Читать книгу In Search of Africa(s) - Souleymane Bachir Diagne - Страница 8

The reader will indeed note, in the following pages, many convergences between the views of Souleymane Bachir Diagne, those of Jean-Loup Amselle, and decolonial thought. In particular, the two thinkers share with decolonial thought a scathing criticism of Eurocentrism and its erroneous identification with the universal. They also declare themselves to be sceptical about so-called ‘postcolonial breaks’, when these breaks merely invert the stigmas or values associated with non-Western worlds and thereby reinstate the usual hierarchies, such as the hegemonic domination of the West. Amselle’s critique of postcolonialism as the ‘new ruse of reason’ (p. 17), whether this reason be colonial or simply ‘ethnological’ (p. 33); Diagne’s parallel denunciation of ‘epistemological colonialism’ (p. 97); their shared willingness to ‘break with the Cartesian mechanical view that provided the enterprise of transforming “nature” into “natural resources” with its philosophy’ (p. 27); their desire to go back and produce a ‘history of philosophy in Africa’ integrated into the history of philosophy in the Western world and into ‘the history of philosophy in the Islamic world in general’ (p. 98) – all these points of agreement are so many decolonial gestures that mark real convergences between the two thinkers. These convergences are actually even more prominent when we explore their respective oeuvres. For that, we need to conduct a brief overview of their work: this will enable us to put the following dialogues into perspective, to draw the line of convergence where two parallel and distinct itineraries could finally meet.