Universal History Disavowed On Critical PDF

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Universal history disavowed: on critical theory and postcolonialism

Antonio Y. Vázquez-Arroyo
Online Publication Date: 01 December 2008
To cite this Article Vázquez-Arroyo, Antonio Y.(2008)'Universal history disavowed: on critical theory and postcolonialism',Postcolonial
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Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 451!473, 2008
Universal history disavowed: on

critical theory and postcolonialism
ANTONIO Y VÁZQUEZ-ARROYO
Downloaded By: [Vázquez-Arroyo, Antonio Y.] At: 03:56 4 December 2008
Universal history must be construed and denied. After the catastrophes that have
happened, and in view of the catastrophes to come, it would be cynical to say
that a plan for a better world is manifested in history and unites it. Not to be
denied for that reason, however, is the unity that cements the discontinuous,
chaotically splintered moments and phases of history*the unity of the control of
nature, progressing to rule over men’s inner nature.1
Theodor W Adorno
The consolidation of transnational financial capital, the proliferation of

planetary networks, diasporic histories, the threat of global catastrophes, and
the advent of postcolonialism have all become predominant themes in
cultural, political, literary, and postcolonial theory. In the humanities,
especially in the field of comparative literature, the aforementioned themes
figure largely in vigorous discussions about the relevance of the idea of world
literature; meanwhile, within political theory some of these historical
developments have been thematized in various adaptations of the idea of
cosmopolitanism. The thematizations of these questions respond to the
changing configurations of power*economic, cultural, and political*in an
increasingly planetary predicament. Yet, while the historical trajectories of
cosmopolitanism and world literature have been significantly revamped in
current discussions, the idea of universal history is consistently eschewed in
these discussions. Indeed, hardly any other notion is these days as disparaged
as the idea of universal history. Its theoretical import*even as ‘World-
History’*has been severely criticized on the basis of its teleological,
totalizing, and Eurocentric conceits, to the extent that no effort is in sight
to try to reclaim the critical import of this idea.2
The sternest challenges to notions of universal and world history have more
recently come from thinkers whose reflections are informed by the post-
colonial critique of Western historiography and its imperial ambitions. In
these theorizations the pair conforming universal history*‘universal’ and
‘history’*are always considered suspect, as these are seen to partake in
European political and epistemic domination. And when theorized together,
the notion conjures the ghosts of stadial theories of history, of a certain form
of historicism that always privileges the European path of development as
normative, and thus is complicit with political and epistemic imperialism. Yet
ISSN 1368-8790 print/ISSN 1466-1888 online/08/040451!23 # 2008 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies
DOI: 10.1080/13688790802468288
the stringency of the postcolonial critique becomes problematic once one

bears in mind the historical and theoretical complicity of cosmopolitanism*
in many ways a notion best theorized by Immanuel Kant in tandem with the
idea of universal history*with Western imperialism. Intriguingly, such
complicity is hardly considered a good reason to discard cosmopolitanism,
let alone to deride its critical import.3 But such leniency is not dispensed to
the idea of universal history. Not only does universal history seem too tainted
with progressivist teleologies of history, with the version of historicism
associated with vulgar notions of historical materialism, but it also conjures
archaic ideas of universal empire and stadial theories of progress and
modernization, which hardly helps the case for its retrieval. With the
exception of Dipesh Chakrabarty, who has recently invoked the need to
theorize the universal in relation to ‘collective histories’ that narrate our

‘species-history’ in a planetary predicament mediated by a ‘looming environ-
mental crisis,’ a rejection of the ‘universal’ and of ‘history’ in postcolonial
theory has become a conceit that prevents any critical theorization of
universal history.4
Perhaps this is one reason why postcolonial theorizations have so far
eluded engagement with the critical theory associated with the Frankfurt
School, especially the reworking of dialectical thinking*most notably the
dialectic of the universal and the particular*that occurred in the thinkers
associated with the first generation, especially in the writings of Theodor W
Adorno. An engagement with Adorno and postcolonial theory, however,
provides unexpected results, such as the retrieval of a negative universal
history as a narrative category to apprehend the complexities of the historical
trends that have shaped the emergence of postcolonialism as a historical
condition. Accordingly, inspired by recent theorizations of the idea of world
literature, this essay defends the critical import of universal history as a
narrative category by exploring intersection between critical theory and
postcolonialism. Herein, I formulate a theoretical reconstruction of this
narrative category and in the concluding section of the essay return to
Chakrabarty’s work in order to probe the critical import of negative universal
history in mapping out planetary predicaments of power, including post-
colonialism.
World literature, universal history

In the late 1820s, inspired by the reading of a Chinese novel, Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe formulated what still is an influential yet contested
idea: ‘world literature.’ Goethe considered this idea a central component of
an emerging process of intra-European cultural exchange, leading to an
enrichment of national cultures and literatures by means of struggles,
arguments, and critical comparisons.5 As an idea, world literature vaguely
oscillated between a canonical reverence of ‘great books’ and an inclusive
regard for all of the world’s literature, at least at a rhetorical level, since its
geographic scope was mostly circumscribed to Europe. Widely regarded as
the ur-idea of comparative literature, from Goethe and Thomas Carlyle on,
452
UNIVERSAL HISTORY DISAVOWED
the idea of world literature continues to trigger theoretical reflections in the

context of the globalizing process of economic and cultural life in the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It oscillates between a global
literary history that seeks to map out morphological variations and reverence
to great books embodying universal values*a productive tension that
remains at its core, at once present in comparative enquiries and in particular
texts.6 The study of world literature thus suggests the possibility of shared
planetary values that signal to a concrete place, the planet: an uncanny locus
that mediates our inhabitance and sense of the world.7 And a locus in which
the universal, in the ambiguity denoted by its real, fictive and ideal
connotations, consistently lurks.8 But also a locus in which temporal and
spatial differentiations in our planetary predicament can be discerned and
mapped out by means of a dialectic of the universal and the particular; a

critical mapping that our current planetary predicament of power*mediated
by neoliberal capitalist imperatives, global asymmetries of power and status,
and the threat of ecological catastrophe*invites more so than ever before.
Universal history, in many ways a similar notion, carries the same critical
import.
Roughly two decades before Goethe, G W F Hegel’s philosophy
synthesized the idea of universal history, which carries significant conceptual
weight in his system and whose subsequent import can hardly be over-
estimated. From the early nineteenth century on, Hegel’s philosophy of
history set the terms of most discussions not only on the nature of historical
knowledge, and its conditions of possibility, but also of its political and
philosophical import. Not only did Hegel creatively rework the reflections on
historical knowledge posited by some of his predecessors, including towering
figures such as Giambattista Vico, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant, but the
imprint of his reflections on historical knowledge is also found*albeit often
left unacknowledged*in contemporary debates on what, after Wilhem
Dilthey, has come to be known as the relationship between ‘explanation’
and ‘interpretation’ in historical and cultural knowledge.9 It could also be
argued that it is in Hegel’s effort to speculatively cognize the identity and lack
of identity between universal and particular*identity and difference*
comprehensively that the epistemological import of his philosophy of history
can be found. By positing the centrality of a comprehensive, and speculative,
need to map the whole, to apprehend it from the perspective of the present in
its multiple mediations*a reflection better theorized in his Science of Logic
(1812)*Hegel sought to formulate a conceptual basis for historical knowl-
edge.10 And his idea of universal history figures largely in this effort.
But Hegel has nowadays become synonymous with another, more
infamous influence: his Eurocentrism and the moments of domination that
feminist, critical, and postcolonial theorists have discerned in his philosophi-
cal system seem to taint his notion of universal history beyond redemption.11
So entangled has the idea of universal history been with progressive teleologies
and ill-defined historicisms that the term is perceived as intrinsically entangled
with Eurocentric domination.12 But the critique of universal history is not just
a conceit of theorizations inspired by poststructuralism. It finds a pivot in
453
some of Hegel’s formulations, even if the critical edge of his dialectical

thinking is irreducible to them. The basis for these charges is found in the logic
of back-shadowing that pervades Hegel’s narratives: the past is not only
justified and given a logical order from the perspective of the outcomes of
decisions that individuals in that past could not have foreseen, but is also, in
this way, despoiled of the ambiguous and contingent dimensions that once
defined it as a present.13 And the past is subsumed in a redemptive moment
that renders the particular into a particularity of the universal.14 Universal
history is already a central idea in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807),
where Spirit’s path, in its mediated incarnations on the way to its self-
consciousness of freedom, is historically traced. In Hegel’s early formulation,
emphasis is not placed on a transnational, or international, form of history
(Geschichte) that could be enriched by its encounters with other local or

national histories. Instead, its intent is that of a progressive teleology that
traces the development of Geist and the realization of the idea of freedom in
the European consciousness.
Hegel’s formulation of universal history thus lacked the critical disposition
of Goethe’s plea for world literature. Rather, what Hegel’s synthesis of this
idea emphasized, as Kant’s version of it did before, was the trajectory of a
universal idea of freedom. But in Hegel its realization carried a logic of
sacrifice that is built into its teleology: his redemption of the deaths of
Antigone and Christ in the Phenomenology of Spirit, and of Socrates in his
Lectures on the History of Philosophy, are just the best known examples.
Besides, its scope was unambiguously Eurocentric.15 In Hegel’s subsequent
formulations, especially in his lectures on the philosophy of history, the non-
European is mostly considered derogatorily, for the sake of illustrating
European superiority; hence, its tacit complicity with European imperial-
ism.16 That is, paraphrasing Adorno, while Hegel the logician portends a
dialectical mediation of the universal and the particular, Hegel the
philosopher of history always sides with the universal to the detriment of
the particular.17
Unlike world literature, universal history is nowadays in shambles. The
current fate of ‘universal’ is that of a Eurocentric conceit that after the
postcolonial critiques is better left in the dustbin of history that it theorized
and to which it has historically consigned the non-European. But this
summary judgment may well be too hasty. As in the idea of world literature,
the pair that this idea brings together*‘universal’ and ‘history’*conjures
different possibilities worth exploring: (1) universal history can signify the
history of the universal, an account of the travails of universality, its changing
meanings in the non-European, as well as within the European, world; (2) or
as the universal dimension of history, a conceptual elucidation of the
centrality of history (Historie not Gechichte) in the human condition
accounting for different variations; (3) a spatially and temporally differ-
entiated narrative of the dialectic of non-identity between universal and
particular in singular events with the planet as its primary locus; (4)
yet another possibility is that universal history alerts us to the produc-
tive intersection between the moment of universality of the structuring
454
imperatives in Capitalism, for instance, and the contingency of its particular

historical manifestations, an intersection in which the different manifestations
of the universal*the real, fictive, and ideal*can be critically apprehended
and discerned.18 The last formulation adumbrates a self-effacing concept of
universal history, but whose effacement is the upshot of dialectical mediation.
While this is hardly the place to explore each of these possibilities, their
invocation suffices to portend the political import of universal history as a
(critical) narrative category and of critical historicism as one of its surrogates.
Adorno or Benjamin?
Retrieving the critical significance of universal history as a narrative category
in which the aforementioned possibilities can be theorized*with the dialectic
of non-identity between universal and particular as its master trope*is

possible by means of Theodor W Adorno’s reflections on this idea in the
often-neglected section of Negative Dialectics, ‘World Spirit and Natural
History.’ As it is well known, Adorno shared with Walter Benjamin a strong
critique of narratives of history as progress.19 And like Benjamin before him,
he rejected fantasies of cumulative history and philosophical notions of a
universal Geist unfolding in history. But there are important differences
between their two accounts which revolve around their respective critiques of
progress: while Benjamin focused on tracing the redemptive potential of
experiences of shock, marginal figures, and the reversal of oppositions (i.e.
materialism and messianism), Adorno’s critical theory mostly worked by
means of the (Hegelian) dialectical concept of ‘determinate negation.’20 It is
in this vein that their contrasting views of universal history are better
assessed. In Negative Dialectics Adorno unequivocally stated, ‘Universal
history must be construed and denied’ [Universalgeschichte ist zu konstruieren
und zu leugnen]; Benjamin, in contrast, rejected the idea of universal history,
albeit not unambiguously. For him, ‘Universal History has no theoretical
armature.’ ‘Its procedure,’ he went on to suggest, ‘is additive: it musters a
mass of data to fill the homogenous, empty time.’21 As such, universal history
is the epitome of the historicism that he criticizes with vehemence in his last
text, ‘On the Concept of History.’ Even so, Benjamin was ultimately
ambivalent about entirely rejecting the idea of universal history. In his
preparatory notes to ‘OCH’ he entertained a possibility at odds with his
rejection of universal history in thesis XVIII: ‘Universal histories are not
inevitably reactionary.’ He further added that what universal history needs is
‘the structural principle’ that opens up spaces of differentiation by means of
which salvation in history is possible.22 Yet it is that differentiation in unity
that his critique of progress requires but that he ultimately did not theorize.
Namely, the differentiation of history in which the critical dislocation and
unity of discontinuity and continuity that cements historical experiences,
perhaps the most crucial element in the history of defeat and possibility that
the theses as a whole argue for, demands a dialectical rendering of history and
progress.23 This dialectical account of historical experience, however, is better
cognized by means of a narrative of universal history in which both moments
455
can be rendered, in their mediations and dislocations, continuities and

discontinuities; a conceptually bounded narrative category of universal
history. By means of dialectical thinking, especially the centrality of
‘determinate negation,’ Adorno is more consistently dialectical and thus
able to theorize the idea of universal history in the ways already adumbrated.
Even so, Adorno’s formulation of universal history is deeply indebted to
Benjamin’s work. His is a reworking of Benjaminian motifs emplotted in a
more sustained dialectical narrative of history. Adorno’s reflections on
history sought to dialectically apprehend concepts in their equivocal
historical articulations*a mode of reading and interpreting phenomena
that consists in the crafting of immanent readings to critically discern the
moment of truth in even reified concepts, thus seeking to pry them open in
their non-identity with the objects that conceptual thinking nonetheless

mediates; namely, to lay bare the moment of non-identity in the concept.
Adorno’s is a philosophy of non-identity that begins with identity, and
immanently negates it by recovering unities and discontinuities, the con-
tinuities and innovations in the historical articulations and concrete historical
realities that concepts seek to apprehend. His critical theory immanently
breaks them out of its historical usages in systematic philosophies and
critically deploys them from the perspective of a negative philosophy of non-
identity.24 In this vein, Adorno’s critique of progress and the ensuing retrieval
of universal history that he formulated stem out of one of the defining
attributes of his critical theory: something that is better understood from the
perspective of his dialectical reluctance to proceed outside of conceptual
thinking.
One of the most prominent aspects of Adorno’s formulation of negative
universal history is a critique of the redemptive narrative at work in Hegel’s
conception, a critique that correlates with the tenor of not only Adorno’s
critique of Hegel but also his critique of historical suffering and the logic of
sacrifice that often underwrites the philosophy of identity. In Minima
Moralia*which alongside Dialectic of Enlightenment and Philosophy of
New Music is one of the commanding works that Adorno produced during
his exile, an experience that in its own ways mediated his plea for
discontinuity and non-identity*Adorno writes: ‘Had Hegel’s philosophy of
history embraced this age, Hitler’s robot-bombs would have found their place
beside the early death of Alexander and similar images, as one of the selected
empirical facts by which the state of world-spirit manifests itself directly in
symbols.’25 Adorno takes to task Hegel’s redemptive narrative of historical
progress: Hegel’s is a narrative of redemption that is predicated on a logic of
sacrifice*sacrifices that are supposedly made for the emergence of a higher
form of freedom. For Hegel the universal always takes precedence over the
particular; a siding with the universal that, as Adorno consistently observed,
sabotages dialectical thinking. Accordingly, the task of a negative idea of
universal history is to restore the particular in its mediations by and with the
universal, which Hegel’s philosophy of history either silences, or disavows, by
often recasting it as a particularity of the universal (ND, 173!174).
456
But this critique of the logic of sacrifice built into Hegel’s formulations*
which echoes that presented by Adorno in his Kierkegaard: The Construction
of the Aesthetic (1932)*hardly leads to a disavowal of universal history as
such, but to a critique of its usage in Hegel. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, for
instance, Adorno formulates a dialectical critique of this logic of sacrifice, as
part of the ‘primal history of subjectivity’ that the text expounds, which
illuminates his treatment of universal history: while cunning redeems sacrifice
in Hegel’s philosophy of history, in Adorno’s reading of the Odyssey, sacrifice
is recast as self-sacrifice for the sake of the principle of identity. But Odysseus’
self-sacrifice carries its moment of truth; it could be dialectically reversed,
which is what the excursus sets out to do, a reversal of the dialectic of
enlightenment in which the principle of identity, and its subordination of the
particular to the universal, is immanently criticized, so the critical telos of

reason can be retrieved by means of a critique of its concept.26
It is by means of this immanent critique of the principle of identity, which
proceeds in tandem with his engagement with Benjamin, that Adorno
formulates the idea of a negative universal history in Negative Dialectics.
The Benjaminian moment is already present in Minima Moralia, where
Adorno draws from Benjamin to further elucidate his critique of Hegel:
If Benjamin said that history hitherto had been written from the standpoint of
the victor, and needed to be rewritten from that of the vanquished, we might add
that knowledge indeed presents the fatally rectilinear succession of victory and
defeat, but should also address itself to those things which were not embraced by
this dynamic, which fell by the wayside*what might be called the waste products
and blind spots that have escaped the dialectic.27
It is precisely these blind spots that Adorno’s negative dialectic, with its
emphasis on non-identity, seeks to illuminate by means of constructing
critical constellations. Ultimately, Adorno’s negative universal history relies
on a critique of progress that, while indebted to Benjamin, proceeds by means
of dialectical immanent critique of the concept of progress in its different
articulations. A critique of progress that illuminates these blinds spots of the
dialectic and incorporates the concern with the defeated, but it is guided by a
reworked dialectic of the universal and the particular.
Adorno’s critical theory thus retains a concept of progress through which
he criticizes ‘progress’ as understood in Hegel’s and Kant’s philosophies of
history. Accordingly, the continuities and discontinuities, as much as the
progressive and regressive elements, found in the history of a concept are
immanently discerned, and thus rendered. ‘Like every philosophical term,
progress has its equivocations; and every such term’s equivocations also
register a commonality.’28 Out of this insight, Adorno goes on to explore
these equivocations in order to flesh out the moment of commonality in
them, and how, by immanently criticizing these equivocations, its true content
emerges:
Progress means: a coming out of the spell, even out of the spell of progress which
is itself nature, when human mankind becomes aware of its own indigenousness
457
to nature and halts the mastery which it exerts over nature through which
mastery by nature continues. In this respect it could be said that progress only
properly occurs where it ends.
Then, progress would become transformed into resistance against the perpetual
danger of relapse.29
Progress thus entails breaking with the spell of providential conceptions of

history, both secular and religious. Later on, in his lecture course of 1964!
1965, Adorno restated his argument as follows: ‘For progress today really
does mean simply the prevention and avoidance of total catastrophe. And I
would say that, if only it can be prevented and avoided, that would be in fact
progress’ (HF, p 143). Progress, like truth, is always historical. Adorno thus
insists on the double character of the notion of progress and on the critical
possibilities that an immanent critique of progress by means of its own

concept opens up.
Accordingly, in the essay ‘Progress,’ as well as in his joint authorship with
Horkheimer in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno historicizes the idea of
progress and immanently explores the conceptual tensions within it*a
critique through which Adorno is able to present a concept of progress that
while resisting any abstract negation of the experiential and utopian
connotations of the term, does not revert into a hypostatized understanding
of history. ‘Each advance in civilization has renewed not only mastery but
also the prospect of its alleviation. However, while real history is woven from
real suffering, which certainly does not diminish in proportion to the increase
in means of abolishing it, the fulfillment of that prospect depends on the
concept.’30 Its moment of truth, as Adorno consistently insisted, is the threat
and permanence of catastrophe:
In the age of catastrophe the idea of progress cannot be conceived of as settling
for less. Progress should no more be ontologized, unthinkingly ascribed to the
realm of being, than should decline, with which, admittedly, modern philosophy
appears to be more comfortable. Too little that is good has power in the world
for the world to be said to have achieved progress, but there can be no good, not
even a trace of it without progress. (HF, p 149)
‘Progress,’ as a concept, is immanently criticized from the perspective of the

utopian moment that is revealed in the concept’s non-identity with the objects
it seeks to denote. But this critique of progress relies on a narrative of history
in which both moments can be discerned and critically apprehended.
Negative universal history

By the mid-1960s, when Adorno was preparing the materials for his magnum
opus, Negative Dialectics, he lectured on the philosophy of history and
articulated the need for ‘an elaborate philosophical theory.’31 The critical task
consisted in elaborating concepts that illuminate the blind spots of the
dialectic as part of the ‘construction’ of a larger ‘constellation’; namely,
history (HF, p 87). Stated differently, once directed to history, constellational
critique, as elaborated in Negative Dialectics, and as compellingly formulated
458
and performed in the ‘Essay as Form,’ seeks to grasp historical experience by

breaking with the silences pervading hegemonic historical narratives and
lending voice to the suffering of the defeated, in many cases the nameless
others sacrificed by the principle of identity inscribed in the idea of
progress.32 Adorno aims at breaking with the silencing of the memory of
suffering, not by pretending to speak for the defeated, or imposing a
reconciliatory voice that redeems their suffering; rather, the goal is to lend a
voice to suffering, to ‘translate pain into the concept’ [den Schmerz in das
Medium des begriffs ubersetzen].33 In Adorno’s philosophy, such labour of
translation reckons with the sedimented histories that mediate concepts. It
also feeds into history the sense of possibility that Adorno inherits from
Benjamin, and thus congeals the utopian longings of the defeated and renders
visible their suffering while presenting a differentiated account of the

universal dynamics at work in particular instances. A dialectic of the
universal and the particular underwrites this labour of translation, but it
does so from the perspective of non-identity. The latter is the moment in
which the silences of the nameless others, the victims of progress, are avowed
in this narrative, even if the silencing of history is criticized. Non-identity is
what opens the possibility for a dialectic of mutual mediation between the
social process and the fates of individuals without reducing historical
experience to either one of these mutually mediated poles.
This dialectic is clearly graspable in Adorno’s formulation of the concepts
of immediacy and mediation. For Adorno, ‘the relation between the
universal, the universal tendency, and the particular, that is the individual,’
is one of mutual mediation (HF, p 11). Even immediacy is mediated, yet the
concept of ‘immediacy’ cannot be discarded. In his lectures on history and
freedom Adorno teases out the critical import of this insight by providing the
following example:
A fact like a house search in which you do not know whether you will be taken
off somewhere or whether you will escape with your life has a greater immediacy
for the knowing subject than any amount of political information [ . . . ] to say
nothing of the larger historical context to which only reflection and, ultimately,
theory can give us access. (HF, p 20)
Yet as indispensable as this moment of experience is, and its immediacy as an

experience is not to be disavowed, this experience of immediacy is mediated
by a universal process that it also constitutes, but that it cannot map out.
Similarly, the universal cannot capture, or convey, the particular as its
particularity. While the immediate experience of horror felt when his house
was searched was real enough and the particular event imprinted in Adorno’s
memory, ‘the real cause [Realgrund]’ of the search is not a contingent, random
occurrence, but the particular instantiation of the Nazi regime, the universal
mediating this particular instance (HF, p 25). Stated differently, this
immediate experience is the product of a series of structural, political
changes that led to the rise of Nazi Germany*hence house searches are
not contingent occurrences in this regime, but are a necessary instrument of
this formation of power, and its political identity, not an aberration*which is
459
the ‘universal’ that mediates the ‘particular’ and at the same time is
constituted by it. Accordingly, what is criticized is not immediacy as such;
instead, following Marx’s critical historicism, Adorno presents ‘a critique of
the immediacy of the immediate’ (HF, p 20). But from the perspective of non-
identity the particular cannot be subsumed in the universal, either. Any
critical narrative of a historical moment needs to render both moments in
their mediations but also in their non-identity.34 Under the Third Reich
individuals like Adorno had their houses searched, an immediate affront that
was experienced in ways that no universal account can completely subsume,
but an immediate affront that needs to be understood within the context of
the universal process.35 Only a narrative of history that avows the immediacy
of memory and the necessary nature of structural imperatives within a
predicament of power can irreducibly render these two moments; hence, the
centrality of comprehensiveness and bindingness in Adorno’s concept of
negative universal history.
But if bindingness can be construed as one crucial pole of negative
universal history, critical historicism is the other. Adorno’s negative universal
history adumbrates a critical historicism that further illustrates the centrality
of mediation in his thinking about history. The lineaments of this critical
historicism can be best discerned in Adorno’s discussion of the concepts of
‘static’ and ‘dynamic.’ Here Adorno turns to the concept of ‘natural history.’
For as part of the ‘social process’ that defines our interactions with the world
as a species, there is ‘the permanent mediation’ of nature and history as two
different albeit thoroughly mediated ‘moments.’36 Yet neither moment is just
static or dynamic. Instead, both are rendered as mutually mediated categories
that positivist sociology has tended to hypostatize. The lineages of Adorno’s
critique of these oppositions*nature and history or the dynamic and the
static*are unmistakenly Marxist. He explicitly draws from the critical
historicism that emerges from Marx’s critique of the categories of the
political economy and thus historicizes the opposition of the static and the
dynamic in relation to the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Western
Europe and links it to the question of memory, arguably the province of the
dialectic of the dynamic and the static, to present how these two notions are
historically mediated. 37 For Adorno, in the same way the ‘static’ is the social
condition of the ‘dynamic,’ the dynamic of the progressive, rational
domination of nature teleologically becomes static.38 A teleologically
constituted dynamic of domination that is rendered as ‘teleological’ not
because it is pre-ordained, or necessary in any metaphysical way; rather,
‘teleological’ in so far as the rational domination of nature has its own ends
and bears a drive towards domination with its own internal imperatives that
threaten to become the sole engine of the historic trend, and thus a static
placeholder for the ideology of ‘progress.’ Capitalism’s own dynamic patterns
of domination thus become static as part of the dynamic stability that defines
its itinerary. Static and dynamic are two thoroughly mediated historical
categories whose respective meanings can only be apprehended by reference
to specific moments and the particular constellation of the dialectic of the
universal and the particular that these moments crystallize. The centrality of
460
mediation in Adorno’s critical historicism further marks the distance between

a negative universal history and statements that self-effacingly posit the
opposition of necessity and contingency, the dynamic and the static, just to
privilege the contingent and the dynamic. Herein, historicism emerges as a
diachronic concept which conjures a way of thinking that is opposed to
exclusively synchronic accounts of knowledge*an approach that may lead to
the contextualization and relativization of epistemological and moral claims,
especially those that claim trans-historical validity, or as the capacity to
understand the historical dimension of human phenomena, both the
continuities and the discontinuities.39 One of Fredric Jameson’s formulations
of historicism is apposite here: ‘The dilemma of any ‘‘historicism’’ can then be
dramatized by the peculiar unavoidable, yet seemingly unresolvable alternat-
ing between Identity and Difference.’40 This dilemma can also be thematized
as the equally unavoidable mediation between the universal and the

particular. But such dilemmas entail a periodization that allows for both a
sense of continuity and discontinuity to emerge, along with the critical import
discerned by Marx’s critique of political economy. Rather than the historicism
of empty-time rejected by Benjamin, critical historicism apprehends history in
its temporal and spatial differentiation; historical events are apprehended as
particulars mediated by universal in both their identity and non-identity.
Adorno’s critical theory of history seeks to comprehend history as the
dialectical evolving of the universal and the particular from the perspective of
non-identity. In doing so, he belabours the continuities established by
identitarian philosophies of history, like Hegel’s, and breaks the binding
yoke of the principle of identity without forsaking continuity, or bindingness.
This conception of history is consistent with the critical core of Adorno’s
critical theory: the subjective undermining of sovereign subjectivity; con-
ceptual critiques of the concept; and a rejection of idealist systems of thought
in the name of a comprehensive knowledge that avows the radical truth of its
objects by forcing concepts to say what in their identitarian formulations
remains ‘unsayable’ by means of inscribing the suffering of the defeated, of
fetching their memory to interrupt identitarian accounts of History.41 Largely
due to his reluctance to give up comprehensiveness and bindingness, Adorno
at once criticizes and preserves the idea of universal history. In doing so, he
reiterates the principle that is constitutive of his philosophy: the need to
immanently analyse the history of a concept in its equivocations, which often
lead to a more adequate understanding of both its utopian content and its
historical complicity with domination. But, contrary to the lengthy treatment
that the philosophy of history receives in Hegel’s system, and the emphasis
the latter places on its method, object, and even in the way of writing it,
Adorno’s retrieval of the critical import of universal history was only
published as one of his models of negative dialectics. In Negative Dialectics
he writes:
Universal history must be construed and denied. After the catastrophes that have
happened, and in view of the catastrophes to come, it would be cynical to say
that a plan for a better world is manifested in history and unites it. Not to be
461
denied for that reason, however, is the unity that cements the discontinuous,
chaotically splintered moments and phases of history*the unity of the control of
nature, progressing to rule over men’s inner nature. (ND, p 320)
Both the cynicism surrounding abstract ideas of progress and the subjugation
of nature by humans are two moments that for Adorno are contained in this
notion. In the same vein, he seeks to construe a narrative category in which
both moments can be cognized in their complex intersections while
illuminating their blind spots, rendering but never conceptually mending
them. Hence, the insistence on the unity that cements the discontinuous
moments. And the fate of humanity*as a whole*is what is depicted by
means of this formulation of universal history.
By insisting on the critical import of this narrative category, Adorno
recasts the dialectic of universal and particular in historical processes, the

intervening and often overlapping temporalities that constitute them, in order
to narrate continuities and discontinuities: namely, victory and defeat, actions
and reactions, and how these are entangled in structural processes that while
contingent inaugurate their own patterns of necessity.42 Its master code, so to
speak, is the dialectic of non-identity of the universal and the particular in
which the primacy of the particular is only attainable ‘by changing the
universal’ (ND, p 313). But this dialectic of universal and particular in
universal history not only purports a different unifying principle, but a
critical construction of it relies on the principle of discontinuity: ‘it represents
life perennially disrupted’; namely, an ‘awareness of discontinuity’ that
constructs a historical narrative that illuminates the ‘totality’ in ways that
question ‘understanding history as the unified unfolding of the idea,’ as in
Hegel’s positive unifying principle, which is the principle of identity.
Conceptually, universal history is a construction by means of a different
binding principle, the principle of non-identity*‘non-identity is a non-
identity of the identical and the non-identity’*which in turn is ‘what gives
history its unity’ (HF, pp 91!93). What is denied is a positive meaning, a
guiding idea in history; what is construed is a narrative category that
apprehends and narrates the ways in which the principle of identity is
manifested in the domination of nature.
But such constructions need to avow the primacy of the object, one of the
precepts that Adorno’s critical theory most vehemently defends (ND, pp 183!
186).43 And here the object is historical experience, the diachronic untidiness
of history that was disavowed by Structuralism. It is in the possibility to
construe a critical narrative of history that the idea of universal history
maintains its validity. As such, it reclaims Marx’s attempt to comprehensively
render the social process that is history, not as something ontologically
posited, but as a social and political process. Accordingly, Adorno goes on to
affirm, ‘History is the unity of continuity and discontinuity’ (ND, p 320). This
rather enigmatic formulation is elucidated in his lecture course, History and
Freedom. Adorno explains it:
The task of a dialectical philosophy of history, then, is to keep both these
conceptions in mind*that of discontinuity and that of universal history. This
462
means that we should not think in alternatives: we should not say history is
continuity or history is discontinuity. We must say instead that history is highly
continuous in discontinuity, in what I once referred to as the permanence of
catastrophe. (HF, p 92)
Here the prevalent theme is the continuity in the domination of nature, a
Freudian motif that is consistently present in recast form as part of Adorno’s
reflections. But this domination is also what in part accounts for the
discontinuities. It is here that Adorno finds inspiration in Benjamin’s well
known critique of progress as a ‘storm’ in Thesis IX.44 For him, this image
conjures the moment of continuity. But this is not enough. Negative universal
history needs to avow and expound historical discontinuities, too. Otherwise,
one will ‘blind oneself to the course of history.’ And the dialectic of continuity
and discontinuity in the course of history stems out of the domination of

nature: it is what ‘welds the discontinuous, hopelessly splintered elements and
phases of history together into a unity while at the same time its own pressure
senselessly tears them asunder once more’ (HF, p 93). Only from the
perspective of historical continuities can discontinuities be apprehended, as
breaks in such continuums. That is part of Adorno’s dialectical contention.
But particular events are discontinuous in yet another sense: in the sense of
being qualitatively different, non-identical. The particular is thus not a mere
instantiation of a larger, universal narrative, yet the particular is mediated by
the universal, by the continuous process of domination. If the dialectic is not
cut short, the particular mediates the universal as much as the universal
mediates the particular. Continuity and discontinuity are thus dialectically
mediated and rendered intelligible, in their mutual interruptions, in a negative
narrative of universal history.
Adorno’s immanent critique and retrieval of universal history is thus
similar to at least one of Marx’s formulations. It is formulated from the
perspective of a historically constituted objectivity in which humanity’s
interactions with nature figure largely. Adorno draws on Marx’s contention,
in The German Ideology, on the relationship between nature and history, and
approvingly quotes the following passage: ‘History can be considered from
two sides, divided into the history of nature and the history of mankind. Yet
there is no separating the two sides; as long as men exist, natural and human
history will qualify each other.’45 Adorno draws on this account of the
mediation of nature and history, and argues the impossibility of separating
these aspects, or presenting nature as an ontological basis for society, or as
second nature (ND, p 355).46 But Adorno at once retrieves and recasts the
terms of this opposition: nature is already historical and history is natural.
What is natural is thoroughly mediated by history; what is historical is
mediated by nature, by our evolving and engagement with the natural world.
By means of apprehending these dialectical mediations, one grasps the ways
in which human-made nature is naturalized, and thus presented as inevitable,
as fate, hence, this idea’s current critical edge.47 In our contemporary
planetary predicament, as Sven Lütticken has recently put it, ‘Social disasters
are naturalized and ‘‘natural’’ disasters are seen as man-made but not open to
463
intervention*society [is] in turn being perceived as subject to quasi-natural

fatality.’48 By means of a critical retrieval of this opposition, a history of
defeat and possibility can be soberly depicted as unnatural history, while the
continuity and the assertion of capitalism as fate can be cognized and
criticized.49 ‘Natural history,’ as theorized by Adorno, provides a dialectical
insight that historicizes looming environmental catastrophes without hypos-
tatizing their natural dimension.
In one of the formulations already alluded to, Adorno asserts, ‘No
universal history leads from the wild animal to the human being, but one
indubitably leads from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.’ This is a story not
about biological evolution but about technology at the service of domination.
Phrased differently, no necessary evolutionary pattern binds our humanity;
albeit contingent events inaugurate their own patterns of necessity, and thus
bring about an abstract bindingness.50 It is the domination of nature, and its
shapes and forms in modern conceptions of power, from Francis Bacon on,
that connects the slingshot to the atomic bomb. Instead of simply opposing
necessity with contingency, Adorno reformulates the binary in terms of a
dialectical narrative in which both are rendered comprehensively. Contingent
historical events carry different degrees of force and fragility, depending on
the success of their legitimating and ideological mechanisms. Suffering due to
the increasing domination of non-identity is an instance of it. Adorno writes:
‘The world spirit, a worthy object of definition, would have to be defined as a
permanent catastrophe. Under the all-subjugating identity principle, whatever
eludes rational planning in the realm of means, turns into frightening
retribution for the calamity which identity brought on the non-identical,’ a
calamity that can take the form of ‘the totality of historic suffering . . . the
One and All that keeps rolling on to this day . . . would teleologically be the
absolute of suffering’ (ND, p 320).
If there is any concrete basis to the moment of continuity in Adorno’s idea
of universal history, it is in the continuation of human suffering, even if its
concrete manifestations have varied historically. Negative universal history
thus contains both moments: the moment of contingency cuts through
notions of necessity, be it progress or evolution; the necessary allows for
socio-historical relations of domination (even of contingent origins) to be
discerned in their continuity and to critically cognize the patterns of
entrenchment of inequalities and unfreedom that mediate our actions in
predicaments of power that are dialectically constituted by these mediations.
Both moments are comprehensively rendered but never reconciled. And that
is what Adorno’s negative universal history entails: a critical narrative
category allowing for the non-identity of the universal and the particular,
one infused with a critical historicism that seeks to historicize particular
histories in their concrete local manifestations, without dispensing of the
universal comprehensive moment in the cognitive experience of apprehension
and representation. Variations and all the non-identical phenomena that the
principle of identity silences and disavows constitute the blind spots that
constellational critique seeks to illuminate. Blind spots whose non-identity is
mediated by the same principle of identity that negates their existence; hence,
464
the need to both deny and affirm universal history, as the canvas where the
continuity in the discontinuities of a planetary history is better discerned.
Negative universal history thus opens up history to both the necessary and
the unpredictable; namely, the incompleteness of history is avowed, as well as
its natality, while acknowledging that both moments are mediated, and
sometimes constrained, by the imperatives of historical continuity, especially
in relationship to ingrained patterns and practices of power*be it political,
economic, or cultural. These imbrications are rendered in a narrative that at
once captures the synchronic and diachronic moments in historical experi-
ences and the multifarious ways in which continuities and discontinuities are
dismantled and then reconstituted.51 The limits of explanation are thereby re-
cognized from the perspective of non-identity, yet historical explanation (and
periodization) is not eschewed.

While this excursus to Adorno’s critical engagement with the philosophy of
history may seem arcane, the critical import has a bearing in theorizing the
complex intersection, the internal mediation, between universal and parti-
cular, nature and history, in postcolonial predicaments of power. It also
provides the way of theorizing a universal history of freedom as possibility.
The latter contributes to the role that Adorno, in a powerful formulation, cast
for thinking, not as ‘the intellectual reproduction of what already exists,’ but
as an activity that ‘has a secured hold on possibility,’ a negative utopian
moment that while dispensing with easy affirmations and consolations,
nonetheless reclaims history not just as a narrative to apprehend the received
past but also a narrative that invites a rewriting of history that soberly
confronts the past but that also teases out moments of possibility.52
Postcolonialism and universal history

In a 1998 short essay published in Interventions, then a newly founded journal
of postcolonial studies, Terry Eagleton made a provocative distinction
between Postcolonialism as a historical condition and ‘Postcolonialism’ as
a theoretical endeavour that serves to map out the stakes in theorizing
Postcolonialism from the perspective of universal history.53 With character-
istic facetiousness Eagleton spelled out the tensions between the two.
Postcolonialism, without scare quotes, is a term that denotes the part of
the world that was formerly colonized directly by political means, and that
now is colonized in different ways, and by other means, mostly economic; a
condition that can be periodized in reference to the emergence of new
‘sovereign states’ in the non-European world after World War II, the wave of
wars of national liberation (1965!1975), and the nationalist politics of the
1980s.54 This is a world marred by the complex intersections between the
economic, the cultural, and the political in particular localities, yet bearing
universal-historical dimensions such as the spread of modernity and
capitalism.
‘Postcolonialism,’ however, is a moniker used to signify a body of theory
that emerged with force after experiences of political defeat and the
substitution of political for cultural nationalism. Its emphases on hybridity,
465
marginality, and difference have made indispensable contributions to ques-

tions of subject formation in postcolonial predicaments and the representa-
tion of the subaltern in these settings. ‘Postcolonialism’ has, for the most part,
disavowed the dialectic of universal and particular, as well as any notion of
historical bindingness*the latter understood as the interplay between the
static and the dynamic, natural and unnatural history. These categories of
negative universal history, however, are central to cognitively mapping the
complexities of Postcolonialism in their particular instantiations, yet these are
ultimately disavowed by ‘Postcolonialism.’55 One need not fully endorse
Eagleton’s polemic to assert that for all its theoretical accomplishment
‘Postcolonialism’ seems unable to provide the critical theory of history
necessary to account for the predicaments of power it attempts to map and
theorize. Or, stated differently, by disavowing dialectical thinking ‘Postcolo-

nialism’ is unable to muster the conceptual armature to fully apprehend the
complexities of Postcolonialism. Negative universal history needs to be
avowed to adequately theorize these predicaments.
Indeed, even while disavowed in most current critical approaches to the
production of history, universal history is oftentimes presupposed in the more
rigorous accounts of ‘Postcolonialism.’ Dipesh Chakrabarty’s stimulating
reflections in Provincializing Europe*a forceful account demoting Euro-
centric conceits which is predicated on a critical juxtaposition of dominant
metropolitan histories and post-colonial accounts of the former colonies*at
once illustrate the centrality of this narrative category and its disavowal. The
radical gesture of this book’s premise is adumbrated in its title: Europe is
rendered as a province rather than as a universal entity, or dominant centre in
historical narrative. Of course, European imperial dominance is at the centre
of the narrative, but its ideological conceits are debunked. As part of this
debunking, however, Chakrabarty makes some interesting assertions that are
worth considering: he affirms that critical concepts such as citizenship, state,
civil society, the individual, public sphere, etc., are intrinsic to political
modernity, which yields a nuanced theorization of the travails of modernity.
‘These concepts,’ he further adds, ‘entail an unavoidable*and in a sense
indispensable*universal and secular vision of the human’; these concepts are
part of the dual legacy of modernity. And these, along with imperialism and
colonialism, are oftentimes of European provenance. Chakrabarty thus
candidly writes: ‘Modern social critiques of caste, oppressions of women,
lack of rights for labor and subaltern classes in India, and so on*and, in fact,
the very critique of colonialism itself*are unthinkable except as a legacy,
partially, of how Enlightenment Europe was appropriated in the subconti-
nent.’56 An appropriation that was informed by a critique of the particular
manifestations, and concrete articulations, of modernity in that part of the
world, and that, in turn, critically unveils the hypocrisies and mischievousness
of Eurocentric formulations of these critiques.
Accordingly, a narrative of negative universal history is called for: a canvas
where this dual process, this concrete manifestation of the dialectic of
enlightenment in the expansion of modernity to the non-European world,
and its political and cultural legacies, can be illustrated. Surely, a universal
466
narrative of capital underlines Chakrabarty’s project. It at once interrupts but

is also interrupted by an alternative narrative of human belonging.57
Narratives of belonging are cast as the particulars that cannot be subsumed
in the history of Capital, and its telos, yet Chakrabarty acknowledges that
these are mediated by it. In his more recent formulation he writes:
History 1 . . . [is] the universal historical logic around which Marx built his
philosophical-historical category of ‘capital’*a history posited by capital itself.
History 2 referred to numerous other tendencies in history that did not
necessarily look forward to the telos of capital but could nevertheless be
intimately intertwined with History 1 in such a way as to arrest the thrust of
capital’s universal history and help it find a local ground.58
But these narratives*the one provincializing Europe and the narrative of

capital*are predicated on a universal-historical narrative that from the

perspective of non-identity seeks to comprehend both the universal and the
particular in these historical processes, without seeking to mend them, or to
impose an identity between Europe and the non-European. That efforts like
Chakrabarty’s are exemplary of the epistemological task of critical theory
goes without question. Even so, a narrative of universal history is
presupposed by this account but it is nowhere theorized in Provincializing
Europe. In subsequent reflections, however, Chakrabarty has explicitly
avowed the inescapability of the universal, even if such avowal is not readily
available from the perspective of either Heidegger or Foucault, two of the
main theoretical signposts of Provincializing Europe.59
Still, the political import of negative universal history is not restricted to
illuminating blind spots in histories, the histories in which enlightened ideals
are at once complicit in political moments of emancipation and in practices of
domination. Rather, its political import also resides in its role as articulating a
history of possibility, which is part of what is accomplished by apprehending
the ‘blind spots that have escaped the dialectic’ and breaking with the
silencing of the production of history.60 Susan Buck-Morss’s seminal essay,
‘Hegel and Haiti,’ offers some clues on what can be gained by reclaiming the
idea of negative universal history as part of an effort to rewrite a universal
narrative of human possibility. Buck-Morss begins the last section of her
path-breaking essay by asking the following:
Why is ending the silence on Hegel and Haiti important? Given Hegel’s ultimate
concession to slavery’s continuance*moreover, given the fact that Hegel’s
philosophy has provided for two centuries a justification for the most complacent
forms of Eurocentrism (Hegel was perhaps always a cultural racist if not a
biological one)*why is it more than arcane interest to retrieve from oblivion this
fragment of history, the truth of which has managed to slip away from us?61
But Haiti is here not just a convenient event to make a point about Hegel’s
Eurocentrism. Within the Western European imagination the Haitian
revolution has been a non-event. In the words of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, it
‘was unthinkable in its time,’ ‘even as it happened,’ insofar as ‘it challenged
the very framework within which proponents and opponents had examined
467
race, colonialism, and slavery in the Americas.’62 The Haitian revolution

represented the first Atlantic revolution whose outcome was the establish-
ment of the first black-nation-state in the western hemisphere*a crucial
moment for any account of the emergence of the modern concept of freedom,
albeit one neglected by Western historiography. Moreover, in light of slavery’s
role as root metaphor in modern Western political thought, from Locke to
Hegel, ending the silences of the Haitian revolution, and of Hegel’s relation to
it, is crucial not only for the sake of scholarly soundness, but politically.63
By offering a narrative that challenges these silences, one can articulate the
equivocations of universalism and reason concretely, in their particular
instantiations. ‘If the historical facts about freedom can be ripped out of the
narratives told by its victors and salvaged for our own time, then the project
of universal freedom does not need to be discarded but, rather redeemed and
reconstituted on a different basis.’64 But such a project calls for a retrieval of
the ideal of universal freedom emplotted in a reworked conception of negative
universal history whose basis resides in forging narratives that undo the
silencing impulse in Western historiography and political theories; narrative
accounts that make room for the nameless others of history, whose agency is
constitutive of the concrete instantiations of universal ideals of freedom. One
of the challenges facing a reconstituted idea of universal history is breaking
with the silences of the past*with the ways in which predominant and
hegemonic discourses, in order to reclaim concealed histories, displaced
individuals and their stories, as well as retrieving ‘undisciplined stories.’
Another is ending with the disavowal of the narrative category that is
presupposed by this effort. But breaking with silences and disavowals is just
one aspect of the critical task; perhaps a more important task is to offer sober
accounts of missed opportunities without losing sight of the intersection
between human action and the imperatives that mediate and constrain its
predicament. A significant step in this direction is conceiving a negative
universal history whose mapping of the past opens up spaces for breaking
with the racist and Eurocentric conceits found in the production of the
historical narratives that have at once nourished and curtailed our political
theorizations.
Notes
1
Theodor W Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E B Ashton, New York: Continuum, 1973, p 320;
hereafter referred to as ND, followed by page number.
2
For a critique of ‘World-History’ see Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World-History, New York:
Columbia University Press, 2002.
3
For two compelling recent discussions, see Anthony Pagden, ‘Stoicism, Cosmopolitanism, and the
Legacy of European Imperialism,’ Constellations 7, March 2000, pp 3!22. See also James Tully, ‘The
Kantian Idea of Europe: Critical and Cosmopolitan Perspectives,’ in The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity
to the European Union, ed. Anthony Pagden, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. For more
on cosmopolitanism see the stimulating work of Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of
Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation, New York: Columbia University Press,
2003, esp. chs 2 and 4; Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2006, esp. part I.
468
4
Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Public Life of History: An Argument Out of India,’ Postcolonial Studies 11,
June 2008, p 187. Two collections of essays contain helpful treatments of postcolonial theory. See
Vinayak Chaturvedi (ed), Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, London: Verso, 2000; and
Ania Loomba et al (eds), Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
An indispensable discussion is found in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason:
Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. For two
recent critical accounts focusing on the relationship between postcolonial theory and history, see Arif
Dirlik, ‘Is There History After Eurocentrism? Globalism, Postcolonialism, and the Disavowal of
History,’ Cultural Critique 42, Spring 1999, pp 1!34; and Frederick Cooper, ‘Postcolonial Studies and
the Study of History,’ in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, pp 401!422. Also noteworthy is Ananda
Abeysekara’s powerful formulation of a post-Nietzschean active forgetting that theorizes the possibility
of justice as part of a ‘disjunctured present.’ See Ananda Abeysekara, The Politics of Postsecular
Religion: Mourning Secular Futures, New York: Columbia University Press, 2008, ch 6.
5
See Stefan Hoesel-Uhlig, ‘Changing Fields: The Directions of Goethe’s Weltliteratur,’ and ‘Emily Apter,
‘Global Translatio: The Invention of Comparative Literature, Istanbul 1933,’ in Debating World
Literature, ed. Christopher Prendergast, London: Verso, 2002. This collection of essays compellingly
maps out recent debates.
6
Three rather different commanding works of programmatic nature critically belabouring this idea have
recently appeared: Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M B DeBevoise, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2004; Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for
Literary History, London: Verso, 2005; and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline, New
York: Columbia University Press, 2003. The engagements with, and often between, these authors have
produced very stimulating essays. See Christopher Prendergast, ‘The World Republic of Letters,’ in
Prendergast, Debating World Literature, pp 1!25; Francesca Orsini, ‘India in the Mirror of World
Fiction,’ in ibid, pp 319!333; Pascale Casanova, ‘Literature as a World,’ New Left Review 31, January/
February 2005, pp 71!90; Christopher Prendergast, ‘Evolution and Literary History: A Response to
Franco Moretti,’ New Left Review 34, July/August 2005, pp 40!62; Franco Moretti, ‘The End of the
Beginning: A Reply to Christopher Prendergast,’ New Left Review 41, September/October 2006, pp 71!
86. See also Franco Moretti, ‘The Novel: History and Theory,’ New Left Review 52, July/August 2008,
pp 111!124.
7
The uncanny element in the image of ‘the planetary’ is suggestively developed by Spivak in Death of a
Discipline, pp 73ff. For different intimations of the planetary see Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia,
New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
8
On these connotations of universality see Étienne Balibar’s stimulating essay, ‘Ambiguous Universality,’
in Politics and the Other Scene, trans. Christine Jones et al, London: Verso, 2002, pp 146!176. Also
instructive is Victoria Camps, ‘Universalidad y mundializacion,’ in Pensar en el siglo, ed. Manuel Cruz
and Gianni Vattimo, Madrid: Paidos, 1999, pp 61!85. Cf. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transforma-
tions: Anthropology and the Modern World, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, chs 2!3.
9
For Hegel’s influence on contemporary debates on the status of historical knowledge, and his influence
on thinkers as diverse as Wilhem Dilthey, Charles Taylor, and Hans-Georg Gadamer, see Eliseo Cruz
Vergara, La concepción del conocimiento histórico en Hegel, Rı́o Piedras: Editorial de la Universidad de
Puerto Rico, 1997. Cruz Vergara compellingly shows the centrality of Hegel for this debate in terms of
the relative advantage the Hegelian Begriff has vis-à-vis the posterior developments found, for instance,
in the hermeneutic tradition.
10
Adorno consistently reclaimed the critical import of dialectical thinking in reference to this text. See, for
instance, Theodor W Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1994, especially the third essay and his comments in Theodor W Adorno, Aesthetic Theory,
trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 356. (Aesthetic Theory is
hereafter referred to as AT). Cf. Alfred Schmidt, History and Structure: An Essay on Hegelian-Marxist
and Structuralist Theories of History, trans. Jeffrey Herf, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983.
11
The locus classicus of this critique is found in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics. See also Adorno, Hegel:
Three Studies. For a feminist critique of Hegel informed by Adorno and the tradition of critical theory,
see Patricia J Mills’s ‘Hegel’s Antigone,’ in Feminist Interpretation of Hegel, ed. Patricia J Mills,
University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1996; and her earlier Woman, Nature, and Psyche,
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987.
12
Francis Fukuyama’s forays in Hegelian universal history (by means of Alexandre Kojève) lend credence
to this view. See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, New York: Free Press, 1992.
The best survey of the different historical and theoretical articulations of ‘the end of history’ is found in
469
Perry Anderson’s essay, ‘The Ends of History,’ in A Zone of Engagement, London: Verso, 1992, pp 279!
375.
13
On ‘back-shadowing’ see Michael André Bernstein, Forgone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
14
A classic account of the influence of Christian eschatology in Hegel’s philosophy of history is found in
Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought, trans. David E
Green, New York: Columbia University Press, 1964, pp 35ff. See also Hayden White, Metahistory: The
Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975,
p 127. On the assimilation of the particular as a particularity of the universal, see Adorno, ND, pp 173!
174.
15
This is not the place to offer a comprehensive history of ‘universal history’ but it is worth pausing to
consider the most influential post-Hegelian rendering of this idea, which came in a materialist recasting
at the hands of Karl Marx. In the Communist Manifesto the internationalism of Goethe’s idea met the
narrative of progression found in Hegel’s; two poles that once rendered together yielded an analysis of
the emergence of capitalism and the political and cultural forms of the class that triggered it, the
bourgeoisie. Universal history was thereby cast as pre-history, what would lead to the beginning of
actual history, of freedom, after capitalism is overthrown. Even so, it is worth noting that Marx
continued reconsidering some of these questions towards the end of his life. After 1871, while reflecting
on the situation in Russia, Marx suggested ‘the idea of a concrete multiplicity of paths to historical
development’ and acknowledged that his well known model of the transition from different modes of
production was based on Western Europe. Marx, however, never fully articulated the implications of this
shift. He only hinted at it in another letter, where he objected to the use of his ‘historical sketch of the
genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a philosophical theory of general development . . ..’ Marx
even suggested a different possibility: one that speculatively reads the universal and the particular
always in reference to concrete historical instances. As he summed it up: ‘Thus events strikingly
analogous, but occurring in different historical milieux, led to unique disparate results. By studying each
of these evolutions on its own, and then comparing them, one will easily discover the key to the
phenomenon, but it will never be arrived at by employing the all-purpose formula of a general historical-
philosophical whose supreme virtue consists in being supra-historical.’ Even so, the dialectic of universal
and particular that he adumbrates in this formulation was never spelled out. For a discussion of this
feature in Marx’s thought, see Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, trans. Chris Turner, London:
Verso, 1995, p 110. Also relevant is Schmidt, History and Structure, esp. pp 99ff.
16
Edward Said offered a remarkable formulation that captures theoretical postures and temperaments like
Hegel’s: ‘When it came to what lay beyond metropolitan Europe, the arts and the disciplines of
representation*on the one hand, fiction, history and travel writing, painting; on the other, sociology or
bureaucratic writing, philology, racial theory*depended on the powers of Europe to bring the non-
European world into representations, the better to be able to see it, to master it, and, above all, to hold
it.’ See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, New York: Vintage, 1994, p 99.
17
See Theodor W Adorno, History and Freedom, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge: Polity Press,
2006, pp 41!42; hereafter referred to as HF, followed by page number.
18
See Balibar, ‘Ambiguous Universality.’ Slavoj Zizek’s ‘leftist plea’ for universalism explores the
productivity of these equivocations of the universal to great critical effect. See Slavoj Zizek, ‘A Leftist
Plea for ‘‘Eurocentrism,’’’ Critical Inquiry 24, Summer 1998, pp 988!1009; and ‘Multiculturalism, or, the
Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,’ in The Universal Exception: Selected Writings, Vol. 2, ed.
Rex Butler and Scott Stephens, London: Continuum, 2006, ch 9. See also his stimulating discussion of
‘concrete universality’ in Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject, London: Verso, 1999, pp 98!103.
19
See Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the
Frankfurt Institute, New York: Free Press, 1977; Eugene Lunn, Marxism and Modernism: A Historical
Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982, part III;
Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations of a Universal Theme,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005, ch 8. For a recent work that refreshingly explores their
respective works as crafters of ‘thought-pictures’ (Denkbilder), see Gerhard Richter, Thought-Images:
Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2007. In addition to Buck-Morss, the two Anglo-American thinkers who have dealt with the question of
history in Adorno and Benjamin are: Gillian Rose, Judaism and Modernity: Philosophical Essays,
London: Blackwell, 1993, p 207; ‘The Origin of Negative Dialectics; The Frankfurt School: The Critical
Theories of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno,’ History and Theory 18, February 1979, pp 126!
35; and Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic, London: Verso,
1990, chs 10!11. Martin Jay’s otherwise stimulating reading of the similarities between Benjamin and
470
Adorno in relation to the question of history and progress fails to notice the singularity of Adorno’s
claims in ‘Progress,’ sometimes ascribes a nuance to Benjamin’s formulation that these lack, and thus
obscures the differences between their respective treatments of this question. See Martin Jay, Marxism
and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984, pp 262!266. On the centrality of history for Adorno’s practice of literary criticism, see
Ulrich Plass’s stimulating study, Language and History in Theodor W. Adorno’s Notes to Literature, New
York: Routledge, 2007.
20
For an exploration of the significance of their respective meta-theoretical considerations in relation to
questions of reconciliation and redemption, see Willem Van Reijen, ‘Redemption and Reconciliation in
Benjamin and Adorno,’ in Adorno: The Possibility of the Impossible, 2 vols, New York: Lukas &
Sternberg, 2003, vol 1, pp 69!84.
21
For the German original, see Theodor W Adorno, Negative Dialektik, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf
Tiedemann, 20 vols, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973, vol 6, p 314. See also Walter Benjamin, ‘On the
Concept of History,’ Selected Writings, Vol. 4: 1938!1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W Jennings,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003, p 396.
22
Walter Benjamin, ‘Paralipomena to ‘‘On the Concept of History,’’’ in Selected Writings, p 404.
23
A coruscating (and very helpful) commentary on Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’ is found in
Reyes Mate, Medianoche en la historia: comentarios a las tesis de Walter Benjamin ‘Sobre el concepto de
historia’, Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2006. Also stimulating is Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter
Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’, trans. Chris Turner, London: Verso, 2005.
24
For a lucid elucidation of Adorno’s usages of concepts, see Robert Hullot-Kentor’s essay, ‘Origin is the
Goal,’ in Robert Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno,
New York: Columbia University Press, 2006, pp 1!22.
25
Theodor W Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E F N Jephcott, London:
Verso, 1978, p 55.
26
See Theodor W Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments,
trans. Edmund Jephcott, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002, pp 36!62; for the question of
Adorno’s authorship of this excursus, see Gunzelin Schmid Noerr’s discussion on pp 217ff. Here I have
relied on Robert Hullot-Kentor’s excellent discussion of this excursus in his essay ‘Back to Adorno,’ now
collected in Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance, pp 36!44.
27
Adorno, Minima Moralia, p 151.
28
See ‘Progress,’ in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith, Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1990, p 84.
29
Adorno, ‘Progress,’ pp 90!91, 101.
30
Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p 32.
31
The lecture course of 1964!1965, Zur Lehre von der Geschichte und von der Freihet, has been recently
translated as History and Freedom.
32
See Theodor W Adorno, ‘The Essay as Form,’ in Notes to Literature, 2 vols, trans. Shierry Weber
Nocholsen, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, vol 1, pp 3!23.
33
See Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie: zur Einleintug, 2 vols, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973!
1975, vol 1, p 83. Cf. Elizabeth Wyschogrod, An Ethics of Remembering: History, Heterology, and the
Nameless Others, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
34
This seemingly arcane conceptual has a bearing on the discussions about the role of archives and
memory in the writing of history. Saul Friedlander’s work is a masterful attempt to write the history of
the Judeocide in ways that memory and history are mutually mediated.
35
The centrality of mediation is even more manifest in Adorno’s account of evil as historical. For a
stimulating discussion see Peter Dews, The Idea of Evil, Oxford: Blackwell, 2008, ch 6.
36
See Theodor W Adorno, ‘Über Statik und Dynamik als Soziologische Kategorien,’ in Gesammelte
Schriften 8, p 221. These two categories figure largely in Adorno’s account of modern art in Aesthetic
Theory. See, for instance, AT, pp 222!224.
37
See Adorno, ‘Über Statik und Dynamik als Soziologische Kategorien,’ p 233. Marx’s critique of
capitalism consistently deployed a ‘critical historicism’ to criticize the false universalization of complex,
and by no means linear, particular-historical process. In the Marxist account, by the late eighteenth
century, the concept of progress has gained salience in Western social and political thought and thus
provided the narrative structure through which the increasing change in politics, culture, and the
political economy began to be framed. (‘Progress’ also provided a narrative structure to apprehend
questions of abundance and scarcity. For a discussion, see Nicholas Xenos, Scarcity and Modernity,
London: Routledge, 1989.) From Thomas Malthus to John Stuart Mill, classical political economy
started to offer conjectures about the possibility of historical progress and to frame within it the idea of
471
social progress by means of education, or in the case of Mill, also by means of an imperialist-
civilizational imperative. In these accounts, the categories of the new political economy were presented
as universal laws, thus brushing aside their historical nature. Marx’s historicism comprehensively
explores the intersection between capitalism, as the newly prevalent mode of production, and the
different modes of production that preceded it. Stated differently, how capitalist imperatives bring under
capitalism non-capitalist relations, as well as pre-capitalist relations; and how these, in turn, become at
once constitutive of the process of accumulation of capitalism as well as reconstituted by this system of
power and its market imperatives. See Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political
Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus, London: Penguin Books, 1993, pp 83ff. On the civilizational
imperative in Mill, along with his historicism, see Uday S Metha, Liberalism and Empire, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999.
38
Here I loosely paraphrase Adorno’s rather difficult formulation: ‘Wie Statik gesellschaftliche Bedingung
des Dynamischen ist, so terminiert die Dynamik fortschreitender rationaler Naturbeherrschung
teleologisch in Statik.’ See Adorno, ‘Über Statik und Dynamik als Soziologische Kategorien,’ p 231.
39
Spanish philosopher Manuel Cruz has formulated a concept of historicism that can be best understood
in relation to the epistemological split between human and nature, and it is informed by an
anthropological understanding of human societies. It is informed by the following precepts: (1) human
history is change; (2) there are no trans-historical, or eternal, truths; (3) every historical process has its
own individuality, even though a comprehensive comparative framework is allowed to explore those
(indeed, it is a necessary aspect of it); (4) there is no such thing as an unchanging human essence; (5)
humans as social individuals are historical beings (Appadurai’s claim on the past as a scarce resource);
(6) social and cultural objects are historical, and history is the sum of human existence; (7) each epoch is
understood as a unity with its own antecedents; (8) and a historical account of the world substitutes
theological and philosophical conceptions. See Filosofı́a de la historia, Barcelona: Paidós, 1995. Other
helpful discussions of historicism can be found in Georg G Iggers, The German Conception of History:
The National Tradition of Historical Present from Herder to the Present, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press, 1983; and David N Myers, Resisting History: Historicism and its Discontents in
German-Jewish Thought, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.
40
Fredric Jameson, ‘Marxism and Historicism,’ in The Ideologies of Theory, Vol. 2, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1988, p 150. See also A Singular Modernity, London and New York:
Verso, 2002, pp 1!81.
41
See Adorno, ND, pp 11!12, 33!35, 37!42, 144!156, 174!176 and 183!186. Robert Hullot-Kentor has
compellingly laid out these attributes of Adorno’s critical philosophy: ‘Adorno’s critique of systematic
reason is not*as has been indicated*a dismissal of thought’s claim to bindingness, but, on the
contrary, having rejected compulsion as the standard consecutive thought, it means to gain a more
demanding and compelling bindingness on the basis of what in it is radically true. [. . .] What Adorno
wanted to comprehend was the capacity of thought*of identity itself*to cause reality to break in on
the mind that masters it.’ See Hullot-Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance, p 15.
42
In Gillian Rose’s reading, universal history must be construed, ‘in order to comprehend social formation
and deformation’ (namely, capitalist relations of production and other socio-cultural dynamics of
continuity and/or domination), and denied, insofar as it has historically been presented either in terms of
the Kantian guiding Providence, or the rational unfolding of a Hegelian World-Spirit. Jameson, on the
other hand, sees this assertion as another instance of Adorno arguing for the need to apprehend a
concept not only by means of its dual-attributes, but also from the perspective of constellational
thinking: the way to handle ‘the impossible yet indispensable concept.’ Or, stated differently, handling
this concept from the comprehensive perspective of ‘constellative critique.’ For Jameson, ‘what is argued
in effect is the ultimate objectivity of that absent and invisible totality that is history . . ..’ See Rose, ‘The
Origin of Negative Dialectics,’ p 130; Jameson, Late Marxism, pp 88, 89.
43
See also Theodor W Adorno, ‘On Subject and Object,’ in his Critical Models: Interventions and
Catchwords, trans. Henry W Pickford, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, pp 245!258.
44
See Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History,’ p 392.
45
As quoted in Adorno, ND, p 358. A classic treatment of Marx’s concept of nature that Adorno refers to
is found in Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, trans. Ben Fowkes, London: New Left
Books, 1971.
46
See also Theodor W Adorno, ‘The Idea of Natural-History,’ trans. with an introduction in Hullot-
Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance, pp 233!267.
47
Elsewhere, Adorno offers a formulation that captures this point: ‘What is, is stronger. In coming to grief
on this, men have themselves learned to be stronger and to dominate nature, and in precisely this process
fate has reproduced itself. [. . .] Fate is domination taken to the point of pure abstraction; the measure of
472
destruction equals the degree of domination; fate is the calamity.’ See Theodor W Adorno, Philosophy of
New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2006,
p 54.
48
Sven Lütticken, ‘Unnatural History,’ New Left Review 45, May!June 2007, pp 115!131. See p 122.
49
In ND Adorno writes: ‘That law [of capitalist accumulation] is natural because of its inevitable character
under the prevailing conditions of production. Ideology is not superimposed as a detachable layer on the
being of society; it is inherent in that being. It is founded in abstraction, which is of the essence of the
exchange process [Tauschvorgang].’ See Adorno, ND, p 354. Translation slightly amended. For
the original see Theodor W Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997, p 348.
50
Of course, evolutionary theory has evolved significantly in recent decades in ways that may cast this
assertion in a more complex light. For a stimulating deployment of evolutionary theory in the terrain of
literature, see Franco Moretti, ‘On Literary Evolution,’ in Signs Taken for Wonders, London: Verso,
1988, pp 262!278.
51
On this point my argument is indebted to Fredric Jameson’s exploration of the possibilities of narrative
for a critical historicism. See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially
Symbolic Act, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981. For a shrewd critical commentary on this
book, see Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation,
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, ch 6. Also valuable is Terry Eagleton’s essay, ‘Fredric
Jameson: The Politics of Style,’ in his Against the Grain: Selected Essays, London: Verso, 1986, ch 5.
52
See Adorno, ‘Resignation,’ in Critical Models, p 292.
53
Terry Eagleton, ‘Postcolonialism and ‘‘Postcolonialism,’’’ Interventions 1, 1998, pp 24!26. Cf. Arif
Dirlik, ‘The Postcolonial Aura,’ Critical Inquiry 20, Winter 1994, pp 328!356. Thoroughly unpacked
theoretical and historical elucidations of the distinction on which Eagleton’s polemical intervention is
based are found in Aijaz Ahmad’s work. See Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures,
London: Verso, 1992; and ‘The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality,’ Race and Class 36, 1995, pp 1!20.
54
For a detailed elaboration of this periodization see Ahmad, In Theory, esp. pp 1!42. Cf. Fredric
Jameson, ‘Periodizing the 60s,’ in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971!1986, Vol. 2, pp 178!208.
Periodizations, of course, are equivocal as unavoidable in critical theory. As Fredric Jameson’s recent
critical maxim has put it: ‘We cannot not periodize.’ See Jameson, A Singular Modernity, p 29.
55
An important exception here is Gayatri Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, but even Spivak
disavows the dialectic of universal and particular that serves as master trope of universal history, even if
some of her formulations presuppose it. See, for instances, pp 224, 239, 263, 290.
56
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Post Colonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000, p 4. Emphasis added. See also his essay, ‘Radical Histories and the
Question of Enlightenment Rationalism: Some Recent Critiques of Subaltern Studies,’ in Mapping
Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, pp 256!380.
57
See Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, p 70.
58
See Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘In Defense of Provincializing Europe: A Response to Carola Dietze,’ History
and Theory 47, February 2008, p 92.
59
Chakrabarty has recently described his aim as follows: ‘. . . my critique of the ‘‘universal’’ in hyperreal
Europe is not a rejection of, as such of the universal ideas or even of the universal that is built into the
fantasy of ‘‘Europe.’’ [Provincializing Europe], ultimately, was an attempt to grapple with this necessary
and yet problematic need for universals in writing histories of political modernity . . ..’ See Chakrabarty,
‘In Defense of Provincializing Europe,’ p 96.
60
Cf. Perry Anderson, ‘Agendas for Radical History,’ Radical History Review 36, 1986, pp 26!45.
61
See Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Hegel and Haiti,’ Critical Inquiry 26, Summer 2002, pp 821!865.
62
See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Boston: Beacon
Press, 1997, pp 82, 73, 82!83.
63
On the Haitian revolution in the European historical imagination, see Silencing the Past, pp 70!107. The
imagery of slavery has been present in Western political thought since its ancient Greek origins. In
modern times, its significance needs to be read as closely related to the Imperial adventures of
Europeans.
64
See Buck-Morss, ‘Hegel and Haiti,’ pp 864!865.
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Universal history disavowed: on

The consolidation of transnational financial capital, the proliferation of

the stringency of the postcolonial critique becomes problematic once one

theorize the universal in relation to ‘collective histories’ that narrate our

World literature, universal history

the idea of world literature continues to trigger theoretical reflections in the

mapped out by means of a dialectic of the universal and the particular; a

some of Hegel’s formulations, even if the critical edge of his dialectical

(Geschichte) that could be enriched by its encounters with other local or

imperatives in Capitalism, for instance, and the contingency of its particular

of non-identity between universal and particular as its master trope*is

can be rendered, in their mediations and dislocations, continuities and

their non-identity with the objects that conceptual thinking nonetheless

particular to the universal, is immanently criticized, so the critical telos of

Progress thus entails breaking with the spell of providential conceptions of

possibilities that an immanent critique of progress by means of its own

‘Progress,’ as a concept, is immanently criticized from the perspective of the

Negative universal history

and performed in the ‘Essay as Form,’ seeks to grasp historical experience by

visible their suffering while presenting a differentiated account of the

Yet as indispensable as this moment of experience is, and its immediacy as an

mediation in Adorno’s critical historicism further marks the distance between

as the equally unavoidable mediation between the universal and the

recasts the dialectic of universal and particular in historical processes, the

and discontinuity in the course of history stems out of the domination of

intervention*society [is] in turn being perceived as subject to quasi-natural

periodization) is not eschewed.

Postcolonialism and universal history

marginality, and difference have made indispensable contributions to ques-

theorize. Or, stated differently, by disavowing dialectical thinking ‘Postcolo-

narrative of capital underlines Chakrabarty’s project. It at once interrupts but

But these narratives*the one provincializing Europe and the narrative of

capital*are predicated on a universal-historical narrative that from the

race, colonialism, and slavery in the Americas.’62 The Haitian revolution

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