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Upon entering the Formosa Plastics Group Museum in Taoyuan, Taiwan, the first thing that visitors see is a large piece of wood, kept under a dome of glass. The label at the bottom reads:

This magnificent piece of New Zealand Kauri burl had been buried in the ground for more than fifty thousand years before being unearthed. The timber is a rare hard resin-filled solid wood. This beautifully-shaped burl weighs 8.5 tons, well over the the 6 ton piece held by the British Museum in London, making it unique in the world. In 2002, Chairman Wang Yung-ching came across the Kauri burl in Kaohsiung and was drawn to its strength so much that he decided to make this Kauri burl the centerpiece of his collection. This remarkable piece of wood on display here at the entrance to the museum symbolizes the vitality of the Formosa Plastics Group capable of immeasurable possibilities. and longevity.

I later learned that a burl is considered a tree's natural response to "some form of stress such as an injury or a viral or fungal infection" (Wikipedia). I also looked up the Mandarin translation for burl, which is 瘤 (liú). This term can mean hump, knurl, lump, nubble, or tumor. The latter invokes environmental and health impacts, such as high cancer rates in petrochemical fenceline communities. However, these issues are not addressed in the museum. Instead, the piece of wood is paired with an all-plastic recreation of a New Zealand rainforest in the museum's B1 gift shop. This recreation includes chirping bird sound effects, leaving visitors with a greenwashed first and last impression.

However, one way to capture the ambivalent meaning of the object at the center of the museum is through Kim Fortun's (2019) reflection on "toxic vitalism," a term that describes "the way systems can take on a life of their own, often beyond what experts planned or expected.

"Scott and Chakrabarty’s critiques tell us less about postcolonial studies’ limits than about the difficulty even its most eminent scholars have keeping its history in mind"

"Advocating resistance and critiquing the conditions of resistance are not, contra Scott, inherently opposed or even separate activities"

"During his “ethical turn,” Derrida reconceived the ultimate point of such deconstructive reading: no longer articulating différance it became instead responding to the experience of the other (Derrida 2002: 230–98; Spivak 1999: 426–8)."

"It becomes instead the capacity and willingness to surrender its agency to the other, thus exposing itself to a future it cannot control. Levinas’s redefinition of the human attempted, in its own way, to place the Hegelian tradition on its feet again. Though Gramsci and Fanon are both frequently assimilated to that tradition (as Scott’s and Chakrabarty’s critiques illustrate), the intellectual’s relationship to the colonized in their work prefigures, if again inchoately, the ideas of responsibility and futurity evident in Levinas and Derrida."

"The problem with Orientalism is precisely its ontological—not ethical—approach: the Orientalist seeks knowledge of the other to master it, decidedly not to protect its epistemic difference. [... ] Orientalism thus declares an epistemological as well as ontological difference between the European and the non‐European. Indeed, the former is the very source of the latter: Europeans and Orientals are different types of being precisely because they have different ways of knowing."

"[T]o think of responsibility as a freedom, you need that very humanistic education which teaches rebellion against it” (Spivak 2012: 461).4 “Humanist education” in general trains the “ethical reflex” in precisely the same way literary study in particular does: it opens one to forms of consciousness fundamentally different from one’s own. Such openness eventually requires one to “rebel” against one’s training itself: the oth- erness of some text—indeed, perhaps every text—will exceed what one has been taught."

"If Marxism responded to capitalism dialectically, wanting to replace it with a single and even more universal system, anti‐globalization movements now respond to capitalism deconstructively, wanting instead to articulate the disparate demands of those who build the global economy but are neither seen nor heard there. If they remain so, who will crawl, Spivak asks, “into the place of ‘the human’ of ‘humanism’ at the end of the day, even in the name of diversity?” (Spivak 2005: 23)."

"[T]he genealogy of postcolonial theory recounted here—from Gramsci and Fanon through Said and Spivak to Chakrabarty and Scott—can be read as a necessarily endless effort to rethink the revolutionary principle of freedom from the perspective of those to whom it was never designed to extend."

shortly attaching this news article on "coronavirus lockdown protests" to this reading. should be an obvious one to all. 

Re: the discussion on "our" concepts of freedom

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Adding a popular quote - from Kafka's "A Report to an Academy" 

I fear that perhaps you do not quite understand what I mean by "way out." I use the expression in its fullest and most popular sense—I deliberately do not use the word "freedom." I do not mean the spacious feeling of freedom on all sides. As an ape, perhaps, I knew that, and I have met men who yearn for it. But for my part I desired such freedom neither then nor now. In passing: may I say that all too often men are betrayed by the word freedom. And as freedom is counted among the most sublime feelings, so the corresponding disillusionment can be also sublime. In variety theaters I have often watched, before my turn came on, a couple of acrobats performing on trapezes high in the roof. They swung themselves, they rocked to and fro, they sprang into the air, they floated into each other's arms, one hung by the hair from the teeth of the other. "And that too is human freedom," I thought, "self-controlled movement." What a mockery of holy Mother Nature! Were the apes to see such a spectacle, no theater walls could stand the shock of their laughter.

No, freedom was not what I wanted. Only a way out; right or left, or in any direction; I made no other demand; even should the way out prove to be an illusion; the demand was a small one, the disappointment could be no bigger. To get out somewhere, to get out! Only not to stay motionless with raised arms, crushed against a wooden wall.