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""History, the Human, and the World Between" will certainly become a significant locus of theoretical discussion given R. Radhakrishnan's remarkable ability to bring into conjunction lines and lineages of thought that are so often pursued discretely."--David Lloyd, author of "Ireland after History"

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History, the Human, and the World between

Duke University Press

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS........................................................ixINTRODUCTION...........................................................11 Revisionism and the Subject of History...............................312 Edward Said and the Politics of Secular Humanism.....................1153 Worlding, by Any Other Name..........................................183NOTES..................................................................249WORKS CITED............................................................267INDEX..................................................................281

Chapter One

FIRST, THE INTRANSIGENT AND RAW IMMANENCE of existence that was parsed into temporality that in turn was semanticized into history to be recovered and redeemed as anthropocentric meaning by the human subject: I begin with a series of cognitive neo-Hegelian displacements only to suggest that the emergence of historicity is in fact constituted by an inescapable asynchrony that bequeaths its lag as the affirmation of history. History neither nails time to an exact calendar, nor does it produce historicity as the exemplum of the temporal condition. History as a genre is rather like the legendary Ganesha in Hindu mythology who transcribes into criture the orality of Vyasa's tale and in so doing inaugurates the time of the between that articulates the time of the telling to that of the writing in a relationship of epistemological difference. Those of us who know that profound tale will remember that Vyasa insists as a precondition that his amanuensis Ganesha has to make sure that he understands what he is writing even as he writes. Not to be outdone, and in a spirit of competitive reciprocity, Ganesha would have Vyasa promise that the dictation be nonstop. This is indeed a magnificent allegory about history, meaning making, and historiography. Even as the two interlocutors commit themselves to their mutual task, they are not willing to let the task dictate itself: in other words, this business of narration and its grammatological rendition is neither all natural nor all artificial. The qualitative condition making that characterizes the transaction makes it clear (1) that just any kind of narration will not do; (2) that just any kind of redaction or transcription will not suffice; and (3) that any attempt to guarantee quality on behalf of either the narration or the transcription can only be undertaken in a spirit of relational autonomy and reciprocal accountability. The pace of the narration is pitted, as in a game, against the temporality of understanding. This joint project is conceived of both symbiotically and agonistically: Vyasa and Ganesha are both contestants and collaborators. Ganesha shrewdly points out to Vyasa that the appropriate temporality for the narrative is that of the perennial flow, whereas Vyasa reminds Ganesha that the temporality of the transcription cannot be legitimated except as a function of cognitive/ hermeneutic reception and understanding. Both the venerable sage and the dynamic note taker are rigorously concerned about the temporality that marks each activity even as they envision the two activities as constitutive of a transcendent horizon perennially in the making. I will just mention in passing that in this tale of voice and criture, the teller is human whereas the amanuensis is a god. To bring Michel Foucault to the Mahabharatha, what is being enacted here is the perennial drama of the "empirico-transcendental doublet" whose commitment to the reality of immanence can only be registered as the unreachability of meaning as transcendence. Conscious of its ontological liminality, history as the representation of the real can at best thematize its exquisitely timed belatedness even as it makes its generic truth claims about what happened, and indeed about the nature of "the about" as the precondition of all representation.

If the foregoing paragraph is persuasive at all, then it follows that the very notion of revisionist history is a tautology; for, all historicizing is taking a second look at what has already been otherwise. It is in and through that glance toward the "what-has-been-ness" of a moment that seemed so one's own in the heat of the experience that history emerges as a kind of a "diving into the wreck," to use Adrienne Rich's terms: for if moments do not die, then there is no history. But on the other hand, moments do not really die except by way of the historical imagination. My point is not just that (1) in the flow of time as a river one never touches the same drop again, or (2) that the moment of the touching and the self-reflexive moment that recognizes the moment of touching as such are temporally nonidentical, but rather that the very constitution of historical reality is premised on an undecidable relationship between the immanent objectivity of what is be-ing and the representational truth claims of history with its transcendental will to meaning. (This scenario could be complicated further by the insight that "time as a river" is already a figurative anthropocentrism that has nothing to do with the anterior objectivity of time.) Here is another way of saying it: of all the genres, history, with its representational claims about reality, facticity, and experience, is best oriented as a compensatory discipline that has to both mourn over a loss beyond recuperation and at the same time name that loss perspectivally and contingently. It is indeed possible, but also mute and inhuman, not to want to return to that loss presented to the human subject as a wreck of meaning and significance. But the opposite of that possibility is not an unerring or incorrigible remembering; it is an agonized countermnemonic commitment that has to learn to live in the tension between a rigorously historicized anthropocentrism and an ontological critique of anthropocentrism. I will return to this theme in the heart of this chapter, where I will be interpreting the multivalent possibilities opened up by Adrienne Rich in her poem "Diving into the Wreck."

Perhaps by now it may be clear why I have chosen to begin with a discussion of temporality rather than of historicity. Without in any way rupturing the necessary relationship between the two, I would like to bring a little more thematic focus on temporality so as to raise anthropocentrism and anthropochronism as issues in themselves, that is, before they are justified and legitimated axiomatically in the name of the human subject and human historiography. It is indeed part of my objective also to question the representational adequacy of history and historiography by (1) naming the truths of history as generic truths; and (2) insisting that the privilege accorded to history as the bottom-line custodian of the truths of reality needs to be renegotiated with the truth claims of other generic imaginings, such as those of theory, literature, and philosophy. Moreover, the rhetoric of temporality has a great deal to contribute to the practice of self-reflexive historicity. The discourse of temporality has built into it a kind of phenomenological solicitude for Being, a kind of Gelassenheit, that historiography would do well to tap into if it intends its self-reflexive practices to be anything more than mere procedural performances or exercises in disciplinary narcissism....