Provincializing France?

Achille Mbembe
Translated by Janet Roitman

Comment? Ils causent tout seuls? (What? Theyre conversing on their own?) Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations V, 168

In the rest of the world, the postcolonial turn in the social sciences and humanities took place nearly a quarter century ago. Since then, the method or style of critique associated with that movement has influenced myriad political, epistemological, institutional, and disciplinary debates in the United States, the United Kingdom, and regions across the Southern Hemisphere (South America, Australia, New Zealand, the Indian subcontinent, and South Africa).1 From its inception, postcolonial studies has been interpreted in extremely diverse ways; over time, it has spawned robust waves of polemic and controversy, not to mention the many objections, each contradicting the previous, that continue today.2 It has also given rise to an abundance of profoundly rich and
1. For an example of this diversity, see Mabel Moraa, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Juregui, eds., Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008). See also Fernando Coronil, Latin American Postcolonial Studies and Global Decolonization, in The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, ed. Neil Lazarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 22140; and Vinayak Chaturvedi, ed., Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (New York: Verso, 2000). 2. See Simon During, Postcolonialism and Globalization: Towards a Historicization of Their Inter- relation, Cultural Studies 14 (2000): 385404; and Harry D. Harootunian, Postcolonialitys
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tremendously divergent intellectual, political, and aesthetic practices so much so that one might earnestly ask where the unity of postcolonial studies lies.3 But despite this logic of segmentation, one can assert that, at its core, the object of postcolonial critique is best described in terms of the interlacing of histories and the concatenation of distinct worlds. Given that slavery and especially colonization (but also migrations, the ordering of sex and sexuality, and the circulation of forms, imaginaries, goods, ideas, and people) played such decisive roles in this process of human collision and entanglement, it is logical that postcolonial studies has made them the privileged objects of its inquiry. The most compelling work in postcolonial studies does not take colonization to be an immutable, ahistorical structure or an abstract entity. Instead, colonization is apprehended as a complex process that generates frontiers and intervals, zones of passage, and interstitial spaces. Similarly, it asserts that as a historical and modern force, one of colonizations functions has been the production of subalternity. Many imperial powers exercised, in their respective colonial contexts, modes of subordination founded on racial differences and juridical statuses that, while often differentiated, always, at the end of the day, produced inferior rankings. Conversely, in order to articulate their demands for equality, many colonized populations were moved to elaborate a critique of the harm and injustice engendered by both the law of race and racialized law (as well as the law of gender and sexuality). Postcolonial studies thus examines the work accomplished by the categories of race, gender, and sexuality in colonial imaginaries and seeks to evaluate their role in the very process of producing colonial subjects. Such work also is concerned with analyzing the forms of resistance that have marked colonial history, the diverse experiences of emancipation and their limits, and the ways that oppressed people have constituted themselves as historical subjects and thus contributed, of their own right, to the constitution of a transnational and diasporic world. Finally, postcolonial studies also considers the manner in which

Unconscious/Area Studies Desire, Postcolonial Studies 2 (1999): 12747. See, more recently, Priyamvada Gopal and Neil Lazarus, eds., Postcolonial Studies after Iraq, special issue, New Formations, no. 59 (2006); and PMLA 122, 123 (2007). See also Aijaz Ahmed, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1993); and Arif Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997). 3. Read in particular Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 2001); David Ludden, ed., Reading Subaltern Studies: Critical History, Contested Meaning, and the Globalization of South Asia (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001); and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). 86

traces of a colonial past become, in the present moment, the object of symbolic and pragmatic work, as well as the conditions under which these practices give rise to unprecedented hybrid or cosmopolitan forms of life, politics, culture, and modernities.
Disjuncture and Temporal Discordance

Provincializing France?

Boundaries between academic disciplines, the relatively stark provincialism of the knowledge produced and disseminated in the Hexagon (consistently masked by the exportation of the works of thinkers like Jean- Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, or Pierre Bourdieu), and cultural narcissism and conceit have all contributed to the marginal position of France in these global ventures of thought. Until recently, postcolonial studies has been disparaged or, at best, overlooked in French scholarship. Is this cavalier indifference or plain ignorance masking for insolence? Calculated ostracism or mere accident? Whatever the reason, up until the onset of the millennium, postcolonial studies has not been the object of an informed critique or serious, conversant debate within the French academy.4 Aside from a handful of texts by Edward Said, almost no works by scholars claiming affiliation with this intellectual current or its various streams (subaltern studies, for example) were translated into French.5 Indeed, just when postcolonial studies was on the rise in Anglo- Saxon academic and artistic circles, French politics and cultural production was moving on an opposite trajectory, entering what we might call an imperial winter. This winter can be characterized as a series of disconnections, anathemas, and grand excommunications that culminated in the relative provincialization of French thought and its regression on a planetary scale. Significant from this point of view was the rupture with Marxism and with a conception of the relations between the production of knowledge and political engagement inherited from a long history of engagement with workers movements, internationalism, and anticolonialism. The empire having been so deeply entrenched in French identity, its loss (and especially that of Algeria) was tantamount to a veritable amputation
4. Notable exceptions are Jacques Pouchepadass, Les subaltern studies ou la critique post coloniale de la modernit, Lhomme, no. 156 (2000): 16186; and Marie- Claude Smouts, ed., La situation postcoloniale: Les postcolonial studies dans le dbat franais (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 2007). 5. An exception is Mamadou Diouf, Lhistoriographie indienne en dbat: Colonialisme, nationalisme et socits postcoloniales (Paris: Karthala, 1999). 87

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in a national imaginary suddenly deprived of one of its greatest sources of pride. Imperial history one function of which was to sing the praises of the nation, paint a gallery of heroic portraits with images of conquests, epics, and exotic representations was relegated to a peripheral region of national consciousness.6 At the moment when, bolstered by poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and a tradition of critical Marxism, postcolonial studies takes off in the Anglo- Saxon world, many French scholars who otherwise might have found interest in postcolonial studies some having been Communist Party activists or sympathizers, others having been associated with radical organizations a re eager to be done with Marxism and its avatars, most notably Third- Worldism (le tiers- mondisme).7 Especially on the left where various struggles for justice had been closely identified with the Communist Party a new generation of intellectuals sought to escape unconditional adhesion to Marxist dogma as a precondition for a renewed critique of Stalinism and the politics of the Soviet Union in terms that did not simply reiterate the language of ultranationalism. Convinced that socialism could not possibly succeed in the West, others were finding it futile to transfer Western revolutionary and utopian aspirations onto the struggles in Third World countries. Thus Sartre and an entire tradition of anticolonialist thought became awash in sarcasm, soon the subject of a rousing disavowal. Before that time, Frantz Fanon, nearly condemned to ostracism, had started his long purgatory, engaging only marginal voices that were mostly ignored. Likewise, the sanctimonious elite took little interest in Aim Csaires Discourse on Colonialism and even less in his Tragedy of King Christophe or Season in the Congo. Of the poet, the only image they were keen to preserve was of a man who, turning his back on the sirens of independence, chose to make his island one of Frances administrative departments. Neither of the two main movements of the twentieth century aimed at deconstructing race the 1960s civil rights movement in the United States and the global struggle against apartheid of the 1980s and 1990s has distinguished
6. Sophie Dulucq, Catherine Coquery- Vidrovitch, Jean Frmigacci, Emmanuelle Sibeud, and Jean- Louis Triaud, Lcriture de lhistoire de la colonisation en France depuis 1960, Afrique et histoire 2 (2006): 23576. 7. Grard Chaliand, Les mythes rvolutionnaires du tiers monde: Gurillas et socialismes (Paris: Seuil, 1979); Pascal Bruckner, Le sanglot de lhomme blanc: Tiers- monde, culpabilit, haine de soi (Paris: Seuil, 1982); Carlos Rangel, LOccident et le tiers monde: De la fausse culpabilit aux vraies responsabilits (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1982); Yves Lacoste, Contre les anti- tiers- mondistes et contre certains tiers- mondistes (Paris: La Dcouverte, 1985); Claude Liauzu, Aux origines des tiersmondismes: Coloniss et anticolonialistes en France, 19191939 (Paris: LHarmattan, 1982); Liauzu, Les intellectuels franais au miroir algrien: lments pour une histoire des tiers- mondismes (Nice: Cahiers de la Mditerrane, 1984). 88

or even watermarked the works of the most prominent French intellectuals, aside from Sartre, Beauvoir, and a few residues of Derrida. Toward the end of the 1970s, when Foucault spoke of the racial state, he had not a word for South Africa, the eras only example of actually existing legal segregation.8 In the end, it was in America and not in Paris that Maryse Cond, Valentin Mudimbe, and douard Glissant all great French or francophone figures identified with postcolonial studies, regardless of their own claims to such labels found refuge and recognition. A key element of French colonial humanism consisted in acknowledging in the features of peoples who had been conquered by France the multiple faces of humanity. For colonial reformers in particular, the differences among various groups of human beings did not foreclose the possibility of a colonial empire founded on the principle of asymmetrical fraternity. The colonial enterprise itself had been a relatively multiracial project. From the administrative heads (commandants de cercle) to the interpreters, all the way up to the governor; from the tirailleurs (native infantrymen) drafted during the wars of conquest or pacification to the deputy of the Palais Bourbon, and even the ministers of the republic the public face of the French colonial state was far from being entirely pale.9 But by the beginning of the 1980s, this colorful mosaic was nothing but a faded memory. Minorities were progressively hidden away, placed in the dark and covered with a veil of prudery that obfuscated their visibility in the nations political and public life. At the same time, Frances old African possessions were abandoned to their tyrants, who received, through corruption and military aid, generous political and ideological support from the French ruling class.10 African dissidents, such as Mongo Beti, who denounced neocolonial violence, were ridiculed and left to howl in the wilderness.11 And when marginalization proved insufficient to bring
8. Michel Foucault, Il faut dfendre la socit: Cours au Collge de France, 19751976 (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 1997). 9. On this phenomenon, W. E. B. DuBois wrote: I have walked in Paris with [Blaise] Diagne who represents Senegal all Senegal, white and black in the French parliament. But Diagne is a Frenchman who is accidentally black. I suspect Diagne despises his own black Wolofs. I have talked with Candace, black deputy of Guadeloupe. Candace is virulently French. He has no conception of Negro uplift, as apart from French development. W. E. B. DuBois, The Negro Mind Reaches Out, in The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (1925; repr., New York: Touchstone, 1997), 397. See also Brian Weinstein, bou (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972). 10. See Achille Mbembe, Sortir de la grande nuit: Essai sur lAfrique dcolonise (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2010). 11. Read Mongo Betis journal, Peuples noirs, peuples africains. See also Ambroise Kom, Mongo Beti parle: Testament dun esprit rebelle (Paris: Homnisphres, 2006). 89

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them back to reason, there was little reluctance to resort to censorship in order to silence them.12 In the immediate aftermath of decolonization, France withdrew into the Hexagon, which became its filter for narrating itself and the world. The same process was in evidence in the relocation of Hexagonal theory. A significant redistribution of the conceptual map had been emerging since the 1950s. With the end of Nazism, important segments of the French intelligentsia had been wrestling with the question of communism and Stalinism. Punctuated by events such as the Hungarian revolt and the Prague Spring, this dynamic had reached its high point in the 1950s and then returned with even greater consequences in the 1970s when intellectuals with different trajectories and interests, but who in the past had shared a connection to Marxism- Leninism, made the shift from philo- communism to the invocation of the ideology of human rights. They embraced the concept of totalitarianism, the usage of which they linked to a militant form of activism in favor of freedom and human rights in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.13 The birth of postcolonial studies during the last quarter of the twentieth century thus coincides with the effort, in France, to disavow inherited traditions of internationalism and anticolonialism and to rid the country of Marxism (both official and oppositional).14 The disavowal of anticolonialism is the other side of the right- wing critique of la pense 68. For conservative intellectuals, both events decolonization and May 1968 marked the defeat of thought itself (la 15 dfaite de la pense). According to Alain Finkielkraut, this defeat found its most striking expression in the deconstruction of two markers of Western modernity, reason and the subject. The deconstruction of these markers opened the way to the proclamation, in particular during the 1960s, of the multiple deaths of man, of meaning, and of history itself. This defeat was also a consequence of the refutation of Western ethnocentrism, which had been legitimated by decolonization and Third- Worldism. Man, that singular and universal concept, was now replaced with the different man as the cornerstone of a nonhierarchical cultural diversity, and the human subject was drowned in a sea of incommensurable identities.16
12. Mongo Beti, Main basse sur le Cameroun: Autopsie dune dcolonisation (Paris: Maspro, 1972). 13. Michael Christofferson, Les intellectuels contre la gauche: Lidologie antitotalitaire en France (19731981) (Marseille: Agone, 2008). 14. See Cornelius Castoriadis, Linstitution imaginaire de la socit (Paris: Seuil, 1973), especially chap. 1, Le marxisme: Bilan provisoire. 15. Alain Finkielkraut, La dfaite de la pense (Paris: Gallimard, 1987). 16. Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, Prface cette dition, in La pense 68 (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 15. 90

From 1985 to 1995, a generation of academics trained in French institutions, and consisting mostly of French citizens of color and minorities from former colonial possessions, began to draw their own conclusions about the prevailing intellectual and cultural winter. Struggling with a monochromal world and a clientelist mandarin system that reigned in universities and research centers, they immigrated to the United States, where, be it the linguistic turn, the self- reflexive moment in anthropology, feminist critique, or critical race studies, an effervescent atmosphere had taken over the humanities and social sciences. This inventive energy drew its inspiration from encounters between cultural and academic work in and from diverse worlds: African American, Caribbean anglophone, SinoIndian, and Latin American. It was at this time that new interpretations of French history and French literature emerged in American universities. The processes I have described are crucial to understanding not only the delayed reception of postcolonial studies in France but also the relative hostility it has encountered, and the disjuncture between France and the rest of the world, as the latter began to account for itself, after decolonization, in terms of circulation and discontinuous flows.17 In the early 1990s, France began slowly emerging from its postcolonial languor. As is often the case, movement began at the fringes of society. A first shimmering appeared in the artistic and cultural spheres; for instance, certain aspects of African American pop culture began to influence the black pop culture of the French banlieues (suburbs) and thus affected minority youths, as was apparent in music but also in fashion and self- styling.18 The long supremacy of jazz, reggae, and rhythm and blues (R&B) started to wane as hiphop emerged.19 The integration of various forms of rap led to new musical genres that, in the hands of artists such as MC Solaar, had an undeniably poetico- political tone.20 This new aesthetic sensibility also was abetted, however indirectly, by the ascendancy of athletes of Arab and African origins in French professional soccer
17. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 18. Heike Raphael- Hernndez, ed., Blackening Europe: The African American Presence (New York: Routledge, 2004). 19. On this period, see Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996). For the years following this period, see Dominic Thomas, Black France: Colonialism, Immigration, and Transnationalism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007); and Bennetta Jules- Rosette, Black Paris: The African Writers Landscape (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000). 20. Manuel Boucher, Rap, expression des lascars: Significations et enjeux du rap dans la socit franaise (Paris: LHarmattan, 1998); Andr J. M. Prvos, Two Decades of Rap in France: Emergence, Development, Prospects, in Black, Blanc, Beur: Rap Music and Hip- Hop Culture in the Francophone World, ed. Alain Philippe Durand (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2002), 121. 91

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teams, one of the most popular pastimes in France. A number of these athletes often participated in debates on racism and citizenship.21 The relative symbiosis among black athletes on the French national soccer team, their counterparts on U.S. basketball teams, and American and Caribbean track- and- field athletes represented a potentially strong symbolic rallying point or at least for the youths from the banlieues, who faced contradictory processes of self- identification and the irrepressible desire to participate in a consumer society in which global black culture had become a planetary index.22 A shimmer on the margins could also be seen in the new forms of minority struggles, whether emerging among sans- papiers (illegal immigrants with no official documents), refused the right to have rights, or the sans- parts of French democracy (those who, despite being nominally French, were nevertheless deprived of all the symbolic capital attached to citizenship, starting with the right to visibility). These situations were linked to the fact that, since the mid- 1970s, extreme right think tanks had been disseminating the idea that French national identity could be soiled by immigrants. With agitation by the Front National, this idea had little by little won over the republican Right and even a part of the Left. After the butchery of the two world wars, the French government had organized immigration so as to respond to the pressing need for labor in its industrial sector, but this immigration ceased after the 1974 oil crisis. For the past thirty years, immigration to France has been insignificant, generally limited to reuniting families, asylum requests, students, tourists, or illegal immigration. But there is a paradox: even though immigration is negligible, laws have become progressively stricter, each minister making it his duty to pass one or several anti- immigration laws that are always more extreme than those of his predecessors. This surge of legislative and repressive arrangements prevent entry into the country, of course, but each new law also renders ever more precarious the lives of foreigners who are already established in France. And, worse, over the past twenty years, this accumulation of laws and regulations has produced a considerable number of undocumented people, whom the state then tries to track down in the name of the fight against illegal immigration. For the past few years, as part of this hunt for illegals, the police force has been mobilized for identity
21. Laurent Dubois, Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Lilian Thuram, Mes toiles noires (Paris: Philippe Rey, 2010). 22. This corresponds more or less to the observations of Paul Gilroy in Darker Than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009). See also Andr J. M. Prvos, In It for the Money: Rap and Business Cultures in France, Popular Music and Society 26 (2003): 44561. 92

card checks and requested to rack up arrests. This pressure has given rise to raids and near constant harassment of large portions of the population of African or North African origin, body searches and racial profiling have become commonplace, and deportation camps have been created for undesirables. France now prides itself on its deportation quotas.23 It is this state of affairs that some observers now qualify as state xenophobia.24 While the first wave of mobilization focused on obtaining the right to have rights (starting with the right to reside in France), the second wave (beginning in the late 1990s) is a struggle for visibility and against stereotypes and inferiorizing practices (minoration). This wave takes indirect aim at one of the chief unspoken truths of the French republican ideal the implicit whiteness of being French. Indeed, in the name of equality among individuals, the French constitution proscribes recognition of differences of race, ethnicity, gender, or religion among individuals and groups. The republic wants to be secular and color- blind. The consequences of this radical indifference to difference are such that collecting ethnic statistics is forbidden by law and any form of affirmative action decried.25 The perverse effect of this indifference to difference is thus a relative indifference to discrimination. In this regard, and until the end of the 1990s, the media in general and television in particular constituted the main theater of a dual symbolic violence on the one hand, the violence of indifference and inferiorization and, on the other hand, the production of stereotypes and racist preconceptions. At the time, television programming was certainly not utterly devoid of minorities. However, their appearance on- screen was relegated to musical or sports programs. Blacks, in particular, often only appeared on- screen and in the public eye as actors, singers, or entertainers. When they were present in fictional works, it was almost always in American, not French, movies. The same was true for advertisements and shows about daily life. Soccer players and other athletes were little better- off. They have been assimilated to modern- day tirailleurs, their bodies and physical strength devoted to the flag, but doubts abound about their inner loyalty: maybe they do not sing the Marseillaise as loudly as they should. The representation of Arab men is similar. The Arabs violent nature and his uncontrollable urges are constant traces of historical modes of stigmatiza23. See Cette France- l Vol. 2 (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2009). 24. See especially Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, La rpublique impriale: Politique et racisme dtat colonial (Paris: Fayard, 2009). 25. For more on these discussions, see Alain Renaut, Un humanisme de la diversit: Essai sur la dcolonisation des identits (Paris: Flammarion, 2009). 93

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tion. Islam itself is feared less as a religion than as a culture; when it is feared as a religion, its theology is of a vehement, angry, and irrational God. Through his proclivity to rape, the young Arab male (le garon arabe), whose family originated in North Africa, is a source of insecurity both within and outside his community.26 The repeated controversies over the Islamic headscarf or the burkha are saturated with the kind of orientalist imagery that Said denounced. These controversies offer the opportunity to stage the violence these men are perpetuating on these women excision, forced marriage, polygamy, the law of big brothers, headscarves, and tests of virginity violence that is nothing like our kind of violence. One thus has compassion for their vulnerability. But more than that, we fear that our women will become the next targets of exogenous sexist violence menaced as they are in public spaces by nonwhite and non- Christian aggressors.27 These stereotypes mirror back at minorities the fact that they are from elsewhere (as opposed to here) and establish their irreducible alterity, that very difference that could potentially contaminate French identity from within. The full veil, affirms the feminist Elisabeth Badinter, in a public statement to the French National Assembly, symbolizes the categorical refusal to come into contact with the other or, more precisely, the refusal of reciprocity. The fully veiled woman assumes the right to see me, but refuses my reciprocal right to see her. Apart from the symbolic violence represented by this situation of nonreciprocity, I cannot help but see therein a sort of pathological contradiction. On the one hand, she refuses to show her face under the pretext that it saves her from being the object of an impure gaze between us, what a strange vision of men; to think that any man who looks at a woman can only fantasize of raping her . . . [laughter in the audience]. On the other hand, this is a veritable self- exhibition because everyone focuses on this unidentifiable object. Is it a woman? Is it a man? Is the person ugly or a mysterious beauty? . . . In sum, she has become an object of fantasy. In this possibility of being looked at without ever being seen and to look at others without their knowledge, I see, from my point of view, a triple pleasure over the
26. Nacira Gunif- Souilamas and ric Mac, Les fministes et le garon arabe (Paris: LAube, 2004). 27. On this point, see Elsa Dorlin, Le grand strip- tease: Fminisme, nationalisme et burqa en France, in Ruptures postcoloniales: Les nouveaux visages de la socit franaise, ed. Nicolas Bancel, Florence Bernault, Pascal Blanchard, Ahmed Boubeker, Achille Mbembe, and Franoise Vergs (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2010), 42942. 94

other: the pleasure of nonreciprocity, the pleasure of exhibitionism, and a voyeuristic pleasure. . . . I think these women are very sick, and I am speaking very seriously, and I do not believe that we should define or classify ourselves according to their pathology.28 In counterdistinction to the Franais de souche (those of French stock), minorities authenticity resides in the exoticism of their customs and the tropicality of their places of origin. Their habits and spaces are represented by fruits and scents in many advertisements, be they for tourist destinations or the display of cacao, bananas, coconut trees, vanilla, or sunny beaches. These representations send the nonwhite French back to the geographic, climatic, or cultural causes of their failure to integrate into the nation.29 The repeated use of the qualifier ethnic to name them and their practices is significant. On the one hand, this usage is impossible to understand without the unstated hypothesis that white French are not ethnic.30 On the other hand, it also underlines the impossible nature of assimilation. Indeed, in 1998, black artists and intellectuals came together to denounce this symbolic system and founded the Collectif galit.31 Struggles for visibility and against inferiorization are based in the idea that the French nation is not a fully formed, already existing entity. Rather, it is in large part the sum of the contradictory identifications professed by its members. The latter ensure the concrete existence of the nation through the staging and constant narration, and renarration, of these contradictory forms of identification. Far from constituting an obstacle to the existence of a democratic public sphere, these contradicting forms are resources that deepen and strengthen the relationship between democracy and mutuality. Again, in the early 1990s, parallel movements emerged in French academia. A young generation of historians created, outside established institutional circles, a research group (Achac), which was initially dedicated to the clash of memory

Provincializing France?

28. www.assemblee- nationale.fr/ (accessed March 12, 2010). 29. Frederick Cooper, From Imperial Inclusion to Republican Exclusion? Frances Ambiguous Postwar Trajectory, and Didier Gondola, Transient Citizens: The Othering and Indigenization of Blacks and Beurs within the French Republic, in Frenchness and the African Diaspora: Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France, ed. Charles Tshimanga, Didier Gondola, and Peter J. Bloom (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 91119, 14666. 30. On all of the preceding, see ric Macs synthesis, Postcolonialit et francit dans les imaginaires tlvisuels de la Nation, in Bancel et al., Ruptures postcoloniales, 391402. 31. See Isabelle Rigoni, ed., Qui a peur de la tlvision en couleurs? La diversit culturelle dans les mdias (Montreuil, France: Aux Lieux dtre, 2007); and Wayne Brekhus Wayne, Une sociologie de linvisibilit: Rorienter notre regard, Rseaux, nos. 12930 (2005): 24372. 95

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and history and to the durability and transformation of colonial views in French popular culture. The group began by focusing on the study of images and representations, seeking to highlight the central role of colonialism in the evolution of French modernity. This perspective led them inevitably to examine the constitutive role played by colonial ideologies in the elaboration of republican identity. Subsequently, on the basis of their acquired understandings of the relationships between republicanism and empire, these scholars inquired into the hybrid forms that issued from the French imperial presence in the world by exploring what they termed the colonial rift (la fracture coloniale). Their approach took its distance from the well- established tradition of French colonial historiography on at least two levels. First, by linking colonial history and metropolitan history, they tended to blur the neat separation between the study of here and the study of there. Second, this work helped reproblematize the French national imaginary.32 But we had to wait for the beginning of the millennium for the elaboration, in the face of indifference and reluctance, of well- founded critiques of postcolonialism in and of itself.33 Since then, myriad events have increased postcolonial studies visibility in the French public sphere. At last, several years after the translation of Saids Orientalism, a few seminal texts of the postcolonial corpus have been translated.34 Many young scholars are producing innovative work that is presented in numerous conferences, seminars, and journals.
Anti- Postcolonialism, Parisianism, and Anachronism

As I noted above, many factors have contributed to the late arrival of postcolonial studies in the French discursive field and to the controversies it has engendered;
32. Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, and Franois Vergs, La rpublique coloniale: Essai sur une utopie (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003); Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire, eds., La fracture coloniale: La socit franaise au prisme de lhritage colonial (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2005). 33. Jean- Marc Moura, Littratures francophones et thorie postcoloniale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999); Jacqueline Bardolph, tudes postcoloniales et littrature (Paris: Champion, 2002); Michel Beniamino and Lise Gauvin, eds., Vocabulaire des tudes francophones: Les concepts de base (Limoges, France: Presses Universitaires de Limoges, 2005). Achille Mbembe, De la postcolonie: Essai sur limagination politique dans lAfrique contemporaine (Paris: Karthala, 2000); see also the preface to the second edition (2005) and the remarks in the preface, ivi. Elsa Dorlin, La matrice de la race: Gnalogie sexuelle et coloniale de la nation franaise (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2006); Franoise Vergs, Mmoires de la traite ngrire: De lesclavage et de leurs abolitions (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005). 34. Homi Bhabha, Les lieux de la culture: Une thorie postcoloniale (Paris: Payot, 2008); Neil Lazarus, ed., Penser le postcolonial: Une introduction critique (Paris: Amsterdam, 2006). 96

none are contingent. Recently, the controversy has extended beyond the strictly literary and theoretical fields in the social sciences and the broader public. In the course of this displacement, it has degenerated into byzantine quarrels. These disputes have been instigated by a group of detractors whose primary goal is to disqualify (without reserve) postcolonial criticism while denigrating authors whose works they have not made the effort to read properly, much less understand.35 The quarrel did not begin or develop in an ideological void, and its stakes are not simply, or even primarily, epistemological.36 And when intellectual stakes do exist, as Jean- Franois Bayart claims in a hastily written essay, they can hardly be dissociated, as he seems to suggest, from political, ethical, and philosophical concerns.37 For colonization was not only a specific form of rationality or a set of dispositifs (devices) and technologies. It was not simply an ideology and a practice of world conquest aimed at subjugating those races deemed inferior. Colonization also conceived of itself as a structure of knowledge, wonder, and belief. This is why it could claim a double authority of jurisdiction and vridiction (truthfulness). To be credible, the critique of colonial situations must therefore seek to reconcile what Paul Ricoeur called epistemological concerns (a part of the historiographical operation) and ethico- cultural concerns (a part of historical judgment).38 This is what he understood by hermeneutic critique (critique hermneutique). Opponents of postcolonial studies in France claim that postcolonial studies has contributed nothing to our understanding of imperialism and colonialism, that it is of little use and even harmful, and that the task at hand is to lay it to rest. Carried forth, in large part, by Parisian circles, hostility toward postcolonialism is not only late in coming and out of touch. As Marie- Claude Smouts writes, The ways of disqualifying postcolonial studies are most ordinary. The most widespread, the one that all new schools of thought that are even slightly disturbing encounter, . . . consists in confusing the complex theoretical approach with the specific interpretations of certain individuals, thus focusing, in a corpus of multiple enunciations, on those that are the least solid, retaining several extreme formulas preferably by isolating them from their context and, on these bases, disqualifying the whole
35. A case in point is the pamphlet by Jean- Loup Amselle, LOccident dcroch: Enqute sur les postcolonialismes (Paris: Stock, 2008). 36. See Catherine Coquery- Vidrovitch, Enjeux politiques de lhistoire coloniale (Marseille: Agone, 2008). 37. Jean- Franois Bayart, Postcolonial Studies: A Political Invention of Tradition? in this issue. 38. Paul Ricoeur, Histoire et vrit (Paris: Seuil, 1955), 11. 97

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thing. This works best when there is a ready- made straw man (as in the very practical figure of the postcolonial anti- Semite).39 Or the postcolonial heirs of Sartre, who, according to Bayart, are not particularly anxious to decide whether or not to act as clandestine agents for Hamas or al- Qaeda.40 It is worth noting that very few Parisian opponents of postcolonialism are proficient in English, and very few works in postcolonial studies have been translated into French. The most virulent reactions come from pamphleteers, who refuse to question the myth of a benevolent colonialism, a myth spread in particular by ideologues of the British imperial expansion.41 Because of this linguistic infirmity, to which one should add a highly pontifical conception of the social sciences and their supposed neutrality, a significant part of their diatribe is formulated from a position of sublime ignorance.42 Their critique, which is too closely linked to problems of taxonomy, brings no new contribution to the numerous debates that have marked the history of postcolonial theory from its inception. Often it merely regurgitates observations already made within the very field of postcolonial studies.43 These are then presented as innovative observations to a reading public ignorant of the complex histories of postcolonial critical traditions. Such is the case for the claim that postcolonial studies supposedly reifies and renders colonization ahistorical, a point made by Anne McClintock back in the early 1990s, when she noted the risks inherent in a monolithic and singular term being used in an ahistorical fashion and haunted by a nineteenth- century episteme of linear progress.44 Yet a cursory examination of the field nowadays shows that there are countless literary and historical studies published every year in journals like the Journal of Postcolonial Studies or Interventions, which demonstrate and reiterate, via examples from the former metropoles and colonial worlds, that imperialism developed as a contradictory and ambiguous project, determined not only by tensions in the heart of the metropole and conflicts internal to colonial administrations but also by the different cultures and contexts into which the colonizers settled. French opponents of postcolonial studies also argue for a relocation of the
39. Marie- Claude Smouts, Les tudes postcoloniales en France: mergence et rsistances, in Bancel et al., Ruptures postcoloniales, 122126. 40. Bayart, Postcolonial Studies, 60. 41. Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2003). 42. This is the case, for example, of Amselle, LOccident dcroch. 43. See Young, Postcolonialism. 44. Anne McClintock, The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term Post-colonialism, Social Text 31/32 (1992): 8498. 98

history of colonization within the broader history of imperialism. Yet they remain silent about the historical fact of anti- imperialism, a cornerstone of postcolonial 45 criticism. Arguing that in various regions of the world colonization was brief, they attempt to minimize its impact, its violence and historical reach, which they describe as superficial without stating exactly what criteria they use to arrive at such a conclusion. In both cases, the objective is to deny the fundamental role colonization played in the history of colonized societies, to show that colonial empires are nothing new, that colonization was nothing but a specific example of a transhistorical and universal phenomenon: imperialism.46 Then, as if this disciplinary category were integrally coherent, they propose to privilege historical sociological methods in accounting for the fact of colonization and its significance, which they reduce to a passage in form from empire to nation- state. Under the guise of this new method, the comparative history of colonialism becomes a simple inventory of the practices of imperial governance.47 For this purpose, they mobilize totemic figures such as Max Weber and Foucault and endeavor to revive the old polemic between explanation/interpretation/understanding that others like Ricoeur or Michel de Certeau tried so hard to settle at a time when the social sciences nurtured an inferiority complex vis- - vis quan48 titative and positivist models so popular in the natural sciences. The historical qualifier attached to this sociology has very little to do with the lessons of French theory during the second half of the twentieth century. As Paul Veyne reminds us, there is no privileged mode of explanation in history.49 Furthermore, to argue that historical sociology somehow engages in pure science while postcolonial studies is concerned only with ideology is disingenuous. To varying degrees, the two genres deal with representations, incessantly pass moral judgments, manipulate causal series that are by definition contingent, and, when
45. Barbara Bush, Imperialism and Postcolonialism (London: Longman, 2006); Patrick Wolfe, History and Imperialism: A Century of Theory, from Marx to Postcolonialism, American Historical Review 102 (1997): 388420. See also, in the historical- literary field, Elleke Boehmer, Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 18901930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 46. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Nouvelles colonies et vieux empires, Mil neuf cent: Revue dhistoire intellectuelle, no. 27 (2009): 1335; and Jean- Franois Bayart, Les tudes postcoloniales: Un carnaval acadmique (Paris: Karthala, 2010). 47. Pierre Grosser, Comment crire lhistoire des relations internationales aujourdhui? Quelques rflexions partir de lEmpire britannique, Histoire@politique: Politique, culture, socit, no. 10 (2010), www.histoire- politique.fr/documents/10/pistes/pdf/HP10_Grosser_pdf_280110.pdf (accessed January 11, 2011). 48. Michel de Certeau, Lcriture de lhistoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975); Paul Ricoeur, Lintrigue et le rcit historique, vol. 1 of Temps et rcit, especially chap. 2. 49. Paul Veyne, Comment on crit lhistoire: Essai dpistmologie (Paris: Seuil, 1971). 99

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all is said and done, are the inheritors of the same tradition of the critical philosophy of history. Finally, French opponents of postcolonial studies argue that postcolonial studies deals only with discourses and texts rather than with real practices, as if peoples discourses had nothing to do with their realities and as if the examination of the imaginary dimensions of colonial domination, or of psychic or iconographic acts, were somehow unimportant in the reconstitution of peoples practices. Discourses and representations, in addition to being symbolic components in the formation of colonial relations, themselves constitute relatively autonomous practices.50 Finally, typical of French anti- postcolonialism is its blindness when faced with the task of accounting for the role that race has historically played in the definition of French identity. French models of racial thought have varied since the eighteenth century, when significant nonwhite populations first found themselves living under the authority of France. Despite these variations, these models have shared three postulates, especially since the Enlightenment. The first is that all races belong to humanity. The second affirms that not all races are equal even if, far from being immutable, human differences may be overcome. The third presupposes an inextricable bind between French culture and the French nation. Neither the revolution nor liberal republicanism has completely transcended the foundational tension among race, culture, and nation at the core of the French national imaginary. The revolution may have asserted the primacy of equality and the common belonging to the republican polis above and beyond all other forms of social difference and status. At the same time, revolutionary France never ceased to make racial difference a factor in the definition of citizenship and in the distribution of the rights of men.51 The tension between a universalism that ignores color and a liberal republicanism fond of the most vulgar racial stereotypes took root in science and gained impetus in French popular culture at the very moment of colonial expansion. It was exacerbated in a context in which the function of colonial imperialism was to revivify the nation and the French character, on the one hand and, on the other, to disseminate the benefits of our
50. Il faut dmystifier linstance globale du rel comme totalit restituer, wrote Foucault. Il ny a pas le rel quon rejoindrait condition de parler de tout ou de certaines choses plus relles que les autres, et quon manquerait, au profit dabstractions inconsistantes, si on se borne faire apparaitre dautres lments et dautres relations. Michel Foucault, Dits et crits, vol. 4, 19801988 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 15. 51. Laurent Dubois, Les esclaves de la rpublique: Lhistoire oublie de la premire mancipation, 17891794 (Paris: Calmann- Lvy, 1998). 100

civilization a dissemination that could only be justified by the institution of a distinction between France and its others.52 During the course of the nineteenth century, models of popular racism in France were also associated with large- scale social transformations. Industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of the bourgeois family lent urgency to the question of difference in general and to that of different qualities of race in particular. As an echo of the disdain aristocrats felt for the sansculottes of the revolutionary era came the scorn of bourgeois democracy toward the burgeoning class of workers. At its origins, the social question was thus already a racial question. Race was both the result and the reaffirmation of the general idea of the implacability of social differences. All those who found themselves outside the racial, social, and cultural characteristics of the nation were, in effect, situated outside the nation itself. This was also the case in the colonies, where citizenship was inseparable from the racial idea of whiteness. One may allude to the experiences of citizenship of males and nonwhites in Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyana, Runion, and the Four Communes of Senegal. But the numbers were small, a few thousand in a vast dominion populated by millions of subjects. From its inception, the empire was always an empire of subjects rather than of citizens. Assimilation had already proven to be a failure well before the advent of decolonization. Decolonization would ratify this failure, legally sanctioning the notion according to which not all white subjects of empire could not become French. Between French citizenship and identity, one always found the barrier of race. Moreover, there has always been, over a much longer history, a direct relationship between a certain form of French nationalism and a theory of racial difference that is masked by the universalistic and republican paradigm.53 Indeed, it might well be that French universalism is itself the product of racial theory.54 If French anti- postcolonialism is anachronistic from epistemological and historical standpoints, it is nonetheless highly indicative of a cultural and political one. At bottom, the quarrel over postcolonial studies as is the case for disputes about the regulation of Islam, the Islamic veil, and the burkha, recent
52. See in particular Alexis de Tocqueville, crits et discours politiques, vol. 3 of Oeuvres compltes (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). 53. Zeev Sternhell, Maurice Barrs et le nationalisme franais (Paris: Fayard, 2000); David Prochaska, Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bne, 18701920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 54. Tyler Stovall, Universalisme, diffrence et invisibilit: Essai sur la notion de race dans lhistoire de la France contemporaine, Cahiers dhistoire: Revue dhistoire critique, nos. 9697 (2005): 6390. 101

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state- commissioned debates on national identity, and the commemorations and innumerable projects for monuments, museums, and war memorials is first and foremost symptomatic of a profound chasm (chiasme) in the present and of Frances unease with globalization. This chasm, or what Ann Laura Stoler calls aphasia, is the direct consequence of the French dis- ease of colonization, quite similar to what used to be known as an ailment of the spirit.55 This ailment arises principally from the confrontation between two antagonistic desires: the desire, on the one hand, for apartheid and the phantasm of a polis without strangers supported by a neorevisionist movement and a desire, on the other hand, for symbolic recognition and the expansion of citizenship defended, in particular, by the minorities and their supporters. One thing unites these otherwise fragmented minorities what they perceive subjectively as an objective condition of symbolic dispossession. This sense of dispossession is exacerbated in France today by the apparent refashioning and reproduction of practices, schemas of thought, and representations inherited from a racist colonial past.
Proximity without Reciprocity

The desire for apartheid brings together neorevisionist currents and heteroclite networks whose common denominator is their quasi- visceral refusal of any nonWestern visions, of the West itself, and of other worlds. This configuration assem bles ideologues from diverse horizons. We find, higgledy- piggledy, those who see the loss of the Empire and especially French Algeria as a catastrophe; dogmatic Marxists for whom class warfare is the last word on history; self- proclaimed defenders of Western values, of secularism, of the republican model, or of French Catholic identity; members of the Acadmie Franaise; both left-and right- wing devotees of anti- A mericanism; anti- postmodern crusaders and adversaries of what is disdainfully called la pense 68; and those for whom Auschwitz must remain the standard for Western collective memory and the founding metaphor for a unified Europe. In what follows, I examine the four themes that anchor this otherwise heterogeneous constellation: the temporality of the world, the politics of radical Islam, the relationship between democracy and difference (race), and the politics of colonial memory. I argue that these diffrends feed and exacerbate the desire for borders and for separation that has become a cultural feature of Frances contemporary moment. Moreover, they have negatively influenced the reception of postcolonial studies in France.
55. Ann Laura Stoler, Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France, in this issue. 102

The first diffrend concerns the characterization of the contemporary moment. Neorevisionist currents have it that our era is marked by a qualitative transformation of violence in the world and a new distribution of hatred on the planet. This situation is thought to be akin to a global civil war and allegedly has a direct effect on the kinds of security risks that now threaten France and other Western countries. These risks entail the very survival of Western civilization. They are apprehended and interpreted through the lens of a new definition of the foreigner as a social type, associated sometimes with the immigrant (the ideal figure of the intruder and the undesirable) and sometimes with the enemy. The polemic status this figure of the foreigner now firmly occupies in the French imaginary goes hand in hand with a renewed desire for borders as well as a reactivation of apartheid techniques of separation and selection. The foreigner is not only the citizen of another state. More significantly, he or she is different from us; his or her danger is real, for a genuine cultural distance separates us from him or her; in all these ways, the foreigner constitutes a mortal threat to our way of life. Furthermore, neorevisionist currents hold that, as a response to the security aspects of this existential anguish, the rule of law (ltat de droit), in its classical sense, must be amended. They call for the blurring of once differentiated functions of the police (responsible for foreigners on national territory) and the army (responsible for enemies). New policies must be implemented to defend the territory from illegal immigration and, recently, Islamic terrorism. Thus we now have, at the very heart of the republican and democratic order, a specific form of governmentality, which one might call a regime of confinement (rgime de la claustration). This regime is characterized in part by an impressive expansion and miniaturization of judicial, police, and penitentiary systems most notably those dealing with the administration of foreigners. To manage undesirable populations, the state has implemented legal, regulatory, and surveillance systems to facilitate practices of detention, custody, incarceration, confinement in camps, or deportation. These arrangements have given rise to the institutionalization of a radical divide between citizens whose protection and security are ensured by the state and the mass of people who are literally harassed, prey to precariousness, and deprived of any substantive rights.56 An array of diverse measures, legislation, and both formal and less formal agreements between France and third- party states has served to perfect this assemblage. The culmination of this process was the creation of the Ministry of Immigration and National Identity. Taken as a
56. See LEurope des camps: La mise lcart des trangers, special issue, Culture et conflits, no. 57 (2005). 103

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whole, this complex assemblage targets certain categories of people and social groups, defined in terms of their ethnic, religious, racial, and national affiliations. Its aim is to limit, restrain, or simply halt their liberty of movement.57 Of course, the stakes of any policy for controlling identity and borders are the control of the very frontiers of politics, and it is this latter point that has become the object, in France, of fragmentation along biological- racial lines. The second diffrend concerns radical Islam, a phantasmatic object par excellence and the final frontier with regard to French fears and anxieties. A number of social practices defined as Islamic are being challenged in the name of secularism. Three basic principles in effect are assumed to constitute the basis of secularism and republicanism la franaise: (1) the ideal of equality, which requires that the same laws apply to all; (2) the ideal of liberty and autonomy, which presupposes that no one should be subjected, against his or her will, to the will of another; and (3) the ideal of fraternity, which imposes the duty of assimilation on everyone a condition necessary for the constitution of a community of citizens. Neorevisionist currents define radical Islam as the dark inversion of Enlightenment ideals and as the inverted figure of modernity. Radical Islam allegedly seeks the application, in France, of a foreign law a sign from its adherents of a refusal to integrate and assimilate. This foreign law contradicts the principles of liberty, gender equality, and fraternity on which the republic is founded since it sanctions the inhumane treatment of women. Muslim women in particular carry a double burden. They must submit to the will of their husband (or to their brothers), and they must submit to a nonegalitarian religion. The republic is morally obligated to free them from this double oppression. Eventually, the law should force them to be free, and republican paternalism should help them achieve emancipation, if need be, by coercing them into freedom. Behind the various controversies surrounding the hijab or the burkha, or the fate of Muslim women, two processes are entangled. The first concerns the institution of a state feminism exploiting the question of Muslim women to lead a racist campaign against an Islamic culture presented as fundamentally sexist.58 On the left and the right, republican feminism is transformed into an incubator of Islamophobia, fueling racist representations and practices but also rendering them

57. Michel Agier, Rmy Bazenguissa- Ganga, and Achille Mbembe, Mobilits africaines, racisme franais, Vacarmes 43 (2008): 18. 58. Elsa Dorlin, Pas en notre nom! Contre la rcupration raciste du fminisme par la droite franaise, in Lautre campagne: 80 propositions dbattre durgence, comp. Georges Debrgeas and Thomas Lacoste (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2007), www.lautrecampagne.org/article.php?id=132. 104

acceptable since they are expressed through euphemisms.59 The second consists of a paradoxical injunction of liberty that goes hand in hand with the culturalization of republican values. In line with the civilizing mission of colonialism, the project is to emancipate, in all good conscience, individuals for their own good, and against their will if necessary, with a law that operates as a means of stigmatization and ostracism.60 From the perspective of neorevisionist movements, republican ideals are embodied in a culture and in a language; they are realized as much in the laws of the republic as they are in an allegiance to French culture. It matters little if confusion is created between the values of the republic and the cultural prejudices of French society. As Ccile Laborde has convincingly shown, French republicanism assumes that the demands made by minorities for reasonable accommodation in the public sphere do not constitute demands for justice.61 In regard to the third diffrend, neorevisionist discourse engages in the reenchantment of national mythology at the very moment in which France is confronted with the predicament of its apparent decline and diminished status on the international chessboard. The theme of decline is neither new nor exclusive to this movement. It reappears at regular intervals in French history, generally coinciding with periods of crises. One immediate effect of this discourse on loss and melancholy is to exacerbate identity politics, reawaken nostalgia for grandeur, and displace not only the sites of conflict but also the political content and forms of social antagonism.62 Such was the case over the last quarter of the twentieth century, when many (and not only the extreme Right) lamented the demise of the great national narrative. This demise was not caused merely by transformations in the French economy and the crisis of the republican model of integration; it is also deemed to be a direct consequence of deconstructionist theory, as embodied by the events of May 1968. Stable identity and the certitudes underpinning the

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59. See Pierre Tvanian, La rpublique du mpris: Les mtamorphoses du racisme dans la France des annes Sarkozy (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2007); Sad Bouamama, Laffaire du voile ou la production dun racisme respectable (Roubaix, France: Geais Bleu, 2004). 60. Sylvie Tissot, Bilan dun fminisme dtat, Collectif Les mots sont importants, February 2008, lmsi.net/Bilan- d- un- feminisme- d- Etat. See also Eric Fassin, La dmocratie sexuelle et le conflit des civilizations, Multitudes, no. 26 (2006), multitudes.samizdat.net/La- Democratiesexuelle- et- le. 61. Ccile Laborde, Critical Republicanism: The Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Laborde, Virginit et burqa: Des accommodements draisonnables? Autour des rapports Stasi et Bouchard- Taylor, La vie des ides, September 16, 2008, www.laviedesidees.fr/Virginite- et- burqa- des.html. 62. Didier Fassin and Eric Fassin, eds., De la question sociale la question raciale? Reprsenter la socit franaise (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2006). 105

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national narrative were allegedly carried away by the coursing waters of relativism and pronouncements about the death of the subject. One wondered: under such conditions, how can one revive the national ideal if not by reinventing the past and thus reappropriating its rich symbolic deposits? This explains recent efforts to rehabilitate a cultural, sacrificial, and almost theologico- political conception of the history of France. Inspired by schoolbooks of the turn of the century, this view of history is consumed with past glories. It situates France characteristically in a francocentric relationship to Europe and to the world and sees the discipline of history as the task of teaching civics and morality. History is not only edifying; it must also reflect the essence of the nation, which has been forged through a chronology of events. Thus, for instance, both the homogeneity of the French and Frances unity supposedly have been accomplished at three distinct dates: the battle of Poitiers in 732, which stopped the Arab invasion; the capture of Jerusalem in 1099, which bore witness to Christian Europe; and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which confirmed Frances status as the eldest daughter of the Church, demonstrating, symbolically, that France is exclusively Catholic and that its identity is forged on the exclusion of Arabs, Jews, and Protestants.63 French history is a glorious history, the account of an array of daring deeds, a succession of great men, and the events of genius. It is likewise the history of exalted patriotism. Finally, it is a form of historical accounting that gives central place to the well- worn rhetoric of the civilizing mission. In this perspective, France is depicted as a nation whose providential destiny is to bring enlightenment to the colonies and to spread it throughout the world. Interestingly, colonization as such is not being obscured; rather, it is acknowledged as an ideological matrix for civic education, as was the case during imperial expansion, when one could hardly conjure the republic without its colonies. For the most zealous, this shift in perspective has entailed attributing heroic dimensions to colonial crimes and to torture, offenses for which no repentance is necessary.64 It is explained that, in the
63. Herv Lemoine, La maison de lhistoire de France: Pour la cration dun centre de recherche et de collections permanentes ddi lhistoire civile et militaire de la France, report to the Minister of Defense and the Minister of Culture and Communication, April 2008, www.culture .gouv.fr/culture/actualites/rapports/rapporthlemoine.pdf. See also Jean- P ierre Azma, Guy Moquet, Sarkozy et le roman national, Lhistoire, no. 323 (2007): 611; Suzanne Citron, Le mythe national: Lhistoire de France revisite (Paris: LAtelier, 2008); and Sylvie Aprile, Lhistoire par Nicolas Sarkozy: Le reve passiste dun futur national- libral, Comit de vigilance face aux usages publics de lhistoire, April 30, 2007, cvuh.free.fr/spip.php?article82. 64. Alain Griotteray, Je ne demande pas pardon: La France nest pas coupable (Paris: Rocher, 2001); Daniel Lefeuvre, Pour en finir avec la repentance coloniale (Paris: Flammarion, 2006); Paul- 106

spirit of the times, these activities were, more than anything, markers of French civilization a civilization capable of asserting itself through both weapons and 65 the mind. For others, even though crimes and injustices may have been perpetrated, in the end, colonization had globally positive effects.66 As such, France is well within its rights to demand gratitude and recognition from those it once colonized. President Nicolas Sarkozy himself included more than the lineaments of this sacrificial and sanctified conception of history in a series of speeches he gave both during his presidential campaign and after his victory. With regard to the colonial question, we find the same refusal to repent and the same urgency for self- absolution, the urgency to be judged innocent. These speeches at Toulon on February 7, 2007, and later in Dakar in July 2007, at which time he literally declared that African man had not entered into history serve to officialize a cultural project undertaken over several years in diverse neorevisionist networks. Says Sarkozy: The European dream needs the Mediterranean dream . . . ; the dream that once sent knights from all of Europe down the roads of the Orient; a dream that drew to the South so many emperors of the saint Empire, so many kings of France; a dream shared by Bonaparte in Egypt, Napoleon III in Algeria, Lyautey in Morocco. This dream was not so much a dream of conquest as a dream of civilization. . . . The wellspring has never run dry. We just need to unite our forces and it will all begin anew. . . . The West has been long steeped in the sin of arrogance and ignorance. Many crimes and injustices were committed. But most of those who headed south were neither monsters nor exploiters. Many put their energies toward building roads, bridges, schools, and hospitals. Many wore themselves out cultivating a bit of thankless land that none had farmed before. Many went only to heal or teach. We must stop blackening the past. . . . We can disapprove of colonization from the point of view of our modern values. But we must respect the men and women of goodwill who honestly believed their work was useful for an ideal civilization in which they believed. . . .

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Franois Paoli, Nous ne sommes pas coupables: Assez de repentances! (Paris: Table Ronde, 2006); Max Gallo, Fier dtre Franais (Paris: Fayard, 2006); Pascal Bruckner, La tyrannie de la pnitence: Essai sur le masochisme occidental (Paris: Grasset, 2006). 65. Paul Aussaresses, Services spciaux: Algrie, 19551957; Mon tmoignage sur la torture (Paris: Perrin, 2000). 66. Marc Michel, Essai sur la colonisation positive: Affrontements et accommodements en Afrique noire, 18301930 (Paris: Perrin, 2009). 107

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I would like to say to all the adepts of repentance, who rewrite history and judge yesterdays men without acknowledging the conditions in which they lived and the challenges they faced, I would like to ask them: by what right do you judge them? I want to say to them: by what right do you ask sons to repent for the faults of their fathers, for sins that were committed often only in your imagination? 67 The fourth diffrend concerns race and racism. Purposefully forgetting the historical experiences of slavery and colonization, the neorevisionist networks claim that racism was never a fully integrated trope of French society and that, contrary to the United States, racial segregation in France has never been legal or institutionalized. In France, racism has always been subject to a symbolic prohibition and supposedly only ever been marginal. Accordingly, discrimination, when it happens, is negligible and, as some portend, would disappear if economic inequalities were greatly reduced. Others maintain that this marginal discrimination would be diminished if France could select its immigrants. Furthermore, the countrys fundamental social problems are rooted in antiwhite racism. When racism against nonwhites is acknowledged, it is treated as a mere cultural difference. Under such conditions, advocacy for affirmative action is stigmatized, for affirmative action would put the republic at risk of ethnicizing its social ties. Therefore, Finkielkraut, in his commentary on the riots that engulfed many French banlieues in November 2005, noted what he saw to be a demonstration of the hatred that blacks and Arabs harbor against France. For him, these riots constitute a snapshot of the war that a part of the Arab- Muslim world has declared against the West, the main target of which is the French Republic. According to Finkielkraut, blacks who hate France as a Republic have the audacity to claim that slavery has the same exceptional status, the same weight of destiny and sacredness, and the same paradigmatic power as the Shoah. But, he explained, if we put the Shoah and slavery on the same level, then we are forced to lie because [slavery] is not the Shoah. And it was not a crime against humanity because it was not only a crime. It was something ambivalent. . . . It started long before the rise of the West. In fact, the specificity of the West with regard to slavery is precisely everything involving its abolition. . . . Moreover, the republic worked only for the good of Africans. Did not colonization aim to educate and, in so doing, bring civilization to the savages? 68
67. Le Monde, November 24, 2005. Trans. Janet Roitman. 68. Le Monde, November 24, 2005. Trans. Janet Roitman. 108

Therefore, the riots were not a response to racism but proof of supreme ingratitude. For all that, French racism is a myth concocted by those who hate France. Of course, there are the occasional French racists . . . who dont like Arabs and Blacks. But how do you expect them to like people who dont like them? Indeed, after the riots, they [the French] will like them [Arabs and blacks] even less now that they realize how much they are hated by them. Moreover, Blacks and Arabs do not consider themselves French. Do you have any idea of how they speak French? Its French whose throat has been cut the accent, the words, and the grammar. Their identity is elsewhere. These people are in France for personal gain; they treat the French state like one big insurance company. The republic undertakes enormous sacrifices and receives in return only hatred and jeers. Herein lies their radical difference, the demonstration that they have never been, and never will be, a part of us. They are not integratable, and their presence among us, over time, could endanger our very existence. According to Finkielkraut, the real problem is antiracism, which, he presages, will be to the twenty-first century what communism was to the twentieth century. The primary function of this ideology is to produce from nothing a form of involuntary guilt exacted by political correctness.69 Worse, antiracism is the new name for anti- Semitism.70
Colonialism and Ailments of Memory

Provincializing France?

One of the defining features of the French state is how it defines the nation as a soul and a spiritual principle. The constitutive elements of this soul and spirit are the shared possession of a rich legacy of memories (the past), on the one hand, and the desire to live together and work to bring this heritage to light in the present. French republican conscience, on the other hand, exhibits an extraordinary exceptionality by claiming to marry French singularity with the universal tout court. Made of sacrifice and devotion, the national past is conceived as heroic, glorious, and Promethean a past of exertion, sacrifice, and faithfulness. To valorize a common heritage and shared memories, the French state historically instituted a form of ancestor worship (le culte des grands hommes) echoed in a cult of sacri69. Alain Finkielkraut, What Sort of Frenchmen Are They? interview by Dror Mishani and Aurelia Smotriez, Haaretz, November 18, 2005; and Le Monde, November 24, 2005. 70. Alain Finkielkraut, Au nom de lautre: Rflexions sur lantismitisme qui vient (Paris: Gallimard, 2003). For similar theses, read Pierre- A ndr Taguieff, La judophobie des moderns: Des lumires au jihad mondial (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2008); and Taguieff, La nouvelle judophobie (Paris: Mille et Une Nuits, 2002). 109

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fice. Because the nation was originally perceived as a moral conscience, it could legitimately claim, as Ernest Renan insisted, the abdication of the individual for the sake of the community.71 In the aftermath of the revolution, the cult of ancestors and their feats and the cult of sacrifice yielded a political and symbolic capital that became all the more crucial to the construction of the national idea that, a mere generation after the regicide, France was confronted with a crisis of representation and an apparent loss of sacrality.72 Love of the fatherland and pride in being French became embodied in public and ritual acts of civic piety: military parades; museums; memorials; commemorations; monuments to the dead; statues; names of boulevards, streets, avenues, bridges, and important places; and, ultimately, the Pantheon. If policies dealing with national memory have always been a prerogative of the state, these policies have also been at the origin of intense passions. Pierre Nora observes that the invention of a republican memory was at once authoritarian, exclusionary, and intensely oriented toward the past. Republican memory the French form of civil religion achieved coherence only insofar as it relied on both real and imagined enemies in order to define itself.73 The new regime that came out of the revolution was contested as much by the Right as by the Left. It had to face the dangers posed by clerics, a fragmented army, and the alliance formed by the banking and industrial bourgeoisie and the peasant class. That the politics of memory has historically proven to be a factor of national division can be explained by the capacity of memory to awaken the wounds of a troubled past. In turn, this accounts for the close relationship among death (in particular violent, political death), debt, and forgetting that has existed in French political culture since the revolution.74 During the revolution, numerous funerary mechanisms were launched, whose effects stretched all the way to the Restoration. The polity witnessed an inflation of honors accorded to human remains, the frantic marking of burial sites, along with innumerable exhumations and reburials. At the same time, public grieving provided an opportunity to show off political power, and memory itself was used as an instrument of punitive justice. Thus in the politics of the state, national memory has always tended to function as a space of expiation, a midway point between the logic of incrimination and the desire for reparation.
71. Ernest Renan, a lecture delivered at the Sorbonne, March 11, 1882. Quest-ce quune nation?, uvres Compltes, vol. 1, ed. Henriette Psichari (Paris: Calmann-Lvy, 1947), 907. 72. Anne- Emmanuelle Demartini and Dominique Kalifa, eds., Imaginaire et sensibilits au XIXe sicle: tudes pour Alain Corbin (Paris: Craphis, 2005). 73. Pierre Nora, ed., Introduction, Les lieux de mmoire, Vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, Quarto, 1997), 560. 74. Paul Ricoeur, La mmoire, lhistoire, loubli (Paris: Seuil, 2000), especially 45980. 110

In the presence of the tomb, we find what Franois- Ren Chateaubriand once described as a field of blood.75 It is this spilled blood that monuments and ceremonies are called on to cleanse, and this is the reason they are assigned the task of bearing witness to the effort of achieving reconciliation with loss. In keeping with this cultural and deeply sacrificial conception of the nation, in 1873 a law stipulating the manner in which those who died in combat for the nation should be commemorated was passed. This law provides for a detailed account of the status of parcels of land and the type of ossuary tombs to be created. For more than a century, the official policy on memorialization commemorated, above all, those who died for France, a civic community originating and reproducing itself symbolically through funeral celebrations, defining itself, therefore, as a community of loss, but loss that is never forgotten. A funerary revolution had already occurred at the turn of the nineteenth century. Political passions were expressed by building new necropolises. Funeral processions crisscrossed the cities. Eulogies were performed over tombs and a new cult for profane relics was emerging. Under certain conditions, worship of the dead was believed to produce consensus and legitimacy. But it could as well provide an opportunity for the expression of dissent, since the blood of the vanquished could easily be summoned as an instrument of vengeance.76 From 1830 onward, this particular form of sacrificial republicanism dominated, and, to a certain degree, it is this paradigm that is being brought back to the French contemporary scene. During the 1980s, however, a shift occurred: from a politics of memory founded on the celebration of the death of those who died for France (morts pour la France) arose another economy of commemorations centered on those who died by France (morts causs par la France). For a very long time, France had never wanted to acknowledge its part in the genocide of Jews. This catastrophe was imputed to the Vichy regime, which was to bear the infamy, alone. This attitude changed progressively, and the first of those who died by France to be acknowledged were those who died in deportation. The 1990 Gayssot Law definitively sanctified their status as victims and defined the role of the state in the elaboration of a memory of the Shoah (mmoire de la Shoah). In 1993 a decree established a national day commemorating victims of racist and anti- Semitic persecutions committed under the authority of a de facto government denominated as the government of the French state. It was followed in 1994 by
75. Franois-Ren Chateaubriand, Itineraire de Paris Jrusalem, uvres Compltes, vol. 7 (Paris: P.-H. Krabbe, 1852), 247. 76. Emmanuel Fureix, La France des larmes: Deuils politiques lage romantique, 18141840 (Paris: Champ Vallon, 2009). 111

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the inauguration of the VeldHiv Memorial, dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Shoah. The last step in this process took place in 1995, when Jacques Chirac admitted Frances responsibilities in the genocide of the Jews. In 2004 the Milles national memorial (in Aix- en- P rovence) was inaugurated, and in 2006 the Shoah Memorial (for the seventy- six thousand deported Jews) and the Wall of the Righteous (for those who hid or saved Jews) were opened in Paris. The culminating point was in 2007, when the righteous entered the Pantheon. If this new public policy of remembrance made room for deaths caused by France, a distinction remains: whereas the deaths of those who died for France are deaths endured by the French for their nation they are then transfigured into heroes those whose deaths were caused by France appear on the altar of national remembrance as victims. This is notably the case for the Holocaust. As it so happens, there are other cases where the French died because of France. This is the case for colonization. Colonialism not only displaces the line that generally separates our dead from theirs; it also divides the political civitas from its core through to its periphery, because colonization offers itself up as its own victim and its own executioner. This is one reason why colonialism is the very eye of the memorial cyclone that has swept through the country. And for the past few years, the state itself has aroused the tempest. For the reasons stated above, the state seeks to officially modernize commemorations. In this proliferation of commemorations, tributes, inaugurations, monuments, museums, and public spaces, the boundaries separating history, remembrance, and propaganda have which been obscured.77 Thus, in a project now under way, the First World War marked an unprecedented retreat from democracy and which ultimately paved the way for the arrival of fascism and Nazism is dialectally reinterpreted as having been the starting point of the European Union. The war of 193545 is no longer a world war but rather an essentially European war with important international repercussions. As for the colonial troops drafted for conflicts that, as we now admit, were foreign to them, it has been suggested that they died for Liberty and Civilization and thus deserve the privilege of having been colonized. In this case as in others, the military endeavor is figured as a crusade in which the dead are martyrs who, in a patriotic fervor, voluntarily gave up their lives for a just cause.78
77. Lawrence De Cock, Fanny Madeline, Nicolas Offenstadt, and Sophie Wahnich, Comment Sarkozy crit lhistoire de France (Marseille: Agone, 2008). 78. See Ministry of Defense, Rapport de la Commission sur la modernisation des commmorations publiques, www.defense.gouv.fr/sga/content/download/103057/906795/file/rapport_comr (accessed July 5, 2010). 112

Discourse against repentance seeks to calmly assume all aspects of Frances history. Its goal is to rehabilitate the colonial enterprise. It is alleged that the true victims of colonization are the colonizers, not the indigenous people. The latter should be grateful to the former. This logic of self- absolution flares bright in the case of Algeria, the memory of which is at the epicenter of the French ailment of colonization.79 France occupied Algeria for more than a century and a half. Four to five generations of Europeans took it as their native land between 1830 and 1962. Large numbers of auxiliary troops in the French army (the harkis, drafted troops, and enlisted men) fought there. It is impossible to measure the trauma caused by the loss of French Algeria, coming on the heels of the defeat at Dien Bien Phu, and it was surely as traumatic as the defeat during the 1870 FrancoPrussian war. Frances defeat in Algeria was different, however: it was not only a military defeat; it was also a political and moral defeat that, among other things, revealed the widespread use of torture by the French army. It was indeed the war of Algeria, which for a long time remained nameless and, not long ago, was still known in France under the euphemism of the events of Algeria it was this war that was the penultimate object of organized practices of concealment and willful colonial amnesia and melancholy. But recently, since at least 2002, there has been a veritable outpouring of testimonies; books; Web sites; press articles; films (La trahison by Philippe Faucon in 2005, Mon colonel by Laurent Herbiet and Indigne by Rachid Bouchareb in 2006, Lennemi intime by Florian Emilio Siri in 2007); documentaries; and television movies (Nuit noire by Alain Tasma in 2005, La bataille dAlger by Yves Boisset in 2007).80 The loss of Algeria is in large part at the root of the famous law of February 23, 2005 a law initiated, perhaps, by a stratum of junior parliamentarians,81 but most definitely adopted by the French National Assembly, along with its article 4, explaining the benefits of a positive colonization. Jacques Chirac repealed article 4 in 2006, but the controversy has not subsided. Its ramifications extend to commemorations of the war and to questions concerning museums, memorials, walls, and monuments to the dead in the south of France (Marseille, Perpignan, and Montpellier), as well as accounting for the
79. Guy Pervill, Pour une histoire de la guerre dAlgrie (Paris: Picard, 2002); Benjamin Stora, with Mohammed Harbi, La guerre dAlgrie, fin damnsie (Paris: Hachette- Poche, 2005). See also Pascal Blanchard and Isabelle Veyrat- Masson, eds., Les guerres des mmoires: La France et son histoire (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2008). 80. Benjamin Stora, Guerre dAlgrie: 19992003, les acclrations de la mmoire, Hommes et migrations, no. 1244 (2003): 8396. 81. Bayart, Postcolonial Studies, 62. 113

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number of French deaths. On the other side of the Mediterranean, in Algeria, we also hear calls for a precise accounting of the number of Algerians killed since 1830 by France, as well as of villages burned, tribes decimated, and wealth stolen. And there is conflict over the restitution of maps that show where the 11 million mines were dropped or deposited during the war by the French army along the Algerian and Moroccan border to prevent activists of the Algerian Army of National Liberation (ALN) from reaching Morocco. According to Algeria, these mines have provoked untold ravages up to forty thousand dead and injured since the end of colonization. In addition, there is the calamitous legacy of nuclear tests in southern Algeria during the 1960s and the question of medical care for atomic radiation victims in the Sahara. Citizens of former imperial possessions and their descendants are not the only victims of colonial trauma in contemporary France; this is also the case for the former French colonizers of Algeria and their descendants. This spectacle of competing memories occurs in a context where the Holocaust was torn from the horrors of the Second World War, becoming a unique event, a dominant political and cultural element of Euro- American life. These ailments of memory must be understood in relation to a crisis in French democracy as well as the spirit of the times, which appraises the creation and expression of bruised and wounded identities. To be acknowledged politically, struggles for recognition increasingly must be constructed around an exceptional signifier my suffering and my wounds. Archetypal and incomparable, this suffering must necessarily answer to a name that is deemed worthier than all others. Insofar as ailments of memory (the chiasmus in the present) often pave the way to absolute oppositions between victims of the same executioner, the quarrel is inevitably about knowing which human suffering should be sanctified and which is, ultimately, nothing but a mere incident without value on a scale of truly meaningful lives and deaths. The struggle for recognition therefore denies all equivalencies between different human lives and deaths because, as some would have it, certain lives and certain deaths are taken to be universal, while others are not and should never be. In the spirit of todays world, many believe in the existence of a Fundamental Mourning (un Deuil Premier), interminable and constantly evoked to remain on the stage of symptoms, but never capable of bridging the chasm. In direct lineage with the spirit of monotheism, this Fundamental Mourning cannot be measured to any other mourning, for all other instances are but a simple pagan affair. Only this Fundamental Mourning appears in the mirror of History. Devoid of a double, it fills the surface of the mirror from one edge to the other: the single entity, the One. All other events, no matter how terrifying, are forbidden access to the field
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of speech and language because this field is already consumed by the Event. But by conceptualizing the Fundamental Mourning in this way, mourning ultimately becomes impossible. Because of its impossibility and because it is interminable, we end up in one of the major paradoxes of contemporary ailments of memory: my mourning consists above all else of killing not my executioner but rather a third party. Our aversion to the suffering of others is demonstrated in the death wish at work in every consciousness of victimization, especially when this consciousness can only conceive of itself in competition with other consciousnesses of the same name. I must therefore either silence the other or, if not, force the other into a state of delirium so that his or her historical suffering returns to a prelinguistic state, a state anterior to all naming. What the French call la guerre des memoires (memories war) is thus inscribed in the frame of struggles for transcendence in a context of ideologies of victimization that mark the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty- first. These struggles are a fundamental aspect of necropolitical projects. Indeed, insofar as one can never found the transcendental on the basis of ones own death, the sacrificial killing of another is necessary to the constitution of the sacred.
Conclusion

Provincializing France?

As a general formula of domination, colonization created a new structure of performance and signification, a new regime of historicity (or, better yet, a new prosaic). Of course, this process of ordering the field for future interactions between the colonizers and their subjects did not erase all preexisting indigenous customs and logics. This process was fundamentally heteronomous. The invention of new customs inspired new constraints, but it also freed up new resources and forced colonial subjects to try to take advantage of the situation, to protest it, or to distort it or to do all three simultaneously.82 Furthermore, colonization was defined by multiple lines of flight. From the beginning to the end, colonial regimes were riddled with fissures, gaps, and breaches that needed to be constantly capped and sealed. Even when they emerged as more or less central apparatuses, colonial regimes were still racked by fragmentary logics. In most cases, each decision simply displaced the lines of flight. As a world of microdetermination, the colonial world depended on the management of small and great fears, the production and miniaturization of the
82. Read Achille Mbembe, introduction to La naissance du maquis dans le Sud- Cameroun (19201960) (Paris: Karthala, 1996). 115

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insecurities shared by both the dominating and the dominated. This molecular fear emerged from the fact that something always escaped the structure, and so colonial regimes constantly enacted new laws and interdictions in a will to capture that which was fleeing and leaking. And even when they succeeded, colonial authorities never knew whether or not they had caught the true object of their fear. Constant fear even paranoia also originated in the double bind of powerlessness and ignorance so characteristic of this primitive mode of domination. The colonial masters could almost never distinguish mere imitation from true opposition, a simple inversion from an apparent appropriation, or even that what appeared to be a revolt had in fact more to do with a simple logic of desire. From beginning to end, colonial regimes lived by the sentiment that something in indigenous societies regardless of scale, size, or dimension was unattributable (inassignable). That said, the history of colonization is not only a history of ambivalence and contingency, of profound coincidences and astonishing encounters, as certain historiographical and sociological renderings often well documented, yet at times disingenuous would have it. Taking distance from positivist conceits, we must therefore reread the history of the West against the grain of Western accounts of its own genesis, reading against its fictions, its obvious and sometimes empty truths, its disguises, its ploys, and it bears repeating its will for power. For, beyond the compilation of empirical detail, the critique of colonialism or imperialism still has nothing to say about colonialism and imperialism until it confronts this will for power and the constant obfuscation of its ontological, metaphysical, theological, and mythological dimensions. As a will for power, colonial reason is simultaneously religious, mystical, messianic, and utopian. Colonization is inseparable from the powerful imaginary constructions and the symbolic and religious representations that are integral to the depiction of a terrestrial horizon in Western thought. The critique of colonial situations and the facts of Empire can thus accommodate a philosophical and ethical critique and a circumstantial examination of what constitutes their inner flame. Practically speaking, the spirit that carries colonial empires forth is, in large part, race. This is what, at base, regulates their language, their perceptual schema, and their imaginaries. Colonial regimes were also systems of signs that were continually deciphered by different actors, each in his or her own way. They had particular procedures for representing their own mythologies to themselves. They had words to designate themselves. They knew how to delegate to the indigenous substitutes that were their extensions. Colonial relationships of domination were neither simple nor unilateral. They emerged out of the hollows. Nonetheless, they did have a frame the
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will for power and what that will had to say about general questions of might and right, rights and justice, justice and responsibility. Colonizers and colonized were invested with desires, beliefs, and interests. Different colonial regimes were not merely political and economic entities; they were also unconscious constructs and, as such, left indelible marks on colonial peoples imagination. Finally, colonial domination was akin to a state of war. And indigenous people often emerged from this permanent, low- intensity warfare in a broken, undone, and disfigured state. For their part, the colonizers risked dwelling in that war until they destroyed everything they could possibly destroy. For all colonial practices are inhabited by an inner drive, a nihilistic impulse. Beyond economic profit, this pulse constructs itself on the crest of an intense line: the clear, cold line of pure destruction. And this pulse runs even along the lines of flight that colonial practice seeks to one day inhabit. The will for power axiomatic to all colonial projects consists, from this point on, of a desire to interrogate everything. It is a bet on the death of others, on a death that is supposed to happen to others, a delegated death. In a globalized humanity, these are precisely the questions that concern us most distinctly in the very enigma of this present moment and in its full future potential. It is indeed in part through the slave trade and colonization and thus through these general questions that our common language was forged and that the inhabitants of the earth were juxtaposed or brought together in a unity that is both emblematic and problematic. We are thus compelled, through these events, to pursue the question of all possible conditions of an authentic human encounter. Yet this encounter cannot begin with acute amnesia, which transforms us into sleepwalkers, or with a form of revisionism that barely masks an archaic scientific positivism; instead, this encounter must begin through reciprocal disorientation. This vital disorientation, in turn, requires the elaboration of forms of thought that are at once profoundly historical and philosophical, sociological, hermeneutical, and ethical memory and antimemory, militant and antimilitant, political, antipolitical, and poetic. In the same vein, the question of the relationship between democracy and difference can never be resolved by a purely abstract conception of both humanity and universalism. A citizen is someone who can personally answer the question, who am I? He or she is someone who can speak publicly in the first person. Of course, speaking in the first person does not suffice to exist as a subject. But there can be no full citizenship when such a possibility is purely and simply negated. Where primary affiliations have been negated or obliterated by violence, domination, and racial stigmatization, the ascent to citizenship is not necessarily incom117

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patible with indexes of difference constituted by family, religious, corporatist, and even ethnic ties. The abstraction of our fundamental differences is not a condition sine qua non of a conscious belonging to a common humanity or, in the case at hand, to a multicultural democracy based on the obligation of mutual recogniLuc Nancy reminds us, equality tion as a condition for convivial life.83 As Jean- does not entail a commensurability of subjects in relation to a random unit of measure; it lies rather in the equality of singularities.84 Stating the plurality of the singular thus becomes an effective mode of navigating the Babel of races, cultures, and nations produced by the long history of globalization. So that the human and the universal are not reduced to pure fictions, we must turn our backs on those forms of universalism that can only think the other in terms of duplication and reproduction to infinity in a narcissistic image, in a spiral form that dominates the individuals on whom it preys.85 The human is discovered and recognized as human, each time, in different and unique figures. And no thought of democracy could be complete that forgets that the subject only apprehends itself through a distanciation of self and can only know and appraise (sprouver) itself through the other, an elsewhere.86 Recognizing difference and mutuality is therefore hardly incompatible with the principle of a democratic society. Such an acknowledgment does not signify that society proceeds without common ideas and beliefs. To the contrary, this recognition is the very condition for these ideas and beliefs to become truly common. And the recognition of this difference by others is precisely the mediation through which we become the same (semblable). It appears, then, that a communion of singularities is indeed prerequisite for a politics of similarity and an ethics of mutuality. Finally, ours is an era that hopes and strives to resuscitate the old myth by which the West, and only the West, has a monopoly on the future. In these conditions, it is hardly surprising that some seek to negate any paradigmatic signification of colonialism and imperialism, as well as to drown serious philosophical and ethical dilemmas that arise with the European expansion in the world by consigning them to a register of unimportant detail. The rehabilitation of good colonial conscience is based on the conviction that real and effective liberty is not the product of any contract or treaty between equals. It issues from natural law (jus
83. Paul Gilroy, After the Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 84. Jean- Luc Nancy, Lexprience de la libert (Paris: Galile, 1988), 96. 85. Jacque Hassoun, Lobjet obscur de la haine (Paris: Aubier, 1997), 14. 86. Jean- Marie Vaysse, Linconscient des modernes: Essai sur lorigine mtaphysique de la psychanalyse (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 389. 118

naturale). Ours is also an era in which the only valid moral is one that is reduced to an instinct for pity, to the thousands of forms of disdain hiding behind charity, to the belief that the winner is right after all. And where might makes right, and reason and might combine, why demand justice and reparations? Furthermore, according to this moral, there is no place in the bowels of our world for guilt and even less for repentance, since guilt and the desire for repentance are but cynical manifestations of the perversity of the weak. In such conditions, the real question asked of French intellectuals today concerns the refoundation of critical thought. But for such a critical thought to have a future at all, we must first turn our backs on that form of anachronism we have come to know as Parisianism.

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