Postcolonial critique of reason: Spivak between Kant and Matilal

The paper ponders the location of Gayatri Spivak in the discursive space between Kant and Bimal K. Matilal (but she is also dis-located by her own enactments, disavowals). So it wonders what a postcolonial critique of reason would look like. In the chapter on philosophy, Spivak (1999) develops a sustained critique of just this kind by decoding the works of the 'Three Wise Men of Continental Europe' (Kant, Hegel, Marx), pointing, via the European impact on the Third World, to the ultimate 'foreclosure: [in the fashion of] the native informant'. But the paper detects another triangular imaginary of reason - this time without an apex, and with limited strategies, each deconstructing and challenging the other. Kant is thus important in spite of his own cosmopolitheia, Matilal for his rational realism of 'moral love'. What both fell short of was a genuine critique of the rational, and therefore also of one of its unfortunate beneficiaries, the postcolonial 'informant'; and this critique is Spivak's 'gift'.

Why is there nothing rather than something? An essay in the comparative metaphysics of nonbeing

The paper is an essay in the comparative metaphysics of nothingness that begins by pondering why Leibniz thought of the opposite question as the preeminent one. In Eastern philosophical thought, like the numeral ‘zero’ (śānya) that Indian mathematicians first discovered, nothingness as non-being looms large and serves as the first quiver on the imponderables they seem to have encountered (e.g. ‘In the beginning was neither non-being nor being’ RgVeda X.129). The concept of non-being and its permutations of nothing, negation, nullity, receive more sophisticated treatment in the works of grammarians, ritual hermeneuticians, logicians, and their dialectical adversaries, variously across Jaina and Buddhist schools, in respect of the function of negation /the negative copula, nãn, fraying into ontologies of non-existence and extinction; not least also the suggestive tropes that tend to arrest rather than affirm the inexorable being-there of something. After some passing references to interests in non-being and nothingness in contemporary (Western) thinking, the paper dwells at some length on Heidegger’s extensive treatment of nothingness in his 1927 inaugural lecture ‘Was ist Metaphysik?’, published later as What is Metaphysics? The essay however distances itself from any pretensions toward a doctrine of Nihilism.