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What can we learn from reading Levinas alongside postcolonial theories of difference? With that question in view, Drabinski undertakes readings of Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Édouard Glissant, and Subcommandante Marcos in order to rethink ideas of difference, language, subjectivity, ethics, and politics. Through these philosophical readings, he gives a new perspective on the work of these important postcolonial theorists and helps make Levinas relevant to other disciplines concerned with postcolonialism and ethics
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Levinas and the Postcolonial R AC E , N AT I O N , O T H E R JOHN E. DRABINSKI Levinas and the Postcolonial DRABINSKI PRINT.indd i 31/05/2011 11:12 To the everyday blessing that is Marisa and Miles DRABINSKI PRINT.indd ii 31/05/2011 11:12 Levinas and the Postcolonial Race, Nation, Other John E. Drabinski EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS DRABINSKI PRINT.indd iii 31/05/2011 11:12 © John E. Drabinski, 2011 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4103 1 (hardback) The right of John E. Drabinski to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. DRABINSKI PRINT.indd iv 31/05/2011 11:12 Contents Acknowledgements Preface vi x Introduction: Decolonizing Levinasian Ethics 1 1. Incarnate Historiography and the Problem of Method 17 2. Epistemological Fracture 50 3. The Ontology of Fracture 89 4. Ethics of Entanglement 129 5. Decolonizing Levinasian Politics 165 Concluding Remarks 197 Index 203 DRABINSKI PRINT.indd v 31/05/2011 11:12 Acknowledgements Parts of Chapter 4 were published as ‘Future Interval: On Levinas and Glissant,’ in Totality and Infinity at 50, ed. Diane Perpich and Scott Davidson. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2010. I wrote this book, like my previous one, in the pauses and breaks of my work and personal life. Of course, one always imagines books written in long, sustained periods of meditation, alone, in the library, weary but steeled against the body, and so on. We have all seen the paintings. The reality is that books are written alongside the buzz of daily life. For me, that makes it all the more satisfying when it is done and sent off to the publisher. I think I wrote this one without being an altogether terrible partner, friend, brother, colleague, and father. And for that, I have a bunch of people to thank. So, here are some words of acknowledgement. Two anonymous referees for Edinburgh University Press provided insightful criticisms and suggestions, and I hope this book reflects how those comments improved my ideas. In many ways, the thoughts about this book began after hearing a talk at Hampshire College. The speaker trotted out a few of the uglier occasional remarks by Levinas for a bit of cheap outrage. As a Levinas scholar, I heard a lot about those remarks from colleagues in the days that followed. What struck me was how we were invited by the speaker to think with shallowness and lack of analysis about Levinas’s rather nasty comments, as if it were all a matter of gossip and moralizing gasps (which, in its own way, instrumentalizes the degraded and insulted Other). Surely something more needs to be said, I thought. And pleaded. In particular, after explaining and discussing some of my concerns with my collea