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One need merely glance at the bibliography of the Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne to discover that he is the author of an oeuvre as demanding as it is disparate, since it has three distinct aspects. First of all, it includes works on various European thinkers (George Boole, Henri Bergson), such as studies in critical epistemology on the type of thinking and logic inherent in mathematics, especially algebra (Boole, 1815–1864),¹⁶ followed by an edition with commentary of Boole’s Laws of Thought.¹⁷ Then come books devoted to philosophical practices in the Islam world: Islam and Open Society¹⁸ and Open to Reason.¹⁹ Finally there are the works on philosophical practices in Africa, such as African Art as Philosophy²⁰ and, more recently, The Ink of the Scholars.²¹

Diagne is clearly working at the crossroads where different disciplines and different worlds meet, and he embodies a form of transcultural thought that straddles and ceaselessly interrelates continents and eras. When you look more closely, his work appears de facto driven by two imperatives: on the one hand, it strives to be rooted in ‘specific’ thought traditions (algebraic logic, the Muslim world, the African world), and, on the other hand, it aims to bring these traditions into dialogue with one another.

Whenever he talks about Boole, Diagne reminds us, following Descartes, for example, that algebra came to Europeans via the mediation of the Arab world, so we need to constantly bear in mind the existence of other traditions of thought that make similar demands on rationality. All things being equal, and as if in a spirit of symmetry, Diagne stresses that the act of philosophizing as it developed in the Muslim cultural world itself came largely from the thinkers of ancient Greece with whom Arab and Persian thinkers entered into dialogue by translating their works. This dialogue was pursued in other Muslim areas: the Indian thinker Muhammad Iqbal, for instance, engaged in a veritable philosophical conversation with the works of European philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson.

Translation, of course, involves written traditions, and inevitable shifts of emphasis. Diagne looks back at the different intellectual disciplines that filled the shelves of the Islamic library, and focuses on three discursive practices: rational theology (kalam), philosophy (falsafa) and Sufism (tasawwuf). In his view, philosophical reflection goes beyond the limits of falsafa alone in order to manifest itself in other discourses, or even other human practices, such as art. This means that two additional dimensions become important for him.

Diagne pays particular attention to the question of the becomingphilosophical of languages: for him, all thought is built not only in a language, but also in the ordeal of its passage or its translation into another. Over the years, he has produced some remarkable analyses of the transformations of Arabic into a philosophical language (Open to Reason), via translations of Greek texts; and more generally he has investigated all the practices of philosophizing in non-European languages, especially in African languages (The Ink of the Scholars).

In tandem with this observation, which might border on a certain conceptual if not linguistic relativism, Diagne comes to a quite different and almost antithetical conclusion. Noting that, thanks to symbolic writing, thought can also be emancipated from the limitations of a given language – especially in the context of algebra –, and can thus be transmitted otherwise than by oral means, he emphasizes what we could call a ‘cognitive universalism’ that always ultimately transcends differences in culture and language.

Finally, this question of the symbolic underpinnings of language goes beyond the strictly linguistic dimension, since other practices can themselves proceed from a form of philosophizing and arouse thought in their turn. In the West, of course, as we know especially from the work of the art historian Daniel Arasse, ‘painting thinks’, it produces and stages thought through modes of non-verbal figuration (such as framing, perspective and composition).²² But in his study of Léopold Sédar Senghor, Diagne shows that, in Africa, art (and, in particular, sculpture) is also a way of producing thought, or ‘a certain approach to reality’, just as ‘scientific knowledge is another [such approach]’. From this point of view, ‘“Negro art” is philosophy’, insofar as it is ‘interpretable as philosophical observations about the nature of the world’.²³

What does African art, as philosophical expression, actually think about? Senghor’s answer lies in insisting on rhythm as the ordering force behind Negro style, while at the same time rhythm is mainly for him the manifestation of a ‘vital force’, or, more precisely, a vitalism of strengths. We can of course compare this answer with the one proposed by Muhammad Iqbal, who characterizes philosophizing in Islam as a ‘movement in thought’, as Diagne puts it in Islam et société ouverte.

It is indeed a real tour de force on the part of Diagne to have drawn a comparison, in his Bergson postcolonial,²⁴ between some of the key ideas in Iqbal and Senghor, and to have related them to the influence of Bergsonism on non-European thought. In the Indian philosopher, says Diagne, ‘the juridico-theological concept of itjihad, which is usually translated as “effort of interpretation”’ (p. 67), or as ‘movement in thought’, is seen as a way of ‘mobilizing Islam’ – in other words, ‘getting it on the move again’ – by leading it, via Bergson, to reconnect with its initial ‘vitalist philosophy’ (p. 79). Life must then be understood as a permanent renewal of the presence of God in the world, and the cosmology of the Qur’an as a ‘creative evolution’ according to a number of verses or sayings of the Prophet (the hadith), quoted on two occasions (pp. 85 and 111). Similarly, the Négritude of Senghor – who insists on emotion, who roots his outlook in a dynamic ontology (‘being is strength’, p. 47) and who highlights the importance of dance and rhythm as a ‘corporal cogito’ (p. 22) – flows directly from the ‘1889 revolution’ when Bergson, in his book of that year, Time and Free Will, underlined the primarily affective nature of the human mind.

If Bergson arouses so much interest in Diagne, this is not only because he allows him to mediate between two such culturally distinct and religiously distant thinkers as the Indian Muslim Muhammad Iqbal and the Senegalese Catholic Léopold Sédar Senghor. Beyond his insistence on the emotional dimension, Bergson also attacked the opposition between primitive or pre-logical mentality and civilized or rational thought in his last book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). In sum, Bergson is not only the thinker of the élan vital, but also the philosopher of the coexistence of opposites and their unification within every individual. From this point of view, we can call him ‘postcolonial’ avant la lettre, since, in Diagne’s view, he always insists on the hybridity inherent in the human being (both body and mind, affect and judgement, belief and rationality), and thereby rejects the artificial binary oppositions between Westerners and non-Westerners disseminated by the ethnology of his time, as for example in the works of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl.

So, if I were to summarize Diagne’s philosophical position in my turn, I would be obliged to conclude that he himself embodies a paradoxical style of thought that flies in the face of the accepted ideas of his time. Against the common idea that Africa is the continent of orality, this Senegalese thinker keeps coming back to the ancient and dynamic presence of written traditions – including philosophical traditions – in Africa, as in the manuscripts of Timbuktu. Against the idea that languages and cultural identities are distinct entities with rigid contours, he shows that they are in fact always fluid, that they borrow from other entities some of their constitutive elements, and that they are defined by subjecting these entities to operations of translation. Finally, while admitting that one can be (or think) ‘Negro’, he never reserves this privilege solely to the ‘Blacks’ of Africa or its diasporas, but insists, on the contrary, on the importance of the interbreeding and pluralism within each individual, each culture.

‘In searching for origin,’ he wrote in his book on Senghor, ‘one is always brought back to the exploration of one’s own hybridity, to the discovery that one is “legion”’, so that ultimately ‘all human civilization is only such because of mixture’.²⁵ This is a lesson that the reader will easily be able to draw from the following interviews, and this defence of an ‘originary syncretism’ will also clearly signal the close connections between the thought of Souleymane Bachir Diagne and that of Jean-Loup Amselle.