Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. When using the term “theory” in this book, I usually refer to the kind of theory primarily developed and practiced within literary studies in the last few decades. “Theory” was mainly associated with poststructuralism and particularly with an operation of formalism, the “uncovering of the structural conditions and features of a text” (Butler, Guillory, and Thomas 2000, viii). However, the term “theory” in the last twenty years has taken a more political turn within academic discourse. Redeployed in “legibly ‘political’ contexts” and “politically invested arenas” such as race, colonialism, gender, and sexuality, it involves what is also known as postcolonial theory and cultural studies (ix).

2. Foucault’s use of the term “operation” often refers to discursive acts involved in, or coinciding with, the production of knowledge and power in a given discursive formation. He also employs the term to refer to processes that enable action to “speak” by turning it into language (see, for example, Foucault 2002, 69, 80, 116, 172, 347; 2000).

3. The term “constitutive outside” is used by Judith Butler to refer not to an absolute outside that exceeds the limits of discourse but to “that which can only be thought—when it can—in relation to that discourse, at and as its most tenuous borders” (1993, 8). The term was proposed by Henry Staten in his discussion of Derrida’s thinking (1984, 16, 20, 24). The aim of the notion, according to Mouffe, is to underscore the fact that “the creation of an identity implies the establishment of a difference, difference which is often constructed on the basis of a hierarchy.” Since every identity is relational, “the affirmation of a difference is a precondition for the existence of any identity, i.e. the perception of something ‘other’ which constitutes its ‘exterior’” (2005, 15).

4. Derrida elaborates this process through the notion of the “double mark.” Every name or concept is involved in the “structure of the double mark.” Although it is caught in “the closed agonistic, hierarchical field of philosophical oppositions,” a concept also retains “its old name” in order to “destroy the opposition,” to which it “has never quite yielded” (2004, 4, 5). Every concept receives “one mark inside and the other outside” the system of binaries and can thus generate a “double reading”: it sustains an opposition but can also critique and disorganize the traditional binary to which it belongs (4). Inevitably, putting “old names to work” involves the risk of “regressing into the system that has been, or is in the process of being, deconstructed” (5). But to do away with old names and thus “cross over,” as Derrida calls it, “into the outside of the classical oppositions,” is missing the opportunity to intervene in the system—here, the binary system that produces the barbarian and the civilized. In the process of using old names for new purposes, we should not forget that the system to which they belong is not “a sort of ahistorical thoroughly homogeneous table” but instead a “hierarchically ordered space whose closure is constantly being traversed by the forces . . . that it represses” and expels (5).

5. On the double sense of meaning as “to mean to” (intend) and “to mean” (signify) and the implications of this ambiguity, see Bal (2002, 271–72).

6. As Derrida argues, the iterability of every utterance—the fact that it performs differently in its every use—“leaves us no choice but to mean (to say) something that is (already, always, also) other than what we mean (to say)” (1988, 62). This gap between intention and meaning guarantees the fundamental undecidability of all utterances—literal, serious, fictional, literary, and so on.

7. Here, I take my cue from Mieke Bal’s concept-based methodology in which she argues that “interdisciplinarity in the humanities must seek its heuristic and methodological basis in concepts rather than methods.” She proposes a methodology that uses concepts in order to understand the research object better and on its own terms (2002, 8).

CHAPTER 1

1. The story was probably written in 1917 and published in 1931, seven years after Kafka’s death. The English translation I am using is by Willa and Edwin Muir (Kafka 1999).

2. Deleuze and Guattari argue that in Kafka there is no “infinite hierarchy belonging to a negative theology” but a “contiguity of desire that causes whatever happens to happen always in the office next door” (1986, 50). In the story, this contiguity of desire manifests itself in the narrator’s desire for answers to his inquiries about the wall’s construction. All his answers slip away and are succeeded by new questions. This produces a mercury-like effect: whenever the reader thinks the narrator has provided the answer to a question, the answer slips out of the reader’s hands, disappearing through the gaps in the story’s wall.

3. Deleuze and Guattari’s views discussed in Réda Bensmaïa (1986, xi). In their reading, Deleuze and Guattari distance themselves from symbolic, allegorical, or mythical interpretations of Kafka’s work and suggest a literal reading of his work. As a result, they are less interested in interpretation—digging beyond the surface of the work—but read his work as “an experimental machine” for effects (xi). In my view, reading Kafka literally does not rule out the reader’s desire for allegorization, to which the stories appeal. In Kafka’s account of the wall of China, we find the literal and allegorical, just like the mythical and the real, on the same discursive level, without one having priority over the other.

4. In his essay “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death,” Benjamin also notices that in Kafka each experience “gives way and mingles with its opposite”; “the very possibility of the third alternative puts the other two, which at first seemed harmless, in a different light” (1999b, 126).

5. This discontinuity, Deleuze and Guattari argue, appears in Kafka especially when power manifests itself as a “transcendental authority, as a paranoid law” imposing “a discontinuous distribution of individual periods, with breaks between each one, a discontinuous repartition of blocks, with spaces between each one” (1986, 72). Moreover, they argue that the blocks in Kafka’s writing do not distribute themselves around a circle with discontinuous arches but “align themselves on a hallway or a corridor” along an unlimited straight line (73). On this line, each block has doors far from the doors of other blocks, but it also has connecting back doors, through which the blocks become contiguous. “This is the most striking topography in Kafka’s work, and it isn’t only a ‘mental’ topography: two diametrically opposed points bizarrely reveal themselves to be in contact” (73).

6. Levine makes this observation about Kafka’s stories in general.

7. For the idea of teaching and pedagogy as an “undoing” of what has been established by education, see Felman, “Psychoanalysis and Education: Teaching Terminable and Interminable” (1987).

8. In the English edition of Kafka’s stories I am using (Vintage, 1999), this fragment (translated by Tania and James Stern), added right after “The Great Wall of China,” is perceived by the reader as a postscript—an adjunct to the main story about the wall. However, this fragment is not formally part of “The Great Wall of China.” In other editions of Kafka’s stories that include “The Great Wall of China,” such as the German edition edited by Paul Raabe (1970), this fragment is left out.

9. “Babel” is the name of God the father. It is thus a proper name, and as such it remains untranslatable. But it is simultaneously a common noun, signifying “confusion.” As God delivers his punishment, Derrida argues, the proper name of God is divided in people’s different foreign tongues, spreading and signifying “confusion.” Therefore, according to Derrida, translation becomes necessary (due to linguistic confusion) but impossible, since a proper name is untranslatable (1985, 173, 177–78). For another detailed analysis of the myth of Babel in relation to language and translation, including an analysis of Derrida’s “Des tours de Babel,” see de Vries, “Anti-Babel” (2002, 211–92).

10. The narrator is condescending toward this theory, underscoring its irrationality: “There were many wild ideas in people’s heads at that time—this scholar’s book is only one example” (Kafka 1999, 239).

11. In his reading of Derrida’s essay on Babel, Stathis Gourgouris considers the myth and deconstruction of Babel in terms of a desire of diaspora. The “Babelian performance” (the myth and deconstruction of Babel), Gourgouris argues, is “the origin of a desire that has scattered its traces all over history, a diasporic desire that has plunged history into confusion—after all, Babel is also the mythical archē, the governing principle, of diaspora” (2003, 303).

12. For Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of desire, see “The Desiring Machines” (1984); on desire in relation to Kafka’s work, see “Immanence and Desire” (1986, 143–52).

13. Deleuze and Guattari discussed in Bensmaïa (1985, xiii–xiv).

14. Perhaps the anonymous scholar’s proposal for the convergence of the two projects is implicitly reformulated by Kafka himself in one of The Zürau Aphorisms: “If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without having to climb it, that would have been sanctioned” (2006, 18). This other tower, which one would not have to climb, could take the form of the wall. In Kafka, the Tower of Babel is not only transfigured into a horizontal construction (a wall) but also takes an earthbound direction. In the spirit of reversal, one of Kafka’s very short stories introduces “The Pit of Babel” (Der Schacht von Babel) (1961, 34–35).

15. The term “paradox-object” has been used by art theorist Boris Groys to refer to objects of contemporary art. For Groys, the field of contemporary art can be viewed as “an embodiment of paradox” (2008, 3): “Already in the framework of classical modernity, but especially in the context of contemporary art, individual artworks began to be paradox-objects that embody simultaneously thesis and antithesis” (3). Particularly since World War II, we find, for example, paintings that can be seen as abstract and realistic, documentary and fictional, or objects that can be described as both “traditional sculptures” and as “readymades” (3). Groys argues that our difficulty in making sense of, and dealing with, modern art “consists in our unwillingness to accept paradoxical, self-contradictory interpretations as adequate and true” (4). Seen as a paradox-object, barbarism is in tune with Groys’s vision of contemporary art.

16. In my reflections on the relation between the positive and the negative in this paragraph, I take my cue from Felman’s exposition of “radical negativity” (2003, 101–5).

CHAPTER 2

1. A transcript of Tony Blair’s statement can be found at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/1538551.stm.

2. A transcript of Tony Blair’s statement at the G8 summit meeting can be found at www.g8.utoronto.ca/summit/2005gleneagles/blair_blasts050707.html.

3. Joschka Fischer’s statement can be found at www.dw.de/dw/article/0,,1201023,00.html.

4. See Mamdani (2004, 18). According to Mamdani, this “culturalization” can be credited to Bernard Lewis’s 1990 article “The Roots of Muslim Rage” and Samuel Huntington’s 1993 article “The Clash of Civilizations?,” which he developed into a book (1996).

5. According to Huntington, the other great threat to Western civilization comes from China.

6. While Huntington views multiculturalism as a domestic threat, he also concedes that the world is inevitably “multicultural” and thus a “global empire” is impossible (1996, 318).

7. In the 1990s, when Huntington’s study was written, these phenomena included a “global breakdown of law and order,” “increasing anarchy,” “a global crime wave,” “mafias and drug cartels,” a “weakening of the family,” and “ethnic, religious, and civilizational violence” (1996, 321). The almost apocalyptic tone of Huntington’s diagnosis reflects the tendency to regard one’s present era as unique and unprecedented.

8. Bernard Lewis introduced the phrase “clash of civilizations” (1990).

9. From Bush’s “Speech to Employees at the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” September 25, 2001 (2003, 22).

10. For example, in his presidential address to the nation on September 11, 2001, he quotes from Psalm 23: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me” (Bush 2003, 3).

11. From the “Presidential Address to a Joint Session of Congress,” September 23, 2001 (Bush 2003, 15–16).

12. The first quotation is from Bush’s “Speech to the Employees of the Department of Labor,” October 4, 2001; the second, from “Presidential Radio Address to the Nation,” October 6, 2001 (Bush 2003, 30, 32).

13. From the presidential address to a joint session of Congress, September 23, 2001 (Bush 2003, 16).

14. The first quotation (about Nicholas Berg’s decapitation) is from “President Thanks Military Personnel and Families for Serving Our Country,” December 7, 2004, and “President’s Radio Address” May 15, 2004, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2004/12/20041207-2.html. The second is from an interview with Al Arabiya, May 5, 2004, http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=120660&page=1. Parts of these statements are also quoted and discussed in Brown (2006, 159).

15. One example among many is the study by Israeli historian Élie Barnavi (2006), in which he seeks the origins of terrorism in religion.

16. From “President’s Remarks at ‘Congress of Tomorrow’ Lunch,” February 1, 2002, quoted in Brown (2006, 179).

17. Žižek goes even further to argue that the real problem with capitalism does not lie in its “secret Eurocentric bias” but in “the fact that it really is universal, a neutral matrix of social relations” (for the way he develops this argument, see 2009, 132–34).

18. Fish’s essay appeared in an issue of the journal The Responsive Community dedicated to the question “Can Postmodernists Condemn Terrorism?”

19. See Rothstein, “Moral Relativity Is a Hot Topic? True. Absolutely,” New York Times, July 13, 2002, http://pascal.iseg.utl.pt/~ncrato/Recortes/EdRothstein_NYT_20020613.htm.

20. The book was first published in French in 2004 as Le choc des barbaries: Terrorismes et désordre mondial.

21. Another noteworthy reversal is performed by Terry Eagleton, “Culture Conundrum,” The Guardian, May 21, 2008, in which he elaborates the claim that “culture is the new barbarism.” See also Eagleton (2009, 154–60).

22. Todorov’s study was first published in French in 2008 as La peur des barbares.

23. Todorov develops his position by arguing against a kind of relativism that shies from judgment of other cultures and, in Todorov’s view, may lead to nihilism. But he also declares to be equally opposed to a dogmatism based on ethnocentrism, whereby the “we” is the holder of the true and the just (2010, 13–14). He thus pleads for a more nuanced approach, which should focus on the complexity of every situation, instead of sweeping judgments based on black-and-white distinctions (10).

24. The translator of Todorov’s book (2010) sometimes translates the French barbarie as “barbarity” instead of “barbarism.” For reasons of consistency with the terminology used in this chapter, I use the term “barbarism” in my discussion of Todorov’s study (except when quoting from Todorov’s book).

25. In Todorov’s account, “civilization” is an absolute and single notion, and the permanent opposite of barbarism. Where others—such as Huntington—use “civilizations,” Todorov uses the word “culture” in the plural to signify historical formations and groups of people with common ways of life and thinking, common traditions, and so on. In order to avoid semantic confusion, Todorov reserves the word “civilization” only for those absolute values that are the opposite of barbarism. In his definition, civilization is an exclusively moral category (2010, 26).

26. Todorov devotes a part of his book to the defense of what he considers as the true heritage of Enlightenment and its humanist values against what he views as misconceptions and abuses of the legacy of Enlightenment today (2010, 28–31).

CHAPTER 3

1. Scott makes this argument for categories of gender, such as femininity, masculinity, sex, homosexuality, and heterosexuality.

2. Although there are many studies of the barbarian in specific periods in Western history, there is to my knowledge no comprehensive, systematic genealogical study of this notion. A popularized genealogy of the barbarian can be found in the study by French philosopher Roger-Pol Droit (2007). Also, Mark Salter (2002) gives an overview of the discourse on barbarism and civilization since the Middle Ages.

3. The word “savage” comes from the Latin word for “wood” (silva) and was first employed for men who lived in the German forests without an organized society (Salter 2002, 20).

4. The trope of the “noble savage” was used by the Romantics to formulate a critique of European civilization. See White, “The Noble Savage Theme as Fetish” (1978).

5. Gaijin, literally meaning “outside person,” is the Japanese word for a foreigner and was especially used for Westerners (European travelers and merchants) visiting Japan. It refers to difference in ethnicity or race (Buckley 2002, 161–62).

6. The figure of the barbarian has had a very central place in the Chinese imaginary. The Chinese resisted cultural influences from the West. Within this ideology of self-sufficiency, perceived by Westerners as xenophobia, peoples outside the Chinese borders, Westerners in particular, were viewed as barbarians. For an exploration of barbarians in Mandarin culture, see Cameron (1970).

7. A typical example of the importance of language in differentiation in the Hebrew tradition is the word shibbōleth. In Judges 12:4–6, the pronunciation of the word was used as a test for nationality, to distinguish Gileadites from Ephraimites (Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, 1998). The word’s pronunciation thus marked some people as insiders and others as foreigners. The word is still used as a word, phrase, or principle that distinguishes a particular class, nation, or group of people (Concise Oxford Dictionary, 2001).

8. Religion was also central to the Hindus’ opposition between themselves and non-Hindus, mlechhas. See Diamond (1974, 125); and E. Hall (1989, 5).

9. Although the specific construct we call “the West” has only been in use in the last two centuries, there are of course older uses of “west.” See Sakai and Morris (2005, 372); and Williams (1985, 333).

10. As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam argue about the relation between West and non-West, “the two worlds interpenetrate in an unstable space of creolization and syncretism” (1994, 15). However, the discourse of purity of the European civilization was premised on exclusions of other cultural influences, such as the influence of Egypt on Greek civilization, of Africa on the Roman Empire, and of Islam on Europe’s economic, political, and intellectual history (58; Robinson 1983, 4). One of the best-known (and most controversial) attempts to revise the Eurocentric construction of the West is by Martin Bernal (1987).

11. In her study on ethnic stereotypes, Rosello takes the “reluctant witness” as “an emblematic figure” that can be very helpful in addressing issues related to ethnic stereotyping. The “reluctant witness,” she argues, “knows that there is no outside, especially if two speakers share the same language, the same linguistic crucible where stereotypes have slowly formed over centuries of intertextual references” (1998, 1).

12. We should not forget that the notion of one Greek language, even in the classical period, is contestable, since Greek was a “collection of myriad regional dialects.” Thus, in many cases, communication among Greeks of different regions would have been just as difficult as between Greeks and non-Greeks (J. Hall 2002, 116–17).

13. For extensive analyses of the use of the barbarian in Greek drama, see E. Hall (1989); Long (1986); Colvin (1999); and Bacon (1961).

14. All these examples are presented in Munson (2005, 65–66).

15. The philological and conceptual history of “culture,” as well as the history of its relation to “civilization” and “barbarism,” are too complex to be accounted for adequately in this typology. My account is limited to a selection of characteristic historical constellations that bring out the transformability of their interrelation.

16. In this sense, the term “civilization,” more than “culture,” is almost automatically conceived in opposition to an outside and a barbarian other. Hence, “civilization” seems to need the figure of the barbarian for its self-definition more than “culture” does.

17. In the ancient world, the specific term “culture” is of course not used as such, but the idea of it is expressed through other related concepts.

18. Isocrates was also a fierce proponent of a strict opposition between Greeks and barbarians and saw the barbarians of Asia as the natural enemies of the Greeks (Long 1986, 149). For Isocrates, Hellenicity was identified with Athenian education (J. Hall 2002, 209).

19. However, not every barbarian was a potential Roman citizen. There were conquered barbarians within Roman borders: those were the groups that could potentially share the benefits of Romanitas. But there was also a barbarous exterior of savagery, aggression, and lack of organization (Goffart 1981, 280). This external barbaricum, which was defined in more absolute terms, contributed to the self-perception of the Roman Empire as the order that warded off chaos from the civilized world (280).

20. For a discussion of Schiller’s views on the relation between ethics and aesthetics, see J. Bennett (1996).

21. The Dada movement, which started in Zürich during World War I and reached its peak from 1916 to 1922, was a movement in art, literature, theater, and graphic design (Kreuter 2006, 41). Surrealism began in the early 1920s, and many surrealists were initially involved in the Dada movement.

22. Both communism and Marxism have been identified with “barbarism.” Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Barbarism with a Human Face (1979) is a fierce attack on communism as well as on Marxism and the “Sovietophilia” of left intellectuals. The group Socialisme ou Barbarie presents an interesting intervention in this divide between capitalism and communism. Founded in France in 1949 by Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort, Socialisme ou Barbarie was a revolutionary political group, which also produced a journal under the same name, still circulating in the mid-1960s. The group, with Castoriadis as its main representative, advocated an alternative position both to Western capitalism and to the Soviet Union. “Barbarism” in Socialisme ou Barbarie is represented by Western capitalism and Soviet communism, as well as the new class of bureaucrats to which they had both given rise, albeit in different forms. Castoriadis’s socialist alternative to this barbarism was an autonomous socialism “based on the self-rule of factories by workers” and on the “assertive free development of the critical individual living in equality with others” (Bronner 1999, 214; Curtis 1992, xix).

23. The political foundations of the opposition are also played out in Aeschylus’s Persae, which dramatized the repercussions in Persia of the Persian defeat by the Athenian fleet in Salamina. In this tragedy, it is suggested that the Persians were defeated because they were prone to despotism, slavishness, and excess, whereas Athenian greatness was based on equality, freedom, and democracy and therefore destined to last through the centuries (E. Hall 1989, 10).

24. Admittedly, the functioning of the Athenian Empire differs from that of other large empires in Western history. It was based on a democratic political system and sought economic and cultural domination not so much over foreign (barbaric) nations but over other Greek nation-states.

25. The concept of empire pervades and extends over several of the civilizational standards laid out in this chapter, such as ideology, economy, politics, gender and sexuality, race, and culture.

26. When talking about modern European empires, we could distinguish two periods: the colonization of the Americas (1492 to the 1830s); and the colonization of Africa, Asia, and the Pacific (1730s until after World War II). Both periods generated strict oppositions between the European (Spanish, British, French) self and colonized others, drawn along diverse lines, such as geography (Europeans versus non-Europeans), religion (Christians versus infidels), culture and progress (civilized versus savages or barbarians), race, and so on (Mills 1997, 21).

27. The figure of the barbarian is particularly foregrounded in Euripides. In his tragedies, the projection of typical barbarian qualities such as foolishness, cowardice, and injustice enhanced the audience’s perception of the opposite virtues—wisdom, courage, and justice—as typically Greek/Athenian (J. Hall 2002, 177–78).

28. Elias writes on the threshold between the civilized and the barbaric: “The greater or lesser discomfort we feel towards people who discuss or mention their bodily functions more openly . . . is one of the dominant feelings expressed in the judgment ‘barbaric’ or ‘uncivilized.’ Such, then, is the nature of ‘barbarism and its discontents’ or, in more precise and less evaluative terms, the discontent with the different structure of affects, the different standard of repugnance which is still to be found today in many societies which we term ‘uncivilized’” (2000, 51).

29. For the relation and opposition between “human” and “animal,” see Agamben (2002).

30. The complex genealogy of the concepts of the human, humanity, and humanism, and the precise ways by which they produce their outside, exceeds the scope of this study.

31. For one analysis of encounters between European civilization and indigenous civilizations of America, and the cultural confrontations to which these encounters led, see Todorov (1984).

32. This quotation is by Eusebius, one of Porphyry’s great adversaries, who here indignantly reports what he claims were Porphyry’s own words (G. Clark 1999, 127).

33. For a detailed exploration of Byzantine writers’ perception of the West as barbarian, see Goffart (1981); see also the entry barbaros in Liddell and Scott (1996).

34. In 1537, Pope Paul III issued a bull that condemned as heretical the opinion that the American Indians could not receive the Christian faith, although this had a very limited effect on the behavior of the conquistadores (Jahoda 1999, 16).

35. According to Manning Marable, race, unlike ethnicity, is a passive affiliation (presented in Shohat and Stam 1994, 20).

36. For the definition of ethnicity, see Murji (2005, 112); for the definition of nation, see Abbé Sieyès (1789), quoted in Hindess (2005, 232).

37. Herodotus also questions Hellenicity as resting on a homogeneous ethnicity (J. Hall 2002, 190–91). In his conception of Hellenicity, cultural criteria (including language and religion) are promoted “to the same level as kinship” (193).

38. Plato’s views are expressed through the voice of the “Stranger” in the dialogue.

39. Despite Plato’s relativism in this passage, his other writings contain contradictions on this matter, which have led commentators to adopt different interpretations of his position. According to Julius Jüthner, for instance, Plato did maintain a belief in racial purity, which created an unbridgeable gap between Greeks and barbarians (Jüthner, presented in J. Hall 2002, 213).

40. Remarkably, in 1869, the English cultural critic Matthew Arnold uses the term “barbarian” as a positive signifier to refer to the aristocratic classes. He contends that all the qualities of the barbarians have been inherited by the aristocracy in his present-day England. He views the barbarians as a source of life and vigor for Europe, and as the true ancestors of the British:

The Barbarians, to whom we all owe so much, and who reinvigorated and renewed our worn-out Europe, had, as is well-known, eminent merits; and in this country, where we are for the most part sprung from the Barbarians, we have never had the prejudice against them which prevails among the races of Latin origin. (1966, 100)

Among the merits and qualities he ascribes to the barbarians (and thus to English aristocracy) are personal liberty and individualism, the care for the body and for manly exercises, vigor, good looks, chivalry, self-confidence, “high spirit,” and “choice manners.” The only flaw he finds with the barbarian disposition lies in the fact that barbarians have an “exterior culture,” not much concerned with the “powers of thought and feeling” (101).

41. The quotation is from “Beyond the Black River” (Howard, quoted in Miller 2006).

42. The quotation is from “Queen of the Black Coast” (Howard, quoted in Miller 2006).

43. E. Hall makes this point in her discussion of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon (1989, 205–6).

44. For the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race in the colonies, see McClintock (1995); and Stoler (1995).

45. For the sexual metaphors of penetration and conquest, which were used to describe the attitude of Westerners vis-à-vis the Orient, see also Said (2003, 44).

46. Some progressive models mentioned in this section could also be called “evolutionary.” “Evolution” is most notably inscribed in the discourse of the life sciences, and it is from evolutionary processes as understood by biologists that the concept has been transferred to the social sciences (Rose 2005, 117). What is implied in both “progress” and “evolution” is the idea of a gradual progression toward an improved state. This also suggests that historical change follows a logic of steps or stages and does not follow from radical breaks or revolutions (117).

47. The views of these historians on this issue are discussed in Hartog (2001, 80–81).

48. Narratives of progress from savagery, primitivism, and barbarism to civilization were very popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Such models were, for example, formulated in France by d’Holbach in 1770 and Diderot in 1776, or in England by Ferguson in 1767. The latter describes the progress of humanity as a movement from “rudeness” to civilization (Todorov 2010, 28).

49. A critical elaboration of this perception of indigenous peoples is developed by Fabian (1983).

50. In Persian Letters, which is both a critique of Europe and a reaffirmation of the otherness of the (non-European) barbarian, Montesquieu elaborates the ambivalent relation of the “barbarian” to Europe. On the one hand, the barbarian hordes threaten Europe; on the other hand, the barbarians have also been seen as “a source of innovation, strength and vigour” (Montesquieu, presented in Salter 2002, 22). For a detailed analysis of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, see also Boer (2004, 49–74).

51. In the Hellenistic period we encounter several challenges to, or reversals of, the opposition between Greek and barbarian, for instance, in Agatharchides of Cnidus (second century BCE) and Posidonius of Apamea, a Stoic philosopher and ethnographer of the first century BCE (Hartog 2001, 100–101). Such views are comparable to the ideals attached to the figure of the “noble savage,” which became popular in the eighteenth century.

52. Of course, one cannot generalize all attempted reversals as ultimately Eurocentric and unable to radically question European civilizational discourse. Each reversal needs to be examined separately.

53. White focuses on the notion of the “wild man.” Although the image of the wild man differs from that of the barbarian, many of White’s observations on the wild man can be extrapolated to the barbarian. White also discusses the similarities and differences between the two concepts (1972, 19–21).

54. White sees the interiorization of the wild man as a remythification, because it still functions as a projection of repressed anxieties and desires (1972, 7).

55. Freud, presented in Brown (2006, 163).

CHAPTER 4

1. The first version of the review-essay “Rigorous Study of Art” was written between July and December 1932, and a second version was published in Literaturblatt der Frankfurter Zeitung in July 1933. The essay is translated by Thomas Y. Levin (2005b).

2. Benjamin’s essay is a review of the first volume of Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen—a collection of art-historical essays from scholars of the Vienna school, which Benjamin saw as introducing a new method for the study of art. Benjamin perceived this method as a translation of his own critical project into art-historical practices (Levin 1988, 81).

3. On this point I agree with McLaughlin, who does not see a systematic theory of barbarism deriving from Benjamin’s uses of the concept in various contexts in his writings (2006, 5).

4. “Erfahrung und Armut” was written between spring and autumn 1933.

5. In my exploration of the notion of “experience” in this chapter I refer to the concept of Erfahrung in Benjamin, not Erlebnis. Benjamin elaborates the distinction between the two notions in “The Storyteller” (1936) and “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1940). Although they are both usually translated in English as “experience,” when Benjamin differentiates the two, he presents Erlebnis as a kind of immediate experience, lived through momentarily, while Erfahrung is something that has taken place as well as an ongoing kind of experience that enables new modes of reflecting, knowing, and understanding to emerge. The latter kind of experience is tied to the possibility of sharing and communicating, and it is precisely this experience and its communicability that have been lost with modernity, particularly after World War I.

6. According to the argument in “The Storyteller,” this recent poverty of experience has made storytelling a craft of the past.

7. Benjamin makes this point in relation to the work of Paul Klee, Adolf Loos, and Paul Scheerbart, who for him embody this creative, forward-looking spirit. It is noteworthy that Loos, whom Benjamin counts among the “good barbarians,” is also for Theodor Adorno an example of barbarism, but in a negative sense. According to Adorno, the merging of aesthetic beauty and real purposiveness (what he calls the “literalization” of art), as he sees it take place in the architectural theory of Loos, is barbaric: “Das Barbarische ist das Buchstäbliche” (The barbaric is the literal) (1970, 97, quoted in McLaughlin 2006, 7). Buildings built to serve nonartistic purposes are not aesthetically significant to him. In this context, barbarism for Adorno becomes synonymous with functionality in architecture. What Adorno sees as barbaric is barbaric for Benjamin too, but in a positive sense: this functionality is the source of aesthetic innovation (McLaughlin 2006, 7).

8. Van Alphen mentions, for example, Charles Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Paul Celan (2007, 341–42). On the same issue, see also Baer (2001).

9. The first version of the essay “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner Technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” was written between autumn and December 1935. The second version was composed between the end of 1935 and the beginning of February 1936. The third and last version is dated between spring 1936 and March/April 1939.

10. For the issue of distraction (in Benjamin and others) and its significance in modernity, see van Alphen (2007).

11. On this point, see also Cadava (1997, 47); and Düttmann (1994, 36).

12. The aesthetization of war finds its literary expression in the movement of futurism, especially in Marinetti’s manifesto on the Ethiopian colonial war—an ode to the beauty of war, parts of which Benjamin quotes in the epilogue to his essay “Work of Art.” The reasons for the fascist beautification of war, however, are not purely aesthetic. According to Benjamin, the actual reasons lie in the fact that war “can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale” and “makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources” while in both cases maintaining “the traditional property system” (1999b, 234).

13. In major German dictionaries, the most common entry for barbarism is Barbarei, which is generally defined as the opposite of civilization or culture. The second most common entry is Barbarismus (a mistake or foreign element in language). Barbarentum is relatively uncommon in contemporary German and has an archaic sound to it. According to the 1997 edition of Schulz and Basler’s dictionary, beginning at the end of the eighteenth century Barbarentum was used to denote the amount and distribution of foreigners in an area. Later in the nineteenth century, Barbarentum was used to signify primitivism, or, in the context of progressive models, a less-advanced state or social formation. Finally, in early twentieth-century usage the word was a synonym of Barbarei, signifying “tyranny” (Gewaltherrschaft des politischen Gegners), and, in particular, the dictatorship of the national socialists (Schulz and Basler 1997, 125). This could suggest that Benjamin opposes his positive Barbarentum not only to Barbarei but also to this particular use of Barbarentum. I do not have any evidence on how common this use of Barbarentum was at the time. However, considering the established use of Barbarei in German to refer to Nazi violence, and given that in the rest of Benjamin’s writings the barbarism associated with Nazism is expressed with the term Barbarei, I contend that his Barbarentum more likely counters the term Barbarei.

14. The barbarism within culture is pointed out in The Arcades Project (fragment N5a, 7) from a slightly different perspective: “Barbarism lurks in the very concept of culture—as the concept of a fund of values which is considered independent, not, indeed, of the production process in which these values originated, but of the one in which they survive. In this way they serve the apotheosis of the latter [word uncertain], barbaric as it may be” (Benjamin 1999a, 467–68) (Die Barbarei steckt im Begriff der Kultur selbst: als dem von einem Schatze von Werten, der unabhängig von dem, in welchem sie entstanden, aber unabhängig von dem, in welchem sie überdauern, betrachtet wird. Sie dienen auf diese Weise der Apotheose des letz[t]ern [?], wie barbarisch der immer sein mag; Benjamin 1991, 6:584). The statement is cryptic, especially because it is fragmented and lacks context. Benjamin seems to find barbarism in the alienation of values from the production process in which they are being consumed at a specific historical moment. Barbarei here appears to refer to the refusal to critically reflect on the values that one has internalized in a social system. As a result, values become reified within a culture that greets them as unchanging possessions instead of mobile entities, dependent on the changing context of their production and consumption. The same quotation from The Arcades Project is somewhat reformulated in Benjamin’s essay “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian” (1937). The term Barbarei is not used in that quotation, but the same condition is ascribed to the concept of Kultur: “The concept of culture—as the embodiment of creations considered independent, if not of the production process in which they originate, then of a production process in which they continue to survive—has a fetishistic quality. Culture appears reified” (2006a, 267). In the context of the latter essay, it becomes clearer that Benjamin sees barbarism in the reification of culture—in “the disintegration of culture into goods” that become objects of possession (267). The barbarism of this bourgeois fetishism prevents people from having any form of genuine experience.

15. Another use of the concept of barbarism, which bears similarities with the way Benjamin describes Barbarismen in “The Work of Art,” appears in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 1928). In his preface, Trauerspiel is labeled as “strange or even barbaric” (1985, 49–50; for the German, see Benjamin 1991, vol. 1, bk. 1, 230). Scholars see Trauerspiel as a “caricature” or a “misunderstanding” of classical tragedy, whereas Benjamin sees it “according to the peculiar logic of ‘renewal or rebirth in decline’” (quoted in McLaughlin 2006, 11). In “The Work of Art,” Benjamin places Barbarismen in art in the same context of decadent epochs. It is particularly during decadent or critical times that “the extravagances and crudities of art” (Barbarismen) thrive and give rise to new and revolutionary artistic forms (1999b, 230).

16. For the creative force of language in Benjamin, see Benjamin’s “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” (2004); Bracken (2002); and Menninghaus (1980). In “On Language as Such” Benjamin connects the creative nature of language with the creative act of God in Genesis and argues that at its origin language was meant to produce, not just describe. In Genesis, Benjamin contends, the creation of man seems to be the product of language as such: “In this ‘Let there be’ and in the words ‘He named’ at the beginning and the end of the act, the deep and clear relation of the creative act to language appears each time. With the creative omnipotence of language it begins, and at the end language, as it were, assimilates the created, names it. Language is therefore both creative and the finished creation; it is word and name” (2004, 68). For an analysis of Benjamin’s “metaphysics” of language, see de Vries (2002, 266–75).

17. Benjamin’s call for “mobilization” echoes Ernst Jünger’s concept of “total mobilization,” which Benjamin explicitly refers to in his essay “Theories of German Fascism” (2005a, 318). Jünger, an intriguing and controversial figure in German literature and social theory, wrote the essay “Total Mobilization,” which first appeared in the anthology Krieg und Krieger (War and warrior), edited by Jünger himself in 1930. The essay studies the relationship between society, war, and technology and can be seen as a prefiguration of totalitarian societies. It attracted critical reactions both from traditional conservatives and left-wing critics (such as Benjamin). John Armitage remarks that for Jünger the “total mobilization of the state’s military and social resources” that typified the post–World War I period “in Jünger’s terms . . . firstly caused the end of nineteenth century limited war and what might be termed ‘partial mobilization,’ that is, of rigid demarcations between civilianization and militarization, and secondly brought about the downfall of the old European monarchies” (Armitage 2003, 194–95; Jünger 1993, 125).

18. Benjamin’s image of World War I soldiers returning from the front in silence illustrates this impotence of the language of experience.

19. Benjamin’s ideas on the mobilization of language in “Experience and Poverty” also echo Jünger’s famous work Der Arbeiter (The worker), published in 1932, shortly before Benjamin wrote “Experience and Poverty.” In it, Jünger sought to explain the crisis of the postwar bourgeois society from a nationalist, right-wing perspective. The crisis of European civilization after World War I was intensified by total disorder brought about by the destructive force of technology (Werneburg and Phillips 1992, 48). Jünger saw technology as the only force not subject to crisis and disintegration. Since he saw no alternative to technological civilization, he pleaded for an assimilation and utilization of the forces of technology for a “revolutionary nationalism” (47). In this context, Jünger’s figure of the “total work-character” embodies social transformation and even a new form of humanity, consisting of highly functionalized and nonindividualized, nondifferentiated human beings (Jünger 1932, 100; Werneburg and Phillips 1992, 48–49). Jünger’s ideas here come close to Benjamin’s thoughts in “Experience and Poverty,” although it is certainly not the same “revolutionary nationalism” that Benjamin has in mind when he proposes a “mobilization” of language. If technology is given the right to participate in the act of naming—which is an act of creation—Benjamin hopes that the new humanity will not be Jünger’s automated nonindividualized workers but perhaps more like Scheerbart’s “completely new, lovable, and interesting creatures.” Benjamin goes along with Jünger’s idea of mobilization but aspires to subvert Jünger’s desired outcome.

20. Cf. terms like “brotherhood,” “sisterhood,” “parenthood,” or the communal sense in “neighborhood.”

21. There are Nietzschean echoes in Benjamin’s figure of the destructive character. Cf. the following quotation from Thus Spake Zarathustra (Also Sprach Zarathustra, 1885): “New paths do I tread, a new speech cometh unto me; tired have I become—like all creators—of the old tongues. No longer will my spirit walk on worn-out soles” (2008, 71) (Neue Wege gehe ich, eine neue Rede kommt mir; müde wurde ich, gleich allen Schaffenden, der alten Zungen. Nicht will mein Geist mehr auf abgelaufnen Sohlen wandeln; 1994, 84). The fact that Nietzsche’s prophet-philosopher refers to himself as a “creator” brings him closer to Benjamin’s “barbarian” (in “Experience and Poverty”), who, unlike the “destructive character,” destroys the old in order to create something new.

22. Hegel’s words are quoted in Benjamin’s essay “Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian” (2006a, 270; also quoted in Wohlfarth 1994, 163). Benjamin quotes this sentence from Hegel to refer to the “eristische Dialektik” (eristic dialectic) (Benjamin 1991, vol. 2, bk. 2, 481).

23. For the relation of the collector with tradition, see Arendt (1999, 48–49).

24. Wohlfarth argues that Benjamin is not against “authentic” traces but rather pleads for the destruction of their secondary substitutes, the dreadful accumulation of which can be seen in the artificial paradise of the bourgeois interior (1994, 172). Based on that, one may argue that the barbarian destroys the secondary traces, while the collector gathers authentic ones.

25. For the notions of tradition and destruction in Benjamin, see Düttmann (1994, especially 54–55).

26. Here Benjamin crosses paths with Martin Heidegger, who also envisions a “tradition that does not give itself up to the past, but thinks of the present” (Heidegger 1962, 8; translated and quoted in Arendt 1999, 50).

27. The term Umwerthung makes its first appearance in Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. Thereafter, it is used in The Antichrist, Genealogy of Morals, Twilight, and Ecce Homo (Large 2010, 5).

28. In his “Letter to Gershom Scholem on Franz Kafka,” Benjamin writes about Kafka’s relation to tradition in a way that captures his own relation to tradition, not as a transmission of doctrines or clear-cut knowledge but as a practice of listening and capturing “snatches of things”—indistinct elements that are reinvented in the present: “Kafka listened attentively to tradition. . . . This listening requires great effort because only indistinct messages reach the listener. There is no doctrine to be learned, no knowledge to be preserved. What are caught flitting by are snatches of things not meant for any ear. This points to one of the rigorously negative aspects of Kafka’s work. (This negative side is doubtless far richer in potential than the positive)” (2006a, 326).

29. The term “illocutionary force” belongs to J. L. Austin’s speech act theory and refers to the performative force of an utterance—the “performance of an act in saying something”—as opposed to the “locutionary aspect” of an utterance that conveys meaning (1980, 94–108, particularly 99).

30. I primarily take my cue from Venuti (1996b, 1994, 1995).

31. Venuti borrows the notion of the “remainder” from Lecercle (1990) to refer to the irreducible and untranslatable difference left behind by the translation (Venuti 1996a, 91).

32. Jacobs notes in relation to “The Task of the Translator” that the essay demands a “violent translation of every term promising the key to its definition” (1993, 129).

33. It is noteworthy that a similar formulation can be found in the concluding verse of C. P. Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” (1904), the subject of the following chapter. As the barbarians fail to show up while everyone is waiting for them, the poem ends with the words: “And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? / They were, those people, a kind of solution” (translated by Keeley and Sherrard 1992, 19; emphasis added). This indeterminate formulation—“a kind of”—is a crucial detail in the poem.

34. Translation, Venuti argues, particularly of conceptually dense philosophical discourse, “can never simply express ideas without simultaneously destabilizing and reconstituting them” (1996b, 25). On the same issue, see also Venuti (1995). On the relation of philosophy and translation, see A. Benjamin (1989); as well as Steiner (1975).

35. For this notion of critique in Benjamin, see Bracken (2002, 341).

36. Benjamin’s motto in German reads: “Immer radikal, niemals konsequent” (1978, 1:425). Benjamin wrote this in a letter to Gershom Scholem on May 26, 1926, to describe his attitude to all things that matter.

37. Benjamin makes this comment in relation to the new schools of architecture, which try to transform bourgeois homes and their inhabitants.

38. Quoted in Arendt (1999, 52). For the original, see Benjamin (1978, 1:330).

39. There are many—mythical or historical—narratives from Greek antiquity in which the oracle’s predictions are not fulfilled. These “misfires” are ascribed to a “wrong” interpretation of the oracle’s words by those seeking consultation. The fact is, however, that the oracle’s prophecies can be interpreted in contradictory ways, because their formulation usually is open to more than one interpretation.

40. “The Destructive Character” is not a “well-developed characterization” but a text full of fragmentary and provocative formulations. The style of writing causes misunderstandings “that it neither seeks nor avoids.” Therefore, the text itself proceeds exactly in the same manner as the destructive character; it does not just describe this character but performs it by employing a “destructive style” (Wohlfarth 1994, 178).

CHAPTER 5

1. With the term “history” or “discourse of history” I refer to dominant academic conceptions of history in the West. To be sure, the term constitutes a generalization and an artificial abstraction from a complex network of heterogeneous narratives and modes of writing about the past. Although its use cannot easily be avoided, I try to problematize it in this chapter. The same holds for the “discourse of civilization.”

2. Although the theory of the performative is used throughout this study, it is here laid out in more detail due to its central role in this chapter in relation to iterability.

3. The terms “performative” and “speech act” in J. L. Austin’s theory refer to an utterance that does what it designates (e.g., in the utterance “I promise to protect you,” one performs the promise by uttering these words). Performatives are opposed to constative utterances, which describe, state, or represent something else. Although he distinguishes two categories of utterances—constative and performative—Austin concludes that all utterances, even constative statements, are to some degree performative. The constative and the performative can thus be considered aspects of the same utterance.

4. For a concise presentation of the travels of the notion of the performative in theory, see Culler (2000).

5. Words like “senators,” “praetors,” and “consuls” in the poem allude to ancient Rome.

6. See Haas (1982); and Savidis, “Cavafy, Gibbon and Byzantium” (1985, 96–97).

7. These three works are existentialist meditations revolving around the process of waiting, which becomes the crux of their plot. The Tartar Steppe tells the story of the slow and painful disillusionment of Lieutenant Giovanni Drogo, who is assigned to an old fortress on the country’s frontier where the desert starts. The protagonist longs for military glory and spends years waiting for an attack by the Tartars, who in the old days were rumored to live in the desert. Nothing ever happens at the fortress, and Drogo wastes his life waiting for the enemy. In Beckett’s absurdist play Waiting for Godot, two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait in vain for someone named Godot, whose arrival is (eternally) deferred. Gracq’s Opposing Shore stages a mysterious atmosphere of a lurking menace between two imaginary Mediterranean nations that have been in a state of dormant warfare with one another for centuries. No frontal attack from the opposing shore takes place in the course of this novel.

8. In an anthology of poems inspired by Cavafy and edited by Nasos Vagenas (2000), fourteen of the selected poems respond to, or restage, Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians.” The poets of these fourteen poems originate from Argentina, Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Egypt, Great Britain, Holland, New Zealand, Romania, Serbia, and the United States.

9. See O’Connell (2008) for O’Connell’s poem and a discussion of its parallels with Cavafy’s poem by O’Connell himself.

10. “Pakeha” are New Zealanders of European ancestry.

11. Felman relates the promise of proper meaning with the figure of the metaphor and traces the deconstruction of metaphor and its transfiguration into anaphora through a series of unkept promises in Don Juan (2003, 24–25).

12. Some critics argue that a “polyphonic” dialogue is at play in the poem: there are not just two but several people who pose and answer the questions. Savidis considers this option and rejects the idea of only two interlocutors, which, in his view, would mean that the questions should “be ascribed to a person of extremely low intelligence to which another person, endowed with infinite patience, replies” (my translation from an essay by Savidis [1985, 64]). Savidis eventually states his preference for a third line of interpretation, according to which the questions are uttered by the same person who answers them in the tone of an internal monologue. The latter view is also shared by Seferis (1974, 394–95) and Karaoglou (1978, 302). Tsirkas argues that although the entire dialogue takes place between two speakers, in the final two lines we hear the direct voice of “the poet” (1971, 326). My preference goes to the interpretive option of two speakers, which in my view embody the tension between two forces within the discourse of civilization: a force of questioning and critique (the first speaker) and a force of authority, repeating and confirming the Empire’s “truths” (the second speaker).

13. For a metrical analysis of the poem, see Mackridge (2008, 287–89).

14. The first quotation is from Coetzee’s novel (quoted in Spivak 2003, 22). The second is Spivak’s (23).

15. The Magistrate also views the desert as a space in which his encounter with the barbarians takes place on equal terms. When he meets the barbarians in the desert and hands over the girl to them, he remarks, “I have never before met northerners on their own ground on equal terms” (Coetzee 2000, 78).

16. Saunders makes the same argument with regard to the status of the foreigner (2001, 218).

17. See, for example, Ryan (2002); Cohn (1999); Barthes (1981); Booth (1961); Ferguson (1997); Foucault (1995); Hayward (1994); Lamarque and Olsen (1994); and Herrnstein Smith (1978). Hayden White in Metahistory (1973) describes historical discourse not as an accurate representation of the past but as a series of creative texts structured by tropes, narrative strategies, and ideological underpinnings that form our historical understanding. White elaborated and nuanced his arguments in Metahistory in two collections of essays, Tropics of Discourse (1978) and The Content of the Form (1987).

18. The translation is mine. In this phrase that Lechonitis ascribes to Cavafy himself, the Greek phrase for what I translate as “historical poet” (ποιητής ιστορικός) could either be translated as “historical poet” or as “poet-historian.”

19. The extreme attention to detail and love for historical precision in his poems; the extensive use of primary sources; his “archaeological” inspiration from inscriptions, ancient literary works, and objects; the full names and genealogical information for (historical or invented) characters; and precise chronological markers and indications of places are some of the ways in which Cavafy’s historical sense manifests itself.

20. See, for example, Mackridge (2007, xxvi–xxvii). Cavafy is mainly interested in the post-classical era (Alexander’s successor states and the Byzantine era) with its decadent empires—eras underrepresented in dominant historical accounts.

21. The poem was written in December 1898 but was not published and circulated by the poet until 1904.

22. For this contextual interpretation of “Waiting for the Barbarians,” see Tsirkas (1971, 48–54).

23. Savidis suggests a possible historical connection of the poem with the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, a thirty-day war between Greece and the Ottoman Empire over the status of Crete (still under Turkish occupation), which Greece wished to annex. But Savidis also views the poem in a broader light, as thematizing the decadence of Western civilization (1985, 227).

24. For example, the poem is cited in the catalogue of Anthony Caro’s sculpture exhibition “Barbarians” (2002). Edward Said’s daughter recited it during his funeral as one of her father’s favorite poems. The poem also gave its title to a collection of essays on Said, published after his death (Ertür and Sökmen 2008).

25. Critics such as Northrop Frye and Fredric Jameson have argued that every interpretation of a text can be considered allegorical, since it tries to make sense of textual images and events by attaching ideas to them. Frye’s and Jameson’s views on the matter are discussed by Attridge (2004, 36). Nevertheless, Attridge contends that a nonallegorical reading would still be possible. His example is Coetzee’s reading of Robinson Crusoe in Foe (36).

26. Van Alphen prefers the term “affective reading” over Attridge’s “literal reading” and convincingly argues that a literal reading can also be invested with meanings and ideas, just as an allegorical reading can (2008, 29–30). For van Alphen, an affective reading is attentive to textual elements and narrative techniques. However, it does not approach these as “‘objective’ textual structures” (as structuralism did) but is interested in how these elements transmit affects to the reader (27).

27. The emphasis on “war,” “vengeance,” and “justice” is in the original. The remaining emphasis is mine.

28. In her article, Saunders provides an elaborate discussion of the concept of the foreign in Coetzee’s novel, which often pertains to that of barbarism.

29. Derrida notes that this freedom of literature is related to the modern idea of democracy in the West (1992, 37).

30. The distinction between “serious” and “non-serious” discourse can be traced back to Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1962) and the discussions that his views triggered among philosophers. Austin makes a distinction between “serious” or “ordinary” use of language and “non-serious” or “parasitic” use (of which typical examples are literary texts). He makes clear that his speech act theory can be applied only to serious utterances. Non-serious use of language (including literature) is excluded from his theory (1980, 22). In “Signature, Event, Context” and Limited Inc Derrida performs a deconstructive critique of the serious/non-serious and normal/parasitic oppositions.

31. On the theme of torture in the novel, see the studies by Moses (1993) and Wenzel (1996).

32. With “uptake” Austin refers to the reception of an utterance by the audience.

33. White argues that the desire for the barbarian derives from the classical tradition (Greek and Roman), whereas the anxiety and fear for the other is more typical for theonomic traditions (the Christian and Hebrew) (1972,10).

34. Renato Poggioli entertains the possibility of a third voice (that of the poet). He argues that the poet “looks at decadence not as an actor but as a spectator doubly removed, and hence able to afford both a sardonic and an urbane wit” (1959, 148). The possibility of a third voice reflecting on the preceding dialogue can be supported by the similar structure of other poems by Cavafy.

35. Decapentasyllabic verse is a common metric form in modern Greek poetry, comprising fifteen syllables in iambic verse. It has been the primary meter of traditional and folk poetry in Greece since the Byzantine period. Based on a metrical and typographic analysis of the poem, Mackridge argues that in the two final lines the voices of the first and second speaker come together, but he chooses not to personify the voices in the dialogue by ascribing them to either real or fictional characters (2008, 289).

36. My translation of Cavafy’s own comments on the poem, published by Savidis in an interview, “O Kavafis ekfrazei ton meizona Ellinismo” (Cavafy expresses the greater Hellenism), in the Greek newspaper Ta Nea, April 23, 1983.

CHAPTER 6

1. I have not been able to determine the date of Linda Sutton’s painting.

2. Ned Rorem’s piece (for medium voice and piano) does not follow Cavafy’s original text but an English translation of the poem.

3. The intellectual and performative power that van Alphen ascribes to art does not entail a personification of cultural objects. When I write about artworks in this study, it is not the works themselves that “speak” or “think.” Rather, they trigger or inspire a mode of visual thinking or knowing that I try to capture and articulate, to the extent that it can be verbalized. As Attridge argues, when we ascribe consciousness or knowing capacities to works of art, what is really at stake is the staging of our pursuit of knowledge, and the work’s refusal to “satisfy the thirst for knowledge that it generates” (2009, 32).

4. Geers has been described as a defiant artist, a “rebel,” an “anarchist,” a “responsible terrorist” (Neumaier 2001, 96); a “cultural terrorist” (Sans and Geers 2000, 270); the “thorn” or the “itch” in the institution (Geers, quoted in Neumaier 2001, 99). All these labels can be attributed to his controversial artistic and performative practices. These include throwing a brick through a gallery window, installing an electric fence in several group shows, placing texts with bomb threats in museums, and exhibiting a pornographic centerfold on which he ejaculated his semen (see, for example, Kerkham 2000, 30). Geers presents himself as a barbarian within the art world, trying to destabilize the system from within.

5. According to the Greek myth, the Minotaur devoured the Athenian youths and maidens sent regularly as a tribute to King Minos. With the help of the king’s daughter, Ariadne, who gave him a ball of string, Theseus managed to kill the Minotaur and find his way out of the labyrinth.

6. Max Weber questions the Enlightenment’s view of progress and happiness and views Western civilization as a highly rational and bureaucratically organized social order, an “iron cage” in which people are trapped (1999, 100–104).

7. On the invisible workings of ideology, see Barthes’s seminal work Mythologies (1957).

8. My translation of the German “Die Natur kann und soll sich hier ihr Territorium zurückerobern.”

9. Monastic life is, of course, rather exclusionary, as it seeks isolation and distance from worldliness. If we follow this line of thinking, the exclusionary character of the monastery is enhanced and negatively tinted by the exclusionary violence the labyrinth suggests.

10. The Teutoburg Forest, which is situated in the same area, has become the symbol of the famous battle, in which an alliance of Germanic tribes ambushed and wiped out a Roman army of three entire legions (9 CE). The battle established the Rhine as the boundary between Romans and Germans. As a result, the borders of the Roman Empire and its sphere of influence were limited to the territory below the Rhine. Another historical occurrence in the region, with significant consequences for the reordering of Europe’s borders, was the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 and led to the division of Europe into single sovereign states. For these historical allusions, see Winkelmann (2001).

11. In yet another association evoked by its location, the installation can be related to the division imposed by the “iron curtain” between Eastern and Western Europe. Notably, Geers initially wanted to place a border post from the Berlin Wall at the center of the labyrinth.

12. For a political history of barbed wire, see also Razac (2003); and Netz (2004).

13. The juxtaposition of colonialism and World War II also draws attention to practices of external and internal exclusion in Europe. Western civilization has identified its barbarian others both outside and within the European space. World War II—“this civil war fought by European civilization against itself”—is a case in point (S. Weber 1997, 92).

14. The effect of haunting as a constant “coming back” of history in the present is similar to what Mieke Bal has called “preposterous history”: an act of reversal that “puts the chronologically first (pre-) as an aftereffect behind (post-) its later recycling” (1999, 6–7).

15. Sacco’s work has appeared in several Biennales and other major exhibitions in museums and galleries worldwide, including Chile, Denmark, Argentina, Guatemala, Mexico, Brazil, Spain, England, and France. Sacco has also been a professor of twentieth-century Latin American Art at the University of Rosario in Argentina (see the artist’s Web site, www.gracielasacco.net/).

16. Stephen Cohen Gallery, www.stephencohengallery.com/scg-archive/scg-2004.html. While heliography is commonly used in the development of architectural blueprints, Sacco developed her own anti-orthodox heliographic method in the 1980s, as she was looking for a way to print photographic images on a variety of surfaces. Sacco has also written a book in Spanish and English, Escrituras solares: La heliografía en el campo artístico (Sun writings: Heliography in the artistic field, 1994).

17. The installation has been exhibited at the 23rd International Biennial of Art of São Paulo (1996) and at the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston (2000). Recently, it was exhibited at Museum Morsbroich in Leverkusen, Germany, as part of the exhibition “Radical Shift: Political and Social Upheaval in Argentinian Art since the 1960s” (2011).

18. The term “intersemiotic translation” (or transmutation) was introduced by Roman Jakobson and refers to the “interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems” (1971, 429).

19. There are extensive theoretical discussions of the “gaze,” from Sartre (2001) and Foucault (1975), to Silverman (1996), Bryson (1983), and Bal (1991, 2002).

20. For a more extensive theorization of the “stare,” see Garland-Thomson (2009).

21. This kind of relation yields what Bal elsewhere calls a “second-person narrative” of an image—a narrative that can account for the agency of the image without falling back into the authoritarian elitist claims of the critic or into the pitfalls of ascribing intentionality either to the object or to its creator (2002, 281–82).

22. Facundo narrates the life of the gaucho Juan Facundo Quiroga, who terrorized provincial Argentina in the 1820s and 1830s. As Kathleen Ross points out, Facundo was also written to “denounce the tyranny of the Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas” (2003, 17). In the book, Facundo Quiroga is portrayed as barbaric and opposed to progress because of his rejection of European ideals, which are identified with city culture, particularly that of Buenos Aires (Sarmiento 2003, 99). The book is not only a critique of Rosas’s dictatorship but also a detailed exploration of Argentinian history and culture, read through this dichotomy. “Sarmiento’s diagnosis is that Argentina is beset by the struggle between civilization and barbarism and that Rosas and his regime incarnate the latter” (Echevarría 2003, 12). Sarmiento poses the hope of civilization against the crude aspects of a brutal caudillo culture, which was dominant at the time. European immigration was for him the answer to the prevalent barbarism in his country (9).

23. “Contemporary art” at the time Bourriaud writes (2002) is the art of the 1990s, to which Sacco’s installation also belongs. His argument, however, is also applicable to artistic practices of the new millennium.

CHAPTER 7

1. For the sake of brevity, in this chapter I refer to “The New Barbarians” as Gómez-Peña’s project, even though several artists were involved in the making of these portfolios.

2. This information is drawn from Gómez-Peña (1996, 2000, 2005).

3. From the short description of the project on the artist’s Web site, www.pochanostra.com/photo-performances/.

4. The first four of these portfolios are published on Gómez-Peña’s Web site. A selection of images from the last three portfolios is published in Gómez-Peña et al. (2006). Images that are mentioned but not reprinted in this book can be accessed on the Web site of Gómez-Peña and his performance troupe, www.pochanostra.com/photo-performances/. These portfolios were created by Gómez-Peña and his troupe, in collaboration with other international performance artists and photographers. “Ethno-Techno: Evil Others and Identity Thieves” was shot in San Francisco with photographer James McCaffrey in 2004; “Post-Mexico en X-paña,” in Madrid with photographer Javier Caballero in 2005; “The Chi-Canarian Expo” (in black and white), in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria with photographer Teresa Correa in 2006. “Tucuman-Chicano” was developed in the Argentine city of Tucuman with twenty Argentinian performance artists in 2005. “The Chica-Iranian Project” was created with four Chicano and three Iranian artists in San Francisco. “Epcot-El Alamall” was shot with photographer Ric Malone in 2004.

5. All information about “The New Barbarian Collection” performance in this paragraph is from the essay “The New Barbarian Collection Fall 2007” as published on the artist’s Web site, www.pochanostra.com/dialogues/page/6/.

6. Mignolo (1998) develops this notion to refer to theory outside or from the margins of the West that challenges Western discourses.

7. The Chicano community, with whom Gómez-Peña is affiliated, is a syncretic border community of American-born and Hispanic-cultured peoples of Mexican descent. It has its own particular culture and language, which is a mixture of US elements with bits of a culture and language they imagine as Mexican, although they have not lived in Mexico themselves. Being Chicano thus implies the struggle of trying to be accepted in an Anglo-dominated US culture and at the same time maintaining a sense of identity in differentiation from mainstream US culture.

8. The word “patriot” derives from the ancient Greek patris (fatherland), which derives from patēr (father).

9. The phrase “yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir” has been used to describe an obedient, servile, or cowardly subordinate. It is attested from 1910 and used to be common in the British Royal Navy. The phrase is also found in the nursery rhyme “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.” See “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baa,_Baa,_Black_Sheep.

10. On this issue, see Butler (2000).

11. The subject of the pietà is primarily found in sculpture (with Michelangelo’s version being the most famous) but has a long tradition in Western painting as well.

12. The same persona appears in several photo-performances in this project. In one of them, this figure (played by Gómez-Peña himself) is identified in the title as El indio amazonico.

13. La piedad intercontinental presents a half-naked woman, her chest pierced with nails, holding a dead black man with bandaged hands. La piedad intercontinental (invertida) is a reverse iteration of the previous image, with the black man in the role of Mary and the woman lying dead in his arms, with a crooked pair of scissors falling from her hand.

14. Gómez-Peña has referred to both Islam and Christianity as “two forms of dangerous fundamentalisms” (2005, 278).

15. Jacques Derrida first used the notion “Babelian performance” in “Des tours de Babel” (1985). In Derrida’s use, “Babelian performance” describes the paradox in the “translatable-untranslatable” name of “Babel,” which “at once translates and does not translate itself.” “Babel” performs for Derrida the necessity and impossibility of translation (175).

16. Aztlan is the mythical place of origin of the Aztec peoples.

17. Amossy and Heidingsfeld (1984) focus on stereotypical representations in texts, but their views can be extrapolated in the study of stereotypes in visual material as well.

18. This article was developed into a book with the same title.

19. Menudo is a hearty, spicy Mexican soup, considered an effective cure for hangovers. Chowder is also a thick, hearty, chunky soup, usually with fish and potatoes.

20. For her use of “catachresis,” see Spivak (1993, especially 29, 60, 71, 127–28, 137–39, 161, 298); see also Morton (2003, 34).

21. The first quotation is part of the OED definition of catachresis, quoted in Spivak (1993, 29). The second quotation is from Spivak (1993, 128).

22. “One of the offshoots of the deconstructive view of language,” Spivak argues, “is the acknowledgement that the political use of words . . . is irreducibly catachrestic” (1993, 161). As a result, the task of a feminist political philosophy, according to Spivak, should not be to grasp the proper or true meaning of a name or to show how this proper meaning “always eludes our grasp” but “to accept the risks of catachresis” (161). The concept of catachresis could easily turn into a general position that acknowledges the catachrestic nature of all language. Spivak, however, warns against turning catachresis into a “totalizing masterword” (71).

23. In this sense, the concept of catachresis comes close to Spivak’s notion of “strategic essentialism” as “a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest” (1996, 214).

24. Jill Bennett explores how animation is able to perform a similar operation: accommodating extreme, even unwatchable violence and simultaneously deadening the effects of this violence (2005, 116).

25. One of the origins of the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt is the ostranenie (making-strange or defamiliarizing) of the Russian formalists, which employs estrangement to fight habitual looking and a certain “perceptual numbness” and make people look at familiar things with a fresh eye (Jameson 1998, 39).

26. The staging of violence may be typical for US culture but is certainly not unique to it. A striking example of staged and recorded violence from outside the United States that comes to mind are the videotaped kidnappings and beheadings of victims in Iraq as “a media tool for exerting asymmetric pressure on various states” (Appadurai 2006, 12).

27. In a dialogue with Lisa Wolford entitled “The Mindfields of Dystopia: The Pervasive Effects of 9/11,” Gómez-Peña points out that even the meaning of terms like “transgressive,” “radical,” “extreme,” or “revolutionary” is changing. This is partly due to the American culture of excess, in which there seems to be nothing left to transgress. But it is also due to the fact that these terms have been invested “with the demonizing meanings of the Bush doctrine and the Patriot Act.” After 9/11, terms like “transgressive” or “extreme” are associated with terrorism. As a result, artists are forced to “tone down” their vocabulary and images so that they don’t “‘offend’ American patriots” (Gómez-Peña 2005, 273). Gómez-Peña tries to reclaim these concepts for his artistic practices.

28. Benjamin’s principle in German reads: “Immer radikal, niemals konsequent.” Benjamin wrote this in a letter to Gershom Scholem on May 29, 1926 (Benjamin 1978, 425).