Magical Criticism: The Recourse of Savage Philosophy (review)

Reviewed by: Magical Criticism: The Recourse of Savage Philosophy Jessica L.W. Carey (bio) Christopher Bracken. Magical Criticism: The Recourse of Savage Philosophy. University of Chicago Press. x, 266. US $20.00 Christopher Bracken’s Magical Criticism is a wide-ranging work of theory that develops multiple, if related, projects. Bracken’s central concern is what he calls ‘savage philosophy,’ an orientation to experience positing that signs do not merely represent reality, but ‘take part in the realization of objects, processes, and even worlds.’ The ‘savage’ designation of this kind of philosophy is deliberate, and has to do with the primary project of the book: Bracken asserts early that ‘[t]his is a book about the racialization of ideas . . . a difference between races has been projected onto an enduring scholarly debate about the relation between signs and things.’ Yet Bracken does not stop at outlining the historical evidence for this racialized projection. In tandem with that line of argument, he develops several rebuttals of this racializing process by interrogating Western philosophy’s Enlightenment-based claim that it is free of the critical tendencies of savage philosophy. Not only does ‘magical criticism’ persist in the work of those canonical Western thinkers who are critical of the [End Page 136] ‘rationality’ that claims a representational divorce between discourse and material reality – Walter Benjamin being a prime example, and the one responsible for the term magical criticism – it also persists in the work of those most committed to the Western rationality that heartily disavows savage philosophy. In fact, Bracken asserts, not only does positivist rationality bear an effaced homology with savage philosophy, but the thinkers in this vein – represented by various figures including Hegel, a certain Nietzsche, anthropologist E.B. Tylor, and Vancouver Sun journalists – actually performatively enact savage philosophy, or what we think of as a ‘confusion’ between sign and referent, in the very act of projecting this critical tendency upon a ‘savage’ that emerges only from that act of discourse. In short, Bracken concludes that we cannot have done with savages because ‘we’ are all savage philosophers, and no more so than when we are denying that ‘we’ believe discourse has material consequences – a denial, to reiterate Bracken’s point, that the West performs by discursively othering this belief in a way that helps actualize societal structures of racialized difference. The work unfolds in a manner that allows Bracken to incorporate an unusually broad range of work from the fields of anthropology, literature, political economy, and philosophy, while maintaining a coherent critical trajectory. The first chapter lays the groundwork for understanding the historical racialization of savage philosophy by examining Adam Smith’s conclusion that economic disparity arises from the existence of ‘two sorts’ of people (a notion that is always already racialized): what Bracken terms an ‘improvident and present-oriented’ sort that spends, and a ‘frugal and future-oriented’ sort that saves. Bracken argues – like most Marxist-oriented economic theorists – that this narrative is endlessly recited ‘not to explain the emergence of the capital relation but to justify it,’ which significantly introduces his recurring point that it is Western theorists whose discourse carries material force, despite their attempt to displace this kind of causality into a ‘savage’ belief in magic. The next three chapters delve further into the ways that post-Enlightenment Western philosophers have simultaneously enacted and disowned the tendency to translate the ‘actualizing’ mimesis of nature (the world of referents) into the ‘restricted,’ merely copy-forming mimesis of human production (the world of signs). Highlights include a compelling foray into Nietzsche’s shifting valuation of the artist and how this shift is influenced by racialized notions, a thorough analysis of the potentiality of impotentiality in the field of semiotics, and a sustained comparison of the notion of commodity fetishism in Marx’s work with anthropological conclusions about ‘savage’ totemism. The trajectory culminates in the fifth chapter’s forceful and ardent analysis of the ‘nondiscursive consequences’ of the West’s racist discourses, examining the discursive strategies of the media during the First Nations land claims process in British Columbia in the [End Page 137] 1990s. Undoubtedly informed by Bracken’s other work in First Nations history (see 1997’s Potlatch...

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