On Imperialist Self-Confidence and Other Features of Philosophy

Ferit Güven (Earlham College) & Tanja Stähler (Sussex)

Ferit Güven:

In his essay »The Crisis in the Teaching of Philosophy« Derrida writes

»Philosophy would repeat itself and would reproduce its own tradition as the teaching of its own crisis and as the paideia of self-critique in general. This paideia goes hand in hand, and there is nothing fortuitous about this, with what I will call without taking it lightly, an imperialist self-confidence of philosophy.«[1]

In a properly Derridean fashion these lines are haunting for me. What is »imperialist« about philosophy; the self-confidence? Is the confidence imperialist or is it the entire content of the philosophical tradition? Is there something colonial about not only dominating other disciplines and assigning them their regional ontologies, but also about the very discourse of philosophy itself? Of course, this very question presupposes there is such a thing as a ›philosophical discourse‹ that has an identity which is itself a philosophical question. Is there such a thing as identity? If philosophy does not have this discursive identity, is it the crisis that is imperialist, crisis in the sense of constantly being separated from itself, always not having an identity or »never having an identity«? Perhaps in a different yet admittedly still problematic way, does philosophy dominate, colonize, thinking itself, both culturally and conceptually.

Derrida continues his essay by forging an alliance between decolonization and deconstruction. It is a curious alliance because it both endorses and rejects philosophy (in a properly philosophical fashion): »If, like philosophy and the deconstruction of the philosophical, decolonization is interminable, it is because it cannot be effective either as simple mode of reappropriation or as a simple mode of opposition or overturning.« (Derrida 2002, 103)

»Every monolingualism and monologism restores mastery or magistrality. It is by treating each language differently, by grafting languages onto one another, by playing on the multiplicity of languages and on the multiplicity of codes within every linguistic corpus that we can struggle at once against colonization in general and the colonizing principle in general (and you know that it exerts itself well beyond the zones said to be subjected to colonization) against the domination of language or domination by language. The underlying hypothesis of this statement is that the unity of language is always a vested and manipulated simulacrum.« (Derrida 2002, 105)

For me discovering postcolonial thought has been a personal philosophical awakening. Being educated in a Western educational system while being from a Muslim Third-World country, I implicitly intuited the colonial dimensions of (my) education, a form of paideia as Derrida indicates. Yet I was not able to verbalize these dimensions. I was taught a foreign language, which was considered necessary for a successful life, because my language was not the language of philosophy, science, and power, hence it was not powerful. To some extent this is the dimension of culture and contingency.

There is also the dimension of the personal. This is a difficult aspect to articulate: I was never and never aspired to be an individual in a Western sense. Such individuality is always a discourse about power. One is either born into a privileged context or creates a privilege by weaponizing one’s powerlessness and thereby transforming it into power. I sensed that I was permanently reduced to the status of the other, without having the resources and desire to transform this otherness into social/political and economic power. I tried to understand the grounds of my permanent ›inferiority‹. It was neither something I internalized, nor used to transform myself to those who were culturally privileged (Europeans).

The political and economic configuration of my ›inferiority‹ did not bother me, because there was nothing necessary about it, it could have always been different. Yet the intellectual and cultural reasons appeared to be more compelling and structural. Ultimately the self-justified superiority of Western Europe was based on a conceptual foundation. It narrated a story of a culture emanating from the rationality of Ancient Greek Philosophy which now spoke English and German. Therefore, philosophy seems to be at the ground of Western imperialism as Derrida seems to suggest in the passage above.

Therefore, my relationship to philosophy has always been a ›hate‹ (more than a traditional love) relationship. While I believed that the colonial and imperialist dimensions of the West were neither justified nor acceptable, it was based on a narcissistic perception of supremacy grounded in philosophical tradition. Consequently, studying philosophy was like learning the foundational blueprints of a building (Cartesian metaphor) in order to blow it up. I always intended to read philosophy in order to undermine it, delegitimize it and restore a sense of justice. Yet obviously things turned out to be much more complicated than that because I also had a thirst for and attraction to complexity. Complexity was necessary for any kind of genuine engagement. Not simply because I had a sense of justice for the enemy but also because of the Nietzschean dictum of ›what does not kill me makes me stronger‹. If you cannot kill philosophy, it only makes it stronger. Philosophy is actually like Capitalism in this sense, it gets stronger by those who oppose it, it includes the critique of itself within itself. It always tries conceptually to incorporate what it considers to be its opposite into itself.

The genuine other of philosophy namely thoughtlessness was not something that I aspired to because it was not strong enough to undermine philosophy. Perhaps I was wrong. When I look at the world in the West today what could undermine European/ Western superiority is thoughtlessness. Yet this possibility can only be understood in terms of identity politics. The important point is not for ›certain people‹ not to be in power anymore, but the entire power structure engineered by Europeans need to be dismantled and for that Western philosophy needs to be deconstructed. Yet even Derrida, the father of deconstruction, ultimately endorses Western democracy, albeit right after 9/11, not a particularly thoughtful phase of human history. Derrida ultimately belonged to Western philosophy. I do not belong neither to Western philosophy nor its other. This is a complicated (because it is hard to stay there) place of between, limbo, araf in Turkish. You simply do not belong, not simply personally but also as a cultural being.

My everyday existence is the practice of a life that I was programmed to hate, because it told me that I did not belong. What I am trying to do is to appropriate the non-belongingness of ›my‹ existence. You do not exclude me; I exclude myself from you. I am not protesting my exclusion in order to belong to your world, rather I take the agency of my own exclusion. Yet the idea of agency is not something that belongs to me, it is not mine, because there is no ›mine‹ that it can belong to.

Yet the critique of subjectivity as a discourse, and refusal to be a Western subject is itself a Western philosophical trope. Here the issue is even more complicated. The Western critique of subjectivity is almost always done from a perspective of a future recuperation, redemption, Derrida is one of the most celebrated Western philosophers (at least in some circles). He would cherish his own exclusion from Analytic philosophy as a badge of honour. Yet he would ultimately be endorsed by those who understand the history of philosophy. While philosophy and its other is a very complex relationship conceptually it is as plain as possible economically, historically and culturally. Most of philosophical ›production‹ is done in certain Western languages and only certain Europeans countries claim cultural specificity and ownership for it. And all the non-Western can do is to repeat the Western philosophy in another language and be its own gravedigger. Yet there is really no Western identity, nor a non-Western identity. Even though the differences are quite striking even ›Real‹ at times, one cannot reasonably, that is justly, ground a criticism on identity. Hence there is really no solution to my alterity, not even for its articulation.

Conceptual difficulties are always lived empirically, this is what makes philosophy so powerful. It anticipates the empirical manifestations of the conceptual difficulties in social, political and economic movements and events. Therefore, while phenomenology follows the dictum »zu den Sachen selbst«, »Sachen« are never empirical facts without self-reflexivity and there is no pure existence without conceptuality. Lacan would call it ›Real‹ without the possibility of being without the ›Symbolic‹. Therefore, the question of postcoloniality in phenomenology can never be understood even if we pretend to raise it, only in order to neutralize it and incorporate into philosophical discourse in the West. This is not a cultural critique of the people in the position of power in order to usurp that power, it is the indication of the impossible position of the postcolonial subject which does not even ›exist‹. It is an existential disposition that always struggles with itself. It even problematizes its own struggle as a false conceptual dichotomy. Yet there is something in me that thinks, despite myself it disturbs the economy of belonging and as fleeting as it is, it is the only thing that deserves loyalty. That which mocks me, it gives me pride, it makes me feel inferior, it allows me to undermine the conditions of my inferiority, it allows me to imagine myself non-inferior, it does not seduce me, it does not promise anything. It allows me to forget what it is. It does not make me a philosopher but it is the only time of ›there is‹.

Tanja Stähler:

I really like the ending of your text; it reminds me of what Judith Butler writes in Giving an Account of Oneself when she tries to describe the experience of that which escapes me. Butler says that »there is something unyielding that sets itself up in us«.[2] Something unyielding, something rigid is that which I cannot change – and I cannot change it because I am not even able to discern it.

Yet Western cultures are unwilling to own up to a fundamental blind spot at the core of the self and have developed philosophical concepts to conceal this concealment – such as the concept of the individual subject based on self-transparency. You put it well when you say that the decolonised subject does not »exist«. Bernhard Waldenfels describes the contrast in the following way: »Anonymity is more prevalent in the Middle Ages than in the modern era; it carries more weight in the traditional African cultures than in Western ones. There is a tendency toward individuation inherent in the Western culture that can be summed up, with a certain satiric exaggeration, as follows: from the saint or wise man to the genius to the star.«[3] Among other problems, such an idea of the individual deliberately suppresses the realisation that my inaccessibility to myself resembles on some deep level the inaccessibility of the other. The illusion of self-transparency majorly contributes to the self-confidence in Western philosophy.

Let me go back to the beginning of your considerations. Derrida links philosophy’s imperialist self-confidence to the way in which philosophy »legislates on objectivity in general«; thus, it »dominates […] all the so-called regional sciences« (Derrida 2002, 101). By legislating and defining objectivity in general, philosophy is saying that whatever specific objects a given culture might come up with, they will still need to conform to the general rules of objectivity. This made me wonder to what extent phenomenology provides resources for a response, albeit more work would certainly be needed. One such resource would come through the phenomenological key concept of world or the way in which phenomenology maintains that the idea of an object and its objectivity is already an abstraction from the way in which we originally encounter anything at all, namely, against its worldly background.

As these worlds come in the shape of homeworlds and alienworlds, I guess the problem then returns through the relation between these worlds, with some worlds colonising and having colonised others. It could be true that each world, or maybe just each Western world, has a tendency to make itself bigger or stronger, promote its language and its history, its becoming. By attaching itself to that language and that logic or system of coherence, philosophy becomes complicit in this tendency to expand (in the first instance probably less by expanding actual boundaries and more by penetrating other worlds through one’s language, culture, ideas). Contributing to philosophy’s imperialist self-confidence would be the realisation that this alliance is very powerful: philosophy realizes that by ›riding‹ on the language, logic, etc. of a world, it gathers its strength from the system on which it ›sits‹ – a mechanism which Derrida would rightfully call ›parasitic‹.

In a later citation you provide above, Derrida mentions that we can struggle against colonization »by playing on the multiplicity of languages and on the multiplicity of codes within every linguistic corpus«. Although it is easy to simplify this suggestion – and I will probably fall prey to this –, it makes me hopeful, especially when it comes to added »codes«: for example, body language. To be sure, body language allows for colonization as well.

I would like to consider a suggestion Waldenfels makes in his essay »Between Cultures« and relate this to a research project of mine. Waldenfels writes:

»However, if the word ›interculturality‹ is taken seriously, we reach an in-between sphere not unlike Husserl’s intersubjectivity or Merleau-Ponty’s intercorporeality. Such an in-between sphere cannot, in its intermediary character, be reduced to something of its own or integrated into a whole; nor can it be submitted to universal laws. What happens between us belongs neither to each of us nor to all of us. It rather constitutes a no man’s land, a liminal landscape which simultaneously connects and separates. That which exists in such a way as to escape our access, we designate as alien.” (Waldenfels 2011, 71)

Furthermore, he suggests: »As interpersonal alienness begins from intrapersonal alienness, so too does intercultural alienness begins from intracultural alienness.« (Waldenfels 2011, 77)

To my mind, intrapersonal alienness makes an appearance especially in situations like childbirth or sexual intimacy, where I encounter not just the Other, but also a strangeness in myself, a strangeness of my own body. Thus, I would like to mention how Waldenfels’ concept of responsivity proves useful in my phenomenological research on childbirth. Perhaps this rather different field can open new perspectives through the link Waldenfels suggests between interculturality and intercorporeality.

The detour of considering some results from my research on childbirth is meant to show, on the one hand, the potential of Waldenfels’ concept of responsivity regarding communication under complex circumstances, and the need for a dynamic approach to intercorporeal and intercultural matters, on the other. When considering the intercorporeal situation of childbirth in relation to contemporary homeworlds and alienworlds, it is easy to get caught up in debates about natural birth versus medicalized birth (which also point to the intricacies of colonization and decolonization). I have become convinced that these matters cannot be decided in general or across the board but require being responsive to the people involved and their volatile situation. Giving birth is a situation which we cannot properly anticipate. Providing people with different options as to where and how to give birth is crucial, and we should not allow for ideologies to get in the way of that. Moreover, it is a significant situation for responsivity because the experience itself might well be entirely different from any anticipation of it. Changing one’s mind is a likely event to which those involved – partners, midwives, obstetricians – need to be responsive, over and over again. This involves a lot of body language because verbal communication is difficult. The situation is also likely to involve strong emotions – especially fear, anxiety, possibly shame, and wonder – which exert a call for open, non-judgmental responses. These emotions vary widely between different cultures. Equivalent considerations could be undertaken for sexual situations and some of the same emotions.

Overall, responsivity to my mind allows countering the specter of relativism which always looms large when philosophies take situations, perspectives, and singularities seriously. Responsivity calls on us to not capitulate but rise to the challenge. This challenge is an impossible one: it requires owning up to the complexities of situations and the people in them, with their life-histories, and try to respond to all that, as best as possible. Furthermore, the challenge is to repeat this response anew, in each moment, and take the changed situation and people’s reactions into consideration, again and again. Alerting us to this challenge is something which I would consider a benefit of phenomenology. Even though we often fail to rise to this challenge, the challenge itself is intriguing. In any case, responsivity names an ongoing process, a movement that will never be finished, because responding to situations and people as they emerge in the ›here‹ and ›now‹ never comes to an end.

Maybe one of the reasons we struggle so much with decolonization is that we are looking for one solution that resolves the issue, when it will in fact need to be an ongoing process of responding time and again to other cultures as well as respond to their reactions. There is no permanent solution to the problems of colonization, and any ›one fits all‹ approach needs to be considered unsuitable. Yet there is a moment in Derrida’s deconstruction when he appears to have been seduced by the idea of one solution, namely, that of ›democracy-to-come‹, as you examine in your book Decolonizing Democracy which I appreciate very much. I cannot summarize your full argument here, especially the interesting and intricate considerations on Specters of Marx. Later, you point out that Derrida’s critique of regulative ideas in the Kantian sense developed in Rogues seems to clash with democracy-to-come. Derrida’s second objection to regulative ideas, namely, that in terms of a regulative idea, one always knows where one is going, is particularly relevant. Although the idea of democracy-to-come is supposed to be very different from any past or actual democracy, I entirely agree with you that it appears inconsistent if we should be able to determine it upfront as democracy. You also point out that it is strange how Derrida deems it necessary to deconstruct the ›ontotheological‹ foundations of democratic sovereignty, but not democracy itself.

What Derrida says about Husserl’s concept of history would then also need to be considered in relation to his own idea of democracy-to-come: it »neutralizes […] the unforeseeable and incalculable irruption, the singular and exceptional alterity of what comes«.[4] The unforeseeable event names something which breaks with all meaningful connections and cannot even really become integrated in retrospect. The event designates »what comes to pass only once, only one time, a single time, a first and last time, in an always singular, unique, exceptional, irreplaceable, unforeseeable, and incalculable fashion« (Derrida 2005, 135). Democracy-to-come appears to neutralize the event.

One of the statements you cite to show how Derrida exempts democracy from deconstructions is this: »Well, what remains irreducible to any deconstruction, what remains as undeconstructible as the possibility itself of deconstruction is, perhaps, a certain experience of the emancipatory promise; […] and an idea of democracy which we distinguish from its current concept and from its determined predicates today.«[5] I wonder whether you think there needs to be something irreducible or undeconstructible? Is there a need for that, or would you think deconstruction can (and should?) question itself fully, impose no limits to the questioning?

FG: I don’t think you need anything irreducible or undeconstructible. When I proposed something like justice instead of democracy, it was because of the need for something that sets deconstruction into motion: questioning not for the sake of questioning, but for the sake of something, although it would be impossible to call it something – including justice – without risking some problematic baggage.

TS: Yes, such a driving element indeed has been in philosophy from the beginning, especially in Plato, and questions of justice as well as Eros play crucial roles. I like how you suggest in your book that instead of democracy-to-come, it would be less problematic (in terms of conceptual heritage) to propose something like equality-to-come or justice-to-come. That which is inspiring the movement of philosophy prevents it from turning into an abstract or self-indulgent exercise. But this also takes us back to the question of the »imperialist self-confidence« of philosophy. Is there any way to counter this element of philosophy, a sort of antidote? What about self-doubt instead of self-confidence? Is this not also in philosophy, and especially in phenomenology, by way of bracketing or suspending judgment?

FG: Maybe doubt, or maybe crisis. A crisis that comes out of constant self-questioning can also respond to other crises, whether of the European sciences or European humanity. To the extent that philosophy functions as a constant reminder to the other sciences, helping disclose their crises, calling on them to clarify their concepts and examine their foundations – to that extent, perhaps philosophy needs to be imperialist or should be. An imperialist doubt in response to crisis. But what phenomenology is perhaps missing is a sufficiently developed dialectical element, in the widest sense, that allows considering the movement, the genealogy of its structures. Something like Foucault’s historical apriori that still allows us to inquire into conditions for the possibility of things without misleading us into taking those to be static or have an essential identity (and without even assuming that there are necessarily things, Sachen).

TS: Yes, I have seen such a replacement of essentialism through genealogy in a very convincing way in Alison Stone’s essay »Essentialism and Anti-Essentialism in Feminist Philosophy«. She suggests:

»This rethinking of women as having a genealogy entails a concomitant rethinking of feminist politics as coalitional rather than unified. According to this rethinking, collective feminist activities need not be predicated on any shared set of feminine concerns; rather, they may arise from overlaps and indirect connections between women’s diverse historical and cultural situations.«[6]

The concept of genealogy responds to the impossibility of defining essential identities, whether in relation to gender or culture. We cannot universalize our phenomenological concepts but have to acknowledge the irreducible asymmetries between home and alien, as Waldenfels points out. Furthermore, he considers the concept of pathos as crucial when it comes to the alien. We cannot bring this pathos about; it will need to overcome us. There could be various reasons for us to seek out the alien: being drawn to the exotic; wanting to diversify our own, rather mundane experiences; or wanting to be inspired to philosophize. Husserl raises such a possibility in his late manuscripts when he suggests that philosophy could be inspired by wonder in the face of an alienworld. Such wonder might be inspired by strangers, their worlds, their art and culture, etc. But we cannot bring it about; in order for such inspiration to work, we cannot seek it out. If we seek to experience wonder, we will always be confined to the role of the coloniser. It is only wonder as trauma or, as Levinas puts it, »traumatism of astonishment«, which stems from »the experience of something absolutely strange«[7] that could lead us from self-confidence to doubt.

FG: Reflecting on our exchange, I would like to put it more blatantly, despite the possible protestations of Derrideans. What I find problematic in Derrida’s conception of democracy-to-come is precisely, as you say, what he criticizes in Husserl, (cultural) appropriation of the future of politics. His appeasement of his audience in the conference in Benin seems to be a typically Western gesture. I would go so far as to say that I do not find any Western philosopher capable of thinking the question of decolonization. This is a structural impossibility rather than an identity deficiency. To me Hegel here provides the structural limit. Western philosophy has to deal with the question of negativity in order to free itself to the question of decolonization. Despite his pretensions Derrida ultimately remains within this limit. Differance ultimately strikes against democracy-to-come and in my mind folds. What remains to be thought is the question of irremediable openness of the future.

The main structural colonialism of Western philosophy finds its expression in Hegel. The problem is not that the West expands and exports its own way of being. The West understands that the problem is its relation to the other and in order to remedy its expansive imperial gestures proposes the complicated nature of its relationship to the other. Yet the very possibility of raising this question has a number of structural possibilities. Someone like Žižek dismisses these so called »transcendental« difficulties by attributing them to Kantian critical theory like that of Habermas. However, the problem is much more complicated as it is both genealogical and existential. The relative imperial power of the Western subject position is not something that one can think away. In the first instance this is a question of language, as Derrida points out. Yet his proposal to play on the multiplicity of languages sounds hollow as he insists on the Greek as well as French and German idiom surrounding democracy.

What I discovered after finishing the book is that I had not questioned the entirely fallacious assumption that people can actually be disciplined. Democracy-to-come relies on this assumption. Yet the contemporary world politics suggests that such a dream of disciplined subjects is both more insidious and impossible. The problem with democracy is not that it fails to live up to an ideal but that the realization of the ideal would be a nightmare. I do borrow this idea from Žižek and psychoanalysis, which admittedly applies to individual subjects. Yet the same structural necessity exists for the democratic dream. In fact, the impossible transparency of the subject is more than an obvious problem for the modern society. Do we really desire to rule ourselves? Perhaps more radically: do we want to be ruled at all, by ourselves or by others? In one sense people do not really care about the political decisions compared to economic necessities. Yet the contemporary life even monetizes political, economic, personal and existential crises.

And this is the thought I want to explore. Derrida describes philosophy in terms of its crises. Yet what happens to the idea of crisis in the 21st Century? The crisis of philosophy is now on the market, it is exchanged just like any commodity. Yet the definition of commodity is now quite different from the classical Marxist framework. It is not exactly an object in the traditional sense, it does require a certain amount of labour but that labour can be expressed in our clicks, linguistic gestures and performances, in our attention and in our algorithmic profiles as effortlessly as looking at a screen blankly. In this economy (of exchange) the philosophical concerns, postcolonial sensibilities are as much monetized as our consumer products. What we commodify is not just ourselves in a dramatic fashion but our thoughts, ideas, opinions and preferences as effortlessly as minuscule gestures and attentions. Therefore, in such an accelerated space of immediate consume-ability crisis is something that we can easily market. The Western philosophy has a crisis. How do we even name such a crisis? How do we market it? How are the philosophical ideas produced, marketed and exchanged? It is impossible to understand philosophy in terms of ›pure ideas‹ independent of the ›material‹ conditions under which they are produced today. Perhaps this is one of the main problems in the way of decolonization of philosophy today. In fact, Western philosophy reduced the contemporary world to such an individualistic ideal, any time we think of philosophical ideas we think parallel to the scientific ideal as if the problem is the aptitude of an individual practitioner. Yet the very term of crisis fails to describe what is at stake in the colonial context. Crisis is fundamentally narcissistic and never comprehends the decolonial problematic.

Notes

[1] Jacques Derrida, »The Crisis in the Teaching of Philosophy«, in: Who’s Afraid of Philosophy?, Stanford 2002: Stanford University Press, p. 101.

[2] Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, New York 2005: Fordham University Press, p. 104.

[3] Bernhard Waldenfels, Phenomenology of the Alien: Basic Concepts, Evanston 2011: Northwestern University Press, p. 77.

[4] Jacques Derrida, Rogues. Two Essays on Reason, Stanford 2005: Stanford University Press, p. 128.

[5] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, London 1994: Routledge, p. 59.

[6] Alison Stone, »Essentialism and Anti-Essentialism in Feminist Philosophy«, Journal of Moral Philosophy, vol. 1, issue 2 (2004), p. 137.

[7] Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, Pittsburgh 1969: Duquesne University Press, p. 73, 46.