Kafka's Monkey and Other Phantoms of Africa

KAFKA’S MONKEY AND OTHER PHANTOMS OF AFRICA

WORLD PHILOSOPHIES

Bret W. Davis, D. A. Masolo, and Alejandro Vallega, editors

KAFKA’S MONKEY

AND OTHER

PHANTOMS OF

AFRICA

Seloua Luste Boulbina

Translated by

Laura E. Hengehold

Foreword by

Achille Mbembe

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

Office of Scholarly Publishing

Herman B Wells Library 350

1320 East 10th Street

Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

English translation © 2019 by Indiana University Press

Originally published as Le singe de Kafka et autres propos sur la colonie by Editions Sens Public in 2008 and as L’Afrique et ses fantômes: Écrire l’après by Présence Africaine in 2015

This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE Foundation (French American Cultural Exchange).

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No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-253-04191-3 (hardback)

ISBN 978-0-253-04192-0 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-253-04195-1 (ebook)

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À Fatima, Khodja, Nadjib, et Marilys.

À Amina, Kérima, Myriam, Élias,

Louis, Wellington, et Zouheir.

CONTENTS

Foreword by Achille Mbembe

Translator’s Acknowledgments

Translator’s Introduction

Prologue: Thinking the Colony

Part IKafka’s Monkey and Other Reflections on the Colony

1With Respect to Kafka’s Monkey

2Challenging Historical Culture

3The Colony, Mirage and Historical Reality

Part IIAfrica and Its Phantoms: Writing the Afterward

Introduction

1Saving One’s Skin

2History, an Interior Architecture

3Language, an Internal Politics

4Sexed Space and Unveiled Gender

5Having a Good Ear

Conclusion

Part IIIEpilogue

From Floating Territories to Disorientation

Bibliography

Index

FOREWORD

IT SHOULD BE NOTED AT THE OUTSET THAT Seloua Luste Boulbina’s rich intellectual trajectory is not only unique but thoroughly remarkable. A life trajectory mixing familial experience, conscious and unconscious choices, and chance and necessity imposes a rhythm and gives form and matter to a critical project that is without doubt one of the most fertile in the contemporary French intellectual landscape.

Here, we are witnesses to a perpetually wakeful spirit in a state of agility, one open to risk and to the unforeseen, which never stops springing forth and rebounding. This spirit carefully deciphers the multiple meanings of its encounters with all the fragments of a complex personal history, one inscribed at the interface of cultures and societies brought together by the accidents of time as well as the will and the actions of men. We must understand this initial historical situation, made of prohibitions, juxtapositions, and inversions, as the originating matrix of Seloua Luste Boulbina’s theoretical project.

This is what explains her abundant productivity, no doubt the result of circumstances, but also the vivacious expression of an extraordinarily erudite and versatile mind, capable of diverse and singularly creative adaptations because it is endowed with an exceptional gift for identifying and going right to the heart of essential questions, the only ones truly worth the difficulty of being posed.

We would like to highlight above all Seloua Luste Boulbina’s decisive contribution to the disentangling of the postcolonial question. Because at bottom, almost everything in her life and in her intellectual quest comes together and leads her to this central subject, which is still theorized far too infrequently and inadequately.

Around the world, the postcolonial turn in the social sciences and the humanities has been at work for almost a quarter century. During that time, the weight of its critique has been felt in many political, epistemological, institutional, and disciplinary debates in the United States, in Great Britain, and in several regions of the Southern Hemisphere (South America, South Africa, the Indian subcontinent, Australia, and New Zealand). Since its birth, this way of thinking has been the object of varied interpretations and has given rise, at more or less regular intervals, to waves of controversy—which continue elsewhere—if not to totally contradictory objections.

Postcolonial critique has also given rise to quite divergent intellectual, political, and aesthetic practices, to the point that one is sometimes justified in wondering wherein lies its unity. Despite this fragmentation, we can affirm that at its core, the object of postcolonial critique is what one could call the interlacing of histories and the concatenation of worlds. Aided, among other things, by a more or less stubborn compartmentalization between the disciplines and between the forms of knowledge produced and disseminated in the Hexagon, France has long remained on the margin of these new voyages in planetary reflection. Such is no longer the case today—or so it seems, from the evidence of the many debates underway and the publication of numerous studies.

In France, meanwhile, the debate suffers from two weaknesses. On the one hand, privileging polemic, it is particularly preoccupied with the syntax and the politics of postcolonial studies, instead of doing postcolonial studies on the basis of empirical cases. On the other hand, this debate has quickly found itself in an epistemological cul-de-sac because it has imported conceptual tools that do not necessarily do justice to the singularity of the French imperial and colonial trajectories.

Africa and Its Phantoms constitutes Seloua Luste Boulbina’s response to this double impasse. Her response is hardly a momentary or conjectural one. The ensemble of her work could actually be read as the search for this third place (to borrow a term from Derrida), a sort of desert within the desert since it refers neither simply to the archi-originary, nor simply to the unarchivable. In this sober and incisive text, history, language, and the colony are put in relation with architecture (interior), politics (internal), sexed space, and unveiled gender.

But what must we understand by postcolonial, and how should it be studied? It is a particular historical period, to be sure, but not just that—a heritage from the past, certainly, but not only that either. Much more, it is a rationality that carries within it an imaginary—of what is yet to come. And it is here that Seloua Luste Boulbina distinguishes herself from a whole tradition of critique, which is as much Anglo-Saxon as it is Francophone—or should we say French?

She inscribes her theoretical and methodological effort in the logic of the old injunction to know oneself, which implies recognition of the subject’s emergence as the experience of its irruption into speech and into language, passing through the ricochet of the voice. She admits, on the other hand, the centrality of practices of subjectivation inasmuch as they are always singular—in other words, the work of actors situated in time, circumstances, and specific conditions that, for those concerned, make up an event. According this privilege to practice and to experience then permits her to approach colonial situations in their unique qualities and in the way that they become objects of symbolization.

More than a doctrine, what she proposes is therefore a strategy. This strategy gives a large place to indetermination, to instability, to hesitation, and to movement. But it also proposes that the postcolony is, before all else, an interworld, a relationship that is not just external and objective but also internal and subjective. These claims are realized through a taut and critical articulation of historiography, of psychoanalysis, of philosophy, and of literature.

Many other aspects of Seloua Luste Boulbina’s work could be emphasized. One might draw attention to her decisive contribution to resolving the question of method in the apprehension of postcolonial reality, given that this is exactly the point on which the contemporary French debate runs aground. No less important, Seloua Luste Boulbina’s works owe their impact beyond any immediate goal to the fact that they have enabled the renewal of critical theory in a singular confrontation with the multiplicity of languages and of discursive forms.

Achille Mbembe

Professor in the Department of Romance Studies,

Duke University

Professor of History and Political Science,

University of Witwatersrand,

Johannesburg, South Africa

TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

EVERYONE KNOWS THAT WRITING PROJECTS SELDOM MOVE AT the speed originally anticipated, but the perpetual surprise is that even in a translation, different conversations internal to the work move at different speeds. Many problems do not appear until others are cleared away. Some sentences or references take months or years to come into their own. Sections evolve independently like bubbles in broth that eventually join together when moved by a larger theoretical consideration, and periodically the whole thing is stirred up by worry over the flow of English prose apart from sense. Thus materiality disappears into the apparent clarity of form and content.

I want to extend my deepest thanks to those who lived this little drama with me. This includes not only Seloua Luste Boulbina herself, for friendship and encouragement over more than ten years after our first encounter in her seminar on The Colony, but also my colleague Cheryl Toman, whose expertise in translating has always pushed me to do a more careful job with language and shown me the difference between more and less creative solutions to sentences. I am also grateful for comments from Frieda Ekotto and Ann Laura Stoler, as well as from Gilbert Doho and Thérèse Kuoh-Moukoury, who continue to expand my world—the world of African France as well as Francophone Africa. Megan Weber and Eve Wang provided editorial assistance, as did the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University, whose indefatigable administrative director, Maggie Kaminski, was also a source of moral support. Without librarians Carl Mariani and Karen Oye or the outstanding patience and flexibility of Dee Mortensen, Paige Rasmussen, and Leigh McLennon at Indiana University Press, of course, this book would be much less beautiful.

I want to acknowledge Brent Adkins, Andrew Cutrofello, and John Sayer, who read sections and accompanied me through crises of indecision, as well as my parents, for their interest and support. And certainly not last, Joe and CZ, for being thoughtful, resilient, and dancing with me. All of the remaining bad steps and infelicities are my own.

TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

ACCORDING TO H EIDEGGER, PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT ALWAYS RELATES TO some world, whose references and ends it complicates. Heidegger was working out the existential-ontological presuppositions of the phenomenology that Edmund Husserl, despite some universalist beliefs, conceived as the only possible response to looming crisis in the European sciences. ¹ But what would it mean to do philosophy that was neither tied to a single world nor global, whether in thought or geography—interworldly, in other words?

In this volume, Seloua Luste Boulbina brings her immense knowledge of political thought and the arts to answer this question. The two texts of which it is composed, Kafka’s Monkey and Africa and Its Phantoms, develop a philosophical metaphorics of the migrant that allows French postcolonial theory to intersect with the Arabic and English-speaking world. This erudite voyage is haunted by the voices of Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault. But Glissant, Spivak, and Rancière are on board, not far behind Fanon and Said. In France, where postcolonial theory does not have an established academic presence, her work is absolutely new. Its configuration of postcolonial themes is new in the English world as well—and never so timely, for it concerns nothing less than the philosophical subjectivity of a possible interworldly experience.²

Thirty years ago, European identity was challenged by the unexpected end of the Cold War division between East and West and the phenomena of migration and ethnic conflict that followed. Today, the challenge to Europe is less intra-European migration than migration from the Arab world, provoked by authoritarian responses to the 2010–12 Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war that has been its most devastating aftermath. To this migration are added refugees from the ongoing American and British wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and those fleeing economic and climate crisis in Africa. The reaction to migration from outside Europe has overdetermined older tensions within European nation-states and increasingly threatens liberalism and the legitimacy of democratic governance in the European Union. This threat seems to be echoed by strains of nativism in the United Kingdom and United States.

In an interview from 1998, Caribbean novelist and philosopher Édouard Glissant suggested that "there are two main types of cultures in the current tout-monde: atavistic cultures that try to link their present state to a creation of the world brought about by means of an uninterrupted filiation and composite cultures that have not had the opportunity or the means to create a myth of the creation of the world because they are cultures born of history," unable to define themselves in exclusionary terms.³ Such cultures can be found on every continent. Whether tensions between them are the signs of cultural pride or of economic anxiety and competition, this difference between the root and the relation, between societies that embrace tolerance and those that refuse it, poses an unprecedented challenge to the universalism of the human rights agenda that has dominated the global imaginary since 1989. Moreover, even when they come to Europe from Central Africa or arrive in the United States from Mexico and South America, migrants are wrapped in a language of threat that has been associated with Islam and the Arab World since the attacks on New York in September 2001.

Each of the wars producing migration has left unofficial and often unarticulated knowledge in the bodies of its survivors. Uprooted families and ethnic groups found their historical experience and hopes for the future amputated from living reality. Such trauma finds outlets in ideologies of violence, but former colonizers and those whose countries are destinations for the new migration have their own ghosts that must be confronted if they are not to be projected fearfully onto the innocent. In the United States, toleration of difference is shaped by guilt and denial about the theft of wealth from African slave labor and from the Native Americans on whose territory this wealth now exists. New waves of immigration have always been perceived and accepted or rejected against the backdrop of these tensions. Glissant predicts that nothing will change "as long as there is no change, not only in consciousness, but also in the imaginaire, the imaginary or deep mentality" of Europeans.⁴ Because of its global import, the French contribution to this imaginary must be accurately understood.

Throughout his life, Michel Foucault showed how Western thought was shaped by the division between subject and other, usually as the result of practices and geographical arrangements that did not enter into conscious reflection. In doing so, he drew attention to the modern episteme or interlocking formation of knowledges around which the university is built.⁵ These include not just the well-respected natural sciences, human sciences, and mathematics, but also the minor disciplines of law, medicine, and administration or management—which often have more impact on the daily thoughts and calculations of individuals and which were particularly important in the colonial context. For there is thought in philosophy, but also in a novel, in jurisprudence, in law, in an administrative system, in a prison.⁶

According to Foucault’s Les mots et les choses, time and history on a roughly Hegelian, progressivist model were the unspoken presuppositions for the modern episteme. But as Luste Boulbina argues, history overflows this episteme in the sense that power relations making enunciation possible were not captured in the resulting body of authorized énoncés, or statements.⁷ To speak of historical culture, she writes, is to place oneself beyond the strict domain of the human sciences and to reflect on the ways historical categories ‘overflow’ the ordinary categories of cognition.⁸ The modern arrangement of knowledge in Western universities, as well as universities inherited from the colonial period in Africa and Asia, does not prepare citizens to respond humanely to these rapidly displacing populations. Decolonization, the establishment of independent postcolonial governments, and participation in wider and wider circuits of migration and exchange inadvertently support this arrangement.

In fact, episteme is too simple a term for these arrangements of knowledge, and in 1964 Foucault also believed late nineteenth-century episteme was reaching its end—a phenomenon he associated more with structuralism than with decolonization, although their fates were linked in anthropology. Even in L’archéologie du savoir (1969), Foucault had begun talking about an archive or regimes of statements and placed less focus on academic disciplines, pointing to a more complicated relationship between political practice and knowledge. The statements accompanying the military, educational, economic, and cultural policies of colonialists are also intrinsically part of that knowledge, as Olúfẹ´mi Táíwò has shown in the case of Frederick (Lord) Lugard and Uday Singh Mehta has shown in the case of John Stuart Mill.⁹ Comparable thinkers, as Luste Boulbina argues, are Louis Faidherbe, who established the basic colonial structure throughout much of the French empire, and Alexis de Tocqueville, who provided many of its rationalizations and strategies.

France was a colonial power from 1605 to 1977.¹⁰ In the 1600s, it had large colonial holdings in Canada and in the Midwest and South of the United States as well as the Caribbean and coast of South America.¹¹ Some of these were lost in the course of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars (for example, the Louisiana Purchase), but later nineteenth-century holdings in Algeria, West and Central Africa, and Indochina more than made up for their surface area. Algerian colonization was marked by expropriation of land and labor, after a violent struggle with the original Berber and Arab tribes. Most French territories were considered colonies, but after 1848, Algeria came to be considered an integral part of France itself, and after the Crémieux decree of 1870, Algeria was given its own departmental representatives (of European descent) in the National Assembly. In none of these territories, as Luste Boulbina explains, were non-European populations governed according to the same rule of law as French men and women.¹²

Shortly after World War II, revolts against French domination appeared in Indochina, Algeria, Cameroon, and Madagascar. The French were driven out of Indochina in 1954, but the loss of Algeria in 1962 was more difficult to absorb. This was not just because of Algeria’s special status as French, which meant that its independence would considerably reduce the geographical scope of France, but also because the settlers’ representatives were willing to topple the Paris government rather than be ruled by a Muslim majority. The Franco-Algerian War was marked by morally repugnant counterinsurgency tactics, including widespread torture.¹³ After eight years of bloody warfare, during which the Fourth Republic collapsed and was replaced by the Fifth Republic under the authority of Charles de Gaulle, most of Algeria’s European inhabitants emigrated to France, and de Gaulle himself orchestrated the independence of the remaining major colonies. However, the former colonies and territories (territoires d’outre-mer) remained economically and politically dependent on France, many to this day.

On the eve of decolonization, knowledge about the Global South in Western universities was shaped by the imperative of training colonial officials and preventing Soviet encroachment on territories, some involved in anticolonial struggle, claimed by the West.¹⁴ Until that moment, the primary anticolonial discourse was Marxist. In this discourse, colonialism was a symptom of capitalist competition rather than a moral and political wrong in its own right. However opposed to colonialism they might be, Marxists and materialist critical theorists tended to share their opponents’ view of Western capitalist societies as the most advanced and therefore, all things being equal, justified in their efforts to shape the economic future of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, if only in the direction of socialism.¹⁵

British postcolonial studies, developed largely by literary authors and historians from the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean, emerged partly in response to the American civil rights and Black Power movements.¹⁶ The prominent British-Caribbean critic Stuart Hall, who applied the Marxist critique of cultural forms to racial expressions in the United Kingdom, was a transition figure to later postcolonial theorists. Historians and archeologists, particularly nonacademic historians such as Basil Davidson, also played an important role in undermining the colonial assumptions of British academic knowledge about Africa and Asia from a standpoint outside the academy.¹⁷ In the United States, postcolonial thought began as one of several critiques of the English literary canon used to instill and justify national identity in university students.¹⁸ It built on a tradition of Caribbean liberatory thought extending back to the eighteenth century and on African American historical studies nurtured in historically black American colleges since the Harlem Renaissance, both of which had been systematized by new black studies departments in major universities. In both the United Kingdom and the United States, postcolonial thought and criticism tried to account for aspects of colonialism and racism that could not be easily reduced to economic class.

In France, where oral sources were mistrusted by most historians, the critique of Eurocentrism began with anthropology, not literature and history.¹⁹ But this did not necessarily entail a reevaluation of Islam, for French orientalist scholarship on West and Central Africa tended to ignore its Islamic culture, much of which was written, just as it demonized Islam in Algeria and the Levant.²⁰ A significant portion of the French left (as well as the right, of course) had been opposed to Algerian independence, for orthodox Marxism, no less than the official French discourse of republicanism, denied the legitimacy of nationalism or religious particularism.²¹ Indeed, it is ironic that in the English-speaking world, so much postcolonial theory relies on French thinkers, for they are less representative of French university life than of tensions in American university life, at least in the humanities.

The trauma of the Franco-Algerian war has made it difficult for academic discourse to connect contemporary French people of African and Caribbean descent to the nation’s colonial past.²² So too does the self-containment of academic disciplines in France.²³ Despite its origins in the Cold War effort, the phenomenon of area studies legitimated interdisciplinary research for Americans, on which later programs such as black studies and women’s studies built. This model was never replicated in France. Efforts to link domains of knowledge around the fait postcolonial are stifled by suspicions that postcolonial studies is simply a rewarmed anticolonial ideology, excessively and unscientifically partisan (if not antiwhite), and by fear that it may give rise to the kind of ethnic nationalisms that French republicans associate, distastefully, with the United States.²⁴ Thus, the decolonization of France has largely been studied in France without referring to the history of Algeria written by Algerians or by other scholars from the former colonies currently living in France; and contemporary ethnic minorities are studied by sociologists as if their family histories and communities were isolated from colonial events.

Edward Said and Valentin Mudimbe were among the most significant critics of metropolitan literary studies, history, philosophy, and social science.²⁵ Said’s Orientalism critiqued the historical assumptions of American Middle Eastern area studies, just as Mudimbe’s Invention of Africa critiqued the missionary and anthropological discourse justifying French and Belgian colonialism. Such readings of Africa and the Arab world responded to Western national security and economic interests and contributed to the West’s distorted understanding of its own power, as well as a distorted self-understanding among formerly colonized populations. But as African American critics argued with respect to their own canon, these forms of knowledge failed to facilitate the self-understanding of European racial minorities descended from immigration.

Ina Kerner situates postcolonial theory (and more broadly, postcolonial studies) within the historical legacy of European critical theory, which Max Horkheimer opposed to traditional theory or the philosophical ground of the modern episteme discussed above, due to its emancipatory orientation.²⁶ Much critical theory, including its founders in the Frankfurt School, shared the Eurocentrism of its origins in Marx. Having supported many anticolonial liberation movements, if only on the grounds of opposition to imperialism during the Cold War, some Marxist critical theorists accused postcolonial studies of providing the neoliberal university with a safer substitute for political economy. They saw the very concept of episteme as a (defective) replacement for the older concept of ideology, marking a shift from the era of anti-imperialist struggle to one of identity formation within triumphant capitalist liberal societies.²⁷ And yet Lionnet and Shih propose that class analysis survived in Western universities after 1989 in large part thanks to postcolonial theory, which represented the search for anticapitalist (and antiracist) subjectivities in a post-Soviet world.²⁸

Unlike either area studies or the Marxist study of imperialism, however, postcolonial theory has made Eurocentrism and its effects on both liberal and Marxist scholarship the object of study. The Tunisian novelist Albert Memmi argued that European colonial privilege could neither be disentangled from economic interest nor be reduced to it.²⁹ Immigrant communities in Europe can be sources of such critical insight, as can intellectual communities in the Global South. Some postcolonial authors, particularly from Latin America, have tried to incorporate indigenous and traditional knowledge into their efforts to go beyond Eurocentric visions of the world.

It is important, however, to remember that in practice, postcolonial theory in Western universities may not overlap with literature, history, philosophy, and social science in Asian and African universities, whose existential enterprises are not limited to the critique of Eurocentrism.³⁰ Nor do writers in the former colonial world necessarily see the same thing as most European or American philosophers in Foucault, Derrida, or Deleuze. The critiques of European subjectivity and knowledge found in these thinkers, as Achille Mbembe explains, were not yet the creation of new philosophical subjectivities by and for non-Europeans.³¹ Postcolonial theorists contend that outside the episteme associated with Western historical development there are and will emerge other forms of subjectivity with their own histories, continuous and discontinuous.³² Intercultural philosophers from both the North and South who draw on their insights, among whom Seloua Luste Boulbina should be counted, are trying to create space for such forms of subjectivity.

The achievement of new subjectivities often takes place in disciplines such as literature, medicine, and the arts. Postcolonial literature does not just illuminate colonial assumptions about subjectivity; it reveals inchoate forms that have counted more as symptoms than as knowledge. In minor literature, for example, languages meet in a heterotopic way.³³ Moreover, according to Deleuze and Guattari, the individuation of the speaker is not stable in the same way as enunciation in a dominant literary language.³⁴ Since history is difficult to write in a multilingual way and since some events or aspects of events are more frequently remembered or memorialized in some languages than in others, ghosts that elude historians are visible and audible to the novelist, as well as the psychoanalyst.

For Jacques Rancière, born in Algeria, politics emerges when those whom a system counts as subjects, those whose words are worth understanding and contesting, is subjected to pressure and reworking.³⁵ Rancière began his career as a student and collaborator of structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser, but he later turned his attention to the power relations vested in education and the arts. When those who have never been considered (or even considered themselves) acceptable interlocutors make themselves understood and achieve a subject position of their own, this rearranges the boundaries, meanings, and stakes of subjectivity for everyone. This does not, Rancière explains, mean that knowledge becomes partisan, but that the conditions for subjectivity and political agency are made explicit and opened to challenge.³⁶

But politics is a rare event, far rarer than academics who accuse each other of politically biased scholarship might imagine, for most often we are stuck in a division of roles and categories that police thought just as they police the streets. By insisting on the task of abstractly ordering the just polis, political philosophy in particular refuses the task of actually participating in or encouraging the ferment of politics around signs of equality and inequality. In the United States, decolonial philosophy is the concern of a small number of thinkers, mainly feminist philosophers, whose focus is the epistemology of ignorance.³⁷ It is hardly at the forefront like philosophy of science, metaphysics, or even ethics. According to Luste Boulbina, for a French philosopher, the colony is situated without exception at the limits of philosophical reflection. It is a question simultaneously too empirical and too idiosyncratic to be judged worthy of a ‘true’ and ‘authentic’ philosophical interest. It is a question that does not belong, by right, to its political landscape.³⁸ In French, English, or any other language, philosophy too often ends up justifying various forms of the police—in other words, administration and distribution of goods and social roles.³⁹ According to Rancière, freedom is the symptom of equality at which genuine politics aims. The form of these colonial thinkers’ law courts, immigration procedures, camps in which their opponents are interned, and military strategies, by contrast, are symptoms of the police.

In Les mots et les choses, Foucault claimed that literature, with its emphasis on the being of language, had been thrust outside the modern episteme, while philosophy formed a transcendental-empirical fold around it. But as Luste Boulbina argues, it is essential for historians and sociologists to interrogate the concept of the colony to which they implicitly refer when describing or explaining what they take to be colonization or decolonization. The interrogation of this concept should be the province of philosophy, just as those who built colonies—their internal juridical system, their distinction from protectorates, or their military corps—were shadow philosophers, even if their work is rarely considered as political thought. To ask about processes of colonization and decolonization rather than the colony, moreover, is to ask about political action—an unfinished and unfinishable action—from the colonizer’s point of view, rather than the standpoint of those colonized.⁴⁰

As a philosopher, Achille Mbembe asked what is the postcolony? whose relations of power were the implicit object of postcolonial studies.⁴¹ Luste Boulbina takes one step back: what is the colony? What an absurd enterprise this must be: wanting to think the colony! I can already hear the objections: this is neither history nor geography, this is neither done nor something that should be done. The colony exists only in abstracto. In concreto, there are acts of colonization and of decolonization. There are historical phenomena. There are no (valid) philosophical categories. In concreto, above all, there are forms of knowledge, not hypotheses. And yet.⁴²

We need to think the colony because it is a philosophical stumbling block that separates the false universalism of European knowledge formations from a general economy of knowledge.⁴³ It holds France in old patterns of perception and enunciation, despite changing statements (énoncés), and prevents France from acknowledging its own status as a postcolony.⁴⁴ But can one think the colony without politicizing philosophy or without deconstructing scholarly history? Can it be done without interrogating our image of the normal state?⁴⁵ And can it be done without, as Rey Chow notes, changing the relative weight of canonical Western sources and writings from the indigenous or Global South in the academic rituals that legitimate scholarly expertise?⁴⁶

Politics, Luste Boulbina writes, "involves the encounter between police logic and egalitarian logic, an encounter giving rise to subject positions, or subjectivation."⁴⁷ Fortunately or unfortunately, asking about the concepts constitutive of but excluded from the modern episteme risks thrusting the one who asks outside of the order of common sense, outside the places and roles through which sensibility is politically distributed. Taking her cues from literature and the arts, therefore, Luste Boulbina approaches these questions by way of a Jewish author of European minor literature, Franz Kafka; a philosopher of history, Friedrich Nietzsche; and two French politicians whose ideas and policies represent the birth and demise of French Algeria, Alexis de Tocqueville and Pierre Mendès France. She does not define a nonpolice philosophy head-on but identifies obstacles to its freedom of movement.

A way out—this Kantian formulation of enlightenment resounds through Kafka’s autobiography of Rotpeter, the civilized monkey whose plea to be recognized as a subject forms the basis for the short story A Report to an Academy.⁴⁸ Rotpeter testifies to the subjectivation of the colonized body in the modern European regime of knowledge. In the Penal Colony, by contrast, describes the subjectivation of the Western witness to colonial torture who is forced to make an artificial choice between the position of partisan (regarded as unscientific or unreliable) and the position of an impartial (but impotent) witness.⁴⁹

Discourse (communication between individuals) and reportage (histoire) are two modes of subjectivation described by the linguist Émile Benveniste.⁵⁰ To these, Luste Boulbina adds Nietzsche’s affective account of minority subjectivation. She shows how asceticism and bad conscience manifest themselves a series of contemporary events, such as the veil affair channeling public outrage against French Muslim high school students and the public humiliation of footballer Zinédine Zidane. Asceticism and bad conscience circulate when people must choose between partisanship and the apparent neutrality of expert knowledge in its most everyday forms—law, administration, education. These challenges are familiar to humanitarians who believe that witnessing suffering is immoral unless accompanied by action. They come to a head in Kafka’s story Jackals and Arabs, in which a traveling European is earnestly interpellated to assume the partisan stance by anti-Arabs who are, in the end, opportunistic feeders on political conflict.

Nietzsche, Luste Boulbina points out, is contemptuous of the historian who confuses scientificity with justice.⁵¹ But does this mean that the work of the historian and the work of the partisan are absolutely distinct? Is it impossible for someone with an existential stake in the outcome of a scholarly inquiry to be just, or even merely accurate? Is history destined to be a purely reactive enterprise? Or is this the effect of a certain historical culture? For insofar as the French recognize that former colonial subjects do have an injury to grieve, they deprive them of recognition as scholars as well as sources of historical evidence, or refuse their experiences as legitimate objects of scholarship. This is particularly ironic given the French focus on the duty to remember and the exploration of the nature of individual and collective memory associated with the fiftieth anniversary of the Occupation and Liberation during the 1990s.⁵² In fact, the duty was selective, as the new century brought with it, in addition to public condemnation of France’s role in the slave trade, official acts of Parliament enjoining schools to teach the positive effects of colonization and recognizing the Algerians who fought against independence (harkis) without recognizing those Algerians who suffered during France’s occupation of their land.⁵³

Postcolonial thinkers have criticized Marxist narratives of world history as the history of capitalist expansion, while Marxists, in turn, have criticized postcolonial theory for seemingly refusing to accept the possibility of historical truths.⁵⁴ According to Neil Lazarus, postcolonial thinkers slid from a critique of imperialist representations to a critique of representation in general.⁵⁵ However, one can argue that Said and Mudimbe interrogate the history of forms of knowledge without abandoning the use of history (including their own) to generate new knowledge. Of course, this new knowledge will not be exhaustive or indubitable. For Michel de Certeau, it refers to a critical standpoint in the Kantian sense. History begins when people debunk the manifest errors in received myths.⁵⁶ The given of historical analysis that constitutes its Real is a loss, whether or not the object lost can be precisely identified.⁵⁷

The relationship among philosophy, political philosophy, and the police order is exemplified in Luste Boulbina’s case studies of Tocqueville and Mendès France. Americans from the United States think of Tocqueville as a liberal witness to their democracy, but his writings on French Caribbean slavery and the colonization of Algeria are less well known.⁵⁸ Indeed, he favored ending slavery in the French Caribbean, but from a colonial standpoint: he suggested the slaves should first be nationalized by France. As a witness, Alexis de Tocqueville was immediately shocked by white American treatment of Native Americans. But as a French politician, he recommended the same policy of relocation and expropriation with respect to the Arabs in Algeria. He recognized that Algerians had their own system of property and law, but insofar as they posed a perpetual threat to European settlers, they had to be strictly controlled.⁵⁹

Americans likewise know of Pierre Mendès France as the prime minister who ended the French war in Indochina, leaving unresolved conflict between communist and anticommunist forces that would later give rise to the American war in Vietnam.⁶⁰ But because he regarded Algeria—unlike Indochina, Tunisia, or Morocco—as fundamentally part of France, and because he did not believe that Algerian Muslims’ histories or reports of their own needs had to be respected or even known, he could not envision any foreign policy allowing him to engage in true diplomacy with representatives of the revolution. Faced with rising anticolonial sentiment, he recognized that France had put Muslims in appalling social and economic conditions, and he opposed police abuses. He would have tried to satisfy some Algerian demands within the framework of French status if he had not been so strongly opposed by the European residents of Algeria.⁶¹ In this sense, Luste Boulbina points out, he was anticolonial. But he could not think of Algerians as political subjects, and thus he could not even acknowledge the civil war with which he was confronted: all speakers who refused to assume Algeria was part of France were by definition self-contradictory, irrational, and impossible to negotiate with.

For Luste Boulbina, Tocqueville represents Kant’s political moralist who ultimately puts expediency above dignity, the police before politics.⁶² He envisioned neither the slaves, nor the Algerians, nor the insurgent workers of Paris as speakers to be governed, but rather as things to be administered. Moreover, Tocqueville was not even trying to add a new colony to France but trying to restore the pre-Napoleonic empire. Like Mendès France’s attitude toward the Algerian nationalists, whom he insisted could not be acceptable interlocutors because he conceived of them as hoodlums, not politicians, Tocqueville’s benevolence toward non-Europeans, whether American or Arab, did not enable him to see them as genuine political subjects. Because he could not imagine the colonial state as abnormal in any way, Mendès France could not understand the National Liberation Front’s demand for sovereignty as such rather than as separatism or secession.

The benevolent attitude toward formerly colonized peoples—an educative attitude, which turns them into either favored or exploited objects of administration—was criticized even in the 1980s by Édouard Glissant with respect to France’s remaining Caribbean territories.⁶³ As Luste Boulbina argues, this attitude also informs the understanding of humanitarian intervention by which continued French interference in African politics is justified.⁶⁴ This is why she explores the complicated genealogy of the term toleration in liberalism and French republicanism specifically. Such toleration is an ambiguous attitude for depoliticizing a situation, not in the sense (as Marxists protest) that it ignores economic interests, history, and subject positions, but in the sense that it limits consideration of those interests and positions to the racially privileged subjects of political sovereignty.⁶⁵ In this sense, although Kant had little sympathy for the kinds of adversarial politics championed by later liberal thinkers, his moral politician would have stood up for the refusal of paternalism implied by Achtung, respect.

Both Tocqueville and Mendès France knew and did not know that the Algerians were subjects, exhibiting what Freud calls disavowal.⁶⁶ But their disavowal was as much the product of the arrangement of knowledge about the colonized as it was the result of personal moral conviction or opportunism. The silence of colonized peoples was a structural condition for the production of administrative statements, discourses, or events—indeed, for the invisible power of administration (with its penal and educational auxiliaries) as a form of knowledge that does not show up in any direct way in the traditional European university. Individuals’ memories of the colony, and their selective duty to remember, have thus been structured by screen memories, which hid painful, incomprehensible, and disabling perceptions behind an apparently anodyne recollection.⁶⁷ Tocqueville and Mendès France contributed to that screen through their assumptions about what constituted a colony, what constituted a normal state, and what constituted a war rather than civil unrest or regional separatism.

Thus, a haunted subjectivity corresponds to the evasion or disavowal of politics rather than its engagement. The phrase phantom Africa comes from the journals of Michel Leiris, who accompanied the famous Dakar-Djibouti anthropological expedition called for by the French government during 1931–33.⁶⁸ The data, narratives, and physical collection of cultural artifacts by this expedition shaped French anthropology for many decades. But as with the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt described by Said in Orientalism, the scientists dragged the administrative conditions for knowledge gathering behind them, creating conflict, benefiting from suppressed conflict, and provoking their interlocutors to conceal as much as they revealed.⁶⁹ The phantoms of Africa are manifest in the unnatural simplicity of Leiris’s travels in colonial space, as well as in the fragmented, frustrated, or panicky experiences of those who endured colonization, anticolonial warfare, and the pressure cooker of postindependence state building. These experiences, bodily but detached from use, take the form of screen memories and phantom limbs. They may not be recoverable, but one can philosophically and psychologically analyze the illusions they produce.

In phenomenology, the medical phenomenon of the phantom limb was enormously instructive for exploring the ontology of embodied subjectivity. The phantom limb testifies to the persistence of a subjectivity identified with bodily integrity even under the most damaging conditions.⁷⁰ It is a symptom, an organ whose construction allows the analyst to decipher and translate the trauma to which mind and body have been subjected. But in the process, the body to which this phantom belongs is redefined, and aspects of prior normality may come to seem pathological. In a society where the state of exception, particularly the colonial state of exception, has been normalized in relation to the historical past, the body of exception (to borrow Sidi Mohammed Barkat’s phrase) haunts the structure of contemporary epistemological and economic formations.⁷¹ Such haunting, as in Michael Haneke’s Caché (Hidden), is part of French life, no less than that of contemporary Algeria.⁷² France cannot claim to have been unmarked by the loss of its colonial appendages.⁷³

But such haunting is also part of the United States, because its heritage is woven from the experiences of European immigrants fleeing poverty and economic uncertainty in Europe and the experiences of transatlantic plantation slavery. These experiences are active in the Caribbean, from which the trauma of bondage in French, Creole, Spanish, Native American, and African languages was exported and then apparently sanitized, forgotten in English. Toni Morrison has foregrounded such ghosts in her fictions, which have inspired and will yet inspire more historiography. These ghosts are also active in South America due to the lasting legacy of dictatorships installed and maintained with the support of covert American and French counterinsurgency experts whose skills were first normalized during the Franco-Algerian war.⁷⁴ In Ghostly Matters, Avery Gordon connects these two scenes of disappearance in the American sociological imaginary, prepared and reworked through literature.⁷⁵ According to decolonial theorists such as Walter Mignolo, the Americas are even less advanced in the process of decolonization than Africa and Asia, despite the growth in radical black and Native American scholarship.

Frantz Fanon, the hyphen or trait d’union linking France to the Americas, takes medicine and psychiatry seriously as part of the organization of knowledge.⁷⁶ A contemporary of Foucault, even in his study of madness, Fanon focused on the way that colonialism anchored and surreptitiously justified the Western episteme.⁷⁷ Fanon reads the bodies of his patients as symptoms of a larger reality, one that includes manufactured phantoms, if not the ghosts of popular tradition. The body of the colonized subject, as Luste Boulbina traces its imprint in Fanon, is a body with neither skin nor tongue—its genitals, ears, and eyes are turned against it by both torture and psychological warfare. Using Fanon, Luste Boulbina shows how history functions as an interior architecture for the bodies caught in colonial conflict. She compares the subjectivizing, humanizing response to trauma in Europe after its major wars to the neglect of psychiatry in the former colonies. Likewise, language is an internal politics because it determines who will be considered an acceptable interlocutor and in what political scenes. In discussing these ideas, she picks up where Fanon left off, between Algeria and the Americas, adding new clinical concepts such as history as interior architecture and language as internal politics to Fanon’s psychoanalysis.

Languages that do not achieve official status, and events lived in languages that cannot connect to the public sphere, are not historical and trap their speakers in a retaliatory cycle whereby, as the analysts Davoine and Gaudillière have argued, what cannot be spoken of must somehow be made physically manifest.⁷⁸ At Blida-Joinville, Fanon confronted a French psychiatric practice that literally did not speak its patients’ languages. The failure or refusal to hear what is said in another’s native language forces him or her to spend valuable time translating and struggling to prove the possession of intelligence itself. To whatever emotional difficulties he or she may have experienced are added the emotional difficulties of struggling with one’s image in an imperfectly controlled language.⁷⁹ This everyday exhaustion and humiliation is part of the micropolitics of racial and colonial domination.

The official insistence that legal, educational, and medical interaction take place in a certain foreign language, as Luste Boulbina notes, can also be deployed by postcolonial states that wish to restrict discussion of those aspects of national history or those residual aspects of popular imagination lived in unofficial or unauthorized languages and associated with heterodox ideas. Unfortunately, indigenous texts and perspectives can easily be taken over by nationalist or fundamentalist political factions such that the Western episteme and its political and philosophical discourses seem be the only paths to pluralism and egalitarianism.⁸⁰ Ideally, the subjectivation that emerges from Rancière’s challenge to the existing distribution of roles and perceptions in acknowledged speech should be socially disidentifying rather than a social identification.⁸¹

Whereas history often attempts to explain, psychoanalysis interprets and translates.⁸² Literature, closely linked to the work of analytic narrative, demonstrates the relationship between what is silent and what is audible in a given language, particularly in a multilingual situation. The relationship of both psychoanalysis and literature to what cannot be known historically does produce subjects and public phenomena inasmuch as it alleviates ghosts and makes them once more capable of action. For this to work, of course, doctors and patients, writers and readers,