Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Sicle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (review)

Jonathan Harris

Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Volume 3, Number 1, 2009, pp. 183-185 (Article) Published by Michigan State University Press DOI: 10.1353/jsr.0.0015

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Aective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Sicle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship
Leela Gandhi
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

eela Gandhis Affective Communities is an engaging journey to the fringes of late Victorian imperial society where the reader discovers an eclectic mix of radical, socialist, and antiimperial politics. Gandhi primarily seeks to provide an alternative history of antiimperialism. Whereas postcolonial studies typically define antiimperialism as a set of actions performed by the colonized against the colonizers (the putative East against the putative West), Gandhi investigates the antiimperialism of several metropolitan, mainly British characters (1). According to Gandhi, these characters forsook the privileges of imperial domination to critique both imperialism and the tradition of Enlightenment thought that appeared to legitimize it, developing affinity with the oppressed in the process. In doing so, Gandhis characters display a capacity for personal hybridity and radical alterity that she places at the center of a proposed politics alternatively called anti-communitarian communitarianism, immature politics, or the politics of friendship. Curious to understand why E. M. Forster should hope to have the guts to betray [his] country rather than his friend (10),1 and why other metropolitans shared his sentiments, Gandhi presents four case studies covering homosexual activism, vegetarianism, mysticism, and aestheticism in the late Victorian era. In each case, Gandhi shows her characters struggling to defend their lifestyles against the binary classifications that they, and she, see as endemic to Western theory and politics. These binarisms, distinguishing mainly between mature and immature, push the protagonists various interweaving commitments outside of the bounds of mature Western society, thereby throwing the protagonists into the same category as the colonized, whose immaturity legitimated the civilizing impulse of the imperial project. The protagonists ultimately defend themselves by asserting the superiority of Indian civilization. Homosexual and vegetarian mystic Edward Carpenter, for example, criticizes the male/female dualism in Western society, which renders the homosexual a deficient being and, sustained by a meat-based diet, becomes a disease leading to imperialism and racism (58). The cure required

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embrace of intermediate types (i.e., homosexuals), who were more readily accepted in Indian and ancient civilizations, and who were capable of forming utopic communities that defied the logic of the social and sexual contract. Thus, writes Gandhi, the savage and the invert were natural allies against binary thinking and its imperial product (59). We see Carpenters cure at work in the figure of Mahatma Gandhi, a loose friend to Carpenter and others of Carpenters milieu such as vegetarian Henry Salt, whose political persona seems to have included a form of bisexual radicalism (6364). Gandhi wants to embrace the messiness of politics, defined by hybridity and alterity, against the conceptual tidiness of Kantian and Aristotelian appeals to self-identity or corporate unity. Gandhis characters estrange themselves from Western civilization to enter the great unknown of a world without taxonomy, risking the psychic derangement (p) that occurs upon dislocating the self, something that the aforementioned tidiness intended to prevent. In this way, Gandhis theme is reminiscient of Bonnie Honigs argument against the displacement of politics that occurs in both liberalism and communitarianism.2 In her most ambitious chapter, Gandhi quarrels with both streams to defend the political nature by noting the intersection of mysticism and antiimperial politics, exemplified in the figure of Mirra Alfassa, the French-born spiritual partner of Indian nationalist Sri Aurobindo and Mother of the latters eponymous ashram. Gandhi blames Kant for pushing religion, dogmatic religion, outside of the realm of political in what she calls an argument against hybridity. The Kantian subject must be free from metaphysical and empirical contaminants in order to be considered a self-identical rational subject. Here, Gandhi turns to Derrida who, in his Faith and Knowledge, turns Kants preferred rational reflective religion into a simple capitulation to the same and familiar, making it incapable of developing any moral capacity. The dogmatic faith that Kant refuses for its risky attempt to gain knowledge of an unknowable God is essential to Derrida, who argues that it produces a fiduciary ethic and an invincible desire for justice in a subject who constantly remains open to the unknown (129). This fiduciary ethic, to which one becomes habituated through cooperation with God, the unknown and unseen helper, develops the capacity for cooperation and friendship essential to political communityfriendship that embraces the

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otherness of the other rather than cowering under Kantian self-identity or Aristotelian unity. In an era when transnational politics has become particularly salient, Gandhi provides powerful material for thinking about a politics freed from the contradictions of the Enlightenment, which for all its commitment to universalism, produce exclusion and nationalism. However, Gandhi notes that her protagonists efforts failed largely because the movement was so immature, weaving together disparate streams of thought and various commitments without any clear organization. The hegemony of maturity, meanwhile, continued through Engels arguments for a scientific rather than a dogmatic socialism, for example (178). Further, given that Gandhis protagonists mainly attempt to prove the superiority of Indian civilization over their own, they do not appear to shatter totally the binary thought against which they purportedly struggle. Gandhi also seems resigned to the fact that the hegemony of Western maturity will continue, with her anti-communitarian communitarianism serving as a constant movement against it, rather than the utopic future of politics. This appears to be the point, but Gandhi leaves the reader wanting something perhaps more radical.
1. From Forsters essay Two Cheers for Democracy in E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy (London: Edward Arnold, 1951). 2. Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).

jonathan harrisindependent scholar