Bhabha's "subaltern agent" and Derrida's "Before the Law"

In my ever-engaged effort to resist readings of the early Derrida as "apolitical" or "nihilistic," I had some thoughts about the resonances I hear echoing through (and sometimes being stifled) in Homi Bhabha's work (I must note that my reading if Bhabha comes from a very isolated selection below--primarily Chapter 9 of The Location of Culture ). Even with the intellectual backlash something called "deconstruction" has suffered in the last twenty years, I have become interested in the ways in which theorists with definite political agendas have extrapolated ideas offered in Derrida’s writings about language to serve their interest, though often without making the connection explicit anywhere in their own language. Bhabha’s post-colonialism in The Location of Culture (1994) implicitly draws upon Derridan thought. While Bhabha never positions his argument this way, it will become evident below how we can trace a similar continuity of intellectual thought from Derrida’s early writings on language and specific foundational concepts proffered by Bhabha. But because he has a political motive he must necessarily make Derrida’s (non)concepts prescriptive, rather than descriptive, and in the process his program must distort the terms of the very practice he borrows from Derrida. Drawing upon Derrida’s discussion of the structure of language, Bhabha’s project is engaged in an effort to de-center the origin of identity, through a re-interpretation of time that makes temporality a series of contingencies, rather than linear sequence of causal relations. From these procedures he is able to present an interpretation of identity that is not static or fixed, but rather a relationship of differences, that can be read as an expression of Derridean différance. However, Bhabha is extrapolating from Derrida’s discussion of language, he needs to introduce terms that are never a part of Derrida’s reading: for Bhabha it is “freedom,” and as agency is necessarily an influential aspect in any political program, he must grapple with the issue of “identity” in a way that Derrida does not.

We can see specific ways in which Bhabha’s post-colonial project is engaged in a similar project that implicitly draws upon and distorts certain ideas suggested by Derrida’s description of the structural functions of language, while in this chapter of Location he never overtly cites their appropriation of Derridan thought. Because Bhabha’s motive is the potentiality for political action, his appropriation of these terms necessitates an elaboration of agency, therefore he attempts to use the (non)concepts of Derrida’s non-causal temporality and différance as a prescriptive method, when for Derrida both time and différance are merely effects of being in the world.

While Bhabha’s “time lag” draws on the Derridan emphasis on time as contingent and the potential for self-consciousness that is imbedded in experiences of indeterminacy, Bhabha conflates the experience of indeterminacy with “freedom”, in a way that remains abstract and thus requires no active engagement with the present moment—the antithesis of Derrida’s way of reading. In the epigraph that heads his chapter, “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern,” Bhabha cites Derrida: “For some of us the principle of indeterminism is what makes the conscious freedom of man fathomable” (245). Yet, Derrida does not de-center binary oppositions in order to re-inscribe new ones, and in his thinking “indeterminism” is not opposed to “determinism” in the way in which Bhabha posits the former as a weapon against the later. Rather than positing indeterminate time as the occasion through with self-consciousness emerges (as Derrida does), Bhabha suggests a “subaltern agency” that acquires agency by maintaining a state of indeterminacy. The agency afforded to the subaltern in this schematic is defined by this subversion of reason/determinism in favor of un-reason/indeterminacy as well as a “rebel consciousness,” a self-consciousness is self-affirming in the complete negation of the Other and enables the subaltern subject to remain in a state of absolute alterity and unintelligibility.

For Derrida, self-consciousness involves the play of differences between the two states, emphasizing the relationality of one to the other as the condition through which self-consciousness is possible. Bhabha misconstrues this notion in his citation of Derrida, because he uses indeterminacy as a tool to negate determinacy, and in privileging indeterminacy. He equates the experience with “freedom,” where for Derrida not only is “freedom” not likened to a political project as Bhabha expropriates the term, but also exists as a potentiality in the experience of the relationality of the terms, which is the exact opposite of the antagonistic dichotomy Bhabha sets up between the terms within the essay. For Derrida, self-consciousness necessarily involves a period of unintelligibility that lags behind the determinacy, because time is a part of human experience.

While Bhabha presumes to use these deconstructionist principles to abolish binary oppositions (in the case the opposition between the dominant and subjugated, or master/slave hierarchy inherited from the Western tradition)—“the disjunctive present of utterance enables the historian to get away from defining subaltern consciousness as binary” (277). But, because at this point in his argument agency has become synonymous with indeterminacy, as time has become an instrument rather than just a condition of experience, Bhabha ends up re-inscribing the same binary opposition he attempted to dismantle, and he puts the subaltern agent back into the position of subjugated in Hegel’s master/slave dialectic.

While Hegel’s account of this dialectical relationship necessitates a much more exhaustive explication, for the sake of brevity, I will briefly outline the process to demonstrate how Bhabha’s distortion of Derridean “indeterminacy” undermines the motive of his political program. In the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel contends that “self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another” (111). That is the emergence of self-consciousness is a process which is predicated on an encounter with another, in which each agent desires to become “in and for itself” initially through the domination of the other. They “mutually recognize themselves as recognizing one another” and since each is “certain of its own self, but not of the other,” its own being “in and for itself” still has not truth (112-113). In this indeterminacy of self, each desires to be the subject and so “each seeks the death of the other” (113). Yet, in this process another awareness arises when the subject risking his life, realizes that his highest expression of freedom is the risking of his own life, because only he has agency over this action. This is the realization that “there is nothing present in it [life] which could not be regarded as a vanishing moment , that is only pure being-in-itself”( 114). In the case of the master and slave, mastery is self-defeating because the master recognizes the slave as the truth of his identity, since it is his dominant relation to the slave upon which his conscious identity depends. While the master’s identity is dependent on the recognition of the slave, the slave’s realization of self is independent of the master since he does not require domination over the master to be in-himself. In this process, the slave inhabits a “consciousness forced back into itself” which withdraws back into itself and become “transformed into a truly independent consciousness” (117). Thus, the slave is truly the one who experiences the possibility of true liberation. While he first sees the overthrow of the master as truth, he has experienced the fear of death and “absolute negativity” and “pure-being-for-itself” (117). He realizes “through his service he rids himself of his attachment to natural existence in every single detail” (117), because he realizes that he has power over nature by virtue of his own labor, while the master only has power over nature through his dependence on the slave’s labor. It is through his active engagement in his own labor that the slave can become liberated in a consciousness that is for-itself, but often he eschews this labor for the continuation of the abstract desire to replace the master. This state of indeterminacy and abstract relationality rather than active agency in one’s own work keeps the slave a slave, and this is the position in which the subaltern agent is left at the end of Bhabha’s essay.

While Bhabha’s subaltern agent is left in a perpetual state of indeterminacy, like the slave of Hegel’s dialectic, Derrida calls for a subjective agency that is in a constant relation between self and other in a form of decision making that cannot abandon responsibility to the real world in “Before the Law (1992).” In his reading of Kafka’s parable in The Trial, Derrida explores the problem of the man from the country who comes before the door of the “Law”: the petitioner comes before the gatekeeper with the assumption that the law should be universal, and in his attempt to enter into the law, he forgets his own particularity. This is because “there is a singularity about the relationship to the law, a law of singularity which must come into contact with the general or universal essence of the law without ever being able to do so” (187). This is the same problem faced by Bhabha’s subaltern agent. According to Derrida, the petitioner’s failure is that when he comes to this space of indeterminacy, the tension between his singularity and the laws supposed universality, he abandons his particularity and abdicates his engagement in his own life. Kafka writes, “ During these many years [that the man attempts entrance into the law] the man fixes his attention almost continuously on the doorkeeper…He becomes childish…At length his eyesight begins to fail, and he does not know whether the world is really darker or whether his eyes are only deceiving him” (184). In forgetting himself, he loses his rationality and his humanity fades, until he has abdicated his place in history, much like Hegel’s slave who fails to achieve self-consciousness through his work in the world.

Rather than remaining static in this state of indeterminacy, Derrida advocates an experience that is attentive to each successive moment in time; a call for continued engagement through thought in the face off that which we misconstrue.. As he asks “what is the law?” and “what is literature?” in the essay, Derrida contends that no answer emerges, but the posing of the question only reveals “an essential structure of referentiality” (213). That is, the experience of the petitioner, of the singular agent engaging with law, and in the reader who interprets a text, “answers” or “meaning” do not emerge, but only “movements of framing and referentiality” that makes the subject keenly aware of context. Rather than abdicating his own particularity before the law, the petitioner should have maintained a relationality with the universal: “ one cannot reach the law, and in order to have a rapport of respect with it, one must not have a rapport with it, one must interpret the relation” (203-204) [emphasis in original]. If the petitioner had interpreted the structure of referentiality linking himself and the law, he would have realized that is his own exercise of agency that excludes his passage into the law—“he must forbid himself from entering” (203)—and this realization of his own autonomous particularity in relation to the indeterminate would have been freedom. He would then realize that “he is both subject of the law and an outlaw” (204).Thus the potentiality for self-determination and agency—the “freedom” that Bhabha misconstrues as indeterminacy—is the constant re-interpretation between the un-readable and the readable as always in relation, and never oppositional. True agency exists in a space not limited by such binary oppositions, and is an authority that recognizes the necessary relationship between self (the petitioner) and other (the doorkeeper/the Law).