The name Johann Gottfried Herder appears regularly in theoretical discussions, where he is almost invariably reduced to noncomplex positions. The most common misperception concerns nationalism. In 1981 Fredric Jameson cited Herder as an example of an “organic populism or nationalism,” which has been “discredited under [its] hegemonic embodiment.”Footnote ¹ Even a superficial reading of Herder would show that he had nothing to do with the brand of nationalism Jameson dismisses. Homi Bhabha calls Herder’s sense of the nation “morally arbitrary,”Footnote ² a statement that shows complete disregard for debates on morality in Herder’s time. In After Globalization, Eric Cazdyn and Imre Szeman refer to Herder’s ideas on the nation as “nonsense” that has managed “not only to stand the test of time, but to become even more popular as the years pass by.”Footnote ³ This appraisal is odd given that many of their own views on the nature of globalization are—unwittingly, I can only assume—close to those of Herder, including a rather interesting theological dimension which they appear not to recognize. What these and other similar caricatures lose is the key to one of the most complex and innovative writers of the German Enlightenment.

Herder’s purported nationalism makes sense only if we understand his central thesis that reason is a universal human potential that is actualized with the acquisition of language.Footnote ⁴ This is what opens the divide I address in this paper between universal reason and its cultural (Herder would also say “national”) manifestations. The predisposition to language/thought is so deeply embedded in the human organism that it makes no sense to speak of the human condition without it. In the Treatise on the Origin of Language (1774) Herder puts it like this: “If, that is to say, reason is no compartmentalized, separately effective force but an orientation of all forces that is distinctive to his species, then the human being must have it in the first condition in which he is a human being. This awareness must reveal itself in the first thought of the child....”Footnote ⁵ The human child does not grow into reason; it is born with a biological drive to activate it through the development of expressive communication in language. Language and reason emerge in the progress from aisthesis to aesthesis—from the formal aspect of sensory life to the active formalization of this experience of life.Footnote ⁶ It is here that the complexity of Herder’s position on nation, culture, and reason is to be sought. What Herder calls “nation” is a systematic affiliation of language users with a shared tradition and what might be called a shared way of being in the world—a shared pathway from aisthesis to aesthesis.

In this paper I am asking readers of postcolonial theory to engage with Herder’s complexity. This will allow insight into the fundamental wager of Herder’s anti-imperialism, that philosophical analysis can be shifted toward aesthetics, anthropology, and cultural history and that this will do justice to the insight that reason is a universal potential that is culturally actualized. This allows him to show—perhaps for the first time—how anti-imperialism can be not only ethically but above all epistemologically grounded.

First, however, what is Herder’s anti-imperialism?Footnote ⁷ Following the precritical philosophy of his teacher Kant, he argues that the concepts with which philosophy deals do not address the truth of things, but the relationships humans establish with things.Footnote ⁸ And because these relationships are built on a system of sense perception and linguistic formation, philosophy needs to understand that truth can only be negotiated aesthetically, through the same medium out of which reason arises: language.Footnote ⁹ Once Herder makes this move, he has left Kant behind and is preparing the way for his later argument that truth is culturally and linguistically situated, but not relative.Footnote ¹⁰ Truth is universal, but its forms of expression are culturally determined. This allows him to sidestep the strange moral pit into which Kant falls in his review of Herder’s Ideas for the Philosophy of History when Kant claims, famously, that if all the Tahitians have to offer to posterity is their own happiness, one has to ask why they even exist: “Does the author really mean that, if the happy inhabitants of Tahiti, never visited by more civilized nations, were destined to live in their peaceful indolence for thousands of centuries, it would be possible to give a satisfactory answer to the question of why they should exist at all, and of whether it would not have been just as good if this island had been occupied by happy sheep and cattle as by happy human beings who merely enjoy themselves?”Footnote ¹¹ In asking such questions, reason sides with imperialism, neglecting the fact that nature is diverse, and reason’s forms of expression are also diverse. Nature is organized such that all cultures should develop in a manner appropriate to their own particular environment, their history, traditions, and understanding of the world. Imperialism mimics universal reason when it fosters “the unnatural expansion of States, the savage mixing of humanity’s types and nations under one scepter.”Footnote ¹² This is why, in an early poem, he calls Columbus an “assassin,” who has “destroyed with poison our world and all its beauties, its charms, its customs and, alas, its life and youthful vigour!”Footnote ¹³ As imperialists, Europeans act as if nature’s laws have no sway over them. “What right,” he asks in 1785, “did you monsters have even to approach the land of these unfortunates, let alone to tear it away from them through thievery, deception and brutality?”Footnote ¹⁴ Viewing European politics and commerce from the point of view of the world’s natural development, Herder writes later (1797) that “our continent ought not to be called the wise, but the presumptuous, intrusive, manipulative part of the earth; it has not cultivated, but destroyed the germs of other peoples’ cultures, wherever and however it was able.”Footnote ¹⁵ And he states in 1793 that “for the benefit of Humanity, unfortunate Europe should perish. Has it not been troubling itself and the world for long enough? Is not every continent dripping with the blood of those whom it slaughtered? with the sweat of those whom it tormented as slaves?”Footnote ¹⁶

The mechanism enabling imperialism as Herder witnessed it is the world market, in which Europeans “roam through the whole world as merchants or robbers.”Footnote ¹⁷ Herder’s theoretical project was formulated at a pivotal moment in the long history of globalization, a moment when, as Dimas Figueroa has shown, the three structural conditions that make it possible to speak of the beginnings of globalization are in the process of being fulfilled: the experience of the planet as a unitary whole, a real relationship among all regions of the planet, and “the inadequate regulation of this relationship by way of moral or political norms.”Footnote ¹⁸ Adopting a critique of commerce similar to that sketched out by Montaigne in the late sixteenth century, Herder argues that the excesses of Europe drive the sacking of the New World. He writes in 1764: “The gold of royal diadems, the delicacies of our tables, all the appurtenances of splendid display and luxury, concealed beneath the mask of convenience, all these are the pillage of distant worlds. The dearer the booty becomes, the higher rises its value; and the raison d’état of commerce thus masters languages, so that other nations may at least be deceived in words of their own tongue.”Footnote ¹⁹ The growing interconnectedness of the world economy implicates all Europeans in the injustices committed in the name of trade, and commodities conceal this. This process is enabled by technology, by Europeans inventing “means and tools to subjugate, to deceive, and to plunder you other parts of the world.”Footnote ²⁰ What Europeans regard as moral superiority is nothing more than “the power, the cunning and the tools to become the thieves, intruders, agitators and destroyers of all the world.”Footnote ²¹

Coupled to the ideology of superiority is a secularized faith in historical progress. This is why the “written histories of the wars and conquests of peoples” cannot legitimately be used to derive the “principles according to which they acted and wrote.... Violence and despotism can command the things they have power over, but not the principles of rights and their infringements [Grundsätze des Rechts und Unrechts] in the history of humanity.”Footnote ²² Natural law justifies the resistance to imperialism. The victims of “the Spanish, Portuguese, English and Dutch... cry out—some more, some less—for revenge.”Footnote ²³ Herder foresees a time when (addressing the subjugated world) “it will be precisely your turn to triumph! We affix chains with which you will pull us; the inverted pyramids of our constitutions will turn upright on your ground.”Footnote ²⁴

Herder took careful note of debates concerning world trade and imperialism, weighing the criticism of older forms of imperialism and the defense of newer forms, and he asked what the changing world and the politics of inequality mean for philosophy. What he saw was an epistemological shift in which his own acts of theory were implicated. The question he never stopped posing to Kant was, what happens to epistemological statements when we position them in the context of globalization, where claims to universal validity look increasingly like European claims on universal power? And yet, without some notion of the universal, how can the idea of common humanity be entertained—an idea that was central to Herder’s philosophical work?

Herder’s understanding of cultural and linguistic diversity is governed by a constant probing of the universal dimensions of human life and thought, resulting in a sophisticated attempt to link epistemology with aesthetics and politics. Herder took the first steps in this direction in 1764 when he tried to delineate clearly the sphere of knowledge and the kinds of questions that are appropriate to human life.Footnote ²⁵ In the process, he raised the problem of universality in knowledge. Analytic method leads from sensory experience to conceptualization—what he called the human path, and it promises a way toward abstraction and toward concepts holding universal validity. This departs from the universality claimed by the rationalist philosophers of his day when they set up a priori concepts then tried by force to fit the material world into those concepts. Universality for Herder should be arrived at analytically, but—and here lies his initial innovation—analysis is not the tool of pure reason. Its objects are culturally embedded, and its formulations are linguistically determined. If there is such a thing as universal knowledge, it cannot be sought prior to this embeddedness and determination. Universality has a history and a geography; it has to be understood in its derivation from the temporality and spatiality of human life. This was not Kant’s transcendental idealism, nor even the transcendental realism Kant rejected; it was reason as enabled by the history and geography of culture, mediated by language. The problem of universality makes sense only when posed within the limited context of human life, and as a result, universality makes sense only if it is seen to be mediated in representation. It is this insight that enables Herder’s critique of imperialism: imperialism relies on false representations and false claims to the universality of one particular perspective on the world (European knowledge). In doing so, it dramatizes the crisis of universality in which philosophy finds itself. In his works it is possible to trace precisely the path that led from the experience of living in a world structured by expanding capital, uneven development, and imperialism to the idea that the project of anti-imperialism is also an aesthetic project. The alternative methodologies Herder proposes all have to do with aesthetics and the politics of interpretation. And because Herder’s crisis of universality persists, I can speak of his methods in the same context as postcolonial theory.

The significance of Herder’s anti-imperialism for postcolonial theory goes further, however, and it concerns the aesthetic. Aesthetic work negotiates the gap between aisthesis and aesthesis, and in doing so it unsettles Enlightenment’s faith in universal representation. Aesthetic form (conceptually derived from aesthesis) signals the loss of aisthesis—of the self-presence of the senses—and in the process it signals its remove from experience. This places the aesthetic in a peculiar position. It works against the specificity of experiences, pushing them toward universal representations; it also works against that which is universal in sensory experience (given by human neurology), pushing it in the direction of specific forms of representation. Aesthetic work straddles the boundary between the specific and the universal. This is particularly important for writing. Once Herder questioned the easy access to universal categories, it made sense for him to interrogate the assumptions surrounding the way writing relates to presence. Because presence is lost in writing, the quest for universality has to address the way writing uses its own specificity to create universality effects. This amounts to presenting what is in fact a culturally specific representation of the world as if it were universal truth. This process is structurally intrinsic to language itself. One of the most important tasks of philosophy is to develop the kind of critical reading that can demonstrate how this happens.

Once the epistemological genesis of Herder’s anti-imperialism is recognized, it becomes apparent that his path from an antirationalist epistemology to a critique of imperialism sets important markers for the postcolonial project. These markers are visible wherever contradiction appears in Herder’s work, and contradiction points in one direction—to the problem of universal reason. At the heart of Herder’s project lies an antinomy that I am calling the antinomy of universal reason. It can be stated like this:

There is a universal capacity for reason that makes humans human; human biology (or to be more precise, neurology)Footnote ²⁶ensures that reason is a shared human capacity for cognizing life.Footnote ²⁷Abstraction and reflection are what make thought human.Footnote ²⁸ This innate structural organization of reason provides the universal ground on which human thought develops.

BUT

There is no such thing as universal reason; reason exists only in the plural, and the plurality of reason ensures that life will be cognized in countless different ways. The diversity of reason follows the diversity of languages, sociolects, ideolects, cultural communities, and individuals. Herder speaks of “the human paths” to reason in the plural.Footnote ²⁹

Neither Herder nor the theorists of postcolonialism have been able to formulate this antinomy with any degree of clarity. Herder himself did not believe there was such a thing as antinomies of reason.Footnote ³⁰ Even the terms in which he attempts to dismiss the idea show how close his epistemological problems are to those of postcolonial theory, however—in order to speak against pure reason, he has to fragment the faculties, assigning them their own voices and jurisdictions.

I believe it would be possible to show, through detailed analysis, that Herder passed this antinomy on genealogically to postcolonial theory. The channels of this transmission are convoluted but would be worth reconstructing. They would lead through Goethe, Hegel,Footnote ³¹ and MarxFootnote ³² to the Frankfurt School and the poststructuralist reaction to French Marxian theory; through Romantic psychology to Freud and the psychoanalytic dimension of poststructuralism; from the experiments of the German RomanticsFootnote ³³ to the rediscovery of the ruses of writing in NietzscheFootnote ³⁴ and Derrida.Footnote ³⁵ These channels are almost entirely unknown today, but I am convinced that careful research would reveal a genealogy linking postcolonialism directly to the figure who was once seen as one of the most important intellectuals of the time—and until this research is done, I can offer nothing more than this speculative assertion. Even without the genealogical link, though, there is a clear structural affinity between Herder’s antinomy of universal reason and the general project of postcolonial theory. I realize this is a generalization, but I believe it is a fair one, and I will try to support it in the paragraphs that follow—although they cannot be much more than a gesture toward postcolonialism’s own version of Herder’s antinomy of universal reason.

Dipesh Chakrabarthy, for example, understands the project of “provincializing” Europe as resting on the antinomy of universal reason. His stated aim (in the foreword to the 2007 edition of Provincializing Europe) is “to find out how and in what sense European ideas that were universal were also, at one and the same time, drawn from very particular intellectual and historical traditions that could not claim any universal validity.”Footnote ³⁶ The challenge here is to explain how this fractured universality relates to modernity. Chakrabarthy does this by pointing out how the historicist project has recast particular, nonuniversal intellectual and historical traditions encountered in the colonized world as the same kind of experiences Europe has overcome in the universalizing process of modernization. This is what makes historical reason (to use his term) elitist, furthering the imperialist cause.Footnote ³⁷ Charkabarthy proves perceptive in formulating the challenge facing historiography in the context of postcolonialism: “to hold in a state of permanent tension a dialogue between two contradictory points of view.” These are “the Enlightenment promise of an abstract, universal but never-to-be-realized humanity” and the “diverse ways of being human, the infinite incommensurabilities through which we struggle—perennially, precariously, but unavoidably—to ‘world the earth’ in order to live within our different senses of ontic belonging.”Footnote ³⁸ This is a precise formulation of the challenge Herder’s antinomy poses for postcolonial historiography. Chakrabarthy takes it a step further, though, and pronounces the problem that Herder never completely managed to exorcise from his encounter with universal reason. When it comes to morality, Kant, it seems, was right. In Chakrabarthy’s words: “We need universals to produce critical readings of social injustices.” And yet, Herder’s criticism of Kant is equally valid in recognizing that (again in Chakrabarthy’s words) “the universal and the analytical produce forms of thought that ultimately evacuate the place of the local.”Footnote ³⁹ To this must be added Herder’s hope that the universal of Kantian morals is not the same thing as analytic method—and that, despite the strong argument Chakrabarthy makes connecting analytic method to a priori universals, analytic method can somehow inflect universals with the ontic belonging out of which they arose. This was the hope he invested in the work of aesthetics. And, as I will argue later, it may indeed be here that Herder has something to offer postcolonialism in understanding methodology.

The sustained hope that the aesthetic can counter a priori universalism, perhaps even producing an alternative path to universalism, subtly inhabits Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony. Mbembe uses the antinomy of universal reason to explore what can be said about modernity once it is wrenched from the grasp of the “West.”Footnote ⁴⁰ This wrenching cannot help but confront the claims to universal reason that drove modernity in Europe: “What a certain rationality, claiming to be universal but in reality mired in the contingent and the particular, has never understood is that all human societies participate in a complex order, rich in unexpected turns, meanders, and changes of course, without this implying their necessary abolition in an absence of center.”Footnote ⁴¹ Mbembe sees the necessity of uncovering the heterogeneity of those societies excluded by Enlightenment rationality, and he sees this as opposing those theories whose roots lie in disciplines that sought legitimacy by stressing their “capacity to construct universal grammars.”Footnote ⁴² The points at which Mbembe encounters this problem are roughly the same as the ones Herder traced in his critique of imperialism, and Mbembe also restates Herder’s shift from rationalist philosophy to the aesthetic, in so many words.

Mbembe’s starting point is the dilemma facing African subjectivity in the wake of slavery and colonization. The “reaffirmation of African humanity” has left Africans with a choice that seems to reside at the heart of the project of African nationalism and that is characterized by the split between emancipation and assimilation: either to accept “a tragic duality and an inner twoness” or to assert “the absoluteness of the African self.”Footnote ⁴³ The problem with this is that, either way, it involves a development of African reason in relationship to the universal reason whose domain is the “uncompromising nature of the Western self.”Footnote ⁴⁴ These attempts to identify “the essence, the distinctive genius, of the black ‘race’ ” implied also the identification of a specifically African form of reason in history, but the realization of this genius was “its fusion in the crucible of the universal.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Consequently, the African finds himself engaged in the paradoxes of negation and self-negation described by Fanon.

What Mbembe is describing is the difficulty in finding a specific form of reason that refuses the dialectical relationship to the universal. In assuming that the forms of African reason do indeed need to refuse the relationship to the universal, we are on well-trodden ground, but Mbembe undermines his own project by his unwillingness to ask what the consequences should be for his own acts of theorization. The result is a wavering between the assumption of a homogeneous African subject who is capable of autonomy and of differentiated thought and action, in spite of having been defined as homogeneous through a history of subjugation—and an African characterized by autochthonous figures of reason. I understand why Mbembe sees the need to speak of the African subject as if it were indeed possible or even desirable to generalize using the register of economic development (“Sub-Saharan Africa”),Footnote ⁴⁶ and why at the same time he wants to investigate the contingencies of everyday life in Africa that work against this generalization. If the dilemma of reason in Africa is to be understood, it needs to be shown to rest on a distinction between how Africans can be spoken of in a register of universal reason and how their acts of reason can also be investigated empirically, while resisting their integration into universal systems—in the way Chakrabarthy pointed out. If the ideological dismissal of Africa (the place where, as Hegel told his students, the rationality of history fails) is to be countered, however, we need to realize that the failure of rationality is inherent in rationality itself and not tied to geographical place, that its failure has been repeated time and again in acts of political violence, not just under colonialism, not just in Africa.

Mbembe is at his most interesting when he understands the dilemma of reason in Africa as the distinction between reason as process, system, or structure, and reason as form—and here he comes close to following Herder’s distinction between humanity and its cultural manifestations and in understanding the work of critique as aesthetic work. Confronting universal reason as a process, Mbembe finds himself trying “to state in the most productive possible way, some general questions suggested by concepts drawn from social theory.” And where this fails—“where these concepts were manifestly incapable of describing the particular figures of reason in African history and the practices of our time, I have invented different modes of discourse, a different writing.”Footnote ⁴⁷ In other words, aesthetic work is offered in opposition to the universalizing discourses of imperialism. This is laudable, but as we see in the unfolding of the book, not as easy as Mbembe seems to assume. The reason is that he seems uncertain about what exactly the aesthetic—the invention of new forms for writing the particularity of African reason—has to offer in resistance to universal reason and how this relates to the material context of his own discourse. Let me briefly discuss two points: time and dehumanization.

Mbembe arrives at the question of time via the same observation Herder had taken from Crusius: that it is a human thing.Footnote ⁴⁸ As Mbembe puts it: “There is a close relationship between subjectivity and temporality,” or in other words, “in some way, one can envisage subjectivity as temporality.”Footnote ⁴⁹ To say as much is, as Herder explored at length, to open the way for a discussion of subjective time as caught up in the language/reason system and to ask how historical time relates to universal and to contingent forms of reason. Mbembe begins to follow up on this when he notes that “every age, including the postcolony, is in reality a combination of several temporalities.”Footnote ⁵⁰ There are different ways of understanding this statement. If time is a human thing, then the phenomenology of time would make way for multiple temporalities within a single event. The multiplicity of time would relate to the multiplicity of sensory perception and to how disparate sensory impressions are resolved in common sense. Where more than one individual is involved, the multiplicity of time is compounded by the multiplicity of resolutions. Multiplicity now becomes a problem of social time and the temporality of production. Then there is the question of representation, or narratives of time, and eventually, of history. It is at this point that Mbembe intends to intervene. What he calls the “time of African existence” sets itself apart from the universal temporality in which the dominant narratives of history are inscribed: “To think relevantly about this time that is appearing, this passing time, meant abandoning conventional views, for these only perceive time as a current that carries individuals and societies from a background to a foreground, with the future emerging necessarily from the past and following that past, itself irreversible.”Footnote ⁵¹ As an alternative, Mbembe offers a picture of time that is not linear, not predictable, and not irreversible. The only way to make sense of this alternative picture of time is to see it as represented time. Where it seems he wants to talk about a politics of phenomenology, he is in fact evoking the politics of representation (whose importance he explains later).Footnote ⁵² It is in this failed connection of temporality to the politics of representation that the missed opportunity lies. The observation that “the contemporary African experience”Footnote ⁵³ is distinguished by the apparent closure of the future and the apparent receding of the horizon of the past could have been an important comment on the politics of representation, but as it stands, it seems to want to claim a common human experience of time as the distinguishing mark of African existence, a claim that returns him to the antinomy of universal reason.

A similar process is at work when it comes to dehumanization. The question of dehumanization is introduced via an oblique passage on what I take to be the same distinction Herder makes between aisthesis (Mbembe speaks of “living in the concrete world”) and aesthesis (“the subjective forms that make possible any validation of its contents”).Footnote ⁵⁴ Mbembe raises the fascinating and important point that the aesthetic formalization of aisthesis sets the particularity of reason in a relationship with violence. This is, incidentally, no different from Herder’s attempts to set up a constellation of reason, form, and violence in the so-called Negro-Idylls of 1797.Footnote ⁵⁵ As Mbembe’s attention turns to strategies of dehumanization in the exercise of colonial power, however, he becomes distracted and begins to lose sight of the problem of reason that, in Herder’s analysis, founds the universality of aisthetic processes and the particularity of aesthetic form. Instead (in chapter one: “On Commandment”), he sidesteps the problem of reason’s universality, concentrating on the cynical alignment of reason with power and interest. It is a well-known story that the question whether Africans think like Europeans or not was swept off the table by the powerful interests of the slave traders and the trading companies. Much more interesting than the sweeping itself, however, is how to bring the question back in a way that does justice to the fact that African reason, like reason itself, is both universal and particular. In many respects, Mbembe’s book can be read as an attempt to do just that, and in many respects it points toward interesting ways that this can be accomplished. What I find noteworthy, however, is that, where it falls down, it does so by failing to address the antinomy of universal reason.

An instructive attempt to address the problems of writing across the gap between universal reason and local formulations of reason is Gayatri Spivak’s Critique of Postcolonial Reason. This is, I think, the intention of her central figure of the native informant, and it seems to be the guiding idea that leads to her valuable uncovering of the marks left by imperialism on the writings of Kant, Hegel, and Marx. I’m hesitant to make such a conclusion, however, because Spivak’s unwillingness to address the core of her intent in plain language leaves her open to the suspicion that what she is writing is not a critique of postcolonial reason but an enactment of its aporia. I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt; perhaps she is right that this enactment is the only way to set out her own position between the various subject positions she explores in her book and the universal discourse in which she writes. Read like this, Spivak displays the challenge facing postcolonial theory: how to adopt writing strategies that uncover the ways the native informant is incorporated into aesthetic practices and into theory formation while at the same time making interventions that are effective within the discourses that effect this incorporation. In her discussion of Kant, this display (she calls it a “performance”) is intended to indicate the “nascent axiomatics of imperialism” that authorized his universalism.Footnote ⁵⁶ At the same time, she understands the methodological difficulty this raises for her own work: in exposing the centrality of imperialism through what she calls her “tropological analysis,” she has to avoid the possible objection that her own reading of Kant, by placing it into a wider frame of world history, or of the advancement of scholarship, itself reclaims the universality at issue. It is instructive to see how this works against statements concerning the antinomy of universal reason. To decry the universalism that makes the native informant’s statements useful and necessary to philosophy seems to imply a position that itself can lay claim to universality—unless it be inscribed rhetorically with markers of its own refusal.

This is the problem of reason that the Enlightenment has bequeathed to postcolonialism, and Spivak acknowledges it when she notes the contradictory historical positions that threaten the integrity of postcolonial studies: “Colonial Discourse studies, when they concentrate only on the representation of the colonized or the matter of the colonies, can sometimes serve the production of current neocolonial knowledge by placing colonialism/imperialism securely in the past, and/or by suggesting a continuous line from that past to our present.”Footnote ⁵⁷ What Spivak is addressing is the same contradiction at work when Herder addresses teleology in history: if we are to do justice to the past, it has to be understood as irrevocably past, and the logic that drove it has to be understood historically; but in order for this understanding of the historical past to present itself as understanding (that is as an analysis of texts that lay claim to rendering past events comprehensible in terms that exceed the historical moment in which they occurred), there needs to be an idea of a plan, a direction for history, and an attendant universal mode for accessing this plan. As Michael Mack notes, this will allow him to develop an understanding of historiography as a dialectical affirmation of the fact “that the present incorporates the non-presence of the past.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Spivak repeatedly alludes to the coupling of this historiographical contradiction with the antinomy of universal reason. The problem is clear in her lengthy footnote on Kant’s mention of the New Hollanders and the Fuegeans in paragraph 67 of the Critique of Judgement. Spivak hopes to sustain these “two proper names of peoples” (the New Hollanders and the Fuegeans) as representations of how the supposedly inhuman inhabitants have entered and authorized the philosophical discourse of modernity, of how in the act of naming, an alternative way of being in the world is acknowledged and immediately dismissed. Spivak wants these names to “invaginate” her text.Footnote ⁵⁹ But how is this to happen? She describes how the pursuit of Aboriginal languages (following Herder, a pursuit of their specific mode of reason)Footnote ⁶⁰ stalled her manuscript for years. What stalled it was the discovery of their heterogeneity. Here the problem of universal reason reappears in its link to the universality of capitalism: “In the process I found, of course, that, like any people on earth, the Koorie today is also class heterogeneous, and divided in its ambitions. I realized that, as for all peoples who are not the felicitous subject of the European Enlightenment, their perennially blocked path to ‘modernity’ has been hybrid, not ‘European.’ (Indeed, if one understands hybridity as an absolute, the so-called European path of modernity is hybrid as well.)”Footnote ⁶¹ Looking from a European perspective at the heterogeneity of non-European languages means at the same time looking at the heterogeneity of modes of conceptualizing the world, the heterogeneity of reason, but looking from the point of view of universality—and I have to read her reference to the “felicitous subject of the European Enlightenment” as hypocatastasis, the unspoken subject position being the universal subject position from which she speaks. The heterogeneity of hybrid subjects would seem to confirm the homogeneity of the European subject—until one turns the same gaze on the European subject and discovers there too a heterogeneity, a hybridity that calls into question the very opposition Spivak started with. Adorno named this problem nicely: “The universal that compresses the particular until it splinters, like a torture instrument, is working against itself, for its substance is the life of the particular; without the particular, the universal declines to an abstract, separate, eradicable form.”Footnote ⁶² But does this make the particular an alternative to the universal? That would be a misunderstanding of the opposition out of which both arise.

Spivak reveals this insight in her discussion of Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, in which she identifies “a desire to obliterate the subject-position implied by our everyday as we speak about ‘our world.’ ”Footnote ⁶³ This desire itself casts the writing subject in a structural contradiction between the empirical observations it can make (and the invocation of the empirical “vitiates the generality of our argument”) and the “deduced experience of a general U.S. ideological subject.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Spivak proves remarkably perceptive in locating the antinomy of universal reason at the heart of attempts to rephrase philosophical arguments as analyses of culture.

I could continue with this attempt to engage the writers of postcolonial theory with Herder’s problem of universal reason. I believe it is a crucial undertaking—even if it serves only as a kind of therapy for the difficulty of being a reader of postcolonial theory. To understand the antinomy I have discussed is to grasp the unenviable position in which readers of postcolonial theory are often placed: of having to decide whether to give the writer the benefit of the doubt and assume that the radical message their texts seem to be formulating can be reconstructed as a clear radical message without buying into the same corrupt regime of signification the author claims to be writing against. The alternative is to accept the strategies of semiological deviance as a radical refusal to enter into complicity with the universal regime of reason that carries epistemological violence—and refuse a shared standard that would permit the radicalness of the message to be evaluated. It as if we hear the writer saying: “I speak to you in the language of universal reason, but my rhetoric shows that this language is nothing but a hollow shell. You, dear reader, must choose whether you want to join ranks with the imperialists and measure my statements on the scale of universal reason, or if you want to join the forces of liberation and accept the formal encapsulation of incommensurability as a performance of universal reason’s impossibility.” Clearly, this choice balances on the fence dividing universal reason from embodied and local forms of reason, and clearly the antinomy it marks cannot be resolved by displacing the burden of responsibility onto the reader. The problem lies with the simple projection of the antinomy of universal reason onto the opposition to or support of imperialism. Of course, you can speak against imperialism in the language of universal reason just as effectively as you can in the language of conceptual particularity. The point is, as Chakrabarthy points out, it’s not a matter of choosing one discursive register over the other; it’s a matter of articulating the two together.

So what is to be done?

What is interesting and instructive methodologically in Herder is how and at what moments in his argument he tries and fails to come to terms with the antinomy of universal reason. At these moments he invariably takes recourse to poetic language to mark the limits not only of rationalist discourse, but also to radicalize the methodology that in his day seems most promising in challenging rationalism: the dialogical and dialectical structure of argument.

Throughout his works, Herder uses the dialogical structure of argument to confront the antinomy of universal reason. This was a common device at the time, and its intention was to display the close connection between what could be said about a matter and who was speaking.Footnote ⁶⁵ Presiding over dialogue for Herder is the death of Socrates.Footnote ⁶⁶ With the voice gone that will guide the interlocutors on the path to truth, truth becomes an absent position to which all the others point. Instead of rolling out homogenizing or hegemonic discourses of truth, Herder proposes allegorizing dialogues. Dialogue cannot offer truth because “the provision of nature is poetically and intellectually inexhaustible.”Footnote ⁶⁷ It can, however, provide insight into how various inclinations toward truth fail to reach it, and in failing, indicate what truth might and might not be.

Herder’s dialectics emerge from his dialogics. If there is a way to think the relationship between an utterance and its truth value in dialogue, it is in the discrepancy between different dialogical positions. What emerges in Herder’s dialectic is that the discrepancy between truth and its representation is not only due to the limitations in individual cognition, but it resides objectively in the human condition itself because it resides in social arrangements and in the nature of things.Footnote ⁶⁸ The methodological emphasis on the dialectic arose from the centrality of historical development and of representation in Herder’s thought. This establishes the crucial role of the historian in matters of philosophy. As a historian, Herder is caught up in the dilemma of wanting to reawaken things whose vitality is suspended in writing.Footnote ⁶⁹ Writing, like conversation, bears within itself the structural markings of its own distance from truth. As a result, Herder’s relationship to writing is driven by the promise that the discrepancy between written statements and truth can be investigated historically. The ensuing historical dialectic leads to a search for origins, a historical negation of the negation of truth in writing, or a determinate negation of the sign. What Herder’s historical dialectic will uncover is not the lost truth of the Golden Age, not even the fact that it is lost; it will discover the way writing preserves the marks of its own genesis and how the diversity of concepts is both preserved and concealed in writing.

In general, postcolonial theory has had a nuanced relationship to the dialectic, and one of its covert struggles has involved addressing the problems in dialectical method pointed out by Foucault, Derrida, and others. In its more sophisticated moments, postcolonial theory articulates well its subtle debt to dialectical method. Spivak is probably the most careful thinker of the dialectic in the postcolonial context, and her comments on the dialectic in “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value” (1985) still deserve careful consideration.Footnote ⁷⁰ Here, it is understood that the challenge is how to come to terms with the question of whether difference is situated in the discourses (and disciplines) that formulate it, or in the human condition itself, or in the relationship between the two. This is, in many respects, Herder’s question, and to recognize it as such is to take a step toward understanding the conceptual universe out of which postcolonial theory arose. The methodological and rhetorical strategies he developed represent a serious attempt to forestall the complicity of reason and exploitation against which postcolonial theory has set itself, and they provide an example of how aesthetics and rhetoric can be solicited in this process—but also of their shortcomings. I believe such an engagement would help bring conceptual clarity to a set of problems that are urgent today and that Herder witnessed in the making.