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Recent Work on Negritude
Full text linkReview of recent works on the Negritude movement, with critical remarks and interventions
Between Earth and Sky
Full text linkAfrica. Who are you?I deliberately don’t say here, “What are you?” As we know, the interrogative pronoun “what” is an attempt to grab the essence of something. As Heidegger says: “whatness [Wassein], comprises what one commonly calls… the idea or mental representation by means of which we propose to… grasp what a thing is.” As such, questions starting with the interrogative pronoun “what” are eminently violent because they reduce the object of inquiry to a thing that can be held in one’s hand; that can make sense as a totality; that can be conceptualized with one idea. The history of philosophy— from Plato to Augustine, from Descartes to Lenin, all the way to Kwame Nkrumah, for example—is littered with the question “What…?”; with these violent attempts at grabbing the essence of something. Africa’s history is also littered with these attempts at reducing a continent to an essence or concept. These attempts are absurdly grandiose (pinning down “the idea” of Africa, for example) and ridiculously small (analyzing the minutiae of life in a village, for example). In all cases, they try to envision Africa as an object to be possessed by any means and I know that we can’t carry on doing that.
Alain Badiou’s Suturing of the Law to the Event and the State of Exception
Full text linkThis article questions whether we can posit a more radical desuturing of the law from the event: Can radical shifts in law produce events? Can the law itself be an event, thereby conditioning the very nature of the event itself, creating a new subjectivity and a new time? I would like to argue that the law can do so. How? Badiou begins “The Three Negations” by discussing the work of the German jurist Carl Schmitt (TN 1877). I would like to argue that the state of exception, as elaborated by Carl Schmitt, can serve as the willed decision of a sovereign that brings about an event. We can understand the sovereign as a kind of legal subject that has the force to bring about a new event, rupturing with an established order and introducing a new form of subjectivity and time.
Against African Communalism
Full text linkCommunalism and its cognates continue to exercise a vise grip on the African intellectual imaginary. Whether the discussion is in ethics or social philosophy, in metaphysics or even, on occasion, epistemology, the play of communalism, a concept expounded in the next section, is so strong that it is difficult to escape its ubiquity. In spite of this, there is little serious analysis of the concept and its implications in the contemporary context. Yet, at no other time than now can a long-suffering continent use some robust debates on its multiple inheritances regarding how to organize life and thought in order to deliver a better future for its population. Given the continual resort to communalism as, among others, the standard of ethical behavior, the blueprint for restoring Africans to wholeness and organizing our social life, as well as a template for political reorganization across the continent, one cannot overemphasize the importance of contributing some illumination to the discourse surrounding the idea. This essay seeks to offer a little illumination in this respect. Additionally, it offers a criticism of what all—proponents and antagonists alike—take to be a defensible version of communalism: moderate communalism. I shall be arguing that communalism, generally, has a problem with the individual. And the African variant of it, mostly subscribed to by the African scholars discussed below and defended by them as something either peculiar to or special in Africa, has an even harder time accommodating the individual. Yet, as history shows, until the modern age in which individualism is the principle of social ordering and mode of social living, a situation that privileges the individual, above all, various forms of communalism never really accorded the individual the recognition and forbearances that we now commonly associate with the idea. The strongest variants of moderate communalism discussed here have a difficult time taking the individual seriously. I am not aware of anyone else ever having made such a case. These arguments are offered to show that (1) Africa and Africans need to take individualism seriously and (2) such have been the historical transformation that our diverse societies have undergone in the course of the last half a millennium that the types of communalism that are on offer do not appear to take this fact of radical change with the necessary urgency.
On the Concepts of Disorder, Retraditionalization, and Crisis in African Studies
Full text linkOver the last two decades, concepts of “disorder as political instrument in Africa,” “politics of belly,” and “re-traditionalization” (Chabal, Daloz, 199) have been used and reused in African studies by European and African scholars to describe the African social and political condition of the last decades. However, despite their canonization, one can question their efficiency and relevance to the analysis and understanding of what is really happening in postcolonial Africa. One might even wonder if these analytical concepts are not reawakening the imaginary of the colonial anthropology which pathologized the “Dark Continent” in order to enclose it in its difference and represent it as the absolute alterity as Hegel did in his philosophical ethnography
Darkened Counsel: The Problem of Evil in Bergson’s Metaphysics of Integral Experience
Full text linkHenri Bergson\u27s work is often presented as an optimistic philosophy. This essay presents a counter-narrative to that reading by looking to the place of the problem of evil within his integral metaphysics. For, if Bergson’s philosophy is simply optimistic, or simply derives meaning from the wholeness of experience, then it risks a theodical structure which undercuts its ability to speak to contemporary social and political problems of suffering. A theodical structure is one that, at bottom, justifies the experience of suffering by way of a concept of the whole or some concept that functions to subsume everything within it. Suffering is subsumed and given meaning by placing it within a relation, often with a telos that redeems or sublimates the experience of suffering. This takes such a singular experience such as suffering and renders it merely relative to the part it plays within the system of everything. On my reading, Bergson’s philosophy contains a supplement of what we might call pessimism or negativity inherent in his metaphysics as integral experience. This supplement undermines the theodical structure that may be assumed to undercut Bergson’s philosophy when confronted with evil or suffering and is seen most clearly in his critique of the notion of “everything.
Solidarity and the Absurd in Kamel Daoud\u27s Meursault, contre-enquête
Full text linkThis article examines Kamel Daoud’s treatment of solidarity and the absurd in Meursault, contre-enquête and posits that the question of how to live in solidarity with others is central to the novel, although the word ‘solidarity’ never appears in it. After recalling Camus’s discussion of the absurd in Le Mythe de Sisyphe and of solidarity in L’Homme révolté, the article examines the manner in which Haroun, Daoud’s narrator and the brother of the Arab Meursault killed in L’Étranger, reveals his own failures of solidarity. He justly criticizes Meursault for privileging his confrontation with the absurd over the death of the Arab he did not even name, but Haroun too has killed. Haroun has, however, a greater understanding of solidarity than his fellows: he at least recognizes that murder is significant. He thus joins Meursault as an unworthy prophet who proclaims the absurd while surrounded by people who flee from it—and proclaiming the absurd can be a gesture of solidarity when one speaks for others, as Haroun speaks for his brother Moussa. Daoud’s novel reminds us that there are no final answers telling us how to live in solidarity with others and that we must do so all the same
On Bergson\u27s Reformation of Philosophy
Full text linkIn this essay I focus on the text Creative Evolution (1907) and show that although Bergson intended to make a contribution to the science of biology and to the philosophy of life, the primary aim of the text is to show the need for a fundamental reformation of philosophy. Bergson wants to show how, through an appreciation of the evolution of life, philosophy can expand our perception of the universe. I examine in detail the two essential claims he makes in the text: first, that we have to see the theory of knowledge and the theory of life as deeply related; second, that there is a need to “think beyond the human condition” or human state. Indeed, Bergson conceives philosophy as the discipline that “raises us above the human condition” and makes the effort to “surpass” it. This reveals itself to be something of an extraordinary endeavour since it means bringing the human intellect into rapport with other kinds of consciousness. Moreover, if we do not place our thinking about the nature, character, and limits of knowledge within the context of the evolution of life then we risk uncritically accepting the concepts that have been placed at our disposal. It means we think within pre-existing frames. We need, then, to ask two questions: first, how has the human intellect evolved?, and second, how can we enlarge and go beyond the frames of knowledge available to us
The Cinematic Bergson: From Virtual Image to Actual Gesture
Full text linkDeleuze’s film-philosophy makes much of the notion of virtual images in Bergson’s Matter and Memory, but in doing so he transforms a psycho-meta-physical thesis into a (very) unBergsonian ontological one. In this essay, we will offer a corrective by exploring Bergson’s own explanation of the image as an “attitude of the body”—something that projects an actual, corporeal, and postural approach, not only to cinema, but also to philosophy. Indeed, just as Renoir famously said that “a director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again,” so Bergson wrote that each philosopher only makes one “single point” throughout his or her whole career. And this one point, he then declares, is like a “vanishing image,” only one best understood as an attitude of the body. It is embodied image that underlies an alternative Bergsonian cinema of the actual and the body—one that we will examine through what Bergson’s has to say about “attitude” as well as “gesture” and “mime.” We will also look at it through a gestural concept enacted by a film, to be precise, the five remakes that comprise Lars von Trier’s and Jørgen Leth’s The Five Obstructions (2003). This will bring us back to the idea of what it is that is being remade, both by directors and philosophers, in Renoir’s “one film” and Bergson’s singular “vanishing image” respectively. Is the “one” being remade an image understood as a representation, or is it a gesture, understood as a bodily movement? It is the latter stance that provides a wholly new and alternative view of Bergson’s philosophy of cinema
The Problem of Choice: Existence and Transcendence in the Philosophy of Jaspers
Full text linkEnglish translation of Jean Wahl, “Le Problème du choix: L’existence et la transcendance dans la philosophie de Jaspers,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 41, 3 (July 1934), 405–44; republished in Jean Wahl, Études kierkegaardiennes (Paris: Fernand Aubier, 1938), 510–52