This publication was supported by the

DFG funded Cluster of Excellence Normative Orders at

Goethe University Frankfurt am Main

Contents
Nikita Dhawan
Introduction ...............................................................................................

I. Entangled Legacies
Nikita Dhawan
Affirmative Sabotage of the Masters Tools: The Paradox of
Postcolonial Enlightenment....................................................................... 19
Karin Hostettler
Under (Post)colonial Eyes: Kant, Foucault, and Critique ......................... 79
Jamila M. H. Mascat
Hegel and the Black Atlantic: Universalism, Humanism and Relation ..... 93
Mara do Mar Castro Varela
Uncanny Entanglements: Holocaust, Colonialism, and
Enlightenment ........................................................................................... 115
II. Transnational Justice
Ulrike Hamann
A Historical Claim for Justice: Re-configuring the Enlightenment for
and from the Margins ................................................................................ 139
Sourav Kargupta
Feminist Justice Beyond Law: Spivakian Ab-Use of Enlightenment
Textuality in Imagining the Other ............................................................. 153
Jorma Heier
A Modest Proposal for Transnational Justice and Political
Responsibility............................................................................................ 177
Anna Millan and Ali Can Yldrm
Decolonizing Theories of Global Justice .................................................. 195

Contents

III. Human Rights

Julia Surez-Krabbe
The Other Side of the Story: Human Rights, Race, and Gender
from a Transatlantic Perspective ............................................................... 211
Judith Schacherreiter
Propertization as a Civilizing and Modernizing Mission:
Land and Human Rights in the Colonial and Postcolonial World ............. 227
Chenchen Zhang
Between Postnationality and Postcoloniality: Human Rights and the
Rights of Non-citizens in a Cosmopolitan Europe ................................. 243
Frederick Cowell
Defensive Relativism: Universalism, Sovereignty, and the
Postcolonial Predicament .......................................................................... 261
IV. Democracy
Lyn Ossome
Democracys Subjections: Human Rights in Contexts of Scarcity ............ 279
Navneet Kumar
Statelessness and the Power of Performance: A Reading of Resistance
in the Face of Agambens Sovereign Power.............................................. 295
Aylin Zafer and Anna Millan
Provincializing Cosmopolitanism: Democratic Iterations and
Desubalternization .................................................................................... 311
Notes on Contributors ............................................................................... 327

Introduction1
Nikita Dhawan
The intellectual and political legacies of the Enlightenment endure in our
times, whether we aspire to orient ourselves by them or contest their claims.
Whenever norms of secularism, human rights, or justice are debated, we are
positioning ourselves vis--vis the Enlightenment, which provides important
intellectual, moral, and political resources for critical thought. Immanuel
Kants dictum, Have courage to use your own reason! succinctly captures
the Enlightenment claim of emancipation through the exercise of reason. In
the face of feudality, violence, prejudice, and subservience to authority, the
Enlightenment intellectuals enunciate ideals of equality, rights, and rationality
as a way out of domination towards freedom. Contesting traditionalism, authoritarianism, and the legitimization of social inequalities, the Enlightenment, it is claimed, inspired radical movements like the French and Haitian
revolution, while influencing progressive political thought including liberalism and socialism. Enabling a critical reflection on political norms and practices, it has fostered the accountability of institutions, equality before law, and
the transformation of social relations. Emancipatory movements for suffrage,
abolition of slavery and civil liberties can all be traced back to the Enlightenment, even as it continues to inspire contemporary social and political
movements. The Enlightenment idea of individual rights and dignity, it is
believed, enables the exercise of political agency and expands individual
freedom.
However, as has been pointed out by both scholars of Postcolonial Studies
as well as Holocaust Studies, Enlightenments promise of attaining freedom
through the exercise of reason has ironically resulted in domination by reason
itself. Along with progress and emancipation, it has brought colonialism,
slavery, genocide, and crimes against humanity.
Against this background, the present volume engages with the contradictory consequences of the Enlightenment for the postcolonial world. In the past
decades, there has been a spate of revisionist historiography that attempts to
recuperate imperialism as a virtuous exercise. The ideological distinction
drawn between good, responsible and evil, irresponsible imperialism in
recent accounts emphasize its positive force to highlight the benefits of
empire. These glorifying narratives disregard the coercive context in which
Europeans emerged as ethical subjects in the guise of redeemers of the
backward people and dispensers of rights and justice. The fact that Europe
1

A special thanks to Johanna Leinius and Anna Millan for their support in preparing the
manuscript.

10

Nikita Dhawan

drew and continues to draw profits from the surplus extracted from its former
colonies is conveniently ignored in these accounts. International systems that
emerged at the end of colonialism create and ensure global inequality. The
fruits of modernization have been accompanied by systematic pauperization.
The aim of the present volume is to question the hollow myth of the Enlightenments long march to freedom and emancipation. However, instead of
a polemical dismissal of the Enlightenment, the effort is to conceptually reposition its role in processes of decolonization, even as the Enlightenment itself
must be decolonized. This is not a simple task of undoing the legacies of the
Enlightenment and colonialism; rather it is a more challenging undertaking of
reclaiming and reconfiguring the fruits of the Enlightenment. The various
contributions in this volume address diverse aspects of colonialism and its
enduring economic, cultural, social, and political consequences both for the
global North as well as the global South. The four sections of the volume deal
with key issues of the entangled legacies of the Enlightenment and colonialism, transnational justice, human rights, and democracy from a postcolonial
feminist perspective. On the one hand, the various contributions engage with
the allegation that discourses of transnational justice, human rights, and democracy are ideological expressions of a coercive will to power of the global
North. On the other hand, they investigate how these Enlightenment concepts
can function as aspirational ideals while providing evaluative criteria to critically assess our socio-cultural, legal, and economic practices. By exploring
the orchestrating and regulative effects of Enlightenment norms as well as
their emancipatory and coercive dimensions, the aim is to delineate the challenges in decolonizing Enlightenment. This opens up space for social and
political interpretations as well as contestations with the aim to overcome
inequalities and injustice in a postcolonial world.
In Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000: 5) argues that almost by definition postcolonial thinkers are obliged to engage with abstract
and universal categories that were forged during the Enlightenment and inform the theorizing of historical, social, and economic phenomena in the
postcolonial world. It is not so much the European origins (Genese) of the
norms of human rights or democracy that compromise their validity (Geltung), but much more the normative violence (Butler 1999: xx) that is exercised on those who violate the hegemonic definitions of these norms. Postcolonial theorists seek to retain these norms, which opens up possibilities of
negotiation, appropriation and transformation of these norms, while contesting their Eurocentric bias. As Chakrabarty (2000: 4) argues, political modernity, with its ideas of citizenship, the state, civil society, the public sphere,
human rights, the rule of law, democracy, popular sovereignty, social justice,
scientific rationality, and secularism is a legacy of the Enlightenment thought
and history. It is inadequate, but nonetheless indispensable in understanding
the postcolonial condition. At the same time, the postcolonial world is not a

Introduction

11

passive recipient of these concepts, but is actively involved in reconfiguring

key concepts like universality, secularity, liberty, and equality, which were
created and re-created in the interaction between colony and metropolis. The
challenge is how to negotiate the Enlightenment legacies of democracy, justice, and rights without reproducing the constitutive violence that has marked
the emergence of these norms.
By subjecting religious and political authorities to reasoned criticism, the
Enlightenment fashions itself as a movement toward human liberty and equality, knowledge and progress. However, the historical triumph of reason and
science brought with it terror, genocide, slavery, exploitation, domination,
and oppression. My own opening contribution Affirmative Sabotage of the
Masters Tools: The Paradox of Postcolonial Enlightenment addresses this
disenchantment with the Enlightenment. Colonialism and the Holocaust are
testimony to the fact that the progressive ideals of the Enlightenment were in
fact tainted. However, a number of recent publications seek to provide a corrective to what is contended is a misrepresentation of the Enlightenments
epistemological investment in imperialism by recovering critical perspectives
within European political thought. As a counterpoint to the postcolonial critique of the Enlightenment it is argued that the Enlightenment was in fact antiimperialist. My paper critically engages with these claims to explore the dilemmatic relation of postcolonialism to the Enlightenment. Following Michel
Foucaults recommendation of freeing ourselves from the intellectual blackmail of being for or against the Enlightenment, I explore the possibilities of
re-enchantment with the Enlightenment and the costs and challenges of this
endeavor.
The other three essays in the first section of the volume similarly engage
with the ambivalent relation between colonialism and the Enlightenment. In
her contribution Under (Post)colonial Eyes: Kant, Foucault, and Critique,
Karin Hostettler outlines a postcolonial reading of Foucaults Introduction to
Kants Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. In Foucaults view
Kants Anthropology occupies an exceptional position within the Kantian
system, especially with regard to the question of critique, even as it builds
upon his previous writings. Despite his insightful reading of Kants Anthropology, Foucault, in Hostettlers view, ignores global colonial power relations
in his reflections. Focusing on Kants discussion of different human races,
Hostettler unpacks the Eurocentric assumptions that haunt Foucaults critical
approach. At the heart of her endeavor is the challenge of overcoming the
Eurocentric bias of the critical tradition, which paradoxically inspires postcolonial thought.
Susan Buck-Morsss book Hegel, Haiti and Universal History establishes
a previously unexplored link between the German philosopher Friedrich Hegel and the Haitian Revolution, which were traditionally conceived of as
belonging to two incommensurable geographies and histories. Along similar

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Nikita Dhawan

lines Jamila Mascats chapter Hegel and the Black Atlantic. Universalism,
Humanism and Relation connects Hegel to the Black Atlantic. However,
in contrast to exploring the influence of the colonial world on European
thinkers, she investigates the reception of Hegel, particularly The Phenomenology of Spirit, in French-Caribbean scholarship. Focusing on the works of
the three Martinican writers Aim Csaire, Frantz Fanon, and Edouard Glissant and their appropriation of Hegel for anticolonial thought, Mascat analyses the literary-philosophical cross-fertilization that occurred between Hegel and the Black Atlantic.
Efforts to link colonialism and the Third Reich are perceived as a provocation by a number of scholars, especially by historians. In her contribution
Uncanny Entanglements: Holocaust, Colonialism and Enlightenment Mara
do Mar Castro Varela argues that thinking together the gruesome atrocities
committed during colonialism and the Third Reich would help develop a
more nuanced and deeper understanding of the relation between colonialism,
the Holocaust, and the Project of Modernity. Drawing on the writings of
Theodor Adorno and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the chapter explores the
role of education in the aftermath of historical violence in envisioning nondominant futures.
The second section of the volume engages with the issue of historical and
contemporary justice from a transnational perspective. Ulrike Hamanns contribution A Historical Claim for Justice Re-configuring the Enlightenment
for and from the Margins focuses on Mary Church Terrells visit to Berlin in
1904. Daughter of former slaves and member of the womens suffrage
movement in the USA, Church Terrell was invited to deliver a talk on The
Progress of Colored Women at the International Womens Congress,
where she was the only woman-of-color participant. In contrast to her bourgeois white German colleagues who did not have access to higher education
on account of their gender, Church Terrell had a college degree, but nonetheless experienced blatant forms of racism in the US as well as in Germany.
Against the background of three intersecting contexts, namely, the European
feminist movement, post-slavery USA, and German colonialism, Hamann
analyses Church Terrells efforts to re-configure the Enlightenment ideal of
progress by inscribing hitherto excluded subjects such as Black women into
discourses of emancipation and rights.
Sourav Karguptas chapter Feminist Justice Beyond Law: Spivakian AbUse of Enlightenment Textuality in Imagining the Other engages with
Spivaks reading of Kants Critique of the Power of Judgment in the form of
an affirmative deconstruction. Spivaks reading retrieves the figure of the
native informant as a mark of a violent expulsion that the Kantian text performs in thinking its central subject. This nuanced reading is unmistakably
postcolonial in its intimate undoing of the Enlightenment textuality. However, in a related move Spivak shows that the eruption of the native inform-

Introduction

13

ant, as a supplement that the text desires and yet denies, persists in the postcolonial text as well, this time as the effaced figure of the subaltern woman.
This insistence in persisting with the work of deconstruction, even at the cost
of questioning the very ground of a postcolonial critique as discourse of
man, positions Spivak not merely outside the average paradigm of the postcolonial fabric, but also configures a deconstruction which is more open to
the notion of the persistent work of feminist justice. Kargupta argues that such
critical labor of feminist deconstruction might point toward a new configuration of reason that is aware of its necessary constitution as a generality, and
yet remains attentive to eruptions of singular and located gendered moments
which may both disrupt and inform it.
Despite increasing research on transnational justice in contemporary critical scholarship, there is a marked absence of the examination of historical
injustice in the form of colonial exploitation, violence, and domination,
whose legacies persist in the postcolonial world. Drawing on the writings of
Iris Marion Young and Joan Tronto, Jorma Heiers essay A Modest Proposal
for Transnational Justice and Political Responsibility, presents an account of
transnational justice that problematizes privileged irresponsibility. Moving
beyond territorialized understanding of justice that limit the commitment to
justice within the nation-state, Heier addresses the history of colonialism,
structural injustice, and epistemic ignorance to present a postcolonial feminist
account of transnational justice. She proposes that Uma Narayans idea of
methodological humility and Spivaks notion of learning to learn from
below offer possibilities of reconfiguring the asymmetrical relation between
the dispensers and receivers of justice.
Along similar lines, Anna Millan and Ali Can Yldrm critically engage in
their contribution Decolonizing Theories of Justice with the Eurocentric
framework of liberal theories of global justice, in particular with the writings
of John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum. Examining the violent exclusions and
elisions operating within these theories of justice, Millan and Yldrm seek to
shift the focus to the position of subalterns, who are most strongly affected by
global injustices. Supplementing mainstream theories of justice through postcolonial-feminist insights like Spivaks reflections on the ethics of responsibility, Millan and Yldrm aim to trace the silencing and marginalization of
subaltern groups, especially subaltern women, in global theories of justice. To
undo subalternity demands a different practice of representation that will
allow disenfranchised individuals and groups to make claims and emerge as
subjects of rights.
The third section of the volume explores the postcolonial critique of human rights discourses. Human rights, in mainstream theories, are considered
as a gift of the European Enlightenment to the world. The rights narrative is
commonly constructed chronologically from the English Bill of Rights in
1689, through the US Declaration of Independence in 1776, and to the Decla-

14

Nikita Dhawan

ration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1788 emerging from the
French Revolution. According to this narrative, these declarations reached a
culminating point in 1948 with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
and the subsequent generations of rights. Julia Surez-Krabbes contribution The Other Side of the Story: Human Rights, Race, and Gender from a
Transatlantic Perspective shifts the focus from Europe to the Americas, from
the era of Enlightenment to the late fifteenth-century discovery of the
Americas to provide an alternate account of how human rights discourse not
only took white male subjectivity as the norm, but was crafted to protect the
Spanish colonizing elites. In light of this analysis, Surez-Krabbe urges a
legal and political reconsideration of the emancipatory assumptions of contemporary human rights discourses.
Judith Schacherreiters chapter Propertization as a Civilizing and Modernizing Mission: Land and Human Rights in the Colonial and Postcolonial
World deals with the emergence of property as a human right in Europe,
which occurred in the historical context of the propertization of soil. Backed
by theories of natural law and the legal philosophy of the Enlightenment, the
Western understanding of property was universalized through colonialism,
while communal land usage, as practiced by peasants in pre-capitalist Europe
and by the indigenous population in the Americas, was disqualified as premodern and primitive. Applying the theories of Dipesh Chakrabarty, Enrique Dussel and Edmundo OGorman to Mexican agrarian history, Schacherreiter argues that the universalization of property contains a colonial way of
thinking that is inherently biased against communal forms of land usage,
which are viewed as mere anachronisms. However, if propertization constitutes an attack on the commons, then taking the commons seriously would
mean contesting the universalism of property in the era of neocolonialism.
Chenchen Zhangs essay Between Postnationality and Postcoloniality:
Human Rights and the Rights of Non-citizens in a Cosmopolitan Europe
examines the tensions between postnational articulations of EU membership,
both in terms of normative expectations and institutional construction, and the
post/neocolonial politics of citizenship and migration in todays Europe.
Revisiting the Arendtian critique of human rights and questioning the problematic construction of the subject of human rights and of the citizen, Zhang
examines how EU citizenship continues to reproduce differential inclusion
and an essentialist cultural identity at the supranational level. Zhang argues
that neither institutional nor morality-based versions of cosmopolitanism can
sufficiently account for the political implications of European migration politics that reinforce the gap between the universal human and the national citizen.
The doctrine of cultural relativism is frequently employed to explain ethical systems that diverge from the Enlightenment consensus of universalized
morality. Designating ethical practices as culturally relative was hitherto

Introduction

15

confined to societies that the colonial project deemed primitive. Cultural

relativism has been employed by critics of the human rights project as a strategy to challenge its universality and civilizing narrative. Relativistic arguments are also used by state parties to international human rights treaties to
justify their own human rights abuses. Frederick Cowells contribution Defensive Relativism: Universalism, Sovereignty, and the Postcolonial Predicament examines the increasing employment of defensive relativism by
Western states to contest international human rights treaties. Analyzing the
UK governments relativism towards the European Court of Human Rights,
Cowell outlines a theory of defensive relativism that compromises the universality of human rights instruments.
The final section of the volume addresses the challenging relation between
decolonization and democratization. An increasingly significant concern with
democratization as an emancipatory political project relates to the ways in
which liberal rights function in various political and economic contexts. Lyn
Ossomes chapter Democracys Subjections: Human Rights in Contexts of
Scarcity examines the complex relation between human rights and democracy in Uganda and South Africa, two countries in which monopoly capitalism
and questions of state sovereignty appear at the core of debates on decolonization. Ossome suggests that liberal notions of human rights applied in contexts of political, cultural, and economic exclusion and lack actually reproduce human rights violations instead of resolving them.
Engaging with Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, Navneet Kumars paper Statelessness and the Power of Performance: A Reading of Resistance in
the Face of Agambens Sovereign Power explores the increasing ability of
states to produce state of exception, which puts the constitutional rights of
citizens in abeyance, while creating non-citizens out of some. According to
Agamben, once categorized as non-citizens, such people are classified as
stateless and even assumed to be outside the sphere of power or any influence. To contest this equation of non-citizens as stateless and powerless and
to illustrate that statelessness can be equated with performative power, Kumar
provides an innovative reading of Harold Pinters Mountain Language and
draws on the works of Judith Butler and Spivak to demonstrate that the category of non-citizenship need not be necessarily equated with dispossession.
Aylin Zafer and Anna Millans chapter Provincializing Cosmopolitanism: Democratic Iterations and Desubalternization juxtaposes Seyla Benhabib and Spivaks theorization of democratic change. Drawing on the writings of Jacques Derrida and Robert Cover, Benhabibs notion of democratic
iteration addresses the challenge of making universal norms respond to particular interests, while remaining true to a universalist liberal model. The goal
is to achieve consensus between different positions within a heterogeneous
liberal democratic society. In contrast, Spivaks pedagogical strategies for
desubalternization focus on the ethical singularity of the subaltern subjects

16

Nikita Dhawan

in the global South, which resist universalizing tendencies and blueprints.

Both Benhabib and Spivak aim for the increased democratic participation of
disenfranchised individuals and collectivities within contemporary globalized
capitalist structures. While Benhabib envisages marginalized individuals like
migrants using the constitutional mechanisms of liberal nation-states to challenge their exclusion, thereby strengthening the universal norms of democracy, human rights, and citizenship, Spivaks strategy for furthering democratization aims to undo class apartheid through epistemic change at both ends
of the postcolonial divide to enable democracy from below.

Bibliography
Buck-Morss, Susan (2009): Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Butler, Judith (1999): Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
10th ed. London: Routledge.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000): Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

I. Entangled Legacies

Affirmative Sabotage of the Masters Tools: The

Paradox of Postcolonial Enlightenment
Affirmative Sabotage of the Masters Tools

Nikita Dhawan

The term Enlightenment is widely disputed and is understood to encompass

a diverse range of attitudes, concepts, practices, institutions, texts, and thinkers. The enduring conversation between the defenders and detractors of the
Enlightenment remains vibrant and controversial. Judith Shklar (1998: 94),
for instance, explains that
part of the eighteenth century that we call The Enlightenment was a state of intellectual
tension rather than a sequence of simple propositions.

Given the plurality of perspectives encompassed under the label of the Enlightenment, Sankar Muthu (2003: 265) suggests that an exhaustive definition that could fully capture this diversity is impossible. He proposes a negative definition of the Enlightenment based upon what enlightened thought is
against, namely, orthodox understandings of religious doctrine and traditional
understandings of state power. This move refrains from limiting the vibrant
intellectual period of the Enlightenment to a singular meaning or common
project. Anthony Cascardi (1999: 21) remarks that the term Enlightenment
simultaneously designates a historical epoch as well as describes a conceptual
paradigm. A critical engagement with the Enlightenment entails a historical
analysis of the modern world even as it examines the nature of reason itself,
with the antinomy of history and theory making Enlightenment a site of an
impasse (ibid).
Going into the historical context in which the question What is Enlightenment?1 was posed against the backdrop of discussions on censorship,
political authority, and religious faith, James Schmidt (1996: 2) unpacks how
despite the differences in the response to this question, one common feature
was that none of the respondents to this question understood it in terms of a
particular historical period. Instead of scrutinizing claims of living in an enlightened age (ibid: 17), Kant [1784], whose essay became canonical, was
1

Johann Friedrich Zllner published an article in the Berlinische Monatsschrift (December

1783) asking: What is enlightenment? This question, which is almost as important as what
is truth, should indeed be answered before one begins enlightening! And still I have never
found it answered! (cit. in Schmidt 1996: 2). On 17 December 1783, J. K. W. Mohsen read
a paper at the Mittwochsgesellschaft (a secret society of Friends of the Enlightenment) on
the question What is to be done towards the enlightenment of fellow citizens? (ibid: 3).
Subsequently the Berlinische Monatsschrift published responses from Moses Mendelssohn
and Kant.

20

Nikita Dhawan

principally concerned with the political and not the historical aspects of the
question. Schmidt (1996: 5) argues that Kants focus was principally on tracing the publicness of reason that marked this period. With the flourishing of
coffee houses, salons, reading societies and scientific academies, reason went
public. The public use of reason2 was closely linked to the autonomy of the
individual, which led Kant to recommend that under no circumstances should
it be restricted. This was one of the cornerstones of Enlightenment political
thought.
Schmidt (ibid: 29) faults thinkers who try to approach the original question and responses in terms of drawing generalizations about the Enlightenment project and its legacies for our age. According to him, the respondents
to the question What is Enlightenment sought to explain a process and not
define a period. Contemporary critics of the Enlightenment are accused of
taking as their point of departure some current problem, like totalitarianism or
the ecological crisis, and linking it causally to the Enlightenment legacy of
instrumental reason and the rise of discourses of individual rights over the
ethics of duties. While Schmidt rejects approaches that blur the difference
between defining the Enlightenment and evaluating the various projects it
allegedly championed, he nonetheless perceives as legitimate the question of
what counts as Enlightenment and the demands it elicits from us.
In light of the recent discussions in both political thought as well as postcolonial studies on the contradictory legacies of the Enlightenment, the aim of
this chapter is to provide an overview of the different positions in this debate
to unpack the strengths and weaknesses of the various arguments. Beginning
in the first section with the critics of the Enlightenment, most notably the
scholars of the Frankfurt school, postmodernists, feminists, and postcolonial
theorists, who point to the pernicious consequences of the Enlightenment, the
second section moves on to the defendants of the Enlightenment, who hope to
bring to light the long neglected anti-imperialist impulses of eighteenth century political thought, with particular focus on German Enlightenment. The
third section takes stock of the simultaneously imperialist and anti-imperialist
nature of the Enlightenment. I propose that while postcolonial theorists risk
homogenizing the Enlightenment by primarily focusing on its violent legacies, advocates of eighteenth century political thought do not adequately
consider the postcolonial-feminist critique in their efforts to recuperate Enlightenment thought. The fourth section deals with one of the core questions
that brings together postcolonial and Enlightenment scholarship, namely, the
role of critical practice in transforming social and political relations. The
concluding section addresses the ambivalent relation between postcolonialism
and European Enlightenment, and the challenge this sets up for politics in the
postcolonial world.
2

Feminists point out the gendered nature of the public versus private distinction on which the
Kantian understanding of the public and private uses of reason rest.

Affirmative Sabotage of the Masters Tools

21

The Disenchantment of Enlightenment

From the outset, reflections on the Enlightenment have been inseparable from
the hopes and fears about what the project epitomizes. The critique of the
Enlightenment and skepticism about reason itself has a long tradition. From
Edmund Burke to Friedrich Hegel, from Karl Marx to Friedrich Nietzsche3,
the merits and triumphs of discourses of reason, science, rights, and law have
been a matter of dispute and polemics. The critique of the Enlightenment is
equally a critique of its self-representation as having overcome history and its
constraints. One of the earliest disenchantments with the Enlightenment derived from its connection to the French Revolution: Some of the earliest challenges to the Enlightenment came from Catholic opponents in France, who
linked the anti-Catholic fervor of the Revolution to the Enlightenment critique
of religion. The idea that the Enlightenment caused the Revolution connects
the terror that ensued with the values of the Enlightenment (Jordanova 1990:
203). Thus the emancipatory potential of the Enlightenment is cast in doubt.
It is argued that the Enlightenment struggle against established authorities and
efforts to create alternatives, ushered in political, theological, and philosophical authoritarianism in the form of Napoleon Bonaparte (ibid: 207).
As critics point out, the Enlightenments presentist bias as well as corrective stance condemns the past as an underdeveloped version of the present
(Cascardi 1999: 2526). The pre-Enlightenment world is characterized as a
period of darkness and ignorance plagued by superstition and dogmatism, to
which the Enlightenment introduced the notion of progress, in which reason
marked the advancement of an enlightened self-consciousness. Its selfcongratulatory stance serves as an ideological tool to produce self-serving
explanations that justify the rejection of its historical antecedents, while
claiming that the Enlightenment is both the result of and the cause of progress
in history. It points to its own success as proof that progress is indeed possible (ibid: 27).
Enlightenment presents itself as a triumph of reason over superstition, as a
movement towards human liberty and equality by subjecting religious and
political authorities to reasoned criticism (ONeil 1990: 186). Its denunciations of tyranny, superstition and intolerance go hand in glove with the promise that knowledge and science will bring justice, peace, democracy, and the
end to suffering and distress. However, as critics have outlined, the Enlightenment has undeniably also reinforced the values and norms of a hegemonic
class that ushered in new modes of social domination and coercion. The rise
3

Many argue that the best account of the consequences of the failure of the Enlightenment
project is to be found in the work of Nietzsche (see MacIntyre 1981, Garrard 2004). Accusing Kant as an enemy of the Enlightenment, Nietzsche called for the denouncement of the
entire eighteenth century political thought.

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Nikita Dhawan

to power of a particular idiom of reason and science rendered unintelligible

other forms of knowledges and cosmologies (Clark/Golinski/Shaffer 1999).
The Enlightenments attempt to create a world in which all individuals, societies, and institutions would be measured against the standard of rational utility
has culminated in domination and oppression.
One of the staunchest contestations of the emancipatory claims of the Enlightenment came from the first generation of the Frankfurt School of social
theory. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer contend that the Enlightenment represents Western cultures attempt to dominate by means of a controlling rationality. In Dialectic of Enlightenment [1944] they argue that far from
ensuring equality and liberty, Enlightenment reason resulted in the barbarism
of fascism. As an instrument of power in the service of its own vision of what
is true and good, the exclusion of non-normative subjects has been at the
heart of the Enlightenment, they argue. Furthermore, they are unconvinced by
claims of its self-corrective nature.
Another powerful challenge comes from post-structuralism (Baker/Reill
2001, Gordon 2001). In his earlier work, for example in Madness and Civilization [1959] as well as Discipline and Punish [1975], Foucault directs his
critique at the classical age or age of reason, which has engendered what
he calls the disciplinary society. Examining the emergence of institutions
like hospitals, asylums, and prisons as closely tied to the development of the
human sciences, Foucault shows how these discourses and institutions rationalized new forms of discipline and control through the deployment of a
particular form of reason. He challenges the self-representation of the age of
reason as humanitarian and progressive. While Kant understands the
Enlightenment as a challenge to the arbitrary use of political power, Foucault
focuses on the link between rationalization and the excesses of political power. He thus uncovers the coercive aspects of Enlightenment reform and emancipation: The introduction of supposedly more humane practices and institutions, whether penal or medical, legitimized the systematic marginalization
and silencing of the Other. The aim was to purge society of individuals that
were perceived as a threat. In the name of curing it, madness became mental
illness and thereby effectively silenced. The regulating and normalizing
urges of the classical age ruptured the dialogue between madness and reason;
modern prisons became a symbol of civilized societies, with surveillance
replacing torture, reform replacing physical violence as more humane. The
earlier technologies were not only critiqued for being cruel, but for being
inefficient and uneconomical. Teachers, psychologists, and social workers
became protectors and enforcers of the norm throughout the entire social
body. This ensemble of techniques of normalization was at the heart of the
new tactics and micro-physics of power that emerged during the age of reason. Corresponding to the social institutions and practices of the classical age

Affirmative Sabotage of the Masters Tools

23

is what Foucault calls the classical episteme, the distinctive way in which
knowledge was conceived, ordered and constituted in the eighteenth century.
It must of course be borne in mind that Enlightenment philosophers like
Kant have been acutely aware of the ambivalent nature of reason, which is
why he does not limit his critique to the Church and the State, but applies it to
reason itself (ONeil 1990: 187188). As Kant explains, the Enlightenment is
an expression of rational will, an exit from self-incurred tutelage (Kant
1977c: 53). The radical social change promised by the Enlightenment is
premised on the exertion of the will to empower ourselves and to transform
social realities. Two key distinguishing features of the Enlightenment are its
claim to freedom to reason and to criticize rather than to think and act in
accordance with external authority. Private uses of reason are partial and
tempt us into obedience (ibid: 53), in contrast to which the public use of
reason is exercised by men of learning (ibid: 55). Autonomous thinking and
acting follows principles of reason that is against both subservience and arbitrariness. However, Kant repudiates any individualist interpretation of autonomy, in that he argues that a solitary individual cannot expect to escape immaturity; rather, autonomy in thinking is always intersubjective and exercised through the public use of reason. He claims that, for the emergence of
an enlightened public, the freedom to make public use of ones reason is more
significant than political reform (ibid: 5556). The Kantian categorical imperative, as principle of autonomy, is a matter of acting only on principles
that could be chosen by all, that is, on maxims which can be willed as universal laws. The only obstacles to freedom and emancipation are cowardice,
laziness, or restrictions on the public use of reason, which must be overcome
(Kant 1974: 51).
This brings us to the other defining characteristic of the Enlightenment,
namely, its universalizing4 ambitions, most clearly expressed through its emphasis on universal principles, which all human beings assumedly aspire to
irrespective and independent of their race, class, gender, sexual orientation,
religion, and nationality. These universal principles are neither contingent nor
negotiable, so that they are undeniable by any rational person independent of
particular times and places. Proponents of the Enlightenment aspire to speak
rationally and objectively about the world as a whole and to establish the
legitimacy of knowledge by means of the systematic separation of value from
fact (Cascardi 1999: 90). As has been repeatedly pointed out by its critics, a
common malady of the Enlightenment is its attempt to divorce reason and
cognition from experience, intuition, and affect. It was contrary to the goals
of enlightened critical thinking to derive the laws that prescribe what ought to
4

Universalism, for Kant, involves determining whether a particular maxim can be consistently taken up by everyone else or whether one is required to make an exception of oneself, and
thus apply a rule to oneself that cannot, without contradiction, be willed by others.

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Nikita Dhawan

be done from instances of what actually is the case (ibid: 8384). To derive
values from the world of fact would leave us with impure and unreliable
forms of value contaminated by interested egoism.
The move to subject reason to critical inquiry has raised concerns about
whether attempts to criticize reason would result in nihilism (ibid: 52). In
response to such doubts, Kant reiterates his faith in reason, understood as
autonomy in thinking and in action, to overcome conflicts and bring about
lasting peace (ibid: 192). However sceptics nonetheless highlight Kants
admiration for Frederick the Great, who asserts: Argue as much as you like,
but obey! as proof of Enlightenments ambivalent relation to political freedom.
Another significant challenge to the Enlightenment model of emancipation
comes from postcolonial studies.5 The Enlightenment claim of having overcome barbarism in Europe, justified its spread to the uncivilized nonEuropean world. The rational ideal of the Enlightenment and its accompanying idea of progress set up a singular, universal goal for humankind, namely,
indefinite improvement and development. Its stadial view of history justified
colonialism on the grounds that through contact with Europe, savage and
barbarian populations could advance to higher stages of development (cf.
McCarthy 2009). Differences between European and non-Europeans were
explained in terms of historical, geographical, social, cultural, political, and
economic factors, which could be overcome if the non-European world accepted the European model of civilization as the blue-print for its future.
Colonialism was the way to overcome backwardness, whereby the guidance
and support of the Europeans would guarantee a positive social, economic,
and political outcome.
Inspired by the Frankfurt School and the poststructuralist critique of the
Enlightenment, postcolonial theorists emphasize the profound interconnection
between Europes imperial ventures and the Enlightenment veneration of
reason, science, and progress that made possible the very thinking of the
world as a unified whole. These world-knowing and world-creating strategies were at the heart of European colonialism. Imperialist ideologies were
successful in translating their provincial understanding of knowledge, norms,
values, and ideals into explanatory paradigms with universalist purchase. The
universalizing project of Enlightenment imposed a uniform standard of instrumental reason, privileging European conceptions of knowledge and institutions. The Enlightenment reform of legal, administrative, and economic
policy in the colonies, instead of ushering in freedom and equality, opened a
5

Festa and Carey (2009: 7) remark that the terms postcolonial and Enlightenment share a
kinship to the extent that both simultaneously describe a period, a kind of political order, a
cluster of ideas, a theoretical purchase point, and a mode of thinking. Both terms are historical breaking-points that mark political and epistemic shifts, in that they are both modes
of oppositional critiques informed by a plurality of local instantiations (ibid).

Affirmative Sabotage of the Masters Tools

25

new chapter of the history of domination. It introduced practices of subjectification, surveillance, regulation, and discipline. Attempts at enlightened and
humanitarian reforms regularly resulted in the increased control over the
individuals in whose name these reforms were carried out. As argued by David Scott (1999: 35), colonialism produced not just extractive effects on colonized bodies, but also governing effects on colonial conduct.
Although the focus has primarily been on time, it is important to bear in
mind that the Enlightenment association with and embeddedness in the geographical region Europe is a decisive aspect of its self-consciousness. From
this perceived center, the Enlightenment thinkers began to theorize the
peripheral parts of the world, comparing their own societies and cultures
with the rest of the world. Colonialism was the age of discovery, when the
Europeans claimed to have found new worlds by bravely encountering
cannibals and savages (Hulme 1990: 20).
Not being great travelers did not deter the Enlightenment thinkers from
theorizing and judging other societies. Although few of them had direct experience of the colonies, several worked closely with private and state bodies
that were responsible for formulating the colonial policies of European powers. Relying on travel literature, ethnographic sources, and literary accounts
they assessed and judged the moral, political, social, and economic practices,
institutions, and traditions in America as well as Asia and Africa. At the heart
of the Enlightenment idea of history was the notion of progress of mankind
from savagery to civilization, based on a complex developmental model
with Europe on top of the civilizational pyramid. For instance, in his reflections in Leviathan [1651], Thomas Hobbes draws on events in the Americas
to substantiate his claim that the state of nature is savagery (Hobbes 2003:
103). In his view, the savages hold a mirror up to the reality of human
nature; they show the frightening image of a society bereft of those attributes
which make it civilized (Hulme 1990: 24). Hobbes proposes that the state of
nature is a state of war, thereby legitimizing the eventual acceptance of an
ultimate earthly authority, namely Leviathan, who will guarantee peace and
order. The implied relationship between Europe and America becomes apparent in this metaphorical map of the world where the former symbolizes civilization and the latter savagery (Hulme 1990: 25). The language of development and the metaphor of maturation deem the natives inferior to European
standards. Or, in John Lockes famous words: in the beginning all the world
was America (2003 [1689]: 121).
Colonial discourse was the epistemological corollary to colonial violence:
It authorized Europeans to construct and contain the non-European world and
its people by defining and representing them as racially and culturally inferior. By constituting them as objects of European knowledge, the colonial subjects perspectives were disqualified and devalued. The universalist agenda of
colonial discourse laid the foundations for the ideological justification of

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Nikita Dhawan

colonialism as a civilizing mission. Its Eurocentric, totalizing teleology

stripped non-European peoples of agency and historicity, while the focus on
reason silenced other perspectives disqualifying them as irrational and
unscientific (Clark/Golinski/Shaffer 1999).
The indigenous inhabitants of the New World were declared subhuman
and not acknowledged as free and self-governing peoples. The genocide of
aboriginals was justified on the grounds that their barbaric traditions threatened the moral sanctity of European civilization. It was argued that those who
wanted to qualify as human must adopt European practices, values, norms,
and institutions. While sixteenth century Salamancan theologians like Franscisco de Vitoria and Bartolem de Las Casas intervened in the dehumanizing
discourses that regarded natives as natural slaves, they did not oppose imperialism as such (Anghie 2007: 27). They believed that inferior peoples
could rise on the universal scale of progress with the help of their Christian
brothers. Ironically the recognition of the humanity of the Amerindians did
not end their political and economic subjugation. Erasing native forms of
sovereignty, a radical break between premodern political society and modern
imperial sovereignty was presumed (Anghie 2007).
One of the most powerful impulses of the Enlightenment was the drive to
examine and find scientific explanations for natural and social phenomena as
well as human nature, body, and mind. This led to the development of the
science of man (Jordanova 1990: 206), which covered disciplines like medicine, natural history and anthropology. There was newfound interest in the
brain as the presumed physical location of thought, experience, and the soul.
The rise in knowledge about fossils and comparative anatomy led to the investigation of skulls and skeletons of different vertebrates, including humans.
Anatomists developed graduations between species and races (Hulme/Jordanova 1990: 9).
Thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, while celebrating the Amerindians
as noble savages, still considered them racially and morally inferior to the
Europeans. In fact the celebration of the raw man, devoid of the artifice of
culture or civilization, ended up animalizing the natives. The idea of what it
meant to be human was determined by Eurocentric understandings of human
nature. Thus, even when Amerindians were formally recognized as equals,
it was argued that they had forfeited both their individual natural rights and
collective sovereignties by virtue of their barbaric social and cultural practices like human sacrifice and cannibalism. Ironically in being acknowledged
as part of humanity, they were measured according to the so-called civilized European norms. Paradoxically, the benevolent bestowal of agency
made the colonized authors of their own domination (Scott 1999: 27).
Another important indicator of the debased condition of the natives was
their failure to make rational use of land, whereby pre-agricultural societies
were seen as lacking moral and political order. The agriculturalist argument

Affirmative Sabotage of the Masters Tools

27

proved the lack of sovereign status of the natives and was part of the ideological justification for the colonial appropriation of non-European territories
and wasted natural resources (Hulme 1990: 2830). The nomadic practices
of some natives were judged inferior to sedentary forms of life. The threat of
masterless men justified enclosure and expropriation. The idle and unproductive natives, it was argued, were ignoring the divine gift of land to humanity, even as the unwillingness to use ones labor was an indication of moral
failure and lack of exercise of reason. The focus was on the industriousness of
Europeans, who appropriated land through their labor and consequently contributed to the public good while pursuing their private interests. For instance,
for Locke (2003: 116), the central division is between those who improve
land and those who, like animals, merely collect what nature provides; only
the former are fully rational and therefore fully human. Here labor and reason
is inextricably linked and characterize the difference between savage and
civilized societies (Hulme 1990: 2830).
The propertization and exploitation of land, forests, hills, and other natural resources was at the heart of capitalist expansion. European land-use practices became normative, with the enclosure of common land into private
property being monopolized by the colonizers. The scarcity of land in Europe
was solved through the colonial theft of indigenous lands in the name of the
rational use of land. The colonizers increasing demand for land provoked
native resistance, which in turn led to reprisals justifying the forfeiture of the
natives right to their land (Hulme 1990: 20). In an ironic reversal, the European settlers became the legitimate inhabitants, while the original inhabitants
were driven from their own territories. The colonizers deployed the legal
doctrine of vacuum domicilium6 to acquire land titles and political jurisdiction, disregarding the sovereignty of indigenous populations. Any resistance
to this theft led to colonial terror: not the Hobbesian war of all against all, but
the war of the righteous against those they perceived as attacking rational
principles of land ownership and land use. The language of just war was mobilized to legitimize imperial aggressions towards the natives in the name of
self-defense (Anghie 2007: 2426).
Against this background, the universal aspirations of the Enlightenment
and its faith in the power of reason are undeniably tainted by this history of
terror and violence. Enlightenment self-representations as harbinger of progress and emancipation are countered by postcolonial interrogations and the
analytic of suspicion (Scott 2004: 178). Frantz Fanon highlights this historical irony as follows:
Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere
they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the
globe (Fanon 1961: 251).
6

Terra nullius and vacuum domicilium are sometimes used interchangeably.

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Nikita Dhawan

The postcolonial critique of European colonial discourses and institutions has

led to the rethinking of the Enlightenment as ideology, aspiration and timeperiod (Festa/Carey 2009: 2). The Enlightenment is accused of sugar-coating
the bitter nature of empire (ibid: 9). Patrick Williams and Laura Crisman
remark: The Enlightenments universalizing will to knowledge [] feeds
Orientalisms will to power (1994: 8).
Another powerful critique of the Enlightenment has come from feminist
scholars who emphasize feminisms troubled relation to the Enlightenment
principles of rationality, universality and autonomy (Knott/Taylor 2005).
There is an important overlap between the feminist critique of the Enlightenment and the challenges formulated by postmodernism and postcolonialism.
While some feminist scholars argue that the Enlightenment ideals of equality
and emancipation have crucially informed the demand for womens liberation, others highlight that the exclusion and silencing of womens voices and
agency is inherent to the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers like Kant and
Rousseau did not consider women to be fully rational and recommended
restricting their educational opportunities. The defendants of the positive
aspects of Enlightenment principles, however, propose that these blind-spots
can be easily corrected by extending rights and equality to previously excluded groups, to which critics respond that the epistemic and discursive violence
of the Enlightenment cannot be easily doctored or purged of its pernicious
aspects. Going beyond the question of mere exclusion, critics emphasize
that feminist contestations of autonomy and rationality subvert the fundamental principles of the Enlightenment. They outline how the Enlightenment
claims of universality and transhistorical truth are themselves a reflection and
imposition of androcentric patriarchal ideology.
Furthermore, feminists also argue that the imperative to detach the self
from the uncertain realm of phenomenal existence incorporates the denigration of femininity as contingency and embodiment. Analyzing the historical
implications of the Enlightenment for European women,7 Robin May Schott
examines the decline in womens rights in the eighteenth century. Focusing on
France, she outlines how the uniform legal system enshrined the Rousseauian
concept of the difference of women from men. The Civil Code recognized the
rights of all citizens, while excluding women from citizenship. Therefore,
womens status worsened in relation to men during this period (May Schott
1996: 473). The Enlightenment principles of individual rights to freedom and
equality were not secured for women in France until 1879. As is well-known,
the feminist political activist Olympe de Gouges dictated all her works to a
secretary because she was unable to write. Women were excluded from university education in both France and Germany, including Knigsberg University where Kant studied and taught. Far from challenging womens exclusion
7

May Schott fails to specify that she is focusing exclusively on European women, thereby
reproducing the universal category women.

Affirmative Sabotage of the Masters Tools

29

from education on egalitarian grounds, Kant mocks womens attempts at

serious philosophical and scientific work, asserting that womens character, in
contrast to mens, is wholly defined by natural needs.8 He views women as
unsuited for scholarly work, not because of their lack of training or access to
education, but because of their lack of autonomy, which in his view is intrinsic to their nature. He asserts that he understands that women want to be more
like men, although men do not want to be like women (ibid: 474).
Along similar lines Jane Flax (1992), in her essay Is Enlightenment
Emancipatory? examines the shortcomings in Kants conception of pure
reason. According to Flax, Kant keeps reason pure from merely contingent
bodily and social influences, to which he accords no significant value. He
segregates the domestic, feminine private sphere of the body, the locus of
affect, the subjective, the particular, the familial, from the masculine public
sphere of reason, the locus of autonomy, maturity, universality, objectivity,
and reason (Flax 1992: 242). Thus rational power denigrates and marginalizes
the feminine as the Other of the Enlightenment, while the universal autonomous individual devoid of gender pursues dispassionate, disinterested,
value-free, objective knowledge, making other ways of being and knowing
illegible and illegitimate.
Kants call to free oneself from self-imposed tutelage is a universal one
that ignores the social, economic, cultural, and historical context in which the
individual struggles to have courage to use his own reason. Kant claims that
all women are afraid of the Enlightenment as they are unable to freely exercise reason (May Schott 1996: 476477). Tutelage, Kant explains, is mans
inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another.
Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies not in lack of reason, but in
lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Having middle-class men with education and civil office in mind, Kants discussion of tutelage does not consider obstacles faced by non-normative subjects
exercising their reason. Further, his disregard of emotion and passion excludes all those associated with these affects from exercising epistemic, moral, and aesthetic agency.
The Enlightenments attempt to free the world from domination falls prey
to a fatal dialectic in which the Enlightenment itself fosters new forms of
domination that are all the more insidious since they claim to be vindicated by
reason itself. This is the most incisive critique presented by Adorno and
Horkheimer, who propose the self-canceling nature of Enlightenment rationality (1972: 2). The Enlightenment, in their view, is the embodiment of the
self-negating ideals of bourgeois culture that regards change as possible
8

Kants remarks on womens character occur both in Anthropology (1983: 255, 261) as well
as in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1992: 3940, 54) (cf.
Kneller 1993, 1996, May Schott 1996: 474).

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Nikita Dhawan

through thought alone. Their interpretation of the Enlightenment and its consequences represent a pervasive disenchantment or world-loss (Cascardi
1999: 3). Enlightenments efforts to emancipate mankind have resulted in
death and destruction. While overcoming superstition, the instrumentalization
of reason makes it a tool to whatever power that deploys it (Schmidt 1996:
21). Colonialism and the Holocaust are testimonies to the fact that despite the
Enlightenment or maybe because of it, emancipatory ideals are tainted (Cascardi 1999: 4). In contrast to the Hegelian idea of subjective selfconsciousness that continuously evolves into some higher or more complex
form, Enlightenment self-consciousness, in Adornos and Horkheimers view,
is self-canceling in that it is haunted by that which it excludes and represses
(ibid: 24). Freedom and domination are deeply entangled, even as Enlightenment rationality refuses to acknowledge its implication in such a dialectical
process (ibid: 25). It assumes an absolute and omnipotent stance over and
against its objects, only to reinforce the very conditions it had set out to overcome (ibid: 25).

Re-enchantment of Enlightenment
Most of the significant scholarship on Enlightenment either ignores colonialism or treats it as marginal to the more important issue of recuperating the
Enlightenment (Hampson 1968, Krieger 1970, Yolton et al. 1991, Outram
1995, Gay 1996, Schmidt 1996, 2000, Porter 2001, Himmelfarb 2004, Dupre
2004, Bronner 2004, Louden 2007, Headley 2007, Todorov 2009, TrevorRoper 2010). Even critical thinkers like Adorno, Horkheimer, and Foucault
disregard colonialism in their critique of the Enlightenment. For instance, the
erasure of the Haitian Revolution, one of the most significant appropriations
of the Enlightenment principles, within the mainstream history of ideas indicates the inability and unwillingness of the European intellectual tradition to
recognize the agency of Others (Fischer 2004). Paul Gilroy similarly problematizes the omission of slave experiences from accounts of modernity (Gilroy 1993).
Against this background, there has been an encouraging development in
the last decade in the scholarship on eighteenth century political theory, in
that there has been a concerted effort to address the connection of the Enlightenment to European colonialism. A number of publications (Muthu 2003,
Festa/Carey 2009: Levy/Young 2011) seek to provide a corrective to what
they claim is a misrepresentation of the Enlightenments epistemological
investment in imperialism. Recovering critical perspectives, they highlight
subversive operations at work particularly within eighteenth century European political thought. Both the post-modern as well as the postcolonial critique

Affirmative Sabotage of the Masters Tools

31

of the Enlightenment is accused of unfairly indicting the Enlightenment of

providing the intellectual infrastructure for coercive practices and institutions
in the colony. It is lamented that the Enlightenment is erroneously used as
shorthand for rationalism, universalism, scientism, and other isms, which
post-modernism and postcolonialism seek to indict. Postmodern and postcolonial criticism is accused of converting the Enlightenment into a monolithic bogeyman (Cheah 2003: 267). Critics of the Enlightenment are
charged with being sloppy regarding chronological boundaries and of projecting current problems on the past, holding eighteenth century thinkers responsible for many ills that plague us today. Another common claim is that the
postcolonial indictment of the Enlightenment merely echoes the critique leveled against the Enlightenment by previous scholars from within the Enlightenment tradition or by writers of the Counter-Enlightenment9 (Festa/Carey
2009: 9).
As a corrective, the effort is to provide a counterpoint to the postcolonial
critique of the Enlightenment by highlighting that the Enlightenment was in
fact anti-imperialist. Emphasizing the plurality of the Enlightenment project
that brings together a diverse set of philosophical doctrines and principles, it
is argued that Enlightenment thinkers were in fact staunch critics of the colonial politics of European states. In his hugely influential work Radical Enlightenment Jonathan Israel (2001) proposes that radical theorists of the Enlightenment pushed the ideas of reason, universality, and democracy to their
logical conclusion, nurturing a radical egalitarianism extending across class,
gender, and race.
Sankar Muthu, in his book Enlightenment against Empire (2003), contests
the misrepresentation of eighteenth century political thought by highlighting
its anti-imperialist impulses. He explains that he uses the term Enlightenment as a temporal adjective, referring to the political thought of the eighteenth century (2003: 1). He also clarifies that he neither wishes to defend nor
attack the Enlightenment, rather simply to broaden our understanding of Enlightenment-era perspectives. Drawing on philosophical and political questions about human nature, cultural diversity, cross-cultural moral judgments,
and political obligations, Muthus stated aim is to pluralize our understanding of the philosophical era known as the Enlightenment (ibid). Particularly
focusing on the late eighteenth century, he unpacks how thinkers like Diderot,
Kant, and Herder criticized imperialism, not only highlighting the injustices
of European imperial rule, but also emphasizing the dangers of colonialism
for the corruption of Europe (ibid). Instead of seeing Europe as standardbearer of liberty and rights for the rest of humanity, it was critiqued as the
primary source of social and political injustice around the world (ibid: 281).
9

It is claimed that the Counter-Enlightenment in fact invented the Enlightenment (Berlin

1998).

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Nikita Dhawan

Muthu bemoans that contrary to anti-slavery writings, for instance of Charles

de Montesquieu, Enlightenment anti-imperial political theory has been neglected. While anti-slavery activists decried the abuses of imperial power in
the form of genocide, exploitation, and dehumanization, it was Enlightenment
political thought that questioned the legitimacy and morality of the imperial
mission (ibid: 4). Thinkers like Jeremy Bentham, Edmund Burke, de Condorcet, and Adam Smith argued for the right to sovereignty, cultural integrity,
and self-determination of the colonized and denounced the illegal and unjust
means by which the ostensibly civilized nations ruled the non-European
world. They also questioned the means and justifications of the expanding
commercial and political power of European states and imperial trading companies (ibid). Legislative efforts by anti-imperialist Enlightenment thinkers
like Burke, who scandalized the unfair trading practices of the East India
Company, were ridiculed by his contemporaries (ibid: 5).
In defense of anti-imperialist Enlightenment thinkers, Muthu outlines how
they highlighted the cultural difference and cultural agency of non-European
populations, who were characterized as possessing a range of rational, aesthetic, and imaginative capacities (ibid: 78). They, thereby, condemned the
imposition of European values and norms on non-European cultures. Drawing
on Rousseaus understanding of humans as free and self-making creatures,
but rejecting his idea of the noble savage, thinkers like Kant, Herder, and
Diderot argued that non-European peoples were cultural agents whose practices, beliefs, and institutions were simply different from Europes (ibid: 9).
Instead of being viewed as deviations from the normative European way of
life, cultural differences were presented as proof of human freedom and reason by these thinkers.
Muthu (2003: 272) outlines three principal philosophical sources of Enlightenment anti-imperialism to be found in the writings of Diderot, Kant, and
Herder, which in his view, resulted in a more inclusive universalism fostering
goodwill and hospitality towards Europes Others: The first and most basic
idea was that human beings share a common humanity and deserve respect by
virtue of being human. The second idea was that human beings were not
merely products of nature, but also cultural beings possessing cultural agency.
And thirdly, by presuming moral incommensurability, not only did they contest the comparison of cultures and peoples, but also any efforts to rank or
measure them against each other. By including cultural agency and incommensurability in their understanding of universal humanity and human nature,
Diderot, Kant, and Herder, in Muthus view, present an anti-imperialist critique, rather than justifying imperialism through universalism. By challenging
the exclusion of the Amerindians from the language of natural rights and their
dehumanization by Europeans, these thinkers rejected imperialist paternalism
(ibid). Kant and Herder, in Muthus view, also rejected Lockean views of
property as well as the language of just war, which allowed Europeans to de-

Affirmative Sabotage of the Masters Tools

33

clare native lands as res nullius (no mans land) and seize them. They even
upheld the rights of the natives to defend their interests and presented the
New World inhabitants as fellow cultural beings (ibid: 275). Muthu argues
that Diderot, Kant, and Herder rejected the belief that European norms and
values were universal standards to compare and rank non-European peoples
and cultures (ibid: 275). In fact they were suspicious of the very notion of
civilization, emphasizing moral incommensurability and cultural difference
(ibid: 280). Condemning the Bengal Famine of 17691770 as well as the
transatlantic slave trade as instances of European immoralities abroad, Diderot attacked European colonial rule as unacceptable. Rejecting the ranking of
peoples on a civilizational scale, Herder too advocated respect for cultural
differences. Along similar lines Kant, in Muthus view, abandoned his earlier
views of racial hierarchy in favor of cosmopolitanism and humanity in his
later writings (cf. Kleingeld 2007).
Like Muthu (2003), Daniel Carey and Sven Trakulhun (2009: 240) propose that universalism remains one of the most contentious features of Enlightenment thought. One of the main criticisms against Enlightenment universalism is that it is accused of negating cultural diversity. For instance, the
very notion of man as a universal category emerges through the exclusion
and marginalization of those who cannot or will not confirm to its normative
force, such as woman or the native. While sexual and racial difference is
implicit in subject formation, the assumption of a common human nature or
essence overlooks the power effects of these gendered and racialized inflections. The impulse to universalize claims of reason, rights, and sovereignty in
order to substantiate a shared human nature or fashion history in a grand
narrative of progress has been targeted as exclusionary and violent. This
critique refutes claims that the Enlightenments universalizing tendencies
represent a liberating force.
Muthu (2003), Lynn Festa and Carey (2009), and Carey and Trakulhun
(2009) endeavor to convince us that Enlightenment universalism does not
disallow diversity to flourish and that in fact knowledge about other cultures
and peoples in the age of discoveries strengthened the awareness of cultural
diversity, which in turn contributed to the emergence of cosmopolitan perspectives. They recommend a more nuanced reading of the writings of Enlightenment thinkers before judging their faults. They contest the claim that
Enlightenment ideals naturalize one particular political model as a universal
telos and propose that these can be reconciled with difference without automatically perpetuating racism.
In their view, one of the best examples that repudiates charges of relentless universalism is the Enlightenment tolerance of religious difference.
Lockes Letter Concerning Toleration [1689] is presented as a prime illustra-

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Nikita Dhawan

tion of the Enlightenment investment in the irreducibility of difference.10

Muthu (2003: 266) and Festa and Carey (2009: 20) highlight the multiplicity
of universalisms across Enlightenment political thought. They claim that
encounters with other peoples led to revisions of the European understanding
of the universal even as it radically altered concepts of human nature and the
representation of non-Europeans. Likewise the struggle over religious toleration within Europe led to the acknowledgement of a plurality of truth claims.
Thus, while the Enlightenment contestation of superstition reinforced modern
scientific rationalism, it also supported religious tolerance (ibid).
Another significant area where anti-imperialist nature of Enlightenment
thought is discussed is the issue of cosmopolitanism. From Francisco de Vitorias reflections on the right to hospitality to Hugo Grotiuss support of the
mare liberum (the free or open seas), the right to commerce and Enlightenment cosmopolitanism are inextricably linked (Muthu 2012: 202203). Key
Enlightenment ideals of global commerce and trade were based on the premise that humans are inherently commercial beings (ibid: 200). Herein, commerce refers not only to market trade and economic arrangements, but also to
communication, exchange, and interaction. Underlying this idea of transcontinental trade is the spirit of a universal community of humankind. In contrast
to earlier concerns that longstanding contact with alien societies and ideas
could have a corrupting influence, the rise of cosmopolitan thought, advocating the common ownership of the earth and the kinship of all human beings,
altered the approach to transcontinental trade and travel (ibid: 202). Commerce was considered a civilizing agent, which transformed feudal economies
through cultivating the commercial spirit of the natives into commercial societies (ibid: 218). Condorcet, for instance, while being a staunch critic of slavery and empire, suggested that corrupt military enterprises and imperial regimes be replaced by communities of European merchants who engage in
commerce as part of a non-imperial civilizing mission (ibid: 218220). Thus,
while subjecting global commerce to critical scrutiny, eighteenth century
Enlightenment thinkers sought to nevertheless defend it in terms of the right
to travel, seek contact with others, exchange ideas and goods and foster partnerships. Kant suggested in Toward Perpetual Peace [1795] that
since the community of nations of the earth has now gone so far that a violation of right on
one place of the earth is felt in all, the idea of a cosmopolitan right is no fantastic and
exaggerated way of representing justice (Kant 1977b: 216217).

The flow of goods, ideas, and people across borders, in Kants view, made a
theory of cosmopolitan justice (ius cosmopoliticum, Weltbrgerrecht) imperative. This did not concern just sovereign states or particular commercial
entities, but humanity as a whole. Kant employs Verkehr to refer to trade and
Wechselwirkung to describe the communicative and interactive functions of
10

Interestingly Locke excluded Catholics and Atheists from his doctrine of toleration.

Affirmative Sabotage of the Masters Tools

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commerce (ibid: 214). He celebrates the potential of the spirit of commerce

to create mutual self-interest among nations (cf. Muthu 2012: 298 fn 20).
At the same time, thinkers like Kant were aware of the profound connection between maintaining liberty at home and furthering commercial and
maritime empire (ibid: 206). Thus the paradox was that while global commerce made the reform of social and political institutions in Europe possible,
it also enabled exploitation and subjugation in the colonies. The irony of the
term Wechselwirkung is that it implies reciprocity, a mutual (Wechsel-)
exchange and influence (Wirkung); however, there was no reciprocity in the
imperial spirit of commerce. The Enlightenment scholars, plagued by concerns regarding the corrupting effects of the exploitative European colonial
rule, struggled with the deeply unjust global system of commerce, arguing
that imperial domination would ultimately ruin of European civilization itself
(ibid: 207208).
Focusing on the writings of anti-slavery activists, Muthu views these as
distinctive contributions of Enlightenment discourse that emerged in the context of transnational commerce and global interconnections (ibid: 215). Highlighting the moral implications of Europeans in slavery, it was argued that it
was imperative to reform the system of global commerce. With British Members of the Parliament being invested in the Atlantic Trade and being plantation owners, anti-slavery legislation was considered unlikely, so appeals were
made to wealthy merchants, trading companies, and other elites. The enlightened consumer was called to boycott slave-produced goods like sugar
and rum, thereby intervening in dehumanizing trading practices. It was argued
that the consumption of sugar makes European consumers accessories to theft
and murder (ibid: 218).
Given that the agents of commerce were also the agents of slavery and of
conquest, of the expropriation of goods and lands, Kant points out that the
primary violators of cosmopolitan right are the civilized commercial states.
Thus, thoughts about global society, world citizenship, and transcontinental
trade were balanced out with concerns about imperial and commercial exploitation and domination. Kant, for instance, was acutely aware that instead of
building peaceful and enlightened societies, global commerce could lead to
universal empire, wars, and oppression (ibid: 208). Some, like Fichte, advocated national isolationism and self-sufficiency, while others, like Kant, reiterated the virtues of cosmopolitanism without losing sight of the irony that the
Enlightenment reform of social and political institutions and practices made
possible by global commerce was also dehumanizing the non-Europeans
(ibid: 209). For Kant increasing civilization did not guarantee perpetual
peace, so he advocated moral cultivation through long term process of the
education of human beings and citizens (ibid: 224). Defending norms of hospitality and just commerce, Kant condemns exploitative trading practices
(ibid: 226). He is against a world state, whereby his understanding of global

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justice is a peaceful community even as he does not rule out rivalry and antagonism in his conception of global relations (ibid). His idea of unsocial
sociability encourages productive resistance in the interest of selfpreservation and not conquest. Thus friction and tensions must be balanced
against commercial and communicative connections (ibid: 230).
Global commerce was thus perceived to be a double-edged sword (ibid:
211). Debt and war-making were central issues in Enlightenment debates
about transnational commerce. Kant argues that perpetual peace can only
exist if no state increases its national debts to finance wars. Close commercial
connections among states would motivate international conflicts to be resolved through mediation (ibid: 222). Instead of short-term profit, the power
of money lies in avoiding a global debt crisis and financial collapse (Kant
1977b: 226). Kant tempered his celebration of commercial humanity with
concerns about transnational commercial domination, acknowledging the
dangerous link between imperial domination and self-domination, between
oppression abroad and moral and political corruption within (Muthu 2012:
207). Diderot and Smith believed that the end of the corrupting influence of
global commerce and international trading companies must come from outside Europe. The rise of non-European nations would lead to more equitable
global economic relations, not through mutual friendship, but through mutual fear (ibid: 214). Ironically they argued that this non-European anticolonial resistance would be enabled because of global commerce and communication, namely as a result of processes that produced injustice. The nonEuropean world was in their view humanitys hope for the future (ibid: 212).
Muthu claims that the contemporary tendency to attack the Enlightenment
and its justification for modern market-oriented commerce ignores the critical
approach to commerce that many eighteenth-century thinkers deployed in the
course of analyzing and assessing the rise of global commerce in its multiple
forms (ibid: 4). He emphasizes that, for instance, Diderots and Kants critical
arguments against the coercive effects of global commerce are neglected
because they irritate standard narratives that only highlight their celebration
of global commerce (ibid: 16).
Another interesting claim made by Muthu is that in contrast to eighteenth
century political thought, prominent political philosophers of the nineteenth
century like John Stuart Mill, Hegel and Marx explicitly defended European
rule over non-European peoples (2003: 259). Muthu contends that with the
rise of the language of race and nation in the nineteenth century, Enlightenment anti-imperialist thought was marginalized (ibid: 279). One of Muthus
strongest claims is that popular nineteenth century political discourses of race,
progress, and nation are projected back into the eighteenth century, leading to
a misrepresentation of the Enlightenment. Contrary to popular belief, he identifies a return to pre-Enlightenment imperialist sentiments in post-Enlightenment scholarship, with eighteenth century political thought offering a rup-

Affirmative Sabotage of the Masters Tools

37

ture in the imperialist narrative. This innovative perspective encourages us to

rethink prevalent historical and philosophical categories in political theory.
Challenging the typical characterization of the Enlightenment as imperialist
ideology, Muthu hopes to offer a more discerning understanding of Enlightenment political theory in order to circumvent the imperative to either defend
or subvert it (ibid: 260). While critics of the Enlightenment identify a universalist agenda that eschews difference and Otherness and deploys doctrines of
progress and emancipation to justify the subjugation of non-European peoples, defendants of the Enlightenment ideals of rights, justice, secularism, rule
of law, democracy, and cosmopolitanism see it as championing the cause of
the disenfranchised.
Like Muthu, Jennifer Pitts A Turn to Empire (2005) traces the displacement of the eighteenth-century critique of empire by nineteenth century imperial liberalism. Pitting Hegel, Mill, and Marx against Diderot, Kant, and
Herder, the former are accused of legitimizing the conquest of non-European
peoples and territories, while the latter are revered as anti-imperialists, who
not only denounced European colonial rule as unjust towards the natives, but
also politically and economically disastrous for Europe. In Pitts view, the
liberal turn to empire displaced theories of cultural diversity in favor of notions of European superiority and native backwardness (Pitts 2005: 2).
Examining the reasons for the decline of eighteenth-century critiques and the
emergence of new justifications of empire in the nineteenth century, Pitts
investigates how despite a commitment to the values of equality, human dignity, freedom, the rule of law, and self-government, their investment in discourses of progress and civilization led liberal political philosophers to support imperial projects (ibid: 3). The support for the violent conquest and despotic rule of non-Europeans among thinkers normally celebrated for their
progressive ideas implicates the liberal tradition in coercive discourses and
practices.
Thus one encounters a deep contradiction at the heart of European discourses about its Other, which made the otherwise progressive liberal thinkers
imperialisms most prominent defenders (ibid: 4). While pronouncing equality and freedom, they endorsed different political standards for different people resulting in incongruity in their positions on domestic and international
politics. One of the best examples of this is Mill: While he fought for democracy at home, he supported despotism in the colony. Burke, in contrast, was a
committed anti-imperialist, even as he was critical of the revolutionary rights
of man. Likewise, Bentham too was skeptical of European claims of cultural
and political superiority and was deeply concerned about the dangers of imperialism for political liberties at home. Others like Condorcet, while denouncing the cruelties of imperialism, rationalized it on the grounds that nonEuropeans were incapable of self-government and self-improvement and thus
required the guidance of the Europeans (ibid: 67).

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It is claimed that the transition from eighteenth to nineteenth century saw

theories of progress become more triumphalist and less tolerant of cultural
difference. In Pitts view, while eighteenth-century thinkers were staunch believers of European superiority vis--vis the rest of the world, they were nonetheless troubled by the injustice of European colonial rule (ibid: 4). Having
experienced the violence of autocratic regimes in Europe, thinkers like Kant,
Herder and Diderot vehemently challenged the claim that it was the duty of
the Europeans to spread their political cultures and institutions across the
world (ibid: 15). In the nineteenth century, a number of factors, from the end
of the ancien rgime in France and the extension of suffrage in Britain, to the
abolition of the slave trade and slavery and the economic and technological
breakthroughs of the industrial revolution, contributed to the surge in civilizational confidence (ibid: 4, 15). Thus nineteenth-century thinkers were convinced of the rightness of political order at home and believed that backward societies were better off with European despotism rather than local rule
(ibid). In France, the conviction was that they were uniquely qualified to
spearhead the mission civilisatrice thanks to their revolutionary commitment
to liberty and equality. Britons, similarly, were confident of their fitness to
spread civilization, in light of their countrys progress toward political equality. Thus the extension of democratic participation in Europe went hand in
glove with the increased support for imperial expansion in the name of exporting good government. European superiority was cast in intellectual, moral, technological, economic, cultural, and political instead of only biological
terms.
One of the most important reasons for the surge in civilizational confidence, in Pitts view, was the rise in economic and technological development,
which of course was parasitical on the exploitation of the labor, land, and
natural resources in the colonies (ibid: 17). With the colonies functioning as
markets for European goods, the stagnation in the colonial economies was
explained via racial stereotypes of inefficient and unproductive natives and
not in terms of colonial exploitative rule that deindustrialized and deurbanized the colonies (ibid). The imposition of trading regimes favorable to European commercial interests destroyed the manufacturing economy and led to
the emergence of increasingly agrarian and peasant-based economies in the
colonies. This in turn reified religious, caste, and tribal structures leading to
traditionalization instead of modernization. With racial and cultural explanations for economic depression in the colonies, colonial rule became once
again the solution for underdevelopment. Ironically, while the backwardness of the colonies was invoked as the justification for civilizing European
rule by liberal supporters of the empire, that very regime contributed to the
creation of backwardness (ibid).
Liberal notions of progress, liberty, tolerance, democracy, civil society,
and the public sphere converged in the all-embracing civilization thesis. His-

Affirmative Sabotage of the Masters Tools

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tory becomes episodic, with historical time divided into tradition and modernity, stagnation and development, superstition and the triumph of reason. The
authoritarian irrationality of the East was a sign of oriental despotism and
immoral feudalism, which proved that the Orient occupied a lower stage in
the evolution of modernity. Eastern political systems were seen to deny the
possibility of rationality and freedom and thus the development of individuality. The legitimization strategy of colonialism as a civilizing mission and the
dynamic of difference between civilized and barbaric societies conceded
the possibility of the natives becoming civilized, but, of course, guidance by
the Europeans was necessary. This was the infamous colonial pedagogic
project of helping backward societies to overcome their civilizational
infantilism (Mehta 1999: 70). Thus refuting the biology is destiny doctrine, imperial liberalism upheld the capacity for civilization of the natives.
It was argued that some societies are at a lower stage of evolution and have to
be educated like children to make them capable of enjoying freedom. The
political incompetence of the colonized could be corrected through colonial
education and the correct form of government that would enable them to
realize their civilizational potential. This offered the natives the possibility to
overcome the stage of rawness (Rohigkeit) that is marked by instinct and
develop requite capacities to reason and thereby exercise freedom and consent, which is central to the legitimacy of political authority. And those who
are not in the position to reason and exercise consent may be governed without their consent (Mehta 1999: 59).
Liberalism rests on the promise that all human beings are born equal and
free and strives toward universal suffrage and self-determination. However,
while human nature was understood to be equal by birth, it was nonetheless
marked by difference due to peoples differing capacities. This justified the
subjugation of some by the others, who became gate-keepers to privilege.
Political inclusion was contingent upon the qualified capacity to reason. This
resulted in the pedagogic obsession to instruct the natives in learning to reason. Lockes Some Thoughts Concerning Education [1693] is almost like a
manual, ranging from toilet training to instructions about what should be
consumed at what time of the day, how to treat servants and others of lower
rank appropriately, and how to temper ones emotions. And although the
capacity to reason is natural, the emphasis is on how rationality must get
inculcated (Mehta 1999: 6061). Liberalism is a project of breeding civility,
with education becoming a process of initiation. Although we are born free,
we are really free only when we learn to exercise the rationality necessary for
political inclusion. Reform is central to the liberal political agenda and involves the process of realignment, an impulse to better the world (ibid: 62).
At the same time, liberal fantasies of reforming and civilizing the Other were
accompanied by the fear of the reformed, civilized Other who would make the
colonial project of civilizing the uncivilized redundant (Bhabha 1994).

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The Paradox of Modernity is that liberal values were preached to the

colonized, but denied in practice. Belief in the evolutionary difference between the metropolis and the colony made it possible for a thinker like Mill to
be a radical advocate of freedom even as he endorsed enlightened imperialism. He claimed that despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement (1989: 13). The
Tunisian philosopher and historian Hichem Djait (1985: 101) accuses imperialist Europe of denying its own vision of man. Colonized societies could be
justifiably excluded from the sphere of sovereignty by virtue of their not fulfilling European norms. Subsequently, those who possess sovereignty can
legitimately dominate those who do not (Anghie 2007). The construction of
the West as a normative power left a trail of violent and exploitative systems
in the name of modernity, progress, rationality, emancipation, rights, justice,
and peace. Any non-Western individual, group, or state wanting to qualify as
civilized and modern had to comply and imitate the European norms or risk
the violence of being forcibly civilized and modernized. While European
norms were deemed worth emulating on the grounds of their superiority, the
natives attempts to imitate European norms could only produce bad,
weak, or failed copies, which once again confirmed the authority of the
European original.
The overcoming of civilizational deficiencies could be achieved through
building cognitive capacity, inculcating self-governance and discipline, fostering abstract and critical thought, and making the colonized trustworthy and
morally upright (Pitts 2005: 20). Thus, while rejecting biological determinism, tacit assumptions about national character justified the exclusion of the
colonized from equality and reciprocity till they were adequately civilized.
This progressivist universalism justified European imperial rule as a benefit
to backward subjects, authorized the retraction of sovereignty of many
indigenous states, and licensed increasingly interventionist policies in colonized societies systems of education, law, property, and religion (ibid: 21).
A key issue is how Europeans acquired knowledge of the people and societies they judged. How critical were they of their sources of information and
their evaluative criteria and biases? Pitts outlines how Tocqueville altered his
views about what was practicable and appropriate for French Algeria as a
result of his journeys, while refraining to write about India because of his
inability to travel there. James Mill, in contrast, boasted that his writings,
which were based on his readings of English-language literature on India,
were impartial and objective because he had not been distracted or contaminated through contact with the natives that plagued the writings of travelers
and administrators (Pitts 2005: 6).
At the same time Pitts unpacks the inconsistencies in the writings of
Burke, Tocqueville and Mill (ibid: 242). Despite his failures, Burke was untiring in his political efforts to challenge British colonialism especially in

Affirmative Sabotage of the Masters Tools

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India. He accuses British colonizers of disregarding the rule of law, thereby

disenfranchising the Indians, who could be sanctioned, fined, incarcerated, or
killed without recourse to legal protection or appeal (ibid: 247). Pitts proposes that Burke was not a singular freak figure; rather a number of eighteenthcentury thinkers were critical of cross-cultural judgments and Europes cultural presumptuousness (ibid: 246).
In contrast, despite awareness of the violence of colonial policies,
Tocquevilles anxieties about the process of democratization in France contributed to his support for French colonial expansion in Algeria. Contrary to
Burke, Tocqueville argues that the development of a stable and liberal democratic regime necessitates the exploitation of non-European societies, legitimizing the suspension of principles of human equality and self-determination
abroad in order to secure stability at home. In choosing to pursue national
glory through empire, Tocqueville condoned the subjugation of the Algerians
for the sake of French national consolidation (ibid: 248). Tocquevilles arguments for French imperial expansion demonstrate how self-interest drew
French liberals into advocating exclusionary and violent international politics
that were a betrayal of liberal humanitarianism. The instrumental value of
imperial expansion for domestic politics shows how the process of democratization in the metropolis was inextricably bound up with imperial politics
(ibid).
Mill, on the other hand, believed that the governance of the empire must
be kept as insulated from the democratic process in the metropolis as possible
(ibid: 249). In contrast to Tocqueville, his justifications for imperialism focused not on how Britain profited from colonial rule, but rather on the benefits for backward subjects (ibid). Interestingly, discussions about the extension of the franchise at home were often linked to the incapacity of colonial
subjects to participate in political power. The debate was conducted not in the
language of political rights, but in terms of their character. Moral worth
was viewed not simply in the capacity for self-rule, but in the exercise of
power over others, which served as a criterion for political office and participation (ibid: 249). Debates about extending suffrage to women or workingmen differentiated between the character of those that were declared worthy
of participation by virtue of being respectable, independent, self-restrained,
industrious, in contrast to those who were to be excluded for being imprudent,
dependent, enslaved to passions or customs and incapable of sustained labor
(ibid). Despite the ideological differences between the political positions of
opponents and advocates of franchise reform, both groups insisted on the
moral integrity of potential voters as they were anxious about the possible
dangers of an expanded franchise for the quality of political decisions (ibid).
Feminist writings of the period contested the exclusion of women from
political power on the grounds of their immaturity and questioned the analogy between women and children mobilized to deny women political partici-

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Nikita Dhawan

pation (ibid: 250). However, feminist writers seldom highlighted the similarities between the woman-child analogy and the barbarian-child analogy, or
challenged the exclusion of colonized adults because of their supposed immaturity. The idea of backward colonial subjects participating in their own
governance was considered absurd (ibid). This indicates the tenuous relation
between anti-imperialist thought and Western feminism.
Moral worth was measured for instance through literacy, which legitimized access to political participation. Mill rationalized unequal political
power not only in terms of differing political competence, but on the basis of
peoples unequal worth as human beings. As Pitts points out, he insisted that
the franchise was a responsibility and privilege to be earned and not a universal right (ibid: 161). Mill characterized the English working classes in similar
terms he used to describe the semi-barbarous people of India: they were
subservient to custom and superstition and unappreciative of progress and
innovation (ibid: 162). Here one detects interconnections between exclusions
within Europe and in the colonies. Mill proposed that colonial governments
could not be held accountable to their subject populations; that progress must
be imposed by appropriately trained civil servants (ibid).
Interestingly both Tocqueville and Mill later voiced concerns about the
moral and political perils of imperialism. They were cognizant of the violence
involved in European conquests, even as they were confronted with the hypocritical nature of their theories (ibid: 255). There was increasing anxiety about
the ability of colonial rulers to govern the people they did not respect or understand. Thus, even as liberalism alleged to be politically inclusionary, it is
deeply linked to the empire and the political disenfranchisement of the colonized, even as it claimed to empower them.

Imperialist Enlightenment or Enlightenment Against

Imperialism?
In the past few years there has been increasing debate whether postcolonial
scholarship that draws on the insights of Enlightenment thinkers reproduces
Eurocentrism. Especially Latin American scholars like Walter Mignolo
(1995) and Ramn Grosfoguel (2007) categorically reject the Enlightenment
as harbinger of exploitation and destruction in the form of colonialism and
capitalism and critique the ideological erasures and hollow claims of the
emancipatory nature of the Enlightenment. They advocate a return to indigenous cosmologies uncontaminated by colonialism.
On the other hand, there have been critics within the field of postcolonial
studies who contest the homogenization of the Enlightenment by attributing to

Affirmative Sabotage of the Masters Tools

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it a singularity of purpose and unity of ideas. Dipesh Chakrabarty in this context remarks that the Enlightenment is an imaginary figure that remains
deeply embedded in clichd and shorthand forms in some everyday habits of
thought (2000: 4). Along similar lines, Neil Lazarus claims that The concept of the West [] has no coherent or credible referent. It is an ideological category masquerading as a geographic one (2002: 44). It is argued that
instead of viewing the Enlightenment as a monolithic and coherent ideological project with unequivocal goals, the tensions within the historical era and
intellectual formation must be attended to. Festa and Carey (2009: 2) lament
that the postcolonial critique of the Enlightenment has been ad-hoc and
haphazard. They further state the demonization of a concept [] makes it
more coherent than it really is (ibid: 15).
Festas and Careys critique of the non-systematic nature of postcolonialism neglects that it is necessarily eclectic, borrowing from post-structuralism,
Marxism, feminism, and psychoanalysis, disciplines that in turn are influenced by Enlightenment thought. Postcolonialism is not only transdisciplinary, but also anti-disciplinary in that it challenges systematic theorybuilding. It has been suggested that the postcolonial attempt to combine
Marxist and post-structuralist insights is like riding two horses at the same
time, to which the Indian historian Gyan Prakash (1992: 184) remarks let us
hang on to two horses, inconstantly. Methodological purity can only be
achieved by disregarding marginalized narratives and perspectives and therefore Prakash favors negotiating the fertile tensions between different theoretical approaches and urges postcolonial critics and historians to become
stunt riders (ibid).
The challenge remains how to think and talk about the Enlightenment as a
historical period and intellectual formation without homogenizing it? Which
thinkers should be considered as representative of the Enlightenment? (cf.
Israel 2001) Against this background, the writings of scholars like Muthu,
Pitts, as well as Festa and Carey are a timely intervention in the discussion
about the ambivalent legacy of the Enlightenment.
Having said that one of my main objections to the way the problem is
posed by defendants of eighteenth century political thought is with their understanding of universality and diversity. Interestingly with sole focus on
postcolonial studies, the defendants of the Enlightenment ignore the important
mutual influences among feminism, queer studies, and postcolonial studies in
their critique of the normative violence (Butler 1999: xx) of the Enlightenment. The nuanced and complex analysis of feminist-queer-postcolonial
scholarship is reduced to a simple dualism of imperialist versus antiimperialist Enlightenment.
With regard to the concept of universalism, postcolonial scholars rightly
ask whether it is even possible to think the globe without being imperial, or
whether the very imagination of the global is inextricably linked to the the

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Nikita Dhawan

imperial (Hulme 2005: 45). Moreover, if one is cognizant of how the term
culture came to replace civilization and race in colonial discourses, it is
difficult to accept the recognition of cultural diversity and cultural agency as
intrinsically anti-imperialist. Muthu and others scholars too easily presume
that the recognition of cultural plurality by Kant and Herder is as such an antihegemonic move, thereby ignoring that difference and diversity are constructed and constituted through power relations. Instead of merely celebrating
diversity in the face of the threat of universalizing assimilation, the more
important question is the ideological function of diversity in so-called antiimperialist discourses. Even a superficial look at the discourses of diversity in
contemporary operations of transnational capital, whose forerunners were
intercontinental trade and commerce, advocated by Kant as a guarantee for
world peace, unfolds how the universal reach of capitalism, made possible
through colonialism, goes hand in glove with the celebration of diversity and
difference. It is instructive to remember Marxs [1844] critique of Bruno
Bauer in The Jewish Question, wherein Marx points out that the focus on
questions of religious difference and of the status of religious minorities shifts
attention away from economic issues. The recognition of cultural diversity by
Enlightenment philosophers like Kant and Herder is hardly enough to earn
them the title of anti-imperialists, which compromises the purchase of the
term. Muthu, for instance, does not really explain what the anti in the antiimperialist signifies. Is the critique of the atrocities committed by European
colonizers enough to qualify Kant and others as anti-imperialist? Is their antiimperialism the same as that of Gandhi or Fanon? As has been well documented by postcolonial thinkers, attacks on immoral imperialism were often
made in the name of more humane imperialism. For every proposed progressive idea presented by Diderot, Kant, Herder, or any other Enlightenment
thinker, one can present a counter-example of racist, sexist, and imperialist
views of these very authors.
In response to the claim that there was a strong rupture between eighteenth and nineteenth-century political thought, I would argue that instead of
viewing eighteenth-century thinkers as more progressive than nineteenthcentury thinkers, it would be instructive to explore the continuities and discontinuities in the ideas of race, national character, culture, climate, development, and progress between the two eras. Muthu contends that Mill, Hegel,
and Marx as representatives of nineteenth-century thought presumed linear
conceptions of social progress and were much more convinced of the
achievements of European civilization. Thus they supported the idea of
Europe coercively introducing superior forms of social, economic, and
political practices and institutions to the non-European world. Marx, for instance, did not view non-Europeans as inherently backward, rather he
claimed that through colonialism, they could be lifted to a condition of selfrule. He justified imperial rule as the transition of feudal societies into capi-

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talist economies that would transform the mode of production as well as the
ownership of the means of production. However, Muthus and Pitts analysis
of the decline of anti-imperialist thinking in the nineteenth century fails to
consider the inconsistencies and contradictions in the writings of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers. By primarily highlighting their critical
reflections, there is the danger of presenting a distorted picture that silences
the deeply racist, sexist, and imperialist aspects of eighteenth-century European political thought. Thus it is imperative to simultaneously address the
ambivalences and inconsistencies in the writings of eighteenth-century thinkers, which show them to be at once imperialist and anti-imperialist.
Contrary to Muthus positive reading, I would like to draw attention to the
contradictions in Kants anti-imperialism. In his discussion of cosmopolitan
ethics in Toward Perpetual Peace, Kant [1795] addresses the issue of the
rights and duties of those who wish to cross borders. He proposes that hospitality is limited to the visitor not bring treated with hostility upon arrival on
someone elses territory, but upholds the right of the sovereign state to refuse
entry, provided this does not result in the destruction of the sojourner. He
emphasizes the temporary nature of the right to hospitality, which hinges on
the entrant not causing any trouble. Thus permanent residency depends entirely on an act of beneficence on the part of a sovereign state, which in any case
always has the prerogative to deny rights to those who create trouble. In his
deconstructive reading of Kants conditional hospitality, Derrida (2000)
speaks of hostpitality, namely, the hostility intrinsic in Kantian reflections
on hospitality. According to him, a truly cosmopolitan ethics would entail
absolute hospitality, which is unconditional and is not qualified upon the
guest fulfilling certain criteria to receive hospitality.
Similarly the greatest strength of the Kantian categorical imperative lies in
its insistence on the fundamental equality of all moral agents. However, this is
accompanied by the demand that individuals prove themselves worthy of
being treated as equal by fulfilling the normative understanding of morality.
Otherwise they forfeit their right to be treated equally. Spivak reads the Kantian categorical imperative as a displacement of Christian ethics from religion
to philosophy (1985: 267). She rephrases the categorical imperative as follows: make the heathen into a human so that he can be treated as an end in
himself (ibid). This violent act of making the heathen into human through
the civilizing mission of colonialism symbolizes the ideology of imperialist
axiomatics, which employs transcendent concepts like morality or culture to
justify colonialism as civilizing mission. At the same time colonialisms economic imperative and coercive means are concealed (Morton 2007: 20).
Spivak clarifies, however, that her mistaken (1999: 3) reading of Kant is a
scrupulous travesty in order to find a constructive rather than disabling
complicity between our position and theirs (ibid: 1314).

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What proponents of anti-imperial eighteenth century thought disregard is

that to argue that Enlightenment thought was diverse, plural, inconsistent,
contradictory, self-critical, self-corrective, and self-reflexive does not imply
that it was not hegemonic in the Gramscian sense in terms of generalizing its
own particular interests as common interests of all of humanity. The acknowledgement of cultural difference and diversity did not result in overcoming
normative violence; European ideals retained their normative power despite
the recognition of a plurality of norms.
Another point of disagreement that I have is with Festas and Careys critique of the perils of courting anachronism (2009: 28). They point out that
many of the concepts that function as key categories of difference in postcolonial theory like gender did not exist during the Enlightenment. I
would counter-argue that just because the concepts gender or heteronormativity have been recently coined does not imply that Kants and Herders
theories were not heteronormative or that their subjectivities and intellectual
formation were not marked by gender politics. As Spivak explains, reproductive heteronormativity is the broadest and oldest institution, which predates both capitalism and socialism, and has sustained pre-colonial as much
as colonial and postcolonial structures (Spivak 2007a: 193).
Another important point of disagreement is the role of religion in antiimperialist Enlightenment thought. The religious tolerance of eighteenthcentury thinkers is considered one of the most important aspects of their antiimperialist position, however, this fails to address how the very category of
religion is a colonial construct: Talal Asad (1993, 2003) and Peter van der
Veer (2001) propose that the universalization of the Christian understanding
of religion led to the reconfiguring of indigenous polytheistic belief systems
into a monolithic faith. Moreover, the recognition of a multiplicity of religions in no way prevented Christianity from being identified as the highest
form or essence of religion (van der Veer 2001: 49).
It has been argued by both Asad and van der Veer that the profoundly
Christian nature of the colonial project has not been sufficiently addressed.
Missionaries were important agents of the empire and education functioned as
religions primary instrument for conversion and expansion. At the same time,
colonial administrators explicitly sought to prevail over religion and the rule
of priests in the colonies and push the natives to modernity, secularism, and
reason. Interestingly it was the Christian missionaries who demanded the
separation between church and state, so as not to be hindered by the state in
their efforts to convert the natives (ibid: 22). The anti-colonial nationalists
responded to this by undertaking a reformist agenda as they did not conceive
the colonial state as neutral and tolerant, but rather as fundamentally Christian. This feeling was further enhanced by the fact that many high-raking
colonial officers were practicing Christians, who felt it their duty to support
the missionizing effort. Thus both the state and the missionary societies pro-

Affirmative Sabotage of the Masters Tools

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voked religious nationalists in the colonies to establish religious schools,

universities, and hospitals. Thus, far from having a secularizing influence, the
modernizing project of the colonial state in fact strengthened the role of religion. The separation of church and state did not result in a secular society
either in the metropolis or in the colony; rather it indicated a shift in the location of religion in society from being part of the state to being part of a newly
emerging public sphere (ibid: 21).
Asad (1993) remarks that the universalization of the concept of religion is
closely related to both: The development of modernity in Europe as well as to
European colonialism. Religion itself is a modern category that becomes
particularly significant with respect to imperialism. For example, Hinduism
and Buddhism as religions are colonial inventions. Asad (1993: 27) argues
that the emphasis on religion as a set of beliefs made it possible to judge and
compare different religions enabling theoretical exercises of comparative
religion. Against this background, the evidence of Kants, Diderots and
Herders recognition of cultural and religious diversity as proof of their antiimperialism elides the ideological function of religious toleration in colonial
discourses.
A closer look at Diderots writings similarly cast doubts on his qualification as anti-imperialist. In her astute analysis, Doris Garraway unfolds how
French philosophers, particularly Lahontan and Diderot, deployed the colonized as vocal critics of European colonial rule (2009: 209). Contra Spivaks
claim that the subaltern cannot speak,11 French Enlightenment philosophers
invoked the figure of the speaking native to articulate a scathing critique of
colonialism, Christianity, French politics, social practices, and moral order
(ibid: 209). The savage critic,12 whom Lahontan called nude philosophers
(ibid: 219), was shown to engage in eloquent dialogue with colonial representatives in the colonizers language. Speaking back to colonial power, they
challenge and ridicule its pretensions, while exposing its brutalities (ibid). At
the same time, Diderot addresses the difficulties and perils of cross-cultural
exchange and the incommunicability of radical difference (ibid: 222). Garraway explains that Diderot persistently alerts the readers to the problems of the
rhetorical device of prosopopoeia, in which a writer communicates to the
audience by speaking as another person. Through parodic caricatures and
exaggerated imitations he intentionally makes transparent the inauthentic and
unrepresentative nature of his depictions of the natives in his texts (ibid: 231).
The uncovering of the fictionality of the figure of the savage critic indicates
the problem of speaking for non-Europeans, while casting doubts on the rep11

12

Critiquing Foucault and Deleuze for abandoning the task of representing oppressed groups
by claiming that they can speak for themselves, Spivak contends that there is no unrepresentable subaltern subject that can know and speak itself (1994a: 8081).
Montaigne was the first to invoke the figure of the indigenous American savage critic. For
more see Pagden (1983).

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resentability of the native (ibid: 228). Thus from within the heart of Europe,
counter-discourses emerge to articulate the ills of French society and colonialism. Unpacking the ideological implications of this fictional staging written
at critical moments of French colonial expansion, Garraway argues that these
writings in many ways anticipate postcolonial critique.
Striking a cautionary note Mira Kamdar argues that in the staging of the
native speaking subject, the Enlightenment philosopher speaks only for himself, while claiming to give voice to the natives, thereby privileging European
agency (1990: 99). The benevolent representation of the native voice on the
stage of world history ironically silences it (ibid). Garraway also raises the
important question of the ideological significance of deploying the trope of
the savage critic by French Enlightenment philosophers (1999: 233). Contra Muthu, Garraway refuses to accept at face value the European Enlightenment philosophers rhetorical opposition to colonialism (ibid: 210). She
argues that these fabricated stagings were instead strategies and tactics deployed to stimulate contestation and debates that were absent in the metropolitan public sphere in order to instigate the reform of French colonial policies.
Unpacking the ideological nature of the fantasy of the savage critic, Garraway argues that instead of being anti-imperialist, the Enlightenment philosophers were merely pro-reform (ibid: 233). The primary aim was not a radical
transformation of colonial relations, but a mere remedying of abuses, thereby
contributing to the continuation of the unjust order. The imaginary staging of
dissent and contestation consolidated colonial hegemony in the Gramscian
sense, in that the negotiation with resistant groups and the introduction of
reform stabilized the ruling ideological formation (ibid: 234). Garraway convincingly argues that eighteenth-century critique of colonialism contributed to
a new colonial discourse based on Enlightenment conceptions of universal
reason, individual freedom, and commercial progress (ibid: 210). Through
native surrogates, Enlightenment philosophers galvanized support among the
European public for a reformed enlightened colonialism, which was capable of accommodating the criticisms of the imagined subjects of empire (ibid:
234). This was a call to reform rather than an end to colonialism (ibid: 236).
Although drawing the readers sympathy for the natives suffering, the Europeanization of the savage critic, who is staged as an articulate representative of Enlightenment thought, ironically subverts the radicality of anticolonial opposition. The voicing of resistance was in the language of universal reason (ibid: 234). The critique of French colonial power presented
through fictional colonial subjects presumed that these imagined colonized
people would consent to the proposed reforms implied in the critique (ibid).
Thus the Enlightenment philosophers appropriation of the native voice and
subject position did indeed contribute to the silencing of the Other and the
nullifying of the subversive potential of their counter-discourses (ibid: 210).

Affirmative Sabotage of the Masters Tools

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The strategy of speaking for and through the non-Europeans, in Garraways

view, indicates the impossibility of recovering the voice of the Other (ibid).
Diderots racism becomes obvious in his representation of the colonial
sexual encounter in his Addendum to the Journey of Bougainville, or dialogue between A and B on the drawback to binding moral ideas to certain
physical actions which bear none [1772]. Through the figure of one of his
main native protagonists, Diderot fantasizes about the sexual fantasies of the
Tahitians. According to him, the Tahitians wished to exploit the arrival of
Europeans as a procreative opportunity and manipulate European desires in
order to produce good mtissage (Garraway 2009: 223227). In contrast to
previous stereotypes of native sexual innocence, Diderot represents the Tahitians as desiring the superior French blood and seed as a means to
profit from the colonial encounter (ibid: 225226). In his depiction of Tahitian sexual and social order, Diderot describes the sexual promiscuity of the
natives and the efforts of Tahitian men to lure European men to pursue their
libidinal urges and have sex with their women. Diderot sees this as an attempt
by the natives to sexual manipulate and subjugate French men. Thus instead
of being a site of theft, rape, and plunder, the porno-tropics (McClintock
1995: 21) become a terrain where Diderot projects his fantasies and fears
even as he reinscribes European stereotypes of racial superiority.
Elsewhere in the same work, Diderot advocates the superiority of European conceptions of agriculture, commerce, and culture thereby legitimizing
colonialism (Garraway 2009: 236). Garraway analyzes the rhetorical strategies, a mix of rationalism, sentimentality, and moral indignation, deployed by
European philosophers, who staged themselves as critics of the tyrannical
colonial rule and defenders of the oppressed. Despite calls to take up arms
against European despots, ultimately colonialism is redeemed as the motor of
civilization in the name of commerce (ibid: 237). Garraway further argues
that Diderots call for insurrection was a strategy to frighten the colonial rules
to enact reforms as well as inspire the masses at home to rise against the moral and social order of the ancien rgime (ibid). Domestic class struggles and
political dissent against unjust rule was projected on the non-European world.
The rhetorical defense of the colonized consolidated Enlightenments selfconception as champions of cosmopolitan humanitarianism and universal
rights (ibid: 238). Drawing on Louis Althusser, Garraway examines how
Enlightenment claims about the universality of humanist values of equality,
freedom, and reason were alibis for class-specific demands for political
change (ibid). The paradox of universalism is its constitutive provincialism,
in that the interests of a select few are equated with that of entire humanity
(ibid). In the name of solidarity with the oppressed natives, French Enlightenment philosophers consolidated the ethical validity of their theories of
universal reason, individual freedom, and commercial exchange (ibid: 239).
Arguments that were politically and morally risky were ventriloquized

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through the speaking native, thereby avoiding sanctions though the strategic
deployment of prosopopoeia. Through a discourse of contestation and opposition to colonial abuses, core norms were reinforced in the name of a more
humane relation with the non-European world based on Enlightenment ideals
(ibid). Colonialism was reconfigured in the guise of commerce and individual
freedom and shaped in the Enlightenments image, thereby consolidating
European dominance. The trope of the enlightened savages, the promise of
power of reason to liberate people, and the expression of an imaginary global
solidarity served to obscure the coercive aspects of the Enlightenment ideals
of reason, progress, property, citizenship, and free trade (ibid). A new discourse of imperialism emerged, which ironically derived its legitimacy from
the supposed native critique of colonialism (ibid). Thus, in response to Muthus claim that Diderot voiced a passionate denouncement of imperial brutalities and recommended non-exploitative commercial relations that respected
the plurality of human cultural values, I would counter-argue that to neglect
the imperialist nature of Diderots position is to downplay the violence of his
discourse.
As previously mentioned, another significant issue raised by the postcolonial critique of Enlightenment is the question of the material underpinnings of
the Enlightenment, namely, the inextricable link between Enlightenment,
colonialism, and capitalism.13 The Enlightenment anti-slavery movement is
famously cited as a prime example of anti-imperialist impulses. However, this
overlooks how the abolishment of slavery in British and French colonies
vindicated the European self-representation as humane, while the persistence of slave-trading in Africa provided further justification for colonizing
Africa. Thus even as the abolitionist movement is repeatedly cited as an example of anti-imperialist impulses, I would read it more as an example of how
Europeans emerged as ethical subjects once again by instrumentalizing discourses of freedom and humanity. The call for boycott of slave-produced
goods was to exonerate oneself by acting as an enlightened consumer. These
paternalistic humanitarian efforts were at the heart of the construction of
responsible imperialism, which ignores that slavery was replaced by the
indentured labor system, which too was exploitative and dehumanizing.
Addressing the question Who financed the Enlightenment? Mary
Poovey (2010) and Ian Baucom (2010) contend that the erasure of this question is intrinsic to the Enlightenment. Poovey (2010: 323) explores the paradoxical relation between money and memory, wherein money loses its own
history. She argues that the effective power of money to hold and transfer
value depends upon transforming an earlier medium for transmitting value
13

Interestingly, when Jrgen Habermas (1987), following Kant, links the flourishing of coffee
houses and salons with the emergence of bourgeois public spheres as sites of deliberative
democracy in Europe, he fails to mention the exploitative conditions under which coffee
and tobacco were produced for European consumption.

Affirmative Sabotage of the Masters Tools

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like gold into new genres of money such as bills of exchange, letters of credit,
or Bank of England notes. However, the efficacy of these proliferating money
genres depends upon an abstraction that effaces the memory of any relation to
original forms of value (ibid). Money performs different functions as a universal equivalent, which facilitates exchange and commerce, storing of value
and amassing of wealth (ibid: 335). Both Poovey and Baucom note that this
abstraction, namely money becoming capital, was an important aspect of the
erasure of the history of money. In order for modern money to perform most
of the functions it is expected to serve, there must be an effacing of the
memory of the various forms money has previously taken (ibid).
Baucom (2010: 337) explains that money is a carrier of the law that, in
expanding the scope of the law, multiplies the boundaries of law and correspondingly those of sanctioned violence. Focusing on international law that
reaches beyond the sovereign state, he examines how this justifies violence
against those who are deemed inimical by virtue of not possessing a state, a
senate, and a treasury (ibid). According to Baucom, this nexus of
law/money/violence, in which each mediates the others, wins formal philosophical sanction as a global imperative or universal rule through Kants
concept of cosmopolitanism. Money, on its network of travels around the
globe, carries with it international law. To the extent that money, as a convertible unit of account, renders possible exchange across national markets, it
also renders possible international law (ibid: 341). The founding monopoly
on legitimate, law-sanctioned violence through which the commonwealth is
established thus creates the conditions for the accumulation of money, which
necessitates the intensification of the states capacity for violence (ibid:
342).14 As money accumulates, the violence of a sovereign power must expand accordingly, which enables further amassing of money (ibid: 343).
Caught in the cycle of the accumulation of money and violence, the commonwealth inevitably runs up against its national boundaries. The solution is
imperialism, which resolves the problems of over-accumulation of money and
violence for the national state (ibid).
In Ciceros Ghost: The Atlantic, the Enemy and the Laws of War, Baucom (2009) presents a scathing critique of Kantian cosmopolitanism and
makes a powerful case against the claim that cosmopolitan right is necessarily
emancipatory. In the Metaphysics of Morals [1785] Kant states that the
rights of a state against an unjust enemy are unlimited in quantity or degree
(Kant 1977d: 473). This departs from Kants general understanding of the
limits of the states right to make war against its enemies (ibid: 469). In his
discussion on international rights, Kant explains that unjust enemy is some14

Baucom argues that this conceptual machinery has been revived by the post 9/11 U.S.
national security agencies on behalf of an unabashedly conjoined theory and practice of international law, global war, and speculative capital (2010: 337).

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Nikita Dhawan

one who makes peace among nations impossible (ibid: 473). In the subsequent portion of his text on cosmopolitan right, Kant links together universal
theory of right, international trade and commerce, and the international law of
war (ibid: 476477). Cosmopolitan right, in Kants view, is the global right to
commerce, which must be enshrined in law and defended through a global
right to violence, if and when necessary (Baucom 2009: 126). This implies
that a global right to commerce is foundational to the emergence of a universal legal order. The cosmopolitan right to commerce and the universal international law extend, via the right to settlement, into those regions of the earth
inhabited by peoples like the Hottentots of the Cape (ibid: 134135). While
Kant maintains that these lawless people should only be made to enter into
a universal cosmopolitanism by treaty, their condition of lawlessness makes
them incapable of participating in binding contracts (ibid). This leads to the
paradoxical situation that while international law and cosmopolitan right
should only be extended by treaty, however given the impossibility of garnering the consent of the lawless, the use of violence becomes unavoidable in
the interest of extending the operating spheres of global commerce (ibid).
Kant is thereby confronted with a dilemma: While rejecting violence as a
means of globally establishing the condition of cosmopolitan right, he cannot
explain how global commerce, international law, and cosmopolitan right can
come into existence without it (ibid: 135136). For precisely to the extent that
lawless people like the Hottentots are seen to be living in a state of nature,
in a condition of the stateless, acommercial, acontractual war of all against
all, they represent a threat to the freedom of all nations (ibid). Accordingly,
in this situation, Kant endorses the recourse to violence against such unjust
enemies (Kant 1977d: 473). Kants cosmopolitan fantasy of free trade guaranteeing perpetual peace is at the cost of reinforcing the nexus between law,
violence, and money (Baucom 2009: 136). This is by no means an antiimperialist endeavor by any stretch of the imagination.
Making a compelling case, Baucoms and Pooveys readings go against
the sympathetic interpretation of a more progressive Kant in his later writings.
This is contrary to the claim that there was a shift in Kants later writings on
cosmopolitanism, marking a move away from his racist beliefs. Pauline
Kleingeld contends that Kant improved his position during the 1790s and
had second thoughts on race in the middle of his critical period (2007:
575). She admits that in his early writings Kant endorsed pro-slavery views
and defended racial hierarchy, however, rather than dismissing Kant as a
consistent inegalitarian, she sees him as an inconsistent universalist (ibid:
576). While some Kant scholars distinguish between Kants serious theory
and his prejudices, which they deem marginal to his political thought
(Louden 2002, Zammito 2002, Wilson 2006), others argue that one cannot
decouple the two: In their powerful writings, Robert Bernasconi (2001), Tsenay Serequeberhan (1997), Charles Mills (1997) and Emmanuel Chukwudi

Affirmative Sabotage of the Masters Tools

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Eze (1997a, 1997b) unpack the negated inclusion of the figure of the African in Kants anthropological history. In The Color of Reason Eze (1997a:
115) analyzes Kantian racism, which is succinctly asserted in Kants claim
that humanity exists in its greatest perfection in the white race (cf. Kant
1977a: 2728). Kant asserts that the morals and customs of non-European
peoples are devoid of ethical principles because of their lack of rational will
and self-reflectivity, which builds moral character through the educational
process of the development of goodness latent in human nature (Eze 1997a:
115). In Kants table of moral classifications, while the Americans are completely uneducable, the Africans can only be trained as slaves and servants
through physical coercion and corporeal punishment (Kant 1977a: 16). Shifting focus to India, he asserts that although the Hindus all look like philosophers, they are incapable of abstract concepts and concludes that they cannot
advance (ibid). The only race that is capable of progress are the white
Europeans. He makes a direct link between skin color and climate and characteristics like talent, morality, intelligence, capabilities, and character.
Eze (1997a: 118) traces an inconsistency in Kants position, wherein on
the one hand, Kant insists that his narrative about the beginnings and the
development of human history is conjectural. However, on the other hand,
in his raciology Kant hierarchically posits first the American Indian, then the
Negro and the Asian as primitive and inferior stages of humanity, for
humanity proper is embodied only in the white European male (ibid: 125).
Kant, in Ezes view, is a normative essentialist. Although, unlike Rousseau,
Kant does not advocate any substantified condition from which humans have
degenerated, or to which they are supposed to return, he does propose that the
essence of human nature is a teleology that humans must realize (ibid: 125).
The true nature of man does not consist in what one is, but in what one
ought to become (ibid: 126). Eze asks if Kants doctrine of human nature is
only normatively, rather than descriptively essentialist, what about his racial
theories? What for Kant is the essence of race (ibid)? Kant suggests that
there is an essential and natural gift that those who are white inherently
have and those who are black inherently lack. The evidence for this natural endowment or the lack thereof is skin color, which constitutes the racial
essence. This indicates that the essentialism of Kants raciology is biologically rooted (ibid).
Eze speculates how Kant managed to accumulate so much knowledge of
Africa, Asia, and the Americas, never having put a foot on any of these continents. One obvious source is books. Published accounts of other lands in
travel literatures of explorers and missionaries were widely available. Furthermore Knigsberg, where Kant lived all his life, was a bustling seaport
well-situated for overseas trade and provided opportunity for interaction with
peoples of diverse languages and customs (ibid: 128). Eze argues that hearsays as well as sensationalist and propogandist accounts were transformed

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Nikita Dhawan

into academic science (ibid: 129). Recycling stereotypes and prejudices about
non-European peoples and cultures, Kant offered a strong philosophical justification of the superior/inferior classification of the races of men (ibid). The
highly theoretical and transcendental nature of his theories refutes claims of
scholars who propose that Kants writings on race and his interest in anthropology and cultural geography was a mere pastime and not philosophically
serious. Eze argues convincingly that Kants reflections on geography and
anthropology were neither marginal to his teaching and professional philosophical career nor inconsequential to a profound understanding of him as a
cultural thinker (ibid: 130). The attempt to trivialize Kants theories of race
may stem from the embarrassing difficulty of reconciling his racist and imperialist ideas with his supposedly more progressive notions of cosmopolitan
right that are so central to modern political thought. It is no easy task for the
Western philosophical tradition to accept the fact that something went terribly
wrong with the best of Enlightenment. As Eze points out, that which one
ought to become in order to deserve human dignity, sounds very much like
Kant himself: white, European, and male (ibid: 130). Dissidents would be
treated as a rebel against fundamental principles of human nature (ibid:
131, italics in original).
Along similar lines Mills (1997: 53) argues in The Racial Contract that
even as Kant defines persons simply as rational beings, without any apparent restrictions of gender or race, the female body is demarcated as insufficiently rational to be politically anything more than a passive citizen. Similarly, the Racial Contract is explicitly predicated on the politics of the body,
which is related to the body politic through restrictions on which bodies qualify as political (ibid: 120). There are bodies that are judged incapable of
forming or fully entering into the body politic. Skin color for Kant is not
merely a physical characteristic; rather it is evidence of an intrinsic moral
quality and the capacity to reason. Mills goes on to argue that
the embarrassing fact for the white West (which doubtless explains its concealment) is
that their most important moral theorist of the past three hundred years is also the foundational theorist in the modem period of the division between Herrenvolk and Untermenschen, persons and subpersons, upon which Nazi theory would later draw (ibid: 72,
italics in original).

In Mills view, modern moral theory and modern racial theory have the same
source: the racial contract underwrites the social contract (ibid: 70). The ideal
norm of the Kantian social contract of the infinite value of all human life thus
has to be rewritten to reflect the actual Racial Contract norm of the far
greater value of white life (ibid: 101). Egalitarianism becomes equality
among equals with blacks and others being ontologically excluded from the
fruits of the Enlightenment (ibid: 58).
In response to the claims that these early racist ideas were discarded or
improved upon in Kants later writings, I would counter-argue that it is im-

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perative to address the tensions between the rupture and reinscription of the
trope of race in early and later Kant. Instead of a simple break with earlier
forms of racism, one needs to trace how the discourse is recovered, modified,
and reconfigured in new forms. Earlier ideas of race do not disappear, but are
superimposed and remodelled in discourses of cosmopolitanism. In Kleingelds view Kantian cosmopolitanism is incompatible with colonialism, in
that Kant grants full juridical status to non-whites as being capable of signing
contracts, while explicitly prohibiting the colonial conquest of foreign lands
(2007: 586). It is also argued that Kant moves away from a critique of transclimatic migration, which he previously explained in terms of natures purposive hindering of non-whites to physically and mentally adapt to Nordic
climates. However, instead of reading Kants support of intercontinental migration as advancement over his previous racist views, I propose that Kant is
merely adapting his theory to a new phase of imperialism. Thus, instead of a
corrective, I would read it in terms of a more sophisticated and less crude
form of racism. Like Herder who opposed the mixing of human species,
which according to him would produce a non-viable monstrosity (Kleingeld
2007: 577 fn 12), Kant too was against the fusion of races that would lead
to humans becoming physically and psychologically similar. His acceptance
of diversity led him to reject racial assimilation for fear of universal uniformity. One detects a deeply racist ideology in this safeguarding of the diversity of
the human species. Kleingeld (2007: 591592) proposes that Kants change
of mind could have been prompted by his general revision of his theory of
biology. It is important to note that Kant never gave up the concept of race as
a biological category. Just because most Enlightenment thinkers rejected
polygenecism and asserted the fundamental species equality of humankind
does not imply that they abandoned their belief in the hierarchical nature of
the human races. In fact, the argument of the species unity of humanity is an
ideological ruse to distance Enlightenment political thought from any racial
connotations (Elden 2009). Thus Kants monogenetic view is not enough to
prove his anti-imperialist credentials.
While scholars like Muthu contend that postcolonial critics do not know
what to make of the anti-imperialist impulses of eighteenth-century political
thought, I am tempted to counter-argue that political philosophers by and
large are still at a loss of how to deal with the deeply racist and imperialist
consequences of emancipatory European thought. They are unable to come to
terms with the profound contradiction that European Enlightenment was
deeply exclusionary, coercive, and violent.
Reading Muthus and Pittss claim that Kant, Herder, and Diderot were
better anti-imperialists than Hegel or Marx, one wonders why postcolonial
studies, irrespective of the regional and historical focus, prefer the latter over
the former when addressing issues of power, domination, and resistance.
From Ngritude to South Asian Subaltern Studies, from Fanon to Dubois, it is

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Marx and not Diderot who inspires the postcolonial imagination. Are the
postcolonial scholars simply guilty of being ignorant or are Muthu and Pitts
too generous with the label anti-imperialist? While it is commendable to
interrupt a linear narrative of the history of ideas, wherein the latter philosopher marks an improvement and corrective to the thought of his predecessor,
claiming the inverse that all was well in the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century ushered in a decline in progressive thought is problematic.
Finally, in claiming that eighteenth-century Enlightenment anticipated
some of the most significant critiques in postcolonial thought, the agency of
the non-European world to transform Europe is discounted. This raises the
question of the relation of postcolonial studies to critical thinking. What are
the consequences of the claim that Enlightenment was always already antiimperialist and self-critical? If there is a strong link between the practice of
critique and the emergence of agency, what are the consequences of the monopolization of critical thinking by the Enlightenment for the postcolonial
world?

Enlightenment Is Critique
This section deals with how the postcolonial world is to deal with the difficult
legacy of Enlightenment critical thinking, which renders impossible any for or
against positions vis--vis the Enlightenment. One of the most important
contributions of critical engagements with the Enlightenment is the challenge
to its self-judgment as progressive and emancipatory. The problems posed by
the Enlightenment cannot be resolved either by rejecting it or by representing
the process of Enlightenment as yet-to-be-completed. Rather it entails affirming the antinomies of Enlightenment that cannot be easily resolved (Cascardi
1999: 29). Enlightenments effort to suppress the other of reason, ranging
from superstition and madness to religion and tradition, was however never
fully achieved by the process of Enlightenment (ibid: 31). Thus even as the
Enlightenment sought to eliminate the other of reason and control its unpredictability, this remains an unsustainable promise (ibid: 33).
Critics like Peter Sloterdijk (1987) regard cynicism as a possible antidote
to the Enlightenment in order to avert future disenchantment. It has been
argued that such positions tend to disregard the ambivalent legacies of the
Enlightenment. The unmasking of the coercive aspects of the Enlightenment
risks does not automatically entail forfeiture of progressive social and ethical
projects as lost causes. Drawing on Albert Hirschman, Schmidt (2000: 742)
outlines that similar to the French Revolution, the assessment of the Enlightenment is caught between three positions: The perversity thesis, which
suggests that any attempt at transforming society runs the risk of producing

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contrary effects to those intended, the futility thesis, which states that attempts to transform societies will bring about a change that is superficial and
cosmetic, hence illusionary, and the jeopardy thesis, which claims that the
proposed change, though perhaps desirable in itself, involves unacceptable
costs or consequences. Schmidt adds to this the critique of excessive Enlightenment, which is positioned against attempts to push the Enlightenment
too far (ibid: 743). He identifies Adorno and Horkheimer as well as Foucault with the perversity argument, whereby, in their view, quest for freedom
produces slavery, for democracy produces tyranny, and for progress produces
disenfranchisement. Remarking on the negative tone of Dialectic of Enlightenment Schmidt states that it is only through a mercilessly negativistic
critique of what enlightenment had become that the past hopes of the Enlightenment might be redeemed (1996: 25). Thus paradoxically, perhaps
only by taking up the arguments of the Enlightenments most vehement critics
can the hopes of the Enlightenment be kept alive (ibid: 26).
One popular approach to the problems posed by the Enlightenment is to
envision a return to the wisdom of the pre-Enlightenment era. This attitude
represents an effort to step back and reverse the process of the Enlightenment
by recovering pre-Enlightenment ways of being and thinking and seeks to
deny the fact that the Enlightenment has had consequences (Cascardi 1999:
40): The yearning to undo the Enlightenment ignores how the emergence of a
critical consciousness is itself a legacy of the Enlightenment.
In contrast to his earlier understanding of the Enlightenment as the age
that paved the way for discipline and normalization, of surveillance and control of bodies and souls, of marginalization and exclusion of the deviant, the
abnormal, the insane, in one of the last writings, Foucault offers a qualified
endorsement of the Enlightenment ethos of critique. In his essay What is
Critique? (1996), Foucault argues that the question of the Enlightenment
remains central to critical theory. According to him, we cannot free ourselves
of this legacy nor can we easily position ourselves for or against the Enlightenment (cf. Foucault 1984: 45). Thus the question of our relationship to the
Enlightenment is marked by the impossibility of categorically locating ourselves either inside or outside the Enlightenment (Cascardi 1999: 5). The
challenge is to contest the violent consequences of Enlightenment rationality
without taking up an anti-Enlightenment stance. According to Cascardi, the
Kantian Enlightenment project is structurally incomplete (ibid: 6), as there
is no point beyond the system from which to reflect upon it, thereby indicating the impossibility of achieving closure. The aim of Enlightenment thought
is the persistent transgression of our ways of thinking, doing, and being. Foucault links the Kantian practice of critique of arbitrary political power, an
important legacy of the Enlightenment, with the art of governance (Foucault 1996: 384). The critical project that Kant identifies with the Enlightenment has now been turned against the Enlightenment and its ideals

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(dEntrves 2000: 186187). Reason, in the form of positivist science, has

been shown to be intimately connected to the excesses of state power, thus
making the critique of governmentality imperative (ibid). However, Foucaults critique of governmentality is not a categorical rejection nor does it
seek to answer the question how to govern better? rather it addresses the
challenge of
how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of principles, in view of such objectives and by the means of such methods, not like that, not for that, not by them (Foucault
1996: 384).

If governmentalization is concerned with subjugating individuals, then critique is the art of voluntary inservitude, of reflective indocility. The essential
function of critique would be that of desubjectification (Foucault 1996: 386).
This critical attitude does not consist of a categorical rejection of government,
but only of the technologies, tactics, and rationalities that make us governmentalizable (see Butler 2002).
In Foucaults view, modern philosophy has not been capable of answering
the question What is Enlightenment? but has at the same time not managed
to get rid of it either (1984: 32). Kant defines the Enlightenment in an almost
entirely negative way, as an exit, a way out. He seeks to understand the
present in terms of the difference it introduces with respect to yesterday (ibid:
34). Thus the Enlightenment is not conceived within the framework of a progressive teleology of history, rather it is concerned with testing the historical
and contemporary limits of the necessary (ibid: 43). Like Kant, whose main
concern in engaging with the Enlightenment was the political question of the
mode of dissent possible for citizens and their obligations in the face of state
restrictions, Foucault, too, is concerned with the art of government and the
critical attitude necessary to disrupt particular rationalities and technologies
of being governed. The Enlightenment is opposed, not to authority per se, but
rather to those forms of authority that are maintained coercively rather than
by consent (Schmidt 1996: 19). This is the emancipatory promise of reflection, which lies at the heart of Kants notion of the Enlightenment. As has
been argued by critics of the Enlightenment, this position disregards that
reflection itself is determined by socio-historical contexts. This raises the
questions: What does the practice of critique entail? What does it mean to
exercise ruthless critique here and now? Who is fit to practice it? From a
postcolonial-queer-feminist perspective it is imperative to trace an alternative
genealogy of the politics of critique and re-imagine its relation to the process
of decolonization.
The origin of the term critique can be traced to the Greek word krinein
or krino, which means to separate, to decide, to fight, to accuse.
Used initially in the juridical sphere, it referred to both the act of accusing
and the giving of a verdict, it indicated the ability to differentiate, to ask probing questions, and to judge. Another related noun is Krisis, which could be

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read as turning point, and Kriterion, namely the means for judging. Wendy
Brown (2009: 9) traces how the multi-faceted holism of the Greek term Krisis
lost its nuances and became limited primarily to its medical connotation of a
turning point of the disease, namely, the critical condition of the patient.
She highlights the important difference between criticism and critique,
even as she points out that different theorists understand critique differently,
ranging from ideology critique to cultural critique to social critique (ibid).
Critique as a form of free and open speech (parrhesia) was especially associated with the cynics. The Greek term kynikos, from which it is derived,
means dog-like. No wonder the cynics were called the watchdogs of humanity, as it was their explicit aim to challenge the doxa, the prevailing, established view. Diogenes remarks other dogs bite their enemies, I bite my
friends to save them (cit. in Stobaeus Florilegium). Over the next few centuries, critique increasingly came to exemplify the activity that separated
reason from revelation by the systematic exposure of errors. Its most famous
proponent was of course Kant, who in response to Humes skepticism that
undermined certainty in any knowledge, sought to prevent pure reason from
making speculative errors by keeping it within proper limits. Instead of striving to transcend all limits, the Kantian definition of critique as the analysis
and reflection upon limits shifted the focus to the question of enabling limits (Simons 1995: 34). His analytic of finitude instructs us that we are indebted to limits for they are not only constraints, but also conditions of possibility. As is well known, Kant eventually called his transcendental philosophy
critical philosophy, distinguishing between limits and possibilities interior
to the process of knowledge and restrictions imposed by an external authority.
The other aspect of Kantian critical philosophy focuses on engaging with
others through the mode of the public exercise of rational critique. The court
of reason becomes the arena for the practice of critique as a process of epistemological self-correction within the established limits of reason. The Kantian dictum that everything must be submitted to critique, even reason itself,
implies that critique begins with challenging the demand for absolute obedience and subjecting every obligation imposed on persons to a rational and
reflective evaluation. Kant, drawing on Horace, invokes the courage of reason
Sapere aude, dare to know as the Enlightenments motto (1977c: 55). If the
only obstacle to Enlightenment is fear and laziness, then human beings can
transform their circumstances by recognizing the lack of resolution and courage to use reason as the source of their own oppression. The Enlightenment,
in Kants view, is mans emergence from his self-incurred immaturity Ignorance is not a lack of knowledge, but a weakness of the will, indicating
mans inability to make use of his understanding without direction from
another (ibid).
With Hegel [1802] the reconfiguration of critique as immanent emerged.
It was immanent in that its critical standards emerged in the historical pro-

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cess. Hegels critique did not start externally, but stemmed from the internal
antagonism of things to be criticized, whose fissures provided the possible
space for the emergence of critique. It was the self-critique of things to be
criticized. Marx was attracted to Hegels philosophy even as he transformed
immanent critique radically. For him immanent principles are necessary
weapons in the struggle for progressive social change, because they provide a
basis for critique within the historical reality. This immanent grounding became the axis of his emancipatory critique of capitalism. Marx also attaches
great importance to the self-critique of things. However, in the Preface of
Critique of Political Economy [1859], he addresses the limitations of social
self-critique, whereby he proposes that no society can earnestly undertake
self-criticism before its productive force has been realized. Marxs insights
illuminate the complex relationship between society and the critical consciousness of its members. He tells us that the emancipation of the workers
will have to be the work of the workers themselves. Marxist critical theory
links the public activity of critique to its revolutionary function. Moving beyond the limits imposed on critique within epistemology, Marx transforms
critique into a weapon for those who seek to change reality, not merely interpret it. In a letter to Arnold Ruge he writes:
But if constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all
the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism
of all that exists (rcksichtslose Kritik alles Bestehenden), ruthless both in the sense of not
being afraid of the results it arrives at and of conflicting with the powers that be (1976:
345).

Here Nietzsches expression to philosophize with a hammer [1889] comes

in handy. Critical thinking, for Nietzsche, is freeing oneself of borrowed
manners and received opinions. In his 1885 notebooks, he notes that one
should no longer trust ones concepts as if they were a magnificent dowry
from some sort of wonderland (Nietzsche 1967: 206). For Nietzsche, the
critical evaluation of inherited ideas and practices is linked to the courage of
transgressing them, to free the self to think differently. Distrust of familiar
ideas is an important part of critical thinking here.
In The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology
[1936] Edmund Husserl tells us that critique is closely linked to the moment
of crisis, even as the greatest crisis is the inability to notice the crisis. According to him, forgetfulness is the subtlety of crisis, a lack of obviousness that
makes crisis difficult to detect. This forgetfulness is a retaining of the past as
merely having been in such a way that it loses its critical powers. Here the
Nietzsche-Foucaultian concept of genealogy as critique, as a form of countermemory, is extremely relevant. The focus is not directed at debunking theories or concepts, but at countering the violent effects of knowledge. Genealogy as a form of critique is an inventory of our discourses on their effects of
power.

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Another important aspect is the relation of critique to itself. A selfreflexive critique attempts to ground its own possibility by means of the same
categories it seeks to overcome (Butler 2002, 2009). Thus, the immanent
critique of the present and the transformation of existing order are intrinsically related. This necessitates the social critique of the present, which indicates
a possible future fundamentally different and yet emerging from it. Such selfreflexivity marks the Frankfurt School of critical theorists, who were inspired
by Marxist theory, yet opposed the totalitarian interpretations of Marxism and
the state socialist bureaucratic domination they created. They pursued a critique of reason being reduced to a means-end instrumentality, which enabled
a broader understanding of the relation between knowledge and domination.
They unpacked how the anti-authoritarian principle of Enlightenment reason
made way for domination in both the natural and human realms, showing how
faith in the emancipatory force of reason resulted in the failure to
acknowledge how it fashioned new logics of domination. Adorno and
Horkheimer see the Enlightenment as having faltered, but conclude that rather
than giving it up, the Enlightenment project itself should be radicalized. It is
the task of critical theorists to reveal the domination of positivistic, scientific,
instrumental categories and structures that shape our current world and to
activate oppositional forces towards human emancipation. It is speculated that
Adorno and Horkheimer talked about writing a sequel titled Rescuing the
Enlightenment (Rettung der Aufklrung). This recovery project was, however, not undertaken. Bronner (2004: 3) proposes that the logic of their argument ultimately left them with few possibilities of conceptualizing an effective political form of opposition. The democratic inheritance of the Enlightenment and its interventionist mode to transform social and political reality
was sidelined. In contrast, Ernst Bloch [19541959] brings together critique
with the emergence of hope and utopias, linking the practice of critique with
imagining the not-yet, even as hope must be disappointed in order to guard it
from becoming totalitarian.
Despite important differences, what is common within the Western paradigm is the assumption that critical speech to be free must be exercised in
public and must involve risk-taking. In regarding itself as confronting relations of power, critique aspires to be heroic (Asad 2009a: 49). This raises
questions like: How is the freedom of critique shaped? In what way is it connected to at once subverting and reinforcing power? What forms of critical
inquiry are justified? Is it an individual endeavor or a collective action? How
do criteria for legitimate critique emerge, by what means are they enforced,
and how can they be transformed? Does one need epistemic certainty in order
to practice critique? If as Derrida claims critique is first and foremost an act
of love rather than a negative practice, how does the object of critique define
the meaning of critique? Where does the critic draw legitimacy for her practice?

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In one of the most challenging philosophical disputes of our times, Foucault and Derrida debate the limits and tools of critique. In his lecture Cogito
and the History of Madness, Derrida (1978: 3334) rejects Foucaults critical
project to go beyond the Western form of reason and the violence it entails.
Derrida contends that Foucaults critical project entails a tricky paradox,
namely, how can one attempt to speak for the silenced by the use of the very
instrument, namely, the language of reason that had previously silenced them.
As Derrida remarks:
The misfortune of the mad, the interminable misfortune of their silence, is that their best
spokesmen are those who betray them best; which is to say that when one attempts to
convey their silence itself, one has already passed over to the side of the enemy, the side of
order, even if one fights against order (ibid: 3536).

In Derridas view, reason puts reason on trial in the name of the mad, whereby this is not possible without recourse to a discourse that itelf produces the
silencing of the mad. Derridas thesis is provocative insofar as he suggests
that it is impossible to avoid complicity in the exclusions of reason. As soon
as one uses language, one collaborates in the process of silencing. There is no
alternative, whereby reason-in-general cannot be surpassed. Derrida professes
that Foucault knows the impossibility of his project, whereby the language of
exclusion, namely, the language of reason, cannot be used to combat exclusion. He finds Foucaults project to be deceptive for it contends to absolve
itself of its investment in the discourse of reason. Five years later, Foucault
responded to Derrida in a paper entitled My Body, This Paper, This Fire
(1979), wherein he performs a double critique on both Derrida and himself.
Foucault suggests that even if Derridas arguments seem plausible, they nonetheless rob his thinking of all its potentially political force. If, as Derrida
contends, exclusion and violence are not historical but economical, namely,
essential to the economy of language as such, then exclusion is the general
condition and the constitutive foundation of the very possibility of speech.
How then, is any form of critique that does not reproduce the mechanisms of
violence it seeks to challenge possible? Eighteen years later, in his lecture
How to Avoid Speaking: Denials (1996), Derrida refers to Ludwig Wittgensteins statement [a]bout that which one cannot speak, one must remain
silent and emphasizes that the imperative one must is of great significance.
In response to the ethical question of speech versus silence, Derrida implores
that one must not avoid speaking (1996: 11). Although Foucault is not
named, Derrida upholds
the necessity of speaking even at the price of a war declared by the language of reason
against itself [because] language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique (Derrida cit. in Spivak 2002 [1967]: xviii).

What is at stake in the Foucault-Derrida debate is not simply the question of

the limits of critique, but the limits of the tools of critique. For the critical

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thinker, whose task it is to contest mechanisms of violence, the challenge is

how to avoid repeating, in her own account, the very gesture of violence and
exclusion that is constitutive of history as such. The critics endeavor remains
caught within the conceptual economy which it claims to denounce. Interestingly, already in Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right, Marx warns that
[t]he weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon
(Marx 1981: 385).
One such historical experiment with the weapon of criticism was made by
the nastikas, namely, the heterodox schools of classical Indian philosophy.
Their theory and practice of ahimsa (non-violence) carefully engages with
how power is exercised in the practice of critique. Thus they attempt to develop a non-violent ethics of political intervention (Dhawan 2007: 301305).
One of the most important and well-known interpretations and implementations of the tool of non-violent critique has been by Gandhi in the context of
the Indian independence movement, who combined the Marxist strategy of
the general strike with heterodox ethics. It has been argued that Gandhis
tactics of non-violence was critical in achieving a moral advantage for anticolonial nationalists. Faced with non-violence, the colonizers were left in a
predicament, as their counter-violence became a sign of the moral bankruptcy of their rule (ibid: 306307).
However, Gandhis experiments with non-violence had many detractors:
Antonio Gramsci (2007: 61) describes Gandhian tactics as passive nonresistance and compares it to mattress against the bullet. B. R. Ambedkar
(1979), the architect of the Indian Constitution and champion of the Dalits,
was a staunch critic of Gandhi. Ambedkar, who was very inspired by European Enlightenment, found Gandhis critique of modernity and his romantic
Swadeshism (of ones own country) counter-productive for marginalized
groups. He lamented that there was no hope for the common man in Gandhism and emphasized that the dalits have no nostalgia for the pre-colonial
past, which for them was an experience of humiliation and exploitation. In the
context of the anti-Apartheid struggle, Nelson Mandela (1999) argues that
Gandhian non-violence is only effective if your opponent adheres to the same
rules as you do. Another critique came from the anti-colonial Hindu nationalists who claimed that Gandhian non-violence was emasculating the Hindu
nation (van der Veer 1994: 96). Thus, despite the good press, non-violence as
a tool of critique has not always found resonance. Fanon, for example, believed that violent revolution is the only means of ending colonial repression
and cultural trauma in the Third World. He argued:
Violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his
despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect (1961: 74).

Hannah Arendt (1970: 83), in contrast, sees violence as a failure of power; as

a compensatory substitute for the lack of real power. In response to Fanons

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call for anti-colonial violence, Arendt claims that the glorification of violence
is caused by the severe frustration of the faculty of action in the modern
world. As is evident, the tension between critique and violence is not easy to
negotiate.
Another important aspect in our discussion on critical practice is the status
of categories like class, race, or gender, which are simultaneously the target
as well as tools of critique. For instance, there is an interesting on-going debate within Critical Race Theory about the significance of the critical as
well as race: For some theorists, critical serves the negative function of
determining that which must be overcome. Accordingly race is dismissed
on the basis of its constructivity. For others, following Kant, critical serves
the function of determining the conditions of meaning and the limits of concept of race. For instance, W. E. B. Du Bois famous critique of the color
line in The Souls of Black Folk (1996: 13) did not limit itself to contesting
prevailing racial assumptions, but targeted the very study of race itself. At the
heart of Du Bois critical race theory, then, is a critique of theory itself.
Critical Race Feminists complicate the discussion by unfolding the inseparability of racial politics from gender and sexual politics. They illuminate how
critique, when it only engages with one dimension of domination, risks reproducing violence. This necessitates anti-imperialist and anti-racist critique
within feminist and queer politics, even as postcolonial politics must engage
with a critique of reproductive heteronormativity. One without the other
reinforces violent mechanisms of oppression.
Another related challenge is: How can feminist, queer, and postcolonial
theory make a simultaneous claim to being a legitimate heir to the Enlightenment while critiquing it? If European and Man have been historically
synonymous with the critical, what relation does its Other have to the task
of critique? If, as insisted in the Western philosophical tradition, Enlightenment is critique, how can the Enlightenment be taken beyond the confines of
Europe and be made to work for the Other? If critiques primary function is
to enable maturity, turning men into adults who reject external authority
and can think for themselves, Asad (2009b: 141) questions how the global
North coerces the global South to assume what they regard as a mature critical attitude. On the other hand, does it suffice to critique Western operations
of racist and imperialist violence or must not the postcolony confront its own
failures? And yet, how does one safeguard that this auto-critique is not instrumentalized to disqualify postcolonial-queer-feminist perspectives?
In conclusion, the role of the critical thinker must be addressed. On the
one hand is the professional critic, who is less concerned with challenging
power, rather strives to systematize the activity of critique, laying bare its
goals, its methods, theorizing it into disciplines, normalizing, and regulating
its scope (Asad 2009a: 55). Disciplinary criticism makes critique integral to
the growth of useful knowledge and therefore intrinsic to the exercise of

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modern power (ibid: 53). Herein the freedom to criticize is coded as a right as
well as duty of every modern individual, whose relentless pursuit of truth and
freedom is the signature of his or her political agency. But as Asad reminds
us, every critical practice is located in material conditions that determine the
contours, the aims, and the forms of the emergence of the practice of critique
(ibid: 54). What the exertion of critique challenges, undermines, ruptures,
stabilizes, reinforces are enabled and regulated by corporate and state power,
namely, the targets of critical criticism (ibid).
This leaves us with several challenging questions when confronted with
the difficult task of decolonization: What privileged function has critique
come to occupy in our postcolonial world? How does it shape subject constitution? How has critique become the indispensable way to freedom? Instead
of being emancipatory or challenging relations of power, can critique be motivated by the desire to conquest? Can it become, as Asad (2009b: 139) asks,
an exercise in cruelty or seduction? How does power inform the exercise of
critique and how does critique sustain power? If Cicero contends that philosophy is the study of how to prepare ones self to die, then the question is how
is the art of critique linked to survival?

Do not Accuse, Do not Excuse

The postcolonial critique of the Enlightenment is not a critique-to-end-allcritiques (Cascardi 1999: 59), but to acknowledge the open-endedness of the
Enlightenment project of critique. In his compelling book Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, Scott traces the shift from a
resistant form of anti-colonialism defined as the overcoming of colonial subservience to a tragic mode plagued by paradoxes and reversals (2004: 13). As
Scott explains, tragedy is both a form of subject constitution at a time of historical crisis as well as a reflection upon such crisis (ibid). One of the most
important interventions of Scotts book is his argument that the narrative of
revolutionary romance and its understanding of decolonization as overcoming
the past is at the cost of forfeiting the critical force of postcolonial thinking.
Anticolonial revolutions held the promise of overcoming colonialism as a
totalized structure of brutality, violence, objectification, racism, and exclusion. The wounded past was to be replaced by the healing present. The destructive power of colonialism was confronted with a regenerative counterpower of anti-colonialism (ibid: 6). Fanons The Wretched of the Earth
(1961) is one of the most influential narratives of the promise of emancipation through the overcoming of domination and exploitation. Colonialisms
totalizing dehumanization shapes the indignant vocabulary of anticolonial

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revolutions. However, Scott asks provocatively: What if the persuasive force

of the past no longer serves to guarantee the opening of an emancipated future? What if romantic notions of resistance and overcoming are no longer
compelling?
Scott regrets that postcolonialism has been primarily concerned with exposing the negative structure of colonial power that limits political agency to
anti-colonial posturing. In order to reimagine postcolonial futures, he urges a
rethinking of our relation to the racist and colonialist past and a move away
from the narratives of vindication (ibid: 7). The challenge of decolonization
must be recast in other terms by rising above the conventional romance of
revolutionary overcoming that led us to believe that undoing colonialism
would usher in a world without injustice and oppression (ibid: 14).
Tracing the differences between the two editions of C. L. R. James Black
Jacobins that appeared in 1938 and 1963, Scott examines how the postcolonial world must come to grips with the fact that the anti-colonial revolution
has fallen short of expectations. With the endemic problems of economic,
social, and political inequality in the postcolonial world, the revolutionary
teleology imagined by James is no longer relevant (ibid: 167). We are faced
with a history without warranty, wherein the present cannot be improved by
echoing earlier slogans of decolonization:
The old languages of moral political vision and hope are no longer in sync with the world
they were meant to describe and normatively criticize (ibid: 2).

However, Scott is careful to state that he does not believe that the anticolonial employment of an emancipationist history was an error; rather the
goals of anti-colonial nationalists are no longer valid for postcolonial times
(ibid: 7). He examines the postcolonial condition as being marked by an
acute paralysis of will and sheer vacancy of imagination, the rampant corruption and
vicious authoritarianism [] an exercise of power bereft of any pretense of the exercise of
vision (ibid: 2).

The hopes of a new beginning that accompanied the formation of new nations
after gaining independence have largely collapsed, so that anticolonial utopias have gradually withered into postcolonial nightmares (ibid). Scotts
lamentation we live in tragic times marks the failure of the project of decolonization. What is at stake in critically thinking through the postcolonial
present is not the fixing of a teleological plot to realize pre-defined goals, but
the refusal to be seduced by the disillusioned present (ibid). As historians of
the present la Foucault, postcolonial scholars need to reflect on what
present it is that the past is being reimagined for (ibid). Our histories of the
past should be strategic interrogations of the present as a way of helping us to
envision the possibilities for an alternative future.
Focusing on the figure of Toussaint LOuverture, Scott remarks that nonEuropeans were conscripted to Enlightenments and modernitys project.

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They were not volunteers, but rather were coercively obliged to render themselves its objects and its agents (ibid: 9). Modernity was not an option to
disregard or accept for the non-Europeans, but one of the fundamental conditions of choice (ibid: 19). The tragedy of LOuverture is in being caught
between two realities: One is the potential and universal claims of the Enlightenment and its embodiment in revolutionary France. The other is the
actual and particular claims of Africans to the same freedom as their French
counterparts. A product of the French revolution, LOuvertures ideological
self-fashioning was constrained by the terrain in which his imagination of the
Haitian revolution emerged (ibid: 129). The choices he faced were either a
return to slavery or a future without France. He could not influence the conditions informing these options, but had to make his choices within the same.
LOuverture was undone, according to Scott, because of his blindness to the
fact that the supposed universal ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity
were in fact racialized, conditioned by white supremacy (ibid: 290). Thus
colonial power circumscribed the conceptual and institutional conditions
under which the slaves were obliged to fight for freedom (ibid: 119). This
paved the way for the postcolonial impasse, wherein colonial structures and
subjectivities were inscribed in new ways in the postcolonial world. Scott
reads the Haitian revolution less as a Romantic narrative of anticolonial
overcoming than as a tragedy of colonial modernity (ibid: 167), which inheres in the fact that we are obliged by the inescapably modern conditions of
our postcolonial predicament. LOuverture as the martyred hero of the slave
revolutions is a symbol of how longings for anti-imperialist emancipation
have lost their purchase in the postcolonial problem-space (ibid: 3) that is
marked by impossible choices (ibid: 167).
Scott unpacks the incommensurability of anti-colonial idioms of resistance
and hope with the postcolonial disenchantment. It is imperative to rethink our
understanding of change and transformation by reposing the question of the
past that moves away from a romantic narrative of the resistance of the oppressed. However inspiring the efforts of postcolonialisms will to resist
may be, it obscures from paying attention to the oppressive practices, institutions, and structures that persist in the postcolonial tragic times (ibid: 131).
We must seek freedom in the very technologies, conceptual languages and
institutional formations in which modernitys rationality sought our oppression (ibid: 168). The failure of decolonization that grew out of aspirations of
sovereignty as self-determination (ibid: 57) confronts us with the problem of
postcolonial oppositional criticism: whom and what should it be directed
against? What should be the grammar of this critique? The paradoxical inscriptions of pasts within the present draw attention to the contingencies within freedom, the trace of failure within success (ibid: 169). Unpacking the
enigma of the Enlightenment, its recalcitrant ambiguity, the collocation of
vision and blindness, knowledge and ignorance [] the irrepressible illusive-

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ness of the Enlightenment (ibid: 170), Scott informs us that the gift of enlightened self-consciousness is accompanied with the legacy of disenchantment. The moral-political predicament of the postcolonial present, drained of
the fervor of the anti-colonial revolution as well as the euphoria of postindependence, is confronted with the intractable dilemmas of modernity (ibid:
172). With the bankruptcy of postcolonial regimes, there is loss of the momentum that once animated the anti-colonial imaginings (ibid: 1).
Certain anti-colonial critics reject the Enlightenment as a colonization of
the mind and instead envision decolonization as a return to local
knowledge systems embedded in traditional cosmologies. They call for the
dismissal of Enlightenment-derived narratives that made history not a story of
reason, progress, prosperity, freedom, liberation, equality, or justice, but
rather a record of imperialism, colonialism, slavery, racism, sexism, domination, genocide, and exploitation. Against this position Scott raises the questions: What is the connection between, on the one hand, the indispensability
of Enlightenment to the resistance of domination and, on the other hand, the
costs of Enlightenment thinking? If the price of the Enlightenment was a
certain disenchantment of the world, what is the cost of re-enchantment?
The fatal gift of the Enlightenment exacts a price, which simultaneously enables and disenables, strengthens and weakens. The script of the Enlightenment is both familiar and yet elusive (ibid: 171). The postcolonial world has
simultaneously succeeded and failed in meeting the challenge of the Enlightenment, whose inheritance cannot be rejected, but must simply be negotiated.
We cannot not be conscripts of Enlightenment, even though we are in a subordinate place within it (ibid).
The challenge is to unsettle and subvert the mastering ambitions of the
Enlightenment without a simple rejection of its claims. Foucault recommends
that we recognize that insofar as we are historically determined by the Enlightenment, it remains unavoidably one of the conditions of the analysis of
ourselves (Foucault 1984: 45). Following Kant, he views the Enlightenment
as an attitude that does not command loyalty to its doctrinal elements, but
rather the permanent critique of its rationalities (ibid: 42, cf. Butler 2009).
Our paradoxical relation to the Enlightenment emerges from the conundrum
that our mode of critique as well as our constitution as critical subjects is
itself a legacy of the Enlightenment. Caught between instrumental one-sided
reason and the enabling critical judgment, the challenge we face is in holding
on to the contradictions of Enlightenment in a productive tension. The lures
and limits of Enlightenment, its gift and curse, are inseparable, its legacy
demands costs that cannot be evaded (Scott 2004: 189). What we need is to
develop a patience of paradox (ibid: 220) and an acknowledgement that the
colonial past may never let go (ibid: 220). If the former slaves have become
conscripts of the Enlightenment, reinforcing its coercive legacy, the question
is what is the direction of postcolonial critique?

Affirmative Sabotage of the Masters Tools

69

Scott urges intellectuals to examine whether the cognitive-political world

in which we live continues to make revolution plausible to think and think
with as criticism (ibid: 88). In contrast to romance that is oriented towards
resolution and guarantees, Scott draws the crucial link between tragedy and
critique insofar as tragedies are marked by moral conflicts, contingencies,
vulnerabilities, and the reversibility of all aspirations and accomplishments.
Leading us away from a progressive dialectical resolution, tragedies do not
offer consolations. In Scotts view, the postcolonial condition marked by
unfulfilled promises is neither the extension of the Enlightenment project nor
its rejection; rather the Enlightenment is the permanent legacy that sets the
conditions of future postcolonial possibility and which therefore demands
constant renegotiation and readjustment (ibid: 2021). The postcolonial
critique of the Enlightenment it caught in a performative contradiction in that
the vocabulary of critique is inherited from the target of its critique. However,
in response to critics who demand the recognition of the emancipatory aspects
of the Enlightenment, Chakrabarty responds: To acknowledge our debt to
the ideas of the Enlightenment is not to thank colonialism for bringing them
to us (Chakrabarty/Ghosh 2002: 164). This bears upon the ambivalent relation of the postcolonial thinker to the tools of critique provided by colonialism. Chakrabarty poses this as the challenge of coming to terms with the irony
that even as we critique the violent legacy of the Enlightenment; it provides
us with some of our most powerful tools. How do we face the task of freeing
ourselves from the intellectual blackmail of being for or against the Enlightenment (Foucault 1984: 45)? If European thought is both indispensable and
yet inadequate in understanding the experiences of political modernity in the
non-Western world, how may the European Enlightenment be appropriated
from and for the postcolonial world?
In an interesting interview titled What Is Enlightenment? Spivak juxtaposes Kants and Foucaults essays to explore the question: What went
wrong with the best of the Enlightenment? (2004: 179). Describing the access to the European Enlightenment through colonization as an enabling
violation, she proposes that one must strategically use this enablement even
as the violation is re-negotiated (2007a: 263). The relation of postcoloniality
to the Enlightenment and its legacies of modernity, secularism, democracy,
human rights, science, technology, hegemonic languages is diagnosed as a
double-bind, whereby Spivak advises that one should neither accuse European philosophers, nor excuse them; rather, one ought to enter the protocols
of the canonical texts of the Enlightenment to see how it can be used if turned
around on its own terms toward a more just and democratic postcoloniality
(2007a: 259). Spivak considers the postcolonial in terms of a child of rape:
Rape is something about which nothing good can be said. On the other hand, if there is a
child, that child cannot be ostracized because its the child of rape. To an extent, the postcolonial is that. (1994b: 279).

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Nikita Dhawan

How is one to learn to love a child of rape, an act of violence? Spivak advocates the ab-use of the Enlightenment (ab in Latin is from below) (2007b:
219). This is neither a misuse, nor an abuse, but a critical relation to the structures that we so intimately inhabit. She remarks that when oppressed minorities ask for civil rights and political rights, they are making a demand within
what we call Enlightenment discourse. Thus, rather than any wholesale rejection of the Enlightenment as dangerous and in bad faith, she recommends
using it from below (2007b: 181):
In order to make its good structures habitable by all, I must open the Enlightenment to
what it was obliged to exclude, but not in an uncritical way (2007a: 259).

She understands the Enlightenment as a code-word for the regularizing of the

public sphere and of the defeudalizing of the polity (2007b: 181).
Against a cultural relativist denouncement of the legacy of the Enlightenment or an ethnocentric search for pure non-Western knowledge systems, it
is more important to explore the entanglements of Western and non-Western
theory productions. As has been the experience in many postcolonial contexts, the critique of modernity has strengthened conservative nationalist
political orders. How can the Enlightenment be taken beyond the confines of
Europe and be made to work for the Other and what are the difficulties that
we continue to face in trying to make concepts like the public sphere with its
Westphalian frame our own? As colonial gifts, they are both present and
poison as Derrida reminds us.
Such a project would entail saving the best of the Enlightenment and rethinking its relation to delegitimized knowledges and their role in the project of decolonization. This would mark a departure from the orthodoxies of
anti-colonial critique; it is important to remember here that nationalism is a
product of imperialism and is implicated in its violent structures. Thus, the
banal opposition between Enlightenment and postcolonialism is an act of bad
faith, which needs to be problematized by acknowledging how far our sense
of critique is shaped by the Enlightenment, even as it is not limited to it. At
the same time, the postcolonial experiences in the global South offer important lessons for the future of critical theories.
Spivak proposes that the aporetic, simultaneously imperial and counterimperial, nature of the Enlightenment makes the exploration of possible ways
to mobilize anti-paternalistic forms of the Enlightenment imperative. Despite
its white, bourgeois, masculinist bias, the Enlightenment ideals are eminently
indispensable, and we cannot not want them, even as their coercive mobilization in service of the continued justification of imperialism must be contested. Spivak proposes an affirmative sabotage of those Enlightenment
principles with which we are in sympathy, enough to subvert! (2012: 4).
One etymology of the sabotage traces the word back to sabot (wooden
shoe): workers in fifteenth-century Holland would throw their clogs into the
gears of textile looms, breaking their cogs lest the automated machines render

Affirmative Sabotage of the Masters Tools

71

the human workers obsolete. The saboteur aims to subvert through obstruction and disruption, through intentionally withdrawing efficiency. Sabotage
was adopted by the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) of France in 1897
as a recognized weapon for the workers in their method of conducting fights
on their employers to gain negotiating power. The strategy was received skeptically by the workers; while some questioned its morality, others denounced
it as cowardice. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1916: 1) explains that its necessity is
its justification for it being moral. In contrast to capitalist sabotage, which
aims at the good of the few, the workers sabotage is for the benefit of the
many (ibid: 11). As a deliberate interference or creative reconfiguration of
work assignments, sabotage sometimes draws on the law, abiding by the rules
and other times breaks the law (ibid: 22). Gurley Flynn gives the example of
the worker who takes a vital part of the engine with him, making it impossible
to operate the machine (ibid: 25). According to her, sabotage is absolutely
necessary for the workers, even as it is not definable because it is in the process of making (ibid: 35). In contrast to boycott and general strike, which is
not always feasible due to conditions of extreme misery and disorganization,
sabotage, which the Glasgow dock workers called ca canny (go slow), is a
tactic to make the employer vulnerable, thereby rewriting the dominant script
between capital and labor, which renders the worker the agent of production
and not merely victim of capitalism. Work continues but according to the
terms set by the workers not the masters. Production corresponds to the
wages rendered.
Spivak supplements the term sabotage with the adjective affirmative,
devising a strategy in which the instruments of colonialism are turned around
into tools for transgression, poison turned into medicine. She explains:
The invention of the telephone by a European upper class male in no way preempts its
being put to the use of an anti-imperialist revolution (Spivak cit. in Alcoff 19911992:
115).

The challenge is to employ the masters tools to dismantle the masters house
(Lorde 1984: 110).

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Todorov, Tzvetan (2009): In Defence of the Enlightenment. London: Atlantic Books.
Trevor-Roper, Hugh (2010): History and the Enlightenment. New Haven: Yale University Press.
van der Veer, Peter (1994): Religious Nationalism: Hindus and Muslims in India.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
van der Veer, Peter (2001): Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and
Britain. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Williams, Patrick/Chrisman, Laura (1994): Introduction. In: Williams, Patrick/
Chrisman, Laura (eds.): Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Wilson, Holly (2006): Kants Pragmatic Anthropology: Its Origin, Meaning, and
Critical Significance. New York: Suny Press.
Yolton, John/Rogers, Pat/Porter, Roy/Stafford, Barbara (1991): The Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Zammito, John (2002): Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.

Under (Post)colonial Eyes: Kant, Foucault,

and Critique
Under (Post)colonial Eyes

Karin Hostettler1
The Masters Tools Will Never
Dismantle the Master's House
Audre Lorde (2001: 110)
Audre Lordes categorical rejection of the masters tools haunts my thoughts
in this essay. Her criticism of institutionalized Gender Studies for its reliance
on racist tools and the resultant exclusion of postcolonial and queer-feminist
perspectives, also voiced by other postcolonial feminist scholars, still remains
valid (Lorde 2001: 110113). The following essay hopes to contribute to this
important intervention. The inherent failure of Gender Studies to reflect on
Eurocentrism, colonial differences, and racism prompts the question: to what
extent is this blind spot rooted in the canonical texts and authors on which
Gender Studies relies? Addressing this question is complex, because not only
Gender Studies but also Postcolonial Studies rely on postmodern, poststructuralist critical traditions. This essay explores the complexity of this
ambivalent relation by focusing on two central topics important to both Postcolonial and Gender Studies, namely critique and anthropology. The essay
seeks to unravel some of the complexities to which Lorde draws our attention
by examining Michel Foucaults Introduction to Kants Anthropology from a
Pragmatic Point of View (2008).2
(Post)colonial thought has an ambivalent position vis--vis Foucault. To
begin with as Foucault makes explicit in his writings on critique and Enlightenment he locates himself squarely in the European tradition (Foucault
1984, Foucault 1992). This is evident in his discussion of two dimensions of
the Enlightenment: on the one hand, he presents the age of Enlightenment as
the era when the task of critique takes center stage; on the other hand, he
identifies critique as an attitude that has informed modernity since the end of
the eighteenth century.

I would like to give my thanks and appreciation to those who helped me accomplish this
paper. My gratitude is especially extended to Stephan Meyer, Sophie Voegele, and Nikita
Dhawan for their inspiring assistance, feedback and support. This essay was possible due to
a scholarship from the Swiss National Science Foundation.
In her study prior to the 2010 German publication of Foucaults Introduction, Ute Frietsch
(2002) pursues a similar approach, but with a focus on gender rather than the interconnection between critique and race, which is the main concern of this essay.

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Karin Hostettler

At the same time, an important strand of (post)colonial reflections drew

on Foucaults work. Pivotal studies such as Edward Saids Orientalism
(1979) and Valentin Y. Mudimbes The Invention of Africa (1988) investigate
the emergence of the asymmetrical relation between the Western self and the
non-Western Other in order to criticize the epistemic violence of colonial
discourse.
Yet, Foucault has also been criticized for failing to acknowledge colonial
aspects of Western theory. In Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988) Gayatri
Spivak, for example, accuses Foucault of failing to admit to the historical role
of Western intellectuals and their complicity in (post)colonial global power
relations. This blind spot implicitly presumes and reinforces the Western,
European subject as the focus of his theoretical reflections. Ann Laura Stoler
(1995), in turn, emphasizes that while Foucault was not silent on racial politics, he limited his analysis of racial formations solely to Europe. Focusing on
the History of Sexuality and the racial underpinnings of the bourgeois regime
of sexuality, she criticizes Foucault for neglecting a key element in the production of European racial discourse. In order to rectify his narrow analysis,
she underscores the significance of resituating his account in a wider imperial
context. Drawing on his notion of reflective insolence (Stoler 1995: 196),
she employs Foucault to criticize Foucault in order to further develop his
approach. Such realignment of his later work entails reconsidering the chronologies of the making of European bourgeois identity and supplementing the
discourse with one of racialized bodies. She draws a link between the formation of bourgeois identity and race codings in the colonies as well as in the
metropole, thereby rendering visible the ways in which discourses on cultural
competencies, sexual proclivities, psychological dispositions, and cultivated
habits stem from the division between the colonizer and the colonized (Stoler
1995: 8). On the one hand, she investigates how biopower, as the bourgeois
form of modern power, is inherently imperial. On the other hand, she emphasizes the uses of Foucaults insights for contemporary postcolonial discussions (Stoler 1995: 196209). These different aspects of Foucaults thought
bestows them a special and complex place in (post)colonial theories. Or, as
Robert Young puts it:
Again and again the paradox of Foucaults work is that his analyses seem particularly
appropriate to the colonial arena, and yet colonialism itself does not figure (Young 1995:
6).

This essay seeks to address this paradox through a close reading of Foucaults
Introduction to Kants Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View and by
exploring the relation between critique, anthropology, and the Enlightenment.
It also illuminates the central role that Immanuel Kant plays in Foucaults
pivotal book, The Order of Things (2005). The main question this essay addresses is whether critique is exclusively located in Western, European mo-

Under (Post)colonial Eyes

81

dernity, in which case, what is the condition of possibility of (post)colonial

critique?
The essay engages with these issues in four parts. In the first section, I examine the complex interrelation between (post)colonial studies, the Enlightenment, and critique. The second section focuses on Foucaults introduction
to his French translation of Immanuel Kants Anthropology from a Pragmatic
Point of View, wherein he develops an approach to a critical anthropology. In
the third section, I elaborate Kants theory of race, which Foucault neglected.
Via this recourse to Kant, I interrogate an important lacuna in Foucaults
critical anthropology. Finally, in section four, I return to the issue of critique
and anthropology, and to Foucault.

Critique, Enlightenment, and (Post)Colonial Interventions

The task of critique is deeply linked to the European Enlightenment; inversely, the European Enlightenment is deeply linked to the question: what is critique? Critique is, however, not just an attitude of a certain historical moment.
It is rather an ethos that characterizes modernity as such. Endorsing this latter
insight, Foucault positions himself squarely within the critical strand of modernity. In the process of examining Kants notion of critique, Foucault also
reconfigures the task of critique. According to Kant, critique as he famously
puts it in What is Enlightenment? means public use of reason to transgress
self-imposed immaturity (Unmndigkeit). Foucault emphasizes that for Kant,
critique also means reflecting on the present time and grasping it in its specificity (see Foucault 1984: 2). Furthermore, Foucault understands the Enlightenment as a double movement, in which humans are, at one and the same
time, part of the world and deeply influence it. Enlightenment is a general
process that takes place because of the collective participation of men, while
men are at the same time subjected to that very process (Foucault 1984).3
While Foucault aligns himself with this understanding of Enlightenment, his
own understanding of critique nonetheless differs from Kants in important
points. Kant was concerned with determining formal structures with universal
value for the purpose of discovering the limits of possible knowledge and
separating real knowledge from speculation. Foucault turns this theoretical
task into a practical one. For him, critique means questioning claims of universality, necessity, and obligation to reveal their singularity and contingency.
The aim of critique is the possible transgression of such arbitrary constraints.
3

Here Foucault uses men in the generic sense to talk about human beings in general. Later
in the text he mentions gender relations as one area where the experimental attitude of critique emerges.

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Karin Hostettler

For Foucault, critique means investigating existence as it is fundamentally

shaped through historical events: events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking,
saying (Foucault 1984: 10).
Critique-as-transgression of the purported limitations to our thought, practices, and being goes beyond epistemic terms that focus on language or discursive-cultural production. It also extends to actions and practices. This will
become evident in my reflections on the Introduction in the second section, in
which I investigate the interplay between embodiment and the realm of actions and its relation to the practice of critique.
Foucaults position is also targeted by (post)colonial thinkers in their critical readings of Enlightenment philosophy and the history of ideas. To mention three important projects: Paul Gilroy (1993) criticizes modernity from
the perspective of the African Diaspora. Speaking from the ambivalent standpoint of being both European and black, he examines modern Western notions such as rationality, autonomy, subjectivity, and power. In addressing
issues of slavery and barbarism, Gilroy reveals the fractures in discourses of
modernity. He furthermore emphasizes the inescapability and legitimate
value of mutation, hybridity, and intermixture (Gilroy 1993: 223) and tries
to keep the unstable, profane categories of black political culture open
(ibid). He thereby transgresses modern, binary, and originary Western thinking and shifts basic notions of modernity into the transcultural, international
diasporic formations of what he calls the Black Atlantic (ibid: 4).
Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2002), on the other hand, addresses a blind spot
within the European history of ideas, namely, its neglect of the Haitian revolution. From a Eurocentric perspective, some human beings were not considered fully human, whereby the Haitian revolution could not be perceived and
understood within this logic. According to Trouillot, a lack of conceptual
tools and the gap between universal theory and particular practices made it
impossible for Enlightenment thinkers to comprehend this event. Ethical and
political predilections within the Enlightenment tradition prevented the possibility to even imagine such an event, for even the most radical critics of colonialism did not question the assumed fundamental difference between human
beings. Therefore, the Haitian Revolution was beyond what was perceived as
possible. That it nevertheless occurred, questions the very framework in
which racism, colonialism, and slavery were discussed, even within discourses critical of colonialism. However, if taken seriously by critical theorists,
events like the Haitian Revolution subvert existing notions of revolution,
resistance, and critique.
Despite the significant differences between Gilroys and Trouillots accounts, both of them open up new perspectives by dislocating established
Eurocentric narratives and highlighting important lacunae within European
knowledge production. More recently Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa (2009)

Under (Post)colonial Eyes

83

have critiqued (post)colonial studies for homogenizing the notion of the

Enlightenment by disregarding the heterogeneity of intellectual traditions in
this era. At the same time, they also fault eighteenth-century studies for not
engaging with insights from (post)colonial theories and therefore ignoring the
impact of European colonialism on European philosophy.
With these interventions in mind, my essay turns to the task of critique, by
confronting the following challenges: If Foucault belongs to the critical strand
of the European Enlightenment, how does the (post)colonial critique of the
Enlightenment influence our readings of Foucault? What are the consequences of postcolonial intervention in our understanding of critical practice? How
should the questioning and transgressing of limitations as a solely European
task be revised from a (post)colonial perspective? And what would be the
framing for a (post)colonial critique of the European notion of critique? The
elaborations on Foucaults Introduction in section two of this essay, and the
subsequent investigation of Kants race theory in section three, aim to investigate in what way and to what extent critical reflections remain bound to
Western philosophy and thereby sustain Eurocentric theorization.

Foucaults Introduction to Kants Anthropology from a

Pragmatic Point of View
During his stay in Hamburg from 1959 to 1960, Foucault worked on the
French translation of Kants Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.4
Andrea Hemminger (2004: 2728) argues that Foucaults engagement with
Kants critical philosophy provided him with some basic insights that were
important for his first widely read book The Order of Things. In addition to
being a preliminary study to one of the most influential postmodern texts,
Foucaults Introduction is at the same time also relevant to his later reflections on critique and Enlightenment.
In Introduction, Foucaults main concern is the relation between Kants
Anthropology and his Critique of Pure Reason.5 Anthropology is one of the
last books Kant published, although he had been working on questions pertaining to anthropology for at least twenty five years prior to its publication.
This corresponds to the period in which he developed his critical philosophy
and proclaimed the Copernican revolution in metaphysics in the Critique of
Pure Reason. This latter book marks the beginning of Kants critical thinking
and is taken as a threshold that divides his writings into the pre-critical and
critical phases. In his analysis, Foucault tries to do justice to the centrality of
4
5

Hereafter: Introduction.
In this essay, the italicized short title Critique refers to Kants Critique of Pure Reason.

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Karin Hostettler

Kants anthropological reflections to his work. Foucault questions whether

Anthropology should be considered the hidden foundation of the Critique; or,
conversely, whether Anthropology built upon critical insights and should be
read as an elaboration of a homo criticus. Both of these are crucial questions.
If anthropological insights turn out to be the hidden foundations of the Critique, this would have significant consequences for the modern critical ethos.
This critical attitude would be built upon a specific understanding of human
beings, wherein implicit norms would define what counts as human. Foucault,
however, focuses more on the question whether Anthropology is built upon
critical insights. On the one hand, this constitutes an interesting starting point
for debating any possible form of anthropological knowledge. On the other
hand, however, this question bears a hidden problematic because as my
recourse to Kant will show the homo criticus still entails Eurocentric assumptions.
In what sense exactly could the Anthropology be built upon critical insights? Foucault does not provide a straightforward answer to this crucial
question. Instead he analyzes Kants text from two points of view: a genetic
one, which explores the textual context of its emergence, and a structural one,
which reflects on the role of Anthropology in Kants work (Foucault 2010:
18). From the outset these two strands are interwoven. Foucault presents a
lengthy and detailed study of the textual context so as to do justice to the
complex formation of this work. He investigates the impact of pre-critical
texts and discusses how this influence makes itself felt in Anthropology; he
then ponders on the relation to the texts produced in the critical period. Interestingly he opts to read the Anthropology without any reference to the Critique. The Anthropology can be viewed as a post-critical text, albeit one informed by the pre-critical phase.6 Foucault even tries a novel approach by
reading Anthropology as the negation or inversion of the Critique. Finally, he
returns to his initial question about the relation between the Critique and the
Anthropology. Foucaults extended discussion of the books structural and
genetic position shows that the text is not easy to locate neither within
Kants oeuvre, nor with respect to his interactions with other authors such as
Jakob Sigismund Beck, Christian Gottfried Schtz, or Christoph Wilhelm
Hufeland. Rather, Anthropology takes its significance specifically from its
deep embeddedness in these textual settings.
Foucaults interpretation can be read as an extensive elaboration of Kants
own introduction to Anthropology. In his introduction, Kant delineates the
general outline of the project of Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of
View. The pragmatic perspective addresses humans not in terms of what
nature made of them. Instead, it focuses on what humans make of themselves,
6

Whereas pre-critical refers to writings preceding the 1781 publication of the Critique,
post-critical points to Kants later return to physical questions that came after his metaphysical writings.

Under (Post)colonial Eyes

85

what they can and should make of themselves. This places human actions at
the center of investigation, even as action is understood in terms of the abilities humans receive from nature. At the same time, Anthropology not only
deals with given or actualized possibilities, but also with what humans should
do whereby Kant opens up an ethical and normative dimension. Anthropology aims to improve human abilities and to explore the limits that distinguish
right from wrong action. The central object of investigation is human agency,
which is ensconced in the general environment. As Foucault points out,
knowledge about humans is at the same time knowledge concerning the
world. Here Foucault detects a clear distinction from Kants pre-critical writings, which he characterizes as cosmological. In those texts, humans are one
element among other things and do not have a special status. They are conceived cosmologically, namely, as independent of worldly locations. Accordingly, they have no specific epistemological or ontological space. In Anthropology, however, Kant deploys a cosmopolitical perspective, where the world
comes into question insofar as it is part of human agency. This contributes
towards determining a new space for humans in modernity, as Foucault will
later explain in The Order of Things, albeit without reference to Kant. Foucault (2005: 347) describes the modern human as empirical-transcendental
duplicate: human beings occupy an intermediate space among empirical and
transcendental perspectives, where the thinking (cogito) no longer leads automatically to being (ergo sum).
This brief description of Foucaults Introduction shows that his interpretation opens up a vast field of crisscrossing binary oppositions: epistemology
and ontology, morality and jurisdiction, philosophy and medicine. The first
opposition epistemology and ontology warrants further exploration, as it
constitutes the crux of the matter that must be addressed in order to tackle the
relation between Critique and Anthropology.
Anthropology is fundamentally a self-reflective work, which analyzes human beings observing themselves. Kant discusses the ways in which humans
who feel they are being observed change their behavior. On a more fundamental level, this self-observation addresses an intricate interplay of subject
and object. This indicates the interesting possibility of an anthropological
understanding of human beings that is neither essentializing nor ontologizing.
Or, to put it in Kantian terminology, this signifies an understanding of human
beings as neither pure phaenomena (Erscheinung) nor as simply noumena (Ding an sich). The outcome of this distinction introduced in Critique is
that an object cannot be perceived as it is, namely, independent of human
perception. But human perception itself follows certain rules that reason provides. Humans themselves their bodies are furthermore part of what appears in nature and in this respect cannot be seen as something other than
natural objects. This, however, poses a problem, since Kants ethical reflections conclude that reasonable human beings are able to act freely insofar as

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Karin Hostettler

they can give themselves laws and act according to what they consider right.
This is what Kant understands as noumenal. The challenging question is how
to bring both aspects together: humans as free agents who are nevertheless
part of nature and therefore subject to natural laws.
According to my interpretation of Foucaults Introduction, his reading of
Kants Anthropology focuses on this question. In Foucaults view, Anthropology provides knowledge of human beings in action, namely, beings who
cultivate and educate themselves. Kant does not explicitly reflect on the condition of knowing in this book, but he does build upon the theoretical structure elaborated in Critique. Hence, Anthropology is a fundamental reflection
of Critique, even as it goes beyond Critique without providing a stable foundation for positive knowledge. In this sense, as Foucault points out, Anthropology occupies a transitional place between Critique and transcendental
philosophy.
Therefore Critique is of importance to Anthropology, even though the latter does not explicitly refer to the former. Anthropology resembles the structure of Critique, even as it reflects on this structure. However, it would be
wrong to conclude that Critique is the foundation of Anthropology. Foucault
(2010: 8196) clarifies that Anthropology should be seen as a repetition of
critical practice on a popular level, as it combines common knowledge with
philosophical insights while retaining the systematic features of Critique. At
the end of Introduction Foucault explains these two features. The borrowed
systematicity allows Anthropology to gather knowledge about human actions
in a methodical manner, even as it enables the attempt to build a coherent
entirety. The popularity of Anthropology and its undertaking is grounded in a
common space and common sense that the author shares with the readers. The
text is written in a comprehensible style and invites the reading public to
contribute their observations and examples. These specific features of Anthropology enable people to enlighten themselves and to provide knowledge
about human beings that is easily accessible to everyone. However, as Foucault explains, it is important to note that this knowledge is located in a specific geographic and linguistic area, namely Germany, from which it cannot
be dissociated. According to Foucault, this location does not, however, restrict these findings, nor does it relativize them. Rather, he reads it as a specific positioning in which the human being in Anthropology is also a cosmopolitical citizen of the world. The anthropological truth of a cosmopolitical
citizen is located in language without being time-bound or having any prior
secret essence. Through the exchange between the text and the readers this
universality can be approached. And the popular style of the Anthropology
allows Kant to reach this aim (Foucault 2010: 9596).
In making this point, Foucault demonstrates that he is concerned with
questions concerning the location of knowledge, with the problem of specific
knowledge, as well as the possibilities of abstractions. The following detour

Under (Post)colonial Eyes

87

through Kants often neglected theoretical work on human races aims to show
that the specific European positioning of Anthropology nevertheless remains
problematic, even though this positioning is explicit and reflected upon.
While Foucault highlights this aspect on several occasions, he fails to provide
a systematic account of its relevance. He also does not connect this Kantian
account of race to his own understanding of the modern human being. However, as argued in the next section, Kants reflections on race deeply influence
his anthropological reflections. The specific Euro-Germanic location of Anthropology implies that white Europeans are given preference in that they
constitute the normative center of possible knowledge about humanity.

Kants Concept of Race

Given the significance of the eighteenth-century debates about the differences
among human beings, it is not surprising that Kant participated in these discussions, too. However, his contributions to the debates about how such differences should be understood, what their origins are, and in what terms they
can be described remain under-theorized. It is not easy to determine when he
actually started to reflect on race, as the notions and terms of the debate were
yet to be scientifically established. In earlier texts, such as Observations on
the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), he, for example, examines
national characters and explains differences in aesthetic feelings in terms of
national belonging. Interestingly, one detects herein his global perspective,
whereby starting with European nationalities, he enlarges his view to a global
dimension. However, in moving beyond the initial European location, he does
not discover anything new: in fact, the aesthetic feelings of the inhabitants in
the remaining regions of the world are depicted merely as imitations of the
aesthetic feelings of Europeans.
In his essay Of the Different Human Races (1777), written at a time when
he was primarily investing his energies in elaborating Critique, Kants explicit reflections on the notion of human races take the form of a fully-fledged
theory. Of the Different Human Races marks a clear rupture with his former
writings on human differences. For example, he defends the monogenetic idea
that all human beings have a common origin, in contrast to the polygenetic
one, which takes the view that human beings originated in several places. But
more importantly, the whole text demonstrates a completely changed perspective on the notion of human races. Race is now strongly linked to the issue of
reproduction and the primary concern is inheritance. Kant distinguishes characteristics that are a necessary part of any inheritance from those features
which only belong to certain families. He separates negligible physiological

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Karin Hostettler

differences from characteristics which are of importance for the offspring.

But the main question is how to establish which traits are more stable? Kant
claims that only those physiological differences which develop due to climatic influences, are preserved in long lines of procreation, and are produced in
mixture with other half-breed (halbschlchtig) offspring are suitable to be
part of race. Hence, climatic regions play a central role in his reflections. He
states that human beings can basically survive in all kinds of climates, insofar
as they are equipped with certain germs and natural predispositions (Keime
und natrliche Anlagen) (Kant 1777: B 139) that develop only under certain
environmental influences. These climatic influences have deep-running effects on procreation: once racial features are developed, they cannot be
changed easily. Kant has the white race in mind when he speaks of the
original human race that is yet to be influenced by a specific climate. This
implies that the white race is still able to adapt to other climatic zones,
whereas other races cannot undo their racial deployment.
The Kantian account of different human races populating different geographic regions is explicitly Eurocentric, in that it declares a neutral place as
well as a neutral race in Europe, whereas other regions differing according
to climatic areas are measured in comparison to this normative center. Even
though Kant changes his hierarchies and racial categorizations over the years,
he repeatedly states that the race of the whites is superior and that the Negro race stands in pure opposition to it (Kant 1777: B 137).7 Despite all the
changes in his thinking about differences among human beings, he systematically upholds this assumption.
Kants race theory thus proposes an understanding of humans as beings
who are deeply influenced by the environment in which they live. However, it
is important to note that Kants reflections on human races are not simply
observations regarding natural phenomena. Of the Different Human Races
makes a distinction between natural species (Naturgattung) and scholarly
species (Schulgattung). While the scholarly classification model looks only
for similarities in nature, the investigation of natural species rests upon the
unity of what Kant calls the reproductive force. This force and the resultant
natural system serve reason, because this natural system subjects beings to
rules. Rules cannot be found in nature, but come from reason, a point to
which Kant explicitly returns in On the Use of Teleological Principles
(1788). The reflection on human races is part of natural history and not of
natural observations and is guided by principles. These principles determine
the realm of possible knowledge and allow the differentiation into different
races. At the same time, these principles put limits on possible natural phenomena. Descriptions of nature cannot to be taken as truthful unless they
correspond to natural laws, according to Kant.
7

In his classification of the races, he names the third race Schwarze (Kant 1777: B 160).

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89

The Anthropology takes up these previous reflections in its second section, which deals with characters. The section which bears the title Character
of Races is, however, very short and does not add anything new to the discussion. Kant refers to a text by Christoph Girtanner, a study which itself entirely
relies on Kants own earlier insights. Thereby Kant merely indirectly reapproves some of his own former insights. Two other passages in the second
part of the Anthropology are, however, important and warrant closer scrutiny.
One deals with gender, the other concerns travel as a way to gain anthropological knowledge.
In the section on the Character of Gender, Kant declares that the purpose
of gender lies in the preservation of the species and the refinement of culture
and society. Especially the character of women is strongly linked to the progress of society. Related to what Kant describes as a subtle game of dominance and subordination, is a more general dynamic that leads to the cultivation of culture. This progress from the raw natural state to a civilized society
ideally culminates in a bourgeois state. Here an important connection can be
found between racial thinking in terms of developing germs as well as a cultural teleological understanding of cultivation. This is at the same time
deeply linked with gendered bodily organization, for in Kants view, nature
puts more effort into developing the female body. Although I cannot do justice to the interplay between gender and race in this essay, even this brief
investigation shows the close relation of Kants racial thinking to his reflections on gender.
Against the backdrop of race theory, there is another passage in Kants
text that is of importance for our discussion. In his introduction to Anthropology he remarks that voyages and descriptions of voyages are important means
of expanding anthropological knowledge, but one cannot access this
knowledge without first gaining some basic insights at home. General
knowledge which arises at home always precedes local knowledge of foreign
places. Home, of course, is Western Europe, where the general human
being resides.
This short discussion of Kants notion of race is intended to foreground a
rather lesser-known aspect of this Enlightenment philosophers writings.
Kants notion of race must be seen as part of a larger-scale Europe-wide debate about human differences and the relations among different peoples. In
addition, it must also be seen as part of an emerging understanding of human
bodies as organisms rather than mechanical automatons. Kants contribution
consists in stipulating, characterizing, and hierarchizing differences between
human beings. It is important to note that over time this discussion becomes
part of a larger project of teleological principles, with the notion of race becoming fundamentally anchored in reason. As argued previously, Foucault
investigates Anthropology in relation to Kants pre-critical, critical, and postcritical thought. Inasmuch as Kant elaborates the notion of race in various

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articles written during the same time span as his work on Anthropology, these
reflections must be discussed along similar lines in their relation to critical
theory. From 1777 onwards, Kants reflections on races shift from a cosmological perspective to understanding the empirical existence of the subject in
Anthropology, as noted by Foucault. However, in contrast to Anthropology,
the reflections on races do not culminate in a cosmopolitical perspective
since, according to Kant, racial features do not belong to the agential realm of
human beings. Kant clearly rejects with full force the possibility that racial
characteristics have an influence on the noumenal part, and there is no discussion to be found about possible limitations in the realm of action. Accordingly, another important aspect distinguishes Kantian writings about race from
the anthropological approach: knowledge about racial characteristics is not
considered in a self-reflective dimension.
Kants reflections on race and Anthropology are highly normative. The
Euro-Germanic location of Anthropology and the possibility of abstraction
from this location, as well as knowledge by and about global citizens (Weltbrger), implicitly accompany racialized hierarchical reflections. What purports to be a neutral abstraction is only possible because whiteness is not
associated with any cognitive or corporeal racial limitations. Therefore, a
dislocation of anthropological knowledge away from Germany or Europe
entails complications. However, both Kant and Foucault are silent on the
possible consequences of such a dislocation of anthropological knowledge.

Perpetual Critique
Foucaults discussion of the geo-cultural situatedness of Kants Anthropology
makes explicit the extent to which the critical attitude that shapes modernity
is indeed firmly located in Europe. Yet, Foucault suggests that, thanks to
language, it is possible to overcome the specificities of this location. Contra
Foucault, I have argued that this solution is flawed, because it fails to address
the imperial Eurocentric assumptions that are integral to Kants race theory
and his Anthropology.
Against this background, I would like to draw a twofold conclusion regarding the issue of critique. On the one hand, in his Introduction Foucault
implies that there is a global epistemic continuity that facilitates common
ground in language as well as possible exchanges among cosmopolitical citizens. Unlike Kant, who in his race theory explicitly dwells on human differences, Foucault ignores how these fundamental differences among human
beings were constructed and implemented during colonialism and continue to
influence contemporary geo-political power relations.

Under (Post)colonial Eyes

91

Because his Anthropology emerges from critical insights, Foucault ascribes to Kant a special status in his reflections on anthropological thinking.
Although Kants Anthropology is not essentialist, it still reinforces Eurocentric assumptions. These are not limited to explicitly racist statements in the
Anthropology, but extend to its underlying structure, which defines the realm
of possible knowledge about human beings. It glosses over any colonial or
fundamental racial differences between human beings, differences which Kant
does in fact spell out in his race theory. Considering the fact that Kants notions of what it means to be human are universalizations of a European perspective, it is to be expected that when Othered subjects appropriate these
notions they contest the allegedly neutral and normative definitions of human
existence. This involves questioning those definitions by rendering visible the
boundaries in order to transgress them.
A further conclusion I would like to draw is to highlight how the Foucauldian notion of critique enables us to understand the enormous effects of
imperial Eurocentrism. Modernity is deeply informed by racial and colonial
differences, which have a considerable impact on anthropological truth.
(Post)colonial power relations fashion us, inasmuch as we shape them in our
thinking, doing, and saying. It is Foucaults notion of critique that enables us
to question the boundaries of historically evolved human existence and
knowledge in their universal truth claims.
As shown above, Foucault reformulates the task of critique, which no
longer consists in the Kantian search for formal structures independent of
historical events that stipulate the limits of possible knowledge. Instead, following Foucault, critique means a practical and persistent questioning and
transgression of given boundaries (Foucault 1984: 10) that entails a shift
away from attempts to constitute an objective realm of possible knowledge as
well as of the places from which critique can be offered. As (post)colonial
critique itself draws heavily on Western theoretical traditions, boundaries
cannot be claimed from a putative outside a position uncontaminated by
Western theoretical traditions is impossible. As Lorde pointed out in her
intervention, the challenge, for both postcolonial and gender studies, is how
to transgress these boundaries to enable radical change. This would require a
critical practice that enables unforeseen perspectives to emerge by dissolving
the boundaries that define the fields of thinking, doing, and saying, which
shape our subject constitution.

Bibliography
Carey, Daniel/Festa, Lynn (eds.) (2009): Postcolonial Enlightenment: EighteenthCentury Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Foucault, Michel (1984): What is Enlightenment?, accessed 1 June 2013, http://

www.diegrenze.com/foucault_webkatalog/index.php?page=6&cat=52&u_sort=titl
e&u_order=asc.
Foucault, Michel (1992): Was ist Kritik? Berlin: Merve Verlag.
Foucault, Michel (2005): The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London: Routledge.
Foucault, Michel (2010): Einfhrung in Kants Anthropologie. Berlin: Suhrkamp.
Frietsch, Ute (2002): Foucaults Introduction lAnthropologie de Kant: Resmee und
Kritik eines unverffentlichten Textes. In: Frietsch, Ute: Die Abwesenheit des
Weiblichen: Epistemologie und Geschlecht von Michel Foucault zu Evelyn Fox
Keller. Frankfurt a. M./New York: Campus.
Gilroy, Paul (1993): The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso.
Hemminger, Andrea (2004): Kritik und Geschichte. Foucault ein Erbe Kants? Berlin/Wien: Philo.
Kant, Immanuel (1998 [1764]): Beobachtungen ber das Gefhl des Schnen und
Erhabenen. In: Kant, Immanuel: Werke in sechs Bnden, vol. 1. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, pp. 821884.
Kant, Immanuel (1998 [1777]): Von den verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen. In:
Kant, Immanuel: Werke in sechs Bnden, vol. VI. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, pp. 730.
Kant, Immanuel (1998 [1781]): Kritik der reinen Vernunft. In: Kant, Immanuel:
Werke in sechs Bnden, vol. II. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
Kant, Immanuel (1998 [1788]): ber den Gebrauch teleologischer Prinzipien in der
Philosophie. In: Kant, Immanuel: Werke in sechs Bnden, vol. V. Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, pp. 137170.
Kant, Immanuel (1998 [1798]): Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht. In: Kant,
Immanuel: Werke in sechs Bnden, vol. VI. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, pp. 395761.
Lorde, Audre (2001): Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. California: The Crossing
Press Feminist Series.
Mudimbe, Valentin Yves (1988): The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and
the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Said, Edward (1979): Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.
Spivak, Gayatri (1988): Can the Subaltern Speak? In: Nelson, Cary/Grossberg, Lawrence (eds.): Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. London: Macmillan,
pp. 271313.
Stoler, Ann Laura (1995): Race and the Education of Desire: Foucaults History of
Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham/London: Duke University
Press.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph (2002): Undenkbare Geschichte: Zur Bagatellisierung der
Haitischen Revolution. In: Conrad, Sebastian/Shalini, Randeria (eds.): Jenseits
des Eurozentrismus: Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus, pp. 84115.
Young, Robert (1995): Foucault on Race and Colonialism. In: New formations, 25,
pp. 5765.

Hegel and the Black Atlantic:

Universalism, Humanism and Relation
Hegel and the Black Atlantic

Jamila M. H. Mascat
Hegel and Haiti, an essay by Susan Buck-Morss that first appeared in Critical Inquiry in 2000, argued for reconsidering Hegels philosophy from the
perspective of a new counter-history of modernity and, as the author herself
would have recalled later, it soon became something of an intellectual event
(Buck-Morss 2009: ix). Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, the book published by Buck-Morss in 2009 as a sequel of the essay, expanded the scope of
her first research maintaining nevertheless the same Benjaminian intent to
reinterpret Hegels thinking and his age against the grain and engaged
extensively with the notion of universalism employed as a conceptual tool
to counter the phantasies of clashing civilizations and exclusionary redemptions as well as to implement an unapologetically humanist project (BuckMorss 2009: xi, 79).
Adopting a different approach from Buck-Morss, who traced extraEuropean influences in Hegels oeuvre, this contribution examines the Hegelian legacy within the French Afro-Caribbean tradition, focusing on the works
of Aim Csaire (19132008), Franz Fanon (19251961), and Edouard Glissant (19282011). The first section outlines the theoretico-political context in
which these authors addressed the philosophy of Hegel (in particular the
Phenomenology of Spirit) and reworked his concepts within an anticolonial
framework. After illustrating how the three Martinican writers appropriated
Hegels heritage respectively through the dialectic of the particular and
the universal in the case of Csaire (section 2), the schema of recognition
in the case of Fanon (section 3) and the notion of totality in Glissants work
(section 4) the concluding section provides an analysis of the literary-philosophical cross-fertilization that occurred between Hegel and the Black Atlantic (section 5).

Hegel in Paris
If the attempt to build bridges between the European Enlightenment and postcolonial studies to challenge the repudiation of Enlightenment in postcolonial theory has proven to be a complicated enterprise (Carey/Festa 2009: 10),

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Jamila M. H. Mascat

the possibility of establishing a connection between postcolonialism and Hegels thought would seem even more controversial at first sight: Hegel, heir to
the French Lumires, notoriously elaborated in his Vorlesungen ber die
Philosophie der Geschichte (1975) a teleological understanding of History,
wherein civilization, following a linear progression, advances from the East to
the West, significantly leaving Africa lying at the threshold of historical development and out of Historys progression.1
In the introduction to Hegel and his Critics (1989), William Desmond recapitulates the many arguments developed during the nineteenth and twentieth century for criticizing or rejecting Hegels philosophy. Among them he
lists the contradictory charges of panlogism and irrationalism, atheism and
religious mystification, foundationalism and historicism, anti-scientism and
anti-aestheticism. However, from the standpoint of a postcolonial critique,
Hegels concept of identity, the Eurocentric teleology underlying the march of
his Weltgeist through History as well as his support of colonialism and antiBlack racism (Bernasconi 1998, Bonnetto 2006) seem to represent the most
problematic aspects. In this regard, Buck-Morss' article Hegel and Haiti and,
before her, Pierre-Franklin Tavars (1992) work on the same topic offer
interesting interventions on the issue. Buck-Morss establishes a previously
almost unthinkable link between the two terms Hegel and Haiti traditionally conceived of as belonging to two incommensurable geographies and
histories. The main thesis plausible but nonetheless refutable of her essay
claims that the Haitian revolution of 1804 a significant world-historical
event during the era of the French Revolution inspired Hegels formulation
of the lordshipandbondage dialectic staged in the fourth chapter of the
Phenomenology of Spirit (1977[1807]). Beyond any disciplinary restriction,
Buck-Morss made this hypothesis philologically and philosophically conceivable which represents the fundamental merit of her research; in other words,
she made Hegel and Haiti commensurable magnitudes.
Though the present contribution follows a similar path connecting Hegel
to the Black Atlantic, it moves in a direction opposite to Buck-Morss inquiry, as it is devoted to the history of the reception of Hegel in FrenchCaribbean literature, particularly in the writings of Csaire, Fanon, and Glissant. Hegels presence in the Black tradition would deserve to be examined in
greater depth, as it is not limited to the works of the three authors, who belong
to the same historical and cultural constellation; hence the choice to confine
the field of this study to them.2 Many things unite these three authors: their
1
2

In reality, all of history [] has definitely consisted of the exclusion of others; and that
consoles me for having been excluded from this movement by Hegel (Glissant 1969: 37).
As Paul Gilroy recalls in The Black Atlantic (1993: 54), many significant Black intellectuals have been deeply fascinated by Hegel: according to the philosopher Cornel West, Hegel
was Martin Luther Kings favorite thinker, while the sociologist W. E. B. Du bois in The
Souls of Black People (1903) engaged in a dialectic re-reading/re-writing of Hegels Philos-

Hegel and the Black Atlantic

95

paths crossed again and again in Martinique and in Europe especially in

Paris, but also in Rome, where all three attended the Second Congress of
Black Writers and Artists in 1959. All three were graduates of the Lyce
Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, which aimed to educate local elites and where,
upon returning to his native island in 1939, Csaire started to teach French
literature, Latin, and Greek, introducing his students to the ferment of Surrealism and negritude poetry, which scandalized some while enthusing others
(Fanon 1994: 2124). Among the latter was Fanon, while Glissant, who attended the same school but not Csaires classes, was nonetheless captivated
by his legend. All three completed their university education in metropolitan
France; Glissant and Csaire studied Literature and Philosophy in Paris, while
Fanon studied Psychiatry and Philosophy in Lyon. Moreover, all three followed the colonial routes of the twentieth century, despite matching different
fates. Csaire and Glissant returned to Fort-de-France after their years in
Paris. While Csaire remained there from 1939 onwards, devoting himself to
teaching, writing, and politics (he was elected mayor and a Communist Party
deputy in 1945), Glissant came back for the first time in 1953, later again in
1965, when he stayed for 15 years. He founded the Institut Martiniquais
dEtudes in 1967 and from the 1980s onwards, after being appointed editor in
chief of The UNESCO Courier and Distinguished Professor of French first at
Louisiana State University then at CUNY, began to divide his time between
Martinique, Paris and the United States. Fanon chose the path of struggle
instead: he initially enrolled in the ranks of the Gaullist French resistance in
North Africa and Europe and later, after attending medical school in Lyon
(19461951) and working at the psychiatric hospital of Blida-Joinville in
Algeria (19531956), he fought against France for Algerian independence
from 1956 until his death.
The heterogeneous trajectories of the three authors shared the vivid experience of the intellectual scene that emerged after World War I in Paris, where
many young students from overseas came to be educated.3 In this context, a
fruitful encounter took place between established French thinkers and artists
and young black students, who became involved in political associations and
in literary creation through the magazines La Revue du Monde Noir, Lgitime
Dfense, LEtudiant Noir and Prsence Africaine.
In the 1930s and for at least two decades thereafter, Paris was the cultural
center of the Black diaspora (Bennetta 1998). At that time, thanks to the lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit held by Alexandre Kojve at the cole

ophy of History in the name of Black emancipation and the poet Amiri Baraka wrote a poem titled Hegel dedicated to the German philosopher. The author of The Black Jacobins
(1989), C. L. R. James, also extensively commented on The Science of Logic (2010) in his
Notes on Dialectics (1980 [1948]).
Fanon actually studied in Lyon, where he attended Merleau-Pontys classes and was introduced to the French key thinkers and theories of the era (cf. Macey 2012, Gibson 2003).

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Jamila M. H. Mascat

des Hautes tudes, Hegel burst on the French philosophical scene. For a
generation of young overseas intellectuals, his thought, and in particular
Marxist and existentialist versions of Hegelianism, represented the medium
that allowed them to approach the Parisian intelligentsia on its own terrain
and, as an integral part of their education, it exerted a strong influence over
their thinking and their poetics (Nesbitt 2003: 120). However, although the
relationship that the three authors here considered entertained with Hegels
philosophy was a sign of their engagement with the intellectual elites of metropolitan France, it should not be too hastily interpreted as a mark of assimilation. The position of these Caribbean writers remained to a great extent offcenter, stopping short of a complete absorption into the Parisian cultural context and giving rise to various forms of critical re-appropriation.

Aim Csaire: Ngritude and Aufhebung

We claim kinship
with dementia praecox
with the flaming madness of persistent cannibalism.
Notebook of a Return to my Native Land

The discovery of Hegel immediately galvanized Csaire. As the poet recalls:

when the French translation of the Phenomenology first came out, I showed it to Senghor
and said to him, Listen to what Hegel says, Lopold: To arrive at the Universal one must
immerse oneself in the Particular! (Nesbitt 2003: xiv)

From the very beginning, the encounter with Hegel represented for Csaire an
explosive intellectual resource, allowing him to rethink the relationship between particularity and universality by reversing their traditional antithesis.
Consequently, Csaire emphasizes in an interview in 1997:4
Hegel explains that we should not oppose the singular to the universal; and that the universal is not the negation of the singular, rather it is by enhancing the singular that we reach
the universal [] We had been told in the West that in order to be universal, we should

The presence of Hegel in Csaires oeuvre has been explored from several perspectives. In
Voicing Memories, Nesbitt emphasizes Csaires recovery of Kojves dialectical historicism and claims that a certain Hegelian tenor of Csaires works (mainly consisting in
the deployment of negativity and of the dialectic) is essential to his negritude project (Nesbitt 2003: 120144). R. S. Bouelet (1987) draws on the dialetic of lordship and bondage to
analyze the heroes of Csaires plays; B. H. Edwards, in Aim Csaire and the Syntax of
Influence (2005), investigates the influence of Hegels concept of determinate negation
borrowed once again from Kojves reading of Hegel in the Cahier. Here a slightly different hermeneutic path has been chosen. It will, however, take into consideration the abovementioned interpretations.

Hegel and the Black Atlantic

97

have started by denying that we are black. To the contrary, I told myself: the more we are
black the more we will be universal (Csaire 1997: 5).

For Csaire, such an overturning seems to be particularly significant: It was

an effort of reconciliation []. An identity reconciled with the universal
[], he remarks. Because identity means entrenchment, but it also means
transition, universal transition (Csaire 1997). The emphasis on this thread
remains essential to Csaires reception of Hegel and makes it possible to
situate the theme of negritude within such a frame. According to Senghor, the
term negritude was coined by Csaire in the early 1930s. Many meanings
converge in this notion: Csaire used it to characterize the simple fact of
being black, and the acceptance of this fact (Senghor 1977: 269270), or the
ensemble of people of color Haiti where negritude rose for the first time
and stated that it believed in its humanity (Csaire 2001: 15) as well as to
delineate a weapon for resisting the French politics of assimilation (Csaire
2000: 88). Moreover, C. L. R. James (1977: 23) suggests that in Csaires
opus, negritude indicates what one race brings to the common rendez-vous
where all will strive for the new world of the poets vision, while according
to Sartres Heideggerian phrase in Orphe Noir it incisively points to the
being-in-the world of the Negro (Sartre 1985: xxix).
Within this collection of meanings, the negritude movement underwent a
gradual realignment over the years, as did Csaires development of the notion:5 In the 1930s, during the short-lived publication of the magazine
LEtudiant Noir (19351936), the call to join the common matrix of negritude reflected the existential and intellectual solidarity that emerged among
the students from the Antilles and Africa living in Paris. The latter used to
consider themselves alien to each other, but now began to meditate on the
racialized condition which they shared and to fight side by side against metropolitan racism. After the war, with the foundation of the journal Prsence
Africaine in 1947, the negritude project took on a stronger political hue
marked by an increasingly anti-colonial orientation. To borrow the words of
the Haitian poet Ren Depestre, it became a philosophy of decolonization
that nonetheless over the years always remained at risk of turning into a political ideology in the service of a racial identity (Bennetta 1998: 71).
Within Csaires humanist thought, the concept of negritude implies a
process of re-rooting (r-enracinement) that does not denote a prison-like
concept of identity, but in Hegelian fashion foreshadows a more intense and
more extensive universalizing impetus (Csaire 2000: 85). The term negritude appears for the first time via negativa in the Cahier dun Retour au
Pays Natal, a long poem that Csaire began to write in 1935 (a few months
before he first returned to Martinique at the end of a five-year stay in Paris)
5

Stanislas Adotevi's Ngritude et Ngrologues (1972) and Marcien Towa's Lopold Sdar
Senghor: Negritude ou Servitude? (1971) provide critical perspectives on the negritude
movement.

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Jamila M. H. Mascat

and finished in 1939.6 There he explains what negritude is not (Csaire 2001:
35):
My negritude is not a stone, its deafness hurled against
the clamor of the day
my negritude is not a leukoma of dead liquid over the earths
dead eye my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral
it takes root in the red flesh of the soil
it takes root in the ardent flesh of the sky
it breaks through opaque prostration with its upright patience

Csaires Cahier can be considered an emblematic Hegelian text inasmuch as

returning constitutes a classic dialectical movement. The comeback drama
restaged in the poem shows that colonial wounds cannot heal completely. The
only not purely consolatory remedy is thus to re-appropriate ones own history and ones own scars, through a gesture of recovery which constitutes at the
same time a frontal rejection of colonialisms violent cultural contamination.
Negritude then means memory that, rescuing the past, returns to the present
and turns into a yearning for liberation.
If negritude appears in Csaires writings partly as a dialectical pathway to
identity The explosion of an identity long hindered, sometimes denied and
at last freed, that in freeing itself asserts itself in hope of being recognized
(Csaire 2000: 91) in another significant way it designates the phenomenological Bildung of Black consciousness. Lastly, it provides a device for establishing a different relationship between nature, culture, and politics from an
anti-colonial perspective. In each of these meanings we can trace the Hegelian
influence.
For Csaire the consciousness of Blacks and of Martinique men in particular is an assimilated consciousness in a state of perpetual alienation.
What is needed then is to dissolve appearances and set off on a descent into
hell by unmasking the estranged postures of consciousness in order to find at
the bottom the fundamental negro who lies there (Louis 2001: 95). For the
young Csaire, the Hegelian notion of estrangement (Entfremdung) is synonymous with assimilation, a subject he takes up in one of his first essays, Ngreries. Jeunesse et Assimilation, published in LEtudiant Noir in 1935:
Young blacks today dont want to be either subjugated or assimilated []. Subjugation and
assimilation resemble each other: theyre both forms of passiveness [...]. Black youth
wants to act and to create [] to contribute to universal life, to the humanization of humanity; thats why, once again, it has to preserve itself (Confiant 1993: 326328).

According to Csaires view, in other words, young Blacks want emancipation, and to emancipate themselves, they need to fight against the assimilators
and the assimilated, thus even against themselves, in order to liberate them6

The text of the Cahier underwent several changes; the definitive version was published in
1956 by Prsence Africaine. For a detailed reconstruction, cf. Pestre de Almeida 2008.

Hegel and the Black Atlantic

99

selves from a self-perpetuated condition of alienation. Violence suffered

demands a violent reaction that aims at challenging Western civilization and
values as well as technology, science, discursive reason, and linguistic rules.
In this sense Surrealism, with its intense antagonism towards European culture, is a powerful ally for Csaire.7
As a transformative experience, negritude harbors two complementary
demands: a corrosive one that wants to subvert the codes imposed by the
colonial system, and a constructive one that strives to assert a new subjectivity. At the intersection of these two instances, the complex issue of culture is
located. In the colonial universe this is as much an instrument of alienation as
it is a resource for resisting and recovering Black consciousness. Through
culture, the colonized consciousness indeed follows a phenomenological
itinerary in which it loses itself and then finds itself again, performing paradigmatic Hegelian moves; its Bildung consists of nothing else but the combination of these two asymmetrical movements.
The theme of culture appears again in the paper Csaire presented at the
First Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris (1956), where he underlined the contradictory and paradoxical character of the relationship between
culture and colonization. On the one hand, he maintained that political
factors influence cultural ones and that culture does not depend immediately
on nature. On the other hand, he emphasized the extent to which colonization,
by suppressing peoples self-determination, also annihilates their creative
potential. Hegel appears twice here: First, Csaire cites a passage from the
Philosophy of History, illustrating the dialectic between nature and culture
(Nature ought not to be rated either too high or too low), in order to reassert
the centrality of culture (The mild Ionian sky surely contributed much to the
charm of Homeric poetry; yet that sky alone could produce no Homers), and
to show the destructive power of colonial systems in every era (For under
Turkish domination no such bards arose, Hegel 1988: 8485, in: Csaire
1994: 110). In the second instance, Csaire quotes from the Science of Logic
to refute the idea that colonization is a contact between civilizations, like any
other one, i. e. that it could be considered as a simple loan (emprunt)
(Csaire 1994: 117). For there to be a cultural loan or exchange, there needs
to be a conscious appropriation that steps in to internalize what is external
and opposite. Hegels vision is applicable here, Csaire states. When a
society borrows something, it makes it its own; it acts instead of just endur-

The barriers [garde-fous] are in place; the law of identity, the law of non-contradiction, the
logical principle of the excluded middle [tiers-exclu]. Precious barriers. But remarkable limitations as well. It is by means of the image, the revolutionary image, the distant image, the
image that overthrows all the laws of thought that mankind finally breaks down the barrier.
In the image A is no longer A []. In the image A can be not-A (Csaire, Posie et Connaissance, published in Tropiques 12 (1945), and quoted in Edwards 2005: 7).

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Jamila M. H. Mascat

ing (Csaire 1994: 117). Quoting Hegel, the author points out that freedom
and creation only arise when
seizing hold of the object, the mechanical process turns into an internal process by which
the individual appropriates the object in such way as to remove its distinctive makeup,
make it a means, and confer his own subjectivity upon it as its substance (Hegel 2010:
142).

In this sense, negritude can be understood precisely as a process of reappropriation taking place between the compulsory drives to preservation and
emancipation. Moreover Hegel and his Logic are called upon here to illustrate
the idea that subjectivity versus mere mechanicity exists only as a move of
internalization of external objectivity, and to reassert indirectly that colonial
systems by the very nature of their domination prevent the occurrence of such
a process and in so doing obstruct the development of paths to subjectivation.
Finally, the last Hegelian connecting thread that reverberates in Csaires
pages is explored by Sartre. In Black Orpheus, the long preface to Senghors
Anthologie de la Posie Ngre et Malgache (1948), Sartre defined negritude
as an anti-racist racism, equating it with a sort of Hegelian determinate
negation. According to Sartre, negritude is a pure superseding of itself
(Sartre 1985: xlii) a negative and antithetical moment that prepares for the
synthesis conceived as liberation:
Negritude appears as the weak time of a dialectic progression: the theoretical and practical
affirmation of white supremacy is the thesis; the position of negritude as an antithetical
value is the moment of negativity. But such a negative moment has no self-sufficiency in
itself []. Thus negritude is the root of its own destruction, it is a transition and not a
conclusion, a means and not a ultimate end (ibid: xli).

The negative reading suggested by Sartre resonates with the words spoken
by Csaire in his 1987 Discours sur la Ngritude, where he explained that
Negritude stems from an active and offensive attitude of spirit. [...] It is [] rejection of
oppression, [] fight against inequality []. It is revolt [] against what Id call the
European reductionism (Csaire 2000a: 84).

At the same time, Sartres reading allows us to follow another path of interpretation that sticks closer to Csaires text. As we noted earlier, the poet
situates the concept of negritude precisely in the dialectical intertwining of
the particular and the universal, explaining that he is heeding Hegels warning:
It has been long time that Hegel showed us the way: [one should attain] the universal, of
course, not by negating his own singularity, rather by enhancing it (Csaire 2000: 92).

Universalism for Csaire is always particular, its concreteness preventing it

from the danger of abstraction. I dont want to bury myself into particularism. But I dont want to get lost within a disincarnate universalism either
(Csaire 1994: 141), he wrote in 1956 in a letter addressed to Maurice Tho-

Hegel and the Black Atlantic

101

rez, secretary of the French Communist Party, in which Csaire announced

his resignation from the PCF. And he added that [t]here are two ways of
getting lost: through segregation walled up in the particular, or by dilution in
the universal (ibid). As a consequence, his conception of the universal is
manifestly that of a living form rich in every particular, rich in all the particulars, enhancement and coexistence of all the particulars (ibid: 141). Nonetheless, praising the assertion of the particular element does not amount in the
authors view to turning ones back on the world, or seceding from it, or
precluding ones future, or getting bogged down in a communitarian solipsism or in resentment; rather, according to Csaire, it means rehabilitating
ones own inheritance and ones own history, reactivating the past in view of
superseding it in a movement that looks very much like Hegels well known
sublation (Csaire 2000: 92).
Negritude, however, doesnt aim to be a philosophy, nor is it a metaphysics, a conception of the universe or an ethnic reality. Instead, it describes a
peculiar
way of living history within history: the history of a community whose experience seems
truly unique, with its deportations of whole populations, its displacement of people from
one continent to another, its recollections of faraway beliefs and its wreckage of murdered
cultures (Csaire 2000: 82).

To those who blame negritude for indicating a blind alley, Csaire ceaselessly
replies that it has not to be conceived of as an impasse, but as a homecoming. To borrow from the leitmotiv of his Notebook, it should be conceived of
as a return to ones native land (Csaire 2001).
In this regard, Csaires dialectic of identity reverberates the unsteady
rhythm of Hegelian Phenomenology, where an alienated consciousness, like
the tormented Black consciousness performing in the Cahier, by the very act
of negating becomes one that devours the world (Csaire 2000: 85).

Franz Fanon: Recognition and Revolution

Was my freedom not given to me then
in order to build the world of the You?
Black Skin, White Masks

Fanons interpretation of Hegel is strongly influenced by Sartre, whom Fanon

met in Rome in 1961 a few months before his death. However, Fanon had
already read and appreciated Sartres writings as a student and was particularly inspired by Being and Nothingness (1993 [1943]) and by the Critique of
Dialectical Reason (2004 [1960]). Fanon was more interested in Sartres
ethics than in his phenomenological ontology and paid particular attention to

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Jamila M. H. Mascat

the problems of agency and of freedom, embracing the humanistic foundation

of Sartres philosophy in order to radicalize his own social and medical investigation of human beings and power relations. However, Fanon reflects on the
notions of humanism, action, and freedom from the perspective of the colonized world, in the attempt to transvaluate these concepts by giving a racialized and colonial meaning to Sartres thoughts on the existence of the Other
and its alienating impact on the Self. In such a context, Fanon observes, the
white man is not only The Other but also the master, whether real or imaginary (Fanon 2008:106).
Fanons philosophical outlook was shaped during the years he spent in
Lyon while studying psychiatry. Hegel in particular, filtered by the readings
of Kojve and Hyppolite, as well as Sartres existentialism and the French
school of phenomenology, fired his curiosity to the extent that he earned a
licence in Philosophy by attending Merleau-Pontys courses. Peau Noire et
Masques Blancs, published in 1952, was a reworking of his dissertation. Of
all his writings, it best reflects his youthful interest in philosophy, in terms of
the matters he addresses and of the many references to Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Sartre.
Through a combination of philosophical, literary, and psychoanalytic elements, Fanon offers impassioned and polemical reflections on the phenomenon of racism, understood as the negation of mankind. Equally dialectical,
and permeated with Sartrian-style Hegelianism, it is Fanons strategy to transcend the inhuman systems produced by racialized social relationships. According to him, there is only one option open to Black people to escape the
two false alternatives of either submitting to racism (and accepting to be negated by white people) or claiming the right to assert ones Blackness (reacting by negating an imposed negation). The remaining option reveals a plainly
Hegelian echo, which requires one
to rise above this absurd drama that others have staged round me, to reject the two terms
that are equally unacceptable, and, through one human being, to reach out for the universal (Fanon 2008: 153).

Fostering particularity towards universality, in a phrase that echoes Csaires

formulation on the topic, becomes then the task of the anti-colonial revolution.
In the penultimate chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon (2008) explicitly engages with the Hegelian dialectic of lordship and bondage, providing a historical re-elaboration of Hegels account in the Phenomenology of
Spirit by relocating it within a colonial framework, specifically within the
Caribbean world. The white settler (manifestly provided with a human nature)
and the Black man (confined to animality) take center-stage. Unlike other
sections of the book, where Fanon explores the distinctly gender-based roles
in colonial (heterosexual) relationships, the conflicting figures in this case are
just the white man and the Black man, who are substitutes for the two self-

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consciousnesses that animate the well-known Hegelian topos. Fanon argues

that the dynamics of recognition portrayed by Hegel cannot simply be transposed to the colonial regime (Villet 2011). In the first place, he emphasizes
that the Hegelian recognition presupposes an absolute reciprocity, which is
absent in the colonial context; in Hegelian terms, in fact, recognition exists
solely as reciprocal recognition. Then Fanon remarks that
if I close the circuit, if I prevent the accomplishment of movement in two directions in
other words, if one forecloses reciprocity I keep the other within himself (Fanon 2008:
169).

Accordingly, the entire dynamic remains paralyzed within a unilateral move.

Hence, as Hegel affirms, action from one side only would be useless (ibid).
Even if in the Phenomenology, recognition never emerges as a result of reciprocal equality, reciprocity is nevertheless expected and postulated from the
very beginning, since every self-consciousness seeks recognition from others.
Conversely, Fanon notes, reciprocity in the relationship between colonist and
colonized is ruled out in principle. The white master does not seek recognition from the slave; he only wants labor from him. Additionally, slave labor, unlike Hegelian labor, is not a Bildungsprozess and does not lead to
emancipation. On the one hand, the slave is thought to be a natural nonhuman
machine that cannot take on human nature and thus cannot properly recognize
any other person. On the other hand, in colonial dialectics, the slave does not
demand to be recognized as such; rather, he wants to be like the white master, considering that this is the only way for him to become a human subject.
Therefore while in Hegel the slave turns away from the master and turns
toward the object, here the slave turns toward the master and abandons the
object, but in so doing he dismisses his only possibility to liberate and
disalienate himself (Fanon 2008: 172).
The result of this entanglement is a paradox: the Black slave, who has
been recognized by the white master without having fought for his freedom
and risked his own life, has not yet proved himself to be fully human.
In Hegel, the aspiration for recognition leads to a Kampf um Anerkennung. Fanon, on the contrary, recalls that historically, the Negro steeped in
the inessentiality of servitude was set free by his master (Fanon 2008: 169
170). There was no proper contention between white and Black, he notes, as,
one day the White Master recognized, without conflict, the black slave
(ibid:171). As a result, colonial dialectics remains affected by what Hegel
would have considered as an insubstantial achievement, for, according to
Hegelian dialectics:
the individual [Individuum] who has not risked his life may well be recognized as a person
[Person] but he has not attained to the truth of this recognition as an independent selfconsciousness [selbstndigen Selbstbewutseins] (Hegel 1977: 114).

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In the final analysis, the colonial experience puts a stop to the dialectics of
recognition. Fanons discussion, however, suggests that a possibility of redemption exists. Where recognition fails and a state of non-recognition and
oppression crystallizes, struggle is imperative:
For the Negro who works on a sugar plantation [], there is only one solution: to fight. He
will embark on this struggle, and he will pursue it, not as the result of a Marxist or idealistic analysis but quite simply because he cannot conceive of life otherwise than in the form
of a battle against exploitation, misery, and hunger (Fanon 2008: 174).

The struggle emerges as a reaction, as a violently assertive movement that

responds resolutely to the denial of freedom and human dignity perpetrated
by the colonial regime:
The natives challenge to the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of points of
view. It is not a treatise on the universal, but the untidy affirmation of an original idea
propounded as an absolute (Fanon 1963: 41).

Thus in the colonial context, a deeper break with the terms of domination is
required if the dominated are to achieve liberation, and violence is seemingly
a necessary component of it. Within Fanons way of thinking, such a rupture
stretches beyond the scope of the struggle for recognition: The anti-colonial
struggle described in The Wretched of the Earth (1963) is a struggle on behalf
of humanity as a whole to counter the inhuman conditions of the colonial
universe and to claim that a new humanism needs to be violently and creatively invented.
What is interesting to note here is that Fanons reconstruction of the Hegelian scheme of recognition is at once a re-adaptation of it to fit a different set
of historical circumstances and a critique of its political limits. Some of his
criticisms still retain some validity even in relation to the contemporary reactualizations of the debate on Anerkennung (Honneth 1996). Recognition,
indeed, presupposes reciprocity; that is, it is based on an expectation of reciprocity. Fanon shows how the arrangement of the colonial world and the
capitalist mode of production that sustains it are founded on the premise of
inequality. In this context, reciprocal recognition becomes a privilege available only to individuals who are already on an equal footing; it does not work
in the sphere of inequality established by relationships of domination. Therefore, the Hegelian dialectic of recognition turns out to be unable to induce any
truly transformational demand; rather, it triggers a mechanism of repetition
that does not allow any subversion.
According to Fanon, then, the fight to overcome these imbalances is not
simply a particular struggle for one category of people to gain recognition
from another, nor is it a battle for a single race to enter a multiracial concept
of manhood. Anti-colonial revolution instead aims to establish a new concept
of humanity from which no one is excluded and with this regard it escapes the
deadlock of identitarianism and expresses a resolute strive for universality. If

Hegel and the Black Atlantic

105

the true challenge facing colonized peoples is the task of liberating themselves and in so doing healing the wounds of the entire world including
this Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them (Fanon 1963: 311) , hence the practical foundation
of a new humanism and the concrete liberation of mankind depend on the fate
of anti-colonial struggles that by emancipating the destiny of colonized people and dismantling the structures of colonial oppression achieve to emancipate the whole human race. In this precise sense, in Fanons view, anticolonial revolutions enact the old Hegelian precept that had been already
embraced by Csaire, whereby the accomplishment of universality meaning: universal freedom must rely on the enhancement of enrooted singularities meaning: rebellions of the wretched. In such a context, where only
violence may be an instrument and a guarantee for the re-invention of the
human, Fanons political discourse resounds the Hegelian emphasis on lifeand-death struggle (der Kampf auf Leben und Tod) that we encountered
earlier in the pages of the Phenomenology. Nonetheless, in Fanons urgent
call to arms, the cruel inescapable dichotomy that animates Hegels conflict
shifts from the universe of recognition among human beings to the horizon
of re-creation of humanity, so that the ordinary dialectics of Anerkennung
end up being absorbed into the dialectical palingenesis of mankind.

Edouard Glissant: Relation and Totality

The poetic word of Csaire, the political act of Fanon, led up somewhere,
authorizing by reversion the necessary return to the point where our problems lay in wait
for us.
This point is described in the Notebook of a Return to the Native Land as well as in Black
Skin, White Masks []. They illustrate and establish the landscape of a zone shared elsewhere.
We must return to the point from which we started.
Diversion is not a useful ploy unless it is nourished by Return:
Not a return to the longing for origins, to some immutable state of Being,
but a return to the point of entanglement, from which we were forcefully turned away.
Caribbean Discourse (1989)

Edouard Glissant arrived in France in 1946, the same year as Fanon, to pursue his university studies. He registered at the Sorbonnes Faculty of Philosophy, received his licence in 1953 and was then awarded a Diplome dtudes
Suprieures with a dissertation written under the supervision of the philosopher Jean Wahl, the author of Le Malheur de la Conscience Dans la Philosophie de Hegel. He also earned a diploma in Ethnology at the Muse de
lHomme (1956) and soon started to attend the literary gatherings of the capital. In those postwar years, Pariss intellectual makeup was changing. Hegel

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Jamila M. H. Mascat

began to be knocked off his pedestal on the philosophical scene, Sartres

influence which had inspired Csaire and Fanon was waning, structuralism began to gain ground, and the journal Prsence Africaine, which from
time to time published articles by Glissant, was at the forefront of Black cultural and political life by getting-together writers, artists and anti-colonial
activists.
Compared to Csaire and Fanon, Glissant is doubtlessly the one who received Hegels legacy by the most tortuous of routes.8 In the first place, his
writings take a repeated and explicit stand against Eurocentric, logocentric
and teleological philosophies, an argument undoubtedly applicable to Hegels
thought. In the second place, his critique of the concepts of universality, totality, identity, and difference can easily be interpreted as patently antiHegelian. The author, nonetheless, stresses in The Poetic Intention that he
does not wish to indulge in the malicious pleasure of contradicting Hegel
and his work does not aim to naively have his revenge on him (Glissant
1969: 38). However, it is precisely the theme of totality the dialectic of
totality (Glissant 1997a: 17) that reveals the intricate Hegelian legacy in
his thought.
In Absolutely Postcolonial (2001) Peter Hallward claims that during the
first thirty years of Glissants literary production, totality would have constituted a tool for imagining the territorialization of national space: at this early
stage, it corresponded to the rise of national consciousness understood as a
process of totalization that embodied the anti-colonial task par excellence.
In the writers later work, instead, the notion of Tout-monde would have
served a very different function, acquiring a largely post-identitarian and
nomadological connotation that focused on singularity, fostered singular
8

Three paradigmatic but opposite readings of Glissants work are especially significant.
Michael Dash (1995), who interprets Glissants oeuvre within a postmodernist framework,
believes that in Glissant's writings the political thrust of earlier ideologies such as cultural
universality, negritude, indigenism, Marxism was clear and that the writer, in the name of
an open-ended ideal of irreducible plurality and diversity for the Caribbean, produced an
epistemological break with essentialist thinking, always keeping equidistant from the
search for the generalizing Universal and from the root-identity path that had tempted his
predecessors (Dash 1995: 2124). According to Nick Nesbitt (2003), however, Glissants
work, by focusing on historical experience, totality, dialectical thought [] labor- and
production-based subjectivity and consciousness maintains modernist continuity. Nesbitt
also claims that while Glissants notions differ from Hegels, his critique takes the form of
a potent reworking of dialectical thought and that his work in fact demonstrates the actual universality of these Eurocentric Hegelian concepts precisely by refusing to limit their
application to European culture (Nesbitt 2003: 171175). Lastly Peter Hallward (2001)
opts for an interpretation that emphasizes the discontinuity in Glissants theoretical output
and identifies a post-modernist shift after the publication of his Caribbean Discourse
(1989), which abandoned the nationalist tones and the modernist aesthetics that had marked
his work in previous years. For Hallward, continuity can be seen in the theme of totality that
runs through all of Glissants work, but whose formulation and treatment vary over the
course of time.

Hegel and the Black Atlantic

107

configurations and conceived of totality as a premise for self-singularization

rather than as a medium for collectivization (Hallward 2001: 66132).
Certainly the idea of totality took on different accentuations in Glissants
work, yet a search for totality is a constant that informs his thought and becomes most evident in his Poetics of Relation (1997a). What are then the
Hegelian roots of this theme? At first sight, Glissants main objection to Hegels totalizing reason seems to refer only to the limits of its scope. Totality
thus appears as an exclusionary device because of everything it leaves out.
However, patently the problem does not concern merely the scale of totality,
but rather its reductionist deployment, doing no more than bringing multiplicity back into the ranks of the One-All. Hegels investigation of the world is
so systematic [] that he sometimes gets the details wrong, Glissant remarks. The philosopher is thus a prisoner himself of the parenthesis in which
he shut up [] the African, hence the most grandiose visions of imperative
(not relational) Reason he concludes degenerate bit by bit in this solitude I have described (Glissant 1969: 3738).
The thought of relation arises precisely as an antidote to this closure. Relation becomes a new original form of totality, replacing the old concept of
universality, which is geared towards the primacy of the One. Conversely, in
the dynamics of relation there is no single identity-root, but only what Glissant names dispersion and empathetic rootings (enracinements solidaires) in other words, only infinite relationships (Glissant 2009: 61).
Despite being an antidote to Hegels alleged totalitarian accomplishment,
to some extent, the relation also conveys Hegelian reminiscences, at least for
its controversial engagement with the form of the dialectics. In reality, Glissant claims a different legacy, asserting that rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, thus appealing to Deleuze and
Guattaris rhizomatic notion of identity (Glissant 1997a: 11). Nonetheless, his
argument in La Potique de la Relation seems to be addressed directly and
polemically towards Hegel, even though he does not explicitly mention the
philosopher.9 Glissant notes indeed that
the difference between Relation and totality lies in the fact that Relation is active within
itself, whereas totality already in its very concept is in danger of immobility. [So while
relation is] an open totality [that] neither relays nor links afferents [] for the simple
reason that it always differentiates among them concretely and diverts them from the totalitarian [], totality would be relation at rest (Glissant 1997a: 171172).

In other words, instead of tending toward an ultimate and definitive completion, relation is movement and the nature of this untotalizable and inexhaustible movement constitutes the boundless effort of the world (ibid).

In the Poetics of Relation (1997), Hegel is actually quoted very few times (on pp. 16, 21 and
194).

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Jamila M. H. Mascat

In contrast to the totalitarian totality, thought of as an entity provided with

a fixed stable structure, the author proposes the Tout-monde, which is in perpetual unlimited expansion and traversed by the thought of errantry:
In the Poetics of Relation, the one who is errant (who is no longer traveler, discoverer or
conqueror) strives to know the totality of the world yet already knows he will never accomplish this and knows that it is precisely where the threatened beauty of the world
resides (Glissant 1997a: 31).

In the long history of the search for totality, Glissant actually identifies three
subsequent stages in Western thought: firstly, the thinking of territory and of
the self (ontological, dual); secondly, the thinking of voyage and of the
other (mechanical, multiple); and lastly a third stage that inaugurates the
thought of errantry and totality, giving rise to relational, dialectical thinking (Glissant 1997a: 18). The latter would be the age we live in.
The author reminds us that errantry occurs when national and cultural fabrics, once pictured in monolithic identitarian terms, are deconstructed and
when one abandons the horizon of what he calls an arrow-like nomadism (a
teleological nomadism of expansion and invasion) in favor of what he defines
as a circular (i. e., errant) nomadism of relation. Errantry, indeed, establishes a unique kind of totality whereby the unity of the whole has for consequence the nullity of dualisms (Glissant 1969: 106), and the possibility of
performing multiple connections in the framework of a new poetics of relation. Thus relation, in opposition to the binary matrix of difference and sameness, turns into a centerless process of totalization, rejecting both the totalitarian drive for the unique root and the temptation of the One-Whole as forms of
identity thinking.
In the 1970s, while Glissant was developing his reading of alienation in
the Antilles, he worked out the concept of antillanit, which he later abandoned and in part even rejected. Unlike negritude, antillanit does not
postulate a return to origins, as Glissant believed that origins always imply
dispossession. Grafting his notion of d-tour onto Csaires idea of re-tour,
Glissant freed the tour the movement from a unilateral confinement to its
source, claiming for a return which is not a comeback but rather a suspension upon a point of entanglement (Glissant 1989: 2526). In the following years, the historico-geographical model of Caribbean experience was
transfigured conceptually through the thought of creolization the suffix of
the term describing it as a process rather than as an inert essence which
serves as an archetype for imagining the totality of the Tout-monde. In a
world pictured as an archipelago of cultures, historic singularity and errant
contamination interact with each other. And whats an archipelago, anyway?, the author wonders. The archipelago is errant and in the archipelago, he adds meaningfully, dispersion becomes a form of recollection (Glissant 1997b: 237238). Relation connects and exchanges singularities within
the whole through dispersion rather than synthesis. In Glissants words:

Hegel and the Black Atlantic

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[r]elation ties, relays, relates. Indeed it doesnt relate something to something else, but the
whole to the whole. In this way, the poetics of relation realizes the diverse (Glissant 2005:
50).

This notion needs to be understood as the very antithesis of the Hegelian

concept of difference.
Glissants archipelagic philosophy leads us to another theme by means of
which we can further measure the controversial presence of Hegel (once again
a subterranean and antagonistic presence) in his writings: the theme of
knowledge.
As opposed to systematic thought, archipelagic knowledge, in Glissants
view, is neither confining dogmatism nor probabilistic skepticism (2009:
62). It is errant and di-verse rather than linear and uni-versal; it is a science of inquiry, not of conquest; hence it embraces many different directions,
rejecting the univocal nature of the teleological scheme ascribed to Hegels
thinking. The writer remarks that the thinking of errantry conceives of totality but willingly renounces any claim to sum it up or to possess it (1997a:
21). The One-Whole no longer represents in any way a failed dream (rve
manqu); it merely ceases to be dreamed of (Glissant 1969: 63). For Glissant
then, if we can speak of totality, it is only in terms of a nomadological and
deterritorialized plane of immanence since as he repeatedly stresses totality is not universal. It is the finite realized quantity of the infinite detail of
the real. And because its detailed, it is not totalitarian (Glissant 1997b:
192). The schema of relation offered by Glissant also problematizes pure
transparency and predictability in cognition. The thought of errance thus
postulates an opaque foundation and invokes the right to opacity against the
supposed transparency of the all-encompassing concepts of reason (Glissant
1997b: 29). This is where poetry steps in for the philosophical logos, taking a
different approach to totality, one that does not engender closure; this is
where comprehension Hegels Begreifen yields to donner-avec, giving
with, a gesture which recalls the openness of the exchange and the generosity
of the gift.
The ultimate task of Glissants poetics is to imagine the unimaginable
turbulence of the relation (1997a: 153), because only poetry can think out its
weave and totalize the Chaos-monde without immobilizing its dynamic and
decentralized arrangement, without reducing to oneness the boundless multiplicity of historical times and of geographical spaces. Hence, while the Toutmonde remains a poetic intuition, according to Glissant the last moment of
knowledge is always a poetics (1997a: 154), so that poetry and imagination
finally attain the ultimate truth overcoming the limits of conceptual thinking.

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Postcolonial Cannibalism
The presence of Hegel in the works of Fanon, Csaire, and Glissant is telling,
not only because the traces of his thought in these authors texts transcend the
confines of simple erudite quotations, but also and most importantly because the type of operation they conduct on Hegels works reveals a process
of theoretical re-appropriation which entails fruitful implications. Csaire
develops the idea of negritude according to a Hegelian logico-phenomenological model; Fanon draws on Hegels dialectics to illustrate the peculiar
dynamics that permeate the colonized world; Glissant elaborates his poetics
of relation and his discourse of totality, presupposing Hegels framework as
a bad example.
What occurs in each of these contexts is not a simple exercise of philosophical re-visitation, rather it is a more substantial gesture which resonates
with a political and existential stance that, paraphrasing Nesbitt, we might call
intellectual cannibalism (Nesbitt 2003: 118). As it has been noted by Nicole
Simek in her article Hungry Ironies in the French Antilles, hungers capacity
to evoke both material suffering and immaterial desire has given it a prominent role in French Caribbean literature (Simek 2011: 107). In a review published in issue 4 of Tropiques (1942) and significantly entitled Misre dune
Posie. John Antoine-Nau, Suzanne Csaire, Aims wife, claims that true
Martinican poetry must be anti-exotic precisely the opposite of hammock,
sugar-and-vanilla literature which was popular at that time concluding that
Antilles poetry will be cannibal or it will not be [La posie antillaise sera
cannibale ou ne sera pas] (Csaire 1978: 4850).
A similar metaphor can be used to describe the commitment of the three
authors discussed in this essay towards Hegels philosophy. If what was at
one time considered as the summa of Western philosophical thought represents for them a key to access the French intellectual milieu, it is also true that
in each case their engagement with the German thinker is the result of an
operation of theoretical cannibalism. Antithetical to metropolitan epistemic
violence (Spivak 1999: 269), postcolonial cannibalism emerges here as the
complex result of two opposing attitudes that reflect the intrinsically ambivalent position of the inhabitants of the French Antilles who are French but
dOutre-mer (Overseas), Black Europeans living in the Caribbean. The
metropolitan existence of the three young students from Martinique is in fact
conditioned on the one hand by a double process of assimilation being assimilated to an alien context requires assimilation of the alien context and
on the other hand by a resolute anti-colonial determination that permeates all
their writings. Borrowing another image of Hegels, we might stress that the
intellectual alienation (Entusserung) that they experience culminates with an

Hegel and the Black Atlantic

111

opposite movement of return, a sort of Erinnerung, or phenomenological

recollection, and that both motions recall those of the Hegelian Geist which is
absorbed in itself, it is sunk in the night of its self-consciousness; but in that night its
vanished outer existence is preserved, and this transformed existence the former one, but
now reborn of the Spirit's knowledge is the new existence, a new world and a new shape
of Spirit (Hegel 1977: 492).

Through the cannibalizing gesture of the three writers, Hegels thought enters
a new shape of Spirit: it ends up being displaced to remote conceptual constellations and mobilized in the service of negritude, the anti-colonial revolution and the poetics of relation. Such a violent and enthusiastic intellectual
voracity allows Csaire, Fanon, and Glissant to establish a rapport of destructive complicity to paraphrase Spivak10 with Hegels philosophy. In
Spivakian terms, in fact, a constructive complicity is the only theoretical
option available for the postcolonial perspective in order to deal with the
heritage of the past and the cultures of the present, and to avoid the mere
alternation of accusations and excuses (Spivak 1999: 34). In the case of
the three Martinican authors, this complicity becomes destructive inasmuch
as the rapport of proximity which they establish with Hegels writings produces a disruptive twist that denaturalizes the Hegelian dialectic and reorients its very functionality. At the same time, in the works of Csaire, Fanon
and Glissant, destruction remains complicit and turns into deconstruction,
critically preserving Hegels traces instead of simply rejecting them. Thus
destructive complicity as an instrument of cannibal acquisition echoes to
some extent the same move of Hegels Aufhebung that still has in itself,
therefore, the determinateness from which it derives (Hegel 2010: 81). The
strategy of intellectual cannibalism, and the unexplored possibilities that lie at
its core, may therefore suggest new paths for postcolonial theory and ongoing
processes of cultural decolonization with the aim to sublate the legacy of
humanism and universalism in order to re-create new humanistic assemblages and to re-invent new paradigms of universalizability (Muthu 2009:
266).

10

In Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak affirms that the task of postcolonial critique is
to develop a constructive rather than disabling complicity between our positions and theirs
[Kant, Hegel and Marx] (Spivak 1999: 34).

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Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich ([1807]1977): Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford:
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Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich (2010): Science of Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge
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Sartre, Jean Paul (1993 [1943]): Being and Nothingness. New York: Washington
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Uncanny Entanglements: Holocaust, Colonialism,

and Enlightenment
Uncanny Entanglements

Mara do Mar Castro Varela

Uncanny Questions1
Uncanny questions are questions that trouble us; questions we do not want to
confront as we fear the possible answers. They are unsettling and betray the
shaky peace we have made with a disquieting past. Reflections on the legacies
of Nazism are troublesome for various reasons, one of the reasons being that
it is marked by a serious paradox: On the one hand, it is claimed that the
genocide committed against the European Jews is unique. On the other hand,
Nazi regime, Hitler, and the Holocaust2 have become global metaphors
for preceding and subsequent genocides and the political terror accompanying
them. However, as Aim Csaire persuasively argues in Discourse on Colonialism, these acts of barbaric violence were only recognized as crimes
when they were committed against Europeans on European territory (Csaire
1972 [1955]: 3). While the Allied soldiers that liberated Auschwitz were
horrified by the atrocities they were confronted with, many of them were
unprepared to deal with what they witnessed. It is instructive to recall the
African American intellectual James Baldwins (1963: 53) incisive argument
that the violence committed by Europeans in Europe came as no surprise to
the African American population. In contrast to white US Americans, they
were not taken aback by reports of the carnage committed by the Nazis, as
they knew perfectly well from their own experiences what Europeans were
capable of. From the perspective of the formerly colonized people and the
descendants of former slaves, the atrocities carried out by Europeans during
the Nazi regime were not unforeseeable. In light of these historical events, the
African American Jewish Philosopher Laurence Mordekhai Thomas (1993)
1
2

I would like to thank Sundhya Pahuja and Dianne Otto, Institute for International Law and
the Humanities, University of Melbourne.
The word Holocaust (lat.) means human sacrifice invoking purification through fire.
Meanwhile, the Hebrew word Shoah can be translated as destruction. The term Holocaust has been the subject of academic and political debates. It is insofar a problematic
term as it carries a religious connotation, which some interpret as the implicit justification
for the genocide. The word Shoah, on the contrary, alludes to the intended extermination
of the European Jews (see also Traverso 1999: 78)

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condemns theories that place the suffering of Jews above those of the American Slaves and vice versa. He states that both historical experiences are deeply evil, albeit in radically different ways.
Against this background, the description of the Shoah as a rupture in civilization (Zivilisationsbruch) (Diner 1988) seems unconvincing. If the Holocaust was an unprecedentedly violent event, it was certainly not because enlightened people acted in a barbaric way for the first time in history. Rather, what was unprecedented was the factorized system of mass murder and
the fact that the genocide took place on European territory and not in its overseas colonies. Irrespective of ones position vis--vis the uniqueness thesis
regarding the Holocaust (cf. Piper 1987), the uncanny and complex relation
between modernity and genocide seems self-evident. Later genocides, for
instance those committed in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, strengthen the
arguments about the potentiality of terror implicit in modernity and the Enlightenment as they remind us that genocide and terror are neither a thing of
the past nor something that only happens outside Europe (see Jalui 2008).
Auschwitz is, alas, neither the first nor the last instance of evil in the world.
In what follows, I want to trace some of the entanglements of historical
violence and modernity/Enlightenment. Furthermore, following Theodor W.
Adorno and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, I will share some scattered thoughts
on the crucial role that education can play in the aftermath of historical violence to render possible non-dominant futures.

The Shoah: Rupture in Civilization or Civilized Evil?

The disenchantment with the Enlightenment presents a huge setback for
emancipatory politics the biggest challenge being not to lose hope in the
face of barbarity (cf. Bloch 1995 [1954]). Since the 1950s a broad range of
intellectuals have been wrestling with how to understand what happened
during the Nazi regime in Europe: A death toll of approximately 35 million
people, terror, and imperial war compels us to make sense of that which cannot be understood.3 Did Europe regress to the Middle Ages? Could the Shoah
have been foreseen? What role did German philosophy and philosophers,
particularly German idealism, play in the Nazi ideology? Can Auschwitz be
explained by invoking the thesis of a murderous German mentality (e.g.
3

Yehuda Bauer (2013: 688) argues that unprecedented is not to be confused with
unique. He is of the opinion that the Nazi horrors were not really unique but unprecedented: Was the genocide of the Jews, which we call the Holocaust, in some ways different
from the other tragedies? Was it not parallel? Actually, it was both. To call it unique appears to be inappropriate, but, more properly, it should be thought of as unprecedented in
some crucial aspects.

Uncanny Entanglements

117

Goldhagen 1997)? And the most challenging question: What to do after the
experience of political evil?
After decades of critical inquiry and scholarship, the aforementioned
questions still feel disturbing and remain unresolved. In response to this discomfort, one either tends to circumvent the questions or to mechanically
reiterate already established answers to some of the questions in a mantra-like
manner, so as to reassure oneself that this was a lapse never to be repeated
again at least not in the civilized world. Nonetheless, entering this field of
debate resembles entering a maze: It is easy to get in, but there is no easy way
out. We continue to struggle with the core issue of how to comprehend the
Enlightenment, modernity, and its legacies. From Theodor W. Adorno to
Judith Butler, from Hannah Arendt to Jacques Derrida, from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Emmanuel Lvinas to Giorgio Agamben, to name just a few,
critical thinkers continue to struggle with reason after evil and the consequences of historical violence for humanity as well as for the humanities.
Already in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1962 [1951]) Arendt remarks
on the continuities of colonial and Nazi imperialism. For instance, she draws
attention to the presence of concentration camps built in the late nineteenth
century by the Spanish in Cuba during the Ten Years War (18681878) and
by the British during the Second Boer War (18991902) in present-day South
Africa (see also Hyslopa 2011). For Arendt, as Seyla Benhabib remarks,
antisemitism had to be understood not in isolation, but in the context of a
crisis of Western civilization that far exceeded the importance of the Jewish
Question (Benhabib 2010: 225). Such insights notwithstanding, efforts to
link colonialism and the Third Reich are still perceived as a provocation by a
number of scholars, especially by historians: The German historian Jrgen
Zimmerers (2011: 9) claim that the first genocide of the twentieth century
was committed against the Hereros and Namas in 1904 in the German colony
of Southwest Africa (present-day Namibia), evoked hostile responses from
his colleagues, especially in Germany. Although Zimmerer in no way conflates the two chapters of historical violence and substantiates his claim by
drawing on renowned scholars like Arendt, Csaire, and W. E. B. Du Bois to
highlight the continuities and discontinuities between the two events, the
attacks on him have been relentless. The very late reception of postcolonial
theory in Germany can be read as another symptom of the same conundrum.
Efforts to analyze the continuities and entanglements between German colonialism and Nazi imperialism are disapproved of. Since the German Historians Controversy (Historikerstreit) in the 1980s, it is considered objectionable to draw connections between the Shoah and other genocides and/or historical violences (Zimmerer 2011: 140171), especially because the uniqueness
thesis renders it difficult if not impossible to relate the Shoah to evils that
predated it. The Historikerstreit was prompted by an article The past that
won't go away by the historian Ernst Nolte in the conservative newspaper

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Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), wherein he challenged the uniqueness

of the Shoah, comparing the atrocities committed by the Nazis with Stalinist
terror. In fact, he claimed that the gulags were the original and greater horror.
In response Jrgen Habermas accused Nolte of being part of a new conservative revisionism. As a result of this quarrel it has become all the more difficult to address the question of the entanglements of different manifestations
of evil.
Linking the gruesome atrocities committed during colonialism and the
Third Reich would, in my view, help to develop a more nuanced and deeper
understanding of whether colonialism and the Holocaust signal a failure of
European Enlightenment or whether they are both outcomes of the Project of
Modernity; whether the Enlightenment in fact has provided the tools to contest imperialism and fascism; and how memory politics and geopolitics might
be transformed through a simultaneous analysis of the legacies of colonialism
and the Holocaust. Instead of rendering colonialism marginal to Holocaust
studies and the Holocaust to Postcolonial Studies, it is urgent to explore the
links between European imperialism and Nazism (cf. Olusoga/Erichsen
2010).
Such an approach involves focusing on issues such as the concentration
camps as well as the practices of forced labor and medical investigations in
the German colonies, for example in the Shark Island extermination camp
(Konzentrationslager auf der Haifischinsel vor Lderitzbucht) (19051907)
(cf. Erichsen 2005). These indicate overlaps between racial ideologies and
fantasies of European supremacy in colonial as well as fascist discourses.
Such links are also evident in other continuities: One striking example is
Eugen Fischer (18741967), Professor of Medicine, Anthropology, and Eugenics. Fischer, who had, in 1905, performed studies on the skulls of dead
prisoners of the Shark Island extermination camps as part of the medical
research program striving to prove the inferiority of the indigenous peoples of
German colonies, traveled to German South-West Africa in 1908 to conduct
field research on Basters, the offspring of German men and African women.
He recommended laws prohibiting miscegenation and interracial marriages,
and this was subsequently implemented in all German colonies. His ideas
influenced all future German legislation on race, including the Nuremberg
laws. Fischer continued his bastard studies in Germany, focusing on the
Rhineland Bastards,4 and was appointed rector of the Friedrich Wilhelm
University, Berlin by Hitler in 1933. He later joined the Nazi party (cf.
Schmuhl 2008). This striking example throws light on the undeniable continuities in racist ideology and practices between German colonialism and Nazism. Racist laws as well as racist medical experiments had a long tradition
4

Rhineland Bastards was a derogatory term for the Afro-German children of white German
mothers and black soldiers during the occupation of the Rhineland during the First World
War (see Campt 2005: 1928).

Uncanny Entanglements

119

in Germany before the Nazis established concentration and extermination

camp throughout Europe (cf. Olusoga/Erichsen 2010:224225).
Mahmood Mamdani (2001: 12) compellingly argues that the link between
the Herero genocide and the Holocaust goes beyond concentration camps:
The common annihilation policies and ideological overlaps and continuities
allude to the larger colonial and fascist projects of Social Darwinism and biopolitics. Furthermore, it is important to bear in mind the link between the loss
of German overseas colonies and Nazi expansionism in Eastern Europe as a
form of internal colonization. In my view, Postcolonial Studies and Holocaust Studies can productively work together to unfold the violence exercised
in the name of racial ideologies and imperial political projects.

The Banality of Evil

In 1961 Arendt travelled to Jerusalem to report the Eichmann trial5 for the
renowned US journal New Yorker. In 1963 her book Eichmann in Jerusalem:
A Report on the Banality of Evil (2006 [1964]) was published and instigated a
furor that spread across the US, Israel, and Germany. One of the most disputed points was her concept banality of evil, which described Eichmann and his
deeds not as demonic but as banal (see Beatty 1976; Formosa 2006). As Benhabib notes:
In coining the phrase the banality of evil and in explaining the moral quality of Eichmann's deeds not in terms of the monstrous or demonic nature of the doer, Arendt became
aware of going counter to the tradition of Western thought, which saw evil in metaphysical
terms as ultimate depravity, corruption, or sinfulness (Benhabib 1996: 174).

According to Susan Neiman (2010: 305), the misreading of Arendt, even by

reputed scholars, was at times so crude and grotesque that it cannot be
understood as a reaction born of sloppiness; rather it points to something
deeper (cf. Young-Bruehl 2002: 339340). Arendt was accused of being
naive, an Anti-Zionist and therefore, of not loving the Jewish people, of
banalizing the Holocaust, of being heartless and cold, and of being unable to
comprehend the magnitude of what had happened (cf. Feldman 1978).

During the Second World War, Otto Adolf Eichmann was responsible for organizing the
railroad transportation of Jews to the concentration camps in Eastern Europe. While Eichmann was not one of the master minds of the Final Solution, he was one of the highestranking Nazis, whose duties, after the Wannsee Conference in 1942, consisted of organizing
the extermination of the European Jews. After the defeat of Germany in the Second World
War, he fled to Argentina, where he was captured by Mossad agents in 1960 and taken to Israel to face trial on multiple criminal charges, including crimes against the Jewish people
and crimes against humanity (cf. Segev 2000: 323366).

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The notion of crimes against humanity6 was one of the central concepts
introduced during the Nuremberg trials in 1946.7 According to the legal theorist David Luban, the term was first invoked in 1915 to denounce Turkeys
genocide against the Armenians as crimes against civilization and humanity
(2004: 86). Interestingly, at that time, it was the United States that objected
with the argument that the so-called laws of humanity had no specific content (ibid), resulting in the proposal to persecute the Turkish perpetrators
being abandoned.8
In Lubans (2004: 94) view, the evil of the Holocaust was the horrific
novelty of the twentieth century: politically organized persecution and slaughter of people under one's own political control. As Luban illuminates, law
traditionally differentiates
between crimes against persons, crimes against property, crimes against public order,
crimes against morals, and the like. Here, the idea is to supplement the traditional taxonomy of legally protected values property, persons, public order, morals by adding that
some offenses are crimes against humanness as such (ibid: 87).

According to Richard Vernon (quoted in Luban 2004: 94, FN 28), charges of

crimes against humanity should be employed solely to describe crimes
committed by a state against its own subjects. Luban therefore denotes
crimes against humanity as autopolemic crimes and describes them as
distinctively tainted and deliberate crimes so as emphasize the specific quality
of such offenses (ibid: 94). At this point, it is important to note that most
people murdered in Nazi extermination and concentration camps were formally not Germans, as the citizenship of German Jews was first revoked, then
they were ghettoized, forced to migrate, and if they were unable or unwilling
to escape or to migrate, they were murdered. The Nazi ideology did not accommodate the idea of German Jews; it was only possible to be either a
Jew or a German.9
6

It was in fact the British Jewish law professor Hersch Lauterpacht who delineated the three
crimes that formed part of the Nuremberg principles: crimes against peace, war
crimes, and crimes against humanity. All three concepts became crucial for the further
development of international criminal law.
The legal basis for the jurisdiction of the court was defined by the Instrument of Surrender
of Germany. Political authority for Germany had been transferred to the Allied Control
Council which, having sovereign power over Germany, could choose to punish violations of
international law and the laws of war.
According to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague, crimes against humanity
are defined as extensive or systematic attacks directed against any civilian population. This
includes extermination, enslavement, torture, rape, enforced sterilization, persecution
against an identifiable group, or other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally
causing great suffering or serious bodily or mental injury (International Criminal Court
2013).
Similarly, during the Spanish Inquisition, Jews were expected either to convert to Catholicism or to leave the country. But de facto the authorities never trusted Jewish converts, who
were derogatorily called marranos, a term of abuse which means pig and dirty in Span-

Uncanny Entanglements

121

The first step in the committing of crimes against humanity usually is the
symbolic as well as factual expulsion of certain groups from the political
community of citizens and often also from the state territory.10 For instance,
being Jewish, having Jewish family members or being a Sinti resulted in the
expulsion from the category of citizen into the Other and the enemy.
The Nuremberg Laws (1935) on Citizenship and Race clearly state in article 4: A Jew cannot be a citizen of the Reich. He cannot exercise the right to
vote; he cannot hold public office. As Luban remarks:
Instead of humanity, there is only us and them, friend and enemy, and the destruction of the
enemy is the ultimate meaning of politics. In Arendts diagnosis, precisely this outlook
paved the way to crimes against humanity in a very literal sense (Luban 2011: 8).

This has historical parallels with the Spanish Inquisition (14781821) and the
infamous Valladolid debate (15501551) between Juan Gins de Seplveda
and Bartolom de las Casas about the legitimacy of slavery, the encomiendas
system,11 and the killing of indigenous people in the Spanish colonies. For
Seplveda, the Indians were irrational and inferior, making them in his view
slaves by nature. The renowned humanist, philosopher and theologian insisted
that the Spanish colonizers had the legitimate right to use arms against those
defying their enslavement. Contrary to Seplveda, Las Casas, the first archbishop of Chiapas, evocatively argued that the Indians were civilized and that
the peaceful conversion of the natives was the appropriate approach. In his
earlier account of the destruction of the Indies, he depicts the unjust conduct
of the Spaniards vis--vis the indigenous people, accusing the colonizers of
being inhuman and causing great losses to the indigenous population. His
report contributed to the establishment of New Laws in 1542, which prohibited the enslavement of the indigenous people and ultimately led to the Valladolid debate (cf. Las Casas 1993 [1552]).12 The debate shows how philosophical and theological arguments served to dehumanize indigenous populations and, consequently, to legitimize violence, murder, and enslavement

10
11

12

ish and which referred to (forced) converts from both Judaism and Islam, as both religions
prohibited the consumption of pork. Although they converted to Christianity under threat of
persecution, they were suspected of secretly practicing Judaism or Islam.
This is also a way new communities are formed.
According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (2013), the encomienda was a legal system, by
which the Spanish crown attempted to define the status of the Indian population in its
American colonies. It was based upon the practice of exacting tribute from Muslims and
Jews during the Reconquista of Muslim Spain. Although the original intent of the encomienda was to reduce the abuses of forced labour (repartimiento) [] as legally defined in
1503, an encomienda (from encomendar, to entrust) consisted of a grant by the crown to
the conquistador, soldier, official, or others of a specified number of Indians living in a particular area. The receiver of the grant, the encomendero, could exact tribute from the Indians in gold, in kind, or in labour and was required to protect them and instruct them in the
Christian faith.
Cf. Benjamin Keen (1998) for an analysis of the influence of Las Casas versus Seplveda
controversy on anti-racism, liberation theology, and postcolonialism.

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during colonialism.13 We witness here the pernicious link between imperialism, racism and anti-semitism.
Luban interestingly distinguishes between genocide and crimes against
humanity and states that:
whereas genocide is a crime directed at groups viewed as collective entities, with a moral
dignity of their own, crimes against humanity are assaults on civilian populations viewed
not as unified metaphysical entities but simply as collections of individuals whose own
human interests and dignity are at risk and whose vulnerability arises from their presence
in the target population (Luban 2004: 97).

To return to Arendts reflections on the Eichmann trial: On 15th December

1961 the Israeli court pronounced, as was expected, the death sentence for
Eichmann. His appeal was rejected by the Supreme Court and on 31st May
1962 he was hanged.14 According to some scholars, Israel violated international law and Argentinian sovereignty by kidnapping Eichmann, which rendered the trial illegal.15 Karl Jaspers, for example, argues that Eichmann
should have been brought to trial before an international court which at that
time did not exist precisely because he had committed crimes against humanity and not just a simple crime against a particular community or group
(cf. Arendt 2006 [1964]: 269271, Young-Bruehl 2002). Arendt agreed but
deemed these objections to be insignificant. In her view, the problem was not
Argentinian sovereignty or the place of the trial, but the inability of the Israeli
court to address the incomparable nature of Eichmanns crimes. She asks:
What are we going to say if tomorrow it occurs to some African state to send its agents to
Mississippi and to kidnap one of the leaders of the segregationist movement there? (Arendt
2006 [1964]: 264).

For Arendt, the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis was a crime against the
human status:16
It was when the Nazi regime declared that the German people not only were unwilling to
have any Jews in Germany but wished to make the entire Jewish people disappear from the
face of the earth that the new crime, the crime against humanity in the sense of a crime
against human status, or against the very nature of mankind appeared. [] it is an attack
upon human diversity as such (Arendt 2006 [1964]: 268269).
13

14
15

16

Also refer to the excellent work by Antony Anghie (2004), who explores the entanglement
of International Law and imperialism in the writings on the theory of just war and international law of Francisco de Vitoria (14831546), founder of the School of Salamanca.
Eichmann is the only person to have been executed in Israel on conviction by a civilian
court.
It should be noted here that the role of the governments of Israel, Argentina, and Germany
in the Eichmann case as a political process is still disputed. The journalist Gaby Weber
(2012), who studied formerly classified reports and did in-depth research on the Eichmann
case, for example, contends that Eichmann was not kidnapped, but that the whole process
had been manipulated and the case instrumentalized for the Cold War.
Arendt employs the term used by the French Nuremberg prosecutor Franois de Menthon
(cf. Luban 2004: 87, Arendt 2006 [1964]: 257).

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According to Benhabib, Arendt's analysis of crimes against humanity is the

most important legacy of Eichmann in Jerusalem (Benhabib 2000: 76). A
crime against the human status, Arendt argues, urges a rethinking of the process of judging itself, as the crimes had no intelligible purpose:
Its capacity for total destruction was the reason, in Arendt's judgment, that totalitarian
terror was radically evil. [] The total domination of man was radically evil [] not
only because it was unprecedented but because it did not make sense (Kohn n. d.: 5).

Furthermore, Arendt argued that the uniqueness of the harm was obscured by
the category crimes against the Jewish people, as this defines the harm done
to a particular group, thereby failing to address plurality as something valuable to be protected (Bilsky 2010: 206207). She did not think as some
commentators of her book claimed that Eichmann was not responsible for
his deeds,17 but rather that he refused or was unable to comprehend their
repercussions (Young-Bruehl 2002: 338).
The crimes committed by the Nazis had shaken the very foundations of
justice in the Western world, and Arendt thought that this called for as a
matter of principle a reconsideration of judgment. Judgment here must be
paired with understanding, even as understanding should not be equated with
empathy in which any type of judgment is suspended (Novk 2010: 483,
see also Benhabib 1988). To understand is not to approve, absolve, or excuse.
For Arendt, understanding is so closely related to and interrelated with judging that one must describe both as the subsumption of something particular
under a universal rule. (Arendt 1954: 383)
Besides the legal problems, the biggest predicament that the trial presented to the court was, as already mentioned, Eichmann reluctance to
acknowledge the magnitude of his terrible crimes.18 Ensconced in a bulletproof glass case for months, he defended himself by claiming that he had
always carried out his duty to the letter. He did his duty, Arendt agrees, he
not only obeyed orders, he also obeyed the law (Arendt 2006 [1964]: 135,
17

18

In fact, she was not even opposed to him being sentenced to death. She writes in her concluding remarks in Eichmann in Jerusalem that the judge should have ended the sentencing
with: Just as you carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of other nations as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world we find that no one, that is, no
member of the human race, can be expected to want you to share the earth with them. This
is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang (Arendt 2006 [1964]: 279).
A juridical problem would have arisen if there had been any evidence that the defendant,
namely, Eichmann, was psychologically unable to stand trial. As is well known, a judge can
only give the guilty verdict in a court of law when the accused is aware of his actions and of
the sanctions he is being given. The question of guilt, in other words, is closely tied to personal responsibility. One can only be found guilty on the assumption that one has a conscience, even if one does not act on it. According to Arendts report, six psychiatrists tested
Eichmanns mental sanity and shared the opinion that he was normal. More normal, at
any rate, than I after having examined him, one of them was said to have exclai-med (Arendt 2006 [1963]: 25).

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italics in original). During the trial, Eichmann would sometimes describe the
virtues and other times the vices of blind obedience, or the obedience of
corpses, Kadavergehorsam, as he himself called it (ibid, italics in original).
Arendt makes an effort to understand this behavior, claiming that Eichmann
was incapable of thinking, describing him as thoughtless and as a non-person
(Arendt 2006 [1964]: 49). Eichmanns case reveals that indeed a conventional
petit bourgeois might be more than willing and able to conform to standards
of absolute criminality, if nearly everyone around him is doing the same. In
Arendts view, Eichmann was like many others: terribly and terrifyingly
normal (ibid: 276). As a matter of fact, it was mass conformism that kept the
Nazis in power. For Arendt, Eichmann had undergone such a radical loss of
identity as an autonomous human agent and such a radical loss of conscience
that it had become impossible to find him guilty as charged.
Arendt argues that a period of totalitarian rule leads to a radical change in
human nature, with the Nazi rule destroying the freedom and spontaneity of
the human personality, thereby undoing the possibility of making moral and
legal judgments (cf. Arendt 1962 [1951]): 473474). Accordingly, the brutal
crimes committed by totalitarian regimes not only demand a rethinking of the
very idea of justice but also of personal responsibility.

Enlarged Thinking
The banality of evil implies that each of us without exception is capable
of being and doing evil.19 It makes evil into something ordinary that is not
exceptional, atypical, demonic, or monstrous. A particularly interesting aspect
of the Eichmann trial transcript concerns his answer when the presiding judge
asked him to explain his claim that throughout his life he had lived according
to the Kantian categorical imperative (Arendt 2006 [1964]: 135136). Eichmann explained that being forced into a position of acting and living under
authoritarianism meant obeying orders and being subjected to higher powers.
With his free will being eliminated, he was no longer master of his life and
actions, neither being able to freely adopt principles nor influence them. Given that he had to place his life in the service of higher authorities, he argued
that obedience must be inserted into the Kantian concept of categorical imperative. Consequently, he claimed that the authorities bear the responsibility
for his actions. Eichmann called his interpretation of Kants principle the
19

The word banality derives from the French banal which means belonging to a house,
common, commonplace, from the Old French banel for communal and ban meaning legal control, authorization. The meaning of banality has evolved from open to everyone, to commonplace, ordinary, to unoriginal and insignificant.

Uncanny Entanglements

125

categorical imperative for a small mans domestic use (Garsten 2010: 340,
Arendt 2006 [1964]: 36).
Arendt (ibid), who was stunned by Eichmanns arguments, remarks that
after providing a somewhat accurate understanding of the categorical imperative, Eichmann proceeded to explain that he could not live according to Kantian principles once he was in charge of carrying out the Final Solution. Not
being master of his own deeds (ibid), he was unable to change anything
(ibid). Arendt proposes that Eichmann does not simply discard the Kantian
formula; rather, he conveniently misconstrues it to conflate the principles of
individual actions with those of the legislator or of the law of the land. Arendt
concludes that Eichmanns interpretation of the categorical imperative reduces Kants ideas to
the demand that a man do more than obey the law, that he go beyond the mere call of
obedience and identify his own will with the principle behind the law the source from
which the law sprang. In Kants philosophy, that source was practical reason; in Eichmann's household use of him, it was the will of the Fhrer (ibid).

Could it be that Arendt uncovers an uncanny entanglement of evil with the

core ideas of European Enlightenment? How is one to reconcile oneself with
the fact that the Kantian categorical imperative was mobilized to justify
crimes against humanity? Was Eichmann just not capable of understanding
the full implications of Kants concept? Or did his position go beyond the
mere misconstrual of one the founding ideas of European ethical philosophy?
Is it perhaps possible to live by Kantian ethics and be a mass murderer?
Arendt, in order to address the question of how we are to find meaningful
standards of justice and morality in a Post-Nazi era, engages with Kants
writing on aesthetic judgment. Judgment (Urteilskraft) for Kant is the ability
of thinking the distinctive (das Besondere). According to Arendt, his treatise
on the nature of aesthetic judgment could perhaps help us come to terms with
the legal and moral judgment that Eichmann posed in court. Kant writes:
The judgment of taste is not a cognitive judgment, and so not logical, but is aesthetic
which means that it is one whose determining ground cannot be other than subjective (Kant
1790: 1).

Arendt draws on this argument to comprehend and explain the unprecedented

historical events that otherwise evade theoretical or moral frameworks of
understanding.
The admiration for beauty that we find around us has the power to make
us feel at home in the world. As [t]hat is agreeable which the senses find
pleasing in sensation. This at once affords a convenient opportunity for condemning and directing particular attention to a prevalent confusion of the
double meaning of which the word sensation is capable (Kant 1790: 3).
Moreover, an interest in the beautiful can flourish only in society, since we
need to communicate our experiences to others. Here Arendt especially

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stresses the category of sociability.20 In her view, it was sociability that Eichmann lacked: basic forms of imagination were deficient. For it is the imagination that enables us to think of how the world would appear from someone
elses point of view. Kant stresses that at least one of our mental faculties, the
faculty of judgment, presupposes the presence of others and asserts that in the
activity of judging, egoism can be overcome. The experience of beauty facilitates achieving a disinterested state, wherein we overcome the private subjective natural self and become part of a community and common culture.
Arendt endorses Kants understanding of judgment as the faculty of enlarged
thought (erweiterte Denkungsart) (Benhabib 1996: 175). The overcoming of
egoistic, private, or bodily interests allows the individual, in Arendts view, to
cultivate a general standpoint. Enlarged thought can be understood as the
ability to occupy diverse perspectives in the world, to understand the variety
of angles from which an issue can be comprehended and judged. Such a perspective does not point to mere emotions and feelings (cf. Benhabib 1996:
191), but to the ability to think along with (Mitdenken) to think with the
other, to think from different standpoints. An enlarged thinking needs the
presence of others, whose perspective must be taken into consideration. Intersubjectivity is at the core of this idea, with respect for and consideration of
the views of different persons and their standpoints being crucial to enlarged
thought. In a letter to James Baldwin, Arendt writes that love is a stranger
in politics (Arendt 1962):21 feelings and emotions, as private matters, have no
bearing on politics.
In a totalitarian environment, individuals are confronted with an uncanny
and unforeseen series of events that force them to take a stance and make
judgments without the luxury of being able to fall back on a set of rules to
guide them. Arendt claims that the majority of the population in Nazi Germany miserably failed to cope with this challenging situation (Benhabib 1996:
295); rather than finding a new way of judging the unprecedented circumstances, their conscience simply collapsed. Eichmann, to this extent, is a typical case of what human beings are capable of, if the political circumstances
undermine the communitys shared set of legal and moral values. In Arendts
view, in such situations, instead of fighting for moral values, most individuals
conform to the difficult circumstances.
Observing Eichmann in court inspired Arendt to conceptualize the idea of
banality of evil. Arendt (2006 [1964]: 48) describes Eichmann as only being
capable of idle talk, of mouthing clichs and slogans, while being unable to
utter a single grammatically correct sentence. Arendt found him comical, even
as she found his behavior grotesque (Arendt 1971: 417). A man so unremarkable and mediocre that it was hard to believe that he was Eichmann the Nazi
20
21

This view has been strongly opposed by the British historian David Cesarani (2004).
The letter to James Baldwin was written on November 21, 1962, in response to his article
Letter to my Nephew (Arendt 2006).

Uncanny Entanglements

127

monster. The scariest thing about Eichmann was that he was commonplace:
neither perverted nor sadistic, but just frighteningly normal. Israel and the
world wanted to see a monster, but Eichmann, according to Arendt, was plain
stupid and a clown (cf. Neimann 2010: 308, cf. Arendt 2006 [1964]: 287). He
was a bureaucrat, who received orders and obeyed them. He never actually
killed anyone himself and repeatedly claimed not to be anti-Semitic (Arendt
2006 [1964]: 22, 26). Unlike the court in Jerusalem, Arendt did not think that
Eichmann was lying or was trying to hide his real malevolence. In her 1971
lecture Thinking and Moral Considerations Arendt explains:
Some years ago, reporting the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem, I spoke of the banality of
evil and meant with this no theory or doctrine but something quite factual, the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal
distinction was perhaps extraordinary shallowness. However monstrous the deeds were, the
doer was neither monstrous nor demonic, and the only specific characteristic one could
detect in his past as well as in his behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic
inability to think (Arendt 1971: 417).

The historian Daniel Goldhagen (1997) proposes another explanation, arguing that many of the mass murderers were ordinary Germans, who were socialized in a profoundly anti-Semitic culture and thus were acculturated
ready and willing to execute the Nazi governments genocidal plans. He
claims that the vast majority of ordinary Germans were willing executioners
(ibid) because of the exceptional eliminationist anti-Semitism (ibid) that
was the cornerstone of German national identity and unique to Germany.
The idea of a murderous German mentality is popular, albeit problematic, as is implies a certain inevitability, wherein anti-Semitism necessarily led
to the Shoah. Moreover, it fails to account for the non-Jewish victims of the
Euthanasia programs (Sinti and Roma, communists, people with disabilities,
homosexuals, etc.) and other atrocities committed during the Nazi regime.
Nor can it explain the collaboration of neighboring countries, who at times
willingly participated in the genocide. Yehuda Bauer (2001: 100) contests
Goldhagens claim that there was a general murderous, racist anti-Semitic
norm in Germany in the nineteenth century. He agrees that there was a
strong and increasing anti-Semitism, especially among the German elites, but
argues that one can neither speak of unanimity nor of an eliminationist
norm (ibid). According to him, it would be too easy to blame the evil of the
Shoah on a German mentality.
In contrast to Goldhagen, Neiman offers a more sophisticated understanding of the evil confronting us. She describes Arendts Eichmann in Jerusalem
as a modern theodicy in that Arendt denies the assumption that evil must be
unintelligible [] [and] intentional (Neiman 2010: 308). She argues that the
misreading of and resistance to Arendts book stems from the scary realization that [i]f Eichmann could do evil without intending it, so could I (ibid:

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311). Along similar lines, Robert Meister (2012: 146), drawing on Lvinas,
argues that the coexistence of evil thoughts and their rejection brings to light
the contingency of the border between who we are and who we are not.
This confronts us with the challenge: If evil deeds were done by ordinary
people, what is to be done after evil? If evil comes in different forms and all
of us are capable of it, what are the consequences of this insight for our ethical and political practices? Neimann argues that a modern theodicy affirms
that the world can be loved without denying the evil within it. However, evil
must be seen as something explicable without reference to mysteriously evil
intentions. (Neimann 2010: 309).

(Re-)Education or What to Do After Evil?

The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological
condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of
more or less civilized and innocent people (Adorno 2003 [1966]: 30).

The cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer famously contended that to mobilize

Germanys decency, decades-old habits need to be altered. Education is a key
ingredient in this. For Adorno
[t]he premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again [] Every
debate about the ideals of education is trivial and inconsequential compared to this single
ideal: never again Auschwitz (Adorno 2003 [1966]: 19).

A maxim that is often described as Adornos categorical imperative, which

forcefully undermines Eichmanns categorical imperative for the little man.
Upon witnessing the extent of the horrors of Nazism, the Allies were confronted with the formidable task of understanding and reacting to the atrocities. They were faced with the challenging question: what is to be done so that
this does not ever happen again? Re-education was proposed as an answer to
these baffling questions. The Allies hastily sketched out re-education programs for Germany, assuming that the Germans were not able or willing to
understand the magnitude of their culpability in committing genocide and
crimes against humanity and in pursuing an aggressive war (cf. Tent 1984).
Denazification was understood as a sine qua non for the possibility of democracy in Germany and Europe.22 The aim of the re-education program later
called re-orientation program , framed as broad democratization and not

22

At the Potsdam Conference in 1945 the Allies agreed on the main objectives of post-war reconstruction, namely, the three Ds: denazification, demilitarization, deindustrialization.
Democratization, it was believed, would follow automatically.

Uncanny Entanglements

129

narrow Americanization, was pursued through the use of one of most effective instruments of Nazi propaganda, namely films.23
In present-day Germany, school curricula include an engagement with the
Third Reich and the Holocaust and, to a much lesser extent, colonialism.
There are furthermore a variety of political and pedagogical projects aiming
to democratize German society. Ironically this reinforces the claim that Germany has dealt with its past in an exceptional way and that the reorientation programs have in the end proved to be successful. But as Neimann
reminds us:
[t]he Holocaust was carried out by millions of people with trivially bad intentions like
those of Eichmann, who did not actively will the production of corpses, but was willing to
walk over them, literally, if it advanced his career; the lukewarm well-meaning bystanders
who wrung their hands and retreated to inner emigration as the catastrophe around them
grew; and people whose intentions were often exemplary, but whose mistakes of judgment
led them to actions that produced the opposite of what they intended (Neiman 2010: 310).

Against this background, the role of education in the process of denazification, decolonization, and democratization is more fundamental than the mere
adaptation of school curricula. It necessitates a more elemental intervention in
the production of subjects and knowledge and the discourses of memory politics and geo-politics. These, unfortunately, are not simply questions of the
past, as the challenges of decolonization and democratization are on-going
projects and unspeakable horrors have not vanished from the earth (cf.
Giroux 2004: 5).
Following Arendt, democratic politics demand that
everyone, regardless of their nationality, is included in the political and economic community of a definite State intending to recognize and protect them as their citizens; otherwise,
no human being can discover his/her own place in the world. (Duarte 2005).

In conclusion, I would like to turn attention to two of the most important

thinkers of education in the aftermath of colonialism and the Holocaust,
namely, Adorno and Spivak. While Adornos Education after Auschwitz
23

However, some of the films screened in Berlin and other German cities, which depicted the
horrors of the Third Reich and the consequences of the war, were openly dismissed by the
German public. For example, the film Hunger (1948) by Stuart Schulberg, which was produced for the Office of Military Government, United States (OMGUS), caused great furor.
The film opens with a montage-scene of hungry people in different cities. Initially the audience assumes they are seeing immiseration in Germany after the war, but soon realize that
they are looking at starving people in Paris, London, and even in faraway India. Later in the
film, when images of the marching Wehrmacht are screened, the audience became excited.
However, when Hermann Gring, the founder of the Gestapo, orders Canons instead of
butter!, the incredulous audience screamed Herman would have never let us starve! and
We want Hermann! Given the responses, the film was withdrawn from distribution (cf.
Mehring 2007). The reaction of the audience demonstrates the deep impact of Nazi ideology
on the German masses, which was not easily undone by confronting them with images of
suffering and distress caused by the Third Reich.

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(2003 [1966]) struggles with the violent legacies of European Enlightenment

against the background of the Holocaust, Spivak, in her An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012), tries to come to terms with the conundrums of the postcolonial situation. For both thinkers, the Enlightenment
entails a double bind: emancipation and violence, civilization and barbarism,
enablement and annihilation. Asked by her students why she teaches the canon, Spivak responds:
it is not to excuse the canon, but not to accuse it either. We must see our complicity; we are
in the same kind of situation in the bosom of the super-power, wanting to be good. []
And so I go, asking the students to enter the 200-year-old idiomaticity of their national
language in order to learn the change of mind that is involved in really making the canon
change. I follow the conviction that I always have had, that we must displace our masters,
rather than pretend to ignore them (Spivak 2012: 116117).

Despite the significant differences in their approaches and convictions, in my

view, Adorno and Spivak both aim to initiate an epistemic change that would
undo former coercive ways. Adorno, in his later work, defines the role of
education as ruthlessly criticizing itself in order, against all odds, to undo its
manifold past failings (Wolin 1992: 62). Along similar lines, Spivak understands education in the Humanities as an uncoercive re-arrangement of desires (Spivak 2004b: 526), the central question being how to possibly rearrange desires that sometimes stand in conflict with ones self-interest. Here
she specifically focuses on the subjectivity of gendered subaltern subjects
who have internalized colonial and patriarchal norms, resulting in the consensual participation of subjects in their own subjection. Unfreedom is ideologically coded and experienced as liberation, coercion as agency. In response to
Spivaks analysis, I propose that Adorno (2003 [1966]: 22) would suggest
that we need a
general enlightenment that provides an intellectual, cultural, and social climate [] in
which the motives that led to the horror would become relatively conscious.

In his lecture on half-education he claims that education needs protection

from the outside world, facilitating a space that allows the imagination to
flourish (Adorno 2006 [1959]: 31). As Henry Giroux (2004: 18) points out:
Adorno understood that critical knowledge alone could not adequately address the deformations of mind and character. In addition to practical and
pragmatic education, the training of the imagination, the exercise in judgment
and the development of the courage to think differently is imperative. Not
surprisingly, Arendt, Adorno, and Spivak all underscore the importance of the
humanities in the processes of contesting coercive discourses and structures.
Already in the preface to the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and
Adorno (2002 [1944]: xiv) lament that the operations of modern science, the
major discoveries are paid for with an increasing decline of theoretical education. Humanities as training of the imagination and judgment, what Spivak

Uncanny Entanglements

131

(2004b: 550) calls ethical imagination, is to prepare the mind to deal with
complex ethical and political dilemmas. For Spivak this entails the ability to
think of what is not there and resist the impulse of only thinking of oneself.
The world, according to Spivak, needs an epistemological change that will
rearrange desires (Spivak 2012: 2). The increasing trivialization of the
humanities (ibid: 288) in the contemporary globalized landscape seeks to
replace this training in thinking the abstract, the singular, and the unverifiable
with instrumental knowledge and informational technology, which may promise material comfort to some, but does not prepare subjects to address issues
of ethical and political justice. But as Arendt already warned us, the inability
and unwillingness to judge entails the biggest threat to humanity:
The manifestation of the wind of thought is no knowledge; it is the ability to tell right
from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And this indeed may prevent catastrophes, at least for
myself, in the rare moments when the chips are down (Arendt 1971: 446).

Along similar lines, Spivak (2004a, b) compellingly argues that one of the
most important elements of education is to prepare the mind for intellectual
performance to deal with the ambivalences and contradictions that marks
imaginative activism:
when we find ourselves in the subject position of two determinate decisions, both right (or
both wrong), one of which cancels the other, we are in an aporia which by definition cannot be crossed, or a double bind. Yet, it is not possible to remain in an aporia or a double
bind. It is not a logical or philosophical problem like a contradiction, a dilemma, a paradox, an antinomy. It can only be described as an experience. It discloses itself in being
crossed (Spivak 2012: 104).

The uncanny entanglements of the Holocaust and colonialism and their ambivalent relation to European Enlightenment make the questions of historical
justice, decolonization, and democratization the biggest challenges of our
times. While none of the thinkers discussed above claim to provide solutions
to these abiding problem, they do propose to negotiate the historical legacies
that we have inherited in a postcolonial, post-fascist globalized world. This
demands persistent auto-critique and an infinite responsibility towards eradicating evil. As I have argued above, the humanities play a crucial role in
ensuring that these (im)possible but necessary utopias are realized. I thus
concur with Butler that critique [] is the measure of the education that we
want to see institutionalized and distributed (Butler 2012: 18).

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II. Transnational Justice

A Historical Claim for Justice: Re-configuring the

Enlightenment for and from the Margins
A Historical Claim for Justice

Ulrike Hamann
Contesting Racism in Imperial1 Germany
Mary Church Terrell,2 daughter of two former slaves and member of the
womens suffrage movement in the US, came to imperial Berlin in 1904 to
deliver a talk on The Progress of Colored Women at the International Womens Congress, where she was the only woman-of-color participant. My essay
seeks to analyze her visit from two perspectives: on the one hand, as a historical event which took place at the intersection of three contexts, namely, the
European feminist movement, post-slavery USA, and German colonialism.
Her talk and dealings at the conference can be thus read as an intervention
into the hegemonic discourses of racism that were prevalent in different forms
in all of the above mentioned three contexts. The essay principally seeks to
examine how the discursive tool of labeling is mobilized to mark a certain
group of people as progressive in contrast to other groups, who are not
eligible for this qualification. A second perspective of analysis will be the
theoretical discussion on how social change can be initiated through the subversive appropriation of discursive tools which actually emerge from oppressive regimes. I propose the idea that social change can be facilitated through
discursive interventions, through a reconfiguration of arguments and a recontextualization of the subjects of a discourse. Drawing on a historical ex-

At that time, Berlin was both the German metropolis of the recently united Empire and the
imperial metropolis of the even more recently built colonial Empire. German state colonialism began in 1884 and ended after thirty long years in 1914. This was the third largest expansion (cf. Grosse 2000: 20) of any existing colonial empire at this point and included todays states of Namibia, Cameroon, Togo, parts of Tanzania, Burundi, Ruanda, China, and
the Pacific Islands of Samoa, Micronesia, and New Guinea. The prefix imperial thus refers both to the Kaiserreich, the German Emperors Empire, as much as to the colonial
German Empire.
I would not have heard about Mary Church Terrell without the outstanding work of the
historian Paulette Reed-Anderson (Reed-Anderson 2000). Following her footsteps and
thanks to a travel bursary from the Frankfurt Society of Friends of Goethe University, I
could undertake research on Church Terrell in the archives of Washington D.C., where she
lived a century ago. I am explicitly grateful to all of them.

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ample, the essay will highlight how a discursive intervention is initiated and
social relations remapped through the articulation of new actors.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has recently called for an ab-use of the
tools of the Enlightenment, a cautious undertaking that aims at opening the
Enlightenment to what it was obliged to exclude (Spivak 2008: 259). Responding to this call, this essay revisits the historical endeavors of a Black3
feminist, who already sought to initiate exactly such an opening in the midst
of European colonialism and modern racism. The essay seeks to demonstrate
that despite the violent conditions of colonialism and racism, there have always been attempts to strategically intervene into hegemonic discourses.
Engaging with the subversive appropriation of Enlightenment discourses
about progress in Berlin in 1904 at the International Womens Conference,
the first part of the essay will be devoted to a close reading of discourses of
difference during colonial times in Germany. Particular attention will be paid
to the German suffrage movement, which will be examined through the lens
of a Black feminist from the US. The second section will be devoted to
Church Terrells writings4 and observations on the social practices of difference experienced at this conference and the ways in which she contested
them. In the third part, I will explain how her intervention re-configured the
discursive framework of the Enlightenment.
We must bear in mind three intersecting contexts, which informed Mary
Church Terrell's experiences during her visit to Berlin to participate in the
International Womens Conference in 1904. Firstly, it was a meeting of
Western women,5 most of whom had a middle or upper class background and
were involved in initiating the womens suffrage movement (cf. Ramirez et al.
1997, Lloyd 1971, Markoff 2003). In different countries of the West, these
rights were implemented differently. In the US, for instance, the right to higher education for women had already been granted. This meant that while
Church Terrell had a college degree, her German hosts lacked access to higher education because of their gender. But in the US, Black womens participation in the suffrage movement was seriously restricted due to the racism of

Even though the term black was rejected during Church Terrells time, with the terms
Negro or colored being considered much less offensive than black (cf. Du Bois, cited in
Bennett 1967), I chose to use the term Black in capital letters, since it has become the preferred term since the Civil Rights Movement also referred to as the Black Power Movement (cf. Carmichael/Hamilton 1976). For an insightful discussion on the different categories, see Bennett 1967.
The basis for this analysis are the papers of Church Terrell I found in the archives of the
Library of Congress, Washington D.C., of Howard University, Washington D.C., and her
published biography A Colored Woman in a White World (first published in 1940).
The participants of the conference came from several European countries, including Germany, Finland, Holland, France, Hungary, Italy, Austria, Norway, Great Britain, Sweden,
Denmark, and Ireland, as well as from the United States and New Zealand.

A Historical Claim for Justice

141

their white6 colleagues. Racism in the Southern states not only took the form
of segregation, but was also violent and lethal. Angela Davis indicts the
womens suffrage movement around 1900 for failing to take a stance against
this white terror (Davis 1983). By not taking a stance against racism, by linking the right to vote to education, and by defining the value of women as
citizens in terms of their function as custodians of the white race, white feminists were complicit in hegemonic discourses. While the movement for womens rights in Germany had not yet embraced colonial color politics, Alice
Salomon was not elected president of the suffrage organization Bund
Deutscher Frauenvereine because of her Jewish background (cf. Sklar et al.
1998, Kaplan 1979, Drkop 1984). Church Terrell and a handful of other
Black suffragettes intervened into both US-American and international discourses. They had, as Church Terrell describes it, to labor under the double
handicap of race and sex (Church Terrell, cited in Newman Ham 2005: 7).
Church Terrells intellectual activism for the rights of Black women in the
US, especially their rights to education, and her reflections on German society
in particular on the German feminist movement provide crucial points of
insight into the historicity of the struggles for inclusion and for the rights of
marginalized groups.7

Discourse of Difference
Around the turn of the century, Germany had already been a colonial power
for more than two decades. The womens suffrage movement itself a counter-hegemonic project had yet to take a stance on the issues of colonialism
or racism at this point. The presence of a Black suffragette from the US carried with it the potential to change this, by offering white feminists an opportunity to learn from her critique of racism. Drawing on the discourse of modernity to further the social and economic struggles of Black women in the
US, she simultaneously appropriated and contested the notion of progress.
In her autobiography, Church Terrell reflected upon her experiences of racism as a delegate at the conference. I will engage with this later in the text.

6
7

In contrast to the term Black, the term white is not capitalized, but is italicized to mark
the privileges of those who fall under this category.
Church Terrell was not the only African-American in Germany at that time. The case of
W. E. B. Du Bois, who studied at Berlin University, is more widely known. However, the
focus here is exclusively on Church Terrell, because her visit to Germany is less wellknown, and because the essay seeks to concentrate on the history of feminist movements
and to contribute to a transatlantic history of feminism and to a history of the contestation
of racism.

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Ulrike Hamann

In their invitation letter to Church Terrell, the German hosts precisely

stated their expectations: We expect you to deliver a talk on the situation of
colored women in the domestic service sector (translation U. H.).8 Instead,
Church Terrell gave a talk about the Progress of Colored Women in the US.
In addition to addressing the issues faced by the domestic service sector, she
also talked about Black business women, Black female scientists and artists.
Drawing on the discursive framework of the Enlightenment, primarily the
idea of progress, Church Terrell represented the social realities faced by
Black women that were beyond the imagination of German white middleclass women. The invitation already betrays the image of Black women as
uneducated, unskilled, and in the service of white women and men a stereotype mirroring images of slavery.
Church Terrell not only used the opportunity to challenge and criticize
these stereotypes by highlighting the blightening prejudice and a cruel
oppression (1904: 458)9 that informed the living and working conditions of
Black women in the US but she also contested the paradigm of progress
when she spoke of the ongoing effects of slavery on Black women. She defines these effects as a forced condition of degradation and ignorance going
back three hundred years,10 from which Black women in the US are still liberating themselves. By contextualizing the contemporary situation as a legacy
of three hundred years of slavery, she also alludes to an implicit triangle between Africa, the Americas, and Europe, which inserts African histories as
well as histories of slavery into the European Enlightenment, even though the
latter was obliged to exclude these narratives.11 She thus reminds her audience of the source of degradation and lack of access to knowledge, which
were, in her eyes, not the effects of race as so many of her white colleagues believed but the consequences of slavery. She repudiates racist
stereotypes and instead outlines the historical processes that produced conditions of poverty and lack of education. Without explicitly naming them, she
also emphasizes the role of those who produced these structures, namely,
8

9
10
11

The original letter, dated 27April 1904 from the head of the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, a section of the International Womens Congress, to Church Terrell reads: Wir erwarten ein Referat von Ihnen ber die Lage der farbigen Frauen im Dienstbotenberuf. This
letter is held at the Library of Congress, Church Terrell Microfilm Edition.
In the German version, it reads grausamen, gnzlich unberechtigten Vorurteile (Church
Terrell 1905: 568, excerpts reprinted in Washington Jones 1990: 193).
In the German original: seit drei hundert Jahren aufgezwungenen Zustande der Degradation und Unwissenheit (Church Terrell 1905: 572).
In this context, the following infamous quote by G.F. Hegel is relevant: At this point we
leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no
movement or development to exhibit. Historical movements in it that is in its northern
part belong to the Asiatic or European World. [] What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature,
and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World's History (Hegel
1956: 99).

A Historical Claim for Justice

143

white slave owners, and the fact that ignorance and poverty are not inherited as many believers of racial hierarchies tried to prove but are consequences of larger structures of inequality. Focusing on the historical entanglements of the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, plantation slavery, and
the racism of modern US society, Church Terrell simultaneously appropriates
the discourse of progress, which in her view characterizes the struggles of
African Americans for social equality and civil rights:
[] that in spite of opposition relentless and obstacles almost insurmountable the AfroAmerican can present today such a record of progress in education, industry, finance and
art as has never been made under such discouraging circumstances, in such a short time by
any race since the world began12 (cited in Washington Jones 1990: 195196).

Church Terrell reconfigures the discourse of progress by inserting AfroAmericans as the new subjects of this narrative. Instead of dismissing modernity and its discursive tools per se, she inscribes into them an expelled history, namely the history of racism and slavery. By drawing on the rhetorical
tool of progress for describing the professional accomplishments of Black
women in US society, Church Terrell defies the expectations resulting from
racist attitudes that locate Black women only in the domestic service sector.
By highlighting the educational, economic, and artistic progress of Black
women despite the discouraging circumstances of over three hundred years of
white supremacy, Church Terrell reconfigures the normative framework of
the entire discourse at the conference. The Black narrative of progress is not
mere mimicry of the history of Europeans (see Chakrabarty 2000: 302), but
a tool of critique. She frames the historical crimes of colonialism as inherent
in discourses of modernity, even as she redefines progress as the ability to
overcome modernitys legacies of colonialism and slavery.

The Anthropological Gaze of the Spectacle: Social Practices of

Difference
In order to understand the impact of a discourse, we also need to examine the
social practices that accompany it. In the following section, I will reconstruct
from her written accounts the social practices that Church Terrell encountered
at the womens conference in Germany. By analyzing the social aspects, we

12

The original German text reads: Trotz aller unbarmherzigen Opposition und fast unbersteiglicher Hindernisse kann der Afro-Amerikaner heute eine solche Summe von Fortschritten in Bildung, Gewerbeflei, finanziellem Wohlstande aufweisen, wie solche in gleich kurzer Zeit und unter gleich entmutigenden Umstnden nicht wieder erreicht worden sind,
seitdem die Welt steht (Church Terrell 1905: 572).

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will be able to understand how difference was produced in the context of

social interactions.
Church Terrells talk at the womens congress had a huge impact on the
audience not only because of the content, but also because it was delivered in
three different languages English, German, and French. The US press repeatedly highlighted this and the impression she left on the audience, more
than the contents of her talk. Interestingly, her multilingualism13 gave her
greater opportunity to participate in the discussions on racism. In an ironic
turn of events, the German hosts approached Church Terrell as the only
German-speaking woman from the US to get information about the Black
guest speaker, whom they were curious about. Church Terrell comments on
this racial curiosity and ignorance:
As soon as I reached Berlin some of the German women who discovered that I spoke
German began to ask me about die Negerin14 (the Negress) from the United States whom
they were expecting. At first I thought they knew I was that individual, and this was the
German way of telling me so. But soon I learned that I was mistaken, and that they had no
idea they were talking to this very unusual anthropological specimen whom they were
seeking (Church Terrell 2005: 238, German in original).

Church Terrells irony functions as a deconstructive strategy: on the one

hand, she notices the anthropological gaze curious to capture her; on the other
hand, she undertakes her own anthropological analysis of her hosts and of the
specific German ways of telling me something. In addition, she uses the
opportunity to gain undercover insights into the exoticization processes
directed at her:
The newspaper reporters were especially anxious to lay eyes upon this rare, colored bird,
so that they might interview her, and each one wanted to publish this interview in his or her
particular newspaper first (ibid).

She draws parallels between the public interest in a Black person and the
hunting of a rare specimen. During this period, discoveries of faraway geographical locations and of rare, unknown animals and plants were part of the
colonial knowledge production.15 Her comparison insightfully draws connections between scientific and journalistic findings and the colonial enter13

14
15

From 1889 to 1890, after completing her college degree and before her marriage, Church
Terrell stayed in Berlin for several months to study the German language. During this time
she met the German feminist Helene Lange (Church Terrell: Diary Sep. 22 1889Oct. 17
1889, Reel 1, The Mary Church Terrell Papers, Microfilm Edition, Library of Congress,
Washington D.C.). She reminisces about those times in her biography (Church Terrell 2005:
105113).
She uses the German terms in her English text and translated them herself in brackets.
As Anne McClintock (1995: 2930) notes, the act of discovery was the instrumental
production of knowledge, wherein the indigenous knowledge systems were exploited. The
naming of peoples, animals, plants and geographical regions outside Europe was at the heart
of the making of Empire. The ideological rhetoric of discovery was inextricably linked to
the imperial power of appropriation, a connection Church Terrell was well aware of.

A Historical Claim for Justice

145

prise. It also unmasks the conflation of differences between animals and certain humans.
However, it was a challenge for Church Terrell to claim a subject position in the face of such a curious crowd and its desire to find an anthropological object. How could she resist this racist curiosity?
When will die Negerin arrive? someone would ask me. Havent you seen her yet? I
would reply. She is already here, I think. Why dont you ask some of the other delegates
from the United States? Perhaps they can tell you where die Negerin is (ibid: 238).

Church Terrell chose to refuse to perform her racial coming out. She passed
on the task of identification of the Negro woman to her white US-American
colleagues (perhaps they can tell you). She playfully met those inquisitive
looks and questions that sought to identify the Negro woman with an ignorant innocence, frustrating their attempts to find what they were looking for.
Thus she played the hide-and-seek game on her own terms. In the end she
relented and gave her story to the only female journalist:
Finally, a dear, little newspaper woman came to me and implored me to let her know the
minute die Negerin arrived, so that she might have the first interview with her. I could not
resist the temptation then and there to confess on the spot that I was the individual she
sought (ibid: 239).

But the journalists reaction confirmed her suspicions regarding how her
appearance disappointed the expectations:
Her joy was great indeed, but her surprise was greater. In relating this phase of my experience when I first reached Berlin, I have sometimes told my friends that the natives who
were so eager to see what manner of person a Negro woman would be evidently surmised
that she had rings in her nose as well as in her ears, that she would both look and act entirely differently from other women and that she would probably be coonjinging or
cake-walking about the streets (ibid: 239).

Church Terrell noticed the desire for absolute difference and the fantasies of
an imaginary Black woman that reduced her to a stereotyped caricature. As
Homi Bhabha proposes in his influential writings, stereotyping was one of the
major strategies of the colonial discourse, operating as [] a form of
knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always in
place, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated (Bhabha 1994: 66). Therefore the stereotype is an arrested, fetishistic mode of
representation within its fields of identification (ibid: 76). However, the
strategy of stereotype is bound to fail again and again. As Frantz Fanon explains:
There is a quest for the Negro, the Negro is in demand, one cannot get along without him,
he is needed, but only if he is made palatable in a certain way. Unfortunately the Negro
knocks down the system and breaks the treaties (Fanon 1986: 176).

In a context where demands for equality took center-stage, Church Terrell

was persistently Othered by the racializing practices employed by her German

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Ulrike Hamann

fellow suffragettes. This white desire and fantasy for a spectacle of racial
difference made them oblivious to other important historical factors. To confront this, Church Terrell began her talk with the declaration that her parents
had been slaves. This, of course, was an uncomfortable and shameful difference not sought by the whites with their curious looks and questions. Avery
Gordon calls this invisible presence of the unreflected crimes of history a
form of haunting (Gordon 1997). The presence of a ghost is a sign that
haunting is taking place and a very particular way of remembering what has
happened. The nightmares that haunt the individual's subconscious bear witness to the past. To understand the importance of the figure of haunting for
colonial memory politics, I now wish to analyze how the question of difference continues to haunt the feminist movement.

A Feminist History of Racism

Some eighty years after Church Terrells talk in Berlin, Audre Lorde similarly
addressed the question of difference in the context of the womens movement
of the 1970s in the US, which was dominated by white feminists, who denied
the existence of difference in favor of the idea of universal sisterhood. The
white desire for racial difference is at once accompanied by the fear and the
denial of this difference as detrimental to feminist solidarity. Lorde remarks:
Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy, which
needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have all been
programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to
handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if
we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns
for relating across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have
been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion (Lorde 1984: 115).

In this famous passage, Lorde does not as often wrongly assumed take
difference as a source of identity that has to be nurtured. Rather, she analyzes
the operation of difference in terms of relations of power, which have to be
remapped in order to envision a different society, wherein difference will not
be used as a tool of power but will be socially valued. But this vision can only
be realized by addressing past and present forms of violence, which would
require white women to take responsibility for their actions as well as their
race, class, and gender privileges and face the ideological aspects of the
sisterhood discourse. Comparing Church Terrell's and Lordes differing but
overlapping experiences, one cannot help but notice that while the German
suffragettes were excited and curious about the supposed racial difference,
as embodied by Church Terrell, US feminists feared that if Black feminists
raised the issue of the violence of racism, it would lead to a fragmentation of

A Historical Claim for Justice

147

their discourse of universal sisterhood. They wanted a struggle for equality

without having to deal with the consequences of the historical politics of
difference, which would require them to acknowledge their complicity in
processes of historical injustice.

Taking the Stage Again

Let us once again turn to Church Terrell to investigate the strategies she employed to contest racial stereotypes, while acknowledging the importance of a
historical perspective on issues of gender, race, and labor. During the Berlin
conference, she explicitly mentions that she would not have been in a position
to deliver her talk without the historical event of the civil war and the subsequent emancipation of her parents. Furthermore, she addresses the irritation
of white women about her not living up to their expectations of Blackness:
When I discovered that practically nobody realized that I was die Negerin in whose
appearance so many were interested, I decided to say something in the very beginning of
my discourse which would impress that fact upon my audience. I wanted to be sure that
they knew I was of African descent (Church Terrell 2005: 243).

She provocatively remarks: You look at me and think to yourself: a white

raven indeed (Church Terrell 1905: 567, translation U. H.). On the one hand,
the figure of the white raven signifies a rarity, but also an anomaly. With
this metaphor, she wants to highlight the exceptionality of her predicament. In
all probability no one else at the conference was descended from enslaved
parents. On the other hand, she also addresses her ability to pass, racially but
also in terms of class, which was brought to the audiences attention in the
moment she evoked her family history of enslavement. The audience was
she remarks amused (Church Terrell 2005: 244); while some might have
been irritated, others were perhaps ashamed when confronted with their stereotypes. Meanwhile, Church Terrell expresses her own feelings as follows:
Thus to me, this [] is a double jubilee, rejoicing as I do, not only in the prospective
enfranchisement of my sex but in the emancipation of my race (Church Terrell 1898: 7).16

With this, she shifts the focus back to her own perspective, having addressed
the expectations of her white audience. Interestingly, she prioritizes the
emancipation of Black US-Americans before the emancipation of women in
general, because, as she notes, without the former her very participation at
this conference of womens rights would not have been possible.
16

The German sentence reads: Ich aber weile froh und guten Mutes heute Abend in Ihrer
Mitte, auch aus zwei Grnden: Erstens freue ich mich der Emanzipation meiner Rasse, und
dann der allgemeinen Erhebung des weiblichen Geschlechts! (Church Terrell 1905: 567)

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Ulrike Hamann

Her talk was received with overwhelmingly tumultuous applause

(Church Terrell 2005: 244), which Church Terrell interpreted as a response to
her multilingualism and her Blackness. When Church Terrell realized that
many of the woman participants did not speak English, she decided to deliver
her talk in German and rewrote it two days before delivering her address.
This was not out of courtesy for the Germans; rather it was imperative for her
to make herself understood, as she was the only person representing the US
women of color. She was anxious about this huge responsibility of representation on her shoulders. One is reminded of the Spivakian insight into representation as both Vertretung (speaking for) and Darstellung (speaking about):
I had only one thought in mind. I wanted to place the colored women of the United States
in the most favorable light possible. I represented, not only the colored women of my own
country but, since I was the only woman taking part in the International Congress who had
African blood in her veins, I represented the whole continent of Africa as well. I felt,
therefore, that a tremendous responsibility was resting upon me, and the nervous strain was
great (Church Terrell 2005: 244245).

At the same time, she was also aware that the contents of her talk would not
receive the same attention as her performance:
I have always believed that the ovation I received from that Berlin audience was largely
due to the fact that a descendant of recently emancipated slaves spoke a foreign language
well enough to deliver an address in it (ibid: 245).

Her talk can thus be read as an important speech act, as a felicitous racial and
gender performance in the face of the impossible responsibility of representing millions of people of the two continents, which loomed larger than the
substance of her discourse.17
Despite this important intervention in 1904, the German womens movement proceeded to reinforce racist18 and imperialist discourses, missing the
chance to learn from the encounter with the Black feminist perspective offered by Church Terrell. Neither a confrontation with their own stereotypes,
nor the substance of Church Terrells talk about the struggles and progress
of African American women despite the hindrances of slavery, nor their enthusiasm for Church Terrells performance helped them learn a historical
lesson.

17
18

She was subsequently asked to contribute articles to German, French, Austrian, and Norwegian journals (ibid).
See Dietrich 2007 for an insightful analysis of this issue.

A Historical Claim for Justice

149

Renewing Enlightenment
But what kind of impact could such an intervention have on hegemonic discourses? Under what conditions are negotiations with structures of power
possible? Which tools can be employed to rearrange its frames? To decode
strategies of post-colonizing the Enlightenment, the latter has to be understood as a frame, a normative order of discourse. Despite the diversity of its
discursive tools, the ductus of progress and modernity is a key element
mobilized to mark actions, persons, and societies as progressive or backward
in relation to Euro-teleological time and history. By inserting new subjects as
well as their understandings of time and history into discourses of progress
and modernity, postcolonial theorists like Chakrabarty recommend the appropriation of the discursive tools of the European Enlightenment by renewing
them from and for the margins (Chakrabarty 2000: 16).
Church Terrell and other marginalized critical thinkers like her have persistently tried to intervene in Enlightenment discourses by subversively employing its discursive tools. Drawing on key ideas of the French Revolution
such as fraternit, egalit, libert to envision an ideal society to be
achieved through progress and emancipation within the time span of
modernity, Enlightenment discourse provided an important framework for the
intelligible articulation of political aspirations. This discursive framework
was used both to legitimize and contest slavery, even as it produced discourses of race and racism. For instance, Hegel one of the most influential
thinkers of the Enlightenment condemned slavery as the opposite of freedom, even as he proposed that it originated in Africa (cf. Hegel 1986: 125).
He considered Africans, in contrast to the white male self, as full of contempt for humanity (Hegel 2011: 89). He took the paradigm of progress as
a historical indicator for the worth of a society, accordingly condemning the
entire continent of Africa as lacking history and therefore progress (Hegel
1956: 129).
Let us return to the transformation of the discourse of progress initiated
by Church Terrell. The societies she encountered on both sides of the Atlantic
were structured by racism in different ways. As we have seen, in the first
wave of the womens movement for civil rights, racial stereotypes were as
common as apple pie (Lorde 1984: 114), but we also encounter discursive
strategies that confronted these stereotypes and sought to shift the terms of
these discourses. While Church Terrell was confronted with difference by
white women, Lorde employs differences to unearth suppressed histories of
violence and disenfranchisement. Even though Church Terrells perspective
did not manage to rupture the hegemonic discourse in Germany, her voice did
not go entirely unheard. Her experiments with the masters tools widened the
framework of the thinkable and speakable. As one of the founding figures of

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Ulrike Hamann

The National Association of Colored Women Clubs (NACWC), she spoke as

an organic intellectual of the Black womens movement in the US. However,
the reason her critique of racism of the white womens movement did not
have a huge impact has to do with the functioning of hegemony. The interests
represented by Church Terrell did not find wider resonance with women of
color in Germany at that time. Nonetheless, her presence and words inscribed
new subjects and new histories into the notion of progress. She thus facilitated a moment of change in the discursive and political field of the womens
movement. These experiments demonstrate the possibility of both thinking
through the crimes of slavery and colonialism as inherently modern and of
valuing and centering the histories of those who first came into contact with
Europe through its crimes. As famously stated by Du Bois, a contemporary of
Church Terrell, a non-euphoric understanding of modernity under these terms
can lead to a deeper understanding of what democracy might look like if it
did not need the Other as a negative counterpart.19

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Fanon, Frantz (1986): Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press.
Gordon, Avery (1997): Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination.
Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press.
Grosse, Pascal (2000): Kolonialismus, Eugenik und brgerliche Gesellschaft in
Deutschland 18501918. Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1956): The Philosophy of History. New York:
Dover.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1986): Vorlesungen ber die Philosophie der Geschichte: Werke, Band 11. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (2011): Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans.
Alvarado, Ruben. Aalten: Wordbridge Publishing.
Kaplan, Marion (1979): The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany: The Campaigns
of the Jdischer Frauenbund, 19041938. Westport: Greenwood Press.
Lloyd, Trevor (1971): Suffragettes International: The Worldwide Campaign for
Women's Rights. New York: American Heritage Press.
Lorde, Audre (1984): Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference. In:
Lorde, Audre, Sister Outsider. Los Angeles: Freedom, pp. 114123.
Markoff, John (2003): Margins, Centers, and Democracy: The Paradigmatic History
of Women's Suffrage. In: Signs 29, 1, pp. 85116.
McClintock, Anne (1995): Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, London: Routledge.
Newman Ham, Debra (2005): Foreword. In: Church Terrell, Mary (ed.): A Colored
Woman in a White World. Amherst: Humanity Books, pp. 721.
Ramirez, Francisco/Soysal, Yasemin/Shanahan, Suzanne (1997): The Changing Logic
of Political Citizenship: Cross-National Acquisition of Women's Suffrage Rights,
1890 to 1990. In: American Sociological Review 62, 5, pp. 735745.
Reed-Anderson, Paulette (2000): Rewriting the Footnotes: Berlin und die Afrikanische Diaspora. Berlin: Die Auslnderbeauftragte des Senats von Berlin.
Sklar, Kathryn Kish/Schler, Anja/Strasser, Susan (eds.) (1998): Social Justice Feminists in the United States and Germany: A Dialogue in Documents, 18851933.
Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2008): Other Asias. Malden: Blackwell.
Washington Jones, Beverly (ed.) (1990): Quest for Equality: The Life and Writings of
Mary Church Terrell, 18631954. Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing.

Feminist Justice Beyond Law: Spivakian Ab-Use of

Enlightenment Textuality in Imagining the Other1
Feminist Justice Beyond Law

Sourav Kargupta
Introduction
Does the postcolonial suspicion of the canonical texts of the European Enlightenment come from the fact that they provide imperialism with its justification, that they constitute an episteme based on making universals that
disqualifies the postcolonial episteme which must foreground the particulars? Or is it because these texts are read only in a certain way which is fundamentally Eurocentric in its assumptions? Is it possible to read the canonical
texts of the Enlightenment from the other side of the colonial divide to re-plot
them as self-interrupting structures?
This essay tries to make the broad argument that in accessing the world,
the textualities of Enlightenment not only feed the discourse of imperialism,
but also open up a different way in understanding the worlds double bind
toward the European Enlightenment (Spivak 2012: 13). The essay situates
this argument in the register of postcolonial feminism, and in the related concept of transnational feminist justice, which, it argues, must be thought
through but beyond the calculative paradigm of law. This argument follows
certain readings by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak of Enlightenment textuality.
For Spivak, Enlightenment is to not to be summarily rejected, but negotiated with, also because most of the concept-metaphors of the contemporary
world with which one does rights-based politics, the theoretical generalities
which have a clear presence in shaping peoples lives human, human
rights, democracy, to name just a few draw their itineraries of abstraction from the texts of Enlightenment. Spivak has always been attentive to the
danger and bad faith [involved] in a wholesale rejection of Enlightenment
1

Parts of this essay and of its arguments have been presented on different occasions, notably
at the International Graduate Conference 2011, Frankfurt Research Center for Postcolonial
Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt, at the Institute of Sociology, Albert-LudwigsUniversity of Freiburg, and at the Workshop on Gender and Law, University of Lucerne,
School of Law. I thank all the participants, who commented on this argument in its various
forms. This paper also presents part of my PhD dissertation currently at its final stage. The
dissertation, which focuses on the intersections between deconstruction and feminist critical
theory, is written under the aegis of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta
(CSSSC) affiliated to Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India.

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(Spivak 2008: 263n2), a vigilance she informs to have picked up from her
continual engagement with the corpus of Jacques Derrida. Consequently, this
essay also argues that in the case of Spivak, it is exemplary how she has developed her own strand of deconstruction in fleshing out this different textuality of Enlightenment, making deconstruction amenable to both the postcolonial and the feminist grain. It is at the site of that very specific work of deconstruction,2 this essay would propose, that the thinking of a postcolonial
feminist justice can take place.
The second key issue that this paper deals with is transnational feminist
justice. The very word transnational has the dual demand of being attentive
to particular located events as well as of thinking of enabling abstractions,
which can gesture toward a justice capable of working beyond particularities. Critical feminism likewise, by its very position, faces the opposing pull
between the two poles: the particular at its very basic: the identity woman, and a certain material presence given to it and the universal the
declared universality of this very signature: woman, as well as of the ethicopolitical projects that hinge on it. In the last few decades, there have been
important efforts in fissuring the apparently a-historical universal category
woman by underlining Other identities based on race, class, caste, or
coloniality which indicate internal differentiations among women (Das
2010: 136). The thread running through these efforts might be summarized
broadly as attempts at interrupting the universal Eurocentric abstraction
(woman) with located bodies (marked by race, class, et cetera). And yet, a
careful analysis shows that these other bodies have ended up constructing
other universals, in the guise of other generalities. Postcolonial discourses
have often come perilously close to naturalizing the fragments,3 the very
fleeting, indeterminate character of which it originally pitted against the selfcertain universal categories. But the crucial problematic is: can postcolonial
feminism epistemologically afford to create its own generalizations? How
does the postcolonial feminist settle terms with the generalities that she works
with? Is it possible to retain certain generalizations and therefore a program
of feminist justice and yet remain attentive to contextual, particular events,
events that are gendered in specific located ways? This essay draws on a
2

Deconstruction typically views its intervention not as a critique but as a work, stressing
the experience of going through the intimate affirmation and undoing of a textual weave.
For more on the work of deconstruction, see Appendix: The Setting to Work of Deconstruction (Spivak 1999: 423431).
I am thinking specifically of Anirban Dass critique (Das 2010) of an existing tendency in
postcolonial feminist discourse of taking the Other womans body and experience as
immediate. The point, however, is not to reject every generality, but instead to remember
the risk of ontologization involved in each act of generalization, affirming the need for it in
any effort at critical articulation. Also see Dass critique of Susie Tharu and Chandra Mohanty delineated in these lines and his detailed comment on the operative conceptual category experience (Das 2010: 135150).

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deconstructive understanding of justice as a work through but beyond any

law-like structure and argues, along with a close reading of certain moments in the corpus of Spivak, that such a justice can be thought as necessarily feminist, where the postcolonial critique, which forecloses the figure of the
woman to its margins, is to be re-structured like a feminism. I try to explain
my moves below.

Textually Placing the Native Informant: Spivak Reading Kant

Spivak contends that her negotiations with Enlightenment textualities have
been consistent and that her double-edged attitude to the European Enlightenment is not a sudden change of heart (Spivak 2008: 263n2). In a recent
piece, she opines that it is by an unsettling reading of Immanuel Kants texts
that a figuration of a postcolonial imagination of the Other can be
achieved.4 But this reading must both reject and retain Kant, and misread him
programmatically. It is this intentional misreading performed from within the
discipline of postcolonial humanities that she calls ab-use (not simply
abuse) where the text signals its undoing and re-location, if we [only]
attend (Spivak 2012: 14). The concept-metaphor ab-use, which she also
sometimes mentions as an affirmative sabotage (ibid: 510n3),5 is mentioned
for the first time in a lecture Spivak delivered in Cape Town in 1992.6 She
suggests that
the Latin prefix ab says much more than below. Indicating both motion away and
agency, point of origin, supporting, as well as the duties of slaves, it nicely captures
the double bind of the postcolonial and the metropolitan migrant regarding the Enlightenment (ibid: 34).
4

Thinking imagination in this sense has a specific meaning, which involves the pedagogic
project of what Spivak calls the uncoercive reorganization of desires (Spivak 2012: 110
118). Taking off from Spivaks position, Das writes: It is the imagination to reach out to
the other [] [it] is a metaphor for figuring: giving figure to the other who is radically
different from the self (Das 2012).
This discussion is from Spivaks recent book An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012). Here, Spivak is more concerned with thinking the grammar of an aesthetic
education, in which she follows Friedrich Schillers reading of Kant in Schillers On the
Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters (Spivak 2012: 514n42), which she calls
a mistake (if one is only attentive to the dominant logic of the Kantian text), but still insists on marking the places in the texts where the possibility for such misreadings arises
and how Kant himself deals with them (Spivak 2012: 19). The reading of Kant that I discuss in the present paper is from an earlier text of Spivak, but the mechanisms of reading
remain the same.
Spivak recounts the event as follows: In 1992, asked to give the first T. B. Davie Memorial
lecture at the University of Cape Town after the lifting of apartheid, I suggested that we
learn to use the European Enlightenment from below (Spivak 2012: 3).

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It is the recognition of the fact that colonialism potentially restructures the

globe; not just the erstwhile colonies but the global as a whole is forced
into experiencing the Enlightenment. Here, Spivaks view can be shown to
be significantly different from other postcolonial scholars.
Partha Chatterjee argues about a different modernity, or the production
of a colonial history, which he terms our modernity in his article of the
same title (Chatterjee 1997). It is a modernity that is national (ibid: 14).
Chatterjee argues:
[The] history of our modernity has been intertwined with the history of colonialism, we
have never quite been able to believe that there exists a universal domain of free discourse,
unfettered by differences of race or nationality (ibid).

This promise of an undifferentiated modernity, he opines, can be seen to be

exemplarily inscribed in the programmatic text of European Enlightenment,
Kants What is Enlightenment (Beantwortung der Frage Was ist Aufklrung?
1784). Chatterjee, though, argues that the colonial subject is never fully deluded by the chimera of universal modernity (1997: 14) and is always
aware of its limits, within which he curves out a modernity of his own.
Spivak, however, takes a markedly different position when she stresses a
certain continuity of the postcolonial world and writes, Enlightenment came,
to colonizer and colonized alike, through colonialism (Spivak 2012: 4). She
thus makes an effort to plot a postcolonial history of everyone, both of the
once colonized and the Others, with a general episteme in view.
Spivak also distinguishes her reading from other European attempts to
use the European Enlightenment critically, with which she is in sympathy.
However, she would contend that, from the displaced place of the postcolonial feminist, any such effort can be productively subverted, since when one
articulates from that displaced place (and displaced time of the postcolonial, one may add), then one can claim that we, whoever we are, are below
the level of the Enlightenment (ibid: 4). As I discuss below, the status of this
we or the place of the articulating postcolonial feminist, is also problematized by Spivak, since for her the postcolonial subject is divided within. The
question of scholarship, feminist or otherwise, is always already furrowed by
a distance between the one who represents and the many who are represented,
representation always being a distanced decipherment (Spivak 1999: 309).
Mary E. John, thinking specifically from an Indian context, has opined that
[t]here are no shortcuts for the distances we must travel or the time it takes
to see from anothers point of view (John 2011: 9). The mention of both
space and time to gesture to the immense problem of knowing the other
(who remains always at a distance) is to be noted. For John, this distance

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cannot be traversed by reducing the difficult task of building solidarity to

so many clear examples (ibid: 9).7
Spivak maintains that in a post 9-11 world, unless we are trained into
imagining the other, a necessary, impossible, and interminable task, nothing
we do through politico-legal calculation will last (Spivak 2012: 373374).8
It is in this sense that for her imagination becomes an epistemological instrument. Spivaks problematic of imagining the other becomes crucial in
asking questions about external (by international law) or top-down (by laws
of the land) interventionist feminist work with a view to giving the woman her
right of free choice or access to subjectivity. Her critique raises the crucial
questions: who gives, who renders justice, or what is giving when it
comes to justice within a feminist frame, which is not regional but central to
the question of human rights.9
It is before such a broad background that Spivak wants to perform an abuse of the Kantian text. This different reading, which she also calls philosophizing as intended mistake (ibid: 1420), does not imply that she refuses
to follow the logic of Kants text; rather, she reads the text against the dominant intention that governs it, never erring, however, from the marks10 that
exist within the text itself. Reading a moment in the Kantian text in such a
way, Spivak asks, how does the text imagine its other? At stake, then, is the
desire of a text which both tries to preserve its intended (rational) subject and
in effect opens itself up to a figuration haunting at the margins which both
rounds off and interrupts that central subject-effect. Spivak follows that unintended folding-back of the text upon itself and calls such a fold necessary.
The self-folding is necessary for the Enlightenment text in thinking its closure, and yet this supplementary fold remains outside the reach of its central
intention. If this fold, both undoing and constituting the (Kantian) text at its
margins, could be called by a name, then for Spivak that name would be:
7
8

10

John quotes from and critiques Mohantys concept of feminism without borders here (see
John 2011 and Mohanty 2003, especially ibid: 913).
Spivak adds that with a logic of revenge and punishment we are not necessarily moving
toward a lasting peace (Spivak 2012: 374). It might be possible to tally her argument in
this speech with her comments on Kants crucial text on Toward Perpetual Peace, to be
found in the Introduction to the same volume (see Spivak 2012: 1317).
Iris Marion Young, even if her position is vastly different from that of Spivak, makes similar arguments when she uses Jacques Derridas concept of the gift as a way of understanding asymmetrical reciprocity, which any act of giving to the other presumes along with
a distance from that other (Young 1997: 55).
A deconstructive reading can be said to be not merely a reading of a text against its grain,
but moreover an affirmation of the marks which present themselves in the text, or of the textual weave and its moments. The work of deconstruction follows the logic of these marks or
moments beyond the pale of the dominant structure of the text. In this sense, deconstruction
is affirmative, it meticulously reads and follows the trajectory of each singular moment of
a textual knit. Spivak reminds us that [a]ffirmative deconstruction says yes to a text
twice, sees complicity when it could rather easily be oppositional (Spivak 1993: 143).

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native informant. I try to schematically chart her moves in achieving this

name below.
Reading the Kantian analytic of the sublime in Critique of Judgment
(1790),11 Spivak shows that for Kant, the feeling of the sublime in humans is
a necessary result of a pre-programmed circuit that not only produces that
effect but also underlines the superiority of reason over imagination. Kant
calls it a Bestimmung (determination),12 which Spivak likens to the related
word Stimmung which carries a suggestion of tuning (Spivak 1999:
10n17). Every time imagination fails to account for the sublime which it
encounters in a scene produced primarily by nature, which is outside of the
subject the circuit is tripped and reason takes over. This bypass to the mapping of reason is like a program which makes us feel the inadequacy of
imagination, a model to which we are [...] tuned (ibid: 1011). In the moment of the sublime, she writes, the subject accedes to the rational will
(ibid: 10). Kant contends that in our respect (Achtung) for the sublime, we
attribute to an object of nature that which in truth is a respect for our own
determination (Kant cited in ibid: 11). Moreover, as Kant makes clear:
the feeling of the sublime in nature is respect for our own vocation, which we show to an
object in nature through a certain subreption (substitution of a respect for the object instead
of for the idea of humanity in our subject), which as it were makes intuitable the superiority of the rational vocation of our cognitive faculty over the greatest faculty of sensibility
(Kant 2002: 141).

But this upper hand enjoyed by reason [] over sensibility is not unproblematically human for Kant. It is a certain tuning in culture rather than a necessary production of culture (Spivak 1999: 12). It is an attunement that is part
of ones being as human and not a matter of learning or becoming (through
education or training), Kultur rather than Bildung, as Spivak emphasizes
(ibid). It is here that Kant inserts the man in the raw [der rohe Mensch],13
(ibid: 13) who is without cultural attunement and consequently incapable of
accessing reason, even if in Kants own formula, this access is somewhat
mechanical and not merely intentional. The raw men, who are without culture
in this sense, can perceive the sublime in nature only as terrible (Kant cited
in ibid: 14) and cannot be summoned to the dominion of reason, therefore
11

12

13

Spivak reads from the German original where she deems necessary, but chiefly follows the
J. H. Bernard translation when it comes to the English version. I have consulted the more
recent translations by Werner S. Pluhar (Kant 1987, trans. Pluhar) and Paul Guyer and Eric
Matthews (Kant 2002, trans. Guyer/Matthews) as well.
This translation of Bestimmung can be found in the J. H. Bernard translation that Spivak
follows. It can also be found in the Pluhar translation in the part of the text referred to (Kant
1987: 67). Guyer and Matthews, however, translate Bestimmung as vocation in the textual
moment in contention (Kant 2002: 141). This translation is very close to the Spivakian
sense of being attuned, since vocation can mean a call or a summon to which someone is drawn.
The raw man would be more literal.

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remaining unattached to a proper human self, or to the proper of humanness: reason.

Spivak is careful enough to distinguish between the concept of the raw
man in Kant and those who are identified by the Kantian text as uneducated or naturally uneducated, namely children and women (ibid: 13). Compared to them, the raw man is a very different kind of Other in the Kantian
scheme of things and includes the savage and the primitive (ibid). It is here
that Spivak makes an important inversion, showing the distinction between
two kinds of mechanisms through which a text deals with its Other. In the
Kantian text, for example, the woman, even if disavowed, can still figure as
an internal moment of the text, which the text avows as its inside and thus
intends a certain mastery over. But, on the contrary, the raw man remains
an unacknowledgeable moment (ibid) and in that sense becomes one figuration, one exemplary textual trace of what Spivak calls the native informant.
In the case of Kant, the figure of the native informant, she contends, is
[...] foreclosed, even if this figuration is key to the most important moment
in the argument, without being a part of the intentional inside of the text
(ibid: 13 n20). The figure of the raw man therefore is a moment in the trajectory of what Spivak calls the native informant, which is imagined on
the margins of her reading of the Enlightenment textuality and which remains an (im)possible perspective (ibid: 9). This formulation needs unpacking, which I try to do in brief below.
For one, Spivak is not claiming that the coming of this figure as key to the
Kantian textuality is self-evident. In fact, the native informant cannot be
staged intentionally by the dominant logic of a text whose central actor is the
man of reason. She emphasizes the fact that it is in part an interested reading
(by the postcolonial critic, played by Spivak), which tries to furrow the unitary intentional logic of the text that produces this figure as a moment constitutive of itself. This, however, does not take away from the fact that the text
does stage the figure of the raw-man as an unsure margin of that very man of
reason who is central to it. At that margin, the rational man trembles before
the question of humanness and must secure its centrality by investing that
confusion in the concrete figure of an-other human who cannot access the
rationality proper to humanness.
Secondly, reading the margins of a text or of a matrix of intentionality in
this fashion itself follows a very well-structured logic called deconstruction
(even if deconstruction would try to be more than a logical reading). One
remembers here the much used and mostly misunderstood Derridian formulation that there is nothing outside of the text, even if the alternative translation
(there is no outside-text) might have been less open to misreading (Derrida
1997: 158). This proposition does not merely mean that everything is a text
and that there exists nothing other than the text. On the contrary, this has a
very specific meaning if one is attentive to the moves of deconstruction. Der-

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rida, in fact, makes it clear elsewhere14 that such a formulation is to be understood against deconstructions proximity to and decisive critique of the Hegelian Aufhebung (mostly translated sublation), which, in its basic, tries to
include the self and the other in a move of progression.
To allege that there is no absolute outside of the text is not to postulate some ideal immanence, the incessant reconstitution of writings relation to itself. [] The text affirms the
outside, marks the limits of this speculative operation, deconstructs and reduces to the
status of effects all the predicates through which speculation appropriates the outside
(emphasis in original, Derrida 1981: 35).

There is no outside to the text, therefore, strictly means that the text cannot
master its outside or the trace of it and not that the text does not have an outside. It indicates that the text is no longer the snug airtight inside of an inferiority or an identity-to-itself and that this thing-in-itself also cannot master
its outside, being rather a different placement of the effects of opening and
closing (Derrida 1981: 36).
I propose that the key lies in the very positioning of the work of reading
which both creates the text and therefore perceives the trace of the outside.15
Like any reading which carries the intention of the one who reads and consequently is not free of the trace of intentionality, Spivak performs an intentional reading here, articulated from a non-Eurocentric position. This reading
asks, what in the Kantian text is that marginal metaphor which both tries to
master its outside and unwittingly ends up splitting open its internal logic to
the trace of the outside (and therefore to the work of deconstruction). If the
answer, in the case of this specific moment in Kant, is the metaphor of the
raw man, then Spivak re-plots that name into a trajectory of other such
metaphors and signifies this trajectory with the name native informant. The
reading that she performs positions itself with deconstruction of a postcolonial kind. It is here, then, that we identify our handle in thinking an intersection
between the ab-use of Enlightenment textuality and a postcolonial feminist
critique.
Thirdly, Spivak is more than aware of the fact that this double-desire, of
opening and closing, of grasping and forgetting the trace that the text performs, likewise, affects any reading, even (her own) deconstructive reading.
Therefore, her reading is not working in an Archimedean outside from
where she can make theory. Her reading itself is another text with constraints of its own. Native informant is a name which reduces radical alterity in the very act of naming, just as any naming is a reduction of an otherness
into textuality. But Spivak takes that risk, in effect making the text of Kant
14
15

In the opening piece of the compilation Dissemination called Outwork, another name for a
preface (see Derrida 1981).
I have discussed the nuances of a deconstructive reading and its specificities in my unsubmitted PhD dissertation, Precarious Objectifications: Ethics of Representation and the
Figure of the Woman.

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what she calls elsewhere practicable (Spivak 1989: 57).16 Spivak also calls
this the making literary of a text in reading (ibid).
This is a crucial move, which is very unique to a Spivakian style of deconstruction, I contend; a deconstruction which always has a desire to be practicable, thereby departing from a strictly Derridian frame. The move toward a
practice seems to attend to the postcolonial and the feminist demand (if one
considers that both of these names are primarily connected to practice and
politics).
The metaphor of the raw man mentioned in the analytic of the sublime
surfaces again when Kant discusses teleological judgment (Spivak 1999:
19-27). Here, the philosopher wonders about the purpose (a priori principle
of purposiveness, emphasis in original, ibid: 20) of the existence of each
thing beyond mere cause-effect relation which connects things in a chain of
production and survival. Such an argument might end with man at the top of
the chain of consumption and survival, but, Kant points out, then we do
not see why it is necessary that men should exist (Kant cited in Spivak 1999:
26).17 The purpose of man is furrowed, Kant points out, by the presence of
the New Hollanders or the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego (Kant cited in
Spivak 1999: 26). These uncanny figures are introduced by a curious twist of
argumentative prose. Even if the search for the teleological purposiveness of
human existence is given the lie by these figures, they are only inserted into
this argument, says Kant, by chance, or casually, as Spivak puts it (ibid).
Spivak makes a parallel between the textual positioning of these figures to the
foreclosure of the raw man encountered earlier in the Kantian text (see
above). Persisting with this connection, one finds that the raw man is geographically plotted here as existing outside of Europe, at the cutting edge of
colonial expeditions. As the philosophical enquiry into the concept man
gets re-plotted in a Eurocentric writing of the world-map (geo-graphy), the
conceptual foreclosure18 becomes recognizable in the history of the world.19

16

17

18

She mentions this in her reading of the proper/improper binary in Karl Marxs critique of
the capitalist mode of production, where she wants to read Marx against the dominant grain
of his text (she is reading the Chapter on Money in Marxs Grundrisse). Through her reading, she shows certain ethical motives working in the argument of Marx, which are not central to its logical weave, even if crucial to the constitution of that very logic. She writes: To
make literary in this sense, then, is to make practicable. Not, that is to say, to expose the
irreducible self-constitution of the text as self-deconstruction; but to show that the moment
of the deconstruction of philosophical justice is the minute foothold of practice (Spivak
1989: 57).
The Guyer and Matthews translation goes like this: grass is necessary to the live-stock, just
as the latter is necessary to the human being as the means for his existence; yet one does not
see why it is necessary that human beings exist (Kant 2002: 250).
Foreclosure is a term Spivak borrows from the psychoanalytic tradition, which defines a
strategy of the ego in trying to reject an idea incompatible with itself along with the affect
it produces. Spivak proposes that in thinking the constitution of an inside (subjects ego) by

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It should be reiterated that Spivak makes a logical short circuit between

her reading of the Kantian sublime and of the teleological judgment to show
the metaphor of the raw man as both constituting and undoing the Kantian
subject, where the former is the more crucial part of this critique. In other
words, one cannot ignore her deconstruction of the Kantian sublime in understanding her critique of the Kantian subject in its entirety. Daniel Carey and
Sven Trakulhun, however, opine that Spivaks reading of Kant cannot be
sustained on closer reading (Carey/Trakulhun in Carey/Festa 2009: 255).
They convincingly show that Spivak omits some parts of the Kantian text
(when she quotes from the teleological judgment), and yet fail to address the
core of her critique.20 This failure is prompted by the fact that they entirely
overlook Spivaks reading of the Kantian sublime, and therefore her gloss on
the metaphor of the raw man. In defense of Kant, Carey and Trakulhun urge
us to consider that in the moment under consideration in the teleological
judgment, Kant is making a more general point about our inability to explain
the existence of human beings in general (ibid: 259), but do not recognize
that Spivak is deconstructing the logical sequence of this very generality, of
the Kantian subject as such as she puts it (Spivak 1999: 14). In effect, the
analysis of Carey and Trakulhun remain limited to what can be called Kants
prejudices and errors. But, as we have been arguing, the crux of a more thoroughgoing postcolonial critique would lie in laying bare the inevitability of
the foreclosure of the other in the very construal of the Enlightenment subject.
It would endeavor to show (as Spivak does, in our reading) that the rational
man cannot be thought without this necessary foreclosure, and therefore
would also highlight the productive nature of such an act of forgetting. Moreover, it would be an intimate and productive critique of the limits of Enlightenment textuality, and not of an individual author. The postcolonial critique,
in this sense, is very different from a criticism which merely accuses Kant of
distortion and misrepresentation of the other, of occasional slippages and
racial beliefs (Carey/Trakulhun in Carey/Festa 2009: 263), but falls short of
addressing the logical structure of the Kantian reason or subject.21
Spivak is aware that the proper reading of philosophy would not let
one linger on such a rhetorical detail, but this is a misreading she willingly performs in following the supplement which the inside of the Kantian argument deploys to master its outside, inadvertently giving into a logic of
historical production and therefore stepping outside the philosophical as well

19
20
21

rejection of an idea along with its affect the discourse of psychoanalysis opens up to a
mechanism of ethical reading (Spivak 1999: 4)
See Spivak 1999: 26n32 for detailed discussion.
We cannot go into a detailed reading of this important gloss on Spivak, see Carey/Trakulhun in Carey/Festa 2009: 243280.
In the same volume, David Lloyds chapter is more attentive to Spivaks reading of the Kantian sublime (see Lloyd in Carey/Festa 2009: 92).

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(Spivak 1999: 26). I have already indicated the internal mechanism of such a
Spivakian deconstruction above, which intends not to reject the text, but
tries to make it practicable. I try to chart below how that move can be read
as a move toward what I call a postcolonial feminist ethics.

Is Postcolonialism a Feminism? Native Informant as Woman

For Spivak, the name native informant marks an unacknowledgeable moment, which is needed by what she calls the great texts of European
Enlightenment, even if this necessity is then foreclosed (Spivak 1999: 4).
The trajectory of the native informant would be such that in its textual moments, the European discursive production would acknowledge it in naming, but not in its operational role which it plays in construing the rational
man of Europe central to its structure.
Therefore, as I have already argued, one should understand the native informant not merely as certain aboriginal others named in the text of Kant,
but as figurations of that radical alterity which any textuality tries to negotiate
with by taming it within its structure and yet not acknowledging that the very
logic of its inside depends on this trace of the outside. Understood along these
lines, the native informant is different from an identity-based category, like,
for example, the colonial subject which works as a subject-position through
which the colonized can be said to find his voice or which can become an
agency in a political struggle. The native informant cannot be thought as such
a subject of politics or as an identity-trope, because it is not a subject-position
to be assumed, but an otherness which surfaces every time any subjectpredication comes into effect.
This enables Spivak to think an Otherness not only in the Eurocentric
textuality, but also in the designs of the postcolonial critique itself. This has
been a very important facet of Spivaks work over the years: She does not put
full radicality in the figure of the postcolonial scholar, because the scholar
cannot re-present Otherness without acknowledging a basic distance from the
Other. For Spivak, Otherness remains by definition not fully accessible.
Likewise, in political practices, the subject (of politics) only re-presents Otherness, but cannot claim to be the Other with a claim to full presence. The
more one tries to catch the figure of the Other, the more it changes place. Like
the Kantian text, the text of the postcolonial scholar, too, is constituted
around a gap, which it tries both to account for and disavow. For Spivak,
the typecase of the foreclosed native informant today is the poorest woman
of the South (Spivak 2012: 6). Since she tracks the foreclosure called the
native informant as a trajectory, she is able to show that the possibility that
the poorest woman of the South would take the place of Otherness is al-

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ready prefigured in the Kantian text. Kant, as discussed above, does not place
the woman at the margin of rational humanness; rather, she is given the
chance of becoming educated and accessing cultural attunement. She is not
given the place of inaccessible Otherness, but is figured as somewhat like a
human in the making. The figure of the native informant, by contrast, even
if rhetorically crucial at the most important moment in the argument, [] is
not part of the argument in any way (Spivak 1999: 13n20). Spivak articulates a sweeping but very important question at this moment:
Was it in this rift that the seeds of the civilizing mission of todays universalist feminism
were sown? At best, it is a recoding and reterritorializing of the native-informant-aswoman-of-the-South, so that she can be part of the argument (ibid).

Put schematically, Spivak is wondering if one can read the trajectory of universalist feminism, which takes the Western European woman as its privileged subject, as an extension of the same Kantian textuality that forecloses
the aboriginal as its other and therefore is complicit with the discourse of
colonialism.22
In countering this discourse, postcolonial critique, even after its turn away
from the colonial elite, might have put the non-European subaltern man at
its discursive helm, but the subaltern woman remains forgotten even in that
construction of subalternity. This amounts to saying that at its secret heart, the
postcolonial text is always already summoned to its Other, the figure of the
subaltern woman, whom it has foreclosed. This figure, who is the constitutive
unconscious of the male subaltern subject, has been doubly displaced, first
by the colonial discourse and then by the discourse which tries to counter it.23
And therefore, as Spivak contends in her now canonical essay Can the
Subaltern Speak?, even within the effaced itinerary of the subaltern subject,
the track of sexual difference is doubly effaced (274).24 If in the contest of
colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow (ibid).
The text of postcolonial critique, therefore, must be re-structured like a
feminism, if it is to account for that Otherness which it has foreclosed even in
22

23

24

This is the point Spivak makes in her canonical Can the Subaltern Speak?, when she argues
that [t]he abolition of this rite [of sati] by the British has been generally understood [by the
colonial discourse] as a case of White men saving brown women from brown men. White
women from the nineteenth-century British Missionary Registers to Mary Daly have not
produced an alternative understanding (Spivak 1999: 287).
As well as by the text conditioned by globalization: the native informant's foreclosed perspective is located in woman's global subalternity, the computing of the great narrative of
history by the shifting currents of global imperialism seem more apposite (Spivak 1999:
89).
I refer to the essay Can the Subaltern Speak? (Spivak 1988) in its re-published and expanded version as inserted in the volume A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Spivak 2012). In
all cases the quotes, however, are part of the original version of the essay published in 1982,
if not indicated otherwise.

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imagining subalternity. One notes here that in the paradigmatic declaration

the subaltern cannot speak, Spivak also means that within the construal of
subalternity, the woman as subaltern cannot find her voice, and that her figuration opens it up to further critique, a feminist one this time. The postcolonial text cannot come to terms with its own constitution till it tries to understand this specific lacuna25 of its own architecture. At its edge, then, postcolonialism can be re-thought as a feminism.
But if the native informants figure is structurally never fully accessible,
how to represent the native informant as woman or name her in writing a new
text of postcolonialism as a feminism? Would the feminist project merely
consist in adding into the subaltern male subject (conceived as yet incomplete) the additional dimension of the gendered subaltern subject? Can
feminism be content with such an additive model?
In the next section, I try to figure such a feminism, which would be based
on a concept of feminist justice, through but beyond law-like structures,
situating the discussion around the figure of the (subaltern) woman. I want to
flag this as another of our key handles in reading deconstruction and postcolonial feminist justice together.

Through and Beyond Law: Toward a Feminist Justice

What might be the form of a feminist conception of ethicality, which can be
attentive to specific gendered moments arising in different historical and
cultural milieu and yet be able to retain the overwhelming generality expressed in the magisterial shorthand: justice? Thinking of a situated problematic might be a good place to start. Spivaks Can the Subaltern Speak?
famously revisits a nineteenth-century debate around the practice of sati
(widow-immolation), legally banned in colonial India in 1829. For our purpose, a schematic recapitulation of the main problematic would do: In the
case of sati, the womans voice is lost between two competing but interlocking statements, as was famously illustrated by Spivak. If one voice says: she
must be saved (or in a colonial setting, White men are saving brown women from brown men), the other claims: she wanted to die, one erasing the
agency of the woman, the other dubiously claiming agency in her supposed
embracing of death (Spivak 1999: 284287). The crucial impasse has been
25

Is this lacuna also not a necessary darker edge of a thought which remains always as its
un-thought, where the point is not to exhaust all darkness or unthought by hoping to reduce it to truth, but to stretch the ambits of thought to find darker and denser unthought. Thus in his critique of Martin Heidegger, Derrida quotes Heidegger: The more
original a thought [] the richer its Un-thought becomes. The Unthought is the highest gift
(Geschenk) that a thought can give (Heidegger cited in Derrida 1991: 13).

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this: how to criticize sati as a performance of a brutal rite and also retain
womans subjectivity and choice, and how to intervene (an act of delivering
justice) without objectifying the woman. It is here that the text confronts the
paradigmatic question, whether the subaltern (woman) can speak.
One notes here that the ability or the act of speaking is mentioned here
also as an expression of agency, which gestures toward a certain form of
assured subjectivity as the locus of speaking. But subjectivity, Spivak tells
us elsewhere quoting Michel Foucault, is not only contained in investigating
what is said or intended to be said and by whom, but also what position can
and must be occupied by any individual if he is to be the subject of it (Foucault cited in Spivak 1987: 242). This I-slot, as Spivak calls it, is a vacant
placeholder or a sign to be assigned (Spivak 1987: 243). This I-slot, left
by the subaltern woman, marks:
[the] case of suttee as exemplum of the woman-in-imperialism [which] would challenge
and deconstruct this opposition between subject (law) and object-of-knowledge (repression) and mark the place of disappearance with something other than silence and nonexistence, a violent aporia between subject and object status (Spivak 1999: 304).

This is a gap from where the woman can neither speak with full intention nor
be totally silent. Rather, she walks the cut, the cut that separates the two
sides of the double-bind in question.
In representing her, one faces the same double-bind. Representations
burden is to relentlessly plot the trail of her flight along the line of the work of
this cut. Representation as such must be incomplete definitionally, but still the
point is to go through the work of it, ethically.
Not representing is not a choice, since the kind of theory which would abstain totally from representation, based on the argument that it can never be
total, would actually run the risk of surreptitiously re-inserting the fully
knowing/speaking subject into the equation.
Derrida, in Force of Law, cautions that left to itself, the idea of the incalculable and of justice can very well be reappropriated by the most perverse calculation, and so the incalculable [] requires us to calculate
(1992: 28). If the fixity of a determined scheme or law cannot reach the
fullness of justice, ever, this is a commonplace that every written law works
with. But law can never lose its view of the transcendence of justice. As
Spivak reminds us, justice is disclosed in law, even at its own effacement
(Spivak 1999: 427).
We can understand the ethical imports of re-presentation within this
frame. Each singular moment of representation, even if it fails, must always
work with and for an unattainable just representation. [T]he intellectuals
solution is not to abstain from representation, writes Spivak, thus emphasizing the indispensability of a law-like structure (Spivak 1999: 272).
One must be attentive here to the fact that in re-presenting specificities of
gender, one also has to take recourse to generalities which would, again,

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leave certain other specificities unassimilated. When one thinks of interrupting the universal shorthand woman with a category like the third world
woman, then the latter also works as a generality reducing different particular instances of that shorthand third world woman. This is not to say that
one does not need law or what I have tried to call the law-like structures,
but one needs to be aware of law-making as an ongoing process. This is a
work which is not simply mechanical or repetitive. Rather, it can be seen as a
machine-like repetition capable of adapting itself to and producing new
events. Therefore, in its very conception, the machinery of law houses a double-bind, that of the machine and of the event, repetition and mutation or
change. The subject of law cannot fully represent the living, tarrying figures
who go through the experiences of everyday, and yet those experiences themselves remain subject to certain laws of representation (to self and to others).
This gap-within is also described by Spivak as the difference between the
woman and woman: the name and, as it were, the thing, the phenomenal
essence (Spivak 1993: 137). Spivak draws a parallel between this difference
and Foucaults use of power. Foucault makes a short circuit between power
the name and power the thing, she argues (ibid: 138).
The feminist, too, needs to make this leap, while remaining aware of the
obligatory reduction. It is crucial that one consistently takes the particularities
into consideration, even as law-making cannot forget that ultimately its work
is the work of appropriating the particular for the general or for the
name, and therefore one of abstraction and reduction, which is nonetheless
necessary. If a commonsensical notion of justice is about taking all the real
interruptions and irregularities into a pre-figured matrix of calculation, then a
feminist justice in line with deconstruction would be about staying with this
work, knowing the impossibility of ever reaching any fullness of justice or,
in other words, full representation of the phenomenal in the constituted gendered subject of law or in the name: woman. Therefore it is a delicate
distance that this deconstructive justice takes from any teleological notion of
justice, which is indicated by Spivak as also being the difference between
right to be claimed and [double-] bind to be watched (ibid: 124).
Philosophically put, this double-bind works between what Spivak calls the
subject of ontology/epistemology, prompted by the question who acts?,
and the subject of ethico-politics, a grammar of how one must act. This needs
a bit of unpacking. The subject of ethico-politics is a figure to which
Spivak constantly returns, mostly to underline the short-circuit through which
it comes into being, cutting itself off from what she calls the subject of ontology/epistemology.
If one tries to compare and measure diverse specificities of a gendered
situation and tries to put them into a structure, then one must think of a reference frame, with respect to which different moments, bodies, or experiences
can be measured and compared. For Spivak, in deciding about this reference-

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frame, one takes the all-important ethical step, which, as if comes before any
conception of the proper, or of the normal, or of the lawful. Unlike the subject
of ontology, the subject of ethico-politics must already have such a frame in
mind and therefore go through a certain acknowledged ontologization. Spivak
is only making the point that this minimal foothold of practice cannot be
called ethical unless one is aware of its rootedness in a certain prepropriative26. Since phallogocentric27 law or any other patriarchal structure
works with a notion of the proper (a certain originary asexual maleness), a
feminist ethics must persist with a critique of any such itinerary of the proper.
And yet, even to think the feminist subject of ethico-politics, it must resort to
a name such as that of the woman-subject. It is in the materiality and essence
contained in a definite name or subject predication that feminism gets tied
to an ontologization.
Spivak urges, however, that to be at a remove from male essentialisms,
feminism must be aware of this leap or short-circuit that is made between
ontology and ethico-politics each time one tries to think feminist practice.
Post-modernism questions the unified subject of action/decision or the subject
of law, and yet, as Jacqueline Rose puts it:
only the concept of a subjectivity at odds with itself gives back to women the right to an
impasse at the point of sexual identity, with no nostalgia whatsoever for its possible or
future integration into a norm (cited in Spivak 1993: 124).

One may read norm as law here. Spivak quotes Rose affirmatively, but
glosses her by adding that one must also be careful to account for the irreducible gap that constitutes the right to a sexual identity but is ignored in
giving a materiality to this right (ibid: 114). Any feminist discourse that
covers over this gap runs the risk of foreclosing the other woman, in effect
stratifying the political subject. Is it also not the double-bind of transnational
justice, where such a thought must remain attentive both to the general and to
the particular? Judith Butler in a similar vein reminds us that to take a finished subjectivity as the starting point of a feminist politics would be to defer the question of the political construction and regulation of the subject
26
27

Proposing the pre-propriative, in this sense, is a theoretically necessary step which thinks of
an undifferentiated past to critique any violent difference that marks the present.
Phallogocentrism is the Derridian notion that unites the Lacanian notion of phallocentrism (centrality of the phallus in the signifying chain which structures the symbolic, where
by a short circuit the male sexual organ always already takes the position of the phallus)
with the concept of logocentrism (the privileging of logos or voice in philosophical or
indeed any discourse woven around presence). Judith Butler reminds us how this key
concept can be put to use in understanding any binary opposition where one term is subordinated to the other, for example in colonial discourse. The effort to include Other cultures as variegated amplifications of a global phallogocentrism constitutes an appropriative
act that risks a repetition of the self-aggrandizing gesture of phallogocentrism, colonizing
under the sign of the same those differences that might otherwise call that totalizing concept
into question (Butler 1999: 18).

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itself (in Contingent Foundations by Butler in Benhabib 1995: 47). I propose that the ethico-political cannot claim a complete separation from the
ontological-epistemological, and in a certain way this ensures its very production and survival, just as subjectivity cannot be thought based purely on the
ethical. This is a thread we must leave in suspense within the limits of the
present paper.
It is difficult to trace even a partial profile of Spivaks various approaches
to the double-bind of feminist ethico-politics. But I would still like to mention
the related distinction she makes in many places between the feminist scholar
who represents, and the women to be represented. The postcolonial feminist scholar, for Spivak, can be that constituted subject that forgets the other
in its haste to claim otherness (Spivak 2008: 176). The scholar is to be attentive to the fact that as a scholar she would always have an unassailable distance from the real, phenomenal women conceived as the Other. On another
register, this same distance would also work between her scholarly self and
her own experiences, which cannot be available to her without mediation.
Therefore, while representing the Other (or herself as Other) she has to take
recourse to a normative structure and to shorthands or names. It is from this
conviction of an ever inadequate but necessary calculation that Spivak sounds
the following program:
Incanting to ourselves all the perils of transforming a name to a referent making a
catechism, in other words, of catachresis let us none the less name (as) woman that
disenfranchised woman whom we strictly, historically, geopolitically cannot imagine, as a
literal referent, [just like] Subaltern is the name of the social space that is different from
the classed social circuit, the track of hegemony (emphasis in original, Spivak 1993: 139).

But this is not merely about naming the Other: woman from a distance,
because that would run the risk of construing an arrogant scholarly subject
too sure of her power of representation. It is instead also about recognizing a
division within. Spivak proposes, Let us divide the name of woman so that
we see ourselves as naming, not merely named, with the im-possible hope
that the possibility for the name will be finally erased (Spivak 1993: 139
140). It is this burden of inadequate re-presentation that the scholar as well as
the calculative paradigm of law must carry. The subaltern cannot speak without mediation, neither can anyone. Speech itself works like a law, which, for
its production, needs both the subjective intention and a prior given structure of mechanicity. Speech works therefore between the event and the
machine, in other words, between the newness of intention and the repetition of the old, a production that Derrida has termed iterability.28 A fem28

Iterability, according to Derrida, includes both difference and identity (vis--vis the
previous moment) in the act of repetition, which is best exemplified in the working of language, but by no means restricted to it. For more on this notion and an elaborate discussion
of the production of speech and the limits of intentionality from the side of deconstruction,
see Derrida 1988.

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inist justice can be that im-possible horizon before which the calculations of
law-like, iterable structures must go on in thinking a politics or a constitution
of the name woman. Since this name is never to be thought as fixed, but
always in production, in the making, as a work of calculation, feminist justice
is both to be revealed and effaced at each moment of such a calculation.

A Situated Problem: Staging the Ethical

I have already indicated the dilemmas involved in the recent feminist rereadings of the nineteenth century debates around the legal abolition of the
rite of satid ha (widow immolation) in its Spivakian articulation. The crucial
impasse in the feminist re-readings of this nineteenth century archive29 has
been this: how to retain the agency and subjectivity of the tortured woman
without giving in to the pro-sati motto she (voluntarily) wanted to die; how
to retain both (the critique of ritual burning and a right to choose death in
specific instances) without sliding into a simple pro-life position; how to represent these moments and how to intervene. As Rajeswari Sunder Rajan
astutely notes, if one subscribes to a liberal ideology of the freedom of
choice one must sometimes grant sati the dubious status of existential suicide (1995: 18); hence, the perils of being uncritically either pro-life or
pro-choice especially in view of the contemporary feminist debates both in
and outside India.
The clue to this double-bind facing the postcolonial feminist critique is
implicit in Lata Manis historical analysis as well. The 1813 circular, issued
by the East India Company, based on the interpretations of scriptures by the
court-pundits, could come up with a category like the willing sati or the
subject willing ritualistic death. As Mani reminds, the 1813 circular []
defined sati as legal providing it met certain criteria, chief among which was
that it be voluntary (1998: 28). The circular effectively could stage a possible scene where (a representative of) the law would play witness to each
performance of satid ha legally defining the performance as voluntary suicide by the widow. But this scene can be deconstructed with the question of
power, since the production of individual choice in the historical context is
always already determined by the sanctions of a patriarchal-textual-legal
complex. That, however, does not nullify the double-bind that the feminist
scholar faces, for it can be argued that any production of individual choice
might work only due to and (at the same time) instead of some form of
authoritative sanction. Can feminism afford to do away with the minute foot-

29

For a more detailed analysis, see also Sunder Rajan 1995 and Mani 1998.

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hold of subjective choice which may work in spite of the sanctions of power and law?
Even after painstakingly reconstructing30 the historico-textual context of
power and (patriarchal-legal-colonial) sanctions which condition and produce the consent of the willing sati, Spivak is unwilling to fully write off
the presence of the womans intentionality. Contrary to the commonsensical
interpretation of the oft-quoted phrase the subaltern cannot speak, Spivak
does not reject the intention of the widow fully and instead tries to stage it,
testing its im-possibility, even if Mani or Sunder Rajan would like to fully
ignore intentionality as unreliable (matter of conjecture, says Sunder Rajan
1995: 18) or fully conditioned by power (Mani 1998: 97).31 Is this rejection a
result of an all-or-nothing logic, where intention is taken to be validated
only by full presence of articulation with no distance between the scholar and
the one whom she represents, a successful ventriloquism of sorts? Mani, dealing with [e]yewitness accounts of widow immolation, maintains that testimonials of women might call Spivaks conclusion that the subaltern cannot speak [...] into question (Mani 1998: 160). But this critique seems to
miss the point that Spivak is not merely talking about unavailability of archival evidence, but also about the ontological questions of representation, subjectivity, and speech as such. For her, [s]uch a testimony would [still] not be
ideology-transcendent or fully subjective (Spivak, cited in Mani 1998:
158). Although Mani mentions this, she fails to read it. Fully is the keyword here; Spivak is neither negating the intention of the (willing) sati
fully, nor is she reading any speech as fully representative of a subjects
intention.
The staging of the problem of intentionality is one of the most important
elements of Spivaks work, an element which is often missed.32 A feminist
30

31

32

It is important to acknowledge that Spivak is not merely dealing in what is sometimes

derisively called abstract theory. Sumit Sarkar recognizes Spivaks work in this historical
reconstruction of the figure of the sati, and Spivak quotes him in gratitude in a footnote to
an extended later version of the piece: I remain grateful to Professor Sarkar for noticing
that Manis article stands in marked contrast to the much more substantive discussion of
pre-colonial and colonial discourses on sati in Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?
(Spivak 1999: 289n137).
For another influential but not very rigorous critique of Spivak, see Benita Parry (1987,
1997). Parry thinks locating histories of struggle in the third world might indicate something very different from the epistemic wasteland Spivak implies (Parry 1997: 10n27).
Spivak replies to Parry (1999: 190191, 217n33). In short, Parry misses the literary-philosophical thrust of Spivaks work, and her critique is too dependent on assumptions which
use categories shot with presence uncritically. It is very difficult, in my consideration, to
formulate an internal critique of the Spivakian text, since it is very aware of the limits within which it works.
A detailed treatment of her nuanced handling of this problem would be outside the scope of
this paper. An indication of a philosophical as well as political solution to the problem of
intentionality in the context of feminist politics is provided by Spivak in the much dis-

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notion of justice must work in the way of gathering the fragments that an
intending, fully willed subjectivity misses. However, the feminist scholar
must work within a closure where political action is possible only by claiming
intentionality and agency. This precarious positioning of the feminist critique
has a similarity to the placement of the postcolonial critique.
The similarity lies in the fact that the postcolonial scholar must work with
received metaphors, which are European in their historical constitution.
But, as Spivak argues, the concept-metaphors of Enlightenment are not to be
refused as European, but to be reclaimed as ones own, realizing nothing
can be either fully European or fully non-European in this present that
is given, a time which is also irrecoverably postcolonial. The feminist, likewise, must try to fix a time that is of the man, and yet, she is to work within
the limiting conditions of this present time, claiming that its pieces cannot be
fully intended by the patriarchy. The crucial question remains, how to put
to work those supplements of the structure of intentionality which do not fall
within the authority of the intending (male) subject.

Conclusion: Feminism of the Singular?

This essay is placed in the intersection between deconstruction and postcolonial feminist critique, both seen from the vantage point of several consistent
lines of argument as they occur in the corpus of Spivak. The essay discusses,
in two related registers, some central threads in the Spivakian strategy of
reading a moment in the corpus of Immanuel Kant and of ab-using that texture in understanding a concept of postcolonial feminist justice. One is
Spivaks reading of a moment in the Enlightenment textuality that retrieves
the figure of the native informant, as a mark of a violent foreclosure that the
text performs in constructing and securing its central subject who is rationally
tuned. The other, however, is the geographical re-writing of these marginal
figures as located in the borders of colonial expansion, which constitutes the
man of reason as the European man. This insight, when applied in reading the
otherwise philosophical text arguing for a centrality of reason, forces a deconstructive re-view of the text. This deconstruction of the Enlightenment is
in tandem with a postcolonialism. Spivak, however, does not stop here and
follows up her deconstruction of the Eurocentric text with a similar undoing
of the postcolonial critique, which confirms that the eruption of the native
informant, as a supplement that the text needs and yet disavows, persists in

cussed example of a young womans suicide in colonial Bengal inserted at the end of Can
the Subaltern Speak? (cf. Spivak 1999).

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the postcolonial text as well, this time as the foreclosed figure of the subaltern
woman. The subaltern woman is therefore twice effaced.
This insistence in staying with the work of deconstruction, even at the cost
of undoing her own disciplinary-political location, positions Spivak not merely outside the average paradigm of postcolonial fabric, but also configures a
deconstruction which is more open to re-thinking reading as practice.
Likewise, Spivaks deconstruction of the figure of the postcolonial feminist
interrogates the distance that remains between her subjectivity and the figurations of those Other women whom she represents, where this distance must be
kept in view to keep the ever-incompleteness of a feminist justice alive.
This justice is incalculable, but must be approached through calculations
which take into account the everydayness of phenomenal bodies, lives, and
experiences. Incalculability also defines the figure of the native informant as
woman, who cannot be named without reducing her alterity, and yet, she must
be named if she is to be made fit for legal rights and therefore subject of law.
Spivak only emphasizes that in this inevitable construal of feminist subjectivity as a stasis, one cannot afford to forget that the name is also a place,
which one needs ultimately to dis-place.
But intentionality, essence, or placement is not to be written off altogether, since that would make politics impossible, if one proposes that the
political needs at least a minute foothold of intentionality and subjectivity.
Spivaks work interrogates this double-bind, which places feminist ethics
between intentionality and its deconstructing supplement, intentionalitys fold
unto itself. How to put that lingering surplus to work, which is both of the
intention and yet beyond it and undoes it? If intentionality desiring full selfpresence is structurally of the man, then what is that excess which never
lets it achieve that fullness? These are the critical questions that the Spivakian
corpus raises.
The mapping of a postcolonial feminism in alliance with deconstruction is
therefore not a wholesale rejection of that Enlightenment textuality which
puts reason at its center. When one displaces the European man from the
center of such a text, one does not simply throw the text away, but learns from
its limitations. A specific moment of reason too sure of itself and invested in a
geographically positioned male subject is deconstructed, but this deconstruction itself depends on the assumption that reason as such cannot be ignored
altogether in thinking politics or textual productions. Spivak argues for a
reason more attentive to its own incomplete nature before the eruption of
specific gendered moments, and more critical of the power structures that set
it to work. This also calls for a notion of feminist justice which is transnational and yet does not reduce singularities of gendered events in its haste to act.
Spivaks arguments, I contend, have the possibility of re-articulating even the
constitution of being human, and therefore human rights, in terms of a feminism of the singular, an effort which undoes the weave of Enlightenment, but

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follows its inscriptions intimately. Can this be a starting point of an impossible feminist politics based on law-like calculations and yet pointing
beyond, toward a feminist justice? I must leave these questions in suspense
within the limits of the present piece.

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A Modest Proposal for Transnational Justice and

Political Responsibility
A Proposal for Transnational Justice and Political Responsibility

Jorma Heier
Within liberal conceptions of justice, to do nothing in the face of harm-doing,
to not right wrongs is to commit a further wrong (Gosepath 2004, Pogge
2005, Rawls 1999). This is due to the prescriptive character of the judgment
unjust. The verdict that a practice or action is unjust entails recognizing that
it is principally human-made and therefore can be remedied, and that someone has the responsibility of righting these wrongs. Curiously enough, even as
there are few harms in Euro_American1 history as massive as colonialism,
attempts at righting these wrongs, even in the feeble forms of symbolic
recognition, have been woefully inadequate (Spivak 2004).
Colonial exploitation, violence, and domination are injustices that span
across a multitude of political entities, people, and centuries. In my view, a
postcolonial feminist account of justice that seeks to right historical wrongs
needs to be transnational in two ways: Firstly, it needs to move beyond a
territorialized understanding of justice that limits the commitment to justice
within the nation-state. Secondly, it must be able to think beyond the nation in
terms of shared political institutions as the outcome of shared responsibilities,
rather than its precondition. Such an account must also consider that at the
outset of the colonial project, many European political entities were still in
the process of nation-building. The responsibility to right colonial wrongs
cannot, therefore, be framed as a question of successor regimes on the level of
nation-states alone. Likewise, insofar as colonialism has been an intergenerational project, it makes no sense to assign responsibility to individuals. Rather, any theory of transnational justice must address the structural conditions
that form the basis and background of colonial harms, for they do not cease
when individual harm-doers decease. Like any approach centered around a
key norm, a postcolonial feminist account of transnational justice must be
mindful of the twofold character of justice: Many of the harms that constitute
1

I use the understrike character (_) to bring into relief two ideas: Dipesh Chakrabartys
suggestion that Europe and America be understood as hyperreal terms [] that [] refer
to certain figures of imagination whose geographical referents remain somewhat indeterminate (Chakrabarty 2000: 27); and the erstwhile marginality of Europe, a formerly peripheral region on the outskirts of the Asian landmass, at the far edge of the trade routes, remote
from the great civilizations of Islam and the East which was able in a century or two to
achieve global and economic dominance (Mills 1999: 33). This history undercuts the claim
to European-American exceptionalism. Thirdly, the understrike character indicates the contributions to world history by the colonized that the colonial gaze has written out of history.

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neocolonialism have been, and still are, legitimized in the name of disseminating justice and doing good in the world (Dhawan 2011). An analysis of
processes of justice must therefore consider the simultaneous enabling and
disempowering function of norms like justice (ibid: 266) by asking who is
counted as the subjects of justice, and who is constructed as justices Other.2
Onora ONeill (1991) argues that none of the dominant conceptions of
justice communitarianism, consequentialism, rights-based accounts, Kantian
universal obligations, and libertarianism provide an adequate framework for
conceptualizing transnational justice.
According to ONeill, the communitarianism concept of justice is when
the authority of any [discourse on justice, J. H.] is anchored within a specific
tradition or community (1991: 280). But this leads to the problematic assumption that the largest sphere of justice is the political community. Since
concepts of justice are not universally shared, the application of international
justice is illusory (ibid: 281). Consequentialism sees injustice in the global
distribution of resources. Just acts are those that maximize global [] wellbeing (ibid: 283). But since it is impossible to foresee all options and causes
on a global scale, and thus determine the action generating maximum justice,
consequentialism is a non-starter (ibid). Moreover, maximizing global wellbeing may mean using some lives to produce benefits for others (ibid: 284),
which permits global injustice to continue. Rights-based accounts conceive
justice as an assignable, [] claimable [] and enforceable right, which
only the claimant can waive (ibid: 288). Bearers of rights are active demanders and not passive receivers of charity. But rights also make demands on
others, which is to say, right-holders ultimately remain passive receivers.
Injustice for which there is no corresponding right remains unallocated (ibid:
285288). In the view of Kantian obligations, injustice is a matter of adopting fundamental principles which not all can adopt (ibid: 297). By contrast,
justice is a matter of not basing actions, lives or institutions on principles
that cannot be universally shared (ibid). According to ONeill, the problem
with this approach is that it does not yield algorithms either for identifying
principles of justice, or for their implementation (ibid: 304). For libertarianism, all interferences with individuals movement, work and trade [is unjust
as it] violates liberty (ibid: 290). But as the central tenet of libertarian justice
is do not redistribute (ibid: 298), not being allowed to redistribute is an
issue given the current colonial violations of economic rights (ibid: 291). In
examining the implicit boundaries of justice underlying these conceptions,
ONeill identifies a failure to consider three prerequisites: the plurality of
actors, shared habitation of one world and the mutual vulnerability of actors
(ONeill 1993: 15, translation J. H.).
2

I thank Nikita Dhawan for her helpful comments.

A Proposal for Transnational Justice and Political Responsibility

179

Instead of letting the story of transnational justice end with these disheartening findings, I suggest a shift of emphasis, in which the focus on theoretical
approaches to transnational justice is moved to existent legal and political
practices of justice already operating across nation-state borders. The set of
practices I have in mind is known as transitional justice, which in the last two
decades has led to a significant rise in transnational practices of justice. This
contradicts ONeills claims. Transitional justice approaches seek to promote
transition from totalitarian regimes or divided political entities to more just,
democratic, and peaceful societies. Supported by institutions that operate
transnationally such as the International Criminal Court, the United Nations
Security Council, and the European Court of Human Rights, transitional justice mechanisms have done much to aid people and countries as they come to
terms with past genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, or crimes of
aggression.
Given that nearly seventy post_colonial3 countries are signatories of the
Rome Statute the central treaty enabling transitional justice and given that
genocide, crimes against humanity, and crimes of aggression are integral parts
of colonialism, European states should be brought to trial before the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity.4 But the reality is
quite different: the ICC attends to cases of violation committed by instead
of forced upon post_colonial nations. For instance, in Uganda, East Timor,
and the Democratic Republic of Congo the ICC has heard charges of sexual
slavery, inhumane acts, willful killings, pillaging, attacks against civilian
populations, destruction of property, rape, murder, and occupation. This list
of crimes committed by agents from the post_colonies resembles the very acts
committed by colonial agents during colonization.5
3

Here the understrike (_) is meant to denote the difference between former colonies such
as South Africa, which have formally been given independence, and colonies such as Australia, which have never even been formally made independent.
Of course, the Rome Statute states that no crime can be brought to trial that was committed
before its ratification, in 2002. In a later section, I will argue that omitting the era of colonialism from the jurisdiction of transitional justice is itself a symptom of the biased moral
baseline that allows the injustices of colonialism to go unremedied.
As these instances show, the violent conflicts for which the ICC seeks to dispense justice
are colonial legacies. Uganda, East Timor, and the Democratic Republic of Congo have in
common that the colonizers broke up the local structures that defined and organized political space and arbitrarily redrew the political boundaries, forcing different political entities
into single territories. In Uganda and the DR Congo, colonial rule politically favored members of one colonized group of the established nation-state over another. After the formal
decolonization, armed groups organized along ethnic lines (DR Congo), former kingdoms
(Uganda), or Christian-syncretism (Lords Resistance Army in Uganda) and began a civil
war (DR Congo), respectively secession war (Uganda), against the post_colonial government. In East Timor, the Indonesian National Army and pro-Indonesian Timorese militias
formed an armed resistance campaign against East Timors independence. The conflicts in
east Timor and DR Congo must be read in the context of Cold War proxy wars in the
post_colonies, as the Indonesian government, supported by the Western axis, sought to de-

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This recurring pattern of asymmetry suggests that the transitional justice

project is part of the Euro_American toolkit, whereby some nation-states are
always righting wrongs, while others are always committing them, with the
line of demarcation running along the global North-South divide. Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak identifies a similar imbalance in the manifest destiny
claimed by particular groups in the global North to dispense justice and to
right wrongs that proliferate with unsurprising regularity among the notorious receivers of justice in the global South (2004: 530).
The point of departure for this essay is my concern about the lack of efforts to right colonial wrongs by international institutions that spearhead transitional justice mechanisms. This essay seeks to explore the conceptual obstacles that prevent transnational justice mechanisms from attending to the harms
of colonialism. Using ONeills three prerequisites of justice as a point of
reference, I draw on post_colonial feminist critique to outline a transnational
justice approach that addresses the historical nature of structural injustices. In
the third section, I argue that privileged irresponsibility and epistemic ignorance are integral elements of any account of responsibility conducive to
transnational justice. The concluding section addresses the question of the
role played by transnational civil society and international law in enforcing
transnational justice.

Post_colonial Feminist Contestations of Transnational Justice

At first glance, ONeills three prerequisites for thinking about transnational
justice appear useful. On closer scrutiny, however, each is problematic from a
post_colonial feminist standpoint. Let me begin with the first, recognizing a
plurality of actors. I agree with ONeill that pluralism is an important element
in the attempt to decolonize dominant conceptions of justice that universalize
European ideas and experiences. But pluralism can nevertheless have essentializing effects as well. For instance, the asymmetrical geopolitical application of transitional justice derives in part from essentialist representations of
cultural plurality, which reinforce the fixed opposition between those who
dispense justice (the Euro_Americans) and those who receive it (post_colonial subjects). Interestingly, the wrongs that Euro_Americans seek to right are
projected outside the borders of Euro_America, which supposedly has no
need for the application of transitional justice within its territory. This discrepancy begs explanation. My hypothesis is that the harms committed in the
feat the possible founding of an East Timorese communist state within the Indonesian archipelago, whereas the Democratic Republic of Congo was a central site of the Cold War
conflict between the USA and the USSR.

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181

post_colonies are considered to be an outcome of cultural or ethnic idiosyncrasies, which erases the Euro-America contribution to the emergence of the
conflict. This view is shared by agents of transitional justice and reflected in
the proceedings of the ICC. The transitional justice needed in these former
colonies affirms their status as justices Other, incapable of establishing just
conditions on their own, dependent on Euro_America to make things right.
Spivak explains that the discontinuity between dispensers and receivers entails a kind of social Darwinism the fittest must shoulder the burden of
righting the wrongs of the unfit and the possibility of an alibi [for imperialistic intervention, J. H.] (Spivak 2004: 524). What at first seems to be progressive politics of recognizing plurality reinstates the racist and imperialistic
notion of the white mans burden, which seeks to correct the perceived
shortcomings in post_colonial countries by reinforcing Enlightenment standards of civilization. For all the emphasis on plurality, this approach ignores
the underlying divides between North and South, between civilized bringers
of justice and uncivilized receivers of justice, and with them the attendant
epistemic violence that constitutes the colonized subject as justices Other. I
will return to the issue of epistemic violence in the third section of my essay
(cf. Narayan 1955: 136). In my view, a post_colonial feminist account of
transnational justice must understand notions of plurality and differences as
contested, and examine who holds the power to define these differences and
their practical implications.
The second of ONeills prerequisites is shared habitation of the same
world. In Inclusion and Democracy, Iris Marion Young rightly argues that
responsibility for justice cannot be limited to nation-states because a) nationstates arbitrarily exclude some people from making justice claims; b) resources are unevenly distributed across the globe; and c) environmental issues
and economic relations do not stop at nation-state borders. In this sense, of
course, the idea of a shared habitation is a useful representation of global
circumstances. Yet, questions of justice between colonizing and colonized
political entities are infrequently formulated in this language. As Spivak observes, a process of worlding (Spivak 1985: 235) generates the naturalizing,
imperialist notions of the First World and the Third World. The inhabitants of the First World understand themselves as exempt from responsibility for injustice that resulted from colonialism. Moreover, justice is not a
property distributed evenly across a shared world. As the black folk aphorism
says, When white people say Justice, they mean Just us (Mills 1999).
Injustice is not a temporary aberrance, but the result of a flawed and biased
moral status quo (cf. Walker 2010). Through structures of power and dominance, some groups of people are excluded from a shared world of justice.
Hence, a post_colonial feminist account of transnational justice must be
mindful of what is actually shared, and how access to the agency of
post_colonial subjects is restricted.

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Finally, I turn to the third prerequisite: mutual vulnerability, which I take

to be a fundamental and unproblematic human fact, namely, humans are fundamentally dependent on other human beings and hence vulnerable to the
actions of others. But if vulnerability is framed as a basic anthropological
fact, then it can neither be changed, nor can responsibility be assigned for the
production of vulnerabilities. In reality, structural relations of power and
domination render differently situated people differently vulnerable. Whole
groups of people benefit economically and socially from structures that leave
entire groups of people structurally vulnerable to exploitation and oppression.
To frame vulnerability as an equally shared human condition neglects the fact
that Euro_Americans benefit from the greater political and economic vulnerability of post_colonial subjects, and reduce the vulnerability of their own
population by exploiting the post_colonies. Assuming an equally shared global vulnerability makes it impossible to assign responsibility for socio-political
structures that render some more vulnerable than others, and prevents collective action from correcting those structures. A post_colonial feminist concept
of transnational justice must take into account the political structures that
produce unequally shared vulnerabilities.

Responsibility to Transnational Justice

From my critique of ONeills prerequisites, I identify three reasons that
speak for a geopolitically asymmetric implementation of transnational justice:
a) Europe and Americas insufficient sense of responsibility for the harm
caused by colonialism; b) the general disregard for structural injustice; c)
epistemic ignorance and violence. I now want to situate these considerations
in a post_colonial feminist account of transnational justice. In Responsibility
and Global Justice, Iris Marion Young proposes a social connection model in
which responsibility for justice across nation-states is understood to emerge
from socio-structural relationships. Focusing on the sweatshop production in
the global apparel industry, Young presents an instance of structural injustice
that requires one to think about what it means to take responsibility for
transnational injustice (Young 2011: 124125). Youngs model uncovers the
social connections that underlie global sweatshop production (2006: 105) and
examines the underlying conditions that sustain them (ibid: 120). Young
criticizes the prevailing liability framework for assigning responsibility only
to persons whose actions are linked directly and linearly to harm. Structural
injustice cannot be traced back to the single deeds of specific individuals
alone; one needs a concept of responsibility that is able to grasp actors contributions to structural processes:

A Proposal for Transnational Justice and Political Responsibility

183

The social connection model of responsibility says that individuals bear responsibility for
structural injustice because they contribute by their actions to the processes that produce
unjust outcomes. Our responsibility derives from belonging together with others in a system of interdependent processes of cooperation and competition through which we seek
benefits and aim to realize projects (Young 2011: 105).

Like ONeill, Young argues that actors enter into practical obligations of
justice to all persons from whose actions they benefit. Insofar as ones actions
depend in part on the actions of others, one needs a generalized understanding
of what others are going to do a common framework of the practices and
institutions that both enable and limit our actions. In a world characterized by
globalized markets, interdependent states, and rapid and dense communication (Young 2006: 106), the range of actors that influence the conduct of
ones actions is often global in scope. This is especially true in the case of
sweatshop production. But the very structure of the global apparel industry
diffuses the responsibility for working conditions in sweatshops. Here,
awareness of the social connections alone does not suffice for the enormity of
the transnational task: holding garment subcontractors, managers, and multinational companies responsible. Enlisting consumers and workers around the
world in the fight against exploitative practices is imperative, but as Young
rightly argues, one needs to judge the circumstances that inform these relationships and interactions (ibid: 120). The social connection model seeks to
bring [] into question precisely the background conditions that ascriptions of blame or
fault assume as normal. When we judge that structural injustice exists, we mean that at
least some of the normal and accepted background conditions of action are not morally
acceptable (Young 2006: 120).

A central task for transnational justice from the standpoint of post_colonial

feminism is to analyze the hegemonic conditions that sustain colonialism and
imperialism, and in this way render visible the suffering inflicted on the
powerless by the status quo (Narayan 1995: 138). According to Margaret
Urban Walker, such suffering produces a faulty moral baseline (Walker
2007a) a non-temporary aberrance of a just status quo that makes possible
structural moral harm:
Those who have suffered violence, gross indignity, and grave disrespect have learned that
standards of decent treatment did not include them, or that others deemed themselves
conveniently exempt from accountability to them [] (Walker 2010: 4243).

Conversely, the European colonial project would have been considered an

injustice had the victims been fellow Europeans,6 or persons whose moral
6

Drawing on Edward Said, Irish Studies have highlighted that intra-European colonialism
was not considered a wrong on all accounts. My inversion of the argument is thus not as
uniform as the statement might imply. Scholars such as Terry Eagleton (1988) and David
Lloyd (1993) have suggested understanding the Irish-British history as one of British expansion colonialism.

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standing the colonizers acknowledged (cf. ONeill 1991: 277). Here lies a
central challenge to the post_colonial feminist account of transnational justice: the privileged are protected by the biased moral baseline that excludes
the colonized from protection.
Judgment of the background conditions can help to understand injustice as
the consequence of an unjust status quo rather than of a temporary departure
from an otherwise just set of global structures and moral standards. Yet, as
Uma Narayan observes, attending to social connections alone does not guarantee that the relationships are non-hegemonic. When colonizers and colonized shared a relationship, they had very different accounts of what the
relationship and its interdependencies amounted to, and whether they were
morally justified (Narayan 1995: 136). Structural relationships between
powerful and powerless groups are grounded on ideologies that perpetuate the
hierarchy, which is why post_colonial feminist accounts of justice need to
address the ideological functions served by moral theories (ibid: 136).
Because Young does not frame the sweatshop example as a colonial harm,
Youngs considerations neglect the epistemic dimension of structural injustice, or what Charles W. Mills calls epistemic ignorance (1999), and the
role that ideology plays therein. Although Young notes that the dominant
frameworks of justice usually do not think it obligatory or even fair to ask of
people to change their normal habits and practices or sacrifice a great deal of
what reasonable people regard as their normal self-interest for the sake of
furthering justice (2011: 123124), Youngs social-connection model does
not provide the conceptual tools necessary to challenge the normal habits,
the normal interests and the epistemic ignorance that allows for privileged
irresponsibility (Tronto 1993: 121). Nor does it grapple with the ambivalent
character of responsibility in a post_colonial context. As Narayan stresses:
the white mans burden [] included both a sense of obligation to confer the benefits of
western civilization on the colonized, and a sense of being burdened with the responsibility
for doing so (Narayan 1995: 135).

A post_colonial feminist concept of transnational justice needs a concept of

responsibility that is simultaneously sensitive to epistemic ignorance as well
as to privileged irresponsibility.

Making Privileged Irresponsibility and Epistemic Ignorance

Matter in Conceptualizing Responsibility
Youngs demand for the judgment of background conditions leads one back
to the faulty moral baseline that makes colonialism possible to begin with, in

A Proposal for Transnational Justice and Political Responsibility

185

which the privileged can ignore the harm their normal interests cause to the
colonized. How does this epistemic ignorance operate?
In Joan Trontos analysis, part of being privileged means having the opportunity simply to ignore certain forms of hardship that they do not face
(Tronto 1993: 120121). People in the global North who claim they do not
know that their actions, or the actions of their governments, and of their globally operating corporations contribute to the structural vulnerabilities of the
disadvantaged use this privileged ignorance for the privileges of ignorance.
Aside from conferring political, social, and economic benefits, this ignorance
shields the privileged from the demands that the less privileged be treated
justly. On the one hand, it absents colonizers from the responsibility-setting
process; on the other, it prevents the colonized from demanding that colonizers take responsibility for righting the injustices of colonialism (cf. Tronto
2013: 63).
Millss study of the epistemic preconditions of what Mills calls the racial
contract shows that privileged ignorance runs deeper than the inability to see
harm one has no direct connection to. The racial contract is an
agreement to misinterpret the world [] Thus in effect [] the Racial Contract prescribes
for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance [] producing
the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they
themselves have made. Part of what it means to be constructed as white [] part of what
it requires to achieve Whiteness, successfully [] is a cognitive model that precludes selftransparency and genuine understanding of social realities (Mills 1997: 18, italics in original).

In the context of colonial injustice, this agreement to misinterpret the world

might be thought of as a neo_colonial contract. Though not all Europeans are
signatories, all Europeans benefit from it in their most basic everyday activities. Their position of privilege can be maintained only by remaining ignorant
to the injustice of colonialism. Epistemic ignorance results not from nescience
but from an active process of misinterpretation that turns the colonized into
the Others of justice. On a deeper, structural level, this misinterpretation gives
rise to global political institutions that privilege certain social groups and
produce biased moral epistemology (cf. Mills 1999: 17).
Given these far-reaching consequences, epistemic ignorance and privileged irresponsibility must be seen as the main obstacles to transnational
justice. Below, I discuss two approaches that claim to help eliminate them:
Narayans methodological humility (1988: 37) and Spivaks learning to
learn from below (2004: 548). In her essay Working Together across Difference, Narayan argues that members of oppressed groups possess a more
immediate, subtle and critical knowledge about the nature of their oppression
than people who are non-members of the oppressed group (1988: 35). But
the fact that epistemic outsiders lack a detailed understanding of lived oppression neither excuses their ignorance nor places the burden of education

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on the oppressed. Bystanders and beneficiaries of oppression must become

conscious of the hardships that they do not experience but that their actions
help uphold. As long as the oppressed are expected to teach the nonoppressed about oppression, its beneficiaries will evade responsibility for
their contribution to structural oppression (cf. Lorde 1984: 114115). Narayan sees an alternative in the idea of methodological humility (1988: 37). It
requires that epistemic outsiders be aware that as outsiders they might miss
important points, and that their assignment of blame to epistemic insiders
arises from inadequate knowledge of the situation. It also requires that the
outsider
attempt to carry out her attempted criticism of the insiders perceptions in such a way that
it does not amount to [] an attempt to denigrate or dismiss entirely the validity of the
insiders point of view (ibid).

Though Narayan has argued against the idea that the oppressed ought to
speak for themselves, several critics have questioned Narayans assumption
that the oppressed have privileged epistemic insight into their own situations.
Spivak dismisses the claim that the subject of oppression can revert to a pure
form of self-consciousness (1988: 285) that has not been informed by colonial
discourses and epistemic violence (ibid: 281). Similarly, Mills points to the
element of coercive ideological conditioning (1999: 83) that enables the
colonial project in the first place. The signatories of the racial contract use
physical and epistemic violence to make the objects of the contract into the
nonwhite subpersons it specifies (ibid: 87). This creates a dehumanizing
and depersonizing conceptual apparatus (ibid) through which both the colonizers and the colonized must learn to read and misinterpret colonial subjects. Spivak believes that every act of representation conflates speaking for
and speaking about. For Vanessa Andreotti, the claim that the subaltern
cannot speak
means that she cannot speak in a way that would carry authority or meaning for nonsubalterns without altering the relations of power/knowledge that constitutes the subaltern
in the first place (2007: 71).

As argued earlier, the current asymmetrical application in transitional justice

processes is mostly due to the ignorant speaking about the places in which
the practices of justice are implemented.7 If a postcolonial feminist account of
transnational justice is to avoid this sort of speaking about, and if the meth7

Of course, many post_colonial subjects participate in processes of transitional justice, but

this does not make them mere imperial agents. They do so for a variety of reasons: the genuine endorsement of transitional justice practices, the support of local traditions and concepts
that prescribe transitional justice practices, the pursuit of personal agendas through the strategic use of dominant Euro_American concepts, and many others. For post_colonial scholars writing on transitional justice practices, cf. Soyinka (2004), Mamdani (1997), Alexander
(2001).

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187

odological humility Narayan suggests is itself problematic, what practices

exist for bringing about informed epistemic change?
I suggest that Spivaks notion of learning to learn from below (2004:
548) can play a crucial role. In Righting Wrongs, Spivak argues that the
absence of redress without remote mediation is what makes the subaltern
subaltern (ibid: 54), but that the responsibility to redress can be shared by
everyone in the persistent mode of to come (ibid: 546). Spivak describes
this approach as a supplemental pedagogy (ibid) that teaches those who
benefit from neocolonialism to unlearn their privilege (1988: 287), as well
as to learn to learn from below (2004: 548).8 It further requires the abandonment of supremacist thinking which constitutes Euro_Americans as the
only subjects capable of authoring history, and a renunciation of the claim
that being born within the folds of the politico-historical site of the Enlightenment automatically renders one qualified and indispensable to righting
wrongs across the globe. To learn how to learn in this way, one must suspend oneself into the text of the other (ibid). This practice requires training
in literary reading (ibid), in which one learns from the singularity of the
singular (ibid: 542), not from what is (supposedly, by way of epistemic violence and ignorance) universal. This necessitates discarding ones epistemic
ignorance of the wrongs of colonialism, the very wrongs that made Euro_America the dispensers of justice and the post_colonies its receivers. In
this way, learning to learn from below permits the epistemic shift from the
social Darwinist notion of responsibility for colonial subjects to responsibility
to them (ibid: 537). Having responsibility to derives from the entangled
(Randeria 2001: 79) and inextricably intertwined (Hall 1997: 299) histories
that violently tie the colonized to the colonizers. Having responsibility to
justice means answering the call of the other before [the formation of ones
own particular desires and] will (Spivak 2004: 335). In answering the call of
the other, responsibility stops speaking about the other and starts being a
genuine multilogue.
Vulnerability to injustice is structurally produced yet unevenly shared. As
Spivak stresses, neither are children in subaltern spaces born with an always
already diminished legitimacy to justice, nor are children in the metropolis
born with an always already augmented authority over justice (Spivak 2004:
557). These socio-structural positions are an outcome of long-time and largescale asymmetrical politics. In a similar vein, Young calls attention to the fact
that a heightened vulnerability to injustice emerges from generalized conditions that are a product of accepted policies, normalized rules, and hegemonic
8

As Ilan Kapoor observes, to unlearn privilege one must retrace the history and itinerary of
ones prejudices and learned habits (from racism, sexism and classism to academic elitism
and ethnocentrism) (Kapoor 2004: 41). This retracing can be undertaken by the privileged
individuals and groups without expecting the oppressed to assume the burden of educating
the oppressors.

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practices (Young 2011: 4748). From this, Young infers that the promotion
of justice requires institutions and collective action, which in turn necessitates
collective organization and institutional support (ibid: 69). But which institution should guarantee transnational justice? A transnational civil society or a
transnational framework of law enforced by nation-states?

Identifying the Agents of Transnational Justice

According to Youngs account, civil society is responsible for pursuing transnational justice. Individual actors recognize their social connection to harm,
assume responsibility for justice, and pressurize economic and political institutions though collective action advocating more just policies. Young conceives shared political institutions as the outcome of shared responsibilities,
not their precondition. Though the state ought to be held accountable for any
injustice it enables for instance, sweatshop production it must also be
liable to severe sanctions from international economic and political institutions. Liability to international sanctions, however, can constrain the capacity
of the states public sectors to enforce justice from within. For example, pressure from the International Monetary Fund reduces the resources available to
poorer political economies for the public sector, undercutting their ability to
enforce justice. For Youngs model, the agents of change are sweatshop laborers, international workers organizations, activists, and consumers. But
Young neglects the issue of epistemic ignorance, and it remains unclear how
activists, consumers, and unionists can be moved to see legalized sweatshop
production as a transnational injustice for which they must answer.
Spivak focuses on the epistemic dimension of transnational injustice and
proposes the introduction of a supplemental pedagogy in which teachers and
students activate a dormant ethical imperative to responsibility (2004: 546).
As a committed proponent of deconstruction, however, Spivak does not conceptualize this responsibility within a prescribed framework of collective
action; and whether or not the agents of the pedagogical project are considered part of civil society depends on ones understanding of civil society. In
this vein, Randeria cautions against presuming civil society as a universal
remedy on the grounds that it can be understood only in relation to ideas of
state such as nation-state, market, public, citizenship and individual rights
(Randeria 2001: 78, translation J. H.). Not only is the states regime of injustice bound up with the civil society that purports to end it; civil society is
itself a product of imperial domination with transnational relations in the
colonies (ibid, translation J. H.). Outlining the colonial and paternalistic relationship that underlies cosmopolitan civil society, Dhawan problematizes
civil societys democratic deficit as it appoints itself as promoter of the cause

A Proposal for Transnational Justice and Political Responsibility

189

of the subalterns without having been elected by those it claims to represent.

Drawing on Spivak and Gramsci, she argues that civil society is in fact the
site of the production of hegemonic regimes (2009: 5960). It reinforces,
rather than undoes, subaltern space. Public space, in the Enlightenment sense
of public use of reason, is itself a colonial product (ibid: 57). Furthermore,
civil is an integral part of the Enlightenment concept ultimately used to
justify colonial domination by designating post_colonies as uncivil. Since
civil society is a product of colonial injustice that transnational justice seeks
to end, its use as a remedy brings with it unavoidable ambivalence.
Similarly, accepting the state as an agent of transnational justice is equally
difficult. Born out of colonialism, the state has served to legitimate a moral
baseline that allows the exploitation and domination of non-citizens and Othered citizens for the benefit of the national economy in the name of the common good. In many post_colonial successor regimes, change on the statelevel has preserved the colonial apparatus by doing nothing more than putting black faces into white places, to use Neville Alexanders phrase (Alexander 2011). With the transnational civil society being at the helm of global
governance, the redistributive powers of the post_colonial state have been
dramatically undermined. Drawing on Derrida and Spivak, Dhawan (2009)
unpacks the ambivalence of the state as pharmakon, namely, both poison
and medicine (ibid: 59). On the one hand, the post_colonial state is the most
promising source of protecting its citizens from the neo_colonial paternalism
of cosmopolitan civil society (ibid: 60). On the other hand, it oftentimes acquits itself of the responsibility to protect its most vulnerable citizens.
Of course, liberal accounts of justice regard the state as a positive force by
comprehending justice first and foremost in legal categories. But as Hannah
Arendt (1951) has argued, judicial decisions can serve this purpose only when
the harmed individual is the citizen of a nation-state willing to protect their
rights. In the event that particular groups are harmed as part of official policy
state violence against indigenous people, say the liberal position ends in
aporia.9
Judicial action against state injustice is problematic on similar grounds:
even when national or transnational judicial bodies succeed, the punishing
victory is won in relatively remote courts of law from which just treatment
can be neither supervised nor enforced (Spivak 2004: 548). What is more,
systemically oppressed groups subject to mass violence often do not enjoy
basic civil rights, making it unlikely that they will obtain the documents and
funds needed to initiate legal proceedings, let alone make the journey to
Strasbourg or The Hague. And should they, against the odds, actually succeed, courtrooms rarely undo subaltern space, as the power to define harm
and sanction wrongdoers lies outside their reach. This is the problem with
9

For a discussion of statelessness within the nation-state, see Judith Butler and Spivak
(2007).

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Jorma Heier

inclusion in general: post_colonies admitted to deliberations within the Euro_American world-order must accept existing rules and conditions before
admission, enormously restricting their ability to set their own terms. Besides,
changing the hegemonic epistemologies under which transnational juridical
institutions operate is an even taller order than changing the epistemologies
under which individual actors operate, as the underlying statutes, constitutions, and contracts are protected against revision. Unless judicial agents
understand the necessity to learn to learn from below, judicial proceedings
will fail to be a promising alternative to transnational civil society all the
more so because state, law, and civil society structure their actions according
to the same faulty moral baseline that permits the injustices of colonialism to
remain ignored. To disprove the saying When white people say justice they
mean just us, the privileged need to shed both epistemic ignorance and
irresponsibility and assume responsibility for transnational injustice.

Conclusion
I began this essay by noting the asymmetry in existing practices of transnational justice: post_colonial subjects are excluded from the purview of justice
even as post_colonies are deemed notorious receivers of justice, incapable
of righting wrongs themselves. I then identified two elements that generate
this harmful state of affairs: privileged irresponsibility and epistemic ignorance. In drawing on works by Young and Tronto, I sketched an account of
transnational justice that argued that individual actors have a responsibility to
pursue transnational justice by virtue of the actions and structural processes
that connect them. I also described how epistemic ignorance can obfuscate
entangled histories and transnational relationships and pointed to Narayans
idea of methodological humility and Spivaks notion of learning to learn
from below as two corrective options. After removing the theoretical obstacles to conceptualizing transnational justice, I considered which institution
should be entrusted with guaranteeing transnational justice. The reference to
Jonathan Swifts A Modest Proposal10 in my title alludes ironically to the
challenging nature of transnational justice: under the current political conditions people are more likely not to meet their responsibilities than fulfill them.
But the main aim of this essay has been to defend the claim that the entangled
and inextricably intertwined relationships that give rise to colonialisms
harms can also provide a sufficient basis for a just and responsible approach
to rectifying those harms. As I noted at the beginning, to do nothing in the
10

In his 1729 satire A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift purports to solve the famine in Ireland by suggesting that Irish parents eat their children or sell them as food to the wealthy.

A Proposal for Transnational Justice and Political Responsibility

191

face of harm-doing is to commit another wrong, irrespective of the moral

baseline. The beneficiaries of colonialism have evaded their duty to extend to
the colonized the same moral standards that protect Euro_Americans. In the
face of these shortcomings, a post_colonial feminist account of transnational
justice can be a promising theoretical tool to end biased exclusion, eliminate
colonial relations of domination and exploitation, and establish morally
habitable relationships in their place (Walker 2007b: 383).

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Decolonizing Theories of Global Justice

Anna Millan and Ali Can Yldrm
Current globalized capitalism is characterized by widespread injustices. The
wealth and opportunities produced by neocolonial capitalist structures continue to be very unevenly distributed, disproportionately benefitting transnational elites, while leaving most of the worlds population particularly in the
global South overexploited, impoverished, and cut off from all social mobility. These pervasive injustices have encouraged wide academic debates
about global justice. Global Justice Studies have recently become a fastgrowing academic field comprising many competing approaches, disciplines,
and perspectives. Nonetheless, they have still not opened themselves to genuinely critical approaches. Mainstream theories of global justice largely remain
situated within a Eurocentric liberal framework, which ignores the position of
subalterns, who are most strongly affected by global injustices.1
In this paper, we aim to critically scrutinize liberal theories of global justice from a postcolonial feminist perspective, concentrating on subaltern subject positions. For us, the critical question of how subaltern positions can
genuinely be considered within theories of global justice is crucial. But where
should we start to seriously engage with this question? In our view, it is important to focus closely on the assumptions, exclusions, and elisions on which
liberal theories of global justice are based, since these confine subalterns to
an object position within theory-building practices. The first part of our paper
will therefore focus on a critical analysis of the theories of John Rawls and
Martha Nussbaum as influential examples of global justice theories operating
within a liberal paradigm. Our aim is to uncover some of the exclusionary
mechanisms operating within them and to outline aspects which are particularly problematic from a postcolonial feminist perspective. In the second part,
we will discuss postcolonial interventions addressing such liberal frameworks.
In our view, postcolonial feminist theories like Spivaks offer important
critical perspectives on subaltern experiences of justice and injustice and on
representing subaltern subject positions within theories of global justice. Such
postcolonial perspectives can productively supplement2 mainstream liberal
theories of justice, which exert an influence well beyond the academic field.
1
2

We are using the term subaltern in accordance with its theoretical elaboration by Antonio
Gramsci, Gayatri Spivak, and the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group.
We are using the term supplement in a Derridean sense as something added to a supposed
original, which functions as both a displacement and substitution of that which it supplements (see Derrida 1997: 141157).

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We propose to treat liberal theories of global justice as an enabling violation (Spivak 1996: 29) in the Spivakian sense and thus as something which
we cannot not want (Spivak 1999: 84), but which operates through violent
exclusions and elisions.

Liberal Theories of Justice and their Exclusionary Mechanisms:

John Rawls's Decent Peoples
John Rawlss influential theory of justice focuses primarily on issues of justice arising within the confines of a liberal nation-state, seeking to develop
just principles for the protection of basic liberties and the distribution of resources. His A Theory of Justice is principally based on the idea of justice as
fairness (1971: 1117) and concentrates on questions of domestic social
justice and the basic structures of modern societies, that is, the way in
which the major social institutions distribute fundamental rights and duties
and determine the division of advantages from social cooperation (ibid: 7).
Here, the initial argument is that basic social structures have a profound influence on the lives of citizens and future generations, making it indispensable
for these structures to be designed as justly as possible. Rawls therefore develops specific principles of justice, which reasonably and justly regulate
the basic structure of a liberal society in order to base social cooperation on
the principles of fairness and equality. To establish appropriate principles of
justice, he employs a procedural approach based on the hypothetical thought
experiment of the original position: Herein, representatives of citizens enter
into a social contract and decide on the terms of their social cooperation in
ignorance of their own social status (ibid: 1214, 1722). Rawls claims that
these representatives would, after deliberation, eventually agree on two basic
principles of justice: The first principle deals with basic liberties and establishes that the rights and liberties of every person are to be protected. The
second principle focuses on social and economic inequalities and is based on
two main considerations, namely the fair equality of opportunity and the
egalitarian difference principle (ibid: 6065). According to this second
principle, social and economic inequalities are to be permitted only in two
instances: when they happen to be attached to positions and offices open to
all (ibid: 60) and are to the greatest advantage of the least advantaged. Rawls
argues that these principles of justice should be the central considerations in
designing the basic structure of a liberal democratic society, because they are
fairly produced products of an agreement reached under fair and equal circumstances for all participants. This is what he understands by justice as
fairness.

Decolonizing Theories of Global Justice

197

Even within the confines of a liberal nation-state of the Western idealtypical model, Rawls hypothetical contract device is based on a number of
assumptions which disregard the most disadvantaged members of such a
society. His model, for example, fails to reflect on injustices resulting from
gender, race, sexual orientation, disability, and their intersections. Nussbaum
(2002: 134135) argues that excluding issues of disability from the design of
societys basic structures is a serious flaw in Rawlss arguments, as such
issues cannot be postponed until after social structures have already been
designed. Nussbaum criticizes that Rawlss Kantian conception of the person
[] based on rationality leads him to conclude that people who lack the
capacity to enter into contracts are not owed any duties of political justice
(2011: 87). Nussbaums criticism is important, but remains within a similarly
narrow liberal framing. She only points to the problems involved in Rawlss
focus on rationality as regards the treatment of disability, but not as regards
the very construction of the category of the rational through its (for example,
colonial or female) Other. She considers the thought experiment of the
original position to be extremely valuable, since it is based on rational subjects choosing appropriate principles of justice for society under complete
disregard of their own race, class, gender, and socio-economic position. She
argues that it is significant that the parties to the original position choose the
principles governing societal cooperation on the basis of their mutual advantage, rather than a concern for others (ibid: 86).
Nussbaums argumentation is based on a narrow instrumental understanding of interests and on the model of a sovereign individualist subject, which
she shares with Rawls. However, she points out contra Rawls that due to
the assumptions of rough equality and mutual advantage [Rawls's theory] cannot deal well
with cases in which we find a deep asymmetry of power between the parties that is not
easily corrected by simply rearranging income and wealth (2010: 8687).

However, like Rawls she fails to reflect on wider historical and structural
geopolitical and geo-economic asymmetries of power.
The even more problematic consequences of such assumptions within a
theory of justice on a global scale become apparent in Rawlss later works.
The Law of Peoples (2000) centrally focuses on issues of international justice
and seeks to define principles regulating relations among different societies.
This emphasis on societies indicates a changed focus of analysis in his later
work. Whereas A Theory of Justice treats individuals/citizens as primary
agents of social cooperation and as the principal units of analysis, The Law of
Peoples primarily focuses on societies, or in Rawlss terminology, peoples.
Rawls concentrates on peoples instead of states in order to exclude considerations of national sovereignty. However, this disregards the complexities of
current geopolitical structures in which (especially powerful) states, transnational organizations, and regulatory regimes have profound impacts on peoples, especially those living in states which are geopolitically weak.

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In The Law of Peoples, Rawls bases his theory of global justice on a significantly modified original position, wherein the parties are no longer rational citizens but peoples. As a result of the analytic shift from individuals to
peoples, the principles which he proposes for international justice are very
different from the ones at the domestic level. Rawls does not envisage the
creation of a just global social structure or substantive redistribution of resources on a global scale. Instead, the ability of peoples to determine their
own internal rules free from external interference becomes central. Rawlss
theory of international justice thus imposes only limited duties to assist other
peoples. These are far below levels of social obligations envisaged at the
domestic level within the earlier original position. Additionally, his theory of
global justice is based on an explicit normative classification of different
peoples: liberal peoples, decent peoples, outlaw states, societies burdened by unfavorable conditions and benevolent absolutisms (Rawls
2000: 4). This establishes a hierarchy of peoples, in which Western-style
liberal societies occupy a privileged position. Rawlss judgment that Western
liberal peoples are normatively superior to other peoples is clearly evident in
the following quote:
I believe that the causes of the wealth of a people and the forms it takes lie in their political
culture and in the religious, philosophical, and moral traditions that support the basic
structure of their political and social institutions, as well as in the industriousness and
cooperative talents of its members, all supported by their political virtues. I would further
conjecture that there is no society anywhere in the world except for marginal cases with
resources so scarce that it could not, were it reasonably and rationally organized and governed, become well-ordered (ibid: 108).

Rawls explains the differing circumstances of different peoples, including the

unfavorable conditions pertaining in many societies of the global South, exclusively by way of reference to factors internal to those societies. However,
if we consider the continuing histories of Western (neo)colonial exploitation
and its domination of the rest of the world, it would be seen more clearly that
this internalist and congratulatory account of Western liberal democracies is
highly questionable. By problematically assigning the blame for injustices
suffered by peoples living outside Western liberal democracies squarely on
reasons internal to those societies, Rawls disregards the damaging effects of
highly unequal geopolitical structures on countries of the global South, which
largely benefit the global North and Southern elites. As a result, for example,
of structural adjustment programs and other externally imposed conditions,
decisions on political and economic structures and on essential public services like health, utilities, and education are often removed from the influence
of peoples of the global South and their governments, leading to policies like
water privatization, which have profound impacts on the poor, while yielding
substantial profits to multinational businesses situated within the global
North. Rawlss attempts to explain the causes of wealth differentials between

Decolonizing Theories of Global Justice

199

peoples through their philosophies, culture, and attitudes are thus fraught with
problems. He, furthermore, posits the universality of values such as individual
freedom, the rule of law, reasonableness, rationality, respect for private property, and human rights, but treats these values as a property and product of
Western modernity, while portraying only the global South as predisposed
towards falling short of these standards. He consequently elides the long (and
far from finished) history of Western violations of these standards.
Rawlss (albeit limited) focus on distribution as the only considered remedy to injustices on a global scale is equally problematic. Like most other
contemporary accounts of global justice, he assumes social justice to be primarily an issue of distribution, to be remedied by some measure of balancing
out inequalities of wealth within and among societies, but fails to take account
of the impact of skewed geopolitical structures and highly unequal power
relations on the efficacy of such attempts. This is a point also raised by Iris
Marion Young (1990: 1533), who was one of the first philosophers to address issues of global justice in a critical way. Young claims that contemporary approaches to justice are making a mistake by restricting the meaning of
social justice to the morally proper distribution of benefits and burdens
among societys members (1990: 15). She argues that by focusing too much
on the distribution of goods, these approaches forget to pay attention to the
institutions and structures determining distributive schemes. Furthermore, the
distribution of goods such as rights and power conceals the real nature of
these goods and treats them as static factors, although they are a function of
social relations and processes (ibid: 16). Social justice is thus not only about
what and how much is distributed, but also how things to be distributed
come into existence and who decides about a scheme of distribution (Forst
2007: 261). Youngs critique of the distributive paradigm raises two points
relevant to our discussion on global justice: Firstly, global poverty cannot
be explained solely in terms of distribution. Schemes against global poverty
which focus exclusively on symptoms produced by highly unequal geopolitical and geo-economic structures are therefore inadequate. Benevolent attempts to end global poverty by beneficiaries of these structures, for example
through sustainable development policies and redistributive schemes, are
likely to fail unless they address the underlying structural injustices generated
by global capitalism. Young (2007: 164167) illustrates this by reference to
anti-sweatshop consumer campaigns. These attempts by ethically conscious
consumers to achieve improvements in the working conditions of Third
World workers fail to overcome global structural injustices. The second relevant implication of Youngs critique of the distributive paradigm relates to
issues of participation and agency. She stresses that subjects located at the
bottom of globalized capitalist structures are systematically excluded from
decisions made by the powerful agents of global capitalism.

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Rawlss theoretical framework systematically fails to take account of the

severe structural as well as epistemic imbalances within globalized capitalism
and their genealogy within territorial imperialism. His theories also overlook
that contemporary financialized globalization3 does not produce injustice
merely as a regrettable by-product of wealth creation, but fundamentally
relies for its functioning on the persistent exploitation of the resources and
labor of the global South. The brutal exploitation of gendered subalterns
(such as female factory workers in the maquiladoras) within the new international division of labor produces the wealth and possibility of the First
World (Spivak 1990: 96), but is not adequately acknowledged by liberal
theorists. Mainstream global justice discourses like Rawls's instead effectively
silence the subject positions of exploited (especially female) subalterns.
We will now consider Nussbaums liberal feminist approach to global justice, which is much more critical of the marginalization of poor women from
the global South, and will examine whether her approach can deal with problems of subalternization more effectively.

Beyond the Parish Walls? Martha Nussbaums Capabilities

Approach
Nussbaums Capabilities Approach posits that there are certain crossculturally invariant human capabilities which are necessary for human flourishing and which exert a moral claim that they should be developed (Nussbaum 2002: 124). Nussbaum provides a list of the most crucial capabilities as
a minimum account of social justice (2003: 40) for all humans. She sees an
important role for states in safeguarding the capabilities of all human beings.
The duty to protect human capabilities lies with the individuals own states in
the first instance. However, if states of the global South are unable to secure
their citizens capabilities, secondary duties of assistance are placed on more
powerful and resource-rich states. Nussbaum makes a distinction between
capabilities and functioning. She limits the above duties to ensuring that human capabilities are met, but individuals are left free to decide whether or not
to exercise these capabilities and convert them into actual functioning, to
allow for individual autonomy and choice, which are central planks of her
liberal approach. She argues that some capabilities like education are more
3

We use the expression financialized globalization to refer to contemporary neoliberal

transnational governance structures controlled by hegemonic states, transnational organizations like the IMF and the World Bank as well as by multinational corporations. These neoliberal governance structures promote policies of economic and political restructuring, financial and trade liberalization, deregulation and privatization, particularly within countries
of the Global South, for example by means of structural adjustment programs.

Decolonizing Theories of Global Justice

201

fertile than others, because they open up possibilities for individuals to

exercise other so-far unused capabilities in the future. Her examples of particularly fertile capabilities, however, problematically include access to credit,
based on the unquestioned assumption that the integration of subaltern women into capitalist structures will lead to their empowerment. Nussbaum claims
that her list of central capabilities reflects considerations of pluralism and
sensitivity to cultural difference (2003: 4142). However, this sensitivity is
heavily circumscribed by her failure to problematize the epistemic privilege
she asserts in setting normative standards of universal applicability. This
extends to rules defining which lives can or cannot count as human, excluding
some people with disability from human status (Nussbaum/Glover 1995: 82),
even though Nussbaum concedes that such judgments can have political implications, such as where the non-human outcome was environmentally
caused (ibid).
She tries to sidestep critiques of Eurocentric bias against her capabilities
approach by arguing that when we speak simply of what people are actually
able to do and to be, we do not even give the appearance of privileging a
Western idea (Nussbaum 2003: 39). She thus purports to deny the situatedness of her theories within Western epistemologies. She shows some anxiety
about speaking for the whole of humanity, including subjects from different
cultures, but the extent of her problematization is limited to debates about
the alleged value-imperialism involved in universalism (2011: 101). She
reduces discussions of imperialism to questions of a possible valueimperialism in judging practices of other cultures and invariably portrays
women from the global South as victims of patriarchal traditions, rather than
of contemporary neocolonial capitalist structures. Nussbaum argues that she
would rather risk charges of imperialism (Nussbaum/Glover 1995: 2) than
to refuse to take a moral stand on urgent issues facing women.
Nussbaum readily admits that the capabilities approach is frankly universalist and essentialist (ibid: 63), since it focuses on commonalities shared
by humans rather than differences. Although she takes into account ways in
which people differ, she treats such differences as stable identity categories.
Nussbaums texts often problematically rely on arguments about human nature derived from psychological studies of general human tendencies []
that have robust cross-cultural credentials (2011: 181). She develops her
universalist position in binary opposition to anti-essentialist positions
which, according to her, refuse all judgments about other cultures. By rhetorical sleight of hand Nussbaum thus homogenizes and dismisses a theoretical field as heterogeneous as deconstruction, post-structuralism, postcolonial
theory, mainstream moral relativism, and communalism. Her argumentation
consequently remains caught within a narrow frame of critique reduced to two
binary alternatives the voice of tradition and a critical universalism
(Nussbaum/Glover 1995: 2) assigning to the non-European Other the epi-

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thet traditional. This dichotomous argumentative frame closes down more

wide-ranging critiques of both financialized globalization and culturalism
or nativism such as Spivaks.
Although Nussbaum (unlike Rawls) repeatedly expresses awareness of
profound economic inequalities between the global North and South, she fails
to reflect systematically on the continuing devastating material as well as
epistemic impacts of the history of (neo)colonial exploitation on the global
South. Her focus is only on the symptomatic results of contemporary geopolitical structures which restrict subaltern womens capabilities, thereby ignoring the mechanisms of their production within contemporary capitalism. She
explicitly treats arguments focusing on colonial exploitation as backwardlooking (Nussbaum 2011: 115116). Her analysis thus purports to keep colonialism firmly in the past, thereby providing only a very limited critique of
current neocolonial structures. Treating development as an unquestioned
good, she fails to question the teleology underlying the term or the unequal
geopolitical and geoeconomic positions of those on the receiving end and
those on the dispensing end of development initiatives like micro-credit lending, which she endorses without reserve.
She assumes that the positions of subaltern women at the receiving end of
development initiatives can be easily understood and represented by liberal
academics like herself. Her work represents poor women in a manner reminiscent of an essentialized Third World Woman emptied of all specificity
as critiqued by Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003). Similarly, her approach is
very different from Spivaks careful theorization of representation as speaking for and speaking about gendered subalterns (cf. Spivak 1988). This
can be seen, for example, in her essay Public Philosophy and International
Feminism (1998), where she repeatedly addresses the two women discussed
in the essay by their first names, Vasanti and Jayamma, claiming that focusing
on their experiences enables her to gain a better understanding of the lives of
poor women in India. She outlines particular issues they both face like domestic violence, lack of access to credit, or poor working conditions. She
claims that their example gives her and the readers of her philosophical writings a better insight into the problems faced by poor women in India and
makes her philosophical work on social justice more relevant to real womens
lives (1998: 765). Nussbaum argues that an approach [that] asks a question
that real people like Vasanti ask and answer [] cannot be accused of being a
purely Western construct (2011: 7980). According to her, stories of women
like Vasanti produce an acknowledgment of the equal humanity of people
whose lives typically are ignored by privileged elites (2011: 8081). She
places particular stock on actually hearing the voices of women (Nussbaum/Glover 1995: 7) and her ability to represent them satisfactorily. Her
problematic assumption of easy access to gendered subaltern voices and her
oversimplified treatment of subaltern agency stand in stark contrast to

Decolonizing Theories of Global Justice

203

Spivaks careful theorization of representation in Can the Subaltern Speak?

and throughout her work. While Spivak rejects representational ventriloquism (Spivak 1999: 255), Nussbaum seeks and seemingly finds access to
knowledge about Indian culture through hearing the voices of subaltern
women mediated by Indian experts and academics. Nussbaum's failure to
problematize the difficulties of representing subalterns and her uncritical
claims to a reliable outside observers position illustrate the problematic theoretical consequences of such assumptions particularly well. This is aggravated
by her theoretical reliance on an autonomous subject and her stress on the
individual freedom to choose whether or not to exercise capabilities, even
though subaltern womens capabilities to choose are severely constrained by
their internalized gendered subalternization. She argues that
by examining a wide variety of self-interpretations of human beings in many times and
places [...] we will have in the end a theory that is not the mere projection of local preferences, but is fully international and a basis for cross-cultural attunement (1995: 7374).

Despite her stated confidence that she is not simply imposing a parochial
view that happened to be our own (1995: 6), her liberal universalism often
seems deeply parochial, since it fails to reflect on its own situation in a highly
particular liberal epistemic framework. Nikita Dhawan (2009) cogently points
to the provincialism of Nussbaums cosmopolitanism that posits easy similarities between metropolitan academics situated within the global North and
gendered subaltern subjects within the global South.
This parochialism is particularly evident in Nussbaums pedagogy aimed
at educating world citizens. She argues that an education in the Humanities
can foster critical thinking, the ability to deal with global problems as a world
citizen, and a sympathetic understanding of problems faced by others (Nussbaum 2010: 7). Nonetheless, she largely makes a business case for the Humanities as fostering skills vital for modern pluralistic democracies surrounded by a powerful global marketplace (ibid: 52). Her uncritical attitude
towards globalized capitalism becomes particularly apparent in her claim that
education can promote both profit and good citizenship at the same time,
since a flourishing economy requires the same skills that support citizenship (ibid: 10). Nussbaums positing of a symbiotic relationship between
capitalist globalization and an education for citizenship is starkly different
from Spivaks ethico-political pedagogy aimed at undoing subalternity
through effective access to citizenship. Even though Nussbaum validates
efforts in Indian education to break away from models of education as rote
learning by getting children to understand what they [are] reading (ibid:
63) and to treat children as active and critical participant[s] in education
(ibid: 57), her prescriptions for a critical pedagogy are severely hampered by
her lack of appreciation of structures of neocolonial exploitation and class
apartheid (Spivak 2004: 536). In contrast, Spivak centrally focuses on and
seeks to break down such structures within her pedagogy aimed at transna-

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tional literacy and at the de-subalternization of subaltern (particularly girl)

children. Her much more sustained focus on auto-critique provides a better
realization of Nussbaums Socratic ideal than Nussbaums own selfcongratulary, but largely uncritical multicultural pedagogy aimed at teaching
intelligent world citizenship (2010: 81), which fails to question her own
uncritical assumptions, including her problematic assumption of a facile synergy between profit-making and the Humanities. In Nussbaums treatment of
Tagore, one of her central pedagogic role-models, she particularly stresses his
fight against the unequal burden dead customs imposed upon women (ibid:
71), again relying on a traditional/modern dichotomy. She thus brackets off
the burdens imposed by the entirely contemporary super-exploitation of
women within the new international division of labor, through bio-piracy,
pharmaceutical dumping, and population control measures within contemporary financialized capitalism, which Spivaks theories highlight. Whereas
Nussbaum uncritically views micro-credits as crucial in enhancing womens
capabilities, Spivak strongly criticizes recent development policies focused
on the credit-baiting of subaltern women through micro-credit lending,
inserting them into capitalist structures without any infrastructural support or
effective access to a public sphere, hence furthering a feudality without feudalism (2012: 27) which perpetuates subalternity.
Whilst Nussbaums liberal feminist work undoubtedly has some advantages over other mainstream global justice theories, her interventions
remain caught within a deeply uncritical and parochial epistemological
framework. She fails to interrogate many problematic assumptions within her
work. In contrast, Spivaks analysis systematically takes into account neocolonial structures within the new world order and the new international division of labor, while consistently paying attention to the complex impacts of
such structures on singular subalterns. Although she does not always systematically elaborate her use of theoretical concepts (for example, of democracy),
her challenging deconstructive theorization of justice on a planetary as well as
singular scale remains a useful supplement to liberal theories of justice. We
will therefore now focus on Spivaks theories of justice more closely.

Justice as an Experience of the Impossible: Postcolonial

Feminist Interventions to Liberal Theories of Justice
As explicated in the preceding discussion, Global Justice Studies could benefit by moving away from their overreliance on liberal approaches and taking
on board postcolonial feminist epistemological frameworks. We believe that
Spivaks theories could particularly productively supplement Global Justice

Decolonizing Theories of Global Justice

205

Studies. Spivak understands justice deconstructively as an experience of the

impossible (1999: 246) and ethics as responsibility to the other before will
(2008: 29). The one-on-one ethical pedagogical engagement with subalterns
and the critical awareness of ones imbrication in hegemonic structures are
crucial aspects of her theories. Her treatment of epistemic violence is particularly relevant in the present context. Spivak highlights that mechanisms of
global domination and exploitation structurally prevent the representation of
subaltern voices. She criticizes theorists who ignore the severe impact of
epistemic violence on subaltern subjects and mistakenly assume that the oppressed can speak, act, and seek justice for themselves (cf. Spivak 1988). On
the exploited side of the international division of labor, oppressed subjects do
not have the same structural means to make their voices heard as their counterparts on the exploiters side. Factors excluding subalterns from access to
hegemonic structures vary significantly depending on their precise historical
and geographic context. Spivak nonetheless stresses one commonality in
subaltern experiences: the continuing epistemic violence of colonialism, depriving subalterns of any voice through the devastating effects of colonial
power which was so pervasive that it re-wrote intellectual, legal and cultural
systems (Loomba 2008: 49).
However, epistemic violence is also perpetrated by current theoretical discussions on global justice, which instrumentalize subalterns in support of
their arguments like Nussbaum does. These theoretical discussions silence
subalterns, for example, by ignoring the following factors: first, subalterns are
directly touched by global neocolonial economic structures, which tend to
violently reshape their lives, but they have no influence over these structures.
Second, subaltern concerns are only given highly circumscribed attention
within global justice theories which rely on knowledge protocols unfamiliar
to subalterns. And last, the consideration of the impacts of physical and epistemic violence on subalterns within global justice theories and practices remains very limited, further reducing subaltern hopes for justice. This epistemic violence on the theoretical level prevents the effective consideration of
subaltern concerns within global justice theories.
Another aspect of Spivaks theories relevant to our discussions on global
justice centers on the representation of subaltern women within international
feminism. Spivak criticizes hegemonic liberal feminist theories for ignoring
and silencing the voices of subaltern women. Her postcolonial feminist approach instead aims to engage systematically with subaltern women's voices,
while stressing the difficulties of this venture: Subaltern women are systematically marginalized within structures of representation which privilege male
voices. Not only the international division of labor and class structures silence
subaltern women, but also patriarchal structures and social relations. However, an international feminism based on universal sisterhood seeking to ameliorate the plight of Third World women can be as detrimental as patriar-

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chal structures. Spivak describes the difficult position of subaltern women

caught between patriarchy and universal sisterhood as follows:
On the other side of the international division of labor, the subject of exploitation cannot
know and speak the text of female exploitation, even if the absurdity of the nonrepresenting intellectual making space for her is achieved. The woman is doubly in shadow (1988:
288).

International feminists overlook their own complicity in hegemonic power

structures if they posit a universal subordination of women through patriarchy. Well-meaning efforts to help poor women by international feminists like
Nussbaum, who fail to question their own theoretical assumptions and positions within hegemonic structures, can thus even reinforce third world womens subalternization.
Spivak instead proposes that feminist intellectuals aiming to undo subalternity should seek to develop an ethically singular relationship with subaltern
women based on mutual learning and responsibility to the Other before will.
To achieve this, they should learn to learn from subaltern women, face the
immense heterogeneity of the field, and stop feeling privileged as a woman (Spivak 2006: 187, emphasis in original). In order to learn to understand
and represent subaltern positions responsibly, it is crucial to exert constant
vigilance, avoid sanctioned ignorance, and acknowledge [ones] complicity
and accountability (Dhawan 2007: 7) in the colonization and financialization
of the globe, in order to develop critical theories of justice which enable subalterns to make their own interests count.
Contrary to oversimplified interpretations of Spivaks Can the Subaltern
Speak?, subalterns can indeed make demands for justice, but these cannot
be understood within hegemonic systems of representation. Subaltern voices
are further silenced by intellectuals speaking for them, who also operate within the same hegemonic systems of representation. The problem of subalterns
silencing thus cannot be solved at the micro-political level alone, because
structural effects of epistemic violence closing off subalterns capacities at the
macro-political level also need to be addressed. Philosophical discussions of
global justice therefore need to open up conceptual spaces where subaltern
concerns can be heard and addressed not through a civilizing mission by
dispensers of global justice from above, but through mutual learning aimed at
minimizing the effects of epistemic violence and at opening up hegemonic
structures to bring subalterns into (parliamentary) representation (cf. Spivak
2005). This process must involve constant vigilance not to appropriate the
Other and persistent efforts without guarantees (Spivak 2004: 532) to
achieve justice in the mode of to come (ibid: 564) without excluding, silencing, or appropriating subalterns.
However, despite the considerable strengths in Spivaks treatment of issues of justice for subalterns, her approach also has some shortcomings: Collective strategies for de-subalternization receive insufficient attention in her

Decolonizing Theories of Global Justice

207

theories, given her strong focus on pedagogic strategies. Her treatment of

mainstream theories of global justice is also far from systematic, since her
engagement with Nussbaum is limited to a single footnote and with Rawls to
isolated remarks. However, her postcolonial feminist theoretical framework
can be applied productively for more detailed critical analyses of liberal theories of justice. Our limited analysis represents only a first step in a persistent
critique aimed at decolonizing global theories of justice by highlighting the
problematic exclusions and assumptions underlying them.
In conclusion, a critical postcolonial feminist perspective on global justice
based on an ethics of responsibility to the Other can productively supplement
liberal approaches to global justice and their ethics based on self-interest und
individual rights. Such a critical ethical framework could offer global justice
studies more effective theoretical tools for inserting subaltern subjects into
structures of representation and developing just global frameworks of cooperation. Global Justice Studies could thus expand its focus to planetary justice,
while providing postcolonial theory with an ally in its efforts to amplify the
political voice of subalterns. Without such a theoretical alliance of mutual
supplementation, Global Justice Studies are unlikely to overcome their theoretical blind spots, even as Spivak highlights that such blind spots are present
in all epistemic frameworks, including her own theories. Liberal theories of
global justice are often reluctant to acknowledge, let alone scrutinize, these
deficiencies. However, they could expand their theoretical scope by taking on
board (self-)critical insights from postcolonial feminist theory. Postcolonial
theory, on the other hand, could also continue to expand its scope by engaging with liberal theories critically and systematically in order to make subaltern concerns count within theories of global justice, continuing the important
collective task of decolonizing these theories.

Bibliography
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Dhawan, Nikita (2007): Can the Subaltern Speak German? And Other Risky Questions: Migrant Hybridism versus Subalternity, accessed 12 December 2012,
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Dhawan, Nikita (2009): Zwischen Empire and Empower: Dekolonisierung und Demokratisierung. In: Femina Politica 2, 2009, pp. 5263.
Forst, Rainer (2007): Radical Justice: On Iris Marion Youngs Critique of the Distributive Paradigm. In: Constellations 14, 2, pp. 260265.
Loomba, Ania (2008): Colonialism/Postcolonialism. New York: Routledge.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (2003): Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory,
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Nussbaum, Martha/Glover, Jonathan (eds.) (1995): Women, Culture and Development: A Study of Human Capabilities. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1999): A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a
History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press
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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2005): Use and Abuse of Human Rights. In: Boundary 2 32, 1, pp. 131189.
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Young, Iris Marion (2007): Global Challenges: War, Self-determination and Responsibility for Justice. Cambridge: Polity Press.

III. Human Rights

The Other Side of the Story: Human Rights, Race,

and Gender from a Transatlantic Perspective
Human Rights, Race, and Gender from a Transatlantic Perspective

Julia Surez-Krabbe
Introduction
One of the most serious critiques against human rights politics is that its primary point of reference is white male subjectivity based on a normative construction of the category human. This essay explores the intimate relationship between race, gender, and the definition of what it means to be human
during the conquest and colonization of the Americas, and suggests that we
revise our historiological and legal assumptions about human rights. The
classification human emerged out of the discourses of the Spanish colonizers during the 16th century. To understand how this designation problematizes twentieth(and twenty-first)-century human rights, the following discussion
translates the coordinates of our analysis from the space of Europe to the
Americas and from the time of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(ratified by the United Nations in 1948) to the late fifteenth (post-1492) and
sixteenth-century discovery of the Americas.
This analytical shift, a shift in the geography of reason, provides a vital
framework for examining the history of human rights from the Other side.
The rights narrative commonly refers back to the English Bill of Rights in
1689, the US Declaration of Independence in 1776, and the Declaration of
the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1788 in the context of the French
Revolution. According to this account, these declarations reached a culminating point in 1948 with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Balfour/Cadava 2004: 282, Douzinas 2000, 2007a) and a series of more recent
culminating points in connection with the history of UN peacekeeping and the
recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. These wars are referred to in the third
section of this paper, where the notion of a just war is examined.
In contrast to mainstream accounts of rights and race, the understanding
expressed here proceeds beyond the scientific racism that emerged during
the nineteenth century and classified humans biologically. Such determinism
was a radicalization of the hierarchization of humans that emerged shortly
after the 1492 discovery of America (cf., for instance, Csaire 2006, Quijano 1992, 2000a, 2000b). The fault line in human rights politics namely its

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Julia Surez-Krabbe

normative formulation of what it means to be human1 needs to be considered in relation to the historical connection linking human rights to race and
to gender. This tie emerged out of the period of the first modernity, that is,
the period of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism. During this time, the first
systematic transatlantic connection involving slavery, genocide, and the exploitation of Europes Other was also established.
The shift in the geography of reason that informs this essay involves developing concepts beyond mainstream definitions of human rights. Boaventura de Sousa Santos nuanced understanding of the different processes of globalization is useful for addressing the other side of human rights; human rights
can be globalized localisms, localized globalisms (reinforcing relations of
power), as well as a common inheritance of humanity (contesting power
relations) (2002a: 2529). In addition, Frantz Fanons distinction between
2
the zone of being and the zone of nonbeing (Fanon 1967: 10) is relevant
to this analysis; namely, the distinction between those whose existence accords with prevalent norms and those who are constructed and assessed
against those norms. In the zone of being, human rights provide legality and
protection. However, in the zone of nonbeing, rights require victims and are,
more often than not, articulated around the logic of appropriation, exploita3
tion, and violence (cf. Santos 2007: 1, Surez-Krabbe 2011). Simultaneously, the zone of nonbeing contains the possibility of treating human rights as
the common inheritance of humanity by virtue of other grammars of human
dignity4 that occur among subjects in this zone.
This essay explores the limits of human rights with reference to the critiques of de Sousa Santos and Fanon. It also examines historical and current
normative constructions of the category human. The following section
addresses presumptions of sovereignty from the subjective stance of the conquistadors and their heirs. The de facto lack of access to the emancipatory
and enabling aspects of human rights is an outcome of that subjective stance
and a major concern for social movements and progressive political organizations involved in enacting human rights. It is at the point where human rights
collapse that the struggles for human rights become most relevant. In order to
grasp contemporary human rights politics, we therefore need to apprehend the
reasons behind this failure (Baxi 2002).

1
2
3
4

This essay refers to human as a category, among other things, to emphasize the ways in
which the term is used to hierarchize people.
See Fanon 1967 and Gordon 1995, 2004, 2009 for more on the zone of nonbeing.
See Santos conceptual image of the abyssal line in 2007: 1.
The research project ALICE, Strange Mirrors, Unsuspected Lessons (2012-2015), operates
with this terminology. See the project webpage at: http://alice.ces.uc.pt/en/index.php/thema
tic-areas/human-rights-and-other-grammars-of-human-dignity/?lang=en.

Human Rights, Race, and Gender from a Transatlantic Perspective 213

Subjectivity and Sovereignty: I Conquer and the Imperial

Attitude
Spanish colonialism and the European invention of America initiated a complex series of processes that have had a profound and lasting impact on the
modern/colonial world-system (Quijano 2000a: 553). This impact extends
from the personal politics of subject formation to the global economic, social,
political, legal, and epistemic order. The world-system is modern/colonial
because coloniality of power (Quijano 2000a) as against colonial power
is the underbelly of modernity.
To the reader unfamiliar with the Latin American decolonial tradition, it is
necessary to explain that when this discussion conceptualizes global processes in terms of what the sociologist Quijano describes as a world-system, it
refers to a world-system in which center and periphery continue to play an
important role, but whose coordinates are changing. However, these changes
do not (at least not yet) challenge the colonial logic of the world-system.
Crucially, then, when this essay refers to the world-system, it also signifies
the modern/colonial world-system in order to emphasize the logic by which
global processes continue to be colonial.
Coloniality began with Spanish and Portuguese colonialism in the first
modernity, between 1492 and the eighteenth century. The philosopher Enrique Dussel has elaborated extensively upon the continuities between the
first and second modernity; his terminology reflects the shift in the geography of reason at the heart of this essay. The first modernity is his designation for the processes initiated by Spanish and Portuguese colonialism; it is
pivotal to understanding the emergence and consolidation of Europes hegemony over the Atlantic. While this hegemony is the crucial phenomenon in
the transition to the second modernity, when northern Europe achieved its
position as a geopolitical center (Dussel 2004: 3, 28), its dominance has only
now begun to be dismantled. The term second modernity refers to the
events and processes traditionally attached to the term modernity from the
eighteenth century onwards, notably including the Industrial Revolution and
the Enlightenment. To decolonize the Enlightenment, we must engage with
the other side of modernity, whose shadow we can discern in the processes
which took place during the first modernity.
Coloniality is intrinsic to contemporary configurations of power. This implies among other things as indicated by the collapsing of the terms modern/colonial that there is a direct link between colonial subjectivity and
modern subjectivity. Indeed, Dussel noted this historical connection in the
early 1990s, arguing that the Cartesian ego cogito was preceded by the ego
conquiro, the I conquer of the first modernity (1992: 40). Dussels approach to the I conquer considers the historical processes that took place in

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the context of the discovery of America (including the Caribbean) from the
sixteenth century onwards. The I conquer is the first modern subjectivity. It
is a way of being that seeks to erase the Other through exploitation and violence. It is an incarnation of the conqueror, who arrived and practiced diverse
forms of violence in the Americas; it represents a male, enslaving, and phallic
ego (Dussel 1992, 2008). The first modern subjectivity is thus also a deeply
gendered subjectivity (Dussel 1992, Lugones 2007, Maldonado-Torres 2008).
While Dussels conceptualization of the I conquer elaborates some of the
ideas already being explored within the Latin American philosophical tradition, it is especially by virtue of Nelson Maldonado-Torres and Maria Lugones analyses that this essay explores the links between the colonial/modern
subjectivity, race, gender, and human rights.
In any examination of human rights, acknowledging the colonial origins of
modern subjectivity is crucial; this reveals an oversight in human rights
scholarship that many human rights proponents and critics alike overlook. To
refer to one example, Costas Douzinas' seminal Human Rights and Empire:
The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (2007b) demonstrates this
blindness to the concept human within human rights and within the practices of humanitarianism, even though his approach is otherwise persuasive.
Early in Human Rights and Empire (2007b: 12), he provides a brief account
of the genealogy of the idea of the human being that stays within the geographical confines of Europe (Ancient Greece and Rome being the epicenters
of the narrative) and consequently collapses historical time to these places. As
such, Douzinas narrative neglects the events taking place during the first
modernity and the actors involved in these events. In addition, he does not
consider how race and gender inform the emergence of the category human effectively, disregarding coloniality. This means that, although interesting, his analysis and arguments are flawed as his critique moves within the
same Eurocentric framework as the ideas he examines.
By contrast, this essay establishes that the construction of man or the
human emerged in the context of the discovery of America. Several scholars have shown that this construction had already been established during the
sixteenth century, as can be seen in the context of the debates among the
Spanish colonial powers concerning the humanity of the Indians. These debates, best known as the Valladolid debates, were conducted by representatives of two conflicting perspectives. According to the viewpoint represented
by Gins de Seplveda, who framed his argument in secularized terms (cf.
Seplveda 1996 [approximately 1550]: 109113), the indigenous peoples
were subhuman Others who had to comply with more advanced peoples and
their laws. If war was necessary to meet these aims, then war had to be
waged.
Seplvedas position provided legitimization for colonization and exploitation, including sexualized exploitation, as discussed below. Bartolom de

Human Rights, Race, and Gender from a Transatlantic Perspective 215

Las Casas (1552), representing the other side, rejected conflict as a means of
civilizing the Other. Instead, he proposed that the Other must be won by reason and that Otherness must at least in principle be respected. According
to Las Casas, the indigenous peoples were human (or at least potentially human) and thus subject to rights, including the right to be different (cf. Castro
2007, Dussel 2008, Maestre Snchez 2004, Surez-Krabbe 2011, Wynter
2003). Given that Seplvedas stance conformed to the interests of the Crown
and the conquistadors, it received far stronger support than Las Casas position within the Americas experience of coloniality.
To state that the I conquer stance actualizes a gendered ego is to emphasize that the racist configurations of power cannot be understood without
taking into account the patriarchal configurations of power (cf. Lugones
2007: 202). The notions of gender and sexuality with which Spanish men had
arrived in the Americas (where there were exceedingly few Spanish women)
changed fundamentally with the emergence of the I conquer. With the I
conquer, the masculinity of Spanish men was not solely constructed in their
relationship with the Spanish women, but also in their relationship of (sexual)
violence with the indigenous and also later with African men and women (cf.
Silverblatt 1987, Wynter 2003). The eroticism practiced in the colonies by
this phallic ego was part of a practice of domination of the body through the
sexual colonization of women and the forced labor of men (Dussel 1992: 50).
The notion of appropriate gender applied to white European, Christian,
and bourgeois women and men, that is, to those in the zone of being which
came to be characterized by biological and sexual dimorphism, heterosexualism, and patriarchy (Lugones 2007: 190). In the zone of being, the category
man orders white bourgeois men and womens lives and simultaneously
determines the modern/colonial significance of all men and women. Moreover, the zone of being is heterosexual, and heterosexuality permeates the
racialized patriarchal control over production (including knowledge production) and collective authority. At the same time, the category man characteristically ignores race and naturalizes gender. Its fundamental dependence
on the zone of nonbeing is also distinctive.
According to Lugones (2007: 195196, 206), the coloniality of gender
had two principal effects on white bourgeois women. Firstly, women were
women as long as they were regarded as sexually pure and passive, thereby fit
to reproduce bourgeois, white males class, colonial, and racial position. In
accordance with dichotomist biological distinctions, the white woman was
characterized by her reproductive role as well as by her sexual passivity and
purity. Secondly, because of their nature, women were excluded from the
collective sphere of authority, knowledge creation, and (by and large) from
control over the means of production. Purported weakness of mind and body
were important components in the reduction and isolation of these women
from most of human experience (ibid).

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Those relegated to the zone of nonbeing have been, in turn, confined to

spaces organized by the logic of appropriation, violence, and control.5 People
in the zone of nonbeing are non-human or sub-human; they do not have a
gender and are forcibly subjected to sex, labor, and death. Other modalities of
gender and sexuality have also been relegated to the zone of nonbeing. As
they do not qualify as human according to white, male criteria for humanness,
they have not been endowed with a sexuality, but have been ascribed an extremely aggressive sexual disposition. They have also not been classed as
men and women, but as males and females although the biological distinction between these categories remains blurred.
With Lugones, it is important to note that the race and gender relations in
coloniality imply that some principles of social organization, which tend to be
universalized by white feminism, only apply to the zone of being the same
zone from which these feminist readings of society emerge. These are, first,
the division between public and private social spheres and, second, the upholding of appropriate gender differences, such as the dichotomy between
men and women. This race-gender normativity also naturalizes white womens privilege of solidarity, where, for example, Scandinavian women can
experience solidarity with Muslim women (implying that they are oppressed),
but Muslim women cannot share solidarity with Scandinavian women (implying that they are free from oppression) (Bouteldja 2011). This functions to
emphasize differences between those inside and outside of the zone of nonbeing.
Maldonado-Torress contribution to this discussion in his essay On the
Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept expands upon this knowledge, showing that questions concerning the humanity
of the Indians whether they were rational beings, whether they had rights
are founded on what he terms a racist/imperial Manichean misanthropic skepticism, or the imperial attitude (2007: 245) of I conquer. This imperial
attitude questions the humanity of the conquered and precedes the Cartesian
methodological skepticism, whose central principle is doubt. MaldonadoTorres emphasizes the crucial significance of doubt or of questioning, in sum,
of misanthropic skepticism, because of its centrality in understanding the
existential dimensions of the I conquer for the conqueror and the conquered. As he states:
Misanthropic skepticism doubts in a way the most obvious. Statements like you are a
human take the form of cynical rhetorical questions: Are you completely human? You
have rights becomes why do you think that you have rights? Likewise, You are a rational being takes the form of the question are you really rational? (ibid: 246)

In contrast to Lugones distinction between the light and the dark side (2007), I prefer Fanons more existential distinction between the zones of being and nonbeing (1967).

Human Rights, Race, and Gender from a Transatlantic Perspective 217

What is important about misanthropic skepticism is not the answers to the
questions posed; what is notable are the questions themselves. It is this doubt
about the humanity of the Other that relegates the Other to the zone of nonbeing, where she is expected to remain or constantly prove her being:
The Misanthropic skepticism provides the basis for the preferential option for the ego
conquiro, which explains why security for some can conceivably be obtained at the expense of the lives of others. The imperial attitude promotes a fundamentally genocidal
attitude in respect to colonized and racialized people. Through it colonial and racial subjects are marked as dispensable (ibid: 246, italics in original).

As such, the imperial attitude has quickly become a racist and colonial commonplace that has radicalized and naturalized the non-ethics of war (ibid:
247).
When Maldonado-Torres writes about the non-ethics of war, he does so in
order to emphasize the differences between the zone of being and the zone of
nonbeing. In the zone of being, we can discuss an ethics of war. This ethics of
war is, however, suspended in relation to those in the zone of nonbeing,
where it becomes a non-ethics that includes genocidal and epistemicidal practices towards the subjects relegated to this zone. As Maldonado-Torres elaborates, war also includes rape, and although the primary targets of this latter
practice of sexual violence are women, men of color are also regarded as
penetrable subjects (ibid: 247248).
These insights are linked to the development of human rights politics: the
imperial doubt had already been internalized within the subjectivity of the
conquerors by the time that Pope Paul III, in 1537, declared the Indians human. Hence, the Popes declaration had no significant impact (MaldonadoTorres 2007: 244, cf. Quijano 1992). Accordingly, the same doubt was already in play when the above-mentioned Valladolid debates regarding the
humanity of indigenous peoples occurred.
The imperial commonplace, the I conquer stance, was never an occasion
for interrogation by Cartesian doubt either and has been left unquestioned and
continues to lie at the heart of the dominant scientific disciplines concerned
with the study of social, economic, political, legal, and humanistic affairs.
This is not coincidental. Rather, as the last section of this discussion demonstrates, it connects historically to the processes that took place during the
transition between the first and the second modernity and so to the transition
between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, when northern European
(mostly British, Danish, Dutch, French, and German) and North American
colonialisms began to take over the transatlantic connection and slave trade
previously controlled by the powers of Spain and Portugal. The next section
examines the complex relationship between the construction of the category
human, the race-gender normativity fundamental to the imperial attitude,
and human rights.

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The Imperial Attitude and Human Rights

The Spanish conquistadors and colonizers, the agents of the Crown, and the
members of the clergy each adopted different positions in the dispute over the
humanity of indigenous people in the Americas (Knig 1998: 1314). To the
colonizers and conquerors, whose position was predicated on the desire for
rapid enrichment and access to power, it was convenient not to regard the
Indians as human. Rapid wealth production and access to power depended
directly on the exploitation and/or eradication of native populations. The
colonizers and conquerors viewpoint was that the Indians were born to be
enslaved, because they had wild customs and were intellectually weak.
As Hans Joachim Knig notes, the perspective of the conquerors and colonizers was an almost direct extrapolation of the ways in which the Spanish
had conceived of Others in antiquity and in the Middle Ages (Knig 1998:
15). The Spanish Crown, also concerned with rapid enrichment, maintained
some ethical limits due to its connection to the Church more specifically
due to its obligation to convert the Indians. For the most part, the Crown
aimed to protect the lives of indigenous peoples and to facilitate their conversion to Christianity, because the autochthonous population was considered
part of the wealth of the discovered territories they were its labor force and
tributaries. The Churchs predominant position was that the Indians were
human and had to be understood as such. They were, however, not fully realized human beings. Rather, having the potential to become Christian, they
could become fully realized humans when they accepted Christianity; the
main focus of the Church was its evangelizing endeavor. In spite of these
differences among the Spanish, the crucial point is that across all three positions, the indigenous peoples were regarded as inferior to the Spanish. The
issue of the humanity of African slaves was not even debated they were not
considered to be people (Knig 1998: 15, Surez-Krabbe 2011: 102105).
This hierarchization of human beings is fundamental to racism. It implies
that those who endorse white, male, bourgeois, and Christian standards for
defining what human means evaluate whether those who do not meet these
standards are human or to what degree they are human. The less similar other
people are to these standards, the less they are regarded as human. Social and
material life is organized according to the hierarchies created by applying the
above-mentioned criteria. During the first modernity, these deliberations were
made on the basis of what the Spanish powers took to be important elements
constituting the human: spirituality, economy, social organization, political
organization, sexuality, and thought.
Racism is not only about having the power to determine other peoples
humanity, but also about defining the terms of such discussions. While many
scholars state that the Church was often on the side of the indigenous, they

Human Rights, Race, and Gender from a Transatlantic Perspective 219

often leave unquestioned that their very ability to take the side of the indigenous was a privilege only the conquering elites had meaning that solidarity
is embedded in the coloniality of power and frequently enacts the zone of
being. In the case of the conquering elites, solidarity was built upon the imperial attitude; the people who were on the side of the indigenous were so because of the potential of the latter to become like them (and so fully human)
this way of thinking remains decidedly racist.
We need to acknowledge the complexity of the historical trajectory of racism and to understand that by debating the rights of people and the laws of
nations (jus gentium), the Spanish elites assumed the privilege of defining
rights by asking whether the indigenous peoples were human and therefore
could have rights.
The deliberations of Francisco de Vitoria, a Spanish Renaissance theologian, jurist, and important contributor to modern international legal interpretations of the ancient Roman customary law of jus gentium, include an exploration of the moral basis of trade based on profit (cf. Anghie 1996, 1999,
2004, Gmez Rivas 2005). Vitorias work condenses, in significant ways, the
positions of the Crown, the Conquerors, and the Church to form a rationale
and a (non-)ethics of war. As Antony Anghie has shown in his writings on
Vitoria and international jurisprudence, Vitoria provides principles for the
distinction between natural law, human law, and divine law in order to conceptualize the Indian question, that is, the legitimacy of imperial power over
indigenous peoples in America. Within this distinction, Vitoria makes the
crucial move to situate questions of ownership and property within natural
and human law. While divine law, mediated by the Pope, is limited to the
Christian world, natural and human laws transcend cultures. Because they are
argued to be within the realms of laws that transcend specific cultures, natural
and human laws are regarded as being universal. It is within the framework of
this operation that we find the basis of the law of peoples, jus gentium
(Anghie 1996: 324326, cf. Vitoria 1981).
The problem of cultural difference is central to Vitorias ideas and the
way in which he deals with it also explains the point of collapse of human
rights discussed in the first section of this essay. In order to grapple with
cultural difference, Vitoria makes three decisive cognitive moves that continue to be central to the negation of the Other in international law. Firstly, Vitoria recognizes the social and customary difference of the Indians. Secondly,
he attempts to overcome difference through jus gentium and the characterization of Indians as human beings who have a universal rationality as reflected
in their social, economic, and religious organization (Anghie 1996: 331). This
universal rationality allows the Indians to understand and therefore comply
with jus gentium. Thirdly, because they are equal to the Spanish in having the
capacity for universal reason, one can expect them to obey universal stand-

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Julia Surez-Krabbe

ards. The difficulty is, of course, that these apparently universal standards are
actually Christian Spanish standards (Anghie 1996: 332).
While Vitoria emphasizes the humanity of the indigenous peoples in some
parts of his discussion, in others he excuses just war against them. He does so
because, according to the Spanish, the Indians are potentially ontologically
equal to them. The criteria for this ontological equality, however, are formulated within Spanish Christian epistemological frameworks and the negation
of the Other, the zone of nonbeing, lies at the center of this definition. In
other words, what the Spanish regard as the indigenous peoples potential to
become like them is, at the same time, that by which they negate the humanity
of the Other: that is, a potential for sameness is also a negation of difference.
This negation makes it possible to grant meta-legal status to the war
against the Indians; the war against the Indians was justified by the universal
jus gentium, similar to the way in which contemporary wars against Iraq and
Afghanistan are justified in the name of human rights. Indeed, whereas Vitorias argument concludes by not denying the difference of the Indians, it also
uses their assumed sameness and equality to deny them sovereignty. As mentioned, it is precisely because the Indians are equal to the Spanish that they
have to obey universal norms for example, those that dictate the right to
travel and explore other lands, to trade in a fair manner, and to spread the
Christian religion in other words, the Indians have the right to colonize if
they become what they in fact can never be: Spanish (Anghie 2004: 2021,
Vitoria 1981: 7276). Vitorias humanist equality masks difference and unequal power relations with a veneer of Spanish philosophical, cultural, economic, and political life. These Spanish forms of life dictate the terms of jus
gentium, demonstrating that the imperial attitude is in operation.
The imperial attitude additionally interprets the Indians resistance to becoming like the Spanish as their inability to comply with the universal laws of
jus gentium. This allows the Spanish powers to affirm that the Indians are
violating universal laws and consequently committing a transgression that
legitimates just war against them (Anghie 1996: 326). Indeed, this is a naturalization of inferiority, and this inferiority itself becomes the rationale for a
just war (cf. Dussel 2008: 166, Maldonado-Torres 2007). By these means, the
Indians end up existing as violators of the universal law who cannot implement righteous war themselves. Just war is, by this definition, a Christians
right; therefore the indigenous peoples would have to convert to Christianity
before being able to conduct war righteously (Anghie 1996: 330). As suggested with reference to the recent Iraqi and Afghani wars, the foundations of
contemporary international law and the doctrine of sovereignty share this
ambiguity which is obscured or explicitly negated in most studies of international relations and international law (cf. Anghie 1996, 2004).

Human Rights, Race, and Gender from a Transatlantic Perspective 221

Conclusion
The imperial attitude has remained almost wholly unexamined in dominant
knowledge construction since the sixteenth century. This is connected to the
processes that took place during the transition between the first and the second modernity, when northern Europe started to take charge of the transatlantic connection and slave trade previously controlled by Spain and Portugal. In
this period of transition, the colonial elites across the Atlantic continued to
deny, or render obsolete, the social struggles of non-elites that, however, had
powerfully affected their thought and political practice. While it is outside the
scope of this discussion to consider the dynamics between emancipation and
the subsumption or neutralization of emancipation within the coloniality of
power, it is nevertheless important to underline the crucial role the Other has
played in changing the terms of ideas and legal issues, perhaps most saliently
in relation to the idea of racial equality (cf. Surez-Krabbe 2013). It is symptomatic of the imperial attitude that the impact of the social struggles of these
Others, such as the Haitian Revolution (17911804), has been largely negated
over time.
The criticisms that came to be known as the Black Legend, which was
primarily advanced during the Enlightenment, involved a representation of
Spanish colonialism as anachronistic and exceptionally brutal.6 The Black
Legend was in effect a Protestant, northern European backlash against Catholic, colonial Spain promoting the imperial interests of northern European and
North American colonialisms. By representing Spanish colonialism as particularly cruel, northern European colonial powers could differentiate themselves as being more humane and modern (Beverley 2008: 599). In effect, the
Black Legend played an important role as another stratum of denial, which
legitimized colonialism and the imperial attitude.
The initial layer of denial, as outlined above, in the discussion of I conquer and its imperial attitude is based upon the negation of the Other. The
second layer is the Cartesian ego cogito, which conceals the negation of the
Other and is built upon the I conquer. The third layer is an extension of
these negations, whereby Spain and southern Europe are themselves located
in a border zone, as they are, for example, via the Black Legend. Spain, Portugal, and the rest of southern Europe are considered neither modern nor
colonial. At best, they might be considered pre-modern due to an academic
bias towards the heritage of Ancient Greece and Rome (cf. Santos 2002b).
One of the common assumptions of northern European elites has been an

Julin Juderas coined the term in his 1914 book The Black Legend and Historical Truth in
reference to anti-Spanish propaganda. The Black refers here to the pejorative representation of Spanish colonial behaviour.

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Julia Surez-Krabbe

understanding of the Other as being at an earlier stage in the history of humanity; more specifically, at an earlier stage of northern European history.
Significantly, the imaginaries reflected in the Black Legend have facilitated a denial of the transatlantic nature of Western ideas since the discovery of
the Americas. This denial is one of the reasons why many students of human
rights depart from the assumption that these are mainly a product of seventeenth and eighteenth century northern European thought, particularly linked
to Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651) and Locke (Two Treatises of Government,
1690) and additionally place the origins of human rights in the French Revolution (as outlined in the introduction to this essay). This historical narrative,
however, is an aspect of the third stratum of negations mentioned above.
To forward this essays central thesis that human rights are not only
built upon, but also protect, white male subjectivity, and that they are the fruit
of the construction of the category human that emerged as a central point of
discussions among the Spanish colonizing elites during the sixteenth century it is pivotal to understand the three layers of negation briefly outlined
above. The race-gender power relations embedded in the category human
played a significant role in the context of the social struggles of racialized
subjects in Latin America during independence and republic-building. Among
the effects of these struggles was the inclusion of the idea of racial equality in
the legal frameworks of several newly independent countries.
Many years later, the idea of racial equality also came to impact on the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Glendon 2003: 33, cf. Carozza
2003). Although the idea of racial equality put the Latin American and Caribbean legal tradition at the forefront of human rights thinking, it increasingly
lost its emancipatory potential and was instead accommodated by white male
elites to protect their interests. It was indeed used to make invisible and to
neutralize the struggles of racialized subjects, who had brought the idea of
racial equality into the light in the first place. For instance, the widespread
assumption that the abolition of slavery was a white mans concession still
has currency.
The period of independence and republic-building in Latin America is
connected to the general decline of Spain as a major colonial power and the
rise of northern Europe and the US as imperial powers. While Latin American
independence movements explicitly used the idea of racial equality, the elites
in Europe and the United States largely ignored racial issues. As the French
revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen attest, the
concerns for racial equality had been absent in these latitudes for some time.
Contrary to debates on the rights of people in the sixteenth century, consideration about the colonial aspects of issues concerning citizenship and
(in)equality were increasingly absent from elaborations of the ideas of rights
(Mignolo 2000: 29).

Human Rights, Race, and Gender from a Transatlantic Perspective 223

These ideas were elaborated within epistemological frameworks determined by the processes that established and universalized Western principles
of national belonging and sovereignty (cf. Santiago-Valles 2003) and by the
configuration of the idea of the citizen within these structures. In order to fit
into the category of the citizen, a person had to conform to requirements regarding religion, blood, color, gender, knowledge, government, and property as defined by European male elites. According to the dominant imaginaries, the formerly colonized still had to progress towards maturity before
they themselves could be expected to start the processes that marked out
civilized societies, including those of defining rights.
The proposals of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens, of the US Declaration of Independence, and of Latin American selfdetermination movements and constitutionalist endeavors were varied continuations of a theme that first began to be discussed in connection with the
management of the colonized lands of the Americas (cf. Csaire 2006). All
were, in diverse ways, concealing the imperial/racist colonialist misanthropic
skepticism or imperial attitude behind the emerging focus on the nation-state
and on the category of the citizen a status not granted to all inhabitants.
Understanding the imperial attitude is central to comprehending how the
significance of the struggles of racialized men and women has been downplayed despite their impact on the development of international human rights
policy, for example on racial equality (as discussed above, cf. Buck-Morss
2000, Lasso 2003, 2006, 2007, Surez-Krabbe 2013). The imperial attitude
remains commonplace as long as a normative, white, male construction of
human subjectivity prevails. This explains the above-mentioned duality of
human rights, and why the security of some, as Maldonado-Torres states, is
promoted at the expense of the lives of Others (2007: 246). The race-gendernormativity embedded in the category human allows Western societies to
mobilize their armies against these Others, alleging to save brown women
from brown men (Spivak 1993: 93), and to save brown men from themselves
(Leets Hansen 2011).

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Crtica de Cincias Sociais and Eurozine, pp. 148.
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Seplveda, Juan Gins de (1996) [approx 1550]: Tratado Sobre las Justas Causas de
la Guerra Contra los Indios. Mxico D. F.: FCE.
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Spivak, Gayatri Chakraborty (1993): Can the Subaltern Speak? In: Williams, Patrick/
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Surez-Krabbe, Julia (2011): At the Pace of Cassiopeia: Being, Nonbeing, Human
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Surez-Krabbe, Julia (2013): Race, Social Struggles, and Human Rights: Contributions from the Global South. In: Journal of Critical Globalization Studies 6,
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Vitoria, Francisco de (1981) [1539]: Relecciones Sobre los Indios. Bogot: El Bho.
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Centennial Review 3, 3, pp. 257337.

Propertization as a Civilizing and Modernizing

Mission: Land and Human Rights in the Colonial
and Postcolonial World
Propertization as a Civilizing and Modernizing Mission

Judith Schacherreiter
Introduction
One of the main critiques of human rights touches on their ethnocentricity:
although human rights are widely held to be universally applicable, their
justification is primarily framed in Western terms (cf., for example, Griffin
2011: 137). Against this background, I will demonstrate that with regard to
property rights the problem runs much deeper. There are additional troubling
dimensions to ethnocentricity and universalism which go beyond the mere
fact of human rights being embedded in Western concepts.
Discourses of Natural Law and the legal philosophy of the Enlightenment
have justified the universalism of a Western understanding of property while
simultaneously dismissing communal land usage,1 as practiced by European
peasants in pre-capitalist Europe and by the indigenous population of the
Americas, as traditional and primitive. Drawing on postcolonial scholars
work, I will investigate the relation between the politics of property, the universalization of property, and coloniality. In this context, I will examine the
propertization of land in postcolonial Mexico and its effects on indigenous
communal land. My analysis will show that the universalization of property
contains a colonial way of thinking which is inherently biased against communal forms of land usage, a practice which is still alive in some of the formerly colonized countries.
The essay is structured as follows: I will begin by tracing the emergence
of property as a human right in Europe, which occurred in the historical context of propertization of soil and was backed by philosophical theories focusing on propertization of land. Here, I will analyze the theories of Hugo Grotius, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant as some of the
most important legal philosophers of Natural Law and Enlightenment. They
conceptualize the conversion of common land into individual property as a
1

In this essay, the notions of communal land usage and common land refer to land used
by a community in accordance with certain rules typically developed by the community itself. This land is neither subject to property rights nor to the free market.

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necessary step in the development from a state of nature towards civilization,

perceiving the common usage of land as a typical feature of the pre-modern
and pre-civilized world. Private property in land, on the other hand, is held to
be the basis of a modern civilized society. Since these narratives make a universal claim, European peasants who lived on the basis of common land usage in feudal Europe and indigenous people in the Americas are deemed
barbaric and pre-modern. Accordingly, both the abolishment of the
commons in Europe and the colonial appropriation of indigenous land in
America are perceived as civilizing and modernizing processes.
This hegemonic discourse will be critiqued employing Dipesh
Chakrabartys (2000: 8, 249250) argument that colonial thinking considers
the now of non-Western cultures (for instance, of indigenous peoples in the
Americas) as a mere antecedent to present-day Europe. The colonized Other
is reduced to a not yet (not yet civilized, not yet modernized, et cetera) and
functions as a reference point for the construction of the superior modern
European self. The civilized needs the barbaric as an opposite to constitute its identity.
With regard to the Americas, this argument will be elaborated in more detail by drawing on the theories of Enrique Dussel (1994) and Edmundo
OGorman (2006) about the invention (OGorman 2006) of the Americas in
European thinking. According to these authors, Europe was only able to constitute itself as the center of the world once the Americas had appeared on the
map as the forth continent. Only in opposition to the New World could
Europe consider itself as the Old World and, simultaneously, as the peak of
universal human development with the right to civilize and colonize. In the
subsequent section, I will again turn to Chakrabartys (2000: 29) argument
that it is paradoxical that non-Western cultures often find Western universalizing theories eminently useful in understanding their own societies, in spite
of their inherent lack of knowledge about the Other. This argument is all
the more valid when as in our discussion regarding property these cultures
are represented as inferior.
Mexican agrarian history is a prime example. After independence, Mexican politicians of the ruling Liberal party (for example, Jos Mara Luis Mora), employed the colonial rhetoric of the importance of property rights, while
abolishing indigenous communal lands by converting them into property.
Drawing on European narratives about the backwardness of the commons,
they argued that propertization was a necessary precondition for modernization (Hale 1985: 227, 253, Fraser 1972: 619, Brading 1973: 148). More than
one hundred years later, under the strong influence of NAFTA and the World
Bank, Mexican communal land was once again privatized in order to modernize the agrarian sector and to make it more efficient in accordance with
Western utilitarian criteria. These agrarian reforms reiterated colonial thinking and reproduced the colonial dispossession of indigenous land. However,

Propertization as a Civilizing and Modernizing Mission

229

they also triggered counter-movements, such as the Mexican Revolution and

the Zapatista uprising of 1994. Both movements employ anti-, and postcolonial discourses (among others) to criticize the propertization of land, thereby
challenging the alleged universalism of property. After looking at the above
example, the concluding section will examine the relation between the political legacy of the Enlightenment and postcolonialism and address the problems of ethnocentrism.

Propertization in Europe
Property, Civilization and Modernity
From the outset, the call to treat the protection of property as a human right
has been dominated by capitalist interests. The historical background to this
legal conception was the abolishment of feudal agrarian structures by the
propertization of land, a process which was completed in the eighteenth and
nineteenth century (Hobsbawm 1996: 24, 31, 4849). According to Karl
Marx (1962 [1947]: 741802), the English enclosure movement, which converted feudal common land into private property, facilitated original accumulation and thereby created the basis for the capitalist mode of production. In
other European countries, the liberation of land from feudal rights, obligations, and relationships, as well as the conversion of formerly feudal land into
free and full property also significantly contributed to the transition to capitalism. The lords lost dominance over the peasants, but the peasants also lost
their feudal rights over the soil, including their communal usage rights. Rural
land and rural workforce were subjugated to the free market and thereby converted into commodities (Polanyi 2001: 37, 7478, 187, Welkoborsky 1976).
Karl Polanyi (2001: 179) argues that in Europe, the [c]ommerciali-zation of
the soil was only another name for the liquidation of feudalism.
Natural Law and Enlightenment philosophy universalized these processes
by defining private property in land as a fundamental basis for human development and civilization in general. Key philosophers like Hugo Grotius, John
Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant considered the abolition
of communal land through the implementation of individual property as an
unfortunate (in Rousseaus view) but necessary step to transcending the state
of nature and entering civilization. According to their theories of property,
property in land is initially established through the occupation of terra nullius, namely no mans land. This process is called originary acquisition.
The acquisition of property by occupation of something which belongs to
nobody (res nullius) was already common in Roman law. However, in Roman

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law, this concept only applied to movable things on a piece of land, in particular to wild animals, fish, and the like, not to the soil itself. In international
law, the legal institution of first occupation developed in connection with
terra nullius, but it is important to note that this term does not denominate the
acquisition of private property rights in land, but rather the establishment of
sovereignty over territory (Lesaffer 2005: 3846).
Within Natural Law and Enlightenment philosophy the notion of terra
nullius has a different connotation: the term is understood to signify land
without (individual) proprietor which is therefore open to acquisition by first
occupation. Common land is also considered terra nullius and thus can be
appropriated. By appropriation, common usage ends, and land is converted
into property. Thereby the state of nature is superseded; the propertization of
land leads to civilization (Grotius 1950: 146148, Locke 2009: 285302,
Kant 1977: 366367, 372, 374375, Rousseau 2006: 132142). Rousseau
summarizes this idea in his famous statement that
the first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, to whom it occurred to say this is
mine, and found people sufficiently simple to believe him, was the true founder of civil
society (Rousseau 2006: 132, emphasis in original).

This narrative of human history justifies both property as an institution and

the (re)distribution of wealth based thereupon as necessary aspects of the
civilizing process.
The main actor in this process is the rational, autonomous individual, who
willfully occupies and appropriates land. In Lockes philosophy, this individual is also a rational utility-maximizer. Locke argues that
God, who hath given the World to Men in common, hath also given them reason to make
use of it to the best advantage of Life, and convenience [] [S]ince he gave it them for
their benefit, [] it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and
uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the Industrious and Rational (Locke 2009: 286, 291).

According to Kant (1977: 354355, 372373), property is based on reason;

he assumes the existence of property as a general postulate of practical reason
(ein Postulat der praktischen Vernunft).
Common usage of land was not understood as an alternative form of land
tenure by philosophers of the Enlightenment; instead, it was viewed as land in
a state of not yet property, awaiting its appropriation and propertization.
The transformation of common land into property was conceptualized either
as a historical process or as a logical/theoretical deduction. Rousseaus
(2006) description of the genesis of property, for example, reads like a tale
about the historical development of humanity. For Kant (1977: 358360,
368369, 372373), on the other hand, common land is a logical/theoretical
precondition for property, but it does not reflect a historical beginning of
human development. Hence, his concept of common land cannot be understood as a description of a historical past, but as a practical notion of reason

Propertization as a Civilizing and Modernizing Mission

231

(praktischer Vernunftbegriff), a pure category of reason (Denkkategorie). For both thinkers, however, the commons are only not yet property, a transitionary phenomenon without intrinsic merits. Property, on the
other hand, is understood as a natural right, since it is the endpoint of a predetermined and just (albeit unfortunate) human development (Rousseau) or
the necessary outcome of a logical process of reason (Kant).
In the context of these historical and philosophical narratives, property
was implemented as a fundamental legal concept in European positive law.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789 (Ishay 1997:
138139) protected property as a natural, sacred, and inviolable human right
(Articles 2, 17). The Code Napoleon of 1804 defined ownership in Article 544 as the right to enjoy and dispose of things in the most absolute manner. The wording of both legal documents refers to property in general, but
the main aim of the legislator was to abolish feudal agrarian structures by
securing property in land. For the first time, property was applicable to movables and land alike; a highly abstract legal institution that equally embraced
such inherently different things as shoes and soil. As such, it was implemented in constitutions and civil law codifications which formed the legal basis of
capitalistic modernity. In the further development of capitalism it has increasingly been expanded to include more and more goods, material and immaterial.

Coloniality of Property
If we understand modernity as being deeply linked to coloniality, the same is
true for the modern concept of land property. The (former) colonies in the
Americas serve as the necessary Other (Dussel 1994) for the selfconstitution of European modernity and as a justification for universalist
narratives of property and civilization. Indigenous common lands are considered an anachronism and a reflection of Europes own past. Hence, their Otherness is converted into a not yet similar, which implies a not yet equal.
The common usage of land is not recognized as an autonomous legal form of
land tenancy, but reduced to a not yet property, a space without law and
cultivation. It represents the state of nature which is characterized by the
absence of law in general and property rights in particular. By universalizing
these categories law, rights, and property and determining them as necessary elements of a civilizatory evolution, Europe has created a universal,
linear path of human development.
The indigenous people of the Americas, practicing the common use of
land, are consequently defined by what they lack: there is a lack of law, a lack
of rights, a lack of property, and a lack of civilization. By setting itself against
them, Europe can define itself as advanced and civilized. This is most obvi-

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ous in the philosophy of Locke. According to him, in the beginning all the
World was America (Locke 2009: 301). The wild Indian does not know
enclosure and still lives as a tenant in common (Locke 2009: 287). However, even though God gave the world to men in common, he did not want them
to remain in this state; it was His will that the industrious and rational
should cultivate the land. The industrious and rational are those who administer the terrain in accordance with utilitarian criteria on the basis of property
rights like the English colonizers. A different form of cultivation is unthinkable for Locke; common land is nothing but uncultivated land (Locke 2009:
291).
Rousseau holds a similar view, claiming that Europe constitutes the pinnacle of civilization. The indigenous people have neither reason nor philosophy but live in harmony with nature. Categories of mine and yours do not
exist, the fruits belong to all and the land to nobody. This life is regulated not
by law but by natural compassion (Rousseau 2006). The civilized man, on
the other hand, is weaker but driven by reason. In the same vein, Kant argues
that the American savages still persist in a state of nature which is a prelegal state (vorrechtlicher Zustand). Civil society (brgerliche Gesellschaft) however requires law, rights, and property, which can only appear
after the appropriation of land (Kant 1977: 365367, 372375).
Even Western Marxism has cultivated the universalist historical narrative
of a linear development from a pre-modern stage to capitalist modernity.
Accordingly, capitalism would be a necessary transitory stage in a nation's
evolution towards socialism. However, there is one important difference to
the accounts of the Enlightenment philosophers above: Marx himself refuses
the universalist notion of a necessary conversion of common land into property. When the Russian revolutionary Vera Sassulitsch asked him at the end of
the nineteenth century whether a socialist revolution would be possible in precapitalist Russia, Marx answered that his theory about the historical inevitability of capitalism was limited to Western Europe, and that due to Russia's
unique combination of circumstances, it was not necessary to destroy the rural
communities in the region. Indeed, these communities might even contribute
to a socialist transformation by serving as strongholds of collective production in a non-capitalistic society (Marx 1962a: 242243, 1962b: 384406).
Hence, Marx thought that an autonomous development of communal forms of
possession, usage, and production was possible.
However, the general European notions of the Americas as a second Europe or a New World following the Old World (OGorman 2006: 150
153, Dussel 1994: 3637) seem to rather reflect the ideas of Natural Law and
Enlightenment philosophers. This gives rise to what Antony Anghie calls the
dynamic of difference: once the gap between the civilized and the uncivilized has been established,

Propertization as a Civilizing and Modernizing Mission

233

what follows is the formulation of doctrines that are designed to efface this gap: to bring
the uncivilized/aberrant/violent/backward/oppressed into the realm of civilization, the
universal order governed by (European) international law (Anghie 2006: 742).

Accordingly, the occupation of indigenous land and the implementation of

property in favor of the colonizers can be justified as necessary steps towards
civilization. As the Other and its communal land tenure system are characterized by a lack of efficiency, law, and property, the occupation of land can be
classified as a first occupation which establishes law, property, and efficient
cultivation. Occidental ideas about efficiency, law, and property are thereby
universalized, and land is pronounced as terra nullius although it has actually been used in common for decades. Common usage is classified as a mere
custom which generates neither property nor any other rights.2 In the context
of colonialism, this argument may also be considered as a secularized version
of the medieval theological claim that because of their infidelity, indigenous
people cannot have any rights and therefore not even rights in land (Hanke
2002: 120, 122).

Propertization in Mexico
Property, Modernity, and Coloniality
Mexican agrarian history is a prime example for the way in which the links
between modernity, property, and coloniality enforce colonial structures even
after formal independence. In Independent Mexico,3 the Liberals (Liberales),
under the strong influence of European liberalism and Enlightenment, implemented a modernizing program which aimed both at the elimination of colonial structures and the creation of a modern society (Hale 1965, 1985). According to Octavio Paz (2007: 269), this modernizing program operated on
the basis of a three-fold negation: a negation of the Spanish heritage, a negation of Catholicism, and a negation of the indigenous past.
A fundamental part of this program was the liberal agrarian reform. In accordance with European theories about property, the Liberals considered the
indigenous communal lands (which had survived colonialism) as an anachronism, a relic of ancient times, a manifestation of a backward culture, and an
obstacle to progress. Individual property, on the other hand, was held to be
2
3

Within Europe, the same argument was brought forward against the commoners in connection with the English enclosures (Neeson 1996: 35, 5556).
Independent Mexico (Mxico Independiente) describes the era of Mexican history between the realization of Independence (1821) and the beginning of the Mexican Revolution
(1910).

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universally applicable as a natural right and a necessary part of modernization (Hale 1965: 217, Fraser 1972: 619, Montemayor 2009: 230231, 318
319). Common land was parceled, privatized, and converted into individual
property; property was implemented as a basic constitutional and civil law
concept in accordance with European legal models.4
Individual colonial titles in land were re-interpreted as titles to property
and as such protected by the constitution. The colonial distribution of land
was held to be the originary act that had constituted private property over a
piece of land for the first time (Orozco 1895: 760765).5 At the same time,
indigenous people lost their communal land in the process of privatization
and became more and more dependent on work on the huge land holdings
(so-called haciendas) of their former colonizers under conditions similar to
slavery (Silva Herzog 2007: 24, 2728, 31, Katz 2004). Thus, liberal agrarian
reform prolonged and reproduced the colonial distribution of land, wealth,
and power. Furthermore, the Liberals sustained colonial epistemic structures
by justifying their reforms with European ideas about the backwardness of
indigenous people living on the basis of communal land usage. Property and
modernization had become a new civilizing mission directed by the political
elites of Independent Mexico against indigenous and rural communities.
The Mexican Revolution (19101917) gave rise to a new agrarian law
which allowed for the redistribution of land and re-established communal
forms of possession. The main aims of the revolutionary agrarian law were
social justice and social peace. Private property was not fully eliminated, but
there was a limit on the amount of land permitted to be held by only one proprietor. Communal concepts of tenure were placed at the center of the reform;
land was assigned to rural and indigenous communities in common. If necessary, this land was taken from huge land holdings exceeding the specified
limitation. Land given to communities was declared inalienable. It could
neither be sold nor rented, and communities were obliged to cultivate the land
personally. The idea behind these regulations was that land should not be a
commodity subject to the free market, but a means of existence for the rural
population. The revolutionary concepts of communal tenancy and communities' right to land were protected by the constitution just as private property
(Gilly 2009, Ruiz Massieu 1987).6
4

Fundamental legislative provitions were Article 27 of the 1857 Mexican Constitution (Constitucin Federal de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos, Sancionada y Jurada por el Congreso
General Constituyente, el da 5 de febrero de 1857) and the Law of Desamortization 1856
(Ley de Desamortizacin de Bienes de Manos Muertas de 25 de junio de 1856).
This follows from the laws on fallow land of 1863 and 1894 (Ley Sobre Ocupacin y
Enajenacin de Terrenos Baldos de 20 de julio de 1863; Ley Sobre Ocupacin y Enajenacin de Terrenos Baldos del 26 de marzo de 1894).
The main principles of the revolutionary agrarian law were laid down in the Agrarian Law
of 1915 (Ley de 6 de enero de 1915, que Declara Nulas Todas las Enajenaciones de Tierras,
Aguas y Montes Pertenecientes a los Pueblos, Otorgadas en Contravencin a lo Dispuesto

Propertization as a Civilizing and Modernizing Mission

235

However, in the 1990s, when the enforcement of the revolutionary program was still pending, the Mexican government, under the influence of
NAFTA negotiations and World Bank recommendations (Heath 1990),
adopted a counter-reform of privatization and propertization (Calva 1993).7
The Mexican president promised progress and modernization. This official
political discourse was once again based on ostensibly universal concepts of
progress, development, efficiency, and modernization. It thereby reproduced
the colonial epistemic structures of Natural Law and utilitarian narratives
about property and civilization. Common land of indigenous people was
now at least implicitly deemed to be unproductive, inefficient, and inconsistent with modernization. Common land use and the ineptitude of the rural
and indigenous population, rather than lack of technologies and of public
support, were identified as the reasons for poor agrarian production.8 Privatization aimed to bring common land under the free market and to permit its
conversion into private property. The rural poor were supposed to give up
their land by means of sale and rent in favor of more efficient proprietors.
This reform once again resulted in the reproduction of colonial structures,
because the privatization of communal land allowed for new forms of dispossession of the indigenous and rural population in favor of national and transnational enterprises. Frequently, these dispossessions (which are still common
today) are legitimized by civil law contracts of sale and of usufructuary rights
entered into under circumstances of economic or political pressure, ignorance, corruption, fraud, or violence.9 Once they have sold their land, the
landless become dependent on wage labor, either on the land formerly owned

7
8

en la Ley de 25 de junio de 1856) and in Article 27 of the Constitution of 1917 (Constitucin Poltica de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos que Reforma la de 5 de febrero del 1857,
Diario Oficial Federal 5-2-1917).
With the agrarian reform of 1992, article 27 of the 1917 Constitution was fundamentally
changed and a new Agrarian Law (Ley Agraria 1992) was adopted.
This is obvious from the legislative material and the official explanations of the Mexican
government (Iniciativa de Reformas de 1992 al Artculo 27 Constitucional), reprinted in Daz de Len (2002: 918ff.).
A lot of such cases have been reported in Mexican daily newspapers; see, for example, La
Jornada 8 August 2011, p. 9: Mentiras y Traiciones, Estrategias de TrasnacionalesPpara
Obtener Ganancias; 8 August 2011, p. 8: Se Alista MineraCcanadiense a Explotar Ejidos
en Oaxaca; Temen Grave Contaminacin; 25 July 2011, p. 17: Obliga la Procuradura
Agraria a Ejidatarios a Vender sus Tierras a Empresas Particulares: Cocyp; 26 June 2009,
p. 34: Ejidatarios de Chihuahua Demandan a Minera Renegociar Precio de Tierras; 26
May 2009, p. 30: Habitantes de Tres Ejidos en Zacatecas Exigen a Minera Canadiense
Cumplir Compromisos; 24 May 2009, p. 33: Pobladores de El Monten, Nayarit, Denuncian Despojo de Playa y Represin por Defenderla; 23 April 2009, p. 36: Firman Ejidatarios de Zacatecas Acuerdo con la Minera Goldcorp; 17 March 2009, p. 31: Ejidatarios
Denuncian Hostigamiento; 9 December 2008, p. 38: Investigan Anomalas en Desistimiento de Juicio Campesino Contra Coppel en Sinaloa; 17 November 2008, p. 13: Apoyo
del Gobierno al Corredor Elico; 6 November 2008, p. 19: Buscan Sacar a Firmas Espaolas de Oaxaca.

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by themselves, in the bigger cities of Mexico, or as migrants in the USA. In

the face of rural poverty, it is often argued that the peasants are better off as
wage workers. However, whether they are able to find work is not always
guaranteed. In any case, they continue being subjected to exploitation as a
cheap workforce through unfair contracts and an unjust distribution of the
profits made from their land.

Struggles for Decolonization

Despite their hegemonic power, discourses justifying propertization in the
name of progress and modernity have always been disputed and challenged.
In particular, Latin American indigenous and peasant movements, as well as
theorists like Jos Carlos Maritegui (2007), have made important contributions in this regard. The Mexican Revolution was a strong manifestation of
these counter-hegemonic forces. Revolutionaries fought not only for a just
distribution of land, but also criticized the colonial origins and the alleged
universality of the concept of individual property. For example, Ricardo Flores Magn, leader of one of the revolutionary movements, adapted the anarchistic critique to the Mexican agrarian sector and linked it with indigenous
worldviews (Zertuche Muoz 1995). He argued that land property arose from
and was upheld with the help of colonial violence (Flores Magn 1911).
The commission which elaborated the constitutional provisions for the
revolutionary agrarian law criticized European legal universalism as well as
those Mexican politicians that had implemented the liberal agrarian reform
after independence, thus enforcing European universalist notions. The commission argued in its proposal that
some years more of dictatorship would have produced the total extinction of the small
properties and the communal properties. This would have been the natural effect of having
adopted European legislation without distinction. Fortunately, the instinct of the lower
classes brought forth the Revolution. [] The Nation has lived with the disorder produced
by the mistake of adopting foreign legislation [] and now it will be necessary to repair
this mistake, so that this disorder comes to an end (Proyecto de la Comisin de Diputados
sobre el Artculo 27 de la Constitucin, cited in Daz de Len 2002: 504).

Thus, while the liberal agrarian reform after independence was strongly influenced by European liberalism and the allegedly universal legal principles of
property, the revolutionary agrarian law reflects the ambition to develop an
autochthonous land regime with its own legal concepts, which corresponds
better to the specific problems of Mexican rural reality. In particular, the
communal form of living of indigenous people was taken into account and
given a legal frame. With regard to its critique of European universalism and
the search for an autonomous development, Paz (2007: 293) describes the

Propertization as a Civilizing and Modernizing Mission

237

Mexican Revolution as a search of ourselves (busqueda de nosotros mismos), and a rebirth of our being (revelacin de nuestro ser, ibid: 279).
Unfortunately, up to the present day, the enforcement of the revolutionary
agrarian law lags behind, and its programmatic and legal promises have yet to
be fulfilled. Following the agrarian reform of 1992, its main principles (redistribution and inalienability of communal land) have been abolished, but its
critical discourse has remained alive, still inspiring many other indigenous
and peasant movements and being placed in the international spotlight with
the Neo-Zapatista revolt of 1994.
The Neo-Zapatistas (Ejrcito Zapatista de Liberacin Nacional, EZLN)
positioned themselves within the tradition of the Mexican Revolution and of
anti-colonial struggles in general. This is reflected in the First Declaration of
the Lacandon Jungle (Primera Declaracin de la Selva Lacandona), in
which they present themselves as the product of five hundred years of
fighting (Marcos 2001: 13) and also in the Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, in which they state that their rebellion of 1994
was not born today. It spoke before with other languages and on other lands. This rebellion
against injustice spoke in many mountains and many histories. It has already spoken in
nahuatl, paipai, kiliwa, cucapa, [list of indigenous languages spoken in Mexico] (Marcos
2001: 9092).

One of their most important claims is the claim for land, which they describe
as arising from a long history of dispossession under European rule (Marcos
2001: 13). Hence, they treat the land issue not only as a social problem, but
also as a part of the postcolonial debate, demanding not only social justice but
also decolonization. Their collective land usage opposes the alleged universalism of propertization and property, and their concept of a world in which
many worlds fit (Marcos 2001: 91) may be understood as a de-universalization of occidental notions of privatization, propertization, modernization, progress, and property.
The demands of the EZLN have been laid down in the Agreements of San
Andrs, which are agreements between the Mexican government and the
EZLN (Hernndez Navarro/Vera Herrera 2004). However, these agreements
have not been fulfilled by Mexican governments, in particular not with regard
to the agrarian question. In the meantime, the EZLN has built autonomous
municipalities with independent normative systems, including their own
Revolutionary Agrarian Law (Ley Agraria Revolucionaria 1993, Monsivis/Poniatowska 2003: 4345) based on communal forms of tenure and
usage. In this context, the commons re-appear as the counter-concept of private property.
These commons should not be understood as a mere revival of the old
commons similar to those of European agrarian history or of a pre-colonial
past, but rather as an example of the currently intensively discussed concept
of the commons understood as an intellectual fundament and political phi-

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losophy (Helfrich/Heinrich-Bll-Stiftung 2012: 16) which opposes the dominance of privatization and commercialization by presenting alternative strategies for a future social order in a non-capitalistic society. These strategies go
beyond the dichotomy between market and state and are reflected in very
different projects and practices throughout the world, such as the communal
usage and administration of parks, the communal organization of public services, or the creative commons on the internet (cf., for example, Hardt/Negri
2009, Helfrich/Heinrich-Bll-Stiftung 2012). In the context of Latin America,
defending the commons against appropriation implies their defense against
neo-colonial forms of propertization.

Conclusion
The point of departure of this contribution was a critique of human rights,
which despite the claim of their universal applicability, are predominantly
justified in Western terms (Griffin 2011: 137). As argued, the issues surrounding the right to property are very complex and cannot be adequately
understood without recourse to colonial history. The root of the problem lies
in the fact that Western conceptions of property tend to represent the colonized Other as a kind of less developed Self of the West. Common land
both of the English commoners and of the indigenous people in the Americas
is considered a chronological precondition for property, but not an alternative independent concept. In this way, the concept of property is universalized, and the indigenous commons are perceived as a mere anachronism. This
is the main problem of the Enlightenment justification of property and its
newer versions in neoliberal politics. Neoliberal discourses on privatization
and propertization perpetuate the one-dimensional Enlightenment discourses
about property, civilization, and modernization as well as the colonial thinking implicit in these notions. The political enforcement of privatization and
propertization simultaneously reproduces the colonial dispossession of indigenous land. Therefore, these policies are criticizable not only in social, but
also in postcolonial terms.
James Griffin, by contrast, argues that Westerners also often adopt concepts of foreign cultures. He gives the example of Asian religious ideas,
claiming that since Western people are not troubled by the fact that these
ideas are formulated and justified solely in Asian terms, there should be nothing inherently problematic in the adoption of Western human rights in nonWestern countries (Griffin 2011: 137). However, if we consider the arguments presented in this essay, it is clear that the adoption of Asian religious
ideas in the West differs dramatically from the universal application of property laws. This essay does not take issue with the mere fact that legal concepts

Propertization as a Civilizing and Modernizing Mission

239

or principles from one legal system influence other legal systems. This phenomenon, referred to as legal transplants, has taken place throughout history (Watson 1993) and is per se neither good nor bad. What is at stake in the
case of the universalization of property is rather the lack of respect for and
possibility of the survival of the Other. The Other is not recognized as an
equal in its Otherness, but instead treated as a less developed and inferior
Self. Taking away its means of existence is justified as being a necessary step
in the process of civilization or modernization. The liberal agrarian reform
after Mexican independence and the neoliberal agrarian reform of 1992 in
Mexico clearly show that the universalization of property reproduces a politics of marginalization and discrimination against the colonized Other. National political and economic elites, supported by an international legal frame
dominated by free trade and the protection of property rights, continue and
renew colonial structures against their own people.
Since its universalization through Enlightenment philosophy and liberal
politics, propertization has successively embraced more and more goods in
more and more parts of the world. Its promotion and defense have been increasingly institutionalized on an international level. This is true for very
different goods, such as land, public services, education, natural resources,
ideas, information, and knowledge. In the dominant politics of today, property is still considered as the best legal institution for the usage, organization,
production, and distribution of almost all goods and wealth worldwide.
With regard to countries of the Third World, the propertization and protection of (above all foreign) property are promoted and enforced on an international level as if it were a new civilizing mission. Like their ancestors, the
new missionaries still view alternative approaches in particular the common
usage of land and nature as mere anachronisms. What is not propertized is
considered as not yet propertized; what is not property is not yet property. Implicit in this thinking is the old colonial idea that humanity as a whole
has to follow a uniform path of development under European direction.
However, just as the universalism of property constitutes an attack on the
commons, taking the commons seriously means attacking the universalism of
property. We find counter-forces against the coloniality of property in rural
and indigenous struggles for land and natural resources. They criticize property and fight propertization not only for social reasons, but also refuse its
ostensible universalism and the ethnocentrism of its promoters. Furthermore,
they demand respect for their communal forms of tenure and usage as real
alternatives. Thereby, they also demand to be recognized as equal Others with
their own opportunities for development, their freedom to choose their future,
and their social rights. We can understand the Zapatistas' aim of a world in
which many worlds fit in this sense. The realization of this goal first and
foremost requires putting an end to the universalization of propertization,

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Judith Schacherreiter

because it undermines the material basis on which such a world could be

built.

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Between Postnationality and Postcoloniality:

Human Rights and the Rights of Non-citizens
in a Cosmopolitan Europe
Between Postnationality and Postcoloniality

Chenchen Zhang
This essay examines how the human rights project1 and the project of the
European Union (EU) deal with the rights of non-citizens particularly, the
rights of undocumented migrants. In doing so, it explores the tensions between postnational articulations of EU membership, both in terms of normative expectations and institutional construction, and the post/neocolonial
condition expressed in the politics of citizenship and migration in todays
Europe. I argue that the exclusion and exploitation of postcolonial migrants
simultaneously underpins and betrays the EUs ambition to re-establish Europe as a leading normative power (Manners 2002) committed to the value
of human rights. In fact, respect for human rights is enshrined in the Treaty
of the European Union as one of the key values on which the EU is founded
and thus constitutes one of the EUs most significant accession criteria. The
connections between human rights and the EU project have gained even more
prominence since the EU was awarded the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize. However,
what seems more interesting to me is the fact that the EU project and human
rights face similar criticisms.
The critiques of human-rights politics closely resemble those of the postnational interpretation of the EUropean project. Aakash Rathore and Alex
Cistelecan (2010) distinguish two approaches to problematizing the international discourse and regime of human rights: the postcolonial and the postAlthusserian approach. According to them, the former is primarily framed in
terms of difference, or of the discontinuous divide between those who right
wrongs and those who are wronged (Spivak 2004: 563); while the latter
insists on the presumption of equality, and thus a formal inscription of universality. However, taking a closer look at these claims, we may find that the two
approaches are complementary rather than contradictory. Each line of argument is effective in dealing with one aspect of the paradoxes of human
rights, which are frequently referred to in both academic discussions and
public discourses. On the one hand, humanitarian intervention is charged with
1

By project, I mean both a set of international legal documents concerning human rights as
well as their implementation through the international human rights regime comprising IOs,
NGOs, international courts, et cetera, and corresponding global narratives of emancipation
and progress (cf. Baxi 2002).

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Chenchen Zhang

being humanitarian war, and even less militant projects of human rights are
accused of imposing the ideology of the rich on the poor (Douzinas 2007:
33). On the other hand, human rights continue to be one of the most powerful
instruments employed by the oppressed and the rightless to claim equality,
rights, and justice. Being neither straightforwardly emancipatory nor unambiguously coercive, the paradoxes of human rights, as Gurminder Bhambra
and Robbie Shilliam (2009) emphasize, derive from their essentially contested nature. The instrumentalization of human rights language by hegemonic
powers is therefore no coincidental abuse, but more fundamentally rooted in
their contested nature. From a postcolonial feminist point of view, Ratna
Kapur identifies three problematic claims on which the human rights project
is grounded: a teleological narrative of progress, discriminatory universalism,
and most importantly the questionable construction of the sovereign subject of human rights (Kapur 2006). Along a similar line of critique, the arguments for the postnational nature of European citizenship and for the idea
of a cosmopolitan Europe have been interrogated for their failure to take
into account Europes history of colonial expansionism, and for their insistence on the genuinely European character of cosmopolitanism.
In light of these interrogations, this essay will, first of all, question the
problematic construction of the subject of human rights and of the citizen, by
addressing the gap between Man and Citizen through the Arendtian critique of human rights. The second section explores EU citizenship as an institution that reproduces differential inclusion and an essentialist cultural identity. It also examines the postcolonial condition of Europe from the vantage
point of the simultaneously politicized and depoliticized migration question. The precarious status of certain migrants and would-be-migrants reveals the incapability of the human rights regime in the face of the states
reassertion of territorial sovereignty. Thus the essay also engages with the
work of contemporary advocates of cosmopolitanism such as Seyla Benhabib
(2004), who makes an ardent appeal to follow a Kant-inspired world federalism guided by moral universalism. I, however, contend that neither institutional nor morality-based versions of cosmopolitanism can sufficiently account for the profound implications of the struggles of non-members for a
political community. The last section accordingly engages with the political
significance of migrant subjectivity through Jacques Rancires (2004) reconfiguration of the subject of rights. The ambivalences of human rights politics
continue to haunt contemporary struggles that both contest and reiterate the
gap between the universal human and the national citizen.

Between Postnationality and Postcoloniality

245

The Rights of Man and the Rights of Citizen

There is little doubt that the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and
Citizen is one of the founding texts that defined the modern notion of popular
sovereignty and the concept of human rights in our time. This concept, however, is ambiguous and controversial. As Giorgio Agamben points out, it is
not clear even in the very title of this fundamental document of modern politics, whether the two terms homme and citoyen name two autonomous beings
or instead form a unitary system in which the first is always already included
in the second (Agamben 1998: 126). Agambens discussion on the rights of
Man unsurprisingly starts by invoking Hannah Arendt, who has offered one
of the most famous and powerful critiques of human rights after the United
Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in
1948. Her central argument (Arendt 1949, 1976) is that human rights are
either the rights of the citizen (as a tautology) or the rights of those who have
no rights (as a void).
To make sense of this argument, one must start with Arendts understanding of the human condition, that is the Aristotelian idea of human beings as
speaking (zoon logon echon), and hence as political beings (zoon politikon).
For Arendt, the discourse of the eighteenth century, by presuming that rights
spring from the nature of man, degrades the political to nature, so that there
is nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human (Arendt 1976:
299). In other words, apart from the institution of the community, there
simply are no humans (Balibar 2007: 733). Human beings qua human beings
are never endowed with inalienable rights, for all rights depend on a tacit
guarantee that the members of a community give to each other (Arendt 1949:
34). What is stated in the UDHR as well as in the French Declaration of two
centuries ago is in fact not human rights, but the rights of equal members of a
political community. Furthermore, since the nation-state is the only legitimate
and universalized form of polity of the modern age, what we call human
rights are in fact the rights of national citizens. However, if there is something
we can call a human right (in singular form), according to Arendt (1976:
298), that would be the right to be a member of a political community or the
right to have rights. Those who have lost the so-called rights of Man are not
completely rightless. Rather, absolute rightlessness means the loss of that
one human right; meaning that one no longer belongs to any community
whatsoever.
Arendts reflections on the post-war effort to reanimate the idea of human rights as political foundation (Menke 2007: 739) are grounded in her
observations on stateless people in the twentieth century. It is the existence
of these people, who are forced to live outside the common world and are
thrown back on their natural givenness, on their mere differentiation (Ar-

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Chenchen Zhang

endt 1976: 302), which reveals the aporias of human rights. Historical evidence has shown, in her view, that the restoration of human rights has been
achieved so far only through the restoration or the establishment of national
rights (ibid: 299).
Thus there is no way for the stateless, or any person who is not recognized
as a member of a political community, to escape their fate of absolute rightlessness. To rescue human rights from being either void or tautological, one
must reconsider the dichotomy underlying the argument that humanity exists
only by virtue of the political community, now the nation-state, which turns
bare lives into political beings. The tension between the realm of the political
(of freedom) and the realm of private life (of necessity), or between bios and
zoe, sets them in rigid opposition to one another. I shall return later to this
problematic opposition. For now, another immediate question is also triggered by Arendts insights, namely, is citizenship to be conflated with nationality, the only attribute that marks the gap between Man and Citizen?
The legacy of the French Revolution serves as an important point of reference in revealing the different modalities of exclusion that constitutes the
founding moment of citizenship (Balibar 2004: 76). The distinction between
citoyens franais and citoyens actifs was immediately introduced in the 1791
Constitution. Emmanuel Joseph Sieys offered one of the earliest justifications for such a distinction: natural rights are those rights for whose preservation society is formed, and political rights are those rights by which society
is formed. He continues to state that women, children, foreigners, and those
who would not at all contribute to the public establishment must have no
active influence on public matters (Sieys 1985, cited in Agamben 1998:
130). In other words, they are merely subjects, not citizens in the genuine
sense of the term. This categorical border drawn between those who are qualified to be citizens and those who are not spells out a political anthropology of
the modern citizen, or of the human itself.2 The Enlightenment notion of rationality plays a key role here, as in Lockes discussions about the relationship between citizenship and property. Property implies first of all the property of the self (Mezzadra 2006: 33), which is, in Sandro Mezzadras words:
the capacity of an individual to rationally dominate his passions and to discipline himself
in order to be able to do that labour which constitutes in turn the foundation of every material property (ibid: 33).

The case of the Haitian revolution is frequently referred to by postcolonial

scholars, yet its familiarity has by no means reduced its impact. When the
leaders of the Haitian revolution, who called themselves Black Jacobins,
declared their independence from colonial rule and slavery, Monsieur Comte

Costas Douzinas claims that a person who enjoys the rights of man is above all a welloff citizen, a heterosexual, white and urban male (2007: 54).

Between Postnationality and Postcoloniality

247

de Mirabeaus speech at the National Assembly was in a way only an exaggerated version of Sieys philosophy:
[i]n proportioning the number of deputies to the population of France, we have taken into
consideration neither the number of our horses nor that of our mules (Trouillot 1995, cited
in Chatterjee 2007: 29).

While the narrative of evolutionary history could easily silence the significance of the Haitian Revolution, it constantly reminds us that the construction
of citizenship and of the subject of human rights have never been independent
of each other. In other words, both immanent others resident aliens,
women, children, and the poor and distant others the uncivilized
constituted the very condition of French citizenship, rather than simply occupying the pre-existing space of the non-citizen.

Citizens, Non-citizens and the Postcolonial

If the French Revolution was the most influential event in the establishment
of the paradigm of national citizenship, the creation of European Union citizenship is regarded by many as an exemplar of postnational or transnational
citizenship. To be sure, the framework and future of this novel conception of
citizenship is subject to continuing controversy. Will Kymlicka summarizes
the two main approaches in this debate as transcending liberal nationhood
and taming liberal nationhood (Kymlicka 2008: 130132). Scholars who
embrace the former approach expect the EU to be the optimal realization of
the idea of a cosmopolitan Europe (Beck/Grande 2007) and view it as a
progressive, human-rights based (Hansen 2009: 20) normative power,
showing the rest of the world once again the direction of history. In contrast,
the latter group holds that the vanishing of liberal nationhood is neither
possible nor desirable in our time (Kymlicka 2008, Bellamy 2008). While
both camps focus on what is or is not promised, they do not make an effort to
address what has been forgotten. What Eleonore Kofman asked two years
after the implementation of the Maastricht Treaty has only become more
relevant today:
So does this mean that the extension of and debate about the renewal of citizenship in
Europe will bring advantages to those groups that have been marginalized or excluded
from it until now? [] [W]ill new political spaces operating at a variety of scales be
capable of redressing the limits of citizenship and responding to the needs of the principal
groups in question? (Kofman 1995: 122)

The key question, in my view, is whether this kind of politics consolidates the
boundary between the subjects of rights, who have benefited from the present
citizenship regime, and those who have only limited access to it? Or, to put it

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Chenchen Zhang

more pointedly, does the project of EU citizenship once again reinforce the
paradox of human rights, namely, that those who are most in need of rights
have the least of them?
Let us take a closer look at the formal institution of EU citizenship to address these questions: European Union citizenship, by definition, complements rather than replaces national citizenship; yet this does not prevent it
from becoming a sui generis form of political membership. Yasemin Soysal
(1995) has famously spoken of postnational membership in Europe, offering the general enjoyment of civil and social rights to all residents regardless
of their nationalities, as argued in the previous section.
The enjoyment of passive rights by foreigners, however, was already a
widely accepted principle in early liberalism. It is therefore the expansion of
political rights to nationals of other member states that makes citizenship of
the Union arguably the only formal constitutionalisation of postnational
citizenship (Cornelisse 2010: 108). Most notably, EU citizens have the right
to vote and stand for election at the municipal level in their state of residence
as well as within the European Parliament. The postnational rights package
also includes freedom of movement within the territory of the Union as well
as the right to appeal to the Ombudsman. Yet its complementary nature continues to maintain and reproduce the differentiating mechanisms of national
citizenship. The postnational rights package is only postnational for the
nationals of member states, and it remains the case that the sovereign state
alone decides to whom it grants citizenship. Here we can see once again the
contradictions the human rights discourse and the EU project seem to share:
while both are supposedly intended to transcend the limits of the nation-state,
both implicitly reaffirm the link between nationality and access to rights.
The political anthropology of the modern subject implied in earlier discourses on citizenship indicates that the structure of inclusion and exclusion
in the paradigm of national citizenship is not solely based on state territoriality; nor does it entirely overlap with ethno-cultural boundaries. The different
images of the Other, or of those who are deemed disqualified to be citizens
foreigners, nomads, the propertyless, and indigenous people mirror one
another and become integral to the construction of modern citizenship. From
this perspective, it is clear that the transformation of citizenship in the EU
does not only involve the promised triumph of civilization over eros
enthusiastically spoken of by optimistic commentators,3 but also, more importantly, creates an increasingly complex system of civic stratifications with
differential access to civil, economic and social rights (Kofman 2005: 453),
depending on different categories of status. There are full-fledged national
3

The Marcusean expression eros and civilization is used by Joseph H. H. Weiler (1999:
324355) to outline the; key issues in the debates on EU citizenship. He contends that the
ideal form of European citizenship should be the embodiment of Civilisation, whereas the
national stands for Eros.

Between Postnationality and Postcoloniality

249

citizens, EU citizens, permanent residents, temporary migrant workers, refugees and asylum seekers, ethnic minorities, and so on. But outside all these
statuses, a group of the population lives in the absence of any legal recognition (Monforte/Dufour 2011: 4). According to the normative understanding
of the word person discussed above they can be deemed non-persons
(Dal Lago 2009). Depending on the context, different terms such as undocumented, illegal, or irregular migrants are used to refer to those people
who live in a country where they do not hold authorized documents for entrance or establishment.4 Being illegalized by virtue of their mere presence,
undocumented migrants are not stateless people in the strict sense of the term.
Yet, among all excluded groups, they are the most reminiscent of Arendts
warning, more than half a century ago, about being denied that one human
right, or the right to have rights.
This is particularly true in those countries or cities where undocumented
migrants suffer from the strongest isolation from other social groups and the
toughest restrictions on their mobility. For instance, the movement restriction
law of Germany (Residenzpflicht) defines a specific status of Duldung or
tolerance. People falling under this category are not deported immediately,
but their mobility is highly restricted, and they can barely leave the district
they are placed in by the state authority (Monforte/Dufour 2011: 10). In this
extreme case, not only is the migration problem depoliticized as a bureaucratic matter of population management, the life of the migrant itself also
becomes apolitical because of the ubiquitous border that separates it from the
rest of society.5 The loss of the relevance of speech, as Arendt argues, and the
loss of all human relationships established by living in a community amounts
to the loss of the most essential attribute of human life.
The predicament of undocumented migration reveals the paradox between
the universal norms of human rights and the exclusive citizenship regime of
the nation-state through which the articulation of rights is made possible.
However, this is only part of the story. The perceived problem of immigration has evoked both depoliticizing and politicizing responses in European
countries and beyond. In debates on migration, political parties, electoral
campaigns, and very often the mass media tend to employ a rhetoric of national identity and thereby imply that the political self-understanding of the
political community is at stake (Huysmans 2000: 163). Furthermore, the process of European integration has contributed to the creation of what tienne
4

In this chapter, I use these terms interchangeably, even as I critique the negative connotations attached to some of these categories. I am also aware of the important difference between irregular and illegal migrants in legal terms, which is concerned with whether the
state considers the violation of its established norms on the entry and residence of foreign
nationals as a criminal act or as a statutory offence (Sciortino 2004).
One could also argue that the very process of depoliticizing certain groups of the population
is essential to the maintenance of the politicized norms on which the biopolitics of sovereignty is grounded.

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Chenchen Zhang

Balibar calls a new racism that is at once postcolonial and postnational

(Balibar 2004: 122). This is directly related to the formulation of a European
identity at the supranational level since the 1970s, which has been considered by Europhile politicians and some democratic theorists to be indispensable to the realization of European citizenship. The concept of European
identity has been criticized for mobilizing an essentialist conception of cultural identity, which inevitably involves Othering the rest of the world as
well as Europes colonial past. Fatima El-Tayeb remarks that this politics of
migration functions simultaneously as a threat uniting the beleaguered European nations and as trope shifting the focus away from Europes unresolved
identity crisis (El-Tayeb 2008: 650). Just as the removal of internal borders
has to be accompanied by the strengthening of external borders in the geographical space of the Schengen area, the fabrication of a supranational identity advocated by the EU entails a similar process of redrawing identitarian
borders in the membership space.6
Thus, illegal migration is not merely an administrative denomination
that classifies a group of foreigners as illegal by virtue of their presence. It
carries immediately and intrinsically racial and economic connotations. This
is indeed not entirely new: racialized immigration filtering was already systematically practiced in the colonies of the British Empire. In Natal in 1897,
for example, when migration restrictions were first introduced on the basis of
property and language proficiency, the prime minister of the self-governing
colony had to explain to the imperial authorities that it never occurred to me
for a single minute that it should ever be applied to English immigrants, and
that the main object of the proposed law is to prevent Natal from being
flooded by undesirable immigrants from India (Cole 2000: 3031). However, the postcolonial condition of Europe in our time is not only about the we
are here, because you were there logic. The perception of fear of and the
subsequent control over migration flows reveal that, while colonialism is
considered a bygone phenomenon, the absolute spatial and temporal borders
that formerly existed between the civilized colonizer and the barbarian
colonized are now being reproduced at the heart of the metropolis (Mezzadra
2006). In addition to the border politics within European metropolises, the
externalization of Europes border policies to migrant-sending countries as
well as the role the low-paid migrant labor force in post-industrialized Europe
demonstrate the historical continuities of the postcolonial logic.

Stein Rokkan (1999: 104) makes a distinction between the geographical space and the
membership space in his analytical framework of boundary-building.

Between Postnationality and Postcoloniality

251

Human Rights, Migrant Rights, and the Postnational

Despite the incapability of international and European human rights regimes
to adequately protect the human rights of immigrants, the respect for fundamental rights is a principle inherent in the EUs constitutional order. As was
officially stated during the European Council meeting in Tampere in 1999,
the project of European integration is rooted in a shared commitment to
freedom based on human rights, democratic institutions, and the rule of law,
and this freedom should not be regarded as the exclusive preserve of the
Unions own citizens (European Council 1999: paragraph 9). However, it
was also maintained that defending such a freedom necessitates a consistent
control of external borders to stop illegal immigration and fighting those
who organize the latter (ibid). For normative political theorists, this raises the
challenge of how to transform moral principles into concrete institutional
arrangements in a normatively justifiable manner. On the other hand, political
theorists like Wendy Brown ask instead whether human rights achieve only
their declared goals and nothing more (cf. Brown 2004)? Let us start with the
normative perspective.
In The Rights of Others (2004), Benhabib assesses the transformation of
citizenship in the EU after a nuanced philosophical analysis of the different
justifications of rights. She offers a postmetaphysical reformulation of the
Kantian principle of rights through discourse ethics. This places emphasis
on the discursive processes through which norms, and especially the institutional arrangements based on these norms, are validated by all those who
would be affected. Within this theoretical framework, her evaluation of the
achievements and limits of the rights regime in contemporary Europe is
rather modest. On the one hand, she observes a disaggregation of citizenship
and a dynamic toward narrowing the divide separating human rights from
citizens rights within the EU and assesses that the trends toward integrating
third-country nationals into the EUs rights regime are irreversible. On the
other hand, she admits that even within the EU, one of the most developed
rights regimes of our world (2004: 168), the degree of human rights violations against refugees and asylum seekers remains significantly high. Along
with other normative political theorists, Benhabib seeks to link universal
norms with historically established institutions by appealing to the spirit of
Kant, foregrounding a combination of moral universalism and cosmopolitan
federalism. The latter still requires democratic nationhood as its foundation,
with the demos of a nation-state being bound by democratic attachments rather than cultural identity. However, even Benhabib herself is not unaware
that universal human rights and sovereignty claims of the state are more often
than not in conflict (ibid: 69). In the context of exile and asylum, she rightfully points out that although the right to seek asylum is recognized as a human

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right, the obligation to grant asylum continues to be jealously guarded by

states as a sovereign privilege (ibid, italics in original). As many legal scholars have pointed out, the protection provided by the international human
rights regime to undocumented migrants is considerably constrained, precisely because international conventions and organizations are fundamentally
based on the principle of territorial sovereignty.
Benhabibs cosmopolitanism is nonetheless an ambitious attempt to reconcile the conflict between universal moral principles that ought to be applied
to all including those who do not belong and the republican values of
bounded communities. Other versions of contemporary cosmopolitanism, in
contrast, tend to either disregard the issue of migrant rights altogether, or
subordinate it to a sort of cosmopolitan justice, or rather a particular international order. For instance, John Rawls famously claims that his theory pertains only to the ideal democratic society, which should be viewed as a complete and closed social system (Rawls 1993: 40). He does not deem it necessary to take into account problems such as unjust wars, immigration, and
nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction (ibid: 12). Another example
is Ulrich Beck, who, in his discussion of the success of European integration, advocates the idea of mobility of whole societies7 to overcome methodological nationalism (Beck/Grande 2007: 121122). Yet, when it comes to
human mobility, he contends that in order to lessen the pressure of immigration in advanced societies, we should anticipate a mode of cosmopolitan distribution, wherein low-skilled jobs are exported from rich to poor countries,
thereby making the need to look for work on a different continent unnecessary (Beck 2006: 109). This cosmopolitan imaginary is not only hindered
by a state-oriented mode of global space (Campbell/Shapiro 1999: xii), but
also takes for granted the reproduction of structural inequalities in a hierarchical inter-state order.
The external border controls of the EU most acutely highlight the failure
of human rights both in terms of moral principle and as an international
regime to achieve the minimalist goal of saving lives. At the same time,
they reveal the relations of power underlying the political rhetoric of human
rights. Practices of deportation and detention across European countries and
the high number of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean Sea under the watch
of national military forces8 are all shameful features of EU policy in connection with the management of external borders, whose primary goal is to en7

According to Beck and Edgar Grande, the traditional concept of society and the social
theory this concept is based upon only recognizes mobility within societies, while being unable to address the idea of the mobility of whole societies. They argue that the enlargement
of the EU offers a unique opportunity to facilitate this mobility through the process of border-transcending preventive Europeanisation (Beck/Grande 2007: 122, italics in original).
See, for example, the briefing paper Hidden Emergency prepared by Judith Sunderland
(2012) for Human Rights Watch.

Between Postnationality and Postcoloniality

253

sure a high and uniform level of checks on persons and surveillance (Council of the European Union 2004). Although the ruling of the European Court
of Human Rights in the case of Hirsi Jamaa and Others v. Italy9 is considered
to be ground-breaking in protecting the human rights of migrants on the high
seas (Hessbruegge 2012, Scheinin 2012), it ironically also reaffirms that the
implementation of international human rights law has not altered and continues to accord with the territorial configuration of state sovereignty. The Court
ordered the Italian government to pay monetary compensation to the victims
and to obtain assurances from the Libyan authorities, which have proven
difficult to secure.10 Even if the compensation was to be paid and if Libya was
to ensure the freedom of the applicants from abuse, the divide between those
who suffer, those who rescue, and those who are termed evil is once again
reconstituted in processes of this kind, as convincingly argued by Costas
Douzinas. The victims are always powerless, faceless and nameless, and the
goodwill of the savers to right wrongs in no way puts this divide into question (Douzinas 2007: 69).

Reconfiguring the Rights in Human Rights

In this last section, I will turn to the post-Althusserian, or post-structuralist
approach in order to redefine the rights in human rights and to address the
political significance of the rights of non-citizens. Such an approach has been
representatively articulated, for example, in Rancires critique of Arendt,11
and in his attempt to identify the real subject of the Rights of Man (cf.
Rancire 2004). According to Rancire, by completely depoliticizing the
stateless those whom nobody wants even to oppress (Arendt 1976: 296),
Arendt excludes the possibility for stateless people to act in the public realm.
This is viewed by Rancire as a vicious circle, since it reasserts the distinction between those who are worthy or not worthy of doing politics that was
presupposed at the very beginning (Rancire 2004: 306). The root of this
vicious circle, according to Rancire, can be traced back to her rigid distinction between the private and the public, between labor and action, and between liberation and freedom (ibid). The subjects of human rights, for Arendt,
9
10

11

European Court of Human Rights. Hirsi Jamaa and Others v Italy (2012). ECHR Application no. 27765/09.
For instance, one of the justifications put forward by the Italian government for not paying
the full compensation ordered was that it could not ascertain the whereabouts of some of the
victims. This was criticized by prominent Italian legal practitioners and activists during a
consultation between the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of Migrants, civil
society actors, and academics in Florence in October 2012.
This critique is not completely fair; see, for example, Gndo du (2011).

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Chenchen Zhang

consequently could only be members of a political community in which individuals recognize each other as equal and distinct (Schaap 2011: 34).
Rancire, seeing this as problematic, tries to revisit the question of the
subject of the rights of Man, and hence the subject of politics as well. He
contends that the rights of man are not
the rights of a single subject that would be at once the source and the bearer of the rights
and would only use the rights that she or he possesses (Rancire 2004: 202).

It is the subject, or more accurately the process of subjectivization, that

bridges the interval between two forms of the existence of those rights
(Rancire 2004: 302). The first form of the existence of rights, according to
Rancire, is the existence of written rights that inscribe a free and equal
community, and the second refers to the rights of those who make something
of that inscription, who initiate a dispute about what is given (ibid: 303).
This would imply that they could make claims when deprived of the rights
accorded by the Declaration of Rights. And they could demonstrate, through
political action, that they had the rights that the constitution denied to them,
that they could enact those rights (2004: 304). Political subjects are not
determinate subjects, nor is the human in human rights. Rather, these
emerge within the process of subjectivization, in the gap opened by the difference between man and citizen, or between the inscriptions of rights and the
instances of their denial. Instances of denial provide moments for verifying
the presupposition of equality equality, in Rancires view, is not the end
to attain, but a point of departure (1991: 138). The subjects of human rights
are not proclaimed equal, but are always already equal, and the value of this
presupposition is only actualized in its attempted verification.
The relevance of the international conventions on human rights thus does
not lie in the expectation that they could ensure the realization of those rights,
nor in the possibility that international human rights organizations could
achieve this task. They are relevant in the sense that citizens of states ruled by
illegitimate laws or by the arbitrariness of governments can appeal to them
against their laws or governments, and undocumented migrants who are denied all rights and legal personhood can invoke them to claim their rights. It is
through the very action of demonstrating that they have the rights they have
not that they are enacting the rights they do not have. In doing so, they
demonstrate the reality of both their equality as speaking animals and of
their inequality within the social order (Schaap 2011: 34). Rethinking rights
and the subject of rights through such an approach enables us to overcome, at
least partially, the ontological divide between the rescuer and the victim
in humanitarianism, and thereby to rescue human rights from humanitarian
rights.
It is not surprising that such an agency-centered approach to rights has
been fruitfully employed in the growing literature on critical citizenship studies. The influential sans-papiers movement in France, the nationwide

Between Postnationality and Postcoloniality

255

demonstrations of undocumented migrants in the United States, the hunger

strikes in the makeshift migrant camps of Calais, and various other forms of
migrant movements worldwide provide illuminating empirical resources for
us to register the political subjectivity of irregular migrants, refugees, and
minorities. However, the tension between abstract equality and particularistic
difference inherent in the discourse of rights remains visible in these forms of
mobilization, for they have to rely on the vocabularies of race, ethnicity,
religion, and culture (Soguk 1997: 323) to accommodate themselves to the
processes of statist territorial democracy. The claim-making of the undocumented must appeal to both the universal through such transnational slogans
as No Man is illegal, and the particular through the rhetoric of French or
British nationalism. It is thus declared in the Manifesto of the Sans-Papiers:
we came to France because we had been told that France was the homeland of the Rights
of Man[and] we dreamed of freedom (Manifesto of the Sans-Papiers, cited in Hayter
2000: 143).

Migrants also emphasize the historical links between their home countries and
the country in which they take up struggles:
Where do we come from, we Sans-Papiers of Saint-Bernard? [] [w]e are all from former
French colonies [] So its not an accident that we find ourselves in France: our countries
have had a relationship with France for centuries (Ciss 1997).

Rancires post-structuralist interpretation of migrant subjectivity is based on

the abstractness of human rights and the formal inscription of universality
enabled by this abstractness. However, while migrant struggles in reality do
use the language of universal rights, they often simultaneously undermine
and reinscribe the territorial and citizenship boundaries against which they
struggle (McNevin 2006: 146, italics in original). It is crucial to
acknowledge that every process of political subjectivization, which according
to Rancires re-conceptualization of the rights of Man is the only way to
restore the validity of human rights, must take place in concrete historical,
spatial, and socio-cultural contexts.

Conclusion
The politics of citizenship and migration in the European Union reveal the
paradox between the universalistic promise of postnationalism and the territorially confined citizenship regime on one hand, and highlights the postcolonial condition of Europe within global power structures on the other. In this
essay, I have sought to examine postcolonial and post-structuralist critiques of
human rights to critically engage with these issues. Whereas the former focus
on inequalities and domination, the latter re-appeal to the presupposition of

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Chenchen Zhang

formal equality. Postcolonial perspectives enable us to analyze the ways in

which EU citizenship is constructed through differentiating and Othering, and
to understand the predicament of undocumented migrants in Europe as more
than a consequence of merely the national order of things (Malkki 1995).
Moreover, the normative articulation of a postnational Europe draws on the
cosmopolitan ideal of the European Enlightenment, which reinforces an
intellectual investment in the idea of a common European civilization
(OBrien 1997: 2). Historically, the civilizational superiority generated by
such an investment was mobilized to legitimize colonialism as well as exclusionary regimes of citizenship and rights. A contemporary cosmopolitanism
informed by this Enlightenment ideal remains challenged by the inherent
conflicts between universal norms and sovereign statehood. So long as they
disregard exclusionary and differentialist moments in the idea of universal
rights, cosmopolitan responses to global migration are likely to remain largely
limited to top-down efforts liable to reproduce existing power relations; they
are also unlikely to sufficiently appreciate the political significance of migrant
agency.
Through a post-structuralist reconfiguration of rights, we may account for
migrant rights as human rights. Or rather, human rights as the rights of those
who put the rights inscribed in law to the test by their rights claims. Migrant
subjectivity is continuously caught in the paradox between universality and
particularistic categories of race, ethnicity, religion, and so forth. However, in
the face of the contested nature of human rights, if we are indeed optimistic
enough to envisage a cosmopolitanism to come (Douzinas 2007), it has to
be born out of this paradox. It must recognize ones desire for and resistance
to belonging, thus conceiving of an identity that is not identical to itself.12

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Defensive Relativism: Universalism, Sovereignty, and

the Postcolonial Predicament
Defensive Relativism

Frederick Cowell1
Introduction
Relativism as an ethical philosophy is metaethical; it provides a framework
for arriving at moral conclusions but does not necessarily establish a moral
conclusion. The only conclusion that relativism actually draws is, as Graham
Long notes, that objective morality is relative to something, whether that be
a particular culture, society, or individuals worldview (2011: 209). The
concept of culture serves as a reference point for cultural relativists from
which to make an argument that a stated universal moral norm is not, or
should not be, universally applied across all cultures. Often cultural relativism
is associated with non-Western societies that resist the application of human
rights law due to the stated incompatibility of their cultural traditions with
international human rights law, which itself is often criticized for having
emerged out of the Enlightenment tradition and for its complicity in colonialism.
This essay argues that Western states, in particular the states that are signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), are themselves engaging in a process of cultural relativism, what I term defensive
relativism, when they resist the universal application of human rights law.
Both Britain and France have rich intellectual traditions of human rights
stemming from the European Enlightenment, but increasingly both governments have been employing cultural arguments to engage in a form of relativist resistance to the operation of the European Court of Human Rights. Drawing on the theories of Gayatri Spivak (2004) and Homi Bhabha (2006) the
first section of this chapter analyzes how culture is mobilized to resist the
universalizing norms of international human rights law. The second section
engages with the critical human rights theories of Costas Douzinas (2008) and
Jose Alves (2000) to explore how the universality of supranational human
rights instruments, such as the ECHR, poses a conceptual threat to the sovereignty of Western states causing states to engage in defensive relativism.
1

The author would like to thank Jose Bellido of Birkbeck College and Fletch Williams of
Trinity College Dublin for their helpful comments and revisions on earlier drafts of this
chapter.

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Frederick Cowell

To set this argument in context, let me briefly provide the historical background: Shortly after the end of World War Two with the Cold War at its
peak, Western European governments created the Council of Europe a
supranational supervisory organization with the stated aim of promoting democratic governance which began the process of drafting the ECHR. It is an
unmistakably liberal document, reflecting the British common law tradition,
the Enlightenment notion of universal personhood as well as entitlement to
core civil rights. In order to make the document a living instrument, the
ECHR mandated the creation of the European Court of Human Rights which
would, subject to the consent of state parties, be able to act as a final court of
appeal on human rights matters, effectively acting as a supranational human
rights court. The Courts work was initially limited, and even though a large
number of cases were brought before it from Italy and the United Kingdom
(mostly in relation to Northern Ireland) it was not until the 1990s, when formerly communist Eastern European states joined the Council of Europe, that
the number of applications to the European Court of Human Rights increased
significantly and managing the volume of cases became problematic (Greer
2006: 3340). Additionally in the 1990s, cases involving immigration, sexual
orientation, and privacy increasingly started to be brought before the Court,
reflecting the changing circumstances of many member states as they became
more affluent and culturally diverse (cf. Dembour 2006, Greer 2006). However, these cases were increasingly perceived by domestic polities as threats
to national sovereignty. With the escalation of the War on Terror, this wave
of criticism became more widespread as governments pursued a range of antiterrorism policies that restricted human rights. The European Court of Human
Rights in turn ruled such measures as being contrary to the ECHR. At the
beginning of 2010, two issues the rights of prisoners to vote in Britain and
the right of Muslim women to wear the Burqa in public in France led two of
the Courts founding members to take up a relativist stance on these issues.2
In January 2012, the British Prime Minister David Cameron delivered a
speech to the Council of Europe which illustrated this increasingly relativistic
trend of opposition to the European Court of Human Rights. While insisting
that human rights were a cause that runs deep in the British heart and long in
British history, he went on to attack the Court for interfering in national
decisions on criminal and immigration matters, emphasizing that national
institutions were the sole forum for deciding such matters (Guardian: 2012).
Claudio Coradetti argues that cultural relativism has three different
strands descriptive, metaethical, and normative (2009: 36). Metaethical
relativism is defined above; descriptive relativism upholds differences between cultures and infers that universal values are incommensurable with
cultural practices, whereas normative relativism holds that what is morally
2

The cases are Hirst v UK (no.2) [2005] ECHR 681 and S.A.S. v France (4385/11).

Defensive Relativism

263

right in a given situation ultimately depends on the context and culture (ibid:
37). This chapter is principally concerned with theorizing the practice of
relativism, rather than an identification of its analytic components, but these
different elements of relativism are relevant to the discussion of the emergence and trajectory of cultural relativism. The central aim of this essay is to
demonstrate that the resistance of European states to the European Court of
Human Rights should be understood as a form of defensive relativism. While
anti-colonialist struggles often mobilized relativist arguments to challenge the
imperialist universalist tendencies of European norms, ideas, and practices,
this essay will unpack how the former colonial powers are employing defensive relativism as a justifying strategy to protect national sovereignty.

Decolonizing Relativism
Dominant notions of cultural and racial superiority of Europeans were central
to the project of colonialism and relied on a teleological vision of societies
advancing from a state of primitiveness to modernity (Rentlen 1988: 56-57).
Relativistic arguments emerged as a form of contestation of the assumption
that human rights, as values and norms of modernity, were a de facto superior
system of morality vis--vis the systems of morality found in territories under
colonial rule, which were often dismissed as primitive or savage (Rentlen
1988, Hatch 1997). Relativism as a political idea gained traction in the 1960s
and 1970s among the governments of the newly decolonized states, who were
still engaged in the wider political project of negotiating the legacy of colonialism. The Enlightenment notions of human as well as of rights, which
shaped the idea of human rights in international law, played a crucial role in
legitimizing discourses of European colonialism. At the core of Enlightenment notions of human rights was the idea that all human beings possessed
intrinsic and inalienable rights, even as it was argued that human nature could
be rationally and scientifically controlled. James Griffin argues that to a large
extent this understanding of human rights is still prevalent (2008: 13). The
idea of universality has its origins in theories of natural law. While this was
contested by some Enlightenment theorists of rights like Jeremy Bentham, it
nonetheless provided the basis for the justification that there were some inalienable human rights (ibid: 11). European colonization had two distinct impacts on these ideas: firstly, colonial powers dictated who counts as human,
who should have rights, and what kind of rights should be universal (Barreto
2012). Secondly, modern human rights law, which came into being after the
1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights, was heavily influenced by the
colonial past of human rights. As the universal norms of international human

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Frederick Cowell

rights law began their life in the European colonial project, resistance to human rights norms in postcolonial contexts often drew on cultural arguments to
contest the normative expectations of human rights instruments or to defend
abuses of human rights in the name of cultural practices (Donnelly 2007).
In order to critically assess relativism it is essential to make two observations about the ontology of human rights. Firstly, it is necessary to distinguish
the Enlightenment theories of human rights from the practices during this era,
which were principally focused on granting and securing liberties from the
state for a minority of individuals. Liberties are possessory rights, or rights
that are designed to exclude others. Domenico Losurdo (2011) notes that the
rise of political liberalism in the eighteenth century saw an increase in liberties as well as the intensification of racism, exploitation, and slavery. The
Enlightenment legacy of human rights was thus fraught with contradictions, as
the historical moment of the inception of universal human rights was deeply
intertwined with its systematic denial to non-Europeans. Accompanying the
economic, social, and military project of colonialism, was the process of
subject constitution on both ends of the colonial divide in disciplines like
biology, literature, history, philosophy, and anthropology that provided legitimacy for colonialism. Spivak explains that this has had a pervasive impact on
the processes of decolonization (2006: 338340). When applied to human
rights law, Makau Mutua argues that these colonial discourses created a narrative of savagery and victimhood, where savages were defined as a
cultural deviation from human rights (2001: 203). These narratives continue
into the postcolonial era heavily influencing modern human rights politics
(ibid). Yet, as argued by Spivak, it is incorrect to simply reject human rights
as Eurocentric, not least because a growing number of human rights workers
are from/in the global South, laboring to counter the detrimental impact of
colonialism, even as they inadvertently reinforce neocolonial structures
(2004: 525).
A second crucial distinction needs to be drawn between the colonial imposition of international law and the idea of human rights. International law
was employed to legitimize and facilitate the process of colonialism and define the territoriality of the new world and the European colonies (Barreto
2012). James Whitman argues that Western law has within it a missionary
impulse generated both by a religious philosophy and by a teleological view
of the inevitability of Western progress, which creates an idealistic urge to
bring [its] benefits to the rest of the world (2009: 307). Along similar lines,
Anthony Anghie traces how colonialism was central to the formation of international law, even as the imperial character of modern international law continues to define the nature of postcolonial states by determining their legal
structures (2004). Institutions of modern international law perpetuate asymmetries of power introduced during the colonial era. Human rights required
the framework of international law to enforce their universality, both through

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their definition and codification as Conventions as well as through the institutional support of the United Nations, which is authorized to take action to
protect the victims of human rights abuses. Spivak observes that the dispensers of human rights must acknowledge that just as the idea of human rights is
contingent upon [the] French Revolution, and the Universal Declaration
upon the historical events that led to the Second World War, modern human
rights are interlinked with the postcolonial turbulence and global economic restructuring of international law (2004: 530). The thrust of Spivaks
argument is that human rights and human rights violations continue to be
mediated through imperialist lenses, either through institutions created during
colonialism or via epistemic frameworks and a pedagogical culture that continues to reproduce the North/South divide in the construction and identification of human suffering. Thus while human rights campaigns and human
rights law have been mobilized to emancipate people from colonial rule and
protect the rights of minorities, human rights require the imperial project of
international law to underwrite its universality and ensure its universal application.
Cultural relativism emerged in part as a mechanism for challenging the
universalism of international law. Relativism was projected against the modernizing impulses of colonialism and is defined within the alterity created by
international law which situated culture, or more precisely the discourse of
culture, as a source of resistance to colonial universality (Pahuja 2005: 456).
A cultures domains of difference, according to Bhabha, allow communities
to challenge the normative expectations of development and progress which
are intrinsic to the project of modernity of international law (2006: 2). The
role culture plays in opposing universality is described by Bhabha as the
articulation of difference making relativism a functional process that
utilizes the vehicle of cultural difference to oppose the formation, interpretation, and enforcement of the universal norms of international human rights
law, locating culture at the enunciatory present of modernity (2006: 341).
Culture becomes the point of resistance to the imperialist project of international law because its universalist pretentions necessarily demand a continuing expansion of the universal. Counter-discourses of culture provide alternate source of values and norms to counteract these processes (Fitzpatrick
2001: 209). On the other side of the postcolonial divide, culture comes to be
shaped as the alterity of international law, which is structurally predisposed to
project what lies beyond it as anti- modern and primitive. The categorization
of non-Western values and norms as being cultural or non-modern is
accompanied by the promise that they can progress towards modernity by
overcoming the particular and embracing the universal.
Defensive relativism is a variety of cultural relativism in that it exploits
culture as a basis for resisting the universal norms of international law. It is
founded upon what Coradetti terms moderate metaethical relativism in that

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the primary purpose of defensive relativism is to use a cultural reference to

resist the imposition, not the content of universality (2009: 40). This would
potentially allow the convergence over common valid standards of morality
(2009: 40). To put it simply: defensive relativism seeks to combat the extracultural imposition of universal values by arguing that practices which conflict with universal norms have a basis in a given communitys culture. This
does not preclude the possibility of existence of universal values; rather, in
certain circumstances, it simply asserts the primacy of cultural values over
universal values.
Defensive relativism needs to be distinguished from absolutist relativism
which had its origins in the descriptive relativism of anthropology. In the
early twentieth century, anthropologists such as Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict argued that contrary to the accepted colonial paradigm, all cultures, even
those thought of as savage, had equally valid modes of cultural existence
and patterns of morality. Melville Herskovits proposed that the human individual is always provided with some culturally constituted means that are
among the conditions which enable him to participate with his fellows
(1958: 270). In 1947, the American Anthropological Association issued a
declaration opposing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, criticizing
it for being based on a Western-centric notion of rights that translated an
evangelical religious tradition [] into a summons to action when confronted by cultural difference and sought to impose Western traditions on
societies with different moral practices (1947: 540). The declaration concluded that the UDHR, and indeed any declaration of human rights, would be
inapplicable [] to mankind as a whole (1947: 542). The Associations
declaration can be read as an appeal for a more inclusive process of framing
international human rights instruments, as the UDHR had been largely shaped
by the colonial powers at the UN. However, as Karen Engle argues, anthropologists came to regret their objections when political actors in postcolonial
states began to use normative relativism to defend acts of political repression
(2001: 536). The problem was that the descriptive relativism advanced by
anthropologists, while countering the colonial assumption of savagery,
implicitly promoted the notion that conflicts of values proved the incommensurability of values. This provided justification for political actors to deny the
protection that international human rights law offered to individuals on the
grounds that the validity of human rights was beyond particular cultural restrictions. As Jack Donnelly observes, during the 1980s cultural relativism
was used by vicious dictators [] to justify their depredations (2007: 282).
These practices were unfortunately consistent with the principles of the Anthropological Associations statement, which did not differentiate between
tolerance of cultural difference and intolerant [] genocidal relativism
(ibid: 282, 295). This form of cultural relativism, in Fernando Tesons view,
became the worst form of moral and legal positivism as it relied on the

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267

assertion that the rules enacted by [cultures] are necessarily correct as a

matter of critical morality (1985: 893). The violence of absolutist relativism
was gruesomely exemplified in the ethnic cleansing in Rwanda and the former
Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, where relativism led to moral neutrality in
situations that are intolerable (Hatch 1997: 372). As US Secretary of State
Warren Christopher stated at the 1993 Vienna Convention on Human Rights,
cultural relativism could become the last refuge of repression, making absolutist relativism a weapon in the hands of political elites who perpetuated the
doctrine of intolerance (Galanos 2010: 30).
Critical advocates of human rights in the postcolonial era simultaneously
reject imperial universalism, which categorizes culturally specific understandings of morality as savage and anti-modern, and the normativity of absolutist relativism that venerates divergences from moral standards to the extent
of condoning mass atrocities committed in the name of culture. Instead, human rights advocates argue that a minimal core of values should be treated as
objectively moral and beyond that moral core, an overarching principle of
toleration should be promoted, which recognizes the diversity of cultural
practices (Rentlen 1988, Waltzer 1994). This, however, presumes that a neat
division between a universal moral core of values and cultural practices can
be easily identified. As some critics have argued, this ignores the sheer multiplicity of different ethical practices (Etzoni 1997). It is also difficult to
achieve genuine cross-cultural consensus when, as in the case of international
human rights treaties, the mechanism for achieving such a consensus is the
extra-cultural and imperial framework of international law. Because of these
difficulties, individual communities, while agreeing on the abstract merits of
universality, are inclined towards drawing on culture as a source of reference
for ethical values in areas where there is a perceived conflict with universal
values. This explains how states notionally favor the promotion of the universal application of international human rights law, while simultaneously mobilizing culture as a justification for resisting specific rights. For example,
Honling Lau notes that the US, while advancing and protecting human rights
in many different areas, in response to conservative cultural and religious
interests, continues to resist protecting the rights of the Lesbian and Gay
community, even though international human rights law requires such a commitment (2004: 1704). It is important to note that the cultural content employed in the process of defensive relativism is to a large extent defined in
opposition to the universal claims of international human rights law. In the
next section, I will argue that not only postcolonial states resort to defensive
relativism; rather, in the face of the universalism of human rights expounded
by international organizations, such as the European Court of Human Rights,
Western states too are resisting the application of universal human rights
norms.

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Sovereignty and Biopolitics

Defensive relativism is principally a state practice that governments engage in
to resist the enforcement of universal norms by supranational organizations,
and it is within this framework that cultural references are formulated. As
argued earlier, defensive relativism is mobilized as a remedy against both
colonization and the colonial legacy of international law, but also employed
by former colonial powers to resist accountability vis--vis the universal validity and legitimacy of international human rights.
Human rights instruments can potentially threaten sovereignty by presenting an external set of moral values that are to some extent beyond the control
of sovereign governments. Martti Koskenniemi explains that although international human rights law claims to be value-neutral, it is often reduced to
conflicting and contested arguments of the political good, which explicitly
interfere in areas that are the self-assumed prerogative of national governments (2011: 133). This is particularly acute in what Alves terms postmodern societies, where governing has become increasingly managerial with
only the localized or national community as a focal point for political organization, resulting in the institutions of the state and national culture becoming
one and the same (2000: 491). The rise of the postmodern state was observed in late 1990s when politics in Western Europe and North America
became increasingly post-ideological, and states created external identities
that were either corporate in nature or defined by reference to selected cultural symbols (van Ham: 2001). Alves argues that the principle of generic universality was important in securing the modern nation-state and the rights of
individual communities within the nation-state, but in postmodern states values are increasingly relative [and] localized (2000: 491). Postmodern
states, Robert Cooper argues, are defined by a conflation of the national and
international in terms of their security and economic policy yet are at the
same time caught in a paradox, because democratic institutions remain firmly wedded to the territorial state localizing political arguments about rights
but internationalizing arguments about political economy (2002: 23). Thus in
postmodern societies, a seemingly formalistic argument about national or
supranational legal jurisdiction on human rights matters can be framed as an
external imposition on culture. Along similar lines, Wendy Brown notes that
many of the constitutive premises that underpinned modern statehood at the
end of the twentieth century have lost their legitimacy, while the teleological
narratives of progress that traditionally sustained the sovereignty of Western
states have progressively weakened (2001: 2). This has led to states fixing
and defining their sovereign boundaries using the language of rights and to
democratic governments increasingly dividing individuals into those who are
granted sovereign rights and those who are not granted rights (ibid).

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269

Whilst Western European states drafted the universal principles of human

rights and set up the European Court of Human Rights to enforce these principles, universalism now threatens the sovereignty of its member states. This
is in part because, as described above, the nature of sovereignty has altered
since the European Convention was signed in the aftermath of World War II
and also because, as described below, the concept of a supranational human
rights regime can pose a series of specific challenges to the sovereign power
of Western states. These threats to sovereignty are largely conceptual, and are
in some cases exaggerated by national governments, but can be perceived as
threatening cultural practices, thus encouraging governments to engage in
defensive relativism.

Democratic Sovereignty and Exclusion

Democratic constitutionalism locates the issuing of meaningful rights (i.e.,
rights that can be enforced against a government in return for entitlements)
within the national political community of a representative democracy, making rights something that can and should be controlled by the political community. Supranational universality ceases to ground rights within the democratic tradition, which, as Douzinas notes, makes rights the concrete result of
deliberations and decisions by the citizens. These constitutional entitlements
construct the human subject (2008: 95). Drawing on Hannah Arendt, Serena Parekh explains that the capacity of rights to construct the human subject
implies that exclusion from rights, namely, being deprived of the right to
have rights, places the individual outside an organized political community
(2008: 11). The operation of rights in a national political community results
in the exclusion of individuals like migrants and other minorities. Douzinas
argues that the political instantiations of modernity engender a split between man and citizen or universal and particular. The constitutional
frameworks that create and deliver rights need to exclude in order to define
rights holders (2008: 95).
The creation of a political community is, thereby, an exclusionary act of
sovereign power. As Douzinas notes, a group of people become a community
when they are gathered together for a common purpose, but a political community is formed by circumscribing itself in its interiority and demarcating
[itself] from an outside (2006: 38). The notion of demarcating the Other is
also essential for the sovereigns control of the state of exception or emergency that often defines sovereign power (Agamben 2005). The need to exclude
control, and be the ultimate source of rights is an essential element of sovereign authority. The biopolitical state has made a virtue of the control of its

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population by managing the processes of life and death (Douzinas 2008). The
reassertion of sovereign control over the population in the course of the War
on Terror, as Julian Reid argues, can be seen as a defense of the biopolitically grounded system of Western sovereignty (2009: 136).
In the name of state sovereignty, Western states have resisted the European Court of Human Rights, especially in cases relating to immigration and
terrorism. Since 1996, the Court has prevented individuals from being deported from member states when they are at risk of being tortured in the state
they were being deported to. As deportation is a key strategy for dealing with
individuals suspected of terrorism, these rulings have been politically unpopular. In 2012, when the Court ruled that Abu Qatada, a key terror suspect,
could not be deported because he was at risk of being tortured, there was a
political outcry within the UK. The ruling was perceived as a security threat
and attack on British sovereignty. As the neo-conservative US politician John
Bolton argued, the Court was undermining the UKs security to the extent that
it was faced with the choice of either remaining a sovereign country or being
taken over by European institutions (Gardiner 2012).

The Groundings of Human Rights: Transcendental Versus

National
In a supranational setting, the challenge for human rights is that they have to
be grounded in transcendental arguments. The idea that all humans have
rights at the supranational level transcends the boundaries of political community and international human rights law, drawing on a universal construction of personhood that has purchase beyond specific political communities.
Yet in doing this, Griffin argues that human rights are removed from being
[s]omething objective and factual that is recognizable by local communities
to being something cosmopolitan and transcendent (2008: 35). Defenders of
moral relativism, such as Gilbert Harman, claim that moral standards are
created by agreement between groups of people, such as the political community of a nation state. Although there might not be a perfect correlation
between what is believed to be morally right and what is actually morally
right, such agreements nonetheless capture the intentions and expectations of
people regarding what ought to be done in a given situation (1975: 16). Moral
structures that create rights, according to Harman, through political agreement
in the context of valid institutional settings command universal acknowledgement from the state and the society at large.
It is important to note that human rights instruments often begin their life
as agreements shaped by political consensus, but by virtue of claiming uni-

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271

versality, also need to contain a transcendental reference, which grows or

diminishes in importance as the original political consensus evolves or disintegrates. The ECHR began its life in the early 1950s as an agreement that
reflected the Western European consensus about the importance of human
rights in preventing the horrors of World War II from reoccurring and for
preventing a communist takeover of Western European nations. This consensus has not weakened, but by 2010s, it no longer has the same resonance.
Much of the empirical evidence suggests that political concerns regarding the
European Court of Human Rights eroding sovereignty are exaggerated.3 The
legal doctrine of the margin of appreciation ensures that the Court declines
to intervene in matters best left to national governments with their own distinct administrative and legal cultures.4 This implies a system that respects
cultural differences between member states (Dembour 2006: 159). However,
the implied transcendentalism of human rights in the preamble of the ECHR,
which refers to rights as the foundation of universal peace and justice, is
independent of the political agreements and politics of the nation-state. Hence
European governments have sought to re-ground human rights in the nationstate, one of the most significant attempts being the 2012 Brighton Declaration, whereby member states of the Council of Europe sought to limit the
number of areas where the ECHR could intervene to protect rights and the
number of applications it could hear.5

The Culture of Rights and Wants

The culture of rights within a society, in Kate Nashs view, often shapes the
ethical reality of a society and determines the ways in which rights are protected and accepted (2009: 5-6). Nash argues that in order to understand what
human rights mean in society, both in the juridical sense and in a broader
social sense, it is necessary to look beyond economic and political factors and
focus on the role of the media in order to assess the nature of a societys culture of rights (2009: 3133). The mediated field of human rights is vital as the
collective effect of television, radio, newspapers, and the internet brings human rights issues [] [into the] mediated publicness which Nash argues is
3
4

Research into cases brought against the UK found that the government lost one in 50 cases
(Donald et al. 2012: 42).
Margin of Appreciation is the technical term for the process whereby the court acknowledges in its judgments that rights will be interpreted differently in different countries and as
a consequence gives the state party some latitude.
The Brighton Declaration was a Council of Europe agreement on the direction of the European Court of Human Rights, which highlights the sovereignty of states and the importance
of the margin of appreciation (Bates 2012).

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Frederick Cowell

the only kind of public life and public debate possible in most complex societies (2009: 50).
The conflation of rights and wants within contemporary human rights culture in many Western societies has complicated attempts to protect human
rights at the supranational level. In Western postmodern societies, Douzinas
argues, the phrase I have a right to X is used interchangeably with the
expressions I desire or want, and this is reflected at many different points
in the mediated sphere (2008: 12). Mary-Ann Glendons study of rights culture in the US notes how the language of rights has created highly individualistic assertions of freedom and desire, with many individuals describing rights
in terms of providing the freedom to do whatever we please which is
framed in the language of no compromise (1991: 9). This not only weakens
the idea of rights as tools of political organization, but also makes them into
instruments of governmental control. The conflation of rights and desire
makes them into a channel for accomplishing individual aims and goals, instead of instruments of wider social and political transformation. The media
in the UK conflates the differences between accounts of families demanding
social housing, students campaigning against university tuition, and celebrities seeking privacy from paparazzi as human rights claims. Whether this is
an accurate account of the legality of rights claims is irrelevant, as the media,
which conveys discourses about rights, often conflates rights and wants
(Glendon 1991). This conflation progressively becomes an ethical reality
which sovereign politics seeks to dominate as these forms of rights are essential for the managerial process of governing the postmodern state.

Conclusion
The Enlightenment idea of universality and the related colonial practice of
expansion of international law are part of the genealogy of international human rights law. Cultural relativism emerges as a doctrine to counter the implicit assumption of colonial universality that culturally divergent moral practices were savage and anti-modern. Defensive relativism is a variant of
cultural relativism that is often employed by states resisting the universal
application of human rights norms. As I have argued above, this is increasingly exploited by Western states in the name of sovereignty to resist judgments
of the European Court of Human Rights.
Cultural arguments serve as an alternate source of value to the universality
of human rights norms, which are transcendentally grounded outside the state
and thus outside the national political community. Culture plays a complex
role within defensive relativism as it refers not only to processes that can be
described as culturally different by a descriptive relativist, but also refers to

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273

legal processes and practices of sovereign states that conflict with universal
norms. In the context of what Alves (2000) calls postmodern states, where
culture and national institutions have become fused, a conflict between national institutions and supranational institutions becomes re-framed as a clash
between national culture and the imposed universality of supranational organizations. Culture in this context is little more than a reaction against universality, but in many ways this highlights the continuing tension between universality and culture a phenomenon that affects both Western and non-Western
states alike. Defensive relativism as a conceptual tool helps understand how
relativism is not confined to societies classified as primitive in colonist
discourse, but is a reaction of nation-states to universality. The critique of
human rights on cultural grounds primarily focuses on its use in postcolonial
contexts. In contrast, defensive relativism explains how states with the intellectual traditions that created the ontology of universality now adopt relativistic positions towards human rights.

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.

IV. Democracy

Democracys Subjections: Human Rights in Contexts

of Scarcity
Democracys Subjections

Lyn Ossome
Introduction
The relationship between democratization and human rights is often taken for
granted, and the dominance of human rights as the discursive language of
justice even more so. The reason for this can be traced back to the incomplete
shift towards democratization in postcolonial African states, beginning in the
structural adjustment period of the late 1980s. This period was historically
important because, among other factors, it was informed by an intensified
demand for liberties. This opening up of political spaces was, however, also
marked by the diminishing engagement with class analysis and the overall
failure to link oppressive social relations that were emerging in the context of
decolonization, such as homophobia, xenophobia, and racism, to the obscuring of class dynamics. As such, while the emphasis on recognition has been
successful in highlighting hitherto ignored forms of oppression, some observers have regretted the fact that it seems to have been coupled with the abandonment of class politics associated with the politics of distribution (Phillips
1999).
The reconfiguring of human rights in the course of the neoliberal turn has
ushered in the discontinuity between civil and political rights and economic
justice, contributing to a significant withdrawal from popular democracy. At
present, the rights discourse is mobilized by powerful countries to justify
aggressive interventionist approaches, while at the same time claiming that
guaranteeing rights to publics set them on a developmental path. Thus, publics encumbered by economic lack and exclusion can paradoxically experience freedom. Globally, workers distressed by worsening economic and
social conditions, are increasingly protesting against and exposing the brutality of states austerity measures as well as state-sanctioned violence perpetrated in the name of maintaining law and order, peace keeping, and defense. It is ironical that a debate is conducted in countries like South Africa
on the possibility of a democratic developmental state without addressing
issues of economic empowerment and equitable development. This has much
to do with the narrow human rights perspective that has prevailed in public
discourse (Moyo/Yeros 2011). This trend is more clearly observable in do-

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nor driven countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and Uganda, where interest is sharply focused on constitutionalism,
rights, and liberties, while the economic demands of the population are neglected. The problematic nature of this trade-off lies in the way in which
human rights, when claimed or applied in specific situations, mask particular
interests and ideological motives. Such interests mirror the neocolonial pacts
through which African states were granted ostensible political freedom and
autonomy while perpetuating the oppressive economic status quo. As such,
democratization as a postcolonial emancipatory project continues to generate
more questions than it answers. What these insights primarily reveal is an
antagonistic relationship between the liberal democratic conception of human
rights on the one hand, and social/redistributive justice as a fundamental aim
of radical democracy on the other.
This essay is concerned with democratization as an emancipatory project
in postcolonial countries, where the dynamics of power and the constraints of
liberalism often negate or undermine mechanisms for redistributive justice.
Focusing on monopoly capitalism and state sovereignty, the liberal human
rights framework will be critiqued. I argue that liberal notions of human
rights, applied in contexts of political, cultural, and economic exclusion and
lack, actually reproduce human rights violations rather than resolving them.
Drawing on Wendy Browns (2010) critique of waning state sovereignty and
Jacques Rancires (2006) radical notion of the democratic man, I argue
that through the implicit inclusion and rewarding of compliant/disciplined
individuals, human rights within liberal democratic regimes function as instruments of exclusion of those subjects constructed as undesirable. This
strategy functions in two ways: firstly, through consumerism the commodification or trading of rights through the market, which walls out those who
are structurally unable to access the market place; and secondly, through the
liberal notion of universality, which obscures the multiple and intersecting
nature of identities and desires to be found within the polity, rendering invisible the rights claims of those whose identities deviate from the norm.
A number of critical debates that emerge from similar concerns begin with
the critique of the liberal democratic state. For instance, Chantal Mouffe
views liberal democracy as more than a mere form of government, characterizing it as a regime that organizes human co-existence in a specific political
form through the articulation of two different traditions: on one hand, political liberalism (i.e., rule of law, separation of powers, and individual rights)
and, on the other hand, the democratic tradition of popular sovereignty
(Mouffe 2000: 18). What is at stake, she argues, is the legitimation of conflict
and division, the emergence of individual liberty, and the assertion of equal
liberty for all (ibid: 19). What we witness, however, is the negation of conflict
and the undermining of difference within the liberal human rights framework,
which proceeds from a universalist and essentialist point of view. According

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to Mouffe, if pluralism is factored in at all, it is of an extreme type that

emphasizes heterogeneity and incommensurability. Herein pluralism understood as valorization of all differences should be limitless. Such a formulation ignores the limits imposed on the extension of the sphere of rights by the
fact that some existing rights have been constructed by the very exclusion or
subordination of others.1
Brown makes a similar point when she asserts that those concerned with
emancipatory political practices confront a set of paradoxes, the central one
being that the liberatory or egalitarian force of rights is always historically
and culturally circumscribed; rights have no inherent political semiotic, no
innate capacity either to advance or impede radical democratic ideals. Yet,
rights necessarily operate in and as an ahistorical, acultural, and acontextual
idiom (Brown 1995: 97). In other words, through the objectivist pursuit of a
discourse of universality, rights undermine the postcolonial project that seeks
to engage with particular legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and neocolonialism; the normative application of rights, lacking as it does in historical and
social specificity, can address itself to no more than a generalized account of
the social realities present in different political and economic contexts.
A further critique relates to the functioning of human rights as one of the
many conditions inscribed upon states and heralding freedom in the postCold War era.2 These conditions are coded as choice, such that development and its opposite, underdevelopment, or wealth instead of poverty, are
conceptualized as preordained and self-evident categories and not what they
ought to be viewed as
particular ways of seeing and acting upon the world that reflect not only the conditions
they describe but also the constellations of social, economic and political forces at the time
of their emergence (Abrahamsen 2003: 202).

Human rights, Patricia Williams (1991) has argued, impose an artificial barrier between opposites like progressive/unprogressive, righted/wronged, legitimate/illegitimate; they maintain illogical barriers between that which is to be
hallowed and that which needs rescuing. Through coded conditions, the idea
that states are ultimately responsible for their own stability is constructed, at
the same time as the notion of state sovereignty is forcibly retrenched though
a discourse of autonomy. Yet if, as Brown (2010) has argued, sovereignty
is no longer to be found in the nation-state, but rather in political economy,
then it becomes clear that the emergence of a liberal human rights regime
1

Despite its claim to be more democratic, Mouffe unpacks how such a perspective prevents
us from recognizing how certain differences are constructed as relations of subordination. It
should therefore be challenged by a radical democratic politics (Mouffe 2000: 20).
Neoliberal capitalism imposes upon developing economies conditions to measure development and freedom. This democratization agenda includes such measures as structural adjustment programs, privatization schemes, trade liberalization, and the entrenchment of the
human rights regime.

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ought to be viewed in relation to, and as a response to, the crisis of waning
state sovereignty. This response is characterized by the hegemonic interference in state matters through (the imposition) of laws and the international
human rights regime, both of which sometimes openly aim to subvert or
supersede the sovereignty of states (Brown 2010: 22). One of the subjective
manifestations of this political interference is discrimination at the level at
which various group identities are essentialized for the sake of maintaining a
semblance of the whole, what Heidegger termed a reassuring world picture (cited in Brown 2012: 118). Responding to universalized oppression(s)
through a liberal human rights framework thus becomes the new method of
exercising power and monopoly, which post-Westphalian states increasingly compromised, as Brown notes, by growing transnational flows of capital,
people, ideas, goods, violence, political and religious fealty can no longer
exert (ibid).3
Although the manipulation of power remains central to the state project,
what is just as apparent in the varying expressions of power in postcolonial
Africa is its highly dispersed nature. This resonates with Rita Abrahamsens
insight that resistance to power is no longer to be found in simply seizing
state power or the means of production (2003: 209). The multifariousness of
power suggests that the task of understanding the particular ways in which
human rights function as the emerging signification and boundary of state
sovereignty must be discovered in the micro-foundations of the application
of rights/power. Critical questions emerge out of such a framing. In a discussion of his seminal work On the Postcolony, Achille Mbembe poses a set of
foundational questions that seek to distinguish the object of power from the
subjections which power produces. He asks under what practical conditions is
the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised? Who is the
subject of this right? What does the implementation of such a right tell us
about the entity that is put to death and about the relation of enmity that sets it
against its murderer? How can we account for the contemporary ways in
which the political, under the guise of war, of resistance, or of the fight
against terror, makes the murder of the enemy its primary and absolute objective? (cf. Hoeller n.d.).
These questions point to the reality that much of what is spoken in ostensibly objective, unmediated voices is in fact mired in hidden subjectivities
and unexamined claims that make property of others beyond the self, all the
3

Nation-state sovereignty has been undercut as well by neoliberal rationality, which recognizes no sovereign apart from entrepreneurial decision makers (large and small), which displaces legal and political principles (especially liberal commitments to universal inclusion,
equality, liberty, and the rule of law) with market criteria, and which demotes the political
sovereign to managerial status. Nation-state sovereignty has also been eroded by the steady
growth and importance of international economic and governance institutions such as the
International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization (Brown 2010: 22).

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while denying such connections (Williams 1991: 11). If human rights claim
such objectivity, whom do they include who is constructed as deserving of
rights and how does this construction proceed? Who/what is excluded or
suffers? And how does this inclusion/exclusion binary render what is then
considered as reality? In short, what casualties are produced out of the
normative framing of human rights as it operates within liberal democracy?
Drawing from these critical debates, this essay seeks to highlight the limitations of justice in contexts where alienation, physical and military violation,
and immiseration are observed despite ongoing democratization processes.
The liberal human rights regime has pushed the boundaries beyond the fantasy that the state will protect its citizens towards an even more intangible desire for the global protector. The antagonisms and tensions arising out of
the ensuing struggle between the nation-state and competing global sovereign
powers, the reproduction of a human rights discourse as knowledge, and the
effect of such constructions on the democratization project form the core
focus of analysis. The paper considers these questions in two different political contexts in Africa: Uganda and South Africa. These cases provide examples that demonstrate that the exploitation, immiseration, and cultural violation of marginalized groups is also the condition for capitalisms accommodation of human rights claims within these liberal democracies.

Human Rights, Scarcity, and State Repression in Uganda

Recent developments in Uganda reveal a country in which leaders have exacerbated the legacy of colonialism by fomenting further ethnic division and
conflict, adopting an uncompromising approach to issues of national importance, marginalizing or seeking to marginalize whole areas and ethnic
groups, adopting disastrous economic policies, and further weakening an
already weak state apparatus. The consequences of such moves have been
recurrent violence, economic decline and stagnation, and perennial political
instability (Galooba-Mutemi 2008: 2). From 1986 to 2006, following a long
civil war, the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) regime under
President Yoweri Museveni undertook economic liberalization and political
reconstruction measures. The NRM wanted to introduce a corporatist economic program, but had to liberalize to obtain donor support. Although the
regime resisted many demands from the international donor community, in
1991 it accepted fiscal discipline (Brett 2008: 348351), and Museveni was
hailed by the foreign press, diplomats, and even some academics as a new
style African leader to be emulated in his almost single-minded pursuit of

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economic development, fiscal discipline, and the free market (cf. Berkeley
1994, Caplan 1997, McKinley 1998).
Political spaces opened up after the NRM takeover, in part due to the fact
that the NRM had yet to consolidate its hold over the country. But as it created and solidified its control over various institutions, it also began to tighten
its grip on those political spaces. The relative stability in the country after
NRM came to power, combined with Ugandas rapid economic growth at the
time, initially won Museveni and his movement considerable support, and
many were willing to overlook the persistent constraints on democratization
(Tripp 2000: 56). These positive changes were, however, associated with
some disturbing developments that included an increasingly ruthless use of
state power to keep the ruling elite in place, growing patronage-based corruption, the failure to resolve the long-running civil war in the North, intensification of North-South inequalities and hostilities, chronic aid dependence, and
weak state capacity (Brett 2008: 351). Liberalization in Uganda was only
opposed by a tiny group of politicians, officials, and others who had direct
access to the rents available through the state,4 while being supported by the
majority of the population who view the state as a criminal conspiracy against
the rest of society.5 Structural adjustment and the very generous aid that came
with it generated widespread benefits and, therefore, consolidated the political legitimacy of the regime (Brett 2008: 359). However, the NRMs intolerance of opposition and its moves towards a more repressive stance and exclusionary posture towards opponents has threatened this legitimacy in recent
years (Galooba-Mutebi 2008: 23). Riots over high commodity prices, routine
harassment and imprisonment of opposition politicians, and the militarization
of society are all symptomatic of a state desperate to consolidate its waning
authority.6 The US and the West have turned a blind eye to the massive corruption, the suppression of freedom of expression and of the press, and that of
dissidents, and have continued to pour aid and donor funding into the country.
In part, this is owed to the fact that Museveni has become a vocal supporter of
4

5
6

In part, this had been maintained through the military provision of the coercive force needed
to maintain regime security, and the assurance by military leaders that competitive interest
groups would not develop modes of behavior that are detrimental to state security. Activities of such groups are carefully monitored by military elites to ensure that none develops
enough potential for violence to capture the government. In return for helping maintain the
regime, the military receives rents via a share of government expenditure (see Kimenyi/Mbaku 1995: 701).
By 1973, the state had lost both its legitimacy and capacity to deliver services, and most
services and economic activities had been effectively privatized and informalized.
Earlier signs included far-reaching proposals for constitutional reform, through which
Museveni sought to lift the constitutional provision that stipulates that a president can stand
for elections for only two terms. Rather than seeking an amendment that would allow a third
term, Museveni recommended that term limits be removed altogether. Musevenis exit from
the helm of Ugandas leadership is uncertain as he has now amended the constitution to allow himself to serve indefinitely (Oloka-Onyango 2004).

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the War on Terrorism. In this context, it has been argued that this massive
influx of aid may actually have impeded democratic reforms, because it made
the government less dependent on popular support (Rice 2006).
Historically, foreign and national security affairs have been the policy areas most difficult to bring under (liberal) democratic control. Reasons of
state generally persuade even those governments formed by parties ideologically opposed to these positions. The implication for state democracy is that
the more important foreign policy and national security become in the life of
the state, the less likely the state is to prove susceptible to democratic control
(Dryzek 1996: 74). Consequently, while on the one hand, Ugandas suppression of human rights and the overall suspension of democratic practices conform to realist international relations theories, on the other hand, the contradictions borne out of the states parallel accommodation of a conservative
rights agenda led by the US evangelical movement defy any normative understanding of Ugandas democratic project. This is due to the fact that although
the state has sought to limit civil liberties through the suppression of LGBTI
rights, in doing so it appears to be fomenting a diverse queer discursive space
in the country.7 This confrontation and the fetishized elevation of a queer
discourse to the status of a national debate ought to be read as a function of
the disciplining power of US and Western governments. The NRM government has maintained an ambivalent stance on the issue, at times apparently
succumbing to intense international pressure to veto the controversial AntiHomosexuality Bill,8 and at other times endorsing the conservative backlash
underpinned in localized discourses by the cultural-religious aggression towards Western values. In short, Ugandas accommodation of the LGBTI
rights discourse is not only deceptive but diversionary, too. For what the
7

Indeed, as Sokari Ekine (2010) observes, the increased visibility of LGBTI activists has
incited public discussions in the media, facilitated easier access to information, and compelled people to think about the effect of exclusionary rights in their society. This sphere, I
would propose, is an emergent counter-public, which has the potential to broaden the possibility of extending democracy and increasing civil society participation in resistance to the
dominant public sphere. See also Fenton/Downey 2003: 15.
A campaign delivered half a million signatures to Museveni, various governments lobbied
the Ugandan government, the German government threatened to cut aid, and currently, the
US Congress has amended financial legislation (with bipartisan support) that would cut aid
to countries deemed to be persecuting gay people. Introducing the legislation, Congressman
Barney Frank highlighted Uganda and noted that the USA have a fairly influential voice in
the development area. To quote US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the treasury department will continue to instruct the U.S. executive directors at each of the MDBs [multilateral development banks] to seek to channel MDB resources away from those countries
whose governments engage in a pattern of gross violations of human rights (Geithner
2011). The European Parliament on its part passed a resolution in December, reminding
Africa that the EU is responsible for more than half of development aid and remains Africa's most important trading partner and that in all actions conducted under the terms of
various partnerships sexual orientation is a protected category of non-discrimination (Canning 2011).

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countrys history provides us with is a narrative of a postcolonial state whose

sovereignty is under immense pressure externally from international financial
institutional dependence and regional political instability, and internally from
intensifying class struggles and political insecurity borne of ethnic minority
marginalization, poverty, and a highly militarized society that suppresses
dissent. Its sovereignty is guaranteed externally by its performative role as the
regional political buffer,9 thus the strong imperative to impose a democratic
outlook upon Uganda what Rancire has termed as the undertaking by
America to spread their democracy throughout the world with armed force
(2006: 3). Contrary to popular thinking, the issue of LGBTI rights is not a
taboo subject in Uganda there has been vibrant, if polemical, debate in the
media, parliament, civil society, and in the general public domain. The conditions enabling this relatively greater discursive space around LGBTI rights in
Uganda compared to other African countries ought to be understood as being
part of the elite pact between wealthy capitalist states of the West and their
elite counterparts in the global South. Browns words in this regard ring true
that there are powers that possess discernible logics, but lack political form or
organization, let alone subjective and coordinated intentionality (2010: 24).
Such powers inadvertently (re)produce themselves through discernible spaces
of power like democracy, which is then subjected to its machinations. Ugandas incubation of a gay rights discursive space must be read in tandem with
the objectives of the deeply rooted neocolonial links it retains with the US
and the West.
What is lost is much more than a genuine space for making rights claims
by those individuals or groups disenfranchised by a greedy, corrupt, repressive, and inequitable state. It is also the case that out of the artificial binary
imposed by human rights between legitimate and illegitimate claims,
those assumed as more deserving of protection the hungry masses are
also the ones most penuriously injured by this falsehood. The deception being
that homosexuality becomes the totality of that which ails society. The
choice offered between one set of (morally corrupting) rights and another set
of transcendental human rights is also the application of liberal choice as an
instrument of capitalist domination (Brown 1995: 24). In the Communist
Manifesto, Marx bemoaned the fact that the bourgeoisie has, in place of the
numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, set up that single unconscionable
freedom Free Trade (Marx/Engels 1934: 12); and that the only equality it
knows is commercial equality, based on brutal and shameless exploitation, on
a fundamental inequality in relations between the service providers of work
9

Successive wars in Uganda have been fundamentally wrapped up in cross-border alliances.

These patterns continue to underpin on-going warfare inside Uganda, pitting government
forces against the Lords Resistance Army in the northern part of the country, as well as
Ugandas involvement with military conflicts beyond its borders, especially in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia (Galoobi-Mutebi 2008: 23).

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and the clients who buy their labor power. Contemporary sociological texts,
Rancire points out, replace the bourgeoisie with another subject, democratic man, from which point it becomes possible, he argues, to transform
the reign of exploitation into the reign of equality, and to make democratic
equality identical to the equal exchange of market services (2006: 19). The
bourgeois classes, concerned only with profitability, create a rights economy that may be deemed as the commodification of rights. Within the liberal
democratic state, rights enter into the realm of market services, alongside
commodities, and the democratic man expresses the equality of the relations of exchange as the equality of human rights (ibid).
The conservative anti-homosexuality debate is the means through which
the public is drawn into a nationalist discourse ostensibly to protect the states
and the peoples sovereignty. Human rights in this sense have emerged as the
barrier or filter through which an us versus them is constructed, and the
us is universalized to obliterate differences of class, ethnicity, sexuality,
geography, and gender, which differentially oppress the Ugandan public under the impoverishing current conditions of monopoly capitalism and militarization at work in the country.

Liberal Constitutionalism, Poverty, and Resistance in South

Africa
This section deals with a further critique of human rights as it functions in
antagonism to state and capital. South Africa is presently witnessing a period
of vibrant, explosive, but uncoordinated worker militancy (Bond 2012) unprecedented in the countrys post-apartheid history. Mass service delivery
protests are traceable to the immediate post-apartheid turn, when the African
National Congress (ANC) government committed itself to urban reconstruction and development, evidenced by two major macro-development strategies
developed after 1994. These are the Reconstruction and Development Plan
(RDP) and the Growth, Economic and Redistribution Strategy (GEAR).10
The RDP was presented as a policy framework for integrated and coherent
social economic progress, which sought to mobilize the people and the countrys resources toward the final eradication of the legacies of apartheid. Its
goal was to build a democratic, non-racial, and non-sexist future, and
claimed to represent a vision for the fundamental transformation of South
10

The RDP is directed at addressing the social aspects of sustainable development by meeting
the basic needs of people and encouraging people-driven processes. GEAR is the countrys
main economic strategy and an attempt to address issues of economic inequity, as well as
the countrys continued economic growth.

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Africa. Critics of the RDP White Paper (WP) (cf. Republic of South Africa
1994: 9) largely conferred upon it a reactionary status. Asgar Adelzadeh and
Vishnu Padayachee, for instance, view it as representing a very significant
compromise to the neo-liberal, trickle down economic policy preferences of
the old regime (1994: 2). Elsewhere, it was argued that the framing of the
RDP and the White Paper submerged crucial political issues (cf. Wolpe 1995:
91).
GEAR, some scholars suggested, was much more than a shift to harsh neoliberalism, but more importantly also a redefinition of the National Democratic Revolution NDR (Hart 2007). According to Gillian Hart, GEAR
asserted new technologies of rule, which, among other things, made social
support conditional on the correct attitudes and aspirations (2007: 93). The
redefinition of the NDR embodies a powerful drive to contain popular mobilization. An initial manifesto of this broader state project was an ANC Discussion Document issued in 1996 which, while not making explicit reference
to the NDR, asserted the imperative for containing the instinct towards
economism on the part of ordinary workers in the following terms:
If the democratic movement allowed that the subjective approach to socio-economic development represented by economism should overwhelm the scientific approach of the
democratic movement towards such development, it could easily create the conditions for
the possible counter-revolutionary defeat of the democratic revolution (paragraph 6.11, in
Hart 2007: 94).

The implication was that the NDRs primary consideration would not be to
address the lived realities of the people, but rather that the legitimacy of
rights claims would be determined by the conditional parameters negotiated
for the revolution. In the case of GEAR or RDP, the extent to which rights
demands could be made were already constituted within their neoliberal limits. Or, as Hart has argued, GEAR can be seen as part of a vanguardist project
to exercise a new form of activism defined in technocratic and hierarchical
terms, and to assert the dominance of a transnationally-connected technocratic elite over mass mobilization and action (2007: 94). The point to note
here is that mass actions and protests, where they have been tolerated in South
Africa, have been delimited by the very foundational documents and policies
that made their expression possible.
As Harold Wolpe had predicted, by mid-2003, the ANC began asserting
itself as a developmental state and effecting a redefinition of the NDR in
terms of a First and Second Economy (Hart 2007: 96). Hart (2006) sees the
First/Second Economy discourses as part of an effort to contain the challenges from oppositional movements that reached their peak by 2002 and to render them subject to government intervention. What is significant about this
discourse, she argues, is the way it defines a segment of society that is superfluous to the modern economy and in need of paternal guidance: those
falling within this category are citizens, but second class. As such, they are

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289

deserving of a modicum of social security, but on tightly disciplined and

conditional terms. Hart (2007) further argues that strategies to identify and
treat a backward segment of society go a long way towards explaining the
vehemence with which powerful figures in the ANC dismissed proposals for a
modest Basic Income Grant (BIG).11 The reason why the ANC government
rejects the BIG, she suggests, is precisely because it is a universal grant and
therefore lacks points of leverage for instilling in its recipients the correct
attitudes and aspirations (2007: 96). The post-apartheid state has, through its
economic policies and a progressive constitution, unleashed desires among
citizens of rights claims, and unbridled consumerism which it has through
the same mechanisms sought to suppress, increasingly violently.
These narratives are reminiscent of Rancires thesis, which calls into
question the notion of impassivity with regards to consumption of goods or
service, when he speaks of human rights as being the rights of the egotistical
individuals of bourgeois society (2006: 17). By this, he suggests that the culture of protest and rights claims ought to be read as impatience on the part
of the consumer who has been seduced by the seeming limitless growth that
is inherent to the logic of the capitalist economy: democracy as the reign of
individuals always yearning to consume ever more (ibid: 20). The exchange
between society and state, however, takes place on inequitable terms: for the
liberal democrat, the condition upon which the citizens wishes are granted
rests on the adherence of the citizen to the states neoliberal (disciplining)
agenda of government within limits, of social regulation, and of economic
austerity. What is at stake with this trade-off is the political and metaphysical
element of human rights. What collectives enable with the depoliticization of
human rights is the re-articulation of human rights in line with the aims of the
very (political and economic) regimes which oppress and impoverish the
communities. In the South African case, Hart explains these as the depoliticizing thrust of discourses of a Second Economy and the disciplinary practices that accompany them (2007: 96). The paradoxical nature of rights claims
in a liberal democracy is that the apparent freedom that citizens exercise in
claiming their rights leads them deeper into an existential unfreedom. Political subjects come to expect new things from democracy, which is newly
understood as the guarantor of the promises of rugged individualism, mass
consumption, and privatization. No longer the guarantor of civic rights, democracy is equated with consumer freedom, allowing freedom of choice
and freedom of expression in and through the marketplace. Democracy is
thus newly expected to guarantee open markets and it is in and through open
11

The basic income grant (BIG) is seen as part of a comprehensive social security system,
in explicit reference to Section 7.26 of the Welfare White Paper. The BIG was set at R100
per month, to be provided on a universal, non-means tested basis. Monthly incomes higher
than R3000 would repay the BIG in the form of taxes, while incomes higher than R5000
would repay twice the BIG in the form of a solidarity tax (Barchiesi 2007: 568569).

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markets that citizens expect what was previously guaranteed by the state
(McLaren/Farahmandpur 2005: 100). Identities once defined by work and
civic responsibility come to be structured under the organizing principle of
consumerism. It is thus as consumers that individuals participate and find
meaning in democracy. Others like migrant laborers, non-unionized workers,
ethnic minorities, and other marginalized individuals and groups become
disenfranchised by an increasingly consumer-driven society, which they can
no longer participate in. As a result, the gap between their subjectivities and
democracys services continues to grow (Nielsen 2007). The stories of mass
protest and wildcat strikes in South Africa are also stories of the states irresponsiveness to the basic demands of individuals driven ever further away
from the state by the punishing demands of consumerism. The states response has, not unexpectedly, been antagonistic, as these individuals are
recognized less as deserving citizens and more as intrusive/disruptive elements in the liberal democratic pact. In South Africa the slow death of the
democratic citizen has been years in the making, as intensified economic
competition entrenched through the explicit alignment of capital with state
interests narrows the scope for the radicalization of the democracy.

Conclusion
Despite the ambivalent relation of the postcolony to the legacies of the Enlightenment, it was hoped that decolonization would foster democracies
where citizens could enjoy freedom in all aspects of life. Its failure, however,
has produced a world in which the needs of consumers are increasingly constructed around hyper-individualism, instant gratification, moral decay, and
hedonism, and with this, the entrenchment of a capitalist culture of contradictions. In the case studies of South Africa and Uganda, this essay has posited
these contradictions as the antithesis of freedom and of universal human
rights. As a walling mechanism, human rights have morphed into exclusionary instruments that account for some and exclude others through its
discursive practices and disciplinary regimes. In addition, there is a paradox
inherent in the expectation that the postcolonial bourgeois state, on the one
hand the guarantor of equal citizenship rights, and on the other, the mediator
of capital, can constitute the locus for radical democratization. For those
whose cultural and traditional modes of production and reproduction do not
fit with the logic of capitalist expansion, development means dispossession
and exclusion. The process of decolonization is as much about exposing the
processes through which such dispossession continues to take place at present, as it is about restoring the dignity and human rights of every human
being regardless of their individual subjugations. Civil society actors, as a

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counter-public, have a revolutionary role to play in this regard that is as much

discursive as it is empirical. It lies in the possibility of organizing resistance
around difference, not as something that need necessarily be reconciled, but
as a means through which
perceived unity and homogeneity are replaced by dialogues which give recognition to the
specific positioning of those who participate in them as well as to the unfinished
knowledge that each such situated positioning can offer (Yuval-Davis 1997: 131).

Postcolonial critiques have exposed difference as one of the key questions of

decolonization, a question which liberal democratic texts have dismally failed
to account for. This annihilation of difference is reminiscent of Hannah Arendts construction of human rights as they function in liberal democratic
regimes, as mere illusion: the illusory rights of a humanity that has been
chased away from its homes and country, and away from citizenship altogether, by tyrannical regimes. Despite the pessimism that abounds, one ought to
find recourse in Rancires poignant urging that those that care about democracys promise must continue to dig deeper (2006: 97).

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Statelessness and the Power of Performance:

A Reading of Resistance in the Face of Agambens
Sovereign Power
Statelessness and the Power of Performance

Navneet Kumar
Independence gained by many colonized Third World countries in the latter
half of the twentieth century has raised important questions about sovereignty,
the role of the sovereign, the countries relationships with former colonizers,
and, concomitantly, the resistance of the Third World peoples against forces
of neo-colonialism and also against their own rulers, democratically elected
or not. While according to Antony Anghie (2004: 2), there were differences
between the First World and the Third World acquisition and understanding
of sovereignty, in this paper I argue that in spite of these differences, the
realization of national sovereignty both within the First and Third Worlds has
produced what Giorgio Agamben calls states of exception (2005: 2). I engage with Carl Schmitt's Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept
of Sovereignty, Agamben's The State of Exception, and Homo Sacer to primarily highlight the conclusion that the states ability to resort to creating a
state of exception putting the constitutional rights of citizens in abeyance
and simultaneously creating non-citizens out of some is increasingly being
presented as a norm. According to Agamben, once categorized as noncitizens, such people are classified as stateless and even assumed to be outside the sphere of power or influence. Further, I draw upon the works of Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, primarily Who Sings the NationState?, to contest this equation (non-citizens as stateless and powerless) to
finally illustrate that statelessness can be equated with performative power
through my reading of Harold Pinters Mountain Language as a text that
illustrates this. While Agambens work provides insights into the creation of
the stateless entity, Butler and Spivaks work is essential in comprehending
the notion of performative power inherent in statelessness. Butler and Spivak's argument holds relevance for postcolonial studies as it delineates strategies of resistance amidst Western interventions in the name of humanitarian
wars in former colonies where the stateless, according to Agamben, remain
outside the purview of any response, recourse, or power.
A few months after the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration authorized
the indefinite detention of what it termed as non-citizens suspected of terrorist
leanings and activities. There was some opposition to this move by the US
government, which granted the state unlimited powers to contain the threat of
terrorism to the extent that these powers in turn threatened the normal func-

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tioning of democracy in many cases. Several academics and artists have combated and critiqued this manufactured frenzy of security and nationalism in
their critical and creative works. One such critic, Spivak (2010: 50), highlights the unrestrained power accorded to the sovereign in the name of national security, and it is the abuse of this power in creating a hypernormative
state that some of her recent writings are concerned with. Likewise, following
Schmitts seminal work mentioned earlier, Agamben (2005: 7) explores the
states resort to the categorization of people as non-citizens to argue that this
unusual extension of state power, or what he calls state of exception, is a
powerful strategy that has the potential to transform democracies into totalitarian states. He argues that such a state of exception increasingly appears as
the dominant paradigm of government in contemporary politics (ibid: 2).
The nation-states ability to readily and legitimately transform this provisional
and exceptional measure into a technique of government is what Agambens
recent work is concerned with.
Reflecting on this state of exception as the new norm, Butler and Spivak
(2007: 35) provide a powerful argument against the homogenizing effects of
the modern nation-state, as it makes effusive and lasting distinctions between
citizens and non-citizens. They argue that while the state signifies the legal
and political institutional structures that delimit a certain territory, a nation
refers only to a socio-cultural entity, a union of people united by a common
language, heritage, and culture (ibid: 4). If the state binds people together in
the name of the nation, then it imposes on people a certain homogeneous way
of being, belonging, and identity. They further argue that while a state is a
structure that binds people together in the name of the nation by conjuring a
certain version of the nation on its people, it is also clearly an entity that unbinds and creates the category of statelessness (ibid). It is this common-sense
assumption and equation between statelessness and powerlessness of the noncitizen that I wish to explore further.
Harold Pinters Mountain Language is a text that, I argue, equates statelessness not with a loss of power but with a condition steeped in power. In
this paper, I shall examine Schmitts and Agambens claims about the creation of statelessness through the invocation of the state of exception; Butler
and Spivaks noteworthy categorization of statelessness as not a state of dispossession but a life saturated with power (2007: 40), and through an interface with Pinters text I argue that statelessness as experienced by the Old
Woman in the play is not to be held synonymous with deprivation but is a
condition steeped in performative power. I argue that while the states decision to create non-citizens may be warranted in the name of some exigency,
the category of non-citizenship need not necessarily be equated with dispossession.

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297

Schmitt and Agamben

Our examination begins with an analysis of the work of Schmitt on sovereignty, which becomes relevant in the present context. In Political Theology:
Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, Schmitt (1985: 7) claims that
constitutions carry within themselves the rights of the sovereign to suspend
constitutional protections for national minorities, thereby effectively arguing
for the right of the sovereign to do that. Mindful of how easily an emergency
provision could be abused and misapprehended, Schmitt proposes that dictatorship can be categorized into two types: commissarial and sovereign. While
the first attempts to restore order so that the existing constitution can be revived and allowed to function normally, the latter utilizes the crisis to abrogate the existing constitution in order to bring about a new constitution.
Schmitt argues that what characterizes an exception is principally unlimited
authority (1985: 12) to suspend the existing order on the perception of any
threat to the well-being of the state. One can surmise then that the categorization of those threatening to disrupt the order of the state as enemies of the
state is naturalized even as such an incident gives unlimited powers to the
sovereign. While Schmitt defends this right of the sovereign to act in the
name of preserving the order of the state, skepticism towards over such noble
impulses of the sovereign has been and continues to be expressed by political
theorists as well as social commentators.
Schmitts statement needs to be contextualized and analyzed, from the
perspective that he was a known Nazi sympathizer and joined the party as a
member on May 1, 1933. Between 1933 and 1936, Schmitt produced four
books, in which he offered effusive praise for Adolf Hitlers establishment of
a legal order. He praises the Nazi quest for racial, cultural, and ethnic homogeneity and classifies people who do not fit into the German ancestry as aliens
and polluters. He even defends the Nazi quest to protect the purity of German
blood in much of his writing during that period. William Scheuerman, in his
examination of Schmitt, offers an insightful account of Schmitts writings
during his Nazi period (Scheuerman 1999: 36). He argues that
Schmitt sides with the Nazis because he sees them as offering a real chance for developing
a novel legal order able to solve the dilemma of legal indeterminacy (ibid: 115).

Scheuerman further elaborates that Schmitt endorses the most terrible features
of National Socialism most importantly, its radical anti-Semitism and ethnic
cleansing because
he sees these elements as indispensable to the task of constructing an alternative legal
system capable of guaranteeing the determinacy allegedly missing from formalistic modes
of liberal law (ibid).

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Navneet Kumar

Scheuerman is clear in that Schmitts idiosyncratic quest for reconceiving the

possibility of legal determinacy is an open endorsement of dystopian National
Socialist visions of a racially and ethnically homogeneous community (ibid).
For Schmitts endorsement of the sovereigns creation of the state and its
possible ramifications in the creation of the category of statelessness is something we are concerned with here. Also, the fear of the creation of a similarly
homogeneous community, as Schmitt conceives, this time based on the notion
of the West versus the rest, remains a distinct possibility after the 9/11 attacks
on the towers in the US.
Schmitts own foray into an analysis of sovereign power leads him to argue that
the sovereign who, in the deistic view of the world, even if conceived as residing outside
the world, had remained the engineer of the great machine, has been radically pushed aside.
The machine now runs by itself (Schmitt 1985: 48).

He argues that with the rise of the general will or the will of the people postEnlightenment, the decisionistic and personalistic element in the concept of
sovereignty was lost (ibid). It is the sovereign who must decide whether a
situation is an exception or not and if any decisions need to be taken in order
to create or recover a juridical order when the existing one is threatened by
chaos. Thus in many ways Schmitt normalizes the acts of the sovereign in the
name of law, which the sovereign is supposedly upholding. Schmitt opens his
book with the following statement: Sovereign is he who decides on the exception (ibid: 5). George Schwab elaborates that
a state of exception includes any kind of severe economic or political disturbance that
requires the application of extraordinary measures, and for which the constitution makes
provisions (Schwab 1989: 7).

While Schwab points out that the state of exception is different from a state of
emergency because the former presupposes a constitutional order, he misses
the point that the state of exception mocks the very constitutional order of the
land that it is supposedly safeguarding. It is no surprise that Schmitt accords
wide-ranging powers to the sovereign in determining what constitutes a threat
to public order and safety.
While advocating the cause for the sovereigns action, Schmitt is simultaneously aware that all tendencies of modern constitutional development
point toward eliminating the sovereign in this sense (Schmitt 1985: 5). He, in
fact, rues the competing claims on competences in the German constitution of
1919, which gave the president of the Reich the right to declare the exception,
but at the same time put him under the control of the parliament. Schmitts
aspiration of achieving legal determinacy of some sort within the German
framework has prompted Agamben to treat the state of exception and its consequences in a modern-day framework. Yet, one needs to make the important
distinction that while Schmitt endorses the achievement of legal determinacy,

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mired in homogeneous structures in the social sphere, Agamben is critical of

the state of exception precisely for the same reasons where society has been
conceived in homogeneous and hierarchical ways. It is useful now to examine
Agambens idea of the state of exception.
His exploration of the sovereign exception leads him to focus on the Roman figure of the homo sacer. This sacred man could be condemned to
death by law, but could not be sacrificed, as he existed as someone whose
political life was removed from him. The homo sacer and the sovereign are
thus both a part of this double exclusion, a zone of indistinction between
sacrifice and homicide (Agamben 1998: 83); both created as effects of each
on the other. However, for Agamben, homo sacer is best exemplified through
the figure of the refugee or the stateless person. Thus, in Agambens work,
one finds the full articulation and teleological summation of the sovereign
exception as an excess and its final culmination in the figure of the stateless
person. Those held in indefinite abeyance at Guantanamo Bay are a result of
an act of sovereign exception realized as a military order issued by the president of the US on November 13, 2001.
One of the first claims Agamben makes is that the state of exception has
become a paradigm of government functioning following World War One and
continues to be so even today. One of the characteristics of the state of exception the provisional abolition of the distinction among the legislative, executive, and the judicial powers here shows its tendency to become a lasting practice of government (Agamben 2005: 7). Agamben characterizes this
practice of governance as modern totalitarianism, which allows not only the
creation of a normalization around the exception, additionally it also allows
for the physical elimination of political adversaries and entire categories of
citizens who cannot be integrated into the political system (ibid: 2). He objects to the extension of the executives powers into the legislative sphere, as
such a move erodes the basis of separation of powers that is the foundation of
many constitutions. In fact, Agamben critiques Schmitts justification for
Germanys resort to constitutional democracy during the Hindenburg presidency because he argues that the paradigm of constitutional dictatorship
functions instead as a transitional phase that leads inevitably to the establishment of a totalitarian regime (ibid: 15).
In a similar vein, Butler and Spivak (2007: 30) argue forcefully that the
distinction between the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary has been
abolished to serve the interests of the homogeneous nation-state formation
which univocally subsumes and sidelines any dissonant voices to create
Schmitts homogeneous order. Butler writes that the nation becomes singular
or homogeneous in order to comply with the requirements of the state, which
in turn derives its legitimacy from the inclusion and exclusion of people from
such formations (Butler/Spivak 2007: 3031). In other words, Butler contends how in the name of national security or an ardent nationalism, the entire

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concept of citizenship is redefined and recoded to include and exclude a certain set of people. The concept of citizenship is of course so narrowly and
homogeneously defined that the disenfranchised clearly become the national
minorities (ibid: 19). For Butler and Spivak, the nation-state can establish its
own image as the norm and hence the deviation is termed as an aberration.
Clinton Rossiter argues how
in times of crisis a democratic, constitutional government must temporarily be altered to
whatever degree is necessary to overcome the peril and restore normal conditions (Rossiter
1963: 5).

Rossiter is aware that such means are fraught with obvious dangers, and he is
also aware that such methods of creating a state of exception have become a
paradigm of governance today. The nation-state through its invasive propaganda machine can both elaborate on a crisis and in some cases even create
a crisis of its own. Also, the provisional nature of such extreme measures of
the state of exception is itself in question, as these actions have become lasting peacetime solutions going well past their initial time intent. Historically,
as Agamben demonstrates, the state of exception has been proclaimed to issue
emergency decrees in the German Reich between 1919 and 1933, in France
during the revolution, in the United States between 1861 and 1865, and again
in 1933 during the time of the Great Depression. Keeping in view the above
contexts, Agamben writes that
the democratic principle of the separation of powers has today collapsed and that the
executive power has in fact, at least partially, absorbed the legislative power (Agamben
2005: 18).

The Parliament is more often limited to ratifying the decrees issued by the
executive power.
In examining the US history for such events, Agamben locates the example of Article 1, guaranteeing the writ of Habeas Corpus, being suspended at
the initiation of President Abraham Lincoln in April 1861. Even after Congress convened, Lincoln authorized the arrest and detention in military prisons of persons suspected of disloyal and treasonable practices. The existence of these non-citizens or refugees marks the erosion of the modern nation-state. Nowhere is this more apparent in modern-day politics than in the
conception of the stateless person as refugee, detainee, or as an exiled individual.
While the stateless person is seen as devoid of any power or performative
aspect, my reading of Mountain Language reveals the Old Woman, a stateless
person, to be full of performative power. Agambens emphasis on the indeterminacy of sovereign power, while no doubt useful, undermines the comprehension of political resistance. Antonio Negri (1999: 21), in his Insurgencies, addresses the distinction between sovereign power and the stateless and
emphasizes the creative, constituent power of the life of a multiplicity in

Statelessness and the Power of Performance

301

action and in opposition to the sovereign power. Constituent power is the

power of resistance of the multitude in the face of sovereign power. It is the
power that is immanent in any society; it always takes a singular form in a
specific situation, the immanent cause of the production of singularities (ibid).
Mountain Language presents a scenario of prisoners in a military prison at an
unnamed location where the nameless state has decreed them to be enemies
of the state and hence put them outside the domain of any recourse to law or
legal aid. The general sweep of this charge is so broad as to include anything
from mild resistance in the face of state power to actual acts of insurgency
against the state. The charges against the prisoners are never disclosed and
this arbitrary nature of power makes their crimes all the more lethal. As
Agamben points out even suspicion of disloyalty is enough to warrant censure
and imprisonment because the sovereign has created the state of exception to
justify the deployment of unlimited powers. Negri writes that while sovereignty presents itself as a fixing of constituent power, and therefore as its
termination, as the exhaustion of the freedom that constituent power carries,
constituent power is an act of choice and a process that opens a horizon
(Negri 1999: 2122). On the other hand, Catherine Mills claims that for
Agamben, the aporetic violence of modern democracy stymies any attempt
to oppose biopolitical regimes from within the framework of bios and zoe
(Mills 2008: 76). Since the danger of such projects lies in the gradual convergence of democracy with totalitarianism, according to Mills, Agamben
must locate the possibility of resistance outside the triad of bios, zoe, and
bare life (ibid).
Once cast out, Agamben argues that one is cast out into a space or a condition of bare life distinct from what is produced by the split between zoe and
bios. Zoe for Agamben is life lived in an unqualified manner as opposed to
bios, which is lived in the space of polis. Bios, according to the Greeks, was
the term used to describe a life that concerned the polis or the city as opposed
to zoe, which was life lived in its very general sense. According to Alex Murray, bare life exists in the realm of the political and results from the fact that
zoe entered the polis at its very conceptualization (Murray 2010: 61). According to Agamben, bare life arises because human life is politicized only
through an abandonment to an unconditional power of death (Agamben
1998: 90). The category of bare life is one that is neither bios nor zoe, but
rather the politicized form of natural life. Agambens argument, in some senses also derivative of Schmitts work, is that it is the sovereign who makes the
distinction between zoe and bios more palpable through the upholding of the
distinction between the two kinds of lives discussed here. Mills indicates that
contemporary political power bases itself on the annulment of the distinction
between bios and zoe, which in turn eradicates bare life (Mills 2008: 70). She
argues that the figure of homo sacer recalls the memory of the exclusions that
found the

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juridico-political sphere as the excrescence of the religious and the profane and illuminates
the distinction between sacrificial and homicidal violence that lies at the heart of sovereign
power (Mills 2008: 72).

Hence, Agamben argues that the sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is
permitted to kill without committing homicide (Agamben 1998: 83). The
sovereign has precluded himself from the sphere of law and has thus generated a parallel domain that both derives its sustenance from the rule of the law
of the land and supersedes it simultaneously in the name of exigency.
However, the argument of necessity is at the core of the creation of the
state of exception in all cases across the spectrum. Necessitys ability to overrule the law derives from its very nature and its originary character. According to Agamben, the state of necessity is interpreted as a lacuna in public
law, which the executive power is obligated to remedy (Agamben 2005: 31)
and therefore consolidate its hold over it. The state of exception in extreme
cases, keeping in view the necessity of the salvation of the state, can lead to
what Agamben calls the iustitium which literally means standstill or a
suspension of the law (Agamben 2005: 41). Agamben, however, cautions
that iustitium is not to be confused with the idea of dictatorship, which is an
absence of law as compared to iustitium, which is a suspension of law. There
is a basic flaw in the imposition of the iustitium, because one encounters the
impossibility of clearly defining the legal consequences of those acts committed during the iustitium. The acts committed during the iustitium are perpetrated in a juridical void, and consequentially they are radically removed from
any juridical determination. Since the term iustitium implies a standstill or a
suspension of law, all legal prescriptions are put out of operation. Thus for
him the state of exception is not defined as a fullness of powers, a pleromatic
state of law, as in the dictatorial model, but as a kenomatic state, an emptiness
and standstill of the law (Agamben 2005: 48). He refuses to equate the state
of exception to dictatorship for this reason.
Going back to the figure of the refugee or the stateless person, we encounter in Agambens work an analysis of the decline of the modern nation-state.
The stateless person becomes an embodiment of nationalist politics and fervor with nationalism operating in an inclusionary/exclusionary manner to
create the division. In fact, the figure of the refugee is an example of the sovereigns exercising the state of exception and hence creating this figure in
turn. This leads us to a further examination of the category of statelessness,
which is ostensibly created when one is put outside the stipulated mode of any
national belonging. Spivak, in Nationalism and the Imagination, focuses on
how nationalism has been related to reproductive heteronormativity as a
source of legitimacy and in turn to the creation of the category of the stateless
(Spivak 2010: 13). She wonders as to

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303

when and how does the comfort felt in ones mother tongue and the comfort felt in ones
corner of the sidewalk, a patch of ground [] transform itself into a nation thing (Spivak
2010: 15).

Seen from the perspective of the public-private divide, Spivak maintains that
the impulse to nationalism is that we must control the workings of our own
public sphere (ibid: 18). With this, she argues, comes the necessary sense of
being unique, better, and even belonging. She proposes that statelessness is
created within the legitimate sphere of national belonging and its exclusions.
In other words, the moment one is characterized as outside any national
belonging, one is termed a non-citizen and one is rendered stateless for all
juridical purposes. One can be characterized as a non-citizen when certain
linguistic, judicial, legal, and other rights are taken away and all constitutional
protections are withdrawn and suspended. For example, Mountain Language
by Pinter exhibits the creation of a nation-state where the rights of a nameless
minority have been taken away. The minorities are imprisoned and the use of
their mountain language is forbidden until further notice. Such linguicidal
tendencies, while clearly deriving from the sovereigns proclamation of the
state of exception, point towards the demarcation of the nation-state between
those who legitimately belong and those who do not. However, the mountain
people, while they have become stateless, are still under the control of state
power. They have been cast out linguistically and in Agambens term relegated to bare life.
Further, Butler and Spivak argue that the category of statelessness is produced by an act of volition by the state where it seeks to align itself with the
homogeneous nation and hence by virtue of this alignment creates national
minorities. One can argue that statelessness is a stipulative and discursive
category produced by non-qualification. In this context, Butler and Spivak
write that:
The nation-state assumes that the nation expresses a certain national identity, is founded
through the concerted consensus of a nation, and that a correspondence exists between the
state and the nation The nation, in this view, is singular and homogeneous or, at least it
becomes so in order to comply with the requirements of the state (Butler/Spivak 2007: 30).

This scenario may further lead to a suspension of any legal recourse available
to the minorities. Women are being made to wait in the cold outside to meet
their loved ones, who are prisoners of the state now. Their crimes, of course,
have been unilaterally designated by the state and the prisoners are now
called enemies of the state. The phrase enemies of the state is loose
enough to cover a range from mild disagreement against the state to full violent, dissident opposition to the state and its practices. The prisoners are
clearly people who have not qualified to be considered citizens and hence
threaten to disrupt the seeming homogeneity and purity of the creation of this
nation-state. The nation-state requires not only a periodic creation of national

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Navneet Kumar

minorities but their expulsion and dispossession in order to gain a legitimating ground for itself as a political creation.
The state of exception accords quasi-absolute powers to the executive and
therefore, acts committed during this time of necessity seem to escape all
legal consequences. Agamben insinuates that when the state of exception
becomes the rule, then the juridico-political system transforms itself into a
killing machine (Agamben 2005: 86). The state of exception has functioned
without interruption since World War II in the name of necessity. Indeed,
Butler and Spivak comment how
whole wars are waged in the name of [the necessity] of national security, a value and an
ideal that makes mockery of any efforts to make the declaration of war contingent upon
constitutional or international justifications (Butler/Spivak 2007: 36).

Through the application of this state of exception, the normative aspect of law
can be ignored with impunity by any government that ironically claims to be
upholding the law of the land, whilst simultaneously justifying violence.
Butler and Spivak (2007: 9) also argue that power is not the same as law,
since these people who are subsisting in this condition of bare life (and power) are outside the province of law. They thereby divest the common topological associations of statelessness and dispossession. While Agambens analysis of the stateless person and the refugee stops at dispossession, detention,
and depravity for the stateless, for Butler and Spivak, statelessness is not to
be held as synonymous with dispossession. What appears as performative
power in Butler and Spivak is realized as constituent power in Negri
both attesting to the error in Agambens work to construe bare life or the
consequent statelessness as a fundamentally passive condition in relation to
sovereign violence. Agamben for his part has argued that the violence of
modern democracy represses any attempt to challenge it and therefore, opposition or resistance is not a reality. Performative power and constituent
power as realized in the Old Womans silence at the end of the play are
instances of the possibility of resistance in the face of sovereign violence.
Much like the street demonstrations of illegal residents in the spring of
2006 in various cities of California, who were responding to George Bushs
claim that the US national anthem can only be sung in English, the military
decree in Mountain Language ordains that only the language of the capital be
spoken at the exclusion of all others. The monolingual requirements of the
nation surface here much like the situation in Mountain Language where the
militarys linguicidal policies are far more threatening than monolingualism.
The enactment of the freedom of assembly in the case of the street protest is
in defiance of the law. The way the singing of the national anthem for the
illegal residents of California becomes a moment of what Butler calls a performative contradiction, I argue that the Old Womans silence at the end of
the play can be interpreted as an exercise in freedom to assert equality in
relation to authority.

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305

The next part of my paper examines forms of resistance that elude or challenge sovereign power or authority. I exemplify this constituent power or
performative power amidst a situation of statelessness through a reading of
the Old Womans silence at the end of Mountain Language.
The prisoners in Mountain Language are at the receiving end of the dictates from a nameless sovereign whose power is enacted through the unambiguous utterances enforced by the soldiers. One can argue that the prisoners
and their loved ones have been relegated to a bare life: a life exposed to
death. The imposition of the language dictate that prohibits the mountain
people from speaking their own language is presented as a law to them. The
Sergeant prohibits the use of mountain language by the women who are waiting outside the prison to see their loved ones in the following manner:
This is a military decree. It is the law. Your language is forbidden. It is dead. No one is
allowed to speak your language. Your language no longer exists (Pinter 2005: 12).

Butler and Spivak in their writing argue that one crucial and central operation of sovereign power is the capacity to suspend the rights of individuals or
groups or to cast them out of a polity (Butler/Spivak 2007: 39). Once cast
out into a space of bare life, their conditions of citizenship are jeopardized. In
spite of the fact that the women visiting the prison are excluded from the bios
and relegated to the zoe, one can argue that such a life is not without its performative exuberance and empowerment.
When the Sergeant indicts the women from speaking and constantly jabs
at the Old Woman for not speaking the language of the state, he reinforces the
ideology of the homogeneity of the formation of the nation-state which treats
any deviance as an aberration and hence worthy of expulsion and arraignment. The alignment of the state with a singular identity proposes a cultural
nationalism that works against any redistributive social injustice in the culturally chosen nation (Spivak 2010: 44). Spivak alerts us to the dangers of such
nationalism which emanates from the alignment of a singular identity with the
identity of the nation as a whole. In Nationalism and the Imagination (2010)
and elsewhere, Spivak argues that the task of the humanities in the globalized
world today is to train the imagination that can divest us of the baggage of
nationalist identitarianism and carry us beyond our national boundaries,
which seem constrictive in many ways (Spivak 2008: 49). Spivak claims that
education in the Humanities attempts to be an uncoercive rearrangement of
desires which guides individuals away from a coercive and parochial conception of nationalism and other such mindsets (ibid: 17, 23). According to
her, [t]he method of a specifically literary training, a slow mind-changing
process, can be used to open the imagination to such mindsets (ibid: 24).
This training of the imagination is an important link in her transnational
literacy initiative which in turn is for her the principal feature of decolonization (Spivak 2012: 152). An imagination trained in the Humanities may dis-

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Navneet Kumar

engage the truth-claims of national identity forced upon the people in Mountain Language. According to Spivak, the task of the literary imagination is the
persistent de-transcendentalizing of categories such as nationalism. One can
argue that the Old Woman becomes representative of Spivaks teacher of the
humanities, whose one of the many tasks is to keep the abstract and reasonable civic structures of the state free of the burden of cultural nationalism
(Spivak 2010: 50). The Old Woman as the teacher of the humanities effectively undoes the seamless equation created by the sovereign state between
citizenship, identity, and power. By being able to infiltrate the power structures of the military state in Mountain Language through her silence, the Old
Woman ironically is the character that ends up having a voice in the play.
Once indicted, the Old Woman grows silent even as the orders prohibiting
the use of language are temporarily lifted, she resiliently defies the martial
decree and its lifting through her performative and/or constituent contradiction. The Old Woman, initially conceived as a subaltern someone who is
removed from and outside all lines of social mobility no longer remains a
victim; instead she has become an agent. Subalternity is the regulated place
from where the capacity for the formation of a recognizable basis of action
cannot be realized or is radically obstructed. The Old Woman's silence becomes a mode of self-representation allowing her to escape the silence of
subalternity and by inference, one can argue that the subaltern can speak. This
coming of the subaltern from the deduced subject of crisis to the logic of
agency makes the Old Woman into the bearer of some agential intuition.
Spivak cautions that the activation of singular agency must not be equated
with and seen translated into a multiplicity. Such differently repeated singularities collectively are a multiplicity, and this is evident in the persona of the
Old Woman whose singularity, repeated with a difference, constitutes not an
empirical collective but works by synechdoche, where the part is taken for the
whole (Spivak 2012: 436). Such singular acts of agential intuition alleviate
the responsibility of postcolonial intellectuals who have been asked to speak
for the subaltern. Asked to speak in her mountain language, the Old Woman
remains silent. Even though she is categorized as stateless, her condition
cannot be equated with a loss of power as is evidenced in her defiance at the
end of the play where much like the Latino street demonstrators in California,
she refuses to be categorized with ease. This jettisoned life, the one both
expelled and contained at the same time, Butler and Spivak would argue, is a
life that is saturated with power precisely at the moment in which it is deprived of citizenship (Butler/Spivak 2007: 40). In this case, the Womans
silence becomes one way of asserting criterial control over her speech and life
which had been jettisoned by the dictates of the sovereign. Since forcing
someone to speak is one of the most unenforceable of acts as opposed to
other strictures, the Old Woman arguably cherishes her moment of triumph.

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307

This cherishing moment finds a corollary in Mahasweta Devi's Draupadi,

in which the protagonist, after being gang-raped by policemen, refuses to be
clothed again. Whereas the Old Woman remains silent, Draupadi stands naked before Senanayak, the army officer who captures and degrades her, and
shames him into acknowledging their reprehensible actions. She says to Senanayak:
Whats the use of clothes? You can strip me, but how can you clothe me again? Are you a
man? [] I will not let you put my cloth on me (Devi 2002: 36).

In each case, the Old Woman speaks through her silence and Draupadi speaks
through her refusal to dress up modestly after being raped. How can one make
someone speak against one's will and how can one clothe someone against
one's unwillingness to do so are questions that ultimately accord agency to the
characters here. I have argued that the Old Womans silence is precisely the
kind of performative contradiction that leads not to impasse but to forms of
insurgency (Butler/Spivak 2007: 63). This performative and constituent
aspect is something that is ignored by Agamben in his analysis of sovereign
power which he sees as foreclosing all possibilities of recourse and resistance.
Because the Old Womans silence is perceived as a performative contradiction whose effects unfold in time, Butler would argue that to
exercise a freedom and to assert an equality precisely in relation to an authority that would
preclude both is to show how freedom and equality can and must move beyond their positive articulations (ibid: 6667).

However, the similarity between the Old Woman and Draupadi in their act of
subversion against the sovereign marks them as agents of performative contradiction. These women can no longer be characterized as subaltern; in spite
of being characterized and deemed as non-citizens by the sovereign, they
have spoken.

Postcolonialism and Legacies of European Enlightenment

The issue of Third World sovereignty has been embroiled further in questions
of subversion and performative contradiction, which have been central to
postcolonial studies. Despite its coercive aspects, political sovereignty is an
important shield for postcolonial states against neo-colonialism. As a result,
Western interventions in the name of humanitarian wars in former colonies
are deemed imperialist. For many post-structuralist and postcolonial critics, it
is European Enlightenment thought that has often been associated with one
form of imperialism or another, whereas Enlightenment universalism has been
characterized as an essentialist enterprise promoting the view of a unitary,

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Navneet Kumar

unchanging human nature. It is no surprise then that postcolonial theories in

the recent past have come to posit themselves as a critique of the legacies of
the European Enlightenment. They have challenged the universalism of the
Enlightenment period, wherein the interests of a small group were made to
stand for the interests of all humanity. Postcolonial critics have also denounced the European Enlightenment for supporting Europes mission to
dominate the entire globe. Additionally, as pointed out by Anghie, the Western and Third World characterization of issues after the gaining of independence by Third World countries has revealed fundamental differences in the
way each side has understood sovereignty and its engagement in the encounter doctrine (Anghie 2004: 214). Asserting the rules of state responsibility
relating to foreign investment, Anghie points out that the Third World has
asserted its ownership over its own resources and has argued that nationalization should be determined according to national rather than international
standards (ibid: 213). Thus, while the Third World managed to pose a challenge to the West through the assertion of its control over its resources and
peoples, the West emphasized the acquired rights doctrine which asserted that
the rights granted by a sovereign to a private entity had to be respected by the
successor sovereign (ibid: 214). Anghie argues that international law has
served to reinforce some of the impulses of colonial dispossession of Third
World resources and therefore he argues that Third World sovereignty was
manufactured by the colonial world to serve its own interests (ibid: 215).
While I agree with Anghie here, I have essentially pointed out in my paper by
drawing on Schmitt and Agamben that Western conceptions of its own sovereignty are marred by internal challenges that rely on differing interpretations
of the law of the state by the sovereign.
How the West has conceived of its own sovereignty vis--vis its erstwhile
colonies has been the topic of interest for many critics such as David Strang,
who argues that the European standard of civilization was proposed repeatedly as the norm and therefore it was used to evaluate non-Western politics as
well (1996: 32). The supplanting of the notion of natural law by those of
positivist thinking and analysis by the end of the nineteenth century was
largely responsible for a shift in perspective where the rights and duties of
international law were viewed not as inherent in the human condition but as
concrete historical products (ibid) Such perspectives intensified the collective delegitimization of forms of non-Western sovereignty and simultaneously
upheld models of universalism. Kwame Anthony Appiah alerts us to the association between universalism and Eurocentrism when he argues that those
who oppose universalism, in real terms, object to Eurocentric hegemony
posing as universalism (Appiah 1992: 58). However, in the last decade or
so, postcolonial criticism inspired by a more multifaceted view of the Enlightenment has also focused on its anti-imperialism, especially through the
works of Sankar Muthu and Peng Cheah. They seem to agree that postcoloni-

Statelessness and the Power of Performance

309

al criticism has converted the Enlightenment into a monolithic bogeyman

(Cheah 2003: 67). Their works reveal a more nuanced view of the Enlightenment and help us reconsider a linear association of imperialism between Enlightenment thought and colonies across the globe in the eighteenth century.
Going back to the development of ideas of sovereignty in the post-WW II
scenario, one finds that while sovereignty provides the state with the ability to
organize its affairs according to the laws of that state and even within the
purview of international law, the idea of absolute sovereignty, which circumvents law, is self-defeating and ends up creating models of exception and
exigency which are opportunistic in nature. While Agamben's work has most
importantly dealt with the nation-state's ability to create such states of exceptions, much of the argument presented in this paper challenges the presenting
of such states of exception to be the norm. While he urges a rethinking of
both life and politics, Negri's constituent power and Butler and Spivak's performative power do inaugurate a conception of life that is not based on a
separation between bios and zoe.

Bibliography
Agamben, Giorgio (1998): Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Heller-Rozen, Daniell. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Agamben, Giorgio (2005): State of Exception, trans. Attell, Kevin. Chicago/London:
University of Chicago Press.
Anghie, Antony (2004): Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International
Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Appiah, Anthony (1992): In My Fathers House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Butler, Judith/Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2007): Who Sings the Nation-State?
London: Seagull Books.
Cheah, Pheng (2003): Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation. New York: Columbia University Press.
Devi, Mahasweta (2002): Breast Stories. Kolkata: Seagull.
Mills, Catherine (2008): The Philosophy of Agamben. Montreal/Kingston: McGillQueens University Press.
Murray, Alex (2010): Giorgio Agamben. London/New York: Routledge.
Negri, Antonio (1999): Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans.
Boscagli, Maurizia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Pinter, Harold (2005): Mountain Language. In: Pinter, Harold: Death etc. New York:
Grove Press, pp. 5-20.
Rossiter, Clinton (1963): Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.
Schmitt, Carl (1985): Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. Schwab, George. Cambridge: MIT Press.

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Scheuerman, William (1999): Carl Schmitt: The End of Law. Maryland: Rowman and
Littlefield Publishers.
Schwab, George (1989): The Challenge of the Exception: An Introduction to the
Political Ideas of Sovereignty of Carl Schmitt Between 1921 and 1936. New
York: Greenwood Press.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2008): Other Asias. Malden: Blackwell Publishing.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2010): Nationalism and the Imagination. London: Seagull Books.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (2012): An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Strang, David (1996): Contested Sovereignty: The Social Construction of Colonial
Imperialism. In: Cambridge Studies in International Relations 46, pp. 2249.

Provincializing Cosmopolitanism: Democratic

Iterations and Desubalternization
Provincializing Cosmopolitanism

Aylin Zafer and Anna Millan

The inclusion of marginalized groups within democratic processes has always
been a central issue for theories of democracy. Contemporary globalization
has increased the demands on theories of democracy, the state, and human
rights to address such issues more effectively. Phenomena like global migration and increasing international information and capital flows have encouraged debates about the appropriate responses to such phenomena, centered on
the ability of liberal multiculturalism to deal with those issues. They have also
stimulated more fundamental critiques by post-structuralists, feminists, and
postcolonial theorists of liberal concepts of democracy and human rights as
Eurocentric, Androcentric, evolutionist, and inattentive towards social difference. The deconstructive theories of French philosopher Jacques Derrida in
particular have influenced the concepts of two feminist theorists, Seyla Benhabib and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, which will form the specific focus of
our paper.
Benhabib views global migration as a challenge to liberal concepts of democracy, the nation-state, and popular sovereignty. Benhabibs notion of
democratic iteration (2006: 45) interrogates how universal norms can respond to particular interests, while remaining true to a universalist liberal
model, the overall paradigm in which her theories operate. Iteration undergoes a functional change in her theories, since Benhabib (2004: 179) conceives of iteration as repetition leading to changes, which are directed towards the goal of achieving consensus between different positions within a
heterogeneous liberal democratic society.
Benhabibs theoretical framework is situated squarely within liberal political theory. Her turn to deconstruction in the context of democratic iteration
thus represents an unprecedented moment in her work. By contrast, the theories and methodology of Spivak are deeply influenced by deconstruction.
Spivaks work systematically focuses on the precarious position of subalterns,
who are excluded from all access to democratic decision-making. Her understanding of a democracy from below is based on a pedagogy of mutual
learning aimed at transnational literacy and desubalternization. While subaltern subjects are to gain access to democratic structures through a new
pedagogy, their teachers in turn should learn from their subaltern students to
question their own assumptions, privileges, and imbrication in hegemonic
structures. Democracy and its egalitarian principle that everyone regardless of

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their background is entitled to shape the rules of government, represents a

central concept for marginalized groups to claim rights and address dominant
forces. Democratic participation is nevertheless a fraught venture, since not
everybodys claims are acknowledged in the same way, and factors like race,
class, and gender still affect the recognition of democratic voices. Therefore, both concepts are welcome contributions to debates over the integration
of subaltern groups into the public sphere.
Beginning with a critical engagement with Benhabibs concept of democratic iteration, the essay will then explicate Spivaks concept of learning
from below and analyze its strengths in extending democratic participation
to subaltern subjects. While Spivak acknowledges the risks of postcolonial
democracies being captured by extreme nationalist forces or bypassed by the
international civil society and hegemonic states, she considers educational
strategies aimed at subaltern access to the democratic infrastructure of postcolonial states to be the best hope for desubalternization within the current
conjuncture.

Seyla Benhabib's Cosmopolitanism: Democratic Iteration and

Jurisgenesis
The increasing transnationalization of the state, politics, and the law presents
new challenges for contemporary democracies and democratic theories. Benhabib disputes that much-used terms like globalization can adequately describe these challenges, since they fail to reflect upon the increasing importance of cosmopolitan norms, which have been the main focus of her work
for some time. Her understanding of democratic processes and civil society
draw on the discourse-theoretical framework of Jrgen Habermas. Benhabib
(2006: 16) argues that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has gradually led to the emergence of a global civil society, encouraging a shift from
international to cosmopolitan norms. As a result, individuals, institutions, and
states are increasingly perceived as morally and legally accountable for their
actions within this global civil society. Benhabib (ibid: 3132) diagnoses a
conflict of interest between cosmopolitan norms like human rights and the
sovereignty of nation-states. She elaborates on this conflict in the context of
her examination of Hannah Arendts concept of the right to have rights,
which collides with the determination of nation-states to ensure that rights to
exercise rights remain conditional on citizenship status. She argues that such
contestations between cosmopolitan norms and national sovereignty expose
contradictions within liberal democracies arising out of the necessary limitation of democratic sovereignty to citizens of a nation-state, which inevitably

Provincializing Cosmopolitanism

313

excludes others such as migrants without citizenship status from democratic participation. Benhabibs (ibid: 20) cosmopolitan project hopes to
perform a mediating function between the emerging international civil society
and national democratic structures. She does not treat cosmopolitanism as a
global ethical or cultural attitude; rather she conceives of cosmopolitanism in
line with Kant as based on universally applicable norms which influence
legislative morality within a global context and provide individuals, who
are not citizens of a particular nation-state, with avenues for pursuing legal
claims against that state (ibid). Contemporary democracies, according to her,
are guided by universal principles and human rights, but do not apply these
equally to all groups within their territory. More effective and inclusive democratic procedures for safeguarding universal human rights therefore have to
be developed. Benhabib sees a possibility for pursuing such transformations
by means of democratic iterations. This concept constitutes a space that
mediates between institutionalized legal norms and demands for change by
civil society actors. For Benhabib (2011: 76), legal norms are not frozen in
time and space, but evolve into self-reflective norms through uncoercive
democratic iterations (ibid), which arguably resemble Spivaks concept of
uncoercive rearrangement of desires (2008: 154). This process changes not
only the principles informing legal decisions, but also the understanding of
democracy, the criteria for membership of a democratic state, and the rights
of minority groups within its territory. Such changes, which are often pursued
by emancipatory social movements and other civil society actors, can affect
judicial and executive state authorities as well as public discourse through the
media, but are usually subject to political contestation.
In Benhabibs earlier writings, democratic iteration was still framed in
terms of an interactive universalism (1992: 153) relying on two principal
theoretical components: firstly, it draws on the term iteration, which derives
from Derrida's (1988) deconstructive philosophy of language; secondly, it is
inspired by the process of jurisgenesis attributed to the American legal
theorists Robert Cover (1983) and Frank Michelman (1996). The term iteration stems from the Sanskrit word itara which means other (Derrida 1988:
7). Iteration highlights that every repetition of a term leads to a change in
its meaning, since each use occurs within an altered context. As a result, one
cannot assume that a term has any primary or original meaning, since any
previous meaning already constitutes a modification of an earlier meaning.
Benhabib argues that in the context of laws and institutional norms, in contrast to the philosophy of language, the principle of iteration needs to be reformulated, since every reference to a norm occurs within a context of institutionalized procedures for creating and interpreting legal norms. With each
repetition of an existing norm, its meaning and thus the context for future
repetitions is transformed. Thus, democratic iteration not only transforms
legal norms, but also the identities of civil society actors involved in this

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process. In The Rights of Others (2004) and subsequent publications, Benhabib unpacks possible practical applications of democratic iteration
through several case studies that largely concentrate on debates over multiculturalism, for instance French debates over veiling in public (laffair du foulard) and their legal ramifications. We will focus on these case studies critically after examining Benhabibs reception of the principle of jurisgenesis
as developed by Robert Cover in Nomos and Narrative (1983).
Benhabib understands jurisgenesis as
iterative acts through which a democratic people that considers itself bound by certain
guiding norms and principles reappropriates and reinterprets these, thus showing itself not
only the subject but also the author of the laws (Benhabib 2004: 181).

Jurisgenesis is thus not limited to official law-making but extends to the

demands of non-citizens and other excluded groups. Benhabib points out that
jurisgenesis is opposed to two established legal traditions: the doctrine of
natural law which traces democratic principles back to inherent legal rules,
and legal positivism which considers all legal norms determined in a procedurally correct manner by a properly constituted legislature to possess democratic legitimacy. In contrast, jurisgenerative politics signals a space of interpretation and intervention between transcendent norms and the will of
democratic majorities (ibid).
For Cover (1983: 4), narratives are of constitutive importance to the creation of laws and their interpretation. Narratives construct normative worlds
or orders and determine their limits. He argues that our normative worlds
influence our everyday differentiations between right and wrong, legality and
illegality, belonging and exclusion. Thus, normative worlds, which Cover also
calls nomos, can be created through two ideal-typical patterns of lawmaking, which he derives from the writings of sixteenth-century scholar Joseph Caro. On the one hand is paedeic/pedagogical or world-creating
law-making (1983: 12): Within a paedeic normative world, a community
creates for itself a common body of assumptions, norms, rules, and narratives.
This is passed on through education, thus providing the individual and community with a sense of direction and a store of shared meanings. On the other
hand is world-maintaining or imperial law-making (1983: 13): Imperial
norms are treated as universal and enforced through institutions. These norms
do not necessarily have to be passed on through education, as long as they
remain effective.
According to Cover (1983: 14), no normative world is created as exclusively paideic or imperial; rather both types invariably overlap, potentially
with strong tensions. Paideic normative worlds tend towards their own destabilization through diverging interpretations of norms. A paedeic nomos seeks
to establish unified legal meanings, which are incessantly fractured in the
process of creating norms. The imperial normative universe on the other hand
is based on a pluralism of legal meanings, which is inhibited by the domi-

Provincializing Cosmopolitanism

315

nance of a particular nomos, usually that of the state, by means of epistemic

and physical violence.
Very diverse communities, including religious, social, or ethnic communities, are able to create paedeic normative worlds with distinct views on lawmaking and interpretation. Although such normative worlds can exist independently of the state, the state is the only agent that can universalize the law
through imposing its own interpretation of the law through official courts.
The courts base their authority primarily on jurisdiction, supported by a constitutional right to sanction non-compliance with their decisions, rather than
on the superiority of their legal reasoning. Cover (1983: 40) attributes a jurispathetic character to the judicature. While different communities propose
diverging interpretations of the law, the courts make sure that only one interpretation of the law ultimately counts that of its courts. Every time a diverging legal interpretation is developed, it enters into struggle with the dominant
interpretation determined by the courts and faces the states violence if it
continues to defy its authority.
However, there are notable differences in Cover's and Benhabib's treatment of jurisgenesis. While acknowledging the empirical basis of Cover's
concept of jurisgenesis and its focus on process rather than outcome, Benhabib treats democratic iteration and jurisgenesis as both empirical and
normative concepts, although both were originally conceived as open-ended
and thus not aimed at a particular goal.
We would now like to turn attention to two critical engagements with
Benhabibs position, namely the responses of Will Kymlicka and Bonnie
Honig. Kymlicka (2006: 128146) questions whether democratic iterations
really change societal norms or whether they merely produce a taming effect on resistant voices and social movements. He believes that the examples
Benhabib cites do not substantively alter the legal framework of liberal nation-states, but at most represent limited concessions to ward off pressure for
wider changes. Both democratic iteration and jurisgenesis seek to retain
the normative basis of the liberal nation-state, at least in the examples provided by Benhabib, while reducing its exclusionary mechanisms. Kymlicka (ibid:
131) does not see cosmopolitan norms and liberal ideas of the nation-state as
irreconcilable in principle; rather, he argues that the main purpose of cosmopolitan norms is to tame the liberal nation-state. He does not view the uncoupling of civil rights from citizenship status envisaged by Benhabib as a
sign of progressive politics, as long as this prevents migrants from achieving
full citizenship. For Kymlicka, the uncoupling of civil rights from citizenship
status can only be considered progressive if excluded individuals are eventually granted full citizenship rights. Disagreeing with Kymlicka's critique,
Benhabib counter-argues that it would be no less valuable to possess noncitizen status (2006: 172).

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Honig (2006: 102127) criticizes that despite aiming for a renewed cosmopolitanism, Benhabib merely reproduces existing cosmopolitan models
based on moral leadership from above. Benhabibs concept of democratic
iteration thus responds politically to a contradiction she does not seek to
overcome. According to Honig (ibid: 113), Benhabibs main argument is that
if individuals are excluded from democratic participation through cosmopolitan laws that, while not perfect, are nonetheless progressive, courts and civil
society actors should take corrective action to address such exclusions and
practice an enhanced universalism. Honig (ibid: 111) criticizes Benhabibs
conception of the process of shaping identities through democratic iterations as inevitably aimed towards a specific normative goal, although such
processes can equally lead to outcomes opposed to such goals. According to
Honig (ibid: 112), Benhabibs discussion of the laffaire du foulard debates1 is not only based on evolutionist assumptions of an increasing universalization of liberal values, but also illustrates the static and formalistic nature
of Benhabibs theories. Benhabib judges the actions of the schoolgirls positively, since their resistance against the French state may eventually teach
them to put up resistance against Islam, which is hardly a compelling argument. Honig (ibid: 109) also criticizes Benhabibs overall understanding of
the law as antiquated and overly formalistic. Benhabib (2006: 60) draws a
distinction between the spheres of law and politics, but believes that politics
can influence the legal sphere or even break down the barriers between politics and law. Honig (2006: 111) critiques that Benhabibs understanding of
law and politics is insufficiently open to future changes of societal objectives
or demands, but is instead fixed on the normative goal of increased tolerance
of difference and an enhanced universalism. Benhabib, according to Honig
(ibid: 110), relies on a subsumptive formalistic logic, which does not treat
new demands as fundamentally opposed to existing understandings of the
law, but as shaping them in a particular direction. Democratic iterations are
not generally aimed at changing universal norms, but merely changing the
relationship of legal subjects towards those norms. None of Benhabibs examples of democratic iteration led to a substantive change to universal
norms in practice. The individuals in the case of the l'affaire du foulard and
in that of Fereshta Ludin2 failed to change prevailing norms. In another example, proposed changes to Hamburg's and Schleswig-Holsteins election

1
2

These debates in France were initiated by three French schoolgirls refusing to comply with a
direction of their school principal to remove their head scarves (Benhabib 2004: 185).
Fereshta Ludin is a Muslim teacher, who took court action after being prevented from
teaching in German public schools by the regional authorities. This led to a vigorous public
debate within Germany. The Federal Constitutional Court held that the decision to bar Ludin from working as a teacher in public schools was not compliant with the constitution, indicating that further legislation was necessary to ban headscarves in public schools (Benhabib 2004: 198202).

Provincializing Cosmopolitanism

317

laws were reversed before they could enter into force.3 As Honig (2006: 113)
argues, these cases did not produce the reformist effects posited by Benhabib,
instead resulting in a further narrowing of options open to affected individuals. In Dignity in Adversity, Benhabib (2011: 152) has since conceded that
democratic iterations can on some occasions also lead to unduly narrow legal
interpretations.
In response to Honig, Benhabib further clarifies that just because her work
focuses on the juridico-political level, it does not follow that she does not
equally value ethico-political aspects. Benhabib (2006: 162) unpacks the
fundamental differences in their respective positions, arguing that while she
conducts an immanent critique within the philosophical tradition of a moral
and legal universalism, Honig provides an ideology critique.
While Benhabib focuses consistently on the position of migrants within
Western nation-states, she fails to distinguish between different categories of
migrants, whose experiences of exclusion differ widely, ranging from relatively privileged migrants with secure immigration status to illegal migrants
with no recourse to legal remedies. Benhabibs theoretical model for enhancing democratization through the progressive inclusion of groups excluded
from democratic decision-making is focused primarily on excluded groups
within a Western nation-state, but fails to take into account the challenges of
furthering democratization within a postcolonial context. Although she also
envisages mechanisms for protecting the rights of excluded groups on a transnational level, she remains insufficiently critical of the international civil
society, which can weaken rather than strengthen democratic structures in
postcolonial states and thus deepen the exclusion of subalterns living within
the global South. Her focus on extending civil rights within Western nationstates also fails to deal with situations where entitlements won by excluded
groups residing within the territory of a Western nation-state have a direct
negative impact on subalterns at the exploited end of the international division of labor, a factor highlighted by Spivak. We will now examine Spivak's
treatment of democratization from below in more detail.

Spivaks Learning to Learn from Below

Spivaks theories highlight the epistemic and physical violence of the
worlding of the Third World (Spivak 1999: 234) and analyze the complex
3

The German provinces of Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein sought to extend the right to
vote at local government level to non-citizens. The proposed legislative changes were
blocked by the Federal Constitutional Court, after they were held to be in violation of the
constitution (Benhabib 2004: 202207).

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overdeterminations of neocolonial epistemic and material structures within

financialized capitalism and their impact on subaltern women, while Spivak's
deconstructive pedagogy aims at undoing subalternity.
Instead of simply rejecting democracy and human rights as Eurocentric,
Spivak stresses the importance of the (neo)colonial legacy of democratic
principles and human rights as something we cannot not want (1999: 84)
and as an enabling violation, the child of a rape (1996: 19). She criticizes
the hegemonic individualist subject constitution and treats liberal individualism as a violating enablement (1993b: 49), since it produces both productive and harmful effects. She speaks of critical intimacy (1999: 242) with
concepts like democracy and human rights and the important of reappropriating them from and for the postcolonial world. This re-appropriation
is, however, based on the close critical scrutiny of categories of knowledge
normally taken for granted to expose the violent exclusions on which they are
based. Spivak (1999: 266) highlights that Enlightenment discourses are centrally founded on a binary subject constitution of the European subject on the
foil of its colonial Other since the subject of Enlightenment always needs an
uncivilized, barbaric, pre-modern Other to represent itself as enlightened,
civilized, et cetera. However, a critical focus on mechanisms of exclusion
based on race or gender without self-critical awareness of class-bound complicity with hegemonic structures can itself silence subaltern subject positions
and deepen subalterns exclusion from democratic structures. Spivak instead
traces the complex race-class-gender overdeterminations (1999: 303) of
these exclusionary mechanisms. Such exclusions operate, for example, within
human rights discourses based on a division between those righting the
wrongs of others and those whose wrongs are to be righted from above.
Spivak (2004: 532) sharply criticizes attempts by privileged subjects complicit with hegemonic capitalist structures, in which she explicitly includes herself
as a privileged diasporic living in the US, to judge their actions solely by their
benevolent intentions to help others. The latters efforts to help others are
frequently informed by feelings of cultural superiority towards the intended
recipients. Spivak (2008: 30) sees such hegemonic benevolence as based on a
kind of social Darwinism or burden of the fittest (2004: 538), dispensing
rights from above to spread democracy and human rights. She reminds us that
history is larger than agential goodwill (2006b: 132), making constant vigilance about one's position in hegemonic structures indispensable. Hegemonic
geopolitical structures implicitly or explicitly code class-privileged subjects
situated in the Euro-US and elites in the global South as dispensers of rights
from above and subalterns as passive recipients of human rights bounty, deprived of agency and access to democratic structures.
Spivak neither elaborates a substantive concept of democracy nor favors
any particular current theory of democracy. Her approach (cf. Spivak 2004) is
instead strategic, relying on the widely accepted definition of democracy as

Provincializing Cosmopolitanism

319

agential participation within the structures of parliamentary democracy. Her

critique of wider geopolitical structures and postcolonial states implicitly
provides some suggestions of an imagined different democracy. However, she
rejects providing detailed prescriptions or blueprints for such a democracy, as
any such attempt can have violent or violating consequences; instead she
outlines points of critique using practical examples to illustrate what she sees
as undemocratic, in order to imagine a democracy which does not reproduce
the class apartheid (2008: 21) of contemporary democracies. This imagined
democracy remains forever in the mode of to come, namely never fully
realizable but aimed for persistently and without guarantees (2008: 2324).
A crucial focus of Spivaks critique of class apartheid within postcolonial India is the highly unequal education provided to poor and classprivileged children, which has left subalterns without effective understanding
of the public sphere and of themselves as members of that public sphere,
despite universal suffrage being constitutionally guaranteed. Building on her
teaching in the Humanities at US elite universities and on her longstanding
engagement in training programs for primary school teachers in India, Spivak
tries to foster a singular ethical relation between elite and subaltern subjects
through a pedagogy aimed at activating democratic habits and at instilling
notions of human rights and responsibility in all subjects on both ends of the
postcolonial divide. Many other theories of democracy such as Benhabibs do
not take into account the crucial fact stressed by Spivak that privileged and
subaltern subjects do not have equal access to democratic structures, not only
in terms of articulating interests publicly, but even of being conscious of such
interests. Spivak argues that democratic habits and attitudes cannot be developed through quick fixes or consciousness raising, but only through a careful pedagogy aimed at sustained epistemological change and understanding of
abstract rights. This can only be achieved by patiently instilling independence
of mind, democratic habits, and rituals in children from a very young age
(Spivak 2006a: 94).
Spivak stresses that the psychosocial systems, habits, and rituals of subaltern subjects cannot be changed easily, due to the longstanding internalization
of their subjugation as normal:
You don't harm people for hundreds of years and then expect their choosing mechanisms to
come out unscathed so that they know exactly what is best for them (2006a: 107).

She first elaborated these arguments in the context of her critique of Michel
Foucault and Gilles Deleuze in her essay Can the Subaltern Speak? (1993a).
Within a discussion later published under the Title Intellectuals and Power
(Foucault/Deleuze 2006) these two prominent French post-structuralist theorists had posited that oppressed groups were themselves able to know and
articulate their own interests and to develop an understanding of the operations of power. Both argued that intellectuals were no longer needed to repre-

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Aylin Zafer and Anna Millan

sent the interests of the oppressed, since the oppressed were better able to
speak for themselves. Spivak strongly disputes these claims. She considers
Foucaults and Deleuzes treatment of subalterns as fully conscious of their
class position and interests to be highly problematic, leading to intellectuals
treating their own role in representing oppressed subjects as transparent
(1999: 265). In order to adequately theorize the crucial role played by intellectuals in representing the needs and interests of subalterns, the different
meanings of representation, which Foucault and Deleuze run into one, have
to be distinguished clearly. In this context, Spivak (1999: 258) refers to The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx (2007 [1852]: 118
120), which makes a distinction between class as a descriptive and transformative category and between representation as speaking for (Vertretung)
and speaking about (Darstellung) others (Spivak 1993a: 71).
Concentrating primarily on the rural poor of the Third World, who are
removed from all access to democratic structures and social mobility,
Spivakian pedagogy aims at the slow work of the uncoercive rearrangement
of the desires of the subaltern [] their insertion into the intuition of a public
sphere (2008: 154), which is central to undoing subalternity. She (2008: 51)
uses the concept metaphor suture for sewing together tissue (or texts in the
wide deconstructive sense) to describe such a pedagogy aimed at bringing
together notions of rights and of responsibility. The challenge is to suture
together responsibility-based subaltern cultural axiomatics defective for capitalism (2008: 25) with the principles of the Enlightenment based on individual rights and democratic participation in order to use them from below
(2008: 145). She stresses the mutuality of this suturing pedagogy (in the sense
of teachers and subaltern students learning from each other) and the crucial
importance of effective access to abstract structures of parliamentary representation (1996: 296). Formal voting rights without intuition of a public
sphere do not enable subalterns to make their voices heard. Spivak points to
an epistemic fracture between the epistemes of subaltern and hegemonic classes, which needs to be sutured by mutual learning between subaltern and
privileged subjects (2008: 29).
Benhabibs theories, by contrast, are based on an interpretation of cosmopolitanism which does not systematically take into account the sharp differentials in access to material and epistemic resources on both sides of the international division of labor. They also ignore the widely divergent impacts of
neocolonial geopolitical and geo-economic structures, which are rooted in
histories of colonial violence and exploitation, on both sides of the international division of labor. The negative impacts of these structures disproportionately affect subaltern subjects within the global South, rather than excluded groups residing within Western nation-states. Benhabibs concept of
democratic iteration represents a well-meaning cosmopolitan attempt to
integrate excluded actors into the political sphere in order to deepen democra-

Provincializing Cosmopolitanism

321

tization. However, it cannot be assumed that all subjects can make their interests count in parliamentary structures. The concept of subalternity therefore
assumes central importance in questions of effective democratization. Cosmopolitan theories of democracy like Benhabibs, which fail to take account
of the wide-ranging consequences of subalternization, can provide neither the
conceptual nor practical means for integrating subalterns into democratic
processes, which is the central goal of Spivaks desubalternizing pedagogy.
Subalterns within the global South are often directly affected by decisions
made by powerful Western nation-states and by the international civil society,
but have no effective means of influencing those decisions. Efforts to widen
democratic participation should therefore also focus on subaltern subjects
within the global South, whom Benhabib fails to consider systematically.
One prerequisite for integrating subalterns into democratic structures,
which Spivak believes to be latent within many subaltern cultural contexts, is
a culture of responsibility which is often corrupted by patriarchal or nationalist ideologies and not easily accessible (2008: 24). Through her suturing elementary pedagogy, she seeks to enable rural subalterns to gain effective access to structures of parliamentary democracy by activating such neglected
epistemes. Her aim is to learn from her students' responses to her teaching
attempts to tailor her teaching to the needs of those particular students.
Spivak views the relationship between teacher and student as dialectical,
based on a learning to learn from below (2004: 548). This concept of learning from below is based on Marx's third Feuerbach thesis that the educators
themselves need to be educated (Marx 2008 [1845]: 145). Spivak compares
this learning to literary reading within the academic context, which she
treats as a training to learn from the singular and the unverifiable (2008:
23).
For Spivak, the imagination is an inbuilt instrument of Othering, encouraging understanding of other points of view and subject positions as well
as the persistent critical questioning of ones own complicity with hegemonic
structures and ones own implicit support for a vicious system which denigrates subaltern subject positions (1996: 276). Education, in her view, is a
responsible intervention in normality (2008: 257) within both the subaltern
and privileged context. Within a class-privileged context, Spivak puts particular emphasis on learning from below and on unlearning ones own privileges as a loss (1996: 4), stressing that ones own privilege limits one's capacity for understanding subaltern subject positions and epistemes. She calls
on privileged subjects to avoid sanctioned ignorance (1999: 279) her term
for a generally accepted lack of knowledge or concern about subalternized
epistemes and experiences within hegemonic structures, for example within
academic institutions. Pedagogy thus becomes an ethico-political practice of
establishing a singular relation between subaltern and privileged subjects

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without guarantees (2008: 23), since all pedagogical efforts can never succeed once and for all, but must forever be renewed.
Spivak has spoken in detail about her educational work with subaltern
children in India in Righting Wrongs (2004). This work has involved frustrating struggles with the deeply class-divided structures of the Indian education
system. Spivak (2008: 44) criticizes sharply that in Indian schools attended by
the middle and upper classes, students learn to understand texts, whereas
students from lower classes are only given an education consisting of spelling
and rote learning. Because of this education, which prepares poor children
solely for manual work and stunts their cognitive functions, it is unsurprising that many teachers in schools for the poor are those least successful in
instilling knowledge in subaltern children, who are not born least successful, just as class-privileged children are not born electronic (2008: 557).
Most subaltern teachers who experience problems in explaining the subject
matter they are teaching do so because they do not understand it themselves
and do not know how to write freely, only having learnt to spell and mechanically repeat things learnt by rote (2004: 561). Spivak trains subaltern teachers
to listen to the children before all else. Through consistently taking the reactions of the children to her teaching into account, she hopes to learn how an
intuition of abstract democratic structures might be activated in those children.
Instead of developing new concepts of democracy, she seeks to patiently
embed democratic practices and rituals from below within the everyday
lives of subalterns (2004: 559). Through training teachers, who are in turn
involved in teaching children, Spivak hopes to work towards recoding hierarchical rituals of subjugation into rituals of parliamentary democracy. She
compares this demanding process of recoding with the hacking of software
(2008: 51). Ritual practices based on obedience to authority are cracked like a
code and overwritten by new codes and habitualized practices of the critical
independence of the mind (ibid).

Conclusion
Spivak and Benhabib both aim for increased democratic participation within
contemporary globalized capitalist structures, but propose very different
strategies for achieving this goal. Benhabib seeks to deepen democratization
primarily by changing the public discourse within liberal nation-states of the
global North, whereas Spivaks theories aim to extend democratic participation to all subjects within the global North and South. Benhabibs concept of
democratic iteration envisages marginalized individuals like migrants using
the constitutional mechanisms of liberal nation-states to challenge their exclu-

Provincializing Cosmopolitanism

323

sion while strengthening the universal norms of democracy, human rights, and
citizenship. However, her case studies show that discriminatory practices are
often reinforced rather than alleviated through such efforts to make democratic institutions and the judicial system more responsive to excluded groups.
Benhabibs failure to consider possible negative or ambivalent outcomes of
democratic iterations is problematic, as is her assumption that marginalized
groups can pursue their interests without mediation. While her treatment of
democratic iterations is geopolitically specific to liberal nation-states of the
Euro-US, it ignores those states systemic imbrication in neocolonial structures. These neocolonial globalized capitalist structures can fatally weaken
democratic control and participation, particularly within the global South, but
increasingly also within the global North. However, they affect subalterns
within the global South even more severely than marginalized groups within
the Euro-US.
Democratic iteration might be a useful tool for the empirical analysis of
struggles for democratization, provided the outcome of such struggles is not
prejudged or viewed in isolation from wider historical and geopolitical contexts, as in Benhabibs treatment of issues like statelessness, asylum, and
immigration, which systematically ignores epistemic and material barriers to
democratic participation faced by marginalized groups worldwide.
Spivaks theoretization of democracy by contrast scrupulously takes account of such epistemic and material obstacles, which she seeks to overcome
by activating democratic instincts in all subjects located in the global North
and South. Spivaks strategies for increasing democratization are decidedly
pedagogical in character and aim at undoing class apartheid. Education
performs a crucial role both in encouraging privileged subjects located within
hegemonic structures to engage responsibly with others and in enabling subalterns to think of themselves as part of the public sphere and of democratic
interactions. These democratic interactions are designed not only to encourage children to critically question their own position in hegemonic structures,
but also to develop the capacity to make their own interests count not only
by changing their position within hegemonic structures but by changing these
structures themselves. Spivak (1999: 383) consistently stresses the importance of wider structural changes to neocolonial capitalist structures,
which she envisages repeatedly being turned towards the social on a planetary
scale. A narrower focus on incremental democratic change within the EuroUS without critical awareness of wider geopolitical structures can instead
worsen the exploitation of subaltern subjects on the other side of the international division of labor. The profound structural inequalities within globalized
capitalism make constant vigilance about ones own privileges and structural
effects beyond ones intentions vital. However, Spivaks understanding of
pedagogy is largely limited to formal education, placing much less emphasis
on other strategies for promoting epistemological change. Though Spivaks

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concept of uncoercive rearrangement of desire at the subaltern and privileged end seems plausible, the mechanisms of fostering greater sensitivity to
injustice through education need to be further elaborated. The question remains, whether better formal education in schools and universities can itself
be sufficient to promote wider changes to hegemonic structures. As Antonio
Gramsci (2012: 14981502) stresses in his Prison Notebooks, changes within
the public sphere can be mediated just as much through the arts, culture, the
press, or the legal system as through formal education. Spivaks concept of
learning to learn from below is nonetheless highly useful, particularly due
to her stress on historical and epistemic violence and on the constant need for
critical scrutiny of ones own assumptions and position in hegemonic structures. In order to work towards increased democratization and the inclusion of
subaltern subjects on a truly global scale, it remains urgent for postcolonial
feminists to carry out the necessary but impossible task of provincializing
cosmopolitan theories of democracy by critically highlighting Eurocentric
teleological assumptions in theories of democracy, which treat European
liberal democracy as universal and normative, without reflecting on the geopolitical and historical particularity of this epistemological framework.

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Notes on Contributors
Mara do Mar Castro Varela is Political Scientist, Professor at the Alice Salomon University, Berlin. She was Maria Goeppert-Mayer Guest Professor at
the Carl v. Ossietzky University in Oldenburg and lecturer at the Zurich University of the Arts. She has held visiting fellowships at the University of Costa Rica; Institute for International Law and the Humanities, The University of
Melbourne, Australia; University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain; Pusan National University, South Korea. Publications include: Ist Integration ntig?
Eine Streitschrift (2013) und Unzeitgeme Utopien. Migrantinnen zwischen
Selbsterfindung und Gelehrter Hoffnung (2007).
Frederick Cowell is currently completing his PhD, specializing in the postcolonial politics of Supranational Human Rights Organizations, at Birkbeck
College, University of London. He has published widely on international
human rights law and has worked as a legal advisor for different human rights
organizations. Previously he has taught constitutional and human rights law at
three different universities. His research interests include theories of relativism, international law and postcolonialism and anti-discrimination in international law.
Nikita Dhawan is Junior Professor of Political Science for Gender/Postcolonial Studies and Director of the Frankfurt Research Center for Postcolonial Studies, Cluster of Excellence The Formation of Normative Orders,
Goethe University Frankfurt. She has held visiting fellowships at the University of Costa Rica, Institute for International Law and the Humanities, The
University of Melbourne, Australia; Program of Critical Theory, University
of California, Berkeley, USA; University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain;
Pusan National University, South Korea; Columbia University, New York,
USA. Publications include: Impossible Speech: On the Politics of Silence and
Violence (2007) and Postkoloniale Theorie. Eine kritische Einfhrung (jointly with Mara do Mar Castro Varela) (second completely revised and extended edition 2014).
Ulrike Hamann is a scholar of Cultural Studies and Political Sciences at Goethe University Frankfurt, currently finishing her PhD thesis on the Genealogies of Biopolitics in Colonial Germany, addressing counter-discourses and
strategies of intervention against racism within the German colonial enterprise. She was research fellow at the junior research group Transnational
Genealogies, Cluster of Excellence The Formation of Normative Orders,
Goethe University Frankfurt.

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Notes on Contributors

Jorma Heier is scientific research associate and lecturer at the Department of

Political Theory and the History of Ideas at the University of Osnabrck,
Germany. She holds a Magistra degree in Political Science, Sociology and
Cultural Anthropology. Heier is currently finishing her PhD thesis on Political Repair, supervised by Matthias Bohlender and Joan Tronto. Her Publications include: Wirkliche Gerechtigkeit ist Restoration, nicht notwendigerweise in den Zustand, wie er gewesen war, sondern in den, wie er
wirklich sein sollte (2012) and Towards a Political Theory of Care (2013,
with Elisabeth Conradi).
Karin Hostettler (lic. phil.) holds a research associate position at the University of St. Gallen. Her research is located at the intersection of Philosophy,
Gender Studies and Postcolonial Theories fields she taught at the Centre for
Gender Studies, University of Basel and currently at the University of St.
Gallen. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Basel; the title of her
dissertation is Denk(t)raum Mensch. Kant, Kritik und Othering.
Sourav Kargupta has just submitted his doctoral dissertation titled, Precarious
Objectifications: Ethics of Representation and the Figure of the Woman at the
Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC), and at the Arts faculty, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. He has worked in the VW-Project:
Nationalist Ideology and the Historiography of Literature in South Asian
Cultures at the Martin Luther University, Halle, Germany, funded by the
Volkswagenstiftung. His publications include: Dinesh Chandra Sens The
Folk Literature of Benga: The Canonization of Folk and the Conception of
the Feminine , in Literature and Nationalist Ideology: Writing Histories of
Modern Indian Languages, edited by Hans Harder.
Navneet Kumar has a PhD in Postcolonial Theory and Literatures from the
University of Calgary and is presently teaching at Medicine Hat College,
Alberta, Canada. Previously, Navneet Kumar was a full-time Assistant Professor of World Literatures in English at Delhi University. His areas of interest and research are Pluralism and Identity, Interrogation of Religion, Secularism & the State, Art and Society, Postcolonial Studies & Literary Criticism. He teaches courses in English literature and General Education.
Jamila M. H. Mascat is research fellow at the ICI Berlin and collaborates with
the chair of Practical Philosophy at the University La Sapienza in Rome. She
received her PhD in Philosophy at the University of Siena with a dissertation
on the notion of abstraction in Hegels Jena writings, which was published in
2011 as Hegel a Jena. La Critica dellAstrazione (Pensamultimedia). Her current research focuses on the notion of totality in Hegels philosophy and within the French reception of Hegel. She is also interested in postcolonial studies

Notes on Contributors

329

and feminist theory, and in particular, in contemporary re-declinations of the

category of subalternity. In 2012 she has co-edited Femministe a Parole, a
critical dictionary at the intersection between feminist, queer and postcolonial
theories (Ediesse).
Anna Millan obtained her first BA degree in English and Politics at York
University in England and subsequently practiced as a solicitor in England for
eleven years. In 2013, she completed a teaching degree in English and Politics at Goethe University Frankfurt. Her research focus is on subalternity,
postcolonialism and feminism. She has written her thesis on Gayatri Spivaks
theory of ideology.
Lyn Ossome is a doctoral candidate and Sessional Lecturer based in the Political Studies Department at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Her research interests are in the areas of feminist theory and politics,
land and agrarian studies, postcolonial theory and African politics. She has
contributed several journal articles and book chapters in these thematic areas.
Judith Schacherreiter is a researcher at the University of Vienna, Department
of Comparative and Private International Law. She spent several years in
Mexico (Oaxaca and Mexico City) researching land rights and agrarian history. Her contribution to this book is part of this research project, financed by
the Austrian Science Fund (project number J2932). Since 2006, she is a
member of the editorial board of the legal journal juridikum zeitschrift fr
kritik | recht | gesellschaft. Her research areas are theory and methods of comparative law, law and legal thinking in Latin America, property and distribution of land, the commons, legal transfer and reception, postcolonial theories
and private international law.
Julia Surez-Krabbe is Assistant professor at the Department of Culture and
Identity, Roskilde University, Denmark and associate researcher at the Center
for Social Studies (CES) at Coimbra University, Portugal. She is currently
involved in the research project ALICE - Strange Mirrors, Unsuspected Lessons and coordinates the Decoloniality Europe network, with mainly scholars
and activists from the global South, who work against racism, Islamophobia
and coloniality in Europe. Her reseearch emphasizes questions of race and
racism in relation to human rights, citizenship, development, anti-racist social
movements, Other knowledges and decolonial social change.
Ali Can Yldrm obtained his BA in Political Science and International Relations from Bogazici University in Istanbul and his MA in Political Theory
from Goethe University Frankfurt and Technische Universitt Darmstadt. His
fields of interest are subaltern studies, postcolonial theory and global justice.

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Notes on Contributors

He has written his MA thesis on the colonizing logic of theories of global

justice.
Aylin Zafer studied Politics and Turkology at Goethe University Frankfurt.
Her MA thesis dealt with transformative approaches to human rights, particularly in the writings of Seyla Benhabib and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Currently, she is pursuing a PhD in Politics at Goethe University Frankfurt. Her
PhD thesis examines political subjectivity in the writings of Antonio Gramsci
and Michel Foucault.
Chenchen Zhang is Erasmus Mundus fellow at the GEM (Globalisation, the
EU, and Multilateralism) PhD School. She holds MA degrees in International
Relations from Peking University and the University of Tokyo. Her PhD
project aims at theorizing the citizenship-migration nexus in the European
Union through the conceptual lens of territory, rights, and mobility. Her research interests include political theory, citizenship studies, mobility and migration studies, and political geography.