Gender, Empire, and Postcolony

Luso-Afro-Brazilian Intersections

Anna M. Klobucka, H. Owen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349465668, 9781137343413
• eBook ISBN: 9781137340993
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Social Sciences

Analyzing a wide body of cultural texts, including literature, film, and other visual arts, Gender, Empire, and Postcolony: Luso-Afro-Brazilian Intersections is a diverse collection of essays on gender in Portuguese colonialism and Lusophone postcolonialism.

Part I

Lusotropicalist Affect and Anti-Imperial Ethics

Chapter 1

Pessoa’s Gandhi

Meditations on a Lost Heteronym

Leela Gandhi

1. Worth

1.1 In his commemoratory essay on Fernando Pessoa, the philosopher Alain Badiou returns more than once to the theme or conceit of “worth.” Here is a framing sequence. Badiou claims Pessoa as a master of inaesthetics, which he defines as an alliance between philosophy and art in the service of the truth and in the face of the devaluing, democratizing momentum of the long twentieth century. The coresponsibility for the existence of truth—that there are truths, tout court—falls on art and philosophy for a reason. Art produces truth. Philosophy makes truth manifest. The task is complex despite appearances to the contrary:

Basically, to make truths manifest means the following: to distinguish truths from opinion. So that the question today is this and no other: Is there something besides opinion? In other words . . . is there something besides our “democracies”? Many will answer, myself among them: “Yes.” Yes, there are artistic configurations, there are works that constitute the thinking subjects of these configurations, and there is philosophy to separate conceptually all this from opinion. Our times are worth more than the label on which they pride themselves: “democracy.” (Badiou 2005, 15)

1.2 Badiou’s sentiments (and anxieties) are similar to those expressed by his compatriot Paul Valéry on the conclusion of World War I. That war, Valéry once lamented, brought home the traumatic knowledge that civilization or cultural life was no less perishable than biological life. In times of violence, everything could be distorted, and most things would pass away: empires, gods, laws, grammars, dictionaries, critics, and critics of critics. Considering this prevision, it was crucial to identify and protect the goods of Europe, sometimes against Europe itself.1 Valéry’s homegrown culprits are motley, but democracy makes the list: “Can the European Spirit—or at least its most precious content—be totally diffused? Must such phenomena as democracy, the exploitation of the globe, and the general speed of technology, all of which presage a diminutio capitis for Europe . . . must these be taken as absolute decisions of fate? Or have we some freedom against this threatening company of things?” (1962, 36). Badiou presents a belated therapeutics for the crisis of worth, thus conceived: as a remediable problem of civilizational self-enfeeblement.

1.3 The mighty European modernists of the twentieth century showcase the harmful conceptual trends wrought by democracy. It is all there in their obsessive variations on Nietzsche’s petulant call to overturn Platonism: its transcendental ideality and its commitment to the eternity of truth. Many joined the anti-Platonist bandwagon—Bergsonians, with their accent on differentiation; orthodox Marxists, who were seeking a political philosophy of experience; the grammatical and linguistic philosophers of ordinary language (Wittgenstein, Carnap, Quine); the nouveaux philosophes of ethical and democratic political thought (Glucksmann, and let us add Adorno as well), with their particular set against totalitarian master discourses; the artists of the avant-garde (from Dadaists to Situationists); the psychoanalytic philosophers of desire; and more besides.

1.4 One voice stands clear of this profligate crowd. The Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa transforms the impetuous centurial clash-unto-death of Platonism and anti-Platonism into a dialectic whereby nothing is lost—merely incorporated and synthesized, albeit on lower ground. There is a trick to this. Idealism must be tamed into new forms of historical materialization so that it yields a metaphysics after, or even without, metaphysics. (“The kingdom of heaven, it is here, it is here, it is here,” as the last Mughal Emperor of India said on the eve of his deportation from Delhi to a British penal settlement in the Andamans.) In this project, then, the world of sensorial singularities, or of the visible, or the “that there is,” is no longer separated by degree from its own origin. The distance has been traversed so that things now have the capacity to become—if not their own Idea—at least their archetype or ontotype, internally differentiated with regard to each other (and certainly with regard to a transcendental norm) yet strangely universal in their own right. Naming, Badiou reasons, is an important sign and spirit of the enterprise.

1.5 Though the topic is Plato, Aristotelian semantics haunts the discussion and sheds light on Badiou’s hypotheses. In some of the works comprising Aristotle’s Organon, such as On Interpretation and Posterior Analytics, it is hinted that simple names can mediate between variable objects, on the one hand, and the universalizable and contentful thoughts or affections of the soul that they resemble, on the other. A chain reaction follows. Once a contentful thought-likeness has been secured by a name for an object, it in turn summons a secondary genus/species signification to make that object intelligible in the world order: for example, what kind of object, or what type of thing? Hence, the featherless animal, man; the heteronymic poet, Pessoa; the techne of worth, inaesthetics.2 This is key to the work that Pessoa’s heteronyms do on our behalf in the age of democracy. They produce truth and make it both manifest and generic at the site of the thing-itself. So doing, they protest the anonymity and randomness of mere matter (its mass nature) with the same vigor with which their times protest the celebrity (or elite nature) of exclusive Ideals and Essences. Heteronymy, Badiou writes, “directs the composition of an ideal place of sorts in which the correlations and disjunctions of the figures evoke the relationships among the ‘supreme genera’ (or kinds) in Plato’s Sophist” (2005, 43). By this action, even within the poetry of each discrete heteronym, other signifying nouns proliferate and yield metaphysically thickened noemata: “The rain, the machine, the tree, the shadow, and the passerby are poetically transformed . . . into the Rain, the Machine, the Tree, the Shadow, and the Passerby” (42). Thus, by soldering objects to their Ideas so that object/Idea become coeval collocates, the nomenclatural poet restores worth “to this world that the gods have forever abandoned” (45). But what of us, Badiou asks, after all this? Is our philosophy yet “worthy of Pessoa” (36)? And “what is this ‘worthiness’ that we attribute to the Portuguese poet, which requires that one set philosophy the task of measuring up to his work?” (37).

2. Worth

2.1 A photograph of Pessoa from his school days in Durban shows an oblong child in imperial mufti. His legs, from knees to ankles, are bound in puttees, and his shoulders are arched back toward the riding crop that he clasps unconvincingly with both hands behind his body. He is strangely out of place in the picture—he looks away from the camera, toward an even further margin than the outer periphery of the frame where he stands, attenuated by the glare of the enormous windows behind him. He seems, nonetheless, at home in empire—more precisely, in the lopsided transnational world born of the fresh internecine scramble for overseas territories during the fin de siècle that resulted in gains for Britain, France, and Portugal but also for newcomers such as Germany, Belgium, Italy, Japan, and the United States.

2.2 While he was enrolled at the Durban High School, Pessoa published an essay in the school magazine on the Whig politician and member of the Council of India Thomas Babington Macaulay (1904). Known selectively in British India for his 1835 “Minute on Indian Education,” Macaulay had passionately defended the implementation of English-style and English-language education in South Asia on the basis of worth. Which language was most worth knowing: English or Arabic and Sanskrit? He confessed to no knowledge of the latter two. But an assessment of value based on conversations with orientalists had confirmed the verdict. A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. Pessoa shows no familiarity with this debate, though he notes, in passing, that Macaulay inspired the enmity of the Anglo-Indians. His own objections to the great man are stylistic. Macaulay, he observes, compares unfavorably to Carlyle and Gibbon. He is worthy of being called a man of talent but not of genius. His impressive sentences rattle like the discharge of musketry. They are short, sharp, tedious, and unpleasant. There are no emotional undulations of style, no climax, no bathos. Only logic, logic, logic. His ballads might put a supine reader to sleep. He grasps the mind but not the soul of poetry.

2.3 In his essay on the poet, Badiou clarifies our philosophical task simply: “to be contemporaries of Pessoa” (2005, 36). By this, he means that we should teach ourselves to inhabit the temporal and conceptual constraint of Pessoa’s vision. Pessoa (our desired contemporary) was briefly in the same place at the same time as the Indian anti-imperialist leader Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who lived out the eventful decades between 1893 and 1914 as a prominent and increasingly radical figure in South African public life. However, between 1896 and 1905, when Pessoa was resident in Durban along with his family and Portuguese-consul stepfather, Gandhi was as yet trying to make a home in empire. Very much the projected subject of Macaulay’s “Minute”—a class of person Indian in blood and color but English in tastes—Gandhi’s two-storied house on the Durban beachside was furnished in high Western style, as was his wardrobe: drawing room, lounge suit, dining room, wing tips. His aim in this period was chiefly to achieve equal standing with the Europeans in Natal. To this end, he set up the Natal Indian Congress as a lobby group to uphold the status of Indian traders as putative citizens of the British Empire. In a similar bid to stake an Indian claim on the imperial enterprise, Gandhi organized an Indian ambulance corps to aid in the British effort during the Boer War of 1899–1902. An anonymous poem published in Punch, titled “The Coolie Corps,” acknowledged the effort with faint praise: “They die, and their meed of fame is small / but they’re Sons of the Empire, after all!”3

2.4 Gandhi’s ambivalence about imperialism—rather, his sense of being on the other side of empire—was slow in coming. The first significant fracture occurred a few years after Pessoa had left South Africa to return to Portugal. In 1909, Gandhi traveled to London to represent the languishing claims of colored migrants in South Africa following the second Boer War and to protest proposals for a monoracial union of South Africa. The trip was a fiasco, and Gandhi was unable to gain an audience with influential politicians or exert any sort of influence on behalf of his cause. On his return voyage on board the ship Kildonan Castle, he wrote out a 275-page tantrum on ship stationery, which was first published as Hind Swaraj in 1910. The text rages at the false foundation provided by Macaulay’s educational policies for India. English education is not worth having. British parliamentary politics is not desirable and not worth copying. Western civilization is a disease in need of a cure. It is not worth aspiring for. On and on. Yet the rant already combines with the strains of a more substantive askesis that Gandhi had been refining since 1904 in the pages of his journal, Indian Opinion, and in the environs of the Phoenix settlement, his first ashram ever and devoted to collective experiments in passive resistance. When he writes under the influence of this latter register, Gandhi’s protestations are altogether more nuanced and also more bracing. To live a good life, a happy life, we must learn that certain apparent existential goods are not really worth having after all: honors, wealth, fame, inspiring fear in others, and power itself. This theme, which is often buried in the fanfare of Gandhi’s more overt anti-imperialism, evolved gradually over the next few decades. It is at the heart of Pessoa’s sole assessment of the Mahatma.

2.5 Sometime between 1925 and 1926, certainly no later than 1928, Richard Zenith surmises, Pessoa began to prepare notes in Portuguese toward an essay on Gandhi—“Great Man” (“Grande Senhor” in the original)—that he never completed. Only two fragments are available. One passage scorns the so-called noteworthy eminences of the era, among them the American automobile industrialist Henry Ford (1863–1947) and the politician Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929), nicknamed “Père la Victoire” for leading France to victory in World War I. “Toss those Fords, and [blank space] those Clemenceaus and [blank space]—those mere humans—into the trash, which is what they are,” Pessoa writes dismissively. In another passage, he calls Gandhi, “the only truly great figure in the world today,” because prevailing standards of greatness are as nothing to him. In Pessoa’s words,

Ele nunca pode ser ridículo porque não pode ser medido pelas normas dos que o pretendem ridicularizar. Asceta, que pária moral dos políticos tem com que medi-lo? O seu alto exemplo, inaproveitável pela nossa fraqueza, enxovalha a nossa ambiguidade. Humilde e austero, despreza-nos do alto da sua vida. Herói sem armas, dá ferrugem aos nossos numerosos gládios, espingardas e peças. Vontade uma e firme, paira acima das nossas intrigas políticas em período de perigo, da nossa firmeza vinda ao acaso, da nossa bebedeira de conseguimentos. (Zenith 2008, 50)4

He can never be ridiculous because he cannot be measured according to the norms of those who attempt to ridicule him. An ascetic, who among the politicians, moral pariahs, has what it would take to measure him? His high example, unavailable to us in our weakness, is an affront to our ambiguity. Humble and austere, he disdains us from his life’s heights. An unarmed hero, he puts rust on our countless swords, rifles and cannons. With his single, firm will, he hovers above our political intrigue in times of danger, our accidental firmness, our drunken bouts of achievement.

The contest between the Fords and Clemenceaus on the one hand, and Gandhi on the other, seems to set the bar for moral discernment. Like the cave dwellers in Plato’s Republic, we must learn to distinguish between true worth and false worth, appearances and essences, shadows and Forms. Thus humility, austerity, and asceticism easily count for more than financial, military, or political success. There is another, more trenchant message secreted within these righteous catechisms. Somewhere, Michel Foucault has written eloquently about philosophy as a way of life “in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them” (1991, 50). In such a lifestyle, it is not necessary—indeed, it is deleterious—to spell out the terms of an improved, new standard or to stipulate a new measure for true worth. So too, Pessoa’s Gandhi “cannot be measured” as such. And his example, though high, is strictly unavailable for application—“inaproveitável.” The only invitation he offers at heart is that we too step out of time or get out of sync with the prevailing limit-norm in an experimental ethics of nonworth or nonachievement. The philosophical task is difficult: to refuse contemporaneity and coevality per se, even (if not especially) with ourselves.

3. Worth

3.1 In another recent appraisal, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben argues that Pessoa’s heteronymic project has possible implications for the posttraumatic ethics of the twentieth century (1999, 117). The interest, he holds, is in how the poet (Pessoa) of the nearly 75 heteronyms bears witness to, and thus implicitly prohibits, his own putative desubje...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Lusotropicalist Affect and Anti-Imperial Ethics
• Part II: Empire of the Lenses
• Part III: Postcoloniality and Gender Politics in Visual Arts
• Part IV: Heroes, Antiheroes, and the Myth of Power
• About the Contributors