On White Mythologies: Detotalising the Legacy of Modernity

Culture, Theory & Critique, 2005, 46(2), 93–113 On White Mythologies: Detotalising the Legacy of Modernity Cláudia Álvares Universidade CláudiaÁlvares Taylor Culture, Original 2004 0000002004 [email protected] & Theory Article Francis Lusófona and Ltd Critique de Humanidades e TechnologiasDepartamento de Ciências da Comunicação, Artes e Tecnologias da InformaçãoCampo Grande, 3761749-024 LisboaPortugal 10.1080/1473578042000283835 RCTC100033.sgm and Francis Ltd Abstract This article argues that modern discourse cannot be reduced to a totalising logic, but rather one of diremption between the universal and the particular. The postmodern emphasis on fragmentation camouflages the ambivalence within modernity, reducing the latter to totalisation based on an appropriation of the other within the same. By accusing modernity of perpetuating the binaries attributed to Hegelianism, Robert Young’s White Mythologies attenuates the fissures within the Hegelian description of the consolidation of self-consciousness. These fissures are visible in Fichte’s and Schelling’s negotiations of Kantian dualisms. Hegelian idealism hovers between the Fichtean desire to affirm a transcendental, self-positing ego that assimilates the other within itself, and Schelling’s aspiration to break with the Kantian dichotomy of sensible/intelligible realms, in the mode of a becoming that unites Spirit and Nature. Such fissures are patent in the contemporary postcolonial focus on a permanent mismatch between signifier and signified. By reproducing Hegelian ambivalence, Said, Bhabha and Spivak are heirs to the modern tradition. While Said transcends dichotomies by defending a dialectic of dependence and recognition where both sides participate as active agents in the prevalent state of affairs, Bhabha explores the concept of ‘time-lag’ so as to interrupt modern linear temporality. Spivak, in turn, posits a catachrestic deconstructive politics of reading that seeks to reinscribe existing narrative values in a novel context. The legacy of Enlightenment thought is to be found in postcolonial deconstruction, which implies an agency capable of resisting Western humanism’s totalising impulse. As age of critique, Enlightenment represents the capacity of the individual to transcend contextual specificities by exercising independent judgement. Young’s allegation that the critic is unable to abstract himself from a dominant cultural totality is ultimately insensitive to the fact that any critique relies on the subject’s capacity to situate himself externally to his object of knowledge. Introduction History is the realm of violence and war; it constitutes another form by which the other is appropriated into the same. For the other to Culture, Theory & Critique ISSN 1473-5784 Print/ISSN 1473-5776 online © 2005 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/1473578042000283835 94 Cláudia Álvares remain other it must not derive its meaning from History but must instead have a separate time which differs from historical time. (Young 1995: 15) Robert Young’s White Mythologies argues for the rewriting of History from a poststructuralist perspective, whereby a non-coherent, ambivalent and polyvocal theory would challenge the prevalent Western model of historicist narrative. The latter is, according to Young, characterised by a rational and linear unity, with little room for dissonance. The urge to totalisation of Western historicism presumably reflects, on an intellectual level, the will to power of the West over its ‘other’ on a practical level. Historical discourse is thus interpreted as one more attempt at appropriation of difference by a European colonial legacy characterised by a vast ‘economy of inclusion’. Young traces the Western inclination towards totalisation back to Hegelian dialectics, which allegedly permits knowledge of alterity through subsumption within the same. East/West and black/white are polarised, for the West seeks to produce a discourse of alterity, inseparable from relations of power, destined to consolidate its own identity whilst domesticating the antagonistic element within the dichotomy. The magnitude of European thought stemming from the Enlightenment, influenced by Hegelian dialectics, ranges from liberal humanism to Marxism. The humanist outlook is, in Young’s view, partly responsible for the logic of violence inherent in the European colonial legacy, since it ‘necessarily produces the non-human in setting up its problematic boundaries’ (1995: 125). Marxism, as a humanism, attempts to subsume the majority of struggles under a working class category that, to Young, appears to have lost currency. Contemporary politics allegedly operate on the micro level, with a hoard of minority groups battling for rights that sometimes conflict with each other. The task, therefore, is to think difference without absorption into the same. Poststructuralism, argues Young, permits the latter by producing a knowledge that respects difference through the singular or contingent event as opposed to universality, allowing the other to be truly other. However, by setting up a clear dichotomy between modernity and postmodernity, Young not only perpetuates the binaries attributed to Hegelianism, but also participates in the logic of violence he seeks to overturn. Young’s equation of modernity with a straightforward binary logic based on coincidence and totalisation is, moreover, problematic. Hegel’s description of the consolidation of self-consciousness whereby the latter transcends itself by dwelling in its opposite only to return to its origin, but no longer coinciding with itself, reveals a permanent fissure, or gap, at the heart of his thinking. This fissure is patent in the postcolonial deconstructive focus on the impossibility of coincidence between signifier and signified, where the former evades any attempt at containment by the latter. Thus, rather than breaking with the totalising logic of Hegelianism, the works of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak can be read as perpetuating its very ambivalence. The diremptions in Hegel, it will be argued, are visible in Fichte’s and Schelling’s attempts to negotiate Kantian dualisms, the latter providing the framework for contemporary humanist/ anti-humanist debates. On White Mythologies 95 If, as Young implies, Hegelianism is considered to be determinant for modernity, then modern discourse is characterised by a permanent diremption, or separation, which cannot be mended. From this perspective, the postmodern emphasis on fragmentation and disunity derives from within modernity itself. Despite being connoted with the will to a universalist, totalising knowledge of its other, Enlightenment thought reveals itself as profoundly ambivalent: it simultaneously represents the age of critique, in which the autonomous individual exercises independent judgement of the spatial and temporal contextual specificities that surround him. The Enlightenment conception of human agency looms over the postmodern attempt to escape binary oppositions. While the postmodern celebration of difference relies on the decentring of the subject, the affirmation of ‘otherness’ only makes sense in light of the aspiration to an identity freed from social constraints. A socially constituted and ideologically produced subjectivity can only question its environmental conditioning by ultimately relying on moral autonomy (Soper 1990: 150). The reduction of modernity to a logic of totalisation causes Young to attenuate the degree to which the former mediates between universality and particularity. Heir to the modern tradition, poststructuralism breathes life into the ‘broken middle’, the aporetic site in which the universal and the particular are continuously negotiated. White Mythologies: writing back at historicism Young critiques the Hegelian dialectic for having structured Western thought in terms of binary oppositions, permitting that we construct knowledge of the ‘other’ through appropriation within the same. But does not the Hegelian dialectical movement transcend the logic of subordination and domination? Consisting in a relational allegory, the Hegelian master/slave encounter suggests that to be emancipated one must have been enslaved first. It is due to the reciprocal nature of the Hegelian dialectic that the movement of recognition occurs in two directions. If one of the paths is closed, the ‘other’ remains imprisoned within himself and is therefore deprived of full self-consciousness, a being-for-itself-in-itself. Desire indicates that by pursuing something greater than life, one is not locked into ‘thingness’ but rather aspires to a world of reciprocal recognitions. The realisation that self-consciousness is more than mere existence, more than just a life process, can only, however, derive from the conflict through which life is placed at risk. Although one need not risk life to be recognised as a person, the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness has not yet been achieved (Hegel 1977: 114). Because the lord has reached the zenith of his potential in terms of mastery, his condition is fixed and cannot progress any further: either he preserves the place he has won through risking his life, or dies. The slave, on the contrary, is not bound to his condition of enslavement. It is because the bondsman lives in servitude that he wishes to become free: the condition of slavery therefore paradoxically consists in a predisposition to progress. Work is the means through which the slave frees himself from natural existence whereby he is dependent on the master. By transforming given 96 Cláudia Álvares reality through formative activity, the slave transforms himself. In this process, he transcends both his own condition of servitude as well as that of the master’s, the latter who, not working, remains bound to the given as it is (Kojève 1980: 22–23). Applied to the colonial context, a dialectic of dependence and recognition reveals the complexity of the intertwining of histories between parts that are usually depicted as belonging to strict binary oppositions, categorised in terms of oppressor/oppressed. The implications, however, are not that both sides of the relationship are equally responsible for the resulting situation – due to the prevalent distorted inter-subjectivity – but rather that there is an existing complicity between the two, which sheds light on the double consciousness that often characterises the marginal element of the binary opposition, such that the latter finds itself both inside and outside the dominant culture (Gilroy 1996: 185–86). Young’s defence of Bhabha’s theorisation of the ambivalence inherent in the coloniser/colonised relationship can therefore paradoxically indicate the support for an understanding of the Hegelian dialectic in terms of dependence and recognition. The ambivalence that prevails in Bhabha’s rhetoric, shifting from fetishism to mimicry to hybridity, doubles, in Young’s terms, ‘his object’s positivities’. By undermining his own authority, Bhabha presumably attempts to write himself out of Western historicism, thereby maintaining the ‘colonial supplementarity’ of address permanently open to interpretation. The uncertainty that ensues from any attempt to fix the colonial subject as an object of knowledge leads to a growing instability in the colonial power-relation. Insofar as the colonised subject is instructed to mimic the coloniser, he will resemble the latter in a partial representation that is more menacing than reassuring. By subverting the identity of that which is being represented, the imitation leads to the reversal of the roles between coloniser and colonised, with the look of surveillance returning as the dislocated gaze of the colonial subject (Young 1995: 147, 150, 156). The reversal of the relation of power between coloniser and colonised is produced by hybridisation whereby other ‘disavowed’ knowledges challenge and intervene upon dominant discourse. Bhabha’s psychoanalytic theories concerning colonial desire represent an attempt to detotalise a discourse polarised around a binary opposition between ‘power and powerlessness’ (Young 1995: 142). With the exception of Bhabha, Young considers it almost impossible to think alterity without revealing the tendency to appropriate the ‘other’ into a totalising theory. Young thus regards most postcolonial Derridean attempts to implode the Euro-Marxist totalisation of history as having failed in their objective, due to the ultimate inability to escape the terms of their own critique. In this, they are reminiscent of Derrida’s own critique of logocentrism, which replaced teleological historicism as transcendental signified by the process of writing, or différance, as another form of transcendence. The concept of différance is simultaneously constituted by that of difference (non-identity) and deferral: whilst the possibility of History hinges on the existence of difference, History is simultaneously prevented from ever being concluded, or totalised, by the delay inherent in difference. It would therefore seem that if, on the one hand, the critic comes up against a permanent inability to produce closure in the search for On White Mythologies 97 totalisation, on the other a process of transcendence informs any detotalising approach (Young 1995: 64–66). Hence, Young claims that Said’s positing of the critic against a dominant cultural system regurgitates the Orientalism/Occidentalism totalising master-code (1995: 135). According to Young, the fissures inherent in Saidean arguments derive from the recognition of contradiction, but refusal to accept the latter without rearticulating it under the auspices of a master-code. Likewise, despite Spivak’s attempt to accomplish a decolonisation of Western epistemology through deconstruction, Young claims that she is unable to escape the Marxian transcendental gesture of closure. This is due to her endorsement of the category of universals in certain situations. Young interprets ‘strategic essentialism’ as a rearticulation of Marxist collectivities, such as class and the economic, which Spivak considers to be determining in ideological formations. Pitted against the universals of economic determinism, the anti-individualism and heterogeneity advocated by Spivak risk being subsumed by the Marxian master-code (Young 1995: 172–73). Spivak, however, aims to deconstruct universalism precisely by seeking recourse in strategic essentialism, that is, in the particular categories, such as race, sex and class, which qualify the all-embracing universality of the human condition. Claiming that the universal is ‘what the other side gives us’ (Harasym 1990: 12), Spivak can be interpreted as urging the adoption of essentialisms so as to write back against universalism. Pure deconstruction or detotalisation, such as that to which Young aspires, is an impossible goal, for deconstructivists are themselves ‘run by a great narrative even as they are busy protecting their theoretical purity by repudiating essentialism’ (Spivak, in Harasym 1990: 12).1 Bhabha’s concept of ‘unsatisfied universals’ points to a permanent fissure in the very concept of universality. Rather than positing a humanism synonymous with ‘oneness’, Bhabha speaks of the need to resort to universals in unsatisfied conditions, a strategy that results in ‘unexpected transformations’. Totalisation of an event is unrealisable, for a past tradition acquires a different meaning the moment it is brought into the present. It is this contingent transformative moment in a citation of the universal which sets up a site which neither is nor is not universal, but which is a partial identification. (Bhabha et al. 1996: 41) Because the universal is moulded by the context in which it manifests itself, there will always be a gap between the original universal and its subsequent instantiation. Thus, while Bhabha’s ‘unsatisfied universals’ make a concession to the impossibility of a utopian totality – a harmonious universality in which 1 According to Stuart Hall, ‘the problem with White Mythologies is … that it is driven by a Promethean desire for the ultimate theoretically correct position … without ever once putting on the table for serious critical inspection the normative discourse, the foundational figure – i.e. Derrida – in relation to whose absence/presence the whole linear sequence is staged’ (Hall 1996: 249). 98 Cláudia Álvares past and present coincide – so too does Spivak’s ‘strategic essentialism’ consist of a writing back against theoretical purity, that is against the expulsion of subjectivity from the world by positing a utopian ‘extra-worldly’ politics of difference, a ‘sociality of saints’ (Rose 1992: xiii) transposed to a ‘superior and infinite realm’. However, where Bhabha’s universals are detotalised by their very manifestation in ‘unsatisfied’ conditions, in Spivak the abstract universal gives way to essentialist categories that intertwine according to the situational specifities inherent in the multiple positionings of subjectivity. Postcolonial agency: reinscribing difference Young’s claim that History reveals the will to power of Europe over the rest of the world does not consider the possibility of the Gramscian notion of consent as underlying the cultural success of Imperialism. Although he critiques Western thought for being structured along the lines of the Hegelian dichotomy, he nevertheless reproduces this very binary opposition in setting up a West whose totalising discourse is all pervasive against an ‘other’ that has little room for resistance. Paradoxically, then, Young represents a position synonymous with the totalisation that he opposes on the grounds of there always being a remnant that resists closure: Every time a literary critic claims a universal ethical, moral, or emotional instance in a piece of English literature, he or she colludes in the violence of the colonial legacy in which the European value or truth is defined as the universal one. (Young 1995: 124) Contrary to Young’s stance, Said argues that consent is crucial in comprehending the essentially cultural manifestations of representation as a political instance. From this perspective, cultural leadership, or hegemony of certain cultural forms over others, works not through domination, but consent by persuasive means. The logic inherent in this argument is that of a dialectic of dependence and recognition where both sides participate as active agents, although on unequal levels, in the prevalent state of affairs. Said’s Culture and Imperialism develops the notion of a quintessential hybridity inherent in every cultural form, due to the global network produced by Imperialist History that has led to an intertwining of experiences common to ‘men and women, whites and non-whites’ (Said 1994: 72). To combat the detotalising effect of a myriad of ‘minority’ groups in the contemporary World, each of which is interested in its own identity politics, Said defends a universalist approach that seeks to set particular histories against the backdrop of a dominant narrative of Imperialist History. The mutual implication of difference with a commonality of experience proves to Said that no identity can be thought in isolation from its historical context. The notion of hybridity espoused by Said conforms to the temporal linearity and spatial uniformity of the One, where the ‘many’ are subsumed within a homogeneous ‘global network’ in the present. The prevalent view here is that of Western modernity’s definition of time and space, permeating On White Mythologies 99 particular histories that might dissonate from the ‘grand narrative’ of imperialist experience.2 Bhabha offers an escape route from the omnipotence of Western temporal and spatial homogeneity by introducing the concept of ‘time lag’ as that aporetic moment in which a historic symbol, crystalised in time and space, is resuscitated into a sign through the act of enunciation in the present: individual agency lies within the sign’s potential for performativity, for being uttered in a novel way that incessantly eludes textual or symbolic fixity. After the iterative, repetitive moment of enunciation, the sign returns to itself without coinciding with itself as symbol. There is a permanent gap, a fissure between sign and symbol, event and enunciation. The present is disjunctive because it consists in a ‘projective past’, a slowing down or lagging that breathes the life inherent in the sign of the present into ‘dead’ symbols of the past. The time-lag of postcolonial modernity moves forward, erasing that compliant past tethered to the myth of progress, ordered in the binarisms of its cultural logic: past/present, inside/outside. This forward is neither teleological nor is it an endless slippage. It is the function of the lag to slow down the linear, progressive time of modernity to reveal its ‘gesture’, its tempi, ‘the pauses and stresses of the whole performance’. (Bhabha 1995: 253) Although Bhabha’s concept of time-lag evades Said’s historicist linearity, it nevertheless cannot be reduced to a Derridean infinite ‘slippage’ of the signified by the signifier as Young attempts to portray. Instead, the time-lag is a concept that engages with aporia, seeking to go beyond binary boundaries, ‘whether these be between past and present, inside and outside, subject and object, signifier and signified’ (Bhabha 1995: 251). Aporia, for Bhabha, refers to the ambivalence inherent in the cultural history of modern nations where archaic and hierarchical traditions coexist with the homogeneous synchronicity of modernity. Such a privileging of ambivalence in the social imaginaries of nationness, and its forms of collective affiliation, would enable us to understand the coeval, often incommensurable tension between the influence of traditional ‘ethnicist’ identifications that coexist with contemporary secular, modernising aspirations. The enunciative ‘present’ of modernity, that I am proposing, would provide a 2 Gilroy’s concept of planetary humanism is similar to Said’s attempt to rearticulate a new humanist outlook in Culture and Imperialism. While, in Said, the common experience of imperialism allows human beings to transcend cultural particularities, Gilroy’s universalism derives from his disavowal of the particular as something on the basis of which a totality can be constructed: race, sex and class are to be deconstructed in favour of a human identity, a ‘species-being’, in opposition to ethnos. Residing in between camps thus entails a decentred comprehension of European history as well as cosmopolitan ethics that provide the basis for a new, non-racial humanism (Gilroy 2000: 80, 84). 100 Cláudia Álvares political space to articulate and negotiate such culturally hybrid social identities. (Bhabha 1995: 250) Bhabha thus distances himself from a Saidean notion of hybridity that seeks to ‘contemporise cultural difference’ by subsuming particular histories under the commonality of the imperialist experience. The intertwining of divergent identity politics would consist of an attempt to articulate pluralism, or the ‘diversity of the many’, under the homogeneous temporal and spatial framework of a non-problematised Western modernity. The concepts of cultural pluralism and cultural relativism consist in a contemporisation of difference, for while the former presupposes the equality of different cultures cohabiting in time, the latter presumes the existence of distinct cultural temporalities sharing the same spatial context (1995: 245). Because cultural difference corresponds to the ‘not-one, the minus in the origin and repetition of cultural signs in a doubling that will not be sublated into a similitude’, it cannot be reduced to either a harmonious, non-aporetic Whole, nor to the infinite signification of difference inherent in heterogeneous notions such as ‘multiplicities of subject positions’, ‘specificities’, ‘localities’ or ‘territories’ (Bhabha 1995: 245). Cultural difference consists in a moment of aporia, of difficulty, of permanent irresolution, in which the acknowledgement of coexistence between opposites leads to an overcoming of binaries. If this is the case, however, then Bhabha’s argument adheres to the Hegelian tradition, according to which the suture, or gap, or middle between two poles, gives rise to a rended novelty. Young’s contention that only poststructuralist thought allows for contradiction, for the ‘excess’ that constantly evades closure, paradoxically refuses to engage in aporia. The aporetic moment in theory is that in which ruptures are kept alive between binaries that coexist with but cannot coincide with each other. By setting up poststructuralism against the Hegelian dialectic to see which of the two is ‘purer’, Young is reducing the two theories to non-aporetic wholes which do not contain contradictions within each other. Perhaps this is because if Young were to recognise the aporetic moment within poststructuralism, he would realise that the latter stems from the Hegelian tradition. I am persuaded that it is the catachrestic postcolonial agency of ‘seizing the value-coding’ – as Gayatri Spivak has argued – that opens up an interruptive time-lag in the ‘progressive’ myth of modernity, and enables the diasporic and the postcolonial to be represented. (Bhabha 1995: 240) Spivak aims to demonstrate the heterogeneous coding systems inherent in Western epistemology by tracing the ‘foreclosed’ or repressed figure of the native informant in the works of three philosophers – Kant, Hegel and Marx – who represent the core of the modern Continental tradition. The value-coding is revealed through a deconstructive ‘new politics of reading’ which seeks to reverse and displace, in short to re-inscribe, existing narrative values. The latter consist of pharmakoi, ‘poison that is medicinal when knowingly administered’: catachresis, or the displacement and reinscription of signs in a novel context, allows for the representation of postcolonial agency. Because the On White Mythologies 101 latter is fundamentally catachrestic, difference lies at its core. Marxism, as a system essentially preoccupied in ‘accounting for difference’, may thus provide an orientation for postcolonial agency. Capitalism is … the pharmakon of Marxism. It produces the possibility of the operation of the dialectic that will produce socialism, but left to its own resources it is also that which blocks that operation. (Spivak 1999: 83) The catachrestic logic inherent in the postcolonial is thus anticipated within Marxism, which aims to abolish difference subsequently to engaging with it. Spivak’s interest lies in the aporetic moment in which difference is accounted for. Her recourse to ‘strategic essentialism’, that is, to the strategic use of essentialisms such as Marxism, aims to reveal the coexistence of two poles – the coloniser and the colonised, the repressed and the unrepressed, colonialism and nationalism – which, although discontinuous, appear as disjunctively linked through a deconstructive reading. If one assumes an ‘own-ness’ … of cultural ground … everything gained through this classed access to the culture of imperialism was an estrangement … This estrangement and foreclosure are now being re-played as varieties of ‘fundamentalism’, a return of the repressed. (Spivak 1999: 60) Spivak considers any value-affirmation to legitimise its opposite by reversal: as such, the contemporary celebration of hybridity authorises purity or nativism in the form of an authentic ethnic voice that can recuperate its place in history. Spivak resorts to the figuration of the native informant in order to escape from the claims and counter-claims inherent in the dualistic structure of the Hegelian chronotypography. By invoking the native informant, Spivak attempts to ‘undo’ the subordination of lived timing to Time as Law: Are we still condemned to circle around ‘Idea, Logos, and Form,’ or can the (ex)orbitant at least be invoked? (1999: 67) For Spivak, the Hegelian graph of Time serves to manipulate history as timing with the purpose of catering to socio-cultural interests. Due to its perpetual movement towards the Absolute, Marx argued that the Hegelian system consisted in ‘the effort of sublating’ rather than in ‘the accomplished sublation’ itself. The effort of sublation corresponds to Being, or ontological Time, as devoured by the present-in-time, or historical timing. The graphic representation of Time as Law, containing lived time, allows for the ‘fitting in’ of all of reality on a diagram, that is, the explanation of how reality comes into being (Spivak 1999: 43, 55, 60). One common way of grasping life and ground-level history as events happening to and around many lives is by fleshing out ‘time’ as sequential process. Let us call this ‘timing’. This feeling for life and history is often disqualified, in a dominant interest, in the name of 102 Cláudia Álvares the real laws of motion of ‘time,’ or rather, ‘Time.’ It is my contention that Time often emerges as an implicit Graph only miscaught by those immersed in the process of timing. (Spivak 1999: 38) Through the figure of the native informant, Spivak lays bare her own vested interest in adopting a deconstructive reading of Western philosophy so as to manifest lived timing in detriment to the Time that caters to dominant interest. Lived time reveals itself in the deconstruction of oppositions between binaries. By drawing attention to the structural complicities between texts of distinct cultural provenance,3 Spivak distances herself from the easy temptation within postcolonial studies of polarisation between camps such as ‘the West’ and ‘the Rest’. Camp thinking would, in Spivak’s words, consist in ‘a legitimation-by-reversal of the colonial attitude itself’ (1999: 39). The deconstructive approach thus converts Spivak’s reading into a ‘mistake’, in as much as any reading is always mistaken due to its inability to coincide with the written symbol or with the author’s intent. Although I am deeply interested in the usual deconstructive focus (not always shared by Derrida) on the ‘moments’… of ‘stalling’ … at beginning and end (‘différance’ and ‘aporia’ are only two names for these moments), I am more interested in the generating of a shaky middle by way of an irreducible ‘mistake’… (Spivak 1999: 48) It is this mistake, or catachrestic recourse to a word out of context – the figuration of the native informant – that allows Spivak to grasp the ‘broken middle’ between poles, the complicities that disrupt rigidified binaries and maintain contradiction alive in place of ‘camp mentality’. Postcolonial agency, as translated by Bhabha and Spivak, fundamentally consists in a critical practice inscribed ‘inside/outside’ modern discourse. Through ‘rememoration’, or the refiguration of existing narrative values, postcolonial practice attempts to resist Western humanism’s epistemic and ontologic totalising impetus. However, both Bhabha and Spivak reveal an awareness of the tensions inherent in the ambivalences and fractures of modernity, stemming from the cohabitation of universalism and humanism on the one hand, and oppressive and exploitative practices on the other. Hegelian ambivalence and Kantian dualism By setting up a clear dichotomy between modernity and postmodernity, whereby humanism is explicitly associated with rationality, Young demonstrates insensitivity to the fissures of modern discourse. The depiction of the humanist outlook as founded upon a Hegelian totalising dialectic, which assimilates the ‘other’ into the same, does not do justice to the ambivalences inherent in modernity. Hence, in the attempt to critique 3 Spivak is specifically alluding to Hegel’s Philosophy of History and to the Vedic Srimadbhagavadgita, both of which allegedly subordinate the lived timing of history to the graph of Time as Law, so as to serve dominant socio-cultural interests (1999: 38–39). On White Mythologies 103 Euro-Marxist historicism, Young reproduces, in part, Marx’s criticism of Hegelian idealism. Marx claims that in Hegelian phenomenology, the negativity of the object is superseded through the return of self-consciousness to itself: by positing itself as object or the object as itself, self-consciousness gains a positive meaning deriving from the ‘indivisible unity of being for itself’. Self-consciousness is at home both in itself and in its other, to the extent that it has reappropriated the alienated other within itself and thus annihilated the object. The totality of these phases corresponds to the movement of consciousness, in what is known as the Hegelian dialectic of negativity: man creates himself as a process that ranges from externalisation as loss of the object to transcendence of alienation by a return of the object to selfconsciousness (Marx 2000: 109, 111). Although Hegel undoubtedly argues that the ‘absolute dialectical unrest’ of consciousness leads ultimately to the Absolute, the eternal Unchangeable, to reach that stage the unhappy consciousness has to traverse a journey of sceptical disorder in which a battle is waged against itself. Responsible for its own unrest, consciousness does not bring its antinomies together, thriving on the separation of the poles of its self-contradiction. Awareness of its own dichotomy ‘as self-liberating, unchangeable, and self-identical’ and ‘as selfbewildering and self-perverting’ gives rise to a new form of consciousness. The latter, dualistic in nature, cannot avoid thinking about itself, becoming self-reflexive due to constantly being confronted with its inner other (Hegel 1977: 124–26). The Unhappy Consciousness itself is the gazing of one selfconsciousness into another, and itself is both, and the unity of both is also its essential nature. (Hegel 1977: 126) The rupture, the middle of the two antinomies indicates novelty, the possibility of beginning. From the two poles of reason, the middle breaks and allows for creative growth. The difficulty, however, resides in starting from the middle rather than from either side of an established dichotomy, each of which is an apparent unity in itself. According to Gillian Rose, most authorships attempt to camouflage the broken middle, triune in nature, that exposes the tension between the ‘universal, particular and singular, in individuals and institutions’ (Rose 1992: xii). This tension nevertheless surfaces in ‘unconceptualised aporia’ within any singular, in difficulties that the conceptual mending of the ‘diremption’ would prefer to ignore (1992: xiii–xv). Diremption is revealed as paradox, rather than as the resolution implied by contradiction where to A corresponds not-A, following the logic of political economy. Consisting in the ‘torn halves of an integral freedom’ that do not add up to each other, diremption posits the third as a ‘sundered unity’ of what was not originally united. The structure of conjunctive ‘ands’ is that of the singular, the child for whom the parents’ marriage appears as a transcendent, pre-existent unity (Rose 1992: 236). By mending the diremptions between the universal and the particular, between law and ethics, totalising discourses refuse to suspend or release the broken middle that allows for the 104 Cláudia Álvares ‘anxiety of beginning’ and the ‘equivocation of the ethical’. Rose argues for the necessity to ‘urge comprehension of diremption in all its anxiety and equivocation’ so as to allow philosophy to distance herself from attempts to transcend dichotomies. In this way, we may resume reflexively what we always do: to know, to misknow and yet to grow. The middle will then show: rended not mended, it continues to pulsate, ancient and broken heart of modernity, old and new, West and East. (Rose 1992: 310) The diremptions within Hegelian thought can be traced back to Kantian transcendental idealism, which has set the framework for contemporary humanist and anti-humanist positions. By positing a dualism between the noumena – the thing in itself – and the phenomena – the thing as it appears – Kant overturned the traditional idealist conception of reality as fundamentally mental in nature. While genuine idealism annihilates the existence of what appears, Kant’s transcendental idealism sustains that our senses will never be able to intuit the thing as it is in itself. Kant argued that the objective reorganisation of subjective cognitive experience precedes experience itself. Pure synthetic cognitions thus exist prior to any order of perception, consisting in ‘principles of possible experience’, which do not refer to things in themselves but rather to objects as they appear to the observer (Ellington 1977: xiii; Kant 1977: 22, 56). By considering objects of perception as appearances, Kant acknowledges that they are founded upon a thing in itself, which nevertheless remains unknown to the observer. Human understanding then can only reflect on appearances and not on things as they truly are (Kant 1977: 34). Reason’s desire for completeness can only be satisfied by a cognition of things in themselves, an objective condemned to fail due to the impossibility of knowing that which transcends the world of appearances. Reason is therefore permanently dissatisfied, for it confronts ‘ever-recurring questions’ to which no complete solution can be found either in the sensible world or by relying on the concepts, such as time and space, oriented towards understanding the empirical world (Kant 1977: 81, 94). Hence, the only solution to warding off the potential disadvantages to knowledge that are inherent in the metaphysical pursuit of reason is, for Kant, the setting up of limits deriving from a scientific critique that tames reason’s dialectical inferences. These limits consist in the recognition of the impossibility of reason ever cognising more than the objects of experience. However, reason simultaneously guides us to the objective boundary of experience,4 to the indication of an area where experience touches ‘the void’, that is, the noumena which 4 Kant draws a distinction between boundary and limits. Where the former refers to ‘something positive which belongs to what lies within as well as to the space that lies without the given complex’, limits consist in ‘mere negations which affect a quantity so far as it is not absolutely complete’ (1977: 93, 101). The boundary, rather than the limits of reason, alludes to the fact that reason is impelled to discover what lies beyond the field of experience, approaching noumena through the transcendental ideas. On White Mythologies 105 are inaccessible to knowledge. This area consists in ‘the highest ground of all experience’, where a relation is drawn between what belongs to the field of experience and what lies beyond it. In this manner, reason seeks to connect the things in themselves, which we never shall know, to the sensible world (Kant 1977: 95, 97). The transcendent cognitions of reason – the psychological, cosmological and theological ideas – serve precisely as indicators of the bounds of pure reason: by representing objects of experience in an extended series – the transcendental ideas – that exceed experience, reason seeks to attach this chain to noumena, enabling practical principles to become universals from a moral standpoint (Kant 1977: 71, 74, 93–94, 101–3). The transcendental ideas are concepts at the bounds of human reason, aspiring not to know things in themselves but rather ‘to guide the use of reason within the world of sense according to principles of the greatest possible (theoretical as well as practical) unity’ (Kant 1977: 101). Hegel critiques Kantian dualism on the grounds of contradiction: because Kant excludes cognition from the thing in itself – the noumena, or in Hegelian terms, the Absolute, synonymous with truth – truth remains unattainable, even in the realm of possible experience. While Kant wishes to limit knowledge to possible experience, the realm where the only possible ‘truth’ may be sought, he simultaneously characterises the thing in itself as the true ‘truth’, one which is impossible to capture. Kant’s ‘fear of falling into error’, of falling prey to illusion by applying the principles of reason to what exceeds possible experience, is for Hegel a ‘fear of the truth’ (Hegel 1977: 47). Hegel considers the divergent forms of knowledge to lead consciousness to the acquisition of true knowledge, the Absolute, where, due to a complete experience of itself the soul becomes spirit, knowing itself as it is, coinciding with itself in complete unity. In the realm of the Absolute, consciousness returns to itself as self-consciousness, in a circular motion whereby it becomes truly spirit by reflecting itself onto itself (Hegel 1977: 49, 488). The supersession of the alienation of the subject from its object of consciousness is achieved by the return to self-consciousness, and in this movement the subject acknowledges the world as his own creation. Thought and being, or abstract essence and Self, or substance and subject, are thus united in the Absolute: consciousness defines existence (Hegel 1977: 488–89). The process leading to the transformation of the in-itself into the for-itself, whereby the omnipotence of the ‘idea’ is affirmed, would not, however, be possible, were it not for prior dialectical preparation, the latter which is manifest in ‘the unhappy consciousness’, that is ‘the consciousness of self as a dual-natured, merely contradictory being’. Despite presenting itself as single, consciousness is therefore inwardly riven and non-cohesive, due to permanently including its other within itself. At the very moment in which it supposedly attains a harmonious fusion with alterity, consciousness is once again impelled out of this peaceful totality towards another object residing externally to itself (Hegel 1977: 126, 130, 489). As such, traces of a Kantian non-totalisable fissure between subject and object survive in the ambivalences inherent in the Hegelian dialectical conception of consciousness. 106 Cláudia Álvares Hegel’s ‘broken middle’: between Fichte and Schelling The ambivalences manifested in Hegelian idealism surface in Fichte’s and Schelling’s attempts to negotiate Kantian dualisms. While Fichte sought to unify subject/object dichotomies under the hegemony of a transcendental ego, Schelling posited a cosmic becoming, in which man is described as a ‘nexus of living forces’ (Schelling 1936: 41). Both Fichte and Schelling aim to problematise Kant’s representational model of experience, founded on a ‘transcendental unity of apperception’, as a pre-condition of the capacity to synthesise intuitions. Contrary to Kant, Fichte allows the ‘I’ to become an object of consciousness, that is, to posit itself in what is deemed to be an act of absolute freedom. Intellectual intuition, as an immediate consciousness of the self, reveals itself through the activity of the ego. Incapable of being conceptually proved nor understood by means of concepts, this discovery surges spontaneously with the realisation that ‘it is possible for me to know something because I do it’ (Fichte 1994: 46). The Fichtean ego is conceived as pure activity rather than a pre-established fact, affirming itself as an infinite process that is never fully concretised. Dispensing mediation, the ‘I’ as productive act is solely composed of its self-positing, that is, of its ability to think about itself. As such, despite attempting to break with the Kantian conceptual model of experience, Fichte reproduces the latter since productivity and experience belong to the transcendental subject. Because every object exists only to the extent that it falls within the limits of the ego, the subject is absolute in its capacity to give rise to its surrounding Reality. In his post-identity philosophy phase, Schelling, in turn, attempts to think of identity as a becoming that results from the interaction between an untamed, expansive, indomitable will, and a will that seeks to shape, contain and integrate ‘longing’ in the unity of existence. As such, where untamed longing, the will-to-depths, corresponds to a virtuality, the attempt to express this longing in the form of a will-to-love is equivalent to an actualisation. Schelling’s depiction of reflection is infused with a malleable and flexible quality, for, in this context, longing tries to individuate and differentiate itself from the amorphous, shapeless, disoriented impulses inherent in the nature of things. Where Kantian transcendental idealism sought to define the universal conditions of experience, conceiving experience as an object of the subject’s cognising activity, Schelling implies that experience may surpass rational form due to the existence of a virtual ‘irreducible remainder’, impervious to assimilation within the synthesising concepts of the understanding. Both Fichte and Schelling lend themselves to ambivalent interpretations concerning the negotiation of Kantian dualisms. At the same time that he affirms the absolute power of the ego, Fichte considers the latter to be inwardly limited by the non-ego. The non-ego consists in the sphere of resistance to the pure activity of the ‘I’, that is, in the obstacles that the self has to overcome in the process conducive to full coincidence with itself. These obstacles correspond to a ‘check’ (Anstoss) on the subject’s expansive productivity. According to Andrew Bowie, the Fichtean check replaces the Kantian thingin-itself. In this mode, the ego relies on the non-ego to ‘reflect its activity back into itself’ (Bowie 1993: 19). Deprived of absolute freedom, the ego’s ultimate On White Mythologies 107 objective becomes that of surpassing the obstacles preventing its affirmation. Kyriaki Goudeli claims, however, that rather than establishing a boundary to the ego’s affirmation, the check forces the ‘I’ to impose limits upon itself (Goudeli 2002: 82). Hence, the ego is posited as limited. The objective element [the Not-I] that is to be excluded [from the I] has no need at all to be present; all that is needed … is the presence of an Anstoss for the I. That is to say, the subjective element must, for some reason that simply lies outside of the activity of the I, be unable to extend any further … such an Anstoss would not limit the I as active, but would give it the task of limiting itself. (Fichte 1982: 189) Established by the ego, the non-ego is indeterminate and alterable. Fichte’s thought thus reveals the following inconsistencies: if on one hand, the ego is unlimited and transcendental, due to positing itself, it simultaneously confronts the possibility of its own finitude in the form of the non-ego. Just as Kant claims that reason is impelled to discover what lies beyond the field of experience, approaching the thing-in-itself through the transcendental ideas, so too the Fichtean I is irresistibly drawn towards the non-I. However, whereas in Kant that movement enables practical principles to establish themselves as objective moral law, in Fichte, that which is objective (non-ego) is converted into the subjective (ego). Yet the Fichtean ego is simultaneously inherently objective: because the willing self is a moral agent, capable of acting and making choices, it is independent of external causality. Hence, despite his attempts to give rise to a philosophy beginning from an Act (the ego that posits itself) rather than a fact, Fichte ultimately reduces that subjective Act to a fact and is thereby unable to escape the rigidity of the conceptual model of experience. Schelling, in turn, lends himself to two contradictory readings. If the willto-depth and the will-to-love are regarded as two sides of a primeval identity, cosmic becoming may be understood as a teleological process leading to revelation of the ‘Absolute’. From this perspective, those two principles consist in immanent manifestations of a transcendental and universal essence, the latter corresponding to a primal unity incessantly aiming for actualisation. However, in the Of Human Freedom treatise, Schelling suggests the nonidentity of the wills and yet the possibility of their synthesis. In this light, the two wills correspond to two similarly ‘eternal beginnings’, interacting in a process of becoming that defies all fixity. Hence, any hierarchy of wills that translates itself into the assimilation of one will by the other is apt to result in stagnation. In Schelling’s thought, the limits imposed upon the will manifest themselves in the attempt to enclose the latter within a systematic structure of thesis and antithesis which prevents the interaction between contraries from taking place. This process of interaction consists in the movement of becoming, a movement which is undetermined precisely due to the groundlessness and unpredictability of every will. By stressing the free activity of the will as ultimately conducive to the dissolution of structures, maintaining the nonteleological movement of becoming alive, Schelling breaks with the Kantian representational mode of experience. Where Kant seeks to order and classify experience structurally, drawing a clear line between the phenomenal and 108 Cláudia Álvares noumenal realms, Schelling breaks with transparent subject/object and sensible/intelligible dichotomies. By opening itself to the irrational, experience converts spiritual transcendence into a sensual immanence: the gods or potencies manifest themselves through the objects of the world, rendering conceptual clarity paradoxical. Schelling paves the way for the re-enchantment of the world, by refusing to reduce experience to that which can be synthesised by the concepts of the understanding. As the site of paradox, experience orients itself towards the ‘logic of longing’ rather than the ‘logic of concepts’. In effect, in Schelling, the process of becoming is sustained by the untamed, disruptive longing that challenges any established order. This mysterious, unruly potency, residing in the profundity of beings, provides the foundations which give rise to the ‘will-to-love’ that shapes, expresses and actualises longing. However, the creative form of longing consists not in the ‘unity’ of the entirely clear ‘utterance’ pertaining to the Kantian concept of the understanding, but rather in ‘a logogrif, the logos of a riddle’. The symbol which expresses longing is thus ‘movable, transmutable, ineffable’, in short, a paradox that defies Kantian conceptual logic as well as the Fichtean ‘logic of the will’ (Goudeli 2002: 9, 110). But the unruly still lies in the ground as if it could break through once again, and nowhere does it appear as though order and form were original, but rather as if something initially ruleless had been brought to order. This is the incomprehensible ground of reality in things, the irreducible remainder which with the greatest exertion cannot be resolved into reason but always remains in the ground. (Schelling 1936: 34) By emphasising the absence of order in the ‘irreducible remainder’, that is, in the longing that characterises the depths of beings, Schelling can be interpreted as inspiring himself in the Kantian description of the noumenal realm. While Kant states that pure reason cannot access the field that lies beyond sense experience, Schelling suggests that the ‘irreducible remainder’ is not to be cleared by the understanding. Hence, although Schelling breaks with Kantian distinctions between a sensible and intelligible world, emphasising cosmic becoming as that which permeates all beings, he nevertheless retains a conception of that which remains inaccessible to human understanding: any creative expression of longing will only partially shed light on the will-to-depths. If Fichte and Schelling problematise Kantian transcendental idealism but are unable to break with it completely, Hegel also nurtures that project and can be read as negotiating both their positions. Hegelian idealism hovers between the Fichtean desire to affirm a self-positing ego in the form of a self-consciousness that assimilates the other within itself, and Schelling’s aspiration to break with the Kantian dichotomy of sensible/intelligible realms, in the mode of a becoming that unites Spirit and Nature. Where, in Fichte, the activity of the ego consists in infinite movement, the finality of which is never reached, in Hegel the development of self-consciousness meets an end in the ‘eternal unchangeable’, the Absolute. From the standpoint of the Hegelian Absolute Idea, Spirit or consciousness preserves each historical On White Mythologies 109 moment in its alienation, so as to achieve complete self-knowledge. This process of self-transcendence, whereby the Spirit maintains each negation within itself, is essential to the realisation of the Absolute Idea. Consisting in the subject of self-realisation, the ‘transcendent Absolute’ is simultaneously its own object, due to its self-reflexivity having provided the impetus for the dialectical movement. Both Schelling and Hegel suggest the possibility of unison between mind and nature, subject and object, through a process of becoming that relies on movement between two principles. However, whilst in Schelling this process consists of an interaction between two free wills, both of which are separate from each other but meet at certain points without losing their respective identity, in Hegel, the development of self-consciousness is more systematised and structured. Hegelian dialectical becoming is therefore grounded in a structure of thesis and antithesis, united in a synthesis, where the subject assimilates the object within himself. Yet Hegel simultaneously draws attention to the ‘unhappy consciousness’, to the fact that self-consciousness never succeeds in fully coinciding with itself, consisting in a divisive, ravaged unity. From this perspective then, Hegel and Schelling resemble each other, for the Hegelian synthesis, as ‘singular’ or ‘broken middle’, is akin to Schelling’s ‘logos of the riddle’ or paradox, essentially transmutable in nature. From coincidence of differences to subsequent dissolution of this very coincidence, identity is constantly in the process of unravelling into non-identity. Just as Schelling claims that the creative formation of longing can never fully express the nature of longing that resides in the depths of beings – there always subsisting an ‘irreducible remainder’ defying human understanding – Hegel suggests the ‘I’ that returns to its point of origin rarely coincides with the ‘Self’, there being a permanent fissure at the heart of consciousness. Likewise, Schelling considers creative form to be an actualisation of the longing that exists in the profundity of beings, while Hegel maintains that consciousness bears within itself the kernel of the Absolute in immanent form. The Hegelian development of selfconsciousness can thus be interpreted as an actualisation of the Absolute Idea. However, Hegel’s actualisation implies a teleological narrative of becoming oriented towards the Absolute, whilst Schelling distances himself from teleology by advocating a groundless movement thriving on the free activity of wills. This discussion, linking the incoherencies in Hegelianism to the fissures existent in Fichte and Schelling regarding Kantian transcendental idealism, shows that any argument accusing Hegel of perpetuating a totalising logic lacks sufficient problematisation. In fact, Hegel sought to negotiate Kantian dualisms by proposing a unity of spirit/nature, subject/object that is inherently wounded. Hence, the concept of becoming proposed by Hegel aspires to a unity which simultaneously admits a permanent dualism. It is through activity, movement and interaction that consciousness realises that it is a partial, incomplete manifestation of an elusive Absolute. Modernity, critique and moral autonomy The ambivalences inherent in Hegelian thought demonstrate that modern discourse is incoherent and non-linear, obeying no grand narrative of 110 Cláudia Álvares progress. Containing within itself a ‘counter-discourse of domination’, a selfcritical and self-reflexive conscience, modernity questions its own totalising impulse (Venn 2000: 146, 148–49). Kant’s definition of the Enlightenment as ‘man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity’ by daring to ‘think for himself’ (Kant 1996: 51) survives in postmodern cultural criticism. Foucault’s critical ontology of the self is rooted in the Kantian conception of the enlightened subject capable of adopting a critical attitude towards the spatialtemporal context that moulds his subjectivity. Foucault claims that from the very moment that humanity makes free use of reason, without subjecting itself to external authority or guidance, critique becomes necessary (Foucault 1984: 38). The role of criticism is therefore that of defining the conditions in which the exercise of reason is legitimate, an objective which entails probing the field of possible experience in ‘actuality’.5 According to Foucault, the ‘critical interrogation on the present and on ourselves’ that Kant gave rise to breaks with the representational mode of experience inaugurated by the other Kantian tradition of ‘transcendental’ criticism. While the latter aims to articulate the universal conditions that lead to pure knowledge, the former is understood as a critical attitude to ‘the events that have led us to constitute ourselves’ (Foucault 1984: 46, 49–50). However, to the extent that both Kantian traditions rely on a notion of experience that is taken to be an object of the subject’s conceptual construction, they depend on a morally autonomous, transcendental consciousness, to which postmodern, as indeed postcolonial, cultural criticism are heirs. Young’s allegation that Said posits the ability of the critic to abstract himself from a dominant cultural totality targets, as such, the autonomous subject of the Enlightenment. Young draws attention to the limits inherent in criticism, by emphasising that a critic cannot choose to position himself outside cultural or theoretical postulates (Young 1995: 136). In this sense, he echoes the Foucaultian view of critique as determined by the contextual specificity of the ‘present’. However, Foucault’s critical ontology of the self presupposes the capacity of the subject to ‘transgress’ the discursive constraints of existence (Foucault 1984: 45). Hence, the distancing from an ontology founded upon a universal human essence and the emphasis placed on a temporally and spatially construed subject, capable of reinventing ‘identity’ through self-production, ultimately presupposes an autonomous consciousness capable of thinking for itself without relying on external guidance. As such, Young’s postmodern stance regarding individual agency in Said is insensitive to the fact that any critique must necessarily rely on the transcendental Enlightenment subject’s capacity to situate himself externally to his object of knowledge. 5 Both Kant and Foucault recognise the existence of limits to the use of reason. Kant defends the complete freedom of the public use of reason, by which he means the freedom of a ‘man of learning’ to address an entire ‘reading public’ regarding any matter whatsoever. However, he simultaneously states that, in the exercise of the private use of reason that accompanies the fulfilment of a civil obligation, citizens ought to comply with the authority of the community to which they belong (Kant 1996: 53). Foucault, in turn, draws attention to the fact that our own capacity for criticism is conditioned by the discursive context of our existence. On White Mythologies 111 Furthermore, Young states that by rehabilitating a ‘critical consciousness’ outside a dominant cultural totality, Said transforms the critic’s particularity into another universal, perpetuating the dichotomical, totalising structure of ‘Orientalism/Occidentalism’ (Young 1995: 135, 137–38). Said is thus accused of reproducing the closed rigidity of Hegelian binarisms, ultimately unable to escape the terms of his own critique. However, as we have seen, Hegelianism cannot be reduced to closure, articulating the problematisations of Kantian dualisms that are discernible in Fichte and Schelling. Moreover, the critic’s position outside a dominant system cannot be reduced to a cohesive totality, for the critic finds himself in a situation conducive to a constant transgression of the limits imposed upon his existence. To the extent that it is subject to criticism, the ‘dominant system’ is also irreducible to a static structure impermeable to change. As such, Young appears to equate Hegelianism with a totalising synthesis, where the antithesis is unable to resist assimilation by the thesis. Paradoxically, this outlook resembles that of Marx’s representation of Hegel, which may lead us to conclude that Young’s most recent attempts to draw a connection between the Marxist project, albeit in ‘tricontinental’ form, and poststructuralism are indeed confirmed in White Mythologies.6 It is additionally difficult to understand why Young considers that Spivak’s and Bhabha’s projects of deconstruction do not require Said’s ‘critical consciousness’, that is, an individual agency that extricates itself from a dominant context. Deconstructive criticism relies, yet again, on an autonomous self, capable of reflecting on the contextual specificities that condition knowledge. Thus, Spivak claims that the perpetuation of neo-colonialism in Western epistemology is to be deconstructed by a careful examination of the intertwining of power and knowledge. Even Spivak’s attempt to displace the categories of universality, in the form of womanhood and ‘Third World’, relies on a conception of an autonomous consciousness capable of articulating the multiplicity of subject positions that impose themselves on individuals. In this manner, it would be possible to point to the excessive supplementarity of the subaltern, that is, to the inability to pin down the latter to a single signified. The subaltern then reveals itself as a floating signifier, a form without a clearly defined content. It represents the limit of History precisely because its authenticity remains permanently elusive to the researcher. The subaltern’s voice is lost to totalising historical discourse and can only be partially expressed, as floating signifier, by tracing the positions through which it has been allowed to reveal itself. Likewise, Bhabha claims that the colonial subject is a permanently elusive signifier, continually escaping fixity. By drawing 6 I am here referring to Young’s preface to the second edition of White Mythologies, in which he claims that European Marxism is insensitive to ‘issues of race, gender, and anti-colonial struggles’, lending itself to the acronym MAMA (‘male Anglo-Saxon Marxist academia’). Aiming to introduce discourses of alterity into MAMA, Young argues that both poststructuralism and postcolonial theory are products of Maoism, that is, of post-1949 ‘tricontinental Marxism’. The Althusserian anti-humanist critique of historicism is thus situated within the conceptual framework provided by ‘Mao’s non-Western dissident Marxism’, and White Mythologies remains, according to its author, heir to the Maoist intellectual legacy (Young 2004: 3, 16, 19). 112 Cláudia Álvares attention to the ambivalence of colonial discourse, which addresses itself to a multiplicity of subject positions, Bhabha suggests that the colonial relation cannot be reduced to a binary opposition between the dominant and the dominated. Bhabha analyses the conditions of this process of address in order to show the occurrence of a slippage which problematises both the claim for a single political-ideological intention of the coloniser, as well as the straightforwardly instrumentalist relation of power and knowledge which Said assumes. (Young 1995: 142) Young considers that Bhabha’s and Spivak’s detotalising logic (with the exception of the latter’s recourse to ‘strategic essentialism’) resides precisely in this impossibility of coincidence between signifier and signified, where the former evades any attempt at containment by the latter. Detotalisation therefore counters, according to Young, modernity’s totalising Hegelian logic. However, once again, we must emphasise that Hegelianism can be interpreted as manifesting Schelling’s ‘logogrif’, or ‘riddle’, in the form of the ‘broken middle’. The non-coincidence between signifier and signified bring to mind Schelling’s ‘irreducible remainder’, the longing that cannot ever be fully expressed in any creative formation, and that in Hegel appears as a permanent gap between the ‘Self and itself’. Rather than representing the failure of Hegelianism, the floating signifier illustrates the ambivalence patent in modernity. As a symbol that releases the ‘broken middle’, it refrains from mending diremptions, articulating instead the perplexity inherent in any attempt to find a path from the universal to the particularity of each instance (Rose 1997: 115). From this perspective, modernity is indeed an unfinished project, which accommodates the centrifugal tendencies of poststructuralism and postcolonial deconstruction. The major issue stemming from the perpetuation of the modern is why the rifts inherent in the latter have been camouflaged by poststructuralist criticism. The poststructuralist emphasis on fragmentation intends to write back against the historical legacy of violence transmitted by the modern, drawing attention to the complicity between modernity and totalisation. Poststructuralist critiques thus refuse to acknowledge that rather than corresponding to a totalising appropriation of the other within the same, the violence of the modern may consist in the unsurpassable separation between the universal and the particular. Liberty, equality and fraternity, the trilogy of modern values, stand as representatives of moral universals, the violence of which resides in their ultimately inaccessible status, that is, in the fact that they are never entirely realisable in any instantiation. References Bhabha, H. 1995 [1994]. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bhabha, H. Hall, S., hooks, b. and Tawadros, G. 1996. ‘Dialogue’. In Alan Read (ed), The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation. London: ICA, 38–44. Bowie, A. 1993. Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction. London: Routledge. On White Mythologies 113 Ellington, J. 1977. ‘Introduction’. In Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. 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