Nationalism and the Imagination

Nationalism is produced by tapping the most private attachment to ground for the purposes of the most public statecraft. It is predicated on reproductive heteronormativity: birthright. To "naturalize" is to legalize a simulacrum of displaced birth, which becomes an actual birthright for the next generation. Today's globalized world calls for a reinvention of the abstract state-structure for proper constitutional redress still to be available. It must be persistently cleansed of the emergence of nationalism through education. We are looking for a critical regionalism with trans-frontier jurisdiction. The international civil society has no social contract

Echo

I started to think specifically about Narcissus when I came across Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism. The book seemed such an attack on the few social gains made by feminism. Yet Narcissus was a boy! What seemed particularly unjust was the description of the young executive as "the happy hooker." (The word Yuppie had not yet come into the common language.) Prostitutes, however, were already organizing precisely because their class-position was rather different from that of young executives. I turned to Freud and found that he too had located the richest examples of narcissism among women, especially women unfulfilled by the secondary narcissism of motherhood. Where was Echo, the woman in Narcissus's story? My essay is an attempt to "give woman" to Echo, to deconstruct her out of traditional and deconstructive representation and (non)representation, however imperfectly

The Making of Americans, the Teaching of English, and the Future of Culture Studies

I was interested to find that, although "Constitutional Convention," "constitutional monarchy," and "Constitution of the United States" were three items listed under "What literate Americans know" in Professor E. D. Hirsch's provocative book Cultural Literacy, the Constitution was not an index entry. In other words, constitutional matters did not form part of Hirsch's own thinking in the making of his argument. There is nothing in his index between "Conservatism" and "Constructive Hypothesis." It is my opinion that, if one is going to speak for or plan for that complicated thing called an "American," one must think of his or her relationship to the Constitution. In this part of my paper, I consider the argument of the brilliant reinterpretation of the Constitution in Professor Bruce Ackerman's forthcoming book Discover the Constitution. Ackerman's understanding of the Constitution is dualist and exceptionalist. The dualism is between normal everyday politics where We the People are not much involved, and the great exceptional moments in political practice--constitutional politics -where We the People are mobilized and involved in the process of change through higher lawmaking

Revolutions That As Yet Have No Model: Derrida’s Limited Inc.

In 1971, Derrida read a paper entitled Signature evenement contexte in Montreal. In 1972, it was included in his collection Marges de la philosophie [Paris: Minuit]. In 1977, in the first issue of Glyph, appeared its English version "Signature Event Context." The piece was followed by "Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida" by John Searle. In Derrida's essay the limits and implications of the philosophical strategy of J. L. Austin, the founder of speech act theory, are discussed. In his short reply Searle, himself a speech act theorist, picks out what in his opinion are some of Derrida's obvious mistakes and corrects them in a tone of high disdain. The piece in review is Derrida's response to Searle's "Reply," published simultaneously and under the same title in French and English. In French as a pamphlet, in English as a part of Glyph 2. In it, with a mocking show of elaborate patience, Derrida exposes Searle's critique to be off the mark in every way. Whereas Searle's essay is brusque and all too brief, Derrida's is long and parodistically courteous and painstaking

New Literary History: Pages from a Memoir

It is hard to think New Literary History without Ralph Cohen. I have already experienced the meticulous editorial practice of Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman, and it makes me certain that they will understand and appreciate what I mean. A sober and general literary journal of superior quality, not confined to an identifiable political position, yet touching the radical edges of the profession as well, and lasting forty years! Ralph, with his extraordinary flexibility, combined with some fairly tenacious convictions, was ideally suited to launch and support such a phenomenon. I did not meet him and Libby until 1982. So let me describe the impact of NLH upon me when it burst upon my intellectual horizons, more than ten years before that meeting. I was a year short of tenure when NLH first appeared. In 1966, one year into my assistant professorship, young U.S. instructors with my sort of training were astounded by the appearance of Roland Barthes's "Introduction à l'analyse structurale des récits" in the pages of Communications. What struck us as readers was that Barthes, providing a fairly careful system, quickly dismantled and destroyed it in another epistemic idiom at the close of the essay. I was already deeply committed to the importance of the double bind as method, and this was an uncanny example of it. You provide a "scientific" system for analysis, but must also situate and provide a symptomatic reading of the need for such systems. Upon such ground, in my case prepared by Tarak Nath Sen at the University of Calcutta, Paul de Man at Cornell University, and Jacques Derrida, to whom I introduced myself impersonally in institutional solitude, appeared New Literary History. At the University of Iowa, where I was teaching, the conflict between George Lyman Kittredge and René Wellek, the history of literature and literary criticism, was alive in the person of E. P. Kuhl, an altogether vocal emeritus member of the Department of English, then in his eighties. It was deeply important for me that this new journal asked us to look at the prospect of a new literary history, not a new history of literature. I was beginning to teach Antonio Gramsci at that time—the Gramsci who felt that history and sociology must take a literary turn if they were to track the subaltern in an inventory without traces. It is all over his Notebooks, but most particularly in his notes on the historiography of the subaltern, the subaltern being the group that has no access to the "state." Thus, the idea that history should be literary, with the best gifts of criticism, seemed to this young professional a great gift—even if the intention of the title may not have been just that. It was no surprise, then, that I read Hayden White, Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, and Jacqueline Rose in its pages. Looking at the list of contributors to prepare myself for these few remarks, I am astounded at the diversity: Ernst Gombrich, Alicia Ostriker, and Stanley Fish under the same roof. Took some doing

Love Me, Love My Ombre, Elle

The Fall 1981 issue of Diacritics contains Gregory Ulmer's review of La carte postale: de Socrate ' Freud et au-dela (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), called "Post-Age." So much of Derrida's work is on the double take that there might be a virtue in double-taking his latest "book" in the pages of the same journal. ("Double" stands for "indefinite," Derrida frequently implies. Exigencies of the schedule of journal publication and the time table of an itinerant scholar have turned the calendar to the Spring of 1984. An indefinite take, then.) Mr. Ulmer gives an authoritative account of La carte. Some duplication is inevitable but I shall, by and large, attempt to stay out of his arguments

Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching

In this essay I consider not only fiction as event but also fiction as task. I locate in Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) and J. M. Coetzee (1940– ) representations of what may be read as versions of the “I” figured as object and weave the representations together as a warning text for postcolonial political ambitions.4 I am obviously using “text” as “web,” coming from Latin texere—“to weave.” In the second part of the essay I move into the field of education as a nation-building calculus. I examine planning as its logic and teaching as its rhetoric—in the strong sense of figuration

Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value

The "idealist" and the "materialist" are both exclusive predications. There have been attempts to question this exclusivist opposition, generally by way of a critique of the "idealist" predication of the subject: Nietzsche and Freud are the most spectacular European examples. Sometimes consciousness is analogized with labor-power as in the debates over intellectual and manual labor. Althusser's notion of "theoretical production" is the most controversial instance [For Marx 173-93]. The anti-Oedipal argument in France seems to assume a certain body without predication or without predication-function. (The celebrated "body without organs" is one product of this assumption -see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.) I have not yet been able to read this as anything but a last-ditch metaphysical longing. Since I remain bound by the conviction that subject-predication is methodologically necessary, I will not comment upon this anti-Oedipal gesture. The better part of my essay will concern itself with what the question of value becomes when determined by a "materialist" subject-predication such as Marx's. This is a theoretical enterprise requiring a certain level of generality whose particular political implications I have tabulated in passing and in conclusion. Here it is in my interest to treat the theory-politics opposition as if intact

Rethinking Comparativism

What is it that one “compare”-s in Comparative Literature? Goethe’s Weltliteratur is usually invoked when talking about the beginnings of a comparative literature. The other story is Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach in Turkey. There is also the story of the rise of the discipline of Comparative Literature to intellectual prominence in the United States in the period following the Second World War, largely as a result of the migration to the United States of a group of noted European comparativists seeking asylum from totalitarianism. This group had a great influence in fostering the theoretical transformation of literary studies and in bringing about fundamental changes in national literature studies. But to think of comparative literature as comparative had something to do with the notion of la littérature comparée in France—where comparison implicitly referred to the standards of the French eighteenth century. This attitude is reflected in the fundamental premises of Pascale Casanova’s work today. René Etiemble’s Comparaison n’est pas raison attempted, in 1963, to combat that impulse in a manner that is still favorably comparable to much that goes on in the Euro-U.S. today. But in terms of the questions we are asking, it is still too much within the internationalist side of cold war logic—going no further than the front-line languages of India and East Asia, with a somewhat paternalistic approach. Whatever the outcome of that debate, and whatever the status of the classical traditions of Asia, Comparative Literature within the United States remained confined to European literary regionalism. After the cold war, the division between a Eurocentric Comparative Literature and geopolitically oriented “Area Studies” seemed to have become less tenable than before. But comparison in favor of the European tradition has remained in place

Acting Bits/Identity Talk

In Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, Assia Djebar places herself with great autobiographers: Augustine, the Berber who wrote not only his theology but his Confessions in the language of Rome; and Ibn Khaldfin, son of a family that fled southern Arabia, who wrote not only his history but his Ta'arif[identity] in Arabic. Staging herself as an Algerian Muslim woman, she gives a fragmented version of the graph-ing of her bio in French. Identity as a wound, exposed by the historically hegemonic languages, for those who have learned the double-binding "practice of [their] writing" (F, p. 181). I accept this difficult definition, to present a series of citations of "myself" engaged in identity talk