The Marginality of Michel de Certeau

The Marginality of Michel de Certeau
Richard Terdiman
The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 100, Number 2, Spring 2001, pp. 399-421
(Article)
Published by Duke University Press
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/30714
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6516 THE SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY 100:2 / sheet 81 of 284
Richard Terdiman
The Marginality of Michel de Certeau
The resistance of others is the condition of our own

development [progrès].
—Michel de Certeau, L’étranger; ou, L’union dans la
différence
O ut of the endless and overwhelming flux, we

conjure epiphanies as if by miracle. We make
meanings. But the condition for doing so is an
experience of ends. For meaning is the con-
sequence of a limit; meaning is an effect of
margins. The border where we materialize such
meaning is what makes meanings possible. We
perceive and conceive and construct and learn on
this frontier.
The margin or frontier or border is where
something is divided from something else. That
something can be anything, but the margin makes
it what it is. On the border, through division, its
definition and its relation to what differs from
it become conceivable. Heraclitean projections
of ceaseless change then metamorphose into a
topology and begin to frame a temporality. In
this sense, continuities are meaningless. Out of
the flux, it is difference that crystallizes significa-
tion. This paradigm has a fundamental seduction
The South Atlantic Quarterly :, Spring .

Copyright ©  by Duke University Press.
Tseng 2002.1.30 18:38
400 Richard Terdiman
for the historical and interpretive sensibility. In contemporary understand-

ing, it is only through the marking of a difference—through the projection
of a border—that the notions of history and interpretation make sense. This
power of the liminary thus resituates the margin as cardinal. We navigate
our meanings across these borders.They always materialize from elsewhere.
Michel de Certeau made this principle fundamental to his understanding
of history as of culture. Consider his  preface to The Writing of History,
which begins this way: ‘‘Amerigo Vespucci the Discoverer arrives from the
sea.’’ 1 This narrative is not innocent. Geographically and temporally, it en-
folds and exposes the mystery by which meanings arise and interpretations
become possible. Politically, it projects the potential for violence—or at least
the constituting incursion—that accompanies the framing of any significa-
tion.
It would be difficult to write an account in which Certeau’s thinking about
borders was not powerfully overdetermined by the circumstances of his own
biography. Repeatedly, regularly, he sought the margin. It was as distinc-
tive a feature of his life as of his thought. By way of comparison, we might
consider the series of eminent Parisians who, during the s and s,
repeatedly visited the United States—colonizing America for theory, so to
speak. Nearly every one of them remained firmly based in Paris. Among this
period’s remarkable group of theory jetsetters, the lone geographic excep-
tion was Certeau, who left Paris to take up a full-time teaching position at
the University of California, San Diego, from  to . Before then he
had regularly traveled to South America, Mexico, and Canada for periods of
teaching and research.2 In part, these displacements reflected a native sense
of adventure; in part, however, they also translated the fact that for a long
period Certeau was effectively an outsider in Paris. As an ordained Jesuit in
a resolutely secularized academy (one whose anticlericalism had long been
a fundamental ideological tenet), Certeau did not have—and when he ac-
cepted his U.S. position he could not have had—a regular post at a French
university.3 It is difficult to imagine that this kind of professional disqualifi-
cation (to consider just one resonance of marginality arising from his biog-
raphy) was unrelated to Certeau’s sensitivity to problems of difference, dis-
advantage, and subordination.
As translated at the level of theory and methodology, the forms and logic
of this sensitivity to the marginal will be my focus here. I want to examine
those models and modes of social understanding that Certeau would root
Tseng 2002.1.30 18:38
The Marginality of Certeau 401
in heterology, in what might be called the constancy of difference or the

centrality of the marginal. But we need to bear in mind that, while theory in-
forms practice, the two registers cannot simply be conflated. Language and
bodies diverge in fundamental ways. Consequently, the reality of marginal-
ization is not just a theoretical counter or an intellectual effect; with its roots
always in the political, marginalization inevitably embodies the cruel reality
of power. Theorize about marginality all you like—you know the threat, the
weight of it when, as happened to Certeau during his time at UC San Diego,
you are given notice by the Migra (the U.S. immigration authorities) that
you may soon be thrown out of the country.4 As my examination of the bases
and structures of Certeau’s relation to marginality proceeds here, it will be
important not to forget that what underlies the euphoria of high-theoretical
elucubration is a problem that always implicates real bodies and always dis-
closes the affliction of real human lives.
In Certeau’s representations, things always appear intricately modulated,

which at times makes him hard to understand.5 This is a margin effect, in
the sense that the difficulty of his writing can be interpreted as an effect of
the pressure put on language when its objective is framing and represent-
ing the border phenomena Certeau termed heterology.6 Meaning arises on
this margin. But capturing that incipience powerfully stresses language’s ca-
pacity for expression and self-reflection. The discourse of heterology strives
to seize its own medium, to express the possibility of its own saying, but this
is like trying to see vision. Speaking on the margin and about marginality are
constitutively arduous. When we attempt to talk about that protean and un-
graspable nonplace where everything passes over, we learn how frustratingly
experience can wriggle away from words.
Today, marginality has become fashionable. But while acknowledging
that, I want also to suggest one aspect of our understanding of marginality
that—in the United States at least—has itself been subtly marginalized. Be-
ginning with his work of the s, Certeau located himself near the begin-
nings of our contemporary fascination with the margin. And his theories
concerning it remain among our most provocative and insightful today. His
reflection upon the modes and significance of difference was extraordinarily
diverse. It is central to a remarkable number of his books, from The Capture
of Speech and Other Political Writings (, English trans. ), through
Tseng 2002.1.30 18:38
Culture in the Plural (, English trans. ) and The Writing of History
(), to The Practice of Everyday Life () and The Mystic Fable ().
Now that all these texts have appeared in English, it becomes clear how the
reflection upon difference that has occupied us for more than two decades
converges with and finds inspiration in Certeau’s work as a whole. But what
seems more important than recognizing his intellectual priority is recover-
ing some of the resonances of his understanding of marginality that our
own uptake has tended to overshadow or sideline.
In our multicultural world, ‘‘marginality’’ has most often been construed
along lines of race, class, gender, and ethnicity. I don’t want to repudiate that
construction. Certeau was framing it for himself as early as  in the sec-
tion of Culture in the Plural he entitled ‘‘New Marginalisms.’’ But his work
gives us an even more powerful impetus to extend that list. For Certeau, the
state of marginality is common to a great variety of social and cultural situa-
tions. His notion of heterology, along with the diverse forms of otherness
it projects and encompasses, conceptualizes experiential connections and
similarities among many varieties of otherness. The project of heterology
imagines regularities of difference that other prominent theoretic strains have
tended to veil or even explicitly to deny.
At an important point in Culture in the Plural, Certeau writes: ‘‘The diffi-
culty of a certain number of minority movements is to have begun by de-
fining themselves negatively. Cultural, social or ethnic autonomy has always
manifested itself in saying ‘no.’ ’’ 7 Thus, more than twenty years ago, Cer-
teau anticipated our sometimes bitter debates over identity politics today.
His critique still has political and analytical force. What is powerful about it
is that he takes a tactical and historical position on the tension between the
various forms of essentialism and their theoretical antagonists. Long before
Gayatri Spivak legitimized the notion of ‘‘strategic essentialism,’’ 8 Certeau
was arguing for a fundamental situatedness of theoretical or political concep-
tions of these issues, and a pattern of connection between marginal posi-
tions that helps to make them more comprehensible even in their diversity
and their difference.
The implications of such an analysis are striking. They invoke and project
the sorts of effects we frequently ignore when theory travels, crossing the
borders marked by geography, race, class, gender, ethnicity, religion, or
some other social indicator.9 Theory always carries political stakes, and our
selection of the interpretive model to bring to bear is never neutral. Theories
Tseng 2002.1.30 18:38
are invariably site- and time-sensitive. So, as a disadvantaged group seeks

to define itself culturally, socially, economically, or politically, the negativity
identified by Certeau is by no means a transhistorically necessary condi-
tion, but rather a stage in that group’s evolving self-constitution. Conse-
quently, the antagonism between essentialism and universalism—one of
the most regularly recurrent and sterile debates within multiculturalism
today—need not be cast in such fruitless binary terms, but can be recon-
ceived as a productive pressure developing in the history of every group and
brought to bear on its relations with others against whom this negativity
must be initially asserted.
In the face of the insistent claims of identity politics that still powerfully
influence conceptions of social life in our multicultural world, I want to
underline the issue of social understanding, of interpretive epistemology,
that such essentialist framings of marginality render opaque. Certeau’s
analysis was reconceiving them as early as . What I seek to recover are
some resonances of the figure of difference that may broaden the thematics
of marginality, which has been the major preoccupation of this discourse in
the United States at least. How does Certeau’s conception of the marginal
diverge from what I would call mainstream constructions of marginality?
Like the negations by which groups initially counterpose themselves
against dominant social forces and discourses, these prototheoretical mar-
ginalities are typically based upon a figure of reversal, with subordination
and domination inverted. Although there are several variants of such a re-
versal—some more thoughtful and useful to our analyses, others less so—
the paradigm is familiar, and it is sustained by both minority rhetoric and
influential segments of the majority. Its political objective is to stigmatize
the prejudice that projects categorial inferiority. Surely, this repudiation of
intolerance is salutary. But in the process, the mechanisms of inequality
themselves often become invisible. As we censure marginalization, then,
we ought to remember the means by which it is produced in social life, so
as to uncover and articulate the conditions of its possibility. Our solidarity
with the victims of inequality gains credibility and efficacy when our critique
addresses not only the moral but also the material bases that sustain it.10
We are familiar with the formation that results when this element is over-
looked. Then rhetorics of victimization and compensation tend to prevail.
Under their influence, in certain parts of the developed world being on the
margin has come to mean occupying a rhetorical center. Some early ver-
Tseng 2002.1.30 18:38
sions of cultural studies that concentrated on a multitude of marginalisms

effectively institutionalized this inversion, and, while such strategies may
resolve inequality on an imaginative level, they do very little to remedy ma-
terial or political inequities. So, however progressive such paradigms were
at an earlier moment of uncovering and valorizing the experience of disad-
vantaged groups, that effect can no longer entirely compensate for the static,
even rigidifying, idealization of marginality that results from projections of
its paradoxical benefit. It would be a very restricted revolution if such a turn-
around—such a valorization of disadvantage—amounted to nothing more
than a shift of arithmetical sign, substituting plus for minus.
What is missing from these paradigms of victimization is analysis of the
epistemological opportunities and consequences of difference and of mar-
ginality. Our understanding of marginality must integrate, as deeply as it
can, the role of borders and differences in creating the conditions of possi-
bility for any understanding. This is where Certeau’s insights can be most
useful, for his focus on the ubiquity and productivity of difference urges
us beyond any paradigm of victimization, compensation, or reversal and
toward reflection upon the material and political mechanisms by which the
guilty hierarchies that mark social existence and make cultural meaning are
constructed and maintained.
Consider the relationship between two of Certeau’s analyses: his contem-
poraneous account of the May  French student uprising in The Capture
of Speech, and his  essay ‘‘The Politics of Silence: The Long March of
the Indians,’’ in Heterologies.11 The Capture of Speech foregrounds the prob-
lem of the possession (or conquest) of language, not in the psychoanalytic
sense, but in the sociopolitical one. Certeau identifies communication as
the irreducible element in the politics of modern society: Who has the effec-
tive right to speak? How is it acquired? What happens when it is inhibited
or denied? These were the questions that Certeau believed central to the
frustrations erupting in May . The problem of substantive marginal-
ization—proscriptions on communication, hence exclusion from politics,
and consequent suppression of diversity—remains a problem more than
three decades later. At that time, Certeau’s analysis brilliantly outflanked
the liberalism of the period, as it does our own even now. What he exam-
ined was not the formalism of rights (the right to speak, to vote, to publish),
which had been secured for all French citizens in long and often bloody
campaigns since the  Revolution; what concerned him, rather, was the
Tseng 2002.1.30 18:38
acquisition of political expression and its exercise in political participation.

To ‘‘communicate’’ in a modern political system requires not only the right
to speak but conditions that allow one to be heard. For the revolutionaries
of May , society seemed to function so as to inhibit their communica-
tion. No one had listened to them before their uprising. But the implications
of Certeau’s analysis went well beyond that event to foreground the simi-
lar political and social marginalization, the inferiority and silencing, of any
disadvantaged group.
An operational definition of marginalization flows from this analysis.
Marginalization results from the blockage of a group’s ability to participate
in the social exchanges that constitute a society’s politics. How these block-
ages occur is at the heart of Certeau’s analysis.While some inhibitions of this
capacity to participate are enforced by what Althusser termed the ‘‘repres-
sive apparatuses’’ of the state—and these did have to be overturned before
the formal rights of French citizens could be exercised—the more daunting
task confronting liberal societies since the French Revolution has involved
those other apparatuses that regulate social existence—Althusser’s ‘‘ideo-
logical’’ ones.12 Repression at gunpoint is clear enough, and, if you accept
the inevitable violence, it can be combated the same way. But the injuries of
contemporary racism—in modern societies decreed by no one and denied
by many—are not symmetrically contestable. (For example, white people
are not much disadvantaged by the contempt that blacks may feel for them.)
Just as the injurious practices to which one group may subject another are
maddeningly diffuse and insidious, so is the struggle against them mad-
deningly difficult to mount. Culture is exceedingly refractory. Changing
‘‘hearts and minds,’’ as the United States learned in Vietnam, is an ardu-
ous task even when one party to a conflict controls the exercise of violence.
Then too that condition will be contravened in the case of certain marginal-
ized groups, against whom both ideological and repressive apparatuses are
simultaneously deployed.
Such a conception illuminates the conditions of marginalization, inferi-
ority, and silencing that regularly (if mystifyingly) deprivilege social groups
even in the absence of any ‘‘legal’’ basis for their disqualification. The prob-
lem then turns out to be how to maintain political process in a situation of
social diversity. The notion of ‘‘communication’’ at the heart of The Capture
of Speech itself captures what is analytically knotty about marginalization in
contemporary society.With its emphasis on reciprocal exchange, it insists on
Tseng 2002.1.30 18:38
examining not the abstract realm of legal rights and claims, but the empiri-
cal and material space of a society’s effective practices, where what deter-
mines behavior is more subtle and elusive than any analysis of formal rights
can grasp. And, perhaps most significantly, it focuses attention on the dif-
fuse and seemingly immaterial realm of language, whose determinations of
social conduct are as mystifying as they are powerful.13
The situation of the Indian tribes of South America would seem to be very
different. But in ‘‘The Politics of Silence’’ Certeau shows how the notion of
communication proves effective in analyzing political contexts quite diverse
from the one that inspired his original formulation. Here he considers the
entry into politics of the tribes indigenous to a region that North Americans
would call ‘‘south of the border.’’ More than twenty years later, the news from
Chiapas indicates how prescient his analysis was. ‘‘The Politics of Silence’’
projects a mode of difference that interrogates dominant white power in
what Certeau ironically reminds us we still call ‘‘Latin’’ America.14 It is this
very power to interrogate something that does not typically question itself
that makes his argument for the Indians’ having in fact established commu-
nication and entered politics.15
In his solicitation and citation of an indigenous voice, Certeau anticipated
the concerns of postmodern anthropologists from Clifford and Marcus to
Johannes Fabian. We could reinterpret this disciplinary evolution in the
same terms as those of The Capture of Speech, with its aim of establishing the
conditions of possibility for effective communication between social groups
and cultures. The etymology of communication—related to English common
and German gemein—carries the root notion of ‘‘exchanging with.’’ Across
the borders that divide cultures in this movement at the margin, episte-
mology becomes bidirectional, such that those whom we call ‘‘the others’’
draw us toward themselves and make meanings we can neither predict nor
constrain. This is how a specific experience of marginality begins to refig-
ure the paradigm of social and cultural discourses, restoring a register of
experience that, having been made inaudible and so unavailable, became
marginalized. In L’étranger Certeau’s resonant formulation that serves as my
epigraph here (‘‘The resistance of others is the condition of our own devel-
opment [ progrès]’’) 16 projects a model of social practice and understanding.
Leaving aside liberal guilt, and thinking only of the methodological moves
these insights suggest, we could say that Certeau’s conception of commu-
nication with those ‘‘others’’ foregrounded the production of ‘‘knowledge’’
Tseng 2002.1.30 18:38
in bidirectional and mutual terms between social groups. Spivak’s question

as to whether ‘‘the subaltern’’ can ‘‘speak’’ thereby receives a practical and
emphatic answer: all of us, subaltern and guild cultural scientist alike, must
insist that she do so. This is not a matter of generosity or noblesse oblige,
because even in dominance we are victimized ourselves by our relative free-
dom to speak about those who are not free to answer. Our own discourse can
only be enabled to the extent that it enables the discourse of those who are
nominally its object. Beyond the salutary sociopolitical consequences that
our multicultural world is attempting to realize, the transfer to the ‘‘other’’
not only of the power of expression and inscription, but of power itself, has
fundamental epistemological consequences. Indeed, Certeau suggests that
these consequences be construed as the most significant motivation for the
ethics and politics implied by our practices of difference.
Thus, while every marginality remains different, our mode of awareness
and openness to the claims of whatever differs from us along any number of
dimensions can only be deepened in response to Certeau’s insights. From
this point of view, marginality would converge with critique; indeed, they be-
come alternative modes for the same set of epistemological potentials and
cultural realities. Their convergence, moreover, constitutes both a scholarly
resource and a political imperative in a world that, endowed with a certain
pessimistic common wisdom, tends to regard itself as increasingly massi-
fied, centralized, and univocal—dominated by a dominant discourse that at
times seems simply to have exhausted the field of utterance.17
Against such projections, heterology or the discipline of ‘‘the margin’’ as-
serts itself and insists that no one formulation or monothetic conceptual-
ization can ever be adequate to our complicated lives—a complication that
arises not only on account of empirical profusion or plethora, of the multi-
plicity and scattering of facts, but from an authentic and multivalent diver-
sity of interests that can never be subsumed, never be reduced, to a single
hegemony. Heterology then becomes a fundamental intellectual discipline
for a multifarious world, allowing us to relate structures of difference across
the whole range of social and cultural—but also temporal, geographic, and
even theological—differences.
A puzzle remains in the perception of Certeau’s heterology, however, as
in a wide variety of political, social, and cultural theories that seek to rectify
or refigure the silencing that defines marginalized groups. A fundamental
ethic underlies the heterological project, an uncompromising commitment
Tseng 2002.1.30 18:38
to an egalitarianism whose parameters still need to be specified. The old

(but now sadly suspect) name for this ethic was humanism—a belief in the
irreducible value of every human life and of all human experience.
With this ethical foundation, I now want to consider the epistemological

consequences of taking heterology seriously. What happens to our knowl-
edge when we attempt to ascertain and then assimilate the knowledge of
‘‘the other’’? Heterology projects an epistemological advantage onto disad-
vantage itself. It could be framed with another question: what is the privilege
of marginality?
In an effort to provide some conceptual archaeology and analysis, I would
say that we need to distinguish several senses in which the epistemologi-
cal value of ‘‘otherness’’ could be argued. The first derives directly from the
humanist ethic to which I referred a moment ago. It posits an a priori ad-
vantage to difference or diversity, analogous to the biological advantages of
species differentiation—a salutary richness in the primary material of exis-
tence. According to this view, which is held by most cultural pluralists, it
is better if many sites and sources, multiple options, prevail in any aspect of
human existence.
A distinct but related vantage point would follow from shifting the em-
phasis to the proto-critical potentiality of difference, manifested as a multi-
plicity of perspectives that decenters the authority and undermines the self-
evidence of any dominant position. Heterology deterritorializes hegemony:
it posits the indispensable founding condition for ideological critique. We
could see it potentially in the image of Montaigne’s ‘‘Cannibals’’ or Mon-
tesquieu’s ‘‘Persians,’’ posed (in accordance with their authors’ deliciously
duplicitous assumptions of naïveté) to marvel over the odd and incompre-
hensible practices of the French. What Roger Caillois termed the ‘‘sociologi-
cal revolution,’’ by which it became possible in confrontation with an other to
dishabituate oneself to, and deprivilege, one’s own ideologies and practices,
then produced a basic instrument with which to reform them.18
On this view, discourses must be regenerated by exposure to difference
if they are to remain vital. My term reform just above was meant to invoke
not only the advantages but also the limitations of the heterological pro-
cessing by which such regeneration can be imagined to occur. But we need
to look more closely at the incompleteness inherent in this formulation of
Tseng 2002.1.30 18:38
heterology. It is a shortcoming that emerges when, in the confrontation of

positions mediated by the encounter with difference, the power differen-
tial in such situations is overlooked or ignored. For paralleling—and most
often outflanking—such positional or practical engagements in terms of
logical or propositional equality is the verticality that frames them, inscrib-
ing the material superiority of the one and the corresponding subordination
of the other.
Consider the following claim from a recent study of American attitudes
toward race: ‘‘A black person’’ in the United States ‘‘cannot go very long with-
out thinking about race.’’ 19 It is obvious that we are to infer no corresponding
preoccupation with race among whites. Such asymmetries are the registers
of hierarchy. They inscribe the capacity of dominance to determine what
might seem an irresistible flow of power (exercised from the hegemonic
side) and a reciprocal preoccupation with it that runs, predictably, in the
opposite direction. Any heterology needs to be acutely aware of such effects.
Such an obligation induces us toward a projection of the heterological
that would be inflected by—and conscious of—an older model of the dialec-
tic. Such a perspective could be informed, for example, by feminist theory’s
sensitivity to negative identifications of the feminine like those observed
by Drucilla Cornell and Adam Thurschwell: ‘‘Many theorists, both feminist
and nonfeminist, have identified negativity as the feminine. Each has done
so in her or his own way, but all locate in ‘woman’ that which eludes repre-
sentation and other forms of categorical confinement.’’ 20
What does this association of difference with negativity mean? The notion
invokes twin dynamics that seem to me to be crucial in understanding how
any form of marginality, disadvantage, or divergence from some supposed
norm could produce communication (in the strong sense I have been in-
voking) and generate a politics. These dynamics are composed of an inscribed
hierarchy and a critical potential. Difference here entails not only the diversity
of perspectives to which most models appeal, but also the material power-
differentials I have been describing. As it enters the circuit of communica-
tion, ‘‘negativity’’ thus figures a perspectival displacement that we need to
understand as offset in two ways, marking differences both of position and of
power. It is this double displacement that makes heterology more than just
the study of abstract propositional heterogeneity, and specifically establishes
it as the register of material politics.
Any functioning practical, ideological, or conceptual system has a reper-
Tseng 2002.1.30 18:38
toire of elements that appear licit and admissible within it. Elements ex-
trinsic to it—heteronomous factors—then initially seem incomprehensible
or meaningless. If the process of understanding stopped at this point, we
could say that there was no process at all. For anything really meaningless
just drops out of a given social or imaginative transaction, and disappears.
The border projected in that case would then remain as uncrossable and her-
metic as some Americans would like our national borders to become. But
in real social experience, almost nothing falls into this category of absolute
and unbridgeable difference. In social existence borders are never airtight.
What cannot be immediately accommodated by or integrated to the system
appears, rather, to pose a challenge or a threat. Both working on the sys-
tem and being worked upon by it in turn, its processing continues until
some sort of negotiation, violent or peaceful, brings about its assimilation.
So ‘‘negativity’’ in this construction never figures a fixed state, nor can it
stand in static opposition to a dominant system. Instead, negativity injects
a perturbing (and potentially transforming) impulse into the system. Nega-
tivity propels systems out of logic and into history. Heteronomy is not only
the register of difference but the determinant of change.
Consequently, this second formulation of marginality’s privilege does not
simply celebrate diversity in the way that a zoo might value an increas-
ing number of species in its collection. What it does is draw attention to
the system-altering potentiality of difference, a figuration that is homolo-
gous with accounts of the effects of more traditional forms of disadvantage.
Groups formerly silenced begin to express themselves, their competing per-
spectives, and their needs or demands; dominant structures then adjust to
the demands by those they dominate. This scenario corresponds to a model
of liberal politics in which the objective is accommodation of diverse inter-
ests toward the end of reducing friction and optimizing social benefit. Opti-
mists or apologists for liberal regimes will praise the capacity of such sys-
tems to adjust to these newly expressed needs; pessimists or opponents of
the status quo will speak of Marcusean ‘‘repressive tolerance,’’ and remind
us (with cogent historical examples) that the state’s potential for violence
can always supersede its capacity for benign accommodation.
But beyond these two conceptions stands a third—and much stronger
—form of marginality’s claim to epistemological privilege. Although the
methodological roots of this final avatar have been established for nearly
two centuries, its influence on contemporary models of marginality has not
Tseng 2002.1.30 18:38
been sufficiently recognized. This is why I believe we need to reexamine

the relationship between Certeau’s heterology and Hegel’s account of the
dialectic.
In a period as reflexively anti-Hegelian as our own, proposing such a con-
vergence risks seeming a provocation. For it is true that a powerful way
of defining poststructuralisms—one with which Certeau’s work has often
been associated—is to see them as a systematic attempt to purge the mem-
ory of Hegel from methodology and representation. I believe, however, that
our blindness to Hegel’s presence in contemporary models is itself an effect
of ideological repulsion, partly of the intergenerational kind that Harold
Bloom has termed the ‘‘anxiety of influence.’’ In France the material basis for
this anxiety (or, at least, this influence) was strong. Beginning in the s,
the so-called Hegel revival involved important French figures. Between 
and , Bataille and Lacan, Queneau and Merleau-Ponty were members
of Kojève’s seminars at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes.21 Indeed, the
echoes of Kojève’s and Hyppolite’s seminars, along with those of the Phe-
nomenology of Spirit in the latter’s translation, were still so strong when I was
an undergraduate in s Paris that the buzz over them resembled what
would later occur with Lacan’s legendary seminars.
Certeau had pursued his own study of Hegel around , during the
period of his Jesuit training at the Scolasticate of Chantilly—particularly, he
had done a systematic reading of the Phenomenology in the original German.
He worked at Chantilly with Joseph Gauvin, and in later years spoke of the
extraordinary influence of this reading of Hegel upon his intellectual and
political development.22 Although there are few explicit references to Hegel
in Certeau’s published work, a deep atmospheric and conceptual filiation
links his heterological project to Hegel, particularly to the famous account
of the dialectic in the second part of the Phenomenology.
Having already suggested the need to distinguish among the several
senses in which we might understand the epistemological status of alterity
—a first that celebrates diversity while ignoring the power-differential that
inevitably marks it, a second that then reregisters this hierarchy—I want to
turn now to a third construction of marginality’s privilege. This third model
functions powerfully, if silently, within Certeau’s heterology, where it re-
capitulates a fundamental move in Hegel. Since Foucault, we have internal-
ized the power-differentials that seem inherent to any social or cultural dif-
ference.What distinguishes this third position is a startling inversion of such
Tseng 2002.1.30 18:38
differentials. Its image arises in Hegel’s analysis of consciousness and recog-

nition in the Phenomenology (particularly part B, section IV-A). We need not
accept all the details of Hegel’s analysis to see the innovation it authorizes
and, indeed, mandates.23
From the point of view of the inquiry into marginality, the essence of
Hegel’s assertion in the ‘‘Lordship and Bondage’’ section of the Phenome-
nology is this: while common sense attributes a relative impotence to the
subordinate element in any relationship defined by a power-differential,
in the practice of social life an epistemological advantage constitutively (if
counterintuitively) complements this sociopolitical inferiority. Conversely,
the position of nominal superiority occupied by the dominant party in a
social relationship entails an intrinsic handicap. These unexpected determi-
nations of any structure characterized by a social differential invert the dis-
advantage of disadvantage and make consciousness of social existence from a
position of inferiority or marginality an indispensable feature of our poten-
tial for understanding the world.24
In most accounts of the lordship and bondage (or master-slave) allegory,
the emphasis falls on the actors’ respective stakes in the symbolic combat
modeled by the dialectic; that is, their readiness (or lack thereof ) to risk
death. This risk itself figures the difference indispensable to any meaning,
which is why Hegel speaks so movingly in the preface to the Phenomenology
about knowledge’s necessary acceptance of the threat, evoking
the tremendous power [Macht] of the negative. . . . Death, if that is what
we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and
to hold fast to what is dead requires the greatest strength. . . . But the
life of Geist does not shrink from death or prevent itself from being
touched by devastation, but rather endures it and maintains itself in
it. . . . It wins its truth only when, in absolute dismemberment [Zerris-
senheit], it finds itself. Geist has this power only by looking the negative
in the face, and enduring it. This enduring the negative is the magical
power [Zauberkraft] that converts it into being.25
This evocation and promotion of the negative is very powerful. But my em-
phasis here is on a different difference. I want to look more closely at how
Hegel reconceives the link between individuals and redefines their relation-
ship within the Phenomenology’s dialectic of consciousness and recognition.
What happens is a surprising reversal of consciousness. This is the deep
Tseng 2002.1.30 18:38
secret, the startling innovation, at the heart of the dialectic here. A clear
social hierarchy would seem to determine the positions of the lord and of
the bondsman. But Hegel projects overturning it through the differential
possibility of knowledge.26
In Hegel’s allegory the lord achieves control over the bondsman through
his acceptance of the risk of death.Whatever we might think of Hegel’s myth
about the origin of such authority in their allegorical combat, its structure
corresponds to our everyday experience of power relations and domination.
We internalize such structures almost before we have the language to de-
scribe them, and we live them every moment of our lives. The existence of
these structures of domination is the point that most ordinary understand-
ings of marginality reach. Indeed, we have grown quite skillful at detecting
those determinants that enforce domination and subordination—the pat-
terns of experience that enact them and consequently map marginality as a
site of determined disadvantage. Whole narratives of victimization are writ-
ten in this key. But, in light of Certeau’s reflections upon marginality, I want
to bring Hegel’s notion of epistemological reversal into contact with Cer-
teau’s representations of subordinated individuals and groups. In Hegel, as
the dialectic proceeds, the bondsman’s subservience unexpectedly flips over
to reveal itself as the determining condition of a privilege of understand-
ing. For the bondsman—the inferior—turns out to have a gift of vision that
propels him into a position of epistemological advantage.
For Hegel, this potentiality is determined by the structure that dictates
the bondsman’s experience of subordination, and stems from the forms of
labor that social inferiority imposes upon his existence. Inferiority then be-
comes the paradoxical condition of possibility for a special form of insight.
In part VI of the Phenomenology, on self-alienated spirit, Hegel invokes a
concrete example of this sort of surprising reversal drawn from Diderot’s
Rameau’s Nephew. On the basis of insights already manifest in Diderot’s
dialogue, Hegel construes the ignominy of Rameau’s baseness as paradoxi-
cally enabling his perception of certain crucial truths concerning society and
human existence: ‘‘The shamelessness which gives utterance to this decep-
tion’’ (i.e., the content of what Geist says about itself ) ‘‘is just for that reason
the greatest truth. This kind of talk is the madness of ’’ Rameau—in other
words, it comes from and articulates a perspective that in truth is not mad
at all.27
The energy that drives this inversion, destabilizing the hierarchy that ini-
Tseng 2002.1.30 18:38
tially figures the lord’s dominance, emerges from and is based upon the
inferior position occupied by such figures as the bondsman and Rameau:
‘‘Through this rediscovery of himself by himself, the bondsman realizes that
it is precisely in his work in which he seemed to have only an alienated exis-
tence that he acquires a mind of his own.’’ 28 The bondsman, in fact, turns
out to be in much fuller contact than the lord with the world and its opposi-
tions.29 However powerfully this reversal inflects the notion of marginality,
I would hasten to add that my tracing such a pattern of inversion should not
be understood as apologizing for (still less as celebrating) domination. Nor
would I want to associate myself with some perverse nostalgie de la boue or
with the sort of ethnic chic that leads suburban white kids to become gangsta
rappas. But our task is to understand what is the case. Domination happens,
and it bears heavily on lives the world over. The move that then construes the
state of oppression or subservience—with all its undoubted and ethically
intolerable suffering—as comporting an opportunity for insight may help
us to understand the full set and breadth of human relations determined
by the reality of inequality and disadvantage. I think this is one of the most
powerful perceptions in Certeau’s heterology, particularly in his thinking
about the condition of marginality and the possibility of ‘‘communication.’’
Certeau is surely not the only thinker to have had insight into such rever-
sals. Consider, for example, a case that may seem less ethically disturbing
than those involving groups whose oppression is more brutal and brutaliz-
ing: Proust’s account of the paradoxical advantages of neurosis in A la re-
cherche du temps perdu. Neurotics suffer deeply, but their pain also functions
to create opportunity. Thus one of Proust’s physicians, clearly ventriloquiz-
ing for the author, says to the narrator’s neurotic grandmother: ‘‘You must
accept being a neurotic [une nerveuse]. You belong to that magnificent and
pitiable family which is the salt of the earth. Everything great that we have
comes from neurotics. It is they, and no one else, who found religions and
create masterpieces. The world will never know how much it owes them,
and above all how much neurotics have suffered to provide it.’’ 30
We can find versions of such an epistemology in a great number of places.
Feminist theory offers analogous models (such as ‘‘standpoint theory’’) that
argue for the singular perspective on social existence provided by women’s
consciousness, or which seek to reclaim the supposed diagnoses of ‘‘hyste-
ria’’ that have been aimed at women throughout history (particularly since
the nineteenth century) by rewriting such signifiers of marginality as an
Tseng 2002.1.30 18:38
epistemological or affective advantage.31 A similar reversal arguably occurs

in Marx’s account of the relation of Jews to the larger society—particularly
to the problem of global emancipation—in ‘‘On the Jewish Question.’’ Marx
maintains that the supposedly marginalized Jews in fact stand for (and im-
plicitly understand) everyone; that they have realized in their own conscious-
ness and identity truths, which remain veiled in the existence of the Chris-
tian majority.32 In History and Class Consciousness Lukács, following Marx,
attributes a corresponding insight to the working class that is structurally
denied to their capitalist oppressors.33 And postcolonial theory offers analo-
gous models of such reversal.34
The general paradigm for these diverse but converging reconceptualiza-
tions of disadvantage is the notion of critique as it has developed in strains
of progressive thought from German idealism to our own day. This is why
it finds such a natural home in the models we associate with contemporary
poststructuralism and in the kinds of reversal with which we have become
familiar from deconstruction. The existence, the exercise, of critique always
implies some form of perspectival externality and some perception of social
disadvantage. The power of critique arises from such disempowerment.
Now I want to conclude by bringing this perspective into contact with Cer-
teau’s own theoretical and analytical work. Heterology is the term that we
increasingly associate with his theory of social differences. But, in light of
this paradigmatic epistemological and experiential process of reversal from
Hegel on, heterology now takes a bidirectional turn. To know and to re-
spect the other is an ethical responsibility that we all bear. Recalling the
image of Certeau’s ‘‘Politics of Silence,’’ the situated knowledge of those who
are dominated turns domination inside out to constitute a site of knowl-
edge that we cannot achieve on our own.35 This limitation on our understand-
ing—in the image of the one that paradoxically constrains the domination
of dominance in Hegel’s allegory—changes the modalities of any possible
knowledge.
We could take as emblematic of this perception in Certeau’s work two linked

passages near the end of his introduction to The Mystic Fable:
The mystics . . . translated [their] situation into their texts . . . in the
social figures that dominate their discourse, those of the madman, the
Tseng 2002.1.30 18:38
child, the illiterate. It is as if, in our own day, the eponymous heroes of
knowledge were the fallen members of our society—(old people, immi-
grants, or the ‘‘village idiot,’’ who, says Simone Weil, ‘‘truly loves truth,’’
because instead of ‘‘talents’’ favored by education, he has this ‘‘genius’’
that ‘‘is nothing but the supernatural virtue of humility in the realm of
thought.’’
....
‘‘The deciphering of history,’’ as Albert Béguin was wont to say, ‘‘is re-
served for certain beings of pain and suffering.’’ One must connect
with this religious and social experience the movement that led ‘‘spiri-
tual’’ learned men and theologians toward witnesses who humbled
their competency: maids, cowherds, villagers and so on. These char-
acters, real or fictitious, were like pilgrimages to an alternative ‘‘illu-
mination.’’ . . . These intellectual converts to ‘‘barbarism’’ testify to the
disarray of their knowledge confronted with the misfortune that had
stricken a system of reference.36
The integration of two linked factors already evoked in my discussion is
what makes Certeau’s heterology a powerful model of marginality, analyti-
cally richer than many others. The first factor is the bidirectionality of com-
munication that can function, he argues, even in situations of subordination
or oppression. He recovers unexpected resonances of effectiveness in even
the powerless.37 At the model’s ethical and political center, this structure in-
scribes an injunction to look for capability on the margins, where ordinarily
ideology suggests we will find only dependency and subservience. Second,
Certeau’s heterology makes the potential reversal of epistemological privi-
lege a fundamental methodological principle based upon the very existence
of subordination. This element at the heart of his theory reanimates the con-
ception of difference, which heterology conceives not in some static sim-
plicity, but rather as including within itself all the ambiguity and complexity
of social life—and all its intrinsic propensity for change.
We need others for many reasons. However, in the quasi-Hegelian—or
the deeply Christian—move that, in my interpretation of Certeau’s work,
powerfully extends the force and scope of heterological understanding, what
comes to light is the theory of an inadequacy that makes the other’s knowl-
edge not just an indispensable complement to, but a constitutive metadis-
course of, our own. The sorts of ties that bind human individuals and groups
Tseng 2002.1.30 18:38
are deepened and complicated in such an epistemological extremity as a re-

sult of the combined opportunity and necessity of extending the grasp of
our knowledge through authentically honoring the knowledge of others. If
heterology is situated by this primordial reversal as the most general form
of any epistemology, then all social knowledge is enabled from the margin,
and all understanding arises in difference—not only in the abstract sense
that I suggested at the beginning of this essay, but as a consequence of the
privileged comprehension that can arise in any situation of social inferi-
ority, exclusion, or disadvantage. Such situations of inequality and margin-
alization lamentably define our existence. Thinking alone cannot conjure
them away. But in the face of these imperfections, Certeau’s insights about
alterity join with his luminous humanism to provide a powerful model for
conceiving social relationships in an increasingly diverse and differential
world.
Notes
This article was published in French as ‘‘La marginalité de Michel de Certeau’’ in Rue Descartes,
no.  ().
 Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York, ), xxvi–
xxviiii; quotation from xxv.
 See Luce Giard’s ‘‘Biobibliographie,’’ in Michel de Certeau: Cahiers pour un temps, ed. Luce
Giard (Paris, ), –, esp. .
 Certeau had been a candidate for appointment to the Cinquième section of the Ecole Pra-
tique des Hautes Etudes, which specializes in religious studies. Predictably, its anticlerical
faculty opposed him, but so did the clerically inclined because of his heterodox position
within the church. Consequently his candidacy failed completely (Jacques Le Brun, per-
sonal communication).
 When Certeau came to the United States, his visa had to be renewed annually for him to
be permitted to work. The Immigration and Naturalization Service summoned him for
what the bureaucracy terms an examination of his immigration status. His association
with the French Socialist Party was no help in those Reagan/cold war years. When the INS
threatened to cancel Certeau’s visa, it took strenuous efforts by university colleagues and
officials to get it renewed and his status regularized. In , François Mitterrand became
president of France, and the French academy got some new blood at the top; and in ,
Certeau was elected as a directeur d’études at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes and returned
to Paris—unfortunately, just a year and a half before he died.
 In connection with the determined difficulty of Certeau’s writing, there is a history to be
written of his work’s reception. For my own short attempt at one, see ‘‘Michel de Certeau,’’
in the Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought, ed. Lawrence Kritzman (New
York, in press).
Tseng 2002.1.30 18:38
 On Certeau’s adoption of this term, see Luce Giard, ‘‘Mystique et politique,’’ in Luce Giard,
Jacques Revel, and Hervé Martin, Histoire, mystique et politique: Michel de Certeau (Gre-
noble, ), –, esp. .
 Michel de Certeau, Culture in the Plural, ed. Luce Giard, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis,
 []), ; translation and emphasis mine.
 See Spivak’s interview with Elizabeth Grosz, ‘‘Criticism, Feminism, and the Institution,’’
in The Post-Colonial Critic. Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
ed. Sarah Harasym (New York, ), –, esp. . Tan See Kam, in ‘‘Making Space for
Heterologies: De Certeau’s Links with Post-Colonial Criticisms,’’ Social Semiotics (a spe-
cial issue on Certeau edited by Ian Buchanan)  (): –, rightly points out that
what Spivak terms ‘‘strategic’’ Certeau calls ‘‘tactical’’ () in The Practice of Everyday Life.
 See Traveling Theory, Traveling Theorists, ed. James Clifford and Vivek Dhareshwar; a spe-
cial issue of Inscriptions  ().
 In this regard, we might fruitfully look again at Albert Memmi’s classic, brilliant account
of one register of such socially imposed exclusion in Le racisme (Paris, ). Memmi’s
courageous and insightful discussion is remarkable for its treatment of the benefits de-
rived by racists from their bigotry. In eschewing the false and facile idealism of purely
ethical conceptions, Memmi’s analysis demonstrates how racism performs, how it pays off
for those who practice it, and his concept of ‘‘heterophobia’’ could be useful for under-
standing the ubiquity and persistence of marginalizing ideologies and practices the world
over. See Albert Memmi, Racism, trans. Steve Martinot (Minneapolis, ).
 Michel de Certeau, ‘‘May ,’’ part  of The Capture of Speech, ed. Luce Giard, trans.
Tom Conley (Minneapolis, ), –; and ‘‘The Politics of Silence: The Long March of
the Indians,’’ in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis,
), –.
 See Louis Althusser, ‘‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an In-
vestigation),’’ in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York,
 []), –. Certeau always used ideological in a much more restricted sense
than Althusser’s. I consider modern society’s passage from repressive to ideological deter-
minations of disadvantage in Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, ),
–.
 Here, Certeau’s ‘‘communication’’ converges with Habermas’s ‘‘ideal speech situation.’’
For a reference to Habermas in Capture of Speech, see chap. , ‘‘A Necessary Music,’’ –
, esp. .
 Certeau, ‘‘Politics of Silence,’’ .
 We might think that in writing about (and seemingly for) the Indians here, Certeau (per-
haps unwittingly) assumes a position of paternalistic hegemony that only displaces, in
a more benign direction, the ongoing political domination of the Indians by the descen-
dants of Europeans. For Certeau wrote his essay in French, and it appeared initially in Le
monde, the most highbrow of Paris newspapers. But as the headnote to its translation in
Heterologies reminds (and as Giard’s preface to La prise de parole elaborates), ‘‘The Politics
of Silence’’ had been written as a postface to a collection of political texts, manifestos by
and for the Indians of Mexico, Colombia, Panama, Venezuela, and other Central or South
Tseng 2002.1.30 18:38
American countries. Indeed, the very texture of Certeau’s essay, beginning with a long ex-
tract from one of these manifestos and quoting them throughout ‘‘The Politics of Silence,’’
at least complicates the issue of hegemonic voicing in the space of a politics defined both
by the Indians’ confrontation with the dominant power in their own countries and by its
resonances in the developed West. The texts in this collection were published by the Asso-
ciation pour la Diffusion de L’information sur l’Amérique Latine, of which Certeau was a
cofounder (see Prise de parole, ). The reference in the essay’s title to the classic and most
consequential instance of a nonwhite people’s seizure of power from white Westerners—
the Chinese Revolution—suffices to suggest that Certeau recognized the ideological and
political complications of Western solidarity with the Indian struggles.
 Michel de Certeau, L’étranger; ou, L’union dans la différence (Paris, ), .
 This is why it is so important to recover the manifold modes whereby Certeau, in one of
his most fundamental insights, demonstrated this reality’s secret, internal multivalence;
its non-self-identity; and consequently its rich potential. The complex of marginal ex-
periences that he and his colleagues brought to light in The Practice of Everyday Life, for
example, revealed in their variety and rich positivity forms of practice that a number of
analyses, from Max Weber to the Frankfurt school, had consigned to a dead and uncom-
municative absence.
 Roger Caillois, Preface to Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Oeuvres complètes,
 vols., ed. Roger Caillois (Paris, –), :.
 David K. Shipler, A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America (New York, );
as quoted by K. Anthony Appiah in his review, New York Times Book Review,  November
, .
 Drucilla Cornell and Adam Thurschwell, ‘‘Feminism, Negativity, Subjectivity,’’ in Femi-
nism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (Min-
neapolis, ), –; quotation from .
 See Michael S. Roth in the appendix to his Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel
in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca, ). On the general phenomenon of Hegel’s influ-
ence over French thought since the s, see Judith P. Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian
Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York, ). The major figures of the ‘‘Hegel
revival’’ (Jean Hippolite, Alexandre Kojève, Alexandre Koyré, and Eric Weil) have all now
been widely studied and/or translated into English.
 See Giard, ‘‘Biobibliographie,’’ . Some of this material is based on personal communi-
cations from Certeau during his time in California. Giard has provided the most thought-
ful reflections on Hegel’s importance for Certeau; see ‘‘Mystique et politique,’’ esp. –.
Giard (Certeau’s literary executor and closest collaborator during the last fifteen years of
his life) termed him ‘‘the most Hegelian of Gauvin’s students.’’ In speaking of Hegel’s
‘‘decisive role’’ in Certeau’s intellectual development, she also refers to the ‘‘structuring
presence’’ of Hegel’s thought in Certeau’s work.
 It has become a commonplace that the French ‘‘Hegel revival’’ of the s and after
tended to focus selectively on certain aspects of Hegel’s work (notably, the ‘‘master-slave
dialectic’’) to the exclusion (or at least the minimization) of other strands. Even though
Certeau read Hegel in German during the s, his reading was inevitably inflected by
Tseng 2002.1.30 18:38
the modes of understanding that prevailed in France then, reflecting the cultural prestige
of the interpretations stemming from Kojève and Hyppolite in particular. This ‘‘French
Hegel’’ is still Hegel. It would be a mistake to reject or ‘‘other’’ it.
 Among many other discussions relevant to this point, see, most recently, Fredric
Jameson, ‘‘Marxism and Postmodernism,’’ in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the
Postmodern, – (London, ), –, esp. .
 G. W. F. Hegel, ‘‘Preface,’’ in Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford, 
[]), ; translation modified.
 On the reversal in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, see Fredric Jameson, ‘‘Transformations
of the Image in Postmodernity,’’ in The Cultural Turn, –, esp. .
 Hegel, Phenomenology, .
 Ibid., –; translation modified.
 On this point, see Christopher Gosden, Social Being and Time (Oxford, ), –.
 Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu,  vols., ed. Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris,  [–
]), :.
 On ‘‘standpoint theory,’’ see especially Feminism and Science, ed. Evelyn Fox Keller and
Helen E. Longino (Oxford, ), in particular Sandra Harding, ‘‘Rethinking Standpoint
Epistemology,’’ –; Donna Haraway, ‘‘Situated Knowledges,’’ –; and Helen
Longino, ‘‘Subjects, Power, and Knowledge: Description and Prescription in Feminist Phi-
losophies of Science,’’ –. Harding’s essay is particularly apposite to my concerns
here, as when she writes: ‘‘The standpoint epistemologists . . . have claimed to provide a
fundamental map [for analysis]: ‘start thought from marginalized lives’ and ‘take everyday
life as problematic’ ’’ (). These two tenets converge with those that we might conceive
as the overarching program for Certeau’s theoretical and analytic work.
For a feminist rewriting of ‘‘hysteria’’ in terms of epistemological privilege, see Jane
Gallop, ‘‘Keys to Dora,’’ in In Dora’s Case: Freud—Hysteria—Feminism, ed. Charles Bern-
heimer and Claire Kahane (New York, ), –. Gallop considers the volume by
Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Min-
neapolis,  []), which raises the question of whether the female hysteric is a victim
or, rather, a heroine. Gallop’s (and Clément’s) point is that Freud’s Dora does not just give
in to hysteria but makes visible, and herself ‘‘sees,’’ the rejection of bodies and the con-
sequent humiliation traditionally inflicted upon women. I am grateful to Julia Simon for
the reference to Gallop’s work.
 Karl Marx, ‘‘On the Jewish Question,’’ in Karl Marx: Early Writings, ed. T. B. Bottomore
(New York, ), –, esp. . The question of the rhetoric and diction in this text
is controversial. At times Marx has been read as overtly anti-Semitic here. But I read his
seemingly repugnant statements about the Jews as inflected by a powerful sarcasm and
by the trope of projecting from out of general consciousness an archetypal ‘‘Jew,’’ which
it is the function of Marx’s writing not to reinforce, but rather to undermine with irony.
For a recent example of this antiphrastic trope, see Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger et ‘‘les
juifs’’ (Paris, ).
 See Georg Lukács, ‘‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,’’ in History and
Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingston (Cambridge,
Tseng 2002.1.30 18:38
MA,  []), –, esp. : ‘‘This same reality deploys the motor of class interests
to keep the bourgeoisie imprisoned within this immediacy while forcing the proletariat
to go beyond it. . . . For the proletariat to become aware of the dialectical nature of its
existence is a matter of life and death’’; see also .
 See, for example, C. L. R. James, ‘‘The Black Jacobins,’’ in The C. L. R. James Reader, ed.
Anna Grimshaw (Oxford, ), –, particularly the brilliant speech James composed
for his protagonist, Toussaint L’Ouverture (); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth,
trans. Constance Farrington (New York,  []); or Bill Ashcrost, Gareth Griffiths,
and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures
(London, ).
 Luce Giard, developing what she believes is the fundamental bearing of Certeau’s own
work, puts it this way: ‘‘The presence of the other, of the multiplicity of others, sustains
the requirement of radicality, for no one can conduct the elucidation of meaning alone;
the contribution of critique, the diversity of perspectives and the difference of positions
held by others are indispensable: ‘Communication is necessary for the recognition of radi-
cality.’ ’’ In ‘‘Mystique et politique, ou l’institution comme objet second,’’ in Histoire, mys-
tique et politique, ed. Luce Giard and Pierre-Jean Labarrière (Paris: Jérome Millon, ),
–; quotation from . Giard’s concluding citation is drawn from Certeau, Le christia-
nisme éclaté (Paris: Seuil, ), .
 Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, vol. : The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans.
Michael B. Smith (Chicago,  []), – and .
 To many of Certeau’s readers these will seem analogous to the surprising depths and
complexities that in The Practice of Everyday Life he and his collaborators discovered in
seemingly banal quotidian usages.
Tseng 2002.1.30 18:38

The Marginality of Michel de Certeau

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The Marginality of Michel de Certeau

The resistance of others is the condition of our own

O ut of the endless and overwhelming ﬂux, we

The South Atlantic Quarterly :, Spring .

400 Richard Terdiman

for the historical and interpretive sensibility. In contemporary understand-

The Marginality of Certeau 401

in heterology, in what might be called the constancy of diﬀerence or the

In Certeau’s representations, things always appear intricately modulated,

402 Richard Terdiman

The Marginality of Certeau 403

are invariably site- and time-sensitive. So, as a disadvantaged group seeks

404 Richard Terdiman

sions of cultural studies that concentrated on a multitude of marginalisms

The Marginality of Certeau 405

acquisition of political expression and its exercise in political participation.

406 Richard Terdiman

The Marginality of Certeau 407

in bidirectional and mutual terms between social groups. Spivak’s question

408 Richard Terdiman

to an egalitarianism whose parameters still need to be speciﬁed. The old

With this ethical foundation, I now want to consider the epistemological

The Marginality of Certeau 409

heterology. It is a shortcoming that emerges when, in the confrontation of

410 Richard Terdiman

The Marginality of Certeau 411

been suﬃciently recognized. This is why I believe we need to reexamine

412 Richard Terdiman

diﬀerentials. Its image arises in Hegel’s analysis of consciousness and recog-

The Marginality of Certeau 413

414 Richard Terdiman

The Marginality of Certeau 415

epistemological or aﬀective advantage.31 A similar reversal arguably occurs

We could take as emblematic of this perception in Certeau’s work two linked

416 Richard Terdiman

The Marginality of Certeau 417

are deepened and complicated in such an epistemological extremity as a re-

418 Richard Terdiman

The Marginality of Certeau 419

420 Richard Terdiman

The Marginality of Certeau 421

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