I Pleady Guilty--But Where Is the Judgment?

My first association on reading William David Hart's critical essay was a reminiscence of my days, three decades ago, as a student of philosophy in the old socialist Yugoslavia. A hard-line Marxist professor used to criticize “bourgeois philosophy” for being “non-dialectical” (positivist, idealist, irrationalist). In short, his basic reproach was that bourgeois philosophy is not Marxism—he rejected it simply for being what it was. And I could not avoid the same impression apropos of Hart's essay, which is also, as it were, knocking on an open door: I directly and openly claim what he is trying to unearth through a critical analysis. I who openly designate myself as “Eurocentrist,” who explicitly argue for the unique position of the Judeo-Christian tradition, am reproached—for what? For my “Eurocentrism” and for privileging the Judeo-Christian tradition. The closest Hart comes to argumentation are general dismissals like “Zizek knows as little about Buddhist scholarship as he does about biblical scholarship.” OK, but where are the concrete counterarguments? I make a series of claims about the specificity of Judaism and Christianity—where am I wrong? Where is the proper judgment on my position? Do we find features that I attribute to Christianity in Buddhism or Hinduism? Am I wrong in attributing these features to Christianity? Or am I wrong in asserting the emancipatory potentials of these features? What we get instead is the most vulgar “applied psychoanalysis”: “To paraphrase Zizek, the question that he must confront is how he invests the ideological figures of the pagan and the fundamentalist with his unconscious desire, with how he has constructed these figures to escape a certain deadlock of his desire.”

Should I also play this game and ask about the obvious deadlock of Hart's own position? To put it quite brutally: Does Hart really think I am not acquainted with every line of his argumentation? What he does is simply retell the old story of how the Hegelian narrative of the dialectical progress of religious consciousness, which culminates in Christianity, the only true religion of freedom, served as the ideological legitimization of Western colonialism. What is missing in Hart's story is Hegel himself, what already Marx referred to as the revolutionary kernel of Hegel's dialectics. That is to say, if Hart's story were the whole story, then Hegel would be just a racist ideologue of capitalist colonialism. And, if this is all Hart sees in Hegel, then one cannot but apply to him Hegel's dictum on how Evil resides in the very gaze which perceives Evil everywhere: it is Hart himself whose gaze is constrained to the colonialist lenses, and is thus unable to discern the tremendous emancipatory potential of Hegel's thought. That Hegel's philosophy is part of modern Western history, inclusive of colonialism, is, of course, a commonplace barely worth mentioning. What is much more difficult to grasp is how this same “Eurocentric colonialist” philosophy provided the ultimate subversive intellectual tools that allow us to discern and question this very “Eurocentric colonialist” bias (recall, say, the key role the reference to Hegel's dialectic of Master and Slave played in Frantz Fanon's work, or, as Susan Buck-Morss demonstrated recently, the role the reference to the first anticolonialist political revolution in Haiti played in Hegel's development itself!). And one cannot oppose the “bad colonialist” Hegel to the “good emancipatory” one—Hegel did not deploy his emancipatory dialectical stance in spite of his limitations—Eurocentric, colonialist, and so on—but on behalf of them. (For those to whom these statements seem excessively “provocative,” it should suffice to mention that this was the very core of Marx's critical relationship toward capitalism: it is capitalism itself that generates the tools allowing us to abolish it, no reliance on precapitalist traditions can do the job.)

To make the point as pointedly as possible: the “postcolonial” critique of Eurocentrism is, in its...