Boundary Lines

Emanuela Fornari, Iain Halliday

Description

In this book, Emanuela Fornari systematically examines the philosophical implications of postcolonial studies. She considers postcolonial critique not as a school or a current of thought but rather as a multiform constellation that—from the celebrated Orientalism of Edward Said to the contributions of authors like Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Ranajit Guha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty—has called into question the assumptions that underlie key concepts in the history of philosophy. Fornari addresses themes such as history and memory, borders, the subject, and translation, engaging classical authors such as Kant, Hegel, and Marx alongside more contemporary theorizations by authors such as Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Étienne Balibar, and Jacques Rancière.
Foreword
Étienne Balibar

Introduction

Part I. Time, History, Writing

1. The Margins of History

1.1. World-History: The End of “Outside”

1.2. Temporalization and Anachrony

1.3. The Ambiguous Border: Exception and Liberation

2. Writing, Narrations

2.1. Counter-Histories

2.2. Archives of Silence

2.3. Narratives of the Possible

3. Aporias of Memory

3.1. The Law of the Past: Ruins and Other Remains

3.2. Historical Sublime and Narrative

Part II. Maps, Subjects, Translation

4. Translation and Transition

4.1. Writing Machines

4.2. Global Capital and “Historical Difference”

5. Politics of Translation

5.1. Cultural Identity and Ambivalence

5.2. Language and Minorities

5.3. Logic, Rhetoric, Silence

6. Political Subjects

6.1. Geography of Dominion, Cartographies of Subalternity

6.2. The Political Word

6.3. Difference and Position: Alliances Located

Notes
Bibliography
Index of Names

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique
• Philosophie moderne
• Philosophie moderne
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 27 décembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781438474137
• Langue: English

Extrait

Boundary Lines
SUNY series in Contemporary Italian Philosophy

Silvia Benso and Brian Schroeder, editors
Boundary Lines
Philosophy and Postcolonialism
Emanuela Fornari
Translated by
Iain Halliday
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
Linee di confine. Filosofia e postcolonialismo by Emanuela Fornari © 2011, Bollati Boringhieri editore, Torino
English translation © 2019 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Fornari, Emanuela, author.
Title: Boundary lines : philosophy and postcolonialism / Emanuela Fornari : translated by Iain Halliday.
Other titles: Linee di confine. English
Description: Albany : State University of New York, 2019. | Series: SUNY series in contemporary Italian philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018027700 | ISBN 9781438474113 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438474137 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Hermeneutics—History—20th century. | Postcolonialism—Philosophy. | Cultural relations.
Classification: LCC BD241 .F64713 2019 | DDC 325/.301—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018027700
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my father,
to his unforgettable smile
Contents
Foreword
Étienne Balibar
Introduction
Part One
Time, History, Writing
1. The Margins of History
1.1. World-History: The End of “Outside”
1.2. Temporalization and Anachrony
1.3. The Ambiguous Border: Exception and Liberation
2. Writing, Narrations
2.1. Counter-Histories
2.2. Archives of Silence
2.3. Narratives of the Possible
3. Aporias of Memory
3.1. The Law of the Past: Ruins and Other Remains
3.2. Historical Sublime and Narrative
Part Two
Maps, Subjects, Translation
4. Translation and Transition
4.1. Writing Machines
4.2. Global Capital and “Historical Difference”
5. Politics of Translation
5.1. Cultural Identity and Ambivalence
5.2. Language and Minorities
5.3. Logic, Rhetoric, Silence
6. Political Subjects
6.1. Geography of Dominion, Cartographies of Subalternity
6.2. The Political Word
6.3. Difference and Position: Alliances Located
Notes
Bibliography
Index of Names
Foreword
É TIENNE B ALIBAR
Emanuela Fornari’s book is magnificent in its clarity, precision, and depth. And the fact that the author has chosen to cite, in the course of her arguments, essays or works in which I myself have touched on some of the issues she deals with, will not prevent me in any way from singing her praises: this because, as with all her other sources, the use she makes of them is entirely original. For me it is an honor to present her book to its Italian readership (as I hope I will present it to further readers). This provides me with an occasion to measure the progress made by a new generation of philosophers whose qualities of reflection, information, and provocation are brilliantly illustrated by the author. It is thanks to them if we are all now able—and if we will be able in the future—to continue our work without repeating ourselves too much.
In the title of Emanuela Fornari’s book, the two lemmas that thematically delimit the field—“philosophy” and “postcolonialism”—bear equal significance: consequently the meaning of the conjunction that binds them must be carefully pondered. This is not a simple work of history of ideas or of documentation, like the various and extremely useful existing contributions (mostly in English) that we find dutifully “inventoried” and consulted, but rather it is a conceptual problematization that takes the risk of generalizing and assessing the formulations of “postcolonial” authors so as to understand what they think, how they think it, and how they oblige us to think after them. Nevertheless, this synthesis—attentive to nuances, to evolutions and to oppositions, in a word attentive to the life of the research work it reports on—does not depart from an illusorily dominant point of view (something which, it must be said, would be particularly grotesque given that it deals with a current of thought that has applied a radical criticism to all the presuppositions of intellectual history, worked-out and projected by the West over the entirety of the world’s cultures). On the contrary, this work distinguishes itself by virtue of real exposure to difference, and by the intense effort expended in penetrating the motivations, the logic, the implications of new discourses that have overturned the instruments of philosophical rationality, pitting them against their traditional use. This recognition of alterity, in the midst of the surprise and destabilization that comes with it, is not however accompanied by any servility, by any abdication of the critical spirit. The author proceeds step by step, and of the postcolonial authors she asks for an account of their reasoning , seeking that which creates their collective strength and on occasion divides them without any posturing, taking herself to the limits of what they put forward and revealing through this the coefficient of uncertainty that eats into and permeates their thought.
Emanuela Fornari’s book thus illustrates a profoundly engaged conception—not only dialogic, but dialectic—of philosophy. I agree with her that this is the only fertile way for our discipline in the new conditions that “mondialisation” imposes on it: conditions that it must know how to deal with in order that it may have today a sense and a usefulness. This book will thus allow many readers to learn what is at stake theoretically as a result of the birth and the flourishing of postcolonialism. But it will also contribute—at least I hope it will—to the universalizing and the deepening of this paradigm. Postcolonial thought has now produced sufficiently revolutionary effects on our concepts of historicity, of “theoretical practice,” of subjectivity, of universality, of collective political capacity, for us to able to face the feedback of its own formulations. Works that are accurate, respectful, incisive, like Emanuela Fornari’s (in all truth, I know of no equivalent of her at the moment in any other language), will progressively bring to light what is at stake. It is here, after all, that one of the essential functions of philosophy resides. The diagnosis of the present that underpins its conceptual elaborations must always involve a self-critical dimension. It is for this reason that it seems important to me to observe how in this book the rigor of an impeccable historical and exegetic method proceeds in step with the boldness of the reconstructions and the absolute freedom of the interpretations and the comparisons.
Within the limits of this presentation, which ultimately seeks to be nothing more than a summary of the impressions of an early reader, I obviously have no intention of summarizing the content of the book you are about to read. To do that would lead inevitably to a simplification and distortion of the analyses within. I would like, nevertheless, to raise three questions that I asked myself in reading it and which, perhaps on reaching the end, readers of the work will want to attempt to answer in their own way, thus prolonging the movement that it has so powerfully initiated. The first regards the new pragmatics of the “subject” implied by the elaboration of the category of subalternity in the entirety of the critical work that came out of the formulations of the Subaltern Studies group, and more precisely that which might be called the “double bind” of the emancipation that this category identifies a need for, a need at once ethical and political. The second question regards the modes of the conflicts that model a “universalism” with no foundation other than differences, of which the “untranslatable” represents both a source of energy and an uncrossable limit at one and the same time. The third hinges on the political and institutional geography within which this intellectual activity operates, an activity that in a spectacular way has ended up placing the recognition of borders, of territories, of localities, at the heart of its reconstruction of historicity; thus the delicate question of knowing to what extent that which it defines as a transition could well be, from some points of view, nothing other than transitory .
A few words of explanation, then, on each of these points.
Let us begin, being as brief as possible, with the issue of the subject. There are two surprising aspects in particular that the meticulous reconstruction of the postcolonial debates and their comparison with the Western hermeneutic tradition raise clearly here—from the paradoxical delimitation of the “archives of silence” to the characterization of the identity-under-construction in a decolonized world marked by an essential ambivalence. The first is that the idea of subalternity adds a chapter that is certainly irreducibly new (but which on closer inspection was not unthinkable) to the modern construction of subjectivity as unity, which the etymology of subjection and emancipation signals indirectly. 1 The second is that only the postcolonial context was able, for necessary reasons (at once historical, anthropological, and political) to bring to light in the foreground the plurality , sometimes violently contradictory, of the “emancipative interests” of the groups subjected to domination and collocated in “subaltern” positions; and that—at the same time—this situation and the political or strategic “double