Review: Conflicting Humanities

Conflicting Humanities #

Edited by Rosi Braidotti and Paul Gilroy Bloomsbury Academic, 2019 (first published 2016), Theory in the New Humanities series

Braidotti, Rosi, and Paul Gilroy, eds. 2019. Conflicting Humanities. Theory in the New Humanities. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 978-1-4742-3755-0 (paperback), 978-1-4742-3753-6 (ePDF).

Commemorative volumes are usually where arguments go to rest. Conflicting Humanities, which grew out of the 2013 Edward Said Memorial Conference in Utrecht (chaired by Mariam Said), sets itself a harder task than tribute. Braidotti and Gilroy want Said's legacy to answer two pressures at once: a decade of drone warfare and "necropolitical" counterinsurgency on one side, and the technological de-centring of the human (genetics converging with informatics) on the other. Their wager is that Said's agonistic humanism, the "secular" worldly criticism of an exile who refused both easy dismissals and easy defenses of the humanist tradition, is the right instrument for both crises. The wager is worth making. I will argue, however, that the volume only half pays it off, by showing 1) that its designed conversations and its Palestine cluster do superb work; 2) that the posthumanist and Palestinian halves of the book never actually meet; and 3) that the title, read against the editors' intention, names this very problem. The half that works is very good.

An architecture that actually talks to itself #

The pleasant surprise here is structural. Most conference volumes are parallel monologues; this one contains designed conversations. Spivak's "A Borderless World?" gets a direct answer in Ankhi Mukherjee's "Borderless Worlds?", which takes Spivak's insistence that borders "must be both removed and respected" and tests it against Katherine Boo's reporting from Mumbai's slums, puncturing the triumphalism of border-crossing as an all-purpose metaphor. Balibar and Isin run parallel Said-with-Derrida readings: Balibar pairs war and translation as models that penetrate each other; Isin reads Said's late Freud lecture to argue that orientalism was always the symptom of something deeper, a failure to think Europe through non-Europe. The big names (Spivak, Butler, Balibar) do new work here rather than depositing reprints, which is rarer than it should be.

Two chapters stand above the rest. Judith Butler's essay on binationalism in Said and Buber recovers a nearly buried intellectual history, the binationalist strain within Zionist thought itself, and lands the volume's sharpest political-theoretical claim: "there can be no conceptualization of a workable binationalism within the ongoing terms of settler colonialism." That single sentence does more analytical work than some entire chapters. Akeel Bilgrami's "The Political Enlightenment: A View from the South" offers the most portable method in the book. Instead of asking how the Orient looked to the metropole, he reverses the gaze: "What do the ideas of the metropole look like from the perspective of the South?" The question extends Said rather than eulogizing him, and it connects the postcolonial critique to suppressed radical and Romantic dissent inside Europe's own Enlightenment.

The Palestine cluster forms the volume's emotional core, and it earns its weight through specificity. Aamir Mufti develops Palestine as "non-place" through Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention (barred from Oscar consideration on the grounds that no such country existed), and closes on the fact that Said's death certificate reads "Jerusalem, Palestine": "In death, this man may be said to have found his missing homeland." Ariella Azoulay's photo-essay recovers her grandmother's suppressed Arabic name, Aysha, to show how Israeli self-formation required what she calls the eviction of the eviction. Robert Young approaches Said's lifelong problem of representing the invisible through, of all things, a 1917 Leonard Woolf story. These chapters honor Said's own practice of routing politics through art and testimony, and Marina Warner's closing essay on the West-Eastern Divan orchestra brings the thread home.

The title names the problem #

Here lies the difficulty, and it is not the generic complaint that edited volumes are uneven. The book's two announced organizing problems never actually meet. The introduction promises to connect the posthuman de-centring of "Man" with Palestine, exile, and settler colonialism, to recompose "Humanity on fundamentally new grounds" under both pressures at once. In practice, Braidotti's opening chapter on the contested posthumanities and the entire Palestine cluster operate in different idioms and barely cite one another. Nothing in Butler, Mufti, or Azoulay needs the posthuman frame; nothing in Braidotti's cartography of the critical intellectual under the neoliberal university depends on the Palestinian material. The synthesis is a constellation the editors assert and no contributor performs. The title accidentally describes the book: these are conflicting humanities in the flat sense that they run on separate tracks, and the lacuna between the tracks is precisely where the promised argument was supposed to live.

The coverage skew compounds this problem. Israel/Palestine commands six or more chapters. The technological, environmental, and Anthropocene strand that the introduction and series preface foreground rides almost entirely on Braidotti herself. And the editors are unusually present in their own volume; Braidotti and Gilroy write the introduction plus chapters 1 and 5, so the posthumanist agenda rests mostly on the people who commissioned it. Gilroy's chapter, to be fair, supplies the book's best polemical line, aimed at academic radicalism's comfortable stasis: for decades, "all that has been needed in order to appear radical... is to stand firmly in the same place while the profane forces of privatization, militarization and financialization churn destructively around you."

There is also a datedness question that the 2019 reissue does nothing to address. The material comes from a 2013 conference. The university-in-crisis diagnosis belongs to the EU-austerity era, the war framing to the drone-and-counterinsurgency moment, and Warner still refers to the orchestra's 2015 tour as current. None of this invalidates the arguments, but a reader in the mid-2020s has to do their own translation, and for a book about worldly criticism, its world has visibly moved.

How it reads #

The register swings wider than in most theory collections, and the swing is the texture of the book. Spivak compresses to near-aphorism ("borders are amphibolic"). Balibar writes in careful, self-qualifying philosophical prose that pauses to doubt its own concepts. Azoulay writes intimate memoir; Warner and Young open like novelists. The editors write high diagnostic polemic about the "necro-political governmentality of our time," and the series preface announces, with two-word bravado, that "Theory is back." Whether that range reads as richness or as a volume that never settled on its audience will depend on the reader. I found it closer to richness, since the spread of forms (treatise, memoir, manifesto, criticism) is itself an argument about what humanistic writing can be, a bricolage in the honorable sense.

Verdict #

Buy this book for Butler, Bilgrami, Mufti, and Gilroy, and for an editors' introduction on institutional dispossession that stands alone as an essay on the neoliberal university. As a memorial to Said, it is the strongest kind: working intellectuals extending his questions rather than polishing his statue. As the synthesis its title and introduction promise, connecting the posthuman condition to the colonial present, it does not deliver, because no chapter after the introduction attempts the connection. The result is two good half-books bound as one, either of which Said would have argued with productively. That may be the most honest tribute an agonistic humanist could receive, but readers should know which book they are actually getting.