Cosmopolitanism and Tragic Silence 137ethnic identity): a spectacle that demands in the very act of interpre-
tation a mental deconstruction of rigid ethnic distinctions.
In the case of Silk in The Human Stain , in addition to undermin-
ing the validity of racial and ethnic taxonomy, his repudiation of the
designation “colored” also represents an act of self-empowerment and
resistance to the repressive rules that impede individual agency—he
“saw the fate awaiting him, and he wasn’t having it” (p. 108). At this
moment in the narrative, the protagonist’s defiant spirit is described
in an elevated tone that evokes the laudator y register used in classica l
Greek tragedy:
You can’t let the big they impose its bigotry on you any more than you
can let the little they become a we and impose its ethics on you. Not
the tyranny of the we and its we-talk and everything that the we wants
to pile on your head. Never for him the tyranny of the we that is dying
to suck you in, the coercive, inclusive, historical, inescapable moral we
with its insidious E pluribus unum. (p. 95)This fundamental assertion of individualism strongly resonates
with what Amanda Anderson describes as the cosmopolitan “advo-
cacy of detachment from shared identities, [... and placing] emphasis
on affiliation as voluntary.”^33 For Macherey, it would also represent
the assertion of subjectivity, which comes into being through a pro-
cess of a “rupture or refolding with respect to the [... individual’s]
historico-totality,” whereby the latter repudiates a predetermined
role of “belonging to a historically determined social system” and
sets about “manipulating [... and] ‘possessing’ it.”^34 It also encapsu-
lates what many cosmopolitan theorists, such as Aboulafia, consider
a central feature of the field in that it exhibits a sense of “cultural
self-determination [... that enables individuals to] define their own
narratives and select courses of action that are dependent on their
deliberations and choices.”^35 The elusiveness of The Human Stain
extends beyond the details of the protagonist, however; for in spite
of the novel bearing sociopolitical relevance and profundity, it nev-
ertheless avoids defining, in precise terms, any specific ideological or
sociopolitical message.
This effect is in large part produced by the unreliability of
the narrator, who leaves omissions and lacunae, but also (as is