Pheng Cheah's "Spectral Nationality" (Book Note)

 

"Spectral Nationality" engages with the juxtaposition of death in its title, but revels in the vitality of ideas, particularly those concerning life. Pheng Cheah skillfully traces a constellation of concepts—such as freedom, culture, organism, Bildung, artifice, nature, life, and death—from their distinct articulation in Kant's critical philosophy to their transposition into postcolonial theory. This conceptual evolution is presented in two acts: the first encompasses four chapters on the evolution of the "organismic metaphor" in eighteenth and nineteenth-century German idealism, while the second delves into four chapters on its progression in twentieth-century postcolonial literature. Each chapter is rich with nuanced erudition, all in service of the book's thesis: contemporary theories of freedom, including popular postcolonial nationalisms, are rooted in a metaphor of the organic body. Yet, this metaphor, crucial as it is to modern theories of freedom, is inherently unstable and prone to unraveling on its own. The realization of freedom, conceived as the philosophical and political project of modernity, remains incomplete. The nation, envisaged as a body embodying the promise of freedom, remains inherently spectral—neither entirely alive nor entirely deceased.

 

The introduction and first chapter aim to disentangle nationalism from its usual associations with intolerance, fanaticism, irrationalism, violence, genocide, romantic mystification, totalitarianism, subordination, atavistic hallucination, and bourgeois ideology. Additionally, they seek to preempt appeals to faith, imagination, and passionate sentiment on its behalf. Cheah acknowledges the immense human calamities and political atrocities intertwined with nationalism over the past two centuries, yet contends that contemporary political thought cannot easily discard it or replace it with utopian, liberal, or socialist cosmopolitanisms. This is because nationalism is deeply interwoven with the foundations of modern philosophical thought. Instead of getting ensnared in specific criticisms against nationalism, the argument strives to uncover its "philosophical basis" in the "organismic metaphor," which has been profoundly caricatured and misunderstood. It is the metaphor's portrayal of the polity as a political body that raises concerns, as it seems to condone the violent subjugation of individuals to the unbridled will of the collective, potentially leading to the identification and removal of perceived diseased elements for the greater good, or even paving the way for the political horrors characteristic of the modern era. Cheah concedes that these are valid apprehensions but contends that they are no more applicable to the "organismic metaphor" than to a host of other conceptions. For instance, Cheah contrasts it with the "mechanistic model" underpinning Hobbes's Leviathan, which, he argues, allows for a more readily hierarchical and despotic utilization than the organismic metaphor.

 

With the organismic metaphor identified as the philosophical underpinning of nationalism, the next question is, what does this metaphor encompass? The second chapter delineates the modern origins of conceptualizing the polity as an organic body in Kant's critical philosophy. The argument unfolds as follows: Kant's distinction between the sensible and intelligible worlds, crucial for understanding human freedom, gives rise to a new problem of accounting for the actuality of human freedom. The sensible world, according to Kant, is a realm of natural phenomena governed by an unbroken chain of mechanical causality, while the intelligible world is beyond this realm and bound only by reason and the moral law. Human freedom, Kant argues in the first and second Critiques, hinges on one's capacity to transcend the natural causal order and act in accordance with the moral law. However, the stark separation between the sensible and intelligible realms, which enables the possibility of human self-causality, also makes it challenging to explain its actualization. If the intelligible world is disconnected from the sensible, how does the freedom promised by the former manifest in the latter? How can self-causality be conceived within a sensible world governed solely by the mechanical law of causality? It is at this juncture that Cheah's argument moves from familiar to thought-provoking territory by demonstrating how Kant's political and historical writings, detailing his solution to this problem, are steeped in the concept of the organism articulated in his "Critique of Teleological Judgment." This revelation establishes an unexpected connection with his critical writings. Cheah acknowledges that he is not the first to make this discovery, but he skillfully outlines the fusion of living organism and political body with great insight.

In Cheah's historical reconstruction, the emergence of modern philosophemes surrounding culture and organism, concurrent with Kant's project, proved instrumental in addressing the challenge of actualizing freedom. Culture encompassed legal, political institutions, arts, and sciences, acting as a "prosthetic" medium through which humanity cultivated a second nature, realizing its inherent capacity for reason. This developmental process, facilitated by culture's rational medium, offered a solution to the embodiment of freedom. Simultaneously, organisms were conceived as self-organizing entities capable of self-construction, regulation, maintenance, repair, and genesis, embodying a form of auto-causality akin to freedom. The capacity of living beings to shape their own form presented another model for realizing freedom. Kant melded these available solutions in a distinctive constellation, intertwining concepts of freedom, culture, and organism. The state, through its relationship with culture, underwent an organic transformation, evolving from an artificial imposition on the populace to a self-organizing entity imbued with organismic causality, suitable for realizing human freedom as the historical embodiment of the moral law.

 

However, Cheah contends that this solution is inherently unstable. Kant's project ultimately unravels, as the formulation of organic life is disrupted by a heteronomy essential to the teleological time required for the incarnation of moral freedom. Both the concepts of culture and organic life struggle to consistently explain the actualization of freedom as auto-causality in the sensible world. Culture retains an element of heteronomy due to its reliance on a prior favor, a cunning ruse of nature from which it cannot fully extricate itself. Similarly, organic life bears the indelible mark of heteronomy, depending on the gift of teleological time. Kant can only temporarily obscure the series of aporias embedded in the concepts of organic life and culture through a certain sleight of hand. Nature's favors serve as an aporetic infection, disrupting even as they inaugurate the teleological time underpinning the actualization of human freedom. While human freedom aims for autonomy, individuals remain inherently open to the heteronomy of nature. This heteronomy becomes both the condition enabling the realization of moral freedom and its condition of impossibility. Consequently, Kant can only mask or "bandage" the constitutive openness to the other that undermines the human pursuit of autonomy. Moral reason, as an incarnational activity, is thus inherently subject to a strict law of contamination, rendering the project of realizing freedom inherently incomplete.

 

Chapters 3 and 4 elucidate how this fundamental Kantian problematics evolve in the works of Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Cabral, and Fanon. Each author endeavors to assert humanity's capacity to transform themselves and the external world in line with their higher rational natures, only to find that each mode of embodying freedom is irreversibly "contaminated by otherness." Cheah's exegetical work in support of this assertion demonstrates remarkable clarity and consistency. The argument's progression from Kant to Cabral and Fanon, while predictable, further reinforces Cheah's thesis. This predictability, in fact, strengthens Cheah's argument.

Chapters 5 to 8 in the latter half of the text delve into the transference of the organismic metaphor from German philosophy to postcolonial nationalism theories, a majority of which, according to Cheah, embrace this metaphor. These theories envision the nation not as a return to traditional communities based on blood ties, but as a novel political community arising from modern knowledge, technology, and organization. The postcolonial nation's vitality hinges on a traditional people's resilience in the face of European modernity's technological impact. However, owing to their inheritance of the organismic metaphor, these theories insist on a strict divide between organic spontaneity embodied by the nation and technical manipulation embodied by the neocolonial state or global capital. Yet, as Cheah elucidated in the first half of the book, this metaphor falls short in reckoning with life's inherent susceptibility to such technical manipulation. Thus, it fails to grasp the essential indebtedness of the postcolonial nation to its technological circumstances and the threat these conditions pose to its ongoing existence.

 

Cheah argues that postcolonial theory overlooks the internal obstacles intrinsic to the process of realizing freedom, instead viewing them as external to the collective body. In essence, it's not only that the postcolonial nation must withstand the neocolonial state and global capital's technical manipulation, but it must also endure the very technologies that birthed it, such as modern knowledge, print technology, and literary culture. The remainder of the text centers on analyses of Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Matigari to support this thesis. Faced with oppressive neocolonial states post-decolonization, Pramoedya and Ngũgĩ aim to rekindle their people's national spirit through fictional recreations of the decolonizing moment. Their novels not only reflect the nation's development but are intended to actively contribute to it. These activist postcolonial nationalist novels serve as a means to cultivate a reading public that can rejuvenate the nation-people, the medium through which it can regenerate itself by self-reflection and self-understanding. The question that arises in these contexts is whether the novel effectively embodies and enacts what it represents, paving the way for the popular reclaiming of the neocolonial state. In both cases, however, the nation these authors conjure remains spectral, banned domestically and circulated abroad in translation. Their works may not fully incarnate the nation, but they persist in haunting the state, affirming that the most fitting figure for freedom today is that of the ghost.

 

In the epilogue, Cheah further expounds on the concept of spectral nationalism, advocating it as a replacement for the organic variant. Both the state and the nation must be perceived as specters, mutually influencing and opposing one another. This spectrality emphasizes a cautious stance towards political power, recognizing its dual nature as necessary for preserving human life and potentially perilous in its efficiency at ending it. While Cheah provides a meticulously established philosophical foundation, his assertion that organicism underpins contemporary research in social, political, and historical studies requires broader validation beyond the Kantian tradition and a limited circle of postcolonial nationalist discourses. The text's reluctance to consider alternatives, like Deleuze's non-organic conception of life, leaves room for potential perspectives that could challenge or expand the discourse. Despite these considerations, Spectral Nationality is a valuable contribution, offering a clear and insightful examination of the texts and traditions it scrutinizes.