About the Book
This book explores the relation between poststructuralist thought and postcoloniality, and identifies in that interaction the expression of a particular anxiety concerning the form of theoretical writing.
Many so-called poststructuralist thinkers, such as Derrida, Cixous, Lyotard, Barthes, Kristeva and Spivak, have turned their attention at some point in their career towards questions either of postcolonialism, or of cultural domination and difference. For all these thinkers, however, a reflection on such questions has generated a sense of unease concerning the assumed neutrality of theoretical discourse, and the inevitable subjective or autobiographical investments of the writing self.
The book argues that this anxiety betrays an unprecedented lucidity concerning the particular challenges of writing about ourselves and others at a time of postcolonial upheaval.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part One: Poststructuralism in Algeria
1. Derrida in Exile: Philosophy, Postcolonialism and the Call for a Singular Universalism
2. In or Out? The Dislocations of Hélène Cixous
3. Lyotard’s Algeria: Theory and/or Politics
Part Two: Theory and Cultural Difference
4. Displacing Barthes: Self, Other and the Theorist’s Uneasy Belonging
5. National Identity and Etrangeté: Kristeva’s Search for a Language of Otherness
6. Spivak’s Echo: Autobiography, Narcissism and the Theoretical Voice
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Contents
About the Author :
Jane Hiddleston is a Lecturer and Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. She is also a Member of the executive committee of the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies, and editor of the accompanying journal.
Review :
Looking at the interplay between poststructuralism and "postcolonialism by a writing persona unsure about how to write about otherness," this book examines texts by theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Helcne Cixous. Jean-Franeois Lyotard, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Roland Barthes, and Julie Kristeva, searching for a voice likely to minimize their inscription within the space in relation to the "ethnic other" they attempt to comprehend. Hiddleston underlines the troubled nature of the pairing of post structuralism and postcolonialism by foregrounding either incompatibility with the mainstream identity or a misunderstanding of the terrains gazed at, thus foregrounding even fUlther alterity. She depicts the theorists in their dealing with the question of colonialism in which their own lives were implicated. The common thread is textual anxiety and the skepticism about neutrality. Instead of being a pad for stability, the nation becomes a location of contention and anxiety. Requiring a grasp of modern theory, this book deals with issues debated by Philip Leonard in Nationality between Poststructuralism and Postcolonial Theory (CH, Sep'06, 44-0135) and Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994). Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above A thorough, well-researched and well-written piece of scholarship. Though it covers a lot of ground, and deals with six notoriously complex and prolific thinkers, the overall project is impressively focused and coherent...This is clearly an accomplished piece of work, and it will be a valuable addition to the growing literature on the topic. Jane Hiddleston's book offers a lucid and detailed discussion of six difficult thinkers associated with 'French' poststructuralism. The necessity of these scare quotes immediately suggests the link to postcoloniality. For if the Frenchness of Derrida, Cixous, Kristeva, and certainly Spivak is problematic in a straightforwardly biographical way, it is also questioned in the work of apparently metropolitan figures such as Barthes and Lyotard, in so far as both critique the mythical grand narratives of French post-war identity. The six chapters are divided into two halves, with a specific focus on Algeria in the first, and on broader constructions of cultural difference in the second. In each, Hiddleston provides clear and perceptive readings of the tensions within these thinkers' positions, supported by wide, recent, and relevant scholarship. This makes it an excellent and comprehensive introduction to these ongoing debates. The rationale for assembling these readings around the thematic of anxiety is also the book's guiding hypothesis. However, despite the useful philosophical genealogy of anxiety in the introduction (passing by way of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, Freud, and Lacan), Hiddleston does not explicitly settle on a single definition of the term. None the less, there seem to be three overlapping but distinct understandings of anxiety at work. Firstly, the inherent anxiety of any 'theoretical persona' engaged in the task, at once ethical and aesthetic, of finding a genre adequate to a non-reductive relation to the Other. This Levinasian sensitivity to the saming of difference foregrounds a primarily formal problem-namely, and after Barthes, is there a style in which the author can both declare and perform his own death? Hiddleston is right, I believe, to characterize the textual experiments of Derrida and Cixous in particular as motivated by this ethico-aesthetic problematic. The second kind of anxiety touches on postcoloniality to the extent that the thinkers engaged in this impossible endeavour experienced their respective Others via the prism of colonialism. They either encounter the cultural Other and try, but fail, to capture its alterity (Lyotard's Algeria, Barthes's Japan, Kristeva's China), or experience themselves as other in relation to the culture of the colonizer which is also their own (Derrida and Cixous's internal alterity as Algerian Jews in France, Spivak's ambivalent status as a 'third world' intellectual in the US Academy). The third anxiety framing the book is the anxiety of 'theory' as it supposedly enters its own 'post' era. This relates to the perceived passing of poststructuralism's high-tide mark around the mid-1990S. In a conclusion that does not quite escape the melancholia it diagnoses, Hiddleston presents the anxious avant-gardism of this previous generation of theorists as a clarion call to the next: novel idioms adequate to contemporary forms of globalized, neo-colonial domination must continue to be elaborated. The main drawback of this emphasis on anxiety, however, is the way in which poststructuralism is privileged far ahead of postcoloniality. In its orientation around the binary of self and Other and its focus on fundamentally metropolitan thinkers, the analysis sometimes allows the postcolonial to lapse into a mere backdrop for what could be considered a paradoxical narcissism ('look at how decentred I am!'). Notwithstanding poststructuralism's important intervention into Eurocentric notions of universality and conceptual mastery, the anxiety identified by Hiddleston's reading arguably has less place in the more engage model of postcolonial theory that roots itself in anti-colonial struggles. This reviewer, at least, felt slightly anxious upon reading that 'this is a book about theory and thought rather than a book about postcolonial politics' (p. 4), as if theory, including its poststructuralist variant, were not intrinsically political at least in aspiration. None the less, Hiddleston has produced a sophisticated and comprehensive study that genuinely contributes to the literature in this area. Hiddleston has produced a sophisticated and comprehensive study that genuinely contributes to the literature in this area. There is an increasing body of critical writing on the intersections between what we might broadly term poststructuralist and postcolonial thought, particularly within a francophone context, where those connections are perhaps more overdetermined than elsewhere, given the French 'roots' of much postcolonial theory. Hiddleston in her book presents a new variation on this theme, shifting the focus to a reflection on the uncertainties and equivocations that surface within the texts of a range of well-known poststructuralist writers - Derrida, Cixous, Lyotard, Barthes, Kristeva, and Spivak - when they attempt to theorize their own experiences of colonialism, or encounters with cultural others. A useful framework is developed in an introductory section that traverses attempts by Kierkegaard, Sartre, Freud, Lacan, and Bhabha to theorize anxiety, and this primarily psychological concept comes to figure throughout this study the different manifestations of textual instability, or rather those moments where the textual performance goes against the grain of its explicit argument or object of analysis. This, Hiddleston claims, then has an unsettling rebound effect on the theory itself in question. So Derrida, for example, in various autobiographical texts dealing with his relationship to Algeria (Le Monolinguisme de l'autre and Circonfession principally), is shown to be anxiously eluding the very philosophical mastery and closure he endlessly deconstructs. Cixous's assured writerly (feminist) resistance to theory runs up against a more ambivalent mode of writing in her autobiographical texts on Algeria, an ambivalence that is intensified in her texts on Derrida. Or the self-conscious writing subjects of both Kristeva and Spivak are shown in their different ways to hover between identification and self-difference, familiarity and unfamiliarity, the heimlich and the unheimlich. Making anxiety a focal concept is an illuminating gesture, and, perhaps symptomatically (and inevitably so), Hiddleston is at times conscious of the uncertainty of her own subject position (for example, in the chapter on Spivak she admits, 'I am aware that I am also rewriting, making leaps and half-blind assumptions', p. 164). At other times one is a little taken aback by a rather sternly moralizing, even judgemental tone (for example, 'Lyotard's botched application of Marxist thinking', p. 96), and one wonders whether the psychoanalytic conceptual model Hiddleston proposes would have to be recalibrated if it were also to consider the role and function of the superego, which is curiously absent from her accounts of Freud's topological model, or Lacan's linguistic model of the subject. The readings of the texts in question are alive with the energy of the theories they present; it is a shame, therefore, that the absence of translations of the original French quotations make these relatively inaccessible to non-francophones. There are occasions where the will to theorize anxiety seems perhaps a little forced, or rushed. One wonders whether the tensions and instabilities highlighted are in fact reducible to a logic of paradox (Derrida would be the obvious case in point here); but that aside, this is a very insightful and well-informed contribution to contemporary theoretical debates within this field. ... this is a very insightful and well-informed contribution to contemporary theoretical debates within this field.
