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268 26 Racial and Colonial Politics of the Modern Object of Knowledge Cautionary Notes on “Scripture” Joseph Parker How might we reconsider the topic of “scriptures” in the midst of what the African historian Steven Feierman has called the “general epistemological crisis affecting all the social sciences and humanities”?1 We find ourselves at sea in this crisis every time we write, not just when explicitly describing the other, and can only navigate its politics successfully if we recognize the dangers of what Emmanuel Levinas termed an ontological imperialism where otherness vanishes as part of the same of modernity.2 For Feierman this crisis has centered on the gradual dissolution of unilinear narratives of world history as the spread of modernity out of Europe; historians have confronted their accountability to the Others of Europe both within Europe and beyond in colonial territories.3 In the case of modern conceptions of “scriptures ,” a similar crisis centers on the dissolving of modern notions of sacred text deriving from the biblical tradition, particularly that of Christianity, as it is entangled in direct colonization and the more pervasive process of ontological imperialism . The object of knowledge known as “scripture” may be reconstituted in ways that refuse appropriation into this unfortunate heritage as an ethics and politics of accountability to the Others of modernity. In this essay I explore a few signs that may be useful while at sea on the voyage to accountability for the academy, accountability to the populations whose perspectives are erased every time seemingly neutral knowledge claims to universal truths and categories are made. For my first sign I turn to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on “marginalia” to think through the epistemological crisis as it applies to “scripture.” Spivak asks us to give attention to the way in which any explanation presupposes an explainable universe and an explaining subject, and thereby excludes “the possibility of the radically heterogeneous.” If our objects of knowledge, such as “scriptures,” are not naturally given to us, we have to call them into coherence, cathect them as we distinguish them from what they are not, and thereby always already stake out a political position. Spivak terms these exclusions the “prohibited margin” and indicates that as a political event and a productive event, each particular explanation specifies a particular politics.4 Through our attempts to theorize and understand “scriptures,” then, we already engage in a highly politicized act of exclusion, an Racial and Colonial Politics of the Modern Object of Knowledge 269 exclusion of heterogeneity even if our object of knowledge is precisely that of the heterogeneous excluded margin. Spivak’s project is one of persistently attempting to renegotiate the prohibited margin of the object of knowledge to practice an ethics and a politics of feminism, anti-class exploitation, and decolonization within limits, a project we may pursue with regard to “scriptures” and their Others. At stake is more than the ethical and political status of our objects of knowledge : if we are not careful our specific politics will also reinforce the marginalization of our work as good liberal humanists in the academy. The specific politics through which humanists are marginalized that Spivak calls our attention to is what she calls “advanced capitalist [and masculinist] technocracy.” As academic custodians of culture, Spivak suggests that our traditional role is “to produce and be produced by official explanations in terms of the powers that police the entire society.”5 As we are thereby being written into the text of capitalist and masculinist technocracy, we also constitute that very text as collaborators in its inscription who have agency and yet are without full control over the text. This is a second sign, a warning or omen: unless the work of studying “scriptures ” addresses issues of advanced capitalist and masculinist technocracy, we run the risk of supporting through an unacknowledged complicity the powers that police the entire society by excluding these policing powers from the objects of our study. The category of “scriptures” may perhaps seem to be as far as one can get from the powers that police society, and this suggests the need to profoundly reshape the limits of the object known as “religion.” Religion is often understood within the truth regime of modernity as something other than science and technology , medicine, legal enforcement systems, psychology, literature, philosophy, economics, or politics. These are the notorious disciplinary boundaries into which we are being constituted even as are also always co-constituting them in our work through our agency, the grid of...

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