Mandair, Arvind-pal

Zene, Cosimo

English

SOAS Research Online

Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution - Routledge] At: 15:44 15 July 2008 Dialogue as the Inscription of ‘TheWest’Special Editors: Arvind Mandair & Cosimo ZeneThe international conference on ‘Dialogue and Difference’ took place in London, atthe School of Oriental and African Studies, between 12 and 14 September 2001. Overthree intense days, 26 papers were presented and discussed by leading scholars fromJapan, the USA, China, Iran, Korea, Germany, France and Great Britain.The conference sought to explore the widely felt and growing concern that, despitean increasinglyglobalised system of linkages, there is, at every moment, a general feeling thatcommunication is breaking down everywhere, on an unparalleled scale. (Bohm,1996)It was perhaps an increasing awareness of this breakdown in dialogue, in the verymidst of dialogue, that the United Nations, at the proposal of President Khatami ofIran, declared 2001 as the ‘Year of Dialogue Between Cultures’.Our forethought while preparing this conference*/that for some (the West) thereis dialogue, whereas for the non-Western other, dialogue does not exist*/wasconfirmed in all its dreadful clarity on the very day before the start of the conference,on September 11. Indeed the fall of the Twin Towers appeared to signify the dualnature of global interconnectedness. Though it seemed even more significant andcompelling, following those events, to go ahead with the conference, our initialquestions returned, even more pressing and disturbing and certainly less theoretical,to haunt us. Dialogue appeared in all its ambiguity and with contradictions. This‘benign word’, seemingly at the foundation of the Western philosophical tradition,needed to be explored and its equivocal character exposed. While religious andpolitical leaders often invoke dialogue as a sign of ‘goodwill’, keen to manifest adisposition towards openness and democracy, it may just as often be a cover formanipulation or deceit. Dialogue was called upon in precisely such a manner duringDr Arvind Mandair, Department of Philosophy and Religion, Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York 11549,USA. Email: arvindmandair@hotmail.comDr Cosimo Zene, Study of Religions Department, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London,London, UK. Email: ZC@soas.ac.ukISSN 1350-4630 (print)/ISSN 1363-0296 (online) # 2005 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/13504630500256845Social IdentitiesVol. 11, No. 3, May 2005, pp. 171/175Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution - Routledge] At: 15:44 15 July 2008 the spread of Western colonialism, and, even in the light of such knowledge, is stilluttered as part of a Western body of theory and discourse.Questions over the hegemony of discourse and language guided our reflectionprior to the conference: How best can this problem of hegemony itself be addressed?Can post-colonial theorizing provide the means by which dialogue may be rethought?How might non-Western languages enter into a dialogue conducted primarily inEnglish? Are ‘indigenous’ forms of dialogue possible or viable when irreducible toEuropean models, capable of evading existing power structures and opening a path tomutual understanding? Or, must cross-cultural dialogue necessarily find itselfreduced to a Western model of ‘movement of the self towards the other’? Cancritical theory help us to ‘un-say’ the ‘said’ of a monological dialogue? Can theoriesfrom outside Europe disrupt such dominance? Is European thought able todeconstruct itself so as to welcome other ways of dialogue without once moreimposing a universal model? In other words, is an ethical/critical dialogue possible?Many of these questions were addressed at the conference and great efforts weremade to concentrate our attention on two major issues. First, the awareness that theWest*/as ‘inventor’ of the concept of dialogue*/must necessarily rethink itsphilosophical bases in the light of the ‘irreducible’ alterity of other cultures and/orsubjects, and thus also taking into account other ways of thinking, applied to therepresentation of their meaningful universe. And second, promoting a critique of thevery concept of Occident/the West, which is always felt as totalizing and/or‘colonizing’ vis-à-vis the other cultures with which it coexists. Thus, on the onehand, it was the concept of dialogue which needed to be re-thought, and on the other,the West, as hegemonic idea and culture was being put under scrutiny. This ‘re-thinking’, to be precise, did not foresee a renewed narcissistic Occidental strategytrying to mirror itself in the pond of its own history and cultural development. Thiswas meant to trigger a self-critique not borne out of itself but of the encounter withother cultures and other ways of thinking.Nevertheless, as Tosolini remarked soon after the conference:Nowadays it has become both difficult and intricate to talk about dialogue, and thefirst difficulty lies, in fact, in its very etymology (dia-logos , ‘through communica-tion’ or ‘through language’ or ‘through reason’). To speak of ‘dialogue’ today meansto take into account the conceptual devices that brought it to life as a ‘theory forsearching the truth’. These devices can be retraced both in the complicateddiscourse on the inevitability of presence of the ‘dia-’ in every dialogical event (i.e.in an atmosphere-presence which does not ‘leave intact’ but, on the contrary,pushes the identity of the speakers into the precincts of Being, thus reducing it to a‘function’ or ‘manifestation’ of Being itself), and in the fact that language*/aslogos*/ contains in itself not just positive potentialities but also destructiveelements. Language not only explains, says and transmits . . . but also homologuesand subjugates every possible discourse and every discussant under the discovery ofa presumed truth. Thus, the concept of dialogue is strongly linked to an Occidentalhistory which, although on the one hand has excavated language to find wayswhich are ‘purer’, more ‘adequate’, ‘truer’, on the other, has generated counterpositions which have appeared as ideological and totalizing. It is here that172 A. Mandair & C. ZeneDownloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution - Routledge] At: 15:44 15 July 2008 dichotomies and essentialisms are borne: ‘correct/wrong’, ‘sense/non-sense’, ‘true/false’, ‘real/illusory’, ‘Being/Nothingness’ . . . leading into the more insidious ‘we/others’, ‘civilized/primitive’, ‘us/them’ etc. which are at the root of our interpreta-tion of facts and of encounters with ‘other’ cultures.This theoretical uneasiness and puzzlement becomes a painful and suffered realityto students, teachers, and researchers across a variety of disciplines where dialogue isdrawn upon as a tool to mediate difference between persons, texts, cultures andreligions; notably in international studies, politics, anthropology, critical pedagogy,religious studies, theology and mission studies, post-colonial studies, gender studies,cultural and critical theory and philosophy. The uneasiness is no less felt, in thecurrent climate of global uncertainty, among policy makers, workers in the UN,development agencies, NGOs and those involved in the burgeoning industry ofconflict resolution, human rights and peace studies. With this first set of seven paperspublished here we propose to continue our reflection on these ‘troubled dialogues’and to focus our attention on the very concept of ‘Inscription of the West’.More precisely, as Naoki Sakai’s paper (‘The West: A dialogic prescription orproscription?’) underlines, there is a need to explore the ‘conflict’ between ‘the Westand the Rest’ and to challenge the pervasive assumption that the West exists, and thehistorical conditions thanks to which the contour of the West is imagined to be aclear and distinct entity. What Sakai calls into question is the imagined configurationof races, cultures and nations according to which the most radical and unpredictablegaps are always to be located between the ‘West and the Rest’. The questions raised bySakai’s paper, also in the light of recent international events, are still very open toreflection and debate: does the West exist? Can its culture be considered a yardstickfor the classification of other cultural expressions? Should the West not be treatedtoday as one of the many partners in the dialogue among cultures? And, what type ofdialogue should we propose now that the West has lost the ‘master’s voice’ in contactwith other ways of existence? In other words, dialogue might have a chance ofsurvival only if and when ‘difference’ forms part of the equation.In a slightly different vein, but following on from this, John McCumber’s paper(‘Dialogue as Resistance to Western Metaphysics’) isolates in the linguistic relation-ship with the other the concept of ‘ambiguity’. This is discussed as a possible way outof the kind of dialogic language which many still identify with a kind of‘homogenization’ of minds reached through the transfer of a mental concept fromone person to another. In this case dialogue and language would be enemies ofdifference. The fascinating dialogue between early twentieth century anthropologyand philosophical phenomenology motivates Robert Bernasconi (‘Lévi-Brulh amongthe Phenomenologists: Exoticization and the Logic of the ‘‘the Primitive’’’), todismantle the idea of a possible unitary dialogue of the West with a different Other,given that difference is already present within the European self. Thus, Bernasconijuxtaposes two contrasting, if not contradictory motifs of Western thought: firstlyself-recognition in otherness; secondly the tendency to project onto the other thoseaspects of oneself that one refuses to recognise in oneself. He illustrates this throughSocial Identities 173Downloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution - Routledge] At: 15:44 15 July 2008 the complex dialectic where the West enters into dialogue with the non-West, byexamining the figure of the ‘primitive’ within twentieth century phenomenologicalauthors including Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, Merleau-Ponty and Levinas. WhilstBernasconi reminds us that the other is silenced by making him or her ‘primitive’ or‘exotic’, he also urges us to reflect ‘on the institutions that dominate our ownpractices’ which reinvent primitivism, exoticism and racism.Bernasconi’s attempt to expose philosophy’s dialogue with anthropology as well asthe dialogue of Western anthropologists with their so-called ‘primitives’, triggers alsoa self-critique of the West borne out of the encounter with other cultures and otherways of thinking. Thus Hans Koegler in his ‘Recognition and Difference: The Powerof Perspectives in Interpretive Dialogue’ tries to rethink the West’s own dialogicalepistemology which takes its moves from the way the dialogical partner understandsitself and its own history. Such an effort, according to Koegler, is ethical in the sensethat this is the only way to respect and recognise the alterity of the other. Koegler’spaper neatly analyses some of the key moves and presuppositions made by manyanthropologists and textual hermeneuts dealing with the non-Western.This is developed in Alphonso Lingis’ paper ‘New Walls in the Age of Information’,where Lingis deals with three main issues: 1) how ethnic and racial prejudices are nowbeing created overnight, 2) how and why dialogue with past civilizations is nowbroken, and 3) the role of religion in conflicts that turn genocidal. Linking theseissues is Lingis’ personal reflection on how the notion of trust can operate as acounter to situations where dialogue is not possible. Alphonso, himself caught up inthe events of September 11, did not manage to attend the Conference, but he did sendus his heartfelt paper where he laments, almost as an inevitable prophecy, that‘dialogue will become possible . . . But first, the streets and fields will have to belittered with a certain critical number of dead bodies’.Dialogue as tolerance becomes an index of peoples’ maturity; a maturity which, inits turn, is open to a deeper comprehension of cultural inter-connection andenrichment taking place in the encounter with the other. Drawing from Ricoeur’sanalysis of narrative identity and the problematic of forgiveness and debt and fromDerrida’s discussion of hospitality and responsibility, Couze Venn (‘The Repetition ofViolence: Dialogue, the Exchange of Memory, and the Question of ConvivialSocialities’) proposes for discussion the Israel/Palestine conflict as an example of‘proliferating cases where the weight of history . . . condemns the present to therepetition of violence’. The ‘incommensurability of difference’, this ‘differend’*/Venntells us*/‘goes to the heart of the issue of the possibility of dialogue’. Narratives ofbelonging, the foundation of a nation, relations of power, the construction ofidentity*/all of which contain forms of oppression and violence*/can find a possiblesolution in the application of ethics founded on the idea of responsibility for theother, in which the ‘exchange of memories’ and the ‘translation’ between culturesoccupy a prominent place.Bringing to fruition his concern quoted here earlier, Tiziano Tosolini attempts inhis paper (‘Infinity or Nothingness? An Encounter between Nishida Kitarō and174 A. Mandair & C. ZeneDownloaded By: [Ingenta Content Distribution - Routledge] At: 15:44 15 July 2008 Emmanuel Levinas’) to stage an encounter between Kitarō and Levinas. Despite thegreat distance and the obvious ‘difference’ which separates both philosophers,Tosolini’s effort signals possible signs of hope for our understanding of the self, theworld and the other: Infinity and Goodness ‘seem to ‘‘surprise’’ and ‘‘touch’’ thelaboured stillness of Absolute Nothingness’.We wish the dialogue to continue. We hope to return to some of these problematicquestions with further contributions to this journal which underline yet again theambiguities of dialogue, the asymmetries of power and different perspectives ofdifference. Perhaps on this occasion we may have been over-preoccupied with aWestern predicament. But it was worthwhile if only to come to terms with our ownshortcomings, in order to be able to then listen to other voices so that some form ofdialogue, however troubled, may continue.AcknowledgementsThe papers in this Special Issue of Social Identities were originally presented at aninternational conference on Dialogue and Difference, held at the School of Orientaland African Studies at the University of London, September 12/14, 2001. Theorganizers of the conference, Arvind Mandair and Cosimo Zene, are the guest editorsof this issue, and would like to formally thank the following sponsors for theirgenerous support: Sikh Research Foundation (UK); Panesar-Plahe SEWA Trust;Japan 2001; SOAS Research Committee.ReferenceBohm, D. (1996) On dialogue. London: Routledge.Social Identities 175

Dialogue and the Inscription of the “West”

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