- Poststructuralism and Postcoloniality: The Anxiety of Theory
There is an increasing body of critical writing on the intersections between what we might broadly term poststructuralist and postcolonial thought, particularly within a francophone context, where those connections are perhaps more overdetermined than elsewhere, given the French ‘roots’ of much postcolonial theory. Hiddleston in her book presents a new variation on this theme, shifting the focus to a reflection on the uncertainties and equivocations that surface within the texts of a range of well-known poststructuralist writers — Derrida, Cixous, Lyotard, Barthes, Kristeva, and Spivak —when they attempt to theorize their own experiences of colonialism, or encounters with cultural others. A useful framework is developed in an introductory section that traverses attempts by Kierkegaard, Sartre, Freud, Lacan, and Bhabha to theorize anxiety, and this primarily psychological concept comes to figure throughout this study the different manifestations of textual instability, or rather those moments where the textual performance goes against the grain of its explicit argument or object of analysis. This, Hiddleston claims, then has an unsettling rebound effect on the theory itself in question. So Derrida, for example, in various autobiographical texts dealing with his [End Page 560] relationship to Algeria (Le Monolinguisme de l’autre and Circonfession principally), is shown to be anxiously eluding the very philosophical mastery and closure he endlessly deconstructs. Cixous’s assured writerly (feminist) resistance to theory runs up against a more ambivalent mode of writing in her autobiographical texts on Algeria, an ambivalence that is intensified in her texts on Derrida. Or the self-conscious writing subjects of both Kristeva and Spivak are shown in their different ways to hover between identification and self-difference, familiarity and unfamiliarity, the heimlich and the unheimlich. Making anxiety a focal concept is an illuminating gesture, and, perhaps symptomatically (and inevitably so), Hiddleston is at times conscious of the uncertainty of her own subject position (for example, in the chapter on Spivak she admits, ‘I am aware that I am also rewriting, making leaps and half-blind assumptions’, p. 164). At other times one is a little taken aback by a rather sternly moralizing, even judgemental tone (for example, ‘Lyotard’s botched application of Marxist thinking’, p. 96), and one wonders whether the psychoanalytic conceptual model Hiddleston proposes would have to be recalibrated if it were also to consider the role and function of the superego, which is curiously absent from her accounts of Freud’s topological model, or Lacan’s linguistic model of the subject. The readings of the texts in question are alive with the energy of the theories they present; it is a shame, therefore, that the absence of translations of the original French quotations make these relatively inaccessible to non-francophones. There are occasions where the will to theorize anxiety seems perhaps a little forced, or rushed. One wonders whether the tensions and instabilities highlighted are in fact reducible to a logic of paradox (Derrida would be the obvious case in point here); but that aside, this is a very insightful and well-informed contribution to contemporary theoretical debates within this field.