Critical Secularism

Critical Secularism: A Reintroduction for Perilous Times Aamir R. Mufti This special issue of boundary 2 was meant fro...

Author: Aamir R. Mufti

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Critical Secularism: A Reintroduction for Perilous Times

Aamir R. Mufti

This special issue of boundary 2 was meant from the start as an engagement with the legacies of Edward Said’s work. It was meant to suggest a number of directions in which the notion of ‘‘secular criticism’’ may now be inflected while remaining true to the enormous critical energies inherent in its appearance in Said’s work. With his sudden passing on September 25, 2003, long feared by those close to him and yet somehow unexpected, this element in the work presented here acquires an aura of inconsolable sadness. What was it that came to us in the form of this person and his work, and what is it that has now passed away? We will be packing and unpacking such questions for a long time to come. Said’s work came to the fore at a time when the world of humanistic knowledge was coming to be shaken to its core, its basic assumptions about the possibilities of knowledge seemingly washed away. In the vernacular, these complex developments in the world of thought and culture have long been collectively dubbed ‘‘postmodernism,’’ often in the form of an epithet. Said himself of course was deeply influenced by the European thinkers—Adorno, Foucault, Derrida, and Auerbach, above all—whose work is an important element in this boundary 2 31:2, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.

2 boundary 2 / Summer 2004

milieu, and he is sometimes seen as belonging fully to it. How little it is still understood that his work was utterly at odds with this contemporary milieu and how differently he read those formative thinkers. Every world he lived in, he inhabited fully, and yet with an uncompromising critical distance. This is the great strength, the beauty, and the paradox of his life. This special issue brings together a number of studies that take as their starting point Said’s relationship to secularism, a relationship that is a critical one in a full and complex sense. At the heart of the Saidian critical project, this collection of essays is meant to propose, is the notion of secular criticism.1 Long ignored as an object of Said scholarship, in favor of the concept of Orientalism or the rubric of culture and imperialism, this term and its significations are now coming to be seen as a constellation that animates Said’s critical practice as a whole. It is the concept that unifies, or brings into articulation, such aspects of Said’s work as anti-imperialism, the critique of colonial knowledge, the insistence on the ‘‘worldliness’’ of language and text, the insistence on the connections between criticism and exile, and the seemingly paradoxical attempt to save the work of art for an ultimately individual and isolated aesthetic contemplation. For years, this emphasis and insistence on declaring his affinities with secularism appeared inexplicable or out of date to many of his readers, who, starting as they thought they did from Said’s critique of Orientalism and of the imperial basis of modern culture, made simplistic and unexamined gestures of renunciation of Enlightenment thought and its legacies as forms of internal and external domination. This recognition of the need to declare oneself for secularism appears now, in light of the escalating forms of religious politics and violence that have come to dominate political life in multiple locations and across the globe, to have been anachronistic in a double sense, both behind and ahead of its time. As a number of commentators have pointed out in recent years, Said’s use of the term secular involves a displacement of its usual significations.2 Secular criticism in Said’s reckoning is, first of all, a practice of unbelief; it is directed, however, not simply at the objects of religious piety but at secular ‘‘beliefs’’ as well, and, at its most ambitious, at all those 1. I have argued this point at some length in Aamir R. Mufti, ‘‘Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture,’’ Critical Inquiry 25 (Autumn 1998): 95–125. 2. See Bruce Robbins, ‘‘Secularism, Elitism, Progress, and Other Transgressions: On Edward Said’s ‘Voyage In,’’’ Social Text, no. 40 (Fall 1994): 25–38; Mufti, ‘‘Auerbach in Istanbul’’; and the contributions to this issue by Stathis Gourgouris and Emily Apter.

Mufti / Critical Secularism 3

moments at which thought and culture become frozen, congealed, thinglike, and self-enclosed—hence the significance for him of Lukács’s notion of reification.3 At no point is secular used in his work in simple opposition to the religious per se. Above all, his concern has been with domination through the classification and management of cultures, and of human collectivities, into mutually distinct and immutable entities, be they nations, properly speaking, or civilizations or ethnicities. To the great modern system for the classification of cultures Said gave the name Orientalism and viewed the hierarchies of this system as marking the presence of a ‘‘reconstructed religious impulse, a naturalized supernaturalism.’’ The emergence of this modern classification of cultures does not represent for Said ‘‘a sudden access of objective knowledge’’ but rather ‘‘a set of structures inherited from the past, secularized, redisposed, and re-formed by such disciplines as philology, which in turn were naturalized, modernized, and laicized substitutes for (or versions of) Christian supernaturalism.’’ 4 Secular criticism thus struggles above all with the imposition of national (or civilizational) molds over social and cultural life, against all unmediated and absolute claims of membership in a national (or civilizational) community. This catachrestic use of the term secular carries the implication that the energies of nationalism in its very broadest sense are thoroughly religious in nature, in a sense that has nothing whatever to do with whether or not an organized religion or a certain canonized popular religious life plays any role, symbolic or organizing, in this or that nationalism. In this sense, the secularism implied in secular criticism is a critical secularism, as I am calling it here, a constant unsettling and an ongoing and never-ending effort at critique, rather than a once-and-for-all declaration of the overcoming of the religious, theological, or transcendental impulse.5 It implies a critical engagement with secularism itself, a scrupulous effort at recognizing the reemergence of that impulse in the midst of secular culture. To be critically secular is also to take on board an understanding of the tainted history of secularism and Enlightenment as icons of the superiority of the West and thus of the legitimacy of its civilizing mission. The social for Said is inherently and eminently secular, that is, unassimilable to transcendental narratives of any sort, in particular narratives of uniform national belonging. The cultural critic must therefore be constantly 3. See, for instance, Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 230–34; and Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 270–72. 4. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 120–21. 5. I am grateful to my friend Jonathan Arac for suggesting this formulation.


and scrupulously attentive to the dense and secular fabric of social life, making of the conflicts and contradictions of society the ground on which literary and cultural criticism is to be formulated. Secular criticism is thus also an invitation to the crossing of boundaries—boundaries of nation, tradition, religion, race, and language—and carries the implication that the world as a whole can be the only authentic horizon of critical practice. In other words, it conceives of communities of interpretation as inhabiting not self-enclosed life-worlds but rather the world itself, or rather some identifiable but never entirely closed-off corner of the world. At a very basic level, of course, secular criticism, this rather complex notion, built as it is around a series of displacements, inversions, and mediations, still contains within it a critique of the hope for the hereafter, of religious opiate, of the religious impulse per se. Implicit in its elaboration in Said’s work is thus a call for the overcoming of fear: fear of death in the first instance, but also fear as it appears in social life, fear as and when it becomes the basis for social life, which is perhaps the same thing. Overcoming fear of the other is one of the great themes of Said’s work, despite the great distance that separates his writing from the conceptual language of psychoanalysis or abstract ethical theory. He was our most important analyst of all those political and cultural impulses that are based on fear of the other, which has been at work in so many of the catastrophes of the last century. At its most ambitious, secular criticism is a praxis for the management of such fear, and, a quarter century after its publication, Orientalism may now be read fruitfully as a sustained warning about the global atmosphere of fear that is now our everyday experience in the post–September 11 era. There, he charted meticulously the long history in the modern West of dehumanizing the Arab and Muslim worlds and lay down the challenge of surviving ‘‘the consequences humanly,’’ as he put it, of that unequal (but never entirely one-sided) societal and cultural encounter.6 There are many sources for the idea of secular criticism in Said’s work, and I argued some years ago for the place of Erich Auerbach in Said’s development of it. We may of course also point to the dialectical tradition per se, to Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument, first of all, about secularizing, Enlightenment thought and its dialectical reliance on, and reversion to, its purported opposite (that is, myth), and, second, to the philosophical anthropology of fear in their work. That the sources for this governing concept in Said’s work turn out to be critical traditions that emerged out of a 6. Said, Orientalism, 45.


certain experience of Jewish (and, more specifically, German Jewish) exile is paradoxical in some ways, but it is a paradox that is no longer an entirely unfamiliar one, and one that he himself began to think about out loud, in public and in private, in the last few years before his death. Like the European émigré intellectuals who influenced him and with whom he remained preoccupied for much of his career, Said’s is an intellectual trajectory profoundly affected by the history of the Jews in the modern era. The recurring turn in his work to such figures as Auerbach, Arendt, and Adorno represents a detailed engagement with this tradition of exile from perspectives made possible by the devastation of Palestinian life in the realization of the Zionist ‘‘solution’’ to the Western crisis surrounding the Jews. It also marks his own perception of the continued imbrications of the figure of the modern intellectual, and of the essentially secular vocation of critique, with the history of the so-called Jewish Question. As I have argued elsewhere, in Said’s critical practice, the attitudes and proclivities adumbrated as secular criticism are animated by a concern with, and remain productively tied to, marginality and homelessness, whose exemplary form in the West in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is provided by the Jews.7 Said’s utter refusal to equate Jewishness or Judaism with Zionism at even the darkest moments of Israeli brutality—an equation that is historically shared by anti-Semitism and Zionism alike—and his frank openness to any Israeli willing merely to recognize the basic fact of the dispossession of the Palestinians, spoke not only of the generosity of spirit for which he was known to those who knew him, but of an utterly secular mind, unclouded by nationalist understandings of history and narratives of collective redemption. He asked of Israelis and Israel’s Jewish supporters elsewhere only the basic decency of acknowledging that their deliverance from annihilation in Europe had come at the cost of the Palestinians, who had paid a steep price for it. He often cited a rather quaint-sounding source for this idea: a book called The Other Side of the Medal, by Edward Thompson, father of E. P. Thompson, who argued in the 1920s, as the national movement became under Gandhi’s leadership for the first time a mass movement against British rule, that the British ought to recognize and take responsibility for the brutality of British rule in India, in particular in the aftermath of India’s First War of Independence in the mid-nineteenth century, known to colonial historiography as the Sepoy Mutiny, whose memory lived on, so he argued, in the collective Indian psyche. Said understood like no one else 7. See Mufti, ‘‘Auerbach in Istanbul.’’


the political importance of this ethical gesture of ‘‘atonement,’’ as Thompson calls it, and that appeared quaint and irrelevant to some younger Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, who perhaps thereby considered themselves more radical than he.8 In the last few years of his life, Said returned to the idea of binationalism in historical Palestine, first propagated in the early twentieth century by, among others, the German Jewish intellectuals associated with the founding of Hebrew University, and supported and publicized by Hannah Arendt, and renewed it, through a critique of the colonial-settler nature of Israeli society, as the authentically secular response to the IsraeliPalestinian situation.9 The essays presented in this issue take as their starting point some of these threads in Said’s secular critical practice in order to think anew, and in a critical fashion, points of affiliation with the configurations of contemporary secularism. The issue begins with Said’s recent essay on Auerbach, first published in the fiftieth-anniversary edition of Mimesis in English.10 Said reads Auerbach as secular critic par excellence—a Prussian Jew escaping Nazi violence who provides the fragments of an alternative history of (Christian) Europe as an exiled observer of Europe’s self-destruction. For Said, Auerbach secularizes the history of cultural identifications in Europe and pluralizes it by foregrounding the emergence of the European tradition in interaction with the Jewish culture of the eastern Mediterranean, doing so, furthermore, by displacing this rather large historical question onto the more concrete and philologically graspable question of the mixing or separation of literary styles. In her astute reading of Said’s essay, Emily Apter points to Said’s use of Auerbach for his own project of a critical humanism that takes on board his own earlier critique of the imperial connections of the Western humanist tradition; and in his inspired, even lyrical, defense of the scrupulously non-transcendentalist imagination, Stathis Gourgouris finds at 8. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 206. 9. For a significant rethinking of the historical meanings of binationalism in Palestine, see Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, ‘‘Binationalism and Jewish Identity: Hannah Arendt and the Question of Palestine,’’ in Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Steven E. Ascheim (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 165–80. 10. See Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Fiftieth-Anniversary ed., trans. Willard R. Trask, with a new introduction by Edward W. Said (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003). The essay is republished here with the permission of the estate of Edward W. Said. I am deeply grateful in particular to Mariam Said. My thanks also to my assistant, Indra Mukhopadhyay, for his able help with the manuscript.


the core of Said’s critical practice ‘‘an exfoliation of the repressed politics of transcendence.’’ A critical secularism means, first of all, an insistence on the thisworldly nature of all human experience and a critical practice of unbelief— threads that are picked up by Apter and Gourgouris in their essays on Said, but also by Willi Goetschel in his essay on the irreverence of Heinrich Heine, who parodied the claims of religious-national identifications in early nineteenth-century Europe at the same time as he took apart the smug detachment of their secular critique. But it also implies the inclination to sharing social space with others, explored, for instance, in my own contribution here, as well as in those by Gayatri Spivak and Gil Hochberg. Hochberg’s essay revives and reinterprets the category of the Levantine, with its resonant colonial history, in order to suggest ways of thinking out of the cultural impasse of the Middle East’s political conflict. The essays by Spivak and Ronald Judy take as their point of departure the current global crisis around the figure of the Islamist militant. Spivak’s far-reaching essay explores the ethical situation called up by the existence of the suicide bomber, finding in a critical reading of Kant’s late writing the possibility for a secularism that is not simply reducible to the workings of calculative reason, and arguing that ‘‘[i]f the university is to be secular, it requires a sustained epistemic effort that can only come from the humanities.’’ Judy offers a remarkable reading of the works of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian Salafist philosopher claimed by the jihadis as intellectual forebear and brutally reinscribed as a ‘‘Wahhabi’’ in the ongoing neo-con war with contemporary Arab society. Qutb emerges in Judy’s reckoning surprisingly as a secularizing figure, in whose work Islam becomes a matter of reading, rather than one of fealty to an unchanging tradition. Against the universalist and leveling tendencies of classic secularist thought and institutions, one strategy of revision proposed by contributors to this issue is to rethink the ‘‘vernacular’’ itself as a space for a refashioning of the secular, as in Judy’s essay, but also in Bishnupriya Ghosh’s reading of what she calls ‘‘postcolonial spectrology,’’ the haunting of global Englishes by the repressed vernacular languages and their literatures in the former colonies. My own essay explores imaginings of India against and across the religious divide in the subcontinent and identifies the lyric tradition in Urdu, long infused with the language of Sufi Islam, as the exemplary site for these secular elaborations. Finally, in a different and more philosophical vein, Akeel Bilgrami argues for the possibility of a ‘‘postclassical’’ secularism that neither rests on an exclusive recourse to ‘‘external reasons,’’ as in classical liberal thought, nor collapses into a relativis-


tic pluralism in the face of the multiplication of value- and commitment-sets known as identity politics. In the very brief time that has passed since his death, it is already becoming clear that Edward Said represented, in a strong sense, the reemergence of the classic figure of the secular universal intellectual, but, paradoxically, in an age—the post-Sartrean age—in which it was thought that the mediations embodied in such a figure had become impossible. Said himself embodied both those mediations and the skepticism about their possibility. His uniqueness in the history of this characteristic figure of the modern era is of course that he emerged to fulfill this role from the formerly colonized world and formulated the question of the struggle against the imperialization of the world as the universal question of the modern era. In this sense, he brought to completion possibilities that had already emerged in such a figure as Frantz Fanon but had remained only partially developed, as evidenced in the patron- and tutor-like relationship that Sartre was able to assume toward the latter, most famously in the preface to The Wretched of the Earth. If the life and work of Said is a unique historical event, if we are right to suspect that there will never again be an intellectual figure like him, this is not just for reasons of individual genius and talent but because he represented the first full development of ‘‘the voyage in,’’ as he himself called it, of the colonized and marginalized world into the global-imperial ‘‘center,’’ which occurred gradually, and for the first time in history, in the course of the twentieth-century, and which transformed both forever.11 He could have appeared only when he did—at the moment of the emergence of a global agglomeration of cultural networks, a conflicted but nevertheless global civilization, if I may be permitted such a seemingly antiquarian (and paradoxical) formulation, but one which seems particularly apt with respect to Said. He was the first, and perhaps last, universal intellectual of this era of globalization and was himself singularly ‘‘Levantine’’ in the sense Hochberg elaborates here, formed at the crisscrossing of languages, cultures, religions, political histories, distinct and divergent historical temporalities, and forms of cultural authority, which will never again be reproduced. Edward Said emerged as a figure in an era of diminished expectations—the aftermath of the revolutionary and anticolonial movements of the early to mid-twentieth century. His work is infused with an attempt to live with this sense of diminishment and loss—the attenuation of utopian hopes for emancipation and transformation of world society, the loss of a sense of 11. See Said, Culture and Imperialism.


plenitude in collective human life—without sentimental brooding, on the one hand, but also without simple-minded optimism or cheerfulness. He spoke of this dogged and late persistence of the hope for a better life—‘‘once the attempt to change the world miscarried,’’ as Adorno once put it 12—as the essentially secular attitude. Whether and to what degree we, his readers, have been successful in learning this lesson, as individuals or collectively, and whether and to what degree we will be able to live with the loss of his presence among us, it is probably too early to tell. For the humanities in the universities and related cultural institutions, his death poses an enormous challenge—to undertake the effort to secularize our thought and our lives— and we owe it to ourselves, to those we teach or inform, and also to Said himself for the gift of energetic thinking that he gave to us, to repeatedly clarify precisely what this challenge is.

12. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1987), 3.

Erich Auerbach, Critic of the Earthly World

Edward W. Said

. . . human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them to give birth to themselves. —Gabriel García Márquez The influence and enduring reputation of books of criticism are, for the critics who write them and hope to be read for more than one season, dispiritingly short. Since World War Two the sheer volume of books appearing in English has risen to huge numbers, thus further ensuring if not ephemerality, then a relatively short life and hardly any influence at all. Books of criticism have usually come in waves associated with academic trends, most of which are quickly replaced by successive shifts in taste, fashion, or genuine intellectual discovery. Thus only a small number of books seem perennially present and, by comparison with the vast majority of their counterparts, to have an amazing staying power. Certainly this is true of Erich Auerbach’s magisterial Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, boundary 2 31:2, 2004. Copyright © 2003 by Edward W. Said, reprinted with the permission of The Wylie Agency, Inc.


published by Princeton University Press exactly fifty years ago in a satisfyingly readable English translation by Willard R. Trask. As one can immediately judge by its subtitle, Auerbach’s book is by far the largest in scope and ambition out of all the other important critical works of the past half century. Its range covers literary masterpieces from Homer and the Old Testament right through to Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust, although as Auerbach says apologetically at the end of the book, for reasons of space he had to leave out a great deal of medieval literature as well as some crucial modern writers like Pascal and Baudelaire. He was to treat the former in his last, posthumously published book, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, the latter in various journals and a collection of his essays, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. In all these works Auerbach preserves the same essayistic style of criticism, beginning each chapter with a long quotation from a specific work cited in the original language, followed immediately by a serviceable translation (German in the original Mimesis, first published in Bern in 1946; English in most of his subsequent work), out of which a detailed explication de texte unfolds at a leisurely and ruminative pace; this in turns develops into a set of memorable comments about the relationship between the rhetorical style of the passage and its socio-political context, a feat that Auerbach manages with a minimum of fuss and with virtually no learned references. He explains in the concluding chapter of Mimesis that, even had he wanted to, he could not have made use of the available scholarly resources, first of all because he was in wartime Istanbul when the book was written and no Western research libraries were accessible for him to consult, second because had he been able to use references from the extremely voluminous secondary literature, the material would have swamped him and he would never have written the book. Thus along with the primary texts that he had with him, Auerbach relied mainly on memory and what seems like an infallible interpretive skill for elucidating relationships between books and the world they belonged to. Even in English translation, the hallmark of Auerbach’s style is an unruffled, at times even lofty and supremely calm, tone conveying a combination of quiet erudition allied with an overridingly patient and loving confidence in his mission as scholar and philologist. But who was he, and what sort of background and training did he have that enabled him to produce such work of truly outstanding influence and longevity? By the time Mimesis appeared in English he was already sixty-one, the son of a German Jewish family residing in Berlin, the city of his birth in 1892. By all accounts he

Said / Erich Auerbach, Critic of the Earthly World 13

received a classic Prussian education, graduating from that city’s renowned Französisches Gymnasium, an elite high school where the German and Franco-Latin traditions were brought together in a very special way. He received a doctorate in law from the University of Heidelberg in 1913, and then served in the German army during World War One, after which he abandoned law and earned a doctorate in Romance languages at the University of Greifswald. Geoffrey Green, author of an important book on Auerbach, has speculated that ‘‘the violence and horrors’’ of the war experience may have caused the change in career from legal to literary pursuits, from ‘‘the vast, stolid legal institutions of society . . . to [an investigation of] the distant, shifting patterns of philological studies.’’ 1 Between 1923 and 1929, Auerbach held a position at Berlin’s Prussian State Library. It was then that he strengthened his grasp of the philological vocation and produced two major pieces of work, a German translation of Giambattista Vico’s The New Science and a seminal monograph on Dante entitled Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt (when the book appeared in English in 1961 as Dante, Poet of the Secular World, the crucial word irdischen, or ‘‘earthly,’’ was only partially rendered by the considerably less concrete ‘‘secular’’). Auerbach’s life-long preoccupation with these two Italian authors underscores the specific and concrete character of his attention, so unlike that of contemporary critics, who prefer what is implicit to what the text actually says. In the first place, Auerbach’s work is anchored in the tradition of Romance philology, interestingly the study of those literatures deriving from Latin but ideologically unintelligible without the Christian doctrine of Incarnation (and hence of the Roman Church) as well as its secular underpinning in the Holy Roman Empire. An additional factor was the development out of Latin of the various demotic languages, from Provençal to French, Italian, Spanish, etc. Far from being the dry-as-dust academic study of word origins, philology for Auerbach and eminent contemporaries of his, like Karl Vossler, Leo Spitzer, and Ernst Robert Curtius, was in effect immersion in all the available written documents in one or several Romance languages, from numismatics to epigraphy, from stylistics to archival research, from rhetoric and law to an all-embracing working idea of literature that included chronicles, epics, sermons, drama, stories, and essays. Inherently comparative, Romance philology in the early twentieth century derived 1. Geoffrey Greene, Literary Criticism and the Structures of History, Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 20–21.


its main procedural ideas from a principally German tradition of interpretation that begins with the Homeric criticism of Friederich August Wolf (1759–1824), continues through Herman Schleiermacher’s biblical criticism, includes some of the most important works of Nietzsche (who was a classical philologist by profession), and culminates in the often laboriously articulated philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey. Dilthey argued that the world of written texts (of which the aesthetic masterwork was the central pillar) belonged to the realm of lived experience (Erlebnis), which the interpreter attempted to recover through a combination of erudition and a subjective intuition (eingefühlen) of what the inner spirit (Geist) of the work was. His ideas about knowledge rest on an initial distinction between the world of nature (and of natural sciences) and the world of spiritual objects, the basis of whose knowledge he classified as a mixture of objective and subjective elements (Geisteswissenschaft), or knowledge of the products of mind or spirit. Whereas there is no real English or American equivalent for it (although the study of culture is a rough approximation), Geisteswissenschaft is a recognized academic sphere in German-speaking countries. In his later essay, ‘‘Epilegomena to Mimesis’’ (1953), translated into English for the first time in the Fiftieth-Anniversary edition of Mimesis, Auerbach says explicitly that his work ‘‘arose from the themes and methods of German intellectual history and philology; it would be conceivable in no other tradition than in that of German romanticism and Hegel’’ (571).2 While it is possible to appreciate Auerbach’s Mimesis for its fine, absorbing explication of individual, sometimes obscure texts, one needs to disentangle its various antecedents and components, many of which are quite unfamiliar to modern readers but which Auerbach sometimes refers to in passing and always takes for granted in the course of his book. Auerbach’s life-long interest in the eighteenth-century Neapolitan professor of Latin eloquence and jurisprudence Giambattista Vico is absolutely central to his work as critic and philologist. In the posthumously published 1745 third edition of his magnum opus The New Science, Vico formulated a revolutionary discovery of astonishing power and brilliance. Quite on his own, and as a reaction to Cartesian abstractions about ahistorical and contextless clear and distinct ideas, Vico argues that human beings are historical creatures in that they make history, or what he called ‘‘the world of the nations.’’ 2. See Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition, trans. Willard R. Trask, with a new introduction by Edward W. Said (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 559–574. All future references to this edition are placed within parentheses in the body of the text.


Understanding or interpreting history is therefore possible only because ‘‘men made it,’’ since we can know only what we have made (just as only God knows nature because he alone made it). Knowledge of the past that comes to us in textual form, Vico says, can only be properly understood from the point of view of the maker of that past, which, in the case of ancient writers such as Homer, is primitive, barbaric, poetic. (In Vico’s private lexicon the word ‘‘poetic’’ means primitive and barbaric because early human beings could not think rationally.) Examining the Homeric epics from the perspective of when and by whom they were composed, Vico refutes generations of interpreters who had assumed that because Homer was revered for his great epics he must also have been a wise sage like Plato, Socrates, or Bacon. Instead Vico demonstrates that in its wildness and willfulness Homer’s mind was poetic, and his poetry barbaric, not wise or philosophic, that is, full of illogical fantasy, gods who were anything but godlike, and men like Achilles and Patrocles, who were most uncourtly and extremely petulant. This primitive mentality was Vico’s great discovery, whose influence on European romanticism and its cult of the imagination was profound. Vico also formulated a theory of historical coherence that showed how each period shared in its language, art, metaphysics, logic, science, law, and religion features that were common and appropriate to their appearance: primitive times produce primitive knowledge that is a projection of the barbaric mind—fantastic images of gods based on fear, guilt, and terror—and this in turn gives rise to institutions such as marriage and the burial of the dead that preserve the human race and give it a sustained history. The poetic age of giants and barbarians is succeeded by the age of heroes, and that slowly evolves into the age of men. Thus human history and society are created through a laborious process of unfolding, development, contradiction, and, most interestingly, representation. Each age has its own method, or optic, for seeing and then articulating reality: thus Plato develops his thought after (and not during) the period of violently concrete poetic images through which Homer spoke. The age of poetry gives way to a time when a greater degree of abstraction and rational discursivity become dominant. All these developments occur as a cycle that goes from primitive to advanced and degenerate epochs, then back to primitive, Vico says, according to the modifications of the human mind, which makes and then can reexamine its own history from the point of view of the maker. That is the main methodological point for Vico as well as for Auerbach. In order to be able to understand a humanistic text, one must try to do so as if one is the author


of that text, living the author’s reality, undergoing the kind of life experiences intrinsic to his or her life, and so forth, all by that combination of erudition and sympathy that is the hallmark of philological hermeneutics. Thus the line between actual events and the modifications of one’s own reflective mind is blurred in Vico, as it is in the numerous authors who were influenced by him, like James Joyce. But this perhaps tragic shortcoming of human knowledge and history is one of the unresolved contradictions pertaining to humanism itself, in which the role of thought in reconstructing the past can neither be excluded nor squared with what is ‘‘real.’’ Hence the phrase, ‘‘the representation of reality’’ in the subtitle to Mimesis and the vacillations in the book between learning and personal insight. By the early part of the nineteenth century Vico’s work had become tremendously influential to European historians, poets, novelists, and philologists, from Michelet and Coleridge to Marx and, later, Joyce. Auerbach’s fascination with Vico’s historicism (sometimes called ‘‘historism’’) underwrote his hermeneutical philology and allowed him thus to read texts such as those by Augustine or Dante from the point of view of the author, whose relationship to his age was an organic and integral one, a kind of selfmaking within the context of the specific dynamics of society at a very precise moment in its development. Moreover, the relationship between the reader-critic and the text is transformed from a one-way interrogation of the historical text by an altogether alien mind at a much later time, into a sympathetic dialogue of two spirits across ages and cultures who are able to communicate with each other as friendly, respectful spirits trying to understand each other. Now it is quite obvious that such an approach requires a great deal of erudition, although it is also clear that for the German Romance philologists of the early twentieth century with their formidable training in languages, history, literature, law, theology, and general culture, mere erudition was not enough. Obviously you could not do the basic reading if you had not mastered Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Provençal, Italian, French, and Spanish in addition to German and English. Nor could you if you did not know the traditions, main canonical authors, politics, institutions, and cultures of the time, as well as, of course, all of their interconnected arts. A philologist’s training had to take many years, although in Auerbach’s case he gives one the attractive impression that he was in no hurry to get on with it. He landed his first academic teaching job with a chair at the University of Marburg in 1929; this was the result of his Dante book, which in some ways, I think, is his most exciting and intense work. But in addition to learning and study, the heart of


the hermeneutical enterprise was, for the scholar, to develop over the years a very particular kind of sympathy toward texts from different periods and different cultures. For a German whose specialty was Romance literature this sympathy took on an almost ideological cast, given that there had been a long period of historical enmity between Prussia and France, the most powerful and competitive of its neighbors and antagonists. As a specialist in Romance languages, the German scholar had a choice either to enlist on behalf of Prussian nationalism (as Auerbach did as a soldier during the First World War) and to study ‘‘the enemy’’ with skill and insight as a part of the continuing war effort or, as was the case with the postwar Auerbach and some of his peers, to overcome bellicosity and what we now call ‘‘the clash of civilizations’’ with a welcoming, hospitable attitude of humanistic knowledge designed to realign warring cultures in a relationship of mutuality and reciprocity. The other part of the German Romance philologist’s commitment to French, Italian, and Spanish generally and to French in particular is specifically literary. The historical trajectory that is the spine of Mimesis is the passage from the separation of styles in classical antiquity, to their mingling in the New Testament, their first great climax in Dante’s Divine Comedy, and their ultimate apotheosis in the French realistic authors of the nineteenth century—Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, and then Proust. The representation of reality is Auerbach’s theme, so he had to make a judgment as to where and in what literature it was most ably represented. In the ‘‘Epilegomena’’ he explains that ‘‘in most periods the Romance literatures are more representative of Europe than are, for example, the German. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries France took unquestionably the leading role; in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Italy took it over; it fell again to France in the seventeenth, remained there also during the greater part of the eighteenth, partly still in the nineteenth, and precisely for the origin and development of modern realism (just as for painting)’’ (570). I think Auerbach scants the substantial English contribution in all this, perhaps a blind spot in his vision. Auerbach goes on to affirm that these judgments derive not from aversion to German culture but rather from a sense of regret that German literature ‘‘expressed . . . certain limitations of outlook in . . . the nineteenth century’’ (571). As we shall soon see, he does not specify what those were as he had done in the body of Mimesis, but adds that ‘‘for pleasure and relaxation’’ he still prefers reading Goethe, Stifter, and Keller rather than the French authors he studies, going once as far as saying after a remarkable analysis of Baudelaire that he did not like him at all (571).


For English readers today who associate Germany principally with horrendous crimes against humanity and with National Socialism (which Auerbach circumspectly alludes to several times in Mimesis), the tradition of hermeneutical philology embodied by Auerbach as a Romance specialist identifies two just as authentic aspects of classical German culture: its methodological generosity and, what might seem like a contradiction, its extraordinary attention to the minute, local detail of other cultures and languages. The great progenitor and clarifier of this extremely catholic, indeed almost altruistic, attitude is Goethe, who in the decade after 1810 became fascinated with Islam generally and with Persian poetry in particular. This was the period when he composed his finest and most intimate love poetry, the West-Ostlicher Diwan (1819), finding in the work of the great Persian poet Hafiz and in the verses of the Koran not only a new lyric inspiration allowing him to express a reawakened sense of physical love but, as he said in a letter to his good friend Zelter, a discovery of how, in the absolute submission to God, he felt himself to be oscillating between two worlds, his own and that of the Muslim believer who was miles, even worlds away from European Weimar. During the 1820s those earlier thoughts carried him toward a conviction that national literatures had been superseded by what he called Weltliteratur, or world literature, a universalist conception of all the literatures of the world seen together as forming a majestic symphonic whole. For many modern scholars—including myself—Goethe’s grandly utopian vision is considered to be the foundation of what was to become the field of comparative literature, whose underlying and perhaps unrealizable rationale was this vast synthesis of the world’s literary production transcending borders and languages but not in any way effacing their individuality and historical concreteness. In 1951, Auerbach wrote an autumnal, reflective essay entitled ‘‘Philology and Weltliteratur ’’ with a somewhat pessimistic tone because he felt that with the greater specialization of knowledge and expertise after the Second World War, the dissolution of the educational and professional institutions in which he had been trained, and the emergence of ‘‘new’’ non-European literatures and languages, the Goethean ideal might have become invalid or untenable. But for most of his working life as a Romance philologist he was a man with a mission, a European (and Eurocentric) mission it is true, but something he deeply believed in for its emphasis on the unity of human history, the possibility of understanding inimical and perhaps even hostile others despite the bellicosity of modern cultures and nationalisms, and the optimism with which one could enter into the inner life of a distant author or historical epoch even with a healthy awareness of one’s limitations of perspective and insufficiency of knowledge.


Such noble intentions were insufficient, however, to save his career after 1933. In 1935, he was forced to quit his position in Marburg, a victim of Nazi racial laws and of an atmosphere of increasingly jingoistic mass culture presided over by intolerance and hatred. A few months later he was offered a position teaching Romance literatures at the Istanbul State University, where some years before Leo Spitzer had also taught. It was while he was in Istanbul, Auerbach tells us in the concluding pages of Mimesis, that he wrote and finished the book, which then appeared in Switzerland one year after the war’s end. And even though the book is in many ways a calm affirmation of the unity and dignity of European literature in all its multiplicity and dynamism, it is also a book of countercurrents, ironies, and even contradictions that need to be taken into account for it to be read and understood properly. This rigorously fastidious attention to particulars, to details, to individuality is why Mimesis is not principally a book providing readers with usable ideas, which in the case of concepts like Renaissance, baroque, romanticism, and so on, are not exact but unscientific, as well as finally unusable. ‘‘Our precision [as philologists],’’ he says, ‘‘relates to the particular. The progress of the historical arts in the last two centuries consists above all, apart from the opening up of new material and in a great refinement of methods in individual research, in a perspectival formation of judgment, which makes it possible to accord the various epochs and cultures their own presuppositions and views, to strive to the utmost toward the discovery of those, and to dismiss as unhistorical and dilettantish every absolute assessment of the phenomena that is brought in from outside’’ (573). Thus for all its redoubtable learning and authority Mimesis is also a personal book, disciplined yes, but not autocratic, and not pedantic. Consider, first of all, that even though Mimesis is the product of an extraordinarily thorough education and is steeped in an unparalleled inwardness and familiarity with European culture, it is an exile’s book, written by a German cut off from his roots and his native environment. Auerbach seems not to have wavered, however, in his loyalty to his Prussian upbringing or to his feeling that he always expected to return to Germany. ‘‘I am a Prussian and of the Jewish faith,’’ he wrote of himself in 1921, and despite his later diasporic existence he never seemed to have doubted where he really belonged. American friends and colleagues report that until his final illness and death in 1957, he was looking for some way to return to Germany. Nevertheless, after all those years in Istanbul he undertook a new postwar career in the United States, spending time at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and as a professor at Pennsylvania State University, before he was appointed as Sterling Professor of Romance Philology at Yale in 1956.


Auerbach’s Jewishness is something one can only speculate about since, in his usually reticent way, he does not refer to it directly in Mimesis. One assumes, for instance, that the various intermittent and moving comments throughout the book about mass modernity and its relationship with, among others, the disruptive power of the nineteenth-century French realistic writers (the Goncourts, Balzac, and Flaubert) as well as ‘‘the tremendous crisis’’ it caused, are meant to suggest the menacing world and how that world affects the transformation of reality and consequently of style (the development of the sermo humilis due to the figure of Jesus). It is not hard to detect a combination of pride and distance as he describes the emergence of Christianity in the ancient world as the product of prodigious missionary work undertaken by the apostle Paul, a diasporic Jew converted to Christ. The parallel with his own situation as a non-Christian explaining Christianity’s achievement is evident, but so too is the irony that, in so doing, he travels from his roots still further. Most of all, however, in Auerbach’s searingly powerful and strangely intimate characterization of the great Christian Thomist poet Dante—who emerges from the pages of Mimesis as the seminal figure in Western literature—the reader is inevitably led to the paradox of a Prussian Jewish scholar in Turkish, Muslim, non-European exile handling (perhaps even juggling) charged, and in many ways irreconcilable, sets of antinomies that, though ordered more benignly than their mutual antagonism suggests, never lose their opposition to each other. Auerbach is a firm believer in the dynamic transformations as well as the deep sedimentations of history: yes, Judaism made Christianity possible through Paul, but Judaism remains, and it remains different from Christianity. So too, he says in a melancholy passage in Mimesis, will collective passions remain the same whether in Roman times or under National Socialism. What makes these meditations so poignant is an autumnal but unmistakably authentic sense of humanistic mission that is both tragic and hopeful. I shall return to these matters later. I think it is quite proper to highlight some of the more personal aspects of Mimesis because in many ways it is, and should be read as, an unconventional book. Of course it has the manifest gravity of the Important Book, but as I noted above, it is by no means a formulaic one, despite the relative simplicity of its main theses about literary style in Western literature. In classical literature, Auerbach says, high style was used for nobles and gods who could be treated tragically; low style was principally for comic and mundane subjects, perhaps even for idyllic ones, but the idea of everyday human or worldly life as something to be represented through a style


proper to it is not generally available before Christianity. Tacitus, for example, was simply not interested in talking about or representing the everyday, excellent historian though he was. If we go back to Homer, as Auerbach does in the celebrated and much-anthologized first chapter of Mimesis, the style is paratactic, that is, it deals with reality as a line of ‘‘externalized, uniformly illuminated phenomena, at a definite time and in a definite place, connected together without lacunae in a perpetual foreground [which technically speaking is parataxis, words and phrases added on rather than subordinated to each other]; thoughts and feelings completely expressed; events taking place in leisurely fashion and with very little of suspense’’ (11). So as he analyzes the return to Ithaca by Odysseus, Auerbach notes how the author simply narrates his greeting and recognition by the old nurse Euryclea, who knows him by the childhood scar he bears the moment she washes his feet: past and present are on an equal footing, there is no suspense, and one has the impression that nothing is held back, despite the inherent precariousness of the episode, what with Penelope’s interloping suitors hanging about, waiting to kill her returning husband. On the other hand, Auerbach’s consideration of the Abraham and Isaac story in the Old Testament beautifully demonstrates how it ‘‘is like a silent progress through the indeterminate and the contingent, a holding of the breath . . . the overwhelming suspense is present. . . . The personages speak in the Bible story too; but their speech does not serve, as does speech in Homer, to manifest, to externalize thoughts—on the contrary, it serves to indicate thoughts which remain unexpressed. . . . [There is an] externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies beneath is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feelings remain unexpressed, are only suggested by silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole is permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and ‘fraught with background’’’ (11–12). Moreover these contrasts can be seen in representations of human beings, in Homer of heroes ‘‘who wake every morning as if it were the first day of their lives,’’ whereas the Old Testament figures, including God, are heavy with the implication of extending into the depths of time, space, and consciousness, hence of character, and therefore require a much more concentrated, intense act of attention from the reader. A great part of Auerbach’s charm as a critic is that, far from seeming heavy-handed and pedantic, he exudes a sense of searching and dis-


covery, the joys and uncertainties of which he shares unassumingly with his reader. Lowry Nelson, Jr., a younger colleague of his at Yale, wrote aptly in a memorial note of the self-instructing quality of Auerbach’s work: ‘‘He was his own best teacher and learner. That process goes on in one’s head, and one can become publicly aware of it to the extent of reproducing some of its primeval dramatic unfolding. The point is how you arrive, by what dangers, mistakes, fortuitous encounters, sleeps or slips of mind, by what insights achieved through great expense of time and passion and to what hard-won formulations in the face of history. . . . Auerbach had the ability to start with a single text without being coy, to expound it with a freshness that might pass for naiveté, to avoid making mere thematic or arbitrary connections, and yet to begin to weave ample fabrics from a single loom.’’ 3 As the 1953 ‘‘Epilegomena’’ demonstrates, however, Auerbach was adamant (if not also fierce) in rebutting criticisms of his claims; there is an especially tart exchange with his polymathic Romance colleague Curtius that shows the two formidable scholars slugging it out rather belligerently. It is not an exaggeration to say that, like Vico, Auerbach was at heart an autodidact, guided in his diverse explorations by a handful of deeply conceived and complex themes with which he wove his ample fabric, which was not seamless or effortlessly spun out. In Mimesis, he resolutely sticks to his practice of working from disconnected fragments: each of the book’s chapters is marked not only by a new author who bears little overt relationship to earlier ones, but also by a new beginning, in terms of the author’s perspective and stylistic outlook, so to speak. The ‘‘representation’’ of reality is taken by Auerbach to mean an active dramatic presentation of how each author actually realizes, brings characters to life, and clarifies his or her own world; this of course explains why in reading the book we are compelled by the sense of disclosure that Auerbach affords us as he in turn re-realizes and interprets and, in his unassuming way, even seems to be staging the transmutation of a coarse reality into language and new life. One major theme turns up already in the first chapter—the notion of incarnation—a centrally Christian idea, of course, whose prehistory in Western literature Auerbach ingeniously locates in the contrast between Homer and the Old Testament. The difference between Homer’s Odysseus and Abraham is that the former is immediately present and requires no interpretation, no recourse either to allegory or to complicated explanations. Dia3. Nelson, Jr., Lowry. ‘‘Erich Auerbach: Memoir of a Scholar,’’ Yale Review, v. 69 n. 2 (Winter 1980), 318.


metrically opposed is the figure of Abraham, who incarnates ‘‘doctrine and promise’’ and is steeped in them. These are ‘‘inseparable from’’ him and ‘‘for that very reason they are fraught with ‘background’ and [are] mysterious, containing a second, concealed meaning’’ (15). And this second meaning can only be recovered by a very particular act of interpretation, which, in the main piece of work Auerbach produced in Istanbul before he published Mimesis in 1946, he described as figural interpretation.4 Here is another instance where Auerbach seems to be negotiating between the Jewish and European (hence Christian) components of his identity. Basically, figural interpretation develops as early Christian thinkers such as Tertullian and Augustine felt impelled to reconcile the Old with the New Testament. Both parts of the Bible were the word of God, but how were they related, how could they be read, as it were, together, given the quite considerable difference between the old Judaic dispensation and the new message emanating from the Christian Incarnation? The solution arrived at, according to Auerbach, is the notion that the Old Testament prophetically prefigures the New Testament, which in turn can be read as a figural and, he adds, carnal (hence incarnate, real, worldly) realization or interpretation of the Old Testament. The first event or figure is ‘‘real and historical announcing something else that is also real and historical.’’ 5 At last we begin to see, like interpretation itself, how history does not only move forward but also backward, in each oscillation between eras managing to accomplish a greater realism, a more substantial ‘‘thickness’’ (to use a term from current anthropological description), a higher degree of truth. In Christianity, the core doctrine is that of the mysterious Logos, the Word made flesh, God made into a man, and therefore, literally, incarnation; but how much more fulfilling is the new idea that pre-Christian times can be read as a shadowy figure (figura) of what actually was to come? Auerbach quotes a sixth-century cleric as saying, ‘‘‘that figure [a character or episode in the Old Testament that prophesies something comparable in the New Testament], without which not a letter of the Old Testament exists, now at length endures to better purpose in the New’; and from just about the same time [Auerbach continues] a passage in the writings of Bishop Avitus of Vienne . . . in which he speaks of the Last Judgment; just as God in kill4. I refer here to Auerbach’s long and rather technical essay ‘‘Figura,’’ published in 1944 and since collected in Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays (Meridian Books, Inc., 1959; rept. Peter Smith, 1973). 5. Ibid., 29.


ing the first-born in Egypt spared the houses daubed with blood, so may He recognize and spare the faithful by the sign of the Eucharist: tu cognosce tuam salvanda in plebe figuram (‘recognize thine own figure in the people that are to be saved’).’’ 6 One last and quite difficult aspect of figura needs pointing out here. Auerbach contends that the very concept of figura also functions as a middle term between the literal-historical dimension and, for the Christian author, the world of truth, veritas. So rather than only convey an inert meaning for an episode or character in the past, in its second and more interesting sense figura is the intellectual and spiritual energy that does the actual connecting between past and present, history and Christian truth, which is so essential to interpretation. ‘‘In this connection,’’ Auerbach claims, ‘‘figura is roughly equivalent to spiritus or intellectus spiritalis, sometimes replaced by figuralitas.’’ 7 Thus for all the complexity of his argument and the minuteness of the often arcane evidence he presents, Auerbach, I believe, is bringing us back to what is an essentially Christian doctrine for believers but also a crucial element of human intellectual power and will. In this he follows Vico, who looks at the whole of human history and says, ‘‘mind made all this,’’ an affirmation that audaciously reaffirms but also to some degree undercuts the religious dimension that gives credit to the Divine. Auerbach’s own vacillation between, on the one hand, his extraordinarily erudite and sensitive care for the intricacies of Christian symbolism and doctrine, his resolute secularism, and perhaps also his own Jewish background and, on the other, his unwavering focus on the earthly, the historical, the worldly gives Mimesis a fruitful inner tension. Certainly it is the finest description we have of the millennial effects of Christianity on literary representation. But Mimesis also glorifies as much as it animates with singular force and individualistic genius, most overtly in the chapters on verbal virtuosity in Dante, Rabelais, and Shakespeare. As we shall see in a moment, their creativity vies with God’s in setting the human in a timeless as well as temporal setting. Typically, however, Auerbach chooses to express such ideas as an integral part of his unfolding interpretive quest in the book: he therefore does not take time out to explain his ideas methodologically but lets them emerge from the very history of the representation of reality as it begins to gather density and scope. Remember that, as his point of departure for analysis (which in a later essay he referred to and discussed 6. Ibid., 46–47. 7. Ibid., 47.


as the Ansatzpunkt), Auerbach always comes back to the text and to the stylistic means used by the author to represent reality. This excavation of semantic meaning is most virtuosically evident in the essay ‘‘Figura’’ and in such brilliant shorter studies as his fertile examination of single phrases like la cour et la ville, which contain a whole library of meanings that illuminate seventeenth-century French society and culture. Three seminal moments in the trajectory of Mimesis should now be identified in some detail. One is to be found in the book’s second chapter, ‘‘Fortunata,’’ whose starting point is a passage by the Roman author Petronius, followed by another by Tacitus. Both men treat their subjects from a one-sided point of view, that of writers concerned with maintaining the rigid social order of high and low classes. The wealthy and the important personages get all the attention, whereas the commoners or vulgar people are relegated to the fate of the unimportant and the vulgar. After having illustrated the insufficiencies of this classical separation of styles into high and low, Auerbach develops a wonderful contrast with that agonizing nocturnal moment in the Gospel of St. Mark when, standing in the courtyard of the High Priest’s palace peopled with servant girls and soldiers, Simon Peter denies his relationship to the imprisoned Jesus. One particularly eloquent passage from Mimesis deserves quotation: It is apparent at first glance that the rule of differentiated styles cannot possibly apply in this case. The incident, entirely realistic both in regard to locale and dramatis personae—note particularly their low social station—is replete with problem and tragedy. Peter is no mere accessory figure serving as illustratio, like the soldiers Vibulenus and Percennius [in Tacitus], who are represented as mere scoundrels and swindlers. He is the image of man in the highest and deepest and most tragic sense. Of course this mingling of styles is not dictated by an artistic purpose. On the contrary, it was rooted from the beginning in the character of Jewish-Christian literature; it was graphically and harshly dramatized through God’s incarnation in a human being of the humblest social station, through his existence on earth amid humble everyday people and conditions, and through his Passion which, judged by earthly standards, was ignominious; and it naturally came to have . . . a most decisive bearing upon man’s conception of the tragic and the sublime. Peter, whose personal account may be assumed to have been the basis of the story, was a fisherman from Galilee, of humblest background and humblest education. . . . From


the humdrum existence of his daily life, Peter is called to the most tremendous role. Here, like everything else to do with Jesus’ arrest, his appearance on the stage—viewed in the world-historical continuity of the Roman Empire—is nothing but a provincial incident, an insignificant local occurrence, noted by none but those directly involved. Yet how tremendous it is, viewed in relation to the life a fisherman from the Sea of Galilee normally lives . . . (41–42). Auerbach then goes on unhurriedly to detail the ‘‘pendulation’’ or swings in Peter’s soul between sublimity and fear, faith and doubt, courage and defeat in order to show that those experiences are radically incompatible with ‘‘the sublime style of classical antique literature.’’ This still leaves the question of why such a passage moves us, given that in classical literature it would appear only as farce or comedy. ‘‘Because it portrays something which neither the poets nor the historians of antiquity ever set out to portray: the birth of a spiritual movement in the depths of the common people, from within the everyday occurrences of contemporary life, which thus assumes an importance it could never have assumed in antique literature. What we witness is the awakening of ‘a new heart and a new spirit.’ All this applies not only to Peter’s denial but also to every other occurrence which is related in the New Testament’’ (42–43). What Auerbach enables us to see here is ‘‘a world which on the one hand is entirely real, average, identifiable as to place, time, and circumstances, but which on the other hand is shaken in its very foundations, is transforming and renewing itself before our eyes’’ (43). Christianity shatters the classical balance between high and low styles, just as Jesus’ life destroys the separation between the sublime and the everyday. What is set in motion, as a result, is the search for a new literary pact between writer and reader, a new synthesis or mingling between style and interpretation that will be adequate to the disturbing volatility of worldly events in the much grander setting opened up by Christ’s historical presence. To this end, St. Augustine’s enormous accomplishment, linked as he was to the classical world by education, was to have been the first to realize that classical antiquity had been superseded by a different world requiring a new sermo humilis, or as Auerbach puts it, ‘‘a low style, such as would properly only be applicable to comedy, but which now reaches out far beyond its original domain, and encroaches upon the deepest and the highest, the sublime and the eternal’’ (72). The problem then becomes how to relate the discursive, sequential events of human history to each other within the new figural dispensation that has triumphed conclusively over its


predecessor, and then to find a language adequate to such a task, once, after the fall of the Roman Empire, Latin was no longer the lingua franca of Europe. Auerbach’s choice of Dante to represent the second seminal moment in Western literary history is made to seem breathtakingly appropriate. Read slowly and reflectively, chapter 8 of Mimesis, ‘‘Farinata and Cavalcante,’’ is one of the great moments in modern critical literature, a masterly, almost vertiginous embodiment of Auerbach’s own ideas about Dante: that the Divine Comedy synthesized the timeless and the historical because of Dante’s genius, and that Dante’s use of the demotic (or vulgar) Italian language in a sense enabled the creation of what we have come to call literature. I will not try to summarize Auerbach’s analysis of a passage from the tenth canto of the Inferno in which Dante the pilgrim and his guide Virgil are accosted by two Florentines who knew Dante from Florence but who are now committed to the Inferno, and whose internecine squabbles between the city’s Guelph and Ghibelline factions carry on into the afterworld: readers should experience this dazzling analysis for themselves. Auerbach notes that the seventy lines he focuses on are incredibly packed, containing no less than four separate scenes, as well as more varied material than any other so far discussed in Mimesis. What particularly compels the reader is that Dante’s Italian in the poem is, as Auerbach puts it assertively, ‘‘a wellnigh incomprehensible miracle,’’ used by the poet ‘‘to discover the world anew’’ (182–183). There is, first of all, its combination of ‘‘sublimity and triviality which, measured by the standards of antiquity, is monstrous.’’ Then there is its immense forcefulness, its ‘‘repulsive and often disgusting greatness,’’ according to Goethe, whereby the poet uses the vernacular to represent ‘‘the antagonism of the two traditions . . . that of antiquity . . . and that of the Christian era. . . . Dante’s powerful temperament, which is conscious of both because its aspiration toward the tradition of antiquity does not imply for it the possibility of abandoning the other; nowhere does mingling of styles come so close to violation of all style’’ (184–185). Then there is its abundance of material and styles, all of it treated in what Dante claimed was ‘‘the common everyday language of the people,’’ (186) which allowed a realism that brought forth descriptions of the classical, the biblical, and everyday worlds ‘‘not displayed within a single action, but instead an abundance of actions in the most diverse tonalities [which] follow one another in quick succession’’ (189). And finally, Dante manages to achieve through his style a combination of past, present, and future, since the two Florentine men


who rise out of their flaming tombs to accost Dante so peremptorily are in fact dead but seem to live on somehow in what Hegel called a ‘‘changeless existence’’ remarkably devoid neither of history nor of memory and facticity. Having been judged for their sins and placed inside their burning encasement inside the kingdom of the damned, Farinata and Cavalcante are seen by us at a moment when we have ‘‘left the earthly sphere behind; we are in an eternal place, and yet we encounter concrete appearance and concrete occurrence there. This differs from what appears and occurs on earth, yet it is evidently connected with it in a necessary and strictly determined relation’’ (191). The result is ‘‘a tremendous concentration [in Dante’s style and vision]. We behold an intensified image of the essence of their being, fixed for all eternity in gigantic dimensions, behold it in a purity and distinctness which could never for one moment have been possible during their lives on earth’’ (192). What fascinates Auerbach is the mounting tension within Dante’s poem, as eternally condemned sinners press their cases and aspire to the realization of their ambitions even as they remain fixed in the place assigned to them by Divine Judgment. Hence, the sense of futility and sublimity exuded simultaneously by the Inferno’s ‘‘earthly historicity,’’ which is always pointed in the end toward the white rose of the ‘‘Paradiso.’’ So then ‘‘the beyond is eternal and yet phenomenal. . . . [I]t is changeless and of all time and yet full of history’’ (197). For Auerbach, therefore, Dante’s great poem exemplifies the figural approach, the past realized in the present, the present prefiguring as well as acting like a sort of eternal redemption, the whole thing witnessed by Dante the pilgrim, whose artistic genius compresses human drama into an aspect of the divine. The refinement of Auerbach’s own writing about Dante is truly exhilarating to read, not just because of his complex, paradox-filled insights, but as he nears the end of the chapter, because of their Nietzschean audacity, often venturing toward the unsayable and the inexpressible, beyond normal or for that matter even divinely set limits. Having established the systematic nature of Dante’s universe (framed by Aquinas’ theocratic cosmology), Auerbach offers the thought that for all of its investment in the eternal and immutable, the Divine Comedy is even more successful in representing reality as basically human. In that vast work of art ‘‘the image of man eclipses the image of God,’’ and despite Dante’s Christian conviction that the world is made coherent by a systematic universal order, ‘‘the indestructibility of the whole historical and individual man turns against that order, makes it subservient to its own purposes, and obscures it’’ (202). Auerbach’s great


predecessor Vico had flirted with the idea that the human mind creates the divine, not the other way around, but living under the Church’s umbrella in eighteenth-century Naples, Vico wrapped his defiant proposition in all sorts of formulae that seemed to preserve history for Divine Providence, and not for human creativity and ingenuity. Auerbach’s choice of Dante for advancing the radically humanistic thesis carefully works through the great poet’s Catholic ontology as a phase transcended by the Christian epic’s realism, which is shown to be ‘‘ontogenetic,’’ that is, ‘‘we are given to see, in the realm of timeless being, the history of man’s inner life and unfolding’’ (202). Yet Dante’s Christian and post-Christian achievement could not have been realized had it not been for his immersion in what he inherited from classical culture—the capacity to draw human figures clearly, dramatically, and forcefully. In Auerbach’s view, Western literature after Dante draws on his example but is rarely as intensely convincing in its variety, its dramatic realism, and stark universality as he was. Successive chapters of Mimesis treat medieval and early Renaissance texts as departures from the Dantean norm, some of them like Montaigne in his Essais stressing personal experience at the expense of the symphonic whole, others such as the works of Shakespeare and Rabelais brimming over with a linguistic verve and resourcefulness that overwhelms realistic representation in the interests of language itself. Characters like Falstaff or Pantagruel are realistically drawn to a certain degree, but what is as interesting to the reader as their vividness are the unprecedented riotous effects of the author’s style. It is not a contradiction to say that this could not have happened without the emergence of humanism, as well as the great geographical discoveries of the period: both have the effect of expanding the potential range of human action while also continuing to ground it in earthly situations. Auerbach says that Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, adumbrate ‘‘a basic fabric of the world, perpetually weaving itself, renewing itself, and connected in all its parts, from which all this arises and which makes it impossible to isolate any one event or level of style. Dante’s general, clearly delimited figurality, in which everything is resolved in the beyond, in God’s ultimate kingdom, and in which all characters attain their full realization only in the beyond, is no more’’ (327). From this point on, reality is completely historical, and it, rather than the Beyond, has to be read and understood according to laws that evolve slowly. Figural interpretation took for its point of origin the sacred word, or Logos, whose incarnation in the earthly world was made possible by the Christ-figure, a central point, as it were, for organizing experience and understanding history. With the eclipse of the divine that is presaged in


Dante’s poem, a new order slowly begins to assert itself, and so the second half of Mimesis painstakingly traces the growth of historicism, a multiperspectival, dynamic, and holistic way of representing history and reality. Let me quote him at length on the subject: Basically, the way in which we view human life and society is the same whether we are concerned with things of the past or things of the present. A change in our manner of viewing history will of necessity soon be transferred to our manner of viewing current conditions. When people realize that epochs and societies are not to be judged in terms of a pattern concept of what is desirable absolutely speaking but rather in every case in terms of their own premises; when people reckon among such premises not only natural factors like climate and soil but also the intellectual and historical factors; when, in other words, they come to develop a sense of historical dynamics, of the incomparability of historical phenomena and of their constant inner mobility; when they come to appreciate the vital unity of individual epochs, so that each epoch appears as a whole whose character is reflected in each of its manifestations; when, finally, they accept the conviction that the meaning of events cannot be grasped in abstract and general forms of cognition and that the material needed to understand it must not be sought exclusively in the upper strata of society and in major political events but also in art, economy, material and intellectual culture, in the depths of the workaday world and its men and women, because it is only there that one can grasp what is unique, what is animated by inner forces, and what, in both a more concrete and a more profound sense, is universally valid: then it is to be expected that those insights will also be transferred to the present and that, in consequence, the present too will be seen as incomparable and unique, as animated by inner forces and in a constant state of development; in other words, as a piece of history whose everyday depths and total inner structure lay claim to our interest both in their origins and in the direction taken by their development (443–444). Auerbach never loses sight of his original ideas about the separation and mingling of styles—how, for instance, classicism in France returned to the vogue for antique models and the high style, and late-eighteenth-century German romanticism overturned those norms by way of a hostile reaction to them in works of sentiment and passion. And yet in a rare moment of severe judgment, Auerbach shows that, far from using the advantages of


historicism to represent the complexity and social change that were overtaking contemporary reality, early-nineteenth-century German culture (with the exception of Marx) turned away from it out of a fear of the future, which to Germany seemed always to be barging in at the culture from the outside in forms such as revolution, civil unrest, and the overturning of tradition. Goethe comes in for the harshest treatment, even though we know that Auerbach loved his poetry and read him with the greatest pleasure. I do not think it is reading too much into the somewhat judgmental tone of chapter 17 of Mimesis (‘‘Miller the Musician’’) to recognize that in its stern condemnation of Goethe’s dislike of upheaval and even of change itself, his interest in aristocratic culture, his deep-seated wish to be rid of the ‘‘revolutionary occurrences’’ taking place all over Europe, and his inability to understand the flow of popular history, Auerbach was discussing no mere failure of perception but a profound wrong turn in German culture as a whole that led to the horrors of the present. Perhaps Goethe is made to represent too much. But were it not for his withdrawal from the present and for what he otherwise might have done for bringing German culture into the dynamic present, Auerbach speculates that Germany might have been integrated ‘‘into the emerging new reality of Europe and the world might have been prepared more calmly, have been accomplished with fewer uncertainties and less violence’’ (451–452). At the time these regretful and actually understated lines were being written in the early 1940s, Germany had unleashed a storm on Europe that swept all before it. Before that, the major German writers after Goethe were mired in regionalism and a marvelously traditional conception of life as a vocation. Realism, as an overall style, never emerged in Germany, and except for Fontane, there was very little in the language that had the gravity, universality, and synthetic power to represent modern reality until Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks in 1901. There is a brief acknowledgment that Nietzsche and Jacob Burckhardt were more in touch with their own time, but neither of course was ‘‘concerned with the realistic portrayal of contemporary reality’’ (519). As against the chaotic irrationality ultimately represented by the anachronistic ethos of National Socialism, Auerbach therefore locates an alternative in the realism of mainly French prose fiction in which writers such as Stendhal, Flaubert, and Proust sought to unify the fragmented modern world—with its unfolding class struggle, its industrialization, and its economic expansion combined with moral discomfort—in the eccentric structures of the modernist novel. And these replace the correspondence between Eternity and History that had enabled Dante’s vision,


and which was now completely overtaken by the disruptive and dislocating currents of historical modernity. The last few chapters of Mimesis thus seem to have a different tone than what goes before them. Auerbach is now discussing the history of his own time, not that of the medieval and Renaissance past, nor that of relatively distant cultures. Evolving slowly from acute observation of events and characters in the mid-nineteenth century, realism in France (and, though he talks about it much less, England) takes on the character of an aesthetic style capable of rendering sordidness and beauty with unadorned directness, although in the process master-technicians like Flaubert, unwilling to intervene in the rapidly changing world of social upheaval and revolutionary change, also formulated an ethic of disinterested observation. It is enough to be able to see and represent what is going on, although the practice of realism usually concerns figures from low or, at most, bourgeois life. How this then turns into the magnificent richness of Proust’s work based on memory, or into the stream-of-consciousness techniques of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, is a topic that makes for some of Auerbach’s most impressive later pages, though once again we should remind ourselves that what Auerbach is also describing is how his own work as a philologist emerges from modernity and is indeed an integral part of the representation of reality. Thus the modern Romance philology exemplified by Auerbach acquires its special intellectual identity by a kind of conscious affiliation with the realistic literature of its own time: the uniquely French achievement of dealing with reality from more than a local standpoint, universally, and with a specifically European mission. Mimesis bears within its pages its own rich history of the analysis of evolving styles and perspectives. To help one understand the cultural and personal significance of Auerbach’s quest, I’d like to recall the laboriously complicated narrative structure of Mann’s postwar novel Dr. Faustus (published after Auerbach’s work), which, far more explicitly than Mimesis, is a story both of modern German catastrophe as well as the attempt to understand it. The terrible story of Adrien Leverkuhn, a prodigiously endowed composer who makes a pact with the devil to explore the furthest reaches of art and mind, is narrated by his much less gifted childhood friend and companion, Serenus Zeitblom. Whereas Adrien’s wordless musical domain allows him to enter the irrational and the purely symbolic on his way down into terminal madness, Zeitblom, who is a humanist and scholar, tries to keep up with him, translating Adrien’s musical journey into sequential prose, struggling to make sense of what


defies ordinary comprehension. Mann suggests that both men represent the two aspects of modern German culture: one as embodied in Adrien’s defiant life and his pathbreaking music, which takes him beyond ordinary sense into the irrational demonic; the other as delivered in Zeitblom’s sometimes bumbling and awkward narrative, that of a closely connected friend witnessing that which he is powerless to stop or prevent. The novel’s fabric is actually made up of three strands. In addition to Adrien’s story and Zeitblom’s attempts to grapple with it (which include the story of Zeitblom’s own life and career as scholarly humanist and teacher), there are frequent allusions to the course of the war, concluding with Germany’s final defeat in 1945. That history is not referred to in Mimesis, nor of course is there anything in it like the drama and the cast of characters that animate Mann’s great novel. But in its allusions to the failure of German literature to confront modern reality, and Auerbach’s own effort in his book to represent an alternative history for Europe (Europe perceived through the means of stylistic analysis), Mimesis is also an attempt to rescue sense and meanings from the fragments of modernity with which, from his Turkish exile, Auerbach saw the downfall of Europe, and Germany in particular. Like Zeitblom, he affirms the recuperative and redemptive human project for which, in its patient philological unfolding, his book is the emblem, and again resembling Zeitblom, he understands that like a novelist, the scholar must reconstruct the history of his own time as part of a personal commitment to his field. Yet Auerbach specifically forswears the linear narrative style, which, despite its numerous interruptions and parentheses, works so powerfully for Zeitblom and his readers. Thus in comparing himself to modern novelists such as Joyce and Woolf, who re-create a whole world out of random, usually unimportant moments, Auerbach explicitly rejects a rigid scheme, a relentless sequential movement, or fixed concepts as instruments of study. ‘‘As opposed to this,’’ he says near the end, ‘‘I see the possibility of success and profit in a method which consists in letting myself be guided by a few motifs which I have worked out gradually and without a specific purpose . . . which have become familiar and vital to me in the course of my philological activity’’ (548). What gives him the confidence to surrender to those motifs without a specific purpose is the realization that no one person can possibly synthesize the whole of modern life, and second, that there is an abiding ‘‘order and . . . interpretation of life which arise from life itself: that is, those which grow up in the individuals themselves, which are to be discerned in their


thoughts, their consciousness, and in a more concealed form in their words and actions. For there is always going on within us a process of formulation and interpretation whose subject matter is our own self’’ (549). This testimonial to self-understanding is a deeply affecting one, I think. Several recognitions and affirmations are at play and even at odds within it, so to speak. One of course is staking something as ambitious as the history of Western representations of reality neither on a pre-existing method nor a schematic time-frame, but on personal interest, learning, and practice alone. Second, this then suggests that interpreting literature is ‘‘a process of formulation and interpretation whose subject matter is our own self.’’ Third, rather than producing a totally coherent, neatly inclusive view of the subject, there is ‘‘not one order and one interpretation, but many, which may either be those of different persons or of the same person at different times; so that overlapping, complementing, and contradiction yield something that we might call a synthesized cosmic view or at least a challenge to the reader’s will to interpretive synthesis’’ (549). Thus it all unmistakably comes down to a personal effort. Auerbach offers no system, no shortcut to what he puts before us as a history of the representation of reality in Western literature. From a contemporary standpoint there is something impossibly naive, if not outrageous, that hotly contested terms like ‘‘Western,’’ ‘‘reality,’’ and ‘‘representation’’—each of which has recently brought forth literally acres of disputatious prose among critics and philosophers—are left to stand on their own, unadorned and unqualified. It is as if Auerbach was intent on exposing his personal explorations and, perforce, his fallibility to the perhaps scornful eye of critics who might deride his subjectivity. But the triumph of Mimesis, as well as its inevitable tragic flaw, is that the human mind studying literary representations of the historical world can only do so as all authors do—from the limited perspective of their own time and their own work. No more scientific a method or less subjective a gaze is possible, except that the great scholar can always buttress his vision with learning, dedication, and moral purpose. It is this combination, this mingling of styles out of which Mimesis emerges. And to my way of thinking, its humanistic example remains an unforgettable one, fifty years after its first appearance in English.

Saidian Humanism

Emily Apter

Of crucial importance to Edward Said throughout his extraordinary career as an exemplary literary comparatist was the problem of humanism. In taking up the issue of Saidian humanism, I want to consider what it is; why it was such a fixture of Said’s intellectual trajectory; and how humanist interpretation was complicated by the critique of Orientalism. As is well known, the German philologist Erich Auerbach remains a consistent reference point in Said’s oeuvre, as a figure of secular criticism in exile, a defender of literary worldliness in an era of cultural standardization, and an explicator of Dante who drew Christian ontology into concert with the representation of earthly realism. Drawing on Said’s preface to a new edition of Auerbach’s seminal Mimesis (reproduced in this volume), I want to examine the question of why Said held on so tenaciously to humanist precepts and exegetical practices. In Orientalism, humanism and empire are revealed in mutual compact, but there are other humanisms that survive the compromise with imperialism: emancipatory humanism, the ethics of coexistence, figural paradigms of ontogenesis in world-historical forms of culture, and the ideal of translatio as portal to a universal or sacred language. Such a language may be boundary 2 31:2, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.


seen as comparable, if not equal, to a linguistic monotheism whose very sound-values—as in the case of classical or Koranic Arabic—are thought to be tangible evidence of paradise.1 Said’s reading of divine language in the preface to Mimesis intimates—though not in any explicit way—that humanism provides a crucial way of dealing with the ‘‘God problem,’’ allowing him to negotiate his way around the categorical imperatives of Christian and Islamic tradition. And this, of course, has significant bearing on definitions of secular criticism indebted to Said’s work. Said was always an accomplished literary critic in a humanist vein, interested in ‘‘great writers’’ even, as he noted in a 1993 interview cited by Jonathan Arac, when those writers are Orientalists and/or imperialists.2 Humanism was integral to his vision of cultural coexistence without coercion as well as to his ascription of Goethean Weltliteratur, which harks back to his translation in 1969 of Auerbach’s ‘‘Philology and Weltliteratur ’’ essay. The back cover of Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power, an anthology of essays edited by Paul Bové, highlights the inseparability of humanism and politics in Said’s work: ‘‘Perhaps more than any other person in the United States,’’ we read, ‘‘Said has changed how the U.S. media and American intellectuals must think about and represent Palestinians, Islam and the Middle East. Most important, this change arises not as a result of political action but out of a potent humanism.’’ 3 Said’s fidelity to humanism’s synthetic approach to diverse cultures (on the order of Goethe’s ‘‘common world-council’’), to philological credos of translatio studii, and to literature’s ability to settle value on the human person allowed his work to remain congenial to the humanities mainstream, even when his political and theoretical engagements aroused antagonism on the part of conservative critics. His adherence to emancipatory humanism was profoundly in step with that of Frantz Fanon insofar as it embraced values of individual freedom, universal human rights, anti-imperialism, release from 1. Hafid Gafaiti spoke about classical, Koranic Arabic as divine medium in remarks made after his paper ‘‘The Language of the State: National Identities and Cultural Resistance’’ (presented at the Territoires des Langues Conference, Brown University, Providence, R.I., April 12, 2003). 2. Jonathan Arac, ‘‘Criticism between Opposition and Counterpoint,’’ in Edward Said and the Work of the Critic: Speaking Truth to Power, ed. Paul A. Bové (Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 68. Arac cites an interview published as ‘‘Orientalism and After,’’ in A Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals, ed. Peter Osbourne (London: Routledge, 1996), 68. 3. Paul A. Bové, ed., Edward Said and the Work of the Critic.

Apter / Saidian Humanism 37

economic dependency, and self-determination for disenfranchised peoples. Most recently, I think, Saidian humanism, defined with the Orientalist critique at its crux, pointed to urgent issues in the field of language politics. Saidian humanism in this guise would examine the linguistic and geopolitical objectives of what Amitav Ghosh has referred to as the new ‘‘Anglophone empire,’’ a term emphasizing the role of English-language commonality in cementing allegiances among countries that make up the ‘‘coalition of the willing’’ (America, Britain, and Australia).4 In Said’s watershed book Orientalism, humanism is rarely directly indicted, but as the ballast of philological Euro-nationalism, and as the purveyor of Orientalist tropes and archetypes, its complicity with Orientalism becomes evident. Said’s reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy is particularly illustrative in this regard. It focuses on Dante’s encounter with ‘‘Maometto’’ (Mohammed) in the eighth of the nine circles of hell. Mohammed, he reminds us, is lower down than the lustful, the avaricious, the heretics, the suicidal, and the blasphemous. He is second only to Judas, Brutus, and Cassius on the absolute scale of iniquity. Cleft in two from his chin to his anus, his entrails and excrement extruding, Mohammed is punished for the sin of schism. Islam is also antagonized by the anachronistic and unfair placement of pre-Christian luminaries in the same category of heathen damnation with post-Christian Muslims. Even though, as Said notes, the Koran recognizes Jesus as a prophet, Dante fails to acknowledge this important fact. Dante’s ‘‘poetic grasp of Islam,’’ Said avers, thus reveals an instance of the schematic, almost cosmological inevitability with which Islam and its designated representatives are creatures of Western geographical, historical, and above all, moral apprehension. Empirical data about the Orient . . . count for very little. . . . Dante’s powers as a poet intensify, make more rather than less representative, these perspectives on the Orient. Mohammed, Saladin, Averroës, and Avicenna are fixed in a visionary cosmology—laid out, boxed in, imprisoned, without much regard for anything except their ‘‘function’’ and the patterns they realize on the stage on which they appear.5 Said’s interpretation of Dante prepared the way for a larger argument to the effect that the Orient of Orientalism was essentially a ‘‘laicized Chris4. Amitav Ghosh, ‘‘The Anglophone Empire,’’ New Yorker, April 7, 2003, 46. 5. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 69–70.


tian supernaturalism’’ (O, 122) dressed to modern taste by philology. It was criticism in this vein that one might expect, but does not find, in Said’s preface to the new edition of Mimesis, the reissue of which, by Princeton University Press, was scheduled to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the first English-language publication of the book in 1953. Said’s introduction to Mimesis offers a moving account of Auerbachian humanism, capturing a sense of the vulnerability of subjectivity, or ‘‘individuality,’’ in Auerbach’s magnum opus. Said is particularly appreciative of Auerbach’s Vico-inspired historicism, his capacity for synthesis, holism, and the cosmic view, his sense of the inner mobility, the animation of inner forces that endow great works of literature with vitality. Like Walter Benjamin, Said understands that Auerbach’s hermeneutic philology is interesting because it throws into relief the places where humanism abuts materialist theology. Where Said notes how Auerbachian philology’s ‘‘extraordinary attention to the minute, local details of other cultures and languages’’ shores up the ‘‘spiritual energy of veritas’’ invested in the Christian figura, Benjamin homes in on Auerbach’s literary materialism, associated with his attention to the facticity and facture of esoteric poetry (including that of Mallarmé).6 For Benjamin, the way in which craft value underpins the aesthetic sign parallels the hidden value of labor inside the commodity fetish.7 ‘‘The philological approach,’’ Benjamin writes in his ‘‘Exchange with Adorno,’’ entails examining the text detail by detail, leading the reader to fixate magically on the text. . . . The appearance of self-contained facticity that emanates from philological study and casts its spell on the scholar is dispelled according to the degree to which the object is constructed in historical perspective. The lines of perspective in this conclusion, receding to the vanishing point, converge in our own historical experience. This way, the object is constituted as a monad. In the monad, the textual detail which was frozen in a mythical rigidity comes alive.8 6. Edward W. Said, introduction to Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, by Erich Auerbach, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), xv, xxi. Subsequent references to this work are cited parenthetically as M. 7. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Review of Renéville’s Expérience poétique,’’ in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Vol. 4 (1938–1940), trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 117. 8. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Exchange with Adorno on ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,’’’ in Walter Benjamin, 108.


The spell of the textual detail is broken by history, but history (or at least the history with which there is personal identification) also liberates the textual monad from the protocols of philological reification and the frozen bonds of myth. In seeming, once again, to come alive, the monad reachieves the power of the fetish, retaining its materialist origin while acquiring a soul. If Said, like Benjamin, often appears drawn to the way in which Auerbach’s practice of philology tested the limits of secularism within humanist historicism, he is also fascinated by the temporal modalities of Mimesis—the longue durée of the book’s chronological span (Homer to Virginia Woolf) and extended afterlife in literary criticism. Where Auerbach himself tends to stress the circumstantial historical conditions inflecting the making of Mimesis—‘‘Mimesis,’’ he writes in the 1953 Epilegomena, ‘‘is quite consciously a book that a particular person, in a particular situation, wrote at the beginning of the 1940s’’ (M, 574)—Said identifies humanist value in the longevity of Mimesis. If centuries seem to be getting longer—in the Arrighi sense—then Said, we might say, attends accordingly to temporal duration in coordination with the spatial reach of geographic, transnational relevance. Here, he seems to echo his earlier book, The World, the Text, and the Critic, in which he praised Auerbach and Leo Spitzer for being ‘‘extraterritorial’’ critics, ‘‘whose philological scholarship is mainly concerned not with reading but with describing the modes of persistence of texts.’’ 9 Along with Georg Lukács, Auerbach and Spitzer are understood to be ‘‘the great intuitors of textual filiation’’ who have made of the text ‘‘a locus of human effort, a ‘text-ile’ fertility gathering in cultural identity, disseminating human life everywhere in time and space’’ (WTC, 250). In the preface to Mimesis, Said is brilliant on Auerbach’s signature theme—‘‘the representation of reality’’—showing how his concern with the ‘‘transmutation of a coarse reality into language and new life’’ has its roots in Christ’s sermo humilis (M, xx). In literary terms, this translates into ‘‘low style,’’ a representation of the real that is essentially comedic and earthly (irdisch in the sense assigned to that word by Auerbach in his early study Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt, misleadingly translated, as Said notes, as Dante, Poet of the Secular World ). ‘‘What fascinates Auerbach,’’ Said observes, ‘‘is the mounting tension in Dante’s poem, as eternally condemned sinners press their cases and aspire to the realization of their ambi9. Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 148. Subsequent references to this work are cited parenthetically as WTC.


tions even as they remain fixed in the place assigned to them by Divine Judgment. Hence, the sense of futility and sublimity exuded simultaneously by the Inferno’s ‘earthly historicity,’ which is always pointed in the end toward the white rose of the ‘Paradiso’’’ (M, xxvi). ‘‘Having established the systematic nature of Dante’s universe (framed by Aquinas’ theocratic cosmology),’’ Said continues, ‘‘Auerbach offers the thought that for all of its investment in the eternal and immutable, The Divine Comedy is even more successful in representing reality as basically human. In that vast work of art ‘the image of man eclipses the image of God’’’ (M, xxvi). Finally, Said contends that ‘‘Auerbach’s choice of Dante for advancing the radically humanistic thesis carefully works through the great poet’s Catholic ontology as a phase transcended by the Christian epic’s realism, which is shown to be ‘ontogenetic,’ that is [and he is citing Auerbach here], ‘we are given to see, in the realm of timeless being, the history of man’s inner life and unfolding’’’ (M, xxvi). Said’s eloquent reading of Auerbach’s Dante chapter fastens on the crucial association of the Incarnation with realism, a realism brimming over with such aliveness that it eclipses the divine. Said’s preface demonstrates his obvious passion for the great works of Western literature analyzed by Auerbach as well as his critical reaccreditation of Auerbach’s typological model, but there is a noticeable lack of attention to Auerbach’s Eurocentrism. In writing about Auerbach in Culture and Imperialism, for example, Said refers explicitly to the philologist’s phobia of non-Western languages, his reluctance (in contrast to his Istanbul colleague Spitzer) to risk scholarly engagement with cultures falling outside of the Holy Roman Empire. Auerbach’s relative silence on President Kemal Atatürk’s instigation of modern Turkish—a radical reform that severed Turkey’s ties to Ottoman literacy and that directly concerned Auerbach, since he owed his job to Atatürk’s Europeanization of Turkish universities in the 1930s—appears almost aberrant in light of the analogies that begged to be drawn between Roman linguistic imperialism and the Turkish linguistic autocolonization that he was witnessing first hand.10 Written in Istanbul between 1942 and 1945, Mimesis bears scant traces of the site of its writing beyond the famous plaint of the epilogue, in which the author bemoans his intellectual isolation and dearth of adequate research facilities. In reading through Said’s preface, one might expect the Turkish cir10. For more on the Turkish chapter of literary history, see my ‘‘Global Translatio: The ‘Invention’ of Comparative Literature, Istanbul, 1933,’’ Critical Inquiry 29 (Winter 2003): 253–81.


cumstances of the book’s genesis to be woven into an account of how Auerbachian humanism fares today when viewed from a post-Orientalism, if not postcolonial, vantage point. But there is nothing obviously ‘‘Saidian’’ about the preface, and if the reader covers up the signature, he or she might never guess that it corresponds to that of the author of Orientalism. Perhaps this was a text written in the spirit of confirming the critic’s freedom to address his interests in any way he sees fit, an example of the pure intellectual pleasure Said has always taken in certain forms of traditional humanist scholarship. Or perhaps, submerged somewhere in this Auerbachian homage, there lay the makings of a theory of Welt-humanism that, once adumbrated, would suggest what humanism after Orientalism might be (Said, as I learned shortly after drafting this essay, was, at the time of his death, completing a book on humanism, which will be published posthumously). The centrality of humanism in Said’s oeuvre may be partially understood as a means of preserving the secular foundations of his thought. Aamir Mufti has analyzed multiple ways in which Saidian secular criticism unfolds out of the ‘‘worlded’’ humanism associated by Said with the figure of Auerbach in exile. In Mufti’s ascription, this ‘‘critical secularism’’ is associated with minority consciousness (dislocation, statelessness, psychic unhoming)11 and the traumatic reckoning with ‘‘what it means for a group to become a minority’’ (a condition of becoming-minor, a state of being included but unrelated to or misfitting in the national whole).12 Mufti’s ethics of transnational solidarity among minorities relies on a vector of comparison between Indian Muslims minoritized after Partition and Jewish refugees exiled during World War II. This ethics of relation, posed against unmediated claims of national membership, belongs to a critically secularist project that implies a holding on to anti-imperialism and the ends of economic and social justice; a commitment to the tactical dejuridification of democratic legalism (which allows a superstate to suspend rights in a state of emergency); freedom from religious opiate; a transnational politics of the multitude built on revolutionary social formations and subjectivities; and, not least, a theoretical disposition of critique that hews to the logical rigorism of the collective while challenging the call to arms embedded in sectarian casuistry. Mufti gives us a renewed appreciation of Said’s Auerbach as a model 11. See Aamir Mufti, ‘‘Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture,’’ Critical Inquiry 25 (Autumn 1998): 96, 99, 102, 105. 12. Aamir Mufti, ‘‘Secularism and Minority: Elements of a Critique,’’ Social Text 45, vol. 14, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 93.


of minority subjectivity running counter to identity politics. In an interview with Jacqueline Rose, Said confesses, ‘‘I’ve become very, very impatient with the idea of and the whole project of identity: the idea, which produced great interest in the United States in the sixties and which is also present in the return to Islam in the Arab world and elsewhere, that people should really focus on themselves and where they come from. . . . What’s much more interesting is to try to reach out beyond identity to something else. It may be death. It may be an altered state of consciousness that puts you in touch with others more than one normally is.’’ 13 This concern to move ‘‘beyond identity’’—reprised in the opening of his memoir Out of Place, in which he describes the sense that ‘‘there was always something wrong with how I was invented’’ and admits to feeling on some occasions ‘‘nearly devoid of any character at all’’—recalls the intellectual disposition of an entire generation of humanists during the war who, even at their peril, resisted the claims of identity in the name of an ontological something else.14 Dismissed from his position as professor of Romance philology, and certain that he would be deported by the Nazis, Victor Klemperer, for example, confides in his diary that he would rather remain a German (because of his identification with the language and culture) than emigrate to Palestine: ‘‘Belonging to a nation,’’ he maintains, ‘‘depends less on blood than on language. . . . [L]anguage contains the totality of the intellectual.’’ Like Walter Benjamin, exhorted by Gershom Scholem to emigrate to Palestine, Klemperer resisted, remaining fast in his convictions: ‘‘We hear a lot about Palestine now; it does not appeal to us. Anyone who goes there exchanges nationalism and narrowness for nationalism and narrowness.’’ 15 And in December 1944, on the eve of fleeing his Dresden home, he writes, ‘‘Perhaps we Jews always want to be something else—some Zionists, the others Germans. But what are we really? I do not know. And that, too, is a question to which I shall never get an answer. And as a scholar that is my greatest fear of death: that in all probability it will give me no answer to all my questions.’’ 16 For Klemperer, Jewishness is perforce the condition of ‘‘no-answer,’’ a state of statelessness contoured by an abiding commitment to secular humanism. 13. Edward W. Said, ‘‘Edward Said Talks to Jacqueline Rose,’’ in Edward Said and the Work of the Critic, 25. 14. Edward Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (New York: Viking, 1999), 3. 15. Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933–1941, vol. 1, trans. Martin Chalmers (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 23. 16. Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942–1945, vol. 2, trans. Martin Chalmers (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 382.


Auerbach’s national, religious, and cultural affinities were just as complex, a fact that helps explain why he often seems to function as a standin or alter ego for Said himself. We cannot fail to be struck by parallels between Said’s ironic portrait of Auerbach, as ‘‘a non-Christian explaining Christianity’s achievement’’ and his own predicament as a Palestinian with Christian roots, explaining the need for a nonmonolithic understanding of Islam (M, xviii). The figure of the critic, negotiating dissensual ideas, and making his ecumenical filiations the very precondition of humanism, matters a great deal to Said, who writes, In Auerbach’s searingly powerful and strangely intimate characterization of the great Christian Thomist poet Dante, who emerges from the pages of Mimesis as the seminal figure in Western literature—the reader is inevitably led to the paradox of a Prussian Jewish scholar in Turkish, Muslim, non-European exile handling (perhaps even juggling) charged, and in many ways irreconcilable, sets of antinomies that, though ordered more benignly than their mutual antagonism suggests, never lose their opposition to each other. (M, xviii) In comments such as these, one recognizes the familiar compassion and intellectual respect that Said consistently demonstrates toward Auerbach, indicative of the special place he reserved for him as acknowledged precursor of his own version of worldly humanism in exile and ‘‘resolute secularism’’ (M, xxii). When Said characterizes Freud’s Moses as a representative figure of nonexclusivist, nondiscriminatory religious origins in Freud and the Non-European, his Auerbach resembles this Freud: a secular Jew open to non-Jewish traditions and keenly aware of how allegorical typology may be applied—like powers of ten—to the analysis of global humanity.17 Reading Said’s preface a second time, one may appreciate why it would have been uninteresting for Said to harp on the limitations of Auerbach’s Eurocentrist humanism. For Said was taking up the challenge of using Auerbachian humanism to fashion new humanisms, not merely because of a sober conviction that great books, on the grounds of their intrinsic merit, should continue to have traction in a global, increasingly mediatized culture industry but more because of his belief that humanism provides futural parameters for defining secular criticism in a world increasingly governed by a sense of identitarian ethnic destiny and competing sacred tongues. In the preface to Mimesis, it is Goethe’s humanist vision of Weltlitera17. Edward Said, Freud and the Non-European (London: Verso, 2003), 44.


tur that opens the door to a humanism negotiating analogically between Christianity and Islam. In the decade after 1810, Said notes, Goethe became fascinated with Islam generally and with Persian poetry in particular. This was the period when he composed his finest and most intimate love poetry, the West-Ostlicher Diwan (1819), finding in the work of the great Persian poet Hafiz and in the verses of the Koran not only a new lyric inspiration allowing him to express a reawakened sense of physical love but, . . . a discovery of how, in the absolute submission to God, he felt himself to be oscillating between two worlds, his own and that of the Muslim believer who was miles, even worlds away from European Weimar. (M, xv) Raised as a Christian, the great-grandson of the first native evangelical minister in Lebanon, yet brought up habituated to Muslim culture in Palestine and Egypt, Said clearly forged his secularism in the midst of contesting world religions. One finds traces of their impression in the way in which he evokes Auerbach’s vision of the drama of earthly Incarnation. Auerbachian themes drawn from doctrinal Christianity—the mystery of the Logos, the Word made flesh, God made into a man, theological typology, the notion of figura as the name for the ‘‘intellectual and spiritual energy that does the actual connecting between past and present, history and Christian truth,’’ and the magisterial demonstration of the ‘‘millennial effects of Christianity on literary representation’’ (M, xxi–xxii)—build up to remind us of humanism’s predication on theistic structure. In his bracing account of Auerbach’s reading of Dante’s earthly paradise, Said moves well beyond the commonplace of Einfühling in the service of historicism. Almost seeming at times to be flirting with the temptations of paradise himself, Said identifies the godly within humanism with a logic of extension. Old Testament figures, ‘‘including God,’’ are adduced to be ‘‘heavy with the implication of extending into the depths of time, space, and consciousness, hence of character, and therefore require a much more concentrated, intense act of attention from the reader’’ (M, xix). It is this logic of extension (with its distant echo of a Spinozist ontology of common notions enabling the extension of the one to the many, of the social multiple to the fortified unicity of the multitude) that brings us to Saidian Welt-humanism.18 This is a humanism foreshadowed in Orientalism in the ‘‘enlightened’’ pursuit of theological unity as a governing principle of a plu18. On the logic of extension in Spinoza, see Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 110–11.


rality of worlds, and in the ‘‘summational attitude’’ of the highly educated Orientalist, which carries over in Said’s estimation to the non-Orientalist Western scholar, the philological humanists of the twenties and thirties: Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Curtius, Karl Vossler, Friedrich Gundolf, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Auerbach, Spitzer, and Freud, whose Egypto-Jewish cultural syncretism Said treats in his book Freud and the Non-European. Late bourgeois humanism, Said argues with neo-Hegelian fidelity in Orientalism, with its commitment to understanding culture ‘‘as a whole, antipositivistically, intuitively, sympathetically’’ (O, 258), ‘‘is what made possible the conversion of the discrete particular into a world-historical process’’ (O, 259). If at times in this preface it seems as if Said minimizes humanist Orientalism in order to salvage humanism tout court, it is perhaps because he believed that there was simply too much at stake within the humanist tradition to justify simplistic denunciations. At the late stage of his career during which he composed the new introduction to Mimesis, Said was clearly committed to the future of humanism, conceived as a world system that takes account of the vast traffic in inter-national learnedness informing GreekArab-Judeo-Christian practices of cultural translation from the early Middle Ages to the present. But I would submit further that Said seems to have been urging humanism, in its prospective guises, to take on not only the history of global translatio but also to build on its past tradition as instigator of intellectual fields that de-compartmentalize established discourses and subjects. Following on from the range of questions addressed in Said’s Auerbach preface, one could argue that it is now the mandate of humanism to define a critical secularism that seeks to reconcile the competing claims of theodicy, relativism, ontogenesis, and anti-imperialism. In Orientalism, critical secularism was identifiable with the exposure of Orientalism’s crypto-religious heuristic practice. In tracing historic connections between Herder-inspired studies of the Orient and philological secular humanism, Said describes some of the infelicitous side effects of Herder’s challenge to universalism. For even if Herder introduced a salubrious new awareness of world cultures that encouraged the beginnings of an enlightened cultural relativism and fostered secular modes of inquiry into cultures of the Orient (so that, for example, ‘‘Gibbon could treat Mohammed as a historical figure who influenced Europe and not as a diabolical miscreant hovering somewhere between magic and false prophecy,’’ thus making possible ‘‘a selective identification with regions and cultures not one’s own [that] wore down the obduracy of self and identity, which had been polarized into a community of embattled believers facing barbarian hordes’’), this


secularizing tendency hardly vaccinated against what Said calls ‘‘a reconstructed religious impulse’’ within Orientalist philology (O, 120–21). According to this model, the Orientalist himself becomes the new God, creating ‘‘the Orient’’ as a culturally reified, historicized object of research, and, in the process, legitimating the ‘‘modern’’ heuristics and doxologies of philology, history, and translation. As an antidote to philology’s inveterate practice of using Orientalism to ‘‘play God,’’ Said, and many of the critics influenced by him, extended worldly humanism to critical secularism. Humanism, of course, has been a tradition shaped and structured historically by tensions between religion and secular culture; tensions that fracture multiply into differences among theology, dogma, popular belief, inner spirituality, individuality, reason, piety, religious telos, and ontology. Secularization arose, at least in part, out of disavowed references by the church fathers to classical authors and texts of antiquity, references in turn drawn on by the quattrocento humanists to legitimate their embrace of classical allusion. In the early fifteenth century, Petrarch swept aside doctrinal strictures against classicism inherited from medieval scholasticism to create a studia humanitatis that absorbed antiquity into a general, secular Italian culture, while Valla extended the reach of humanism to the domains of philosophy, religion, and legal theory. Dante’s invention of what Auerbach calls ‘‘extreme subjectivity’’ in The Divine Comedy advanced secularization yet further, but this new emphasis on human subjective consciousness was hardly at odds with religious purpose, because Dante’s first concern was to transpose sacred, biblical knowledge into the modern form of textuality known as European literature.19 Tensions between religion and secularism remain anchored in humanism, inflecting even the most recent attempts to engender a humanist critical secularism. As a freestanding term, secularism carries problematic connotations as a code word to distinguish ‘‘fundamentalism,’’ or theocratic states in the Middle East, from (Israeli) ‘‘democracy.’’ In this case, secularism becomes all too easily assimilated to the political export of hegemonic models of democracy. Moreover, it repeats and reinforces old Orientalist binarisms that have acquired new currency in Samuel Huntington’s ‘‘clash of civilizations’’ paradigm. Critical secularism, by contrast, seeks to countervail such binarisms by framing the venerable humanist concern ‘‘to connect the renewal of liberal disciplines with the subjective consciousness of such an 19. Edward Said, Beginnings (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), 212. Subsequent references to this work are cited parenthetically as B.


undertaking’’ within the broader context of colonial history, imperialism, and the critique of nationalism.20 Pointing to the theocratic dimension of nationalism, for example, Bruce Robbins defines secular not in opposition to the religious but as a term for the critique of ‘‘nation and nationalism as belief system.’’ 21 In a complementary vein, Stathis Gourgouris (in his essay for this volume) sees the ‘‘motif of transformation against the grain of transcendence’’ in Said’s work as reaching ‘‘beyond mere opposition of the secular to the religious to another configuration that strips away from the religious (and indeed from metaphysics itself) an assumed imperviousness to the political, so that we may speak of Said’s work, rather dramatically, as an exfoliation of the repressed politics of transcendence.’’ 22 One might say that Saidian secular criticism sublimates a repressed politics of transcendence while unmasking organized religion’s pose of political impartiality. But one might also venture that Said’s attentiveness to theological exegesis in the preface to Mimesis attests to an intellectual curiosity toward cultures of belief, a willingness to engage ‘‘religiously’’ with the matter of how philosophies of transcendence have shaped revolutionary ethical militance and subjective freedom. How, for example, should we interpret paradise, defined as a language of revealed truth embodied in linguistic theism? This question becomes particularly urgent now: the lure of paradise is often invoked in Western denunciations of Islam, especially when it is targeted for caricature as a motivation for suicide martyrdom. The politics of religion, and the very particular complexities attending the sacred status of Koranic Arabic (sometimes characterized as the instructions of God en direct), would be better appreciated if read contrapuntally in relation to the political cosmogony of paradise in Christian humanism, specifically as it emerges in Dante’s language of paradise, in which, according to one commentator, ‘‘all heavenly phenomena are direct utterances of God and of His angels.’’ 23 Auerbach’s Dante monograph, originally published in 1929, and deemed by Said in the introduction to Mimesis to be possibly his best work, 20. Riccardo Fubini, Humanism and Secularization: From Petrach to Valla, trans. Martha King (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 9. 21. See Aamir Mufti, paraphrasing Bruce Robbins, in his essay ‘‘Auerbach in Istanbul,’’ 96. He cites Robbins’s essay ‘‘Secularism, Elitism, Progress, and Other Transgressions: On Edward Said’s ‘Voyage In,’’’ Social Text 40 (Fall 1994): 26. 22. Stathis Gourgouris, ‘‘Transformation, Not Transcendence,’’ in this volume, 55–56. 23. P. H. Wicksteed, as cited by John D. Sinclair, in notes to Canto II of Dante’s Paradiso, trans. John D. Sinclair (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939), 45.


affords a relevant point of departure. Through his close reading of The Divine Comedy, Auerbach sets himself the task of describing how Dante makes paradise linguistically tangible. He begins with a time-honored problem of theodicy confronted by Dante, namely, how to reconcile divine order and the actually lived experience on earth of supreme injustice. It was Augustine, according to Auerbach, who gave man something to hope for in the form of Christ’s story, communicated as ‘‘the idea of a personal God,’’ in such a way as to preserve ‘‘the fundamentally European determination not to abolish reality by speculation, not to take flight into transcendence, but to come to grips with the real world and master it.’’ 24 Auerbach maintains, citing Harnack, that Augustine was ‘‘able to endow Latin and the future tongues of Europe with a ‘Christian soul and the language of the heart’’’ (D, 17). This language of the heart was fully mobilized by Dante in the Inferno and the Purgatorio. Preparing the way for his future arguments in Mimesis, Auerbach shows how crass vernacular inflections, concrete sound values, and metric monotony emerge as the linguistic equivalents of Christ’s mortal and mortified body. Even the preferred verse form of terza rima (hallowing the sacred number three) is seen as essential to Dante’s construction of what Auerbach calls an ‘‘Other World,’’ at once ethereal and irdisch, anthropocentric, and referential to God. When it came to the Paradiso, Auerbach acknowledges, Dante encountered greater difficulty in preserving the human character of the Christian afterlife. Subjective rapture and celestial radiance threatened to disembody the subject, inducing radical depersonalization. And yet, the language of the Paradiso, contrary to common opinion, is far from dull. Yes, there is an abstract, radiant lexicon of beatitude and satisfaction that tends to numb the senses and distance the reader from earthly reality, but if we take Auerbach’s reading of Dante seriously, there is a rhetoric of geometric metaphysics in paradise that achieves a truly ‘‘worlded’’ expressionism: In Paradise all the souls have undergone a transformation which the human eyes cannot penetrate; they are hidden by the radiance of 24. Erich Auerbach, Dante, Poet of the Secular World, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 17. Subsequent references to this work are cited parenthetically as D. Auerbach’s reading of Augustine as the guardian of the human connection to God is perhaps subject to contention, especially if one goes back to humanist theological debates over the anthropomorphization of God. In the fifteenth century, Andrea Biglia attacked San Bernadino for losing ‘‘the wholly Augustinian sense of the infinite distance between Creator and creature, and of the enlightening power of grace that excludes a narrowly prescribed ethics.’’ See Fubini, Humanism and Secularization, 68.


their beatitude and Dante cannot recognize them; they themselves must say who they are, and they cannot express their emotions by human gestures; strictly speaking, personal emotion can only manifest itself here by an increase in radiance. The danger of depersonalization and repetition are evident, and many believe that Dante succumbed to it and that the Paradiso lacks the poetic power of the first two parts of the Comedy. But such a criticism of Dante’s ultimo lavoro springs from the Romantic prejudice of which we have spoken above. . . . The great similarity between the luminous manifestations, resulting from their common beatitude, does not exclude a preservation of the individual personality; the man is almost if not entirely hidden from the eyes, but he is there and finds means of making himself known. (D, 155) The reference to ‘‘luminous manifestations’’ in this passage reveals Dante grappling with the theophanic dilemma of making God manifest in language: ‘‘Although the bodies are hidden, the luminous apparitions of the Paradiso have expressive gestures which accompany their memories of the former lives on earth; these are different modes and movements of light, which Dante illustrates with an abundance of metaphors; the feminine souls of the moon appear as pearls on a white forehead; the souls of the sphere of Mercury gather around Dante like fish in clear water, swimming toward food that has been cast to them’’ (D, 155–56). Auerbach savors these images of effulgent, ghostly bodies, while cautioning the reader against interpreting them as decorative similitudes of ‘‘pure inspiration.’’ They are allegoremes with a distinct purpose, he insists, sensuous images placed before the reader not just to serve as delectable ‘‘food to catch the eyes and so possess the mind’’ but rather—and the distinction is crucial—as diaphanous traces of the real that signify rational thought: God as idea and absolute of justice. The only human shapes figured in paradise are St. Thomas and St. Francis, but their physical forms are encased in veils of light. It is their sacral language that conserves the phantom of their former individuality as material for testing the suffering or enjoyment of divine justice. Reading the Paradiso in the ‘‘right’’ Auerbachian way thus entails reading linguistic theophany as justicium. Why was justice in paradise so important to Dante? Perhaps because, as Auerbach reminds us, Dante was bent on obtaining it. As is well known, much of the polemical import of The Divine Comedy lies in redeeming the Christian faith from ecclesiastical corruption (and, more specifically, from the particularly egregious venality of the church in his home town of Florence).


Though justice emerges as the preeminent abstract ideal of paradise, it is imbricated within a vision of imperial glory. Auerbach traces Dante’s ‘‘imperialist’’ vision of paradise in the typological surcodage of Roman military and Christian virtues (self-sacrifice, conquest, salvation). A clear example is in Canto XIV of the Paradiso, where the phrase ‘‘Resurgi e Vinci’’ (‘‘arise and conquer’’), which comes to the narrator in a flash of messianic imperial hope, prefigures the representation of all-out redemption as Gloria Patri, the union of church and empire in God’s thought in Canto XXVII. Consider, too, the place in Canto XVIII where Dante plays on the Gothic capital form of the letter M. First the letter is shown to resemble the (FrenchGuelph-Florentine) lily, then an eagle, the movement of the wings, upright and then down, forming the last letter of the word TERRAM (earth, world), taken to stand for Monarchia (empire).25 It might strike the modern observer as strange, Auerbach says, but Dante introduces the idea of the special mission of Rome and the Roman Empire in history. From the very beginning Divine Providence elected Rome as the capital of the world. It gave the Roman people the heroism and the spirit of self-sacrifice necessary to conquer this world and possess it in peace; and when the work of conquest and pacification, the sacred mission announced to Aeneas, was accomplished after centuries of bitter battles and sacrifices and the inhabited world lay in the hands of Augustus, the time was fulfilled and the Saviour appeared. . . . Rome was the mirror of the divine world order. (D, 122) Dante’s allegory focuses subsequently on earthly Rome’s fall from grace as it yields to the greed-driven institutions of church and state, but the version of the Roman Empire which is, so to speak, ‘‘made in paradise’’ represents the unity of all peoples in a just world order, an ‘‘empyreal’’ imperium, as it were. This upper reach of the celestial spheres transcends dialectical striving; even the millennial desire to recover a new king is replaced by the will of a collection of souls forming a spirit of the multitude and held together in a space-time continuum commonly known as the Primum Mobile.26 If, in the 1920s, Dante’s paradise served Auerbach as a figure for a reconstituted humanism, in the present era the work of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish endows it with contemporary resonance. Dante and Darwish may seem initially to share little ground of comparison, but on closer 25. See notes to Canto XVIII of Dante’s Paradiso, 266–67. 26. John D. Sinclair, in notes to Canto XVIII of Dante’s Paradiso, 266.


reading, Darwish’s volume of poetry Unfortunately, It Was Paradise offers interesting parallels. In the poem ‘‘Like the Letter ‘N’ in the Qur’an,’’ the letter N (referring to a chapter of the Koran that uses a dual rhyme scheme ending in N) renders God alphabetically perceptible, recalling Dante’s designation of the imperial TERRAM, with its final M in Gothic script. In the work of both writers, paradise emerges as a placeholder for political utopia— a just world—that looks more like a perfected secular society than a holy land beyond representation. In Darwish’s ‘‘Earth Presses against Us,’’ much loved and often quoted by Said, paradise—located somewhere ‘‘after the last sky’’—is the name for the dream of a restituted homeland: Earth is pressing against us, trapping us in the final passage. To pass through, we pull off our limbs. Earth is squeezing us. If only we were its wheat, we might die and yet live. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Where should we go after the last border? Where should birds fly after the last sky? 27 Christian and Islamic paradise, in the work of Dante and Darwish, respectively, resembles an Auerbachian figura—a term Said, in Beginnings, credits Auerbach with ‘‘finding’’ in the course of his research on Dante. An Ansatzpunkt, or keyword, springing directly from historical context, figura functions as an X-term, assuming an algorithmic function in the meaningproduction of humanism. For Said, this X-term carries maximal significance since it allows epistemes to crystallize and enter history (B, 68). ‘‘No longer mere words or unknown symbols,’’ Said writes, these mots-thèmes in Auerbach’s writing ‘‘enact the combination of past and future woven into the historical fabric of language. A mute term, relatively anonymous, has given rise to a special condition of mind and has evoked the poignancy of time’’ (B, 69). For a term to become a piece of ‘‘reconstructed history,’’ it must be fortunate to find—in the manner of Benjamin’s text of the original in search of the ideal translator—an interpreter capable of conferring an afterlife. For Said, the term figura becomes ‘‘incarnate’’ (that is to say, a term of agency, ready to change and be changed) only by virtue of being discovered by Auerbach in the course of his scholarly research (B, 69). One could say the same 27. Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, trans. Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 9.


about the term Orientalism, which lay dormant in Western philology until Said plucked it from the fusty shelves and galvanized it as a critical episteme, a foundational Ansatzpunkt for an anti-imperialist understanding of world culture. And perhaps, as I am proposing here in conclusion, one could perform the same function on the word paradise, transforming it from a term connoting nonsecular utopias and the desire for self-sacrifice unto death into an Ansatzpunkt defining future humanisms through the theory of ‘‘possible worlds.’’ Without relinquishing the commitment to exposing religion’s threat to a politics of the here and now, or forgetting the need to hold steadfast against manipulative invocations of transcendentally authorized injunctions, humanism, informed by critical secularism, might be well advised to consider once more the temptations of ‘‘imparadising’’ oneself (to borrow Dante’s phrase), that is to say, of attaining ‘‘God’’ for the love of justice. For though it may seem an antique dilemma, understanding the relationship between theophany and justicium would seem to be the political order of the day. In other terms, whether it is conceptualized as justice divined as the expressionism of sacred language, or as the transformation of an imperialist rhetoric of Christian salvation into a rhetoric of planetary utopianism, or as the space between physics and metaphysics that in today’s theoretical parlance might be called ‘‘possible worlds’’ or ‘‘parallel universes,’’ paradise— as the signature expression of a politics of utopia—assumes new relevance to global humanism. Edward Said’s legacy will unfurl into the future of comparative literary studies in ways that cannot even be imagined in the present moment. In paying tribute to Said as a reader of Erich Auerbach, the concern has not just been to confer the Auerbachian mantel on Said (he assumed that mantle quite naturally by refurbishing the Auerbachian project of ‘‘philology and Weltliteratur ’’ for a late industrial, neo-imperialist age and by extending the political stakes of Jewish exile to Palestinian refugees). I have been interested, rather, in exploring specifically how Said’s reception of Auerbach—particularly Auerbach the reader of Dante—defined a whole new set of questions and programmatic concerns for comparative literature and the humanities at large. Saidian humanism, as I have sought to define it, prompts an activist return to the ‘‘great works’’ of humanism, with the understanding that humanism itself be rezoned to avoid misleading cartographic divisions between European and non-European cultures. Like his lifelong exemplars, Vico, Dilthey, Hegel, and Auerbach, Said aspired to the flash of learned cultural synthesis in a historicist frame, and yet like Auerbach (or for that matter Benjamin), he remained chary of totalizing interpretations


that lent themselves to hegemonic application. Auerbach said of Mimesis that ‘‘the book is no theoretical construct; it aims to offer a view, and the very elastic thoughts or ideas that hold it together cannot be grasped and proven wrong in single, isolated phrases’’ (M, 562), and Said, unlike many of Auerbach’s critics, appreciates the lack of seamless narrative in Mimesis, seeing in its fragmentary structure and the quirky, very personal drift of literary analysis the mark of the human. Said, in his own work, never lets the reader forget the human in the humanities. ‘‘Auerbach,’’ he writes, ‘‘is bringing us back to what is an essentially Christian doctrine for believers but also a crucial element of human intellectual power and will’’ (M, xxii). The same, of course, could be said about his own work. Mining the humanist tradition for a utopian politics of paradise—despite the association of humanism with Eurocentrism and Orientalism—Said not only circumvented crude oppositions between cultures of belief and the critical secularism of technological modernity but made palpable the effects of ‘‘human intellectual power and will’’ in the sacred narratives of divine ontogenesis.

Transformation, Not Transcendence

Stathis Gourgouris

This essay belongs to a series of meditations on the secular imagination, by which I mean, very broadly, the capacity of humanity (occasional though it is) to conceptualize its existence in the absence of external and transcendental authority, and thus to exercise its radical potential for transforming the conditions of its existence in full cognizance of its historical character. Obviously, such a meditation also involves an interrogation as to what constitutes the historical subject, the subject of history, as well as, of course, the subject in history, and would thus require equally an investigation of subjectivity’s psychic dimensions. (Hence, the simultaneous interest of the overall project in the politics of sublimation, though on this occasion this will be broached only tangentially.) The central figure in this essay is what Edward Said has called ‘‘secular criticism,’’ a notion I take to be indicative of an intransigent intellectual position that seeks to critique and transform existing conditions—and this holds true both in matters of aesthetic form (literature, music) and social-political action—without submitting to the allure of otherworldly or transcendent solutions. The motif of transformation against the grain of transcendence is the core element in Said’s conboundary 2 31:2, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.


ceptual framework. It reaches beyond mere opposition of the secular to the religious to another configuration that strips away from the religious (and indeed from metaphysics itself) an assumed imperviousness to the political, so that we may speak of Said’s work, rather dramatically, as an exfoliation of the repressed politics of transcendence.1 If Said’s core understanding of these elements tends to elude the majority of critics in favor of discussing his other, more explicitly political aspects, the events and aftermath of September 11 underscore ever more profoundly the urgency of what he calls ‘‘secular criticism.’’ The present historical moment, I believe, marks a watershed of a range of positions (often held with dire political consequences) on the relation between religion and politics, which I draw here in the broadest sense to include our most elemental decisions as to what constitutes our encounter, as historical subjects, with the world. Hence the impression of real methodological and epistemological confusion over the global significance of the events of 9/11, particularly as revealed by certain voices in—let us say, for the sake of argument— the ‘‘secular Left,’’ who are so conscious of the historical ground slipping into uncharted waters that they either fall into silence or into rapid declaration. It is difficult not to acknowledge that the continuous and yet still indeterminable unfolding of this historical moment has produced a sense of being suspended before a confounding crossroads of histories made and unmade, known and to be known. In full recognition of this sense of suspension, I begin by considering a curious incident that emerged alongside the initial ripple effects of September 11 as an allegorical instance of the wider psychosymbolic dimensions framing the events. Placing oneself within these dimensions makes imperative precisely the mode of interrogation needed in order to break down the deadly social-historical logic that produced these events in the first place and yet continues to be strengthened by their occur1. This essay is indebted to Bruce Robbins, who first articulated that Said’s secularism should not be opposed strictly to religion but rather to nationalism, and to Aamir Mufti, who extends this further by perceiving Said’s secular mind to be implicated in an episteme of homelessness and a political adherence to minority positions. See Bruce Robbins, ‘‘Secularism, Elitism, Progress, and Other Transgressions: On Edward Said’s ‘Voyage In’’’ (1994), in Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 115–26; Aamir R. Mufti, ‘‘Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture,’’ Critical Inquiry 25 (Autumn 1998): 95–125. On the contrary, William D. Hart’s Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) fails profoundly to understand these nuances of Said’s grasp of the secular imagination, expending instead enormous energy to prove that Said’s discourse is rather replete with unwitting religious metaphors.

Gourgouris / Transformation, Not Transcendence 57

rence: namely, a mode of interrogation that begins with the question, How can the secular be philosophically articulated apart from its traditional opposition to the religious? This is exactly the interrogation that Said’s thought performs with such subtlety and incisiveness. On Wednesday, September 19, 2001, in the back pages of one of the New York Times sections, a tiny unsigned article was introduced by the astonishing headline ‘‘Attacks Called Great Art.’’ What followed was a hastily and scantily reported news item that hardly justified the stunning claim. It reported that Karlheinz Stockhausen, surely one of the leading figures in contemporary music, described the attacks of September 11 as ‘‘the greatest work of art ever,’’ going on to reproduce a relatively long and awkward quotation by the composer himself: ‘‘What happened there—they all have to rearrange their brains now—is the greatest work of art ever. That characters can bring about in one act what we in music cannot dream of, that people practice madly for ten years, completely, fanatically, for a concert and then die. That is the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos. I could not do that. Against that, we, composers, are nothing.’’ Then the article concluded with a quizzical statement, which really belongs to the world of a novel, not a news report: ‘‘Mr. Stockhausen was reported to have left Hamburg in distress.’’ This last sentence, I suppose, refers to the immediate consequences that the composer’s statements provoked, though this short article barely touches on them. Apparently, the scandalous remarks were made during a press conference that Stockhausen had given in Hamburg, on the occasion of a performance of his recent work in the yearly festival, which this year carried the title Welt-Raum, a theme whose multiple significations become all the more pertinent at this juncture. The scandalous remarks prompted a scandalous response, and the performance was summarily canceled by the city’s commissioner for culture. The significance of this scandal in German (and more generally, European) circles, at both the state level and the cultural community ranks, was obviously not newsworthy to this New York Times correspondent. Neither was, apparently, the labyrinthine process of correcting this apparent misquotation in the original German press report, nor the laborious story of how the city of Hamburg dealt with the event. It is likely that the whole lot was considered irrelevant because it pertained to the complex relation between public funding and art production one finds in Germany but, of course, would never find in the United States in a million years. I shall lay aside the sequence of these events and their significance


for Germany, for the European framework of cultural production, and surely, for Stockhausen himself, all of which is exceedingly fascinating as a nationalhistorical document. I shall also lay aside, however, for reasons that will become apparent as we go, the problem emerging from the fact that the remarks I just quoted are in effect a misquotation—apparently, a deliberate act by a hostile reporter. Indeed, I would insist that the trouble with word accuracy is merely symptomatic of the entire problem, because, even though Stockhausen was certainly misquoted (as taped transcripts reveal), the gist of his thinking was curiously preserved. It almost seems as if the hostile reporter was so caught up in Stockhausen’s logic that he could not but reveal its inner fold in misquoting him. So, any turning to Stockhausen’s actual, accurate, comments would best be conducted not in the spirit of correction but in the spirit of enhancement. Examining the composer’s response to the misquotation indeed enhances the overarching problematic of both his thinking and the grim historical events he addresses.2 Arguably, the most likely reaction to hearing that Stockhausen called the horrific acts of September 11 ‘‘the greatest work of art ever’’ is to consider it yet another instance of the extreme aesthetization of violence that decidedly characterizes the fascist tradition. Hence the anxious response of the German authorities, who are as attuned to refined fascist overtones as they are astutely committed to the continuation of German aesthetic expression. That Hitlerian fascism conceptualized war and violence in the purest aesthetic terms is indisputable in retrospect, and German intellectual and artistic minds, from Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno to Heiner Müller and Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, have gone a long way, ultimately by negative ritualization, to isolate and disintegrate the phenomenon’s many insidious folds. That Stockhausen’s universe bears real affinity to this latter againstthe-grain tendency does not necessarily preclude it from falling into this sort of problematic aesthetization; this is in itself indicative of the extremely complex and contradictory conditions of German modernity since the late eighteenth century, of which I have spoken extensively elsewhere.3 To put 2. The entire and rather baroque sequence of events, including numerous explications, clarifications, justifications, retractions, and so forth, from all parties involved (including Stockhausen and his entourage, the German senator Christina Weiss, the original reporter from North German Radio who is credited with the mendacious reportage), can be found in detail in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s official Web site, www.stockhausen.com. 3. See Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 123–54; and ‘‘The Gesture of the Sirens,’’ in Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 161–97.


it bluntly (and to allude to what lies ahead), negative ritualization of fascist aestheticism better deploy the most inventive antitranscendentalist imagination if it is to guard itself against the danger of reproducing the forces of the object it aims to disintegrate. Yet, if we merely remain at this level—the suspicion that Stockhausen’s aestheticism is crypto-fascist—we shall miss the profound inroads opened by his remarks, misquoted though they were. Let us play a devilish game for a moment and take seriously the comments I quoted from the New York Times. If we do not merely settle into thinking of art as personal expression within the canonically bounded domain of the aesthetic, and we ascribe to art an active involvement (however difficult to define precisely) in the transformation of social conditions—which I hardly mean in the lazy Marxist sense of carrying out the order of political economy into the cultural battlefield—then we better be ready to come to terms with art as a realm in which humanity exercises its utmost creative/destructive potential, and not in the so-called (since Hegel) world of the spirit but in the world itself. At its best, this exercise takes place within—and takes on as a challenge— the entirety of society’s imaginary significations: its foundational images and symbols, its implicit or explicit assertions and preconceptions, its basic organizational principles, whatever a community takes for granted and reproduces thoughtlessly. To speak of society’s poiēsis is to speak of society’s self-alteration, of nothing less than the capacity of society to alter the terms and conditions of its very being. This involves a profoundly radical gesture of transforming terms and conditions, where the creative force can never be philosophically disentangled from the destructive force. Opting out of art as purely bounded within the aesthetic, we thus lend to the poiētic an overarching scope, relevant to the broadest range of human creativity, which opens the way for a better understanding of the interwoven condition of the poetic with the political beyond the traditional (and often mechanical) infusion of art with a didactic moral imperative. From this standpoint, the conventional reading of the aesthetization of the political as characteristic of fascism does not hold its ground. On the contrary, only if one effaces the basic dialectical entwinement of the poetic with the political at all levels of human/social activity does one practice a fascist aesthetization of politics, whose unacknowledged content, after all, is to depoliticize society, indeed to anesthetize society to politics. Stockhausen claims that in order to comprehend what happened on 9/11 we have to rearrange—to reset, as he actually said—the wiring of our brains. So, instead of rejecting his alleged aestheticization of these events, let us take it as a point of departure. In aesthetics, praxis entails a compo-


sition, a creative/destructive refiguration of present and imagined elements so that presumably a new relationality emerges. Oftentimes, if the composition demands a truly radical refiguration, this praxis signals a rupture with instituted meaning that throws everything into a whirlwind. The aesthetics of modernity has always yearned for the one composition that would signify in all senses the end of composition—because it would exceed all possible points of reception and interpretation, including the point of its creation. To practice fanatically for years for one act and then die in executing it is the aesthetic essence of the sublime performance, the performance that exceeds both the agency and the temporality of its praxis. Such performance also requires the obliteration of its identity, which I take to mean the ensemble of traces that makes a subject’s and an object’s historical existence decipherable. Identicide is in this sense the supreme logic of Mallarmé’s project, to speak of a celebrated instance of impossible (and from a certain point of view, self-destructive) aesthetics. No doubt, as the history of modern aesthetics suggests, this sublime yearning is also associated with failure; its power is predicated on the knowledge that it will remain forever immaterial. Mallarmé’s Livre owes its conceptual existence and creative drive to the impossibility of its actualization. Any evidence that the sublime praxis of identicide in art is actualized in history profoundly disturbs the autonomy of the aesthetic, as if in a perverse sense it reminds us that the aesthetics of the sublime (from Kant onward) is actually terrified of history, terrified of history’s outmaneuverable contingency, which is by definition impervious to excess, indeed impervious to the sublime. Whatever his immersion into pure aesthetics, Stockhausen cannot but bow before history, concluding his remarks with the desperate admission that, in the foreground of the events of September 11, ‘‘we, composers, are nothing.’’ Whether accurately rendered or not, this statement is entirely sincere. But what makes it dramatic is what belies it, namely, the composer’s unwieldingly gothic and otherworldly conceptualization of his work and the world, which makes it all the more susceptible to the aesthetic allure of the literally spectacular signature of the attacks on the World Trade Center. Its susceptibility is due to two factors: On the one hand, Stockhausen’s work has been characterized since the beginning by relentless commitment to the technology of sound as the medium for the invocation of the transcendental, an attitude bearing the precarious duplicity of conceiving technology itself as an immaterial, transcendental language—as sound pure and simple, devoid of any instrumentality. From the sumptuous Gesang der


Jünglinge (1955), in which real voices are combined with electronically produced vocal sounds so that all distinction between the ‘‘natural’’ and the ‘‘technological’’ is blurred, producing a rather uncanny choral effect, to the inimitable (and, from a certain conventional standpoint, insufferable) Helicopter String Quartet (1995), in which the string players perform each in his own helicopter, with the sound of the rotor blades providing the consistent rhythmic backdrop to a barrage of disembodied glissandi, Stockhausen has sought not merely to enlist technology’s aid in musical composition but much more: to render possible, audible, by virtue of composition, the sound of technology as such, in an intransigent gesture of making the Kantian object speak its own uninstrumentalized language. On the other hand, however, Stockhausen’s aesthetic and psychic universe, which arguably culminates in the ultra-Wagnerian gesture of his current opera-in-progress, Licht (officially begun as a composition in 1977 and, if ever actualized in performance, to last seven days, according to the seven days of Creation in Genesis), suggests a rather traditional expression of transcendence. Constructed entirely along biblical motifs, whereby the archangels Michael and Lucifer are locked into the originary and definitive battle between Good and Evil, this work is profoundly religious. And though Lucifer here is drawn in Miltonian fashion through and through—as literally the heroic bearer of light who seeks to destroy Light—the mythological conceptualization of this work is hardly emancipatory. The opera merely serves to confirm, beyond any of his previous works, Stockhausen’s aesthetic cosmos, which hinges on articulating the material power of technology as consubstantial with metaphysical excess, precisely the deadly combination of the events of September 11. From this standpoint, it hardly matters that Stockhausen attributed the assessment of September 11 as the ‘‘greatest work of art ever’’ not in fact to his person but to the Luciferian protagonist of his opera. This character figures, in the composer’s mind, as a veritable spiritual force. As he put it in the corrective statement he issued to the press three days after the notorious remark: At the press conference in Hamburg, I was asked if Michael, Eve, and Lucifer were historical figures of the past and I answered that they exist now, for example Lucifer in New York. In my work, I have defined Lucifer as the cosmic spirit of rebellion, of anarchy. He uses his high degree of intelligence to destroy creation. He does not know love. After further questions about the events in America, I said that such


a plan appeared to be Lucifer’s greatest work of art. Of course, I used the designation ‘‘work of art’’ to mean the work of destruction personified in Lucifer. . . . I cannot find a fitting name for such a ‘‘satanic composition.’’ 4 Stockhausen’s aesthetic principles dictate that Lucifer is a mythic figure with historical presence—the presence of destruction that has disengaged itself from its dialectical entwinement with creation. Stockhausen might be said to have responded to the events as if he were William Blake.5 There is indeed something hallucinatory about his response, although, unlike Blake, his hallucinations show disdain for the materiality of myth in favor of the mystifying incorporeality of metaphysics. There is a bottom line that Stockhausen’s own attempt to modify and clarify his reported comments cannot efface: namely, his aesthetics is religious in essence. And thus, like Mallarmé and perhaps Wagner (who is obviously the Oedipal figure to be outdone), Stockhausen aspires to an aesthetics that, though it claims to hold a hand over history, is actually anesthetized to historical materiality, if only because it cannot comprehend the enormous and undeconstructible significance of humanity’s finitude. In his case, the recognition that the artistic sublime is doomed to failure (‘‘we, composers, are nothing’’) resounds in the backdrop of the terrifying failure of history itself: the annihilation of the world in the name of religious transcendence of the world. But this resonance reveals yet one more twist in this circuitous story, which is worth considering. The occasion of Stockhausen’s commentary on the events of September 11, which flash in his horizon as the hallucinatory translation of his religious aestheticism into historical reality, leans directly against the nominal religious-terrorist logic behind the events. In outrageously aestheticizing an event whose horror defies measure, Stockhausen unwittingly serves to plunge the declared transcendentalist ideology of its perpetrators back into the pool of historical finitude to which they belong. An avowed act of religious martyrdom is irreparably damaged by being construed as artwork, once we hold on to the profound entwinement of the poetic with the political. It cannot extricate itself from the worldly universe within which it is executed; moreover, the worldliness of its terms of execution surpasses whatever might be the alleged transcendental intention. In a way that arguably pushes all our experiential buttons, the fact that 4. This excerpt is from a statement with the title ‘‘Message from Professor Stockhausen,’’ dated September 19, 2001, www.stockhausen.com. 5. I thank Martin Harries for this figure.


this horrifying event exists by virtue of its spectacularization enables us to counteract its proclaimed logic, to see it, first and foremost, as a political act that deserves a political response. Here Stockhausen’s art actually falls short. At this specific historical juncture, a political response cannot rely on the allegorical terms of the archaic religious battle between Good and Evil, Michael and Lucifer, because these are precisely the terms of ‘‘God Bless America’’ and ‘‘fundamentalist Islam’’ (or ‘‘Holy Islam’’ and ‘‘America as Satan’’—the four terms bear exactly the same content). Such allegory may be said to fail even as evidence of the presumed utopian function of art, speaking aesthetically, because its unwitting proximity to history dramatically unveils an otherwise occluded aspect of utopian art, namely, that certain utopian visions of art often harness, for their own alleged gain, the transcendentalist element of religion. Ultimately, such allegory fails because history has rendered it too proximate to the literal plane. It is rather rare that the literal can achieve such spectacular actualization of the psycho-symbolic elements that animate it, but this may be the crux of what brought the events of September 11 so perilously close to a certain aesthetic realm, a peril that Stockhausen’s remarks (accurate or inaccurate, regardless) splendorously evoke. The Stockhausen incident may have been otherwise trivial, if its peculiar (and rather incidental) logic did not ultimately echo, as Edward Said would understand it, the contrapuntal nature of the aesthetics-religion equation. Understanding the contrapuntal nature of complicity between events and things, concepts and beliefs, may be the most succinct task of secular criticism, as Said encapsulates it in his Culture and Imperialism project, beyond the actual texts and details taken up in the book. In an idiosyncratic and surely ingenious way, he creates a unique methodology by proceeding from a Gramscian sense of spatial complexity (a sense of asymmetrical, multilateral, geographical relation) to a musicological sense of co-incidentally entwined figures that testify to a polyphonic simultaneity understood as internal to the object of inquiry. In other words, a contrapuntal reading does not seek a presumed order of things that might arise from various external forces bearing upon the object, nor does it settle for an interpretive framework that privileges singular identities emerging from an otherwise assumed and unexamined totality. Rather, it perceives both singularities and external forces as internal instances within a complex orchestration, where they might be privileged provisionally and always in distinctive relation, indeed are accented by this provisional distinction, which itself then becomes internal to the dynamic, and so on.


Said’s sense of contrapuntal reading has both a spatial and a temporal component. His keen geographical mind, sharpened by his perception early on that Antonio Gramsci’s thought introduced in the Marxist dialectical tradition the primacy of the concept of territory, enables him to appreciate and gauge precisely the multiversality of a situation, a political event, a text, an artwork. At the same time, his acknowledged allegiance to Georg Lukács and his groundbreaking understanding of the reification of consciousness—the cornerstone of so-called Western Marxism—remains at the core of Said’s constant reminder that the force of identity (as a concept, form, psychic state, mode of thinking) must be battled and resisted at all costs. Resistance to identity means profound alertness to history, to the temporal fluidity and multiplicity we inhabit in our being in the world. The temporal and the spatial—or as Said prefers, the historical and the geographical—are thus distinguished by a shared multidimensional configuration, and the Saidian methodology, throughout its complex and multivalent trajectory over the years, settles for nothing less. The musicological expression that Said lends to this methodology harkens back to his deep-seated veneration for Adorno, whose remarkable intellectual edifice, Said argues, must be read primarily as the multifaceted work of a musical sensibility. Indeed, in Adorno, Said’s own personal investment in the figures of displacement (the intellectual as an exile) and nonidentity (the thinker as a performative subjectivity) finds precise and elaborated resonance. This triptych of intellectual figures might well serve as a referential network for those primary significations animating the language of secular criticism. This does not mean that the three thinkers form a nucleus of influence, from which Said’s thought can then be derived. They belong to a group of twentiethcentury figures with whom Said remains consistently in dialogue (much like Erich Auerbach, Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Michel Foucault, or Glenn Gould), but they are distinct insofar as they preside over the methodological coordinates of the task of secular criticism, which Said’s work conducts in such uncompromising fashion. Let us consider some of Said’s own descriptions—so as not to say definitions—of the task of secular criticism: The secular intellectual works to show the absence of divine originality and, on the other side, the complex presence of historical actuality. The conversion of the absence of religion into the presence of actuality is secular interpretation.6 6. Edward W. Said, ‘‘Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, Community,’’ in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 131.


A secular attitude warns us to beware of transforming the complexities of many-stranded history into one large figure, or of elevating particular moments or monuments into universals. . . . Secular transgression chiefly involves moving from one domain to another, the testing and challenging of limits, the mixing and intermingling of heterogeneities, cutting across expectations, providing unforeseen pleasures, discovering experiences.7 If secular criticism deals with local and worldly situations and is constitutively opposed to the production of massive, hermetic systems, then it must follow that the essay—a comparatively short, investigative, radically skeptical form—is the principal way in which to write criticism.8 Right off, one perceives two elemental figures that animate the conceptual framework of these statements. First, an unequivocal sense of mobility characterizes Said’s encounter with the realm of objective phenomena: not only the worldly realm as such—the order of things—but also the less tangible but equally objective realm of concepts, ideas, desires, affects. This sense of mobility, of restlessly moving from object to object, of denying the stability of any presumable ground, produces an equivalent philosophical sense of mobility regarding the subject-object relation as such—indeed, a condition of mobility that is just as much a condition of mutability, particularly as it pertains to forms. This leads to the second elemental figure in this framework, namely, the consistent characteristic of what Said calls in multiple contexts elaboration, a working upon the plasticity (mutability) of form that denies the frequent theoretical compulsion to engulf matters in impermeable and lasting structures. Converting thus ‘‘the absence of religion into the presence of actuality,’’ which is admittedly an abstract statement, can be read as the epitome of the critical secular attitude, not merely because it recognizes the concealed void of religion (which arguably exists in order to fill the void of existence) but because, more importantly, it describes a transformative process whereby the metaphysical void is elaborated as an actual condition in the world with definitive consequences. This elaboration presupposes that form is both material force and mutable ground, and that one’s engagement with it is the most tangible confirmation of one’s significance as historical subject. 7. Edward W. Said, Musical Elaborations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 55. 8. Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 26.


Said’s essentially modernist outlook, in both matters of literature and music, exemplifies this understanding of elaboration as transformation and, as he says above, transgression. The epistemic co-incidence of transformation and transgression is crucial in determining the meaning of the secular, a term which is, in turn, not locked into an a priori signifying framework, given once and for all (even if in a figure of opposition to a rival signifying term—presumably, the religious), but points instead to an attitude, perhaps we might even say a method, that is experimental at the core. The meaning of secular in the term secular criticism does not designate an ensemble of properties—to be therefore enacted in the critical practice—but characterizes the substance of the critical act itself. This is, in my opinion, the profound gesture in the reverse formulation of ‘‘critical secularism’’ to which this gathering of texts aspires. The etymological ground of criticism—the Greek notion of krisis means not merely judgment or decision but also distinction, investigation, interrogation, interpretation, all under the rubric of a performative mind—underlines this elaborative, contingent, mutable, nonsystemic, experimental nature of critique. This is why Said explicitly selects the essay as the form of writing that formally exemplifies critique: the kind of provisional and interrogative trial of bringing together contrapuntally the contentious but intertwined aspects of human activity, of history. And though the very notion of elaboration grasps precisely the meaning of essai as Montaigne initially conceived it, it is the intransigent manner of Adorno—which Said characterizes indicatively as ‘‘dogged stubbornness’’—that animates his distinct use of the form. It is important to remember that Adorno explicitly names the essay as the critical form par excellence because it is formally bound to its own self-reflection on every turn. This self-reflection does not just take place at the level of argumentation—in other words, it is not merely a conceptual self-reflection— but, more importantly, at the level of signification, of language itself. Thus, Adorno claims, the essay is marked by a resistance to ‘‘the ambitious transcendence of language beyond its meaning,’’ which is the characteristic element of transcendental philosophy, whereby language consists of ‘‘words [that] tremble as though possessed, while remaining secretive about what possesses them.9 Adorno is making here a cryptic reference to Heidegger, but the comment reaches beyond the specific insinuation. It links selfreflection, and indeed critique, with resistance against transcendence, with 9. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘‘The Essay as Form,’’ trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor and Frederick Will, New German Critique 32 (Spring/Summer 1984): 155.


exposing the tendency of a certain language to render itself sacred and to do so, moreover, by veiling the mode of its own sacralization. Adorno sees the essay as a form of praxis that belongs to what he calls ‘‘emancipated intellect,’’ which he characterizes variably as homeless, mobile, experimental, heretic, unbinding, nonidentitarian (all these are his terms). The essay is a form that recognizes the force of contingency and finitude in history, and, hence, the importance of elaborating a kind of thinking process that does not owe itself to (or, is not possessed by) any preconceived or predetermined principles, forging instead its own way through a problem on the terrain that the problem itself constitutes each time anew. This is what Adorno means when he says ‘‘[the essay] proceeds, so to speak, methodically unmethodically.’’ 10 That un-method is the formal method of the essay is not some sort of sophistic cleverness. It provides actually an opening to thinking about method much more rigorously than merely defining (if not in fact confirming, codifying) a writer’s or a text’s retrospectively predictable ways and modes of operation. Though Adorno does not quite say it, his sense of the method in the essay is linked to its performativity. When Said oftentimes focuses on musical performance in the midst of discussions of literature, philosophy, or politics, he is shifting our attention to an ephemeral and finite figure of humanity’s imprint on the world in order precisely to dispossess those discourses of their reverential hold on their own certainty. Thinking from the standpoint of performativity means breaching the structure of an immovable core of identity. It is a transgressive act. And the transgression in this sense becomes tangible in the manner in which ideas, concepts, thoughts, art forms, textual figures, and so forth, break open the presumable closure of their existence and become entwined with the fluidity of social-historical forms and events. ‘‘The transgressive element in music is its nomadic ability to attach itself to, and become part of, social formations,’’ 11 says Said, and I suggest we take this further than the specifically musical—or, rather, expand the musical reference to include the broader consequences of Said’s notion of ‘‘performance as an extreme occasion’’—in order to underline the precarious relation of critique with the experimental, which is always connected, in some way or other, to the profoundly social-historical sense of the experiential. Grasping the matter in this way is confirmed by the fact that historical experience can never be retrieved intact but only through its experimental 10. Adorno, ‘‘The Essay as Form,’’ 161. 11. Said, Musical Elaborations, 70.


transmutation into form (in essence, its transformation). This is one of the central aspects of modernist thinking and applies distinctly to Said’s own attempts in relation to identity both to record his memoirs and to articulate the significance of his right to return to Palestine. Before we take this up, however, I want to consider the way in which Said broaches dialogically a kind of pedagogy of performativity in his discussions with Daniel Barenboim. A good part of their conversation is taken up with an attempt to articulate the relation between performance and interpretation. Both Said and Barenboim focus on performance in the musical domain, while Said returns repeatedly to interpretation as a figure that pertains to the act of reading, constituted primarily by the experience of reading literature. In this respect, the meaning of performance (and, more broadly, the implicit significance of performativity as a particular quality) partakes strongly of the language of music, which leads Barenboim in fact to certain astute remarks on the phenomenology of sound, the profound dialectical relation of music to silence, and music’s defiance of the physical laws of nature. Surely, one can argue that interpretation in music (by an orchestra conductor or an instrumentalist) is inevitably subsumed to the discourse of performance and that the most crucial questions pertain to the domain that Barenboim rightly emphasizes: namely, using Said’s language, the profound materiality of sound in its extreme relation to the occasion of its emergence—space, time, body. Yet, insightful though it is, this side of the argument unwittingly casts its shadow over a whole range of other instances, like the very act of reading texts, where grasping the precise nature of interpretive performance itself is at stake. Though reading belongs to a literary universe where orality is no longer primary and is thus unavoidably individualized and silent, its constitutive performativity does not cease. It may become less tangible, it may become implicated in the technological capacity for repetition, for returning to a printed text whose words on the page do not change, but there is no convincing epistemological ground on which to argue that each occasion of reading, even the same text by the same person, loses hereby its occasionality, its singular, ephemeral, contingent relation to the act of reading. And though the bodily dimension of reading a text is rather elusive compared to the musical and theatrical arts (which confront directly the physical laws of nature, as Barenboim formulates it), it does not mean that the corporeality of reading, the actual sensation of engagement and apprehension in the occasion of reading, is not a presence to be reckoned with in assessing the experience of interpretation. I would signify this experience as essen-


tially performative. The limit point between interpretation and performance is not determinable with any certainty; in the ancient use of hermēneia, to interpret means literally to perform. I insist on this point because it is crucial to Said’s understanding of the secular. Said never hesitates to remind us that the critical faculty (for him linked directly to the interpretive condition) requires a gesture of transgression against one’s identity—more precisely, a displacement of identity so as to position oneself in or as a certain ‘‘otherness.’’ Addressing Barenboim, Said says that as ‘‘an interpreter—an interpreter of literature and literary criticism, one has to accept the idea that one is putting one’s own identity aside in order to explore the ‘other.’’’ 12 Exploring this other should not be understood here as the gesture of an empirical desire to enter unknown, strange territory, if only because the elementary sense of explorer, in its traditional meaning, requires an intact sense of self, an integral subject that pursues a presumably discoverable object. Instead, Said seems to demand a radical disintegration of the self (in the way that Adorno would use the term), producing a self-induced condition of homelessness within one’s own subjectivity. This kind of deconstitution of the subject is achieved by positing an otherness at the core of one’s identity in the act of interpretation, which is tantamount, in the sort of language familiar to us from the theater, to an act of impersonation, of taking on the attributes of an other.13 Thus, the requisite gesture for the interpreter and the performer—Said often brings the two together—is self-alteration, the elemental meaning of the radical critical faculty, a poetically transformative, revolutionary gesture in the best sense. The vocabulary of secular criticism is all over this gesture—mobility, mutability, displacement, nonidentity, transgression, transformation—and the gesture is exemplary in its performativity. Nowhere does Said exercise this performative deconstitution of the subject more extremely and more astutely than in his meditation on the significance of his own name that opens his book of memoirs, Out of Place. It is essential to quote at length:

12. Daniel Barenboim and Edward W. Said, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society, ed. Ara Guzelimian (New York: Pantheon, 2002), 12. 13. I discuss the poetics and politics of impersonation at length in ‘‘Lucid Drunkenness (Genet’s Poetics of Revolution),’’ South Atlantic Quarterly 97, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 413–56. Said’s affinity for Genet (and particularly for his ability to enter the world of the other without appropriating it) is well known. See Edward W. Said, ‘‘On Jean Genet’s Late Works,’’ Grand Street 36 (1990): 27–42.


All families invent their parents and children, give them a story, character, fate, and even a language. There was always something wrong with how I was invented and meant to fit in with the world of my parents and four sisters. Whether this was because I constantly misread my part or because of some deep flaw in my being I could not tell for most of my early life. Sometimes I was intransigent, and proud of it. At other times I seemed to myself to be nearly devoid of any character at all, timid, uncertain, without will. Yet the overriding sensation I had was of always being out of place. Thus, it took me about fifty years to become accustomed to, or, more exactly, to feel comfortable with, ‘‘Edward,’’ a foolishly English name yoked forcibly to the unmistakably Arabic family name Said. True my mother told me that I had been named Edward after the Prince of Wales, who cut so fine a figure in 1935, the year of my birth, and Said was the name of various uncles and cousins. But the rationale of my name broke down when I discovered no grandparents called Said and when I tried to connect my fancy English name with its Arabic partner. For years, and depending on the exact circumstances, I would rush past ‘‘Edward’’ and emphasize ‘‘Said’’; at other times I would do the reverse, or connect these two to each other so quickly that neither would be clear. The one thing I could not tolerate, but very often would have to endure, was the disbelieving, and hence, undermining, reaction: Edward? Said? 14 For any student of literature, the literariness of this passage is striking. There is a Proustian self-irony, the consciousness of how perilous it is to apply oneself to the task of self-representation in writing, but there is also a daring clarity about the theatricality of self-fashioning—familial invention, (mis)reading one’s part in the drama of life, attempting to fit into a character, a kind of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt on the utterance of the name(s) Edward Said—all of which defies any sort of propriety in the gesture of autobiographical self-reference. The literary effect consists in the double gesture of simultaneously foregrounding the principle of fictionalization present in any process of fashioning an identity with an unabashedly genuine staging of the process of being named. Thus, the author Edward Said begins to take on the genre of memoir by instantly dismantling whatever metaphysical qualities traditionally authorize the proper name. His first ‘‘autobiographical’’ gesture is to cast the authorial personality in uncertain light, to problematize the otherwise assumed seamlessness of self-recognition across space 14. Edward W. Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 3–4.


and time by staging a contradictory situation of othering oneself. A phrase from Proust comes to mind that encapsulates this contradictory aspect of recognition: ‘‘For to ‘recognize’ someone and, a fortiori, having failed to recognize someone to learn his identity, is to predicate two contradictory things of a single subject; it is to admit that what was here, the person whom one remembers, no longer exists, and also that what is now here is a person whom one did not know to exist.’’ 15 Said’s self-referential point of departure is to immerse the name into the flux of historical contingency, so as to set up an interpretive mode that is radically skeptical toward the minutest tendency to grant the principle of identity a natural and transparent authority. It is not merely that Edward Said is out of place, that his story and the story of his people (his family, of course, but, by inference, the Palestinian people themselves) is a story of displacement; it is that identity itself is out of place. But in the incisive irony of the passage one also reads a certain urgency, perhaps even a compulsion, to register the epistemic significance of this inaugural placelessness, as well as the history of social and cultural displacement that inevitably expands its meaning. Said has alluded elsewhere, in reference to what animated his theoretical study on beginnings in the 1970s, to just this sense of inaugural self-authorization in the absence of even the most elemental authorities, such as home, family, religion, nation, language: ‘‘This was then my autobiographical impetus [in writing Beginnings], to rethink the whole question of what it means to start again, to begin. It involved acts of choice, acts of designation, rather than things coming from heaven. That is why the emphasis on the secular is so great, as far as I’m concerned. It is a congeries of things, a number of things, working at the same time.’’ 16 Much like his sense of contrapuntal thinking, thinking in secular terms for Said involves an irreducible plurality at the core of signification, even the inaugural signification of one’s own being. This plurality is marked by both contestation and entwinement; Said is not content merely to posit a fragmented self, as is often nowadays fetishized. He has a definite grasp of the authorial ‘‘I.’’ Authors of all kinds, including composers and artists, occupy a central position in his referential network. But they are never impervious to the worldly conditions that permeate them. On the contrary, an author’s relative autonomy is predicated on recognizing the contingent 15. Marcel Proust, The Past Recaptured, trans. Andreas Mayor (New York: Vintage, 1971), 186. 16. Edward W. Said, ‘‘People’s Rights and Literature,’’ interview by Jonathan Rée (Cairo, 1993), in Power, Politics, and Culture: Interviews with Edward Said, ed. Gauri Viswanathan (New York: Pantheon, 2001), 257.


nature of his or her authorization and on sustaining an oppositional stance in respect to the dominant terms of authority all around. Standing along with Adorno in tireless resistance to the forced reconciliation of the subject-object antinomy in the world, Said remains vigilant against the tendency of thinkers to be co-opted by enveloping structures of ideas, systems, beliefs, even political alliances. Even though he generally distances himself from psychoanalytic frameworks of explanation, he accentuates the radical importance of subjectivity in the worldly domain. He has never hesitated publicly to affirm the significance of personal pleasure in the things one chooses to engage above and beyond the commitment to respond politically to those social and historical exigencies that permeate one’s daily existence. He often speaks of literature and music, of reading, listening, and, of course, writing, as something profoundly motivated by a not quite analyzable sense of personal pleasure—an unadulterated instance of plaisir du texte, to use a now forgotten term of Roland Barthes. This is a crucial dimension of secular subjectivity, for which objects that merit one’s psychic investment (sublimation) do not provide the certainty and safety of permanence or transcendence. Sublimation—a concept entirely absent from Said’s vocabulary—is hardly a psychogenetic condition, emerging from the innermost needs of an impermeable subjectivity, but a condition that says as much about the society that makes it possible as about the individual who is produced by it. In other words, sublimation has a politics; the objects in which one invests are always indicative of a particular socialization, never neutral or singular.17 Said’s memoir provides, perhaps unwittingly, a chronicle of a specific politics of sublimation in the very same gesture that it provides, altogether consciously, a chronicle of a lost world, a lost socialhistorical experience. Oftentimes in interviews, which constitute for Said a veritable genre of developing orally and improvisationally the interrogative composition he attributes to essay writing, Said will seize on a detail that unlocks the methodological underpinnings of a project. Consider his elaboration on the impetus for writing his memoir: I have resisted the use of the word ‘‘autobiography.’’ I call it a memoir because I don’t try to account for a public trajectory. I felt that I had something to understand about a peculiar past. . . . We had 17. I elaborate on the politics of sublimation, in specific reference to the way Cornelius Castoriadis conceptualizes it, in ‘‘Philosophy and Sublimation,’’ Thesis Eleven 49 (Spring 1997): 31–43.


an extremely strange—because my father sort of invented it—a very strange, constructed life. . . . I think probably the main thread of the memoir is to trace the effects of this sort of imprisoning or limiting life that I had as a child, perhaps because my family felt they had to protect me. . . .18 The intriguing thing in this rumination is not so much the final qualifying phrase as to whether a sense of limitation might be due to parental overprotectiveness (which returns us rather to a recognizable literary tropos) but the immediately prior part of the sentence that ties the writing of a memoir to threading together a way out of the perceived labyrinth of a constructed and constrained childhood. The stated intention, an authorial intention, is to weave the strands of memory so as to ponder the enigma of a particular childhood in a distinctly traceable, though actually now perished, social world: in other words, a particular sublimation that is, no doubt, also a cultural-historical experience which exceeds its avowed uniqueness. Said’s indefatigable resistance, in his subsequent ‘‘public trajectory,’’ to any sort of structure that limits life could be interpreted as the response to this childhood experience and, in effect, the extension of this initial sublimation. But this would be just a psychoanalytic explanation. What is more important is the expressed intention to achieve some sort of commensurable relation between the odd familial experience and the altogether pervasive socialhistorical drama that surrounds it and, indeed, at times, remains shielded by it: Palestinian victimization and exile. The phrase ‘‘I felt I had something to understand about a peculiar past’’ resonates entirely, contrapuntally, with other such phrases spoken in other instances and perhaps with other things in mind but still hanging in irredeemable suspension, perfectly clear yet inscrutable in their own isolation: ‘‘My own past is irrecoverable. . . . I don’t really belong anywhere, but I’ve resolved that that’s the way it is.’’ 19 Or: ‘‘What return does mean to me is return to oneself, a return to history, so that we understand exactly what happened, why it happened, and who we are.’’ 20 The relation between the ‘‘I’’ and the ‘‘we’’ here is a matter of co-incidence; the two subjects are entirely consubstantial in their antithesis. The homeless ‘‘I’’ may be settled in its irrecov18. Edward W. Said, ‘‘Returning to Ourselves,’’ interview by Jacqueline Rose (London, 1997–98), in Power, Politics, and Culture, 421–22. 19. Edward W. Said, ‘‘Orientalism and After,’’ interview by Eleanor Wachtel (Toronto, 1996), in Power, Politics, and Culture, 226. 20. Said, ‘‘Returning to Ourselves,’’ 429.


erable condition, but this is precisely what enables it to articulate the necessity of achieving a home for the exiled and disenfranchised community. Said has often been maligned for this dialectical position, which is the envy of many who do not dare the risk of being committed to personal homelessness and yet, simultaneously, to political community. Regarding the memoir specifically, the charges of elitism or narcissism from various quarters of both American and Arab cultural-intellectual terrains dovetail perfectly with slanderous attempts by Zionist propagandists to discredit Said’s claim to familial and territorial connection to his native Palestine. In all cases, of course, a profound disdain, even contempt, is reserved for what remains defiantly personal in the worldly encounter with the other, even though in fact, contrary to conventional wisdom, it is precisely this radically personal imaginary that fuels one’s unwavering commitment to communal affairs, one’s responsibility toward the polis. Throughout his activist trajectory on behalf of the Palestinian cause, Said has remained consistently vehement in his critique of both nativism and separatism. He has always made a point of reiterating Fanon’s crucial lesson that all nativism signals the victory of the colonial/imperial project (or in a Saidian language, confirms the domination of Orientalism) by bearing out to its endpoint the fetishist logic of identity, singularity, and abolition of the other. In the same way, he rejects all separatist discourses as epitomes of nationalism, as politics of exclusion, dispossession, deterritorialization. For this reason, Said has insisted that the grave task of resolving what he calls the ‘‘sublime conflict’’ between Israel and Palestine cannot be conducted under a politics of partition. Partition, he reminds us, is the legacy of British colonialism and has already left its mark on the Palestinian conflict—indeed, its inaugural mark—much as it has done on the ongoing conflicts between India and Pakistan and in Cyprus. In this respect, from The Question of Palestine onward, Said has advocated, both politically and theoretically, that the coexistence of the two peoples has become historically insurmountable. In an interview I conducted with him in 1990 for a Greek journal, Said responded skeptically to a deliberately provocative question about a future Palestinian national history inevitably embracing the typical identitarian ideology of ancestry and ascendancy, claiming instead that what made Palestinian history and society different was the impossibility of disengagement from its adversarial other.21 The force of identitarian principles that fuels the writing of national history, he argued, is in this case 21. Stathis Gourgouris, ‘‘Conversation with Edward Said’’ (New York, 1990), Planodion (Athens, Greece) 16 (June 1992): 392–401.


disrupted by an antagonistic entwinement between two ongoing complicitous histories, which can neither be ignored nor dissolved. Some years later, Said wrote a bold article in the New York Times Magazine that elaborated on the one-state solution as the only historically possible outcome short of total annihilation of both cultures; this drew support from certain Israelis but was disparagingly rejected by many American Jewish commentators. Drawing on the region’s centuries-old (though now severely torn) tradition of multiethnic and multicultural coexistence, which he then grafted onto a theoretical privileging of civil society over religious-nationalist community, Said put forth the thesis that ‘‘there can be no reconciliation unless both peoples, two communities of suffering, resolve that their existence is a secular fact, and that it has to be dealt with as such.’’ 22 This activist theoretical and political trajectory, which is made possible by virtue of an intellectual mind that rejects totalizing and transcendentalist figures, has never been quite appreciated in these terms. On the contrary, the secular vision is summarily discredited, arguably because its historical power is tangible and perfectly real. When Zionist critics assail Said for being ‘‘the professor of terror,’’ one gets the impression that they do so because they desire to silence a Palestinian voice that articulates the profound historical reality of such coexistence. Though nowadays, in the context of such extreme adherence to nationalist/religious dogmatism on both sides, this position seems utopian, the actual historical reality to which it focuses our attention is ultimately more threatening to Ariel Sharon’s position than are scores of suicide bombers, precisely because it casts an insurmountable shadow over the Zionist dream-wish to do away with the Palestinian factor altogether, so as to clear out the territories for the unimpeded establishment of Eretz Israel. Said has trained his eye on this annihilating logic since the seminal essay ‘‘Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims’’ (1979), in which he argues that, even at the simplest discursive level, the nationalist dream of Zionism was predicated on the vision of a pristine, uninhabited land inherited from time immemorial via the privilege of ancestry. It was thus inevitable that the foundation of the Israeli state in the wake of the Holocaust and the brutal militarization of the Zionist dream would spin forth a logic of unacknowledged but tacitly justified and altogether totalizing victimization of the other. ‘‘We are the victims of the victims,’’ Said repeatedly declares. This phrase is formidable in its utter simplicity because it exposes the unsayable 22. Edward W. Said, ‘‘The One-State Solution,’’ New York Times Magazine, January 10, 1999, 39.


belief that occupies the imaginary core of post-Holocaust Zionism, namely, ‘‘We are the last, the ultimate victims.’’ From a psychoanalytic point of view, this unutterable conviction is drawn from the same compulsion toward a monopoly of signification that animates the inaugural imaginary signifier of Hebrew ancestry: ‘‘we are God’s chosen people.’’ The monopoly of victimization is, in other words, religious in essence. I mean this not in the sense of emerging out of a specific ecclesiastical dogma (and thus pertaining to Jewish religious practice) but rather in the same way that nationalism is proximate to religion, insofar as it obliterates the multivalent and contentious worldliness within which it exists. In this respect, to echo both Bruce Robbins’s and Aamir Mufti’s positions, Said’s secular critique of Zionism (and, one must add, of both Islamic fundamentalism and pan-Arabist nationalism) is predicated on a configuration of the secular in opposition, not to the religious per se but to the nationalist. This is exactly why the Zionist response to Said’s secular criticism has been so enraged. When he was first slandered as a promulgator of terrorism, it was in response to the use of the term secular criticism in The World, the Text, and the Critic, where the term bears an explicit literary meaning. Said’s use of secular was linked by a certain writer on the American Jewish Committee to Yasir Arafat’s mandate for Palestine as a ‘‘secular democratic state.’’ 23 I would argue, again with a certain psychoanalytic slant, that there is real substance to this otherwise absurd and boneheaded syllogism. Said’s critical secularism threatens Zionism at its core. No monolithic identitarian principle, which is essentially theologically grounded (and here certain Islamist positions mirror Zionist ones in ways that neither would tolerate), can withstand the exfoliation of the identity principle that Said’s critical secularism takes as a point of departure. The denouncement of the secular as terrorist marks an instance where, like the Stockhausen incident at the outset, a fraudulent logic exposes the inner verity of the matter, in this case the accuser being driven by genuine, though unconscious, fear that his position will be exposed for what it is: ‘‘National identity becomes not only a fetish, but is also turned into a kind of idol, in a Baconian sense—an idol of the cave, and of the tribe. That produces, pulls along with it, the rise of what I would call a kind of desperate religious sentiment.’’ 24 23. Said relates the episode at length in ‘‘Literary Theory at the Crossroads of Public Life,’’ interview by Imre Saluzinsky (London, 1987), in Power, Politics, and Culture, 69–93. 24. Edward W. Said, ‘‘Criticism and the Art of Politics,’’ interview by Jennifer Wicke and Michael Sprinker, in Edward Said: A Critical Reader, ed. Michael Sprinker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 232.


Because it is conducted as a critical secular project, Said’s uncompromising critique of Zionism has stayed explicitly clear from any of the discursive traps that mirror the adversary’s tactics. Hence his insistence against any notion of de-Zionization, any sort of annihilating gesture in return. He has been too deeply involved in the experience of communal erasure, deterritorialization, and bona fide bulldozing of history to learn of the danger of monological principles. He continues, rather, to advocate the dialectical entwinement of societies and histories, and the continuous rediscovery of the making of history by real people in the real world. Instead of the security of a religious-nationalist Palestinian vision, he prefers the secular uncertainty of a state, a home, that is no one’s singular property: ‘‘I suppose part of my critique of Zionism is that it attaches too much importance to home. Saying, we need a home. And we’ll do anything to get a home, even if it means making others homeless. . . . I want a rich fabric of some sort, which no one can fully comprehend, and no one can fully own.’’ 25 It is no surprise, then, that in this, a recent interview for an Israeli journal, Said is recognized by the interviewer to ‘‘sound very Jewish.’’ Said’s response, the last words of his recent collection of interviews, which I can imagine being spoken with a great deal of humorous subversiveness, should be nonetheless taken seriously: ‘‘Of course. I’m the last Jewish intellectual. You don’t know anyone else. All your other Jewish intellectuals are now suburban squires. From Amos Oz to all these people here in America. So I’m the last one. The only true follower of Adorno. Let me put it this way: I’m a Jewish-Palestinian.’’ 26 For those claiming to represent the allegedly real world of politics, Said’s critical secular vision is at best utopian, its sense of the future immaterial, literary. Yet I would argue, perhaps in a more philosophical vein, that, on the contrary, the politics of comments such as the one above is drawn from the mature cognizance of humanity’s finite existence, of the corporeality and mortality of subjective experience, in addition to a defiant lack of interest in transcendent solutions—all of which, together, generate a sharpened and radical focus on the actual historical future. It is possible to consider that Said makes such comments in the spirit of ‘‘lateness,’’ or Spätstil (late style), as Adorno theorized it, a notion forming the basis, during the last decade, of Said’s main literary and theoretical inquiry.27 According to 25. Edward W. Said, ‘‘My Right of Return,’’ interview by Ari Shavit (Tel Aviv, 2000), in Power, Politics, and Culture, 457. 26. Said, ‘‘My Right of Return,’’ 458. 27. See Edward W. Said, ‘‘Adorno as Lateness Itself,’’ in Adorno: A Critical Reader, ed. Nigel Gibson and Andrew Rubin (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 193–208.


Adorno, lateness exceeds what is acceptable and normal in the world, and hence submits one’s presumed unity with historical time and social environment to irreconcilable dissonance. Lateness reaches beyond its present time in history, or, more precisely, it makes its mode of expression achieve a suspended presentness that fissures time, disrupts the beguiling assurance of controlled temporality, and thus enables a radical historical consciousness to emerge. Said diagnoses this kind of consciousness at work in a variety of literary and artistic contexts; in addition to Adorno himself, he has spoken specifically of Beethoven, Strauss, Proust, Beckett, Genet, Cavafy. But I find particularly insightful, in this context, his discussion of ‘‘late style’’ in Sigmund Freud’s bold gesture of writing Moses and Monotheism as the last response of a profoundly secular mind to a world of single-minded identities and totalizing violence. Freud’s own unresolved sense of identity (on many registers, not merely the cultural, but also the scientific and professional) produces a way of fissuring the imaginary core of monotheism by tying its emergence to the constitutive presence of the stranger, the foreigner, the other, within the instituted communal body. Said recognizes in what sense this remarkable gesture attests as well to how an ethnic/national exclusionary institution is also irreparably entangled with the stranger, the foreigner, the other, at the origin. The strength of Freud’s thought, Said argues, ‘‘can be articulated in and speak to other besieged identities as well, not through dispensing palliatives such as tolerance and compassion, but rather by attending to it as a troubling, disabling, destabilizing secular wound, the essence of the cosmopolitan, from which there can be no recovery, no state of resolved or stoic calm, and no utopian reconciliation even within itself.’’ 28 Only a critical secular response that attends to this ‘‘wound’’—that realizes the limitations of history and yet recognizes the limitless capacity of the historical imagination—would cast its eye upon the future without becoming enchanted by its conjured irrelevance, apocalyptic abolition, utopian promise, or transcendence. It is this transgressive, transformative desire to resist the will to transcendence that animates Said’s conviction that ‘‘all criticism is postulated and performed on the assumption that it is to have a future.’’ 29 The conviction of having a future against all odds is this paradoxical affirmation of our historical being that emerges out of the acceptance of our existential 28. Edward W. Said, Freud and the Non-European (London: Verso, 2003), 54. 29. Edward W. Said, ‘‘The Future of Criticism,’’ in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 171.


finitude. Disappointingly, this is becoming more and more rare in our historical present. The religious imaginary revealed in the events of September 11, whether intended this way or not, suggests the casualty of envisioning a future—a future in the world, of course, for the future of martyrdom is no future, strictly speaking; it is submission to a heteronomous plenitude, to the supreme authority of the Other, which knows no temporality. Sadly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the response of the American state, institutionally a secular state, exhibits a similar monological (so as not to say outright monotheistic) attitude toward history, which might be said to cancel history’s capacity to remain unpredictable, uncertain, in flux. The scandalous White House document titled The National Security Strategy of the United States of America—a document of enormous significance, if only because of its unabashed declaration of the projected terms of global domination—envisions a future so narrowly self-referential and wishfully guaranteed by sheer military power and ideological conviction in the transcendental authority of the market and its brand of civilization that it leaves one wondering if that’s any future at all. The faith that certain policies and courses of action, whether directed by the will of God or by the pseudorational analysis of national security specialists, will unilaterally transcend the contradictions of the present and be fulfilled in a redemptive future means lack of thinking critically, historically. It actually abdicates humanity’s responsibility and selfconsciousness in the making of history, making of the future a mere game of power in order to confirm the status quo of power in the present. The grave problem laid before us is how to conduct a fight for the future that takes as supreme values, first, the untranscendable finitude of human existence; and second, the absolutely teleological danger of the destruction of the whole planet (that is, total finitude). To this extent, I argue, the tradition of transcendental thinking has never offered humanity anything better than the blissful pill of oblivion, while a transgressive, transformative thinking takes one’s individual finitude as the point of departure and draws from it the energy to combat whatever forces might risk humanity’s irreversible end.

Terror: A Speech After 9-11

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

1 These ruminations arose in response to America’s war on terrorism.1 I started from the conviction that there is no response to war. War is a cruel caricature of what in us can respond. You cannot be answerable to war. Yet one cannot remain silent. Out of the imperative or compulsion to speak, then, two questions: What are some already existing responses? And, how respond in the face of the impossibility of response? When I thus assigned myself the agency of response, my institutionally validated agency kicked in. I am a teacher of the humanities. In the humanities classroom begins a training for what may produce a criticism that can possibly engage a public sphere deeply hostile to the mission of the humanities when they are understood as a persistent attempt at an uncoercive rearrangement of desires, through teaching reading. Before 1. The first version of this paper was delivered at a conference—‘‘Responses to War’’—in the Feminist Interventions series run by the Institute for Research of Women and Gender at Columbia University. I thank Rosalind Carmel Morris for inviting me to participate in it. boundary 2 31:2, 2004. Copyright © Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.


I begin, I would like to distinguish this from the stockpiling of apparently political, tediously radical, and often narcissistic descriptions, according to whatever is perceived to be the latest Euro-US theoretical trend, that we bequeath to our students in the name of public criticism. Uncoercive rearrangement of desires, then; the repeated effort in the classroom. Thus I found myself constructed as a respondent. A response not only supposes and produces a constructed subject of response, it also constructs its object. To what, then, do most of these responses respond? The ‘‘war’’ on the Taliban, repeatedly declared on media by representatives of the United States government from the president on down, was only a war in the general sense. Not having been declared by act of Congress, it could not assume that proper name. And even as such it was not a response to war. The detainees at Guantanamo Bay, as we have been repeatedly reminded by Right and Left, are not prisoners of war and cannot be treated according to the Geneva Convention (itself unenforceable) because, as Donald Rumsfeld says, among other things, ‘‘they did not fight in uniform.’’ 2 The US is fighting an abstract enemy: terrorism. Definitions in Government handbooks, or UN documents, explain little. The war is part of an alibi every imperialism has given itself, a civilizing mission carried to the extreme, as it always must be. It is a war on terrorism reduced at home to due process, to a criminal case: US v. Zacarias Moussaoui, aka ‘‘Shaqil,’’ aka ‘‘Abu Khalid al Sahrawi,’’ with the nineteen dead hijackers named as unindicted co-conspirators in the indictment. This is where I can begin: a war zoomed down to a lawsuit and zoomed up to face an abstraction. Even on the most general level, this binary opposition will no longer stand. For the sake of constructing a response, however, a binary is useful. To repeat, then, down to a case, up to an abstraction. I cannot speak intelligently about the law, about cases. I am not ‘‘responsible’’ in it. I turn to the abstraction: terror-ism. Yet, being a citizen of the world who aspires to live and prosper under ‘‘the rule of law,’’ I will risk a word. When we believe that to punish the per2. This is not as silly as it may sound. In an interesting article in The American Prospect, Anne-Marie Slaughter also mentions this as an important reason: ‘‘[t]he convention governing prisoners of war defines unlawful combatants as participants in an armed conflict who abuse their civilian status to gain military advantage: those who do not carry arms openly and do not carry a ‘fixed distinctive sign’ such as a uniform or other insignia that would identify them as soldiers’’ (Slaughter, ‘‘Tougher than Terror,’’ The American Prospect, January 28, 2002, 2).

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petrators as criminals would be smarter than, or even more correct than, military intervention, we are not necessarily moving toward a lasting peace. Unless we are trained into imagining the other, a necessary, impossible, and interminable task, nothing we do through politico-legal calculation will last, even with the chanciness of the future anterior: something will have been when we plan a something will be. Before the requirement of the emergence of a specific sort of ‘‘public sphere’’—corollary to imperial systems and the movement of peoples, when different ‘‘kinds’’ of people came to live together—such training was part of general cultural instruction.3 After, it has become the especial burden of an institutionalized faculty of the humanities. I squash an entire history here. Kant’s enlightened subject is a scholar.4 In ‘‘Critique of Power’’ Benjamin writes, ‘‘what stands outside of the law as the educative power in its perfected form, is one of the forms of appearance of divine power.’’ 5 I happen to be a Europeanist, but I have no doubt at all that historically marked intuitions about the importance of the educative moment is to be found in every cultural system. What seems important today, in the face of this unprecedented attack on the temple of Empire, is not only an unmediated intervention by way of the calculations of the public sphere— war or law—but training (the exercise of the educative power) into a preparation for the eruption of the ethical. I understand the ethical, and this is a derivative position, to be an interruption of the epistemological, which is the attempt to construct the other as object of knowledge. Epistemological constructions belong to the domain of the law, which seeks to know the other, in his or her case, as completely as possible, in order to punish or acquit rationally, reason being defined by the limits set by the law itself. The ethical interrupts this imperfectly, to listen to the other as if it were a self, neither to punish nor to acquit. Public criticism today must insist that no amount of punishment, legal upon individuals, or military and economic upon states and collectivities— indeed, military and economic rewards such as invitation into alliances or 3. Livy, History of Rome, bk. 1, 58–60, recalling the founding of the Roman Republic, places it in Lucretia’s fear that she should be represented as having slept with a ‘‘man of base condition.’’ 4. Immanuel Kant, ‘‘What Is Enlightenment?’’ in What Is Enlightenment? EighteenthCentury Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 58–64. 5. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Critique of Violence,’’ in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1978), 297; translation modified.


entry into the World Trade Organization—is going to bring lasting change, an epistemic shift, however minor. We must also attend upon a preparation for the ethical upon which we must attend. And that is where the public responsibility of the humanities may be situated. By contrast, the ‘‘War on Terrorism’’ has generated an intense resurgence of nationalism, consolidated by an act of Congress: the Patriot Act. There was an unexamined assumption by academic intellectuals that, because the world economic system acts multi- and trans-nationally, even globally at the top, a seamlessly ideological postnationalism is the contemporary episteme. That bit of irresponsible thinking has been given an indecent burial—an unintended consequence, but a consequence nonetheless. Women are prominent in this war on terrorism, this monstrous civilizing mission. We cannot ignore the very vocal fresh-faced women, shown by CNN, at the helm of a US aircraft carrier. One of them, unnervingly young, said to the viewers, ‘‘If I can drive an aircraft carrier I can drive any truck.’’ This was in response to the most bizarre example of single-issue feminist patter that it has been my good fortune to hear from the mouth of a male CNN correspondent: ‘‘No one will be able to make sexist jokes about women drivers any more.’’ All women? The ‘‘women of Afghanistan’’ are coded somewhat differently. Given this gender-prominence, a feminist critical theory must repeat that expanding the war endlessly will not necessarily produce multiple-issue gender justice in the subaltern sphere. The most visible consequences, the exacerbation of state terrorism in Israel, Malaysia, India, and elsewhere, have nothing to do with gender justice at all. If ruined Kabul is an ‘‘international city’’ of a rather different kind from Abd-ur Rahman’s dream at the end of the nineteenth century, with perhaps a UN peacekeeping force in place, and constant access to the globalized version of US local culture, something consonant with US and UN gender politics will again emerge as part of social consciousness.6 But these gender-sensitive groups will represent 6. Abd-ur Rahman Khan, The Life of Abdur Rahman, Amir of Afghanistan, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). The issue of ‘‘gender,’’ the abstraction of sexual difference, itself discursive since always posited as a difference, for both dominant and subordinate, is never absent from a society. I say ‘‘again’’ because, as I say in my text, the issue of civil justice for women can be charted along the story of the often-thwarted development of the Afghan intelligentsia. As far as I know, that story has not been put together between covers. One can start from the loss of the Silk Road monopoly, or from Abd-ur Rahman.

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the subaltern as little as, indeed possibly less than, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). There is no possibility, in an American protectorate, of gender holding the repeated and effortful turning of capital into social, which is the best of the counter-globalizing struggle. That happened in the era of the seventies’ ‘‘new’’ social movements in what we now call the ‘‘global South.’’ The most difficult thing as the emancipation of women by the US is celebrated over and over again is an assessment of the Soviet regime. Middle-class women are emerging from where they were before the Taliban sent them underground. Everybody knows the US created the Taliban. Indeed, in these times of quick-fix political education to match the flavor of the week, this is often the acme of left-liberal knowledgeability. But why were these women flourishing as professionals under the Soviet regime? There is a singular ignoring of the history of the development of the Afghan intelligentsia and its genuine involvement with the Left.7 There is an internal line of cultural difference within ‘‘the same culture.’’ The emancipation of women has forever followed this line, and that story is bigger than wars, if anything can be. I comment on it in my forthcoming book Other Asias.8 Another response to Terror has been to put quotation marks around it—to commodify it, relexicalize it for History and Geography, museumize it. At the soft end of this is the marketing of a sentimentalized 9-11 that is altogether offensive. To this a superficial but scrupulous public criticism of the visual culture industry can surely apply. Contained within it there are arresting metonyms that negotiate the area between the hard and soft: Behind an adjacent tarpaulin-cloaked fence topped with barbed wire [at Ground Zero] . . . splinters from the soaring television antenna that marked the highest point in New York City—1,732 feet into the sky— sit on their sides, right next to the punctured, debris-choked remains of Fritz Koenig’s great spherical bronze sculpture, the former center7. Gregory J. Massell, The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia, 1919–1929 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974); Fazal-ur-Rahim Marwat, The Evolution and Growth of Communism in Afghanistan (1917–1979): An Appraisal (Karachi: Royal Book Co., 1997). 8. I am beginning to chart out this argument in a piece entitled ‘‘Gender,’’ initially presented at Womens Studies, University of Pennsylvania (November 14, 2001), and next at Hong Kong University (June 3, 2002) and the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University (June 20, 2002).


piece to the trade center’s ground-level plaza, interpreted as a symbol of world peace through trade. And nestled against the Koenig globe is . . . a charred and pitted lump of fused concrete, melted steel, carbonized furniture and less recognizable elements, a meteoritelike mass that no human force could have forged, but which was in fact created by the fiery demise of the towers.9 An objet trouvé, because ‘‘world peace through world trade’’ is a lie. And the forces are human. The Koenig globe—marked as was Yeats’s lapis lazuli— has now been installed as a memorial at Historic Battery Park on the Eisenhower Mall near Bowling Green, adjacent to the Hope Garden. The Sphere, as it is called, is lexicalized into the text of New York as the capital of capital, into a phrase in the imaginary that will contain the signifiers History (Eisenhower, Battery Park), Space (Battery Park, Bowling Green, Garden), and Hope. Close to the event, there were the conceptual banalities accompanying what is no doubt much more interesting architecturally, at a number of shows, from which I choose at random a show called ‘‘A New World Trade Center’’ at the Max Protetch Gallery in New York.10 At one end, the most lasting memorial—a response to the time of terror by spacing—the classic model of writing—Stonehenge-model slabs fixing the exact position of the sun during the two attacks, ‘‘Zero Zones,’’ designed by Raymund Abraham. At the other end, the typical pomo exhortation to active forgetfulness: ‘‘Let’s not even consider remembering. . . . What for?’’ offered by Foreign Office architects for their plioform snakelike towers. In between there were other conceptualities, including a vaguely leftish criticism of the towers as buildings: ‘‘Jet(tison) the past, out-of-sync anyway (US=bigness, power). Out of the Tower ruins will emerge generative matter’’ (Thomas Mayne, Architects). The wildest of them, twin towers of light, representing the inscription of the towers as noumenal rather than phenomenal, was the temporary memorial chosen by the city. Of all the responses I find this middle-of-the-road trend the most reassuring. Europe has always been good at museumization. The quotation marks neutralize, although here too political art can fuel martial art, and the task of responsibility is never closed. This response is now mired, of course, 9. Eric Lipton and James Glanz, ‘‘A Nation Challenged: Relics; From the Rubble, Artifacts of Anguish,’’ New York Times, Section 1, January 27, 2002, 1. 10. ‘‘A New World Trade Center: Design Proposals,’’ Max Protetch Gallery, New York, January 17–February 16, 2002.

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in the conflict between competition sculpture, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, and the conventions of mourning. I come now to my second question: What response to offer in the face of the impossibility of response. The stereotype of the public intellectual, from Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek International to Christopher Hitchens, the freelance British gadfly, would offer statements describing US policy, coming out promptly in response to every crisis. This is undoubtedly worthy, often requiring personal courage, but it is not a response. It enhances the charisma of the intellectual and produces in the reader a feeling of being in the thick of things. This type of cognitive mapping, heavily dependent upon the fieldwork of frontline investigative journalists and humble gatherers of statistics, legitimates by reversal the idea that knowledge is an end in itself, or that there is a straight line from knowing to doing politics as human rights or street theater. But to respond means to resonate with the other, contemplate the possibility of complicity—wrenching consciousness-raising, which is based on ‘‘knowing things,’’ however superficially, from its complacency. Response pre-figures change. Reading Aristotle and Shelley, students typically ask, What is the difference between prediction and pre-figuration? The difference is, negatively, in the intending subject’s apparent lack of precision, in the figure; positively, it is the figure’s immense range in time and space. The figure disrupts confidence in consciousness-raising. That is the risk of a response that hopes to resonate through figuration. When we confine our idea of the political to cognitive control alone, this does not just avoid the risk of response, it closes off response altogether. We end up talking to ourselves, or to our clones abroad. Predictably, on Left and Right, you lose support when you stop us-and-them-ing, when you take away the unself-critical convenience of doing good or punishing. It is for such situations that Mahasweta Devi wrote, ‘‘there are people for passing laws, there are people to ride jeeps, but no one to light the fire.’’ 11 The response is in the fire. You get burned if you are touched and called by the other. If anything in what follows outrages you or seems not political enough, please remember this. The traditional Left here in the US and in Europe has by and large understood the events of September 11 as a battle between fundamentalism and the failure of democracy. Being Indian, I look more at the Indian press, 11. Mahasweta Devi, ‘‘Douloti the Bountiful,’’ in Imaginary Maps, trans. Gayatri Spivak (New York: Routledge, 1995), 88.


and the tone on the Left there is less exclusivist. ‘‘Nineteen Arab men . . . brought their various frustrations onto four commercial aircraft,’’ writes Vijay Prashad, ‘‘[t]he impoverishment of other languages of social protest leads many young people to adopt the garb of Islam to articulate their alienation.’’ Prashad’s tone is fairly representative.12 By contrast, Noam Chomsky can be read as representing the dominant line on the US Left: ‘‘‘globalization,’ or ‘economic imperialism,’ or ‘cultural values,’ [are] matters that are utterly unfamiliar to bin Laden and his associates and of no concern to them.’’ 13 If, on the other hand, we think of the actants involved, politicized graduate students, rather unlike Chomsky’s stereotype, we do not have to withhold from them the bitterness of understanding that, as the stakes in the Great Game shift, and Russia and the US maneuver to come together over the black gold of the Caspian, bypassing the Taliban, who were flourishing on September 11, 2001, there was no hope that their cities would participate, to quote one of the innumerable World Bank Policy and Research Bulletins—this one entitled ‘‘Creating Cities That Work in the New Global Economy’’—‘‘in the changes [attendant upon world trade reaching more than $13 trillion in 1998, that] carry the promise of large gains for developing countries, but [only] expos[ure] to greater risks’’ to some among them.14 Why can’t Islam be a liberation theology for radicals from the middle-class elite as a great culture—called ‘‘Islam’’—continues to get separated from the mainstream toward modernity? I hold no brief for liberation theology. Indeed, in the heyday of the gender-compromised Latin American liberation theology, I would often ask, ‘‘Why can’t we have the liberation without the theology?’’ But the possibility must be granted if one is trying to imagine something different from the sorry stereotype. I would agree with Professor Chomsky that the hijackers cannot be fully explained by globalization. But I would also agree with Vijay Prashad that 9-11, as it is being called now, is not just about religion. There is neither mourning nor execution without imagining the transcendental, and the transcendental, when imagined, has cultural names. But that is another matter, and, as I will argue in the final section, this set should not be given the blanket name ‘‘religion’’ too quickly. It is also true that a millennial confrontation is 12. Vijay Prashad, War Against the Planet: The Fifth Afghan War, Imperialism, and Other Assorted Fundamentalisms (New Delhi: LeftWord, 2002), 7, 27. 13. Noam Chomsky, ‘‘The Theatre of Good and Evil,’’ http://www.zmag.org/chomskygsf. htm. 14. ‘‘Creating Cities That Work in the New Global Economy,’’ World Bank Policy and Research Bulletin 10, no. 4 (October–December 1999): 1.

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on record, as soon as Islam emerged out of its tribality, of which I as a Europeanist know the European side rather more. George W. Bush, if he were literate, could tap the Chanson de Roland. Was it ever thus? I cannot know. Culture is its own explanations. Sayyid Qutb and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin tap into this too. If this intuition—that culture is its own explanations—is credited, then anthropological ideas of culture and Marxist ideas of ideology hang out together. That ‘‘Muslims’’ explain things in terms of ‘‘Islam’’ and ‘‘Americans’’ in terms of ‘‘freedom’’ begins then to make a different kind of sense. The fragility of both under stress can then move, perhaps, toward understanding. The impersonal narrative of globalization: capital-formation producing, as much as managing, its crisis, explained as the progression from absolute state b colony b imperialism b empire, is then less persuasive as the rational explanation of 9-11.15 The explanation is contained rather in the ideology of thinking oneself the proper shadow of the transcendental—hence ‘‘global’’—in a historical as well as contemporary sense. Thomas Aquinas wrenching Aristotle away from Ibn Rushd at the University of Paris in the thirteenth century is an example of this. This shadowy self-concept, unencumbered by history, but alive to visible injustice—military, political, and economic—is provided a semblance of access, speed, momentaneity by the Internet, producing a collectivity soldered by the intense male bonding of students living together, a political phenomenon well-known by all tertiary educators. It happens to soldiers too, of course, and guerrillas—but I have easier access to the foreign-student phenomenon. Through this access, I am trying to go toward these uncanny young men. If MSNBC is to be believed, the one who actually flew the plane into the tower was eighteen years old! When Terry Castle writes with embarrassment about her fixation on the young soldiers in the First World War, I perceive the risk-taking of a real response such as I too am attempting.16 No doubt the millennially imagined confrontation was present and communicated among the young men who executed the attack and who lie, unremembered, among the aggressively remembered twenty-eight hundred. Although common sense would tell us that, once embarked upon the plan, it was the dream itself that enchanted them, and the millennial confrontational imaginary became the deepest of deep background. 15. This is the general argument of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). 16. Terry Castle, ‘‘Courage, mon amie,’’ London Review of Books, April 4, 2002, 3–12.


Unremembered, yes. But when, in May 2002, New York presented a memorial, European and military in the spectacularity or visuality of its culture of mourning, it could not not welcome the seven hijackers who lie in that ground into the economy of Nature. There is no apartheid in the transcendental. I will now quote at some length from the article ‘‘Temple Desecration in Pre-Modern India’’ by Richard Eaton, published in Frontline.17 But first I want to mention a tiny but important detail that Sayad Mujtaba Ali recorded in his unpublished writings, that for centuries the Balkhi Afghans came to India to learn Farsi rather than go to Iran, and the major premise of Asia Before Europe, that the Indian Ocean rim was a much more important motor of cultural change than today’s ‘‘national or religious identity-’’ based thinking.18 It is also true that the connections between South Asian Islam, Iran, and Central Asia are historically strong. Thus, even if we want to accept Chomsky’s dismissal—they knew nothing of globalization—we can cite a cultural imaginary. Eaton writes of ‘‘the sweeping away of . . . prior political authority,’’ and continues: ‘‘[w]hen such authority was vested in a ruler whose own legitimacy was associated with a royal temple . . . that temple was normally looted, redefined, or destroyed, any of which would have had the effect of detaching a defeated [king] from the most prominent manifestation of his former legitimacy. Temples that were not so identified but abandoned by their royal patrons and thereby rendered politically irrelevant, were normally left unharmed.’’ ‘‘It would be wrong,’’ Eaton continues, ‘‘to explain this phenomenon by appealing to an essentialized ‘theology of iconoclasm’ felt to be intrinsic to the Islamic religion. . . . [A]ttacks on images patronized by enemy kings had been, from about the sixth century A.D. on, thoroughly integrated into . . . political behavior [in the area]. . . . In short, from about the sixth century on, images and temples associated with dynastic authority were considered politically vulnerable.’’ 19 17. Richard M. Eaton, ‘‘Temple Desecration in Pre-Modern India,’’ Frontline 17, no. 25 (December 9–22, 2000): 62–70. 18. Syed Mujtaba Ali, Works, vol. 7 (Kolkata: Mitra and Ghosh Publishers, 1974–). Kirti N. Chaudhuri, Asia Before Europe: Economy and Civilization of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 19. Eaton, ‘‘Temple Desecration,’’ 64–65. To understand why the distinction between ‘‘India’’ and ‘‘Afghanistan’’ is in this context spurious, see Martin W. Lewis, Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 213, 13, 14. A version of this argument has now been published in Centennial Review (forthcoming).

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I am not speaking of intended rational choice. I am speaking of a cultural imaginary producing ‘‘reason,’’ somewhat like the repeated marching band arrangement of the ‘‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’’ and the lavish use of African Americans in the preamble to the declaration of this altogether catachrestic ‘‘war.’’ It is possible to add to this by doing a riff on the notion of dynasty displaced into lineages of class-mobility in the US context. I will do no more now than represent the confrontation in September as the destruction of a temple—world trade and military power—with which a state is associated. It may not be a referential message about the inequity of an ideology of trade and arms at all; not an intended rational choice. And it helped that the buildings were tall, a fact not unconnected with the representation of power. It is certainly reflected on the other side in the Stonehenge-type projects, in the project that reflects twin beams of light as tall and thin as the erstwhile towers, ‘‘beacons of light as symbols of strength,’’ or builds a World Art Tower behind an exact replica of Tower One, a hollow square arch flanking the filled one. If the other side needs a temple, this side needs at least a word: terror. Something called ‘‘terror’’ is needed in order to declare a war on it—a war that extends from the curtailment of civil liberties to indefinite augmentation of military self-permission. Without the word terror, this range of things, alibied in the name of women, cannot be legitimized. I have been trying to open up that abstraction—‘‘terror’’—to figure out some possibilities. During these efforts, it has seemed increasingly clear to me that ‘‘terror’’ is the name loosely assigned to the flip side of social movements—extra-state collective action—when such movements use physical violence. (When a state is named a ‘‘terrorist state,’’ the intent implicit in the naming is to withold state status from it, so that, technically, it enters the category of ‘‘extra-state collective action.’’)20 ‘‘Terror’’ is, of course, also the name of an affect. In the policy-making arena, ‘‘terror’’ as social movement and ‘‘terror’’ as affect come together to provide a plausible field for group psychological speculation. The social movement is declared to have psychological identity. In other words, making terror both civil and natural provides a rationale for exercising psychological diagnostics, the 20. Former U.S. Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger did not know what New Social Movements were at the conference ‘‘Does America Have a Democratic Mission,’’ University of Virginia, March 19–21, 1998. The useless definition of terror is quoted in Chomsky, 9-11 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001), 54. Derrida has recently written an entire book on the possibility of rogue states (Voyous [Paris: Galilée, 2003]).


most malign ingredient of racism. I have neither the training nor the taste for such exercises. But I must still say that in the case of ‘‘terror’’—sliding imperceptibly into ‘‘terrorism’’—as social movement, the word is perhaps no more than an antonym—for ‘‘war,’’ which names legitimate violence, but also, paradoxically, for peace. And here we could wander in the labyrinth where war and peace become interchangeable terms, although the status of war as agent and peace as object never wavers. We have come to accept the oxymoron: ‘‘peacekeeping forces.’’ The United Nations High Commission for Refugees and Save the Children-UK, in a report of February 2002, asked peacekeeping missions to stop trafficking in women and girl children. Feminists agitate against the sexually rapacious behavior of ‘‘peacekeeping personnel.’’ 21 The scandal of rape within the US Army is now well known. At the same time, Barbara Crossette offers the conventional wisdom, in an article entitled ‘‘How to Put a Nation Back Together Again,’’ that ‘‘fastermoving armies are necessary.’’ 22 Here is the usual division between the various spheres of discourse, but they work within the same cultural imaginary, this time almost global: Conquering armies violate women. Where ‘‘terror’’ is an affect, the line between agent and object wavers. On the one hand, the terrorists terrorize a community, fill their everyday with terror. But there is also a sense in which the terrorist is taken to be numbed to terror, does not feel the terror of terror, and has become unlike the rest of us by virtue of this transformation. When the soldier is not afraid to die, s/he is brave. When the terrorist is not afraid to die, s/he is a coward. The soldier kills, or is supposed to kill, designated persons. The terrorist kills, or may kill, just persons. In the space between ‘‘terrorism’’ as a social movement and terror as affect, we can declare victory. Although civil liberties, including intellectual freedom, are curtailed, and military permissiveness exacerbated, although racial profiling deforms the polity and the entire culture redesigns itself for prevention, and although, starting on September 28, 2001, the UN Security Council adopts wide-ranging antiterrorism measures, we can still transfer the register to affect and say, ‘‘We are not terrorized, we have won.’’ And the old topos of intervening for the sake of women continues to be deployed. It is to save Afghan women from terror that we must keep the peace by force of arms. I want to distinguish the suicide bomber, the kamikaze pilot, from these received binaries. 21. UNHCR and Save the Children-UK, Note for Implementing and Operational Partners on Sexual Violence and Exploitation: The Experience of Refugee Children in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, February 2002. 22. Barbara Crossette, ‘‘How to Put a Nation Back Together Again,’’ New York Times, Week in Review Section, November 25, 2001, 3.

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Single coerced yet willed suicidal ‘‘terror’’ is in excess of the destruction of dynastic temples and the violation of women, tenacious and powerful residual. l l l l

These comments on suicide bombing have provoked so much hostility that I include here some words of explanation that I offered to Dr. Michael Bernet, in response to a specific query: I believe responsible humanities teaching strives at uncoercive rearrangement of desires in the student. An extreme violation of this responsibility is seen in groups such as Hamas or Islamic Jihad, which coercively rearrange desires until coercion seems identical with the will of the coerced. I, like many others, think that the conduct of these groups is tied to the extremist politics of the state of Israel. It must, however, be admitted that these groups are now out of control, not a little because it is not possible to credit any offer of ‘‘peace’’ as reliable. Those whose desires are rearranged so as to undertake suicide bombing are invariably the young, whose attitude to life is peculiarly vulnerable to such coercion. I am a pacifist, I cannot and do not condone violence, practiced by the state or otherwise. I therefore also believe that violence cannot be brought to an end by ruthless extermination. I believe that we must be able to imagine our opponent as a human being, and to understand the significance of his or her action. It is in this belief—not to endorse suicide bombing but to be on the way to its end, however remote— that I have tried to imagine what message it might contain. Of course this does not mean each suicide bomber has these specific thoughts in mind! Here, too, I think things are out of control and whole generations have been affected. Mine may therefore be seen as the counsel of despair, but certainly not as an endorsement of violence. It is convenient for the laws of war to distinguish between civilians and soldiers. It is just that there be law, but law is not justice. In view of justice and the discourse of the ethical, human life cannot be marked for death by positive law.


Single coerced yet willed suicidal ‘‘terror’’ is in excess of the destruction of dynastic temples and the violation of women, tenacious and powerful residual. It has not the banality of evil. It is informed by the stupidity of belief taken to extreme. It is we, who can no longer die young, who are banal, albeit with the banality of the merely quotidian. The Kantian sublime is, strictly speaking, and from the point of view of the spectator, for whom alone the sublime ‘‘is’’ sublime, stupid. The sublime is mindless. We bring it under something like control because ‘‘the rational vocation of our cognitive faculty’’ kicks in.23 If in what I now say you feel distaste, even rejection, you will be tasting the risk in response. But do not mistake this for Stockhausen’s aesthetic gush.24 To legitimize the largest number killed by diagnosing ‘‘evil empire’’ is no good either way. That too is to close off response. I am not suggesting that violence or the exercise of power, legitimized or delegitimized, is sublime in the colloquial sense. For me the word ‘‘sublime’’ (more than the German Erhabene, such is the force of English) has been forever marked by Kant. It names a structure: the thing is too big for me to grasp; I am scared; Reason kicks in by the mind’s immune system and shows me, by implication, that the big thing is mindless, ‘‘stupid’’ in the sense in which a stone is stupid, or the body is (OED sense 2). I call the big mindless thing ‘‘sublime.’’ I am also not suggesting that political analyses and resistances and, on another level, aid and human rights, are unnecessary. I am suggesting that if in the imagination we do not make the attempt to figure the other as imaginative actant, political (and military) solutions will not remove the binary which led to the problem in the first place. Hence cultural instruction in the exercise of the imagination. Even within this suggestion, I am not describing all the acts of September 11, 2001, as ‘‘sublime’’ in the Kantian sense. It is an imaginative exercise in experiencing the impossible—stepping into the space of the other— without which political solutions come drearily undone into the continuation of violence. To paraphrase Devi: ‘‘there are many to offer political analyses and solutions, but no one to light the fire.’’ Cultural instructions through the imagination in time of war is seen, at best, as aestheticization and, at worst, as treason. But that too is situational. 23. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 141. The Analytic of the Sublime goes from 128–212. 24. It was widely reported that the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen had, days after September 11, made remarks to journalists in Hamburg to the effect that the attack on the World Trade Center was a work of art. ‘‘Attacks Called Great Art,’’ New York Times, September 19, 2001, Section E, 3.

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Suicide bombing—and in this case the planes were living bombs— is a purposive self-annihilation, a confrontation between oneself and oneself—the extreme end of autoeroticism, killing oneself as other, in the process killing others. It is when one sees oneself as an object, capable of destruction, in a world of objects, so that the destruction of others is indistinguishable from the destruction of the self. The scary thing is that the destruction of the royal temple can be referenced as so transcendental a task that mere human lives become as nothing, theirs as mine. This is the moment one cannot, in principle, imagine—but no use covering that inability with that word again. We have no idea if these men had killed before—they don’t seem different from foreign students anywhere. We hear from those phone calls from the planes that one of them cut a passenger’s throat. It is a horrible detail. Was it to bring the aura of death into this ‘‘licensed lunacy,’’ not merely to think it and have it happen, but to pretend to have control over that peu profond ruisseau calomnié la mort? Whatever it was, this act of global confrontation was neither resistance nor multitudinous. There is no such thing as collective death. It cannot be punished, despite the efforts at due process. It cannot be condoned as a legitimate result of bad US policy abroad, as in the usual US-centered political analyses. Such a gesture matches the media overkill to ‘‘mourn’’ the dead with every possible sentimentality and thus attempt to contain the sublimity of Ground Zero. Many of us saw the second plane hit the second tower live (if that is the word) on that morning of September 11. That enclosed object, moving across a sunny sky quickly, with no special effects, hitting the tower and bursting into thick fire is ‘‘beyond Ate’’—beyond ‘‘the limit that human life can only briefly cross.’’ 25 Its unremarkable progress contained a collection of heterogeneous personal terror, connecting so desperately to transcendentality, that cannot be grasped. I am a pacifist; I cannot support violence rationally. But we must acknowledge the sublimity of terror, as in the inadequate name of a human affect beyond affect, rather than the catch-all name for any act of violence not authorized by the state. The second plane, hitting, as seen live, can be imagined within the structure of the Kantian sublime conceived as a limit to imagining. On May 21, 2002, on Late Show with David Letterman, Diane Sawyer kept saying, ‘‘Charlie [Charles Gibson, the other anchorperson] and I were in denial as we were commenting’’—and that denial is the moment in the structure described in the Analytic of the Sublime when the subject feels ‘‘displeasure 25. Jacques Lacan, ‘‘The Splendor of Antigone,’’ in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959– 1960: Seminar Book VII, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Routledge, 1992), 262–63.


from the inadequacy of the imagination.’’ 26 I was watching that channel. I have no memory of their ‘‘denial,’’ and that too computes. Commenting on the May 30, 2002, memorial for the removal of the last standing column of the World Trade Center, Richard Meyer said, ‘‘The moment I saw the second plane, I knew we were at war.’’ That too can be a moment in the structure of coping with the sublime. It is the moral will at its most restricted: I can destroy the thing that scares me by force of response: war is a caricature of what in us can respond. I have suggested that suicide bombing undoes the difference between the bomber and his or her enemy. And I have suggested that, behind the smoke screens, the definitive predication of terrorism was ‘‘violent extra-state collective action,’’ that a ‘‘terrorist state’’ disqualifies itself for stateship. Insofar as the United States makes its own rules as it expands its war on terrorism, it allows ‘‘terrorist states’’ to concentrate and legitimize their policies. I am thinking, of course, of Israel and India, but so-called preventive antiterrorism now spans a good part of the globe. It would be out of place here to offer accounts and analyses of such state terrorism. I hope you remember that I was lukewarm about the potted analyses that accompany each crisis. I will comment in closing on one isolated point for each case, points that relate to the question of public criticism—the training for ethics in the humanities. First, then, Palestine. If 9-11 was a boy thing, in the struggle against Israel in Palestine we encounter female suicide bombers. I do not think this is a gendered phenomenon. Suicidal resistance is a message inscribed in the body when no other means will get through. It is both execution and mourning, for both self and other, where you die with me for the same cause, no matter which side you are on, with the implication that there is no dishonor in such shared death. It is only the young whose desires can be so drastically rearranged. I have no sympathy for those who train the young in this way. It is the extreme case of cultural instruction—coercion at the full, simulating choice, imagination represented as revealed truth. And this is where the dialogue must start—between a humanities training trivialized here and in extremis there. It is the history of this failure of cultural instruction, recoded as triumph, that we must question, not the instruction itself. For that history, leading now to apartheid and unspeakable violence in their homeland, can be so narrativized as to persuade the young to die. The female suicide bomber, thus persuaded, does not make a gendered point. Put them over against those female warriors on CNN and you 26. Kant, Power of Judgment, 141.

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will see that in suicide bombing there is no recoding of the gender struggle. When the dust settles, and at the moment it does not seem likely that it will settle over anything but the ruins of Palestine, the gender divisions will perhaps settle into the same or similar lines. Bhubaneswari Bhaduri, the subaltern in ‘‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’’ was a woman who used her gendered body to inscribe an unheard message; the bomber who died with Rajiv Gandhi, also a woman, did not.27 (It is interesting that in the male imaginary, the female suicide bomber is gender-marked by the reproductive norm. I am thinking of The Terrorist, a film made by an Indian Tamil about Sri Lanka, and of The Cyclist, the brilliant novel by Viken Berberian, a brave attempt to imagine the inner world of the suicide bomber.)28 Even though I am trying to imagine suicide bombing without closing it off with the catch-all word ‘‘terror,’’ the real lesson for the young potential suicide bombers may be that their message will never be heard. Even if a terrifying number of children become suicide bombers, they will remain exceptional, even as suicide is always an exceptional death—an impossible phrase. The most pathetic and most powerful thing about suicide bombing is that, like the ghost dance, its success is that it cannot succeed. In the face of this, public criticism can only repeat, taking the risk of responding with the utmost banality: it is not worth the risk. I come, finally, to India. The conflict that emerged in the visuality of our everyday, in the context of the War on Terrorism, in the summer of 2002, was Kashmir. But if, in the Palestinian case, no one ever mentions that the West Bank is occupied territory, in the Indian case, the state of Gujarat, where genocidal violence against Muslim citizens is condoned by state and police, never makes it into the visualization of international public culture. Indeed, The Economist calls the Hindu attacks on Muslims in Gujarat ‘‘true but irrelevant.29 In closing this section, I want to cite these few words from a poignant piece by Harsh Mander—a former government official who resigned after writing this piece, which is available on the Internet.30 ‘‘I have never known a riot which has used the sexual subjugation of women so widely as an instrument of violence as in the recent mass bar27. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’’ in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313. 28. The Terrorist, directed by Santosh Sivan, 1998; Viken Berberian, The Cyclist (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002). 29. The Economist, June 1, 2002, 11. 30. Harsh Mander, ‘‘Cry, the Beloved Country: Reflections on the Gujarat Massacre,’’ http://www.sabrang.com/gujarat/statement/nv2.htm.


barity in Gujarat,’’ Mander writes. He then goes on to comment on the rule of law: As one who has served in the Indian Administrative Service for over two decades, I feel great shame at the abdication of duty of my peers in the civil and police administration. . . . The law . . . required them to act independently, . . . , impartially, decisively. . . . If even one official had so acted in Ahmedabad, she or he could have deployed the police forces and called in the army to halt the violence and protect the people in a matter of hours. No riot can continue beyond a few hours without the active connivance of the local police and magistracy. My piece describes the long-term effort that subtends such necessary and immediate decisions. At the end of his piece, Mander invokes the ethical by way of a story: I recall a story of the Calcutta riots, when Gandhi was fasting for peace. A Hindu man came to him, to speak of his young boy who had been killed by the Muslim mobs, and of the depth of his anger and longing for revenge. And Gandhi is said to have replied: If you really wish to overcome your pain, find a young [Muslim] boy, just as young as your son, . . . whose parents have been killed by Hindu mobs. Bring up that boy like you would your own son, but bring him up in the Muslim faith to which he was born. Only then will you find that you can heal your pain, your anger, and your longing for retribution. If so far I have urged the humanities to train the imagination so that the ethical interruption can postpone the attempt merely to know the other— even in Cultural Studies occupied with one’s ‘‘own culture’’—here the tables are turned. What is offered as the identity of the subject must be accessed in the imagination when every impulse is to repudiate it. It is no use saying, with the reverse fundamentalists, true Hinduism is not like this; or to exclaim, with the secularists, I am a secularist, I do not vote with these people. The toughest task is to imagine myself a Hindu, when everything in me resists, to understand what in us can respond so bestially, rather than merely to show cause, or to impose rules that will break, in every polity but a police state, unless prepared for by a sustained and uncoercive rearrangement of desires with moves learned from the offending culture. As the humanities instruct us to instruct, critical theory distinguishes the discriminations of a global culture dominating our pitifully local mind-sets.

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2 I taught at the University of Hawaii–Manoa in the spring of 2003. Part of the job was to deliver public lectures. I had proposed ‘‘Terror’’ in advance of arrival. By the time I spoke, Iraq had broken. The university was profoundly politicized. There was a small enclave of native Hawaiian students and faculty, there was Pearl Harbor and the military base—what one of them described as ‘‘weapons of mass destruction under the Turtle[-shaped island].’’ The protest carried a peculiar poignancy, since the military base was one of the largest employers of the Hawaiian underclass, in this place that had been forcibly annexed by ‘‘the Bayonet Constitution’’ of 1887.31 I could not recycle the initial script. I have attempted to indicate its embedding in this short second section. In the midst of what seemed to be a disastrous engagement with Iraq, I went back to reading Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘‘Beyond Vietnam,’’ the 1967 speech he delivered at Riverside Church in New York, a minute’s walk from where I live now. Again and again in the text of the speech, I found Dr. King exhorting us to ‘‘speak for those who have been designated as our enemies,’’ because ‘‘the human spirit [does not] move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world.’’ ‘‘How do they judge us?’’ King asked. ‘‘When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered,’’ he said. It was first in Hawaii that I was able to connect my efforts to imagine the suicide bomber with these exhortations. I spoke there of the fact that this resonance with Dr. King’s effort had received hostile responses from various persons and journals and this in itself was cause for alarm. I referred to the speech given in Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on April 30, 1967, which contained these powerful words: ‘‘Don’t let anybody make you think that God chose America as His divine messianic force to be—a sort of policeman of the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment, and it seems that I can hear God saying to America: ‘You are too arrogant! If you don’t change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power.’’’ I wondered—even as I repeated the apologia offered to Dr. Michael Bernet—if these words applied to the curtailment of civil liberties, including intellectual freedom, the exacerbation of military permissiveness, the deformation of the polity through racial profiling, and the re31. On the Bayonet Constitution, see Jon Kamakawiwoole Osorio, Dismembering Lahui: The History of the Hawaiian Nation Until 1887 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002).


designing of the entire culture for the prevention of autoimmunity, of which I spoke in section 1. I pointed out that we are now so used to the idea that it is the United States’ responsibility as the new Empire to police the world that we quibble over containment or war, war over oil as opposed to a just war, assassination as opposed to regime change. I shared with that audience my comments, made to the then provost of Columbia University, after listening to a crazy debate on Iraq between Alan Dershkowitz and George P. Fletcher: I felt that I could not actually ask only a question—to an extent the response could not come from what the debaters had presented. It was pretty unsettling to hear ‘‘It is sometimes better to do the right thing rather than the legal thing.’’ This is of course the grounds for civil disobedience, but precisely because it is civil. We cannot speak of states operating in this way. When it comes to state practice, it turns to vigilantism, precisely because there is no authority to ‘‘disobey.’’ I was also a bit unnerved that there were hands up in the room for condoning the right ‘‘to kill.’’ Even one hand up for this is unnerving—since we were not speaking of capital punishment, which I do oppose, but which at least can be discussed within an idea of law. It is not correct to think that, because ‘‘inalienable’’ rights have been again and again violated, they do not exist. Surely, the difference between having torture warrants and having an individual policeman decide that torture was okay is that the latter can be punished if discovered! The problem with deciding in favor of legalized targeted assassination is surely that if a covert targeted assassination is discovered, then, at least, in perhaps a utopian vision of the rule of law, such a thing can be retroactively punished? It was troublesome to see how a debate presumably on our right to invade Iraq turned into such a rhetorical tirade against Palestine. (Here I would want to use stronger words.) The repetitive condemnation of Palestinians showed no ability to imagine them in a material context where Israel figured as anything other than ‘‘a good figure.’’ This is where George Fletcher’s idea in Romantics at war, that romanticism was simply a variety of irrationalism, may be questionable.32 We must call the glass half full rather than half empty. Romanticism was a strike for a robust imagination—for me, it is summarized in Shelley’s remark, precisely 32. George P. Fletcher, Romantics at War: Glory and Guilt in the Age of Terrorism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).

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in the context of the beginnings of capitalism, that ‘‘we want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know.’’ 33 It is the ability to imagine the other side as another human being, rather than simply an enemy to be psyched out, that is the greatest gift of romanticism. What I was saying the other day about the humanities comes in here, because this is the terrain where a solid grounding in the humanities allows one to think the spirit rather than the letter of the law, and not think of the imagination as mere unreason. Although I do think that Mike Davis, in his new book Dead Cities, is somewhat over the top, he certainly does have a good deal of documented material that would not allow us to think that we are above the law because we will never be irresponsible with weapons of mass destruction.34 Not to mention Agent Orange! I grant that I am somewhat outside the grounds of the debate because historical experience makes me very uncomfortable with the pre-comprehended assumption on both sides that America should think of itself as having an imperial mandate. I admit that George Fletcher’s repeated assertion that there are no good or bad states, but equal states, can be read as a questioning of this pre-comprehension. It troubled me then that there were student hands up in that Law School auditorium condoning murder, albeit to be carried out by the state. This too is a coercive rearrangement of desire. And such a possibility makes it necessary to call upon the robust imagination, once again, to undo the binary opposition between bad cop and good cop—and remember that they are both cops. The impulse to help by enforcing human rights, by giving things, giving money, commodifying literacy, ignoring genderconsciousness, has a relationship with the impulse to kill. I quote Kant: ‘‘Although . . . there can still be legally good actions, [if] . . . the mind’s attitude is . . . corrupted at its root . . . the human being is designated as evil.’’ 35 Today, with the endorsement of the assassination of Sheikh Yassin, the backbone of the rule of law is broken. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Christian, ‘‘the field of his moral vision’’ 33. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘‘The Defence of Poetry,’’ in Shelley’s Critical Prose, ed. Bruce R. McElderry (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), 8. 34. Mike Davis, Dead Cities, and Other Tales (New York: New Press, 2002). 35. Immanuel Kant, ‘‘Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,’’ in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 78. Hereafter, subsequent pages are cited parenthetically in the text.


was religious, and he was by profession a man of God. It was his reliance upon the transcendental that gave him his strength. In ‘‘Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,’’ Kant investigates if a secularism is possible without some intuition of the transcendental that cannot be reasonably enforced. His answer is ‘‘no,’’ because mere reason is by nature unwilling to a moral working through (Bearbeitung) (95). It merely likes to patch a minus with a plus, push legally good actions with no attention to the mind’s corrupt attitudes. Kant has the courage, in this text, to compare the bloody violence of the Aboriginal to the bloodless malice of the academic scene. In the house of mere reason, he cannot allow himself to move from determinant to reflexive judgment, to philosophize without the Aboriginal as human example, as he had done in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, two years before.36 In the same way, we would say that the heavenly rewards, sounding so medieval in English translation (as a translator I have something to say about this), that we associate with Islamic ‘‘terror’’ may be compared with the calculative or carrot-and-stick push-and-pull with which the management of peace and war is undertaken by the new imperial interests: here a human rights violation, there an economic sanction, as it were. Kant calls this titfor-tat approach to salvation Nebengeschäfte, generally translated ‘‘secondary tasks,’’ relegating the work of the ethical state to the moral will alone. I believe Jacques Derrida is right in suggesting that a persistent critique of these Nebengeschäfte, calculative reason standing in for moral labor, must be taken as a primary task in a multicultural and multifaith world.37 This task is absolutely crucial today. Those sanitized secularists who are hysterical at the mention of religion are quite out of touch with the world’s peoples and have buried their heads in the sand. Class-production has allowed them to rationalize and privatize the transcendental, and they see this as the welcome telos of everybody everywhere, without historical preparation for this particular class-episteme. Radical alterity, an otherness that reason needs but which reason cannot grasp, can be given many names. God in many languages is its most recognizable name. Some have given it the name of ‘‘man,’’ some ‘‘nation,’’ ‘‘nature,’’ ‘‘culture.’’ Kant’s good faith was reflected in his acknowledgement that mere reason ‘‘needs’’ the transcendental. It is this good 36. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 26–29 n. 32. 37. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Faith and Knowledge,’’ in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2001), 42–101.

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faith that allows our more stringent position, recognition of a repeatedly detranscendentalized radical alterity, to coexist, however discontinuously, with faith itself, always watchful for the calculative. These are untimely words in a world of urgency. But times are always urgent and cultural preparation—now reflected in the teaching of the humanities—is always for the long haul. 3 I had begun making the connection to Kant and that led me to secularism. The disclaimer in the paragraph below is a continuation of the unwillingness to recycle that had set in in Hawaii, I think. Our session at the MLA had been set at the same time as a memorial panel for Edward W. Said, who had died three months earlier. I was unhappy to be absent from that session and realized how much my comments were a supplement to Said’s magisterial work on the secular critic, who resembles the scholar, the Gelehrte, the hero of the Kantian Enlightenment, in being ‘‘oppositional’’ to every system, the individual who resists systems.38 I wanted to look at ‘‘ordinary people.’’ Here, then, is that third text, with its recalcitrant opening: This is not a polemic against the current state of war. There are others more capable of offering informed polemic. It is also the case that, given the indifference and arrogance of the war-makers, the recitation of polemic in non-policy-oriented conferences has limited usefulness. Further, I do not believe stockpiling of details about what is obviously true—that politics is misrepresented as religion by war-makers when the occasion suits— will do anything for secularism. Secularism is not a mind-set—it is an abstraction that must be protected. It is no use thickening it with affect, like narrative ‘‘new math.’’ No. Located as we are at the university, it is both the university and the secular that we need to rethink. The university is in the world. And the world’s universities are, no doubt, of the ‘‘European model [which], after a rich and complex medieval history, has become prevalent . . . over the last two centuries in states of a democratic type.’’ 39 Yet that structure does not operate everywhere with the same degree of efficiency, the same degree of informed consent or critique, 38. Edward W. Said, ‘‘Secular Criticism,’’ in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 1–30; ‘‘Gods That Always Fail,’’ in Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 120. 39. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘The University without Condition,’’ in Without Alibi, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 202.


with the same quality or connection with the state. As the best in the United States think more and more of world governance, in the name of sustainable development and ethical globalization, and human rights—to oppose the murderous collusion of the military and the economic—in the context of world governance, then—we must think of all of these different kinds of universities, rather than just generalize from the universities we know, as if the world were one. If we move through the spectrum, the ideas we will see circulating among students and teachers will be ‘‘cultural identity,’’ ‘‘cultural difference,’’ ‘‘national sovereignty,’’ ‘‘minority politics.’’ More often than not, these issues shade off into varieties of religious freedom. I hasten to add that this is not invariably the case. The historical place and nature of state religions are of course important. But since an active culture is the least tangible part of human behavior, the signs that spell ‘‘culture’’ for a mobilized collectivity are often indistinguishable from signs that can easily spell ‘‘religion.’’ Religion in this sense is the ritual markers of how we worship and how we inscribe ourselves in sexual difference. These are performative gestures of being-human, needing no referential ‘‘evidence,’’ being between nature and super-nature, a precarious place that needs such semiosis constantly. It is a place that captures and controls the possibility of the transcendental by writing it as that which is worshiped. We have seen that Kant dismisses this ground-level institutionality of religion, synonymous, as it were, with the automatic negotiations of culture, as Nebengeschäfte. This eighteenth-century point of view is still around in those who preach ‘‘the true religion has been hijacked into something terrible’’ or ‘‘a few bad examples are corrupting the whole.’’ There is nothing necessarily wrong with those sentiments. But if we are thinking secularism, we must come to terms with this perennial level of something that we might as well call religion, but just as well call culture, which is always ready to bite because it is a species of proto-public sphere, in Said’s word an ‘‘affiliation-in-filiation,’’ for brothers and sisters of brothers, honorary brothers. It is neither possible nor desirable to be precise here. And Samuel Huntington is so wrong because he performs a precise identification between religion and culture.40 In this imprecise and imbricated normality, it is not a question, strictly speaking, of belief, but of something like linguistic competence. And the competence is called on, demanding different levels of semantic negotiations, in different psychopolitical situations. Gendering 40. Samuel P. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Touchstone, 1997).

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plays a strong role here, with different levels of acquiescence, even consensuality. Indeed, it can be said that this is the groundrock of the semantics of gender, the weave of permissible narratives. The preparation for secularism is political: to work for a world where religion can shrink to this mundane normality. In order to sustain such a world, assuming its establishment, it is the skills we teach in the humanities that we need. I am speaking, of course, of the skills of reading, of catching the generic difference between registers of language, with the hope of a ‘‘setting to work’’ to meet the world in which we live, in order to read Martin Luther King Jr.’s example of one who so loved his enemies that he died for them as a narrative, singular and unverifiable. It should be clear from my description of the situation of religion that secularism—which I will define in a moment—is a persistent critique; a persistent setting to work to recognize language as system rather than ground for belief. If we are to keep working for such a world, we must partially (only partially) undo the lesson of the last few European centuries and massively redo the program of disenfranchised histories. It sounds pretty scary put this way. But if we think of it as a collective enterprise that we undertake in the classroom, it need not work that way. If the signs that spell ‘‘culture’’ for a collectivity are often indistinguishable from signs that can easily spell ‘‘religion,’’ this can also be true of a ‘‘culture’’ that fetishizes mere reasonableness. In its most sublime mode, Kant shows this in ‘‘Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason.’’ I have spoken of this text in passing. Let me spend a few moments on it now. Although he made an attempt to show that all religions tended toward dramatizing the role reason must play in order to ensure an ethical collectivity, there was no doubt in Kant’s mind that Christianity is ‘‘the first true church’’ (181). This conviction, that the judeo-christian is the secular religion, is the prejudice that still rides us and is only legitimized by reversal, as in Sayyid Qutb’s work on Islam. If the judeo-christian is seen as the religion of reason, de-transcendentalized into secularism, that is also a description of capturing and controlling the possibility of the transcendental as that which is worshiped, the characteristic of religion-as-culture that I advanced above. My point is that, whatever your politics or your religion, the place of reason in whatever secularism might mean remains implacable. If reason is to be our ally, and there is no compromise on that one, it cannot be fetishized, as in the most common version of secularism, laundered judeo-


christianity. Today’s soft option, ‘‘teaching tolerance,’’ is of course a good thing. But as Kant’s real effort at tolerance two centuries ago, at the end of ‘‘Mere Reason,’’ shows us, tolerance allows you to de-transcendentalize all other religions but the religion-culture language that governs your own idiom. Basically, it is the same problem as with cultural relativism. Tolerance, such an easy virtue in theory, is difficult to practice. It is, at best, a private virtue. A ‘‘tolerant’’ state is a secular state. We are talking the juridico-legal, not the psychological. It flourishes best when religion is detranscendentalized into something like linguistic competence, which is most easily done in the absence of the need to mobilize, not when it is privatized by a particular class. It is clear, in other words, that the two pieces of machinery bequeathed to us by the European eighteenth century—the separation of church and state and the separation of the public and the private—are too race- and class-specific and indeed gender-specific to hold up a just world. Privatization of the transcendental works for a handful. Our world shows us that secularism is not an episteme. It is a faith in reason in itself and for itself, protected by abstract external structures—the flimsiest possible arrangement to reflect the human condition: under the circumstances, I invite you to think of secularism as an active and persistent practice, an accountability, of keeping the structures of agency clear of belief as faith. Secularism is too rarefied, too existentially impoverished to take on the thickness of a language. It is a mechanism to avoid violence that must be learned as mere reasonableness. It is as thin as an ID card, not as thick as ‘‘identity.’’ What role can we play in promoting the practice of secularism rather than simply ‘‘being secular’’? Think of the role religious belief has in fact come to play in the contemporary multicultural university, and you will see that ‘‘being secular’’ is often a matter of preserving the letter of secularism. What I am going to suggest is not going to insist that there is some enlightened spirit of secularism for which we ought to initiate new conversion rites, but that we ought to acknowledge that secularism is only ever in the letter, and that we ought to train fiercely to protect it as such. No religion has a special privilege to it. (At the 2003 Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association, I was fortunate enough to receive many proofs of resonance. One of the most important came from my old friend Phil Lewis, who commented that this was my most important contribution to the thinking of a broad-based secularist practice: that it was only ever ‘‘in the letter.’’ ‘‘But,’’ said Phil, ‘‘it will be difficult for people to understand, Gayatri.’’ I think the training that is

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now required is for the sake of this understanding, that secularism is a set of abstract reasonable laws that must be observed to avoid religious violence.) At this point, it should also be clear that any assertion of the ‘‘universalism’’ of reason-based secularism is suspect for me because it finesses the fact that such assertions are based on the assumption that the university—the place designated for the training in deep subjective change—is not only an institution of class-mobility, but of a specifically European-style class-mobility. However European the model of the modern university may be, our commitment to multiculturalism resists that scenario. Indeed, even the description of the forum at the MLA reflected that in its goal of presenting ‘‘visions of the contemporary university that go beyond the Europe–North American axis.’’ It is precisely the figure of ‘‘the universal secular intellectual’’ that will no longer suffice for what the university must produce today. It is in order to think the alternative that I turn to Kant, for he was the philosopher who gave the best articulation to the universal secular intellectual as produced by the university: it is when a scholar writes for all times and all places that he is enlightened. For singular individuals of our generation, that is still a noble ideal, and that is where I have placed Said’s thinking of secular criticism. Yet accompanying Kant’s wonderful statement about publishing comes exhortations to be obedient on the job where we would expect a statement of public freedoms. If we look at Kant’s philosophical writings, especially ‘‘Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,’’ written at the end of his life, we will see that Kant’s idea of a common ethical life—a gemeines Wesen for which the translation ‘‘public sphere’’ would be altogether inadequate—is based not on the separation of the public and the private but on the fact that all human beings have the same reason and therefore the goal of humanity is collective. (The church, which is a public institution, also messes with the private.) As I have tried to argue, it is upon the universality of reason that the promise of secularism is also based. Because Kant was deeply aware of the limits of reason, he asked himself if it was possible to forge a species of what we might as well call secularism, which would incorporate intuitions of the transcendental. Let us see how he solved his problem and what we, who must be fair to our debt to Kant and yet must undo him, can learn from him. To begin with, although reason is one, and indeed that is the ground of ethical commonality, Kant fractures that unity, rather more than we do when we put our blind faith in secularism as we understand it. (Kant himself always asserted that the various reasons were different forms of appear-


ance of the same reason. What I am describing here can take that on board.) Between the fractured functions of reason, Kant establishes a skewed relationship. Pure reason, of which Kant is most suspicious, is the highest function of reason. And mere reason, which is what we work with every day and which can only be accountable—zurechnungfähig rather than responsible— is inimical to moral labor. Therefore, in describing how we would philosophize the moral in pure reason, Kant asks us, literally, to make room for— einräumen—the effects of grace. If this is too Eurocentric, it is because I need to question the reading of Kant that is used to justify world governance.41 There is a certain degree of self-confidence in such justifications, whereas Kant’s relentless honesty makes him shackle reason. In the spatial institution of pure reason, then, we must make room for ‘‘the effects of grace.’’ And, in the last section of this last ‘‘critique,’’ where he is speaking of world governance, with repeated theological references (since he is fighting the theological faculty), he insists that a global institution based on ethical commonness of being is impossible. The ethical cannot be immediately institutionalized. I learn many of my ways of reading the past from Marx, and this is where I want to read Kant as Marx read Aristotle, with admiration but with the historical acknowledgement that he could not imagine the value-form. Even within his brilliantly fractured model of the oneness of reason, Kant spoke of ‘‘effect of grace’’ because he could not imagine a European-style university where the theology faculty was not dominant. We have to run with the revolutionary force of the word ‘‘effect,’’ clear out of the theological into the aesthetic. ‘‘Effect’’ comes as close as Kant can get to de-transcendentalizing Grace. Grace is caught in the figure of something like a metalepsis—the effect of an effect. Since pure reason—or indeed any kind of reason—cannot know the cause, all that is inscribed is an effect. Hannah Arendt commented on the political potential of Kant’s thinking of the aesthetic.42 What I am proposing links up with that thought. Most of us are familiar with the slightly off-key English translation of the aesthetic: 41. It would require a great deal of space and time to support this statement adequately. Suffice it to refer to the close of the document signed by Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas in the Frankfurter Allgemeine on May 31, 2002. Derrida’s position on Kant is altogether more nuanced, as evidenced by his many writings on Kant throughout his career. 42. Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

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purposiveness without purpose. We know that Kant tells us that the aesthetic gives practice to the faculty that can represent without objective concepts. Then, ever the thinker of checks and balances, in the Third Critique, Kant straps in the tendency of the imagination to shoot too far by emphasizing the task not of reason but of understanding. In ‘‘Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,’’ Kant implicitly, and to a large extent without acknowledgement, shifts the task of representation-without-concept—figuration—to the figuring of Grace as nearmetalepsis—unverifiable effect of an effect—to a parergon or outside-work of pure reason. It is not understanding that is now a check on the Imagination, as it was in the Third Critique. It is figuration that supplements mere reason’s calculative moral laziness. I apologize for the abstruseness of this last paragraph. Universalist multiculturalism would go down much better. But bear with me for just a few more pages. In support of my reading, I offer the fact that ‘‘Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason’’ is an extended allegorical or dis-figuring reading of the New Testament—a species of liberation theology. And I am now going to make a suggestion that I hope won’t rattle you. We will go back to suicide bombing. Liberation theology works because it literalizes the metaphorology of a religious culture. Suicide bombing works the same way. I am not equating the two, nor am I endorsing either. The only thing they share is bad gender politics. Over the past few years, I have been trying to imagine suicide bombing because I am convinced that to dismiss it as pathological, murderous, or aberrant is to speak from the positions I have already discussed. Have you ever heard Palestinian mothers lament the transformation of their sons and daughters to suicide bombers by the current situation? This is what I was speaking of at the outset when I said that the ever-accessible bilinguality between religion and culture as idiom becomes mobilized in situations. If liberation theology mobilizes by literalizing the metaphor, in the case of suicide bombing we see the recoding of religious narrative as referential in the narrowest sense. But training in the humanities does neither of these two moves— it teaches us to learn from the singular and the unverifiable. If the university is to be secular, it requires a sustained epistemic effort that can only come from the humanities. The idea that secularism can be supported by training in political science and law alone belongs to privative disciplinary formations, where the subject’s control is customarily left unquestioned. It


is the humanities that can provide continuing practical instruction in detranscendentalizing the radically other—re-inventing grace as necessary metalepsis—a lesson learned by undoing the prophet of that earlier style.43 The humanities must learn to de-trivialize themselves and to stake their suitable place at the university of this troubled century. I am utterly appalled by conservative young colleagues who insist with amazing insularity on teaching ‘‘only literary skills’’—what are they?—because the students arrive untrained; as the world breaks around them. If we want to take up the challenges of the twenty-first century, we must also learn languages. The simplified reading I have offered of Kant would be impossible from even the best translations into English. And we must not look for the vicissitudes of the translation for the word ‘‘secular’’ as applied to states and societies in ‘‘the rest of the world.’’ No. The task is to find something like the ‘‘secular/transcendental’’ binary in the many languages of the world rather than offer abstruse translations of the English or the metropolitan words. Din aur dunya and jagatik o pamarthik are the two I work with as candidates for undoing: the two major religions of India. Indeed, I came up with the definition of religion as ritual markers of how we worship—ki korey thakur pujo kara hoy—as I was speaking to a rural woman in West Bengal on December 16, a barefoot teacher who was completely incapable of explaining the lesson on religion written in the elementary school textbook. I close as I began, exercising my institutional validation as a teacher of narrative. I open Baby No-Eyes, a novel by the Maori writer Patricia Grace.44 My friend and colleague Carolyn Sinavaiana helped me teach this book and gave an impressive account of the Maori worldview that acknowledged not the distinction between public and private but rather a circulatory commonness among all its members. I mention above Kant’s notion of the ethical common being and the oneness of reason. As I argued about Buchi 43. Derrida had warned in ‘‘Différance’’ that an effect without a cause would lead to a first cause. Kant’s near-metalepsis of grace still has God in the offing, although Kant is careful to bind this possibility in every way, one of the most important being the discussion of the hypothetical use of reason (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Paul Guyer [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 590–604). Derrida’s argument would be that to locate the effect of grace in texts would not necessarily invoke a causeless cause (Derrida, ‘‘Différance,’’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982], 17). This, put another way, is the de-transcendentalization of the radically other, the causeless cause, the persistent effort of a training in the humanities. 44. Patricia Grace, Baby No-Eyes (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998), 293.

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Emecheta’s rewriting of the Enlightenment some years ago, these characteristics of Kant’s thought allow it to be pliable outside its European provenance.45 But what it remained for me to point out was that the last chapter of the novel ended at a university where the newest Maori learns to ‘‘Try Opposite,’’ the most succinct lesson in the imagination moving away from identity as reference. If Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a novel about the shift from Africa to African-America, this novel is on the cusp from the move from Aotearoa to New Zealand. It is upon such historical changes that the persistent effort at keeping the university secular—by persistently de-transcendentalizing the radically other into a space of effect, persistent acknowledgement of religio/culture as idiom rather than ground of belief—is placed into the hands of the pedagogy and scholarship of the humanities.

45. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘‘Interview with Jane Gallop,’’ in Polemic: Critical or Uncritical, ed. Jane Gallop (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).

Sayyid Qutb’s fiqh al-waqii, or New Realist Science

Ronald A.T. Judy

No reader of al-Adāla al-ijtimāīya fil-Islām (Social Justice in Islam) can help but remark the pronounced way in which Sayyid Qutb begins his earliest effort at elaborating the conceptual basis for an Islamist resistance to classical liberalism and its heirs with a near total disregard for the complex history of Islamic thought’s efforts to grapple with the question of divine immanence.1 It is true that there are far more recurrences of explicit reference to divinity (uluhīya) in the sixth and last edition, published in 1964, than in the preceding five, whose publication record runs from 1949 to 1958. Nonetheless, those later additions of the term merely make more explicit and emphatic what was already fully in play in the original 1949 edition, which is that uluhīya is immanent in every particular of existence. This attention to divinity is not, however, as a problematic of legitimate knowledge or 1. Sayyid Qutb, Al-Adāla al-ijtimāīya fil-Islām, 1st ed. (Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1949). Henceforth, this work is referred to in the essay as Social Justice in Islam and cited parenthetically as SJ. All translations are my own and are based primarily on this edition, with the occasional inclusion of variations taken primarily from the sixth edition published in 1964 by Matbaāt Isa al-Babī al-Halabī wa-shurukauhu. boundary 2 31:2, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Ronald A.T. Judy.


authentic faith—that is, it is neither a topic of doctrinaire apologetics and systemic elaboration, as it was for ilm-ul-kalām (rational theology), nor a constellation of systematic contemplations on the workings of inner faith, as it was for Sufism. Instead, it is an aspect, albeit a key one, of a fundamental comprehensive concern with Islam as a historical system of life. In that concern, divinity is not a mystery commanding contemplation or a question fostering speculation; it is a doctrinal point of departure that enables the articulation of a complex system of thought and praxis. Divinity is the principal institution of the historical Islamic system (niẓām). This is why William Shepard discerns in the multiple editions of Social Justice in Islam published after 1949 an increased theocentrism that foregrounds the history of the doctrine of divine sovereignty while disregarding the history of speculation on the concept of divinity itself. Shepard offers this reading in support of a theory of development, by which account Qutb’s concept of divine sovereignty becomes increasingly radical in response to textual influence—particularly Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi’s Al-Muṣṭalahāt al-arbaa fil-Islām (The Four Key Terms in Islam)—and as a consequence of Qutb’s active involvement with the political movement al-Ikhwān-ul-Muslimūn just before the 1952 Egyptian revolution, which eventually led to his repeated prolonged imprisonment and torture by the Nasser regime and ultimately to his execution in 1966. Adhering to this theory, it is possible through textual analysis of the sequential editions of Social Justice in Islam to expose the way Qutb’s concept of theocentrism developed from being merely the point of departure for the elaboration of a theory of social justice in 1949 into a prominent theory of political power by 1964. Despite the care taken with this exposition, however, what Shepard’s reading draws attention to—in fact, what it succeeds in describing—is Qutb’s increasingly emphatic reiteration of theocentrism as the principal concept of a system of material political power. For example, in the 1949 edition, the second chapter, ‘‘Tabīya aladāla al-ijtimāīya fil-Islām’’ (‘‘The Nature of Social Justice in Islam’’) states: One begins the serious research of Islam by clearly understanding its general foundational conception about the totality of the universe, life and humanity before considering its views on government and finance, or the relations between nations and individuals, etc. Certainly, all of these derive from this totality concept and cannot be adequately understood without a profound and correct understanding of it. . . . Islam comprehends the nature of the relationship between the creator and creation, between humanity, the physical universe, and life,

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as well as the relationship between humanity and itself, between the individual and the collective and the entirety of human aggregates, and between generations of [humans]. All of this begins with a total concept whose outline is readily discernible in the processes of the [various] branches of knowledge and detailed expositions [of thought]. This is the philosophy of Islam. (SJ, 21–22) The first of these paragraphs is amended in the 1964 edition to read: ‘‘One begins the serious research of Islam by clearly understanding its general foundational conception about divinity, the totality of the universe, life, and humanity.’’ This additional reference to divinity still does not change the orientation of the research, which is to understand the historical institutions of Islam as a system that derives from a first principle; although it does spell out more explicitly that divinity is the principal aspect of this principle. The subsequent iterations in the sixth edition of the emphatic statement that divinity is the focus of the Islamic principle of total absolute unity of existence—for example, the text adds the terms rubūbīyah (divinity or divine lordship), manhaj rabbānī (divinely ordained methodology), niẓām ulIslām-ur-rabbānī (the divinely ordained system of Islam)—are in fact little more than an emphasis of what was already stated in the 1949 edition, where Qutb asserts, ‘‘As for the relationship between the Creator and creation (the physical universe, life, and humankind) it is latent in the force of the word; it is the immediate will from which the entirety of created things issue: ‘Verily, when He wills a thing, his command is ‘‘Be,’’ and it is.’ 2 Accordingly, there is no mediation between the Creator and the creature in force or substance. All existence emanates immediately from His perfect absolute will; and by His immediate perfect absolute will existence is sustained, ordered, and dynamic’’ (SJ, 23). Theocentrism was always the governing concept of Social Justice in Islam, from the first to the sixth edition, and it was always foregrounded as the principal concept of a system of material political power predicated on absolute universal divine sovereignty—tauḥīd-ul-hākimīya. The increasingly emphatic reiteration of this predication in the last three editions is what brings this early articulation of Qutb’s Islamist project in line with his mature ideology as expressed in Maalim fi aṭ-ṭarīq, in which he pronounces the generalized apostasy of all current Muslim states and their cooperative citizenry—a judgment known as takfir, which has been referenced by presentday Islamist movements such as Takfir wa Hijra, whose members assassi2. Quran, Sura Ya Sin: 82.


nated President Anwar Sadat in 1980, and FIS, which engaged in a bloody campaign of insurgency against the whole of Algerian society in 1992 in order to legitimate campaigns of destructive violence against Muslim states and populations. There is something else, even more significant, that is elided in Shepard’s theory of development, and that is the way Qutb begins Social Justice in Islam by elaborating a genealogy of the historical institution of Christianity in Europe. The title of the first chapter, ‘‘Ad-Dīn wa al-mujtama bayn al-masiḥīya wa al-Islām’’ (‘‘Religion and Society, Between Christianity and Islam’’), provides a clear indication of the purpose of this genealogy, which is twofold. On the one hand, the purpose is to challenge the practice by modern Muslim states and society of adopting wholesale Western principles, systems, and legal structures—Qutb explicitly refers to Europe, America, and Russia as the particular sources of these—in order to solve their ‘‘corrupt social reality’’ (SJ, 5), while at the same time disregarding any of the solutions that might be available from the intellectual and spiritual heritage of Islam. In this wholesale procurement of either democratic, socialist, or communist principles, Islam is proclaimed as the official religion of state, but with the understanding that religion is a private affair that does not govern or otherwise effect the politics of government or general finance. Nor do any of these things have a place in religion. Qutb’s charge is not merely that this radical distinction between religion and politics, which is ‘‘foreign to the nature and history of Islam,’’ is adopted, but that it is adopted with total ignorance of its genealogy, of ‘‘its origins or beginnings, and without ever knowing its foundations or well-spring’’ (SJ, 6). Recalling the conceptual framework of the institutional history of Europe is merely a pretext, however, for what is the main purpose of Qutb’s genealogy, which is to deconstruct Western political philosophy’s distinction between state and religion with its postulate that religion is a wholly private matter, protected by law but also impervious to the law. What Qutb offers as a history of European Christianity turns out to be a historical criticism of European secularism. More precisely, the aim is to reveal that classical liberalism’s postulate of individual liberty has its ultimate origins in a misconception of Allah and the world that is the constitutive idea of Pauline Christianity. And that is the idea of personal salvation through the resurrected Christ. In Qutb’s analysis, Paul’s project of Christianity is recognized as superseding the divide between the Hellenic and Judaic world, between pagan cosmology and revealed law, with the idea of personal salvation through the resurrected Christ. The institutional expression of this is Paul’s


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concept of apostolic knowledge, which is fundamentally and irreducibly subjective and personal—the truth of resurrection as the Christ-event of redemption was revealed to Paul on the road to Damascus. The absolute subjectification of knowledge of truth as personal revelation logically and historically yields the concept eternal election and the distinction between divine will and the world, which is coincidental with the distinction between the law as basis of right society and the salvation of man’s immortal soul as an event of grace. This is the fatal error constitutive of European Christendom, according to which the sphere of faith, which belongs to religion, is impenetrable by the force of law, which belongs to sovereign worldly power, and the sphere of law is a potential contaminant to faith. The subsequent formation of Western Christendom as a domain constituted on the basis of two heterogeneous dominions—the secular dominion of Roman and feudal law, and the religious dominion of church canon law—establishes the pattern of social and political development in Western Europe that culminates in terms of a dialectical struggle between the secular and the religious, whose synthesis is the modern secular state, in which religion is restricted to the private realm of personal life and fancy. The summary history of European Christianity proffered in Social Justice in Islam pays scant attention to the Augustinian elaboration of eternal election into a history of the career of the two cities. Nor does it address in any explicit coherent way Calvin’s systemization of that election into a system of Reformation theological polity. Nevertheless, Qutb’s account recognizes that the conceptual principals of Europe’s secular modernity are indissolubly linked with its historical institutions of power and knowledge, particularly the juridico-theological. Registering the full significance of Bacon’s postulate that the realization of any organization of knowledge is contingent upon its having a determinate relation to power, Qutb understood that the establishment of scientific knowledge Bacon heralded attended to the formation of the modern imperialist European nation-state as an instrument of its power. His own effort to elaborate the conceptual framework for an Islamic resistance to that formation is predicated on the same Baconian postulate.3 Social Justice in Islam is merely the principal, and to a large 3. This lends some credence to Marshall Hodgson’s characterization of the modernist antiimperialist intellectual and political tendency emergent in Muslim countries after World War II, which he called ‘‘neo-Sharism,’’ as working on the premise that if, as Hodgson puts it, a ‘‘technicalistic mutation’’ had occurred within the precolonial Islamic society before it had in the West, then Sharīa would have evolved under its own momentum along similar lines as had modern European political and juridical thought without the moral corruption


extent propaedeutic, text in that effort. The fuller elaboration occurred subsequently in the two-part work, Khaṣaiṣ at-taṣawwur al-Islāmī (Conditions of the Islamic Conception) and Muqawwimāt at-taṣawwur al-Islāmī (Components of the Islamic Conception).4 It is in Social Justice in Islam, however, that Qutb lays out the aims and scope of the project as well as its fundamental presuppositions. The stated aim is to arrive at an Islamic conception of the right or just society that is historical, both in the sense of being based on the known institutions of practice and thought, and in the sense of approaching those institutions in terms of their material record over time, rather than approaching them as manifestations of theological development. Hence the apparent disregard for the history of speculative knowledge of divinity. Qutb restricted his study of Islamic institutions to those material institutions of Muslim discourse that could verifiably be traced from Muslims’ primary engagement with revelation—that is, those discourses of interpreting and applying the meaning of the Quran in this world according to the documented practice of the Prophet Muhammad. From these sources, Qutb extrapolates the principal idea of Islam: Islam, which is mandated to organize the totality of human life, does not attend to the diverse aspects of that life blindly or randomly, nor does it treat them as fragments or parts. That is because it has a universal integrated concept of the physical universe, life, and humanity, from which all the divisions [of thought] and detailed expositions begin and return, and to which are linked all its theories, legislation, prohibitions, rituals of worship, and its social relations. All these things are founded on this universal integrated concept. Islam does

that plagues the latter. See Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, vol. 3, The Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 385. 4. The first of these two works was published in 1962 and republished in an eighth edition by dar-ul-Shuruq in 1983 under the title Khaṣaiṣ at-taṣawwur al-Islāmī wa muqawwimātuhu (Conditions of the Islamic Conception and Its Components), which, in fact, contains only the first part. The second part, Muqawwimāt at-taṣawwur al-Islāmī, was completed in the last years of Qutb’s life and published posthumously. It should be borne in mind, however, that, in modern Arabic philosophical discourse, taṣawwur denotes concept in the Kantian sense. This philosophical meaning may very well remark the intervention Qutb makes in the discourse of modern epistemology, most pointedly his explicit effort to place the conceptual framework he articulates on a par with the Kantian edifice. At the same time, it should not be forgotten that this is a critical intervention that seeks to dispose of the philosophical tradition in elaborating an Islamic conceptual framework.


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not improvise an opinion for every given occasion, or treat every given problem as separate from the rest of the problems. (SJ, 28) This existence emanating from the immediate perfect absolutely comprehensive will is an integrated unity, a singularity each of whose particulars are in perfect symmetry: Islam is the religion of the unity between all the forces of the universe; it is unquestionably the religion of singular unity [tauḥīd ]: the singular unity of Allah, the singular unity of all religions in the religion of Allah, and the singular unity of The Messenger [Muhammad] in the evangelizing of this one religion since the dawn of life. . . . Islam is the religion of unity between worship and work, ideology or creed and behavior, spirituality and materiality, economic and symbolic value, the world and immortality, heaven and earth. (SJ, 28) Islam here is an abstraction, the force of which is formulated as the doctrinal creed of unity, on which is based all precepts, legislation, orientations, prohibitions, as well as political philosophy and political economy (SJ, 28). When Qutb says religion, or, better yet, dīn, he means a historical way of life that entails all these institutions and more like them, based on a coherent, clear doctrinal answer to the question, What is the meaning of it all? The answer to which is that there is one, unified integral event and consciousness underlying all particular appearances and expressions. The way to truth that is life is to bind oneself perpetually to that unity, accounting for the multitude of divergent expressions and institutions as moments of development in accord with the purposefulness of the singular unity. A familiar name for this in modernity is providence. Qutb calls it the absolute harmonizing unity of divine singularity—tauḥīd. The human endeavor to discover and understand the laws of the physical universe flounders if it loses sight of this unity, resulting in fragmentary and momentary understandings of reality that cannot provide the basis for a universal and sustainable social justice. Attaining that basis requires a new realist science—fiqh al-waqii—whose foundations are the Quran and Ḥadīth. Three fundamentals of this science form the conceptual basis for Islamic social justice. The first of these fundamentals is at-taḥrir al-wajdānī—literally translated as ‘‘affective or emotional liberty,’’ and translated by Shepard as ‘‘liberation of the inward soul,’’ but arguably better rendered in English as ‘‘liberty of conscious.’’ 5 The second 5. A full and proper elaboration of the reasons for this preferred English-language translation are beyond the scope of this current essay. All that will be remarked here in explanation


fundamental is al-musāwa al-insānīya al-kāmila (complete human equality). The third is at-takāfil al-ijtamāī (secure social solidarity). Once the first fundamental is grasped, the other two fall into place (SJ, 34). The realization of complete social justice (adāla ijtimāīya kāmila) is not attainable, nor is its sustained implementation assured, without relying on an inherent human feeling that any particular individual has a right to justice and that society needs justice. This feeling (shuūr ) is motive; it is an affective state that finds expression in the doctrinal principle (aqīda) that social justice leads to the highest human objective. That same principle becomes identified with the individual’s desire to achieve the best material condition so that he will take up the security and defense of social justice as a necessity. Such an identification of social justice with individual desire cannot be achieved through law before it is achieved in affect, and for that to happen there must be established the material conditions that foster such identification (SJ, 35). Liberty of conscious does not result from radically rejecting or even transcending material reality. Qutb’s remarks in this regard are rather pertinent to discerning just how he thrusts his criticism of secularism: For the life drives [dawāfia al-ḥayā] cannot be suppressed in every instance, and the material necessities of life cannot be eternally conquered. Of necessity, humanity yields to the pressures of these drives most of the time. Indeed, the perpetual suppression of life’s drives is not good, because Allah has created life, and he has not done so in vain, nor has he created life for humans to neglect or hinder its development. Undoubtedly, it is good for humanity to exceed its physical necessities and transcend its desire, but not to disregard life in the process. The soundest and safest way is to unleash the constitutive potentiality of human nature so that humanity can supersede the humiliating submission to its physical necessities. This is the aim of Islam when it unites the physical necessities and the passions of the spirit into a system, securing the absolute individual liberty with inherent feeling and practical possibility, neglecting neither. (SJ, 35) Islam begins with the liberation of individual human consciousness from servitude to anything other than Allah, and from submission to anyis that there are obvious structural parallels between Qutb’s three fundamentals of Islamic social justice and Oliver Cromwell’s four fundamentals of English constitutional government, which Cromwell proffered in argument for the institution of the commonwealth.


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thing other than Allah. There is no ruler over the liberated individual other than Allah, nor is there anything that kills or sustains human life other than Allah. Consciousness of the absolute unity of Allah brings about the recognition that there is no true sovereignty besides that of Allah, and it is this recognition that brings about a profound sense of freedom. Absolute liberty of conscious is attained, then, in freedom from fear of anything other than Allah. Qutb is insistent that this means freedom from fear of death at the hands of other humans, or homicide. It is not that the absolutely freed individual thinks homicide is unlikely or not a prevalent danger but rather that the significance of individual death is measured against the immortality of the soul. Liberty of conscious forms the basis for the social contract because each individual’s becoming fully aware of his absolute equality with every other human being, in accord with divine ordinance, fosters a strong sense of solidarity and cooperation. This concept of liberty of conscious seems to be in direct contradiction to Hobbes’s fundamental postulate that fear of homicide forms the basis for the social contract. Hobbes is a significant figure in Qutb’s criticism of classical liberalism. After all, he is credited with laying the foundations of modern political science, or civil philosophy, with De cive and Leviathan.6 In large measure, critical engagement with Hobbes’s theory of the social contract is the point of departure for Qutb’s elaboration of modern Islamic political theory. A more lucid understanding of the conceptual orientation of that theory is achieved when it is read in relation to Hobbes’s exposition of human nature, most pointedly his elaboration of the ‘‘two most certain postulates of human nature.’’ This is not to suggest that Qutb is a Hobbesian, however. Although it is significant that he does accede to the Hobbesian postulate that the principal condition of humanity is motive. The life drives Qutb refers to entail both desires for and aversions to things, both of which are motives. Affect—or the passions in Hobbes’s language—does not issue from the will; it is the will.7 6. Thomas Hobbes, De cive, ed. Bernard Gert (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1990); Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Henceforth, these works are cited parenthetically as DC and L, respectively. The first of these books Hobbes himself claimed to be the beginning of civil philosophy. Leviathan is generally regarded as marking the beginning of modern political science as a branch of knowledge that is coincident with the modern natural sciences as defined in the work of Bacon and Galileo—the latter of whose resolutive-composition method Hobbes applies in elaborating his study of power—but is fundamentally independent of it. 7. Thomas Hobbes, Elements of Law, Natural and Political, trans. G. A. J. Rogers (Bristol, England: Thoemmes Press, 1994), 69. Henceforth, this work is cited parenthetically as E.


The first of Hobbes’s postulates concerning human nature is natural appetite. His conclusion that the natural condition of man as the war of everyone against everyone stems from his psychology, according to which human appetite, while originating in momentary sense impressions as it does with animals, in contrast to that of animals, extends beyond the momentary desire. The traditional Aristotelian distinction between the zoological and biological is the conceptual framework; accordingly, the principal distinction between animal and human is the latter’s possession of reason. Animal desire is absolutely bound to the moment—it is, in reality, no more than an immediate reaction to external impressions—so that the animal desires only finite objects. It is always hungry now. The human can imagine moments that are not immediate, those of a past and future hunger. Human desire is, through reason, spontaneously infinite; it is infinite because it is an endless striving for absolute satisfaction that is not limited by immediate percepts. This is not an increasing desire in proportion to, or in response to, the necessities of survival, or even the want to enhance the conditions of living. It is a spontaneous desire for infinite dominion over everything imaginable. And the imagination generates the sense of sequential event, or time. It is the human capacity to imagine the constancy of change that transforms the animal desire, common to the entire zoological world, to which Homo sapiens belong, into a spontaneous infinite and absolute desire for everything. The desire for absolute dominion over everything is coincidental with human being so that it is without reason—in other words, irrational. Because this irrational striving after everything does not stem from necessity—that is, it is not a function of perception and zoological necessity—it springs from a primal pleasure that humans derive from imagining their own infinite power, the congenital pleasure each human takes in triumphing, at least in imagination, over all others. Hobbes calls this primal pleasure vanity, which he postulates is the origin of human appetite. Desires, for Qutb, are never wholly, or even primarily, physiological. Nor are they functions of an anthropomorphic psychopathology in which imagination is the driving force. Humanity, whether considered as a species or with particular focus on the individual, is an integrated unity—that is, its apparent differentiations are, in fact, all functions of a single orientation (muwaḥḥda al-ittijāh). In this respect, it is in accord with the singular unity of the universe. Ignorance of this singular unity is the basis for distinguishing between the material and the spiritual aspects of humanity—that is, between the psychological and the physiological. Both human percepts and concepts are functions of the same singular law, in the sense that they


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are mutually harmonious aspects of it, as well as function according to it in their own particular ways. The foundational Islamic principle, according to Qutb, is that there is one substance in the universe, and all particulars are expressions of it. Unity of the universe and the individual is a function of the state of nature. Nature is not divinity but the creation of divinity (SJ, 24–26). This is in contrast to the Christian doctrine as instituted by the church councils—specifically those of Nicaea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon—according to which the distinction between ouisa (substantia: essence or nature) and hypostasis (persona: entity) established that the physical and the spiritual are perpetually at odds. This doctrine determined the historical circumstance in Europe, prompting the necessity for the scientific explanation of natural appetite arising from perception and forming the basis for imagination’s concepts. Hobbes’s postulate that the infinite capacity of imagination for abstraction is what drives natural appetite to such an extreme that the war of everyone against everyone (al-maaraka qāma bayn hadihī al-quwwa wa tilka) is humanity’s natural condition is the result of the historical institution of Pauline Christianity. As a distinct historical institution, Islam has no such necessity. Its principal thought is the universal law of hypersymmetry, which is what drives both natural appetite and imagination: ‘‘The universe is a singular unity which is a complex of perceivable phenomena and what is beyond perception and unknowable. So too, life is a complex of material and immaterial forces that is not reducible to one or the other unless there is an imbalance of these forces. Humanity is also a complex unity of spiritual desires aspiring to the heavens, and physical inclinations adhering to the earth’’ (SJ, 26–27). Because humanity is constitutively like the universe, essentially a singular force with numerous aspects that are ultimately articulations of the ‘‘infinite and eternal force’’ that created and sustains the universe, the transient individual, as Qutb puts it, possesses the means to connect with this eternal force as something immanent in his life. Just as the original principle of the universe is the hypersymmetry of all its particular aspects, the proper state of human consciousness is to be in conscious harmony with the universe. This harmony is, Qutb asserts, ‘‘the unity between the particular aspects of the universe and its force, the unity between every aspect of life, and the unity between humanity and itself, between its reality and dreams. It is the unity that assures perpetual peace between the universe and life, life and living creatures, between the aggregate and the individual, between the individual’s desires and inclinations, and, in the end, between the world and religion, between heaven and earth’’ (SJ, 28).


Postulating that the proper state of human consciousness is peace of mind achieved through recognizing its being in harmonious unity with the universe emanating immediately from the unique force of creation, Allah, gives Qutb the warrant to remove the psychological question about the origin of human nature from the field of Islamic contemplation. More precisely, he preempts the question of how humans know the laws of nature with the answer: by Allah’s will. And it is an answer that is accessible only through direct guidance in revelation, not through the exercise or disciplining of unaided reason. In dismissing reason as incapable of achieving true understanding of natural law, Qutb contradicts the second of Hobbes’s most certain postulates concerning human nature: natural reason. This postulate is formulated as the principle of the avoidance of death, on the logical assumption that the continuance of life is the requisite condition for the satisfaction of any appetite. According to Hobbes, the continuance of life is the primary good, because only in life is the unhindered continual pleasure of prospering, of having everything, possible. The possibility of having everything, that is, of pursuing everything, is happiness. Happiness is the greatest good, in a radically accumulative sense. Because Hobbes denies the immortality of the soul—the only eternity natural man can imagine is the eternity of prosperity—there is no supreme good, in precisely the sense that Qutb means liberty of conscious as a transcendent state of mind. There is only the greatest good of perpetual accumulation. Death, however, is the primary and supreme evil, because only death can end life and so negate all good. It is important to recall here that, according to Hobbes’s theory of human nature, liberty as the unhindered power of each man to do as he will for selfpreservation is a right of nature. In the natural human condition, because every man is equal in his power of self-preservation, in his liberty, every man has a right to everything, even to another’s body. Hence, the war of every man against every man is the natural condition of humanity in its natural rights. Whereas natural rights find expression in the motive animal aspect of human nature, the cognitive aspect of humanity, reason, gives expression to the laws of nature. A law of nature is a precept or general rule, discovered by reason, according to which a man is prohibited from doing that which is destructive to his life, or is enjoined to do that which will best preserve his life. Right is the liberty to do; law is the binding determination and restriction of that liberty. On their own, the affective natural rights foster the condition of insecurity and permanent anarchic war between all men, which threatens the


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destruction of all men. This threat of destruction is recognized by reason as ‘‘that danger from the equality between men’s forces’’ (E, 92) and compels reason to formulate the principal law of nature, which is to seek peace as far as possible, but to resort to war when peace cannot be achieved directly. The second law follows from this and stipulates that every man be willing to seek peace, as long as others are, too, and in peace find selfdefense by giving up his right to everything, as others do theirs, agreeing to the mutual and equal limiting of liberty (L, 92). It is fear of homicide—which is an affective state—that compels humanity to reason, which formulates laws in response. The security of life stipulated in the natural laws cannot be achieved unilaterally by the individual human unless all other humans agree to surrender their equal right to everything; and given the force of natural rights, such an agreement cannot be enforced unless there is a greater agent than that of any individual, one that is constitutively the sum of the collective human agency. The solution is the institution of the sovereign as that entity constituted with the natural rights surrendered in equal proportion by individual men, which exercises the unique authority of that agency in order to secure every man’s liberty in safety. These principles of natural law signal Hobbes’s overcoming a fundamental distinction of political philosophy since Aristotle, that between the natural and artificial state. In overcoming it, Hobbes establishes the distinctive break between his and traditional political philosophy, and so achieves the foundations of modern political science. In Aristotle’s Politics, patrimonial monarchy is the natural state formation, arising from the exercise of superior might, and democracy the artificial or institutional formation, arising from the exercise of reasoned choice. The key distinction is in motive. Fear forms the basis of monarchy; and hope, democracy. Although Hobbes, in the Elements and even in De cive, adheres to this traditional distinction, arguing for the principality of monarchy over democracy in nature if not in legitimacy, by Leviathan, he overcomes it through the reduction of the two motive forces to the one principal force of homicidal fear. With this, he successfully abandons the traditional Aristotelian concept of natural monarchy versus institutional democracy by revealing that all institutional, qua artificial, state formations are ultimately based on the same motive force as the natural state. The institution of the sovereign as the solution to homicidal fear is a function of natural law that, at its base, is the reasoned response to the fact of nature. Both fear and reasoned response are constitutive forces of human nature. Fear is constantly externalized in the natural state of absolute liberty. Reason is an internal potential that can be externalized only after


establishment of the security that occurs with the institution of sovereignty. Through discovering that the motive of hope is based in fear, Hobbes demonstrates that what was traditionally understood to be the basis of the natural state—patrimonial monarchy—is also the basis of the institutional state. The natural fact of power is thus identified with the consensual legal institution of power, so that the natural legal institution of power is that of monarchy. Institutional monarchy is the realization of the laws of nature, providing the requisite security for their externalization as the framework for society. The very natural law that institutional monarchy realizes has its foundation in the intelligence of God. This is the explicit argument of Elements, which states that ‘‘forasmuch as law, to speak properly, is a command, and these dictates, as they proceed from nature, are not commands, they are not therefore called laws, in respect of nature, but in respect of the author of nature, God Almighty’’ (E, 109). It would seem, then, that Hobbes and Qutb are in agreement, if the following passage from Social Justice in Islam is read in tandem with this argument from Elements: When the [human] conscious is liberated from the feeling of servitude to and sanctification of any of Allah’s creatures, and is full of the feeling that it is in immediate contact with Allah, then it is not effected by fear for its life, or property, or reputation. These are ugly fears, suppressing an individual’s sense of himself, which may induce him to accept humiliation and to surrender much of his nobility and many of his rights. Islam, on the contrary, fosters an adamant desire in people for honor and nobility, as well as a sense of pride in truth and the preservation of justice. By these means—as well as by legislation [ilāwa alā at-tashrīa]—it ensures absolute social justice, neglecting no one. All of which means it takes special care to resist fear for life, property, and reputation; for life is in Allah’s hands and no creature has the power to shorten it by one hour or less. Indeed no creature has the power to shorten it by even a single breath. . . . In this way we must understand the Quran’s precepts [taujīh] and the general orientation of Islam; this is the true understanding corresponding to its general methodology (idea and philosophy) regarding precepts and law. (SJ, 39) Although Hobbes does offer scriptural evidence in support of the assertion that the institution of monarchy is in accord with divine law, this appeal to Scripture does not signal any theocentrism on his part. Instead,


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it is symptomatic of a criticism of Christianity that is quite similar to Qutb’s but, unlike Qutb’s criticism, extends to revealed religion in general. Hobbes’s point in Elements is not to subordinate reason’s natural law to revelation but to establish that reason is in accord with revelation: ‘‘Finally, there is no law of natural reason, that can be against the law divine: for God Almighty hath given reason to a man to be a light unto him. And I hope it is no impiety to think, that God almighty will require a strict account thereof, at the day of judgment, as of the instructions which we were to follow in our peregrination here, notwithstanding the opposition and affronts of supernaturalist now a-days, to rational and moral conversation’’ (E, 116). Conversation between natural reason and divine law implies an argument for natural theology, that there is a natural knowledge of God as the Principal Cause. Yet, regarding natural knowledge of God unaided by revelation, Hobbes argues in De cive: ‘‘It is therefore almost impossible for men, without the special assistance of God, to avoid both rocks of atheism and superstition’’ (DC, 310). Revelation shores up natural reason’s knowledge of God by providing a historical record of the covenant between man and God, Scripture, that underwrites the conversation between divine and natural law. The danger in natural theology is that it formulates ‘‘an opinion of right reason without fear,’’ which means that there is no necessity or compulsion to adhere to the laws of natural reason, except the expediency of circumstance, which tends toward being mutable. Such expedients are precepts or rules ‘‘by which a man is guided, and directed in any action whatsoever’’ (L, 356). Without any coercive force that compels one to obey them under fear of immanent penalty, such rules are not law. Law proper has the force of the civil sovereign to compel compliance. Here is where Qutb and Hobbes part ways sharply. On the Hobbesian side of things, if Scripture offers evidence that the laws of natural reason are in accord with divine law in order to support the postulate that institutional monarchy is the only naturally legitimate formation of state power, the question is, What is the power to make the Scriptures Law? Hobbes’s well-known final answer to this question is the civil sovereign. Moses is the exemplary case where God’s law and civil authority coincide, because Moses was the sovereign of the commonwealth of Israel. It was his sovereign power that instituted the commandments as law, so that the Books of Moses are received as law proper. The Gospels of the apostles, in contrast, are canonical—that is, they are rules of guidance, precepts— but they can have the force of law only if a civil sovereign says they do. The distinction Hobbes draws between the Old Testament as law and the New


Testament as canon turns on the fact that Israel was a worldly monarchal commonwealth, while Jesus Christ’s Kingdom of God is not of this world, in which case any interpretation of the Christian Scriptures can acquire the force of law only by being sanctioned by the civil sovereign. And, insofar as such interpretation is a function of the teachings of any given church, whether Episcopal, Independent, or Congregational, its power in law issues from the civil sovereign authority. The teachers teach the gospel of salvation in Jesus Christ at the sufferance of the earthly monarch. Religion is subordinated to the state in a manner that, Hobbes hopes, will dispel the disruptive tendencies of confessional dispute, and so overcome the doctrinal error Qutb discovers plagues European Christianity. What is most pertinent to our concerns here is that Hobbes reads the Scriptures in a manner that subordinates the interpretive force of reading to civil authority. Salvation may indeed come from Jesus Christ, but belief in that salvation is an act of confession mandated by the sovereign. In other words, the force of interpretation is the will of the sovereign, who has the only legitimate power to determine the material circumstances of any methodology of interpretation. Hobbes’s methodology is historical and materialist, which is why certain scholars of Hobbes have read it as a form of Bible criticism in complement with Spinoza’s. The appeal to Scripture, rather than sustaining a theological principle of power, occasions a historical analysis of power. The focal point in that analysis is the distinction between precept as a rule and law as a force of domination. Bacon had already discerned that scholasticism’s chief weakness was ignorance of history. His primary concern was with the authority of Aristotelian natural philosophy. In that same vein, Thomas Blundeville remarked about Aristotelian moral philosophy that because it consisted only of general precepts and rules, it offered no concrete examples of the fact, or human experience, of power. Such examples, Blundeville argued, could not be arrived at through philosophical teaching, but only through what ‘‘the historiographers doe teach.’’ Hobbes’s distinction between precept and law is an expression of the distinction between political philosophy and political science. The method of the one is careful elaboration of the conceptual structures of thought about the just society, based on dogmatic principles. The method of the other is contemplation of the material history, the human experience, of power, based on historiographical evidence. What Hobbes offers as a psychological anthropology of human nature is an elaboration of the Epicurean account of primitive, oversexed humans without religion, language, or law, who inhabited solitary caves in the primeval forest, subsisting on nuts, berries,


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and crudely slaughtered animal flesh. The expressed natural theology of that anthropology implied a historical criticism of revealed religion. It is not revealed religion but history that aids natural reason in realizing its precepts as civil law. Scripture is read as a document of evidence in an incipient materialist history of civilization as the natural institution of power. In this way, the doctrine-driven wars of religion spawned by the Reformation are recognized as instances in the war of every man against every man. This is the main thrust of Hobbes’s beginning political science. There have been those readers of Hobbes, like Michel Foucault, who recognize in his postulate of the war of every man against every man a conceit meant to obfuscate rather than depict the historical circumstances of societal and state formation. For Foucault in particular, there are two targets of Hobbes’s obfuscation. One is the very real and, for Hobbes, rather immediate, material conditions of the English Civil War, with its scandal of regicide. The other is the conceptual framework that, in some measure, enabled the war by legitimating Puritan claims that reason was their law. This latter target Foucault refers to as what he calls the historiography of race war articulated in the English chroniclers’ account of the fact and continuity of Anglo-Saxon law before and after the Norman Conquest, but most elaborately formulated in the work of Henri de Boulainvilliers. This work, Foucault effectively argues, recognizes society to be constituted in war and a form of war, rather than as a solution to it. In such a reading, Hobbes’s absolute sovereign as the anthropomorphic personification of collective human agency is not the best and only true means of preempting absolute anarchy and social destruction. Instead, this concept of the sovereign is revealed to be a figure through which Hobbes disqualifies from consideration, if not contemplation, the violence constitutive of society by placing voluntaristic choice as the constitutional act of commonwealth. The whole point of the homicidal fear postulate is to make choice necessary as the prerequisite of sovereign legitimacy—no matter the particular institutional form the anthropomorphic abstraction achieves, whether monarchy (the most natural form), aristocracy, or the constitutional parliamentary state, it is founded in the willful choice of all its human elements to live under the sovereign power rather than die at human hands. For Hobbes, this is universally so, even in the case of conquest, for it is not the moment of defeat on the battlefield that constitutes the commonwealth but the moment of surrender to the conqueror as sovereign rather than being killed by him. If it can be successfully established as axiomatic in the historiography of legitimate power that society is constituted in the moment of willful surrender in


and under the law, and not that of violence, then all other variant historiographies of power are disqualified as illegitimate. The underlying contractual nature of every instance of legitimate sovereignty makes any assault on the sovereign ultimately a violation of natural law. Hobbes’s war of every man against every man appears to be, then, a war without any dead bodies, to put it crassly. It establishes not fear as the basis from which society is formed but choice, a choice that is based itself on an abstract fear—that of vanitydriven homicide, which is abstract precisely because, in Hobbes’s account, it is purely psychopathic without any discernible sociological elements. It is as if, and Hobbes very nearly states this to be so, in nature everyone exists principally in a state of solipsistic imagination, where the congenital pleasure of absolute dominion over everything is fulfilled. This natural state of solipsism—which for Hobbes is an illusion of perspective—is disrupted only by the equally imagination-driven fear of homicide. In order to deracinate the historical circumstances of the commonwealth’s establishment as an act of war, Hobbes posits psychotic phobia as the foundation of society. Fear of homicide is the only factual basis for humans achieving immediate consciousness of self as distinct from the external world of danger, so that it is in homicidal fear that all outward virtuous activity begins. Qutb was not the historiographer Hobbes was. He invests no effort at all in elaborating a theory of the origins of civilization, or the nature of pre-Adamite humanity. Whether civilization was begun by brute beast or erudite thinkers is simply not a problem that concerned Qutb. Nonetheless, he shared with Hobbes one of the fundamental presumptions of modern historiography that distinguishes it from the historiography of the classical Mediterranean world and Christian Europe. Qutb understood humans to be peculiarly historical beings, subject to forces of change that transcend any individual, national, or racial drive, to repeat in a different context what was stated earlier about his understanding of life drives. He need not have learned this from Hobbes, however. Ibn Khaldun postulated the same some three hundred years before the publication of either De cive or Leviathan in Al-Muqaddima, the introduction to his history of civilization, Kitāb ul-ibar. Indeed, Qutb’s realist science owes a good deal to Khaldun’s ilm-ulumrān (science of civilization). The etymology of the term umrān indicates that the subject of this science is not civilization in the sense of civitas— juridical and legislative order—but temporal duration in relation to human being. The root is amara (to live long, prosper, and endure). This gives umr and amār (duration of life, lifetime). It also gives imāra (architectural structure), which is why umrān is generally translated as ‘‘human civilization,’’


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in the sense of material culture as a sign of development. Ibn Khaldun’s project was an attempt to temporize social constitution as an event of duration in order to understand the historicality of human being. Undoubtedly, this entails a specific concept of change. In fact, theorizing change was the key innovation of his science. Hence, the question of history is theoretical for Ibn Khaldun. This is a question of how one thinks about the force or power expressed with social change. In Khaldunian historiography, power is understood epistemologically, and the subject of epistemology is the condition of human being—this is evident in the organization of both Kitāb ul-ibar and its more well-known introduction (Al-Muqaddima). Much more attention needs to be paid to what is invested in the term umrān, as a conceptual category, than can be given here. That attention will lead to a fruitful comparative analysis of Marxist, neoliberal, and Khaldunian historiographies. This, in turn, will lead to a closer examination of the question of ideology, which, like change, is a crucial category for Ibn Khaldun. Indeed, the relationship of knowledge, and its organization, to societal structure is the focus of his work. What is pertinent to our concerns with Qutb is the way the Khaldunian concept of historical time relates to revelation as an institution of Islam. If al-Islām—and this we should carefully translate as ‘‘the time of Islam’’—is the conclusion of all knowledge and the completion of all things, then this means that nothing can occur in the future that is not foreseen by it. The time of Islam, of course, is identical with zaman-al-wahī, ‘‘the time of revelation.’’ They are the same time. Revelation, then, is the eternal present. Consequently, it is necessary to distinguish between two temporalities: the time of revelation, and historical time, the emergent—that is, transient time. In other words, there is an eternal essence behind every transient event; and that eternity is the eternal present. There is no return to a place reserved for the future, because there is only the present that is always arriving. So that the guaranteed praxis is revelation, it is to live in the present of revelation, that is, the future. The temporality of revelation is contrary to the Greek temporality of Chronos, which brings things into being and annihilates that which it brings into being. In contrast, the temporality of revelation is transcendent to the activity of creation and annihilation, the activity of change and transience. The temporality of revelation is what it is from its emergence to eternity. In other words, revelation is not known in time; on the contrary, time is known through it. Even more precisely, revelation is the agency of time; time is not the agency of revelation. This means that religious thought (al-fikra ad-dīnīya) is transcendent to time, that is, history. Historical evolution is transient marginalia; it has no value in itself. Value


is exclusively with revelation—the thinking that transcends history and its developments. There is, in other words, a sense of continuity against which transitory events (waqiat ) occur, and this is the eternity that is the now. Just because occurrences are in time does not mean that they have time. Rather, they are encountered as events that pass through a permanent present, so that every encounter of every event is in a now that is carried on to another now in a determined sequence. The events of history can be explained as a sequence that is on a curve, moving back to its beginning. Still, the direction of the sequence is irreversible; it moves in one direction forward, back to its beginning. Within the domain of revelation, every now is just like every other, and every event moves toward the same inevitable end. The homogenization and irreversibility of now is a pronounced characteristic of zaman al-wahī. What this achieves is the assimilation of time to space, precisely because all dynamic change is expressed into a permanent present. Time is mathematized, or as Aristotle maintains in Physics (bk. IV, pt. 11, 219b), time is the calculable measure of dynamic change, αριθμος κινησεως. Arguably, zaman al-wahī is the reduction of time to arithmetic sequence change. Eternity is conceived of as a domain that is comprehensive in totality. This comprehensiveness is expressed in historical time through revelation (alwahī ). That is to say that zaman al-wahī, expressed as the Islamic state, is the repetition of eternity in space. It is with all this in mind that Ibn Khaldun’s account of change can be read as duration. Again, a closer look at ilmul-umrān discovers an attempt to come to an understanding of the human through a careful consideration of the possible modes of being known to Ibn Khaldun. Precisely in this sense, his concept of human is historiographical and not derivative of an ideal type abstracted out of a specific ideology (asabīya), which is why ideology is always a problematic category for him. It is a function of power; remember, authenticity equals asabīya in Ibn Khaldun’s analysis. In the same fashion, for Qutb, authenticity equals the proper Islamic ideology. Still, the notion of humans as historical beings is why Qutb’s history of Islam focuses on institutions and economic and social formations rather than intellectual treatises and narrative disputation about authentic lines of transmission. In this aspect, his historiography is one of the institutions of authority as well as power. The proper history of authority and power does not begin, as Hobbes conjectured, with human nature, however. It begins with the origin of human nature, knowledge of which is achieved exclusively through contemplating the signs of divine revelation. The social contract does not emerge out of homicidal fear. Its basis is the liberty of


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conscious, or the Islamic spirit, as Qutb also calls it, achieved in individual submission to Allah through reading qua contemplation of the signs of divine revelation. Once the Islamic spirit is awoken, it is subject to the supervision of Allah’s force, and not the force or power of the state as instituted in its legislation. Sharīa does not cause or even sustain consciousness; it is symptomatic of it. Sharīa is a legislative institution whose sovereign power is Allah. This sovereignty cannot be personified, precisely because it is not the issue of human agency or desire. Humans do not institute sovereignty through their willful or coerced surrendering of their agency to an anthropomorphic abstraction, whether the monarch or the constitutional state. Nor is Allah’s sovereignty delegated to any mortal person. There is no High Priest like Moses in Islam, so that Hobbes’s argument for the conjunction of divine law and natural reason in the person of the civil sovereign does not carry. Here Qutb is careful to quote the Quranic statements about the limitations of Muhammad’s authority as a human: ‘‘It is said of Muhammad (SAW): ‘Muhammad is nothing but a messenger; messengers have been created before him. If he were to die or be killed will you turn back on your heels.’ 8 And it addresses the Prophet directly with forceful candor: ‘Not for you [but for Allah] is the decision: Whether he turn in mercy to them or punish them’’’ 9 (SJ, 37). The legitimate civil authority, whether Muhammad or, after him, the Caliph, rules only in accordance with divine ordinance, with the mandate to institute the societal conditions under which the possibilities for contemplating the signs of Allah’s absolute immanence, and so achieving liberty, are preserved and guaranteed. Any system of human knowledge and social organization that rejects the truth of Allah’s immediate and eminent guidance of the universe, or otherwise preempts the possibility of engaging that truth, is the very definition of ignorance, jahīlīya, according to Qutb. To imagine, then, that humanity exists in a state of nature in which it is free in concept and action from the truth of divine unity is the purest form of jāhilīya. So, too, are any and all formations of power, including Muslim, that deviate from the truth of Allah’s sovereignty. Qutb’s postulate of Allah’s sovereignty is the conceptual foundation for a historiography of power that is oppositional to what he called the fable of liberalism’s society in security. The extent to which this fable informs not only the Muslim misconception of liberalism’s danger to its way of life but 8. Quran, Sura Al Imran: 144. 9. Quran, Sura Al Imran: 128.


also the self-delusion of liberal society Qutb described in a series of correspondences written immediately after completing Social Justice in Islam while residing in the United States from 1949 to 1952. These letters were subsequently collected and published under the title Amrīkā allatī raaytu: fi mīzān al-qīm al-insānīya (The America I’ve Seen: In the Measure of Human Value). In them, Qutb struggles to think about the significance of America as the exemplary instance of the most advanced and positive political and social realization of classical liberalism. Referencing Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land, he observes that violent struggle is the American’s first nature: The nature of the American population is competitive struggle, whether that of class, factionalism, or the struggle between nations and ethnicities. I have no idea on what basis the world, especially the Orient, has come to accept the fable of the peace-loving American people. In fact, in his constitutive nature, the American is warring, a lover of violent struggle. The thought of war and struggle is predominant in their blood and expressed in their behavior. This is in accord with their history. The first wave of [Europeans] arrived in America with the explicit aim of colonial domination, competition, and struggle. Accordingly, they murdered each other in large numbers and waves, then they murdered nearly all the original inhabitants (the American Indian), and are still waging a war of annihilation against them up to this very moment. The Anglo-Saxons murdered the Latins [Hispanics] and expelled them to Central and South America. The American colonials, under the leadership of George Washington, waged a war against their own nation, the English, until they achieved independence from the British Crown.10 This state of constant war is not a function of human nature. It is an aspect of America’s historical formation as a state predicated on classical liberalism’s concept of absolute liberty. No matter that Locke’s solution of institutional democratic sovereignty is the immediate point of reference in the founding war, that war was conceivable on the basis of the Hobbesian concept of natural rights. The theory of security under sovereignty, which Qutb calls a fable, is an instrument of American power deployed in the continual war that is American society. Qutb recognizes that the personification 10. Sayyid Qutb, Amrīkā allatī raaytu: fi mīzān al-qīm al-insānīya, in Amrīka min ad-dakhil bi-minẓār Sayyid Qutb, ed. Salah Abd al-Fattah al-Khalidi, 2nd ed. (Jiddah, al-Saudiyah: Dar al-Manara; al-Mansura, Misr: Dar al-Wafa, 1986), 104.


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of this instrument is the normative white man, the subject of law. He calls this the greatest enemy to humanity, because the progressive dissemination of this subject—a dissemination he understood to be a chief function of the universal rule of law then being promulgated by the United States in the new institutions of Bretton Woods and the United Nations—meant that the American war was planetary in its scope, putting all other ways of being human at risk of annihilation. Both the fact of constant war and the fable of peace under institutional democratic sovereignty rest on the same conceptual error of absolute human liberty, whose ultimate origin is the constitutive idea of Pauline Christianity. It is not so much that Qutb misconstrued the deployment of modern historiography in antithesis to Scripture as simply another form of Christianity. Rather, he understood the thesis to provide the historical circumstances for which the antithesis became necessary. The Pauline doctrine of salvation through Christ in the kingdom that is not of this world, incorporated into the juridical structures of Imperial Rome, is what called for the secular solution. The fact that the doctrine is in fundamental error about the nature of the universe and life, and that the secular solution responds only in terms of that error—producing the sort of perpetual warfare characteristic of American society—is what places it within the scope of the doctrine. In other words, classical liberalism’s concept of individual liberty results not from the abandonment of knowledge of the universe as immediately emanating from divine will—nature as the signification of Allah’s will—for the subject of knowledge, but from this constitutional idea of European Christianity, which misconstrues God’s immanence as a matter of personal faith rather than an objective fact. There is ample basis in text for this reading of Qutb’s having attempted an Islamic materialist historiography of power, analogous to Hobbes in its understanding that the evidence of the true nature of power— and through it the proper conditions for the just society—is discernible in the material history of human institutions, but opposed to Hobbes in its conceptual orientation. The fundamental difference between Qutb and Hobbes is their respective historical examples of legitimate power. Hobbes draws his from what he supposes to be the full breadth of human experience, Scripture being one historical institution of this. Qutb draws his exclusively from the history of Islam, the Quran being the divine beginning of this. Yet, a discernible conflict is apparent between Qutb’s piety as a true believer (mumin) and the eminently secular orientation of his historiography. Meditating on the Islamic just society based on the fundamental con-


cept of divine singularity as the only legitimate understanding of sovereignty, Qutb explicitly excludes every inconvenience resulting from the epistemological political endeavor of al-falāsifa—specifically the work of Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd—whose epistemological arguments for prophecy amount to anthropologies of human thought that do little more than delineate the limits of conscious human intelligence but do not discover its origin in singular unity. These are Greek—that is, pagan in orientation and method— elaborations of why humanity of necessity postulates Allah’s existence to preserve the reasonable meaning of the world. Such elaborations are finally apologia for reason’s capacity to discover the full meaning of revelation— implying that the text or Quran is allegorical or otherwise obscure, and that Ḥadīth falls short in clarification—in order to secure its relative liberty from revelation. Qutb’s own engagement with the texts of the Quran and Ḥadīth dispenses so completely with the theoretical controversies associated with the philosophers, however, that even the legalist tradition of ilm-u-Sharīa (jurisprudence), with its attendant exegetical corpus, is put aside in favor of a methodical reading and utilization of the texts as documentary evidence for his historiography. In a way remarkably similar to how Michael Servetus’s work in criticism of the Athanasian doctrine of the Trinity documented the divergence of the two main momentums of the Protestant Reformation—on the one hand, his work precipitated the Protestant reinvestment in creedal community; on the other, it precipitated the anti-Trinitarianism that would develop into Unitarianism—Qutb’s criticism of Islamic philosophy and theology fostered a radically critical attitude toward reductivism while at the same time it became the basis for that very reductionism. His having left no record of ever resolving this conflict contributed, in some measure, to the rather intense pamphlet war that ensued between various constituencies of Muslim intellectuals and ideologues in the last few years of the twentieth century over whether his views—particularly the theory of ḥākimīya (Allah’s sovereignty) and the assertion of takfir (the declaration of the generalized apostasy) against all current Muslim state governments and their subject populations—were heretical. The specific charge being that his work instituted a school of thought called Qutbīya (Qutbism), which is the modern expression of the extremism of Khawārijīya.11 There were considerable high stakes in 11. The focal point of this dispute is a Web site called Salafipublications.com, where a series of pamphlets making this assertion were circulated. The original Kharijite, as they are termed in English, were a group of Ali’s supporters in his contestation with Muawiya


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this pamphlet war, being heavily invested in the ideological foundations of the Algerian Civil War, as well as the then emergent campaign of al-qāida against the Saudi regime. The intensity of this dispute was fueled by the historical complexity informing Qutb’s effort to formulate an Islamic historiography of power, which called for considerable methodological innovation. This effort to elaborate a rather materialist historical understanding of Islamic thought was dependent on a Quran criticism—whose text is Qutb’s voluminous fi Ẓilāl-il-Quran (In the Shade of the Quran)—the methodology of which is remarkably minimalist, effectively dispensing with any philological complexities, and pronouncedly historicist in orientation with a great deal of certainty invested in the capacity of the modern reader to comprehend the totality of Islamic thought in concreto, as it were, without relying on the speculations of antecedents. The critical apparatus of Qutb’s approach, or its determining figure, ẓilal ul maanā (traces of meaning), was first articulated in his 1936 book of modernist literary criticism, Kutub wa Shaksīyāt (Writing and Identity). The methodology of that criticism is fundamentally humanistic in the sense that, while presuming the immanence of divine will in human intelligence, Qutb’s formulation of Islamic thought is in terms of material practices of reading and interpretation as the exclusive historical institutions of that thought, not as a continuous unchanging methodology of thinking but as documents of possibility for thinking in an Islamic way. Qutb’s concern is not to continue the practice of ilm-u-Sharīa but to formulate an Islamic political theory based on the postulate of absolute divine sovereignty. In other words, in lieu of either the natural theology implicit in modover succession to the Caliphate after Uthman’s murder. After the battle of Siffin in 657–658, these supporters rejected the terms of arbitration by neutrals between Ali and Muawiya on the question of the legitimacy of Uthman’s murder. Legitimating their rejection with a radical renunciation of all prevalent forms of Muslim governance, except that of democratic populism based exclusively on the Quran, they withdrew from Ali’s party— a literal translation of Shia Ali—and formed a camp of extreme opposition that waged war against both Muawiya and Ali. The overall effect of identifying Qutbīya as the most current expression of Khawārijīya was to both dismiss it as a completely heretical, and so illegitimate, innovation and to underscore its being profoundly dangerous to the integrity of any legitimate Islamic polity. Efforts were made to legitimate this assault on Qutb’s thinking by claiming that it was based on explicit statements of condemnation made by some of the most prominent scholarly intellectual leadership (mashāyikh) of Salafīya, such as Shaykh Saalih al-Fawzaan, Shaykh Abdul Aziz ibn Baz, Imam al-Albani, as well as the widely renowned scholar Shaykh Muhammad Ibn Saalih al-Uthaymin. The dispute became rather intense, with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Office of the Presidency of Islamic Research and Legal Verdicts stepping in, in 1997, to defend Qutb.


ern historiography or the rational theology of philosophy and ilm-ul-kalām, Qutb substitutes a sort of rational civil theology of divine providence. For all its disavowal of the abstractions of intellectualism, in which direct immediate engagement with the text of revelation is displaced by an elaborate semiotics that itself assumes the role of transcendent referent, Qutb’s theory of a civil Islamic polity based on absolute divine sovereignty results in an Islam that of necessity is inhuman in its methodology. In fact, there is much mystery about Islam, and precisely the Islam Qutb is supposed to be referencing. It is, as he asserts, a complexity of ways of thinking whose historical expressions and institutions are appreciably dynamic and variegated. Those expressions and institutions involve a perpetual mimetic relationship to the primitive scriptural event of prophecy—the historical events of revelation and the Prophet Muhammad’s life as the Messenger of Allah—that is properly understood as poetic. Each occasion of encounter with the primitive event—and the encounter is profoundly worldly in the sense that the event is represented institutionally, habitually, as well as literally as a historical problematic—entails a striking inadequacy of language and concept, married with the unavoidable call to make it make sense for the moment. The poetic character of the relationship stems from its being the human effort to make the incomprehensible understandable in a way that sustains a praxis, a doing of thoughtful life. The actual complexity of expressions and institutions are the material trace of that doing. The problem is how to engage in any coherent way this complexity as a way of life. The poetic response is to do so dynamically. Each encounter with the primitive event is a beginning that institutes its own series of interpretations whose divergence is informed by a myriad of elements from politics and culture to communal histories and geography. At its crux, the fundamental problem Qutb’s work grapples with is a recalling and revitalization of the ijmā (consensus) of Muhammad’s original Medinan umma, particularly in situations pertaining to the authentic Islamic attitude or orientation—madhab, in the sense of the directional plane— toward immediate historical events and circumstances. The Arabic term umma is a complicated term to translate. It is generally translated into English as ‘‘community.’’ This is a rather misleading translation, however, because it suggests a limited customary horizon to Muhammad’s project in instituting Medina out of Yathrib—the name of the city prior to Muhammad’s hijra. A better sense of how this term works is needed in order to gain a richer perspective of the principal constitutive element of the historical Medina for Qutb’s theory of a civil Islamic polity.


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Etymologically, umma derives from the verb ummata, meaning ‘‘to give birth or become a mother.’’ This same root verb gives us the substantive imām, meaning ‘‘the head or leader of a collective’’—usually religious, as in the imām of prayer or the mosque. It also gives us the substantive al-ummu, meaning ‘‘original,’’ in the sense of foundation or principal beginning as institution (institutio). This is the sense of such phrases as Mecca umm-ul-qurā, ‘‘the foundation of all towns.’’ 12 The substantive umma itself means both ‘‘the mother’’ (al-wālida), in the same sense of origin as al-ummu, so it refers to an aggregate (jamaa) of people, the majority of whom have a common origin.13 Although this approaches the classical Latin sense of gentius/gentium, it would be in error to translate umma as ‘‘nation,’’ because the term also means ‘‘the collecting of people’’ as a function of heritage, convention, or faith, or even way of life (dīn). It is noteworthy that the Latin gentius is derived from genera. Besides meaning ‘‘to beget, bear, bring forth, produce’’ (in the passive, ‘‘to be born, to spring, arise, proceed’’), this same root gives us the French term agencer, a transitive verb meaning ‘‘to arrange, to dispose, to organize an aggregate by a combination of elements.’’ The substantive of this is agencement, and a cognate agence, meaning ‘‘agency,’’ in the sense of the office or function of an agent or factor. This last sense is related to the English agency, which as a verb means ‘‘the faculty of an agent or of acting; active working or operation; action, activity; as well as action or instrumentality embodied or personified as concrete existence.’’ Of particular interest to us here is the sense in which agencer, echoing its derivation from gentius, evokes the agency by which something is ‘‘brought forth.’’ In this sense, it not only marks the action of aggregation by which arrangement takes place, but it also marks the disposition of the arrangement. This sense of umma as agencement, as the arrangement of an aggregation of elements into an ordered disposition, is supported by the etymology of the term, which cites two Quranic verses as examples.14 The verse ‘‘Therefore We made you a justly balanced umma’’ 15 clearly indicates the sense of an aggregation of elements into an ordered disposition. Then there is the verse ‘‘Abraham was indeed an exemplary original [ummatan], devotedly obedient to Allah and true in faith [ḥanīfan],’’ 16 which indicates foundational matrix or institution. In precisely this double sense of agency and arrangement, the Medinans con12. al-Muajim al-Wasit, bab-ul-hamza, 27. 13. al-Muajim al-Wasit, bab-ul-hamza, 27. 14. al-Muajim al-Wasit, bab-ul-hamza, 27. 15. Quran, Sura Al-Baqara: 143. 16. Quran, Sura Nahl: 120.


stituted themselves as an aggregate. In terms of historiographical concerns of Qutb’s civil theology, they formed a civitas, a civil order, under the sovereignty of Allah, whose authorized administrator was Muhammad (SJ, 37). As a historical institution, Medina replaced the society of Yathrib with the civitas of Islam. More precisely, society was subsumed under and made identical with Islamic civilization, which is absolute in its universality. The principal basis of aggregation in the new civil order was the members’ explicitly consenting to adhere to Muhammad’s Sunna. Even prior to Islam, the Arabs referred to a customary habitude that was accepted as normative and practiced by the entire community as sunna—a more literal-minded translation would be ‘‘the well-worn path,’’ recalling the substantive’s metaphoric derivation from the verb sanna, which describes the repeated action of wearing something into a desired form, whether that means to sharpen a blade or mold a rock. Muhammad’s Sunna was profoundly dynamic, articulating the most authentically Islamic attitude to the material situation of any given moment in complement to divine communication. In Muhammad’s case, however, the source of knowledge about authenticity was not the ancestral habitude but the divine communication personally given to him and for which he was the principal and sole human agent of articulation. This was subjective experience, which meant that authenticity in attitude was immanent with his personal life-practice, with his Sunna. If adherence to Muhammad’s Sunna was the principal constitutive element of the historical Medina, the second was that this adherence established a personal relationship in law between all individuals that superseded and displaced prior relationships of family, tribe, origin of birth or nation, and caste, constituting them as members of a civil order rather than persons subject to a limited community. Because Medina was constituted in common adherence to the Sunna of Muhammad, there was a homogeneity of lifestyle, albeit one of common Arab custom, but modified by the collective allegiance to Muhammad. Together, these elements sustained a consensual conscious submission to the immanence of divinity in the world. This is a key point in Qutb’s anthropology of the concept of divine immanence. As an idealized model or primitive institution, on the other hand, Medina is characterized by a set of three principles parallel to those of the historical Medina. The first of these is that Muhammad was the living agency through which the principles and terms by which authentic daily life was to be lived were realized. Because of his personal relationship to revelation, he was the guarantor of correct interpretation, and so the human executor of divine sovereignty. This authority did not derive from his character but


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from his election by Allah to be an example. Although, Muhammad’s character was a determining factor in his being believed in the early days of his prophethood and was the substantive object of emulation in formulation of Ḥadīth. The second principle follows from this, and it is that civil order in Medina is not constituted based on a tradition of legislation inherited or deduced from a set of universal principles passed down in memory like the Roman concept of jus genitum. It is dynamically constituted in the everyday empirical experience of practice—Muhammad’s Sunna—that is immanently sanctioned by divinity. The third principle, then, is that the immediate experience of this civil order in action is second only to the Prophet’s personal enactment of revelation in authenticity. It is its constitution qua Muhammad’s Sunna that makes Medina ideal. This exemplary umma is limited to the first three generations of the original society of Medina under Muhammad, consisting of the Companions of the Prophet, their children and grandchildren, for whom the livedexperience of Muhammad’s prophecy—the eventfulness of Quranic revelation and Muhammad’s associated habitual life-practice (Sunna) as an institution of revelation—was within living memory.17 The authenticity, and, hence, authority, of that experience is a matter of temporal proximity to the Prophet Muhammad’s lifetime, with the generation of his lifetime Companions the most authentic, and the generation of their grandchildren the limit. The ways in which these salaf (founding fathers) articulated that principal experience are the historical institutions of Islam. In restricting his historical examples to the institutions of the founding fathers in order to elaborate a legitimate rational civil theology, Qutb is unquestionably in line with the Salafīya reform movement, whose intellectual roots begin with the work of the nineteenth-century Egyptian reformer Muhammad Abdu. Strict adherence through reasoned analysis to the historical example of the institutions of the founding fathers is what gives Salafīya its name. The key concern is sustaining the authentic Islamic attitude toward these principal institutions, which is fundamentally a question of the authoritative determination of the authentic Sunna as habitual practice. That is, it is an issue of methodology, according to which the techniques of method articulate the object of analysis, so that the validity of the object is established only through valid methodological attitude. 17. Throughout this essay, Sunna is capitalized when referring to Muhammad’s habitude in keeping with the established convention of romanization. Otherwise, it is italicized and in lowercase when referring to other habitudes or habitude in general.


Qutb’s demonstrable Salafī orientation is why the charge of Khawārijīya made against him is so highly charged and politically complicated on two counts. Besides the depiction of Qutbīya as heretical, the charge presents what is purported to be the correct Salafīya understanding of Islam, according to which Islam is profoundly homeostatic. It is represented as a system that retains and preserves its internal equilibrium—an internal dynamic whose terms remain constant and immutable in their relationships to one another—in the face of disruptive external environmental conditions. Not only is Islam homeostatic, but so is the supposed proper Salafīya way to think about historical events. Both the conceptual frame of reference as well as the events perceivable within it are presented as symptomatic of the system’s own internal dynamic. There is no change in the sense of emergent events and attending innovative ways of thinking—that is, ways of thinking whose innovation presumes possibilities completely beyond the range or logic of the internal dynamic. There is only change within the scope of the dynamic—an immutable pattern of perspectives and orientations. Within the scope of so homeostatic an understanding, the epitaph Kharijite designates a cancerous pathology congenital to Islamic civilization that must be aggressively treated from time to time. Such an understanding is a perverse radicalization of what Muhammad Abdu postulated as Salafīya. While he represented the first three generations of Muhammad’s Medina umma as the genetically defining population—in Vico’s sense that genesis is nascence— which articulated the constitutive ethical attitudes of Islam, he discovered them to be more flexible theoretically. The homeostatic change postulated in Abdu’s reform was the constancy of ethical orientation in the course of considerable theoretical and political acclimatization. In other words, the homeostasis of Abdu’s Salafī was ethical and not conceptual. How Muslims approach and understand the Salafī is subject to tremendous nonhomeostatic change, in accordance with the open-ended dynamics of human thinking. The conviction that the absolute horizon of human interpretive understanding was already achieved within the first three generations of Islam is not in accordance with the Salafīya reform initiated by Abdu, or with those, like Qutb, who explicitly engage his project. Such a conviction is attributed to what is perhaps more fittingly called neo-Salafīya. It cannot altogether be ignored that the neo-Salafīya portrayal of Qutbism is in keeping with that offered recently by the recognizable neoconservatives Daniel Piper, Stephen Schwartz, Stanley Kurtz, and Dinesh D’souza. While distinguishing between Qutbism and what they refer to as ‘‘mainstream Islam,’’ Schwartz and Piper, in particular, attribute the root causes for


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Qutbism to the corrupt social conditions of the Arab world and specifically associate it with Salafīya itself. To underscore the connection between the image of corrupt despotic Arab rulers and reactionary Islamic tendency, they anachronistically label Salafīya ‘‘Wahabism,’’ after the eighteenth-century Najdi founder of the movement that has become the religious establishment of Saudi Arabia. Schwartz’s and Piper’s assertions that Wahabism has deliberately laid the grounds in which Qutbism can flourish is in harmony with the tale proffered in more politically diverse U.S. and British circles that Qutbism is a Western-oriented deviation from mainstream Islam, a claim to which the anti-Qutbism pamphleteers now tenaciously cling, recirculating quotations from sundry Western journalists—mainly analysts associated with conservative far-right think tanks—and even secularist Muslims. The collection is astounding in its ideological variety, from John Gray and Malise Ruthven—the latter, significantly enough, has been a visiting fellow and lecturer at the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, England, which is supported by the Aga Khan Development Network—to Robert Worth and Amir Taheri, as well as Ladan and Roya Boroumand, founders of the Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation for the Promotion of Human Rights and Democracy in Iran. As far as the neoconservative attack is concerned, there is a certain cynicism in its being embraced by elements among previously staunch one-time Reaganite allies of the Saudis in the U.S. government, who in effect are now holding the Saudi government chiefly responsible for failing to hold up its end of the alliance by not curtailing or otherwise policing the destructive forces of Qutbism. It was with U.S. consent and cooperation during the Reagan presidency that the Saudis aggressively established institutions of Salafīya in former Soviet central Asia; and with a particular domestic disregard, the U.S. government studiously ignored the serious inroads made by Saudi-financed Salafīya institutions among the rapidly growing Muslim population in America’s inner cities and federal penitentiaries. The immediate political pertinence of all this policy-oriented attention to Qutbism notwithstanding, its complete disregard for the documentation of his thinking preempts any erstwhile attempt to understand and so grapple with the serious efforts of Muslims such as Qutb to articulate a constitutive function for Islam in modernity. Indeed, preemption of thinking is a hallmark strategy of the neoconservatives—and in the instance of Islamic thinking, it is a strategy with which the U.S.-based Left concurs. With an eye toward the broader stakes of imagining a truly historical critical secularism, however, while not altogether ignored, the political facts of the moment cannot be permitted to occlude the thinking at issue here. And what is at issue is


whether Qutb demonstrated the feasibility of a critical Islamic historiography of power. Bear in mind that the point of Qutb’s historiography is to recall the conditions of umma Muhammad in Medina and revitalize its principles as the authentic dynamic way to achieve the pious individual who is a member of what we now more properly understand as the pious civility. We have, then, a problem of how to make dynamic a situation lost in time. The answer Qutb proffers is a literary attitude: the principal institutions are approached as textual documents of the Islamic civilization’s historical beginning, which is the exemplum, bar none, of just society. Accordingly, the practice of understanding is that of reading, which, as a practice, is highly dynamic and historical. It is impossible to undertake such a practice without an acute awareness of complete contemporaneity or temporal duration. One is always reading now, even when engaging antecedent readings, such that the relationship one’s own reading has to those antecedents is one of adjacency. The literary attitude, then, is a dynamic practice of engaging the historical customary habitude of communal understanding—meaning a habitude that is contemporaneous with the moment of the understanding. Authenticity remains an aspect of the lived-experience of the salaf, which is recounted and transcribed as an elaboration of precepts. As a corpus, these recordings of direct experience of the Prophet’s life-practice are what became known as Ḥadīth. Equating knowledge with experience poses very real practical problems. Foremost among these is the incongruence between telling and recording stories of past events and the experience of them, and the experience of imminent events and situations. The problem is how to—as in, by what authentically prophet-derived method—adduce the authentic Muslim attitude toward imminent events without the Prophet’s agency. From the early days of Islam’s conquests and expansion, the way of adducing the authentic Islamic attitude toward questions of legal and personal life was called fiqh (understanding), a hermeneutic practice in which authoritative inferences were drawn first from interpretive readings of the Quran text—as is attested to by the example of Ibn Abbās—then from recollections of pertinent prophetic utterances or practices (Sunna), and then from recognized communal practice (sunna) and reasoning (ijtihād ) among the Prophet’s Companions. The dispersal of the Companions across the emerging polity meant that many equally authoritative understandings were occurring, so that the practice of fiqh was remarkably localized in its beginnings, with each garri-


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son town formulating a normative code of law based on the norms immediately at hand. The most prominent of the localities were Kufa in Iraq, whose preeminent faqīh was Abu Ḥanīfa, and Medina in the hijaz, whose leading legate was Mālik ibn Anas. Both Abu Ḥanīfa and Mālik understood fiqh to be a practice of legal criticism in opposition to Umayyad, and initially Abbasid, imperial policy. They were engaged in an explicit effort to formulate and realize, at least locally, an authentically Muslim subjectivity based on individual responsibility to revelation and prophetic Sunna directly, rather than through the mediating political institutions of power. Abu Ḥanīfa, who publicly refused to swear allegiance to the Abbasid, maintained the view throughout his tenure as the preeminent Iraqi faqīh that, besides the Quran and Ḥadīth, local consensus and ijtihād was a valid source on which to base the normative code of piety. Mālik, in contrast, held to a narrower view, according to which the legitimate sources for legal understanding beyond the Quran and Ḥadīth are limited to the consensus and ijtihād of the original community of Medina under Muhammad. The eventual ascendancy of the Medinan school was due in large measure to the formulation of Mālik’s legal criticism into a theory of law and jurisprudence by his student, Abu Abd Allah Muhammad ibn Idris as-Shāfii (767–820). Imam as-Shāfii systematically standardized the various efforts of fiqh, excluding all sunna except for Ḥadīth—effectively eliminating all other living sunna—and establishing the now familiar hierarchy of sources or foundations of understanding (usul-ulfiqh) that became the basis for ilm-u-Sharīa. Restricting sunna to Ḥadīth made more pronounced the problematics entailed in basing legitimacy on authentic experience. Shāfii’s restriction meant that experience must now be verifiable through an objective method. The evaluation of Ḥadīth as a source of legal understanding second only to the Quranic text underscored the need to regularize the process by which the events of Muhammad’s Sunna were presented in the record and to establish objective criteria for verifying the authenticity of transmission. The subsequent endeavor at regularization and verification became the discipline of ilm-ul-Ḥadīth—literally translatable as ‘‘the science of Prophetic habitude as narrative’’ and commonly translated as ‘‘Prophetic tradition,’’ but more aptly rendered as ‘‘the archaeology of knowledge about the Prophet.’’ The methodology by which authentic transmission was achieved was isnād—the supporting genealogy of transmission. This is a specific narrative form through which the chain of transmission of any particular prophetic utterance or act is recorded and authenticated. Authentication is determined according to the authoritative arrangement of the collected enunciations of the Medina consen-


sus—the literally recorded speech acts of the Prophet’s Companions, their children, and grandchildren. As the authenticating narrative mode of transmission, isnād is a normative logic for the transmission of knowledge. Each isnād exhibits the genealogy of its own composition and compilation, recording who received what from whom when, all the way back to the principal interlocutor with Muhammad, or witness of the event of record. It is in this sense that ilm-ul-Ḥadīth is best translated as ‘‘the archaeology of knowledge about Muhammad’’ and best understood as a narrative practice of authorship and not a policing action, which is to say it is a way of formulating authoritative lines of transmitting readings, genealogies, if you will, and not an institution of imperial hermeneutics. It provides us with genealogies of knowledge that define our understanding of the Medina consensus. Shāfii did not, in fact, exclude all living Arab sunna from the foundations of understanding. He excluded only those that could not be verifiably traced back to the Medina consensus, the presumption being that as a sunna, the continued habitude of the Medinans and their immediate descendants perpetuated the homogeneity of orientation of the original umma. If ijmā still meant consensus in the sense of an umma of judgment, it was made as conservative as Ḥadīth, so much so that Shāfii restricted juridically binding consensus to the first three generations of the original society of Medina. This is an extreme posture that Qutb did not hold, concurring instead with Muhammad Abdu’s position that ijtihād is still available as the agency of consensus for subsequent generations. This reopening of the door of ijtihād is what enables the historiography that characterizes Qutb’s project, in which the consensus achieved by the original umma becomes a determinate fact fixed in time. For Qutb, the relationship between umma and ijmā is indissoluble. Proper knowledge of this relationship is treated as a constant order of thought translated across time and space with no loss of value or meaning. The consistent integrity of this knowledge is conditio sine qua non for authentic legal judgment and is guaranteed both through the regularization of the written record and the way it is read. As a conservative practice of reading, his historiography constitutes and sustains in a worldly way the Allah-ordained civil order of Muhammad in the present by reiterating the methodology of the salaf as regularized by Shāfii. As Shaykh Muqbil ibn Hadi al Wadii is reported to have said, Qutb was an adīb—literati. It is simply not humanly possible to preserve the purity of the principal situation of the revelation of Muhammad at Medina—neither the individual nor collective awareness, let alone consciousness, of the Medinans can be ‘‘returned to’’ as a permanent or constant state of being-in-the-world.


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What can be achieved, indeed, what is achieved, is a recollection of their attitude as a function of literacy—The Stories of the Companion, Sira nabawiyah (The Biography of the Prophet) by Ibn Hisham, and the recognized compilations of Ḥadīth. These are figura insofar as they appear as exempla to be realized in the world. As a model, the Medina community is an appearance accessible only—and this point is absolute—as an attitude of thinking in literature. As an attitude of thinking, even the Sunna is a train of ideas or thinking about things that passes through our minds in the course of reading rather than a constancy of events. Another way of looking at this situation is to recall that it is precisely the authority of the genealogy of thought described in and by ijmā—the material expression of which is isnād—that forms the basis for what is designated in Islam as ilm. The polysemia of the term ilm is best echoed in the German Enlightenment concept of Wissenschaften. This is an interpretive translation that is not simply fortuitous but speaks directly to Qutb’s principal assumption that his Islamic political theory is an epistemological project for individual liberty. In this way, ijmā can be reimagined as the collective process of reading, characterized by a principal attitude toward the infinite. This familiar problem of the relationship between justice and transcendence is what Qutb’s thinking grapples with. Can there be a humanistic Islam whose constitutive principle is divine immanence in all particulars of life? The answer Qutb proffers is the grounding of justice in a transcendent inhuman intelligence, which means that the principal concern is with the institution of an Islamic polity in which it is possible to foster and sustain ways of human life that are neither simply anthropological and rational— in the way that positive law is—or solipsistically reverential. The challenge that Qutb faced was how to assume an attitude toward infinity while avoiding both the risk of historicizing the activity of thinking as the expression in the world of the transcendent law (Allah) and the tendency to think the infinite as a horizon to be approached with the expectation of subjective fulfillment. Qutb clearly fell prey to both risk and tendency. But the way of his failure is instructive. Having come to understand America as a dynamic force that articulated and disposed of communities as a matter of course and to no end, Qutb sought to discover the condition for sustainable community in an inhuman intelligence. Qutb held that such an intelligence is a transcendent personified force manifested with revelation and enacted in habitual practices of reading and interpretation. This is not a question of morality but one of narrative possibility or ethics. His own enactment of the habitude of lit-


erary Islam compelled him to supplant the rule of law with divine judgment as the only way to achieve social justice and the preservation of human intelligence against global ignorance. Plainly stated, Qutb’s Social Justice in Islam is concerned with answering the question, What is the alternative to the global ignorance of immanence? To the extent that the answer he proffers is the grounding of civilization in a transcendent inhuman intelligence, then the principal concern is not with the institution of an Islamic polity but with the instituting of an Islamic region of humanity in which those possibilities of the ways of man that are neither anthropological or rational—in the way that positive law is—can be sustained. The pertinence of Sayyid Qutb’s effort to the issue of secularism lies in the simple fact that it engages us in thinking about what it is to be human in the historical circumstances of opposing a discourse of universal justice derived from the Pauline doctrine of salvation.

Heine’s Critical Secularism

Willi Goetschel

Heinrich Heine’s secularism is of a particular kind. Occupying a prominent, if not dominant, place in his writing, the secularist impulse plays a central role in his poetry and prose. But rather than taking secularization as a universal yardstick to measure success or failure of the project of Enlightenment and historical progress, his poetic project reflects the problem of secularism in a critical fashion. Heine resists the temptation of unreservedly subscribing to the imperatives of secularization, as if they would not warrant careful examination of their hidden assumptions and implications. Rather, and more critically, he inscribes and rewrites secularization in a manner that offers a self-consciously creative reinscription of the past and present. As a consequence, Heine’s critical secularism presents an alternative approach that prompts us to take a fresh look at current discussions on secularism. In resolutely critical response to the exigencies of his time, Heine engages in the cause of secularization with a different sense of urgency than his contemporaries. Yet, in doing so, he never loses sight of the profound ambivalence of the implications of secularization for the meaning of modernity. Heine’s writing addresses secularization as the formidable problem and boundary 2 31:2, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.


challenge of modernity rather than simply as the solution. Liberating, yet, at the same time, profoundly challenging, secularism is for Heine a constitutive moment in the experience of modernity. As a result, modernity emerges in Heine’s work as a project deeply steeped in the problems of secularization. But Heine’s project sets itself apart from other discourses of secularism. Against the impasse of the alternative of either forsaking all religious intentions for a modern atheism or invoking some religious authenticity that would acknowledge secularization simply as validation of its own deeper truth, he takes a different approach. Born and raised as a member of the generation of the grandchildren of Moses Mendelssohn, the great champion of German Jewish emancipation, Heine responds to the predicament of the precarious legal, social, political, and cultural status of German Jews with a keen sense of the problem of secularization in modern society. From the point of view of Heine and his Jewish contemporaries, secularization never would nor could present an unproblematic final answer to theology’s long anachronistic hold. In their eyes, even the most advanced forms of secularism at hand betrayed too much of a Christian particularism to justify any claim to universalism. In a way, their Jewish particularity served as a critical test case for gauging exactly how nineteenth-century variants of European secularisms would work out. For Heine, who once quipped that the entry ticket to European culture came in the form of baptism,1 secularism presented a project that called for a critical grasp of the problem of religion. After all, he soon was to learn that instead of gaining acceptance and respectability, his baptism stamped him once more as a stereotypical Jew, only this time without the possibility to wash off his Jewishness by holy water.2 Reducing religion to either universal theological truth or socially acceptable form of superstition was no longer a viable option for him. As early nineteenth-century forms of European secularism showed their theological underpinnings, it became increasingly clear that no gesture of radically cutting off the theological and religious roots would ever lead to complete secularization that would no longer privilege one form of religion 1. Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Klaus Briegleb, 2nd ed. (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997), 6.1:618. Subsequent references to this edition are cited parenthetically as Briegleb, followed by volume and page number. 2. See Heine’s letter to Moser, in Heinrich Heine, Werke, Briefwechsel, Lebenszeugnisse: Säkularausgabe (Berlin and Paris: Akademie Verlag and Editions du CNRS, 1970), 20:234.

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over others. Rather, it became increasingly clear that secularization meant an ongoing process whose success would depend on the continuing recognition and critique of its theological and religious underpinnings. Heine’s signal contribution to the genealogy of a critical notion of secularism consists in the creative recovery and working through of this problematic. While other critics posit the process of secularization as narrative following a simple, straightforward trajectory from religion to its disenchantment, demise, and dissolution, Heine presents a theory and practice of secularization that engages religious difference as a critical force that highlights secularization in both its enabling and disabling aspects. Whimsically, but with a critical purpose, moving back and forth between Judaism and Christianity, and free of any anxieties of denominational allegiance and fixation, Heine presents secularism as a force not outside but within, or more precisely, between, religions. He stages secularization through the shifting of perspectives, presenting Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism from the ever-changing point of view of an observer whose loyalties remain strategic but are, at the same time, guided by a knowing appreciation of the redeeming function of the critical force of religion in whatever guise it might manifest itself. What on the surface seems for many critics of Heine like a shifty and supposedly shaky outlook reveals itself, upon closer examination, as a thoughtful and artfully mounted appreciation of the fundamental significance of the legacy of religion for modernity. Not unlike the Marrano experience of the Sephardic Jews of the seventeenth century and of their philosophical exponent Spinoza—Heine’s declared hero—Heine finds himself caught between the conflicting claims of Judaism, Christianity, and the challenge of modernity.3 For Heine, just as for the Marranos, an exclusionary privileging of one over the other religious tradition does not seem to be a viable option, because, according to their experience, Judaism, Christianity, and modernity present too much of an intertwined complex to isolate one from the other as the singularly universal truth. But in contrast to Marrano culture, whose profound skepticism separates them from their Jewish legacy in ways too radical for Judaism to provide any possibility for positive 3. Klaus Briegleb calls Heine a Marrano Jew. See Klaus Briegleb, Bei den Wassern Babels: Heinrich Heine, jüdischer Schriftsteller in der Moderne (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1977). For the role of Spinoza for Heine, see Willi Goetschel, Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004); and ‘‘Heine’s Spinoza,’’ Idealistic Studies 33 (2003): 207–21.


identification, Heine considers Jewish tradition a fundamental but ignored, if not repressed, part of Christian tradition and modernity. This allows him to take a sovereign stand toward religious traditions, which provides the groundwork for a critical platform for theorizing secularism. Heine, the baptized Jew, does not need to return to Judaism, which he never left in the first place. Stubbornly resistant against any urge for religious or cultural supremacy, the double exposure to both Judaism and Christian culture allows him to understand secularization to be a matter of perspective. What Nietzsche will later develop into a full-fledged theory of perspectivism is already prefigured in Heine. Heine launches his secularism as a contrastive perspectivism that views secularization as an everchanging differential movement addressing one particular religion in critical difference to the religious and theological theory and practice of its other. In switching positions between Christian and Jewish points of view, the critical force of Heine’s lyric and narrative trajectories emerges in its unique poetic voice. This continuing religious code switching opens the horizon that throws secularization into sharp profile as it provides a critical space for expressing the undiminished complexity of the process of secularization. This oscillating movement at the heart of Heine’s secularism makes for a distinctly post-Romantic notion of religion. His provocative blend of postEnlightenment and historico-philosophical tenets provides the framework for a critical recognition of religion as a modern phenomenon. Heine thus understands secularization as a critical concept in the Kantian sense.4 For him, secularization does not denote a doctrinary project whose truth claims simply erase or overwrite tradition. Rather, he casts secularization as a process that sheds light on the complicities and hidden affinities between a fully emancipated rationalism and its other, that is, religion, tradition, even superstition. This mutual dependence of religion and secularism is what, at times, gives the world of Heine’s poetry its haunted outlook. But far from simply presenting a self-obsessed anxiety of the uncanny, the staging of this haunting interdependence signals the moment of the critical in Heine’s work, for such haunting does not derive from the return of religion but from secularism’s zealous rigor, eager to deny and suppress the claims of religion. In critical distinction, Heine’s poetry and prose propose that only a consistently self-reflective critique of religion, one that 4. For a discussion of Kant’s concept of critique and the critical, see Willi Goetschel, Constituting Critique: Kant’s Writing as Critical Praxis (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 1–8.


poetically imagines its own blind spots as constitutively connected to what it critiques, will succeed in the release of the emancipatory power that secularization promises. What appears in his early poetry to be subtly interwoven with a heightened post-Romantic sensitivity articulates itself over the course of Heine’s writing career in ever-sharper and more palpable terms, as his critical secularism becomes ever-more outspoken and distinct. But the pulsating energy of this critical secularism, responsible for the pointed irony for which Heine is so notorious, registers already in his earliest and seemingly romanticizing texts. Book of Songs Secularizing the canon of metaphors in a cheerfully playful but consistent manner, Heine’s early poetry represents a coherently executed project of the secularization of German classic and Romantic poetry. His poetry removes the theme of love and longing, of lost love, desire, and lust, from its traditional context, in which the world was presented as metaphysically secured by the safety net of the decor of a Christian worldview, which was either implicitly present or explicitly invoked. While paganizing poetry, like Goethe’s early poems, or Schiller’s classicizing ones, would propose an alternative to Christian worldviews, their poetry would not reflect, address, or engage in the kind of radical secularization project typical for Heine. For in his love poetry, the ironic turn that leads to the dismantling of both the expectations of the reader and the longings of the lyrical I directly challenges and undermines the mind/body dichotomy underpinning Christian worldviews. The recurrent theme of excess sensualism that runs through Heine’s poetry like a leitmotif carries a secularizing force no other German poet would express with such persistent determination before Heine. The love poems, which have become widely known through Robert Schumann’s lieder cycle Dichterliebe, express this tendency in a remarkably subliminal yet distinct fashion. While the romanticizing compositions often seek to cover up this tension or domesticate it into a Romantic mood, the poetry’s breaks and disillusionments create a unique secularization effect. Much of the sting of Heine’s poignant irony derives from this shocklike repetition of the moment of secularization. His poetry rejects the traditional canon of love. Loss of love, rejection, and disappointment are no longer transcended or ‘‘sublimated.’’ Instead, the sting of the pangs of love is given unmitigated expression. Nothing exists in this poetic universe that can soften the pain of love


and existence; nothing can redeem it. The melancholy and woe are set free from any metaphysical or religious meaning. Running counter to both classic and Romantic poetic conventions, Heine’s lyrical subject stands abandoned and in defiant rejection of any metaphysical consolation. Heine’s most famous and popular poem, ‘‘Lorelei,’’ exemplifies this kind of secularism in a paradigmatic manner. A careful reading of the poem, whose notoriously longing voice has been given prominent status as an expression of heightened German national sentiment, reveals a dimension of critical reflection that calls for attention. Beneath the powerfully suggestive but, at the same time, precariously thin surface of Romantic veneer, the poem performs an intriguing poetic act of secularization. The pretended ignorance and loss of cultural memory is given its interminable resolution in what follows the enchanting, singsong-like opening lines: ‘‘I don’t know the reason why / I should be feeling so sad.’’ 5 What seems irretrievably lost and unfathomable to the rational subject is retrieved—through the poem’s act of remembrance—through the figure of loss. As the poem recalls the fatally bewitching powers of Lorelei, it expresses a mourning that laments, beyond the recovery of memory, what escapes the grasp of the secular mind. The poem’s stirringly soothing style gives voice to the powerful hold of the mythical, whose spell transfixes the gaze of the secular the more it desires to break that spell. But rather than an expression of anxiety or fear,6 the poem articulates a critical comment on the predicament of secularism: as it figures secularization as disenchantment, whose loss remains incommensurable with the promise of secular hope, it reminds the reader of secularization’s loss as its curse. Secularization is, then, not an unproblematic process but fraught with uneasy difficulties that haunt the secular: ‘‘A tale of times gone by / Keeps running through my head’’ (Heine/Pollak, 9). The suggestive tension between the unknowing melancholy of forgetting and the obsessive memory of an old-time tale brings out the aporia that defines the project of 5. ‘‘Lorelei,’’ trans. Felix Pollak, in Heinrich Heine, Poetry and Prose, ed. Jost Hermand and Robert C. Holub (New York: Continuum, 1982), 9. Subsequent references to ‘‘Lorelei’’ are to this bilingual edition and are cited parenthetically as Heine/Pollak. 6. Jakob Hessing, ‘‘Heil und Unheil: Zur Umformung religiöser Motive in Heinrich Heines feüher Lyrik,’’ in Das Jerusalemer Heine-Symposium: Gedächtnis, Mythos, Modernität, ed. Klaus Briegleb and Itta Shedlitzky (Hamburg: Dölling and Galitz, 2001), 65–78, gives an interesting reading that stresses the moment of anxiety of loss. But his verdict that transcendence has become silent in Heine (74) seems problematic in the face of Heine’s jubilation of double entendres. It is important to note that Heine’s is a poetry that always gives both sides of every aspect its voice. Anxiety and fear are thus always counterbalanced by the liberating joy and celebration.


disenchantment as ambivalent in nature. The poem stages this ambivalence in programmatic manner: its melancholy sadness is not only prompted by the forgetting and the anxiety that results from such forgetting. More critically, melancholy figures in this poem also as remembering, a remembering that remains melancholy as long as it remains unable to recognize the source of its sadness as the problem of secularism. As the poem begins to speak of olden times, it appears to move seamlessly into the past, a past that the poem, however, stages in the present. It is not until the final line that the poem changes to the past perfect, but not without another curious twist added. While Lorelei’s seductive powers bewitch the boatman, evoking his deadly desire and longing, the text performs a curious move that both enforces and undermines the illusion of the quasi-mythological image the poem conjures. If we are told that the lyrical I believes now that both boatman and boat sink, the issue of the status of this story emerges with underhanded virulence. What is a reader, who stumbles over this ‘‘Ich glaube’’ (I fancy), to think of the story, then, as a whole? This ‘‘Ich glaube’’ both makes and unmakes the narrative fundament on which the narrative seems to stand: the tradition of a tale that is at the same time both remembered and not quite remembered. Signaling indecision, the past becomes transparent as mediated through a present that is linked to the past it does and does not remember, a past that breaks into the present in fragmented form to light up, if only for an instance, to disappear again. Instead of a continuous narrative that links past and present in uninterrupted form, ‘‘Lorelei’’ reminds the reader that continuity remains a precarious and fragile specter, and that connection with the past is an ever-new challenge to the present it haunts: Ich glaube, die Wellen verschlingen Am Ende Schiffer und Kahn; Und das hat mit ihrem Singen Die Lore-Ley getan. [I fancy the waves will cover Both boatman and boat before long; And that was done to her lover By the Lorelei and her song.] (Heine/Pollak, 8–9) While the rhythm seems to suggest a smooth transition into the final stanza, the lyrics undermine this appearance. In ironic suspense, as belief rather than knowledge, the words Ich glaube (I believe) highlight the problematic


character of this production of the past as one that becomes legible as a fiction of the present. The semblance of simplicity is subverted here and the fictional character of the past exposed. The melancholy sense of loss gives voice to the mourning of a past figured as present. What gives this poem its uncanny force is not its mythological or fairy-tale dimension but the way the narrative is inscribed in the lyrical I’s own present. Beyond a nostalgic return to the past and a celebration of the present, the text expresses a heightened sense for the precarious fragility of the present that defines modernity. In this poem, the contemporary and the noncontemporary can no longer be neatly kept apart. They cannot be contained as two distinctly separate entities. Instead, their interdependence emerges as an uneasy, conflicted condition. The Lorelei’s singing reaches into the present and haunts it as the vanishing trace of the past. But the poem does not allow the reader to settle comfortably in nostalgic sentimentalism. Nor can the haunting impulse of the poem be explained away as the trace of the Romantic uncanny. Instead, the poem presents an irresistible enactment of the feeling and the recognition of the noncontemporary as the constitutive moment of the present: the simultaneity of a past invoked that remains elusive but just strong enough to operate the powerful call of the past for those who wish to live exclusively in the present: Er schaut nicht die Felsenriffe, Er schaut nur in die Höh. [He sees not the cliffs approaching, His eyes are fastened above.] (Heine/Pollak, 9) The one who does not look down but only up, who only looks ahead but fails to look back, is doomed, the poem reminds us. But, then, a particular kind of doubt underlies this poem: Ich glaube, die Wellen verschlingen Am Ende Schiffer und Kahn. [I fancy the waves will cover Both boatman and boat before long.] (Heine/Pollak, 9) This is not an absolute doubt but rather a qualifying doubt, a doubt that hesitates to pass for history, or fact. It is a legend, a tale. But while the lyrical I cannot forget it, remembering it does not cure it of melancholy. Part of the poem’s potent melancholy stems from its insight that the past can


be addressed only head-on, as the present, and that the present can be grasped only as the past. Read as a tale of modernity and the problem of secularization, ‘‘Lorelei’’ reminds us that emancipation and liberation from the irrational forces come with the cost of a loss whose mourning may produce the enticing beauty of poetic magic. But this loss will always leave the mourner with the recognition that reason rests on the precariously fluid grounds of the irrational it ‘‘fancies’’ to have secularized.7 To highlight the moment of secularization, let me, on a lighter note, compare Heine’s poem with a later version of the Lorelei song by two other Jewish authors/composers. If the Gershwin brothers’ ‘‘Loreley’’ takes the myth of Lorelei to the extremes of secularization, reducing her to a lascivious seducer in the age of bimboism, where the inexplicable is reduced to sexiness, their version highlights, by contrast, Heine’s concern to comprehend secularization as an open-ended affair that provides the ground for emancipation only as long as this process is understood as an ongoing project in progress. In the age of the early-twentieth-century mass culture industry, one could say, this process had to come to an end if it was not to jeopardize the self-congratulatory assuredness of the man of the ‘‘free world.’’ Secular Kissing In his ‘‘City of Lucca’’ (1831), Heine stages the problem of secularism in all its critical urgency. As his narrator reaches the city of Lucca at night, a Catholic procession is under way. To escape the somber atmosphere of this festivity, the narrator drops by a church. In a corner, he spots the lady of his dreams, who takes him in her arms and kisses him. But being kissed by the sensual Italian beauty is not the kind of complete wish fulfillment the reader might have expected. For her kisses are accompanied by the passionate whispering: ‘‘Cecco, Cecco, caro Cecco!’’ This passionate embrace and kissing, the narrator comments, are meant for someone else— for Cecco, a young abbot from Bologna, and thus a servant of the Roman Catholic Church. Confusion follows, but no embarrassment. For Heine’s narrator has no scruples in accepting such favors: 7. For background information on Heine’s sources for the myth of Lorelei, see Heinrich Heine, Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Manfred Windfuhr (Düsseldorf: Campe, 1973), 1.2:877–86. The folklore and the Romantic elaborations by Chamisso and others conjure a Christian framework that Heine’s version effectively undercuts.


Als Protestant machte ich mir kein Gewissen daraus, mir die Güter der katholischen Geistlichkeit zuzueignen, und auf der Stelle säkularisierte ich die frommen Küsse Franscheskas. (Briegleb, 2:495) [As a Protestant I had no scruples about appropriating the goods of the Catholic clergy, and I secularized Francesca’s pious kisses on the spot.] 8 This is, even for Heine, a densely packed sentence brimming with ironies. Already the opening, ‘‘As a Protestant,’’ does not lack ironic double entendre. While Heine certainly was a certified Protestant by baptism, he quickly came to regret his decision to undergo baptism, as it, ironically, stamped him ‘‘indelibly’’ a Jew, a Jew whose Jewishness could not be washed off by holy water. ‘‘As a Protestant’’ thus covertly signals ‘‘as a Jew.’’ As a Jew and Protestant, or, rather, a Jew who appears in the guise of a Protestant, the narrator appropriates the properties of the Catholic authorities without hesitations, secularizing them on the spot right then and there, inside the sanctuary of the sacred sphere of the church. This scene complicates the notion of secularization in a striking meaning. Foregrounded by the complex setting of the scene in the narrative and the text, the narrative’s complication creates a conceptual short circuit that challenges the neatness of the common notion of secularization as it is understood and used by the opposing parties involved in the secularization debate of the nineteenth century. As Heine’s narrator performs an act of secularization, taking the meaning of secularization literally, he breaks the barriers and transgresses the hermeneutic horizon of his reader’s expectations. Exposing the blind spots of the tacit arrangements that drive the secularization debate, this intervention necessitates a principal rethinking of the meaning of secularization. At a closer look, the kind of piety that Franscheska’s pious kisses suggest harbors a this-worldly tendency which the church, represented by the beloved abbot, would be only too willing to accept. If secularization comes as easy as offering yourself as recipient of the goods of institutionalized religion, the passive receptive part of the narrator points to the fact that secularization is already on its way and that the point consists in simply stating what happens ‘‘naturally.’’ Following this idea to its logical conclusion, the text leads up to a radical performance of secularization. Thriving on the 8. Heinrich Heine, Selected Prose, trans. and ed. Ritchie Robertson (London: Penguin, 1993), 162. Subsequent references to this work are cited parenthetically as Robertson, followed by page number.


double entendre of the central religious event of Catholic experience, the moment of transubstantiation, in which the symbol of the wafer assumes the properties of Christ’s body, the narrator’s praise of the physical beauty of his beloved Franscheska imitates the exact wording of the Catholic doctrine: [‘‘]Ich liege in deinen Armen . . . das Wort wird Fleisch, der Glaube wird versinnlicht, in Form und Gestalt, welche Religion! Ihr Pfaffen! Jubelt unterdessen Eur Kyrie Eleison, klingelt, räuchert, läutet die Glocken, laßt die Orgel brausen, laßt die Messe von Palestrina erklingen—‘das ist der Leib’!—ich glaube, ich bin selig, ich schlafe ein—aber sobald ich des anderen Morgens erwache, reibe ich mir den Schlaf und den Katholizismus aus den Augen, und sehe wieder klar in die Sonne und in die Bibel, und bin wieder protestantisch vernünftig und nüchtern, nach wie vor.’’ (Briegleb, 2:496) [(‘‘)I will lie in your arms . . . the word will become flesh, faith will become sensual in shape and in form—what a religion! You priests! chant your Kyrie Eleison meanwhile, tinkle, ring the bells, swing the censer, let the organ boom, let Palestrina’s Mass resound—‘this is the body!’—I shall believe myself among the blest as I fall asleep— but as soon as I wake up next morning, I shall rub the sleep and the Catholicism from my eyes, and again see the sunshine and the Bible clearly, and be rational, sensible and Protestant, as before.’’] (Robertson, 163) This passage paradigmatically performs the act of secularization. Its amusing quid pro quo underscores a crucially critical moment: secularization is not a primary act that initiates the undoing of a hitherto unquestioned religious claim. Rather, and more subtly, this staging of the narrator’s wild mixing of religion and sexual desire highlights the fact that the institution of religion does not spring from divine revelations alone but is always already constituted as spiritualization of the secular from which it takes its cues, albeit in order to transcend, deny, and suppress them. Secularization is thus grasped as continuous with the movement religion itself initiates. Finally, this passage hammers home the point of Catholicism and Protestantism as each other’s opposite, whose agonistic coexistence is not the whole of the story but rather conceals a shared monopoly that excludes other forms of religiosity. While these two denominations might fancy sharing their power the way day and night rule together all life on earth—an aspiration perhaps prefigured in the pope’s 1494 arbitration between Portugal and Spain


to split the world into two equal hemispheres—the Protestant wake-up call brings with its forced sobriety and sensibility the silent memory of what goes unmentioned but what Heine’s text recalls as Christianity’s repressed: the Jewish body that Christian religion celebrates or secularizes. This uniquely Heinean double entendre that confuses and mixes flesh and spirit effectively undoes the key distinction on which the entire Christian universe hinges. Heine links here his interest in the reinstatement of the senses and the resurrection of the body directly to his secularism. Besides its more frivolous aspects, this reclaiming of the rights of the senses presents a crucial moment of his critical secularism, as Heine strips Christian symbolism from its spiritual content and reduces it in radical manner to its literal meaning, thus literally secularizing religion. But this provocative secularization amounts to more than simply an iconoclastic affect. For Heine, the program of reinstating the flesh, the senses, and joy expresses not just his anticlerical penchant but is also part of his critical secularism that seeks to free us from both obsolete notions of outdated morality and its modern versions that aim at yet another subjection of the individual who still awaits emancipation. Secularized Jewish Jesus As Heine’s secularism does not shy away from a direct engagement with religion, it subjects Jesus and even God to a bold and provocative treatment of radical secularization. In the case of Jesus, Heine’s seemingly infidel attitude produces a stunning portrayal that functions as a critical intervention in the discourse of Jewish emancipation. What the conscientious friar in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan the Wise had done in diplomatic manner, namely, point out that Jesus was, after all, a Jew, Heine now turns into a critical point of contention. If Jesus was the man he was said to be, a fair look at the history of religion would have to admit that it was, after all, the Jewish contribution that provided Christianity with its religious substance, so often claimed to be superior to Judaism. For Heine, reclaiming Jesus as a Jew means more than just the conciliatory gesture it was for the kindhearted friar in Nathan the Wise. For Heine, the Jewish claim to Jesus signals a particular kind of secularization, one that secularizes Jesus from divinity into human being, but not in order to devalue him as a figure. On the contrary, this secularizing move signals, in the case of Jesus, that recognition of his humanity calls for a fundamental reevaluation of the Jewish role in the construction of European culture. As a consequence, a secularized


Jesus does not cause the end of religion per se but, rather, the end of the claim to universalism of one particular religion and the opening of modernity to a degree that allows Judaism as equal participant in its secularizing project.9 In Heine’s appropriation of Jesus, Jesus and his symbolism mark the points of rupture where the Jewish theme makes its appearance.10 Jesus comes to stand for the Jews, and the Jews come to stand for Jesus. This poetic equation creates a point of reference that links secularization to religious freedom and equality. It thus prefigures twentieth-century notions of secularization as a genuine chance for religion to reinvent itself.11 Heine imagines Jesus, the Jew and compassionate brother of the Jews, as a figure who not only presents Judaism as equal to Christianity but one who brings home the point of Judaism’s importance as origin of Christianity. Furthermore, Heine’s Jesus also redefines modern spirituality in terms of the emancipatory secularist aspects of his gospel. And indeed, who other than Jesus performs the ultimate act of secularism, as he is sent down to earth among the humans? Yet Heine gives this theological doctrine of Jesus’ secularism his own, one could say, ‘‘Jewish’’ turn. This reclaimed Jesus has not come to redeem the world, for where could the traces for such redemption be found? Instead, Heine’s Jesus serves as a symbol for all that calls for and awaits redemption. This Jesus stands for the irreducible particularity that alone can provide the solid ground to anchor any nonexclusionary ecumenical universalism. In contrast to the church, which casts Christ, as Heine points out, as the founder of a religion for delinquents, Heine salutes Jesus, his fellow brother, as the one who brought mankind the great teaching of freedom and equality that, in the guise of the French Gospel, inspires today’s world (Briegleb, 2:493; Robertson, 160). And it is precisely in this context that Heine sums up for the first time his theory of secularization: 9. The programmatic reclaiming of Jesus by the Jewish historian Abraham Geiger as a sign of the cultural significance of Judaism for Christianity and, as a consequence, for Western civilization is most likely inspired by Heine, who was also a source of inspiration for other nineteenth-century German Jewish historians, such as Heinrich Graetz. For more on Abraham Geiger, see the exemplary study by Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 10. In addition to the passages discussed, see also the opening of Shakespeares Mädchen und Frauen (Briegleb, 4:173). 11. For a discussion of secularization as an opportunity for religious self-examination, see Hermann Lübbe, Säkularisierung: Geschichte eines ideenpolitischen Begriffs, 2nd ed. (Freiburg: K. Alber, 1975).


Nur so lange die Religionen mit anderen zu rivalisieren haben, und weit mehr verfolgt werden als selbst verfolgen, sind sie herrlich und ehrenswert. . . . Wie den Gewerben ist auch den Religionen das Monopolsystem schädlich, durch freie Konkurrenz bleiben sie kräftig, und sie werden erst dann zu ihrer ursprünglichen Herrlichkeit erblühen, sobald die politische Gleichheit der Gottesdienste, so zu sagen die Gewerbefreiheit der Götter eingeführt wird. (Briegleb, 2:518) [Only when religions have to compete with one another, and are persecuted rather than persecuting, are they magnificent and admirable. . . . A system of monopolies is as harmful to religions as to trade; they remain alive through free competition, and they will only return to their original splendour when political equality of worship is introduced—free trade in gods, as it were.] (Robertson, 182) If this passage in ‘‘The City of Lucca’’ seems to extol the American model of freedom of religion and trade, this is not Heine’s last word. But we must remember that for the European secularists, America was the country that pointed to the future, a country where, indeed, freedom of religion presented a crucial aspect of the constitution of the new world. Yet Heine does not allow himself to be blinded by crude economism. Instead, his application of economic terms to expose the reality of organized religion does not imply any value other than a heuristic one. Translating religious practice into its economic consequences, Heine succeeds in exposing, at the same time, the hypocrisy of religion and the lie of supposed economic freedom, just as in his On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany he focuses on the social consequences religion produces across the board. As he expresses it polemically in ‘‘The City of Lucca,’’ Ist es doch eine bekannte Bemerkung, daß die Pfaffen in der ganzen Welt, Rabbinen, Muftis, Dominikaner, Konsistorialräte, Popen, Bonzen kurz das ganze diplomatische Corps Gottes, im Gesichte eine gewisse Familienähnlichkeit haben, wie man sie immer findet bei Leuten, die ein und dasselbe Gewerbe treiben. . . . Die geistlichen Kaufleute, solche die von Religionsgeschäften ihren Unterhalt gewinnen, erlangen daher auch im Gesichte eine Ähnlichkeit. (Briegleb, 2:486) [After all, it is a familiar observation that priests all over the world, rabbis, muftis, Dominicans, consistory counsellors, Orthodox popes, Chinese bonzes, in short, God’s entire diplomatic corps, have a cer-


tain family resemblance in their faces, such as is always found in people who practise the same trade. . . . Hence spiritual merchants, who make their living in the religion business, acquire a similarity of features.] (Robertson, 154–55) If it is the economic occupation and station that determine individual appearance, Heine’s insistence sounds quite close to Marx’s point that it is the material base that determines consciousness rather than the other way around. However, Heine takes this insight literally but playfully, as he continues formulating a striking parallel to modern trade practice: Freilich, einige Nuancen entstehen durch die Art und Weise wie sie ihr Geschäft treiben. Der katholische Pfaffe treibt es mehr wie ein Commis, der in einer großen Handlung angestellt ist; die Kirche, das große Haus, dessen Chef der Papst ist, gibt ihm bestimmte Beschäftigung und dafür ein bestimmtes Salär; er arbeitet lässig, wie jeder, der nicht für eigne Rechnung arbeitet und viele Kollegen hat, und im großen Geschäftstreiben leicht unbemerkt bleibt—nur der Kredit des Hauses liegt ihm am Herzen, und noch mehr dessen Erhaltung, da er bei einem etwaigen Bankerotte seinen Lebensunterhalt verlöre. (Briegleb, 2:486) [Admittedly, some nuances result from the manner in which they pursue their business. The Catholic priest pursues his like the clerk employed in a large company; the church, the great commercial house whose chairman is the Pope, gives him a specified occupation and pays him a specified salary for it; he works sluggishly, as does anyone who is not working on his own account, has many colleagues, and can easily remain unobserved in the great hubbub of business— he cares only about the credit of the company, and still more about its survival, since he would lose his source of income if it were to go bankrupt.] (Robertson, 155) And while the Catholic priest’s attitude is that of a little employee of a big corporation who is less concerned about actual sales than the longevity of the company that provides for his needs, Heine’s Protestant reverend foreshadows key features of the Protestant entrepreneur of Max Weber’s theory of the ride of capitalism: Der protestantische Pfaffe hingegen ist überall selbst Prinzipal, und er treibt die Religionsgeschäfte für eigene Rechnung. Er treibt keinen Großhandel wie sein katholischer Gewerbsgenosse, sondern nur


einen Kleinhandel; und da er demselben allein vorstehen muß, darf er nicht lässig sein, er muß seine Glaubensartikel den Leuten anrühmen, die Artikel seiner Konkurrenten herabsetzen, und als echter Kleinhändler steht er in seiner Ausschnittbude, voll von Gewerbsneid gegen alle großen Häuser, absonderlich gegen das große Haus in Rom, das viele tausend Buchhalter und Packknechte besoldet und seine Faktoreien hat in allen vier Weltteilen. . . . Ein katholischer Pfaffe wandelt einher als wenn ihm der Himmel gehöre; ein protestantischer Pfaffe hingegen geht herum als wenn er den Himmel gepachtet habe. (Briegleb, 2:486–87) [The Protestant priest, on the other hand, is everywhere himself the principal, and conducts the religion business on his own account. He does not do wholesale trade, like his Catholic counterpart, but only retail trade; and since he must be in sole charge of it, he cannot be idle, he must advertise his own articles of faith and cry down his competitors’ articles, and he stands in his booth like a real retailer, full of commercial envy against all large companies, especially the great house in Rome which employs many thousands of book-keepers and dispatchers and has its trading-posts in all four continents. . . . A Catholic priest strolls around as if heaven belonged to him; a Protestant priest, on the other hand, bustles about as though he had taken a lease of heaven.] (Robertson, 155) Besides this refreshingly perceptive characterization of the two corporate cultures of Christianity, there is another aspect crucial to Heine’s critique of institutionalized religion. The critical bite of this juxtaposition does not consist so much in its staging of two mutually exclusionary (Christian) religious worldviews; more importantly, Heine frames his discussion of Catholicism and Protestantism by confronting them with Judaism. If, on the one hand, the discourse on Judaism makes its entrance through the space that the critique of Christianity opens up, it is, on the other hand, this explicit reference to Christianity’s sources that points to the Jewish subtext that informs Heine’s secularism critically. As the text self-consciously underscores the constitutive link between Jesus and the Jewish tradition, it addresses the question of secularism in a new way. With the introduction of the figure of the suffering Christ in chapters 5 and 6, Heine reclaims Christian spirituality as a product of a secularization process that appropriated Jewish religiosity for its own religious purposes; as a result, Christianity’s claim to superiority turns out to depend on the merciless erasure of any


memory of its Jewish traces. In allowing the return of this repressed memory, the text highlights secularization as the constitutive moment that unites Judaism and Christianity. Notorious for its provocative and unforgiving critique of Jewish assimilation, this text, however, complicates its critique in a challenging manner, as ‘‘The City of Lucca’’ confronts its readers with Christian spirituality in a manner that leaves no doubt that the project of secularization remains incomplete as long as the Jewish sources of both Christian religion and modern secularism are ignored. Constructed as a carefully balanced narrative, Heine’s text arranges the Jewish and Christian themes as contesting and mutually exclusive views. But this contradiction is staged as an enabling critical force, a force that releases rather than obstructs the process of secularization. Heine thus effectively stages secularization as an interreligious phenomenon. And it is, interestingly, through this contrastive positioning of the discourse on Jewish emancipation in the midst of a discourse of secularization that Heine’s Jewish subtext gains its critical function. Projecting Judaism into the narrative, Heine gives it new meaning as a critical point of reference that brackets the question of its truth or validity and, instead, applies it as critical for the question of secularism. With this move, Judaism is thus introduced in a narrative that presents itself as resolutely emancipated from the constraints and fetters that define Christian-dominated discourse even in its variety as European secularism. In Heine’s work, Jesus, the double-faced man/God who represents both humanity’s accumulated suffering and bloodletting, and the revolutionary vision of universal freedom, marks the point where Christian and Jewish worlds meet. If one world serves as lever for the secularism of the other, Jesus represents both the moment of their shared spirituality and the source that makes secularism possible. With Jesus at the crossroads between religions—as it were, located prior to any institutionalized form of religion—and as a figure who returns at crucial moments in his texts, Heine gives voice to a critical principle that reflects the double-faced aspect of secularization as always both, a secular and a religious event. The curious theologicalpolitical role of Jesus in Heine’s writing highlights his highly developed sense of the precarious and fragile grounds of secularism, located at the interspaces between traditional spirituality and modern agnosticism. It is this foundational precariousness that his reworking of Jesus is meant to stake out. Far from resolving the problem of secularism, his Jesus further complicates it. With his this-worldly other-worldliness, Heine’s Jesus calls any uncritical concept of secularism into question. Refusing to fit any incon-


sequential notion of religion or agnostic form of disenchantment, this view of Jesus conjures what enables and resists an uncritical secularism at the same time. With his distinctly (and forcefully) (non-)secular features, Heine’s Jesus can be seen as a cousin of Walter Benjamin’s uncanny little hunchback, whose double hides in the famous chess-play apparatus of Benjamin’s first thesis on history. Just as Benjamin comments on the repressed but so powerfully present ugly face of theology as the force that drives historical materialism, Heine draws attention to the fact that the basis for critical secularism rests on the full recognition of the religious moment that informs the project of secularization. An Alternative Narrative of Secularization In On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, written a few years after ‘‘The City of Lucca,’’ Heine systematically unfolds the insight into the profound connection between religious spirituality and its repressed origins. While this work is mostly read for its quirky presentation of the history of modern German philosophy, its emphasis on the history of religion and philosophy announces already in the title some hint at the connection between religion and the secular thought of philosophy. And indeed, Heine presents the reader here with a stunning performance of history writing. In a breathtaking sweep through the centuries, he constructs the genesis of modern German thought as the outcome of a century-long struggle between different forms of superstition, religion, and the social realities they would reflect. Not surprisingly, the narrative of the battle between local forms of paganism and imported Christianity assumes the form of an argument concerning secularization. But rather than following a narrative of progressive transformation from religion to secular thought, Heine’s text paints a portrait where the most significant moments of the history of religion present themselves as already secularized. In an ingenious moment in this narrative, where he comments on the construction of Saint Peter’s Basilica under Pope Leo X, Heine combines the history of religion and social history with intellectual history in a manner that is paradigmatic for his approach. Pointing out that this venture was financed through the church’s aggressive sale of letters of indulgence, Heine observes daß die Sünde ganz eigentlich das Geld hergab zum Bau dieser Kirche, die dadurch gleichsam ein Monument sinnlicher Lust wurde. (Briegleb, 3:532)


[that sin really did provide the money for building this church, which thus became, as it were, a monument to sensual pleasure.] (Robertson, 220) This is not only caustic irony but also the kind of observation that demonstrates the profoundly secular moment that informs even the construction of one of the most sublime symbols of the Catholic Church. But, vice versa, if it could be argued that, indeed, the devil built this house of God, it is, on the other hand, not the least of the triumphs of spiritualism that it had sensualism erect spiritualism’s most beautiful temple. This double-faced take makes for a secularism that, on the one hand, operates deliberately at a distance from organized forms of religion but, on the other hand, aims at theoretically satisfactory explanations for the subliminal role religion plays in social and intellectual history. In a dramatic ride through history, the reader follows the compromise formations between local and imported and imposed forms of religion and superstition. Secularization emerges thus as anything but a linear and teleological development. Rather, Heine’s narrative produces a whirlwind of historical impressions undermining any notion of a straightforward progressive process that would lead from an absolute hold of the power of religious imagination to the state of total freedom from any traces of religious tradition. Heine’s approach to intellectual history rests, instead, on the recognition that the success of the project of secularization hinges on how cultural and religious differences are allowed to be played out. One of the key scenes in Heine’s narrative of emancipation and liberation is the bold and undaunted way in which he confronts the reader with the ultimate aspect of secularization, the death of God. And as in the case of Jesus, God himself, too, has features that remind the reader only too well of the poet’s own personality, but this comes as no surprise, for the young Heine’s secularism is less concerned with dragging God down to earth than with liberating humanity to the heights of the Divine. In On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, the announcement of God’s death is followed by an obituary reviewing God’s career from the city of Ur, to Egypt and Jerusalem, and to his final promotion to Rome.12 But while God assumes here the features of the communities that venerate him, this short secularization narrative mercilessly secularizes God himself, subjecting him to the 12. This narrative concludes the second book. An account of deism’s January 21 (the day of Louis XVI’s execution), it serves as prelude to the French Revolution. See Robertson, 266.


ultimate destiny of men, namely, death. More importantly, in an additional twist, this biographical sketch links the small tribal God of the Jews with the principle of universalism that points beyond the problem of secularism to the issue of the status of secularism itself. Linking Christian universalism with the small-time God of Judaism, this obituary writes the death of God as the end of particularity’s struggle for universalism, which, behind all irony, encapsulates the dialectic of secularism in the image of a snapshot: Wir haben ihn so gut gekannt, von seiner Wiege an, in Ägypten, als er unter göttlichen Kälbern, Krokodilen, heiligen Zwiebeln, Ibissen und Katzen erzogen wurde—Wir haben ihn gesehen, wie er diesen Gespielen seiner Kindheit und den Obelisken und Sphinxen seines heimatlichen Niltals Ade sagte und in Palästina, bei einem armen Hirtenvölkchen, ein kleiner Gott-König wurde, und in einem eigenen Tempelpalast wohnte—Wir sahen ihn späterhin, wie er mit der assyrisch-babylonischen Zivilisation in Berührung kam, und seine allzumenschliche Leidenschaften ablegte, nicht mehr lauter Zorn und Rache spie, wenigstens nicht mehr wegen jeder Lumperei gleich donnerte—Wir sahen ihn auswandern nach Rom, der Hauptstadt, wo er aller Nationalvorurteile entsagte, und die himmlische Gleichheit aller Völker proklamierte, und mit solchen schönen Phrasen gegen den alten Jupiter Opposition bildete, und so lange intrigierte bis er zur Herrschaft gelangte und vom Kapitole herab die Stadt und die Welt, urbem et orbem, regierte.—Wir sahen, wie er sich noch mehr vergeistigte, wie er sanftselig wimmerte, wie er ein liebevoller Vater wurde, ein allgemeiner Menschenfreund, ein Weltbeglücker, ein Philanthrop—es konnte ihm alles nichts helfen— (Briegleb, 3:591) [We have known him so ever since he lay in his cradle, in Egypt, where he was brought up among divine calves, crocodiles, sacred onions, ibises, and cats. We saw him bid farewell to these childhood playmates and to the obelisks and sphinxes of his native Nile valley, and become a little god-king in Palestine among a poor shepherd tribe, where he lived in a temple-palace of his own. We saw later how he encountered Assyrian and Babylonian civilization and put aside his all-too-human passions, no longer spitting anger and revenge, at least not uttering thunder on account of every trifle. We saw him emigrate to Rome, the capital, where he abandoned all local prejudices, and proclaimed the heavenly equality of all the nations, and,


with the aid of such fine slogans, formed an opposition party against old Jupiter, and kept intriguing until he attained power and governed the city and the world, urbem et orbem, from the Capitol. We saw how he became yet more spiritual, how he whimpered mildly, how he became a loving father, a friend of humanity, a universal benefactor, a philanthropist—none of it helped him. . . .] (Robertson, 266) Introducing the motif of revolution, Heine’s account of the death of God links the birth of modernity with a strong and powerful notion of the connection between secularization and modernity. But this was not Heine’s final word. After a resolutely atheist phase, whose pantheist underpinning, however, allowed his secularism to never lose track of the importance of the history of religion for the genesis of modernity, a view that also allowed him to maintain his Jewish identity in all its complexities, he announced a change of view with regard to the self-deification of man.13 Often explained in terms of the illness that would confine him to his ‘‘mattress grave’’ for the rest of his life, Heine’s revocation of atheism suggests more a shift in emphasis than an actual turn or return to a tradition he did not consider ever to have left in the first place. As he experienced it painfully early, there was no leaving behind his Judaism. Instead, tradition and identity followed him afoot. Heine’s creative reimagining of Judaism and its traditions allowed him to comprehend his own experience of change and alterations as already a living part of Jewish history itself. As his theory and practice of secularism resist at every point the seductive power of doctrinary assertiveness, they are in Heine’s work defined by a critical attitude too self-reflected to settle for any crude form of atheism. Polemically strategic, even his most brazen and controversial statements thrive on the notion of the differential construction of all religious tradition and can therefore function as agents for both secularization and its opposite. I argue, therefore, that Heine’s staging of his return to a personal God should not be reduced to mere biographical anecdote. Heine’s conscious confusion of public and private persona, I would argue, works resolutely both ways. Given the timing, we can read Heine’s ‘‘return’’ as a critical reminder for the generation of 1848 to recognize that radical atheism does not resolve the problem of modernity but is rather one of its symptoms. Heine’s self-stylization as a latter-day Lazarus communicating with the world from his ‘‘mattress grave’’ provides a unique platform to urge the 13. See his 1852 preface to On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany and his postface to Romanzero.


acknowledgment of the constitutive role religion continues to play in the age of secularism. Without this recognition, the voice from the ‘‘mattress grave’’ reminds us, modern secularism might just be another episode in the history of religion, an episode in which repression of religion would lead only to an ever-more-powerful return of the repressed in the guise of superstition that suppresses rather than elevates religion to the heights of modern spirituality. A consciously staged noncontemporaneity, Heine’s religious ‘‘turn’’ marks a countermove that highlights the problematic restrictions of his contemporaries’ secularism that imagines itself to have abolished all traces of religion. Against such an uncritical attitude, Heine insists on embracing religion as a critical and critically constitutive agent of modernity. Coda Heine’s ‘‘Hebrew Melodies’’ may be viewed as the completion of the project of a critical secularism. It shakes off the old fetters of social control by religious powers while it commemorates, at the same time, the liberating moment of religion itself. ‘‘Hebrew Melodies’’ performs such a reflection on the disabling and enabling forces.14 With its almost primitively direct and abrupt ending of ‘‘Disputation,’’ the poem that concludes the cycle of the three ‘‘Hebrew Melodies,’’ this poetic cycle reminds the reader that the appallingly arrogant and self-deluding attitude of the Middle Ages has not ended, after all, but continues to exert its hold up to the present. The unique singularity of the ‘‘Hebrew Melodies’’ consists in the way this cycle of poems brings out the double-sided aspect of secularism. Expressing a radically secularized concern that self-consciously gives voice to religious memory, ‘‘Hebrew Melodies’’ spells out what can be voiced only on the grounds of a critical secularism. The poems articulate a uniquely critical force: as the uncompromising insistence on particularity as the anchor for any consistent attempt at secularization. In other words, it is possible for the particularly ‘‘Hebrew’’ aspect of these melodies to raise its poetic voice only thanks to the fact that these melodies are the product of a poetics that is conceived as a thoroughly secularized project. 14. For a discussion of the centerpiece of the ‘‘Hebrew Melodies,’’ ‘‘Jehuda ben Halevy,’’ see the chapter ‘‘Tradition as Innovation in Heine’s ‘Jehuda ben Halevy’: Counterhistory in a Spinozist Key,’’ in my Spinoza’s Modernity, 266–76; for a discussion of ‘‘Prinzessin Sabbath’’ and ‘‘Disputation,’’ see my ‘‘Nightingales instead of Owls: Heine’s Joyous Philosophy,’’ in A Companion to the Works of Heinrich Heine, ed. Roger F. Cook (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2002), 139–68, esp. 157–59 and 161–62.


The ‘‘Hebrew Melodies’’ and Heine’s ‘‘return’’ to Judaism do not revoke his secularism but, instead, are its critical expression. Read this way, Heine’s secularism emerges as one that is not afraid of acknowledging the historically revolutionary impulse of religion but is equally unafraid of modernity’s difference that reinvents tradition in its own creative ways. Heine’s critical secularism presents us with a challenging approach that productively complicates traditional notions of secularism. Identifying the virulently religious moment in secularism itself, his writing forces readers to appreciate the interminable quality of secularization as a critical task.

Secularism and Relativism

Akeel Bilgrami

1 For over three decades now, secular liberalism 1 has been confronted by a form of politics that we have taken to describing, without too much pre1. Two terminological clarifications are needed. First, I am joining secularism with liberalism throughout this essay. It is not at all obvious that one should do so on any conceptual grounds. As a theme, secularism is not dependent on liberalism, since there can be perfectly illiberal forms of secularism, as in many Communist countries, or even in Baathist Iraq. And the point can go in the other direction, too: perfectly liberal societies can be religiously constituted in one or another respects, but such respects do not clash with liberal commitments. Despite all this, I have joined these two doctrines because, throughout this essay, I am working with one central example of the opposition to secularism, and that is the religious (in this particular case, Islamic, though we need not have restricted it to Islamic) objections to freedom of speech coming from laws and value commitments about the censorship of blasphemy. Since free speech is so central to liberalism too, the secularist and the liberal join together on this example. And it is generally true, perhaps, that they join together on many others, as well. But this joining is contingent and not necessary or conceptual. Second, secularism sometimes marks a doctrine that states should be neutral between religions and deal with them evenhandedly. This is not how I will be using the boundary 2 31:2, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Akeel Bilgrami.


cision, as ‘‘identity’’ politics. This essay takes philosophical stock of that confrontation and then goes on to address a very natural worry about whether there is a form of relativism about values implied by that confrontation. It seems more and more urgent to declare oneself a secularist (and I hereby do so) in a time when wars are waged by a government dominated by the thinking of the Christian Right, terror is perpetrated in the name of Islam, occupation of the territories of a continuously displaced population is perpetuated by a state constituted in explicitly Jewish terms, and a beleaguered minority is killed in planned riots by majoritarian mobilizations reviving an imagined past of Hindu glory. But even as one declares it, it would be complacent not to acknowledge that both philosophical understanding and worldly knowledge require that a claim to secularism cannot any longer deny that it is only one claim among others. Secularism does not seem to have a philosophical right on its side that makes it rise by the light of reason over other opposing claims, nor does it seem to have a natural place at center stage on grounds of our world’s manifest modernity. This is not to say that it does not have the right on its side, only that that right will have to be more hard won than by philosophers’ appeal to the pure light of reason or glib assertions of our modernity. In a series of articles over the years, I have tried to say why traditional, or what I, in this essay, will call ‘‘classical,’’ arguments for secular liberalism have not dealt with how the claims of religious and cultural identities are not so easily put aside, and how that right might be won on behalf of secular term. I will be using it to mark the quite different idea that a polity and state should not be constituted by any religious precepts and laws. The distinction between these two uses is important, since it is perfectly possible for a state to be evenhanded between Islam and Christianity by allowing for censorship of blasphemy against each, thereby falling under ‘‘secular’’ in the former sense of the term and not the latter. There is yet another use of the word secular that is neither of these, and it is quite a preposterous misuse, which has it that a ‘‘secular’’ person is an irreligious person and a ‘‘secular’’ society is one in which all or most people are irreligious. This is how Christopher Hitchens uses the term, and I suspect so do people such as Richard Dawkins. It certainly is not how I use the term in this essay. I think it is a misuse, because for some time now the term has come to define only a political doctrine that religious people can subscribe to, so long as they are prepared to put aside those aspects of their religious beliefs that speak to issues of polity and law. Even if atheists such as Hitchens and Dawkins (and, it should be said, myself) would like to see a society that is increasingly irreligious, there is no reason to confuse this sentiment by making it a sentiment about what is properly called ‘‘secular.’’ See my ‘‘The Clash within Civilizations,’’ Daedalus (Summer 2003): 88–93, for a mild polemic against Hitchens on this point and several other related points that flow from it regarding current events and the actions of the United States government.

Bilgrami / Secularism and Relativism 175

liberalism along more modest, alternative, nonclassical lines.2 Roughly, my diagnosis and proposal has been this: Classical arguments for secular liberalism have assumed that there are reasons that all rational people should be bound by, and these reasons justify basic secular and liberal ideals. But there are no such reasons. The only reasons there are for secular liberalism are reasons that appeal not to something that all rational people will find compelling, just in virtue of their rationality, but rather reasons that appeal to substantive value commitments that some may hold but others may not. If that is right, then the task of achieving secular ideals in a world in which there are strong religious and cultural identities becomes distinctly more demanding. One is now required to look for reasons that will appeal even to those with these identities. ‘‘Hard won’’ would seem an apt description when such are the tasks to be achieved. The difficulties here are not merely practical, though they certainly are that. It is also a theoretical point that it will not do to say that those who are not convinced by secular liberal ideals are failing to be illuminated by some clear light of reason. It is a theoretical fallacy to declare the opponents of secular liberalism irrational by standards of rationality that all rational people accept. Finding them wrong requires finding them wrong by the light of some of their own values. This is what I, following Bernard Williams, call ‘‘internal’’ reasons, by which one can show them to be wrong, by contrast with what I have been saying is simply unavailable: ‘‘external’’ reasons, which all rational people are supposed to accept, not because of any substantive values they hold but because these external reasons precisely make no appeal to other substantive values of theirs; they make appeal only to their capacities to think rationally. In this essay, I will rehearse these points briefly and will then focus more on what seems like a prima facie implication of these points. The question is this: If there are no external reasons, if all we have are reasons and arguments internal to the moral psychologies of agents, are we theoretically 2. To mention just two, ‘‘Rushdie and the Reform of Islam,’’ Grand Street 8, no. 4 (Spring 1989): 170–84; and ‘‘What Is a Muslim? Fundamental Commitment and Cultural Identity,’’ in Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992): 198–219. In subsequent articles, I applied this philosophical point by way of criticism of a very specific political case of secularism, the case of Nehruvian secularism in India, both after Indian independence and for some years before, in the thinking and rhetoric of the Indian National Congress Party as it led the movement for independence. These and a number of other essays will appear in my volume entitled Politics and the Moral Psychology of Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).


obliged to concede a relativism about values, such that secular liberal values have only a relative truth on their side? My own view is that what seems to be a prima facie implication of my own previous arguments and conclusions is not in fact so. Relativism is not implied, despite appearances, by the denial of external reasons. This is so because of two related things: first, a conception of the significance of history for the moral subject, and, second, a highly nonstandard version of humanism that underlies such a conception of the significance of history. I should like to dedicate this essay to the memory of my colleague and friend Edward Said, a great humanist, who had just finished a book on humanism before he died last September. 2 Let me first briefly rehearse some of my earlier arguments and conclusions before I address their prima facie implications for relativism. It is best—for the sake of abbreviation—to work with some specific clash between some particular principle of secular liberalism and the commitments of some particular identity. I will fasten on the issue of tolerance and its potential clash with a religion’s objection to blasphemy. Liberalism’s most honored slogan says this: ‘‘Individual citizens must be left unimpeded to pursue their conceptions of the good life.’’ The slogan divides into two. The first half (‘‘Individual citizens must be left unimpeded ’’) mentions a certain value commitment to noninterference in the lives of citizens, whether by the state or by other collectivities or even by other individuals. The second half (‘‘to pursue their own conceptions of the good life’’) mentions other sorts of commitments, more substantive ones (whose pursuit the first half requires to be left unimpeded), values such as, say, those of Islam or Christianity or socialism or more specifically of a life in the theater or philosophy or watching and playing cricket. Of course, there may be many qualifications and escape clauses that are often added as ‘‘built-in’’ exceptions to the slogan’s basic message, but those need not concern us now. The point is, the slogan is absolutely defining of liberal doctrine, and it seems to make a basic division of two sorts of commitments in its two halves. It is the essence of the doctrine that it subscribes to such a notion of noninterference. Such noninterference may be and is often put aside for some very specific sort of substantive pursuits, such as the unconstrained accumulation of property or of income without payment of taxes, and so forth, but we know that it would not be liberalism we subscribe to if we did not see the


force of this slogan as operating in the realm of such things as speech and writing, and in the realm of worship, and so on. It is worth noting that the point of distinguishing between the two halves of the slogan is to distinguish between two sorts of commitments that are of a different order rather than a different grade. The value of noninterference cited in the first half of the slogan is of a qualitatively different order than the substantive commitments cited in the second half. The two are not to be weighed on the same scale. What makes for the special character of noninterference among the various commitments we might have is a question that has had famous and familiar answers in the long-standing history of liberal doctrine. That there is a difference of kind here is not something liberals can deny and still remain liberals, even if it is very hard to say what exactly makes for the qualitative difference. Classical liberalism has placed a very strong demand on the value of noninterference to account for its special character, its qualitative distinctness, among our values. What is that? Let us focus on noninterference in the realm of speech and writing in order to answer this question. I will bring out the very strong nature of the demand by looking at one argument. There are other arguments in the history of liberal thought that reveal the same demand, but I will restrict myself to just one, because it seems to speak with such authority to the most fundamental liberal ways of thinking not just about politics but about the nature of knowledge, truth, and intellectual and normative inquiry. Perhaps the most famous argument in the history of liberal theory for freedom of speech and writing is John Stuart Mill’s meta-inductive argument in his careless masterpiece, On Liberty.3 It has two premises that can be crudely stated as (1) our own past opinions have been wrong, and (2) our present opinions may therefore also be wrong, despite our conviction in them. From these premises, Mill concludes that (3) we should tolerate dissent against our current opinions just in case they are wrong and the dissenting opinion is right. It is a conspicuous feature of this argument that it appeals to no substantive moral or political values in its premises in order to come to its conclusion. It proceeds from an induction (‘‘meta’’-induction, because it is not based on observations of past phenomena in the world but on observations about our own past beliefs) straight to its evaluative conclusion. Perhaps it assumes the value of pursuing the truth since it concludes that dissenting 3. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).


opinions should be tolerated because they might be true. But even that is a cognitive value, not a moral or political one. (More on this value below.) There is a lesson in this: the strong demand that classical liberals place on the moral and political value of noninterference is precisely that it should be something we embrace on the basis of what any rational person will accept (in this case, the basic facts of past error and its corollary, our present epistemic fallibility) and not on the basis of particular substantive moral and political values some may have and others may not. If it were based on something that is only variably held (as the other more substantive values are), then the fear would be that noninterference would itself (like the other more substantive values) be that much more contestable. Hence, this strong demand on how we may justify the value of noninterference rules out any justificatory strategy that appeals to the fact that noninterference as a value is well supported and well reinforced by substantive value commitments particular citizens might have. Only what all rational subjects will accept is permissible as a basis for justifying free speech as a liberal principle. This is what makes for the special character of the value mentioned in the first half of the liberal slogan—precisely its complete independence of the sorts of things mentioned in the second half of the slogan. It may not be possible to completely undermine Mill’s argument, which has such a grip on liberal theory, in a short space. But I will say just a few things to raise a very serious question about it, in the hope that it will at least display what must be addressed by those who find the argument gripping. A specific difficulty is that when we say in the first premise that our past opinions have been wrong, we are saying it from the point of view of our present opinions, so it is hard to see how we can be diffident in holding our present opinions in the way that the second premise requires us to be. It is all right to be diffident about our present opinions, if that is what we must be, but to the extent that we are diffident, the first premise is that much shakier than Mill presents it. This is because, as I have said, the judgment expressed in the first premise is based on our current opinions. If the premises are so shaky, how can we possibly find the conclusion of the argument credible? Now, someone may defend the argument by saying that Mill does not think all of our current beliefs might be wrong. In particular, he does not require that we have any lack of confidence in our current judgments about our past beliefs being false. So the first premise is not shaky. According


to this defense of Mill, we make epistemological progress and cumulatively build up on a fund of truths by rejecting past convictions in the course of the history of inquiry. But there are still a vast number of present beliefs of which we are convinced that may well be false, given the meta-induction. For example, it might be said that there is no need to lack confidence in our judgment that our past belief that the earth is flat is false. As was claimed by Karl Popper (another philosopher, who—like Mill—tried to display the virtues of a free and open society on the basis of abstract arguments that all rational subjects would accept), we make epistemological progress by confidently rejecting certain convictions (such as the one about the earth being flat) as false. So, in general, this line of defense of Mill says that adopting freedom and tolerance opens up our convictions to falsification by allowing dissenting views, and we can make progress in knowledge by this process of falsification, which tolerance enables. But this defense of Mill’s epistemological assumptions in his argument for freedom is of no real help to him. It should follow from this defense that Mill would allow that, at least as far as the belief that the earth is not flat (i.e., the belief that we confidently hold, the belief that our epistemic progress has established conviction in, via the falsification process made possible by tolerance) is concerned, we should not tolerate dissent toward it. This is because we do not have any diffidence in this belief—and diffidence in our convictions was the basis on which he argued for free speech. For Mill, the argument for free speech goes through only because beliefs are the sorts of things that, in general, we are never confident we have established as being true. So, if there are beliefs about whose truth epistemic progress via falsification allows confidence, then to that extent, free speech (as argued for by Mill) need not be necessary regarding at least them. But Mill will not allow that there be exceptions made to freedom of speech for some beliefs. He is not, therefore, going to allow that our convictions (now held with confidence) that certain beliefs are false are immune from his conclusion about tolerance and free speech. This is simply not a ground in Mill for putting tolerance aside. The defense may be right in trying to free Mill of a noncredible epistemology, but even if it is right in doing so, it has not done so in a way that strengthens a weak argument. The more general difficulty with Mill’s argument and its epistemological assumptions is that the pervasive diffidence we are supposed to have in our opinions, according to this argument, is due to a conception of truth that has it that we can never know when we have achieved the truth for any


belief. It is clear from the argument’s premises that it is because we can never know we have attained the truth that it comes to its conclusion. Such a view of truth would make truth fall outside of the goals of inquiry, because it would make no sense to say that we must strive to attain truth in inquiry if we never know when we have achieved it. The problem here is not the standard one of how we cannot intend to attain what we know we cannot attain. The argument does not presuppose that we cannot attain the truth, only that we cannot know when we have attained it. The problem here is rather that we would have to think of inquiry into truth on the model of sending messages in a bottle out to sea. What sort of an epistemological enterprise is that? Inquiry would have no knowledge or control of its own success, making all success a sort of bonus or fluke. Again, a defense of Mill might be mounted by saying that quite apart from the detailed premises of the meta-inductive argument for free speech, which may have the problems I mention, the spirit of the argument lies in a salutary, general principle that toleration permits the airing of opposing views, which may force us to be less dogmatic in our own convictions. So it is of epistemological advantage that we are tolerant. Opening up our beliefs to assessment by alternative and dissenting points of view is the opposite of dogmatism, and to oppose dogmatism is rational; it is an epistemological merit. It is our basis for valuing free speech, and it is a basis that all people who are rational should see the force of. But it is not at all clear that it is rational to oppose dogmatism along these lines. Rather, the rational thing, the thing that has epistemological merit, is to be open to criticism of specific beliefs when evidence or reason is given to put them into doubt. It is no particular epistemological merit to allow for doubt on the general grounds that some belief or other of ours might be false. This latter and absolutely nonspecific qualm does not give the inquirer any instruction in his or her inquiry. It does not tell her of which belief she should open her mind up to being critical. She can therefore proceed with inquiry without in any way being affected by the qualm, waiting for some more specific reason to be critical, if and when it shows up. Hence, there is no epistemological merit in the general qualm, as there would be if we were given qualm when a specific belief is put into doubt for some specific reason, counterevidence, and so forth. Though it is possible in some sense (logically possible, I suppose) that any of our beliefs is false, that possibility is of no epistemic interest, since it gives the inquirer no instruction that makes any difference to how he or she should proceed with inquiry. And


as the pragmatist rightly says, what makes no difference to inquiry, makes no difference to epistemology.4 It will not do, in the face of all these issues arising out of Mill’s argument for liberalism, to say, ‘‘You are right. There is no need to think that inquiry will have truth as a goal, if we can never know when we have attained any particular truth. But perhaps then we should cease to think that truth is a goal of inquiry. We simply try and achieve something less than truth.’’ This move (made by Rorty—see footnote 4) does not help Mill at all, because now the question will arise: What, then, is Mill’s argument for tolerance targeting in the meta-induction? Is it not essential to the argument that it find one, or place one, in a position of never being confident that we have what we epistemologically seek? If truth, the property of beliefs we never are confident we have achieved, is no longer a goal of inquiry, if it is replaced by something weaker that we can be confident of having achieved when we have achieved it, then Mill loses his premises altogether. In general, Mill seems to presuppose as a value that it is good to seek the truth, and that it is a goal of ours that we seek it, and the argument for tolerance turns on our never being sure that we have achieved it. And in my critique, I have been saying that the idea that we are never sure we have achieved truth is in deep tension with the presupposition of the argument that truth is a value and that we have truth as a goal of inquiry. To respond to the critique by saying that we do not have truth as a goal of inquiry is to give up on Mill’s premises and argument altogether. Even if that is the right way to go in epistemology, it does no favors to Mill on the question of liberty. None of the foregoing is to suggest that we do not have, or even that Mill does not have, good arguments for tolerance and free speech. In On Liberty, Mill presents other arguments for it, but these are unlike the metainductive argument we are discussing. In them, we are not being presented with an argument that all rational people will accept by the sheer fact of being rational, and without appeal to any substantive values of theirs. Rather, substantive values are central to showing why one should embrace freedom of 4. It is bizarre that a self-declared pragmatist such as Rorty does not come to this conclusion. Though he insists that something that does not make a difference to inquiry makes no difference to epistemology, he does not see that this pragmatist insight requires us to see truth as something we can often know we have attained when we have attained it. Instead, he retains the Cartesian conception of truth, which is that we can never know when we have attained truth, and so goes on to say that truth is not a goal of inquiry. To call this pragmatism is simply wrong. It is caving in to Cartesianism and indeed to a Platonist notion of truth and reality.


speech, as—to take just one such argument in Mill—when he says that it is good to live in a society with diverse opinions in the air (as we might say today, a ‘‘multiculturalism’’ of opinion). Now, diversity of this kind is a value, a further value, and a substantive value. The value of noninterference in speech is being reinforced and justified by appeal to another value, the value of a diverse society. Rational people may accept the conclusion that noninterference in speech should be adopted if they have this further value, or they may not, if they do not have this further value. Therefore, a justification of free speech that appeals to a further substantive value does not strike them down with conviction just on the basis of their being rational creatures. Whether it strikes them down with conviction depends on whether they have other substantive values that support it. However, this is a strategy of justification of free speech quite measurably different from the methodological strategy of the meta-inductive argument. It is a strategy that is bound to be disappointing to the classical liberal, who will fear that to make something as fundamental as free speech depend on something as contestable and variable among people as the substantive value one places on diversity is to make free speech more vulnerable in our society than it should be. Basic liberal values should have stronger grounds, according to the classical liberal. But if my claims against Mill are right, there aren’t any. This conclusion raises a large question. 3 How can secular liberalism now cope with the phenomenon of identity politics, without the resources of external reasons? When the politics of identity confronts liberalism with individual or group convictions and commitments that are sometimes (though by no means always) manifestly illiberal, what resources does secular liberalism have to deal with this confrontation? Various examples can be raised, but let us fasten on Muslim or Islamic identity, since it is so much in the air in recent years. Let us also continue with the theme of free speech already present in the texts by Mill that we have been discussing. Take, then, the Muslim commitment to the censorship of blasphemy, as for example in the aftermath of the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. (Other commitments might be cited as well, such as the fact that Muslim identity also often implies commitments, legal commitments in the form of personal laws, that are at odds with secular liberal commitments. Thus, for example, sharia laws covering marriage, divorce, and alimony to a considerable extent run counter to secular liberal


commitments to gender-justice, a problem that has surfaced often in the context of secularism in India and elsewhere.) A terminological aside is necessary about what I will mean by ‘‘identity.’’ Let us say that identities in politics, in the subjective sense of identity, come from deep value commitments individuals or groups have—to their religions, their nationalities, their race, their gender, and so forth. Objective identities, by contrast, do not come from value commitments; they simply turn on facts, which need not be endorsed and made into commitments at all, facts about such things as descent, where or to whom one is born, where one is domiciled, the color of one’s skin, one’s chromosomes, and so on. Objective identity will not be taken up in this essay at all. Of course, subjective identities often are a result of endorsement by agents of the facts that make for their objective identities, endorsements, which therefore transform those facts into value commitments. Thus, someone who belongs to a certain race by descent (an objective fact about him) may make his racial identity subjective by endorsing this fact about himself, in other words, by valuing the fact that he belongs to that race, and so making it into a value commitment. I will focus on subjective forms of religious identity, in particular Islamic identity. To return to our question: If one cannot effectively give arguments in the form that Mill and other classical liberals do to establish liberal principles of free speech, what resources does one have left against identitarian commitments when these latter imply commitment to specific values such as censorship of blasphemy? Nothing in the critique of Mill that I have presented, and nothing in my more general methodological conclusion drawn from that critique, suggests that liberalism has no resources left against these illiberal tendencies that may emerge in identity politics. All it suggests is that classical liberals have sought for such resources in the wrong places, by looking for justifying arguments for liberal principles that make no appeal to our other (more substantive) moral and political value commitments. But those places do not exhaust the resources available. The lesson here is obvious. If the efforts of the classical liberal, which we have just criticized, are paradigmatically the efforts to provide external reasons (as I defined these earlier), then what we are left with are the resources provided by internal reasons in any response we can give to Muslims on the question of censorship of blasphemy, gender-injustice, and so on. Here is where our large subject looms. There is bound to be a widespread and quite natural tendency to think that if internal reasons are the


only reasons one can bring to bear on a disagreement over values, then something like relativism about values is necessarily in the offing. If so, the thought that the liberal is not yet out of resources against, say, Muslim identitarian politics might seem too optimistic, because now antiliberal Muslim commitments, such as to the value of censorship of blasphemy, may have their own sort of truth (relativistically characterized truth) on their side. This tendency, I have said, is a natural one. What is most interesting is that it is natural for both the ‘‘external reasons’’ or ‘‘classical liberal’’ theorist, as well as for a quite different kind of liberal theorist, the ‘‘relativist pluralist’’ (such as Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams). For the former, the tendency issues from a theoretical anxiety that if the sort of (externalist) normative power she has all along claimed for Reason is being denied, then there is nothing to do but sink into an identitarian mayhem. For the latter, who is waiting triumphantly in the wings, calling this effect of the loss of the external power of Reason ‘‘mayhem’’ will seem tendentious because he has all along said that the classical liberal was too ambitious in the first place when she claimed that free speech and other such liberties had an exclusive wisdom on their side. Other and opposing views may also have their own sort of wisdom and right on their side, such a relativist would say. That is to say, both the classical liberal theorist and his relativistically oriented pluralist liberal opponent, despite their deep disagreements, share a tendency to assume that if there are no external reasons, there is not much left by way of Reason in situations of moral and political conflict. They, of course, take opposite sides once they make this shared assumption (one concluding that loss of conviction in the plausibility of external reasons leads to a sort of relativistic mayhem, the other concluding that this is just how things are with fundamental disagreement about values, and to call it mayhem is a classical liberal prejudice), but they do share the assumption. If the shared assumption is right, then a secular liberal ought to be made anxious by the loss of external reasons, since relativism does imply that she cannot hold her views with the kind of confidence that she might like, that she must allow that the ways of life she finds morally and politically reprehensible have their own sort of right on their side. But the shared assumption should not be allowed to pass without scrutiny. What sort of relativism are these two opposed doctrines assuming to be implied by the loss of external reasons? It is this: When there are no external reasons, and two parties are disagreed over some value commitment, there may in principle be no scope for either party to give internal reasons to one another. Internal reasons are dependent on support coming


from our substantive values, not something given to us by the very fact of our rationality. Therefore, unlike external reasons, there is no guarantee that internal reasons will be available, since they are dependent on further values that may not be present in perfectly rational agents. And it is prima facie possible that in some sorts of value-disagreement, there will, in principle, be no such values for the parties in the disagreement to appeal to. In that case, we will have the kind of impasse mentioned in the formulation, just given, of relativism. The expression ‘‘in principle’’ is doing some serious work in this formulation of relativism. Relativism is a theoretical or philosophical position; it is not just a practical difficulty about how it is sometimes very hard to persuade someone you disagree with on some evaluative matter. The theoretical position is that each party in the dispute may be utterly unreachable by the other. This may indeed be cause for alarm in politics and morals, and, as I have said, it is in particular a cause for pessimism about the resources being claimed for liberalism in the face of identity politics, once it has lost its basis in external reasons. But before we can assess how alarming it exactly is and how pessimistic to be, some more detailed understanding of the resource we are left with, the resource of internal reasons, is required. What is it to find internal reasons to persuade another? Internal reasons are reasons we give to another that appeal to some of his own values in order to try and persuade him to change his mind on some given evaluative issue, such as a commitment to censorship of blasphemy. So if a Muslim does have such a commitment, a liberal can only appeal to some other value of his which is in tension or in conflict with his commitment to the censorship of blasphemy. To put it very explicitly, one will have to find that such Muslims are committed to (a) censorship of blasphemy, and yet that they are also committed to (b) various other values that may lend support to the value of free speech.5 And for the liberal, to use internal reasons against such Muslims is to stress (b) to them in an effort to bring them around to discarding (a). This is a strategy very alien to classical liberalism because (b) is not the sort of thing that all rational agents necessarily embrace. In general, then, the strategy of internal reasons is a strategy that 5. The sorts of values that fall under (b), the sorts of values that lend support to free speech, may differ for different subjects or groups. I have been taking this view of how to think about achieving secularism since ‘‘Rushdie and the Reform of Islam’’ (see footnote 2). There is more discussion of this point in the text of the present essay, and also a comparison of it with Rawls’s notion of an overlapping consensus in a longer footnote further below.


can work only when those against whom it is brought to work are internally conflicted. (It is important to add that conflicts within values need not always take the form of blatant inconsistencies among them. In fact, this may seldom be the case. Much more likely and much more pervasive are conflicts of a more subtle kind, tensions or dissonances between values.)6 We can now pull the strands together. Relativism in this context, we have just said, is a doctrine that holds if there is a certain kind of impasse. It holds if there are, in principle, no internal reasons that two parties in a disagreement over values can give to one another. And if the prospect for giving internal reasons turns on the possibility of there being an internal conflict in at least one of the parties involved in a disagreement over values, then that implies that relativism would hold true only if both parties in such a disagreement are completely unconflicted, that is, if they have perfectly and maximally coherent value-economies. In other words, in order for relativism, of the sort we are worrying about, to be true, it would have to be the case that someone with whom one is disagreed over values is not merely never inconsistent (as I have admitted, blatant inconsistency might be hard to attribute to political and moral subjects), but they would also have to be wholly without any tension or dissonance in their values and desires. That alone makes for a principled impasse. But it is hard to think that ordinary human subjects are so completely without internal conflict in this broad sense. The idea of such a total lack of inner conflict is an extraordinary condition to find in any value-economy. Relativism, conceived on this condition, would find instance, it seems, only when two parties in a dispute over a value were monsters of coherence. Perhaps some imagined rational automatons are maximally coherent in their value commitments, but the idea that ordinary human moral-psychological economies are so is barely conceivable. Thus, so long as Muslims and other antiliberal elements that surface in identity politics are susceptible to conflicting relations among their commitments, so long as they are not possessed of maximally coherent value-economies, the scope of internal reasons to establish secular liberalism even in the face of identity politics is maintained. Maximal coherence being a barely conceivable condition, there is no need to despair about the scope for liberal politics to succeed without classical externalist reasons and arguments. The point cannot be left where it is. Let it even be conceivable that, 6. I discuss this more subtle kind of internal conflict in my forthcoming book, mentioned in footnote 2.


at a given time, a particular illiberal evaluative economy is highly coherent and unconflicted—at any rate, let it be conceivable, as it surely is, that any conflict or tension that it does contain among its value commitments is not, as a matter of fact, helpful in bringing it around to shedding its antiliberal commitments. It is perfectly possible that even if Muslims are internally conflicted on some matters, these may be matters that are not relevant to secular liberal efforts to give internal reasons to them to get them to change their mind on censorship of blasphemy. This still does not hobble the scope of secular liberalism, because political philosophy cannot consider moral subjects and political citizens as standing outside of history, in some timeless, unconflicted psychological economy. Being historical subjects, history, and the incoming states of information it provides to these subjects in its course, may well introduce conflict in them by introducing tensions and dissonance in the relations between their value commitments. Let me just give one example. It is now fairly well documented that the large increase in pro-choice attitudes among women in America who, up until the third quarter of the last century, were relatively conservative was a result of their having deliberated their way out of a conflict in their own commitments, a conflict that emerged fully only in that period of history, when, as a result of the rise of service industries and the relative decline of heavy manufacturing goods industries, a more gender-distributed workforce was created. A historical change that provided for greater prospects for employment for women introduced conflict into the values of even hitherto conservative women, and this in turn gave rise to internal deliberation on their part that resulted in many of them revising their views on issues of abortion. The point, then, is that even if, at a given time, a value-economy seems relatively unreachable by internal reasons because it is relatively coherent and unconflicted, so long as we think of moral-psychological economies as necessarily being in history, conflicts may be injected by historical developments into moral-psychological economies. The point is essentially Hegelian, though in Hegel himself it is unfortunately ruined, because it is embedded in terms that were unnecessarily deterministic. But it is a point of the utmost importance to the way in which postclassical liberals might think of themselves as being able to cope theoretically with the loss of external conceptions of reason that defined its classical period. This Hegelian idea goes deeper than it might seem. It might seem that all the idea amounts to is that at some later time, we might be able


to persuade someone with whom we are disagreed by giving him internal reasons, but for now, at least, there is an impasse, and so relativism about reasons is true. But this deflationary description misses the real theoretical status of the appeal to the subject-in-History. That appeal is precisely intended to repudiate the idea that we should think of subjects as being in slabs of time, with relativism about their values holding in one slab, and possibly passing away in the next. Despite the talk of different times, that would still be to conceive the subject essentially synchronically at each slab of time. A genuinely diachronically conceived subject (hardly ever the subject that is considered by analytical philosophers writing about morals and politics, or anything else), a subject conceived neither synchronically nor in discreetly periodized times, but rather a subject conceived of as essentially historically open-ended, is exactly intended to replace the subject relativized to a time when his values may have a ‘‘relative’’ truth, or his reasons a relative closure. Hence the inclination to say, ‘‘Relativism for now, but not perhaps later !’’ is to be not quite yet on board with the depth of the point that Hegel’s stress on the importance of history for our conception of human subjectivity is making. To be fully on board is to see that no sort of relativism is sanctioned for subjects conceived essentially diachronically and therefore open to the conflicts that history may provide. I will admit again, however, that my appeal to Hegel here is highly selective, since the fact that history should play this kind of role in our understanding of moral subjectivity (paradoxically) opens things up against the very sort of historical determinism that historicism, in particular Hegel’s own historicism, usually suggests.7 The select element in Hegel I am applauding is the idea that Reason (what I call ‘‘internal’’ reason) does its work in a human subject by bringing about changes of value via deliberation on her part to overcome internal conflicts among values (something that popularizing Hegelians—never Hegel himself—describe overly schematically in dialectical terms of the trio of ‘‘thesis, antithesis, and synthesis’’), and that one does so very often as a result of conflicts (what in the popular Hegelian representation is called ‘‘antitheses’’) that emerge because of incoming states of information provided by specifically historical encounters. Once viewed this way, there is no reason to think that relativism follows upon the loss of external reasons, and so no reason to be pessimistic about the scope of internal reasons to be a resource for secular liberal political out7. I discuss the importance of this Hegelian point to issues of moral reason and moral antirelativism in my book, mentioned in footnote 2.


comes. Within this selective Hegelian view of the importance of history and of diachronic subjectivity, the right way to describe what has wrongly been described as this ‘‘pessimism’’ is simply to say that there is no Whiggish guarantee of a consummation of the historical process in a secular liberal outcome. This is not pessimism; it is a recoil from a deterministic historicism. That we should see the significance of history for subjectivity along these lines is, however, not merely a metaphysical position; it is, in a rarefied sense, an evaluative position. This point is crucial. After all, someone else may see history as having a rather depressing record in resolving conflict between groups and resist my repudiation of relativism, a repudiation that has the default lie in the view that it is always at least possible that new conflicts internal to an individual or group may—by means of internal reasoning—help resolve conflicts between individuals or groups. Such a person will simply not find the record in history sanctioning this default position. The default says that when there is an intractable value-disagreement between two parties, history may always inject in one of the parties the sort of internal conflict necessary for the other to provide internal reasons to it. The interlocutor here will deny this, saying that the record of history does not justify this to be the default position. I have no purely philosophical or metaphysical argument against such an interlocutor who does not agree with me about how to view the significance of history for moral subjects in conflict with one another. To find this interlocutor wrong is, in the end, to assert a value. In fact, we cannot find him wrong without asserting a value, and we cannot find him wrong by a nonevaluative argument. To say this is to assert the priority of the evaluative over the metaphysical. I will echo and complete this point, which is the eventual heart and center of this overall argument, at the end of this essay. Of course, none of this will seem too principled to the classical liberal. Liberalism, conceived and arrived at along the lines proposed here, is much too dependent on the particular conflicts and the particular internal reasons that a particular subject or group may find itself invoking in a particular historical moment, in order to sign on to liberal principles. Unlike the external reasons of Mill, where a single principled reason (‘‘the elusive nature of truth’’) is given for embracing a liberal principle, on this view there may be a variety of quite different internal reasons by which different subjects and communities may sign on to liberal principles, overcoming quite different conflicts within their respective psychological economies in order to do so. This criticism should be granted. It is indeed unprincipled in this sense. However—and I insist on this important point—there is no sense in


which this lack of principle is like other sorts of unprincipled outcomes that may be forced on one by circumstance, such as, for example, agreeing on something that one is not wholeheartedly behind, a form of compromise that puts aside what one really wants for the sake of some minimal thing that all parties want. This is simply not the nature of the lack of principle I am admitting to. Rather, what is being admitted is that there is no single reason that all have for signing on to the outcome in question. Each may have quite separate reasons for doing so. But despite this fact, it is an outcome that all embrace wholeheartedly, and not merely as a compromise, since they each have internal reasons for embracing it. That it is not the same reason does not mean that it is not a reason that fully (internally) justifies the embrace of the outcome on each person’s (or party’s) part. It comes off as unprincipled not in any other sense, therefore, than that it appears unprincipled to someone such as the classical liberal, who wants the reasons for political outcomes adopted to be the same for all rational persons (and parties).8 8. There is an exegetical question here, about which I am not very clear. To what extent is the claim I make about there being a variety of distinct internal reasons, as opposed to a single external reason, for free speech of a piece with Rawls’s later (nonclassical liberal) idea of an ‘‘overlapping consensus’’? When I first wrote of internal reasons in early articles on the Rushdie affair, I had not read Rawls’s work on overlapping consensus. And now that I have read and studied his work, I remain uncertain of the extent of agreement. To begin with, there are minor differences. For example, Rawls tends to put much emphasis in his discussion on the notion of ‘‘comprehensive doctrines’’ and how they affect liberalism, and how liberalism must respond to them. I do not think that doctrines are political phenomena—people are. One does not give or provide reasons—internal or external— to doctrines. There are Muslims who do, but Islam does not, get into the political arena, whether a contractual arena or some other. People may subscribe to doctrines, of course, but these are people who subscribe to all sorts of things, other than doctrines, and so bringing in some idea of a ‘‘comprehensive’’ doctrine does not really amount to anything useful or relevant, or even real. Secondly, it is important for Rawls that the context in which he developed his idea of overlapping consensus is one in which the disagreement between liberalism and those groups embracing an ‘‘identity’’ politics is to be seen as a disagreement between agents who are essentially ‘‘reasonable.’’ By contrast, I am inclined to think that reasonableness here is an outcome of the effectiveness of internal reasons in any particular case where such reasons are effective, rather than a starting point. That is to say, reasonableness is not something that we should plunk down as a starting assumption. We need only plunk down a capacity for internal reasoning, which is a much weaker thing to plunk down. In fact, I have never been clear about how philosophers such as Rawls, who seem at crucial points to wheel in the notion of ‘‘reasonable’’ to do serious work, really expect to provide philosophical illumination or argument in doing so. Much more important—and this may be a closely related point—throughout his work, even in his most recent publication (Law of Peoples [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001]),


4 Let me conclude by saying that even if the view presented in this essay seems unprincipled by the lofty standards of classical liberalism as we find it in Mill and others, what it loses by way of principle, it gains by way of pluralism, which is itself a good liberal ideal. That is to say, it allows for a plurality of reasons for political outcomes. But even as I say this, I want to mark a distinction of some importance. This is a pluralism that is quite distinct from the pluralism we discussed earlier, the pluralism of philosophers such as Isaiah Berlin and others influenced by him, for whom the doctrine (despite his somewhat coy demurrals) has essential ties to a relativism about the liberal outcomes, that is to say, about liberal principles themselves. For Berlin, pluralism amounts to a liberal having to acknowledge that liberal principles are only one among other political doctrines, and (when they clash) each one may have some sort of right on its side, its right. No such acknowledgement is being made by the pluralism I am congratulating myself on having gained by my stress on a secular liberalism founded on internal reasons. The whole point of the stress on internal reasons, which this essay has tried to bring to the understanding of liberal doctrine, is to disallow any such concession, any such compromise on the exclusive truth or rightness of the liberal viewpoint (as against opposing political viewpoints). Rather, pluralism is acknowledged at a quite different level than where Berlin places it. Pluralism should not be the view that has the liberal conceding that opposing principles to liberal ones may have their own sort of right on their side; rather, it Rawls talks of overlapping consensus as something to be achieved within a procedure that begins with his celebrated ‘‘original position.’’ This is explicit in Law of Peoples, where he spends a long section elaborating once again on the original position. He therefore never gives up the point and importance of the original position. But this is not at all how I see the role of internal reasons as providing for a higher-order pluralism. The whole point of what I am suggesting is that the notion of external reasons drops out—whereas the original position is a position that precisely retains the idea of external reasons because it is a position that, ex hypothesi, leaves out substantive values as providing reinforcing justifications. So, from my point of view, Rawls’s use of the original position in his last work should be seen as utterly redundant once one sees the point of his own notion of overlapping consensus. These are large differences to have registered. But if we put such differences aside, I think what is being suggested in this essay is proximate to a general theoretical tendency captured well in the idea of an overlapping consensus, and to that limited extent, I would be happy to view the efforts of this essay as (1) a grounding of that idea of overlapping consensus in a basis having to do with the nature of internal rationality, as I expound it in Hegelian terms, and (2) allowing this grounding itself to grow out of a prior critique of classical liberals such as Mill (and Rawls himself in his earlier work).


should be the view that there may be plural reasons (plural internal reasons) emerging in differently conflicted subjects for signing on to secular liberal principles, which alone have the right on their side. In other words, unlike Berlin, who explicitly insists that his pluralism is about the values or principles themselves, the pluralism being suggested here is only about reasons for principles.9 This last conceptual distinction regarding how to think about pluralism has enormous practical consequences. Which pluralism one embraces can make all the difference to what liberal states will allow. Let us take a wellknown example from India. Pluralism, for someone such as Berlin, allows for the idea that a liberal state will, in the name of minority cultural rights, grant 9. Just to be scrupulous to some details in Berlin, the real point of importance on this score is this: Berlin sometimes—though not always—tends to deny that his pluralism requires him to say that conflicting values have their own right on their side because he thinks that the deep source of relativism is not value-conflict but rather that values can be incommensurate. But this is all wrong. Exactly the opposite is true. That is to say, if you have incommensurateness but you have no conflict, no hard problem arises. Such superficial ‘‘apples-and-oranges’’ incommensurateness means only that you sometimes cannot compare highly disparate values. Why should this cause any concern of a relativistic kind? It is impasse-inducing conflict among values that is the deepest source of relativism, not incommensurateness-lite that is unaccompanied by conflict. In fact, if and when values are incommensurate in this superficial sense, they cannot conflict, since if you cannot compare two things, they cannot be found to conflict. If I say mountains are beautiful and you say books are interesting, there is no deep problem. Both may be true. No one who thought relativism was a deep problem thought this sort of incommensurateness was a problem. Certainly Kuhn did not. Rather, relativists insisted that incommensurateness was deep only when there was incompatibility or conflict as well. For now, one could save the day, one could avoid the intolerability of inconsistency, only by relativizing the correctness of inconsistent value judgments to different conceptual schemes or to different cultural backgrounds, and so forth. The fact is, we do not really know what Berlin’s relativism amounts to, because he is coy and often inconsistent in his remarks, leaving it unclear whether his pluralism is relativizing the correctness of value judgments or whether it is only pointing to a superficial form of incommensurateness, in which there is no problem raised that relativizing the correctness of value judgments helps to solve. So, let us put aside these difficulties of interpreting his views and simply pose the question to his sort of pluralist position about moral values and principles: What stand would Berlin’s pluralism take when values do conflict in some fundamental way? And the point is that in the context of this question, he cannot disavow the deeper relativism about values without actually taking something like the Hegelian stance I have suggested above. And so, the eventual point is that if you do help yourself to the Hegelian stance—for which there is no evidence whatever in Berlin—then there is no need to assert a pluralism about values and principles, rather than merely a pluralism about reasons for values and principles.


to minorities (in the Indian case, to Muslims) their own special personal laws on divorce, marriage, alimony, and so forth, even if some of these laws are illiberal in various respects. Thus, it allows an exception to a uniform, secular civil code in the name of minority rights. Exactly Berlin’s sort of pluralist arguments were voiced in constituent assembly discussions in India before rights to their own (in some cases illiberal) personal laws were awarded to the Muslim minority there. How exactly that awarded outcome in India is to be interpreted is actually a rather delicate matter. In some explicitly formulated constitutional statements, the thought is that Muslims’ readiness to embrace a secular civil code should be a matter of waiting for them to find internal reasons for embracing it, and to the extent that one stresses those formulations, it would be wrong to describe the outcome as expressing a relativistic pluralism of the sort I am opposing in Berlin. But there are other clauses regarding minority rights and personal laws in the constitution (and certainly many claims made in the constituent assembly debates) which suggest that granting them personal laws is not just a matter of waiting till Muslims find reasons from within their own values to sign on to a uniform civil code. Rather, their religious personal laws are an alternative nomic system that is a rival system to secular law with its own sort of right on its side, and the pluralism that the constitution was committed to must acknowledge this fact. This sort of tendency in the constitution is much more akin to the position one finds in Berlin. On that interpretation of the outcome, the pluralism I am proposing—where the pluralism is only at the level of allowing plural (internal) reasons for signing on to liberal principles and laws without in any way compromising on the principles and laws themselves—would find no legitimacy for the outcome at all.10 (This issue has been excruciatingly complicated at present by the fact that the demand for reform of Muslim personal law usually comes these days—and for some years now—not from anything recognizable as allowing Muslims to reform them as a result of their own internal reasoning but rather from a kind of harassment of a minority by the Hindu right-wing in the country. That Muslims could be reasonably expected to reform their personal laws by internal reasoning in the face of such harassment would be to utterly fail to understand the psychological preconditions for how internal reasons usually work in a historical context. A group’s capacity to change via internal reasoning requires a great deal of psychological security and 10. I pursue this subject in another chapter, entitled ‘‘A Hegelian Moment in the Indian Constitution,’’ in my book mentioned earlier, Politics and the Moral Psychology of Identity.


self-confidence, precisely what is put into abeyance by the demoralization caused by such harassment.) Returning from the details of this example to the general point about different types of pluralism, I do not want to deny, and in fact have just admitted above, that even the more austerely conceived ‘‘higher-order’’ pluralism regarding reasons I am proposing only compromises the purity of the classical liberal’s conception of reasons and justification for liberal principles. But I do want to repeat that it does not at all compromise, as the relativistic version of pluralism does, a liberal’s strength and confidence in the claim to the exclusive correctness of the secular liberal principles themselves. This confidence itself has its source in, or perhaps it is just a reflection of, the Hegelian notion of subjectivity I invoked earlier. The default position already mentioned was that we must see the significance of history for subjectivity to be as follows: that one always see it as at least possible that a dispute in values may be resolved by internal reasoning as a result of the requisite internal conflict being introduced into one or another of the disputing parties by the incoming states of information that historical changes provide to their psychological and value economies. It is when the significance of history is viewed along these lines (as allowing such a default position) that we are in turn allowed to turn our back on the claim of relativism that disputes in value might constitute an impasse. That is to say, such a default allows one to make no concession to a possible right or truth or correctness on the side of one’s opponent, in cases of interesting and deep moral and political dispute. So the deepest question, which I raised earlier, remains: What gives us the right to view the significance of history for moral subjectivity along these lines? Why may we not see its significance along quite different lines, see history as providing too much evidence for disallowing what I have just claimed as at least a necessary and permanent possibility ? The nested modalities are complicated here, but my interlocutor’s idea will be that what I am insisting is a possibility might only be contingently so; there may be no necessity that such a possibility always exists. History is simply not to be viewed in the optimistic way I am viewing it. It is possible that such dispute-resolving internal conflicts are introduced into moral subjects by history, but it is possible also that they are not. Why, then, am I insisting that history must be viewed in a way that it necessarily leaves it as an open possibility that such a conflict is introduced? As I admitted earlier, there is no answer to this question (and so there is no justification for taking the default position I do on the significance of


history) along lines that are non-normative or purely metaphysical. There is nothing in history, nothing in the concept of history and our place in it, when that is conceived in purely descriptive and non-normative terms, that could instruct us to view history as offering us the default position I insist on. To take the default position I do, therefore, is itself to take a higher-order evaluative stance. And it is only by taking such an evaluative stance that a secular liberal can express the confidence that disputes in identitarian contexts with illiberal tendencies need not ever produce the despondency of saying that perhaps both sets of principles (liberal and illiberal) may have their own sort of right on their side. What do I mean by saying that it is, in the end, an evaluative stance that gives a secular liberal the confidence to insist on the exclusive rightness of secular liberalism against illiberal opponents, despite the loss of externalist reasons and the loss of externalist justifications of liberalism? I mean simply that it reflects a value, a value central to what I think is best conceived as a special and unusual version of humanism. Here is how I have allowed myself to think of it. When one is in a moral dispute with another, even if it is a bitter and vexed dispute, it is far better to have an attitude of inclusiveness toward one’s foe that makes one strive to share the truth as one sees it with him, rather than to adopt an excluding attitude and say that he may have his own sort of truth or right on his side. The latter is what the relativist pluralist says, and it will be said by anyone who does not see the philosophical and methodological force and insight of the Hegelian notion of a subject and its significance for morals and politics as I am seeing it. For someone who does see this force and this significance, the attitude will be quite the opposite: the value of inclusiveness. This is the value that claims that it is far more attractive to say even to one’s bitterest foe in a moral or political conflict, ‘‘You must be my brother’’ than it is to say, ‘‘You can never be my brother.’’ To insist that he must be your brother, to refuse to allow him his own truth and to strive to convince him of the truth as you see it and judge it, is to show the requisite attitude of inclusiveness toward him. This may seem paradoxical, since one is refusing him his own sort of truth for his views in the name of seeing him as one’s brother. But that is just how it is. Perhaps only a subject as perverse and abstract as philosophy can see in this no paradox at all. I will admit that the rhetoric of ‘‘must’’ versus ‘‘never’’ in my last paragraph to express the contrasting values does not present the best options. I did use this flamboyant rhetoric even so and presented the options in their most extreme form in order to bring out the contrast vividly. To care about


the truth, as one sees it and judges it, and to care enough for others who do not see it, to strive to share it with them, need not take on the vocabulary that has it that one thinks they ‘‘must’’ be one’s brother and embrace the truth we see. But such a vocabulary captures something of the caring I want to stress here against the relativist form of pluralism, which precisely does not care in this way. Opposing such a relativistic form of pluralism, I am saying, involves not merely appealing to the Hegelian notion of subjectivity in the way I do but also seeing that appeal as an assertion of a value of caring about the truth (as one sees it and judges it) rather than showing an indifference to others who disagree with one, as the relativistic pluralists do when they say that they may have their own sort of moral truth on their side. Such a way of caring for truth, therefore, itself reflects a caring for others, caring enough to want to convince them of the truth. That is the point of the talk of ‘‘brotherhood’’ as a value, a humanist value, which in this specific sense is missing in the relativist cast of pluralism. To many humanists, such talk of brotherhood—flowing as it does from an ideal of caring for something so abstract as truth, and wanting to share that abstract thing with others—will seem too intellectualized a way of talking compared either to the down-to-earth ways in which we talk of the humanist values of brotherhood or to the sentimental, literary cast it had taken on ever since the rhetoric of ‘‘sweetness and light.’’ It is brotherhood based on an epistemological value rather than on the usual sort of moral values of solidarity and support that are articulated in standard versions of humanism. To such traditional humanists, the paradox of denying one’s moral foe his own sort of rightful moral view in the name of brotherhood will seem to undermine the doctrine from within. However, as I have said, there is no paradox here. It is a sign of greatly respecting someone, of including him in humanity, that you deeply want him to believe what you believe to be the truth rather than grant him as a truth (his truth) what you take to be deeply false. I admit that this is a very abstract way of configuring the ideal of human inclusiveness. But why should humanism not have highly abstract sources? These sources are precisely what might give the doctrine some further muscle and rigor, and therefore make it less dismissible as a musty and pious doctrine. At any rate, it is this rarefied version of humanism alone that can justify reading the significance of history along lines that arrest the slide from an acknowledged loss of external Reason to a relativism about values, a slide that would deeply limit the aspirations of even the most soberly formulated secular modernity.

On Grafting the Vernacular: The Consequences of Postcolonial Spectrology

Bishnupriya Ghosh

The literary icon Amitav Ghosh has lately acquired the status of elder statesman among South Asian writers, a political designation bestowed on him following his withdrawal of The Glass Palace from the Commonwealth Writers Prize ‘‘Best Book’’ nomination in 2001. In a modulated letter, Ghosh writes, ‘‘As a literary or cultural grouping however, it seems to me that ‘the Commonwealth’ can only be a misnomer so long as it excludes the many languages that sustain the cultural and literary lives of these countries.’’ 1 His abrogation of the cultural currency of English in the postcolonial world, and his consequent focus on the vernaculars of that world, hones my perception of a certain quality in his oeuvre: the stalking of the novel in English by vernacular Indian fiction. This ‘‘other’’ archive—a phrase I use deliberately to capture Ghosh’s ongoing historiographic projects—that shadows his novels generates what can only be called a hauntological literary oeuvre. Here I speak to the contours of Ghosh’s literary haunting through the pursuit of a particular spectacular example, The Calcutta Chromosome 1. See ‘‘Letter to the Administrators of the Commonwealth Prize,’’ posted on Amitav Ghosh’s Web site, www.amitavghosh.com; my emphasis. boundary 2 31:2, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.


(1996).2 It is in this novel that Ghosh most elaborately deploys the tropology of the specter through his ethical spectrology (ghosting) and epistemological excavation (grafting), twin processes that can be considered, I shall argue, key postcolonial imperatives. Haunting is central to the text’s interrogation of a colonial truth: Ronald Ross’s discovery of the cure for malaria. Versed in medical journalism, Ghosh embarks on an arduous explanation of chromosomes and their functions. At full speed in this breakneck romp through medical discoveries, folk rituals, murders, hallucinations, transmigrating souls, and scary panoptical computers owned by futuristic megacorporations, we encounter a syphilitic homeless woman, Mangala, an untrained genius who, in pursuit of the little-known scientific discovery that the malaria bug could be used to regenerate decaying brain tissue in the last stages of syphilis, stumbles upon a DNA conglomerate that she cannot name: the ‘‘calcutta chromosome.’’ A chromosome only by analogy, this genetic bundle, we are told with grave objectivity, would amount to a ‘‘biological correlate’’ to the ‘‘human soul’’ (206). Residing only in non-regenerative human tissue (the brain), the ‘‘chromosome’’ survives only through incessant mutations, recombining the traits designating the uniqueness of each individual. But the ability to cut and splice DNA is precisely one of the pernicious features of the malaria bug, as Mangala accidentally discovers; and in the process of cutting and splicing human DNA, the bug can actually digest (and thus retain) this otherwise untransmissible genetic blueprint. An infected person’s brain can thus be rewired to fit an original mold. Material souls, in this novel, migrate not through but by the transmission of disease. Hence the scientific ‘‘discovery’’ in this novel is the truth about transmigratory souls (Mangala’s practice of corporeal immortality), a ghost story foisted upon the reader of a medical thriller. The Calcutta Chromosome is a medical thriller that won the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Science Fiction Award in 1997, and the project was soon under a film contract with Gabriele Salvatores. Yet the novel’s uncovering of the ‘‘facts’’ leads us to a series of ghost stories that supposedly explain the puzzle set up in the opening pages of the mystery; these fragmentary pieces are the ‘‘Lakhaan stories’’ published in an obscure Bengali literary rag by a local writer, Phulboni. For many, the detective story ends rather abruptly, unsatisfactorily: the novel fizzles out as a medical mystery. Said one irritated reviewer for Under the Covers Book Reviews, ‘‘He [Ghosh] 2. Amitav Ghosh, The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium, and Discovery (Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1996). Subsequent references to this text are cited parenthetically by page number only.

Ghosh / On Grafting the Vernacular 199

veers sharply from the detective mystery format some thirty pages from the end of the book in that he fails to deliver the promised solution. . . . In the end he serves to only denigrate the resourcefulness of the human mind.’’ 3 But if we take seriously Ghosh’s postcolonial unraveling of an established colonial truth, then the very genre of truth-telling must suffer. Indeed, a great deal of ‘‘resourcefulness’’ is required to graft onto the body of a mystery another manner of telling more capable of visionary praxis; hence the traffic in ghosts. The Calcutta Chromosome presents us with a template for understanding the complex textual mode operative in Ghosh’s work, one which explains his literature of haunting. The DNA analogy of grafting allegorizes the archival search that constitutes detection in the novel: the detective Murugan’s suspicion that Ross’s analyses of the Anopheles mosquito was rigged leads him to the real architects of the discovery—a group of folk medicine practitioners with immortality on their minds and no interest in the cure for malaria. But this new knowledge comes about through continuous fragmenting and grafting of hypotheses and speculations: each narrative about Ross’s discovery is haunted by the probability of another truth that confounds its credibility. Then there is the further allegory of cutting, splicing, and recombining literary genres and traditions: this is a medical thriller, a ghost story, a murder mystery, a philosophical rumination, and a historiographic project. And finally, at the metatextual level, Ghosh grafts a larger vernacular tradition of ghost fiction onto this novel in English in the fragmented ‘‘Lakhaan stories,’’ vernacular fiction written in the standardized Indian languages since the inception of colonial-modern cultural forms (the short story, the novel, the essay) in the mid-nineteenth century. The ‘‘Lakhaan stories’’ appear three times in The Calcutta Chromosome, variously as events experienced by Grigson (a linguist who suspects Lakhaan), Farley (a missionary who is killed by the boy ghost), and Phulboni (the writer who narrowly escapes the ghost); the details of these fragments densely encrypt specific vernacular ghost stories. Tarrying with the Vernacular My critical practice speaks of this ghosted tradition that haunts Ghosh while writing The Calcutta Chromosome. In a recent conversation, the author confessed to being in the thralls of Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘‘Kshu3. S. M. Acton, review of The Calcutta Chromosome, by Amitav Ghosh, Under the Covers Book Reviews, September 24, 1998, 1.


dhita Pashaan’’ (‘‘The Hungry Stones’’), a short story he had translated for the journal Civil Lines in 1995 before embarking on The Calcutta Chromosome.4 This claim finds longer exposition in Ghosh’s correspondence with historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, the year after Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference appeared in print.5 Disagreeing with Chakrabarty on the valence of Tagore’s colonial inscription, Ghosh reads Tagore as a man in ‘‘crisis’’—the Bengali cosmopolitan cognizant of his Enlightenment legacies yet also ‘‘anguished’’ over his imbrication as a colonial subject. For Ghosh, Tagore’s angst eviscerates the smoothness of his prose on occasion, with particular instantiation in ‘‘Kshudhita Pashaan,’’ when the protagonist repeatedly cries out, ‘‘Its all a lie.’’ In Ghosh’s reading of the tale, these recursions comprise the colonial subject’s glimpse into his own alienation. Tagore tropes the divided colonial subject, argues Ghosh, in the protagonist’s obsessive changing of clothes and switching of identities. And it is a trope that, in my view, Ghosh encrypts in The Calcutta Chromosome, a novel replete with switched bodies, clothes, names, and identities. Speaking to the diverse transformative effects of colonialism, Ghosh criticizes Chakrabarty’s emphasis on the ‘‘discursive and persuasive’’ aspects of colonialism. He insists that the postcolonial intellectual give equal weight to the record of ‘‘coercion’’—of racial violence, of population transfers, and of massive upheavals in the rural.6 Hence, in his own writing of The 4. In February 2002, Ghosh presented a lecture on mourning and ethical mapping at the University of California, Riverside. I had the singular pleasure of spending an afternoon with the writer chatting about politics, his travels, and recent work; I took the opportunity to voice my uncanny feeling about The Calcutta Chromosome, the sense that the novel drew substantially on Bengali ghost fiction. It was at this point that Ghosh mentioned the two inspirational fragments integrated in the novel—the ghost fiction of Tagore and Renu. And he confessed to be in the thralls of ‘‘Kshudhita Pashaan’’ while he was working on The Calcutta Chromosome. 5. This correspondence between Ghosh and Dipesh Chakrabarty (simply titled ‘‘A Correspondence on Provincializing Europe’’), available on Ghosh’s Web site, was published in full in Radical History Review 83 (Spring 2002): 146–72, just as I was revising this essay. I was immediately struck by the two scholars’ interest in the vernacular idiom as a central resource for postcolonial historiographies, an insistence that has earned both the label of ‘‘nativist.’’ 6. One of Ghosh’s major criticisms of Provincializing Europe is of Chakrabarty’s inattention to the question of ‘‘race,’’ that invisible category in South Asian postcolonial explorations. Ruminating on the shame and anguish of the postcolonial subject (with personal evocation of his father’s experience of the colonial military regime), Ghosh returns to Tagore as the exemplar of the divided colonial subject, Tagore’s self-reflexivity notwithstanding. Not a surprising preoccupation, given that race, especially in terms of military experience, had


Calcutta Chromosome, Ghosh represents very different subjects of colonialism: Murugan is the cosmopolitan from the metropole who develops an ethics of representation, while the homeless Mangala and the rural migrant Lakhaan are the colonial/postcolonial subaltern subjects. In such a formulation, the inclusion of Tagore (the ‘‘father’’ of the literate Bengali postcolonial middle-class subject with aspirations to continuing cultural hegemony) is obviously not enough. So Ghosh encrypts another ghost story, ‘‘Smells of a Primeval Night’’ (1967), this time from an interlocutor of the postcolonial nation-state, the Hindi writer Phaniswarnath Renu. Known for his literary depictions of some of the most economically decimated landscapes of postcolonial India, Renu gave up the Padmashree (a high national award for cultural achievement) in 1975 to protest what he saw as the dictatorship of the postcolonial state; and we know that Tagore used his literary stature in a similar fashion, renouncing his knighthood in 1919 to protest the violence of the colonial state in the infamous Jallianwalla Bagh massacre. Both Tagore and Renu saw their literary projects as crucial to the formation of a national ethics beyond the narrow concerns of territorial governance and sovereignty; but Renu focused primarily on rural subjects, while Tagore’s protagonists often inhabit a colonial metropolitan milieu. No wonder Ghosh is attracted to these two literary stalwarts in his writing of the postcolonial diasporic subject’s struggle to represent the subaltern ‘‘other’’ (note, in The Calcutta Chromosome, both Antar, the protagonist of the novel, and Murugan work for the International Water Council [earlier, LifeWatch], a megacorporation). As we shall see, both the Bengali and Hindi ghost stories are tales of betrayal, and both writers use ghosts as literary devices for raising those ethical questions of exclusion and coercion that trouble the (native) colonial and postcolonial bureaucrat. By grafting these stories into The Calcutta Chromosome, Ghosh implies that Tagore’s and Renu’s ethical concerns continue into our contemporary postcolonial time, only now the progressive intellectual must guard against a ‘‘forgetting’’ facilitated by the current global hierarchies of knowledge. For Ghosh, recalling his father’s shame at a racial slur encountered while in military service under the British, ‘‘forgetting’’ brings an ‘‘epistemological perplexity’’ engendering a series of fraught misrecognitions. Both Ghosh and Chakrabarty agree that this ‘‘forgetting’’ is in part due to the postcolonial scholar/writer’s failure to keep alive other ‘‘critical traditions’’ that received extended treatment in Ghosh’s The Glass Palace, a historical novel published the same year as Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000).


can be important resources for living: Chakrabarty cites philosophical and commentarial treatises, Ghosh evokes literary and religious sources.7 In their ensuing exchange, it becomes evident that the linguistic hierarchies set in motion from the colonial-modern period are largely responsible for the relative obscurity of these critical traditions (whose texts, more often than not, are written in Indian vernaculars). Of course, we understand vernacular not to signal authenticity; the vernacular, in the Indian context, is always a historical category for the Indian languages and literatures placed in binary opposition to colonial English since 1813 (the Education Act).8 Nor are vernacular texts more ‘‘indigenous’’ to the colony; certainly contemporary Bengali and Hindi literature—Ghosh’s two choices for The Calcutta Chromosome—are, after all, modern traditions that wrest anew colonial cultural forms such as the novel or the essay. These vernacular texts acquire the status of an ‘‘other’’ archive—‘‘supplemental’’ in the Derridean sense— because of their current global invisibility, especially in view of the enormous cultural capital of the post-1980s’ South Asian novel in English. Hence Ghosh’s caution against ‘‘forgetting’’: bereft of this vernacular writing, we lose entire ‘‘epistemologies’’ that raise crucial ethical questions about the past. He dramatizes the dangers of forgetting, willful or not, in The Calcutta Chromosome, where we encounter multiple levels of lost epistemologies (counterscientific discourse, folk medicine practices, Spiritualism, and Hindu popular religion, such as tantra) owned by the phantom presences in the novel (Mangala, Lakhaan, European Spiritualists, and the maverick scientists ‘‘wronged’’ by Ronald Ross). At a metatextual level, the writer Phulboni’s struggle over representation, and his own ‘‘silences’’ (the ‘‘lost’’ Lakhaan stories), provides a mise en abyme for Ghosh’s literary project. In Ghosh’s letter to Sandra Vince of the Commonwealth Writers Prize Board, he implies that, in consolidating postcolonial epistemologies, some energy should be devoted to popularizing these vernacular literatures. He makes visible to a global market for non-Western literatures that ghostly body of vernacular writing eclipsed by the glamorous literary stars of his ilk— South Asian writers in English. His invocation hails postcolonial literary critics—cultural translators for a cosmopolitan audience—to follow that lead, to 7. Ghosh and Chakrabarty, ‘‘A Correspondence,’’ 160. 8. I will not pursue this point any further here, for it has received extensive treatment in Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). See also Priya Joshi’s recent work on the vernacular fortunes of the novel in In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).


spend our (often North-based) resources on excavating those ‘‘vernacular’’ and ‘‘supplemental’’ knowledges that do not endlessly refer back to European colonial texts.9 I take on that invocation in my critical acts in this essay, a first stab at a larger project on colonial and postcolonial spectrology. Practicing Spectrology The Calcutta Chromosome offers a part-fictive, alternative history of medicine, one that is traditionally eclipsed in the official narrative of Ronald Ross’s romance with the Anopheles mosquito. Mangala stumbles on a process that won the medical visionary Julius Wagner-Jauregg the Nobel Prize in 1927—the process of curing syphilis with the malaria bug. Not only is Ghosh interested in unearthing these parallel histories, but he sees the colonial narrative of discovery as an exercise of power. Thus, a mediocre Englishman enters the annals of history, even though the last and arguably the most crucial stages of his research on the Anopheles were orchestrated by Mangala and her associates. But why the need for the puppet discoverer, Ross? Murugan hypothesizes that these folk medicine practitioners needed specific mutations of the malaria bug to stabilize the transfer of the ‘‘biological soul,’’ but they lacked the resources to produce those mutations in a controlled (laboratory) setting. Indeed, by giving us a list of (European) scientists whose research Ross basically filches, Ghosh exposes the ‘‘discoverer’’ as a charlatan and the act of scientific discovery as a collaborative and cumulative enterprise often indebted to those on the radical edge of science. The postcolonial version of this scientific underground, the spectral corpus, is even more radical in touching upon a matter troubling to our contemporary moment—biological cloning (207). Murugan simulates the task of an archivist in reconstructing this alternative history, in part garnered from seemingly unrelated medical discoveries, in part interpreted, and in part hypothesized. Indeed, such imaginative historiography has been the mark of Ghosh’s fiction and nonfiction. For one, archival reconstruction was the motor for the travelogue that shot Ghosh to 9. Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge exemplify an earlier moment of debate in postcolonial studies that addressed the bad marriage of the postcolonial to the postmodern. These debates interrogated the market stipulations that condition the production of postcolonial knowledge, with progressives crying foul. Mishra and Hodge called for the situated study of postcolonial contexts and the subsequent consolidation of vernacular and local knowledges to supplement analyses of postcolonial literatures. See ‘‘What Is Post(-)colonialism?’’ Textual Practice 5, no. 3 (1991): 399–414.


fame. In an Antique Land, published in 1993, features the forgotten histories of Jews, Muslims, and Hindus traversing Egypt and India in the early modern period. A thinly veiled autobiographical narrator’s obsessive search for a slave’s story, one that would have otherwise remained a footnote in history, leads him to excavate these histories from equally forgotten archival chambers (the Geniza).10 The narrator first comes across a passing allusion to the slave, Bomma, in a letter written by Madmum, a merchant in Aden, to his friend, Abraham Ben Yiju, from Mangalore; the narrator is further intrigued by the second appearance of the slave in a letter from S. D. Gottein’s collection of letters in the Bodelian Library. Curious about this recurrent trace, and convinced of the erasure of the ‘‘small voice of history’’—‘‘the wazirs and the sultans, the chroniclers and the priests had the power to physically inscribe themselves upon time’’ 11—Ghosh plots looping and fragmented journeys to Lataifa, Nashawy, and Mangalore, seeking Bomma. The narrator’s geographic dispersal replicates the scattering of certain ways of knowing the world, while Ghosh powerfully brings the forces of modern knowledge—history, anthropology, philology, sociology, and religion, complete with thirtyseven pages of documentation—to bear on his reconstructive project. On other occasions, Ghosh has been an active participant in an Indian national spectrology: the obsession with ‘‘forgotten’’ national icons, a corollary to the ongoing national historical revisions of the 1980s and 1990s. In the New Yorker issue commemorating India’s golden jubilee of independence, Ghosh chose to write an essay on the forgotten history of the Indian National Army (INA), titled ‘‘India’s Untold War of Independence.’’ 12 A militant mobilization against the British led by Subhas Chandra Bose and repressed within statist historical narrations of the nonviolent freedom struggle, the INA story is a fiercely remembered regional (eastern Indian) struggle reconstructed in Ghosh’s commemorative essay. His recounting of those glory days becomes a political intervention of sorts into the national struggle over history, the ghost of Netaji (the freedom fighter, Bose) looming over India’s celebrated Gandhian nonviolent revolution. Netaji’s recursive figure in the 10. Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land (Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1993). 11. Ghosh, In an Antique Land, 17. 12. Amitav Ghosh, ‘‘India’s Untold War of Independence,’’ New Yorker, June 23, 1997, 105– 21. Ghosh starts his essay by evoking popular memory—the contradictory stories about this untold war that he received from his parents motivated his historical digging. Popular gossip in Bengal has it that Bose’s disappearance was actually a murder covered up by the British. In politically troubled periods, there were repeated Netaji sightings in Bengal that record a Bengali desire for lost political national hegemony.


Bengali imagination marks a desire for the Bengalis’ lost centrality in nationalist politics, on the one hand; but, on the other, this ghost demands ethical redress from contemporary Indian citizen-subjects for the traumas of the INA soldiers, tried for treason by the colonial state and represented as betrayers of the nonviolent revolution in ‘‘official’’ nationalist accounts.13 This abiding interest in historically grounded ghosts stimulates Ghosh’s literary endeavor in The Calcutta Chromosome. And it is a project that he shares with Dipesh Chakrabarty, who argues, in Provincializing Europe, for the sentience of literature in postcolonial ethnography. Chakrabarty demonstrates the difficulties of translating subaltern lifeworlds (and the entire belief systems that these narratives carry with them) into the time of rational history: how does one capture subaltern significations of supernatural and cyclical time that compel understandings of work and translate them into the rational abstraction ‘‘labor’’? The problem, argues Chakrabarty, is perhaps best dealt with in a kind of translation that registers the shock of the uncanny, keeping faithful to the scandal of incommensurabilities—for historians do not have the license available to literary practitioners to jump the parameters of rational narration. Chakrabarty turns to songs, idioms, poems, festival rituals, and so on, to provide evidence of ‘‘other times’’ in subaltern lifeworlds, becoming an ethnographer of sorts; Ghosh takes on the same role somewhat differently, treating literary practice as an ethnographic and historical endeavor. But in their actual tasks of consolidating this ‘‘other’’ archive, the two scholars diverge. As their exchange in Provincializing Europe indicates, Chakrabarty is clearly preoccupied with the ‘‘uncanny’’ as an effect of incommensurability; the condition of disjunctive historical discourses and the implications of loss concern him greatly. Ghosh sees in the same loss the imperative for recovery—an imaginative project that mobilizes literary resources for its purposes. Hence ‘‘ghosts,’’ for Ghosh, are devices that undo certain discursive (and generic, in The Calcutta Chromosome) limits; ghosts therefore occupy a more redemptive place in his oeuvre, in moving us to those questions of political justice and hope that Jacques Derrida asks in his elaboration of ‘‘hauntology and its attendant ethics’’ in Specters of Marx.14 13. More recently, Netaji has found literary evocation in Ruchir Joshi’s The Last Jet-Engine Laugh (New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2001), as a man whose famous disappearance (while flying to Japan in 1942) continues to plague the regional imagination. 14. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), xix. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as SM.


The Calcutta Chromosome is Ghosh’s most sustained engagement with hauntology, in both its incitement to imagine a radical postfoundationalist future (Derrida) and its overt staging of incommensurable epistemologies (Chakrabarty). Of all of Ghosh’s novels, it is this novel that takes seriously the undoing of oppositions that is Derrida’s figuration of the specter. Such unraveling of literary seams makes for the unprecedented uneven narration, textual fragmentation, and generic dysfunction that, I suspect, might well account for this novel’s unpopularity in Ghosh’s canon. More importantly, The Calcutta Chromosome is a literary theater that extends the ethical implications of the Derridean specter to break new ground. Since Gayatri Spivak’s In Other Worlds (1988), and despite her continuing critiques of Derrida, Derrida’s rigorous questioning of Western foundationalism has been critical to the poststructuralist strain of the postcolonial critique. The ethical turn we witness in The Calcutta Chromosome shares Derrida’s perception of ‘‘haunting’’ as inimical to the histories of trauma and loss, precisely what is occluded in the politico-juridical discourses of wrong, repayment, and debt. In her remarks on Walter Benjamin’s angel of history and Derrida’s specters as ‘‘poignant signifiers’’ of the postfoundationalist predicament, Wendy Brown asks, ‘‘What kind of historical consciousness is possible and appropriate for contemporary political critique and analysis, and how can agency be derived to make a more just, emancipatory, or felicitous future order?’’ 15 Specters present new possibilities in undoing the opposition between life and death, presence and absence; by implication, they collapse the boundedness of present, past, and future. Specters are, Brown argues, redemptive: they are intangible sites for imagining a future beyond discredited modernist narratives of progress and a violent exclusionary metaphysics of presence. Spectrology, in this sense, is postprogressive history relocating historical meaning to an ‘‘other space and idiom’’ 16; it imagines political justice in a world that is ‘‘contingent,’’ ‘‘unpredictable,’’ and ‘‘not fully knowable.’’ 17 Such Derridean and multivalent use of specters opens up our reading of Ghosh’s deployment of hauntology beyond the staging of the ‘‘uncanny’’ as a figure for the incommensurable.

15. Wendy Brown, ‘‘Futures,’’ in Politics Out of History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 139–40. 16. Brown, ‘‘Futures,’’ 144. 17. Brown, ‘‘Futures,’’ 145.


The Ghost That ghosts bear witness to erasures in the ‘‘living present’’ is, of course, commonplace in the enormous literature on mourning and memory work of the last decades.18 Derrida pushes us further, pitching ghosts as specters of futurity: If I am getting ready to speak of ghosts, which is to say about certain others who are not present, nor presently living, either to us, in us, or outside of us, it is in the name of justice. Of justice where it is not yet, not yet there, where it is no longer, let us understand where it is no longer present, and where it will never be, no more than a law, reducible to laws or rights. It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost, and with it, from the moment that no ethics, no politics, whether revolutionary or not, seems possible and thinkable and just that does not recognize in principle the respect for others who are no longer or for those who are not yet there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born. (SM, 10) He reminds us of Marx’s well-known sighting of Communism as a ‘‘specter that haunts Europe,’’ a ‘‘phantomic’’ possibility of a future socius. Focusing on Marx’s injunction, Derrida insists that the specter here is not just in the domain of ideas (Spirit) but is already materially there in the ‘‘living present.’’ All forces of the law—the church, the family, the state in nineteenth-century Europe—girded themselves against this specter in a willful denial of those certain others whose promise preoccupies Marx; for him, the counterrevolutionaries in 1848 thus erase that strangely familiar body but continue to be haunted by its recursions. In fact, it is this disappeared body of the ghost— this someone who looks at you—that gives these forces of the law their strength and organization. Marx is therefore critical of spectralization, its evacuation of the concrete; the ethical task at hand is to bring back the body proper of the ghost. We find a precursor to The Calcutta Chromosome’s spectral ethics in Ghosh’s essay on the Delhi riots following the assassination of Mrs. Gandhi, ‘‘The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi.’’ Published in 1995, the year following Der18. A majority of scholars recognizes literature as the domain where these specters of embodied loss roam: for instance, in Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), Avery Gordon reads that now-famous ghost in Toni Morrison’s Beloved as the ‘‘seething presence of the absent’’ (23). For Gordon, ghosts are entirely necessary to grasp the complexities of our social world, for they speak eloquently of ‘‘invisibilities’’ and ‘‘exclusions’’ (23).


rida’s Specters of Marx, Ghosh directly addresses the ethical significance of remembering violence. As the essay progresses, he jettisons chronological narration in favor of many interrupted returns to the past, a temporal idiom he explicitly describes as a haunting.19 Ghosh’s memory of the 1984 riots while he was working for the daily Indian Express impels him to consider 1947 again. He starts writing The Shadow Lines soon after the Delhi riots, explaining that this was ‘‘a book that led me backward in time, to earlier memories of riots, ones witnessed in childhood. It became a book not about any one event but about the meaning of such events and their effects on individuals who live through them.’’ 20 Further along in the essay, Ghosh’s account of the pamphlet ‘‘Who Are the Guilty?’’—a tract in which the citizens of Delhi question possible state participation in violence—propels him to consider another violent scene, the Bombay riots of 1992–93. Moments of violence, ruptures in the unitary national polity, foreground those ‘‘certain others’’ (SM, 10) who remain invisible and excluded from national consciousness: each riot (1947, 1984, 1992–93) jolts the memory of another specter, another sighting of unrestful spirits. Ghosh’s looping narrative in this essay suggests that the cost of a unified nation has always accrued to those who do not count in our ‘‘living present.’’ The Calcutta Chromosome continues this project of speaking to ghosts that is vibrant in his essays on the Delhi riot and the INA (some of his material on the INA has been fictionalized recently in The Glass Palace [2001]). Not surprisingly, almost every character in The Calcutta Chromosome has commerce with ghosts. A virtual ghost, flashing on Antar’s screen and demanding his investigation of Murugan, propels the mystery forward. Antar is the twenty-first-century protagonist who embarks on finding Murugan, who had disappeared from LifeWatch. LifeWatch, a dystopian Kafkaesque panoptical North-based megacorporation with headquarters in New York but ‘‘no office in Calcutta,’’ initially employs both men. In pursuit of his Kurtz, Antar learns that Murugan’s advocacy of an epistemological challenge led to his ‘‘ostracism’’ from the ‘‘scholarly community’’ and ‘‘estrangement from several of his friends and associates’’ (31). Much later in the narrative, we realize that it is not just Antar’s official assignment or curiosity about the Ross story that keeps him engaged in the wild chase for Mangala and her associates but his fascination with his alter ego, Murugan’s renegade status in LifeWatch. A glimpse into Antar’s pre-LifeWatch existence 19. Amitav Ghosh, ‘‘The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi,’’ New Yorker, July 17, 1995, 35–43. 20. Ghosh, ‘‘The Ghosts of Mrs. Gandhi,’’ 40.


in a small village by the banks of the Nile (shades of the narrator in In an Antique Land ) clues us in to Antar’s sense of loss and his consequent nostalgia for a simpler life beyond the tentacles of a megacorporation. The virtual ghost undoes Antar’s compartmentalized present, instigating personal anguish and luring him to rebellion—this time against his omniscient computer, Ava. Nor is Antar’s haunting an anomaly. Each major character in the novel is haunted by a secret that links him or her to the vital calcutta chromosome mystery: Mangala and Murugan are syphilitics, the glamorous Sonali is in search of her natural father, Phulboni searches for immortality as a writer, and so on. The familiar other beckons the detective, the journalist, the writer, and the missionary to a larger ethical quest. The Corpse While the ghost inhabits the seam between the real and the fictive, the present and the past/future, the ‘‘corpse’’ is its visible presence in rationally ordered space and time. But Mangala’s practice of corporeal immortality troubles the empirical status of the corpse by insisting on a biological haunting. D. D. Cunningham, Countess Pongracz, and Murugan, among other characters, are—medically speaking—dead or literally have disappeared into obscurity. Yet they continue to trouble our pseudomedical rationality by constantly reappearing (being reincarnated) as other characters, and the novel insists that the philosophical premise of transmigration be accorded the same empirical credibility that we willingly give (even the most esoteric) medical discourse on bodies. Such epistemological leaps are necessary to speak to ghosts in our living present. In fact, Ghosh restores the corporeal materiality of these ghosts by explaining transmigration of souls in biological terms—the lingo of chromosomes, DNA, retroviruses, and mutations well known to contemporary global cosmopolitan readers. For in Mangala’s popular religious medical practice, the transfer of the human soul is accomplished by the transmission of malaria-infected blood (routed through the bodies of pigeons, which are used as agar-plates). This drama of corporeal restoration in the story is homologous to Ghosh’s (hypothetical) restoration of a corpus/corpse of indigenous knowledge troubling to the colonial medical gaze. Scientists, administrators, doctors, missionaries, computer analysts fall prey to the spectral knowledge that makes their discourse on health and cures possible but that remains inadmissible in rational discourse. There are some converts to the doctrine of corporeal immortality, as we see in D. D. Cunnigham, Ross’s predecessor, who stonewalls Ross’s


search for the malaria bug for almost a year before disappearing into the steamy underground of soul switchers. In developing the process of spectralization, Derrida provides notes on the ghostly body proper that resonate with The Calcutta Chromosome, a novel about bodies in the present, past, and future. Marx, in Derrida’s view, posits the process of ghosting as the de-materialization of the body—the red specter that ‘‘was conjured (away) by the counter-revolutionaries (in fact, by all of Europe: the Manifesto was yesterday)’’ (SM, 117). This violent exclusion—dis-incarnation—of the ghost does not mean that the material conditions of the specter have disappeared; it is the work of demystification to restore the body proper to the ghost. Derrida insists on the strange corporeality of the ghost shuttling between the nonhuman (a thing) and the human (someone) in the world. In the recurrence of disappeared bodies in The Calcutta Chromosome, we inhabit this uncanny place, where only by partially abandoning the proportions of scientific rationalism can we recognize certain others. Ghosh deconstructs the rational premises of knowledge production in focusing our attention on the problem of disappeared bodies: the corpus of folk and popular religious and medical knowledge becomes invisible, silent, ephemeral, only when commodified and circulated in colonial modern practices. These ‘‘subaltern’’ practices—if we understand ‘‘subaltern’’ to be a differential relation—are put to instrumental and quantifiable use in the colonial regime: the knowledge of possible corporeal immortality is transformed into the cure for malaria. Looking anew at Marx’s conception of the commodity fetish, Derrida notes that it is in the translation of things—their coding in systems of exchange—that they acquire a ghost-effect. The table, he argues—continuing with Marx’s famous example—is, after all, an ‘‘ordinary, sensuous thing’’ that has use value, it is ‘‘human at the bottom’’ (SM, 151). In the Derridean landscape of specters, this sensuous thing acquires the mystical properties of commodity when it enters a chain of exchange: ‘‘The ghostly scheme now appears indispensable. The commodity is a ‘thing’ without phenomenon, a thing in flight that surpasses the senses (it is invisible, intangible, inaudible, and odorless); but this transcendence is not altogether spiritual, it retains the bodiless body that we have recognized as making the difference between specter and spirit. What surpasses the senses still passes before us in the silhouette of the sensuous body that it nevertheless lacks or that remains inaccessible to us’’ (SM, 151). Knowledge fetishized as ‘‘medical discovery,’’ the conquest of the corporeal, is uncanny commodity in The Calcutta Chromosome. Mangala’s insights lose their sen-


suousness in the transfer to Ronald Ross’s lab and its incumbent colonial mystique. The use value of finding the malaria bug’s ability to cut and paste DNA remains mundane in Mangala’s routine soul transfers, but the malaria bug is Ross’s ticket to fame. Hence the discovery acquires mystical value, his ‘‘cure’’ a treasured commodity in the colonial rationale for government. Despite his critique of colonial appropriation, Ghosh can, in his fictional medium, imagine an ‘‘outside’’ to these systems of exchange and commodity formation: in the secrecy of Mangala’s rituals, the use value of the calcutta chromosome retains its materiality, its sensuousness, its silence. Silences The silence of Mangala’s occult practices poses a problem for modern postcolonial historiography. How to speak of this counterscientific knowledge from the proportions of rational discourse? How, indeed, to speak of, to, and with ghosts? This is the classic question of communicability that haunts all postcolonial discourse, and it is foregrounded as the key problem among subaltern studies scholars. Chakrabarty poses disjunctive discourse—uncanny speech—as one utopian solution; he asks us to imagine a subaltern history away from ‘‘the dream of the whole called a state,’’ in a ‘‘fragmentary and episodic’’ structure of democratic dialogue.21 The historian enters a dialogue punctured by the other, respectful of the ‘‘radical polysemy of languages and practices’’ that testifies to the incommensurability of the worlds that ‘‘we’’ (presumably, Chakrabarty, speaking of the secular modern subject) inhabit.22 This is precisely the disjunctive discourse 21. See Chakrabarty, ‘‘Radical Histories and the Question of Enlightened Rationalism: Some Recent Critiques of Subaltern Studies,’’ Economic and Political Weekly of India, April 8, 1995, 751–59. Chakrabarty takes on formidable critiques of radical left histories from more traditional Marxist critics, such as Sumit Sarkar. Sarkar has most famously criticized subaltern studies scholars for their undermining of the legacies of Enlightenment rationalism, an underscoring of rationality that celebrates all manner of the affective, the unsaid, the lived. This includes religious understandings of community, which, in the age of chauvinistic Hindutva, seem particularly dangerous to the goals of secularism. Chakrabarty defends his critical engagement with Enlightenment rationalism, which in no way entails a ‘‘wholesale rejection of the tradition of rational argumentation’’ (752). Rather, his work rejects the ‘‘hyper-rationalism of the colonial modern’’ that would deny anything affective—‘‘pleasures, desires, emotions’’—as being important to the tasks of historical investigation. 22. Chakrabarty, ‘‘Radical Histories,’’ 751.


we encounter in The Calcutta Chromosome, where the ‘‘facts’’ of science, requiring communication (the narrative of discovery), are indeed ‘‘punctured’’ by the counterscientific will to secrecy, improbability, and inadmissibility. In the novel, medical discourse and its attendant literary genres are contaminated with meditations on religio-philosophical truths. The reality of transmigration assumes centrality as the protagonist Antar becomes the John Malkovichian body for the grafting of other characters in the novel; transmigration is further posited as logically commensurable with our present-day experiences of living multiple and virtual cyberlives. We can account, in part, for the secrecy in the practice of corporeal immortality if we take a closer look at the kinds of religio-philosophical shenanigans dramatized in the novel. We enter an underground of rituals and cults, from meetings of spooky syphilitics in forest clearings to Spiritualist (the European take on accessing multiple souls, equally scorned by scientists) séances. For we are in the domain not only of religion but popular religion. The nature of the performances described in the novel—rituals with a punchy charge—refers us to tantra, that Other of Brahmanical Hinduism. Always seen as a counterreligion, tantra works against the Brahmanical imperative to control and prohibit desire in order to attain moksha (freedom from the cycle of death and rebirth); tantric cults deploy desire, and therefore the body, as a means to freeing the soul. The ecstatic antics of Mangala’s followers, their ease with violence and the worship of sexualized female deities, echo the tantric rites exalting the Kali (a malignant manifestation of the mother goddess venerated in Bengal).23 In turn, any philosophy of transmigration is posed as the ‘‘other’’ of Western scientific rationalism, as many of the European characters in the novel inform us; seen from within epistemological hierarchies, the spiritual reaching toward the eternal is of secondary importance to the scientific 23. Tantra was most widely practiced by forest dwellers, ‘‘outlaws’’ who worshipped Kali and were often characterized as dacoits (bandits) in common Bengali lore. The British abolition of ‘‘Thugee’’ in 1837 attempted to clean up these populations, driving them underground with their tantric practices. No surprise, given that tantra was always perceived as popular religion by Brahmanical Hindus. Even more interesting, for our purposes, is the fact that these bands of thugs acquire heroic proportion as freedom fighters in the fiction of nineteenth-century novelist Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay (especially enshrined in his widely circulated Devi Chaudurani ). Ghosh is interested in Chattopadhyay because the latter wrote the first Indian novel in English, Rajmohun’s Wife, a novel Ghosh reads as a dress rehearsal for Chattopadhyay’s more celebrated Bengali fiction. See Amitav Ghosh, ‘‘The March of the Novel through History: The Testimony of My Grandfather’s Bookcase,’’ reprinted in The Imam and the Indian (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002), 287–304.


hubris of rejuvenating mortal bodies. And from within rational discourse, spiritual will acquires the shadiness of a ‘‘counterscience’’: the other side of mortality is inadmissible; it assumes proportion only as occult, as excess. These alternative medical and philosophical practices, therefore, rely on secrecy—the very opposite of communication and/or discovery—for their continued transmission: ‘‘Silence is their religion,’’ Murugan explains to a bewildered Antar (88). Silence is thick discourse in this novel, and it transforms those who answer to it. Congruent with the precepts of corporeal immortality, Phulboni imagines silence to be a material thing, a ‘‘creature’’ that haunts the bowels of the city: ‘‘But here our city, where all law, natural and human, is held in capricious suspension, that which is hidden has no need of words to give it life; like a creature that lives in a perverse element, it mutates to discover sustenance precisely where it appears to be most starkly withheld—in this case, silence’’ (121). Literary Tongue As modern subjects, if indeed we must break the silence, the literary provides a place for phantomic figurations. Phulboni, the literary visionary in the tale, is the one most tuned to stealth of the silent underground; his language eddies around its possibilities. His capable expressivity in the novel convinces us that Mangala’s steamy underground cannot be spoken of in denotative descriptive language; its only tongue is the figurative, the domain of imaginative work. The argument advances through Murugan’s progression from a LifeWatch employee, to detective, to postcolonial archivist. As the novel proceeds, we are faced with a crisis in narration. The narratives of several scientists, administrators, linguists, missionaries, doctors, and Spiritualists are constantly displaced, replaced, cut and pasted. In fact, all major acts of detection in the novel involve deconstructing existing and discordant accounts from the colonial era (journal entries, diaries, logs of scientific research, partially damaged audiocassette narrations, oral memories, letters). The main pursuers of truth in The Calcutta Chromosome figure out the puzzle of the counterscientific through filling in gaps, finishing log entries, or writing in the indecipherable. Soon our main fact finder Murugan’s epistemological frustrations give way to an oppositional subjectivity. He rejects the institutional parameters of discovery, and he begins to supplement the fissures of the colonial story with fragments of other unconventional knowledges. For new evidence, he draws on unfinished fragments of records from other men who come in contact with Ross and his strange crew, Elijah Farley


and D. D. Cunningham, both of whom traffic in ghosts. So Murugan has to turn to ghost stories published in an obscure and out-of-print vernacular magazine to finally understand what ghostly presences are doing in the narrative of Ross’s discovery.24 There are three sightings of Lakhaan’s ghost in the novel’s denouement, just as in Phulboni’s oeuvre the Lakhaan stories circle around different mutations of the same character, Lakhaan. Murugan’s love interest and fellow investigator, Urmila, reads these mutations as a ‘‘kind of allegory’’ (93). As a journalist/literary critic, Urmila has a quest of her own, one that allegorizes Ghosh’s ‘‘recovery’’ (and embedding) of vernacular antecedents to his novel in English. Urmila seeks the story behind the famous writer Phulboni’s spiraling personal decline and his delirious wanderings, which she ascribes to the ‘‘mystery’’ of the Lakhaan stories. In its ability to figuratively gesture toward another story that remains silent in the text, literary practice edges closer to the truth of counterscience than scientific explanation. By the end of the novel, the vernacular literary tale is the only authoritative means through which the characters can decode the muddled and untruthful records of scientific discovery. Vernacular Sutures In terms of postcolonial literary practice, vernacular ghost fiction presents a certain ‘‘native’’ record of the colonial presence, a register of its violence upon the colonized world. Scattered encryptions of vernacular ghost stories in The Calcutta Chromosome exert an uncanny pressure on any reader familiar with traditions of vernacular ghost fiction, a tradition that Ghosh clearly claims as central to understanding the contemporary postcolonial scholar/writer’s ‘‘epistemological perplexity.’’ Even on first read, one is struck by the specific resonances in the three Lakhaan fragments in the novel. They seem to beckon a corpus of 24. In fact, Ghosh grants equal credence to written facts as he does to lore and hearsay. His renegade detective, Murugan, wonders if Phulboni wrote the Lakhaan story first and later ‘‘heard’’ its folk version or vice versa. This confusion of folk versions, literary manifestations, and hearsay as ‘‘scientific’’ evidence constitutes the new work of the archivist, Ghosh suggests, an insistence on subaltern knowledges—myths, folk narratives, and fiction—as the ground of rational understanding given the fallen state of knowledge in the colonial-modern world. The final ‘‘truth’’ must be experienced or performed by the investigator. Thus, throughout the novel, written and oral traces lead us to performances: of illicit healing, of unsavory séances, of sexual fusion between bodies.


writing best described by Parama Roy as the Indian ‘‘bureaucratic gothic,’’ 25 a genre that figurally records the trauma of modernity in the postcolonial liberal state. In the case of Bengali literature, I could identify (albeit inexpertly) antecedents to this genre that date back to literature written under colonial rule, but here I focus on two memorable examples, Tagore’s ‘‘Kshudhito Pashaan’’ and Renu’s ‘‘Smells of a Primeval Night,’’ which were cited by Ghosh as inspirational sources for The Calcutta Chromosome.26 Numerous references to these tales find their way into The Calcutta Chromosome, creating a literary puzzle of sorts: the haunted station is explicitly named Renupur, and we are told it lies somewhere between Barich and Darbhanga (Barich is the setting for the Tagore story); ‘‘Kshudhito Pashaan’’ commences with a ghost story told by a tax collector to his fellow travelers on a train, and in The Calcutta Chromosome, Phulboni hears the story of Lakhaan’s ghost also on a train (a classic Indian setting for storytelling, with the railways symbolizing the reach of the state/empire); the Tagore story is suffused with the changing and exchanging of clothes, much like the obsessive changing of bodies in The Calcutta Chromosome; Phulboni works for a British company when he encounters the boy ghost, and thus qualifies as a protagonist for the bureaucratic gothic; further, Phulboni chose his pseudonym—no doubt playing with the pen name of another famous Bengali writer, Bonophul—from the wild Phulboni region in the eastern state of Orissa, the place of Santhals, who are Karma’s (Renu’s servant-boy protagonist) people. One could go on. But my point here is this: in Ghosh’s hands, this vernacular ghost genre becomes the genetic blueprint for the novel in English. The Lakhaan ghost fragments to which all trails return are mutations of original vernacular literary fare, perhaps Ghosh’s elaborate allegory for the primal scene of postcolonial writing in English. I would further explain this personal haunting by a quick look at the 25. Parama Roy, author of Indian Traffic, spoke from her new work at the Cultural Analysis Colloquium at the University of California, Santa Barbara, March 6, 2002. Her talk, titled ‘‘Figures of Famine,’’ presented Mahasweta Devi’s literary and journalistic ‘‘accounting’’ of famine, a phenomenon that troubles the postcolonial liberal state and its agents (bureaucrats). Fiction that captures the shock of this traumatic excess within the bureaucratic imaginary is what Roy pithily transcribes as ‘‘the bureaucratic gothic.’’ 26. Rabindranath Tagore’s ‘‘Kshudhita Pashaan’’ (‘‘The Hungry Stones’’) was published in The Hungry Stones and Other Stories (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 1–15; Phaniswarnath Renu’s tale is set in the postcolonial era, and a translation may be found in The Third Vow and Other Stories, trans. Katherine G. Hansen (New Delhi: Chanakya Press, 1986), 133–51.


subject of these two stories (metonymically the subject of the colonial and postcolonial bureaucratic gothic). The Lakhaan story in The Calcutta Chromosome is a tale of vengeance, where the boy’s ghost takes revenge on the station master who attempts to kill him. The boy is a poor rural migrant who is violently handled by the agent of empire, the station master, who treats him as an outcast drifter of suspect parentage. Living in a railway station, he is caught in the transition between the village and the modern city. He becomes the recursive ghost of the postcolonial state—the specters from the hinterland vibrant in Mahasweta Devi’s ghost fiction—who reminds the liberal urban postcolonial bureaucrat of an ethical failure; the rural or tribal other is that figure of excess for whom ‘‘free’’ India cannot account and for whom there are no rights and no redress.27 Almost all these features of the Lakhaan character are mutations of Karma, Renu’s protagonist. In a postcolonial fable set in the most underdeveloped region of postindependent India, the migrant foundling knows that he ‘‘belongs’’ to a list of ‘‘babus’’ (white-collar workers under the Raj, often agents of empire) as he shuttles between railway hubs. He is traumatized by how he is perceived as a casteless and homeless thief, and constantly dreams of being lured by a red light to the train tracks, where he dies. Karma is haunted by his own bodily disintegration when his feet and head are sundered from his torso by the carnal engine; in his delirium, and much to his amazement, Karma sees himself wearing Anthony sahib’s boots (Renu equates the colonial sahib to the postcolonial babu/bureaucrat)— obviously, he has been murdered for his sin of stealing the boots. Karma’s nightmare finds literal encryption in Farley’s and Grigson’s encounters with Lakhaan 28 in The Calcutta Chromosome, where a ghostly red lantern leads 27. Parama Roy eloquently made this point about ghosts as a record of the excess inconceivable to the liberal postcolonial subject, an excess that activists such as Mahasweta Devi catalog in their fiction. Phaniswarnath Renu presents an interesting parallel to Mahasweta Devi, since he is best known for his intellectual commitment to nonmetropolitan milieus and his critique of the postcolonial liberal state, especially in his celebrated novel Maila Anchal (Delhi: Soiled Border, 1954). Like Mahasweta Devi, then, he is both a chronicler of and an active interventionist in the modern violences that the nation inflicts on its own people. 28. Lakhaan is a common name with an interesting mythological referent for our particular ghost. Lakshman (the Sanskritized version of the eastern Indian variant, Lakhaan) is Ram’s brother, who follows the former, the epic hero of the Ramayan, into his fourteenyear exile; Lakshman’s motives are simply loyalty and love, and it is a common Indian joke to cast aspersions on Lakhaan’s motives. The name Lakhaan, therefore, conjures one who


the men to their doom on the train tracks. Yet the tables have turned. For in Ghosh’s hands the poor migrant avenges himself by turning the babu (Phulboni) and the Englishmen (Farley and Grigson) into the victims. Tagore’s protagonist, a Hindu man and a theosophist kinsman, hears the ghost story from a Muslim collector of cotton duties for the British government, with whom he travels. The cosmopolitan urban Muslim fascinates the theosophist, who becomes enamored by this someone who is besieged by ghosts, a Muslim other, no less. In turn, the tax collector recognizes his ‘‘malady’’ (manifested in hallucinations) through someone else who is haunted—the old man, Meher Ali, the custodian of local lore. Tagore’s investment in a unified (Hindu and Muslim) national socius—pervasive in his fiction following the partition (1905) and reunification (1911) of Bengal—projects the fantasy of a Muslim past in the imaginary of a collaborator (colonial agent), a fantasy that captivates his Hindu audience. The tax collector, given to facts and figures, cannot account for his temporary madness while on assignment in Barich. Drawn to an abandoned palace, he succumbs to its hungry stones: he plays and replays the role of a lustful Muslim pasha driven mad by his harem, and by one beauty in particular. The drama of lust, revenge, and yearning has seeped into the very walls of the mansion that now consumes any who cross its threshold. In this colonial bureaucratic gothic, Tagore’s metaphoric hungry stones are the excess that drives British rulers and their Indian agents to delirium and hallucination; it is a specter that cannot be accounted for or put to rest. Both the vernacular stories register a trauma of betrayal. Ghosts are the literary devices that return us to those ethical questions of historical cultural and economic violence that trouble Tagore and Renu—a violence replayed only a little differently at our current phase of ‘‘empire.’’ Lakhaan and Mangala are reminders of erasure: they demand redress from rational historiography; their ghostly stories split the seam of the English-versusvernacular modernist opposition that has hounded Indian writing in English from its inception in the 1930s. The protagonists of The Calcutta Chromosome, Antar and Murugan, are also ‘‘guilty’’ of self-betrayal, of working for the ‘‘babus’’ of globalization. No small wonder that these stories exert uncanny pressure on Ghosh, a writer intent on salvaging future epistemologies from the debris of the past. comes second, who follows, faithfully, but who remains partially eclipsed in the narrative— a resoundingly good choice for the recursive Lakhaan/Lutchman (Mangala’s assistant) in The Calcutta Chromosome.


Such a grafting of vernacular paradigms onto a literary tradition that characteristically, and often problematically, references only its Anglo antecedents 29 is a polemical refiguring of postcolonial literary practice. Now any postcolonial criticism of the novel in English must recuperate a vernacular archive to make good its promise. Quite predictably, Derrida concludes his rumination on ghosts with the injunction not only to speak to and of ghosts but to let them speak to us: If he loves justice at least, the ‘‘scholar’’ of the future, the intellectual of tomorrow should learn it and from the ghost. He should learn to live by learning not how to make conversation with the ghost but to talk with him, with her, how to let them speak or how to give them back speech, even it is in oneself: they are always there, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet. They give us time to rethink ‘‘there’’ as soon as we open our mouths, even at a colloquium and especially when one speaks there in a foreign tongue. (SM, 176)

29. Consider, for example, the review of The Calcutta Chromosome in Science Fiction Weekly, where John Clute pitches British writer Robert Irwin’s The Arabian Nightmare (1983) as the source for Ghosh’s venture into science fiction (John Clute, ‘‘A Tale Decent Folks Can Buy,’’ Science Fiction Weekly 56 [October 20, 1997], 1–2). Ghosh, relatively unknown in the science fiction reading communities, had received some disgruntled attention after he won the Arthur C. Clarke Science Fiction Award in 1997. In the many reviews of the book that are commonly in circulation, not one mentions the Tagore or Renu influences, despite these writers’ cultural eminence in their literary traditions. Katherine Hansen, the translator of Renu’s work into English, is the single exception, identifying Renu as a source in her review of the novel, ‘‘Malarial Imaginings, The Kathmandu Post Book Review 3, no. 9 (August 30, 1998): 1–3.

‘‘Permanent Immigration’’: Jacqueline Kahanoff, Ronit Matalon, and the Impetus of Levantinism

Gil Z. Hochberg

The Mediterranean is another way of writing history. —Michel Eckhard Elial 1 Following the first wave of Moroccan immigrants to Israel in 1949, a French diplomat, who has chosen to remain anonymous, was quoted in the leading Israeli newspaper Ha-aretz as warning the new state that ‘‘the immigration of certain human material is liable to bring the Jewish nation down, and make it into a Levantine nightmare.’’ 2 A decade later, the British daily the Manchester Guardian had accused Israel’s then prime minister, David BenGurion, of ‘‘plunging the new nation into Levantinism,’’ and Ben-Gurion himself was quoted as saying that he would surely ‘‘prevent Levantinism from creeping into [Israel’s] national life!’’ 3 Unless otherwise noted, all English translations are my own. 1. Michel Eckhard Elial, ‘‘Commune presence,’’ Levant: Cahiers de l’espace méditerranéen 1, no. 1 (1989): 9. 2. Arieh Gelblum, ‘‘Hagira temanit ve-habaaya ha-afrikanit’’ [Yemenite Immigration and the African Problem], Ha-aretz, April 22, 1949. 3. Manchester Guardian, February 6, 1961, sec. 8/2. boundary 2 31:2, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.


What is Levantinism, and what does it mean for a people or a nation to be Levantinized? What, on the other hand, does it mean to save a nation from Levantinization? As the examples above reveal, Levantinism is understood to be a social threat imagined as a process, culminating in an undesirable state of affairs. What exactly does this state of affairs involve, and why has Israel, in particular, been the target of so much concern regarding the possibility of Levantinization? The first and most detailed attempt to define Levantinism and explain the source of its social threat was made by the Israeli writer of Iraqi descent Nissim Rejwan, in an essay published in the Jerusalem Post in 1961. The Levant, he writes, is first and foremost a geographical space, yet Levantinism has less to do with geography than with culture: ‘‘Levantinism is a cultural [concept] . . . you can come from the Levant and be the opposite of a Levantine: you can hail from Europe and be the epitome of Levantinism.’’ 4 Levantinism, Rejwan argues, is ‘‘a state of mind’’ brought about by losing possession over one’s own culture and values. Along similar lines, A. H. Hourani suggests that ‘‘to be a Levantine is to live in two or more worlds at once, without belonging to either; to be able to go through the external forms . . . of a certain nationality, religion or culture, without actually possessing it.’’ 5 Drawing on these words, we can conclude that Levantinism is a state of performing culture: ‘‘going through the external forms of culture, without actually possessing them.’’ Now, if anyone, as Rejwan suggests, can be ‘‘Levantinized,’’ or ‘‘on the way to a perfect Levantine mood’’ (What Is), we can begin to see the threat Levantinism presents and possibly relate to Ben-Gurion’s promise to prevent the Levantinization of the newly born nation. Yet we still need to ask, What does it mean to ‘‘perform culture,’’ that is to say, to ‘‘go through [its] external forms’’ without possessing it, and how can a possession over culture be lost? Finally, if it is possible to perform culture without having to possess it, what does it mean to embrace this state of mind as a conscious and subversive political and cultural stance? Levantinism: A Culture-in-Becoming The French and British colonizers of North Africa and the Middle East were the first to use the terms Levant and Levantine to mark not only a geo4. Nissim Rejwan, ‘‘What Is Levantinism?’’ Jerusalem Post, May 16, 1961. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as What Is. 5. A. H. Hourani, Syria and Lebanon: A Political Essay (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), 70.

Hochberg / ‘‘Permanent Immigration’’ 221

graphical space but also a state of culture and a ‘‘type’’ of person.6 The literal meaning of the French word levant—meaning, among other things, ‘‘rising sun’’—was often used by French colonizers to denote the evolutionary cultural development from East to West. The affiliated term, Levantinism, came to mean, in this context, a state of cultural impurity: a failed attempt on the side of the colonized to imitate the ways of the West, resulting in poor performance of (Western) culture. The trajectory of such colonial imagination can be easily traced in numerous literary and journalistic texts published in Hebrew since 1948 and dedicated to the problem of Levantine influence (hashpaa levantinit). What for the French and British was part of a halflegitimate colonial discourse found its way into the authoritative Hebrew dictionary, Milon Chadash meet Avraham Even Shoshan. The latest 1999 edition offers two definitions for the term Levantine. The first refers to a person who is of ‘‘Middle Eastern descent’’; the second refers to ‘‘a person with superficial education who behaves according to false codes of politeness and lacks any real culture or spiritual stability.’’ The noun Levantinism (Levantiniyut) is defined as ‘‘part of the characteristics of Oriental countries,’’ or ‘‘a shallow education that lacks authentic and significant cultural and spiritual stability.’’ 7 When the young Egyptian writer Jacqueline (Shohat) Kahanoff, who was born in Cairo in 1917 to a Jewish family of Iraqi and Tunisian descent, reintroduced the term Levantinism in her writing published in Israel from the mid-1950s through the late 1970s, she was determined to reclaim the term and transform its derogatory and colonialist connotations into a new radical sociopolitical and cultural position.8 Against Ben-Gurion’s promise to pre6. For further readings on this colonial legacy, see Evelyn Baring, Modern Egypt, vol. 2 of Orientalism: Early Sources, ed. Bryan S. Turner (1908; repr., London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 228–59; Elie Kedourie, England and the Middle East: The Destruction of the Ottoman Empire (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1978), 67–87; D. G. Hograth, A Wandering Scholar in the Levant (London: J. Murry, 1896); and Claude Liauzu, ‘‘Eloge du Levantin,’’ Confuences en Maediterranaee 24 (Winter 1997–1998): 61–65. 7. Avraham Even-Shoshan, ha-Milon he-hadash; otsar shalem shel ha-lashon ha-Ivrit ha-sifrutit, ha-madait veha-meduberet, nivim ve-amirot Ivriyim ve-Aramiyim, munachim benleumiyim, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Kiryat-sefer, 1999). 8. Kahanoff grew up in Cairo and studied in the French colonial education system, the ‘‘Alliance Israélite Universelle.’’ She later lived in Paris and in New York, where she published a novel and a few short stories. Throughout the 1960s and until her death in 1979, she lived mostly in Israel. Her numerous cultural and political essays were published in the cultural journal Keshet, as well as in leading Israeli literary supplements (Davar and Ha-aretz). Aharon Amir, the editor of Keshet and the translator of Kahanoff’s work (from English and French into Hebrew), had collected her writings in a book he published a year before her


vent the Levantinization of Israel, Kahanoff suggested that Israel needed to embrace Levantinism. In an essay she published in 1959, she writes quite explicitly that ‘‘Israel cannot expect to march on isolated to the end of time. . . . In stopping the fear of its Levantinization, Israel might open a path towards future regional peace.’’ 9 Kahanoff wrote in French and in English, although her essays have so far been collected and published only in their Hebrew translation. As a new immigrant to Israel, Kahanoff was very disturbed by what she identified as the nation’s inner colonialism (From East, 52). In 1959, she published a cycle of four autobiographical essays entitled ‘‘A Generation of Levantines.’’ In the first two essays, Kahanoff uses the term Levantine to describe her complex sense of identity growing up as a Jewish child and learning in a French School in Cairo: ‘‘At [the French] school we learned nothing about ourselves. . . . We never quite understood how come us girls—Jewish, Armenian, Moslem, and Greek—found ourselves learning about the French revolution, about Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. . . . We were people with no language . . . we could not speak outside the language of Europe in which our inner self was well-hidden, buried under layers of European dialectics’’ (From East, 16). But Levantinism comes to signify for Kahanoff not only the experience of hidden self and loss of language but also the way out of this state of loss. In the following two essays of the cycle, Kahanoff focuses on her experience as a new immigrant in Israel, analyzing, for the first time, Jewish-Israeli society in terms of colonial oppression and defining the cultural meetings between the Ashkenazi (European) Jews and the Mizrachi (Jews of Arab descent), in terms of inner colonialism: ‘‘a complex illness’’ death: Mi-mizrach Shemesh (From East the Sun). While Kahanoff herself wrote in French and English, her readership today is limited almost entirely to Hebrew readers. (The original writings, aside from the novel Jacob’s Ladder [London: Harvill Press, 1951] and a few essays published in American journals and newspapers, were never published.) Ronit Matalon, who, since the mideighties, has published a few articles about Kahanoff, has played a central role in reintroducing Kahanoff’s work to a wider (Israeli) public. Other critics have also contributed to the renewed interest in Kahanoff’s work: see Dolly Benhabib, ‘‘Ha-chatsaiyot hitkatsru’’ [Skirts Are Shorter Now: Comments on Levantine Female Identity in the Writing of Jacqueline Kahanoff], Theory and Criticism: An Israeli Forum 5 (1994): 159–65; Nissim Kalderon, ‘‘Ze lo ha-kol sipur echad’’ [It Is Not All One Story], Rechov: A Literary Journal 2 (1995): 48–58; and Yoram Bronowski, ‘‘Ha-levantinim’’ [The Levantines], Ha-aretz, April 5, 1996. 9. Jacqueline Kahanoff, Mi-mizrach Shemesh [From East the Sun], trans. Aharon Amir (Tel Aviv: Yariv and Hadar, 1978), 9. Subsequent references to this work are cited parenthetically as From East.


based on racism and phobia (From East, 48). It is this illness that Kahanoff hopes to ‘‘cure’’ by reclaiming Levantinism: ‘‘As for myself, I am a typical Levantine in the sense that I appreciate to the same degree [what] I got from my Eastern background and what I later adopted from Western culture. Many dismiss this cultural blend, calling it impure or ‘Levantine.’ I myself see it as a source of enrichment. To live in a mono-cultural ghetto—that seems to me like a negative and obsessive kind of loyalty: a compulsion almost a neurosis!’’ (From East, 121). Turning the very characteristics used by the colonial discourse to undermine the ‘‘Levantine’’—the lack of cultural stability, inauthentic performance of culture, the absence of unified origins, and the lack of cultural possessions—into the most cherished elements of a new cultural position, Kahanoff openly promotes cultural impurity and dismisses the very grounds on which ethnic and national monoculturalism is constructed. The crisis brought about by historical violence is relocated by Kahanoff and placed at the very heart of cultural formation. The painful experiences of colonialist occupation, deportation, and uprooting thus serve as a means through which culture itself is put into crisis as the meaning of authenticity, cultural possession, and cultural stability are critically reexamined. In an essay published in 1972 in Ha-aretz, Kahanoff extends her views on cultural impurity beyond the Israeli context to include a more general comment on the decline of national cultures: ‘‘A new genre or group of works is created, one that cannot be defined by reference to any given national belonging, but which represents a ‘culture-in-becoming.’ . . . This might seem marginal from a national perspective, but from a larger social perspective, such literature directs our attention to a new era of cultural intersections and a new understanding of culture produced along numerous new and surprising ‘meetings.’’’ 10 Making such ‘‘surprising meetings’’ the characteristic of Levantine culture, Kahanoff goes on to suggest that ‘‘[while] the Levant cannot be sharply differentiated from the Mediterranean world, it is not synonymous [with it]. The Levant has a character and a history of its own. . . . Giving rise to world civilizations, fracturing into stubborn local subcultures and multilayered identities . . . [the Levant] is not exclusively eastern or western, Christian, Jewish, or Moslem. . . . It is like a prism whose various facets are joined by a sharp edge of differences . . . reflecting or refracting light.’’ 11 10. Jacqueline Kahanoff, ‘‘Sifrut shel mutatsya chevratit’’ [A Literature of Social Mutation], Ha-aretz, December 8, 1972; my emphasis. 11. Quoted in Ammiel Alcalay, After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 71–72. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as AJA. The text Alcalay cites is available as an unpublished manuscript held


Kahanoff, who clearly feels uncomfortable with the geographical definition of the Levant, opens the spatial definition to include the temporal dimension and associates the Levant with the ability to bridge the past (the glorious ancient world civilizations) and the recent present of European colonialism, in which it is Europe that sets the tone of the cultural meetings between the East and the West: ‘‘The Levant should reevaluate itself by its own lights, rather than see itself through Europe’s sights, as something exotic, tired, sick and almost lifeless’’ (From East, 72). Indeed, while the modern Levant is a geographical space, there seems to be no consensus about the exact location of this space. It is most commonly associated with the countries located on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, namely, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon (the area known in Arabic as bilād al-shām), but it has also been known to include Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya, and, in other formulations, it extends to Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, North Africa, and even parts of West Africa and India.12 This failure to reach a consensus regarding the exact location of the Levant reaffirms Rejwan’s claim that the Levant ‘‘is a cultural term over and above a geographical one’’ (What Is) and that, as such, it is an object quite literally difficult to place. In After Jews and Arabs, Ammiel Alcalay suggests that in order to recover the Levant as a cultural space, its rich history, the world of classical antiquity to the various Islamic empires, needs to be studied. For Alcalay, the Levant is part of a rich cultural past: ‘‘The ancient East. The Fertile Crescent, the world of classical antiquity, various Islamic empires, the Middle East’’ (AJA, 2). Furthermore, it is a past through which the ‘‘modern myth with Kahanoff’s literary executor, Ms. Eva Zeintraub, of Tel Aviv. The quotation appears on pages 4–5 of the preface of this manuscript. 12. Locating the Levant along the borders of the classical Andalusian culture, Alcalay argues that the Levant includes present-day Portugal, Spain, Italy, the Balkans, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus, Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, and parts of West Africa and India (After Jews and Arabs, 21). Ken Seigneurie, the editor of the new book entitled Crisis and Memory: The Representation of Space in Modern Levantine Narrative (Berlin: Reichert Verlag Wiesbaden, 2003), limits the space of the modern Levant to ‘‘Israel-Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon,’’ or what he calls ‘‘the Eastern littoral of the Mediterranean’’ (7). More often, the Levant is thought of as a space including, in addition to these countries, Turkey, Egypt, and North Africa, and, according to Brian Newsome, Eastern Europe has also often been referred to as part of the Levant. See his illuminating essay ‘‘‘Dead Lands’ or ‘New Europe’? Reconstructing Europe, Reconfiguring Eastern Europe: ‘Westerners’ and the Aftermath of the World War,’’ East European Quarterly 36, no. 1 (2002): 39–62.


of the Jew as pariah, outsider and wanderer’’ can be reexamined, since the Levant is a ‘‘space in which the Jew was native . . . an absolute inhabitant of time and space’’ (AJA, 1). The Levantine Jew is a native Jew, ‘‘at home’’ in his natural environment, and his writing ‘‘is concerned with concrete and sensual attachment to the fact and memory of a native space’’ (AJA, 215). The figure of the native Levantine Jew, the son of the East, presents, Alcalay seems to suggest, empirical proof or historical evidence for the possibility of a future peaceful and culturally rich life created by Jews and Moslems who share the same living space. Thus, Alcalay recommends a ‘‘return’’ to what he calls ‘‘paradigmatic historical moments and encounters’’ between Jews and Arabs (AJA, 27) in order to challenge the main narrative of hostility that dominates the present relationship between the two peoples, a narrative that is based on a totalizing Western view in which the Jew plays the symbolic role of the displaced outsider. The Israeli sociologist David Ohana similarly writes about ‘‘the Mediterranean Jew,’’ who, unlike the exilic European Jew, is comfortable in his place, ‘‘a natural son to his surroundings . . . and cultural origins.’’ 13 Hannan Hever, an Israeli literary scholar, has also directed attention to the importance of the Arab Jew’s authentic and original relationship to the Mediterranean space: ‘‘The spatial reality of the Mizrachi Jew, unlike that of the Ashkenazim . . . is local. It is the reality of a continual relationship one carries to one’s own place of birth . . . this continuity connects the Arab-Jew to his former Arab neighbor from whom he has never separated.14 l l l l

Although these critical revisions of the (European) modernist and postmodernist conceptions of the Jew as a symbol of modified alterity (a conception that makes the Jew, and Jewish history, belong only to Europe, and paradoxically so, by rendering the Jew as never fully European) serve a purpose, I am reluctant to embrace the historical figure of the ‘‘native’’ or local Jew as an alternative sociopolitical figure. It is, after all, precisely the concepts of nativeness, locality, and natural belonging (the continual relationship to one’s place of birth) that are commonly mobilized in the service of 13. David Ohana, Humanist ba-shemesh [Humanist in the Sun] (Jerusalem: Carmel, 2000), 143. 14. Hannan Hever, ‘‘Lo baanu me-hayam: Kavim le-geographia sifrutit mizrachit’’ [We Have Not Arrived from the Sea: Towards a Literary Mizrachi Geography], Theory and Criticism 16 (2000): 188; my emphasis.


Zionist national aggression and translated to a discourse of rights expressed in terms of entitlement and return. In Kahanoff’s writing, the Levant emerges less as a historical figure than as a cultural space that challenges the very attempt at sharply differentiating the past from the present. As a bridge between cultures and times, the Levant opens the present to new-old cultural figurations and social attachments that, to use Homi Bhabha’s words, ‘‘become part of the necessity of living, not a nostalgia.’’ 15 My own interest in the Levant as a contemporary cultural space has little, if anything, to do with rediscovering the Jew as native, the historical proof of the nonexilic pre-Israeli Jewish position. On the contrary, I anticipate, by locating the Levant as a contemporary cultural map—a living force of current cultural and political reality—challenging the very notions of nativeness and natural belonging, and replacing the fantasy of being ‘‘an absolute inhabitant of time and space’’ (AJA, 1) with that of never fully answering ‘‘the call to belong.’’ 16 l l l l

Mikaél Elial and Shlomo Elbaz, the editors of the short-lived journal Levant, argue that the modern Levant ‘‘is a model of interpretation: a way of writing, reading and thinking which carries some undetermined connections with the Andalusian school [el’Andalus].’’ 17 Following this insight, I suggest that the Levant is above all a space of literary production, one that is explored along ‘‘numerous surprising meetings,’’ such as in the literary collaboration between Jacques Hassoun, an Egyptian Jewish writer living in Paris, and Abdelkebir Khatibi, a Moslem Moroccan writer from Rabat; in the cultural dialogue between the Israeli writer Amos Oz and the Moroccan writer Tahar Ben-Jelloun; in the numerous publications of Hebrew texts written by Palestinians, such as Naim Araidi, Atallha Mansur, Muhammad Watad, Salman Massalha, and Anton Shammas; and in the recent revival of Kahanoff’s Levantine prospect by the Israeli writer Ronit Matalon. Furthermore, I suggest that these texts and many others not only represent a reality 15. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 7. 16. I am here paraphrasing Mireille Rosello. See her informative essay, ‘‘The Beur Nation: Toward a Theory of Departenance,’’ Research in African Literature 24 (1993): 13–24. Rosello here argues that belonging is never a given condition but always a response: ‘‘One had already been called upon to belong’’ (23). 17. Michel Eckhard Elial and Shlomo Elbaz, ‘‘De Nouvelles Andalousies,’’ Levant: Cahiers de l’espace méditerranéen 4, no. 1 (1991): 9.


of national, linguistic, and religious-ethnic border crossing, but also elicit a practice of reading that undermines the prescriptive divisions set to keep apart the East from the West, Hebrew from Arabic, the Middle East from Africa, and the Arab (along with tradition and the Middle East) from the Jew (along with modernity and Europe). In focusing on the present cultural production of the Levant as an alternative map to the existing (national, geographical, and ethnic) political maps, I do not suggest a new transnational space as much as I draw attention to the ongoing crossing between these maps, or to use Edward Said’s words, the productive ‘‘interplay between nationalism and exile.’’ 18 The Place Where the Photo Opens In 1995, the Israeli writer Ronit Matalon published her first novel, Zeh im ha-panim elienu, which was translated into English three years later as The One Facing Us.19 The novel follows three generations of an Egyptian Jewish family whose members left Cairo gradually from the late 1930s until the mid-1950s, when all Jews were forced to leave. The historical need to leave home forms the background for the novel’s focus on the ‘‘new homes’’ the characters create, or fail to create, for themselves. Two narrators—first and third person—shift back and forth between the past and the present, between the family’s scattering to different locations (Cameroon, Israel, New York, Paris, and Gaza) and the more current experiences of Esther, la nièce, who is sent by the family to her uncle in Cameroon, in order to ‘‘get some of that old world spirit into her’’ (23). Most chapters open with a photo, supposedly found in Uncle Sicourelle’s family album, followed by the personal writings of seventeen-year-old Esther, who spends her time in Cameroon writing a journal and looking at family photos, interweaving the ‘‘stories’’ she finds in them (68) with the narration of her own daily experiences. The movement between past and present is experienced by Esther as a conflict between, on the one hand, 18. Edward W. Said, ‘‘The Mind in Winter: Reflections on Life in Exile,’’ Harper’s, no. 269 (1984): 54. 19. Ronit Matalon, Zeh im ha-panim elienu (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1995); The One Facing Us, trans. Marsha Weinstein (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998). When the published English translation is used, I provide page numbers of the Hebrew text first, followed by the corresponding page number from the English text. In all other cases, page numbers refer to the original text only.


her desire to revive her familial past and locate herself in relation to it, and, on the other hand, her sense of the historical discontinuity that makes her attempt impossible. This tension is manifested in the novel’s complex use of the family photos as both a gateway to the past, which the narrator enters in search of her own identity, but also no less as a reminder of how uncertain, indeterminate, and necessarily partial this search must be: The place where the photo opens itself to its viewer is the place where the weak border between the real and the non-real flashes for a moment, revealing itself. This is the place where the photo announces not only its status as a witness of reality, but also its potential. Only this way can I see. I plant myself there from a distance of years . . . turning to myself in the third person . . . as a sign of agreement with the possible, if doubtful existence in relation to my uncertain familial identity. (10–11) Viewing the family photos, Esther looks not only at what she clearly identifies but also at what could possibly be. Vague shadows, partial particles, unrecognized objects draw her attention, destroying the photos’ status as coherent and sealed objects of the past. Thus, looking at the yellowing edges of an old photo, Esther notices the continuity between a yellowish picture seen in the photograph and the fading color on the edges of the object she holds. This continuity, she remarks, ‘‘[n]o longer allows the separation between that which is seen and the effects of time on it. The future has found its way into the photo. It has become part of the past, which likely invades the present’’ (122). Between the image captured in the photo and the reality that escapes the frame, between Esther’s first-person narration and the third-person narrating voice describing the niece, between reality and the ‘‘potential,’’ Esther’s voice emerges—doubled and torn—in spite of, or perhaps due to, the impossibility of faithfully telling ‘‘her story,’’ in a form of familial genealogy: [They lived] among real and fictive stories that wandered about with no citizenship, passing from hand to hand, from one house to the other. Names, attributes, smells, all these served as codes for something, as some clue, which the family photos proved right, wrong, or neither. The photos presented another possibility: a dazed twilight zone between right and wrong; true and false. In that dazed zone the error—the eye’s mistake, the false stories and the illusion that creates them—grew like a culture of microbes. (35; my emphasis)


The story of oneself unfolds here, not as a return (a recovery of familial genealogy) but as a double and contradictory movement, locating identity in the ‘‘twilight zone’’ between fiction and reality, past and present, memories and fantasies. Tracing the movement of the Jewish Levantine immigrants from the old home, ‘‘which was never a homeland but was a home’’ (121–22), to the new homeland, which was never a home, The One Facing Us emphasizes the displacement experienced by each of the characters, which, while not directly introduced by the Zionist project, was certainly enforced by it. The family’s photos—most of which are presented at chapters’ openings, while others are declared missing—are followed by narratives in which the different family members’ recent pasts unfold. Nona Fortuna, the grandmother, moves with her elder son, Moise, to Israel, ‘‘the place she hated since’’ (241). Esther’s mother, Inés, drags her husband, Robert, to a kibbutz that they later leave due to ethnic tensions. Esther’s uncle, Sicourelle, settles in Cameroon, where he believes life is more suitable for the family’s Levantine spirit. Edouard, the young uncle, becomes a chief commander in the Israeli force in the Gaza Strip. And the youngest sister, Nadine, moves to New York, where she disappears, never to be seen again. In addition to Esther’s family members, the novel presents the figure of Jacqueline Kahanoff by including two of her essays at full length, accompanying them with a few ‘‘fake’’ or missing photographs, such as a photo of two people standing by a railroad station in Warsaw, Poland, which is enigmatically entitled ‘‘Jacqueline Kahanoff, the Nile River, Cairo 1940.’’ This photo, like other photos of unknown people in unknown places and times, ‘‘[w]anders from one house to another,’’ Esther comments, ‘‘like a story with no citizenship’’ (35). In an interview conducted with her in 2001, Matalon dismisses the claim that her family knew Kahanoff personally and argues against the critics’ misunderstanding of the place the photos have in her novel, reading them as carrying straightforward documentary value rather than presenting a zone between real and unreal, true and false. In the same interview, she further reveals that the photo of ‘‘Kahanoff by the Nile River’’ is only one of many fake photos in the novel.20 It is along the borders between the real and the imagined, ‘‘the true and false,’’ as Esther comments, that the past ‘‘flashes for a moment revealing itself’’ (35), and it is within this shadowy zone opened between right and wrong, true and false, past and present, 20. Ronit Matalon, Ani ha-teona [I Am the Accident], Yediot acharonot, April 27, 2001.


memory and invention, Warsaw and Cairo, that the figure of Jacqueline Kahanoff is reintroduced. Her presence in the novel is elevated to the status of something like a cultural myth. She takes the place of the spokeswoman of Levantinism, which as such can never be fully captured but rather forever remains a ‘‘missing photo.’’ Her ghostly presence represents a world that Matalon’s narrator calls ‘‘the Levantine fading dream’’ (24). The remnants of this world within the Israeli present reality are described by her as nothing more than ‘‘shadows of gallant men’’ and ‘‘deserted memories of half real people in half real places walking through ghostly streets’’ (188). Indeed, if Kahanoff turned to the cultural possibility of Levantinism in order to offer a solution for what she identifies as ‘‘an inner colonialism’’ in the becomingIsraeli society, Matalon, writing thirty years later, returns to this cultural possibility (or its traces), not so much in search of a prescriptive solution but rather as an alarming memory: a reminder of a lost historical opportunity through which the present victory of Zionist nationalism reemerges in the ghostly form of failed Levantinism. Inscribing the failure of Levantinism back into the political taxonomy of the Zionist national home, The One Facing Us exposes not only the failure of the first but, no less important, the ideological limitations of the latter, revealing the ‘‘forgetting’’ that is located at the very heart of the nation’s becoming. This national home, which, for the young narrator, has become, as she says, ‘‘her only possible home’’ (219), has never become a home for her Egyptian Jewish family, nor could it ever become a home for the ‘‘poor Moslems in Gaza who shake in fear whenever her uncle [the king of Gaza] crosses the street’’ (156). Following Esther’s family’s varied attempts to find and create new homes for themselves, The One Facing Us takes us back to the historical moment when Levantine Jews, like Kahanoff herself, had to leave their ‘‘Levantine world’’ and resettle. More than ideological reasons and personal preferences, what usually determined the place where the new home was sought was a pragmatic decision based on where one could settle. Israel was the easiest and therefore most natural choice for most Egyptian Jews, who either never had Egyptian citizenship (like Kahanoff herself) or lost it after 1948. The historical need to leave home sets the background for the novel’s focus on the new homes the characters create, or fail to create, for themselves, while they all ‘‘miss those other days and themselves as they used to be in those days—they miss the place, which was never a homeland but was home’’ (121–22; my emphasis). Thus, while the novel emphasizes the


desire for a home, shared by all characters, it also highlights the unsatisfying translation of this desire into the attachment to the new national space. This gap between the desire for home and the inability to attach to a homeland is emphasized by the novel’s frantic movement, back and forth, through many different failing attempts to follow the promoted Zionist narrative of arriving at the Promised Land. Moise, Esther’s oldest uncle, and the only devoted Zionist, gradually grows bitter as he realizes his dreams of becoming an artist do not match the roles assigned in his new homeland to his ethnicity; Edouard, the young uncle, becomes a chief commander in the Israeli force in the Gaza Strip, taking all his frustration out on his subordinates; and Nona Fortuna, the grandmother, settles in Tel Aviv, where she ‘‘hated everything in sight. A real cauchemar: Jews and Arabs, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, the religious and the secular, the wealthy and the poor. They were all cruel and ridiculous in their endless war over a piece of land she considered not worth a spit’’ (241). For Inés, Esther’s mother, who, more than any other character in the novel, is determined to make a new home for herself and her family, ‘‘home’’ is a necessity that can and should be constructed at any given moment, at any given place, even under circumstances of transition, as within a tent in a transit camp for immigrants (maabarah): ‘‘After two weeks in the camp, Inés made their tent ‘a model.’ . . . ‘It is only a tent, Inés, it’s only a tent,’ her husband Robert insisted. But she did not want to hear. ‘Tent, shment,’ she argued, ‘meanwhile, it’s a home’’’ (188). This last phrase signifies the answer to a very basic need for Inés. This need is again expressed clearly in her answer to her visiting American cousin, Zuza, who asks her whether she misses her ‘‘roots in Egypt.’’ Inés determinedly answers: ‘‘Roots, roots, whatever. What one needs is a home, not roots!’’ (294). Home, as clearly presented in Inés’s answer, has nothing to do with roots or origins. It is configured in Matalon’s novel as nothing more (or less) than the need for a point of reference, or ‘‘a place in the world,’’ to use Edouard Glissant’s words.21 l l l l

From a national perspective, the idea that home is not based on shared origins, roots, or historical rights of territorial possession threatens to relocate the nation as just one site of social affiliation and personal identification, within what José Saldívar calls ‘‘different cognitive maps in which the nation-state is not congruent with cultural identity, and belonging is dis21. Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 20.


tinguished from place.’’ 22 Along the same lines, Said argues that ‘‘home is always more than a territorial location.’’ 23 Challenging both the modernist romanticizing views of exile and the notion of culture as ‘‘home’’ (‘‘culture as a system of values saturating downwards almost everything within its purview’’),24 Said’s notion of secularism situates the individual/critic in a productive distance from the dominant culture (‘‘Home’’), forcing her/him to see that at home or in place means more than ‘‘the idea of a nation, of a national-cultural community . . . a sovereign entity set against other places.’’ 25 Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat reiterate this idea, arguing that ‘‘home as an idea appears locked within the fundamental ambivalence: ‘home’— place or desire?’’ 26 To ask this question means to accentuate the dissonance between desire and location, the very same dissonance that the national imagination aims to obscure, in rationalizing the nation in terms of collective desire: ‘‘What constitutes the nation’s soul,’’ Ernest Renan tell us, is ‘‘the desire to live together.’’ 27 Normalizing (Jewish) Identity Long before the Zionist ideological articulation of home, the negation of exile and the inspiration for a return to Zion as the real homeland were central to Jewish thought.28 And yet it is crucial to note that within the Jewish 22. José Saldívar, Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), ix. 23. Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 8. 24. Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin, eds., The Edward Said Reader (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 227. 25. Bayoumi and Rubin, eds., Said Reader, 226. 26. Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat, introduction to Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 2. 27. Ernest Renan, ‘‘What Is a Nation?’’ in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 19. 28. For background reading on the place of the ‘‘myth of return,’’ and homeland within the modern Jewish Diaspora, see Etan Levin, ed., Diaspora: Exile and the Contemporary Jewish Condition (New York: Stimatzsky/Shaposky, 1986); William Safran, ‘‘Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,’’ Diaspora 1 (1991): 83–99; Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, ‘‘Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity,’’ Critical Inquiry 19 (1993): 693–725; and Amnon Raz-Karkozkin’s innovative essay ‘‘Galut be-tokh ribonut: le-bikoret shelilat ha-galut ba-tarbut ha-yisraelit’’ [Exile within the State-Nation], Theory and Criticism 4 & 5 (1993/1994): 23–52/113–36.


diasporic imagination, the place of the aspired return and the hope for homecoming were not translated to national activism but to a certain negation of, and distancing from, the present political reality. In other words, within this context, the envisioned return to homeland occupied the place of desire but was not translated into an actual political investment in the possessing of a territory as a fulfillment of such a desire. In addition to this envisioned redemptive homecoming, a different conceptualization of home altogether developed within Jewish diasporic imagination, one that shifted the location of home from the land (of Zion) to the (Hebrew) text.29 It is important to note, then, that prior to the emergence of the Zionist national discourse, a great tension existed within Jewish thought concerning the actual meanings of both home and return: first, the desire for home and for a nostalgic return did not meet with an agreement concerning the actual fulfillment of such a return; second, and following the first tension, the understanding of home ‘‘as land’’ conflicted with the conception of home ‘‘as text’’ or ‘‘language.’’ Within the modern Zionist discourse, however, these tensions have gradually dissolved, as both land and language have become explicit markers of national identity. ‘‘Being at Home’’ has become—like in any other modern national discourse—tightly associated with the occupation of specific territory by a specific people who possess the same land, language, and cultural affiliation. It is this elusive coherence—the compatibility of place, culture, language, and rights of possession—that is advanced by the modern national discourse and promoted very explicitly in the case of Zionism as an attempt at ‘‘normalizing’’ the Jewish people.30 An example of such an attempt is 29. For a discussion of this trope in modern Jewish thought and literature, see Sidra DeKoven-Ezrahi, ‘‘Our Homeland, the Text . . . Our Text, the Homeland: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination,’’ in ‘‘The Middle East,’’ ed. Anton Shammas, special issue, Michigan Quarterly Review 31, no. 4 (1992): 463–97; and her book, Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Also see George Steiner’s essay ‘‘Our Homeland, the Text,’’ Salmagundi 66 (1985): 4–25. For a critical discussion of the trope of the Jew ‘‘at home in text’’ and its manifestations within both modernist and postmodernist discourses, see Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), and Amos Oz’s essay ‘‘After the Sound and the Fury: An Interview,’’ Prooftexts 2 (1982): 305–12. 30. While the compatibility of language, culture, and place can be traced in all modern national movements, one should not overlook the anomaly of Zionist nationalism as a modern national ideology and political movement. For an elaborated analysis of Zionism as a unique manifestation of modern nationalism, see Anthony Smith’s ‘‘Zionism and Diaspora


found in the words of the prominent Israeli writer A. B. Yehoshua, who in 1997 expressed his concern for the future of the Israeli Jewish identity. In order to preserve the unique characteristics of this identity, Yehoshua suggested adding a precondition to the 1950s ‘‘law of return’’ (chok ha-shvut), which guarantees automatic Israeli citizenship to all Jews. Being Jewish, he claims, should no longer be a sufficient requirement for becoming an Israeli. Rather, the new Jewish Israeli identity must be based on the Hebrew language and therefore demands a ‘‘proficiency in Hebrew as the new principal criterion for receiving [Israeli] citizenship.’’ 31 Adding the criterion of language proficiency to the ethnic criteria, Yehoshua attempts to overcome the abnormal and ‘‘neurotic’’—to use his words—condition of the Jewish people, finally putting an end to the conflicts between ‘‘home—land or language?’’ as well as that of ‘‘home—place or desire?’’ 32 The Levant in the Present Tense Breaking down the oneness of time, place, and language, diffusing the borders between the past and the present, between various locations (Tel Aviv, Cairo, Dualla, Paris, New York, and the Gaza Strip) and languages (Hebrew, Arabic, French, and English), The One Facing Us stretches the gap between desire and place and accentuates the incompatibility of place, language, and the location of culture, thus challenging the nation’s selfimage of normality. Centering on the shift from ‘‘a home that was never a homeland’’ to ‘‘a homeland’’ that ‘‘never becomes a home’’ (122–22), the novel exposes the violence of the national discourse in terms of its attempt to overcome the complexity of cultural identification by obliterating the conflicts between home and homeland, language and national language, the desire to belong and the location of belonging. Nationalism,’’ Israel Affairs 2 (1995): 1–19. Smith suggests that as a national movement, Zionism attempts to overcome the colonial tensions between East and West, and hence it is going against the spirit of postcolonial national movements. Second, he notes that as a ‘‘diasporic nationalism,’’ Zionism is founded on premodern and religious sources and hence it cannot be analyzed in terms of European, national, and modern thought alone. 31. Bernard Horn, Facing the Fires: Conversations with A. B. Yehoshua (Syracuse, N.Y: Syracuse University Press, 1997), 153. 32. For an elaboration of his views, see A. B. Yehoshua’s collection of essays bi-zkhut ha-normaliyut [In Defense of Normality] (Tel Aviv: Shocken Publishing House, 1980). This Hebrew title could also be translated literally as ‘‘in favor of normality,’’ or less literally, but probably more accurately, as ‘‘the right to normality.’’


The dream of a normal national existence, as expressed in Yehoshua’s model of the newly made normalized Jew, is contrasted in The One Facing Us with a reality of racial and ethnic violence: Esther’s Uncle Moise’s request from his kibbutz to support his studies is denied, while another member ‘‘with a different last name’’ (232) receives the money. Having proven himself to be the ‘‘toughest and cruelest of interrogators’’ (156), the youngest uncle, Edouard, becomes head of the security service team in Gaza, where he is known as ‘‘the local King’’ (156). Directing our attention to such antagonistic reality, The One Facing Us moves us away not only from Yehoshua’s dream of national normality but also from Kahanoff’s dream of ‘‘cultural pluralism.’’ Unlike the rest of the family, who moved to Israel, Uncle Sicourelle sees in his life in Cameroon ‘‘a natural line of continuity of himself and of his old Levantine world. A world where there is no room for national identity but ample room to carry out any conceivable human whim’’ (255/239). But this world that seems to follow the Levantine is heavily dependent on the economic oppression and racial discrimination enforced within postcolonial Cameroon: Uncle Sicourelle and his wife enjoy the lifestyle of French colonizers, living in a huge house and being served by locals whom they refer to as ‘‘their blacks’’ (51, 185). The pluralistic dream of Levantinism, envisioned by Kahanoff as a fruitful meeting of different cultures from the East and the West, is shown to be constructed on colonial projections and social injustices. Exposing the irreconcilable tensions found within the ‘‘Levantine option,’’ itself a product of the colonial world, The One Facing Us hardly echoes Kahanoff’s somewhat naïve hope for the growth of a productive pluralistic and multicultural Levantine society in Israel. Levantinism, like Zionist nationalism, is critically revisited in Matalon’s novel as a concept born in, and sustained by, colonialism. But why, then, return to Levantinism and the Levantine option after all? In revisiting the Levantine option, Matalon is invested in the lesson of this option’s failure rather than in Levantinism as a productive solution. In Cameroon, Esther comes to terms with her own (previously unrecognized) displacement as she discovers that she herself is only ‘‘a guest’’ in her family’s past, dreams, and languages: ‘‘My uncle speaks Arabic to me, enforcing an intimacy that was never mine’’ (24). Out of the irresolvable tensions between Esther and her family’s experiences, between their past and her present, between their home and hers, a critical approach toward home and cultural affiliation emerges as a practice of reevaluating the normality of one’s own present and, in this case, the normality of national existence. This critical approach is not to be confused with the negation of the nation in favor


of a romantic perception of exile. Matalon’s revision of Levantinism is by no means a call for the (Levantine) Jews, or for anyone else for that matter, to pick up their belongings and return to a world that no longer exists. But her novel does seem to suggest there might be a way to incorporate Levantinism as a ‘‘state of mind’’ or a memory of failure into the nation. As an alternative to the binary between homeland and exile, as well as between present and past, Matalon’s novel presents the possibility of mobilizing memory as a decolonizing force. Kahanoff’s failed Levantine dream maintains its political impetus as a disturbing reminder of national violence. As such, it is incorporated into the national narrative as a detector that is alarmed by any sign of ‘‘victory’’ known to us as national normalization. Permanent Immigration In her brief essay entitled ‘‘Language and Home,’’ Matalon distinguishes between the common view of immigration, which, she writes, ‘‘considers immigration to be a temporary crisis and a traumatic stage one needs to overcome, [like] a childhood disease,’’ and the perception of immigration as a state of mind and a way of being (havaya): ‘‘A condition of living in between cultures, languages, and places. A situation in which national roots and the attachment to a specific geographical location and a monolingual culture are themselves viewed as unnatural.’’ Kahanoff and her generation of Egyptian Jewish immigrants, she suggests, are historical examples of the latter. These people, she writes, ‘‘never became immigrants. They were immigrants . . . their migrant existence embraced the perception of cultural identity as transportable.’’ Kahanoff’s family, like Matalon’s own family, arrived at Cairo during the nineteenth century mostly from Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Lebanon. They lived, as Matalon writes, ‘‘in a world of culture in crisis. A world made of torn identities and evident contradictions.’’ But for this generation, she continues, ‘‘‘crisis’ was a way of living,’’ not a stage leading toward (national) resolution.33 An echo to this view is found in Kahanoff’s own words concerning monoculturalism, an option she defines as ‘‘a manifestation of an obsessive kind of loyalty, a compulsion, almost a neurosis’’ (From East, 121). For Inés, Esther’s mother, being rooted and tied to one place is also a clear sign of unhealthiness: ‘‘She pulls out the roots of everything that grows around her; plants and tries and shifts them from one place 33. Ronit Matalon, ‘‘Ha-lashon ve-habait’’ [Language and Home], Mikarove: A Journal for Literature and Culture 2 (1998): 169.


to another . . . attacking them with strange fanatic force . . . she pulls and pulls until their spirit comes out’’ (163). ‘‘It is bad for everyone to be stuck like that to one corner!’’ Inés explains to her astonished neighbors (163). In her latest book—a collection of autobiographical essays—Matalon quotes her uncle’s similar view, expressed in his half-joking response to his interviewer: ‘‘The only right place for us Levantine Jews is the midair,’’ he says, ‘‘the airplane is where we really feel at home!’’ 34 The ‘‘condition of space in the Levant’’ (AJA, 28), to use Alcalay’s words, has always been transnational and has emphasized mobility. In contemporary Levantine literature, one immediately recognizes the emphasis put on transition and mobility. The actual distances between Paris, Beirut, and Tel Aviv collapse in Edmond el Maleh’s writings; the constant movement among Tunisia, Argentina, France, and Israel occurs in all of Albert Memmi’s novels; just as the movement between Cameroon, New York, a kibbutz in Israel, Gaza, Cairo, and France unfold in Matalon’s The One Facing Us. These examples, and many others, could very well be part of a literary attempt to mimic the actual lifestyle in the old Levant, but they also introduce a new configuration of culture that emphasizes migration as a ‘‘way of being in the world.’’ 35 ‘‘Permanent immigration’’ 36 as a state of living denaturalizes the bonds between cultural identity and location. That this state of being and this legacy of dislocation could paradoxically be practiced within one’s own homeland is emphasized in the cynical words of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: ‘‘Exile’’ he writes, ‘‘is so strong in me, I think I will bring it back home with me, to my ‘homeland’’’ (ha-galut col-cakh chazaka be-tokhi, ani choshev sh-avi ota artza iti).37 Levantinism and the ‘‘Palestinian Problem’’ Kahanoff was the first to explicitly analyze Israeli society in terms of colonialism and define the cultural meetings between the Ashkenazi Jews and the Mizrachi Jews in terms of a ‘‘complex social illness’’ (From East, 48), racism, and phobia. It is this illness she hoped to ‘‘cure’’ by the promotion of Levantinism as a political stance invested in ‘‘a correlation between the two major components [East and West] into a dynamic and creative 34. Ronit Matalon, Kro u-ketov [Read and Write] (Tel Aviv: Ha-sifriya Ha-chadasha, 2001), 42. 35. Matalon, ‘‘Ha-lashon ve-habait,’’ 170. 36. Matalon, ‘‘Ha-lashon ve-habait,’’ 170. 37. Mahmoud Darwish, ‘‘Interview with Hilit Yeshurun,’’ Chadarim 12 (1996): 194.


unity’’ (From East, 53). However, while she seems alert to the similarities between the European colonialism she experienced as a child in Cairo and the interactions between the Ashkenazi and Mizrachi Jews she recognizes in Israel, she fails to account for a similar colonialist violence between Jews and Palestinians. This radical difference in approach can be traced back to the special role Kahanoff ascribes to herself and other Levantine Jews within the colonial drama. More than once, the Egyptian Jews appear in her autobiographical writing as ‘‘mediators’’ between the French and English colonizers (the West) and the colonized Arab Moslems (the East). The latter are described as ‘‘poor and numerous. Servants and beggars . . . Arab masses’’ (From East, 11), whom the Jews ‘‘felt responsible for’’ due to ‘‘the advantage [they] had over them, thanks to the European education [they received]’’ (From East, 19).38 This distance that Kahanoff’s narrator maintains from the ‘‘Arab Masses’’ is translated into the ‘‘forgetting’’ of the Palestinians within her optimistic vision of the emerging Israeli Levantine society. Indeed, the ‘‘national’’ and the ‘‘ethnic’’ remain radically separated in Kahanoff’s writings, a separation that is translated into an absence of any actual Palestinian agency. The only time Kahanoff directly refers to the existence of Palestinians is after her first visit to East Jerusalem, occupied by Israel in 1967. Not once does Kahanoff mention the heavy military presence in the city, nor her own complex status as a ‘‘visitor.’’ The one thing that does capture her attention is the fact that ‘‘the Palestinian women’s skirts seem to have become shorter since 1967, they are much closer in length to the skirts worn by Israeli women’’ (From East, 111). Kahanoff’s look at the meeting between Israeli society and the occupied Arab woman is not, one might say, the critical look she maintains in her analysis of the meeting between Europe and the Arab colonies, or the one she presents in her analysis of the inner colonialism between Ashkenazi and Mizrachi Jews. The influence of the ‘‘West’’—associated with the Israeli occupation—is viewed quite posi38. This mediating position of the Jew, especially under French colonialism, is not limited to Kahanoff’s self-presentation. Alliance Isráelite Universelle (AIU)—the school Kahanoff attended in Cairo—was established in most of the French colonies in Middle Eastern and North African countries and presented itself as an attempt to ‘‘uplift and modernize the Jews of the Middle East by imbedding them with French education and culture,’’ to use Joel Beinin’s words (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998], 49–50). ‘‘Jews,’’ as Daniel Boyarin, following Albert Memmi’s writings, notes, ‘‘have always played a mediating position under French colonialism inhabiting the interstices between the colonizer and the colonized and seen by both as the other’’ (‘‘Jewish Cricket,’’ PMLA 113, no. 1 [1998]: 43).


tively, as Kahanoff goes on to imagine the shortening of the skirts as ‘‘a sign of cultural progress . . . an opportunity for a cross-national dialogue.’’ 39 How, then, could Kahanoff, who experienced the colonial meeting with the French as a ‘‘loss of language and meaning’’ (From East, 17), forget this experience of alienation when writing about the meeting between the Israelis and the occupied Palestinian population? Or perhaps this forgetfulness is related, as Rejwan has ironically remarked, to her estranged relationship with the ‘‘Arab masses’’ and perhaps also with Arabic culture and language more generally: ‘‘The appellation ‘Levantine’ suited Jacqueline Kahanoff superbly. . . . How else can one describe a Jewish woman who was born in Cairo of an Iraqi father and a Tunisian mother, got her schooling in Egypt and yet managed to speak not a word of Arabic . . . ?’’ 40 The main point, however, is not whether Kahanoff knew ‘‘a word of Arabic’’ but that she herself seemed unable to clearly answer this question. Arabic is mentioned a few times throughout her essays, and yet it seems to appear, only to disappear immediately after. In her essay ‘‘My Brother the Rebel,’’ Kahanoff mentions Habib Bourguiba’s enforcing of French in Tunisia’s elementary schools, supporting his claim that ‘‘Arabic, in its current state, is not suitable to deliver modern thoughts and terms that are necessary for our times . . . for surviving in the twentieth century’’ (From East, 38). Indeed, she refers to Bourguiba as a true Levantine who gives expression to the Levantine humanism, and, as it seems, this ‘‘humanism’’ requires that he speak ‘‘French better than Arabic’’ (From East, 38). A more cryptic yet very telling example, which emphasizes Kahanoff’s complex enigmatic relationship to Arabic (and to her own Arab identity), is found in her essay entitled ‘‘A French Journal.’’ Describing her visit to Paris in 1962, Kahanoff writes about an interaction she has when noticing a group of Algerian manual laborers working outside a museum she visits. She wonders how these people feel, working in Paris, speaking Arabic among themselves and French to others, and whether the gendarme is ‘‘supervising the Algerian workers or protecting them.’’ Kahanoff concludes that there is no way to decipher the ‘‘double meaning of such perpetual crossing back and forth between Arabic and French’’ (From East, 122). Where, however, does Kahanoff locate herself in this scene, along this ‘‘perpetual crossing’’ between languages, between French and Arabic, and between the colonizer and the colonized? We soon find out, as she is drawn into the scene 39. For a fine essay about this double-faced approach to the question of cultural colonialism, see Dolly Benhabib’s essay mentioned in footnote 8. 40. Nissim Rejwan, ‘‘The Denigrated,’’ Jerusalem Post, September 15, 1978, 17.


by a question directed to her by one of the workers: ‘‘One of the workers asks me for the time, surprised I mechanically answer in Hebrew. ‘What Arabic dialect are you speaking?’ he asks me. I am shocked. For a moment, I forgot that I was in Paris. This man, a blue cap on his dark head, looked to me like so many of ours’’ (From East, 122; my emphasis). The worker most likely asked for the time in French because he, too, ‘‘forgot he was in Paris’’ or thought that Kahanoff looked like ‘‘so many of them,’’ in which case he might have spoken in Arabic. What makes Kahanoff ‘‘slip’’ into Hebrew (which she is famous for not speaking very well)? Answering in Hebrew, I suggest, removes Kahanoff from the colonial drama (the perpetual movement between French and Arabic) and places her outside of her own ‘‘perpetual crossing back and forth,’’ between her doubled position as a colonized Arab-Jew and a colonizing Israeli. While the initial intimacy Kahanoff feels toward the Algerian worker makes her ‘‘forget’’ she is in Paris, her slip into Hebrew, rather than, as one could expect, into Arabic, reveals her failure or resistance to locate herself on either side of the ‘‘colonial perpetual crossing’’ (From East, 122). Furthermore, while the perpetual movement between Arabic and French is identified as the outcome of a colonial dynamic, her own slip from Arabic into Hebrew is located outside the context of colonial interaction and presented only in terms of a familial resemblance: ‘‘What Arabic dialect are you speaking?’’ Kahanoff’s inability, or refusal, to draw the connection between the inner colonialism she identifies between Ashkenazi and Mizrachi Jews, and the colonial interaction between Jews and Palestinians, has since been repeated by many who have discussed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in exclusively national (rather than colonial) terms.41 In the mid-1990s, a group of Israeli scholars and writers established the ‘‘Israeli-Mediterranean Culture Forum,’’ which they presented as a forum dedicated to promoting a ‘‘new kind of humanism [in Israel] as an ideology of tolerance and dialogue between East and West.’’ 42 However, very much like Kahanoff, the members of the forum fail to relate this ‘‘Mediterranean humanism’’ to the political reality of Israel, in which the national conflict between Israel and the Palestinians 41. An exception to this is Edward Said’s groundbreaking essay, ‘‘Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims,’’ first published in The Question of Palestine (New York: Times Books, 1979), and Ella Shohat’s essay, ‘‘Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims,’’ republished in Dangerous Liaisons, 39–68. Shohat presents one of the first attempts to expose the colonial ideology behind both the Palestinian occupation and the discriminatory status of Mizrachi Jews in Israel. 42. Ohana, Humanist ba-shemesh, 104.


is undoubtedly central. Thus, the poet Aharon Amir describes the Levant as the ‘‘cosmopolitanism of the Mediterranean. A colorful culture hybrid made of Jews, Italians, Greeks and Copts . . . represented in the work of the Greek poet Cavafy and Lawrence Durrell.’’ 43 Amir’s description of the Levant fails to mention the Arab and Moslem world. The liberal politician Amnon Robinstein justifies this neglect, arguing that the possibility of an Arab Mediterranean society ‘‘belongs only to the past,’’ and that ‘‘Cairo and Alexandria—the centers of the old Mediterranean world—are now nothing but homogeneous and reactionary Arab-Moslem places.’’ The place to look for ‘‘lost Alexandria,’’ Robinstein concludes, is paradoxically ‘‘in Israel . . . with its lovely Mediterranean ports and blinding mixture of cultures united together under the strong sun.’’ 44 But for a Levantinized Israel to be politically relevant, it must be envisioned, less as part of the ‘‘tragic humanism of the Mediterranean’’ 45 and more in terms of the present sociopolitical reality of the Middle East. The latter is unlikely to be found in the words of the great Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy, writing about late nineteenth-century Alexandria, in the Oriental images of Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, or even among the reflections of the writer known as the frontier man of ‘‘Mediterranean humanism,’’ Albert Camus, who writes passionately about the powerful ‘‘ancient Mediterranean sea’’ with its ‘‘warm Latin wind’’ and its ‘‘hitting sun above.’’ 46 For the purpose of Levantinizing Israel, it would probably be more effective to attend to those Israelis (Palestinians and Jews) whose writings so clearly express the need to promote new discourses of intimacy, while changing or redefining the ways in which we think and talk about cultural identity and alterity, that is, about ‘‘being at home.’’ For Mahmoud Darwish, the leading Palestinian poet, the Israelis and the Palestinians by now ‘‘dwell inside each other,’’ so that any attempt to create a complete separation between these cultural and political entities is doomed to fail.47 The writings of Anton Shames, Emil Habibi, and Atallah Mansur—all Palestinian writers who have either chosen to write in Hebrew or to have their work translated into Hebrew—seem to join this stance and promote through their writing a reality of ‘‘creative difference,’’ to use Said’s 43. Aharon Amir, ‘‘Havtacha im shachar ha-maftsiaa al ha-nilus’’ [A Promise at Dawn Rising from the Nile], Ha-aretz, April 5, 1996. 44. Amnon Robinstein, ‘‘Anachnu ha-yam ha-tikon’’ [We Are the Mediterranean], Ha-aretz, April 21, 1997. 45. Ohana, Humanist ba-shemesh, 121. 46. Cited in Ohana, Humanist ba-shemesh, 151. 47. Darwish, ‘‘Interview with Hilit Yeshurun,’’ 194.


words.48 Their various works (Arabesques, In a Different Light, Athyeh, to mention just a few) point to the fact that it is no longer sufficient to challenge current political antagonisms (such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) on the basis of ‘‘historical evidence’’ or ‘‘rights of origins,’’ and that a more radical reconsideration of (cultural) identity that challenges the very notions on which such identities are based is required. Such a reconsideration would have to take into account the fact that the two peoples, the Israelis and the Palestinians, are not by-products of a political conflict but are also an outcome of a relationship, just as the Palestinian poet and the Israeli-Jewish writer in Anton Shammas’s Arabesques are ‘‘a schizophrenia,’’ or ‘‘two that are in fact one . . . having yet to decide who is the ventriloquist of whom.’’ 49 By incorporating Arabic into her novel and having many of the dialogues take place in Arabic, accompanied by Hebrew translations in footnotes (all of which are lost in the English translation), Matalon joins these Palestinian writers in redirecting attention to the continual presence of Arabic in Israeli (Jewish) society. Forcing readers of Hebrew to read the Arabic (transliterated in Hebrew letters) and, furthermore, to ‘‘look up’’ the meanings of the text in the footnotes, she interrupts the common hierarchy that characterizes the ‘‘perpetual crossing’’ between these two languages within the Israeli context. Her novel further emphasizes the continuity of colonial imagination that ties the inner colonialism between Ashkenazi and Mizrachi Jews and the colonial interaction that takes place between Jews and Palestinians. It is the artificial separation between the two—between the ethnic and the national—that leads to Esther’s Uncle Edouard’s schizophrenic position toward his own Arab identity. The mighty officer, ‘‘the king of Gaza,’’ proudly claims to be the only one in the family who is ‘‘entirely Arab’’ and who maintained the pride they left behind in Egypt (156). He refuses to speak Hebrew, insists on speaking only Arabic, and accuses his family of becoming too Ashkenazi-like. At the same time, and without realizing the contradiction involved, he protests against what he calls ‘‘their soft attitude toward the Palestinians,’’ arguing that ‘‘these Arabs’’ need to be treated with discipline and violence, for that is the only language they understand (157). As a memory that draws us back to the insufficiency of our present, Levantinism, as Matalon’s novel suggests, forces us to think beyond the reality of the nation. It opens our current political and cultural maps to include not only what we easily see and identify but also the vague shadows of par48. Edward W. Said, ‘‘An Ideology of Difference,’’ Critical Inquiry 12 (1985): 57. 49. Anton Shammas, Arabeskot (Tel Aviv: Am-Oved, 1986), 130.


tially recognized particles, which—like ‘‘stories with no citizenship’’—hover over our reality, carrying a potential for political transformation. Such hope is carried in the words of the Palestinian-Israeli poet Naim Araydi, in a short essay entitled ‘‘To Be a Levantine.’’ With these inspiring words I close: Until the age of thirteen I studied in our local village school. I learned to ask: ‘‘what’’ and ‘‘who.’’ After thirteen, my parents sent me to study in the city, in an Israeli-Jewish school where I learned to ask ‘‘why’’ and ‘‘how.’’ Today people keep asking me if I am an Arab Poet [Aravi ] or a Hebrew poet [Ivri ]. This question doesn’t make much sense to me, but I fear it nevertheless. In order to overcome my fear, I had to become very optimistic. This optimism is my Levantinism.50

50. Naim Araydi, ‘‘L-hiyot levantini’’ [To Be a Levantine], Moznayim 78 (1989): 79.

Towards a Lyric History of India

Aamir R. Mufti For Professor C. M. Naim, ihtiraman

The whole cannot be put together by adding the separated halves, but in both there appear, however distantly, the changes of the whole, which only moves in contradiction. —Theodor Adorno 1 At its best, the Urdu lyric verse of Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911–1984) can make available to the reader a disconcerting form of ecstasy, a sense of elation at the self being put in question, giving even the thoroughly secular reader the taste of an affective utopia not entirely distinguishable from religious feeling. It is, at the very least, a paradoxical structure of feeling, given the explicitly Marxist and anticlerical affiliations of his poetry, which displays a marked interest in the secularization of culture and language. Faiz is widely regarded as the most significant Urdu poet of the postcolonial period. His poetry exemplifies some of the central dilemmas of Urdu 1. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘‘The Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,’’ in The Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1982), 275. boundary 2 31:2, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press.


writing in the aftermath of the partition of India at the moment of independence from British rule. It represents a profound attempt to unhitch literary production from the cultural projects of either postcolonial state in order to make visible meanings that have still not been entirely reified and subsumed within the cultural logic of the nation-state system. Despite his stature as the uncrowned poet laureate of Pakistan during the first several decades of its existence, his is notoriously an oeuvre with vast audiences across what was once North India—the map of its reception seemingly erasing the national boundaries that are the territorial legacy of partition. Against much of Faiz criticism, I argue here that the foremost theme of Faiz’s poetry, its defining theme as a body of writing, is the meaning and legacy of partition. I have argued elsewhere that the problematic of minoritization inscribes itself in Urdu narrative at the level of genre in a foregrounding of the short story as the primary genre of narrative fiction.2 In poetry, it translates into debates about the meaning and nature, the very possibility, of lyric verse in modernity. In the decades following the 1857 Rebellion, for instance, the classical tradition of lyric poetry, and in particular the ghazal form, became the site of fierce contention about the prospects of a distinct ‘‘Muslim’’ experience in Indian modernity. The poetry of Faiz exemplifies the unique relationship of Urdu literary production to the crisis of Indian national culture that is marked by the figure of the Muslim. The lyric element in Faiz’s poetry—its intensely personal contemplation of love and of the sensuous—poses a notorious problem of interpretation: he is a self-avowedly political poet—laureled in the Soviet Union, repeatedly persecuted by reactionary postcolonial regimes—whose most intense poetic accomplishments are examinations of subjective states. The orthodox solution—shared by critics of many different political persuasions—has been to argue that Faiz merely turns a ‘‘traditional’’ poetic vocabulary to radical political ends, that we should read the figure of the distant beloved, for instance, as a figuring of the hoped-for revolution.3 I suggest a somewhat different direction here and argue that, first, the political element in Faiz’s work cannot be read without the mediation of the social. 2. See Aamir R. Mufti, ‘‘A Greater Story-Writer Than God: Genre, Gender, and Minority in Late Colonial India,’’ in Subaltern Studies XI: Community, Gender, and Violence, ed. Partha Chatterjee and Pradeep Jeganathan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 1-36. 3. See Agha Shahid Ali, ‘‘Introduction: Translating Faiz Ahmed Faiz,’’ in The Rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems, rev. ed., trans. Agha Shahid Ali (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), xiv; and V. G. Kiernan, introduction to Poems by Faiz, by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, trans. V. G. Kiernan (Lahore: Vanguard Books, 1971), 40.

Mufti / Towards a Lyric History of India 247

Faiz’s exploration of the affects of separation and union with the beloved makes possible an examination of the subject, the ‘‘I,’’ of Urdu writing. It would be incorrect to assume that Faiz’s ‘‘Progressiveness’’—his association with the literary culture that carries the imprimatur of the All-India Progressive Writers Association (AIPWA)—implies a dismissing of the question of identity. The central drama of his poetry is the dialectic of a collective selfhood at the disjunctures of language, culture, nation, and community. In his well-known argument about the relationship of lyric poetry to society, Theodor Adorno suggests that it is precisely lyric’s apparent distance from social determinations that constitutes its social meaning. He holds out the paradoxical possibility that its distance from the social in fact made of lyric poetry an exemplary site for the inscription of social meanings. The more the lyric reduces itself to the pure subjectivity of the ‘‘I,’’ Adorno argues, the more complete the precipitation of the social within its content will be. The more it immerses itself in what takes individual form, the more it is elevated to the level of universality, but a universality that is ‘‘social in nature.’’ 4 In this essay, I shall elucidate the place of lyric in Faiz’s work and its relationship to the social horizon that is brought to crisis in partition. It is precisely in those poems that are closest to being ‘‘pure’’ lyric, that is, ones in which the inward turn is most complete, rather than in such explicitly ‘‘partition’’ poems as ‘‘Freedom’s Dawn’’ (‘‘Subh-e azadi’’), that we may glimpse these social meanings in their fullest elaboration. I would like to explore the possibility that what Faiz’s love lyrics give expression to is a self in partition, that what they make visible is a dialectic of self and other in which the subject and object of desire not so much become one as simultaneously come near and become distant, exchange places, are rendered uncertain. The desire for wisal, or union, takes the form of this dialectic itself. In the years following the partition of India, the problematic of national fragmentation comes to imbue the lyric world of Faiz’s verse in profound and explicit ways. But the broader problematic of a partitioned self is already present in the poems of the pre-partition years, at least as potential, something that these poems point to and anticipate. The social truth embodied in Faiz’s lyric poetry is that the emergence of the (modern) self is also its self-division. The truth of the self is its contradictory, tense, and antagonistic reality. Faiz makes it possible to think about identity in post-partition South Asia in terms other than those normalized within 4. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘‘On Lyric Poetry and Society,’’ in Notes to Literature: Volume One, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 42, 38.


the shared vocabulary of the postcolonial states. The purportedly autonomous national selves that emerged from partition are revealed to be what they are—moments within the dialectic of Indian modernity. And partition comes to acquire meanings very different from its usual significations, now referring not merely to the events of 1947 (or even of 1946–48) but to a history of social (‘‘communal’’) identifications coextensive with the history of the Indian modern itself. The immense popularity of Faiz’s poetry in the UrduHindi regions, its almost iconic status as a pan–South Asian oeuvre, is a vague but nevertheless conclusive measure of its success in making available an experience of self that is Indian in the encompassing sense, across the boundaries of the ‘‘communal’’ and nation-state divides. But this is a staging of selfhood that takes division seriously, refusing to treat it as merely epiphenomenal, as in the unity-in-diversity formula of Indian nationalism. In fact, it suggests that division, the indefinitely extended separation from the beloved, constitutes the very ground from which union can be contemplated. It is commonplace in Faiz criticism to invoke love of country or nation as an essential feature of his poetry.5 Faiz himself thematizes this on several occasions, as in the early poem ‘‘Two Loves’’ (‘‘Do ishq’’): ‘‘In the same fashion I have loved my darling country, / In the same manner my heart has throbbed with devotion to her.’’ 6 But it is not accidental that neither the criticism nor the poetry itself is unequivocal about what the term country (watan) signifies. It might even be said that to speak of watan and qaum (nation/people) in the context of Faiz is to remain meaningfully silent about the objects toward which they point: does the hubb-ul-watani (love of country or nation, patriotism) of Faiz’s poetry attach itself to any one of the postcolonial states of South Asia? Does it represent a hope for dissolution of these states? What is its stance on partition, their moment of coming into being? Does it imply a ‘‘civilizational’’ referent? If so, which civilization—Indic, Indo-Persian, or Islamic? Where exactly, in other words, is the poet’s home? 5. See, for instance, Syed Sibte Hassan, ‘‘Faiz ka adarsh,’’ in Faiz Ahmed Faiz: tanqidi jaiza, ed. Khaleeq Anjum (New Delhi: Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu, 1985), 119, 121. 6. Faiz, Poems by Faiz, 166–67. In matters of translations, I have set the following principles for myself: wherever it is possible, I cite Kiernan’s translation, the ‘‘literal’’ one if I am engaging in a line-by-line analysis, as this is closest to the original in terms of line content, and the ‘‘non-literal’’ where the object is to convey a sense of the whole. Where a poem or fragment is not available in a Kiernan translation, I either provide my own ‘‘literal’’ translation or turn to the more freely translated versions of Agha Shahid Ali (see note 2) or Naomi Lazard—see The True Subject: Selected Poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, trans. Naomi Lazard (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988)—depending, again, on the specific purpose at hand.


The symbolic vocabulary of Faiz’s poetry draws on the stock of traditional Persio-Arabic images available to the classical Urdu ghazal—barbat o nai (lyre and flute), lauh o qalam (tablet and pen), tauq o salasil (neckirons and chain), kakul o lab (lock of hair and lip), dasht o gulzar (wilderness and garden)—resisting the ‘‘plain’’ language that had already become more common with some of his contemporaries and is more so with the generation of poets who have followed in his wake. In this sense, Faiz’s poetry is a living rebuke to the ideal of a neutral ‘‘Hindustani’’ idiom from which both Arabo-Persian and Sanskritic influences have been excised, an ideal to which the secularist, ‘‘anticommunalist’’ imagination in South Asia has been repeatedly drawn. Victor Kiernan, his translator and lifelong friend, notes that Faiz ‘‘was repelled by the prospect held up by Gandhi of a united ‘Hindostani’ language, a nondescript neither Hindi nor Urdu.’’ 7 The mythopoetic universe of his work is replete with references to Persian, Arabic, and ‘‘Islamic’’ sources, although, as Kiernan has noted, ‘‘a fondness for allusion to things Hindu, even religious, has not left him,’’ an important question to which I shall return.8 My contention here is that the question of collective selfhood—the meaning of ‘‘nation,’’ ‘‘people,’’ ‘‘culture,’’ ‘‘community’’—is at the heart of Faiz’s poetry, and not merely in the sense of his political devotion to ‘‘the people’’ and contempt for their exploitation by neofeudalism and colonial and postcolonial capital. Faiz problematizes the very notion of nation or people, raising fundamental questions about identity and subjectivity and their historical determinations. To put it more precisely, in Faiz’s poetry, both the degradation of human life in colonial and postcolonial modernity—exploitation—and the withholding of a collective selfhood at peace with itself—what I am calling partition—find common expression in the suffering of the lyric subject. Love and Its Discontents: The Lyric Poet in the World In a small number of early poems, one or two of which have something like a programmatic status in his oeuvre, Faiz stages the aesthetic dilemmas of the modern poet. They are metapoetic texts, for in them Faiz turns to exploring the nature and meaning of lyric poetry in modern life. In such poems from the late 1930s as ‘‘The Subject of Poetry’’ (‘‘Mauzu-e 7. See Kiernan, introduction to Poems by Faiz, 38. For a contemporary selection of Gandhi’s views on the language question, see Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Our Language Problem, ed. Anand T. Hingorani (Karachi: Anand T. Hingorani, 1942). 8. Kiernan, introduction to Poems by Faiz, 38.


sukhan’’) and ‘‘My Fellow, My Friend’’ (‘‘Mire hamdam, mire dost’’), but above all in ‘‘Love Do Not Ask for That Old Love Again’’ (‘‘Mujh se pahli si mahabbat meri mahbub na mang’’), we find the poetic persona torn between the exquisite demands of unrequited love, on the one hand, and those of the larger world and its oppressions, on the other. Faiz himself has spoken of these poems as turning points in his aesthetic development, marking a growing sense of dissatisfaction with the dominant, ‘‘romantic’’ literary ethos of the times.9 Thus, in the latter poem, the dominant mood is set by the speaker’s asking the beloved not to ask for the kind of love formerly given—‘‘pahli si mahabbat’’—a singular love, alert to nothing but the beloved’s charms and cruelties. The speaker lists the efficacies of this love in which it had formerly believed and concludes the first section of the poem with the confession, ‘‘It was not true all this but only wishing.’’ After noting the cruelties of the outer world—its injustice, inequality, and alienation—with which the beloved must compete for the speaker/lover’s attention, the poem ends on the note on which it began. In ‘‘The Subject of Poetry,’’ the same tension between the alternative demands on the speaker’s senses is maintained, but this tension is approached, as it were, from the other direction. Alternating between the mysteries of the beloved and those of the larger world, the poem ends by affirming that the poet cannot expect to overcome the former as his true theme: —These too are subjects; more there are;—but oh, Those limbs that curve so fatally ravishingly! Oh that sweet wretch, those lips parting so slow— Tell me where else such witchery could be! No other theme [lit., subject] will ever fit my rhyme; Nowhere but here is poetry’s native clime [lit., homeland]. [Ye bhi hain aise kai aur bhi mazmun honge Lekin us shokh ke ahista se khulte hue hont Hae us jism ke kambakht dil-avez khutut Ap hi kahiye kahin aise bhi afsun honge? Apna mauzu-e sukhan inke siva aur nahin Tab-e shair ka watan inke siva aur nahin.] 10

9. See ‘‘Faiz—az Faiz,’’ in Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Nuskhaha-e wafa (Lahore: Maktaba-e Karvan, 1986), 308–11. 10. See Faiz, Poems by Faiz, 90–95; and Faiz, Nuskhaha-e wafa, 89–91.


These early poems have most often been read as signs of a young poet’s political awakening, a politicization that does not lead to an abandonment of concern with the integrity of literary language. Faiz himself has contributed to the authority of this reading.11 While I do not take this to be an incorrect interpretation, I read the apparent dualism of these poems—interiority and affect versus the external world, lyric poetry versus society—somewhat differently, as demonstrating an interest in the relationship between the lyric self of Urdu poetry and the ‘‘wider’’ world of contradiction and conflict over the meaning of nation and community. I shall argue that these poems enact, in a literary-historical register, the dilemmas and complexities of a ‘‘Muslim’’ selfhood in Indian modernity. The phrase pahli si mahabbat points to the problematic of love in the classical Urdu lyric, and the poem comments on the relationship of the modern poet, located in the national-cultural space that is (late colonial) India, to that classical tradition. In Pakistan, Faiz has long been spoken of as a ‘‘national’’ poet, as the national poet during the first forty years of the country’s life. It is my contention that this cannot mean what it is usually thought to mean, that, in part, the accomplishment, the grandeur and ambition, of his work is precisely that it raises serious doubts about whether the nation-state form can account for the complexities of culture and identity in modern South Asia. Born early in the second decade of this century in the now-Pakistani city of Sialkot, Faiz received an education that was becoming increasingly typical for young men of his regional, religious, and class background— the rudiments of Quranic instruction, Persian and Arabic with the local maulvi, modern schooling of the colonial (in his case, missionary) sort, and degrees in (in his case, English and Arabic) literature.12 According to his own account, Faiz’s early reading consisted of a diet of Urdu poetry of the classical period, in particular Muhammad Taqi Mir (1723?–1810) and Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1795?–1869), and the major nineteenth-century works of Urdu narrative. After finishing his studies at the Government and Oriental Colleges, Lahore—those bastions of modern higher learning for northwestern colonial India—Faiz took up a teaching position at Amritsar, where 11. See Faiz, Nuskhaha-e wafa, 308–11. 12. This biographical summary is based on the following sources: Kiernan, introduction to Poems by Faiz; Khaleeq Anjum, ‘‘Faiz biti,’’ in Faiz Ahmed Faiz: tanqidi jaiza, 14–37; Faiz, ‘‘Faiz—az Faiz,’’ in Nuskhaha-e wafa, 307–14; Faiz, ‘‘Ahd-e tifli se unfuwan-e shabab tak,’’ in Nuskhaha-e wafa, 489–97; ‘‘Bachpan ki qirat se Josh ki buzurgi tak,’’ in Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Mata-e lauh o qalam (Karachi: Danyal, 1985), 112–21; and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Mah o sal-e ashnai: yadon ka majmua (Karachi: Danyal, 1983), 5–20.


he was first exposed to Indian Marxism and to nationalist political culture generally. Faiz’s first collection of poetry appeared in 1941, and the last to be published in his lifetime, in 1981.13 From time to time, he also published widely read volumes of critical essays, letters, and memoirs. In Amritsar, Faiz was drawn into the literary circles that proved to be the core group in the establishment of the AIPWA in 1936, and he subsequently came to be identified as the leading ‘‘Progressive’’ voice in Urdu poetry while also maintaining his autonomy from that organization and from the Communist Party, never becoming a spokesman for either in quite the same way as a number of his contemporaries, such as Sajjad Zaheer and Ali Sardar Jafry. Jafry even accused Faiz once of equivocating about the goals of Progressive poetry and of ‘‘drawing such curtains of metaphor [istiariyat]’’ around one of his poems—‘‘Freedom’s Dawn’’—that ‘‘one cannot tell who is sitting behind them.’’ 14 He joined the colonial Indian Army after the collapse of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, at a time when the official policy of the Indian National Congress was noncooperation with the war effort, rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, and returned to civilian life in 1946 with a Member of the British Empire (M.B.E.). A few years after independence, during which he rose to prominence in Pakistan as a newspaper editor and labor unionist, he was arrested in 1951 with a number of other radical writers, political activists, and military officers—including Zaheer, who was the leading founder of the AIPWA and after partition became general secretary of the newly founded Communist Party of Pakistan—charged with conspiring against the state. The arrests, part of a general crackdown on the Pakistani Left, had a chilling effect on political and cultural life, and marked the beginnings of Pakistan’s realignment as a frontline U.S. satellite in the Cold War and as a reliable regional client after the rise of Mossadegh in Iran, a role whose price the country continues to pay to this day. After a trial, during which the shadow of a death sentence hung over him, Faiz was sentenced to imprisonment and was finally released after spending over four years in various prisons in Pakistan. In the late 1950s, with the implementation of martial law 13. Naqsh-e faryadi (Remonstrance) was published in 1941, to be followed by Dast-e saba (Fingers of the Wind [1952]), Zindan-nama (Prison Thoughts [1956]), Dast-e tah-e sang (Duress [1965]), Sar-e wadi-e Sina (Mount Sinai [1971]), Sham-e shahryaran (Twilight of Kings [1978]), and Mire dil mire musafir (My Heart, My Traveling Heart [1981]) during his lifetime. His late and previously uncollected poems have since been collected as Ghubare ayyam (Dust of Days [1984]) as part of an edition of his complete works. The first four translations here are Kiernan’s, the rest are mine. 14. Quoted in Azmi, Urdu men taraqqi pasand adabi tahrik (Aligarh: Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu, 1972), 109.


in Pakistan, Faiz was again in jail, this time only for a few months. Already by the late 1950s, Faiz had developed an increasingly international reputation, especially in socialist countries and many parts of the Third World. In 1962, he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize and, at the end of his life, in exile from Zia’s Pakistan, served for several years as editor of Lotus, the journal of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association, which he edited from Beirut, during the years of its devastation, including the months of the Israeli siege and bombardment. There he composed a small body of what is the most exquisite exile poetry in modern Urdu literature, ‘‘an enactment of a homecoming expressed through defiance and loss,’’ in the words of Edward Said, who met him in Beirut during those exile years.15 It represents an attempt to introduce exile and homelessness into the vocabulary of Urdu verse as a constitutive experience. Read together with the early ‘‘metapoetic’’ poems, this later exile poetry makes clear that for Faiz, Urdu is, in a strong sense, a homeless literature and culture, that he sees its entire modern history as a series of uprootings and displacements. The appropriateness of using the term lyric poetry in anything more than a loose and descriptive sense with respect to Urdu writing in general and Faiz in particular is not self-evident and requires some justification. While Urdu has a number of terms, such as the adjectives bazmiyya and ghinaiyya, that provide very partial equivalents of the English word, Urdu poetics makes no extensive theoretical use of such an umbrella concept and proceeds for the most part in generic terms—and in particular in terms of the mutual opposition of the ghazal and the nazm. It is certainly part of the specificity of Faiz’s work that, unlike some of his contemporaries, he does not turn his back on the ‘‘classical’’ poetic genres, in particular the ghazal, with its rigid meter and rhyme schemes, and its set themes centered around the experience of separation from the beloved. He is, in fact, widely credited with having resuscitated this form after a half century of neglect and disdain. In the decades following the suppression of the uprisings of 1857–58, with the collapse of the tottering social structure that had been the basis of the Urdu literary culture of the ashraf, or ‘‘noble’’ elites in northern India, ‘‘reform’’—religious, social, cultural, political, and educational reform—became the slogan of what I would call reluctant embourgoisement among these social groupings. The Aligarh movement of Sayyid 15. Edward W. Said, ‘‘Reflections on Exile,’’ Granta 13 (1984): 160. Faiz makes a brief appearance in Mahmoud Darwish’s memoir of the Israeli siege. See Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness, translated and with an introduction by Ibrahim Muhawi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).


Ahmed Khan is only the most famous and influential of these reform efforts directed at Muslims.16 In the critical writings of such Aligarh-related figures as Muhammad Husain Azad and Altaf Husain Hali, the ghazal came to be singled out as the genre par excellence of Muslim decline and decadence, as too decorative, subjective, and impervious to nature, incapable of the sober intellectual effort and didactic purpose called for in the ‘‘new’’ world.17 For nationalist writers beginning in the late nineteenth century, it became something like an icon of the vast distances separating the ashraf Muslim elites from the space of the genuinely popular. Such distrust of the ghazal has survived into our own century among both the literary movements committed to the social purposiveness of poetry, including the Marxists of the AIPWA who were Faiz’s contemporaries and comrades, as well as those whose commitment to the intellectual demands of modern poetry is in the name of art for art’s sake.18 The Urdu ghazal and the constellation that surrounds it—metrical structures, histories of composition and reception, Persianate vocabulary and thematic conventions, and the image associated with it of an imperial culture in decline—retain a distinct place in the postcolonial Indian cultural imaginary, from popular ‘‘Hindi’’ cinema to such a work of Indo-English fiction as Anita Desai’s In Custody, despite the massive effort in recent decades to denaturalize and alienate Urdu to contemporary Indian culture and society. Perhaps like no other poetic form in northern India, the history of this lyric genre is inextricably tied up with the emergence and development of national culture, and in no other form, not even the Hindi git, or ‘‘song’’ that is sometimes said to be the national-popular poetic genre par excellence, are the contradictions of the social so deeply inscribed. Even in his practice of the diffuse nazm form—whose only possible definition appears to be that it is a nonnarrative poem that is not a ghazal— Faiz bridges the divide between these varieties of poetic writing and imbues the lyric world of the latter with its characteristic, non-national forms of affec16. See, for instance, the brilliant cultural history of the early years of the Aligarh movement by David Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978; Barbara Daly Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982); and an intriguing study of culture and space by Faisal Fatehali Devji, ‘‘Gender and the Politics of Space: The Movement for Women’s Reform, 1857–1900,’’ in Forging Identities: Gender, Communities, and the State, ed. Zoya Hasan (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1994), 22–37. 17. For a full-length account of these debates, see Frances W. Pritchett, Nets of Awareness: Urdu Poetry and Its Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 18. See Gopi Chand Narang, Sakhtiyat, pas-sakhtiyat, aur mashriqi sheriyat (Delhi: Educational Publishing House, 1994), 9.


tivity. In this essay, I shall look most closely at a number of poems that are not ghazals, strictly speaking, but apply the concept of lyric to Faiz’s oeuvre as a whole, irrespective of genre in the narrow sense. In treating Faiz as a modern lyric poet, however, I am not suggesting that we engage in a search for qualities in modern Urdu verse that are characteristic of the lyric in modern Western poetry. On the contrary, the purpose of my analysis of a number of Faiz’s poems is precisely to make it possible to explore the specificities of modern lyric in a colonial and postcolonial society. Above all, what the concept of lyric makes possible is the translation, the passage, of Faiz’s poetry from a literary history that is specifically Urdu into a critical space for the discussion of Indian literary modernity as a whole. To the extent that Faiz’s poetry itself pushes in the direction of ending the inwardness of the Urdu poetic tradition, as I shall later argue, such a critical move is implied and required by his work itself. Remembering Oneself: Lyric Subject and Memory in Faiz I shall now turn to the theme of separation and union in Faiz’s love poetry by working through its elaboration in one of his best-known lyric poems, ‘‘Yad’’ (Memory). The poem appears in the collection Dast-e saba (1952) and has been made hugely popular by the singer Iqbal Bano as ‘‘Dasht-e tanhai’’: 1. In the desert of solitude, my love, quiver 2. the shadows of your voice, your lips’ mirage. 3. In the desert of solitude, under the dust of distance, 4. the flowers of your presence bloom. 5. From somewhere nearby rises the flame of your breathing, 6. burning slowly in its own perfume. 7. Afar, beyond the horizon, glistening, drop by drop, 8. falls the dew from your heart-consoling eyes. 9. So lovingly, O my love, has placed 10. your memory its hand this moment on my heart. 11. It seems, though this distance is young, 12. The day of separation is ended, the night of union has arrived. [1. Dasht-e tanhai men, ai jan-e jahan larzan hain 2. Teri avaz ke sae, tere honton ke sarab


3. Dasht-e tanhai men, duri ke khas o khak tale 4. Khil rahe hain, tere pahlu ke saman aur gulab 5. Uth rahi hai kahin qurbat se teri sans ki anch 6. Apni khushbu men sulagti hui, maddham maddham 7. Dur—ufaq par chamakti hui, qatra qatra 8. Gir rahi hai teri dildar nazar ki shabnam 9. Is qadar pyar se, ai jan-e jahan, rakkha hai 10. Dil ke rukhsar pe is waqt teri yad ne hath 11. Yun guman hota hai, garche hai abhi subh-e firaq 12. Dhal gaya hijr ka din, a bhi gai wasl ki rat.] 19 Dominant in the first stanza is the image of solitude as expanse of desert or wilderness, expressed in the string ‘‘Dasht-e tanhai’’ (the desert/ wilderness of solitude/loneliness), which opens lines 1 and 3. The metaphor also governs the second stanza, as the spatial language of line 5— ‘‘From somewhere nearby rises the flame of your breathing’’—acquires a geographical register in line 7: ‘‘Afar, beyond the horizon. . . .’’ The dominance of this desert metaphor is sustained in the treatment of the beloved, at least in the first stanza. There, the solitary subject is confronted with the ‘‘mirage’’-like presence of the object of its desire—‘‘the shadows of your voice, your lips’ mirage.’’ For the subject, the shadows and mirage are both signs of the beloved. But while a mirage points to an absent, illusory object, the shadow of an object, though it is itself immaterial, is a sign of the object’s physical presence. By being placed in combination with each other, however, ‘‘shadows’’ and ‘‘mirage’’ infuse each other with new meanings. The latter becomes something more than illusion, a mere projection outward of a desire intensely felt, like a vision of water in a parched land; and the former becomes something less than the sign of a physical presence. The geographical metaphor is fused here with a visual one, and together they come to signify the manner of the beloved’s becoming-present. What exactly this manner is becomes more clear in the next two lines (3–4), for here ‘‘the 19. Faiz, Nuskhaha-e wafa, 184–85. It is regrettable that Kiernan did not include this very beautiful poem among his excellent translations (see note 2). It is also ignored by Agha Shahid Ali (see note 2) and Naomi Lazard (see note 5). This translation is my own. I have tried to keep it as literal as possible—with almost no attention to meter or rhyme scheme— and to retain the content integrity of the lines, even at the cost of syntactical awkwardness, as in lines 9–10. I shall stay in my analysis close to the original, with the translation meant as merely a rough guide for readers not familiar with the Urdu.


flowers [lit., jasmine and rose] of your presence’’ are said to bloom ‘‘under the dust [lit., the withered bushes and dust] of distance.’’ In other words, the nearness or presence of the beloved does not cancel out its distance. And the reverse is also true: the distance of the beloved is also the mode of its coming near. This theme is developed in the second stanza. In lines 5–6, the ‘‘flame’’ (anch) of the beloved’s breathing is said to be rising from somewhere near the speaking subject—‘‘kahin qurbat se’’—and yet, simultaneously, the ‘‘consoling eyes’’ of the beloved are placed by the speaker ‘‘Afar, beyond the horizon.’’ In the third and final stanza, the geographical metaphor is abandoned, and we are within an internal, purely subjective space. This intimate space is here signified by ‘‘heart’’ (dil ), or, more precisely, by its ‘‘cheek’’ (rukhsar ), which is traditionally a sign of the beloved’s beauty and of (the lover’s) intimacy with it but here comes to express the tenderness of the lover’s own heart (line 10). The inexpressible beauty of this image—a beating heart gently caressed by a human hand, as a lover’s cheek is touched by the beloved—is an expression of the desire for an end to suffering, for union, for reconciliation of subject and object. It expresses a desire for the form of reconciliation that Adorno has called ‘‘peace’’: ‘‘Peace is the state of distinctness without domination, with the distinct participating in each other.’’ 20 The presence of the beloved continues in this stanza to also be its distance. For the beloved enters this interior realm only as image or yad (memory). In the last two lines (11–12), the poem turns to the intensity of this caress of memory, to its effect on the subject: the guman (appearance/feeling/illusion) that ‘‘The day of separation is ended, the night of union has arrived.’’ Like the first two stanzas, therefore, the third stanza also enacts the dialectic of separation and union, in which separation is indefinitely extended, and union, intensely desired and felt, does not cancel out the distance between the subject and object of desire. It renders uncertain the distinction between them but not in order to appropriate the life of the object in the interest of the former. The object is also revealed to be a subject and the (desiring) subject an object of (the other’s) desire. The beloved is at the same time distant, and hence other, and intimately present to the self as itself. In other words, the self that emerges in the course of ‘‘Yad’’ is a divided one, not at home with itself, desiring reconciliation and wholeness and yet cognizant that its own distance from itself is the very source of its move20. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘‘Subject and Object,’’ in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1988), 500.


ment and life. It is an uncanny interplay of nearness and distance precisely summed up in a four-line poem titled ‘‘Marsia’’ (Elegy), which appears in Sar-e wadi-e Sina (1971): Having gone afar you are near to me, when were you so close to me? You will not return now, nor leave, meeting and parting [hijran] are now same to me. [Dur ja kar qarib ho jitne Ham se kab tum qarib the itne Ab na aoge tum na jaoge Wasl o hijran baham hue kitne.] 21 We may begin to outline the social meanings of this lyric self by noting the resonances of the word hijr (separation) in the final stanza of ‘‘Yad’’ (and of its derivative hijran in ‘‘Marsia’’). A transformation of the Arabic hajr, the word is the most frequently used term in classical Urdu poetry for ‘‘separation,’’ or parting from the beloved. As is well known, the meanings of this word and those of its paired opposite, wisal (union), constitute one of the central and most familiar problems in Urdu poetics. These meanings vary not only from poet to poet or era to era, but also from one poetic genre to another, in the works of the same poet, and often within the same poem itself. Thus, for instance, depending on the poemic context, the words may signify the dynamics of romantic or erotic love, or of religious devotion. In the Sufi traditions of Urdu (and Persian) poetry in particular, wisal is a sign for mystic union with the divine, for the desire of the self to become extinct (fana) in a realization of its ishq-e haqiqi or ‘‘true’’ love of God, compared to which the love of man for man is only ishq-e majazi, inauthentic or ‘‘metaphorical’’ love. Most typically, a verse may be interpreted at several different levels, in several different registers, simultaneously.22 The problematic of ‘‘love’’ is 21. See Faiz, Nuskhaha-e wafa, 438. The translation is mine, with the literal meaning as the immediate goal, with some attention to rhyme scheme. 22. On the classical ghazal and its symbolic and thematic universe, see Ralph Russell, The Pursuit of Urdu Literature: A Select History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), chap. 2; and Annemarie Schimmel, A Two-Colored Brocade: The Imagery of Persian Poetry (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), pt. 2; on the erotics of ghazal imagery, see Annemarie Schimmel, ‘‘Eros—Heavenly and Not So Heavenly— in Sufi Literature and Life,’’ in Society and the Sexes in Medieval Islam, ed. Afaf Lutfi alSayyid-Marsot (Malibu, Calif.: Undena Publications, 1979), 119–41.


thus constituted around an oscillation or productive tension between otherworldly and this-worldly significations. In latter times, this poetic language is very far indeed from any concrete practice of Sufism. In Faiz, paradoxically, this religious substratum is brought again close to the surface, in order to be secularized anew. The secularization of hijr in Faiz’s poetry is part of the general secularization of poetic language and purpose undertaken by him and his contemporaries. One aspect of this secularization has been that the Sufistic eroticism of the vocabulary of the traditional poetic genres, and the ghazal in particular, has acquired political meanings, most explicitly in militant poets such as Habib Jalib, who is associated with the world of radical student politics, but also in more serious poets such as Faiz himself. Thus, for instance, wafa (loyalty or devotion) and junun (madness or intoxication) come to mean political steadfastness and selfless abandon, the rational and irrational components, respectively, of commitment. Faiz’s most programmatic announcement of the secularizing impulse of his poetry comes perhaps in ‘‘Dua’’ (‘‘Prayer’’), a poem written in the mid-1960s: Come, let us too lift our hands We for whom prayer is a custom forgotten, We who except for love’s flame Remember neither idol nor god— [Aiye hath uthaen ham bhi Ham jinhen rasm-e dua yad nahin Ham jinhen soz-e mahabbat ke siva Koi but ko khuda yad nahin.] 23 Prayer may be a ‘‘forgotten’’ custom for the lyric subject, but its very knowledge of this fact belies a memory of a living connection to it. The secular subject contains within itself traces of the lifeworld signified here by ‘‘idol’’ and ‘‘god.’’ As in so much of Faiz’s poetry, secularization is not a mere rejection of religious experience but rather a wrestling with it. This is not an expression of a positivistic atheism that wants simply to abolish the religious impulse in a rationalized culture of struggle and action—‘‘love’’ in the sense of political commitment. What is performed in the poetry of Faiz, instead, is the recognition of the immense power of religious thought and experience for the 23. See Faiz, Poems by Faiz, 276–77, for Kiernan’s rendition, which I have altered slightly; and Faiz, Nuskhaha-e wafa, 429.


modern subject. More specifically, the unorthodox and transgressive energies that are always at least implicit in the mystical Sufi tradition are turned in Faiz’s verse against religious orthodoxy and its alliance with oppressive worldly authority. A Marxist and internationalist poet, Faiz is nevertheless immersed in the religious language of mystical Indian Islam, both in its high cultural elaboration in the Urdu poetic tradition and as a kind of cultural lingua franca in northern India. Faiz’s poetry reveals a deep respect and love for this culture and a recognition of the poet’s very complex relationship to it. It represents an agonistic embracing of a particular religious tradition— the Indo-Muslim and Urdu poetic elaborations of Sufi expression—in order to produce out of it the resources for modernity; at the same time, therefore, it also points to the worldly basis of religious experience itself. At no point, however, is this merely a nostalgic embracing of a supposedly syncretistic religious life, and (poetic) modernity appears as a kind of dialectic of the religious and the secular or worldly. The problematic of hijr in the work of Faiz therefore cannot fail to evoke another narrative-mythological constellation, designated by the related word hijrat. Originally referring to the emigration of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in AD 622, hijrat was appropriated in Urdu at partition for the dislocations and emigrations that accompanied that event, in particular from the Hindi-Urdu heartland to the territory of Pakistan. It lends to the latter experience an epic quality and seeks to contain partition itself within a narrative of leave-taking. Faiz explores (and exploits) this historical density of hijr as a signifier of relation to place, community, uprooting, and the paradoxes of restoration and return. While he was not himself a muhajir, or partition migrant, strictly speaking—having been born and raised within the territorial limits later claimed for Pakistan—hijr-hijrat becomes in his poetry a metonym for the displacements of partition as a whole, the massive fissures it requires of people, language, culture, and memory coming to be figured as the experience of prolonged separation from the beloved. The political impulse in Faiz’s poetry can therefore be understood only through the mediation of the social. For the desire for justice, the steadfastness in the face of suffering and oppression, and the belief in a new dawn are complicated by the ‘‘partitioned’’ nature of the collective subject. In other words, for me the significance of Faiz’s repeated use of hijr and of its derivatives is that it imbues the lyric experience of separation from the beloved with a concrete historical meaning—the parting of ways or leave-taking that is partition. If, in Sufi traditions, to speak simultaneously of the pain and joy of hijr is to point to the consummation of love in death or self-extinction, then in


Faiz this prolongation of separation from the beloved is made the modality of collective selfhood, its very mode of being in history and the world.24 It is significant in this connection that within Pakistan critics have sometimes complained about the seeming masochism of such prolongation of hijr in Faiz’s poetry, in marked contrast to the work of his contemporary Miraji, for instance, where the attempt to project an authentic selfhood not only takes the form of an actualization of union but often is literalized in sexual release. This complaint is significant, for from within a framework that affirms the terms of partition, this refusal to grant to the (collective) self autonomy (from the whims of the beloved) can indeed only appear masochistic. The lyric subject in Faiz’s poetry is located at those borderlands of self and world where autonomy and heteronomy lose their distinctness, where the self is confronted with the uncanny presence of an other that is also self. For Faiz, the end of hijr is not a literal union. The sadness of hijr echoes the finality of hijrat, of leaving one’s home forever, but it also inverts the implied religious sanction for partition by reinscribing the self’s leave-taking of the (antagonistic) other as a separation from the beloved. When Faiz speaks of lost companions and almost-forgotten friendships, as he does in a number of poems from the 1950s onward, he is echoing an experience that is common in the entire northern belt that was affected by partition. Take, for instance, the opening lines of ‘‘Paun se lahu ko dho dalo’’ (‘‘Wash the Blood Off Your Feet’’): What could I [lit., we] have done, gone where? My feet were bare and every road was covered with thorns— of ruined friendships, of loves left behind, of eras of loyalty that finished, one by one. [Ham kya karte kis rah chalte Har rah men kante bikhre the Un rishton ke jo chhut gae Un sadyon ke yaranon ke Jo ik ik kar ke tut gae.] 25 24. See Schimmel, ‘‘Eros—Heavenly and Not So Heavenly—in Sufi Literature and Life,’’ 134–35. 25. This evocative, but largely free, translation is Agha Shahid Ali’s. See Faiz, The Rebel’s Silhouette, 85; and Faiz, Nuskhaha-e wafa, 524–25. As has often been noted, Faiz’s poetry shows a marked preference for the first-person plural, a sort of royal ‘‘we,’’ over the firstperson singular.


I suggest that we read ‘‘eras’’ (lit., centuries) here as a sign of historical time, and ‘‘friendships’’ (lit., relations or connections) and ‘‘loves’’ (lit., friendships, companionships, or loves) as pointing toward the fabric, the text, of culture, difference, and identity in history. The modes and forms in which memories of the pre-partition past are popularly kept alive pose questions of immense importance and interest for scholarship and have only begun to be explored. In Pakistani cities such as Lahore, Karachi, Hyderabad, and Rawalpindi, which were cleared of their large Hindu and Sikh populations within months of August 1947, the signs of these erstwhile residents are ubiquitously present—in the sight of sealed-off temples, in street and neighborhood names that continue to be used despite municipal attempts to erase them, in the signs of the ‘‘other’s’’ tongue above doorways in the old quarter of any city. The memories and stories of older eyewitnesses, the tales travelers tell of revisiting long-abandoned homes, the enormous font of verbal genres—folk songs, nursery rhymes, proverbs, and popular tales about characters such as Birbal and Mullah Dopiaza—are among the many everyday means of unsettling the finality of partition, of disconcerting the self with its own uncertainty. The paradox at the heart of Faiz reception is that while he writes poetry that is ‘‘difficult’’ in some obvious ways and true to the subjective demands of lyric, it is this enormous font of popular memory that it seeks to mobilize. We can say of him, as Adorno does of Brecht, that in his poetry, ‘‘linguistic integrity’’ does not result in poetic elitism or ‘‘esotericism.’’ 26 The suffering of the subject in Faiz’s poetry, or rather its pleasure and suffering at being separated from the beloved, echoes in lyric terms what is already present everywhere in popular experience, even if in ways that are muted, less than conscious, and fragmentary. If hijr and its derivatives point us in the direction of dislocations and separations that are collective, such a historical reading of Faiz’s lyric poems is made possible in other ways as well. Since Dast-e saba (1952), an increasing number of poems in successive collections appear dated by month and year or by exact date, and many are also marked by place of composition, which, in the case of the poems included in Dast-e saba and Zindan nama (1956), is most often a Pakistani prison. This dating and ‘‘placing’’ of the poems is almost always significant. I suggest that we read the date (and/or the place-name, where it exists) as an extrapoemic, historical text requiring interpretation in interaction with which the poem reveals its meaning. The date functions with respect to the text of the poem in the man26. Adorno, ‘‘Lyric Poetry and Society,’’ 46.


ner of what Gérard Genette has called paratexts. ‘‘Elegy,’’ for instance, is dated ‘‘August, 1968,’’ and ‘‘Prayer’’ is underlined with ‘‘Independence Day, 14 August 1967.’’ The month of August, during which Pakistan and India celebrate their independence from colonial rule and Pakistan, its separation from India, in fact appears frequently over the years as the date of composition of numerous poems. The extrapoemic, ‘‘historical’’ reference here is to the complex text of national independence-partition, lending to these poems a quality of national stocktaking. The pronouns ham (we) and tum (you, singular/familiar) acquire in this context a collective resonance, even as the lyric quality of the poems, their uncompromising subjectivity, produces a sense of deep intimacy, of meetings and partings at the very core of the self, which defines its very existence. Let us take, for instance, ‘‘Blaik-Aut’’ (‘‘Black-Out’’), which appears in Sar-e wadi-e Sina and is dated ‘‘September, 1965.’’ The historical reference in the date is to the Indo-Pakistani war of that month, the first full-scale war between the two postcolonial nation-states, which is a watershed in their histories. As C. M. Naim has argued, for Urdu literary culture, in particular, the war proved a turning point, for with the ensuing suspension of communications between the countries, Urdu literary production and reception began to take place within national spheres less and less in contact with each other.27 The availability of books and journals from the other side of the border, visits of writers and critics, and simultaneous publication of works in both countries, all common in the period leading up to the war, fell sharply in the following years, to the point of being almost extinct today. The year marks the entrenchment of ideological polarization between ‘‘Indian’’ and ‘‘Pakistani’’ writers, with increasing self-consciousness about hitching literary production to the cultural fortunes of either the one state or the other. In the wider cultural milieu as well, the war led to a suspension of contact between the two societies, which had been extensive and routine earlier, ranging from frequent family visits within divided families to the public availability of cultural commodities, such as magazines and films, from across the border. The title of Faiz’s poem makes reference to the introduction of a new vocabulary of war into Urdu—a vocabulary of war, like its technology, of foreign and Western origin. The poem itself remains faithful to the subjective demands of lyric poetry, with the collective and historical reference made explicit through the title and date of composition: 27. See C. M. Naim, ‘‘The Consequences of Indo-Pakistani War for Urdu Language and Literature,’’ Journal of Asian Studies 38, no. 2 (February 1969): 269–83. Also see Aijaz Ahmad, ‘‘Some Reflections on Urdu,’’ Seminar 359 (July 1989): 29.


1. Since the lamps have been without light, 2. I am seeking, moving about, in the dust: I do not know where 3. Both my eyes have been lost; 4. You who are familiar with me, give me some sign of myself. 5. It is as if into every vein has descended, 6. Wave on wave, the murderous river of some poison, 7. Carrying longing for you, memory of you, O my love [lit., life]; 8. How to know where, in what wave, my heart is swallowed? 9. Wait one moment, till from some world beyond 10. Lightning comes towards me with bright hand. 11. And the lost pearls of my eyes, 12. As luminous pearls of new eyes drunk with the cup of darkness, 13. Restores. 14. Wait one moment till somewhere the breadth of the river is found, 15. And, renewed, my heart, 16. Having been washed in poison and annihilated, finds some landing-place 17. Then let me come bringing, by way of offering, new sight and heart, 18. Let me make the praise of beauty, let me write of the theme of love. [1. Jab se benur hui hain shamen 2. Khak men dhundta phirta hun, na jane kis ja 3. Kho gai hain meri donon ankhen 4. Tum jo waqif ho batao koi pahchan meri 5. Is tarah hai ke har ik rag men utar aya hai 6. Mauj dar mauj kisi zahr ka qatil darya 7. Tera arman, teri yad liye jan meri 8. Jane kis mauj men ghaltan hai kahan dil mera 9. Ek pal thairo ke us par kisi dunya se 10. Barq ae meri janib, yad-e baiza le kar 11. Aur meri ankhon ke gum-gashta guhar 12. Jam-e zulmat se siyahmast nai ankhon ke shabtab guhar, 13. Lauta de 14. Ek pal thairo ke darya ka kahin pat lage 15. Aur naya dil mera 16. Zahr me dhul ke, fana ho ke kisi ghat lage


17. Phir pa-e nazr nae dida o dil le ke chalun 18. Husn ki madh karun, shauq ka mazmun likhun.] 28 The poem opens in darkness, in a state of lightlessness that is external— ‘‘Since the lamps have been without light.’’ But this absence of light is, as it were, reflected internally, and the speaker finds himself lost, in search of himself. The first three lines of the poem are an elaboration of this metaphor of darkness—darkness as metaphor for forgetting, for losing oneself. In line 4, the speaker addresses an other being, asking to be recognized and hence restored to his own (lost) identity. But this other is also an intimate, familiar (waqif ) with the latter’s identity (pahchan). In lines 5–8, there is a shift of metaphors, and the crisis of the self is likened to the infusion of an unknown poison—‘‘the murderous river of some poison’’ (line 6)—into the veins, a deluge into which the self—‘‘my life’’ (line 7) and ‘‘my heart’’ (line 8)— struggling to keep from drowning, carries its memories of, and longing for, the beloved (lines 7–8). In the elaboration of this second metaphor, as well, therefore, we get a shift of emphasis from externality and the physical to interiority. In lines 9–13, the poem returns to the metaphor of light, or rather, returns to the darkness metaphor of lines 1–4 by reversing it into the image of light as deliverance from the darkness of the self. This section of the poem opens with the gentle injunction to wait, to be patient—‘‘Ek pal tahro’’ (‘‘Wait one moment’’)—which is repeated at the beginning of the next section, lines 14–16. Clearly, lines 9–10 contain a primary allusion—‘‘from some world beyond’’ and the ‘‘bright hand’’ of lightning—to the (here Quranic) story of Moses on Mount Sinai, an allusion made explicit in the title poem in this collection, ‘‘Sar-e wadi-e Sina,’’ written on the occasion of the Arab-Israeli war of 1967. But I wish to stress again the manner in which this image is secularized here: us par, unlike beyond in English, suggests more a horizontal gesture, directed toward the horizon, than a vertical one, toward the heavens, which the strictly religious image would require. The light that restores comes, in other words, from beyond the horizon—an orientation that we have already seen in ‘‘Memory.’’ The feeling produced by the phrase ‘‘from some world beyond’’ is of a neighboring world that should be unknown, yet is half familiar and vaguely remembered. The spatial register in which these images, and indeed the use of 28. This is a slight modification of Kiernan’s translation. See Faiz, Poems by Faiz, 268–71. Also, in Faiz, Nuskhaha-e wafa, the lineation is slightly different, and Kiernan’s line 12 is broken into two after ‘‘siyahmast’’ and line 16 after ‘‘ho ke’’ (see 409–10).


space in ‘‘Memory,’’ become meaningful is the very opposite of state territoriality or of a geography whose scale is superhuman. There is something small-scale and intimate about it. It suggests distances that are traversable by human beings. It is a register to which Faiz repeatedly turns in order to convey a sense of a place both not far away and not so close as to be indistinguishable from here. I suggest we read this complex spatial imagery as a means of exploring, within the terms of lyric poetry, the connections between culture and geography, or, more precisely, the process through which the nation-state converts its territory into a national geography. What Faiz is able to render here is a human geography that traverses the boundaries, and escapes the territorial logic, of the nation-state. In a number of essays and lectures from the 1960s, Faiz raises the basic geographical conundrum faced by Urdu writing in Pakistan: the historical ‘‘home’’ of Urdu—Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Hyderabad—lies beyond the territorial confines of the country. In his lyric poems, this question is echoed by the predicament of a dislocated, displaced lover, often depicted as imagining union with a beloved left behind in a world—nearly but not completely forgotten—somewhere beyond the horizon. In lines 14–16 of ‘‘Black-Out,’’ the metaphors shift again, and the dominant image is once more that of a river, a broad and mighty river, and the struggle of the self to keep from drowning. But this river, which could consume the self, is also the means to its restoration, to the healing of its wounds. In fact, in order to be restored to itself, in order to find a riverbank (ghat), the self must be bathed in this poison and become extinct (fana). Having come to know annihilation, it is born anew. The fact that Faiz uses reaching a ghat as an image of restoration and healing is not insignificant. It is an Indic (rather than Persio-Arabic) word and image, with a clear reference both to the Hindu sacralization of bathing in river waters as a means to purification and to the ritual cremation of the dead. Furthermore, fana points to the Sufi goal of extinguishing the self in the (divine) object of the self’s desire. But in its secularization here it has a utopian impulse, signifying an end to the self’s suffering. This combination of these images—the one clearly of ‘‘Muslim’’ origin, the other, ‘‘Hindu’’—is an attempt, in this poem occasioned by the war of 1965, to keep open possibilities of collective selfhood that that event was closing off. Nothing is more natural to a nation-state than going to war, and it may be argued that this particular war was a key moment in the realization of the nation-state form in postcolonial South Asia. That is certainly how it was perceived in contemporary Urdu writing, and aside from Faiz’s own poems of that moment, Ahmad Faraz’s ‘‘Main kyun


udas nahin’’ is among the more famous literary responses to the dilemmas it posed. But even in Faraz’s poem, there is a slipping into the terms provided by the structure of national citizenship, as the speaker singles out and names the Pakistani cities of Sialkot and Lahore, both on the border with India and both threatened with occupation, and bemoans their suffering.29 In Faiz’s work, on the contrary, the insight about the war as interpellative event is held on to steadfastly, and, above all, suffering never becomes an alibi for a reification of the self. The functioning of lyric in Faiz’s writing as a whole is as an abrupt flash of memory—not a fully formed recollection but rather an instantaneous sensation, of the self in motion, in dialogue with an other that is, uncannily, also self. The final two lines of ‘‘Black-Out’’ offer a glimpse of reconciliation and restoration. Having been washed in poison and made anew, armed with ‘‘new sight and heart,’’ the self becomes capable once again of ‘‘praise of beauty’’ and of writing of ‘‘the subject of love.’’ This resolution is highly significant, for it comments on the seemingly dualist movement of programmatic poems like ‘‘Love Do Not Ask for My Old Love Again’’ and ‘‘The Subject of Poetry,’’ which I discussed earlier, and opens it up to the influence of a third term.30 If those early, pre-partition poems suggest a tension or poemic indecision between the aesthetic autonomy of love and lyric, on the one hand, and the material predications of the (lyric) subject, on the other, these closing lines suggest that that earlier duality was not simply the opposition of lyric self and society but rather that the identity of the social was all along at stake in each of its terms. Thus, it is not simply the material environment of the lyric self that poses the problem of the social; the interior world of affect itself raises questions about collective identity. The closure of that lyric world is a figure for the illusion of autonomy of Urdu literary culture and identity as a whole. And the coherence of that world is disturbed by the uncanny appearance of the other. To suggest that the lyric self in modern Urdu can no longer be contained within the world defined by love’s intoxications is to insist, in historical retrospect, that the claim to autonomy of that world is 29. Ahmad Faraz, ‘‘Main kyun udas nahin,’’ in Nayaft (Lahore: Mavra Publishers, 1989), 29–30. The title itself is ambiguous and could be translated as either ‘‘Why Do I Not Grieve?’’ or ‘‘Why I Do Not Grieve.’’ I am not interested here with the explicitly jingoistic verse that was produced in response to the war. For a discussion of some of this work and its context, see Naim, ‘‘The Consequences of Indo-Pakistani War for Urdu Language and Literature.’’ 30. Kiernan translates the title ‘‘Mauzu-e sukhan’’ as ‘‘Poetry’s Theme.’’ This leaves out the grammatical and philosophical senses that mauzu shares with subject.


itself socially determined, that it is a moment within the contradictory movement of a larger whole. Thus, in neither of the two early poems is the lyric sensibility simply canceled and overcome by a higher sensibility. The two are held in an indefinite, dialectical tension, with the result that while the first term is forced to open itself up to the second, larger term, it does not simply submerge its identity within it. The poems announce an end to the isolation of the lyric subject, or, rather, an end to the illusion of its isolation. But they do not cancel out the distance between the interior world of subjectivity and the outer world of objectification. To the extent that these early poems are programmatic works, therefore, this is not simply in the sense that they announce an aesthetic of commitment. They are essays in literary and cultural history. They explore the relationship of the lyric in Urdu to the larger history of social and ‘‘communal’’ contradictions that is the history of the Indian modern itself, raising questions about the ‘‘subject’’ of Urdu writing in the double sense of the word, a double sense that the word mauzu shares with its English equivalent. What these poems make visible is the social life of the lyric subject—the subject as it appears in classical Urdu lyric—its isolation now appearing as its mode of being in the (Indian) world.31 In the closing lines of ‘‘Black-Out,’’ the impossibility of sustaining the purely lyric sensibility is finally explicitly linked to the vicissitudes of collective and national selfhood. What forces the lyric self to look beyond itself, to other pleasures and sufferings than those of love, is therefore a recognition of its own fragmentedness. The lyric as an aesthetic mode will become once again possible only when the wounds of the self are healed and it is whole again. In other words, the lyric, and the ‘‘purely’’ aesthetic in general, is held up as a utopian possibility tied to an end to the antagonisms, and hence suffering, of the collective subject. In ‘‘Sipahi ka marsia’’ (Soldier’s Elegy), another poem from this period and dated ‘‘October, 1965’’—that is, marking the end of the war—this refusal to reify self and other is given a novel turn. The poem, in the voice of a parent (perhaps mother) addressing its dead son, abandons ‘‘high’’ Urdu vocabulary altogether and turns to an idiom whose resonances are ‘‘Hindavi,’’ in a generalization of the function that ghat performs in ‘‘Black-Out’’: 31. For a rather different reading of ‘‘Mujh se pahli si muhabbat’’ by an orientalist ‘‘lover’’ of the classical ghazal tradition, see Russell, The Pursuit of Urdu Literature, 230–31 and 243–44. In line with his literal readings of Urdu poetry in general, Russell notes sarcastically that he is not impressed with the discovery ‘‘that there are other things in life besides love of women’’ (243). His entire chapter on Faiz would be laughable—he considers Faiz a second-rate poet—if it did not border on the scurrilous, accusing Faiz of self-promotion and political insincerity and cowardice.


Utho ab mati se utho Jago mere lal, Ab jago mere lal Tumri sej sajavan karan Dekho ai rain andhyaran . . . [Stand, get up from the dust Wake up, my son You wake up now, my son Look, to make your bed Dark night has arrived . . .] 32 The effect of the Hindavi idiom here is untranslatable into English. (A very partial parallel would be a poem about World War II written in Middle English.) It is as if in this moment of crisis for collective selfhood, modern Urdu becomes inadequate as a vehicle for grief. What the Hindavi makes possible here is an exploration of the communal and nation-state conflict in terms of the dissonances of language and language history. The poetic language associated most famously with the Sufi saint and poet Amir Khusro (1258– 1325) is a fraught issue in the history of the Hindi-Urdu conflict over the last century and a half. It has often been excised from official histories of Urdu as too vernacular, that is, not Persianized enough, to be considered an antecedent for the mualla or ‘‘exalted’’ Urdu that emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but is embraced within Hindi literary culture as the medieval font from which modern, shudh (or pure) Hindi has evolved.33 The larger effect of Faiz’s abandonment in this poem of the Persianized Urdu that is the language of his entire oeuvre, and its substitution with a Hindavi idiom, is therefore to undermine, within a linguistic register, the claims for an autonomous Muslim (and hence Pakistani) selfhood. Faiz places the language that is conspicuously absent from the poem, namely, modern ‘‘high’’ Urdu, in a line of descent from the lingua franca of fourteenth-century northern India. Or rather, the surface of modern language is peeled off to reveal submerged sounds and meanings. To turn to Hindavi in order to articulate the grieving voice of the modern self is to reveal affinities beneath the surface of modern Urdu that are disavowed in its official history. If this poem can belong to the canon of Urdu, and of Pakistani, literature, then the lin32. Faiz, Nuskhaha-e wafa, 412–14. The translation is mine. 33. For a clearly executed survey of the far from clear debates about the origins of modern Hindi and Urdu, see Amrit Rai, A House Divided: The Origin and Development of Hindi/Hindavi (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984), 1–36.


guistic and cultural configurations of self and other are not what the postcolonial nation-states, in this moment of self-definition through war, require them to be. The use of Hindavi idiom makes it impossible for the poem to be canonized as an elegy for a Pakistani soldier alone. But it does this not through disavowals of difference—‘‘we are all the same’’—but rather precisely through a careful elaboration of the text of linguistic, cultural, and historical discontinuities. Faiz returns to the themes and motifs of ‘‘Soldier’s Elegy’’ in a poem that is dated ‘‘September, 1975’’—pointing to the tenth anniversary of the war of 1965. The poem, ‘‘Mori araj suno’’ (Hear My Plaint), is accompanied by a dedication to Amir Khusro and opens with a series of citations from the Hindavi poems attributed to the latter, each in a plaintive mode, asking for recognition, for the attention of the other, for deliverance and restoration. Unlike in the former poem, here modern Urdu provides the dominant discourse, with the Hindavi in the subordinate position of citation, a mode appropriate to remembering the war and the crisis of self it had precipitated. The language of the rest of the poem, following the lines from Khusro, is the ‘‘normal’’ language of Faiz’s poetry, with words and phrases from the citations inserted. The overall effect of the poem is therefore again to resist a reification of self and other, to disconcert the self with a recognition of the sameness of the other, without collapsing the distinction between them. The poemic present, signified by ab (now), points to the moment of the modern, specified by the self’s apperception of itself in the other. As in so many of Faiz’s poems, modernity is the putting into motion of self and other. Towards a Lyric History of India As we have already seen, the poetic program that Faiz announced early in his career envisioned orienting the lyric subject toward the larger world. I have argued that some of his most ambitious and effective poems are a series of exercises precisely in ending the isolation of the lyric subject, or rather in ending its illusion of isolation. They take the form of imbuing it with the recognition that what it takes as object, as the larger world of things, is itself subject and in dialogue with it. This dialectic of inner and outer worlds, I have further argued, carries collective, historical resonances; it is an enactment of the relationship of ‘‘Muslim’’ culture and identity to the emergence of a wider ‘‘Indian’’ modernity. The self-absorption of the lyric subject in classical Urdu poetry, so widely and repeatedly condemned since the nineteenth century, becomes for Faiz a social fact. And if that lyric subject—and its locus classicus is the ghazal—appeared to be, as Azad and


Hali had argued, addicted to fantasy and impervious to reality and nature, that judgment could itself be explained in terms of the emergence of the horizon of ‘‘nature’’ and ‘‘reality’’ that we call the nation.34 Therein lies the modernity of Azad and Hali’s critique of classical lyric: it seeks to reorient writing within an emerging national experience, with the fatally necessary corollary that it enter the field of contest and conflict over the meaning of community and nation. In this sense, Faiz is a descendant of the nineteenth-century reformers—and we should recall that his early formation took place in a milieu where the writings of nai raushni (the New Light) had long acquired canonical status—with the important difference that for him this project is to be carried out not through didactic poetry, as it is for Hali, but in terms of the lyric itself.35 What is the nature of the modern (Indian) self?—that is the question that underlies the reorientation of the Urdu lyric subject in Faiz’s poetry. The enormous paradox of partition, for Faiz, is that it requires a rewriting of the self in the name of whose preservation it had been demanded. It is a paradox that he sometimes figures as the collision of different, inner and outer languages of self, as in this couplet from a ghazal that is dated ‘‘1953’’: The heart as such had settled its every doubt when I [lit., we] set out to see her But on seeing her the lips spoke love’s unrehearsed words and everything changed everything changed [dil se to har muamla kar ke chale the saf ham Kahne men un ke samne bat badal badal gai] 36 34. See Altaf Husain Hali, Muqaddama-e sher o shairi, ed. Dr. Waheed Qureishi (Aligarh: Educational Publishing House, 1993), 116–17, 153–54, 158, and 178–85. Hali makes it very clear what he has in mind when he recommends ‘‘naichral shairi’’ (natural poetry): ‘‘By ‘natural poetry’ is meant that poetry which, in terms of both words and meanings, is in accord with nature and habit . . . [in accord with] the everyday form of the language, because this everyday speech carries for the inhabitants of the country where it is spoken, the weight of nature [nechar] or second nature [saikind nechar]’’ (158). 35. Faiz himself makes the argument that much of what Hali is credited with having originated in poetry—the turn to ‘‘nature,’’ the rejection of ‘‘artificial’’ affect, the rejection of abstraction and esotericism—can in fact be traced to Nazir Akbarabadi, who wrote almost a century earlier. Hali’s uniqueness lies in the national (qaumi) nature of his poetry and poetics. See his important essay, ‘‘Nazir aur Hali,’’ in Faiz, Mizan, 169–70 and 179–83. 36. The English here is a modification of Agha Shahid Ali’s very free but lovely translation. See Faiz, The Rebel’s Silhouette, 30.


I suggest that we read the pathos of this couplet, this sense of the impossibility of saying what you mean, as a response to ‘‘public’’ languages of selfhood and identity. What Faiz points to here is the excess that cannot be contained within the categorical structure of the nation-state, within which ‘‘Muslim’’ is placed at the cusp of a fatal dilemma: it can signify either ‘‘a separate nation’’ or ‘‘an Indian minority.’’ Faiz’s entire lyric oeuvre is a refusal to accept the terms of this fixing of identity and an attempt to put the self in motion. The narrative element in the above couplet—the self setting out with confessional intent to encounter an other but finding its own words becoming alien, producing meanings other than those intended—must be read in a collective and historical register as an interpretation of the history of conflict over the meaning of nation and communal identity, and, in particular, as an interpretation of the history of Muslim cultural separatism. Faiz is indeed a descendant of the writers and intellectuals of the New Light, who, a century earlier, postulated for the first time the distinctness of a ‘‘Muslim’’ experience in Indian modernity. But with historical retrospection, he bathes that assertion itself in the subdued light of pathos, pointing to the twists and turns, the reroutings and misfirings that mark the passage from that moment to our own. This ghazal, composed in 1953, is a comment on India’s partition from this side of the cataclysmic event, full of infinite sadness at what Indian Muslim ‘‘nationhood’’ has finally been revealed, in the cold light of statehood and ‘‘sovereignty,’’ to mean. Faiz distills that historical pathos into the subjective language of the ghazal, giving it the form of the lover’s sadness at the impossibility of saying, when face-to-face with the beloved, what exactly one means. The recurring image in Faiz’s poetry of an ever-elusive totality that is no less real for its elusiveness shares something of the melancholy of Adorno’s concept of a contradictory whole whose ‘‘movements’’ are visible only in the ‘‘changes’’ of the fragments.37 This concept of the dialectic is an attempt to comprehend totality in late modernity, once ‘‘the attempt to change the world,’’ as Adorno put it, has been missed.38 The ‘‘lateness’’ of 37. See, for instance, Adorno, ‘‘The Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’’: ‘‘The whole can not be put together by adding the separated halves, but in both there appear, however distantly, the changes of the whole, which only moves in contradiction’’ (275). 38. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973). On Adorno and lateness, see Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990); and Edward W. Said, ‘‘Adorno as Lateness Itself,’’ in Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of the World, ed. Malcolm Bull (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 264–81.


the contemporary world for Adorno thus resides in the fact that it is the aftermath of a disappointment, a kind of dénouement once the utopian hopes generated by modern European history have suffered a catastrophic defeat. Hence the series of questions that Adorno directs at contemporary culture: Is it possible to write poetry after Auschwitz? Is philosophy possible once the chance to realize it in a transformation of human existence has been missed? Is it possible, or even desirable, to defend the subject in an age when it is besieged on all sides by the forces of mass culture and mass destruction? Postcolonial culture is itself constituted by an aftermath and marked by the ‘‘late’’ acquisition of the cultural artifacts of the European nineteenth century: national sovereignty, the popular will, the demand for democracy. In postcolonial South Asia, this moment is also that which follows the partitioning of northern Indian society. Frantz Fanon argued a long time ago that in order to be transplanted to the colonial setting, ‘‘Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched.’’ 39 The ‘‘lateness’’ of postcolonial culture itself requires a stretching of the concept of late modernity, its uncoupling from the narrative of economic overdevelopment and overconsumption and its opening up instead to a comprehension of the aftermath of decolonization. Faiz is certainly not an ‘‘Adornian’’ poet in the sense in which Celan, Beckett, or even Mann might be spoken of as Adornian writers.40 But it has been my purpose here to rethink and expand what it means to write in and of the vistas of ‘‘lateness’’ that Said and others have identified in the constellations of Adorno’s thought.41 Faiz is the poet of a late postcolonial modernity, a poet who directs the energies of negative thinking at the congealed cultural and social forms that constitute the postcolonial present. For Adorno, the concept of lyric poetry has a referent that is ‘‘completely modern,’’ and ‘‘the manifestations in earlier periods of the specifically lyric spirit familiar to us are only isolated flashes.’’ 42 Faiz, however, turns to the traditional Urdu lyric itself and extracts from it a vocabulary for the elaboration of the relation of self to world, individual to totality. He elaborates an experience of modern Indian selfhood that seeks to escape the cultural logic of the nation-state system inaugurated at partition, that paradoxical moment 39. See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 40. 40. I am grateful to Stathis Gourgouris and Eduardo Cadava for making clear the need for this clarification. 41. See, for instance, Said, ‘‘Adorno as Lateness Itself,’’ 264–81; and Jameson, Late Marxism. 42. Adorno, ‘‘On Lyric Poetry and Society,’’ 40.


of realization through reinscription, of success through failure. He does this, furthermore, by immersion in the Indo-Islamic poetic tradition, with its deep relationship to Sufi thought and practice, and its long involvement in the crisis of culture and identity on the subcontinent. This is the larger meaning of Faiz as an Urdu poet with an immense audience across the political and cultural boundaries implemented by partition. His is not an appropriation of the fragment from the position of totality, but neither is it an attempt to reconceive the fragment itself as a totality. His is the oeuvre of an aftermath once the chance to achieve India, to ‘‘change the world,’’ as it were, has been missed. He confronts the fragment itself with its fragmentary nature, making perceptible to it its own objective situation as an element in a contradictory whole. To put it differently and more explicitly in historical terms, we might say that Faiz is another name for the perception, shadowy and subterranean for the most part, but abruptly and momentarily bursting through the surface of language and experience from time to time, that the disavowal of Indianness is an irreducible feature of Indianness itself. The powerful tradition of lyric poetry in Urdu, long accused of its indifference to properly Indian realities, is revived and given a new lease on life in Faiz and his contemporaries not because they infuse old words with new meanings, as the intentionalist cliché in Faiz criticism would have it, but because in their practice it becomes a site for the elaboration of a selfhood at odds with the geometry of selves put into place by partition. In his lyric poetry, Faiz pushes the terms of identity and selfhood to their limits, to the point where they turn upon themselves and reveal the partial nature of postcolonial ‘‘national’’ experience.

Books Received

Agustini, Delmira. Selected Poetry of Delmira Agustini: Poetics of Eros. Trans. Alejandro Cáceres. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. Augst, Thomas. The Clerk’s Tale. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Bird, Stephanie. Women Writers and National Identity: Bachmann, Duden, Özdamar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Breisach, Ernst. On the Future of History: The Postmodernist Challenge and Its Aftermath. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Brown, Richard Harvey. The Politics of Selfhood: Bodies and Identities in Global Capitalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Cheah, Pheng. Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Cook, Matt. London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Corin, Lucy. Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls. Tallahassee: FC2, 2004. Davidson, Michael. Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Davis, Tracy C., and Thomas Postlewait, eds. Theatricality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Dezon-Jones, Elyane, and Inge Crosman Wimmers, eds. Approaches to Teaching Proust’s Fiction and Criticism. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2003. Durrant, Sam. Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning: J. M. Coetze, Wilson Harris, and Toni Morrison. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Evans, K. L. Whale! Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.


Faris, Wendy B. Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification Narrative. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004. Farred, Grant. What’s My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Fenves, Peter D. Late Kant: Towards Another Law of the Earth. New York: Routledge, 2003. Finkelstein, David H. Expression and the Inner. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Fletcher, Angus. A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. Fox, Christopher. The Cambridge Companion to Jonathan Swift. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Fraser, Hilary, Judith Johnston, and Stephanie Green. Gender and the Victorian Periodical. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Garber, Marjorie. A Manifesto for Literary Studies. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004. Gardaphe, Fred L. Leaving Little Italy: Essaying Italian American Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Genet, Jean. The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews. Trans. Jeff Fort. Ed. Albert Dichy. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004. Gilman, Sander. Jurek Becker: A Life in Five Worlds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Goldberg, Jonathan. Tempest in the Caribbean. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Gould, Philip. Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Halevi-Wise, Yael. Interactive Fictions. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2003. Harrison, Robert Pogue. The Dominion of the Dead. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Hayot, Eric. Chinese Dreams: Pound, Brecht, Tel Quel. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Herman, Peter C., ed. Historicizing Theory. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Hewitt, Nicholas. The Cambridge Companion to Modern French Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Books Received 277

Hill, Mike. After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority. New York: New York University Press, 2004. Jaffe, Harold. 15 Serial Killers: Docufictions. Hyattsville, Md.: Raw Dog Screaming Press, 2003. Joseph, Betty. Reading the East India Company, 1720–1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Karatani, Kojin. Transcritique: On Kant and Marx. Trans. Sabu Kohso. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. Lawrence, D. H. D. H. Lawrence: Paul Morel. Ed. Helen Baron. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Le Besco, Kathleen. Revolting Bodies? The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004. Lee, Anthony W., ed. Yun Gee: Poetry, Writings, Art, Memories. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004. Lewis, Nathaniel. Unsettling the Literary West: Authenticity and Authorship. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Marrouchi, Mustapha. Edward Said at the Limits. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Martin, Jonathan D. Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. Martinson, Deborah. In the Presence of Audience: The Self in Diaries and Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003. Mazor, Yair. The Poetry of Asher Reich: Portrait of a Hebrew Poet. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. McGowan, Todd. The End of Dissatisfaction? Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Modiano, Raimonda, Leroy F. Searle, and Peter Shillingsburg, eds. Voice, Text, Hypertext: Emerging Practices in Textual Studies. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004. Nancy, Jean-Luc. A Finite Thinking. Ed. Simon Sparks. Cultural Memory in the Present. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003. Ocasio, Rafael. Cuba’s Political and Sexual Outlaw: Reinaldo Arenas. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. Olson, Toby. The Blonde Box. Tallahassee: FC2, 2003. Postone, Moishe. Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.


Preistman, Martin, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Radano, Ronald. Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Rajan, Tilottama, and Arkady Plotnitsky, eds. Idealism without Absolutes: Philosophy and Romantic Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Scribner, Charity. Requiem for Communism. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. Szeman, Imre. Zones of Instability: Literature, Postcolonialism, and the Nation. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2003. Tichi, Cecelia. Exposés and Excesses: Muckraking in America, 1900–2000. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. Wang, Hui. China’s New Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Warren, Kenneth W. So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Webb, Constance. Not without Love: Memoirs. Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2004. Wirth, Jason M. The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Witham, Barry B. The Federal Theatre Project: A Case Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Yúdice, George. The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2004.

Contributors

Emily Apter is professor of French and comparative literature at New York University. She is the author of Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects (1999), Feminizing the Fetish: Psychoanalysis and Narrative Obsession in Turn-ofthe Century France (1987), and coeditor, with William Pietz, of Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (1991). A book near completion is titled The Translation Zone: Language Wars and Literary Politics. Additional publications include articles in October, Public Culture, PMLA, Sites, Parallax, Modern Language Notes, Esprit Créateur, and Critique. She edits the book series Translation/Transnation for Princeton University Press. Akeel Bilgrami is Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. He is the author of Belief and Meaning (1992) and forthcoming books called Selfknowledge and Resentment and Politics and the Moral Psychology of Identity. Bishnupriya Ghosh currently teaches postcolonial literature and theory, gender/ sexuality, and film studies at the Department of English, University of California, Davis. Besides publishing several essays on South Asian cultural and gender studies, Ghosh coedited and introduced Interventions: Feminist Dialogues on Third World Women’s Literature and Film (1997). She is the author of a book on language, migration, and globalization, titled When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (2004). She is working on a second project on the currency of South Asian female icons (such as Phoolan Devi and Mother Teresa) in present globality, Stray Embers: The Iconic Afterlife of South Asian Female Icons. Willi Goetschel is professor of German and philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Constituting Critique: Kant’s Writing as Critical Praxis (1994) and Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine (2004), and the editor of the collected works by Hermann Levin Goldschmidt (1993–). He is currently working on a book on Heine and critical theory.


Stathis Gourgouris teaches comparative literature at Columbia University. He has also taught at Princeton, Yale, the University of Michigan, and the National Polytechnic in Athens. He is the author of Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (1996) and Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (2003), as well as of numerous articles in political theory, psychoanalysis, film, and music. He is currently working on a book project on the politics of sublimation and the secular imagination. Gil Z. Hochberg is assistant professor of comparative literature at UCLA and teaches courses on Arab-Jewish relationships, postcolonial theory, immigration and exile in literature and film, the politics of memory, and critical theory. She has published on such issues as Francophone North African literature, Palestinian writers of Hebrew, gender and nationalism, cultural memory, and immigration. Her book-in-progress, The Levant in Present Tense: Memory, Imagination, and the Limits of Cultural Identity, is a comparative reading of contemporary novels written in North Africa and Israel-Palestine, introducing the Levant as a generative, transnational, multilingual, and cross-ethnic cultural horizon. Ronald A. T. Judy is professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches courses related to the fields of American literature and culture, African literature, Arab literature, contemporary Islamic thought, global English studies and literature, as well as literary theory, with a particular focus on modernism. He is a member of the editorial collective of boundary 2, and the guest editor of a special issue of boundary 2 on the philosophy of W. E. B. Du Bois, entitled ‘‘Sociology Hesitant: Thinking with W. E. B. Du Bois,’’ which was awarded second place in the category of Best Special Issue of 2001 by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. Most recently, he was coeditor, along with Jonathan Arac, of boundary 2 ’s special issue ‘‘Ralph Ellison: The Next Fifty Years.’’ He is currently completing a book project tentatively called The Last Negro, or, The Destruction of Categorical Thought: An Experiment in Hyperbolic Thinking. Aamir R. Mufti is associate professor of comparative literature at UCLA. He is the author of Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and Dilemmas in Postcolonial Culture (forthcoming), and coeditor of Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives. He has published articles on such subjects as secularism, minority culture, blasphemy and literature, the post-literate public sphere, literary criticism and social critique, and the short story in Urdu literature in Social Text, Critical Inquiry, and Subaltern Studies. He served for several years on the editorial collective of Social Text and is now a member of the boundary 2 editorial collective. Edward W. Said was the University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and former president of the MLA. He was the author of more than twenty books, including The Question of Palestine; Covering Islam; Culture and Imperialism; Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process; Entre Guerre et Paix (Between War and Peace); The End of the

Contributors 281

Peace Process: Oslo and After; Reflections on Exile and Other Essays; Power, Politics, and Culture; and Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society. His work has been published in more than thirty-five languages. His memoir, Out of Place, won many awards, including the 1999 New Yorker Book Award for Non-Fiction; the Year 2000 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction; the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award in Literature conferred by the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and the 2001 Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement. In addition to his academic work, he wrote a twice-monthly column for Al-Hayat, a daily Palestinian newspaper, and Al-Ahram, an Egyptian daily newspaper; was a regular contributor to newspapers in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East; and was the music critic for The Nation. He served on the editorial board of twenty journals, including boundary 2. He died on September 25, 2003. The essay included in this volume appears in his forthcoming book, Humanism and Democratic Criticism. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and the director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. Among her publications are Of Grammatology (translation with critical introduction of Jacques Derrida’s De la grammmatologie); Imaginary Maps; Breast Stories; Old Women (translations with critical material of the fiction of Mahasweta Devi); In Other Worlds; The Post-Colonial Critic; Outside in the Teaching Machine; A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present; and Death of a Discipline. Spivak’s work has been translated into all the major European and Asian languages.

Critical Secularism

Rethinking Secularism

Secularism Confronts Islam

Secularism Confronts Islam

Islam and Secularism

Secularism and Religion-Making

A Short History of Secularism

Secularism and Freedom of Conscience

Hallowed Secularism: Theory, Belief, Practice

Critical

Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism

Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism

Secularism and Science in the 21st Century

Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism

Critical

Critical

Ayodhya and the Politics of India's Secularism

Growing Critical (Critical Psychology)

Secularism and Secularity: Contemporary International Perspectives

Martin Buber: Prophet of Religious Secularism

Martin Buber: Prophet of Religious Secularism

State and Secularism: Some Asian Perspectives

Religious Revival and Secularism in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan

A World Abandoned by God: Narrative and Secularism

Secularism and Muslim Democracy in Turkey (Cambridge Middle East Studies)

Critical Exposure

Critical Space

Critical Intelligence

Critical Intelligence

Critical Impact

Critical Intelligence

Critical Secularism

Rethinking Secularism

Secularism Confronts Islam

Secularism Confronts Islam

Islam and Secularism

Secularism and Religion-Making

A Short History of Secularism

Secularism and Freedom of Conscience

Hallowed Secularism: Theory, Belief, Practice

Critical

Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism

Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism

Secularism and Science in the 21st Century

Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism

Critical

Critical

Ayodhya and the Politics of India's Secularism

Growing Critical (Critical Psychology)

Secularism and Secularity: Contemporary International Perspectives

Martin Buber: Prophet of Religious Secularism

Martin Buber: Prophet of Religious Secularism

State and Secularism: Some Asian Perspectives

Religious Revival and Secularism in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan

A World Abandoned by God: Narrative and Secularism

Secularism and Muslim Democracy in Turkey (Cambridge Middle East Studies)

Critical Exposure

Critical Space

Critical Intelligence

Critical Intelligence

Critical Impact

Critical Intelligence

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