Abstract
On page 18 of Derrida’s brilliant “Future of the Profession” in this volume is a dig at Cultural Studies: “These Humanities to come will cross disciplinary borders without dissolving the specificity of each discipline into what is called, often in a very confused way, interdisciplinarity, or into what is lumped with another good-for-everything concept, ‘cultural studies.’ ”This is now a common gesture among serious deconstructive Europeanist Comparative Literature academics. I think it might be more advisable to try to mend Cultural Studies than to think that a better model of interdisciplinarity will spring up in the general field called Humanities at the U.S. university. The U.S. university was of course originally based on a European model, but now it has developed distinct twists and turns, which are in turn copied by the Europeans. In the United States, Humanities are literature and philosophy. History is institutionally a “social science” Philosophy is not noticeably an interdisciplinarity subject. And it is in literature departments that the suspect interdisciplinarity of Cultural Studies finds a home. If by Humanities is meant the French Human Sciences—Anthro, Poli Sci, History—and this French conception provides the model for “specificity of disciplinary borders,” which Derrida wants to maintain, then Cultural Studies, properly reconceived, brings something to the table.
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Notes
The very first sentence encourages us to think of the possibility of counterfeit and perjury: “No doubt like …,” and continues to present the essay as a representation of reader participation in a contradiction of the body of thought “Derrida.” This is also a reference to an undermining of his relationship to Rousseau (“like a profession … traitor to his habitual practice”), who, in turn, places his (?) “profession of faith” in a doubly fictive episode, in the name of another, of “the truth” of which he gives a fictive “guarantee,” in a novel where he engages the question of an education that repudiates the institution: “We can be men without being scholars. Dispensed from consuming our life in the study of morality [la morale], we have at less expense a more certain guide in this immense maze of human opinions.” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau [1979]. Emile, or On Education. Translated by Allan Bloom [NewYork: Basic Books], p. 290). Derrida’s “habitual practice” with Emile is elaborated in Of Grammatology (Translated by Spivak [1976]. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). His traffic with Rousseau continues through his recent work on Paul de Man. How is Derrida asking us to permit him to be unfaithful to such habitual practice? Would that be professing with or against? Without venturing up to that perilous necessity, I ask if it is legitimate to (mis-)quote the profession of faith of the vicar of savoy: “One must begin by learning how to resist [nature] in order to know when one can give in without its being a crime.” (Emile, p. 267). As recently as “Faith and Knowledge,” (in Gil Anidjar [ed.], Acts of Religion [NewYork: Routledge, 2002], pp. 42–101) Derrida has tangled with Kant’s “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason” (Religion and Rational Theology [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996).And there we read:“any such profession of faith can well be hypocritically feigned” (p. 177). In a final passage, having connected professions of faith with the grounding principle of dishonesty or Unredlichkeit, Kant outlines the safe position regarding professions of faith. Of course Kant speaks of religion and Derrida of university. Yet for Kant Christ as model for reason is invariably and repeatedly a teacher. The connection may be a little stronger than a simple mutatis mutandis: “The genuine maxim of safety, alone consistent with religion, is exactly turned around (umgekehrt): what, as means and conditions of blessedness, can be known [bekannt]not through my own reason but only through revelation, and can be received [aufgenommen]into my profession [Bekenntniss]solely through the intermediary of a historical faith, does not contradict pure moral principles—this I cannot indeed believe and assert as certain, but just as little can I reject it as certainly false” (p. 205; translation modified).This proto-deconstructive position is what I hope Derrida guards in his “profession of faith,” rather than the European competition with the United States in the name of a Kant I do not recognize, which is a later manifestation. (The phrase in the first Kantian passage I cite is translated “confession de foi,” in the most commonly used French edition; in the second passage the translation is “profession de foi,” Kant [1986]. Oeuvres completes [Paris: Gallimard], vol. 3, pp. 183, 227.)
I have discussed these passing interventions in “Deconstruction and cultural studies: Arguments for a deconstructive cultural studies,” in Nicholas Royle (ed.), Deconstructions (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 14–43 and Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 5–6.
My vulgarized analogy is with Emmanuel Levinas (1997). Otherwise than Being: or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press), pp. 59, 72–73.
“Moving Devi,” in Vidya Dehejia (ed.), Devi: The Great Goddess (Washington: Smithsonian Institute, 1999), pp. 181–200.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000). Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), pp. 105–109.
I have discussed the relationship between ethnos and ethnikos in “Acting bits/identity talk,” in Dennis Crow (ed.). Geography and Identity: Living and Exploring Geopolitics of Identity (Washington: Maisonnneuve, 1996), pp. 41–72.
C. Mackenzie Brown (1990). The Triumph of the Goddess: The Canonical Models and Theological Visions of Devi-Bhāgavata Purāna (Albany: State University of New York Press), p. ix. It is still appropriate to make such statements in a disciplinary textbook. For a somewhat more scholarly register, see Thomas B. Coburn (1984). Devi-Mahatmya: The Crystallization of the Goddess Tradition (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass). No academic could be against disciplinarization.We are interested in what is left out when the discipline consolidates. These remains cannot become disciplinary authority as “experience.” They can only interrupt knowledge to indicate its vulnerability and to signal pathways for the imagination, as dangerous as they are challenging. An inventory without traces.
This story is repeated in all histories of Hinduism, often between the lines. For a sober and learned account, see Sukumari Bhattacharji (1988). The Indian Theogony: A Comparative Study of Indian Mythology From the Vedas to the Puranas (London: Cambridge University Press,American Edition).
Raymond Williams (1977). Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 128–135.
The argument about Marx is in Derrida (1994). Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge), pp. 95–176. In making this move Derrida draws upon Kierkegaardian-Levinasian thought, which is best explained in Derrida, pp. 70–78. In what follows in my text the reader is asked to keep in mind that the two-ness of the Peoples of the Book is not the two-ness of the dvaita, although there is something like a relationship between them, perhaps. Derrida’s work here relates, willy-nilly, to Jewish particularism and its vicissitudes, Levinas and Heidegger, if you like, and as such can take on board the figure of “a structure of feeling,” not necessarily connected to an intending subject, although, as Levinas at least would argue, it is indistinguishable from intentionality as such: “Hospitality opens as intentionality” (Derrida, Adieu, p. 48).
This is the first line of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (1923). It means “every angel is terrible.” Literally “each one angel is terrible.”
Mahasweta Devi (1999). “Statue,” in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (trans.), Old Women (Calcutta: Seagull).
Jacques Derrida (1980). “The law of geme.” Glyph, 7, 206.
Paul de Man (1979). Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven:Yale University Press), p. 301. I have altered two words. I invite the reader to ponder the changes.
Sigmund Freud (1961-) “Moses and Monotheism,” in James Strachey et al. (trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works (New York: Norton), vol. 23, pp. 83, 93.
This is not necessarily “feminist.” It can even be a limit to feminism within permissible narratives. Indeed this is the problem with Levinas’s apparent privileging of the feminine. The best treatment of the question of woman in Levinas is Luce Irigaray (1991). “Questions to Emmanuel Levinas: On the divinity of love,” in Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (eds), Re-Reading Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), pp. 109–118. The general insight about permissible narratives is part of Melanie Klein’s legacy, not necessarily connected to feminism.
For the sheer multiplicity of the rasas, seeVenkatarama Raghavan (1975). The Number of Rasa-s (Madras: Adyar Library).
Parita Mukta (1994). Upholding the Common Life: The Community of Mirabai (Delhi: Oxford University Press) is indispensable for an understanding of women’s bhakti in India today.
Achintya Kumar Deb (1984). The Bhakti Movement in Orissa:A Comprehensive History (Calcutta: Kalyani Devi), pp. 122–200.
Ibid., p. 199. “Gora” (= golden) is also a sobriquet of Chaitanya. Fault of karma could also mean just simply “fault.” Edward C. Dimock (1989). The Place of the Hidden Moon: Erotic Mysticism in the Vaisnava-Sahajiya Cult of Bengal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) 2nd ed. is deservedly the text most consulted internationally. I have mostly consulted “Hindu” scholarship for the problem of negotiating the dvaita structure of feeling-thinking for uneven scholarly recoding, always negotiating with that unreliable autobiographical element, that “structure of feeling,” which spells responsibility.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1975). Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts. Translated byT. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press), vol. 1, p. 340.
For the distinction between “story” and “fabula,” see Mieke Bal (1985). Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Translated by Christine van Boheemen (Toronto: University Of Toronto Press), p. 5.
Virginia Woolf (1929). A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt), pp. 4–5.
Sukumari Bhattacharji (1996). Legends of Devi (Calcutta: Orient Longmans), pp. 46–47.
Kalikapurana 17.16, in B. N. Shastri (ed.), The Kalikapurana (Delhi: Nag Publishers, 1991), Pt. I, p. 179.
Devibhagavatapurana 7.30.37, in Panchanan Tarkaratna (ed.), Devibhagavatam (Calcutta: Nabobharat, 1981), p. 696.
For “poetic function,” see Roman Jakobson (1960). “Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics,” in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language (Cambridge: MIT Press), p. 358.
The list is available in Thomas B. Coburn’s good translation, Encountering the Goddess: A Translation of the Devi-Mahatmya and a Study of its Interpretation (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991), pp. 53–54.
Alexander Garcia Düttmann (Fall/Winter 1994). “On translatability” qui park, 8.i, 36.
On “focalization,” see Bal, Narratology, pp. 100–114, and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (1983). Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (New York: Routledge), pp. 71–85.
Subroto Kumar Mukhopadhyay (1994). Cult of Goddess Sitala in Bengal (Calcutta: KLM), p. 50.
Jacques Derrida (1997). Politics ofFriendship. Translated by George Collins (NewYork:Verso), p. 69; translation modified. It is not a good idea to describe a phenomenon as an unmediated example of deconstructive discourse. But this old settler colony—India—requires from me a bolder and more “mistaken” descriptive gesture than the more visibly violent examples of Australia or South Africa.
Shambhunath Gangopadhyay (1994). Madhyayuger Dharrnabhavana o Bangla Sahitya (Calcutta: Sanskrita Pustak), p. 27; translation mine. I have tried to keep to the sense of tal in “error” as mistake and wandering. I have also tried to keep to the polysemous relationship between teacher and student—whether the teacher can only speak to students who are deaf, whether when the teacher says this the student is deaf, and the like.
Jacques Lacan (1992). “The splendor of Antigone,” in Dennis Potter (trans.), TheEthics ofPsychoanalysis (New York: Norton), pp. 243–283.
Sanat Kumar Mitra (1981). Folk Life and Lore in Bengal (Calcutta: G.A.E. Publisher), p. 9.
I have put together two popular reference sources here. One is of course the dictionary. The other is Bimla Churn Law (1976). Historical Geography of Ancient India (Delhi: Ess Ess Publications).
Both the earlier Sudhir Kakar and the earlier V. S.Naipaul, coming from quite different politics but applying a “real” Freudian standard, had concluded that Indian men do not pass Narcissus (Sudhir Kakar [1981]. The Inner World: A Psycho-analytic Study of Childhood and Society in India [NewYork: Oxford University Press], esp. pp.154–211; and V. S. Naipaul [1978] India: A Wounded Civilization [New York:Vintage Books]).
N. N. Bhattacharya (1982). History of the Tantric Religion (New Delhi: Manohar), p. 283.
Not all tantra is vamachari or sex-practicing tantra. See Swami Lokeswarananda, ed. (1989). Studies on the Tantras (Calcutta: Ramakrishna Mission Inst. of Culture). Nirode Mazumdar’s use of the yantra points toward vamachar.
Ibid., p. 333.
Ibid., p. 370.
B. Bhattacharya (1988). The World of Tantra (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal), pp. 357–370.
Jacques Derrida represents comparable (though not identical) masculine contortion effects on his own part in order to accede to his dying mother, in “Circumfessions,” in Geoffrey Bennington (1993). JacquesDerrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). In the more “vedic” mode it is also Derrida who warns us that if we set a practical course on intractable “new philosophies,” we risk falling into the opposite of the new.Yet one cannot quite ignore the call to sapere aude (dare to know).This see-saw is, I believe, the dynamic ofDerrida, Politics, pp. 75–77.
Mukundaram Chakrabarti (1986). Chandimangal. Edited by Sukumar Sen (Calcutta: Sahitya Akademi).
Ibid., pp. 195–196. For a fuller list, see Somnath Mukhopadhyay (1984). Candi in Art and Iconography (Delhi: Agam Kala), pp. 102–104.
See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ed. (1994). Money & the Market in India 1100–1700 (Delhi: Oxford University Press), for a sense of the turbulence of the scene.
K. N. Chaudhuri (1990). Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (NewYork: Cambridge University Press).
Roland Barthes (1977). “The structural analysis of narrative,” in Stephen Heath (ed.), Image/Music/Text (NewYork: Hill & Wang), p. 104.
See Sen, “Introduction,” Chandimangal. For the immediately contemporary situation vis-à-vis the global “rural,” see George Monbiot June 4, 1998). “The African gene,” The Guardian (London), 22; and Bob Herbert (June 7, 1998). “At what cost?,” New York Times.
The phrase “willing suspension of disbelief” is from one of the great texts of English literary criticism, which generations of disciplinary students of English are invited to internalize (Samuel Taylor Coleridge [1960]. Biographia Literaria [NewYork: Dutton], pp. 168–169).
Jacques Derrida (1992). “‘This strange institution called literature’,” in Derek Attridge (ed.), Acts ofLiterature (NewYork: Routledge), p. 49.
Immanuel Kant (1951). Critique of Judgment. Translated by J. H. Bernard (NewYork: Collier), p. 55.
Wordsworth does speak of producing good cultural habits in Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems. Edited by James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 745.
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Chakravorty Spivak, G. (2005). Moving Devi. In: Trifonas, P.P., Peters, M.A. (eds) Deconstructing Derrida. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980649_10
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