Borrowed Light Vico, Hegel, and the Colonies [Paperback]

A critical revaluation of the humanist tradition,Borrowed Lightmakes 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 thenhuman vs. inhuman, religions of the book vs. oral cultures, the authoritarian state vs. the representative state and, above all, scientific rationality vs. humanist reasonremain 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 theorya 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.Timothy Brennan is Professor of comparative literature, cultural studies, and English at the University of Minnesota. He is the author most recently ofSecular Devotion: Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz(Verso, 2008) andWars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and Right(Columbia, 2006). This surprising, provoking book re-charts the intellectual map by reassembling lineages of anticolonial thought, and rescuing with new readings old texts that were supposedly behind us. Vigorously engaged on the battlefield of contemporary theoretical debates, the book's argument and its execution are classic Brennan. A critical revaluation of humanism, this book makes a case for the 20th-century as the anticolonial century by returning to the scil!