vernacular solidarity

Vernacular SolidarityOn Gilroy and Levinas

John E. Drabinski

And of the millions on millions of all confessions and all nations, victims of the same hatred of the other man, the same anti-semitism.

— Emmanuel Levinas

L evinas’s opening dedication of Otherwise than Being is well known and, perhaps, too familiar to readers. Our familiarity with his dedication is

important because it suggests a prominent role for the memory of the Shoah in Levinas’s work, a role that, if taken seriously, could radically transform our understanding of his thinking. In that sense, I wonder if we have thought enough about the evocation of memory that opens a text dedicated to the failure of memory and the force of the immemorial. What would it mean to recast Levinas’s thought as a theorizing after the disaster? Or, if we focus attention on the term “hatred,” the dedication suggests a recasting of Levinas as an antiracist thinker, allowing us to theorize singularity and the like as responses to the history of racial persecution. What would it mean to place Levinas in the antiracist moment of European thinking?

For the interests of the present essay, I interrogate a key word, one that qualifies hatred (and so racism, racial terror, and racist sub-jugation) as “the same,” one that also links hate to anti-Semitism as a foundational form of racism, and so asks critical questions about the most neglected aspect of the close of the dedication: Levinas’s globalizing moment. Have we properly theorized the complexity of

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Levinas’s evocation of the same hatred, an assertion of commonality between forms of racial persecution and terror, but also one gathered here in a turn of phrase that ought to move us to consider what it means to move Levinasian thinking across borders? Levinas already makes that move here in the language of the same: the same hatred, the same anti-Semitism. That is, for Levinas, it would seem, Otherwise than Being aims not just at the possibility of saving Western culture from totality and totalitarianism but also at an understanding of the conditions for the possibility of racism as such — racism, it is crucial to add, in a global context. What, then, does Levinas mean by rac-ism and racial terror, such that he could diagnose not only the fate of European Jews, but also the fate of all on the racial margin? Levinas’s texts give us very little by way of an answer, so if we are to take the dedication seriously, we need to raise and retheorize these questions in the spirit of Levinas through his texts and enigmatic conceptual schemes and explore the limitations of those texts and concepts.

The suggestiveness of the dedication aside, raising questions of race and racism in Levinas’s work is immediately confronted with a cluster of prerogatives, all of which threaten to stall inquiry. First and foremost amongst these prerogatives is the singularity of ethical expe-rience. If ethics is first philosophy and the experience of the ethical, whether phrased as excess, dephasing, or diachrony, pulls us out of history, then appeals to cultural and historical formations of identity are ever precarious, perhaps even outright untenable. Race is certainly one of those identity formations. Racial difference, it is worth remind-ing, is all but culturally and historically constructed; genomic science has made it plainly clear that race and racial difference is a matter of fantasy, not biology. Levinas’s early essay on Hitlerism makes this point clearly and, in retrospect, with so much force and foresight. So without the scientific trump card, as it were, and with cultural and historical experience rendered secondary and even violent interven-tions against the fragility of the ethical, questions of race would seem to stall before they begin. And yet, there is racism. There is hatred

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of the other as anti-Semitism and all other anti-Semitisms, hatred as cruelty and suffering. That is, there is the question of justice.

Let me start with a minor and hopefully uncontroversial assertion: the experience of racism places specific imperatives and particular urgency on the question of justice. For Levinas, the question of jus-tice is itself a fraught question, caught as it is between being (the plane of obligation) and the otherwise than being (the diachronic structure of obligation). Justice is a political imperative, obligation, and act, yet it is also set in a strange — and at times estranged — rela-tion to the ethical. This estrangement is straightforward and, at this point, familiar. Politics is concerned with what is general, shared, common, knowable, with decision, and, at its worst, with calcula-tion. The ethical is concerned with the singular, the face-to-face, the unique, the enigma, with undecidability, and, at its best, with the incalculable. We can see how and why Levinas so easily announces that politics left to itself is tyranny. At the same time, that slight twist in the phrase “left to itself ” reminds us that for all the estrangement, there is also the strangeness of the relation between the ethical and the political (and politics). The ethical intervenes in important ways on the political, both as a productive interruption that moves justice into an interstitial space and as a sort of regulative idea that reworks notions of law, being, and action. Such intervening is always strange; there are no rules or anticipated structures of crossing the political with the ethical. The ethical complicates the political, even at times, outright contradicting it by drawing another pull of obligation into the scene of subjectivity. Indeed, the firstness of ethics marks that pull with a certain decisive intensity, reminding political subjects of their (pre)original condition of its very presence to the world.

What does this configuration of the ethical and the political mean for questions of race and racism? The most obvious meaning is the sug-gestion of a Levinasian rewriting of the conventional liberal critique of notions of race and the practice of racism. To wit: if the intrigue of the interhuman is comprised of the face-to-face, of singularities from


the outset, then the legitimacy of political — conceived in the classical sense of polis, all of those ways in which we live together — construc-tions of racial identities are contested, critiqued, and overturned by the sheer nakedness of the face. The nudity of the face, as Levinas reminds us across the many decades of elaborating a theory of the singular, issues from beyond essence and otherwise than being, so any markers of essence and being are subject to critical dismissal. Race is comprised of just those markers, so on the liberal-critique reading of Levinas, political problems of race and racism are surmounted by the firstness of the ethical. (We see this position articulated in work deploying Levinas to critique a generally overpathologized identity politics.) The ethical, we could say, saves us from the murderous excess of politics — yet, let us keep that always in view: racism is mur-derously excessive. Is an anti-identity politics position really the best Levinasian strategy for addressing the terror of racism?

I resist this view for two reasons. First, it is important to note that no matter the liberal critique of race and racism, the lived experi-ence of racial identity — which can produce sublime aesthetic expres-sions and profound acts of political courage and solidarity as well as racism,continues to persist, functioning in many ways as the infra-structure of contemporary political life, from the daily hustle to our foundational political institutions. That persistence ought to shift our regard away from the abstract space of liberalism and Levinas’s often nude, colorless faces, and toward the vicissitudes of obligation in a life of bodies of color, history, and sociopolitical moral freight. Second, the liberal critique, whatever its particular Levinasian configuration and radicalization, obscures what is perhaps most productive about Levinas’s work on the postraciological body read alongside the dedi-cation of Otherwise than Being: conditions of solidarity that appeal to historical experience, cosmopolitan, ethical, and political sensibilities, and vernacular occasions of suffering and responsibility. Put another way: the strange, yet existentially urgent experience of racism and rac-ist persecution opens up important new spaces for the intersection of the ethical and the political without raciology and without nationalist


conceptions of racial identity. Perhaps the face is not so nude. And in that nonnudity, perhaps responsibility takes on a distinct kind of urgency.

How can we begin thinking this new horizon of responsibility? And what is the fate of Levinas’s central insights, all of which remove us from the plane of being and the bearing of historical experience on responsibility, when the nudity of the face is contested? In pursuit of this new horizon of responsibility and with a commitment to the central insights of Levinasian thinking, I bring Paul Gilroy’s reading of Levinas into the conversation. Though best known for his theoriz-ing of diaspora and diasporic movement — gathered in his phrase and famous book title The Black Atlantic — Gilroy’s recent work carries on a quiet, sustained dialogue with Levinas’s conceptions of suffering, the body, vulnerability, and justice. Gilroy’s dialogue is innovative and transformative. Against the liberal nonspace of postraciological thinking, and yet still fully informed by the critique of the scientism of race, Gilroy comes to think about race, suffering, justice, and soli-darity on the most Levinasian of models: the exposed and vulnerable body. But Gilroy’s treatment is no restatement of Levinas’s position. The cosmopolitan and the vernacular contexts of both the experience of race and racism and the scene of justice as solidarity are not just examples for Gilroy, but the very meaning of ethics and politics. Who is Gilroy read through Levinas? And who is Levinas after Gilroy’s treatment of ethics and politics?

In taking up Gilroy’s appropriation of Levinas and attending to its innovations and transformations, my interest is less in offering an immanent critique of Levinas (though that is surely a consequence) than in recasting Levinasian thinking for a twenty-first century that must be attentive to the vicissitudes of responsibility. The shadows of race and racism haunt us; that much is plain. If Levinasian thinking is to be relevant in addressing those ghosts and the sorts of demands they make on us, then the provincialism of Levinas’s texts needs to be contested. Contested with sympathy, to be sure, but contested nonetheless.


Gilroy and the Problem of racioloGy

Gilroy’s work in critical historiography and cultural theory has reinvented the field of Africana studies. Not without controversy, to be sure, but through a sustained re-theorizing of subaltern histori-ography, his work shifts the central paradigm of the field: disapora. In The Black Atlantic, Gilroy recasts the notion of diaspora in terms of movement and circulation. This recast changes the language of diaspora by inserting chaotic movement into the center of diasporic thinking and reading, which in turn, displaces any sense of center. Roots are routes, as Gilroy puts it, playing on the homophony. And so, in his readings of a number of foundational figures in the black intellectual tradition from Martin Delaney to W. E. B. Du Bois to Richard Wright, diasporic thinking and reading — so often defined by a relation to roots and rootedness — is given over to the com-plex, mixed dynamics of cultural production. Instead of reading the black intellectual tradition in terms of roots (alienated, searching, or atavistic), Gilroy reads the tradition in terms of encounters with the alien, whether that be the alterity of ideas in a philosophical prob-lem (e.g., Du Bois’s philosophy of history, Wright and existential-ism, and so on) or the otherness of geography in travel both internal to the nation and across borders. Rather than seeds scattered from a common center, black diasporic identity, for Gilroy, is modeled on the sorts of mixture and reconfiguration that come from forced migration, immigration, travel, and all other sorts of chaotic interplay of culture. The “foundations” of the black intellectual tradition are therefore not simple foundations at all, but instead an-archic combi-nations held together by a cluster of aesthetic threads stretching back and forth across the Atlantic.

So, Gilroy’s conceptual paradigm and book title The Black Atlantic nicely captures his central insight. Roots in place and nation (and later, race) are replaced with the circulation of ideas across the Atlantic: cul-tural production as encounter with otherness. Diaspora without ata-vism. It might seem unsurprising, then, that Gilroy comes to consider


Levinas’s work closely in thinking through the consequences of this notion of diaspora. Gilroy, like Levinas, begins thinking with a rejec-tion of sameness and uniformity, beginning instead with the enigma of difference and differentiation. And yet, in The Black Atlantic, Gilroy first voices a serious and important hesitation before Levinas’s notion of the other. In particular, Gilroy questions how well Levinas’s work survives an encounter with the devastation and cultural aftermath of the Middle Passage and slavery, both of which resist modeling loss, alterity, and such on the Holocaust. After a short remark on Zygmunt Bauman’s work on the Holocaust, national identity, and modernity, Gilroy writes: “Whether born of ignorance of disregard, his [Bauman’s] view of the Jews as ‘the only non-national nation’ (emphasis added) and the only group ‘caught in the most ferocious of historical conflicts: that between the pre-modern world and advanc-ing modernity’ typifies a Eurocentrism that detracts from the rich-ness of his intellectual legacy. Emmanuel Levinas’s remarks about the qualitative uniqueness of the Holocaust suggests that he suffers from a similar blind spot and that his understanding of the rational basis of these processes could not survive a serious encounter with the history of either slavery or colonial domination.”1

Levinas is of course not unique in this critical horizon. European thinkers have rarely, if ever, theorized the Middle Passage or slavery as either a philosophical problem concerned with being, knowing, and doing or, more intimately, as constitutive of the European imagi-nation of itself. Still this challenge to Levinas stands as important (as well as the address to Bauman) precisely because of the centrality of the materiality of suffering, the immemorial, and radical difference to his thinking. Is Levinas’s thought condemned to a certain global insignificance because of this blind spot? Or can the ethical be recast outside Eurocentrism in order to retrieve a persistent and persisting set of insights?

Interestingly, Gilroy’s first hint of the exit from Eurocentrism is the problem of theodicy. Theodicy infuses problems of suffering, personal and historical, with a sense of redemption, but Levinas


famously breaks apart temporalities of synchrony, kairos, and other models of closure, even in conceiving positive notions of messian-ism. Interruption and diachrony subvert the closure of time with the straightforward weakness and fragility of the face. The face interrupts and opens a gap between time — the most important and complex moment of radical difference — that cannot be sutured by the work of the intellect. The other suffers, the subject suffers the wound of obli-gation, and time holds the relation open. Gilroy writes in an impor-tant footnote, “Levinas’s remarks on useless suffering in another context: ‘useless and unjustifiable suffering [are] exposed and dis-played without any shadow of a consoling theodicy.’ ”2 The problem of theodicy is important here for both Gilroy and Levinas and, in that importance, we catch first sight of the terms in which Gilroy’s later appropriation writes Levinasian theory into a larger narrative about Europe and European culture. In particular, what interests Gilroy about Levinas (and what interests Levinas about certain forms of suf-fering), is how we might conceive suffering outside the arc of moder-nity. Modernity, in this context, is registered as a story of history, a philosophy of historical movement and experience that privileges, at the expense of the particularity of the victims, ultimate meaning or dialectical resolution. It is one thing to simply identify the exclusion-ary consequences of modernity’s sense of historical experience. It is something altogether different to begin, as do Gilroy and Levinas, with what remains, in relation to ultimate meaning and dialectical resolution, as useless and meaningless.

In a strange entanglement, then, Gilroy identifies Levinas at once with the problem of Eurocentrism — a problem that limits his ability to think about suffering in a transnational context — and the notion of useless suffering as what works counter to modernity. Calculative reason, one of the signature features of modernity and its transforma-tion of thinking, cannot contain suffering in the mode of uselessness, that moment in which suffering refuses its use value: redemption, systematic conceptualization, framing, and explanation. Useless suf-fering therefore runs counter to modernity in offering something too


weak, too fragile, and thus resistant to larger narratives about ulti-mate historical meaning. Suffering is not simply outside modernity as a remainder or epistemological outlier, but because suffering resists through obligation (Levinas) and alter-cultural meaning (Gilroy), the wreckage of history (as Benjamin famously put it) generates a coun-terforce alongside modernity’s domination. Now the development of the notion of the countermodern is perhaps the biggest and most important task in The Black Atlantic, so Levinas’s appearance as a chiasmic figure is not without real significance. Gilroy will often draw on the crossing, as well as the difference, between the structure of the Jewish and black diaspora, but in The Black Atlantic the question of suffering and its countermeaning, generative of counter traditions and forms of resistance, infuses Gilroy’s work, however quietly, with a Levinasian motif. With that infusion, too, we see a post-Eurocentrism promise in Levinas’s work.

How then might Levinas break from modernity and the Euro-centrism it bears? In Between Camps, retitled as Against Race for publication in the United States, Gilroy takes up Levinas’s early conception of the body and critique of biologism. This critique in “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism” (1934) embeds Levinas’s early critical philosophy in the question of race, which is key for Gilroy’s reading, but it also indicates a deep phenomenologi-cal critique of modernity and its pretenses — what Levinas will later simply call the problem of totality. Totality and the question of race merge, according to Levinas, in the development of the myth and biology of raciology. Race becomes a science when the science of race blends biological notions of body and intellect with mythologi-cal notions of body, character, and fate. Raciology, of course, is pre-cisely where questions of suffering and diaspora emerge for both the Jewish and black Atlantic traditions — emerging, that is, as a point of simultaneous crisis and radical break. The crisis inheres in the attempt to root racism and racial persecution in a foundation that is scien-tific in the naturalistic and human senses both, and the radical break opens in just that hubristic move. Scientificity opens claims to clear


refutation, but it is also worth noting that racism’s vertical approach to culture and cultural production is itself a gratuitous gesture that notes important differences, then anchors those differences in a hier-archy of values. Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic contests that hierarchy with the notion of the countermodern. Perhaps here we can see the resonance with Levinas’s claim, however controversial it might be, that Europe is the tension (even contradiction) between the Bible and the Greeks.

Raciology begins with the body in its biological, existential, and aesthetic registers. For both Levinas and Gilroy, the critique of raci-ology begins with questions of embodiment. Gilroy writes that in contrast to the traditions of Christianity and liberalism, both of which see “a sense of embodiment and corporeal constraint” as “a stage to be passed through en route to a higher and more valuable sense of freedom, . . . Levinas warns that Hilterism finds and founds a new definition of freedom from an acceptance of being constrained by the body. The soul or spirit does not disappear, but its essence is redefined by the fact that it is chained to the body.”3 Constraint is channeled through the fascist imagination in order to derive pleasure from this constraint; indeed, this is the function of a filmmaker like Riefenstahl, a fascist whose visual craft, one could argue, aims at articulating the athletic and militaristic overcoming of the body’s constraints through individual and collective (racial) effort. Or, alternatively, how the black body has figured in an infrahuman aesthetic that, while it gestures toward the superhuman, remains inscribed within the white suprema-cist imagination of the link between embodiment, enchainment, and human possibility. Levinas identifies just this aspect as a philosophical problem, one bound to a history of essentialism that is, under the political and epistemological regimes of fascism, brought to bear on the body through the naturalistic and cultural science of race. Gilroy follows this characterization of Levinas in Between Camps with a pas-sage from “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism” in which the relationship between this enchainment of the body — which will be very different than the postbiologistic notion of the embodied subject


developed elsewhere in Levinas’s work — and the question of origins is made clear. “To be truly oneself,” Levinas writes, “means becom-ing aware of the ineluctable original chain that is unique to our bod-ies, and above all accepting this chaining” (RPH 69).4 For Levinas, of course, this begins a lifelong meditation on the possibility of an anti-humanist conception of a humanism of the other — an enigmatic and slippery notion that perhaps still needs elaboration. The humanism of the other is rooted in the unrooting, the anarche, of both subjec-tivity and the alterity of the other. Singularity, to employ a complex and freighted term, contests and resists both the ineluctability of the enchainment to the body — the meaning and sense of the body is structured by the unicity of the face-to-face, not an essence — and the sense of origin, which is biological through and through in early twentieth century discourse on race. The truth of the self is at stake in this break with the raciological body, which in Levinas’s hands, becomes also and firstly the truth of the relation to the other.

Gilroy identifies this moment in the early Levinas as crucial for breaking with the language of race, which means opening new pos-sibilities for political meaning and meaning making, but the repudia-tion of raciology is firstly an ethical project. That is, the Levinasian reconception of the body in response to the ineluctable and original chain of the raciological body is situated in the outrage and wound of racism. Gilroy writes: “However reluctant we may feel to take the step of renouncing ‘race’ as part of an attempt to bring political cul-ture back to life, this course must be considered because it seems to represent the only ethical response to the conspicuous wrongs that raciologies continue to solicit and sanction.”5 The reluctance here, of course, lies in the fact that race continues to structure political and cultural reality, and so renouncing race as a philosophical cate-gory would seem to erase the very terms under which the racial other lives. Race must be rethought outside raciological habits of thinking. The alternative is not a postracial notion of equality or sameness, which like Levinas, Gilroy understands to be part of the problem of racial violence and terror. And yet there is still the possibility of a


humanism without sameness of meaning or essence. The Levinasian face and its ethical command provides Gilroy with the model for this other humanism: the humanism of the other. He continues: “The deliberate wholesale renunciation of ‘race’ proposed here even views the appearance of an alternative, metaphysical humanism premised on face-to-face relations between different actors — beings of equal worth — as preferable to the problems of inhumanity that raciology creates. If this metaphysics ultimately acquires a religious cast . . . [in] the work of the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas . . . it can be rescued from the worst excesses of idealism if only it is recognized as incor-porating a provocative attempt to reactivate political sensibilities so that they flow outside the patterns set for them in a world of fortified nation-states and antagonistic ethnic groups.”6 Everything is gathered in the face-to-face: race, humanism, ethno-nationalism, the state of war, and difference and equality. Can the Levinasian ethical carry this liberatory promise? What sort of humanism is possible after human-ism’s traffic in raciology and the production of infrahumanity?

Gilroy opens up a cluster of critical issues here. First, he rehearses a familiar reproach of Levinas: that he is idealistic or utopian in his formation of the face. However, Gilroy himself articulates the sig-nificance of utopianism in the same pages as this hesitation (Between Camps affirms the power of the utopian imagination), underscoring, in a way Levinas perhaps should have, the importance of ethical and political imagination in an era of flattened and flattening possibili-ties. Second, Gilroy proposes Levinas’s work as an alternative to the problems of inhumanity created by raciology and racism, the problem of totality as it is lived in political bodies, which importantly links the ethical to the complex project of contesting the persistence of ethno- and racial-nationalism in all forms of political thinking. The ethical allows us to imagine a relation to the other that counters modernity and its violence, not out of the ephemera of thinking, but in a con-crete encounter with otherness. The face-to-face is as material as it is ideal. Embodiment, in its ethical signification, anchors the political imagination. And so, Gilroy will claim in “Biopolitics and the Black


Public Sphere” that this “pre-ontological space of ethics” allows us to “rehabilitate the untimely issues of intersubjective responsibility and accountability that have been expelled from the interpretive commu-nity during the reign of ethnic absolutism and its bodily signs.”7 Being is a precondition of ethnic absolutism, an insight and philosophical ground to Gilroy’s account of raciology that Levinas’s reflection on totality makes possible. Responsibility, which Gilroy expresses here as a Levinasian intersubjectivity, is only possible if the bodily sign of race — that ineluctable enchainment and site of origin — is criti-cally surmounted by another body, another subject, another sense of other, and so another sense of responsibility.

Levinas therefore plays a double role in Gilroy’s critique of raciol-ogy. First and foremost, the delinking of the body and subjectivity from senses of the ineluctable and origin has the philosophical effect of thinking beyond being and essence. But such a delinking also opens up a new ethical and political horizon of the interhuman, and perhaps the political moment of that new horizon can reintroduce a productive sense of the political experience of racial persecution to Levinasian thinking. The bodily sign of ethnic and racial absolut-ism, that catastrophic enchainment to the body, is surmounted by the Levinasian account of the face-to-face, which itself is only possible when incarnate subjectivity is theorized outside the logic of identity. What for Levinas is an important and ultimately fecund break with identity thinking is, for Gilroy, an insight into a companion impera-tive: make a clean break with racial essentialism. Indeed, the thread across the essays gathered in Between Camps, which also structures Gilroy’s later reflections in Postcolonial Melancholia, casts the prob-lem as the persistence of Manichean thinking in racial politics. The massive challenge here, though, is the question of how race might still name something important and ethically, politically formative after the critique of raciology has been moved to the center of our thinking. For if race no longer signifies in the body as a fixed, origi-nal, and ineluctable sign, then how are we to think outside race, while at the same time responding to the imperatives that issue from racial


persecution? How can race signify without essentialism? In other words, what is race after raciology?

race after racioloGy

Levinas’s and Gilroy’s hesitation before the language of race is clear and convincing. Race as raciology enchains the body to a myth of origins, and those origins set fate such that the racialized body is fixed as a threat to a particular vision of humanity, whether that is the threat of excessive power or the pathetic lot of those who cannot yet achieve humanity’s authentic virtues. So it is not surprising to imag-ine that a certain humanism proves seductive. After all, what stron-ger rebuke could we find to racism than an inclusive notion of the human? Except that, of course, the imagination of the human has its own history. The history of the human and of humanism is itself part of the racist and colonial project; subjugation is just as much, perhaps more, justified by than it is resisted in humanism. Precisely because humanism, in the conventional sense of the term, is an essentialism, it is susceptible to (if not outright constructed for) racial formation and exclusion. The humanism of the other — this quirky notion in Levinas that also attracts Gilroy in the postraciological moment — is therefore an idea of exceptional promise, even as the emphatic place of singularity would seem to marginalize the lived experience of racial identity and persecution.

It is interesting to note here how the humanism of the other comes to expression. Levinas’s now famous story about Bobby, the last Kantian in Germany, puts the matter in direct, even stark terms. The humanism of the other speaks itself in the moment of perhaps deepest despair, in that precarious space between the human and the infra-human. Bobby speaks to Levinas as a dog and a face, which places the animal — our liminal space par excellence — squarely in the ethical, not as a site of responsibility, but rather as a commanding reminder of the recurrence of goodness in the midst of violence and death.


Levinas’s moment of reminder is not an ethno-cultural sign. Whereas, for example, Elie Wiesel’s reminder of human goodness (and plain survival) is signaled at the moment in which he hears the recitation of kaddish in the remains of Auschwitz, reinscribing resistance to vio-lence in the Jewish tradition of mourning and particular meaning-making, Levinas turns to (or is turned by) the animal. The animal body solicits and reminds the body caught between the human and infrahuman. Enchainment to the body is here not an enchainment to tradition and millennia-old methods of making meaning, but instead to the raw materiality of the animal body’s relation to our human-ity, to our enduring sense of witness, responsibility, and, in the end, goodness.

For Gilroy in “Biopolitics and the Black Public Sphere,” the dog (and so the animal more generally) also signifies, expressing, in a pecu-liar liminal space, the possibility of a “positive value of intersubjectiv-ity in black political cultures.”8 The occasion for Gilroy’s reflection on the animal and responsibility is the 1993 debut album Doggystyle by the hip-hop artist Snoop Dogg (Calvin Broadus). The album cover and the music video for “Who Am I? (What’s My Name?)” feature the artist and his friends morphing back-and-forth between animal and human: the dog face becomes a human face, the human face becomes a dog face. The title of the song is of course crucial. The open questions — Who am I? What’s my name? — are not just musical catch phrases, but symptoms and signs of identity crisis after the slow, yet urgent, fade of essentialist notions of blackness. Racial identity itself is at stake in those questions, of course, for a sense of being and name lays a foundation for thinking critically about the possibility of black political life after essentialism. Gilroy writes that the

ethical and political significance of Snoop’s affirmation of blackness in dog-face has one last important layer. Its simultaneous question-ing of humanity and proximity can be used not only to reinterpret what passes as ‘nihilism’ but to construct an argument about the posi-tive value of intersubjectivity in black political cultures that are now


subject-centered to the point of solipsism. In this sense, Snoop’s dog may help to sniff out an escape route from the current impasse in think-ing about racialized identity . . . [and] asking about the premium that this talk about sex places on touch and the moral proximity of the other.9

For Gilroy, the simultaneity of the questions “Who am I?” and “What’s my name?” with the alienation of sex signified by the dog places the animal, perhaps unexpectedly, in the position of ethical teaching. The dog, passing from animal to human, signals something that exits the solipsism of modernity’s claim on black cultural life, moving toward what Gilroy previously called the preontological space of another kind of interhuman relation: ethical intersubjectivity.

But here, in Gilroy’s hands, the dog teaches the ethical in order to reawaken the question of political life and the ethics of intersubjectiv-ity. For Levinas, of course, the last Kantian is a reminder that the face survives all stripping away of humanity. The camp exposes the limits of humanism and its attempt to identify a human essence; reduced to the animality of camp life, the animal himself expresses a face and thereby reasserts ethical life in the ruins of the human. Gilroy sees Snoop Dogg’s morphing back-and-forth between the animal and the human in the midst of decrepit, broken life (the beleaguered streets of the urban poor, which is as much a figure of modernity as it is a literal depiction) as an ambivalent, yet suggestive sign of another possible life. It is another possible life at the very same moment that life itself is being consigned, once again, to the melancholy of the infrahu-man. That is, Gilroy sees the dog as a signifier of ethical meaning and responsible subjectivity in Doggystyle, an unexpected reversal of the animal-human that is especially important to those for whom the link between subjugation and animality has been historically terrifying. In the Levinasian moment, this strange signification emerges precisely when the humanist tradition fails to see the humanism of the other. The beleaguered streets are nothing if not the failure of modern cul-tural and political life to create a sense of universal belonging, an ethi-cal and political failure, to be sure. So if the animal, and so our own implication in the animality of human life, signifies the possibility of


ethical life in the moment of disaster, then we can also say that the dog reminds us that the ethical does not operate on the plane of being. Embodied life, in its ethical register, is not tied to identities or other modalities of persistence in being. The dog reminds Levinas, as well as Gilroy, of how the ethical interrupts the play of humanism with a more profound, more disruptive, and therefore more full possibility of contact and proximity. For Levinas, the caress solicits the infinite in the other and thereby moves outside totality. For Gilroy, touch opens the horizon of sexuality and the histories of sexual pleasure that made meaning outside the cruel plane of being-as-racial-terror. For both of them, contact and touch remake intersubjectivity as dif-ference, multiplicity, and differentiation, rather than shared identity, essence, and the quiet nationalism of community.

Gilroy’s twist on Levinas’s insight, however, is decisive and, in the Levinasian context, dramatic. The ethical life of proximity — which for Gilroy, refigures sexuality and pleasure, and for Levinas refigures welcoming and liturgical senses of expenditure — is not yet political for Levinas. Touch and contact are relations of singularity. That is, there is not yet a sense of historical identity and the kinds of politi-cal sensibility that might emerge from embodied life in proximity. Without the political, Gilroy worries, rightly, that problems of anti-racist struggle and solidarity across borders and boundaries of identity get lost in the face-to-face drama of the ethical. This is not to say that the ethical is not (or cannot be articulated as) already freighted with political transformation. Indeed, Gilroy insists across his work that the new intimacy, which is also quite old, opened up by sex and plea-sure in proximity (the ethical moment) transforms a sense of com-munity, shifting from the solipsism of modernity toward a belonging that is neither a fixed identity nor a rooted relation between bodies. This is why Gilroy finds Snoop Dogg’s album Doggystyle so compel-ling. The sexual position named by the title enacts what Gilroy calls a “dual solitude,” in which the contact between bodies is not yet a Levinasian proximity; there is no face-to-face, literally or figura-tively. Yet, doggystyle as the transition from infrahuman to animal to


human and back again indicates another sort of relation of the subject to itself and to the other. The stripped down animality of the dog, like Levinas’s Bobby, bears a face that, through a camera trick, is also a human face. This doggystyle shifts the question of meaning back into the preontological space of the Levinasian ethical, a space not yet alienated by the solipsism of modernity (and Western metaphys-ics more widely) and, for the black Atlantic, a space reserved outside the internal and external subjugation of bodies. Gilroy reminds us repeatedly that embodiment and sexual pleasure have always been important as forms of resistance and, most importantly, reminders of the possibility of meaning in the midst of unspeakable suffering. And so, in this moment, the specificity of black historical experience comes to bear on the ethical and its attendant political dimension. Solipsism, tied as it is to notions of totality and being, alienates the subject from the body in an act of violence, but, when Levinas’s claim is moved across different racialized experiences, the resonance of this alienation and violence is altered. The shift here turns on a concep-tion of race — if indeed such a conception is possible — that refuses the biologism and repetition of nationalism inherent in raciological conceptions of identity.

We stumble upon one of the most perplexing, if utterly obvious, problems in theorizing race. How can we talk about race after biolo-gism? What words and concepts can now be deployed in the descrip-tion of race, racism, and racialized experience (whether as persecution or as identity formation)? Once we understand both that a biological theory of racial difference is no longer theoretically or rhetorically viable and that, with Levinas’s essay on Hitlerism in view, the biologi-cal conception of the body is an anxious site of nationalism and vio-lence, the problem of articulating racialized experience and identity comes into the fore. Perhaps this is one way to reread the trajectory of Levinas’s oeuvre. His essay on Hitlerism is, along with On Escape, an early Levinasian intervention in discussions of the body, wherein incarnate being becomes both an existential condition that binds the self to its materiality and a fraught condition of racial essentialism.


If the essay on Hitlerism clarifies Levinas’s (righteous) objection to biologism, it also establishes a certain anchored — Levinas will use the term enchained in a number of other places — sense of the body. Even if, as we have seen above, this enchainment breaks with the inelucta-ble and senses of origin, Levinas’s subject is embodied: singularity as incarnation. Is singularity the only strategy for thinking against racio-logical identities? Perhaps we ought to read Levinas as an antiracist thinker in just these terms, even as he employs, quite freely, ethno-cultural terms to describe the West and its internal constitution.

Gilroy’s Postcolonial Melancholia takes on this very same dilemma, with a more pointed and comprehensive resistance to essentialisms. Levinas’s work will turn repeatedly to the particularity of Jewish wis-dom, which is perhaps related to his later, sympathetic turn toward Zionism, and that in turn retrieves something of the truth of the ethno-cultural binary of the Greek and the Jew. But Gilroy attempts to think without the remnants of this binary, which in the Africana context is the colonial binary of white and black. The Manichean conception of race is not just an historical period piece or mythology of a now past era, but instead, a form of ethical and political thinking that survives the death of raciology. For this reason, every form of nationalism is subject to critique in Between Camps, including those forms that, like Gilroy, are in search of liberation from racism. And while he is certainly similarly concerned with the ethno-cultural prac-tices of the black Atlantic and how those practices produce a coun-termodern history, he is not entirely convinced of the irrelevance of the question of race as a kind of experience. How can we theorize in this space, having both repudiated the deep conceptual language of raciology and affirmed the ethical force of bodies in proximity?

For Levinas and Gilroy, then, there can be no language of race as raciology. This means that any language of racial identity is both ungrounded and precarious. On the one hand, notions of diaspora and tradition carry some of the forms and weight of race, insofar as diasporic identity is an identity. Something lived as meaningful in manifold senses. Indeed, the sense of belonging-without-nation


expressed by diaspora (and even makes it possible) gives a group a sense of commonality while at the same time avoiding repetition of colonial structures of identification. Tradition deepens this belonging and commonality by threading together the scattered seeds without appealing to what often turns out to be a fantasy of racial origins. On the other hand, diaspora and tradition have a difficult time accounting for the racialized experience that survives the end of raciology. As well, as Homi Bhabha’s work so clearly and emphatically argues, diaspora itself — especially when it is tied to notions of tradition — traffics in its own fantasies. The narration and dissemination of diasporic identity works intimately with all sorts of national fantasy, whether in an ata-vistic or syncretic register.10

Where are we left after raciology? Should we be content with the thin, yet not nothing, identities of diaspora and tradition? Or do we need another rewriting of race as historical and political experience — an experience of asymmetrical social space, lived as col-lective and as a space of injustice, obligation, and so on?

Solidarity, Vulnerability, JuStice

If the dilemma for Gilroy after raciology is the question of how to conceive identity and tradition without fixed essences, and that the history and persistence of suffering under antiblack racism remains a ghostly and obligating presence in that question, then we should not be surprised to find him turning again to Levinas. First, there is Levinas’s own problematic of Jewish identity, which at times finds expression in Zionist sympathy, other times in appeals to tradition and the shape of European culture from the margins. Levinas’s rejection of biologism and its attendant theories of race in the Hitlerism essay signals an important critical break with a certain European tradition, and yet that leaves him in a precarious place as a thinker: what is iden-tity without something fixed and essential? What sorts of continuities can be expressed without the fixed and essential? Second, there is the


familiar crossing of the ethical and the political. However familiar, it continues to be a fraught and complicated conceptual space for Levinas and those of us thinking in a Levinasian register. To wit: if we have eschewed the language of essence or any shared, fixed identity, then how do we transition from the near-incomprehensibly singular character of the ethical to a larger question of political responsibility? However difficult the transition, the transition is an imperative. The crossing of the ethical to the political means we must find sites and centers of political gravity that call us outside subjectivity and into, for lack of a better way of putting it, a kind of transcendence of collec-tivity. How can we think this collectivity and the relation of transcen-dence without repeating what is so grotesque about fascist spectacles of belonging and national identity?

On this question, Gilroy proceeds from a very different — no mat-ter how related — configuration of diaspora. The Jewish diaspora serves as a prompt for thinking about the scattering of seeds, to be sure, and yet the idea of tradition and the experience(s) of language fundamentally change the meaning of identity across fragmentation. The Bible and its linguistic-conceptual center give the diasporic frag-mentation a sense of tradition that remains fixed across difference. Indeed, this is a constant in Levinas’s work. No matter the shifts and turns in interpretation and appreciation of the Bible’s wisdom of love, there is the book and the axis around which difference orbits. The African diaspora cannot begin with such an assumption. Rather, it begins with the loss of the book and tradition; the Middle Passage and colonialism aim at nothing short of complete devastation of identity. In thinking through this meaning of diaspora, then, Gilroy begins with devastated space and the invention of aesthetic forms in response to total loss. Gilroy’s story of the slave sublime in The Black Atlantic centers and decenters the African diaspora, marking how and why a history of pain gives birth to a distinctive people, sound, and set of global (and globalizing) meanings. When Gilroy theorizes iden-tity in this conception of diaspora, however, the ethical and political


language is not of commonality and strict identity, but instead of belongingness and solidarity. How can we theorize belonging and solidarity outside the Manichean rhetoric of nationalism, raciology, and the like?

Again, Gilroy turns to Levinas in order to both reorient the ques-tion and transform Levinasian motifs. Now, the ethical register of Levinas’s work is of course his signature contribution to contem-porary philosophy and cultural theory more generally. The place of embodiment deepens as Levinas moves from the language of the face, itself an embodied encounter, to the language of wound, skin, and a host of other signs of materiality. In fact, his account of the exposed body in Otherwise than Being is arguably the centerpiece of Levinas’s rewriting of the ethical in the later work, replacing the language of excess and voluptuosity in Totality and Infinity with a considerably more austere theoretical vocabulary. The exposure of the subject’s body to the other is a fact, perhaps the founding fact, of my incarna-tion. I am, Levinas famously writes, uncomfortable in my own skin (OB 49, 104, 106, 108). The incarnation of the subject adds a trou-bling, anxious dimension to his multilayered critique of the conatus essendi, a critique that will not only sever the idea of responsibility from the will, but also places subjectivity in the liminal space between violence and goodness. That is, the subject’s incarnation implicates, if not outright declares, the intractable character of violence. To be is to commit injustice, to damage the Other simply in the act of bodily need and being. My body has hunger, so it consumes. My body takes up space, so it usurps. In that consumption and in that space, the other is displaced, even if my heart is kind. The imperative to give bread from my own mouth, such a powerful and evocative motif in the early Levinas, is supplemented with a different affective precondi-tion: my incarnation and its attendant desires and needs signal failure before I come to words and action. The body, then, is a sign of my violence. I am enchained to the body in this manner. Broken from the ineluctable and an original chain of essential meanings, I am nonethe-less irrecusably embodied. Embodied in this space, this place, and so


I am an agent of violence before the will, choice, and any other sense of making my way through the world.

For Gilroy, the body’s vulnerability, its irreducible fragility, is lived differently when the historical experience of race and racism frames embodiment. This is of course nothing like a repetition of raciology, but instead an account of how the history of subjugation and the persistence of antiblack racism come to bear on the experience of the black body. In this moment, Gilroy turns to Fanon and uncov-ers, beneath the often hypermasculinity of his later work in Wretched of the Earth, a vulnerable and exposed body. Gilroy writes that for Fanon, “epidermalized power violated the human body in its sym-metrical, intersubjective, social humanity, in its species being: in its fragile relationship to other fragile bodies and in its connection to the redemptive potential dormant in the wholesome or perhaps suf-fering corporeality.”11 Gilroy will not take on Fanon’s voluntarist language here, strictly speaking, but instead sees a key opening in Fanon’s account of the fragile body. Whereas for Fanon the fragile body becomes, one could argue, a feminized body that is remascu-linized in revolutionary action, Gilroy takes the fragile body in two senses. The first is a Levinasian sense. The fragile body names our relation to the other in the preontological moment, an opening to the ethical relation from a position of vulnerability, rather than, as for Fanon, a pure moment of injustice. The second sense of the fragile body, however, nuances and transforms the vulnerable body. As we have seen, Gilroy’s concern is at one and the same time with the pos-sibility of responsible intersubjectivity (his name for the Levinasian ethical) and the meaning of modernity’s bearing on black bodies. In this latter concern, the fragile body names the ambivalent incarnation of the black subject whose advance into modernity — what one might call liberation — is the advance of solipsism and alienation between black bodies. Fragility is as much an act of violence as it is a point of opening to another sense of incarnate intersubjectivity. The politics of this moment, then, are paramount. What can be done with the fragile body such that it opens up new possibilities while also not consigning


itself to the damage of racism? Gilroy’s answer to this question lies in a peculiar blend of the animal and solidarity, both of which cross the ethical and the political.

In Postcolonial Melancholia, Gilroy evokes Levinas’s story of Bobby again, but here in relation to what I would call a Levinasian reading of George Orwell’s essay “A Hanging.” Orwell’s story, like Levinas’s recounting of Bobby, describes the terrifying presence of death and the interruption of death’s solipsism and mechanistic cruelty by the animality of a dog’s face, all of which happens as the British colo-nial police carry out an execution with lazy, casual everydayness. The animal in Orwell’s story stands outside humanism’s reach and thereby reminds of the ethical moment. Gilroy’s account of the dog, which engages both Orwell and Levinas, again links the animal to an emergent, antihumanist sense of humanity, which in this case is linked to the suffering of the body. Gilroy writes: “This vital human-ity, which can only be realized in the overthrow of injustice, directs attention away from all anthropology and toward the ‘bestial floor’ of the human being in the body, in particular to ordinary experi-ences of sickness and suffering.”12 The body, in its ordinariness and everyday pathos, suffers two wounds. First, there is the relation of the wounded other, whose suffering provokes my attention and trans-forms my subjectivity at its origins. The other’s suffering reconfigures subjectivity by drawing the meaning and sense of ethical life into the preontological space of proximity, the other’s body, the body of the subject as moi. This is Levinas’s claim from the mid-1950s onward and it makes sense of Gilroy’s engagement with Orwell, the dog, and the quirky manner in which the animal draws us to a “vital human-ity” or what Levinas calls the humanism of the other. Second, in this preontological space of relation, the body of the subject suffers the wound of accusation. Indeed, Levinas’s work is most complex and compelling in this very moment in which the transformation from the I to the me is enacted. Solitude and solipsism are surmounted in the name of the good, to be sure, but it is also a painful surmounting


insofar as the subject loses its place in the world. But this is a loss for justice and for the good; this is what it means to become a subject for-the-Other. Even as Levinas will claim that the subject is for-the-Other prior to all worldliness, we must keep in mind, which Gilroy does in his appropriation of Levinas, that this call to the prior disrupts all of our sense of embodied proximity in modernity.

The ordinariness of the body exposes the body’s exposure, fragility, and vulnerability. In that ordinariness, then, there is the opening of the ethical. But Orwell’s story, it is important to note, has two politi-cal moments at its core. First, there is the political act of execution. Second, there is the colonial context: the British police execute a man in Burma. So, Gilroy’s sustained reflection on Orwell’s “A Hanging” reinscribes the Levinasian problem of embodiment, in particular the vulnerable body as ethical subjectivity, into the question of justice. He continutes: “What, after all, might the vagrant and exile have gained by their separation from the cozy comforts of the national commu-nity, even in its worthy oppositional pattern? For brevity’s sake, I shall say only that Orwell might be thought of as having traded the dubi-ous benefits of his imperial Brit nationality for a rare opportunity to connect with and even understand the whole world. This is not . . . a devaluation of love, but its transmutation into the fragile, emergent substance of vital planetary humanism.”13 Orwell’s trading of imperi-alism for transnational contact, a sort of race-traitor act in the name of justice, carries the Levinasian insight into the ethics of the suffer-ing body over to the political. Or at least there is such a promise, one borne by the name Gilroy gives to this transmutation of the wisdom of love in a global context: translocal solidarity. Translocal solidarity is at once a political act — one no doubt determined by certain con-straints in the plane of being, so still troubled by the ethical — and an ethical-political claim of justice upon the body — a claim that bears more Levinasian promise in politics. This Levinasian promise does not proceed from rooted national or racial identity, but instead from the insight into exile and vagrancy, both of which wander the subject


across borders with a sense of obligation that intensifies. This is a humanism of the other, to be sure, but in Gilroy’s hands, a sense of the other in a planetary context: a transnational ethics and politics.

For Gilroy, this is a fragile and still emergent sense of planetary humanism. Because it is a humanism conceived outside the identity theory of conventional humanism and the values of modernity, the body and the animal set the ethical grounds for any claim to respon-sibility. What does it mean to think politically about this humanism of the suffering other, of the suffering body who bears witness to the other’s precarious condition? Witness becomes solidarity, which is an act that is both translocal and a dismantling of privilege and power through the body’s exposure, fragility, and vulnerability. Gilroy writes: “The growing band of people who opt to bear active witness to distant suffering and even to place their lives at risk in many parts of the world as human shields thankfully represent the undoing of identity politics. Their practical answer to imperialism, racism, and the narcisissism of minor differences mobilizes the invaluable solidar-ity of the slightly different. . . . Theirs is a translocal commitment to the alleviation of suffering and to the practical transfiguration of democ-racy which is incompatible with racism and ethnic absolutism.”14 It is noteworthy here that Gilroy underscores the slightly different moment in solidarity, a marking of difference that at once refuses the nationalism of absolute (racial, ethnic) difference and places prac-tices and histories of racism at the center of political action. And here we see what remains of race after raciology: the suffering under rac-ist regimes of knowing, being, and acting. The human shield — the ethical-political body par excellence — intervenes in the violence of racism in the refusal of absolutism. It is the injustice done to the other and how that injustice names me, in my privilege, as a respon-sible being that moves a Levinasian responsibility across borders: the exposed body as exile as ethical and political responsibility. Gilroy writes further: “It is only racism that acknowledges the difference between their rights-bearing bodies and those of the rights-less people they protect by their presence. These gestures of solidarity proceed from


the assumption that translation will be good enough to make the desired experiential, political, and ethical leap. Purposive vagrancy and exile. . . . Where the lives of natives, prisoners, and enemies are abject and vulnerable, they must be shielded by others, endowed with those more prestigious, rights-bearing bodies that can inhibit the brutal exercise of colonial governance.”15 The exilic condition of the ethi-cal, a quiet theme throughout Levinas’s work, is here reoriented at the level of action or politics. Embodiment prompts solidarity in the preontological space of the ethical, to be sure, but embodiment also prompts responsibility in the plane of being. Politics as being reifies the body, marking what Gilroy here calls “rights-bearing bodies” as simultaneously sites of violence (bearing rights as others remain rightless) and sites of responsible action (making the body vulnerable again in the name of justice). This is not institutional reform politics. It is, rather, an intervention against violence in its particular manifes-tation, in a particular face-to-face, and in a particular racist rendering of the interhuman. The ethical crosses the political in the vulnerable body’s act of solidarity. This is a leap, no doubt, but surely also a fine risk worth taking.

We arrive at a crucial problem in Levinas’s theorizing of the rela-tion between ethics and politics: the asymmetry of political space. Levinas’s rhetoric, in terms of the Western tradition of political phi-losophy and the polemic against nationalism and fascism, identifies being with uniformity. Rights talk, law, and national belonging traffic in just such uniformity and, insofar as action takes place within the political space of rights and the configurations of intersubjectivity as the nation-state, the identification of politics with being-as-uniformity is not only a convincing point, but, at times, the only point one can make about political life. And yet political space, when thought in terms of racism and a transnational sense of relation and injustice, is not symmetrical or uniform. In the nonuniformity, a certain kind of action is called for. Gilroy’s evocation of the translocal and solidarity is just that kind of action, and the Levinasian motif of the body in its vulnerability, exiled at every level, gathers together the complexity of


the postraciological moment. Racism is a critical component of the call to justice, but our embodied action is potent, transgressive, and just precisely when it refuses nationalisms of all sorts and embodies the purposive vagrancy of solidarity work.

The Vernacular and the Cosmopolitical

In considering Gilroy’s appropriation of Levinas, it is plain that his reading gathers together and reclusters, in a very different form than in the original, Levinasian ideas of ethics, politics, embodiment, and the peculiar call of justice. Gilroy, after all, is an original thinker and not a commentator or acolyte. This is one of the real virtues of Gilroy’s appropriation of Levinas, an appropriation that we might go so far as to call a liberation of Levinasian thinking. This is not to say that that Levinas’s work is not already liberation from the Western tradition’s often suffocating preoccupation with totality and strict identitarian thinking. We cannot, for instance, think about time, space, subjectiv-ity, or ethics without the massive shift in the conceptual field initiated by his work. At the same time, Levinas’s work is compromised from the outset by his provincialism, his commitment to Europe only, and therefore the very real conceptual apparatus underpinning his various “controversial” remarks about Africa, China, and Palestinians. Those provincialisms, commitments, and varieties of racism or xenophobia are not solely personal failings of the man, reflections of the age, or occasional remarks contradicted by a more palatable and virtuous Levinas. Rather, the troubling Eurocentrism of Levinas’s work affects not so much the internal composition of Levinasian ideas but the particular ways in which those ideas are assembled. That is, there is a fine argument to be made — if not without some controversy — that Levinas uncovers something fundamental about what it means to be human. We are embodied and present to the world, which means that vulnerability is less an experience we undergo than the very struc-ture of our subjectivity. Vulnerability is resistance, in the context of the present essay, to the essentializing and scientism of the body of which raciology is a particularly sinister example.


What Gilroy’s treatment of vulnerability and justice underscores, however, is that the assemblage of Levinasian motifs in Levinas’s work operates in a largely neutral conceptual space, and so, despite all the appeals to singularity and the instant, is still a kind of universalism. Those ideas need not be assembled in such a space. Gilroy’s insistence on thinking in a cosmopolitical context, which is the founding mean-ing of the black Atlantic as a global cultural event, shifts the assembly of those ideas through an appeal to what we could call, with him, the vernacular intervention. Vernacular here simply means the way or ways in which a particular site or moment forms the meaning of a cluster of signs such that those signs cannot be understood outside the site and moment, while at the same time having a clear prov-enance in a shared chain of significations. The vernacular interven-tion reclusters a conceptual scheme in a specific place. What does the other ask of me? This is the vernacular moment, and one that refuses the seductions of politics as rights, law, and inclusive universality. Infusing solidarity with the vernacular begins to address the core ten-sion in Levinas’s work between the ethical and the political. That is, if the singularity of the ethical contradicts the political, produc-ing a certain kind of impasse, then perhaps the vernacular context of the call of justice — that urgent crossing of singular responsibility with something more, something emphatically historical and satu-rated with questions of identity — indicates a bit of the particularity of context that refigures the relation between the ethical and the politi-cal. This shift toward the particularity of context may also suggest a reconfiguration of being as rhizomatic, rather than, as Levinas always imagines it, uniformity and sameness.16

The vernacular context of justice places Levinasian terms — espe-cially the imperatives of the ethical — in a cosmopolitical context. Travel, figured here by Gilroy as purposive exile and vagrancy, changes everything. Travel changes the theoretical constellation of the Levinasian concepts in this case, which is the fate of conceptual schemata that move across borders, in part because Levinas’s own texts are limited by the European context in which they are written


and toward which they are written as an address. If we are to take Levinas seriously in the context of pressing issues of race and racism, then we need to move across borders. Or, perhaps, we could say that we need to rediscover Levinas’s own borders, for it is peculiar — if not a bit dispiriting — to find no mention of problems of immigration, political asylum, and postcolonial migration patterns in the great thinker of the Other as stranger. Derrida’s late work, of course, takes up just these sorts of interest and always in a decidedly Levinasian vein, with issues of infinite responsibility, interruption, and the ques-tioning of borderlands and borderlines prominently featured. And yet all of this is still to be thought through with the problem of the subaltern in view, which is to say, in nonview at the center of our reflections on what it means to be in solidarity with the other. It is one thing to hear the other accuse in the face-to-face. It is an alto-gether other cluster of enigmas — so urgent, so under thought in a Levinasian context — to hear the question from across borders, the question of the dog, perhaps, but also the question of the humanism of the Other under regimes of racial violence and exclusion, the ver-nacular question that calls me not to answer with my own words, but to respond, in vulnerable embodiment, with “Here I am, in solidar-ity,” when addressed: What’s my name?

Notes to drabiNski, “verNacular solidarity“

Paul Gilroy, 1. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993), 213.

Ibid., 230n81. The quotation is from Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” in 2. The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (London: Routledge, 1988), 164.

Paul Gilroy, 3. Between Camps (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 175–76.Quoted in Gilroy, 4. Between Camps, 176.Gilroy, 5. Between Camps, 40.Ibid., 41.6. Ibid., 42.7. Ibid., 205.8. Ibid., 205.9. See the classic essay, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins 10.

of the Modern Nation,” in Location of Culture (New York, Routledge, 1994), 134–70.

Ibid.11. , 46–47.Paul Gilroy, 12. Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University

Press, 2006), 78.Ibid., 80.13. Ibid., 79.14. Ibid., 79–80.15. This is the argument of the final chapter of my 16. Levinas and the

Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), where I read Levinas in relation to Édouard Glissant’s account of other-ness and the rhizomatic politics of Subcommandante Insurgente Marcos and the Zapatista movement.

Notes to Farred, “riGhtlessNess: the case oF basil d’oliveira“

D’Oliveira’s exact date of birth has long been shrouded in uncertainty. 1. When he first represented England in 1966, the story — which may or may not be apocryphal — goes that Dolly himself suggested he was “closer to forty than thirty.”

Critics of D’Oliveira’s original omission condemned the “pusillanim-2. ity” of the English selectors — their refusal to, originally, offend the apartheid state. In addition to D’Oliveira’s autobiographies, D’Oliveira: An Autobiography (London: Collins, 1968) and Time to Declare (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1980), see also Peter Oborne’s Basil D’Oliveira: Cricket and Conspiracy: The Untold Story (Great Britain: Little, Brown, 2004) for the most recent account of the many developments that led up to the cancellation of the tour — and its effects, in Britain, South Africa, and the world at large. There were others, among them D’Oliviera’s teammates, who questioned not the cancellation of the

236 Notes to Pages 173–97

vernacular solidarity

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