Europe and Its Shadows

Coloniality after Empire

Hamid Dabashi

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780745338408
• eBook ISBN: 9781786803993
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Europe has long imagined itself as the centre of the universe, although its precise geographical, cultural and social terrains have always been amorphous. Exploring the fear and fascination associated with the continent as an allegory, Hamid Dabashi considers Europe to be a historically formed barricade against the world. Frantz Fanon's assessment that 'Europe is literally the creation of the Third World' is still true today; but in more than one sense for the colonial has always been embedded in the capital, and the capital within the colonial. As the condition of coloniality shifts, so have the dividing lines between coloniser and colonised, and this shift calls for a reappraisal of our understanding of nationalism, xenophobia and sectarianism as the dangerous indices of the emerging worlds. As the far-right populists captivate minds across Europe and Brexit upsets the balance of power in the European Union, this book, from a major scholar of postcolonial thought, is a timely and transformative intervention.

One
Europe: A Mobile Army of Metaphors

What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors—in moral terms: the obligation to lie according to a fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all.¹

Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an
Extra-Moral Sense (1873)

On August 13, 1976, when I had just turned 25, the rather haphazard course of my life saw me seated inside an airplane leaving Mehrabad Airport in Tehran for Geneva, Switzerland. After two weeks around Lac Léman, on the stretch between Geneva and Montreux, I flew to Philadelphia, USA, for what would be the American extension of my Iranian life. Ever since that inaugural August 1976, I have traveled back and forth from one end of Europe to another, from London and elsewhere in the United Kingdom, to Saint Petersburg, Russia, and many more European destinations in between. While I lived in Iran, and long before I was based on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States between Washington, DC, and Boston, with Philadelphia and New York as my successive homes, the idea of “Europe” was an elusive abstraction, something everlastingly new, solid, permanent, irreducible, historic, prevailing. Soon after I began my frequent flights back and forth to Europe from the United States, “Europe” became a fixated and total visual and mental abstraction, something to behold, consolidating my earlier vision of it formed by my fascination with Italian neorealism and its echoes in German and French cinema, or else in Hitchcock’s films, or Truffaut’s, and before that in the fiction of Dickens, Zola, or Ignazio Silone, the artwork of impressionism and cubism, or else classical music from Handel to Brahms. With every trip to Europe—England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Finland … all the way to Greece—Europe kept consolidating itself as the measure of meaning, a total and undiluted abstraction. It was strange: Europe was both very old, like the Parthenon ruins in Athens, and yet very new, like the most recent film of Ingmar Bergman. Once in Oslo, Norway, I saw Henrik Ibsen’s play An Enemy of the People in the original Norwegian in their major city theater. I could not understand a word of the original. But I knew the play almost sentence by sentence and recited it in my mind in Persian. For a minute there I forgot if I was watching a Persian play in Norwegian or a Norwegian play in Persian.

My visits to Europe were regular but haphazard: a family visit to London, a vacation in Italy, or else a drive between Switzerland and Germany on another occasion. Eventually these trips became more professional: as a member of a film jury in Locarno or Saint Petersburg, delivering a keynote in Amsterdam or Berlin, a few more in Brussels, France, UK, or all the way to the imaginative edge of Europe in Turkey. I soon was no stranger to Europe. I knew people there, and people there knew me: friends, family, colleagues, comrades, students. Once even in a train station in Bologna a young couple approached me and the man introduced himself as one of my “fans” who read my work regularly!

I entered Europe in my twenties a wide-eyed stranger. I grew up to my sixties a familiar foreigner to its physical, moral, and imaginative landscape. I was twice attacked and robbed in Europe—once in Paris, once in London, both times by colored immigrants who looked just like me. After each incident, almost a decade apart, at the moment that I was being robbed, I felt strangely at home in Europe. I was not harmed in either of those two incidents. My two immigrant brothers just wanted their fair share of my wallet. After the second time, I went and reread George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), happily smiling to myself from cover to cover.

Strangers in a Familiar Land

From the very onset, Europe had an allegorical presence in the lives and thoughts of my generation of Iranians. We were only too consciously aware that this allegorical presence was global, universal, transnational, shared by all people drawn to and yet critical of the very idea of “Europe.” Europe was the epicenter of “the West,” and in a seminal text definitive to the moral and intellectual composition of my generation, by the towering Iranian intellectual Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s Gharbzadegi (Westoxication, 1962), we were exposed to the knotted paradox of this allegory: Europe as an occasion for critical thinking, a space of drawing into and pulling out of the term as a colonial concoction. In later abusive takes on this transformative text, Islamists pushed it one way, while those uncritically enamored by “the West” and sold to its project capitalist modernity pulled it in the opposite direction—as the former lionized it, the latter vilified it. Some even went so far as to identify it as the very definition of what Nietzsche had called ressentiment, a sour grape attitude, of envying. We were really envious of “the West,” these what Al-e Ahmad would call “Westoxicated” intellectuals charged, wanted to be part of it but resented the fact that we were not! It was quite a circus. In an utterly miserable misreading of the text, a book that had gathered an entire generation to think critically about our place in the world had become a talisman of reactionary politics. It was nothing of the sort. Quite to the contrary: with all its limitations, it enabled an epistemic shift in our critical thinking. Suddenly we realized we were part of a larger conversation from the global south. Against all such systemically abusive misreading, however, Al-e Ahmad’s text was an act of liberation, a site of defiance, a rebellious narrative of rejecting self-alienation and reconfiguring a renewed sense of moral imagination, of political awareness, and above all, of historical agency.

Gharbzadegi was neither for nor against “the West,” nor was it against modernity. It was a critique of colonialism and the colonized mind, one among scores of similar texts published across the colonial world at the time. Al-e Ahmad’s essay was later falsely assimilated backward to an obscure professor of philosophy at Tehran University named Ahmad Fardid (1912–1994) and his fascination with the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Al-e Ahmad scarcely knew of Heidegger, let alone enough to be fascinated by him. Al-e Ahmad knew no German, nor Heidegger was still translated into Persian at the time. Al-e Ahmad tells us Fardid had read his Gharbzadegi and subsequently introduced Al-e Ahmad to the German philosopher Ernst Jünger’s book Über die Linie (Crossing the Line, 1949), and helped him translate it into Persian. Al-e Ahmad lacked any serious university education. He was enamored by the fact that a professor of philosophy at Tehran University had taken him seriously—and did as Fardid had suggested and they jointly translated Über die Linie and published it as Ubur-e Az Khat. But Über die Linie is a book on nihilism and has absolutely nothing to do with Al-e Ahmad’s Gharbzadegi. Fardid was wrong thinking it did. The fact that Heidegger was attracted to another book by Jünger, Der Arbeiter (1932), and reported it influential on his own major essay Die Frage nach der Technik (The Question Concerning Technology, 1954) is entirely irrelevant to Al-e Ahmad’s Gharbzadegi. This was and remains a comedy of errors in reading Iranian intellectual history backward and thinking Al-e Ahmad had apathy toward “the machine” or to modernity. But later historians of ideas, rightly angry with the Islamic republic, wrongly went all the way from Al-e Ahmad to Fardid and from Fardid to Heidegger and given Heidegger’s notorious Nazism, from him to the Holocaust … to denounce Al-e Ahmad and see him as the forerunner of the notorious Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad! It was (and it remains) quite a bizarre and surreal scene. Gharbzadegi, the seminal essay of its time, has thus been so systematically abused that scarcely anyone remembers or cares to read it for what it was. No doubt, Al-e Ahmad’s own rhetoric and defiant prose, occasionally bordering with what Theodor Adorno in his magnificent essay Jargon der Eigentlichkeit: Zur deutschen Ideologie (The Jargon of Authenticity, 1964) would call “jargon of authenticity” sounded nostalgic for a nonexistent “self,” and was partially responsible for such abusive readings, but the thrust and spirit of his essay were lost in and to the fury of the post-Islamic republic battle of historiography of who to blame for the calamity of the theocracy.²

Jalal Al-e Ahmad was our Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Frantz Fanon, and Edward Said all wrapped in one, though we did not know this at the time. It would take me a very long time to realize that Al-e Ahmad’s liberating act had its own drawbacks, not in the sense that his ultra-Euro-modernist critiques would portray and object, but in a far more serious way. At the time we were reading him in the 1960s and 1970s, however, we could breathe more confidently in his emancipatory prose. In Gharbzadegi, which was Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and Said’s Orientalism (1978) in one, Al-e Ahmad had a very simple thought: that we as a people, a culture, a political consciousness were what he termed “Westoxicated,” hit by a fixation with “the West”—that this figment of our imagination had become the measure of universal truth, and he meant it as in a disease, a malady, a distorted scheme of things, an ability to think critically outside the European frames of references, as such it was by no means a dismissal of modernity, but an epistemic change to the Eurocentricity of that modernity. Because this was a disease, as Al-e Ahmad understood it, then we needed to be cured of it and recuperate our own “self”-consciousness. Like anyone else in my generation, I was of course deeply drawn to Al-e Ahmad and his theory, and seriously disagreed with those who opposed him among his own cohorts (mostly the uncritical admirers of “Western modernity”). But I still remained, as I am today, quite skeptical of the idea of a “return to the self,” which I think is a bogus proposition. We have no clue where this “self” is and what it means—except as an escape route away from “the West.” I could not imagine any “self” to which to return without the simultaneous constitution of an “other” that is ipso facto an alienating force. But at the time the idea of this “return,” which after Al-e Ahmad, Ali Shari’ati also elaborated even in more details, appeared quite compelling to us. With the same token, and just like Edward Said in Orientalism, Al-e Ahmad had in effect fetishized this West beyond history and right into allegorical terms. Today, I look at those youthful years with a sense of nostalgic affection but seasoned critical distance. To me, today, Europe, and a fortiori, the West, is not a reality sui generis. It is a delusional fantasy, a false consciousness, at the full service of an imperial hegemony. The objective is not to run away from it. The objective is to dismantle and overcome it—and in that act of deconstruction, postcolonial critics with a fetishized fixation on the West are as much an impediment as those promoting and celebrating it.

It would take decades of my life, my doctoral work with Philip Rieff (1922–2006)—the eminent Freudian cultural theorist at the University of Pennsylvania, staunchly conservative in his political culture—and my more serious exposure to seminal thinkers from Fanon to Césaire to Said, Gayatri Spivak, Ashis Nandy, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Enrique Dussel, to eventually map out the details of this allegorical paradox between what Europe had enabled and what Europe had disabled at one and the same time, and plant and place me somewhere where I could begin to ask the questions I now wish to share in this book: Where is Europe? What is Europe? Where and what is this towering metaphor of time and space, of sense and sensibility, that has imagined itself the center of the universe, and by defiance or acknowledgment the world at large has reciprocated and acquiesced, revolted or reversed? Is it a geography or a civilization, a continent or a culture, an imaginative universe or an emotive register? In We, the People of Europe? (2003), the eminent philosopher Étienne Balibar addresses the idea of “transnational citizenship” from the vantage point of what he solidly establishes as “a European perspective.” From theories of state to sovereignty of nations, or when the prospect of multiculturalism is unleashing deepest layers of racism, Balibar intends to right some serious wrongs in the manner Europe sees itself, and yet like any other European critical thinker, he ends up positively consolidating the very idea of Europe—however dialectically. But to me here in this book, “Europe” is a metaphoric moment that has exhausted its epistemic possibilities and has now positively imploded onto itself—and we need to move beyond it—but not before bidding it a proper farewell.

Foreign to its familiarities, a stranger at home, I stand in front of Europe and ask Europe please to introduce itself not with an accusatory finger, or to be sure with an extended hand of false friendship, neither with a raised fist of anticolonial anger, nor indeed with the affected forgiveness of a postcolonial reason. We have all been there and done that. Our time faces a different challenge: the challenge of overcoming Europe, bringing it to the fold of a different world it left in ruins. I stand in front of Europe as a metaphoric mystery—aware of the sustained course of its racist colonial and imperial atrocities, conscious of its false familiarities—basking in the sun of its recognizable shores as a mixed metaphor. I am neither Eurocentric nor Europhobic. Europhobia, I often say, is the worst kind of Eurocentricism. Between Europhilia and Europhobia dwells the space of our proverbial self as their other, or more bluntly in Nietzschean terms their good that cannot see us but their evil. We are at a point that we must join Nietzsche and see how we can go beyond that good versus evil by first recognizing their contingencies. “How could anything originate out of its opposite?” I still remember the joyous bewilderment I felt the first time I read that sentence in Nietzsche’s Jenseits von Gut und Böse: Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft (Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, 1886) in a seminar with Philip Rieff at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1970s. “Truth from error, for instance? Or the will to truth from the will to deception? Or selfless action from self-interest? Or the pure, sun-bright gaze of wisdom from a covetous leer?” How in the world did we miss that? I wondered out loud at the seminar. How did we fail to see that good and evil were not opposites but coterminous? The rest of that bold, brilliant, sarcastic passage has stayed consistently with me:

Such origins are impossible, and people who dream about such things are fools—at best. Things of the highest value must have another, separate origin of their own—they cannot be derived from this ephemeral, seductive, deceptive, lowly world, from this mad chaos of confusion and desire.… It has not occurred to even the most cautious of them to start doubting right here at the threshold, where it is actually needed the most. … But we can doubt, first, whether opposites even exist and, second, whether the popular valuations and value oppositions that have earned the metaphysicians’ seal of approval might not only be foreground appraisals. Perhaps they are merely provisional perspectives, perhaps they are not even viewed head-on;…. It could even be possible that whatever gives value to those good and honorable things has an incriminating link, bond, or tie to the very things that look like their evil opposites; perhaps they are even essentially the same. Perhaps! But who is willing to take charge of such a dangerous Perhaps! For this we must await the arrival of a new breed of philosophers, ones whose taste and inclination are somehow the reverse of those we have seen so far—philosophers of the dangerous Perhaps in every sense. And in all seriousness: I see these new philosophers approaching.³

That Nietzschean dialectic remains at the core of my concern in this book—between one and the next, between good and evil, between self and the other, between now and the deferment—between Europe and its shadows: Islam and the West, the West and the Rest, one contingent on the other. Europe is not just Europe. Europe is a contingency. Europe is the mother of the other towering metaphor of our time called “the West,” and the West is nothing without the Rest. “The West,” as the offspring of Europe, grew more as an abbreviation for “Western Europe” rather than being on “the Western” side of the European “Eastern” fantasies. From “Western Europe,” in turn “the West” emerged, somewhere between the West of the Danube River and the East of English Channel. Eastern Europe was always external, or the internal other, of Europe as a master trope, more in the domain of the Ottoman Empire, and precisely for that reason “European” philosophers and critical thinkers ranging from Slavoj Žižek (Slovenia) to Yanis Varoufakis (Greece) are more Catholic than the Pope when speaking of their “Europe” with the chip of the European “other” on their shoulders. The forced manufacturing of the European Union (EU), economically to counterbalance the United States, has always been contested by the Eurozone crisis dominant from Greece to Spain and Portugal, until with their xenophobic Brexit the British delivered the very idea of it a coup de grâce. As a trope, Europe is neither here nor there, both here and there—either way corroborating Europe as the cornerstone of merely being in the world. In eliciting all such similar or contradictory sentiments, Europe is ethereal, unreal, metaphoric, not material. What would the world do without Europe? It will reinvent itself. Nietzsche in effect anticipated that eventuality—for “whatever gives value to those good and honorable things has an incriminating link, bond, or tie to the very things that look like their evil opposites; perhaps they are even essentially same.”

Truths Are Illusions

In On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873), Nietzsche proposes: “We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction—What’s in a Word: “Europe”?
• 1. Europe: A Mobile Army of Metaphors
• 2. Europe, Shadows, Coloniality, Empire
• 3. Whence and Wherefore “Europe”?
• 4. Europe and its Shadows
• 5. The Postcolonial Paradox
• 6. Europe: The Indefinite Jest
• 7. Mapping beyond the Postcolonial Artworld
• 8. Is Peace Possible?
• Conclusion—Wherefore Should We Stand in the Plague of Custom and Permit?
• Notes
• Index