Towards Prejudiced Unhomeliness and Corrective Alterity: Ontology, Hermeneutics, and Transgressive Myth in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

Abstract

With the advent of today’s cross-cultural alterities, the percolating notions of ‘home’, ‘self’, and ‘other’, have undergone radical transformations. This alterity, if at all, has bred a world of changing identities under the indefatigable pretext of a global consciousness. In Totality and Infinity, Emmanuel Levinas has made us leery of forging a reality that never existed; a ‘saraband of cultures’ where nomadic figures become rootless subjects. Amid these palpable alterities, the ‘self’ has embraced the transient tropes of a planetary world and a diasporic consciousness. The question remains: how is it possible to think of postcolonial subjectivity amid a world of mobility and displacement? Or, more precisely, how can we conceive of subjectivity and alterity? Overridden by these questions, this article critiques the tacit roots of the poststructuralist subject whose rootless wandering demeans the primacy of historical rootedness. The subject’s errant rootlessness necessitates a thinking that is neither absolute nor homeless. The postmodern nomad forsakes the facticity of home and forges an otherness that is irreducibly errant. In doing so, the nomad grants the ‘other’ its own myths and ideals. Postcolonial subjectivity, as this article underscores, possesses an indispensable rootedness in the facticity of shared existence. This article re-thinks postcolonial subjectivity in accordance with the hermeneutic horizon of ‘factical rootedness’ in a world of impeding prejudices. While the Western hero represents the ‘other’, the postmodern nomad transcends the land. Both models of subjectivity are culturally and politically suspect. Whereas the colonial subject reduces the ‘other’ to an object of experience, the postmodern nomad does not defy the ‘other’s myths and idols. It so happens that instead of forging an alterity that evinces the self/other dichotomy by embracing an absolute otherness, hermeneutic prejudice encourages an alterity that defies the chauvinistic logic of the subject and the ‘other’s’ claim to absolute estrangement. The discussion on hermeneutic subjectivity calls for a radical return to the soil to which only the figure of the prejudiced subject can uphold. In The Waste Land, the Greek seer Tiresias, defied by Eliot’s prejudiced stance, trespasses the threshold of pure subjectivity and forges a transformative subjectivity that illuminates the corrective alterity of prejudice (Vorurteil).