Postcolonial theory and the crisis of European man

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Notes

1. Ian Hunter, ‘The History of Theory’, Critical Inquiry 33, 2007, pp 78–112.

2. See Friedrich Engels, Socialism, from Utopia to Science, trans. Edward Aveling, New York: New York Labour Press, 1968, 1982; Robert Blantchford, Merrie England, London: Journeyman, 1893, 1977; and Vladimir Lenin, ‘Left-Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder: An Attempt at a Popular Discussion on Marxist Strategy and Tactics, London: Martin Lawrence, 1920, 1934. I have written in greater detail about the historical occlusion of fin de siècle ‘theoretical’ anti-imperialisms and socialisms in Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006.

3. R H Tawney, The Sickness of an Acquisitive Society, London: G H Bell, 1921, p 3.

4. The Aryan Path, vol. ix, September 1938, no. 9, pp 421–456.

5. For details about the Indian involvement in the Great War see Upendra Narayan Chakravorty, Indian Nationalism and the First World War, 1914–1918, Calcutta: Progressive Publishers, 1997, and S D Pradhan, Indian Army in East Africa, 1914–1918, Delhi: National Book Organisation, 1991. David Omissi (ed.) Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914–18, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1999, offers an illuminating account of subaltern participation in the war.

6. M K Gandhi, The Bombay Chronicle, 4 May 1918, cited in Chakravorty, Indian Nationalism, p 19.

7. Mulk Raj Anand's Across the Black Waters, Delhi: Vision Books, 1940, 1978, p 93, provides a fictional account of an estranging yet culturally educative encounter between an Indian and East African regiment on the Western Front.

8. Omissi, Indian Voices, letter no. 56, p 56.

9. Omissi, Indian Voices, letter no. 13, p 32.

10. Omissi, Indian Voices, letter no. 121, p 90.

11. Omissi, Indian Voices, letter nos. 24 and 63, pp 38, 59.

12. Omissi, Indian Voices, letter no. 449, p 258.

13. Omissi, Indian Voices, letter no. 26, p 40.

14. Omissi, Indian Voices, letter no. 25, p 39.

15. Omissi, Indian Voices, letter no. 118, p 88.

16. Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, 1922, 1970, p 4.

17. Omissi, Indian Voices, letter no. 115, p 87.

18. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E F N Jephcott, New York: Verso, 1951, 2000.

19. Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, p 23.

20. See Chakravorty, Indian Nationalism, pp 10–33, for an account of coercive recruitment during the Great War. Omissi, Indian Voices, pp 15–16, has a brief discussion of the subject.

21. An engaging fictional account of the perverse compact between Germany and radical Islam is drawn in John Buchan's Greenmantle (1916) which also recasts the Great War as a covert crusade fought between committed Muslims and ‘Missionaries’. For a historically sensationalist version of this episode, see Peter Hopkirk, On Secret Service East of Constantinople: The Plot to Bring Down the British Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

22. M K Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. XVI, Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry for Information and Broadcasting, 1965, p 308.

23. See Richard Wright, The Colour Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference, London: Dennis Dobson, 1956, p 127.

24. George McTurnan Kahin, The Asian-African Conference, Bandung, Indonesia, April 1955, Port Washington: Kennikat Press, p 39.

25. Wright, The Colour Curtain, p 170.

26. Albert Memmi, The Coloniser and the Colonised, trans. Howard Greenfeld, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1965, pp 63, 62.

27. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham, New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1955, 1972, pp 9, 13.

28. Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Preface’, in Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961, 1990, p 24.

29. Memmi, Coloniser and Colonised, pp 117, 119.

30. See Paul Nizan, The Watchdogs: Philosophers of the Established Order, trans. Paul Fittingoff, New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1960, 1971; and Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations of Science, Culture and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995, p 195.

31. See Sartre, ‘Preface’, in Wretched of the Earth, p 25.

32. Memmi, Coloniser and Colonised, pp 127, 135, 137.

33. M K Gandhi, Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, ed. Anthony J Parel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910, 1997, pp 106, 68.

34. Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy: Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Philosophy and the Crisis of European Man, trans. Quentin Lauer, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965, p 150.

35. See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970, pp 5–6.

36. Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, p 146.

37. The phrase ‘lived actualisation’ is from James Dodd, Crisis and Reflection: An Essay on Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences, Dordrecht, Boston, MA and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004, p 17.

38. Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of European Sciences, p 17.

39. Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of European Sciences, p 77. An eloquent consideration of epochē as a form of ascesis is given in Paul Ricoeur, Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology, trans. Edward G Ballard and Lester E Embree, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967, pp 176–177.

40. Emmanuel Levinas, Discovering Existence with Husserl, trans. Richard A Cohen and Michael B Smith, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998, p 61.

41. Edmund Husserl, The Paris Lectures, trans. Peter Koestenbaum, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964, p 35.

42. Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. James H Nichols, Jr., Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1947, 1969, p 20.

43. To this recognition that humanity belongs, in a sense, to the oppressed, Fanon famously testifies toward the end of The Wretched of the Earth, p 252: ‘When I search for Man in the technique and style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders. The human condition, plans for mankind and collaboration between men in those tasks which increase the sum total of humanity are new problems, which demand true inventions … . Let us try to create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth.’