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ibidem-Press, Stuttgart

Table of Contents

Abstract

Introduction

Chapter 1 The Postcolonial Paradigm/Paradox: Theorizing between the Universal and the Particular

Chapter 2 Toussaint, Mimicry, and the Primal Scene of Postcoloniality

Chapter 3 In the Name of the Father: Representing Postcolonial Nationalisms

Chapter 4 Toussaint, Globalization, and the Postcolonial Spectacle

Epilogue

About the author

Bibliography

Abstract

This book attempts to rethink, under the rubric of globalization, a number of key notions in postcolonial theory and writings by revisiting what it conceives of as “the primal scene of postcoloniality”—the Haitian Revolution. Theoretically, it unpacks and critiques the poststructuralist penchants and undercurrents of the postcolonial paradigm in First-World academia while not reinstating earlier Marxist stricture. Focusing on Édouard Glissant’s, C. L. R. James’s, and Derek Walcott’s representations of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution, the textual analyses aim to approach the issues of colonial mimicry, postcolonial nationalism, and postcoloniality in light of recent reconsiderations of the universal/the particular in critical theories, and psychoanalytic conceptions of trauma, identity, and jouissance. This book argues that postcolonial intellectuals’ characteristic celebration of the Particular, together with their nuanced denunciation of the postcolonial nation and the Revolution, doesn’t really do away with the category of the Universal, nor twist free of the problematic of the logics of difference/equivalence that sustain the “living on” of the nation-state, despite an ever expanding globality; rather, such a postcolonial phenomenon is symptomatic of a disavowed traumatic event that mirrors and prefigures the predicament of the postcolonial experience while evoking its simulacra and further struggles centuries later.

Introduction
The Postcolonial Problematic

As with the precedents of postmodernism and poststructuralism, the expansion, together with the eventual ascent, of postcolonial studies to a paradigmatic status on the contemporary intellectual scene in recent decades doesn’t seem to help clarify many of the fundamental questions about the field. There have been theoretical debates over the parameters, definition(s), methodologies or epistemological grounds, speaking positions, and the locality of postcoloniality: For example, is the postcolonial “post” in the same sense as the postmodern or the poststructuralist? When is (was) the postcolonial, or was there ever such a moment? What is postcoloniality, and how does one conceive of it vis-à-vis postcolonialism (and vice versa)? Who are the postcolonials? Who speaks as/for the postcolonial? Are the ex-colonized and ex-colonizer “postcolonial” in the same sense?1 Like the designation “postcolonial” itself, key notions/terms in the field, such as “hybridity” or “diaspora,” tend to lapse into loosely conceived and exuberantly celebrated buzzwords as they appear more and more frequently in and beyond postcolonial studies.

In this book, I’d like to approach, in the spirit of polemics, the postcolonial “controversies,” or—as I prefer to call them—“problematics” by focusing on two of the multiple and entangled facets of the issues: 1) the spatial dimension concerning the manifestations of these problematics in the postcolonial nation and the variegated inflections of postcolonial nationalism; 2) the temporal dimension entailing the indeterminate, convoluted temporality of postcoloniality, trauma of colonial slavery as the “remainder” of the history of colonialism, and a query of the presumed pastness of colonialism in certain discourses of postcolonialism. Against the backdrop of this “postcolonial problematic,” which might as well be called the point of departure of this book, I’d like to locate another, deeper, and more latent problematic in postcolonial studies—the question of the universal/particular; this latent level of the postcolonial problematic, as well as its manifest instantiations, then, has to intersect, or even be traversed by an “Event” that encompasses these contestations by both illuminating and problematizing them: Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution.2 Let me briefly explicate the centrality of the historical figure of Toussaint—whose emergence itself was an “event” in the history of colonialism—and the Haitian Revolution to this book before we move on to full-length explorations (in Chapter 1) of the universal/particular problematic in postcolonial criticism and theory.

Who is Toussaint?

This, no doubt, is meant to be more of a rhetorical question. Rather than supplying a biographical account or historical documentation, I’d draw attention to the historical disjunction or discontinuities in historiography through which Toussaint is largely forgotten in the Western memory of colonial slavery—a forgetfulness that is the background against which this question, in its literal sense, has to be asked, especially for those stumbling into the field of postcolonialism: no, really . . . who is Toussaint?

Maybe it would be easier to reawaken the memory of Toussaint by citing a work of canonical Western literature which treats Toussaint as its subject matter. One such rare case can be found in William Wordsworth’s “To Toussaint L’Ouverture”:

Toussaint, the most unhappy man of men!

Whether the whistling Rustic tend his plough

Within thy hearing, or thy head be now

Pillowed in some deep dungeon’s earless den;—

O miserable chieftain! Yet die not; do thou

Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow:

Though fallen thyself, never to rise again,

Live, and take comfort. Thou hast left behind

Powers that will work for thee; air, earth, and skies;

There is not a breathing of the common wind

That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;

Thy friends are exultations, agonies,

And love, and man’s unconquerable mind. (Poems 577)

Ironically, not only had Toussaint few allies, but he has been virtually forgotten, most conspicuously in Western colonial and abolitionist discourses (Hesse 164), before C. L. R. James’s ground-breaking book, The Black Jacobins, resuscitated it from obscurity and the brink of oblivion, stirring not only memories but also Third-World revolutions in the mid-twentieth century.3 In his interview with C. L. R. James, Stuart Hall says of his anecdote: “I once met a Haitian intellectual who told the story of how astonished people were in Haiti to discover that Black Jacobins was written first by a black man, secondly by a West Indian. Because of course it had come back to them through London, through Paris” (qtd. in Farred, “Mapping” 227). Perhaps thanks to Toussaint, James’s work suffered another round of neglect. For instance, Paul Gilroy, whose ground-breaking conception of the “Black Atlantic” as an alternative to Western modernity charts the trajectories of the lives and works of a few monumental black figures, curiously relegates both James and Toussaint to nearly total oblivion. Though Gilroy acknowledges the importance of James, himself a diasporic intellectual, and refers to others’ writings on him (see, for example, xi, 221), his virtual omission of Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution is quite puzzling: It is particularly so when one considers how the author attempts to, rightly, recuperate the significance of the memory of slavery and elegantly elevates it to the “slave sublime” (187–223); how the Haitian Revolution emerged as the first successful slave revolt in history;4 or the fact that Toussaint and the slaves, displaced by the Middle Passage and thrown into an unknown modern world, collectively constituted or participated in the prototypical diasporic experience, which Gilroy argues is the defining characteristic of the routed Black Atlantic (and we may add, of the “postcolonial condition”).

Remembering Toussaint, Rethinking Postcolonial

Why Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution? How do they tie into the context of our postcolonial inquiry? In my view, Toussaint’s Haitian Revolution, which has often been considered an imitation of its immediate historical precedent, the French Revolution, best exemplifies the inherent inconsistency/antagonism of the Western model nation-state and presents itself as a thought-provoking case of the potentialities and limits of (post)colonial mimicry, the question of postcolonial nationalisms, and the convoluted temporality of the postcolonial. It was the first successful, sustained decolonization movement against European colonialism in history, and, in some sense, the first “postcolonial” moment as well. Yet Toussaint’s Haitian Revolution further complicates the temporality of postcoloniality not only in the sense that it predated, and inspired, the mid-twentieth century anticolonial movements, against which certain paradigms of contemporary postcolonial criticism register their antagonism and identify themselves as “postcolonial”; but also that it presaged a certain “undead colonialism” after decolonization, mirroring the uncanny recurrence of violence, corruption, and dependency epitomized in the failures of the postcolonial nation-state in our historical juncture. It is, in other words, an instantiation of Édouard Glissant’s well-known notion of vision prophétique du passé (“the prophetic vision of the past”; 227). The displaced or disavowed memories of the colonial encounter and slavery, as well as the structural impossibility of revolutionary ideals, which I shall highlight in the analyses of the case of the Haitian Revolution, constitute the traumatic kernel of the postcolonial and engender or evoke what I call “the primal scene of postcoloniality” (see Chapter 2).

Still, such “institutional forgetting” of Toussaint, the Haitian Revolution, and colonial slavery persists in our allegedly “postcolonial” present, especially in the form of “spectacle.” To rehabilitate the significance of Toussaint, the exploration of which cannot be extricated from the memories of the Haitian Revolution and of colonial slavery, would require that we remember them beyond their various forms of spectacle. Years before Edward Said’s well-known argument that the Orient is literally the (discursive) creation of the West,5 Frantz Fanon had contended that it was Europe that could be considered “literally the creation of the Third World,” since it was the exploitation of the material resources and labor from the colonies, “the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races” that sustained the “opulence” of Europe (Wretched, 76, 81). Further back in history, colonial slavery, as Hardt and Negri argue, can be “perfectly compatible with capitalist production” (122; emphasis in original), even though it appears that the capitalist ideology of freedom “must be antithetical to slave labor” (121). “There is no contradiction here,” Hardt and Negri conclude wryly, “slave labor in the colonies made capitalism in Europe possible, and European capital had no interest in giving it up” (122). This uncovering of the material base of colonial/capitalist system at an increasingly global scale is not merely the reinstating of a materialist mode of analysis—which is important itself, or even a sort of economic determinism; rather, it seeks to probe, in light of a psychoanalytic approach, the traumatic effects of a colonialism that often starts with, but goes deeper than material devastation. Moreover, this book attempts to bring to the fore what has to be radically excluded from this system so that it can be constituted, or how such “constitutive exclusion” is systematically obliterated, even by means of rendering it a spectacle.

To remember Toussaint properly is therefore to confront the traumatic effects of colonial slavery, in its variegated forms, under the aegis of today’s capitalist, globalizing world that feeds on the disavowal or liquidation of its memory (, Hess, 158); it also means to re-examine the West’s liberal-democratic fantasy of the pastness of colonialism and its simultaneous rendering of contemporary postcolonial failures as otherworldly spectacle. In a more politically salient sense, to remember Toussaint is to come to realize that “the cruelest Haitian paradox, then, is not that its role as the nation that birthed the black postcolonial movement is forgotten. Nor is it that the country that was one of the wealthiest of the Caribbean . . . is currently the poorest in its hemisphere. Rather, it is that the very model of resistance that Toussaint and the slave developed almost two hundred years ago continues to offer unread lessons to contemporary postcolonial societies in Haiti, Ghana, Kenya, Jamaica, and even in the newly post-apartheid South Africa” (Farred, “Mapping,” 245; emphasis mine).

Apropos of the structure of this book, the centrality of Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution to this book in general will be illuminated in terms of universality/particularity; of the final moments of (formal) colonial slavery and the fine moments of revolutionary hopes; of taking place at the originary instances of the (Western) nation-state, decolonization, and postcoloniality; and of the constitutive yet disavowed role of colonial slavery in an expanding capitalist globalization. Each chapter of this book, in a sense, is structured around one of these illuminations, though interrelated points are unavoidable and may thus cut across different sections.

1 One of the most important representatives of such debates can be found in the special issue of the journal Social Text 31/32 (1992), which some critics consider an “event” in the short history of postcolonial studies (e.g. Masao Miyoshi, 750; Grant Farred, “New Faces, Old Places”). For queries of the term “postcolonial,” see, particularly, Anne MacClintock’s and Ella Shohat’s pieces in this issue. For the contour of the debate and the focus of these polemics, see the editors’ “Introduction” to this special issue. The first question enlisted here, about the semantic vagueness of the “post” in “postcolonial,” is adapted from Kwame Anthony Appiah’s essay with the straightforward title, “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonialism?” The most notable and fiercest critiques of the “careerism” of postcolonial intellectuals, their complicity with the dominant neo-colonial regime of knowledge or cultural production, and their position vis-à-vis the non-cosmopolitan postcolonial subjects they presumably represent, are levied by Aijaz Ahmad, Timothy Brennan, Arif Dirlik, Stuart Hall, and Benita Parry, though Hall is adamantly critical of what he perceives as reductionist dismissals made by more orthodox Marxists, particularly Dirlik (see Hall, 258–259). In addition, Hall conveniently reviews these contestations over the term postcolonial itself, especially on the question of its temporality, in his “When Was the Postcolonial?” For critiques from scholars who identify with and work within the field of postcolonial studies yet register discontent with the French-inspired “high theory” in much of the works of prominent postcolonial theorists, see Bart Moore-Gilbert’s distinction between “postcolonial theory” and “postcolonial criticism.” For fairly comprehensive documentations of the more general “postcolonial controversies,” see Ania Loomba (Colonialism 7–19) and Vilashini Coopan. Also see Graham Huggan for a recap of the institutional history of postcolonial studies as a field, as well as the trajectories of the postcolonial debates (228–264).

2 This capital “E” certainly cannot hide its implicit allusion to Alain Badiou’s notion of Event or Truth-Event. For reasons that will become clearer to the reader in the remainder of the book, I’d say, under the rubric of Badiou’s work, the legend of Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution is definitely an Event for the post-Bastille “situation” from which it sprang, and, to a certain degree, for the problematic of the “postcolonial situation” we’re exploring in this book: It is an Event in the sense that it foregrounds the inherent lack or excess of the “official” situation—what the latter has to exclude in order to come into being; it produces its own Truth—a new Universal—which is not yet accountable or justifiable in the terms of the preceding situation.

3 To be sure, the memory of Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution had lived in local folklore, historical accounts, and official documents written by Haitian historians or fellow Caribbeans, despite the metropolitan neglect which sufficed to ensure the marginalization of this memory. It was not until after the emergence of James’s book, and the political climate of the last century, that it was able to have such planetary influence and significance. See Farred (“Mapping”; “Victorian”).

4 Eugene Genovese emphasizes that the Haitian Revolution differs from the numerous slave revolts before it mainly because of its revolutionary ideology and practices, not simply due to its much greater military success over the white colonial powers.

5 It must be noted that Said, as he was to stress again and again, never discounts a “really existing” Orient outside of the West’s discursive formations. In his later works, for example Culture and Imperialism, he points out, on the other hand, the West’s dependence on its epistemological and cultural Other.

Chapter 1
The Postcolonial Paradigm/Paradox: Theorizing between the Universal and the Particular

Although postcolonial debates, as outlined in the preceding discussion, have resulted in more problematics than consensus, the spotlight postcolonialism is enjoying has nevertheless invited more critical and, sometimes, soberer scrutiny across disciplines in the humanities. In the following pages, I do not attempt to document or reenact in detail these contested issues, but would like to situate them in the context of the rise of anti-foundationalism and multiculturalism on the (mainly Western) contemporary intellectual scene and on one of the most quintessential debates arising from the (in)compatibility and/or tension between them: the issue of the universal and the particular. I will, furthermore, call attention to a certain internal contradiction of postcolonial discourse and examine it in light of the complicated relationship between universalism and particularism.

Universalizing the Particular or Particularizing the Universal?: Between Anti-foundationalism and Multiculturalism

It is a critical commonplace of recent decades that the Enlightenment notion of the Universal is bankrupt, or at least, theoretically specious and politically malevolent. A wary critic, however, can notice at least two undercurrents in such “universalising condemnations of the universal” (Hallward, 176). On the one hand, there are profound and influential critiques of the foundationalism of Enlightenment Reason, consummated in the postmodern/poststructuralist debunking of the transcendental, universalist Subject and the subsequent substitution of “subject positions” in its place. The “dismantling of the universal” as well as the relentless questioning of any foundationalist claim to an epistemological ground or determinate identity has no doubt been summarily regarded as the founding gesture of contemporary (Western) thought (Schor, 15), befitting the characteristic fragmentation of the social in the present-day world. In the wake of, or perhaps owing to or in response to, the “death of the subject,” we witnessed, on the other hand, a proliferation of ethnic, sexual, racial, national, cultural, and other increasingly particularistic identities (e.g. age groups, women or gays within minority communities, disabilities, etc.) under the rubric of multiculturalism which, while sharing with postmodern anti-foundationalism the emphatic rejection of the Universal (as the “ethnia of the West,” for example) along with the valorization of difference and particularity, nevertheless makes claims to a certain degree of authenticity and subjectivity in “identity politics.” The rise of postcolonial theory and literatures can be said to have taken place in the debates over postmodern anti-foundationalism and multiculturalism, in the simultaneous affinity and incommensurability of the two.

As in the case of the popularization of cultural studies in Western academia,1 the remarkable spate of general interest in postcolonial studies stemmed from a growing dissatisfaction among cultural and literary critics with the (earlier) postmodern/poststructuralist approaches—probably the most widely endorsed theoretical means available—not only for their preoccupation with deconstructing “grand narratives” primarily at the linguistic and epistemological levels, instead of directing or extending the assault to more “toxic” socio-politico-historical issues; but also for their apparently Eurocentric frame of reference—both in terms of theoretical edifice and objects of study—which appears inadequate in the face of the necessary pluralization following the breakdown of metanarratives and which runs counter to the patently postmodern imperative to always contextualize and attend to the local, the marginal. The typical postcolonial gesture against the postmodern paradigm is that “merely postmodern writing,” as Peter Hallward recounts, “tends toward a certain placelessness, a disembodied abstraction uncomfortably close to an ideological reflection of prevailing modes of production in the West” (20). The “postcolonial,” by contrast, signals not only a temporal lapse, but also a certain spatiality, an outside, a “somewhere-else,” though the accent is predominantly placed on the transient trajectories of migration (rather than the “fixed” locations themselves), on the border-crossing, boundary-effacing movements of un-specification. In short, postcolonialism sets itself against what it perceives as the failed postmodernist/poststructuralist promise to affirm the particular or the marginal and eschew any universalizing attempt by more forcefully valorizing the particular and the marginal and highlighting what heretofore has been neglected and marginalized by Enlightenment thought and Eurocentric anti-foundationalism alike. This brings postcolonialism closer to the particularism of “identity politics,” one of the important players in the debates about multiculturalism.

Apropos of multiculturalism, postcolonialism is empowered by, and caught up in “the politics of authenticity”: the postcolonial gains a great deal of currency in the milieu of a pluralist promotion of particularity and multiculturalist accentuations of strong identity claims from the margins; however, the particular, though born of contingency, can hardly present its particularity if it is conceived as constantly permeated by the contingent, by a flux of (subject) positions or movements of the changing, which postcolonial intellectuals believe characterize contemporary mode of existence. While recognizing the necessity to somehow vindicate a certain particularity in their distancing from the postmodern penchant of obliterating origins, of collapsing all kinds of boundaries, including the identitarian one, the postcolonial critics, like many participating in the debates on multiculturalism, are quick to avoid, locate, and even castigate any trace of ethnic or racial essentialism in the constitution of identities.2 After “the linguistic turn” and the “cultural” or “ethnic” turn, therefore, we don’t quite have yet another paradigm shift. It is easy to discern in postcolonial writings the anti-foundationalist penchant of poststructuralism or postmodernism (for example, the overflowing glorification of hybridity and syncretism, the insistent avoidance or renunciation of essentialism); more obvious are the theoretical vocabularies and explicit or implicit references to well-known poststructuralist thinkers deployed in the work of postcolonial theoreticians.3 Such a theoretical indebtedness to an entrenched anti-foundationalism is presumably what makes postcolonial studies inadvertently or self-consciously swing back to the other end of the debates surrounding multiculturalism and anti-foundationalism and repeat the gestures and practices it seeks to do without: its ineluctable propensity to generalize and universalize in its theoretical speculations; its alleged Eurocentric orientation in its historical frame of reference (e.g. histories of the colonized structured exclusively around European colonialization) and indifference to distinct socio-historical conditions when “applying” Western theoretical insights; its unabashed culturalism and textualism which privilege questions of culture, textuality and language over social, historical, macro-political, and economic issues.4

These major fronts on which postcolonial studies has been attacked signal more than its oscillating status (especially of its theoretical endeavors) between opposing camps on the contested terrain of critical engagements; it also foregrounds the internal contradiction or inherent tension within postcolonial discourse, a contradiction, I argue, that is entwined with the question of the universal and the particular and is intrinsic to the debates about anti-foundationalism and multiculturalism, a context from which postcolonial studies cannot be detached. As Ernesto Laclau observes in his account of the increasingly visible contradiction within the theoretical edifice and politics of the aforementioned debates,

[i]t is important, however, to realize that these two debates have not advanced along symmetrical lines, that argumentative strategies have tended to move from one to the other in unexpected ways, and that many apparently paradoxical combinations have been shown to be possible. Thus, the so-called postmodern approaches can be seen as weakening the imperialist foundationalism of the Western Enlightenment and opening a way to a more democratic cultural pluralism; but they can also be perceived as underpinning a notion of ‘weak’ identity which is incompatible with the strong cultural attachments required by a ‘politics of authenticity’. And universal values can be seen as a strong assertion of the ‘ethnia of the West’ . . . but also as a way of fostering—at least tendentially—an attitude of respect and tolerance vis-à-vis cultural diversity. (Emancipation(s), 47; emphasis mine)

Such paradoxical positions often go unheeded, that is, they have the political efficacy—at least within academic circles—to resonate among and mobilize previously incongruous groups under a radical or progressive rhetoric, especially in the days when cultural studies and postcolonial studies, as new, emerging fields, were rapidly expanding their intellectual territories.

On the terrain of postcolonial theory, critics have pointed out that Homi Bhabha, one of the elite group of theorists who in many ways personify and popularize the field, cannot help but reveal his generalizing or universalizing tendency in theorizing colonial (and anti-colonial) discourses and the colonial encounter amidst the particularist rhetoric pervasive in his work as well as in plainly anti-generalizing claims such as “I have attempted no general theory” (Location, 170). His preoccupation with the enunciative instability—the “cracks” or immanent différance—of colonial discourse as evidence of the irreducible hybridity of the colonial subject (on both sides of the colonial divide) inevitably leads one to question, as Ania Loomba does, whether this “hybridity of enunciation spills over into becoming the definitive characteristic of all colonial authority, everywhere, at any time” (“Overworlding,” 172). One can even go as far as to say that Bhabha’s employment of “enunciation” exemplifies, rightly or wrongly, his constant and “problematic shift” from “a particular act of enunciation to a theory of all utterance” (ibid.), that it ultimately equates any particular subject (dominant/dominated, colonizer/colonized) with “an instance of enunciation itself” (Hallward, 27).

In the bigger picture, as Peter Hallward remarks, “postcolonial theory often seems to present itself as a sort of general theory of the non-generalisable as such” (xi). Paradoxically, the proliferation of heterogeneity and difference, which has accompanied the rise of postcolonialism, as well as postcolonial theorists’ attentiveness to even more particularistic and marginal categories, entails a purview that is “scarcely less inclusive, both historically and geographically, than that of something like the study of everything affected by modernisation and its consequences” (Hallward, xi). The most representative of such unexamined and unduly expansive postcolonial studies is probably Bhabha’s wide-ranging definition, in highly abstract language, of “postcolonial criticism”:5

Postcolonial criticism bears witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the modern world order. Postcolonial perspectives emerge from the colonial testimony of Third World countries and the discourses of ‘minorities’ within the geopolitical divisions of East and West, North and South. They intervene in those ideological discourses of modernity that attempt to give a hegemonic ‘normality’ to the uneven development and the differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races, communities, peoples. They formulate their critical revisions around issues of cultural difference, social authority, and political discrimination in order to reveal the antagonistic and ambivalent moments within the ‘rationalizations’ of modernity. (Location, 171)

Ironically, Bhabha’s expansive reference to generic “nations, races, communities, peoples” betrays his well-meaning, legitimate attempt to valorize the particular, to recuperate the “differential, often disadvantaged, histories” of the hitherto marginalized, just as the “geopolitical divisions of East and West, North and South” not only reveals the “antagonistic” moments or divisions over issues of cultural difference, but, under the aegis of this inclusivist rhetoric, also implicitly envisages an all-encompassing globality which houses a thriving multitude—differences that make up the whole or consist of an underlying Sameness.6 This further exemplifies how “many writings on postcolonialism,” as Loomba points out, “routinely claim to be describing ‘the postcolonial condition’, or ‘the postcolonial subject’,” despite their emphasis on “concepts like ‘hybridity’ and fragmentation and diversity” (Colonialism, 15; emphasis mine). Such a theoretical short-circuit or inconsistency—and the disavowal of its existence or relevance—arises, I argue, from an indifference or reluctance to engage with the inescapable problematic of the universal/particular, and is certainly not an inconsistency peculiar to Bhabha.7

Edward Said, the preeminent postcolonial critic/theorist who is credited with founding the field of postcolonial studies, or at least its contemporary instantiation—a mode of analysis that draws heavily on Western critical theory—is an exemplary case in which the postcolonial intellectual occupies what Said himself terms as “the counterpoint,” mediating, in a somewhat facile and serene manner, “an array of opposites, negatives, oppositions” (Culture and Imperialism, 59–60).8 Critics of Orientalism have pointed out “the profound paradoxes, even confusions, within the argument of Orientalism,” despite the book’s status as a ground-breaking study and its far-reaching influence (Moore-Gilbert 43). For instance, James Clifford, Dennis Porter, and Robert Young have all called attention to the contradictions resulting from the incompatible methodologies and epistemological positions deployed in this work: the underlying humanism and Said’s recourse to the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, on the one hand, and his anti-humanism, à la Foucault, on the other. The originality of Orientalism lies primarily in its laying bare the complicity of Western scholarship and academic productions of knowledge about the Orient with the material and political institutions that dominate their objects of study—hence a rejection of the liberal humanist understanding of the “disinterested” pursuit of knowledge. Cast in the language of universalism/particularism, Said’s book discloses how the universalist discourse of Orientalism is implicated in its own particularity while posing as the transcendent agency which represents or speaks on behalf of the particular objects organized under its purview.

Yet the Foucauldian linking of “the will to knowledge” to the exercise of power also entails Foucault’s conception of power as a ubiquitous and impersonal force or network of relations which operates through a multiplicity of channels and sites and which “dissipates” down into the very constitution of the subject, thereby hindering agencies or sites of resistance, if not foreclosing them. Reinstating agency and intentionality of power to his project, and envisaging a mode or strategy of resistance quite different from the particularistic, localized “guerrilla wars” at the margins inspired by a largely Foucauldian vein of thought, Said “clearly inscribes a model of agency and intentionality drawn not just from Marxism [mainly Gramsci], but from a humanist tradition to which, judging by the generous praise accorded to scholars like Erich Auerbach, he remains deeply attached” (Moore-Gilbert, 37). We recall, however, that this humanist tradition and its pretentious claim to a universal agency in the discursive formation of Orientalism is precisely what Said sets out to critique in the first place. This contradiction would seem impossible to mitigate unless one distinguishes “good” Orientalists, a prospect Said sometimes does concede in Orientalism (e.g. 326), from the throng of accomplices in that imperialist enterprise of cultural domination. Such a distinction would also allow for the opposition between a “good humanism” and a bad one, and, by extension, a desirable universalism and the Eurocentric one that has been rightly denounced. Unlike most postcolonial critics, Said does not demur from the rhetoric of universalism. The problem, however, is that much of Said’s universalist penchant derives from his “unflinching adherence to the traditional virtues of a disinterested, broadly humanist criticism” (Hallward, 52).

This penchant still persists in his later works, and appears even more incongruous in relation to his post-Orientalism writings in which he increasingly favors and valorizes the inclination of “fragmenting, dissociating, dislocating, and decentering the experiential terrain covered at present by universalizing historicism” (“Orientalism Reconsidered,” 102). Placing the accent on “discrepant experiences,” “each with its particular agenda and pace of development . . . coexisting and interacting with each other,” Said strives to “think through and interpret together” these experiences from a “contrapuntal perspective” (Culture and Imperialism, 31–32; emphasis mine).9 Said’s attempt to articulate disparate particulars or heterogeneous elements in the same breath or under the same scheme results in a curious “eclecticism, which,” argues Bart Moore-Gilbert, “is perhaps both the strength and the weakness of Culture and Imperialism,” in which Said’s continuing recourse to the humanist tradition is evident. Thus T. S. Eliot is juxtaposed with Frantz Fanon, and the frequent references, “without demur,” to writings by conservative critics, which coexist in the book with more left-leaning, materialist paradigms of cultural analysis, or even mentions of Deleuze, sometimes come “close to reinscribing some of the problems involved in the older humanist model of a ‘common culture’—but this time on a global, not national scale” (71). It is clear, though, that Said endows the “contrapuntal critic” with some sort of privilege or “disinterestedness” that transcends his/her own particularity and that does not clearly account for the critic’s interconnectedness vis-à-vis the myriad of elements he/she mediates and coordinates (Hallward, 58–60). While it would not be fair or accurate to characterize Said’s appeal to a universalism as merely falling back on that (Western) humanist model he still invokes from time to time, Said’s work does foreground, albeit without openly acknowledging it, the inherently contradictory tendencies necessarily opened up by, and operating in or even fueling, contemporary metropolitan postcolonial discourse—at once (patently) particularistic and (inadvertently, inevitably) universalizing. This constitutive paradox is rendered even more conspicuous as the field of postcolonial studies or the postcolonial mode of cultural analysis and production assumes a paradigmatic status. Before we further pursue this paradigmatic postcolonial problematic, I’d like to place it under the broader rubric of recent critical reconsiderations of the universal.

In Search of a New Universal: Horizons and Impasses

Up until 1990, Cornel West, known for his activist stance, could still celebrate the “postmodern politics of cultural difference” with unequivocal optimism and enthusiasm by pronouncing that it set out “to trash the monolithic and homogeneous in the name of diversity, multiplicity and heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general and universal in light of the concrete, specific and particular; and to historicize, contextualize and pluralize by high-lighting the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative, shifting and changing” (3). This statement, which might as well be read as a manifesto of postcolonialism, represents postmodernist cultural studies at the height of its power as well as the fast-rising popularity of postcolonial studies; but if it heralds the paradigmatic status and hubris of postcolonialism since the early 1990s, it also anticipates the increasingly glaring fissures opened up by the constitutive contradiction between elements once loosely grouped under the banner of postcolonialism: Do these injunctions not point to some generalized, and universalizable principle? How can one not sense the irony of this proclamation’s recourse to some sort of binarism (homogeneity/heterogeneity, the general/the specific)—postmodernism’s sworn enemy? More importantly, how does one reconcile the concrete with the shifting—how does particularity, as mentioned above, manifest itself through, or in spite of, the changing? Since the early 1990s more and more scholars have begun to seriously call into question the premises of postmodernist/poststructuralist model(s) and rethink particularly, as if in a dialectical move, what had been unanimously dismissed—hence the resurgence of the question of the universal back to the top of theoretical and political agendas. In fact, as some remind us, the term/concept “universal” is not endemic to Enlightenment thought (it dates back to classical philosophy) and has always remained a central or ineluctable category in French feminism as well as other strains of modern and contemporary European philosophy, despite the postmodern dismissal or suspension of the universal (cf. Schor, Scott).

Naomi Schor identifies an event in late 1991 that served as the watershed for the “return of universalism within the precincts of the American academy”—a conference on “Identity in Question,” co-sponsored by October and the Collège International de Philosophie and held at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York (28). Although the force of recent reconsiderations of universalism couldn’t have been shaped out of just one single occasion, the weight of the venue of publication of the conference proceedings—a special issue of October 61 (1992)—and the celebrity of the panelists bespeak its benchmark status. One prime example of the effects of this turn of events, as Schor specifies, is the change of positions of Judith Butler, who had been a prominent anti-universalist yet came to recognize, shortly after Gender Trouble, that “identity is essential to politics and that the category of the universal cannot be done away with” (27). This “return,” of course, is hardly an outright reversal of the earlier trend. The unqualified glorification of the particular as well as the unthinking denunciation of the universal may have been curbed, but that doesn’t lead to reinstating Enlightenment ideals on the contemporary intellectual scene. A more plausible reading of this putative return to universalism in critical thought is that it reflects, as Linda Zerilli points out, “a growing consensus that poststructuralist political theories are incapable of generating a viable alternative to the collective fragmentation that characterizes late modernity,” and that “poststructuralism is critically valuable but politically bankrupt” (3). A logical corollary following this realization of the inadequacy of the poststructuralist denunciation of the universal would be to admit the “necessity of universalism.”10 What remains to be contested in theoretical endeavors in the wake of this “reconciliation of sorts between those who refuted these [Enlightenment, universalist] ideals and those who sought to realize them” (ibid.), therefore, still concerns a vexing question, one that has been raised time and time again in history, though with perhaps unconscious certainty: How does one conceive of the universal? Now we may have to rephrase it more subtly: How do we conceive of the universal in such a way as to bridge the gap between theory and practice, to address the challenges of our time? What is this (new or necessary) universal or what does one mean by “universal”?

The common denominator in the recently revived reconsiderations of the universal, including the still persistent and rampant poststructuralist suspicion of it, is that the “old universal” was in fact a “pseudo-universal,” whose duplicity and many vices we need not recount here. This universal is also an “inflated particular”—which is why it is false—whose cover has been blown not only by exposing its particularity (white, male, European, straight, etc.)—but also by highlighting other excluded or incommensurable particularities. “To speak of a false universalism,” however, as Schor points out, “logically implies that there is such a thing as a true universal, unless, that is, one simply assumes that all universalisms are by definition false” (22, emphasis mine). In other words, unless one is prepared to accept the wholesale poststructuralist dismissal of universalism, one is bound to confront the binary opposition of “true universalism” versus “false universalism,” besides the already troublesome one between universal and particular. It’s not that we should reject all binary oppositions in the good old spirit of poststructuralism, but the task of constructing a radically different universal requires more than substituting a new universal in the place of the old and would seem insurmountable, especially when one still clings to the idea of a false universal as an inflated particular, or the ideal of a true universal in which each particular can find its place—a universal that, as Zerilli puts it, “could someday be One” (10).

Invoking an alternative and ideal universal, Schor states that “the goal is to arrive at a new universal that would include all those who wish to be included, and that would above all afford them the opportunity to speak universal while not relinquishing their difference(s)” (42). Such an all-inclusive universal as a new, authentic universal, according to Zerilli, is also what is envisaged by many who share the renewed interests and efforts in postulating a universal (3). However, few are specific enough in delineating this all-encompassing universal beyond staking out a general direction and the widely felt need for universalism. “What form shall this new universal take? How will it differ from the old?” Schor asks. But even Schor herself cannot offer satisfactory answers to these questions, as she confesses when concluding her essay of feminist intervention: “Reinscribing universalism on the agenda of feminism is, relatively speaking, the easy part. Determining what might constitute a specifically feminist universal of our time . . . presents a far more daunting challenge” (43; emphasis in original). Like many other attempted returns to the universal, Schor’s above-quoted statements characteristically reflect the inherent tension or contradiction in the conception of universality, new or old. Not only is there a discernible discrepancy between the “specifically feminist universal” and a non-specific, generic “universal that would include all those who wish to be included”; but the professed open-ended universal seems to amount to little more than ameliorating the enlightenment model of universality that was never truly realized (thus ending up as a way of completing the “unfinished project of modernity,” as Habermas would have it). If indeed this new universal is an ever-expanding ground with no apparent boundaries or exclusions, how will it be different from the formalistic idea of abstract universality that underlies the Kantian notion of some formal a priori framework with its contingent, shifting contents? If such a universal cannot be free from exclusions, on what basis does it conceive its exclusion/inclusion without repeating the (undeclared) exclusionary logic or epistemic violence of Enlightenment thought which had been rightly renounced? How will this new universal with its inevitable exclusions live up to the billing of a universal that “would really be inclusive of all people, regardless of race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, and whatever attaches to the ‘embarrassing etcetera’ that, as Judith Butler reminds us, inevitably accompanies such gestures of acknowledging human diversity” (Zerilli, 3–4)? Similar to Bhabha’s definition of postcolonial criticism quoted earlier, the thrust of this all-encompassing universalism seems to lie, paradoxically, in an insistence on differences, particularities, and marginalities.

The theoretical impasse we seem to inescapably encounter in rethinking the universal results in part from an insistence on an ideal universality (hence the distinction between true universalism and false universalism) as well as insufficient reconsiderations of the relationship between universal and particular. Based on the strains of thought on the universal/the particular I will underscore in the following pages, this book maintains that the universal cannot be determined solely on an empirical basis, nor deduced from a logical, teleological, or a priori epistemological principle. To say that the universal can be deduced according to some transcendental governing principle or epistemological ground would mean that the universal can be determined in advance, or that the universal is embodied by a certain entity which is destined by nature to assume that role; to derive the universal from empirical phenomena wouldn’t preclude the prospect that this universal is theoretically fallible (or fallibilistic) as soon as a case which is not taken into account, whether in the present situation or in the unforeseeable future, indicates otherwise. The former falls back on or risks repeating the Enlightenment notion of the universal because universality thus conceived either results from some underlying essence along the line of a certain unconditioned principle, or operates in the precinct of “a regulative idea” which, even if it’s “empirically unreachable,” has an “unequivocal teleological content” (Laclau, Emancipation(s), 55). One prime example would be the classical Marxist concept of the “universal class,” in which the proletariat is designated as the agent who serves this role merely by virtue of the capacity emanating from its social being.11

As opposed to this epistemologically regulative universality, there is another kind of regulative universality which is merely empirically generated and hence “would be better named ‘regularities’ or ‘tendencies’” (Hallward, 179). Immanuel Wallerstein, for instance, proposes to construct “a new universalism based on a foundation of countless groups,” with an empirical approach not unlike that in his construction of the “world system” (“Revolution,” 231). In their opposition to the particularizing inclination in postcolonialism (along with postmodernism), Marxist critics such as Aijaz Ahmad, Arif Dirlik, or Neil Lazarus seek to identify an overriding universality in capitalism, whose ambition, scope, and historical developments seem to deserve the name. Lazarus et al. further make clear in their manifesto essay “The Necessity of Universalism” that this necessary universalism has to be firmly grounded in the observable historical consequences of capitalism (85; cf. Lazarus, 16–17).12 As compelling as their analyses of the universality of capitalism are, and as important as empirical knowledge is to any theorizing move, the empirical approach to the universal is, however, flawed on two fronts: It is methodologically unsound and fallible, since a universality premised on empirical examples, which can hardly be exhaustive, is likely to be undone by one single exception, whether under the rubric of present circumstances or in the unknown future. Moreover, identifying universals empirically may wind up affirming the status quo, since it can call universal that which, rightly or wrongly, is taken for granted or is already universalized (rather than envision what is universalizable but not yet universalized). The empirical universal therefore may not be as politically progressive as those committed to radical politics would like it to be.13 It must be added that the empiricist formulation of universality is, in a sense, an idealist one too, even though it appears to open universality to the irreducible contingency of empirical, historical phenomena. For its aspiration for a universal encompassing all “actually existing” examples amounts to an idealism of inclusion—an idealism, which, being vulnerable to its own subversion by the contingency of experiences themselves, would fall prey to the poststructuralist trap of totally dispensing with the universal: “we can’t have a universal unless we can have a true universal, which has been proved to be impossible in practice as well as in theory.”

Toward an Alternative Universal

In seeking an alternative to these idealist, regulative approaches to the universal, both epistemologically and empirically, here I’d like to turn to Laclau’s intervention on this issue. Refusing the rigid opposition of universalism versus particularism as well as the idealized notions of universality/particularity that simultaneously drive a polarized debate and undergird its impasse, Laclau attempts to conceive the universal by situating the relation between the universal and the particular in the field of political articulations.14 Universality/particularity, placed in this context, is constructed through such political processes, rather than emerging out of one term’s indissoluble essence or some transcendental logic. The relationship between the two, therefore, is not one of mutual exclusion but mutual, irreducible contamination, which inexorably invalidates the positions of both ideal universality and pure particularism, thus undermining the binary oppositions of the universal/particular as well as true universalism/false universalism (cf. Torfing, 168; Zerilli, 10). But if, as we’ve mentioned, almost all parties involved in contemporary debates about universalism agree that the universal is little more than an “inflated particular”—an inflation which is certainly deemed of a political nature, then how is Laclau’s position different from those sketched out earlier? Maintaining that the universal is an ineluctable category, both theoretically and politically, Laclau undoubtedly can’t concur with the dismissal of universality by many poststructuralists and postcolonialists, as he is also rather critical of the penchant for pure particularism he sees in the latter (to which we will return later). On the other hand, Laclau’s notion of the universal is distinct from that of the “new universalists” of the debate, as he swiftly rejects some sort of ideal universality—either a universality devoid of any trace of particularity or an idealist vision of universality as an all-inclusive receptacle of all particularities—expressed or clandestinely presupposed in the recent wave of the “return” of universalism, whose theoretical edifice, as we’ve seen, is inconsistent with its politically progressive agenda.

For Laclau, some ineradicable remainder of particularity always imbricates the universal (just as the universal is an irreducible dimension in the constitution of any particular identity); he even goes as far as to say that “the universal is no more than a particular that at some point has become dominant,” sounding like a typical anti-universalist denouncing the legitimacy of the universal (Emancipation(s), 26). However, taking this statement to interpret the universal, as Schor does, to be nothing but an inflated particular, hence a false universal, is missing Laclau’s point (22). As Zerilli specifies, “a universalism could be false in the sense of never fully devoid of particularity and yet still stand for that which we call universal” (20). This “contaminated,” partially particular universal can “stand for” all the particulars and thus functions as a universal only when we forego the idealist conception of the universal—which, as suggested above, is secretly shared by the anti-universalists and their universalist counterparts—because there is no such thing as ideal universality. It would also require that we conceive of the formation of universality not according to a representational logic (the universal fully, adequately representing the particulars) but through what Laclau and Mouffe call “articulation,” which is defined as “any [discursive] practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result of the articulatory practice” (105). For the notion of representation, rendered sufficiently problematic since the advent of poststructuralism, is likely to lead us to another impasse like the postulation of ideal universality. As Laclau perceives, the “modern idea of a ‘universal class’ and the various forms of Eurocentrism are nothing but the distant historical effects of the logic of incarnation,” since they always posit a certain privileged agent whose particular body is “the expression of a universality transcending it.”15 But the constitutive inconsistency of Enlightenment universality lies in its cancellation of this operative logic through its disavowal of such particularity embedded in the universal: “if everything has to be transparent to reason, the connection between the universal and the body incarnating it also has to be so; in that case, the incommensurability between the universal to be incarnated and the incarnating body has to be eliminated. We have to postulate a body which is, in and of itself, the universal” (23). Such a postulation would be to fall back on the illusion and pitfalls of pure, ideal universality.

To say that the universal is constructed through political articulations is to underline that the universal is not a preexistent entity to be discovered, nor an a priori principle to be followed or applied, but emerges via a chain of equivalences out of the various demands of particular groups. As Laclau points out, “the universal emerges out of the particular not as some principle underlying or explaining the particular” (28), but through a certain contingent articulation of the particular demands of particular groups into a relation of equivalence, which is established as a result of “all of them being antagonized by the dominant sectors” (54). “[This] ‘something identical’ shared by all the terms of the equivalential chain,” emphasizes Laclau, “cannot be something positive (that is one more difference which could be defined in its particularity), but proceeds from the unifying effects that the external threat poses to an otherwise perfectly heterogeneous set of differences (particularities)” (57). One prime example is the colonial situation, as Laclau and Mouffe point out:

In a colonized country, the presence of the dominant power is everyday made evident through a variety of contents: differences of dress, of language, of skin colour, of customs. Since each of these contents is equivalent to the others in terms of their common differentiation from the colonized people, it loses its condition of differential moment . . . . Thus, a relation of equivalence absorbing all the positive determinations of the colonizer in opposition to the colonized, does not create a system of positive differential positions between the two, simply because it dissolves all positivity: the colonizer is discursively constructed as the anti-colonized. In other words, the identity has come to be purely negative. (127–128; emphasis in original).

Universality constructed or articulated through such equivalential relations is distinct from what we have explored so far. This universal—that “something identical” knotting together the equivalential chain—is not a common ground with positive, specified determinations, therefore it cannot represent any objective relations articulating the commonalities of the particular terms, or any communitarian essence; rather, it can only signify the “absent fullness of the community, which lacks . . . any direct form of representation and expresses itself through the equivalence of differential terms” (Emancipation(s) 57; emphasis mine). It is important to note that though universality is fundamentally incommensurable with particularity, as Laclau insists (see, for example, 34–35, 57), this universal can still only be expressed in the particular. Such universality thus highlights something which is inherently unrepresentable by means of any particularity—namely, the unreachable communitarian fullness—or foregrounds the limit of the logic of representation, because the universal is not based on any differentiable, positive characteristics, but on some radical negativity or exclusion.16 The operation in which a certain particular emerges, through an equivalential relation and on an antagonistic ground, to assume this universal function and articulate such impossible universality is precisely what Laclau calls “hegemony.”

One can sense that the universal, as Laclau conceives of it, has a radically contingent character and transformative function; as he argues: “the universal does not have a concrete content of its own (which would close it on itself), but is an always receding horizon resulting from the expansion of an indefinite chain of equivalent demands” (34). Whatever particularity there once was would be somehow “diluted” or hybridized in the process of equivalential aggregations resulting in eventual and inevitable universalization, which further complicates the interpenetration of the universal and the particular, since the differential identities of the particular terms of the chain wouldn’t remain intact either. The universal is therefore subject to or has to open itself to contingency and transformation, since “it is essential that the chain of equivalences remains open: otherwise its closure could only be the result of one more difference specifiable in its particularity” (57). “The open character of the chain,” continues Laclau, “means that what is expressed through it has to be universal and not particular” (ibid.). The place of the universal, which brings to the fore not the communitarian ground but precisely its impossibility or absence, is an “empty place” in which particular terms are necessarily engaged in hegemonic struggles for and articulations of universality, as Laclau argues: “the impossibility of a universal ground does not eliminate its need: it just transforms the ground into an empty place which can be partially filled in a variety of ways (the strategies of this filling is what politics is about)” (59).

This Universal Which Is Not One17

To work toward an understanding of universality/particularity that serves as the theoretical groundwork for the further inquiries of this book, I’d like to underscore a number of things in our exploration of the universal so far, place them under the aegis of the postcolonial problematic, and illuminate them with other discourses on the universal/particular as well as the central historical event to be examined in this book—Toussaint’s Haitian Revolution.

First of all, antagonism is the precondition of universality: This universal is based on what Laclau and Mouffe define as “antagonism,” a radical negativity or exclusion, which stems from the positing of some threatening otherness as its outside and which brings about the dissolution of all positive, differential determinations that characterizes the “emptiness” of universality. The universal consisting in such exclusion or negativity must divest itself of positivized or differentiable identities; otherwise, it would only be another particular and not a universal. One crucial point not to be mistaken is that antagonism, as Laclau conceives of it, is not reducible to antagonistic relations between particular sectors in a given social order; rather, antagonism is precisely the internal limit of the social itself (cf. Žižek, “Discourse,” 253):

Antagonism as the negation of a given order is . . . the limit of that order, and not the moment of a broader totality in relation to which the two poles of the antagonism would constitute differential—i.e. objective—partial instances. . . . The limit of the social must be given within the social itself as something subverting it, destroying its ambition to constitute a full presence. Society never manages fully to be society, because everything in it is penetrated by its limits, which prevent it from constituting itself as an objective reality. (Laclau and Mouffe 126–127; emphasis mine)

“Society doesn’t exist”—if we adopt Žižek’s patently provocative phrasing when he comments on Laclau—because antagonism does (“Discourse,” 249). It is important to note that in Laclau’s political theory, antagonism is not only what prevents society from reaching a communitarian fullness—a utopian society with no strife, conflict, or unsatisfied demands—but is also what is constitutive of the social. That is, antagonism, which signals that there is something fundamentally antagonized and excluded, points to a radical absence of the fullness or impossibility of the community, yet this exclusion or impossibility is precisely the precondition of the social, much in the way that a certain primordial repression necessarily precedes the very constitution of the subject—exclusion as the price to be paid for access to the socio-symbolic order.18 Universality predicated on antagonism therefore signals precisely the impossibility of pure universality (where the universal finds its ideal incarnating body), or the absence of any communitarian fullness, or universal ground.

This conception of universality has at least the following ramifications that are particularly relevant to our exploration and deserve more elaboration: This universal, first and foremost, is divisive, or a “contestatory universal” (MacCannell, “Stage Left,” 41). It is divisive and contestatory not only because it is split between its universalist function and irreducible, ineradicable particularity, but also because this universal brings to the fore the inherent fissure or gap that constitutes the current hegemonic constellation, which strives to suture it. But how can a universal claim to be at once universalizing and dividing? Invoking Fanon, Hallward argues that “every emergence of a new figure of universality . . . must begin as no less divisive: there can be no new mobilisation of the universal interest that does not immediately threaten particular privileged beneficiaries of the old status quo” (xv, emphasis in original). Furthermore, the divide opened up by this new universal is not between particular sectors of society, but between social and non-social, between a given socio-political field and what is radically excluded so that the social order can be established. Citing Marx’s particular example of the weavers’ revolt in Germany, Juliet Flower MacCannell interprets this view of antagonistic universal as the result of the radical exclusion of “a class so fully devastated, so excluded, so dehumanized, and so dispossessed that it is not merely relegated to haunting the society that denies it all standing, but is forced to becoming the universal” (“Stage Left,” 40; emphasis in original).19 The universal character of this particular revolt, continues MacCannell, lies in the following message: “no one should suffer as we are suffering. This no one is a critical, negative universal. It conceals no petty self-interests. It has no particular content, even though its coming into existence depends entirely on the particular that has been squeezed down to become no more than a universal shout: ‘No one should have to suffer this way’” (40–41; emphasis in original).

This, too, was the message Toussaint saw in the precepts of the French Revolution, whose universalist vision and ramifications have been widely acknowledged, even though those who drafted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and those who championed its precepts hardly took into account the slaves, at least not in practice (we’ll have more detailed discussion of how the question of colonial slavery was “forgotten” in Revolutionary France in Chapter 2). No other group in history was more dehumanized and farther removed from anything that might have consisted of a social fabric than the displaced African slaves. Since Toussaint, slave revolts and decolonization movements have gained a universalist dimension and been fought in the name of universal emancipation—which is why the revolt Toussaint led was not a mere revolt, like the numerous slave insurrections before it, but a Revolution (cf. Blackburn, Davis, and Genovese). The emancipatory message that resonated in the hearts of black slaves across the Western hemisphere in Toussaint’s time, and later echoed on a global scale by the colonized peoples in the mid-twentieth century, however, amounted to little more than a resounding “No!” Stemming from the most drastic forms of oppression, it didn’t need to have a specific, particular, positivized content to mobilize a constituency that was as diverse geographically as ethnically and linguistically.20

The struggle between Toussaint and post-Bastille France, therefore, was not a showdown between two particular forces within the same (existing) socio-political field; rather, it was an arena in which a given socio-symbolic order was confronted with what was foreclosed or precluded from it—an exclusion which was nevertheless constitutive of this order. For, as mentioned earlier and as will be further discussed in the next chapter, colonial slavery was what essentially funded the bourgeois Republic, yet had to be extricated from or disavowed by post-Bastille socio-political discourse so that the existence and functioning of the bourgeois order could be maintained and justified in the first place. It was a struggle, therefore, between an emerging universal defined by nothing more than a radical exclusion, a not-yet-specified antagonism, and an old universal that ossified into a particular, privileged sector within the status quo, which presupposed a radical exclusion of some element or antagonism that was constitutive of it.

Cast in Étienne Balibar’s conception of the three moments, meanings, or modalities of universality—universality as reality, as fiction, and as ideal—the confrontation between these two universals here can be seen as that between ideal universality, which is premised on the notion of the “unconditional” (65) and sets in motion the destabilizing process of “insurrection,” in the name of egaliberté, against the status quo (64), and fictitious universality, by which most people, except those experiencing “internal exclusion” (55), reinforce their identification with their immediate social roles—hence solidifying universality as reality—by virtue of their imaginary identification with the ideological fiction of a higher order of belonging (such as State or Church). This new universal thus lays bare the universalist pretension of the existing socio-symbolic discourse and counters it precisely on the grounds of universality. In the case of Toussaint, the combative universal he appeals to follows that very same universalist logic put forth by the precepts of the French Revolution. As Hardt and Negri indicate, Toussaint simply “takes the Declaration of the Rights of Man to the letter and insists on its full translation into practice” (118). Toussaint’s revolution is, I argue, a radical mimicry, as he turns the universalism of the French Revolution against it by pushing its lofty, universalist discourse till it reaches its internal limit, by being more Jacobin than the Jacobins.21

In other words, Toussaint’s struggle exemplifies what Slavoj Žižek describes as a confrontation “between the social and its exteriority, the non-social” (Contingency, 92). The limit between these opposing camps, “the limit that separates society itself from non-society,” again, has to be an internal limit instead of an external one (ibid.). If it’s an external limit, it would only constitute another difference between particular elements within the same socio-symbolic edifice.22 Such positioning of the internal limit, as at once radically outside and penetratingly internal, is precisely why this non-social element, this “constitutive exclusion,” or what Žižek calls, à la Jacques Rancière, “the part of no part,” can claim a universal status (Ticklish, 188). The radical exclusion of such a peculiar element, which entails the deprivation of its place in society and in the available representational system—hence, any specified, positive, particular content vis-à-vis the given socio-symbolic field, is crucial in its transformation into a universal, as MacCannell points out: “It is only in realizing their exclusion from the human that the universal is born, and that the human can be reconstructed” (40). The existing social order can thereby be restructured because “such a universal,” argues MacCannell, “offers what nothing ‘in’ society can: a standpoint to seize society as a ‘whole’” (41; emphasis in original). But, once again, this antagonistic universal opposes the existing social field not from without, but from within. For if this universal is born out of what we’ve called radical antagonism, which is foreclosed yet constitutive of the social, everything in society, we recall, would be penetrated by such antagonism as the internal limit of the social (Laclau and Mouffe, 127). The postulation of a radical “outside” does not result in the universal’s differential relationship to the existing order, which is a relationship defined by the particularities of the terms; rather, the deprivation, degradation, and exclusion of the slaves, the plebs, the wretched (Fanon), or the subaltern (Spivak) is so total and profound that it divests itself of any particular, postivized content (of their antagonism) and cancels out any (previous and potential) differential relations with the “social.” It is only in this sense that it becomes a universal, since, as Laclau reminds us, that “something identical” shared by the terms of the equivalential chain which stems from radical antagonism and which gives rise to a universality “cannot be something positive (that is one more difference which could be defined in its particularity)” (Emancipation(s), 57). Now that I’ve deployed two terms—and names—frequently invoked in postcolonial discourse, let me dwell here on how our latest reflections on the (alternative) universal can shed light on some of the related issues in postcolonial criticism and theory.

Difference and Equivalence

In their attempts to valorize and thereby include the hitherto excluded, many postcolonial critics seem to be primarily driven by a glorification of and preoccupation with particularity, otherness, and most importantly, a logic of difference; the flip side of this penchant is, of course, “the postcolonial aversion to universals” or the “‘universalizing’ condemnations of the universal” of postcolonial theory, as Hallward puts it (176). Much has been said about the limits of particularism in radical politics—and that’s the theoretical background of our earlier discussions of the recent reconsideration or even return to the universal in critical theory. Here, I’d like to first examine such postcolonial preoccupations in terms of the logics of difference and equivalence, which Laclau, following a structuralist/poststructuralist vein of thinking, employs in his critique of particularism. In the contemporary cultural milieu of celebrating difference, no one would seem to contest the idea that all identity is differential, that the identity of a group (ethnic, racial, religious, etc.) constitutes a difference. Yet this also means that no particular group leads a “monadic existence,” but is always situated in a wider community or a larger context, since “part of the definition of its own identity is the construction of a complex and elaborated system of relations with other groups” (Laclau, Emancipation(s), 48; emphasis mine). So far this view of differential identity appears to be similar to Said’s conception of cultural identity, and by extension, hybridity, as always implicated in an elaborate web of interconnection, occupying a nodal or “contrapuntal” point at which different cultural elements intersect. Laclau’s point, however, is that the logic of difference is necessarily entangled in the logic of equivalence. For, as Laclau argues, the very assertion of a given group’s right to their difference already posits or appeals to some universal principle or equivalential relation, and “there is no particularism that does not make an appeal to such principles in the construction of its identity” (26). In the case of the political discourse of rights, “if it is asserted that all particular groups have the right to respect of their own particularity, this means that they are equal to each other in some way” (49; emphasis mine). Where the logic of difference is not contaminated by the logic of equivalence, where the pure logic of difference holds sway, we encounter the notion of “separate developments” lying “at the roots of apartheid”—in which case the mere assertion of particularity ends up “sanctioning the status quo in the [unequal] relation of power between the groups” (27, 49; emphasis in original).

It is noteworthy that the postulation of some universal principle is not merely the implementation of regulating norms and principles which transcend the particularism of any group—this, however, is what Said’s inconsistent, mostly humanistic universalism appears to advance. If the universal emerges out of a radical antagonism that is nevertheless constitutive of the social, it is to be conceived as the interruption or subversion of differential identity, because, we recall, universality is expressed through an equivalential chain in which the dimension of equivalence is privileged “to the point that its differential nature is almost entirely obliterated” as a result of confrontation with radical exclusion or antagonism (ibid. 39). That is why Laclau writes, in a quite Lacanian way, that “the universal is part of my identity as far as I am penetrated by a constitutive lack, that is as far as my differential identity has failed in its process of constitution” (28).23 Based on the conception of antagonism as the internal limit of the social, Laclau points out that “all political identity is internally split, because no particularity can be constituted except by maintaining an internal reference to universality as that which is missing” (31; emphasis mine).

Postcolonial theorists, who in general are wary, or even critical of the strong, sometimes essentialized identity claims in the broader postcolonial criticism and literatures24 as well as in identity politics, adopt a different approach to undermine differential identities and their systematic certainties. Although this approach is also premised on a similar line of thinking regarding the insurmountable problematic of representation (Spivak) and the necessary incompletion of identity or subjectivation (Bhabha)—a poststructuralist contribution postcolonial theorists acknowledge—it is still largely bound by a logic of difference, not only because of the postcolonial theoretical resistance to universalization based on a logic of equivalence, but also due to own its tendency to generate more particularistic categories derived from the existing particularities whose fixed identities and epistemological certainties they seek to deconstruct or subvert. Take, for example, Bhabha’s conception of the “third space,” which is closely related to (or metonymic to) his well-known, yet ever elusive, terminologies of “in-between-ness” and “hybridity”:

If . . . the act of cultural translation (both as representation and as reproduction) denies the essentialism of a prior given original or originary culture, then we see that all forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity. But for me the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the ‘third space’ which enables other positions to emerge. This third space displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received wisdom. . . . The process of cultural hybridity gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognisable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation. (“The Third Space,” 211)

Under the rubric of our preceding discussions, I’d like first to query whether this “third space” is itself another difference accounted for in the current terrain of cultural embattlement (or “translation”), rather than the undermining or subversion of the differential identities of the “two original moments.” For if those moments or existing identities constituting the “binary closure” are to be subverted in “the process of hybridity” beyond recognition, and everything leveled down to the same plane, then the designation “third space” has little meaning.25 In much of his work, Bhabha undoes colonial discourse by demonstrating that mimicry can be deployed as a means of disrupting colonialist surveillance and authority by creating ambiguous identities that elude the gaze of the colonizer. However, the legitimacy of such mimicry as a strategy of resistance seems to hinge on a colonial control presumed to be airtight; its radicality appears to dissolve once it’s removed from the reach of prohibition, since, as Bhabha himself points out, “the visibility of mimicry is always produced at the site of interdiction” (Location, 89).

A more sympathetic reading of Bhabha has to be proposed here, too, since Bhabha at times seems to border on positing, quite uncharacteristically and perhaps unwittingly, a new universal that redefines and restructures the given socio-symbolic field (“This third space . . . sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives”).26 For, as mentioned earlier, both the initial particularity of the agent assuming the role of the universal and the differential identities of the terms entering the equivalential chain will somehow be “hybridized” in the process of universalization. This reading, however, appears to run counter to Bhabha’s overall theoretical endeavor of anti-universalism. Furthermore, his conception of the “third space” as “a new area of negotiation” and his frequent references to the process of “reinscription and negotiation” (see, for instance, Location, 191) in the production of cultural identity never seem to make clear whether, in the actual arena of cultural embattlement,27 the reference is to a space (or an agency?) in which mediating between (existent) particularities takes place, or where the existing social field confronts its radical outside: in other words, whether it is a (re)negotiation between the “particulars,” or, more radically, between the social and the non-social, the “part of no part,” the socially unrepresentable, which Bhabha’s occasional invocation of “something new and unrecognizable” seems to suggest. If this process of hybridity or negotiatory space points to the former, then it is likely that the particular terms from which the third term derives would not be undermined—the hybrid can be accommodated and reduced to another difference, however fleetingly, juxtaposed with the originary particularities and constituting a merely differential relation. What we have, then, would be a proliferation of differences in an expanded socio-cultural field whose infrastructure remains relatively intact. One also has to be wary, as Laclau cautions us, that the model of negotiation—as ambiguous as this term has become—would lapse into an even worse scenario, in which “the agreement concerns only circumstantial matters, but the identity of the forces entering it remains uncontaminated by the process of negotiation” (Emancipation(s), 32).

Articulation, Agency, and Misrecognition

Rather than indulging in the celebration of what appears to be an infinitely complex, indeterminable, yet ultimately conciliatory space of negotiation that absorbs antagonism, I’d like to propose “a contingent intervention taking place in an undecidable terrain,” an intervention taken up by a hegemonic agent who articulates radical antagonism (ibid., 89). We understand, from our preceding analysis, that radical antagonism is irreducible to the antagonistic relations between the particulars within a given socio-political order; however, the gap or fissure opened up by constitutive antagonism (which is not merely another internal difference) can only be mapped, in a distorted way, onto a particular difference within the social (Žižek, Contingency, 92), since the universal emerges not simply out of struggles or “negotiations” between particulars, but points to something beyond the particulars that, nevertheless, can only be articulated through some particularity. The agency which assumes the universal function, therefore, is itself a particular, an intra-social difference onto which a fundamental difference (between the social and the non-social) is mapped and through which radical antagonism as well as a new universality are articulated. The equivalential chain that sustains this antagonistic universal, I argue, is not based on a logic of incarnation or representation (according to which the represented is coextensive with its agent), but on a profound misrecognition of the antagonism to be articulated; it is an articulation which does not necessarily reflect the positivity or objective differential relations of the social because antagonism, as constitutive and indissoluble, tends to dissolve objectivity into the social (but not totally). This universal therefore does not go beyond the well-documented problematic of representation; rather, it only foregrounds such a problematic, since the indispensable role of agency it presupposes represents, first and foremost, the impossibility of universal grounds.

Such impossibility of communitarian fullness, of full representation, is also famously figured in Spivak’s subaltern, who is no less excluded and unrepresentable than the non-social elements we’ve enlisted so far. For Spivak pushes the logic of difference and the notion of representation to their limits, to the point where one has to postulate not only a constantly self-differentiating difference, but an absolute alterity, impenetrable to anyone who has the audacity to represent her—hence rendering suspect any form of agency seeking to “include” the subaltern. With her eye trained on the most excluded among the excluded, Spivak’s insistence on relentlessly tracking or evoking the subaltern figure seems to suggest that radical antagonism be either left intact on the unfathomable fringe of any socio-political representation; or that it be fully, adequately represented, i.e., that antagonism coalesces on a coextensive content able finally to give the subaltern its due. For the latter, no representational system available, as the critic is well aware, can do the trick. Moreover, doesn’t Spivak’s theoretical probing of the subaltern itself demonstrate that subalternity can be somehow articulated, though certainly not without some degree of complicity with the socio-symbolic edifice that forecloses it? Spivak’s ethical injunction on the subaltern question—which reads, from the subaltern perspective, “[since] we can be represented; [therefore] we must not represent ourselves”—is a “catachrestic rewriting” of Marx’s formulation: “[they] cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” (Larsen, 207; cf. Spivak, “Subaltern,” 276–277).28 Without the slightest intention of contesting the insurmountable problematic inherent in representation, I’d like to paraphrase Spivak and propose the following: The subaltern cannot speak; she cannot be represented, but she can be, and always has been, articulated, not only because her “constitutive exclusion” is the precondition of the socio-symbolic order vis-à-vis which she is subaltern, but also because she can be articulated in such a way that she (mis)recognizes her plight in the articulation and that may thus transform both her and the socio-symbolic order.29

Let me conclude this chapter—and introduce the next—by looking at, as an instance, the articulation of revolutionary ideals in the case of Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution. Toussaint and many other former slaves who devoted their lives to the liberation of all were profoundly impacted by the French Revolution, as they apparently identified with the proclaimed ideals of liberty and equality. Yet their identification, I argue, was based more or less on a misrecognition; or rather, the precepts of the metropolitan Revolution got articulated and transmuted in their part of the world in such a way that what united them was scarcely a unified message with a positivized, particular content: In the age of revolution (circa 1770–1823), writes David Brion Davis, revolutionary ideology took a myriad of forms, yet the “vague and often confused idea of revolution continued to spread.” For example, in the Caribbean, British slaves “sometimes imagined that their masters were resisting and suppressing the king’s efforts to free them; in 1790 this conviction sparked a revolt in Tortola” (76). Robin Blackburn also notes that, to the extent that “liberty and equality had become the religion of the formerly enslaved,” the emancipatory message “might be conveyed in a variety of idioms—French, or Kréyole or some African language—and with a variety of political or religious inflexions—royalist, Republican, Catholic, voodoo—so long as slaveholder power was broken” (259). During his initial success against the French troops, Toussaint didn’t have any specified goal other than overthrowing slavery in the colony of San Domingo.30 After granting universal liberty to all the inhabitants of San Domingo (which was the first polity in the Americas to have done so), Toussaint went on to realize more specific goals of rebuilding war-torn San Domingo and meet the increasingly concrete demands of a diverse constituency, ranging from blacks to Mulattoes to the whites, which for some time Toussaint managed to satisfy (James, Black Jacobins, 251–256). In the later stage of his tenure, however, Toussaint was not able to raise any specific issue or slogan around which he could rally, as effectively as before, the black masses who had single-mindedly and willingly followed all of his commands, even though his authority and popularity were rarely challenged (cf. James, especially Ch. XII; Miller).31

As exemplified in Toussaint’s case, it is precisely because the articulation of universality is based on misrecognition, and because what is to be expressed in the universal is an impossible object—the absence of communitarian fullness—that the place of the universal can only be filled temporarily and partially by the agency assuming the universal function. This “un-fulfilling” of the universal agent, paradoxically, is what gives it a universal character, since the filling of the place of universality—its coinciding with the agent’s ineradicable particularity—can only mean it’s a particular fully recognizable in its particularity. The place/placing of the universal is at once precarious and indispensable, both impossible and necessary, and it is for this reason that universality is always subject to contingent, contestatory articulations.

1 Huggan suggests that the rise of postcolonial studies in the 1990s be seen as “partly the offshoot of a wider institutional phenomenon—the so-called turn to cultural studies in an increasing number of English (among other humanities) departments at Western universities,” or even “an analytical attempt to globalise the already wide scope of cultural studies” (240). Loomba’s book Colonialism/Postcolonialism further places the recent boom of postcolonial studies under the aegis of historically situated anti-imperialist critiques produced in modern as well as contemporary socio-cultural movements and phenomena, such as the history of decolonization and the “revolution” within the “Western” intellectual tradition (Marxism, 1980s colonial discourse analysis, etc.).

2 A notable exception to this unanimous avoidance of the designation “essentialism” would be Spivak’s proposal of “strategic essentialism,” which is echoed among cultural critics and theoreticians (e.g. Laclau, Emancipation(s), 50–51). However, numerous instances in Spivak’s writings, ever elusive themselves, disprove the notion that she would by this term endorse the common understanding of using essentialism strategically, as a tool to reach some common political goal. Her self-reflexive, relentlessly self-deconstructing tendency in what she calls a “self-separating project” (Postcolonial Critic, 21) and more recently, her affirmation of some sort of ineluctable yet productive “complicity” (Critique, xii, 3–4, 9) in any resistance certainly mark a sharp distinction from those insisting on maintaining strong, politically salient identity claims.

3 A crude, sometimes caricaturing, sometimes heuristically motivated characterization which has been circulating around for quite some time has been to identify behind Bhabha, Said, and Spivak—who Robert Young calls the “Holy Trinity” of postcolonial theorists—the monumental figures of Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida, respectively. Those sympathetic to postcolonial theory and those critical of it both seem to accept this linkage to poststructuralism/postmodernism: students and those who have no prior local and historical knowledge of colonialism recognize in postcolonial discourse the familiar and paradigmatic terminology and themes of postmodernism and accept it on this ground, while on the other hand, there are others maybe equipped with the necessary socio-historical knowledge of colonialism—for example, Marxists and many Third World intellectuals not trained in Western academia—who reject postcolonial studies, especially the theory part, precisely because of its postsructuralist association. See Moore-Gilbert for a distinction between French poststructuralist theory-inspired “postcolonial theory” on the one hand, and on the other, the “wider field of postcolonial criticism” that is, generally speaking, averse to or skeptical of “theory.”

4 For a similar itemized summary of the general critiques of postcolonial studies, see Hallward, xv. For more refined marshallings of such attacks on postcolonialism and/or detailed analyses of one or more of these critiques, see Ahmad, Cooppan, Dirlik, Loomba (Colonialism), MacClintock, and Shohat. This list, of course, can’t be exhaustive.

5 This “definition” originally appeared in an article of 1992 whose title serves a clear purpose—“Postcolonial Criticism.” The original passage was slightly revised and included in an essay called “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern: The Question of Agency,” collected in The Location of Culture.

6 Here I am drawing on Slavoj Žižek’s explication of Badiou’s critique of multiculturalism, which often describes itself as premised on the Deleuzian “rhizomatic multitude.” In his writings on Deleuze, Badiou has characterized him as “the most radical monist in modern philosophy” (Žižek, Totalitarianism, 238, 269).

7 I shall return to tackle some other issues raised in Bhabha’s work, specifically his appropriation of Lacanian psychoanalysis, in Chapter 2. Spivak’s relentlessly particularistic and singularizing approach will also be discussed later in the book, with the emphasis on her admitted “complicity” in the totalizing/universalist schemes she sets out to deconstruct.

8 Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman claim that Said’s Orientalism “single-handedly inaugurated a new era of academic inquiry: colonial discourse, also referred to as colonial discourse theory” (5). Thanks to Spivak and Bhabha, the other two of the “big three,” Said’s status as the founding figure of the (sub)field of postcolonial theory is further consolidated in their acknowledgement of Orientalism as a work that “inaugurated the postcolonial field” (Bhabha, “Postcolonial Criticism,” 465), or as “the source book in our discipline” (Spivak, Outside, 56). Before Said’s intervention, there had certainly been a well-developed body of work on colonialism and postcolonial situations that was diverse disciplinarily as well as geographically (by Third World intellectuals such as Fanon and C. L. R. James besides the Western ones) yet that didn’t garner as much currency as its post-Orientalism counterpart. For this last point, see Ahmad, Lazarus, Loomba (Colonialism), among others.

9 In Said’s conception, the “contrapuntal” position, in accordance with its musical connotation, connects, synthesizes, or coordinates discrete yet now related elements. Hallward comments that such contrapuntal perspective can only be “the perspective of the whole” (58, original emphasis), since, according to Said himself, counterpoint is the “the tying together of multiple voices in a kind of disciplined whole,” as distinct from their “simple reconciliation” (“Criticism, Culture, and Performance,” 26).

10 This happens to be the title of an essay in a special issue on universalism in difference 7.1 (Spring 1995). The forthright message of this particularly long piece by Lazarus et al., moreover, is also indicative of the overall consensus of the articles in the same issue—a significant theoretico-politcal intervention by itself, though there are definitely nuances in the positions of individual essays.

11 One can also find a more recent case in Habermas’s idea of the aseptic space of free communication which presupposes its own universal rules and whose teleological end (of unimpeded communication) ensures the participant’s intelligibility to the Other (and vice versa).

12 This capital-driven universality, of course, is to be combated, not defended, and it cannot be effectively combated through the partial and particularistic struggles that postcolonialism seems to embrace. Both Dirlik and Lazarus argue that one should develop concepts or a universalism that can match capitalism’s total reach and implications and systematicity—a universalism which they defend (Dirlik, 105; Lazarus et al., 75; Lazarus, 23–24, 61–62). Similarly, Ahmad postulates universality as a result of “the global operation of a single mode of operation” (In Theory, 103).

13 Take patriarchy, for example. Patriarchy could be empirically determined as a universal prior to the exceptions discovered (or until the exceptions could no longer be ignored). While it was, and still is, a preponderant tendency regulating most societies, locating universals in such tendencies and regularities would be theoretically fallible and politically hazardous.

14 Zerilli observes that Laclau, like Hannah Arendt, attempts to “shift the discussion of universalism from the terrain of philosophy to that of politics.” For Laclau, the question of the universal, therefore, is a “question of political community after metaphysics” (7).

15 Examining the historical forms of the conceptions of the binarism universality/particularity in ancient Greek philosophy, Christianity, and Enlightenment thought, Laclau seeks to demonstrate the emergence and limits of the logic of incarnation underlying the idea of representation. In classical philosophy (particularly that of Plato), the universal and the particular are absolutely incommensurable, with an “uncontaminated dividing line” separating the realm of reason (universality) and irrationality (particularity). The particular either “eliminates itself as particular and transforms itself in a transparent medium thorough which universality operates,” writes Laclau, “or it negates the universal by asserting its particularism (but as the latter is purely irrational, it has no entity of its own and can only exist as corruption of being)” (Emancipation(s), 22). This unbridgeable gap between the universal and the particular is overcome and these two incompatible orders are somehow brought together by Christianity in the logic of incarnation, by which the universal, as “mere event in an eschatological succession,” is incarnated in a “finite and contingent succession” of worldly events—a revelation. Here God is the “only and absolute mediator,” and since God’s designs are inscrutable, the relationship between the two orders, between the universal and the particular, has to be opaque and incomprehensible to humans. Enlightenment thought sets out to demystify Christian eschatology and thus interrupt the logic of incarnation by replacing the arbitrary, unfathomable divine intervention with a universal, “rational grounding that has to be fully transparent to human reason” (ibid., 23). And then come the now familiar critiques of Enlightenment rationality, ushered in by Adorno and Horkheimer’s “de-demystification” of an enlightenment repeating the very mythic gesture it seeks to do without and culminating in the postmodernist debunking of its universalist pretensions and inherent contradictions. Later in Emancipation(s), Laclau proceeds to a similar historical re-examination of the concept of universal/particular, with emphasis on individual philosophers—Plato, Hobbes, Hegel, and Gramsci—who represent “four moments” in the thinking of ruling and universality (60–65).

16 It comes as no surprise that this universal representing the absent fullness of community is often taken to be the “true” communitarian ground or “essence” of the community in reality; this fundamentally false universal thus assumes, in effect, the function of the “true” universal, however temporarily, tenuously, or erroneously. This once again resonates with Zerilli’s comment on Schor that “a universalism could be false in the sense of never fully devoid of particularity and yet still stand for that which we call universal” (20).

17 Here I am borrowing the title of Zerilli’s essay, “This Universalism Which Is Not One.”

18 Without such socially constitutive antagonism, we would have “the reconciled society,” whose existence requires “the emergence of a social actor whose own particularity would express the pure essence of humanity” and therefore allows for “the full realization of a pure universality” (Laclau, Reflections, 78).

19 Here MacCannell is explicating Žižek’s, or rather, a Lacanian, conception of the Universal in light of Marx. There are, of course, nuances between the Marxian formulation of the universal and the one we’re advancing here. It goes without saying that Marx, in much of his writings, privileges the proletariat as the agency destined to incarnate the universal and carry out its universalizing function, whereas the discourses of universality we’ve enlisted do not exclusively attribute this radically excluded element to the proletariat. The difference, I think, lies mainly in who or what it is that is so systematically excluded and rendered outside the social or even the human, and whether such a non-social element is still considered a class, as part of society. Marx’s ambivalence and inconsistency with regard to the status of the most victimized and oppressed strata of society—and hence their candidacy for the agency of universality—is revealed most explicitly in his notion of the lumpenproletariat, which he considers even more heterogeneous vis-à-vis the existing order than the proletariat, and which represents less the emergence of a new class than the unfixing of all class differentiation. See Peter Stallybrass’s discussions of Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire. I shall return to the question of the lumpenproletariat in Chapter 4.

20 It was common practice for owners to mix slaves of different tribal and regional origins so as to prevent mass communication and, hence, mass uprisings on their plantations.

21 More detailed elaborations of Toussaint’s mimicry will follow in Chapter 2.

22 Or, rather, this non-social would be swiftly co-opted in an expanded yet structurally intact universe, and we would have another antagonistic fight between particularistic forces that pose themselves as “false universals,” as postmodernists and many postcolonialists would have it.