History, the Human, and the World Between (review)

The key term in the title of R. Radhakrishnan’s latest book is between, a prepositional signpost that maps out the contingent cartographies of both a radicalized social theory and the very domain of the human. As a theoretical intervention, the book seeks to chart a space between deconstructive critiques of epistemology that make it impossible to make any claims about the social world and humanist projects that revive old teleologies and cast experience in ontological categories. For Radhakrishnan, the human resides in the nexus of these two modes of critique—always caught between history and theory, being and becoming—because the human necessarily must be grasped within the limits of representation. What sort of social theory, then, can remain vigilantly attuned to epistemology—so as to hold in check the Eurocentric underpinnings of a criticism too quick to authenticate itself—while not abandoning knowledge altogether as strictly textual, and thereby preserving the possibility of politics grounded in a “quarrel with history”? An answer, Radhakrishnan argues, may be found in the double consciousness of a phenomenological critique that persists in making the “return” to history, but does so as part of a strategic politics and is always conscious of the potential hubris of knowledge.

The methodology of the book is conjunctival and comparative. Bringing together writers from wide-ranging cultural and epistemic contexts, Radhakrishnan evaluates various ways of envisioning the “worlding of the world”—a phrase that captures the creative, and necessarily destructive, moment when representation gives shape to the human. European philosophers such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Foucault and postcolonial thinkers including Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Ranajit Guha are carefully parsed to lay bare their epistemological structures and assumptions. In nearly every case, Radhakrishnan acknowledges the contributions of each thinker while also identifying conceptual turns that make these critical projects insufficiently “between”: they either make too radical a move toward poststructuralism, as with Homi Bhabha’s reading of Fanon as an “allegory of ‘pure becoming’” (87), or they gesture toward humanism by offering up a new aestheticization of history, as with Fanon’s own endorsement of a nationalist ethic. These discussions reveal a fundamental divide regarding the very nature of politics. One view questions the basis on which truth claims are made and contends that such investigations will themselves unearth new modes of knowledge hitherto subjugated in the naturalized representations of dominant discourse. For the humanists, however, knowledge must have a telos—a sense of prescriptive justice for a better world. Fanon’s work has proven to be so enduring precisely because it articulates a politics that operates on both registers at once: Fanon seeks to dismantle “the very structure of the binary at the metalevel” (for example, his famous pronouncement that “The Negro is not. Any more than the white man”) while also “addressing the unequal historical realities brought into existence by binarity” (81).

The three linked chapters that comprise History, the Human, and the World Between build upon Fanon’s work by demonstrating that these two idioms of politics need not be as opposed as the well rehearsed tensions between poststructuralism and Marxism would suggest. Radhakrishnan’s first chapter begins with a reading of Adrienne Rich’s elegant symbolization of revisionist historiography in her poem “Diving into the Wreck.” Rich’s dive into the wreck does not uncover a presence, but exposes the absences in the calcified formations of knowledge that compose the historical record. Yet Rich offers the hope that marking absences may in fact dislodge something long negated: the dive may resuscitate “possibilities wrecked by the historiography of patriarchy and the discourse of heterosexual normativity” (54). The poem figures these possibilities in an image of androgyny, but Radhakrishnan stresses that the decided use of the first person marks only the emergence of an inclusive space where new discoveries may be made and new dialogues forged. In his reading, the poem refrains from naming what the diver uncovers, thus refusing to saddle us with an...