Midwest Modern Language Association
Unpacking My Library Again
Author(s): Homi Bhabha
Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 28, No. 1, Identities
(Spring, 1995), pp. 5-18
Published by: Midwest Modern Language Association
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Unpacking My LibraryAgain
Homi Bhabha
"Iam unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the
shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredomof order. ... InsteadI must
ask you to join me in the disorderof crates."With these words, borrowed
from WalterBenjamin'sessay "UnpackingMy Library,"I ask you to participate momentarilyin the "dialecticaltension between the poles of order
and disorder"that have marked my life and my work these past two
months, since arrivingin Chicago.As I drew out books from cratesin the
most unlikely pairings- Maud Ellmann'sTheHungerArtistsinterleaved
with PeterCarey'sTheFatManinHistory- the questionspressed:Does the
orderof books determinethe orderof things?Whatkind of historyof oneself and one's times is coded in the collecting of books? Driven by these
thoughts,I was led to a somewhat unlikely, yet intriguing,readingof Benjamin'sconcludingparagraphs.The inspiredflaneur,you will remember,
conjuresup images of his wanderingworld throughthe cosmopolitandisorderand discoveryof his old books:"Riga,Naples, Munich,Danzig,Moscow, Florence, Basel, Paris ... memories of the roomswhere these books
had been housed,"only to remindus, as Benjamindoes, that for the collector "theacquisition of an old book is its rebirth."1
It was then that it struck me, unpackingmy own library- memories of
book-buying in Bombay, Oxford, London, Hyberabad, Champaignof our books that makes of us
Urbana,Jyavaskala- that it is the "disorder"
to what WalterBenirredeemable"vernacular"
committed
cosmopolitans
of
In
as
"the
renewal
existence."
subtle
describes
ways that disorder
jamin
of
and
the
shelved
order
the
the
study,
displaces Dewey decimal
challenges
that
us
we
which
are cosmopolitansof a more "univerpersuades
system,
formal
that I am suggestingbetween a
academic
cast.
The
connection
sal,"
kind of transdisciplinarypedagogyand a revisionarycosmopolitanismis
part of my new book, and must wait for another occasion. My purpose
here is more circumstantial,even anecdotal,but not without a relevance
to a kind of contingentdis-orderedhistorical"dwelling'bestowed upon us
by many of the most interestingbooks that we collect today.
As I unpackmy book crate,which is beginningto sound more and more
like Pandora'sbox, two texts emerge in an unexpectedsynchronicity:one
fromher volume
old, the othernew - AdrienneRich's"EasternWar-Time"
HomiBhabha
5
An Atlas of the Difficult World, and Martha Nussbaum's essay "Patriotism
and Cosmopolitanism,"published with wide-rangingresponses in The
BostonReview.In their differentways, Rich and Nussbaum propose that
our contemporaryhistoricalmoment requiresto be read, and framed, in
translationaltemporalitiesof the "new-old,"or "time-lag,"
or the "projective-past,"concepts I've tried to develop in TheLocationof Culture.
I was struck initially by a certain bookish "dis-order"
that becomes, in
both texts, the primal scene for making a map of the late modern world.
Adrienne Rich writes:
ignorantly
Jewish,
tryingto graspthe world
throughbooks:Jude the Obscure,TheBallad
of ReadingGoal,EleanorRoosevelt'sMy Story.2
ForMarthaNussbaum,it is the Cynics, the Stoics,Kantand Rabindranath
Tagore'snovel TheHomeand the World-a motley, ill-fittinggroupdespite
their cosmopolitansympathies,her criticshave pointed out- thatmust be
yoked togetherto revive the "veryold ideal of cosmopolitanism,"the "vivid
imaginingof difference."3It is the contingencyof these "un-packedbooks,"
throughtheir concatenationand contestation,thatproducea sharedbelief
in the need for Benjamin'sethical and aesthetic imperative:"therenewal
of life"throughrelocation, dislocation, and re-situation.
ForRichand Nussbaum,such a renewal leads to a "global"
reorientation
of the patrioticor nationalistperspective, but, for both, some difficult,unin the cateanswered questions remain:What is the sign of "humanness"
of
of
the
Where
does
the
cosmopolitan?
gory
subject global inquiry, or
it
from?
To
what
relation?
From where does it
does
bear
injury, speak
claim responsibility?
And here the resemblancebetween them ends. ForNussbaum,the "identity"of cosmopolitanismdemands a spatial imaginary:the "self"at the
center of a series of concentric circles that move through the various
cycles of familial, ethnic, and communalaffiliationto "thelargestone, that
of humanity as a whole."The task of the citizen of the world, she writes,
lies in making human beings more like our "fellowcity dwellers,"basing
our deliberationson "thatinterlockingcommonality."
In her attempt to avoid nationalistor patrioticsovereignty, Nussbaum
that is profoundly provincial, provincial in a
embraces a "universalism"
too readilyassumedthe "givenness"
of
historical
sense.
Nussbaum
specific
a commonalitythat centerson the "self"- as the Satrapof a benign,belated
concentric
liberalbenevolence- as it genially generatesits "cosmopolitan"
circles of equal measure and comparableworth. But who are our "fellow
city dwellers"in the global sense? The eighteen or nineteen million refugees who lead their unhomely lives in borrowed and barricadeddwell-
6
UnpackingMy LibraryAgain
ings? The hundred million migrants, of whom over half are fleeing poverty and gender persecution world-wide? The twenty million who have
fled health and ecological disasters?4
These "extreme" conditions are not at the limits of the cosmopolitan
world, as much as they emphasize a certain liminality in the identity or
subject of cosmopolitanism that is mobilized by Nussbaum. It is a subject
peculiarly free of the complex "affect"that makes possible social identification and affiliation. She neglects those identities [that] "arise from fissures
in the larger social fabric," as Richard Sennet suggests in his response to
Nussbaum; "[they contain] its contradictions and injustices. . . . they
remain necessarily incomplete versions of any individual's particular
experience."5
And here lies the difference in Adrienne Rich's cosmopolitan subject:
I'ma canal in Europewhere bodies are floating
I'ma mass grave a life that returns
I'ma table set with room for the Stranger
I'ma field with cornersleft for the landless. ....
I'man immigranttailorwho says A coat
is nota pieceof clothonly....
I have dreamedof Zion I'vedreamedof world revolution
I'ma corpse dredgedfrom a canal in Berlin
a river in Mississippi I am a woman standing....
I am standinghere in your poem, unsatisfied... .6
For Rich, the boundaries and territories of the cosmopolitan "concentric"
world are profoundly, and painfully, underscored and overdetermined.
The "I"is iteratively, interrogatively staged; poised at the point at which, in
recounting historical trauma, the incommensurable "localities" of experience and memory each time put the "I"in a different place. A place of
difference-such that the atlas of the difficult world articulates a defiant
and transformative "dissatisfaction,"a dissonance at the heart of that complacent circle that constitutes "ourfellow city dwellers." For it is precisely
there, in the ordinariness of the day-to-day, in the intimacy of the indigenous, that, unexpectedly, we become murderous, unrecognizable strangers
to ourselves.
Shouldn't Nussbaum be concerned, Michael Walzer asks, that the crimes
of the twentieth century have been committed alternatively by perverted
patriots and perverted cosmopolitans?7
It is to the perverse passions of patriotism and its world-historical
"masks"that I now want to turn. On April 20, 1939, the Guardian Leader
published the following account:
HomiBhabha
7
Anxiety on Hitler'sBirthday
Today,as in the days of Napoleon,Europeanhistoryis madeby one man.
He sets the pace, he holds the worldin suspense,andthe questionthattranscends all otherquestions,day afterday, is "Whatwill he do?"Never has that
been asked with keener anxietythan today, the 50th anniversaryof Hitler's
birthwhich is being celebratedwith greatrejoicinginGermany...
Is he a greatman or a small man?Undoubtedlyboth. He is the greatestliving demagogue.He is a masterof politicalstrategy.He is extremelyshrewd
anda manof abruptaction.His mindis commonplaceandhe has hadfew original ideas. Although he demands the utmost discipline . .. he is undisciplined.He is self-controlledwith respectto food anddrink;his indiscipline
shows in other matters,notably in monumentaland political architecture.
His indisciplineis the cause of his extremerestlessness.He is always on the
move, can never sit or standstill, even when submergedin broodingsilence.
If any difficultyor obstacleis put in his way, he breaksinto a fiercerage;his
fitsof angerwill sometimeslastfordays. He regardshimselfas an instrument
of providence sent with a divine mission. He clings to a few ideas about
and aboutthe superiorityof the Germanrace,althoughparadoxically
"race,"
enough in some ways he despises the Germans.
The banality of evil has its own restlessness. Is it great or is it small?
Monumentaland premeditated,or anxiousand undisciplined?The anxiety
runs deeper: is history being made by "one"man who clings on to "afew
a Napoleonic reveideas about race,"or is Hitler a demonic "doubleman,"
nantwith a disastrousiddefixe?Thoseof us who are familiarwith the early
nineteenth-centurydiscourses of Oriental despotism will recognize, in
this 1930s "English"
portraitof Hitler, a certain indeterminacy,a doubleand
address:does Nazism provoke anxiety, or is the
of
ness inscription
Hitlerianbody politic itself in a state of anxiety (. .. Whatwill he, or it, do
next)?
Hitler'sown, often repeated, response to such a question, was at once
bombasticand banal;a commonplaceanswerwhich has, over the last fifty
years, gained a terrible resonance that places it amongst the most trauof ourtimes:"Thespiritof the new German,"Hitlerdeclaimed
matic"truths"
in his Nuremberg oration, "does not manifest itself in parades and
speeches. It is seen as its best when the ordinaryduties of everydaylife are
carriedout efficiently."In the inter-waryears in England,the avowed project of the patricianfellow travelersof the fascist rightwas to providemodern Britishnationalismwith an effective mobilizingpopulistmyth, which,
as Tom Nairn has persuasivelyargued,it had traditionallylacked:a mobilizing myth that depended "onthe self-actionof the Volk, [ratherthan an
appeal to the] inexhaustible wisdom of Institutions and their patrician
custodians."8Pro-Nazi sentiment in the 1920s and 1930s attempted to
Hitler and naturalizenational socialism in order to propa"quotidianize"
a
gate racist,decisionist, and masculinepoliticalimaginary.E. W. D. Tennant, who was to play some significant part in persuading the Prince of
Wales into taking an appeasing stance, wrote in April, 1933:
8
UnpackingMy LibraryAgain
Historywill recordthat nothing but this movement could have saved Germany from Bolshevism.We in GreatBritainmust begin to understandwhat
has happenedin Germany.... To an impartialoutsiderthe firstimpressionof
Adolf Hitleris ratherdisappointing.He is of medium height ... more like a
youthfuleditionofJ. H. Thomasthanof Napoleon.He has a mostremarkable
moustache. He would like to cut it off but feels that it is now too late-his
moustache is famous. .... He is probablyone of the greatestoratorsof all
times. His voice is attractive,powerful and untiring.... Duringthe recent
election campaign... wireless was an immense help to him. By this means
he got in touch with hundredsof thousandsof potentialCommunists;they
came to curse and remainedto bless.9
This attempt to turn the house painter from Linz into J. H. Thomas, the lad
from Swindon who became a leading light in the National Union of Railwaymen in the late '20s, and later parliamentary under-secretary for the
colonies, is not simply an attempt to reduce the anxiety around the figure
of Hitler, and fascism more generally. In the image of Hitler's demagoguery lies the political lesson: the voice that carries across the "internal,"
uneven borders of the nation turns an internally divided and differentiated social into the common national subject - an imagined community.
And if the rhetoric of the banal or the quotidian is part of the language of
populism, we encounter, in this voice that produces a seamless "whole,"
the more coercive political etymology of the word "banal":a commonality,
or common purpose, that is derived from compulsory "feudal"service,
which, through time, comes to be naturalized as the common-place or
common-usage: the banal mobilized in the "everyday"service of the nation.
Young Elisabeth Fairholme writes in July 1937, after joining the Women's
Labor Service in Germany in order to experience the spirit of the "new
Germany":
I foundmyself on cold darkwinter dawns salutingthe Arbeitsdienstflag,and
singingthe rousinganthemsof the new Germany.... Indeedso powerfulis
the spirit and atmosphereof these camps, thatjust as the other girls forget
that they come of differentclasses, so for the time being I forgot I was of
anothernationality.... Servicebecomes the objectof each girl'slife; and service withoutrewardor recognition.... It is exceedingly
difficulttodescribehow
this is accomplished,thisharmoniousatmospherewithinthe Camp.Thereis no
... Thewordsof the songsI sang
printedcode,orlistof rulesin theArbeitsdienst.
daily in Campbecameso deeply absorbedin my mindthat even now I unwittinglyfindmyselfutteringtheirmeaningand intentclothedin differentwords,as
thoughtheyweremyown thoughtsand opinions."10
Elisabeth Fairholme, in the grip of amor patriae, is not herself free of
anxiety in the midst of her obvious enjoyment. The only event that she
remembers as having disturbed the harmony of the camp was when a girl
who had been cleaning pig-styes and cutting wood all day "had failed to
HomiBhabha
9
curl her hairfor the evening meal of cocoa and black bread"(791).Amidst
the ratherbanal benevolence, and the nationless, classless identity of the
once-and-future"clairol"
chanteuse,there lies, just aroundthe edges, the
terrorof not quite knowing who you are or what you are being subjected
to, the anxiety of findingyourself utteringtheirmeaning and intent as my
thoughtsand opinions.
If Elisabethfinds all this somewhat difficultto understand,SlavojZivek,
the Lacanianfrom Ljubljana,finds it all too easy. In "ForThey Know Not
WhatThey Do"- a banal title in my double readingof that word- he suggests that the Jew is Hitler'spointde capiton;all the diversity of earthly
miseries is conceived as the manifestationof the Jewish plot; for it is the
Jew who manifests the enjoyment-"impossible,unfathomable, enjoyment"- that has been stolen from us, and therefore, the Jew provides the
knottingof the narrativethreads of national degeneration, humiliation,
of the
"moraldecadence,"economic crisis. Elisabeth'sEnglish"enjoyment"
anti-semitic"being'of the Germannation (in this psycho-politicalsense),
certainlybears out, in part, Ziiek'spsychoanalyticalreading:Elisabethis
at once the nation'svolkish "unchosen"subject-unmarked by nation or
class, participatingironicallyin an almost pre-nationalethics of "service,"
and, in anotherdiscursive space within the same narrative,she becomes
the vehicle for the state's paranoiac, projective reinscriptionof those differ-
ences of race, gender,class, generation,nation- for instance,the objectification of the Jew as oriental,effeminate,and corruptlybourgeoiscosmopolitan- those very signs,if not sites, of differencethat were disavowed or
or captureof the new nazi-nationalcitizen. "In
displacedin the "captation"
everything natural there is something unchosen,"Benedict Anderson
writes in the course of an argumentthat suggeststhat the naturalistmode
of the national narrative is its moment of "unisonance":". .. (motherland,
Vaterland,patria, heimat)become the transparent[objects] of national
ties of
identification:skin-colour, gender, parentage."11Those "natural"
the national sentiment produce "thebeauty of Gemeinschaft,""aghostly
intimation of simultaneity across [the nation's] homogeneous, empty
of national
time."My concern now is with the moment when the "object"
identification turns anxiously abject:that moment when, for instance,
ElisabethFairholmeuncannilyencountersherself, automaton-like,unwittingly,repeatingthe meaning and intent of others in words that are her
own. Or, laterin my talk, the momentwhen the EnglishbutlerStevens,in
TheRemainsof theDay, has to confronthis unwittinganti-semitismin the
service of LordDarlington:a guilt that rises suddenly from the depths of
the "unconscious,"and as a form of psychic reality, presents us with the
a politicalaffectivityattached
problemsof agencywithout"intentionality,"
to objects that are displaced or symptomatic.Is there a genealogy of this
uncanny "naturalism"that constitutes, at once, the anxiety and the affiliation of national identity?
10
UnpackingMy LibraryAgain
Now this suggestedlink between nationalismand an anxiousnaturalism
is clearly seen in the work of JohannFichte, often creditedwith being the
father of modern national sentiment. With Nietzsche and de Lagarde,
Fichte formed the matrix of the Nazi appeal to the authorityof a "racial"
philosophical traditionas Etienne Balibarand Hans Sluga have recently
argued. Fichte has a particularrelevance to the rather hybrid "EnglishNazi"terrainof my lecture, for in the popularculturaland politicaljournals of the inter-warperiod, like TheEnglishReview,Fichte, Nietzsche,
and Renanwere the three thinkersmost commonlyused to familiarizethe
English public with the ideologies of the German state. It is, however,
rarelyremarkedof TheAddressesto the GermanNation (1807-8),12 that its
centralmetaphorfor nationalidentificationis the scopic regimewhere the
chosen love of the nationturnsanxiouslyinto a split identifica"naturalist"'
tion. In a very different context, Balibar has recently remarked in his
splendid book entitled Masses, Classes,Ideas (Routledge, 1994) that the
very namingof the Germansand the GermanState,in the work of Fichte,
is the productof an "internalscission":a figureof ambivalence,that plays
on the impossibility- and anxiety, we may add- of the impossible coincidence of Germannation and German State.
In the midst of Fichte'smetaphysics of the "directnessof national perception"it is the patriarchalimage of the Fatherwho providesthe "natural"
of the fatherenables only
modalityof citizenship.Butthe discursive"sign"
a form of identificationthat is indirect and elisional- what we may call a
"phallic"peripherality.For it is the absent Father,ratherthan the mother
who appears"moredirectly as benefactor,"that constitutesthe principle
of nationalself-identification.The nationalsubjectis founded on the trace
of the father'sabsent-presencein the present of the mirror,whereas the
is supplemental, marked by the
mother's immanent "over"-presentness
of
the
but
more
shadow
father,
clearlyheld in the line of light
overbearing
and vision.The orientationto nationalsubjectivityis caught,we may say,
between the reflective frame, and the tain, of the mirror.
The visibility of the nationalmirror,then, cannot but be liminal rather
than, as Fichte would claim, supersensual.The citizen-subjectheld in the
temporality of the national present, constituted in the fort/da game of
fatherlands and mother tongues, turns amor patriae into a much more
anxiouslove.Explicitlyso, when we realizethroughSamuelWeber'ssplendid reading of the psychoanalyticgenealogy of anxiety, that anxiety is a
"sign"of a dangerimplicit in the very threshold of identity, in-betweenits
claims to coherence and its fears of dissolution, "betweenidentity and
non-identity,internaland external"(154).13This anxiousboundarythat is
also a displacement- the peripheral- has a specific relevance to national
identificationwhen we realize that what distinguishesfear from anxiety,
in the psychoanalytic sense, is a certain occlusion of the "naturalness"of
HomiBhabha
11
the referent:anxietyemergesin responseto the perceived"dangerof a loss
of perception (a Wahrnehmungsverlust)
attachedto familiar (andfamilial)
images, situationsand representations"
(155).The indeterminacyof anxiety
produces, as with my readingof the Fichteanmirror,"atraumaticdivergence of representationand signification"(155),a splittingat the very core
of the cathexes that stabilize the nation's"I."
If it has been suggested,in differentways by Anderson,Gellner,Nairn,
and Todorov, that nationnessis the Janus-facedstrait gate of modernity
and all who enter shall look backwards-in what we may now call an
anxietyof theantecedent-then SamuelWeberhas also pointed out that the
psychic experience of anxiety is like being "caughtin the space between
two frames:a doubled frame, or one that is split"(167). What enters this
double frameof the nation'sanxietyis not the naturalized,harmonizedunchosen of the amorpatriae- which is also the love of the nation-peoplebut its double: those who are the "unchosen,"the marginalizedor peripheralizednon-people of the nation'sdemocracy.
Time and time again,the sign of the complex,unassimilablephenomena
and paraphernaliaof racialmarkingemerges with its banal evil. It is as if
the Aufhebungthatsublatesthe nation'santeriority- its dynasticpredemocraticverticality- and that raises the nationalidea to the level of historicity, does not merely returnas the repressed, but turns demonically from
Aufhebunginto an archaic, articulatorytemporalityof the nation'senunciation and performativity,its everyday enactment.Time and time again,
the nation'spedagogical claim to a naturalisticbeginning with the unchosen things of territory,gender and parentage- amorpatriae- turn into
those anxious, ferocious moments of metonymic displacementthat mark
the fetishes of nationaldiscriminationand minoritization- the racialized
body, the homophobic defense, the single mother: the "chosen"fixated
objects of a projectiveparanoiathat reveal, throughtheir alien "outsideness,"the fragile, indeterminateboundariesof the nationalimaginaryof
the "People-As-One."
In orderto grasp such peripheralityand ambivalencein the idea of the
nation, Tom Nairn resortsto WalterBenjamin'sAngelusNovus, his angel
of History- an allegoricalfigure that emerges in recent discourses of the
nation to mark the complex temporality of its modernity. Nairn and
Andersonend their books with the figure of the Angelus Novus; the collage on the cover of StuartHall's volume on Thatcherism, The Road to
Renewal,shows Mrs. Thatcheras the angel of history sucking up large
numbers of the Britishradicalleft of the late '70s and '80s, into her catastrophicvision of Progress.Let me remind you, once more, of the sphinxlike figure, half-bird,half-man,half-historian,half-messiah,WalterBenjamin'sAngelus Novus:
12
UnpackingMy LibraryAgain
His face is turnedtowardsthe past. Wherewe perceive a chain of events, he
sees one single catastrophewhich keeps pilingwreckageuponwreckageand
hurlsit in frontof his feet. The angelwould like to stay, awakenthe dead,and
makewhole what has been smashed.Buta stormis blowingfromParadise;it
has got caughtin his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer
close them. The storm irresistiblypropels him into the future to which his
backis turned,while the pile of debrisbeforehim growsskyward.The storm
is what we call progress.14
And this is Tom Nairn rereading the coming of the angel:
Let us returnto the real historicalsources of Benjamin'ssingle catastrophe,
the home of the wind that has propelled[the angel of history]so far and so
erratically.This means the history of Western-foundedprogress.It is only
now thata distinctivelynon-occidento-centricversion of the storyis becoming possible, a version that will be something like the world's picture in
which the Enlightenment,and the bourgeoisand industrialrevolutionsof
the Westfigureas episodes,however important.... The terrorof [theangel's]
vision comes fromthe originalwest wind of progressas wellas the multiform
reactionsit has producedin the east and the south.15
The angel hovers over the discourse of the nation's anxiety at the very
point when the specter of race and cultural difference emerges in a radical
disjunction-what I earlier described as the "unchosen"-to question its
claims to a modern homogeneous temporality, and its democratic promise
of social horizontality. To contemplate the agency of the Benjaminian
"temporal montage"16as it defines the geopolitics of the historical present-the destiny and discourse of democracy-is no easy task. Surprisingly, such an occasion was recently provided by Michael Kinsley in an
essay in Time magazine, entitled: "Is Democracy Losing Its Romance?"
After a tour d'horizon of the postcommunist world during which he concludes, "democracy, far from suppressing nationalist hatred, has given
ferocious vent to it,"Kinsley turns a homeward glance. In the US today, he
suggests, there is a populism with an anti-democratic flavor which
hungers for "astrong leader on a white horse. Thus Ross Perot, America's
would-be Fujimori." And, he continues, "As the current movie The
Remains of the Day reminds us, there was a time, not long ago, the 1930s,
when openly expressed doubts about the wisdom of democracy were positively fashionable, even in established democratic societies. These days
everybody at least pays lip-service to the democratic ideal. Will that
change?"17
Is it possible to read Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, centered in
the very British bathos of the butler Stevens, a "gentleman'sgentleman," as
a parable of the anxiety and ambivalence involved in the service of the
inter-war English nation? The temporal montage of the novel is a threeleveled palimpsest: the authoritarian populism of the Thatcherite late
HomiBhabha
13
1980s (its moment of enunciation), re-staging the Suez-centered mid 1950s
with its post-imperial "confusions" (the historical "present"of the narrative), which, in turn, frames the countryhouse, patrician fascism of the
fellow-travelers of late '20s and '30s (the novel's ficelle). Ishiguro's narrative
retroactivity articulates these temporalities, the "present"of each moment
partialized and denaturalized by the process of the others.
Ishiguro's narrator establishes a performative identification with an
aristocratic Tory traditionalism, enacted in the customary belief in the
"dignity of service." In the English context, "service"has a double cultural
genealogy. It represents an implication in the class-structure where service normalizes class difference by extravagantly "acting it out" as an
affiliative practice, perfectly seen in the metonymic mimicry of the idiomatic naming of the butler as gentleman'sgentleman: "Abutler's duty is to
provide good service," Stevens meditates, "by concentrating on what is
within our realm... by providing the best possible service to those great
gentlemen in whose hands the destiny of civilization truly lies."'8
The brilliance of Ishiguro's exposition of the ideology of service lies in
his linking the national and the international, the indigenous and the colonial, by focusing on the anti-semitism of the inter-war period, and thus
mediating race and cultural difference through a form of difference -Jewishness - that confuses the boundaries of class and race and represents the
"insider'soutsidedness."Jewishness stands for a form of historical and racial
in-betweenness that again resonates with the Benjaminian view of history
as a "view from the outside, on the basis of a specific recognition from
within." 19
If "domestic service" figured through the butler is that "unchosen"
moment that naturalizes class difference by ritualizing it, then the narrative's attention to Jewishness and anti-semitism raises the issue of gender
and race and, in my view, places these questions in a colonial frame. It is
while polishing the "silver"- the mark of the good servant - that the narrative deviates to recall the dismissal of two Jewish maids at the insistence
of the fascist Lord Darlington. The gleam of the silver becomes that Fichtean national mirror where the master's paternal authority is both affirmed
and, in this case, tarnished by the housekeeper Miss Kenton's pressing of
the charge of anti-semitism against both Darlington and Stevens. This is
the ambivalent moment in the narrative, when the "memory" of antisemitism and the inter-war "English"Nazi connection turns the naturalism
and nationalism of the silver service into the "anxiety"of the past - what
Lacan has described as the temporal antecedence of the anxious moment.
The preservation of social precedence, embodied in the butler's service, is
undone in the temporal antecedence that the presence of the Jew anxiously
unleashes in the narrative of the national present. The English silver - the
mark of the gentleman - becomes engraved with the image of Judas Iscar-
14
UnpackingMy LibraryAgain
iot - the sign of racial alterity and social inadmissibility. But the antisemitic historic past initiates, as anxiety is want to do, a double frame of
discrimination and domination that produces a narrative where Jew and
colonized native, anti-semitism and anti-colonial racism, are intimately linked
in a textual and temporal montage.
For the British fascists, such as Ishiguro's Lord Darlington, argued for
the Nazi cause on the grounds that Hitler's success was intimately bound
up with the preservation of the British Empire. In My Life, Oswald Mosley, the founder of the British Union of Fascists, remembers his first meeting with Hitler in April 1935-a luncheon in Munich-during which he
recalls that Hitler wanted no more from Britain than its neutrality in his
struggle against Russia and communism; "in return, he would have been
ready to offer all possible guarantees for the support of the British
Empire."20
E. W. D. Tennant, who was undoubtedly amongst the most prominent
of Lord Darlington's guests, and had certainly basked in the afterglow of
Stevens's glinting silver, had this to say in 1933, in an article entitled "Herr
Hitler and His Polity,"published in TheEnglishReview, that surely adorned
the walnut veneered tables at Darlington Hall:
The evidence that I saw supportsthe idea that the burningof the Reichstag
and the consequentseizingof the KarlLiebknechthouse was an act of providence. The Karl Liebknechthouse was set up as a printingworks where
Communistpropagandawas preparedfor distributionall over the world.
Therewere thousandsof pamphletsin many languagesincludingthousands
for distributionamongthe natives of Indiaand SouthAfrica.Muchinformain regardtoIndia
tionof thehighestinterestto theBritishEmpireandparticularly
and theAnti-Imperial
leagueis available.21
The link between British anti-semitism and the colonialist racism of this
period has been largely left unexplored by the canonical historians of the
period. It goes further than two related imperial dreams, one in the West,
the other in the East. The victimage shared by both, Jews and colonial subjects respectively, was the denial of their fundamental rights to be recognized as "peoples," however contradictory and complex that designation
might be. To the extent that both Jewish intellectuals and anti-colonial
freedom fighters were linked through the much vaunted Bolshevik plot,
they became the agents of a profound patrician anxiety. For these marginalized and discriminated peoples, with their different histories of diaspora and domination, were attempting to construct forms of community
and identity that were implacably opposed to returning to what an
influential section of the "English"intellectual and political "right"defined
as the urgent necessity for "abiological angle of vision in viewing mankind
... [which] would combat and eliminate degeneracy."22
HomiBhabha
15
This last phrase comes from Anthony Ludovici, one of the leading public intellectuals of the inter-war decade who would certainly have been
one of Lord Darlington's country-house habitues. He had just returned
from the Nuremberg games, to which he was invited as a guest of honor.
With Hitler's speech ringing in his ears, Ludovici proclaimed the benefits
of a polity of "silence," over the ceaseless chatter of democracies where
"the impudence of degenerate nonentities is pampered and defended":
"The Fuehrer repeatedly assures Germany of the benefits of her silence, if
only as a therapeutic measure, and points to the advantage which, as a
silent nation, she enjoys over all the vociferous and chattering nations of
western democracy" (52). Laid over this silence, please remember the
voice-over of Elisabeth Fairholme's chants and anthems. But let us not forget, that in that very England, there were other anti-fascist voices, too:
In Bucksthere is a countryhouse, countryhouse
Wheredwells LordAstorand his spouse
And Chamberlainand Halifax
To manufactureFascistpacts, fascist pacts.
Farethee well the Leagueof Nations
Hail to "peacefulpenetrations"
And good bye to Internationallaw- law- law
Adieu Democracy,adieu, adieu, adieu
We have no furtheruse for you, use for you
We'llpin our faith to fascism and war
Whatis the NationalGovernmentfor- Governmentfor?
The words of this marching song return us to that place where we
started, in the sundering of "concentric cosmopolitanism," and the attempt
to understand the behemoth that haunts the banality of the dialogues we
have with "ourfellow city dwellers." In that past-present that is our time,
the conversation is once again, as once before, of the disuniting of peoples
and the degeneration of Civilization "as we know it." The Disuniting of
America, The Cultureof Complaint- I have almost unpacked my old books,
and am acquiring some new ones.
But at this conference, devoted to the question of identity, let me conclude with an old friend who caught my eye, after many years, as he
emerged unexpectedly from the chaos of my book crates. For no one
understands both the degradation and the defiance of the minority condition better than my friend, the photographer Mr. Styles who works from a
cockroach-ridden studio in the New Brighton township of Port Elizabeth,
South Africa. There is something quite campy about his name- Stylessomething apposite to the trendy theoretical themes of mimicry and
camouflage and performativity, only he must use these devices of identification in the milieu of the work-camp and South African apartheid laborlaws. In Athol Fugard's Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, Styles recycles work permits
16
UnpackingMy LibraryAgain
and provides false identities. By replacing the identity photograph on a
pass, an illegal township worker is fitted out with a new city identity. But,
as one of his clients protests, that means living life as a ghost. Mr. Styles
shoots back: "When the white man looked at you at the Labour Bureau
what did he see? A man with dignity or a bloody passbook with an N.I.
number? Isn't that a ghost?. .. All I'm saying is to be a real ghost, if that is
what they want .... Spook them into hell, man!23
The minoritization of a people, no less than its "nationalization,"exceeds
the language of numbers and the majoritarian claim to a "common good."It
must be seen for what it is: the "other side," the alterity, the fantasy of the
national "people-as-one" that disturbs the parochial dream of ascendant
authority. Let's spook them to hell!!
University of Chicago
Notes
1. Walter Benjamin,"UnpackingMy Library"in Illuminations(New York: Harcourt, Brace& World,Inc., 1955)61, 67.
2. Adrienne Rich, "EasternWartime"inAn Atlas of theDifficult World:Poems 1988-91
(New York:W. W. Norton, 1991)36.
3. Martha Nussbaum, "Patriotismand Cosmopolitanism,"Boston Review 19.5
(October/November1994):3-6.
4. See HerbertGintis'sresponseto MarthaNussbaumin BostonReview19.5 (October/November1994):28.
5. See p. 13 in the same issue of BostonReview.
6. Rich, 44.
7. See p. 29 in the same issue of BostonReview.
8. T. Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain:Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (London: Verso,
1981)296.
9. E. W. D. Tennant,"HerrHitlerand His Polity;March1933"TheEnglishReview
56 (April1933):362-63.
10. ElisabethFairholme,"TheWomen of New Germany,"TheEnglishReview64
(July 1937):788-92; my emphasis. Anotherpage reference for this work will be
given within the text.
11. For the citations in this paragraphsee B. Anderson,ImaginedCommunities:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983) 131-32.
12. J. G. Fichte,Addressesto theGermanNation(Chicagoand London:OpenCourt
PublishingCompany,1922).Page referenceswill appearin the text where appropriate.
13. All citationsin the next two paragraphs(includingthe Lacanquote)come from
SamuelWeber'ssignal contributionto this debate. See his Returnto Freud:Jacques
HomiBhabha
17
Lacan'sDislocation of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991), especially
Appendix A "Beyond Anxiety: The Witches Letter."All page references to this work
will be given in the text.
14. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" in Illuminations,
59-60.
15. Nairn, 360, 361.
16. This phrase belongs to Andrew Benjamin and can be found in his essay "Tradition and Experience: Walter Benjamin's 'On Some Motifs in Baudelaire'" in The
Problems of Modernity:Adorno and Benjamin, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1989) 122-40.
17. Time, 17 January 1994: 60.
18. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (London: Faber and Faber, 1989,
115-17.
19. Peter Osborne, "Adornoand the Metaphysics of Modernism: The Problem of a
'Postmodern' Art,"in The Problems of Modernity:Adorno and Benjamin 93.
20. Sir Oswald Mosley, My Life (London: Nelson, 1968) 365.
21. Tennant, 373; my emphasis.
22. Anthony Ludovici, "Hitler and Nietzsche," The English Review 64 (January
1937): 44.
23. Athol Fugard, Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, in Siswe Bansi Is Dead and The Island (New
York: Viking, 1973) 38.
A different version of part of this essay, entitled "Anxious Nations, Nervous States,"
appeared in Supposing the Subject, ed. Joan Copjec (London and New York: Verso,
1994), 201-17.
18 Unpacking My Library Again