The End of the West and Other Cautionary Tales 9780231541404

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I. THE END OF THE WEST
1. The Black Athena Debate
Bernal and His Critics
Deconstructing “Roots”
PART II. FROM TELEOLOGY TO NEGATIVE TELEOLOGY
2. The Phenomenological Turn
Husserl and the Spiritual Shape of Europe
Heidegger and the Opening
3. The Ethical Turn
Levinas and Orientation
Derrida and “Globalatinization”
PART III. FROM CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY TO POSTCOLONIAL THEORY
4. The Critique of Representation
Said and Orientalism
Mohanty and Western Feminism
5. The Defense of Difference
Bhabha and the Third Space
Trinh and the Third World Woman
PART IV. THE LIMITS OF ANTIETHNOCENTRISM
6. The Beatles in India
Help!
Hyperbolic Representation
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

THE END OF THE WEST and O T H E R C A U T I O N A RY TA L E S

THE END OF THE WEST and O T H E R C A U T I O N A RY TA L E S

SEAN MEIGHOO

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

C O LU M B I A U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S PUBLISHERS SINCE NEW YORK

1893

CHICHESTER, WEST SUSSEX

cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Meighoo, Sean, author. Title: The end of the West and other cautionary tales / Sean Meighoo. Description: 1 [edition]. | New York, NY : Columbia University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015041593 | ISBN 9780231176729 (cloth : alkaline paper) Subjects: LCSH: Civilization, Western. | Civilization, Western—Philosophy. | Ethnocentrism. | Postcolonialism—Philosophy. | Continental philosophy. | Culture—Study and teaching. | Philosophy—History. | Intellectual life—History. | Teleology. | East and West. Classification: LCC CB245 .M434 2016 | DDC 909/.09821—dc23 LC

record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015041593

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 C O V E R D E S I G N : H E A D S O F S TA T E

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

To my parents, Cynthia and Peter Meighoo, for all the times that they have asked me when my book would be published and to my partner, Deboleena Roy, and our children, Kheyal and Koan Roy-Meighoo, for all the times that they have made me stop to celebrate the slow and fitful progress of my manuscript with them— the celebrations, I hope, are not over yet.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction

ix xi

PA R T I THE END OF THE WEST

1. The Black Athena Debate

1

9

Bernal and His Critics 9 Deconstructing “Roots” 29

PA R T I I FROM TELEOLOGY TO NEGATIVE TELEOLOGY

2. The Phenomenological Turn 49 Husserl and the Spiritual Shape of Europe Heidegger and the Opening 60

49

43

viii

CONTENTS

3. The Ethical Turn 70 Levinas and Orientation 70 Derrida and “Globalatinization” 84

PA R T I I I FROM CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY TO POSTCOLONIAL THEORY

109

117

4. The Critique of Representation Said and Orientalism

117 133

Mohanty and Western Feminism

5. The Defense of Difference Bhabha and the Third Space

150 150

Trinh and the Third World Woman 163

PA R T I V THE LIMITS OF ANTIETHNOCENTRISM

6. The Beatles in India 185 Help! 185 Hyperbolic Representation 192

Conclusion Notes

219 223

Bibliography 239 Index 247

179

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THANKS TO MY COLLEAGUES AT BOTH EMORY UNIVERSITY and San Diego State University who have supported my work in one way or another during the past ten years, even if they have since come to regret it: Huma Ahmed-Ghosh, Peter Atterton, Deepika Bahri, Steven Barbone, Geoffrey Bennington, the late Rudolph P. Byrd, Kevin Corrigan, Jonathan K. Crane, Anne Donadey, C. Aiden Downey, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Sander L. Gilman, Jonathan Goldberg, Elizabeth Goodstein, Naama Harel, Lynne Huffer, John Johnston, Howard Kushner, Irene Lara, John Lysaker, Elissa Marder, Noëlle McAfee, Andrew J. Mitchell, Michael Moon, William A. Nericcio, Walter Reed, Benjamin Reiss, Pamela Scully, Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, Chris Werry, Deborah Elise White, Cynthia Willett, Elizabeth Wilson, and Yanna Yannakakis. Thanks also to Cecelia Cancellaro at Idea Architects for helping me with my book proposal, to Wendy Lochner and Christine Dunbar at Columbia University Press for walking me through the publishing process, and to both anonymous readers for their generous comments on my initial manuscript draft. And finally, thanks to the Emory College of Arts and Sciences and the Laney Graduate School for providing subvention funds to cover the indexing costs of this book.

INTRODUCTION

A N E W E T H N O C E N T R I S M H A S R E C E N T LY B E C O M E P R E VA L E N T in certain intellectual quarters. But what is most striking about this new ethnocentrism is that it is presented as a critique of ethnocentrism. Over the course of the past century, the entire Western tradition has been subjected to a radical interrogation within continental philosophy. It has been claimed that underlying the search for truth that occupies all Western thought, from the ancient Greeks to modern European thinkers, is a profound ethnocentrism, an essentially Western ethnocentrism by which the culturally specific problem of truth is given universal significance. The end of an era—or to use both Martin Heidegger’s and Jacques Derrida’s term of preference, the end of an “epoch”—has thus been declared. What is really at stake in the end of philosophy, the end of history, and even the end of “man” is the end of the West itself. Twentieth-century continental philosophy has been marked, then, by the turn from a historical teleology of the West to what I would call a “negative teleology”—that is, by the turn from a discourse that celebrates the historical and technological progress of the West to a counterdiscourse that laments its cultural and spiritual decline. More recently still, over the past few decades, this negative teleology has

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been reappropriated within postcolonial theory. Insofar as postcolonial theory endorses the radical critique of Western ethnocentrism that has been formulated within continental philosophy, it continues to rely on a teleological concept of the West, even if this concept now operates in a “negative” mode. The end of the West has thus become a fundamental precept of continental philosophy and postcolonial theory alike. In this book, I want to argue that this radical critique of Western ethnocentrism presumes another form of ethnocentrism—more subtle, perhaps, but all the more persistent. For what this critique presumes is that there is a “West” to begin with. This Western tradition is ostensibly constituted by a continuous line of thought extending from the ancient Greeks to modern European thinkers, a tradition that has remained impervious to all nonWestern traditions. What I would suggest instead is that this Western tradition has been punctured by innumerable points of contact with other intellectual traditions as well as by innumerable points of rupture within. In other words, there is no “West,” at least not in the sense in which it has been conceived as an altogether unique and distinctly privileged event or course of events within world history. Of course, this is also to say that there is no “East” or any other tradition in which we might situate ourselves completely outside the West, as it were. Neither East nor West can furnish the theoretical precepts for the critique of ethnocentrism that so many continental philosophers and postcolonial theorists have recently attempted to offer. It is in a double sense, then, that I have titled this book The End of the West and Other Cautionary Tales. In one sense, I want to extend the radical critique of Western ethnocentrism that has been so forcefully articulated within twentieth-century continental philosophy and postcolonial theory. But in another sense, I also want to question the intrinsically teleological concept of the West on which this very critique is premised. For if this declaration on the end of the West is to provide an effective critique of ethnocentrism, then it can no longer serve the purpose of establishing a new beginning for the concept of the West itself. This book is divided into four parts, containing a total of six chapters in addition to this introduction and a short conclusion. In part I, I present my own declaration of sorts on the end of the West. Rather than simply announcing the end of Western ethnocentrism, I argue that the very concept of the West must be dismantled. In chapter 1, I attend critically to what

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has become known as “the Black Athena debate,” an intellectual controversy that was initially sparked by the publication of the first volume of Martin Bernal’s multivolume work Black Athena. Bernal proposes not only that ancient Greek civilization was profoundly indebted to ancient Egyptian and Phoenician civilization but also that the modern theory of the Hellenic origins of Western civilization was itself an invention of nineteenth-century European scholarship—a theory, moreover, to which even the ancient Greeks did not subscribe. Following the appearance of the second volume of Black Athena, the collected volume Black Athena Revisited was published, comprising twenty essays in which Bernal’s work was sharply criticized for its allegedly poor scholarship and ideological agenda. A number of related publications have since appeared, including Bernal’s response to his critics, Black Athena Writes Back, as well as the third and last volume of Black Athena. In this chapter of my book, however, I do not attempt to contribute any historical evidence to Bernal’s case but instead to discern what is at stake in this ongoing debate. I argue that the significance of Bernal’s Black Athena lies not so much in its stated aim to locate “the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization” as in its deconstructive effects on the very idea of historical or cultural origins or “roots.” I suggest that the Black Athena debate concerns not only the concept of the West but also the concept of the origin. It is only by dismantling the origin of the West, then, that my own argument on the end of the West averts the establishment of yet another beginning. In part II, I introduce my argument on the turn from teleology to negative teleology in twentieth-century continental philosophy. I suggest that the discourses of teleology and negative teleology are fully complicit with each other insofar as they both rely on the intrinsically teleological concept of the West even if the Western tradition is generally denigrated in the discourse of negative teleology. In chapter 2, I trace the turn from teleology to negative teleology in a close reading of some key texts by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, marking what I consider the first articulation of negative teleology in continental philosophy. In chapter 3, I trace this turn again in a close reading of some key texts by Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, marking what I consider the most powerful reiteration of negative teleology in continental philosophy. Read together, these two chapters thus call into question not only the radical inversion of teleology into negative teleology but also the intellectual progress that is widely assumed to have

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been made in continental philosophy from Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenological investigations to Levinas’s and Derrida’s ethical interventions. Recalling Levinas’s dictum that “ethics precedes ontology,” I suggest instead that ethics repeats phenomenology. The ethnocentric teleology that informs Husserl’s phenomenology is the same ethnocentric teleology that informs Levinas’s ethics of alterity, just as the negative teleology that is articulated in its prototypical form in Heidegger’s destruction of ontology is, to some extent surely, the same negative teleology that is articulated in Derrida’s deconstruction. There is, then, a profoundly unethical opening to ethics as such. For the ethical subject of continental philosophy is none other than the historical subject of the West. In part III, I continue my argument on the turn from teleology to negative teleology in twentieth-century continental philosophy by addressing the reappropriation of negative teleology within postcolonial theory. I suggest that the very emergence of postcolonial theory has been made possible by what is admittedly the strongly compelling discourse of negative teleology. However, rather than setting my focus on the concept of the West itself, I attend to the critique of representation and the accompanying defense of difference that have been extended from continental philosophy to postcolonial theory. In chapter 4, I consider the postcolonial critique of representation in a close reading of some key texts by Edward W. Said and Chandra Talpade Mohanty. Both Said and Mohanty claim that representation constitutes a form of power that is unique to the Western tradition, thus reiterating the discourse of negative teleology. In chapter 5, I further consider the postcolonial defense of difference in a close reading of some key texts by Homi K. Bhabha and Trinh T. Minh-ha. Presuming the claim that representation is indeed unique to the Western tradition, both Bhabha and Trinh maintain that difference in its most radical sense presents a form of resistance to this tradition. Read together, these two chapters thus pose the challenge of dismantling the negative teleology of the West on which postcolonial theory has in large part been based. Of course, I pose this challenge only from within the intellectual space that these postcolonial thinkers themselves have cleared. These two chapters also call into question the extension of negative teleology from continental philosophy to postcolonial feminist theory more specifically. As both Mohanty’s and Trinh’s work demonstrates, the negative teleology of the West has been reappropriated

INTRODUCTION

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within postcolonial feminist theory in order to indict Western feminist discourse. The postcolonial woman is thus cast as the exemplary non-Western subject who resists all representation and bears true difference in herself. Within postcolonial feminist theory, then, the reappropriation of negative teleology signals the end of Western man as well as the end of Western woman. In part IV, I attempt to address some of the implications of my argument on the end of the West. Rather than merely endorsing the strategy of antiethnocentrism that guides both twentieth-century continental philosophy and postcolonial theory, I advocate a performative politics of representation that not only would call attention to the illocutionary or iterative force that generates the concept of the West itself but might also provide us with some tactics for displacing it. In chapter 6, I shift my focus from academic discourse to popular music and film culture, a field in which this performative politics of representation seems to have been put into play somewhat more effectively. I attend particularly to the much celebrated collaboration between “Eastern” and “Western” artists that impacted popular music so greatly in the second half of the twentieth century, a collaboration that has often been glossed by the phrase “the Beatles in India.” I am especially interested, however, in the Beatles’ initial encounter with Indian music and religion during the making of their second film, Help!, a comical spoof of the spy-thriller film genre that deals freely in racial and cultural stereotypes of the “East”—an encounter that took place before any of the Beatles had ever set foot in India. Although these stereotypes of Eastern worshippers, thugs, and villains in Help! certainly seem to lend themselves to the charge of ethnocentrism if not outright racism, I suggest that a more careful viewing of this film reveals a process of subversion at work in which stereotypical Western representations of the East are themselves parodied. Moving beyond the strategy of antiethnocentrism, a strategy that entirely avoids the representation of “different cultures,” as it were, the sort of transcultural engagement that is staged by the director and screenwriters of Help! instead confronts the unavoidable perils of representation, both within and between these supposedly different cultures. Rather than reject representation altogether, then, I make the appeal for what I would like to call a “hyperbolic” practice of representation—a representation of representation, a practice of representation in which the concept of the West

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is displaced by its own excessive repetition. Undermining the discourse of cultural purity wherever it might be found, my argument on the end of the West thus insists on the irreducibly hybrid composition of all cultural forms, the Western intellectual tradition included. Needless to say, I do not attempt to offer an exhaustive survey or sweeping account of the concept of the West in all its historical and cultural determinations—a very daunting if not impossible task in any case, it seems to me, at least within the parameters of a book like this. Rather, I am concerned more precisely with the discourse or counterdiscourse on the “end of the West” as such, focusing on a purposefully delimited range of discursive sites within which the teleological concept of the West has been reaffirmed, repudiated, or otherwise reiterated—none of which, of course, necessarily precludes the others. Spanning continental philosophy and postcolonial theory, classical studies and cultural studies, my argument is not confined to any disciplinary subject area or regulated by any disciplinary method but guided instead by what I am calling the “negative teleology” of the West itself, traversing these various sites across academic discourse and popular culture alike. Far from setting academic discourse above and apart from popular culture or the other way around, for that matter, my argument draws attention to the mutually generative relations between all of these discursive sites through which the teleological concept of the West is produced and circulated, reproduced and consumed. What I hope to accomplish in this book at the very least, then, is to problematize the concept of the West that is so readily dispatched in even the most “progressive” contemporary scholarly discourses. This concept makes what is perhaps its most familiar appearance today in the ubiquitous tag phrase “in the West” that is used to qualify various critical projects in philosophy, history, literary criticism, and cultural theory—the history of truth “in the West,” the regime of representation “in the West,” the deployment of sexuality “in the West”—critical projects, moreover, to which I am quite sympathetic. Faithfully adhering to the strategy of antiethnocentrism, this tag phrase is intended, without any doubt on my part, both to assign some cultural specificity to these various critical projects themselves and to revoke any claim to intellectual authority over different cultural traditions. In other words, contemporary scholars use the phrase “in the West” not only to acknowledge their own cultural location but also to protect

INTRODUCTION

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themselves against any possible accusations of ethnocentrism or cultural imperialism. Yet the effect of this qualifying tag phrase, whether intentional or not, is both to reassert the cultural integrity of the West itself and to dismiss the intellectual complexity of cultural formations that arise outside of this selfsame West. To put it in other words again, contemporary scholars who use the phrase “in the West” not only reinforce the cultural borders of the Western tradition but also excuse themselves from critically engaging with non-Western traditions in their own projects. What I want to offer in this book is thus a deconstructive critique of ethnocentrism as well as antiethnocentrism, of teleology as well as negative teleology, of continental philosophy as well as postcolonial theory. Even if this book only gives its readers pause to think twice before going on to dispatch the concept of the West once more, perhaps in a seemingly innocuous tag phrase, I would be greatly pleased nonetheless to have made some contribution toward this particular end.

THE END OF THE WEST and O T H E R C A U T I O N A RY TA L E S

PA R T I THE END OF THE WEST

THE END OF THE WEST HAS BEEN IN THE AIR FOR QUITE some time now, and yet the meaning of this phrase, this idea, or this event— whatever it is—has still not been decided. The meaning of “the West” itself remains very ambiguous. It is, of course, the name of one of the four cardinal directions, a basic concept of geographical knowledge, a fundamental experience of the world bearing a presumably global validity. It indicates the path of the sun’s daily journey across the sky and the place of its nightly setting on the horizon. The West is thus associated with the end of the day, the final goal or destination point of the sun, the last ray of light. Even in its most common sense, then, the West is an end in itself.1 The cardinal directions are not symmetrical, nor are they neutral. The geographical inscription of the earth as such is the foundational act of all geopolitics. “The West” is also a name given to more properly defined geopolitical formations, although these formations, too, betray an underlying asymmetry. There is the geographical region of West Africa as distinguished from the regions of East Africa, North Africa, and South Africa, the last of which, however, is also the name of a political state—a name, moreover, that became practically synonymous with apartheid during the latter part of the

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twentieth century and that has perhaps still not freed itself from this association. There is the geographical region of West Asia as distinguished from the regions of East Asia and South Asia, notwithstanding the effective absence of any comparable region bearing the name “North Asia,” a name that remains much less widely used even than “West Asia” itself, which seems to have been rather deliberately coined in order to replace—as if things were not already complicated enough—the “Near” or “Middle East.” There is also—or rather there was—the state of West Germany, as the Federal Republic of Germany was commonly called, distinguished from East Germany, as the German Democratic Republic was similarly called, along with the city of West Berlin as distinguished from East Berlin, until the spontaneous destruction of the Berlin Wall and the formal reunification of Germany toward the end of the twentieth century—a reunification, however, that was much less an integration between West and East Germany than an absorption of East Germany into West Germany, which is now simply called “Germany.” And within the United States, there is the state of West Virginia as distinguished from Virginia, from which it seceded during the Civil War after the state of Virginia had already seceded from the Union, which was also called “the North”—to further complicate matters once again—and joined the Confederacy, which was also called “the South.” “The West” has also long stood on its own as a name for large historical and cultural blocs, detaching itself, as it were, from any more substantive geographical place-names. Since the end of World War II and its political aftermath, the West has stood for the alliance struck between the United States and the largely western European states represented by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), in direct opposition to the East, which stood for the alliance struck between the Soviet Union and the eastern European states represented by the Warsaw Pact. The West has thus become synonymous with capitalism, individualism, and democracy, and the East with communism, totalitarianism, and bureaucracy. Following the nearly simultaneous dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union itself toward the end of the twentieth century, it seems that the West and its ideological associations have not only survived the collapse of the East but indeed been vindicated by it. But the West has long stood alone, more or less apart from any such Eastern counterpart, since well before the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Iron Curtain. The West also stands for

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the American and Canadian frontier lands that were settled after the colonies on the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean and the St. Lawrence River had achieved political independence. While the territorial expansion of both states required the subjugation and forced relocation of the indigenous populations who already lived on these lands, it promised the beginning of a new life for the American and Canadian settlers who made the westward pilgrimage, as though they had been guided there by the sun itself. Even today, this promise of the West continues to lure “Old World” citizens to the “New World” and New World citizens ever farther westward. The meaning of “the West” that interests me in this book, however, refers to an even longer historical and cultural tradition, a tradition beginning in ancient Greece, transmitted through ancient Rome and medieval Europe, and ending in modern Europe and its civilizational outposts in North America and Australia—a civilization that provides the very measure of civilization. This tradition of the West is marked by its historical continuity and cultural coherence, having been united by an indissoluble bond that was originally forged by the ancient Greeks with the invention of philosophy, science, and democracy all at once, a truly singular event that has come to be known, commonly enough, as the “Greek miracle.” “The West” as European tradition, then, is inevitably implicated with all the other meanings of “the West” that we have just teased apart—the West as capitalist bloc, the West as American frontier, even the West as cardinal direction. The West binds together reason, progress, and freedom in a way that remains absolutely unique to itself. The West is thus clearly distinguished from the East, although, again, this distinction attests to their decidedly asymmetrical formation. The East is marked precisely by its lack of historical continuity and cultural coherence or, indeed, by the absence of “history” and “culture” altogether—at least in the proper sense of these terms—by its essentially barbaric traditions, by its merely rudimentary forms of civilization at best. This distinction between the East and the West, between the Orient and the Occident, between Asia and Europe endures in spite of their frequently shifting geographical boundaries, for, once again, the distinction is geopolitical through and through. After all, there is no strictly geographical or geological basis for the division between the continents of Asia and Europe, a distinction that might seem to be the least politically charged of all. By all accounts, Asia and Europe are formed from a common tectonic plate,

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the Eurasian Plate, which itself excludes, however, the Arabian and Indian Peninsulas, both of which are formed from separate plates and yet considered “subcontinents” rather than continents themselves. Europe is not, then, a purely geographical concept—whatever that might mean—but an intrinsically geopolitical concept that denies any historical trace or cultural hybridity between the European tradition and non-European traditions, on one hand, and conceals all the historical discontinuities and cultural incoherencies that undermine this ostensibly singular European tradition, on the other. The geographical concept of Europe has perhaps outlived the philological concept of the Aryan and the anthropological concept of the Caucasian, but it thrives on their remains. “The end of the West” thus alludes to many things at once, without simply meaning any one of these things. Yet some of these allusions are obviously more salient than others. There seems to be little sense in declaring the end of a cardinal direction inasmuch as all four cardinal directions remain rather instrumental for any long-distance navigation, whether by land, by sea, or by air, and inasmuch as the sun still continues to travel across the sky along its westward path. And there seems to be only little more sense in contemplating the end of a geographical place-name insofar as nomenclature is an essentially arbitrary procedure even if a change in name is itself related to more significant geopolitical shifts. But some of the recent declarations on the end of the West do indeed concern such momentous geopolitical transformations. The transatlantic alliance between western Europe and the United States does appear to have been seriously compromised not only by the ongoing incorporation of both western and eastern European states into the European Union since its establishment in the last decade of the twentieth century but also by the consistently unilateral actions of the United States during the first decade of the twentyfirst century, actions that flagrantly disregarded the international mandates of both NATO and the United Nations. And the mythical freedom of the western frontier is hardly tenable any longer, if it ever was in the first place, with the increasing corporate accumulation of agricultural lands in the West itself over the past few decades as the latest turn in globalization brings the dubious benefits of the Green Revolution back home. However, the meaning of “the end of the West” that especially interests me concerns what appears in many ways to be the imminent loss of

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European as well as American economic, political, and cultural hegemony throughout the world. Certainly, the Western colonial and later neocolonial social order was continually upset over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by popular movements for political independence in the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, and Africa; by massive waves of migration from these same regions to Europe and North America themselves; and by the gradual emergence of many non-Western nations as important economic and political forces in the global arena. All these events seem to have culminated by the beginning of the twenty-first century to threaten, if not to have actually produced, the very end of Western civilization. “The end of the West” has become something of a rallying cry, then, both a cry of distress and a cry to action, a cry that is often heard not only from the defenders of Western civilization but also from its detractors. For whether it is declared in the name of colonialism or anticolonialism, globalization or antiglobalization, what “the end of the West” announces is that there has already occurred or else will soon occur a decisive rupture or break from the Western tradition, entailing, for better or worse, the dissolution of this great tradition itself. The end of the West in this sense constitutes nothing less than the end of reason, progress, and freedom, whether it comes as boon or bane. And yet does this rallying cry not simply reaffirm the geopolitical concept of the West itself? Is “the end of the West” not just another way of declaring the absolutely unique origin of the West? Has the concept of the West not always contained within itself, from its very beginning, its own end? For what “the end of the West” presumes is that there has indeed existed a historically continuous and culturally coherent Western tradition, beginning in ancient Greece and ending in modern Europe, a long and broad tradition that has nonetheless been bound together by the singular invention of philosophy, science, and democracy—the “Greek miracle”— and set apart from all other historical and cultural traditions by this same event. The end of the West would have thus been preordained at the very origin of the West, the final goal of a tradition destined to extinguish itself by universalizing itself, by emptying itself of all historical and cultural particularity, by imparting its axiomatic values of reason, progress, and freedom to the rest of the world. This concept of the end, far from undermining the historical teleology of the West, would only fulfill it. Even the radical

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denunciation of Western civilization, an end so often declared in the name of antiethnocentrism, would remain complicit with the most ethnocentric concept of the West. This book, then, attempts to respond to the question that is surely left hanging after our short exposition on the end of the West: Is there any sense of the end that would not conform so readily to the historical teleology of the West? Such an end would not stop at merely declaring the end of the West but turn to dismantling the origin of the West as well. It would not only trace the emergence of philosophy, science, and democracy back beyond the “Greek miracle” to other historical and cultural traditions but also check the privilege that is routinely accorded to these civilizational pursuits in defining the Western tradition itself. It would not seek primarily to disprove the actual existence of the West but instead to provide some account of the performative force by which the West is generated. “The end of the West,” at least in the sense that I want to consider it in this book, would not simply mean that there is no longer any such thing as the West but rather that there has never been any West as such. It is thus only fitting that I should begin my book not at the end but at the origin of the West, the “Greek miracle” itself, an origin that has recently become subject to much scholarly dispute as well as to more public scrutiny but that, even so, remains no less fabulous. In chapter 1, I turn my attention to the publication of Martin Bernal’s massive three-volume work Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization and the widespread controversy surrounding it, sparking a phenomenon in the world of academic publishing and public scholarship that has become widely known as “the Black Athena debate.” Bernal presented his general argument in the first volume of Black Athena, proposing not only that ancient Greek civilization was profoundly indebted to both ancient Egyptian and Phoenician civilization but also that the modern theory of the Hellenic origins of Western civilization was itself a rather late invention of racist European scholarship. Although I do not intend to contribute any historical evidence as such to Bernal’s argument, I do hope to discern more precisely what was at stake in the ensuing controversy. I suggest that the lasting significance of Bernal’s work lies not in its stated aim to locate “the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization,” as it is put in the subtitle of Black Athena itself, as much as in its deconstructive effects on any idea of historical or cultural origins or “roots”

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at all. In other words, what is at stake in the Black Athena debate is not only the concept of the West but also the concept of the origin. For whether Bernal and his critics articulate it quite so clearly or not, the concept of the West is an origin as much as an end in itself, an intrinsically teleological concept that requires both a starting point and a final goal, the very movement between which defines all history. What I am saying, then, is that to declare the end of the West without attempting to dismantle the origin of the West as well is merely to provide the West with a new beginning. In the end, of course, this task of dismantling the teleological concept of “the West” may perhaps turn out to be just as difficult as dismantling the cardinal direction that goes by the same name.

1 T H E B L A C K A T H E NA D E B A T E

Bernal and His Critics The first volume of Martin Bernal’s work Black Athena was published in 1987 under the even more provocative title The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985. In his ambitious introduction to this volume, not only does Bernal present his argument on the construction or “fabrication” of what he calls the Aryan Model of ancient Greek civilization by European scholars over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but he also offers an extensive outline of the remaining two projected volumes of Black Athena, under the working titles Greece European or Levantine? The Egyptian and West Semitic Components of Greek Civilization and Solving the Riddle of the Sphinx and Other Studies in Egypto-Greek Mythology, respectively. While the titles as well as the contents of these two volumes would undergo some significant revisions during the nineteen years that it eventually took for their publication—the now completed three volumes of Black Athena standing as the centerpiece of his life’s work—it is the argument that Bernal presents in the very opening pages of his introduction to the first volume that provides the most succinct if not compelling statement of his entire project. Of course, Bernal had been working on this project for many years before

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the appearance of the first volume, floating the name that he coined for his project in a couple of his previous journal articles, “Black Athena: The African and Levantine Roots of Greece” and “Black Athena Denied: The Tyranny of Germany Over Greece,” published in 1985 and 1986, respectively. And before he took on this project, his book Chinese Socialism to 1907 had been published in 1976, focusing on the field of modern Chinese political history, in which he had received his scholarly training at Cambridge and which he had also been teaching at Cornell.1 After the appearance of the first volume of Black Athena, however, Bernal would become one of the most public figures in the contemporary “culture wars,” immersing himself in many narrowly specialized and yet highly politicized debates spanning modern historiography and ancient history, classical studies and archaeology, linguistics and dendrochronology. Well aware of the intellectual audacity of his project, Bernal opens his introduction to the first volume with an epigraph taken from Thomas S. Kuhn’s work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions on the role that scholars who are new to their disciplines have in creating paradigm shifts. Bernal cites this passage in “an attempt,” as he puts it, “to justify [his] presumption, as someone trained in Chinese history, to write on subjects so far removed from [his] original field.”2 He proposes that although his intervention into these scholarly fields does not constitute a paradigm shift “in the strict sense,” the shift in rethinking the formation of ancient Greek civilization that is entailed by his project is “none the less fundamental” (1:1). Indeed, what Bernal advocates is not a new paradigm at all but rather a return to the old paradigm, or what he calls the Ancient Model, which was itself the dominant paradigm for more than two thousand years before the emergence of the Aryan Model—a paradigm, moreover, to which the ancient Greeks themselves subscribed: These volumes are concerned with two models of Greek history: one viewing Greece as essentially European or Aryan, and the other seeing it as Levantine, on the periphery of the Egyptian and Semitic cultural area. I call them the “Aryan” and the “Ancient” models. The “Ancient Model” was the conventional view among Greeks in the Classical and Hellenistic ages. According to it, Greek culture had arisen as the result of colonization . . . by Egyptians and Phoenicians who had civilized the native

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inhabitants. Furthermore, Greeks had continued to borrow heavily from Near Eastern cultures. . . . [T]he Aryan Model . . . developed only during the first half of the 19th century. In its earlier or “Broad” form, the new model denied the truth of the Egyptian settlements and questioned those of the Phoenicians. What I call the “Extreme” Aryan Model, which flourished during the twin peaks of anti-Semitism in the 1890s and again in the 1920s and 30s, denied even the Phoenician cultural influence. According to the Aryan Model, there had been an invasion from the north—unreported in ancient tradition—which had overwhelmed the local “Aegean” or “Pre-Hellenic” culture. Greek civilization is seen as the result of the mixture of the Indo-European-speaking Hellenes and their indigenous subjects. (1:1–2)

Rather than a simple reversion to the Ancient Model, however, what Bernal advocates more specifically is a “return to the Ancient Model, but with some revisions” (1:2), or what he calls the “Revised Ancient Model.” This model accepts the main thesis of the Ancient Model that ancient Greek civilization was formed largely by Egyptian and Phoenician colonization efforts and subsequent cultural influences from the Levantine world, but it also admits an important proposition from the Aryan Model that ancient Greek language was based primarily on the Indo-European language that was introduced to the region by northern invaders (1:2). Furthermore, the Revised Ancient Model eliminates two very questionable hypotheses on which the Aryan Model relies—namely, first, the existence of an enigmatic “pre-Hellenic” culture that presumably supplied the missing source for all linguistic and other cultural elements of ancient Greek civilization that could not be traced back to any Indo-European source and, second, the stubborn persistence of an interpretatio Graeca that supposedly led even the ancient Greeks themselves to attribute so many of their own cultural innovations to outside Egyptian and Phoenician influences (1:7). Bernal is also well aware of the political implications of his project, but, instead of shying away from them, he treats the relationship between politics and scholarship thematically, beginning with his own work. Still in the very opening pages of his introduction, he ventures the suggestion that his argument on the formation of ancient Greek civilization challenges not

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only the dominant scholarly opinion on the unique historical origins of the Western tradition itself—an opinion that has become very widespread in the public imagination as well—but also the much cherished assumption that the scholarly discourse of modern historiography has remained impervious to the political pursuits of imperialism, slavery, and racism: If I am right in urging the overthrow of the Aryan Model and its replacement by the Revised Ancient one, it will be necessary not only to rethink the fundamental bases of “Western Civilization” but also to recognize the penetration of racism and “continental chauvinism” into all our historiography, or philosophy of writing history. The Ancient Model had no major “internal” deficiencies, or weaknesses in explanatory power. It was overthrown for external reasons. For 18th- and 19th-century Romantics and racists it was simply intolerable for Greece, which was seen not merely as the epitome of Europe but also as its pure childhood, to have been the result of the mixture of native Europeans and colonizing Africans and Semites. Therefore the Ancient Model had to be overthrown and replaced by something more acceptable. (1:2, italics in original)

Bernal thus devotes the greater part of the first volume of Black Athena to demonstrating in meticulous detail the subordination of Egypt and the elevation of Greece in modern European thought from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, a remarkable intellectual shift that was informed equally by the Renaissance revival of Christianity, the Enlightenment notion of progress, the emergence of colonial racism, and the romantic belief in “roots” (1:189–223). However, while he makes a strong argument that the Ancient Model was rejected for largely political reasons rather than for strictly scholarly ones, he is careful to point out that the Aryan Model is not to be simply shunned, either. He proposes somewhat more modestly that the objective of Black Athena is to submit both the Aryan Model and the Revised Ancient Model for rigorous scholarly interrogation: “If it can be shown that the Ancient Model was overthrown for externalist reasons, its supersession by the Aryan Model can no longer be attributed to any explanatory superiority of the latter; therefore it is legitimate to place the two models in competition or to try to reconcile them” (1:10). Leaving his own interrogation of these competing models for later volumes, then, Bernal closes his introduction to the first volume by returning to the political

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implications of his project, calling attention to the pertinence of contemporary scholarship on the historical origins of the West to the political exercise of European ethnocentrism: “The scholarly purpose of [all three volumes of Black Athena is] to open up new areas of research to women and men with far better qualifications than I have. The political purpose of Black Athena is, of course, to lessen European cultural arrogance” (1:73). The first volume of Black Athena was remarkably successful, garnering much scholarly attention for itself as well as a more popular readership. Although critical reviews of this volume were far from uniformly positive, the strong affirmation that it did receive from its most enthusiastic readers was corroborated when it won a Socialist Review Book Award in 1987 and an American Book Award in 1990. Furthermore, in addition to the numerous television and radio talk shows on which Bernal appeared, a television documentary, Black Athena, was produced for the British series The Bandung File on Channel Four in 1991, focusing on Bernal’s work and its tumultuous reception in both the United Kingdom and the United States.3 But what remains perhaps the most significant record of the vexed yet promising scholarly engagement with the first volume of Black Athena was the publication of a special issue of the classical studies journal Arethusa in 1989 under the title “The Challenge of ‘Black Athena,’ ” which was itself based on the Presidential Panel of the 120th Annual Meeting of the American Philological Association (APA) held earlier that same year. The special issue of Arethusa features an introductory essay by Molly Myerowitz Levine, who guest-edited the issue and also organized the special panel at the APA meeting; three essays that were based on the panel presentations; two essays that were specially solicited for the issue; three short responses that were presumably taken from the discussion following the panel presentations; and Bernal’s substantial response essay to the panel presentations and solicited essays. Again, this special issue, itself spanning history, archaeology, linguistics, and classical studies, does not present any unanimous scholarly opinion on Bernal’s work. As Levine puts it in her introductory essay, “The Challenge of Black Athena to Classics Today,” “These papers not only represent a variety of disciplines, they also offer a wide range of responses [to Bernal]: genial embrace, tentative handshake, decidedly cold shoulder, punch in the nose.”4 Yet even the sharpest criticisms of Bernal’s work that are offered over the course of the issue are presented in what may

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generally be described as the respectful terms of scholarly debate, if only, perhaps, because of Levine’s benevolent editorial guidance. Certainly, in her introduction Levine herself calls on her fellow classicists for an “expert and fair evaluation of Professor Bernal’s arguments and approach,” with “less name-calling and more accessible explanations.”5 Meanwhile, Bernal spends the opening part of his response essay, “Black Athena and the APA,” puzzling over the scholarly attention so generously lavished on his work by the classics establishment, represented in this case by the APA itself, and in so timely a manner. Playfully deprecating himself in the third person, he expresses his frankly “bewildered” sense of gratitude: “According to Bernal, when reacting to a fundamental challenge, disciplines first of all ignore, then dismiss peremptorily, and only finally attack the challenge. . . . All this basically shows is how crude and oversimplified Bernal can be.”6 Indeed, the scholarly goodwill that is evinced throughout this special issue of Arethusa often verges on academic self-parody. In his response, Bernal thanks Levine “for having organized [the APA] panel and for her fair and accurate introduction to [his] work and its implications” and thanks all the participants on the panel “for their kind words and penetrating criticisms”; similarly, in the closing sentence of her introduction, Levine presumes to speak on behalf of the very classics establishment that Bernal indicts in Black Athena: “I—and all members of the establishment—can only thank him for making his case.”7 It is also in this issue that Bernal, apparently encouraged by the success of the first volume of Black Athena, announces his intention to expand his multivolume work from a “trilogy” to a “tetralogy,” as Levine calls it in her introduction,8 an intention that he would later have to reconsider. The second volume of Black Athena was published in 1991, under the title The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence. In the meantime, Bernal’s book Cadmean Letters: The Transmission of the Alphabet to the Aegean and Further West Before 1400 B.C., a shorter work on the ancient Greek alphabet that was generated from the Black Athena project, had also been published in 1990.9 In his introduction to the second volume of Black Athena, Bernal reflects on the mixed reception of his first volume, both reiterating his general argument on the Revised Ancient Model of Greek civilization and indicating the necessary revisions that he had since made to this argument. He justifies the appearance of a second volume of his work by explaining

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that even the more critical reviews of his first volume largely conceded to him the point that modern historiography has been crucially informed by European ethnocentrism, which was, after all, the main point of his argument in The Fabrication of Ancient Greece: “In the many reviews of the first volume, there has been some skepticism about the utility or ‘truth’ of the Revised Ancient Model I propose. On the other hand, there has been a general acceptance of my historiographical scheme and of my contention that most of the men who established the Aryan Model were—to put it bluntly—racists and anti-Semites. There has also been a recognition that these attitudes could have affected their writing of history. I take this reception as a licence to continue my project.”10 Bernal thus resumes his argument in the second volume of Black Athena, but he does so only after enumerating three modifications to the detailed description of his project that he offered in the first volume. First, the archaeological and documentary evidence that he had hoped to present in two chapters now comprised the entire second volume, and, second, the “disciplinary rigour” with which he had hoped to present his evidence was now replaced by a “thick description” drawing many forms of evidence together (2:2). But third and most important, obviously emboldened by the widespread controversy that already surrounded his work, Bernal states that he has now retracted his more modest proposal to submit both the Aryan Model and the Revised Ancient Model for equal consideration: “I have given up the mask of impartiality between the two models. Given my commitment to the Revised Ancient Model, I had always known that this would be difficult. In the event, I have found it impossible. Now, instead of judging their competitive heuristic utility in a ‘neutral’ way, I shall try to show how much more completely and convincingly the Revised Ancient Model can describe and explain the development and nature of Ancient Greek civilization than can the Aryan Model” (2:3). In addition to these three modifications, Bernal indicates a couple more significant revisions to his argument over the course of the second volume of Black Athena. Later in his introduction, he proposes another revision to the Ancient Model—the first revision being his admission that ancient Greek language was based on an Indo-European language from the north—by arguing for an earlier dating of the Hyksos colonization of the Aegean, one of the central episodes through which ancient Egyptian and Phoenician

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civilization was transmitted to ancient Greece (2:41). And much farther into the second volume, Bernal also admits that in his first volume he relied too heavily on the ancient Greek model according to which cultural transmission occurred primarily through military conquest, now turning his attention toward the more peaceful cultural exchange between the Levantine and Aegean worlds, an exchange that was itself secured, however, by the long-standing Egyptian political hegemony over the region (2:362). While the second volume of Black Athena seems to have lost some of the popular readership that the first volume enjoyed, it certainly attracted just as much scholarly attention to itself and, along with it, an increasingly notorious reputation. Surely enough, Bernal had anticipated this reaction, if not invited it himself, in his conclusion to the second volume. Summarizing the archaeological and documentary evidence for the historical veracity of the Revised Ancient Model, he welcomes the rather predictable accusation that he advances his argument in this volume “only by committing what many modern scholars would consider to be ‘outrages’ ” (2:522), further promising to continue this “outrageous” method in his next volume on the linguistic evidence: “Indeed, in many ways, this [second] volume is more outrageous than the first. . . . [H]owever, the ‘outrages’ in this book are nothing to those I propose for the next volume” (2:522, 527). Nonetheless, Bernal’s second volume also managed to attract a popular readership, despite its more narrowly specialized concentration. Another television documentary, Who Was Cleopatra?, was produced for the American series Archaeology on The Learning Channel in 1992, focusing on the response to Bernal’s work among classicists and archaeologists.11 However, the notable differences between the two television documentaries signaled a general shift in the reception of Bernal’s work, from the more promising engagement with his first volume to the more defensive reaction against his second volume. Whereas the hour-long British documentary Black Athena that aired in 1991 was produced by the political journalist Tariq Ali and featured interviews with Bernal and Levine as well as with the postcolonial literary scholar Edward W. Said, the half-hour-long American documentary Who Was Cleopatra? that aired in 1992 featured more obviously staged and scripted scenes with Bernal and was hosted by the actor John Rhys-Davies, who was and perhaps still is best known for his role as Sallah in Raiders of

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the Lost Ark, the Egyptian friend and colleague of the all-American archaeologist Indiana Jones. And whereas the documentary Black Athena carefully addressed such issues as the impact of racism on modern historiography, the cultural discourse of “roots,” the mixed reception of Bernal’s work, and its critical appropriation by Afrocentrists, Who Was Cleopatra? limited its attention to the archaeological evidence for the ancient Egyptian colonization of Greece or the lack thereof and to the racial composition of the ancient Egyptians themselves, as its title suggests. Of course, these differences were in some sense warranted by the shift in Bernal’s own work from his focus on historiography in the first volume to his focus on archaeology in the second. But what is most telling about the second documentary is that the scripted narration itself simply reiterates the Aryan Model of ancient Greek civilization from beginning to end, entirely missing the point of Bernal’s historiographical argument. Who Was Cleopatra? opens by starkly contrasting ancient Egyptian and Greek civilizations in a passage voiced by Rhys-Davies over panning shots of the Pyramids, the Sphinx, and the Parthenon: “Two ancient great civilizations— one rigid and authoritarian, changeless and unrelenting, [and] the other, spirited, free-thinking, timeless, and original. Could one have inspired the other?” And the documentary closes with a slow zoom-in on Rhys-Davies himself, seated behind a large wooden desk in a bright sunlit den, assuring us that the archaeological evidence plainly shows that the ancient Egyptians were not “black” but “multicultural,” regardless of the strong desire among many African Americans for historical “role models”: “The debate over what role Egypt played in the rise of Greece has raised an incendiary question: Was Egypt black? Does it matter? It matters deeply to many African Americans, searching for role models in the ancient world. Scholars, however, insist that such a notion represents a serious misreading of the archaeological record. The evidence tells us that the Egyptians were a multicultural people [sigh]. Indeed, it may have been the very tapestry of their society that allowed them to achieve so much.” This curious dismissal of Bernal’s work in the name of “multiculturalism” itself was reiterated and only somewhat refined in the heated scholarly response to the second volume of Black Athena. Although Bernal continued to garner much support from scholars across the disciplines, the

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increasingly vehement opposition to his work was consolidated by the publication of Black Athena Revisited in 1996, a collection of twenty essays by twenty-four scholars from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Italy, coedited by Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers, who also contributed the introductory and concluding essays, respectively. Taken together, these essays span all the disciplines that Bernal’s own Black Athena does, but to the collection’s apparent advantage each one also claims to represent the most advanced scholarly expertise in its field. Furthermore, despite the measured tone of scholarly detachment in the collection’s title, all of the essays in Black Athena Revisited are highly critical of Bernal, if not openly hostile toward him. In contrast to the albeit often strained collegiality of the special issue of Arethusa guest-edited by Levine, the essays in Black Athena Revisited seem to have been specially selected by the coeditors or else deliberately cultivated by them for their frankly disparaging comments on Bernal’s work, ranging in character from petty asides to personal attacks. Even a most cursory reading of these essays reveals what appears to be the deep resentment toward Bernal harbored by almost every one of the contributors. In their preface to the collection, Lefkowitz and Rogers call Bernal’s project an “amateur attempt” and point out his own sense of “moral superiority” over classical scholars themselves;12 in her introductory essay, Lefkowitz maintains that Bernal’s argument for the Revised Ancient Model “betrays considerable historiographical naiveté”;13 John Baines finds a “quirk” in Bernal’s habit of identifying modern scholars by their ethnicity;14 on a more restrained note, David O’Connor concludes that Bernal’s propositions on ancient Egyptian influence in the Aegean world are “unpersuasive”;15 raising the tone again, however, Frank J. Yurco bemoans the “tortuous reasoning” that invariably guides Bernal’s attention toward ancient Egyptian influences;16 Kathryn A. Bard detects “racist undertones” in the very title of Bernal’s project, Black Athena;17 Frank M. Snowden Jr. asserts that “Bernal and many Afrocentrists” have conflated ancient Egyptians with modern “blacks” in a “misinterpretation” of the available evidence;18 C. Loring Brace and his colleagues claim that Bernal’s description of ancient Egypt as “fundamentally African” is “misleadingly simplistic”;19 although Sarah P. Morris also believes in a pervasive Near Eastern influence on the Aegean world, she objects to “the fantastic scenarios invented by Bernal” in order to explain this influence;20 Jay H. Jasanoff and Alan Nuss-

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baum call Bernal’s argument for the Revised Ancient Model “an exercise in politically up-to-the-minute wishful thinking”;21 Robert Palter insists that Bernal’s treatment of modern historians of science is based largely on “insult, innuendo, and misrepresentation”;22 Emily T. Vermeule expresses her disappointment in “[Bernal’s] endearingly childlike faith in the absolute historical value of Greek myths”;23 John E. Coleman complains that “[Bernal’s] claims of victimization act as a sort of preemptive strike against potential criticism”;24 Lawrence A. Tritle warns against the “polemical undercurrents and antiquarian-style pursuit of the past” in Bernal’s project;25 Edith Hall suggests that Bernal’s work relies on “an unsophisticated view of myth in general, and [of ] Greek myth in particular”;26 in his second contribution to the collection, Palter accuses Bernal of “distort[ing] the history of [the] scholarly discipline [of Egyptology] for his own political purposes”;27 Robert E. Norton contends that Bernal’s critique of romanticism “has left the domain of ‘mere’ scholarly inquiry and entered the arena of demagoguery”;28 Richard Jenkyns questions whether Bernal’s purported aim “to give African-Americans a share of the credit for Egyptian civilization” is not also Eurocentric;29 although Mario Liverani concurs that modern historiography has been impacted by European imperialism, he laments that “[Bernal’s own] historiography is old-fashioned and contradictory”;30 in a rousing climax to the collection, Rogers decries Bernal as “a false prophet” of “the true gospel of the multicultural foundations of the West”;31 and in his short concluding essay, Rogers, speaking on behalf of both the coeditors in regard to Afrocentrism, “call[s] upon Bernal to reject publically, explicitly, and unambiguously any theories of history which conflate race and culture.”32 This pointed shift in tone from the special issue of Arethusa to Black Athena Revisited is particularly notable in the essays by Snowden and Morris, who contributed to both collections; Morris also appeared in the documentary Black Athena. And yet, disparaging comments and all, the essays in Black Athena Revisited present little more of a scholarly consensus on Bernal’s work than those in the special issue of Arethusa do. Precisely because of each essay’s concentration on its own discipline, not only do most contributors to Black Athena Revisited criticize different aspects of Bernal’s work, but they also accept various arguments that he proposes over the course of his first and second volumes. The task of formulating a scholarly consensus among this rowdy

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bunch, then, falls to the coeditors Lefkowitz and Rogers, both in their joint preface to the collection and in their respective essays. In their preface, Lefkowitz and Rogers acknowledge and moreover seem to celebrate the cultural diversity of the contributors to Black Athena Revisited, establishing a provisional unity among them based only on their scholarly estimation of Bernal’s work: “The authors of the essays in this book are young and old, black and white, male and female, European and American, and, within the United States, from all parts of the country. Together or separately we present no homogeneous point of view. We are united only in our respect for the significance of the questions Bernal raises in Black Athena, and in our conviction that our criticisms of it are offered in the spirit of scholarly endeavor, which must always be to get at the truth, no matter how painful our discoveries may be to any or all of us.”33 Striking a conciliatory tone, Lefkowitz and Rogers even express their gratitude to Bernal, if only for providing them the occasion to disclaim their own ethnocentrism: “Even though most ancient historians and classicists have been critical of many aspects of Bernal’s work, all of us have been stimulated to think creatively and seriously about the questions Bernal has raised, and we are grateful to him for raising them. To have refused to reexamine these issues would have been a sign that we were as Eurocentric and elitist as our critics imagine us to be.”34 Yet Lefkowitz and Rogers repeatedly undermine the more significant intellectual differences between the contributors to Black Athena Revisited, making much use of the ambiguous collective pronoun we throughout their preface, often obfuscating whether they are referring to themselves as the coeditors or to the contributors, to some of the contributors, or to all of them.35 This covert strategy is more clearly stated by Rogers in his concluding essay, “Quo Vadis?” Speaking on behalf of the coeditors, Rogers formulates “a series of questions” that have been raised by Bernal’s work as well as “some preliminary answers” to them based on a summary reading of the essays collected in Black Athena Revisited. Although he admits in a parenthetical remark that there are some intellectual differences among the contributors to the collection, he immediately reduces these differences to a matter of “details”: “These preliminary answers are based upon summaries of the articles edited for this volume (although there are obviously some differences among the contributors about details).” He goes on to provide

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what are the most summary answers indeed to a series of very complicated questions on ancient history, modern historiography, race and culture, and scholarly methodology over the rather short span of some four pages. Furthermore, still presumably speaking on behalf of the coeditors, Rogers states that although he expects Bernal as well as other scholars to disagree with these answers, he “welcome[s] [Bernal’s] response.”36 Of course, this welcome seems to have been worn out rather early, for the coeditors apparently did not invite Bernal to contribute a response to his critics in Black Athena Revisited, a standard scholarly practice in the case of such critical collections and one that Levine had followed in the special issue of Arethusa. But perhaps the most interesting attempt at formulating a scholarly consensus in Black Athena Revisited is undertaken by Lefkowitz in her introductory essay, “Ancient History, Modern Myths.” This essay is a revised version of an article that was originally published in the political journal New Republic in 1992, an article that would also make Lefkowitz one of the most public figures in the contemporary “culture wars,” attracting even more notoriety to herself than Bernal did. Indeed, this article seems to have set Lefkowitz on a new career path, a path that would strangely mirror Bernal’s own intellectual trajectory insofar as her later work defending classical studies against Afrocentrism—with which she closely identified Bernal’s Black Athena—gained her far more attention than her earlier work on women in ancient history and mythology ever had. Expanding on her article for the New Republic, Lefkowitz’s book Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History was also published in 1996, the same year in which Black Athena Revisited appeared. Later on, her book History Lesson: A Race Odyssey was published in 2008, offering her personal reflections on the unsuccessful libel suit that was brought against her by one of her Afrocentric colleagues at Wellesley College, the highly litigious Tony Martin.37 It is thus quite significant that in her introductory essay to Black Athena Revisited, Lefkowitz seeks primarily to place Bernal’s work in the context of Afrocentrism, tracing his intellectual debt to Marcus Garvey, Cheikh Anta Diop, and George G. M. James, the author of Stolen Legacy. Much to her credit, Lefkowitz does not attempt to provide any easy summary of Black Athena Revisited in her introduction, although she does insert some references to other essays in the collection to support her own claims. What

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makes Lefkowitz’s contribution most interesting, however, is the clear distinction that she attempts to establish between history and myth, a distinction that she uses to great effect in the title of her essay, “Ancient History, Modern Myths,” and that she would use again throughout both Not Out of Africa and History Lesson. Running the risk of appearing naive, as she puts it, “in the aftermath of Foucault and poststructuralism,” she nonetheless confidently champions historiography over mythology, fact over fiction, and truth over lies, even against the “noble lie.”38 Yet what the title of her essay suggests and what she actually spends most of her introduction demonstrating in the case of ancient history is that the distinction between history and myth is not so clear after all, that the universal consensus on history has been fragmented into a conflicting plurality of histories, and that modern historiography itself has now been supplanted by ancient mythologies, leaving us this hopelessly anachronistic world of “ancient history” and “modern myths.” In her introductory essay, then, Lefkowitz both establishes and deconstructs the distinction between history and myth, though of course without at all intending to do so. Lefkowitz and Rogers’s persistent attempts to formulate some sort of consensus among the contributors to Black Athena Revisited thus produce an inadvertently comical effect of “kettle logic” or, rather, a whole range of “kettle logics” since there are so many kettles on the boil. Whereas Freud’s famous story of the kettle admits three contradictory arguments in support of a single claim,39 Lefkowitz and Rogers proffer innumerable arguments in support of many various claims made throughout the collection, albeit with the single aim of discrediting Bernal’s work. In response to Bernal’s claim concerning the impact of racism on modern historiography, Lefkowitz and Rogers argue over the course of their joint preface and respective essays that, first, Bernal portrays many modern European scholars as racist or anti-Semitic by taking their statements out of context;40 that, second, although there were some European scholars who were racist or antiSemitic, most of them were not;41 that, third, European scholars failed to question the ancient Egyptian and Phoenician influences on Greek civilization not because they were racist or anti-Semitic but rather because there was a lack of evidence in the historical record;42 that, fourth, even the most recent evidence has not proven these scholars wrong;43 that, fifth, if European scholars have misinterpreted the historical record, they have not done

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so deliberately;44 that, sixth, there was such a diversity in opinion among European scholars themselves that it cannot be said that any single “Aryan Model” existed or that any “models” or “schools” existed for that matter;45 and in any case that, seventh, Bernal exaggerates his claim that European scholars have “fabricated” ancient Greece.46 In response to Bernal’s claim concerning the ancient Egyptian and Phoenician influences on Greek civilization, Lefkowitz and Rogers argue that, first, the ancient Greeks themselves considered Egypt a radically different culture from their own;47 that, second, there was little Egyptian or Phoenician influence on Greek civilization beyond the transmission of the Phoenician alphabet to Greece;48 that, third, there was an important Phoenician influence on Greek civilization—namely, the transmission of the alphabet;49 that, fourth, classicists do not deny that there were important Near Eastern influences on Greek civilization;50 that, fifth, by searching so intently for African influences on Greek civilization, Bernal himself neglects these important Near Eastern influences;51 that, sixth, classicists do not deny that there was an important Egyptian influence on Greek civilization;52 that, seventh, the Egyptian influence on Greek civilization was not as important as Bernal thinks it was;53 that, eighth, although the Egyptian influence on Greek astronomy, mathematics, and medicine was particularly notable, Greek achievements in these fields were nonetheless original;54 that, ninth, if there were Egyptian and Phoenician influences on Greek civilization, then there were also Greek influences on Egyptian and Phoenician civilization;55 that, tenth, even if the Hyksos did colonize the Aegean, as Bernal claims, it stands to reason that just as in the case of the later Roman conquest of Greece, “the culture of the conquered [would have] dominated the culture of the conquerors”;56 that, eleventh, ancient Greek civilization emerged from a complex network of African, Near Eastern, and European cultural influences;57 and that, twelfth, the essentially Afrocentric paradigm of Bernal’s Revised Ancient Model has been superseded by the “truly pluralistic scholarship” of the multicultural “model” of ancient Greek civilization, a model that classicists themselves have helped to establish.58 In response to Bernal’s claim concerning the African or “black” identity of the ancient Egyptians, Lefkowitz and Rogers argue that, first, apparently taking their cue from “Foucault and poststructuralism” themselves, the modern concept of race was not meaningful in the ancient world;59 that,

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second, Bernal himself runs the risk of racism and anti-Semitism by continuing to insist on the “racial” character of ancient civilizations;60 that, third, the ancient Egyptians considered themselves culturally distinct from other African, Near Eastern, and European populations;61 that, fourth, although Egypt may be called “African” in geographical terms, ancient Egypt was not an “African” civilization since it evolved separately from other African civilizations;62 that, fifth, by modern definition the ancient Egyptians were not black or white but “people of color”;63 that, sixth, in historical fact the ancient Egyptians were racially mixed;64 that, seventh, Bernal avoids the issue of race by declining to pursue the actual racial composition of the ancient Egyptian population;65 that, eighth, it is the ancient Ethiopians as opposed to the ancient Egyptians who were black or “Negroid”;66 that, ninth, by focusing on ancient Egypt, Bernal diverts his attention away from the “real Africa and its own achievements and civilizations”;67 and that, tenth, by focusing on ancient Egypt and Phoenicia only insofar as they influenced Greek civilization, Bernal practices the same European ethnocentrism that he wants to challenge.68 And last, in response to Bernal’s claim concerning the methodological difficulties of establishing “proof ” in ancient history, Lefkowitz and Rogers argue that, first, Bernal’s appeal to “competitive plausibility” rather than to proof in his argument for the Revised Ancient Model of Greek civilization is largely unacceptable to classicists;69 that, second, classicists themselves are aware that in the case of ancient history it is often difficult if not impossible to establish proof;70 that, third, in the absence of proof, interpretations of the available evidence are to be evaluated on the basis of their plausibility;71 and that, fourth, although some of Bernal’s claims for the ancient Egyptian influence on Greek religion and mythology are plausible, they do not necessarily prove it.72 The dizzying effect of this rampant kettle logic is only heightened by the other eighteen essays in the collection, although few of the contributors make the same claim for consensus that the coeditors do. In spite of its dizzying kettle logic, or perhaps precisely because of it, Black Athena Revisited managed quite successfully to establish itself as the most popular single source for scholarly criticism on Bernal’s work. It seems to have accomplished just what the coeditors had hoped—that is, as Rogers puts it in his concluding essay to the collection, “to provide scholars

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and the general public with a handy reference to the state of expert judgment on some difficult scholarly questions,”73 no matter how academically irresponsible and theoretically inconsistent this “handy reference” was. Furthermore, attesting to its impact on both the scholarly community and the public readership, Black Athena Revisited would compel Bernal himself to publish a substantial response to it, apparently diverting him from his stated intention to expand the Black Athena project from a three-volume to a four-volume work. In the meantime, however, the Black Athena debate raged on, fueled by the appearance of other major publications, including a special issue of the classical studies journal Talanta in 1997 under the title “Black Athena: Ten Years After,” based on a one-day conference held the previous year at the African Studies Centre in Leiden, to which Bernal contributed three essays, and Jacques Berlinerblau’s book Heresy in the University: The Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals in 1999.74 Bernal’s own retort, Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to His Critics, was eventually published in 2001 in “direct response,” as he confirms, to Black Athena Revisited.75 Edited by the postcolonial literary scholar David Chioni Moore, Black Athena Writes Back comprises eighteen essays by Bernal, including his introductory and concluding essays to the volume, clearly organized to reflect the composition of Black Athena Revisited. Motivated by Lefkowitz and Rogers’s refusal to solicit any kind of response from him for their collection, Bernal offers a series of individual replies, book reviews, and related essays, addressing most of the contributors to Black Athena Revisited and a few other classicists as well. Black Athena Writes Back is thus a massive work in itself, presenting Bernal’s meticulously detailed response to the widely divergent criticisms of his project to date, a work that is comparable in size to any one of the three volumes of Black Athena that were eventually published and that seems, moreover, to have ultimately replaced the projected fourth volume. Yet, even so, Bernal intended Black Athena Writes Back, as he indicates at various points in the text, to provide only part of a larger response to his critics, a response that was to have included a companion volume of essays by an interdisciplinary range of scholars that he would coedit with Moore, Debating Black Athena (ix–x, 1, 17, 18), as well as another book generated from the Black Athena project that he would gear toward a more popular readership, Moses and Muses (70,

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445 n. 46, 446 n. 54)—both of which, however, he would later be forced to abandon. In Black Athena Writes Back, the only part of Bernal’s multifront response that was actually published, then, he does not introduce any significant revisions to his argument. Rather, he attends very closely to the many criticisms leveled against him in Black Athena Revisited, from the most sweeping dismissals of his project in its entirety to the most painstaking minutiae on the relevant archaeological and linguistic data. He notes the especially hostile tone of the collection and further explains how his own efforts to contribute a response were rebuffed by the senior editor, Lefkowitz (1, 13–14). He also comments wryly on what I have characterized as the kettle logic that pervades the collection: “Defenders of the academic status quo use two basic formulae to protect themselves from major challenges: ‘It’s all rubbish’ and ‘We all knew that anyhow’ ” (80). But among the few contributions to Black Athena Revisited that Bernal does not address in Black Athena Writes Back, there is one essay that deserves some sort of response, or so it seems to me at least—an essay by Mario Liverani, the only contributor, incidentally, who is not from the United States or the United Kingdom. For despite its unfortunately trite title, “The Bathwater and the Baby,” this essay presents what is arguably the most sophisticated assessment of Bernal’s work in Black Athena Revisited. Curiously enough, Bernal himself has less to say about Liverani than he does about any other contributor to the collection (18–19). Of course, given the enormity of Bernal’s task in Black Athena Writes Back as well as the brevity of Liverani’s essay itself, this neglect on Bernal’s part might perhaps be excused. In any case, Liverani sets himself apart from most if not all of his fellow contributors to Black Athena Revisited by endorsing Bernal’s project or, more precisely, by endorsing the deconstructive part of Bernal’s project. Indeed, in the opening paragraph of his essay, he appears to congratulate Bernal on the success of the first two volumes of Black Athena in a passage that is actually quoted on the back cover of Black Athena Writes Back: “Black Athena must be the most discussed book on the ancient history of the eastern Mediterranean world since the Bible. . . . [It] enjoys such continued attention because it raises important scholarly questions, and because it makes a difficult subject available to a large audience.”76

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However, in the very next paragraph Liverani goes on to clarify his own scholarly opinion of Bernal’s work: “I take it as given that [Black Athena] is filled with too many logical and methodological inconsistencies, historical and philological mistakes, and documentary and bibliographical omissions to discuss here in detail. It is not with the details of Bernal’s work, but with his basic historiographical principles that I propose to disagree.” Striking a tone that certainly resonates more clearly with the rest of the essays in Black Athena Revisited, Liverani considers Bernal’s historiographical methodology “old-fashioned and contradictory” and the detailed evidence that Bernal presents in the second volume of Black Athena therefore unworthy of any serious scholarly attention: “Hardly a single chapter (or even page) of Black Athena escapes the blame of ignoring correct methodology, adopting oldfashioned explanations, and omitting relevant data and literature.”77 Liverani’s criticism, then, is directed at Bernal’s argument concerning the formative influence of European imperialism on modern historiography, made largely in the first volume of Black Athena. Once again setting himself apart from most of the contributors to Black Athena Revisited, Liverani “fully concede[s] . . . that scholarship (historiography in particular) is influenced by the scholar’s sociopolitical background [and] that the ancient history of the eastern Mediterranean world was constructed by European scholars living in imperial times and countries,” although he is also quick to point out that Bernal is not the first one to have had this idea. Citing Said’s work Orientalism, Liverani explains that both Philhellenism and Orientalism were complicit in the imperialist fabrication of a world history according to which civilization itself follows a westward path, finally culminating in modern European industrial society: Eurocentrism gave rise to a privileged axis in world history: civilization was considered to have been successively displaced in time and space, from the Ancient Near East to Greece, to Rome, to the Christian Middle Ages, to the Western European Renaissance, to the industrial empires. . . . [This] shift of cultural primacy from the Near East to Greece (the one dealt with in Bernal’s book) was interpreted in line with two slogans: Ex Oriente Lux (“Light from the East”) (mostly used by Orientalists) and “The Greek Miracle” (mostly used by Classicists). These slogans appeared

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to represent opposing ideas but in fact were one and the same notion: the Western appropriation of ancient Near Eastern culture for the sake of its own development.78

Liverani further argues that after “the process of decolonization,” only a “multicultural” model of history can approach the cultural complexity of the contemporary world: “[A] new model is now required in the reconstruction of world history: a multicultural model, in which different centers and different political and cultural strategies are all granted equal attention and merits as due, quite apart from their greater or lesser success in the course of events.” However, Bernal’s project simply replaces the antiquated Aryan Model of the Philhellenists with the even more antiquated Ancient Model of the Orientalists, all revisions aside: “Instead of offering a new, multicentric model he merely seems to suggest an Afrocentric and Levantine model, reverting to the old-fashioned Ex Oriente Lux position.” Liverani thus makes a distinction between the critical or “destructive” part of Bernal’s project, which he largely endorses, and the original or “constructive” part, which he flatly rejects on the basis of Bernal’s “regressive” historiographical methodology: “Though Bernal’s pars destruens (destructive element) is a contribution to multicentered scholarship, his pars construens (constructive element) poses an insurmountable obstacle to scholarly progress.” Liverani closes his essay, then, by discharging Bernal from his scholarly duties, speaking however tentatively on behalf of only properly qualified ancient historians: “We duly thank Martin Bernal for his useful insights about the biased approaches of former (and present) classical scholars, but we have to go along on our own way without him. We will keep and we like (at least I like) his baby, but we must throw out all his dirty water.”79 This provocative critique of Bernal’s work appears all the more convincing insofar as it goes unanswered in Black Athena Writes Back. While Liverani’s harsh treatment of Bernal certainly seems to belie their substantial agreement on the formative influence of European imperialism on modern historiography, the distinction that Liverani proposes between the destructive and constructive elements of Bernal’s project offers a very tempting interpretive device for assessing Black Athena—even to its most sympathetic readers. Indeed, what I want to consider over the remaining course of this chapter is whether it might be easier in the end to accept the deconstructive

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effects of Bernal’s argument on modern historiography without necessarily advocating his reconstructive efforts in ancient history itself.

Deconstructing “Roots” The third volume of Black Athena was published in 2006 under the title The Linguistic Evidence. With this volume, Bernal’s project certainly seems to have arrived at a sense of closure. Not only does he clarify that it is the last volume of the series, but he also confirms that Debating Black Athena, the projected companion volume to Black Athena Writes Back, has been abandoned.80 He does not even refer to his other projected work, Moses and Muses, which had also been abandoned by the time that the third volume of Black Athena was published, although he does devote one chapter of this volume to the common etymological derivation of the Hebrew term for “Moses” and the Greek term for “Muses” from the ancient Egyptian cluster ms(i), “child, birth, or midwife” (3:20, 276–99). Apologizing for the long delay in publishing this third and final volume of the Black Athena project, then—which, as he points out, “was promised in 1987 and expected in the early ’90s” (3:xv), the four years between the appearance of the first and second volumes far exceeded by the fifteen years between the appearance of the second and third volumes—he admits that his attention was diverted in large part by the acrimonious debates following the publication of his second volume and by his own substantial contribution to these debates— namely, Black Athena Writes Back (3:xv). More importantly, however, Bernal explains that he had also initially underestimated the difficulty of presenting the linguistic evidence for his argument in a sufficiently rigorous scholarly form (3:xv). But he maintains that this difficulty was less a result of his personal lack of preparation than an effect of the privileged position of language within classical studies itself. Recalling his argument in the first volume of Black Athena, Bernal contends that the disciplinary formation of linguistics was crucially informed by the romantic belief in “roots” as well as by the emergence of colonial racism. Language has thus long provided the classics establishment with its last bastion against any criticism whatsoever of the Aryan Model. And it is this privileged position of language within classical studies that largely determined the reception of Black Athena, as Bernal describes it accurately enough, well before the appearance

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of the third volume: “Language is the most controversial aspect of the Black Athena project. Many reviewers of the first two volumes have taken the position that the historiography was more or less all right, the archaeology was dubious and the language was crazy” (3:1–2). Bernal’s third volume on the linguistic evidence, then, broaches what is perhaps the most difficult task of his project, a difficulty that is reflected both by the long delay in its publication and by the length of the volume itself, the longest one in the series. He closes this final volume by returning obliquely to his first volume. In the last chapter, Bernal offers his most detailed account of the etymological derivation of the Greek terms for “Athena” and “Athens” from the ancient Egyptian title Ht-ntr (nt) Nt, “temple or city of Nt or Neit” (3:26–27, 540–82), an etymology that he briefly presents in his introduction to the first volume, albeit in a modified form (1:51–53), and that itself, of course, provides the name for his entire project, Black Athena. And finally, closing his short conclusion to the third volume, he quotes Darwin on his confidence in the future generation of young scholars (3:585), using a passage that he takes from Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions—the same work that he quotes at the very opening of his introduction to the first volume (1:1), thus bringing his own project full circle, as it were. The third volume of Black Athena appears to have met a quieter reception than either one of the previous volumes did, losing much of the popular readership that the first volume enjoyed as well as some of the scholarly attention that, for better or worse, both the first and second volumes invited. Nonetheless, two major publications appeared in 2011 to mark the completion of Bernal’s project: Black Athena Comes of Age: Towards a Constructive Re-assessment, an updated and expanded republication of the special issue of Talanta that was originally published in 1997 and to which it seems that Bernal was not asked to contribute either, and African Athena: New Agendas, a collection of essays based on a three-day conference held in 2008 at the University of Warwick, to which Bernal did contribute an afterword.81 Bernal also self-published his autobiography in 2012, Geography of a Life, before he passed away the following year.82 But after the bitterly polarized debate between the contributors to Black Athena Revisited on one hand and Bernal in Black Athena Writes Back on the other, not to mention the very long wait

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for the third and final volume of Black Athena itself, it seems that only Bernal’s most committed readers were still interested in his argument on the formation of ancient Greek civilization. To invert the formula of “ignore, dismiss, and attack” that Bernal himself playfully suggests in the response essay that he contributed to the special issue of Arethusa, “Black Athena and the APA,” we might say that it was the first volume of Black Athena that was dismissed or, perhaps better, absorbed by the classics establishment, the second volume that was attacked, and the third volume that was ignored. And yet, despite what many of Bernal’s critics have clearly implied—and despite what many of his advocates have secretly hoped—both the second and third volumes of Black Athena remain essential reading for any careful assessment of his work, just as essential as the first volume. In other words, putting it in the terms of Liverani’s provocative but all too easy critique in “The Bathwater and the Baby,” the “destructive element” of Bernal’s project cannot be so simply extracted from its “constructive element,” let alone strained or drained from it. What I have called the deconstructive effects of Bernal’s argument on modern historiography, then, are inseparable from his reconstructive efforts in ancient history. These deconstructive effects, moreover, are not at all limited to the first volume on the “fabrication” of ancient Greece but are dispersed throughout the second and third volumes on the archaeological and linguistic “evidence” for his Revised Ancient Model as well. Of course, Liverani is not the first one to have proposed a distinction between the destructive and constructive elements of Bernal’s project, and although Bernal does not reply to Liverani in Black Athena Writes Back, he has responded to such criticism at other points in his work, however briefly. Already in “Black Athena and the APA,” which was written in response to criticism of the first volume of Black Athena, Bernal remarks on what he describes as a rather common critique of his project. Calling it the “deconstructionist view,” he playfully addresses himself in the voice of his ostensibly deconstructionist critics: “Wonderful! You have deconstructed classics! That is tremendous! Why do you now want to set up something else? Any model that you set up is bound to be as false and as relative as any other, because you, too, are just as much a product of your society and history as the creators of the Aryan Model—whom you denounce—were of theirs.”

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Bernal responds to this critique by objecting to the “complete relativism” that is inherent in such a position, further arguing that his Revised Ancient Model is justifiable “on ethical grounds.”83 Similarly, in Black Athena Writes Back, he rejects postmodernism or, more precisely, the position of “some postmodernists” (188) on the issue of representation. Indeed, in this work Bernal likens his most hostile conservative critics from the classics establishment to these same postmodernists, despite their obviously different political sympathies: Both [conservatives] and [postmodernists] insist on a full representation of the intricacies of any situation in all their shifting chaos. Inevitably, such a position leads to intellectual and political paralysis. Where most postmodernists tend to regret this outcome, [conservatives are] very happy to use “full representation” as a tool to preserve the academic status quo. I fundamentally disagree with both groups because the only true accurate representation of reality is the one-to-one map of reality itself. Thus, despite the inevitable distortion that it entails, I am convinced that some degree of simplification and the establishment of models is necessary both for coherent thought and for effective political action. (188–89)

Surely, Bernal’s associations between deconstruction and “complete relativism,” on one hand, and postmodernism and “full representation,” on the other, as well as his assumption that deconstruction and postmodernism inevitably lead to ethical and political “paralysis” deserve sharper interrogation. But what is clear enough from these remarks, I think, is that not only would Bernal himself have resisted Liverani’s distinction between the destructive and constructive elements of his project, had he ever been inclined to offer a reply, but he would also have quite likely put up at least some resistance to my own claim regarding his project’s deconstructive effects. Nonetheless, what I want to argue, now that the three volumes of Black Athena have finally been completed and the debate surrounding them has largely subsided, is that it is Bernal’s strategic displacement of the concept of “roots” itself that in the end provides the most lasting significance of his work.

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Black Athena is all about roots. The subtitle of Black Athena, after all, appearing on the front cover and title page of all three volumes, says so: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Bernal’s stated aim, as we have read, is to replace the Aryan Model of ancient Greek civilization with his Revised Ancient Model—to replace ancient Greek civilization itself as the origin or fundamental basis of Western civilization with ancient Egyptian and Phoenician civilization. My claim that the deconstructive effects of Bernal’s project are produced by his “displacement” of the concept of roots seems to be seriously undermined, then, by his own insistence on the more straightforward “replacement” of ancient Greek roots with ancient Egyptian and Phoenician ones. Indeed, in the opening pages of his introduction to the first volume of Black Athena, Bernal positively endorses the paradigm of cultural diffusion that, as he himself points out, his Revised Ancient Model shares in common with both the Ancient and Aryan Models. According to this paradigm, civilization is formed primarily by its diffusion or spread from dominant cultural centers to subordinate ones. He further explains that this paradigm sets all three models apart from the more contemporary model of autochthonous origins, a model that is quite comparable to what Liverani calls the “multicultural model” of ancient history: “The Ancient, Aryan and Revised Ancient models share one paradigm, that of the possibility of diffusion of language or culture through conquest. Interestingly, this goes against the dominant trend in archaeology today, which is to stress indigenous development. The latter is reflected in Greek prehistory by the recently proposed Model of Autochthonous Origin” (1:7). Curiously enough, in the last chapter of the first volume, Bernal admits that the paradigm of cultural diffusion itself relies on an essentially imperialist ideology of civilization, even calling it “an academic reflex” (1:407) of colonial racism. However, apparently siding with his opponents in classical studies and linguistics as far as the issue of cultural diffusion is concerned, Bernal defends this paradigm by attesting to its ability to explain relationships between language populations, further arguing that the important role played by conquest and migration within modern history suggests a similar role for conquest and migration within ancient history (1:407). In “Black Athena and the APA,” Bernal somewhat tempers his position by adopting the paradigm of “modified diffusionism,” according to which

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new civilizations are formed by the conjunction of dominant cultures with indigenous ones.84 He maintains this “modified diffusionist” position throughout the rest of his work, defending its intellectual integrity against its political associations with colonial racism once again in the second volume of Black Athena (2:64–67) and scoffing at the “liberal dislike of the notions of conquest and colonization” in Black Athena Writes Back (204), as if to remind us of his Marxist credentials. While I certainly agree with Bernal that cultural formations rarely if ever take shape outside political and economic structures of inequity—a critical point that both the multicultural and autochthonous models of ancient history tend to elide with their decidedly “liberal” leanings—what I am calling into question is the concept of origins or roots that his avowed paradigm of cultural diffusion, whether in its modified form or not, continues to promote—the idea that all cultures or civilizations can ultimately be traced back to a single origin or simple “root.” Certainly, Bernal himself takes this idea of the single origin or simple root further than most of his fellow cultural diffusionists would even dare insofar as he proposes a single origin not only for each attested language family but for all language as such. In his introduction to the first volume of Black Athena, he states his preference for the linguistic theory of “monogenesis” even as he acknowledges its highly contested status: “Like most scholars, I believe that it is impossible to judge between the theories of monogenesis and polygenesis for human language, though I incline towards the former. . . . I further accept the conventional, though disputed, view that a language family originates from a single dialect” (1:11). Bernal appears more confident, though, in attesting to the historical existence of a language “superfamily” from which both the Afroasiatic and Indo-European language families derived, calling it “Proto-Afroasiatic-Indo-European” (1:11), thereby providing a common source for all three languages in which he is primarily interested in the Black Athena project—ancient Egyptian, Phoenician, and ancient Greek: “Recent work by a small but increasing number of scholars has convinced me that there is a genetic relationship between the Indo-European languages and those of the Afroasiatic language ‘superfamily’ ” (1:11). He pursues this proposition in the third volume, drawing from much current research on what he describes as “the putative language hyper-family ‘Nostratic’ ” (3:10). Devoting a chapter to

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the origin of this Nostratic “hyperfamily” and its subsequent bifurcation into Euroasiatic and Afroasiatic (3:39–57), he begins his discussion by settling the dispute between the rival theories of monogenesis and polygenesis once and for all: “Linguists seem to have stopped, or at least suspended, the debate over whether there was a single or multiple origin of all existing languages. A consensus that all existing languages are ultimately related to each other now appears to have emerged” (3:39). Indeed, Bernal seems to have lowered his critical guard against the romantic belief in roots that he identifies so astutely in his first volume, freely employing the linguistic concept of Urheimat—the German term for “original homeland”—throughout the first few chapters of his third volume (3:15, 46). In some sense, moreover, Bernal’s entire argument hinges on the distinctly classical and rather logocentric idea of “civilization” itself, as the subtitle of Black Athena also says. In his introduction to the first volume, he readily concedes that civilization is a singular cultural phenomenon that can be traced back to a common source: “Few scholars would contest the idea that it was in Mesopotamia that what we call ‘civilization’ was first assembled. With the possible exception of writing, all the elements of which it was composed—cities, agricultural irrigation, metalworking, stone architecture and wheels for both vehicles and pot-making—had existed before and elsewhere. But this assemblage, when capped by writing, allowed a great economic and political accumulation that can usefully be seen as the beginning of civilization” (1:12). While Bernal thus locates “the beginning of civilization” not in ancient Egypt but in Mesopotamia, he presumes that it is this same civilization that spread from Mesopotamia to India, the Levant, and Africa during what he calls “[t]he miraculous 4th millennium” (1:15) and then from the Levant and Africa to the Aegean from the third millennium on. Although this account of the spread of civilization does not follow the strictly westward path of world history, it nonetheless accommodates what Liverani calls “the Western appropriation of ancient Near Eastern culture” only too well. It is precisely in this sense, then, that Bernal’s argument appears to preserve the concept of the West as the very measure of civilization, even as he pushes its origin back beyond ancient Greece. As he himself summarizes it in his conclusion to the final volume, the main goal of the Black Athena project is to extend the history of the West itself back to ancient Egyptian and Phoenician civilization: “The purpose

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of these volumes is . . . to [demonstrate] that neither Ancient Egypt nor the pagan Levant were dead ends. Both of them, through Greece and Rome and the civilizations of the monotheist religions, have been central and crucial to western history” (3:583). And yet, notwithstanding Bernal’s own stated aim to locate “the Afroasiatic roots of classical civilization,” his argument over the course of the three volumes of Black Athena hopelessly complicates any idea of the single origin or simple root. He advances this argument quite deliberately, furthermore, treating the concept of roots thematically throughout his work. But perhaps his most effective treatment is presented in his recurring critique of the linguistic model of the tree. Bernal first turns his attention to this model during his discussion of romanticism in the first volume of Black Athena. He explains that the model of the tree that was so prevalent in nineteenth-century scientific theory and historiography alike was ideally suited to the romantic belief in roots: “Apart from the extraordinary achievements of natural science during the period of Romantic dominance from 1790 to 1890 there was an enormous interest in history, and in both the chief model used was that of the ‘tree.’ Trees, which are to be found in Darwinian evolution, Indo-European linguistics and most 19th-century histories, provide the ideal Romantic image. They are rooted in their own soils and nourished by their particular climates; at the same time they are alive and grow. They progress and never turn back. . . . [T]rees have a simple past and a complicated and ramified present and future” (1:205). Describing the impact of romanticism on the disciplinary formation of linguistics, he critically addresses the theoretical limitations of this model as well as of the closely associated model of the family: Romantic influence can be seen in the discipline’s two chief models—the tree and the family—which, with their enormous aesthetic and progressive appeal, became widely popular throughout 19th-century scholarship and science. In historical linguistics, the assumptions of simple beginnings and later ramification and divergence—through regular, though specific, shifts that can be charted—proved extremely useful in the early stages of the new discipline. On the other hand, the tree and the family do not allow for “backtracking” or mixing and convergence and they have a tendency to teleology, the assumption that each language has an

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ultimate nature inbuilt in its beginnings which are not fundamentally affected by later contacts. (1:226–27)

Bernal continues what he calls his “attack on trees” (1:475 n. 55) in his subsequent works generated by the Black Athena project. In Cadmean Letters, in which he makes an argument for the early transmission of the Phoenician alphabet to ancient Greece, he registers his objection to “the Stammbaum or ‘tree’ model” in the opening pages of the first chapter. While he admits that the elegant simplicity of the tree makes it an attractive model for linguistic theory, he also enumerates four “major drawbacks” to this model: the tree can trace linguistic divergence but not linguistic convergence; the bifurcation or forking of branches cannot adequately represent the more complex process by which a single language “disintegrates” or “explodes” into multiple languages; the tree can indicate growth but not retraction or repetition; and the tree frequently implies a mistakenly teleological pattern of linguistic development. He goes on in the third chapter to suggest the replacement of “the tree model or Stammbaumtheorie” that still dominates linguistics by “a wave model or Wellentheorie,” despite its lack of the tree’s elegant simplicity.85 In Black Athena Writes Back, Bernal confronts the apparent inconsistency in his work between his critique of the linguistic model of the tree and the romantic belief in roots that it betrays, on one hand, and his own persistent appeal to the concept of roots, on the other. While he continues to indict his critics for their reliance on the model of the “selfgenerating” tree (112, 125), he defends his recourse to the concept of roots by pointing out that the single trunk of the tree is invariably supported by multiple roots: “I have perpetrated an inconsistency in that, though I have objected to the Romantic image of a culture as a tree, I have used the term ‘roots.’ My justification for this inconsistency is that, although a tree has a single bole or stem, roots are multiple, and I am convinced that all innovative civilizations are or, at least originally, were multicultural, with many different sources” (199). This appeal to multiple roots thus evokes what he describes as “a complex lattice or mangrove” rather than “a ramifying tree from a single bole” (112). Bernal finally returns to his critique of the linguistic model of the tree in the third volume of Black Athena, leaving us with what remains his last word on the issue of roots.86 Instead of “attacking the tree” as he does in

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the first volume, he explains more carefully that the linguistic model of the tree itself reduces the complexity of the “actual tree” with its multiple roots. He compares this more complex and accurate image of the tree with multiple roots to the concept of the rhizome: “Although the philologists have not used it this way, an actual tree provides a better model if one does not stop at the stem but considers the multiple roots. Some Caribbean writers have tried to convey this concept with the word rhizome, the Greek word for ‘root.’ . . . [O]ne could say that root and rhizome amount to the same thing. In modern botany, however, rhizome is used for ‘rootstock’ and in particular for the tangled web of mangroves, which many Caribbean intellectuals see as a more appropriate image for their culture than that of a large tree with a single stem” (3:11). Interestingly enough, Bernal does not attribute the concept of the rhizome to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who most famously—or infamously—counterpose the rhizome to the tree in their joint work A Thousand Plateaus. He provides only what is a rather vague reference to “some Caribbean writers.” Of course, considering his notable reticence toward postmodernism, this lapse is not altogether surprising. Even so, however, Bernal argues that although Caribbean culture itself may best be seen as a rhizome or mangrove swamp, the ancient Egyptian, Semitic, and Greek languages in which he is most interested in Black Athena are better seen as trees with multiple roots (3:11–12). What I have called Bernal’s strategic displacement of the concept of roots, then, is effected not by any complete abstention on his part from all discourses on origins, roots, or trees, for that matter, but rather by his subversive reinscription of these very discourses throughout his work. Indeed, at another point in the third volume, Bernal sums up the guiding principle of the Black Athena project— a principle that surely complicates if not entirely undermines his stated purpose of extending the history of the West back beyond ancient Greece to ancient Egyptian and Phoenician civilization. Reaffirming his model of the tree with multiple roots, he spells out its implications for any concept of historical or cultural origins: “This idea leads to the general principle upon which my whole project is organized: there are no simple origins” (3:29, emphasis in original). This principle, I contend, is borne out by a careful reading of all three volumes of Bernal’s Black Athena. His Revised Ancient Model does not simply replace ancient Greek civilization as the “miraculous” origin of the

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West with ancient Egyptian and Phoenician civilization but rather challenges the idea that any culture or civilization is or ever was completely original. Bernal’s thesis that one of the most important historical events contributing to the massive influence of ancient Egyptian and Phoenician civilization on ancient Greek civilization was the Hyksos colonization of Greece during the second millennium BCE, an event to which the ancient Greek accounts of early Egyptian and Phoenician colonies correspond, however loosely, has certainly provided one of the most hotly contested points throughout the Black Athena debate. While I cannot confirm the historical veracity of this event in this chapter of my book, I do want to call attention to the complicated nature of this influence. According to Bernal himself, the Hyksos colonization of Greece, far from accomplishing any wholesale transplantation of ancient Egyptian and Phoenician civilization into Greece, only extended farther a complex historical and cultural interaction spread across Europe, Asia, and Africa that had already begun long before the Hyksos’s arrival in either ancient Egypt or Phoenicia. As he puts it in the second volume of Black Athena, “While the Egyptian Hyksos would seem to have been Indo-Aryan-Hurrian-Semitic and those in Crete would be Indo-Aryan-Hurrian-Semitic-Egyptian, those in the Cyclades and Mainland Greece would have been Indo-Aryan-Hurrian-Semitic-EgyptianCretan” (2:381). Similarly, Bernal makes an intriguing proposition on the “mixed” nature of ancient Egyptian civilization itself. This proposition has attracted much less attention than his thesis on the Hyksos colonization of Greece, though, since it was not introduced until the third volume of Black Athena. What Bernal suggests in this volume is that ancient Egyptian language and culture alike were not inspired by any single source of civilization but were rather themselves constituted by the much attested “duality” between Upper and Lower Egypt: “Ancient Egyptian gives every indication of being a mixed language. . . . Throughout the more than three thousand years of its history, Ancient Egyptian culture was acutely conscious of the duality of Upper [Egypt] (the Nile Valley) and Lower Egypt (the Delta). This division partly resulted from different geographical environments. It may also derive, however, from reflexes of the two linguistic and cultural sources” (3:15–16). For Bernal, then, there are origins, but they are never simple. To improvise on his model of the tree with multiple roots, we might say that roots are never fully formed in themselves before the tree appears

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but rather continue to proliferate as the tree grows, extending and splitting themselves again and again. It is much in this manner that every single historical or cultural origin or source that Bernal presents in his work seems to split itself into at least two on more careful reading. As he explains to his critics in Black Athena Writes Back, he does not at all deny that ancient Greek civilization was influenced by Indo-European speakers from the north but only objects to the Aryan Model according to which this influence operated exclusive of other significant influences from ancient Egyptian and Phoenician civilization to the south and east. Bernal thus supports a “dual” influence on ancient Greek civilization: “This dual influence—and not a sole influence from the south and east—is what I propose in my ‘Revised Ancient model’ ” (9, emphasis in original). Moreover, Bernal’s insistence on both the African and Levantine roots of ancient Greek civilization, or its “Afroasiatic” roots, since his earliest work on the Black Athena project indicates that he always considered this influence from ancient Egyptian and Phoenician civilization “dual” in itself. In the first volume of Black Athena, he traces his own argument for the Revised Ancient Model back to the work of Cyrus Gordon and Michael Astour in Semitic studies on one hand (1:xiii–xv, 36–37, 415–22) and to the work of George G. M. James and Cheikh Anta Diop in Egyptology on the other (1:38, 435). However, he also notes that whereas Semitists promote the Phoenician influence on ancient Greek civilization but neglect the Egyptian influence, Egyptologists affirm the ancient Egyptian influence on Greek civilization but deny the Phoenician influence. Bernal presents his own work, then, as “an attempt to reconcile these two hostile approaches” (1:437). His Revised Ancient Model is thus no more Afrocentric than it is Zionist insofar as in his account of the origins of Greek civilization its African and Levantine roots remain inextricably entangled. But even more crucially, I think, neither is Bernal’s Revised Ancient Model compatible with the multicultural and autochthonous models of ancient history that so many classical studies scholars themselves have recently come to champion. For much like the Afrocentric and Zionist models, both the multicultural and autochthonous models continue to promote the idea of the single origin or simple root. Although these more contemporary models certainly challenge the outright chauvinism of the Aryan Model, they nonetheless maintain that all cultures are principally formed

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in isolation from each other, each one thus preserving its essential purity. As Bernal puts it in “Black Athena and the APA,” it is ultimately this concept of historical or cultural purity that he sets out to combat in his project: “The notion of purity is, in fact, my essential enemy.”87 Black Athena does more to deconstruct than to preserve or even extend the concept of the West, then, by calling into question the singularity of the Western tradition. Over the course of his project, Bernal complicates not only the origin of the West, the “Greek miracle,” but also the very concept of the origin, the simple purity of “roots.” What I am arguing in this chapter, finally, is that the concept of the West cannot be effectively dismantled without dismantling the concept of the origin as well. Indeed, the Western tradition has always been defined by its ostensibly singular possession of a properly historical beginning and end, its intrinsically teleological structure setting it apart from all other cultural traditions. In other words, the end of the West is premised on its having begun, this beginning having furnished the history of the West with an absolutely unique point of origin. The task of dismantling the West that I have proposed in this book would thus entail another sort of end, an end that would displace the beginning of the West rather than reaffirm it—an end that would also displace, if it were possible, the end of the West itself. Of course, this is not to say that modern Europeans have not actually sought inspiration from the ancient Greeks in many aspects of their social and intellectual life, thereby forging a common tradition of sorts. But this tradition is always relayed, crosscut, and elsewise mediated by other traditions, both “Western” and “non-Western,” the origins of which are also traced by their own adherents back to the ancient Greeks or, more often, through the ancient Greeks and beyond them. Furthermore, this tradition that presumably unites ancient Greece and modern Europe is itself irreducibly polymorphous, the Greek legacy of reason, progress, and freedom cohabiting the modern European imagination with the equally compelling Greek legacy of myth, fate, and nature. What all this is to say is that, in the end, the West is an inescapably geopolitical concept that is not determined by its historical, cultural, or geographical point of reference so much as it is generated by its performative, illocutionary, or iterative force.

PA R T I I FROM TELEOLOGY TO NEGATIVE TELEOLOGY

TO EMPLOY THE LONG-OUTMODED TERMINOLOGY OF SAUSSUREAN linguistics,1 the syntagm that provides the title for my book—“the end of the West”—conjures up some more familiar syntagms that figured quite prominently in continental philosophy over the course of the twentieth century. These syntagms—“the end of philosophy,” “the end of history,” “the end of man”—are conjured up through the associative relations based on the term the West. And yet “the end of the West” has never been declared as such alongside these more familiar syntagms, “the West” itself remaining, again to employ the terminology of Saussurean linguistics, in absentia. But has the end of the West not always been at stake in the declaration of the end of philosophy, the end of history, the end of man? Certainly, the thinkers who are invoked by these syntagms have suggested as much insofar as it is a historically and culturally specific metaphysics, episteme, or epoche, as the case may be, whose end they themselves augur. Moreover, this syntagm—“the end of the West”—also conjures up other unfamiliar syntagms through the associative relations based on the term end—“the crisis of the West,” “the closure of the West,” “the destruction of the West.” “The end of the West” is further associated, then, with “the crisis

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of humanism,” “the closure of metaphysics,” “the destruction of ontology.” Of course, the thinkers who are again invoked by these syntagms have also suggested the ambiguity of the end, most notably through another set of associative relations based on this term—Martin Heidegger’s “ending,” Jacques Derrida’s “ends.” In “Overcoming Metaphysics,” Heidegger explains that the ending of metaphysics unfolds within the history of metaphysics itself, making this history intelligible: “[Metaphysics] has entered its ending. The ending lasts longer than the previous history of metaphysics. . . . [W]e may not presume to stand outside of metaphysics because we surmise the ending of metaphysics.”2 He thus forestalls the end even as he orients his intellectual project in the direction of its inexorable approach. Meanwhile, in “The Ends of Man,” Derrida argues that the rebuttal to humanism offered in phenomenology and poststructuralist thought alike is fully complicit with the metaphysical determination of truth inasmuch as “man” has never been considered an end in himself within metaphysical thought: “The thinking of the end of man . . . is always already prescribed in metaphysics, in the thinking of the truth of man. . . . The end of man (as a factual anthropological limit) is announced to thought from the vantage of the end of man (as a determined opening or the infinity of a telos). Man is that which is in relation to his end, in the fundamentally equivocal sense of the word. . . . The name of man has always been inscribed in metaphysics between these two ends.” Derrida warns his poststructuralist contemporaries that by insisting on man’s essential relation to language, they merely repeat the phenomenological gesture of elevating man to a new height: “What is difficult to think today is an end of man which would not be organized by a dialectics of truth and negativity, an end of man which would not be a teleology.”3 Derrida thus poses the challenge of articulating a sense of the end that would not simply serve the purpose of another beginning. Given the ambiguity of the end, then, what might “the end of the West” mean? Following Heidegger’s prompt, it might mean that after the colonial encounter between Europeans and their non-European subjects, the Western regime of truth is, if not nearing its end, then at least within sight of it. But has the naïveté of the Heideggerian end not yet itself been overcome? Following Derrida’s prompt instead, the end of the West might rather suggest that the critique of ethnocentrism with which an almost entire generation of continental philosophers came to be identified relies on

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another, however more subtle, form of ethnocentrism. The emergence of poststructuralist thought in particular during the late twentieth century was accompanied by a radical critique of the purported ethnocentrism of all Western thought. Poststructuralist thinkers claimed that this ethnocentrism is perfectly consonant with the search for truth that has always occupied Western thought from the ancient Greeks to modern European thinkers. The critique of Western ethnocentrism as such—for within twentieth-century continental philosophy, Western ethnocentrism is the only ethnocentrism, just as Western metaphysics is the only metaphysics— has been established as a fundamental precept of poststructuralist theory. Yet what the poststructuralist critique of Western ethnocentrism presumes, much like Western ethnocentrism itself, is that there has indeed been a continuous line of thought extending from the ancient Greeks to modern European thinkers and that this intellectual tradition has remained impervious to all other traditions. What might “the end of the West” mean, then, were it not to rely on the idea of the West itself? It might mean that there has never been a West, at least not in the sense in which the West has been conceived as an altogether unique and distinctly privileged event or course of events in world history. Undermining the presumption of both Western ethnocentrism and its poststructuralist critique, I would submit that the history of Western thought has been punctured by innumerable points of contact with other intellectual traditions as well as by innumerable points of rupture within. The end of the West would thus also mean that there has never been an East or any other geopolitical space completely outside the West within which we could situate ourselves. Neither East nor West—and neither North nor South, for that matter—can provide the theoretical precepts for the critique of ethnocentrism that so many poststructuralist thinkers have attempted to articulate. But I am less interested in historically recounting the hybrid origins of the West in this part of my book than in critically attending to the persistent reliance on the concept of the West within twentieth-century continental philosophy. I want to argue that continental philosophy has been marked by the turn from teleology to what I call “negative teleology,” from a celebration of the historical and technological progress of the West to a lament on its cultural and spiritual decline. My argument is that despite

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this assuredly radical strategy of inversion, negative teleology remains complicit with the historical teleology of the West itself. The turn from teleology to negative teleology in continental philosophy has thus been characterized not by any decisive epistemological break but rather by their uneasy theoretical cohabitation. Negative teleology emerges from teleology and withdraws back into it. I want to trace this turn from teleology to negative teleology, then, at what I consider a couple of especially significant moments in continental philosophy. The first moment is indicated by the turn from Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology to Martin Heidegger’s destruction of ontology, and the second moment by the turn from Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of alterity to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction. The turn from Husserl to Heidegger I consider the earliest emergence of negative teleology in continental philosophy, and the turn from Levinas to Derrida its most powerful reiteration. In part II, I offer a close reading of selected texts by Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida. These texts are not commonly included among their major works but have rather been published in the forms of appendices, essays, interviews, and conference proceedings. What interests me in these minor texts, so to speak, is their distinctly uncommon attention to the nonWestern subject—or, more precisely, to the theoretical foreclosure of the non-Western subject. It is a rare occasion indeed on which either Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, or Derrida addresses the non-Western subject in his text. Yet I want to argue that the foreclosure of this subject is crucial to each of their philosophical projects even if it is only rarely acknowledged or, more precisely again, even if this foreclosure requires, somewhat paradoxically, that it be acknowledged only in the most cursory manner. In other words, these marginal texts by Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida that I have selected for a close reading over the next two chapters are quite central not just to the turn from teleology to negative teleology but also to the constitution of continental philosophy itself. In tracing the first turn from teleology to negative teleology—what I call the “phenomenological turn”—I offer a close reading of Husserl’s text “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity,” also known as the “Vienna Lecture,” as well as of Heidegger’s texts “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” and “Time and Being.” These texts represent both Husserl’s and Heidegger’s later thought, as the expression goes, after Husserl had incor-

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porated a sweeping historical reflection into his presentation of phenomenology and after Heidegger had abandoned his pursuit of what he called “fundamental ontology” in favor of what he called the “destruction” of ontology altogether. In tracing the second turn from teleology to negative teleology—what I call the “ethical turn,” to put another spin on a well-worn phrase—I offer a close reading of Levinas’s text “Signification and Sense” and of Derrida’s texts “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone” and “On Forgiveness.” These texts similarly represent both Levinas’s and Derrida’s later thought, to use the expression again, after Levinas had inserted his existential analysis of the other into an encompassing ethical problematic and after Derrida had shifted the focus of his deconstructive program from philosophical and literary works to current social and political issues. Of course, this distinction between Levinas’s and Derrida’s earlier thought and their later thought is even more suspect than the distinction is between Husserl’s and Heidegger’s. After all, it would not be too difficult to demonstrate that Levinas’s earlier thought was already located in an ethical framework, just as Derrida’s earlier thought more often than not involved the subversion of contemporary social and political dogmas. My double focus on phenomenology and ethics in part II thus calls into question not only the radical inversion of teleology into negative teleology within twentieth-century continental philosophy but also what is presumably the intellectual progress that was made from Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenological investigations to Levinas’s and Derrida’s ethical interventions—or intellectual retreat, as Levinas and Derrida may well have intended it. Does ethics precede ontology, as Levinas put it, or does ethics merely repeat ontology in the form of phenomenology? For the historical teleology of the West that informs Husserl’s phenomenology is the same teleology that informs Levinas’s ethics of alterity. And it seems that the negative teleology that is articulated in its prototypical form in Heidegger’s destruction of ontology is, at least in some sense, the same negative teleology that is articulated in Derrida’s deconstruction. The poststructuralist critique of Western ethnocentrism, then, remains incalculably indebted to Heidegger’s discourse. And as for Derrida himself, that most careful reader and astute critic of the Western philosophical tradition, could it be that even he had yet to overcome the naïveté of the Heideggerian end?

2 THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL TURN

Husserl and the Spiritual Shape of Europe The turn from teleology to negative teleology that I discuss in this chapter provides us with what I have called the articulation of negative teleology in its prototypical form. This is to say that the theoretical presumptions of negative teleology have not been significantly revised since its earliest emergence in twentieth-century continental philosophy and, more specifically, that negative teleology as such has remained a fundamental precept of all poststructuralist theory—with the possible exception of one particularly sensitive articulation of negative teleology that I discuss in the next chapter. What is still more surprising, or perhaps not, is that the historical teleology of the West on which the articulation of negative teleology itself relies has also remained largely intact in late-twentieth-century continental philosophy, even if it is rarely articulated in its “positive” version. In this part of my book, then, I want to attend to this teleology in both its positive and negative versions. If I pay too much attention to an ethnocentric discourse that might seem to have become almost if not altogether obsolete in contemporary intellectual culture, then it is because the complicity between teleology and negative teleology is made patently obvious once the

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theoretical presumptions of this ethnocentric discourse are explained in any detail. These presumptions, of course, are often only implied in the counterdiscourse of negative teleology, an ostensibly antiethnocentric discourse that still thrives today in continental philosophy and beyond it as well. Edmund Husserl’s text “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity” is based on a two-part lecture series delivered in Vienna in 1935. It is the lecture series delivered in Prague later that same year on which his more substantial text The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology is based. Crisis was a projected five-part work, but only the first two parts were published during his lifetime, while the unfinished third part was published posthumously together with “Philosophy.” The first part of Crisis largely reiterates “Philosophy,” albeit with some significant variations. Generally speaking, it presents a more concise version of Husserl’s teleological argument. It also provides, of course, an introduction to what would become his last effort to articulate his philosophical project of phenomenology. It is perhaps Crisis, then, in which the fundamental importance of teleology to Husserl’s broader project is best demonstrated. In the first part of this text, Husserl presents what he calls a “teleological-historical reflection upon the origins of our critical scientific and philosophical situation, [in the attempt] to establish the unavoidable necessity of a transcendentalphenomenological reorientation of philosophy.”1 He argues that the task of phenomenology is to complete the mission that has been endowed to Western civilization, a mission that was begun by the ancient Greeks and resumed by modern European thinkers. Husserl thus poses the rhetorical question “whether the telos which was inborn in European humanity at the birth of Greek philosophy . . . is merely a factual, historical delusion, the accidental acquisition of merely one among many other civilizations and histories, or whether Greek humanity was not rather the first breakthrough to what is essential to humanity as such, its entelechy” (15, emphasis in original), or again “whether European humanity bears within itself an absolute idea, rather than being merely an empirical anthropological type like ‘China’ or ‘India’ ” (16), or yet again “whether the spectacle of the Europeanization of all other civilizations bears witness to the rule of an absolute meaning, one which is proper to the sense, rather than to a historical non-sense, of the world” (16).

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It is quite evident, then, that the “genuine humanity” or the “new humanity” to which Husserl refers throughout the first part of Crisis is none other than European humanity itself, now having understood the purpose of its own history. But as provocative as these comments are, “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity” presents his teleological argument in even more detail and with even greater candor. It is this text rather than Crisis in which the historical teleology of the West that informs Husserl’s phenomenology is itself most fully articulated. Indeed, I offer my close reading of “Philosophy” in this chapter with a peculiar sense of gratitude to Husserl for having expressed his ethnocentrism in such plain terms that I am not left in the position of having to put any words in his mouth. Husserl’s presentation of phenomenology in “Philosophy” may certainly be read as a critical response to the emergence of existentialism in German philosophy associated with Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger as well as to other forms of “irrationalism” in contemporary European society, not the least significant of which was fascism.2 Although the crisis that Husserl seeks to address in both Crisis and “Philosophy” is variously called “the crisis of European sciences,” “the crisis of European humanity,” or “the crisis of European existence,” it is more precisely the crisis of rationalism that concerns him. In “Philosophy,” he thus takes up what he calls the “frequently treated theme of the European crisis” by proposing a “philosophical-historical idea (or the teleological sense) of European humanity” (269). He summarizes his argument: The “crisis of European existence,” talked about so much today and documented in innumerable symptoms of the breakdown of life, is not an obscure fate, an impenetrable destiny; rather, it becomes understandable and transparent against the background of the teleology of European history that can be discovered philosophically. The condition for this understanding, however, is that the phenomenon “Europe” be grasped in its central, essential nucleus. In order to be able to comprehend the disarray of the present “crisis,” we ha[ve] to work out the concept of Europe as the historical teleology of the infinite goals of reason; we ha[ve] to show how the European “world” was born out of ideas of reason, i.e., out of the spirit of philosophy. The “crisis” could then become distinguishable as

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the apparent failure of rationalism. The reason for the failure of a rational culture, however . . . lies not in the essence of rationalism itself but solely in its being rendered superficial, in its entanglement in “naturalism” and “objectivism.” (299, emphasis in original)

For Husserl, then, the task of phenomenology is not to refute rationalism as such or even to expose its limitations but rather to reclaim the radical impetus of rationalism that spurred ancient Greek and early-modern European thought alike before it became weighed down by the reductive positivism of both the natural and the “human” sciences. He concludes his text with the stirring call for a return to the philosophical spirit: There are only two escapes from the crisis of European existence: the downfall of Europe in its estrangement from its own rational sense of life, its fall into hostility toward the spirit and into barbarity; or the rebirth of Europe from the spirit of philosophy through a heroism of reason that overcomes naturalism once and for all. Europe’s greatest danger is weariness. If we struggle against this greatest of all dangers as “good Europeans” with the sort of courage that does not fear even an infinite struggle, then out of the destructive blaze of lack of faith, the smoldering fire of despair over the West’s mission for humanity, the ashes of great weariness, will rise up the phoenix of a new life-inwardness and spiritualization as the pledge of a great and distant future for man: for the spirit alone is immortal. (299)

According to Husserl, the successful resolution of the European crisis depends on the realization that this crisis is itself a crucial episode in the progress of reason that is specially borne for all humanity by the history of the West. What makes “Philosophy” particularly germane to my argument in this chapter is, once again, the candor with which he presents the teleological argument that informs his phenomenological project. In this text, Husserl entertains questions on the privileged position of Europe in world history that later twentieth-century continental philosophers would rather more wisely avoid, questions that he himself poses only rhetorically in the first part of Crisis. “Philosophy” certainly recalls the teleological argument

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made by earlier generations of continental philosophers, especially the German Idealists, as they are commonly called. Indeed, Husserl acknowledges his intellectual debt to the German Idealists in this text, although he also claims that his project of phenomenology surpasses their philosophy: “German Idealism preceded us long ago in [the] insight . . . that the stage of development of ratio represented by the rationalism of the Age of Enlightenment was a mistake, though certainly an understandable one. . . . [T]he German Idealism proceeding from Kant was passionately concerned with overcoming [the] naïveté [of naturalism and objectivism] . . . though it was unable to attain the higher stage of reflexivity which is decisive for the new form of philosophy and of European humanity” (290–92). Husserl further claims that his phenomenological project surpasses the “fashionable prejudices” and “phraseologies” (289) of his existentialist critics, who, however, remain nameless in his text: “I would like to think that I, the supposed reactionary, am far more radical and far more revolutionary than those who in their words proclaim themselves so radical today” (290). Yet what I want to suggest is that the relationship between Husserl and his critics is not as strained as they themselves imagined or, rather, that their antagonistic relationship is to be reconceived on the basis of the historical teleology of the West that informs both of their philosophical projects. Over the course of “Philosophy,” Husserl presents what is surely a radical argument, as he would have it, for the privileged position of Europe in world history. Invoking the philosophical work of G. W. F. Hegel, who also, however, remains nameless in his text, Husserl outlines what he calls a “spiritual history” (273) of Europe. This spiritual history is guided by “a remarkable teleology, inborn, as it were, only in our Europe . . . one which is quite intimately involved with the outbreak or irruption of philosophy and its branches, the sciences, in the ancient Greek spirit” (273). Following conventional practice, Husserl thus “make[s] the leap” (294), as he admits, from modern Europe back to ancient Greece in assembling the history of the West: Spiritual Europe has a birthplace. By this I mean not a geographical birthplace, in one land, though this is also true, but rather a spiritual birthplace in a nation or in individual men and human groups of this nation. It is the ancient Greek nation in the seventh and sixth centuries

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B.C. Here there arises a new sort of attitude of individuals toward their surrounding world. And its consequence is the breakthrough of a completely new sort of spiritual structure, rapidly growing into a systematically self-enclosed cultural form; the Greeks called it philosophy. . . . In the breakthrough of philosophy in this sense, in which all sciences are contained, I see . . . the primal phenomenon of spiritual Europe. (276, emphasis in original)

The emergence of philosophy among the ancient Greeks is very significant for Husserl insofar as it marks a “reorientation” from the “natural attitude” to the “theoretical attitude” (280–81). The natural attitude, which is the “primordial” or “original” attitude of all humanity, is characterized by “a life [that is] naïvely, straightforwardly directed at the world, the world being always in a certain sense consciously present as a universal horizon, without, however, being thematic as such” (281). The theoretical attitude, which originated among the ancient Greeks but eventually spread throughout the West, is characterized by a reorientation of the natural attitude whereby “the world itself [is made] thematic” (281). Again following conventional practice, Husserl attributes the further refinement of this theoretical attitude to Socrates, Plato, and, in particular, Aristotle (293). He also goes on to describe a third attitude in which a “synthesis” (283) between the natural and theoretical attitudes is achieved—this is presumably the task of phenomenology, although he does not state it as such. Yet throughout “Philosophy,” the reorientation from the original natural attitude to the new theoretical attitude seems to remain especially significant for Husserl. Indeed, the phenomenological reorientation of philosophy itself would be impossible without this prior reorientation having already taken place. According to Husserl, the emergence of philosophy thus marks the advent of a new period in human history, distinguishing European humanity from the rest of humanity: “The philosophical idea which is immanent in the history of Europe (spiritual Europe) or, what is the same, the teleology which is immanent in it . . . makes itself known, from the standpoint of universal mankind as such, as the breakthrough and the developmental beginning of a new human epoch—the epoch of mankind which now seeks to live, and only can live, in the free shaping of its existence, its historical life, through ideas of reason, through infinite tasks” (274). Husserl does admit

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that all humanity is “bound together by . . . spiritual relations,” comprising a “plenitude of human and cultural types,” albeit some “more complicated” than others and others “more primitive” than some (274). However, he goes on to argue that the singular origin of the theoretical attitude among the ancient Greeks marks a profound historical break between “philosophical and scientific humanity” (277), on one hand, and “prephilosophical” (292) and “prescientific” humanity (277), on the other. The emergence of philosophy signals a new type of rationality altogether, a rationality that distinguishes Europe from all other human societies, whether civilized or primitive: “Reason is a broad title. According to the old familiar definition, man [sic] is the rational animal, and in this broad sense even the Papuan is a man and not a beast. . . . But just as man and even the Papuan represent a new stage of animal nature, i.e., as opposed to the beast, so philosophical reason represents a new stage of human nature and its reason” (290). The history of the West, then, is inaugurated not only by a “new sort of historicity which distinguishes itself . . . from history in general” but also by a “new sort of humanity, one which, living in finitude, lives toward poles of infinity” (277). Yet Husserl is quick to point out in “Philosophy” that this new European humanity, “genuine humanity” as such (291), does not include all Europeans themselves. He explains that the spiritual history of Europe takes for its subject what he calls the “spiritual shape of Europe” (273). This spiritual shape of Europe is not quite congruent with its physical shape but rather delineates the common intellectual and cultural tradition of the West. According to Husserl, then, European humanity includes some of those who are located outside the geographical borders of Europe, just as it excludes some of those who are located inside these borders: “We refer to Europe not as it is understood geographically, as on a map, as if thereby the group of people who live together in this territory would define European humanity. In the spiritual sense the English Dominions, the United States, etc., clearly belong to Europe, whereas the Eskimos or Indians presented as curiosities at fairs, or the Gypsies, who constantly wander about Europe, do not” (273). Interestingly enough, “the Jews” remain conspicuously absent from this list of curiosities and wanderers. After having thus qualified what he means by European humanity, Husserl goes on to argue that the distinction of European humanity from the

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rest of humanity is not simply one distinction among many but is rather an absolutely unique distinction. Even as Europeans are engaged among themselves in rivalry and war, they cannot fail to understand the special historical mission of the West that they bear in common: “No matter how hostile they may be toward one another, the European nations nevertheless have a particular inner kinship of spirit which runs through them all, transcending national differences. There is something like a sibling relationship which gives all of us in this sphere the consciousness of homeland” (“Philosophy,” 274). Yet Husserl makes it clear that this distinct sense of “supranationality” (276, 289) that Europeans feel among themselves is not to be conflated with the more mundane sense of cultural affinity that nonEuropeans may feel with each other: This [inner kinship of spirit among Europeans] comes immediately to the fore as soon as we think ourselves into the Indian historical sphere, for example, with its many peoples and cultural products. In this sphere, too, there exists the unity of a family-like kinship, but one which is alien to us. Indian people, on the other hand, experience us as aliens and only one another as confreres. Yet this essential difference between familiarity and strangeness, a fundamental category of all historicity which relativizes itself in many strata, cannot suffice. Historical mankind does not always divide itself up in the same way in accord with this category. We feel this precisely in our own Europe. There is something unique here that is recognized in us by all other human groups, too, something that, quite apart from all considerations of utility, becomes a motive for them to Europeanize themselves even in their unbroken will to spiritual self-preservation; whereas we, if we understand ourselves properly, would never Indianize ourselves, for example. I mean that we feel (and in spite of all obscurity this feeling is probably legitimate) that an entelechy is inborn in our European civilization which holds sway throughout all the changing shapes of Europe and accords to them the sense of a development toward an ideal shape of life and being as an eternal pole. (274–75)

Of course, Husserl assures us that this conviction that the progress of reason is specially borne for all humanity by the history of the West is not

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the result of any prejudice on his part but the only conclusion to be drawn from a rational reflection on history itself: “Now all this is not intended as a speculative interpretation of our historical development but as the expression of a vital presentiment which arises through unprejudiced reflection. But this presentiment gives us an intentional guide for seeing in European history highly significant interconnections in the pursuit of which the presentiment becomes a confirmed certainty for us. Presentiment is the felt signpost for all discoveries” (275–76). In other words, if Husserl himself does harbor any prejudice at all, then he is vindicated by the indisputably correct conclusion that he is able to draw from it. In “Philosophy,” Husserl thus asserts that philosophy as such remains unique to the Western tradition, the intellectual and cultural origins of which are to be traced from modern European thinkers back to the ancient Greeks. Anticipating the objection against his teleological argument, he elaborates on what he considers the fundamental difference between the Western intellectual tradition and all other intellectual traditions: Here we encounter an obvious objection: philosophy, the science of the Greeks, is not something peculiar to them which came into the world for the first time with them. After all, they themselves tell of the wise Egyptians, Babylonians, etc., and did in fact learn much from them. Today we have a plethora of works about Indian philosophy, Chinese philosophy, etc., in which these are placed on a plane with Greek philosophy and are taken as merely different historical forms under one and the same idea of culture. Naturally, common features are not lacking. Nevertheless, one must not allow the merely morphologically general features to hide the intentional depths so that one becomes blind [sic] to the most essential differences of principle. Before everything else the very attitudes of the two sorts of “philosophers,” their universal directions of interest, are fundamentally different. In both cases one may notice a world-encompassing interest that leads on both sides—thus also in Indian, Chinese, and similar “philosophies”— to universal knowledge of the world, everywhere working itself out as a vocation-like life-interest. . . . But only in the Greeks do we have a universal (“cosmological”) life-interest in the essentially new form of a purely “theoretical” attitude. (279–80)

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Husserl explains this fundamental difference between the Western intellectual tradition and all other intellectual traditions, between philosophy properly speaking and philosophy so called, by further distinguishing the theoretical attitude from the “practical attitude” (282). The practical attitude, which, like the natural attitude, is common to all humanity, is characterized by an intention to “serve the natural interests of life or, what is in essence the same thing, natural praxis” (282). The theoretical attitude, which is “totally unpractical,” is characterized by “a voluntary epoche¯ of all natural praxis, including the higher-level praxis that serves the natural sphere” (282). Despite the seeming resemblance of the practical attitude to the theoretical attitude, then, the practical attitude remains entirely within the natural attitude: “[The practical attitude] still belongs to the sphere of the natural attitude. . . . [T]he universality of a practical attitude, now related to the whole world, by no means need imply an interest and a concern with all the details or all the particular totalities within the world, which would of course be unthinkable [from within the natural attitude]” (282). We are left by Husserl to assume that this practical attitude is somehow different from the synthesis between the natural and the theoretical attitudes that is supposedly achieved by phenomenology itself. Husserl thus responds to the objection against his teleological argument by insisting that philosophy, which is to be specifically understood as the intellectual production of the theoretical attitude, does not properly belong to any intellectual tradition outside the West. He argues that all Eastern intellectual traditions, both Near and Far Eastern, have been marked by the practical attitude rather than by the theoretical attitude and even more exactly by a variant of the practical attitude that he calls the “religiousmythical attitude”: For a deeper understanding of Greek-European science (universally speaking: philosophy) in its fundamental difference from the oriental “philosophies” judged equal to it, it is now necessary to consider more closely the practical-universal attitude which created these philosophies prior to European science and to clarify it as the religious-mythical attitude. It is a known fact, but also a necessity essentially available to insight, that religious-mythical motifs and a religious-mythical praxis

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belong to every civilization living in the natural sphere—i.e., prior to the outbreak and the effects of Greek philosophy and thus of a scientific world-view. The mythical-religious attitude exists when the world as a totality becomes thematic, but in a practical way; by “world” we mean here, of course, the world which is concretely, traditionally valid for the civilization in question (a nation for example), i.e., the world as apperceived mythically. . . . [T]his mythical-practical world-view and worldknowledge can give rise to much knowledge of the factual world, the world as known through scientific experience, that can later be used scientifically. But within their own framework of meaning this worldview and world-knowledge are and remain mythical and practical, and it is a mistake, a falsification of their sense, for those raised in the scientific ways of thinking created in Greece and developed in the modern period to speak of Indian and Chinese philosophy and science (astronomy, mathematics), i.e., to interpret India, Babylonia, China, in a European way. (283–85)

Similarly, Husserl notes that although monotheistic religious traditions may be “formed anew in the spirit of philosophical ideality” such that “God . . . becomes the bearer of the absolute logos,” polytheistic traditions are not recuperable by philosophical rationality (288–89). It is especially worth noting that Husserl concludes his argument that philosophy does not properly belong to any intellectual tradition outside the West with an appeal to some sort of cultural relativism. He claims that it would be inappropriate indeed to subject non-European systems of thought to any European method of interpretation or “to interpret nonEuropeans in a European way.” Husserl thus defends his Western ethnocentrism by making what might now be read, along the lines of the poststructuralist critique, as a statement against this very ethnocentrism. Of course, this sort of cultural relativism only serves to establish an essential difference between the East and the West, while obliterating all differences within either one of these geopolitical spaces. In the text “Philosophy” itself, then—a text that presents what is perhaps the boldest argument that has ever been offered within twentieth-century continental philosophy for the privileged position of Europe in world history—the inversion from

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a positive teleology to a negative teleology of the West is already accomplished, even if it is immediately followed by a reversion back to the most emboldened ethnocentrism.

Heidegger and the Opening Martin Heidegger’s text “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” is based on a lecture delivered in 1964, while his text “Time and Being” is based on a lecture delivered in 1962. Heidegger presents his philosophical project in quite different terms in these two texts, “End of Philosophy” focusing on what he calls, aptly enough, “the end of philosophy” and “Time and Being” focusing on his concept of Appropriation. Read together, these texts offer not only a critical reassessment of his early treatise Being and Time but also a detailed commentary on both Hegel’s and Husserl’s philosophical projects. The title “Time and Being” is obviously a play on the title Being and Time, reversing yet preserving the philosophical terms that organized his earlier work. Even at the time of the original publication of Being and Time in 1927, Heidegger presented it as the first half of a text that remained to be completed. And as he himself noted in his preface to the seventh German edition in 1953, “After a quarter century, the second half could no longer be added without the first being presented anew. Nonetheless, its path still remains a necessary one even today.”3 He also situates “End of Philosophy” in relation to his earlier work, providing a singular trajectory to almost all of his texts following Being and Time: “[This] text belongs to a larger context. It is the attempt undertaken again and again ever since 1930 to shape the question of Being and Time in a more primal way. This means: to subject the point of departure of the question in Being and Time to an immanent criticism. . . . Accordingly, the name of the task of Being and Time will change.”4 Heidegger’s task in both “End of Philosophy” and “Time and Being” is thus no longer to restore the fundamental question on being that inaugurates philosophy, metaphysics, or ontology, as the case may be, but now to redirect this very questioning. In approaching this task, he formulates two new questions in “End of Philosophy”: “What does it mean that philosophy in the present age has entered its final stage?” and “What task is reserved

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for thinking at the end of philosophy?”5 Yet what Heidegger calls the task of thinking is less an abandonment of his earlier work than a critical extension of it, the end of philosophy taking us back this time not to the beginning of philosophy but rather to a time before the beginning, from the fundamental question on being to a question prior to the philosophical determination of being as such. Certainly, Heidegger still describes his task as “the attempt to think Being without regard to its being grounded in terms of beings.”6 But this task is no longer to be attempted from within philosophy, metaphysics, or ontology: “To think Being without beings means: to think Being without regard to metaphysics.”7 The task of thinking at the end of philosophy, then, is precisely “to determine that which concerns thinking,” to determine “the matter of thinking” itself or, indeed, “the phenomenon itself.”8 As Heidegger explains, however, “the matter at stake” does not simply refer to “something which is” but rather concerns “what is decisively at stake in that something inevitable is concealed within it.”9 This matter of thinking has always been concealed from philosophy, right from its beginning up to and including phenomenology. Heidegger thus presents his own project by way of critiquing both Hegel’s and Husserl’s phenomenological projects: “In recent times, philosophy has of its own accord expressly called thinking ‘to the things themselves.’ ”10 But he explains that in Hegel’s concept of the idea and Husserl’s concept of intuition alike, following René Descartes’s ego cogito, the phenomenon is determined as subjectivity, and being is reduced to consciousness: For the call “to the thing itself,” what concerns philosophy as its matter is established from the outset. From the perspective of Hegel and Husserl—and not only from their perspective—the matter of philosophy is subjectivity. It is not the matter as such that is controversial for the call, but rather its presentation by which the matter itself becomes present. Hegel’s speculative dialectic is the movement in which the matter as such comes to itself, comes to its own presence. Husserl’s method is supposed to bring the matter of philosophy to its ultimately originary givenness, that means: to its own presence. The two methods are as different as they could possibly be. But the matter as such which they are to present is the same.11

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Heidegger argues that despite Hegel’s and Husserl’s methodological differences, then, both of their projects remain entirely within the philosophical tradition. The task of thinking at the end of philosophy is not to escape this tradition, however—very wishful thinking, as Heidegger himself would certainly concede—but rather to reveal the matter of thinking on whose concealment philosophy has always depended: “[I]n our attempt to bring the task of thinking to view . . . we [must] go beyond a mere discussion of the call and ask what remains unthought in the call ‘to the thing itself.’ Questioning in this way, we can become aware how something which it is no longer the matter of philosophy to think conceals itself precisely where philosophy has brought its matter to absolute knowledge and to ultimate evidence. . . . This is true not only of philosophy’s method, but also and primarily of its matter.” Turning to literature instead of philosophy, Heidegger thus declares that the matter of thinking “is a ‘primal phenomenon,’ to use a word of Goethe’s. We would have to say a primal matter.”12 Yet insofar as his attempt to identify this primal matter is also a response to the philosophical call to the thing itself, his own task is contained well within the mandate of phenomenology. This intellectual continuity that I have traced from both Hegel’s and Husserl’s phenomenological projects to Heidegger’s project as well as from Heidegger’s earlier work to his later work is not without bearing on the theoretical turn from teleology to negative teleology within twentieth-century continental philosophy. Of course, the relation of Heidegger’s project to Husserl’s project in particular is especially important to my argument in this chapter. In many respects, Heidegger’s argument on the end of philosophy is but a revision, albeit a very radical revision, of Husserl’s argument on the crisis of European sciences, humanity, or existence. Whereas Husserl argued that the naturalism or objectivism of the natural and “human” sciences alike was to be overcome by a return to the essence of rationalism, Heidegger argues that rationalism itself is to be overcome by a return to the task of thinking, a kind of thinking prior to philosophy, prior to the very distinction between rationalism and irrationalism that has always been so decisive for philosophy. Heidegger thus responds to the charge of irrationalism that is laid against existentialism by Husserl, who, however, remains nameless in Heidegger’s text, just as Heidegger remained nameless in Husserl’s text:

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But isn’t this all unfounded mysticism or even bad mythology, in any case a ruinous irrationalism, the denial of ratio? . . . As long as ratio and the rational still remain questionable in what is their own, talk about irrationalism is unfounded. The technological scientific rationalization ruling the present age justifies itself every day more surprisingly by its immense results. But these results say nothing about what the possibility of the rational and the irrational first grants. . . . Perhaps there is a thinking which is more sober than the irresistible race of rationalization and the sweeping character of cybernetics. Presumably it is precisely this sweeping quality which is extremely irrational. Perhaps there is a thinking outside of the distinction of rational and irrational still more sober than scientific technology, more sober and thus removed, without effect and yet having its own necessity.13

Heidegger entirely agrees with Husserl, then, that the naturalism or objectivism of the sciences and the philosophy that makes this naturalism or objectivism possible are intellectually if not spiritually bankrupt. But whereas Husserl traced the decline of philosophical and scientific thought only as far back as the Enlightenment period, Heidegger traces it back to the advent of philosophy itself. For Heidegger as for Husserl, philosophy as such specifically denotes the Western intellectual tradition. If Heidegger rarely indicates the historical and cultural specificity of philosophy, then, it is only because this specificity is already understood, at least as far as he is concerned. Making the leap from modern Europe back to ancient Greece without, however, acknowledging it, even if only in a most cursory manner as Husserl did, Heidegger outlines the history of philosophy: Philosophy is metaphysics. Metaphysics thinks being as a whole—the world, man, God—with respect to Being, with respect to the belonging together of beings in Being. Metaphysics thinks beings as being in the manner of representational thinking which gives reasons. For since the beginning of philosophy and with that beginning, the Being of beings has showed itself as the ground. . . . [T]he ground has the character of grounding as the ontic causation of the real, as the transcendental

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making possible of the objectivity of objects, as the dialectical mediation of the movement of the absolute Spirit, of the historical process of production, as the will to power positing values.14

Heidegger thus outlines a rather monolithic history to be sure, a philosophical tradition in complete unison as to its theoretical determination of being that has persisted “[e]ver since the beginning of Western thinking with the Greeks” or, again, “from the dawn of Western-European thinking until today.”15 This singular philosophical determination of being has endured through all its historical transformations “as the hen, the unifying unique One, as the logos, the gathering that preserves the All, as idea, ousia, energeia, substantia, actualitas, perceptio, monad, as objectivity, as the being posited of self-positing in the sense of the will of reason, of love, of the spirit, of power, as the will to will in the eternal recurrence of the same.”16 The history of philosophy, then, is precisely what is considered, following conventional practice, the history of the Western intellectual tradition itself beginning with Plato and ending with Marx and Nietzsche, although it is safe to assume that Heidegger would more readily than not extend this genealogy from Socrates to Husserl himself: “Throughout the whole history of philosophy, Plato’s thinking remains decisive in changing forms. Metaphysics is Platonism. Nietzsche characterizes his philosophy as reversed Platonism. With the reversal of metaphysics which was already accomplished by Karl Marx, the most extreme possibility of philosophy is attained.”17 Heidegger thus argues that the end of philosophy has already arrived, that philosophy “has entered its final stage” (57). This final stage of philosophy is characterized by the dominance of scientific technology. But whereas Husserl claimed that modern scientific thought betrayed the spirit of ancient Greek philosophy, Heidegger points out that the dominance of scientific technology has been made possible by the emergence of philosophy itself among the ancient Greeks: “We forget that already in the age of Greek philosophy a decisive characteristic of philosophy appears: the development of sciences within the field which philosophy opened up. . . . The end of philosophy proves to be the triumph of the manipulable arrangement of a scientific-technological world and of the social order proper to this world. The end of philosophy means: the beginning of the world

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civilization based upon Western European thinking.”18 For Husserl and Heidegger alike, then, philosophy remains unique to the Western tradition. However, Heidegger inverts the positive value that Husserl ascribed to this tradition. Whereas the history of the West according to Husserl described the ascent of a European humanity endowed with a universal mission, the history of the West according to Heidegger describes its descent. Whereas Husserl told the story of a genuine humanity, Heidegger tells the story of a fallen one. But, as always, there is redemption after the fall. If according to Husserl there was an entelechy guiding European civilization, then according to Heidegger there is similarly some sort of fatal necessity to the history of philosophy—which is to say the history of the West—a necessity that was determined at the very outset of philosophy. The task of thinking at the end of philosophy thus calls for a recollection not of the beginning of philosophy but of a time before the beginning: But is the end of philosophy in the sense of its development to the sciences also already the complete realization of all the possibilities in which the thinking of philosophy was posited? Or is there a first possibility for thinking apart from the last possibility which we characterized (the dissolution of philosophy in the technologized sciences), a possibility from which the thinking of philosophy would have to start out, but which as philosophy it could nevertheless not experience and adopt? If this were the case, then a task would still have to be reserved for thinking in a concealed way in the history of philosophy from its beginning to its end, a task accessible neither to philosophy as metaphysics nor, and even less so, to the sciences stemming from philosophy.19

Heidegger suggests that there is a first task of thinking that does not rejoin its last task, then—a task prior to the first task, a primal matter as such that inaugurates and yet remains concealed from philosophy. He calls this primal matter that it is our task to think at the end of philosophy the “opening.” The opening precedes and thereby remains inaccessible to philosophical rationality: “All philosophical thinking which explicitly or inexplicitly follows the call ‘to the thing itself ’ is already admitted to the free space of the opening in its movement and with its method. But philosophy knows

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nothing of the opening. Philosophy does speak about the light of reason, but does not heed the opening of Being. [The light of reason] throws light only on openness. It does concern the opening, but so little does it form it that it needs it in order to be able to illuminate what is present in the opening.” Indeed, philosophy is the concealment of the opening itself. At the very outset of philosophy, the opening was perceived, but it was not understood. As Heidegger explains, the concept of the opening “was already said a long time ago precisely at the beginning of philosophy and for that beginning, but has not been explicitly thought.” Or rather, it was said just before the beginning of philosophy, before Aristotle, before Plato, and even before Socrates. Heidegger identifies his concept of the opening with the ancient Greek term aletheia as it was used by the pre-Socratic thinker Parmenides: “Aletheia is named at the beginning of philosophy, but afterward it is not explicitly thought as such by philosophy. For since Aristotle it became the task of philosophy as metaphysics to think beings as such ontotheologically.” Heidegger thus insists on what he calls a “prephilosophical way of understanding [aletheia].”20 The concept of the opening as such “is not even anything new, but the oldest of the old in Western thought.”21 Yet Heidegger disputes the conventional translation of aletheia as “truth,” offering instead the more literal translation “unconcealment.” “Opening is named with aletheia, unconcealment, but not thought as such.”22 In what is certainly a most interesting twist to his argument, Heidegger further suggests that the opening, the primal matter, the phenomenon itself is not suppressed by any outside force inasmuch as there is nothing outside the opening. Rather, the opening conceals itself. Philosophy, then, is not quite the concealment of the opening itself but more precisely the opening concealing itself. The history of philosophy is thus an integral part of the opening itself: [What aletheia is] remains concealed. Does this happen by chance? Does it happen only as a consequence of the carelessness of human thinking? Or does it happen because self-concealing, concealment, lethe belongs to a-letheia, not just as an addition, not as shadow to light, but rather as the heart of aletheia? And does not even a keeping and preserving rule in this self-concealing of the opening of presence from which unconcealment

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can be granted to begin with, and thus what is present can appear in its presence? If this were so, then the opening would not be the mere opening of presence, but the opening of presence concealing itself, the opening of a self-concealing sheltering. If this were so, then with these questions we would reach the path to the task of thinking at the end of philosophy.23

Heidegger explains that this concealment of the opening was misunderstood even by the ancient Greeks themselves who determined the concept of aletheia as truth. After all, the concept of unconcealment could not have been understood at the outset of philosophy, for the opening had yet to conceal itself. It is not simply a matter of returning to pre-Socratic thought, then, insofar as Parmenides himself, although he spoke about unconcealment, never thought about it as such. Rather, what Heidegger suggests is that “we experience aletheia in a Greek manner as unconcealment and then, above and beyond the Greek, think it as the opening of self-concealing.”24 As it turns out, the end of philosophy is thus a new beginning for the task of thinking, a task that is begun anew by Heidegger himself. It is in this sense that the history of philosophy—which is again to say the history of the West—follows its fatal necessity. As Heidegger explains, “The end of philosophy means the completion of metaphysics. . . . Each epoch of philosophy has its own necessity. We simply have to acknowledge the fact that a philosophy is the way it is.”25 It is only after the history of philosophy has run its inevitable course, after all the possibilities of being as it has been determined by philosophy have been exhausted, that the task of thinking about the opening reveals itself—or, rather, unconceals itself: Each of [Being’s] transformations remains destined. . . . What is historical in the history of Being is determined by what is sent forth in destining, not by an indeterminately thought up occurrence. The history of Being means destiny of Being. . . . To hold back is, in Greek, epoche. Hence we speak of the epochs of the destiny of Being. . . . When Plato represents Being as idea and as the koinonia of the Ideas, when Aristotle represents it as energeia, Kant as position, Hegel as the

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absolute concept, Nietzsche as the will to power, these are not doctrines advanced by chance, but rather words of Being as answers to a claim which speaks in the sending concealing itself. . . . Always retained in the withdrawing sending, Being is unconcealed for thinking with its epochal abundance of transmutations.26

However Heidegger may or may not qualify his use of the terms epoch and destiny, then, his argument on the end of philosophy still relies on the historical teleology of the West, just as Husserl’s argument on the European crisis did. But what distinguishes Heidegger’s teleology from Husserl’s is the negative value that Heidegger ascribes to the history of the West itself. Whereas for Husserl philosophical rationality constituted the essence of Western history, for Heidegger it constitutes the accident. Or rather, whereas for Husserl the crisis of rationalism was accidental to the essential course of the Western progress of reason, for Heidegger the Western progress of reason is itself accidental to the essential course of a greater history yet, a history that cannot be called historical in the common sense. Indeed, Heidegger challenges us “to think the historicity of that which grants a possible history to philosophy.”27 And yet this greater history is none other than the history of the West, albeit a more profound history of the West, the genealogy of which extends past Plato on one end and past Marx and Nietzsche on the other, past Socrates and past Husserl—from Parmenides to Heidegger himself and surely beyond them both as well. In Heidegger’s argument on the end of philosophy, the history of the West thus continues to bear a special mission for all humanity, a mission that is made only more poignant by its negative charge. The universal import of the history of the West is affirmed for Heidegger by the global dominance of scientific technology. Although Europeans and non-Europeans alike have been swept up in this global process, he explains that Europeans remain at its center, providing the very consciousness of this process: Now that modern technology has arranged its expansion and rule over the whole earth, it is not just the Sputniks and their by-products that are circling around our planet; it is rather Being as presencing in the sense of calculable material that claims all the inhabitants of the earth in a uniform manner without the inhabitants of the non-European continents

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explicitly knowing this or even being able or wanting to know of the origin of this determination of Being. (Evidently those who desire such a knowledge least of all are those busy developers who today are urging the so-called underdeveloped countries into the realm of hearing of that claim of Being which speaks from the innermost core of modern technology.)28

For Heidegger, then, non-Europeans are universally compelled to submit themselves to the technological rationality of the West without even realizing it, much as for Husserl they were compelled to “Europeanize themselves even in their unbroken will to spiritual self-preservation.” But whereas Husserl valued this compulsion positively, Heidegger values it negatively. It is also worth noting that Heidegger concludes his commentary on the global dominance of scientific technology with what might certainly be read as a statement opposing the neocolonial order of economic development. He seems to suggest that the “so-called underdeveloped countries” offer the most promising source of resistance to the philosophical determination of being. And yet, according to his own argument, it would be futile for non-Europeans to resist the technological rationality of the West insofar as the history of philosophy follows the necessary course of concealment before the opening as such is revealed to it. Besides, it is impossible for non-Europeans to resist the history of the West since they remain ignorant, whether willfully so or not, of its necessary course, in which they themselves have already been swept up. In the texts “End of Philosophy” and “Time and Being,” there thus emerges what is probably the first fully articulated argument in continental philosophy on the negative teleology of the West. Of course, this articulation was prepared for some time before the appearance of these texts themselves by the positive teleology that informed Husserl’s as well as Heidegger’s own earlier phenomenological investigations. Indeed, it was prepared in such a thorough manner that it is really quite difficult to indicate the precise point of inversion from one to the other.

3 THE ETHICAL TURN

Levinas and Orientation The turn from teleology to negative teleology that I discuss in this chapter concerns what I have called the most powerful reiteration of the first such turn in twentieth-century continental philosophy. To put it very schematically, the historical teleology of the West that informed Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology is reiterated in Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of alterity, while the negative teleology that was formulated in Martin Heidegger’s destruction of ontology is reiterated in Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction. Surely enough, this reiteration of the turn from teleology to negative teleology is not a simple repetition of it. I am certainly not suggesting in this chapter that Levinas just rehashes Husserl’s philosophical project. For both Levinas and Derrida follow Heidegger’s path toward the end of philosophy, endorsing his critique of phenomenology and the destruction of ontology altogether. The imputed ethical turn in Levinas’s and Derrida’s thought is thus prefigured not only in their earliest texts but also in Heidegger’s own declared turn in thinking. In style and substance, Levinas’s and Derrida’s ethical interventions are heavily indebted to Heidegger’s later thought, their disavowal of the philosophical project as such accompanied by their eschewal of logical discourse in favor of a more figurative language—a

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critical poetics or a tortuous prose, depending on the reader’s preference. It is Heidegger, after all, who first stripped ontology of its status as “first philosophy,” providing the theoretical opening for both Levinas’s ethics of alterity and Derrida’s deconstruction. The “ethical turn,” then, if this phrase bears any theoretical significance at all, characterizes not only Levinas’s and Derrida’s later thought but also twentieth-century continental philosophy in general, especially since Heidegger’s intervention. The turn away from ontology is precisely the turn toward ethics—from identity to alterity, from logic to language. Levinas’s continued reliance on the historical teleology of the West might thus seem quite anomalous to his ethical project. It is rather jarring to read his positive teleology not only after Heidegger’s radical critique of Western thought but also after the global resurgence of anticolonial movements, both intellectual and political, during the mid-twentieth century. In this sense, Levinas’s project might very well seem like an intellectual retreat or throwback to an earlier generation of continental philosophers— a throwback, indeed, to Husserl if not to G. W. F. Hegel himself. But my argument in this book, of course, is that teleology and negative teleology are complicit with one another, that negative teleology emerges from and withdraws back into teleology itself, and that positive teleology remains intact even in the most sensitive articulation of negative teleology within twentieth-century continental philosophy. Derrida’s own ethical project, then, also continues to rely on the historical teleology of the West, even if he appears to extend Heidegger’s path farther yet toward the end of philosophy rather than backtrack along it. Insofar as both Levinas’s and Derrida’s ethical interventions depend on the same ethnocentric discourse as Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenological investigations did, I want to suggest that there is a profoundly unethical opening to ethics itself, at least as it has been understood within twentieth-century continental philosophy. Ethics follows phenomenology, retaining the historical subject of the West at its center. This profoundly unethical opening of ethics thus accommodates the teleology that is articulated in Levinas’s ethics of alterity as readily as the negative teleology that is articulated in Derrida’s deconstruction. Levinas’s text “Signification and Sense” was originally published in 1964, partially incorporating the text “The Trace of the Other,” which had been published the previous year.1 “Signification and Sense” marks an important

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point of transition in Levinas’s ethical project, not only providing a critical review of both Husserl and Heidegger as well as of Maurice Merleau-Ponty but also offering yet another attempt to establish a discourse that would not rely on the conceptual framework of ontology. In this text, Levinas seems to have accepted Heidegger’s assimilation of philosophy, ontology, and metaphysics insofar as he appears to abandon the dictum that he presented in what was at the time his still recently published treatise Totality and Infinity, “Metaphysics precedes ontology.”2 Of course, Levinas’s commentators nearly always gloss this dictum as “ethics precedes ontology,” thereby replacing the term metaphysics with ethics, presumably in deference to Heidegger’s theoretical terminology as well as to Derrida’s sustained critique in “Violence and Metaphysics” of Levinas’s avowedly metaphysical discourse. The success of Levinas’s attempt in “Signification and Sense” to establish a new discourse that would not rely on either ontology or metaphysics might be judged, then, by Derrida’s own adoption of the concept of the trace in Of Grammatology. In any case, Levinas announces what he considers a decisive break with contemporary philosophy as such in “Signification and Sense.” This gesture certainly recalls both Husserl’s argument on the European crisis and Heidegger’s argument on the end of philosophy, and yet it is Husserl and Heidegger themselves who represent contemporary philosophy for Levinas. Although Levinas stages his own ethical intervention into contemporary philosophy by critiquing Merleau-Ponty’s project, he opens his text by pitting Husserl and Heidegger against each other. He argues that all philosophy may be divided into two theoretical positions, both of which, however, presume a common concept of signification: There would seem to be a distinction between the reality given to receptivity and the signification it can acquire. As if experience first offered contents . . . and afterward these contents were animated by meta-phors [sic], received a surcharge that carried them beyond the given. This metaphor can be attributed either to a defect of perception or its excellence, depending on whether the beyond of the metaphor leads to other contents simply absent from the limited field of perception or [is] transcendent with regard to the order of the contents or the given.3

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Philosophy has traditionally adhered to the first position, according to which signification must compensate for the inevitable “failure of perception.” Perception fails in its “mission . . . to render present, to represent,” because its field is always limited. Signification fills in this “lack” by bringing those objects that are absent from the field of perception to consciousness: “Intellectualism—whether rationalist or empiricist, idealist or realist—is attached to this conception. For Plato, for Hume, and even for contemporary logical positivists, signification is reduced to the contents given to consciousness” (9–10, emphasis in original). Levinas further explains that Husserl’s concept of intuition also adheres to this theoretical position, even if it does constitute a more subtle form of intellectualism as such: “Husserl, who incidentally marks the end of [the empiricist] notion of signification, pursues . . . its intellectualism: he accounts for significations by a return to the given. Categorical intuition—the notion by which he breaks with sensualist empiricism—in fact extends the intuitivism of signification. Relations and essences are, in turn, givens. Intuition remains the source of all intelligibility” (10, emphasis in original). From Plato to Husserl, then, philosophy has been dominated by this “intellectualist” or “intuitivist” concept of signification (10). Levinas argues that contemporary philosophy, however, adheres to the second theoretical position, thereby opposing the intellectualist concept of signification. According to contemporary philosophy, “[s]ignification does not console a disappointed perception, it just makes perception possible” (11, emphasis in original). Signification does not refer back to any contents originally given to consciousness but rather “precedes givens and illuminates them” (12). Levinas thus describes the phenomenological concept of signification dominating contemporary philosophy: Pure receptivity, like pure sensibility without signification, would be a myth or abstraction. . . . No given would bear identity forthwith; none could enter into thought by the effect of a simple shock against the wall of a receptivity. To be given to consciousness, to glimmer for it, the given would have to be previously placed on an illuminated horizon, similar to the word that receives the gift of being understood from a context to which it refers. Signification would be the very illumination of this

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horizon. But the horizon does not result from an addition of absent givens, because each given already needs a horizon to define and give itself. This notion of horizon, or world, conceived on the model of a context and, finally, on the model of a language and culture—with all the historical adventure and “already done” this entails—is then the place where signification is situated. (11, emphasis in original)

While this description certainly evokes both Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological projects, Levinas suggests that it is Heidegger’s treatment of language as demonstrated in his notorious “etymologies” (12) that best epitomizes the concept of signification in contemporary philosophy: “[S]ignification is not the modification brought to a content existing outside language. Everything remains within a language or within a world, a world whose structure resembles the order of language with possibilities that no dictionary can permanently settle. . . . At no time would there have been initial birth of signification from being without signification and outside a historical position where language is spoken. This is doubtless what was meant when we were taught that language is the habitation of being” (13, emphasis in original). For Levinas, then, the full gamut of contemporary philosophy is run from Husserl to Heidegger. In Husserl’s concept of signification, on one hand, “the figurative sense must be justified by the literal sense offered to the intuition” (10). In Heidegger’s concept of signification, on the other, “there would be no literal meaning. . . . [The figurative sense] does not result from the pure and simple presence of an object placed in front of thought. Objects become significant from language and not language from objects given to thought and designated by words that function as simple signs” (11–13). In “Signification and Sense,” Heidegger thus remains the central figure of contemporary philosophy. Even though Levinas’s review of contemporary philosophy in this text is occasioned by Merleau-Ponty’s work on the body, as Levinas himself states, he summarizes Merleau-Ponty’s work by placing it in relation to Heidegger: “It is not surprising that Merleau-Ponty’s thought seemed to develop in the direction of Heidegger. . . . [In MerleauPonty’s conception of the body] we meet the schema of the late Heidegger, which is also the fixed idea of all contemporary thought: getting past the subject–object structure” (17). Levinas goes on to trace Heidegger’s thought

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in turn back to Hegel: “It may be that at the source of all these philosophies stands the Hegelian vision of subjectivity understood as an ineluctable moment of becoming by which being comes out of its obscurity, the vision of a subject aroused by the logic of being” (17). Much like Husserl and Heidegger, then, Levinas outlines a singular tradition of philosophy, extending from the ancient Greeks to Hegel and farther to Husserl and Heidegger themselves as well as to the French writers Charles Baudelaire and Anatole France and philosophers Henri Bergson and Merleau-Ponty. But whereas philosophy as such was constituted for Husserl by the emergence of the theoretical attitude and for Heidegger by the concealment of the opening, philosophy is constituted for Levinas by the very concept of signification. Levinas thus makes what he claims to be a theoretical departure from contemporary philosophy by introducing his concept of sense. He argues that phenomenology in particular has effectively leveled all signification. As he explains it, signification “does not express prior thought; it expresses the being to which . . . it already belonged” (16). Any act of signification, then, is only an intervention in the “pre-existent language and cultural world” (16) of which it is part. And since there is no position outside of language or culture from which any act of signification could be evaluated, it follows that signification is a purely “lateral” relation (23) among words and gestures themselves and, furthermore, that it is always “multivocal” (20). However, Levinas argues that significations themselves acquire significance only in that they all are directed toward a “univocal signification of being” (22), which he calls a “unique sense” inasmuch as it is not a signification in the philosophical sense of the term: Do . . . significations not require a unique sense from which they borrow their significance? The world . . . and language . . . have lost the univocality that would authorize us to ask of them the criteria of what makes sense. Absurdity does not lie in non-sense but in the isolation of countless significations, the absence of a sense that orients them. What is lacking is the sense of the senses, the Rome to which all roads lead, the symphony where all senses become song, the song of songs. Absurdity lies in multiplicity within pure indifference. Cultural significations posed as ultimate are the explosion of a unity. It is not a question of simply setting

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the conditions in which the facts of our experience or the signs of our language arouse in us a sentiment of comprehension or seem to proceed from a reasonable intention or translate a structured order. It is a question, beyond these logical and psychological problems, of true signification. (23–24, emphasis in original)

Levinas explains that this “true signification,” the sense of signification itself, is established by the other to whom all signification is directed yet whom contemporary philosophy continues to neglect in its treatment of language: Hasn’t the third dimension been forgotten? The direction toward the Other who is not only collaborator and neighbor of our cultural work of expression or client of our artistic production, but interlocutor: the one to whom expression expresses, for whom celebration celebrates, he [sic] who is both term of an orientation and first signification. In other words, before it is celebration of being, expression is a relation with the one to whom I express the expression and whose presence is already required so that my cultural gesture of expression can be produced. The Other who faces me is not included in the totality of being that is expressed. He arises behind all collection of being, as the one to whom I express what I express. I find myself facing the Other. He is neither a cultural signification nor a simple given. He is, primordially, sense because he lends it to expression itself, because only through him can a phenomenon such as signification introduce itself, of itself, into being. (30, emphasis in original)

Levinas thus argues that all signification relies first and foremost on an ethical relation to the other rather than on an ontological comprehension of being as such. Sense is this “absolute orientation toward the Other” (27) or, again, “a movement of the Same toward the Other that never returns to the Same” (26, emphasis in original). As ethics precedes ontology, so does sense precede signification. In locating another level of signification that he calls sense above and beyond the purely lateral relation of signification, then, Levinas challenges what he calls the “anti-Platonism of contemporary philosophy” (19). His

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own assessment of Plato in “Signification and Sense,” however, is somewhat complicated, if not confused. Levinas associates Plato’s philosophy with the intellectualist concept of signification as well as with the phenomenological concept, both of which he seems to refute at the opening of his text (9–13). Yet he goes on to express great sympathy with Plato’s project, at least insofar as it contradicts the concept of signification in contemporary philosophy: “Contemporary philosophy of signification—whether Hegelian, Bergsonian or phenomenological in origin—is thus opposed to Plato on a fundamental point: the intelligible is inconceivable outside the becoming that suggests it. There does not exist any signification in itself. . . . To reach the intelligible we must cross through history, or relive duration, or go from concrete perception and the language installed in it” (18, emphasis in original). Levinas thus calls for a return to the idealism of Platonic philosophy, to a concept of signification that transcends history and culture, experience and language. Of course, this call remains a rhetorical strategy on Levinas’s part insofar as he also affirms the necessity of returning to the ancient Greeks by way of following modern European thinkers. His concept of sense, as he puts it, “marking the limits of historical comprehension of the world and the return of Greek wisdom, [is] mediated by the entire development of contemporary philosophy” (38). Levinas’s strategic call for a return to Platonic philosophy, then, recalls both Husserl’s return to Cartesian philosophy and Heidegger’s return to pre-Socratic philosophy, even if the precise point of his return falls somewhere in between theirs. For this theoretical strategy of return—whether it marks a return to the rational spirit of philosophy or a return to the task of thinking before philosophy—relies on a teleology that traces the history of the West in a continuous line of thought extending from the ancient Greeks to modern European thinkers. But, of course, there is always a twist to the historical teleology of the West. According to both the positive and the negative versions of this teleology, the Western intellectual tradition has lost itself somewhere along the way, even if it lost itself at the very beginning of this same tradition, even if this tradition has been lost all along. Indeed, the longer the West has lost itself, the greater the event when the West finally rejoins itself. Levinas’s return to Platonic philosophy in “Signification and Sense” also seems to fall somewhere in between Husserl’s and Heidegger’s strategic calls for return inasmuch as he follows Heidegger in abandoning ontology

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altogether yet inclines toward Husserl in attempting nonetheless to reclaim the Western intellectual tradition. Whereas Levinas critically reconsiders Heidegger’s project in this text, he revaluates Husserl’s project more positively. Levinas contrasts his own concept of the subject that proceeds by a movement toward the other with Heidegger’s existentialist concept of the subject that abides in itself: “According to Heidegger’s formulation ‘one whose existence is an issue for that existence itself,’ [the] subject . . . defines himself [sic] by concern for self and . . . in happiness, fulfills his for-himself ” (29, emphasis in original). Levinas further characterizes his concept of the subject that thus proceeds without any concern for itself by its “being-forbeyond-my-death,” a mode of being “beyond the famous ‘being-for-death’ ” (27), alluding again, of course, to Heidegger’s existentialist concept of the subject. Surely, Levinas’s discussion of the subject that works toward a future beyond its own death and, more specifically, of the supreme “nobility” of such work “at a time when Hitlerism triumphed, in the deaf hours of that night without hours” (28–29), is also a thinly veiled reference to Heidegger’s collaboration with the Nazi regime as rector of the University of Freiburg. Meanwhile, Levinas lauds Husserl’s efforts to return to the idealism of Platonic philosophy, even though he does not entirely endorse Husserl’s project: “Platonism, as assertion of the human, independent of culture and history, is found in Husserl, in his opinionated way of postulating phenomenological reduction and constitution (by rights at least) of the cultural world in the intuitive transcendental consciousness. One is not obliged to follow the same path Husserl took to reach this Platonism” (38). And yet although Levinas himself does not follow Husserl, their paths merge at the admittedly Platonic concept of a univocal signification that orders the plurality of historical and cultural significations, a unique sense that precedes all signification as such. It is not very surprising, then, that Levinas’s argument on the precedence of sense to signification reiterates the historical teleology of the West that informed Husserl’s argument on the European crisis. In Husserl’s and Levinas’s projects alike, the intellectual appeal to ancient Greek philosophy is inseparable from the ethnocentric appeal to the Western tradition. Levinas appeals to the idealism of Platonic philosophy in order to challenge the cultural pluralism that he considers phenomenology in particular to have

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entrenched in the contemporary philosophy of signification: “In the light of contemporary philosophy, and by contrast, we understand more clearly what Plato meant by separation from the intelligible world, beyond the mythical sense attributed to the realism of the Ideas: for Plato, the world of significations precedes the language and culture that express it; it is indifferent to the system of signs that can be invented to make this world present to thought. Consequently, it dominates historical cultures” (18). He argues that within contemporary philosophy, however, this unique sense has been supplanted by a “cultural, aesthetic notion of signification” (22), whereby cultural expression becomes the privileged way of access to being itself: “Culture and artistic creation are part of the ontological order itself. They are ontological par excellence; they make it possible to comprehend being. So it is no accident that the exaltation of culture and cultures, the exaltation of the artistic aspect of culture, guides contemporary spiritual life and that, beyond the specialized labor of scientific research, museums and theaters like temples in the past make possible communion with being, and that poetry passes for prayer” (17). Levinas thus objects to the theoretical status that contemporary philosophy accords to culture as such, in the full multivalence of this term: “Reflection on cultural signification leads to a pluralism lacking in a unique sense” (25). As he explains, what this irreducible pluralism of cultural signification implies is that sense cannot be made outside of any historical or cultural context, that sense does not transcend the world of experience or language: For phenomenologists, as for Bergsonians, signification is not separate from the access leading to it. Access is part of signification itself. The scaffoldings are never dismantled. The ladder is never drawn up. Whereas the Platonic soul, liberated from the concrete conditions of its bodily and historical existence, can reach Empyrean heights and contemplate the Ideas, whereas the slave, as long as he “understands Greek” well enough to have a relation with his master, arrives at the same truths as the master, contemporary thinkers ask God himself [sic], if he wants to be a physicist, to go through laboratories, weights and measures, sensible perception and the infinite series of aspects in which the perceived object is revealed. (20, emphasis in original)

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Levinas argues that the cultural pluralism of contemporary philosophy, then, is based on a theoretical reduction of the movement toward the other to the experience of the same. Certainly, what is at stake in his appeal to Platonic philosophy is not the transcendence of any ontological order of being but rather the precedence of the ethical relation to the other. Levinas thus challenges the phenomenological concept of cultural signification by reinstating the vertical dimension of sense over the horizontal dimension of signification, which is to say by elevating ethics above aesthetics, morality above culture: “Signification is situated before Culture and Aesthetics; it is situated in Ethics, presupposition of all Culture and all signification. Morality does not belong to Culture; it allows us to judge culture, to evaluate the dimension of its elevation. Elevation ordains being. . . . [M]oral standards are not embarked in history and culture. . . . [T]hey make all signification possible, even cultural signification, and they make it possible to judge Cultures” (36–38). What might arguably seem like a very suggestive critique of cultural pluralism, however, is accompanied by an unabashedly ethnocentric argument on the historical mission of the West. Like both Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas asserts that the history of the West bears a special mission for all humanity, a mission in which the advent of philosophy among the ancient Greeks played a decisive role. But he follows Husserl rather than Heidegger on the point that the historical mission of the West carries a positive charge rather than a negative one. He appeals to the idealism of Platonic philosophy, then, not only to enlist theoretical support for his own argument on the precedence of sense to signification from Plato’s concept of the world of significations that transcends all cultures but also to make the rather contrary argument that the culture in which Plato’s concept first appeared thereby acquired the right or, rather, inherited the responsibility to direct all other cultures toward its own “revolutionary” project. Levinas derives this contradictory position from Plato himself: For Plato there would exist a privileged culture that does approach [the world of significations] and can understand the transitory and seemingly childish nature of historical cultures; there would exist a culture that consists of depreciating purely historical cultures and in a certain way colonizing the world, beginning with the country where this revolution-

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ary culture, this philosophy surpassing cultures, arises; there would exist a culture that would consist of remaking the world according to the timeless order of the Ideas, like the Platonic Republic, that sweeps away the allusions and alluviums of history. (18–19)

The historical mission of the West is thus precisely to colonize the world by subjecting its many cultures to the unified rule of philosophy itself. Levinas himself makes this argument for the colonizing mission of the West quite deliberately, even playing on what he calls the “absolute orientation” of sense (27, emphasis in original). His concept of orientation refers to the irreversible direction of all significations toward the unique sense, the impossible return of the ethical movement toward the other. It thus also refers to the “rectitude of the ethical movement” (33) or the “rectitude of morality” (38), the straight and narrow path of the righteous—right thinking as such. Yet this concept of orientation also refers to the colonization of the world by the Western intellectual tradition, without which the world would have remained “disoriented,” at least for Levinas. The unique sense that orders all cultural significations, then, is comprehended only after the world historical event of European colonialism. Indeed, Levinas fears that the contemporary political movement of decolonization threatens not only European colonialism but also the ethical and moral sense of the world itself: The world created by this saraband of countless equivalent cultures, each one justifying itself in its own context, is certainly dis-Occidentalized; however, it is also disoriented. To apperceive for signification a situation that precedes culture, to apperceive language from revelation of the Other—who is at the same time the birth of morality—in the gaze of man [sic] sighting a man precisely as abstract man disengaged from all culture . . . means returning in a new way to Platonism. It also allows for ethical judgments of civilizations. Signification, the intelligible, is being showing itself in its nonhistorical simplicity . . . existing “before” history and “before” culture. (37–38)

He closely associates the disorienting movement of decolonization with the cultural pluralism of contemporary philosophy and anthropology,

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alluding, of course, to Claude Lévi-Strauss, who maintained a collegial intellectual exchange with Merleau-Ponty. Levinas thus defends the univocality of signification against a curious amalgam of forces, including French phenomenology, structural anthropology, anticolonial politics, and modern atheism: “The most recent, most daring and influential anthropology keeps multiple cultures on the same level. Thus, efforts at political decolonization are connected to an ontology, an idea of being interpreted from multiple multivocal cultural signification. And this multivocality of the sense of being, this essential disorientation, may well be the modern expression of atheism” (20). But the great irony of the contemporary situation, according to Levinas, is that the concept of cultural pluralism has itself been derived from the idealism of Platonic philosophy. As he explains, the very idea of cultural pluralism is a gift of the Western intellectual tradition, a gift given of its own generosity of spirit—a gift, however, that dissident Western intellectuals themselves have turned against this very generous tradition: It is extremely important to stress the anteriority of sense with regard to cultural signs. To attach all signification to culture, making no distinction between signification and cultural expression, between signification and art that prolongs cultural expression, is to recognize that all cultural personalities realize the Mind by the same rights. Then no signification could be detached from those countless cultures that would allow us to make judgments on them. . . . Such a conception . . . translates the radical opposition, characteristic of our times, against cultural expansion by colonization. Culture and colonization do not go together. . . . The progress of the Western conscience no longer means purifying thought of cultural alluviums and language particularisms that, far from signifying the intelligible, perpetuate childishness. . . . [The] generosity and the dignity of the Western world [liberate] the truth from its cultural presuppositions and [go], with Plato, toward significations themselves, separated from becoming. The danger of such a conception is clear. The emancipation of minds can be a pretext for exploitation and violence. Philosophy had to denounce the ambiguity and show that significations arising on the horizon of cultures, and even the excellence of Western culture, are culturally and historically conditioned. So philosophy had

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to join up with contemporary anthropology. Behold Platonism defeated! But defeated in the name of the very generosity of Western thought that, perceiving the abstract man in men [sic], proclaimed the absolute value of the individual and encompassed in the respect granted to him [sic] the cultures where these individuals stood and expressed themselves. Platonism is defeated using the very means it furnished to the universal thought derived from Plato, the decried Western civilization that knew how to understand particular cultures that never understood anything about themselves. (36–37, emphasis in original)

Philosophy is thus the gift of European colonialism to the world. Reiterating Husserl’s teleological argument, Levinas presumes that philosophy is unique to the Western intellectual tradition even if he does not quite state it. It is only philosophy as such that provides understanding to those outside the Western tradition, those who before the event of European colonialism “never understood anything about themselves.” And, interestingly enough, further reiterating Husserl’s argument, Levinas does not question the inclusion of Judaism within this Western tradition. Indeed, he describes his concept of the trace as it has been shown by the “revealed God of our Judeo-Christian spirituality” (44), the supposedly common religious tradition of the West as such. Levinas’s argument on the precedence of sense to signification, then, relies on the historical teleology of the West, and, moreover, it relies on a positive version of this teleology. Levinas’s brazen ethnocentrism is certainly rare among his twentieth-century contemporaries in continental philosophy, and yet this ethnocentrism is crucial to his renowned ethical intervention. For his right-thinking rejection of cultural pluralism precludes the establishment of any ethical relationship between Europeans and nonEuropeans. Indeed, the ethical subject is none other than the historical subject of the West. Levinas thus introduces his argument against the purely “lateral” relation of signification in his text by explaining that the Western subject’s engagement with another language or culture depends on an ethical choice that is made prior to this engagement itself: It is said: being is historically, it requires men and their cultural becoming to collect itself. It is said: the unity of being, at any moment,

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would consist simply in the fact that men, in the penetrability of cultures, understand one another; this penetrability could not be made by the intervention of a common language that, independent of cultures, would translate the proper, ideal articulations of significations, making these individual languages useless after all. In this conception, penetration would be, as Merleau-Ponty says, lateral. In fact it is possible for a Frenchman [sic] to learn Chinese and pass from one culture to another without an intermediary Esperanto that would falsify both languages it mediated. However, this eventuality leaves out the need for an orientation that in fact leads a Frenchman to learn Chinese instead of claiming it is barbaric (that is, lacking in the true virtues of language), that leads him to prefer words to war. (23, emphasis in original)

Europeans alone are confronted by ethical choices, whereas non-Europeans are compelled to submit themselves to the choices that Europeans have already made, more often than not, in the course of colonizing the world. What I am suggesting, in other words, is that according to Levinas’s own argument the ethical orientation of his exemplary “Frenchman” toward learning the Chinese language cannot be reciprocated. After all, there is no Chinese subject as such who chooses to learn the French language in Levinas’s example. But even if there were any such thing as a historically or culturally Chinese subject, this subject would presumably never be confronted by the ethical choice of whether to proclaim the French language “barbaric” or not. Ethics makes sense, I dare say, only to the Western subject, who already understands something about the ephemeral nature of cultural signification in relation to ethical sense itself. In “Signification and Sense,” then, the positive teleology of the West is installed at the theoretical opening of one of the most radical arguments in twentieth-century continental philosophy for the primacy of ethics—a teleology that maintains, however, a profoundly unethical relationship between the European subject and its non-European other.

Derrida and “Globalatinization” Derrida’s text “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone” was originally published in 1996, and his text “On

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Forgiveness” was originally published in 1999.4 Derrida presents these two texts in very different styles, “Faith and Knowledge” composed in fifty-two numbered propositions that he himself calls “aphoristic”5 and “On Forgiveness” composed in response to a series of questions posed to him in an interview. Yet in both of these texts alike he carefully attends to two highly contested terms that are nonetheless central to the ethical project as such— religion and forgiveness, respectively—making not so much an ethical intervention into philosophy as a deconstructive intervention into ethics itself. In this chapter, however, I am particularly interested in Derrida’s argument on globalatinization, a term that he coins in “Faith and Knowledge” and to which he returns in “On Forgiveness.” I want to suggest that his argument on globalatinization reiterates the negative teleology on which Heidegger’s argument on the end of philosophy relied. Of course, Derrida’s reiteration of Heidegger’s negative teleology is not at all to be considered a simple repetition of it. In his later thought, Derrida seems to have largely abandoned the Heideggerian problematic that framed his earlier thought, no matter how unfaithful his faithfulness to Heidegger had always been. Having already called into question not only Heidegger’s argument on the end of philosophy but also the very concept of the end in his earlier texts such as “The Ends of Man,” Derrida seems to have lost interest in this question altogether by the time “Faith and Knowledge” and “On Forgiveness” appeared—or, indeed, to have grown tired of it. In the text Specters of Marx, originally published in 1993—a text that is billed rather sensationally on the back cover of its English translation as the work marking “[Derrida’s] definitive entry into social and political philosophy”—he expressed a certain sense of fatigue with all philosophical and political discourses on the end, whether they were derived from Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, or Heidegger, the type of discourse that he himself had taken up in his earlier work, as he insinuates, “with the jubilation of youthful enthusiasm”: The eschatological themes of the “end of history,” of the “end of Marxism,” of the “end of philosophy,” of the “ends of man,” of the “last man” and so forth were, in the ’50s, that is, forty years ago, our daily bread. We had this bread of apocalypse in our mouths naturally, already, just as naturally as that which I nicknamed after the fact, in 1980,

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the “apocalyptic tone in philosophy.” . . . Thus, for those with whom I shared this singular period . . . the media parade of current discourse on the end of history and the last man looks most often like a tiresome anachronism.6

Furthermore, not only does Derrida continue to question the concept of the end in his later thought, but he also challenges the historical teleology of the West that informed Husserl’s, Heidegger’s, and Levinas’s projects alike by pressing on the closed borders of the West itself. In the text The Other Heading, originally published in 1991, he offered his readers a brief autobiographical sketch, of the sort he had avoided entirely in his earlier work. Tracing his own culturally “hybrid” origins, he again expressed the “feeling of an old, anachronistic European, youthful and tired of his very age”: I will confide in you a feeling . . . on the subject of headings—and of the shores on which I intend to remain. It is the somewhat weary feeling of an old European. More precisely, of someone who, not quite European by birth, since I come from the southern coast of the Mediterranean, considers himself, and more and more so with age, to be a sort of over-acculturated, over-colonized European hybrid. (The Latin words culture and colonialization have a common root, there where it is precisely a question of what happens to roots.) In short, it is, perhaps, the feeling of someone who, as early as grade school in French Algeria, must have tried to capitalize, and capitalize upon, the old age of Europe, while at the same time keeping a little of the indifferent and impassive youth of the other shore. Keeping, in truth, all the marks of an ingenuity still incapable of this other old age from which French culture had, from very early on, separated him.7

Derrida’s reiteration of the negative teleology of the West in his argument on globalatinization, then, is surely complicated by his continued efforts to deconstruct both the concept of the end and the concept of the West itself. In some sense, certainly, my own argument on the end of the West follows his lead. The sense in which I would depart from Derrida, however, remains to be determined over the course of this chapter.

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In “Faith and Knowledge” and “Forgiveness,” Derrida confronts the current social and political issues of religious fundamentalism and national reconciliation, respectively, by interrogating in his own inimitable way the terms religion and forgiveness themselves. Although “Faith and Knowledge” in particular—an especially rich text whose many threads I cannot pretend to even nearly unravel in this chapter—is strewn with references to Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas, it seems that Derrida is not very concerned with locating his ethical intervention of sorts in relation to any of their theoretical projects. Rather, it is primarily Immanuel Kant toward whom Derrida directs his attention in “Faith and Knowledge”—more specifically, Kant’s work Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, to which, of course, Derrida alludes in the subtitle of his own text. After all, as Derrida points out, the roundtable discussion on religion that occasioned his text, insofar as its participants were neither ministers nor theologians but rather academic scholars in the critical tradition, itself circumscribed a concept of religion “within the limits of reason alone,” thereby repeating “this ‘Kantian’ gesture.”8 Derrida thus attends to the concept of religion in “Faith and Knowledge” by carefully considering Kant’s argument that Christianity is the only “moral” religion inasmuch as it is congruous with rationality. Calling this argument a “strange proposition,” Derrida yet insists that it “must be taken as seriously as possible in each of its premises” (49, italics in original): There are in effect for Kant, and he says so explicitly, only two families of religion, and in all two sources or two strata of religion. . . . [T]he religion of cult alone . . . seeks “favours of God,” but at bottom, and in essence, it does not act, teaching only prayer and desire. Man [sic] is not obliged to become better, be it through the remission of sins. [Moral religion], by contrast, is interested in the good conduct of life . . . ; it enjoins him to action, it subordinates knowledge to it and dissociates it from itself, prescribing that man become better by acting to this end. . . . Kant thus defines a “[reflecting faith].” . . . Because it does not depend essentially upon any historical revelation and thus agrees with the rationality of purely practical reason, reflecting faith favours good will beyond all knowledge. It is thus opposed to “[dogmatic faith].” If it breaks with this “dogmatic faith,” it is insofar as the latter claims to know and thereby ignores the difference between faith and knowledge. (49, italics and emphasis in original)

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As Derrida explains, then, the beginning premise of Kant’s argument is that there are two “sources” of religion as such—belief and action, dogma and reflection, faith and knowledge. He continues, preparing us for the all too predictable conclusion to Kant’s argument: Are we ready to measure without flinching the implications and consequences of the Kantian thesis? The latter seems strong, simple and dizzying: the Christian religion would be the only truly “moral” religion; a mission would thus be reserved exclusively for it and for it alone: that of liberating a “reflecting faith.” It necessarily follows therefore that pure morality and Christianity are indissociable in their essence and in their concept. If there is no Christianity without pure morality, it is because Christian revelation teaches us something essential about the very idea of morality. From this it follows that the idea of a morality that is pure but non-Christian would be absurd; it would exceed both understanding and reason, it would be a contradiction in terms. . . . When [morality] addresses us, it either speaks the idiom of the Christian—or is silent. (50, italics in original)

Christianity is thus, according to Kant, the only religion that issues from the source of reason, albeit a practical reason that is geared toward action, good acts, or “morality” as such. In “Faith and Knowledge,” then, Derrida commits himself to a deconstruction of what he calls “the fundamentally Christian axiomatics of Kant ” (52, italics in original). And yet his own propositions on religion are just as strange as Kant’s—stranger perhaps. Certainly, as he himself indicates, he pays very close attention to Kant’s argument on Christianity not only for the deconstruction that it demands but also for what theoretical instruction it offers. From both Kant’s work Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone and Bergson’s work The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, to which Derrida also alludes in the subtitle of his text, he retains the proposition that there are indeed two distinct sources of religion: “Now the principle of such an opposition—and this is why I emphasize it—could not be simply definitional, taxonomic or theoretical; it serves not simply to classify heterogeneous religions under the same name; it could also define, even for us today, a place of conflict, if not of war, in the Kantian sense. Even today, albeit provisionally, it could help us structure a problematic ” (49, italics in original). He even calls Kant’s concept of moral religion

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or reflecting faith itself “a concept whose possibility might well open the space for our discussion ” (49, italics in original). Of course, he also critically extends Kant’s argument on Christianity by posing the deceptively simple question that seems to have eluded Kant as well as Bergson: “It must still be asked why [the two sources of religion] share the same name whether proper or common” (49, italics in original). In other words, belief and action, dogma and reflection, Christian religion and non-Christian religion as such remain bound to one another in Kant’s argument, but without any account of their binding force. Derrida thus suggests that faith and knowledge are mutually implicated in a sense that Kant could not admit. Over the course of “Faith and Knowledge,” Derrida articulates this sense of implication between what he persists in calling the two sources of religion by recasting the common concepts of faith and knowledge themselves, employing an array of strategies traversing the style and substance of his text. “Faith and Knowledge” is composed in two font styles—creating quite some havoc for his English translator as well as for his commentators, as this chapter of my book demonstrates—in order to illustrate, as he puts it, “the difference between the Roman and the Italic, the latter potentially symbolizing everything that can incline—at a certain remove from the Roman in general ” (44–45, italics in original). Derrida also renames these two sources the “messianic” and the “chora” (55–59, italics and emphasis in original), rehearsing the dramatic history of Christianity itself that unfolds between its rival Judaic and Hellenic origins, or what he himself called “the difference between the Jew and the Greek” in a much earlier text on Levinas’s ethical project, “Violence and Metaphysics.”9 But in “Faith and Knowledge” Derrida offers what is probably his most programmatic account of the two sources of religion by distinguishing between “the experience of belief, on the one hand,” and “the experience of the unscathed, of sacredness or of holiness, on the other” (70, emphasis in original). The experience of belief is associated with “trust, trustworthiness, confidence, faith, the credit accorded the good faith of the utterly other in the experience of witnessing” and the experience of holiness with “that [which] is safe and sound (heilig, holy)” (72, emphasis in original). He proposes that the experience of belief is not invariably attached to the experience of holiness and vice versa:

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These two veins (or two strata or two sources) of the religious should be distinguished from one another. They can doubtless be associated with each other and certain of their possible co-implications analysed, but they should never be confused or reduced to one another as is almost always done. In principle, it is possible to sanctify, to sacralize the unscathed or to maintain oneself in the presence of the sacrosanct in various ways without bringing into play an act of belief, if at least belief, faith or fidelity signifies here acquiescing to the testimony of the other—of the utterly other who is inaccessible in its absolute source. . . . Conversely, if it carries beyond the presence of what would offer itself to be seen, touched, proven, the acquiescence of trust still does not in itself necessarily involve the sacred. (70, emphasis in original)

Derrida argues, then, that the concept of religion is informed by both belief and holiness but that it routinely confuses them: “[The experience of belief and the experience of holiness] comprise two distinct sources or foci. ‘Religion’ figures their ellipse because it both comprehends the two foci but also sometimes shrouds their irreducible duality in silence, in a manner precisely that is secret and reticent” (72, emphasis in original). Yet if Derrida’s argument were simply that there are two distinct sources of religion, then it would not extend Kant’s argument in any critical way, no matter how Derrida might redefine the concepts of faith and knowledge themselves. Indeed, despite his intriguing presentation of the concepts of the messianic and the chora, their bond remains somewhat of a mystery in his text as well, thus respecting the mysterious bond between the Judaic and the Hellenic sources of religion, which is to say the mystery of Christianity as such. However, in his discussion of belief and holiness, Derrida complicates the Kantian argument by addressing what he considers “the necessity for these two heterogenous sources of religion to mingle their waters, if one can put it that way, without ever, it seems to us, amounting simply to the same” (70). Although the general theme of “Faith and Knowledge” is religion, a theme that Derrida admits to having himself proposed for the roundtable discussion that occasioned his text, it seems that the specific issue that he wants to confront is the “return of the religious,” as it is commonly put. He argues that the radical opposition between religion and reason that this common phrase presumes is under-

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mined by the reliance of contemporary forms of religious fundamentalism on scientific technology, a reliance that is disavowed, however, in the name of religion itself: Religion today allies itself with tele-technoscience, to which it reacts with all its forces. It is, on the one hand, globalization; it produces, weds, exploits the capital and knowledge of tele-mediatization; neither the trips and global spectacularizing of the Pope, nor the interstate dimensions of the “Rushdie affair,” nor planetary terrorism would otherwise be possible, at this rhythm—and we could multiply such indications ad infinitum. But, on the other hand, it reacts immediately, simultaneously, declaring war against that which gives it this new power. . . . It conducts a terrible war against that which protects it only by threatening it, according to this double and contradictory structure: immunitary and auto-immunitary. (82, emphasis in original)

As Derrida explains in a note to the text, given the overdetermined political, religious, biological, and social meaning of immunity, “we feel ourselves authorized to speak of a sort of general logic of auto-immunization. It seems indispensable to us today for thinking the relations between faith and knowledge, religion and science, as well as the duplicity of sources in general” (80 n. 27). Religion thus sustains itself by employing reason and its manifold products—science, technology, telecommunications, the mass media, all of which are relayed through the globalized circuits of capital—and yet, according to some strange necessity, it also turns on itself by attacking this support system. Religion both associates itself with and dissociates itself from reason, thereby immunizing and autoimmunizing itself as such: The same movement that renders indissociable religion and tele-technoscientific reason in its most critical aspect reacts inevitably to itself. It secretes its own antidote but also its own power of auto-immunity. We are here in a space where all self-protection of the unscathed, of the safe and sound, of the sacred (heilig, holy) must protect itself against its own protection, its own police, its own power of rejection, in short against its own, which is to say, against its own immunity. It is this terrifying but

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fatal logic of the auto-immunity of the unscathed that will always associate Science and Religion. . . . [N]othing immune, safe and sound, heilig and holy, nothing unscathed . . . without a risk of auto-immunity. (79–82, emphasis in original)

What Derrida defines as the two sources of religion—the experience of belief and the experience of holiness, sacredness, or the unscathed—are thus necessarily implicated by this logic of autoimmunization, or what he also calls “auto-immune indemnification” (85 n. 31). In “Faith and Knowledge,” then, he makes the compelling argument that both religion and reason draw from these same two sources, which is to say from faith and knowledge themselves, even as each attempts to extricate itself from the other: “In principle, today, there is no incompatibility, in the said ‘return of the religious,’ between [on the one hand] the ‘fundamentalisms,’ the ‘integrisms’ or their ‘politics’ and, on the other hand, rationality, which is to say, the tele-techno-capitalistico-scientific fiduciarity, in all of its mediatic and globalizing dimensions” (81). The Roman and the Italic, the messianic and the chora, the experience of belief and the experience of holiness are thus the “two names” that Derrida gives, undoubtedly under the duress of history, culture, and the expediency of naming itself, “to the duplicity of these origins. For here origin is duplicity itself, the one and the other” (55, italics in original). Derrida’s proposition on “the duplicity of sources in general,” as he puts it, is a very profound one, I should say. But I would also argue that this proposition is thwarted by his accompanying proposition on the “globalatinization” of the concepts of religion and forgiveness alike. Derrida reiterates what he calls Kant’s “strange proposition” or, again, his “fundamentally Christian axiomatics” by insisting that both religion and forgiveness are essentially Christian concepts. Of course, Derrida remains critical of Kant’s positive teleology of the West—to put it in the terms of my own argument in this book—as well as of what he alleges is Friedrich Nietzsche’s negative teleology. In “Faith and Knowledge,” he thus questions Nietzsche’s reversal of Kant’s position on Christianity: This thesis of Kant . . . is it not also, at the core of its content, Nietzsche’s thesis at the same time that he is conducting an inexpiable war against Kant? Perhaps

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Nietzsche would have said “Judaeo-Christian,” but the place occupied by Saint Paul among his privileged targets clearly demonstrates that it was Christianity, a certain internalizing movement within Christianity, that was his primary enemy and that bore for him the gravest responsibility. The Jews and European Judaism even constituted in his eyes a desperate attempt to resist, in so far as there was any resistance, a last-ditch protest from within, directed against a certain Christianity. (50, italics in original)

I want to make the argument that Derrida repeats precisely what he diagnoses, whether correctly or not, in Nietzsche’s discourse on Christianity. For Derrida himself maintains a categorical distinction between Christian religion and non-Christian religion—or, rather, between religion as such and what is presumably pseudo-religion—inasmuch as the concept of religion remains ineluctably Christian in itself, resisting any translation from its Latin provenance even as it is drawn into the irresistible movement of globalization. Furthermore, Derrida’s own ambivalence toward Judaism and Islam as rival traditions to Christianity repeats what he diagnoses, once again whether correctly or not, in Nietzsche’s treatment of Judaism. It follows from my argument, then, that far from preserving for all non-Christian religions the dignity of the name “religion,” I would rather subject all contemporary forms of religious fundamentalism to Derrida’s powerful deconstruction of the opposition between religion and reason on which, it seems to me, they rely in common, whether Christian or Jewish, Islamic or Hindu. And the same goes, of course, for all rationalist or secular “fundamentalisms” as well. In this chapter, however, I am more specifically concerned with Derrida’s complicated reiteration of the historical teleology of the West that informed Husserl’s, Heidegger’s, and Levinas’s theoretical projects. Despite his abandonment of the Heideggerian problematic, Derrida thus discreetly returns in his argument on globalatinization to the negative teleology that Heidegger first articulated in his argument on the end of philosophy. Derrida coins the term globalatinization in “Faith and Knowledge” and uses it again in “On Forgiveness.” He forms this neologism, obviously enough, by conjoining the terms globalization and Latinization.10 Derrida suggests, then, that globalization is not simply a universal process of economic consolidation, a natural drift bringing together all of humanity, but

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rather a historically determined effort to establish an economic, political, and cultural hegemony that would encompass the world, an extension of the European colonial project. As he puts it in “On Forgiveness,” the concept of globalatinization is intended “to take into account the effect of Roman Christianity which today overdetermines all language of law, of politics, and even the interpretation of what is called the ‘return of the religious.’ ”11 Derrida claims that all international discourses on religion and forgiveness themselves extend the reach of this European cultural hegemony insofar as they promote what are essentially Christian or even Catholic concepts. In “Faith and Knowledge,” he asserts that the process of globalization itself is thus one of “globalatinization, religion that does not speak its name, ethnocentrism putting on, as always, a show of ‘universalism’ ” (89). I want to argue that although Derrida is certainly justified in critically attending to the power relations that saturate all processes of globalization, he seems to oversimplify these power relations by foreclosing the possibility for contesting, subverting, or reappropriating the “Latin” concepts of religion and forgiveness or, indeed, by denying that these terms themselves might be translated, that they often are translated, that they have always already been translated. In making this argument, I proceed by following Derrida’s own prompts in “Faith and Knowledge,” given in the form of three phrases that he emphasizes in bold, twice each, over the course of his text. The first of these phrases is: “We are already speaking Latin” (64, 66). Derrida introduces his argument on globalatinization by proposing that any critical discussion of the concept of religion must include some consideration of its derivation from the Latin term religio: Reflection upon the Latin noun “religion” will no longer be held for an academic exercise, a philological embellishment or an etymological luxury. . . . Does not “the question of religio” . . . quite simply merge, one could say, with the question of Latin? By which should be understood, beyond a “question of language and of culture,” the strange phenomenon of Latinity and of its globalization. . . . Globalatinization (essentially Christian, to be sure) names a unique event to which a meta-language seems incapable of acceding, although such a language remains, all the same, of

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the greatest necessity here. . . . The co-extensiveness of the two questions (religion and worldwide Latinization) marks the dimensions of what henceforth cannot be reduced to a question of language, culture, semantics, nor even, without doubt, to one of anthropology or history. (64–67, emphasis in original)

Derrida goes on to outline a critical approach to the concept of religion that relies not on any singular “meta-language” as such but rather on “several etymologies,” “filiations or genealogies,” types of programme”—namely, “etymologies pragmatics, pragmatics ” of which he insists that “the last type ought to dominate” and “ (71–72, emphasis in original). Yet it seems to me that the etymological approach dominates Derrida’s text, as demonstrated by his extended critical reading of Émile Benveniste that punctuates “Faith and Knowledge.” My point is that Derrida’s reliance on this typically Heideggerian strategy presumes, perhaps inherently, a teleological history of the West, extending from ancient Greece to modern Europe and even past modern Europe to the contemporary United States. This is the very same teleology, of course, on which Husserl himself relied in his argument on the European crisis, claiming that “the English dominions, the United States, etc.” belonged to what he called “the spiritual shape of Europe.”12 On the one hand, then, Derrida calls attention to the Latin derivation of the term religion within the first few pages of “Faith and Knowledge”: “To think ‘religion’ is to think the ‘Roman.’ . . . A chance or necessity for recalling the history of something like ‘religion’: everything done or said in its name ought to keep the critical memory of this appellation. European, it was first of all Latin” (45, italics and emphasis in original). But he immediately goes on to trace the history of the concept of religion back beyond its ancient Roman provenance to its ancient Greek origins: “Difficult to say ‘Europe’ without connoting: Athens—Jerusalem—Rome—Byzantium” (45, italics in original). And he reiterates that “everything done or said in the name of religion,” as he puts it, “is not merely European, but Graeco-Christian, Graeco-Roman” (46, italics in original). For Derrida, certainly, the concept of religion belongs to a “Western tradition” that is “Christian or Graeco-Christian, extending to Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger” (61). On the other hand, he traces the history of the concept of religion right up to contemporary “Anglo-American” culture:

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The world today speaks Latin (most often via Anglo-American) when it authorizes itself in the name of religion. . . . [The] heritage [of the Latin term religio has been] revived by the global and still irresistible hegemony of a “language,” which is to say, also of a culture that in part is not Latin but Anglo-American. For everything that touches religion in particular, for everything that speaks “religion,” for whoever speaks religiously or about religion, Anglo-American remains Latin. Religion circulates in the world, one might say, like an English word . . . that has been to Rome and taken a detour to the United States. (64–66, emphasis in original)

In tracing the history of the concept of religion, Derrida thus appeals to a Latin tradition that is not, strictly speaking, Latin. Following Husserl’s argument more closely than Heidegger’s argument in this sense, he relies on a history of the West that extends from the ancient Greeks to modern European thinkers as well as to American speakers of English, a quite monolithic history that not only conceals any intellectual discontinuities between the ancient Greek and Roman traditions—the sort of discontinuity to which Heidegger himself was so attentive—but also reduces the linguistic complexity or, indeed, the cultural hybridity of English languages in particular and of all language in general. The second phrase in “Faith and Knowledge” that Derrida emphasizes twice in bold is: “And what if religio remained untranslatable?” (67). In his extended critique of Benveniste, Derrida indicates the inconsistency of Benveniste’s etymology of the term religion. Benveniste argues that the Latin term religio, from which, of course, both the French term religion and the English term religion are derived, signifies a concept without any historical precedent, an absolutely original idea as such, an argument with which Derrida himself tends to agree: Benveniste . . . recalls that there is no “common” Indo-European term for what we call “religion.” The Indo-Europeans did not conceive “as a separate institution” what Benveniste, for his part, calls “the omnipresent reality that is religion.” Even today, wherever such a “separate institution” is not recognized, the word “religion” is inadequate. There has not always been, therefore, nor is there always and everywhere, nor will there al-

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ways and everywhere (“with humans” or elsewhere) be something, a thing that is one and identifiable, identical with itself, which, whether religious or irreligious, all agree to call “religion.” (72–73, emphasis in original)

Yet, as Derrida explains, Benveniste goes on to trace the history of the concept of religion by comparing the Latin term religio to the ancient Greek term threskeia that preceded it. Exploiting Benveniste’s paradoxical argument on the equivalence of these Greek and Latin terms, Derrida thus describes the concept of religion as “an equivalent without equivalent,” further posing the question, “At bottom, is this not the least deficient definition of religion?” (73 n. 22). But Derrida’s continued reliance on the teleological history of the West confirms his response to this question, which might have otherwise been considered a merely facetious remark on his part. As he puts it himself, “In any case, what Benveniste’s formal or logical inconsistency designates is perhaps the most faithful reflection, even the most theatrical symptom of what actually occurred in the ‘history of humanity,’ and what we here call the ‘globalatinization’ of ‘religion’ ” (73 n. 22). Derrida’s argument that the history of the concept of religion extends all the way from ancient Greece to the contemporary United States presumes and yet does not admit that the Latin term religio has already been translated, twice at the very least— once from ancient Greek into Latin and again from Latin into modern English—even without taking into account, of course, the complex confluence of numerous modern European languages themselves, including Derrida’s as well as Benveniste’s own language, French. In other words, Derrida suggests, however coyly, that the Western tradition bears the proper meaning of religion, even if that meaning refers to the duplicitous origins of religion itself. Indeed, the very opposition between religion and reason is, according to Derrida, distinctively European: One would blind [sic] oneself to the phenomenon called “of religion” or of the “return of the religious” today if one continued to oppose so naïvely Reason and Religion, Critique or Science and Religion, technoscientific Modernity and Religion . . . if one continue[d] to believe in this opposition, even in this incompatibility, which is to say, if one remain[ed] within a certain tradition of the Enlightenment, one of the many Enlightenments

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of the past three centuries . . . a certain critical and anti-religious vigilance . . . a certain filiation “Voltaire-Feuerbach-Marx-Nietzsche-Freud(and even)-Heidegger[.]” (65, emphasis in original)

Derrida’s placement of Heidegger within this “critical” or “antireligious” tradition of European thought is certainly significant. Following Husserl’s argument on the European crisis, Derrida maintains that reason, insofar as it relies on a claim to knowledge that excludes any act of faith or belief, is specific to the Western tradition. Departing from Husserl’s argument, however, and following Heidegger’s argument on the end of philosophy, he ascribes a negative value to this concept of reason, which he redefines by the “experience of the unscathed, of sacredness or of holiness” and its “terrifying but fatal logic” of autoimmunization. He thus aligns his own theoretical intervention with the “experience of belief,” the act of faith that entrusts one to the “utterly other” and from which the rationalist compulsion toward autoimmunity invariably attempts to dissociate itself. As he puts it most succinctly, “Faith and knowledge: between believing one knows and knowing one believes, the alternative is not a game” (76). Furthermore, even as Derrida places Heidegger within the Enlightenment tradition, he follows Heidegger’s strategic lead nonetheless by placing his own project of deconstruction within the very tradition that he critiques, even if only on its Marxist, Nietzschean, or Freudian margins: “Why is this phenomenon, so hastily called the ‘return of religions’, so difficult to think? Why is it so surprising? Why does it particularly astonish those who believed naïvely that an alternative opposed Religion, on the one side, and on the other, Reason, Enlightenment, Science, Criticism (Marxist Criticism, Nietzschean Genealogy, Freudian Psychoanalysis and their heritage), as though the one could not but put an end to the other? ” (45, italics in original). In this sense, then, Derrida is at his most Heideggerian, placing himself within the same critical tradition as that in which he places Heidegger. After all, he does subscribe to a certain “critical” or “anti-religious” sentiment himself, insofar as he argues that the concepts of both religion and reason are governed by the rationalist logic of autoimmunization, a rationalism that demarcates the West as such. So when Derrida asks us, twice, to consider that the Latin term religio might resist translation altogether, he not only fails to acknowledge that this term has already been translated many times over within the Western tradition itself but also forecloses the

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possibility that this term can ever be translated beyond the cultural borders of the West. And last, the third phrase in “Faith and Knowledge” that Derrida emphasizes twice in bold is: “[W]e Europeans” (69, 70)—the simplest and yet perhaps the most complicated phrase of all, the intuitive understanding of which Derrida himself called into question in another, much earlier text on Heidegger’s philosophical project, “The Ends of Man,” by asking, “But who, we?”13 Of course, Derrida addresses this very matter in “Faith and Knowledge” itself. Quite simply, he is referring to the participants in the roundtable discussion on religion that occasioned his text as well as the publication in which his original French text appeared. Derrida thus, admirably enough, calls attention to the historical, social, linguistic, and political conditions of this ostensibly “international” event: Date: 28 February 1994. Place: an island, the isle of Capri. . . . Like this meeting of philosophers, the international publication that was proposed to us turns out to be first of all “Western,” and then confided, which is also to say confined, to several European languages, those that “we” speak here in Capri, on this Italian island: German, Spanish, French, Italian. . . . We represent and speak four different languages, but our common “culture,” let’s be frank, is more manifestly Christian, barely even Judaeo-Christian. No Muslim is among us, alas, even for this preliminary discussion, just at the moment when it is towards Islam, perhaps, that we ought to begin by turning our attention. No representative of other cults either. Not a single woman! We ought to take this into account: speaking on behalf of these mute witnesses without speaking for them, in place of them, and drawing from this all sorts of consequences. (43–45, italics in original)

But the matter is not so simple, inasmuch as simply calling attention to one’s own position is never enough. As Derrida puts it, the participants in this roundtable discussion “represent” or “speak for” a certain Western tradition, what he insists is their “common culture” of Christianity. In both “Faith and Knowledge” and “On Forgiveness,” then, Derrida’s position on the inclusion of Judaism and Islam within the cultural tradition of the West is rather ambivalent. Whereas neither Husserl in his argument on the European crisis nor Levinas in his argument on the precedence of

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sense to signification questioned the inclusion of Judaism or, indeed, of Jews themselves within the teleological history of the West, we can only surmise that Heidegger in his argument on the end of philosophy would have shared Derrida’s more ambivalent position, an ambivalence that is all the more pronounced by their divergent political and ethical commitments. In “Faith and Knowledge,” although Derrida argues that the concept of religion is essentially Christian, he still locates this concept within “a GraecoJudaeo-Christian tradition” (57, italics in original), if not within the common tradition of “the Abrahamic religions” themselves (45, italics in original), the “monotheistic tradition” (78) as such. Similarly, in “On Forgiveness,” although Derrida does not provide an etymology of the term forgiveness in the kind of detail with which he attends to the term religion, he locates the concept of forgiveness primarily within the “Abrahamic tradition”: “As enigmatic as the concept of forgiveness remains, it is the case that the scene, the figure, the language which one tries to adapt to it belong to a religious heritage (let’s call it Abrahamic, in order to bring together Judaism, the Christianities, and the Islams). This tradition—complex and differentiated, even conflictual—is at once singular and on the way to universalisation.” Indeed, what Derrida argues is the “double and contradictory” concept of forgiveness—defined by “the unconditional and the conditional,” two forms of forgiveness that remain “irreconcilable but indissociable,” much like the two “sources” of religion as such—he locates “at the heart of the heritage” itself, referring, of course, to the Abrahamic tradition.14 More accurately, however, Derrida locates the concepts of religion and forgiveness alike not within the Abrahamic tradition itself but rather within the cultural process of “Graeco-Abrahamic hybridization” (“Faith,” 57, italics in original), which is to say the Christian tradition, which is also to say the rationalist or secular tradition, “the ontotheologico-political tradition that links Greek philosophy to the Abrahamic revelations” (58, italics in original). This hybrid tradition of the West thus inherits both “ ‘Abrahamic’ culture and that of a philosophical humanism, and more precisely a cosmopolitanism born from a graft of stoicism with Pauline Christianity.”15 Derrida calls this “Graeco-Abrahamic” tradition, quite simply, “our heritage” (“Faith,” 58, italics in original). Even as he criticizes what he alleges is Nietzsche’s simple reversal of Kant’s position on Christianity, then, he follows Nietzsche’s argument by speculating that both Judaism and Islam remain foreign to the

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Christian tradition of the West, having been presumably unaffected by the “pagan” influence of ancient Greece: Judaism and Islam would thus be perhaps the last two monotheisms to revolt against everything that, in the Christianizing of our world, signifies the death of God, death in God, two non-pagan monotheisms that do not accept death any more than multiplicity in God (the Passion, the Trinity etc.), two monotheisms still alien enough at the heart of Graeco-Christian, Pagano-Christian Europe, alienating themselves from a Europe that signifies the death of God, by recalling at all costs that “monotheism” signifies no less faith in the One, and in the living One, than belief in a single God. (51, italics in original)

Although Derrida critically distances himself from these Kantian-cumNietzschean speculations, his own propositions on the concepts of both religion and forgiveness only seem to confirm that Judaism and Islam remain foreign to the Western tradition. In “Faith and Knowledge,” based on his predominantly “etymological” approach to religion and despite his critique of Benveniste’s etymology, Derrida thus suggests that the concept of religion is exclusively Christian: “In any case, the history of the word ‘religion’ should in principle forbid every non-Christian from using the name ‘religion,’ in order to recognize in it what ‘we’ would designate, identify and isolate there” (72). Similarly, in “On Forgiveness,” he claims that the concept of forgiveness is also essentially Christian, even as it circulates internationally within the secular discourse of human rights: “If this sacredness [of the human] finds its meaning in the Abrahamic memory of the religions of the Book, and in a Jewish but above all Christian interpretation of the ‘neighbour’ or the ‘fellow man’ . . . then the ‘globalisation’ of forgiveness resembles an immense scene of confession in progress . . . a process of Christianisation which has no more need for the Christian church.”16 Derrida’s ambivalent position on the inclusion of Judaism and Islam within the Western cultural tradition contrasts rather sharply, however, with his forthright position on the exteriority of other non-European cultures in relation to the West. Although Derrida seems to respect the mysterious bond between the Judaic and Hellenic sources of religion, the mystery of Christianity as such, his argument on globalatinization precludes any process of hybridization that might involve other cultures

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beyond the borders of the West. Posing the question of religion in “Faith and Knowledge,” then, Derrida reduces the multiform possibilities for hybridity or translation between European and non-European cultures or languages by rather starkly delineating the option between the flagrant universalism of globalization on one hand and the ineluctably Christian determination of religion on the other: “How then to think . . . a religion which . . . would today be effectively universal? And which, for that matter, would no longer be restricted to a paradigm that was Christian or even Abrahamic? . . . Does this project retain a meaning or a chance? A geopolitical chance or a meaning? Or does the idea itself remain, in its origin and in its end, Christian?” (53, italics in original). Derrida’s own answer to the question of religion in “Faith and Knowledge” tends to oscillate between these two options insofar as he considers the concept of religion either to have become completely hegemonic within the Roman Catholic tradition, if not the entire Christian tradition itself, or to have remained entirely inappropriate to all other religious traditions, especially to non-European religions. Although he is quite attentive to the political relationship between Roman Catholicism and other forms of Christianity in explaining his concept of globalatinization, he seems to suggest that the essentially Catholic concept of ecumenism itself is particularly inappropriate to those religious traditions located outside the “European-Anglo-American” West: This declaration of peace can also, pursuing war by other means, dissimulate a pacifying gesture, in the most European-colonial sense possible. Inasmuch as it comes from Rome, as is often the case, it would try first, and first in Europe, upon Europe, to impose surreptitiously a discourse, a culture, a politics and a right, to impose them on all the other monotheist religions, including the non-Catholic Christian religions. Beyond Europe, through the same schemes and the same juridicotheologico-political culture, the aim would be to impose, in the name of peace, a globalatinization. The latter become henceforth EuropeanAnglo-American in its idiom. (79, emphasis in original)

If we read Derrida carefully here, as I believe we should, then it seems that globalatinization commences as such only “beyond Europe,” despite the

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religious disputes that certainly flare up among Christians within Europe itself, which is also to say, of course, the United States. This categorical distinction that Derrida makes between European and non-European cultures is perhaps better demonstrated in his discussion of the international discourse of forgiveness. In “On Forgiveness,” Derrida poses the question “Why does [the concept of forgiveness] today impose itself on cultures which do not have European or ‘biblical’ origins?”17 He specifies just such a situation using the “example” of Japan, South Korea, and China: In all the scenes of repentance, confession, forgiveness, or apology which have multiplied on the geopolitical scene since the last war, and in an accelerated fashion in the past few years, one sees not only individuals, but also entire communities, professional corporations, the representatives of ecclesiastical hierarchies, sovereigns, and heads of state ask for “forgiveness.” They do this in an Abrahamic language which is not (in the case of Japan and Korea, for example) that of the dominant religion of their society, but which has already become the universal idiom of law, of politics, of the economy, or of diplomacy: at the same time the agent and symptom of this internationalisation. . . . I am thinking of those scenes where a Japanese Prime Minister “asked forgiveness” of the Koreans and the Chinese for past violence. He presented certain “heartfelt apologies” in his own name . . . without implicating the Emperor at the head of state, but a Prime Minister always implicates more than a private person.18

Derrida uses this example, of course, to say that any such carefully calculated request for forgiveness is far from “unconditional.” Yet as he himself declares in another, much earlier text on deconstruction itself, Of Grammatology, there is no such thing as an “example,”19 or at least no such thing as an innocent example. On this point, I follow Derrida. But in that same text he also makes the strange proposition that “Chinese or Japanese . . . civilization [has] develop[ed] outside of all logocentrism,”20 a strange proposition on a number of counts. On this point, I would depart from Derrida. Let me explain here, returning to the text at hand. In “On Forgiveness,” Derrida uses this Japanese “example” to make his argument on

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globalatinization. This argument relies on the absolute exteriority of certain, if not all, non-European cultures to European culture, depending on how Europe itself is defined. In this sense, East Asian culture is an exemplary non-European culture insofar as it is, according to a particular logic, radically removed from European culture in terms of its geographical distance, its racial difference, its nonphonetic language, and its polytheistic religion. In Derrida’s argument, globalatinization operates wherever translation, hybridization, or even appropriation is no longer possible. Globalization becomes “Latinization” for those non-European cultures in which the Christian concepts of religion and forgiveness will forever remain foreign. The only possible relationship between European and nonEuropean cultures is thus one in which European culture is dominant and non-European cultures are subordinate. It is worth noting, however, that in Derrida’s argument on globalatinization, non-Europeans themselves are not necessarily confined to their non-European cultures or religions. In his discussion of the process of national reconciliation in South Africa, Derrida argues that the South African archbishop Desmond Tutu himself acted as an agent of globalatinization: “When Desmond Tutu was named president of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he christianised the language of an institution uniquely destined to treat ‘politically’ motivated crimes. . . . With as much good will as confusion, it seems to me, Tutu, an Anglican archbishop, introduced the vocabulary of repentance and forgiveness. He was reproached for this, among other things, by a non-Christian segment of the black community.”21 Derrida suggests, then, that Tutu, having assumed the secular discourse of forgiveness, had become estranged from his African culture or from his religion or, indeed, from the “black community” itself. He does not at all consider the possibility that Tutu might have spoken a hybrid language, whether he was successful or not at negotiating the difficult process of national reconciliation. Instead, Tutu invariably “interprets and translates” the language of his African community “in his Christian idiom” of “AngloAnglican,” as Derrida puts it.22 Derrida’s argument on globalatinization thus follows Husserl’s argument on the European crisis, Heidegger’s argument on the end of philosophy, and Levinas’s argument on the precedence of sense to signification alike. For in both the positive and negative versions of the historical teleology of

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the West, non-Europeans are compelled to submit, whether willingly or not, whether wittingly or not, to the irresistible force of Western history itself, to a globalization that is also a Latinization, or to what Husserl himself called “Europeanization.”23 While Husserl argues that the global expansion of the theoretical attitude “[motivates all other human groups] to Europeanize themselves even in their unbroken will to self-preservation,” Heidegger argues that the global expansion of technological rationality “claims all the inhabitants of the earth in a uniform manner without the inhabitants of the non-European continents explicitly knowing this or even being able or wanting to know of the origin of this determination of Being.”24 Similarly, while Levinas argues that the “orientation” of sense itself is granted by “the decried Western civilization that knew how to understand particular cultures that never understood anything about themselves,” Derrida argues that the “globalatinization” of the concepts of religion and forgiveness plays itself out in the absurd theater of international politics where these concepts “[impose themselves] on cultures which do not have European or ‘biblical’ origins.”25 Is globalatinization, then, not itself a kind of orientation, in a sense that Levinas himself did not mean to say—or perhaps he did—insofar as Derrida orients the West absolutely in relation to the East, a West that resists translation, hybridization, all forms of depropriation, a West that is itself never disoriented? Of course, Levinas favors such an orientation, whereas Derrida would like to resist it. And yet does Derrida’s argument on globalatinization not just as surely presume this absolute orientation of the West, even as he inverts Levinas’s positive teleology into a negative one? In “Faith and Knowledge” and “On Forgiveness,” Derrida thus reinscribes Kant’s “strange proposition” on Christianity. Whereas Kant argues that Christianity is the only religion that properly distinguishes between faith and knowledge, the two sources of religion as such, Derrida argues that the inherently Christian concept of religion perpetually confounds these two sources. Furthermore, whereas Kant aligns Christian religion with the source of knowledge, reflection, or action as opposed to that of faith, dogma, or belief, Derrida aligns his own ethical intervention with the source of belief as opposed to that of holiness, which is to say ethics as opposed to ontology, the commitment to the utterly other as opposed to the investigation of fundamental being. But in Derrida’s argument on

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globalatinization, it is precisely the geopolitical space of the West that remains unscathed, safe and sound, even sacred or holy, sacrosanct. This concept of the West has remained intact from Husserl to Derrida, from phenomenology to ethics, from the positive teleology to the negative teleology that cohabited twentieth-century continental philosophy together, however uneasily so. Certainly, to put another spin on one of Husserl’s own turns of phrase, it is as a “good European” that Derrida undertakes the task of articulating a negative teleology of the West—one who refuses “to interpret” his non-European others “in a European way,” to express it in the terms that Husserl himself provided for those who would inherit his tradition, even if only with the deepest ingratitude.26

H A V I N G C R I T I C A L LY A T T E N D E D I N T H I S PA R T O F M Y B O O K T O the turn from teleology to negative teleology within continental philosophy, I do not at all mean to dismiss the theoretical significance of this turn. I am not particularly interested in collapsing the rather sensible distinction between ethnocentrism and racism. As critics of ethnocentrism, we must be careful enough to distinguish our friends from our enemies. It is rather obvious, I think, that neither Husserl’s phenomenology nor Levinas’s ethics of alterity offers us the theoretical resources for an effective critique of ethnocentrism. But distinguishing our friends from our enemies becomes exceedingly difficult in the midst of Heidegger’s and Derrida’s friendly fire. Nonetheless, we must also be careful enough to differentiate between their respective articulations of negative teleology in order to determine whether Heidegger’s destruction of ontology or Derrida’s deconstruction offers us any such effective theoretical resources. My argument that negative teleology remains complicit with the historical teleology of the West itself, then, does not proceed from any intention on my part to reduce what I consider are the significant theoretical differences between Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida. Over the course of chapters 2 and 3, I have gone to great lengths, quite literally, to address these differences. However, what I do want to reiterate is that the problem of ethnocentrism remains inextricable from each one of their theoretical projects insofar as they all rely on some general concept of the West.

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And yet this problem does not play itself out in any predictable fashion. What I am saying, to put it bluntly, is that if we want to understand how ethnocentrism does play itself out in the work of these thinkers, then we must read their texts closely rather than simply extrapolate from their biographies. It would be comforting indeed to think that Husserl and Levinas finally abandoned the historical teleology of the West in their work—Husserl, whose own scholarly activities were curtailed by the Nazi regime during the last years of his life, and Levinas, whose close family members were killed during the Holocaust and who was himself kept in segregated barracks as a prisoner of war in Germany during World War II. However, both Husserl and Levinas remained committed to the historical mission of the West and to the full inclusion of Jews in this mission, expressing the most offensive sort of European chauvinism even in their later thought. And it would be just as comforting to think that Heidegger expressed the same blatant ethnocentrism in his work—Heidegger, who consented to have his dedication to Husserl removed from Being and Time, who was himself responsible for the expulsion of many Jewish scholars and students from the University of Freiburg, and who remained a member of the National Socialist Party right until the end of the war. However, it was Heidegger who among European philosophers first criticized the Western economic, political, and cultural tradition in its entirety, offering a radical critique of the West as such that was to be adopted by the following generation of philosophers, including the culturally hybrid Derrida, who was himself sent to a segregated secondary school in colonial Algeria under the collaborationist Vichy regime in France during the war. But I digress. My point is that negative teleology is a complex reiteration rather than a simple repetition of teleology in its positive version—as if there were any such thing as a simple repetition—a reiteration, then, that cannot be defined by any kind of “epistemological break” from the Western tradition. Of course, it is precisely in the theoretical terms of an epistemological break, rupture, or discontinuity that those thinkers who have most strongly championed the end of the West within twentieth-century continental philosophy present this reiteration of teleology in their work. Yet my argument is not that Heidegger’s break with Husserl or Derrida’s break with Levinas is not radical enough or that a more fundamental rupture or

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discontinuity is required to actually bring about the end of the West. On the contrary, my argument on the end of the West challenges the very concept of the epistemological break, for this concept ultimately guarantees the internal consistency, stability, and continuity of the Western tradition as such. What I am arguing instead is that the discourse of negative teleology has emerged only as a theoretical possibility from the historical teleology of the West itself. My own call for the end of the West in this book thus entails not any radical break with negative teleology as much as another complex reiteration of this powerful discourse—a reiteration, however, that would not serve to establish a new beginning for the West but that would rather call into question all historical and cultural beginnings as well as ends.

PA R T I I I F R O M C O N T I N E N TA L PHILOSOPHY TO P O S T C O L O N I A L T H E O RY S U R E LY E N O U G H , T H E H I S T O R I C A L T E L E O L O G Y O F T H E W E S T has already been called into question within continental philosophy as well as within the more recently established field of postcolonial theory. This critical interrogation of teleology has entailed not only a reconsideration of the place of the non-Western subject in world history but also a reassessment of the very idea of world history or, indeed, the concept of history as such. Again, the emergence of poststructuralist thought in particular during the late twentieth century brought with it a strong suspicion that the teleological ruses of progress, reason, and truth are absolutely intrinsic to the concept of history. Poststructuralist thinkers thus heralded an intellectual shift of epochal significance from the unmistakably Hegelian concept of history to the decidedly Nietzschean concept of genealogy—a shift, moreover, that has generally received a warm welcome from their postcolonial readers. Yet this promising interrogation of teleology has all too often relied on a theoretical strategy of inversion by which the cultural superiority of the Western tradition is refuted but the exceptional status of the West itself is reaffirmed. What I am calling “negative teleology,” then, has rather ironically become the stock discourse of both continental philosophy and

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postcolonial theory, pressed into service regularly to ward off the more blatantly ethnocentric discourse of Western triumphalism. In part III, I want to extend my argument on the turn from teleology to negative teleology within twentieth-century continental philosophy by shifting my attention to the reappropriation of negative teleology within postcolonial theory. What I am suggesting is that the powerful discourse of negative teleology in continental philosophy has itself made possible the recent emergence of postcolonial theory or at least greatly contributed to its intellectual formation. Postcolonial theory or, once again, at least a certain line of postcolonial thought is founded on negative teleology inasmuch as it subscribes to a concept of the West or a regime of Western representation from which it claims to have made a decisive historical break, if not to have inherited a different cultural tradition altogether. Yet it seems to me that the more critical task for postcolonial thinkers is precisely to dismantle both the historical teleology of the West and its inversion into a negative teleology, both the discourse of Western triumphalism and the counterdiscourse of Western fatalism. In part II, I suggested that the poststructuralist critique of Western ethnocentrism remains incalculably indebted to Martin Heidegger’s discourse of negative teleology. I went to great lengths to demonstrate Jacques Derrida’s complex reiteration of Heidegger’s discourse insofar as it is Derrida himself who, among all the poststructuralists, has reckoned most carefully with this debt, if not with its very incalculability. I claimed that with the possible exception of Derrida’s own critical rearticulation of Heidegger’s discourse, the theoretical presumptions of negative teleology have not been significantly revised since its earliest emergence in twentieth-century continental philosophy. Heidegger’s discourse thus provides us with what I called the articulation of negative teleology in its prototypical form. Negative teleology as such has remained a fundamental precept of most, if not all, poststructuralist theory, and, as I hope to demonstrate in part III, it still remains a fundamental precept of much postcolonial theory as well. But rather than focus on the geopolitical concept of the West itself, I want to attend more closely to what I consider to be some of the most crucial theoretical presumptions of negative teleology—namely, that representation constitutes a form of power that is unique to the dominant Western tradition and that difference presents a form of resistance to this tradition, or at

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least difference as it is conceived in its most radical sense, a difference that remains unfettered by any concept of identity, difference in itself. These concepts of representation and difference have figured quite prominently in both poststructuralist theory and postcolonial theory. It appears that each concept necessarily implicates the other, the critique of representation thus finding its intellectual corollary in the defense of difference. Yet these twin presumptions of negative teleology were established within poststructuralist theory well before the advent of postcolonial theory, as many postcolonial thinkers themselves have attested. The poststructuralist argument on the Western provenance of representation and the coeval suppression of difference was perhaps most memorably presented in the earlier work of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. Indeed, Foucault and Deleuze seem to have worked in tandem in making this argument on representation and difference in their respective texts The Order of Things and Difference and Repetition, which were first published in the heady years 1966 and 1968. In The Order of Things, Foucault offers us a history or what he calls, of course, an “archaeology” of “the system of signs in the Western world.”1 He argues that the historical emergence of representation in the West was marked by the reduction of language to discourse, a reduction that is indeed specific to Western modernity: “In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the peculiar existence and ancient solidity of language as a thing inscribed in the fabric of the world were dissolved in the functioning of representation; all language had value only as discourse” (43). Although Foucault’s argument in The Order of Things hinges on his own rather idiosyncratic distinction between the “Classical age” of representation and the “modern age” of signification, he insists nonetheless that it is the initial emergence of representation as such that constituted the truly decisive turning point within the history of the West: In the sixteenth century, one asked oneself how it was possible to know that a sign did in fact designate what it signified; from the seventeenth century, one began to ask how a sign could be linked to what it signified. A question to which the Classical period was to reply by the analysis of representation; and to which modern thought was to reply by the analysis of meaning and signification. But given the fact itself, language was never to be anything more than a particular case of representation

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(for the Classics) or of signification (for us). The profound kinship of language with the world was thus dissolved. The primacy of the written word went into abeyance. And that uniform layer, in which the seen and the read, the visible and the expressible, were endlessly interwoven, vanished too. Things and words were to be separated from one another. The eye was thenceforth destined to see and only to see, the ear to hear and only to hear. Discourse was still to have the task of speaking that which is, but it was no longer to be anything more than what is said. This involved an immense reorganization of culture, a reorganization of which the Classical age was the first and perhaps the most important stage, since it was responsible for the new arrangement in which we are still caught—since it is the Classical age that separates us from a culture in which the signification of signs did not exist, because it was reabsorbed into the sovereignty of the Like; but in which their enigmatic, monotonous, stubborn, and primitive being shone in an endless dispersion. (42–43, emphasis in original)

Meanwhile, in Difference and Repetition Deleuze takes up what he calls “the project of the philosophy of difference.”2 He argues that “difference in itself ” has always been subordinated to identity within the dominant philosophical tradition inasmuch as this tradition is premised on the concept of representation: “Difference is not and cannot be thought in itself, so long as it is subject to the requirements of representation” (262). Although Deleuze does not invoke the West in Difference and Repetition as Foucault does so routinely throughout The Order of Things, he does, however, trace the philosophical subordination of difference somewhat predictably back to ancient Greek philosophy, thus reaffirming the historical continuity of the Western tradition: There are four principal aspects to “reason” in so far as it is the medium of representation: identity, in the form of the undetermined concept; analogy, in the relation between ultimate determinable concepts; opposition, in the relation between determinations within concepts; resemblance, in the determined object of the concept itself. These forms are like the four heads or the four shackles of mediation. Difference is “mediated” to the extent that it is subjected to the fourfold root of identity, opposition,

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analogy and resemblance. On the basis of a first impression (difference is evil), it is proposed to “save” difference by representing it, and to represent it by relating it to the requirements of the concept in general. It is therefore a question of determining a propitious moment—the Greek propitious moment—at which difference is, as it were, reconciled with the concept. Difference must leave its cave and cease to be a monster; or at least only that which escapes at the propitious moment must persist as a monster, that which constitutes only a bad encounter, a bad occasion. (29, emphasis in original)

It is through this critique of representation and the accompanying defense of difference that the negative teleology of the West has largely been circulated within poststructuralist theory. For despite Foucault and Deleuze’s apparent disagreement on whether the concept of representation first achieved dominance within ancient Greek philosophy or only with the arrival of modernity—a disagreement that recalls, interestingly enough, the disagreement between Husserl and Heidegger on whether the task of contemporary philosophy was to return to Cartesian rationalism or to preSocratic thinking, a disagreement that seems, moreover, to be endemic to the ongoing geopolitical constitution of the West itself—they concur that the Western tradition is distinguished by the historical emergence of representation and the concomitant subordination of difference. This distinction of the Western tradition as such is not just one distinction among others but rather an absolute distinction—a distinction by which the West is not distinguished so much as it distinguishes itself, a distinction by which the West distinguishes itself even from itself. Although both Foucault and Deleuze went on to reinvent themselves many times over in their later work, the concepts of representation and difference as they were articulated in The Order of Things and Difference and Repetition established a common theoretical problematic that would endure over the course of their remarkable philosophical itineraries, virtually defining what eventually came to be called “poststructuralist theory.” It is well known that Foucault and Deleuze shared a close intellectual relationship that was overshadowed only by their immense personal admiration for each other. In “Theatrum Philosophicum,” Foucault’s ecstatic review of Deleuze’s books Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense first pub-

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lished in 1970, he freely speculates that “perhaps one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian.”3 And already in Difference and Repetition, Deleuze credits his analysis of the “four iron collars of representation” to Foucault, alluding to The Order of Things: “As Foucault has shown, the classical world of representation is defined by these four dimensions which co-ordinate and measure it” (262). Furthermore, in addition to their collaboration on “Intellectuals and Power,” a conversation between Foucault and Deleuze first published in 1972, Foucault contributed a laudatory preface to Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s book Anti-Oedipus that same year, while Deleuze went on to publish the similarly effusive work Foucault in 1986, shortly following Foucault’s death. But what is not quite as well known as Foucault and Deleuze’s mutual respect is their common intellectual debt to Heidegger, a debt that they themselves acknowledged perhaps too rarely. Deleuze did actually acknowledge this debt near the very beginning of his preface to Difference and Repetition itself. Following his suggestion that the preface should be read after the rest of the book rather than before it, he attempts to place his own philosophical project on difference and repetition in relation to a variety of recent intellectual as well as cultural movements, the first among which is Heidegger’s later thought: The subject dealt with here is manifestly in the air. The signs may be noted: Heidegger’s more and more pronounced orientation towards a philosophy of ontological Difference; the structuralist project, based upon a distribution of differential characters within a space of coexistence; the contemporary novelist’s art which revolves around difference and repetition, not only in its most abstract reflections but also in its effective techniques; the discovery in a variety of fields of a power peculiar to repetition, a power which also inhabits the unconscious, language and art. (xix)

As for Foucault, he finally acknowledged the enormity of his debt to Heidegger in his last interview, “The Return of Morality,” which was first published just a matter of days after his death in 1984. Having been prompted by the interviewer’s question on Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger, Foucault admits that his own interest in Nietzsche was sparked by Heidegger: “For me

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Heidegger has always been the essential philosopher. . . . My entire philosophical development was determined by my reading of Heidegger. . . . It is possible that if I had not read Heidegger, I would not have read Nietzsche. I had tried to read Nietzsche in the fifties but Nietzsche alone did not appeal to me—whereas Nietzsche and Heidegger: that was a philosophical shock! But I have never written anything on Heidegger, and I wrote only a very small article on Nietzsche; these are nevertheless the two authors I have read the most.”4 And yet, notwithstanding these rare acknowledgments, it seems to me that neither Foucault nor Deleuze ever attended closely or critically enough to Heidegger’s problematic of being, let alone to his discourse of negative teleology—or at least certainly not as closely or critically as Derrida did over the course of his philosophical itinerary. It is in this sense, then, that I have suggested that the poststructuralist critique of Western ethnocentrism, especially as it has been articulated in both Foucault’s critique of representation and Deleuze’s defense of difference, remains incalculably indebted to Heidegger’s discourse. But, of course, it is not the Heideggerian but rather the poststructuralist problematic from which postcolonial thinkers have so heavily drawn since the earliest formation of their field in the last decades of the twentieth century. And it is largely the critique of representation and the accompanying defense of difference through which negative teleology has been reappropriated within postcolonial theory. Over the next two chapters, I offer a close reading of what I consider to be some of the most significant texts in the admittedly short history of postcolonial theory, a reading that I hope is no less careful than the reading of Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida that I offered in the previous two chapters. I trace the postcolonial critique of representation in a close reading of Edward W. Said’s text Orientalism and Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s text “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Said’s book is commonly considered the founding text of postcolonial theory, and Mohanty’s text constitutes one of the earliest critical engagements between postcolonial theory and feminism. Both Said and Mohanty openly cite Foucault’s work, making a similar argument on the Western provenance of representation as such. I go on in the next chapter to trace the postcolonial defense of difference in a close reading of Homi K. Bhabha’s text “The Commitment to Theory” and Trinh T. Minh-ha’s text “Difference: ‘A Special Third World Women

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Issue.’ ” Bhabha’s essay poses the challenge of radical difference not only to colonial discourses of racism but also to anticolonial discourses of nationalism, while Trinh’s text poses this challenge to feminism as well. Curiously enough, Bhabha and Trinh do not cite Deleuze’s work at all in these texts, but, as I hope to show, Deleuze’s philosophy of difference provides an important theoretical source for their argument, however surreptitious this source remains. In offering my close reading of Said’s and Mohanty’s critique of representation on one hand and of Bhabha’s and Trinh’s defense of difference on the other, I also want to call into question the extension of negative teleology into postcolonial feminist theory. It might very well seem that the theoretical inversion of teleology into negative teleology could only have been complicated by the feminist intervention into postcolonial theory. Any critical attention to sex and gender would presumably have upset the predetermined categories of race and culture on which negative teleology continues to rely. However, the negative teleology of the West has been further reappropriated within postcolonial feminist theory in order to indict the newly hegemonic discourse of Western feminism. The nonWestern woman, also known as the “Third World woman” or the “woman of the South,” has thus been cast as the exemplary subject who resists all representation and bears true difference in herself. This rather novel reappropriation of negative teleology, then, signals not only the end of Western man but the end of Western woman as well.

4 THE CRITIQUE OF REPRESENTATION

Said and Orientalism What I have called the reappropriation of negative teleology within postcolonial theory has been effected largely through the critique of representation. Indeed, it may very well be claimed that it is the poststructuralist critique of representation as a specifically Western form of power that provided the intellectual opening for the emergence of postcolonial theory itself. This radical critique of representation has made it possible for postcolonial thinkers to address the very constitution of the non-Western subject as an operation of Western colonial power rather than simply assuming the prior existence of this non-Western subject. However, many postcolonial thinkers themselves have continued to rely on the theoretical presumption of Western exceptionalism insofar as they consider representation a uniquely Western problematic. The postcolonial critique of representation is thus marked by its pronounced ambivalence toward the teleological concept of the West as it questions the epistemological authority of all Western representations of their non-Western subjects on one hand and yet reaffirms the absolute distinction of the Western tradition from all nonWestern traditions on the other.

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This ambivalence, moreover, seems to have played itself out in these postcolonial thinkers’ ultimate disavowal of their intellectual debt to poststructuralist theory in general and to Michel Foucault’s critique of representation in particular. While the earliest postcolonial texts are characteristically strewn with references to Foucault, later postcolonial texts are characterized instead by various strategies for establishing their distance from him even when—or, rather, especially when—these texts are written by the same thinkers. It is as though by the strange force of its own reappropriation postcolonial theory has been compelled to detach itself precisely from those sources that first nourished it—and perhaps still do, all the more so. Edward W. Said’s text Orientalism was first published in 1978, marking what few if any postcolonial scholars would dispute was the inauguration of their field as such.1 Within the first few pages of this substantial monograph, Said invokes Foucault’s concept of discourse to describe what he calls “Orientalism.” He actually provides three different definitions of Orientalism in his own widely cited introduction to the text, all of which are, as he puts it, “interdependent.”2 In his first definition, Orientalism refers to the multidisciplinary study of the Orient, even in those cases where the term Orientalism itself is not employed. In his second definition, Orientalism refers to what he describes as “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’ ” or, again, “between East and West” (2), a distinction that informs much intellectual work beyond the study of the Orient itself. Said’s third definition of Orientalism as a discourse determines the historical relationship between the first “academic” and second “more or less imaginative” (3) forms of Orientalism that thrived during the latter period of European colonialism: Taking the late eighteenth century as a very roughly defined starting point Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. I have found it use-

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ful here to employ Michel Foucault’s notion of a discourse, as described by him in The Archaeology of Knowledge and in Discipline and Punish, to identify Orientalism. My contention is that without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage— and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period. (3)

Following Foucault’s concept of discourse, then, Said argues that Orientalism is not simply an ideological mystification of European colonialism but rather a productive social formation with very real effects: [Orientalism is] a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience. The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles. (1–2, emphasis in original)

The discourse of Orientalism thus produces the Orient or the East itself rather than reflecting, whether accurately or not, a preexisting geographical area, population, or culture. Furthermore, this discourse produces the Occident or the West as well, the self to which the Orient or the East is condemned to play the role of the other. Insofar as Said’s argument on Orientalism calls attention to the very constitution of the East as well as of the West in the ongoing political project of geographical inscription—the geopolitical project as such—I would only

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too willingly admit that my own argument in this book unfolds within the intellectual space that Said himself has opened. Interrogating what he calls the “ontological and epistemological distinction” between the East and the West, Said suggests in his introduction to Orientalism that there is no contemporary form of geographical knowledge that has not been conditioned by colonial relations of power: “The Orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there, just as the Occident itself is not just there either. . . . [S]uch locales, regions, geographical sectors as ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ are man-made [sic]. Therefore as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West. The two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other” (4–5, emphasis in original). In the closing sentence of his introduction, he even goes so far as to propose “eliminat[ing] the ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ altogether” (28). And yet Said’s argument itself continues to rely on the negative teleology of the West, generating a theoretical tension that remains unresolved over the course of his text. Certainly, it is this tension running throughout Orientalism that has made it such an enduring text, capable of yielding so many different readings and, indeed, of yielding an entire field of thought. Said’s text thus inaugurates both the postcolonial contestation and the postcolonial reappropriation of negative teleology. Orientalism begins with two epigraphs or, rather, with two indictments, both of which provide the general framework for Said’s argument. The first epigraph is taken from Karl Marx’s work The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented.” The second is taken from Benjamin Disraeli’s work Tancred: “The East is a career” (xiii). I want to discuss the second epigraph first, as Said does himself in his introduction to the text. Said argues that Disraeli’s statement, “The East is a career,” refers not to the East itself but rather to the concept of the East as it is produced by the discourse of Orientalism. However, Said qualifies his argument by making a distinction between this Orientalist concept of the East and a lived experience of the East that presumably remains unaffected by Orientalism. Whereas just a few pages earlier in his text he seems to have problematized any such idea as the East itself, in his discussion of Tancred he instead asserts the autonomous existence of the East or, as he puts it, the East in “its mere being”:

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It would be wrong to conclude that the Orient was essentially an idea, or a creation with no corresponding reality. . . . There were—and are— cultures and nations whose location is in the East, and their lives, histories, and customs have a brute reality obviously greater than anything that could be said about them in the West. About that fact this study of Orientalism has very little to contribute, except to acknowledge it tacitly. But the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient . . . despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a “real” Orient. (5, emphasis in original)

It is perhaps this claim for the existence of the East outside of the discourse of Orientalism that strikes the first note of tension in Said’s argument, although it might also be said that this tension sounds from the very first page of his text. For Said argues that the East is produced by the discourse of Orientalism on one hand and that the East bears an extradiscursive reality of its own on the other. Or to put it another way, Said supports his definition of Orientalism as a discourse by placing the term real within quotation marks in the phrase “a ‘real’ Orient” and yet continues to appeal to the “brute reality” of living in the Orient without these unsettling quotation marks. Or to put it another way yet again, Said states his lack of concern for any “correspondence” between Orientalism and the Orient but nonetheless admits that there is some “corresponding reality” to the concept of the Orient. This theoretical tension around the reality of the East as such is not unrelated to the more encompassing critique of representation that Said mounts in Orientalism. After his brief discussion of Tancred, Said goes on in his introduction to insist on what he calls the exteriority of Orientalism. He argues that the discourse of Orientalism derives its authority not from “what lies hidden” within it but rather from “its exteriority to what it describes” (20). This relation of exteriority is precisely what constitutes representation: “Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is, on the fact that the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West. He [sic] is never concerned with the Orient except as the first cause of what he says. What

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he says and writes, by virtue of the fact that it is said or written, is meant to indicate that the Orientalist is outside the Orient, both as an existential and as a moral fact. The principal product of this exteriority is of course representation” (20–21). Given the exteriority of representation, then, Said focuses his attention on “the text’s surface” (20), where the various strategies of representation are themselves deployed: “My analysis of the Orientalist text therefore places emphasis on the evidence, which is by no means invisible, for such representations as representations, not as ‘natural’ depictions of the Orient. This evidence is found just as prominently in the socalled truthful text (histories, philological analyses, political treatises) as in the avowedly artistic (i.e., openly imaginative) text. The things to look at are style, figures of speech, setting, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, not the correctness of representation nor its fidelity to some great original” (21, emphasis in original). It is at this later point in his introduction that Said refers to the first epigraph to his text, albeit only in passing. He suggests that Marx’s statement, “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented,” does not simply describe the historical event that Marx wanted to analyze in the Eighteenth Brumaire but also reproduces the logic of representation itself: “The exteriority of the [Orientalist] representation is always governed by some version of the truism that if the Orient could represent itself, it would; since it cannot, the representation does the job, for the West, and faute de mieux, for the poor Orient” (21). Yet whereas Said seems to admit that Disraeli might have realized that there was an East beyond his own discourse on it, he does not make any allowance that Marx might have similarly thought that those who had been represented were capable of representing themselves. In this sense, it is certainly Marx who bears the brunt of Said’s critique. But what especially interests me in this chapter of my book is Said’s argument that representation as such is a specifically Western form of power. Having so sharply interrogated the geopolitical distinction between the East and the West in his introduction to Orientalism, Said thus himself resorts to the most orthodox concept of the West in his own critique of representation. Remaining very close to Foucault’s critique of representation in The Order of Things, he argues that discourse operates according to the requirements of representation by displacing the presence of things

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themselves. However, whereas Foucault makes a historical distinction between the classical age of representation and the preclassical age—inasmuch as Foucault is interested only in the history of the West, just as he is always interested, after all, only in the history of the West—Said makes a cultural distinction between the Western practice of representation and non-Western practice: What is commonly circulated by [discourse] is not “truth” but representations. It hardly needs to be demonstrated again that language itself is a highly organized and encoded system, which employs many devices to express, indicate, exchange messages and information, represent, and so forth. In any instance of at least written language, there is no such thing as a delivered presence, but a re-presence, or a representation. The value, efficacy, strength, apparent veracity of a written statement about the Orient therefore relies very little, and cannot instrumentally depend, on the Orient as such. On the contrary, the written statement is a presence to the reader by virtue of its having excluded, displaced, made supererogatory any such real thing as “the Orient.” Thus all of Orientalism stands forth and away from the Orient: that Orientalism makes sense at all depends more on the West than on the Orient, and this sense is directly indebted to various Western techniques of representation that make the Orient visible, clear, “there” in discourse about it. And these representations rely upon institutions, traditions, conventions, agreed-upon codes of understanding for their effects, not upon a distant and amorphous Orient. (21–22, emphasis in original)

Said distinguishes what he calls “Western techniques of representation,” then, from what we are left to assume are non-Western techniques, although these techniques are not techniques of “representation” as such and perhaps not even “techniques” at all. Surely enough, Said associates the problematic of representation—or “re-presence,” as he so quaintly puts it—with the technical practice of language or, more specifically, written language. It is thus written language, this arch-technique of representation, that enables the establishment of codes, conventions, and institutions, all of which work to support discourse. Whatever we may think of the alleged technicity of written language, what is most surprising is that Said should

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associate representation, discourse, and written language so closely with the West. Even if we were to concede that Said would not very likely endorse the possible implication of his argument that writing is unique to the West, his claim remains that the reduction of language to its function of representation in discourse is a characteristically if not distinctly Western phenomenon. For Said, then, Orientalism provides the paradigmatic form of discourse itself inasmuch as it is nothing but Western representation. If it seems that I am reading far too much into a single phrase that happens to appear in the introduction to Orientalism, then it may well be worth turning to a later section of Said’s text in which he presents a more explicit argument for the Western provenance of representation. In the second part of the first chapter, “Imaginative Geography and Its Representations: Orientalizing the Oriental,” he reiterates his argument that all geographical knowledge is politically conditioned. Drawing from Claude Lévi-Strauss and Gaston Bachelard—as if he were presenting an archaeology of Foucault’s concept of discourse itself—Said argues that regardless of the modern accumulation of positive knowledge about the world, there is an irreducibly imaginative element to any form of geographical knowledge. The discourse of Orientalism thus constitutes only one among many forms of what he calls “imaginative geography,” the cultural practice of establishing a geographical distinction between the self and the other (53–55). And yet Said insists that Orientalism is a particularly impoverished form of geopolitical knowledge or, as he puts it, “knowledge of another kind, say, from ordinary historical [or geographical] knowledge” (72): “There is nothing especially controversial or reprehensible about such domestications of the exotic [as the Orientalist representation of the East]; they take place between all cultures, certainly, and between all men [sic]. My point, however, is to emphasize the truth that the Orientalist, as much as anyone in the European West who thought about or experienced the Orient, performed this kind of mental operation. But what is more important still is the limited vocabulary and imagery that impose themselves as a consequence” (60). Said goes on to suggest that although all forms of geopolitical knowledge reduce the complexity of other cultures, what distinguishes Orientalism from all other such forms of knowledge is the totalizing power of the disciplinary mechanisms to which the West has been able to subject the East:

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All cultures impose corrections upon raw reality, changing it from freefloating objects into units of knowledge. The problem is not that conversion takes place. It is perfectly natural for the human mind to resist the assault on it of untreated strangeness; therefore cultures have always been inclined to impose complete transformations on other cultures, receiving these other cultures not as they are but as, for the benefit of the receiver, they ought to be. To the Westerner, however, the Oriental was always like some aspect of the West. . . . Yet the Orientalist makes it his work to be always converting the Orient from something into something else: he does this for himself, for the sake of his culture, in some cases for what he believes is the sake of the Oriental. This process of conversion is a disciplined one: it is taught, it has its own societies, periodicals, traditions, vocabulary, rhetoric, all in basic ways connected to and supplied by the prevailing cultural and political norms of the West. And . . . it tends to become more rather than less total in what it tries to do, so much so that as one surveys Orientalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the overriding impression is of Orientalism’s insensitive schematization of the entire Orient. (67–68, emphasis in original)

By a turn of argument signaled in both of these passages by the transitional terms however, but, and yet, Said explains that Orientalism is just like any other form of imaginative geography, only more so. Orientalism distinguishes itself from other forms of geopolitical knowledge by the sheer success of its discursive enunciation. This distinction is absolute—an absolute distinction, moreover, that is qualitative precisely because it is quantitative and vice versa. Said thus argues that the disciplinary mechanisms of Orientalism, comprising its own societies, periodicals, and traditions, wield a discursive power that has been made possible only by the Western practice of representation, a discursive power that its non-Western subjects could never have imagined, so to speak, for themselves: “Imaginative geography . . . legitimates a vocabulary, a universe of representative discourse peculiar to the discussion and understanding . . . of the Orient” (71). Even the problem of truth, then, defined as it is by the correspondence between reality and discourse, is generated by Western representation: “The Orient is thus Orientalized, a process that not only marks the Orient as the province of the

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Orientalist but also forces the uninitiated Western reader to accept Orientalist codifications . . . as the true Orient. Truth, in short, becomes a function of learned judgment, not of the material itself, which in time seems to owe even its existence to the Orientalist” (67, emphasis in original). Indeed, Said suggests that the entire ontological problematic of being is implicated by Orientalism insofar as all discursive statements on the Orient or the East are invariably made in “the tense . . . [of ] the timeless eternal,” signified by “the simple copula is” (72, emphasis in original). Drawing from Foucault’s critique of representation as well as from Heidegger’s destruction of ontology, Said thus predicates Orientalism on the peculiar status and exceptional power of Western discursive practice. While we might certainly sympathize with Said’s attempt to convey the immensity of modern colonial power, it remains nonetheless quite surprising that he should trace the Western practice of representation all the way back to ancient Greece, the much-vaunted origin of the Western tradition as such. He presents a rather sweeping history of representation in Orientalism, then, a history based on the twin principles of continuity and accumulation—precisely the sort of history against which Foucault himself directed his genealogies and Heidegger, of course, directed his etymologies. In the same part of the first chapter, “Imaginative Geography and Its Representations,” Said proposes that the geopolitical distinction between the East and the West “already seems bold” in the Iliad (56). He considers Aeschylus’s The Persians and Euripides’s The Bacchae more carefully, stating emphatically that “Aeschylus represents Asia” (57, emphasis in original). He goes on to trace this history of representation in a continuous lineage of Orientalist discourse from ancient Greece and Rome right through to the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, stopping along the way to discuss the representation of Islam in both Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale (63–67) and Dante’s Inferno ( 68–70) in quite some detail and in that particular order. Orientalism thus forms a remarkably consistent discursive bloc for Said, predating not only the formal establishment of Orientalism as an academic field of study but also the beginnings of European colonialism itself. It seems that in his efforts to refute the crude materialist claim that Orientalism is merely a cultural by-product of colonialism, Said asserts instead that colonialism is actually the political product of Orientalism, the cumulative effect of more than two thousand years of Western discourse on

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the East. Insofar as he argues that Orientalism emerged with the advent of representation at the origin of the Western tradition, then, he reassembles the very concept of the West that he sets out to dismantle in the introduction to his text. Said offers some concluding remarks on his critique of representation in the penultimate section of Orientalism, addressing the theoretical tension that he himself seems to admit runs throughout his text. In the third part of the third chapter, “Modern Anglo-French Orientalism in Fullest Flower,” he presents us with a strikingly discordant formulation concerning the Orientalist representation of Islam—a discordance that is too striking for him not to have noticed and even intended. Rather than simply confusing himself, as some of his critics have claimed,3 Said quite deliberately blurs the categorical distinction between representation and misrepresentation on which Orientalism itself depends, as does all discourse as such: Much as one may be inclined to agree with [the thesis that Orientalism misrepresents Islam]—since, as this book has tried to demonstrate, Islam has been fundamentally misrepresented in the West—the real issue is whether indeed there can be a true representation of anything, or whether any and all representations, because they are representations, are embedded first in the language and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambience of the representer. If the latter alternative is the correct one (as I believe it is), then we must be prepared to accept the fact that a representation is eo ipso implicated, intertwined, embedded, interwoven with a great many other things besides the “truth,” which is itself a representation. What this must lead us to methodologically is to view representations (or misrepresentations—the distinction is at best a matter of degree) as inhabiting a common field of play defined for them, not by some inherent common subject matter alone, but by some common history, tradition, universe of discourse. (272–73, emphasis in original)

The theoretical point of Said’s overtly paradoxical formulation is thus that the very possibility of misrepresentation is opened by the reduction of language to its discursive function of representation. In this sense, misrepresentation is indeed a form of representation itself. The discourse of Orientalism does not merely misrepresent the East, then, but moreover,

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and more importantly for Said, subjects the East to its various disciplinary mechanisms geared toward the production of geopolitical knowledge. Orientalism is fundamentally defined not by its all too common misrepresentation of the East but rather by its highly regulated disciplinary representation of the East—not by its carelessness but by its care, its scrupulous attention to the East itself, through which, of course, modern colonial power has been administered: The representations of Orientalism in European culture amount to what we can call a discursive consistency, one that has not only history but material (and institutional) presence to show for itself. . . . [S]uch a consistency was a form of cultural praxis, a system of opportunities for making statements about the Orient. My whole point about this system is not that it is a misrepresentation of some Oriental essence—in which I do not for a moment believe—but that it operates as representations usually do, for a purpose, according to a tendency, in a specific historical, intellectual, and even economic setting. In other words, representations have purposes, they are effective much of the time, they accomplish one or many tasks. Representations are formations, or as Roland Barthes has said of all the operations of language, they are deformations. The Orient as a representation in Europe is formed—or deformed—out of a more and more specific sensitivity towards a geographical region called “the East.” (273)

What interests me in this chapter of my book, then, is not the alleged theoretical incoherence of Said’s argument in Orientalism but rather the very close coherence of his critique of representation with the poststructuralist critique. It is not that Said’s critique of representation is not quite Foucauldian enough so much as it is that his critique is a bit too Foucauldian. And this theoretical coherence between Orientalism and The Order of Things, let me add, is only underscored by Said’s reference in this passage to Roland Barthes’s concept of deformation taken from his early work Mythologies. What I am arguing is that the theoretical tension that runs throughout Orientalism is generated by Said’s largely effective reappropriation of the negative teleology of the West. This negative teleology is endemic to the critique of representation that he wants to mobilize against colonial-

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ism itself. In the same part of the third chapter, “Modern Anglo-French Orientalism in Fullest Flower,” Said thus recapitulates his argument that representation is a specifically Western form of power—a form of power, moreover, that the non-Western subject has never been capable of wielding for itself: “From the beginning of Western speculation about the Orient, the one thing the Orient could not do was to represent itself ” (283). This statement clearly resonates with Marx’s statement, “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented,” which Said himself, of course, so flatly rejects in his introduction. And yet in this passage Said reproduces the same logic of representation that he accuses Marx of doing. However, he introduces the caveat that it is the Western subject who invariably represents the East—and this, apparently, makes all the difference. If Marx, according to Said at least, proposes that those who are incapable of representing themselves must therefore be represented by others—a proposition that is made in what Said calls “the tense of the timeless eternal”—then Said demands that those who have never been able to represent themselves now attempt to do so—a demand that is made in the tense of the historical present or, indeed, in the very name of presence. By Said’s caveat, non-Western subjects must thus represent themselves. Yet this act would not constitute another form of representation, not technically. For the reduction of language to discourse is a Western event. The non-Western subject would not speak in the terms of Western discourse— or, at least, it should not. The non-Western subject would not speak the truth and it would not even speak of its own reality inasmuch as both of these concepts themselves—truth and reality—are produced by the logic of representation. Rather, by its nontechnical act of speech, the non-Western subject would affirm its presence, a presence to which this act of speech would itself contribute, not seek to displace. This act of “self-presentation” would no longer be an act of “re-presentation” but would instead destroy the logic of representation altogether. Following Said’s argument in Orientalism, then, non-Western self-representation signals the end of Western representation not only because it takes the power of representation away from the West but also because it circumvents representation as such. This postcolonial critique of representation remains remarkably consistent over the course of Said’s work, enduring well beyond Orientalism and even beyond his express disaffection from Foucault. Of course, Said states

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his reservations about Foucault in Orientalism itself, particularly concerning the place of the individual subject in Foucault’s theory of discourse. Said explains that whereas “Foucault believes that in general the individual text or author counts for very little” in the functioning of discourse, his own study of Orientalist discourse leads him instead to “believe in the determining imprint of individual writers upon the otherwise anonymous collective body of texts constituting a discursive formation like Orientalism” (23). Yet he prefaces these comments by acknowledging that he is nonetheless “greatly indebted” (23) to Foucault’s work. His increasing discomfort with Foucault, however, is evident in some of his earliest essays following Orientalism. In “The Problem of Textuality: Two Exemplary Positions,” which was first published in 1978, the same year in which Orientalism first appeared, Said attempts to resituate Foucault’s theory of discourse from what we might call the poststructuralist problematic of textuality to the Marxist problematic of hegemony. He thus compares Foucault quite favorably to Derrida in a rather glib formulation of their intellectual differences: “Derrida’s criticism . . . moves us into the text, Foucault’s in and out of it.” He goes on to compare Foucault somewhat less favorably to Antonio Gramsci, though, who seems to provide an intellectual role model for Said himself: “What one misses in Foucault . . . is something resembling Gramsci’s analyses of hegemony, historical blocks, ensembles of relationships done from the perspective of an engaged political worker for whom the fascinated description of exercised power is never a substitute for trying to change power relationships within society.”4 In “Travelling Theory,” which was first published in 1982, Said seems to have abandoned Foucault to the poststructuralist problematic: “Foucault’s history is ultimately textual, or rather textualized.” He again compares Foucault to Gramsci, with whom Said himself obviously identifies: “[Gramsci] would certainly appreciate the fineness of Foucault’s archaeologies, but would find it odd that they make not even a nominal allowance for emergent movements, and none for revolutions, counter-hegemony, or historical blocks.”5 In “Michel Foucault, 1927–1984,” which was first published just after Foucault’s death in 1984, Said delivers a respectful eulogy, over the course of which he nonetheless offers some strong criticism of Foucault’s work, especially his later work: “[Foucault’s] Eurocentrism was almost total,

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as if ‘history’ itself took place only among a group of French and German thinkers. And as his later work became more private and esoteric in its goals, he seemed even more unrestrained in his generalizations.”6 Said’s escalating criticism of Foucault eventually culminates in “Foucault and the Imagination of Power,” which was first published in 1986. In another characteristically glib formulation, he argues that Foucault succumbs to the force of his own pessimistic description of power in his later works— namely, Discipline and Punish and the first volume of The History of Sexuality: “Foucault’s imagination of power is largely with rather than against it.”7 Said ultimately disavows his intellectual debt to Foucault, then, by charging that Foucault himself grants too much power to discourse, denying any capacity for individual subjects to contest discursive power at all—a charge, interestingly enough, that many critics have laid against Said’s own theory of Orientalism. Certainly, Said’s efforts to distance himself from Foucault might have been motivated largely by this sort of response to his work. And yet even after this disavowal has taken effect, the critique of representation that Said mounts in Orientalism remains intact in his later works, including those works that critically revisit Orientalism itself. In “Orientalism Reconsidered,” which was first published in 1985, Said revisits his argument in Orientalism only to reaffirm and extend it. He thus strikes the same note of theoretical tension in this later text, claiming “to refuse [entirely] designations like ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’ ” on one hand while attesting to the “4,000-year-old history” of the relationship between Europe and Asia on the other. Furthermore, in assessing the intellectual position of one of his more hostile critics, Said practically repeats Marx’s statement from the Eighteenth Brumaire: “They cannot represent themselves, they must therefore be represented by others.” But instead of attributing this statement to Marx, as he does in Orientalism, he adopts it in order to describe the logic of representation or what he calls “the most familiar of Orientalism’s themes.”8 Said does revisit Orientalism somewhat more critically, however, in another substantial monograph that was first published in 1993, Culture and Imperialism. Said himself describes this text as “not just a sequel to Orientalism but an attempt to do something else.”9 He finally concedes to his critics that his theory of Orientalism itself may have granted too much power to colonial discourse: “What I left out of Orientalism was that

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response to Western dominance which culminated in the great movement of decolonization all across the Third World” (xii). In Culture and Imperialism, then, Said addresses both the colonial culture of imperialism and the anticolonial culture of resistance. Invoking Gramsci’s geopolitical analysis of the “southern question” this time rather than Foucault’s theory of discourse again, he proposes what he calls a “contrapuntal” reading of the colonial archive, placing the cultural texts of imperialism and resistance in counterpoint to each other (51). But I think that Said would have more than readily agreed with me that this essentially dialogical strategy of contrapuntal reading does not undermine his theory of Orientalism so much as expand on it. For although he attends in some detail to the anticolonial culture of resistance in Culture and Imperialism, he maintains that what distinguishes the colonial culture of imperialism as such is the Western discursive practice of representation. Said thus reiterates in this later work the critique of representation that he introduced in Orientalism: As I have argued, the power even in casual conversation to represent what is beyond metropolitan borders derives from the power of an imperial society, and that power takes the discursive form of a reshaping or reordering of “raw” or primitive data into the local conventions of European narrative and formal utterance, or, in the case of France, the systematics of disciplinary order. And these were under no obligation to please or persuade a “native” African, Indian, or Islamic audience: indeed they were in most influential instances premised on the silence of the native. When it came to what lay beyond metropolitan Europe, the arts and the disciplines of representation—on the one hand, fiction, history and travel writing, painting; on the other, sociology, administrative or bureaucratic writing, philology, racial theory—depended on the powers of Europe to bring the non-European world into representations, the better to be able to see it, to master it, and, above all, to hold it. (99)

Said also goes on to clarify the cultural distinction that he initially made in Orientalism between the Western practice of representation and nonWestern practice—a distinction, as he himself suggests, that is absolute: “All cultures tend to make representations of foreign cultures the better

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to master or in some way to control them. Yet not all cultures make representations of foreign cultures and in fact master or control them. This is the distinction, I believe, of modern Western cultures” (100, emphasis in original). Indeed, the theoretical continuity between Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism is quite remarkable. In the later text, Said once again refers to Marx’s statement on representation, attributing it to Marx but without citing the Eighteenth Brumaire (277). He also reaffirms that the discourse of Orientalism may be traced back to ancient Greece (xxv). Said even presses the term re-presentation (283) into service, a throwback to an earlier time when presumably more politically minded intellectuals believed that “representation” could be circumvented by “self-presentation.” As for Foucault, however, although he still receives an honorable mention in Culture and Imperialism for his concept of discourse (110), he is ultimately dismissed for his willful “ignor[ance of ] the imperial context of his own theories” (278). Over the course of Said’s work, then, from Orientalism to Culture and Imperialism, the postcolonial critique of representation detaches itself from its poststructuralist sources to turn this critique against poststructuralism itself, revealing that poststructuralist theory is only the latest form of Western representation.

Mohanty and Western Feminism Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s text “Under Western Eyes” was first published in 1984 in a special issue of the journal boundary 2 titled “On Humanism and the University I: The Discourse of Humanism,” providing a critical focus that appears to have significantly informed the composition of Mohanty’s text itself. In the opening paragraph of her text, although she does not refer to Foucault, she does invoke the concept of discourse in order to delimit her analysis of colonialism. She explains that what she wants to interrogate in her essay is the discursive production of the Third World as such: “Colonization has been used to characterize everything from the most evident economic and political hierarchies to the production of a particular cultural discourse about what is called the ‘Third World.’ . . . The definition of colonization I wish to invoke here is a predominantly discursive one.” She proposes that feminism or what she very tentatively calls

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“Western feminism” functions as a colonial discourse insofar as it produces the stereotypical figure of the Third World woman: “Colonization almost invariably implies a relation of structural domination, and a suppression— often violent—of the heterogeneity of the subject(s) in question. What I wish to analyze is specifically the production of the ‘Third World Woman’ as a singular monolithic subject in some recent (Western) feminist texts.”10 Mohanty goes on in this introductory section of her text to argue that Western feminist discourse generally reduces the complexity of the nonWestern female subject by its insistence on the universal import of sexual difference, an insistence that yields in turn the ethnocentric concept of what she terms the “Third World Difference”: Assumptions of privilege and ethnocentric universality on the one hand, and inadequate self-consciousness about the effect of Western scholarship on the “third world” in the context of a world system dominated by the West on the other, characterize a sizable extent of Western feminist work on women in the third world. An analysis of “sexual difference” in the form of a cross-culturally singular, monolithic notion of patriarchy or male dominance leads to the construction of a similarly reductive and homogeneous notion of what I call the “Third World Difference”—that stable, ahistorical something that apparently oppresses most if not all the women in these countries. And it is in the production of this “Third World Difference” that Western feminisms appropriate and “colonize” the fundamental complexities and conflicts which characterize the lives of women of different classes, religions, cultures, races and castes in these countries. It is in this process of homogenization and system[a]tization of the oppression of women in the third world that power is exercised in much of recent Western feminist discourse. (335)

Mohanty’s argument on the concept of sexual difference thus poses a challenge not only to the feminist theory of gender as a universal category of analysis but also to any poststructuralist theory of difference as a salve against identity, homogeneity, or, indeed, representation itself. In this sense, “Under Western Eyes” certainly provides an important precursor to my own argument on the postcolonial defense of difference in chapter 5.

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Furthermore, having problematized the discursive production of the Third World in the opening paragraph of her text, Mohanty takes care in the following paragraph to interrogate her own reliance on the concept of the West in her critical analysis of what she calls “Western feminist discourse.” Recalling Said’s argument on the exteriority of representation without citing either Foucault or Said at this point, she explains that the West is a discursive effect that is produced by various feminist texts themselves: Clearly Western feminist discourse and political practice is [sic] neither singular nor homogeneous in its [sic] goals, interests or analyses. However, it is possible to trace a coherence of effects resulting from the implicit assumption of “the West” (in all its complexities and contradictions) as the primary referent in theory and praxis. My reference to “Western feminism” is by no means intended to imply that it is a monolith. Rather, I am attempting to draw attention to the similar effects of various textual strategies used by particular writers that codify Others as non-Western and hence themselves as (implicitly) Western. It is in this sense that I use the term “Western feminist.” (334, emphasis in original)

What Mohanty persists in calling “Western feminist discourse,” then, is marked not by its presumably Western provenance but rather by its very enunciation of the “Third World Difference,” the cultural distinction between the Western self and the non-Western other. She thus underscores that feminist theory is itself a discursive formation bearing political effects. Feminist discourse enters into a complex set of relations with other discourses in the political contest for cultural hegemony, a contest from which feminist discourse cannot simply excuse itself: Feminist scholarship, like most other kinds of scholarship, is not the mere production of knowledge about a certain subject. It is a directly political and discursive practice in that it is purposeful and ideological. It is best seen as a mode of intervention into particular hegemonic discourses (for example, traditional anthropology, sociology, literary criticism, etc.); it is a political praxis which counters and resists the totalizing imperative of age-old “legitimate” and “scientific” bodies of knowledge. Thus,

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feminist scholarly practices (whether reading, writing, critical or textual) are inscribed in relations of power—relations which they counter, resist, or even perhaps implicitly support. There can, of course, be no apolitical scholarship. (334, emphasis in original)

It seems to me that Mohanty’s careful attention to the discursive production of the Third World as well as of the West itself within feminist scholarship not only confirms that the female subject is necessarily implicated within rather than simply left outside the political effects of discourse but also suggests the corollary argument that the non-Western subject is similarly implicated within discourse. It would follow, then, that the nonWestern female subject is also inscribed within rather than outside discourse, representation, or power—for rhetorical effect we might even say doubly so. Yet much like Orientalism, “Under Western Eyes” continues to rely on the negative teleology of the West, generating its own theoretical tension—a tension that is perhaps all the greater for its critical engagement with both postcolonial and feminist theory. Mohanty’s text thus constitutes one of the earliest and what I consider to be one of the most lasting efforts in the postcolonial feminist reappropriation of negative teleology. What remains most remarkable about “Under Western Eyes,” at least to me, is Mohanty’s location of the colonial discourse of feminism in relation to the discourse of humanism. In the concluding section of her text, she places her own argument squarely within the poststructuralist problematic of humanism, invoking Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Sarah Kofman, Hélène Cixous, and, curiously enough, Edward W. Said (352–53). Although it might appear strange that Mohanty names Irigaray and Cixous in particular after having so roundly dismissed the concept of sexual difference, she explains that what she finds most compelling in the work of all these poststructuralist and feminist thinkers alike is their indictment of the “underlying anthropomorphism and ethnocentrism” (352) of humanist discourse itself. Much like Said again, Mohanty is especially indebted to Foucault, citing his work at a few points in her text. However, it is Foucault’s later works that she cites—namely, the first volume of The History of Sexuality and the English-language collection of his interviews, lectures, and short essays, Power / Knowledge, works from

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which Said would have presumably distanced himself. Whereas Said claims that Foucault’s later works operate “with rather than against [power],”11 it is precisely Foucault’s theory of power from which Mohanty draws in her critical analysis of Western feminist discourse. In contrast to Said’s all too easy formulations, then, Mohanty presents a brief but concise reading of Foucault’s theory of power in her argument on the discursive production of the Third World woman: The setting up of the commonality of third world women’s struggles across classes and cultures against a general notion of oppression (primarily the group in power—i.e., men) necessitates the assumption of what Michel Foucault calls the “juridico-discursive” model of power, the princip[al] features of which are: “a negative relation” (limit and lack); an “insistence on the rule” (which forms a binary system); a “cycle of prohibition”; the “logic of censorship”; and a “uniformity” of the apparatus functioning at different levels. Feminist discourse on the third world which assumes a homogeneous category—or group—called women necessarily operates through the setting up of originary power divisions. Power relations are structured in terms of a source of power and a cumulative reaction to power. Opposition is a generalized phenomenon created as a response to power—which, in turn, is possessed by certain groups of people. The major problem with such a definition of power is that it locks all revolutionary struggles into binary structures—possessing power versus being powerless. Women are powerless, unified groups. If the struggle for a just society is seen in terms of the move from powerless to powerful for women as a group, and this is the implication in feminist discourse which structures sexual difference in terms of the division between the sexes, then the new society would be structurally identical to the existing organization of power relations, constituting itself as a simple inversion of what exists. If relations of domination and exploitation are defined in terms of binary divisions—groups which dominate and groups which are dominated—surely the implication is that the accession to power of women as a group is sufficient to dismantle the existing organization of relations[.] But women as a group are not in some sense essentially superior or infallible. The crux of the problem lies in

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that initial assumption of women as a homogeneous group or category (“the oppressed”), a familiar assumption in Western radical and liberal feminisms. (350–51, emphasis in original)

Mohanty thus mobilizes Foucault’s theory of power against the essentially humanist subject of Western feminist discourse. And much like Said yet again, she even draws from Claude Lévi-Strauss in a surprisingly benign remark on his attention to value in the exchange of women rather than to the exchange itself (341). Indeed, beyond her references to Foucault, “Under Western Eyes” recalls Orientalism in many ways, whether Mohanty herself intended it or not. Although she cites Said’s text only in a footnote along with other texts by Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, and Deleuze and Guattari (357 n. 43)—simply placing Said among the poststructuralists, as it were—it is quite obvious that Mohanty’s own text follows Orientalism much more closely than she seems to acknowledge, for whatever reason. Mohanty reiterates the critique of representation that Said presents in Orientalism, then, extending this critique to the issue of gender without, however, challenging its theoretical presumption on the Western provenance of representation as such. Of course, Mohanty herself must certainly have intended to follow Said’s critique of representation in some sense. She concludes her text with an oblique reference to Orientalism, quoting Marx’s statement on representation from the Eighteenth Brumaire that serves as one of the epigraphs to Said’s text: “It is time to move beyond the Marx who found it possible to say: They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” (354). Failing to provide any direct reference to Marx’s text, Mohanty’s concluding sentence thus alludes all at once to the figure of Marx himself, to the generally Marxist orientation of the various feminist texts that she analyzes in “Under Western Eyes,” and to Said’s critique of Marx’s logic of representation in Orientalism. By this rhetorical gesture, Mohanty calls on Said in her attempt to establish a common critique of Western representation, well before any such field as postcolonial theory had been established. Placing her own work within the intellectual space opened by the poststructuralist problematic of humanism, then, Mohanty pursues the argument that representation is a specifically Western form of power. In the in-

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troductory section of her text, she begins by suggesting that feminist theory is defined largely by its critical attention to the representation of woman: The relationship between “Woman”—a cultural and ideological composite Other constructed through diverse representational discourses (scientific, literary, juridical, linguistic, cinematic, etc.)—and “women”—real, material subjects of their collective histories—is one of the central questions the practice of feminist scholarship seeks to address. This connection between women as historical subjects and the re-presentation of Woman produced by hegemonic discourses is not a relation of direct identity, or a relation of correspondence or simple implication. It is an arbitrary relation set up by particular cultures. (334)

Mohanty thus reaffirms even as she problematizes the distinction between representation and reality, between discourse and materiality, between hegemony and history. Much like Said’s critique of representation—or “representation,” as she puts it herself—Mohanty’s critique is marked by this theoretical tension around the reality of woman as such. Mohanty further emphasizes, however, that what representation entails primarily is the reduction of the plurality of “women” as extradiscursive subjects to the singular concept of “Woman” as a subject of discourse. Feminist theory presumably attempts to recover this historical plurality of women’s lived experience. Mohanty continues her critique of representation, then, by arguing that in the colonial situation Western feminist discourse itself reduces the historical plurality of non-Western women’s lived experience: “I would like to suggest that [‘Western feminist’ writings] discursively colonize the material and historical heterogeneities of the lives of women in the third world, thereby producing/re-presenting a composite, singular ‘Third World Woman’—an image which appears arbitrarily constructed, but nevertheless carries with it the authorizing signature of Western humanist discourse” (334–35). She thus suggests that Western feminist discourse derives its own authority to represent the non-Western female subject from the discourse of humanism itself. What transforms the feminist recovery of women’s lived experience into a colonial discourse on the Third World woman is

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precisely its ideological reproduction of the humanist subject. Mohanty presents her argument on humanism in more detail in the concluding section of her text: Let me suggest some disconcerting similarities between the typically authorizing signature of . . . Western feminist writings on women in the third world, and the authorizing signature of the project of humanism in general—humanism as a Western ideological and political project which involves the necessary recuperation of the “East” and “Woman” as Others. . . . [It is] only in so far as “Woman/Women” and “the East” are defined as Others, or as peripheral, that (Western) Man/Humanism can represent him/itself as the center. It is not the center that determines the periphery, but the periphery that, in its boundedness, determines the center. (352–53, emphasis in original)

For Mohanty, then, the subject of humanist discourse is consolidated only by its marginalization of both the non-Western subject and the female subject. The very concept of the human is therefore implicitly Western and male. While I find this interrogation of the complicated relationship between colonialism, feminism, and humanism very compelling—an interrogation that remains perhaps the most promising line of argument in Mohanty’s text—what concerns me in this chapter of my book is her insistence on what she calls the “Western ideological and political project” of humanism. Although Mohanty proposes in “Under Western Eyes” that the concept of the West is a discursive effect, she nonetheless maintains the Western provenance of humanism itself. Again, she does take care to interrogate her own reliance on the concept of the West in her critical analysis of Western feminist discourse. She explains that any historical subject, even the nonWestern female subject, may adopt the discourse of Western feminism or, indeed, any ethnocentric discourse such as Western humanism: Even though I am dealing with feminists who identify themselves as culturally or geographically from the “West,” what I say about [the] analytic strategies or implicit principles [of Western feminist discourse] holds for anyone who uses these methods, whether third world women in the

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West, or third world women in the third world writing on these issues and publishing in the West. . . . As a matter of fact, my argument holds for any discourse that sets up its own authorial subjects as the implicit referent, i.e., the yardstick by which to encode and represent cultural Others. It is in this move that power is exercised in discourse. (336)

Similarly, Mohanty explains that Western feminists themselves are not necessarily fated to reproduce the colonial discourse of Western feminism. Indeed, one section of “Under Western Eyes” is devoted to a close reading of a feminist text by Maria Mies (344–46) that, as Mohanty puts it, “does not fall into the analytic traps” (336) of Western feminist discourse. And yet if we read Mohanty’s text carefully here, it seems that what remains salient for her is the Western provenance not of the subject but of the discourse itself. The non-Western female subject thus adopts the discourse of Western feminism or humanism either by locating herself “in the West” or by “writing in the third world and publishing in the West.” In other words, Mohanty argues that it is not the cultural identity of the subject but rather the geopolitical location of the discourse that determines the colonizing effects of Western feminism: “I am not making a culturalist argument about ethnocentrism; rather, I am trying to uncover how ethnocentric universalism is produced in certain analyses, and in the context of a hegemonic First/Third World connection, it is not very surprising to discover where the ethnocentrism derives from” (336). Mohanty preempts the easy accusation of reverse ethnocentrism, then— an accusation that has commonly been leveled against Said’s argument in Orientalism—by reasserting the power of discourse over the individual subject. In this sense, she follows Foucault’s concept of discourse more closely than Said does, disclaiming what Said himself calls in Orientalism “the determining imprint of individual writers upon the . . . discursive formation” (23). However, Mohanty’s critique of representation remerges with Said’s critique insofar as she argues that the discourse of humanism, a discourse that is defined by its function of representation, is a characteristically if not distinctly Western phenomenon. And any discourse of feminism that remains committed to the representation of the humanist subject thereby also constitutes a “Western ideological and political project,” as she puts it.

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Again, as in the case of Orientalism, the theoretical tension that marks “Under Western Eyes” is thus generated by Mohanty’s reappropriation of the negative teleology of the West, a negative teleology that is endemic to the critique of representation that she wants to mobilize against colonialism as well as feminism itself. It is not any theoretical incoherence on her part but rather the very close coherence of her critique of representation with the poststructuralist critique that interests me in this chapter of my book. Extending the negative teleology of the West to her critical analysis of feminist discourse, then, Mohanty suggests that in order to circumvent Western representation the non-Western female subject must represent herself. Over the course of her text, she makes the argument that although some Western feminists have effectively reclaimed the historical plurality of women’s lived experience by representing themselves, Western feminist discourse largely reproduces the stereotypical figure of the Third World woman: “Discourses of representation are confused with material realities, and the distinction . . . between ‘Woman’ and ‘women’ is lost. Feminist work on women in the third world which blurs this distinction (which is present in certain Western feminists’ self-representation) eventually ends up constructing monolithic images of ‘Third World Women’ as women who can only be defined as material subjects, not through the relation of their materiality to their representations” (349, emphasis in original). Reaffirming her distinction between discursive representation and material reality, Mohanty thus charges that Western feminist discourse produces not only the stereotypical figure of the Third World woman but also the idealized figure of the Western woman: A homogeneous notion of the oppression of women as a group is assumed, which, in turn, produces the image of an “average third world woman.” This average third world woman leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and being “third world” (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.). This, I suggest, is in contrast to the (implicit) self-representation of Western women as educated, modern, as having control over their own bodies and sexualities, and the freedom to make their own decisions. (337)

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It seems that, for Mohanty, Western feminists’ self-representation, with very few exceptions, supports rather than challenges the logic of representation insofar as Western feminist discourse, following Western humanist discourse as such, inadvertently conflates the orders of representation and reality. Addressing the problematic of self-representation in more explicit terms than Said does, then, Mohanty makes a theoretical distinction between what she calls “re-presentation” and “self-presentation”—neither of which terms is employed by Said in Orientalism. Mohanty suggests that although the representation of Western women as an oppressed group is certainly problematic, what the representation of Third World women as an oppressed group demonstrates is the colonial power of Western feminist discourse itself: “What happens when this assumption of ‘women as an oppressed group’ is situated in the context of Western feminist writing about third world women? It is here that I locate the colonialist move. By focusing on the representation of women in the third world, and . . . Western feminisms’ self-presentation in the same context, it seems evident that Western feminists alone become the true ‘subjects’ of this counter-history. Third world women, on the other hand, never rise above their generality and their ‘object’ status” (351). Mohanty thus argues that it is only by the re-presentation of Third World women in Western feminist discourse that the self-presentation of Western women is accomplished. In this sense, Western feminist discourse deploys the same strategies of representation that the essentially humanist discourses of Marxism and international development do: The distinction between Western feminist re-presentation of women in the third world, and Western feminist self-presentation is a distinction of the same order as that made by some Marxists between the “maintenance” function of the housewife and the real “productive” role of wage labor, or the characterization by developmentalists of the third world as being engaged in the lesser production of “raw materials” in contrast to the “real” productive activity of the First World. These distinctions are made on the basis of the privileging of a particular group as the norm or referent. Men involved in wage labor, first world producers, and, I

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suggest, Western feminists who sometimes cast Third World women in terms of “ourselves undressed” (Michelle Rosaldo’s term), all construct themselves as the referent in such a binary analytic. (337, emphasis in original)

Mohanty further explains that it is precisely the re-presentation of Third World women as passive recipients of tradition that makes possible the self-presentation of Western women as active agents of change: A comparison between Western feminist self-presentation and Western feminist re-presentation of women in the third world yields significant results. Universal images of “the third world woman” (the veiled woman, chaste virgin, etc.), images constructed from adding the “third world difference” to “sexual difference” are predicated upon (and hence obviously bring into sharper focus) assumptions about Western women as secular, liberated, and having control over their own lives. This is not to suggest that Western women are secular, liberated and have control of their own lives. I am referring to a discursive self-presentation, not necessarily to material reality. If this were a material reality there would be no need for political movements in the West. . . . Similarly, only from the vantage point of the West is it possible to define the “third world” as underdeveloped and economically dependent. Without the overdetermined discourse that creates the third world, there would be no (singular and privileged) first world. Without the “third world woman,” the particular self-presentation of Western women mentioned above would be problematical. I am suggesting then that the one enables and sustains the other. (353, emphasis in original)

The distinction that Mohanty makes between re-presentation and selfpresentation, then, is internal to Western representation as such. In other words, Western feminists’ self-representation remains caught within representation itself. However, if representation is a specifically Western form of power—a power that is peculiar to Western humanist discourse, as Mohanty argues—then the non-Western female subject’s self-representation would not constitute an act of representation as such. The non-Western female subject’s act of self-presentation would not complement any act of

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re-presentation at all, not in the sense that within Western feminist discourse the Western woman’s self-presentation simply complements the Third World woman’s re-presentation. Insofar as the non-Western female subject does not avail herself of Western humanist discourse, she would not conflate any discursive representation with her material reality. Rather, the non-Western female subject’s act of speech itself would affirm her material reality. Mohanty’s argument in “Under Western Eyes” thus follows Said’s argument in Orientalism that non-Western self-representation signals the end of Western representation. Curiously enough, Mohanty’s text has little if any critical commentary to offer on the representation of the non-Western female subject by the non-Western male subject. We are left to presume, then, that although the non-Western male subject may certainly adopt the discourse of Western humanism, just as the non-Western female subject may adopt the discourse of Western feminism or humanism, both the non-Western male subject and the non-Western female subject are culturally located outside representation as such. Following Mohanty’s argument, the non-Western male subject’s representation of the non-Western female subject would not constitute a discursive act of representation, at least not in the sense that the Western woman’s representation of the Third World woman remains a discursive act. Mohanty thus limits her critique of representation in “Under Western Eyes” to Western feminist discourse, refraining from any sort of critical engagement with anticolonial nationalist discourse whatsoever—a discourse, it seems to me, that is also fraught with the inevitable difficulties of representation, whether we judge it to be merely derivative of Western nationalist discourse or not. But this theoretical limit to Mohanty’s critique is perhaps not so surprising after all since what I have called the postcolonial feminist reappropriation of negative teleology continues to insist on the absolute distinction of the Western tradition itself, regardless of sex, gender, or any other social formation that might complicate the ostensible unity of the West. The postcolonial feminist critique of representation, then, only further reiterates the end of Western man inasmuch as it announces the end of Western woman. Mohanty goes on to qualify this postcolonial critique of representation over the course of her work, not only critically revisiting her argument on Western feminist discourse in some of her later essays but also making

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some significant revisions to the text of “Under Western Eyes” itself. Whereas Said ultimately rejects Foucault in his later work while reaffirming his own critique of representation, Mohanty does not return to settle her accounts with Foucault, as it were, but rather distances her critique of representation from the poststructuralist problematic of humanism altogether. She thus reneges on what I think remains the most promising line of argument in her text, a line of argument that Said himself quite consciously refuses to pursue in Orientalism or in any of his subsequent works. “Under Western Eyes” has been revised and republished more than once, indicating its rather hotly contested status within the fields of postcolonial and feminist theory. It was first revised and republished in 1988 in the journal Feminist Review, with all the copyediting revisions and additional notes that might be expected after its four years of circulation. Yet the structure of Mohanty’s argument remains unaltered in this version of her text, and her references to Foucault and allusions to Said are left intact. However, Mohanty adds a lengthy note on the possible recuperation of humanism, providing the very last note in this version of “Under Western Eyes” as well as in all subsequently revised versions of this text. Citing an essay by Marnia Lazreg that was published earlier the same year, Mohanty seems to endorse the argument for “a new conception of humanism in work on third-world women.” She explains that this recuperation of humanism does not necessarily contradict her own argument on humanism: “While Lazreg’s position might appear to be diametrically opposed to mine, I see it as a provocative and potentially positive extension of some of the implications that follow from my arguments.” Citing a forthcoming essay by S. P. Mohanty as well, Mohanty also seems to endorse the suggestion for a “move beyond the deconstructive to a fundamentally productive mode in designating overlapping areas for cross-cultural comparison.” As Mohanty describes it, this move “calls not for a ‘humanism’ but for a reconsideration of the question of the ‘human’ in a post-humanist context.”12 “Under Western Eyes” was revised and republished again in 1991 in the collected volume Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, which Mohanty herself coedited and to which she contributed the introductory essay, “Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism.”13 In this version of “Under Western Eyes,” although Mohanty retains her references to Foucault throughout the text as well as her allusion to Ori-

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entalism in the concluding sentence, she makes some rather significant revisions to her argument in the introductory section. Adding a new opening paragraph, she qualifies her own redeployment of Foucauldian discourse analysis and other such poststructuralist theoretical strategies: Any discussion of the intellectual and political construction of “third world feminisms” must address itself to two simultaneous projects: the internal critique of hegemonic “Western” feminisms, and the formulation of autonomous, geographically, historically, and culturally grounded feminist concerns and strategies. This first project is one of deconstructing and dismantling; the second, one of building and constructing. While these projects appear to be contradictory, the one working negatively and the other positively, unless these two tasks are addressed simultaneously, “third world” feminisms run the risk of marginalization or ghettoization from both mainstream (right and left) and Western feminist discourses. It is to the first project that I address myself [in this essay].14

Over the course of her revisions to “Under Western Eyes,” then, Mohanty noticeably tempers her argument on the reproduction of the humanist subject within Western feminist discourse, the very argument by which she establishes the relationship between this discourse and colonial discourse itself. In the opening paragraph and the last note that together frame her revised text—the text that has become perhaps the most widely circulated version of “Under Western Eyes”—she thus attempts to distance herself from the poststructuralist problematic of humanism, even as the argument that she presents within this framework continues to depend on it. Indeed, Mohanty’s distinction between the deconstructive and the constructive projects in her revised text only serves to announce the limits of poststructuralist theory as such for the apparently more encompassing intellectual and political project of postcolonial feminism or what she tentatively calls “third world feminisms” in the plural. What seems on first reading like an odd gesture of self-effacement, then, turns out to provide the theoretical justification for her own recourse to the figure of the Third World woman in her essays that followed the earliest version of “Under Western Eyes.” Surely enough, “Cartographies of Struggle,” which was first published in

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1991 as Mohanty’s introductory essay to Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, is intended to be read as a companion piece to the revised version of “Under Western Eyes” that also appears in this volume. In “Cartographies of Struggle,” taking up what she describes in this version of “Under Western Eyes” as the constructive project of formulating “third world feminisms” in the plural, Mohanty offers what she calls “a political definition” of Third World women as opposed to “an essentialist one”: “[The term third world women] designates a political constituency, not a biological or even sociological one. . . . What seems to constitute ‘women of color’ or ‘third world women’ as a viable oppositional alliance is a common context of struggle rather than color or racial identifications. . . . [I]t is third world women’s oppositional political relation to sexist, racist, and imperialist structures that constitutes our potential commonality.”15 She thus adopts the distinctly singular subject position of the Third World woman in this text, employing the plural term Third World women, of course, but insisting nonetheless on their underlying “commonality,” a commonality that is shared even by “women of color” in the United States and other ostensibly Western societies. Although Mohanty does not explicitly address the problematic of self-representation in this text, she does explain that this politically defined subject position of Third World women is based on their self-knowledge—what she calls “the creation of a discursive space where (self-)knowledge is produced by and for third world women” or “the creation of self-knowledges for third world feminists” or, again, the act of “producing knowledge for ourselves”—a form of knowledge that appears to escape representation.16 Whereas Mohanty so sharply interrogates Western feminists’ representation of Third World women as well as Western feminists’ self-representation in “Under Western Eyes,” then, she rather highly valorizes Third World feminists’ own selfrepresentation in “Cartographies of Struggle.” Moreover, in “ ‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity Through Anticapitalist Struggles,” which was first published in 2003 as the concluding essay to Mohanty’s own collected volume Feminism Without Borders, she not only reiterates her valorization of Third World feminists’ self-representation but also repudiates the poststructuralist problematic entirely. Whereas Said’s critique of representation remains intact in his later works, Mohanty thus disengages herself quite deliberately from the critique of representation that she presents in “Under Western Eyes.”17 And

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yet she continues to rely on the theoretical presumption that representation is a specifically Western form of power, although she does not put it in these decidedly poststructuralist terms. Indeed, Mohanty spends much of “ ‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited” on devising a new theoretical terminology for her project without questioning this presumption at all. Rather than extending the interrogation of both the geopolitical concepts of the West and of the Third World that she began in “Under Western Eyes,” she simply reinforces the distinction between them. Reaffirming the “political and explanatory value” of the concepts “West” and “Third World,” she employs them throughout her text in conjunction with the concepts “North” and “South,” respectively, as well as with the more esoteric terminology of “One-Third World” and “Two-Thirds World,” thereby enlisting an expressly majoritarian politics into the discourse of antiglobalization.18 Furthermore, Mohanty freely admits in “ ‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited” that her critical reflections on her earlier work are intended to redress what she calls its “postmodernist appropriation,” an appropriation that she does not hesitate to describe as a “misreading” of her work. Asserting her own “move . . . from critique to reconstruction” in this text, she draws on the work of feminist standpoint thinkers and “postpositivist realists” in making her argument on the “epistemic privilege” of “women of the Third World/ South or the Two-Thirds World.” Mohanty thus pits her amalgamation of antiglobalization discourse, feminist standpoint theory, and postpositivist realism against poststructuralist theory in no uncertain terms: “My view is thus a materialist and ‘realist’ one and is antithetical to that of postmodernist relativism.”19 But this argument on epistemic privilege, let me suggest, is not so far removed from the critique of Western representation that has been formulated in both poststructuralist and postcolonial theory. After all, Mohanty’s critique of Western feminist discourse entirely spares the non-Western female subject from the task of representation, offering her instead what we might call the guarantee of discursive innocence if not epistemic privilege as such. From “Under Western Eyes” to “ ‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited,” then, the postcolonial disavowal of poststructuralist theory is carried to the point of renunciation, finally turning to attack the very critique of representation that first heralded the emergence of the non-Western subject, an emergence that in its most fundamental sense remains unburdened by representation.

5 THE DEFENSE OF DIFFERENCE

Bhabha and the Third Space The critique of representation that opened the field of postcolonial theory was soon followed by a radical interrogation of the concept of difference. Following the poststructuralist argument on difference, many postcolonial thinkers have rejected this concept insofar as it is bound to the concept of identity, a bond that was cemented only with the emergence of representation. But rather than simply abandoning this concept, they have insisted that difference is to be salvaged from representation, its bond to identity severed, its confinement to conceptual thought itself lifted. This defense of difference as such has allowed postcolonial thinkers to address nonWestern cultural difference without reducing it to some variant of Western culture in its long march of historical progress. Yet many of these postcolonial thinkers have not gone on to question the theoretical presumption of Western exceptionalism by which the subjugation of difference to identity is considered to be a uniquely Western event. The postcolonial defense of difference thus forms another crucial episode in the reappropriation of negative teleology. However, whereas the postcolonial critique of representation is marked by its eventual disavowal of poststructuralist theory, the postcolonial de-

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fense of difference begins with this disavowal. Whereas those postcolonial thinkers who draw on Michel Foucault’s critique of representation in their earlier texts feel compelled to repudiate Foucault if not poststructuralist theory altogether in their later texts, those postcolonial thinkers who take up the poststructuralist argument on difference fail to provide any significant reference to Gilles Deleuze’s work at all. This is a rather notable lapse, it seems to me, particularly since Deleuze provides the very terms of the postcolonial defense of difference in Difference and Repetition: “Difference is not diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is given, that by which the given is given as diverse.”1 Deleuze’s distinction between difference and diversity has been reiterated by some of the most prominent postcolonial thinkers in their work on cultural difference and, often enough, in precisely these words. And yet Deleuze remains an obscure figure within postcolonial theory, of secondary importance at best, his radical propositions on difference itself having nonetheless permeated the entire intellectual field. The postcolonial defense of difference is launched, then, only by detaching itself from what has proven to be perhaps its most fertile poststructuralist source, even if this source has yet to be acknowledged. Homi K. Bhabha’s text “The Commitment to Theory” was first published in 1988 in the journal new formations and based on a paper that he presented at the Third Cinema conference hosted by the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 1986. This essay was revised and republished in 1989 in the collected volume Questions of Third Cinema. It was revised and republished again in 1994 as the first chapter to Bhabha’s collection of essays The Location of Culture, with all but one direct reference to the conference removed. “The Commitment to Theory” is composed in two parts, held together rather tenuously, it appears, by the circumstances of its composition. While the second part of this text presumably reproduces the paper that Bhabha presented at the Third Cinema conference, the first part formulates a response to what he describes as the simple opposition between “theory” and “politics” that generally informed the conference discussions. Each part is quite dissimilar to the other, in form as well as in content, and each might easily be read apart from the other. Although the title of the essay, “The Commitment to Theory,” obviously refers to the first and significantly longer part of this text on the relationship between theory and poli-

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tics, it is in the second part that Bhabha addresses the concept of difference as such. In the original version of his text, Bhabha opens the first part by calling into question the assumption that critical theory is merely a cultural expression of Western colonial power: “There was a damaging and self-defeating assumption circulating at the Edinburgh ‘Third Cinema’ conference—and in many influential places beyond it—that theory is necessarily the elite language of the socially and culturally privileged. It is said that the place of the academic critic is inevitably within the Eurocentric archives of an imperialist or neo-colonial West.”2 He goes on to suggest that the attendant opposition between Western critical theory on one hand and Third World political activism on the other only reiterates, however strategically, the binary opposition between the Occidental self and the Oriental other within colonial discourse itself: Deep within the vigorous knock-about that ensued, at times, at Edinburgh, between what was represented as the “[larceny]” and distortion of European “metatheorizing” and the radical, engaged, activist experience of Third World creativity, I could see the mirror image (albeit reversed in content and intention) of that ahistorical nineteenth-century polarity of Orient and Occident which, in the name of progress, unleashed the exclusionary imperialist ideologies of self and other. This time round, the term “critical theory,” often untheorized and unargued, was definitely the Other, an otherness that was insistently identified with the vagaries of the “depoliticized” Eurocentric critic. (5–6)

Bhabha thus questions the assumption that critical theory simply reflects Western economic and political interests. Over the course of the first part of his text, he sets out to articulate what he calls “a politics of cultural production” (6) that would not assume the existence of “a pre-given political subject” but rather account for the production of “the political subject—as indeed the subject of politics—[as] a discursive event” (8): “Because [the politics of cultural production] makes the surfaces of cinematic signification the grounds of political intervention, [it] gives depth to the language of social criticism and extends the domain of ‘politics’ in a direction that will not be entirely dominated by the forces of economic or social

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control” (6). Bhabha makes the argument, then, that the political effects of critical theory, or of any other cultural form such as film, cannot be determined on the basis of its geographical location or origins. The irreducible hybridity that marks all postcolonial cultural forms problematizes any convenient distinction between the West and the Third World: “I want to take my stand on the shifting margins of cultural displacement—that confounds any profound or ‘authentic’ sense of a ‘national’ culture or an ‘organic’ intellectual—and ask what the function of a committed theoretical perspective might be, once the cultural and historical hybridity of the post-colonial world is taken as the paradigmatic place of departure” (7). And yet Bhabha readily concedes that on the social level of the economy or politics itself, the distinction between the First World and the Third World is quite valid: “I am convinced that, in the language of political economy, it is legitimate to represent the relations of exploitation and domination in the discursive division between First and Third Worlds” (6). Despite what he calls his “erasure” (15) of the distinction between theory and politics altogether in the first part of his text, he thus preserves some form of distinction between the West and the Third World. This recourse to the concept of the West is echoed in the argument on cultural difference that Bhabha presents in the second part of “The Commitment to Theory.” He opens this part of his text by calling into question again the association between critical theory and its presumably Western determination. Yet his first response to this question is to reaffirm this association, a response that seems especially surprising after his “erasure” of the opposition between Western critical theory and Third World political activism in the first part of his text: What is at stake in the naming of critical theory as “Western”? It is, obviously, a designation of institutional power and ideological Eurocentricity. Critical theory often engages with Third World texts within the familiar traditions and conditions of colonial anthropology either to “universalize” their meaning within its own cultural and academic discourse, or to sharpen its internal critique of the Western logocentric sign, the idealist “subject,” or indeed the illusions and delusions of civil society. This is a familiar manoeuvre of theoretical knowledge, where, having opened up the chasm of cultural “difference”—of the indeterminacy of meaning

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or the slippage of the signifier—a mediator or metaphor of “otherness” must be found to contain that “difference.” In order to be institutionally effective as a discipline, the knowledge of cultural difference must be made to “foreclose” on the Other; the “Other” thus becomes at once the “fantasy” of a certain cultural space or, indeed, the certainty of a form of theoretical knowledge that deconstructs the epistemological “edge” of the West. (16)

Bhabha argues that critical theory may indeed be called “Western,” then, insofar as it poses the radical challenge of cultural difference only to subordinate it to the concept of otherness. This claim on the Western determination of critical theory seems all the more surprising since even at this early point Bhabha’s argument on difference strongly recalls Deleuze’s argument in Difference and Repetition, which Bhabha does not cite at all in his text. In both Deleuze’s and Bhabha’s arguments, difference poses a radical challenge to the very logic of representation. Difference produces what Bhabha calls the “indeterminacy of meaning” or the “slippage of the signifier” that undermines all forms of representation but that representation attempts to capture nonetheless by the concept of otherness. Bhabha’s argument on difference thus closely follows both the poststructuralist and the postcolonial critique of representation. It is worth noting that in the first part of his text Bhabha resists any such compulsion “to transcend the contradictions and ambivalences” (5) of subjectivity and representation, going so far as “to state the obvious, that there is no knowledge—political or otherwise—outside representation” (8). In the second part of his text, however, he seems quite willing to accept the theoretical presumption that representation is a characteristically if not distinctly Western phenomenon. Bhabha underscores his reliance on this critique of representation in the revised version of his text that was published in Questions of Third Cinema. In this version, he replaces the phrase “slippage of the signifier” with the phrase “crisis of representation,”3 strengthening his argument, then, that difference in its most radical sense escapes the confines of representation. Yet in the subsequently revised version of his text that was published in The Location of Culture, he deletes the clause on meaning and signification or representation from this passage completely.4

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But I would insist that, notwithstanding these revisions to his text, the postcolonial critique of representation remains crucial to Bhabha’s defense of difference. Bhabha begins his argument in the second part of the original version of “The Commitment to Theory,” then, with the assertion that the deployment of cultural difference within Western critical theory serves only to secure the disciplinary knowledge of the West itself. He explains that within the Western intellectual tradition—from modernism to postmodernism, from structuralism to poststructuralism—cultural difference is reduced to the concept of otherness, whereby any and all non-Western cultures are assigned to play the role of the other to the Western self: The site of cultural difference becomes the mere phantom of a dire disciplinary struggle in which it has no space or power. Montesquieu’s Turkish Despot, Barthes’s Japan, Kristeva’s China, Derrida’s Nambikwara Indians, Lyotard’s Cashinahua “pagans” are part of this strategy of containment where the Other text is forever the exegetical horizon of difference, never the active agent of articulation. The “Other” is cited, quoted, framed, illuminated, and the cultural politics of difference become the closed circle of interpretation. The “Other” loses its power to signify, to negate, to initiate its “desire,” to split its “sign” of identity, to establish its own institutional and oppositional discourse. However impeccably the content of an “other” culture may be known, however antiethnocentrically it is represented, it is its location as the “closure” of grand theories, the demand that, in analytical terms, it be always the “good” object of knowledge, the docile body of difference, that reproduces a relation of domination and is the most serious indictment of the institutional powers of critical theory. (16, emphasis in original)

Bhabha’s indictment of poststructuralist theory, let me say, is largely justified. Certainly, his reference to the ostensibly antiethnocentric representation of non-Western cultures within poststructuralist theory anticipates my own argument in part II on the turn from teleology to negative teleology within twentieth-century continental philosophy. He is quite right in pointing out that within poststructuralist theory non-Western cultures are

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uniformly denied what may be described as the contradictory and ambivalent processes of signification and identification. Roland Barthes’s “Japan,” Julia Kristeva’s “China,” and Jean-François Lyotard’s “Cashinahua” alike provide easy foils to the concept of the West that continues to operate in their respective works. But it seems to me that Bhabha is rather too hasty, if not just plain wrong, to include Jacques Derrida’s “Nambikwara” on this list since it is Derrida himself, after all, who in Of Grammatology criticizes Claude Lévi-Strauss’s ostensibly antiethnocentric representation of the Nambikwara. And yet Bhabha might well have put Derrida’s “China” or “Japan” on his list instead inasmuch as Derrida makes the claim in the very same text that “Chinese or Japanese” civilization remains “outside of all logocentrism” as such.5 This apparently minor complication in Bhabha’s argument is not altogether unrelated to his purposefully strategic naming of critical theory as “Western.” For not only does he neglect the considerable theoretical disagreements between modernist and postmodernist thinkers as well as among these structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers themselves by simply calling them all “Western,” but he also fails to acknowledge his own intellectual debt to the poststructuralist argument on difference itself. However, Bhabha quickly goes on to complicate his first response to the question of critical theory and its Western determination. He pursues his argument by suggesting that critical theory harbors the intellectual resources for its own political transformation. Critical theory is thus marked, as he puts it, by a “tension . . . between its institutional containment and its revisionary force” (17) or “between [its] institutional history . . . and its conceptual potential for change and innovation” (16). He proposes to read critical theory against itself, then, a reading that would follow the intellectual countertradition of the anticolonial thinkers C. L. R. James and Frantz Fanon: “[Critical theory] can be subjected to a translation, a ‘transformation of value’ as part of the questioning of the project of modernity in the great, revolutionary tradition of C. L. R. James contra Trotsky, or Fanon, contra phenomenology and existentialist psychoanalysis” (16–17). Bhabha begins this transformation or translation of critical theory by acknowledging that poststructuralist theory in particular poses a radical challenge to the Western tradition of humanism: “Many of these post-structuralist ideas

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are themselves opposed to Western Enlightenment humanism and aesthetics. They constitute no less than a deconstruction of the moment of the modern, its legal values, its literary tastes, its philosophical and political categorical imperatives” (17). If James rereads Leon Trotsky and Fanon rereads Jean-Paul Sartre, then Bhabha proposes to reread those structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers who have posed what he considers to be the most radical challenge to Western humanism—namely, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, and, of course, Foucault: Althusser’s critique of the temporal structure of the Hegelian–Marxist expressive “totality,” despite its functionalist limitations, opens up the possibilities of thinking the “relations of production” in a time of differential histories. Lacan’s location of the signifier of desire, on the cusp of language and the law, allows the elaboration of a form of social representation that is alive to the ambivalent structure of subjectivity and sociality. Foucault’s archaeology of the emergence of modern, Western “man” as a problem of finitude, inextricable from its afterbirth, its Other, enables the linear, progressivist claims of the social sciences—the major imperializing discourses—to be confronted by their own historicist limitations. (16)

It is worth noting again that Bhabha does not include Deleuze in this list of acknowledgments even though what he offers in his text is precisely a rereading of Deleuze’s argument on difference—and a rather faithful rereading at that. Indeed, Bhabha presents his own argument on difference in “The Commitment to Theory” by making a distinction between cultural difference and cultural diversity, closely following Deleuze’s distinction between difference and diversity in Difference and Repetition. Bhabha introduces this distinction in his text by way of rereading structuralist and poststructuralist theory: “We must rehistoricize the moment of the ‘emergence of the sign,’ or ‘the question of the subject,’ or the ‘discursive construction of social reality,’ to quote a few popular topics of contemporary theory. And this can only happen if we relocate the referential and institutional demands of such theoretical work in the field of cultural difference—not cultural diversity”

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(17, emphasis in original). Over the remaining course of his text, he elaborates on this distinction in quite some detail, arguing that it is only through the process of cultural difference that the object of cultural diversity is produced: This revision of the history of critical theory rests . . . on the notion of cultural difference, not cultural diversity. Cultural diversity is an epistemological object—culture as an object of empirical knowledge— whereas cultural difference is the process of the enunciation of culture as “knowledgeable,” authoritative, adequate to the construction of systems of cultural identification. If cultural diversity is a category of comparative ethics, aesthetics, or ethnology, cultural difference is a process of signification through which statements of culture or on culture differentiate, discriminate, and authorize the production of fields of force, reference, applicability, and capacity. Cultural diversity is the recognition of pregiven cultural “contents” and customs, held in a time-frame of relativism; it gives rise to anodyne liberal notions of multiculturalism, cultural exchange, or the culture of humanity. Cultural diversity is also the representation of a radical rhetoric of the separation of totalized cultures that live unsullied by the intertextuality of their historical locations, safe in the Utopianism of a mythic memory of a unique collective identity. (18, emphasis in original)

Once again, it is striking how closely Bhabha’s distinction between cultural difference and cultural diversity follows Deleuze’s distinction, according to which, as Deleuze himself puts it, “diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is given.”6 My point, however, is not that Bhabha’s argument on cultural difference simply repeats Deleuze’s argument on difference as such. Rather, what I want to point out is that Bhabha’s argument provides a complex reiteration of Deleuze’s argument even as Bhabha himself fails to acknowledge this intellectual debt. Bhabha presents his argument on cultural difference, then, by drawing more openly from those structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers whom he does acknowledge in his text—Althusser, Lacan, and Foucault—as well as from Derrida. He returns to the concept of enunciation in describing the process of cultural difference:

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The enunciative process introduces a split in the performative present, of cultural identification; a split between the traditional culturalist demand for a model, a tradition, a community, a stable system of reference—and the necessary negation of the certitude in the articulation of new cultural demands, meanings, strategies in the political present, as a practice of domination, or resistance. The struggle is often between the teleological or mythical time and narrative of traditionalism—of the right or the left—and the shifting, strategically displaced time of the articulation of a historical politics of negotiation. . . . The enunciation of cultural difference problematizes the division of past and present, tradition and modernity, at the level of cultural representation and its authoritative address. It is the problem of how, in signifying the present, something comes to be repeated, relocated, and translated in the name of tradition, in the guise of a pastness that is not necessarily a faithful sign of historical memory but a strategy of representing authority in terms of the artifice of the archaic. That iteration negates our sense of the origins of the struggle. It undermines our sense of the homogenizing effects of cultural symbols and icons, by questioning our sense of the authority of cultural synthesis in general. (19)

What Bhabha calls “the ambivalence of cultural authority” (19) is thus inscribed in the very structure of cultural difference. Citing Fanon’s work The Wretched of the Earth, he explains that the “cultural uncertainty” or “significatory or representational undecidability” (19) that characterizes those periods of rapid cultural transformation during anticolonial struggles is not exceptional to such periods but rather constitutive of all culture. Bhabha’s concept of cultural difference, then, problematizes the discourse of origins, roots, or beginnings that necessarily grounds any form of cultural nationalism—whether colonialist or anticolonialist, whether in the name of “domination” or in the name of “resistance.” The irreducible ambivalence of identification in the enunciative process of cultural difference preempts the common assumption of “the unity or totality of cultures” (20) that informs humanism and relativism, pluralism, or multiculturalism alike: “Cultures are never unitary in themselves, nor simply dualistic in relation of Self to Other. This is not because of some humanistic nostrum that beyond individual cultures we all belong to the human culture of mankind; nor is

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it because of an ethical relativism that suggests that in our cultural capacity to speak of and judge Others we necessarily ‘place ourselves in their position’ ” (20). It is in this sense that culture is marked by what Bhabha calls “hybridity” (22, emphasis in original)—a term that has come to stand metonymically for Bhabha’s work in general, for better or worse—a cultural hybridity that undercuts any claim to “the inherent originality or ‘purity’ of cultures,” as he puts it, “even before we resort to empirical historical instances that demonstrate their hybridity” (21). “The Commitment to Theory” thus provides a most important precursor to my own argument in this book insofar as it calls into question the unity, originality, or purity of all cultural traditions, whether Western or non-Western. And yet Bhabha himself seems to maintain the distinction of the Western tradition from all non-Western traditions in his argument on cultural difference. As in the case of both Orientalism and “Under Western Eyes,” this theoretical tension that marks “The Commitment to Theory” is generated by Bhabha’s reappropriation of the negative teleology of the West. And again as in the case of Edward W. Said and Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s postcolonial critique of representation, this negative teleology is endemic to the defense of difference that Bhabha wants to mobilize against colonialism. He makes his recourse to the concept of the West, then, in addressing the “temporal dimension” of the “enunciative split” (20) of cultural difference. Of course, he never does abandon this concept of the West entirely but rather holds it in reserve, as it were, for just such strategic moments in his text. Proposing the “general characterization of the Western expectation of culture as a disciplinary practice of writing” (21), he argues that the enunciative process shatters the temporal continuity of culture, a concept of time that informs the Western discourses of anthropology and nationalism alike: The splitting of the subject of enunciation destroys the logics of synchronicity and evolution which traditionally authorize the subject of cultural knowledge. It is taken for granted that the value of culture as an object of study and the value of any analytical activity that is considered cultural lie in a capacity to produce a cross-referential, generalizable unity that signifies a progression or evolution of ideas-in-time, as well as a cultured self-reflection on their premises. . . .

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[This enunciative split], which makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process, destroys this mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is continuously revealed as an integrated, open, expanding code. Such an intervention quite properly challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force, authenticated by the originary Past, kept alive in the national tradition of the People. In other words, the disruptive temporality of enunciation displaces the narrative of the Western nation which Benedict Anderson so perceptively describes as being written in homogeneous, serial time. (20–21)

Bhabha thus distinguishes not Western culture or the Western nation itself from non-Western cultures or nations but rather Western discourse on culture and the nation from non-Western discourses. What he considers a distinctly Western phenomenon is not the absence of cultural difference but its suppression. Yet however subtle his distinction may be, it is nonetheless absolute. For it is precisely this Western subordination of cultural difference that distinguishes it as such. The concept of the West continues to operate in his text, then, not as a geographical location so much as an imaginary space, albeit a space that remains geopolitically inscribed. This geopolitical space of the West, moreover, is set in relief by what Bhabha calls the “Third Space.” As he describes it, the Third Space opens the possibility for the enunciative process of cultural difference itself: “[the] Third Space of enunciation [is] the precondition for the articulation of cultural difference” (22). Bhabha first coins this term in his text to make his own theoretical intervention into the structuralist and poststructuralist argument on the split subject of enunciation: [The process of cultural difference] is dramatized in the common semiotic account of the disjuncture between the subject of a proposition (énoncé ) and the subject of enunciation, which is not represented in the statement but which is the acknowledgement of its discursive embeddedness and address, its cultural positionality, its reference to a present time and a specific space. The pact of interpretation is never simply an act of communication between the I and the You designated in the statement. The production of meaning requires that these two places be

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mobilized in the passage through a Third Space, which represents both the general conditions of language and the specific implication of the utterance in a performative and institutional strategy of which it cannot “in itself ” be conscious. What this unconscious relation introduces is an ambivalence in the act of interpretation. The pronominal I of the proposition cannot be made to address—in its own words—the subject of enunciation, for this is not “personable,” but remains a spatial relation within the schemata and strategies of discourse. The meaning of the utterance is quite literally neither the one nor the Other. (20)

He goes on to extend this semiotic theory of enunciation to his argument on cultural difference: “It is [the] Third Space, though unrepresentable in itself, which constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be reappropriated, translated, rehistoricized, and read anew” (21). But Bhabha’s theoretical formulation of the Third Space is not merely another linguistic concept that refers to the indeterminacy of all meaning or to the split subject of enunciation that is “neither the one nor the other.” Surely enough, Bhabha also coins this term in a playful reference to the concept of “Third Cinema,” which provided the title for the conference where he first presented the paper on which “The Commitment to Theory” is based. And the concept of Third Cinema refers in turn to the emergence of a cinematic culture within the Third World or a Third World cinema. Bhabha’s concept of the Third Space thus reiterates quite deliberately the concept of the Third World itself. Of course, it is undoubtedly his intention to dislodge any singular definition of the Third World or of Third Cinema for that matter, especially considering his attention to the enunciative split that marks the Third Space. However, Bhabha himself remarks on the close association of the Third Space if not with the Third World as such, then with the geopolitical space of the colonial or postcolonial subject: “It is significant that the productive capacities of this Third Space have a colonial or post-colonial provenance” (22). In other words, he suggests that the articulation of cultural difference in its most radical sense is the prerogative of the non-Western subject.

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Over the course of Bhabha’s text, then, the postcolonial defense of difference is bolstered by the negative teleology of the West. Whereas the non-Western subject is immersed within cultural difference, the Western subject reduces cultural difference to cultural diversity. Whereas the nonWestern subject is engaged in the process of enunciation, the Western subject stops the process of enunciation with the logic of representation. Whereas the non-Western subject is open to the ambivalence of identification, the Western subject closes the ambivalence of identification by the assertion of identity. Whereas the non-Western subject is marked by its cultural hybridity, the Western subject conceals its cultural hybridity under the guise of cultural purity. Bhabha thus insists that difference at its root remains free from the Western imposition of representation, identity, or diversity. There, at the end of Western representation, is the beginning of non-Western difference.

Trinh and the Third World Woman Trinh T. Minh-ha’s text “Difference: ‘A Special Third World Women’s Issue’ ” was first published in 1986 in a special issue of the journal Discourse on postcolonial and feminist theory titled “She, the Inappropriate/d Other,” which Trinh herself edited and obviously named in her own distinctive style and to which she also contributed the introductory essay. Throughout this issue, the text was interspersed with various photographs, and the text of Trinh’s essay in particular was interspersed with stills from her most recent film, Naked Spaces—Living Is Round. “Difference” was revised and republished in 1987 in the journal Feminist Review. The text was shortened, and it was interspersed instead with stills from her earliest film, Reassemblage. It was revised and republished again in 1989 as the third chapter to Trinh’s monograph Woman, Native, Other. The text of her essay was expanded this time, and it was interspersed, like the text of her entire book, with stills from all four of her films to date, the most recent of which were Surname Viet Given Name Nam and a work-in-progress that seems to have never been completed, India—China.7 Certainly, Trinh’s theoretical work is crucially informed by her filmmaking as well as by her musical composition and multimedia installation work. Her writing is further distinguished

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from most contemporary work in postcolonial and feminist theory by its ready incorporation of poetry and East Asian philosophy. Yet, much like Bhabha’s work, Trinh’s work also offers one of the most persistent efforts in the ongoing theoretical articulation of what I have called the postcolonial defense of difference. She addresses the concept of difference itself in her short introductory essay to “She, the Inappropriate/d Other.” This introduction is followed immediately by her longer essay, “Difference.” Indeed, Trinh’s introduction may be read as the first part of “Difference,” and she herself incorporates a section of this short text into the expanded version of “Difference” that appeared in Woman, Native, Other. Trinh begins her introduction to “She, the Inappropriate/d Other,” then, by problematizing the concept of difference that, as she insists, concerns all the essays in this special journal issue on postcolonial and feminist theory: “The Other of the West, the Other of man: one is never installed within marginality, one never dwells outside it. Of importance to the texts included in this issue is the place/s of postcolonial woman as writing and written subject. Difference is at the crux of the challenges issued.”8 Making an argument that Bhabha reiterates in “The Commitment to Theory,” Trinh proposes that there is a radical sense of difference or what she calls “critical difference” that cannot be simply reduced to the concept of otherness: “These texts open the space for critical difference. And difference in this context undermines opposition as well as separatism. Neither a claim for special treatment, nor a return to an authentic core (the ‘unspoiled’ Real Other), it acknowledges in each of its moves, the coming together and drifting apart both within and between identity/ies” (3). And again like Bhabha, following Deleuze but not citing him at all, Trinh argues that difference escapes the logic of representation that attempts to capture it by the concept of otherness: “To raise the issue of the Other is also to raise the issue of not representing the Other, involving therefore questions of enunciation, of translation, and of interpretation” (6). Yet, unlike Bhabha, Trinh associates this logic of representation not only with Western discourse but with patriarchal discourse as well. Her argument on difference thus implicates both senses of cultural and sexual difference: “Difference should neither be defined by the dominant sex nor by the dominant culture” (5). Drawing from postcolonial as well as feminist theory, then, she suggests that the multiply-split subject position of the postcolonial woman furnishes a

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theoretical strategy for reclaiming difference in its most radical sense: “She is this Inappropriate/d Other who moves about with always at least two/ four gestures: that of affirming ‘I am like you’ while pointing insistently to the difference; and that of reminding ‘I am different’ while unsettling every definition of otherness arrived at” (9). It is perhaps Trinh’s attention to both cultural and sexual difference in her introduction that prompts her to question the very distinction between the West or the First World and the Third World. Alluding, it seems to me, to the Taoist theory of the relationship between yin and yang, she recasts the distinction between the First World and the Third World not in order to formulate a more appropriate identity for the non-Western female subject or the postcolonial woman as such but rather to complicate any form of cultural or sexual identity whatsoever: “What is at stake is not only the hegemony of Western cultures, but also their identities as unified cultures; in other words, the realization that there is a Third World in every First World, and vice-versa. The master is made to recognize that His Culture is not as homogeneous, not as monolithic as He once believed it to be; He discovers, often with much reluctance, that He is just an other among others. . . . [I]dentity is this multiple layer whose process never leads to the True Self, or to Woman, but only to other layers, other selves, other women” (3). Like Bhabha’s text, Trinh’s introduction thus provides an important precursor to my own argument in this book insofar as it calls into question not only the dominance of the Western tradition but also the very concept of the West. Yet Trinh resorts to the concept of the West again in her essay “Difference: ‘A Special Third World Women Issue.’ ” While she makes her proposition on critical difference in the opening paragraph of her introductory essay, she interrogates the concept of difference at more length over the course of this text. The title of her essay itself, playing on both senses of the term special issue, offers a rather sardonic commentary on her own role as guest editor of a special journal issue on “Third World women” that focuses on the concept of difference as a special theoretical issue for this particular group of cultural and sexual subjects. At an early point in her text, Trinh’s interrogation of difference takes on the familiar form of a colloquial question. She suggests that the very act of posing this question often betrays a refusal to engage with difference itself: “ ‘What’s the difference?’ as if I cared? or yes, I mean it, help me see? . . . Do I really ask for difference or am

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I just saying it’s not worth trying to find out?”9 Indeed, Trinh spends the greater part of her text on presenting a critique of the concept of difference inasmuch as this concept functions in the service of separation, segregation, or marginalization. She argues that the concept of difference easily lends itself to its most reductive definitions: “Difference is not difference to some ears, but awkwardness or incompleteness” (12). Or again: “ ‘difference’ is essentially ‘division’ in the understanding of many” (14). And these reductive definitions of difference inform the most violent social practices of discrimination, exploitation, and war: “It is . . . much easier to dismiss or eliminate on the pretext of difference (destroy the other in our minds, in our world) than to live fearlessly with and within difference(s)” (16). Writing in the voice of the South African political regime of apartheid—which was still operative, of course, when this text was composed—Trinh demonstrates that it is precisely the concept of difference or “differentiation” that provides the theoretical justification for the official policy of “separate development” (12–14). Trinh goes on in her text to discuss this concept of difference as it affects the non-Western female subject in particular. She addresses the situation of the Third World woman who all too often finds that she is “the only Third World woman at readings, workshops, and meetings” or, wryly commenting again on her own role as guest editor, that she is “among the few women chosen for a ‘Special Third World Women Issue’ ” (14). Trinh explains that when Third World women are not simply absent from such public forums, their presence is welcome only insofar as they provide the very embodiment of cultural and sexual difference: “On the one hand, it is difficult for us to sit at the table with them (the master and/or his substitutes) without feeling that our presence, like that of the native (who happens to be invited) among the anthropologists, serves to mask the refined sexist and/or racist tone of their discourse, reinforcing thereby its pretensions to universality. . . . Yet, on the other hand, you and i [sic] acquiesce in reviving the plot of the story, hoping thereby that our participation from the inside will empower us to act upon the very course of its events” (14–15, emphasis in original). Third World women are thereby forced to make the difficult if not impossible choice between a compromised form of inclusion on one hand and outright exclusion on the other.

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Furthermore, Trinh argues that Third World women face a similar predicament within feminism itself or what she calls “pseudo-feminism.” Recalling Mohanty’s argument in “Under Western Eyes,” Trinh suggests that the stereotypical figure of the Third World woman is produced by the collusion of feminist discourse with the colonial discourse of anthropology: “The established image of the Third World Woman in the context of (pseudo-)feminism readily merges with that of the Native in the context of (neo-colonialist) anthropology” (“Difference,” 17, emphasis in original). Within feminism as well as within anthropology, the Third World woman is actually invited to participate in various public forums, then, but only on the condition that she speak of nothing but her cultural difference or, as Trinh so emphatically puts it, her authenticity: i am tolerated in my difference as long as i conform with the established rules. . . . i am not only given the permission to open up and talk, i am also encouraged to express my difference. My audience expects and demands it; otherwise people would feel as if they have been cheated: We did not come to hear a Third World member speak about the First (?) World. We came to listen to that voice of difference likely to bring us what we can’t have, and to divert us from the monotony of sameness. They, like their anthropologists whose specialty is to detect all the layers of my falseness and truthfulness, are in a position to decide what/who is AUTHENTIC and what/who is not. No uprooted person is invited to participate in this “special” wo/man’s issue unless s/he MAKES UP her/his mind and paints her/himself thick with authenticity. Eager not to disappoint, i try my best to offer my benefactors and benefactresses what they most anxiously yearn for: the possibility of a difference, yet, a difference or an otherness that will not go so far as to question the foundation of their beings and makings. . . . [T]he Third World representative the modern sophisticated public seeks as its ideal is the unspoiled African, Asian, or Native American, who remains more preoccupied with her/his image of the real native—the truly different—than with the issues of hegemony, racism, feminism, and social change (which s/he lightly touches on in conformance to the reigning fashion of liberal discourse). (22–23, full capitals and emphasis in original)

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Trinh’s rather combative rhetoric in “Difference”—pitting “us” against “them,” the “Third World woman” against “the master”—is somewhat tempered, however, by her attention to the willing complicity of the Third World woman herself with this concept of difference. Playing on the term special again, she explains that it is the Third World woman who often enough most carefully guards the privileged status that has been conferred on her within feminist discourse: “One gives ‘special care’ to the old, to the disabled, and to all those who do not match the stereotype of the real wo/man. It is not unusual to encounter cases where the sense of specialness, which comes . . . with being the ‘first’ or the ‘only’ woman, is confused with the consciousness of difference. One cannot help feeling ‘special’ when one figures among the rare few to emerge above the anonymous crowd and enjoys the privilege of preparing the way for one’s more ‘unfortunate’ sisters” (20–21). Trinh herself thus seems to admit that the concept of difference has been so narrowly defined by the logic of separation, segregation, or marginalization that it is simply not worth the effort to reclaim it, not even in the name of postcolonial feminist theory: “You and I/i might as well not walk into this semantic trap which sets us up against each other as expected by a certain ideology of separatism” (14). Whether the concept of difference operates in the form of apartheid or as a token gesture within feminism itself, then, it appears to be determined by the very logic of identity that it is intended to challenge. Yet Trinh goes on to make a distinction between this concept of difference and what she calls “critical difference,” following the proposition that she makes in the opening paragraph of her introductory essay. In “Difference,” she explains this distinction in more detail over the course of her discussion on the dilemma that authenticity poses for the Third World woman. She argues that critical difference cannot be reduced to any concept of difference that remains determined by the logic of identity or authenticity: Every path I/i take is edged with thorns. On the one hand, i play into the Savior’s hands by concentrating on authenticity, for my attention is numbed by it and diverted from other, important issues; on the other hand, i do feel the necessity to return to my so-called roots, since they are the fount of my strength, the guiding arrow to which i constantly refer before heading for a new direction. The difficulties appear perhaps less

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insurmountable only as I/i succeed in making a distinction between difference reduced to identity-authenticity and difference understood also as critical difference from myself. The first induces an attitude of temporary tolerance—as exemplified in the policy of “separate development”— which serves to reassure the conscience of the liberal establishment and gives a touch of subversiveness to the discourse delivered. . . . A critical difference from myself means that I am not i, am within and without i. I/i can be I or i, you and me both involved. We (with capital W) sometimes include(s), other times exclude(s) me. You and I/i are close, we intertwine; you may stand on the other side of the hill once in a while, but you may also be me, while remaining what you are and what I/i am not. (26–27)

Trinh’s distinction between critical difference on one hand and the concept of difference as it has been reduced to identity on the other thus strongly resonates with Bhabha’s distinction between cultural difference and cultural diversity. Trinh’s description of this “critical difference from myself,” as she puts it, also resonates with Bhabha’s description of the split subject of enunciation, even if Bhabha’s concept of the Third Space is more rigorously articulated in theoretical terms than is Trinh’s rather opaque formulation of the “I/i.” And, of course, although Trinh’s distinction between critical difference and difference as such closely follows Deleuze’s distinction between difference and diversity in Difference and Repetition, she does not cite Deleuze at all in her text, much like Bhabha again. But whereas Bhabha at least acknowledges his intellectual debt to the structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers Lacan, Althusser, Foucault, and Derrida in “The Commitment to Theory,” Trinh makes no such acknowledgments in “Difference.” Rather, she openly draws throughout her text from a wide range of feminist thinkers and writers—white, black, Chicana, Native American, and postcolonial—including Zora Neale Hurston, Mitsuye Yamada, Audre Lorde, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Gloria Anzaldúa, Alice Walker, Leslie Marmon Silko, Barbara Smith, Adrienne Rich, Simone de Beauvoir, and Sojourner Truth, among others, while reserving some more critical comments for Virginia Woolf (16–17). Trinh’s inattention to Deleuze as well as to poststructuralist theory in general is all the more surprising given her open acknowledgment of the structuralist thinker Roland Barthes, whose

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essay “Well, and China?” is included in the same special journal issue that she edited and introduced and to which she contributed her essay “Difference” itself. What is so surprising is that Trinh does not at all question the very romantic ethnocentrism of Barthes’s antiethnocentric representation of either China or Japan in his work—an ethnocentrism that Bhabha criticizes in “The Commitment to Theory” and that few if any other postcolonial thinkers would endorse as Trinh herself appears to do so readily, both in her introductory essay to this issue (7–8) and in her early essay on Barthes’s treatment of Japan, “The Plural Void: Barthes and Asia,” which was first published in 1982.10 Again, the point that I want to make in this rather detailed account of Trinh’s acknowledgments is not that her argument on difference simply repeats Deleuze’s argument on difference but rather that it offers a complex reiteration of Deleuze’s argument, even though, like Bhabha once again, she fails to acknowledge this most crucial intellectual debt. Trinh pursues her argument on critical difference, then, by addressing what she describes as “the difference (within) between difference itself and identity” (“Difference,” 29, emphasis in original). She argues that this radical sense of difference “has so often been ignored, and the use of the two terms so readily confused” (29) that it is commonly reduced to its function as an operational concept within the logic of identity. Indeed, playing on the term special yet again, Trinh asserts that this logic requires the concept of difference in order to maintain the very concept of identity: “Difference as uniqueness or special identity is both limiting and deceiving. If identity refers to the whole pattern of sameness within a human life, the style of a continuing me that permeates all the changes undergone, then difference remains within the boundary of that which distinguishes one identity from another” (29). But as Trinh insists, difference in its most radical sense or critical difference escapes this logic altogether: “Difference . . . is that which undermines the very idea of identity, deferring to infinity the layers whose totality forms ‘I.’ It subverts the foundations of any affirmation or vindication of value, and cannot, thereby, ever bear in itself an absolute value” (29, emphasis in original). Making an argument that again strongly resonates with Bhabha’s concept of the Third Space, Trinh explains that critical difference splits the unitary subject of identity, revealing an irreducible ambivalence in the process of identification:

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Not One, not two either. “I” is, therefore, not a unified subject, a fixed identity or that solid mass covered with layers of superficialities one has gradually to peel off before one can see its true face. “I” is, itself, infinite layers. Its complexity can hardly be conveyed through such typographic conventions as I, i, or I/i. Thus, I/i am compelled by the will to say/unsay, to resort to the entire gamut of personal pronouns to stay near this fleeing and static essence of Not-I. Whether I accept it or not, the natures of I, i, you, s/he, We, we, they and wo/man constantly overlap. They all display a necessary ambivalence, for the line dividing I and Not-I, us and them, or him and her is not (cannot) always (be) as clear as we would like it to be. Despite our desperate, eternal attempt to separate, contain and mend, categories always leak. (27, emphasis in original)

Trinh thus complicates the combative rhetoric that she herself employs throughout “Difference,” it seems to me, by problematizing the conventional distinctions drawn between “I” and “you,” “he” and “she,” “we” and “they,” “man” and “woman,” even admitting the conceptual limitations of her own formulation of the “I/i.” As she puts it, then, the point of critical difference is precisely “to dismantle the very notion of core (be it static or not) and identity” (30). Furthermore, following Deleuze’s argument on difference and anticipating Bhabha’s argument on cultural difference, Trinh argues that critical difference poses a radical challenge to representation itself. As she suggests, the living or performative process of critical difference remains irreducible to the order of reality or representation: “The real, nothing else than a code of representation, does not (cannot) coincide with the lived or the performed” (28, emphasis in original). Similarly, redeploying a theme that runs throughout both her writing and her filmmaking, she insists that the act of “speaking near by [sic] or together with” remains irreducible to the mode of “speaking for or about,” as she describes it: “Speaking near by or together with certainly differs from speaking for and about. The latter aims at the finite and dwells in the realm of fixed oppositions (subject/object difference; man/woman sexual difference)” (33). Trinh’s defense of difference thus also relies on both the poststructuralist and the postcolonial critiques of representation. It is not entirely unexpected, then, that Trinh should resort to the concept of the West in her argument on critical difference even as she calls

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into question the very distinction between the West and the Third World in her introduction to “She, the Inappropriate/d Other.” As in the case of Orientalism, “Under Western Eyes,” and “The Commitment to Theory” alike, this theoretical tension that informs “Difference” is generated by Trinh’s reappropriation of the negative teleology of the West. And I would like to suggest once again that this negative teleology is endemic to the defense of difference that she wants to mobilize against both colonialism and feminism. Trinh thus argues that the reduction of difference in its most radical sense to its function within the logic of identity is a distinctly Western phenomenon or, as she puts it, an “Occidental” one. Moreover, she presents this argument in the most explicitly Heideggerian terms, but of course without naming Heidegger at any point in her text: “The differences made between entities comprehended as absolute presences—hence the notions of pure origin and true self—are an outgrowth of a dualistic system of thought peculiar to the Occident (the ‘onto-theology’ which characterizes Western metaphysics). They should be distinguished from the differences grasped both between and within entities, each of these being understood as multiple presence” (27, emphasis in original). Quite unlike Said, Mohanty, or Bhabha, then, Trinh bypasses Foucault and Deleuze altogether in this passage by affirming the intellectual bond between the postcolonial defense of difference and the Heideggerian problematic of being. Following Heidegger’s own distinction between “being” and “Being” with a capital B, as his German lexicon is commonly translated into English, Trinh argues that the concept of difference that circumscribes separate entities, presences, or identities is to be carefully distinguished from the more radical sense of difference that necessarily precedes any such circumscription or what she calls in the penultimate paragraph of her text “Difference” with a capital D (33). And following Heidegger’s critique of “onto-theology,” she insists that this diminished concept of difference is precisely what distinguishes the Western tradition of metaphysics from all non-Western traditions—a distinction that does not just count as one distinction among others, but that itself rather constitutes an absolute distinction. As Bhabha argues in the case of cultural difference, Trinh thus argues that it is the uniquely metaphysical reduction of critical difference that distinguishes the West as such. This absolute distinction of the West is only reinforced by Trinh’s strategic recourse to the concept of the Third World itself in her text. She

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reassesses this concept in her discussion of the marginal position of the Third World woman within feminism or, again, what she calls “pseudofeminism.” As Mohanty argues in “Under Western Eyes,” Trinh argues that the concept of woman within feminist discourse provides a stable identity for Western women by suppressing cultural and sexual difference. Playing on the term special once again, she explains that difference is thereby considered a specific concern of Third World women: Wo- appended to man in sexist contexts is not unlike Third World, Third, Minority, or Color affixed to woman in pseudo-feminist contexts. Yearning for universality, the generic woman, like its counterpart, the generic man, tends to efface difference within itself. Not every female is “a real woman,” one knows this through hearsay. . . . Just as man provides an example of how the part played by women has been ignored, undervalued, distorted, or omitted through the use of terminology presumed to be generic, woman more often than not reflects the subtle power of linguistic exclusion, for its set of referents rarely includes those relevant to Third World “female persons.” . . . Third World, therefore, belongs to a category apart, a “special” one that is meant to be both complimentary and complementary, for First and Second went out of fashion, leaving a serious Lack behind to be filled. (30–31, emphasis in original)

Yet Trinh immediately goes on to suggest that the concept of the Third World must nonetheless be reclaimed from its “negative” connotations, referring to the original “positive” formulation of this term to denote a political position of nonalignment with either the First World or the Second World: To survive, Third World must necessarily have negative and positive connotations: negative when viewed in a vertical ranking system— “underdeveloped” compared to over-industrialized, “underprivileged” within the already Second sex—, and positive when understood sociopolitically as a subversive, “non-aligned” force. . . . Exploited, looked down upon and lumped together in a convenient term that denies their diversity, a group of POOR (neutralized nations), having once sided neither with the Occidental liberal economy type nor with the socialist type,

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has slowly taken on a threatening face by turning this denial to the best account. (31, full capitals and emphasis in original)

Certainly, I would agree that the concept of the “Third World” has proven very valuable in the articulation of a political position that challenges the authority of both capitalist and Communist imperial powers by prioritizing the struggle against colonialism itself. However, to reclaim this concept in order to circumvent Western feminism or Western metaphysics, for that matter, seems to me a much more objectionable proposition. Although Trinh only proposes to reclaim the concept of the Third World very tentatively in the first version of “Difference,” she makes this proposition more boldly in the expanded version of her essay that appeared in Woman, Native, Other. While the first version ends with her critical reflection on the Chinese New Year celebration in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the expanded version continues with a discussion on Julia Kristeva’s representation of Chinese women—a discussion that is only slightly less enthusiastic than her discussion of Barthes’s representation of China and Japan in some of her other texts—in addition to a discussion on the anthropological distinction between sex and gender. But Trinh also expands her discussion on the concept of the Third World itself in this later version of “Difference,” significantly extending her argument for the strategic reclamation of this concept. She argues that what the term Third World offers to “Third World peoples” or “non-whites” is precisely a unitary form of opposition to the West: “ ‘The Third World to Third World peoples’ . . . becomes an empowering tool, and one which politically includes all non-whites in their solidarist struggle against all forms of Western dominance.” Furthermore, she claims that the “positive” use of this term by Third World people themselves cannot be equated with its “negative” use by “Westerners,” resorting once again to a most combative rhetoric: “Whether ‘Third World’ sounds negative or positive also depends on who uses it. Coming from you Westerners, the word can hardly mean the same as when it comes from Us members of the Third World.” Trinh insists, then, that it is Westerners or “whites” who object most strongly to this term: “Whenever it is a question of ‘Third World women’ or, more disquietingly, of ‘Third World Women in the U.S.,’ the reaction provoked among many whites almost never fails to be that of annoyance, irritation, or vexation.” She even goes so far as to suggest that

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the term Fourth World has been coined to denote First Nations, indigenous, or aboriginal peoples by Westerners or whites themselves in the ongoing colonialist effort to break the solidarity of Third World peoples by creating, as she puts it, “a Third World within the Third World.”11 The postcolonial critique of representation and the accompanying defense of difference are thus even more tightly woven together in the expanded version of Trinh’s text. And just as in the case of Bhabha’s argument on cultural difference, the negative teleology of the West continues to inform Trinh’s argument on critical difference. For when the Western subject speaks of difference, this concept of difference as such has already been determined by the logic of identity, authenticity, or presence. However, when the non-Western subject speaks of difference, of his or her own difference, of cultural or sexual difference, this radical sense of critical difference undermines any such determination. For Trinh, as for Bhabha, then, difference at its root remains free from Western representation. And there again, at the limits of Western representation, lies the horizon of nonWestern difference. Much like “Under Western Eyes,” “Difference” thus has little to offer in any of its versions, whether shortened or expanded, on the sexual difference of the non-Western female subject from the non-Western male subject. We are again left to presume that since the reduction of difference to its function within the logic of identity is unique to Western metaphysics, both the non-Western male subject and the non-Western female subject are immersed within critical difference. At most, these non-Western subjects might be partially engaged in the process of delimiting their own sexual identities from one another, but they could never be wholly contained by it. In Trinh’s argument, then, whereas the Western female subject’s affirmation of difference from the non-Western female subject ultimately conforms to the logic of identity itself, the non-Western male subject’s affirmation of difference from the non-Western female subject would not conform to this logic. Like Mohanty, Trinh thus directs her critical attention to Western feminist discourse in “Difference,” entirely avoiding the issue of cultural and sexual difference within anticolonial nationalist discourse, a very contentious issue indeed. Despite her attention to both cultural and sexual difference in the introductory essay of “She, the Inappropriate/d Other,” she seems to restrict her discussion to the cultural difference between Western

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and non-Western women in “Difference.” But this inattention to sexual difference is itself dictated by the postcolonial feminist reappropriation of negative teleology insofar as it maintains the absolute distinction of the West as such. This absolute distinction cuts across all other distinctions, divisions, or differences—cultural, sexual, or otherwise. The end of Western man, then, also spells the end of Western woman.

THE TASK THAT I HAVE SET FOR POSTCOLONIAL THINKERS IN this part of my book—the task of dismantling not only the historical teleology of the West but also its inversion into a negative teleology—could only have been proposed, let me reiterate, from within the intellectual space that they themselves have cleared. My argument that negative teleology remains complicit with teleology itself does not proceed from any intention on my part to disparage what I would readily concede are the significant theoretical interventions made by twentieth-century continental philosophers and postcolonial thinkers alike into the teleological discourse of the West. Certainly, my own call for the end of the West would hardly have been possible without my having carefully read the work of such continental philosophers as Heidegger, Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze as well as the work of such postcolonial thinkers as Said, Mohanty, Bhabha, and Trinh. I have offered a critical reading of these postcolonial thinkers over the course of chapters 4 and 5 not in any effort to repudiate the critique of representation and the accompanying defense of difference entirely but rather in order to extend this twin problematic further yet, even beyond the scope of those poststructuralist thinkers who first formulated this problematic. It is not a matter, then, of keeping Foucault’s critique of representation or Deleuze’s defense of difference confined to the Western tradition—a confinement to which they would only too happily oblige, of course—but instead of dismantling the concept of the West that effectively contains the most subversive implications of their work, not to mention the work of those postcolonial thinkers who have followed them—which is to say that there has never been any language without representation, that there has never been any identity without difference, or, indeed, that there has never been any West. My argument on the end of the West thus also signals the end of the East, the North, and the South, the end of a peculiar sort of

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complicity with the historical teleology of the West, the end of a certain line of postcolonial thought that positions itself squarely outside the Western tradition, preserving the concept of the West itself with a non-Western seal. I do not want to pretend, either, that my close reading of Said, Mohanty, Bhabha, and Trinh has even nearly exhausted the intellectual field of postcolonial theory. There are surely many other postcolonial thinkers who have also pursued the poststructuralist problematic of representation and difference in their own work and yet who have not, it seems to me, followed Foucault’s and Deleuze’s discourse of negative teleology quite so faithfully. The work associated with both the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and the Subaltern Studies series—despite the significant disparity between these two bodies of work in style and substance—offers what I consider to be a rather more careful approach to the persistent problems of representation and difference not only within the Western tradition but also within non-Western cultural practices themselves. I freely admit that my own argument would have unfolded very differently had I decided to offer a close reading of Stuart Hall’s text “New Ethnicities” or Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s text “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in this part of my book instead. “New Ethnicities,” Hall’s essay on black cultural politics in Britain that was first published in 1988, is perhaps most famous for his claim on “the end of the essential black subject.” However, Hall also addresses the twin problematic of representation and difference in his text not by rejecting representation altogether in favor of some radical form of difference but by further complicating this problematic, tracing what he calls “a significant shift . . . in black cultural politics . . . from a struggle over the relations of representation to a politics of representation itself.”12 Similarly, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Spivak’s essay on the abolition of sati or “widow sacrifice” in colonial India that was first published in 1984 and then republished in a greatly expanded form in 1988, is just as famous for her claim that “the subaltern cannot speak.” But Spivak also addresses the problematic of representation and difference in her text by calling attention to the distinction between the German terms Vertretung and Darstellung in Marx’s work, which she defines as “representation as ‘speaking for,’ as in politics, and representation as ‘re-presentation,’ as in art or philosophy,” respectively.13 It is this more complicated postcolonial problematic of representation and difference that I want to pursue in part IV—a problematic

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in which, to put it very schematically, difference is inscribed within rather than outside representation. The task of dismantling the concept of the West that I have proposed in this part of my book, then, has already begun within postcolonial theory. Following this other line of postcolonial thought instead, I suggest that the task for postcolonial thinkers is not to demarcate a cultural space for collective resistance against the purportedly monolithic tradition of the West but rather to problematize the discourse of cultural purity wherever it might be found, even if it is within postcolonial theory itself. Again, this task entails yet another complex reiteration of the negative teleology of the West. Yet for the same reason, I also hesitate to call this complex reiteration a specifically “postcolonial” task inasmuch as the very possibility for such a reiteration emerges from twentieth-century continental philosophy. I want to resist the disciplinary impulse to clearly distinguish postcolonial theory from philosophy as such, to quarantine the issues of race, ethnicity, culture, and power from what are presumed to be the more properly philosophical issues of language, discourse, knowledge, and reality. After all, continental philosophy and postcolonial theory are bound to each other by their common desire to distinguish the Western tradition from all other cultural traditions, whether in the name of ethnocentrism or in the name of antiethnocentrism. The compulsive repetition of the West within continental philosophy has thus produced its own displacement. Postcolonial theory remains indebted to continental philosophy insofar as it furthers this displacement. To paraphrase one of the epigraphs to the text that opened the very field of postcolonial theory, the end of the West is a career.

PA R T I V THE LIMITS OF ANTIETHNOCENTRISM

TO SAY THAT THERE IS NO WEST IS NOT TO SAY THAT WE must completely abandon the concepts of history, culture, power, and knowledge. Rather, it is to say that the concept of the West can no longer furnish us with a prefabricated history, whether in the form of a future destiny as in Husserl’s and Levinas’s “positive” teleology of the West or in the form of a past heritage as in Heidegger’s and Derrida’s negative teleology. We may certainly continue to trace specific histories and to delineate specific cultures, but these histories and cultures would not fall so easily into the geopolitically predetermined categories of “East” and “West.” Similarly, to say that the West is generated by its performative force is not to say that modern European thinkers have simply falsified their tradition by tracing it back to the ancient Greeks. It is to say, though, that the construction, invention, or “fabrication” of the Western tradition has always been a geopolitical project. The deconstruction, dismantling, or “end” of the West that I have proposed in this book would thus entail a performative politics by which the concept of the West is not exposed as a lie so much as it is subverted, undermined, or displaced by its own excessive illocutionary or iterative force.

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In part IV, I want to spell out my argument on the end of the West in a slightly less cryptic code by shifting my attention from academic discourse to popular music, a cultural field in which the border between East and West has been so frequently crossed that the radical critique of Western ethnocentrism that has been formulated within twentieth-century continental philosophy now seems somewhat antiquated. In chapter 6, I consider the cross-cultural collaboration between “Eastern” and “Western” artists that irrevocably transformed popular music in the latter part of the twentieth century, a complicated episode involving an intricate network of classical and jazz musicians, pop songwriters, and spiritual teachers that has since been condensed in the popular imagination by the phrase “the Beatles in India.” Not surprisingly, this episode is centered on the British pop group the Beatles’ pivotal interest in Indian classical music and Hindu religious practices during what is commonly considered their most experimental period in the mid- to late 1960s. During this period, the Beatles not only drew from Indian music to produce some of what are arguably the most successful cross-cultural efforts in British and American popular music to date— including the songs “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown),” “Love You To,” “Tomorrow Never Knows,” “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” “Within You Without You,” “Blue Jay Way,” “The Inner Light,” and “Across the Universe,” to name only a few of the most obvious ones—but also drew an unprecedented level of international attention to the Hindu practices of meditation and chanting. Of course, this cross-cultural phenomenon might itself be interpreted as a clear demonstration of the West’s unilateral power of cultural appropriation, a form of power that indeed distinguishes the Western tradition from all other cultural traditions. This interpretation would imply that the Beatles were able to incorporate elements from Indian classical music into their own music precisely because their politically and economically privileged position as Western subjects allowed them to do so. Whether the Beatles actually appropriated or misappropriated Indian classical music and Hindu religious practices in their music and their personal lifestyles would thus only be a secondary question at best, a question that would necessarily follow the primary determination of the Western subject’s power to appropriate other cultures. I want to suggest, however, that all such arguments on cultural appropriation are based on a logic of “propriation”—propriation

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as both property and propriety, a logic that is also an ethics, an epistemology that is also a morality. This logic of propriation grounds the cultural identity of the West itself—an identity that was ordained at its origin and that will endure to its end, an identity that comprehends all non-Western cultural difference as difference from itself. In the “progressive” politics of multiculturalism, this logic is often extended to non-Western cultural traditions as well, endowing each and every culture with its own identity, its own origin and end, even its own comprehension of cultural difference as difference from itself. The strategy of antiethnocentrism is premised on this very logic according to which all subjects are responsible for and responsible to only their own cultures, a logic in which the subject of culture and the culture of the subject are mutually implicated in a relation of cobelonging. Undermining this logic of propriation in both its ethnocentric and antiethnocentric variants, then, is what I would call “depropriation.” Depropriation can neither be easily reduced to another logic that would oppose or contradict propriation nor be simply conflated with “misappropriation,” which, like its opposite, “appropriation,” would follow or adhere to the logic of propriation itself. Depropriation exceeds the logic of identity and difference, origins and ends, appropriation and misappropriation even as it makes all of these oppositions possible. Not confined to the strictures of cultural belonging or cobelonging, depropriation is both improper and nonproprietary, rendering any and all cultural expressions available for deconstruction and desegmentation, decontextualization and desublimation. Without this condition of depropriation, no form of cultural communication or transmission whatsoever would be possible. Certainly, there are many cultural traditions in which this condition of depropriation is disavowed and in which simple accounts of their own pure origins are elaborated and defended at all costs. But all such disavowals are themselves made possible by depropriation. And yet I am not particularly interested in making the argument that the Beatles’ incorporation of specific elements from Indian classical music into their own music did not constitute an act of cultural appropriation on their part. I will not therefore discuss the Beatles’ cross-cultural efforts in any more detail, notwithstanding the compelling demonstration of cultural depropriation that this discussion would surely provide. Rather, what I am

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particularly interested in discussing is the Beatles’ initial encounter with Indian music and religion during the making of their second film, Help!, a comical spoof of the spy-thriller film genre that itself deals quite freely in racial and cultural stereotypes of the East. Although these apparently distasteful stereotypes might lend themselves to the charge of ethnocentrism if not outright racism, I want to suggest that a more careful viewing of Help! reveals a process of subversion at work in which stereotypical Western representations of the East are themselves parodied. Funnily enough, it is precisely the off-color depiction of Eastern culture in this film that would eventually lead to the Beatles’ more serious collaborations with Indian classical musicians and spiritual teachers alike. This phenomenon within popular music and film culture for which “the Beatles in India” serves as an effective trope, then, moves beyond the strategy of antiethnocentrism that has recently been endorsed by so many continental philosophers and postcolonial thinkers. For whereas the strategy of antiethnocentrism entirely avoids the representation of different cultures, the sort of transcultural engagement that is staged in Help! instead confronts the unavoidable perils of representation, both between and within different cultures. The reproduction of ethnocentric stereotypes is perhaps an inevitable part of this engagement. Yet the alternative rejection of representation altogether only fortifies the closed borders of the West by insisting on the essential difference of Western culture from all other cultures. What I am questioning is thus the strategy of antiethnocentrism that has undoubtedly informed the work of all the poststructuralist and postcolonial thinkers whom I discussed in part III. After all, it was a decidedly antiethnocentric impulse that led Foucault and Deleuze to confine their critique of representation and its suppression of difference to the Western tradition, and it was the same antiethnocentric impulse that led Said, Mohanty, Bhabha, and Trinh to adopt their radical critique. This strategy of antiethnocentrism as such requires an adamant rejection of all representations of different cultures on the principle that representation invariably reduces cultural difference itself. But this strategy has its limits, for it fails to account for the inscription of cultural difference within the practice of representation. In other words, non-Western cultural difference is produced by the very discourse of Western cultural identity. Both identity and difference are inevitably caught up in representation.

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By simply rejecting representation, then, the strategy of antiethnocentrism only entrenches further the presumption of Western exceptionalism—the unassailable conviction that the West is completely distinct from the East, the Third World, or any other non-Western geopolitical space for that matter—as well as the presumption of Western univocality—the equally unassailable conviction that the West speaks only to itself, of itself, for itself. Instead of this antiethnocentric rejection of representation—this very ethnocentric antiethnocentrism—what I am advocating is rather a hyperbolic practice of representation in which cultural, sexual, and myriad other identities as well as differences would emerge and collide, morph and dissolve. Instead of rejecting representation, we would accept it, welcome it, and maybe even embrace it—spinning representation upon representation, representations teeming with irreducibly hybrid identities and differences. Instead of rejecting the representation of other cultures, we would readily engage ourselves with other cultures, other sexes, other “others,” even if it means sullying their purity—or, indeed, especially if this is what it means. In chapter 6, I want to argue that it is this hyperbolic practice of representation in which the Beatles’ film Help! is engaged, albeit in the more unruly idiom of bloodthirsty Kali worshippers, nouveau-riche pop stars, and power-hungry, grant-seeking scientists and their apprentices.

6 THE BEATLES IN INDIA

Help! Although it is quite likely the Beatles had already heard Indian classical music—or at least had heard of it—by the time they began filming Help! in early 1965, what might be considered their first significant encounter with both Indian music and religion took place on the set of this film.1 While they were shooting in the Bahamas, the Beatles were approached by Swami Vishnu-devananda, who gave each of them a signed copy of his book The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga. Furthermore, while they were shooting in London a few weeks later, they were introduced to the sitar, a musical instrument that the Beatles’ lead guitarist George Harrison would begin to learn to play the following year under the guidance of the accomplished Indian sitarist and composer Ravi Shankar. Following the release of the film in July 1965, the soundtrack album to Help! was released in August, appearing one week earlier in the United Kingdom than it did in the United States.2 While the U.K. release presents all seven of the Beatles’ songs from the film on side 1 of the record and seven additional Beatles songs on side 2, the U.S. release presents a mixed sequence of the seven Beatles film songs and five selections from the instrumental film score composed by Ken Thorne. Some of these selections from the film score on the U.S.

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release prominently feature several Indian musical instruments, although none of the musicians who played these instruments are credited on the album. One of these selections, “Another Hard Day’s Night,” which is credited as a composition by the Beatles’ main songwriters, guitarist John Lennon and bassist Paul McCartney, is an amusing medley of three Beatles songs from their first film, “A Hard Day’s Night,” “Can’t Buy Me Love,” and “I Should Have Known Better,” played on sitar, surbahar, bansuri, tabla, and khartal. Meanwhile, the closing track, “The Chase,” which is credited as a composition by Thorne, is simply the climactic jhala section of a more or less traditional performance of a North Indian raga in the largely improvisational khayal style played on sitar, surbahar, tabla, and manjira. But perhaps most significant of all on the U.S. release of the Help! soundtrack album, the opening title track “Help!” itself is introduced by a brief musical passage from the film score that prominently features the sitar, thus marking the first appearance of sitar or any other Indian musical instrument on a Beatles album. Moreover, the U.S. release of the soundtrack album to Help! was packaged in a deluxe gatefold cover featuring stills from the film shoot in both color and black and white as well as notes to the film. These anonymously written notes offer a sensational preview of the Beatles’ film in a series of punchy lines and leading questions, invoking images of “Eastern” thugs and beauties, priests and goddesses. Using some very expressive language indeed, the notes reveal a farfetched plot in which the Beatles’ drummer Ringo Starr and the rest of the group are chased around the world by the “high priests” of the “terrible Goddess . . . Kaili” and their “gang of Eastern thugs,” not to mention two “leading” but “power crazy” scientists who “hope to rule the world,” all of whose nefarious plans are routinely thwarted by an “Eastern beauty” who repeatedly saves the Beatles’ lives. This rapid synopsis of the film is completed by a jumbled series of references to Buckingham Palace, Scotland Yard, Salisbury Plain, Austria, and an “Alpine lake” as well as the Bahamas and Bermuda, which are apparently confused with each other—Help! was not shot in Bermuda at all. Interestingly enough, these notes that originally appeared on the U.S. release of the Help! soundtrack album on vinyl record have only recently been reproduced in CD format with the release of the Beatles’ box set The U.S. Albums

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in 2014, after decades of remaining unavailable on any prior release of the Beatles’ album catalog on CD.3 Yet as inviting as a critical reading of the original U.S. soundtrack album release might seem, I want to focus my attention in this chapter on the film itself. Help! was the Beatles’ second film. Their first film, A Hard Day’s Night, had been released one year earlier in July 1964 in the United Kingdom and in August 1964 in the United States. Both A Hard Day’s Night and Help! were produced by Walter Shenson and directed by Richard Lester, and they would remain the only two scripted narrative films that featured the Beatles themselves in starring roles. Each of these films showcased seven songs that were specially written and recorded for them by the Beatles. Both films also displayed a comic sense of absurdity, physical as well as verbal, that was indebted largely not only to the Beatles’ personal sense of humor but also to Lester’s own work in film and television. Indeed, although Shenson had selected Lester to direct the Beatles’ films based on their previous work together on the film The Mouse on the Moon, released in 1963, the Beatles were themselves eager to work with Lester based on his work on The Running Jumping and Standing Still Film, a short film shot in black and white without any dialogue and released in 1960. This short film was directed by Lester, “devised” by Peter Sellers, and composed from “thoughts” by Spike Milligan, Sellers, Mario Fabrizi, and Lester himself. Lester had previously worked with Sellers and Milligan as the producer and director of two series of British comedy television programs in 1956, A Show Called Fred and Son of Fred. These television series were based on the radio program The Goon Show, which would itself later be cited as an important influence on the Beatles as well as on the British comedy troupe Monty Python. Both A Hard Day’s Night and Help! were very popular among music fans as well as film critics, and they were generally considered to have made a significant improvement over the previous rock-and-roll musical films of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Not only did A Hard Day’s Night and Help! spawn a host of imitations on film as well as television during the mid-1960s when they were first released, but they also went on to provide a popular model for music videos many years later in the late 1970s and early 1980s. However, A Hard Day’s Night seems to have enjoyed a greater and more consistent critical acclaim than Help! has, certainly among film critics

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themselves but also among the general viewing public over time. Andrew Sarris hailed A Hard Day’s Night as “the Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals,” and Roger Ebert later described it as “not simply the best of the Beatles films, but one of the best musicals ever made.”4 It received two Academy Award nominations in 1965, one for Alun Owen’s original screenplay and another for George Martin’s musical score adaptation. Nearly two decades after its original theatrical release, A Hard Day’s Night was re-released in film theaters in the United States in 1982, featuring a new opening sequence assembled from photographic stills of the Beatles and set to another song from the soundtrack album, and it was re-released in film theaters again in the United States in 2000 and in the United Kingdom in 2001. It was first released on videocassette in 1984 and on DVD in 1997 and re-released on DVD in 2002 and again most recently on both DVD and Blu-ray disc in 2014. In contrast, although Help! did receive an enthusiastic response from many film critics, none of its reviews seemed to match the superlatively rave reviews of A Hard Day’s Night. Help! did not receive any Academy Award nominations. It was never re-released in film theaters either in the United States or in the United Kingdom. It was first released on videocassette in 1987 and on DVD in 1997 but remained unavailable for many years until its re-release on DVD in 2007 and on Blu-ray disc in 2013. Of course, some of the more obvious differences in the production of these two films might account for their rather unequal reception over the past few decades. Help! was allotted a significantly larger budget as well as a longer shooting schedule following the somewhat surprising success of A Hard Day’s Night. While A Hard Day’s Night was shot in black and white on a few locations in and around London, Help! was shot in color on a variety of visually striking locations, including Salisbury Plain, the Austrian Alps, and the Bahamas. Furthermore, as Lester was working on Help! he did not attempt to simply repeat or even to expand on the success of A Hard Day’s Night in any formulaic way. While the screenplay for A Hard Day’s Night was written by Owen, a British playwright who was from Liverpool like the Beatles themselves and who incorporated much of the Beatles’ own witty banter into the film’s dialogue, the screenplay for Help! was cowritten by the American-born screenwriter Marc Behm and the British playwright Charles Wood based on Behm’s own fantastical story. Moreover, it seems that in addition to the Beatles’ increasing dissatisfaction with their gruel-

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ing recording and touring schedules, the thrill of making their first film had worn off by the time that they started shooting Help!, and the tedium of the filming process had begun to sink in. By all accounts, Lester had a more difficult time keeping them focused on the script, as they seemed to be more interested in making clandestine appointments to smoke up with each other than they were in waiting in front of the cameras to deliver their lines. To be sure, the more fantastical the story becomes in Help!, the more deadpan if not detached the Beatles’ delivery appears. Nonetheless, I want to suggest that the mixed response to Help! among Beatles fans and critics alike since its original theatrical release five decades ago owes not to its farfetched plot or to its dry sense of humor but mainly to its comical representation of Indian culture. I am not claiming that Help! is a better film than A Hard Day’s Night or even that these two films are equally satisfying because in many ways I tend to agree with the film critics that they are not. But what I am claiming is that if it was generally acceptable for Western films to comically represent non-Western cultures, characters, or characteristics during the 1960s—and there is much evidence to suggest that it was largely acceptable to do so, from the depiction of Japanese culture in My Geisha, directed by Jack Cardiff, starring Shirley MacLaine, and released in 1962, to the depiction of the Indian lead character in The Party, directed by Blake Edwards, starring Peter Sellers, and released in 1968—this sort of representation has become increasingly unacceptable over the past few decades. If Help! does not seem to have aged as well as A Hard Day’s Night, it is because Help! represents another culture in a comical way, whereas A Hard Day’s Night does not. The film Help! is thus widely considered by Beatles fans and critics today to be an unfortunate display of an outdated ethnocentrism, the only lasting value of which is that it led to the Beatles’ subsequent interest in Indian music and religion, however inadvertently it may have done so. This kind of response to Help! is well demonstrated by two books published during the past decade that address the broader cultural forces at work around the Beatles’ encounter with Indian music and religion—both of them very compelling books, I should say, from which my own account of this transcultural engagement has heavily drawn. Published in 2006, Peter Lavezzoli’s book The Dawn of Indian Music in the West: Bhairavi presents a richly detailed description of the cross-cultural collaboration between

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Indian and Western musicians during the latter part of the twentieth century and includes a very supportive foreword by the legendary Ravi Shankar himself. Lavezzoli considers the Beatles, and Harrison in particular, the most important artists to have introduced Indian classical music to the Western pop audience: “George Harrison will likely be remembered not only for his role in the Beatles and as a solo artist, but also as the most famous Western musician to recognize the importance of a non-Western musical tradition and give it voice. Like Yehudi Menuhin and John Coltrane, George Harrison opened the door to a world of music that many Westerners otherwise may never have discovered.” Indeed, Lavezzoli credits Harrison for sparking his own interest in Indian classical music: “Quite simply, this book would not exist if not for George Harrison.” However, despite his great estimation of Harrison and the Beatles, Lavezzoli indicts Help! for what he calls its “shameless Orientalism”: “Harrison first encountered Indian music and spirituality during the shooting of [the Beatles’] second feature film, Help! The convoluted plot revolves around a nondescript Eastern cult whose followers address their turbaned leader as ‘Swami.’ . . . The great irony of Help! is that while the film smacks of shameless Orientalism, and was never intended to present Indian culture in a respectful light, the process of making the film introduced George Harrison to Indian music, which would transform his life.”5 Similarly, published in 2010, Philip Goldberg’s book American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation—How Indian Spirituality Changed the West offers a broad review of the interaction between Indian and Western artists, philosophers, and spiritual leaders over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Goldberg attaches an enormous significance to the Beatles’ discovery of the Indian religious practices of meditation and yoga and to their introduction of these practices to the Western public: “In February 1968 the Beatles went to India for an extended stay with their new guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It may have been the most momentous spiritual retreat since Jesus spent those forty days in the wilderness.” Yet notwithstanding his high opinion of the Beatles themselves, Goldberg also accuses Help! of perpetuating common racial and cultural stereotypes: “Hollywood films have often reinforced negative images of Indian culture and religion. . . . Even the Beatles succumbed:

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Help! involves a cult, led by Swami Clang, that sacrifices human beings to the goddess Kali. . . . Of course, whatever bad karma the Beatles acquired for Swami Clang was offset when they turned on a generation to India’s wisdom.”6 Both Lavezzoli and Goldberg seem to agree, then, that although the comical representation of Indian culture in Help! remains problematic at best—or, as Goldberg puts it, a case of “bad karma”—the film’s fortuitous introduction of Indian music and religion to the Beatles themselves provides its most redeeming quality. It thus came as a rather pleasant surprise, or at least it did to me, that Help! was given such lavish treatment when it was finally re-released on DVD by a newly revived Apple Corps in 2007. Not only was it released in a standard two-disc edition that included a number of special features and notes to the film by Lester as well as the renowned director Martin Scorsese, but it was also released in a deluxe oversize box-set edition that further included reproductions of an original Help! film poster from 1965, eight original lobby cards, and, most extravagantly of all, Lester’s typed copy of the script with his own handwritten notes on it.7 Not even the Beatles’ more popular and critically acclaimed first film A Hard Day’s Night had been given this lavish treatment when it was re-released on DVD by Miramax five years earlier in a two-disc edition that included a reproduction of the first draft of Owen’s screenplay on DVD-ROM.8 Yet the problem of ethnocentrism, racism, or Orientalism that has been raised by Lavezzoli and Goldberg, among others, is not broached at all in either the standard or the deluxe edition of Help!—not in the video or the print content and not by Lester or Scorsese, who only mentions “a plot about an Indian death cult” as a passing comment in his notes to the film.9 Of course, I would hardly expect a scholarly essay on the cultural politics of representation to be included on the DVD release of Help!, although I should also say that the notes to many recently released CD compilation albums and box sets by various popular music artists do indeed address such issues in a critical and often scholarly way. In any case, it seems to me that a more careful reading of Help! would call into question not only the charge of Orientalism that has been leveled against it but also the claim of innocence that both Lester and Scorsese appear to make in their notes to the film. It is as if they were themselves offering an oblique defense against the charge of Orientalism

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in their notes, a charge that they dare not acknowledge even as they attempt to deny it. Help! is simply treated as what Lester calls “a Pop Art fantasy,”10 a fantasy that presumably remains unburdened by the responsibilities of representation. In this chapter, then, I am not interested in justifying or defending the comical representation of Eastern culture in Help! either on the grounds that it was the Beatles’ early encounter with Indian music and religion on the set of this film that eventually led to their more respectable musical and spiritual endeavors with Shankar and the Maharishi or on the grounds that this film was merely the innocent expression of a youthful period that had not yet become mired in the political turmoil of the late 1960s. I want to argue instead that Help! itself is engaged in what I have called a hyperbolic practice of representation—a practice of representation that does not simply serve to entrench offensive racial and cultural stereotypes of the East but that rather works to undermine the discourse of cultural purity that informs the very concept of the East as well as of the West.

Hyperbolic Representation The comical representation of Indian culture in Help! is certainly far from innocent. Both the film and the script begin with the depiction of a failed human sacrifice in what is a very thinly veiled reference to the religious rituals dedicated to the Hindu goddess Kali. The opening scene of the film begins with a backlit shot of a stone statue with ten arms, accompanied by the sound of a gong, cymbals, and a rather poorly played surbahar. It fades to a wider shot of a stone temple, at the far end of which the large statue is seated and in the middle of which is located a raised altar. A ritual leader stands in front of the statue, facing an assembly with his arms outstretched and wearing an ornate costume with golden armlets and a golden headdress that masks his face. A sacrificial female victim is brought toward the altar, lying flat on a stretcher and apparently unconscious, clothed in a red dress and her skin painted the same color. Meanwhile, the ritual leader chants: “In the name of Preverti, daughter of the mountains, whose embrace with Rani made the whole world tremble.” The assembly responds: “Tremble.” The ritual leader continues to chant: “Tremble. Whose name is the terrible, whose name is baleful, whose name is the inaccessible, whose name is the black mother, mother of darkness.” The assembly

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responds again: “Kaili.” The ritual leader steps up to the altar, and he is handed a sacrificial knife by a male attendant. He chants in a higher tone: “We turn our hearts to Kaili, drinker of blood, black mother.” The assembly responds in a descending arpeggio this time: “Kaili.” The ritual leader continues: “Killer of demons, gorge on this flesh, our offering. Drink!” He raises his arm, preparing to plunge the sacrificial knife into the victim on the altar. But his arm is stayed by a female attendant, who exclaims: “Hold!” The ritual leader puts down the knife, removes his headdress to reveal his face, and replies: “Hold?” The female attendant holds up the sacrificial victim’s left hand and explains: “The ring! She is not wearing the sacrificial ring.” The members of the assembly turn and mutter to each other. The female attendant continues: “She cannot be sacrificed without the ring.” The ritual leader points to the victim and exclaims: “Where is the ring? Search her! What has she done with the ring?” The assembly begins to scatter in confusion as the scene suddenly ends. In the script for Help! the opening scene begins with a brief description of Kaili that clarifies her relationship to Kali—a description, however, that was not incorporated into the film: “INT. TEMPLE OF KAILI / The GODDESS KAILI is terrible—twice as terrible as KALI and we all know about KALI.”11 The director and screenwriters of Help! would indeed have all known about Kali, as would the Beatles themselves perhaps, for the religious ritual of human sacrifice dedicated to Kali had played an active part in the British colonial imagination over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kali was well known to the British in colonial India by her long association with the city of Calcutta. There is a famous temple dedicated to Kali in Kalighat, an area of Calcutta named after the ghat or public set of steps leading down to the river there that is associated with Kali and from which the name “Calcutta” itself is commonly said to have been derived. The temple in Kalighat is located on a sacred site, one of fifty-one Shakti Pithas throughout India, where the fragments of the goddess Sati’s immolated body are believed to have fallen from the god Shiva’s shoulders in his furious dance of destruction. Over the course of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the English and later the British East India Company established its last major trading post in Calcutta, declared it a Presidency Town, and constructed both the old and the new Fort William there. Calcutta became the capital of the Bengal Presidency in the eighteenth century and then of all of British-ruled India in the nineteenth century, until the

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capital was relocated to New Delhi in the early twentieth century following the emergence of the Swadeshi movement in response to the partition of Bengal. Based on their knowledge of the Kalighat temple in Calcutta, then, the British in colonial India invariably associated the religious rituals dedicated to Kali with human sacrifice. During the early nineteenth century, the colonial government had targeted the cultural practices of human sacrifice, sati or “widow sacrifice,” and female infanticide for radical social reform and had targeted the Thagis for elimination as well. The Thagis were an extensively organized group of bandits or “thugs” whose own religious rituals were also dedicated to Kali. Although the Thagis appeared to have been disbanded quickly enough, the practices of human sacrifice, sati, and female infanticide seemed to persist long after they had been legally prohibited. In his pamphlet Siva Bhakti published in 1902 and subtitled An Appeal to Educated Hindus, John Murdoch, a prolific Christian missionary based in Madras, not only identified the practice of animal sacrifice specifically with Kali but also voiced the widespread suspicion that human sacrifice had not been completely eradicated: “In Vedic times sacrifice was considered so important that it was called ‘the navel of the world.’ Largely through the influence of Buddhism, animal sacrifices were discontinued. At present they are chiefly offered in connection with the worship of Káli. Human sacrifices were formerly offered, and it is believed that they have not yet entirely ceased.” Murdoch also went on to describe Kali’s special relationship with the Thagis: “Káli was the patron goddess of the professional murderers, called Thugs. . . . Before going on their expeditions, Thugs made offerings to the goddess, who, they believed, would not only shield them from harm, but visit with her wrath all who injured them.”12 One full century later, in the opening years of the twenty-first century, the suspicion that the religious ritual of human sacrifice dedicated to Kali still survived in independent India continued to provoke the globalized postcolonial imagination. In his article “Killing for ‘Mother’ Kali,” published in the July 29, 2002, issue of the Asia edition of the U.S.-based weekly news magazine Time, Alex Perry joined the old colonial discourse of moral repulsion with the new multicultural discourse of religious tolerance by sharply distinguishing Kali from the Brahminical tradition of Hinduism: “Human sacrifice has always been an anomaly in India. Even 200 years ago, when a boy was killed every day

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at a Kali temple in Calcutta, blood cults were at odds with a benign Hindu spiritualism that celebrates abstinence and vegetarianism. But Kali is different. A ferocious slayer of evil in Hindu mythology, the goddess is said to have an insatiable appetite for blood.”13 It is obvious that Help! greatly exploits this stereotypical association of Kali with human sacrifice, ritual murder, and criminal activity. After the basic premise is established in the opening scene that the sacrificial ring is missing from the victim’s finger, it is quickly divulged that the ring has come into Ringo’s possession. The opening scene cuts abruptly to a close shot of a ring with a very large stone in it that Ringo is wearing on one of his fingers as the Beatles perform the title song of the film. This scene appears to be shot entirely in black and white until a red dart lands on Ringo’s head at the beginning of the second verse and is soon followed by another colored dart. The next shot reveals that the ritual leader is maliciously throwing darts at a screen on which a black-and-white film of the Beatles’ performance is being projected. He is surrounded by both his male and his female attendants as well as by some other members of the assembly, and they all are gathered around the screen watching the performance. The screen has been set up in the temple just in front of the statue of Kaili, and the film projector is placed on the altar next to the sacrificial victim, who is now conscious and watching the performance as well. The Help! film credits then appear in bright colors over the moving images of the Beatles in black and white. More and more darts land on the screen as the Beatles continue their performance, until the song ends and the screen goes black, the colored darts still stuck in it. After this opening title sequence, the plot of Help! follows the increasingly desperate attempts made by the Kaili worshippers—including the ritual leader Clang, whom his followers address as “Swami”; his male attendant Bhuta; his female attendant Ahme; and some other rather thuggish members of his assembly—to complete their sacrifice, while the Beatles themselves try to remove the sacrificial ring from Ringo’s finger, where it has become stuck. The Kaili worshippers first travel to England in an attempt to steal the ring back from Ringo, even by cutting off his finger if necessary. However, when the ritually prescribed time for making the sacrifice lapses, they must sacrifice Ringo himself to their bloodthirsty goddess since he is still wearing the ring. With each attempt that Clang’s thugs make on Ringo’s life, they cover him in red paint and scream, “Kaili!” Over

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the course of the remaining plot, the Kaili worshippers chase the Beatles to the Austrian Alps, back to England, and finally to the Bahamas, where they have transported their temple, keeping it entirely intact—Kaili statue, sacrificial altar, and all. Help! thus plays on the most common stereotypical associations of Kali with human sacrifice—dreadful associations, indeed, that have continued to fascinate the British colonial imagination and the globalized postcolonial imagination alike for centuries. These stereotypes are certainly offensive, and they may quite rightly be considered ethnocentric if not racist. However, Help! does not simply endorse these stereotypes but rather lampoons them. The film is a parody, much like the Beatles’ first film, A Hard Day’s Night. Of course, what has divided the overwhelmingly positive response to A Hard Day’s Night from the mixed response to Help! over the past few decades is the general contention that whereas the Beatles parody themselves in A Hard Day’s Night, they parody Indian culture in Help! According to the currently prevalent logic of multiculturalism, the Beatles’ selfrepresentation in their first film is acceptable, while their representation of another culture in their second film is not. But I want to suggest that the distinction between representation and self-representation is much more complicated than this logic concedes. A Hard Day’s Night is hardly a direct representation of the Beatles themselves any more than Help! is a direct representation of Indian culture. The Beatles began filming A Hard Day’s Night in early 1964, less than a month after they had embarked on their first concert tour of the United States and made their first television appearances there as well. Their enormously successful arrival in the United States was recorded in the documentary film What’s Happening! The Beatles in the USA, directed by Albert and David Maysles and released in 1964, shortly before A Hard Day’s Night itself was released. Although Lester would not have had the opportunity to view What’s Happening! before he began filming A Hard Day’s Night, he might have seen the documentary television program Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! The Beatles in New York, which had been assembled from the Maysles’ early film footage and broadcast in the United Kingdom while the Beatles were still in the United States. In any case, it is obvious that Lester’s decision to use black-and-white film was determined by his budget as much as by his efforts to imitate the contemporary media coverage of the Beatles in both the United Kingdom

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and the United States, while his clever exploitation of deliberately shaky camera work seems to mimic what was then the innovative documentary style of the Maysles’ film footage. A Hard Day’s Night is not simply a parody of the Beatles themselves, then, but more accurately a parody of their phenomenal and scarcely comprehensible rise to fame or what the news press had already dubbed “Beatlemania.” A Hard Day’s Night is precisely what I am calling a hyperbolic representation—a representation of representation, a satirical representation of the Beatles’ own representation in the British and American mass media. Likewise, Help! is not simply a parody of Indian culture. On one hand, it continues to parody the Beatles’ representation of themselves, closely following A Hard Day’s Night in this sense. The opening title sequence of Help!, in which a black-and-white film of the Beatles’ performance is projected on a screen, is itself an oblique reference to their first film, a reference that would not have been lost on any of their fans. But there is also another early scene in Help! that extends this parody further, playing on the popular image of the Beatles as just four working-class lads from Liverpool who had made good, an image that was especially fostered by the British news press. After a dialogue sequence between Clang, Bhuta, and Ahme that immediately follows the opening title sequence, the Beatles themselves make their first appearance in the third scene of Help!—which is to say, of course, their first appearance in color after their performance in black and white. The scene opens on a modest residential street lined on both sides with rows of modest terraced houses as a black Rolls Royce drives down the street and pulls over to the curb. The Beatles climb out of the car in matching black suits, and Paul waves to two elderly women across the street. One of the women smiles and waves back, saying to her friend in a decent working-class accent: “Wave!” The second woman replies in an equally decent working-class accent: “I don’t like to.” The first woman nudges her friend and says: “Go on, wave!” The second woman replies again: “Shall I? They expect it, don’t they?” She smiles and waves back as well. The Beatles walk up to four separate doors of four separate houses, the only apparent difference between which are the bright colors of the doors themselves. The first woman continues to her friend: “Lovely lads, and so natural. I mean adoration hasn’t gone to their heads one jot, has it? You know what I mean, success!” The second woman concurs: “Just so natural! And still the same

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as they was before they was.” The Beatles open their four separate doors, only to reveal that they all share one very large apartment that is divided into four sections, each one of which is extravagantly designed to match the color of the door. George’s section of the house is painted green and contains a lawn that is maintained by a gardener who cuts the grass with chattering teeth; John’s section is painted red and contains a large bookcase with hidden revolving shelves built into the wall and a sunken bed; Ringo’s section is painted blue and contains a variety of vending machines that are mounted inside the walls; and Paul’s section is painted white and contains a stairwell leading downward and a white organ with lights that rises through the floor. On the other hand, Help! is not simply a parody of Indian culture insofar as what it parodies is more accurately the representation of non-Western cultures in contemporary Western film itself. Help! is a spoof of the spythriller film genre—namely, the James Bond film series. Although this series had just been launched a few years earlier, the cinematic formula that would ensure its popular appeal for many future decades had already been devised by this point. All the basic elements of this formula are comically spoofed in Help!—the exotic locations, the technological gadgets, the foreign enemies, and the duplicitous women, who are always available and more often than not quite expendable. Indeed, the James Bond film series inspired many parodies over the course of the 1960s, including the television series Get Smart, created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry and broadcast from 1965 to 1970, as well as the film Casino Royale, codirected by Val Guest among others and released in 1967. But it appears that Help! was the first parody of the James Bond film series or at least the earliest one that has managed to survive over the past five decades. Based on the series of novels and short stories by the British writer Ian Fleming, the James Bond film series was initially released through the American film studio United Artists and produced by Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli, featuring Sean Connery in the starring role as the British secret agent 007, James Bond. The film series quickly established its own cinematic identity, however, from the opening sequence of its very first installment onward. The first film in the series, Dr. No, directed by Terence Young and released in 1962, opens with a dimly lit shot of a man dressed in a suit and hat as seen through the barrel of a gun. The shot follows

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the man, who is walking by slowly, apparently unaware that he is being targeted, until he suddenly turns and shoots his own gun directly at the camera. The entire shot is then washed in red, presumably blood, as it drips from the top to the bottom of the screen. The film credits follow this sequence, animated by flashing circles and rounded squares in bright colors and set to the dynamic and somewhat dissonant musical accompaniment of a full orchestra, a drum set, and an electric guitar. Both the opening film sequence and the accompanying musical theme would reappear in all of the following James Bond films released through United Artists, soon becoming some of the most iconic references in cinematic culture, imitated in countless films as well as television programs—or spoofed, as in the case of Help! Indeed, the most obvious reference to the James Bond film series in Help! is arguably the film score composed by Thorne. Early in the film, just following the Beatles’ entrance into their luxuriously renovated terraced houses, it is revealed that Clang, Bhuta, and Ahme have arrived in England in their attempt to steal back the sacrificial ring from Ringo. After a couple of failed efforts by Ahme, Clang attempts to bribe the Beatles with gold as they leave their houses the next day, posing as a jeweler from Harrods, the famous upscale British department store. When the Beatles drive away in their Rolls Royce, the first chase scene of the film ensues as Clang, Bhuta, and Ahme set off to pursue them in a Harrods electric van. This short chase scene is set to the musical accompaniment of a full orchestra, a drum set, and an electric guitar in what is another very thinly veiled reference albeit to the James Bond theme music this time, though with the additional touch of sitar. It is this section of the film score from which the brief introduction to the opening title track “Help!” on the U.S. soundtrack album release was taken. The first three installments of the James Bond film series had been released by the time production for Help! began. Dr. No was followed by From Russia with Love, again directed by Terence Young and released in 1963, and Goldfinger, directed by Guy Hamilton and released in 1964.14 These three films established the general plot of the entire series, in which the secret agent Bond is charged with defending the political, economic, and military interests of the Western world, centered on the alliance between the United Kingdom and the United States, against a various array of hostile foreign powers. In Dr. No, Bond, with some assistance from the American

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secret agent Felix Leiter, foils a plan to derail the U.S. missile program that has been concocted by Dr. No, a German-Chinese atomic scientist whose secret operations are based in Crab Key, a small island off the coast of Jamaica, but who works in the service of the international criminal organization SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counter-Intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion). In From Russia with Love, Bond thwarts an assassination plot on his own life after he is lured into assisting in the sham defection of a female cipher clerk from the Soviet consulate in Istanbul who has promised to hand over an advanced Soviet cipher machine to the British secret service in return, an elaborate scheme orchestrated by the mysterious Ernst Blofeld, SPECTRE’s top agent, whose national origins remain unspecified but whose accent sounds vaguely European. In Goldfinger, after singlehandedly dismantling a drug laboratory run by revolutionaries on an unnamed island near Miami, presumably Cuba, Bond stops an attempt to contaminate Fort Knox’s gold supply with atomic radiation, an ambitious plan devised by Auric Goldfinger, a British-born international jeweler who also speaks with a vaguely European accent and who heads Auric Enterprises, a company based in Switzerland but operating in league with China to bring about “economic chaos in the West,” as Bond puts it. After the enormous success of Goldfinger, not only was the James Bond film series ripe for parody, with its caricatured representations of the morally and physically superior British hero on one hand and his villainous and degenerate enemies on the other, but it also seemed to invite such a parody from the Beatles themselves. In what is perhaps the most famous scene of Goldfinger, if not of the entire film series, after Bond has slept with Goldfinger’s female escort Jill Masterson and is knocked unconscious in his hotel room, he reawakens to discover that she is dead, her nude body lying prostrate on the bed and covered in gold paint. In the scene immediately preceding this one, however, as he is walking toward the refrigerator to chill a bottle of wine, Bond explains to a still-breathing Masterson: “My dear girl, there are some things that just aren’t done—such as drinking Dom Pérignon ’53 above the temperature of 38 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs!” It was perhaps this deliberate provocation on the part of the filmmakers of Goldfinger that inspired Behm’s outrageous story for Help! Moreover, the Beatles’ parody even seemed to anticipate the next film in the James Bond series itself,

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Thunderball, again directed by Terence Young and released in 1965, just a few months after Help! was released. All three previous films in the James Bond series had been shot on location in various parts of the world, with additional filming at Pinewood Studios in London. Dr. No was shot on location in Jamaica, From Russia with Love in Istanbul, and Goldfinger in Switzerland. Following suit, Help! was shot on location in Wiltshire, Austria, and the Bahamas, with additional filming at Twickenham Film Studios in London. Shooting for Help! began in the Bahamas in late February 1965, and within weeks of its completion shooting for Thunderball began there as well, providing the main location for Bond’s next adventure—yet another twist on the hyperbolic representation of representation in which the original comes to mimic its copy. In addition to its exotic locations, another element of the cinematic formula established by the first three films in the James Bond series was the secret agent’s skilled use of the most technologically advanced weapons and communication devices developed by the British secret service. In Dr. No, Bond is equipped simply with a more powerful gun for his new assignment. But in From Russia with Love he is outfitted with a black leather briefcase in which is concealed a folding sniper’s rifle with an infrared telescopic sight, twenty rounds of ammunition, a flat throwing knife, fifty gold sovereign coins, and a tin of talcum powder containing an exploding tear gas cartridge. And in Goldfinger he is supplied with a silver Aston Martin “with modifications,” as the equipment officer “Q” puts it, such as bulletproof windows, revolving number plates, a long-range radar, smokescreen and oil-slick defense mechanisms, left and right front-wing machine guns, and a passenger ejector seat, along with a homing device, one component of which is to be magnetically attached to the enemy’s vehicle and the other of which fits into the heel of Bond’s shoe. This flattering if somewhat overconfident depiction of British scientific intelligence in the James Bond film series is comically lampooned in Help! not by equipping the Beatles themselves with such laughable technological gadgets but by introducing two more characters into the story instead, the megalomaniac scientist Foot and his bumbling assistant Algernon. In the first scene of the film in which these characters appear, the Beatles have approached “the nearest scientist,” as the occasional narrative captions put it, in their ongoing efforts to remove the sacrificial ring from Ringo’s finger.

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At the opening of this scene, Ringo is attached standing upright to a rather crudely assembled machine by a series of wires connected to various parts of his body as well as to his suit, with his hands secured to two metallic boxes emitting ultraviolet light through circular openings covered in glass, and his head positioned under a metallic dome. The rest of the Beatles are following Foot and Algernon about the surrounding laboratory, both of whom, of course, are dressed in white lab coats. As Foot walks around the laboratory checking the equipment, he lodges a general complaint: “Oh, it won’t work. I don’t expect it to work. It could work if the government would spend some more money. Made in America, you see.” In the ensuing dialogue between Foot, Algernon, and the Beatles, Foot repeats his complaint, lamenting the current state of the British scientific research industry in comparison to the American one: “Made in America, you see. Hmm. Streets ahead of anything we’ve got.” As Algernon fumbles with some wires, Foot also complains about his assistant, lamenting the current state of the British educational system: “He’s an idiot. A degree in woodwork, I ask you.” In his own defense, the ever amiable Algernon explains: “Ah, well, it’s the plugs, you see. The main thing’s the plugs. Good, British plugs. All this American rig—wrong voltage. That’s what foxes me.” When Foot and Algernon rather predictably fail to remove the ring from Ringo’s finger, Foot only redoubles his efforts. The rest of the Beatles demand that they stop the procedure, but Algernon reveals the extent of Foot’s ambition: “Oh, it’s more than my job’s worth to stop him when he’s like this. He’s out to rule the world—if he can get a government grant.” Indeed, Foot decides that he must have the ring for himself in his continuing search for power: “Fantastic! With a ring like that, I could—dare I say it—rule the world. I must have that ring!” Foot orders his assistant to prepare the laser for some nefarious purpose, but while Algernon is fumbling with the wires of the large ray gun, Ahme bursts into the laboratory, stopping the scientist at gunpoint. Holding his hands up in the air, Foot declares feebly: “MIT was after me, you know. Wanted me to rule the world for them.” As the Beatles attempt to make their escape with Ahme, Algernon finally gets the laser working. But when he hoists up the ray gun and shoots, it instantly blows a fuse. Algernon apologizes: “It’s the wrong plug. If you could just give me five minutes. . . .” The scene closes as Foot watches Ahme back out of the laboratory, still pointing a gun at him, while he holds himself helplessly,

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muttering on about his assistant: “It’s the brain drain. His brain’s draining.” For the rest of the film, Foot and Algernon thus play rival villains to the Kaili-worshipping Clang and his gang of thugs, their frequently murderous attempts to steal the ring from Ringo constantly thwarted by their reliance on inferior British technology and their own bumbling incompetence. Of course, the chief villains in Help! remain the Indian worshippers of the goddess Kaili. But again it is not simply Indian culture or Hindu religion as such that is being parodied in this film but rather the representation of non-Western cultures in the James Bond film series itself. The first three films in the James Bond series that had been released before Help! featured what was often a bewildering alignment of non-Western forces, united only by their animosity toward the West and often enlisting the service of traitorous Westerners themselves. In Dr. No, the German-Chinese Dr. No is assisted by the British Professor Dent, while his secret atomic power station is run by nameless Chinese personnel, and his less skilled criminal operations are executed by nameless black Jamaican locals. In From Russia with Love, the mysterious Ernst Blofeld is aided by the Russian Rosa Klebb and her fellow Russian Kronsteen, both of whom have defected from the Soviet secret service to join the broadly international organization SPECTRE, as well as by the British hired assassin Grant. In Goldfinger, the trans-European Auric Goldfinger conspires for world domination with the Chinese Mr. Ling, while he is loyally attended by the mute Korean Oddjob, who does everything for Goldfinger from knocking Bond unconscious and covering Masterson in gold paint to carrying Goldfinger’s golf clubs and cheating to improve his game score. Although the hero Bond is plainly charged with the defense of the Western world, his numerous foreign enemies do not serve the East alone, or, rather, they do not serve the Communist countries of the Eastern bloc. Setting itself apart from the series of novels and short stories on which it was based, the James Bond film series recast the antagonistic relationship between the Communist East and the democratic West from its first installment onward. During one of the later scenes in Dr. No, the German-Chinese villain explains to Bond that he is an agent of SPECTRE in the service of neither the East nor the West, having himself been rejected by both world powers. In this sense, the film series was somewhat ahead of its time, then, insofar as it challenged the rigid ideological opposition between the Com-

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munist East and the democratic West at what was perhaps the very height of the Cold War during the early 1960s. Even as it continued to rely on the most hackneyed stereotypes of Russians and other eastern Europeans, it nonetheless warned its viewers of a greater threat to both the Communist East and the democratic West. Inviting the Communist East back into the European fold of Western society, the James Bond film series turned its viewers’ attention toward another East, farther East yet, offering an image of the East that was both at once more current and more ancient. This new enemy of the Western world was also its oldest enemy, no longer the threat of communism but rather the threat of what had only recently been named the “Third World”—the newly rising threat of those other Easterners who had been colonized by the European powers but who were now demanding their political, economic, and even military independence from the Western world. It is precisely this representation of the Eastern villain in the James Bond film series that is spoofed in Help! The film’s comical representation of the religious ritual of human sacrifice dedicated to the fictional goddess Kaili, who is “twice as terrible” as the Hindu goddess Kali, as the script tells us, is a parody of the contemporary cinematic representation of the foreign enemy from the East that typified not only the James Bond series itself but also the booming spy-thriller genre at large. What might seem on a first viewing of Help! to be a rote repetition of offensive racial and cultural stereotypes turns out to be a ludicrous send-up of these very stereotypes, a hyperbolic representation of representation. One of the problems with such satirical representations, however, is that they run the risk of simply reiterating the same stereotypes that they set out to parody—a risk that only increases, somewhat paradoxically, the more effectively these stereotypes are mimicked. Help! manages to negotiate this problem by calling attention to its own practice of representation, mainly through its comic sense of absurdity, though not entirely so. In the opening scene of the film depicting the failed human sacrifice to Kaili, it is telling that although Clang, Bhuta, Ahme, and the rest of the assembly are fancifully clothed in what is presumably the ritual attire of Kaili worshippers and her sacrificial victims, they are not wearing any cosmetic or prosthetic makeup to alter their skin color or facial features. Such makeup techniques were still very common in the Western film industry during the 1960s, and they are plainly evident in the early installments of the James Bond

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film series as well as in the roughly contemporary comedy films My Geisha and The Party. These techniques, of course, strike many film viewers today as highly objectionable, more or less comparable to the representation of African Americans by blackface in minstrel shows and films during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Whether the filmmakers of Help! themselves conscientiously objected to these makeup techniques or not—a possibility that seems rather doubtful even to me—the effect of this apparent inconsistency between the Kaili worshippers’ dress and their visible race is to call attention to the performance of the Western actors who are playing the role of the Eastern villains. But there are many more devices in Help! calling attention to its own practice of representation that seem to have been employed quite deliberately on the part of the filmmakers and to much greater comical effect, only a couple of which I will discuss here to make my point. In the opening scene and throughout the rest of the film, Clang, Bhuta, and Ahme all deliver their English dialogue in a mock Indian accent that seems to vaguely signify their Eastern cultural origins rather than accurately reproduce any accent in which English-speaking South Asians themselves might speak. Of course, the Western film industry during the 1960s was rife with actors who spoke in very poorly performed foreign accents, whether in earnest or in jest. Such satirical representations thus all too often simply reiterate the stereotypical Western cinematic representation of non-Western subjects. However, through its comic sense of absurdity Help! exposes the formulaic use of foreign accents in Western films for the representational practice that it is. During one scene in the middle of the film, Clang is sitting on an underground commuter train surrounded by some thugs from his assembly, who are sitting or standing close to him, all in the midst of some more typical British train passengers. Clang’s thugs are wearing black suit jackets, shirts, ties, and bowler hats over their more identifiably Indian attire and red headscarves. Clang speaks to them in a low voice and in a fictional foreign language, presumably an Indian one, apparently instructing them on his plans to steal the sacrificial ring back from Ringo. His loyal male attendant Bhuta emerges from a group of British passengers who are standing nearby, holding on to the train’s support handles as he approaches Clang and his thugs in an effort to listen in on the plans. Clang quickly slaps Bhuta’s arm for affirmation, saying: “Hai?” Looking confused, Bhuta

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responds absentmindedly: “What? Uh, yes, hai.” Clang continues to speak in his language, while Bhuta looks intently from one thug to the next. After another brief moment of confusion, he smiles and explains to them, gesticulating with one of his hands and speaking in his mock Indian accent: “I don’t understand a word. I—I don’t speak the language, you see. Latin, yes, but this Eastern babble, no.” The scene closes as Bhuta walks off toward the exit doors and the rest of the Kaili worshippers on the train stand up to follow him. In the script for Help! this scene slightly varies from the film. Clang speaks to his thugs in the “Hindustani” language, while subtitles are provided in English. Bhuta attempts with some difficulty to read the English subtitles from his place on the train.15 In both the film and the script, what this short scene reveals is that foreign accents in English-language films do not offer direct translations of different languages into English but rather deploy the English language itself to mark the position of the foreigner. In other words, film characters who speak English in a foreign accent are not really speaking another language, not even when they are speaking with each other—an obvious point perhaps, but one that is nonetheless overlooked by many film viewers. Indeed, this scene in Help! serves to remind its viewers that besides Clang’s brief dialogue on the train, the Kaili worshippers actually speak English throughout the entire film albeit with a mock Indian accent, even during their own religious rituals in the Kaili temple. There is another scene in Help! that calls attention more specifically to the Western representation of the East in precisely these terms, prompting a deconstruction of both the East and the West just as effectively as any philosophical or postcolonial text I have discussed in this book so far— and it does so, moreover, with a sense of humor. Earlier in the film, the Beatles make their way to an Indian restaurant named Rajahama in an effort to learn something about the ring that has become stuck on Ringo’s finger, seeking out “the nearest Oriental,” as the occasional narrative captions put it again. They approach an attendant standing on the pavement beside the doorway of the restaurant who is dressed up as a sepoy, wearing a long red jacket with gold trim, white pants, red shoes with pointed toes, a white turban with a gold broach, white gloves, and a sword and sheath. Like Clang, Bhuta, Ahme, and the rest of the Kaili worshippers in the film, he is not wearing any cosmetic or prosthetic makeup to alter his skin color

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or facial features. Ringo holds the ring up to the attendant’s face, saying: “It’s played out anyroad, isn’t it? You know, rings.” The attendant responds genially, nodding his head: “Very nice.” Ringo pushes his hand forward and offers: “It’s yours.” The attendant replies, his thick Cockney accent now becoming clearer: “No—no good to me, mate. My missus wouldn’t wear a ring like that. Ostentatious, that is.” Ringo looks at the other Beatles in surprise and points to the attendant, objecting: “He’s from the West!” The attendant looks around and says: “No, East—Stepney!” Ringo tries again, waving the ring in front of the attendant’s face: “Does this ring mean anything to you?” The attendant makes a guess: “Freemason?” Ringo looks at the restaurant and then back at the attendant, asking in disbelief: “Do you mean you’re all English?” The attendant replies: “Certainly. What are unions for?” But then he quickly checks himself: “No, wait a minute, I tell a lie. We have got one in there, from the mystic East. Or we did have.” He turns and calls: “Hey, Abdul!” Another attendant walks out of the restaurant, wearing a long white jacket with a wide red belt, white pants, red shoes with pointed toes, and a white turban and holding a menu and a cloth napkin over one arm. He answers in what is plainly a workingclass British accent as well: “Yes, darling?” The first attendant asks: “Eh, we did have one, didn’t we? Uh—a lad from the sunnier clime, east of Suez.” The second attendant nods his head in agreement: “Yeah, very nice he was, too. I think he’s still down there, in the coalhole.” Ringo fixes his eyes on the second attendant and extends one of his arms toward the restaurant, while a brief musical flourish on sitar accompanies his gesture. The scene ends as the second attendant leads the Beatles inside the restaurant and the first attendant looks on from his position beside the doorway, courteously smiling at them with a nod. In the script, the name of the restaurant is “Ganesaguts,”16 playing on the name of the Hindu god Ganesa—a detail that was left out of the film, perhaps for the better. In any case, this scene in Help! is particularly noteworthy, I think, for the facility with which it draws together so many of the issues concerning representation that I have been discussing in this chapter over the course of a quick exchange between a few characters. First of all, the Beatles’ expectation in the film that the first Indian they meet will be able to tell them about the sacrificial ring provides a sardonic commentary on the practice of ethnographic representation through which the West produces

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its ostensibly authoritative knowledge of the East. Furthermore, their assumption that the restaurant attendant dressed up as a sepoy must be an Indian himself calls attention to the performative force by which the West generates its image of the East. The salient point, it seems to me, is not that the restaurant attendant deceives the Beatles into believing that he truly comes from the East but rather that it is his performance as a sepoy that constitutes the East as such. His presence at the doorway is an essential part of the authentic experience of the East that Westerners seek when they arrive to dine at the restaurant. It is only the restaurant attendant’s Cockney accent that gives away his Western identity to the Beatles, undercutting what is apparently an otherwise very convincing performance. Film viewers might well wonder whether they would have realized that he was not an Indian himself had he spoken with a mock Indian accent like the Kaili worshippers. Introducing another twist into this hyperbolic scene of representation, however, the Cockney attendant insists that he does actually come from the East—more specifically, from Stepney in the East End of London. Certainly, the contrast between the impoverished and criminally inclined East End of London on one hand and the affluent and highly cultured West End on the other offers a strangely familiar reiteration of the distinction between the East and the West, the Orient and the Occident, Asia and Europe—a reminder of the fundamentally asymmetrical formation of the cardinal directions themselves. It seems only natural, then, that both the English poor and the immigrant population should have made their homes in the East End, notwithstanding the often deadly strife between them. In this sense, the Cockney restaurant attendant in Help! is indeed an Easterner himself— an East Ender, a figure that embodies the poverty, criminality, disease, and degeneration of the East in much the same way that the Kaili worshippers do. Pushing the joke to its limits, he even calls his fellow attendant by an identifiably Eastern name, “Abdul.” The effect of this strategic displacement of the East by the East End on the part of the filmmakers themselves is to put the very concept of the East into play, expanding its range of meaning rather than attempting to reduce it. By the next scene, during which the Beatles do finally meet an Indian restaurant worker who attends the coal furnace in the basement while he stands on his head, film viewers have

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been well prepared for the lampoon of all things Eastern and Western in which Help! so openly revels. But no spoof such as Help! would be complete without some sort of take on the representation of women in the James Bond film series—or, as these women have become commonly known, the “Bond girls.” Another element of the cinematic formula established by the first three films in this series was the British secret agent’s sexual exploitation of the duplicitous women who are variously employed by his foreign enemies. These women are usually foreign to Bond as well, and yet they are always available to him for sexual conquest. It is not any moral agency on their part that leads them to ally themselves with Bond but rather their inherently duplicitous nature that causes them to betray his enemies—once he coaxes them enough, of course, precisely with his sex. This reduction of women to their sexual function is accomplished by some very specific cinematic devices that have become practically synonymous with the James Bond film series. In Dr. No, the opening credit sequence transitions abruptly from its barrage of abstract shapes and colors set to the James Bond theme music to a series of colorful silhouettes of both women and men who are dancing to what is presumably African-Caribbean instrumental percussion music, before the sequence transitions again to the black silhouettes of three blind men walking in a line set to a calypso version of the song “Three Blind Mice.” A more enduring formula for the James Bond opening credits seems to have been struck, however, in From Russia with Love. In the opening credit sequence for this film, the text of the credits themselves is projected onto the body of a belly dancer dimly lit in red, enlarged and distorted by her undulating arms, hands, legs, belly, back, breasts, and buttocks as well as by her veiled face at one point, which she quickly unveils, but only for a split second. In the opening credit sequence for Goldfinger, rather than the text of the credits themselves, moving images from the film are projected onto the backlit body of a woman wearing a gold bikini and covered in gold paint, her eyes closed and her body set still in different poses, while the credits appear around her body in the black space on the screen. This display of women’s bodies either in silhouette or in very dimly lit form during the opening credit sequence would become a staple feature of

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the subsequent films in the James Bond series albeit one with seemingly endless variations, not to mention one of the most instantly recognizable references in cinematic culture. Women are also reduced to their sexual function in the James Bond film series by their suggestive if not obscene names—names that are so blatantly sexual that they cannot even be considered instances of a more refined double entendre. In Dr. No, the final focus of Bond’s wandering sexual attentions is Honey Ryder, a name that alludes to a woman who “rides” or straddles her partner during sexual intercourse, while in Goldfinger the ultimate target of Bond’s affections is Pussy Galore, a name with a meaning so obvious that it does not require any explanation on my part. When Bond first encounters each of these women in their respective film appearances, he comments on her name in some way as if to ensure that more innocent viewers do not miss the dirty joke. In Dr. No, when Bond asks Honey Ryder for her name, she tells him: “Ryder.” He presses the question: “Ryder what?” She answers: “Honey Ryder.” Bond looks at her with amused surprise, and she asks somewhat coyly: “What’s so funny about it?” He replies, playing along: “Nothing. It’s a very pretty name.” In Goldfinger, when Bond asks Pussy Galore who she is, she announces very plainly: “My name is Pussy Galore.” After taking a long pause, he says to himself: “I must be dreaming.” One last device that is employed in all of the first three films in the James Bond series is the final scene before the closing credit sequence, during which a satisfying resolution is provided for Bond’s adventures by showing his sexual conquest of the welcoming woman herself, thus completing what the opening credit sequence began. Dr. No ends with a shot of Bond and Honey Ryder embracing and kissing each other on a smallengine boat adrift in the Caribbean Sea, From Russia with Love with a shot of Bond and Tatiana Romanova doing the same on another small-engine boat taking them through the canals of Venice, and Goldfinger with a shot of Bond and Pussy Galore doing it again in the grassy woodlands of Kentucky. Yet not all the women in the James Bond films are treated to such a happy ending. In the first three films of the series, while most of the women with whom Bond has sexual relations during his adventures are foreign to him, their visible race also performs an important function in determining the particular sort of end to which they will come. In Dr. No, Bond sleeps with the Chinese-Jamaican Miss Taro, an undercover agent in the service

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of Dr. No, named in truly bad taste after the root vegetable that was introduced into the Caribbean by Chinese settlers—and who, incidentally, is played by a British actress who does not conceal her British accent but who does wear cosmetic makeup to alter her skin color and facial features. Bond arranges to have Miss Taro arrested, however, immediately following their liaison. As they step outside of her house together, he pushes her into the back seat of a police car that is waiting there for her. She spits in his face through the open window, and the car drives away. In contrast, Bond befriends and rescues the white, blond-haired Honey Ryder, an innocent local raised though not born in Jamaica who collects shells for a living. In From Russia with Love, when Bond helps to repel an attack on a small Turkish Gypsy village, he is thanked by the village chief, who offers him two Gypsy women for his pleasure overnight. Bond later sleeps with and ultimately wins over the white, blond-haired Russian Tatiana Romanova, an undercover agent for the Soviet secret service who is unwittingly being manipulated by SPECTRE but who ends up falling in love with Bond and even saving his life. In Goldfinger, Bond seduces the white, blond-haired British Jill Masterson, Goldfinger’s paid escort who is killed after she sleeps with Bond in his hotel room. Her death has an unusually distressing effect on him, for which he is sharply reprimanded by his superior, “M.” Bond goes on to sleep with and ultimately win over the white, blond-haired, British Pussy Galore as well, the leader of an American team of female pilots who works for Goldfinger but who turns against him in the end. Although the racial profile of the “Bond girls” would gradually change over the course of the series to include dark-haired white women as well as nonwhite women—it is difficult to say whether for better or worse—in these early James Bond films it certainly seems that it is only the white, blond-haired women who are either capable or worthy of moral redemption, albeit through the intermediary of their carnal desires. In this sense, Help! appears to have been perhaps too progressive in comparison to the film series that it was meant to spoof. It is the blackhaired and supposedly Indian women in this film who prove their duplicity by betraying Clang and his gang of thugs, eventually siding with the Beatles against their fellow Kaili worshippers. Ahme reveals her disloyalty to Clang very early in the film. In the scene immediately following the opening credit sequence, Clang discusses his plans to travel to England to

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steal back the ring from Ringo with his attendants Bhuta and Ahme. Showing herself the more competent of his attendants, she anticipates Clang’s own plans, handing him his plane tickets in a BOAC booklet before he even asks for them. In the middle of their discussion, though, Clang looks toward both of his attendants and calls out: “Bhuta!” Bhuta responds with devotion: “You ask of me, master?” Clang states emphatically: “Obedience and love.” Bhuta replies, visibly fawning with the requisite obedience and love: “This is so.” Meanwhile, Ahme turns away from both of them and grimaces in disgust. Clang then calls out her name: “Ahme!” She turns back around to face him and says sweetly: “This is so.” Moreover, Ahme soon reveals her own attraction to the Beatles—or rather to Paul in particular. Just a few scenes later, when Clang is posing as a jeweler from Harrods, he approaches Paul and attempts to bribe him with some gold nuggets. But Ahme interrupts their conversation, smiling and winking at Paul. As Paul walks away from them, Ahme explains to Clang in her mock Indian accent: “Is not the Beatle with the ring, he!” Overhearing her, Paul turns around and asks: “Aren’t I?” She replies, giggling and turning her face away from him shyly: “No—unfortunately. . . .” Paul frowns and walks away again toward the black Rolls Royce that is waiting by the curb. Once all the Beatles have seated themselves inside the car, it pulls off as Ahme gazes closely at Paul in the back seat through the closed window, coyly drawing her veil down over her head. Over the remaining course of the film, Ahme, who is dressed in increasingly fanciful costumes as well as the most fashionable clothing and swimwear in the “mod” style of the period, goes on to rescue Ringo and the rest of the Beatles from numerous attempts made on their lives not only by Clang and his thugs but also by Foot and Algernon. Indeed, at one point during one of her earliest rescue efforts in the film, wearing a flowing gown ornamented with gold, jewels, and feathers and a large matching headdress, she turns to the camera and openly announces her duplicity to the film viewers: “I am not what I seem.” Help! thus establishes Ahme’s duplicitous character by playing on both her exotic Eastern origins and her womanly sex. In another scene later in the film, Ahme is sitting on one side of a couch in the Beatles’ shared apartment, sporting a fitted pink jacket, tapered pink pants, and pink leather boots, with her pink turban-style hat set down on the coffee table in front of her, while George is sitting on the other side of

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the couch. As the Beatles perform one of their songs for her, George tries to woo her away from Paul with a series of ineffectual gestures, while Paul winks at her, and she timidly smiles back. As soon as the song is finished, Ahme pulls a large syringe with unknown contents out of her black leather purse, and George faints at the sight of it. As John gets up from his armchair and lays his guitar down, he says to Ahme: “Now see what you’ve done with your filthy Eastern ways!” She strongly protests: “No! It is Clang, the high priest, who is filthy in his Eastern ways!” John sits down between Ahme and George on the couch and replies to her with an oddly affected lisp: “How do we know you’re not just as filthy and sent by him to nick the ring by being filthy, when you’ve lulled us with your filthy Eastern ways?” Paul leans in with his elbow on the arm of the couch next to Ahme and asks with some interest: “What filthy ways are these?” However, unlike the duplicitous women in the first three films of the James Bond series, Ahme never embraces or kisses any of the Beatles in Help!, let alone sleeps with any of them. Although it is Ahme’s character that is most obviously intended to spoof the role of the “Bond girl,” the sacrificial victim herself also goes on to prove her duplicity by betraying her fellow Kaili worshippers and revealing her attraction to the Beatles. In the opening scene of the film depicting the failed human sacrifice, the disappearance of the ring from the victim’s own finger remains a mystery. It is quite some time before film viewers learn that Ringo received the ring as a gift from one of his fans. During the sequence when the Beatles visit the Indian restaurant in their search for the “nearest Oriental,” Clang and his thugs pose as restaurant attendants in their ongoing attempts to steal back the ring from Ringo. Ringo explains to Clang in the vernacular of the day that a young Eastern woman sent him the ring, holding his hand up for Clang to take a closer look: “I got it from this Eastern bird—lady—in a fan letter. I get all sorts.” A little later in the film, during the scene when Ahme is sitting on the couch in the Beatles’ apartment, she tells them that the sacrificial victim is her sister. Film viewers might wonder, then, whether the victim sent Ringo the ring because she really was a Beatles fan or because she wanted to save herself from being sacrificed, perhaps in secret league with her sister, Ahme. In the script for Help!, however, it is revealed very early that the sacrificial victim is indeed a Beatles fan—or, more specifically, a fan of Ringo’s. In the opening

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credit sequence of the film, as the black-and-white footage of the Beatles is being projected on the screen in the Kaili temple, she watches the Beatles with what certainly appears to be desire. In the script, her excitement over watching Ringo in particular is spelled out in more detail: “The BEATLES are projected [in] BLACK AND WHITE on a movie screen erected in the Temple of Kaili. CLANG views the screen—BHUTA is his faithful assistant and hands him darts which he flings at RINGO on the screen. The VICTIM lies where she was placed on the table of blood and utters pip pips of joy and occasional yelps of ‘Ringo.’ ”17 The sacrificial victim’s contravention of the religious ritual of human sacrifice dedicated to Kaili by her act of dedicated fanship toward Ringo himself thus provides the motivating force for the entire plot of Help! Furthermore, although the sacrificial victim does not appear very extensively in the film, there is one short scene in which she does appear that continues the playful deconstruction of the East and the West begun during the scene outside the Indian restaurant earlier in the film. The scene in which Ahme tells the Beatles that the sacrificial victim is her sister abruptly cuts to a green screen with the caption “End of Part One,” spoken aloud by a man’s voice in a rather proper British accent. This shot immediately cuts to a blue screen with the caption “Intermission,” spoken aloud by the same voice. A short scene of about five seconds follows, featuring sped-up footage of the Beatles frolicking in the English woods. This scene then cuts to an orange screen with the caption “End of Intermission,” spoken aloud by the same voice again. This shot immediately cuts to a red screen with the caption “Part Two,” spoken aloud by the same voice yet again. Another short scene of about ten seconds follows, this time featuring a clean and tastefully decorated bathroom. As the camera zooms in on the mirror above the sink, the reflection shows two women in the bathroom. The sacrificial victim is sitting in a tub full of water without any clothes on and with her back, the profile of her face, and her long, black, braided hair visible to the camera, her skin covered all over in red paint. Another woman, wearing an orange and brown sari-style silk dress with silver stitchwork, is sitting on the edge of the tub, her dark-brown hair combed up in a large bun, as she scrubs the victim’s back with a very large sponge. Presumably the mother of both the victim and her sister, Ahme, she interrogates her daughter while she tries to wash the paint off her back, her thick Cockney accent reminis-

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cent of the restaurant attendant from Stepney in the East End: “Where you been, eh? You been up that temple again, haven’t you? You’re as bad as your sister, coming home from work all hours and all colors!” The scene cuts to a blue screen with the caption “End of Part Two,” spoken aloud by the same proper British man’s voice. This shot immediately cuts to another blue screen with the caption “Part Three / Later That Evening,” spoken aloud by the same voice again. The greater part of the film then proceeds from this point. Besides offering a notable precursor to the mock intermission break that Monty Python would include in their second film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, a full decade later in 1975, this fast-paced sequence in Help! further displaces the concept of the East by associating it with the East End of London, transposing the intergenerational conflict between mothers and daughters from one Eastern culture to the next. In a deliberate play on this conflict, it seems that Ahme and her sister’s mother, an Easterner herself, is more worried by her daughters’ frequenting the Kaili temple than by their following the Beatles in any way. Far from reaffirming the various racial, cultural, and sexual stereotypes that undoubtedly motivate the James Bond film series, then, Help! puts these stereotypes into play only to poke fun at them. It does not simply represent Indian culture or Hindu religion so much as it represents the representation of non-Western cultures in Western film. Neither an ethnocentric representation of the colonial imagination nor an innocent representation of contemporary youth culture, Help! is critically engaged in a hyperbolic practice of representation that calls into question the very categories of East and West. Yet despite the constant indications given throughout the film that it is indeed a parody—just some of which I have attempted to describe in this chapter, albeit at the risk of ruining the pleasure of watching the film itself—it remains entirely possible that the film’s viewers may miss the point that it is a parody, as many of its critics seem precisely to have done. After all, Help! is a musical, or, more to the point, it is a Beatles film that ultimately owes its continued viewership to their numerous musical performances in it rather than to its satirical representation of Western heroes, Eastern villains, and women who are never what they seem. For however crucial this satirical element is to a fuller appreciation of the film, most if not all of the Beatles’ musical performances in Help! may be viewed on their own easily enough apart from the rest of the film, as the

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filmmakers themselves surely intended. Moreover, the seven songs that the Beatles wrote and recorded for Help! are completely indistinguishable from any of their other songs written and recorded during this period in terms of both their lyrical content and their musical arrangement. Even the lyrics to the title track “Help!” do not bear any relation to the film beyond the title itself, while the brief instrumental introduction featuring sitar was added to this track only on the U.S. soundtrack album release after it had already been recorded, presumably at the request of the record company. Although the director and screenwriters of Help! certainly set out to spoof the James Bond film series and all of its attendant stereotypes quite deliberately, it thus remains a somewhat contentious matter as to what extent the Beatles themselves were let in on the joke or to what extent they got it. In any case, I do not mean to suggest in this chapter that the Beatles’ initial encounter with Indian music and religion during the making of this film determined in some prefigurative sense or even established the tenor of their subsequent musical and spiritual endeavors with Ravi Shankar and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whether these later cross-cultural collaborations are considered more respectable or not. While both George Harrison’s and John Lennon’s interest in Indian music and religion over the next few years deeply inflected their songwriting and even their guitar playing to different degrees, bassist Paul McCartney’s and drummer Ringo Starr’s less keen interest does not seem to have affected their songwriting or playing in any significant way. Furthermore, while Lennon soon became disenchanted with Indian music and religion after the Beatles’ extended retreat with the Maharishi in Rishikesh, India, in early 1968, Harrison stopped learning to play sitar later that same year but went on to establish a working relationship with Shankar that would last for the rest of his life. He would collaborate with Shankar on various musical projects over the course of his career as a solo artist and as a record and film producer, including the documentary film Raga: A Film Journey Into the Soul of India; the multimedia relief effort The Concert for Bangla Desh, consisting of a benefit concert, a single release, a live album recording, and a concert film; the three albums Shankar Family and Friends, Ravi Shankar’s Music Festival from India, and Chants of India; the Dark Horse concert tour; the track “Friar Park” on the Ravi Shankar Project’s album Tana Mana; and Shankar’s compilation

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box set In Celebration. Harrison also edited and contributed the foreword to Shankar’s second autobiography, Raga Mala: The Autobiography of Ravi Shankar. Meanwhile, in a final twist on the hyperbolic representation of representation, McCartney would go on to become part of the lucrative James Bond film franchise himself, contributing the theme song for the eighth installment in the series, Live and Let Die, released in 1973. The track was cowritten with his wife, Linda McCartney, and recorded with his new group, Paul McCartney and Wings, featuring an orchestral accompaniment that reproduced the instantly recognizable musical sound of the same film series that Help! had lampooned just a few years earlier. All this is to say that whether Help! either anticipated or compromised the Beatles’ own widely celebrated transcultural engagement with Indian classical music and Hindu religious practices that followed it, the film itself operates by a performative politics of representation to dismantle the very concept of the West. In this sense, I would even suggest that this film’s parody of both Eastern and Western culture offers a more promising strategy for an effective deconstruction of the West than any discourse on “crosscultural” collaboration can provide. And yet these strategies do not necessarily preclude each other. Harrison’s highly conspicuous incorporation of Hindu chanting and iconography into his solo music and album artwork shows his sincere devotion to these religious practices as well as his playful sense of humor toward them. Besides, the hyperbolic practice of representation that I am advocating is not at all limited to parody, satire, spoofs, or lampoons. All practices of representation that operate on the strategies of repetition and displacement, reiteration and defamiliarization, are hyperbolic, which is also to say that all practices of representation are hyperbolic insofar as these strategies remain operative even within the most strictly logical functions of representation. We might say that representation as such is originally or fundamentally hyperbolic, provided that all the metaphysical formulations in this sentence are struck through: “originally or fundamentally,” “as such,” “is,” and—why not—“representation.” As I take it, the task of postcolonial theory is thus not to abolish representation in the name of difference but to recover the interplay of identity and difference within all practices of representation. Rather than laying the perpetual charge of cultural appropriation against the West, the task is to draw out

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the subversive force of depropriation that conditions all forms of cultural communication and transmission, both Western and non-Western. To say that there is no West, then, is to say not merely that the Western tradition itself has both appropriated and been appropriated by many other cultural traditions over the course of its historical formation but, more to the point, that it has never been able to fend off its own depropriation—a depropriation, of course, that was never its own to begin with.

CONCLUSION

THE NUMEROUS DECLARATIONS ON THE END OF THE WEST that have recently been circulating within various public discourses concern what we might call the cultural, political, and economic ends of the West all at once—presuming, of course, that we still subscribe to this classical account of the ternary structure of society, if we ever did in the first place. Although my argument in this book is perhaps more specifically concerned with the cultural ends of the West, I would suggest that it broaches the political and economic ends of the West as well.1 The proliferation of newly independent nation-states following the withdrawal of the European imperial powers from their colonial territories over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially after World War II, has prompted many such declarations on the end of the West in terms of its overtly colonial exercise of political domination, while the emergence of rapidly expanding markets in some of these same nation-states accompanied by the increasingly frequent financial crises of the European and American market systems during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has prompted many similar declarations on the end of the West in terms of its more covert neocolonial exercise of economic domination.

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And yet whether these political and economic ends are hailed as harbingers of the imminent downfall of Western civilization or mourned on behalf of this dying civilization itself, such declarations fail to call into question the continued dominance of the very political form of the nation-state as well as of the economic form of market capitalism, both of which together provide what is arguably the most lasting legacy of European colonialism around the world. It is in this sense, once again, that the end of the West has always been the final goal of Western civilization—a civilization determined to eradicate itself in the process of bestowing itself on the rest of the world, the inevitable globalization of liberal democracy constituting its greatest testament of all. The apparent challenge to Western ethnocentrism that these declarations pose, then, harbors a more insidious form of ethnocentrism by which the cultural, political, and economic domination of the West is ultimately vindicated in the name of a universal humanism. In this book, I have argued for the end of the West in another sense—an end of the West that would effectively dismantle the teleological concept of the West itself, an end that would call into question all beginnings as well as all ends. Calling into question the political and economic ends of the West would thus entail asking not only whether the nation-state and market capitalism are “culturally appropriate” for the non-Western world but also whether these political and economic forms are proper to the West as such. For it seems that the political and economic subjects of the West have not unilaterally fared much better under the nation-state and market capitalism than their non-Western counterparts have done, these institutions having produced rather disastrous results wherever they have been established, whether within Europe and its colonial settler societies or not. In other words, there is nothing innately “Western” about the nation-state or market capitalism, any more than there is anything innately “Western” about philosophy or science. All of these cultural, political, and economic forms alike are susceptible to the force of depropriation, for better or worse, regardless of their particular historical origins. What I am suggesting, then, is that my argument on the end of the West warrants a critical interrogation of both the nation-state and market capitalism rather than a congratulatory salute to the rise of non-Western liberal democracies. Yet this interrogation cannot rely on the concept of the West—even if this concept is employed in the discourse of negative teleology precisely in order to indict Western

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civilization itself—without promising to preserve yet another legacy of European colonialism. The “idea” of the West thus has very “real” effects on the world, although these effects are much more complicated than the currently prevalent discourse on the end of the West seems to allow. First among these effects, of course, is the discursive production of a historical “reality” that is supposed to have existed before the emergence of this discourse itself and that continues to exist outside it. Yet the concept of the West is not simply a misrepresentation of some preexistent historical reality or an intricate web of lies that could easily be brushed away by any extradiscursive form of truth. Rather, it is the performative force of this concept that has generated the historical reality of the West, as it were, and that sustains it with its discursive repetition. In other words, the grand Western tradition that joins ancient Greek and modern European civilization together did not predate but was instead manufactured by the cultural, political, and economic institutions of European colonialism. To declare the end of the West, however boldly so, without attending more carefully to the ongoing discursive production of the Western tradition, then, is to remain complicit with colonial as well as neocolonial discourse. Another, no less substantial effect of the concept of the West is its ideological organization of global power relations into an essentially binary structure. This reductive polarization between East and West not only smoothes over what was the very uneven consolidation of European colonial power around the world over a long period of more than four centuries but also greatly oversimplifies the circuitous operations of contemporary European and American neocolonial power. Colonial domination was not the inevitable consequence of the philosophical, technological, or instrumental rationality of the West, whether it was first born in ancient Greece or in modern Europe itself. Rather, it was the complex outcome of a heterogenous assemblage of cultural, political, economic, military, technological, biological, and ecological vectors. Furthermore, colonial and now neocolonial domination could not have been established and maintained without the strategic collaboration of the Western powers with various non-Western polities, corporations, and other interests who themselves were and remain heavily invested in the discursive polarization between East and West, North and South, First World and Third World.

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I am quite happy to admit, however, that the task of dismantling the West that I have taken up in this book is much more modest in its scope than these summary remarks on the “real” political and economic effects of the concept of the West itself might seem to indicate. Far from mounting a case against contemporary European and American neocolonial hegemony in all its forms—a very worthy task, indeed, that is better left for more qualified experts to take on—I have attempted only to demonstrate that the concept of the West continues to thrive today even within many of the most radical discourses that have been directed against this same hegemony. Finally, then, to dismantle or deconstruct the teleological concept of the West along the lines that I have suggested is not to purge or remove the term from our vocabulary altogether. For while we may no longer be able to say that the history of the world follows the course of the sun from East to West, we can still say that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. While we may no longer be able to say that philosophical rationality first emerged within the Western tradition, we can still say that ancient Greece lay on the western side of the Aegean Sea. And while we may no longer be able to say that language has been reduced to its discursive function of representation in the West, we can still say that Germany and France are part of western Europe, albeit on condition that this proper name is invoked to mark what is a mutable and often volatile geopolitical formation rather than a simple geographical fact as such. Yet if it seems that even this modest proposal of mine is too rigid or demanding for an effective deconstruction of the West, we can always turn to the discourse of negative teleology once more, but this time in order to displace the concept of the West itself by its own excessive repetition or performative force, to indict the West on the charge of fabricating its own history—all of which is to say, of course, that there is no West. Over the course of this book, perhaps I have not done anything else.

NOTES

Part I: The End of the West 1.

This heliotropic association between the West and the concept of the end itself—as both “endpoint” and “end goal”—received what is perhaps its most blatantly ethnocentric articulation in G. W. F. Hegel’s work The Philosophy of History, the second edition of which was published posthumously in 1840 and based primarily on the course of lectures that Hegel delivered in 1822–1823 and 1824–1825. Notwithstanding the apparent inconsistency of his own argument, Hegel claims that the history of the world follows the course of the sun, beginning in the East and ending in the West: “The History of the World travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning. The History of the World has an East țĮIJ௘’ ਥȟȠȤȒȞ; (the term East in itself is entirely relative), for although the Earth forms a sphere, History performs no circle round it, but has on the contrary a determinate East, viz., Asia. Here rises the outward physical Sun, and in the West it sinks down: here consentaneously rises the Sun of self-consciousness, which diffuses a nobler brilliance. The History of the World is the discipline of the uncontrolled natural will, bringing it into obedience to a Universal principle and conferring subjective freedom. The East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free; the Greek and Roman world, that some are free; the German World

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knows that All are free. The first political form therefore which we observe in History, is Despotism, the second Democracy and Aristocracy, the third Monarchy” (The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree [Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2004], 103–4, emphasis in original). This heliotropic association between the West and the concept of the end has endured well into the twentieth century and beyond, entering popular literary culture in conjunction with nineteenth-century philological discourse. In J. R. R. Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings, the much renowned epic fantasy novel that was published in 1954–1955, the end of the Third Age is marked by the departure of the Elves of the High Kindred or the High Elves from Middleearth to the Undying Lands of Aman the Blessed, which lies beyond the Great Sea in the Uttermost West (The Fellowship of the Ring [London: HarperCollins, 2007], 3, 9, 104, 318; The Return of the King [London: HarperCollins, 2007], 1354, 1357). The personification of the sun in the High Elves themselves is attested by one of Tolkien’s characters in the novel, Galadriel the Lady of Lórien, who concedes their common fate in decidedly heliotropic terms: “Lothlórien will fade. . . . I will diminish, and go into the West” (Tolkien, Fellowship, 475–76).

1. The Black Athena Debate 1.

2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

Martin Bernal, “Black Athena: The African and Levantine Roots of Greece,” in “African Presence in Early Europe,” ed. Ivan Van Sertima, special issue of Journal of African Civilizations 7, no. 2 (1985): 66–82; “Black Athena Denied: The Tyranny of Germany Over Greece,” Comparative Criticism 8 (1986): 3–69; Chinese Socialism to 1907 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976). Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 1; subsequent volume and page number citations to this work are given parenthetically in the text. Christopher Spencer, dir., Black Athena, VHS (California Newsreel, 1991). Molly Myerowitz Levine, “The Challenge of Black Athena to Classics Today,” in “The Challenge of ‘Black Athena,’ ” ed. Molly Myerowitz Levine, special issue of Arethusa 22, no. 1 (1989): 9. Ibid., 15, 14. Martin Bernal, “Black Athena and the APA,” in Levine, “The Challenge of ‘Black Athena,’ ” 18. Ibid., 17, 30; Levine, “Challenge of Black Athena to Classics Today,” 15.

1.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

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Levine, “Challenge of Black Athena to Classics Today,” 7–8. Martin Bernal, Cadmean Letters: The Transmission of the Alphabet to the Aegean and Further West Before 1400 B.C. (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1990). Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 2: The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 2; subsequent volume and page number citations to this work are given parenthetically in the text. Bertrand Morin, dir., Who Was Cleopatra?, VHS (Films for the Humanities and Sciences, 1993). Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers, preface to Black Athena Revisited, ed. Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), ix, xi. Mary R. Lefkowitz, “Ancient History, Modern Myths,” in Lefkowitz and Rogers, Black Athena Revisited, 14. John Baines, “The Aims and Methods of Black Athena,” in Lefkowitz and Rogers, Black Athena Revisited, 30. David O’Connor, “Egypt and Greece: The Bronze Age Evidence,” in Lefkowitz and Rogers, Black Athena Revisited, 61. Frank J. Yurco, “Black Athena: An Egyptological Review,” in Lefkowitz and Rogers, Black Athena Revisited, 82. Kathryn A. Bard, “Ancient Egyptians and the Issue of Race,” in Lefkowitz and Rogers, Black Athena Revisited, 111. Frank M. Snowden Jr., “Bernal’s ‘Blacks’ and the Afrocentrists,” in Lefkowitz and Rogers, Black Athena Revisited, 127. C. Loring Brace, with David P. Tracer, Lucia Allen Yaroch, John Robb, Kari Brandt, and A. Russell Nelson, “Clines and Clusters Versus ‘Race’: A Test in Ancient Egypt and the Case of a Death on the Nile,” in Lefkowitz and Rogers, Black Athena Revisited, 156. Sarah P. Morris, “The Legacy of Black Athena,” in Lefkowitz and Rogers, Black Athena Revisited, 168. Jay H. Jasanoff and Alan Nussbaum, “Word Games: The Linguistic Evidence in Black Athena,” in Lefkowitz and Rogers, Black Athena Revisited, 178. Robert Palter, “Black Athena, Afrocentrism, and the History of Science,” in Lefkowitz and Rogers, Black Athena Revisited, 214. Emily T. Vermeule, “The World Turned Upside Down,” in Lefkowitz and Rogers, Black Athena Revisited, 278.

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24. John E. Coleman, “Did Egypt Shape the Glory That Was Greece?,” in Lefkowitz and Rogers, Black Athena Revisited, 291. 25. Lawrence A. Tritle, “Black Athena: Vision or Dream of Greek Origins?,” in Lefkowitz and Rogers, Black Athena Revisited, 328. 26. Edith Hall, “When Is a Myth Not a Myth? Bernal’s ‘Ancient Model,’ ” in Lefkowitz and Rogers, Black Athena Revisited, 346. 27. Robert Palter, “Eighteenth-Century Historiography in Black Athena,” in Lefkowitz and Rogers, Black Athena Revisited, 392. 28. Robert E. Norton, “The Tyranny of Germany Over Greece? Bernal, Herder, and the German Appropriation of Greece,” in Lefkowitz and Rogers, Black Athena Revisited, 410. 29. Richard Jenkyns, “Bernal and the Nineteenth Century,” in Lefkowitz and Rogers, Black Athena Revisited, 419–20. 30. Mario Liverani, “The Bathwater and the Baby,” in Lefkowitz and Rogers, Black Athena Revisited, 425. 31. Guy MacLean Rogers, “Multiculturalism and the Foundations of Western Civilization,” in Lefkowitz and Rogers, Black Athena Revisited, 443. 32. Guy MacLean Rogers, “Quo Vadis?,” in Lefkowitz and Rogers, Black Athena Revisited, 453. 33. Lefkowitz and Rogers, preface to Black Athena Revisited, xii. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., xi–xiii. 36. Rogers, “Quo Vadis?,” 447–48, 448, 448–52. 37. Mary R. Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York: Basic Books, 1996), and History Lesson: A Race Odyssey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 38. Lefkowitz, “Ancient History,” 5; see also 14–15, 21–22. 39. Freud first tells the old story of the kettle during a discussion of one of his own dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams. He explains that in the logic of the dream multiple devices may be mobilized in order to fulfill a single wish, even if these devices undermine each other. Freud thus compares the dream to “the defence offered by the man accused by his neighbour of returning a kettle to him in a damaged condition: in the first place the kettle wasn’t damaged at all, in the second it already had a hole in it when he borrowed it, and in the third he had never borrowed a kettle from his neighbour. But so much the better: if only one of these three defences is acknowledged to hold good, the man has

1.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

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to be acquitted” (The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. Joyce Crick [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999], 95–96). Rogers, “Quo Vadis?,” 451. Ibid., 450–51. Ibid., 451. Ibid. Lefkowitz, “Ancient History,” 5. Lefkowitz and Rogers, preface to Black Athena Revisited, xi. Ibid., xi; Lefkowitz, “Ancient History,” 13. Lefkowitz, “Ancient History,” 12. Rogers, “Quo Vadis?,” 449. Lefkowitz, “Ancient History,” 5. Rogers, “Quo Vadis?,” 449, 450. Lefkowitz and Rogers, preface to Black Athena Revisited, xii; Lefkowitz, “Ancient History,” 17. Lefkowitz and Rogers, preface to Black Athena Revisited, xii–xiii; Lefkowitz, “Ancient History,” 6, 20. Lefkowitz and Rogers, preface to Black Athena Revisited, xi. Rogers, “Quo Vadis?,” 450. Ibid. Lefkowitz, “Ancient History,” 19. Lefkowitz and Rogers, preface to Black Athena Revisited, xii; Lefkowitz, “Ancient History,” 19. Lefkowitz, “Ancient History,” 19–20; Rogers, “Quo Vadis?,” 453. Rogers, “Quo Vadis?,” 448. Ibid., 448, 452–53. Lefkowitz and Rogers, preface to Black Athena Revisited, xii; Rogers, “Quo Vadis?,” 448. Rogers, “Quo Vadis?,” 448–49. Lefkowitz and Rogers, preface to Black Athena Revisited, xii; Rogers, “Quo Vadis?,” 448. Rogers, “Quo Vadis?,” 448. Lefkowitz, “Ancient History,” 20, 21. Lefkowitz and Rogers, preface to Black Athena Revisited, xii; Lefkowitz, “Ancient History,” 20, 21. Lefkowitz, “Ancient History,” 21; see also Rogers, “Quo Vadis?,” 449.

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68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81.

82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

87.

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Rogers, “Quo Vadis?,” 452. Ibid. Lefkowitz, “Ancient History,” 5. Ibid., 5–6. Ibid., 15–16. Rogers, “Quo Vadis?,” 448. Wim M. J. van Binsbergen, ed., “Black Athena: Ten Years After,” special issue of Talanta 28–29 (1997); Jacques Berlinerblau, Heresy in the University: The Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1999). Martin Bernal, Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to His Critics, ed. David Chioni Moore (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 1; subsequent page citations are given parenthetically in the text. Liverani, “Bathwater,” 421. Ibid., 421, 425. Ibid., 422–23. Ibid., 423, 424, 427. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 3: The Linguistic Evidence (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 583, xv; subsequent volume and page citations to this work are given parenthetically in the text. Wim M. J. van Binsbergen, ed., Black Athena Comes of Age: Towards a Constructive Re-assessment (Berlin: LIT, 2011); Daniel Orrells, Gurminder K. Bhambra, and Tessa Roynon, eds., African Athena: New Agendas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Martin Bernal, Geography of a Life (Bloomington, Ind.: Xlibris, 2012). Bernal, “Black Athena and the APA,” 25. Ibid., 23. Bernal, Cadmean Letters, 2–3, 53–54. Although both Bernal’s afterword to African Athena and his autobiography Geography of a Life were written after he had completed the third volume of Black Athena, he does not critically attend to the concept of roots as such in either one of these texts. Bernal, “Black Athena and the APA,” 24, emphasis in original.

2.

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Part II: From Teleology to Negative Teleology 1.

2. 3.

According to Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, there are two types of relations between linguistic terms, the syntagmatic and the associative: “The syntagmatic relation is in praesentia. It is based on two or more terms that occur in an effective series. Against this, the associative relation unites terms in absentia in a potential mnemonic series” (Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, in collaboration with Albert Riedlinger, trans. Wade Baskin [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966], 123). Martin Heidegger, “Overcoming Metaphysics,” in The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 85. Jacques Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 121–23, emphasis in original.

2. The Phenomenological Turn 1.

2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 3 n. 1; subsequent page citations are given parenthetically in the text. Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity,” in Crisis of European Sciences, 292; subsequent page citations are given parenthetically in the text. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), xvii. Martin Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 55. Ibid. Martin Heidegger, “Time and Being,” in On Time and Being, 2. Ibid., 24. Heidegger, “End of Philosophy,” 61, 73, 66. Heidegger, “Time and Being,” 4. Heidegger, “End of Philosophy,” 61. Ibid., 64. Ibid., 64–66, emphasis in original. Ibid., 71–72. Ibid., 55–56. Heidegger, “Time and Being,” 7, 2.

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16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Ibid., 7. Heidegger, “End of Philosophy,” 57. Ibid., 57–59. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 65, 66, 60–61, 69, 70 n. 5. Heidegger, “Time and Being,” 24. Heidegger, “End of Philosophy,” 70. Ibid., 71. Ibid. Ibid., 56. Heidegger, “Time and Being,” 8–9. Heidegger, “End of Philosophy,” 60. Heidegger, “Time and Being,” 7.

1.

See Emmanuel Levinas, “Signification and Sense,” in Humanism of the Other, trans. Nidra Poller (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 9–44, and “The Trace of the Other,” trans. Alphonso Lingis, in Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 345–59. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 42. Levinas, “Signification and Sense,” 9, emphasis in original; subsequent page citations are given parenthetically in the text. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 42–101; “On Forgiveness,” trans. Michael Hughes, in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (New York: Routledge, 2001), 25–60. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 83, emphasis in original. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 15, 14–15. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, trans. PascaleAnne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 7, 6–7.

3. The Ethical Turn

2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

3.

8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

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Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 48, emphasis in original; subsequent page citations are given parenthetically in the text. Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 153. In a translator’s note, Samuel Weber provides a very pertinent discussion on the translation of Derrida’s French term mondialatinisation by the English term globalatinization, which is, for better or worse, based on the common translation of mondialisation by globalization and the attendant shift in emphasis from the concept of the world (Fr. monde) or worldliness to that of the globe or globality (in Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 50 n. 7). Derrida, “On Forgiveness,” 32. Edmund Husserl, “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity,” in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 273. Jacques Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 136. Derrida, “On Forgiveness,” 34, 27–28, 35, 44, 45, 34, 37, emphasis in original. Ibid., 31. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 28–31. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, rev. ed., trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), lxxxix. Ibid., 90. Derrida, “On Forgiveness,” 42. Ibid., 43. Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences, 16. Husserl, “Philosophy,” 275; Martin Heidegger, “Time and Being,” in On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 7. Levinas, “Signification and Sense,” 37; Derrida, “On Forgiveness,” 31. Husserl, “Philosophy,” 299, 285.

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Part III: From Continental Philosophy to Postcolonial Theory 1.

2.

3.

4.

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 42; subsequent page citations are given parenthetically in the text. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 29; subsequent page citations are given parenthetically in the text. Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 165. Michel Foucault, “The Return of Morality,” trans. Thomas Levin and Isabelle Lorenz, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 250.

4. The Critique of Representation 1.

An extended excerpt from Said’s forthcoming book was published in the spring 1977 issue of the Georgia Review under the title “Orientalism,” comprising two parts, “Imaginative Geography and Its Representations: Orientalizing the Oriental” and “Projects.” This excerpt was republished the following year as the second and third parts of the first chapter of the book Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient under the same titles, although the subtitle “Orientalizing the Oriental” was italicized in the book. The book Orientalism reprinted the excerpt “Orientalism” almost verbatim except for the inclusion of English translations of some citations in French and other minor copyediting revisions; the deletion of the introductory footnote to the excerpt; and the addition of some bibliographic notes, two paragraphs on the European fear of Islam, and two concluding sentences on the construction of the Suez Canal (see Edward W. Said, Orientalism, rev. ed. [New York: Vintage Books, 1994], 59–60, 92). I have decided to offer a close reading of the book Orientalism in chapter 4 since it seems to me that, as theoretically significant as the excerpt “Orientalism” remains, it is the publication of Said’s entire text, including his rightly famous introduction, that signaled the definitive emergence of a new theoretical problematic for the critical study of colonialism. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that all of the passages that I cite from “Imaginative Geography and Its Representations” in this chapter can also be found in the Georgia Review

4.

2. 3.

4. 5.

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excerpt “Orientalism” with only very slight differences (Edward W. Said, “Orientalism,” Georgia Review 31, no. 1 [1977]: 162–206). Said, Orientalism, 2; subsequent page citations are given parenthetically in the text. In a particularly rancorous critique of Said’s work, “Orientalism and After: Ambivalence and Metropolitan Location in the Work of Edward Said,” Aijaz Ahmad insists that Said is “[unable] to make up his mind whether ‘Orientalist Discourse’ is a system of representations, in the Foucauldian sense, or of misrepresentations, in the sense of a realist problematic” (in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures [New York: Verso, 1992], 185–86, emphasis in original). Ahmad cites what he calls “two rather inconsistent statements” on misrepresentation in Orientalism, these “brief and stark” passages supposedly demonstrating “Said’s equivocation on this key question” (193). Yet it is Ahmad himself who extracts these all too brief statements from the much longer passages in which Said offers to elucidate his critique of representation in Orientalism, passages that I cite at considerably greater length in this chapter. Furthermore, Ahmad quotes even these very brief statements inaccurately, both replacing and inserting words as well as adding emphasis without indication (193). It seems to me that what Ahmad describes as Said’s Nietzschean problematic of (mis)representation—a problematic according to which, as he puts it, “the line between a representation and a misrepresentation is always very thin” (193)—would provide a more interesting account of Ahmad’s (mis)reading of Said’s text in any case than Ahmad’s avowedly Marxist problematic—a problematic that he presumably associates not only with the theoretical affirmation that “true statements are possible” (193) but also with the intellectual virtues of “austerity” (167) and “rectitude” (193). I should perhaps add to this note that although Ahmad presents an especially promising interrogation of Said’s essentialist concept of the West (179–86)—what I am calling in this chapter Said’s reappropriation of negative teleology—it would be easy to demonstrate that Ahmad reiterates the negative teleology of the West in his own text insofar as he argues that Said’s work, like postcolonial theory in general, is historically determined by its “metropolitan location” (190–97). Edward W. Said, “The Problem of Textuality: Two Exemplary Positions,” Critical Inquiry 4, no. 4 (1978): 674, 710, emphasis in original. Edward W. Said, “Travelling Theory,” Raritan 1, no. 3 (1982): 66.

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8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

4.

T H E C R I T I Q U E O F R E P R E S E N TA T I O N

Edward W. Said, “Michel Foucault, 1927–1984,” Raritan 4, no. 2 (1984): 10. Edward W. Said, “Foucault and the Imagination of Power,” in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 152, emphasis in original. Edward W. Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Race and Class 27, no. 2 (1985): 6, 2, 7. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), xii; subsequent page citations are given parenthetically in the text. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in “On Humanism and the University I: The Discourse of Humanism,” ed. William V. Spanos, special issue of boundary 2 12, no. 3, and 13, no. 1 (1984): 333, emphasis in original; subsequent page citations to this specific publication are given parenthetically in the text. Said, “Foucault and the Imagination of Power,” 152, emphasis in original. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Feminist Review 30 (Autumn 1988): 85–86 n. 25, emphasis in original. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 1–47. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in Mohanty, Russo, and Torres, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, 51. Mohanty, “Cartographies of Struggle,” 5, 7, emphasis in original. Ibid., 35, 15, 11, emphasis in original. For some reason, Mohanty insists throughout “ ‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited” that she wrote “Under Western Eyes” in 1986 even though the earliest version of “Under Western Eyes” was published in 1984 and the revised version that is reprinted in Feminism Without Borders was first published in 1991. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “ ‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity Through Anticapitalist Struggles,” in Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 226, 226–27. Mohanty’s own self-representation in terms of the “One-Third World” and the “Two-Thirds World” in her text takes on all the dimensions of farce: “While I would have identified myself as both Western and Third World—in all

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my complexities—in the context of ‘Under Western Eyes,’ in this new frame, I am clearly located within the One-Third World. Then again, now, as in my earlier writing, I straddle both categories. I am of the Two-Thirds World in the OneThird World. I am clearly a part of the social minority now, with all its privileges; however, my political choices, struggles, and vision for change place me alongside the Two-Thirds World. Thus, I am for the Two-Thirds World, but with the privileges of the One-Third World. I speak as a person situated in the One-Thirds [sic] World, but from the space and vision of, and in solidarity with, communities in struggle in the Two-Thirds World” (“ ‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited,” 228). 19. Ibid., 225, 221, 231.

5. The Defense of Difference 1. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 222. Homi K. Bhabha, “The Commitment to Theory,” new formations 5 (Summer 1988): 5; subsequent page citations to this specific publication are given parenthetically in the text. Homi K. Bhabha, “The Commitment to Theory,” in Questions of Third Cinema, ed. Jim Pines and Paul Willemen (London: BFI, 1989), 123. Homi K. Bhabha, “The Commitment to Theory,” in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 31. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, rev. ed., trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 90. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 222. Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Difference: ‘A Special Third World Women Issue,’ ” in “She, the Inappropriate/d Other,” ed. Trinh T. Minh-ha, Discourse 8 (1986–1987): 11–37; introduction to Trinh, “She, the Inappropriate/d Other,” 3–9; “Difference: ‘A Special Third World Women Issue,’ ” Feminist Review 25 (March 1987): 5–22; “Difference: ‘A Special Third World Women Issue,’ ” in Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 79–116. Trinh, introduction to Trinh, “She, the Inappropriate/d Other,” 3; subsequent page citations are given parenthetically in the text. Trinh, “Difference,” in Trinh, “She, the Inappropriate/d Other,” 16; subsequent page citations to this specific publication are given parenthetically in the text.

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10. Trinh T. Minh-ha, “The Plural Void: Barthes and Asia,” Sub-Stance 36 (1982): 41–50. 11. Trinh, “Difference,” in Woman, Native, Other, 97–99, emphasis in original. 12. Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities,” in Black Film/British Cinema, ed. Kobena Mercer, Institute of Contemporary Arts Documents no. 7 (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1988), 28, 27. 13. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 308, 275.

6. The Beatles in India 1.

2.

The details of my account in this chapter concerning the production of the Beatles’ first two films, A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, and their subsequent interest in Indian music and religion have been gleaned from a number of sources: Philip Glass, George Harrison, Ravi Shankar, Naseem Khan, et al., notes to Ravi Shankar and George Harrison, Collaborations, CD/DVD box set (Rhino Entertainment, 2010); Philip Goldberg, American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation—How Indian Spirituality Changed the West (New York: Harmony Books, 2010); Dhani Harrison and Kevin Howlett, notes to George Harrison, The Apple Years, 1968–75, CD/DVD box set (Universal Music Group, 2014); George Harrison, I Me Mine (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2002); George Harrison, Timothy White, Ravi Shankar, et al., notes to Ravi Shankar, In Celebration, CD box set (Angel Records, 1995); Peter Lavezzoli, The Dawn of Indian Music in the West: Bhairavi (New York: Continuum, 2006); Martin Scorsese, dir., George Harrison: Living in the Material World, DVD (Universal Music Enterprises and HBO, 2011); Ravi Shankar, My Music, My Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), and Raga Mala: The Autobiography of Ravi Shankar (New York: Welcome Rain, 1999); Derek Taylor and Mark Lewisohn, notes to Beatles, Anthology, CD, 3 vols. (EMI Records, 1995–1996); Geoff Wonfor, dir., The Beatles Anthology, DVD box set (EMI Records, 2003); Howard Worth, dir., Raga: A Film Journey Into the Soul of India, DVD (East Meets West Music, 2010); and You Can’t Do That: The Making of A Hard Day’s Night, DVD (MPI Home Video, 1998). The Beatles, Help!, LP (Parlophone, 1965); The Beatles, Help!, LP (Capitol Records, 1965).

C O N C LU S I O N

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

237

Beatles, Help!, in The U.S. Albums, CD box set (Capitol Records, 2014). From insert in Richard Lester, dir., A Hard Day’s Night, DVD (MPI Home Video, 1997). Lavezzoli, Dawn of Indian Music, 172–73, 9, 173. Goldberg, American Veda, 7, 276. Richard Lester, dir., Help!, DVD, standard ed. and deluxe ed. (EMI Records, 2007). Richard Lester, dir., A Hard Day’s Night, DVD (Buena Vista Home Entertainment, 2002). Martin Scorsese, notes in Lester, Help!, DVD, deluxe ed. Richard Lester, notes in ibid. Ibid., script. John Murdoch, Siva Bhakti, with an Examination of the Siddhanta Philosophy: An Appeal to Educated Hindus (London: Christian Literature Society for India, 1902), 24, 25. Alex Perry, “Killing for ‘Mother’ Kali,” Time, Asia ed., July 29, 2002, http:// www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,322673,00.html (accessed October 18, 2012). Dr. No, From Russia with Love, and Goldfinger can be found in the James Bond Ultimate Collection, DVD box set (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios/Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2006), as can Thunderball, mentioned later. Lester, Help!, deluxe ed., script. Ibid., script. Ibid., script.

Conclusion 1.

Corroborating my opening statement in part I that the end of the West has been in the air for quite some time now, there are two scholarly publications concerning the political and economic ends of the West, as it were, that have appeared since I began writing my own book under the same title. The End of the West? Crisis and Change in the Atlantic Order is a collected volume edited by Jeffrey Anderson, G. John Ikenberry, and Thomas Risse and published by Cornell University Press in 2008 that addresses the crisis in the transatlantic alliance between Europe and the United States following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq during the first years of the twenty-first century. This

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volume is obviously intended to provide a critical response to the article by Charles A. Kupchan published in the Atlantic Monthly in November 2002 under the title “The End of the West.” Kupchan also contributes an essay to this volume. The End of the West: The Once and Future Europe is a monograph written by David Marquand and published by Princeton University Press in 2011 that focuses on the future of the European Union after the global transformation of power relations over the course of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

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INDEX

Abrahamic tradition/culture, 100, 101, 102, 103 “Across the Universe” (song), 180 Aeschylus, 126 African Athena: New Agendas (Orrells, Bhambra, and Roynon), 29 Afrocentrism/Afrocentric, 19, 21, 23, 28, 40 Ahmad, Aijaz, 233n3 aletheia (unconcealment), 66, 67 Ali, Tariq, 16 Althusser, Louis, 157, 158, 169 ambivalence of cultural authority, 159 American Philological Association (APA), 13 American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation—How Indian Spirituality Changed the West (Goldberg), 190 ancient Egypt, Bernal’s argument for ancient Egyptian and Phoenician civilization as origin/fundamental basis of Western civilization, 33, 38–39 ancient Greece: ancient Egyptian and Phoenician civilization as transmitted to,

15–16; colonial domination as born in, 221; discourse of Orientalism as tracked back to, 133; dual influence on, 40; as early transmitter of Western tradition, 3, 5; as fabricated, 23, 31. See also The Fabrication of Ancient Greece (Bernal); Husserl as making leap from modern Europe back to, 53, 63; origin of civilization as back beyond, 35, 38; transmission of Phoenician alphabet to, 37; Western practice of representation as traced back to, 126 “Ancient History, Modern Myths” (Lefkowitz), 21, 22 Ancient Model, 10, 11, 12, 15, 28 ancient Phoenicia, Bernal’s argument for ancient Egyptian and Phoenician civilization as origin/fundamental basis of Western civilization, 33, 38–39 ancient Rome, as early transmitter of Western tradition, 3 “Another Hard Day’s Night” (song), 186 anticolonial movements/anticolonialism, 5, 71

248 anticolonial nationalist discourse, 145, 175 antiethnocentrism: denunciation of Western civilization as declared in name of, 6; as guiding twentieth-century continental philosophy and postcolonial theory, xiii; limits of, 179–218; strategy of, xiii, xiv, 181, 182, 183 antiglobalization, 5, 149 Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari), 114 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 169 Apple Corps, 191 appropriation: concept of, 60. See also cultural appropriation; postmodernist appropriation; Western appropriation of ancient Near Eastern culture Archaeological and Documentary Evidence, The (Bernal), 14 Archaeology (TV program), 16 Arethusa (journal), 13, 14, 18, 19, 21, 30 Aristotle, 54, 66 Aryan Model, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 17, 23, 28, 29, 31, 33, 40 Astour, Michael, 40 Australia, as current transmitter of Western tradition, 3 autochthonous model, of ancient history, 34, 40 autoimmunization, 91, 92, 98 Bacchae, The (Euripides), 126 Bachelard, Gaston, 124 Baines, John, 18 Bandung File, The (TV program), 13 Bard, Kathryn A., 18 Barthes, Roland, 128, 156, 169, 170, 174 “Bathwater and the Baby, The” (Liverani), 26, 30 Baudelaire, Charles, 75 Beatlemania, 197 Beatles in India: Help! (film), 185–92; hyperbolic representation, 192–217; use of phrase, xiii, 180, 182 Beauvoir, Simone de, 169 Behm, Marc, 188 Being and Time (Heidegger), 60, 107 Benveniste, Émile, 95, 96–97, 101 Bergson, Henri, 75, 88, 89 Berlinerblau, Jacques, 25

INDEX

Bernal, Martin, xi, 6, 7, 9–41 Bhabha, Homi K., xii, 115, 116, 150–63, 164, 169, 170, 171, 172, 182 Black Athena (TV documentary), 16, 17 “Black Athena and the APA” (Bernal), 14, 30, 33, 41 Black Athena Comes of Age: Towards a Constructive Re-assessment (Van Binsbergen), 29 Black Athena debate: Bernal and his critics, 9–29; deconstructing roots, 29–41; use of phrase, xi, 6; what is at stake in, 7 “Black Athena Denied: The Tyranny of Germany Over Greece” (Bernal), 10 Black Athena Revisited (Lefkowitz and Rogers), xi, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 29 “Black Athena: Ten Years After” (Van Binsbergen), 25 “Black Athena: The African and Levantine Roots of Greece” (Bernal), 10 Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (Bernal), xi, 6–7, 9, 12, 13 Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to His Critics (Bernal), xi, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 31, 34, 37, 40 “Blue Jay Way” (song), 180 boundary 2 (journal), 133 Brace, C. Loring, 18 Broccoli, Albert R., 198 Brooks, Mel, 198 Cadmean Letters: The Transmission of the Alphabet to the Aegean and Further West Before 1400 B.C. (Bernal), 14, 37 “Can’t Buy Me Love” (song), 186 “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (Spivak), 177 Cardiff, Jack, 189 Cartesian rationalism/philosophy, 77, 113 “Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism” (Mohanty), 146, 147, 148 Casino Royale (film), 198 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 177 “Challenge of Black Athena to Classics Today, The” (Levine), 13

INDEX

chanting, 180, 217 Chants of India (album), 216 “Chase, The” (song), 186 Chinese Socialism to 1907 (Bernal), 10 Christianity: according to Kant, 87–89, 90, 92–93, 100, 105; according to Nietzsche, 92–93, 100 Cixous, Hélène, 136 closure: of metaphysics, 44; of the West, 43 Coleman, John E., 19 colonial discourse: of anthropology, 167; binary opposition between Occidental self and Oriental other within, 152; feminism as, 133–34, 136, 141; of moral repulsion, 194; of racism, 116; Said’s theory of Orientalism as granting too much power to, 131; on Third World woman, 139 colonialism: Bhabha’s mobilization of defense of difference against, 160; legacy of, 220, 221; Mohanty’s analysis of, 133, 142; Orientalism as cultural by-product of, 126; philosophy as gift of, 83; as political product of Orientalism, 126; relationship of with feminism and humanism, 140; Trinh’s mobilization of defense of difference against, 172 Coltrane, John, 190 “Commitment to Theory, The” (Bhabha), 115, 151, 153, 155, 157, 160, 162, 164, 169, 170, 172 Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga, The (Vishnudevananda), 185 complete relativism, 32 Concert for Bangla Desh, The, 216 Connery, Sean, 198 continental philosophy: antiethnocentrism as guiding, xiii, 50; as bound to postcolonial theory, 178; from to postcolonial theory, 109–16; critique of Western ethnocentrism as forcefully articulated within, x, 180; in earlier generations, 53; emergence of negative teleology in, 49; end of West as fundamental precept of, x; first fully articulated argument in on negative teleology, 69; persistent reliance on concept of West within, 45; syntagms that figure prominently in, 43;

249 turn from teleology to negative teleology in, xi, xii, 45, 46, 47, 62, 70, 106, 155; in twentieth century, ix; unethical opening to ethics within, 71 Course in General Linguistics (Saussure), 229n1 Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, The (Husserl), 50, 51, 52 critical difference, 164, 165, 168–69, 170, 171, 172, 175 critical theory, according to Bhabha, 152, 153–54, 155, 156, 158 cultural affinity, 56 cultural appropriation, 180, 181, 217 cultural authority, ambivalence of, 159 cultural difference: according to Bhabha, 153, 154, 155, 158, 159, 160, 163, 171, 172; according to Trinh, 164, 165 cultural diffusion, 33, 34 cultural diversity, 20, 157, 158, 163, 169 cultural pluralism, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83 cultural production, politics of, 152 cultural purity, xiv, 41, 163, 178, 192 cultural relativism, 59 cultural signification, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84 Culture and Imperialism (Said), 131, 132, 133 culture wars, 10, 21 Dante, Alighieri, 126 Dark Horse concert tour, 216 Dawn of Indian Music in the West, The (Lavezzoli), 189 Debating Black Athena (Bernal and Moore), 25, 29 decolonization, 28, 81, 82, 132 deconstruction, xii, 31, 32, 46, 47, 70, 71, 88, 93, 98, 103, 106, 157, 179, 181, 206, 214, 217, 222 Deleuze, Gilles, 38, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 136, 138, 151, 154, 157, 158, 164, 169, 171, 172, 182 depropriation, 105, 181, 218, 220 Derrida, Jacques, ix, xi, xii, 44, 46, 47, 70, 71, 84–106, 107, 110, 115, 136, 138, 156, 158, 169 Descartes, René, 61, 77

250 destruction: of ontology, xii, 44, 46, 47, 70, 106, 125; of the West, 43 d’Herbelot, Barthélemy, 126 difference: as being salvaged from representation, 150; Bhabha’s defense of, 116, 150–63; as caught up in representation, 182; concept of, 110, 111, 150; defense of, 150–63; Deleuze’s argument on, 157; Deleuze’s defense of, 115; Deleuze’s philosophy of, 116; Trinh’s defense of, 116, 163–76 Difference and Repetition (Deleuze), 111, 112–13, 114, 151, 154, 157, 169 “Difference: ‘A Special Third World Women Issue’ ” (Trinh), 115–16, 163, 164, 165, 168, 170, 171, 172, 174, 175, 176 Diop, Cheikh Anta, 21, 40 Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 131 discourse: concept of, 118, 119, 124, 133, 141; Foucault’s theory of, 130, 132 Discourse (journal), 163 Disraeli, Benjamin, 120 Dr. No (film), 198–200, 201, 203–4, 209, 210–11 East, the: concept of, 120–21; meaning of, 2, 3; theoretical tension around reality of, 121 Ebert, Roger, 188 economic development, neocolonial order of, 69 Edwards, Blake, 189 ego cogito, 61 Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The (Marx), 120, 122, 131, 133, 138 end of history, ix, 43, 85, 86 end of man, 43, 44 end of philosophy: according to Heidegger, 61, 62, 64, 65, 68, 70, 71, 72, 85, 93, 98, 100, 104; as new beginning for task of thinking, 67. See also task of thinking (at end of philosophy); as syntagm, 43; what is at stake in, ix “End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking, The” (Heidegger), 46, 60, 69 end of the West: as final goal of Western civilization, 220; as premised on its having

INDEX

begun, 41; as rallying cry, 5; use of phrase, 1, 4–5, 6, 43–45 End of the West? Crisis and Change in the Atlantic Order, The (Anderson, Ikenberry, and Risse), 237–38n1 End of the West: The Once and Future Europe, The (Marquand), 237–38n1 end of Western man, xiii, 116, 145, 176 end of Western woman, xiii, 116, 145, 176 “Ends of Man, The” (Derrida), 44, 85, 99 enunciation, concept of, 158–59, 160–61, 162, 163 epistemic privilege, 149 epistemological break, concept of, 107, 108 ethical turn, from teleology to negative teleology: Derrida and globalatinization, 84–108; Levinas and orientation, 70–84; use of phrase, 47 ethics: of alterity, xii, 46, 47, 70, 71, 106; as following phenomenology, 71; as preceding ontology, 76; unethical opening to, 71 ethnocentrism: critique of, ix, x, xv, 44–45, 47, 106; as distinct from racism, 106; Help! as considered unfortunate display of outdated ethnocentrism, 189; of Levinas, 83; new form of as critique of, ix. See also reverse ethnocentrism; Western ethnocentrism Euripides, 126 Europe: Husserl and spiritual shape of, 49–60; modern Europe as current transmitter of Western tradition, 3; privileged position of in world history, 53, 59; spiritual history of, 53, 55 European ethnocentrism, 13, 15, 24 European humanity, 50, 51–52, 53, 54, 55, 65 Europeanization, 50, 105 existentialism, 47, 51, 53, 62, 78, 122, 156 Ex Oriente Lux (“Light from the East”), 27, 28 Fabrication of Ancient Greece, The (Bernal), 9, 15 Fabrizi, Mario, 187 faith, concept of, 89 “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone” (Derrida), 47, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 99, 100, 101, 102, 105

INDEX

family, linguistic model of, 36 Fanon, Frantz, 156, 157, 159 feminism: as colonial discourse, 133–34, 136, 141; third world feminisms, 147, 148; Western feminism, discourse of, 116; Western feminism, Mohanty and, 133–49 Feminism Without Borders (Mohanty), 148 feminist discourse, 135, 137, 141, 167, 168, 173, 175. See also Western feminist discourse Feminist Review (journal), 146, 163 feminist theory, 134, 135, 136, 139, 146, 163, 164 Fleming, Ian, 198 forgiveness: concept of, 100, 101, 103, 105; international discourse of, 103 Foucault (Deleuze), 114 Foucault, Michel, 111, 113, 114, 115, 118, 119, 122, 123, 125, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 136, 137–38, 141, 146, 151, 157, 158, 169, 172, 182 “Foucault and the Imagination of Power” (Said), 131 Fourth World, 175 France, Anatole, 75 Freud, Sigmund, 22, 98, 226–27n39 “Friar Park” (song), 216 From Russia with Love (film), 199, 200, 201, 203, 209, 210, 211 full representation, 32 fundamental ontology, 47 Garvey, Marcus, 21 genealogy, concept of according to Nietzsche, 98, 109 genuine humanity, 51, 55, 65 geographical knowledge, 1, 120, 124 Geography of a Life (Bernal), 29 geopolitical knowledge, 124, 125, 128 geopolitical project, 119, 179 German Idealism/German Idealists, 53 Get Smart (TV program), 198 globalatinization: Derrida and, 84–106; use of term, 93, 94 global dominance, of scientific technology, 68–69 globalization: conjoining of term with Latinization, 93, 104; defined, 93–94; of liberal

251 democracy, 220; as part of irresistible force of Western history, 105 global power relations, as organized into binary structure, 221 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 62 Goldberg, Philip, 190–91 Goldfinger (film), 199, 200, 201, 203, 209, 210, 211 Goon Show, The (radio program), 187 Gordon, Cyrus, 40 Graeco-Abrahamic tradition, 100 Gramsci, Antonio, 130, 132 Greece European or Levantine? The Egyptian and West Semitic Components of Greek Civilization (Bernal), 9 Greek miracle, 3, 5, 6, 27, 41 Green Revolution, 4 Guattari, Félix, 38, 114, 138 Guest, Val, 198 Hall, Edith, 19 Hall, Stuart, 177 Hamilton, Guy, 199 Hard Day’s Night, A (film), 187–88, 189, 191, 196, 197 “Hard Day’s Night, A” (song), 186 Harrison, George, 185, 190, 198, 212, 216, 217 Hegel, G. W. F., 53, 60, 61, 62, 71, 75, 85, 109, 114, 223–24n1 Heidegger, Martin, ix, xi, xii, 44, 46, 47, 51, 60–69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 77, 78, 80, 85, 86, 93, 95, 96, 98, 100, 105, 106, 107, 110, 113, 114, 115, 125, 172 Help! (album), 185–86 Help! (film): Beatles’ initial encounter with Indian music and religion during making of, xiii, 182, 185; as Beatles’ second film, 187; as calling attention to own practice of representation, 204, 205; as comical representation of Indian culture, 189, 191, 192; as considered unfortunate display of outdated ethnocentrism, 189; description of scenes from, 192–93, 195–96, 197–98, 199, 201–3, 205–7, 211–15; as engaged in hyperbolic practice of representation, 183,

252 Help! (continued ) 192 (see also hyperbolic representation); as exploiting stereotypical association of Kali with human sacrifice, 195–96; makeup technique used in, 204–5; as not simply a parody of Indian culture, 197, 198, 203; as parody/spoof, 196, 209, 217; as parody/ spoof of James Bond film series, 198, 199, 200, 201, 203, 204, 211, 213; as operating by performative politics of representation to dismantle concept of West, 217; production of, 188–89; re-release of, 191; response to, 187–88, 189–91, 196; shooting of, 201; songs in, 215–16; transcultural engagement as staged in, 182 “Help!” (song), 186, 216 Henry, Buck, 198 Heresy in the University: The Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals (Berlinerblau), 25 Hinduism, 93, 180, 192, 194, 195, 203, 204, 206, 207, 215, 217 historical purity, 41 historiography: Bernal’s focus on, 17, 29, 31; as impacted by European imperialism, 19, 27, 28; impact of racism on, 12, 17, 22; as informed by European ethnocentrism, 15; as supplanted by ancient mythologies, 22 history: concept of according to Hegel, 109; end of, ix, 43, 85, 86 History Lesson: A Race Odyssey (Lefkowitz), 21 History of Sexuality, The (Foucault), 131, 136 human, concept of, 140 humanism: Bhabha on, 156, 157; crisis of, 43– 44; Mohanty’s argument on, 136, 139–40, 141, 146; poststructuralist problematic of, 136, 138, 146, 147; recuperation of, 146; relationship of with colonialism and feminism, 140; Western tradition of, 156. See also philosophical humanism; universal humanism Hurston, Zora Neale, 169 Husserl, Edmund, xi, xii, 46, 47, 49–60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 80, 83, 86, 95, 96, 98, 99, 105, 106, 107, 113

INDEX

Hyksos colonization of Greece, 15, 23, 39 hyperbolic representation, xiii, 183, 192–217 idea, Hegel’s concept of, 61 idealism, 77, 78, 80, 82. See also German Idealism/German Idealists identity: as caught up in representation, 182; concept of, 111, 150, 170; logic of, 168, 170, 172, 175, 181; subjugation of difference to, 150 Iliad (Homer), 126 imaginative geography, 124, 125 In Celebration (CD box set), 217 independent nation-states, 219 indeterminacy of meaning, 153–54 India—China (film), 163 Indian culture, Help!’s comical representation of, 189, 191, 192 Inferno (Dante), 126 “Inner Light, The” (song), 180 “Intellectuals and Power” (Foucault and Deleuze), 114 interpretatio Graeca, 11 Interpretation of Dreams, The (Freud), 226–27n39 intuition, Husserl’s concept of, 61, 73 Irigaray, Luce, 136 irrationalism, 51, 62, 63 “I Should Have Known Better” (song), 186 Islam, 93, 99, 100, 101, 126, 127, 132 James, C. L. R., 156, 157 James, George G. M., 21, 40 James Bond film series, 198–201, 203–4, 209–10, 215, 216 Jasanoff, Jay H., 18 Jaspers, Karl, 51 Jenkyns, Richard, 19 Judaism/Jews, 55, 83, 93, 99, 100, 101, 107 Kali, 193–94, 204 Kant, Immanuel, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92, 100, 101, 105 kettle logic, 22, 24, 26 knowledge, concept of, 89

INDEX

Kofman, Sarah, 136 Kristeva, Julia, 136, 138, 156, 174 Kuhn, Thomas S., 10, 29 Lacan, Jacques, 157, 158, 169 language hyper-family, Nostratic, 34–35 language superfamily, 34 Latinization: conjoining of term with globalization, 93, 104; as part of irresistible force of Western history, 105 Lavezzoli, Peter, 189–90, 191 Lazreg, Marnia, 146 Lefkowitz, Mary R., 18, 20, 21–22, 23, 24, 25, 26 Lennon, John, 186, 198, 212, 216 Lester, Richard, 187, 189, 191, 192, 196 Levantine model/world, 10, 11, 16, 28, 40 Levinas, Emmanuel, xi, xii, 46, 47, 70–84, 86, 89, 99, 105, 106, 107 Levine, Molly Myerowitz, 13, 14, 16, 18, 21 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 82, 124, 138, 156 Linguistic Evidence, The (Bernal), 29 linguistic model: of the family, 36; of the tree, 36, 37, 38; of the wave, 37 Live and Let Die (film), 217 Liverani, Mario, 19, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 33, 35 Location of Culture, The (Bhabha), 151, 154 Logic of Sense, The (Deleuze), 113 Lorde, Audre, 169 “Love You To” (song), 180 “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (song), 180 Lyotard, Jean-François, 156 MacLaine, Shirley, 189 Mahesh Yogi, Maharishi, 190, 192, 216 man, end of, 43, 44 market capitalism, 220 Martin, George, 188 Martin, Tony, 21 Marx, Karl, 64, 68, 85, 98, 114, 120, 122, 129, 131, 133, 138, 143, 177 Maysles, Albert, 196 Maysles, David, 196 McCartney, Linda, 217 McCartney, Paul, 186, 198, 216, 217

253 medieval Europe, as early transmitter of Western tradition, 3 meditation, 180, 190 Menuhin, Yehudi, 190 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 72, 74, 75, 82 Mesopotamia, as location of beginning of civilization, 35 metaphysics, closure of, 44 “Michel Foucault, 1927–1984” (Said), 130 Mies, Maria, 141 Milligan, Spike, 187 miraculous 4th millennium, 35 Model of Autochthonous Origin, 33 modified diffusionism, 33–34 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, xii, 115, 116, 133–49, 160, 167, 172, 173, 175, 182 Mohanty, S. P., 146 mondialatinisation, 231n10 monogenesis, 34, 35 Monty Python, 187, 215 Monty Python and the Holy Grail (film), 215 Moore, David Chioni, 25 Morris, Sarah P., 18, 19 Moses and Muses (Bernal), 25, 29 Mouse on the Moon, The (film), 187 multiculturalism: current logic of, 196; dismissal of Bernal’s work in name of, 17; progressive politics of, 181 multicultural model: of ancient Greek civilization, 23; of ancient history, 33, 34, 40; of history, 28 Murdoch, John, 194 My Geisha (film), 189, 205 Mythologies (Barthes), 128 Naked Spaces—Living Is Round (film), 163 national reconciliation, 87, 104 nation-states, 219, 220 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 2, 4 natural attitude, 54, 58 naturalism, 52, 53, 62, 63 Nazi regime, 78 negative teleology: as complex reiteration of teleology, 107; as complicit with teleology,

254 negative teleology (continued ) 106, 176; as endemic to critique of representation, 128; ethical turn, 47, 70–108; first articulation of, xi, 69; as fundamental precept of postcolonial theory, 110; as fundamental precept of poststructuralist theory, 110; Heidegger’s discourse of, 110; Mohanty’s reappropriation of, 142; of Nietzsche, 92; phenomenological turn, 46, 49–69; postcolonial contestation and reappropriation of, 120; postcolonial defense of difference as bolstered by, 163; postcolonial feminist reappropriation of, xiii, 116, 136, 145, 176; postcolonial reappropriation of, x, xii, 110, 117, 150; reappropriation of, 172; as stock discourse of both continental philosophy and postcolonial theory, 109–10; turn from teleology to, 45–46; use of term, ix, xiv neocolonial discourse, 221 “New Ethnicities” (Hall), 177 new formations (journal), 151 new humanity, 51 New Republic (magazine), 21 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 64, 68, 85, 92, 93, 98, 100, 101, 109, 114, 115 North America, as current transmitter of Western tradition, 3 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 2, 4 Norton, Robert E., 19 “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” (song), 180 Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (Lefkowitz), 21, 22 Nussbaum, Alan, 18–19 objectivism, 52, 53, 62, 63 O’Connor, David, 18 Of Grammatology (Derrida), 72, 103, 156 “On Forgiveness” (Derrida), 47, 84–85, 87, 93, 94, 99, 100, 101, 103, 105 “On Humanism and the University I: The Discourse of Humanism” (Spanos), 133 ontology: destruction of. See destruction of ontology; fundamental ontology, 47

INDEX

opening, according to Heidegger, 65–67 Order of Things, The (Foucault), 111–12, 113, 114, 122, 128 Orientalism (Said), 27, 115, 118, 120, 121, 122, 124, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 136, 138, 141, 145, 146–47, 160, 172, 232–33n1 Orientalism/Orientalists, 27, 28, 117–33, 190, 191 “Orientalism Reconsidered” (Said), 131 orientation, Levinas’s concept of, 81 otherness, concept of, 154, 155, 164 Other Heading, The (Derrida), 86 “Overcoming Metaphysics” (Heidegger), 44 Owen, Alun, 188 Palter, Robert, 19 Parmenides, 66, 67, 68 pars construens (constructive element), 28, 30, 31 pars destruens (destructive element), 28, 30, 31 Party, The (film), 189, 205 Paul McCartney and Wings, 217 Perry, Alex, 194 Persians, The (Aeschylus), 126 phenomenological turn, from teleology to negative teleology: Heidegger and the opening, 60–69; Husserl and the spiritual shape of Europe, 49–60; use of phrase, 46 phenomenology, 46, 47, 50, 51, 52, 54, 70, 71, 78, 106 Philhellenism/Philhellenists, 27, 28 philosophical humanism, 100 philosophy: according to Levinas, 72–75; as concealment of the opening itself, 66; emergence of, 54, 55; as gift of European colonialism to the world, 83; Heidegger as central figure of, 74; history of, 63–64, 65, 66, 67; intellectual and cultural origins of, 57; as in its final stage, 60, 64; as the opening concealing itself, 66; phenomenological reorientation of, 54; as unique to Western tradition, 57, 58, 59, 65, 83. See also end of philosophy “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity” (“Vienna Lecture”) (Husserl), 46, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 59

INDEX

Philosophy of History, The (Hegel), 223–24n1 Plato, 54, 64, 66, 68, 73, 77, 78, 79, 80–81, 82–83 “Plural Void, The” (Trinh), 170 politics of cultural production, 152 polygenesis, 34, 35 popular music, transformation of, 180 positive teleology: as cohabiting with negative teleology in continental philosophy, 46, 106; as informing Husserl and Heidegger, 69; inversion from to negative teleology, 59–60; of Kant, 92; of Levinas, 71, 105, 179; as remaining intact even in most sensitive articulation of negative teleology, 71; in “Signification and Sense,” 84 positivism, 52 postcolonial feminist theory, xii, xiii, 116, 168 postcolonial theory: emergence of, 117; as endorsing radical critique of Western ethnocentrism, x; as founded on negative teleology, 110; as indebted to continental philosophy, 177; significant texts in history of, 115 postmodernism/postmodernists, 31 postmodernist appropriation, 149 postpositivist realism, 149 poststructuralism/poststructuralists, 45, 47, 59, 109, 110, 111, 113, 115, 117, 118, 130, 134, 136, 138, 147, 149, 150, 151, 155, 156, 169 power, Foucault’s theory of, 137–38 Power/Knowledge (Foucault), 136 practical attitude, 58 pre-Hellenic culture, 11 pre-Socratic thinking, 66, 67, 77, 113 primal matter, according to Heidegger, 62, 65, 66 “Problem of Textuality, The” (Said), 130 propriation, logic of, 181 Proto-Afroasiatic-Indo-European language superfamily, 34 pseudo-feminism, 167, 173 Questions of Third Cinema (Pines and Willemen), 151, 154 “Quo Vadis?” (Rogers), 20

255 race, modern concept of as not meaningful in ancient world, 23 racism: colonial discourse of, 116; as distinct from ethnocentrism, 106; impact of on historiography, 12, 17, 22 Raga: A Film Journey Into the Soul of India (documentary film), 216 Raga Mala: The Autobiography of Ravi Shankar (Shankar), 217 rationalism: autoimmunization and, 98; as being overcome by return to task of thinking, 62; crisis of, 51, 52, 68; radical impetus of, 52 Ravi Shankar’s Music Festival from India (album), 216 reason, concept of, 98 Reassemblage (film), 163 religion: according to Derrida, 89–92, 95; concept of, 87, 90, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 105; opposition of to reason, 90, 93, 97. See also specific religions Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (Kant), 87, 88 religious fundamentalism, 87, 91, 93 religious-mythical attitude, 58–59 re-presentation, 129, 133, 139, 143, 144–45, 177 representation: concept of, 110, 111, 112, 113; crisis of, 154; Deleuze’s critique of, 182; difference as being salvaged from, 150; as distinct from self-representation, 196; Foucault’s critique of, 115, 118, 125, 151, 182; hyperbolic representation, 192–217; logic of, 122, 143, 154, 164; Mohanty’s critique of, 116, 139, 141, 142, 160; postcolonial critique of, 145–46, 150, 155; Said’s critique of, 116, 117–33, 135, 138, 139, 148, 160 “Return of Morality, The” (Foucault), 114 reverse ethnocentrism, 141 Revised Ancient Model, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19, 23, 24, 31, 32, 33, 38, 40 Rhys-Davies, John, 16, 17 Rich, Adrienne, 169 Rogers, Guy MacLean, 18, 19, 20–21, 22, 23, 24, 25 Roman Catholicism, 102

256 roots, deconstruction of, 29–41 Running Jumping and Standing Still Film, The (film), 187 Said, Edward W., xii, 16, 27, 115, 116, 135, 136, 137, 139, 141, 145, 146, 160, 172, 182 Saltzman, Harry, 198 Sarris, Andrew, 188 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 157 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 229n1 Saussurean linguistics, 43 scientific technology: dominance of, 64, 68–69; reliance of contemporary forms of religious fundamentalism on, 91 Scorsese, Martin, 191 self-presentation, 129, 133, 143, 144–45 self-representation, 129, 142, 143, 144–45, 148, 196 Sellers, Peter, 187, 189 sense, Levinas’s concept of, 75, 77, 78 sexual difference, 134, 136, 144, 164, 165, 166, 171, 173, 175, 176 Shankar, Ravi, 185, 190, 192, 216, 217 Shankar Family and Friends (album), 216 “She, the Inappropriate/d Other” (Trinh), 163, 164, 165, 172, 175 Shenson, Walter, 187 Show Called Fred, A (TV program), 187 signification, Levinas’s concept of, 72, 73, 74, 75–76, 77, 78, 79, 82 “Signification and Sense” (Levinas), 47, 71, 72, 74, 77, 84 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 169 Siva Bhakti (An Appeal to Educated Hindus) (Murdoch), 194 slippage of the signifier, 154 Smith, Barbara, 169 Snowden, Frank M., Jr., 18, 19 Socrates, 54, 64, 66, 68, 77 Solving the Riddle of the Sphinx and Other Studies in Egypto-Greek Mythology (Bernal), 9 Son of Fred (TV program), 187 southern question, Gramsci on, 132 Specters of Marx (Derrida), 85

INDEX

spiritual shape of Europe, Husserl and, 49–60, 95 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 169, 177 Stammbaum (tree model), 37 Starr, Ringo, 186, 195, 198, 199, 201–2, 205, 207, 212, 213, 214, 216 Stolen Legacy ( James), 21 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The (Kuhn), 10, 29 Subaltern Studies series, 177 subject, Levinas’s concept of, 78 supranationality, 56 Surname Viet Given Name Nam (film), 163 syntagms, 43–44 Talanta (journal), 25, 29 Tana Mana (album), 216 Tancred (Disraeli), 120, 121 task of thinking (at end of philosophy), 61, 62, 65, 67 technological rationality, 69, 105, 221 “Theatrum Philosophicum” (Foucault), 113 theoretical attitude, 54, 55, 57, 58, 75, 105 theoretical tension: around reality of the East, 121; in Mohanty’s critique, 139; in Said’s Orientalism, 120, 127, 128, 131; that informs “Difference,” 172; that marks “The Commitment to Theory,” 160; in “Under Western Eyes,” 136, 142 thinking, task of (at end of philosophy), 61, 62, 65, 67 Third Cinema, 151, 152, 162 Third Space, 161–62, 169, 170 Third World, concept of, 174 Third World Difference, 134, 135, 144 third world feminisms, 147, 148 Third World political activism, 152, 153 Third World woman/women, 116, 134, 137, 139, 142, 143, 144, 145, 165, 166–67, 168, 173, 174 Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Mohanty, Russo, and Torres), 146, 148 Thorne, Ken, 185, 186 Thousand Plateaus, A (Deleuze and Guattari), 38

INDEX

Thunderball (film), 201 Time (magazine), 194 “Time and Being” (Heidegger), 46, 60, 69 “Tomorrow Never Knows” (song), 180 Totality and Infinity (Levinas), 72 “Trace of the Other, The” (Levinas), 71 “Travelling Theory” (Said), 130 tree, linguistic model of, 36, 37, 38 Trinh T. Minh-ha, xii, 115, 116, 163–76, 182 Tritle, Lawrence A., 19 Trotsky, Leon, 156, 157 Truth, Sojourner, 169 Tutu, Desmond, 104 Two Sources of Morality and Religion, The (Bergson), 88 unconcealment, concept of, 66, 67 “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” (Mohanty), 115, 133, 134, 136, 138, 140, 141, 142, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 160, 167, 172, 173, 175 “ ‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity Through Anticapitalist Struggles” (Mohanty), 148, 149 United Nations, 4 universal humanism, 220 Urheimat (original homeland), 35 U.S. Albums, The (CD box set), 186 Vermeule, Emily T., 19 “Violence and Metaphysics” (Derrida), 72, 89 Vishnu-devananda, Swami, 185 Walker, Alice, 169 wave, linguistic model of, 37 “Well, and China?” (Barthes), 170 Wellentheorie (wave model), 37 West, the: Black Athena as doing more to deconstruct than to preserve/extend concept of, 41; closure of, 43; concept of, 35, 165, 222; crisis of, 43; destruction of, 43; as geopolitical concept, 3, 5, 41; heliotropic association of with concept of the end, 223–24n1; historical continuity and cultural coherence

257 of, 3, 5; historical mission of, 81; history of, 68, 80; idea of as having real effects on the world, 221, 222; meaning of, 1–3. See also end of the West Western appropriation of ancient Near Eastern culture, 28, 35 Western critical theory, 152, 153, 155 Western ethnocentrism: challenge to, 220; critique of, ix, x, 45, 47, 110, 115, 180; Husserl’s defense of, 59 Western exceptionalism, 117, 150, 183 Western fatalism, 110 Western feminism: discourse of, 116; Mohanty and, 133–49 Western feminist discourse, xiii, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, 147, 149, 175 Western films, representation of non-Western cultures, characters, or characteristics in, 189 Western intellectual tradition, xiv, 57–58, 63, 64, 77, 78, 81, 82, 83 Western tradition, as punctured by innumerable points of contact and rupture, x, 45 Western triumphalism, 110 Western univocality, 183 What’s Happening! The Beatles in the USA (documentary film), 196 Who Was Cleopatra? (TV documentary), 16, 17 “Within You Without You” (song), 180 Woman, Native, Other (Trinh), 163, 164, 174 woman of the South, 116 Wood, Charles, 188 Woolf, Virginia, 169 Wretched of the Earth, The (Fanon), 159 Yamada, Mitsuye, 169 Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! The Beatles in New York (TV documentary), 196 yin and yang, 165 yoga, 190 Young, Terence, 198, 199, 201 Yurco, Frank J., 18 Zionism/Zionist, 40