This is an interdisciplinary text. Its philosophical intent is pursued largely via the interpretation and analysis of material that is literary-theoretical and historical-political in character. The book sets out to analyse the thought of several leading figures in contemporary philosophy, literary theory and postcolonial literature in terms of the way they individuate the terms that populate the philosophical or literary universes they invent. The philosophical argument of the book is that contrary to its usual characterisation in terms of plurality, particularity (...) and resistance, the ‘postcolonial' is best understood as an ultimately singular, absolute or non-relational category, i.e. one that generates the medium of its own existence (roughly in keeping with Spinoza's conception of substance or Deleuze's conception of difference). Drawing on the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou and guided by comparisons with Buddhism and Islam, Absolutely Postcolonial defends this approach through both a detailed critique of postcolonial theory and comparative readings of four very different contemporary writers: Edouard Glissant (Martinique), Charles Johnson (USA), Mohammed Dib (Algeria), and Severo Sarduy (Cuba). (shrink)

In his formidable Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, Kojin Karatani endeavors to assert the critical potential of an in-between stance which he calls the “parallaxview”: when confronted with an antinomic stance, in the precise Kantian sense of the term, one should renounce all attempts to reduce one aspect to the other. One should, on the contrary, assert antinomy as irreducible, and conceive the point of radical critique not as a certain determinate position as opposed to another position, but as the (...) irreducible gap between the positions themselves, the purely structural interstice between them. Kant’s stance is thus “to see things neither from his own viewpoint, nor from the viewpoint of others, but to face the reality that is exposed through difference (parallax).” What Kant does is to change the very terms of the debate; his solution—the transcendental turn—is unique in that it first rejects any ontological closure: it recognizes a certain fundamental and irreducible limitation (“finitude”) of the human condition, which is why the two poles, rational and sensual, active and passive, cannot ever be fully mediated—reconciled. And, according to Karatani, Marx, in his “critique of political economy,” when faced with the opposition of the “classical” political economy and the neo-classic reduction of value to a purely relational entity without substance, accomplished exactly the same breakthrough toward the “parallax” view: he treatedthis opposition as a Kantian antinomy, i.e., value has to originate outside circulation, in production, and in circulation. (shrink)