Cheah Pheng. Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation

New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. — 432 p. — ISBN10: 0231130198; ISBN13: 978-0231130196This far-ranging and ambitious attempt to rethink postcolonial theory's discussion of the nation and nationalism brings the problems of the postcolonial condition to bear on the philosophy of freedom. Closely identified with totalitarianism and fundamentalism, the nation-state has a tainted history of coercion, ethnic violence, and even, as in ultranationalist Nazi Germany, genocide. Most contemporary theorists are therefore skeptical, if not altogether dismissive, of the idea of the nation and the related metaphor of the political body as an organism. Going against orthodoxy, Pheng Cheah retraces the universal-rationalist foundations and progressive origins of political organicism in the work of Kant and its development in philosophers in the German tradition such as Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. Cheah argues that the widespread association of freedom with the self-generating dynamism of life and culture's power of transcendence is the most important legacy of this tradition. Addressing this legacy's manifestations in Fanon and Cabral's theories of anticolonial struggle and contemporary anticolonial literature, including the Buru Quartet by Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and the Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong'o's nationalist novels, Cheah suggests that the profound difficulties of achieving freedom in the postcolonial world indicate the need to reconceptualize freedom in terms of the figure of the specter rather than the living organism.Introduction. The Death of the Nation?Culture as freedom: territorializations and deterritorializationsThe Rationality of Life: On the Organismic Metaphor of the Social and Political BodyMyths of the Organic Community
The Transition from Mechanistic to Organismic Metaphors of the Social and Political Body
Freedom, Culture, and OrganismKant’s Cosmopolitanism and the Technic of NatureHow Can Freedom Be Objectively Real? Antimechanism Before the Third Critique
Taking Credit from Nature: Culture as Freedom in Kant’s Historical Writings
Organized Products of Nature: Organismic Causality and Freedom in the Critique of Judgment
The Political Body as Organism: Cosmopolitan Culture and the Reorganization/Organicization of the State-Machine
The Technic of Nature: Effacing Nature’s Favor and the Absolute Recuperation of Techne
The Technic of the Other: Sheer ExposureIncarnations of the Ideal: Nation and State in Fichte and HegelThe Original People: Fichte’s Addresses to the German NationThe Nation as a Community of Language and the Overcoming of Death
The Kulturnation as Spiritual Organism
The State as Instrument of the People: Why National Bildung Is Not an Official Ideology
The Originary Infection of the Nation-PeopleThe Actualization of Reason: Hegel’s Organic State and the Ghost of National CultureWirklichkeit and the Idea of the State
Becoming Other While Staying at Home: the Animal Organism
The Vital State and the Machine of Civil Society
Bildung as the Paradigm of Spiritual Work and Freedom
Volksgeist: The Apparitional Supplement of the Rational StateRevolutions That Take Place in the Head: Marx and the National Question in Socialist DecolonizationThe World Community of Productive Laborers: Marx’s
Deterritorialization of Freedom 181
Epigenesis of Labor: The Verwirklichung of Humanity and the
Proletarian Revolution as Appropriation 191
Ghostly Consciousness, Haunted Actuality 200
Acts of Culture: The Return of the Nation-People in Socialist DecolonizationNovel Nation: The Bildung of the Postcolonial Nation as Sociological OrganismThe Haunting of the People: The Spectral Public Sphere in Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet[/b]The Buru Quartet’s Function: Reanimating a Critical Public Sphere in New Order Indonesia
The Birth and Arrested Life of the Indonesian Nation Circa 1900
The Modernity of National Consciousness: The Spectral World of Modern Knowledge
The Comparative Gaze and the Desire for National Bildung
Freedom Through the Nation: The Critique of Colonialist Instrumental Reason as the Reenchantment of the World
Conjuring the People, Giving Life to the National Body: Organization as Vital Movement and Power
“Landasan [yang] lebih mengikat”: What Binds a Healthy Nation- People TogetherAfterlives: The Mutual Haunting of the State and NationThe Negation of Life: The State as the Agent of Death
The Negation of Death
The Haunting of the Colonial State by Minke’s Afterlife
Morbid Interrogations: The Constitutive Possibility of Death Within the Living National Body
Publicness and the Spectral Gaze of State Surveillance
Counterfeit LifeThe Neocolonial State and Other Prostheses of the Postcolonial National Body: Ngu˜g˜ı wa Thiong’o’s Project of Revolutionary
National CultureNational Culture as Self-Recursive Mediation
The Onus of Narrative Fiction
Monstrous Bodies and Nonfunctional Organs
The Surviving of SurvivingEpilogue. Spectral Nationality: The Living-On of the Postcolonial Nation in Globalization