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ePaper created 2014-06-21, 10:32:49 | version 1.31.00
Untimely Vision 12 5 61. Here we should recall Adorno’s insight about Franz Kafka’s “literalness” through which he “explodes [an object] by taking it more exactly at its word than it does itself.” Theodor Adorno, “Notes on Kafka,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), 151. 62. In addition to Marx’s suggestion that cooperative labor, large-scale industrial production, and joint stock companies already signaled an incipient if still alienated form of socialism, we might recall Benjamin’s claim, borrowed from Gershom Scholem, that for Jews, in the post-Messianic “world to come . . . everything will be the same as here — only a little bit different.” Walter Benjamin, “In the Sun,” in Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 2:664; and The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, ed. Gershom Scholem (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 123n. Similarly, Adorno suggests that only a “hair’s breadth” separates knowledge conditioned by the world as it actually exists from knowledge of the world as it would appear from the standpoint of redemption. Theodor Adorno, Minima Mora- lia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 2005), 247. 63. For defenses of state sovereignty as necessary for Third World social democracy, see Samir Amin, Delinking: Towards a Polycentric World (London: Zed, 1990); and Pheng Cheah, Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007). value the very idea of France.61 Said differently, Césaire identified imperialism as federation in alienated form; he recognized prospectively that the possibility of a postcolonial federation was already immanent to the existing empire.62 I have suggested that in 1848 and in 1801 emancipatory possibilities were foreclosed by actual forms of political liberty that were instituted. Likewise, the visionary potential contained in Césaire’s initiatives for departmentalization and federalism were obstructed not only by a recalcitrant French state but by the doxa of decolonization itself that restricted emancipation to state sovereignty. This political presumption, shared by colonial powers as well as many colonized peo- ples, was subsequently reinforced by activism, criticism, and scholarship that dis- credited the prospect of decolonization without national independence. I am not claiming that national states are inherently oppressive, or that federalism is inher- ently progressive, or that decolonization should never entail state sovereignty.63 My aim is merely to challenge the tendency to treat projects for nonnational colo- nial emancipation as inherently reactionary. Regardless of their real limitations, we need to analyze Césaire’s postwar ini- tiatives not in terms of an independence supposed to be inevitable but in terms of a fragile freedom whose institutional form could not be presumed in advance. His interventions help us recognize the contingent rather than necessary relation- ship among emancipation, independence, sovereignty, self-determination, and autonomy. His initiatives were situated attempts to create the conditions and to