Thinking at the Enlightenment's Limit

Sunil Agnani's Hating Empire Properly: The Two Indies and the Limits of Enlightenment Anticolonialism (winner of the 2014 Henry Levin Prize) is a rich contribution to a nascent but ever-expanding field we could call colonial Enlightenment studies. This field has, variously, implicated seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment principles even more profoundly than previously acknowledged in the modern imperial project; studied, conversely, the Enlightenment's own largely overlooked critique of this project; and articulated, even more subtly, the necessary dependence of anticolonial revolution on Enlightenment reason.¹ To a greater extent than any of its precursors, Hating Empire Properly operates on each of these levels at once. In the process, it helps us understand why the Enlightenment may haunt postcolonial thought indefinitely. Pushing Agnani's work and the larger debate in a direction they have not yet explicitly taken, I would argue that the reason lies in the extreme difficulty of critiquing the simultaneously revolutionary and oppressive legacy of critique.

According to a like-minded work on which Agnani draws, David Scott's Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (2004), Enlightenment is the inescapable condition of every anticolonialism—and by extension of postcolonial scholarship.² Building on C. L. R. James's perspective in The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938 [1963]), Scott has argued that Enlightenment principles alone gave colonial subjects the capacity to comprehend their own historical formation, to intervene in the intricate systems that controlled their lives, and consciously to construct different futures. But if the Enlightenment constitutes the very conditions of possibility for anticolonial revolutions, it also ensures their failure. It inspires anticolonial revolutionaries with a commitment, above all else, to the values of freedom, justice, and equality. At the same time, it prevents them from taking other values as seriously and hence from accommodating plurality within either the revolution or the post-colonial state. Though their colonial education gives revolutionary leaders a comprehensive grasp of the colonial system and the farsighted capacity to envision a different future, it renders them unable, furthermore, to anticipate what is obvious to the less educated: the fatal consequences of a single-minded devotion to Enlightenment knowledge and institutions. The violent sacrifice of other value systems and the destruction, ultimately, of the revolutionary dream itself are, according to Scott's narrative, the tragic "costs" of anticolonialism's paradoxical—but necessary—dependence on the Enlightenment. The tragedy of colonial enlightenment is, in Scott's view, "the fundamental story of our time" (175).

Conscripts of Modernity thus reorients postcolonial studies vis-à-vis the Enlightenment. Rather than diametrically opposed forces, Enlightenment reason and anticolonial revolution are, in Scott's account, so intimately intertwined that they can never be separated. Postcolonial studies is in no position, therefore, to reject the Enlightenment. Conscripts of Modernity consequently reiterates Foucault's refusal of the "blackmail" that inevitably accompanies the very use of the term "Enlightenment": the implicit demand that one either remain within the parameters of Enlightenment reason or, alternatively, disown it altogether (179).³ If postcolonial scholars instead studied how colonial Enlightenment simultaneously enabled and disabled anticolonial movements, we might acquire, Scott suggests, a historical vision more relevant to our own time, when the dreams of revolution have all but died. For Scott, the act of reflecting on anticolonialism's Enlightenment genealogy is, in other words, the precondition of a postcolonial scholarship that could finally accept and think through the manifest failure of postcolonial emancipation.

We should note, though, that if Scott has opened a new—perhaps infinitely ramifying—path into the Enlightenment, its global dissemination, and its tragic persistence, he does not himself take it, falling back as he does on old clichés about Enlightenment reason (on one hand, the necessary foundation of self-reflexive consciousness and hence revolution; on the other, an intrinsically univocal and hence absolutist form of thought). Agnani's study is, to my knowledge, the first monograph to extend the path that Conscripts of Modernity began. Though...