boundary 2

Spanoss Polemos: An Oppositional Intellectual

in the Age of Mundializacin

Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott

The Western onto-theo-logical tradition should not be understood

as simply a matter of ontological representation as it seems to have
been since the implosion of deconstruction and the rise of political
or cultural or worldly criticism. As the poststructuralist critique of
disciplinary knowledge production implied, if it did not make abso-
lutely clear, it constitutes a dynamic, however uneven continuum
of multiple sites or field of forces, ranging from the representa-
tion of being as such, through the human subject, the ecos in which
humanity dwells, gender, race, economics, social formation, lan-
guage, culture, and national and international politics.
William V. Spanos, Exiles in the City: Hannah Arendt and
Edward W. Said in Counterpoint

1. The Status of Destructive Criticism

From its inception, a secular vocation has characterized the work of

William V. Spanos. His goal is to confront the historical relations of power

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and subordination that configure the ontologico-political context determin-

ing human agency and its potentialities. His particular style of criticism,
however, does not content itself with generalities and always looks into the
singular or specific conditions informing any particular context; it is a sort
of destructive attitude that goes beyond the metaphysics as a master dis-
course and engages with specific historical situations or, as he would put
it, historical occasions. His writings on American literature, contemporary
humanities, the Harvard Red Book, and the subsequent university reform
of the late 1970s in the United States, along with his critical understanding
of imperial reason, American exceptionalism, and his particular adapta-
tion of Martin Heideggers destructive hermeneutics to disclose the his-
torical narrative informing humanism, the modern university, and the pro-
fession at large, are among the topics he treats and which make of his
work a thoughtful intervention in contemporary intellectual debates. Each
one of his works is an attempt to produce a visibility that reveals the set of
metaphysical and material aspects related to our contemporary intellectual
practices, which makes it difficult to assign his own work to any standard
category. Indeed, Spanos is neither a conventional literary critic nor a pro-
fessional Heideggerian philosopher. Consequently, his polemical scholar-
ship could also be read as an open-ended problematization of the figure
of the modern intellectual, aware of his or her limitations and in agreement
with a sort of parrhesiastic dictum for which telling the truth is not just an
epistemological or ethical imperative but also a political one.
Certainly, more than the production of a corpus of historical or socio-
logical knowledge, what defines Spanoss work is the radical confronta-
tion with facticity, that is to say, with the quotidian determinations of being
as being-with-others and as being-always-already-in-the-world. Hence, his
distinctive polemos, a sort of agonal confrontation with the historical con-
ditions of his own intellectual agency, a polemos Spanos retrieves from
Heideggers Auseinandersetzung.1 In this sense, what is both relevant

1. There is a particular moment when we can see the way Spanos appropriates and
elaborates on this Auseinandersetzung, a process at work in his entire oeuvre. I am refer-
ring to The Intellectual and the Posthumanist Occasion: Toward a Decentered Paideia,
the last chapter of The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1993), 187221. There, after disclosing the self-limiting con-
sequences of poststructuralism and its reduction toyet anotheruniversity (master)
discourse, Spanos, vis--vis the Brazilian critical intellectual Paulo Freire, elaborates a
self-problematizing conception of his own teaching practice, which he calls a destruc-
tive pedagogy.

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and unique in his several critical endeavors is not just erudition or the pro-
duction of a coherent, logical, narrative but also his ability to disclose the
ontological and historical elements at stake in each case. Moreover, this
is possible because, from the beginning, Spanos understood Heideggers
destructive hermeneutics as a critical process aimed not only at the onto-
logical level but also at what Spanos calls equiprimordiality (cooriginality).
He therefore is concerned not with Heideggers contributions to philoso-
phy but with the worldly consequences of destruction. In Spanoss critique,
there is not a privileged center to access being (whether ontology, econ-
omy, or language), since being would manifest itself in a decentered con-
tinuity through the ontological, cultural, historical, economic, and political
dimensions of the human world.
In other words, Spanoss criticism does not lack professionalism and
is not at odds with the standards of academic scholarship. In addition to
his erudition and ability to engage critically with several dimensions of con-
temporary thinking, and in addition to his enabling editorial work related to
boundary 2 and the configuration of an academic venue for a rather par-
ticular style of criticism (theoretically informed but worldly oriented), there is
something else, something that could be called a politics of writing, which is
apparent in every piece he has ever written. From his early interpretation of
Herman Melvilles Moby-Dick to his analysis of American exceptionalism in
the age of globalization, Spanos has constantly criticized US foreign policy,
framed by the Vietnam War and the so-called War on Terror. Along this
line, he has also pointed to the contributions and limitations of Heideggers
thought for a historical understanding of imperial reason, Pax Americana,
and the postnation-state limbo brought about by the end of the Cold War
period and by so-called globalization. This specific engagement gives his
work intellectual and political relevance today.
Yet one should not mistake the diversity of objects and concerns
informing his writings with a lack of a defined interest to which his works
always gravitate. His interest (inter-esse, as he reminds us, following Sren
Kierkegaard) is not only, as it might appear, to produce a rehabilitation of
Heideggers destruction or to supplement that destruction with a genealogi-
cal understanding of power relations. He is not just disclosing the American
jeremiad as the hidden reason for contemporary US foreign policy in the
Middle East, and its overt continuity with the aggressive foreign policy the
country developed since World War II and the crisis of European imperial-
ism. Along with all of this, Spanoss main question, I daresay, is about the

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status of historical thinking and not the history of thought or historicism.

He is concerned, in other words, with the particular conditions defining the
possibility of thinking as a historical engagement with the order of the real.
Consequently, in his reading of US imperialism, he offers a critical
understanding of Americas expansive and aggressive foreign policy from
the twentieth century until today. In doing so he also emphasizes the his-
torical difference between classical European imperialism and this new
imperial reason born out of World War II, a neoimperialism fully in place
after the end of the Cold War, the fall of communism, and the first war
against Iraq, in the early 1990s.2 In that sense, he illustrates the confluence
of American exceptionalism, a long-standing tradition of self-representation
that grants America a crucial role in the world, with Pax Americana as an
ontological political category that justifies the imperial task to bring peace
to the wilderness. This Pax Americana finds its remote antecedents in
the Pax Romana and its conversion of Greek historical thinking into a cate-
gorical thought.3 Thanks to this historical and critical understanding of
imperial reason, Spanoss approach differs a great deal from classical anti-
imperialist movements and doctrines of the so-called Third World, mainly
oriented by a national liberation tendency and a complementary, politically
controversial nationalism. Finally, his approach attends to the intertwined
relationship between theory and practice, between the language of the
bureaucrats in charge of US foreign policy and the language of humanities,

2. The recent rise of the Peoples Republic of China and its subsequent relevance to the
contemporary global order, whether at the political or economic level, should be under-
stood not as the exhaustion of American imperialism but rather as a historical transfor-
mation of imperial reason (beyond the West), for which Spanoss work, even if mostly
focused on America, is more than pertinent. At the same time, this ongoing transfor-
mation demands further critical analysis, and the recent works of Donald E. Pease and
Andrew W. Neal, not to mention Michael Hardt and Antonio Negris Empire (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), seem relevant. See Pease, The New American
Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); and Neal, Exception-
alism and the Politics of Counter-terrorism: Liberty, Security, and the War on Terror (New
York: Routledge, 2011).
3. This continuity should not occlude current historical transformations of imperial rea-
son, such as the ones highlighted by Neda Atanasoski in her Humanitarian Violence: The
U.S. Deployment of Diversity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). In other
words, even if Spanoss understanding of imperial reason allows us to perceive the his-
torical continuity between the metaphysical thought, the ontotheological tradition politi-
cally articulated through the juxtaposition between Pax Romana, Pax Europaea, and Pax
Americana, it still requires further analysis of what we might call the ongoing metamor-
phosis of imperial reason.

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the language of the intellectuals that, willingly or not, has fostered US for-
eign policy through the twentieth century.
In order to produce this complex reading, Spanos appeals to Hei-
deggers destructive hermeneutics, with special attention to Heideggers
194243 seminar at the University of Freiburg, translated as Parmenides.
Spanos reads the overlapping between metaphysics and ontotheology to
produce a political Heidegger that goes against the grain of Heideggers
case, and does not close itself in the so-called final triumph of Western
metaphysics, remaining instead as an open and undecided situation, an
interregnum.4
To put it differently, Spanoss works, their superficial similarity not-
withstanding, change according to different historical situations and inter-
ests. First comes his reception of existentialism and his understanding of
the postmodern occasion as one enabling and demanding a new critical
approach (which led him to found boundary 2), different from New Criti-
cism and the textual attitude of French- influenced scholars.5 Second
is Spanoss specific appropriation of Heideggers thought and critique of
Western humanism, as expressed in Spanoss disobedient reading of mod-
ern education and the university reforms, synecdochically epitomized by
the Harvard Core Curriculum Report.6 The third context is his critical recep-
tion of poststructuralism and his specific retrieval of the cultural politics of
destruction, in the context of a liberal-humanist misappropriation of the
Heidegger controversy aimed at concealing the brutal US intervention in
Vietnam.7 Also, we should note his ongoing revision of American litera-

4. See William V. Spanos, Americas Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire (Minneapolis: Uni-

versity of Minnesota Press, 2000). See also Martin Heidegger, Parmenides (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1998). We should mention that Spanoss reading of Heideggers
thought does not share the once popular hypothesis of the turn (die Kehre) that Heideg-
ger is said to have gone through during the 1930s, after his destructive hermeneutics
proved a failure in dealing with metaphysics; a turn that is said to have led him to his later
preference for the work of the great poets of the West after the 1940s. On the contrary,
radicalizing the destructive moment in Being and Time, Spanos links destruction to his-
torical thinking, enabling a positive dimension rather than mere dialectical negativity or
nihilism.
5. In addition to his editorial work, his almost infinite number of articles, and his editing of
essay collections, I should mention Spanoss Repetitions: The Postmodern Occasion in
Literature and Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987).
6. Spanos, End of Education.
7. William V. Spanos, Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruc-
tion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

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ture (mainly but not only Melville) as a symptomatic place to understand

Americas self-appointed task of saving the world as the new chosen
people for such an endeavor (in a clear reference to the doctrine of Mani-
fest Destiny).8 His latest engagement is with the legacies of Edward Said
and Hannah Arendt, in what appears to be a turning point from his earlier
antihumanism to a more moderate conception of humanisms critical con-
sequences, in what he calls, again polemically, the second forgetting of
die Seinsfrage.9
I need to state two warnings with regard to this enumeration. First,
this is not a historicist reduction of his thinking to a linear model. Sec-
ond, his thinking, even if elaborated and consistent, is not a philosophi-
cal system; therefore, it is not without contradictions and blind spots. In
other words, Spanoss thinking is erratic insofar as it is articulated accord-
ing to the historical occasions that motivate it in the first place, and this is
better, for the alternative would be a fossilized image of thought that is
not engaged with historys radical indetermination, an image of thought
that functions as a master discourse, indeed, as a philosophy of history.
Accordingly, in dealing with any particular dimension of Spanoss work, one
is already dealing with its absent center, which is problematic but neces-
sary, since any other alternative would reduce his critical style to theory,
that is to say, to an unproblematic place or function within the universitys
division of labor.
Before turning to Spanoss movement from destruction to counter-

8. In recent years, Spanos has been analyzing figures such as Charles Olson, Mark
Twain, Graham Greene, Thomas Pynchon, and Herman Melville, among others. See
Spanos, Repetitions. See also William V. Spanos, The Errant Art of Moby-Dick: The
Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies (Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 1995); Spanos, American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization: The
Specter of Vietnam (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008); and Spanos,
Herman Melville and the American Calling: The Fiction after Moby-Dick, 18511857
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008).
9. William V. Spanos, The Legacy of Edward Said (Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
2009); Spanos, Exiles in the City: Hannah Arendt and Edward W. Said in Counter-
point (Columbus: Ohio State University, 2012); and Spanos, Arab Spring: A Symptom-
atic Reading of the Revolution (To the Memory of Edward Said), symploke 20, nos. 12
(2012): 83119. This second forgetting of die Seinsfrage would be the consequence of
the perpetuation of violence, war, and devastation as a distinctive signature of American
exceptionalism in the world, as well as a result of the negligent inability of oppositional
intellectuals to transcend the disciplinary determinations of their particular logocentric
discourses and engage worldly affairs without renouncing the critique of liberal humanism
and its complicity with American imperialism.

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point, we need to take a short detour through his recent memoir, as it illu-
minates my commentary.

2. Countermemory as Destructive Narrative

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived for-

wards. This proverb, attributed to Kierkegaard, comes to mind when read-
ing Spanoss timely memoir In the Neighborhood of Zero.10 Indeed, his
works include many references to World War II as a defining event, but his
memoir makes clear the influence it had on his life and thought. My com-
mentary will address his works more than his life, but even though they are
intertwined, there is not a causal relationship here. His turn to Heidegger
and contemporary posthumanism, even if coherent with his narrative, is not
necessary at all, and it is important to understand that his appropriation of
contemporary thought is contingent; that is to say, it expresses a particu-
lar politics and not an ontological necessity, for we might disagree with that
politics without missing the coherence of his decisions.
In his memoir, Spanos recounts his experience as a prisoner of war
at an Arbeiten Kommandos in Dresden, the magnificent city devastated by
Allied air forces at the end of World War II.11 His goal, it seems, is to articu-
late a narrative that, more than producing a coherent justification of ones
life, registers a dislocating experience that influenced him and therefore
somehow defined his particular pathos. As a memoir, however, it is not
about the individual experience that the book, as a modern device, modu-
lates and presents to the public; it is rather about the infinite task of coming
to terms with such an experience, unbearable for any individual, while dis-
closing its political dimension, its historical meaning. From that disturbing
moment, we now know, his oeuvre becomes even more engaging, timely
in a more untimely way, and symptomatic of contemporary history. In short,
his narrative of the war is a countermemory, one that goes against the grain
10. William V. Spanos, In the Neighborhood of Zero: A World War II Memoir (Lincoln: Uni-
versity of Nebraska Press, 2010).
11. In fact, Spanos expresses a sort of disappointment with Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt
Vonneguts renowned account of the same events, as both were prisoners of war in
Dresden that infamous night. For Spanos, Vonneguts inability to deal with the brutal
dimensions of the Allied attack precipitates his oblique and ineffective plot, missing the
opportunity to disclose firebombings raison dtre. In contrast, the German writer W. G.
Sebald elaborated an alternative and critical account of the bombing, and the subsequent
destruction of German cities by the Allies, after Germanys capitulation and the Fhrers
suicide. See On the Natural History of Destruction (New York: Modern Library, 2004).

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of the standard and sacrificial representations of American involvement in

World War II, against the cultural industry that proliferated after that con-
flict and which, still today, complements so well the doctrine of American
exceptionalism.
Nonetheless, it took him a long time (19452010) to write this mem-
oir, because what was at stake in it was not the psychological therapy of
an individual working out a traumatic scene. On the contrary, the mem-
oir attests how, even if in a nonarticulated way, Spanos understood the
uncertain condition of bare life, both in his early dayswhen he heard
the call of duty and enlisted, only to be captured and imprisoned by
the Germansand now, when the same violent dynamics of global con-
temporary capitalism has reduced life in general to the same precarious
condition.
What makes this memoir so important is that it materializes the Kier-
kegaardian motto I mentioned above: it was almost impossible to fully
understand what was taking place in Dresden in that moment, when he
was a young and inexperienced Greek American soldier just starting his
life. Almost impossible, because even if a properly discursive or theoreti-
cal reading of that event is the result of a life devoted to the examination
of violence and war, the understanding is always too little. Or, if you like,
there is always a pretheoretical or nonverbal understanding working there,
enabling Spanoss thinking and self-detachment from the natural euphoria
following the wars end. This is why he could deidentify himself and ques-
tion the logic that structures every official version of the past. Even if this
was not expressed in a theoretical mode, he was able to suspend the natu-
ral and reductive logic of the friend and enemy, the us and them that
reduces the inner complexity of history and politics to a matter of belonging
and identity.
No wonder, then, that Spanos used the same motto to open an
earlier book, Heidegger and Criticism (1993).12 This book could be read not
only as an academic study but also as a monumental, yet probably failed,
attempt to deal with both the European Heideggerian philosophers related
to so-called poststructuralism and the liberal humanists who, misappropri-

12. This is Spanoss clarifying comment: We understand backward but live forward. I
encountered this resonant sentence from Sren Kierkegaards journals when I was an
undergraduate at Wesleyan University. It led me to Heideggers Being and Time and to
virtually an academic lifetime devoted to thinking its self-evident and baffling content, not
least its revolutionary cultural and sociopolitical implications (Heidegger and Criticism,
xxiii).

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ating the Heidegger controversy in the 1980s, inhibited the national cultural
memorys ability to address Americas aggressive behavior in Vietnam and
elsewhere. The reasons for this alleged failure, however, are related not to
Spanoss inability to deal with the issues at stakesay, in a philosophical
waybut to the very repetition of war as a defining phenomenon in todays
world. Here lies the strong link between metaphysics and war, indeed,
between the ontotheological vocation of Western thought and the imperial
reason feeding contemporary neoimperialism: Pax Americana. And this
unconcealed relationship remains at the core of his subsequent books on
American literature, globalization, and the current crisis of the nation-state
and its conceptual apparatus (class, people, sovereignty, democracy, rep-
resentation, human rights, humanities, the modern university, etc.), which
makes his work even more opportune for our time.
Of course, we are not pointing to the war, his captivity at Dresden,
or his eyewitness of the destruction as the empowering origin leading
him to become a Heideggerian thinker. It is not that Spanos came back
from Europe with Heidegger or any other reference in mind. Instead, the
war produced a particular way of perceiving the world, as if there were a
secret, almost unbearable, pedagogy in the catastrophe. Yet there is no
natural relationship between that disturbing experience and, let us say, his
Heideggerian polemos. Even better, his idiosyncratic appropriation of Hei-
degger, although justified as rational and coherent after the facts (aprs
coup), is a political decision, that is to say, it is contingent and not neces-
sary. Thus, Spanos, not the biographys figure but the signatory of an insis-
tent critical and polemical work, owes his coherence not to a philosophical
system, a corpus of knowledge that grants him safety, but to what, using
Alain Badious terms, we might call his loyalty to that event and his tireless
elaboration.
Consequently, without missing the political and ethical dimensions
of that decision, we still might wonder just how unavoidable a reference
Heidegger is for Spanoss idiosyncratic criticism. Because if it is quite true
that Spanoss reading of Heideggers thought moves beyond professional
philosophy, and is not particularly concerned with defending Heidegger
from his obvious and active involvement with national socialism, it seems
also true that the references to Heidegger are, paradoxically, authoritative
and authorizing of his own thinking.
We need to be extremely cautious here, and loyal to Spanoss pole-
mos. It is not that his memoir is a Heideggerian reconstruction of a young
soldiers precarious life and his estrangement in the middle of the battle.

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It is not that Heideggers thought works as a central reference to orga-

nize and justify his own life and works. Yet Spanoss constant turning to
the potentialities of this destructive hermeneutics cannot help but pro-
duce the effect, contrary to his political interest, of situating Heidegger, and
contemporary philosophical discourse, in a commanding position from
which one can perceive and criticize the ruses of metaphysics. This is not
a minor problem, since the destruction of metaphysics has become part of
the hyperbolic master discourse of professional philosophy, in the United
States and elsewhere. It is as if, to adopt the most contemporary jargon,
Spanoss bare life, which is also a deinvested (naked) life confronted with
the Real, became reinvested with Heideggers thought.
Of course, we are talking about a philosophical discourse that has
become self-aware of philosophys authorizing position and has denounced
it without reservation. We call this critique of philosophical reason destruc-
tion, genealogy, deconstruction, and so on, but the paradox lies in the way
metaphysics feeds the critique of metaphysics, as if the references to
Heideggers thought not only enable a radical politics of reading and writ-
ing but also constrain the potentialities of criticism to a permanent dialec-
tic between the dissemination of philosophys authority and its unavoidable
reinsemination. In spite of this limitation, we might say, Spanoss rheto-
ric is nonrestrictive; it feeds from different discourses and forms of knowl-
edge. The inner complexity of his work, the nonconventional apparatus of
notes and references with which he supplements every single assertion,
is indicative of his critical engagement. His argumentative logic is meticu-
lous, never taking anything for granted and always willing to specify what
is at stake in every affirmation. In the end, one does not need to agree
with everything he might say to understand the material consequences of
such a style, consequences related to an intellectual practice concerned
with worldly matters and not with the bureaucratic aspects of university
disciplines.
In this sense, Spanoss version of Heideggers thought is noncon-
ventional. Instead of paying attention to the infinite discussion regarding
the inner complexity of Heideggers philosophy and his undeniable involve-
ment with national socialism, Spanos focuses his reading on the critique
of imperial reason, the overlap between metaphysics and the spatializa-
tion of temporality, and the disclosure of the continuity between classical
ontology, medieval theology, and modern logic or logocentrism. This should
make sufficiently clear Spanoss appropriation of destruction as a differen-
tial project within contemporary Heideggerian scholarship. In the end, his

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interest lies in asserting the radical heterogeneity of being in its equiprimor-

diality, its different locus of existence; a heterogeneity or difference (even
diffrance), to use a more contemporary notion that has historically been
the target of metaphysics.
This kind of argumentation, however, will take us back to contem-
porary philosophy, not only to the disclosure of Heideggers complicity
with national socialism but also to what could be termed the postdecon-
structive (or just nondeconstructive) return to Heidegger.13 I prefer not
to do so here, since I seek to interrogate Spanoss recent engagement
with Said and Arendt in the context of a nonidentitarian and postnorma-
tive cosmopolitanism that appears as an alternative to the current process
of mundializacin,14 and the proliferation of bare life (inmundos cuerpos
abandonados).15

13. As Donald E. Pease aptly notes in his foreword to Heidegger and Criticism, Spanos
was reacting to the Critical Inquiry symposium on Heidegger, which included papers by
Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Franois Lyotard,
Jrgen Habermas, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, along with some American scholars. In
this sense, we might say, Spanos was already working on a postdeconstructive prob-
lematization of Heideggers thought. Pease adds, The difference between Spanoss
destructions of the late 1960s and those of the 1990s entailed his belated recognition (in
the wake of the Heidegger controversy) that this retrieval was not enough; that it required
for its historical efficacy a correlation of Heideggers ontological critique with Foucaults
genealogical method (xiv). In addition to Foucaults genealogy, Saids secular criticism
and Arendts recovery of the political also seem relevant. For other examples of post- or
nondeconstructive Heideggerianism, see the works of Graham Harman, Bernard Stieg-
ler, and Catherine Malabou.
14. I resort to this Spanish word as it conserves the meaning at stake in the process of
globalization. Mundo (world) also permits an open-ended play between mundializacin,
inmundo (worldlessness, but also filthy), and mundanidad (worldliness), more com-
plex than any monolithic reading of globalization. In fact, mundano (worldly, but also
profane) is related to the secular (seglar), as opposed to the confessional or religious.
Worldlessness, then, the lack or deprivation of a world, is not equivalent to exile or to the
situation of the migr. It refers instead to one who never dares to go beyond, one who is
not worldly enough. As the contemporary Argentine writer Osvaldo Lamborghini puts it,
we live in a time of inmundos cuerpos abandonados (filthy abandoned bodies), a con-
dition that Agamben has extended to life in general, in our biopolitical society (bare life).
See Lamborghini, El nio proletario, in Novelas y cuentos I (Buenos Aires: Sudameri-
cana, 2003), 5662; Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
15. This nonidentitarian and postnormative cosmopolitanism should be understood as a
political project different from those related to the modern-philosophical notion of univer-
sality (and its complementary categories: mankind, universal history, universal reason,
etc.) and to contemporary identity politics and its reductive agenda, insofar as Spanos

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3. Destruction as Counterpoint

Spanoss most recent book, Exiles in the City, relaunches his politi-
cally engaged project. In Exiles, he attempts to historicize (reactivate)
both Arendt and Said, as a reading that does not favor their inherent politi-
cal interrogation has somehow cloistered them. Writers Spanos refers to
as the postcolonial heirs of Said sometimes overemphasize his critique
of the West, thereby depoliticizing his work and producing an essential-
ist and dichotomic version of the complex relationship between West and
East. Against this binary logic of us and them that permeates not only the
metaphysical foundation of Western ontotheology but also the still essen-
tialist position of many Third World criticsand, we might add, contempo-
rary advocates of the so-called decolonizing turnSpanos observes,

It is, it seems to me, this unique kind of postcolonial polity focalized,

if not enabled by Edward Saids reflections on the exilic conditionso
radically different from all too many Third World nationalist versions
Nehrus, to mention one crucial exampleand, not incidentally, from
the now-influential German jurist Carl Schmitts Hobbesian thesis
that modern liberal democratic politics are always enacted accord-
ing to the dictates of the Friend/foe binary oppositionthat con-
stitutes his major contribution towards ameliorating our precarious
global, post-Western historical conjuncture.16

Spanos also attempts to recover Said from what he considers a neg-

ligent reading of the Palestinian intellectual, a reading that, emphasizing
the humanist aspects of his thinking, is unable to overcome its resistance to
contemporary posthumanism. For Spanos, the main consequence of this
resistance is the impossibility to connect Saids secular criticism to post-
structuralism and, we might say, to recent European thinking, which ends
up limiting the potentiality and relevance of Saids work today.

In committing themselves to humanistic secularism without (ade-

quately) interrogating its genealogy, these so-called worldly critics
have unwittingly obfuscated, if not denied the historical reality that
the secularism of the Western humanist tradition has by and large
been, in Saids own words, a natural supernaturalism, or, more tell-

(vis--vis Arendt and Said) does not content himself with a simple repetition of the prob-
lem of recognition.
16. Spanos, Exiles in the City, 54; hereafter cited parenthetically as EC.

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ingly, a political theology that, in the face of its achievement of hege-

mony called modernity, has become one with the life-damaging and
culture-destroying global operations of the Western democratic
nation-state. (EC, 93)

What is at stake here is the very notion of the secular, a notion

that could also be recognized as a main ideological motto informing the
modern philosophy of history, development, and modernization.17 Spanos
nonetheless identifies at least three dimensions of this problem. First, he
understands Saids notion of secular criticism to be an intellectual practice
not reducible to the commonsensical notion of secularism that Western
powers usually oppose to Islamic fundamentalism. Second, contemporary
critics of metaphysics (particularly Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levi-
nas), in emphasizing the Hebraic elements present in the Western tradi-
tion, somehow permit a retheologization of this tradition and the forgetting
of both the Roman translation of Greek a-letheia to veritas and the renewal
of the classical theological order by the modern anthropologos. That is to
say, they contribute to the forgetting of the Renaissance-Enlightenment
era in favor of the Judeo-Christian origin of the Western tradition. Against
the anthropological modern and metaphysical discourse of secular-
ism and against this new Jewish question, Spanos attempts to recover
Saids secular criticism in tune with Heideggers destructive hermeneu-
tics. Finally, his appropriation of Said against the grain of worldly critics
seeks to reconcile his critical humanism with the posthumanist aspects of
poststructuralism and contemporary thought. Instead of placing them in an
incompatible antagonism, Spanos reads Said along with Heidegger, Gilles
Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Badiou, and Giorgio Agamben, updating both
his own Heideggerian criticism and Saids secular criticism according to
our contemporary occasion. Whether he succeeded or not is the subject of
another discussion.18

17. A similar discussion took place during a symposium titled Is Critique Secular? held
at the University of California, Berkeley, in October 2007. See Talad Asad et al., Is Cri-
tique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2009). The main purpose of this symposium was to question the narrow under-
standing of the secular as opposed to the religious, as well as to question the assumed
secular condition of academic criticism.
18. Spanos is referring to Paul Bov and Stathis Gourgouris, two main secular intellec-
tuals who have criticized Agambens turn to Paul and theology at large, making impos-
sible the reconciliation between secular criticism and contemporary (messianic) thinking
(which also includes the connotations Carl Schmitts political theology has acquired in

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One cannot but agree with this resonant critique of secularism,

whose Nietzschean spirit should be obvious to the reader. However, it
seems also fair to reiterate that Saidsand Saidiansunderstanding of
secular criticism is not to be mistaken for the more conventional secular-
ism the West promotes as its distinctive philosophy of history (progress,
secularization, modernization, etc.).19 At the same time, one does not need
to claim a Marxist point of view to observe that Spanoss correction of the
sociopolitical emphasis of worldly critics, in spite of the ontological, still
does not give a fair account of what could be considered as the critique
of the ongoing processes of capitalist accumulation. From such a critique,
it is not only possible to interrogate the dedifferentiation between Western
modernity, capitalist development, and secularization; it is also possible,
and crucial I daresay, to distinguish between modernity, as a heteroge-
neous process, and capitalism. Up to what point is capitalism equivalent to
modernity? This is just a reformulation of a former critical question: Under
what criteria does capitalism imply democracy and modernity? This ques-
tion seems pertinent to avoid the trap of essentialism that today, by means
of a critique of Western modernity as equal to capitalism, proposes the
recovery of nonmodern, authentic forms of life.20

recent decades). Spanos insists, In the name of Edward Said, some very persuasive
worldly opponents of the recent theorists who invoke the event (vnement) as the
point of departure of their vision of the coming community refer to the latter critically as
apocalyptic and utopian, that is, as theorists who reject history and, in thus embrac-
ing a certain Gnosticism, become complicit with a political right-wing and/or evangelical
cohort of born-again Christians that disdains history and politics (EC, 84).
19. See Why I Am Not a Postsecularist?, dossier in boundary 2 40, no. 1 (Spring 2013):
780. Also see Stathis Gourgouris, Lessons in Secular Criticism (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2013).
20. Of course, this is the risk one runs in overemphasizing Heideggers concern with
technology. This is indeed a complex issue since the relationship between metaphysics
and technology is not clear (in Heidegger or in the contemporary discussions about it).
It would take us far from our argument, however, to deal with this crucial issue here, but
let us just say that, besides Heideggers complex elaboration on the question of tech-
nology, the very opposition between authentic and artificial is problematic, requiring seri-
ous revision when considered from the exiles point of view. To put it differently, the exilic
condition that Spanos, via Said and Arendt, is thinking so politically implies a perma-
nent elaboration of a prosthetic form of life (adoption, adaptation, resistance), much as
in one of Jorge Luis Borgess short stories, The Story of the Warrior and the Captive
Maiden, where a barbarian warrior ad portas Byzantium, rather than waging war and
raining destruction on the cityhis former goalinstead adopts its people, language,
and culture, and dies in its defense. See Borges, Collected Fictions (New York: Penguin
Books, 1998), 20811.

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But, let us come back to our central argument since, without renounc-
ing secular criticism, Spanos proposes a reading of Said from the point of
view of what he calls, following Agamben, profanation. Indeed, Spanoss
profane reading of Said consists, grosso modo, of two main points. First,
he tries to recover Said from liberal humanists and worldly critics who, ironi-
cally, would be complicit in fossilizing his thinking, whether reducing Said to
a binary representation of the West and East or preventing a reading of his
secular criticism in tune with other critical apparatuses. Second, Spanos
attempts to complement Saids criticism with Heideggers destructive her-
meneutics in order to find a better articulation of both the ontotheological
and the sociopolitical aspects of reality. The first thing that must be said
about the ontotheological tradition in the face of the resurgence of religion
and the present indifference of oppositional intellectuals to the question of
being (the second forgetting of die Seinsfrage) is that it refers primarily,
though not exclusively, to ontologythe way being has been represented
in the West from its origins in Greco-Roman antiquity through the Christian
era to the Age of the Enlightenment and after (EC, 67).
Spanos is making a clear argument against what he considers too
quickly to be a dismissal of Heidegger, but most notoriously, of Agambens
and Badious return to Saint Paul. For him, the too easy opposition between
secularism and the contemporary religious turn in continental philosophy
hides the fact that secularism itself could easily be retheologized. His read-
ing of Agambens and Badious return to Pauls Letter attends not to the
theological and foundational condition of his figure but to the eventful logic
that feeds its politics. For Spanos, in that eventful logic resides a possibility
of desubjectivization that seems pertinent to supplement the sociopolitical
aspects of secular criticism with a proper understanding of the ontotheo-
logical determinations of todays global order.
Even if I understand Spanoss appropriation of Agamben and
Badiou, I also share with the worldly critics he is targeting a skepticism
regarding this recent turn to theology, a turn mostly identified with Agam-
bens and Badious elaborations on power and human agencythe reduc-
tion of democracy to parliamentary capitalism, on the one hand, and the
universalization of the concentration camp as paradigmatic of contempo-
rary power, on the other.
Somehow, Agambens and Badious critical style has an involuntary
paralyzing effect because of the contemporary cultural industry of theory
and the infinite proliferation of the hyperbolic interpretations of power,
domination, institutions, and so on. At the same timeand this could only

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be expressed tentativelymodern continental philosophy, no matter how

critical, seems snared by a persistent amphibology that informs and over-
determines its understanding of historical processes and human agency.
Insofar as this amphibology emphasizes the architectonics of power (ide-
ology, spectacle, biopolitics, etc.), it also leads to notions such as event,
Messianism, coming community, and so on, as if the everyday practices of
social resistance were not just irrelevant but also inexistent. In other words,
this amphibology presumes politics as something always-to-come, some-
thing we have not experienced yet, while, at the same timeand here lies
the amphibologypolitics is also the name for a long-standing determina-
tion of human experience (as in the Roman notion of homo sacer as bare
life regulated by a series of biopolitical dispositives). Against this amphi-
bological understanding of history, we should remember that the first con-
sequence of destruction is not the opening of being for a time to come (an
emptied Messianism) but the positive disclosure of beings historical and
worldly existence as already taking place here and now.21
In a similar fashion, Spanos comes to terms with Arendt. His reading
recovers simultaneously her exilic thinking, her elaboration of non-Jewish
Judaism, and the pariah. He does this against the grain of two main read-
ings. First, he struggles against the disciplinary political science and
political philosophydiscourses that have reduced Arendts complex think-
ing to a historically situated critique of totalitarianism and Marxism, without
attending sufficiently to her critiques of identity politics. Second, Spanos
confronts the Zionist reactions to Arendts problematization of Jewish iden-
tity, finding in her understanding of the nonidentitarian community a point of
intersection with Saids elaboration of the question of Palestine. We might
add to these conventional readings of Arendt those that circulated by the
1990s in Latin America, whose main goal was to limit the processes of
democratization many countries were accomplishing during that time with
a very narrow, uncontaminated, notion of the political (as opposed to the

21. In this sense, I share the more elaborated understanding of history and politics found
in the line that goes from Foucault to Jacques Rancire, which detaches itself from the
reenactment of Platonic ontology and from the closure of the political universe by the
biopolitical overdetermination of human life. In addition to the insightful reading of litera-
ture as a symptomatic place where imperial reason is always at work, this approach also
offers the chance to read complex literary works as linguistic elaborations of human his-
torical imagination, something Said and Spanos are very much aware of, as have been
Giambattista Vico, Erich Auerbach, Jorge Borges, Jos Lezama Lima, and Pascal Qui-
gnard, to name only a few.

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social and the economic). Indeed, Arendt has been misappropriated by

neoconservatives all around the world, scholars who, reducing her germi-
native thinking to the critique of totalitarianism, have presented Western
liberal democracies, the so-called Euro-American articulation, as the only
good alternative to dictatorship and fundamentalism, without interrogating
the historical enactment of imperial reason this articulation has made pos-
sible in the first place.
In this sense, Spanoss most recent book produces a movement
from destruction to counterpoint, which, however, should not be taken as
mutually exclusive. Instead, they represent different moments in Spanoss
historically engaged thinking. While destruction enables the disarticula-
tion of beings historical and decentered agency from the overdetermi-
nation produced by metaphysicsas a historically articulated discourse,
ontotheologycounterpoint follows as a supplementary procedure con-
cerned with affirming beings practices as heterogeneous and equiprimor-
dial to the question of being. In this sense, Spanoss reading of Arendt and
Said, his affiliation in counterpoint, does not attempt a harmonic articu-
lation of both or a dialectical synthesis. Instead, he wants to conserve the
dissonances of the encounter, since in them there is much to be thought.
What makes this counterpoint a possibility is a series of coincidences,
but not similarities, in their life and work. First, Spanos attends to their exilic
condition and their particular elaborations of that condition. Both Said and
Arendt came to America, leaving behind Palestine and Germany, to pursue
prolific academic careers, which were also an intellectual practice, worldly
oriented, politically engaged, but not reducible to the logic of partisanship.
Spanos then points to the particular politics their thinking makes pos-
sible, a politics marked but not reducible to their identity. It was, instead,
a nonidentitarian politics, already beyond the binary logic of the us and
them, oriented toward a kind of cosmopolitanism unwilling to identify itself
with ethnic, cultural, linguistic, or national overdeterminations. This is why
the non-Palestinian Palestinian, always somehow out of place, and the
non-Jewish Jew, who knew the difference between the parvenu and the
pariah, seem particularly relevant to this cosmopolitanism. It is Saids secu-
lar understanding of the Palestine question, his ability to engage with Israeli
intellectuals without renouncing his critique of Zionism, and it is Arendts
understanding of the Holocaust, her particular reading of the Eichmann
case, and her reservations with respect to the affective identification and
unconditional defense of the Jew, that makes them models for Spanoss
exilic politics.

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Crucial also is the emphasis Spanoss places on the exile and the
refugee (migrant) as a material embodiment of our time, the postCold War
mundializacin that is also the decline of the nation-state and its commu-
nity. But this is an ambiguous moment in Spanoss elaboration of the prob-
lem, since the exile seems to be both an epistemological and existential
position that enables a secular intellectual practice and a dramatic condi-
tion, a condition millions of human beings forcibly suffer today. Spanos
claims that Arendts and Saids challenging works set the conditions for a
secular, nonidentitarian, cosmopolitical criticism able to deal with the brutal
character of contemporary global capitalism and its inherent production of
bare life. Let me quote him one last time on this:

In other words, what I have tried to suggest in pointing to the affilia-

tive relationship between Saids exilic consciousness and Arendts
conscious pariahdom is that their discourses on the question of
Palestine, however distant in time, can be read not simply as a gen-
erational dialogue as such, but, more resonantly and exactly, as an
Auseinandersetzungan open-ended and constantly rejuvenating
dialogue in loving strifeone undertaken by a non-Jewish Jew and
a non-Palestinian Palestinian in the dissonant polyphonic mode
that Said, in opposition to the deadly marching logic of belonging of
the nation-state, envisioned as the singular mode of belonging of the
community to come. (EC, 192)

Again, what is salient in this enabling counterpoint is the role played

by Agambens articulation of bare life (and the community to come).
There is not, under any circumstance, a romantic representation of the
exilic condition in Said, Arendt, or Spanos. But, at the same time, neither
Arendt nor Said reduce the exile to the homo sacer, precisely because the
exile struggles, in a very melancholic mood if you like, to mourn a loss.
But, as part of this mourning task, the exile also always enacts a prosthetic
form of life. Therefore, what Said and Arendt envisioned in their reflec-
tions on the question of Palestine, power, exile, and politics is not neces-
sarily the coming community imagined by contemporary European think-
ing. It is instead the real community, the one being right here, and not in
illo tempore.
I should therefore be forgiven this last comment, since I am think-
ing the potentiality, the futurity of Spanoss work, his example and his
many achievements, as crucial for a more than needed political account
of our contemporary occasion. Spanoss intellectual politics, his polemical

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criticism, and the generosity of his destructive confrontation with the real
enable an interrogation of the actual community, the too many Americas in
America, and the current inability to come to terms, beyond identity politics,
ethnographic approaches, and area studies, with the savage heterogeneity
not of the coming community but of the actual community in which our own
practices are inserted.22
This is, after all, the secular meaning of this nonhumanist human-
ism. Of course, Spanos seems to me more than relevant, not just because,
biographically speaking, it was through him that I got a sense of Ameri-
can imperial reason and American higher education23 but also because
his insistent polemos authorizes us to read him critically, without reserva-
tion. I would daresay, in line with his polemos, that what his thinking actu-
ally demands is a radical reconsideration of the university division of labor,
in order to make American studies a place for worldly matters, probably
the only place where the interrogation of American imperial reason and its
complementary exceptionalism opens the questions of mundializacin, the
ongoing metamorphosis of imperial reason, and the current proliferation of
bare life. In this sense, what is at stake here is not an indeterminate future
but our present, even though we understand backward but live forward.

22. Of course, I am not saying this as a Latin American intellectual (a meaningless term
that merely repeats a nineteenth-century nomenclature). Instead, following this affilia-
tive, nonidentitarian politics, I am saying this as it seems relevant for a cosmopolitanism
based on the secular representation of the community, a sort of secular republicanism
for which Heideggers destructive hermeneutics or even Agambens biopolitical analysis
could be relevant but not enough.
23. It was around 2000; I had just arrived at the University of Pittsburgh and was taking
a class with Paul Bov when I heard from him some comments on William Spanos. Then
I read The End of Education, which struck me deeply, as it allowed me to transition from
the kinds of problems I was confronting in postdictatorial Chile to the kinds of problems I
was about to confront in my new American life. After consulting with Spanos, who came
to a b2 conference that year, I decided to translate this book into Spanish. More impor-
tant than the publication and the debates around it in Chile and Latin America, I consider
the process of coming to terms with this work of criticism a decisive experience in my life.
The book appeared in Chile as Heidegger y la crisis del humanismo contemporneo: El
caso de la academia norteamericana (Santiago: Escaparate, 2009).

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