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Notes Prologue 1. See Louis Sala-Molins, Les misères des Lumières: Sous la raison, l’outrage (Paris: R. Laffont, 1992), translated as Dark Side of the Light: Slavery and the French Enlightenment , trans. John Conteh-Morgan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Similarly, with regard to the Renaissance, see Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). 2. Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World-History, Italian Academy Lectures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002) opens with one such consideration of the need to examine, in particular, philosophy’s “complicity” with colonialism; his focus is Hegel. By contrast, Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), tries to excavate and give form to an Enlightenment that stood against this alliance. 3. “Letter to a Member of the National Assembly,” in Edmund Burke, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford and William B Todd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981–), 8:294–335. 4. See vol. 1 of J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 4 vols. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999–), titled “The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon.” For an insightful collection of postmodern engagements with this question, see Daniel Gordon, Postmodernism and the Enlightenment: New Perspectives in Eighteenth-Century French Intellectual History (New York: Routledge, 2000). A different approach is taken by Richard Rorty, who attempts to distinguish between the political and the philosophical projects of the Enlightenment. See his contribution to Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hanns Reill, What’s Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 5. An early question posed by Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985). See in particular the chapter “Modernity and the Planes of History.” 192 / notes 6. As with the term Enlightenment, there seem to be many who are eager to proclaim the death of postcolonial thought, or its end. The term may die with a whimper, but what it identified, its enabling tensions, certainly has not. I discuss this further in my contributions to Patricia Yaeger, “Editor’s Column: The End of Postcolonial Theory ? A Roundtable with Sunil Agnani, Fernando Coronil, Gaurav Desai, Mamadou Diouf, Simon Gikandi, Susie Tharu, and Jennifer Wenzel,” PMLA 122 (2007). 7. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004) has productively explored the intersection of Enlightenment and modernity, as has (in a very different manner) Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). More broadly, this study shares the interpretive approach of such works as the chapters on the eighteenth century in Sanjay Krishnan, Reading the Global: Troubling Perspectives on Britain’s Empire in Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Betty Joseph, Reading the East India Company, 1720–1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender, Women in Culture and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans : Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804, Post-Contemporary Interventions (Durham , N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999); and the reflections on Kant’s New Hollander in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 8. “What Is Enlightenment?,” in Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984); Michel Foucault, “What Is Critique?,” trans. Kevin Paul Geiman, What Is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 9. Foucault, The Foucault Reader, 42. “Cet êthos implique d’abord qu’on refuse ce que j’appellerai volontiers le ‘chantage’ à l’Aufklärung.” Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce que les Lumières?,” Dits et écrits, 1954–1988, ed. Daniel Defert, François Ewald, and Jacques Lagrange, Bibliothèque des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 4:571. 10. Foucault, “What Is Critique?,” 383. 11. Ibid., 387. “Et je proposerais donc, comme toute première définition de la critique , cette caractérisation générale: l’art de n’être pas tellement gouverné.” Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce que la critique? [Critique et Aufklärung], Compte rendu de la séance du 27 mai 1978,” Bulletin de la Société française de la Philosophie 84.2 (1990): 38. 12. François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité: Présentisme et expériences du temps, La librairie du XXIe siècle...

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