d ox a at l a rge

The Paupers Gift: Postcolonial Theory and the New Democratic Dispensation
Leela Gandhi

Anti-Postcolonial Critique

In the course of its checkered career, officially launched with the publication in 1978 of Edward Saids Orientalism, postcolonial studies has suffered a continuous critical onslaught against its disciplinary claims indeed, against its very right to disciplinary existence conducted under the symbolic aegis of the orthodox Left. The lineaments of the conflict are largely hermeneutic and concern two competing readings of modern European imperialism. One draws on a long Marxist tradition of anti-imperial critique (J. A. Hobson, Nikolay Bukharin, Rudolf Hilferding, V. I. Lenin, to name a few) to describe imperialism simply and precisely as the globalization of capital. By contrast, postcolonialism contemplates empire under a dizzying plethora of subheadings and subdisciplines, sometimes as impossible to think as Jorge Luis Borgess taxonomy from a certain Chinese encyclopaedia, in this case, epistemological bad faith, discursive binarization, a misjudgment of dust, the mutations of cricket, the countermutations of polo, legality, the fallacy of curry, the census, the history of cholera, cartography, the object-ridden nineteenth-century novel, and such.1 For reason of this inchoative and antisystematic quality to its thought, postcolonialism stands charged of academic and political dilettantism: as poor history, poor literary criticism, very bad philosophy and, thereon, a form of shadow elitism, chary of collectivity, incurious about solidarity, a discourse of taste rather than of necessity,
1. This reading of Borgess story, The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, as a parable about the limits of thought is, famously, from Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970), xv xxiv.
Public Culture 23:1
doi

Copyright 2011 by Duke University Press

10.1215/08992363-2010-013

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oftentimes reinforcing rather than refuting its own object of critique. Postmodernist and postcolonialist strategies that appear to be liberatory, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri put it somewhat thunderously in Empire, do not challenge but in fact coincide with and even unwittingly reinforce the new strategies of rule!2 Reactionary and witless, to boot. In their weakest moments postcolonial theorists have responded to such offensive with self- damaging counteroffensive, claiming membership of an inventive avant-garde well in advance of dusty, textbook, schoolroom Marxism. In their worst moments they have capitulated to accusations of arrested development through hasty promises of remedial action, returning to lost scenes of disciplinary integrity, defending the organizational rigor and systematicity of a postcolonial politics. Their best moments, however (moments upon which the future of postcolonial theory may well be predicated), are marked by two features: first, by a defiant, creative rapprochement with their own presumed immaturity, whether academic or political, and, second, by a refusal to be severed, even so, from the history of radical anticolonialism, Western and nonWestern alike.
Toward Democracy

Broadly speaking, postcolonialism has been subject to two spates of critique linked yet disparate in their own way. The first, borne of the justly irate Marxisms of the globally conservative 1990s and dominated by critics such as Aijaz Ahmad and Arif Dirlik, launched its offensive against postcolonial theory in the name of the popular and the real, charging intellectuals in the field with capitulation to Western Third-Worldism (and all for the dubious cause of metropolitan salaries and preferment).3 Concealed in such harangue were allegations of intellectual decadence at the new scenes of postcolonial studies, the oft-repeated accusation that postcolonial thought was merely an indulgent pastime quite removed from the raw materiality and harsh realities of the colonized world. If not always, postcolonial critics often responded to such invective by refuting the rigid oppositions between the theoretical and the material or between abstraction and reality, on which much anti-postcolonial critique relied and which presupposed an underlying bias toward the social sciences and against the new humanities. Couched
2. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 138. 3. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Arif Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1998). 28

as a resistance to realist epistemology per se, these refutations achieved their true apotheosis in the commitment shared by so many of the subfields within the new humanities, with gender and queer studies preeminent among these to expanding the disciplinary boundaries of politics itself by giving cognizance and credence to a range of putatively unpolitical activities: reading, literariness, eating, dress, conversation, and so on. To this register belong Homi Bhabhas inspired locutions in defense of theory and, no less, Saids formative insistence on the discursivity of imperialism and his presentation of anti-orientalist disposition as an artes vivendi: the rare matter of a carefully cultivated monastic worldliness. Yet even in these moments of rebellious aestheticism, dubbed as the ill effects of deracinated, migr poststructuralism, the theorists under review refused to forswear their historical claim to, and horizontal affinities with, international socialism/s. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and others within the South Asian subaltern studies collective, most notably, catalogued the inextricability of Marxism and contemporary French philosophy in their work.4 Others such as Bhabha clarified with some help from theoretical scaffolding provided by thinkers such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe his allegiance to a long history of nonorthodox socialisms, carefully incubated within the then complex cultures of the British New Left.5 In recent years, even as practitioners of the field have begun to protest their own relevance, postcolonialism has elicited the fresh incredulity of a complex body of thinkers loosely neo-Marxist and post-Althusserian in disposition and converging in shared interest on the topos of democracy. We might include here the work of Negri, Hardt, Alain Badiou, Slavoj iek, Etienne Balibar, and Jacques Rancire. Some qualifications and further comments are in order. I am imputing a certain intertextuality to the thinkers named above, even though they may not conceive themselves as constituting a cohort. Yet it is genuinely perplexing, given their striking, shared revival of certain themes (a new need for universalism, a new emphasis on democracy), that even those among them who are not explicitly hostile to postcolonialism (e.g., Balibar and Rancire) raise no clear
4. Most pertinent here are Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? (1995), reprinted in Marxist Interpretations of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke, U.K.: Macmillan Education, 1998), 271 313; and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Marx after Marxism: History, Subalternity, and Difference, Meanjin 52 (1993): 421 34. 5. Two works that provide crucial if sometimes indirect ground for the continuity among postcolonial thought, the British New Left, and new social movements are Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985); and Paul Gilroy, There Aint No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London: Hutchinson, 1987). See also Simon During, The Cultural Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1993). 29

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public objection to the onslaught upon this field from key peers. Such objections must be raised, however, from within the ranks of this emerging discourse given the vexed, colonial history of the concept of universalism and, no less, given the violent neocolonial conservatism presently being justified anew in its name as also, more perniciously, in the name of democracy. Indeed, democracy is arguably the vexed trope of current global conflicts: Who has it? Who bears it? What should it look like? How might it be delivered? By which means? Should it be enforced? Even as dominant Western players in the new world order condone violent territorial interventions into postcolonial geographies, there is something discomfiting about the coeval academic disqualification of postcolonial theory and its adjacent interests by radical Euro-American intellectuals. All the more so when such disqualification attaches, as in the case of Badiou and iek, to arguments about the exemplary universality of Western Christianity or, indeed, albeit in a more congenial register, to Balibars reclamation of Europe as the critical site, if any, for postcolonial practice.6 Given these reservations, let us consider some ramifications of anti-postcolonial, neodemocratic thought with a view to gleaning new possibilities for postcolonial analysis from the shifting ground beneath its feet. Current retheorizations of democracy tend to conceive this trope in its complex relation to the three adjunct themes of universalism, cosmopolitanism, and politics and, most distinctively, as the only means for a long-overdue revaluation of the common, a hitherto underworked idea, we are told, in Western political philosophy and social theory. Understood primarily as an ethos of sharing and participation (of material, natural, affective, organizational, informational, infrastructural, epistemological, and communicational resources), the common is also the setting for a theater of mass or collective empowerment, as Hardt and Negri have it, of becoming-Prince.7 From this participatory setting, however,
6. See Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (New York: Verso, 2001); and Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997). Balibar, Badiou, and Rancire are identified as sharing a project against wishy-washy postcolonial, multicultural liberalism in Slavoj iek, Political Subjectivization and Its Vicissitudes, in The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (New York: Verso, 1999), 171 244. For a recent defense of the exemplary global universality of Western Christianity, see Slavoj iek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? ed. Creston Davis (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009). For Balibars European appropriation of postcolonial theory, see Etienne Balibar, We the People of Europe: Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, trans. James Swenson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 7 8. 7. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009), viii. 30

postcolonialism is debarred as a fitting theoretical ally by some though not all of the thinkers under review. Among these a few find the field, such as it is, ill equipped for the task of thinking democracy for reason of its own cognitiveideological impediments: We suspect that postmodernist and postcolonialist theories may end up in a dead end because they fail to recognise adequately the contemporary object of critique, that is, they mistake todays real enemy.8 Others disqualify postcolonialism from thinking-the-common for reason of its inability to transcend a (dis)order of idiosyncrasy and psychic privatization characterized by Levinasian masochism, unwitting hedonism, sentimentalism, and the rule of preference: this ever-growing flowering of groups and subgroups in their hybrid and fluid, shifting identities, each insisting on the right to assert its specific way of life and/or culture . . . possible and thinkable only against the background of capitalist globalization.9 Into this fray postcolonialism must descend if only to clarify the crucial historical symbiosis between anticolonialism and democracy. So, for instance, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhis proposal for unmediated self-rule in his Hind Swaraj (1910) remains exemplary as a blueprint for the radical coexistence of quarrelsome multiplicities, and, in a similar vein, the little acknowledged Bandung Conference of 1955 is noteworthy for its proposal under a strictly postcolonial dispensation for cooperative yet nonpartisan and nonaligned transnational democracies. We might also pay heed to the way that E. M. Forsters internal critique of British colonialism was inextricable from his appeal for a nonjingoistic democracy requiring only two rather than three cheers from the demos: the one for its encouragement of variety in social and communal life, the other for its endorsement of criticism in public discourse.10 For purposes of the present discussion I wish to draw special attention to Edward Carpenters Toward Democracy, published in progressive installments from 1883 onward until the complete edition of 1905. Regarded by numerous British and European anti-imperialists as their bible, Carpenters work described democracy as a credo of self-transformation rather than one of systematic political organization alone. As Gilbert Beith writes in his foreword to a later reprint of the work, To Carpenter the word democracy meant a thing of the heart rather than a political creed, whereas the democracy that has established itself is an organised one and too much intent on organisation. Unless it manages
8. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 136. 9. iek, Ticklish Subject, 209 10. 10. E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy (London: Edward Arnold, 1951). 31

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to make itself loveable it will dry up and fail. No one realised this more than Carpenter himself. It is very unlikely that he would have regarded the present position of the Labour Party as a fulfilment of his ideals. He never had much use for organisations or for committees or for dialectic. His heart was always stronger than his head, but he must not therefore be dismissed as a sentimentalist, which hard-headed sociologists are inclined to do.11 Much as in Carpenters work, and this time in the spirit of fidelity to its own immaturity (a quality that is also, at best, a democratic refusal of self-authorization and priority), postcolonialism might consider owning the charges of redundancy, degeneracy, and recidivism to which it is prey, so as to elaborate the outlines of a naive democracy: naive both in conception and in content, as a way of thinking about the common and also as a thought of the common. With regard to the question of methodology, or, more appropriately, of epistemological disposition, there is a great deal to learn from Paul Ricoeurs account of criticism as the condition of a second navet.12 To recall, this is the cultivation of an attitude of credulity in a desacralized world that, perforce, sacrifices its own claim to epistemological soundness in exchange for the (very likely misguided) belief that the world may be better than it is in fact. Such a knowledge is thence redemptive because it is twicefallen from positions of privilege and exceptionality: once from the enchanted scene of primal navet and then again from the disenchanting rigor of post/enlightenment skepticism. Hereon, with regard to the question of content, postcolonialism could do much worse than return to the anticolonial archive wherein the common is engaged not only as the scene of resource sharing and the redistribution of sovereignty but also as the labor of inhabiting the hard ground of ones commonization or unexceptionality. Consider here Frantz Fanons anti-euphemistic designation of the colonized as abidingly the wretched of the earth or the preference of Indian untouchable castes to go by the pejorative name dalit, meaning those who have been broken and ground down. There is, of course, a rich tradition within numerous oppressed cultures for the positive reappropriation of pejoratives. But what I am trying to emphasize here is not only the

11. Edward Carpenter, Towards Democracy (London: GPM, 1985), 12. 12. See Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (New York: Harper and Row, 1967); Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970); and Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi- disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny, with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977). 32

important strategic rhetorical inversion of an abusive term such that it signifies a set of values antonymic to the original abusive intent. Rather, I want to foreground the operation of experiences of suffering or oppression that strip one of value altogether, rendering their subject unexceptional, ordinary, unremarkable, unworthy of note, and, in a word, common. What happens or what is achieved when such negative common-ness is actively cultivated in the name of democracy? How is democracy transformed as a project when it calls for a tending of this condition? Indeed, how might this objective be enacted and performed? Some cues obtain from forms of anticolonial practice and manifesto (Gandhi is, once again, exemplary here) that endeavor to dismantle all existing forms of sovereignty to conceive a polity and sociality where meaning attaches precisely to that which is naive, in this instance apropos Michel Foucault, inadequate . . . insufficiently elaborated . . . located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scienticity . . . low-ranking . . . unqualified, even directly disqualified . . . parallel and marginal.13 Post/anti-colonialisms naive democracy, we could say, potentially substitutes the project of becoming-Prince with one of becoming-pauper.
Naive Futures

Paupers Gift

In the remainder of this discussion I consider some applications of the principle of naive democracy sketched above. My focus is on universalism, cosmopolitanism, and politics, three themes that are central to the current argument between postcolonialism and its critics.
A Naive Universalism

Especially in the work of Badiou and iek the disqualification of postcolonialism from thinking-the-common is authorized with reference to the figure of universalism, indispensable to any proper reconsideration of collectivity, yet long abandoned, it is argued, by postcolonialisms contaminating turn toward theories of difference and toward a host of mutually incompatible particularisms.14 If useful for the purposes of polemic, however, this sharp binarization between universalism and difference blurs the history of universalisms endemic particularism, the
13. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972 1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire, U.K.: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1980), 82. 14. This is especially visible in iek, Political Subjectivization and Its Vicissitudes, and Badiou, Ethics. 33

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failure of its agents consistently to transcend their own interests. Universalisms are always French, German, British, American, Christian, and so on, and, thence, Indian, Kenyan, Muslim, Chinese as well, and nowhere more so than at the scene of late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century colonial encounter/s. But here we may distinguish between two broad types of competing (if not wholly epistemologically discrete) universalisms: imperial and anti-imperial, respectively. In the case of the former, the rhetoric of the imperial civilizing mission begins with the assumption of civilizational plenty and then proceeds to the alibi of redistribution: to share the excessive goods of Europe. By contrast, what makes anti-imperial universalism naive, in the ways proposed earlier, is its premise of a culture, ethos, or disciplinary or belief system, stripped of all its assets but nonetheless determined to make a gift of its best self to an iniquitous world (Fanons humanism, Gandhis nonviolence, Muhammad Iqbals ecumenism). To be exact, this is universalism carefully crafted as a paupers gift, demanding to be read and received as a principle of rarity rather than of particularity, as a way, la Foucault, of speaking on the basis . . . of poverty, and yet despite it.15 It is helpful, in context, to further ponder the hinted links in Foucaults thinking about discourse between the themes of rarefaction, or an external interdiction on discourse (a making-poor), and rarity, which is a defiant discursive effect borne of rarefaction yet utterly excessive in relation to the same, a movement, if you will, from denudation to singularity or, by a cooking analogy, from reduction to concentration and enhancement of flavor.
A Naive Cosmopolitanism

Emerging as their field did at the scene of reactionary nationalisms, theorists of the postcolonial predicament have long been animated by a cosmopolitan disposition, by a poetic preference, that is, for the migrant and the refugee over the citizen and the denizen. Notwithstanding its disciplinary credentials in this domain, however, the new democratic dispensation under review declares postcolonial cosmopolitanism insufficient to the scale proper to this thought and one that demands, the argument goes, renewed attentiveness to the status of all, many, mass, and multitude, a commitment, in other words, not only to the qualitative but also to the quantitative enhancement of collectivities.16 There is no imperative for post15. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Routledge, 1989), 120. 16. Especially relevant in this context are Rancires eloquent Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (New York: Verso, 2006); Etienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics 34

colonialism to eschew this invitation to think in big numbers, although there is still something to recommend in its deep commitment to the micrological, once again via principles of rarity and navet and on the strength of the conviction that sometimes less is more. We might consider here the slim cosmopolitan opportunity available in Bhabhas interstices; the world- enriching quality of Arundhati Roys nonvirtuoso god of small things who can do only one thing at a time; or the sparse scenes of anarchist accord portrayed in Gandhis Hind Swaraj featuring two quarrelsome entities, two people and a cow, a person and three clay pots, each scene forging types of radical relationality outside the glare of history proper.17 In his typically polemical style Gandhi will tell us that the work of widening affective sympathies, which is at the heart of cosmopolitanism and which is performed in numerous, daily, incidental yet perpetual rituals, la Immanuel Kant, of peacemaking, is rarely deemed worthy of documentation. Engaged only by epic events and great personages, history is thus constitutively anticosmopolitan. In Gandhis words, History is really a record of every interruption of the even working of the force of love.18 Given this knowledge, the ascetic trick, of course, is in successfully resisting the temptation to achieve admission into the record upon the understanding that noteworthiness is structurally incompatible with a politics of accord. If indirectly, postcolonial micrological cosmopolitanism has long pursued the logic of this thought with a little help from Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, in particular, with reference to their contentious suggestion that those who have been deterritorialized best preserve the radical lineaments of their struggles by remaining minor. Minor-ness in this case, or a commitment to remaining-small, consists in practices of reterritorialization that are simply discontinuous with the telos of dominance, in other words, immune to the inducements of either hegemony or canonicity.19 Bhabha is especially eloquent on this credo:

Paupers Gift

and Philosophy before and after Marx, trans. James Swenson (New York: Routledge, 1994); and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004). 17. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 2; Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 330; Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, ed. Anthony J. Parel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 54, 56 57, 58 59, 83 84, 89 90. 18. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, 90. 19. See Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, Theory and History of Literature 30 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 35

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By minoritarian identification, I want somehow to get beyond the polarised geographies of majority vs. minority, where it is assumed that the political desire of the minority is to achieve the hegemonic, majoritarian position. . . . The kind of minoritisation that impresses me is the sort of thing W. E. B. Du Bois was hinting at when he said that there are minorities that do not want to become majorities; their sense of minorities who seek a kind of public articulation or affiliation that does not depend on associating social authority with cultural sovereignty; a metonymic minoritisation (if I may) in which the agency of any specific recognition of difference gender, race, generation, location is not grounded on a primordial identity, but in a lateral ethical movement ( la Levinas).20 Bhabhas accent on minor-ness as a subset of ethics, with the majoritarian position as a contrasting correlative of hegemonic or power politics, demands further consideration of the somewhat strained if well-meaning relationship between the ethical and the political within postcolonial democracy and is the concluding topic of my discussion.
Political Navet

In an unexpected digression Badiou et al.s strenuous critique of postcolonial theory has situated itself along an axis demarcating the domains of ethics and politics. Ascribing ethics to postcolonialism and politics to a general leftism, it is argued that the divergence between ethics and politics is one of degree rather than of kind, wherein ethics belongs merely to the fuzzy region of prepolitical sensibility.21 Poststructuralist ethics is especially handicapped by pass theories of difference even as a new regime of the political emerges as the victorious bearer of a robust universalism and cosmopolitanism, crucial, we have seen, for updated iterations of democracy, collectivity, multitude, and so on. This consignment of postcolonialism to the rudimentary schoolroom of ethics, however, is not without theoretical and historicist opportunity. For a start, it points the way to serious reassessment of anticolonial ethics as an anarchist inheritance. I am speaking here about the deep and abiding skepticism with which many colonized cultures responded to the claim that (imperial) government and political
20. Homi Bhabha and John Comaraff, Speaking of Postcoloniality, in the Continuous Present: A Conversation, in Relocating Postcolonialism, ed. David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 2002), 17. 21. The strongest expression of this position comes from Alain Badiou, Does the Other Exist? in his Ethics, 18 29. 36

culture was the cornerstone of la mission civilisatrice, the gift from Europe to the pathologically irregulable non-West. If unevenly manifest across anticolonial contexts, such skepticism about the civilizing propensities of imperial governance often translated, especially in the South Asian instance, into a distinctively ethical aversion to all organized and institutional politics, in other words, to bureaucratic, mediating, and regulatory forms of power. Foucault is instructive once more for such a reading. As is well known, in many of his late incidental writings he illuminates the technologies of power and of self common to the fields of what he calls governmentality, on the one hand, and ethics, on the other. If intimately linked, however, where governmental techniques of subjectivation serve projects of domination, ethical techniques of subjectivation often tend toward the practice of freedom. For what is ethics, Foucault observes, if not the practice of freedom, the conscious practice of freedom?22 What, we might ask, distinguishes these overlapping technologies of self such that one converts power into domination while another transforms the same into a text of freedom? While governmentality, Foucault will tell us in response, works on the subject through the prescriptive, interdictory, and strictly juridical order of nomoi (code or customoriented morality), ethics brings the recalcitrant self to bear on itself internally in an effort of self-mastery or ascesis. These distinctions resonate immediately with the antagonisms specific to colonial encounter wherein the tamed or forcibly civilized subject of colonial nomoi protests precisely by embarking on an oppositional ascesis seeking sole, if ultimately illusory, command of his or her affective and psychic interiority, hoping against hope to become sui juris and autonomous at least in this imagined domain if none other.23 In these terms, we could say that the centrality of ethics to anticolonial endeavor (indeed, anticolonialisms willful navet in relation to dominant political culture, whether imperial or nationalist) is enabled by the paradigmatic clash of governmental nomoi and self-rule-seeking ascesis within colonial encounter. In this context ethics emerges and is available for theoretical recuperation, simply and powerfully as a critique of the very principle and prerogatives of rule. The constitutive unruliness of (anticolonial) ethics is thence a subject for further consideration and elaboration. Although explicit admissions of an anarcho- ethical inheritance or selftendency are unheard of in mainstream postcolonial theory, many thinkers in
22. Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, vol. 1 of Essential Works of Foucault, 1954 1984, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1997), 284. 23. See Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, vol. 2 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1987), 25 32. 37

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the field have betrayed a distinctly anarchist distaste for politics proper. Saids reflections on his own vexed relationship to the power structure of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) are especially apposite in view of the preceding discussion and a good note on which to conclude these musings: I saw the importance of the party, of the organization, how it gave hope, how it sustained one, but it exacted a price from one, a price of submission, which was that you gave up a critical distance. And of course on the other side were those in power, who used that power in a certain sense to insulate themselves from their mistakes. . . . So I always had the sneaking suspicion that if you were too close, and you accepted too much, the prerogatives of power, and the insulations of power, and what my sister used to call quite brilliantly, a seat in the front row, you dont see what is going on behind you.24 To summarize, the new antagonists of postcolonial theory have done a great deal to bring new energy to the field. At the very least their provocations have rendered democracy a crucial topic for postcolonial intervention, even into an organizing trope for its multiple concerns. There are numerous routes such investigations might take. My vote would be for a postcolonial defense of naive democracy, founded on the cultivation of common-ness or becoming-pauper and qualified, thence, by imperatives of rare universalism, micrological cosmopolitanism, and anarcho-socialist parapolitical ethics. It could be much worse.

24. Edward Said, In Conversation with Neeladri Bhattacharya, Suvir Kaul, and Ania Loomba, in Goldberg and Quayson, Relocating Postcolonialism, 12 13. 38