The Nation‐Form

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 The opposition cannot be reduced to the question of a taxonomy of ideologies, or of nationalisms, but is rather a question of the subject, and of (its) mimesis or representation. A taxonomic approach to nationalism can be found in Tanıl Bora, ‘Nationalist Discourses in Turkey’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 102:2/3, 2003, pp 433–52. Speaking of a variety of nationalisms (namely liberal, official, racist and Islamic) made up of different articulations and syntheses, Bora’s descriptivist approach is uncritical especially of the national subject and its production in representation, since his variety of different nationalist contents all assume the form of the subject. Just how this presumption is produced is the question my essay poses. 2 Edward Said, Orientalism, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1977. By the Orientalist spacing or worlding of the world, I suggest that Edward Said’s formulation of Orientalism as ‘an epistemological and ontological distinction between the West and East’ can be read as spacing in Derrida’s sense. See Mahmut Mutman, ‘Under the Sign of Orientalism: The West vs Islam’, Cultural Critique, no 23, winter 1992–1993, pp 165–97. Such a reading will enable us to approach a number of problems that appear in Said’s analysis in a productive way rather than merely to expose Said’s errors. 3 Homi Bhabha, ‘The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Nationalism’, in The Location of Culture, Routledge, London–New York, 1994, pp 66–84 4 Pheng Cheah, ‘Spectral Nationality: The Living‐on [Sur‐vie] of the Postcolonial Nation in Neocolonial Globalization’, in Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory and Futures, ed Elizabeth Grosz, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY–London, 1999, pp 176–200; Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation, Columbia University Press, New York, 2003 5 Cheah, ‘Spectral Nationality’, op cit, p 181 6 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, Peggy trans Kamuf, Routledge, London, 1994 7 Cheah, ‘Spectral Nationality’, op cit, p 198 8 Cheah, Spectral Nationality, op cit, p 3 9 Ibid, p 8 10 Ibid, p 113 11 Cheah, ‘Spectral Nationality’, op cit, p 191 12 Philippe Lacoue‐Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics, trans Chris Turner, Basil Blackwell, Oxford–Cambridge, 1990, p 81 13 Ibid, p 78 14 Homi Bhabha, ‘Dissemination: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation’, in The Location of Culture, Routledge, London–New York, 1994, pp 139–70 15 Plato, Republic, trans Raymond Larson, Crofts Classics, Arlington Heights, IL, 1979, 397abc 16 Homi Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, in The Location of Culture, Routledge, London–New York, 1994, pp 85–92 17 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans Barbara Johnson, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1981, pp 173–286 18 Again, as has been demonstrated by Philippe Lacoue‐Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics, op cit, pp 61–104. 19 Homi Bhabha, ‘Dissemination’, op cit, pp 165–6 20 Ibid, pp 142–3, 156–7, 159, 164–9 21 Ibid, pp 145, 147, 152, 153, 156, 157, 160, 167, 170 22 Lacoue‐Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics, op cit, p 79 23 Ibid, p 81 24 In fact, this is explicitly accepted in Gregory Jusdanis’s influential work on Greek nationalism. He argues that all projects of modernisation ‘after the Netherlands, England and France are belated’. (See his Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis–Oxford, 1991, p xiv.) I must also underline that Jusdanis’s brilliant account of Greek nationalism as coming out of a strategic investment in the modern, Western European myth of Ancient Greece that nicely supports and further complicates Philippe Lacoue‐Labarthe’s reading of modernity as a mimesis of ancient Greece. 25 Lacoue‐Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics, op cit, pp 82–3 26 Philippe Lacoue‐Labarthe, ‘Typography’ and ‘Transcendence ends in Politics’ in Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed Christopher Fynsk, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 1989, pp 43–138 and 267–300, and Heidegger, Art and Politics, op cit, pp 61–103 27 This might seem to be a deviation from Lacoue‐Labarthe, and in some sense it is. Yet I must warn the reader that a spectral problematic is not entirely alien to Lacoue‐Labarthe’s deconstruction of mimesis. I am reminded here of his great essay on Theodor Reik’s Haunting Melody: ‘The Echo of the Subject’ in Typography, pp 139–207. And his fascinating reading of the death of God in Nietzsche: ‘We must rather imagine a death without disappearance (nor reappearance, of course), a kind of haunting, perhaps, which would explain at once how the “dead” god continues to inhabit the language that has “killed” him (grammar…) and how he never stops undoing it, ruining its assurance, faith and power.’ See Lacoue‐Labarthe, The Subject of Philosophy, trans Thomas Trezise et al, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis–London, 1993, p 33. 28 It seems essential, once more, to emphasise the significance of Jacques Derrida’s seminal reading of Plato’s mimesis together with Mallarmé’s short enigmatic text Mimique: ‘Pierrot is brother to all the Hamlets haunting the Mallarmean text’ (Dissemination, p 195 – emphasis added) and if there is no model and ‘no imitation’ (Dissemination, p 194) there is still copying: ‘Letting itself be read for itself, doing without any external pretext, Mimique is also haunted by the ghost or grafted on to the arborescence of another text’ (Dissemination, p 202 – emphasis added). And, if there is no referent, there is still a reference, a ghost: ‘we are faced then with mimicry imitating nothing; faced so to speak with a double that doubles no simple, a double that nothing anticipates, nothing at least that is not itself already double. There is no simple reference. It is in this that the mime’s operation does allude, but alludes to nothing, alludes without breaking the mirror, without reaching beyond the looking‐glass… This speculum reflects no reality; it produces mere “reality‐effect”. For this double that often makes one think of Hoffmann, reality is, indeed, death… In this speculum with no reality, in this mirror of a mirror, a difference or dyad does exist, since there are mimes and phantoms. But it is a difference without reference, a reference without referent, without any first or last unit, a ghost that is the phantom of no flesh, wandering about without a past, without any death, birth or presence’ (Dissemination, p 206 – emphasis added). 29 As Lacoue‐Labarthe puts it: ‘The self‐production of the Aryan myth is an end in itself, the end as immanent, embodied and immediate’ (Heidegger, Art and Politics, p 95). The sense of self‐formation in peripheral nationalism is, rather, characterised by a strife of a unique kind, even in its most authoritarian mode or moment. 30 For a discussion of this point, see Cheah’s Spectral Nationality, pp 5–7. Cheah’s argument differs from mine in this respect. While he shows, in a brilliant philosophical tour de force, the positive role of the organic metaphor in German philosophy since Kant, I am more inclined to see the other side of German organicism as an excess from which we learn something of the national subject‐constitution rather than as an explanatory model for peripheral nationalism. 31 The Turkish case is the prime example here with a classic Nazi‐type, mass‐based, national socialist movement whose recent electoral percentage is around 14 percent. 32 Gerald MacLean: ‘Ottomanism Before Orientalism: Bishop Henry King praises Henry Blount, Passenger in the Levant’, in Travel Knowledge: European ‘Discoveries’ in the Early Modern Period, eds Ivo Kamps and Jyotsna Singh, Palgrave, Basingstoke–New York, 2001, pp 75–96. See also his ‘Performing East: English Captives in the Ottoman Maghreb’, Actes du Ier Congrès International sur Le Grande Bretagne et le Maghreb: Etat de Recherche et contacts culturels, Fondation Temimi, Zaghouan, Tunisia, 2001, pp 123–39. I must also mention Alain Grosrichard’s important contribution: The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East, trans Liz Heron, Verso, London–New York, 1998. Grosrichard shows how the concept of despotism was European political coding. 33 Of course, taken in itself, this is a problematical statement. Quite simply, for a case to be a case of something, of some concept or theory, it must already exceed or fail it. How can I simply turn to my ‘case’ while I claim to problematise mimesis itself? In a shifting force field, always already on the move, the norm itself is changed the moment one brings up one’s excess or failure, that is to say, one’s ‘case’. My only purpose then is to develop a theoretical and political sensitivity to a certain aspect in the force field of peripheral politics. Any decision or choice in such a force field that is subject to a general instability and undecidability can only be provisional and should be judged by the results it is capable of producing. But then, am I not simply privileging my own background? I cannot deny this possibility, yet my only hope can be to destroy the mastery that I cannot not claim to have of this ‘background’. Since, after all, should it not be the alienness or otherness of my ‘background’ to my very self that urges me to write what I write in the first place? 34 Samir Amin, Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism, Harvester Press, Sussex, UK, 1976, pp 13–59 35 For the concept of habitus, see Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans Richard Nice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989, pp72–95. For the concepts of ‘power‐knowledge’ (‘pouvoir‐savoir’) and governmentality see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol 1, trans Robert Hurley, Vintage, New York, 1980, pp 92–202; and ‘Governmentality’, in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, eds Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, 1991, pp 87–104. For economic and political history, see Çağlar Keyder’s seminal work: State and Class in Turkey: A Study in Capitalist Development, Verso, London, 1987, and Şevket Pamuk: The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism, 1820–1913: Trade, Investment and Production, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987. For historical analyses of the Ottoman reform see the important articles by Uriel Heyd, Albert Hourani and Feroz Ahmad, in The Modern Middle East, eds Albert Hourani, Philip S Khoury and Mary C Wilson, University of California Press, Berkeley–Los Angeles, 1993, pp 29–60; 83–110; 125–44. To these classic works, which focus on the administrative reform, I must add a recent excellent historical work which focuses on the administrative reform as it concerns property relations: Huri Islamoğlu, ed, Constituting Modernity: Private Property in the East and West, I B Tauris, New York, 2007. This important collection focuses on China and India as well as the Ottoman Empire. 36 It was Keyder who drew attention to this significant ideological metaphor in State and Class, op cit, pp 49–69. 37 If one follows Georges Bataille, this sovereign moment is an ‘experience’ that cannot be experienced. It is lost as soon as it is consecrated as experience in language. See Georges Bataille, Essential Writings, ed Michael Richardson, Sage, London, 1998, pp 188–201. When this power of impossibility is coded into the (pedagogical) narrative (of the origins) of the nation‐state as territorial (delimited) sovereignty, it produces a performative contradiction. In a short, instructive comparative reading of American, Indian and Turkish constitutions, Gayatri Spivak shows, following on Jacques Derrida’s reading of the American constitution, how the identity of the national agent is produced in performative contradiction: although the sovereign nation‐people does not exist before it declares itself as sovereignly existing, the declaration can only act as if it does. Gayatri Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, Routledge, New York–London, 1993, pp 262–9. Spivak warns that the trace of this undecidability must always be kept in sight. 38 It is these specific characteristics of the Turkish path that often led to its comparison with the German one, especially in the arguments of pro‐Anglo‐American liberal globalists in Turkey. The judgement is of course that such a path is abnormal and pathological. 39 The two best examples are Bernard Lewis’s well‐known work: The Emergence of Modern Turkey, Oxford University Press, London, 1968 and Ernest Gellner’s chapter on ‘Kemalism’ in his Encounters with Nationalism, Basil Blackwell, London, 1994. These studies are typically Orientalist in their basic assumptions for their very possibility as discourse depends on the axiomatic spacing of the ‘East’ as ontologically and epistemologically different from the West. See Edward Said, Orientalism, op cit, and for my reading of his succinct formulation of an ‘epistemological and ontological distinction between the East and the West’, see ‘Under the Sign of Orientalism: The West vs Islam’, Cultural Critique, 23, Winter 1992–93, pp 165–97. 40 This includes the liberal left as well. According to an important spokesperson of this approach, Murat Belge, the president of the Turkish Helsinki Citizens Association, ‘we have a centralised government tradition here. The Ottoman period was followed by the Republican, and the nation‐state continues along that path… And it seems that this is the big problem in the country now. The paternalist structure that provided the foundation for this country, that “protected” it up till now, that brought it up to this day, has become its major problem, has become an apparition it must free itself from’, in Urban Rights: Turkey in a Comparative Perspective, ed Mete Tunçay, WALD Academy, Istanbul, 1994, p 45. Belge’s argument is based on the assumption that the ‘apparition’ can and must be exorcised and replaced by a rational order. I would like to argue on the contrary that the apparition is neither simply reducible to paternalism nor replaceable by a rational order in a straightforward manner. On the contrary, any democratic initiative must definitely take into account the radical indeterminacy of spectral logic. 41 The language question was not simply an invention of the republican regime. It was the Young Ottomans who first formulated the question of language in Ottoman modernisation. (This early reformist group of the mid‐nineteenth century should not be confused with the Young Turks, or the Committee of Union and Progress.) Their most prominent member, the poet and playwright Namık Kemal, argued for a simplified language that would be easily readable and understandable. This was the moment of emergence of a modern public sphere in the empire, which was historically split between an official, administrative, royal language on the one hand and a multiplicity of spoken languages on the other. The formation of a public sphere was impossible without the production of a new language that is common and legible to everyone. For these post‐Tanzimat intellectuals (especially Namık Kemal and Şinasi), see Şerif Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: a Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1962. Later in the early twentieth century, in parallel with the emergent national identity of the ‘Turk’ in the discourse of the Party of Union and Progress, the situation was further complicated by the new imperative of articulating Turkish sounds in the Arabic script (a necessity that was not felt under conventional Ottoman identity). The CUP leader Enver Pasha’s idea of a new script (called ‘Enveri’) was an attempt to introduce a new system of marks (for Turkish sounds) into the Arabic system. But the resulting script itself required a translation into the traditional Ottoman! On the more positive side, when the Republic was established, there was already a relatively developed public sphere. I thank Murat Güvenç for sharing his knowledge of ‘Enveri script’ with me. 42 Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, op cit, pp 277 43 ‘We must free ourselves from these incomprehensible signs that for centuries have held our minds in an iron vice.’ Mustafa Kemal Ataturk quoted in Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, p 278. 44 In my childhood, there were still old people who used the Arabic script for their personal notes or non‐public communication. 45 An Ottoman historian of Turkish origin today has to learn the Arabic script, and there are literary works that are still not translated into contemporary Turkish. 46 For an interesting psychobiography of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, see Vamık D Volkan and Norman Itzkowitz, The Immortal Atatürk: A Psychobiography, University of Chicago Press, Chicago–London, 1986, which could have engaged this question if it did not have the evolutionary bias of its Anglo‐American framework. 47 This is not an unproblematic question, as it assumes a prior unity of the subject; however, I suggest that we think under the methodological presumption of a constitutive loss that is prior to all loss. 48 See Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans Nicholas Rand, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1986; and The Shell and the Kernel, trans and intro Nicholas Rand, University of Chicago Press, Chicago–London, 1994. 49 In fact, Abraham and Torok develop a singular concept of phantom or ghost as the effect of another’s unconscious in my unconscious. See The Shell and the Kernel, pp 171–6. 50 Tobias van Veen: ‘The Crypt and Incorporation’, http://www.quadrantcrossing.org/papers/TheCrypt-tV.pdf 51 Derrida himself wrote a long introduction to Abraham and Torok’s work on Freud’s famous case of the ‘wolf‐man’. Jacques Derrida, ‘Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’, in The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, pp xi–lxxii. In a recent excellent work on Gothic writing, Jodey Castricano brought these theoretical approaches together: Cryptomimesis: The Gothic and Jacques Derrida’s Ghost Writing, McGill‐Queen’s University Press, Montreal–Kingston, 2001. My above argument is certainly not as elaborated as her highly original concept of ‘cryptomimesis’, which must be regarded as a singular contribution to deconstruction. 52 This whole process is itself the historical backdrop to what is today called the ‘deep state’ – the secret organisations, the self‐appointed saviours, the coding of politics in conspiratorial language in the media and popular culture – what should be called an incessant secretion of the secret without a final disclosure. 53 Derrida, ‘Fors’, op cit, p xiv 54 Such an undertaking would also have to take into account Atatürk’s well‐known theory of sun‐language. 55 Michel Foucault: Language, Counter‐Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed Donald F Bouchard, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1977 56 Derrida, Specters of Marx, op cit, p 3 57 This would have to mean that the border between introjection and incorporation can theoretically be governed; or, to put it in other words, the other can be known and returned to the same. That the other as such cannot be raised, for as soon as such a process begins it will dissimulate itself to remain other, is a point that Jacques Derrida has underlined more than once. As he writes: ‘The presentation of the other as such, that is to say the dissimulation of its “as such” has always already begun and no structure of the entity escapes it’, in Of Grammatology, trans Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 1976, p 47. 58 Derrida, ‘Fors’, op cit, pp xxi–xxii, and van Veen, ‘The Crypt and Incorporation’, op cit 59 Castricano, Cryptomimesis, op cit, p 32; Lacoue‐Labarthe, Typography, op cit, passim 60 For the notion of public, see Thomas Keenan, ‘Windows: of Vulnerability’, in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed Bruce Robbins, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, London, 1993, pp 121–41. 61 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans Harry Zohn, ed and intro Hannah Arendt, Schocken Books, New York, 1968, pp 69–82 62 Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans Jennifer Bajorek, Polity Press, Cambridge–Oxford–Malden, MA, 2002, especially pp 113–34 63 For a reading of Benjamin’s sense of survival, see Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln–London, 1988, p 122. 64 I have rhetorically transformed Benjamin’s famous passage into a question. The original runs as follows, ‘A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.’ Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, op cit, pp 257–8. 65 Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans V Binetti and C Casarino, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 2000, p 125. The concept of ‘spectacular society’ is of course Guy Debord’s in his Society of the Spectacle, trans Donald Nicholson‐Smith, Zone Books, New York, 1995. 66 The spectral is never under my cognitive command. It keeps returning, multiplying, fragmenting and crypting ‘itself’. Its time is disjointed, Jacques Derrida reminds us: ‘this non‐object, this non‐present present, this being‐there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to knowledge’, in Specters of Marx, op cit, p 6.