Pheng Cheah's Spectral Nationalism: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literature, A Mini-Review

I like to write small reviews - recapitulations, really - of some of the books I've read. Here's one for Pheng Cheah's Spectral Nationalism: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation:

It is entirely unfair that Pheng Cheah can write an entire book on German Idealism, and then write another entire book on Indonesian and Kenyan post-colonial literature, and then put them together and call it one book. But that, of course, is just what they have done. And if this disjunction of themes did not already seem broad enough, what binds them together is yet more extraordinary: an intensive exploration of theme of the ‘organism’ and how this organismic metaphor came to underwrite these disparate efforts to theorise the very foundations of freedom and nationalism. Still, we’re not done. Underlying all this, is a broadly Derridian methodology that seeks to look at how this invocation of the organism never quite succeeds; or, more accurately, succeeds despite itself: that the ‘life’ involved in the life of the organismic metaphor is always undercut by a current of death, which at once contests and sustains any such invocations, for both Kant and his philosophical and literary progeny.

So much for a gloss on the myriad and intertwined themes involved here! Now for some unpacking. Beginning with Cheah’s reading of the German Idealist tradition - with chapters devoted to Kant, Fichte, and Hegel specifically - what he figures as novel among them is their conception of freedom as an ongoing project. If, for Kant, the Enlightenment itself was, in his words, “man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity”, such a process of maturation could only ever operate by means of an en-culturation: to be induced into culture and thus thus freed from the mechanistic fetters of nature. This sense of ‘culture’, however cannot be divorced from its etymological root: culture as a sample in a petri dish, subject to growth, nourishment, cultivation, and care: in short, culture as life, or simply cultural life, ‘bildung’ in the German. Against this sense of culture was opposed the mechanism of nature, the inviolable order of efficient cause corresponding effect. What ‘life’ provided was a different model of causality, one of self-generation and self-production, with culture developing of itself, from itself.

For Cheah, it was precisely this model that animated - quite literally - much of the political philosophy of the German Idealists, which tied together both their grand metaphysical claims about freedom and ethics, as well as their more terrestrially grounded claims about nations and the politics of states. In each case though, throughout their various permutations from Kant to Hegel, is Cheah also keen to show that this emphasis on the ‘life of culture’ - so central to the project of freedom - is never quite able exorcize the spectres of ‘mechanism’ which it works to act against. ‘Spectres’ which then return to haunt every conception of nationalism from Kant to the present day - hence the book’s title. Thus in Fichte, for example, is the dead, mechanistic hand of the State ultimately called upon to secure, as intermediary, the otherwise vital growth of the nation; and in Hegel, the reverse, with ‘national spirit’ (Volksgeist) playing intermediary between the otherwise organic relation between individuals and the State.

If these detailed readings did not already constitute a novel and enduring contribution in and of themselves, Spectral Nationality’s scope takes this all further still: in showing how these themes equally make themselves felt in the postcolonial literature of Pramoedya Ananta Toer (Indonesia) and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (Kenya), respectively. At this point I can only behoove any prospective reader to consult the book itself to see this magnificent extension in action. A note to close however: one curiosity of the book’s argument is that it ultimately functions as a limited defence of nationalism, at least with respect to Marxist and post-colonial aspirations to cosmopolitan harmony. Cheah’s contemporary targets here are those appeals to ‘subalternity’, and resistance to capitalist hegemony couched in terms of ‘fragmentation’ or ‘hybridity’. In one particularly brutal and memorable passage Cheah declares: “hybrid resistance is only feasible for arriviste formerly colonial academics” (ten points if you can name the unnamed reference here).

Against this does Cheah ultimately argue for a more grounded nationalism that, while acknowledging its limits, also claims, in the ultimate Derridian denouement, for the very generativity of those limits themselves. As he puts it, “it is not a matter of rejecting the hope that freedom can be actualized through cultural work but of understanding the conditions of the (im)possibility of [freedom’s] incarnation” - in this case, its' incarnation in a nation. Published in 2003, when the fires of postcolonial studies were still hot if not fading, today, it’s hard to look back upon this work without a certain trepidation. In the light of the multiplying ascendency of racist and yes, fascist nationalisms all across the globe, is it not the case that rather than a new flowering of nationalisms, however nuanced, what we need more than ever is just the very internationalism that is here the object of critique? At the very least, Spectral Nationality prolongs, rather than closes that very pressing question.