Editor's Introduction, Minority Maneuvers and Unsettled Negotiations

Editor's Introduction: Minority Maneuvers and Unsettled Negotiations
Author(s): Homi Bhabha

Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 23, No. 3, Front Lines/Border Posts (Spring, 1997), pp. 431-459
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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Editor's Introduction: Minority Maneuvers
and Unsettled Negotiations
Homi Bhabha
When I first proposed "Front Lines/Border Posts" in 1992 as a special

issue of CriticalInquiry, my ambitions were largely abstract and archaeo-
logical. My purpose was to survey the terrain of the postfoundationalist
humanities from the perspective of the "jargon of the minorities," as I
described it in my call for papers. The phrase itself speaks of a certain
ambivalence on my part about the prodigious production of discourses of
"othering" that, in their turn, have given rise to formulations of affiliative
"Front Lines/Border Posts" will continue in the next issue of CriticalInquirywith essays
by Simon During, Amitava Kumar, Natalia Majluf, and Christopher Pinney.
I would like to thank my contributors for their generous engagement in a project that
has meant so much to us all. Their patience and cooperation have been exemplary. The
coeditors of CriticalInquiry have spared nothing in their careful readings and helpful sug-
gestions. This volume has benefited immensely from their advice as well as from the edito-
rial work of the staff of Critical Inquiry:Jay Williams, Mari Schindele, Aeron Hunt, and
Jennifer Peterson. Andrew Hebard's assistance was crucial to the preparation of this manu-
script, and Rajiv Vrudhula contributed much to its final edit. My thanks to them all.
On a more personal note, this introductory essay has woven within it the voices of
many of my friends and colleagues at Chicago. Tom Mitchell, Bill Brown, and James Chan-
dler pored over the text and, quite simply, transformed it; Miriam Hansen's productive
aperfus were invaluable, in particular her gift of the Kracauer citation. Sheldon Pollock
helped me understand the middle voice. Joan Copjec, as ever, allayed my anxiety about
anxiety. Judith Butler has been a much closer friend and collaborator than the distance
between Chicago or London and Santa Cruz might allow one to suppose. I am most grate-
ful to them all.
CriticalInquiry23 (Spring 1997)

? 1997 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/97/2303-0004$01.00. All rights reserved.
431
432 Homi Bhabha Editor' Introduction
alterity that get described-both by the left and the right, traditionalists
and progressives-as the mantras of multiculturalism. It is frequently ac-
knowledged that the formulaic invocation of the equality of oppression
and the moral well-being of minorities elides the specificity of cultural
differences. Such political pieties should not obscure the difficult transi-
tion that characterizes the political demands made by members of "new"
social movements. These transitions represent not merely a shift in the
subject of the political process but a translation of the very nature of what
can be construed as political, of what could be the representational objects
and objectives of social transformation: polymorphous and perverse de-
sires, AIDS, the (un)translatability of cultural traditions, the melancholic
social memory of slavery, the postcolonial tryst between Irish and South
Asian feminists in their struggles against fundamentalism, to name but a
few. Some socialist feminists might balk at the intrusion of the psychic
dimension of desire into demands for gender equality in the workplace
or the need to acknowledge the concept of fantasy in drafting sexual ha-
rassment policies; orthodox Marxists, intent on preserving the primacy
of class contradiction in their understanding of the dialectic of labor and
capital, might consider the growing attention to the gendered and ra-
cialized body of a diasporic or migrant workforce as a diversion from the
class struggle; and social welfare activists who take a statist and institu-
tionalized view of national health policy might resist the perspective of
AIDS activists who insist that the ethics of community or civic health can-
not be founded on the policing of pleasure or the sanitization of sexual
choice. The contentious and contradictory conditions of political affilia-
tion, even within progressive social forces, suggest that there is a signifi-
cant shift in the conversation around the values that constitute cultural
and social citizenship when human rights and needs are cross-referenced,
in complex ways, with group interests and the contingency of collective
demands.
My title is emblematic both of an editorial and an intellectual di-
lemma. Special issues are customarily built around acknowledged themes
or established topics that illustrate the state of the craft. This volume,
however, departs from such protocols. It attempts to unearth explana-
tions for, and examples of, the paradoxical positioning of theory in that
decade of difference and diversity-the mideighties to the midnineties-
Homi Bhabha is the Chester D. Tripp Professor in the Humanities

at the University of Chicago. He is also a visiting professor at the Univer-
sity of London. He edited Nation and Narration (1990) and has collected
his own essays in TheLocationof Culture(1994). He is at work on two books,
one entitled A Measurefor Dwelling, the other a history of vernacular cos-
mopolitanism.
CriticalInquiry Spring 1997 433
that we might call, after the manner of historians, the long 1990s. "Front
Lines/Border Posts" functions as a kind of synoptic signature, or ideo-
gram, of a tension that haunts the theoretical enterprise. To harbor
advance-guard aspirations, to be in the front line of conceptual innova-
tion, has been one of the most significant gestures of the theoretical ad-
venture. Theory's work has occupied the border posts of political and
disciplinary intervention, measuring, mapping, and surveying metadis-
cursive activities that the metaphor of militancy within my title makes
apparent. Such maneuvers are made necessary because of the culture
wars, the battle of the books, the subtle subvention of popular cultural
traditions to the national(ist) cause-conflagrations connected with con-
flicting conceptions of the core of a syllabus or a society. These, then, are
the ways that counter-public spheres, subaltern studies, and unofficial
knowledges are figured. But, on the other hand, my title evokes those
key words of a decade committed to the borderline conditions of split
subjects, discursive regimes, concepts under erasure, and accounts of it-
erative and performative social agency. The crossing of cultures, the
grafting of genres, and the hybridity of knowledges and identifications
have become the activityof a theoretical enterprise that negotiates a range
of critical conditions with the post mark-poststructuralist, postfeminist,
postcolonial, postmodern. Between the one and the other, I found a set
of originating questions: Post-this, post-that, but why never post-the other?
Was the other the political bottom line, the last ethical frontier?
For one who had played a modest role in mothering this very "oth-
ering," I was not about to turn Medea, but there was something about the
regnant and resistant orthodoxy of the other that I wanted to explore.
The oblique slash that I placed in "Front Lines/Border Posts" might have
been better represented in other ways-perhaps a run of ellipses. Or an
expectant gap might keep open the possibility of an emergent space, a
potential object of address. Or, more simply, why not a host of question
marks placed at that very point where the frontline approach is articu-
lated to the borderline condition: Front lines? Border posts? What autho-
rizes the postfoundational humanities? Can discourses so deeply
concerned with epistemological and institutional transition speak from a
liminal position? How can we face the task of designating identities, speci-
fying events, locating histories?
Some of these questions were substantially engaged in the Critical
Inquiry special issue "Identities," edited by Kwame Anthony Appiah
and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.1 One of the innovations of that volume was to
shift the issue of identity from a concern with the persuasions of per-
sonhood-whether individual or communal, subaltern or sovereign-
and restage it as a question of historical and geographical location. I see
1. See CriticalInquiry 18 (Summer 1992) and Identities, ed. Kwame Anthony Appiah
and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago, 1995).
its value, moreover, as shifting the question of identity from the ontologi-
cal and epistemological imperative-What is identity?-to face the ethical
and political prerogative-What are identitiesfor?-or even to present the
pragmatist alternative-What can identitiesdo?
The power of historical locality becomes particularly persuasive as
the problem of cultural identity is staged in discourses of geographical
complexity-migration, diaspora, postcoloniality. The demand for speci-
ficity increases as the subject of cultural citizenship becomes inscribed
with more and more of the striations of difference found in a multicul-
tural, pluralist, late capitalist global society. The call for historical locality
is also then a dislocation of the agency of cultural and disciplinary
identity.
For example, in "What Is a Muslim?" Akeel Bilgrami proposes the
possibility of being the moderate Muslim-an emergent minorityposition
between the fundamentalist and the purely secular-that rests on the
possibility of a certain ambivalent and contingent double consciousness.
The moderate Muslim must be able to switch from the defensive third-
person perspective-where recognizing oneself as a Muslim is a reaction
to the histories of colonial oppression, Orientalist obloquy, and postcolo-
nial/neo-imperialist racial discrimination-to the more active, self-aware
first-personperspective-a critical production of a depoliticized Islam that
will not become the ploy of fundamentalist factions.2 Leaving aside the
merits of the case, I want to draw attention to the fact that the possibility
of assuming the moderate minority position depends upon establishing
an interstitial space of identification. The moderate Muslim is articulated
in a movementin betweenthirdandfirst persons.It is, moreover, in this move-
ment that a narrative of historical becoming is constituted not as a dialec-
tic between first and third person but as an effect of the ambivalent
condition of their borderline proximity-the first-in-the-third / the one-
in-the-other. The agon inherent in moderation succeeds as a political and
cultural practice, as an act of toleration or moderation, only on the condi-
tion that the first and third positions are accepted as living in an unre-
solved, ongoing, ambivalent articulation in relation to each other. In
order for there to be political change from fundamentalism to moderate
Islam, it becomes necessary to motivate the movement between positions,
to acknowledge the ambivalence within any site of identification or enun-
ciation. To assume a progressivist schema where the third-person position
is the politically good or virtuous one would be to deny that it is the
first person that registers the history of neocolonialism, racial prejudice,
cultural stereotypy. Whereas to live complacently or contentiously within
the first person would be to deny the possibility of political change and
2. See Akeel Bilgrami, "What Is a Muslim? Fundamental Commitment and Cultural

Identity," in Identities,pp. 198-219.
psychic movement. It is the ambivalence in their coexistence-the proxi-

materelationbetweenpersons-that becomes the basis for the performance
of moderation as a practice of life.
The difficulty of deducing the truths in the interstices from the high-
level statements, principles, or doctrines under whose rule they fall
does not imply that they were sheer images.... Ambiguity is of the
essence in this intermediary area. A constant effort is needed on the
part of those inhabiting it to meet the conflicting necessities with
which they are faced at every turn of the road. They find themselves
in a precarious situation which even invites them to gamble with ab-
solutes, all kinds of quixotic ideas about universal truth.
-Siegfried Kracauer, History:TheLast Thingsbeforethe Last3
What changes when you write from the middle of difference, when
you inscribe that intermediary area that invites the ambiguous gamble
with the historical necessities of race, class, gender, generation, region,
religion? I could, of course, continue to specify social divisions or bear
historical witness to difference, but the effect of such testifying often re-
sults in repetitious piety-the multiculturalist mantras-that instantiates
differences without revealing those interstitial articulations through
which categories of difference constitute new social movements. There is,
indeed, a danger that the title of the minority creates a hasty equivalence
between public spheres, normalizing forms of social difference and mor-
alizing divergent strategies of subordination, oppression, or resistance, as
the interpellation of a shared, homogenous victimization. My opening
question focuses on processes of the emergence of minorities-forms of
marginal writing, designations of displaced or discriminatory subjects,
subaltern acts of historical and rhetorical revision-where the affiliative
decision to act in the cause of exclusion, or to participate in the emer-
gence of new social movements, engenders a mode of public discourse
articulated with a strong affective charge. Thus we move, in Hannah Ar-
endt's phrase, from being engagesinto becoming enrages.4
The particular enunciative modality of the minority that concerns
me here is a form of identification in the public sphere, a designation
of peoplehood, which Etienne Balibar has recently described as the
emergence on a world-scale of "minoritieswithoutstableor unquestionablema-
3. Siegfried Kracauer, History:The Last Thingsbeforethe Last, trans. and ed. pub. (New
York, 1969), p. 216.
4. See Hannah Arendt, On Violence(New York, 1970), p. 65.
436 Homi Bhabha Editor'sIntroduction
jorities."5Whereas once minorities were the anomalies of a national pre-

dicament, "half stateless.... an exceptional phenomenon, peculiar to
certain territories that deviated from the norm,"6 to use Arendt's descrip-
tion, now minority status has generalized into a paradoxical condition
where the distinction between minorities and majorities becomes fre-
quently blurred because "in the North and South 'internal exclusion re-
places external separations"' ("AU,"p. 55). With this phrase Balibar seeks
to effect a new location for the minority at the point of a historical switch-
back. He reverses the nationalist or imperialist perspective founded on a
pattern of domination where the core radiates outward, incorporating
the geopolitical limits and the cultural periphery. The (relative) sover-
eignty of the nation-state and the assumed unity of national cultures,
upon which such a perspective is based, are both fundamentally dis-
turbed when the core areas turn into multivalent and ambivalent net-
works that project the periphery internally. Global migration acquires a
new historical and theoretical importance in the post- or transnational
context because the older normalizing strategy of nationalizing minorit-
ies-"the very existence of minorities . . . was a state construct"-breaks
becomes blurred"
down "as the distinctionbetween'minorities'and 'majorities'
("AU,"p. 53). The blurring of the boundary is a response to the phenom-
ena of uneven and unequal global and transnational flows whose disjunc-
tive dynamic has been finely mined by Arjun Appadurai:
Thus the central feature of global culture today is the politics of the
mutual effort of sameness and difference to cannibalize one another
and thus to proclaim their successful hijacking of the twin Enlighten-
ment ideas of the triumphantly universal and the resiliently particu-
lar.... on a stage characterized by radical disjunctures between
different sorts of global flows and the uncertain landscapes created
in and through these disjunctures.7
National societies are becoming heterogeneous because minorities turn

their alterity into the conditions of ethical life at the level of the culture
of communal life while being, at the same time, active participants in the
more universalistic, "enlightened" procedures of political and juridical
citizenship. At the personal level, Balibar suggests, a new "imagined com-
munity" is in the process of forming around mixed marriages, divided or
5. Etienne Balibar, "Ambiguous Universality,"Differences7 (Spring 1995): 55; hereafter

abbreviated "AU."My discussion here is, at once, deeply indebted to Balibar's argument and
an interpretation and elaboration of it along paths that he may not, himself, have chosen
to follow.
6. Arendt, The Originsof Totalitarianism(New York, 1951), p. 275.
7. Arjun Appadurai, "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,"
Public Culture2 (Spring 1990): 17.
multiple selves practicing different languages, and memberships ac-

cording to their private and public positions. Political antagonism-or
contradiction-between a global underclass and a transnational class of
the internationally privileged increases as the territorial grounding of the
nation opens for peoples who are in contention with the "'homogeneous,
empty time"' of the nation's "imagined community."8The emergence of a
postnationalist minority defined by internal thresholds and external bor-
ders allows us to articulate a different understanding of those shibboleths
of "universality"-freedom, emancipation, solidarity-that have been
the signatures of minority writing. The universal, Balibar suggests, is
multiple, but "not in the sense of being relative, less than unconditional,
bound to compromising, but rather in the sense of being always already
beyond any simple or 'absolute unity, therefore a source of conflicts for-
ever"' ("AU,"p. 72). Balibar leads us, I believe, beyond relativism or per-
spectivism towards an understanding of the authority of generalization
or universalism as consisting in a temporal movement whose regulatory
claims are iterative rather than imperative, translational rather than tran-
scendental. The multiple universal is a process of negotiation between
claims imagined communities or symbolic differences staged across the
blurred or disjunctive boundaries between majority and minority. This
process leads us to a postontological, performative condition. It is not
what minority is, but what minority does, or what is done in its name,
that is of political and cultural significance. And in order to be able to
determine that, we have to explore the political movementwithin the inter-
stices of difference, "to accept the scattered meaning of the universal,
and elaborate the passages between its different modalities.... to seek
an 'intelligible order between them-which is always, in the last instance,
a matter of ethical and political choice"' ("AU,"p. 49).
How do you dwell in and through your espousal of minority differ-
ence-as a relation to writing, as a responsibility for representing-when
you are, as the phrase has it, in the thick of it or, we might say with a
certain Geertzian twist, part of the thick description itself? And, then,
another question related to the minority as the emergence of a subject
through the antagonism, the ambivalence, the anxious borderlines of the
proximate relation: how to acknowledge its revisionary presence from
such a site of messy negotiation? Our task, then, is one that requires what
Judith Butler has acutely described in "Sovereign Performatives in the
Contemporary Scene of Utterance" as "speaking and exposing the al-
terity within the norm (the alterity without which the norm would not
know itself) exposes the failure of the norm to effect the universal....
This vulnerabilitymarksthe way that a postsovereigndemocraticdemandmakes
8. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:Reflectionson the Origin and Spreadof Na-

tionalism(London, 1983), p. 31.
itselffelt in the contemporaryscene of utterance."9How does the fragility of

communal selfhood bear the weight of a life turning towards the futurity
of difference; how does it take the strain of the bending toward the bur-
den of agential action?
The emerging formation of minorities is a moment in the identifica-
tion with otherness. It constitutes an experience of being-in-difference,
which may take various forms: a sudden collapse of epistemological dis-
tance; a dawning awareness of historical overdetermination; the insepara-
bility of antagonistic elements into the orderly, or disorderly, opposites of
progressive/regressive, tradition/modernity; the ethical need to negotiate
what is incommensurable, yet intolerable; and, most startling of all, the
awareness of the ambivalence in our identifications-with others, objects,
ideas, ourselves-and the agonistic choices that determine the antago-
nists we engage, the solidarities that we seek, and the values that we serve.
Such an encounter with difference as a proximate activity is well caught
by Slavoj Zizek in his meditation on the "Balkanians" in Sarajevo.10An-
other salutary instance of this proximity, within minority identification,
comes from James Baldwin's essay "Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets
Brown." He is in Paris, in the midst of a triangulation of gazes formed by
himself, an African, and a white American. His minority identity, as a
form of agency, as a person grasping the drift of freedom, emerges when
it is no longer possible to draw a clear and unambiguous line. In his own
self-definition or his identification with the other as himself,there is ambiv-
alence, anxiety, "extimite"(to use Lacan's term), but there is also proximity:
"The Negro [recognizes] that he is a hybrid.... In white Americans he
finds reflected-repeated, as it were, in a higher key-his tensions, his
terrors, his tenderness.... Now he is bone of their bone, flesh of their
flesh.... Therefore he cannot deny them, nor can they ever be di-
vorced."" This agonistic state of hybridity, this state of acting from the
midst of identities, takes us beyond the multicultural politics of mutual
recognition that, for all its seductive reasonableness, too readily assumes
coevality at the point at which difference is being adjudicated and cul-
tural judgement passed. For the difference of proximity refuses to posit
the relations of persons or cultures as different on the normalizing
grounds of an abstract universality of meaning or on a shared, synchro-
nized temporality of present being. Proximity is the excessof thehybridstate,
where the problem for the American black and white person is neither
incorporation nor assimilation but the recognition of the double relation
9. Judith Butler, "Sovereign Performatives in the Contemporary Scene of Utterance,"
CriticalInquiry23 (Winter 1997): 368, 369; emphasis mine.
10. See Slavoj Zilek, For They Know Not What TheyDo: Enjoymentas a Political Factor,
trans. pub. (London, 1994).
11. James Baldwin, "Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown," The Price of the
Ticket:CollectedNonfiction, 1948-1985 (London, 1985), p. 39.
and its "interfection" (to use Fredric Jameson's term for the encounter
with the self in the midst of the minoritized otherness).'2 It is this exces-
sive encounter of proximity that Levinas, appositely for our (Baldwinian)
purposes, describes as a relation "'in flesh and bone' (the usual transla-
tion of Husserl's 'leibhaftgegeben')."He goes on to stress the disjunctive
and disrupted temporality of the encounter: "This excess or this 'ex-
cession' makes proximity always be an anachronous presence to con-
sciousness: consciousness is always late for the rendezvous with the
neighbor" or the other.'3 Given the hybridity of the proximate encounter,
cultural or political antagonism cannot be defined as a dualistic encoun-
ter. Proximity becomes agonistic in that doubled interstitial maneuver
where the tryst of the self and the other results in both less and more than
either one, for they are bound in the twinned "excession" and excision of
blood and bone that belongs, in a kind of heightened repetition, at once
to each and exclusively to neither. We are now in a better position to
grasp what Deleuze and Guattari cryptically describe in A ThousandPla-
teaus as "becoming-minoritarian": a movement within "the in-between....
constitut[ing] a zone of proximity ... sweeping up the two distant or con-
tiguous points, carrying one into the proximity of the other."14
What form of affect emerges with, or through, this belated encoun-
ter of proximity? From where do you speak when a safe distance turns
arbitrary and the hybrid sacrament of blood and bone is, at once, a secret
sharing and an agonistic pairing? Let me attempt, at first, a theoretical
response through Deleuze and Guattari's celebrated essay "What Is a Mi-
nor Literature?" before turning to a performance of that very problem-
atic in Adrienne Rich's poem "Movement." This is a finer coupling than
one might expect, for there is a community in the questions posed by
both poet and theorist. Rich asks:
When does a life bend toward freedom? grasp its direction?

How do you know you're not circling in pale dreams, nostalgia,
stagnation
but entering that deep current malachite, colorado15
12. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism,or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism(Durham,

N.C., 1991), p. 373.
13. Emmanuel Levinas, CollectedPhilosophicalPapers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Boston,
1987), p. 119.
14. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A ThousandPlateaus: Capitalismand Schizophrenia,
trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1987), pp. 291, 293. For an illuminating reading of
Deleuze and Guattari in the context of Irish cultural nationalism, see David Lloyd, National-
ism and Minor Literature:James ClarenceMangan and the Emergenceof Irish CulturalNationalism
(Berkeley, 1987).
15. Adrienne Rich, "Movement," Dark Fields of the Republic:Poems 1991-1995 (New
York, 1995), p. 61; hereafter "M."
Deleuze and Guattari certainly enter the Colorado-middle passage,

black Atlantic, the Mariel boat lift, the Vietnamese boat people-in order
to deterritorialize the very language of the literary institution. They ask:
How many people today live in a language that is not their own? ...
This is the problem of immigrants, and especially of their children,
the problem of minorities, the problem of a minor literature, but also
a problem for all of us: how to tear a minor literatureawayfrom its own
language, allowing it to challengethe language and makingit follow a sober
revolutionarypath?16
To "bend toward freedom," to tear away a minor literature-these

are wounding sentiments central to Deleuze and Guattari's desire to es-
tablish revolutionary conditions within the heart of the major literary and
linguistic traditions. Although the terms major and minor work against
each other in their essay, and although hegemonic cultures and lan-
guages are named, there is an important sense in which major and minor
are in a subaltern relationship of proximity to each other. That is, al-
though they imagine Kafka's minority writing as starving the German
language, making it cry, tearing out its deterritorialized heart, there is an
important sense in which to be belated, late for the appointment "with
the neighbor," is not to miss the meeting with history. In the terms of
proximity that I'm proposing, the time-lagged disjuncture that character-
izes minority address and its agency forces the majority to face what Levi-
nas describes as "an anachronous presence." Minority writing emerges
from its uneven and unequal cultural locations within a fierce, anxious
time lag that effects an anachronous displacement upon the majority,
making it confront its own precarious peripheral existence. The critical
edge of minority writing is born of this tangential temporality that resig-
nifies or translates the discourse of the majority in terms of the minori-
tarian tradition determined by its point of tangential departure. Such a
tangential act of translation echoes Alasdair MacIntyre's notion of transla-
tion at the end of WhoseJustice? WhoseRationality?He suggests that, where
difference exists not only as incompatibility but as incommensurability,
we must learn the poetic art of knowing how to go on by going throughthe
disjunction of the untranslatable, itself a liminal breach in the object.17
When Deleuze and Guattari argue that "minor" literature is "the
possibility of setting up a minor practice of major language from within"
("WML,"p. 61; my emphasis), then that within signifies the minority as
setting out from the internal liminality of the major, from its blurred and
breached borderlines. To act from within is close to my sense of acting in
16. Deleuze and Guattari, "What Is a Minor Literature?" in Out There:Marginalization

and ContemporaryCultures,ed. Russell Ferguson et al. (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), pp. 61-62;
my emphasis; hereafter abbreviated "WML."
17. See Alasdair MacIntyre, WhoseJustice?WhoseRationality?(Notre Dame, Ind., 1988).
the midst of things. It is an interstitial movement of writing motivated by

the act of tangential departure or the creation of an anachronous space
in between the major and the minor. How do we conceive of the minority
voice as emerging from such a place within? The conditions of minority
discourse-"deterritoriality," political immediacy, collective value-do
not answer the question of emergence-as-enunciation; for it is the per-
formative act of emergence-Deleuze and Guattari's list of metaphors of
minority discourse, such as tearing away, vibrating with a new intensity, a
ladder, a circuit-that fleshes out minority inscription as a mode of
agency. It is only when we approach Deleuze and Guattari's description
of the process of utterance that we begin to understand what an emergent
agency might be and how it emerges with the attendant affect of (largely
unacknowledged) anxiety. Minority writing moves outside "the tradi-
tional categories of the two subjects" (the diegesisof "the author and the
hero, the narrator and the character") because "the message doesn't refer
back to an enunciating subject who would be its cause, no more than to
a subject of the statement (sujetd'enonce)who would bc its cffcct" ("WML,"
p. 60). How can we then think the process of revolutionary agency given
Deleuze's favored state of beginning in the middle? What form of agency,
however deformed, can inhabit the writing of the minority?
"There is no longer a designation of something by means of a proper
name, nor an assignation of metaphors.... Rather, there is a circuit of
states that forms a mutual becoming.... Language stopsbeingrepresentative
in orderto now move towardits extremitiesor its limits" ("WML,"pp. 63, 64,
65). And what are these\front lines, these border posts? Contrary to what
we might be given to understand, Deleuze and Guattari's discourse is
almost exclusively wrought in the register of metaphorization and figu-
ration: Kafka'sminority writing is a fasting; "he will feed himself on absti-
nence; he will tear out of Prague German" the hidden hollow heart of
"underdevelopment" that it hides; "lie will make it cry.... He will pull
from it the barking of the dog, the cough of the ape." He will "use syntax
in order to cry, to give syntax to the cry" ("WML,"p. 67). The productive
move beyond the relation of the two is brought up short by this acting
out of affects that mark the emergence of the minority as a form of identi-
fication; and identification-be it translative or transferential-demands
the movement of metaphor, as Diana Fuss has eloquently suggested in
IdentificationPapers.18 For Deleuze and Guattari, however, the affect that
accompanies the emergence of minority enunciation or identification is
left unacknowledged, and this disavowal is linked to an earlier scene in
the essay where a particularly significant scenario of affect/agon/ambiva-
lence is quickly brushed past, almost avoided. They write: "when Kafka
indicates that one of the goals of a minor literature is the 'purification of
the conflict that opposes father and son and the possibility of discussing
18. See Diana Fuss, IdentificationPapers (New York, 1995), p. 51.

that conflict,' it isn't a question of an Oedipal phantasm but of a political

program" ("WML,"p. 59). It is this problematic immediacy of the politi-
cal, as if a political program is free of its requisite phantasmatic identifi-
cations or affective components, that, I believe, leaves the moment and
movement of minority writing without a form of affect or a mode of phan-
tasmatic identification. How do we think affect and agency together and
take these concepts beyond the relation of the "two subjects"? Can we
extend and elaborate a process that Andre Greene has so appositely de-
scribed as "affects of writing which undermine and compete with the af-
fects of life"?'9
If we start with the little signs of minority life, those affectsthat bring
out the agency of minority writing, we discover that they are surprisingly
reminiscent of the clinical symptoms of anxiety as a writing of affect. In
Edward Glover's classic essay "Psychoanalysis of Affects," he describes the
subjective state of anxiety as "'being disrupted,' 'flying into fragments' or
'going mad."' It is a state of weird, compound, mixed, or fused affects.20
Most of these phrases are apt for Kafka's minority writing, and "flying
into fragments" may have almost been derived from Deleuze and Guat-
tari's central concept metaphors that circle insistently around flight. Mi-
nority writing as fasting and Kafka'sdried-up German recall Freud's early
notes on melancholia where he describes anorexia "as the nutritional
neurosis parallel to melancholia."21 "Writing like a dog digging a hole, a
rat digging its burrow.... finding his [Kafka's] own point of underdevel-
opment ... his own third world, his own desert" ("WML,"p. 61): this
passage again echoes the central introjective movement of anxious identi-
fication, what Laplanche describes as "'the casting within oneself."'22The
deep inward burrowing of minority discourse reaches the point of its un-
derdevelopment and then activates language's deterritorialization. It is
that utilization of language that frees it of its metaphoric function and
turns its speech acts into borderline phenomena-"one language can fill
a certain function for one material and another function for another ma-
terial.... divid[ing] up in turn and carry[ing] with it multiple centers of
power" ("WML,"p. 65). In a similar move Laplanche suggests that anxi-
ety is "above all a boundary-phenomenon in exact accordance with its
bodily expression." Anxiety represents an ongoing, vacillating process of
translation that iteratively crosses the border between external/internal,
psychic/somatic, between the ego "'as the actual seat of anxiety"' and the
19. Andre Greene, On Private Madness (London, 1986), p. 320.

20. Edward Glover, "The Psycho-Analysis of Affects" (1938), On the Early Development
of Mind (New York, 1956), p. 302.
21. Sigmund Freud, "Draft G. Melancholia" (1895), TheStandardEditionof the Complete
PsychologicalWorksof Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London, 1953-74),
1:200.
22. Jean Laplanche, "AMetapsychology Put to the Test of Anxiety," InternationalJour-
nal of Psycho-Analysis62 (1981): 84; hereafter abbreviated "MA."
inner attack of id and superego ("MA,"pp. 87, 88). Within language,

Kafka'sminority discourse exacerbates a disjunction between content and
expression in order to produce a "language torn from sense, conquering
sense, bringing about an active neutralization of sense" ("WML,"p. 63).
The borderline affect of anxiety emerges from a similar disjunctive rela-
tionship between the external and internal worlds, or material reality and
psychic reality, in its translationalfunction. For however internal the drive,
Laplanche argues, it is constituted through the experiences of the exter-
nal world; yet the relation to the external world through the fantasmatic
representation of the drives confuses the priority or causality of exter-
nality and internality and, as with minority discourse, actively neutralizes,
even estranges, the division between sense and experience. I am sug-
gesting then, that anxiety may be a signal and significant affect in the
minor key, while the "neutralized" language of minor literature may re-
quire the agency of anxiety to mark its enunciative emergence. In the
words of the minority Chicago poet, A. K. Ramanujan:
Not branchless as the fear tree,
Not geometric as the parabolas

of hope....
Flames have only lungs. Water is all eyes.

The earth has bone for muscle....
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
But anxiety
can find no metaphor to end it.23
Nor can minority writing find itself in the language of metaphors, figura-
tive tropes, or proper names if it wants to go on, in Deleuze and Guattari's
words, "to open the word onto unexpected internal intensities ... an in-
tensiveutilizationof language" ("WML,"p. 64). Can this resistance to meta-
phor, this commitment to utterance as an ongoing negotiation of aberrant
and adjacent, side-by-side (remember the passage from Kracauer) causal-
ities on the borderlines of difference enable us to find a place for the
anxiety of minority enunciation? Anxiety, Laplanche writes, happens in
that nontransitive voice that classical linguists call the doubly reflexive
middle voice: "it makes itself anxious within myself" ("MA,"p. 84). There
is, in the middle voice, an echo of a certain openness and process that
classical linguists traditionally associate with the form. Within the enunci-
ation of anxiety, then, there is a disjunction between the subject as object
of itself, "to be made anxious," and, in a double move, the object as sub-
jected to itself, "myself as anxious." The it of anxiety is interruptive of and
yet articulated within myself. Through this process of partial introjection
23. A. K. Ramanujan, "Anxiety,"SelectedPoems(Delhi, 1976), p. 11.
or identification there emerges an externality of the subject that questions

its limits. Anxiety marks the site of the subject as tangential to the major-
ity; its form of identification is iterative and interrogative, a doubly re-
flexive question: What is it to be within? What is within myself? This
double and split reflexivity of anxiety is a form of aphanisis, an "absolute
otherness ... in so far as it is closer to the subject than anything that the
subject can set against itself in the domain of objectivity."24This particular
scenario of the anxious subject is crucial to its emergence and constitutive
of its emergence as an agency that translates external cause into fantas-
matic identifications. It is almost mimicked in Deleuze and Guattari's con-
stitution of the minority subject, give or take a little. If you give in just a
little to the Lacanian objetpetita and take away slightly more from Deleuze
and Guattari's Nietzschean becoming,you will see how the double reflexiv-
ity of the middle voice works in the minority subject-as-circuit, emerging
as an anxious, yet inventive, questioning about what takes the place of
the subject beyond the two designations of author and character, hero
and victim. The "intensive utilization" of minority language as a form of
anxious identification addresses Rich's originating question, in the pre-
cise form of its utterance, as question:"When does a life bend toward free-
dom? grasp its direction?"
The affective question of freedom, so crucial to the minority dis-
course, is in a subtle, subterranean way central to anxiety, too-although
it purposefully complicates any Deleuzean sense of political immediacy.
Leo Rangell, who has worked extensively on anxiety with his patients,
has this to say:
Depression is about a certainty; anxiety about a possibility. However

hidden under the impact of stress, the other side of anxiety is hope,
that the danger ["unpleasure"] might in fact not come to pass. The
ego has a choice. It can do something. In fact it must do something
if it is to bring about what it wishes. Anxiety challenges it to do just
that, to do what can be done to move from danger to safety [from
"unpleasure" to a kind of fulfillment].25
Rich's poem is written from within such an anxious choice of the ego,
crafting its own agency at the point at which the universal scatters (in
Balibar's image) and one bends to freedom. Although Rich writes from
the precarious sense of the paralysis of choice at the moment of stepping
into the deep current of change, it is the anxiety of freedom that enables
her to see, at once, the marks, and masks, of the possible. The immediacy
of the political aim or objective is distanced in the dramatization of what
24. Zizek, "Is There a Cause of the Subject?" Supposingthe Subject,ed. Joan Copjec
(New York, 1994), pp. 103-4.
25. Leo Rangell, "On Understanding and Treating Anxiety and Its Derivatives," Inter-
nationalJournal of Psycho-Analysis59 (1978): 231.
it means to emerge, to submerge, as minority. Rich's double reflexivity

resides deep in the syntax of the poetic present, which is articulated as a
gap in the midst of the lines themselves-a moment of deterritorializa-
tion-while the subject encounters itself, paradoxically, in the historical
continuum as its other. Through the anxiety that mediates an external
world that insistently conditions and contests the site of political choice,
the poet finds her own middle voice, at once gendered and engendering
of the identification with, and through, difference. Now for the poem
that provoked the theory:
Old backswitching road bent toward the ocean's light

Talking of angles of vision movements a black or a red tulip
opening
Times of walking across a street thinking
not I havejoined a movementbut I am steppingin this deepcurrent
Part of mylife washing behindme terrorI couldn'tswimwith
part of mylife waitingfor me a part I had no wordsfor
I need to live each day through have themand knowthemall
thoughI can seefrom herewhereI'll bestandingat the end.
When does a life bend toward freedom? grasp its direction?

stagnation
but entering that deep current malachite, colorado
requiring all your strength wherever found
your patience and your labor
desire pitted against desire's inversion
all your mind's fortitude?
Maybe through a teacher: someone with facts with numbers
with poetry
who wrote on the board: IN EVERY GENERATION ACTION FREES
OUR DREAMS
Maybe a student: one mind unfurling like a redblack peony
. . . . . . . . . . . . . ...... . . . . . *. .
-Your journals Patricia: Douglas your poems:....

. . * . * . * . . .
-And now she turns her face brightly on the new morning in
the new classroom
new in her beauty her skin her lashes her lively body:
Race, class ... all that ... but isn'tall thatjust history?
Aren'tpeopleboredwith it all?
She could be
myself at nineteen but free of reverence for past ideas
ignorant of hopes piled on her She's a mermaid
momentarily precipitated from a solution

which could stop her heart She could swim or sink
like a beautiful crystal. ["M" pp. 61-62]
Rich writes from the "midstness" that is the temporal mark of the inscrip-
tion of proximity discussed above. At the same time, she writes of the
tremulous emergence of a minority movement into the public sphere of
recognition. Thefaux naive phrase "Race,class ... all that ... butisn'tall that
just history?"makes it a text of the pedagogy of our times: the blithe
nineteen-year-old, the author's unreflecting alter ego, caught on the front
lines of generational shifts, turning her back on all that history, while the
poem turns the girl's face, "a redblack peony," to confront precisely the
deep current of the political and psychic movements of race and class
fought for by her teachers, her poets, that made her, without her know-
ing, into what she is. The throwaway line at the end--"Race, class... all
that"-makes it clear that the poet is talking of joining a movement con-
cerned with what is popularly called the politics of difference. It is, how-
ever, the wonder of the poem that its concern with the experience of what
it means to be in the middle of difference happily makes the poet with-
hold the naming of her politics, so we don't fall into the trap of identity
politics and are open to thinking politics as an identification. The subject
of the poem is, literally, the sphere of the proximity of difference. Race,
class, and gender are rendered as the one-in-the-other: hope and igno-
rance, mothers and daughters, political sisters and intergenerational
strangers, vain historic hopes and "past ideas." This dialectic of difference
does not represent the numerical measure of majority and minority; it
opens up, within a political movement, a form of social agency where, to
use Deleuze and Guattari's words, minority is the connection, "the and
produced between elements, between sets, and which belongs to neither,
which eludes them and constitutes a line of flight." "Aline of becoming"
"passes betweenpoints, it comes up through the middle, it runs perpen-
dicular to the points first perceived.... The middle is not an average; it
is fast motion, it is the absolute speed of movement ... A becomingis nei-
therone nor two, nor the relationof the two."26
In the midst of talk about "angles of" political "vision," "a black or a
red tulip" opens, a "redblack peony" unfurls. These imperceptible, yet
intense, movements of flowers that "come up through the middle" of the
verses are the border posts that designate the double territory where the
resolute intention to join a movement turns into the deep, moving cur-
rent of psychic displacement. The "I" splits ambivalently between parts:
the washed-up past, the life waiting to happen, the part that needs to
find its voice, its language. And flowers stand as witnesses of the front
line, as the deep integuments of proximate identities-race and class and
26. Deleuze and Guattari, A ThousandPlateaus, pp. 470, 293; emphasis mine.
gender and generation and ... open up. These identities do not live in
the middle ground of the abstract equivalence of difference or by the
straight arrow of emancipation. As the poet says, freedom has to be
grasped in that fleeting movement,in a narrow isthmus of intervention
that can easily be misrecognized. For the deep current of change-swirl-
ing, invisible, and disorienting-must not be confused with the encircling
waters of"pale dreams" and "stagnation." Freedom's insight is contingent
and unpredictable: it may come when walking across a street; it may be
emblazoned on a board, taught in so many words, "IN EVERY GENERATION
ACTION FREES/OUR DREAMS"; or it may be caught, quite surprisingly, in
this one's journal, that one's poem. What does it mean to belong to a
movement-"Race, class... all that"? "When," in the poet's words, "does
a life bend toward freedom?"
The poetics of proximity, through which Rich makes her answer, can-
not at first sight be seen or read. It emerges in the gaps that open in
betweenthe verses themselves, breaking up the movement of the line and
placing the act of minority enunciation in a borderline space: "Partof my
life washing behindme terrorI couldn'tswim with/partof my life waiting for
me a part I had no wordsfor."It is the space and time of the present, not
signified as an idea or concept but as a kind of verbalact oractionof articula-
tion that occupies this gap in time and knowledge. For the present, signi-
fied in the gap or the blank in the verse, is the attenuated ground of
political decision, its incompleteness, its not being quite there; but this
very indeterminacy also makes the disjunctive present-not yet enunciated
as itself-the basis of political action. The unfulfilled or unsatisfied pres-
ent becomes the site of a certain futurity, of freedom as a project(in both
senses of the word) that has to be negotiated. These silent openings-
tulips, peonies-that form a signifying chain across the poem are none-
theless the connective and actional movements through which the poem
works out its answer to the question of freedom.
Freedom, in this account, is part of"the future [that] is real but must
be ec-statically kept up," as Sartre describes it.27The translational move-
ment-between idea and action, the pedagogical and the performa-
tive-is signified in the poet's marking, or making, a difference between
"talking" and "walking":
Talkingof angles of vision movements a black or red tulip

opening
Times of walking across a street thinking
not I havejoined a movementbut I am steppingin this deepcurrent
Part of mylife...
part of mylife ... a part I had no wordsfor
27. Jean-Paul Sartre, Notebooksfor an Ethics, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago, 1992),
p. 464.
The "ec-static" condition of the future speaks through or beside the gaps
in the present. It is an emancipatory movement; the drive to futurity, the
desire for freedom, is marginalized in a present moment that is signified
as synecdoche (the representation of a life in parts) or articulated as
asyndeton, through gaps ("the ellipsis of conjunctive loci"). Asyndeton
and synecdoche are those figures of"pedestrian" enunciation that Michel
de Certeau associates with a subversive and translational process that he
calls the discourse of "local authorities": inserting a "void" into a homoge-
nizing function or a totalizing system (like the political movement or the
concept of freedom), "allow[ing] a certain play within a system of defined
places or "classifi[able] identities" that contradicts and compromises the
univocity of the system.28 Freedom's propensity to be always in the uto-
pian front line-"where I'll be standing at the end"-is underscored by the
quotidian, yet unlanguaged, conditions of its enunciation-"part of my
life waitingfor me a part I had no wordsfor"-that makes freedom a border
post, a measure of survival--"to live each day through."Or, as Sartre
explains, "ec-static" freedom, "the given, the choice, the situation,
goal ... this totalization is impossible because there is no homogeneity of
elements.... And if the dialectic is not a closed system, then we have to
live with the incertitude of the present moment ... [while] the future
dimension is ignorance, risk, uncertainty, a wager."29If nowadays the fu-
ture as a pedagogical-political ideal is made peripheral, it is also peri-
phrastically articulated around the missing words of the present. Taking
part in a political movement as a form of collective recognitionbecomes
also a process of being taken apart at the level of identification. With the
poem's distinction between "walking" and "talking" we have stepped into
the midst of some of the most contentious contemporary discussions
around the politics of difference or multiculturalism.
"Talking"is, in the broadest sense, the pedagogical realm of minority

politics: the theorizing of "angles of vision," the dialogue between student
and teacher, the practices of public and institutional address-"IN
EVERY GENERATION ACTION FREES OUR DREAMS." "Talking,"as the realm of
the visuality of the public sphere where image and action come together,
constitutes what Charles Taylor has called the "politics of recognition"
in his recent influential essay on multiculturalism. The new dimensions
that contemporary minority politics adds to the Hegelian problematic of
recognition are its explicit commitment to cultural authenticity and a mil-
28. Michel de Certeau, The Practiceof EverydayLife, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley,
1984), pp. 101, 106.
29. Sartre, Notebooksfor an Ethics, pp. 464, 467.
itant avowal of the "presumption of equal worth." Contemporary femi-

nism, race relations, and multiculturalism are founded on a version of a
post-Herderian notion of authenticity-the essential, inward truth of us
as a turn or returnto ourselves-which is now articulated through a con-
cept of social dialogism. The liberal ethic of mutual recognition-how-
ever unequally and unevenly distributed between master and slave,
among classes, genders, races-is now read largely from the perspective
of exclusionary misrecognition: "the projection of an inferior and de-
meaning image on another can actually distort and oppress, to the extent
that the image is internalized.... The withholding of recognition can be
a form of oppression."30
The demand for cultural emancipation and recognition on the part
of the excluded is based on a prescriptive presumption of equal cultural
value. The culture of exclusion claims that "just as all must have equal
civil rights, and equal voting rights, regardless of race or culture, so all
should enjoy the presumptionthat their traditional culture has value"
("PR,"p. 68; emphasis mine). This presumption does not participate in
the universal language of cultural value, argues Taylor, for it focuses ex-
clusively on recognition for the excluded. But what Taylor finds particu-
larly unacceptable about the presumption of equal value is the extension
of civil rights into the domain of cultural judgement. It cannot be that
"as a matter of right ... we come up with a final concluding judgment
that their value is great, or equal to others.... It cannot be dictated by a
principle of ethics" ("PR,"p. 69).
Taylor's objection is particularly open to question. For in his view the
substance of the right or the nature of the minority presumption is less
problematic than the fact that the minorities have got theirtimingall wrong
in making their bid for freedom and recognition. A real judgement of
worth cannot ethically presume value; it must emanate from a "'fusion of
horizon"' of standards that emerges from an immersion in the culture in
question, and will yield new vocabularies of comparison, create broader
horizons as "the background to evaluation [to set aside] the formerly un-
familiar culture.... [and provide us] with an understanding of what con-
stitutes worth that we couldn't possibly have had at the beginning"("PR,"
p. 67; emphasis mine).
The utter reasonableness of this notion of processual judgement as
working through cultural difference in order to be transformed by the
other is not as straightforwardly open to the other as it sounds. For the
possibility of the "'fusion of horizon"' of standards-the new standard of
judgement-is not all that new; it is founded on the notion of the dialogic
subject of culture that we had preciselyat the beginningof the whole argu-
ment. That crucial standard of judgement has not changed. What fails to
30. Charles Taylor, "The Politics of Recognition," in Multiculturalism,ed. Amy Gutman

(Princeton, N.J., 1994), pp. 72, 36; hereafter abbreviated "PR."
be translated (or transformed) by the other culture is the assumption of

the dialogical subject of authenticity as ahistorically and immanently un-
derlying the process of the transvaluation of cultural judgement. Further,
there is a presumption of dialogical recognition as a form of social and
psychic reciprocity that makes the fusing of horizons a largely consensual
and homogenizing norm of cultural value or worth, based on the notion
that cultural difference is fundamentally synchronous.
Despite the misrecognition and misrepresentations of cultural differ-
ence that Taylor attends to, the notion of reciprocity assumes that dialogic
recognition exists within a binary relationship that consists of two unitary
(individual or collective) cultural subjects; difference is constituted and
totalized within each culture. But the issue for the minority subject, as
Rich demonstrates with rare intensity, is not the question of reciprocity-
"the relation of the two"-but the problematic ofproximity-the internally
ambivalent subject structured through the temporal disjunction of pres-
ent being. Anxiously split and inverted at the point at which it comes
to be identified with, or a representative of, the minority politics of dif-
ference-synecdoche, metonymy, asyndeton-this critical discourse of
I
proximity (if might adapt a point Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues in
quite another context) "acknowledge[s] proximity" to get at "perspectival
normativity" as the internal liminality of a norm-"an affect in extre-
mis"-rather than recognizing, she continues, "the identity of an entire
continent, or ... put[ting] one's signature on a concept."31
desire pitted against desire's inversion

all your mind's fortitude?...
but the repetitive blows
on spines whose hope you were, on yours:
to see that quenching and decide. ["M" p. 61]
The minority subject produced through the proximity of difference

(rather than reciprocity) emerges from a history of discriminatory and
exclusionary practices without the temporal coevality that dialogism de-
mands for successful recognition. And in his concluding paragraphs Tay-
lor articulates what he wants to be a reasonable assumption on the basis
of which the judgement of cultural value might proceed: "One could ar-
gue that it is reasonable to suppose that cultures that have provided the
horizons of meaningfor largenumbersof humanbeings,of diverse characters
and temperaments, overa longperiodof time-that have, in otherwords,articu-
latedtheirsenseof thegood, theholy,the admirable-are almost certain to have
something that deserves our admiration and respect" ("PR,"p. 72; em-
phasis mine). Let us bracket, for the moment, "diverse characters and
temperaments" and ask whether the spatial notion of "large numbers of
31. Spivak, "Acting Bits/Identity Talk," in Identities,pp. 177, 178.

human beings" and the continuist, organicist temporality of "a long pe-
riod of time" would not, of necessity, return the concept of minority to a
model of a national peoples. Public virtue of this kind does not address
the identificatory desire of minorities who "have lately reformulated our
historical exclusion as a matter of historically produced and politically
rich alterity."32Nor could such a "recognition of reciprocity" adequately
value what Nivedita Menon describes as the emergence of a masculinist,
minority, religious identity in contemporary India, where the politics of
gendered identification confuses both the statist and the communitarian
modes of recognition. The interstitial articulations of selfhoods "assert
their difference on the one hand, from the public sphere defined by the
constitution, where the citizen is devoid of all distinguishing marks in-
cluding that of sex" and on the other from "other communities who mark
their specific maleness differently."33The embedded national or statist
metaphor through which Taylor works his evaluative chronotope of cul-
tural judgement would be unable to recognize migrant or diasporic
peoples as representatives of minority cultures; they would be seen as
representatives of their national or atavistic cultural heritages, or as part
of a mosaic within the "homogeneous, empty time" of the nation. As a
principle of judgement and identification this sense of a dialogical syn-
chrony-despite its standard of reasonable liberal procedures-would
result in what Fanon would describe as the pathology of freedom.
Freedom does not come from the expansive fused horizons that Tay-
lor proposes. It is a certain "bending toward freedom" that emerges in
between two adjacent forms of historical repetition: the contingency of
living and knowing each day as it unfolds flowerlike into a fleeting and
difficult everyday emancipation; and the solipsistic, stagnant "circling in
pale dreams," victimhood and "wounded attachments" that imprison the
minority imaginary.34"Walking," Rich's figure for drawing the fine line
between exclusion and emancipation, resembles much more the psycho-
analytic process of identification-what Fuss describes as the "space of
the borderlander":
Identification.... makes identity possible, but also places it at con-

stant risk: multiple identifications within the same subject can com-
pete with each other, producing further conflicts to be managed;
identifications that once appeared permanent or unassailable can be
quickly dislodged.... It is a profoundly turbulent history of contra-
dictory impulses and structural incoherencies.35
32. Nivedita Menon, "Citizenship and a Question of Justice: State/Gender/Commu-

nity in India," Chicago Humanities Institute, May 1996, unpublished manuscript.
33. Ibid.
34. Wendy Brown, Statesof Injury:Powerand Freedomin Late Modernity(Princeton, N.J.,
1995), p. 52; hereafter abbreviated SI.
35. Fuss, IdentificationPapers,p. 49.
This very turbulence of politicized identity in the minority cause is at

the center of Wendy Brown's remarkable speculations on the "wounded
attachments" that bind together communities of exclusion. In sharp con-
trast to Taylor, Brown sees the current claim to minority identity as a
denial, even a reversal, of dialogic recognition:
Just when polite liberal (not to mention correct leftist) discourse

ceased speaking of us as dykes, faggots, colored girls, or natives, we
began speaking of ourselves this way. Refusing the invitation to ab-
sorption, we insisted instead upon politicizing and working into cul-
tural critique the very constructions that a liberal humanism
increasingly exposed in its tacit operations of racial, sexual, and gen-
der privilege was seeking to bring to a close. [SI, p. 53]
Brown echoes Freud's question when she asks, What does politicized
identity want?
Brown's question turns on her salutary sense that the minoritarian
perspective can become caught in a ressentimentthat forces it into a collu-
sion with its subjectivist production conditions, which are marked by pain
and suffering. In any period of severe retrenchment in the critiques of
capitalism and bourgeois values, this ressentimentcan result in an emanci-
patory demand that derives its claims to injury and exclusion from an
ambivalent identification with "its reviled subject as objects of desire....
the white masculine middle-class ideal" (SI, pp. 60, 61). The politicized
identities of gender, race, and sexuality cannot articulate what they want
because their emancipatory claims are too often frozen by "entrenching,
restating, dramatizing, and inscribing [their] pain in politics" (SI, p. 74),
where the "I am" becomes a fixed, defensive identity that cannot partici-
pate in a transformative, collective politics. One way out of this "circling
in pale dreams" is to change the enunciative subject of the emancipatory
claim. Instead of"I want," the minoritarian performative should read in
its identificatory mode as
"I want this for us.". .. to rehabilitate the memory of desire within
identificatory processes, the moment in desire-either "to have" or
"to be"-prior to its wounding. ... to read "I am" this way: as poten-
tially in motion, as temporal, as not-I, as deconstructable according
to the genealogy of want rather than as fixed interests or experi-
ences.... This deconstruction could be that which reopens a desire
for futurity. [SI, p. 75]
Brown's project justifies the shift I made from the subject of recogni-
tion and reciprocity to the minoritarian position as identification and
proximity. Her demand for a minority subject in motion,continually nego-
tiating a futurity from the temporality of a present that destabilizes or
deconstructs presence(not-I), or "'I want this for us,"' has been staged, to
a large degree, in Rich's poem, as I read it. Have we come full circle? No,
the question of freedom's futurity, its particular movement, still remains
to be tracked. If the seeds of the future lie, as Brown suggests, in rehabili-
tating memory and desire in a moment "priorto its wounding," one can
only ask what that moment would be and from whereit could speak its
demand. From Brown'spsychoanalytic perspective, there is indeed no pos-
sibility of the "worlding" of the subject without a wounding; the subject
only comes to light in a continual, ambivalent, contradictory trajectory
of desire between "being" (I am the object) and "having" (not-I)-what
Freud calls being a "frontier-creature."36From the historical or political
perspective, the motion that Brown desires, where "I want" and "I want
this for us" lie in a proximate relation to each other (the one-in-the-other,
not a relation of "two" but a doubling relation), is measured temporally
and can only emerge from working-through the wounding, not beingprior
to it. The mimesis of memorialization-the restitution of record, date,
time, name-anxiously gives way to the deferred event of memory, its
repetition as revenant, its ghostly appearance in the present; testimony is
caught in the affective anxiety of what it means to remember, recall, re-
count. This ethical process of memory is at the heart of Lacan's seminar
on the "function of the good": "the function of memory, remembering,"
he writes, "is at the very least a rival of the satisfactions it is charged with
effecting.... In other words, the structure engendered by memory must
not in our experience mask the structure of memory itself insofar as
[memory] is made of a signifying articulation":37
part of mylife waitingfor me a part I had no wordsfor
But can this ever constitute a political future?-a freedom whose present
consists of parts (metonym, asyndeton, synecdoche)? a mode of emanci-
pation without its anxious enunciative moment?
Rich ends her poem with the unthinking insouciance of youth, ut-
tered by the nineteen-year-old: "Race,class... all that... butisn'tall thatjust
peopleboredwithit all?" What speaks through this negation of
history?/Aren't
history is also unconscious of the next generation. For a moment we are
seemingly projected into a futurity where the wounding has been forgot-
ten, and with it the girl's own political genealogy. The transmission of the
political struggles of the past, of an earlier generation, turns spectral,
almost invisible.
But not for long. The poet's last image of the girl as "mermaid," sus-
pended between life and death, "precipitated from a solution/which
36. Quoted in ibid., p. 49.

37. Jacques Lacan, "The Function of the Good," The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,vol. 7 of
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, trans. Dennis Porter, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York,
1992), p. 223.
could stop her heart She could swim or sink"-all these images of the
"ec-static" future remind us that the wounding terrors (and territories)
of history are there, frozen in the killing air, for the suspended mermaid.
As the poet did once, the new beauty will also have to enter the current
of the Colorado and ask the question:
Whendoesa life bendtowardfreedom? grasp its direction?
The Conductof Language

The opening essays of this special issue-those by Stephen
Greenblatt, Ranajit Guha, and Mary Ellen Wolf-joined under the rubric
"The Conduct of Language," concern the complex bend towards freedom
that has diverted the traditional academic discourse of canons and cores
in the cause of the recognition of minorities or the representations of
multiculturalism.
In "What Is the History of Literature?" Greenblatt reads the genius
literariusas a ghostly presence, a spectral figure that comes to life in the
liminal proximity that exists between what is "made-up" and what ap-
pears to be "made-real." The emancipatory impulse of literary history
comes, for Greenblatt, from the practice of an anxious interstitial sur-
vival-literature's ambiguous referentiality ensures its openness to a secu-
lar, democratic future whose borderline shifts between life and death,
philological ontology (the archive) and contesting interpretations. In this
sense literary history must, ethically, be minoritarian. There is an unex-
pected echo between Greenblatt's new necromanticism (once the new his-
toricist!) and Guha's attention to the social and psychic anxiety that
spooks Orwell, at a crucial moment of indecision, during his imperial
service in Burma. If for Greenblatt the singularity (or sovereignty) of lit-
erary history is an impossibility, then for Guha it is the rhetorical and
linguistic possibilities of literary affect that make plausible the revisions
of imperial history: only the ambiguous referentiality of literary signifi-
cation enables the subaltern historian to reveal the psycho-political bor-
derline condition of the colonized, beyond the discursive limits of
historiography.
By insisting on anxiety as a necessarysocial affect of the indeterminacy
of the imperial everyday (Alltg,lichkeit),Guha derails the intentionality of
imperial discourse by questioning the historiographical orthodoxy of"the
very mentality of imperialism itself" (p. 487). In the breakdown of the
familiar binary boundary between sahib and native, other psychic bor-
derlines get rapidly established, inscribed across subjects, in between acts
and objectives. The present opens up, as in Rich's verses, as a disjunctive

gap carrying the promise of"ec-static" freedom in its maw. Orwell writes,
"When the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys"
(quoted on p. 491).
What kinds of freedoms are these, that in literature's case speak
through the Ghost, and in the domain of history can only be uttered
when the colonizer becomes hollow, a dummy, a puppet?
In "Sovereign Performatives in the Contemporary Scene of Utter-
ance" (which will be grouped together with Greenblatt, Guha, and Wolf
in the forthcoming book publication of this issue), Judith Butler provides
a fine response to this question. By addressing the politics of spectral and
anxious subjectivity implicated in the legal and linguistic constructions of
hate speech, Butler, as I quoted above, raises the question of cultural
translation from the perspective of the discourse of the minority.
Speaking and exposing the alterity within the norm (the alterity
without which the norm would not know itself) exposes the failure
of the norm to effect the universal.... Such double-speaking is pre-
cisely the temporalized map of universality's future, the task of a
postlapsarian cultural translation whose future remains unpredict-
able. The contemporary scene of cultural translation ... is precisely
the interpretive dilemma to be valued, for it suspends the need for
a final judgement in favor of an affirmation of a certain linguistic
vulnerability to reappropriation. This vulnerabilitymarksthe way that a
postsovereigndemocraticdemandmakesitselffelt in the contemporaryscene
of utterance.38
The public utterance extends-through the ecritureof everyday life-to

the ubiquitous visuality of contemporary culture. Mary Ellen Wolf's docu-
mentary photo essay "Out of Frame: Border(line) Images," witnessing
transvestite lives on the Mexico-U.S. border, pushes the problematic of
cultural translation to confront the conceptual edge of ethnographic rep-
resentation. "When you pick up a camera and negotiate an image, the
categories of us/them, he/she become so simplistic and abstract as to
clearly ring false.... How to involve yourself in another culture and
space, how to dismantle your power, how to have a relationship-these
problems and processes remain paradoxical, a part of the work" (pp.
494-95). Documenting the transvestite practice of doing chueco (passing
as a woman) takes Wolf deep into the lives of her friends as subjects: that
paradox of identity nicely expressed in the tension between the highly
staged mise-en-scene and the intimate, unadorned look that faces a cam-
era deeply inscribed in a world of small, awkward spaces and larger-than-
38. Butler, "Sovereign Performatives in the Contemporary Scene of Utterance," pp.

368, 369; emphasis mine.
life ladies. As Wolf's photography works its way through rented rooms,
cross-streets, borderline bars, tacky taquerias, she suggests that gender
may be a site-specific installation. Less "intent on knowing what was be-
neath the clothes,",true lives, her camera work establishes the scenario of
sexual identity as identification: transvestism as a kind of translation that
displays or overplays what is untranslatable, the je ne sais quois of sexual
desire and pleasure. In the interstitial temporalities of the photographic,
difference is articulated "in the texture of life-the time between the
frames" where faking femininity is at once an economic reality and the
cultural artifice of a sex ever open to reappropriation, to dressing up
(p. 498).
VernacularTranslations
The essays that follow, grouped together as "Vernacular Transla-
tions," expose "the alterity within the norm" and describe displaced or
diverted intention in the colonial world of the long nineteenth century.
Each locates a specific or singular history of cultural translation where
the discursive present is wrought through a disjunctive temporality or
a performative anxiety. Schwarz's "Laissez-Faire Linguistics" addresses
Nathaniel Brassey Halhed's Grammarof the Bengal Language (1778) as a
discourse symptomatic of a peculiar contradiction in the East India Com-
pany's "'idiom of incorporation"' whereby the egalitarian universal com-
munication required by liberal governance is violated by the political
need to produce a native subject whose incorporation can only be partial
in order to preserve the priority of English power (p. 510). Gyan Prakash's
"The Modern Nation's Return in the Archaic" opens in 1895 and tracks
the emergence of a Western-educated Hindu elite and its ambivalent,
even paradoxical, desire to create a modern Indian nation through a re-
turn to the archaism of Hindu science. And David Attwell, focusing
mainly on Tiyo Soga's journal (1857-1870), attempts to understand the
nature of a transculturated and transvalued African Enlightenment
wherein "nationalism involves both a claim to participate in universal his-
tory and an affirmation of his Africanness" (p. 565).
When the process of identification has to manage the tension be-
tween archaism and modernity (Guha) or universality and Africanness
(Attwell), the discourse functions by way of a "continual covering over of
a gap which it thereby reproduces, a self-negating relation," a vacillation
between the I and the not-I.39 Soga offers a transitional link between a
homestead counterenlightenment and a diasporic global perspective
based on an ethic of survival that goes beyond the fate of victimhood to
construct a question and a condition of freedom.
39. Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time:Modernityand Avant-Garde(New York, 1995),

p. 95.
VernacularCosmopolitans
The subsequent essays within "Vernacular Cosmopolitans" are trans-
national and transcultural productions whose collective subtitle could
well be, in Rajeswari Sunder Rajan'sapt phrase, "the geographies of intel-
lectual labor" (p. 596). Within these essays, the double inscription of the
colonial condition-between the Enlightenment and its oppressions, be-
tween liberalism and tyranny-finds its way towards its own fraught vi-
sions of freedom. Each in its different way speaks through Frantz Fanon
when he envisions the scope of his futurity, in recalling the slave leader
Toussaint L'Ouverture, C. L. R. James's celebrated black jacobin: "I am a
man, and what I have to recapture is the whole past of the world. I am
not responsible solely for the revolt in Santo Domingo."40
The attempt to capture the whole of the world as an act of historic
retrieval and psychic restitution (after colonialism's incorporations and
dislocations) results in various revisionary struggles with the universalist
claims of both History and the Individual. Frangoise Verges turns her
attention to the Fanonian body, alienated in the display, and displace-
ment, of colonial power-black skin, white masks-that becomes the site
of freedom's struggle. Sunder Rajan reflects on the agon of knowledge
and power-between geopolitical locations, postcolonial discourses,
genres, genders, and classes-that gets played across a range of textual
locations and ideological locales. For Kwame Anthony Appiah, however,
to capture the whole world is, indeed, to become a citizen of the world,
but the wholeness of the world is distinguished neither by its historical
universality nor by its social homogeneity: it is the ability to translate dig-
nitas in terms of the Asante value of animuonyam(respect) and derive, at
the point at which the one bleeds into the other, a minoritized, vernacular
cosmopolitanism.
In the process of providing a thick ethnography of what it means to
write "under Western eyes," it is Sunder Rajan who becomes a transi-
tional figure, bridging the ground between the fate of a counterenlight-
enment nationalism and the emergence of a third world critical discourse
on the futures of postmodernism and global culture. This transition is
made through the theoretical movement of cultural translation, earlier
encountered in Gyan Prakash's essay, where the very iterability of a dis-
course-its "lack of finality"-further exposes the alterity within the
norm, and through that passage of proximity opens up new conjunctures
of meaning and emergent locations of identity. The role of contemporary
Indian secularists and feminists has been to work in an interstitialpolitical
space where the class category has to be acknowledged for its rational
and materialist intervention in the spheres of civil society and economic
40. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, WhiteMasks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York,
1967), p. 226.
activity, but has to be translated-often through the protocols of post-

structuralist thought-to accommodate the representational schemas,
and ethical prerogatives, of caste affiliation, gender difference, sexual
preference, and cultural rights. To transform social division into progres-
sive minority agency, we must acknowledge processes of psychoaffective
identification that constitute the collectivity of groups outside the rigid
temporal and ideological orders of "traditional versus other knowledges"
and beyond the earlier preoccupations with the border posts of develop-
ment on the long, often hopeless, road to modernization.

stagnation
but entering that deep current malachite, colorado?
These meditations become all the more politically problematic, and

poetically poignant, in situations where the driving cataract of history,
flowing relentlessly in the direction of the global, does not simply obliter-
ate locality as a kind of obsolete irrelevance but reproduces its own com-
pensatory projections of what tradition, the local, or the authentic ought
to have been. Such a counterfactual move attempts to normalize the emer-
gence of minority resistance to play precisely the defensive part of the
local against the global, the nativist against the universalist, thus justifying
both the future reach of globalization without frontiers and its own ex-
tinction. How does minority agency emerge from the deep and danger-
ous crevasse in between pale, nostalgic dreams and the deep current of
the Colorado? How do resistance and revision happen?
Who then is a Hawaiian? is the focus of David Baker's essay on the
Hawaiian sovereignty movement (Ea). Baker describes the ambivalent
and contradictory enunciative positions through which native Hawaiian
claims to sovereignty have to be negotiated. The error in knowledge is
turned into a resistant knowledge-through-error-a condition resem-
bling Rich's description of political freedom as pittedagainst desire's
"desire
inversion."The tactics of appropriation and disarticulation that Hawaiian
activists deploy are commensurate with having to act through the disjunc-
tive present of being, in the "midstness" of the minority struggle-my
leitmotif of agency as proximity-creating possibilities for translation
and action.
But is such agential maneuverability always possible? Is it possible in
Beirut, today, where the frontiers of nation and state, private interest and
public responsibility, have all but disappeared in a blurred haze of laissez-
faire legerdemain? Saree Makdisi projects an image of a reconstructed
Beirut as a groundplan for the limits, boundaries, and frontiers of global
capitalism. Beirut will be turned into a dual city divided by the frontier
of class; the central business district, inhabiting a different chronotope
from the rest of the city and a five-minute drive from the international
airport, will represent the node of the information-based formal econ-

omy; around it will stand the peripheralized margin of the city that inhab-
its an archaic time-space of a downgraded labor-based informal economy.
Makdisi argues that global and local do not relate to each other as sepa-
rate entities but that one is carried into the other. Beirut will become "the
'same' ... city, which is at one and thesametimethird world and first world.
... Beirut [is] no longer to be identical to itself... but rather to have
taken on in its own space the disarticulations of the global economy" (p.
705).
Between a futuristic global Beirut and an antique imperial Burma
we have almost come full circle. Beirut now becomes the site where late
global capitalism turns unheimlich, where once Burma was the site of
the colonial uncanny: "There is something uncanny about empire," Guha
suggests as the sun momentarily darkened, even if it did not set, on the
British Empire (p. 482). What has markedly changed on the borderlines
between imperialism and globalization is the proselytizing faith in the
colonizing myth of progress as a world-historical project.
If I started this project with abstract, archaeological ambitions, my
ending comes close to resembling a site-specific installation or earthwork.
The significance of this shift lies in my own altered circumstances. I began
with a lonely idea, which my contributors have now turned into a collabo-
rative conversation. We have, I hope, dug tracks of critical inquiry that
have shifted the sightlines, turned historical horizons to face other front
lines, and placed border posts where once there was breached ground or
uncharted territory. It has been my concern, however, to make sure that
the dust does not settle. For as we engage in our own negotiated unset-
tlements with transdisciplinary issues and transcultural events, establish-
ing our translated terrains, the frontiers we foreclose are themselves
the grounds for other elaborations in contrary or contradictory critical
modes. Traduttore-traditore! This is no plea for unregulated open-
endedness or the celebration of pluralism. It is, in fact, an argument for
recognizing the necessity of that anxious movement of minority enuncia-
tion that insists upon the possibility of choice-ethical, aesthetic, politi-
cal-in those negotiations of culture and identity, where the proximate
relation of difference and distance reveals a straitened, precarious path
between circling in pale dreams, and entering the deep current. To be
caught in the midst of the translation of theory and politics, or anxiety
and emergence, is to affirm a kind of historical movement that, as it draws
the future closer, brings the past nearer, too.

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Editor's Introduction: Minority Maneuvers and Unsettled Negotiations

Author(s): Homi Bhabha

When I first proposed "Front Lines/Border Posts" in 1992 as a special

CriticalInquiry23 (Spring 1997)

Homi Bhabha is the Chester D. Tripp Professor in the Humanities

2. See Akeel Bilgrami, "What Is a Muslim? Fundamental Commitment and Cultural

psychic movement. It is the ambivalence in their coexistence-the proxi-

jorities."5Whereas once minorities were the anomalies of a national pre-

National societies are becoming heterogeneous because minorities turn

5. Etienne Balibar, "Ambiguous Universality,"Differences7 (Spring 1995): 55; hereafter

multiple selves practicing different languages, and memberships ac-

8. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities:Reflectionson the Origin and Spreadof Na-

itselffelt in the contemporaryscene of utterance."9How does the fragility of

When does a life bend toward freedom? grasp its direction?

12. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism,or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism(Durham,

Deleuze and Guattari certainly enter the Colorado-middle passage,

To "bend toward freedom," to tear away a minor literature-these

16. Deleuze and Guattari, "What Is a Minor Literature?" in Out There:Marginalization

the midst of things. It is an interstitial movement of writing motivated by

18. See Diana Fuss, IdentificationPapers (New York, 1995), p. 51.

that conflict,' it isn't a question of an Oedipal phantasm but of a political

19. Andre Greene, On Private Madness (London, 1986), p. 320.

inner attack of id and superego ("MA,"pp. 87, 88). Within language,

Not branchless as the fear tree,

Not geometric as the parabolas

Flames have only lungs. Water is all eyes.

or identification there emerges an externality of the subject that questions

Depression is about a certainty; anxiety about a possibility. However

it means to emerge, to submerge, as minority. Rich's double reflexivity

Old backswitching road bent toward the ocean's light

When does a life bend toward freedom? grasp its direction?

-Your journals Patricia: Douglas your poems:....

momentarily precipitated from a solution

Talkingof angles of vision movements a black or red tulip

"Talking"is, in the broadest sense, the pedagogical realm of minority

itant avowal of the "presumption of equal worth." Contemporary femi-

30. Charles Taylor, "The Politics of Recognition," in Multiculturalism,ed. Amy Gutman

be translated (or transformed) by the other culture is the assumption of

desire pitted against desire's inversion

The minority subject produced through the proximity of difference

31. Spivak, "Acting Bits/Identity Talk," in Identities,pp. 177, 178.

Identification.... makes identity possible, but also places it at con-

32. Nivedita Menon, "Citizenship and a Question of Justice: State/Gender/Commu-

This very turbulence of politicized identity in the minority cause is at

Just when polite liberal (not to mention correct leftist) discourse

part of mylife waitingfor me a part I had no wordsfor

36. Quoted in ibid., p. 49.

Whendoesa life bendtowardfreedom? grasp its direction?

The Conductof Language

and objectives. The present opens up, as in Rich's verses, as a disjunctive

The public utterance extends-through the ecritureof everyday life-to

38. Butler, "Sovereign Performatives in the Contemporary Scene of Utterance," pp.

39. Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time:Modernityand Avant-Garde(New York, 1995),

activity, but has to be translated-often through the protocols of post-

How do you know you're not circling in pale dreams, nostalgia,

These meditations become all the more politically problematic, and

airport, will represent the node of the information-based formal econ-

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Editor's Introduction, Minority Maneuvers and Unsettled Negotiations

Editor's Introduction, Minority Maneuvers and Unsettled Negotiations