On Infinite Decolonization

On Infinite Decolonization Alberto Moreiras Duke University I HAVE JUST FINISHED TEACHING A CLASS ON U.S. CRIME FICTION. A few weeks ago we read Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, and then we watched the film John Huston made on the novel, with Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor. The film curiously makes no reference to one of the most famous passages in the book, which is when Sam Spade tells the devious but lovable Ms O ’Shaugnessy the story of the man called Flitcraft. Flitcraft is the fellow who, in the middle of “a clean orderly sane responsible affair” (64) of a life, has a freaky near-death experience that makes him confront his own mortality, and decide that, given the fact that we live in a universe that embodies death as its real, a universe of blind chance and freak events, a universe of unreason, the more attuned to reasonable life we seem to be, the more out of step with life we really are. The more in step with life the more out of step; the more reasonable our life, the more unreasonable it is. Poor Flitcraft abandons everything, his life, his loyalties, his family, his job, his money, moves to another city, and starts a new life, only to find himself a few years later having essentially reproduced his previous life. How much of current thought in postcolonial studies mimics Flitcraft’s impossible attempt to escape his own shadow? ESC 30.2 (June 2004): 21-28 Alberto Moreiras is Anne and Robert Bass Professor of Romance Studies and Literature and Director of the Center for European Studies at Duke University. He is the author of Interpretación y diferencia, Tercer espacio: literatura y duelo en America Latina, and The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies. He has coedited with Nelly Richard a book entitled Pensar en/la posdictadura. He is co-editor ofJournal of Spanish Cultural Studies. Flitcraft’s attempt to decolonize his life, to rid it of everything that seemed at one point to be clean, orderly, sane, and responsible, ends in failure, because he restitutes a subjectivity that cannot but fall into the apparent cleanliness, orderliness, sanity, and responsibility that can only produce themselves as such at the cost of a fundamental omission: the omission of the real, as the essential out-of-stepness of history itself. There can be no restitution. The thought of infinite restitution is merely delusional, when not sheer ideology. It is perhaps time to give up what Dipesh Chakrabarty a few years ago called “good history” (97-98). If infinite colonization cannot in any case be avoided, as Flitcraft rather comically discovers, should we not at least refuse to be colonized by the pretense of its opposite? Have we forgotten what we must mean when we say “decolonization”? The failure to think of the limits of decolonization is colonization itself. Bartolomé Claveros Genocidio yjusticia. La destrucción de las Indias ayer y hoy is a theoretical attempt at presenting the contemporary pre­ dicament of decolonization regarding the Latin American indigenous communities The book might show, contrary to its best intentions, how infinite or radical decolonization is not really decolonization but rather a curious form of recolonization: an apotropaic decolonization, which only decolonizes in order to better colonialize, according to what we could call, following the logic of that book, the spirit of our times, or what the book terms "nuestras alturas,” “our heights,” the “alturas” of a time that is wiser than older times, more enlightened, thanks to the efforts of the so-called decolonizers. The notion of “our heights” is a particularly bla­ tant symptom of the presence of nomic ideology: the notion of a nomos, or of an order of the world, that subordinates the political, to follow Carl Schmitt’s complex notion.1 Clavero seems to state that we know better, we have a better order today than in the past, if we could only just follow it. Perhaps the impossible or contradictory claim for infinite decoloniza­ tion, supposedly made possible today, has come to constitute something like the dominant progressive ideology of our times, even if more in the 1 I...