Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 10 Number 1, April 2009
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Bracken, Christopher, Magical Criticism: The Recourse of Savage Philosophy, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2007. 256 pages, ISBN 0-226-06990-7 cloth £31.50/$50.00, ISBN 0-226-06991-5 paper £12.00/$20.00
Reviewed by
University of South Florida, Tampa
Bracken argues that in the course of Western civilization becoming Enlightened, defined more or less as no longer being logocentric (logocentric being defined as believing that “physical forces can be deployed by discursive means” [3], among other things), the logocentric became associated with economic and moral values and became stigmatized and racialized as “savage philosophy.” Bracken traces this development through a wide range of human thought: philosophy, anthropology, literature, economics, and politics—through thinkers as various as Aristotle, Nietzsche, Marx, Proust, Freud, Peirce, Hegel, Tylor, Derrida, and Spencer, and through events in colonial history such as treaty negotiations and tribal land claims in Australia and Canada, as recently as the 1990s. Bracken then demonstrates that the irony is that the logocentric continues to exist and be used, even in the work of the above thinkers, and it continues to be racialized, even today. He proffers Walter Benjamin as having begun, but not completed, a project for a magical criticism which takes logocentric thought into account, which project Bracken aims “to reactivate . . . for contemporary purposes” (20).
If, as maintained by many theorists today, cognition is a social phenomenon, then it is notable that Magical Criticism details not only historical theoretical, philosophical, and literary consequences but also social consequences of the shifts in our views toward cognitive processing. Bracken calls for de-racializing so-called “savage philosophy,” and then using it rather than decrying it, since it seems to be a recurring and essential part of our discourse.
As Bracken paints a very broad picture, detailed criticism will need to come from specialists in each of the various fields he examines. However, since Bracken paints a very broad picture (and the fact that this phenomenon covers such a wide area is one of his major points), a host of other supporting examples will spring to the reader’s mind. For example, at the end of the book, in the Coda, Bracken states that the discourse common to savage philosophy, now that colonialism is coming to an end, has been displaced into our discourse about extraterrestial intelligences. This reminds me of Mallarmé’s sonnet “Quand l’ombre menaça de la fatale loi” (“When the shadow threatened with its fatal law” [my translation]). The sonnet was composed in the late nineteenth century in the same time frame as many of the works that Bracken analyzes, addresses the same threat to logocentric thinking, and comes up with the same displacement of the issue—to outer space. What is interesting in Bracken’s very broad, but detailed, overview, is that the same ideas recur even to this level of specificity.
The book is recommended reading. Although the prose at times seems somewhat polemical (savage?), it is tempered by a sly sense of humor.