt this sense of accomplishment. I would suggest

that this is because there remains within Hegel’s system a necessity, namely a figure of

hiddenness, that despite reason’s exploits must somehow remain consigned to the dark

spaces beyond reason’s pale. The figure of the African in The Philosophy of History

signals this only too well.

Fanon’s engagement with Hegel foregrounds Idealism’s racial character, and

shows that despite the condition of slavery (as it is celebrated in the Phenomenology)

black Africa has been banished to a space of privation, exclusion, excess, that is as

much a signifier of reason’s exploits — what reason is not — as the increasing visibility

of the celebration of the slave in the Phenomenology. Hegel’s celebratory discourse

produces two kinds of slave. On the one hand, those unwilling to overcome sublime

fears, and on the other, those who embrace such fears and the inward journey to the

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absolute that they promote. How might these slave selves be distinguished? Fanon

makes this clear when he states:

In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of

his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. It is a

third-person consciousness. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain

uncertainty. I know that if I want to smoke, I shall have to reach out my right arm

and take the pack of cigarettes lying at the other end of the table. The matches,

however, are in the drawer on the left, and I shall have to lean back slightly. And

all these movements are made not out of habit but out of implicit knowledge. A

slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal

world — such seems to be the schema.292

The black body, it would seem, gets in the way of a consciousness that is built upon

negating the body. The black body impairs such a negation, and thwarts the progress to

the absolute. The basis for the doubleness of the figure of the slave is a racial one.

Reason’s authority over the sensory is a white accomplishment. The black body

stands in its way. Self-consciousness arises when the body ceases to structure

consciousness, and instead consciousness structures feelings, knowledges, and acts.

With its crucial location in the structuring of self-consciousness, the Hegelian slave is

thus white. The black slave remains behind, ever the symbol of what reason has passed

beyond. Such a social space as far as reason is concerned is indispensable. The

master/slave dialectic sorts out reason’s terms. And as a space of sorting, polarises the

social world in racial terms. Whilst there is reason, the Phenomenology and The

Philosophy of History reveal that there, as Fanon puts it, “will always be a world — a

white world — between you and us”.293 What Fanon’s pointed engagement in Hegel

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effectively means, is that black Africans have been excluded even from the discourse of

the romantic slave. Cut out from this equation, ‘the wretched of the earth’, for Fanon,

are even more wretched than romantic slaves.

Thus far I have underscored Fanon’s ambivalence concerning the liberatory

potential of Hegel’s thought. From this two crucial issues emerge. Firstly, the category

‘slave’, whilst endowed with a romantic quality in Idealism, appears to be highly

problematic for the discourse of the postcolonial. Decolonisation effectively sets forth a

freedom that wipes out the possibility, for the formerly colonised, of speaking from the

space of the slave. In conservative thought such a space is reserved for its own

accomplishments, its own myths. As such decolonisation would emerge as less a

response to a growing resistance within, than a part of the processes of its own maturity.

Decolonisation in many respects remains Western history, it is part of the West’s

continuing accomplishment in the world. The ‘greater’ freedom of the postcolonial is a

freedom, on the part of the formerly colonised, arrived at by a kind of default.

Secondly, in its difficulty with the Kojèvean sublime, Fanon’s thought reveals that the

material condition of the black African ! the body in space and time ! in the context

of Hegel’s dynamic architectonic system is essentially invalid. Hegel’s is an undeniable

celebration of the supremacy of Europe.

As the closing sections of Black Skin, White Masks show, Fanon’s work can be

understood as a search for modes of thought and being that are able to inhabit, and

productively move beyond the gaps that emerge in the critical possibilities between

thinkers such as Hegel and Nietzsche. Neither seems to be able to articulate the

situation and the politics of the ‘fact of blackness’. I would contend, therefore, that

what Fanon offers is a way of dealing with the conservatism of Hegel’s thought. It is in

such a dealing that the postcolonial sublime can be staged.

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Conclusion: The Sublime Postcolonial Body

Idealism does not hold out great hope for oppressed Africa. In countering

Idealism’s racism, Fanon declares, “I am not the slave of the Slavery that dehumanized

my ancestors”.294 Inspired by Nietzsche’s ‘earthiness’, he thus turns to find a different

basis for a creative, cultural, and politically affirmative self. He demands that the black

body, that despised figure in Hegel’s architectonic system, become the site from which

an affirmative sense of community might begin again. As Dash rightly suggests,

“Fanon attempts to rewrite the body of colonised man, creating a new subject from the

dismemberment and castration inflicted by the coloniser’s destructive gaze. ... Fanon

equates a reanimated body with the liberated voice of the revolutionary intellectual”.295

It is not upon Hegel’s celebration of the romantic slave that this politics is built. Rather

we find a celebration of what Hegel’s system seeks to overcome. Immediately the

political resonances of this space begin to emerge. Perhaps Hegel underestimated what

he dismissed so easily.

What Black Skin, White Masks in its complex erasure of Hegel’s master and

slave effects, is the notion that it is upon the black body, in seizing that body that the

struggle against colonial oppression begins. Crucially, such a struggle cannot be

defined in terms of the Hegelian dialectic, as an opposing force, for as we have seen the

black struggle has no political legitimacy in this space. Instead such a struggle must be

defined in relation to the dialectic, its rejected location within the system. Any voice

that stirs in this space, of the unspeakable, the unpresentable as unpresentable, of

temporal oblivion, effectively means that Hegel’s system leaks. As Hegel sought to

shore up Kantian reason, to make its authority more robust than the slippage in Kant’s

architectonic system would allow, gaps, contradictions, and unaccountable spaces

appear. A politics of excess, of contamination begins to emerge; one which exposes the

fragility of the system, and exploits the borders that have been established to mark

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reason’s limits. On this border we can locate the work of Fanon. It is a space of

questioning, defiance, a space that attempts to push reason beyond the terms of its

limits. In many respects it is to be the object of the sublime, wrested from its inscription

in reason’s processes. To continually open up what reason’s legislation and systematics

exclude is to open up the sublime, to seize what is despised as the despised and to make

it a politically productive site.

From the space of what I have called this temporal oblivion the cause of

resistance movements such as ‘negritude’ have been staged. Whilst Fanon concedes

that such a politics is necessary to a certain degree — recapturing the past in order to

legitimate a politics of the present and the future — ultimately he argues that it merely

replicates the myths of authenticity that have marked the violent effects of Western

Reason. Fanon instead proposes that the historical self that negritude seeks ought to be

taken as a given. In other words, that something that negritude seeks is always already

here; it is the history of black struggle. As Fanon asserts:

It is not enough to try to get back to the people in that past out of which they have

already emerged; rather we must join them in that fluctuating movement which

they are just giving a shape to, and which, as soon as it is started, will be the

signal for every-thing to be called in question. Let there be no mistake about it; it

is to this zone of occult instability where the people dwell that we must come.296

In Fanon’s valorisation of Nietzsche we can thus hear possibility. The dredging

up of a past merely replays the structures of European thought, and fails to engage in the

productive possibilities that mark the present. This ‘zone of occult instability’, the zone

banished by Hegel, with its rhythms, fluctuations, sensuality, the messy world of the

everyday, of the body, is the site of such possibility. Fanon calls for a life founded upon

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an openness to the diversity and richness of the earth’s vast fluxes, and a literature

forged in and through material existence, rather than the transcendence of a reason built

upon extinguishing such an existence. Such a literature, Fanon writes:

is a harsh style, full of images, for the image is the drawbridge which allows

unconscious energies to be scattered on the surrounding meadows. It is a vigorous

style, alive with rhythms, struck through and through with bursting life. ... The

contact of the people with the new movement gives rise to a new rhythm of life

and to forgotten muscular tensions, and develops the imagination.297

As an integral component in establishing the limits of Enlightenment reason, the

sublime in the hands of Fanon takes on a different role. It could be said that Fanon

opens up the unpresentable unpresentable, the Kantian sublime reframed in a much

more extreme form. Idealism’s romantic and confident ‘play’ upon the limits of reason

opens up an unpresentable in the form of nature, the divine, and the poetic hero who

manages to express what has otherwise been inexpressible. In such formulations, the

discourse of the sublime has been bestowed with a nobility befitting those who pretend

to the status of the most supreme expression of humanity. It is the domain of Genius, of

the Cultured, Educated, Civilised European man. But into the equation there bursts the

debased and the lowly, those that had effectively been excluded from history, denied

even the status of the slave. There lies within the discourse of the sublime, a darker and

much more threatening side, as far as reason is concerned. The figure of the other as

threat that has been central in conservative racial politics.

Within and against Hegelian self-consciousness and its preoccupation with the

systematic, Fanon’s black body emerges as a creative force that opens up the possibility

of questioning the authority of reasonable systems. New modes of affirmative thinking

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and being must be found, rather than the legislation and negations of Idealism’s reason.

To question the capacity of Kant and Hegel is to contaminate reason with what it must

constantly face but is unable to countenance, the possibility of its demise. It is to open

up a moment of hesitation (Todorov’s fantastic) in which the authority of the system is

brought into question. Such hesitation opens up the possibility of altering the

destination of Reason. As Moraru, who I discussed in chapter one, contends, the

postcolonial also needs to be understood in terms of its capacity to ‘Orientalise Europe’.

Fanon finds in the despised black body, the possibility of altering reason’s destination,

to produce within what it is not.

In Fanon’s attacks upon colonialism, we find a sense of selfhood that, as a

consequence of colonial violence, defies formulation, neat systemisation. Like the

image of the exiled self in Bennett’s mirror (from chapter two of the thesis), caught in-

between the golden order of Kant and the violent chaos of dispossession, Fanon’s work,

since it finds the certainties of Idealism’s neat dialectics inadequate, emerges as

scandalous. In the difficult turns and contradictory juxtapositions we find a gesture

toward a problematic which defies the unity of consciousness that marked Hegel, the

sublime elevation of reason over the body. Not content to say this is the colonial

subject, Fanon exceeds the possibility of the question. In this refusal, the defiance of

the systematic, the sublime as an excess from below, rather than above, disrupts the

confidence of reason, and changes the terms of its smooth ordering. In the course of

what I have called the fort/da of reason, the figure of Fanon’s black man cannot be

brought into the light of reason. His consciousness belongs to an order that cannot be

explained in terms of the discourse of the slave. Yet like the Hegelian slave such a

consciousness is creative. Fanon’s self is a something-else-besides, a creative,

imaginative being that renders Hegel’s system incomplete. As George Lamming, in his

probing The Pleasures of Exile, in dealing with Hegel’s world history puts it, “what

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disqualifies African man from Hegel’s World History is his apparent incapacity to

evolve with the logic of language which is the only aid man has in capturing the Idea.

African Man, for Hegel, has no part in the common pursuit of the Universal”. It is

interesting that Lamming combats such a notion with the aesthetic. Hegel’s

formulation, in the context of African poetry, effectively means the absurd notion “that

we shall have to treat the Senegalese poet, Leopold Senghor as an absolute

phenomenon, a mysterious barbarian”.298 The universality of Hegel’s system in the face

of the creative moment that exceeds its terms, emerges as an absurdity.

For the thesis, what Fanon’s engagement in Hegel opens up is a possibility for

articulating what a postcolonial sublime might be. In being faced with the task of

disrupting the violent effects of reason, Fanon’s postcoloniality seizes that which is

despised, the space of the sublime, that indispensable moment in reason’s fort/da, and

utilises it for ‘other’ purposes: namely opening up the question of being as affirmative

becoming, as actional rather than reactional. Such a critical strategy owes more to the

logic of contamination than pure opposition. Rather than deny the power of

conservatism outright, Fanon occupies spaces that have been marked for conservative

purposes in order to alter the destination of such purposes.

Having charted the notion that the sublime is an indispensable moment in the

discourse of reason, my task for the remainder of the thesis will be to continue outlining

what is at stake in a postcolonial politics that seizes the space of the sublime for its own

purposes. In order to continue opening up such a critical space, I will turn firstly to the

work of Lyotard, as a counterpoint to my discussion on the postcolonial sublime.

Lyotard’s refusal to engage in the Hegelian sublime makes his critical strategies

politically difficult for the discourse of the postcolonial. I will then turn to the work of

Bhabha for a more cogent understanding of what is at stake in the postcolonial sublime.

I am interested in Bhabha’s opening up of spaces of contamination, as opposed to the

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Kantian purity of Lyotard. It seems to me that a politics of contamination marks our

time, rather than the logic of differend. As I suggested in chapter one in my brief

engagement in Bennedict Anderson’s lament concerning what he calls “exodus”, this is

a time marked by movement, change, and border crossings. This means that the

untenability of pure cultural sites remains a cancer that continues to threaten the pundits

of purity, whose increasingly vehement reactionary politics, in many quarters, signals

the great weight that ought to be afforded to postcolonial contaminations. Finally, I will

turn to Rushdie in order to find a basis for a postcolonial politics that is rooted in what I

have called the postcolonial sublime.

Notes

214
Arthur Schopenhauer, Manuscript Remains in Four Volumes, ed. Arthur Hübscher,
trans. E. J. F. Payne (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1988), vol. 1, 480, 540.
215
Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 205. See also
Robert Pippin’s useful account of Hegel’s indebtedness to Kant, in Hegel’s Idealism:
The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989), 16-41.
216
G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: George Allen &
Unwin, 1969), 47, 51.
217
Hegel, Science of Logic, 51. See also Hegel’s The Encyclopaedia Logic, trans. T. F.
Geraets, W. A. Suchting, H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company,
1991). He writes: “it must be said that in its true and comprehensive significance the
universal is a thought that took millennia to enter into men’s consciousness; and it only
achieved its full recognition through Christianity. The Greeks, although otherwise so
highly cultivated, did not know God, or even man, in their true universality” (240).
218
Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, 286, 288.
219
G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1977), 54.
220
Hegel, Science of Logic, 56.
221
Friedrich von Schlegel, The Philosophy of Life and the Philosophy of Language in a
Course of Lectures, trans. A. J. W. Morrison, (1847, London: G. Bell & Sons, 1913),
389.
222
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 54.

168
223
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 142.
224
Hegel, Science of Logic, 51.
225
Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, 80.
226
Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience, trans. Harper & Row Publishers
(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1970), 33. See also Heidegger’s, Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1988). Heidegger writes, “with self-consciousness truth is generally at
home, on its own ground and soil” (130).
227
Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 136, 130.
228
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 105.
229
Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr.,
ed. Allan Bloom (New York: Cornell University Press, 1980), 38.
230
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 106.
231
Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 39.
232
Homi Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition”, in
Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and
Laura Chrisman (Hemel Hempstead, England: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993) 114.
233
Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon”, 113.
234
Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon”, 115.
235
Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon”, 115, 120.
236
Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon”, 120.
237
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin
Milligan, ed. Dirk J. Struik (New York: Lawrence and Wishart, 1964), 110.
238
Renate Zahar, Frantz Fanon: Colonialism and Alienation (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1974), 92.
239
Michael Kelly, Hegel in France (Birmingham: Birmingham Modern Languages
Publications, 1992), 37.
240
According to Michael Kelly’s substantially complete inventory of publications
relating to Hegel published in French, from 1900-1944 there were 101 publications on
Hegel. From 1945-1955 there were 129. See Kelly, Hegel in France, 85-98.

169
241
See for instance Annie Cohen-Solal’s Sartre: A Life (London: Heinemann, 1988),
431-437, which details Fanon’s deep friendship with thinkers such as John-Paul Sartre
and Simone de Beaviour.
242
Shadia Drury, The Roots of Postmodern Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1994).
243
Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 22.
244
Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 21, 20.
245
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York:
Grove Press, 1967), 8.
246
Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1970), 18.
247
See also Frantz Fanon, “Racism and Culture”, in Toward the African Revolution:
Political Essays, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 29-44.
Fanon contends, “The setting up of the colonial system does not of itself bring about the
death of native culture. Historic observation reveals, on the contrary, that the aim
sought is rather a continued agony than a total disappearance of the pre-existing culture.
This culture, once living and open to the future, becomes closed, fixed in the colonial
status, caught in the yoke of oppression. Both present and mummified, it testifies
against its members. It defines them in fact without appeal. The cultural
mummification leads to a mummification of individual thinking” (34).
248
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (London:
Penguin, 1967), 28, 33.
249
I would argue that Kojève’s reading of Hegel is dubious. His bracketing of the slave
means that he fails to take Hegel’s conservatism into account. This bracketing strategy
can be seen in Lyotard’s reading of the Kantian sublime. An issue I will take up in
chapter four.
250
G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1975), vol. 1, 387.
251
Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1996),118.
252
Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans.
Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974),
170.
253
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 114.
254
Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 46.
255
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 117, 118.

170
256
G. W. F. Hegel, The Berlin Phenomenology, trans., ed., M. J. Petry (Dordrecht,
Holland: D. Reidel Publishing, 1981), 87.
257
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 9, 8, 10.
258
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 13.
259
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 111.
260
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 217.
261
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 219.
262
Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991
(London: Abacus, 1995), 216.
263
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 220.
264
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 221.
265
Julie Dowling, Julie Clampett (Perth: Art Gallery of Western Australia, 1995).
266
In the context of Hegel’s celebration of the great attainments of Spirit, the abolition
of slavery occupies a central place. In The Encyclopaedia Logic in a section dealing
with the supremacy of modern Europe over the ancients, he writes, “the genuine reason
why there are no longer any slaves in Christian Europe is to be sought in nothing but the
principle of Christianity itself” (240).
267
“Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aborigines”, in The Concept of
Empire: Burke to Attlee 1774-1947, ed. George Bennett (London: Adam & Charles
Black, 1962), 103.
268
G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover
Publications, 1956), 96, 98, 99.
269
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, n220-221.
270
Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 99, 93.
271
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 222. Fanon has Mounier’s L’Éveil De L’Afrique
Noire (1947) in mind.
272
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Vocation of Man, The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb
Fichte, vol. 1-2, trans. William Smith (London: Trübner, 1889). He writes, “I am I,
myself. … What I am, I know because I am it; and that whereof I know immediately
that I am it, that I am because I immediately know it. There is here no need of any tie
between subject and object; my own nature is this tie. I am subject and object: - and
this subject-objectivity, this return of knowledge upon itself, is what I mean by the term
‘I’” (381-382).
273
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 222.

171
274
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future”,
trans. Walter Kaufman, Basic Writings of Nietzsche (New York: The Modern Library,
1968), 394.
275
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human all too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans R. J.
Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 37.
276
Nietzsche “Beyond Good and Evil”, 395.
277
Nietzsche, Human all too Human, 36-37.
278
Nietzsche “Beyond Good and Evil”, 395.
279
Nietzsche “Beyond Good and Evil”, 397.
280
On this point I follow Gilles Delueze, and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor
Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
They assert, “the first characteristic of minor literature … is that in it language is
affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization … Prague German is a
deterritorialized language… (this can be compared in another context to what blacks in
America today are able to do with the English Language). The second characteristic of
minor literatures is that everything in them is political. … its cramped space forces each
individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. … The third characteristic of
minor literature is that in it everything takes on a collective value … there are no
possibilities for an individuated enunciation that would belong to this or that “master”
and that could be separated from a collective enunciation (16- 17).
281
See Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Falsity in their Ultramoral Sense”, in The
Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, vol. 2, ed. Oscar Levy (London: Allen and
Unwin, 1924), 173-191.
282
Nietzsche “Beyond Good and Evil”, 394.
283
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale
(New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 550.
284
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 546.
285
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 12-13.
286
See Léopold Senghor (“Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century”, in The
Africa Reader: Independent Africa, ed. Wilfred Cartey and Martin Kilson (New York:
Vintage Books, 1970), 170-192), who draws Bergson (a thinker embroiled in the
problematics of Idealism), into the foundation of a negritude, that “humanism of the
twentieth century”, as he calls it. This critical move seeks to open up the possibility,
Senghor writes, of “rooting oneself in oneself, and self-confirmation: confirmation of
one’s being” (180, 179).
287
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Penguin, 1985), 102.

172
288
Interestingly Hegel celebrates the French revolution in terms that amount to a
celebration of the progressive possibilities of mastery. In a Letter to Zellman (1807),
Hegel writes: “Thanks to the bath of her Revolution, the French Nation has freed herself
of many institutions which the human spirit had outgrown like the shoes of a child.
These institutions accordingly once oppressed her, and now they continue to oppress
other nations as so many fetters devoid of spirit. What is even more, however, is that
the individual as well has shed the fear of death … along with the life of habit — which,
with the change of scenery, is no longer self-supporting. This is what gives this Nation
the great power she displays against others. She weighs down upon the impassiveness
and dullness of these other nations, which, finally forced to give up their indolence in
order to step into actuality, will perhaps … surpass their teachers” (“Hegel to Zellman”,
Hegel: The Letters, trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984), 123.
289
Aristotle, The Poetics of Aristotle, trans. S. H. Butcher (London: Macmillan and Co.,
1902), 41.
290
Hegel, Science of Logic, 59.
291
Bernard Holland, “The Crown and the Empire”, in The Empire and the Century
(London: John Murray, 1905), 34.
292
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 110-111.
293
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 122.
294
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 230.
295
Michael Dash, “In Search of the Lost Body: Redefining the Subject in Caribbean
Literature”, Kunapipi, vol. 11, no. 1 (1989), 24.
296
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 182-183.
297
Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 177, 194.
298
George Lamming, The Pleasures of Exile (London: Michael Joseph, 1960), 32.

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 Chapter Four

Interrogating the Lyotardian Sublime

Having located Fanon’s critical position in relation to Idealism, I would wish to

take up the critical oscillation that has produced the terrain of this thesis. As I suggested

from the outset, this charting of the postcolonial sublime has been engendered by the

political excesses of both Lyotard’s theory of differend and Bhabha’s notion of

hybridity. Each questions the terms in which universalist systems are drawn up. Each

contributes a particular understanding of what is at stake in politics in the late Twentieth

Century. In terms of the discourse of the postcolonial, however, important distinctions

between these bodies of thought demand to drawn up. I would wish to contend that the

postcolonial sublime departs from the terms of the postmodern sublime, as theorised by

Lyotard. As I argued in the previous chapter, Fanon’s seizure of the black body, to

disrupt Hegelian systemisation, opens up a materiality that seems to be absent in the

disruptions of the postmodern sublime. With the material excess of Fanon’s politics in

mind, this chapter interrogates Lyotard’s postmodernism, specifically postmodernism’s

philosophical basis as charted in Le Differend, and outlines the basis for championing

the postcoloniality of Fanon, Bhabha, and Rushdie over the Lyotard of the differend.

No contemporary philosopher has celebrated the political and aesthetic

possibilities that Kant opens up like Lyotard. Indeed his work in the late seventies to

the mid eighties seems to directly correspond to Kant’s critical concerns in the three

Critiques. Lyotard’s much cited La Condition Postmoderne: Rapport sur le Savoir,

which deals with questions of epistemology, can be read as a response to Critique of

Pure Reason. His Au Juste: Conversations considers the question of postmodern

justice, and can be contrasted to Critique of Practical Reason. And Le Differend takes

up the question of political judgement, and directly utilises the Critique of Judgement.
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In the wake of recent terrors such as Nazism and the former Soviet Union,299 and the

contemporary ‘postmodern condition’,300 Lyotard draws upon Kant to open up the

possibility of rethinking questions concerning art, politics, and justice. As I suggested

in chapter one, Lyotard’s celebration of the genuine sentiment of the sublime, novatio,

in which the unpresentable form continually opens up new possibilities for thinking and

being, is staged in opposition to the sublime’s dark side, nostalgia, in which the

unpresentable becomes an absent content.301 It is significant that according to Lyotard

Kant’s majestic architectonic system is ultimately not guilty of nostalgia.302 Since I

have sought to underscore the ‘colonial qualities’ of Kant’s work, specifically his

utilisation of the sublime to establish the necessity of reason’s authority, Lyotard’s

claim demands to be investigated.

For Lyotard the radical incommensurability of the faculties in Kant means that

ethics can never be reduced to the aesthetic order. The sublime, which appears as the

abyss between the faculties, attests to the impossibility of such a reduction. Lyotard’s

(controversial) reading of Kant thus brackets the sublime, as an aesthetic moment, in

order to celebrate what is perceived as Kant’s failure to reconcile freedom and

necessity, as the Critique of Judgement intends. According to Lyotard, the ‘analytic of

the sublime’ as an appendix cannot be taken as an integral component in the system.

“The ‘mere appendage’ to the critical elaboration of the aesthetic”, Lyotard tells us, “by

natural finality ... takes a menacing turn. It indicates that another aesthetic can be not

only expounded but ‘deduced’ according to the rules of the critique”.303 Given its

menacing location in Kant’s architectonic system, this deduction of the sublime

becomes, for Lyotard, the most apt analogy for (re)opening questions concerning art,

justice, and politics.304 In what emerges as Kant’s cognisant failure, the continual

opening up of this failure as novatio in art, and differend in politics, radically disrupts

the nostalgic core of totalising discourse.

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 Given Lyotard’s affinity to Kant, my aim in this chapter will be to interrogate

the politics that Lyotard sets forth. I would wish to argue that his critical Kantianism,

whilst in many respects a useful account of injustice, fails to characterise what is at

stake in the discourse of the postcolonial. This is not to say that Lyotard is of little

critical value, as far as postcoloniality goes,305 it is to say, as I have maintained in

chapter one, that the discourse of the postcolonial with its emphasis upon excess,

contamination, negotiation, and leakage suggests that Lyotard’s bracketing of the

Kantian sublime is dubious. I think that ultimately it is necessary to establish a

distinction between the critical concerns of the discourse of the postcolonial and the

critical concerns of a postmodern thinker such as Lyotard. It seems to me that Hegel’s

critical distance from Kant, as exploited by Fanon, provides a more apt basis for

thinking through what is stake in a postcolonial sublime. I will begin with Lyotard’s

staging of Kant’s critical thought.

Lyotard and Kant

The French Revolution, that vast exercise in purification and Terror, transfixed,

perhaps like no other eighteenth-century event, the people of Western Europe. Incisive

in its impact upon art, politics, and morality, the revolution was no where more

dramatically felt than in the realms of philosophy and literature. The radical idealist

Fichte, for instance, celebrated the freeing of the self “from external shackles”. The

revolution engaged Fichte “in an inner struggle”, and became an exemplary moment in

the staging of a philosophical system which frees the self from “the fetters of things in

themselves”.306 Hegel too, whilst distancing himself from what he considered the

abstract nature of the Idea of the revolution,307 described it as a “glorious mental dawn”

that was rightly celebrated by “all thinking beings”. The revolution was an historical

moment in which “a lofty character stirred”, with such an “enthusiasm” of the spirit that

it “thrilled through the world”.308 Kant, in contrast, rather than champion the events of

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the revolution itself, sought to underscore the gap between the event and its spectators

feelings of enthusiasm. “This event”, he writes, “consists neither in the momentous

deeds or crimes committed by men … It is simply the mode of thinking of the

spectators … this mode of thinking demonstrates a character of the human race at large

and all at once; owing to its disinterestedness, a moral character of humanity”.309

It is significant that these judgements concerning the revolution’s social,

political, and historical effects draw upon a language that sought to carve out a space for

the autonomous self to be realised in the social world. As I have suggested throughout,

the Idealist self coincides with European expansionism. Terms such as “inner struggle”,

“enthusiasm”, and “disinterestedness”, belong to that elite band of German Idealists,

who believed that the world is made meaningful through, and only through, the subtle

movements of conscious thought. As I argued in chapter two, such thought can be

understood as a crucial contribution to the assumption of European superiority on the

global stage. Celebrated both directly and indirectly, the revolution symbolised the

triumph of imaginative Reason in human affairs.

Celebrated directly, the revolution simply erased the past and presented a clean

slate for humanity to rewrite itself (Fichte). It also generated such an enthusiasm of

Spirit that it signalled nothing less than the ultimate supremacy of the reasonable self

(Hegel). But unlike Fichte and Hegel, Kant judged the revolution in terms of the

incommensurability of the faculties, and the play of the faculty of judgement in its

aesthetic mode. A “disinterestedness”, as he puts it, reveals that the revolution merely

functions as a ‘sign of history’, in the sense that it marks an aesthetic ‘feeling’, a

‘feeling’ of progress rather than determinate empirical evidence of the same. Free from

the object, the idea of historical progress as an aesthetic feeling reveals the (dangerous)

indeterminacy that lies at the core of the faculty of judgement. Kant declares:

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 in the family of the supreme cognitive faculties there is a middle term between the

understanding and the reason. This is the judgement, of which we have cause for

supposing according to analogy that it may contain in itself, if not a special

legislation, yet a special principle of its own to be sought according to laws,

though merely subjective a priori.310

In seizing Kant’s aesthetic language, Lyotard challenges the cultural location of

this language in this thesis. Not content to separate the aesthetic from knowledge and

morality, or to explain knowledge and morality via the aesthetic as analogy, I have

argued that the aesthetic is contaminated by the cultural as the cultural is contaminated

by the aesthetic. What this means in the context of this attempt to distinguish the

postcolonial from the postmodern, is that for the postcolonial the aesthetic remains less

‘pure’ than Lyotard would have it. Lyotard argues that the faculty of judgement, as it is

dramatically called upon by Kant to force “‘passages’ between the faculties”, reveals at

the same time, however, “a major flaw … in the area of its ability to know an object

that would be proper to it”. The remarkable thing about the faculty of judgement is that

“it has no determined object”,311 and is thus forced to find its own principle without

reference to an ‘outside’. The emphasis upon the indeterminate nature of judgement

here inspires Lyotard to link the feelings of Kant’s enthusiastic spectators to the feelings

that are attended to by the sublime. Kant refused to champion the horrifying events of

the revolution itself, yet at the same time found in the Idea of the revolution — freedom

— a great joy. I will take issue with the place of the French revolution in postmodern

thought through the work of Bhabha in the following chapter. I draw attention to Kant’s

celebration of the revolution at this point in order to reveal the philosophical basis for

Lyotard’s celebration of indeterminacy. In teasing out Lyotard’s Kantian

underpinnings, I would wish to question this radical indeterminacy.

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 In the face of the revolution’s tumultuous events, the spectators felt both pain

and pleasure. I have charted what I consider to be the conservative basis for Kant’s

work upon the sublime in chapter two. The pain and the pleasure of the sublime

moment, as Kant writes, “generates a subjective purposiveness” in which the ideas of

reason, and with it the “superiority” and moral worth of humanity in the face of terror,

rise up and are able to reign supreme.312 But Lyotard puts the sublime to a different use.

He argues that the sublime moment, which establishes the supremacy of the Ideas over

the terrifying in nature, signals that at the core of the revolution’s celebrated freedom

there is indeterminate judgement. This indeterminacy suggests that politics can be

understood in terms of aesthetic principles, rather than the supposed certainties of

theoretical and practical reason. What becomes crucial is that the Ideas as regulating

principles, in order to be realised, must utilise the faculty of judgement, which is forced

to link the structures that mark thought. Such a linkage, since the faculty of judgement

does not function in terms which correspond to objects but must search for the rules of

its own operation, is forced to function by way of analogy, to make links between the

various faculties ‘as if’ they were the same.313 This means that the idea of freedom

itself can be characterised not just in terms of the regulatory effects that it attends to

upon the faculty of judgement, but also, crucially, the idea means that ultimately

freedom as an empirical state never actually arrives, since ideas call forth the necessity

for the constant search for the rules of its own regulating principle. As such judgement

itself, in its various forms — aesthetic, political — is always already marked by an

indeterminacy, such that judgement, in what ever form, is forced to stage itself in terms

of the search for rules, rather than the operation of a determinate concept. The

indeterminate nature of judgement, however, rather than being cause for lament,

becomes the philosophical ground for questioning conventional political and artistic

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forms, and provides the basis for an affirmative and practical understanding of

(in)justice.

With the indeterminacy that lies at the core of Lyotard’s call for new modes of

art and politics in mind, I would wish to ask: how does such a reformulation of art and

politics figure in the discourse of the postcolonial? In the context of this thesis, this

question can be formulated thus: if the discourse of the postcolonial takes as its object

the complex relationship of the former colonisers and formerly colonised world, and

seeks to evoke slippages and excesses, points of uncertainty that expose and disrupt

Western hegemony (as I suggested in chapter one in championing Moraru as opposed to

Rattansi), is Lyotardian indeterminacy an apt description of what is at stake in this

process? In order to deal with this question, it will be necessary to outline Lyotard’s

aesthetic and political theories. I will turn initially to his work on the event and the

avant-garde, and then make my way to The Differend. My strategy will be to seize,

what David Carroll insightfully calls, “the minimal element, or ‘zero degree’” of

Lyotard’s “critical discourse”.314 It seems to me that the possibilities that Lyotard’s

aesthetic and political theories open up are built upon a single moment within

representation: the avant-garde as event, the phrase as event. I would wish to question

the critical capacity of the avant-garde and the phrase events.

Art: The Avant-Garde as Sublime Event

The nature, or the condition, of the event emerges as a crucial moment in

Lyotard’s engagement in what is at stake in avant-garde art. Indeed in Lyotard’s oeuvre

generally, which can be situated biographically in terms of a widespread disillusionment

with the totalising theories of Marx, and perhaps to a lesser extent Freud,315 much is

demanded of the temporal singularity of the event, and the critical possibilities that this

temporal caesura opens up. Lyotard’s analysis of the sublime and the avant-garde, as it

is set forth in the collection of essays The Inhuman, links the event to the sublime, and

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emerges in his argument as the “time” that is “a stranger to consciousness and cannot be

constituted by it. … it is what dismantles consciousness, what consciousness cannot

formulate”. Linked to the analytic of the sublime this marks “an irreversible deviation

in the destination of art, a deviation affecting all the valencies of the artistic

condition”,316 and makes an important break with traditional philosophical programs.

The upshot of this argument is two fold. On the one hand it presents the notion that the

sublime should be thought through as a temporal problem, as an event — an ‘it happens’

— that introduces to art and philosophy an indeterminacy that radically disrupts

conventional notions concerning representation, politics and justice. On the other hand,

the temporal nature of the event anxiously prevents the reign of the sublime imagination

in the political sphere, the terror of nostalgia.

In the context of this thesis, what this insistence upon the event amounts to is a

basis for disrupting totalising accounts of history, such as that of Hegel. The object of

Lyotard’s critical work, like the discourse of the postcolonial, is essentially the

reasonable grounds for totalising history. The issue that I would wish to take with

Lyotard’s work, thus concerns the terms of such a critique. Does this evoking of the

event lead to the affirmative ruptures that I have suggested mark the discourse of the

postcolonial? It will be necessary to outline Lyotard’s work on art, in order to gain

further insight into the nature of the event. Then I will make my way to the working out

of the event in the political sphere.

Drawing on Cézanne, Lyotard argues that the avant-garde artist is driven by a

fundamental question: ‘what is a painting?’317 What becomes apparent in this

undertaking is the notion that an avant-gardist work is less a representational object than

an event that occurs in a temporal instant, a now, which includes the act of the gaze and

the aesthetic ‘feeling’ that that temporal instant effects. What is at issue is that the

painting as an “occurrence or event” is not expressible in the conventional sense in

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which it stands in for something other than itself, in the cognitive realm. The actual

paint on the canvas, the formal (dis)organisation of pigment, has a life of its own that

directly correlates to the sensations, feelings of pleasure or displeasure, that precede

thought. The avant-garde thus evokes a moment that occupies a non-conceptual, non-

communicative temporal space.

This remarkable claim finds its basis in Lyotard’s detailed engagement in Kant’s

analytic of aesthetic judgement, which he reads not in terms of the necessary ‘bridge’

between theoretical and practical reason, the ‘method’ of the critique, but in terms of the

critique’s “manner”, in order to reveal that an aesthetic moment accompanies every act

of thinking. Lyotard, in response to Kant’s analogy between “the way we linger … on

an attractive object” and the manner in which thought lingers before itself, writes:

before an inquiry into the a priori conditions of judgements can be made, critical

thought must be in a reflective state … Thought must “linger”, must suspend its

adherence to what it thinks it knows. It must remain open to what will orientate

its critical examination: a feeling.318

As Kant would have it, a priori thinking must always linger in that moment in which

thought encounters the sensations (colour etc.) that necessarily accompany it. This

means that Reason cannot function without the aesthetic. But it remains to be seen

whether or not, in light of the notion that the aesthetic in Kant is a necessary moment in

the construction of reason’s authority, this unleashing of the sublime in this “manner” is

as disruptive as Lyotard claims.

It is in terms of this unleashing of the aesthetic from the shackles of Kant’s

architectonic system that we can begin to deal with the critical possibilities of avant-

gardist art. The avant-garde foregrounds the sensation that is otherwise hidden,

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forgotten, or negated in representational art forms. Crucially it is the instant in which

sensation occurs, and nothing more that is at issue here. The aesthetic feeling that is

evoked by avant-gardist painting reveals “that (something) happens” as an inexpressible

event, which does “not reside in an over there, in another word, or another time”. As

Lyotard understands it, the task of the avant-garde is, therefore, to guard “the

occurrence ‘before’ any defence, any illustration, and any commentary, guarding before

being on one’s guard, before ‘looking’ ... under the aegis of now”.319

Against the Hegelian celebration of art as the expression of Ideas, an art of the

avant-garde testifies to the possibility of the event. The notion of art as event leads

Lyotard’s aesthetic considerations to the Kantian and the Burkean senses of the sublime.

Art as a form of ‘non-conceptual communication’,320 working in terms of a resistance to

expression in the conventional sense — “the failure of expression” — produces the

feeling of pain and pleasure that is characterised by the pathos of the sublime. Lyotard

writes:

Here then is an account of the sublime feeling: a very big, very powerful object

threatens to deprive the soul of any ‘it happens’, strikes it with ‘astonishment’ …

The soul is thus dumb, immobilized, as good as dead. Art, by distancing this

menace, procures a pleasure of relief, of delight. Thanks to art, the soul is

returned to the agitated zone between life and death, and this agitation is its health

and its life.321

The staging of the avant-garde in the agitated zone — the passage of life that is always

already threatened by death — sets forth crucial possibilities for art and theory. There is

a sense in which closure, in whatever form, is analogous to death, or to the condition of

consciousness in which ‘nothing further happens’, as Lyotard puts it. Life thus equates

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to a resistance to closure, and can be characterised as the constant search for rules, the

desire for the possibility of an infinite stream of the ‘something happens’. Such an

understanding of life can be understood contra Hegel, as the continual opening up of

possibility, rather than a systemisation that divides and subsumes all before it. The

agitated zone is a space that is characterised by that split in the self that Freud alluded to

when anal eroticism is threatened by the smell of shit, such that satisfaction is forced

“away from its sexual aim towards sublimations and displacements of libido”.322 The

subject in this Freudian moment is caught between an unlimited pleasure that does not

recognise the boundaries of being, Eros, and the knowledge of being in decay, and the

inevitability of death, Thanatos. The aesthetic of the sublime, because it implicates

being in decay, mortality, yet also testifies to the possibility of resistance to closure,

thus produces the double effect of pain and pleasure: the inevitable nothing is happening

has not happened yet.

The avant-gardist testifies that here and “now there is this painting, rather than

nothing”.323 The ‘feeling’ that constitutes this instant emerges as a pure event, divorced

from thinking that reveals a knowledge of objects. The avant-garde lays bare the

conditions upon which consciousness is constructed. Thought in this instant runs into

itself, becomes conscious of its conceptual failure, and is forced to experiment, to

invent, within the frame of this failure, new patterns of thinking. As an art form the

avant-garde thus challenges conventional modes of thought, which deny, forget, that

conscious thought is built upon the unstable foundation that feeling as an event evokes.

Formally the avant-gardist gives “up the imitation of models that are merely beautiful”,

in order to “try out surprising, strange, shocking combinations” in order to evoke this

instability. The task is to allow the event, “to present the fact that there is an

unpresentable ... to make seen what makes one see, and not what is visible”.324 As such

the sublime instant presents, paradoxically, the unpresentable within representation.

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The unpresentable does not lie outside representation as a content that exceeds possible

forms. The point is that representation is itself built upon what is already an

unpresentable moment.

The event as a pure instant325 that precedes subordination to cognition thus opens

up the possibility, perhaps necessity, for a search for new ways of thinking and being.

There is a sense in which the event, as a radically excessive moment within

representation in which sensation and thought are unable to be harmoniously integrated,

is able to push the limits of consciousness beyond the teleological schemes of culture

and society. Invention is enabled in that excessive moment that the event marks, and

pushes thought beyond its limits. The avant-garde sets itself the task of unleashing this

moment of excess, and it is crucial that this is continually opened up, lest art itself ends

in death as Hegel would have it. The avant-garde is thus marked by the endless search

for the excessive moment that disrupts the rules that constitute conventional thought. It

resides in an indeterminate state of constant questioning — “is it happening?” — and is

not unlike the Nietzschean nomad, that radically indeterminate self that is free from the

conventional constraints of time and space, that Fanon ultimately found difficult to fully

embrace (as I argued in chapter three of this thesis).

It is thus significant that ultimately at the edges of Lyotard’s analysis of the

avant-garde we can hear a romantic nostalgia for an authentic, pure space for Art, and

the event, within the social domain. I would wish to take issue with the purity of the

event. Animated by metaphors of negotiation, contamination, excess, it is my

contention that the discourse of the postcolonial cannot be reduced to the pure aesthetic

that Lyotard stages. This purity emerges in his lament concerning the critical reception

of the avant-garde. In what could be called a reverse of the romantic poet Shelley, who

sought to discover the transcendent order that makes all apparent realities possible,326

Lyotard would wish to underscore the structural resistance to order that lies at the edges

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of thought, and that threatens in every instant the stability of apparent reality. Thus

rather than develop the political possibilities of this disorder in his work on the avant-

garde and the sublime (in this construction this is still waiting in the wings), Lyotard,

like Shelley, merely mourns the misunderstood value of art’s capacity within the social.

The destination of the avant-garde lies not with the ultimate triumph of the event, but is

regrettably “dissolved into the calculation of profitability, the satisfaction of needs, self-

affirmation through success”.327 Lyotard thus does not move beyond outlining the

formal parameters of a ‘questioning’ art, and as a conclusion merely laments the failure

of society to understand it.

We can sum up the event as follows. The event, that pure instant in the

imagination, is not reducible to what has gone before, or to a vision for the future. It

makes no promises, and resists being subordinated to past understanding. The pure

instant in all of its indeterminate glory is pitted against the pure promises of political

visionaries. The sublime as event emerges as a disorder, an excess, which, in its pure

form, the singularity of its moment, is a guarantee, it seems, against the orders of

totalitarianism and the terror of nostalgia. But at the same time the event refuses the

status of a dangerous abstraction, and emerges as a force within the domain of the

social, since it calls forth the demand for judgement. It is the demand of this instant,

judgement, that calls forth a radical rethinking of questions of politics and justice. It is

thus time to allow The Differend to find its way out of the peripheries to take centre

stage in my engagement in Lyotard’s work. In preparing the ground for the postcolonial

formulations of Bhabha, as I will chart them in the following chapter, I would wish to

consider what I have called the problematic purity of the Lyotardian event in his

engagement in the question of politics. In my struggle with both Lyotard and Bhabha,

my eventual turn to Bhabha as a more cogent formulation of what is at stake in

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contemporary national politics in the West hinges upon the purity of the Lyotardian

event.

Politics: The Differend

I have maintained that Lyotard stages the question of art in terms that directly

relate to the problem of conscious thought that arises in Kant, namely the conflation of

the question of the subject and the question of the subjective. I would suggest that

Lyotard at every turn resists questions that deal with art’s social and institutional

production (Raymond Williams, Peter Bürger)328 in favour of an understanding of art

and its relation to subjective thought. It seems to me that after Lyotard, to think the

sublime one must think merely in terms of the problems of the subtle movements of

consciousness. It is precisely such an emphasis upon consciousness, on thought in and

for itself, that the work of Fanon, with its bodily excesses takes issue. In reading The

Differend one of the most striking things is that in its work upon the problems of

representation bodies are strangely absent, or are at best, simply reduced to the orders of

language.329 It is significant that The Differend, Lyotard’s most important work on the

question of politics, maintains this insistence upon the subjective, as opposed to the

bodily. The Differend is built upon the logical extension of the singularity of the event

that is occasioned by the sublime ‘failure of expression’, and attempts to set forth, if we

are to attempt to rescue the work from its pessimistic disposition concerning justice, the

possibility of affirmative experimentation and invention in the realm of politics.

Lyotard’s sublime, in keeping with Kant, is strictly a problem concerning the subtle

movements of conscious thought. A distinction between what I have called Fanon’s

material sublime, and, what can be considered, Lyotard’s insistence, after Kant, upon

the sublime as a problem of consciousness begins to emerge.

One wonders why Lyotard insisted upon the realms of thought and language, as

opposed to the messy world of the material everyday. Lyotard’s turn to the questions of

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justice and politics demands clearly marked analytical categories, rather than ‘muddy’

ones. Such a demand for a ‘clean’ analytic, however, is problematic. It is precisely the

question of analytical clarity that is the object of the material disruptions of Fanon.

Lyotard works from the stability of theory in order to disrupt. Fanon works from the

messy location of culture, in order to disrupt what Lyotard asserts as a starting point. I

will continue with Lyotard.

The task of art, as we have seen, is to provide an occasion for the event. If in the

realm of art the event opens up the possibility for an artful experimentation and

invention, in the realm of the social the possibility of experimentation and invention, if

at all possible, is occasioned by phrase events and the differends that they effect. In its

most basic form, Lyotard writes,

a differend … would be a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that

cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both

arguments. One side’s legitimacy does not imply the other’s lack of legitimacy.

However, applying a single rule of judgement to both in order to settle their

differend as though it were merely a litigation would wrong (at least) one of them

(and both of them if neither side admits this rule).330

This general introduction reveals the emptiness that lies at the heart of political

judgement. The differend is defined in terms of a lack, the “lack of a rule” that

accompanies social dispute. What is at issue is that there are certain kinds of dispute

that give rise to an instant in which thought is called upon to make a judgement, but

fails to find a readily available rule to be able to equitably meet this end. This failure in

this instant forces thought to invent a rule to judge the event, since no determinate rule

can be found. Thought is thus forced to function reflectively in order to carry out this

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necessary task. The differend entails the failure of thought to be able to deal with what it

encounters, and calls forth the necessity of invention in the realm of political judgement

and justice. Determinate judgement, the conventional domain of politics (Marx’s

empiricism, Rousseau too) is revealed to be flawed, since, in certain instances, the lack

of a determinate rule forces political judgement into a reflective state. The assumed

stability of a politics that rests upon an empiricist authority, preoccupied with its own

content, is thus disrupted. Whilst the differend’s “vengeance is on the prowl”331 the

capacity for a conventional politics to deliver what is just must be questioned.

When thought encounters the failure of expression in the domain of the social

there is, however, the possibility that this failure can become an occasion for the reign

of terror, for injustice, rather than an openness to the affirmative possibilities that

differends open up. An injustice is occasioned, in this equation, if it is the case that

thought fails to find a determinate rule to judge, and this failure is taken as a signal that

the phrase that presents the case concerning the referent is not valid. In this instance the

differend has been suppressed. Rather than turn to the demand for invention that this

calls forth (though there is a problem with this formulation that I will deal with in due

course), this thought refuses to budge from the domain of the determinate, and acts as if

the dispute is a case of litigation. The addressee of the phrase that seeks expression is

thus silenced, and rendered a pragmatic location within the discursive universe that is

unjust.

For the most part, as Lyotard’s examples testify, the differend is ignored and

social disputes are treated as cases of litigation. It seems to be the case that the

dominant idiom and the dominant party are synonymous in this formulation. The

suppression of the ‘lack of a determinate rule’ via a dominant idiom usually favours the

dominant party in the dispute. We can assume that ‘dominance’ in this instance can be

drawn up around questions of race, gender, and class, and as such much of the work

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involves an interrogation of the structures which give rise to the silences that these

categories effect.

A central example is the suppression of Jewish testimony to the horror of Nazi

gas chambers at Auschwitz. This is enacted by the logic: to see is to bear witness, but to

‘truly’ bear witness to death in a gas chamber one has to die in a gas chamber.332 The

consequence of this difficulty is that the survivors were prevented access to testifying

structures, and it appeared as if they had no legitimate complaint. Other examples

include: the workers that “have had to and will have to speak of their labor … as if it

were … a commodity of which they were the owners” (Lyotard suggests that with “the

logic of Capital, the aspect of Marxism that remains alive is, at least, this sense of the

differend, which forbids any reconciliation of the parties in the idiom of either one of

them”;333 “Marxism has not come to an end, as the feeling of differend”);334 there is also

a “differend between regret [modern aesthetics] and experimentation [the

postmodern]”;335 and we can add, the logic that the publisher cannot fail to publish

major works, because no one has ever read a major work which hasn’t been

published;336 and Heidegger’s insistent silence about the Nazis and the Jews as a

consequence of his failure to embrace the differend between thought on Being and

thought on Law, his failure to be open to a sublime “art” which says not the unsayable,

“but … that it cannot say it”.337 The critical import of the work is thus to testify to the

instant of the differend, which has the potential to open up the question of judgement, to

push thought beyond conventional limits toward an inventive, playful, and perhaps

more just sense of the social.

The differend as an idea is built upon three interrelated discursive components:

the phrase regimen, proper names, and genres of discourse. My aim at this point will be

to detail the function of each component. If we are to take issue with the work it is

necessary to engage at this ‘nuts and bolts’ level. It is here that we will find certain

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difficulties and assumptions that reveal the limits of Lyotard’s attempt to rethink the

political. I would wish to question, as I have suggested, the temporal relation of the

phrase to genres of discourse. It seems to me that the introduction of the phrase event,

and the question of linkage that it calls forth, merely asserts a starting point that is

‘rooted’ in the indeterminate, as opposed to a starting point that works from the material

condition of the social. Each sets up a causal chain that produces a specific

understanding of what constitutes a just politics. The problem for Lyotard, however, is

that it is questionable that his own work itself, and the demand for bearing witness to

differends, is actually rooted in the indeterminate as the work suggests. Lyotard’s later

work, littered by examples of historical injustices, can be read as a response to material

social conditions that underscore an alteration in the destination of what might be

thought a just politics. As such the possibility of a differend rooted in the indeterminate

sublime seems dubious. Moreover the opening of the work seems to defy this sublime

politics. It seems to me that statements such as “the decline of universalist discourses

… The weariness with regard to ‘theory’ … The time has come to philosophize”338 bear

a decidedly Hegelian accent.

It is significant that The Differend draws upon the discursive in order to rework

the question of politics. As I stated, there is a remarkable lack of bodies here. Having

said this, however, readers must be careful to attend to the nuances that the discursive

and language in this context give rise. It would be a mistake, for instance, to think the

differend in terms of something like Roman Jakobson’s ‘verbal communication’ model.

Similarly differend cannot be understood as a politicisation of Derrida’s (mis)reading,

with its disruptions to self presence and determinate mimetic truth, or as a kind of

Nietzschean perspectivism. In terms of the latter, The Differend’s emphasis upon the

phrase regimen, as opposed to the “language games” (Wittgenstein) of The Postmodern

Condition and Just Gaming, marks an important refinement in Lyotard’s search for a

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more just sense of political judgement. I would thus suggest, after underscoring the

importance of the subjective, that for Lyotard the discursive functions, in the context of

The Differend, as the conscious surface upon which the social writes itself, and upon

which the social is written. Lyotard is concerned with the question of what can and

can’t be phrased upon, what I would wish to call, the discursive surface. As such the

discursive surface calls forth a pragmatics, an ethics of the phrase. Rather than the

linguistic problem of meaning, which is concerned with the content of messages passed

from subject to subject, the problem of meaning that the phrase evokes is inseparably

linked to ethical questions. The question of politics thus emerges in terms of this phrase

ethics, since to deny a phrase, as we have seen, is to deny a social space. My contention

is that such a pragmatics does not seem to ‘capture’ the postcolonial, or provide an

adequate model for critique. As opposed to the excesses and contaminations of the

discourse of the postcolonial, Lyotard’s aesthetic purity remains dubious. I will

continue unpacking the outworking of the indeterminate judgement that Lyotard draws

from the Kantian sublime. Lyotard’s systematic ‘phraseology’ — in which the political

implications of indeterminate judgement are charted — is perhaps an oversimplified

account of what is at stake in contemporary political judgement.

The phrase regimen can be located at the edges of thought, and, subsequently,

marks the edges of being. I would suggest that Lyotard conflates thought and being, or

at least sets forth an understanding of being that is constituted in terms of the

indeterminate basis for thought. Phrases reside in that ‘twilight zone’, that paradoxical

space that marks the limits of thought, and yet is also the point from which thought

begins. It is crucial to note that the phrase doesn’t in any sense precede the self, and the

self doesn’t precede the phrase. Any consideration of the self by default thus becomes a

consideration of the phrase, since subjects are “situated in a universe presented by a

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phrase”,339 there is no transcendent outside which determines the self and its location in

the phrase regimen.

We may wonder about the body, the material world, and the unconscious (all

crucial elements for the discourse of the postcolonial). But again these are inseparable

from the discursive surface, since this surface itself doesn’t consist of language in the

conventional sense, but is constituted in terms of the movements of consciousness, and

as such cannot be separated from the body and its location in the material world.

Phrases can include a range of gestures from speech itself, to the acts and feelings of the

phenomenological body: “A wink, a shrugging of the shoulder, a taping of the foot [sic],

a fleeting blush, or an attack of tachycardia can be phrases. — And the wagging of a

dog’s tail, the perked ears of a cat … And a tiny speck to the West rising upon the

horizon of the sea … — A silence”.340 The phrase can be understood as any act or thing

that presents itself in consciousness, in whatever form. As such there is a sense in

which there simply is nothing beyond the phrase, no space or site that can in some sense

be occupied by something other than what always must be: conscious thought. It is not

possible to speak of an empirical outside,341 such as objects, or empty space, the body as

if it exists independent of phrases, and to phrase the ultimate end is to evoke Zeno’s

paradoxical logic. We can only gesture toward what could be considered the

nothingness that marks the end of all phrases, that moment in which conscious thought

finally ceases, when the sun explodes and the earth disappears such that “thought will

have stopped — leaving that disappearance absolutely unthought of”.342 For the time

being the discursive surface remains, and it is all that there is. Social being presents

itself to thought in and through phrases, thought “is inseparable from the

phenomenological body”,343 as the phrase is inseparable from social being. I would

contend, however, that these Lyotardian formulations remain too neat, too pure to be

politically useful. My aim at this point, will be to continue charting what I have called

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Lyotard’s problematic purity. My contention is that the contaminations and disturbing

excesses of the discourse of the postcolonial exceed the possibilities that Lyotard’s neat

formulations open up.

The differend, as I have suggested, is inhabited by the logic of the event. In this

instance this logic is built upon the sure foundation, for much is demanded, of the

phrase universe. Lyotard writes:

It should be said by way of simplification that a phrase presents what it is about,

the case … which is its referent; what is signified about the case, the sense … that

to which or addressed to which this is signified about the case, the addressee; that

‘through’ which or in the name of which this is signified about the case, the

addressor. The disposition of a phrase universe consists in the situating of these

instances in relation to each other.344

The remarkable thing about the phrase is that it consists simply of the empty relation

between various instances: the addressor, addressee, referent, and sense. It is important

to note that there is no content here in the conventional sense, waiting to burst forth

upon the social. Rather the phrase, as Lyotard writes, “is an event”,345 that is to say an

“Is it happening”, which is distinct from “what happens” and “which is not tautological

with what has happened”.346 The phrase is a temporal phenomenon, a pure instant

which is designed, as I have suggested, to ward off being hijacked in the service of

totalitarian regimes. The instances in the specific phrase occur, unpredictably, without a

teleology, in an instant. The meaning of the phrase, its stakes, its use, always arrives as

an afterthought.

The phrase as event punctures the discursive surface, bursts forth in

consciousness not as a content but as consciousness, becomes aware of itself, and

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creates a vacuum, a point of low pressure, to use a physical metaphor, which is also a

kind of demand toward which other phrases are forced to rush. There is no sense in

which the event of the phrase is preceded by anything, the event itself is a sign that

something is happening — ‘a sign of history’ (Kant) — that is attended to by the

feeling that something is yet to be said, and the waiting for the moment of this

occurrence. Here we can locate what is crucial about the phrase, and begin to

understand how it relates to the social, and ultimately to whether or not Lyotard’s

consideration of the social stands or falls. This occurs in that moment in which Lyotard

announces that this feeling and this waiting, which seems remarkably similar to the

feeling of pain and pleasure that precedes the thought that encounters the avant-garde,

itself doesn’t in any sense precede the phrase, it actually is the phrase.

You can’t say everything. … But you certainly accept … ‘that something asks to

be put into phrases’? — This does not imply that everything ought to or wants to

be said. This implies the expectant waiting for an occurrence … that indeed

everything has not been said. … This waiting is in the phrase universe. It is the

specific ‘tension’ that every phrase regimen exerts upon the instances.347

The phrase occurrence presents the initial moment in the process that gives rise to what

we understand as social reality. As Lyotard writes:

A phrase presents a universe. No matter what its form, a phrase entails a There is

... whether it is marked or not in the form of the phrase. What is entailed by a

phrase is that it … presents a universe constituted by instances (referent,

addressor, addressee, sense) which can be marked or not in the form of the phrase.

The phrase is not a message passed from an addressor to an addressee who remain

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 independent of it. The latter are situated in the universe that the phrase presents,

together with the referent and the sense. … The phrase universe is not presented to

something or someone as if to a subject. The presentation is that there is a

universe.348

The “Is it happening” presents a “There is”, a specific universe designated by the

regimen of the phrase. The universe presented by the phrase cannot be understood in

terms of a communicated content, a signification, that is in some sense occupied or

received and understood by a subject. Rather, the universe is presented as an emptiness,

a void, a relation between its instances, and as such appears as a question that demands

to be made meaningful. The “Is it happening” occurs in a state of privation. The

presentation, “it”, is a question mark349 — no “phrase is able to be validated from

inside its own regimen”350 — that opens up the necessity for other phrases, through the

process of linkage, to compete to make the phrase mean. The phrase is meaningless in

this sense in its own terms. Reality, that thing that we all engage in everyday without

quite knowing what it is, begins in this remarkable social theory as a void, a question

mark that demands to be dealt with.

I have suggested that the phrase universe appears in the form of a question that

makes a demand upon the discursive surface. The form that this questioning takes,

however, does not appear in isolation, but arises in relation to other phrases in and

around the specific sites that make up the discursive surface. For Lyotard the discursive

surface, or the term “world” is understood as “a network of proper names”.351 This

should not be understood in the definitive sense, but simply as a linguistic orientation,

through the naming things. The proper name is a linguistic marker that designates

specific objects, places, people. Here Lyotard leans upon the antidescriptivism of Saul

Kripke’s famous “Naming and Necessity” lectures in the sixties. A logician, he argued

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that proper names designate the same object even if there has been a change in the state

of that object. The descriptive phrase ‘the first Emperor of France’, for instance,

designates Napoleon. Historically the truth value of the phrase can be validated, but this

situation is not a necessity. The Emperor of France could have been Barry, instead of

Napoleon. What this means, as far as Kripke is concerned, is that this descriptive

phrase does not appear to be rigid. Its designation, even though the descriptive phrase

remains the same, does not remain constant. ‘Napoleon’ on the other hand, is a rigid

designator, since there are circumstances that depend upon the proper name ‘Napoleon’

in order to determine the truth-condition of certain phrases. In a descriptive phrase such

as ‘Napoleon was born in Corsica’, for instance, the truth of the phrase depends upon no

one else but ‘Napoleon’.352 What this suggests is that the proper name possesses a

particular property. Its social working cannot be understood in terms of the notion that

there is a descriptive phrase that precedes and defines it. Proper names as rigid

designators have a deictic quality. They are rigid yet empty signifiers.

This issue will become crucial in establishing what I consider to be Lyotard’s

problematic demand for analytic purity. As I showed in chapter one, the discourse of

the postcolonial remains far from pure. It is precisely contaminations and excesses that

mark the political cogency of the discourse of the postcolonial. Such excess renders the

analytic purity of Lyotard dubious. Thus as Lyotard leans upon the empty but rigid

nature of proper names, I would contend that for the discourse of the postcolonial

proper names demand to located in material struggle. I will take this issue up in due

course. It will be useful at this point to continue with the question of the phrase and the

work of the proper name.

Phrases cluster around proper names, and through a process of resemblance to

other phrases form heterogeneous phrase families, or regimens, that cannot be reduced

to one another, or subordinated to a single rule or theory. These include among an

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infinite number of possibilities: prescriptives, descriptives, cognitives, declarations,

evaluations, etc. Phrases directly affect the referent of a single proper name by situating

it upon different instances in the universe they present. The meaning of the proper

name for Lyotard thus remains indeterminate since its appearance within the phrase

shifts from phrase to phrase, and across phrase regimens. The proper name functions as

the site for the clash of phrase regimens, as they rush toward the void that has been

opened up by the phrase in its engagement with proper names, which emerge as empty

signifiers that cannot be exhaustively identified or described.

Is it possible that the number of senses attached to a named referent and presented

by phrases substitutable for its name increases without limit? Try to count, while

respecting the principle of substitutability, the phrases which are substitutable for

names like Moses, Homer, Pericles, Caesar. ... It cannot be proven that

everything has been signified about a name (that “everything has been said about

x”) not only because no such totality can be proven, but because the name not

being by itself a designator of reality (for that to occur a sense and an ostensible

referent need to be associated with it), the inflation of senses that can be attached

to it is not bounded by the “real” properties of its referent.353

Proper names are thus the site for the clash of heterogeneous phrase universes.

Because of the emptiness of the phrase, and the fact that there is nothing beyond it, the

phrase described by metaphors such as “feeling”, “waiting”, “tension”, can be

understood as that agitated zone, that Lyotard alluded to in his work on the sublime and

avant-garde. As an agitated question mark waiting for the occurrence there is no

possibility that the phrase itself will fail to be linked to other phrases in the process of

the social. There is no option, no possibility of asking, should there be a link, should

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there not? In the “vigil for an occurrence, the anxiety and the joy of an unknown idiom,

has begun. To link is not a duty … ‘We’ cannot do otherwise”.354

The presentation, the phrase, occupies a rigid instant in time. This rigidity

means that there can be only one linkage, and one genre that engages the Is it

happening? and draws it toward a specific end. This temporal quality occasions an

agonistics upon the discursive surface. Genres of discourse compete for that limited

temporal instant that is occasioned by the phrase. It is at this point that we move from

that single phrase instant, and its relation to proper names and phrase regimens, to the

social, which consists of many instances, and an unlimited number of possible linkages.

For Lyotard this moment is crucial, it introduces the question of politics, for “to link is

necessary; how to link is contingent”.355 As such we may think of reality not as the

reality of the phrase, or the reality that the phrase presents, instead reality emerges in

the form of a question, “it is a state of the referent” within the phrase regimen, “which

results from the effectuation of establishment procedures”356 that draw the phrase into

meaning making chains. Such genres include: the economic, narrative, the

philosophical, the declarative, dialectical, ethical, logic, metaphysical, ontological,

speculative, cognitive, etc.

In the agitation of the phrase the demand for linkage arises, but the question of

linkage itself emerges in terms of a lack. Whilst there is an excess of possible linkages,

there is no ultimate guiding principle to direct this process. After all, as Lyotard insists,

there are no meaningful possibilities beyond the discursive surface. As such, one genre

of linkage engaging the phrase in meaning making chains necessarily suppresses every

other possibility of linkage. Everything about the phrase is at stake in the nature of the

linkage. The meaning of the phrase, its referent, signified, addressor, and addressee are

all determined by the nature of the linkage. The way in which phrases are linked,

considering the random and indeterminate phrase mass and unlimited number of

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possible ways to link, is thus a political question — to what end, and for whom are these

phrases linked? Questions of justice also reside at the point of linkage — what phrases

must be suppressed for this meaning to be privileged?

The differend thus disrupts the notion of justice as a rule or theory which

somehow transcends the contexts that they are applied to. Likewise the position of the

judge as an objective observer independent from situations is also disrupted. The

positing of a radical indeterminacy, the condition of the phrase, “prohibits any

determinate subject — individual, class, nation, or even imperial humanity — from

claiming itself as the sovereign author or supreme referent of right”.357 In contrast to

these assumed rights, what we have before us is the question of linkage. If we adhere to

the work of the phrase which arises in indeterminacy and reveals the lack that lies at the

heart of political judgement, then we must accept that politics resides firmly in the

domain of the reflective. Political judgement is thus not a determinant activity, since, as

Kant’s celebration of the revolution shows, there is no rule to govern this process

outside the process itself. The phrase by its very nature demands to be judged, but this

demand must be carried out without criteria.

As I have attempted to show, for Lyotard The Differend seeks to offer a

philosophical basis for affirmative judgement in the social domain. Such an affirmation

begins in that moment in which aesthetic groundlessness is unleashed, and demolishes

the assumption that all peoples can be subordinated to a universal law. To resort to a

metanarrative, derived from a universal principle such as Nature (Rousseau), is to deny

the reflective character of the political, and with it the possibility of an affirmative

judgement, and to effect an injustice since it is impossible to accommodate every

possible procedure of meaning making within a single genre. The resort to

metanarratives always already entails an injustice in Lyotard’s scheme of things. The

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inability to be sensitive to differences, to tolerate the incommensurable,358 silences all

that fails to find expression in the privileged genre. This silencing would be a wrong.

This is what a wrong [Tort] would be: a damage [dommage] accompanied by the

loss of means to prove the damage. This is the case if the victim is deprived of

life, or of all his of her liberties, or of the freedom to make his or her ideas or

opinions public, or simply of the right to testify to the damage, or even more

simply if the testifying phrase is itself deprived of authority.359

For Lyotard this injustice is constantly before us. He thus opens the door, via the

imagination, for affirmative political judgement. He continues:

To give the differend its due is to institute new addressees, new addressors, new

significations, and new referents in order for the wrong to find an expression and

for the plaintiff to cease being a victim. This requires new rules for the formation

and linking of phrases. No one doubts that language is capable of admitting these

new phrase families or new genres of discourse. Every wrong ought to be able to

be put into phrases. A new competence (or “prudence”) must be found.360

It is thus possible to find that affirmative moment in Lyotard: the call for a ‘new

competence’. We may understand this new competence in terms that have been set

forth in Just Gaming. In this regard Lyotard announces:

the thinker I am closest to in this regard is Aristotle, insofar as he recognizes ...

that a judge worthy of the name has no true model to guide his judgements, and

that the true nature of the judge is to pronounce judgements, and therefore

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 prescriptions, just so, without criteria. That is, after all, what Aristotle calls

prudence. It consists in dispensing justice without models.361

Justice for Lyotard thus functions in terms of the ‘as if’ that lies at the heart of

reflective judgement in Kant, and is not an object of cognition. “To be just” Lyotard

continues, “is to act in such a way that ... the maxim of the will may serve as a principle

of universal legislation. But ... in such a way that ... it is not a condition that defines

justice”.362 The just judgement thus respects the radical indeterminacy that is attended

to upon the discursive surface, and does not attempt to legitimate itself as a practice by

privileging one genre, say the cognitive and its relation to descriptive phrases, over

others. The question of justice thus resides in the shadow of the problem of linking

phrases. The ‘as if’ does not precede judgement, or exist somehow outside it in order to

act as a motivating force, it occurs in the instant in which a judgement is called forth.

This means that Lyotard is attacking the liberal pluralist notion that the idea of

justice is the totality of all the things that can be said about it, or at least a set of

prescriptive rules, or a (pre)condition that effects a contractual agreement. The problem

is that such rules privilege the cognitive genre, and exclude what can’t be phrased. For

Lyotard, on the other hand, we are always obligated to judge. This is thus not a

relativism, but is an obligation that functions only in terms of the failure of determinate

judgement to be able to deal with the event justly, and the subsequent necessity for

reflective judgement. The idea of justice itself is thus always to be determined, since it

is caught up in the sublime void that resides at its heart. The just judgement emerges in

that heteronomous moment, as opposed to an autonomy that is drawn from ‘outside.

Always conscious of the moment of its enunciation, the just judgement is never able to

move into spaces beyond that moment.

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 My aim in outlining Lyotard is to question the capacity of the phrase as event to

deliver an effective politics in the context of the discourse of the postcolonial. The

criteria for judging this capacity is threefold. In the first instance, I would wish to

juxtapose the political claims of Lyotard with Lyotard’s desire for the work. In

Lyotard’s lament concerning the avant-garde we can hear another agenda that cannot be

reduced to the logic of the event. What I am suggesting is that in such a lament there is

a something beyond the event, a forethought, a pedagogy perhaps, that exceeds and

disrupts the claims concerning the art event. Secondly, in light of Fanon’s staging of the

body as a disruptive site, the erasure of the body in Lyotard must be questioned. I

would suggest that there is an analytic of purity at work in Lyotard, an analytic that

seeks to find and privilege a pure instant to explain the social. It seems to me that this

desire to find a single critical moment, in order to explain what constitutes the social

bond, is critically reductive. Thirdly, since the sublime is an object of postcolonial

critique, as I argued in chapters one and three, I would suggest that the sublime can no

longer be considered in the terms that Lyotard maintains. The discourse of the

postcolonial attempts to interrupt, what I have called, reason’s fort/da. Such an

interruption, as Fanon’s body politics shows, attempts to disrupt reason’s establishment

from within. It is to push the sublime elsewhere, beyond the terms and the limits that

reason, in its Idealist incarnation, demands. It could be, therefore, that Lyotard’s

bracketing of the sublime fails to adequately engage in reason’s processes.

Conclusion: Lyotard and the Discourse of the Postcolonial

I have situated The Differend in the anxiousness concerning the art/politics

nexus that the French Revolution opened up, in order to foreground Lyotard’s desire to

redefine what constitutes politics and justice. In this critical endeavour the phrase is set

forth as a pure moment, and is thus granted the capacity to disrupt existing orders and

effect social change. Free from the contaminating influences of history, the phrase

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opens up the possibility, the necessity of invention within the domains of politics and

justice. I have staged such a possibility, despite Lyotard’s attempt to distance the work

from Idealist overtones, via the problem of consciousness that remained central to

Idealism’s critical task. I would argue that ultimately the pure void that lies at the core

of the phrase, as it attends to the “lack” that marks judgement, ultimately works to open

up a space for the reign of imaginative reason in human affairs. Here the self judges ‘as

if’ the determining forces of history have been put to an end.

But it seems to me that this redefinition of the political and the just, via the

demands that are attended to by the pure nature of the phrase, signals that the work itself

fails to function in the manner that the phrase sets forth. In this attempt to redefine we

find an interesting anomaly. Lyotard desires a pure site which is free from social

contamination. Yet the utilisation of such a pure site to critique existing structures of

thought must surely exceed the bounds of this purity. We could ask: why the historical

necessity for redefinition if the phrase by its very nature makes this demand? It thus

seems that whenever Lyotard considers the critical work of the differend he finds that it

demands a thought before, and of, the limits of the thought that the phrase marks. It is

significant that this forethought is already inscribed in a history of thought:

philosophical, political, and social.363 The event of The Differend is therefore

contaminated with what it denies before it begins, namely the always already inscribed

nature of social being. Readers, spectators — Lyotard is one among them — are very

rarely, perhaps never open to the empty questioning — the ‘is it happening?’ — that

The Differend in its insistence upon the phrase seems to demand. Readers are

contaminated with the social and material structures that they inhabit, in which being is

negotiated: what does the work contribute to the history of thought? What impact does

it have upon social being? This chapter is no exception.

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 As such I have seized that moment in which “the lesser evil ought to be the

political good”,364 in order to read The Differend as an affirmative gesture. To bend the

work in this way, to highlight this aspect at the expense of others is not to open the work

up to the radical emptiness and indeterminacy that lies at the heart of the phrase. Rather

it reveals that readers always bring an agenda with them — the demands of the thesis,

etc. — in order to negotiate what appears to be the excessive nature of texts

(differance?). As a consequence, therefore, it remains to be seen if it is possible for

events, the phrase, to precede the agendas that subjects bring to works as The Differend

implies. It is thus possible that in its preoccupation with denying causal structures, the

work merely asserts a pseudo-causality — the phrase precedes (temporally) the question

of linkage — at the expense of the material condition of bodies in social spaces. I am

thus not sure that this reversing gesture on the part of Lyotard actually escapes the kind

of theoretical claustrophobia that the work seeks to demolish.

Moreover, I would question the emptiness of the proper name in the context of

the work. Lyotard’s demand for pure and empty spaces upon which to stage the

indeterminate nature of linkage, seems to be too analytically convenient. Where can

such pure spaces be found? The proper name rather than being a rigid designator, an

empty signifier, like the phrase, is always already inscribed in the history of its

designation. Who names? For what purpose? On what conditions? The capacity to

name and to rename is itself a political process. To attend to the linkages upon the

proper name ‘Ayres Rock’ as if ‘Ayres Rock’ is an empty signifier is to miss the trace

of a history of colonisation, and it is also to miss the political nuances of changing the

name of Ayres Rock to ‘Uluru’. As Žižek in examining Kripke’s antidescriptivism, to

which Lyotard subscribes, rightly argues:

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 What is missed by the antidescriptivist idea of an external causal chain of

communication through which reference is transmitted is ... the radical

contingency of naming, the fact that naming itself retroactively constitutes its

reference. Naming is necessary but it is, so to speak, necessary afterwards,

retroactively, once we are already ‘in it’.365

What this means is that proper names are contaminated by the trace of the processes of

their production within the social. The retroactive ‘in it’ suggests that rather than a

causal chain that proceeds from emptiness to the necessity of linkage, as it is in Lyotard,

the proper name emerges as an afterthought, a necessity that arises in and through the

self’s location in a world of objects and ideas. This suggests that even at the point of

the proper name, that empty unit in Lyotard, we find political struggles that reveal that

The Differend does not go far enough in its critical work. It also suggests that the

indeterminate nature of the phrase as it attends to the proper name, and the question of

linkage are processes that are socially determined. Of course Lyotard would not deny

this, the point is that it is questionable, given this political struggle, whether the phrase

actually does open up the necessity for reflective judgement. Since the proper name

owes its existence to social processes — naming is inseparably linked to the issue of

authority: who has the authority to name? — it remains doubtful that the refusal to deal

with that history actually provides a basis for an affirmative justice. It is perhaps more

useful to deal with the site of the proper name’s production, its location in culture. As I

will show in the following chapter, this is what Bhabha does.

Lyotard would have us believe that historical transformation occurs in terms of

the random and uncontaminated nature of the phrase. Historical transformation is

staged in this account in terms of the disruptive capacity of the random phrase. The

phrase exceeds the limits of history, it is not produced by history, it produces historical

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transformation constantly. Change is thus a necessary structural condition. The social

is marked in Idealist terms by the constant necessity to deal with indeterminacy, and

consequently with the problem of indeterminate judgement. The social, in Lyotard’s

thinking, is thus always already marked by the demand for invention. I would contend,

however, that, whilst a certain Idealism remains at the edges of this thought — even

Fichte’s celebration concerning the demolition of the past and subsequent ‘clean slate’

from which to begin again, and perhaps again and again … — one must question this

accent upon invention. As a metaphor, invention in this account emerges as a necessary

structural condition. It has been staged in terms that bear a remarkable resemblance to

Idealism’s insistence upon the problems of conscious thought, the subjective rather than

subjects, as it works upon the phenomenal world.

If, however, we were to attend to the metaphors, such as ‘negotiation’, that

underpin political fields such as the discourse of the postcolonial, we would find an

accent upon the social construction of subjects and the impact of this construction upon

conscious thought. It is in this sense that Fanon takes up the material body as a site

from which to construct a politics. As such, rather than invention, the discourse of the

postcolonial presents a politics of negotiation, that seeks to displace existing rules

(Bhabha and Rushdie) rather than foreground the necessity for a search for a rule, as

Lyotard would have it. I would contend that this important difference — negotiation as

opposed to invention — sets the postcolonial endeavour apart from critical strategies

that have been built upon an anxious Kantianism. If we are to engage in the discourse

of the postcolonial it seems to me that this critical difference is crucial and must be

opened up.

Perhaps the most telling blow to the critical usefulness of the idea of differend

can be found in The Differend’s final clause, which, like the phrase, emerges in the form

of a question. Lyotard writes:

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 The Is it happening? is invincible to every will to gain time. But the occurrence

doesn’t make a story, does it? — Indeed, it’s not a sign. But it is to be judged, all

the way through to its incomparability. You can’t make a political ‘program’ with

it, but you can bear witness to it. — And what if no one hears the testimony, etc.

(No. 1ff.)? — Are you prejudging the Is it happening?366

Are we to consider the French master, to use Shelley’s memorable phrase, an

‘unacknowledged legislator of the world’? Is it possible that differends, like avant-

gardist art, are merely misunderstood and rendered a sad and lonely political location.

Or is it that ultimately Lyotard must confront the difficulty of bearing witness to

differends, as the work urges, since differends themselves whilst everywhere present are

always already unpresentable. The problem is that this unpresentability means that

differends always require a thought, an ethic, a politics that lies beyond the terms of the

differend itself. As such the work seems to gesture toward, and rely upon a moment

outside and beyond its analytical categories.

It is in terms of this beyond — culture as material production — that Fanon’s

lucid “The Fact of Blackness” can be staged. As I argued in chapter three, ‘blackness’,

for Fanon, is constructed in relation to ‘whiteness’, which emerges as less a body

metaphor than an issue concerning self-consciousness. White equates to mind, whilst

black equates to what is bodily. In the context of Idealism, which seeks to establish the

authority of reasonable thought, this means that the black body demands to be sublated,

even expelled. But does Fanon’s resistance to this sublation take up the logic of

differend? Whilst it is the case that Lyotard rightly diagnoses the violence of Europe’s

production of its others, it is also the case that Fanon’s politics seizes that moment of

vulnerability in reason’s processes, in order to push it beyond its limits. Fanon’s

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politics is not concerned with overcoming political illegitimacy as differend. Rather, his

work takes up and subverts the illegitimacy into which he has been inscribed. The

body, that desiring machine that is always already antagonistic to Idealist thought, has

been unleashed by Fanon as a transgressive force. Such a politics cannot be defined in

terms of a Lyotardian agonistics. In maintaining the purity of the Kantian faculties,

Lyotard denies the possibility of a politics of contamination. The discourse of the

postcolonial is effected through a politics that can be described in the terms that Lyotard

denies: contamination, translation, leakage, excess.

Having charted what I consider to be the problem with Lyotard’s Kantian purity,

I would wish to re-turn to the postcolonial sublime through Homi Bhabha. After Fanon,

whose body seeks to inhabit and contaminate the structures of Hegel’s system, it is

necessary to turn to Bhabha’s discursive transgressions, because he takes up the

temporal ethic that underscores Hegel’s articulation of Western progress and radically

alters its terms.

Notes

299
See Lyotard’s “Lessons in Paganism”, in The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 122-154.
300
See Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
301
Jean-François Lyotard, “Answer to the Question: What is the Postmodern?”, in The
Postmodern Explained to Children, ed. Julian Pefanis, Morgan Thomas (Sydney: Power
Publications, 1992), 23-24.
302
It could be pointed out that Lyotard’s rejection of the first Critique, in order to take
up the third, and as it turns out the second also, means that my claim here needs to be
qualified. I would suggest in response that the privileging of the third Critique over the
entire system can be read as an attempt to redeem the system. It seems to me that
Lyotard reads the third Critique as a logical conclusion to the divisions that are set up in
the first.
303
Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth
Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 53.

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304
On this point I follow David Carroll, Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida
(London: Routledge, 1987), 173-184.
305
See Vijay Mishra, “Postcolonial Differend: Diasporic Narratives of Salman
Rushdie”, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 26, no. 3 (1995), 7-
45.
306
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Daniel
Breazeale (New York: Cornell University Press, 1988), 385.
307
G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 3, trans. E. S. Haldane
and Frances H. Simpson (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1955), 390.
308
G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover
Publications, 1956), 447.
309
Immanuel Kant, Conflict of Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor (New York: Abaris
Books, 1979), 153.
310
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner
Press, 1951), 13.
311
Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 130.
312
Kant, Critique of Judgement, 97, 101.
313
Lyotard, The Differend, 124; Lyotard, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 75-76.
314
Carroll, Paraesthetics, 183.
315
I agree with Julian Pefanis (Heterology and the Postmodern, Sydney Allen and
Unwin, 1991) who locates Lyotard’s thought, along with Bataille and Baudrillard, in the
context of the changed circumstances of Eastern Europe in the 60’s, and consequent
need to reconstitute critical thought outside the givens and certainties of Marxism.
Pefanis argues that this critical turn was driven not by philosophical means, but by the
concrete historical conditions in the USSR at the time. Lyotard’s observation of the
party setting itself above the Marxist narrative of emancipation, and above the citizens
from whom they were legitimated, resulted in a loss of political faith, and search for a
politics and justice free from, what was understood as, totalitarian constraints. See also
Geoffrey Bennington’s, Lyotard Writing the Event (Manchester, Manchester University
Press, 1988), which argues that Lyotard’s break with Marxism involved two phases.
The first, a total break (drift) from the Socialisme ou barbarie group, and the second, a
(re)turn to ethical and political questions (1).
316
Jean-François Lyotard, “The Sublime and The Avant-Garde”, in The Inhuman, trans.
Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991),
90, 101.
317
Lyotard, “The Sublime and The Avant-Garde”, 102.

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318
Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, 7.
319
Lyotard, “The Sublime and The Avant-Garde”, 93.
320
Lyotard, “Something Like Communication … Without Communication”, in The
Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1991), 108-118.
321
Lyotard, “The Sublime and The Avant-Garde”, 99-100.
322
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. J. Riviere (London: Hogarth,
1930), 78n.
323
Lyotard, “The Sublime and The Avant-Garde”, 93.
324
Lyotard, “The Sublime and The Avant-Garde”, 100, 101-102.
325
Bill Readings in Introducing Lyotard (London: Routledge, 1991) argues that “the
event is very close to the Derridean supplement” (57). I do not agree with this
formulation. Unlike the event which exceeds the trace of the social, the supplement is
always already contaminated. Derrida contends in Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1976) that the
supplement “harbors within it two significations which cohabitation is as strange as it is
necessary” (144). On the one hand the logic of the supplement is driven by the desire to
overcome the loss of a presence: Rousseau smells the scent of his absent lover upon the
pillow. But whilst the supplement “functions in her absence as a substitute for her
presence … even in her presence the supplement is at work” (152): Rousseau swallows
a lock of her hair whilst she dines with him. The supplement thus inhabits being in the
sense that the desired presence never actually arrives but is always already deferred
(159). As such the supplement is a logic that is built upon the human desire for the
complete connection between the self and the object of desire, in its various forms, but
this desire for presence can only emerge in terms of the absence of the desired object. It
is this ‘cohabitation’ that sets the logic of the supplement apart from the logic of the
event, since the event is marked not by the desire for something, a presence, but by
disruptions to the grounds for that desire itself. The event emerges not in terms of a
lack, but in terms which exceed. Whilst Derrida insists upon a never ending
supplementarity to substitute for an absence, Lyotard underscores the empty and
disruptive nature of the event.
326
See Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, ed. John. E. Jordon (Indianapolis:
The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965). He writes: poets “are not only the authors of
language and of music, of the dance and architecture, and statuary, and painting; they
are institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of
life, and the teachers who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true,
that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion”.
The imagination, Shelley argues, reveals the essential order of things. The conclusion
to A Defence of Poetry thus valorises poets as the mirrors of the “gigantic shadows [of]
futurity”, the “trumpets” that sing to battle, and the “influence which is moved not, but
moves”. Even though hardly anybody realises it, the influence of the poets is powerful
and pervasive; poets, Shelley would have us believe, “are the unacknowledged

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legislators of the world” (31, 80).
327
Lyotard, “The Sublime and The Avant-Garde”, 105.
328
See Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformism
(London: Verso, 1989); and Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael
Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnestoa Press, 1984).
329
On this point I follow Horst Ruthrof, “Differend and Agonistics: a Transcendental
Argument”, Philosophy Today, vol. 34, no. 2 (1992), 324-335. He argues that the
theory of differend is incomplete. The absence of bodies, non-verbal sign systems !
the tactile, aural, proxemic, olfactory and visual ! in Lyotard’s privileging of the
linguistic as a model for the social “fails to account for a broad range of instances of
social injustice not accessible to a description based upon phrases” (333).
330
Lyotard, The Differend, xi.
331
Lyotard, The Differend, 56.
332
Lyotard, The Differend, 3-4.
333
Jean-François Lyotard, “The Differend”, in Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings
and Kevin Paul Geiman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 9-10.
334
Lyotard, The Differend, 171.
335
Jean-François Lyotard, “Answer to the Question: What is the Postmodern?”, 22.
336
Lyotard, The Differend, 4.
337
Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and “the jews”, trans. Andreas Michel and Mark
Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 47.
338
Lyotard, The Differend, xiii.
339
Lyotard, The Differend, 71.
340
Lyotard, The Differend, 70.
341
Lyotard, The Differend, 28.
342
Jean-François Lyotard, “Can Thought go on Without a Body?”, in The Inhuman,
trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1991), 9.
343
Lyotard, “Can Thought go on Without a Body?”, 23.
344
Lyotard, The Differend, 14.
345
Jean-François Lyotard, “Discussions, or Phrasing after Auschwitz”, in The Lyotard
Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 371.

212
346
Lyotard, The Differend, 79. See Charles Stivale’s, “Review” of The Differend, The
French Review, vol. 63, no. 4, (1990), 722-723, in which Lyotard’s notion of ‘the
phrase’, is defined as a fluid, strategic term, rather than a definitive one.
347
Lyotard, The Differend, 80.
348
Lyotard, “Discussions, or Phrasing after Auschwitz”, 371-372.
349
Lyotard, The Differend, 79.
350
Lyotard, The Differend, 29.
351
Lyotard, The Differend, 79.
352
See Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980)
353
Lyotard, The Differend, 47.
354
Lyotard, The Differend, 80.
355
Lyotard, The Differend, 29.
356
Lyotard, The Differend, 4.
357
Jean Francios Lyotard and J. Rogozinski, “The Notion of the Thought Police”, Art &
Text, no. 26 (1987), 29.
358
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 66.
359
Lyotard, The Differend, 5.
360
Lyotard, The Differend, 13.
361
Lyotard and Thébaud, Just Gaming, 25-26.
362
Lyotard and Thébaud, Just Gaming, 47.
363
See Seyla Benhabib’s suggestion in “Epistemologies of Postmodernism”, New
German Critique, no. 33 (1984), 103-127, that there is a contradiction in Lyotard’s
postmodern program. It seems that Lyotard is divided between advocating a plurality of
heterogeneous language games, and developing an epistemological viewpoint from
which he can attack grand narratives. Benhabib argues that Lyotard is unable to make
the choice. Whilst he champions a total move to the side of plurality and heterogeneity,
he deprives himself of a standpoint for critique. See also Stuart Sim’s, “Lyotard and the
Politics of Antifoundationalism”, Radical Philosophy, no. 44 (1986), 8-13.
364
Lyotard, The Differend, 140.
365
Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 95.

213
366
Lyotard, The Differend, 181.

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 Chapter Five

Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture

Driven by the subaltern history of the margins of modernity — rather than by the

failures of logocentrism — I have tried, in some small measure, to revise the

known, to rename the postmodern from the position of the postcolonial.367

The thesis began by charting the dynamism of Enlightenment Reason. This

dynamism remains central in the postcolonial return to the colonial past. Next, in

turning to Fanon’s complex engagement in Hegel, I showed that in Hegel’s

preoccupation with systems a vulnerability emerges. Fanon seizes this vulnerability by

taking hold of a bodily excess that refuses to be contained by Hegel’s systems. This

excess can be considered the postcolonial sublime. The sublime thus falls from its

noble frame in Kant to be taken up as a base, despised form. This shift from what could

be called the sacred to the profane marks the work of the postcolonial sublime. As an

excess the postcolonial sublime contaminates universalising impulses. It opens up

ruptures, disruptions that alter the course of such impulses. Following this exploration

of the politics of excess in the context of the postcoloniality of Fanon, I then turned to

the work of Lyotard. I argued that Lyotard fails to account for the processes of reason.

The purity of the phrase event, its emptiness, is an inadequate description of the overfull

sign of the postcolonial. Postcolonial ruptures arise as a consequence of an

uncontainable excess, a too much that renders unifying teleologies untenable. Having

launched an attack upon Lyotard’s theory of differend, I would now wish to chart what I

would consider to be a more cogent political strategy for dealing with what I have called

the West’s increasing conservatism. Such a strategy can be found in the discourse of

the postcolonial, specifically in the work of Homi Bhabha.

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 Homi Bhabha’s collection of essays, The Location of Culture, has had a doubly

disruptive impact upon the contemporary critical scene. It provides not only a challenge

to the idea of culture as monolithic, but also employs a profuse and controversial prose

which engages the reader in pushing the question of culture beyond the confines that the

teleology of reason demands. The text consists of fragments, ironies, and clusters that

are linked to various issues in order to provoke and disrupt, rather than instruct in the

pedagogic sense. As such we find conflicting discourses which remain open, refusing

to be reduced to a rigid understanding of the material base, or to a priori concepts.368

The text implies a reader who must negotiate the shifting and contradictory structures of

being, in order to engage in the question of culture. Bhabha’s postcolonial subjects

occupy excessive spaces that are transgressive, pagan, and in the process of continuous

transformation.

It is precisely this accent upon transgressive transformation that introduces us to

the question of Bhabha’s conflictual discourse. I would suggest that much of the

controversy that surrounds this work can be related directly to this question. It has been

possible for some to read Bhabha, for instance, as a Marxist, others as an unabashed,

apolitical pantextualist.369 I would suggest, however, that this debate, which

characterises work on Bhabha generally, ignores the productive conflicts and

confrontations that are embedded in this body of work, and thus misses Bhabha’s

contribution to contemporary theory. I would wish to consider the politics of Bhabha’s

open form.

A possible model for the structure of The Location of Culture can be drawn from

Bakhtin’s theory of the polyphonic novel. Polyphony as a musical metaphor represents

the presence of independent and interdependent ‘voices’ within the novel. The voices in

this ‘dialogic’ relationship, as Bakhtin calls it, resist being subsumed and overruled by

an authorial totality. This is an aesthetic form that thus remains open. It works to

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promote productive possibilities, to promote debate, rather than insist upon a dominant

authorial voice which objectifies its characters, as in the case of monologic literary

forms.370 I would contend that Bhabha’s rhetoric draws upon a dialogic aesthetic form,

via its insistence upon incompleteness, and openness.

But what does this incompleteness mean in the context of a work whose

organising fiction is the location of culture? How does such a form figure in the

discourse of the postcolonial? My contention is that Bhabha’s insistence upon an open

and diffuse architecture can be understood in terms of what I have called the

postcolonial sublime. For the discourse of the postcolonial, the sublime emerges as a

critical site upon which the authority of reason is written. To disrupt this conservative

authority it is necessary to unleash the sublime, its unpresentable excesses, from the

shackles of reason. Bhabha’s politics is marked by its insistence upon occupying

structures of conservative authority, in order to unleash an excess that disrupts the terms

of such authority.

My purposes in this chapter are twofold. Firstly, I aim to consider Bhabha in

terms of the question of excess and conflict. And secondly, I would wish to locate the

implications of this excess in the context of thinking contemporary culture. As the

thesis intends, I will show how Bhabha seeks to disrupt the authority of reason by

unleashing the sublime. This disruptive politics takes up the conservative structures of

colonial authority, and exploits the vulnerability of such structures. I will begin this

study of Bhabha by drawing some productive parallels between his work and Fanon’s

complex engagement with Hegel, as discussed in chapter three.

Bhabha, Fanon and Hegel

Although it is commonplace these days to grind Bhabha through the sieve of

names such as Lacan, and Derrida etc., I would wish to resist such a reading. Whilst I

think it correct that Bhabha uses the strategies of critique established by

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poststructuralism,371 there is an attempt to deflect, to push elsewhere the terms of this

critique. As such I think Bhabha needs to be read alongside Lacan and Derrida as a

theorist attempting to come to terms with a specific moment within modernity, the

emergence of the capitalist West as oppressor. I would, therefore, in the terms that I

have drawn up in the thesis thus far, wish to situate Bhabha’s thought in a critical

relation to the Idealism of Hegel. I think that this relation is necessary, firstly because it

was Hegel, not Derrida or Adorno, who initially revealed how culture transforms itself

qua culture, via struggle, such that new cultural and artistic forms emerge. This is

crucial for Bhabha. And secondly because it does provide a useful metaphor for

thinking through the relationship between power, identity, and agency, as they appear in

various forms in Bhabha’s theorisation of a postcolonial contra-modernity. Inspired by

Fanon, Hegel provides the terms for Bhabha’s critical work, and the terms for the

excesses and disruptions that are crucial in his elaboration of the location of culture.

In chapter three I argued that what Black Skin, White Masks effects in its

complex erasure of Hegel’s master and slave, is the notion that it is upon the black

body, in seizing that body that the struggle against colonial oppression begins.

Crucially, such a struggle cannot be defined in terms of the Hegelian dialectic, as an

opposing force, for as we have seen the black struggle has no political legitimacy in this

space. Instead such a struggle must be defined in relation to the dialectic, its rejected

location within and outside the system. It is from this space of rejection that Fanon’s

politics begins. Any voice that stirs in this space of the unspeakable, the unpresentable

as unpresentable, of temporal oblivion, effectively means that Hegel’s system leaks. As

Hegel sought to shore up Kantian reason, in a sense, to make its authority more robust

than the slippage in Kant’s architectonic system would allow, gaps, contradictions,

unaccountable spaces, appear. A politics of excess, of contamination begins to emerge

when these unpresentable spaces are seized in order to interrupt the totalising claims of

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reason. Such a politics seeks to expose the fragility of reasonable systems. Located on

that muddy borderline that Kant grappled with, the discourse of the postcolonial goes to

work upon the limits of reason. It seeks to open up a space of questioning, defiance, a

space that attempts to push reason beyond the terms of its limits. In many respects the

discourse of the postcolonial wrests the sublime from its inscription in the drama of

reason’s processes, and puts it to disruptive use. To continually open up what reason’s

legislation and systematics exclude is to open up the sublime, to seize what is despised

as the despised, and to make it a politically productive site.

I would wish to read Bhabha in light of this conclusion concerning Fanon’s

politics. In Bhabha we find an elaboration of culture that utilises the metaphor of the

sublime. The sublime emerges in Bhabha as that material excess that reason fails to

contain. When opened up, this space of uncontainability effects a politics that cannot

be understood in terms of a neat dialectics. As I have suggested throughout the thesis,

the conservative sublime has its dialectic in Idealism. But in the discourse of the

postcolonial the sublime is that which exceeds dialectics. The cogency of the discourse

of the postcolonial can be staged precisely in terms of the overspill, the excess, that

defies the limits of dialectics. The Location of Culture begins with the essay “The

Commitment to Theory”, in order to dispel the notion that to engage in ‘a politics of

resistance’, is to engage in an oppositional, antagonistic, ‘them’ and ‘us’, struggle.

Bhabha rejects this critical propensity, and argues that there is no point in considering

intercultural encounter as a collision of homogeneous, essential, wholes. It seems that

there is always the possibility that the polarities in such a schema can become unequal,

and it is thus futile to resort to a politics which merely asserts, what Paul Gilroy has

called, an ‘ethnic absolutism’372 to demolish Western essentialism.373

In keeping with the notion that Bhabha seeks to open the sublime as sublime, his

work charts the material basis for asserting the inadequacies of dialectics. For Bhabha

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the nature of postcolonial identity resists the kinds of neat categorisation that

traditionally inhabit theories of culture. Displaced peoples, because they do not have

Home as a ready reference point, dwell in-between the conventional cultural categories,

such as East/West. Displaced peoples are forced to negotiate the divide between past

and present, East and West, North and South, First and Third. This temporality is

crucial for it evokes an understanding of culture in terms of a metaphor of material

struggle; for Bhabha culture is ‘a strategy of survival’. Cultural identity emerges in

situations in which ‘survival’ becomes a central issue. It is in this conflictual terrain

that politics emerges, and cultural change is made possible. I will take up the question

of culture as survival in greater detail in due course. What I am seeking to underscore,

at present, is Bhabha’s emphasis upon cultural spaces that resist neat categorisation. It

is in this resistance to system that the postcolonial sublime emerges. I would thus wish

to begin by charting the outworking of this sublime in Bhabha. As the postcolonial self

resists neat categorisation, it is that which is left over, the excess that reason is unable to

contain that marks the moment of the postcolonial sublime. We can begin to chart the

political nuances of this excess by examining Bhabha’s critique of the postmodern.

The Postmodern Question

Bhabha’s critique of the postmodern conception of modernity can be drawn up

in terms of the phenomenological relationship between time and space. I turn to this

issue in these terms, because it is this phenomenology that leads directly to the

postmodern critique of Idealism. What is central here is the Idealist propensity to

privilege time over space in theorising consciousness. Kant for instance privileged time

over space in the imagination’s work upon the world of appearances.374 Hegel’s

conservatism is also drawn up in terms of time. As I argue in chapter three, time is a

measure for the progress of Geist, it is utilised to mark reason’s authority. This

privileging of the temporal as a marker of conservative authority is crucial for Bhabha.

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He seeks to interrupt the universal temporality that marks Hegel, with the notion that

space, cultural location, impacts upon consciousness. Bhabha attempts to open up the

cultural inscriptions that are hidden beneath the universal pretensions of Western

philosophy. As I showed in chapter two, for instance, Kant’s architectonic system is

contaminated at every turn by its cultural location, the space of its formulation. Bhabha

shows that the postmodern is not immune to such a (self)critical blindness.

Bhabha’s basic argument against the postmodern is that the postmodern critique

of modernity is inadequate because it fails to take its cultural location into account. We

could say that the postmodern replays the spatial blindness that I have suggested

inhabits Kant. In order to overcome different aspects of the modern, be it reason, the

problem of legitimation, Progress, or History, thinkers at the forefront of the

postmodern, such as Lyotard, set forth, what Bhabha calls, an ‘ethics of self-

construction’.375 This is the notion that in order for the self to be truly free from the

constraints of totalising systems of thought, it must be divested of any objective status

in order to be ‘constantly reconstructed and reinvented’.376 As we shall see, Bhabha’s

contention here is not with reconstruction itself since his work basically repeats this

aim. Its interest lies in the question of the relationship between time and space in this

reconstruction, and the political effects of the assumptions that underpin it.

In order to outline what is at issue here, Bhabha goes to work upon Foucault.

The ‘Great Event’ of the French Revolution (in Foucault’s reading of Kant’s Was ist

Aufklärung?),377 as a sign of modernity, can only be named as such if it is viewed from

a distance. Those in the midst of the action itself, ‘in the enunciative present’, could not

view the event as a spectacle, or interpret the event as a Sign in Foucault’s terms. Events

are made to mean in events that are outside, from the distance of perspective. Bhabha

in response to Foucault asks: whose is this space of distance? And points out that

Foucault’s perspective is nothing less than a Eurocentric one, since the ‘ontology of the

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present’ is constructed in terms of making sense — ‘sense-as-synchronous’— from

European space. This means that this reading of the past excludes, and contains, any

rupture in this perspectival sense of meaning. Bhabha writes, what “if the ‘distance’

that constitutes the meaning of the ‘Revolution’ as sign, the signifying lag between

event and enunciation, stretches not across the Place de la Bastille or the rue des blancs-

Monteaux, but spans the temporal difference of the colonial space?”.378

This question concerning the postmodern is also applicable to Lyotard’s reading

of Kant on the revolution. It too lacks the spatial self-consciousness that Bhabha

evokes. As I have suggested, this is one the problems with Lyotard’s reading of the

sublime. It fails to foreground the materiality of Kant’s Idealism. Similarly, for

Foucault, the practice of making time mean, and in this instance this means historical

event, is confined to a spatial perspective which assumes, for Bhabha, a continuity with

a European past. This practice leads Bhabha to make a statement that can be directly

linked to his critique of the postmodern: “the Eurocentricity of Foucault’s theory of

cultural difference is revealed in his insistent spatializing of the time of modernity” (my

emphasis).379 The point is that Bhabha considers the postmodern emphasis upon the

constant reconstruction of the self to be confined to a certain cultural and social space.

Instead of this Bhabha is interested in the possibility of meaning from different

perspectives, those that do not assume a spatial continuity with historical events in the

manner of Foucault. It seems that Bhabha is interested in emphasising the possibility of

difference within the formulations of these theorists of difference.380

The critique of the postmodern that is offered here can be understood in terms of

Weber’s contention concerning the time of capitalism. The use of this term has been set

forth in Terry Maley’s useful reading of Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of

Capitalism, in which questions concerning time are drawn into a critique of

instrumental rationalism. Maley writes:

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 Both Marx’s Promethean hero and Weber’s own were ... rendered anachronistic

because the conceptions of historical time — both linear and developmental —

that the nineteenth century had inherited from the Enlightenment were being

obliterated by the temporality specific to instrumental rationalization, by

chronometric time.381

Chronometric time is understood here as the abstract “time of modern scientific

calculation”, which, in the case of capitalist rationality, is “implicated in bureaucratic

structures, in discourses of power and disciplinary regimentation, and in the

rationalization of the modern world in general.” By the end of the nineteenth century, a

capitalist formulation of time emerged and demolished (what is for Weber the more

humane) modern “historically developmental time (Hegel, Marx) and linear,

progressive time (Condorcet, Comte, J.S. Mill)”. The effect of this is “a certain

endlessness ... an experience of time as never-ending, the endless repetition/production

of more”.382

But for Bhabha it is not simply an ‘instrumental rationality’ that is at issue here.

If the perpetual splitting of the subject, the constant reconstruction in terms of

interpreting the past from a distance, is the condition that frees subjects from the

constraints of the modern propensity to totalise, how, Bhabha writes, “do we specify the

historical conditions and theoretical configurations of ‘splitting’ in political situations of

‘unfreedom’ — in the colonial and postcolonial margins of modernity?”.383 The point

is, and here Bhabha parts company with Weber, that the constant fracturing of the

subject still implies a synchronous progression, or transformation, that is complicit with

time as it is privileged in Idealism. For Weber the loss of synchronicity was lamented

for its dehumanising effects. Hence we find Hegel among the few who offer a more

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“humane” conception of time. The capitalist subject is caught in the trap of an endless,

directionless time, and consequently human potential, namely the capacity to be free

from dogmatic rationality, is lost. The time that Bhabha seems to have in mind here,

however, is problematised precisely because of this continuity. Modern time enables

the idea of progress, as we have seen in Hegel, and differentiates the past from the

present, such that categories such as the modern and the primitive arise.384 Continuous

time has enabled the West to think itself legitimate and authentic, an identity worthy of

protection and propagation. Postmodern thinkers would obviously reject linear

progression outright, the point, however, is that the meaning of the past is still

constructed in terms of modern time’s differentiating function, the present judged in

terms of the past from the space of Europe.

The temporality that Maley’s Weber champions thus emerges in opposition to

what I have called the excesses of the postcolonial. Two points need to be stressed here.

The first is that modernity is understood in terms of the Enlightenment ideal of the

rational free ‘man’, the discourse in which “the figure of the ‘human’ comes to be

authorized”. The second relates to the first. Modernity is the consensual march of

progress (developmental or linear), and economic and industrial development. It is a

temporal notion, one that differentiates the past from the present and future, and which

legitimates or delegitimates culture and society. These two moments converge in Tony

Spybey’s description of Europe’s capitalist expansion. I note the crucial link between

the social and the philosophical at work here.

The success of the European states in setting up their colonial empires gave the

Europeans a tremendous sense of their own superiority. This coincided with the

Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution so that there appeared no

limits to the frontiers, abstract or physical, that Europeans could push back. The

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 fusion of a culture of rationality with political and economic power created the

positivistic world-view.385

I would suggest that in Bhabha’s critique of the postmodern the relevance of

philosophical reason for the discourse of the postcolonial begins to emerge. In the

construction of postmodern epistemologies, which assume the postmodern as a cultural

dominant, there seems to be a disregard for the possibility of other spaces. The

disregard for otherness is constructed in terms, as Simon During so aptly puts it, “which

more or less intentionally wipe out the possibility of post-colonial identity. Indeed ...

the conceptual annihilation of the post-colonial condition is actually necessary to any

argument which attempts to show that ‘we’ now live in postmodernity”.386 The

postmodern thus reads much like reason’s processes: it is not immune to making

universal claims, and it produces cultural spaces that are unable to be subordinated to

the terms of its critique of modernity. I would suggest that what Bhabha seizes in his

critique of the postmodern, are these spaces that exceed the scope and terms of the

postmodern. As this chapter begins, we may gesture toward defining the discourse of

the postcolonial as that which is left over when the postmodern reaches its limits. It is

with this sense of the spatial limits of the postmodern in mind that I would wish to

outline Bhabha’s postcolonial time. In keeping with the aim of the thesis, I will draw

this temporality into my engagement in the sublime. The sublime emerges as a

disrupting force, a critical temporality that interrupt’s the hegemony of Western reason.

The Time of Politics

Bhabha launches an alternative conception of space, time, and politics via Frantz

Fanon’s “sense of the belatedness of the black man”.387 This recalls the

exclusion/inclusion of the African in Hegel’s Philosophy of History. Of course it has to

be said that Bhabha’s reading of Fanon appears to remain selective and therefore

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contentious, since it departs from Fanon’s more existential and Marxist moments. For

many this is an unacceptable critical practice. It could be argued, in response to this

charge, that Bhabha’s use of Fanon in this fashion is one which refuses to reduce his

ouvre to a singular whole, and attempts to present some of the more dissenting

moments, at least from Bhabha’s perspective. My own reading of Fanon in chapter

three takes up such a reading strategy, though I put it to use in areas that Bhabha passes

over. The outcome, however, remains consistent with Bhabha. Fanon’s unsettled

Hegelianism attempts to open up, what he calls (with a different object in mind),

“Fanon’s insight into the dark side of Man”.388

In order to formulate the temporality of a material politics, Bhabha focuses upon

the assumed benevolence, as articulated by Fanon, toward the colonised that

accompanied the European sense of superiority: “But of course, come in, sir, there is no

colour prejudice among us. ... Quite, the Negro is a man like ourselves. ... It is not

because he is black that he is less intelligent than we”.389 This attempts to reveal a

discontinuous temporal gap between the white world of the coloniser, and the black

world of the colonised desire to be like the white man. The gap reveals that the black

world, despite its desire, arrives too late, it is always one step behind in the myth of

progression that sustains the Western sense of superiority. We can understand this

superiority in Hegelian terms as a temporal accomplishment.

For Bhabha this discontinuity is further exemplified in Fanon’s unconventional

grammatology: “Le nègre n’est pas. Pas plus que le Blanc”.390 This in-between

grammatical moment (the full stop) exemplifies, in Bhabha’s scheme, the time of

politics, the possibility of the seizure of the391 location of culture as an uncontainable

space. Fanon’s choice to use a full stop in this instance functions temporally rather than

spatially as the work’s title suggests. The full stop marks the end of the first clause, and

the gap, break, interruption, between the first and the second. The choice not to use an

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exclamation mark, or a question mark (which, apart from the full stop, are the only

conventional ways to end French and English sentences), also means that one clause is

not emphasised over the other. The distinction that emerges is thus a temporal one.

Two clauses emerge in the space upon the page, but the relationship between them is

temporal. One asserts itself in front of the other. The ‘location of culture’, as a

metaphor in this instance, thus functions, paradoxically, in terms of time, since

‘location’ is a spatial term. Fanon’s formulation thus becomes the sign of the ‘time-lag

of cultural difference’. The full stop marks a break, a temporal gap between black and

white, and this becomes the site which makes a politics of resistance possible, or as

Bhabha writes:

The power of the postcolonial translation of modernity rests in its performative,

deformative structure that does not simply revalue the contents of a cultural

tradition, or transpose values ‘cross culturally’. The cultural inheritance of

slavery or colonialism is brought before modernity not to resolve its historic

differences into a new totality, nor to forego its traditions. It is to introduce

another locus of inscription and intervention, another hybrid, ‘inappropriate’

enunciative site, through that temporal split — or time lag — that I have opened

up ... for the signification of postcolonial agency.392

If the colonised arrives too late in the myth of progression, then there is a sense in which

the colonised speaks from Europe’s past. If a linear relationship between the past and

the present is the legitimating strategy of modernity, then it is possible, if this past is

occupied in some sense, to disrupt the present. Because the colonised occupies this past

space — ‘time-lag’ — this “postcolonial ‘belatedness’... disturbs the punctum of man as

the signifying, subjectifying category of Western culture”.393 Politics thus emerges in

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this space of ‘belatedness’, in what has been left behind. Such a ‘belatedness’ when

seized in terms of the logic of the colonial, effectively disrupts colonial time. Cultural

struggle is a temporal notion in this scheme, it emerges in the temporal gap between

coloniser and colonised in order to produce sites of the elsewhere, or the ‘hybrid’ as

Bhabha formulates it elsewhere.

The temporal location of the postcolonial disrupts the temporality of the

colonial. Like the question of exile that Gordon Bennett’s Painting for a New Republic

(The Inland Sea) opens up — where am I? (as I discussed in chapter two) — Bhabha

inserts (an)other time into the space of the colonial nation. This is a strategy that seeks

to disrupt what I have called the process of reason, the task of Western philosophy to

produce an authoritative account of reason. In the temporal gap between the coloniser

and colonised, the possibility of contesting this task is opened up. This gap can be

described as the location of cultural agency. The ‘time lag’ evokes an indeterminacy, an

always already ‘yet-to-be-decided’. It is a space that marks a struggle concerning the

way history can be made to mean. In the context of Hegel’s thought, such struggle

disturbs the capacity of reasonable systems. Thus rather then privilege time over space,

as in Idealism, what Bhabha underscores is the difficult temporality of spatial

marginalisation.

From “the shifting margins of cultural displacement”,394 Bhabha writes, from the

perspective of peoples who do not have a ‘cultural reference point that is readily

available’, a people who inhabit a problematic relationship to modern time, questions

concerning identity, agency, power and politics, and community emerge. This difficult

cultural location can be understood in terms of the sublime. It is a space of excess, a too

late, that does not fit into totalising cultural forms, the stability of Western dialectics.

Bhabha's cogency derives from the following presupposition. The postcolonial

inhabits a ‘space’ that cannot be unproblematically defined. It is a kind of ‘other-space’

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that is ‘located’ in time in-between fixed categories, a place of hybridity, a space of

translation, a place in which a new political object emerges being ‘neither one nor the

other’. This is the “‘middle passage’ of contemporary culture”, which, as “a process of

displacement and disjunction ... does not totalize experience”.395 Postcolonial identity is

thus unable to be defined in terms of a unified ‘essence’. It seems that the postcolonial

exists in a groundless and indeterminate space, which, from the perspective of the

hegemonic West, has the potential to be a sublime threat.

Rather than being cause for lament for Bhabha, the groundless ‘location’ of the

postcolonial is celebrated as a space that disrupts and alters the destination of the

discourses of domination. As I discussed in chapter one, such a celebration effectively

takes up Moraru’s parallel model of the relationship between the West and its other.

Moraru contends that this relationship can be staged as oblique and politically

conflictual. Parallel discourses, running as it were in opposite directions, suggests that

colonial and postcolonial nationalisms cannot simply be understood in terms of a

dialectic of self-consciousness. What Moraru opens up is the possibility of thinking of

the colonisers and their relation to the colonies and former colonies through metaphors

of contamination and disruption, rather than antagonism or consensus. I would contend,

along with Moraru, who explains that the ‘Orientalising of Europe’ has been staged ‘on

different scales and with varying political bearings’, that the possibility of this

Orientalisation, precisely because of the inequality of (post)colonial relations, arises as a

disturbing threat to the authority of the colonial. Such disturbances are less antagonistic

challenges to pedagogic authority, or consensual, cultural ‘sharing’, than cultural

excesses that disrupt the structural terms of that authority. In this regard, Bhabha’s

thought is indispensable. The pedagogic authority of the (former) colonial, expressed

through the myth of nationalist unity, contends not just with the structural necessities of

self-consciousness, but also with the possibility of a disturbance to that structure. The

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‘Orientalisation of Europe’ can thus be understood as an instance in which the

postcolonial sublime takes effect. It will be useful to turn to some of the key critical

terms that Bhabha employs in order to explain the critical task of the postcolonial in-

between, its sublime possibilities.

Bhabha’s Infrastructures

Bhabha undertakes the task of opening up the space of what I have called the

postcolonial sublime via an examination of colonial discourse through novelists such as

Morrison, Gordimer, Walcott, Rushdie, and Conrad, archival documents from the

Indian Mutiny, Third World Cinema, and nineteenth century colonial history. Several

key terms are set forth in order to open up a disruptive postcoloniality within colonial

discourse. In chapter one I suggested that the discourse of the postcolonial is grounded

in the notion that the nationalism of ‘third world’ liberation movements effectively

delivered the former colonies back into the hands of the old colonial powers (Chatterjee,

Davidson, Dirks). The term ‘postcolonial’ thus directly relates to colonialism, and

suggests that colonial power has not diminished but has merely shifted its structure of

authority (Prakash). I would suggest that in Bhabha such a proposition concerning a

reformulated colonial power is central. It is significant that in a critical undertaking that

takes up the postcolonial to prise open the question of culture, there does not seem to be

a great deal of discrimination between texts that obviously occupy the height of

colonialism and texts that have emerged after colonialism. This lack of discrimination

implies, as I have suggested, that the political, economic, and cultural world is still

indelibly marked by subtle and not so subtle structures of colonial power. It seems that

for Bhabha, and the discourse of the postcolonial in general, the term ‘postcolonial’

marks the necessity of (re)turning to the primal scene of colonial domination in order to

articulate a politics for today. If reason is compelled to repeat the possibility of its

collapse (the conservative sublime) in order to establish its authority, the discourse of

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the postcolonial compulsively returns to the terror of colonialism to find a ground for a

contemporary politics.

The discourse of the postcolonial hinges upon this assumption concerning a

restructured colonial power. Is it a valid assumption? I would suggest unmistakably so.

At the core of such a pessimistic assumption there is the stark reality of the failure of

liberal democracy to deliver a more equitable world. Bound in a conservatism that

continues to be preoccupied with myths of national unity, the polyglot nature of the

contemporary world remains, in the formulations that mark this thesis, the object of

reason’s teleology. It is precisely this accent upon the dominance of conservative

politics that leads us to what I have called Bhabha’s infrastructures. In this (re)turn to

the primal scene of colonial domination Bhabha’s infrastructures set forth the grounds

for a politics of postcoloniality. Such a politics seeks to disrupt the conservative

insistence upon symbols of oneness, and the political consequences of oneness, with a

discourse of excess. In the context of this thesis, this insistence upon excessive and

disruptive sites means that the sublime can never be as contained as the pundits of a

confident Idealism presupposed.

Several interrelated terms are marshalled in order to examine colonial discourse,

some of which have become the standard critical terms for postcolonial criticism.396

Among these, mimicry, sly civility, subaltern agency, hybridity, the third space of

enunciation, and culture as a strategy of survival, have emerged as the most pivotal. I

shall outline the key features of each term, and subsequently make some connections to

the vulnerable structure of the colonial that I have suggested is at the core of Bhabha’s

work. My aim is to examine the staging of the location of culture. I shall begin this

outline with the term mimicry. Bhabha writes:

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 colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a

difference that is almost the same, but not quite … the discourse of mimicry is

constructed around an ambivalence; in order to be effective, mimicry must

continually produce its slippage, its excess, its difference.397

Whilst ‘mimicry’ in this formulation is set forth in the language of Freud (fantasy) and

Lacan (camouflage), it is also a formulation that calls an understanding of the teleology

of colonial reason into play. I would contend that ultimately the political possibilities

that Bhabha seeks to open up come to the fore only in and through disruptions to

Hegelian systemisation. Lacan and Freud function in this context precisely as sites from

which to draw the possibility of such a disruption.

As I argued concerning Hegel in chapter three, the importance of Hegelian

thought in the context of Europe’s colonial expansion, and, therefore, for the discourse

of the postcolonial, with its emphasis upon conflict, liberation, becomes apparent in

Hegel’s reworking of the Kantian sublime. Hegel’s theory of the self is drawn up

around one basic problematic. Proceeding from the assumption that Absolute Spirit

(unity) is greater than the individual self, it becomes the task of the self to overcome the

unknown darkness within, in order to be at one with the Absolute. Whilst Kant argued

that the Absolute perspective is impossible, and remained content to locate reason’s

dynamism in relation to reason’s dark side, for Hegel the absolute perspective is as

necessary as it is indispensable in reason’s historical teleology. This history marks the

progressive movement of human consciousness from darkness to light, from the obscure

to the axiomatic, from slavery to mastery.

In the colonial encounter in Bhabha, this formulation of reason takes an

interesting turn. As the colonial draws his subject into a narcissistic structure of

identification, to make them ‘the same’, to draw ‘them’ into the light of reason, a gap

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between the possibility of that sameness and its impossibility, ‘but not quite’, appears.

This gap emerges as a necessary part of the colonial game. As Hegel reveals,

possession demands its object continuously, but such a demand is necessitated on the

basis of the object always remaining an object. The demand for mimicry by the

coloniser thus reveals a major pitfall that disrupts the grounds for colonial authority.

The subject of mimicry is marked by a sameness that is also a difference, a visibility

that is at once a menacing camouflage (Lacan), and, in the language of Freud (on the

nature of fantasy), as Bhabha writes, problematises “the very notion of ‘origins’ … It is

a form of colonial discourse that is uttered inter dicta: a discourse at the crossroads of

what is known and permissible and that which though known must be kept

concealed”.398 It is this difference/camouflage/metonymy of presence that Bhabha puts

to a political use. In the context of Hegel’s thought — which is driven by a process of

unconcealment — the possibility of concealment disturbs the authority of the system

that reason produces.

Bhabha writes, the discursive “excess or slippage produced by the ambivalence

of mimicry … does not merely ‘rupture’ the discourse [of the colonial], but becomes

transformed into an uncertainty which fixes the colonial subject as a ‘partial’

presence”.399 The colonial subject thus ‘resembles’ the colonial, yet at the same time

becomes a ‘menace’, as Bhabha puts it, since this resemblance can never be complete.

This means that colonial authority is never a totalising discourse, there remains a

subjectivity that exceeds the limits of that authority. The subject of mimicry, a subject

of the ‘knowing’ colonial, the subject made visible by the cognitive powers of

Enlightenment, remains in many ways hidden and not known, beyond the authority of

reason. That hidden moment within mimicry, the unpresentable, is thus a political

disruption only insofar as it opens up the possibility of the question within the discourse

of colonial mastery, and with it the possibility of changing the terms of that colonial

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imposition. Mimicry is a menace precisely because it unleashes a hidden space within

the confines of reason.

The civil discourse — sly civility — of the colonial also struggles in the face of

ambivalence. Bhabha writes:

What threatens the authority of colonial command is the ambivalence of its

address … which will not be resolved in a dialectical play of power. … Between

the civil address and its colonial signification — each axis displaying a problem

of recognition and repetition — shuttles the signifier of authority in search of a

strategy of surveillance, subjection, and inscription. Here there can be no dialectic

of the master-slave for where discourse is so disseminated can there ever be the

passage from trauma to transcendence? From alienation to authority? Both

colonizer and colonized are in a process of miscognition where each point of

identification is always a partial and double repetition of the otherness of the

self.400

What is at issue here, once again, is the attempt to disrupt the process of reason. If

Fanon celebrated and unleashed what reason attempts to subdue — the body — Bhabha

seeks the disturbing hidden spaces within reason’s processes to disrupt the terms of its

authority. Hegel’s model provides the grounds for the colonial encounter, it

characterises colonial desire initially — to systematise — but at the same time must be

effaced, for the encounter with the other resists this possibility. The imposition of

authority is thus less the smooth drawing together of disparate elements, than a process

of splitting. The colonial is caught between its desire to make concrete its abstract

thought, and, what could be considered, the actual discursive encounter. In the case of

sly civility we find that the coloniser/colonised relationship is defined in terms of

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miscognition, rather than the recognition that can be found in Hegel’s

phenomenological model. Again the accent upon miscognition produces a subject that

disrupts the dialectic of unconcealment. In similar fashion to the ideas that cluster

around mimicry, we find the colonial desire for repetition, and the problem that the

demand for repetition produces: it never produces the same but the difference of the

same.

Subaltern agency is also staged in terms of a slippage that works against the

sureties of colonial authority:

This emphasis on the disjunctive present of utterance enables the historian to get

away from defining subaltern consciousness as binary, as having positive or

negative dimensions. It allows the articulation of subaltern agency to emerge as

relocation and reinscription. In the seizure of the sign … there is neither

dialectical sublation nor the empty signifier: there is a contestation of the given

symbols of authority that shift the terrains of antagonism. The synchronicity in

the social ordering of symbols is challenged within its own terms, but the grounds

of engagement have been displaced in a supplementary movement that exceeds

those terms.401

The ‘disjunctive present’, as opposed to abstract desire, is the crucial element in

engagement in thought concerning colonialism. The contact between the coloniser and

the colonised is theorised in the temporal and spatial terms that Bhabha opens up in his

critique of the postmodern. The moment of the event of communication, the now of

colonial encounter, is marked by a radical disjunction between the coloniser and

colonised. The now of colonialism in this formulation is less an event in Lyotard’s

terms than an overdetermined site, marked by both the structures of colonial desire and

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the desire of the objects of colonial desire. What is at issue in the space of the now of

colonialism, for Bhabha, is the meaning of signs, and the possibilities that the

ownership of signs opens up, or shuts down.

We can recall Derrida’s lucid argument in Dissemination concerning the

relationship between speech and writing here. Derrida points out that Plato’s mistrust of

writing, as opposed to the valorisation of speech, in the Phaedrus, where writing

presupposes the absence of the author’s authority over the communicative event, and is

deemed a threat to the interests of morality and truth, is, paradoxically, condemned itself

to be written in the interests of the same. Writing is thus constituted in terms of the

logic of the Pharmakon: it is both a remedy that is able to counteract the deficiencies of

speech, and a poison, since it operates in terms of the absence of authority. Derrida

attempts to disrupt the assumption of Western philosophy that constitutes itself in terms

of speech, but which must always be condemned to writing. We could say that Bhabha

takes up this logic in his analysis of colonial acts. Colonial desire, for Bhabha, cannot

operate solely in terms of the spatial demands of speech. Like Plato’s mistrust of

writing, colonial desire demands a wide dissemination that calls upon the discursive to

supplement the spatial drawback of speech. This means that colonial logic, like

Western philosophy, is inscribed in the logic of the pharmakon. Derrida writes, “the

pharmakon is ‘ambivalent’ because it constitutes the element in which opposites are

opposed, the movement and play by which each relates back to the other, reverses itself

and passes into the other … The pharmakon is the movement, the locus, and the play

(the production) of difference”.402

Bhabha champions this play between texts and their colonial authors. The

movement, rupture, and disjunctions that are inscribed in the logic of the pharmakon

open up the possibility for contesting the meaning of colonial signs. In fact we could go

a step further and say that it is not the possibility of contestation that is what is at issue

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here, it is that contestation itself is a structural necessity. Indeed as Lord Alfred

Tennyson would write in 1872:

... The Loyal to their crown

Are loyal to their own far sons, who love

Our ocean-empire with her boundless homes

For ever-broadening England, and her throne

In our vast Orient, and one isle, one isle,

That knows not her own greatness: if she knows

And dreads it we are fall’n.403

What struck the imagination of Britain during the height of its colonial reign was a stark

awareness of Britain as an Island with a relatively small population. We are ‘one isle’,

the poet repeats, yet masters of a vast empire. The issue of maintaining such a vastness,

administratively, economically, and culturally, remained at the forefront of the colonial

mind. The uniting of the plethora of differences under one flag was as an immense task.

To achieve a sense of unity across such a vast space would indeed be a great

accomplishment. Just as Idealism established the authority of reason via its capacity to

bring a unity to bear upon the manifold (Kant), to unite disparate elements (Hegel), the

Empire shone as an example of the greatness of Britain.

But was the Empire ever unified? Or was it always haunted at its edges by the

nagging thought that ultimately this robust image of unity was extremely costly

(economically, administratively, socially), and fragile? Consider Adam Smith’s

dismissal of the value of empire:

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 The rulers of Great Britain have, for more than a century past, amused the people

with the imagination that they possessed a great empire on the west side of the

Atlantic. This empire, however, has hitherto existed in imagination only. It has

hitherto been, not an empire, but the project of an empire; not a gold mine, but the

project of a gold mine; a project which has cost, which continues to cost, and

which, if pursued in the same way as it has been hitherto, is likely to cost,

immense expence, without being likely to bring any profit [sic].404

The notion of the incompleteness of the accomplishments of empire animates Smith’s

concern for profitability. The empire for Smith was clearly in process, as his repeated

insistence upon the term “project” suggests. His acute economic analysis reveals the

disjunction between colonial desire and its actuality in the space and time of the

colonies that Bhabha underscores. Reason’s colonial teleology remains an abstract

desire that was forced to face the complicated and irreconcilable demands of

colonialism.

As a discursive regime that effects images of the unity of empire, colonial

authority is haunted by the logic of the pharmakon. Colonial authority thus can never

arrive in terms of the demands of colonial desire. There are uncontainable sites that

disrupt the desire to subsume the object under the ruling principles of reason. In

practice the colonial was very rarely reasonable. Perhaps the most stark instance of this

emphasis upon the impossibility of a dominant cultural sign, can be found in Bhabha’s

notion of hybridity:

To grasp the ambivalence of hybridity, it must be distinguished from an inversion

that would suggest that the originary is, really, only an ‘effect’. Hybridity has no

such perspective of depth or truth to provide: it is not a third term that resolves the

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 tension between two cultures, or the two scenes of the book, in a dialectical play

of ‘recognition’. The displacement from symbol to sign creates a crisis for any

concept of authority based on a system of recognition: colonial specularity,

doubly inscribed, does not produce a mirror where the self apprehends itself; it is

always the split screen of the self and its doubling, the hybrid.405

Hybridity is set forth in terms of a crisis in the process of reason. Again we find

doubling, repetition, and an excessive displacement that cannot be contained. The

colonial subject as the mirror of the colonial, can never reflect back the kind of

recognition that the coloniser demands. There is a rupture, a disjunction in the process,

which means that authority can never be unified. In order to maintain mastery the

colonial, as a structural necessity, must disavow unity. Mastery can never be a fixed

imposition. It is marked by movement, change, and transformations. It can never draw

upon fixed traditions of knowledge, but, like the capitalist logic in which it is

embedded, must efface those traditions in order to take up new ones in the struggle for

mastery. The colonial encounter produces sites which cannot be reduced to the terms of

that encounter. New spaces are produced which disrupt and force the processes of

reason to constantly move elsewhere in an irresolvable crises.

Of the mobile army of figures deployed in order to articulate the politics of the

postcolonial, ‘hybridity’ perhaps emerges as the most pivotal,406 at least in the context

of Bhabha’s critical reception. The example outlined in The Location of Culture is that

of the Hindu response to the message of Christian missionaries in India.407 It seems that

Hindus resisted Christianity not through a straight out rejection of the Christian message

but by articulating a ‘supplementary’ discourse: ‘give us the vegetarian Bible and we

will convert’. Bhabha notes that this construction ! the vegetarian Bible ! is not

prefigured in the Hindu/Christian dialectic, but goes beyond it. The construction of a

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‘hybrid’ object by Hindus in this instance, functions as a sign of resistance that cannot

be contained dialectically, it pushes dialectics elsewhere. As a consequence the

Christian missionary is frustrated by the emergence of the hybrid, and must redefine, re-

evaluate, and change, in order to maintain status as the teacher of the faith. Hybridity

thus emerges as a disturbance to the assumed authority of colonial pedagogy. Its

nuances relate to the issue of spatial displacement and its effect upon the time of culture,

and identity that I have outlined. Hybridity is the moment in which colonial desire is

frustrated by a politics that contaminates, transgresses, pushes meaning beyond the

limits that have been marked by the colonial. In the now of colonial pedagogy, colonial

desire is thus less the total imposition of a predictable, monolithic cultural unity upon an

otherwise empty native signifier, than a frantic attempt to ‘pin down’ the meanings that

the native other subverts. The grounds for the certitude of the colonial are

problematised, Bhabha writes, “not by the simple assertion of an antagonistic cultural

tradition”, but by a “process of translation” which opens up “another contentious

political and cultural site at the heart of colonial representation”.408

I would contend that the hybrid as a space of excess can be understood as an

instance in which the postcolonial sublime emerges. The possibility of contesting

cultural signs ultimately means that colonial desire can never be fully present to itself.

When this desire is employed in the dissemination of the sign of cultural unity, it suffers

a kind of violence. For the coloniser the sign bears the trace of the colonial ! its

materiality means that it is recognisable (the Bible as a sacred text) ! but to the

colonised the colonial sign is understood in terms of a different cultural sign system.

The colonial sign is thus subverted, structurally disrupted by the native: the Bible is a

sacred text, but its sacredness is dependent upon … . This process of doubling can be

understood in terms of the politics of excess that is the subject of this thesis. The

production of a hybrid site that exceeds the limits of colonial desire disempowers the

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colonial as it empowers the native. The coloniser recognises the structural limitations of

its desire and, in order to maintain the authoritative hand, transforms what is otherwise

considered to be his unitary cultural discourse. The colonial process thus gives rise to

hybridity for both the coloniser, in the act of self negation that is necessary for the

practice of domination, and the colonised, in resisting the coloniser. As can be seen, the

political site for this process is never fixed and unitary, the simple conflict of a unified

master and slave. Such a site is in flux, always already in a state of emergency as the

hybrid as sublime excess emerges to alter the destination of the coloniser and the

colonised relationship.

The critical terminology that I have briefly outlined must be understood in

temporal and spatial terms. The now of colonial encounter, its location in space and

time, is set against the abstract teleology of reason. There is an important distinction

between the abstract and the actual, between reason’s teleology and actual colonial

encounter at work here. Bhabha’s terms of engagement in colonial discourse seek to

move beyond the abstract, in order to resist totalising colonial encounters. It is

important to note that the now of colonial encounter, as I have outlined, cannot be

understood in terms of the Lyotardian event. The enunciative space is a space of

confrontation, a conflict concerning reason’s fort/da, unlike the event which functions

as a moment in itself. The excesses that the space of the now can be considered

disruptive precisely because there is a teleology at work, or at least a teleology figures

in the political nuances that can be drawn up around excess. Rather than a moment of

prefiguration, as in the Lyotardian event, the indeterminacy that characterises

postcolonial excess can be considered a residue that is left over after the encounter, after

the dissemination of colonial desire.

It is in this temporal space that the confrontation of the coloniser and colonised

is staged. This confrontation can be characterised as a discursive event,409 a struggle

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concerning the authority of dominant cultural signs. As I have suggested, there is a

sense in which colonial desire is inhabited by the logic of the pharmakon. The

dissemination of the abstract colonial sign of unity does not seem to be able to arrive at

its colonial destination as a self-presence. To use the well worn distinction between the

motivated and purposeful nature of the symbol and the arbitrary sign, the abstract

symbol of colonial authority at the point of dissemination emerges as an arbitrary sign.

The possibilities of the sign exceeds the intentions of the symbolic forms of authors.

The disjunction between authors and signs in the temporal and spatial singularity of the

colonial moment becomes the site for transgression on the part of the colonised subject.

Colonial conflict is thus a cultural concern, a struggle concerning the sign/symbol of

cultural unity.

I would suggest, and I will deal with this in a moment, that the discursive space

that characterises the colonial encounter can be understood as a space of conflicting

desires. But one would wonder, and Bhabha doesn’t really deal with this, why the space

of the now, as a space concerning the sign/symbol of unity, is privileged in the colonial

encounter over the notion that colonialism itself, whilst it does operate discursively, is

also a spatial imposition? I have suggested that Bhabha’s emphasis upon the complex

relation of the temporal and the spatial is drawn from one of Derrida’s infrastructures,

the pharmakon, but this doesn’t ultimately deal with the problem of spatial imposition.

The modern colonial built jails, railroads, power stations, and schools, and established

plantations. The process of colonial modernity was a very physical one. It designed

buildings, introduced machines, and built infrastructures that changed the landscape and

reorganised the structures of human relationships. It would be valid to understand the

building of a church in a native village as a discursive act, but to suggest that a church

building is nothing but a discursive act, as Bhabha seems to, is to overlook the

physicality of buildings, and the impact they have upon bodies, feelings, and the

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libidinal drives. If this is the case then the question of resistance cannot be reduced to

the working out of a discursive desire. Resistance must involve a physical dimension.

What I am suggesting is that to resist a colonial presence such as the church

requires much more than a struggle concerning the sign of unity. It also involves taking

hold of the infrastructures that are built around the institution in order to effect social

change. A reconsideration of colonial encounter as a spatial phenomenon, to use a

phrase from Manuel Castells, based upon the notion that “space is not a ‘reflection of

society’, it is society”,410 would open up possibilities for the questions of agency and

resistance that Bhabha doesn’t engage in. This renders Bhabha’s propensity for the

discursive temporal as a limited engagement in the question of colonial encounter. But

as I have suggested, the scope of Bhabha’s infrastructures seems to be much broader

than simply detailing what took place in the history of colonialism. I would argue that

his work lends itself to a contemporary politics in which the discursive is paramount to

any politics. What is pointed in Bhabha’s ‘discursive turn’, as opposed to the Lyotard

of The Differend, is the struggle of desire that animates the discursive. I will attend to

this in due course.

Having suggested that Bhabha’s discursive turn is marked by the figure of

desire, I would contend, contra Benita Parry, that this discursive and temporal staging of

the colonial encounter depends upon, rather than excludes, the dialectic of colonial

domination. Parry argues that the groundlessness that is implied in the privileging of

the discursive does not empower the native and give cause to resistance. Writing from a

Marxist vantage point, she argues that Bhabha has been seduced by a poststructuralist

pantextualism — “there is no knowledge outside representation” — in his insistence

upon mobilising “the language model to explain colonialism’s past social processes and

contemporary postcolonial situations”.411 For Parry, Bhabha presents the terror of

colonialism as a kind of writing which is somehow destabilised by Derridean différance.

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Moreover the utilisation of ‘hybridity’ as a conceptual term to undermine colonialism’s

pretension to order — by disrupting the system of oppositions that make this order

possible — is an ‘agonistic’ politics that denies the possibility of oppositional conflict

between the coloniser and colonised, and thus the reality of colonial oppression. The

crux of the matter is that an agonistic strategy implies that the coloniser and colonised

do not inhabit a dialectic of domination. For Parry, Bhabha has subsumed the

ontological conflicts that constitute colonial encounter beneath an Ontology that

subordinates human experience to language, and which does not engage in the material

base. This means that instead of approaching the question of colonialism as the hostile

struggle between two opposing, ‘antagonistic’ forces, in which the distribution of power

is not equal, Bhabha stages the coloniser and the colonised relationship as a competition

upon a level playing field for the appropriation of cultural symbols. For Parry this

means that Bhabha’s concern with hybridity as a product of colonisation — where

cultural difference is translated “in the third space of enunciation, where it is reiterated

differently from its prior context”412 — sets him apart from the more general, and

useful, use of the term by Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall, among others, as denoting

culture’s multiple accents.

For my purposes two things are at issue here. The first concerns the claim that

Bhabha refuses to think resistance in terms of a dialectic of domination, or at least

stages the question of resistance in terms which demand the abolition of the antagonism

that constitutes the dialectic of domination. The second is what I perceive as a

conceptual error in Parry’s engagement in Bhabha’s work. Her argument conflates the

now of colonial encounter with the abstract, in a way that is not consistent with

Bhabha’s text. She fails to consider Bhabha’s textualism in terms of the relationship

between desire and the processes of signification. This means the argument, whilst it

does point towards the limits of pure textualism, misses what is at stake in this attempt

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to relocate the question of culture. If Lyotard and Foucault were interested in the

meaning of the revolution from a distance, as I have outlined, Bhabha is concerned with

the event from the space of the revolution itself. But this insistence upon the now of the

event is not to take up the postmodern preoccupation with the local, as Parry implies.

The now of colonial encounter in Bhabha, is excessive and disruptive precisely because

it can be located in relation to global economic and cultural discourses. In Bhabha the

local emerges as less a site in itself, which somehow disrupts metanarratives, than a site

of inscription. In the colonial context, what Bhabha opens up is what happens when the

metanarrative as process comes to the village.

Thus far I have argued that Bhabha’s terms of engagement in colonial

contestation can be characterised as singular events that render the space of domination

as uncertain. This temporal and spatial emphasis aims at dealing with colonial acts in

terms of the instant in which they take place. I have suggested that, because of this

singularity, these are terms that attempt to resist a pretension to abstraction. Bhabha

does, however, set this process of contestation forth in abstract terms. This is the

function of the much used term, the ‘third space of enunciation’. This term provides an

interesting opening for a consideration of the desire, which, as I have suggested,

emerges in the context of discursive disruption, and also of Bhabha’s critical position on

the question of contemporary culture. Here the figure of the migrant comes to the fore.

If mimicry, sly civility, subaltern agency, and hybridity underscore contingent

disruptions to colonial discourse, the third space builds upon these insights and marks

the disturbing figure of the migrant for the Western nation. He writes:

It is that Third Space, though unrepresentable in itself, which constitutes the

discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of

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 culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be

appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew.413

The third space is set forth as a kind transcendental condition (Kant). It is the structural

space that characterises the overlap in intercultural encounter. It is a space which is set

forth under the demands of consensus, assimilation, but which ultimately is unable to

deliver, and leads to conflict and excess. In itself it is ‘unrepresentable’, it does not

precede the actual encounter itself. As such the third space seems to be both inside and

outside the discursive. It seems to function as an alterity within the communicative act,

which means that inter-cultural encounter is necessarily marked by a process of

translation on the part of the desiring subject. Intercultural encounter is marked by the

presence of the unpresentable.

Bhabha does not develop the use of the term fully. But it seems to open up an

idea of desire and its role in the processes of signification in a way which underscores

the textual disjunctions of the colonial encounter and migrancy, and which enables

Bhabha to champion ambivalence as productive rather than negative from the

perspective of the colonised/migrant. The third space works against both the

“primordial unity” and “the notion of fixity”, expressed in the desire of the Western

nation. It promotes transgression and subversion which, in the context of myths of

national unity, can be seen to be productive for the migrant and disruptive to the nation-

state. Clearly Bhabha in abstraction seeks a term in order to stage an alternative desire,

one which confronts the desire of the conservative nation-state. I say this because his

work is littered with telling phrases such as, “the everyday existence of the Western

metropolis”, and “Maggie Torture’s Britain” (Rushdie), that are opposed to the

“revenge of the migrant”, “hybridity is heresy”, and cultural translation is blasphemy.414

This means that the third space is marked as transgressive (the subversion of the object

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of the referent for its own ends). The location of an excessive cultural space, the

scandalous ‘third space’, contests both the discourses of cultural relativism and its

opposite, assimilation. But why the scandal?

I would suggest that what Bhabha opens up is the question of the unpresentable,

the disturbing sublime. In this context, with its excesses and contaminations, the

unpresentable remains to haunt the myth of unity, it refuses to be drawn into its order.

This renders unifying systems untenable. The unpresentability in a dialectic of

domination, as played out in Bhabha’s infrastructures, marks the impossibility of

totalising discourse. If Lyotard found the impossibility of the analytic of the sublime to

be drawn into Kant’s architectonic system as the marker of the unpresentable, for

Bhabha the unpresentable can be found in relation to a dialectical process. The

postcolonial sublime is that cultural excess that refuses to be drawn into the teleology of

a reason driven order.

The third space is animated by a linguistic theory: Walter Benjamin’s “The Task

of the Translator”. Benjamin makes a point concerning the impossibility of fixed

language, and the impossibility of fixity in translation that can be drawn into what I

have suggested is unpresentable about the postcolonial. No translation, he tells us,

“would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original. For in

its afterlife — which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and a

renewal of something living — the original undergoes a change”. Conversely, whilst

the fluidity of the original implies the necessity of translation, “the language of a

translation” must find a logic of its own, it must “let itself go, so that it gives voice to

the intentio of the original not as reproduction but as harmony, as a supplement to the

language in which it expresses itself, as its own kind of intentio”.415 Translation thus is

not constituted as the (re)production of the original literally, its subject matter, as if the

original is a pure site that is somehow cut off from the translation’s impurity. The

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reproduction is part of what is already integral to the life of the original, its poetic

(Romanticism) ‘afterlife’, its active energy in history.

What does a literary work say when what it says it not what it says? This is

Benjamin’s point of departure: “In all language and linguistic creations there remains in

addition to what can be conveyed something that cannot be communicated”.416 In the

case of the literary, if such a thing exists, the literal translation can be totally inadequate.

Bhabha seizes this inadequacy, that moment of untranslatability — the subject-matter of

the original — as a metaphor for the postcolonial migrant. Thus whilst Benjamin

disrupts translation as information, as telling those who don’t understand what the work

says what the work says,417 Bhabha insists that migrant culture is marked by the

impossibility of translating that what. But what is untranslatable here? I would suggest,

to pursue Benjamin as Bhabha insists, that what is at issue is less the possibility of the

translation of cultural essence, the pure original, than the notion that the translated is

itself untranslatable. Benjamin makes this lucid point:

The higher the level of a work, the more does it remain translatable even if its

meaning is touched upon only fleetingly. This, of course, applies to originals

only. Translations, on the other hand, prove to be untranslatable not because of

any inherent difficulty, but because of the looseness with which meaning

attaches to them.418

It is thus the defiance of the possibility of the original, of a cultural essence, that renders

the migrant translation untranslatable. This untranslatability is scandalous, it can be

understood as an excess that refuses to be subordinated to an ordered language. As

Bhabha cogently points out, untranslatability “moves the question of culture’s

appropriation beyond the assimilationist’s dream, or the racist’s nightmare, of a ‘full

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transmissal of subject-matter’”.419 The impossibility of such a transmissal is

scandalously disruptive to any notion of culture that would pretend to the progress of

Hegel. There is a threatening excessiveness, an uncontainment here that works against

the discourses of cultural purity. Such an excess can be understood as that which is

sublime, that which defies the order the cognition when cognition is the order of the

day.

The sublime that emerges in Bhabha thus cannot be understood in the romantic

terms of Lyotard. What Lyotard’s reading of the sublime lacks is an account of the

sublime in reason’s teleology. Such a process, however, is crucial for Bhabha. The

unpresentable as unpresentable, that moment of hesitancy that distinguishes the

monstrous Saladin Chamcha from the disturbing figure of Gibreel Farishta, as I

discussed in chapter one, emerges when reason is confounded by what it fails to

comprehend. Bhabha unleashes this moment of incomprehension in order to attack the

hegemony of Western reason.

Conclusion: Bhabha and the Postcolonial Sublime

For Bhabha a postcolonial politics makes a priori principles obsolete. Political

struggle is best theorised in terms of the ‘now’ of the colonial encounter, the ‘third

space of enunciation’, rather than as a conflict between monolithic discourses. He

writes:

The language of critique is effective not because it keeps forever separate the

terms of the master and the slave, the mercantilist and the Marxist, but to the

extent to which it overcomes the given grounds of opposition and opens up a

space of translation: a place of hybridity, figuratively speaking, where the

construction of a political object that is new, neither the one nor the other,

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 properly alienates our political expectations, and changes, as it must, the very

forms of our recognition of the moment of politics.420

The commitment to politics is thus a commitment to the process of ‘negotiating’,

as Bhabha calls it, the passage of reason, in order to open up sites that exceed the terms

of this passage. As the thesis contended in the previous chapter, ‘negotiation’ as a

political metaphor departs from the postmodern purity of Lyotard. If the contenders in

any conflictual relation are never unitary in themselves, their interaction has the

possibility of always setting up other political sites in which the ratio of power is

transformed,421 and as such culture itself. I have contended that Bhabha’s

infrastructures effectively seek to lay hold of the sublime, in order to undertake the

disruptive work that emerges as a necessity in the discourse of the postcolonial. Where

colonial desire is reason’s authoritative processes, for the discourse of the postcolonial

the sublime is the material real, that which is unable to be contained. The

infrastructures, mimicry, sly civility, subaltern agency, hybridity, all open up spaces of

excess in order to disturb the authority of the colonial. As such the postcolonial sublime

emerges from the dark spaces within reason’s processes. In colonial terms, Bhabha’s

infrastructures arise as an obligation, but quickly exceed the terms of such an obligation.

If in Fanon the disruptive capacity of excess is unleashed through the black body, in

Bhabha a disruptive untranslatable excess emerges in the colonial demands upon the

native. In each the teleology of Western reason is interrupted by a sublime that is less a

noble pursuit (Kant) than the sublime that contaminates. Such is the sublime of the

despised.

I have also contended that Bhabha takes what I have called a politics of the

postcolonial sublime and sets it to work against contemporary formulations of the

nation-state. Here the figure of the postcolonial migrant (re)enters what is essentially a

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colonial relation. As Anderson in his article “Exodus” laments, such a (re)entering

disturbs the sustainability of the unifying myth of nation (as I discussed in chapter one

of the thesis). I will deal with this issue in greater detail in the following chapter on

Rushdie. What I would wish to note at this point is that Anderson’s lament, which is

built upon the ‘problem’ of the migrant’s relationship to ‘homeland’, reveals that

colonial residues remain embedded in contemporary Western culture. Indeed in the

wake of Said’s seminal works, Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, the question

of culture demands to be linked to the colonial residues that continue to inhabit Western

culture. The pervasiveness of colonial acts, and the outworking of colonialism in the

shape of the contemporary world, means that colonialism lies at the heart of both

Western Culture and all that have been forced to negotiate, directly or indirectly, the

teleology of that culture.

In interrogating this fundamental teleology, Bhabha finds two crucial and

interrelated signs that suggest that culture as monologic form can never actually arrive.

The first is the notion that colonial encounter is never the clash of two unified wholes,

or the imposition of one unified whole upon an empty other. As I discussed in chapter

one, such a formulation underpins what could be considered the logic of the discourse

of the postcolonial. In the models that I set forth from the outset, this logic can be

understood in terms of Rattansi’s intertwined metaphor. But there is another important

moment in Bhabha, that pushes the discourse of the postcolonial beyond the Hegelian

frame of Rattansi to the much more disruptive parallel model of Moraru. As a

consequence of the ‘inbetween’ space, which is occupied by the postcolonial subject,

the diasporic, dispossessed, colonised, and culturally dislocated, or in other words, those

that occupy a cultural space that does not fit into conventional, homogeneous national

and racial typologies, Bhabha is able to open up excessive spaces that interrupt the

terms of such conventions. The presence of the postcolonial subject, since culture is

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staged via colonialism, thus demands a rethinking of culture, in terms of both its

constitution and its transformation. Bhabha’s infrastructures seize what I have called

the postcolonial sublime in order to undertake this task.

Further insight into the disturbing and sublime character of the discourse of the

postcolonial can be found in Bhabha’s comments concerning his articulation of the

notion of the third space. The third space, as an articulation in a body of work that

consists of a series of open fragments, ironies, and clusters linked to various issues in

order to provoke and disrupt rather than instruct (an apt description of the discourse of

the postcolonial as outlined in chapter one), in many ways remains consistent with the

postcolonial sublime. It is significant that Benjamin’s translator is drawn upon merely

as the “motif or trope” for the third space. Bhabha tells us, therefore, that this “theory

of culture is close to a theory of language” (my emphasis). A similar point is made

concerning the location of psychoanalysis: it serves as an “analogy” for hybridity.422

Bhabha’s critical relation to ‘culture’ can thus be thought of itself as a kind of

translation that is marked by the unpresentable. To say close is also to imply a gap, a

not quite, a something beyond. It is to ask as it explains: how is culture not like a

language? How does culture exceed theory? To say close is thus to blur that distinction

between art and the world.

Cultural theory as description or prescription has thus been exceeded by

scandalous displacement in Bhabha. It would be tempting to consider this scandalous

displacement a Nietzschean artfulness. But as Fanon reveals, such an artfulness

demands to be located. This is what is implied in the location metaphor that titles

Bhabha’s work. The location of culture works against the idea of the Nietzschean

nomad, and the Lyotardian event. The critical work of both of these notions is

established on the basis of not being able to be located. The Location of Culture doesn’t

quite fit what would constitute an assertion concerning culture: ‘culture is this!’ as the

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definite article implies. Any assertion seems at once to take on the character of a

question. Bhabha seizes this space of questioning, its excess, and opens it up as a

productive site. I would contend that such an opening up, a questioning, in the context

of the monolithic understandings of culture that have been reinvigorated of late, takes

on the character of the sublime, that I have suggested lies at the core of the third space

of enunciation.

I would thus wish to propose another analogy to draw out the transgressive

nature of the Bhabha’s work. This analogy can be found in the Lyotard of the body and

desire, as opposed to the Lyotard of the Kantian turn, to which the previous chapter is

devoted. I would wish to take up what Lyotard rejected, in order to articulate what is at

stake in Bhabha’s work: Lyotard’s distinction between ‘figure’ and ‘discourse’.423 In

order to disrupt Enlightenment reason, Lyotard at this earlier stage in his career, sought

to liberate the libidinal intensities. The “object of the desire of every ‘science’”, he

writes, “is the regulation of displacements, the law: thus the exclusion of libidinal

intensities from its object and thus, also, from its discourse”.424 In another setting, with

semiotics in his sight, he also writes, “signs are not only terms, stages, set in relation

and made explicit in a conquest; they can also be, indissociably, singular and vain

intensities in exodus”.425

I would suggest that these are apt terms for an engagement in Bhabha’s

evocation of the colonial encounter as discursive. Drawing on Freud, desire for Lyotard

operates in two distinct ways: there is the sense of wish (Wunsch) and that of force or

energy (Nietzsche’s Wille)”. The human psyche is thus marked by a tension which

erupts between the pleasure principle and the reality principle. Through a process of

repression the reality principle — reason, order — asserts itself over the pleasure

principle — “a force beyond the rules of negation, of implication, of alternation, of

temporal succession”.426 For Lyotard this process corresponds to the rule of science, in

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which the abstract reigns over the liberation of the creative forces of art. He thus seeks

to realise, what he terms the figural, or the sphere of unbounded pleasure in Freud’s

language, via art movements. The accent here is upon the transgressive and disruptive

capacity of art, which attacks Enlightenment reason in order to set libidinal intensities

adrift in a world of creativity and production. Transgression finds its feet in art, and it

corresponds to the ‘artfulness’ of the transgressive moment in colonial encounter. What

I would wish to take up, perhaps erroneously, is the distinction between figure and

discourse.

But it is important to note, and here we can make a distinction between the

power of the figural as a precursor to the postmodern and its failure in the postcolonial,

that the figural does not exercise a total privilege over discourse. It does not constitute a

new totality. Desire has two distinct dimensions. Whilst it may function

transgressively, it also is able to affirm new discourses in which the figural is present. It

is interesting in the colonial context, as we find in Bhabha, that the work of affirmation

does not seem to be developed. Bhabha’s work underscores the productive capacity of

transgression alone. Hybridity, for instance, in its production of the ‘vegetarian

bible’427 functions transgressively, rather than affirms an object with a new life of its

own. The new object, whilst it is not prefigured in the Hindu/Christian dialectic, can

only be understood, like all transgressions,428 in relation to the force or the rule that it

seeks to transgress. The hybrid object does not have a life of its own apart from its

transgressive, its sublime function. In the context of colonial encounter the new object

functions to disrupt the ratio of power between the colonial and the native,429 rather than

effect a positive political program. This means that Bhabha paints a rather bleak picture

for the libidinal intensities. Creativity in the colonial context corresponds to

transgression.

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 The terms that I have outlined thus situate the question of politics in a distinct

in-between location. On the one hand we have the colonial which is characterised in

terms of Hegelian reason, or the work of discourse in Lyotard’s scheme. This is what

drives the colonial encounter, this is the structure of (Western) being, or at least is the

ontology upon which the West has been built, and which the colonised subject seeks to

dismantle. Bhabha’s own critical work engages in this undertaking both in its open

structure, and as it marshals the support of Lacan, Derrida, among others, thinkers at the

forefront of critical attempts to demolish Hegel. On the other hand we have a

productive transgressive desire, the figural, which manifests itself in the contest of

signs. Hegelian being is thus asserted and disavowed at the same time. Figure and

discourse arise simultaneously, each working against the other, but neither is ultimately

able to be erased or transcended. The process of disavowal presupposes the process of

assertion, and vice versa. What this means is that the dialectic of domination is always

present in this discursive encounter. This is a clash of desires, which pits reason and

order, its teleology, against an other which must partially assimilate, or set forth a

figural desire in order to push the dialectic of domination elsewhere. It is significant

that Bhabha champions the transgressive, rather than the affirmative. It suggests that

the colonised self is on the defensive, that there is an aggressor. And the fact that the

only option that seems available, in Bhabha’s scheme, reveals that this is never a level

field of play.

Bhabha’s assertion that culture is a strategy of survival reveals the pessimistic

consequences of the location of the postcolonial. He writes:

Culture as a strategy of survival is both translational and transnational. It is

transnational because contemporary postcolonial discourses are rooted in

specific histories of cultural displacement … Culture is translational because

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 such spatial histories of displacement … make the question of how culture

signifies, or what is signified by culture, a rather complex issue.430

Survival in this context consists of negotiating (negating?) the complexes that emerge

through cultural displacement. The metaphor is split between a sense of hardship and

loss, but at the same time of productivity and resourcefulness. In the context of the

organising fiction for this collection of essays — ‘the location of culture’ — survival

emerges as a productive force which seeks to overcome the demands of the Hegelian

desire for social unity. “Culture is the strategic activity of ‘authorizing’ agency: not the

interpellation of pre-given sites of celebration or struggle”.431 The metaphor thus comes

into play in situations in which a threat becomes an overruling force. There is the

possibility that something can be destroyed, or removed. Survival implies that the

threat has been faced and is overcome, defeated, or at the very least postponed.

Survival emerges as a material metaphor, it is staged in that muddy and

disturbing space that wrests the sublime from its conservative trajectory. In a critical

response to Arlene Croce’s essay “Discussing the Undiscussable” ! in which she

announces her refusal to see the dance work Still/Here, “on the grounds that [the] use of

HIV positive dancers, and of video testimony by AIDS patients turned the art of dance

into “victim art”, a “travelling medicine show”432 ! he sets forth the idea that culture is

‘survival’ in defence of this ‘victim art’. Bhabha suggests:

Could it be that identifying Still/Here as a narcissistic art of victimage, Croce

may be missing the show’s spectacular performance of survival — the attempt ...

to counter the privacy and primacy of the individual self with the collective

historical memory?”433

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The notion of survival thus emerges as inseparably linked to questions concerning

identity and community. If there is an inbetween temporal moment, that is a people free

from the myth of a continuous past, then what constitutes the social bond, the sense of

solidarity that ‘victims’ are able, in this instance anyway, to articulate?

To survive, technically, is to continue after the cessation of a thing, event, or

process; to carry on in the light and shadow of a break, a trauma, a trial, a

challenge. Survival demands a bridging, a negotiation, an articulation of the

moments “before” and “after” without necessarily assuming a historical or

temporal continuity between them. Survival also requires the courage to live

through the flux and transition of cessation. ... She cannot envisage an art that

would short-circuit the sublime, transcendent option to plug into a dialogue with

a community that establishes its solidarity and group identity through sharing a

desolate interruption, a cessation ! death, mourning, melancholia.434

The upshot is a theory for cultural transformation, and a call for a rethinking of

questions concerning the constitution of the social bond.435 The metaphor of survival

demands a location that is set in relation to an act which seeks to deprive. The point of

the metaphor is that it highlights the temporal disjunctions that characterise the threat of

depravation, and calls forth the necessity for dealing with the condition of imposition.

As such ‘survival’ underscores the necessity of the transgressive nature of desire, rather

than the affirmative. The Bhabharian subject is caught in the space inbetween acts of

domination, that seek to impose an order, and acts of transgression, that seek to

dismantle the propensity to order. The work of Bhabha is thus embedded in what could

be called a dualism, which takes the question of culture beyond the confines of the

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monolithic, toward questions of power and transgression. In this dualism the

transgressive force of the postcolonial sublime is played out.

The implication of this dualism can be considered pragmatically. Every act of

domination is animated by the demands of Hegelian systemisation. Any act of

resistance must move beyond that mode of thinking and being to modes of desire that

are rooted in production, rather than lack. If the question of survival is the fundamental

condition of culture, then it is impossible to move beyond the conflictual terrain that

marks the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised. This condition is

always already inscribed in culture, there is no space that enables a movement beyond

it. This is why Bhabha insists, via the terms that I have outlined, that the disruptive

capacity of resistance does not erase the relationship between coloniser and colonised,

the hegemonic West and the postcolonial, but simply transforms the ratio of power

between them.

It is this dualism that marks the question of culture. Bhabha’s work can thus be

characterised as an attempt to deal with Hegel’s ontology, and ultimately to disavow it

with a sublime desire rooted in an excessive materiality. Bhabha’s dualism is crucial in

the context of contemporary cultural theory. In the Australian context in which I write,

a nostalgic cultural monolith has raised its head. The Australian political climate is

marked by a reactionary conservatism (Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party),436 and the

return of a conservative government, which, in its insistence upon ‘one rule for all’,

gives no room to the possibility of alternative ways of thinking. Any opposition is

discounted as misinformed,437 as subject to the ‘misrepresentations of the media’. The

assumption is that this so called politics of ‘fairness’, of oneness, is not only irresistible,

it is set in transcendent stone. It is a climate that gives no room to ‘debate’, no space of

questioning, and it thus reinforces the tenor of, what I have called, Bhabha’s dualistic

pessimism.

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 The recent return of a conservative government, and public re-emergence of

nationalism signals that colonial desire remains embedded in ‘white Australia’s’ psyche.

In similar fashion, there is no ground for the outworking of affirmative desire in

situations in which reason’s processes are on the prowl. Those that are not included in

this rhetoric, are forced to negotiate the structures that seek to produce a totality from

the disparate elements that mark the social. As Bhabha suggests, it seems futile to

contend this rhetoric with a resistance that finds its basis in an opposite cultural purism,

an opposed force that corresponds in its moment of enunciation to the desires of

discourse, as opposed to the figural. Such a politics merely reinforces the tenor of

Hegelian desire, which demands an enemy, a task, to generate its own sense of

legitimation, and its conservative use of the sublime as a dialectical other.

The crucial contribution that Bhabha makes to theory is that he puts back a

perspective upon culture that is grounded in reason processes, that has been lost in

recent preoccupations with the postmodern. Whilst it has been suggested that Bhabha

has been lulled into the false securities of the we-are-all-homeless-signifiers-floating-

around cliché, his work consistently deals with the reality of a Hegelianism that is alive

and well in the West. What we find in Bhabha is a staging of culture as radically

divided. As governments refuse to deal with cultural difference, and outmoded slogans

such as ‘we are monocultural’ begin to re-emerge in the public sphere as a matter of

serious debate, the disruptive force, the scandal, of the migrant and the dispossessed that

Bhabha underscores could not be more valid. All this suggests that cultural identity is

always already relational, always already worked out in and through the complex

workings of desire: discourse? figural? This, whilst I have attempted to reveal Bhabha’s

limitations, still opens up the possibility of thinking culture in discursive terms as a

clash between strategies of unity, and strategies of transgression. This is what marks the

present day. It is a pessimistic and bleak picture, but I would suggest that it represents

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an apt ‘snap-shot’ of the West as it is. If ever there is the possibility that the world’s

differences and myriad accents will come to the fore in public life, then the process of

affirmative desire must be preceded by the transgressive engagement in the West’s

continuing preoccupation with racial, cultural, and national purity. Bhabha’s work takes

up this challenge.

I have undertaken an outline of Bhabha’s work in order to stage the postcolonial

sublime. Bhabha clearly opens up sites of excess, uncontainment, in order to disrupt

Western hegemony. Given the conservative use of the sublime in establishing reason’s

authority, what Bhabha seizes is the excess of the excess, that which the process of

unity fails to bring to a coherent order. As such Bhabha effectively unleashes the

sublime from the shackles of reason. His work, in its polyphonic form, and the

infrastructures of excess, sets forth a critique of reason as a process. A politics of

transgression emerges. As I have shown, this process of transgression is built upon the

question of the sublime. In having charted the terms of the postcolonial sublime

through Bhabha, I would wish to turn to the texts of Rushdie, to further explore the

outworking of the postcolonial sublime in a literary context.

Notes

367
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 175.
368
Robert Young in White Mythologies (London: Routledge, 1990) champions
Bhabha’s eclectic use of a wide range of theories and ideas, which have no obvious
logical linkage, as exemplary postcolonial criticism. Such a strategy for Young resists
being reduced to a “consistent metalanguage”, and the postcolonial critical tools that are
set forth cannot be reified “into static concepts” (146-147).
369
W.J.T. Mitchell, in an interview with Bhabha (“Translator Translated”, Artforum,
(March 1995), 80-83, 110, 114, 118-119): “the book has been controversial; I’ve heard

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it characterized as too difficult, as too political, as not political enough” (81). Compare
Kwame Appiah, “The Hybrid Age”, Times Literary Supplement (27 May 1994), 5, who
reads Bhabha as a ‘leftist’; and Benita Parry, “Signs of our times”, Third Text, vol.
28/29 (1994), 5-24, who argues that Bhabha has been seduced by a poststructuralist
textualism. See also Aijaz Ahmad, “The Politics of Postcoloniality”, Race and Class,
vol. 36, no. 3 (1995), 1-20; and Asha Varadharajan, Exotic Parodies (Minneapolis:
Minnesota University Press, 1995), 22-23, who take up a similar position to Parry.
370
See Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, trans. R.W. Rotsel (Ann
Arbor: Ardis), 1973.
371
See for example Mitchell and Bhabha, “Translator Translated”, 14. Bhabha’s
celebration of the moment of indeterminacy, as the moment in which freedom and
politics is possible, is drawn directly from Derrida. See also Homi Bhabha, “Freedom’s
Basis in the Indeterminate”, October, no. 61 (1992), 46-57. He writes, “it has been my
growing conviction that encounters and negotiations of differential meanings and values
within the governmental discourses and cultural practices that make up “colonial”
textuality have enacted, avant la lettre, many of the problematics of signification and
judgement that have become current in contemporary theory” (48).
372
See Paul Gilroy’s, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1993).
373
Lyotard makes this point in Driftworks, trans. R. McKeon (New York: Semiotext(e),
1984), about dialectical criticism. The problem is that dialectical critique functions as a
kind of photographic negative of capitalism, preserving itself within the same
representational framework. The critique instead of surpassing capitalism thus
consolidates it.
374
See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London:
Macmillan, 1933), 77.
375
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 241.
376
Bhabha cites Mladan Dolar’s unpublished manuscript, The Legacy of the
Enlightenment: Foucault and Lacan.
377
See Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?”, trans. Catherine Porter, in The
Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (London: Penguin, 1984), 32-50.
378
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 244.
379
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 243.
380
Bhabha’s critique is akin to Spivak’s interrogation of Deleuze and Foucault in “Can
the Subaltern Speak?”, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Gary Nelson
and Lawrence Grossberg (London: Macmillan, 1988), 271-311. Spivak argues that
Deleuze and Foucault, in voicing their opposition to capitalist exploitation, homogenise
the international division of labour, and overlook crucial differences between third
world and first world workers. By masking the differences between workers within the
context of global capitalism, the narrative fabricated in Deleuze’s and Foucault’s
“Intellectuals and Power” is seen to be complicit with the anonymous subject that is

261
concealed in the narrative of Western history. Both of these French intellectuals refuse
to acknowledge what Spivak calls a “sign, structure operating experience” (279). Such
a refusal allows them to collapse the European “Subject of desire and power” with the
“subject of the oppressed”. This leads to, Spivak continues, an “essentialist, utopian
politics” (276).
381
Terry Maley, “The Politics of Time: Subjectivity and Modernity in Max Weber”, in
The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment, ed. Asher
Horowitz and Terry Maley (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1994), 147.
382
Maley, “The Politics of Time”, 147-148.
383
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 240.
384
See J. Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1983), 1-41.
385
Tony Spybey, Social Change and Dependency (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 113.
386
Simon During, “Postmodernism or Post-colonialism Today”, Textual Practice, vol.
1, no. 1 (1987), 33.
387
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 236.
388
Homi Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition”, in
Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and
Laura Chrisman (Hemel Hempstead, England: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 114.
389
Fanon cited in Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 237.
390
Frantz Fanon, Peau Noire Masques Blancs (Paris: Éditions Du Seuil, 1954), 207.
391
Bhabha writes, “I claim a generality for Fanon’s argument because he talks not
simply of the historicity of the black man, as much he writes in ‘The fact of blackness’
about the temporality of modernity within which the figure of the ‘human’ comes to be
authorized” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 236).
392
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 241-242.
393
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 237.
394
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 21.
395
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 25, 5.
396
See Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back:
Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989).
397
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86.
398
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 89.
399
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 86.
400
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 97.
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401
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 193.
402
Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 127.
403
Lord Alfred Tennyson, “Idylls of the King”, in The Concept of Empire: Burke to
Attlee, 1774-1947, ed. George Bennett (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1962), 256.
404
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776;
New York: The Modern Library, 1937), 899-900.
405
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 113-114.
406
Bhabha writes, “my contention, elaborated in my writings on postcolonial discourse
in terms of mimicry, hybridity, sly civility, is that this liminal moment of identification
! eluding resemblance ! produces a subversive strategy of subaltern agency that
negotiates its own authority through a process of iterative ‘unpicking’ and
incommensurable, insurgent relinking. It singularizes the ‘totality’ of authority by
suggesting that agency requires a grounding, but it does not require a totalization of
those grounds; it requires movement and manoeuvre, but it does not require a
temporality of continuity or accumulation; it requires direction and contingent closure
but no teleology and holism (Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 184-185).
407
See Homi Bhabha, “Signs taken for Wonders”, in The Location of Culture, 102-122.
408
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 33.
409
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 23.
410
Manuel Castells, The City and the Grass Roots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban
Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 4.
411
Benita Parry, “Signs of Our Times”, 9, 7.
412
Parry, “Signs of Our Times”, 13.
413
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 37.
414
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 223, 228, 226, 225.
415
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York:
Schocken Books, 1968), 73, 79.
416
Benjamin, Illuminations, 80.
417
Benjamin, Illuminations, 69.
418
Benjamin, Illuminations, 81.
419
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 224.
420
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 25.
421
Homi Bhabha, David Bennett, and Terry Collits, “The Postcolonial Critic”, Arena,
no. 96 (1991), 62.
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422
Homi Bhabha, “The Third Space”, in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed.
Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 210, 211.
423
Jean-François Lyotard, Driftworks, trans. R. McKeon (New York: Semiotext(e),
1984), 57-68.
424
Jean-François Lyotard, “On a Figure of Discourse”, in Toward the Postmodern, ed.
Robert Harvey and Mark Roberts (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993), 14.
425
Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1993), 50.
426
Lyotard, “On a Figure of Discourse”, 13, 14.
427
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 102-122.
428
See Michel Foucault’s “A Preface to Transgression”, Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 29-52.
429
Bhabha, “The Postcolonial Critic”, 62.
430
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 172.
431
Bhabha, “The Postcolonial Critic”, 50-51.
432
Homi Bhabha, “Dance this Diss Around”, Artforum, April (1995), 19.
433
Bhabha, “Dance this Diss Around”, 20.
434
Bhabha, “Dance this Diss Around”, 20. See also Homi Bhabha, “A Question of
Survival: Nations and Psychic States”, in Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory, ed.
James Donald (Houndsmill: Macmillan, 1991), 96.
435
See Homi Bhabha’s, “Black Male”, Artforum (February 1995), 86-87. See also
Bhabha’s “Novel Metropolis”, New Statesman (16 February 1990), 16-18.
436
See Pauline Hanson’s “One Nation” web site: http//:www.gwb.com.au/onenation/
437
For an interesting comparison of a similar phenomena in France in the 50’s, see
Roland Barthes, “A Few Words from Monsieur Poujáde”, The Eiffel Tower and other
Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), 51-53.

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 Chapter Six

Rushdie’s Politics of Excess

A poet is not an apostle; he drives out devils only by the power of the devil.438

Two interrelated notions have animated my exploration of the postcolonial

sublime. Firstly, the postcolonial sublime arises as a material excess that marks the

impossibility of the tenability of myths of cultural unity. I have drawn upon the Kantian

sublime and its Hegelian reformulation as a conservative trope to underscore what is at

stake in evoking this excess. What emerges is the notion that in order to disrupt

reason’s authority it is necessary to unleash the sublime from its conservative shackles.

In the face of the threat of the sublime, European reason was supremely confident that

such a threat would never overtake its capacity to unify conscious thought, and by

extension the social. We could say that the discourse of the postcolonial begins when

this supreme confidence is put into doubt. Fanon’s bodily excesses underscore this task.

Secondly, the discourse of the postcolonial can be located alongside the postmodern,

rather than implicated in it. I have argued in my critical engagement with Lyotard and

Bhabha that postcolonial excesses demand to be understood in material terms. The

sublime excess that the discourse of the postcolonial opens up, signals that the pure

event that lies at the critical core of Lyotard’s postmodern sublime is inadequate. For

the discourse of the postcolonial the signs of culture and history are overfull, rather than

empty question marks. Thus instead of the pure sites that preoccupy Lyotardian

incommensurability, a politics of contamination and negotiation emerges in the

discourse of the postcolonial.

In this chapter I propose to bring these concerns together. I will follow several

interrelated lines of inquiry. Firstly I will outline what I consider to be an important

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assumption concerning the social framing of Rushdie’s literature. ‘Rushdiecriticism’ is

caught in a Romantic literary model, that either denounces or celebrates his work on the

basis of its complicity in the myth of a heroic literature. I have in mind here my

discussion in chapter three on Hegel’s Romantic slave. As Fanon reveals, such a binary

formulation fails to adequately describe the literature of the postcolonial. I would

contend that this is true of Rushdie’s literature also. His work resists at every turn the

romantic model that dominates ‘Rushdiecriticism’. In continuing the thesis’

engagement with the question of the postmodern and the postcolonial, I will then turn to

Aijaz Ahmad’s well known denouncement of Rushdie as an irresponsible postmodern.

I would wish to challenge such a reading on two interrelated fronts. Firstly, I will show

that in Ahmad’s rigid critical practice a leakage, a moment of excess arises that

exemplifies, perfectly, the strategies employed in Rushdie’s sublime resistance to neat

categorisation. And Secondly, in a reading of the remarkable Midnight’s Children, with

the support of Shame, The Satanic Verses, and The Moor’s Last Sigh, I will show that

Rushdie’s politics can be understood in terms of the excessive disruptions and

contaminations that mark what I have called the postcolonial sublime. Finally I will

take up Rushdie’s literature in social terms, and with his own statements concerning the

public necessity of the artist in mind, I will further develop the postcolonial sublime by

theorising his work in terms of its disturbances to conservative political teleologies.

Rushdiecriticism

In the wake of Marxist models of literary production the mystique that surrounds

the art of the exiled has been contested. Indeed in celebrations of the high modernist art

that ranges from Joyce’s Ulysses to Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, from E. M. Forster’s A

Passage to India to D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent, and from Conrad’s “Heart

of Darkness” to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon the alienated exile has emerged

in aesthetic theory as a gifted social figure. Exile as a form of alienation was considered

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a metaphor for the dehumanising effects of modernity. The splintering of the frame and

rejection of realism in Picasso’s painting and Modernist literature, were built upon a

fascination with dislocation and displacement as instances that necessitate the

destruction of form. Against such a celebration of exile, Marxists such Lukács have

defended and redefined realism. Ahmad’s argument concerning Rushdie’s

irresponsibility can be read in terms of Lukács’ rejection of the power of alienation. His

concern with the (ir)responsibility of Rushdie’s artistic form is drawn up in terms of the

problematic figure of the migrant intellectual, who, for many, corresponds to that great

myth of the exiled genius at the core of Modernism.

Denouncements of Rushdie can be formulated as follows: since Rushdie enjoys

both economic and intellectual privileges, and is distanced from his subject(s), his art

fails to engage in the struggle that makes History. In more general terms, Rushdie can

be considered a detached, masculine, bourgeois Idealist who produces texts that

perpetuate dominant myths. Harveen Sachdeva Mann argues in such terms. The

Satanic Verses, Mann contends, works through a problematic in which the postmodern

attack upon materialism is simply an intellectual elitism that alienates ‘the people’.

Mann writes:

there is … a disjunction between Rushdie’s stated desire and textual practice, that,

in fact, the “average,” majority Indian migrant in Britain is not his principal target

reader in The Satanic Verses becomes amply clear from the author’s linguistic

practices. While his multilingualism in The Satanic Verses can, on the one hand,

be read as a metaphor of resistance to the imperialism of English — much as

Derrida reads Joyce’s polyglotism in Finnegans Wake — such resistance remains

largely inaccessible to the non-literary reader unfamiliar with the Joycean

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 wordplay of modernism, the elitist learning of the privileged academic, and the

postmodernist rhetoric of pastiche.439

Jean M. Kane similarly (contra Linda Hutcheon’s reading of the dissemination of

Saleem as the creative centre440) reads Midnight’s Children in terms of its moment of

production: Rushdie’s limited recollection of India from the metropolitan centre. The

limits of this cultural location are reflected in the text through the figure of Saleem, who

accepts the part for the whole, and writes his history through the metaphor of sexual

competence upon the body of woman. Kane contends that the fluidity of the Midnight’s

narrative remains far from open, and is secure in the domain of its creator, the master

Saleem. The “phallic model”, Kane declares, “emphasises Saleem’s singular agency as

a masculine writer remote from his co-citizens.”441 Rushdie thus speaks for a literary

model, in this instance, that corresponds in its epistemological moment to the

masculinist creator author that was valorised by the English literary establishment.

If Ahmad, Kane, and Mann question Rushdie’s political status, it is significant

that ‘Rushdiecriticism’ is driven largely by a popular celebration that bears a remarkable

resemblance to the Kantian Genius and Hegel’s valorisation of the romantic slave (as I

discussed chapter’s two and three of this thesis). The figure of the exiled artist, the

underling that lay at the core of eighteenth-century aesthetic celebrations, has been

replayed, perhaps too quickly, in discussions concerning the figure of the migrant

intellectual. If Ahmad, Kane, and Mann draw the trope of the modern artist as

outsider/underling into their reservations concerning the political value of Rushdie,

others have taken this trope in order to champion Rushdie as a kind of twentieth-century

literary genius.442 We hear echoes of the figure of exile as genius in Dieter

Riemenschneider’s celebration of Rushdie’s work. In seizing Saleem as a metaphor for

the value of aesthetic reflection, Riemenschneider announces:

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 there is, after all, some meaning, and this lies in employing one’s recollection in

order to give history immortality. This suggests that man’s purpose in life as well

as in history is to preserve it, hand its ‘meaning’ down to others for them to listen

to, and, perhaps, to learn from. Saleem, so it appears, has learnt his moral lesson.

Yet underneath we detect another more embracing dimension to Saleem’s

account, a philosophical quest. Rushdie, apart from telling a moral story, is

basically concerned with the crucial question of Indian philosophy and the Indian

mind.443

The implication is that the ‘Indian’ mind is able to be accessed more fully at a distance.

Rather than the immediacy and contingency of national space, Riemenschneider

champions creative possibilities that are opened up through distance. We can recall

Kant’s spectators of the French revolution here. As I suggested in chapter four, for

Lyotard the supremacy of the Ideas over the terrifying in nature signals that at the core

of the revolution’s celebrated Freedom, there is indeterminate judgement. This

indeterminacy suggests that politics can be understood in terms of aesthetic principles,

rather than the supposed certainties of theoretical and practical reason. Bhabha, on the

other hand, takes issue with the universal tone that is implicated in this celebration of

the creative possibilities of aesthetic judgement (as I discussed in chapter five of this

thesis). I would suggest that such a universality underpins Riemenschneider’s Rushdie.

Bhabha’s mistrust of the universal overtones that mark postmodern thinkers such as

Lyotard, leaves us with a difficult question: does Rushdie’s excess like Lyotard’s avant-

garde merely assert a new universal? I will take up this issue in detail in due course.

For the moment it is sufficient to claim that this is not the case. It seems to me that

Rushdie’s excess opens up a politics of contamination and negotiation that cannot be

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understood as a new universal.444 As I have shown, the purity of Lyotard’s postmodern

spaces are not what is at issue in the discourse of the postcolonial. Rather the reverse is

the case, namely that the discourse of the postcolonial sets out to reveal the

impossibility of pure spaces.

The echoes of Riemenschneider’s celebration of the detached artist, in its

various forms, almost drown out Rushdie’s dissenters. Alongside Riemenschneider we

find Durix, who similarly champions Rushdie’s unbelonging and belonging. “Being a

man of the ‘First’ and of the ‘Third’ world at the same time”, Durix writes, “he may be

better equipped than many to approach contemporary political and social problems”.445

And Aikant likewise celebrates Rushdie’s self imposed exile from India as the most apt

vantage point from which to contest the totalising narratives of Western

historiography.446 The infamous fatwa merely compounds what is essentially a

celebration of the Kantian disinterested aesthetic that was historically located by Hegel:

the artist as authoritative outsider/underling. Paul Gray’s review of East, West pushes

such a celebration to extremes. The assumption is that a truly ‘free’ art is forged in the

face of death. The political cogency of Hegel’s theorisation of the master and slave

relationship is no where more apparent. He declares:

Since these stories cannot make things worse for Rushdie than they already are, he

has, on the page, the luxury of total freedom.447

To Paul Gray’s Hegelian concerns we can add, Pico Iyer’s announcement on East,

West:

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 [...] all these perverse twists in have a special authority when coming from a man

who discovered riches in the same breath as a death-sentence, and acquired fame

at precisely the moment when he could no longer enjoy it.448

Tom Wilhelmus likewise celebrates The Moor’s Last Sigh as a great triumph against

adversity. In a state of depravation (Rushdie hiding as a consequence of the fatwa) the

literary value of the work is intensified. Because “of its energy”, Wilhelmus writes,

“and tolerance, its courage and its sheer entertainment value, it is difficult not to view it

as heroic.”449

I have no problem with the notion that Rushdie has displayed nothing less than

great courage in the face of adversity. What I would wish to take issue with is the

notion that this courage belongs to, and indeed is a driving force in, myths of progress.

Such a myth, for instance, can be found at the edges of Al-Azm’s celebration of

Rushdie as a great dissident. In lending credence to Hegel’s concern for the

undiminished spirit of slave culture, he frames Rushdie as a dissident, and The Satanic

Verses as the expression of an historically valid struggle, a “lesson”. Al-Azm writes:

If Louis Althusser can take pride in praising Spinoza’s philosophy for “terrifying

its time” by providing “one of the great lessons in heresy the world has seen,”

then I see no reason why we cannot take pride in praising Rushdie’s novel also for

“terrifying its time” by providing “one of the greatest lessons in heresy that the

Muslim world has seen”.450

Samir Dayal’s “Talking Dirty: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children” takes

Azm’s point of entry into the field of ‘Rushdiecriticism’ a step further. I would suggest

that the celebration of dissidence that underscores the surety of Dayal’s argument

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presents important difficulties. Dayal draws upon the famous French dissident Bataille

to unpack and to politicise the visceral language of Midnight’s Children, and The

Satanic Verses. The plotted line from dissident to dissident, however, produces an

interesting critical formulation that can be drawn up around similarity and difference.

We thus find a politics of “displacement” in both Bataille and Rushdie. Dayal writes,

Rushdie “shares Bataille’s rejection of the presumed hegemony of the high, pure, and

intellectual over its supplement, the low, impure, visceral”451. But in having asserted

Bataille, Dayal is also anxious to stress Rushdie’s differences. Bataille’s visceral

essentialism should not be conflated with viscerality in Rushdie. Dayal thus brackets

off Bataille’s essentialism as a difference — he repeats: “Admittedly, Rushdie does not

go as far in this direction”; “Rushdie does not risk Bataille’s incendiary and essentialist

assertion”452 — and concentrates on what he considers to be useful similarities.

But such an approach produces a limited critical practice, and a restricted

understanding of Rushdie. The shadow of Hegelian progress still looms large upon

Dayal’s critical landscape. It is difficult to see how Rushdie escapes the romantic

celebration of the slave that is at the core of Hegelian progress. This is not to suggest

that Bataille is Hegelian (though he is decidedly Kojèvean); it is to suggest that the

relationship between Rushdie and Bataille that Dayal charts is Hegelian. I would

question the critical strength of such a charting. Dayal’s celebration is constrained by a

structure of similarity, a structure that is just one step away from the tradition of

influence that preoccupies traditional literary studies. I would wish to ask in response to

this approach, what is at stake in this bracketing? What happens to Bataille if you

remove the essence from his celebration of the visceral? What stops Rushdie from

crossing the line that Dayal has drawn? I ask this because Dayal, and indeed the

celebration of Rushdie generally, tends to isolate the critical capacity of his work. By

this I mean that criticism such as Dayal’s isolates Rushdie in the same manner that

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Lyotard isolates the Kantian sublime. Such an approach fails to deal with Rushdie’s

leakages, contaminations, his politics of excess. I would contend that Dayal’s attempt

to draw a line from Bataille to Rushdie, in order to explain and to demystify Rushdie’s

viscerality, and nothing more, misses the space of the bracket as an excessive and

uncontainable site. As such the presence of this great European dissident, though

fundamentally flawed according to Dayal, is still able to explain postcolonial literature.

This is a puzzling critical practice. Bataille has at once been drawn upon as a ‘pure’ site

from which to judge, and yet has also been rejected. The gesture of this rejection is

undoubtedly the essay’s strength, but it is also the site of its weakness, for in having

opened up the possibility of difference, Dayal refuses to read Rushdie’s visceral

excesses back against Bataille’s essentialism. Rather than pay attention to the nuances

of Rushdie as a disruption to Bataille, as antagonistic, as Dayal anxiously tells us, he is

content to conflate, to categorise, and to ignore productive differences. Thus instead of

a diverse and rich field built upon critical contaminations that produce new sites,

disruption, and perhaps even critical dialogue, Dayal reduces Rushdie to the mere

repetition of the critical strategies of the famous theoretical dissidents.

Against defining and categorising Rushdie in terms of a great tradition of some

sort, I would thus argue that studies that situate Rushdie as a kind of heroic dissident

have missed what troubles thinkers such as Ahmad. Even though Ahmad is prone to an

Hegelian vision of art, he still sees something much more disturbing, more excessive,

more resistant to the comparative approach of Dayal, or the Hegelian insistence upon

the regenerative capacity of slave culture. With this sense of more troubling

disturbances, I would wish to turn to work of Ahmad. For it is Ahmad who, perhaps

unwittingly, opens a much more politically cogent Rushdie. And we can understand

this cogency in terms of the postcolonial sublime.

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Ahmad and the Politics of Excess

When the Indian Marxist Aijaz Ahmad writes in his In Theory that Rushdie’s

“art can only be an art of despair”453 we are drawn into a specific understanding

concerning the political capacity of postcolonial art. In the context of Ahmad’s

argument this aesthetic despair functions as a negative symptom, and is situated in a

broad social and historical polemic against current intellectual trends. Rushdie’s Shame

is understood by Ahmad as the deplorable formal product of the pernicious link between

the formation of a ‘Third World’ literary counter-canon, and an academic climate that is

preoccupied with debunking nationalism and rejecting materialism. For Ahmad this

hostility to nationalism and materialism is based upon an indulgent avant-gardist literary

model that produces questioning strategies that exclude crucial issues such as gender,

class, global capitalism, and the social determination of critical practices.454 Rushdie’s

‘art of despair’ thus emerges as the logical product of an existential being animated by

metaphors which privilege uncertainty and unbelonging, and an academic institution

that is historically and politically implicated in late capitalism. Ahmad’s denouncement

of Rushdie thus takes up the bracketed sublime of Lyotard, as manifest in his work upon

the avant-garde, as a model for Rushdie’s art. As I maintained in my discussion on

Bhabha in the previous chapter, such a model is an inadequate description of the

discourse of the postcolonial.

An uncompromisingly ideological reading of Rushdie by Ahmad — and it is

clear that this is so throughout — sets forth what I would consider to be several

oversimplifications in its formal engagement with Rushdie’s text. These

oversimplifications are underpinned by the notion that Shame, and Rushdie’s work

generally, represents only the unmediated perspective of the privileged class, and

excludes the heroic struggle of the under-class. Rushdie is thus condemned to represent

a ‘Pakistan in slices’. The totality, which necessarily includes the historic struggle of an

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underclass against oppression, is thus ignored. A text that has lost sight of the totality in

this manner thus loses sight of the real issues, and represents the real tragedy of tyrants

comically,455 perpetuates misogyny against women, and plummets into the depths of

narcissistic despair.456 If we are persuaded, after Ahmad we are obliged to conclude

that there is no political worth in Rushdie’s avant-gardist, “depthless” form!

But is this link between Rushdie’s art and the avant-garde tenable? Is it valid to

assume that avant-gardist art and theory have seduced Rushdie’s postcoloniality such

that the form and stakes of his texts can only be considered the mere reflection of the

avant-gardist master texts? For the thesis this question is crucial. I have maintained

that the discourse of the postcolonial cannot simply be defined as a moment within the

postmodern. As I argued in the previous chapter on Bhabha, the postcolonial exceeds

postmodern formulations. I would contend that Rushdie’s art refuses at every turn to be

contained in the neat oppositions that underpin such judgements. In its sheer excess this

is an art that poses questions that more conventional political and artistic models fail to

deal with.

Ahmad’s judgement upon Rushdie draws upon the age-old opposition between

the socialist realist novel form and the fragmented and ‘unmediated totalities’ that

characterise modernism. We hear echoes of Lukács’ famous edict:

[the modernist self] is an ahistorical being. … This negation of history takes

two different forms in modernist literature. First, the hero is strictly confined

within the limits of his own experience. There is not for him — and

apparently not for his creator — any pre-existent reality beyond his own self,

acting upon him or being acted upon by him. Secondly, the hero himself is

without personal history. He is ‘thrown-into-the-world’: meaninglessly,

unfathomably. He does not develop through contact with the world; he

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 neither forms nor is formed by it. The only ‘development’ in this literature is

the gradual revelation of the human condition.457

Lukács draws a dividing line between modernism and critical realism. What is at issue

is the manner in which the artist negotiates the dialectic between the subjective self and

the historical world. Art in Lukács’ language occupies the space between the poles of

this opposition, or at least is able to reproduce an ontological space that holds this

opposition in a tension, such that one side is not reduced to the other. This is a problem

for modernist art, which, Lukács argues, mistakenly confuses the objective world for the

subjective self. Consequently modernist art plummets into melancholy.

Freud defines melancholy, that dark side of romanticism, as the unconscious

‘loss of a love object’, a sentimental ‘excess’ that “casts a pathological shade on the

grief, forcing it to express itself in the form of self-reproaches, to the effect that the

mourner himself is to blame for the loss of the loved one”.458 Self-blame, or at least the

sense of hopelessness that comes from the realisation that nothing could, or can be done,

produces a narcissistic withdrawal into a relation with the lost object. If we are to

follow Lukács this is the narcissistic tendency that manifests itself in modernist art.

Modernism, as a melancholic form, has lost the material world as an object, and

redirected its energy into the subjective, Idealist world of the self.

For Ahmad, Rushdie’s art is nothing more than (post)modernism’s melancholic

paragon. Marked by a “conceptual flaw of a fundamental kind”, Rushdie, like Lukács’

modernist, simply fails to “include integral regenerative possibilities within the

Grotesque world of his imaginative creation”.459 Rushdie is driven by what is

understood as a kind of political despair in which “one acts … not because one hopes to

change anything but because one is condemned, by existential necessity, to act”.460

There appears from this perspective to be no discontinuity between Beckett’s complex

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(post)modernist formulation: “I can’t go on ... I will go on”,461 and Rushdie’s aesthetic.

Such despair thus lends itself to the political conclusion that this is an ‘art’ form that is

politically irresponsible.

The finality of Ahmad’s political judgement suggests that Rushdie has been

‘summed up’, that the secret that underpins his work has been revealed in its entirety.

This is also a judgement that becomes prescriptive in its enunciation. After Ahmad

there appears to be no room for debate. A politically productive art is possible only if

certain formal practices are adhered to. But in the weave of Ahmad’s text we find a

significant anomaly that works against this sense of finality, and opens up a useful space

for engaging in Rushdie’s fiction, and ultimately in the discourse of the postcolonial.

This anomaly emerges initially in the moment that Ahmad necessarily concedes that he

also has given us only a slice of his object. In staging an attack based upon Rushdie’s

class affiliations — and hence a partial representation of Pakistan that excludes the role

of the historical and heroic underclass struggling against the conditions of oppression —

Ahmad is anxious to point out that the Rushdie that he presents is ‘pure’. In other

words, his pre-fatwa Rushdie has not been tainted by that frenzy of publication that

marked the Satanic Verses Affair. Ahmad’s is a cool, detached speculative reason.

This means that Rushdie’s Shame merely articulates as its organising fiction what for

Ahmad is a claim that attempts to reveal the ‘pure’ nature of his inquiry. Of course the

assumption is that this pure part directly relates to, and in a sense informs, Rushdie’s art

as a whole. But there is no solid ground for this assumption.

A quick glance at the Rushdie affair, for instance, reveals that Rushdie’s art

occupies a messy and conflictual terrain that is marked by various voices disputing

(violently) how Rushdie’s art can be made to mean. The Satanic Verses has been

resisted and championed in a variety of concrete national contexts, and upon divergent

political fronts. The proper name, ‘Rushdie’, has been subject to an agonistic process of

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inscription that renders its meaning illusive and uncertain. ‘Rushdie’ has been the site

for dispute, clash, struggle. We find ‘Rushdie’ contested, for instance, in the cultural

imaginary of the postcolonial Indian parliament,462 in the struggle of British Muslims

for equity and justice,463 and in the political opportunism of Iran’s powerful clerics.464

We also find ‘Rushdie’ inscribed into the discourse of ‘free expression’, the valorisation

of the autonomy of the artist and aesthetic object,465 the defence of capitalist

consumption,466 and the assimilationist racism of British purity: “British Muslims

should know their Koran, of course, but they should also know their Shakespeare”.467

Rushdie’s inscription, despite the appearance of a rigid set of critical agendas, thus

remains far from settled. The affair reveals that an official version of Rushdie is yet to

arrive. Cultural ownership of this proper name and what it means is illusory. As

English Literature, Rushdie’s work remains a disputed entity, a signal that the literary

landscape can no longer be considered a homogeneous contribution to humanity’s Geist.

This historical moment reveals that Rushdie’s art in many ways exceeds the possibility

of formulation. There is simply too much Rushdie to be contained in the part. Just as

Rushdie concedes there is too much Pakistan to be contained as a totality in a single

novel.468

This means that Ahmad’s study reveals that a final judgement about Rushdie’s

art is yet to be made. For the attempt to contain and confine the aesthetic, like all

attempts at a universal politics, can only ever be incomplete. The problem of excess

and its relation to the political can be found in that moment in which an excess bursts

forth and haunts Ahmad’s controlled social and historical text. At a point in the

argument that attempts to set forth the political seriousness of art, Ahmad makes an

interesting turn to the language of traditional aesthetics and concedes, “both the parody

and the burlesque are at times delicious, inventive, hilarious”. But this brief lapse into

aesthetic pleasure is immediately subordinated to a political judgement. Ahmad

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continues, “Rushdie has given us a Laughter which laughs, unfortunately, much too

often … that one is in danger of forgetting that Bhutto and Zia were in reality no

buffoons, but highly capable and calculating men whose cruelties were entirely

methodical”.469 I would contend that this lapse into the ‘delicious’ pleasure of the text

by Ahmad produces an interesting problematic. For this is a lapse that reveals that

Rushdie’s fiction works in (at least) two distinct ways, and suggests that the relationship

between the aesthetic and the political in the postcolonial context is much more

complex than Ahmad would have us believe.

How is it possible for a text to be pleasurable and at the same time in a state of

political despair? What strategies of thinking enable this opposition between aesthetic

pleasure and political judgement? If we turn to the language of Kant — as Ahmad’s

own discussion demands that we should — it seems that a direct cognitive judgement of

the work has been privileged over a purely aesthetic feeling. The metaphor ‘delicious’

functions as a non-conceptual inner feeling. There is a sense in which Ahmad relaxes

and doesn’t maintain the rule that governs the object. This is a pleasure in the literary

characters as they are in themselves, in the form in which they appear in the

imagination. The “hilarity” that Ahmad concedes, in this instance, is thus not in any

way related to the laughter that, as Bergson writes, “does not belong to the province of

esthetics alone, since unconsciously … it pursues a utilitarian aim of general

improvement” (sic).470 Ahmad’s laughter reveals the possibility of the Kantian

aesthetic; he assigns no symbolic value to this aesthetic pleasure in this instance. Thus a

certain aesthetic ‘deliciousness’ is enjoyed, and with it all of the trappings of Kant’s

judgement of taste: a disinterest in the object that bypasses cognitive knowledge,471 the

universal validity of aesthetic pleasure,472 a pure harmonious pleasure that is without a

concept in order to judge what the object ought to be,473 and perhaps even the possibility

of the ‘exemplary satisfaction’ and subsequent ‘senus communis’ that accompany

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judgements of taste.474 But it is striking to find that Ahmad is at great pains to break

with this aesthetic disinterestedness in order to judge the work in purely political terms.

In relegating aesthetic pleasure to what appears to be an isolated domain, Ahmad

introduces a puzzling moment. The excessive “Laughter” seems to move beyond the

limits of aesthetic pleasure, enters the symbolic and produces a negative political effect.

Perhaps this textual moment in Rushdie can be described as a movement beyond the

beautiful to the sublime. This would mean that Ahmad’s rejection of Rushdie is based

upon a rejection of the conservatism, as I argued in chapter two, of the Kantian Sublime.

I intend to deal with this issue in due course. For the moment, however, I am interested

in the problematics of this textual movement. Why does Ahmad seem to embrace

aesthetic pleasure in one moment, and then in the next reject the excesses that this

pleasure produces? Clearly, for Ahmad, pleasure and politics are incommensurable. I

use the term incommensurable because I am not sure just where the line between a

disinterested aesthetic pleasure and politics in this instance can be drawn, and I am not

convinced that Ahmad would have us draw it either. I would contend, however, that

what this puzzling moment reveals is that there is another agenda at work in this

consideration of art and politics and the politics of art. It seems that Ahmad has made a

theoretical switch without telling us. I would suggest that this is a switch, subtle and

allusive as it is, from Kant’s aesthetic, as I have outlined, to a more Hegelian conception

of art.

Ahmad makes a very clear point: “too much” laughter detracts from social

reality. When aesthetic pleasure becomes excessive — “Laughter” — it disrupts the

capacity of the text to deliver what could be called a representation that reveals the

object’s rules. Rushdie’s excesses seem to work against this representational capacity,

and instead produce a condition of ‘forgetting’ what constitutes objects (in this case

Bhutto and Zia) in the actual world. The issue for Ahmad has thus moved beyond

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aesthetic pleasure to questions concerning adequate representation. Ahmad is interested

in the denotative capacity of art. Art is thus an object of cognition, it tells us something

about the state of the world. It seems that aesthetic excess interferes in that cognitive

process, and thus produces falsity, or at the very least detracts from objective reality.

Aristotle’s notion concerning an art of the material everyday is in play here.

Again I call upon Lukács in order to exemplify Ahmad’s theoretical platform. He

writes:

The Aristotelian dictum [zoon politikon] is applicable to all great realistic

literature. Achilles and Werther, Oedipus and Tom Jones, Antigone and Anna

Kerenina: their individual existence — their Sein an sich, in the Hegelian

terminology; their ‘ontological being’, as a more fashionable terminology has it

— cannot be distinguished from their social and historical environment.475

This formulation is crucial in a conception of art as a representation of the object’s

rules. The problem of the author’s social context — the ‘context of creation’ — and the

degree to which that context is able to be dealt with in an individual and imaginative

way, is vital in Ahmad’s implicit demand for a representational art. How is it possible

for art to be at once determined by the social everyday and open to the possibilities of

imaginative creation? Lukács draws upon Hegel to triumphantly solve this problem.

He introduces the category of potentiality to stage the crucial relation between the inner

subjective self and the outer social world.476 This relation is characterised as the

essential opposition between the abstract and the concrete nature of human existence.

Hegel writes:

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 In order to comprehend what development is, what may be called two different

states must be distinguished. The first is what is known as capacity, power, what I

call being-in-itself … the second principle is that of being-for-itself, actuality.477

Here we find a notion in which the individual self, with an inner world, coincides with

the world of social relations, the outer world. It is an opposition which, for Lukács,

effects two basic responses: on the one hand, the idealism of subjective interiority which

can imagine an infinite number of historical possibilities for the self, and on the other,

the concrete actions, the willing interaction of the inner self with objective reality in

order to achieve the self’s inner intentions. The creative self is thus always already

located in relation to the social world. Authentic acts of creation therefore negotiate the

social, and it is precisely the failure to stage this relation in an adequate way, on the part

of Rushdie who seemingly errs on the side of the subjective, that Ahmad denounces.

The question of art has thus moved in Ahmad’s text from the domain of the

purely aesthetic, with its subjective pleasures, to the domain of knowledge, and

subsequently politics, from the realm of Kant’s Critique of Judgement to that of Hegel’s

Lectures on the History of Philosophy.478 Ultimately it is the domain of knowledge that

attempts to reject and close down aesthetic excess in the name of a pure politics.

Ahmad’s reading strategy thus produces a textual tension, an opposition between

pleasure and politics. In his implicit insistence upon potentiality the opposition

functions, like all oppositions, hierarchically, and representational art is privileged over

what is considered to be unmediated pleasure. But I would contend that this attempt to

depoliticise the pleasure of the text, precisely because of the theoretical switch that

informs it, is inadequate in its engagement with Rushdie. Ahmad’s turn to a Hegelian

conception of art, despite conceding that aesthetic pleasure in terms of Kant’s outline of

the judgement of taste is at certain points legitimate (what a delicious text!), fails to deal

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with the nuances of the art/politics nexus that inhabits Rushdie. Put simply, Ahmad’s

judgement upon Rushdie amounts to a theoretical plug for a rigid Hegelian/Lukácsian

approach to art, at the expense of the nuances of a questioning art that seeks to disrupt

rigid theoretical paradigms, and open up the question of politics itself.479 Ahmad reads

Rushdie’s excesses as an abdication of artistic responsibility. He is content to reduce

questions concerning Rushdie’s postcoloniality to a squabble over what side of the

Marxist/Postmodernist fence the artist seems to sit. But in having evoked excess as

disturbance, as his problematic handling reveals, after Ahmad we are compelled to

rethink Rushdie’s politics, and politics itself.

I would wish to take up the excesses that Ahmad finds troubling. Clearly such

excess belongs to the discourse of the sublime. And whilst I have utilised Kant to open

up this sublime, I would contend that ultimately the excess that Rushdie opens up

moves beyond the conservative formulations of Kant. I will turn to a reading of

Midnight’s Children in order to unpack the politics of Rushdie’s excess. In this work

the relation between the issues of migrancy and nationalism are taken up as a site upon

which an historical excess may be written. I would wish to theorise this historical

excess and its political capacity in terms of the postcolonial sublime.

Midnight’s Children as Essay on the Postcolonial Sublime

I had been mysteriously hand-cuffed to history, my destinies indissolubly chained

to those of my country.480

[…] you should never underestimate a spittoon.481

As Ahmad’s more general conclusions concerning Rushdie reveal,

Midnight’s Children can be considered a seminal work that draws a politics of excess

into questions concerning historical responsibility. My contention is, however, that

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Rushdie stages a politics not by putting history to death, thus denying social

obligation, but, through the notion that history itself is excessive as opposed to

insular and singular, foregrounds the necessity of judgement. His is thus not an

abdication of responsibility, but an exploration of what constitutes a responsible

historicism in the face of the real as excess. In other words, the most compelling

issue in Rushdie, in the context of this thesis, is the ‘too much’ history that an elite

Indian nationalism is forced struggle with. The problematic replays what I have

suggested is at the core of the postcolonial sublime. As opposed to the unifying

teleology of nationalism, the postcolonial sublime is the excess that such a teleology

is unable to subordinate to its rule. Rushdie is interested in this excess. Thus as soon

as we enter the terrain of history in Rushdie we are in the terrain of the postcolonial

sublime.

I will unpack what is at stake in Rushdie’s sublime by exploring the

construction of the historical self in Midnight’s Children. I will begin with the

question: how does an artist write history? For Ahmad, Rushdie simply produces

history in an Idealist/Romantic fashion. In such a formulation, Rushdie’s art can be

understood as a radicalisation of Addison’s eighteenth-century assertion: “it is the

part of the Poet to humour the Imagination ... by mending and perfecting Nature”482

(as discussed in chapter two of the thesis). Such an assertion, for Ahmad, is

underpinned by the principles of the Marxist understanding of history as class

struggle. Thus, with prescriptive overtones, art ought to objectively symbolise that

struggle. But the relation of the objective scientist to the object is not the same as the

artist’s relation to the object, at least as we might understand ‘art’ since Kant. Art

intervenes in the perception of objects, in the experience of things in themselves. As

such art that deals with what could loosely be called ‘history’, takes up a relation to

the object that does not necessarily correspond to the epistemological concerns of the

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objective scientist. Rushdie is a case in point. Yet an artistic relation to the

historical cannot be confined simply to the positivist implications that underpin

Kantian formulations of ‘art’, as if art is an end in itself devoid of objective historical

concerns and consequences, either. Art, unlike objective science, has not only its

own history, it also takes up science’s claim to objectivity in order to reveal the

subjective base that lays beneath its own creative core. Rushdie again is a case in

point. So what does he mean by history?

Objective historical writing assumes that there is a History, a dominant

narrative to be recorded. This assumption is driven by the comfortable ease in which

the object reveals itself to the subject. In this regard Ahmad’s Marxism owes much

to a reworked Hegelian Idealism. But Rushdie’s version of the subcontinent exceeds

the formulations of the rigid Ahmad. History is less a ‘grand narrative’, in the

singular, than too much, an excess, many narratives. As such, rather than deny

historical obligations, Rushdie attempts to remain receptive to history as excess.

Thus we find in Midnight’s Children a concern for the impossibility of separating

historical fact from both the history of the writing of historical facts, and the creative

politics of the subject that engages in such facts. In such a formulation the relation of

the subject to the object is not impossible, but difficult and unsettled.

I have begun my discussion of Midnight’s Children with this difficult

epistemology, to underscore what has been my concern throughout the thesis: what

are the political implications of a politics of excess? Whilst excess has been, and

continues to be, central in conservative cultural and national constructions, the

problem of excess, as I have maintained throughout the thesis, takes an interesting

turn in the discourse of the postcolonial. The temporal complexities of the

postcolonial location (Bhabha) cannot be contained by the neat formulations of

conservatism. I have traced these neat formulations in my engagement in Idealism

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and the sublime (chapter’s two and three). Since the discourse of the postcolonial

works against conservative teleologies — it arises as an uncontainable site — it

demands to be understood as a disturbing presence for such a teleology. Rushdie’s

work is crucial in this undertaking since it takes up historical excess in order to open

up questions concerning historical responsibility.

Thus it must be noted that Rushdie’s art refuses the pretension to objectivity

that underpins Ahmad’s determinate judgement, and which problematically

structures his vision for objective creative writing. However, on the other hand, we

do not find the disinterested aesthetic that has been erected in the name of Kant

either. Rushdie occupies an unsettling space in-between. This is not to occupy a

creative space that assumes that the subjective and the objective have no relation, or

conversely, that they must be held in a rigid tension. Rather, it is to foreground both

the form and the stakes of such a relation. We can think Rushdie’s excess in terms of

this foregrounding. Such a foregrounding lends itself to the question of judgment:

how should we judge history? Thus, at the outset, Midnight’s Children confronts the

reader with the first person narrator, Saleem, who is in the process of writing

himself/India. Saleem’s act of narration is far from naive, it is self-consciously

located in the split that I have suggested inhabits the term ‘history’. Saleem seems to

be caught in a strange struggle that would render the space of the objective and the

subjective, as discrete spaces in themselves, highly problematic.

Saleem introduces himself and the aim and the scope of the project by telling

us that he is a midnight’s child, who is fortuitously linked to India’s triumphant

independence from colonial rule. His relation to this historical event, to Indian

history, is set forth via a metaphor — ‘handcuffed’ — that evokes notions of

connection, inseparability, and in some respects, servitude. Similar metaphors

occupy a central place in Rushdie’s oeuvre: “joined, if only by elastic bands”;483 “‘to

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be born again,’ sang Gibreel Farishta, tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to

die’;484 the comma in-between East, West;485 and, “here-I-stand-or-sit with my life’s

sentences nailed to the landscape”.486 Given such an emphasis upon the

impossibility of disconnection from history, it is strange to find that Saleem’s aim in

writing is to dispel the meaningless void that haunts the edges of his being.

[…] time (having no further use for me) is running out. I will soon be thirty-

one years old. Perhaps. If my crumbling, over-used body permits. But I have

no hope of saving my life, nor can I count on having even a thousand nights

and a night. I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up

meaning — yes, meaning — something. I admit it: above all things, I fear

absurdity.487

We can understand this ominous meaninglessness — the absurd — in spite of the

metaphor of connection in the terms that Lyotard set forth in his discussion on the

avant-garde. The threat of the ‘nothing further happens’ is synonymous to closure,

death. Meaning for Lyotard is opened up in the ‘something happens’,488 the

possibility of meaning is staged in temporal terms. To stop time, to put a halt upon

its effects, to ignore the something happens, is to close down affirmative

possibilities. I use the term ‘affirmative’ in the sense that I outlined in my discussion

on Lyotard in chapter four. ‘Affirmative’ suggests a sense of doing justice, a

responsibility for outcomes. Thus despite the meaningless void, that sense of

closure, Saleem desperately clings to the possibility of affirmative being.

The possibility of such an affirmation, as I will show, cannot be understood in

terms of the simple divide of the subject and the object. Rushdie writes from the

muddy space in-between these clearly marked categories. His texts seek to remain

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open to what he perceives is the excess of history, and the difficulties that such an

excess presents. We can understand Rushdie’s art in terms of its disturbances to neat

formulations. This, as I have suggested, is an issue Ahmad fails to take into account.

I would thus wish to suggest that a more cogent reading of Rushdie can be

undertaken by paying attention to the political force of excess in his work.

No other image in the Rushdie corpus portrays excess more aptly than Aurora

Zogoiby’s bedroom painting. Here we find what could be called a logic of the

palimpsest. Such a logic underpins Rushdie’s work generally, and becomes the

grounds for the problem of judgement that I have suggested is at the core of

Rushdie’s political project. It will be useful to include the quote in full. The implied

narrator declares:

Every inch of the walls and even the ceiling of the room pullulated with

figures, human and animal, real and imaginary, drawn in a sweeping black line

that transformed itself constantly, that filled here and there into huge blocks of

colour, the red of the earth, the purple and vermilion of the sky, the forty

shades of green; a line so muscular and free, so teeming, so violent, that

Camoens with a proud father’s bursting heart found himself saying, ‘But it is

the great swarm of being itself.’ [...] she had put history on the walls, King

Gondophares inviting St Thomas the Apostle to India; and from the North,

Empora Asoka with his Pillars of Law, and the lines of people waiting to stand

with their backs against the pillars to see if they could join their hands behind

them for good luck; and her versions of erotic temple-carvings, whose explicit

details made Camoens blanch, and of the building of the Taj Mahal, after

which, as she unflinchingly showed, its great masons were mutilated, their

hands cut off, so that they could never build anything finer; and from her own

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 South she had chosen the battle of Srirangapatnam and the sword of Tipu

Sultan and the magic fortress of Golconda where a man speaking normally in

the gatehouse may be heard clearly in the citadel and the coming long ago of

the Jews. Modern history was there too, there were jails full of passionate

men, Congress and Muslim league, Nehru Gandhi Jinnah Patel Bose Azad, and

British soldiers whispering rumours of an approaching war; and beyond history

were the creatures of her fancy, the hybrids, half-woman half-tiger, half-man

half-snake, there were sea-monsters and mountain ghouls. In an honoured

place was Vasco da Gama himself, setting his foot on Indian soil, sniffing the

air, and seeking out whatever was spicy and hot and made money.489

I would contend that the palimpsest opens up the question: How should we

judge history as excess? Such a question emerges in this instance as a matter of

crises. With polemical overtones it corresponds to the political landscape of which it

is an integral part: how is history currently being judged? In the context of my

concern with the question of excess, the latter judgement can be understood in terms

of a unifying teleology. India as palimpsest emerges as a counter to historical

teleologies. It is thus in this split and torn space, between the registers of absolute

possibility and the constraints of political necessity (survival?), that we hear at the

edges of Saleem’s desire for affirmative meaning the term ‘rewrite’. Saleem’s desire

to “commence the business of remaking my life”,490 is played out in writing. There

is a strong sense in which the younger Saleem’s cyclical separation from history,

which can be understood only as the closing down of Aurora Zogoiby’s remarkable

palimpsest, is countered by the mature Saleem’s writing history. The younger

Saleem appears to be teleological history’s victim, the object of political necessity,

the mature Saleem, a champion of history as excess, an object of writing. I would

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thus wish to argue that in the multifarious layers that comprise Midnight’s Children,

the proper name ‘Saleem’ is a site upon which (at least) two incommensurable

discourses clash. ‘Saleem’ is both the subject in and object of this historical writing.

These two formal subject positions cannot be unproblematically reconciled. I am not

saying that the two Saleems are not the same person, I am saying that the mature

Saleem is writing against himself, his own failures as a midnight’s child, his

disconnection from history as excess. The text is driven by the problem of

reconciling Saleem as subject, and Saleem as object. I am not convinced that this is

achieved, and I am not convinced that either position is valorised as the most apt

vantage point for writing history. What we find is a subjectivity constructed on the

basis of the dispute of the subject and the object. We find an unsettling in the face of

excess, and an opening of the question of judgement that resides in the split space of

both possibility and necessity.

A Politics of the Spittoon

The mature Saleem deals with failures concerning the relation of the self to

India’s historical palimpsest. For even though the younger Saleem becomes

increasingly disconnected from history, as postcolonial India and partitioned

Pakistan demand, the mature Saleem undertakes the writing task with the aim of

establishing connections across the divide that partition, and language divisions

effect. To claim to be handcuffed to history is to question the divisiveness of the

politics of postcolonial India and partitioned Pakistan. With this task at hand the

mature Saleem manages to forge a complicated narrative, littered with difficulties,

confusions, inversions, and excesses. Faced with the proposition that there is too

much to include — as Saleem tells us against the grain of his increasingly

disconnected life, “I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just one of me,

you’ll have to swallow the lot as well”491 — the narrative resists both a pretension to

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objectivity and also its opposite, a disconnected Idealist subjectivity. Readers of

Midnight’s Children are thus faced with the task of unravelling just what kind of

narrative Saleem seems to be writing. I would suggest, therefore, that to read the

work as an interplay between the subjective and the objective alone, to say for

instance that ultimately Rushdie champions the subjective domain of memory and

recollection over the objective domain of historical science, would be to miss what is

crucial about Saleem’s difficult struggle against the void that is eating him away.

What Rushdie produces in the narrative that Saleem writes, and in the struggles that

mark that writing, is a crucial statement about the location and the political capacity

of art. Located in neither the camp of the objective or the subjective, but somewhere

else besides, Rushdie’s art defies the limits that this Idealist binary sets forth. Thus

rather than a romantic conception of art as the reign of the subjective self (as played

out in the Hegelian progress to the absolute), or the mimetic overtones of Ahmad,

Rushdie seeks to unsettle such formulations, to open up a politics that begins with an

historical excess.

The construction of the space of this unsettling can be articulated by the

interesting historical possibilities that the figure of the silver spittoon opens up in

Midnight’s Children. The spittoon marks the excesses and the contaminations that I

suggested through my earlier engagement in Bhabha, the untenability of pure cultural

sites. The discourse of the postcolonial seeks to foreground this untenability. The

sliver spittoon is a historical object that establishes connections across the temporal

breaks that mark the text. As an object which appears to be both a part of the

historical weave of the narrative, and an object in itself that is laden with meanings,

the silver spittoon occupies an interesting location in the novel’s architecture. It

passes from the first book to the second and third. As a counterpoint to Saleem’s

shifting relation to history, the silver spittoon emerges as a constant site from which

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such shifts are able to be articulated, and politicised. Against the attempt to put

history to death, the silver spittoon opens up the obligations and affirmative

possibilities that mark historical being. Its presence across the divisions that mark

the work — Book 1, Book 2, Book 3 — can be read in terms of connections,

contaminations. Rather than neat divisions, Midnight’s Children is a text that

foregrounds what has been central in this thesis, the untenability of contained spaces.

The silver spittoon is marked as a symbolically excessive site. The object is

at once a utensil for the artful dispensing of spit and betel-juice and a symbolic,

meaning laden figure in itself. Its symbolic value outweighs its use-value, or at least

its use-value, as far as Rushdie is concerned, is subordinate to its symbolic function,

namely the spaces of excess that it marks. Midnight’s Children draws out the social

and political artfulness of the spittoon, as opposed to its objective function as a

receptacle of spit and juices. It constitutes an apt site for exploring the political

implications of excess that are drawn up around that difficult space of disconnection

and connection in which Saleem is located.

Apart from the narrative energy that is generated around the spittoon, the

object itself takes on meaningful nuances that remain constant throughout the text,

and which ultimately mirror Saleem’s aim as a writer. The silver spittoon appears as

a textual object that belongs to the modernist poet (of sorts) Nadir Khan. Saleem

gazes upon a mildewing photograph of Mian Abdullah’s Free Islam Convocation,

and evokes, to Padma’s chagrin, words from the figures of Nadir and Rani of Cooch

Naheen:

‘I do not believe in high art … art must be beyond categories; my poetry and

— oh — the game of hit-the-spittoon are equals’. … So now the Rani, kind

woman that she is, jokes, ‘Well, I shall set aside a room, perhaps; for paan-

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 eating and spittoon-hittery. I have a superb silver spittoon, inlaid with lapis

lazuli, and you must all come and practise. Let the walls be splashed with our

inaccurate expectorating! They will be honest stains, at least.’492

As a narrative device this memory of the silver spittoon engenders a narrative

thread that leads to the underground home of Nadir and Mumtaz, who consummate their

love by just such spittoon-hittery, and the magicians ghetto, which is explored in the

third book. Saleem’s (creative) elaboration of the Free Islam Convocation photo,

reveals what is the case concerning spittoons throughout the text. Laden not just with

betel-juice and spit, the figure of the spittoon is a historical object, it marks the presence

of subjectivity. What can we say concerning the subjectivity that marks this cultural

site? The words of Saleem tell us the spittoon functions as a site for the gathering of

selves in what could be called an other space. It is an object that belongs to the past-

time of the people, gathered around it we find a community that cannot be defined in

terms of the auspices of the nation-state. The spittoon can be found in the spaces of

speculation, social freedom, myth and legend, and ultimately is utilised as a metaphor

for the collapse of the high/low art binary. Thus in both brass and silver the figure of

the spittoon is a site upon which the desire of the people, regardless of social privilege

or unprivilege, is powerfully staged in and against the auspices of authoritative rule.

In the work, the figure of the spittoon first appears in brass on the streets of

Agra. The shift from brass to silver in the text, rather than mark difference, produces an

effective valorisation of the symbolic value of the figure of the spittoon. The spittoon in

silver takes on the meanings of the spittoon in brass. Doctor Aziz, that inbetween self

who is open to new possibilities, has contracted, what Saleem calls, “a highly dangerous

form of optimism” concerning Mian Abdullah, “the hope of India’s hundred million

Muslims”. With the aim of bringing together “dozens of Muslim splinter groups” the

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Free Islam Convocation opposes itself to the Muslim League, “who demand partitioned

India”.493 It is in this context, one haunted by the possibility of violence, that we first

encounter the figure of the spittoon. Linked to the optimistic possibilities that such a

context presents — newness perforating the world — the spittoon emerges as the site

upon which such possibilities are engendered. With the subject matter of myth and

legend, gossip, and tales, the spittoon is a site for a public imagining, intellectual

pursuit, and cultural theory.

The betel-chewers at the paan-shop had begun to talk about omens; calming

themselves with their game of hit-the-spittoon, they speculated upon the

numberless nameless Godknowswhats that might issue from the fissuring earth.494

In similar terms the space of a public imagining that gathers around the spittoon

in colonial India is also inextricably political. The same spittoon is central in a street

scene that can be characterised by what Bakhtin called the carnivalesque.495 The

carnival, with its boy kings and excessive caricatures, occupies the muddy space, the

tension, between autonomous identities: ruler and subject, employer and worker, teacher

and pupil, husband and wife. It is a space that disturbs what appears to be a balanced

binary, as it celebrates extremes, negation, inversion, subversion, and transgression.

Marked by an excessive role play, the carnival is the great leveller that interrupts the

hierarchical forces of monologism. Thus the spaces of the streets, in this instance, are

marked as a disturbing excess that renders the poverty stricken street dweller a theorist

of culture rather than a subject of the state. It is worth quoting the scene at length:

Late into the evening they nudge each other with, ‘Do you remember when-’ and

‘Dried up like a skeleton on a washing line! He couldn’t even ride his-’ and ‘-I

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 tell you, baba, that woman could do terrible things. I heard she could even dream

her daughters’ dreams, just to know what they were getting up to!’ But as

evening settles in the nudges die away, because it is time for the contest.

Rhythmically, in silence, their jaws move; then all of a sudden there is a pursing

of lips, but what emerges is not air-made-sound. No whistle, but instead a long

red jet of betel-juice passes decrepit lips, and moves in unerring accuracy towards

an old brass spittoon. There is much slapping of thighs and self-admiring

utterance of ‘Wah, wah, sir!’ and, ‘Absolute master shot!’ … Around the oldsters,

the town fades into desultory evening pastimes. Children play hoop and kabaddi

and draw beards on posters of Mian Abdullah. And now the old men place the

spittoon in the street, further and further from their squatting-place, and aim

longer and longer jets at it. Still the fluid flies true. ‘Oh too good, yara!’ The

street urchins make a game of dodging in and out between the red streams,

superimposing this game of chicken upon the serious art of hit-the-spittoon … But

here is an army staff car, scattering urchins as it comes … here, Brigadier Dodson,

the town’s military commander, stifling with heat … and here, his A.D.C., Major

Zulfikar, passing him a towel. Dodson mops his face; urchins scatter; the car

knocks over the spittoon. A dark red fluid with clots in it like blood congeals like

a red hand in the dust of the street and points accusingly at the retreating power of

the Raj.496

Built upon the principles of civility, law and order, the nation-state obligates its

subjects. Rushdie’s texts relish in the visible markers of authority, the repressive

apparatus: the military, the police, the military police. Thus within the jurisdiction of

this surveillance there are social spaces that disturb its smooth operation. It is in this

disturbing guise that the space of the spittoon becomes crucial.

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 The spittoon space is in many ways hidden from, or at least is concealed from,

the visible demands of the nation-state. As a space of gossip, of legend making, endless

stories and tales, it emerges in its boundless capacity to tell, as simply too much to

contain. Like the space of carnival, it is not an oppositional space, of anti, or counter-

stories that seek an open contest upon the plains of officialdom. Rather, the spittoon

space is marked as a disturbing force in its sheer excess, in its refusal to subordinate this

excess to the pedagogic power of the rulership. It is an uncontrollable space with an

overspill that remains an unknown entity, from the perspective of the ruler. The

possibilities of such an unknown, when hidden from view in this way, become a

nagging disturbance in the sureties of the discourse of power: what is this unknown

entity really capable of? Thus within this graphic depiction of a carnival space, the

overflow from the spittoon merely bursts forth artfully, almost magically, and

pronounces the end to British tyranny when it is run over by a military car.

If in this carnival space the disturbing excesses of the spittoon pronounces

judgement upon the forces of colonial rule, there is also a sense in which this disturbing

excess belongs to India’s destiny, or at least to a hope for a free India. In the same

street the figure of authority, frustrated by hidden spaces — the underground lodging of

the Free Islam Convocation outlaw, Nadir Khan and his secret wife, Mumtaz and their

silver spittoon — attacks the spittoon on the street.

O awesome rage of Major Zulfy when he found that the bird [Nadir Khan] had

flown! […] Enraged Zulfy […] pelted past the cycle-rickshaw rank. Old men

were playing hit-the-spittoon and the spittoon was out in the street. Urchins

dodging in and out of the streams of betel-juice. Major Zulfy ran, ononon.

Between the old men and their target, but he lacked the urchins’ skill. What an

unfortunate moment: a low hard jet of red fluid caught him squarely in the crotch.

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 A stain like a hand clutched at the groin of his battledress; squeezed; arrested his

progress. Major Zulfy stopped in almighty wrath. O even more unfortunate;

because a second player, assuming the mad soldier would keep on running, had

unleashed a second jet. A second red hand clasped the first and completed Major

Zulfy’s day … slowly, with deliberation, he went to the spittoon and kicked it

over, into the dust. He jumped on it — once! twice! again! — flattening it, and

refusing to show that it had hurt his foot. 497

The scene closes in upon the futility of Major Zulfy’s violent act against the figure of

the spittoon. In concluding this comic image of Major Zulfy’s lack of competence in

the spaces of the people, Saleem tellingly announces, the “old ones retrieved their

brutalized receptacle and began to knock it back into shape”.498 The political import of

this reshaping reveals not only Saleem’s respect for the space of the spittoon, it also

reveals the un-oppositional nature of resistance that is the object of this respect. Rather

than a direct attack against the rule of authority, the old ones preserve the site upon

which the disturbing excesses of telling are able to be written. There is a sense in which

the space of the spittoon, and the endless possibilities that it generates, is inextricably

linked to what constitutes hope. Saleem’s writing gestures in its epistemological

underpinning to a hope for the impunity of the spaces of the spittoon in art and in life.

He writes, thus revealing the narrative authority that he grants to such social spaces:

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

According to legend, then — according to the polished gossip of the ancients at

the paan-shop — Mian Abdullah owed his downfall to his purchase, at Agra

railway station, of a peacock-feather fan […] And so it was that none of the

Hummingbird’s optimists were prepared for what happened. They played hit-the-

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 spittoon, and ignored the cracks in the earth. […] the assassins reached the

campus.499

A similar narrative authority is granted to the plethora of stories and the

delicious gossip in Shame: the implied narrator declares, “then (the legend goes)”;500

we find instances of the “tribals who bore this tale into the bazaar”;501 the tale of Raza

Hyder’s shame “was in the wind, and in the bazaars and at the bus depots and over the

tables of cheap cafés”;502 and Rani’s shawls speak powerfully of the unspeakable

violence of her husband Iskander Harappa.503 I would suggest that like Midnight’s

Children, Shame inserts itself into the tale telling practice that gives the narrative its

form, and to speak the unspeakable in order to defy the forces of a tyrannical nation-

state.

Gossip is like water. It probes surfaces for their weak places, until it finds the

breakthrough point”.504

Gossip is an integral part in the working out of self-identity. We tell stories about each

other, as I tell this story about Rushdie, as subjects in relations of power and economic

exchange. Gossip is a kind of public imagining which functions, in this context, as a

counter-discourse against the formalities of a dictatorship. A sense of resistance thus

emerges in the public speaking of the secrets of rulers. There is power in leakage, and it

is the task of tyrants to contain it, as it was the task of Raza Hyder to contain knowledge

of the violence that lay beneath his rise to power:

Raza summoned his triumvirate of Generals. Radi, Bekar, and Phisaddi arrived, to

hear Hyder dredge up, for the last time, a few shards of his old authority. ‘Arrest

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 these subversives!’ he demanded, waving newspapers at the Generals. ‘I want

them in the darkest jail, I want them finished, defunct, kaput!’.505

Like the gossip in Shame, the spittoon thus represents an excess, a critical mass

of sorts, that poses a threat to unifying teleologies. The uncontainable space of the

spittoon, that mixture of spit and discourse, in many respects engenders the necessity of

state violence in this context. Violence is a necessity precisely because of the slippage

that uncontainability calls forth. Just as the excess and slippage in Kant’s architectonics

engenders the authority of reason, the violence that Rushdie’s texts foreground can be

considered a last ditch effort to contain a plethora of stories and theories. Where

pedagogy (propaganda) ends, physical violence begins. Indeed in the light of the

disturbing excesses of Bhabha’s infrastructures, it could be argued that the colonial

equipped with Enlightenment reason resorts to physical violence precisely because

reason’s teleology encounters an excess that ultimately renders its success untenable.

In having been engendered with the excessive and disturbing nuances that I have

opened up, the spittoon passes from the first to the second book and enters the space of

historical memory. In the second book the spittoon is a ‘precious possession’506 that

symbolises connections to, and differentiation from, the past. As such it occupies a

muddy inbetween space. It doesn’t belong wholly to the past or to the present. Thus its

presence in the household of Ahmed and Amina is a visible sign, on the part of Amina

at least, that her identity is constituted by what is present in this time and place, and also

by what is absent, what has been constituted elsewhere. Despite her re-invention —

Mumtaz becomes Amina — the impossibility of being either one or the other is at stake

here. For Amina the migrant is caught in-between her past — her underground home

with Nadir in Agra — and her new life with Ahmed in Delhi. She is dislocated: “‘It’s

[the sun] come up in the wrong place!’”, and, “something of its jumbling influence

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remained with her and prevented her from feeling entirely at ease”, and thus is

condemned, like her parents, to “fall in love with her husband bit by bit”, whilst always

remaining “susceptible to the forbidden dream-images of …”507 Mumtaz/Amina as

migrant in many ways exceeds the possibilities that her new world would present to her.

She is marked by the telling image of having too much past to accompany her to a new

life:

And now Aadam Aziz lifted his daughter (with his own arms), passing her up

after the dowry into the care of this man who had renamed and so re-invented her

[…] In the compartment the new Amina Sinai sat (in mint condition) with her feet

on the green tin trunk which had been an inch too high to fit under the seat”.508

It is in this context of the spectres that accompany migrants, spectres that

characterise Rushdie’s vision of India as a palimpsest of movement and change, that the

secret and the forbidden excess of that past is attended to by the figure of the spittoon.

Stolen with some other precious items, and then discovered in the bed roll of Musa the

servant a short time later, the silver spittoon continues to be linked to the disturbing

power of what cannot be spoken. To hide the spittoon in a bed roll, only in the hope

that it will be discovered by its owners — Mary Pereira, burdened with her interference

in Saleem’s parentage (she switched the name tags) framed Musa, to whom she had

shared her secret — leads the novel into questions concerning the constitution of truth,

specifically historical truth. The silver spittoon as a marker of possibility, is marshalled

into the service of falsity in this instance. Hidden from view in a bed roll the spittoon’s

presence falsely accuses Musa. There is a sense in which the space of the spittoon,

despite the possibilities that it generates, is able to be thwarted by forces that would put

it to ill use.

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 Interestingly this sense of ill use is not openly condemned in the novel. The

spittoon speaks Musa’s guilt, despite his seeming innocence. The space of the spittoon

thus remains far from utopian, and is in no way presented as a pure site from which an

innocent becoming is able to be maintained. What this resistance to innocence reveals

is that the idealistic egalitarian spaces toward which my suggestions concerning the

spittoon gesture, are fraught with individual interests, differences, struggle. I would

thus suggest that it is not until Mary Pereira hides the silver spittoon in the bed roll that

the spittoon emerges as a truly productive site. This is a site that is marked by an

agonistics rather than a concern for the truth. The spittoon is as much marked by

dispute as consensus. But it is the possibility of dispute, and the possibility of reframing

reality as dispute, that marks the strength of the space of the spittoon. The disturbing

character of the space of the spittoon in the discourses of authority is disturbing

precisely because its reality remains unsettled, subject to dispute.

Contaminations, Leakages, Negotiations

The various issues that I have drawn up around Rushdie’s spittoon — the

carnivalesque, an excessive space that disturbs the pretension to order, a space of

dispute rather than Truth, a space that unsettles neat binary logics — clearly inhabit a

logic that defies the possibility of myths of national unity. The materiality of the social

location of the spittoon defies the radical historical disjunctions that mark myths of

unity, and which are central in Midnight’s Children. I would wish to turn at this point

to consider some of the problems that this defiance of gaps and divisions raises. One of

the most crucial problems that Midnight’s Children engages in, is India’s passage from

the colonial to the postcolonial.

The issues that I would wish to raise here, directly relate to my contention that

the discourse of the postcolonial cannot be easily identified in terms of homogeneous

schemes. In Chatterjee, the nationalist liberation struggle merely effected the structures

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of the colonial which had claimed to have been displaced. In Fanon, Hegel’s slave

failed to provide a metaphor for the struggle of black Africa. In Bhabha, the discourse

of the postcolonial is alway already a transgressive, rather than an affirmative force.

Each suggests that the postcolonial emerges in a kind of crises. Colonialism is not dead

and buried, but has merely changed the terms of its rule. We can read Rushdie’s

historical excess much like Fanon’s excessive body, and the spaces of uncontainability

in Bhabha. That is to say, Rushdie attempts to unleash an excess of history, in order to

disrupt the teleological claims of Western historiography.

The framing of the first book by Saleem as his history, when in fact the point of

Mary’s burden is that it is not actually his history, can be read as a crucial statement

concerning the discourse of the postcolonial. As I framed Fanon’s work in chapter

three, the rug-pulling act of decolonisation — specifically the notion that for Fanon the

emancipation of the colonised peoples, set forth in the guise of simply abolishing the

master/slave dialectic, merely writes them out of an equation that in some sense

provided an opportunity to confront the injustice of colonialism — that Fanon sought to

overcome is a problem for Rushdie also. It is significant that in a novel about a

character who is increasingly disconnected from history, that we read the novel’s first

book at all. The inclusion of this colonial past in Saleem’s (re)writing suggests that a

postcolonial art draws such a past into its orbit, in order to take up a disturbing location

within the Western imagination. The shift from colonial to postcolonial India, and the

refusal to leave that colonial moment behind, is ultimately a refusal of an Indian history

as British History. If Aadam Aziz had “learned that India — like radium — had been

‘discovered’ by the Europeans,”509 pragmatically speaking, the decolonisation of India

by the British in no way disrupts what Aziz had learned. Decolonisation actually

becomes a part of that history of discovery, it is thus still the history of the British in

India, the history of their leaving. The comic image of Methwold’s estate, and the

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“little game” of this parting colonial, who insisted that the houses be “bought complete

with every last thing in them”, and “that the entire contents be retained by the new

owners”,510 reveals a desire for the lasting legacy of that history. But Saleem’s

inclusion of a history, perhaps more accurately, histories that are both his and not his,

disturbs the grip of the colonial masters upon the historical. Thus rather than a

reverence for the British Raj’s rule, or even a politics of blame that would evoke a

reverence of sorts, colonial India emerges as a space with its own historical struggle, its

own magic, its own resourceful people.

Colonial India is an effect, in many ways, of the colonial occupation of Britain,

yet at the same time its history is unique to the characters that think, feel, and act both

inside and outside that colonial occupation. Saleem’s narrative in connecting itself with

that past effectively counters the rug-pulling tactic that lies at the core of decolonisation.

To ignore that past, to fail to find a life and energy that in no way reflects the othering

demands of the colonial, would to be complicit with the divisiveness of what Aziz had

learned. This narrative with its magical sites, its sheer excess, occupies a terrain within

the auspices of colonial authority. Such an occupation, just by virtue of the fact that it is

possible to upset a centre/margin mentality with subjectivities that can’t be situated in

such a binary — Kashmir, the ghetto of Bombay — disturbs the historical assumptions

of the colonial and his predecessors centrality.

This is the strange space that Rushdie’s art seeks to occupy. Decolonisation is a

political reality, it represents a historical break, but, like Amina’s Mumtaz, such a break

is politically charged. The parting colonial left with an agenda, rather than withdrew

from one. Rushdie’s difficult narrative thus refuses to allow the break to set up

counterproductive divisions — past/present — that play into the hands of the

hierarchical pretensions of colonialism.511 Rather than blot out colonial India the text

utilises the break as a kind of connection that demands to be negotiated. It is in this

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negotiation that the question, ‘who are we’?, is able to be inscribed into a history of

becoming. To deny that becoming as the site for this question is to refuse to

acknowledge the social and historical nature of being, and to plummet into a

conservatism that would champion the cause of an isolated individuality, the heroic

underling that structures Hegel’s Phenomenology. Thus Saleem is exiled from what is

not his, but that what that is not his is inextricably linked to the structures of his

identification, national, local. To be hand-cuffed to this history is thus a gesture that

evokes an unforgetting, it is to recognise the trace of the past that continually emerges in

the present as an absence that demands to be engaged with. What is this absence?

Nothing other than the myriad of possibilities that is India, the plethora that deifies by

virtue of its excess the limits of the colonial pretension to historical order. To treat this

historical break as radically discrete rather than a complex of connections and leaks is to

blot out the palimpsest that lays beneath the surface of the face of the new. Thus

Rushdie, in this novel, confronts the reality of the past as it leaks into the present, and

the futility of living in a void that refuses to engage in that leak. Saleem’s impending

plummet into the nothing further happens is inextricably linked to this issue of the

historical leak. To defy the leak is to close down affirmative possibilities in Saleem’s

economy.

We can read this defiance of the leak in the terms that I have set forth in my

reading of the Kantian and the Hegelian sublime. The possibility of unifying the excess

of sensory experience is crucial for reason’s claim to authority in Kant, and in Hegel,

the capacity of reason to unify disparate elements under one principle signals its

authority. The former is subjective, the latter puts the subjective to work in the social

domain. Colonialism can be understood in terms of the subjective/objective split that

preoccupied Idealism. Taking a unified subjectivity as a model of authenticity, the

colonial sought to establish an empire with the principle of unity as a teleology.

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Rushdie seeks to interrupt the possibility of such a unity with an excess, that can be

understood in terms of what I have called the postcolonial sublime.

The most telling blow upon the refusal to engage in the productive possibilities

of temporal leakage is, as I have suggested, set forth via Saleem’s migration to Pakistan.

Saleem as a midnight’s child, despite being a symbol of new possibilities for the nation,

absurdly plummets into obscurity. His increasing extraction from history, his increasing

sense of unbelonging, signals that rather than new possibilities, he is a sign of the failure

of the nation’s political imagination. Thus this gradual extraction reads like a tale of

innocence lost. From the wide eyed infant who had to be taught how to blink in his

beloved Bombay, too much Bombay — “the city, basking like a bloodsucker lizard in

the summer heat. Our Bombay: it looks like a hand but it’s really a mouth, always

open, always hungry, swallowing food and talent from everywhere else in India”512 —

Saleem plummets into a state of despair. I would wish to map this increasing

disconnection from history with the notion that the mature Saleem ultimately

undermines the possibility of such a disconnection. In other words, if there is a seeming

disconnection at work here there is always already the presence of the past as an

excessive absence. As I have suggested, the text is built upon a tension between a

disconnected and a connected Saleem. And it is in this difficult tension that the political

cogency of the postcolonial sublime emerges.

Through rejection and displacement Saleem as a symbol of the new, the mirror

of the nation, becomes increasingly decentred, removed from Indian national life. In the

context of book two, he doesn’t seem to overcome this specific relation to the nation,

and is constantly frustrated at never being able to actively and literally participate in its

historical processes. It is tempting to read this distance as a universal rejection of

Marxism, as Ahmad perhaps would, but I would contend that it deals specifically with

the time of partition, and with Pakistan’s difficult status as a Muslim homeland. As

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such Saleem’s historical and national identity can only be a negative one. It is doomed

to be charted in a gap as a mirrored reversal of the nation-state. The time of Saleem’s

being disrupts the emptying of the time of Pakistan’s birth as a nation. Again Rushdie’s

critique of Pakistan in Shame articulates what is at stake here. In building Pakistan, he

declares, “it was necessary to cover up Indian history, to deny that Indian centuries lay

just beneath the surface of Pakistani Standard Time”.513 Saleem contradicts what

Pakistan deems about its new beginning. Culturally he is anything but pure. He is

contaminated, a kind of cultural palimpsest that has been written upon by centuries of

subcontinental time.

Thus on the brink of being torn apart by language differences, Saleem attempts

to remain open to the excessive possibilities of centuries of time, rather than the

resurrection of rigid ancient authenticities. In what is essentially a bleak political

outlook, Saleem seems to remain history’s victim, rather than its main protagonist, as

the promise of his symbolic national function suggested. The Hindu raised as a Muslim

by default, the Kasmiri/Bombay Indian who becomes a Pakistani national, by extension

a similar default, is forced to tread the false boundaries that such oppositions set up. So

instead of the increasing influence of the midnight’s children and the possibilities that

they open up, in a kind of reverse Hegelianism the ‘new’ nation closes them down.

Without Saleem as (re)writer of this history at its edge, this book would mercilessly

remain politically pessimistic.

Failures

So among the midnight children were infants with powers of transmutation, flight,

prophecy and wizardry … but two of us were born on the stroke of midnight.

Saleem and Shiva, Shiva and Saleem, nose and knees and knees and nose … to

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 Shiva, the hour had given the gifts of war […] and to me, the greatest talent of all

— the ability to look into the hearts and minds of men.514

In the face of the great hope that the children of midnight promised, such a

pessimism can be understood in terms of the historical connections that the text seeks to

establish. Beginning with the demise of this hope, the mature Saleem seeks to affirm

being as excess. For my purposes, the historical excess that I have connected to the

postcolonial sublime is a crucial site in the context of contemporary conservatism. Thus

with its remarkable membership the Midnight’s Children Conference (MCC) promised

much. It equates to a concentration of the productive excesses that are attended to by

the figure of the spittoon. The ability to be able to draw the thought of the nation, that

vast plethora of ideas and feelings into one space and time, had been Saleem’s gift. Yet

remarkably the tale of the MCC, like the nation, is one of division, struggle, and

ultimately demise. Given such an excess of ideas and possibilities, it remained

impossible to even generate discussion concerning what could be the Conference’s sole

purpose. Saleem tells us, “I introduced the Conference to the notions which plagued me

all this time: the notions of purpose, and meaning. ‘We must think,’ I said, ‘what we

are for’”. I would suggest that Saleem is not necessarily calling for a singleness of

purpose in the positive sense here. His unblinking nature, his voyeurism, and the

obvious differences that constituted the Conference, suggest that he sought a strategy of

negotiating difference, rather than a commitment to a monologic politics. But the

answers that filled and overflowed the mind of the Conference convener rendered his

openness to difference impossible. Among the philosophies and aims dogmatically

suggested: collectivism, individualism, filial duty, capitalism, altruism, science,

religion, cowardice, women’s rights, improving the fortunes of the untouchables, land

claims, political power.515 Thus the MCC ultimately splits and fractures into the image

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of the nation that it mirrored. Driven by the prejudices of the adult world, the hope that

the image of innocence, of becoming, of the future that children engender, disintegrates

into factions, dogmatisms, and a counter-productive rigidity: innocence lost.

Saleem fails to convince the declining Conference that they be a “third principle

[…] the force which drives between the horns of the dilemma”: the duality of masses

and classes, capital and labour, them and us.516 The third principle, Saleem explains,

via the recurring metaphor of innocence, is “childhood”;517 the newness, endless

possibility, incompletion, the undecidability, and, in many ways, indeterminacy that

characterises pre-adult life, and which disturbs the adult pretension to a divisive order.

Children know no boundaries, and are free to explore their world before the imposition

of adult-hood sets in and begins to regiment thought and life. Midnight’s Children is a

plea for an innocent becoming. But such a becoming, as I have suggested, has already

been contaminated by Saleem’s desire for the centrality of the aesthetic in the socio-

political sphere.

Thus, just as Padma foregrounded the politics of inclusion and exclusion, Shiva

opposes Saleem’s call for the artful negotiation of the political in terms that bear a

remarkable likeness to Ahmad’s Marxist judgement upon Rushdie. Shiva pronounces

Saleem’s emphasis upon the productive capacity of undecidability as nothing but elitist

sentiment.

‘No, little rich boy; there is no third principle; there is only money-and-poverty,

and have-and-lack, and right-and-left; there is only me against the world! The

world is not ideas, rich boy; the world is no place for dreamers or their dreams,

the world, little snotnose, is things.518

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This materialist attack upon what appears to be an Idealism becomes a central concern

in this text. But such a concern, despite Saleem’s hierarchical pretension, is

complicated by the problem of history that I have suggested is at the core of Saleem’s

‘masterful’ (re)writing. Inhabited by the switched name tags — ‘Shiva’ and ‘Saleem’

had been subject to Mary Pereira’s class based interruption of familial history — the

conflict between them deals directly with Saleem’s ‘disconnection’ from the past.

Shiva’s argument is that Saleem is caught up in a disinterested idea (Kant), rather than

the thing in itself. We can recall Marx and Engels’ opposition to Idealism’s central

tenants in The German Ideology: “Life is not determined by consciousness, but

consciousness by life”.519 But such an attack in this instance, as Saleem’s advantageous

re-writing reveals, falls short. For it is not that Saleem has ideologically plummeted

into the false economy of an aesthetic Idealism, it is that his own cultural location —

‘determined’ as it is by a kind of in-betweenness — demands a politics that doesn’t

directly correspond to the interests of European Marxism. It could be that even though

Marxist political strategies formed the basis of Europe’s critique of Imperialism in the

decades after the turn of the century (Lenin’s analysis of Hobson),520 in the cultural in-

between, as Rushdie’s India is predominantly defined through tropes of migrancy, such

a critique fails to be viable. The figure of the spittoon as dispute refuses to allow either

an aesthetic disconnection or the socio-historical determinism that underpins Shiva’s

attack. Rushdie’s Saleem is thus not quite an Idealist (the romantic genius) nor an

outright materialist, but something else. The path from the subject to the object, or from

the object to the subject, depending upon the critic’s point of view, remains flawed by

the excesses that render the gaps and the divisions that such schemes depend upon as

highly problematic.

Reading Rushdie in terms of the postcolonial sublime enables the political

nuances of his work to opened up. Rather than the Marxist/postmodernist battle that

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characterises Rushdiecriticism, Rushdie can be considered in terms of an excess that

refuses to be reduced to such a theoretical framework. My contention is that Rushdie

demands to be taken up in terms of the politics of material excess — the real that is left

over when unifying teleologies have gone to work — and the contaminations that refuse

to be reduced to homogeneous typologies.

Connections, Border Crossings, Possibilities

How does Saleem’s mastery figure in relation to that eighteenth-century

propensity for the creative centrality of the Romantic genius? I would suggest that

Saleem’s mastery cannot be understood via such a figure. As Europe’s aesthetic and

intellectual ‘development’ haunts ‘Rushdiecriticism’, as the celebration of his exilic

status continues to be a site for both celebration and denouncement, Rushdie’s ‘mastery’

in Midnight’s Children becomes elusive. To claim to be the master of the fragment

from the space of the migrant is not to evoke the mastery of the romantic outsider, it is

to turn away from the centre/margin model that structures the myth of the Romantic

genius, and which finds its way into the domains of postcolonial literary departments.

In many respects to claim to be a master of the fragment is to write as if the fragment

itself were the centre. Given its productive moment — Rushdie sat down to write

Midnight’s Children as a relative unknown — the argument that Saleem’s mastery can

be conflated with Rushdie’s acclaim as an “Indian born British writer” is a retrospective

fallacy. With Rushdie’s own stated resistance to the trope of the artist as outsider,521 I

would suggest that his fiction seeks to escape the dialectical ethic that underpins such

tropes. Saleem’s mastery in no way corresponds to the aesthetic disconnection that

preoccupied Shiva and Ahmad after him.

Thus we find that even when Saleem is seemingly totally removed from all

visible forms of a past, utterly dispossessed, the past plummets from the sky out of the

ruins of that dispossession, and, in the figure of the spittoon, strikes him on the head.

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The novel’s second book, which charts the demise of the MCC and Saleem’s gradual

disconnection, concludes with just such a strike. During the Pakistan-India war of 65,

which was driven by the demand for a radical historical disjunction, Saleem writes:

I pick myself up dizzily after the blast, something twisting turning somersaulting

down, silver as moonlight, a wondrously worked silver spittoon inlaid with lapis

lazuli, the past plummeting towards me like a vulture-dropped hand to become

what-purifies-and-sets-me-free, because now as I look up there is a feeling at the

back of my head and after that there is only a tiny but infinite moment of utter

clarity while I tumble forwards to prostrate myself before my parents’ funeral

pyre, a minuscule but endless instant of knowing, before I am stripped of past

present memory time shame and love, a fleeting but also timeless explosion in

which I bow my head yes I acquiesce yes in the necessity of the blow, and then I

am empty and free, because all Saleems go pouring out of me.522

There is a certain historical resilience at work here. As I have suggested, this resilience,

this unwillingness on the part of the mature Saleem to be expelled from history,

compels us to think through what is at stake in the question of nationalism. It is the

myth of unity that animates this war. But despite the violent imposition of war, and the

alteration of the landscape that marks any invasion, the historical body remains. The

figure of the spittoon works against Saleem’s emptiness. There is, in this case, a

receptacle of historical being, physical evidence from that obliterated past. Moreover,

the presence of the narrative that precedes this event, like the persistent inclusion of the

spittoon, testifies to the impossibility of Saleem’s complete disconnection from history

and the impossibility of the emptying of time (Weber).

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 The third book politicises this theme. We find an empty, heedless Saleem,

known as the “buddha”, with his sanity in question, serving the Pakistani military in a

war, from Rushdie’s perspective, between enemies who belong to the same historical

palimpsest. The spittoon in this scene of dispossession marks a figurative connection.

His teeth are stained; betel-juice reddens his gums. A red stream of expectorated

paan-fluid leaves his lips, to hit, with commendable accuracy, a beautifully-

wrought silver spittoon, which sits before him on the ground. Ayooba Shaheed

Farooq are staring in amazement. ‘Don’t try to get it away from him,’ Sgt-Mjr

Najmuddin indicates the spittoon, ‘it sends him wild’.523

In this relative obscurity the spittoon remains and signals that despite the intentions on

the part of the Pakistani authorities to empty time and space, to deny the centuries of

Indian history that lay beneath its surface, the past leaks through, this Pakistani Muslim

soldier carries a small piece of his Indianness. It is just such a leakage that redeems and

restores the mature Saleem, and, moreover, opens up questions concerning the

unleashing of a postcolonial sublime. The third book in the triadic structure of

Midnight’s Children re-opens once again the issue of the historical self, and attempts to

define the bridges between the radically displaced Saleem and the reflective, mature

Saleem. Saleem, the Kashmiri/Bombayite Hindu who was raised as a Muslim and who

migrated to Pakistan, embarks upon a journey of self-discovery (invention?).

As a dutiful tracker in the Pakistani military in their war against India, this

journey begins, paradoxically, by way of escape into the realm of dreams. Remaining

torn between two worlds, in a kind of cultural non-space defined only by duty—which

remains no less problematic than his desire for the centrality of the MCC — the

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buddha, (mis)leading three fellow soldiers, flees to the jungle of the Sundarbans. What

does he flee from? Obligation.

the buddha, finally incapable of continuing in the submissive performance of his

duty, took to his heels and fled. Infected by the soul-chewing maggots of

pessimism futility shame, he deserted, into the historyless anonymity of rain-

forests.524

It is significant that the spittoon again features as a motif for hope, for the possibility of

historical being across the Pakistan/India divide. Saleem in (re)writing expresses the

distance, as I have suggested, between himself and the character of his narrative, who

remains stripped of history. Total anonymity is the logical conclusion to a self torn

apart by the ravages of a history denied. Its expression is violence, as the buddha knows

no other way than obedience to his military masters. Saleem explains to Padma:

What I hope to immortalize in pickles as well as words: that condition of the spirit

in which the consequences of acceptance could not be denied, in which an

overdose of reality gave birth to a miasmic longing for flight into the safety of

dreams […] ‘I am glad,’ my Padma says, ‘I am happy you ran away.’ But I insist:

not I. He. He, the buddha. Who, until the snake, would remain not-Saleem; who,

in spite of running-from, was still separated from his past; although he clutched,

in his limpet fist, a certain silver spittoon.525

In the directionless, timeless, seemingly purposeless, and hostile jungle, survival itself

overshadows the war and the concerns of soldiers:

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 the chase, which had begun far away in the real world, acquired in the altered light

of the Sundarbans a quality of absurd fantasy which enabled them to dismiss it

once and for all. So it was that Ayooba Shaheed Farooq and the buddha

surrendered to the terrible phantasms of the dream-forest.526

In this disordered space the buddha is bitten by a snake — the scene is a confusion of

Buddhist and Christian iconography — and begins to reclaim “all lost histories, all the

myriad complex processes that go to make a man”.527

The Sundarbans is a place of confrontation. History emerges as a matter of

survival against an anonymous oblivion. History as a palimpsest of possibilities stands

against the threat of nothing further happening, or at least of not being aware that

something happens. The buddha’s articulations thus enact a handcuffing. The only

time he speaks in the jungle is to articulate an historical self, excessive as he is. To be

able to articulate stories is to be joined, to be engaged, to be an agent in the invention of

self-hood. Without a sense of movement or change, and the memories and stories of

such, cultural identity would not be possible. Midnight’s Children contests any notion

that would set forth self-hood as a historyless agent, or which would presume to locate

an authentic self-hood, as in Romanticism, as somehow outside of the constraints and

the enablements of time.528 The anonymous dreamscape of the Sundarbans defy such a

possibility.

Thus as each book marks a division within the text’s architecture, each division

remains far from self-contained. Despite Saleem’s seeming disconnection from the

historical divides that the text’s architecture mark, Saleem’s emergence from the space

of oblivion marks a border crossing. Concealed in a wicker basket with the spittoon by

his side, he escapes from that other partition, Bangladesh, back to India. Again a

dangerous anonymity looms in this situation. The safety of the wicker basket as womb

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tempts Saleem to the oblivion of isolation. But as is characteristic of Rushdie’s texts

generally, this temptation is transformed through the power of anger. Saleem writes:

In the grip of Parvati’s sorcery, I felt my hold on the world slip away — and how

easy, how peaceful not to never return! — to float in this cloud nowhere, wafting

further further further, like a seed-spore blown on the breeze — in short, I was in

mortal danger. What I held on to in that ghostly time-and-space: a silver spittoon.

Which, transformed like myself by Parvati-whispered words, was nevertheless a

reminder of the outside … clutching finely-wrought silver, which glittered in that

nameless dark, I survived. […] I was saved, not only by the glints of a spittoon,

but also by another transformation […] I discovered anger.529

In the context of the border crossings that mark this text, Anger is an understated social

concept. It is either a psychological disorder or a sin. Feminists on the other hand have

cautiously seized its liberatory power.530 For Rushdie too anger generates a series of

contradictory possibilities. Anger occupies an important location in all of his major

works. In Shame the body of the innocent Sufiya, written over by Pakistan’s violence,

erupts to judge the rulers of the nation. In The Satanic Verses Saladin Chamcha

discovers anger and manages to overcome his goat like form, that physicality that

mirrored British nationalist attitudes toward the Indian migrant. In The Moor’s Last

Sigh Aurora Zogoiby dances her anger in the form of a protest, high above the

fundamentalist Hindu procession. But in Midnight’s Children the redemptive power of

anger is raised only in order to reveal its limits. The mature Saleem writes his failures

in order to underscore the political necessity of an openness to historical excess.

Saleem’s anger reveals an object of overcoming. It is significant that this object

— his increasing displacement from and lack of historical centrality — cannot be

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overcome via the cool detachment of Kantian reason. Anger transgresses the limits of

Reason, it cannot be constrained by the moral sublimity that underpins the authority of

the Kantian self. Rushdie’s anger is a material force, an affirmative, as opposed to a

reactionary, bodily eruption that is able to confront, as Fanon’s complex rejection of

Hegel reveals, where no confrontation is possible. But anger also produces rigid

oppositions, essentialisms, violent preconceptions, and the possibility of being drained

(the widow). The mature Saleem thus calmly counters his impetuous youthful rage with

a fluid identity, “to understand me, you’ll have to swallow a world”.531 The

transformative power of anger thus fades, not in the name of Kantian rationality, but in

the name of excess. Unlike the pain of a wrong, anger lifts the feeling that can’t be

phrased above and beyond and makes a demand for a determinate judgement.

Rushdie’s mature Saleem prefers the spaces of excess.

The closed space of the wicker basket, as a repeated metaphor, becomes a womb

for a rebirth of sorts. This cyclical pattern characterises this narrative text: birth, the

desire for historical centrality, the demise of that desire, seeming obscurity, rebirth.

One constant remains: the figure of the spittoon, that marker of historical processes. In

the third book, however, Saleem’s anger engenders the desire for centrality in the

nation’s affairs that had been thwarted before. In this instance he attempts to join the

public service. But again the possibilities that such a social location afford are denied.

He returns to the magicians slum, to finally lose everything, even the sliver spittoon that

accompanied him throughout this cyclical process. Indira crushes the resistive space of

the magicians ghetto. With the loss of his wife, Pavarti-the-witch, as a consequence of

Indira’s purge, Saleem announces a nostalgia for the spittoon. I would suggest that this

important moment marks a shift from anger as an animating principle to nostalgia.

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 I was consumed by nostalgia for my bulldozed spittoon. Picture Singh had

provided me with a spittoon-surrogate, an empty Dalda Vanaspati can, but

although I used this to entertain my son with my expertise in the gentle art of

spittoon-hittery, sending long jets of betel-juice across the grimy air of the

magicians’ colony, I was not consoled. A question: why such grief over a mere

receptacle of juices? My reply is that you should never underestimate a spittoon.

Elegant in the salon of the Rani of Cooch Naheen, it permitted intellectuals to

practise the art-forms of the masses; gleaming in a cellar, it transformed Nadir

Khan’s underworld into a second Taj Mahal; gathering dust in an old tin trunk, it

was nevertheless present throughout my history, covertly assimilating incidents in

washing-chests, ghost visions, freeze-unfreeze, drainage, exiles; falling from the

sky like a piece of the moon, it perpetrated a transformation. O talismanic

spittoon! O beauteous lost receptacle of memories as well as spittle-juice! What

sensitive person could not fail to sympathize with me in my nostalgic agony at its

loss?532

How should we understand this nostalgia? Several interrelated factors intervene in our

understanding. Firstly it is significant that a writer who is supposedly caught up in the

so called postmodernist rejection of historic nostalgia, evokes such a crucial moment.

The postmodern disrupts the oppression of conventional Historical representation, by

positing a multiplicity of representations. An excess of history thus emerges in this

textual space as less India’s Truth, than the presentation of truths, for India’s

marginalised voices, the stories from the slums, and the underworld invade the text with

their own histories. In this context this multiplicity disrupts the telling of historical

Truth, or as Linda Hutcheon puts it, “we now get the histories (in the plural) of the

losers as well as the winners, of the regional (and colonial) as well as the centrist, of the

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unsung many as well as the much sung few, and I might add, of women as well as

men”.533 The postmodern form thus enables alternative histories to be presented, and

this gives rise to the notion that there can no longer be a privileged voice in historical

discourse, or a nostalgic longing for such a space.

But history here, despite this postmodern revision, remains representation. Does

this signal an end to the totalitarian injustices that the postmodern seeks to demolish? I

would like to argue, in contrast to the version of the postmodern that I have touched

upon here, that this faith in the power of language to present its object is just as

repressive. What I am saying is that despite history’s postmodern revision it remains, to

bend an argument Derrida made against Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation, the rule

that represses the silent.534 In other words repression does not simply take place in

conventional History, it begins in the modernist, and even postmodernist, thought of

history as representation. Postmodern history here merely expands its horizon to

include the marginalised.

I would wish to argue that the space of the spittoon, as I have outlined in the

current study, presents a marked departure from the postmodern revision of history.

Marked by incommensurabilities and the problem of representation, the postmodern

fails to account for the border crossings, the contaminations, the unrepresentable

moments within representation, that are played out in Midnight’s Children. I would

suggest that these sites of excess can be understood as the postcolonial sublime. The

text closes with the image of Saleem teaching his adopted son (Shiva is his father) the

art of spittoon-hittery. Such a scene is staged in and against the knowledge that Indira’s

quest to delete the midnight’s children had not been totally successful. There remains a

second, perhaps stronger, generation to open up a myriad of possibilities. The mature

Saleem thus leaves his son a legacy, thirty glass jars filled with chutney and one jar that

is empty. It is in this context that Saleem’s nostalgia is staged. He leaves his son not

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with a prescription, as the postmodern rejection of nostalgia implies, but with a

nostalgia for the possibility of India as an excessive cultural space. Significantly, the

relation of the empty jar to the thirty full jars thwarts Lyotard’s thesis. Given the

presence of thirty full jars, the implication is that the empty jar doesn’t occur in

isolation. It is not an event in the Lyotardian sense that demands invention. Its filling

can only be undertaken in relation to the excess, the too much, that the thirty full jars

represent. Despite its emptiness there is a sense in which it has already begun to be

filled, already contaminated by Saleem’s nostalgia for the Indian Palimpsest. The

empty jar is not connected causally to the others, nor is it isolated. This means that its

filling stages not a rejection of history, but a reimagining of history as a presentation of

the unpresentable. The future contents of the empty jar will only be able to be

understood in relation to the excess — thirty other jars — that it is unable to present.

History for Rushdie is thus not a matter of finding a space for representation, it is a

matter of articulating the unpresentabilities that lay beneath and which leak into its

surface.

I have attempted to read Rushdie in terms of what I have called the postcolonial

sublime. Several interrelated issues have emerged. Firstly, the excess of history

presented in the novel can be understood as a critical moment in which the impossibility

of cultural unity is powerfully staged. Rushdie’s texts stage uncontainable material sites

as disruptions to totalising teleologies. This excess is the postcolonial sublime.

Secondly, Rushdie’s texts are deeply engaged in the postmodern question. In defending

his work against Ahmad’s claim that he has been seduced by a postmodern

irresponsibility, I have argued that excess in Rushdie demands to be understood in

material terms. What this means is that Rushdie actually raises the issue of historical

responsibility: what can be done with too much history? Such a question emerges as a

polemic against a nationalist violence that is preoccupied with myths of cultural and

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historical purity. The sublime excess that Rushdie opens up demands that the question

of historical responsibility be radically rethought. Thirdly, even though the postmodern

insistence upon difference can be located at the edges of Rushdie’s work, I would

contend that ultimately the materiality of the excess, and the impossibility of breaking

free from this excess, signals that the pure event that lies at the critical core of Lyotard’s

postmodern sublime does not adequately describe Rushdie. For Rushdie the sign of

culture and history is overfull, rather than an empty question mark. Finally, I have

underscored the productive capacity of the postcolonial sublime. To consider Rushdie’s

refusal to be homogenised is to open up a disruptive politics. I would wish to conclude

the chapter by turning to consider the disruptive capacity of Rushdie’s literature in the

context of the conservative cultural politics that marks our time.

Conclusion: Rushdie’s Art

It will be useful to juxtapose these conclusions to Rushdie’s wider articulations

concerning art. The juxtaposition of my discussion concerning the excesses of

Midnight’s Children, its articulation of the unpresentable within representation,

Ahmad’s judgement, which fails to take the political possibilities of excess into account,

and Rushdie’s celebration as triumphant artist, reveals important disjunctions between

Romanticism and the politics of Rushdie’s art. But when it comes to Rushdie’s stated

aims concerning art, he is decidedly anthropomorphic. The subject is the source, and

total controller of human destiny. For Rushdie there are no ultimate guiding principles

outside the human will, history, politics and religion are merely the manifestations of

this. This idea can be traced to Ludwig Feuerbach’s assertion that human beings ‘are

what they eat’, and that religion is a human invention. For Feuerbach God is a

projection of human potentiality, an expression of our unrealised ideals. Religion works

by taking this imaginary construction and demanding devotion to it, rather than working

to overcome the shortcomings which led to the construction in the first place. This is

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argued in the influential work, The Essence of Christianity, which seeks to demystify

God, the upshot being the notion that human beings can only become free through

rejecting religious limits to self assertion. In other words, freedom is effected by

rebelling against God,535 or god in the guise of totalising systems of philosophical

thought.

It is easy to see the influence of such ideas in the contemporary world. Rushdie

is one among many who has consciously or unconsciously adopted Feuerbach’s view of

the world. He expresses it this way:

The dream is part of our very essence. Given the gift of self-consciousness, we

can dream versions of ourselves, new selves for old. Waking as well as sleeping,

our response to the world is essentially imaginative: that is, picture-making. We

live in our pictures, our ideas. I mean this literally. We first construct pictures of

the world and then we step inside the frames. We come to equate the picture with

the world, so that, in certain circumstances, we will even go to war because we

find someone else’s picture less pleasing than our own.536

Here Truth is identified as an anthropomorphic construct, which, when considered as

such, makes violence in the name of truth seem ludicrous. The constructed nature of

truth, for Rushdie, disrupts the authority, and legitimacy, of such claims. If we all

recognised the unfixed and constructed nature of our truths we would be less willing to

defend them violently, and more open to new ideas. Rushdie thus buys into

Feuerbach’s argument as the affirmation of a freedom from the constraints of

dogmatism. He announces, the “elevation of the quest for the Grail over the Grail itself,

the acceptance that all that is solid has melted into air, that reality and morality are not

givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins”.537

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 Interestingly, Rushdie describes this condition as a ‘postmodern’ one, citing

Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition as an articulation of this freedom.538 Clearly the

emphasis upon overturning grand narratives, which is Lyotard’s project, is crucial in his

understanding of the function of art and literature, and the role of the artist in today’s

world. Even though the discourse of the postcolonial shares the same object as the

postmodern, I have contested the critical capacity of Lyotard (in chapter four of the

thesis), and I would argue that ultimately Rushdie does too. For Rushdie art, more

specifically literature, is the medium which is at the forefront of this project. Art

functions as a critical weapon against totalitarianism, it is a medium which seeks to re-

imagine, or as Rushdie puts it in defence of The Satanic Verses, to “see the world

anew”.539 People, he writes, “understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing

and challenging and questioning and saying the unsayable; not by bowing the knee,

whether to gods or to men”.540 Literature thus has an overtly political function, one

which provides space for the effectuation of social change. Rushdie’s project is

indicative of Karl Marx’s reading of Feuerbach, and the declaration, “the philosophers

have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”.541

Rushdie’s writer is thus faced with a unique task in this revolutionary project.

The task involves articulating new versions of the world in order to set captives free

from the constraints of totalitarianism. The path that such a political gesture, if we were

to read it as such, bears a remarkable likeness to the valorisation of the writer as

Romantic genius. The writer is an extraordinary being, with an extraordinary project.

He writes:

What draws us to an author is his or her ‘unlikeness’, even if the apparatus of

literary criticism then sets to work to demonstrate that he or she is really no more

than an accumulation of influences. Unlikeness, the thing that makes it

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 impossible for a writer to stand in any regimented line, is a quality novelists share

with the Caped Crusaders of the comics, though they are only rarely capable of

leaping tall buildings in a single stride.542

Rushdie’s writer is a kind of super hero, exceptional being, a genius who has, somehow,

not only managed to break the moulds that constrain the rest of us, but also has

managed to find a form for this, in order to bring refreshment and newness to our lives.

Perhaps there is room here for piety toward these ground breaking heroes. Rushdie’s

Rushdie, the writer, is the modernist creative genius, ‘who can do nothing but write’.

These terms are utilised by Farrukh Dhondy in defending Rushdie’s work. He writes,

the fatwa is “the most desperate and fearful threat ever laid on the life of an innocent

man trying to do, quite brilliantly, what he conceives of as his metier, something he

cannot avoid doing: being a writer”.543

This notion shows its true colours in Rushdie’s defence of the novel as a sacred,

if not holy, form. He contends that the function of literature is analogous to the function

of religion. This means that literature is an absolute necessity in a world which has

forgotten God. Literature is the medium which fills the godless vacuum. Rushdie

writes:

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to

capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for

a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god

offers in the world of faith.544

Among these basic human needs Rushdie includes: the need to understand why life

makes us feel so small, and subsequent need to know that despite this we have been

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destined for something; the need for answers to the unanswerable, such as, how did we

get here?; and the need for codes to live by. In the past these needs were met by

religion, now, given the decline of belief in grand narratives, literature has been forced

into this space. The writer thus deals with these most human questions, and provides,

for the discerning reader, as Rushdie puts it, “explanations of the heart”.545

The implication here, as I see it, is that the world can’t do without literature or

art if it is to move beyond, what must be, its current unjust and stagnant state. Literature

is a specialised domain which deals with the issues of life, with the true ‘essence of

humanity’. It is a domain which deals in freedoms, at least as Feuerbach and Rushdie

consider it. It follows that such an important domain needs to be preserved and

protected. Art is synonymous with freedom. It is a space for breaking through

constraints and articulating ‘newness’, which is an integral part of our human identity.

The right of writers to freely express ideas is crucial, given the importance of art in

Rushdie’s economy.

The reason for ensuring that privileged arena is preserved is not that writers want

the absolute freedom to say and do what ever they please. It is that we, all of us,

readers and writers and citizens and generals and godmen, need that little,

unimportant-looking room. We do not need to call it sacred, but we do need to

remember that it is necessary.

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.

Without the freedom to challenge, even to satirize all orthodoxies, including

religious orthodoxies, it ceases to exist. Language and the imagination cannot be

imprisoned, or art will die, and with it, a little of what makes us human. 546

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 But despite the Romantic artistic heritage that inhabits these well worn lines, and

Rushdie’s unexplained keenness for the Eighteenth Century, “the great century”547 as he

put it, there is a disjunction, a disturbing ‘not quite’ at work here. Rushdie ultimately

fails to mirror the Romanticism that began in eighteenth-century British aesthetics, and

which was crucial in myths concerning the glory of empire. Caught in a conception of

the sublime as elevation, eighteenth-century aesthetics carved out a space for the heroic

outsider. Rushdie’s heroic status is marked by the almost but not quite that Fanon

announces and Bhabha seizes (as I showed in chapter five of the thesis). As I have

argued, in its excesses Rushdie’s work contaminates the totalising teleologies of the

Western imagination.

Just as Rushdie feels uncomfortable with the tag, “Indian-born British writer”548

— which has similar overtones to the colonial formulation that Twinings of London

employ to promote their English Breakfast Tea: “A blend of Ceylon and Indian teas,

producing a full-bodied, typically English brew” — his own valorisation of the

Romantic artist doesn’t quite match V. S. Naipaul’s.549 This is because, unlike Naipaul,

there is something materially confrontative, invasive, disturbing, something dangerously

scandalous at work in his fiction. The arrival, for instance, of Gibreel Farishta to the

shores of Britain parallels the Norman Conquest. As Rosa Diamond watches the ghosts

of Britain’s past, “the Norman fleet had sailed right through this Englishwoman’s

home”,550 Gibreel announces:

‘Rise ’n’ shine! Let’s take this place by storm’, Turning his back on the sea,

blotting out the bad memory of in order to make room for the next things,

passionate as always for newness, he would have planted (had he owned one) a

flag, to claim in the name of whoknowswho this white country, his new-found

land.551

325
 This image of the migrant as conqueror has been aptly celebrated by Uma

Parameswaran.

I read yet another prophecy in Rushdie’s novel. He sees non-white immigrants

coming into their own, and I see them going further — I see them taking over

these countries [...] In my fantasy, the conquering armies marching from

immigrant and Asian wombs will outnumber, out-think and outshine the others

and take over. Not an unfit retribution for the races that have annihilated

aboriginal cultures and peoples in five continents over the past five hundred

years.552

As I have suggested, the conservative sublime always occurs as a disjunction between

thought and the object of thought, it is a state of privation, a lack, a want. The sublime,

as I have shown in my engagement in Kant (in chapter two of the thesis), is a term

linked to the West’s desire for elevation, detachment, a pure domain for Culture, Art,

and Society. The sublime is that oppositional moment, in which the self faced with

danger, or a great and seemingly invincible magnitude, is able to take up imaginative

reason, and thus rise above the perils of nature, or the onslaught of the perceived enemy.

The momentary possibility of the breakdown (in every sense of the word) of the

capacity of reason, the pain that attends to this moment, is accompanied by the pleasure

of the triumph of imaginative reason.

The possibility of the sublime, as it is attended to by metaphors of overcoming

obstacles, has been a crucial component in the Western myth of progress (Hegel). But

something has happened. The postcolonial subject, once the object of the colonial, now

returns as a greater force, one that poses a threat to the authority of Reason (Kant). But

326
it is not a threat that finds its base in an equal and opposite force. As Gibreel Farishta

claims the land in the name of “whoknowswho”, the discourse of the postcolonial can

be understood as a force which contaminates and upsets the capacity of Reason, and the

myth of cultural purity. Rather than perpetuate the space of the genius, Rushdie writes

in the name of an intense dissatisfaction against that space. If the lowly were able to

seize the space of victimage in order to legitimate a case in the myth of European

progress (as Fanon acknowledged and rejected), the in-between self exceeds such

spaces, and is rendered a scandalous disturber rather than a contributor to the romantic

ethic that is at the core of the conservative myth of progress. Rushdie’s ‘too much’

simply gets in the way of Reason’s pleasure.

It is in an agonistic relation to this regard for an ethical romanticism that

Rushdie’s metaphors such as, ‘hand-cuffed to history’, joined by elastic bands, the

comma in-between, and nailed to history become politically charged. As a kind of

freedom from the auspices of cognitive authority, this emphasis upon a connection to

historical excess disturbs any sense of history as ethical progress. We can understand

this disruption through excess, in political terms, as an opening up of the ‘how’ in the

question: ‘how do we judge history?’ Such a questioning by its very nature defies

essence. With its emphasis upon being connected to too much, Rushdie’s excess, rather

than give grounds for abdicating social and political responsibility, demands a

judgement that arises as a response to historical excess. Rushdie’s sense of justice is

driven by the affirmative capacity of the excess. Its logic begins with an excess, and

moves toward a politics, a representational practice, that is able to accommodate excess,

the unrepresentable that lies in representation. Consequently, a Western actuality built

upon the pure narrative of progress loses its validity. The art of the postcolonial

Rushdie exceeds the actualities of the colonial imagination: India has always been,

centuries of subcontinental history drown out the orders of historical colonialism. We

327
can understand the political nuances of this excess through Uma Parameswaran’s claim

that Rushdie ultimately disrupts the Western imagination from postcolonial space.

“Rushdie’s delineation of the status and ethos of Indians-in-Britain and of British

racism is so insightful, so excellent”, she writes, “that one tends to think that he is

certainly one-of-us-Indians as different from one-of-them-Angrez”.553

Rushdie’s fiction occupies that muddy space between the real and the free play

of the imagination. His work is at once unreal in its reality and real in its unreality.

This is not to suggest that his fiction refuses to deal with the real and becomes

completely detached and unreal, or that the unreal itself is a new and more legitimate

reality (aestheticism), it is to situate Rushdie on that muddy border between the

referential, or the symbolic function of art, and the imaginative possibilities that are

opened up in that referential play.554 I would suggest that this artistic location, neither

symbolic nor an outright aestheticism, is what disturbs Ahmad.

What can be said about this referential play? The migrant intellectual in this

instance deals with history, specifically a history that has been structured in the West’s

imagination through the trope of the heroic struggle of the outsider/underling. Rushdie

too buys into the myth and describes his relation to this imagination through the protest

metaphors of slavery, of limits, of defilement — ‘handcuffed to history’, ‘joined by

elastic bands’, falling, ‘nailed’. But ultimately these are metaphors that enact a

connection to an excess that disturbs the ethical limits of the Western myth of progress.

Rushdie thus writes from a critical space that squarely faces the West. His is a looking

back, but such a critical direction as it opens up history as excess, undoes the past as it

has been constructed in the Western imagination. Rushdie utilises the tools that lay

within the Western imagination, only in order to disrupt, to disturb. Rushdie is the devil

within the Western fold, that contamination that the West struggles to look at. Forced

by the demands of unifying teleologies, where there must remain nothing that is unable

328
to be accounted for, the West must look. But such a look is accompanied by the

nagging thought that Rushdie is nothing other than a prince of darkness. Who is

Rushdie? Who does he write for? In the impossibility of authoritatively claiming

Rushdie as ‘one of the West’s own’ we find a hesitation, a moment that Todorov calls

the fantastic. There is something about Rushdie that cannot be articulated in terms of

the homogeneous impulses of Western literary departments. There remains an excess, a

postcolonial sublime, that cannot be accounted for. Thus we can think Rushdie as a

disturbance to the West’s ethical imagination. In its excess his work gestures toward

the possibility of newness without knowing what that newness is, as Saleem’s empty

chutney jar testifies. Rather than utopian visions, his is a disturbance that opens up the

postcolonial sublime, which emerges, as I have contended throughout, in order to

disrupt unifying teleologies.

Notes

438
Søren Kierkegarrd, Fear and Trembling, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 61.
439
Harveen Sachdeva Mann, “‘Being Born Across’: Translation and Salman Rushdie’s
The Satanic Verses”, Criticism, vol. 42, no. 2 (1995), 290.
440
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of the Postmodern: History, Theory, Fiction (London:
Routledge, 1988), 161-164.
441
Jean M. Kane, “The Migrant Intellectual and the Body of History: Salman Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children”, Contemporary Literature, vol. 37, no. 1 (1996), 112.
442
I would contend that the metaphor of the suffering exiled artist has remained a
constant factor in ‘Rushdiecriticism’. It would be tempting to argue that the Satanic
Verses Affair marks a shift in the critical reception of Rushdie, but such a shift has not
taken place. The affair merely intensified that sense of the outsider/underling artist that
has been utilised by critical work on Rushdie since it began.
443
Dieter Riemenschneider, “History and the Individual in Salman Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children and Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day”, Kunapipi, vol. 6, no. 2
(1984), 61-62.
444
In contrast see the English Journal, which, in its editorial entitled “Children of
Modernism”, vol 81, no 1 (1992), 98-99, utilises the trope of the postmodern to

329
universalise Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. The editorial declares, “Saleem is a
quintessential postmodern. By extension, he represents us all. All children of the
twentieth century are Midnight Children — our students as well as their teachers” (98).
445
Jean-Pierre Durix, “It Was So, It Was Not So”, in A Shaping of Connections:
Commonwealth Literature Studies — Then and Now: Essays in Honour of A. N.
Jeffares, ed. Hena Maes-Jelinek, Kirsten Holst Peterson, and Anna Rutherford (Sydney:
Dangaroo Press, 1989), 226.
446
Satish Aikant, “Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: The Middle Ground of
Diaspora”, in Interrogating Postcolonialism: Theory, Text and Context, ed. Harish
Trivedi and Meenakshi Mukerjee (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, 1996),
213-220.
447
Paul Gray, “East, West (book review)”, Time, vol. 145, no. 3 (1995), 1.
448
Pico Iyer, “After-Raj Tales”, Times Literary Supplement (30 September 1994), 23.
See also Albert Camus’ interesting article on Oscar Wilde, “The Artist in Prison”, trans.
Antonia White, Encounter, vol. 2, no. 3 (1954), 26-29. He writes, “Wilde realised that,
in wanting to divorce art from suffering, he had severed one of its roots and thus cut
himself off from real life. ... Now that he wore the livery of a convict, he knew that he
had dragged beauty down to sub-human level, since such art conveys nothing to those
who are deprived of everything. ... But the sorrow and joy in King Lear or War and
Peace can be recognised by all who pine in our houses of injustice. Nothing could
console him now but the great voice of genius which transforms man’s common pain
into glory” (27-28).
449
Tom Wilhelmus, “Between Cultures”, The Hudson Review, vol. 49, no. 2 (1996),
318.
450
Sadik Jalal Al-Azm, “The Importance of Being Earnest about Salman Rushdie”, in
Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, ed. D. M. Fletcher
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 257.
451
Samir Dayal, “Talking Dirty: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children”, College
English, vol. 54, no. 4 (1992), 435.
452
Dayal, “Talking Dirty”, 434, 435.
453
Aijaz. Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992), 155.
454
Ahmad, In Theory, 6.
455
Ahmad, In Theory, 139-141.
456
Ahmad, In Theory, 150, 155.
457
Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (London: Merlin Press,
1963), 21.

330
458
Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”, in Collected Papers, trans. Joan
Riviere (New York: Basic Books, 1959), vol. 4, 161.
459
Ahmad, In Theory, 151.
460
Ahmad, In Theory, 155.
461
Ahmad, In Theory, 155.
462
See Syed Shahabuddin, “Yes, Mr Rushdie, We Shall Not Permit Literary
Colonialism, Nor Religious Pornography”, Impact International, vol. 18, no. 21 (1988),
17-18. See also Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (“Reading The Satanic Verses”, Public
Culture, vol. 2, no. 1 (1989), 87-88) who contends that the Indian parliament’s decision
to ban the book was not a religious one, but a ‘rational abstraction’ to ease the tension
between racial groups. See also Midge Decter’s, “The Rushdiad”, Commentary, vol.
87, no. 6 (1989), 18-23.
463
See M. M. Ahsan, and A. R. Kidwai, Sacrilege Verses Civility (Leicester: The
Islamic Foundation, 1991), 25-60. See also S. Akhtar, “Holy Freedom and the
‘Liberals’”, Impact International, vol. 20, no.4 (1990), 10.
464
Spivak, “Reading The Satanic Verses,” 91. For alternative readings: Daniel Pipes,
“The Ayatollah, the Novelist, and the West,” Commentary, vol. 87, no. 6 (1989), 9-17;
Alex Knonagel, “The Satanic Verses: Narrative Structure and Islamic Doctrine,”
International Fiction Review, vol. 18, no. 2 (1991), 69-75; A. Ali, “The Westernisation
of a Nice Muslim Boy”, The Universal Message, vol. 12, no.10 (1991), 25-32; and M.
A. Anees, The Kiss of Judas: Affairs of a Brown Sahib (Kuala Lumpur: Quill
Publishers, 1989).
465
Anthony Close, “The Empirical Author: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses,
Philosophy and Literature, vol. 14, no. 1 (1990), 248-267.
466
“Right to be Read”, The Daily Telegraph (17 January 1989), 16. For a useful
critique of this consumerist defence, see Aamir Mufti, “Reading the Rushdie Affair: An
Essay on Islam and Politics”, Social Text, no. 29 (1991), 95-116.
467
“Race, Religion, Rushdie”, The Times, July 25, 1989, 15. See also Clifford Longley,
“A very British Lesson Muslim’s Must Learn”, The Times (8 July 1989), 12; and his
“Rushdie to the Rescue”, The Times (29 December 1990), 10.
468
Rushdie, Shame, 69.
469
Ahmad, In Theory, 141.
470
Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley
Bereton and Fred Rothwell (London: Macmillan and Co., 1911), 20.
471
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. J.H. Bernard (London: Macmillan
and Co., 1914), 54-55.
472
Kant, The Critique of Judgement, 67, 165.

331
473
Kant, The Critique of Judgement, 81.
474
Kant, The Critique of Judgement, 170.
475
Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, 19.
476
It is significant that potentiality does not appear in Hegel’s controversial
considerations upon art. Potentiality is the principle that governs development,
specifically philosophical development. In Hegel’s thought art precedes religion, and
ultimately reaches its absolute manifestation, via a synthesis with religion, in
philosophy. Art is limited (poetry, as opposed to painting and music, is situated in this
regard) because it “destroys the fusion of spiritual ideality with external existence” (The
Philosophy of Fine Art, vol. IV, 16). Art in its most complete form — poetry —
resides merely on the side of the Ideal in this system. Lukács’ use of the concept in this
context suggests, contra Hegel, that he considers art a philosophical, and ultimately a
political, form of expression.
477
G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane
and Frances H. Simpson (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co.,1892) vol. 1, 20-
21.
478
Hegel’s critique of Kant in The Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller (London: Allen
& Unwin, 1969), 51, is also applicable here. Hegel argues that there is no distinction
between the I that thinks and the concepts, for the I is only (self)realised in the act of
thinking. The I doesn’t precede the concepts as Kant presupposed. Similarly this also
means that there are no objects which precede the act of thinking. The object
presupposes I as I presupposes the object, there is no sharp distinction. What is
important is that the self comes to be realised only in relation to the object. Both are
realised simultaneously. It is this lived relation that is crucial in both Ahmad’s, and
before him, Lukács’ aesthetic considerations.
479
On this point I follow Tim Brennan’s, “Review: Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory”, Textual
Practice, vol. 8, no. 2 (1994), 327-335. He writes: Ahmad “cannot bring himself to
grant the double-edged nature of history — its creativity and its powerful discomfort
with specific forms of power, not only its evanescence and pretence” (328).
480
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Pan Books, 1982), 9.
481
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 448.

Joseph Addison, The Spectator (no. 418, Monday June 30), (1712, reprint. Oxford:
482

Clarendon Press, 1965), vol. 3, 569.

483
Salman Rushdie, Shame (London: Jonathan Cape), 28.
484
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988, reprint. Dover, Delaware: The
Consortium, 1992), 3.
485
Salman Rushdie, East, West (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994).

332
486
Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), 4.
487
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 9.
488
Jean-François Lyotard, “The Sublime and The Avant-Garde”, in The Inhuman, trans.
Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991),
99-100.
489
Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh, 59.
490
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 10.
491
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 9.
492
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 45.
493
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 39, 40, 46.
494
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 39.
495
See Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Cambridge Mass.:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1968). See also Philip Engblom’s “A
Multitude of Voices Carnivalization and Dialogicality in the Novels of Salman
Rushdie”, in Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, ed. D.
M. Fletcher (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 293-304.
496
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 44.
497
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 62-63.
498
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 63.
499
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 47.
500
Rushdie, Shame, 16.
501
Rushdie, Shame, 54.
502
Rushdie, Shame, 261.
503
Rushdie, Shame, 191-195.
504
Rushdie, Shame, 48.
505
Rushdie, Shame, 261.
506
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 146.
507
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 66, 68, 69.
508
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 66.

333
509
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 11.
510
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 95.
511
Sarah Saleri, “Contraband Histories: Salman Rushdie and the Embodiment of
Blasphemy” (The Yale Review, vol. 78, no. 4 (1990), 604-624), in similar terms situates
Rushdie on the borders of both devotion and sacrilege. His ‘blasphemous’ work — The
Satanic Verses — must evoke both and neither categories at once, in order to undertake
disturbances to the space of rigid faith. The upshot reveals the difficulty in rigidly
locating Rushdie’s work.
512
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 125-126.
513
Rushdie, Shame, 87.
514
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 200.
515
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 228.
516
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 255.
517
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 256.
518
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 255.
519
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, ed. R. Pascal, trans. W.
Lough and C. P. Magill (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1938), 15.
520
See Vladmir Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1966); and J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (1902, reprint. London:
George Allen & Unwin, 1968).
521
Salman Rushdie, “Salman Rushdie”, Lateline, Australian Broadcasting Corporation,
n.p., 1994.
522
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 343.
523
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 348.
524
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 360.
525
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 360.
526
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 363.
527
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 365.
528
For an interesting contrast to the historical connections in Rushdie, see Marcel
Proust, Time Regained, trans. C. K. Scott Moncreiff, Terrance Kilmartin, and Andreas
Mayor, in Remembrance of Things Past (New York: Random House, 1981), vol. 3, 709-
1107.
334
529
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 381-382.
530
See Mary Valentis, Female Rage: Unlocking its Secrets, Claiming its Power (New
York: Carol Southern Books, 1994).
531
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 383.
532
Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 448.
533
Linda Hutcheon, A Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989), 66.
534
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1978), 35.
535
Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (New York: The Continuum
Publishing Company, 1990).
536
Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (London: Granta, 1992), 377-378.
537
Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 422.
538
Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 422.
539
Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 393.
540
Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 394-395.
541
Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach”, in Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the
End of Classical German Philosophy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1946), 68. Marx
champions Feuerbach’s work as it performs the dissolution of the religious world into
its secular basis, but goes on to argue that Feuerbach fails to see that religion is the
product of social relations.
542
Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 426.
543
Farrukh Dhondy, cited in The Rushdie File, ed. Lisa Appignanesi, and Sarah
Maitland (London: Fourth Estate, 1989), 183.
544
Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 421.
545
Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 421.
546
Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 429, 396.
547
Una Chaudhuri, “Imaginative Maps: Excerpts from a Conversation with Salman
Rushdie”, Turnstile, vol. 2, no. 1 (1990), 37.
548
Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands, 67.
549
See for instance Rushdie’s review of Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival. “V. S.

335
Naipaul”, in Imaginary Homelands, 148-151. He writes, “All this is evoked in delicate,
precise prose of the highest quality, but it is a bloodless prose. The idea that the British
have lost their way because of ‘an absence of authority, an organization in decay’, that
the fall of the manor encourages ordinary folk ‘to hasten decay, to loot, to reduce to
junk’, is an unlikable, untenable one” (150-151).
550
Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 129
551
Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 131.
552
Uma Parameswaran, “The We/They Paradigm in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses”, in
Us/Them: Translation, Transcription and Identity in Post-Colonial Literary Cultures,
ed. Gordon Collier (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992), 198-199.
553
Parameswaran, “The We/They Paradigm in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses”, 193.
554
See Uma Parameswaran, “Salman Rushdie’s Shame: An overview of a Labyrinth”,
in The New Indian Novel in English: A study of the 1980’s, ed. Viney Kirpal (New
Delhi: Allied Publishers, 1990), 121-130; Kumkum Sangari, “The Politics of the
Possible”, Cultural Critique, no. 7 (1987), 157-186: Patricia Merivale, “Saleem
Fathered by Oskar: Intertextual Strategies in ‘Midnight’s Children’ and ‘The Tin
Drum’, Ariel, vol. 21, no. 3 (1990), 5-21.

336
 Conclusion

This mapping of the discourse of the postcolonial can proceed indefinitely, since

its meaning refuses to be fixed. In taking up an ambivalent architecture, the discourse

of the postcolonial imposes its ambivalence upon conventional understandings of

culture and nation. Aijaz Ahmad argues, on the contrary, that the supposed

ambivalence of contemporary culture and experience manifests the ambiguity of the

discourse of the postcolonial. Not able to embrace Ahmad’s hope for a ‘proletarian’

revolution, the discourse of the postcolonial attempts to open up a ‘third space’

(Bhabha), in order to play with and upon the game of reason obliquely. It is not by

some ideological conspiracy that the discourse of the postcolonial takes up Western

reason as both its strategy and its object. The pervasive Idealism of Kant and Hegel is

constructed anxiously. It can be read as an apologetic for colonial expansion, an

apologetic that is, ultimately, insecure.

The insecurity of Western reason — empirical vertigo and the threat of madness

in Kant, the impossibility of system in Hegel — can, however, serve to reveal what

might be called the object of the discourse of the postcolonial. For it is clear that the

ambivalent architecture of the discourse of the postcolonial can be understood in

transgressive terms as an attempt to overcome the subjectivism of Idealism and the

objectivism of what could be called Ahmad’s Marxism. This attempt is realised in the

space of convergence in Bennett’s painting, in Fanon’s celebration of the black body

and its location both inside and outside Hegel’s phenomenology, in Bhabha’s discursive

infrastructures, which seek to alter the course of colonial desire, and in Rushdie’s

excessive historical art, which refuses to be contained by Western historiography.

These thinkers have one crucial thing in common: they all return to the scene of colonial

domination in order to set forth a politics of excess to combat the teleological desire of

contemporary conservatism. In the complicity of colonial expansion and Kant’s

337
philosophy, we have seen how excess plays a vital role in establishing the authority of

reason. A crises mentality both engenders and empowers conservatism. These

postcolonial thinkers seek to exploit this crises, to push it beyond its structured location

in Idealism. They aim not at system building, but at transgressing the infrastructures of

all thought, especially systematic thought.

Is there not, in sum, a resolve to take up excess, the sublime, to perform such a

task? The Kantian sublime makes sense only as a colonial metaphor. This is why there

is a postcolonial sublime. The location of the sublime in Kant’s architectonic system

engenders the authority of reason, which, in the context of European expansionism,

becomes the stable ground upon which knowledge can securely travel. The sublime as

excess is thus a threat to a secure knowledge, and when tamed, as Kant and Hegel

attempt, it becomes a symbol of the power of reason. But this attempt to tame the

sublime is fraught with difficulty. The Kantian sublime as a colonial metaphor is able

to be pushed beyond the limits of Idealism’s systems. This pushing, or opening up of

the excessive residues that remain embedded within such systems is disruptive of the

colonial claims that have been enacted in its wake. This is the postcolonial sublime.

Located in the muddy space inbetween Hegelian conservatism and the

groundless Nietzschean wanderer, Fanon’s body politics radicalises the Kantian

sublime. Into the confident nobility of Kant’s dialectical play upon the sublime, there

bursts the based and the lowly, who are, despite being excluded from the progress of

history, creative beings. Fanon’s celebration of the black body thus emerges as a

creative force that questions the authority of the Western pretension to the systematic.

It opens up a space of hesitation, of questioning, that ultimately demands a deviation in

the destination of reason’s teleology. Where Hegel confesses — “I was fully conscious

... of the inherent difficulty of the subject matter and of its exposition ... I have tried

after many years ... to remedy this imperfection [and] feel I still have reason enough to

338
claim the indulgence of the reader”555 — and proceeds with confidence, Fanon’s black

body, rooted as it were in the excesses of material desire as situated inside Hegel’s

system, reveals the impossible grounds for such confidence.

Bhabha’s transgressive infrastructures, too, effectively seek to push the Kantian

sublime beyond its limits, its location in the construction of the authority of reason. The

infrastructures, mimicry, sly civility, subaltern agency, and hybridity open up spaces of

excess in order to disturb the assumed power of the colonial gaze. Each arises in the

form of an obligation, but the untranslatable excess that is produced in the dissemination

of colonial authority contaminates and alters the destination of that authority. Such

spaces thus take on the disturbing character of the postcolonial sublime. Where colonial

desire is reason’s teleology, for Bhabha the sublime is the material real that is unable to

be contained in such a teleology.

In the excessive play of Rushdie’s fiction we also find a play upon the Kantian

sublime. Bursting with possibilities, his fiction, rather than define and demystify in the

classical Marxian sense, ultimately opens up the question of politics. One of the most

striking things about the spaces from which life is staged in his texts, is that they all

leak. The textual spaces that presuppose the fixed boundaries that give rise to Ahmad’s

despair, are spaces that collapse, spaces of the uncontainable. But it is precisely this

accent upon leakage that constitutes the possibility of a politics that disrupts the

violence of unifying teleologies. Rushdie’s fiction sets forth a politics of leakage.

Midnight’s Children inserts itself into the everyday world of the pleasure and the power

of gossip and the telling of stories, the space of the spittoon, and seeks to speak the

unspeakable, that which has been overwritten by a hegemonic Western imagination.

Like all gossip it is a politics that is delicious and yet disturbing. And, in the context of

reason’s teleology, it is a politics of excess that pushes Kant’s quaint musing upon the

reality of meaninglessness, beyond its inscription in European confidence.

339
 I have linked each of these thinkers to the anxiousness that emerges in the

critical tension between Kant and Hegel. In this tension there is an unsettling, a

vulnerability. As Hegel in his quest to champion the attainments of Europe focuses

upon Kant’s incomplete Idealism, the postcolonial sublime arises when this

vulnerability is foregrounded and maintained. In my study of some of the key moments

in the discourse of the postcolonial, I have shown that it is precisely the uncontained,

that which exceeds the limits of unifying teleologies, that can be considered both the

object and the subject of the discourse of the postcolonial. In effecting a politics that

disturbs the Western myths of unity and cultural purity, the excess of the postcolonial

goes to work upon the Kantian sublime and wrests it from its dialectical location in his

architectonic system.

But the question is whether the postcolonial sublime can be understood in terms

of a postmodern groundlessness. By ‘groundlessness’ I mean the Lyotardian event, the

phrase as an empty question mark that demands to be dealt with. The discourse of the

postcolonial, however, begins with a material excess, as opposed to an empty

questioning, and then proceeds to affirm this excess. If Lyotard championed the event

as a lack, the discourse of the postcolonial opens up the material real as a site of too

much.

It is clear that the fruitfulness of the discourse of the postcolonial lies in its effort

to exploit the anxiousness that lies at the core of Western reason. Any engagement with

it clearly must take place on this basis. The appropriation of the sublime moment as

both material excess and a rhetorical strategy — to the extent that the ambivalent

architecture of the discourse of the postcolonial is neither a shallow deviousness nor an

eclecticism without theoretical depth — meets the demands of the time very well. And

if I concur with Bhabha’s return to Fanon in order to access the ‘dark side of man’, it is

340
because postcoloniality seems to signify the possibility of disrupting the increasing

capacity of the forces of conservatism upon the global scene.

Notes

G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: George Allen and

555

Unwin, 1969), 31.

341
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