The Transitive “In-Between”: Culture, Meaning, and the Political in Voegelin and Bhabha

Abstract

Political questions force us to explore the directionality of the transitive space. Here, we will examine the work of two thinkers: Eric Voegelin, a political philosopher, and Homi K. Bhabha, a political sociologist. Voegelin argues that the transitive—the “in-between,” as he calls it—is most efficacious as a vertical space: one that seeks truth while remaining anchored in the “ground of being” that undergirds all reality. He turns towards theology—namely, that of Paul Tillich¹— as does Giorgio Agamben in his own way, in the current generation of thinkers. Despite Voegelin’s insistence to the contrary, the “transcendence” of this ground of being does suggest marked territory, a territory anchored in symbols. Bhabha, in contrast, argues that the transitive is most effectively understood as a horizontal space. He turns to the anthropological model of Michel De Certeau and the “practice of everyday life.”² The “practice” of everyday life is a way to redefine political language, as well as other binding structures, through the creativity of the active human being. In a sense, we argue, Voegelin and Bhabha cross, and at that crossroads, we locate transitivity, which, for us, involves the contact zone, the space in which the colonial overcomes the “other.” But it also suggests more: the reality that, in that space, as Ashis Nandy showed us, symbols are both in tension and merging into new forms.³ Could we but harness this power, our reading of Voegelin and Bhabha suggests, we would have a fertile ground, though not one without tensions, for rethinking identity, community, and political form in the (post) modern world.