Fair Exotics. Rajani Sudan
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an empirical catalogue of “new” knowledge (even if this knowledge turns out suspiciously to replicate what Crusoe has always known). It is, however, also the place for introspection, a place made “safe” for convoluted expressions of xenodochial desire because of the emergence of a disembodied writing self. Such an example of rendering resistant desire “safe” by authorial reason occurs when Crusoe discovers an alien footprint that he at first reads as the sign of the devil, then of “some more dangerous creature, viz … the savages,” and finally, with (short-lived) relief, “a mere chimera of my own” (139–40).
There seems to be a moment in literary representation when ideas about the externality of difference shift toward the introjection of that difference as a strategy of national self-identification. Defoe’s novel is not only a tour-de-force celebration of eighteenth-century commercialism; it stands more insistently as just such a transitional text. Crusoe figures his island as a supplement to British economic structures, but part of its appeal (especially for Crusoe himself, the archetypal merchant adventurer) is that it both replicates and resists Britain’s imperial model and demonstrates the ways in which commercial traffic becomes a barometer of moral traffic.7
These moments from Robinson Crusoe serve to illustrate early imperial constructions and contestations of “race,” the “natural,” and the “feminine,” especially as they are manifested in Crusoe’s consumerism and husbandry. But especially at issue in this novel are two crucial features that mark it as a transitional text. First, is the relationship between xenophobia and xenodochy. The initial attraction of the foreign becomes frightening to the British subject, thus giving rise to the repudiation of the thing that provoked illicit or dangerous desire by xenophobia. The second feature is the striking similarity (and difference) this relationship has with the tenets of romanticism. Harbored within British cultural consciousness is the mutual dependence of self and other. In the first two definitions of “xenodochy” supplied by the Oxford English Dictionary, the “entertainment of the foreign” may take shape either as an expression of a mutual intertwining or as a form of maintenance. In either expression, foreign entertainment implies that the apparently radical differences between familiar and foreign are in fact contingent on each other and can therefore be the source of an equally radical anxiety on both parts.8 Xenophobia and xenodochy work as an economy because they are mutually constitutive, and it is through this economy that national and cultural identity is manifested. Particularly resonant with romantic discourse is the desire and loathing for the foreign thing that establishes a distinct place for the self.
Xenophobia is firmly fixed within the symbolic register of representation and its referents are produced through the paranoic construction of the “other.” Like the ways in which we erase the historical aspect of paradigms of race, however, the condition of xenophobia seems to exist similarly a priori as a psychic impulse or drive without the historicizing accorded most cultural events. Long perceived and accepted as a “phobia,” the fear of the foreign may, in fact, signify something quite different. This phobia may work as a fetish, as something in which we invest and cathect a great deal of cultural meaning in order to organize our own national identities. The fear of something foreign presupposes that “we” can understand what counts as foreign, but how are we to come to an understanding of the foreign without recognizing it within some signifying system that makes sense to us? Xenophobia is the process by which the “other” is constructed, but its definition is contingent on previous interest or attraction to the foreign (xenodochy). Freud’s understanding of the fetish help explicate the xenophobic drive. Freud writes:
One would expect that the organs or objects selected as substitutes for the penis whose presence is missed in the woman would be such as act as symbols for the penis in other respects. This may happen occasionally but it is certainly not the determining factor. It seems rather that when the fetish comes to life, so to speak, some process has been suddenly interrupted—it reminds one of the abrupt halt made by memory in traumatic amnesias. In the case of the fetish, too, interest is held up to a certain point—what is possibly the last impression received before the uncanny traumatic one is preserved as a fetish.9
The fetish first emerges as a “cover” for the missing penis; accidentally and arbitrarily a part of the scene in which the castrated woman is first observed, an object is literally dis-placed from its proper location and “stands in” for what is really absent. As such a disavowal of that absence, however, the fetish clearly also testifies to the knowledge of castration that it negates. The care and attention that Freud argues we give to fetish objects because they both signify and nullify castration—because they mark a troubling and disturbing eruption while simultaneously dismissing it—is evocative of the ways in which xenophobia constructs cultural identities through a grid of abjection: the fearful foreign body signifies our difference and negates the possibility of our own castration by negating the castration itself. In the case of eighteenth-century Britain, cultural difference was fetishized as color difference, and hierarchical codes were erected that could only benefit the British and abject the foreign. The complications of foreign identity and agency were thus reduced to the material body. Early modern infatuation with commercial traffic increased the physical boundaries of “home,” but it also supplied multiple opportunities for contaminating domestic identity with xenodochial desire. Nineteenth-century industrialism may have been, therefore, compelled to divorce the sordid details of exploitation and dominance from commercial enterprise and fetishize its moralizing aspects. Such a focus would then have provided a way of situating English cultural identity as the body of an idealized imperial authority.
It should not be possible to think about romanticism without invoking xenophobia. Perhaps philosophical models of the production of knowledge, especially a model that is an acknowledged “bridge” between Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought in the philosophical tradition, may help us understand how such a claim is possible. Kant is one of the clearest systematizes of the Enlightenment, and yet the dualism between the noumenal and the phenomenal that, according to his logic, makes room for God, also happens to accommodate an early model for the split subject: the unconscious. It is this split that profoundly influenced romantic formulations of subjectivity. This model may also help locate the histories of the internalization of psychic space. For example, in the Critique of Pure Reason, at the beginning of the “Transcendental Aesthetic,” Kant describes the intuitive mediation of phenomenological knowledge: “In whatsoever mode, or by whatsoever means, our knowledge may relate to objects, it is at least quite clear, that the only manner in which it immediately relates to them, is by means of an intuition.”10
It seems that Kant, spending his entire life in Königsberg, never venturing forth from this tiny East Prussian town, would have been hard put not to have developed an entire critique of reason that turned the internal processes of the mind into a transcendental object, a representation of the sublime.11 His sequestered material life demonstrates the dramatic turn self-definition took toward the end of the eighteenth century both across Europe and in Britain—a turn that privileged a radical implosion of the external world into the consciousness of the individual. In early eighteenth-century Britain, a primary strategy of national self-definition was the xenophobic differentiation of self from nonwhite colonial others; the strategy was naturalized. By the end of the eighteenth century, as we see with Johnson and his strong influence, self-definition, nationalist or otherwise, involved a conviction of the existence of an essential inner self—and of existence as an essential inner self, ostensibly independent of any external context or dependence on an “other.” These beliefs were wholeheartedly espoused by British and European intellectuals. Kant’s notions of the sublime, of pure reason, and the domain of the transcendental aesthetic, produced in this milieu, reflect these changing accounts of subjectivity. Such an aesthetic shift promised an existential or subjective freedom to the individual imagination and suggested, in part (though class difference in literary production was always an issue), a liberating departure from the rigid standards of poetic practice established by eighteenth-century men of letters. In short, this aesthetic shift reflected other forms of revolution that championed the emancipation of the individual; for example, Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man and the French Revolution itself.
Kant continues his explication of the intuitive. On the transcendental exposition of the conception of time, he writes:
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