World Philosophies

Seloua Luste Boulbina, Laura Hengehold

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780253041937
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophical Essays

Even though many of France's former colonies became independent over fifty years ago, the concept of "colony" and who was affected by colonialism remain problematic in French culture today. Seloua Luste Boulbina, an Algerian-French philosopher and political theorist, shows how the colony's structures persist in the subjectivity, sexuality, and bodily experience of human beings who were once brought together through force. This text, which combines two works by Luste Boulbina, shows how France and its former colonies are haunted by power relations that are supposedly old history, but whose effects on knowledge, imagination, emotional habits, and public controversies have persisted vividly into the present. Luste Boulbina draws on the work of Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, and Édouard Glissant to build a challenging, original, and intercultural philosophy that responds to blind spots of inherited political and social culture. Kafka's Monkey and Other Phantoms of Africa offers unique insights into how issues of migration, religious and ethnic identity, and postcolonial history affect contemporary France and beyond.

PART I

KAFKA’S MONKEY AND OTHER REFLECTIONS ON THE COLONY

1

WITH RESPECT TO KAFKA’S MONKEY

There are many who consider as an injury to themselves any conduct which they have a distaste for, and resent it as an outrage to their feelings; as a religious bigot, when charged with disregarding the religious feelings of others, has been known to retort that they disregard his feelings, by persisting in their abominable worship or creed.

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

ONE GENERALLY THINKS OF THE POSTCOLONY AS THE situation of states that gained independence after having been colonies under foreign domination.¹ Implicitly, this suggests that colonial space is defined by the colonized territories and excludes the metropole, which is supposed to escape the grasp of colonization. But this is hardly the case. Certainly colonial space is divided, but it is also shared. This is why, like Cameroon, Vietnam, or Algeria, contemporary France can be regarded as a postcolony with respect to its history. It is affected by the advent of independence as well as by its past as a colonial empire. Above all, this means that the political and intellectual work of decolonization involves France as much as France’s former colonies. The colonizer country is no less thoroughly impregnated by the colony than the colonized country is, albeit in a different way.

We must move beyond outdated representations. The philosopher’s task is to flush such representations out of hiding so that we can be freed from them. The point of this chapter is to propose, through a reading of Kafka, a subject-oriented analysis of colonial and postcolonial situations.

Assimilation, Asceticism, Illness

The Greeks knew two forms of spatial exclusion: ostracism, which involved expelling whoever was considered an “evil from above,” and the Thargelia ritual, which consisted in expelling whoever was considered an “evil from below.” In both cases a human measure was established relative to what is divine and heroic on the one hand and to what is bestial and monstrous on the other. Jacques Derrida analyzed this ancient ritual of exclusion in Dissemination.² The problem is one of differences and distribution/division [partage] implicit in the distinction between the intra muros and the extra muros: “The ceremony of the pharmakos is thus played out on the boundary line between inside and outside, which it has as its function to ceaselessly trace and retrace. Intra muros/extra muros. The origin of difference and division, the pharmakos represents evil both introjected and projected.”³

Just as in the past, those who are socially excluded today are not exterior to a society; they are outside [dehors] while playing an intrinsic part. They are an “inner enemy” whose archetypes can be found in the double figure of the delinquent and the immigrant. More recently, the leper gave rise to exclusionary rituals, but so did madness and poverty.⁴ Michel Foucault showed that exclusion was not the same as expulsion. The “great confinement” of the seventeenth century, with its general hospital holding 1 percent of the Parisian population and its houses of correction or work, marked the dividing line between the “good poor” who merited assistance and the “bad poor” who called for repression. It drew a boundary. The great confinement was a matter of preventing every form of mobility or circulation. Indeed, circulation was considered a form of wandering (from whence the prohibition on begging). In the nineteenth century, lepers were treated like plague carriers, meaning that a grid-based technology of disciplinary power was applied to the excluded space whose inhabitants (beggars, vagabonds, madmen, the violent) were symbolized by the leper. Disciplinary power cuts two ways: it individualizes those who are excluded, but its procedures of individualization also stigmatize and serve to mark the fact of exclusion.

Exclusion is an example of what Jacques Rancière calls the mésentente (disagreement).⁵ If exclusion designates a deprived space, a space of freedom without circulation, this makes it into the object of a genuinely political conflict. Rancière proposes that the ancients (Greeks or Romans) invented politics when they accepted the existence of a faction (part) formed by those who have no share in society’s goods (sans part). Thus, politics emerges when the simple effects of domination are interrupted by an act in which freedom is recognized, understood here as a status of those who lack “status.” Socially speaking, there is no faction of those without a share; the only shares that exist are shares in society. But this means that exclusion is the sign of a wrong, a tort.⁶

Politics introduces the tort of incommensurability, the contradiction of two worlds lodged in a single world (with a conflict over the existence of a common scene). One world is occupied by those who count socially, the other by those who do not. The political dimension must therefore be distinguished from that of the police. The police refers here to the distribution of places and functions—to redistribution, properly speaking. Politics, on the other hand, refers to the institution of those who by definition lack any place, the institution of democratic equality.⁷ Politics involves the encounter between police logic and egalitarian logic, an encounter giving rise to subject positions, or subjectivation. But political subjectivation is not social identification with a given place or role; quite to the contrary, it is socially disidentifying.

The moralists known to Nietzsche certainly observed the aggressivity suffusing all social relations, even the most polite and the best policed. “It is monstrous to consider how easy it is for us to ridicule, censure, and despise others, and how we enjoy it,” affirmed La Bruyère in Les caractères (1688), “and yet how enraged we are when others ridicule, censure, and despise us.”⁸ But in reality, whatever one might say, the roles of ridiculer and ridiculed are not interchangeable. The moralists were quite aware that civility is a shared illusion that hides differences in the distribution of power and wealth, or more generally in positions and social goods. To put it more simply, it is the valet who must swallow it all [tout avaler]. Nothing prevents the master from saying what he likes. Apparent situations of reciprocity dissimulate the profound asymmetry at work in esteem. This is because these situations replace a conflict (of interests) with a play (of appearances).

If some people have the capacity de facto to be “givers” of symbolic gratification beyond the appearances of social play, others are in the position of “petitioners.” The individual who must ask waits to be acknowledged, to be admitted. According to Jean Starobinski,

one suspects that the pleasure is less attached to the persons by whom one is accepted than to the recognition the petitioner asks for, the esteem that he or she is henceforth entitled to feel. It is the pleasure of being “distinguished,” of being judged worthy to take part in a “circle.” On the other hand, for the one or ones who “receive,” who “recruit,” who “prefer” to admit others, pleasure comes first and foremost from being able to exercise a choice, feeling able to refuse access, and finally in consulting criteria of similarity which require the petitioner to confirm, by his or her whole being and conduct, the ideal image that the members of the “circle” have of themselves: they will only accept someone who resembles them and who, by his or her merits and agreements, offers a reflection of their own value.⁹

This description could serve as a definition of the “complex of the colonized.” It could also shed light on the notion of “symbolic violence.”¹⁰ Nonetheless, the criterion of admission, being narcissistic, is an image and not a reality—an ideal, not a practice. One has illusions of getting along. Thus Michael Walzer notes, “In ordinary speech, it is often said that toleration is always a relationship of inequality where the tolerated groups or individuals are cast in an inferior position. To tolerate someone else is an act of power; to be tolerated is an acceptance of weakness.”¹¹ He draws an analogy between the majority and government: the majority tolerates “cultural difference” in the same way that the government tolerates political opposition.¹² From this standpoint, belonging to the majority is simply a matter of considering oneself able to judge, to admit, and to exclude: in short, to decide.¹³ It is the askers who must demonstrate the appropriate degree of asceticism, even if they ask for nothing strictly speaking and even if the judges themselves must offer similar proofs.

Indeed, asceticism is generally defined as a kind of self-control that is inevitably accompanied by frustrations. But originally ascèse (askèsis) referred to every form of exercise, particularly gymnastic exercise. It is a type of labor that shapes the body, a discipline in the strict sense of the term. In this sense, the ascetic ideal is both a physical and a moral ideal. To be sure, as Nietzsche has shown, this is why the ascetic ideal is a pillar of mental strength [morale] and of morality as practiced.¹⁴ It is altogether noteworthy that in Nietzsche’s philosophy, asceticism appears as a subjective tactic of the weak, who seek to carry out in morality what they cannot carry out in reality (socially): the subjective response of a minority who, paradoxically, may be the numerical majority in a population.

For minority does not necessarily mean numerically insignificant. In this respect, there are two paradigmatic cases: first, women, whom one may consider a minority historically speaking, as much on the economic and social plane as on the political and cultural plane;¹⁵ second, the colonized. In Algeria prior to independence, for example, former indigènes (natives) were an economic, social, political, juridical, and cultural minority although they made up the vast majority of the population. Minority in the largest possible sense exists the moment there is no equality, neither on the political plane, nor the social plane, nor the economic plane, nor the cultural plane. Often equality is also lacking on the juridical plane. Religious minorities (Jews and Protestants in Europe) are a specific kind of minority. What unites all minorities, in their great heterogeneity, is not living under the (bad) gaze of the other; that would simplify things unfairly. Rather, it is living under a gaze one might grant to the other from a ferocious obligation to conform—not to the other him- or herself, but to ideals that are ultimately (if differently) shared. Adepts of internalization . . .

A tyrannical and cruel superego, Freud would say, guards over women, Jews, and other Protestants—a domestic tyrant, in Nietzsche’s vocabulary, who administers and domesticates the aggressivity accumulated by what, for simplicity’s sake, we call domination, with this caution: that it should be imagined as a relation of force, and not as a force exercised by some over others. The older term power (puissance) could also be used.

If philosophers are not priests, as Nietzsche insisted in his time, they always share with priests a favorable prejudice toward asceticism. It must be said that they are, practically speaking, specialists in asceticism. How should we approach asceticism more generally, particularly the asceticism of minorities? The narcissistic dimension of asceticism is linked to the implicit pursuit of an impossible recognition. Asceticism is an illness, to be sure, but it is also the price of simple survival under conditions of social suffering.

How might we analyze the “last match of a legend,” starting from Nietzsche’s analysis?¹⁶

Like an overly spoiled and badly raised child, he botched his farewell [raté son sortie]. During the final match of the World Cup in Germany on Sunday July 9, Zinédine Zidane tarnished the conclusion to his story as a soccer player of genius with an unacceptable, intolerable, unforgivable head butt. . . . A head butt, everything collapses, and forgotten precedents come to mind once again. . . . A head butt, and what reappears is the character’s dark aspect, his black face, other side of the rumored image about one of France’s favorite public figures. Sunday, the Italians beat the Blues in the World Cup final. But France lost Zizou.¹⁷

These few lines make the French soccer champion look like a kind of Mr. Hyde hidden behind the good doctor Jekyll, as if this were the nth misdeed (twelfth red card) of a man with no manners. Signs of his “origin”? The mark of his “community”?¹⁸ “He ruined his legend,” claimed the journalist in an article that, curiously, said nothing about Marco Materazzi’s attitud...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Translator’s Acknowledgments
• Translator’s Introduction
• Prologue: Thinking the Colony
• Part I: Kafka’s Monkey and Other Reflections on the Colony
• Part II: Africa and Its Phantoms: Writing the Afterward
• Part III: Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Authors