Spectral Nationality

by Cheah, Pheng

• ISBN13: 9780231130196
• ISBN10: 0231130198
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-12-01
• Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr

Summary

This far-ranging and ambitious attempt to rethink postcolonial theory's discussion of the nation and nationalism brings the problems of the postcolonial condition to bear on the philosophy of freedom. Closely identified with totalitarianism and fundamentalism, the nation-state has a tainted history of coercion, ethnic violence, and even, as in ultranationalist Nazi Germany, genocide. Most contemporary theorists are therefore skeptical, if not altogether dismissive, of the idea of the nation and the related metaphor of the political body as an organism. Going against orthodoxy, Pheng Cheah retraces the universal-rationalist foundations and progressive origins of political organicism in the work of Kant and its development in philosophers in the German tradition such as Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. Cheah argues that the widespread association of freedom with the self-generating dynamism of life and culture's power of transcendence is the most important legacy of this tradition. Addressing this legacy's manifestations in Fanon and Cabral's theories of anticolonial struggle and contemporary anticolonial literature, including the Buru Quartet by Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and the Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's nationalist novels, Cheah suggests that the profound difficulties of achieving freedom in the postcolonial world indicate the need to reconceptualize freedom in terms of the figure of the specter rather than the living organism.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
List of Selected Works Cited and Abbreviations	xiii
Introduction. The Death of the Nation?	1	(14)
PART I CULTURE AS FREEDOM: TERRITORIALIZATIONS AND DETERRITORIALIZATIONS	15	(218)
1. The Rationality of Life: On the Organismic Metaphor of the Social and Political Body	17	(44)
Myths of the Organic Community	17	(8)
The Transition from Mechanistic to Organismic Metaphors of the Social and Political Body	25	(9)
Freedom, Culture, and Organism	34	(27)
2. Kant's Cosmopolitanism and the Technic of Nature	61	(54)
How Can Freedom Be Objectively Real? Antimechanism Before the Third Critique	64	(10)
Taking Credit from Nature: Culture as Freedom in Kant's Historical Writings	74	(6)
Organized Products of Nature: Organismic Causality and Freedom in the Critique of Judgment	80	(9)
The Political Body as Organism: Cosmopolitan Culture and the Reorganization/Organization of the State-Machine	89	(10)
The Technic of Nature: Effacing Nature's Favor and the Absolute Recuperation of Techne	99	(7)
The Technic of the Other: Sheer Exposure	106	(9)
3. Incarnations of the Ideal: Nation and State in Fichte and Hegel	115	(64)
The Original People: Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation	117	(4)
The Nation as a Community of Language and the Overcoming of Death	121	(4)
The Kulturnation as Spiritual Organism	125	(4)
The State as Instrument of the People: Why National Bildung Is Not an Official Ideology	129	(7)
The Originary Infection of the Nation-People	136	(5)
The Actualization of Reason: Hegel's Organic State and the Ghost of National Culture	141	(3)
Wirklichkeit and the Idea of the State	144	(5)
Becoming Other While Staying at Home: The Animal Organism	149	(4)
The Vital State and the Machine of Civil Society	153	(8)
Bildung as the Paradigm of Spiritual Work and Freedom	161	(8)
Volksgeist The Apparitional Supplement of the Rational State	169	(10)
4. Revolutions That Take Place in the Head: Marx and the National Question in Socialist Decolonization	179	(54)
The World Community of Productive Laborers: Marx's Deterritorialization of Freedom	181	(10)
Epigenesis of Labor: The Verwirklichung of Humanity and the Proletarian Revolution as Appropriation	191	(9)
Ghostly Consciousness, Haunted Actuality	200	(8)
Acts of Culture: The Return of the Nation-People in Socialist Decolonization	208	(25)
PART II SURVIVING (POSTCOLONIALITY)	233	(148)
5. Novel Nation: The Bildung of the Postcolonial Nation as Sociological Organism	235	(14)
6. The Haunting of the People: The Spectral Public Sphere in Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Buru Quartet	249	(58)
The Buru Quartet's Function: Reanimating a Critical Public Sphere in New Order Indonesia	253	(11)
The Birth and Arrested Life of the Indonesian Nation Circa 1900	264	(5)
The Modernity of National Consciousness: The Spectral World of Modern Knowledge	269	(4)
The Comparative Gaze and the Desire for National Bildung	273	(8)
Freedom Through the Nation: The Critique of Colonialist Instrumental Reason as the Reenchantment of the World	281	(8)
Conjuring the People, Giving Life to the National Body: Organization as Vital Movement and Power	289	(7)
"Landasan [yang] lebih mengikat": What Binds a Healthy Nation People Together	296	(11)
7. Afterlives: The Mutual Haunting of the State and Nation	307	(74)
The Negation of Life: The State as the Agent of Death	307	(5)
The Negation of Death	312	(7)
The Haunting of the Colonial State by Minke's Afterlife	319	(10)
Morbid Interrogations: The Constitutive Possibility of Death Within the Living National Body	329	(2)
Publicness and the Spectral Gaze of State Surveillance	331	(10)
Counterfeit Life	341	(13)
8. The Neocolonial State and Other Prostheses of the Postcolonial National Body: Ngúgi wa Thiong'o's Project of Revolutionary National Culture	349	(5)
National Culture as Self Recursive Mediation	354	(9)
The Onus of Narrative Fiction	363	(2)
Monstrous Bodies and Nonfunctional Organs	365	(6)
The Surviving of Surviving	371	(10)
Epilogue. Spectral Nationality: The Living-On of the Postcolonial Nation in Globalization	381	(16)
Index	397