"After" Russian Post-Colonial Identity

1) "Repetition"

Russia is after history. I will repeat it. Russia is after history.

I invite you to read in this repetition two regimes that constitute Russian history, its identity, its chronotope, its "place" in time. One marks Russia's profound temporal lagging: its very being appears "after" history, (after the history of Europe, of other countries) has already happened, making it forever "behind" the movements of World History, making it forever, irrevocably, late. It is in that sense a country in which a belated interval of the "post," dictates all its "historical" modalities, a place-time "after" modernity. This statement opens up a possibility that Russia's history yet has a future.

The other regime of this repeated statement would situate Russia outside history, before history occurred, in the realm where the temporality of World History has not even happened: in the realm of the Messianic promise, that will alone hurl Russia towards the historical, its full teleological fulfillment, "after" it and beyond. In this second sense, which is perhaps prior, Russia is still too early, forever young, untainted by historical time, since the clock of history measures time for countries, peoples or cultures completely alien to Russia's immemorial or futural temporality. The repetition itself, rhetorically, models this chronology whereby the iteration, a copy, say, of Europe, precedes the original. Russia's time, too late, yet to come.

2) "The Fold"

The iteration of this statement about Russian identity is meant to tease out or condense synecdochically an internal difference constitutive of the functioning of the culture that we call "Russian": an internal division, a repetition with a difference, at the very origin of Russia's entrance into "modernity," or history. The folding of a culture within itself, the fold onto itself marked by an internal division, hinge, self-colonization. (The words "culture" and "colonization" derive from the same root, to till the land--colere, cultus--a fold that is always related to soil, and an upturn, overturning of its top. An originary force or violence at the "origin" of culture is manifest as colonization). I am referring of course to the originary co-implication between modernity and Russian history known as the reforms of Peter the Great, and the subsequent reverberations of this charge that propels the rhythms of Russia's subsequent history.

In his "DissemiNation: Time, Margin and the Narrative of Modern Nation," in the collection Nation and Narration, Homi Bhabha draws attention to precisely such a "double temporality" constitutive of the "origin" of a nation, "the problematic boundaries of modernity enacted in these ambivalent temporalities of the nation-space." In order to give an accurate, non-essentializing account of this history, one has to have recourse to a notion of "this double time of the nation. It is indeed only in the disjunctive time of the nation's modernity . . . that questions of nation as narration come to be posed" (Bhabha 1990, 294). In Location of Culture, Bhabha argues that for this borderline experience "there seems to be no proper name other than the current and controversial shiftiness of the prefix 'post'" (Bhabha 1994, 1). Or, as Geoffrey Bennington points out in his "Postal Politics and the Institution of the Nation," analyzing the "primacy" of the "post" or "after" in any calculation of national identity, "History begins to lose grip at this point: or rather history . . . maintains its grip by a violent reduction of this scandalous instability of the prefix 'post-', which raises philosophical questions in excess of history" (Bennington 123, 1990). It is exactly this excess of iterability which cannot be reduced to an unequivocal identity that is captured by the repeated statement that "Russia is after history." Momentarily, I will explore how it shapes some of the most celebrated narratives in Russian philosophy and literature, by Chaadaev, Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoevsky. But first, another postponement.

3) "After"

It is with the Petrine reforms that, according to Boris Groys, "the authentic Russian history begins." As a result of its modernist aspiration...