Rhetorical Gestures (was Re: Spivak sez...)

[Charles Brown]

But isn't a better negative critique of the national-juridical foundations of capitalist society found in Marx and Engels than Kant, as well as the positive critique ? And it seems strange that the area of Kant's weakness , racism/nationalism (see Yoshie's posts on PEN-L on this)  is what Spivak uses him for. Kant's questions of the national-juridical foundations of capitalism are exactly weakest in relation to the relationship between colonizer and colonized nations. It would seem likely that Kantian based critiques of the abstract "nation-state" are defective in trying to understand some kind of "proto-national structures" , which are significantly derived from  colonizer/colony, white/colored struggles.  In other words, international-state issues are Kant's glaring weakness, why turn to him for foundation of an analysis of international dynamics 1999 ? Whether for a negative or positive critique ?

Kant was the quintessential liberal philosopher in the era of origin of Liberalism.  To paraphrase Dennis, Neo-liberalism is the Neo-Kantianism per se ( the thing-in-itself) today.  We need an anti-neo-Kantian analysis in the era of neo-Liberalism.

Perhaps Spivak is just undercover for our side inside the neo-liberal bubble, because she must know this. She may be using Kantian irony againt neo-Kantianism, especially since there is no tenure for Marxism-Leninism.

Charles Brown


>>> Dennis R Redmond <dredmond at OREGON.UOREGON.EDU> 10/13/99 07:52PM >>>
On Wed, 13 Oct 1999, Charles Brown wrote:


> But was Spivak using "Kant" in that way ?  I got the impression from
> your post that Spivak was referring to Kant himself. So, how does she
> read Kant from below ?  The philosophical problem with Kant is not only
> racism but dualism and agnosticism. Does she address these ?

For one thing, Kant is the first philosopher to really wrestle with
the notion of human rights and the national-juridical foundations of such
in capitalist society; he's not a rationalist building a system, like
Descartes or Spinoza, but is already, on a certain level, beginning to
question that system. His answers are inadequate, but he at least asks the
right questions. This is a big deal for Spivak, because her own position
as an Indian expatriate means that she has to deal with Kantian
contradictions all the time -- 1st world human rights activisms vs. 3rd
world peasant struggles, transnationalism vs. allegiance to local
nationalisms, etc.  Kant's categories, properly historicized, are a useful
tool for critiquing the moral claims of such proto-national structures
(though not for building alternatives to such; then you need Hegel, Marx,
20th century Marxism, etc.). 

I'd argue that neoliberalism is really an applied neo-Kantianism,
actually. There's no movement in the neolib utopia: just the eternal
recurrence of the Wall Street Bubble, the categorical imperative of
a rentier past made future, over and over again. It fears the march of
history. Hopefully, after Seattle, it'll start fearing much more than
that.

-- Dennis