Joseph Scalice

James Siegel. Fetish, Recognition, Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

I fear that I am predisposed to dislike a work that opens by acknowledging its indebtedness to Jacques Derrida, who “shows the impossibility of our disciplines [viz. anthropology and history], precisely their lack of foundation. To continue after him means to accept this impossibility.” (x) The post-structuralist deconstructionist rupture of signifier and signified – the impossibility of history - entails my immediate alienation. More on this in a bit.

I will limit myself - a solipsistically imposed aporia (sorry, I couldn’t resist) - to a few comments and questions that arose from my reading.

I was troubled by Siegel’s unexamined mechanism of textual selection. Fn. 7 on page 256 merely offers the reader Siegel’s assurance that the selected texts are representative. That the texts are representative of a larger corpus of texts we will accept on this say-so, but how are they representative of ‘Indonesian’ thought? Footnote 6 on the same page makes this question obvious and then leaves it painfully unanswered. Widespread illiteracy is irrelevant Siegel states, a) because he imagines that more people were literate than the evidence indicates “though I know of no figures to substantiate my claim” (!) and b) because these texts were known through the theater. If these texts were largely disseminated through the theater then it seems that Siegel’s extreme close reading of texts may be inappropriate; the extreme inflected nuance of language which he reads into cinta, etc., would, it would seem, only be apparent in print.

I believe that at least part of the explanation for Siegel’s footnoted shrug with regard to what as an historian I would consider a central preoccupation – namely, source material – is a result of the post-structuralist revaluation of all texts as inherently equal. While doing away with the privileging of authorial intentionality, post-structuralist readings – here, Barthes and Derrida – chose to privilege the textual signifier over the signified – i.e., over authenticity, representativeness, veracity, or even verisimilitude. All texts are ‘created’ equal. But some (namely those of an abstruse Derridean playfulness) are more equal than others.

It should be pointed out that this ‘metaphysical’ hermeneutic ironically allows the reader free rein to ride roughshod through the semiotic landscape of post-structural texts. The author, a deus absconditus and not a dieu mort, must relinquish claims to the variant significations of her own text.

From this perspective a post-structuralist work can be simultaneously insightful and utter nonsense – like Douglas Adams’ deity it vanishes in a puff of logic.