Spanos

The Question of Philosophy and Poiesis in the PosthistoricalAge: Thinking/Imagining the Shadow of Metaphysics

William V. Spanos

boundary 2, Volume 27, Number 1, Spring 2000, pp. 151-174 (Article)

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The Question of Philosophy and Poiesis in the PosthistoricalAge: Thinking/Imagining the Shadow of Metaphysics

William V. Spanos

The widely and rapidly spreading devastation of language not onlyundermines aesthetic and moral responsibility in every use of lan-guage; it arises from a threat to the essence of humanity. . . . Muchbemoaned of late, and much too lately, the downfall of languageis, however, not the grounds for, but already a consequence of, thestate of affairs in which language under the dominance of the mod-ern metaphysics of subjectivity almost irremediably falls out of itselement. Language still denies us its essence: that it is the houseof Being. Instead, language surrenders itself to our mere willing andtrafficking as an instrument of domination over beings.—Martin Heidegger, ‘‘Letter on Humanism,’’ Basic Writings

We had to destroy Ben Tre in order to save it.—An American military officer as reported by Michael Herr, Dis-patches

boundary 2 27:1, 2000. Copyright © 2000 by Duke University Press.

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If there is anything that contemporary history—especially the Viet-nam War—and the theory that in large part was instigated by it have dis-closed to this postmodern generation of critics, it is that the European con-sciousness, which has become the ‘‘burden’’ of an ‘‘exceptionalist’’ Americato assume in the face of its ‘‘betrayal’’ by the ‘‘Old World,’’ is essentially animperial consciousness, insofar as it has, from the beginning, been orientedby a metaphysical perspective. This is the perspective that perceives thedifferential being of being meta ta physika, from after or above its dissemi-nations, which is to say, from a panoptic perspective outside of and beyondtime that, from that distance, reduces time to space, its anxiety-provokingintangibility to a region or domain to be grasped and mastered. This his-tory and the theory it enabled have also disclosed that literature, from thebeginning of the Western tradition, has been complicitous with philosophy(and with knowledge production, in general) in the formation of this imperialEuropean consciousness. This is because the ideal European text mirrorsin microcosmic form the macrocosm posited by the speculative metaphysi-cal consciousness, that is, because this metatext is informed by a principleof presence that forcibly reduces time and the differences that time dissemi-nates to an appearance that occludes its structure. By ‘‘the beginning of theWestern tradition,’’ I mean, with Martin Heidegger, that founding epochalmoment when the Romans translated the Greek understanding of truthas unconcealment (a-letheia) to veritas, the correspondence of mind andthing; when, in other words, the originative and thus always errant thinkingof the Greeks was reduced to a derivative, end-oriented mode of inquiry(paideia) that was intended to inculcate virtu in the citizens of Rome andto render Rome the imperial metropolis of the orbis terrarum.1 Despite thisknowledge, however, the postmodern occasion has not adequately thoughtthese revolutionary disclosures. To put it more specifically, we have not fullyregistered the cultural and political global significance of the knowledge dis-closed by a contemporary theory that was instigated in large part by theself-de-structive practices of the West—particularly by the United States—in the last half of the twentieth century.

This failure of contemporary theory to adequately think the ‘‘other’’ of

1. See Martin Heidegger, ‘‘Letter on Humanism,’’ in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell,rev. and exp. (New York: Harper and Row, 1993), 224–25; and Heidegger, Parmenides,trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1992), 39–49.

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the world interpreted according to the thingness of beings—what, in somesense, we knew even before the Vietnam War by way of the disclosuresnot simply of the Heidegger of Being and Time but also of such writers asFranz Kafka (The Castle), Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea), Nathalie Sarraute(Portrait of a Man Unknown), Jorge Luis Borges (‘‘The Garden of the ForkingPaths’’), Eugène Ionesco (Victims of Duty), Harold Pinter (The Homecom-ing), Samuel Beckett (Watt), Jean Genet (The Blacks), Ralph Ellison (TheInvisible Man), and LeRoi Jones (Dutchman and the Slave), all, and more,of whom were spontaneously committed to exposing the will to power overthe being of being informing the accommodational tradition that has privi-leged closure—is symptomatically reflected in two related contemporarycurrents of cultural transformation. I am referring, first, to the prematurelydecisive turn in oppositional discourse away from ‘‘destructive’’ or ‘‘decon-structive’’ thinking to what is now called ‘‘cultural,’’ which includes ‘‘postcolo-nial,’’ criticism and to a recuperated form of Marxism; and, second, to theanalogous reaction in the domain of literary writing and publishing againstthe de-centered, open-ended, and errant forms of postmodern poiesis infavor of the realistic end-oriented literary forms that one once thought post-modern theory and literary practice had decisively delegitimized by showingthese canonical forms to be complicitous with cultural domination.

This failure to think the shadow of—that belongs to—the light ofmetaphysics, if it is acknowledged at all, must not be understood as simplyanother critical moment in the vicissitudes of the rarefied history of Westernphilosophy and literature. It is no accident, I submit, that the marked turnfrom destructive or deconstructive theory to cultural criticism, and from thepostmodern literature of errancy to the literature of hyperrealism, has oc-curred simultaneously in the wake of the end of the cold war, that, indeed,this turn has been enabled by the systematic obliteration of the memory ofthe Vietnam War by the American culture industry—synecdochically repre-sented in the aftermath of the Gulf War in 1991 as ‘‘kicking the Vietnamsyndrome’’—and by the annunciation of the ‘‘end of history’’ and the ‘‘ad-vent of the New World Order’’ presided over by ‘‘America,’’ if not the UnitedStates. We might say, by the proclamation of the Pax Americana.

In the following intervention, I will address the question: Whither phi-losophy and literature in the wake of the current momentum ‘‘against [post-modern] theory?’’ 2 This is a question, I suggest, that has been instigated

2. Walter Benn Michaels and Stephen Knapp, ‘‘Against Theory,’’ Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4(1982): 723–42. For the Marxist version of this turn against postmodern theory, see Terry

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precisely by this specific amnesiac post–cold war history. I will attempt—all too briefly, but I hope suggestively—to think the global significance ofthis turn from ‘‘theory’’ (by which I mean philosophical de-centering and in-determinacy) and the literature of open form (by which I mean narrativeerrancy) in the context of the massive and sustained thirty-year representa-tional project of the dominant liberal capitalist culture to forget the epochalevent called ‘‘Vietnam’’ and to recuperate and reaffirm the historical legiti-macy of the ontological principles of liberal capitalist democracy in the wakeof the cold war. My purpose in attempting to think the global implications ofthis turn from the polyvalent postmodern initiative as it came to be under-stood in the period between World War II and the Vietnam War is to retrievethe revolutionary initiative to rethink thinking/poiesis inaugurated, if not sat-isfactorily worked out, by Heidegger. I am referring to his de-centering ofthe imperial ontological center in Being and Time and his disclosure of thecomplicity between Western philosophy, that is, metaphysics, and the im-perial project in the Parmenides lectures delivered in the winter semester of1942–1943. This was the antimetaphysical, or, put positively, the postmod-ern or posthumanist, initiative reconstellated into the imperialist historicalcontext (which included the Algerian War, the Indochina War, and the Viet-nam War) that precipitated the events of May 1968 first by Jacques Derridaand Jacques Lacan and then, after and against its disabling rarefaction anddisciplining in the hands of their American literary critical followers—Paulde Man, Jonathan Culler, J. Hillis Miller, Joseph Riddel, Barbara Johnson—by other more politically oriented poststructuralists, such as Jean-FrançoisLyotard, Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault. In what fol-lows, I will overdetermine philosophy. But it should always be kept in mindthat this inaugural postmodern philosophical initiative in thinking parallels—indeed, draws its inspiration in large part from—the contemporaneous anti-mimetological literary initiative to destroy narrative or, more precisely, thestructure of narrative, privileged by the Western literary tradition since Aris-totle’s Poetics or, rather, since the romanization—especially in the so-calledRenaissance—of Aristotle’s Poetics.

Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); Timothy Bewes, Cyn-icism and Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1997); and the essays collected in Ellen Meik-sins Wood and John Bellamy Foster, In Defense of History: Marxism and the PostmodernAgenda (New York: Monthly Review, 1997).

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The American culture industry’s representation of the end of the coldwar has not simply entailed the establishment of the new world order pre-sided over by ‘‘America’’; more importantly, it has also entailed the comple-tion of the narrative of world history. The end of the cold war, according tothe intellectual deputies of the ‘‘triumphant’’ culture, has brought history toits close in precipitating liberal capitalist democracy as the end of the dialec-tical process of Universal History. This, for example, is the Hegelian thesisof Francis Fukuyama’s highly mediatized book, The End of History and theLast Man, which, as Derrida has tellingly emphasized, announces this finaland all-incorporative synthesis (Aufhebung) in the eschatological Christianmetaphorics of ‘‘good news’’:3

The fact that there will be [after the decisive triumph of liberal capital-ist democracy in the cold war] setbacks and disappointments in theprocess of democratization, or that not every market economy willprosper, should not distract us from the larger pattern that is emerg-ing in world history. . . .

What is emerging victorious, in other words, is not so much liberalpractice, as the liberal idea. That is to say, for a very large part of theworld, there is now no ideology with pretensions to universality thatis in a position to challenge liberal democracy, and no universal prin-ciple of legitimacy other than the sovereignty of the people. Monar-chism in its various forms had been largely defeated by the beginningof this century. Fascism and communism, liberal democracy’s maincompetitors up till now, have been both discredited themselves.4

This euphoric representation of the end of the cold war by one of theintellectual deputies of the dominant culture has been modified, of course,under the pressure of world events since the apparently decisive defeat ofthe Iraqi army in the Gulf War: the genocidal ethnic strife in the former Yugo-slavia, the political instability and violence in much of central and southernAfrica, the bloody struggle between a secular state and religious funda-mentalists in Algeria, the continuing tensions between East and West in the

3. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992),xviii. For Derrida’s critique, see Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work ofMourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994),56–65.4. Fukuyama, End of History, 45.

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Middle East, not least, the reaffirmation of Iraqi sovereignty against the U.S.threat of intervention. Indeed, reference to the end of history and the newworld order have all but disappeared from both mediatic and theoretical rep-resentations of the contemporary occasion. But this modification should beinterpreted not as a tacit admission of the illegitimacy of the end-of-historydiscourse but rather as an accommodation of these contradictory events toits global scenario, an accommodation that, in fact, renders this banal end-of-history discourse more powerful insofar as its apparent acknowledgmentof the historical specificity of events obscures its real metaphysical basis.

This accommodational strategy of representation, for example, isepitomized by Richard Haass, a former official in the Bush administrationand now director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institute, in his re-cent book, The Reluctant Sheriff: The United States after the Cold War.5 Es-chewing Fukuyama’s vulnerable Hegelian eschatological structure in favorof theorizing the actual practices of the United States in the internationalsphere, Haass frames the post–cold war occasion in the totalizing liberalcapitalist image of a ‘‘deregulated world’’ (in contrast to the world ‘‘regu-lated’’ by the cold war scenario) and the role of the United States as that ofa sheriff leading posses (the appropriate members of the United Nations orthe NATO alliance) to quell the threats to global stability and peace posedby this international deregulation. Despite the acknowledgment that conflictis inevitable in the world ‘‘after the cold war’’ (an acknowledgment that, infact, echoes Fukuyama), the triumphant (ontological) idea of liberal capital-ist democracy—its ontologically grounded commitment to the ‘‘laissez-faire’’polity (deregulation), which is to say, to the fictional concept of the sovereignsubject—remains intact. Indeed, Haass gives this representational frame-work far more historical power than Fukuyama’s disciplinary discourse ofpolitical science is able to muster. For, unlike the Fukuyamans, he informshis representation of the historically determined and determining excep-tionalist mission of the United States in the globalized post–cold war erawith the teleological metaphorics that have been, from the beginning, fun-damental to the constitution and power of the American cultural identity.The metaphor of the sheriff/posse derives from the history of the Ameri-can West and constitutes a variation of the pacification processes of west-ward expansion. As such, it brings with it the entire ideological baggage ofthe teleological myth of the American frontier, from the Puritans’ ‘‘errand in

5. Richard N. Haass, The Reluctant Sheriff: The United States after the Cold War (NewYork: Council on Foreign Relations; distributed by Brookings Institute, 1997).

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the [‘New World’] wilderness’’ to the myth of Manifest Destiny. As the NewAmericanist countermemory has persuasively shown, this is the myth thathas saturated the cultural discourse of America, both high and low, since itsorigins: whether in the form of the American jeremiad, which, from the Puri-tans through Daniel Webster to Ronald Reagan, has functioned perenniallyto maintain the national consensus vis-à-vis its providentially ordained mis-sion to domesticate (and dominate) what is beyond the frontier, or of theHollywood western (including its military allotrope), which has functioned tonaturalize what one New Americanist has called the American ‘‘victory cul-ture.’’ 6 The virtually unchallenged official and mediatic representation of theself-righteous militaristic solution of the crisis in Kosovo—a representationthat reiteratively justifies the devastation of Serbia and the terrible ‘‘collat-eral damage’’ this violence necessarily entails—as a ‘‘just, humanitarian’’war undertaken by the United States under the alias of NATO bears witnessto the historical reality of this myth, to its irresistible durability (despite itsself-destruction in the 1960s), and to its inordinate power.

What the presently privileged oppositional discourses are blindedto by their binarist and exclusionary turn from theory to praxis is, to putit bluntly, the relationship of this recuperative representation of the post–cold war period to the Vietnam War, a war, not incidentally, that, as Presi-dent John F. Kennedy’s equation of Southeast Asia as ‘‘the new frontier’’suggests, was, from the beginning of the United States’ intervention, repre-sented in the exceptionalist terms of the founding American myth of thefrontier: the providentially ordained ‘‘errand in the wilderness.’’ 7 Or, rather,

6. See Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of WisconsinPress, 1978); and Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and theDisillusioning of a Generation (New York: Basic, 1995). See also Richard Slotkin, Regen-eration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middle-town, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), The Fatal Environment: The Myth of theFrontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985), andGunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York:Atheneum, 1992); Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating andEmpire-Building, rev. ed. (New York: Schocken, 1990); Donald E. Pease, ed., New Ameri-canists: Revisionist Interventions into the Canon, a special issue of boundary 2 17 (spring1990), esp. the introduction; and William V. Spanos, The Errant Art of Moby-Dick: TheCanon, the Cold War and the Struggle for American Literary Studies (Durham, N.C.: DukeUniversity Press, 1995).7. See John Hellmann, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: Colum-bia University Press, 1986); and William V. Spanos, ‘‘Vietnam and the Pax Americana: AGenealogy of the New World Order,’’ in America’s Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire (Min-neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). As the American Puritan’s fundamental

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it is the thisness—the historical specificity—of the Vietnam War that needsto be put back into play by a discourse that would effectively resist the poly-valent reactionary political implications of this global representation (andhere I am referring specifically to the event of Kosovo).

The triumphalist end-of-history discourse is the precipitate of a mas-sive mnemonic project of the custodians of the American cultural memory,not least the media, to obliterate the memory of the decades-long eventwe call ‘‘Vietnam.’’ This project of forgetting, undertaken by what Althussercalls the ideological state apparatuses, or, alternatively, the liberal capitalistproblematic, was a systematic one that began with the reduction of the this-ness of the Vietnam War to war-in-general and culminated in the oblitera-tion of reference to it in post–cold war representations of American history.This eventuation is symptomatically suggested by the (enforced) visibleabsence of significant reference to the Vietnam War in Fukuyama’s andother triumphalists’ accounts of Universal History’s dialectical fulfillment ofits destined end in the demise of Soviet communism and the global triumphof liberal capitalist democracy, its establishment, as it were, of its imperiumsine fine. But it is made resonantly clear by President George Bush’s an-nouncement, following what his administration and the media that aped itsrepresentation of that global occasion took to be the decisive American vic-tory in the Persian Gulf, that ‘‘we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome at last.’’ 8

I cannot here fully articulate this integral relationship between theend-of-history discourse (the announcement of the Pax Metaphysica, as itwere) and the historical specificity of the Vietnam War.9 It will have to suf-fice simply to invoke a summary account of the representation of this rela-tionship since the real defeat of the United States in Vietnam. The actualhistory of what I am calling the event of Vietnam begins, despite the con-sistently deliberate official misrepresentation to the American public of theraison d’être of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and of its actual practice, with

reliance on the typological or ‘‘prefigurative’’ hermeneutics of the ‘‘Old World’’ in interpret-ing its mission in the ‘‘New World,’’ a hermeneutics enabled by a providential view of his-tory, suggests, the self-identification of America as exceptionalist—enforced by Alexis deTocqueville’s naïve but tremendously influential announcement of America’s radical politi-cal novelty in Democracy in America and endowed with official status by such Americanhistorians as George Bancroft, Francis Parkman, and Frederick Jackson Turner—is anideological myth that has perennially obscured its continuity with the idea of Europe andits imperial practice, that is, its violent reduction of the other in the name of the Logos,whether in the form of the ‘‘Word’’ of God or of History.8. New York Times, 3 March 1991.9. See ‘‘Vietnam and the Pax Americana,’’ in Spanos, America’s Shadow.

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the activation of a healthy national self-questioning of the perennial mythof American exceptionalism. I mean the consensual political, cultural, andeven ontological assumptions—those that had their fictive origins in thefounding of colonial America and that compelled the American res publicanot simply to interfere in a people’s war in Vietnam, a Third World countrywest of the ‘‘last American frontier,’’ but to undertake something like geno-cide in its arrogantly ethnocentric effort to ‘‘win the hearts and minds’’ of theVietnamese people to the basic (ontological) principles of American democ-racy, in an effort, as it were, to fulfill America’s ‘‘errand in the [Vietnamese]wilderness.’’ But this destructive history was subjected to an ideologicallymotivated rewriting inaugurated by the dominant culture around the timeof the dedication of the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in 1982, a rewritingthat was intended to recuperate the national consensus by ‘‘healing thewound’’ inflicted on the American national identity by the persuasive force ofthe indissolubly related civil rights, peace, and women’s movements in theVietnam decade. Prepared for by the culture industry, most notably Holly-wood’s incremental but inexorable transformation of the originally defeatedand vilified American soldier into the mythic Rambo figure, the cross be-tween Leatherstocking and bionic man, whose defeat in Vietnam is repre-sented as a defeat not by the Vietnamese enemy but as one imposed onhim by an American government corrupted by the un-American values ofthe protest movement, this re-visionary representational narrative achievedclosure with the end of the cold war. This was the moment when the healthynational self-questioning precipitated by the self-destruction of the perenni-ally benign American national identity, having passed through the recupera-tive ‘‘healing-the-wound’’ phase, came to be represented retrospectivelyas a collective psychological sickness that prevented the American soldierfrom winning the war. To put it positively, this recuperative renarrativizationof the actual history of the Vietnam War came to closure when the ‘‘triumph’’of America in the cold war and the apparently decisive defeat of SaddamHussein enabled the dominant culture in America to declare, with a cer-tainty that precluded serious response, that the national consensus disinte-grated by the demagoguery of a small fraction of heretics was reestablishedwhen, in the powerful revisionary trope of that euphoric moment, the sui-cidal national neurosis—‘‘the Vietnam syndrome,’’ or, more decisively, ‘‘theVietnam psychosis’’—had been cured.

In short, the history of the representation of the Vietnam War hasbeen an amnesiac and, insofar as this forgetting is a forgetting of the dif-ference that makes a difference, a banalizing history. In obliterating the

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radically contradictory memory of Vietnam, this forgetful remembering hasenabled the dominant liberal democratic capitalist culture to represent thedenouement of this narrative as the fulfillment of an original promise: asthe end of history and the advent of the Pax Americana. I am invokingthis Latin term to recall the promise/fulfillment structure of Virgil’s Aeneid,which America, like so many other imperial Western nations, appropriated,from the beginning, not simply to justify its ontologically grounded errand inthe Western wilderness but to represent its violent depredations beyond itsfrontiers and its imperium sine fine in the benign image of universal peace.10

What, in other words, has haunted the dominant American culturethroughout the thirty years since the American invasion of Vietnam, whatit would forget at all costs, is the decisively delegitimizing aporia precipi-tated by the fulfillment of the onto-logic of the truth discourse of America.I am referring to the genocidal violence perpetrated by the United Statesagainst the Vietnamese people in the name of ‘‘saving Vietnam’’ for the‘‘free world,’’ the violence synecdochically disclosed by the undeviatinglybanal problem-solving logic of the Pentagon Papers that killed, mutilated,and uprooted millions of Vietnamese people—mostly innocent peasants—destroyed their land, and disintegrated their traditional rice culture. The chill-ing indifference to human life, especially to Vietnamese life, of this utterlyinstrumentalist logic is epitomized in a memorandum McGeorge Bundy, onhis return from a ‘‘fact-finding’’ visit to Vietnam, wrote to President John-son (7 February 1965), recommending the initiation of a full-scale bombingcampaign against North Vietnam:

We believe that the best available way of increasing our chance ofsuccess in Vietnam is the development and execution of a policy ofsustained reprisal against North Vietnam—a policy in which air andnaval action against the North is justified by and related to the wholeViet Cong campaign of violence and terror in the South.

While we believe that the risks of such a policy are acceptable,we emphasize that its costs are real. It implies significant U.S. airlosses even if no full air war is joined, and it seems likely that it wouldeventually require an extensive and costly effort against the wholeair defense system of North Vietnam.

Yet measured against the costs of defeat in Vietnam, this program

10. For an in-depth study of the West’s appropriation of The Aeneid to justify its perenni-ally imperial project, see Richard Waswo, The Founding Legend of Western Civilization:From Virgil to Vietnam (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1997).

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seems cheap. And even if it fails to turn the tide—as it may—thevalue of the effort seems to us to exceed its cost.11

The sublime inhumanity of this mindless cost-efficiency logic—the ‘‘bestand the brightest’’ in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations called it‘‘can-do’’ thinking12—cannot help but recall Hannah Arendt’s resonant, butstill to be understood, attribution of the horrifically murderous role AdolphEichmann, the Nazi functionary, played in the accomplishment of the FinalSolution, not to evil as it has been traditionally understood in the West but tothe utter banalization of thinking incumbent on the triumph of instrumentalthinking in the Third Reich:

The immediate impulse [for my preoccupation with thinking in TheLife of the Mind ] came from my attending the Eichmann trial in Jeru-salem. In my report of it I spoke of ‘‘the banality of evil.’’ . . . [W]hatI was confronted with was utterly different [from what the traditionalconcept of evil led one to expect] and still undeniably factual. I wasstruck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossibleto trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level ofroots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer . . . wasquite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specificevil motives, and the only notable characteristic one could detect inhis past behavior during the trial and throughout the pre-trial policeexamination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity butthoughtlessness.13

To reconstellate this epochal, yet still to be adequately thought, dis-closure into the amnesiac, triumphalist post–cold war context, what hasmenaced the discourse of America ever since the ‘‘benign’’ intervention ofthe United States in Vietnam began manifesting itself in the destructionof the Vietnamese earth and its culture, and the indiscriminate—routin-ized—killing of Vietnamese people in order to ‘‘save Vietnam’’ is the specter

11. McGeorge Bundy to President Lyndon Johnson, The Pentagon Papers, ed. George C.Herring, abr. ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), 109. See Richard Ohmann, English inAmerica: A Radical View of the Profession (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976),190–206; and William V. Spanos, ‘‘The University in the Vietnam Decade,’’ in The Endof Education: Toward Posthumanism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993),162–86.12. David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972), 265.13. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1979), 3–4.

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of its delegitimation, not simply (I want to emphasize) at the site of poli-tics but all across the indissoluble continuum that comprises being as awhole, from the ontological through the linguistic and cultural, to the politi-cal sites. In short, what haunts America is the specter of an epistemicbreak. I mean, more precisely, the specter understood as that polyvalentdifferential ‘‘reality’’ that the constructed reality of empirical/technologicalthinking—Americanism, that is, metaphysics in its late, triumphant imperialmode—cannot finally accommodate to its instrumentalist ‘‘world picture.’’The singular event of Vietnam—its recalcitrant refusal to be reduced to ‘‘warin general’’—would deconstruct the dominant American culture’s represen-tation of world history in the aftermath of the cold war as ‘‘the end of his-tory.’’ That is why the intellectual deputies of this culture, like Fukuyama andHaass, the culture industry and the information agencies that have madethem international luminaries in the domain of thought, and the corporateexponents of the ‘‘free’’ global market have been compelled at all cost toobliterate the event of Vietnam from their recuperative teleological historicalnarratives.

What I want to underscore, in other words, is that the dominant lib-eral democratic/capitalist culture’s representation of the post–cold war asthe advent of the peace of the new world order must be understood notsimply as the global triumph of an economic-political system. Equally, if notmore, important for the present historical conjuncture, though more difficultto perceive, it must also be understood, as the alignment of this end-of-history discourse with the new (political) world order clearly suggests, asthe global triumph of an indissolubly related onto-logy and its banalizinginstrumentalist language. It must be understood, that is, not simply as thePax Americana but also, and perhaps above all, as the Pax Metaphysica:that teleological representation of being which, unlike all other past repre-sentations, now, at the end of the dialectical historical process, claims to benoncontradictory, that is, devoid of conflict, and which, therefore, rendersany alternative representation of truth—and of the truth of history—in thefuture impossible. In short, it should be understood as the completion ofthe perennial Occidental project that is and, however unevenly in any his-torically specific moment, always has been simultaneously and indissolublyan imperial political practice and an imperial practice of thinking as such,a polyvalent praxis, in other words, the end of which is the enframement,colonization, and reduction of the differential human mind as well as thedifferential human community to disposable reserve.

In his late essays, Heidegger insistently called for the rethinking of

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thinking itself as the first praxis in a ‘‘destitute time,’’ 14 because ‘‘it lies undera double lack and a double Not: the No-more of the gods that have fled andthe Not-yet of the god that is coming.’’ 15 In the process, Heidegger prolepti-cally referred to this representation of being in modernity as the planetarytriumph of technology in the ‘‘age of the world picture.’’ 16 By ‘‘world picture,’’he meant the global triumph of a mode of knowledge production—and thelanguage, the saying, inherent in it—inaugurated by the imperial Romansthat reduces the differential force of the being about which it is inquiringinto an inclusive and naturalized spatial trope: a ‘‘world picture’’ (Weltbild ),or, to invoke an undeveloped but extremely suggestive motif in Foucault’sthought, a ‘‘domain,’’ an ‘‘area,’’ a ‘‘region,’’ a ‘‘field,’’ a ‘‘territory’’ to be con-quered and colonized, as the (Roman/Latin) etymologies of these meta-phors make forcefully clear. ‘‘Region’’ (of knowledge), for example, derivesfrom the Latin regere, ‘‘to command’’; ‘‘domain,’’ from dominus, ‘‘master’’or ‘‘lord’’; ‘‘province,’’ from vincere, ‘‘to conquer.’’ 17 This is what Heidegger

14. Martin Heidegger, ‘‘What Are Poets For?’’ in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. anded. Richard Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 91.15. Martin Heidegger, ‘‘Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,’’ trans. Douglas Scott, in Exis-tence and Being, ed. Werner Brock (London: Vision, 1968), 413.16. Martin Heidegger, ‘‘The Age of the World Picture,’’ in The Question Concerning Tech-nology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977).17. In the Parmenides, Heidegger writes that for the Greeks, ‘‘the earth is the in-between,namely, between the concealment of the subterranean and the luminosity, the disclosive-ness, of the superterranean. . . . For the Romans, on the contrary, the earth, tellus, terra,is dry, the land as distinct from the sea; this distinction differentiates that upon whichconstruction, settlement, and installation are possible from those places where they areimpossible. Terra becomes territorium, land of settlement as realm of command. In theRoman terra can be heard an imperial accent, completely foreign to the Greek Gaia andGe’’ (60). In a similar vein, Foucault suggests that ‘‘once knowledge can be analyzed interms of region, domain, implantation, displacement, transportation, one is able to cap-ture the process by which knowledge functions as a form of power and disseminates theeffects of power. There is an administration of knowledge, a politics of knowledge, rela-tions of power which pass via knowledge and which, if one tries to transcribe them, leadone to consider forms of domination designated by such notions as field, region and ter-ritory’’ (‘‘Questions in Geography,’’ in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and OtherWritings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon [New York: Pantheon, 1980], 69). Thinking this,no doubt accidental, correlation between Heidegger’s and Foucault’s identification of thespatialization of the temporality of being in Western knowledge production with imperialistpower, should, I submit, become a major project of the post–cold war. Though Bill Read-ings (among others) has demonstrated the complicity of what he appropriately calls ‘‘theposthistorical university’’ with the globalization of knowledge production in The Universityin Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), he has not adequately perceived

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meant when, in response to his Japanese interlocutor’s reference to theEast’s increasing temptation ‘‘to rely on European ways of representation,’’he said that this ‘‘temptation is reinforced by a process which I would callthe complete Europeanization of the earth and man.’’ 18 It is this fulfillment,or, rather, consummation, of the logical economy of metaphysics that, de-spite the failure of the opposition to hear its claims—not to say the hauntingsilence on which they are based—announces itself at the end of the coldwar as the end of the dialectical historical process and the advent of the endof history. And it is this consummation—this ‘‘end of philosophy,’’ as it were—that calls for the retrieval of Heidegger’s project, or, at any rate, the retrievalof the de-structive or deconstructive initiative instigated by his interroga-tion of instrumental thinking, the anthropological or post-Enlightenment mo-dality of the end-oriented or retro-spective calculative thinking privileged bythe Occidental tradition. This time around, however, the deconstructive ini-tiative should be undertaken with fuller awareness than in the 1960s and1970s of the indissoluble relationship between being and ‘‘the world,’’ be-tween thinking/language and praxis.

For it is not simply that the triumph of metaphysical/technologicalthought in the post–cold war era has ‘‘universalized’’ thinking from aboveor after the-things-themselves—which, say, with Heidegger, has demonized‘‘as unreason’’ ‘‘any thinking which rejects the claim of reason as not origi-nary.’’ 19 In thus delegitimizing every other kind of thinking, actual or imag-inable, than the dialectical/instrumental—and inexorably reductive—think-ing allegedly precipitated by History itself, or, to invoke a language usuallyand disablingly restricted to geopolitics, in thus ‘‘totally’’ colonizing think-ing in general, this metaphysical/technological thought has also, as AntonioGramsci anticipated in thinking the political defeat of his antifascist emanci-

the spatialized/imperial essence and the historical genealogy of the kind of thinking thatcharacterizes ‘‘posthistory.’’ For my critique of Readings, see ‘‘American Studies in the‘Age of the World Picture’: Thinking the Question of Language,’’ in The Future of Ameri-can Studies, ed. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman (Durham, N.C.: Duke UniversityPress, forthcoming).18. Martin Heidegger, ‘‘A Dialogue on Language,’’ in On the Way to Language, trans. PeterD. Hertz (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 15. See also ‘‘The End of Philosophy andthe Task of Thinking,’’ in On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harperand Row, 1972): ‘‘The end of philosophy [in cybernetics] proves to be the triumph of themanipulable arrangement of a scientific-technological world and the social order properto this world. The end of philosophy means: the beginning of the world civilization basedupon Western European thinking’’ (59).19. Heidegger, ‘‘Dialogue on Language,’’ 15.

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patory movement in the early part of this century as the interregnum, madeit virtually impossible for an adversarial constituency to oppose the imperialdiscourse in other than the latter’s terms. To be recognized, an adversarialdiscourse and practice must be answerable to the triumphant imperial modeof instrumental thinking. In this ‘‘posthistorical’’ era, Fukuyama arrogantlyobserves, ‘‘even non-democrats will have to speak the language of democ-racy in order to justify their deviation from the single universal standard.’’ 20

The highly remarked impasse of the now privileged left-oriented thinking inthe face of the triumphalism of the post–cold war liberal capitalist discourse,whether that of neo-Marxism or new historicism or feminism or cultural criti-cism or postcolonial criticism or even that globally oriented ‘‘posthistorical’’discourse that would ‘‘dwell in the ruins’’ of the corporatized university, bearstelling witness to this ominous condition. So, too, not incidentally, does thespectacle of university presses (such as Harvard, Yale, and Duke, to namethe most prestigious of these)—the traditional forums at least for origina-tive, nuanced, and densely articulated thinking—competing with the cultureindustry in the global marketplace.

This impasse, it should be added, is also repeated, if far more indi-rectly, in the serious literature of our late post-postmodern occasion. I amreferring to the market-induced nostalgia for closure that, not accidentally,accompanied the will of the American cultural memory to finally forget Viet-nam in the late 1970s and the 1980s. Reconstellated into the end-of-historycontext, this marked recuperative initiative comes to be seen as a turn-ing away from the exploration of the aesthetic, ethical, cultural, and socio-political implications of the open and errant forms so characteristic of post-modern American writing in the 1950s and 1960s in favor of a neorealismthat, whatever its ideological intentions, reproduces in miniature the com-pleted world represented by the end-of-history discourse. More precisely,it comes to be seen as the abandonment of the quest—so fundamental,however symptomatic, to such American novelists as Jack Kerouac, Ellison,Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, Robert Coover, JerzyKosinski, William Gaddis, and to such poets as William Carlos Williams,Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Edward Dorn, Allen Gins-berg, Denise Levertov, David Antin, Jerome Rothenberg, Gary Snyder, andAmiri Baraka, for what Herman Melville before them called ‘‘the voice ofsilence’’ in the face of the banalization of poiesis incumbent on the trans-formation of being into a technologized ‘‘world picture’’ (specifically the cold

20. Fukuyama, End of History, 45.

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war scenario of which McCarthyism was a notorious subdivision). By thevoice of silence, I mean, with the Melville of Pierre; or The Ambiguities, alanguage that is immune to the accommodational strategy of the imperialnationalist discourse of mimetic realism. There are, of course, exceptionsto this debilitating post–cold war momentum: Pynchon, E. L. Doctorow,Coover, Don DeLillo, Kathy Acker, Leslie Marmon Silko, Toni Morrison, Ish-mael Reed, for example. But to find open-ended experimental writing that iseffective as a form of linguistic, cultural, and political resistance, one must,tellingly, look elsewhere than North America, or, for that matter, the West.One must, that is, look to writers of postcolonial or Third World societies, or,rather, since even most of these are ideologically committed to representingresistance in the self-defeating nationalist language of realism, to writers ofthe diaspora precipitated by the ravages of the Western imperial project: toSalman Rushdie, J. M. Coetzee, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ntozake Shange, JessicaTarahata Hagedorn, Maryse Conde, Mahmud Darwish, for example, whosepoiesis, like their very physical being, haunts not simply the imperialist prac-tice that estranged them from a homeland but also the hegemonic lan-guage, the saying, that is complicitous with, if not the basis of, that practice.

3

Critical theory has to be communicated in its own language—the lan-guage of contradiction, dialectical in form as well as in content: thelanguage of the critique of the totality, of the critique of history. Notsome ‘‘writing degree zero’’—just the opposite. Not the negation ofstyle, but the style of negation.—Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

What, then, it will be asked, would a thinking and poiesis that is ade-quate to the negative conditions of the post–cold war global occasion belike? Given the scope and depth of the imperial context I have described, itwould be presumptuous to make such a projection. But what can be done—what these negative conditions of thought and poiesis that have been pre-cipitated by ‘‘the end of philosophy’’ and its concomitant banalization of vio-lence against all manner of the Other call for doing in this interregnum—isto think their negativity positively. Or, rather, they call for the reconstellationof the by now abandoned inaugural Heideggerian initiative to interrogatethe ontological foundation of Western thought into the global post–cold warcontext, in which, it is alleged, history has come to its plenary end and,

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despite manifestations to the contrary as in Yugoslavia, the promised newworld order has arrived. More precisely, these now visible negations call forrethinking the double meaning that Heidegger, in accusing philosophy ofcomplicity with the imperial will to power, gave to this resonant, though yetto be fully understood, word thinking. The announcement of this imperativeto think the nothing that belongs to being positively, significantly, was notlimited to Heidegger, the theorist of being, or to those ontological thinkershis thought catalyzed, such as Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Lyotard, Lacan,Luce Irigaray (and, in an even earlier, but equally pertinent, context, Arendt).To remind those praxis-oriented Marxist critics, such as Terry Eagleton andPerry Anderson, who will have nothing to do with Heidegger and ‘‘Heideg-gerianism,’’ the imperative to rethink thinking itself was also fundamentalto Gramsci, the Marxist philosopher of praxis, who, as Paul Bové has re-minded us, ‘‘facing the undeniable fact of his movement’s political defeat . . .thinks the need to think differently [in the interregnum], to think anew in re-sponse to a singular present [what] his own prior (Marxist) thought had notthe categories to theorize or to understand.’’ 21 And, as I will suggest, it isfundamental, as well, if variously interpreted, in the late work of Deleuzeand Félix Guattari, Paul Virilio, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,Enrique Dussel, Giorgio Agamben, and, not least, the Derrida of Spectersof Marx.

The fulfillment—the coming to its end—of the logical economy ofmetaphysical thought in the planetary triumph of technology means, aswell, as I have suggested by referring to this arrival as its consummation,the coming to its end not simply in the sense of fulfillment but also ofdemise. The completion of the metaphysical imperial problematic, that is,has rendered visible and active—as radical contradiction—the differencethat finally, because it is temporal/differential, cannot be accommodated by—and therefore is not answerable to—its imperial spatializing/reifying/circu-lar/enlightening/colonizing logic. As Heidegger says in ‘‘What Is Metaphys-ics?’’ concerning the question of the nothing (das Nichts) as it pertains tothe discourse of science prevailing in the age of the world picture: ‘‘Whatis remarkable is that, precisely in the way scientific man secures to himselfwhat is most properly his, he speaks of something different. What [accord-ing to science] should be examined are beings only, and besides that—nothing; beings alone, and further—nothing; solely beings and beyond that

21. Paul A. Bové, foreword to Film, Politics, and Gramsci, by Marcia Landy (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1994), xiv.

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—nothing. What about this nothing? . . . The nothing—what else can it befor science but an outrage and a phantasm? If science is right, then onlyone thing is sure: science wishes to know nothing of the nothing.’’ 22

In the context of the interregnum, this ‘‘in between time,’’ which Hei-degger called ‘‘a time of dearth,’’ and which Arendt, more radically, calleda time that has disclosed the terrible ‘‘banality of evil,’’ the thinker/poet whowould think/imagine the contradiction—the ‘‘something different’’ that be-longs essentially to the saying of instrumentalist reason—becomes the Ab-geschiedene, the stranger, the one who has parted from the homeland,or, rather, is a-part from/of it. According to the deadly imperial measureof the routinzed technological thought of the age of the world picture, thisde-centered and estranged thinker—the Dasein who has been unhomedby the total colonization of thinking by instrumental reason—must be pro-claimed ‘‘the madman,’’ because the (non)‘‘object’’ of his or her ec-centricthinking/poiesis in the domain of the uncanny (die Unheimlichkeit) is ‘‘anoutrage and a phantasm.’’ This, Heidegger implies, was the fate not only ofthe thinker Nietzsche, but also of the poets Friedrich Hölderlin and GeorgTrakl. Though still to be adequately thought in this constellation, it was,mutatis mutandi, also the fate of many other modern and even postmod-ern writers, both in Europe and America (Arthur Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud,Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Genet, Hart Crane, Kerouac, Ginsberg, to name buta few of the most ‘‘notorious’’), who, each in their own way, were symptom-atically searching for a way of saying that could resist the deadly banalityof the leveling imperatives of the triumphant instrumental saying of the ageof the world picture. This, above all, I suggest, explains why the enablingthinkers of the postmodern occasion were profoundly attracted to poets,writers, dramatists, painters, sculptors, and musicians who were ‘‘mad,’’ or,as in the case of Foucault, were profoundly engaged by the phenomenonof madness as it has been represented in and by Enlightenment moder-nity: It was one of the essential purposes of early postmodern literature andtheory to disclose the symbiotic binarist relationship between the vapor-ous silence of the alien and vagrant ‘‘madman’’ and the solid saying of the‘‘sane’’ and sedentary citizen of the homeland. But this disclosive initiativeas such did not fulfill the possibilities for thinking inhering in the erruptionof the phantasmic other of instrumental reason into invisible visibility. Andthis is because this early initiative overdetermined the negative (repressive)effects of instrumental reason and thus precluded the possibility of think-

22. Heidegger, ‘‘What Is Metaphysics?’’ in Basic Writings, 95–96; my emphasis.

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ing the phantasmic in an other than merely symptomatic way.23 It is, despitehis disastrous political blindness, precisely because Heidegger inauguratedthe process of thinking the positive potentialities of the shadow cast by thelight of instrumental reason that the retrieval of his project to rethink think-ing is rendered a political imperative of the opposition in the age of theworld picture, the age that has borne witness to the planetary triumph oftechnological thinking and the utter reduction of its ‘‘object’’ to disposablereserve.

To return to Heidegger, then, the Abgeschiedene, the thinker/poetwho has been estranged from his or her discursive homeland by the total-ization of instrumental thought, is not obliterated from being. On the con-trary, it is precisely at the point of the ‘‘triumph’’ of instrumental thought thatthis alienated exile, like the nothing, returns, as an absent presence to hauntthe centered thought of the metropolitan homeland from which he/she hasbeen driven into exile: as, that is, the non-being which belongs to the truthof metaphysical Being but which this truth will have ‘‘nothing to do with.’’For if saying belongs as an absolute prerogative to the imperial languageof technological thinking, the Abgeschiedene, as the other of this kind ofthought, speaks the unsayable, a language of silence. This silent languageis an ‘‘other’’ language, a language that will not be answerable to the say-ing of the They (das Man), that is, to ‘‘the dictatorship of the public realm,’’of the ‘‘way things have been publicly interpreted,’’ 24 in the totally colonizedhomeland.

Here, in his invocation of the thinker as wandering stranger and his orher silent language as the spectral contradiction that returns to menace theroutinized logical economy of the discourse of the triumphant dominant cul-ture, Heidegger anticipates at the site of thought not only Derrida’s ‘‘trace,’’‘‘différance’’ and ‘‘specter’’; Levinas’s ‘‘absolutely other’’; Lacan’s ‘‘real’’; Lyo-tard’s ‘‘unpresentable’’ and ‘‘differend’’; Althusser’s ‘‘absent cause’’: all thoseintuitions of an other ‘‘reality’’ than that arrogantly asserted by the onto-theological tradition insistently, if only symptomatically, articulated by early

23. See Louis Althusser’s analysis of the ‘‘problematic’’ in ‘‘From Capital to Marx’s Phi-losophy,’’ in Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London: Verso, 1979), for atelling instance of this failure to think the ‘‘shadow’’ (the invisible) of the problematic’s light(the visible) positively. For a sustained ‘‘symptomatic reading’’ of Althusser’s productivefailure, see William V. Spanos, ‘‘Althusser’s ‘Problematic’ in the Context of the VietnamWar: Toward a Spectral Politics,’’ Rethinking Marxism 10 (fall 1998): 1–21.24. Heidegger, ‘‘Letter on Humanism,’’ 221; and Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. JohnMacquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962), 221.

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postmodern theorists. What is more important, because it suggests anindissoluble relationship between theory and praxis that cannot help butcall for thinking, he also anticipates the global antitechnocapitalist politicsof Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘‘nomadology,’’ 25 the global antifascist politics ofAgamben’s Arendt-inspired thought of the global ‘‘state of exception’’ (the‘‘refugee’’),26 and the global postcolonial politics of Homi Bhabha’s conceptof ‘‘hybridity,’’ Spivak’s ‘‘catachrestic’’ subaltern, and Dussel’s ‘‘non-being.’’ 27

Even more suggestively, Heidegger’s Abgeschiedene is, if one makes ex-plicit the implicit relationship between the thinking of this ontological exileand the errant thinking that, according to the Parmenides lectures, was de-cisively transformed by Rome’s reduction of the Greek understanding oftruth as a-letheia (un-concealment) to veritas (the correspondence of mindand thing) in the name of its imperial project, proleptic of the postimperialpolitics that Said tentatively articulates in Culture and Imperialism againstthe global language of the ‘‘administered’’ imperial society.

In the face of the impasse of emancipatory practice in the ‘‘postcolo-nial’’ period, Said, with Deleuze, Virilio, and the Theodor Adorno of MinimaMoralia in mind, calls for ‘‘a new critical consciousness’’ that would takeits lead from the radical transformation of the global demographics precipi-tated by the depredations of modern European imperialism. The imperialproject and its postcolonial aftermath, he observes (in a political rhetoricthat is remarkably like the ontological rhetoric that circulates around Hei-

25. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophre-nia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 351–423.26. Giorgio Agamben, ‘‘Beyond Human Rights,’’ in Radical Thought in Italy: A PotentialPolitics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1996): ‘‘If the refugee represents such a disquieting figure in the order of the Nation-State,that is so primarily because, by breaking the identity between the human and the citizenand that between nativity and nationality, it brings the originary fiction of sovereignty tocrisis. . . . What is new in our time is that growing sections of humankind are no longerrepresentable inside the Nation-State—and this novelty threatens the very foundations ofthe latter. Inasmuch as the refugee, an apparently marginal figure, unhinges the old trinityof State-nation-territory, it deserves instead to be regarded as the central figure of ourpolitical history’’ (163).27. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘‘Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authorityunder a Tree outside Delhi,’’ in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994),102–22; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘‘Marginality in the Teaching Machine,’’ in Outsidein the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), 53–57; Enrique D. Dussel, Phi-losophy of Liberation, trans. Aquilina Martinez and Christine Morkovsky (Maryknoll, N.Y.:Orbis, 1985).

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degger’s Abgeschiedene), ‘‘produced homeless wanderers, nomads, andvagrants, unassimilated to the emerging [postcolonial] structures of institu-tional power, rejected by the established order for their intransigence andobdurate rebelliousness. And insofar as these people exist between the oldand the new, between the old empire and the new state, their condition ar-ticulates the tensions, irresolutions, and contradictions in the overlappingterritories shown on the cultural map of imperialism.’’ 28 Unlike the avail-able postcolonial (and posthistorical) discourses, therefore, the new criticalconsciousness Said symptomatically derives from these ‘‘tensions, irreso-lutions and contradictions’’ that are embodied in the diasporic condition ofa massive part of the population of the planet will not be answerable to thethinking/saying of the ‘‘triumphant’’ imperial culture. To invoke Althusser, thisnew critical consciousness, in its strategically contradictory ‘‘ec-centricity,’’its unaccountability, and its measurelessness, will not be interpellated bythe saying—the concept of agency—on which the dominant liberal capitalistdiscourse utterly relies to maintain its hegemony:

It is no exaggeration to say that liberation as an intellectual mission,born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and rav-ages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled, established,and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentered,and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the mi-grant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artistin exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, be-tween homes, and between languages. . . . And while it would bethe rankest Panglossian dishonesty to say that the bravura perfor-mances of the intellectual exile and the miseries of the displacedperson or refugee are the same, it is possible, I think, to regardthe intellectual as first distilling then articulating the predicamentsthat disfigure modernity—mass deportation, imprisonment, popula-tion transfer, collective dispossession, and forced migrations.

‘‘The past life of émigrés is, as we know, annulled,’’ says Adorno inMinima Moralia, subtitled Reflections from a Damaged Life. . . . Why?‘‘Because anything that is not reified, cannot be counted and mea-sured, ceases to exist’’ or . . . is consigned to mere ‘‘background.’’Although the disabling aspects of this fate are manifest, its virtues orpossibilities are worth exploring. . . . Adorno’s general pattern is what

28. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 332.

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in an other place he calls the ‘‘administered world’’ or, insofar as theirresistible dominants in culture are concerned, ‘‘the consciousnessindustry.’’ There is then not just the negative advantage of refuge inthe émigré’s eccentricity; there is also the positive benefit of chal-lenging the system, describing it in language unavailable to those ithas already subdued: ‘‘In an intellectual hierarchy which constantlymakes everyone answerable, unanswerability alone can call the hier-archy directly by its name.’’ 29

Characteristically, Said overdetermines praxis over theory. As a con-sequence, he fails to see adequately, despite his symptomatic gesture to-ward it, how essential the imperative to rethink thinking itself is to the radi-cally different, and differential, emancipatory sociopolitical agenda he infersfrom the damaged condition of the displaced people—these ‘‘non-beings’’—of the postcolonial occasion. This is why I think it is necessary to retrieve,in this temporal and spatial ‘‘in between,’’ what I have been calling for con-venience the Heideggerian initiative to think the ‘‘nothing’’ that an imperialscience will have nothing to do with, or rather to reconstellate this generalbut discontinuous initiative into the context of the post–cold war postcolonialoccasion, which is the concern not only of Said but of the current dominantoppositional discourses.

To put it synecdochically, we might say that the inadequately thoughtrelay between Said’s ‘‘new critical consciousness’’ and his diagnosis of theglobal demographics precipitated at and by the end of imperialism—it is, notincidentally, a diagnosis proleptically announced (though it has barely beennoticed) by Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism—compels us to thinkSaid’s political ‘‘émigré’’ differently. It compels us, more specifically, to thinkthis elusive itinerant, this ‘‘nomad,’’ who will refuse to be answerable to ‘‘thegeneral pattern,’’ the ‘‘administered world,’’ the ‘‘consciousness industry,’’in relation to the ontological nothing that belongs to the Being posited bythe thought of modernity, the anxiety-provoking non-being Heidegger an-nounced at the beginning of this century. I mean, more precisely, the ‘‘phan-tasm’’—which is an ‘‘outrage’’ to instrumental reason—precipitated by andat the ‘‘end of philosophy,’’ by and at, that is, the triumph of technologi-cal thinking and the accomplishment of modernity’s imperial agenda in theglobalized electronic ‘‘age of the world picture.’’ Or, to appropriate the tropeDerrida has recently invoked to rehearse his solidarity with a ‘‘certain Marx’’against ‘‘the new [post–cold war] Holy Alliance,’’ the unthought in Said’s

29. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 333; my emphasis.

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equation compels us to think his émigré in relation with the specter thatmenaces the triumphant end-of-history discourse of the new world order.30

Understood as this contradictory revenant that returns to visit thevisitor, as Derrida puts this ‘‘hauntology’’ to evoke the reductive and pacify-ing unidirectional imperial visualism of metaphysical thinking, the spectral isa trope that brings the ontological discourse of Heidegger and the politicaldiscourse of this ‘‘certain’’ (post-Marxist) Marx into an uncannily resonantrelationship.31 Indeed, in thus reconstellating ‘‘Heideggerian’’ theory into thepostcolonial occasion, it brings into clear and resonantly visible focus ahitherto disablingly blurred or neglected, if not entirely rejected, understand-ing of a recurrent, fundamental, and potentially politically productive motifof postmodern theory at large. I am not simply referring to the indissolublerelationship between the various philosophical names that different speciesof postmodern theory have attributed to the ‘‘alterity’’ that belongs to themetaphysical principle of Identity. I am also referring to the relay betweenthe ‘‘other’’ of the metaphysical Identity of Western thinking and the ‘‘other’’of the ethnocentric Identity of the Occident, more specifically, those whohave been forcefully unhomed by the global fulfillment of the logical econ-omy of the imperial project. I mean, to repeat, the indissoluble relation-ship between, on the one hand, the ‘‘nothing’’ (Heidegger), the ‘‘trace’’ or‘‘différance’’ (Derrida), the ‘‘surplus always exterior to the totality’’ (Levinas),the ‘‘differend’’ (Lyotard), ‘‘the invisible’’ (Althusser), and, on the other, the‘‘pariah’’ (Arendt), ‘‘the jew’’ (Lyotard), the ‘‘migrant’’ (Virilio), the ‘‘nomad’’(Deleuze and Guattari), the ‘‘hybrid’’ (Bhabha), the ‘‘catachrestic remainder’’(Spivak), the ‘‘non-being’’ (Dussel), the ‘‘refugee’’ (Agamben), and, mostresonantly, the ‘‘émigré’’ (Said).

30. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, andthe New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).31. This otherwise unlikely productive relationship is implicit in Heidegger’s ‘‘Letter onHumanism’’: ‘‘What Marx recognized in an essential and significant sense, though derivedfrom Hegel, as the estrangement of man has its roots in the homelessness of modernman. This homelessness is specifically evoked from the destiny of Being in the form ofmetaphysics, and through metaphysics is simultaneously entrenched and covered up assuch. Because Marx by experiencing estrangement attains an essential dimension of his-tory, the Marxist view of history is superior to that of other historical accounts. But sinceneither Husserl nor . . . Sartre recognize the essential importance of the historical in Being,neither phenomenology nor existentialism enters that dimension within which a produc-tive dialogue with Marxism first becomes possible’’ (243). Presumably, because Heideg-ger does recognize the importance of the historical, that productive dialogue with Marxbecomes a possibility.

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And in thus focusing this indissoluble relay, which could be collec-tively subsumed under the silence that belongs to the totalized saying privi-leged by a metaphysical representation of being as Being, this reconstel-lation also points the way that the rethinking or retrieval of thinking (andpoiesis) must take when history has come to its end in the age of the worldpicture, which is to say, in the ‘‘posthistorical’’ age of transnational capital-ism. In the interregnum, which bears witness to the massive displacementof human lives precipitated by the globalization of the idea of liberal capital-ist democracy—and the utter inadequacy of the Western interpretation ofhuman rights—it is not enough to engage capitalist economics or politics,or patriarchy, or racism, or classism, and so on. All these pursued inde-pendently remain trapped within the strategic disciplinarity of the dominantdiscourse. In the interregnum, rather, the thinker and the poet must thinkthe polyvalent manifestations of the spectrality released by the consum-mation of the Pax Metaphysica if they are to prepare the way for a politicsthat is adequate to the task of resisting the impending Pax Americana and,beyond that, of establishing a polis that, in its always open-ended agonis-tics, precludes what Arendt, far more clearly than Heidegger and all thosepostmodern critics of the city of modernity, recognized as the banality ofevil incumbent on the reduction of being at large to a territory, planetary inscope, to be conquered, compartmentalized, and administered. Which isto say on all self-righteous proclamations of universal peace that justify thephysical and spiritual slaughter and maiming of human life.

Tseng 2000.2.10 10:23

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