Читать книгу In Search of Africa(s) - Souleymane Bachir Diagne - Страница 15

Jean-Loup Amselle

Universalism has been, and continues to be, rightly decried insofar as the conquest and colonization of Africa were carried out in the name of the eradication of ‘barbaric customs’ such as slavery, human sacrifice or female genital mutilation.¹ What is described as ‘overarching universalism’ – a phrase that acts as a sort of frozen syntagm – and the corresponding imposition of the rights of man, or, as we say today, human rights, continue to be propagated in the form of campaigns against female genital mutilation, against homophobia and against the treatment meted out to women in the South. These campaigns are led by major international organizations and NGOs, and are taken up in Africa by the ‘secular’ fractions of the elites in each country; they have the disadvantage of arousing the determined opposition of a significant number of the population, who are in favour of maintaining female genital mutilation or are hostile to the emancipation of women and averse to homosexuality. It is also well known that in many cases the legal prohibition of female genital mutilation does not stop this practice from being performed.

Hostility towards any reform of what is supposed to be an immutable ‘tradition’ is also taken up and supported, in Mali, for example, by Muslim leaders of every tendency; they see it as a political marker for confronting the secular faction of the local bourgeoisie, which they describe as kowtowing to the West. So what is to some extent just a political issue between fractions of the ruling class is presented as a clash between Africa and the West, with the consequence of muddying the waters and fostering so-called ‘postcolonial’ positions.²

This phenomenon became clear during Barack Obama’s visit to Dakar, Senegal, in 2013: while the American president was favourable to ‘coming out’ about one’s sexual orientations, whatever they were, the Senegalese president Malick Sall said homosexuality was not one of the ‘African traditions’ and that there was no question of decriminalizing it.³ The imposition from outside of a universalism of human rights in its different forms – whether it be ‘the gay international’, as Joseph Massad put it with regard to homosexuality, or ‘femonationalism’, to use the term put forward by Black feminists⁴ – caused and continues to cause collateral damage within Southern countries, since the obligation to ‘come out’ as encouraged by the West has the effect, in both cases, of penalizing working-class homosexuals and trapping women within an apparent patriarchal dictatorship.

The importance of this damage should be relativized and a proper emphasis placed on the ‘agency’⁵ (the capacity of social actors to respond) of homosexuals in the South, especially in Muslim countries; and the same applies to women’s resistance to the injunctions of ‘White’ feminists from the North. Nonetheless, the fact remains that the imposition of a universalism of human rights is part of the aftermath of the colonial period⁶ and must, as such, be condemned – despite the ambiguities that ran through the Durban conferences in 2001 and 2009.⁷

Unfortunately, criticism of the unilateral imposition of human rights, of this overbearing Western universalism in all its aspects, often has the harmful effect – now as before, during the colonial period – of concealing the need to defend another type of universalism whose importance is obvious in the face of the excesses of cultural relativism associated with the denigration of reason, or what is now called decolonial ‘pluriversalism’.⁸ True, universalism must be rejected to the extent that it is only a Eurocentrism, and therefore a ‘particular’ opposing other ‘particulars’ seeking recognition. This does not, however, mean forgoing the quest for a unity of the different manifestations of capitalism on different continents or the search for potential communication and translation between different cultures.

To begin with, let us introduce the postcolonial thinkers Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose theories are often based on culturalist premises which emphasize the irreducible specificity of different countries or subcontinents such as China or India. As I endeavoured to show in my book L’Occident décroché, Indian historians of the ‘subalternist’ school who initially based their analyses of popular resistance on the ideas of Antonio Gramsci later resorted to other authors such as Michel Foucault and Louis Dumont, thereby giving an essentialist and culturalist flavour to their apprehension of Indian social realities.⁹ Those who oppose this culturalist vision and claim to have discovered a redefined universalism are more discrete: they come from the same Southern countries, but they also teach in the United States. Here I will mention the Indian Marxist thinker Vivek Chibber, professor at New York University. A defender of universalism, he insists that the manifestations of capitalism are basically the same in the East as in the West, in India, Europe and the United States.¹⁰ In a similar way, Nivedita Majumdar showed that the almost exclusive focus on gender at work in the writings of Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha had the effect of masking the forms of acquiescence to the tradition that are in some cases demonstrated by so-called ‘subaltern’ women, or of obscuring their class consciousness.¹¹

The American-Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, meanwhile, uses other data – basically, cultural data – and has a different theoretical slant, but he too is just as committed, within the context of what he defines as a ‘cosmopolitanism’, to seeking values shared by many cultures. My own concept of universalism is close to his theoretical model.¹²

Another American-Ghanaian philosopher, Kwasi Wiredu, is also clearly hostile to cultural relativism: he defends a universalist position based on the biological unity of the human species. For him, there is nothing impossible in the idea of translating Western concepts into African cultures (in this case, Akan)¹³ or African concepts into European languages, even though this latter transference is less common than the former. In this respect, he rejects the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, whose strong version, ‘linguistic determinism’, postulates that human actions are necessarily limited by the language in which they are expressed. He is also hostile to the idea of the ‘indeterminacy of translation’ put forward by the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, for whom to understand a sentence is to understand a language. In both cases, Wiredu believes, the powerful influence of language on thought cannot legitimize any relativism.¹⁴

Souleymane Bachir Diagne goes even further.¹⁵ Indeed, he has developed a theory of the universalism of translation whose major sources of inspiration are Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Lévi-Strauss, and the work of Emmanuel Levinas.

In the report he presented in 1958 to his colleagues with the aim of setting up a Chair in Social Anthropology for Lévi-Strauss at the Collège de France, Merleau-Ponty distinguished two kinds of universalism: overarching universalism and lateral universalism.¹⁶ By ‘overarching universalism’, Merleau-Ponty means the elementary, unconscious structures that Lévi-Strauss detected in kinship, with a focus on the universality of the nature/culture distinction and of the prohibition of incest.¹⁷ To this formalistic mathematics of ‘atoms of kinship’ – a mathematics that is perfectly inhuman, being attached to no given society or culture – Merleau-Ponty opposes a ‘lateral universalism’, based on the concreteness and richness of the society or culture that is the subject of the work of the ‘ethnographer’, a term which has in fact been largely abandoned by contemporary anthropology. As Merleau-Ponty puts it:

It’s about building a general reference system where the point of view of the native, the point of view of the civilized person, and the errors made by one about the other can find their place; it’s about constituting a broadened experience which may in principle become accessible to people of another country and another time.¹⁸

In this case, it is not a matter of applying a mathematical or logical apparatus on unconscious social actors from above, as a grammar is imposed on speakers, thereby flattening out all differences; rather, the aim is to establish an empirical communication between radically distinct cultural spheres. However, for Merleau-Ponty, this process of communication goes further, since he maintains that anthropologists must not only apprehend exotic societies, but also free themselves from the force field of their own society so as to see their own culture as if it were another, rather like Montesquieu, who, in The Persian Letters, looks at French society from the outside, or like François Jullien, who uses Chinese culture to apprehend his own (French) culture.

It is thus a kind of intercultural friction that Merleau-Ponty is proposing, a friction which should also allow Western anthropologists to find the ‘savage side’ within them – the ‘savage mind’ (Lévi-Strauss) which does not belong to so-called ‘primitive’ societies alone, but is common to all societies.¹⁹ Interculturalism, or the translation of cultures into one other, is thus for Merleau-Ponty a source of knowledge for human beings in general.

One striking contradiction, however, deserves to be noted. Merleau-Ponty bases his theory on the existence of discrete cultures in the mathematical sense of the term ‘discrete’, that is, discontinuous. To conceptualize translation, or interculturalism, he needs a concept of the discontinuous, just as the thinkers of hybridity need to base their arguments on the hypothesis of supposedly ‘pure’ cultures.

But there is another problem. Merleau-Ponty’s position with regard to what might be called exotic otherness or the ‘oblique universal’, which he locates exclusively in India and China (the only civilizations he knows – and even then it is through their philosophical ideas alone), is not without its ambiguity, as is evident from his discussions of this topic in Signs,²⁰ a work that was published in 1960, at around the same time as a report supporting Lévi-Strauss’s candidacy for a chair at the Collège de France. Merleau-Ponty follows an evolutionist tradition leading from Hegel to Husserl, and sees Indian and Chinese thought as a kind of unfinished ‘prematuration’ of Western thought, which, in his view, is alone capable of reaching universality. But, at the same time, he echoes Léopold Sédar Senghor²¹ and looks forward to Michel Foucault²² in the way he views this ‘prematuration’ as simultaneously a source of primitivism capable of regenerating a Western thinking based solely on the development of (frigid) reason, and thus able to ‘learn from them [these non-European cultures] to rediscover the relationship to being’.²³ It is surprising, in this respect, that Diagne did not view Merleau-Ponty as a postcolonial author avant la lettre.

An analysis of certain aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s work demonstrates that considering certain societies as unfinished, owing to their occupying an earlier phase of the history of humankind, and viewing them in an ahistorical way, also turns this defect into a quality, a certain soulfulness that might be able to breathe fresh life into an enfeebled, withered West. All the ambiguity of what is called the ‘reversal of the stigma’ (the stigma of ‘Négritude’ in particular) is summed up by this episode in the history of thought, and it is the same ambiguity that we find in certain aspects of the various different types of postcolonialism.²⁴ It is easy to understand why the work of Merleau-Ponty, who championed Lévi-Strauss and was attentive, for better and for worse, to exotic otherness, managed to seduce Diagne.

Emmanuel Levinas is also a major philosopher on whom Diagne relies to develop his idea of the universalism of translation. It should be borne in mind that Levinas’s particularly rich and complex work combines, in a contradictory way, both a hymn to cultural diversity and a vision, or conception, inspired by Platonism. On the one hand, what Levinas acknowledges in Greek philosophy is a superiority of the (personal) other (autrui) over being, of ethics over ontology. For him, the ‘Greek’ is the man open to all seas, so that ‘the Good is a matter more of the delta than the source: it is the Greek element, also a source in its own way, but the pre-eminent model of openness, interpretation and infinite translatability’.²⁵ So the universality of the ‘Greek philosopher’ is the place where all cultures can potentially overlap and be translated into one another. Levinas thus presents us with the hypothesis of a de-Westernized, de-Platonized world, one that is not subject to the affirmation of the human regardless of culture and history, in a word, de-moralized. It is this relativist conception of culture, as expressed in some of Levinas’s works, which Diagne embraces.

But, on the other hand, in Humanism of the Other, a book which plays a major role in Diagne’s argument, Levinas follows another line of thought, one that is strictly Platonic:

The saraband of innumerable and equivalent cultures, each justified within in its own context, has created a world that is certainly de-Westernized, but it is also a world that is dis-oriented. To see the meaning of a situation which precedes culture, to perceive language from the revelation of the Other […] is to return to Platonism in a new way.²⁶

After opening Greek philosophy up to the plurality of cultures, Levinas therefore dismisses cultural relativism and returns to what he refers to as the Other (Autre), the figure of the Divine that takes shape on the face of the Other-as-person (Autrui), a figure which in fact resembles the figure of the One. In Levinas, the overarching universal actually pre-exists what he somewhat condescendingly calls the ‘saraband’ of cultures, the infinite shimmer of cultural diversity that in itself bears no real meaning. For our philosopher, this infinite wealth, this infinite diversity, in short the ‘noise’ that the cultures of the world make in their mad saraband, is an embarrassment for the serenity which should preside over our reflection on, and quest for, Being. For the author of Humanism of the Other, who constantly plays on the difference between ‘other’ and ‘Other’, the philosophy of Being is prior and superior to anthropology, in the sense that anthropologists give this term.

For Diagne, cultural diversity, the infinite profusion and shimmer of all the cultures of the world, cannot be conceived as a ‘saraband’ – at best, a lascivious oriental dance, at worst (and this is doubtless the meaning intended here by Levinas), a way of making a noise, kicking up a racket. This is not Diagne’s view: he sees no contradiction between the quest for the universal and the appreciation of cultural diversity. Indeed, while he rejects ‘overarching universalism’ as understood by Merleau-Ponty, that is, the search for categories or structures valid at all times, in all places and for all people – categories derived from the questions about kinship or sorcery that the anthropologist forces onto his or her informers or that the West seeks to force onto the rest of the world (in the guise of human rights) –, he nevertheless declares himself be a staunch defender of universalism. But, for Diagne, this universalism is based on the possibility of a translation, that is, on the infinite translatability of all cultures into one other. So it is paradoxically in the dimension of cultural relativism that his quest for universality lies, as the purpose of his approach is to find ‘common ground’ for all cultures on an empirical basis.

To this end, Diagne defines two kinds of translations: a vertical translation and a horizontal translation. The former concerns the reception of the suras of the Qur’an by the prophet Muhammad, this revelation being conceived as a translation of the divine language. The latter relates to the translation of different cultures and languages into one another. Taking into account the problem raised by the principle of the former kind of translation for anyone who is not a believer, we may wonder if the latter kind of translation does not benefit, in its optimism, from the truly religious posture of the former, to some extent as happens in Leibniz’s ‘Monadology’ of 1714.²⁷ Indeed, unlike such writers as Édouard Glissant, François Jullien and Barbara Cassin, Diagne does not postulate any ‘opacity’ or ‘untranslatable’ residue underlying the relationship between different cultures: in his view, every culture is in principle commensurable, understandable, assimilable by any individual from another culture.²⁸

This first difficulty is compounded by the question of whether this universalism of translation is based on the illusion of the separate purity of each culture. In other words, it could be that the infinite cultural diversity of the planet as it has been collected over the centuries by travellers, conquerors, missionaries, colonial administrators and ethnologists is actually, in the words of Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, an ‘invention of tradition’.²⁹

This desire to put different cultures on the same level paradoxically leads to hyper-relativism. Apart from the question of postcolonialism or decolonial pluriversalism, it leads to a whole swathe of contemporary anthropology tilting towards ecological and anti-speciesist hyper-relativism, a shift that is mainly carried out by disciples of Lévi-Strauss who have abandoned that aspect of his work that is properly focused on universalism (notably The Elementary Structures of Kinship) and who are now engaged in ‘perspectivism’, a kind of ‘multinaturalism’ where the aims of the jaguar (the prey) are posed as equivalent to the aims of the Amazonian hunter pursuing it.³⁰ Even though Diagne is not directly connected to this trend, his ecological perspective and hyper-relativist tendencies are part of the same zeitgeist.

The old cultural relativism of American anthropology to which Lévi-Strauss was linked is thus put on the back burner, since man is no longer conceived, as he was by Descartes, as ‘the master and possessor of nature’; rather, nature itself, the Earth (Gaia), becomes a living creature, in line with the Amerindian notion of Pachamama, the ‘Mother Earth’, the emblem of several NGOs and of the anti-globalization movement ATTAC – a notion that is promoted by both the philosopher Isabelle Stengers and the ‘decolonial’ sociologist Ramón Grosfoguel.³¹ In this perspective, the destruction caused to the environment in Central and South America is less the result of actions of multinational mining companies than an assault on ‘Mother Earth’.

We seem to be straying from Diagne’s ideas, but in actual fact, as we will see later, there is a certain overlap between the Indianocentric ideas of Pachamama and buen vivir, on the one hand, and the Afrocentric positions on human rights set foward by Diagne as they appear in ‘the Charter of the Mandé’.

And while Diagne admittedly does not go so far as to endorse the extreme positions of his Latin American colleagues, his hypothesis of the universalism of translation between different cultures nevertheless presupposes a hyper-relativism that is found in both fields.

The positions of Kwame Anthony Appiah, Kwasi Wiredu and Souleymane Bachir Diagne on the relations between the universal and the particular may be different, but all share a conception which, despite being generous with regard to the possibility of a communication and thus a translation between African and Western cultures, ultimately rests on the initial postulate of the existence of discrete cultures; even when they are not considered ‘intact’ (as in Quine, for example), and unaffected by history, these cultures are nevertheless closed entities existing in some eternal way.

Against this position, or rather these positions, I consider that it is appropriate to postulate the primacy of the whole over the parts: that is, the primacy of ‘chains of societies’, of ‘originary syncretism’, of ‘branchings’ and of cultural derivations. In my opinion, each culture is made of bits and pieces; it is a composite, so that there are no purely local identities. In my various works such as Au coeur de l’ethnie (At the heart of ethnicity),³² Mestizo Logics³³ and Branchements (Connections),³⁴ I have tried to show that, right from the start, the processes of identification involved, in whatever historical period, signifiers much more extensive than those of the local communities, and that these signifiers were reappropriated by social actors in the form of particularistic utterances.

Indeed, the palette of the world’s cultures, as we know it today, or rather as it appears on the ethnic maps of Africa in particular, does not reflect a definite state of affairs, but rather a socio-historical construction, the projection of a knowledge/power onto what is actually a continuous network of cultures and societies.³⁵ As I have tried to show, the way different ethnic groups of West Africa have been recorded by colonial knowledge/power for the purposes of intellectual and political management resulted in the rending of the continuous fabric which had united these societies in the precolonial era.³⁶ Cultural singularity is thus the product, in a colonial context that postcolonial authors should certainly not ignore, of the (generally speaking arbitrary) delimitation of ethnic groups and cultures – a delimitation that results from a process of de-historicization, de-Islamization and de-politicization, in short of an ethnic cleansing effectuated in the intellectual and political field. This process prefigures the numerous cases of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and genocides that have occurred or are occurring now.

What some authors propose under the humanist label of the universalism of translation is actually based on sewing back together entities previously torn apart by colonial knowledge/power. Viewing the ‘saraband’ of cultures as a timeless entity is thus tantamount to forgetting the historical process through which the multiple ethnic groups and cultures of the world have come to be what they are. Claiming that they can be grasped sub specie aeternitatis amounts to setting them up as so many essences and turning them into the prey of processes of ethnic cleansing that in other contexts are deplored.

Everyone – or at least all those who are willing to accept the fact – knows that the categories of Hutu and Tutsi do not refer to immemorial ethnic groups, but that they are the product of the imposition of these categories by Belgian missionaries in Rwanda. These ethnic categories were themselves inspired by a reading of the works of François Guizot and Augustin Thierry dealing with the interracial war that, in the history of France, set the Franks against the Gauls!³⁷ Before colonization, in Rwanda there were just Tutsi and Hutu kingdoms, and there was therefore no ethnic opposition, since they all spoke, and still speak, the same language, Kinyarwanda. Only with colonization and the identity cards on which one’s ethnic identity appeared did these categories emerge; the genocide of 1994 was thus to some extent a belated effect of the imposition of this colonial knowledge.

Yet we need to go beyond the pure vision of the ‘invention of tradition’. We really need to ask why these categories imported and imposed by outside agents have ‘set’, in the way that concrete sets. One answer would lie in the strong similarities that existed between the political models in force in the France of the Ancien Régime and in precolonial Africa. In fact, the predominant theories of power in these two areas drew a contrast in each case between those who held political power from the outside and the indigenous masters of ritual and the soil, which corresponds exactly to the model of the ‘war of the two races’ (Franks versus Gallo-Romans or Normans versus Anglo-Saxons) unearthed by Michel Foucault in Society Must be Defended.³⁸

This is the new ‘matrix of universalism’, with its postulate of principles common to many cultures, that I would like to propose, based not on some speculative reflection, but on the study of concrete situations tackled both by empirical field study and by a close analysis of the texts that discuss it. There are two main ways of doing anthropology: one can either start from differences and end up with similarities, or start from similarities and consider differences as a ‘remainder’. It will be understood that it is this last way of doing anthropology that I prefer.

This counter-intuitive point of view can also be supported by the existence of many practices that straddle Africa and Europe, such as the use of clairvoyance by certain heads of state – Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and François Mitterrand, for example – or even the religion of consumption which is reflected in an exponential growth in the amount of waste and which can be compared, mutatis mutandis, to the sacrifices made to fetishes in Africa. It is probably no coincidence that Marx characterizes capitalism as the reign of ‘commodity fetishism’, resorting to a concept based on the observations made by the Dutch merchant Willem Bosman on the coasts of Africa and later by Charles de Brosses. An equivalence is thus drawn between the way Africans worship certain objects called fetishes and the consumer goods that are worshipped in consumer societies. Both cases involve ‘partial objects’ that manifest the nature of ‘religion’ in force in both African ‘precapitalist’ societies and Western ‘developed’ societies.³⁹ On this point, I share the position of some Latin American liberation theologians such as Hugo Assmann and Franz Hinkelammert.⁴⁰

The critique of overarching universalism, as developed by Merleau-Ponty and taken up by Diagne, cannot provide a path for the legitimate struggle of the old colonized peoples against the old colonial powers to follow, or for the struggle of African migrants and minorities fighting the discrimination imposed on them by the powers and governments of Western countries. Indeed, in my view this posture conceals two major pitfalls: it replaces class with race, religion and identity and thereby minimizes internal class conflicts in African countries (and in the countries of the South in general) and in the countries of the North. This is what the political and religious leaders of certain African countries do when they use female genital mutilation or the struggle against homosexuality (as they once used AIDS) to create an imagined conflict between practices described as foreign and as such to be condemned, and African ‘traditions’ that have remained fundamentally healthy.

So I do not think it is relevant to ‘provincialize Europe’, as Dipesh Chakrabarty calls on us to do, turning it into just one more cultural area, as this would result in a formatting of the world as so many cultural areas impervious to one other.⁴¹ In my opinion, it is the quest for commonalities which must prevail over the affirmation of differences.

In L’Occident décroché, I analyse postcolonialism as a critical trend led by Indian, African and Latin American thinkers. These thinkers undermine the legacy of colonial domination in the kinds of knowledge constructed by the social sciences concerning dominated societies. In that work, I undertake a critical presentation of this trend of thought, as well as the forces contesting the West. While exposing the arguments and the pathways of this movement, I try to show how some of these writers incline towards forms of primitivism and cultural essentialism, sometimes taking over colonial stigmas while attempting to reverse their meaning. Thus, postcolonialism seems to me to constitute, by means of a new ruse of reason, the surest way of establishing the hegemony of the West even as it seems to aim at reversing it. That is why L’Occident décroché cannot in any way, pace Diagne, be equated with defending the idea that ‘the West is […] naturally the place of the universal’. Diagne also describes me as ‘paranoid’ and believes that I am ‘tilting against windmills’, but I could gently return the compliment.⁴² Nor am I ‘nostalgic for a universal that really existed and is threatened by postcoloniality’;⁴³ my main aim is to affirm that there is a possibility of communication between cultures, or, rather, as all my works (based on fieldwork) strive to show, that it is not relevant to take every culture into consideration when trying to understand the history of humankind and that we must start from ‘chains of societies’ or branching ‘connections’ to show that local identities do not exist and never have.⁴⁴

Therefore, in the final analysis, the demand made by postcolonial thinkers that Europe consider itself as a cultural area radically different from other cultural areas cannot fail to satisfy the European far right, which endeavours to seek exclusively Christian roots for this continent by ostentatiously ignoring Jewish, Muslim and Roma contributions. By criticizing universalism as ‘White’, as the Indigenous of the Republic do,⁴⁵ or by endeavouring to ‘provincialize Europe’, postcolonial thinkers and their decolonial successors are forgetting that Europe is merely a political and intellectual construction aimed at excluding from its space everything it considers as not (or no longer) part of itself (i.e. non-Christians) and as shunning all the continents (the migrants) from which it seeks to preserve itself. To define Europe as a distinct cultural area is therefore to render a great service to all European nationalists since this is the very idea they strive to promote. Just as the thinkers of the far right have as their stock in trade the idea of an eternal France, England or Germany, an intangible Europe of the nations, so they need to believe in the ‘African’ (who has not fully entered history) as well as in the durability of ethnic groups across the different precolonial, colonial and postcolonial periods in the history of Africa.

In short, the essential question here is that of difference: the difference between the African and European continents, and the difference between the many African ethnic groups and cultures – a problematic which ultimately forms the basis of the theme of translation which lies at the centre of Diagne’s thought.