2.22.2006
Spectral Nationality (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Title
Cheah, Pheng. Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
Field
Postcolonial Asian American Studies
Summary
Pheng Cheah's Spectral Nationality is a philosophical history of the concept of freedom as conceived within organismic political bodies. The book is split into two parts. The first charts the roots of the organismic metaphor for community, sorting out misconceptions of it's beginings in German Romanticism (tainting it as part of the past of fascist nationalism) and rather, situates it in the trajectory of German Idealism. As opposed to the mechanistic metaphor for community immagined by Locke or Rousseau (think social contract) the organistic metaphor is a means for individual freedom within a bounded, organically functioning whole (think body metaphors here). He begins with Kant's transcendental freedom and culture (through Bildung) as the means of realizing that freedom - "Culture is a crucial agent for the realization of freedom because of its incarnational causality...This ability to transform and improve human nature through rational endeavor, which cannot be understood solely in terms of mechanical causality, implies that humanity possesses a degree of freedom from nature." (41) Oh by the way, the deal with freedom and the organistic is that anything mechanistic has to be put into motion by something outside itself, but the organism, as self-realizing, self-powering, self-incarnating (you get the idea), is obviously (or not so obviously as we shall see in Cheah's sparkling and stunningly awesome conclusion) more free. "All political forms that rely on the organismic metaphor are different models intended to provide the optimal institutional basis for the auto-causality of freedom, these forms have as their common substrate a dynamic that subordinates death and artiface to organic life. That which has the capacity to regenerate itself spontaneously lives forever in some form or other. Hence, that which is free is that which has eternal life." (59) Anyways, I should also mention that this book is about life and death, this is premised on the basic idea that freedom is the transcendence of finitude. Ok, so culture is the process of the transcendence of finitude (the bland idea here is like, a work of art living forever even if the artist is dead) but this can extend to the idea of the nation, right? Bildung is what creates culture (bildung being reason's auto-causality) Also, should mention Aristotilean distinctions between physis and techne because this will be important - you know, that techne must always be mimic of physis. Ok, but getting back to Kant, while Cheah acknowledges the importance of his contribution to the history of the organismic metaphor, he points out the weird temporal space produced by Kant's insistence on the organism as an end in itself and yet, this is totally screwed by the teleology of bildung/reason (at least, I think that is what it is screwed by). "We need the existence of organisms so that we can postulate the purposive nature as ground for actualizing our freedom from the mechanism of nature. But such a ground is thereby also a means towards a higher end that lies beyond it. Paradoxically, we need nature to be independent of us so that it can finally be subjected to us via the technic of judgement!" (106) Ok so what does this mean to the organismic metaphor? "The organismic metaphor of the social and political body attempts to ground human transcendence in the purposiveness of organic life as a phenomenal analouge of moral reason's spontaneous auto-causality. But life itself turns out to be the gift of an inhuman techne that exceeds the causality of human reason. This means that the organism's teleological time is contaminated at its origin by a certain otherness." (113)
Cheah then has to deal with Fichte and Hegel, especially since this is the tricky part of the organismic metaphor that he will later link to anti-colonial movements (I realized that I didn't mention that at the beginning - part of this whole argument is that anti-colonial movements rely on this metaphor, also, so he is tracing its roots here, but he is also going to say that this metaphor isn't working anymore, but I'll get to that in bit) as the "fact that their [Hegel and Fichte] organismic ideas can so easily become ghost of ideology or an instrument of the machine-state suggests that the rationality of life is constutively infected by death...The border between life and death wavers because life necassarily opens itself to an other, which it has to pass through and overcome in order to be self-originating." (117) (I'm sorry, but how awesome does all this sound?) So for Hegel, reason can only actualize itself through it's "passage through otherness." (143) Cheah also discusses Hegel's statist argument that "the people out to be defined by the state (159), however, as the states finitude becomes a problem (see the similar problem of teleology and Kant - time is always a problem here) "the organic state requires the supplementation of something other in order to be itself: Voltgeist." (170) That is the nationalization of Bildung. But the problem is that Voltgeist in its vagueness becomes "habitual obedience." (174) Ok, so then on to Marx. I didn't understand the Marx chapter as well as the others, but here goes. So old Marx, he determined "the nation form as a phantomatic ideology that impedes the formation of cosmopolitan proletarian consciousness from a double perspective." (180) But even in Marxist flavored decolonialization, we still get invocations of the nation - what gives? Cheah maintians that Marxist "materialist teleology is organismic...Marx figures the conflict between labor and capital as a struggle between the actual and living and the nonactual, dead, phantom, monstrous, or magical." (197) However, Cheah points out the problem of Marx's utopian (but that isn't the problem - the paradox and the resultant haunting is the problem - or the production, I guess), "confidence in the eventual return of all prostheses to humanity...simply put, the original possibility of alienation inheres in the incarnation process itself, which is thereby haunted." (207)
The book then moves to it's second part - the part about postcoloniality and the end of the organismic metaphor and the ghosts that haunt and undo it. He looks at the national bildungsromane of Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Ngugi wa Thiong'o - In their "attempts to narrate the nation, the interruption of organismic causality is indicated by an uncontrollable recurrence of ghosts and prosthesis that possess or invade the nation's proper organic body. A ghost is that which traverses the border between life and death. The wavering of organic life is quite literarlly the becoming-indeterminate of this border...What is ultimately broached is the realization of freedom itself, of freedom as the self-directed actualization of ideals and the transcendence of finitude. This haunting, which disrupts the teleological time of reason's self actualization, is a type of finitude that blocks transcendence through rational work." (247) He traces the organism in these author's novels - in Pramoedya he notes the difference of good spectrality ("the desacralizing incarnational magic of modern knowledge" (302) and bad spectrality ("a form of techne that cannot be converted and returned back to life"(299)) - however, there is always the possibility of good spectrality going bad - "the possibility of becoming ideology irreducibly marks the nation from within." (304) Further, the nation is constituted by this very possibility as it is its limit - death, finitude. "Life, or the national body, has come face to face with deth in the shape of the colonial state and finds its path blocked. But death is not mere obstacle that can be transcended, removed and subsumed by life. It is a radical finitude that contaminates the national organism from within as its constitutive possbility."(305) So then we have it: "Spectrality, which is the mutual haunting or constitutive interpenetration of nation and state - the opening-up of the living nation to the death-dealing state and vice versa - complicates this topography. It is also the irreducible possibility of the becoming-ideological of nationalism, where the nation becomes a mystification the state deploys in the service of global capital. This should not be understood as a rejection of the decolonizing nation, the uncompleted nationalist project as a vehicle of freedom, or the necessity of the ideal of freedom itself. What it does imply is that the idea of freedom needs to be fundamentally reinvented because the transcendence of finitude or the overcoming of death through collective rational work is enabled by something other to reason and life." (346)
The book ends with an epilogue integrating the ghost of Derrida and Derrida's concept of radical finitude (however, Derrida would not be salvaging the nation from this hauntology - that is Cheah's intervention) that has been with this text the entire way through and leads to what Cheah sees as what comes after (oh, but I am not saying telelogically after) this organismic conception of nation and freedom as transcendence of finitude: "The metaphor that has replaced the living organism as the most apposite figure for freedom today is that of the ghost. It is epitomized by the postcolonial nation, whose haunted life or susceptibility to a kind of death that cannot be unquivocally delimited and transcended suggests the need to reconceptualize freedom's relation to finitude." (383)
Keywords
Nationalism, Death, Life, Freedom, Organism, Philosophy, Haunting, Phantomatic, Substrate.
Other Thoughts
I have to start by saying that this is a spectacular book. I lurved it.For starters, it looks at reason but not in Homi Bhabha's sometimes ambivalence for ambivalence's sake alterity and productive productions of products or whatever, but looks at reason and its workings, its possibilities and even reason's desires, reason here becomes a kind of magic as opposed to reason opposed to magic. That is so awesome and so needed, I think. I have been thinking a lot of time and teleology and death and magic - well, to be honest, time and teleology and death are my bread and butter. I mean, think about it - my fields are about the body that fails and narrative. I've always had this feeling that it all came down to time (ok, this is going to be the corniest writing anyone ever dribbled out to the internets, so you have been warned). But anyway, that time is obviously bound up with narrative and the ways that we can understand our very lives is all here in this book and further, so is the positing of death as fundamental to understanding how time is structured, ok, not a revelation...BUT - what I LOVE is the tying of this in with the organic incorporation of the other. And the (im)possibility of the organism. So in a way, this book is totally the jump off (whoa) because it brings me to a point where I want to look at failure and this organismic failure and further, as opposed to a new conception of freedom vis a vis time, i want to use this unbounding of narrative brought by failure, through the encounter with alterity and the other, to find a new way of thinking the body. Ok, obviously, I could never do that because my brains are too small and I am most likely full of shit (always, always, I am full of shit) but seriously, when I grow up, I want to be like this book.
And ok, also, Cheah totally sums up my ethics of organ transplants and life in general in terms of not being an asshole (or not wanting to be called out on being asshole which is why I think everyone does everything) and failure and who gives a crap we are all going to die anyway but that is precisely why we do give a crap, and must, which is almost like something Kilgore Trout might say (or at least the aliens in Slaughter House 5 - so it goes) and why in the end, I do believe in magic:
"Since spectrality also sets teleological time in motion it is not a matter of rejecting the hope that freedom can be actualized through cultural work but of understanding the conditions of the (im)possibility of incarnation. The experience of radical finitude is practical experience that gives rise to imperativity and responsibility. Without or persistence in time, no incarnational work or action and, therefore, no political event, can take place. However, we can never be guaranteed of our own persistence in time beyond any given instant. In each and every moment, we live only in and through the possibility that in another instant, perhaps the next, we might die." (389)
"Because the incarnational process is always figured in organismic terms, this internal possibility of failure is also an interminable dying, haunting that cannot be exorcised." (177)
"This understanding of freedom as the transcendence of finitude and its association with organic life and culture needs to be reassessed today along with the analytical categories that organismic vitalism informs." (230)
"It suggests that any moment of negation necessarily contains within itself that which it negates because it is defined through the act of negation. This means that negation also contains within itself its own negation. The negation of the negation is thereby promised in the future." (315)
"Death is a limit that life can know and comprehend because it has posited this limit within itself, and in its knowing of this limit as its own limit, as a limit proper to or belonging to life, life thereby transcends this limit that is death." (330)
"Reason is the prophylactic secularized humanity deploys to protect itself from finitude." (333)
"Unlike teleology, which always involves a return to the self, messianic affirmation is the sheer loss of self through exposure to an alterity that cannot be anticipated. But this exposure to an alterity that cannot be anticipated. But this exposure to the absolutely other is always presupposed by any teleology for it is the gift of time."(390)
"Given the territorial state's tenacity, dismissing the nation's radical potential for transformatively mediating between the masses' needs and the state leads either to the ludicrous celebration of the transntional migrant's resistent hybridity, or the utopian characterization of subaltern politics as a subversive negativity that disrupts institutional practices. Hybrid resistance is only feasible for arriviste formerly colonial academics." (303)
ummm...Daaaaammmnnn.
Other QE Works Cited
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality (History and Theory of the Body)
Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor. Dialectic of Enlightenment (Film and Media Studies)
Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Cheah, Pheng. Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.
Field
Postcolonial Asian American Studies
Summary
Pheng Cheah's Spectral Nationality is a philosophical history of the concept of freedom as conceived within organismic political bodies. The book is split into two parts. The first charts the roots of the organismic metaphor for community, sorting out misconceptions of it's beginings in German Romanticism (tainting it as part of the past of fascist nationalism) and rather, situates it in the trajectory of German Idealism. As opposed to the mechanistic metaphor for community immagined by Locke or Rousseau (think social contract) the organistic metaphor is a means for individual freedom within a bounded, organically functioning whole (think body metaphors here). He begins with Kant's transcendental freedom and culture (through Bildung) as the means of realizing that freedom - "Culture is a crucial agent for the realization of freedom because of its incarnational causality...This ability to transform and improve human nature through rational endeavor, which cannot be understood solely in terms of mechanical causality, implies that humanity possesses a degree of freedom from nature." (41) Oh by the way, the deal with freedom and the organistic is that anything mechanistic has to be put into motion by something outside itself, but the organism, as self-realizing, self-powering, self-incarnating (you get the idea), is obviously (or not so obviously as we shall see in Cheah's sparkling and stunningly awesome conclusion) more free. "All political forms that rely on the organismic metaphor are different models intended to provide the optimal institutional basis for the auto-causality of freedom, these forms have as their common substrate a dynamic that subordinates death and artiface to organic life. That which has the capacity to regenerate itself spontaneously lives forever in some form or other. Hence, that which is free is that which has eternal life." (59) Anyways, I should also mention that this book is about life and death, this is premised on the basic idea that freedom is the transcendence of finitude. Ok, so culture is the process of the transcendence of finitude (the bland idea here is like, a work of art living forever even if the artist is dead) but this can extend to the idea of the nation, right? Bildung is what creates culture (bildung being reason's auto-causality) Also, should mention Aristotilean distinctions between physis and techne because this will be important - you know, that techne must always be mimic of physis. Ok, but getting back to Kant, while Cheah acknowledges the importance of his contribution to the history of the organismic metaphor, he points out the weird temporal space produced by Kant's insistence on the organism as an end in itself and yet, this is totally screwed by the teleology of bildung/reason (at least, I think that is what it is screwed by). "We need the existence of organisms so that we can postulate the purposive nature as ground for actualizing our freedom from the mechanism of nature. But such a ground is thereby also a means towards a higher end that lies beyond it. Paradoxically, we need nature to be independent of us so that it can finally be subjected to us via the technic of judgement!" (106) Ok so what does this mean to the organismic metaphor? "The organismic metaphor of the social and political body attempts to ground human transcendence in the purposiveness of organic life as a phenomenal analouge of moral reason's spontaneous auto-causality. But life itself turns out to be the gift of an inhuman techne that exceeds the causality of human reason. This means that the organism's teleological time is contaminated at its origin by a certain otherness." (113)
Cheah then has to deal with Fichte and Hegel, especially since this is the tricky part of the organismic metaphor that he will later link to anti-colonial movements (I realized that I didn't mention that at the beginning - part of this whole argument is that anti-colonial movements rely on this metaphor, also, so he is tracing its roots here, but he is also going to say that this metaphor isn't working anymore, but I'll get to that in bit) as the "fact that their [Hegel and Fichte] organismic ideas can so easily become ghost of ideology or an instrument of the machine-state suggests that the rationality of life is constutively infected by death...The border between life and death wavers because life necassarily opens itself to an other, which it has to pass through and overcome in order to be self-originating." (117) (I'm sorry, but how awesome does all this sound?) So for Hegel, reason can only actualize itself through it's "passage through otherness." (143) Cheah also discusses Hegel's statist argument that "the people out to be defined by the state (159), however, as the states finitude becomes a problem (see the similar problem of teleology and Kant - time is always a problem here) "the organic state requires the supplementation of something other in order to be itself: Voltgeist." (170) That is the nationalization of Bildung. But the problem is that Voltgeist in its vagueness becomes "habitual obedience." (174) Ok, so then on to Marx. I didn't understand the Marx chapter as well as the others, but here goes. So old Marx, he determined "the nation form as a phantomatic ideology that impedes the formation of cosmopolitan proletarian consciousness from a double perspective." (180) But even in Marxist flavored decolonialization, we still get invocations of the nation - what gives? Cheah maintians that Marxist "materialist teleology is organismic...Marx figures the conflict between labor and capital as a struggle between the actual and living and the nonactual, dead, phantom, monstrous, or magical." (197) However, Cheah points out the problem of Marx's utopian (but that isn't the problem - the paradox and the resultant haunting is the problem - or the production, I guess), "confidence in the eventual return of all prostheses to humanity...simply put, the original possibility of alienation inheres in the incarnation process itself, which is thereby haunted." (207)
The book then moves to it's second part - the part about postcoloniality and the end of the organismic metaphor and the ghosts that haunt and undo it. He looks at the national bildungsromane of Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Ngugi wa Thiong'o - In their "attempts to narrate the nation, the interruption of organismic causality is indicated by an uncontrollable recurrence of ghosts and prosthesis that possess or invade the nation's proper organic body. A ghost is that which traverses the border between life and death. The wavering of organic life is quite literarlly the becoming-indeterminate of this border...What is ultimately broached is the realization of freedom itself, of freedom as the self-directed actualization of ideals and the transcendence of finitude. This haunting, which disrupts the teleological time of reason's self actualization, is a type of finitude that blocks transcendence through rational work." (247) He traces the organism in these author's novels - in Pramoedya he notes the difference of good spectrality ("the desacralizing incarnational magic of modern knowledge" (302) and bad spectrality ("a form of techne that cannot be converted and returned back to life"(299)) - however, there is always the possibility of good spectrality going bad - "the possibility of becoming ideology irreducibly marks the nation from within." (304) Further, the nation is constituted by this very possibility as it is its limit - death, finitude. "Life, or the national body, has come face to face with deth in the shape of the colonial state and finds its path blocked. But death is not mere obstacle that can be transcended, removed and subsumed by life. It is a radical finitude that contaminates the national organism from within as its constitutive possbility."(305) So then we have it: "Spectrality, which is the mutual haunting or constitutive interpenetration of nation and state - the opening-up of the living nation to the death-dealing state and vice versa - complicates this topography. It is also the irreducible possibility of the becoming-ideological of nationalism, where the nation becomes a mystification the state deploys in the service of global capital. This should not be understood as a rejection of the decolonizing nation, the uncompleted nationalist project as a vehicle of freedom, or the necessity of the ideal of freedom itself. What it does imply is that the idea of freedom needs to be fundamentally reinvented because the transcendence of finitude or the overcoming of death through collective rational work is enabled by something other to reason and life." (346)
The book ends with an epilogue integrating the ghost of Derrida and Derrida's concept of radical finitude (however, Derrida would not be salvaging the nation from this hauntology - that is Cheah's intervention) that has been with this text the entire way through and leads to what Cheah sees as what comes after (oh, but I am not saying telelogically after) this organismic conception of nation and freedom as transcendence of finitude: "The metaphor that has replaced the living organism as the most apposite figure for freedom today is that of the ghost. It is epitomized by the postcolonial nation, whose haunted life or susceptibility to a kind of death that cannot be unquivocally delimited and transcended suggests the need to reconceptualize freedom's relation to finitude." (383)
Keywords
Nationalism, Death, Life, Freedom, Organism, Philosophy, Haunting, Phantomatic, Substrate.
Other Thoughts
I have to start by saying that this is a spectacular book. I lurved it.For starters, it looks at reason but not in Homi Bhabha's sometimes ambivalence for ambivalence's sake alterity and productive productions of products or whatever, but looks at reason and its workings, its possibilities and even reason's desires, reason here becomes a kind of magic as opposed to reason opposed to magic. That is so awesome and so needed, I think. I have been thinking a lot of time and teleology and death and magic - well, to be honest, time and teleology and death are my bread and butter. I mean, think about it - my fields are about the body that fails and narrative. I've always had this feeling that it all came down to time (ok, this is going to be the corniest writing anyone ever dribbled out to the internets, so you have been warned). But anyway, that time is obviously bound up with narrative and the ways that we can understand our very lives is all here in this book and further, so is the positing of death as fundamental to understanding how time is structured, ok, not a revelation...BUT - what I LOVE is the tying of this in with the organic incorporation of the other. And the (im)possibility of the organism. So in a way, this book is totally the jump off (whoa) because it brings me to a point where I want to look at failure and this organismic failure and further, as opposed to a new conception of freedom vis a vis time, i want to use this unbounding of narrative brought by failure, through the encounter with alterity and the other, to find a new way of thinking the body. Ok, obviously, I could never do that because my brains are too small and I am most likely full of shit (always, always, I am full of shit) but seriously, when I grow up, I want to be like this book.
And ok, also, Cheah totally sums up my ethics of organ transplants and life in general in terms of not being an asshole (or not wanting to be called out on being asshole which is why I think everyone does everything) and failure and who gives a crap we are all going to die anyway but that is precisely why we do give a crap, and must, which is almost like something Kilgore Trout might say (or at least the aliens in Slaughter House 5 - so it goes) and why in the end, I do believe in magic:
"Since spectrality also sets teleological time in motion it is not a matter of rejecting the hope that freedom can be actualized through cultural work but of understanding the conditions of the (im)possibility of incarnation. The experience of radical finitude is practical experience that gives rise to imperativity and responsibility. Without or persistence in time, no incarnational work or action and, therefore, no political event, can take place. However, we can never be guaranteed of our own persistence in time beyond any given instant. In each and every moment, we live only in and through the possibility that in another instant, perhaps the next, we might die." (389)
"Because the incarnational process is always figured in organismic terms, this internal possibility of failure is also an interminable dying, haunting that cannot be exorcised." (177)
"This understanding of freedom as the transcendence of finitude and its association with organic life and culture needs to be reassessed today along with the analytical categories that organismic vitalism informs." (230)
"It suggests that any moment of negation necessarily contains within itself that which it negates because it is defined through the act of negation. This means that negation also contains within itself its own negation. The negation of the negation is thereby promised in the future." (315)
"Death is a limit that life can know and comprehend because it has posited this limit within itself, and in its knowing of this limit as its own limit, as a limit proper to or belonging to life, life thereby transcends this limit that is death." (330)
"Reason is the prophylactic secularized humanity deploys to protect itself from finitude." (333)
"Unlike teleology, which always involves a return to the self, messianic affirmation is the sheer loss of self through exposure to an alterity that cannot be anticipated. But this exposure to an alterity that cannot be anticipated. But this exposure to the absolutely other is always presupposed by any teleology for it is the gift of time."(390)
"Given the territorial state's tenacity, dismissing the nation's radical potential for transformatively mediating between the masses' needs and the state leads either to the ludicrous celebration of the transntional migrant's resistent hybridity, or the utopian characterization of subaltern politics as a subversive negativity that disrupts institutional practices. Hybrid resistance is only feasible for arriviste formerly colonial academics." (303)
ummm...Daaaaammmnnn.
Other QE Works Cited
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality (History and Theory of the Body)
Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor. Dialectic of Enlightenment (Film and Media Studies)
Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
# posted by SMRT : 9:19 PM
