HOMI BHABHA, HYBRIDITY AND IDENTITY, OR DERRIDA VERSUS LACAN

Author(s): Antony Easthope

Source: Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) , 1998, Vol. 4, No.
1/2, THEORY AND CRITICISM [Part 1] (1998), pp. 145-151
Published by: Centre for Arts, Humanities and Sciences (CAHS), acting on behalf of the
University of Debrecen CAHS

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HOMI BHABHA, HYBRIDITY AND IDENTITY,
OR DERRIDA VERSUS LACAN

s4«to*uf SsXitbrfte

Homi Bhabha

The words "Orient" and "Occident" originate simply in the Latin

words for sun rising ( oriens ) and sun setting ( occidens ). In his path-
breaking work, Orientalism (1978), Edward Said snows how a massive and
ancient discursive regime took these essentially mobile positions and fixed
them in relation to an imaginary centre in Europe. The Orient" became an
object which could be known by a European subject as it could not know
itself. This line of argument effectively founded a new area in textual and
cultural studies, that of post-colonial theory.
Said's work has been criticised and complemented by Homi Bhabha
in a series of widely influential essays, most of which are collected in The
Location of Culture (1994). This volume introduces a crucial and necessary
reservation against Said, that in Said's account "There is always ... the
suggestion that colonial power and discourse is possessed entirely by the
coloniser." Bhabha proposes that the effort of Orientalising must always
fail since the colonial subject is constructed in "a repertoire of conflictual
positions"; these render Him or her "the site of both fixity and fantasy"
("Difference" 204) in a process which cannot but be uneven, divided,
incomplete.
Bhabha discusses a number of mechanisms which threaten colonial
domination, including fetishism, sly civility, paranoia. In showing that the
subject of colonialism is always resistant, never simply in place, he draws
on a number of arguments whose content is psychoanalytic. However,
Bhabha goes beyond this initial response to Said to work out a theoretical
position of his own based in the notion of "hybridity" and relying heavily
on the ideas of Jacques Derrida. Currently, this notion is proving to be
enormously influential and it is this I want to engage with, especially since
it provides a way to consider the wider opposition between Derrida and
Lacan.
Bhabha claims there is a space "in-between the designations of
identity" and that "this interstitial passage between fixed identifications
opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference
without an assumed or imposed hierarchy" ( Location 4). Hybridity can
have at least three meanings - In terms of biology, ethnicity and culture. In
its etymology it meant the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar,
hybrida, ana this genetic component provides the first meaning. A second
definition of hybridity might be understood to mean an individual "having
access to two or more ethnic identities." In fact, Bhabha develops his notion
of hybridity from Mikhail Bakhtin, who uses it to discriminate texts with a

Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 4.1-2. 1998. Copyright ©

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 "single voice" (lyrical poems) from those with a "double voice" (such as
novels, whose narrator cites characters speaking in their own voice - these
texts are hybridic).
Something that makes me reticent about Bhabha's position is already
evident here: an assumed opposition between hybridity and the non-
hybridic. For Bhabha the non-nybridic has two related features. One is a
commitment to "unitary" or "originary" identity, identity as "presence,"
identity therefore represented by the supposedly transcendental ego. Well
set out by Descartes, this notion of the subject supposes that thinking is to
be equated with being and that its very essence is an undivided, self-
controlling self-consciousness: what Bhabha refers to as "the 'individual'"
that is the support for the "universalist aspiration" of "civil society"
(. Location 10).
Second, Bhabha believes this Cartesian concept of subjectivity is at
the very centre of a Western, Eurocentric definition of culture, and
necessary support for it. He avoids the risk of essentialism by arguing that it
is the enemy who claims essence, unity and singleness of identity -
everything that may be mobilised against such an idea of unity counts as
radical. An intervention, Bhabha argues, is progressive if it "challenges our
sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenising, unifying force,
authenticated by the originary Past, kept alive in the national tradition of the
People" (37). Hybridity is ontologically prior to any notion of unity or
identity and therefore always liable to surface within in. "The colonial
presence," Bhabha says, "is always ambivalent, split between its
appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and
difference" (107).
It should be clear from this that Bhabha's opposition between identity
and hybridity corresponds to and extends Derrida's contrast between
presence and difference, and, as we shall see, is liable to some of the same
criticisms. In his 1968 essay "Difference" Derrida explains difference by
saying what it is not: "... it governs nothing, reigns over nothing, and
nowhere exercises anv authority . . . there is no kingdom of differ ance, but
differance instigates the subversion of every kingdom . . ."(123).
In Derrida's account presence is constituted by the effect of
immediacy in time or punctuality in space - presence seems to be entirely
at one with itself. But whenever or however an effect of presence is
produced, it is possible to relativise and unsettle it by referring to the
difference from which it arises and on which it relies. Bhabha's hybridity is
Derridean difference applied to colonialist texts - the presence of a
dominant meaning in a dominant culture can be put in question by referring
to the hybridity or difference from which it emerges.
Because it is modelled on Derridean difference, Bhabha's hybridity is
advocated as a position or effect in between existing positions. Bhabha's
term interstices" means to respond to Derrida's account of difference as
spatial differentiation. What articulates cultural differences is defined as
"'in-between' spaces" {Location 1, 2, 38), "interstices" in which "domains of
difference" may "overlap" (2), an "interstitial passage between fixed
identifications" (4).

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Lacan contra Bhabha

Problems follow for Bhabha, as they do for Derrida, from the

presence/difference opposition. I am not sure Derrida offers an adequate
account of presence; in space it appears as spatial identity, in time it appears
as a making present, in discourse it is ensured by the privileging of one side
of a binary which thus aims to efface its denigrated other. Presence, like
metaphysics, is inescapable; what gives it substance, what are its conditions
of existence, Derrida leaves uncertain. Presence, one might conclude, exists
only to vanish into difference.
These difficulties carry over into Homi Bhabha. Like Derrida he
refuses a notion of subjectivity which would explain, substantiate and make
sense of the identity hybridity undermines. When he describes identity as
single and unitary (and always a source of oppression), he omits to
distinguish between different kinds and possibilities of identity. He
presumes that all versions of identity claim to be absolute and originary as
though the only notion of identity around was that of the Cartesian or
"transcendental" ego.
Now I would invoke Lacan's notion of the imaginary to sanction the
view that some provisional identity is necessary for the subject, that the ego
must maintain for itself some permanence, some identity, some unity, some
presence, some fixity of position. Failing to take this possibility on board,
Bhabha is forced into a binary opposition between the full subject or no
subject at all - an opposition which he articulates as that between the full
subject and difference.
Bhabha has engaged in an act of inversion, not deconstruction. In
seeking to undermine the Cartesian ego, he falls into the contrary error of
privileging difference. In fact, he invites us to try to live in difference, in a
state of pure hybridity, actually in the "interstices." We are told to pose the
question of community "from the interstitial perspective" (Location 3) and
invited "to inhabit an intervening space (7). I invite you to hesitate before
trying this, for the experience is not at all unfamiliar, for it is the experience
of psychosis. The sad old man with dirty clothes and wild hair who mutters
incoherently to himself on the corner of the street has fallen into the gaps
coherent identity would conceal he indeed inhabits a space, an "interstitial
passage between fixed identifications."
If Bhabha's work is flawed in the ways I suggest, why is it so widely
celebrated? What (one might ask) is the nature of "the desire for Bhabha"? I
would suggest that his writing makes available for the reader especially two
forms of fantasy satisfaction. The first may be characterised as a structure
of abreaction. Thus the reader who sympathises with Bhabha and identifies
with his position is afforded an identity which is definitely not racist, not
bigoted, not that of someone whose mind is closed out of fear of the other.
This idealised self-image goes along with a self-congratulatory compassion
for the victim of racism, which, as we know from Freud, is a iorm of
sadism.

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 The second fantasy satisfaction for Bhabha-readers ensues (I would
suggest) from the pleasure of mastery, when the readers identify themselves
as subjects supposed to be able to remain sure of themselves even when
confronted with the appearance of differance on all sides. A more abrasive
way of putting this would be to point out that we can only enjoy inhabiting
interstices between meaning if someone else is doing it for us.

Lacan contra Derrida

In these criticisms of Bhabha in relation to the Lacanian imaginary, a

larger encounter is already developing, one whose importance in
contemporary theory makes it important to explore much more explicitly,
that between deconstruction and psychoanalysis. At stake is the question of
the subject.
The trajectories of Lacan and Derrida run alongside each other in that
both reject a notion of the transcendental subject, both confront the
implication pressing in on all Western writers this century that subjectivity
is ineluctably entrammeled in language, is indeed an effect of discourse.
For Lacan "the symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the
thing, an4 this death constitutes in the subject the eternalisation of his
desire" (Ecrits 104)-j-the speaking subject appears only to disappear into
the defiles of the signifier, the language appropriated by all speaking
subjects but which belongs to none of them. Being is characterised by "the
particularity" (286) of need, the particularity of the infant before he or she
enters the universality of the signifier, the shared order of language. Once
we do, the subject can identify itself only by losing itself there "like an
object" (86).
A similar drama is played out according to Derrida in "The Violence
of the Letter," but in terms of naming, the possibility and impossibility of a
proper name, and "the play of difference" most signally realised in writing.
The proper name "as the unique appellation reserved tor the presence of a
unique being" (Of Grammatology 109) has never been, Derrida argues, for
it is erased in a system, obliterated from the moment which brings a
"classificatory difference into play" (109). This is also the moment from
which "there is a 'subject'" (108). So for Derrida, in a phrasing subsequent
to that of Lacan just cited but one which recalls it, "the death of absolutely
proper naming, recognising in a language the other as pure other, invoking
it as what it is, is the death of the pure idiom reserved for the unique" (110).
Both Lacan and Derrida insist that any particularity of the subject,
whatever might contribute to the presence of a unique being, is cancelled by
its necessity to emerge on the universalising, classificatory grounds of
language. But while Derrida begins with a subject already foreseen from
the side of language, a subject as a proper name, Lacan starts with a
particularity" whicn precedes language altogether. How can this be?
At tins juncture we come up against the Darwinian heritage of
psychoanalysis. For Freud "the finding of a [psychic] object is always a re-
finding" (On Sexuality 145); after the Oedipal transition the subject tries to

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refind in its objects of desire the pleasures it experienced in direct and
unmediated form as an infant. For Lacan, scandalously, there is indeed a
pre-linguistic self, the particular materiality of the body as shaped by its
place in the family. The subject is defined by the attempt to refind this self
within culture and language. Lacan offers to theorise this mysterious
crossing of the frontier through the distinctions between need, demand and
desire, the concept of objet petit a, and the opposition between Being and
Meaning.
Tne pre-linguistic exists at the level of need. In the register of demand
the Other is addressed as being able to satisfy needs; but the attempt to hold
the sign onto a particular object is doomed to failure since it initiates frill
entry into the generality of language where demand gives way to desire.
The object of desire (different for each of us) emerges in the place of the
subject's particularity which has dropped out of the real with the entry into
language; objet petit a is a trace of that self retained on the side of
discourse.
Lacan would represent the subject with a Venn diagram in which
Being and Meaning necessarily exclude each other. Within the circle of
Being the pre-linguistic self is at one but has no meaning; within the Other
the subiect has meaning but is not fully itself. It is consistent with Lacan's
other theorisations that part of the subject's Being reappears within the
Other as the unconscious.
Thus deriving its identity from a mediation of the real, the Lacanian
subject is defined by limitations and attributes, individuated by its desire to
refind its particular self. If you embrace the view that the subject is
constructed as an effect of discourse, you are faced with the question, "Why
do I seek myself in these signifiers and not others?" Lacan has an answer to
this - Derriaa does not. As Peter Dews points out, he "offers no alternative
between the illusory immediacy of speech and the endless delay of writing"

For Derrida, situated in the register of philosophy, subjectivity is

always already produced and effaced in writing; presence has never been,
or been only as immediately erased in difference; there are no structures of
the subject; there is strictly no subject, for subjectivity is conceived only
from the side of language, as it were, from the point of view of the shared
social possession of language. In contrast, appearing within the discourse of
psychoanalysis, Lacan's teaching promises to comprehend the subject in the
real, at the level of need, as being, and also the subject within meaning, an
effect of discourse. Perhaps; but as I shall suggest, Derrida can come back
against Lacan.

Derrida contra Lacan (and back again)

In 1988 Derrida rejects even Heidegger's radically displaced version

of subjectivity on the grounds that it "occupies a place analogous to that of
the transcendental subject" ("Eating Well" 273). Derrida concedes that the
Lacanian subject does not have "the traits of the classical subject" but

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affirms that it remains "indispensable to the economy of the Lacanian
theory" and is also "a correlate of the law" (256). What Derrida opposes is
subjects with predicates, the traditional view that subjects are to be defined
through an enumeration of "the essential predicates 01 which all subjects are
the subject." He continues:

While these predicates are as numerous and diverse as the type

or order of subjects dictates, they are all in fact ordered around
being-present [etant-present]: present to self - which implies
therefore a certain interpretation of temporality; identity top
osition, positionality, property, personality, ego,
consciousness, will, intentionahty, freedom, humanity, etc.
(274)

That is: commit yourself to a definition of the subject and you are
necessarily committed to an essence (however decentred you may claim it
to be), committed to an epistemology, an ontology and a theory or law; you
have closed off historical possibilities of what it might be to be human.
There is, however, a Derridean subject and it does have something
very like attributes. As we learn from The Gift of Death my identity is that
of "an irreducibly different singularity" (45) since no one can die in the
place of another; on me is laid "the absolute responsibility of my actions"
(60), and I appear to myself in a secrecy through which I have a "structure
of invisible inferiority" (109). My obligation to be open to the other can be
assessed in the contrast between my self-interested acts of calculation for
which I know and determine the consequences and my responsibility for an
alterity whose consequences I cannot know and cannot calculate.
It would be a Lacanian question to inquire what kind of subject is
being assumed which could know and discriminate between calculation and
responsibility without fantasy and self-deception. In The Gift of Death
Derrida asserts that absolute responsibility means I must always make the
sacrifice of Abraham because in fulfilling responsibility to those close to
me I give up "my obligations to the other others whom I know or don't
know, the billions of my fellows (without mentioning the animals . . .)"
(69). Lacan writes of "the mirage that renders modern man so sure of being
himself even, in the mistrust he has learned to practise against the traps of
self-love" ( Ecrits 165). Can Derrida uphold his distinction between
calculation and alterity by ensuring the absence from calculation of any
self-deception which would undermine its supposedly clear-sighted self-
interest? Can his idea of responsibility for everything (including the
animals) truly take place without any touch of self-flattering megalomania?
Bracketing the subject, assuming the subject only as it appears within
language, Derrida envisages the possibility of a transformation of discourse
without end rather as Marxism affirms the transformation of society
towards a classless Utopia. In the same team with Derrida here we can line
up Nietzsche, Foucauft, Deleuze and Guattari, Richard Rorty. Lacan, in
contrast, derives the identity of the speaking subject from a nature and a

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need which resists absolute transformation because it dictates the shape of
our desire.
Whatever future changes society and discourse may approach, Lacan
in contrast would continue to return us to an anti-Utopian conclusion. It can
never finally come right, neither in a communist future which promises the
rendering of objective realisation as free choice, nor in a world in which the
Cartesian ego has vanished into wall-to-wall hybridity. No one will ever
elude that constitutive either/or between Being and Meaning in which the
real and the rational necessarily exclude each other. Choose Being and you
fall into non-meaning; choose Meaning and you get it, but only because
your Being is eclipsed by its disappearance into the field of the signifier (it
is, as Lacan says brutally, "Your money or your life!" Four Fundamental
Concepts 212 ). There is indeed a Lacanian subject but it is impossible.4

NOTES

' Bhabha, "Difference," 200. This essav is not reprinted in The Location of Culture.
„ "Interstice" is borrowed from Levinas, see Location, 15 and 258.
If we choose meaning, the meaning survives only deprived of that part of non
meaning that is, strictly speaking, that which constitutes in the realisation of the subject, t
unconscious" (Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts 211).
I am very grateful to Routledge for their permission to reprint in this essay som
paragraphs that first appeared in Antony Easthope, "Bhabha, Hybridity and Identity,"
Textual Practice 12.2 (1998).

WORKS CITED

Bhabha, Homi. "Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism

Politics of Theory. Ed. Francis Barker et al. Colchester: U of Essex, 1983.
- . The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
Derrida, Jacques. "Differance." A Cultural and Critical Theory Reader. Ed. A
Easthope and Kate McGowan. Buckingham: Open UP, 1992. 108-32.
- . " 'Eating Well,' or the Calculation of the Subject." Points . . . Interviews , 1974-1
Elisabeth Weber. Stanford: Stanford UP. 1995. 255-87.
- . The Gift of Death. Chicago: Chicago UP. 1995. •
- . Of Grammatology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
Dews, Peter. Logics of Disintegration. London: Verso. 1987.
Easthope, Antony. "Bhabha, Hybriditv and Identity." Textual Practice 12.2 (1998V
Freud, Sigmund. On Sexuality. Harmonds worth: Penguin, 1977.
Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. London: Tavistock, 1977.
- . The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. London: Hogarth, 1977.

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