Representing a pre-colonial past is impossible within the metaphysic of representation

Evidence

These passages are deliberately fragmentary and incomplete. They do not pretend to represent a pre-colonial past. For reasons that lie at the core of the argument of this book, such a representation would not be possible. Rather, they are intended as commentaries on the book’s account of the colonising project, to suggest the possibility of thinking about language, meaning, and political order in ways that are not governed by the metaphysic of representation. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 44

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: if representation of a pre-representational past is impossible, how does scholarship escape its own frame — is there any method that actually does, or is this a self-consuming argument?
• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘metaphysic of representation’ as the core conceptual frame of the book.
• XREF: connects to: The past cannot be constructed from present elements alone — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 411; All systems of representation spatialize and thereby distort lived experience — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1293; Structural linguistic asymmetry makes the third-world text unknowable to metropolitan theorists — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 376 (+1 more)