Midwest Modern Language Association

Unpacking My Library Again Author(s): Homi Bhabha Source: The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 28, No. 1, Identities (Spring, 1995), pp. 5-18 Published by: Midwest Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1315240 Accessed: 18/09/2009 22:44
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Unpacking My LibraryAgain
Homi Bhabha
"Iam unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredomof order.... InsteadI must With these words, borrowed ask you to join me in the disorderof crates." I ask you to partifrom WalterBenjamin's My Library," essay "Unpacking tension between the poles of order cipate momentarilyin the "dialectical and disorder"that have marked my life and my work these past two months, since arrivingin Chicago.As I drew out books from cratesin the most unlikely pairings-Maud Ellmann'sTheHungerArtistsinterleaved - the questionspressed:Does the with PeterCarey'sTheFatManinHistory orderof books determinethe orderof things?Whatkind of historyof oneself and one's times is coded in the collecting of books? Driven by these thoughts,I was led to a somewhat unlikely, yet intriguing,readingof BenThe inspiredflaneur,you will remember, jamin'sconcludingparagraphs. of his wanderingworld throughthe cosmopolitandisconjuresup images orderand discoveryof his old books:"Riga, Naples, Munich,Danzig,Moscow, Florence, Basel, Paris... memories of the roomswhere these books had been housed,"only to remindus, as Benjamindoes, that for the collector "theacquisitionof an old book is its rebirth."' It was then that it struckme, unpackingmy own library- memories of book-buying in Bombay, Oxford, London, Hyberabad, Champaignof our books that makes of us Urbana,Jyavaskala- that it is the "disorder" to what WalterBencommitted irredeemable"vernacular" cosmopolitans In as "the renewal of existence." subtle describes ways that disorder jamin and the shelved order of the the challenges displaces Dewey decimal study, that which us we are cosmopolitansof a more "universystem, persuades connection that I am suggestingbetween a academic cast. The formal sal," a kind of transdisciplinary and revisionarycosmopolitanismis pedagogy of new and must wait for another occasion. My purpose book, part my here is more circumstantial,even anecdotal,but not without a relevance to a kind of contingentdis-orderedhistorical"dwelling' bestowed upon us of the most that we collect books interesting today. by many As I unpackmy book crate,which is beginningto sound more and more like Pandora's box, two texts emerge in an unexpected synchronicity:one War-Time" fromher volume old, the othernew - AdrienneRich's"Eastern

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and Cosmopolitanism," published with wide-rangingresponses in The BostonReview.In their differentways, Rich and Nussbaum propose that our contemporaryhistoricalmoment requiresto be read, and framed, in translationaltemporalitiesof the "new-old," or "time-lag," or the "projective-past," concepts I'vetried to develop in TheLocationof Culture. I was struck initially by a certain bookish "dis-order" that becomes, in both texts, the primal scene for making a map of the late modern world. Adrienne Rich writes:
ignorantlyJewish, tryingto graspthe world TheBallad throughbooks:Jude the Obscure, of Reading Goal,EleanorRoosevelt's My Story.2

An Atlas of the Difficult World, and Martha Nussbaum's essay "Patriotism

ForMarthaNussbaum,it is the Cynics,the Stoics,Kantand Rabindranath novel TheHomeand the World-a motley, ill-fittinggroupdespite Tagore's their cosmopolitansympathies,her criticshave pointed out- that must be the "vivid yoked togetherto revive the "veryold ideal of cosmopolitanism," of It is the of difference."3 these books," imagining contingency "un-packed their concatenation and that a shared belief contestation, produce through in the need for Benjamin's ethical and aesthetic imperative:"therenewal of life"throughrelocation, dislocation, and re-situation. ForRichand Nussbaum, such a renewal leads to a "global" reorientation of the patrioticor nationalistperspective, but, for both, some difficult,unin the cateanswered questions remain:What is the sign of "humanness" of of the Where does the gory cosmopolitan? subject global inquiry, or it from? To what relation? From where does it does bear injury, speak claim responsibility? And here the resemblancebetween them ends. ForNussbaum,the "identity"of cosmopolitanismdemands a spatial imaginary:the "self"at the center of a series of concentric circles that move through the various cycles of familial, ethnic, and communalaffiliationto "thelargestone, that of humanity as a whole."The task of the citizen of the world, she writes, lies in making human beings more like our "fellowcity dwellers,"basing our deliberationson "thatinterlockingcommonality." In her attempt to avoid nationalistor patrioticsovereignty, Nussbaum that is profoundly provincial, provincial in a embraces a "universalism" too readilyassumedthe "givenness" of historical sense. Nussbaum specific - as the Satrap of a benign, belated a commonalitythat centerson the "self" concentric liberalbenevolence- as it geniallygeneratesits "cosmopolitan" circles of equal measure and comparableworth. But who are our "fellow city dwellers"in the global sense? The eighteen or nineteen million refugees who lead their unhomely lives in borrowed and barricadeddwell-

Again UnpackingMy Library

ings? The hundred million migrants, of whom over half are fleeing poverty and gender persecution world-wide? The twenty million who have fled health and ecological disasters?4 These "extreme" conditions are not at the limits of the cosmopolitan world, as much as they emphasize a certain liminality in the identity or subject of cosmopolitanism that is mobilized by Nussbaum. It is a subject that makes possible social identificapeculiarly free of the complex "affect" tion and affiliation. She neglects those identities [that] "arisefrom fissures in the larger social fabric," as Richard Sennet suggests in his response to Nussbaum; "[they contain] its contradictions and injustices. . . . they remain necessarily incomplete versions of any individual's particular experience."5 And here lies the difference in Adrienne Rich's cosmopolitan subject: I'ma canal in Europewhere bodies are floating I'ma mass grave a life that returns I'ma table set with room for the Stranger I'ma field with cornersleft for the landless.... I'man immigranttailorwho says A coat is not a pieceof clothonly..... I have dreamedof Zion I'vedreamedof world revolution I'ma corpse dredgedfrom a canal in Berlin a river in Mississippi I am a woman standing ....
I am standing here in your poem, unsatisfied .. .6

For Rich, the boundaries and territories of the cosmopolitan "concentric" world are profoundly, and painfully, underscored and overdetermined. The "I" is iteratively, interrogatively staged; poised at the point at which, in recounting historical trauma, the incommensurable "localities" of expein a different place. A place of rience and memory each time put the "I" difference-such that the atlas of the difficult world articulates a defiant and transformative "dissatisfaction,"a dissonance at the heart of that complacent circle that constitutes "ourfellow city dwellers." For it is precisely there, in the ordinariness of the day-to-day, in the intimacy of the indigenous, that, unexpectedly, we become murderous, unrecognizable strangers to ourselves. Shouldn't Nussbaum be concerned, Michael Walzer asks, that the crimes of the twentieth century have been committed alternatively by perverted patriots and perverted cosmopolitans?7 It is to the perverse passions of patriotism and its world-historical "masks"that I now want to turn. On April 20, 1939, the Guardian Leader published the following account:

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Anxiety on Hitler'sBirthday Today,as in the days of Napoleon,Europeanhistoryis made by one man. He sets the pace, he holds the worldin suspense,andthe questionthattransNever has that will he do?" cends all otherquestions,day afterday, is "What been asked with keener anxietythan today, the 50th anniversaryof Hitler's birth which is being celebratedwith greatrejoicingin,Germany... Is he a greatman or a smallman?Undoubtedlyboth. He is the greatestliving demagogue.He is a masterof politicalstrategy.He is extremelyshrewd anda manof abruptaction.His mindis commonplaceandhe has hadfew original ideas. Although he demands the utmost discipline ... he is undis-

with respectto food and drink;his indiscipline ciplined.He is self-controlled shows in other matters,notably in monumentaland political architecture. His indisciplineis the cause of his extremerestlessness.He is always on the move, can never sit or standstill, even when submergedin broodingsilence. If any difficultyor obstacleis put in his way, he breaksinto a fiercerage;his himselfas an instrument fitsof angerwill sometimeslastfordays. He regards of providence sent with a divine mission. He clings to a few ideas about and aboutthe superiorityof the Germanrace, althoughparadoxically "race," enough in some ways he despises the Germans.

The banality of evil has its own restlessness. Is it great or is it small? Monumental and premeditated, or anxious and undisciplined? The anxiety runs deeper: is history being made by "one"man who clings on to "afew ideas about race," or is Hitler a demonic "doubleman,"a Napoleonic revenant with a disastrous idee fixe? Those of us who are familiar with the early nineteenth-century discourses of Oriental despotism will recognize, in this 1930s "English"portrait of Hitler, a certain indeterminacy, a doubleness of inscription and address: does Nazism provoke anxiety, or is the Hitlerian body politic itself in a state of anxiety (... What will he, or it, do next)? Hitler's own, often repeated, response to such a question, was at once bombastic and banal; a commonplace answer which has, over the last fifty years, gained a terrible resonance that places it amongst the most trauof our times: "Thespirit of the new German,"Hitler declaimed matic "truths" in his Nuremberg oration, "does not manifest itself in parades and speeches. It is seen as its best when the ordinary duties of everyday life are carried out efficiently." In the inter-war years in England, the avowed project of the patrician fellow travelers of the fascist right was to provide modern British nationalism with an effective mobilizing populist myth, which, as Tom Nairn has persuasively argued, it had traditionally lacked: a mobilizing myth that depended "on the self-action of the Volk, [rather than an appeal to the] inexhaustible wisdom of Institutions and their patrician custodians."8 Pro-Nazi sentiment in the 1920s and 1930s attempted to "quotidianize"Hitler and naturalize national socialism in order to propagate a racist, decisionist, and masculine political imaginary. E. W. D. Tennant, who was to play some significant part in persuading the Prince of Wales into taking an appeasing stance, wrote in April, 1933: 8 UnpackingMy Library Again

History will recordthat nothing but this movement could have saved Germany from Bolshevism.We in GreatBritainmust begin to understandwhat outsiderthe firstimpression of has happenedin Germany.... To an impartial Adolf Hitleris ratherdisappointing.He is of medium height... more like a youthfuleditionofJ. H. Thomasthanof Napoleon.He has a most remarkable moustache. He would like to cut it off but feels that it is now too late-his times. His voice is attractive,powerful and untiring.... Duringthe recent election campaign... wireless was an immense help to him. By this means he got in touch with hundredsof thousandsof potentialCommunists;they came to curse and remainedto bless.9 This attempt to turn the house painter from Linz intoJ. H. Thomas, the lad from Swindon who became a leading light in the National Union of Railwaymen in the late '20s, and later parliamentary under-secretary for the colonies, is not simply an attempt to reduce the anxiety around the figure of Hitler, and fascism more generally. In the image of Hitler's demagoguery lies the political lesson: the voice that carries across the "internal," uneven borders of the nation turns an internally divided and differentiated social into the common national subject-an imagined community. And if the rhetoric of the banal or the quotidian is part of the language of populism, we encounter, in this voice that produces a seamless "whole," the more coercive political etymology of the word "banal": a commonality, or common purpose, that is derived from compulsory "feudal"service, which, through time, comes to be naturalized as the common-place or
common-usage: the banal mobilized in the "everyday" service of the nation. moustache is famous .... He is probably one of the greatest orators of all

Young Elisabeth Fairholme writes in July 1937, after joining the Women's Labor Service in Germany in order to experience the spirit of the "new Germany": I foundmyself on cold darkwinterdawns salutingthe Arbeitsdienst flag,and singingthe rousinganthemsof the new Germany.... Indeedso powerfulis the spirit and atmosphereof these camps, thatjust as the other girls forget

that they come of different classes, so for the time being I forgot I was of another nationality.... Service becomes the object of each girl's life; and service without reward or recognition.... It is exceedinglydifficultto describehow this is accomplished, this harmonious atmosphere within the Camp. There is no printedcode, or list of rules in theArbeitsdienst.... The words of the songs I sang daily in Camp became so deeply absorbed in my mind that even now I unwittingly find myself uttering their meaning and intent clothed in differentwords, as though they were my own thoughtsand opinions."10

Elisabeth Fairholme, in the grip of amor patriae, is not herself free of anxiety in the midst of her obvious enjoyment. The only event that she remembers as having disturbed the harmony of the camp was when a girl who had been cleaning pig-styes and cutting wood all day "had failed to

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curl her hairfor the evening meal of cocoa and black bread" (791).Amidst the ratherbanal benevolence, and the nationless, classless identity of the once-and-future"clairol" chanteuse,there lies, just around the edges, the terrorof not quite knowing who you are or what you are being subjected to, the anxiety of findingyourself utteringtheirmeaning and intent as my thoughtsand opinions. If Elisabethfinds all this somewhat difficultto understand,SlavojZizek, finds it all too easy. In "For the Lacanianfrom Ljubljana, They Know Not in of that word- he suga title double Do" banal WhatThey reading my all de the Hitler's the is that point capiton; diversity of earthly Jew gests of the the manifestation as miseries is conceived Jewish plot; for it is the the enjoyment-"impossible,unfathomable, enjoyJew who manifests - that has been stolen from us, and therefore, the Jew provides the ment" knottingof the narrative threads of national degeneration, humiliation, of the economic crisis. Elisabeth's "moral decadence," English"enjoyment" of the Germannation (in this psycho-politicalsense), anti-semitic"being" certainlybears out, in part, Zizek'spsychoanalyticalreading:Elisabethis at once the nation'svolkish "unchosen" subject-unmarked by nation or class, participating ironicallyin an almost pre-nationalethics of "service," and, in anotherdiscursive space within the same narrative,she becomes ences of race, gender,class, generation,nation-for instance, the objectification of the Jew as oriental, effeminate,and corruptlybourgeoiscosmopolitan- those very signs,if not sites, of differencethat were disavowed or citizen. "In or captureof the new nazi-national displacedin the "captation" Benedict Anderson everything natural there is something unchosen," mode writes in the course of an argumentthat suggeststhat the naturalist
of the national narrative is its moment of "unisonance":". . (motherland, the vehicle for the state's paranoiac, projective reinscriptionof those differ-

Vaterland, patria, heimat)become the transparent[objects] of national ties of identification:skin-colour, gender, parentage."1Those "natural" "aghostly the national sentiment produce "thebeauty of Gemeinschaft," intimation of simultaneity across [the nation's] homogeneous, empty of national time."My concern now is with the moment when the "object" identification turns anxiously abject:that moment when, for instance, unwitElisabethFairholmeuncannilyencountersherself, automaton-like, her in that are words intent of others and the meaning tingly,repeating own. Or, later in my talk, the momentwhen the EnglishbutlerStevens,in TheRemainsof theDay, has to confronthis unwittinganti-semitismin the service of LordDarlington:a guilt that rises suddenly from the depths of and as a form of psychic reality, presents us with the the "unconscious," a politicalaffectivityattached without"intentionality," of agency problems to objects that are displaced or symptomatic.Is there a genealogy of this that constitutes,at once, the anxiety and the affiliauncanny "naturalism" tion of national identity?
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Now this suggestedlink between nationalismand an anxious naturalism is clearly seen in the work of JohannFichte, often creditedwith being the father of modern national sentiment. With Nietzsche and de Lagarde, Fichte formed the matrix of the Nazi appeal to the authorityof a "racial" philosophical traditionas Etienne Balibarand Hans Sluga have recently argued. Fichte has a particularrelevance to the rather hybrid "EnglishNazi"terrainof my lecture, for in the popularculturaland politicaljournals of the inter-warperiod, like TheEnglishReview,Fichte, Nietzsche, and Renanwere the three thinkersmost commonlyused to familiarizethe English public with the ideologies of the German state. It is, however,
rarely remarked of The Addresses to the GermanNation (1807-8),12 that its

centralmetaphorfor nationalidentificationis the scopic regimewhere the chosen love of the nationturnsanxiouslyinto a split identifica"naturalist" tion. In a very different context, Balibar has recently remarked in his splendid book entitled Masses, Classes,Ideas (Routledge, 1994) that the very namingof the Germansand the GermanState,in the work of Fichte, a figureof ambivalence,that plays scission": is the productof an "internal on the impossibility- and anxiety, we may add- of the impossible coincidence of Germannation and German State. In the midst of Fichte'smetaphysics of the "directnessof national perit is the patriarchal ception" image of the Fatherwho providesthe "natural" of But the discursive"sign" of the fatherenables only modality citizenship. a form of identificationthat is indirect and elisional-what we may call a peripherality.For it is the absent Father,ratherthan the mother "phallic" that constitutesthe principle who appears"moredirectly as benefactor," The nationalsubjectis founded on the trace of nationalself-identification. of the father'sabsent-presencein the present of the mirror,whereas the is supplemental, marked by the mother'simmanent "over"-presentness
overbearing shadow of the father, but more clearly held in the line of light

and vision.The orientationto nationalsubjectivityis caught,we may say, between the reflective frame, and the tain, of the mirror. The visibility of the nationalmirror,then, cannot but be liminal rather The citizen-subjectheld in the than, as Fichte would claim, supersensual. in the fort/da game of constituted national of the present, temporality fatherlands and mother tongues, turns amor patriae into a much more anxiouslove.Explicitlyso, when we realizethroughSamuelWeber'ssplendid reading of the psychoanalyticgenealogy of anxiety, that anxiety is a its of a dangerimplicit in the very threshold of identity, in-between "sign" claims to coherence and its fears of dissolution, "betweenidentity and This anxiousboundarythat is (154).13 non-identity,internaland external" also a displacement- the peripheral- has a specific relevance to national identificationwhen we realize that what distinguishesfear from anxiety, of in the psychoanalyticsense, is a certain occlusion of the "naturalness"

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the referent:anxiety emergesin responseto the perceived"danger of a loss of perception (a Wahrnehmungsverlust) attachedto familiar (andfamilial) of anxiety images, situationsand representations" (155).The indeterminacy produces, as with my readingof the Fichteanmirror,"atraumaticdiverat the very core gence of representationand signification" (155),a splitting of the cathexes that stabilize the nation's"I." If it has been suggested,in differentways by Anderson,Gellner,Nairn, and Todorov, that nationnessis the Janus-facedstrait gate of modernity and all who enter shall look backwards-in what we may now call an anxietyof theantecedent-then SamuelWeberhas also pointed out that the in the space between psychic experience of anxiety is like being "caught two frames:a doubled frame, or one that is split"(167). What enters this double frameof the nation'sanxietyis not the naturalized,harmonizedunchosen of the amor patriae -which is also the love of the nation-people-

but its double: those who are the "unchosen," the marginalizedor periof the nation's pheralizednon-people democracy. Time and time again,the sign of the complex, unassimilablephenomena and paraphernalia of racialmarkingemerges with its banal evil. It is as if - its dynasticpredemothat sublatesthe nation'santeriority the Aufhebung craticverticality- and that raises the nationalidea to the level of historicity, does not merely returnas the repressed,but turns demonicallyfrom into an archaic, articulatorytemporalityof the nation'senunAufhebung ciationand performativity,its everyday enactment.Time and time again, the nation'spedagogical claim to a naturalisticbeginning with the unthose anxious, ferocious moments of metonymic displacementthat mark the fetishes of nationaldiscriminationand minoritization-the racialized fixated body, the homophobic defense, the single mother: the "chosen" alien "outsidetheir objects of a projectiveparanoiathat reveal, through ness,"the fragile, indeterminateboundariesof the nationalimaginaryof the "People-As-One." In orderto graspsuch peripheralityand ambivalencein the idea of the nation, Tom Nairn resortsto WalterBenjamin's AngelusNovus, his angel in of History-an allegoricalfigurethat emerges recent discourses of the nation to mark the complex temporality of its modernity. Nairn and Andersonend their books with the figure of the Angelus Novus; the collage on the cover of StuartHall'svolume on Thatcherism,The Road to Renewal,shows Mrs. Thatcheras the angel of history sucking up large numbers of the Britishradicalleft of the late '70s and '80s, into her catastrophicvision of Progress.Let me remind you, once more, of the sphinxlike figure, half-bird,half-man,half-historian,half-messiah,WalterBenjamin'sAngelus Novus:
chosen things of territory, gender and parentage - amor patriae - turn into

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His face is turnedtowardsthe past. Wherewe perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps pilingwreckageuponwreckageand hurlsit in frontof his feet. The angelwould like to stay, awakenthe dead,and makewhole what has been smashed.Buta stormis blowingfromParadise; it has got caughtin his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistiblypropels him into the future to which his backis turned,while the pile of debrisbeforehim growsskyward.The storm is what we call progress.14 And this is Tom Nairn rereading the coming of the angel: Let us returnto the real historicalsources of Benjamin's single catastrophe, the home of the wind that has propelled[the angel of history]so far and so progress.It is only erratically.This means the history of Western-founded version of the storyis becomnow that a distinctivelynon-occidento-centric ing possible, a version that will be something like the world'spicture in which the Enlightenment,and the bourgeoisand industrialrevolutionsof the Westfigureas episodes,howeverimportant.... Theterrorof [theangel's] vision comes fromthe originalwest wind of progressas wellas the multiform reactionsit has producedin the east and the south.'5 The angel hovers over the discourse of the nation's anxiety at the very point when the specter of race and cultural difference emerges in a radical disjunction-what I earlier described as the "unchosen"-to question its claims to a modern homogeneous temporality, and its democratic promise of social horizontality. To contemplate the agency of the Benjaminian "temporal montage"16as it defines the geopolitics of the historical present-the destiny and discourse of democracy-is no easy task. Surprisingly, such an occasion was recently provided by Michael Kinsley in an essay in Time magazine, entitled: "Is Democracy Losing Its Romance?" After a tour d'horizon of the postcommunist world during which he concludes, "democracy, far from suppressing nationalist hatred, has given ferocious vent to it,"Kinsley turns a homeward glance. In the US today, he suggests, there is a populism with an anti-democratic flavor which hungers for "astrong leader on a white horse. Thus Ross Perot, America's would-be Fujimori." And, he continues, "As the current movie The Remains of the Day reminds us, there was a time, not long ago, the 1930s, when openly expressed doubts about the wisdom of democracy were positively fashionable, even in established democratic societies. These days everybody at least pays lip-service to the democratic ideal. Will that change?"17 Is it possible to read Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, centered in the very British bathos of the butler Stevens, a "gentleman'sgentleman," as a parable of the anxiety and ambivalence involved in the service of the inter-war English nation? The temporal montage of the novel is a threeleveled palimpsest: the authoritarian populism of the Thatcherite late

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1980s (its moment of enunciation), re-staging the Suez-centered mid 1950s with its post-imperial "confusions" (the historical "present"of the narrative), which, in turn, frames the countryhouse, patrician fascism of the fellow-travelers of late '20s and '30s (the novel's ficelle). Ishiguro's narrative retroactivity articulates these temporalities, the "present"of each moment partialized and denaturalized by the process of the others. Ishiguro's narrator establishes a performative identification with an aristocratic Tory traditionalism, enacted in the customary belief in the "dignity of service." In the English context, "service"has a double cultural genealogy. It represents an implication in the class-structure where service normalizes class difference by extravagantly "acting it out" as an affiliative practice, perfectly seen in the metonymic mimicry of the idiomatic naming of the butler as gentleman'sgentleman: "Abutler's duty is to provide good service," Stevens meditates, "by concentrating on what is within our realm ... by providing the best possible service to those great gentlemen in whose hands the destiny of civilization truly lies."18 The brilliance of Ishiguro's exposition of the ideology of service lies in his linking the national and the international, the indigenous and the colonial, by focusing on the anti-semitism of the inter-war period, and thus mediating race and cultural difference through a form of difference-Jewishness - that confuses the boundaries of class and race and represents the "insider's outsidedness."Jewishness stands for a form of historical and racial in-betweenness that again resonates with the Benjaminian view of history as a "view from the outside, on the basis of a specific recognition from within."19 If "domestic service" figured through the butler is that "unchosen" moment that naturalizes class difference by ritualizing it, then the narrative's attention to Jewishness and anti-semitism raises the issue of gender and race and, in my view, places these questions in a colonial frame. It is -the mark of the good servant- that the narwhile polishing the "silver" rative deviates to recall the dismissal of two Jewish maids at the insistence of the fascist Lord Darlington. The gleam of the silver becomes that Fichtean national mirror where the master's paternal authority is both affirmed and, in this case, tarnished by the housekeeper Miss Kenton's pressing of the charge of anti-semitism against both Darlington and Stevens. This is the ambivalent moment in the narrative, when the "memory" of antiNazi connection turns the naturalism semitism and the inter-war "English" and nationalism of the silver service into the "anxiety"of the past-what Lacan has described as the temporal antecedence of the anxious moment. The preservation of social precedence, embodied in the butler's service, is undone in the temporal antecedence that the presence of the Jew anxiously unleashes in the narrative of the national present. The English silver - the mark of the gentleman- becomes engraved with the image of Judas Iscar-

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iot-the sign of racial alterity and social inadmissibility. But the antisemitic historic past initiates, as anxiety is want to do, a double frame of discriminationand domination that produces a narrativewhereJew and
colonized native, anti-semitism and anti-colonial racism, are intimately linked in a textual and temporal montage.

For the British fascists, such as Ishiguro'sLordDarlington,argued for the Nazi cause on the groundsthat Hitler'ssuccess was intimately bound up with the preservationof the British Empire.In My Life, Oswald Mosley, the founderof the BritishUnion of Fascists,remembershis firstmeeting with Hitler in April 1935-a luncheon in Munich-during which he recalls that Hitler wanted no more from Britainthan its neutralityin his struggleagainst Russia and communism;"inreturn,he would have been ready to offer all possible guarantees for the support of the British
Empire."20

E. W. D. Tennant,who was undoubtedlyamongstthe most prominent of LordDarlington'sguests, and had certainlybasked in the afterglow of Stevens'sglintingsilver, had this to say in 1933, in an articleentitled"Herr Hitlerand His Polity," Review,that surelyadorned publishedin TheEnglish the walnut veneered tables at DarlingtonHall:
The evidence that I saw supportsthe idea that the burningof the Reichstag and the consequentseizingof the KarlLiebknechthouse was an act of providence. The KarlLiebknechthouse was set up as a printingworks where Communistpropagandawas preparedfor distributionall over the world. Therewere thousandsof pamphletsin many languagesincludingthousands for distributionamongthe natives of Indiaand SouthAfrica.MuchinformatoIndia andparticularly in regard tionof thehighest interest to theBritish Empire available.21 and theAnti-Imperial is league

The link between Britishanti-semitismand the colonialistracismof this period has been largely left unexploredby the canonicalhistoriansof the period. It goes furtherthan two relatedimperialdreams, one in the West, the otherin the East.The victimagesharedby both,Jews and colonialsubjects respectively, was the denial of their fundamentalrightsto be recognized as "peoples," however contradictoryand complex that designation might be. To the extent that both Jewish intellectuals and anti-colonial freedom fighterswere linked throughthe much vaunted Bolshevik plot, they became the agents of a profound patriciananxiety. For these marginalizedand discriminatedpeoples, with their differenthistories of diaspora and domination,were attemptingto constructforms of community and identity that were implacably opposed to returning to what an influentialsection of the "English" intellectualand political"right" defined as the urgentnecessity for "abiologicalangle of vision in viewing mankind
... [which] would combat and eliminate degeneracy."22

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This last phrase comes from Anthony Ludovici, one of the leading public intellectuals of the inter-war decade who would certainly have been one of Lord Darlington's country-house habitues. He had just returned from the Nuremberg games, to which he was invited as a guest of honor. With Hitler's speech ringing in his ears, Ludovici proclaimed the benefits of a polity of "silence," over the ceaseless chatter of democracies where "the impudence of degenerate nonentities is pampered and defended": "TheFuehrer repeatedly assures Germany of the benefits of her silence, if only as a therapeutic measure, and points to the advantage which, as a silent nation, she enjoys over all the vociferous and chattering nations of western democracy" (52). Laid over this silence, please remember the voice-over of Elisabeth Fairholme's chants and anthems. But let us not forget, that in that very England, there were other anti-fascist voices, too: In Bucks there is a countryhouse, countryhouse Where dwells LordAstorand his spouse And Chamberlain and Halifax To manufactureFascistpacts, fascist pacts. Farethee well the Leagueof Nations Hail to "peaceful penetrations" And good bye to International law- law- law Adieu Democracy,adieu, adieu, adieu We have no furtheruse for you, use for you We'llpin our faith to fascism and war Whatis the NationalGovernmentfor- Governmentfor? The words of this marching song return us to that place where we started, in the sundering of "concentric cosmopolitanism," and the attempt to understand the behemoth that haunts the banality of the dialogues we have with "ourfellow city dwellers." In that past-present that is our time, the conversation is once again, as once before, of the disuniting of peoples and the degeneration of Civilization "as we know it." The Disuniting of America, The Cultureof Complaint- I have almost unpacked my old books, and am acquiring some new ones. But at this conference, devoted to the question of identity, let me conclude with an old friend who caught my eye, after many years, as he emerged unexpectedly from the chaos of my book crates. For no one understands both the degradation and the defiance of the minority condition better than my friend, the photographer Mr. Styles who works from a cockroach-ridden studio in the New Brighton township of Port Elizabeth, South Africa. There is something quite campy about his name- Stylessomething apposite to the trendy theoretical themes of mimicry and camouflage and performativity, only he must use these devices of identification in the milieu of the work-camp and South African apartheid laborlaws. In Athol Fugard's Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, Styles recycles work permits

16

UnpackingMy Library Again

and provides false identities. By replacing the identity photograph on a pass, an illegal township worker is fitted out with a new city identity. But, as one of his clients protests, that means living life as a ghost. Mr. Styles shoots back: "When the white man looked at you at the Labour Bureau what did he see? A man with dignity or a bloody passbook with an N.I. number? Isn't that a ghost?... All I'm saying is to be a real ghost, if that is
what they want .... Spook them into hell, man!23

The minoritization of a people, no less than its "nationalization,"exceeds the language of numbers and the majoritarian claim to a "common good." It must be seen for what it is: the "other side," the alterity, the fantasy of the national "people-as-one" that disturbs the parochial dream of ascendant authority. Let's spook them to hell!! University of Chicago Notes in Illuminations 1. Walter Benjamin,"Unpacking (New York: HarMy Library" court, Brace& World,Inc., 1955)61, 67. Poems inAnAtlasof theDifficult World: 1988-91 2. Adrienne Wartime" Rich,"Eastern (New York:W. W. Norton, 1991)36. and Cosmopolitanism," Boston Review 19.5 3. Martha Nussbaum, "Patriotism 1994):3-6. (October/November Review19.5 (Octo4. See HerbertGintis'sresponseto MarthaNussbaumin Boston ber/November1994):28. 5. See p. 13 in the same issue of BostonReview. 6. Rich, 44. 7. See p. 29 in the same issue of BostonReview. Crisisand Neo-Nationalism 8. T. Nairn, TheBreak-Upof Britain: (London:Verso, 296. 1981) Hitlerand His Polity;March1933" TheEnglish 9. E. W. D. Tennant,"Herr Review 56 (April1933):362-63. TheEnglish 10. ElisabethFairholme,"TheWomen of New Germany," Review64 July 1937):788-92; my emphasis. Anotherpage reference for this work will be given within the text. 11. For the citations in this paragraphsee B. Anderson,Imagined Communities: on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism Reflections Verso, 1983) 131-32. (London: to theGerman Nation(Chicago and London:OpenCourt 12. J. G. Fichte,Addresses PublishingCompany,1922).Pagereferenceswill appearin the text where appropriate. 13. All citationsin the next two paragraphs (includingthe Lacanquote)come from SamuelWeber'ssignal contributionto this debate. See his Return to Freud:Jacques

HomiBhabha

17

Lacan'sDislocation of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991), especially Appendix A "Beyond Anxiety: The Witches Letter."All page references to this work will be given in the text. 14. Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" in Illuminations, 59-60. 15. Nairn, 360, 361. 16. This phrase belongs to Andrew Benjamin and can be found in his essay "Tradition and Experience: Walter Benjamin's'On Some Motifs in Baudelaire'" in The Problemsof Modernity:Adoro and Benjamin, ed. Andrew Benjamin (London: Routledge, 1989)122-40. 17. Time, 17 January 1994: 60. 18. Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (London: Faber and Faber, 1989, 115-17. 19. Peter Osborne, "Adornoand the Metaphysics of Modernism: The Problem of a 'Postmodern' Art,"in The Problems of Modernity:Adoro and Benjamin 93. 20. Sir Oswald Mosley, My Life (London: Nelson, 1968) 365. 21. Tennant, 373; my emphasis. 22. Anthony Ludovici, "Hitler and Nietzsche," The English Review 64 (January 1937): 44. 23. Athol Fugard, Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, in Siswe Bansi Is Dead and The Island (New York: Viking, 1973) 38. A different version of part of this essay, entitled "Anxious Nations, Nervous States," appeared in Supposing the Subject, ed. Joan Copjec (London and New York: Verso, 1994), 201-17.

18 Unpacking My Library Again