Writing a National Colony: The Hostility of Inscription in the Ge ...

The derivative “hostility,” used for the first time in 1531, means “the state or fact of being hostile; hostile action exercised by one community, state, or power against another; esp. such as involves war” (“hostility”). I wish for these autoantonymic semantics of “host,” as applied to bodies of texts, to invoke the concept of différance, the ever-unnameable other, as well as a duplicitous, insinuating and unstable quality of language. Layered onto the friend/fiend binary that the term encompasses is the semantics of the “army,” from which emerges an additional aggressive notion of language, an out-numbering and multiple attack, a murmur of discourse turned battlecry. In choosing a shifting term that plays on its Latin etymology to describe a cultural formation (a body of texts), I also mean to mimic—admittedly gleefully—a predilection of nineteenth-century European naturalists to have recourse to Latin taxonomic denotation. Blatantly repurposing Homi Bhabha’s concept of colonial mimicry, I endeavor to endow the term “host of writings” with the notion that it is “at once resemblance and menace” (Location 86) to the naturalist’s attempt to stabilize knowledge by hegemonic inscription. If Latin is historically the language of choice to inscribe purported scientific truths, it makes a return appearance here to denounce the truth-proposition of inscription. Understood as an army of texts, the host of writings is a hostile multiplicity that invariably assaults the reader with its intent to act on him, an army of narrative, argument, description, and explanation; of authority, sanction, and intervention; of sentiment and metaphor. Carrying the terminology of the host to its inevitable extreme, then, I propose to define “hostility” in consequence as the field of action of the host, that is, a system of textual practices by which a host of writings establishes desire as truth.

What, then, is the quality of the links that allow us to group disparate texts together and call them a host, and how may we conceive of a systematic pattern in the formation and actions of such linkages? How do texts, and in particular written texts, work together to create, articulate, and guarantee propositions, and how do they question, undermine, and supplant them? In order to account for what a host of texts does, I will briefly discuss some of the notions of textuality and intertextual relationships that underpin my concept of a host.