BOR ROW ED LIGHT B O R R OW E D L I G H T volume i Vico, Hegel, and the Colonies Timothy Brennan STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS STANFORD, CALIFORNIA Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2014 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brennan, Timothy, 1953- author. Borrowed light : Vico, Hegel, and the colonies / Timothy Brennan. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8047-8832-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-8047-9054-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Colonies—Philosophy. 2. Imperialism—Philosophy. 3. Philosophy, Modern. 4. Vico, Giambattista, 1668-1744—Influence. 5. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770-1831—Influence. I. Title. jv51.b74 2014 325'.301—dc23 2013047796 isbn 978-0-8047-9058-1 (electronic) Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/14 Minion For Keya In those days, the communists were, I tell you this in all truth, the only human ones. Patrick Chamoiseau CON TEN TS Acknowledgments xi List of Abbreviations xv INTRODUCTION 1 The Interwar Moment 1 Arguments and Lineages 4 Why Philology 7 Rupture/Continuity 11 Overview of Chapters 14 1 VICO, SPINOZA, AND THE IMPERIAL PAST 17 Vico’s Untimeliness 17 Anticolonial Imagination 21 Vico as a Contemporary 36 Spinoza and the Purity of Mind 45 “Spinoza” for the Moment 52 Vico’s Cadre 63 2 HEGEL AND THE CRITIQUE OF COLONIALISM 73 Vico’s Hegel 73 At the Court of Liberal Thought 80 An Other State 89 The Tale of Hegel, Africa, and Slavery 98 Dialectical Oblivion 108 Polemical Intelligence 119 Marx, Hegel, and Backwardness 124 3 NIETZSCHE AND THE COLONIES 133 Classics and Class War: Vico and Nietzsche 133 Nietzsche in Colonial Discourse 139 The War on Philology 147 Odyssean Imperialism 154 Untimeliness in Real Time 159 The Interwar Fear Genre 175 What Nietzsche Means by Genealogy 184 4 BORROWED LIGHT 197 Bataille and the Party of de Sade 197 Signifying on Hegel 207 Prophetic Suicide: Reading 218 Posthumanism as Imperialism 224