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The Question of Philosophy and Poiesis in the Posthistorical

Age: Thinking/Imagining the Shadow of Metaphysics

William V. Spanos

The widely and rapidly spreading devastation of language not only

undermines aesthetic and moral responsibility in every use of lan-
guage; it arises from a threat to the essence of humanity. . . . Much
bemoaned of late, and much too lately, the downfall of language
is, however, not the grounds for, but already a consequence of, the
state of affairs in which language under the dominance of the mod-
ern metaphysics of subjectivity almost irremediably falls out of its
element. Language still denies us its essence: that it is the house
of Being. Instead, language surrenders itself to our mere willing and
trafficking as an instrument of domination over beings.
—Martin Heidegger, ‘‘Letter on Humanism,’’ Basic Writings

We had to destroy Ben Tre in order to save it.

—An American military officer as reported by Michael Herr, Dis-
patches

boundary 2 27:1, 2000. Copyright © 2000 by Duke University Press.

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If there is anything that contemporary history—especially the Viet-

nam War—and the theory that in large part was instigated by it have dis-
closed to this postmodern generation of critics, it is that the European con-
sciousness, which has become the ‘‘burden’’ of an ‘‘exceptionalist’’ America
to assume in the face of its ‘‘betrayal’’ by the ‘‘Old World,’’ is essentially an
imperial consciousness, insofar as it has, from the beginning, been oriented
by a metaphysical perspective. This is the perspective that perceives the
differential being of being meta ta physika, from after or above its dissemi-
nations, which is to say, from a panoptic perspective outside of and beyond
time that, from that distance, reduces time to space, its anxiety-provoking
intangibility to a region or domain to be grasped and mastered. This his-
tory and the theory it enabled have also disclosed that literature, from the
beginning of the Western tradition, has been complicitous with philosophy
(and with knowledge production, in general) in the formation of this imperial
European consciousness. This is because the ideal European text mirrors
in microcosmic form the macrocosm posited by the speculative metaphysi-
cal consciousness, that is, because this metatext is informed by a principle
of presence that forcibly reduces time and the differences that time dissemi-
nates to an appearance that occludes its structure. By ‘‘the beginning of the
Western tradition,’’ I mean, with Martin Heidegger, that founding epochal
moment when the Romans translated the Greek understanding of truth
as unconcealment (a-letheia) to veritas, the correspondence of mind and
thing; when, in other words, the originative and thus always errant thinking
of the Greeks was reduced to a derivative, end-oriented mode of inquiry
(paideia) that was intended to inculcate virtu in the citizens of Rome and
to render Rome the imperial metropolis of the orbis terrarum.1 Despite this
knowledge, however, the postmodern occasion has not adequately thought
these revolutionary disclosures. To put it more specifically, we have not fully
registered the cultural and political global significance of the knowledge dis-
closed by a contemporary theory that was instigated in large part by the
self-de-structive practices of the West—particularly by the United States—
in the last half of the twentieth century.
This failure of contemporary theory to adequately think the ‘‘other’’ of

1. See Martin Heidegger, ‘‘Letter on Humanism,’’ in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell,
rev. and exp. (New York: Harper and Row, 1993), 224–25; and Heidegger, Parmenides,
trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1992), 39–49.
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Spanos / Thinking/Imagining the Shadow of Metaphysics 153

the world interpreted according to the thingness of beings—what, in some

sense, we knew even before the Vietnam War by way of the disclosures
not simply of the Heidegger of Being and Time but also of such writers as
Franz Kafka (The Castle), Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea), Nathalie Sarraute
(Portrait of a Man Unknown), Jorge Luis Borges (‘‘The Garden of the Forking
Paths’’), Eugène Ionesco (Victims of Duty), Harold Pinter (The Homecom-
ing), Samuel Beckett (Watt), Jean Genet (The Blacks), Ralph Ellison (The
Invisible Man), and LeRoi Jones (Dutchman and the Slave), all, and more,
of whom were spontaneously committed to exposing the will to power over
the being of being informing the accommodational tradition that has privi-
leged closure—is symptomatically reflected in two related contemporary
currents of cultural transformation. I am referring, first, to the prematurely
decisive turn in oppositional discourse away from ‘‘destructive’’ or ‘‘decon-
structive’’ thinking to what is now called ‘‘cultural,’’ which includes ‘‘postcolo-
nial,’’ criticism and to a recuperated form of Marxism; and, second, to the
analogous reaction in the domain of literary writing and publishing against
the de-centered, open-ended, and errant forms of postmodern poiesis in
favor of the realistic end-oriented literary forms that one once thought post-
modern theory and literary practice had decisively delegitimized by showing
these canonical forms to be complicitous with cultural domination.
This failure to think the shadow of—that belongs to—the light of
metaphysics, if it is acknowledged at all, must not be understood as simply
another critical moment in the vicissitudes of the rarefied history of Western
philosophy and literature. It is no accident, I submit, that the marked turn
from destructive or deconstructive theory to cultural criticism, and from the
postmodern literature of errancy to the literature of hyperrealism, has oc-
curred simultaneously in the wake of the end of the cold war, that, indeed,
this turn has been enabled by the systematic obliteration of the memory of
the Vietnam War by the American culture industry—synecdochically repre-
sented in the aftermath of the Gulf War in 1991 as ‘‘kicking the Vietnam
syndrome’’—and by the annunciation of the ‘‘end of history’’ and the ‘‘ad-
vent of the New World Order’’ presided over by ‘‘America,’’ if not the United
States. We might say, by the proclamation of the Pax Americana.
In the following intervention, I will address the question: Whither phi-
losophy and literature in the wake of the current momentum ‘‘against [post-
modern] theory?’’ 2 This is a question, I suggest, that has been instigated

2. Walter Benn Michaels and Stephen Knapp, ‘‘Against Theory,’’ Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4
(1982): 723–42. For the Marxist version of this turn against postmodern theory, see Terry
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precisely by this specific amnesiac post–cold war history. I will attempt—

all too briefly, but I hope suggestively—to think the global significance of
this turn from ‘‘theory’’ (by which I mean philosophical de-centering and in-
determinacy) and the literature of open form (by which I mean narrative
errancy) in the context of the massive and sustained thirty-year representa-
tional project of the dominant liberal capitalist culture to forget the epochal
event called ‘‘Vietnam’’ and to recuperate and reaffirm the historical legiti-
macy of the ontological principles of liberal capitalist democracy in the wake
of the cold war. My purpose in attempting to think the global implications of
this turn from the polyvalent postmodern initiative as it came to be under-
stood in the period between World War II and the Vietnam War is to retrieve
the revolutionary initiative to rethink thinking/poiesis inaugurated, if not sat-
isfactorily worked out, by Heidegger. I am referring to his de-centering of
the imperial ontological center in Being and Time and his disclosure of the
complicity between Western philosophy, that is, metaphysics, and the im-
perial project in the Parmenides lectures delivered in the winter semester of
1942–1943. This was the antimetaphysical, or, put positively, the postmod-
ern or posthumanist, initiative reconstellated into the imperialist historical
context (which included the Algerian War, the Indochina War, and the Viet-
nam War) that precipitated the events of May 1968 first by Jacques Derrida
and Jacques Lacan and then, after and against its disabling rarefaction and
disciplining in the hands of their American literary critical followers—Paul
de Man, Jonathan Culler, J. Hillis Miller, Joseph Riddel, Barbara Johnson—
by other more politically oriented poststructuralists, such as Jean-François
Lyotard, Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault. In what fol-
lows, I will overdetermine philosophy. But it should always be kept in mind
that this inaugural postmodern philosophical initiative in thinking parallels—
indeed, draws its inspiration in large part from—the contemporaneous anti-
mimetological literary initiative to destroy narrative or, more precisely, the
structure of narrative, privileged by the Western literary tradition since Aris-
totle’s Poetics or, rather, since the romanization—especially in the so-called
Renaissance—of Aristotle’s Poetics.

Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); Timothy Bewes, Cyn-
icism and Postmodernity (London: Verso, 1997); and the essays collected in Ellen Meik-
sins Wood and John Bellamy Foster, In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern
Agenda (New York: Monthly Review, 1997).
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The American culture industry’s representation of the end of the cold

war has not simply entailed the establishment of the new world order pre-
sided over by ‘‘America’’; more importantly, it has also entailed the comple-
tion of the narrative of world history. The end of the cold war, according to
the intellectual deputies of the ‘‘triumphant’’ culture, has brought history to
its close in precipitating liberal capitalist democracy as the end of the dialec-
tical process of Universal History. This, for example, is the Hegelian thesis
of Francis Fukuyama’s highly mediatized book, The End of History and the
Last Man, which, as Derrida has tellingly emphasized, announces this final
and all-incorporative synthesis (Aufhebung) in the eschatological Christian
metaphorics of ‘‘good news’’:3

The fact that there will be [after the decisive triumph of liberal capital-
ist democracy in the cold war] setbacks and disappointments in the
process of democratization, or that not every market economy will
prosper, should not distract us from the larger pattern that is emerg-
ing in world history. . . .
What is emerging victorious, in other words, is not so much liberal
practice, as the liberal idea. That is to say, for a very large part of the
world, there is now no ideology with pretensions to universality that
is in a position to challenge liberal democracy, and no universal prin-
ciple of legitimacy other than the sovereignty of the people. Monar-
chism in its various forms had been largely defeated by the beginning
of this century. Fascism and communism, liberal democracy’s main
competitors up till now, have been both discredited themselves.4

This euphoric representation of the end of the cold war by one of the
intellectual deputies of the dominant culture has been modified, of course,
under the pressure of world events since the apparently decisive defeat of
the Iraqi army in the Gulf War: the genocidal ethnic strife in the former Yugo-
slavia, the political instability and violence in much of central and southern
Africa, the bloody struggle between a secular state and religious funda-
mentalists in Algeria, the continuing tensions between East and West in the

3. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992),
xviii. For Derrida’s critique, see Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994),
56–65.
4. Fukuyama, End of History, 45.
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Middle East, not least, the reaffirmation of Iraqi sovereignty against the U.S.
threat of intervention. Indeed, reference to the end of history and the new
world order have all but disappeared from both mediatic and theoretical rep-
resentations of the contemporary occasion. But this modification should be
interpreted not as a tacit admission of the illegitimacy of the end-of-history
discourse but rather as an accommodation of these contradictory events to
its global scenario, an accommodation that, in fact, renders this banal end-
of-history discourse more powerful insofar as its apparent acknowledgment
of the historical specificity of events obscures its real metaphysical basis.
This accommodational strategy of representation, for example, is
epitomized by Richard Haass, a former official in the Bush administration
and now director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institute, in his re-
cent book, The Reluctant Sheriff: The United States after the Cold War.5 Es-
chewing Fukuyama’s vulnerable Hegelian eschatological structure in favor
of theorizing the actual practices of the United States in the international
sphere, Haass frames the post–cold war occasion in the totalizing liberal
capitalist image of a ‘‘deregulated world’’ (in contrast to the world ‘‘regu-
lated’’ by the cold war scenario) and the role of the United States as that of
a sheriff leading posses (the appropriate members of the United Nations or
the NATO alliance) to quell the threats to global stability and peace posed
by this international deregulation. Despite the acknowledgment that conflict
is inevitable in the world ‘‘after the cold war’’ (an acknowledgment that, in
fact, echoes Fukuyama), the triumphant (ontological) idea of liberal capital-
ist democracy—its ontologically grounded commitment to the ‘‘laissez-faire’’
polity (deregulation), which is to say, to the fictional concept of the sovereign
subject—remains intact. Indeed, Haass gives this representational frame-
work far more historical power than Fukuyama’s disciplinary discourse of
political science is able to muster. For, unlike the Fukuyamans, he informs
his representation of the historically determined and determining excep-
tionalist mission of the United States in the globalized post–cold war era
with the teleological metaphorics that have been, from the beginning, fun-
damental to the constitution and power of the American cultural identity.
The metaphor of the sheriff/posse derives from the history of the Ameri-
can West and constitutes a variation of the pacification processes of west-
ward expansion. As such, it brings with it the entire ideological baggage of
the teleological myth of the American frontier, from the Puritans’ ‘‘errand in

5. Richard N. Haass, The Reluctant Sheriff: The United States after the Cold War (New
York: Council on Foreign Relations; distributed by Brookings Institute, 1997).
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the [‘New World’] wilderness’’ to the myth of Manifest Destiny. As the New
Americanist countermemory has persuasively shown, this is the myth that
has saturated the cultural discourse of America, both high and low, since its
origins: whether in the form of the American jeremiad, which, from the Puri-
tans through Daniel Webster to Ronald Reagan, has functioned perennially
to maintain the national consensus vis-à-vis its providentially ordained mis-
sion to domesticate (and dominate) what is beyond the frontier, or of the
Hollywood western (including its military allotrope), which has functioned to
naturalize what one New Americanist has called the American ‘‘victory cul-
ture.’’ 6 The virtually unchallenged official and mediatic representation of the
self-righteous militaristic solution of the crisis in Kosovo—a representation
that reiteratively justifies the devastation of Serbia and the terrible ‘‘collat-
eral damage’’ this violence necessarily entails—as a ‘‘just, humanitarian’’
war undertaken by the United States under the alias of NATO bears witness
to the historical reality of this myth, to its irresistible durability (despite its
self-destruction in the 1960s), and to its inordinate power.
What the presently privileged oppositional discourses are blinded
to by their binarist and exclusionary turn from theory to praxis is, to put
it bluntly, the relationship of this recuperative representation of the post–
cold war period to the Vietnam War, a war, not incidentally, that, as Presi-
dent John F. Kennedy’s equation of Southeast Asia as ‘‘the new frontier’’
suggests, was, from the beginning of the United States’ intervention, repre-
sented in the exceptionalist terms of the founding American myth of the
frontier: the providentially ordained ‘‘errand in the wilderness.’’ 7 Or, rather,

6. See Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin

Press, 1978); and Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the
Disillusioning of a Generation (New York: Basic, 1995). See also Richard Slotkin, Regen-
eration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middle-
town, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the
Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985), and
Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York:
Atheneum, 1992); Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and
Empire-Building, rev. ed. (New York: Schocken, 1990); Donald E. Pease, ed., New Ameri-
canists: Revisionist Interventions into the Canon, a special issue of boundary 2 17 (spring
1990), esp. the introduction; and William V. Spanos, The Errant Art of Moby-Dick: The
Canon, the Cold War and the Struggle for American Literary Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1995).
7. See John Hellmann, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1986); and William V. Spanos, ‘‘Vietnam and the Pax Americana: A
Genealogy of the New World Order,’’ in America’s Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). As the American Puritan’s fundamental
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it is the thisness—the historical specificity—of the Vietnam War that needs

to be put back into play by a discourse that would effectively resist the poly-
valent reactionary political implications of this global representation (and
here I am referring specifically to the event of Kosovo).
The triumphalist end-of-history discourse is the precipitate of a mas-
sive mnemonic project of the custodians of the American cultural memory,
not least the media, to obliterate the memory of the decades-long event
we call ‘‘Vietnam.’’ This project of forgetting, undertaken by what Althusser
calls the ideological state apparatuses, or, alternatively, the liberal capitalist
problematic, was a systematic one that began with the reduction of the this-
ness of the Vietnam War to war-in-general and culminated in the oblitera-
tion of reference to it in post–cold war representations of American history.
This eventuation is symptomatically suggested by the (enforced) visible
absence of significant reference to the Vietnam War in Fukuyama’s and
other triumphalists’ accounts of Universal History’s dialectical fulfillment of
its destined end in the demise of Soviet communism and the global triumph
of liberal capitalist democracy, its establishment, as it were, of its imperium
sine fine. But it is made resonantly clear by President George Bush’s an-
nouncement, following what his administration and the media that aped its
representation of that global occasion took to be the decisive American vic-
tory in the Persian Gulf, that ‘‘we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome at last.’’ 8
I cannot here fully articulate this integral relationship between the
end-of-history discourse (the announcement of the Pax Metaphysica, as it
were) and the historical specificity of the Vietnam War.9 It will have to suf-
fice simply to invoke a summary account of the representation of this rela-
tionship since the real defeat of the United States in Vietnam. The actual
history of what I am calling the event of Vietnam begins, despite the con-
sistently deliberate official misrepresentation to the American public of the
raison d’être of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and of its actual practice, with

reliance on the typological or ‘‘prefigurative’’ hermeneutics of the ‘‘Old World’’ in interpret-

ing its mission in the ‘‘New World,’’ a hermeneutics enabled by a providential view of his-
tory, suggests, the self-identification of America as exceptionalist—enforced by Alexis de
Tocqueville’s naïve but tremendously influential announcement of America’s radical politi-
cal novelty in Democracy in America and endowed with official status by such American
historians as George Bancroft, Francis Parkman, and Frederick Jackson Turner—is an
ideological myth that has perennially obscured its continuity with the idea of Europe and
its imperial practice, that is, its violent reduction of the other in the name of the Logos,
whether in the form of the ‘‘Word’’ of God or of History.
8. New York Times, 3 March 1991.
9. See ‘‘Vietnam and the Pax Americana,’’ in Spanos, America’s Shadow.
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the activation of a healthy national self-questioning of the perennial myth

of American exceptionalism. I mean the consensual political, cultural, and
even ontological assumptions—those that had their fictive origins in the
founding of colonial America and that compelled the American res publica
not simply to interfere in a people’s war in Vietnam, a Third World country
west of the ‘‘last American frontier,’’ but to undertake something like geno-
cide in its arrogantly ethnocentric effort to ‘‘win the hearts and minds’’ of the
Vietnamese people to the basic (ontological) principles of American democ-
racy, in an effort, as it were, to fulfill America’s ‘‘errand in the [Vietnamese]
wilderness.’’ But this destructive history was subjected to an ideologically
motivated rewriting inaugurated by the dominant culture around the time
of the dedication of the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in 1982, a rewriting
that was intended to recuperate the national consensus by ‘‘healing the
wound’’ inflicted on the American national identity by the persuasive force of
the indissolubly related civil rights, peace, and women’s movements in the
Vietnam decade. Prepared for by the culture industry, most notably Holly-
wood’s incremental but inexorable transformation of the originally defeated
and vilified American soldier into the mythic Rambo figure, the cross be-
tween Leatherstocking and bionic man, whose defeat in Vietnam is repre-
sented as a defeat not by the Vietnamese enemy but as one imposed on
him by an American government corrupted by the un-American values of
the protest movement, this re-visionary representational narrative achieved
closure with the end of the cold war. This was the moment when the healthy
national self-questioning precipitated by the self-destruction of the perenni-
ally benign American national identity, having passed through the recupera-
tive ‘‘healing-the-wound’’ phase, came to be represented retrospectively
as a collective psychological sickness that prevented the American soldier
from winning the war. To put it positively, this recuperative renarrativization
of the actual history of the Vietnam War came to closure when the ‘‘triumph’’
of America in the cold war and the apparently decisive defeat of Saddam
Hussein enabled the dominant culture in America to declare, with a cer-
tainty that precluded serious response, that the national consensus disinte-
grated by the demagoguery of a small fraction of heretics was reestablished
when, in the powerful revisionary trope of that euphoric moment, the sui-
cidal national neurosis—‘‘the Vietnam syndrome,’’ or, more decisively, ‘‘the
Vietnam psychosis’’—had been cured.
In short, the history of the representation of the Vietnam War has
been an amnesiac and, insofar as this forgetting is a forgetting of the dif-
ference that makes a difference, a banalizing history. In obliterating the
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radically contradictory memory of Vietnam, this forgetful remembering has

enabled the dominant liberal democratic capitalist culture to represent the
denouement of this narrative as the fulfillment of an original promise: as
the end of history and the advent of the Pax Americana. I am invoking
this Latin term to recall the promise/fulfillment structure of Virgil’s Aeneid,
which America, like so many other imperial Western nations, appropriated,
from the beginning, not simply to justify its ontologically grounded errand in
the Western wilderness but to represent its violent depredations beyond its
frontiers and its imperium sine fine in the benign image of universal peace.10
What, in other words, has haunted the dominant American culture
throughout the thirty years since the American invasion of Vietnam, what
it would forget at all costs, is the decisively delegitimizing aporia precipi-
tated by the fulfillment of the onto-logic of the truth discourse of America.
I am referring to the genocidal violence perpetrated by the United States
against the Vietnamese people in the name of ‘‘saving Vietnam’’ for the
‘‘free world,’’ the violence synecdochically disclosed by the undeviatingly
banal problem-solving logic of the Pentagon Papers that killed, mutilated,
and uprooted millions of Vietnamese people—mostly innocent peasants—
destroyed their land, and disintegrated their traditional rice culture. The chill-
ing indifference to human life, especially to Vietnamese life, of this utterly
instrumentalist logic is epitomized in a memorandum McGeorge Bundy, on
his return from a ‘‘fact-finding’’ visit to Vietnam, wrote to President John-
son (7 February 1965), recommending the initiation of a full-scale bombing
campaign against North Vietnam:

We believe that the best available way of increasing our chance of

success in Vietnam is the development and execution of a policy of
sustained reprisal against North Vietnam—a policy in which air and
naval action against the North is justified by and related to the whole
Viet Cong campaign of violence and terror in the South.
While we believe that the risks of such a policy are acceptable,
we emphasize that its costs are real. It implies significant U.S. air
losses even if no full air war is joined, and it seems likely that it would
eventually require an extensive and costly effort against the whole
air defense system of North Vietnam.
Yet measured against the costs of defeat in Vietnam, this program

10. For an in-depth study of the West’s appropriation of The Aeneid to justify its perenni-
ally imperial project, see Richard Waswo, The Founding Legend of Western Civilization:
From Virgil to Vietnam (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1997).
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seems cheap. And even if it fails to turn the tide—as it may—the

value of the effort seems to us to exceed its cost.11

The sublime inhumanity of this mindless cost-efficiency logic—the ‘‘best

and the brightest’’ in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations called it
‘‘can-do’’ thinking 12—cannot help but recall Hannah Arendt’s resonant, but
still to be understood, attribution of the horrifically murderous role Adolph
Eichmann, the Nazi functionary, played in the accomplishment of the Final
Solution, not to evil as it has been traditionally understood in the West but to
the utter banalization of thinking incumbent on the triumph of instrumental
thinking in the Third Reich:

The immediate impulse [for my preoccupation with thinking in The

Life of the Mind ] came from my attending the Eichmann trial in Jeru-
salem. In my report of it I spoke of ‘‘the banality of evil.’’ . . . [W]hat
I was confronted with was utterly different [from what the traditional
concept of evil led one to expect] and still undeniably factual. I was
struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible
to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of
roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer . . . was
quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.
There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific
evil motives, and the only notable characteristic one could detect in
his past behavior during the trial and throughout the pre-trial police
examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but
thoughtlessness.13

To reconstellate this epochal, yet still to be adequately thought, dis-

closure into the amnesiac, triumphalist post–cold war context, what has
menaced the discourse of America ever since the ‘‘benign’’ intervention of
the United States in Vietnam began manifesting itself in the destruction
of the Vietnamese earth and its culture, and the indiscriminate—routin-
ized—killing of Vietnamese people in order to ‘‘save Vietnam’’ is the specter

11. McGeorge Bundy to President Lyndon Johnson, The Pentagon Papers, ed. George C.
Herring, abr. ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1993), 109. See Richard Ohmann, English in
America: A Radical View of the Profession (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976),
190–206; and William V. Spanos, ‘‘The University in the Vietnam Decade,’’ in The End
of Education: Toward Posthumanism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993),
162–86.
12. David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972), 265.
13. Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1979), 3–4.
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of its delegitimation, not simply (I want to emphasize) at the site of poli-

tics but all across the indissoluble continuum that comprises being as a
whole, from the ontological through the linguistic and cultural, to the politi-
cal sites. In short, what haunts America is the specter of an epistemic
break. I mean, more precisely, the specter understood as that polyvalent
differential ‘‘reality’’ that the constructed reality of empirical/technological
thinking—Americanism, that is, metaphysics in its late, triumphant imperial
mode—cannot finally accommodate to its instrumentalist ‘‘world picture.’’
The singular event of Vietnam—its recalcitrant refusal to be reduced to ‘‘war
in general’’—would deconstruct the dominant American culture’s represen-
tation of world history in the aftermath of the cold war as ‘‘the end of his-
tory.’’ That is why the intellectual deputies of this culture, like Fukuyama and
Haass, the culture industry and the information agencies that have made
them international luminaries in the domain of thought, and the corporate
exponents of the ‘‘free’’ global market have been compelled at all cost to
obliterate the event of Vietnam from their recuperative teleological historical
narratives.
What I want to underscore, in other words, is that the dominant lib-
eral democratic/capitalist culture’s representation of the post–cold war as
the advent of the peace of the new world order must be understood not
simply as the global triumph of an economic-political system. Equally, if not
more, important for the present historical conjuncture, though more difficult
to perceive, it must also be understood, as the alignment of this end-of-
history discourse with the new (political) world order clearly suggests, as
the global triumph of an indissolubly related onto-logy and its banalizing
instrumentalist language. It must be understood, that is, not simply as the
Pax Americana but also, and perhaps above all, as the Pax Metaphysica:
that teleological representation of being which, unlike all other past repre-
sentations, now, at the end of the dialectical historical process, claims to be
noncontradictory, that is, devoid of conflict, and which, therefore, renders
any alternative representation of truth—and of the truth of history—in the
future impossible. In short, it should be understood as the completion of
the perennial Occidental project that is and, however unevenly in any his-
torically specific moment, always has been simultaneously and indissolubly
an imperial political practice and an imperial practice of thinking as such,
a polyvalent praxis, in other words, the end of which is the enframement,
colonization, and reduction of the differential human mind as well as the
differential human community to disposable reserve.
In his late essays, Heidegger insistently called for the rethinking of
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thinking itself as the first praxis in a ‘‘destitute time,’’ 14 because ‘‘it lies under
a double lack and a double Not: the No-more of the gods that have fled and
the Not-yet of the god that is coming.’’ 15 In the process, Heidegger prolepti-
cally referred to this representation of being in modernity as the planetary
triumph of technology in the ‘‘age of the world picture.’’ 16 By ‘‘world picture,’’
he meant the global triumph of a mode of knowledge production—and the
language, the saying, inherent in it—inaugurated by the imperial Romans
that reduces the differential force of the being about which it is inquiring
into an inclusive and naturalized spatial trope: a ‘‘world picture’’ (Weltbild ),
or, to invoke an undeveloped but extremely suggestive motif in Foucault’s
thought, a ‘‘domain,’’ an ‘‘area,’’ a ‘‘region,’’ a ‘‘field,’’ a ‘‘territory’’ to be con-
quered and colonized, as the (Roman/Latin) etymologies of these meta-
phors make forcefully clear. ‘‘Region’’ (of knowledge), for example, derives
from the Latin regere, ‘‘to command’’; ‘‘domain,’’ from dominus, ‘‘master’’
or ‘‘lord’’; ‘‘province,’’ from vincere, ‘‘to conquer.’’ 17 This is what Heidegger

14. Martin Heidegger, ‘‘What Are Poets For?’’ in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. and
ed. Richard Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 91.
15. Martin Heidegger, ‘‘Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,’’ trans. Douglas Scott, in Exis-
tence and Being, ed. Werner Brock (London: Vision, 1968), 413.
16. Martin Heidegger, ‘‘The Age of the World Picture,’’ in The Question Concerning Tech-
nology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977).
17. In the Parmenides, Heidegger writes that for the Greeks, ‘‘the earth is the in-between,
namely, between the concealment of the subterranean and the luminosity, the disclosive-
ness, of the superterranean. . . . For the Romans, on the contrary, the earth, tellus, terra,
is dry, the land as distinct from the sea; this distinction differentiates that upon which
construction, settlement, and installation are possible from those places where they are
impossible. Terra becomes territorium, land of settlement as realm of command. In the
Roman terra can be heard an imperial accent, completely foreign to the Greek Gaia and
Ge’’ (60). In a similar vein, Foucault suggests that ‘‘once knowledge can be analyzed in
terms of region, domain, implantation, displacement, transportation, one is able to cap-
ture the process by which knowledge functions as a form of power and disseminates the
effects of power. There is an administration of knowledge, a politics of knowledge, rela-
tions of power which pass via knowledge and which, if one tries to transcribe them, lead
one to consider forms of domination designated by such notions as field, region and ter-
ritory’’ (‘‘Questions in Geography,’’ in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other
Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon [New York: Pantheon, 1980], 69). Thinking this,
no doubt accidental, correlation between Heidegger’s and Foucault’s identification of the
spatialization of the temporality of being in Western knowledge production with imperialist
power, should, I submit, become a major project of the post–cold war. Though Bill Read-
ings (among others) has demonstrated the complicity of what he appropriately calls ‘‘the
posthistorical university’’ with the globalization of knowledge production in The University
in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), he has not adequately perceived
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meant when, in response to his Japanese interlocutor’s reference to the

East’s increasing temptation ‘‘to rely on European ways of representation,’’
he said that this ‘‘temptation is reinforced by a process which I would call
the complete Europeanization of the earth and man.’’ 18 It is this fulfillment,
or, rather, consummation, of the logical economy of metaphysics that, de-
spite the failure of the opposition to hear its claims—not to say the haunting
silence on which they are based—announces itself at the end of the cold
war as the end of the dialectical historical process and the advent of the end
of history. And it is this consummation—this ‘‘end of philosophy,’’ as it were—
that calls for the retrieval of Heidegger’s project, or, at any rate, the retrieval
of the de-structive or deconstructive initiative instigated by his interroga-
tion of instrumental thinking, the anthropological or post-Enlightenment mo-
dality of the end-oriented or retro-spective calculative thinking privileged by
the Occidental tradition. This time around, however, the deconstructive ini-
tiative should be undertaken with fuller awareness than in the 1960s and
1970s of the indissoluble relationship between being and ‘‘the world,’’ be-
tween thinking/language and praxis.
For it is not simply that the triumph of metaphysical/technological
thought in the post–cold war era has ‘‘universalized’’ thinking from above
or after the-things-themselves—which, say, with Heidegger, has demonized
‘‘as unreason’’ ‘‘any thinking which rejects the claim of reason as not origi-
nary.’’ 19 In thus delegitimizing every other kind of thinking, actual or imag-
inable, than the dialectical/instrumental—and inexorably reductive—think-
ing allegedly precipitated by History itself, or, to invoke a language usually
and disablingly restricted to geopolitics, in thus ‘‘totally’’ colonizing think-
ing in general, this metaphysical/technological thought has also, as Antonio
Gramsci anticipated in thinking the political defeat of his antifascist emanci-

the spatialized/imperial essence and the historical genealogy of the kind of thinking that
characterizes ‘‘posthistory.’’ For my critique of Readings, see ‘‘American Studies in the
‘Age of the World Picture’: Thinking the Question of Language,’’ in The Future of Ameri-
can Studies, ed. Donald E. Pease and Robyn Wiegman (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, forthcoming).
18. Martin Heidegger, ‘‘A Dialogue on Language,’’ in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter
D. Hertz (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 15. See also ‘‘The End of Philosophy and
the Task of Thinking,’’ in On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper
and Row, 1972): ‘‘The end of philosophy [in cybernetics] proves to be the triumph of the
manipulable arrangement of a scientific-technological world and the social order proper
to this world. The end of philosophy means: the beginning of the world civilization based
upon Western European thinking’’ (59).
19. Heidegger, ‘‘Dialogue on Language,’’ 15.
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patory movement in the early part of this century as the interregnum, made
it virtually impossible for an adversarial constituency to oppose the imperial
discourse in other than the latter’s terms. To be recognized, an adversarial
discourse and practice must be answerable to the triumphant imperial mode
of instrumental thinking. In this ‘‘posthistorical’’ era, Fukuyama arrogantly
observes, ‘‘even non-democrats will have to speak the language of democ-
racy in order to justify their deviation from the single universal standard.’’ 20
The highly remarked impasse of the now privileged left-oriented thinking in
the face of the triumphalism of the post–cold war liberal capitalist discourse,
whether that of neo-Marxism or new historicism or feminism or cultural criti-
cism or postcolonial criticism or even that globally oriented ‘‘posthistorical’’
discourse that would ‘‘dwell in the ruins’’ of the corporatized university, bears
telling witness to this ominous condition. So, too, not incidentally, does the
spectacle of university presses (such as Harvard, Yale, and Duke, to name
the most prestigious of these)—the traditional forums at least for origina-
tive, nuanced, and densely articulated thinking—competing with the culture
industry in the global marketplace.
This impasse, it should be added, is also repeated, if far more indi-
rectly, in the serious literature of our late post-postmodern occasion. I am
referring to the market-induced nostalgia for closure that, not accidentally,
accompanied the will of the American cultural memory to finally forget Viet-
nam in the late 1970s and the 1980s. Reconstellated into the end-of-history
context, this marked recuperative initiative comes to be seen as a turn-
ing away from the exploration of the aesthetic, ethical, cultural, and socio-
political implications of the open and errant forms so characteristic of post-
modern American writing in the 1950s and 1960s in favor of a neorealism
that, whatever its ideological intentions, reproduces in miniature the com-
pleted world represented by the end-of-history discourse. More precisely,
it comes to be seen as the abandonment of the quest—so fundamental,
however symptomatic, to such American novelists as Jack Kerouac, Ellison,
Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, Robert Coover, Jerzy
Kosinski, William Gaddis, and to such poets as William Carlos Williams,
Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Edward Dorn, Allen Gins-
berg, Denise Levertov, David Antin, Jerome Rothenberg, Gary Snyder, and
Amiri Baraka, for what Herman Melville before them called ‘‘the voice of
silence’’ in the face of the banalization of poiesis incumbent on the trans-
formation of being into a technologized ‘‘world picture’’ (specifically the cold

20. Fukuyama, End of History, 45.

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war scenario of which McCarthyism was a notorious subdivision). By the

voice of silence, I mean, with the Melville of Pierre; or The Ambiguities, a
language that is immune to the accommodational strategy of the imperial
nationalist discourse of mimetic realism. There are, of course, exceptions
to this debilitating post–cold war momentum: Pynchon, E. L. Doctorow,
Coover, Don DeLillo, Kathy Acker, Leslie Marmon Silko, Toni Morrison, Ish-
mael Reed, for example. But to find open-ended experimental writing that is
effective as a form of linguistic, cultural, and political resistance, one must,
tellingly, look elsewhere than North America, or, for that matter, the West.
One must, that is, look to writers of postcolonial or Third World societies, or,
rather, since even most of these are ideologically committed to representing
resistance in the self-defeating nationalist language of realism, to writers of
the diaspora precipitated by the ravages of the Western imperial project: to
Salman Rushdie, J. M. Coetzee, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ntozake Shange, Jessica
Tarahata Hagedorn, Maryse Conde, Mahmud Darwish, for example, whose
poiesis, like their very physical being, haunts not simply the imperialist prac-
tice that estranged them from a homeland but also the hegemonic lan-
guage, the saying, that is complicitous with, if not the basis of, that practice.

Critical theory has to be communicated in its own language—the lan-

guage of contradiction, dialectical in form as well as in content: the
language of the critique of the totality, of the critique of history. Not
some ‘‘writing degree zero’’—just the opposite. Not the negation of
style, but the style of negation.
—Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

What, then, it will be asked, would a thinking and poiesis that is ade-
quate to the negative conditions of the post–cold war global occasion be
like? Given the scope and depth of the imperial context I have described, it
would be presumptuous to make such a projection. But what can be done—
what these negative conditions of thought and poiesis that have been pre-
cipitated by ‘‘the end of philosophy’’ and its concomitant banalization of vio-
lence against all manner of the Other call for doing in this interregnum—is
to think their negativity positively. Or, rather, they call for the reconstellation
of the by now abandoned inaugural Heideggerian initiative to interrogate
the ontological foundation of Western thought into the global post–cold war
context, in which, it is alleged, history has come to its plenary end and,
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despite manifestations to the contrary as in Yugoslavia, the promised new

world order has arrived. More precisely, these now visible negations call for
rethinking the double meaning that Heidegger, in accusing philosophy of
complicity with the imperial will to power, gave to this resonant, though yet
to be fully understood, word thinking. The announcement of this imperative
to think the nothing that belongs to being positively, significantly, was not
limited to Heidegger, the theorist of being, or to those ontological thinkers
his thought catalyzed, such as Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Lyotard, Lacan,
Luce Irigaray (and, in an even earlier, but equally pertinent, context, Arendt).
To remind those praxis-oriented Marxist critics, such as Terry Eagleton and
Perry Anderson, who will have nothing to do with Heidegger and ‘‘Heideg-
gerianism,’’ the imperative to rethink thinking itself was also fundamental
to Gramsci, the Marxist philosopher of praxis, who, as Paul Bové has re-
minded us, ‘‘facing the undeniable fact of his movement’s political defeat . . .
thinks the need to think differently [in the interregnum], to think anew in re-
sponse to a singular present [what] his own prior (Marxist) thought had not
the categories to theorize or to understand.’’ 21 And, as I will suggest, it is
fundamental, as well, if variously interpreted, in the late work of Deleuze
and Félix Guattari, Paul Virilio, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
Enrique Dussel, Giorgio Agamben, and, not least, the Derrida of Specters
of Marx.
The fulfillment—the coming to its end—of the logical economy of
metaphysical thought in the planetary triumph of technology means, as
well, as I have suggested by referring to this arrival as its consummation,
the coming to its end not simply in the sense of fulfillment but also of
demise. The completion of the metaphysical imperial problematic, that is,
has rendered visible and active—as radical contradiction—the difference
that finally, because it is temporal/differential, cannot be accommodated by
—and therefore is not answerable to—its imperial spatializing/reifying/circu-
lar/enlightening/colonizing logic. As Heidegger says in ‘‘What Is Metaphys-
ics?’’ concerning the question of the nothing (das Nichts) as it pertains to
the discourse of science prevailing in the age of the world picture: ‘‘What
is remarkable is that, precisely in the way scientific man secures to himself
what is most properly his, he speaks of something different. What [accord-
ing to science] should be examined are beings only, and besides that—
nothing; beings alone, and further—nothing; solely beings and beyond that

21. Paul A. Bové, foreword to Film, Politics, and Gramsci, by Marcia Landy (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1994), xiv.
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—nothing. What about this nothing? . . . The nothing—what else can it be

for science but an outrage and a phantasm? If science is right, then only
one thing is sure: science wishes to know nothing of the nothing.’’ 22
In the context of the interregnum, this ‘‘in between time,’’ which Hei-
degger called ‘‘a time of dearth,’’ and which Arendt, more radically, called
a time that has disclosed the terrible ‘‘banality of evil,’’ the thinker/poet who
would think/imagine the contradiction—the ‘‘something different’’ that be-
longs essentially to the saying of instrumentalist reason—becomes the Ab-
geschiedene, the stranger, the one who has parted from the homeland,
or, rather, is a-part from/of it. According to the deadly imperial measure
of the routinzed technological thought of the age of the world picture, this
de-centered and estranged thinker—the Dasein who has been unhomed
by the total colonization of thinking by instrumental reason—must be pro-
claimed ‘‘the madman,’’ because the (non)‘‘object’’ of his or her ec-centric
thinking/poiesis in the domain of the uncanny (die Unheimlichkeit) is ‘‘an
outrage and a phantasm.’’ This, Heidegger implies, was the fate not only of
the thinker Nietzsche, but also of the poets Friedrich Hölderlin and Georg
Trakl. Though still to be adequately thought in this constellation, it was,
mutatis mutandi, also the fate of many other modern and even postmod-
ern writers, both in Europe and America (Arthur Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud,
Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Genet, Hart Crane, Kerouac, Ginsberg, to name but
a few of the most ‘‘notorious’’), who, each in their own way, were symptom-
atically searching for a way of saying that could resist the deadly banality
of the leveling imperatives of the triumphant instrumental saying of the age
of the world picture. This, above all, I suggest, explains why the enabling
thinkers of the postmodern occasion were profoundly attracted to poets,
writers, dramatists, painters, sculptors, and musicians who were ‘‘mad,’’ or,
as in the case of Foucault, were profoundly engaged by the phenomenon
of madness as it has been represented in and by Enlightenment moder-
nity: It was one of the essential purposes of early postmodern literature and
theory to disclose the symbiotic binarist relationship between the vapor-
ous silence of the alien and vagrant ‘‘madman’’ and the solid saying of the
‘‘sane’’ and sedentary citizen of the homeland. But this disclosive initiative
as such did not fulfill the possibilities for thinking inhering in the erruption
of the phantasmic other of instrumental reason into invisible visibility. And
this is because this early initiative overdetermined the negative (repressive)
effects of instrumental reason and thus precluded the possibility of think-

22. Heidegger, ‘‘What Is Metaphysics?’’ in Basic Writings, 95–96; my emphasis.

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ing the phantasmic in an other than merely symptomatic way.23 It is, despite
his disastrous political blindness, precisely because Heidegger inaugurated
the process of thinking the positive potentialities of the shadow cast by the
light of instrumental reason that the retrieval of his project to rethink think-
ing is rendered a political imperative of the opposition in the age of the
world picture, the age that has borne witness to the planetary triumph of
technological thinking and the utter reduction of its ‘‘object’’ to disposable
reserve.
To return to Heidegger, then, the Abgeschiedene, the thinker/poet
who has been estranged from his or her discursive homeland by the total-
ization of instrumental thought, is not obliterated from being. On the con-
trary, it is precisely at the point of the ‘‘triumph’’ of instrumental thought that
this alienated exile, like the nothing, returns, as an absent presence to haunt
the centered thought of the metropolitan homeland from which he/she has
been driven into exile: as, that is, the non-being which belongs to the truth
of metaphysical Being but which this truth will have ‘‘nothing to do with.’’
For if saying belongs as an absolute prerogative to the imperial language
of technological thinking, the Abgeschiedene, as the other of this kind of
thought, speaks the unsayable, a language of silence. This silent language
is an ‘‘other’’ language, a language that will not be answerable to the say-
ing of the They (das Man), that is, to ‘‘the dictatorship of the public realm,’’
of the ‘‘way things have been publicly interpreted,’’ 24 in the totally colonized
homeland.
Here, in his invocation of the thinker as wandering stranger and his or
her silent language as the spectral contradiction that returns to menace the
routinized logical economy of the discourse of the triumphant dominant cul-
ture, Heidegger anticipates at the site of thought not only Derrida’s ‘‘trace,’’
‘‘différance’’ and ‘‘specter’’; Levinas’s ‘‘absolutely other’’; Lacan’s ‘‘real’’; Lyo-
tard’s ‘‘unpresentable’’ and ‘‘differend’’; Althusser’s ‘‘absent cause’’: all those
intuitions of an other ‘‘reality’’ than that arrogantly asserted by the onto-
theological tradition insistently, if only symptomatically, articulated by early

23. See Louis Althusser’s analysis of the ‘‘problematic’’ in ‘‘From Capital to Marx’s Phi-
losophy,’’ in Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London: Verso, 1979), for a
telling instance of this failure to think the ‘‘shadow’’ (the invisible) of the problematic’s light
(the visible) positively. For a sustained ‘‘symptomatic reading’’ of Althusser’s productive
failure, see William V. Spanos, ‘‘Althusser’s ‘Problematic’ in the Context of the Vietnam
War: Toward a Spectral Politics,’’ Rethinking Marxism 10 (fall 1998): 1–21.
24. Heidegger, ‘‘Letter on Humanism,’’ 221; and Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John
Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962), 221.
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postmodern theorists. What is more important, because it suggests an

indissoluble relationship between theory and praxis that cannot help but
call for thinking, he also anticipates the global antitechnocapitalist politics
of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘‘nomadology,’’ 25 the global antifascist politics of
Agamben’s Arendt-inspired thought of the global ‘‘state of exception’’ (the
‘‘refugee’’),26 and the global postcolonial politics of Homi Bhabha’s concept
of ‘‘hybridity,’’ Spivak’s ‘‘catachrestic’’ subaltern, and Dussel’s ‘‘non-being.’’ 27
Even more suggestively, Heidegger’s Abgeschiedene is, if one makes ex-
plicit the implicit relationship between the thinking of this ontological exile
and the errant thinking that, according to the Parmenides lectures, was de-
cisively transformed by Rome’s reduction of the Greek understanding of
truth as a-letheia (un-concealment) to veritas (the correspondence of mind
and thing) in the name of its imperial project, proleptic of the postimperial
politics that Said tentatively articulates in Culture and Imperialism against
the global language of the ‘‘administered’’ imperial society.
In the face of the impasse of emancipatory practice in the ‘‘postcolo-
nial’’ period, Said, with Deleuze, Virilio, and the Theodor Adorno of Minima
Moralia in mind, calls for ‘‘a new critical consciousness’’ that would take
its lead from the radical transformation of the global demographics precipi-
tated by the depredations of modern European imperialism. The imperial
project and its postcolonial aftermath, he observes (in a political rhetoric
that is remarkably like the ontological rhetoric that circulates around Hei-

25. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophre-
nia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 351–423.
26. Giorgio Agamben, ‘‘Beyond Human Rights,’’ in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential
Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1996): ‘‘If the refugee represents such a disquieting figure in the order of the Nation-State,
that is so primarily because, by breaking the identity between the human and the citizen
and that between nativity and nationality, it brings the originary fiction of sovereignty to
crisis. . . . What is new in our time is that growing sections of humankind are no longer
representable inside the Nation-State—and this novelty threatens the very foundations of
the latter. Inasmuch as the refugee, an apparently marginal figure, unhinges the old trinity
of State-nation-territory, it deserves instead to be regarded as the central figure of our
political history’’ (163).
27. Homi K. Bhabha, ‘‘Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority
under a Tree outside Delhi,’’ in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994),
102–22; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘‘Marginality in the Teaching Machine,’’ in Outside
in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), 53–57; Enrique D. Dussel, Phi-
losophy of Liberation, trans. Aquilina Martinez and Christine Morkovsky (Maryknoll, N.Y.:
Orbis, 1985).
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degger’s Abgeschiedene), ‘‘produced homeless wanderers, nomads, and

vagrants, unassimilated to the emerging [postcolonial] structures of institu-
tional power, rejected by the established order for their intransigence and
obdurate rebelliousness. And insofar as these people exist between the old
and the new, between the old empire and the new state, their condition ar-
ticulates the tensions, irresolutions, and contradictions in the overlapping
territories shown on the cultural map of imperialism.’’ 28 Unlike the avail-
able postcolonial (and posthistorical) discourses, therefore, the new critical
consciousness Said symptomatically derives from these ‘‘tensions, irreso-
lutions and contradictions’’ that are embodied in the diasporic condition of
a massive part of the population of the planet will not be answerable to the
thinking/saying of the ‘‘triumphant’’ imperial culture. To invoke Althusser, this
new critical consciousness, in its strategically contradictory ‘‘ec-centricity,’’
its unaccountability, and its measurelessness, will not be interpellated by
the saying—the concept of agency—on which the dominant liberal capitalist
discourse utterly relies to maintain its hegemony:

It is no exaggeration to say that liberation as an intellectual mission,

born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and rav-
ages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled, established,
and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentered,
and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the mi-
grant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist
in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, be-
tween homes, and between languages. . . . And while it would be
the rankest Panglossian dishonesty to say that the bravura perfor-
mances of the intellectual exile and the miseries of the displaced
person or refugee are the same, it is possible, I think, to regard
the intellectual as first distilling then articulating the predicaments
that disfigure modernity—mass deportation, imprisonment, popula-
tion transfer, collective dispossession, and forced migrations.
‘‘The past life of émigrés is, as we know, annulled,’’ says Adorno in
Minima Moralia, subtitled Reflections from a Damaged Life. . . . Why?
‘‘Because anything that is not reified, cannot be counted and mea-
sured, ceases to exist’’ or . . . is consigned to mere ‘‘background.’’
Although the disabling aspects of this fate are manifest, its virtues or
possibilities are worth exploring. . . . Adorno’s general pattern is what

28. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 332.
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in an other place he calls the ‘‘administered world’’ or, insofar as the

irresistible dominants in culture are concerned, ‘‘the consciousness
industry.’’ There is then not just the negative advantage of refuge in
the émigré’s eccentricity; there is also the positive benefit of chal-
lenging the system, describing it in language unavailable to those it
has already subdued: ‘‘In an intellectual hierarchy which constantly
makes everyone answerable, unanswerability alone can call the hier-
archy directly by its name.’’ 29

Characteristically, Said overdetermines praxis over theory. As a con-

sequence, he fails to see adequately, despite his symptomatic gesture to-
ward it, how essential the imperative to rethink thinking itself is to the radi-
cally different, and differential, emancipatory sociopolitical agenda he infers
from the damaged condition of the displaced people—these ‘‘non-beings’’—
of the postcolonial occasion. This is why I think it is necessary to retrieve,
in this temporal and spatial ‘‘in between,’’ what I have been calling for con-
venience the Heideggerian initiative to think the ‘‘nothing’’ that an imperial
science will have nothing to do with, or rather to reconstellate this general
but discontinuous initiative into the context of the post–cold war postcolonial
occasion, which is the concern not only of Said but of the current dominant
oppositional discourses.
To put it synecdochically, we might say that the inadequately thought
relay between Said’s ‘‘new critical consciousness’’ and his diagnosis of the
global demographics precipitated at and by the end of imperialism—it is, not
incidentally, a diagnosis proleptically announced (though it has barely been
noticed) by Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism—compels us to think
Said’s political ‘‘émigré’’ differently. It compels us, more specifically, to think
this elusive itinerant, this ‘‘nomad,’’ who will refuse to be answerable to ‘‘the
general pattern,’’ the ‘‘administered world,’’ the ‘‘consciousness industry,’’
in relation to the ontological nothing that belongs to the Being posited by
the thought of modernity, the anxiety-provoking non-being Heidegger an-
nounced at the beginning of this century. I mean, more precisely, the ‘‘phan-
tasm’’—which is an ‘‘outrage’’ to instrumental reason—precipitated by and
at the ‘‘end of philosophy,’’ by and at, that is, the triumph of technologi-
cal thinking and the accomplishment of modernity’s imperial agenda in the
globalized electronic ‘‘age of the world picture.’’ Or, to appropriate the trope
Derrida has recently invoked to rehearse his solidarity with a ‘‘certain Marx’’
against ‘‘the new [post–cold war] Holy Alliance,’’ the unthought in Said’s

29. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 333; my emphasis.

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equation compels us to think his émigré in relation with the specter that
menaces the triumphant end-of-history discourse of the new world order.30
Understood as this contradictory revenant that returns to visit the
visitor, as Derrida puts this ‘‘hauntology’’ to evoke the reductive and pacify-
ing unidirectional imperial visualism of metaphysical thinking, the spectral is
a trope that brings the ontological discourse of Heidegger and the political
discourse of this ‘‘certain’’ (post-Marxist) Marx into an uncannily resonant
relationship.31 Indeed, in thus reconstellating ‘‘Heideggerian’’ theory into the
postcolonial occasion, it brings into clear and resonantly visible focus a
hitherto disablingly blurred or neglected, if not entirely rejected, understand-
ing of a recurrent, fundamental, and potentially politically productive motif
of postmodern theory at large. I am not simply referring to the indissoluble
relationship between the various philosophical names that different species
of postmodern theory have attributed to the ‘‘alterity’’ that belongs to the
metaphysical principle of Identity. I am also referring to the relay between
the ‘‘other’’ of the metaphysical Identity of Western thinking and the ‘‘other’’
of the ethnocentric Identity of the Occident, more specifically, those who
have been forcefully unhomed by the global fulfillment of the logical econ-
omy of the imperial project. I mean, to repeat, the indissoluble relation-
ship between, on the one hand, the ‘‘nothing’’ (Heidegger), the ‘‘trace’’ or
‘‘différance’’ (Derrida), the ‘‘surplus always exterior to the totality’’ (Levinas),
the ‘‘differend’’ (Lyotard), ‘‘the invisible’’ (Althusser), and, on the other, the
‘‘pariah’’ (Arendt), ‘‘the jew’’ (Lyotard), the ‘‘migrant’’ (Virilio), the ‘‘nomad’’
(Deleuze and Guattari), the ‘‘hybrid’’ (Bhabha), the ‘‘catachrestic remainder’’
(Spivak), the ‘‘non-being’’ (Dussel), the ‘‘refugee’’ (Agamben), and, most
resonantly, the ‘‘émigré’’ (Said).

30. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and
the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).
31. This otherwise unlikely productive relationship is implicit in Heidegger’s ‘‘Letter on
Humanism’’: ‘‘What Marx recognized in an essential and significant sense, though derived
from Hegel, as the estrangement of man has its roots in the homelessness of modern
man. This homelessness is specifically evoked from the destiny of Being in the form of
metaphysics, and through metaphysics is simultaneously entrenched and covered up as
such. Because Marx by experiencing estrangement attains an essential dimension of his-
tory, the Marxist view of history is superior to that of other historical accounts. But since
neither Husserl nor . . . Sartre recognize the essential importance of the historical in Being,
neither phenomenology nor existentialism enters that dimension within which a produc-
tive dialogue with Marxism first becomes possible’’ (243). Presumably, because Heideg-
ger does recognize the importance of the historical, that productive dialogue with Marx
becomes a possibility.
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174 boundary 2 / Spring 2000

And in thus focusing this indissoluble relay, which could be collec-

tively subsumed under the silence that belongs to the totalized saying privi-
leged by a metaphysical representation of being as Being, this reconstel-
lation also points the way that the rethinking or retrieval of thinking (and
poiesis) must take when history has come to its end in the age of the world
picture, which is to say, in the ‘‘posthistorical’’ age of transnational capital-
ism. In the interregnum, which bears witness to the massive displacement
of human lives precipitated by the globalization of the idea of liberal capital-
ist democracy—and the utter inadequacy of the Western interpretation of
human rights—it is not enough to engage capitalist economics or politics,
or patriarchy, or racism, or classism, and so on. All these pursued inde-
pendently remain trapped within the strategic disciplinarity of the dominant
discourse. In the interregnum, rather, the thinker and the poet must think
the polyvalent manifestations of the spectrality released by the consum-
mation of the Pax Metaphysica if they are to prepare the way for a politics
that is adequate to the task of resisting the impending Pax Americana and,
beyond that, of establishing a polis that, in its always open-ended agonis-
tics, precludes what Arendt, far more clearly than Heidegger and all those
postmodern critics of the city of modernity, recognized as the banality of
evil incumbent on the reduction of being at large to a territory, planetary in
scope, to be conquered, compartmentalized, and administered. Which is
to say on all self-righteous proclamations of universal peace that justify the
physical and spiritual slaughter and maiming of human life.
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