Jae Emerling (JE): All of us at the Journal of Visual Culture have been celebrating the 20th anniversary of the journal’s founding as well as the critical, experimental, and courageous work it has had the honor of publishing over these two decades. As part of these celebratory events it is a sincere honor to sit down with you for a dialogue about your work, a body of work that for many of us has long been a point on the horizon, encouraging and challenging us to think alterity, ethics, temporality, and our own decolonial politics of resistance anew. For all of us at the journal you are an exemplary scholar whose work so gracefully wends between socio-political and aesthetic concerns. You embody the key aspects of the Stuart Hall quotation that we have long been motivated and tested by, the one we keep at the top of our website: ‘We must mobilise everything [we] can find in terms of intellectual resources in order to understand what keeps making the lives we live and the societies we live in profoundly and deeply anti-humane’. So from all of us at the Journal of Visual Culture, our sincere thanks and admiration.
Homi K. Bhabha (HKB): Thank you. I knew Stuart very well, personally. In the early years before I came to the United States I knew him very well. But I did not have the experiences others had with him at the Birmingham Centre as I never studied there. But we became close friends. We did several things together including events where we looked at England as a laboratory to examine its own cultural, ethnic, and economic fissures, to acknowledge its new emergent communities, to ask questions of race and security (and insecurity). Mostly I remember several dinners at his house, with him and his family. I felt very close to him.
JE: I would like to begin by relating a comment I read many years ago. It was in an interview you gave in the early 1990s and in it you mention that when you were younger you hoped to become a poet. I have always remembered that comment. Not only because I shared that desire, but because this linguistic–durational–affective desire has always been part of your written work. Do you think this early desire made you more open to the aesthetic and epistemic nuances of others’ written and visual texts as a critic and scholar?
HKB: That is kind of you to say. I hope I am an attentive reader. But my love for poetry – and I don’t persuade myself that I am a poet and, in fact, I was dissuaded of that when I was in college in Bombay – has set me a challenge. And this challenge is that however conceptually adventurous or innovative you want to be, you have to find the language that does not merely carry the meaning or the idea, but the language which is shaped by the idea and reaches beyond it. So in a sense I am always interested in developing a theoretical concept but I am, at the same time, thinking of its tropic possibilities and capabilities. Which is why I can sit down and sketch out an argument and people will say ‘yes, you have the argument, why don’t you just write it?’ And I will say that ‘well, I have to find the timbre, the odd music that needs to happen in my head. I haven’t found it yet.’ So that’s why there are these leitmotifs or even choric soundings in the work.
JE: This explains, in part, how you use quotations in your work. Whether it is Claudia Rankine or whomever, you do not just cite such work to illustrate your point, but rather it has its own standing within your text. Its own signifying autonomy. As such, they create other lines of possibility, nuance, and allusion within your lines, amidst your voice.
HKB: It is precisely because of that kind of thing that Claudia and I are now working on a possible film. So I have been writing stuff with her and discussing images. But you’ve said something quite important, it is because this poetic trope lives within the concept of the idea. It is that poetic trope that allows me to move from song to theory, from art to a certain philosophical idea, because I am not interested simply in the analytics or hermeneutics of the object, I am interested in something that attaches to it or some accident and yet fortuitous swerve that it creates.
JE: I would like to ask about the first chapter of The Location of Culture (1994): ‘the commitment to theory’. My own work, as well as that of my closest colleagues, such as Kamini Vellodi with whom I am editing a collection of essays about the ‘afterlife’ of theory in the discipline of Art History, remain ‘committed’ to theory, meaning that the event of post-structuralist thought in the 1960s remains a potentiality for us. We refuse to limit our engagement with theory to the insights and limitations of an earlier generation of English-speaking scholars in a variety of fields who interpreted and utilized the work of Derrida, Foucault, Irigarary, Barthes, Spivak, Deleuze and Guattari, etc. For us, this simply does not exhaust the scope and creative–clinical ideas at play in this body of work. Thus, we are interested in the durational temporalities that these theories create, even if this means that we must betray the now iconic or hypostasized renderings of them. The ‘commitment’, then, is to the afterlife of theory itself, that is, to an open field comprised of past–future events transmitting unforeseen, unimaginable modes of criticism, aesthetic and historiographic insight, and even modes of cultural resistance. I apologize for the long exordium on this question. My point is to ask you about the role of theory in the development of your own critical practice as well as your continued commitment to it.
HKB: Absolutely, there is a futural promise to theory. I don’t even want to date theory. I am committed to conceptual and theoretical ways of thinking more than I am committed to a particular school of theory. Possibly it is a quirk in my head that to me the theoretical moment in my encounter with a painting or a text or even in a conversation like ours, is the moment where I feel that I am in a space of untranslatability, a moment of a certain kind of stasis. And that is the moment where I don’t know what is stopping me from moving either forwards or backwards. It is this kind of break that really brings the fragility of the now in which I am writing – and the anxiety of that now – to form. I know that this is not simply an existential breakdown, but there is an element of this because there is some object that obscures my vision, which is being articulated by what I am trying to work with. I always need to locate a problem that I really want to commit to or explore. For me, the theoretical enterprise is, in a way, psychoanalytically, a sense of trying to work through your own fantasies of expertise, your own narcissism, your own sense of power precisely at the point at which you have a power outage. Then you know that you are up against it.
JE: Precisely. Because thinking only takes place when faced with a problematic, only when one senses the unthinkable. One thinks within a limit-threshold of what is impossible, unthinkable. Thinking is never reflection or contemplation or readymade communication. I am immediately reminded of a quotation that I keep on a postcard at my desk from Walter Benjamin (1978[1932]: 14) that reads:
Probably one will never become a master of anything in which he [sic] has not known impotence, and whoever concurs in that will also know that this impotence does not lie at the outset or before all endeavor with respect to the matter, but rather at its center.
HKB: Yes! The real commitment to theory is to think at that limit. That is, for me, the real commitment and compulsion to theory. Somehow our modes of teaching and thinking and writing have become much more expository, descriptive, and exegetical. In some ways much more journalistic. There are many eminent scholars who want to write things for a more public audience. But there are also things they cannot do with that audience. The university doesn’t encourage you do theory because of its desire for what has been termed the ‘public facing humanities’. This is a desire, in my view, that derives from a panic that we are not getting enough students concentrating in the humanities. Thus, the university asks us to cultivate another voice. I am all for cultivating other voices, but I do it through the poetic, through a kind of theoretical poetics. But there are people who feel that it has to be done in a much more descriptive way.
I have often been asked: ‘why do you start off with a Levinasian idea, then you turn it to your own thing, and then you take a thing from Derrida and translate it into something else?’ But, for me, this is one version of theoretical work. A good version of it. But, then they would say: ‘Are you not a Derridean?’ ‘Are you not a this or that?’ These were good dinner-time or seminar conversations. But it shares with the new moralism we are facing socially and culturally a disavowal of the complexities of what it means to interpret. How do your values enter into the interpretational process? So it seems very often that comments of the kind you mention, like when you encountered opposition to working with a thinker like Hannah Arendt because of her misreading of revolutionary politics in the 1960s or the plight of the Palestinians, they are made when the work is read simply for opinion, the way you might read a newspaper columnist. But serious, thoughtful, cultural, philosophical, social, aesthetic work is absolutely not about opinion. You cannot induce opinions out of it.
For example, I have been very involved in working with the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on the recent Philip Guston retrospective. One point of contention was that the hooded figures in some of the paintings must be seen simply as images of racism or as racist images that are then ‘inappropriate’ to put in a public art institution at this time. Well, once you start thinking like that, without understanding the history of Guston’s work, without understanding the iconography, without understanding that certain shapes have their own stories linked with the Ku Klux Klan but that also go beyond it, without understanding that when the artist does a studio painting with a hood this is not a kind of mirror face, rather, it is him saying that if you don’t stop this [racism] then it will get into the finest artist studio. Just like it got into Heidegger’s rectorship or into Furtwängler. But the problem is that this simple mirror reading of hooded figures equals racism is presented and received as a very sophisticated reading. It is at this moment that you begin to say to yourself something so banal and stupid like just because somebody drew a hood you can’t say that that is the Ku Klux Klan and the fact that he drew it makes this triangular shape a racist symbol. It is a signifier aimed at revealing racial, psychic, and aesthetic problems. This is a real problem of interpretation. This is what is happening so often now. That works of art and culture are being interpreted either in relation to opinion, particularly in relation to current opinion; or we are going back to a kind of biography-based interpretation that lacks all nuance. It is deeply proscriptive on very personal terms. It is personal proscriptivism. And that’s why I think it is our job to teach how to interpret and to learn from the current moment. How to do the work of interpretation because if we are stopped from doing it then we might as well go home. But also because traumatic racism finds its most telling representational expression in the vivid urgency of the arts – in image, language, and movement – those very forms of life and language that depend on ‘vividness’ of embodied meanings and their phenomenological performance.
II
JE: You have written brilliantly about the complex histories and practices of systemic racism as they traverse all aspects of our lives. In the light of recent traumatic acts of racism and state-abetted violence, which you have written about with real urgency and insight as violent, iterative, interruptive, and erratic, you have posited a concept of ‘vividness’ (see Bhabha, 2021a, 2021b). A concept that pivots on both a Fanonian ‘violence of vividness’ as well as modes of resistance to this violence that the arts (‘the vivid urgency of the arts’ in your words above) can render visible, interrogate, and perhaps supplement with other possibilities. Could you discuss the continued importance of Fanon’s work for every and all efforts to comprehend and enact decolonization? His complex call for a ‘new humanism’? You frame decolonization as a performative, epistemic, aesthetic, ethical, and institutional event. So, if you would, could you share your understanding of Fanon’s (1968: 145) quite complex call to resistance from The Wretched of the Earth as summarized in the line: ‘each generation must discover its mission, fulfill or betray it, in relative opacity’?
HKB: I am fascinated by a statement by Fanon when he says that if nationalism doesn’t very quickly deepen itself by turning to humanism, then all is lost and the government buildings and the flags mean nothing because they do not belong to the people. So I am beginning to think: what is humanism for Fanon? Because five pages before the statement I just referred to is found, he talks about the necessity of armed warfare, etc. So then I started thinking about that moment in which he spoke it. I need to answer this question by looking at the influence of mental illness and psychiatry as his angle on the start of a new humanism. Because, do not forget, there is a moment in ‘Colonial Violence and Mental Disorders’, I think, where he says this is not only a pathology of the mind, this racism, this colonialism, it is a pathology of atmosphere and that is what I will be focusing on.
I want to pursue this complex notion of a ‘new humanism’ (Bhabha, 2004: xiii–xvii). In a less theorized way, which was always his mode I think, and in a more philological way, Edward Said’s last book also calls for a humanism. Du Bois saw a form of humanism, but for him it was the acceptance of double-consciousness: ‘on one hand, I am a race man; on the other, I love Wagner’. That problem. And then in James Baldwin there is what he calls ‘the human trouble’. And he says something very interesting there, how do we deal with this human trouble? Yes, he is talking about race, but race is a telescope to talk about what he considers to be the great insecurities of American history, i.e. white Americans do not want to look at me, they want to look at all sorts of images, but not me. And they do not want to look at me because they are afraid of death. Not because I am a Black terrorist and I will kill them. They are just afraid of death. So, for him, to get out of the human trouble, requires also a kind a humanism. He says that we have to achieve our nation in an anticipatory sense but in order to do so we have to earn our death. So there are four different notions of how race, the nation, and this sustaining humanism, which is not human rights, can be created.
This is the project that I am working on now. In all of these writers that I mention, humanism is not only a set of ideas about human rights, human representation, etc., but it is also a particular form of enunciation. A very particular form of discourse. I am thinking about the last chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, where there is this call to the Third World, but it is not only made against the violence of Europe. It is also mediated through what is not yet lost (an ontology of freedom) and how to respond to it; what is being lost creates the agency. I am very interested in this kind of humanism where there is this calling to the Third World while having, through that, a mediated triangular conversation with Europe. This is very close to Emmanuel Lévinas’ (2001 [1995]) ethics of proximity.
JE: As you were laying out your project, I was reminded of Fanon’s great line: ‘words have a charge’ (Macey, 2000: 159). In fact, it has always been evident to me that only an oversimplified reading of Fanon would mistake in his calls for instrumental violence an implication that any decolonized peoples would automatically, and by default, become exemplars of a ‘new humanism’. Fanon is simply too intelligent for such a reading. Instead, we return to the complex ‘psycho-affective realm’ that always fascinated him, a sphere constructed and expressed through language, discourse, action, and narrative. Your explication of this ‘psycho-affective sphere’ is so insightful that I’d like to read it quickly here:
the psycho-affective realm, which is neither subjective nor objective, but a place of social and psychic mediation and, furthermore, it is a realm of the body, dreams, psychic inversions and displacements, phantasmatic political identifications. A psycho-affective relation or response has the semblance of universality and timelessness because it involves the emotions, the imagination or psychic life, but it is only ever mobilized into social meaning and historical effect through an embodied and embedded action, an engagement with (or resistance to) a given reality, or a performance of agency in the present tense. (Bhabha, 2004: xix)
Thus, the linguistic or discursive ‘charge’ Fanon implies is at once electro-magnetic – magnetizing bodies, identities, interpellations – in the present, but it is also, through and as language, within a psycho-affective sphere, attracting and materializing elements from the past that we have not been aware of before, the ‘as-yet unlived’ in Benjamin’s terms.
HKB: Yes, there is also in your understanding of this notion of the charge as an electric-affective thing a charge that brings a group together, that makes a kind of community, a constituency. But, by making the constituency, it is also laying, in the legal sense, a charge. It is to some extent putting Europe in the witness box, but it is not arresting Europe. It is not stopping Europe. That’s why he says there are many things we learned from Europe. But, if all we can do is imitate it, then all is lost. We are lost. Fanon clearly states that if all you want in Africa is a new Europe, then do not look at me. This is the psychoanalytic distinction between imitating and identifying.
JE: There is also a distinction in psychoanalysis between what Jacques Lacan calls the ‘hysteric’s discourse’ and the passage to the act (the transformative psychoanalytic event itself). Meaning, if a therapist can hystericize a patient – get a patient to say ‘you don’t know what you are talking about? what do you know?’ – then real change is possible. Fanon hystericizes Europe very quickly. The response is hysterical: ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about? We civilized the Third World, etc.’ But the real end is not just these hysterical words and charges, it is the passage to the act, the proleptic one, that was there in the past, that comes up in another, completely unexpected, future context or situation, when you least need it or expect it.
HKB: Yes. Exactly. It is a proleptic event. This is why I said that there is a triangulation or thirdness in Fanon. A thirdness in Fanon which is not quite there in Said. In Baldwin you have it.
JE: This thirdness is an ethical risk.
HKB: Yes. And the other thing with Lévinas, especially in his late essay ‘Peace and Proximity’ (2001 [1995]), he gives a list of things like ‘how can Europe claim anything of the Enlightenment’, etc. Then he creates a kind of negative version of the face-to-face encounter by saying that Europe must confront Europe. So it’s a different kind of risk to Europe because between these two faces there is no reciprocity, no recognition. There is only having to take a risk. In the sense of openness, exposure. This question of risk is very important to me. It is what I am developing in my latest projects. Baldwin is all about taking the risk. For those who have the least must take the greatest risk.
JE: This is why neoliberalism attempts to render us all insurance agents trained to mitigate every ethical risk.
III
JE: You have also written forcefully about the continued role of the humanities in 21st-century scholarship and education. I discern some of these pedagogical concerns intersecting with your more explicitly political insights. For instance, in ‘The Fragility of Democracy: Now Everywhere and Anywhere’, which appeared in Critical Inquiry in 2021 (Bhabha, 2021b), you wager that ‘to arrive at the truth is as much duration as destination: a process of arguing, reflecting and judging on the grounds of evidence, facts, interpretations, and interventions’. As such, ‘self-doubt and epistemic uncertainty are essential parts of the process.’ This wager equally applies to an education in the humanities (or even the post-humanities as it is being redefined), which includes Visual Culture Studies and the arts in general. In taking our educational and political–ethical experience as inextricably linked, what do you see as our responsibilities as university professors, artists, writers, critics, and scholars? I think we share an interest in refusing to deny the necessity of nuance, complexity, constructive ambivalence, and intensified experience in the act of teaching as well as in our socio-political negotiations with others. Are ideas such as ‘nuance’ or ‘unpreparedness’ valid ones to read across your concerns for university education and your socio-political interventions?
HKB: Yes, the notion of ethical risk no longer exists within it. We claim to want ‘safe spaces’ now, not risk. These safe spaces are not free of traumatic experiences because they are created as refuges from trauma, and are therefore constituted in relation to it. Indeed these spaces should be ones in which the traumatized life is ‘worked through’ by creating alliances with others in similar situations, or proximate to the experience in some way, in order to find both solidarity and solace. It is important, I think, to consider a safe space to be one which is open to all those in a community who are opposed to tolerating the existence of ‘unsafe spaces’ that threaten the security – psychic, physical, political – of any member of the public. Thus the discussions of ‘trigger warnings’, etc. I must say, however, that my students have been remarkable. That is partly because I have chosen, and my preference is, to teach seminars, not to teach large lecture courses. In those moments I am really able to take some risks. My aim is to make my students understand that these are ethical risks and not risks against someone’s sense of self or perception.
JE: This may be because in a seminar one can create a collective that did not exist before. The idea of a group of individuals working with a shared subject – differentiation and tolerance as the ethical risk of pedagogy for all involved. Whereas lecture courses have become a public address that extends beyond the members of class. But an audience is neither a community nor a collective.
HKB: For example, whenever I teach Baldwin or Fanon, or others, and if there is the so-called n-word then I always offer a choice. I say that this is not something written by a Ku Klux Klansman and the particular sentences depend for their efficacy on these words. These were chosen words. Chosen words that were used and then reversed in their intention. There is a double signification. I then ask: ‘do you want the word read or not?’ And I have to say I have had only one student, once, who said no. So I am really thinking now about how to redefine thought and pedagogy, which is so policed. But without the pedagogy of policing being really explored other than x might upset y, this might upset that, which all hinges on this notion of belonging and safety. Many people went to university or college because they were tired of belonging and they wanted to re-belong elsewhere. I really wonder what will happen. For example, with Art History, if before you finish your lecture you hear complaints about what you are presenting, then what are we to do?
JE: The university seems invested in avoidance, which is presented under the watchword ‘other options’ for students who claim to have some objection to working with challenging subject matter. But, even among my students, the majority of them remain and work with the material. In large part because, as you mentioned, they acknowledge that their worldview can be widened and one reason they are sitting in their seat is that they want to be challenged, to be forced to think and experiment beyond their own lived experience.
HKB: Exactly. I have been teaching a first-year seminar recently and whenever I propose reading something they say ‘yes’ even though clearly they are not aware of aboriginal practices or the memoir of a colonial housewife, but they express an openness to these experiences that fall far outside of their own.
IV
JE: Let us try to diagram this ‘new moralism’ as you phrased it a bit more. A new moralism that wields opinion and lived experience seemingly above working with alterity. Would you argue a distinction between new moralism (e.g. cancel culture) and ethics? Perhaps this extends our discussion of the contending definitions and interpretations of Fanon’s ‘words have a charge’.
HKB: This new moralism is a conviction of literalness. There is no nuance allowed. Words have power and affect (to hurt, to belittle, as in demeaning racist language). There is a desire to censor, end, silence this type of language. But censorious language is itself ‘charged’ and thus dangerous, explosive, hurtful, uneducated even. But this is done in the name of repression because within the illogic of silence, of the canceling, language and the thought/act disappear as well.
JE: Is there any example of culture based on a complete avoidance of being offended, challenged, upset, triggered, forced to think and speak otherwise? This new moralism is abetted by social media, by opinion (doxa as in a new orthodoxy) rather than knowledge or thought, let alone ethical risk. For us to counter this new moralism we must redress the question of interpretation, of dissensus. Because this new moralism is tied, for me, pedagogically to the consumerism of other end-driven demands: e.g. explain Sartre in three minutes, consumable/searchable simplified versions of complex issues and histories. Political piety and end-driven readings of both right and left comprise this new moralism.
HKB: Precisely, end-driven reading is extractive, meaning it aims to extract the soundbite, the anecdote, the shareable and consumable. Such extractive reading is analogous to extraction (ecological abuse, mining companies, etc.). But such metonymic reading is extractive and thus depletive. I would say that reading for interpretation subtends our teaching, scholarship, ethics, and socio-political acts. This implies a temporality of understanding, a recognition of a practice. Such a temporality demands patience (a trait we must redevelop). We must now become readers not only of primary texts, but also of the open fields of their ‘afterlife’, as Benjamin tells us in The Arcades Project (1999[1927–1939]) and his translation essay (1968[1921]: 71) where he discusses the concept of Überleben. A survival inescapable from the vicissitudes and transformations of intercultural, inter-worldly, translation. Why would we forfeit these abilities when we need them the most?
JE: Within our current discourse on diversity and equity there is an emphasis on ‘lived experience’ that, as your work has shown, has a point of origin in Fanon’s chapter ‘The Lived Experience of the Black Man’. Is there a tension, or perhaps an untranslatability, between this concept of ‘lived experience’ as it is being deployed now within varied discourses – for example, the decolonization of institutions (such as the museum) or ‘woke’/’cancel culture’ in general – and your definition of hospitality? A concept that you quite beautifully define as ‘not merely an invitation to reside in proximity’, but rather ‘an obligation to revise one’s ways of being, living and thinking, side-by-side, in a spirit of complementation, not completion’, that is, ‘to re-enter an edifice of one’s own making in a state of belatedness, as indigene and stranger, both at once’.
HKB: This point is coupled with our facing the intolerance of modalities of transition (migration, border crossings) and/as translation. Hospitality is bound to transition. Transition has an ontological performativity that is distinct from the phenomenological and embodied meanings of political movements. Transition is barely legible, especially within lived experience, as it is interstitial, migratory, and translation as an ethical act of witnessing (see Bertacco and Vallorani, 2021).
JE: Precisely. Transition is signaled, indicated only by the shifts, becomings, and asignifying forces of the psycho-affective sphere.
HKB: Yes. For both the figures of transition and ourselves as ethical readers of them, patience is required. There is no voice to guide us, but we can sense the chimes (as in Bob Dylan’s song ‘The Chimes of Freedom’) and our own unpreparedness (see Bhabha, 2021a) to respond to them, which is precisely what causes us to act, to resist.
JE: There is a slow wait in events that fascinates us, especially in the proleptic temporality that signals the affective magnetic field that an event composes and within which we become otherwise.
HKB: I see a relationship between signal-forces like Dylan’s ‘chimes’ and what I have called our ‘unpreparedness for the present’, which includes our (un)awareness of what is being done to us politically. For instance, the distractions of media, self-aggrandizing ethno-nationalism, etc. Our unpreparedness is symptomatic of traumatic racism.
V
JE: In your recent work, this concept of ‘unpreparedness’ passes through a series of conceptual points and personae: hospitality, Fanon, dignity (not as an inherent quality but as a performative Arendtian moment or act), Lévinas, William Kentridge, and others. As you know, we have recently published an emergency (after the Israeli regime’s actions in Gaza in May and June 2021) themed issue entitled The JVC Palestine Portfolio (Smith et al., 2021), which includes work by scholars, poets, artists, designers, visual activists, cultural workers, architects, and others to respond to the longstanding ‘tribal nationalism’ we see at work in Israel as it relates to the Palestinians. I am not asking you to respond to this specific issue; rather, I would like to use it as a prompt to have you reiterate some of the related geopolitical issues you presented to us in your piece ‘The Fragility of Democracy: Now Everywhere and Anywhere’ (Bhabha, 2021b). There you develop Arendt’s concept of ‘tribal nationalism’ as a means to foreground the shared traits of ethnonationalist regimes – to ‘keep citizens and residents in states of anxiety and unpreparedness in times of emergency’ – and the very fragility of democracy itself in the US, Hungary, Myanmar, India, Israel, Brazil, and elsewhere.
HKB: Unpreparedness is an inflection point between a psychological affective response to events in the present and our future political and ethical effectivity. For me, the response to the events that we have witnessed – George Floyd, Trumpism, Black Lives Matter, Arab Spring, COVID-19 – is always surprise, an expression of being totally unprepared for them. This conveys another notion of a ‘charge’ as it carries an affective charge of a political or historical moment of shock or surprise. It is emotion leading to cognition, a state of uncertainty that opens us to act.
JE: So an aspect of the psycho-affective sphere translates us into another mode of political awareness and commitment?
HKB: Yes. It is the future’s present. We are back to my interest in proleptic events. Being unprepared renders us belated and disoriented within our own present, within our own horizon of expectations. Fanon understood this mode as being necessary for any call to resistance.
JE: A pre-political moment of real encounter encourages, or perhaps better, demands, us to take ethical risks. To understand rather than to judge.
HKB: And to listen and be patient.
VI
JE: Traumatic racism, as you present it, is neither simply an analysis of systemic racism nor trauma studies. Instead, it is the field or horizon (a limit-experience) within which an ethics opens. An ethics opposed to the new moralism. Unpreparedness, therefore, signals an openness to an event, which demands ethical encounters such as bearing witness. Such an event cannot be controlled or framed with the existing juridical, ontological, and ethical discourses at hand. The unjust geopolitical events we are living through are discursive as well as affective. Although these discursive and ‘psycho-affective’ forces (to redeploy Fanon’s interest) are in themselves a-signifying and non-discursive, they instigate anew, unforeseen, performative experimentation with the very materials (bodies and signs) that comprise and compose our politics as well as our ethics of action, resistance.
HKB: This politics of ethical reading and experimentation is both ontological and aesthetic (its vividness): a psycho-affective sphere opens and through it we encounter yet again, as not yet lost, both the vividness of violence and the vivid urgency of the arts as well as other acts of resistance. All of which we are unprepared for, a lack which turns out to be our greatest hope.
JE: Perhaps it goes without saying, but all of this requires a specific temporality or, at least, a different understanding of history, correct? I mean it extends and complicates your longstanding interest in our unending ‘revisions of modernity’ to allude to the final chapter of The Location of Culture (Bhabha, 1994).
HKB: The events of traumatic racism are ontological and ethical limit-experiences. Consider the very real limit-experiences the Ukrainians are now facing, etc. For Arendt, and myself, these limit-experiences are inextricable from action, from movement. They indicate both untimely and timely movement within the present because, for Arendt, to act is to be free. Untimely because we are unprepared and taken aback by what we are witnessing in Ukraine. Acting is an iterative practice. So, yet again, we are unprepared for an event that appears to be a simple repetition and yet this unpreparedness gives us all an opportunity to ‘right oneself’ ethically and politically against illegitimate uses of power, against majoritarian, ethnonationalist, or populist regimes. Here, the past is immanent and iterative.
The phrase we hear – that Ukraine is ‘not yet lost’ – signifies an ongoing survival within the future conditional temporality of an event.
JE: As in Kentridge’s use of the term ‘whilst’, which I know intrigues you (see Bhabha, 2016).
HKB: Exactly. But also our contemporary histories need an ontology of the present irreducible to any presentism. This is related to our discussion of ethical reading and interpretation. We must complete the project that Foucault initiated but failed to fully articulate, that is, the history of the present.
JE: An ethical history of the present. Wherein ethics is inseparable from the aesthetics of not only language, but the entire psycho-affective realm. Meaning ‘words have a charge’ because a magnetic field is formed that renders visible and intelligible complex intersecting and asymmetrical histories, discourses, politics, but also ‘the body, dreams, psychic inversions and displacements, phantasmatic political identifications’ – all within the history of the present as an open temporal means of survival. This is your politics of translatability. A magnetism that collects new, aleatory, unknown content. Ethics is a working with and through these ‘charged’, discomforting, shifting discursive fields (‘revisions of modernity’ included, see Bhabha, 1994: 236–256) and not just the repression or censoring of specific discursive statements which have been extracted from these fields. The ethics here is one of reading and experimentation, of living. Thus it is an ethics of hospitality, which, as you say, is more than bodies ‘residing in proximity’ (as in the new moralism) because it is an obligation to revise one’s ways of being, living and thinking, side-by-side, in a spirit of complementation, mediation, not completion. We must learn how to re-enter an edifice of one’s own making in a state of belatedness, as indigene and stranger, both at once. Our ethical response, informed by the negative politics we are witnessing now, is nevertheless enriched and intensified by our ‘almost lost freedoms’, a beautiful phrase you have given us. One which we are unprepared to receive.
