Decrypting Caliban’s Immanence: A Meditation on Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo’s Being and Contingency
By Thomas Meagher
The figure of Caliban is one who learns a language from the figure seeking to dominate him, Prospero. Caliban thus speaks Prospero’s language, raising the possibility, further, of thinking in Prospero’s language. Viewed from the perspective of indigeneity, it is Prospero who is in Caliban’s world, and, indeed, the world of Sycorax: Prospero is the interloper in a pre-existing constellation of meaning. But the logic of domination inverts this picture: for Prospero, what has occurred is the incorporation of the island into his world. Caliban and Sycorax are imagined to be brutes outside the realm of genuine meaning-constitution prior to Prospero’s intervention.
Caliban, though never explicitly discussed, is relevant to Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo’s Being and Contingency: Decrypting Heidegger’s Terminology (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) in at least two ways. The first is that Sanín-Restrepo’s subject matter is, as the subtitle suggests, an exploration of Martin Heidegger’s ontology, for which the matters of being-in-the-world, language, and immanence come to the fore. The second is that the impetus to this study, Sanín-Restrepo informs us, stems from the matter that “we did not choose Heidegger but rather Heidegger’s construction of the ready-to hand was imposed by the mainstream Western philosophical tradition that sees in it the final and definite bid for the liberation of beings from the chains of metaphysical eminence and the fallacy of presuppositions” (27). As a thinker working through the vistas of Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, and Agamben, Sanín-Restrepo must encounter Heidegger from a Calibanic perspective: it is the language imposed as representing the possibility of emancipation, and it is in light of such imposition that Sanín-Restrepo thinks.
Sanín-Restrepo’s aim is to decrypt Heidegger’s terminology. “Decryption” for Sanín-Restrepo is a project of laying bare meaning beyond the force of potestas, or power-as-domination. Similar to Enrique Dussel, Sanín-Restrepo locates the fundamental task of political philosophy as creating the possibility for a world beyond Euromodern potestas—a coloniality of power in which supposedly “political” institutions function merely as instruments of dominating forces—in which genuine potentia and hence democracy can emerge. As Sanín-Restrepo elaborated in Decolonizing Democracy, coloniality manifests through constituting potestas as a simulacrum of potentia: the power of the people is transmogrified into “power in a solid state,” which negates power as genuine power—as in, e.g., Hannah Arendt’s notion—through the production of “the hidden people,” people who do not count as sources of power. The saturation of language, norms of communicability, and the lifeworld with the logic and imperatives of such a simulacrum thus functions as a mode of encryption. Decryption, then, can be likened to efforts to overcome the coloniality of knowledge. What Sanín-Restrepo persuasively demonstrates are many ways in which the functioning of potestas is presupposed—and left unsettled—by Heidegger’s vocabulary. Thus, Sanín-Restrepo’s project of encryption reveals the failure of Heideggerian “thought on Being” to deliver on the liberatory ends stipulated by his proponents.
Sanín-Restrepo’s text is, as it forthrightly indicates, suffused with mystery. Typical readers will, no doubt, find themselves lost in Sanín-Restrepo’s often bewildering use of language. This, though, accords with design: as a text evoking the Heideggerian tradition, its bewildering effects are de rigueur. Defamiliarizing our terms—bringing them beyond the meaning imposed by “the they”—is the order of the day. Such defamiliarization Sanín-Restrepo affects both in order to demonstrate Heideggerian thought and to decrypt it. Much of this work is done through an extended engagement with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, such that the matter of language games must be front and center. The reader may come to wonder whether these language games are, at times, at the reader’s expense—certainly a sensation familiar to readers of Heidegger—but careful study reveals that Sanín-Restrepo is, indeed, building to something.
Sanín-Restrepo states that “the theory of decryption blooms from ‘creolization…’” (22). One might, then, consider this text an effort to creolize Heidegger. At the same time, though, there’s a sense in which what is creolizing about Sanín-Restrepo’s decryption is its implications for the displacement of Heidegger. For Calibanic dynamics of thinking “in the wake” of Heidegger, decryption can be understood as demonstrating the possibility of escape from under the weight of Heidegger’s Prosperic lexicon. On that reading, Sanín-Restrepo would be helping to toss aside a Heideggerian encumbrance whose function is decreolizing: the claim that one can only arrive at a pure escape from Western metaphysics through Heidegger is decrypted so that other projects can be undertaken.
Creolization in the Caribbean emerged out of a context for which Caliban is emblematic but also misleading. Creolization emerges as dominators impose a grammar of everyday life on the dominated. Imposition of European languages on Africans and their descendants in this fashion is represented by the Prospero-Caliban relationship. Yet the actuality of creolization is not a pure one-on-one dynamic: part and parcel of such creolization was the social phenomenon of communication among people drawing on African linguistic resources to render the imposed languages intelligible. Creolization emerges because there are Calibans, not merely a Caliban. It is this social dynamic—this manifestation, in Sanín-Restrepo’s Deleuzian terminology, of difference—that is requisite for creolization as such.
Creolization thus emerges out of contexts well-described by Sanín-Restrepo’s characterization of language, potestas, and encryption. “Potestas moves to rule over the nervous system of language, to direct its flows and overshadow difference. …It is not that language is everything but that everything in language is passed through the sword of potestas” (51). Creolization thus emerges in contexts shaped by potestas. But is this encryption as such? For Sanín-Restrepo, “To encrypt is to colonize the rest of the world with rules whose creator is outside the language game. It is to control utterly any language game through power plays that control every possible move” (112). Liberalism is thus understood as having encryption as its engine: discourse is avowed as the core of power, even as discourse masks its prior conquest by force through domination. Yet this encryption, we note, would seem to follow the moment of creolization, rather than preceding it. Colonizing has its Prospero-Caliban moment of language acquisition, but also the Caliban-Caliban movements of communication, cooperation, and contestation. Encryption, then, is an effort at decreolization: it locks the colonized into a prior moment of creolization, such that their agency now and in the future is foreclosed by linguistic reifications.
The product of encryption would thus figure to be immanence, entrapment within a language that dominates. For Heidegger, Deleuze, and others with whom Sanín-Restrepo is engaging, immanence is the name of the game. As the Heideggerian-influenced African-American novelist and philosopher Charles Johnson put it in Being & Race, “we live in language. It works upon us as we upon it” (Johnson 1988: 23). Yet in the reality that produced creolized languages in the Caribbean, the people’s “work[ing] upon” the language is not a matter of pure immanence, of merely living in it. There is in this context a dialectic of the immanent and the transcendent. If it is true that thought is always in language, it neither follows that one is always in a language, nor that one is always in thought. The explanation for why enslaved peoples in the Caribbean participated in the language games imposed by colonizers is not found in the language of either colonized or colonized. It is found in their reality as human beings, struggling together to breathe.
To view the human being, a la Sylvia Wynter, as a languaging being cannot mean to reduce the “person” to mere immanence to a language. I am in language, but I also paradoxically transcend language. I do not here mean I transcend it purely. In the Heideggerian lineage, the effort to displace a metaphysics of substance and transcendence has often ironically led to interpreting transcendence as if it were substance. If transcendence is apprehended relationally, by contrast, its manifestations may be dialectical, impure, creolized, and creolizing. If immanence and transcendence are understood as dialectical elements in the constitution of a multidimensional human reality, this both displaces the notion of Man as Transcendent—divine substance—and the orthodox Heideggerian portrait in which our being-in-the-world precludes the possibility of what Maria Lugones termed world travelling.
In this reader’s view, then, Sanín-Restrepo demonstrates the presuppositions in Heideggerian thought that help it function implicitly on the side of encryption. Calibans, in the plural, function as the hidden people, the hidden difference, whose reality is occluded in the account of being-in-the-world and the ready-to-hand. Heidegger may be seen as an inspiration for liberatory or anti-colonial thought by some, but the failure to reckon with potestas in the constitution of the lifeworld means, ultimately, Heidegger’s ontology must function as an object rather than source of decryption. If Heidegger helps us see beyond a portrait of pure transcendence—which Euromodern Man is all-too-commonly regarded as divinely embodying—then the hope is that Sanín-Restrepo’s text will help those thinking seriously about domination to decrypt the presumption of Caliban’s pure immanence.
References
Johnson, Charles. Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988.
Sanín-Restrepo, Ricardo. Being and Contingency: Decrypting Heidegger’s Terminology. Washington, DC: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021.
Dr. Thomas Meagher is the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s Secretary for Institutional Memory and Archiving. He is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Sam Houston State University, specializing in philosophy of race and gender, Africana philosophy, phenomenology, and political theory.