The translatability of revolutionary idioms

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Notes

David Huddart

School of Historical and Cultural Studies

Bath Spa University College

Bath BA2 9BN

UK

E‐mail: [email protected]

I would like to thank Angelaki's anonymous reviewers for their comments on this paper.

See “Interrogating Identity” in The Location of Culture 40–65.

Robert Young's Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction . See also Aijaz Ahmad, “Postcolonialism: What's in a Name?” 11–32.

“Revolutions that as Yet Have No Model” in The Spivak Reader 75–106. The title comes from Derrida's “Limited Inc a b c …,” referring to what is entailed by the structure of iterability; see Limited Inc (100).

“Limited Inc a b c …” is a response to John Searle, who had criticized Derrida's “Signature Event Context” for its (interest in) non‐seriousness. “Signature Event Context” is in Limited Inc.

Ahmad writes that “Robert Young, who had until a decade ago devoted himself almost entirely to propagating French poststructuralism in the British Isles, with hardly a thought to spare for the erstwhile colonies, suddenly emerged as a leading theorist of what got called ‘postcolonial criticism’” (“The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality” 8). Young's Postcolonialism insists that this separation of colonies and poststructuralism is precisely a consequence of a focus, such as Ahmad implies, on anglophone contexts.

Young argues that “the degree to which French poststructuralism more generally involved what amounted to a Maoist retheorization of European political and cultural theory, as well as its complex connections to Indian postcolonialism, remain as yet unexplored” (Postcolonialism 187). One possible exploration could be organized around the notion of dissensus.

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge , trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1972) passim.

See John Nash's distinction between the motif and movement of deconstruction (120).

Geoffrey Bennington writes in terms of the risk around this name: “The messiah is the first casualty of this construal of the messianic, which is why the word ‘messianic’ can seem a risky or unduly provocative term for Derrida to use in these contexts, a perhaps extreme form of the familiar deconstructive strategy of paleonymy” (137).

Responding to Ahmad's claim that he aestheticizes (textualizes) Marx, Derrida writes that “It is not enough to call the idea of ‘systematicity’ in philosophy into question (the system is only one form of coherence or ‘consistency’, a form that, moreover, appears late in the history of philosophy) in order then to take refuge in the aesthetic” (“Marx & Sons” 247). Derrida's approach to Hegel (as an obvious example of system) heeds this warning.

Ghostly Demarcations 213–69.

In a recent article for the Chronicle of Higher Education, titled “Save the World on Your Own Time” (23 Jan. 2003), Fish writes that “in my view no university, and therefore no university official, should ever take a stand on any social, political, or moral issue.” His assertion is that academics, when they speak as academics, have a duty to profess views pertaining only to academic virtue, not moral virtue; in other words, “it is immoral for academics or academic institutions to proclaim moral views.” Any kind of construction (rather than description) of globality would seem to imply professing morality, and so on this view the university could only be involved in describing the problem, not producing solutions. Activism might be something one does in the morning, but come the afternoon class on globalization, one can only describe it.

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david huddart

David Huddart School of Historical and Cultural Studies Bath Spa University College Bath BA2 9BN UK E‐mail: [email protected]