In Praise of Historical Materialism as a certain Philosophy of Nature
Soumyabrata Choudhury What is an extremely sober and measured account of some of the greatest European philosophers of the 20th century is also a book smelted in the fire of a certain materialism. I will go to the extent of saying, a certain historical materialism. A certain natural-historical materialism – admittedly an enigmatic characterization though not without a trace of irony… I will, in a moment, speak of the work of fire, the exact temperature at which thought moulds and smelts, beyond which temperature thought burns and rages; I will speak of certain traces, unburnt and immaculate, as if glowing with a superior indifference to the inflamed surface of their emergence. But before that, a word in enthusiasm for the fact that such an elusive fire, such an exact book exists! Aniruddha Chowdhury’s Post-deconstructive Subjectivity and History: Phenomenology, Critical Theory and Post-colonial Thought commences with a fluent statement, encompassing a vast range of philosophical materials and operations, on the deconstruction of the history of western metaphysics and the possible dissolution of the Subject determined by this metaphysics as substantial and self-present identity – a deconstruction irreplaceably and disparately pioneered by Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. Then the book utters a “yet…” . It says, “Yet, the aim of the present work is to argue that the deconstruction is not only not a dissolution of the subject, as it is often opined, but a thinking of the subject, or better, subjectivity otherwise than the transcendental philosophy or even ontology.” (p.1). So the exact question to ask is, what is this “thinking of the subject…otherwise”? To my mind, it is a natural-historical materialist thinking that passes through several nodal points, also called “singular” points in this book, reaching up to the heart of the post-colonial puzzle whether the “subaltern” has access to the position of the ennunciative subject. My unqualified enthusiasm is for the fact that Aniruddha Chowdhury writes a consistently philosophical book with remarkable restraint, maintaining this calm passion in a milieu of thought attuned to the heteronomy, nay, inconsistency of history, an inconsistency that the book affirms. It affirms the thinking of the subject otherwise than metaphysically, hence, heteronomously, inconsistently, historically – and for this exact ‘fiery’ reason, philosophically. Everything hinges on the “yet” of the author which rises up in a kind of schematizing revolt at the exact moment when deconstruction promises – or threatens, depending on your taste – the delirium of a philosophy without the subject, an oceanic aphilosophy as it were. The “yet” interrupts the delirium every time to present the following schema (and here I am schematizing very quickly Aniruddha Chowdhury’s own epic schema): the subject is to be ‘otherwise’ thought, in the post-deconstructive cusp, as obligation, eschatology and natural-history. To this schema corresponds a brilliant constellation in the sky of European philosophy: Heidegger-Levinas-Walter Benjamin. Then come the last two ‘inconsistent’ chapters on Wilson Harris, the Carribean writer from mid 20th century and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the post-colonial Indian critic who provided the earliest passage for the English speaking world to deconstruction in the 1970s with her translation of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology. In a moment, I will dwell further on the explicit interest of the ‘inconsistent’ chapters. Suffice it to say that they provide a second ‘non-European’ articulation to the hinge, a second “yet” articulated with the initial one which, in a manner of speaking, interrupts the fundamental (de)constructive interruption launching Chowdhury’s project. But before that it is essential to point out that even within the Great Constellation, the star that is Walter Benjamin emits an ‘inconsistent’ light to make the Constellation tremble whereupon the sky of European philosophy shimmers, darkens, shimmers…This is the light of the notion of “natural-history”. In the chapter on Benjamin, the author prepares for the work of the German thinker’s singular notion by posing, in the light of the earlier chapters on Heidegger’s ‘gathering-abandoning’ of Dasein as a subject of obligation as opposed to being a historical subject, and Levinas’ opposition of eschatology-ethics to history, the following question: “…whether or not historiography can be reconciled, if that is the word, with the singularity and eventness of happening, and yet retain the critical dimension of thought without being totalizing.” (p.87) From the earlier chapter on Heidegger we learnt that Dasein’s authentic temporalization requires a return to its “ownmost” potentiality, which, in turn, means the freeing of its ‘historical’ structures toward a pure listening to the “call” of the irreducible other. This freeing movement frees Dasein towards a true existential history away from mere historical existence. But such existential history is always a structure of ‘co-belonging’ within the element of the pure distance of the Other, that is, a ‘being-with’ in the Other. This taking-place of ‘being-with’ is, peculiarly, the event of an obligated subject in (non) relation to an irreducible Other. The privileged place of this event of obligation is either a kind of “nameless” (Heidegger’s word from Letter on Humanism) discourse, or the ‘name-of-the-fire’ that is Poetry. We then learn about Levinas’ difficulty that Heidegger names the “nameless” too much; he signs the event too much along the contour of the “horizon” of the metaphysical figure of Man. The event then only returns to what it always was, an authentic ground and potentiality for an access and erection of meaning, of “ontological hermeneutics”. Levinas on his part radicalizes the gesture of obligation as the event of the other rather than re-absorb it into the authentic potentiality or capacity of a ‘subject’. To be sure, Aniruddha Chowdhury openly wagers the same radical ‘ethical’ gesture as a movement beyond hermeneutics, as present in Heidegger himself which the latter “disavows”, according to Chowdhury. The main point here however is that the readings and critique express a stake of the thinking of the subject “otherwise” and of the event “beyond being”, that go beyond both historical factuality and existential facticity. Beyond philosophy of history and ontology, a “beyond”, like the earlier “yet”, that philosophy must either incorporate into a superior consistency or