Borrowed Light: Vico, Hegel, and the Colonies

by Timothy Brennan

A critical revaluation of the humanist tradition, Borrowed Light makes the case that the 20th century is the "anticolonial century." The sparks of concerted resistance to colonial oppression were ignited in the gathering of intellectual malcontents from all over the world in interwar Europe. Many of this era's principal figures were formed by the experience of revolution on Europe's semi-developed Eastern periphery, making their ideas especially pertinent to current ideas about autonomy and sovereignty. Moreover, the debates most prominent then―human vs. inhuman, religions of the book vs. oral cultures, the authoritarian state vs. the representative state and, above all, scientific rationality vs. humanist reason―remain central today. Timothy Brennan returns to the scientific Enlightenment of the 17th century and its legacies. In readings of the showdown between Spinoza and Vico, Hegel's critique of liberalism, and Nietzsche's antipathy towards the colonies and social democracy, Brennan identifies the divergent lines of the first anticolonial theory―a literary and philosophical project with strong ties to what we now call Marxism. Along the way, he assesses prospects for a renewal of the study of imperial culture.

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, History

300 pages, Paperback

First published April 9, 2014

Reviews

[Elle · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Nietzsche's position is the only one apart from Communism' – Georges Bataille.

Timothy Brennan's 'Borrowed Light: Vico, Hegel and the Colonies' is a brilliant, important contribution to the history and intellectual lineage of anti-colonial thought. Reading Vico against Spinoza and Hegel against Nietzsche, Brennan seeks to reassess the works of these thinkers, and give a new account of how they either contributed to what became known as Marxism during the interwar period in the 20th century, or found themselves in fierce opposition to the rise of socialism, mass politics and national liberation; an opposition which, Brennan shows, sits just below the surface in much contemporary theory thought to be of 'the left'. In doing so, he breathes new life into the debates over humanism and anti-humanism, philology and counter-philology, textual meaning vs indeterminacy, scientism and positivism, and the individual vs society. It's a wonderful achievement and well argued, I look forward to Brennan continuing the discussion in the forthcoming sequel 'Borrowed Light: The Interwar Moment and Imperial Form'

[Morgan]

I cannot speak as much for the rest of the book, but the chapter on Spinoza and Vico is a trash fire. Brennan constructs a dichotomy between a (good) 'humanist' lineage going through Vico and Hegel to Marx and a (bad) 'modernist' lineage going through Spinoza and Nietzsche to Bataille where the latter must be confined to the dustbin of history (being 'situated', which for him means banished from productive appropriation and interpretation). His vendetta against postmodernism, posthumanism, and postcolonialism (rooted in their anti-humanism) drives him to paint a grossly distorted image of Spinoza as a static, idealist, and transcendental (!) thinker. In order to achieve this he has to at one point say one thing of Spinoza, and then at another point the exact opposite. He also criticizes Althusser, Negri, Deleuze, etc. for reading things into Spinoza which cannot be found in his texts, but in the positive section of the chapter where he speaks for the relevance of Vico he explicitly says multiple times that parts of his own interpretation are directly counter to what Vico actually wrote. The positive project of reconsidering Vico may well be valuable, but this butchering of Spinoza and his appropriators is completely unnecessary for that. It is true that attempts at simply substituting Spinoza for Hegel must be opposed, but that does not necessitate abandoning Spinoza altogether.

Brennan's political project becomes obvious in a section where he regurgitates the standard caricatures of the Second International, this time with the addition of a bizarre contrast between Hegel and teleology (???) and delightfully tasteless praise of the syndicalist-fascist Georges Sorel for adopting a voluntarist position against the Second International's 'teleological narrative of absolute determinations'. What Brennan actually proposes is nothing less than to undo everything positive which 'Spinozism' and postmodernist critique have given to dialectical materialist theory - e.g. (metaphysical) determinism, anti-humanism, critique of truth - and return to a naive objectivist and voluntarist humanism. In that sense, this book is incredibly reactionary.

For those who want to actually understand Spinoza, Steven Nadler's biography serves as a good introduction. For those who want to actually understand the Second International, a good place to start is the first chapter of Lars T. Lih's Lenin Rediscovered and his review of Witnesses to Permanent Revolution (and for further elaboration there is the brilliant Discovering Imperialism which covers Second-Internationalist anti-imperialist thought).

[Peter Mathews · Rating 4 out of 5]

Timothy Brennan is a brilliant critic, well-read and insightful, but Borrowed Light is a conflicted and deeply problematic book.

It starts off well enough. Its reasoned opposition to the rise of posthumanism, together with the affirmations of Vico and Hegel, are what might be called "productive" readings. They go against the reader's conventional expectations, disrupting conventions and forcing us to rethink our positions on these two thinkers, especially in light of the debates about colonialism.

Brennan does not extend the same mindset to the other three figures he focuses on in this book: Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bataille. In recent decades, they have formed the heart of a powerful left-wing critique based on the same kind of productive reading Brennan performs on Vico and Hegel (and to a lesser extent, Marx). It is impossible to argue with Brennan's scholarship - he really does know his stuff - but at every step he seems intent on disqualifying SNB as having any redemptive value; indeed, they are rooted out as hidden collaborators in the service of empire.

What is the quality that Brennan finds so repellant in these thinkers? What disturbed him, he claims, was what he refers to as their "antihumanism," a condition of powerlessness that makes resistance against oppression seem impossible. This conditioned helpless is attributed, in turn, to Spinoza's determinism, Nietzsche's critique of ressentiment, and Bataille's theory of sovereignty. Each of these thinkers seduce us into thinking that nothing can be done, that the colonizer always ultimately wins.

I find this method of reading these three thinkers perverse, especially given the generosity with which Brennan treats the equally problematic Vico and Hegel. Vico, after all, championed monarchy as the highest form of political order! Hegel's fantasy was the absolute state! Brennan absolutely refuses to brook the idea that Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bataille are confronting the limits of human powerlessness in a productive way, that they critique the ethics of a revolution against oppression because they recognize the dangers of a perverse trap that can transform the rhetoric of freedom back into the reality of slavery. He can only see them as invidious collaborators, never to be enlisted to the causes he supports.

For all that, Borrowed Light is an utterly fascinating and intriguing book. Brennan is so well-read about his enemies despite his paradoxical tunnel vision that there are ideas worth encountering in every chapter. For me, though, it is a pity that he took the negative path he did. There is a potent but underdeveloped critique of posthumanism in this book that emerges in the opening chapters and reemerges enticingly at the end, but that completely loses its way in the chapters on Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bataille.