South Atlantic Quarterly 106:1, Winter 2007

doi 10.1215/00382876-2006-016 2007 Duke University Press

Horacio Legrs
Impertinence
In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha ex-
presses his belief that the encounters and ne-
gotiations of diferential meanings and values
within colonial textuality, its governmental dis-
courses and cultural practices, have anticipated,
avant la lettre, many of the problematics of signi-
fcation and judgment that have become current
in contemporary theoryaporia, ambivalence,
indeterminacy, the question of discursive clos-
ure, the threat to agency, the status of intention-
ality, the challenge to totalizing concepts, to
name but a few. Bhabha connects these critical
concepts to colonial experiences in an essay aptly
entitled The Postcolonial and the Postmodern.
All the items listed by Bhabha fall essentially into
two big categories: that of language (aporia, inde-
terminacy), and that of subjectivity (the threat to
agency, the status of intentionality).
Newness and emergence also appear frequently
in Bhabhas work, even though he remains sus-
picious of a critical approach that would favor
issues of origin, force, and becoming. This reluc-
tance separates Bhabhas production from the
main concerns of subalternism. While the sub-
alternists language strives to understand its topic
in terms of irruption and insurgency, Bhabhas
86 Horacio Legrs
prefers conceptual tools such as displacement and ambivalence to deal with
the fragmented experience of a postcolonial modernity. The subalternist
acknowledges that subalternity is mediated and constituted as a discursive
efect; but he or she must also acknowledge the pressure that the subaltern
exerts on the historical text or the police record where its fgure appears
inscribed for the frst time. The status of the subalterns irruption remains
ambiguous. It is recorded in terms of violence by the dominant social con-
fguration, but the subalternist must strive to understand this irruption as
a modality of force.
The discourse of the aesthetic also ties the question of origins and emer-
gence to the issue of force. There is little doubt that the centrality of rep-
resentation throughout modernity has resulted in a certain confation not
only of the question of aesthetic and political representation, but also of
poetic force and social emergence. An exemplary instance of this rela-
tionship appeared with the publication of Appeal to Some Intellectuals,
a poem by the bilingual (Quechua-Spanish) and bicultural Peruvian writer
Jos Mara Arguedas. In this poem, Arguedas invokes the power of poetry
in his confrontation with a reductionist postcolonial violence. Much to our
surprise, perhaps, Arguedass negation takes neither the form of an ethical
claim of singularity based on diference and identity nor the appearance
of a poststructuralist deconstruction of an imperial, Eurocentric logos.
Instead, he seeks to challenge the violence of domination by recourse to
a lived world that is posited as the unavoidable substratum of any social
or historical edifce. This declaration of the primacy of the world recalls
the phenomenological intervention that colored the anticolonial pages of
Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Memmi, or Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The intimacy
between the language of phenomenology and the problematic of postcolo-
niality has largely been forgotten today. In the long run poststructuralism
displaced phenomenology as the ground from which to think the colonial
and the postcolonial relationship. Text, ambiguity, and aporia replaced
reduction, valuation, and intentionality as conceptual means of under-
standing the coordinates of the postcolonial experience, and even the pri-
mordial phenomenological language was rewritten in a poststructuralist
logic of the sign. Thus, for Bhabha even intentionality and purpose . . .
emerge from the time-lag, from the stressed absence that is an arrest,
a caesure of time. The phenomenological tone has not been altogether
banished, however, and can be detected not only in Arguedass poem but
also in some critical infections of contemporary theory. In this essay, I
Impertinence 87
want to interrogate this convergence of poetics, a phenomenological style
of interrogation, and the poststructuralist framework that dominates dis-
cussions of postcoloniality. What interests me above all is how these three
discoursespoetics, phenomenology, and poststructuralismtackle the
problematic status of force today.
Immemorial Landscape and Historical Time
Arguedass poems and novels are never just poems and novels; they also
function as theoretical interventions, lending his books an aura of proph-
ecy and insight. One of the strongest of these interventions was the 1966
Spanish-Quechua poem Llamado a unos doctores (Appeal to Some Intel-
lectuals). The poem is directly related to a public debate that took place
at a roundtable organized by the Peruvian Institute of Literature following
the publication of Arguedass novel Todas las sangres in 1964. Arguedas
had characterized his novel not only as an instance of realism but also as a
testimonial of indigenous and mestizo life in the Andes. The participants
at the roundtable, however, criticized the novel as nothing but the wistful
portrayal of a bygone society. The disagreement centered around the
question of how to characterize the popular element of Andean societies.
For Arguedas, this popular element was indigenous in its worldview and
upbringing. For the social scientists, the only valid category with which to
address the popular strata of Peru was that of the peasant; their worldview
could be understood only according to the issues forced upon them by the
modernizing and exploitative dynamic of a regional form of capitalism.
This tension regarding the identity of the popular (more cultural and
autonomous in Arguedas, more socioeconomic and reactive in his readers)
was coupled with a no less dramatic disagreement around the nature
and goals of literary discourse. Commentators at the roundtable charged
Arguedas with incarnating a reactionary position. Salazar Bondy regretted
that the sympathies of the author did not lie with the character that in his
view represented a progressive step (27). Jos Miguel Oviedo lamented
the fact that the Indians sided with the traditional and reactionary land-
owner in his confict with the innovative, greedy, and unscrupulous na-
tional industrial. Not only did this seem confusing to Oviedo; it would,
he thought, confuse the readers as well (34). Rather surprisingly, both
Salazar Bondy and Jos Miguel Oviedo claimed that they were expressing
not so much a personal opinion as a sociological standpoint (27, 34).
88 Horacio Legrs
Meanwhile, those who sided with Arguedas in the debate called for a
literary reading of the novel, where the expression literary reading was
opposed to a naive, referentialist ideology of the artistic work. They did
not notice that depriving Arguedass fction of the claim of being inextri-
cably linked to reality amounted to condemning it to irrelevance in his view.
The truth is that the unskilled literary reader, sociologist, or anthropologist
who measured Arguedass novel by the parameters of reality were not
wrong, not even from a properly theoretical point of view. Arguedass
literature had always addressed the status of the real in a context so fs-
sured along linguistic, ethnic, and cultural lines that it constantly ruined
the claims for stability made by any hegemonic discourse.
Appeal to Some Intellectuals is more than an answer to the arrogance
of the intellectual. It is also a liminal text that looks ahead to Arguedass
last, unfnished novel, The Fox from Up Above, and the Fox from Down
Belowa text, in Alberto Moreirass words, powerful enough to arrest our
world and any world. This process of arresting a world, which clearly sets
The Fox apart from all of Arguedass previous production, is already the
most noticeable feature of the poem. In this composition, Arguedas was
no longer concerned with the identity of the Andean people as in his pre-
vious works; rather, he was concerned with the world as the very ground
for the adjudication of social and historical identity. This move incarnates
the postcolonial enunciative position in an exemplary way insofar as its
most immediate result is to reawaken the original epistemic and linguistic
violence that is foundational to the colonial relationship. But Arguedas
insists not on the aporetics of language or on the deidentifcatory nature
of subjection, as in a postmodern version of postcoloniality, but rather on
embodiment. Already at the roundtable, the Peruvian writer had rejected
the possibility of a disembodied vision of the Andes with such vehemence
and coherence that we must read it in programmatic, rather than acciden-
tal, terms: I have to tell it as it was, because I enjoyed it, I sufered it (18).
The phrase links a claim of objectivity to a factual commitmentto use the
old existentialist expressionof the author to his world. Such a link leads
to a form of realism which, as Cornejo Polar noticed, is both a description
and an interpretation of reality. It is a form of realism based not so much
on observation and detachment as on the intensity of a lived experience. Is
admitting a lack of objectivity a self-defeating strategy? Arguedas would
perhaps have answered that any narration, and not just his narration, tes-
tifes to a relationship of joy or sufering with the world. He surely enter-
tained and dismissed the possibility of a disembodied knowledge of the
Impertinence 89
worlda knowledge performed by nobody upon an object that has become
indiferent, almost nothing. This thought may have terrifed him, and a
good deal of his literature seems to arise in answer to this possibility.
The Value of the World
The poems opening lines read:
They say that we no longer know anything, that we are backward,
that they will exchange our heads for better ones.
They also say that our heart is not in tune with the times, that it is
full of fears, of tears, like the heart of the calandria, like the heart
of a great bull whose throat is cut, and for this we are considered
impertinent. (253)
The poem starts by conceding a dominant position to the intellectuals: that
of common sense, that of the said. Some intellectuals, some doctores,
the poem says, think the Indians are unft for the times. The developmen-
talist ideology that underpins the discourse of the intellectual is evoked
through words that connote the movement of a historicist modernizing
discourse (no longer, backward, not in tune with the times). But Arguedas
denies this position epistemic authority. The deep collusion of morality and
developmentalism is made blatant by the use of a word such as impertinent
to refer to the intellectuals reaction to the endurance of an indigenous
worldview. Yet as the poem unfolds, the boundaries between the rational
discourse of the intellectual and the traditional mythic discourse of the
Indian poet whose worldview is under siege starts to break down. The intel-
lectuals say (but in a language that robs them of their language) that the
Indians heart is full of fears, of tears, like the heart of the calandria, like
the heart of a great bull whose throat is cut.
Arguedass goal is to put an end to this pretension of the intellectual to
explain the world and appropriate the others point of view, correcting his
or her impertinence. The resistance to appropriation, however, comes not
through an afrmation of the ethical right of the indigenous voice to defne
its own social being , as we might expect, but rather by opposing the pre-
tension of the intellectuals to the rock face of lived reality. [Let them speak
then], the poet challenges the doctores; and he immediately asks:
What is my brain made of ? What is the fesh of my heart made of ?
The rivers run roaring in the deep. The gold and the night, the silver
90 Horacio Legrs
and the frightening night create the rocks, the walls of the canyon
where the river sounds; that rock is the matter of my mind, my heart,
my fngers. (253)
Arguedas challenges the doctores on a terrain which they call theirs but
which they have, in a remarkable lapse of attention, perhaps forgotten:
the ontological ground of reality. This movement toward a primordial
understanding of the being of the world appears forcefully expressed in
an otherwise nonsensical question: What is the fesh of my heart made
of ? The knowledge of the intellectuals may not be false from a scientifc
point of view, but it is alienated knowledge. Thus the question-accusation:
What is there on the riverbank of those waters you do not know doctor?
The intellectuals own the word, but they are foreign to the land of which
they speak, because they are foreign to every land. Scientifc knowledge is
obtained through a renunciation of worldly experience. The Andean world
is not, however, closed to the gaze of the intellectual. Arguedas challenges
them to use all the potency of their vision: Bring out your spyglass, your
best glasses. See, if you can (253). Seeing, mere seeing, does not grant
knowledge because knowledge itself has become a form of blindness.
Seeing avoids its fate as blindness when it incarnates a real, active power
of defamiliarization that we associate with the life of aesthetic forms but
that Arguedas, in his poem, locates in a sphere more primal than that of
the aesthetic.
There was a time when theory, too, was radical in its orientation.
Merleau-Ponty, to name the most prominent member of this school of
radicalism, also indicted science and theory for the eagles gaze, the lofty,
removed view that cannot engage the thickness of the world but rather
consoles itself by producing a substitute reality. For Merleau-Ponty, the
phenomenological reduction invites us to return to a world which pre-
cedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to
which every scientifc schematization is [abstract] . . . as is geography in
relation to the countryside in which we have learnt beforehand what a
forest, a prairie or a river is. Against the abstract knowledge of the sci-
entist Merleau-Ponty proposed a disalienated experience of the world. In a
passage from The Visible and the Invisible, he phrases this experience in the
following terms: The efective, present, ultimate and primary being . . .
ofer themselves . . . only to someone who wishes not to have them but to
see them, [to someone] who is therefore not a nothingness the full being
Impertinence 91
would come to stop up, but a question consonant with the porous being
which it questions and from which it obtains not an answer, but a confr-
mation of its astonishment.
Not only does Arguedass poem echo these contemporary pages of
Merleau-Ponty; in addition, at a critical juncture the poetic voice asks: Is
the world without value, my friend, my doctor? The word value is more
enigmatic than it appears at frst sight. It is a value consonant with the
arising of humanity itself. Unsurprisingly, value is a critical word in the
language of the phenomenologists as well (unsurprisingly because, as
Merleau-Ponty put it, phenomenology is not a school, but an attitude as old
as the world itself ). Value is the word through which the phenomenologist
reminds his or her reader that phenomenology is not a psychologism.
Reduction does not lead back to the utopian moment of an objective and
distinct perception. The active side of the intentional act is a donation of
meaning. For Merleau-Ponty, this initial value of the world is, as we already
saw, astonishment. Likewise, Arguedass literature confronts its reader
with the problem of the value-forming activity of the indigenous, subaltern
people of Peru; however, the gesture, repeated novel after novel, always
remained difcult to read. But what about us? Can we today think value?
Can we think of value, as Arguedas does, outside the sphere of a juridical-
moral purview? Can we restore its connections with the dimension of cre-
ation, production, and originality that, Agamben tells us in the last aesthetic
of the twentieth century, even today constitutes the basis of arts promise
of a disalienated human habitation of the world?
Roots and Breaks
The diference between the phenomenological style of interrogation (the
one that comes closest to the anticolonial discourse incarnated in Argue-
dass poem) and the poststructuralist one (the one favored by transnational
postcolonialism) reveals itself fundamentally as a diference in orientation.
Reduction, Husserl reminds his reader somewhere in his copious work,
comes from the Latin reducere, leading back, going back. The radicalism
of phenomenology is literal, even if, unlike contemporary theory, it never
leads us back to the letter. It is a regressive radicalism, opposed to the
forward movement that characterizes theory, and, more precisely, post-
colonial theory today. We are used to thinking the postcolonial along with
other posts, namely the poststructural (from which, Ranajit Guha tells
92 Horacio Legrs
us, the subalternists drew the essential tools of their critical apparatus) and
the postmodern (somewhat equated by Homi Bhabha to the postcolonial).
As we saw in the quote from Bhabha that opened this essay, the issues
that most concern the researcher in these modalities of the postmodern,
the postcolonial, and the poststructural are issues of language and subjec-
tivity, in an arrangement in which the intrinsic ambivalence of the frst
bequeaths the sign of its uncertainty to the second. Yet it is also the same
Bhabha who, when retracing the intellectual path taken by a primordial
fgure such as Frantz Fanon, will recall the instrumental role played by
a phenomenological style of interrogation in the key arguments of Black
Skin, White Masks. Fanon, Bhabha tells us, splits his critical energy into
three discoursesMarxism, phenomenology, and psychoanalysisand
puts phenomenology to work in an attempt to restore the presence of the
marginalized (Location, 41). This reference is brief but critical. Since the
beginning, phenomenology appears tied to the question of acknowledging
the presence of an outside, registering the irruption of a force into the
careful check and balances of a well-ordered hegemony.
A postcolonial theory heavily infuenced by poststructuralism and de-
construction makes irony, the literalization of the law, or the play of identi-
fcation and disidentifcation the cornerstones of its emancipatory strategy.
The Western values of reason and universalism are not rejected but used with
the knowledge that their claim to universal validity is fawed. They are used
against the West, as regulating ideas able to show how an imperial logos
cannot unfold without contradicting its own core. One wonders if this
strategy can survive the increasing domain of what Peter Sloterdijk calls
cynical reason. One also wonders up to what point a strategy based on
irony does not presuppose the self-division of the modern European sub-
ject rather than an objective structure created by the colonial relationship
(such would be Bhabhas position). We know, for instance, that irony is a
rhetorical weapon completely unavailable to a writer such as Arguedas,
whose characters only experience self-division, as Creon or Oedipus did
two millennia before, under the form of destinys curse. Under the current
shape of dominance, which relies on cynicism (Sloterdijk), patronizing
benevolence (iek), or the denial of coevalness (Johannes Fabian), Argue-
dass poem reminds us that the phenomenological reduction, with its pos-
sibility of suspending the posited world, remains a formidable political
weapon. Even more, as I will argue more explicitly later, there seems to be
an elective afnity between literature as an aesthetic force and the recourse
to the reduction of the world as a postcolonial strategy of sorts.
Impertinence 93
If the phenomenology of culture has always constituted a relevant politi-
cal tool for disassembling established hegemonies, how can we explain phe-
nomenological discourses plunge in the stock market of critical discourses?
The criticism of phenomenology is far from being a recent development.
Some of the core propositions of phenomenology were already under siege
in Husserls lifetime. Husserl attempted to reground European science by
bringing the essence of the thing into the sphere of absolute immanence.
The phenomenological method intended this essence under the modality
of absolute presence (a Selbstgebung, self-giving). Already in the late
1920s, Heideggers philosophy had made some dents into the possibilities
announced so pompously by Husserl. The subject cannot constitute the
world, because it arrives into a world that is already constituted. In Being
and Time, the formative attributes of the Husserlian transcendental subject
appeared to be eclipsed by the disoriented humility of a fallen Dasein. In
the 1960s, subsequent and conclusive blows came in the shape of the early
work of Jacques Derrida. In 1962 Derrida translated and wrote an extensive
introduction to Husserls The Origin of Geometry. In 1967, he published
Speech and Phenomena, a deconstructive reading of Husserls Logical Inves-
tigations. Phenomenology again played a critical role in Derridas frst three
important books of the late 1960s and early 1970s: Writing and Diference
(which contains a whole revised version of Genesis and Structure and
Phenomenology, which Derrida had presented at a conference in 1959),
Margins of Philosophy, and Of Grammatology. One of the main targets of
Derridas criticism was the logic (as much as Husserl disliked the word)
implicit in the reduction and the dependence of that logic on an intuition
based on the modality of the presence of the eidos. Derridas notion of dif-
france, in contrast, underlined the deferred character of all possible logical
operations. But more important, Derrida faulted phenomenology for not
delivering on its promise of a genetic investigation and instead canceling
the genetic moment with dogmatic recourse to a structure.
Finally, in the 1980s (but this enumeration does not pretend to be
exhaustive), Slavoj iek launched an attack on the genetic pretensions of
the phenomenological exploration of the development of a human sphere
from his logical-structuralist interpretation of the Lacanian inheritance. In
Cartesian Subject versus Cartesian Theater, iek discards the possibility
of a reduction to a prerefectiveunderstood by him as prelinguistic
state of being. His argument follows the style of the clear-cut structuralist
and antigenetic articulation. As described by Mladen Dolar, this strategy
recognizes that structure always springs up suddenly, from nothing,
94 Horacio Legrs
without any transitional stages. For iek the structure in question
here is the symbolic as the operator that severs the human link to nature
and ruins any explanation of a genetic passage from a naturelike stage to
a culturelike stage. There is no subjectivity, writes iek, without [a]
gesture of withdrawal . . . the withdrawal-into-self, the cutting-of of the
links to the environs, is followed by the construction of a symbolic universe
that the subject projects onto reality as a kind of substitute-formation.
Through the development of such critique (and, no doubt, with the con-
tribution of others, like feminism and post-Marxism) a certain common
sense of contemporary criticism crystallized in the 1980s and 1990s. Any
genetic investigation, any investigation of origins, transformations, and
beginnings, is suspect of harboring a form of essentialism, of ontologizing
what is in fact no more than a discursive efect. It was iek himself who
articulated theorys unease regarding this situation in the most forceful
manner, when, in the context of a discussion with Ernesto Laclau, he
quotes Wendy Brown on the subject of the repression of radical politics
and critical imagination. To what extent, Brown asks, is a critique of capi-
talism foreclosed by the current confguration of oppositional politics,
and not simply by the loss of the socialist alternative or the ostensible
triumph of liberalism in the global order? iek takes the argument
further and declares that the main question of todays philosophic-political
scene lies in the impossibility of imagining any alternative to the ruling
capitalist order, a situation that he diagnoses in terms of an inability to
think the dimension of the act. We live, he continues, under an unwritten
Denkverbot (prohibition to think) whose result is that the moment one
shows a minimal sign of engaging in political projects that aim seriously to
change the existing order . . . one is met with a disarming benevolence and
an outright resistance towards even thinking an act. Arguedass reaction
against the critique of the social scientists echoes the situation described
by iek in this paragraph.
An ominous Hegelian pronouncement comes to mind: the end of his-
tory. Is the systemic nature of society, which, pace iek, the Lacanian no-
tion of the symbolic did a lot to sediment, the theory of the subject at the
end of all things? Are origin and change impossible in a world that has
exhaustedto say it in phenomenological fashionall variations and in
which history stands unmoved in complete nakedness? Or is it rather
that we are ill equipped to think origin, becoming, and emergence in the
grammar of our times? These termsorigin, becoming, forcedo not cover,
Impertinence 95
of course, the same phenomena, but they draw up a system of inextricable
equivalences. For a postcolonial perspective, origin and originality are the
two most important concepts in the series, provided that, by them, one
does not understand the impossible moment of pure diference scorned by
Borges in some well-known texts, but rather, as Giorgio Agamben shows
laboriously in The Man without Content, proximity to the origin: an intimate,
inalienable relationship to the cause, and, through the cause, working as a
form of poiesis.
Now, if the origin is always already under the mark of a repetition, in
what sense does the phenomenological project hold any interest for an anti-
colonial politics? Perhaps, as Derrida contends, phenomenology is unable
and unwilling to think the question of the origin. Phenomenology, however
(but phenomenology is here just a placeholder for a larger desire), wanted
to think some of these liminal positions. Where has this desire gone? What
place does it occupy in the discourses with which we seek to keep alive
what Benjamin called the tradition of the oppressed? Because, if theory does
not live in the inheritance of that call, if theory does not serve that purpose,
it is difcult to see what purpose it is going to serve and remain a critical
theory.
Force of Marx
It is no doubt revealing that ieks tirade against postmodernists, decon-
structionists, and hypocritical liberals comes in the context of a dis-
cussion of the Lacanian act, as the action able to change the coordinates
of the symbolic. This act is ieks favorite tool to think social change in a
way that remains heavily structuralist (society as a structure changes due
to a cause that hits it from outside, so to speak). The obvious problem
with this approach is the blindness entailed by the movement, and this
despite the fact that the act, as iek reminds us, retroactively produces
grounds which justify it. But it is not a matter of disqualifying the act,
so much as recognizing in its blindness the problematic status of force in
contemporary thinking and its imperfect repression in the decorum that
dominates the academic debate at times.
The foreclusion of the act takes the form, iek says, of a Denkverbot,
a prohibition to think. Although foreclusion is too strong a word, it is
perhaps the same barrier against which the argumentfor lack of a
better wordof Specters of Marx unfolds. In this book, Derrida tells us that
96 Horacio Legrs
the real antagonism is one between praxis (but he doesnt say praxis, he
says force) and the neutralizing anesthesia of a new theoreticism (Specters,
32). As theory lapses into contemplation, it lives in the silent assent, the
tacit consentas Gramsci would put itto the existent and to the power
structure that characterizes it. There has been much debate about how to
interpret Derridas call for a renewed fght against the deep-rooted theo-
reticism of theory. Is the call a moment of voluntarism that falls outside
the strict conditions that defne the Derridean corpus? (Derrida himself
leaves the door open for this reading on page 32 of Specters.) Ahijaz Ahmad
sees in Specters an attempt to use the prestige of deconstruction to high-
light the vitality of a besieged tradition. Terry Eagleton reads it as a proof
of the irresistible attraction the peripheral exerts on the deconstructionist
ethos. There are also those who read the book as the instantiation of a
philosophical break, a sudden urge to talk about Marx and, through Marx,
about politics, power, and hope. Such a break was announced, we read, by
Derridas increasing engagement with Levinass ethics and confrmed by
the appearance of texts like For Nelson Mandela. Personally, I think that
Specters of Marx is a much more conservative book than these commen-
tators invite us to believe. Even the oft-quoted assertion that for Derrida
deconstruction hardly holds any interest except as a radicalization of a
certain spirit of Marxism (Specters, 92) should perhaps be read not in the
personal-ethical sense in which it has been read so far but in the literal,
phenomenological spirit of radicalization as reduction, as leading back to an
ontogenesis of the world. Of course, it will be difcult to prove this point.
Derridas aversion to a discourse of origins will conspire against it, and
so will the inadequacy of our critical language to name this performative
moment of origination without confusing it with an instance of teleological
originwhat Derrida calls the question of the event as the question of the ghost
(Specters, 10).
The fact that Specters, like so many of other Derridas texts, is not a
very bookish book also conspires against the possibility of reading it in
reference to the much more stable body of Marxist tradition. Specters of
Marx is a book in which not all the claims can be wholly articulated, made
commensurable to each other. It is a book through which Derrida catches
up with Levinas and, along with Levinas, with the discourse of phenome-
nology, with certain imprudent moments of Heidegger, with a renovated
attention to emergences, beginnings, and survivals (that identify a certain
Marxist discourse as well), and fnally with Derridas intellectual history
Impertinence 97
itself. Its structure is perhaps best grasped under the Heideggerian rubric
of the gathering, of the tension between juncture and disjuncture (dik and
adikia), so correctly used by Fredric Jameson as one of his keys for reading
the text (Ghostly, 41).The books fgure would be a disjunctive gathering, an
attempt to maintain together that which does not hold together (Specters,
17). And although this (not) holding together pertains to the structure of
historical temporality as much as to the structure of temporalization, it
grasps, as Antonio Negris interpretation claims, an essential change in the
modalities of production and subjection of late capitalism: the vanishing
ontology of work that is displaced by the ghostly consistency of the work
of the general intellect. However, Specters bears a Heideggerian mark
not because gathering can work as a fgure of its composition (an obser-
vation that, by and large, remains banal), but because truth is, here more
than ever, the result of a struggle. Juncture and disjuncture only hold their
places in their simultaneous reference to the struggle, which in terms of
the book is elucidated as an ontophenomenology of force.
Force, the thinking of origin, was never alien to Derridas work. His
interest in the issue is already apparent in the 1967 essay Force and Signi-
fcation, but colored by a pessimistic tone and an ambiguous relationship
to the structuralist event. Already on the second page of the essay one
fnds this assertion: Form fascinates when one no longer has the force to
understand force from within itself. That is, to create (4). And then, after
establishing the unbreakable link through which structuralism receives
the whole weight of the Western metaphysical tradition from phenome-
nology, Derrida goes on to write: One would seek in vain a concept in
phenomenology which would permit the conceptualization of intensity
or force (27). The impossibility of thinking force marks phenomenologys
(and consequently structuralisms) return to Platonism. Is, then, a thinking
of force (a word determined, at this stage, only by its opposition to form)
the key to a break with Platonism? And if this is true, how could the project
of deconstruction develop without turning toward this question? In 1967,
force makes its way back into Derridas thought through his engagement
with Levinass philosophy. In the essay Violence and Metaphysics, also
contained in Writing and Diference, Derrida confronts the remnants of
metaphysical pretensions inhabiting Levinass ethics of otherness with
phenomenological convictions in order to show that the rights of the here
and now depend on what, many years later, he will call a paradoxical phe-
nomenality. Violence and Metaphysics, which arises from a reading of
98 Horacio Legrs
Totality and Infnity, does not contain any distinction between violence and
force. It is only after the publication of Levinass Otherwise Than Being,
with its refned notions of trace and the distinction between said and saying
(a distinction, however, that was available to Derrida through the oppo-
sition between call and naming in Levinass 1951 essay Is Ontology
Fundamental?), that Derrida will recognize in speech and performativity
a socially constitutive force that can be separated from the instances of
power. This equation will in turn lead to the formula Deconstruction Is
Justice in an essay in which force itself makes the headlines: Force of
Law.
If force has always been part of the horizon of deconstruction (as the pro-
motion of questions such as those of the gift, the es gibt as original opening,
the identity between force and justice, and the increasing concern with
performativity may attest), how can one ignore, on the other hand, that
Specters of Marx brings a special torsion to this meditation? The structure
of supplementarity between deconstruction and Marxism that takes place
in this text remains difcult to elucidate, however. Perhaps one of the main
obstacles for this elucidation lies in the extended prejudice that the only
form of engagement that deconstruction can entertain is that of reading
texts. Michael Sprinker spells this attitude out clearly in his introduction
to Ghostly Demarcations, when he writes that confronting head on the rela-
tionship of deconstruction to Marxism is synonymous with subject[ing]
Marxs texts to the same kind of exegetical rigor that Derrida himself had
already brought to bear on those of Plato, Rousseau, Heidegger and many,
many others (Ghostly, 1). In our way of imagining the engagement between
deconstruction and Marxism, we want to escape this language of subjecting
and subjection. What is the desire, and not just the urgency, that pulls
Derrida into the Marxist text? What element inside the deconstructionist
project is itself pulled out by the discursive confguration inaugurated by
the inheritance of Marx? Like every question about causes, this one will
remain, perhaps, impossible to answer. But we can advance in that direction
by asking about the grounds on which the encounter of deconstruction and
Marxism takes place. The best candidate to fll this position is, of course,
the notion of hauntology, with its revelation, as Fredric Jameson put it, that
the living present is scarcely as self-sufcient as it claims to be (Ghostly,
39). Although he acknowledges the accuracy of Jamesons characterization,
Derrida sees in it a reduction of the complexity of hauntology (Ghostly,
267, note 71). Hauntology is more than that, Derrida complains. It refers
Impertinence 99
to the diference between Specter and Spirit and, beyond that diference, to
their articulation in a relation of difrance. But more, here, is simulta-
neously less. The stress on the structure of temporalization deemphasizes
the weight of the ontological that so fascinates both Jameson and Negri in
Derridas book. And Jamesons less is consequently more, because haunt-
ology is the meeting ground of deconstruction and Marxism, I want to
suggest, only with the condition that we see in it the revelation of a force.
And with this condition, the element that can be named the ground of
the encounter changes so that the encounter between deconstruction as a
thinking of originary force and Marxism as the historical-messianic deter-
mination of force happens in fact on the grounds of the concept of work
in general. Derrida and the Marxist tradition that he interrogates have two
diferent names for this primordial ground. For Marx, who was writing
with the Industrial Revolution rising before his eyes, work (or force) names
a particular power: labor power. For Derrida, who writes Specters of Marx
at the historical juncture of the neoliberal remodeling of the post-Fordist
world, the concept of work in general refers to mourning, which, Derrida
tells his reader, is work proper, true work.
It would be a complex but worthwhile task to read the Arguedian corpus
as a summary of these determinations: the value-positing power of labor,
the primary force that subtends any labor power by the sheer fact of its
attunement to the world, and fnally the work of mourning as the consti-
tutive force of the aesthetic drive. A problem arises at this point that is worth
at least being mentioned. Benjamins eleventh thesis on history speaks of a
corrupted conception of labor and sees as its attribute the forgetting that
labor is in our times always exploitative labor. For Benjamin labor appears
already subsumed in the dialectic between monument and barbarism. Der-
ridas notion of labor comes from a more idealistic interpretation of labor as
human self-fulfllment. In many of his texts, Arguedas seems to side with
the optimistic notion of labor as self-fulfllment. Arguedas does not forget
that labor is also a source of alienation, but he believes that there is still a
chance to rescue actual, exploitative labor from the realm of alienation by
returning the essence of the subject to the dignity of a situation.
How is the disjuncture between an alienated form of labor and labor
as a primordial human activity thought in Derridas text? At the his-
torical juncture in which Derrida writes his text, which is also the his-
torical juncture of Arguedass production, the work of mourning is also
the mourning of work. This double bind between the work of mourning
100 Horacio Legrs
and the mourning of work maintains the tenuous hope that there will still
be a future (There will be no future . . . no future without Marx, without
the memory and the inheritance of Marx [Specters, 13]). Derrida is talking
not about any future whatsoever but about a future that is bound to a past
that stands as its original destination. The idea of historical time implicit in
this assertion is not the empty homogeneous time of modern temporality.
Modern time is precisely never empty and homogeneous in that sense, but
rather inhabited by the ghosts of a commanding past. It is in this sense that
there is no future without Marx, without a certain specter of Marx. Not,
at least, a future that we will still be able to call ours. Like Heidegger, who
is the unavoidable reference to this way of thinking temporality, Derrida
evokes the structure of inheritance embroidered in our experience of time
at a moment of great danger for the inherited past and for the structure of
inheritance itself. Mourning as true work is the constant, ghostly reemer-
gence of work at the moment of its dismissal. This is Derridas way of
inserting the dimension of promise in a world exhausted not only by the
neutralizing anesthesia of a new theoreticism but also by the devaluation
of production, the banalization of democracy, and the reduction of art and
creativity to the parameters of market consumption.
Derrida, of course, is not discovering these threats; their best formu-
lation appeared, more than three decades ago, in Herbert Marcuses One
Dimensional Man. Arguedas knew them too. Perhaps his whole work is a
passionate indictment of the ferocious disenchantment of the world by the
logic of developmentalist capitalism. In Appeal to Some Intellectuals, and
in the story that surrounds its production, we already read the dominant
confguration in which the exhaustion of production, a wholesome terri-
torialization of creativity, and an anesthetizing theoreticism speak of an
arrangement in which the messianic promise of justice, the poietic essence
of art and life, and the openness of the political seem to live under a common
threat.
The Dimension of the Aesthetic
Arguedas wrote Todas las sangres as a political intervention into the daz-
zling struggle that he saw developing before him. At the roundtable, he was
called to order in the name of science and a progressive politics. Unable to
answer to the charges of the scientist in the language of dissent, he vowed to
kill himself in notes drafted two days after the roundtable. Instead he kept
Impertinence 101
writing for a few more years. Appeal to Some Intellectuals arose from this
postponement of death. But it is difcult for a discourse of force to hold
its place in the social arena. Appeal to Some Intellectuals is, like death, a
retraction into a more elemental dimension of existence. This retraction,
it is worthwhile to remember, has its origin in a refusal to grant political
validity to the writers word. It will be a mistake to think of this suspension
of the political as a parochial incident. Even if a suspension of the political
is inherent to the colonial situation, the truth is that such a reduction is not
an exception anymore, but increasingly the norm everywhere. As politics
endas the dominant politics becomes the foreclosure of the political
the world becomes inhabited by a certain fundamentalism, a tenacity of
self-assertion. This tenacity can have all the fragility of market-produced
identities or the unsoundable depth of a quasi-mystical afrmation of an
endangered singularity. True, Fanon (Bhabha taught us to recognize this
fact) speaks most efectively from the uncertain interstices (40), such as
when he writes: The Negro is not. But Fanon also stresses the material,
almost unbearable character of the antagonism: the fact of blackness. The
fact of blackness is an inextricable, postlinguistic determinationan exis-
tential in Heideggers terms. The facticity of existence that Fanon ciphered
in a color scheme, Arguedas ciphered in the obstinacy of a certain ineradi-
cable worldliness in the formation of self, other, and knowledge: That rock
is the matter of my mind, my heart, my fngers.
One can still argue that an opposition commands this fall into literal-
ization. What does Arguedass assertion of an always-renewable primacy
of the world contest? What is the epochal enemy that demands the return
of the world? Nihilism? Very likely and even more likely the coupling of
nihilism and capitalism. The knowledge of the scientists hovers over the
world, as capitalismsays Fernand Braudel in a remarkable insight
hovers over markets and communities waiting for the moment to vam-
pirize the surplus of their eforts. The knowledge-before-experience of
the doctores, like the capitalist appropriation without production, acquires
the status of a philosophical-political problem not because they incarnate
a developmentalist logic (Arguedas sees nothing wrong with the modern-
ization of the Andes) but because they incarnate a nihilistic path that seeks
to uproot the material, phenomenal basis of the worlds diversitybecause
they seek the erasure of the world and its reconstitution in a hegemonized
form of surplus knowledge.
Although these social conditions should be taken into account in a reading
102 Horacio Legrs
of Arguedass poem, we are still confronted with the fact that Arguedas
did not use a manifesto or a political statement to denounce the collusion
of nihilism and capitalism. The fact that these things are said in a poem
changes everything. The epochal encounter of art and negativity endowed
the question of originality with a chilling power of dissolution. This power,
Agamben recounts in The Man without Content, already inhabited the
ancient Greek world. The Greeks experienced the essence of art as Deus
phobos, a divine terror in whose name and fear Plato banned the poets from
his Republic. But only in modernity, Agamben continues, the artist lends
his or her substance to the work. Now, insofar as this substance is consti-
tuted by the negation of every and any content, the work of art becomes
the site for the exercise of an annihilating activity. It is precisely because
the work of art embodies the magnifcent power of the negative that we
feel authorized to relate its operation to the philosophical tradition of the
negative. The kinship between art and philosophy is, however, limited. The
work of art boasts an essential irresponsibility that philosophy can acquire
only at the price of the dissolution of the sphere in which it is nourished
and in which it evolved. Unlike philosophy, the aesthetic does not recognize
any frontiers to its power of dissolution because dissolution itself reigns in
its essence. For this reason, we would be grossly mistaken if we ended
our reading of Arguedass poem with the celebration of an inexhaustible
worldliness of the world that opens up a space of originality, a proximity
of the work to the activity of its production. It is true that Arguedas privi-
leged these ideas in previous works and that this intonation is present in
the poem; but this is not its fnal word. Even if it is true that no subaltern
or subordinate position can renounce the possibility of regrounding the
world in a diferent set of values, the fact is, Appeal to Some Intellectuals
ofers no values at all. Arguedass brutal reduction of the antagonism to the
ground of every possible antagonism implies a certain removal of the anta-
gonic logic itself, which is suspended by his particular style of thematizing
the ground. This movement, which implies a salutary subtraction of tele-
ology, of the fatality of history, after obtaining its presumed goal, keeps
going, doing away with all (or almost all) positivity as a storm or a tornado
wrecks a countryside, uprooting trees and tearing houses apart. The world
that thus comes into being is barely a symbolic world. It is, rather, an undif-
ferentiated world able to devour the very trace of the human. Its opening
is an opening less to the Heideggerian-Derridean thinking of the Es-gibt,
the generosity of language, a gift beyond economy, than to the horror of
the Levinassean Il-y-a, the irremissibility of existence, the impossibility of
Impertinence 103
death that comes with the most radical reduction: Let us imagine all be-
ings, things and persons, reverting to nothingness. . . . But what of this
nothingness itself ? Something would happen, if only night and the silence
of nothingness. The fact of existence, the brute mere fact that there is
there is, imposes itself even in the absence of beings. Levinas, who after
all wanted to rehabilitate metaphysics, saw this terrifying fnitude of an
ungrounded existence incarnated in the work of Merleau-Ponty, and he
faulted Merleau-Ponty and phenomenology on this account.
In the postcolonial world (but perhaps, if Bhabhas equation holds, in the
postmodern world too) two irreconcilable politics come together: on the
one hand, the politics of difrance, of an untamable justice that gives force
to the just law from the depths of nothingness and negativity; on the other
hand, the politics of self-assertion, the absolute fundamentalism madly in
love with the antagonism whose rejection is the essence of the foreclusion
of the political. In Arguedas this second politics operates in the spirit of
the reduction but only to exasperate the bracketing of the world beyond the
limits of the critical intervention, pushing it into a region where criticism
dissolves itself into its intimate opposite. After the most radical reduction
takes place, the reader summoned to a reconstruction of the primacy of
the world is left with nothing but life, eternal life, the ceaseless world
(257). This annihilation of a valued world reveals the terrifying dimension
of the aesthetic in its purity. It pushes the poet beyond the assertion of the
worldliness of the world into a region that in its very radicalism refuses to
be named. Arguedas assimilates this force-beyond-force to the totality of
the existent and convokes the frightening nights to preside over a dia-
lectic that is not one of fnitude or infnitude but rather a destruction of
the measure of the world in a realm without end and without beginning
(257). This less-than-pagan, atheistic proposition brings about a terrifying
act, and hence an act of terror: the literary act of a cornered animal that
smashes the world of men with the blows learned in the school of a self-
annihilating nothingness.
Notes
1 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 173. Subsequent cita-
tions are given parenthetically in the text.
2 Homi Bhabha, In a Spirit of Calm Violence, in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and
Postcolonial Displacements, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1999), 331.
3 Jos Mara Arguedas, Appeal to Some Intellectuals, included in Katatay. Temblar in Jos
104 Horacio Legrs
Mara Arguedas. Obras completas. Tomo II (Lima: Editorial Horizonte, 1983), 25257. All
translations of quotes from the poem are my own; subsequent citations are given paren-
thetically in the text.
4 Guillermo Rochabrn, ed., La Mesa redonda sobre Todas las sangres (Lima: Pontifcia
Universidad Catlica del Per, 2000). Subsequent citations are given parenthetically in
the text.
5 The quote comes from the back cover blurb to the English edition of The Fox from Up
Above and the Fox from Down Below (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000).
6 Antonio Cornejo Polar, Los universos narrativos de Jos Mara Arguedas (Buenos Aires:
Losada, 1973), 82.
7 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, What Is Phenomenology, in Phenomenology: The Philosophy of
Husserl and Its Interpretation, ed. Joseph Kockelmans (New York: Anchor Books, 1967),
359.
8 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 1012.
9 See Homi Bhabha, Of Mimicry and Man, in The Location of Culture.
10 Tran-Duc-Thao ofers an antiessentialist account of the phenomenological moment as a
negative deduction in his discussion of the reduction as consciousness of impossibility.
See Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, trans. Daniel H. J. Herman and Donald V.
Morano (Boston: D. Reidel, 1985), 4.
11 Slavoj iek, Cartesian Subject versus Cartesian Theater, in iek, Cogito and the
Unconscious (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).
12 Mladen Dolar, Beyond Interpellation, Qui Parle 2 (1993): 7596.
13 iek, Cartesian Subject versus Cartesian Theater, 259.
14 Quoted in Slavoj iek, Class Struggle or Postmodernism? in Contingency, Hegemony,
Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, ed. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and
Slavoj iek (New York: Verso, 2000), 96.
15 Ibid., 127.
16 Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1999), 6877.
17 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New
International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994). Subsequent citations are
given parenthetically in the text.
18 Slavoj iek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London:
Verso, 2002), 192. This concept of act bears an obvious parallelism to Badious notion of
event or truth-event, and sometimes iek uses both concepts interchangeably, as in The
Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), 164.
19 See Aijaz Ahmad, Reconciling Derridas Specters of Marx and Deconstructive Politics
(88109) and Terry Eagleton, Marxism without Marxism (8387), both in Ghostly
Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derridas Specter of Marx (London: Verso, 1999).
20 Negri himself does not discuss this idea of general intellect, which appears prominently
in Empire (29), and implicitly in other writings. In the afterword to Ghostly Demarcations,
Derrida partially rejects this reading of Negri.
21 For without the phenomenon of other as other no respect would be possible. The phe-
Impertinence 105
nomenon of respect supposes the respect of phenomenality. And ethics, phenome-
nology. Writing and Diference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1978), 121. The expression paradoxical phenomenality appears in Specters, 6.
22 I have discussed the status of labor in Arguedas Yawar Fiesta in Yawar Fiesta: El retorno
de la tragedia, in Jos Mara Arguedas, hacia una potica migrante, ed. Sergio R. Franco,
6179 (Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2005).
23 For Heidegger the inherited element in Western thinking was, of course, the thinking
of Being. As he puts it in Enowning, But in coming to grips with the frst beginning,
the heritage frst becomes heritage; and those who belong to the future frst become heirs.
One is never an heir merely by the accident of being one who comes later. Martin Hei-
degger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kennet
Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 134.
24 Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th18th Century, vol. 2: The Wheels of
Commerce, trans. Sin Reynolds (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 2526.
25 Agamben, The Man without Content.
26 Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhof, 1978), 57.
27 See Emmanuel Levinass Intersubjectivity: Notes on Merleau-Ponty and Sensibility,
in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, ed. Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990).