A significant strain of contemporary Continental political philosophy takes as its point of departure the horrific fact of the Shoah under Nazi Germany and considers the conceptual origins of such political cruelty in the structuring exclusions that characterise the operation of Western sovereignty (Agamben 2005; 1999; Derrida 2009; see Bignall 2014b). Other thinkers take European fascism as an implicit horizon informing their efforts to understand how docile bodies become compliant with the powers that repress them, or to theorise creative desire as the condition of a ‘non-fascist’ life (see the preface in AO). Ongoing investigation and repudiation of the ideas underscoring the exclusion and attempted annihilation of Europe’s internal others is undeniably important and prescient, especially when support for neo-fascism is swelling in many European centres. However, although Hannah Arendt (1968) points to the conceptual framework of imperialism as a source of the fascist totalitarianism that underscored the events of the Shoah and made them possible, Continental philosophers have generally been less inclined to think about the horrors Europe inflicted on its external others as a result of colonisation. This neglect on the part of Continental philosophy is still more troubling because the dark legacy of Western colonisation extends materially into the time of the now.

The present chapter is situated in the context of a legacy of colonial fascism in Australia, which included a formal policy of child removal that the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission in 1997 identified as a settler-colonial programme of genocide. It considers the formal apology given in 2008 by the Australian government to Indigenous ‘Stolen Generations’, alongside the state’s simultaneous disinclination to explicitly ask for the forgiveness of Indigenous Australians. Employing a perspectival, associative and decolonising methodology that seeks points of intercultural alliance across diverse traditions of thought, I position Indigenous conceptualisations of ontological plenitude alongside Nietzsche’s thinking about the exercise of the ‘gift-giving virtue’ as a mode of sovereign existence. The aim of the discussion is to investigate the sovereign implications of the politics of giving and receiving implicit within the acts of apology and forgiveness. I argue that forgiveness (like apology) is a definitive sovereign act, and therefore that the Australian government’s refusal to supplicate for Indigenous pardon is also a refusal to acknowledge Indigenous authority inherent in the sovereign capacity for forgiveness.

Despite his interest in a non-sovereign and anomial politics, Agamben makes scant reference to thinkers in the anarchist tradition. However, particularly with the turn to questions of government and economy in his latest works, he delves increasingly into themes at the heart of anarchist philosophy: the renunciation of property and the practice of poverty as a means of living outside of determination by law and state; the negative and positive moments of transformation variously associated with revolt or revolution; the ‘idea of communism’ and the figure of ‘the Ungovernable’. It is noteworthy how, at the point in The Time That Remains where he first explicitly references anarchist theory, Agamben identifies in Max Stirner an ‘ethical-anarchic interpretation of the Pauline as not’. While this reference to anarchist theory is brief, it nonetheless suggests that anarchism is important to understanding Agamben's account of the ‘coming politics’. That he refers to the anarchist tradition in the wider context of a discussion of Marxist thought concerning the ‘messianic’ vocation of the proletariat class and Marx's ‘ridiculing’ of the anarchic egoism of Stirner, invites reflection on Agamben's relation to anarchism and to Marxism. In this chapter I explore these connections in the context of the ideological conflict that strained relations between Marx and the anarchists, and ultimately resulted in the collapse of the First International Workingmen's Association in 1872.

For Agamben, ‘philosophical archaeology’ returns thought to an unstable moment, manifestly past, in order to apply its methodological pressure: recovering the productive potential of the uncertainty that was lost when the crisis passed resolutely into history; reinvesting this potential with a redemptive power to transform radical thought and practice in its current responses to contemporary configurations of power and economy. In an ‘archaeology’ of radical thought in the Western political tradition, the First International stands as a flashpoint where internal conflicts gave rise to selectively victorious strategies with significant historical effects. These include the dominance within the Left of the Marxist paradigm of historical materialism; the perceived failure of communism with the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union; and, hence, the spectacular hegemony of late capitalism that has become our inheritance.

History today still designates only the set of conditions, however recent they may be, from which one turns away in order to become. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 96)

What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday? (Foucault 1984a: 34)

A particular understanding of historical process as ‘actualisation’ arises from Deleuzian ontology. Actualisation contrasts with the dominant view of history as a dialectical process of progressive harmonisation caused by the generative negativity of desire/lack conceived in relation to a transcendent state of ideal perfection. While similarly driven by causal desire, actualisation is motivated by the immanent positive force of desiring-production, which involves bodies in an open-ended process of becoming. The purpose of the present chapter is now to ask: in the absence of a projected final harmony, what might be understood by the notion of ‘the postcolonial’ in history? In 1784, Immanuel Kant asked a similar question of Aufklärung (Enlightenment), and his response later assisted Michel Foucault in his attempts to conceptualise history as a process marked by rupture and discontinuity (1984a, 1986a). The first part of this chapter will consider Foucault's discussions of Kant on Enlightenment in some detail, in order to define ‘the postcolonial’ as a difference introduced to the process of history with the occurrence of events such as ‘reconciliation’. I will propose that reconciliation does not cause this postcolonial difference, but is, among other events, an effect of a causal disposition towards forms of society that respect the principles of self-determination and peaceful co-existence, and that this causal disposition is a permanent virtuality, immanent to the historical process.

Ours is a birth-time and a period of transition to a new era. (Hegel 1977: ¶11)

Twilight of the Idols – in plain words: the old truth is coming to an end. (Nietzsche 1992: 86)

Critiques of colonialism and of associated forms of imperialism – territorial, cultural, epistemological and so forth – are well established and provide ongoing fuel for the deconstructive task of decolonisation. However, certainly in the former imperial centres, conceptual tools for imagining modes of constructive agency suited to the reconstruction of post-imperial forms of society remain woe-fully underdeveloped. For example, in their collaborative work on Empire, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt argue that ‘the multitude’ must ‘confront directly and with an adequate consciousness the central repressive operations of Empire. It is a matter of recognising and engaging the imperial initiatives and not allowing them continually to re-establish order.’ However, when they ask what ‘specific and concrete practices will animate this political project?’ they admit: ‘We cannot say at this point’ (Hardt and Negri 2000: 399–400). Without an alternative conceptualisation of agency and ethical practices of social construction, attempts to transform cultures infused with the legacy of colonialism often remain in hiatus, structured by a form of agency that has been complicit with practices of Empire, and which postcolonial society must surely reject.

We need a new political ideology for indigenous political strategy. (Pearson 1997b: 218)

There is no ideology and never has been. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 4)

Directed transformative political practices, such as postcolonisation, require the collective deployment of a strategy. Strategy is self-consciously expressed from a position of subjectivity. The subject is thus the cause of transformative action, which is organised via the strategy it expresses. However, according to Deleuze and Guattari, a subject emerges only as an effect of its becoming. A subject – like all forms of being – is a virtual assemblage, made actual. But how can a subject then be a cause of its own becoming, when it is actually an effect of this process? What makes a body a ‘self’, an active agent of its own formation as subject? As a produced effect or object of social relations of power and desire, how can a subject come to have a position that is critical and capable of taking those social relations as the object of her intentional action? When she only exists as a position already given, already made actual, how can the subject strategically choose her position of action and cause the transformations she wills?

This chapter will consider what notion of the subject is possible for constructivist philosophy like Foucault's or Deleuze and Guattari's. The discussion begins by revisiting the nature of the body as conceived by Deleuze and Guattari, in light of their complementary concept of the body-without-organs (BwO).

[T]he analysis of desire is immediately practical and political … for politics precedes being. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 203)

Central to the creation of a postcolonial concept of agency is the need to reconsider the nature of power and desire, which together constitute the conditions and the impetus for social action. The first aim of this chapter is to present an alternative perspective on power, not conceptualised in relation to mastery. This is found in Deleuze's interpretation of Nietzsche, and in Foucault's elaboration of this in Discipline and Punish and the History of Sexuality. However, Foucault's analysis is largely limited to the constitutive effects of power upon the subject, and the scope for constructive agency is often not understood or is obscured in readings of Foucault's work. I will suggest that this problem arises because Foucault does not adequately emphasise desire as a causal component of agency. While there are constant references to desire made in the context of his history of sexuality and his later work on the ethical practices of the self, ultimately Foucault shows how a concept and practice of ‘desire’ is produced in modernity as an effect of power, captured by discourses of sexuality and morality, and reduced to an aspect of pleasure. This obscures the way the force of desire itself acts as a cause in the production of social forms.

The second aim of this chapter is therefore to place Foucault's causal concept of productive power in relation to a complementary concept of desire, which is not conceptualised in relation to ontological lack and appropriative satisfaction.

Every human problem must be considered from the standpoint of time. (Fanon 1967a: 12)

The dialectic models the ontological basis of a philosophy of becoming – of the formation and transformation of being – which privileges the roles played by difference in the practices of critique and negation. The dialectic also gives a model of human interdependence in the form of one's reliance upon others with respect to subject formation and social harmonisation. Oriented and structured by the (temporary or teleological) goal of ontological synthesis and the resolution of conflict, the dialectic is driven both by a final cause (ideal unity) and by an immanent cause (real difference), which together define a motivating force of causal desire. These concepts of causation ground a clearly defined concept of agency – both subjective (towards others), and collective (towards the process of history-making and social transformation).

However, the model of dialectical process is problematic from a postcolonial perspective, since the trajectory is driven simultaneously by difference, conceptualised negatively as lack or opposition, and by the desire to negate this difference in the movement towards unity and recognised presence. This structuring dynamic results in a mode of agency shaped by an imperial motivation: the desire to negate external difference by its appropriation or elimination. As we saw in Chapter 2, this motivating desire seriously complicates postcolonial theory and constrains post-imperial transformative practices, such as reconciliation. Postcolonial theory needs an alternative, positive notion of difference as a basis for thinking about critical and creative agency.

In the first two chapters, I will critique the way postcolonial theory usually presents the problem of postcolonisation. My main objective is to consider how postcolonial theory utilises two of the most influential organising concepts in modern and contemporary political theory. These are firstly negation, which privileges the possibility of critique and the potential for transformation in social analysis; and secondly recognition, which underlies various forms of ‘identity politics’ and claims for equality. I will trace the influence of these two concepts from their early expression in Hegel's philosophy, through Sartre and Fanon, to much current postcolonial theory. The discussion will particularly attend to the ways in which both recognition and negation are informed by the dialectical category of desire. In (post-)Hegelian philosophy, desire is negatively conceived: it signals a lack and a longing, which is understood to be the constitutive or constructive force of identity-formation occasioning recognition, but also and simultaneously the deconstructive or negating force that compels the transformation of existing reality. I will argue that this ambiguity results in conceptualisations of subjectivity, agency and process that are problematic, and finally unsuitable, as supports for postcolonial theory and for practical efforts at postcolonisation.

At this point we leave Africa never to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the world; it has no movement of development to exhibit … The History of the World travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia is the beginning. (Hegel 1900: 99)

Our sense of critique is too thoroughly determined by Kant, Hegel and Marx for us to be able to reject them as ‘motivated imperialists’ … A deconstructive politics of reading would acknowledge the determination as well as the imperialism and see if the magisterial texts can now be our servants, as the new magisterium constructs itself in the name of the Other' (Spivak 1999: 7; emphasis added).

Like other postcolonial theories, this work is concerned with the legacy of colonial dominance in the social relations and institutions of the present. Postcolonial theory has in fact developed in response to this basic problem, and might best be characterised as aiming to find an appropriate solution by conceptualising and evaluating methods for the transformation of societies and cultures shaped by colonialism. An important aspect of this project is the critical destabilisation and deconstruction of the cultural authority of the colonising subject. A second aspect is the conceptualisation of social transformation in terms of the political agency of the ‘subaltern’ classes, repressed by colonial rule and the imposition of colonial culture. Resistance to colonialism and continuing cultural imperialism is enabled by the identification of a collective, self-conscious and oppositional subjectivity.