Striking a conciliatory note in her long-standing debate with David Damrosch over the pedagogical and scholarly project of world literature, Gayatri Spivak writes: “For me, the best reason for walking with David Damrosch is his plea for collectivity.”Footnote 1 Spivak makes clear at the same time, however, that the best reason not to walk with Damrosch is his pluralistic concept of collectivity, which, as she has observed, “lets us all be self-interested and provide for identitarian enclaves.”Footnote 2 The question of collectivity, I suggest, is at once the core theoretical problem and stake of world literature from a deconstructive perspective. This becomes clear in the objections that Gayatri Spivak and Emily Apter, two of the most prominent practitioners of a deconstructive approach to world literature, raise to Damrosch’s project and their attempts to formulate an alternative.
The vision of world literature Damrosch presents in What Is World Literature? and more recent texts is aligned with the basic principles of the American Comparative Literature Association’s Bernheimer Report of 1993, which urged an updating of the discipline to reflect a multicultural, globalized world.Footnote 3 By facilitating access to non-Western texts through initiatives such as his multivolume Longman Anthology of World Literature, Damrosch has sought to correct comparative literature’s Eurocentric bias and to promote a canon that offers more “windows on the world.”Footnote 4 Alongside greater exposure for underrepresented cultures, Damrosch advocates a heightened focus on global connectedness, proposing that the study of world literature track the transnational circulation of texts and rewrite the histories of national literary traditions in light of the mobility of influence.
While few would deny the importance of dismantling European and American exceptionalism, both Spivak and Apter take issue with the limitations of a multiculturalist approach to the problem. Apter identifies two distinct tendencies at work, either “toward reflexive endorsement of cultural equivalence and substitutability, or toward the celebration of nationally and ethnically branded ‘differences’ that have been niche-marketed as commercialized ‘identities.’”Footnote 5 The first of these disregards difference, hitching the claim of equality to that of an essential sameness. As Roland Barthes observed of the liberal humanist affirmation of a “Great Family of Man”: “[W]e are kept at the surface of an identity, prevented by sentimentality itself from penetrating into that deeper zone of human conduct, where historical alienation introduces those ‘differences’ which we shall here call quite simply ‘injustices.’”Footnote 6 Likewise, positing a “Great Family of Literature” on the basis of cross-cultural commonalities of literary form has the ideological effect of obscuring historical relations of domination and uneven development. Moreover, as Barthes notes, it tends to reaffirm the static nature of the existing order; and, indeed, the premise of a universal literariness typically reproduces the aesthetic values of the hegemonic culture, whereby non-Western texts are judged worthy of inclusion in the canon based on their similarity to Western “great works.”
Diametrically opposed to the first tendency Apter mentions, the second emphasizes difference as such. This can take either the form of a culinary enjoyment of diversity, or a more politicized form that draws attention to the politics of location in order to attack the universal status attributed to hegemonic values. In the latter case, non-Western traditions reveal the canonical construction of literature to be an ideological expression of Western hegemony by pointing to the very fact of their difference and their exclusion from supposedly universal categories.
While the unmasking of false universals is indispensable to any critical concept of collectivity, the problem with a multiculturalist approach is that it allies the politics of location with identity politics and, consequently, grounds its resistance in a particularism that relativizes all universals into a system of competing particularities and special interests. The effect, ultimately, is a ghettoization of knowledge on the basis of the essentializing assumption that one both necessarily represents and can only represent the part of the world from which one comes; as Spivak puts it, “we the ‘others’ are caught within our politics of identity and can only offer as a substitute [to the Western canon] something coming from our own neck of the woods.”Footnote 7
Dispossessive Collectivism
For Apter and Spivak, world literature’s unfulfilled promise lies ultimately in its capacity to imagine a globalized world beyond capitalism and its conceptual framework of possessive individualism, which, they argue, is possible only to the extent that world literature takes its distance from identity politics. The relationship between identity and property is deeply entrenched. Historically developed in tandem with the concept of the bourgeois legal subject, identity is grounded in a person’s possessions and is itself viewed as a form of personal property. This is evident in the foundational documents of bourgeois liberal democracy, such as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. More surprisingly, the idea of self-ownership also undergirds Marx’s radical critique of this society, notably in the theory of alienation that presents human essence – “species-being” – as the rightful and originary property of which humanity is dispossessed under conditions of capitalism. Therefore, while a world literature oriented around what Apter calls dispossessive collectivism is naturally sympathetic to the Marxist tradition, it cannot adopt a Marxist framework without rethinking its reliance on the concept of identity.
Jean-Luc Nancy’s 1983 essay “The Inoperative Community” sought to tackle this very problem. In response to the implosion of the left in France after May 1968, Nancy called for a radical revision of the communist project and, in particular, its central concept of community. Drawing from Maurice Blanchot’s reflections on the désoeuvrement or “unworking” of the artwork, Nancy focuses his critique on the Marxist–humanist definition of self-actualization and community as forms of work. As Nancy puts it, the idea of human beings “as producers … of their own essence in the form of their labor or their work” lays the foundation for the concept of collectivity as “a community of beings producing … this essence as community.”Footnote 8 The problem with the idea of a self-producing collective subject is that it presupposes a relation of immanence or transparency between beings. In other words, like the individualism it ostensibly opposes, Marxist collectivity begins from the assumption of originary identity rather than difference. Where individualism posits the self-contained, atomized subject as originary, communism simply reproduces this individualist logic on a larger scale when it imagines unalienated social relations as “a communion that fuses the egos into an Ego or a higher We.”Footnote 9 In order to break with the logic of individualism, then, communism must reconceive of the common in terms not of recognizing oneself in the other, but of seeing difference as constitutive of oneself. Nancy thus defines community not as a condition of having something substantial in common, such as reason or humanity, but of “being-in-common,” or shared exposure to alterity.
Like Nancy, Spivak’s theory of collectivity foregrounds exposure to otherness. In her view, world literature should seek to reimagine the world through the ways in which this exposure interrupts and destabilizes identity; Spivak calls this alternative vision of the world “planetarity.” Unlike the globe, which is mappable in a way that “allows us to think we can control it,” she writes, the planet “belong[s] to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan.”Footnote 10 To think in terms of the planet is to consider the “world” of world literature from the perspective of or “in the species of alterity.”Footnote 11 In more recent writings, Spivak has added to the metaphor of a world on loan a second figure of othering as dispossession, namely, “wasteful spending,” which is her translation of bajey khoroch, a term Rabindranath Tagore used to describe comparative literature. She proposes the potlatch as a figure for the stakes of world literatureFootnote 12 because “the uncertain intimacy open to ethical alterity is ‘wasteful.’”Footnote 13 World literature’s promise lies in staging experiences of othering that can only truly take place without reserve. World literature initiates us into the perspective of planetarity when, for example, it interrogates European periodizations, genres, and other categories used to bolster Europe’s claim on modernity and relegate other parts of the world to “tradition,” a euphemism for premodernity or ahistoricity.Footnote 14 Spivak scathingly contrasts world literature’s Bataillan general economy or will to dispossession with the “tax deductible write-offs of purchased virtue” embodied by the emergence of an industry of world literature anthologies, compiled by North American academics and distributed by for-profit textbook publishers.Footnote 15
Apter’s discussion of originary dispossession in Against World Literature spells out the relation between non-identitarian collectivity and Spivak’s figures of expenditure without return and dwelling granted on loan. “One reason why literary studies falls short as anti-capitalist critique,” Apter writes, “is because it insufficiently questions what it means to ‘have’ a literature or to lay claim to aesthetic property.”Footnote 16 Approaching literature from the perspective of translation, for Apter, disrupts the possessive and individualistic concept of identity that shapes the way we conventionally construct the literary work as an object of knowledge. She argues that the translated work, which is neither fully the property of the author nor the translator, presents “a model of deowned literature.”Footnote 17 Translation here plays the role of a Derridean supplement to the original, in the sense that it disrupts the very concept of originality. By privileging translation, Apter reimagines the literary work as a site of collaborative labor and “collective, terrestrial property” dissociated from the individual author, the nation, and other identitarian structures.Footnote 18
Spivak and Apter both acknowledge their debt to Derrida’s analysis of linguistic identity and national community in Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin.Footnote 19 Neatly summarizing the main claims of his book, Derrida’s title presents two apparent paradoxes: one’s “own” language as a locus of otherness and the origin as addendum. Taking a rare autobiographical approach, Derrida explores the impossibility of identity through his relationship to French, the language that constitutes his sense of cultural belonging and that, therefore, he might be inclined to consider in some way his language. He discovers, however, that the relation of belonging is not reversible; while humanity may be said to belong to language, language does not belong to humanity. In terms resonant with Spivak’s planetarity, Derrida describes his relationship to French as one of dwelling: “My monolingualism dwells, and I call it my dwelling; it feels like one to me, and I remain in it and inhabit it. It inhabits me.”Footnote 20 The French language, for him, is an “absolute habitat [milieu absolu]” in the sense that it conditions his very subjectivity: “I would not be myself outside of it” – nor, indeed, would anything else in the world be itself: “it dictates even the ipseity of all things to me.”Footnote 21 Everything Derrida is and knows arises from “his” language. “Yet,” he continues, “it will never be mine, this language, the only one I am thus destined to speak.”Footnote 22 As Spivak writes of the planet, language is given only “on loan.” Language resists assimilation onto the order of identity and, by the same token, resists possession. Thus, in a refrain that punctuates the book, Derrida concludes: “I only have one language, yet it is not mine.”Footnote 23
It was, Derrida relates, his childhood experience in colonial Algeria that brought him initially to see monolingualism “in the species of alterity,” to use Spivak’s expression. He found himself in a heteronomous relationship both to French and the non-French languages of Algeria; both were equally languages of the other. He describes, on one hand, the “organized marginalization” of Arabic and Berber in everyday life, most notably at his lycée, where Latin and French were compulsory, while Arabic was, along with English, Spanish, and German, an optional “foreign” language and Berber was not acknowledged at all.Footnote 24 On the other hand, French monolingualism (and national identity) were simultaneously imposed and withheld: French was imposed insofar as it was supposed to be his native language, yet withheld since its “source norms, rules, and law were situated elsewhere.”Footnote 25 The identitarian structures of mother tongue and motherland shape the conditions of Derrida’s existence and yet are never fully habitable. At once overbearing and strangely absent, their presence is ghostly. Indeed, Derrida suggests that his ambivalent relationship to national identity was a key reference for the motif that has figured so prominently in his thought: “Deep down, I wonder whether one of my first and most imposing figures of spectrality, of spectrality itself, was not France.”Footnote 26
Opposing a traditional ontology that posits full, undivided presence as originary and opposes to it absence, multiplicity, and difference as derivative, Derrida’s “hauntology” takes the specter, with its undecidable play of presence and absence, as the point of departure. This idea emerges clearly in his critique of Abdelkebir Khatibi’s account of his relation to the “mother tongue.” Taking issue with Khatibi’s phrase “my mother tongue has lost me,”Footnote 27 Derrida suggests that the loss Khatibi laments does not modify a prior wholeness and that the claim of natural possession underlying the concept of the mother tongue (“my mother tongue”) is illusory. The originary dispossession of language is, for Derrida, an “‘alienation’ without alienation, without any property that is forever lost or to be ever reappropriated.”Footnote 28 By the same token, no appropriative measures can undo this “inalienable alienation”; it is an ontological condition.Footnote 29
Spectrality thus troubles the concept of linguistic identity in the two ways indicated by the book’s twin titles: Monolingualism of the Other and The Prosthesis of Origin. The othering of monolingualism refers to the disruption of a national and linguistic identity that the conventional metaphor of kinship (motherland, mother tongue) presents as natural. Conversely, the play of presence and absence disrupts the relation of immanence presumed to be the default or native state; it views the idea of the pure, unitary origin as itself non-originary, an artifice conjured up after the fact. These two gestures have distinct political implications. By denaturalizing linguistic identity, the first reveals the power relations this identity expresses and reproduces. For Derrida, to accept the concept of a “mother tongue” is, following Rousseau’s naturalizing formula for reconciling freedom with obedience, to identify with the Law (both “the language of the Law” and “the Law as Language”) “as if I was giving it to myself.”Footnote 30 Derrida emphasizes the “as if,” however, since this autonomy is achieved only in the imagination. The relation to the Law “remains necessarily heteronomous, for such is, at bottom, the essence of any law.”Footnote 31
Whereas this first set of implications exposes the heteronomous nature of identity, the second highlights the conditions of resistance to heteronomy. Derrida describes his relationship to his French identity and monolingualism as a “solipsism” that precedes the self – that “is myself before me”Footnote 32 – and the condition of being held hostage “à demeure,” or with a permanence associated with dwelling. These metaphors figure a heteronomy that underlies the order of the same in its most primordial and hermetic forms. Rejecting the fantasy of recovering a lost wholeness is, for Derrida, the first step toward a viable politics. Avoiding the “symbolics of appropriation”Footnote 33 shared by nationalist and Marxist discourses alike is crucial to ensuring that resistance efforts do not inadvertently reproduce the logic of the system they oppose, or as Spivak puts it, to preventing “failed revolutions.”Footnote 34
Asserting a universal condition of dispossession and heteronomy, however, runs the risk of occulting the reality of global inequality. While Derrida acknowledges the danger of neglecting “determinate expropriations against which a war can be waged on quite different fronts,” he discusses neither the specifics of such a war, nor what role deconstruction might play in it.Footnote 35 The task that remains, then, is to link up the ontology of dispossession with a politics that addresses determinate acts of dispossession. Transposed to the discourse of world literature, this means theorizing the connection between conceiving of “world” in terms of planetarity on one hand, and continuing to address the politics of location on the other. The goal of this exercise is, in Judith Butler’s formulation, to construct “ethical and political ways of objecting to forcible and coercive dispossession that do not depend upon a valorization of possessive individualism” – in short, to articulate a politics of location that goes beyond identity politics, or what Derrida might call a hauntopological politics of location.Footnote 36
Situatedness and Exemplarity
Derrida’s cursory treatment of actual struggles in Monolingualism of the Other is perhaps all the more curious since he introduces his argument with an account of a historical act of expropriation. Early on in the book, Derrida relates a formative childhood event: when he was ten years old, in October 1940, the Vichy regime stripped Jews living in Algeria of their French citizenship for a period of three years. It was a moment of collective anamnesis according to Derrida, recalling Algerian Jews to the disturbingly recent origins of their recognition by the French state under the Crémieux decree of 1870. Far from a natural and inalienable property of their existence, French identity was revealed to be something that “had been lent to them as if only the day before.”Footnote 37 The general claims about language and identity Derrida advances are thus self-consciously traced back to an unquestionably uncommon experience. To bolster what might seem to be a tenuous form of evidence, Derrida elaborates a theory of exemplarity that stands as an alternative to the logic of representation and indicates how to connect the politics of location with non-identitarian political ontology.
Derrida presents himself – or, rather, a first-person narrator with “only a vague resemblance to myself” – as “the exemplary Franco-Maghrebian.”Footnote 38 This caricatural self-staging enables him at once to bear witness, as a Franco-Maghrebian, to a certain experience of dispossession, while recalling us to the fictionality of all autobiography. Virginia Woolf famously deploys the same strategy in A Room of One’s Own, writing of the first-person narrator: “‘I’ is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being.”Footnote 39 For Woolf as for Nietzsche, “I” is merely a grammatical fiction. The testimonial voice in Woolf’s text belongs to somebody whose lack of discrete identity is expressed by the absence of a proper name or, rather, by the casual proliferation of them: “[C]all me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael,” she invites us, “or by any name you please.”Footnote 40
Woolf justifies her curious narrative technique by explaining that, in regard to a highly contested topic such as gender, “one cannot hope to tell the truth.”Footnote 41 In other words, there are no personally disinterested positions in such a debate; everybody necessarily speaks from a certain position in relation to power. As Spivak has argued, this is likewise the case for empire, one of the more problematic potential subtexts of the “world” of world literature. There is no Archimedean point from which to judge the imperialist or anti-imperialist valence of world literature: “Discourses of worldliness are autobiographical in genre and confessional in institution, even when their interest in exactly not so.”Footnote 42 Any claim to universal truth in describing the world is immediately undercut by the particularity of the speaker’s position, hence Spivak’s canny substitution of viewing the world sub specie alteritatis for Spinoza’s sub specie aeternitatis.
Woolf does not surrender the claim to a form of universal truth, however. She finds another way in. Since “one cannot hope to tell the truth” using the language of truth, one must tell the truth using the language of lies. Instead of sublimating the narrator’s particularity through an apparently neutral, scientific discourse, Woolf calls attention to it by adopting the form of testimony and, moreover, of fictionalized testimony. Woolf turns the particularity of a single person’s experience into a vehicle for truth – while, at the same time, holding it up for critical scrutiny. She gives the following explanation of her strategy:
when a subject is highly controversial – and any question about sex is that – one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker. Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.Footnote 43
The form of the autobiographical essay allows Woolf to expose the relationship between the ideas presented in the book and contingencies that shaped them – the contingencies, that is, of everyday, embodied existence, as structured by a particular social and economic context. At the same time, by laying claim to the status of fiction, Woolf eschews the positivistic discourse of identitarian authenticity that conventionally undergirds the authority of testimony. Similarly, Derrida’s distanced voicing of autobiographical experiences highlights the locatedness of his theoretical approach, while rejecting the essentialist assumptions of what, in Specters of Marx, he calls “ontopology” – that is, “an axiomatics linking indissociably the ontological value of present being [on] to its situation, to the stable and presentable determination of a locality, the topos of territory, native soil, city, body in general.”Footnote 44 He seeks instead to elaborate the hauntopology of an identity dislocated from its geographical and ethnic coordinates and, indeed, to do this from the particular, yet exemplary, perspective of someone too Maghrebian to be properly French and too French to be properly Maghrebian.
Woolf’s proposition that fiction may contain more truth than fact translates, then, to a claim about the relation of singularity to the universal. This relation, as Derrida (and others, notably Giorgio Agamben) have observed, is that of the example. Exemplarity refers not to “an example in a series,” Derrida writes, but rather to a singularity “that allows one to read in a more dazzling, intense, or even traumatic manner the truth of a universal necessity.”Footnote 45 The singularity or example is not isolated by its particularity but instead functions to render a universal condition newly legible, which is the promise of the world literature and, indeed, of literature in general. World literature does not consist, then, merely of new additions to the canon, conceived as an expanding aggregate of particular perspectives; it does not add examples “in a series.” Instead, the world literary text would, ideally, allow us to perceive “in a more dazzling, intense, or even traumatic manner” the universal condition of literature. Attunement to the historical, geopolitical particularity of the text would illuminate the differences between the “worlds” of literary traditions. At the same time, the perspective of planetarity would work to de-ontologize cultural and national difference. At stake is an alternative concept of difference from that of an identity politics that polarizes on the basis of special interests, on one hand, and, on the other, a liberal multiculturalism that views inclusiveness and tolerance as end goals.
Disidentification and the Politics of Location
Like postcolonial criticism, a deconstructive approach to world literature begins with rereading the Western tradition from the perspective of the other, that is, in taking the other as the first term in a comparison. Contrary to a traditional postcolonial approach, however, the principal objective is not to analyze how hegemony consolidates its power through techniques of representation – the sort of program, for example, that Edward Said pursued in Orientalism. Instead, a deconstructive approach ultimately aims to destabilize identitarian formations in hegemonic and non-hegemonic cultures alike, in order to make possible new concepts of global collectivity. What risks falling outside of the purview of the latter approach, however, is a specific analysis of power.
The opposition I have just sketched out between deconstruction and a conventional strain of postcolonial criticism recapitulates the tension between the two conceptions of world literature outlined at the beginning of this chapter. According to one vision, world literature strives to expand the canon in order to extend some degree of self-representation, within hegemonic culture, to non-hegemonic global populations. According to another, it does the opposite of what this representative logic promotes; it deconstructs the identitarian logic by which texts are designated representatives of nationalities or ethnicities. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Reference Nguyen2015 novel The Sympathizer attempts to reconcile these two approaches by elaborating a politics of location untethered from the politics of identity. Its twinned critique of American neoimperialism in Vietnam and the Vietnamese struggle for independence, moreover, presents this hauntopology in the context of Derrida’s warning against the “symbolics of appropriation” in nationalist resistance to territorial dispossession.Footnote 46
The Sympathizer opens in Saigon during the final days of the Vietnam War, when its protagonists, along with hundreds of thousands of other South Vietnamese, are preparing to flee. In the 1950s, America had committed increasing amounts of financial and military resources to propping up, first, the failing French colonial administration and then, following the withdrawal of the French, an unpopular South Vietnamese government under President Diem. In 1963, a military coup carried out with America’s approval escalated the civil war, which made South Vietnam even more dependent on support from the Americans. Several years later, however, in response to domestic pressures, the American government withdrew its troops and eventually stopped funding the South Vietnamese regime. Faced with dwindling supplies of gas, ammunition, and other necessities against the swift advance of the Viet Cong, “the General,” one of The Sympathizer’s many unnamed protagonists, laments of his erstwhile American benefactors: “We were foolish enough to think they would keep their word. Now there’s nowhere to go but America.”Footnote 47 The General and his cohort are drawn to America, in other words, not by the promise of freedom and opportunity, but by a broken promise of protection. The Sympathizer thus begins by framing relocation to the center of empire in terms of imperialism’s tendency to make the periphery uninhabitable. By refashioning the immigrant narrative – and the myth of American exceptionalism it supports – from the perspective of a population instrumentalized and betrayed by American interventionism, The Sympathizer makes the case for the disruptive potential of expanding the canon. Exposure to such perspectives does not give rise to an ethics of tolerant inclusivity or cosmopolitan appreciation of cultural diversity, but instead interrogates the position of institutional power from which one includes or appreciates.
The narrator explicitly claims an oppositional positionality when he observes that April 1975 was “a month that meant everything to all the people in our small part of the world and nothing to most people in the rest of the world.”Footnote 48 And yet, while invoking an “us” shaped by the shared experience of geopolitical marginality (“our small part of the world”), he nonetheless rejects the concept of a national identity centered, as is often the case in independence movements, around reappropriating a territory, language, and culture conceived as naturally belonging to a homogenous population. Recalling Derrida’s account of his own unstable national identity, The Sympathizer interrupts this nativist narrative by enfolding layer upon layer of hybridity in the character of the unnamed narrator. A North Vietnamese mole embedded with the South Vietnamese military command, the narrator is “a man of two faces” and “a man of two minds … able to see any issue from both sides.”Footnote 49 Divided between political allegiances, his double consciousness forks again along lines of ethnicity and power. The narrator is Eurasian, the illegitimate offspring of a French missionary and his thirteen-year-old Vietnamese maid, and consequently rejected by French and Vietnamese communities alike. His experience of exile introduces yet more shades of dislocation. In America, he does “not simply live in two cultures, as celebrants of the great American melting pot imagined” but also “in two time zones, the here and the there, the present and the past.”Footnote 50 Like Derrida’s Hamlet, who having survived “what one does not survive” becomes himself a ghostly figure, the narrator is condemned to live in a time out of joint.Footnote 51 The uncanny temporality of his existence is compounded by the circular structure of his itinerary; the novel ends with him once again fleeing Vietnam. Resonant with Derrida’s remarks on the anamnestic effects of France’s withdrawal of citizenship from Algerian Jews, this circularity points up the sense of repetition in refugee, replacing the concept of refuge, a place to flee back to, with that of recurrent flight and, as the narrator’s “muddled heritage” suggests, originary exile.Footnote 52
Whereas America’s betrayal of the South Vietnamese was the reason for the narrator’s initial flight, betrayal by his “own” side in the conflict, the triumphant Vietnamese communists precipitate the second. Upon returning to Vietnam, the narrator is imprisoned by his longtime employer and subjected to a brutal program of reeducation. In a parody of the fantasy of homecoming as disalienation, the narrator’s return is marked by the impossible imperative to recover an identity that had always been denied him. His captor announces that he will be released only when he has been “transformed from an American into a Vietnamese once more.”Footnote 53 The novel takes the form of the confession he is forced to rewrite until it demonstrates this transformation. On successive drafts, the narrator is criticized for referring to the South Vietnamese with whom he was embedded as “we,” rather than “they”Footnote 54 and for having been “contaminated by the West”Footnote 55; the commandant of the prison camp notes disapprovingly his preference for “foreign intellectuals and culture over our native traditions,”Footnote 56 as demonstrated by his tendency to quote Marx and the Beatles instead of “Uncle Ho” and communist poet To Huu.
The narrative’s symmetrical structure bears out Derrida’s statement that nativist revolutions reproduce the logic of the imperialist regimes they depose. As I noted earlier, this observation leads Derrida to view the premise of originary dispossession as the founding condition of real politics: it “permits one at once to analyze the historical phenomena of appropriation and to treat them politically by avoiding, above all, the reconstitution of what these phantasms managed to motivate: ‘nationalist’ aggressions (which are always more or less ‘naturalist’) or monoculturalist homo-hegemony.”Footnote 57 While Derrida’s definition of politics is clearly reflected in Jean-Luc Nancy’s rethinking of communism and Apter’s and Spivak’s approaches to world literature, it is Jacques Rancière’s theory of political subjectivation that offers its most robust articulation, especially as it relates to The Sympathizer. By rethinking of solidarity in terms of disidentification, Rancière indicates how to conceive of collective agency without positing a collective identity, to resist historical acts of dispossession without recourse to identitarian claims of originary entitlement.
According to Nguyen’s narrator, it is his lack of a stable, legitimate identity that makes him a good spy and the (communist) sympathizer of the book’s title. If to sympathize, as the narrator explains, is to blur “the lines between us and them,”Footnote 58 then to be a sympathizer means to occupy a liminal position between “us” and “them” – or, more precisely, between disidentification from an “us” and impossible identification with a “them.” What the narrator calls sympathy constitutes, for Rancière, the process of political subjectivation. Rancière notes that the militants of his generation became politicized through impossible identifications, as expressed in the famous slogan of May 1968, “We are all German Jews.” Regarding similar expressions of solidarity with the unarmed Algerian protestors massacred by riot police in Paris in October 1961, Rancière writes: “We could not identify with these Algerians, but we could question our identification with the ‘French people’ in whose name they had been killed. Thus, we became capable of acting as political subjects in the interval or gap between two identities, neither of which we could adopt.”Footnote 59
Toward the end of The Sympathizer, the motif of disidentification takes a curious turn that completes the novel’s delineation of what I have called the hauntopological politics of location. The narrator is subjected to a program of extended sleep deprivation designed to help him recall a key event missing from his confession. Paraphrasing the dynamic of ontic proximity and ontological distance in the analytic of Dasein, the doctor in charge explains that the narrator can only access the repressed memory if he observes himself from the outside: “[W]e are the ones most able to know ourselves and yet the most unable to know ourselves … if we could only split ourselves in two and gain some distance from ourselves, we could see ourselves better than anyone else can.”Footnote 60 The ploy works. The narrator enters a psychotic state of desubjectivation: in one chapter, the narrative voice shifts from the first to the third person; in another, the dialogue is presented in the form of a play, where the narrator is just one character among others. His madness permits him finally to access the memory of the communist agent he failed to save. He recounts how she had refused to inform on her contact, who happens to be the commissar now in charge of the narrator’s reeducation, and had been punished. Afraid of blowing his own cover, the narrator had stood by and watched (in an interrogation room converted from a movie theater, no less) while three South Vietnamese officers raped her.
Here, the novel’s circular structure reveals a deeper symmetry. As I mentioned earlier, The Sympathizer begins with the narrator positioning himself and his compatriots against the world’s general indifference to the plight of the Vietnamese; April 1975 was “a month that meant everything to all the people in our small part of the world and nothing to most people in the rest of the world.”Footnote 61 It concludes by destabilizing the opposition that undergirds this positionality. Having uncovered the fate of the forgotten agent, the narrator’s torturers confront him with his own complicity in the failure of solidarity he denounces: “The world watched what happened to our country and most of the world did nothing. Not only that – they also took great pleasure in it. You are no exception.”Footnote 62 The agent’s defiant retort when asked her name, “My surname is Viet and my given name is Nam,” secures the parallel.Footnote 63 Having repeatedly protested his imprisonment by exclaiming, “I have done nothing!” the narrator realizes that his declaration of innocence is at the same time an admission of guilt: “I was guilty of the crime of doing nothing.”Footnote 64 This final confession marks the conclusion of the narrator’s reeducation.
Within the framework of Rancière’s theory of political subjectivation, the gap introduced between the narrator and his fellow operative – that is, between the narrator and the Vietnam of sans-part or subalterns he has been fighting for – highlights Derrida’s reminder that all identifications are impossible identifications. Rancière’s important contribution to the deconstruction of identity, however, is to articulate the impossibility of identification explicitly in terms of asymmetries of power. The Sympathizer reflects this politicized approach insofar as it reveals the dependence of narrator’s identification with his compatriots and his cause on the erasure of the third-world subaltern woman, one at whose expense, moreover, both the narrator and his torturer survive. Ironically dubbed “the agent,” her agency and subjectivity cannot be represented within the framework of the narrator’s self-understanding, which is why he becomes able to consider himself from her perspective only once his identity has been destroyed. From the completion of his reeducation until the novel’s conclusion, the narrator proceeds to refer to himself in the first person plural, transforming the assertion of collective identity from the beginning of the novel into an acknowledgment of internal difference.
The unraveling of identity, even ostensibly oppositional forms of identity, and the forms of understanding this unraveling makes possible, are the effects I imagine Spivak has in mind when she speaks of seeing the world in “the species of alterity.”Footnote 65 At the most basic level, the political stakes of the debate over world literature boil down to the question of what we want the dismantling of Eurocentrism to look like and how far we want it to go. Spivak clearly rejects a cosmopolitan program of broadening horizons, of multiplying “windows on the world,” that imagines a non-Eurocentric world principally as an expanded, diversified array of cultural riches.Footnote 66 Against this accumulative economy, Spivak has repeatedly insisted on the experience of loss. Reading world literature in a way that decenters the world involves, inescapably, the unflattering process of confronting one’s own implication in geopolitical relations of domination and resistance, taking stock of how one profits from misery in some ways and is exploited in others. It involves looking for whatever has been suppressed in order to secure identitarian narratives about the world and one’s place in it. In order to gain a new world, Spivak reminds us, we must surrender our old attachments: “In this space of learning, you play to lose.”Footnote 67
