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Sly Civility
Sly Civility
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Sly Civility
HOMI K. BHABHA
If the spirit of the Western nation has been symbolized in epic and anthem,
voiced by a "unanimous people assembled in the self-presence of its speech,"'
then the sign of colonial government is cast in a lower key, caught in the irre-
deemable act of writing. Who better to bear witness to this hypothesis than that
representative figure of the mid-nineteenth century, J. S. Mill, who divided his
8. Mill, p. 97.
9. Mill, Parliamentary Papers,1852-1853, p. 310.
10. Mill, quoted in G. D. Bearce, BritishAttitudesTowardsIndia1784-1858, London, Oxford
University Press, 1961, p. 280.
74 OCTOBER
16. For a further elaboration of this concept, see my essay "Signs Taken for Wonders: Ques-
tions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817," in the special issue
on "Race, Writing, and Difference," ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Critical Inquiry, Fall 1985.
17. See Louis Althusser, "Montesquieu: Politics and History," Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx,
trans. Ben Brewster, London, Verso, 1982, chap. 4.
Sly Civility 77
18. Derrida, "Living On: Border Lines," Deconstructionand Criticism, Harold Bloom, et al.,
London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979, p. 87.
19. Missionary Register, Church Missionary Society, March 1819, pp. 159-160.
78 OCTOBER
wide place, and has a thousand gates"; and that their religion is one
by which they hope to enter. Thus, together with their fixed persua-
sions, they have their sceptical conceits. By such evasions they can
dismiss the merits of the case from all consideration; and encourage
men to think that the vilest superstition may serve to every salutary
purpose, and be accepted in the sight of God as well as truth and
righteousness.20
In the native refusal to satisfy the colonizer's narrative demand, we hear
the echoes of Freud's saber-rattling strangers, with whom I began. The natives'
resistance represents a frustration of that nineteenth-century strategy of surveil-
lance, the confession, which seeks to dominate the "calculable" individual by
positing the truth that the subject has but does not know. The "incalculable" na-
tive produces a problem for civil representation in the discourses of literature
and legality. This uncertainty impressed itself on Nathanael Halhead whose A
Codeof GentooLaws (1776) was the canonical colonialist codification of Indian
"native" law, but he was only able to read this resistance to calculation and
testimony as native "folly"or "temporary frenzy ... something like the madness
so inimitably delineated in the hero of Cervantes."21 The native answers dis-
play the continual slippage between civil inscription and colonial address. The
uncertainty generated by such resistance changes the narratorial demand itself.
What was spoken within the orders of civility now accedes to the colonial signi-
fier. The question is no longer Derrida's "Tell us exactly what happened." From
the point of view of the colonizer, passionate for unbounded, unpeopled posses-
sion, the problem of truth turns into the troubled political and psychic question
of boundary and territory: Tell us why you, the native, are there. Etymologically
unsettled, "territory" derives from both terra (earth) and terrire(to frighten)
whence territorium"a place from which people are frightened off."22The colonial-
ist demand for narrative carries, within it, its threatening reversal Tell us why
we are here. It is this echo that reveals that the otherside of narcissistic authority
may be the paranoia of power; a desire for "authorization" in the face of a process
of cultural differentiation which makes it problematic to fix the native objects of
colonial power as the moralized "others" of truth.
The native refusal to unify the authoritarian, colonialist address within
the terms of civil engagement gives the subject of colonial authority - father and
oppressor- another turn. This ambivalent "and," always less than one and dou-
ble, traces the times and spaces between civil address and colonial articulation.
The authoritarian demand can now only be justified if it is contained in the
language of paranoia. The refusal to return and restore the image of authority
to the eye of power has to be reinscribed as implacable aggression, assertively
coming from without: He hates me. Such justification follows the familiar con-
jugation of persecutory paranoia. The frustrated wish "I want him to love me,"
turns into its opposite "I hate him" and thence through projection and the ex-
clusion of the first person, "He hates me."23
Projection is never a self-fulfilling prophecy; never a simple "scapegoat"
fantasy. The other's aggressivity from without, that justifies the subject of au-
thority, makes that very subject a frontier station of joint occupation, as the
psychoanalyst Robert Waelder has written.24 Projection may compel the native
to address the master, but it can never produce those effects of "love" or "truth"
that would center the confessional demand. If, through projection, the native is
partially aligned or reformed in discourse, the fixed hate which refuses to circu-
late or reconjugate, produces the repeated fantasy of the native as in-between
legality and illegality, endangering the boundaries of truth itself. The litigious,
lying native became a central object of nineteenth-century colonial, legal regu-
lation and each winter an Indian magistrate was dispatched to the Caribbean
to adjudicate over the incalculable indentured Indian coolies. That the process
of colonial intervention, its institutionalization and normalization, may itself
be an Entstellung, a displacement,is the symbolic reality that must be disavowed.
It is this ambivalence that ensues within paranoia as a play between eternal
vigilance and blindness, and estranges the image of authority in its strategy of
justification. For, excluded as the first-person subject and addressed by an ag-
gressivity prior to itself, the figure of authority must always be belated; after
and outside the event if it wants to be virtuous, and yet master of the situation,
if it wants to be victorious:
The English in India are part of a belligerent civilisation ... they are
the representatives of peace compelled by force. No country in the
world is more orderly, more quiet or more peaceful than British India
as it is, but if the vigour of the government should ever be relaxed, if
it should lose its essential unity of purpose . . . chaos would come
again like a flood.25
Delusions of "the end of the world"-- as Judge Schreber confessed to Freud
- are the common tropes of paranoia, and it is with that in mind that we should
reread Fitzjames Stephens's famous apocalyptic formulation that I've quoted
above. In the oscillation between apocalypse and chaos, we see the emergence
of an anxiety associated with the narcissistic vision and its two-dimensional
space. It is an anxiety which will not abate because the empty third space, the
otherspace of symbolic representation, at once bar and bearer of difference, is
closed to the paranoid position of power. In the colonial discourse, that space of
the other is always occupied by an ideefixe: despot, heathen, barbarian, chaos,
violence. If these symbols are always the same, their ambivalent repetition
makes them the signs of a much deeper crisis of authority that emerges in the
lawless writing of the colonial scene. There, the hybrid tongues of the colonial
space make even the repetition of the name of God uncanny:
. . every native term which the Christian missionary can employ to
communicate the Divine truth is already appropriated as the chosen
symbol of some counterpart deadly error ....
writes Alexander Duff, the most celebrated of nineteenth-century Indian mis-
sionaries, with trepidation.
You vary your language and tell [the natives that] there must be a
secondbirth. Now it so happens that this and all similar phraseology is
preoccupied.
The communication of the Gayatri, or the most sacred verse in
the Vedas . . . constitutes religiously and metaphorically the natives'
second birth .... Your improved language might only convey that
all must become famous Brahmans ere they can see God.26
26. Rev. A. Duff, IndiaandIndiaMissions, London, John Hunter, 1839, pp. 323-324.