BONDSMEN AND SLAVES: SERVILE HISTORIES IN HEGEL AND NIETZSCHE

Recent readings of what is commonly known as the dialectic of master and slave have tended to focus either philosophically on concepts such as desire, reflection, and recognition or historically on the specific nature of the economic relation it evokes. In this paper I challenge that division of proper objects, arguing that Hegel's dialectic and its reception raises the question how the nature of servitude (whether that of a bondsman or that of a slave) structures not only the emergence of historical agency but also the relationship between history and philosophy. The importance of reflection in Hegel's treatment of the dialectic of lord and bondsman is both clearly stated and structural. Alexandre Kojève's reading of this dialectic makes explicit that human history originates in it, but, unlike Hegel, Kojève does not emphasize the product of the slave's labor. Judith Butler's reading of the dialectic in Hegel and Kojève locates the difference between Hegel's bondsman and Kojève's slave within the structure of servitude itself as a Foucauldian opposition between “body” and “life.” In On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Friedrich Nietzsche differentiates between two varieties of servile work on the basis not of what is produced but instead to whom service is rendered, announcing what turns out to be a problematic familiar from both the Old and New Testaments: the impossibility of service to two masters. In a typically perspectival turn, Nietzsche shows that servitude is a condition of possibility not only of human history but also of its academic study. Self‐conscious historians must thus take into account not only the dependence of their object of study upon relations of servitude but also their own place within such relations.     

Capitalism's Anxious Whole: Fear,Capture and Escape in the Grundrisse

Abstract: Two Hegels inhabit the Grundrisse. The first is conservative of the “selfsame” subject that continuously returns to itself as non‐identical identity and propels “history”. The other Hegel tarries with the “negative” he (which or variously calls “non‐being”, “otherness”“difference”) to disrupt this plenary subject to Marx's reading of a Hegel who is different‐in‐himself lends Grundrisse its electric buzz: seizing Hegel's “negative” as the not‐value of value, i.e. “labor”, Marx explains how capital must continuously enroll labor to its will in order to survive and expand. But this enrollment is never given; hence, despite its emergent structure of necessity, capital's return to itself as “self‐animating value” is never free of peril. The most speculative aspect of my argument is that the figure of “labor” in Grundrisse, because of its radically open formulation as not‐value, anticipates the elusive subject of difference in postcolonial theory, “the subaltern”—that figure which evades dialectical integration, and is in some ontological way inscrutable to the “master”. Unexpectedly, then Grundrisse gives us a way to think beyond the epistemic and geographic power of “Europe”.     

AN OPEN INVITATION?: ADDING LINKS TO THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF HISTORICAL REPRESENTATIONS

Gradual changes in the way historians select, interpret, and represent aspects of the past are related to equally or perhaps more gradual changes in museum practice. Edited collections on this subject reflect the state of both disciplines and offer an opportunity to evaluate trends, assess progress, and forecast the future. The collection examined in this review essay focuses on the idea of sharing historical authority: How far have we come? What methods have been used? What is the value of collaborative effort? Have technological developments, including digital media and the “participatory Web,” really enabled more inclusive participation? The analysis of the collection includes specific attention to the text itself as an exhibitionary object and emphasizes the effects of its unusual design elements, deictic signals, and heterogeneous genres—particularly the case studies and “thought pieces” that form a significant part of the collection. Other focal points include: the interrogative mood of the text and its call for active reading; explicit historical, social, and disciplinary contexts; and precursor texts that have addressed similar subject matter.     

5. INDIA,ITIHASA, AND INTER‐HISTORIOGRAPHICAL DISCOURSE

An effective and enriching discourse on comparative historiography invests itself in understanding the distinctness and identity that have created various civilizations. Very often, infected by bias, ideology, and cultural one‐upmanship, we encounter a presumptuous‐ness that is redolent of impatience with the cultural other and of an ingrained refusal to acknowledge what one's own history and culture fail to provide. This “failure” need not be the inspiration to subsume the other within one's own understanding of the world and history and, thereby, neuter the possibilities of knowledge‐sharing and cultural interface. It is a realization of the “lack” that provokes and generates encounters among civilizations. It should goad us to move away from what we have universalized and, hence, normalized into an axis of dialogue and mutuality. What Indians would claim as itihasa need not be rudely frowned upon because it does not chime perfectly with what the West or the chinese know as history. accepting the truth that our ways of understanding the past, the sense of the past, and historical sense‐generation vary with different cultures and civilizations will enable us to consider itihasa from a perspective different from the Hegelian modes of doing history and hence preclude its subsumption under the totalitarian rubric of world history. How have Indians “done” their history differently? What distinctiveness have they been able to weave into their discourses and understanding of the past? Does the fact of their proceeding differently from how the West or the Chinese conceptualize history delegitimize and render inferior the subcontinental consciousness of “encounters with past” and its ways of being “moved by the past”? This article expatiates on the distinctiveness of itihasa and argues in favor of relocating its epistemological and ideological persuasions within a comparative historiographical discourse.     

Russia,China, and the universalism of modernity: the “Account of the Reforms of Peter the Great” by Kang Youwei

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes a short essay by Kang Youwei (1858–1927) – one of the intellectual and political protagonists of late imperial and early Republican China. In it, he interpreted the historical experience of Russian modernization under Peter the Great (1672–1725) and used it as a “success story” for the renewal of Chinese monarchical institutions. It was written in 1898 and presented to the Manchu throne under the title “Account of the Reforms of Peter the Great”, and for our purposes will be the departing point for a “global intellectual circuit” through which the following questions will be addressed: Why was seventeenth and eighteenth century Russia considered as a model for China by the author? How did he manage to adapt the historical experience of Russia into a social and political conceptual framework for China? What was Kang’s historiographical method, and what kind of philosophy of history framed his reflections? What does this short essay tell us about Kang’s view on “Westernization”, on the concept of “modernity” itself, and on its use for historiographical purposes?     

Hegel,Analytic Philosophy’s Pharmakon

In this article I argue that Hegel has become analytic philosophy’s “pharmakon”—both its “poison” and its “cure.” Traditionally, Hegel’s philosophy has been attacked by Anglo-American analytical philosophers for its alleged charlatanism and irrelevance. Yet starting from the 1970s there has been a revival of interest in Hegel’s philosophical work, which, I suggest, may be explained by three developments: (1) the revival of interest in Aristotelianism following Saul Kripke’s and Hilary Putnam’s work on natural kinds, and Elizabeth Anscombe’s, Philippa Foot’s, and Putnam’s opposition to the fact-value distinction; (2) the rehabilitation of Hegel’s theories by various philosophers, including Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard, Fred Beiser, Robert Stern, and Stephen Houlgate; and (3) the Sellars-inspired philosophy of mind of John McDowell and of Robert Brandom. The first and third of these reasons, I argue, have led several analytic theorists to cast Hegel in a more positive light as the “cure” for analytic philosophy. The combined outcome of these changes, both ironic and fitting, is that the Hegelian principle of internal critique has played a significant role not only in analytic philosophy’s rapprochement with Hegel’s philosophy but also in overcoming the Analytic-Continental philosophical divide.     

BURYING THE DEAD,CREATING THE PAST1

Professional historians tend to be ambivalent about one of the prime historical phenomena of our time: the desire to commemorate. The amount of attention given to memory (collective or not) and trauma bears witness to the fact that historians really do want to give in to that desire; the fact that they treat these subjects in a rather “positivist” way suggests that they regard it as a bit improper to do so wholeheartedly. As a result commemoration is all over the place but is never taken as seriously as it should be. This essay argues that effective commemoration should start with a question Giambattista Vico might have asked: “who are we that this could have happened?” Posing this question means relinquishing the identity‐enhancing, self‐celebrating stance from which we tend to commemorate “unimaginable” events. Commemorative self‐exploration is a confrontation with what we don't like to be confronted with: the fact that occasionally we behave in utter contradiction to what we regard as our identity. Heterodox, “monstrous,” and therefore Gedächtnisfähig behavior comes in three varieties: things we are proud of, things we are ashamed of, and the sublime “mutations” in which we “commit” history and embark on the unimaginable. Because sublime mutations change consciousness, commemorating them confronts posterity with almost insuperable epistemological difficulties. Commemorating sublime mutations means burying them—not in the sense of “covering” them, but in the sense of “inventing” a way in which they keep on living.     

POTENTIAL HISTORY: READING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FROM INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGES*

Until the beginning of the twentieth century, history, as a core concept of the political project of modernity, was highly concerned with the future. The many crimes, genocides, and wars perpetuated in the name of historical progress eventually caused unavoidable fractures in the way Western philosophies of history have understood change over time, leading to a depoliticization of the future and a greater emphasis on matters of the present. However, the main claim of the “Historical Futures” project is that the future has not completely disappeared from the focus of historical thinking, and some modalities of the future that have been brought to the attention of historical thought relate to a more-than-human reality. This article aims to confront the prospects of a technological singularity through the eyes of peoples who already live in a world of more-than-human agency. The aim of this confrontation is to create not just an alternative way to think about the future but a stance from which we can explore ways to inhabit and therefore repoliticize historical futures. This article contains a comparative study that has been designed to challenge our technologized imaginations of the future and, at the same time, to infuse the theoretical experiment with contingent historical experiences. Could we consider artificial intelligence as a new historical subject? What about as an agent in a “more-than-human” history? To what extent can we read this new condition through ancient Amerindian notions of time? Traditionally, the relationship between Western anthropocentrism and Amerindian anthropomorphism has been framed in terms of an opposition. We intend to prefigure a less hierarchical and more horizontal relation between systems of thought, one devoid of a fixed center or parameter of reference. Granting the same degree of intellectual dignity to the works of Google engineers and the views of Amazonian shamans, we nevertheless foster an intercultural dialogue (between these two “traditions of reasoning”) about a future in which history can become more-than-human. We introduce potential history as the framework not only to conceptualize Amerindian experiences of time but also to start building an intercultural dialogue that is designed to discuss AI as a historical subject.     

Very long term history and people's history

Often William Blake and Isaac Newton are positioned as “opposites”: Newton the great systematizer, Blake the visionary artist. (Blake himself, in fact, seemed to have set up this direct opposition.) However, this opposition is perhaps too simple and overlooks the intricacies of each thinker's work. Further, this straightforward “opposition” fails to account for the pressure that scholarship itself, always occurring from a particular subjective position, applies to shape its objects of study; that is, it creates a useful “Newton” and a useful “Blake” with which to work. Here I employ spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre's technique of “critical thirding” (as Edward Soja has called it), or accounting for “an-Other” position in the dialectic of “Blake” and “Newton”. I consider where Blake and Newton were perhaps more similar than has been suggested in the scholarly literature, and, more crucially, how scholarship itself mobilizes (or indeed “creates”) its own, subjectively useful, “Blake” and “Newton” in order to make particular arguments.     

THE PHILONIC DISTINCTION: GERMAN ENLIGHTENMENT HISTORIOGRAPHY OF JEWISH THOUGHT

Leon Roth's famous question “Is there a Jewish philosophy?” has been the subject of an ongoing controversial debate. This paper argues that the concept of a Jewish philosophy—in the sense of an allegedly continuous philosophical tradition stretching from antiquity to early modernity—was created by German Enlightenment historians of philosophy. Under competing models of historiography, Enlightenment philosophy construed a continuous tradition of Jewish thought, a philosophia haebraeorum perennis, establishing a controversially discussed order of discourse and a specific politics of historiography. Within this historiography, historical and systematical paradigms, values, and patterns kept shifting continuously, opening up perspectives for different, even contradictory accounts of what Jewish philosophy was (and is). With Hegel and his successors, this specific discourse came to a close. Hegel attacks “Jewish thought” as a form of metaphysics of substance—a critique countered by several thinkers who can be referred to as “Jewish Hegelians” (E. Fackenheim). The Jewish Hegelians fully accepted, however, Hegel's account of the “Philonic distinction”: the difference between substance and subject within the conception of the one. This calls attention to the idea that not only the role of the “mosaic distinction” (J. Assmann), the distinction between true and false in religion, should be examined more closely, but also the consequences of the “Philonic distinction” between identity and difference in monotheistic concepts of deity.     

White But Not Quite: Normalizing Colonial Conquests Through Spatial Mimicry

The role of mimicry in the construction and deconstruction of social identities has enriched our understanding of power relations considerably. However, as a spatial practice, mimicry has received scant consideration. In what ways can space itself become an object of mimicry? What strategies and practices are involved in this process and with what political objectives? The current paper treats these questions by analyzing processes of mimetic spatial production aiming to transform the Israeli‐occupied territory of Mount Hermon into an “ordinary” western ski resort. Yet this concerted effort produces a variety of tensions and contradictions that ultimately undo the normalization of the colonial space, comprising a test case of the convoluted ways in which mimicry of space, not merely in space, generates various forms of slippage, excess and ambivalence.     

Hegel and the Paradox of Democratic Education

This article explores Hegel’s Philosophy of Right as a work on education that responds to two democratic ideals: the ideal of individual integrity, which demands that individuals come to know the principles that animate them of their own accord, and the ideal of collectivism, which demands that individuals be at home in a shared world. While the great political works of Plato and Rousseau fasten on one of these ideals at the expense of the other, I show that Hegel’s political philosophy accepts both. The result is what I call the paradox of democratic education. Hegel solves this paradox through a three-fold pedagogical strategy which speaks to the transformational possibilities of institutions as well as more directly to the needs of the “ironic consciousness.” This strategy reveals a Hegel who calls on us to strengthen our commitment to a democratic polity through a deeper conception of the requirements of democratic education.     

THE TIME OF THE SELF AND THE TIME OF THE OTHER

What is time? This essay offers an attempt to think again about this oldest of philosophical questions by engaging David Hoy's recent book, The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality, which proposes a “history of time‐consciousness” in twentieth‐century European philosophy. Hoy's book traces the turn‐of‐the‐century debate between Husserl and Bergson about the different senses of time across the various configurations of hermeneutics, deconstruction, poststructuralism, and feminist theory. For him, what is at stake in such a project is to distinguish between the scientific‐objective “time of the universe” and the phenomenology of human temporality, “the time of our lives.” Hoy's approach is to organize his book around the three tenses of time—past/present/future—and to view objective‐scientific time as derived from the more primordial forms of temporalizing lived experience that occur in our interpretation of time. In my reading of Hoy's work, I attempt to explore how “time” (lived, experiential, phenomenological) can be read not in terms of “consciousness” (Hoy's thematic), but in terms of the self's relationship with an Other. That is, my aim is less to establish a continental tradition about time‐consciousness, understood through the methods of genealogy, phenomenology, or critical theory, than it is to situate the problem of time in terms of an ethics of the Other. In simple terms, I read Hoy's project as too bound up with an egological interpretation of consciousness. By reflecting on time through the relationship to the Other rather than as a mode of the self's own “time‐consciousness,” I attempt to think through the ethical consequences for understanding temporality and its connection to justice.     

Life and Death Decisions in our Posthuman(ist) Times

Abstract: Geography, like much of social science, is witnessing a resurgence of interest in Michel Foucault's formation of biopower—the power to make live and foster life. This paper seeks to engage with this interest by staging a dialogue between the work of Nikolas Rose and Paul Rabinow on the one hand and that of Giorgio Agamben on the other. I propose that, while Rose and Rabinow provide a diagnostic for our emerging geographies of “life itself” and outline allied forms of political citizenship known as “biosociality” or “biological citizenship”, it is Agamben who enables us to consider the limit figures to this form of political inclusion. To draw out these limit figures I focus on recent debates surrounding end‐of‐life decisions and provide examples from the Dignity in Dying campaign and the Not Dead Yet movement. Throughout, I situate this paper within recent debates on posthumanism and the posthuman in geography. In doing so I effectively ask: why, in our seemingly posthuman(ist) times, does much of Western politics seek to decide on the form, the right and, inevitably, the limit of human beings?     

(Education for) Sustainable Development in Geography Education: review and outlook from a perspective of Germany

Nearly 15 years after the Rio Conference and 10 years after the Lucerne Declaration on Geographical Education for Sustainable Development we are interested to what extent the goals of this declaration have been implemented? What role does Geography play in Education for Sustainable Development in higher education? We analyzed the modules of 107 degree programs with Geography as a degree major or as a teacher training subject at 55 German universities, technical colleges and universities of education. We conducted a quantitative text analysis in which we searched the key words “Sustainability”, “Sustainable Development”, “Education for Sustainable Development” and “Nature-Society Studies” in the Module Regulations. Our data indicate great heterogeneity between the degree programs. The key words were predominantly found in majors in “Human Geography”, “Geography” and teacher training programs for “academic high schools”. Aspects of the results considered in the paper include: (a) differences in the orientation of degree programs, (b) varying degree of implementation in the modules, (c) different conceptual understanding of the principles of sustainability, (d) the extent to which concepts of Environmental Education and Education for Sustainable Development are mixed, (e) heterogeneity between mandatory courses and electives.     

WHAT IS A SCHOLARLY PERSONA? TEN THESES ON VIRTUES,SKILLS, AND DESIRES

What is the problem that “epistemic virtues” seek to solve? This article argues that virtues, epistemic and otherwise, are the key characteristics of “scholarly personae,” that is, of ideal‐typical models of what it takes to be a scholar. Different scholarly personae are characterized by different constellations of virtues and skills or, more precisely, by different constellations of commitments to goods (epistemic, moral, political, and so forth), the pursuit of which requires the exercise of certain virtues and skills. Expanding Hayden White's notion of “historiographical styles” so as to encompass not only historians' writings, but also their nontextual “doings,” the article argues that different styles of “being a historian”—a meticulous archival researcher, an inspired feminist scholar, or an outstanding undergraduate teacher—can be analyzed productively in terms of virtues and skills. Finally, the article claims that virtues and skills, in turn, are rooted in desires, which are shaped by the examples of others as well as by promises of reward. This makes the scholarly persona not merely a useful concept for distinguishing among different types of historians, but also a critical tool for analyzing why certain models of “being a historian” gain in popularity, whereas others become “old‐fashioned.”     

The Colonial (Dis)order and the (Im)possibility of Redemption: Jeong,Abolition, and Living from the “End of the World”

This article develops the oppositional edge of postcolonial theologies by way of Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonial desire for the “end of the world.” It connects W. Anne Joh’s elaboration of jeong – the living in excess of (neo)colonial violence – to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s anti-fascist critique of the godlike desires of European humanism (the sicut deus). The overall aim of the article is to clarify and assess what is at stake in a project of eschatological decolonialism. What might it mean to think theologically about salvation as abolition? And what might it look like to live from the “end of the world?”     

Toward a Received History of the Holocaust

In this article, I examine both the problem of so-called postmodern history as it relates to the Holocaust and suggest the ways that Saul Friedlander's recent work successfully mediates between the somewhat overly polemicized positions of “relativist” and “positivist” history. In this context, I find that in his search for an adequately self-reflexive historical narrative for the Holocaust, Hayden White's proposed notion of “middle-voicedness” may recommend itself more as a process for eyewitness writers than as a style for historians after the fact. From here, I look at the ways Saul Friedlander's reflections on the historian's voice not only mediate between White's notions of the ironic mode and middle-voicedness, but also suggest the basis for an uncanny history in its own right: an anti-redemptory narrative that works through, yet never actually bridges, the gap between a survivor's “deep memory” and historical narrative. For finally, it may be the very idea of “deep memory” and its incompatibility to narrative that constitutes one of the central challenges to Holocaust historiography. What can be done with what Friedlander has termed “deep memory” of the survivor, that which remains essentially unrepresentable? Is it possible to write a history that includes some oblique reference to such deep memory, but which leaves it essentially intact, untouched and thereby deep? In this section, I suggest, after Patrick Hutton, that “What is at issue here is not how history can recover memory, but, rather, what memory will bequeath to history.” That is, what shall we do with the living memory of survivors? How will it enter (or not enter) the historical record? Or to paraphrase Hutton again, “How will the past be remembered as it passes from living memory to history?” Will it always be regarded as so overly laden with pathos as to make it unreliable as documentary evidence? Or is there a place for the understanding of the witness, as subjective and skewed as it may be, for our larger historical understanding of events? In partial answer to these questions, I attempt to extend Friedlander's insights toward a narrow kind of history-telling I call “received history”—a double-stranded narrative that tells a survivor-historian's story and my own relationship to it. Such a narrative would chart not just the life of the survivor-historian itself but also the measurable effect of the tellings—both his telling and mine—on my own life's story. Together, they would compose a received history of the Holocaust and its afterlife in the author's mind—my “vicarious past.”     

Does Nature Always Matter? Following Dirt through History

Despite several decades of impressive scholarship in environmental history, the field remains largely marginal to the discipline as a whole. Environmental stories are still more likely to turn up in introductions, sidebars, and footnotes to political, social, and economic histories than they are to be incorporated into those narratives in a transformative way, though we as environmental historians know that potential is there. As we struggle to identify what precisely it is that we want other historians to do with our work, we run up against questions of definition and mission: What is environmental history? What do we do that is unique? What do we want other historians to learn from what we do? Some scholars in our field have suggested that we can answer these questions by framing “environment” as a category of analysis parallel to race, class, and gender, arguing that careful attention to the environment offers as rich a way of uncovering power relationships in societies as attention to these other categories does. While it is true that power can be read in the environment, and is frequently expressed through it, I argue that “environment” as both concept and fact is so fundamentally different from class, race, and gender that the analogy does not work, and distracts us from another, more fruitful strategy for articulating the broader relevance of our scholarship: demonstrating the significance of material nature for histories beyond the environmental realm. If other historians would join us in our attention to the physical, biological, and ecological nature of dirt, water, air, trees, and animals (including humans), they would find themselves led to new questions and new answers about the past.