Introduction: Nonsense—Critique for the Times Open Access

1.

From 1492 and earlier and later, and from the twelfth century and before and in what follows, the ongoing war against Black and Indigenous life extends itself in the unending transformation of the forms of colonial and settler violence of which Frantz Fanon spoke in The Wretched of the Earth.¹ If something, what our present moment demands, and what it convokes in the social, is an enactment of a never-ceasing practice of “absolute substitution” in the struggle against colonial and settler forms and their destruction of life and world: “Without any period of transition,” Fanon noted, “there is a total, complete, and absolute substitution.”² To introduce this special issue on “Critique and Translation,” I want to linger with this Fanonian substitution and ask what sort of act it would be and what sense of the social it would give. It is an act that does not promise a “transition” but only its own mere taking place, in the giving of a sense of relation, language, and life distinct from that coerced by the settler. And it is an act that refuses the social forms privileged through the state, rights, the subject, and the law as it calls into being a sociality in collective, inidentical struggle. The being that does or acts in “absolute substitution” does not precede those acts but is conjured through them in the act of struggle and the doing of language—in the collective social insurgence—which decolonization, in Fanon, is. I wish to underline that the subject conjured in Fanon is not derivative of the first-person singular pronoun—insofar as there is a first-person pronoun, and insofar as it linguistically makes manifest the being of a social form, we ought not assume that this form is its own—but is occasioned in an enunciation in language and a social practice that ruptures the terms for temporal coherency.³ There is a non-self-same temporality, a non-autonomy, which is the form that transpires in Fanon and gives place to the decolonization he affirms. The Fanonian affirmation is a practice of form, and it is a form wholly other than that privileged in the European settler tradition, by which I mean in the normative terms for life and the social, for being and language, and for critique and philosophical self-reflection, ever since, if I might privilege a single name, Immanuel Kant.⁴

2.

What is the form of a critical subject? What sort of sociality—and what sense of the social—does critique generate and proliferate? How might we think about the social in relation to the sort of subject that critique demands, and in relation to the understanding of language and form it coerces? Might we think about critique as a kind of translation, by which I intend not so much an attitude or pose, and not so much an intellectual or theoretical operation enacted by a subject, but a way of being and a way of calling into being—a way of instituting in language—a quite particular sense of the social? And might we think about critique, then, as an idiom into which all beings are coerced to translate themselves and their lifeworlds, where “autonomy” is granted a radical if ever-morphing privilege, a centrality for the reflection on language and relation, and thought and life?⁵ I want to observe that to speak of critique, to write on or of it, has meant to privilege autonomy as a social and linguistic form, and as a category through which thought is, itself, to be thought, and I want to notice that to speak of critique has meant to do so by way of one's turning, still yet again—heteronomously, as it were—to Kant.⁶ We cannot cease turning to Kant, and it may be that there is no critique without this turn, and so to think about critique and translation I wish to turn to Kant's “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?,” a text about orientation and form in relation to the subject and thought. Kant outlines what he calls reason's “need” (Bedürfnis), for orientation in thinking, and, taking as a starting point one's “geographical” need for orientation, which is to be grounded in “the feeling of a difference in my own subject, namely, the difference between my right and left hands,” he “extends” this difference, and this need for orientation, to one's orientation in space, which Kant calls “mathematical,” and then, by “analogy,” to one's orientation “in thinking in general,” which he calls “logical.”⁷ “Finally,” Kant clarifies, “I can extend this concept even further, since it could be taken as consisting in the faculty of orienting myself not merely in space, i.e., mathematically, but in thinking in general [überhaupt im Denken] i.e. logically.”⁸ Such orientation, as it extends itself “even further” (noch mehr), is to be secured through its thinking a “concept of God,”⁹ which is also to say, a being that “can only be thought and never intuited,”¹⁰ and it is through this grounding orientation that properly comported thought—a practice given through a subjective need—is to be made possible.

The Kantian setting of limits—“God” may be thought but not intuited—is a self-subordinating therapeutic; to subordinate oneself properly to the limits set through critique is to liberate oneself from heteronomy and install oneself as an autonomous being: “The extended and more precisely determined concept of orienting oneself can be helpful to us in presenting distinctly the maxims of healthy reason [der gesunden Vernunft] in its working on its cognitions of supersensible objects.”¹¹ And this self-subordination is to provide safety from error, and, I wish also to notice, from errance, from an improper and excessive wandering: “One can remain safe from all error [Man kann vor allem Irrtum gesichert bleiben] if one does not undertake to judge where one does not know what is required for a determinate judgment.”¹² To remain safe in this manner is to yield to a logic of mere presupposition: one is to presuppose but not assert that one knows “the concept of the unlimited,” in order to perform one's orientation in thinking.¹³ Self-orientation is the philosophical affirmation of the subject's setting of limits in the institution of autonomy as self-subordination, as it gives critique to be thought as a practice for the determination of the social as a field of beings capable of properly comported self-reflection and healthy, self-delimited motion.

I want to underline that Kant's demand for orientation in thinking responds, and the locus for this response is “nonsense” (Unsinn). “And its opposite,” Kant writes of the freedom of thought given in properly self-subordinated reason, “is the maxim of a lawless use of reason,” where “if reason will not subject itself to the laws it gives itself, it has to bow under the laws given by another; for without any law, nothing, not even the greatest nonsense, can play its game for long.”¹⁴ “Nonsense,” in this passage, is an intensification of “lawlessness” (Gesetzlösigkeit), and lawlessness refers to a mode of being that is incapable of subordinating itself to the law; it is a mode of being which, in its improperly exceeding the bounds of thought, and in its uncontrolled heteronomy, makes experience in general impossible. “Nonsense,” Winfried Menninghaus has written, in relation to Kant's Anthropology, “decomposes the very coherence of experience,” and as it does so it decomposes—and, as Kant writes, it “destroys”—the social itself.¹⁵ “And so freedom in thinking finally destroys itself [zerstört sich selbst] if it tries to proceed in independence of the law of reason.”¹⁶ It is not only that Kant calls for, and demands, an absolutely generalized autonomy, but that this demand founds the social; and those beings that confound the generalization of this autonomy and upset the institution of the social become, therefore—and as thought's destruction of itself inverts and sends itself outward—objects of destruction. The imperative of autonomous life sets itself against all other forms life and the “confusion of language” (Sprachverwirrung) they foment, where the world of Kantian autonomy becomes a world against all of those beings capable, merely, of helplessly improper lawlessness: of nonsense.¹⁷

The Kantian demand for orientation in thinking generalizes a pedagogy of self-grounding subjects as it creates a division between those capable of the law—which is to say, those capable of either lawfulness or lawlessness—and those incapable of it. These terms are racialized, and we may understand this raciality through R. A. Judy's “Kant and the Negro,” where Judy underlines Kant's mixing, his excessive and paralogistic intercalculating, of the transcendental with the empirical in his explication of “the Negro.” If what Kant speaks of, in speaking of “the Negro,” is not “something in the world, but The Negro as a concept,” and if “about this concept he offers two apodictic categorical judgments, or propositions: To be Negro is to be stupid; To be black is to be Negro,” the form of Kant's explication mirrors the lawless surpassing of boundaries against which critique sends itself and in relation to which critique offers itself as a therapeutic.¹⁸ If, in this, Kant's language “constitute[s] just the sort of sophism masquerading as knowledge which Kant sought to expose,”¹⁹ we may also notice that Kant's language links the demand that the subject impose upon itself a law to the foundational racialization of the form of the philosophical subject, and the subject of language, in modernity—the subject, I wish to underline, through which the social is called into being through the interpellative force of Kant's language. Kant's turn to the subject, his insistence on it and his delimitation of the subject as a subject for its own self-orientation, linguistically performs a response to a lawlessness—a nonsense—which is also Kant's own, and which relates, in Judy's elaboration, to Kant's explication of “the Negro” in relation to the setting of boundaries, which Kant's critical philosophy is.²⁰ Critique, in Kant, is an outward- and inward-pressing response to what it understands to be a threat represented by forms of sociality and life—and, in particular, Black, and simultaneously Indigenous, sociality and life—in relation to which the modern subject of critical form and philosophical self-reflection is instituted in its globality.²¹

The being which, in Kant, retains a capacity for law, and therefore for critical form, is not any particular being but a “race,” and, in particular, as J. Kameron Carter has explained in Race: A Theological Account, what Kant calls “the white race.”²² This race is, further, “not quite a race,” it is “the race that transcends race,”²³ and this is because it is that race which, through its capacity to properly impose limits upon itself and thereby gain proper orientation, overcomes—even as it can do nothing but hold in reserve—race. Critique, then, may be understood as the formalization and extension of whiteness, where whiteness is “understood not merely and banally as a pigment but as a structural-aesthetic order and as a sociopolitical arrangement,” which is also to say, as a particular sense of sociality, language, and being.²⁴ In this arrangement, non-white beings—which are located on the side of “pathology,” as Denise Ferreira da Silva has elaborated in Toward a Global Idea of Race—are incapable of ascending to the form of the properly autonomous subject.²⁵ “They cannot abstract themselves from their own bodies and enter into an autonomous way of existence,” Carter writes, just as they remain incapable of moving, in “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?,” from “geographical” to “mathematical” to “logical” orientation.²⁶ If this incapacity is constitutive of all non-white forms of being—“The other races have become races in such a way as to be held hostage to their own particularity”²⁷—it consigns such forms of being, in a global frame of colonial and settler practice, across languages, to death.

Such “other races,” as Carter further explains, are ineducable—“All this bespeaks their improper relationship to the law, which is indicative of their inability to make progress in education”²⁸—and incapable of self-governance and autonomy—“Although each race suffers from a different kind of imbalance, the core problem for all of them is their inability to be self-governing or autonomous”²⁹—and because of this they will never have been capable of exerting the self-limiting freedom required for thought. Such “races,” then, are not only incapable of “orientation” but of what Kant called, in the passage I noted above, “thinking in general,” as the Kantian elaboration delimits a quite particular sense of what “thinking” (Denken) is. The forms of being and life that are to be captured under the racialized headings Kant proliferates can do nothing but die—“These limitations lead to the inner decay that destroys the nonwhite races,”³⁰ Carter writes—and the critical subject exteriorizes death through the demand that all beings yield asymmetrically to its form, where “whiteness is to be completed,” if neverendingly, “as the project of reason.”³¹

To think about critique and translation, then, is to think about critique as a material and social practice for the generalization of a particular sense of form, and it is to think about critique as a racialized exteriorization of death on a global scale. And to do so is to think about critique as the exteriorization of an economy of terms—as a particular coordination of relation and propriety in form—in relation to which all beings are to be translated in a linguistic and social practice of temporal pacification.³² And yet I wish to notice that critique in Kant, in “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” and elsewhere, makes legible an understanding of critique as the social and linguistic insurgency, the form of life and sociality, against which it responds and in relation to which critical philosophy installs itself as a counter-insurgent practice for the carceral stabilization of social life. If critique in Kant responds—and if as it does so it sets itself against “the nonwhite races,” which are, in critique, and as Carter underlined, to be “destroyed”—critique also, and in excess of all of this, makes visible a sociality that refuses the terms for Kantian critical form. I want to argue that critique—as we are given to think it as a mode of sociality and linguistic performance against which Kant sets himself and his language—is a non-autonomous social form, a way of doing and being that is all excess and all giving, that is, one might say, translating into the language of Kant, nothing but heteronomy, in excess of the law and incapable of it, neither lawful nor lawless but merely “nonsense” (Unsinn). I am not only arguing that in critique Kant sets his language against itself and its paralogistic thinking of “the Negro”—and it does, as R. A. Judy has shown; I am arguing that Kant's language makes visible a social form, an understanding of language, and a mode of insurgence that is given to be read in his text as an object under attack. And I am arguing that this insurgence—this inidentical and collective form of doing in sociality—is what critique, in a wholly non-Kantian sense, is. In this sense, critique becomes a practice of struggle, an inessential and insubstantial sociality in collective insurgence—a form of struggle inherited in Fanon and which we have been given to read in his articulation of “absolute substitution” in The Wretched of the Earth. I wish to offer this single translation, then, because through Kant critique becomes “nonsense,” what one might call critique for the times.

3.

The articles collected in this special issue on “Critique and Translation” attend to the form and practice of critique in contexts that relate to, intersect with, or emerge from Arabic-language writing, form, practice, and articulation in its diasporic and translational contexts. The work offered here crosses genre, media, language, and mode, in literature, theory, essay, radio, psychoanalysis, and art, as it teaches us to attend to the materiality of language and the matter through which critique transpires. It is not, as this work collectively shows, that critique devolves upon a subject or belongs to this or that epoch or period, because critique is the dehistoricization of enunciation and practice as language translates and matter disarticulates coherency in form.³³ If, in the tradition of Kantian critique, critique may be understood as a locus through which a social and linguistic demand is made on behalf of the critical subject, where one is called upon to become critical, and where a division between those capable and incapable of critique is forwarded in the institution of the social—and this division mirrors the division between those capable and incapable of the law, in critique's attack against what Fred Moten has called “a kind of mass ungovernability”—in the work studied in this special issue, critique is delocalized as a form and disarticulated as a privileged mode of comportment or understanding allocated to a subject in its self-formation.³⁴

Two of the articles included here address Frantz Fanon, a thinker, both Lucie Mercier and Michael Allan teach us, of social form as a practice of language and translation. Mercier provides a translational frame for thinking with Fanon, as she teaches us to read Fanon with a renewed attention to language, across his relations to Aimé Césaire, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, François Tosquelles, and others, and through his practice of psychoanalysis and writing on the Algerian revolution. In Mercier's hands, we are given to read language in Fanon as a medium rather than a means, and as a form and social practice that does not devolve upon or presume a subject for language or sense. In a reading of Fanon's “This Is the Voice of Algeria,” included in A Dying Colonialism, for example, Mercier shows that radio “constitutes the nation through the community it mediatizes,” and she argues that in this mediatization language becomes an instance of “linguistic poiēsis.” We are given, through Mercier, to think a desubstantialization of the social in at least several senses. The subject is not a being or form that precedes language or translation, but is only given through them in their mediated practice. And the social is understood as in excess of itself; in revolutionary struggle, and in the community of form that language convokes, language gives place to a sociality “in excess of the ‘totalizing’ function of the social.” Critique becomes a practice of social relation, where language becomes a mode or a practice of life, and thought becomes a form of collective practice—the experience of lived sociality in mediation.

Michael Allan offers a reading of Edward W. Said's citation of Marx in Orientalism—“They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented,” in Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte—to open a reflection on representation, language, sociality, and voice in relation to the literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the Moroccan writer Abdelfattah Kilito, and Fanon. Through a reading of Said's citation of Marx, Allan demonstrates that “the ‘self’ of self-representation is always already elsewhere”; in drawing attention to the practices of citation, translation, and paraphrase in Said, he underlines “a vision of solidarity above and beyond linguistic mastery,” where translation—thought in the capacious sense in which Allan gives us to think it—becomes “paraphrase, welcoming in place, hosting in language, and hosting in situation.” After drawing out a reflection on a “pragmatics of citation” (in Spivak) and an “ethics of hospitality” (in Kilito), Allan turns to Fanon—and to Fanon's essay “This Is the Voice of Algeria”—to underline the sense of the social enlivened through his language; rather than a subject of self-representation there is an “attunement,” which calls into being a community of language in struggle, a “resonating in common.” Instead of a practice of lexical decipherment, with its privilege of the subject of linguistic understanding, there is a sociality of language, and rather than a subject of critique, there is a practice of relation, a “translational solidarity” in anti-colonial, insurgent life.

The modern, colonial period has seen the coercive if endlessly unfinished domestication of the social in relation to the state in post-Ottoman contexts.³⁵ Since at least the nineteenth century, capitalism has transformed social relations, instituting regimes of property as new juridical and discursive practices redefined categories, including dīn (religion), lugha (language), ʿilm (knowledge), and adab (comportment)—a term which, in the Arabic nineteenth century, came to be understood as “literature,” the linguistic practice of a properly cultivated, autonomous subject—and as new categories, among which I might underline mujtamaʿ (society), were invented.³⁶ These transformations occasioned the institution of the practice of literary writing and form in a new sense, and an attention to this sense is offered in the contribution of Amirah Silmi. In her article on the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli and the Algerian writer Assia Djebar, Silmi observes a withholding of voice in what she calls “silence,” where literary writing—in the laying bare of the social logics of settler-colonial form and ongoing Zionist-settler colonization—refuses the terms for self-articulation and language, what Silmi calls “the need to make legible,” which the settler state and the colonizer, in both the Palestinian and Algerian contexts, however differently, presume and coerce. In this sense, critique becomes a refusal of a particular sense of form and relation, and a declining of the resolution of settler, colonial, and state violence in the juridically authorized form of the modern state and its properly comported, linguistically cultivated subjects in what Silmi eloquently terms “a poetics (and ethics) of the minor.” This is to say: literary writing, in Shibli and Djebar, may be thought of as a linguistic and social act of refusal—a refusal of accommodation and recognition, and a refusal of translatability, one also might say—and in this way Silmi teaches us to notice a decolonial insistence in this literary writing and in its attention to mode and form.

This insistence is made manifest in Maya Kesrouany's explication of the critical theoretical work of the Lebanese philosopher Husayn Muruwwa in relation to its inheritance in the art, performance, and video of his grandson, Rabih Mroué. Kesrouany's reading traces Muruwwa's intellectual formation, and she attends, in particular, to the philosophical-theoretical project of Muruwwa in his Materialist Trends in Arabic-Islamic Philosophy (al-Nazaʿāt al-māddiyya fi-l-falsafa al-ʿArabiyya al-Islāmiyya). Kesrouany shows that Muruwwa creates an approach to philosophical writing as a question of method (minhaj), which problematizes the appearance of an object for critique (naqd), where the object of critique is constituted through its reading. “The historical specificity of the site of knowledge production constitutes the object of knowledge,” Kesrouany importantly writes; “[Muruwwa] understood the turāth,” what appeared, beginning in the nineteenth century, as a field of textuality that one is to have received as an inheritance, “to be constituted by how we know it.” If Muruwwa's intervention extends a tradition of Arab Marxism—a tradition elaborated, for example, through Maḥmūd Amīn Al-ʿĀlim and ʿAbd al-ʿAẓīm Anīs's On Egyptian Culture (Fi-l-thaqāfa al-Misriyya)—it does so in a way that intersects with the epistemic critique of the Moroccan philosopher Muhammad ʿĀbid al-Jabrī in his multi-volume Critique of Arab Reason (Nadq al-ʿaql al-ʿarabī), and it perhaps retains a closer affiliation to al-Jābrī's work than one might at first assume.³⁷ Kesrouany's intervention contributes not only to the understanding of Muruwwa's thought but also to the development of an approach in Arabic studies which refuses the presentism, the historicism, and the representational demand made upon non-European literary, theoretical, and—as Kesrouany also shows—artistic forms.

Kesrouany studies the last of these in a reading of the inheritance of Muruwwa's critical practice in the art, video, and installation of Mroué. Mroué, Kesrouany underlines, is no longer able to affirm the form of subject capable of carrying out or sustaining method (minhaj) in critique. There is a tension, she observes, in the multiple takes of the video performance presented in Mroué's Three Posters (performed in 2002 and 2004), and this tension places in question the privilege of a temporally coherent, self-articulated historical or linguistic subject—the subject of critique in Muruwwa. Because there is no longer a coherent subject, art or performance convoke a futurity for which they do not give account but to which they remain responsible: “Mroué's work makes possible imagining a ‘different future’ while still acknowledging its responsibility to the past,” Kesrouany explains. In this context, we may notice that critique occurs as it transits, and as it translates itself, across media, and that it therefore remains unrecognizable because it is only given in its transmutation across forms. And critique, then, reappears as a practice of “critical hope,” where art makes manifest a relation to a “past” to which it remains responsible and through which a sociality of thought—in the relation between Muruwwa and Mroué—is given.

The new sense of language coerced in the juridical practice of the modern state cyphers the form of the critical subject, which it exteriorizes as a social and ontological demand. To think about critique and translation is, therefore, to think about critique in its Kantian elaboration—and this elaboration, I have underlined, advances the death of Black and Indigenous life, through which the social is constituted in Kant—and it is to think this elaboration globally as it is made manifest juridically, materially, and linguistically in particular contexts. And to think about critique and translation is also to think about critique as it transforms itself, as it mutates and becomes something else, and—in the articles contained in this special issue—as it becomes a practice of sociality in translational form, where critique insurges against the social and linguistic terms affirmed in the Kantian critical philosophy. This sense of critique is addressed in my own contribution to this special issue, where I read Theodor W. Adorno's language in relation to the work of the Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum. In Adorno, what we are given to read—with and against his language—is a racialized, property-centric sense of being and life, which intersects with his reading of language, and Hegel, in relation to a privilege of autonomy, self-reflection, the law, and whiteness. At the same time, what Hatoum's art enacts and shares is a practice in the social, where a wholly other sense of relation and language is given to us—a sense we are taught to appreciate through Adania Shibli's interpretation of Hatoum and the forms of anti-colonial struggle and practices of sociality and life in Palestine. To think about critique, form, and life in Adorno and Hatoum has meant to move from critique to the social, from the social to the practice of form, and from the practice of form to life, and the essays contained herein may be said, each in a different way, to be an affirmation of life in contexts of ongoing colonial, settler, and state-juridical destruction.

4.

“The I think must be capable of accompanying all my presentations [Das: Ich denke, muß alle meine Vorstellungen begleiten können],” Kant wrote in the second, 1787, edition of the Critique of Pure Reason.³⁸ Mūsā Wahba, in his Arabic translation of this sentence, renders it as follows: “Yajib an yakūn al- ‘ufakkir’ qādiran ʿalā an yuwākib taṣawwurātī jamīʿahā.”³⁹ Kant's writing of this “I think,” what he also calls “pure apperception,” imparts a particular sense of the social.⁴⁰ Kant's explication of apperception distills the form of the speaking subject in an abstraction that must be presupposed in order to secure for that subject the possibility of understanding, and thought, in general: the possibility of thinking the transcendental object “x,” as Kant wrote.⁴¹ Because it organizes the possibility of thought around the first-person-singular pronoun, and because it does so through the linguistic act that is the explication of the setting of limits Kant calls “critique,” the Kantian critique advances the social terms for self-understanding and language, for raciality and property, and for Black and Indigenous death I have underlined. Yet I wish to notice that whereas Wahba renders the German modal verb müssen with an Arabic noun, qādiran (capable), his translation may be understood not as substantializing a capability but as giving a verbal or sonorous quality to a noun, and, in particular, to an active participle. The noun, then—and, by extension, the pronoun “I” (anā), contained in the verb ufakkir—may be understood in a verbal sense, and it is, therefore, temporal in a quite particular manner. This is to say: through its Arabic rendering we are given to think the subject of transcendental apperception in Kant's explication in relation to the particularity of the social forms it coerces, just as we are given to think the question of thinking—and of being—outside of the privilege accorded to the first-person-singular pronoun and the autonomy demanded of it in critique.⁴² Reading Kant in Arabic gives us to think the linguistic and social nature of the being of the subject that says “I think,” and the Arabic rendering of this passage therefore recalls the insubstantial, inessential form of the subject, where there is no longer a “subject” but only a being constituted through its mere practice of language in the social, a giving in sociality that would be as inconsonant with the form of the Kantian critical subject as it would be consonant with—and as it would inherit and pass on to us, as it would give to us in translation—the insurgent mode and form of Fanon's “absolute substitution.” And so, to think about critique and translation is also to think about the ways in which, when critique moves across languages, we are given something wholly other than the modes of domination, and the asymmetrical imposition of death, to which we have become utterly accustomed.

Notes

Works Cited