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Comment? Ils causent tout seuls?
(What? Theyre conversing on their own?)
Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations V, 168
In the rest of the world, the postcolonial turn in the
social sciences and humanities took place nearly a quarter century ago. Since
then, the method or style of critique associated with that movement has inu-
enced myriad political, epistemological, institutional, and disciplinary debates in
the United States, the United Kingdom, and regions across the Southern Hemi-
sphere (South America, Australia, New Zealand, the Indian subcontinent, and
South Africa).
1
From its inception, postcolonial studies has been interpreted in
extremely diverse ways; over time, it has spawned robust waves of polemic and
controversy, not to mention the many objections, each contradicting the previous,
that continue today.
2
It has also given rise to an abundance of profoundly rich and
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1. For an example of this diversity, see Mabel Moraa, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Juregui,
eds., Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate (Durham, N.C.: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2008). See also Fernando Coronil, Latin American Postcolonial Studies and Global
Decolonization, in The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, ed. Neil Lazarus
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 221 40; and Vinayak Chaturvedi, ed., Mapping
Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (New York: Verso, 2000).
2. See Simon During, Postcolonialism and Globalization: Towards a Historicization of Their
Inter- relation, Cultural Studies 14 (2000): 385 404; and Harry D. Harootunian, Postcolonialitys
PubIic CuIture
86
tremendously divergent intellectual, political, and aesthetic practices so much
so that one might earnestly ask where the unity of postcolonial studies lies.
3

But despite this logic of segmentation, one can assert that, at its core, the object of
postcolonial critique is best described in terms of the interlacing of histories and
the concatenation of distinct worlds. Given that slavery and especially coloniza-
tion (but also migrations, the ordering of sex and sexuality, and the circulation of
forms, imaginaries, goods, ideas, and people) played such decisive roles in this
process of human collision and entanglement, it is logical that postcolonial studies
has made them the privileged objects of its inquiry.
The most compelling work in postcolonial studies does not take colonization
to be an immutable, ahistorical structure or an abstract entity. Instead, coloniza-
tion is apprehended as a complex process that generates frontiers and intervals,
zones of passage, and interstitial spaces. Similarly, it asserts that as a historical
and modern force, one of colonizations functions has been the production of sub-
alternity. Many imperial powers exercised, in their respective colonial contexts,
modes of subordination founded on racial differences and juridical statuses that,
while often differentiated, always, at the end of the day, produced inferior rank-
ings. Conversely, in order to articulate their demands for equality, many colo-
nized populations were moved to elaborate a critique of the harm and injustice
engendered by both the law of race and racialized law (as well as the law of
gender and sexuality). Postcolonial studies thus examines the work accomplished
by the categories of race, gender, and sexuality in colonial imaginaries and seeks
to evaluate their role in the very process of producing colonial subjects. Such
work also is concerned with analyzing the forms of resistance that have marked
colonial history, the diverse experiences of emancipation and their limits, and
the ways that oppressed people have constituted themselves as historical subjects
and thus contributed, of their own right, to the constitution of a transnational and
diasporic world. Finally, postcolonial studies also considers the manner in which
Unconscious/Area Studies Desire, Postcolonial Studies 2 (1999): 127 47. See, more recently,
Priyamvada Gopal and Neil Lazarus, eds., Postcolonial Studies after Iraq, special issue, New For-
mations, no. 59 (2006); and PMLA 122, 123 (2007). See also Aijaz Ahmed, In Theory: Classes,
Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1993); and Arif Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World
Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997).
3. Read in particular Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford,
U.K.: Blackwell, 2001); David Ludden, ed., Reading Subaltern Studies: Critical History, Contested
Meaning, and the Globalization of South Asia (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001); and Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).
PrcvinciaIizing france!
8
traces of a colonial past become, in the present moment, the object of symbolic
and pragmatic work, as well as the conditions under which these practices give
rise to unprecedented hybrid or cosmopolitan forms of life, politics, culture, and
modernities.
Disjuncture and 1empcraI Disccrdance
Boundaries between academic disciplines, the relatively stark provincialism of
the knowledge produced and disseminated in the Hexagon (consistently masked
by the exportation of the works of thinkers like Jean- Paul Sartre, Simone de
Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, or
Pierre Bourdieu), and cultural narcissism and conceit have all contributed to the
marginal position of France in these global ventures of thought. Until recently,
postcolonial studies has been disparaged or, at best, overlooked in French scholar-
ship. Is this cavalier indifference or plain ignorance masking for insolence? Cal-
culated ostracism or mere accident? Whatever the reason, up until the onset of the
millennium, postcolonial studies has not been the object of an informed critique
or serious, conversant debate within the French academy.
4
Aside from a handful
of texts by Edward Said, almost no works by scholars claiming afliation with
this intellectual current or its various streams (subaltern studies, for example)
were translated into French.
5
Indeed, just when postcolonial studies was on the rise in Anglo- Saxon aca-
demic and artistic circles, French politics and cultural production was moving
on an opposite trajectory, entering what we might call an imperial winter.
This winter can be characterized as a series of disconnections, anathemas,
and grand excommunications that culminated in the relative provincialization of
French thought and its regression on a planetary scale. Signicant from this point
of view was the rupture with Marxism and with a conception of the relations
between the production of knowledge and political engagement inherited from
a long history of engagement with workers movements, internationalism, and
anticolonialism. The empire having been so deeply entrenched in French identity,
its loss (and especially that of Algeria) was tantamount to a veritable amputation
4. Notable exceptions are Jacques Pouchepadass, Les subaltern studies ou la critique post-
coloniale de la modernit, Lhomme, no. 156 (2000): 161 86; and Marie- Claude Smouts, ed., La
situation postcoloniale: Les postcolonial studies dans le dbat franais (Paris: Presses de la
Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 2007).
5. An exception is Mamadou Diouf, Lhistoriographie indienne en dbat: Colonialisme, nation-
alisme et socits postcoloniales (Paris: Karthala, 1999).
PubIic CuIture
88
in a national imaginary suddenly deprived of one of its greatest sources of pride.
Imperial history one function of which was to sing the praises of the nation,
paint a gallery of heroic portraits with images of conquests, epics, and exotic
representations was relegated to a peripheral region of national consciousness.
6

At the moment when, bolstered by poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, and a tradi-
tion of critical Marxism, postcolonial studies takes off in the Anglo- Saxon world,
many French scholars who otherwise might have found interest in postcolonial
studies some having been Communist Party activists or sympathizers, others
having been associated with radical organizations are eager to be done with
Marxism and its avatars, most notably Third- Worldism (le tiers- mondisme).
7

Especially on the left where various struggles for justice had been closely iden-
tied with the Communist Party a new generation of intellectuals sought to
escape unconditional adhesion to Marxist dogma as a precondition for a renewed
critique of Stalinism and the politics of the Soviet Union in terms that did not
simply reiterate the language of ultranationalism. Convinced that socialism could
not possibly succeed in the West, others were nding it futile to transfer Western
revolutionary and utopian aspirations onto the struggles in Third World countries.
Thus Sartre and an entire tradition of anticolonialist thought became awash in
sarcasm, soon the subject of a rousing disavowal. Before that time, Frantz Fanon,
nearly condemned to ostracism, had started his long purgatory, engaging only
marginal voices that were mostly ignored. Likewise, the sanctimonious elite took
little interest in Aim Csaires Discourse on Colonialism and even less in his
Tragedy of King Christophe or Season in the Congo. Of the poet, the only image
they were keen to preserve was of a man who, turning his back on the sirens of
independence, chose to make his island one of Frances administrative depart-
ments. Neither of the two main movements of the twentieth century aimed at
deconstructing race the 1960s civil rights movement in the United States and
the global struggle against apartheid of the 1980s and 1990s has distinguished
6. Sophie Dulucq, Catherine Coquery- Vidrovitch, Jean Frmigacci, Emmanuelle Sibeud, and
Jean- Louis Triaud, Lcriture de lhistoire de la colonisation en France depuis 1960, Afrique et
histoire 2 (2006): 235 76.
7. Grard Chaliand, Les mythes rvolutionnaires du tiers monde: Gurillas et socialismes (Paris:
Seuil, 1979); Pascal Bruckner, Le sanglot de lhomme blanc: Tiers- monde, culpabilit, haine de soi
(Paris: Seuil, 1982); Carlos Rangel, LOccident et le tiers monde: De la fausse culpabilit aux vraies
responsabilits (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1982); Yves Lacoste, Contre les anti- tiers- mondistes et contre
certains tiers- mondistes (Paris: La Dcouverte, 1985); Claude Liauzu, Aux origines des tiersmond-
ismes: Coloniss et anticolonialistes en France, 1919 1939 (Paris: LHarmattan, 1982); Liauzu,
Les intellectuels franais au miroir algrien: lments pour une histoire des tiers- mondismes (Nice:
Cahiers de la Mditerrane, 1984).
PrcvinciaIizing france!
8g
or even watermarked the works of the most prominent French intellectuals,
aside from Sartre, Beauvoir, and a few residues of Derrida. Toward the end of
the 1970s, when Foucault spoke of the racial state, he had not a word for South
Africa, the eras only example of actually existing legal segregation.
8
In the
end, it was in America and not in Paris that Maryse Cond, Valentin Mudimbe,
and douard Glissant all great French or francophone gures identied with
postcolonial studies, regardless of their own claims to such labels found refuge
and recognition.
A key element of French colonial humanism consisted in acknowledging in
the features of peoples who had been conquered by France the multiple faces
of humanity. For colonial reformers in particular, the differences among various
groups of human beings did not foreclose the possibility of a colonial empire
founded on the principle of asymmetrical fraternity. The colonial enterprise itself
had been a relatively multiracial project. From the administrative heads (com-
mandants de cercle) to the interpreters, all the way up to the governor; from the
tirailleurs (native infantrymen) drafted during the wars of conquest or pacication
to the deputy of the Palais Bourbon, and even the ministers of the republic the
public face of the French colonial state was far from being entirely pale.
9
But by
the beginning of the 1980s, this colorful mosaic was nothing but a faded memory.
Minorities were progressively hidden away, placed in the dark and covered with a
veil of prudery that obfuscated their visibility in the nations political and public
life. At the same time, Frances old African possessions were abandoned to their
tyrants, who received, through corruption and military aid, generous political
and ideological support from the French ruling class.
10
African dissidents, such
as Mongo Beti, who denounced neocolonial violence, were ridiculed and left to
howl in the wilderness.
11
And when marginalization proved insufcient to bring
8. Michel Foucault, Il faut dfendre la socit: Cours au Collge de France, 1975 1976
(Paris: Seuil/Gallimard, 1997).
9. On this phenomenon, W. E. B. DuBois wrote: I have walked in Paris with [Blaise] Diagne
who represents Senegal all Senegal, white and black in the French parliament. But Diagne is a
Frenchman who is accidentally black. I suspect Diagne despises his own black Wolofs. I have talked
with Candace, black deputy of Guadeloupe. Candace is virulently French. He has no conception of
Negro uplift, as apart from French development. W. E. B. DuBois, The Negro Mind Reaches Out,
in The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (1925; repr., New York: Touchstone, 1997), 397. See also Brian
Weinstein, bou (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972).
10. See Achille Mbembe, Sortir de la grande nuit: Essai sur lAfrique dcolonise (Paris: La
Dcouverte, 2010).
11. Read Mongo Betis journal, Peuples noirs, peuples africains. See also Ambroise Kom, Mongo
Beti parle: Testament dun esprit rebelle (Paris: Homnisphres, 2006).
PubIic CuIture
go
them back to reason, there was little reluctance to resort to censorship in order to
silence them.
12
In the immediate aftermath of decolonization, France withdrew into the Hexa-
gon, which became its lter for narrating itself and the world. The same process
was in evidence in the relocation of Hexagonal theory. A signicant redistribu-
tion of the conceptual map had been emerging since the 1950s. With the end of
Nazism, important segments of the French intelligentsia had been wrestling with
the question of communism and Stalinism. Punctuated by events such as the Hun-
garian revolt and the Prague Spring, this dynamic had reached its high point in the
1950s and then returned with even greater consequences in the 1970s when intel-
lectuals with different trajectories and interests, but who in the past had shared
a connection to Marxism- Leninism, made the shift from philo- communism to
the invocation of the ideology of human rights. They embraced the concept of
totalitarianism, the usage of which they linked to a militant form of activism in
favor of freedom and human rights in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
13

The birth of postcolonial studies during the last quarter of the twentieth cen-
tury thus coincides with the effort, in France, to disavow inherited traditions of
internationalism and anticolonialism and to rid the country of Marxism (both
ofcial and oppositional).
14
The disavowal of anticolonialism is the other side
of the right- wing critique of la pense 68. For conservative intellectuals, both
events decolonization and May 1968 marked the defeat of thought itself (la
dfaite de la pense).
15
According to Alain Finkielkraut, this defeat found its most
striking expression in the deconstruction of two markers of Western modernity,
reason and the subject. The deconstruction of these markers opened the way to
the proclamation, in particular during the 1960s, of the multiple deaths of man,
of meaning, and of history itself. This defeat was also a consequence of the refuta-
tion of Western ethnocentrism, which had been legitimated by decolonization and
Third- Worldism. Man, that singular and universal concept, was now replaced
with the different man as the cornerstone of a nonhierarchical cultural diversity,
and the human subject was drowned in a sea of incommensurable identities.
16
12. Mongo Beti, Main basse sur le Cameroun: Autopsie dune dcolonisation (Paris: Maspro,
1972).
13. Michael Christofferson, Les intellectuels contre la gauche: Lidologie antitotalitaire en
France (1973 1981) (Marseille: Agone, 2008).
14. See Cornelius Castoriadis, Linstitution imaginaire de la socit (Paris: Seuil, 1973), espe-
cially chap. 1, Le marxisme: Bilan provisoire.
15. Alain Finkielkraut, La dfaite de la pense (Paris: Gallimard, 1987).
16. Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, Prface cette dition, in La pense 68 (Paris: Gallimard,
1988), 15.
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17. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
18. Heike Raphael- Hernndez, ed., Blackening Europe: The African American Presence (New
York: Routledge, 2004).
19. On this period, see Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (New
York: Houghton Mifin, 1996). For the years following this period, see Dominic Thomas, Black
France: Colonialism, Immigration, and Transnationalism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2007); and Bennetta Jules- Rosette, Black Paris: The African Writers Landscape (Urbana: Univer-
sity of Illinois Press, 2000).
20. Manuel Boucher, Rap, expression des lascars: Signications et enjeux du rap dans la socit
franaise (Paris: LHarmattan, 1998); Andr J. M. Prvos, Two Decades of Rap in France: Emer-
gence, Development, Prospects, in Black, Blanc, Beur: Rap Music and Hip- Hop Culture in the
Francophone World, ed. Alain Philippe Durand (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2002), 1 21.
From 1985 to 1995, a generation of academics trained in French institutions,
and consisting mostly of French citizens of color and minorities from former
colonial possessions, began to draw their own conclusions about the prevailing
intellectual and cultural winter. Struggling with a monochromal world and a cli-
entelist mandarin system that reigned in universities and research centers, they
immigrated to the United States, where, be it the linguistic turn, the self- reexive
moment in anthropology, feminist critique, or critical race studies, an effervescent
atmosphere had taken over the humanities and social sciences. This inventive
energy drew its inspiration from encounters between cultural and academic work
in and from diverse worlds: African American, Caribbean anglophone, Sino-
Indian, and Latin American. It was at this time that new interpretations of French
history and French literature emerged in American universities.
The processes I have described are crucial to understanding not only the
delayed reception of postcolonial studies in France but also the relative hostility
it has encountered, and the disjuncture between France and the rest of the world,
as the latter began to account for itself, after decolonization, in terms of circula-
tion and discontinuous ows.
17
In the early 1990s, France began slowly emerging
from its postcolonial languor. As is often the case, movement began at the fringes
of society. A rst shimmering appeared in the artistic and cultural spheres; for
instance, certain aspects of African American pop culture began to inuence the
black pop culture of the French banlieues (suburbs) and thus affected minority
youths, as was apparent in music but also in fashion and self- styling.
18
The long
supremacy of jazz, reggae, and rhythm and blues (R&B) started to wane as hip-
hop emerged.
19
The integration of various forms of rap led to new musical genres
that, in the hands of artists such as MC Solaar, had an undeniably poetico- political
tone.
20
This new aesthetic sensibility also was abetted, however indirectly, by the
ascendancy of athletes of Arab and African origins in French professional soccer
PubIic CuIture
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teams, one of the most popular pastimes in France. A number of these athletes
often participated in debates on racism and citizenship.
21
The relative symbiosis
among black athletes on the French national soccer team, their counterparts on
U.S. basketball teams, and American and Caribbean track- and- eld athletes rep-
resented a potentially strong symbolic rallying point or at least for the youths
from the banlieues, who faced contradictory processes of self- identication and
the irrepressible desire to participate in a consumer society in which global black
culture had become a planetary index.
22
A shimmer on the margins could also be seen in the new forms of minor-
ity struggles, whether emerging among sans- papiers (illegal immigrants with no
ofcial documents), refused the right to have rights, or the sans- parts of French
democracy (those who, despite being nominally French, were nevertheless
deprived of all the symbolic capital attached to citizenship, starting with the right
to visibility). These situations were linked to the fact that, since the mid- 1970s,
extreme right think tanks had been disseminating the idea that French national
identity could be soiled by immigrants. With agitation by the Front National, this
idea had little by little won over the republican Right and even a part of the Left.
After the butchery of the two world wars, the French government had organized
immigration so as to respond to the pressing need for labor in its industrial sec-
tor, but this immigration ceased after the 1974 oil crisis. For the past thirty years,
immigration to France has been insignicant, generally limited to reuniting fami-
lies, asylum requests, students, tourists, or illegal immigration.
But there is a paradox: even though immigration is negligible, laws have
become progressively stricter, each minister making it his duty to pass one or
several anti- immigration laws that are always more extreme than those of his
predecessors. This surge of legislative and repressive arrangements prevent entry
into the country, of course, but each new law also renders ever more precarious
the lives of foreigners who are already established in France. And, worse, over
the past twenty years, this accumulation of laws and regulations has produced a
considerable number of undocumented people, whom the state then tries to track
down in the name of the ght against illegal immigration. For the past few years,
as part of this hunt for illegals, the police force has been mobilized for identity
21. Laurent Dubois, Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 2009); Lilian Thuram, Mes toiles noires (Paris: Philippe Rey, 2010).
22. This corresponds more or less to the observations of Paul Gilroy in Darker Than Blue: On
the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2009). See also Andr J. M. Prvos, In It for the Money: Rap and Business Cultures
in France, Popular Music and Society 26 (2003): 445 61.
PrcvinciaIizing france!
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card checks and requested to rack up arrests. This pressure has given rise to
raids and near constant harassment of large portions of the population of African
or North African origin, body searches and racial proling have become com-
monplace, and deportation camps have been created for undesirables. France now
prides itself on its deportation quotas.
23
It is this state of affairs that some observ-
ers now qualify as state xenophobia.
24
While the rst wave of mobilization focused on obtaining the right to have
rights (starting with the right to reside in France), the second wave (beginning in
the late 1990s) is a struggle for visibility and against stereotypes and inferiorizing
practices (minoration). This wave takes indirect aim at one of the chief unspoken
truths of the French republican ideal the implicit whiteness of being French.
Indeed, in the name of equality among individuals, the French constitution pro-
scribes recognition of differences of race, ethnicity, gender, or religion among
individuals and groups. The republic wants to be secular and color- blind. The
consequences of this radical indifference to difference are such that collecting
ethnic statistics is forbidden by law and any form of afrmative action decried.
25

The perverse effect of this indifference to difference is thus a relative indifference
to discrimination.
In this regard, and until the end of the 1990s, the media in general and televi-
sion in particular constituted the main theater of a dual symbolic violence on
the one hand, the violence of indifference and inferiorization and, on the other
hand, the production of stereotypes and racist preconceptions. At the time, televi-
sion programming was certainly not utterly devoid of minorities. However, their
appearance on- screen was relegated to musical or sports programs. Blacks, in
particular, often only appeared on- screen and in the public eye as actors, singers,
or entertainers. When they were present in ctional works, it was almost always in
American, not French, movies. The same was true for advertisements and shows
about daily life. Soccer players and other athletes were little better- off. They have
been assimilated to modern- day tirailleurs, their bodies and physical strength
devoted to the ag, but doubts abound about their inner loyalty: maybe they do
not sing the Marseillaise as loudly as they should.
The representation of Arab men is similar. The Arabs violent nature and
his uncontrollable urges are constant traces of historical modes of stigmatiza-
23. See Cette France- l Vol. 2 (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2009).
24. See especially Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, La rpublique impriale: Politique et racisme
dtat colonial (Paris: Fayard, 2009).
25. For more on these discussions, see Alain Renaut, Un humanisme de la diversit: Essai sur la
dcolonisation des identits (Paris: Flammarion, 2009).
PubIic CuIture
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tion. Islam itself is feared less as a religion than as a culture; when it is feared as
a religion, its theology is of a vehement, angry, and irrational God. Through his
proclivity to rape, the young Arab male (le garon arabe), whose family origi-
nated in North Africa, is a source of insecurity both within and outside his com-
munity.
26
The repeated controversies over the Islamic headscarf or the burkha
are saturated with the kind of orientalist imagery that Said denounced. These
controversies offer the opportunity to stage the violence these men are perpet-
uating on these women excision, forced marriage, polygamy, the law of big
brothers, headscarves, and tests of virginity violence that is nothing like our
kind of violence. One thus has compassion for their vulnerability. But more than
that, we fear that our women will become the next targets of exogenous sexist
violence menaced as they are in public spaces by nonwhite and non- Christian
aggressors.
27
These stereotypes mirror back at minorities the fact that they are from else-
where (as opposed to here) and establish their irreducible alterity, that very
difference that could potentially contaminate French identity from within. The
full veil, afrms the feminist Elisabeth Badinter, in a public statement to the
French National Assembly,
symbolizes the categorical refusal to come into contact with the other or,
more precisely, the refusal of reciprocity. The fully veiled woman assumes
the right to see me, but refuses my reciprocal right to see her. Apart from
the symbolic violence represented by this situation of nonreciprocity, I
cannot help but see therein a sort of pathological contradiction. On the one
hand, she refuses to show her face under the pretext that it saves her from
being the object of an impure gaze between us, what a strange vision
of men; to think that any man who looks at a woman can only fantasize
of raping her . . . [laughter in the audience]. On the other hand, this is
a veritable self- exhibition because everyone focuses on this unidenti-
able object. Is it a woman? Is it a man? Is the person ugly or a mysterious
beauty? . . . In sum, she has become an object of fantasy. In this possibility
of being looked at without ever being seen and to look at others without
their knowledge, I see, from my point of view, a triple pleasure over the
26. Nacira Gunif- Souilamas and ric Mac, Les fministes et le garon arabe (Paris: LAube,
2004).
27. On this point, see Elsa Dorlin, Le grand strip- tease: Fminisme, nationalisme et burqa en
France, in Ruptures postcoloniales: Les nouveaux visages de la socit franaise, ed. Nicolas Ban-
cel, Florence Bernault, Pascal Blanchard, Ahmed Boubeker, Achille Mbembe, and Franoise Vergs
(Paris: La Dcouverte, 2010), 429 42.
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gy
28. www.assemblee- nationale.fr/ (accessed March 12, 2010).
29. Frederick Cooper, From Imperial Inclusion to Republican Exclusion? Frances Ambiguous
Postwar Trajectory, and Didier Gondola, Transient Citizens: The Othering and Indigenization of
Blacks and Beurs within the French Republic, in Frenchness and the African Diaspora: Identity
and Uprising in Contemporary France, ed. Charles Tshimanga, Didier Gondola, and Peter J. Bloom
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 91 119, 146 66.
30. On all of the preceding, see ric Macs synthesis, Postcolonialit et francit dans les imag-
inaires tlvisuels de la Nation, in Bancel et al., Ruptures postcoloniales, 391 402.
31. See Isabelle Rigoni, ed., Qui a peur de la tlvision en couleurs? La diversit culturelle dans
les mdias (Montreuil, France: Aux Lieux dtre, 2007); and Wayne Brekhus Wayne, Une sociolo-
gie de linvisibilit: Rorienter notre regard, Rseaux, nos. 129 30 (2005): 243 72.
other: the pleasure of nonreciprocity, the pleasure of exhibitionism, and
a voyeuristic pleasure. . . . I think these women are very sick, and I am
speaking very seriously, and I do not believe that we should dene or clas-
sify ourselves according to their pathology.
28
In counterdistinction to the Franais de souche (those of French stock),
minorities authenticity resides in the exoticism of their customs and the tropical-
ity of their places of origin. Their habits and spaces are represented by fruits and
scents in many advertisements, be they for tourist destinations or the display of
cacao, bananas, coconut trees, vanilla, or sunny beaches. These representations
send the nonwhite French back to the geographic, climatic, or cultural causes of
their failure to integrate into the nation.
29
The repeated use of the qualier eth-
nic to name them and their practices is signicant. On the one hand, this usage
is impossible to understand without the unstated hypothesis that white French
are not ethnic.
30
On the other hand, it also underlines the impossible nature
of assimilation. Indeed, in 1998, black artists and intellectuals came together to
denounce this symbolic system and founded the Collectif galit.
31
Struggles for
visibility and against inferiorization are based in the idea that the French nation
is not a fully formed, already existing entity. Rather, it is in large part the sum of
the contradictory identications professed by its members. The latter ensure the
concrete existence of the nation through the staging and constant narration, and
renarration, of these contradictory forms of identication. Far from constituting
an obstacle to the existence of a democratic public sphere, these contradicting
forms are resources that deepen and strengthen the relationship between democ-
racy and mutuality.
Again, in the early 1990s, parallel movements emerged in French academia.
A young generation of historians created, outside established institutional circles,
a research group (Achac), which was initially dedicated to the clash of memory
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32. Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, and Franois Vergs, La rpublique coloniale: Essai sur
une utopie (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003); Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire,
eds., La fracture coloniale: La socit franaise au prisme de lhritage colonial (Paris: La Dcou-
verte, 2005).
33. Jean- Marc Moura, Littratures francophones et thorie postcoloniale (Paris: Presses Univer-
sitaires de France, 1999); Jacqueline Bardolph, tudes postcoloniales et littrature (Paris: Cham-
pion, 2002); Michel Beniamino and Lise Gauvin, eds., Vocabulaire des tudes francophones: Les
concepts de base (Limoges, France: Presses Universitaires de Limoges, 2005). Achille Mbembe, De
la postcolonie: Essai sur limagination politique dans lAfrique contemporaine (Paris: Karthala,
2000); see also the preface to the second edition (2005) and the remarks in the preface, ivi. Elsa
Dorlin, La matrice de la race: Gnalogie sexuelle et coloniale de la nation franaise (Paris: La
Dcouverte, 2006); Franoise Vergs, Mmoires de la traite ngrire: De lesclavage et de leurs
abolitions (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005).
34. Homi Bhabha, Les lieux de la culture: Une thorie postcoloniale (Paris: Payot, 2008); Neil
Lazarus, ed., Penser le postcolonial: Une introduction critique (Paris: Amsterdam, 2006).
and history and to the durability and transformation of colonial views in French
popular culture. The group began by focusing on the study of images and repre-
sentations, seeking to highlight the central role of colonialism in the evolution of
French modernity. This perspective led them inevitably to examine the constitu-
tive role played by colonial ideologies in the elaboration of republican identity.
Subsequently, on the basis of their acquired understandings of the relationships
between republicanism and empire, these scholars inquired into the hybrid forms
that issued from the French imperial presence in the world by exploring what they
termed the colonial rift (la fracture coloniale). Their approach took its distance
from the well- established tradition of French colonial historiography on at least
two levels. First, by linking colonial history and metropolitan history, they tended
to blur the neat separation between the study of here and the study of there.
Second, this work helped reproblematize the French national imaginary.
32
But we
had to wait for the beginning of the millennium for the elaboration, in the face of
indifference and reluctance, of well- founded critiques of postcolonialism in and of
itself.
33
Since then, myriad events have increased postcolonial studies visibility in
the French public sphere. At last, several years after the translation of Saids Ori-
entalism, a few seminal texts of the postcolonial corpus have been translated.
34

Many young scholars are producing innovative work that is presented in numer-
ous conferences, seminars, and journals.
Anti-PcstccIcniaIism, Parisianism, and Anachrcnism
As I noted above, many factors have contributed to the late arrival of postcolonial
studies in the French discursive eld and to the controversies it has engendered;
PrcvinciaIizing france!
g
none are contingent. Recently, the controversy has extended beyond the strictly
literary and theoretical elds in the social sciences and the broader public. In the
course of this displacement, it has degenerated into byzantine quarrels. These dis-
putes have been instigated by a group of detractors whose primary goal is to dis-
qualify (without reserve) postcolonial criticism while denigrating authors whose
works they have not made the effort to read properly, much less understand.
35
The
quarrel did not begin or develop in an ideological void, and its stakes are not sim-
ply, or even primarily, epistemological.
36
And when intellectual stakes do exist, as
Jean- Franois Bayart claims in a hastily written essay, they can hardly be dissoci-
ated, as he seems to suggest, from political, ethical, and philosophical concerns.
37

For colonization was not only a specic form of rationality or a set of dispositifs
(devices) and technologies. It was not simply an ideology and a practice of world
conquest aimed at subjugating those races deemed inferior. Colonization also
conceived of itself as a structure of knowledge, wonder, and belief. This is why it
could claim a double authority of jurisdiction and vridiction (truthfulness). To be
credible, the critique of colonial situations must therefore seek to reconcile what
Paul Ricoeur called epistemological concerns (a part of the historiographical
operation) and ethico- cultural concerns (a part of historical judgment).
38
This is
what he understood by hermeneutic critique (critique hermneutique).
Opponents of postcolonial studies in France claim that postcolonial studies has
contributed nothing to our understanding of imperialism and colonialism, that it
is of little use and even harmful, and that the task at hand is to lay it to rest. Car-
ried forth, in large part, by Parisian circles, hostility toward postcolonialism is not
only late in coming and out of touch. As Marie- Claude Smouts writes,
The ways of disqualifying postcolonial studies are most ordinary. The
most widespread, the one that all new schools of thought that are even
slightly disturbing encounter, . . . consists in confusing the complex theo-
retical approach with the specic interpretations of certain individuals,
thus focusing, in a corpus of multiple enunciations, on those that are the
least solid, retaining several extreme formulas preferably by isolating
them from their context and, on these bases, disqualifying the whole
35. A case in point is the pamphlet by Jean- Loup Amselle, LOccident dcroch: Enqute sur les
postcolonialismes (Paris: Stock, 2008).
36. See Catherine Coquery- Vidrovitch, Enjeux politiques de lhistoire coloniale (Marseille:
Agone, 2008).
37. Jean- Franois Bayart, Postcolonial Studies: A Political Invention of Tradition? in this
issue.
38. Paul Ricoeur, Histoire et vrit (Paris: Seuil, 1955), 11.
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thing. This works best when there is a ready- made straw man (as in the
very practical gure of the postcolonial anti- Semite).
39

Or the postcolonial heirs of Sartre, who, according to Bayart, are not particu-
larly anxious to decide whether or not to act as clandestine agents for Hamas or
al- Qaeda.
40
It is worth noting that very few Parisian opponents of postcolonialism are pro-
cient in English, and very few works in postcolonial studies have been translated
into French. The most virulent reactions come from pamphleteers, who refuse
to question the myth of a benevolent colonialism, a myth spread in particular by
ideologues of the British imperial expansion.
41
Because of this linguistic inr-
mity, to which one should add a highly pontical conception of the social sciences
and their supposed neutrality, a signicant part of their diatribe is formulated
from a position of sublime ignorance.
42
Their critique, which is too closely linked
to problems of taxonomy, brings no new contribution to the numerous debates that
have marked the history of postcolonial theory from its inception. Often it merely
regurgitates observations already made within the very eld of postcolonial stud-
ies.
43
These are then presented as innovative observations to a reading public
ignorant of the complex histories of postcolonial critical traditions. Such is the
case for the claim that postcolonial studies supposedly reies and renders colo-
nization ahistorical, a point made by Anne McClintock back in the early 1990s,
when she noted the risks inherent in a monolithic and singular term being used
in an ahistorical fashion and haunted by a nineteenth- century episteme of linear
progress.
44
Yet a cursory examination of the eld nowadays shows that there are
countless literary and historical studies published every year in journals like the
Journal of Postcolonial Studies or Interventions, which demonstrate and reiter-
ate, via examples from the former metropoles and colonial worlds, that imperial-
ism developed as a contradictory and ambiguous project, determined not only by
tensions in the heart of the metropole and conicts internal to colonial adminis-
trations but also by the different cultures and contexts into which the colonizers
settled. French opponents of postcolonial studies also argue for a relocation of the
39. Marie- Claude Smouts, Les tudes postcoloniales en France: mergence et rsistances, in
Bancel et al., Ruptures postcoloniales, 122126.
40. Bayart, Postcolonial Studies, 60.
41. Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2003).
42. This is the case, for example, of Amselle, LOccident dcroch.
43. See Young, Postcolonialism.
44. Anne McClintock, The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term Post-colonialism, Social
Text 31/32 (1992): 8498.
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gg
45. Barbara Bush, Imperialism and Postcolonialism (London: Longman, 2006); Patrick Wolfe,
History and Imperialism: A Century of Theory, from Marx to Postcolonialism, American Histori-
cal Review 102 (1997): 388 420. See also, in the historical- literary eld, Elleke Boehmer, Empire,
the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890 1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
46. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Nouvelles colonies et vieux empires, Mil neuf
cent: Revue dhistoire intellectuelle, no. 27 (2009): 13 35; and Jean- Franois Bayart, Les tudes
postcoloniales: Un carnaval acadmique (Paris: Karthala, 2010).
47. Pierre Grosser, Comment crire lhistoire des relations internationales aujourdhui? Quelques
rexions partir de lEmpire britannique, Histoire@politique: Politique, culture, socit, no. 10
(2010), www.histoire- politique.fr/documents/10/pistes/pdf/HP10_Grosser_pdf_280110.pdf (accessed
January 11, 2011).
48. Michel de Certeau, Lcriture de lhistoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1975); Paul Ricoeur, Lintrigue
et le rcit historique, vol. 1 of Temps et rcit, especially chap. 2.
49. Paul Veyne, Comment on crit lhistoire: Essai dpistmologie (Paris: Seuil, 1971).
history of colonization within the broader history of imperialism. Yet they remain
silent about the historical fact of anti- imperialism, a cornerstone of postcolonial
criticism.
45
Arguing that in various regions of the world colonization was brief,
they attempt to minimize its impact, its violence and historical reach, which they
describe as supercial without stating exactly what criteria they use to arrive at
such a conclusion. In both cases, the objective is to deny the fundamental role
colonization played in the history of colonized societies, to show that colonial
empires are nothing new, that colonization was nothing but a specic example of
a transhistorical and universal phenomenon: imperialism.
46
Then, as if this disciplinary category were integrally coherent, they propose
to privilege historical sociological methods in accounting for the fact of coloni-
zation and its signicance, which they reduce to a passage in form from empire
to nation- state. Under the guise of this new method, the comparative history of
colonialism becomes a simple inventory of the practices of imperial governance.
47

For this purpose, they mobilize totemic gures such as Max Weber and Foucault
and endeavor to revive the old polemic between explanation/interpretation/under-
standing that others like Ricoeur or Michel de Certeau tried so hard to settle at
a time when the social sciences nurtured an inferiority complex vis- - vis quan-
titative and positivist models so popular in the natural sciences.
48
The histori-
cal qualier attached to this sociology has very little to do with the lessons
of French theory during the second half of the twentieth century. As Paul Veyne
reminds us, there is no privileged mode of explanation in history.
49
Furthermore,
to argue that historical sociology somehow engages in pure science while
postcolonial studies is concerned only with ideology is disingenuous. To vary-
ing degrees, the two genres deal with representations, incessantly pass moral
judgments, manipulate causal series that are by denition contingent, and, when
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oo
all is said and done, are the inheritors of the same tradition of the critical phi-
losophy of history.
Finally, French opponents of postcolonial studies argue that postcolonial stud-
ies deals only with discourses and texts rather than with real practices, as if
peoples discourses had nothing to do with their realities and as if the examina-
tion of the imaginary dimensions of colonial domination, or of psychic or icono-
graphic acts, were somehow unimportant in the reconstitution of peoples prac-
tices. Discourses and representations, in addition to being symbolic components
in the formation of colonial relations, themselves constitute relatively autonomous
practices.
50
Finally, typical of French anti- postcolonialism is its blindness when faced with
the task of accounting for the role that race has historically played in the deni-
tion of French identity. French models of racial thought have varied since the
eighteenth century, when signicant nonwhite populations rst found themselves
living under the authority of France. Despite these variations, these models have
shared three postulates, especially since the Enlightenment. The rst is that all
races belong to humanity. The second afrms that not all races are equal even
if, far from being immutable, human differences may be overcome. The third
presupposes an inextricable bind between French culture and the French nation.
Neither the revolution nor liberal republicanism has completely transcended the
foundational tension among race, culture, and nation at the core of the French
national imaginary. The revolution may have asserted the primacy of equality
and the common belonging to the republican polis above and beyond all other
forms of social difference and status. At the same time, revolutionary France
never ceased to make racial difference a factor in the denition of citizenship
and in the distribution of the rights of men.
51
The tension between a universal-
ism that ignores color and a liberal republicanism fond of the most vulgar racial
stereotypes took root in science and gained impetus in French popular culture at
the very moment of colonial expansion. It was exacerbated in a context in which
the function of colonial imperialism was to revivify the nation and the French
character, on the one hand and, on the other, to disseminate the benets of our
50. Il faut dmystier linstance globale du rel comme totalit restituer, wrote Foucault. Il
ny a pas le rel quon rejoindrait condition de parler de tout ou de certaines choses plus relles
que les autres, et quon manquerait, au prot dabstractions inconsistantes, si on se borne faire
apparaitre dautres lments et dautres relations. Michel Foucault, Dits et crits, vol. 4, 1980 1988
(Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 15.
51. Laurent Dubois, Les esclaves de la rpublique: Lhistoire oublie de la premire mancipa-
tion, 1789 1794 (Paris: Calmann- Lvy, 1998).
PrcvinciaIizing france!
o
civilization a dissemination that could only be justied by the institution of a
distinction between France and its others.
52
During the course of the nineteenth century, models of popular racism in
France were also associated with large- scale social transformations. Industrial-
ization, urbanization, and the rise of the bourgeois family lent urgency to the
question of difference in general and to that of different qualities of race in par-
ticular. As an echo of the disdain aristocrats felt for the sansculottes of the revolu-
tionary era came the scorn of bourgeois democracy toward the burgeoning class
of workers. At its origins, the social question was thus already a racial ques-
tion. Race was both the result and the reafrmation of the general idea of the
implacability of social differences. All those who found themselves outside the
racial, social, and cultural characteristics of the nation were, in effect, situated
outside the nation itself. This was also the case in the colonies, where citizenship
was inseparable from the racial idea of whiteness. One may allude to the experi-
ences of citizenship of males and nonwhites in Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyana,
Runion, and the Four Communes of Senegal. But the numbers were small, a few
thousand in a vast dominion populated by millions of subjects. From its inception,
the empire was always an empire of subjects rather than of citizens. Assimilation
had already proven to be a failure well before the advent of decolonization. Decol-
onization would ratify this failure, legally sanctioning the notion according to
which not all white subjects of empire could not become French. Between French
citizenship and identity, one always found the barrier of race. Moreover, there has
always been, over a much longer history, a direct relationship between a certain
form of French nationalism and a theory of racial difference that is masked by
the universalistic and republican paradigm.
53
Indeed, it might well be that French
universalism is itself the product of racial theory.
54
If French anti- postcolonialism is anachronistic from epistemological and his-
torical standpoints, it is nonetheless highly indicative of a cultural and politi-
cal one. At bottom, the quarrel over postcolonial studies as is the case for
disputes about the regulation of Islam, the Islamic veil, and the burkha, recent
52. See in particular Alexis de Tocqueville, crits et discours politiques, vol. 3 of Oeuvres com-
pltes (Paris: Gallimard, 1992).
53. Zeev Sternhell, Maurice Barrs et le nationalisme franais (Paris: Fayard, 2000); David
Prochaska, Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bne, 1870 1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1990).
54. Tyler Stovall, Universalisme, diffrence et invisibilit: Essai sur la notion de race dans
lhistoire de la France contemporaine, Cahiers dhistoire: Revue dhistoire critique, nos. 96 97
(2005): 63 90.
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oz
state- commissioned debates on national identity, and the commemorations and
innumerable projects for monuments, museums, and war memorials is rst
and foremost symptomatic of a profound chasm (chiasme) in the present and
of Frances unease with globalization. This chasm, or what Ann Laura Stoler
calls aphasia, is the direct consequence of the French dis- ease of colonization,
quite similar to what used to be known as an ailment of the spirit.
55
This ailment
arises principally from the confrontation between two antagonistic desires: the
desire, on the one hand, for apartheid and the phantasm of a polis without strang-
ers supported by a neorevisionist movement and a desire, on the other hand, for
symbolic recognition and the expansion of citizenship defended, in particular, by
the minorities and their supporters. One thing unites these otherwise fragmented
minorities what they perceive subjectively as an objective condition of sym-
bolic dispossession. This sense of dispossession is exacerbated in France today by
the apparent refashioning and reproduction of practices, schemas of thought, and
representations inherited from a racist colonial past.
Prcximity withcut keciprccity
The desire for apartheid brings together neorevisionist currents and heteroclite
networks whose common denominator is their quasi- visceral refusal of any non-
Western visions, of the West itself, and of other worlds. This conguration assem-
bles ideologues from diverse horizons. We nd, higgledy- piggledy, those who see
the loss of the Empire and especially French Algeria as a catastrophe; dogmatic
Marxists for whom class warfare is the last word on history; self- proclaimed
defenders of Western values, of secularism, of the republican model, or of French
Catholic identity; members of the Acadmie Franaise; both left- and right- wing
devotees of anti- Americanism; anti- postmodern crusaders and adversaries of
what is disdainfully called la pense 68; and those for whom Auschwitz must
remain the standard for Western collective memory and the founding metaphor
for a unied Europe. In what follows, I examine the four themes that anchor this
otherwise heterogeneous constellation: the temporality of the world, the politics
of radical Islam, the relationship between democracy and difference (race), and
the politics of colonial memory. I argue that these diffrends feed and exacerbate
the desire for borders and for separation that has become a cultural feature of
Frances contemporary moment. Moreover, they have negatively inuenced the
reception of postcolonial studies in France.
55. Ann Laura Stoler, Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France, in this issue.
PrcvinciaIizing france!
oj
The rst diffrend concerns the characterization of the contemporary moment.
Neorevisionist currents have it that our era is marked by a qualitative transforma-
tion of violence in the world and a new distribution of hatred on the planet. This
situation is thought to be akin to a global civil war and allegedly has a direct
effect on the kinds of security risks that now threaten France and other Western
countries. These risks entail the very survival of Western civilization. They are
apprehended and interpreted through the lens of a new denition of the foreigner
as a social type, associated sometimes with the immigrant (the ideal gure of
the intruder and the undesirable) and sometimes with the enemy. The polemic
status this gure of the foreigner now rmly occupies in the French imaginary
goes hand in hand with a renewed desire for borders as well as a reactivation of
apartheid techniques of separation and selection. The foreigner is not only the
citizen of another state. More signicantly, he or she is different from us; his or
her danger is real, for a genuine cultural distance separates us from him or her; in
all these ways, the foreigner constitutes a mortal threat to our way of life.
Furthermore, neorevisionist currents hold that, as a response to the security
aspects of this existential anguish, the rule of law (ltat de droit), in its clas-
sical sense, must be amended. They call for the blurring of once differentiated
functions of the police (responsible for foreigners on national territory) and the
army (responsible for enemies). New policies must be implemented to defend the
territory from illegal immigration and, recently, Islamic terrorism. Thus we now
have, at the very heart of the republican and democratic order, a specic form of
governmentality, which one might call a regime of connement (rgime de la
claustration). This regime is characterized in part by an impressive expansion
and miniaturization of judicial, police, and penitentiary systems most notably
those dealing with the administration of foreigners. To manage undesirable popu-
lations, the state has implemented legal, regulatory, and surveillance systems to
facilitate practices of detention, custody, incarceration, connement in camps, or
deportation. These arrangements have given rise to the institutionalization of a
radical divide between citizens whose protection and security are ensured by the
state and the mass of people who are literally harassed, prey to precariousness,
and deprived of any substantive rights.
56
An array of diverse measures, legisla-
tion, and both formal and less formal agreements between France and third- party
states has served to perfect this assemblage. The culmination of this process was
the creation of the Ministry of Immigration and National Identity. Taken as a
56. See LEurope des camps: La mise lcart des trangers, special issue, Culture et conits,
no. 57 (2005).
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whole, this complex assemblage targets certain categories of people and social
groups, dened in terms of their ethnic, religious, racial, and national afliations.
Its aim is to limit, restrain, or simply halt their liberty of movement.
57
Of course,
the stakes of any policy for controlling identity and borders are the control of the
very frontiers of politics, and it is this latter point that has become the object, in
France, of fragmentation along biological- racial lines.
The second diffrend concerns radical Islam, a phantasmatic object par
excellence and the nal frontier with regard to French fears and anxieties. A num-
ber of social practices dened as Islamic are being challenged in the name of
secularism. Three basic principles in effect are assumed to constitute the basis
of secularism and republicanism la franaise: (1) the ideal of equality, which
requires that the same laws apply to all; (2) the ideal of liberty and autonomy,
which presupposes that no one should be subjected, against his or her will, to the
will of another; and (3) the ideal of fraternity, which imposes the duty of assimi-
lation on everyone a condition necessary for the constitution of a community
of citizens. Neorevisionist currents dene radical Islam as the dark inversion
of Enlightenment ideals and as the inverted gure of modernity. Radical Islam
allegedly seeks the application, in France, of a foreign law a sign from its
adherents of a refusal to integrate and assimilate. This foreign law contradicts
the principles of liberty, gender equality, and fraternity on which the republic is
founded since it sanctions the inhumane treatment of women. Muslim women
in particular carry a double burden. They must submit to the will of their hus-
band (or to their brothers), and they must submit to a nonegalitarian religion. The
republic is morally obligated to free them from this double oppression. Eventu-
ally, the law should force them to be free, and republican paternalism should help
them achieve emancipation, if need be, by coercing them into freedom.
Behind the various controversies surrounding the hijab or the burkha, or the
fate of Muslim women, two processes are entangled. The rst concerns the insti-
tution of a state feminism exploiting the question of Muslim women to lead a
racist campaign against an Islamic culture presented as fundamentally sexist.
58

On the left and the right, republican feminism is transformed into an incubator of
Islamophobia, fueling racist representations and practices but also rendering them
57. Michel Agier, Rmy Bazenguissa- Ganga, and Achille Mbembe, Mobilits africaines, rac-
isme franais, Vacarmes 43 (2008): 1 8.
58. Elsa Dorlin, Pas en notre nom! Contre la rcupration raciste du fminisme par la droite
franaise, in Lautre campagne: 80 propositions dbattre durgence, comp. Georges Debrgeas
and Thomas Lacoste (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2007), www.lautrecampagne.org/article.php?id=132.
PrcvinciaIizing france!
oy
acceptable since they are expressed through euphemisms.
59
The second consists
of a paradoxical injunction of liberty that goes hand in hand with the culturaliza-
tion of republican values. In line with the civilizing mission of colonialism, the
project is to emancipate, in all good conscience, individuals for their own good,
and against their will if necessary, with a law that operates as a means of stig-
matization and ostracism.
60
From the perspective of neorevisionist movements,
republican ideals are embodied in a culture and in a language; they are realized as
much in the laws of the republic as they are in an allegiance to French culture.
It matters little if confusion is created between the values of the republic and the
cultural prejudices of French society. As Ccile Laborde has convincingly shown,
French republicanism assumes that the demands made by minorities for reason-
able accommodation in the public sphere do not constitute demands for justice.
61
In regard to the third diffrend, neorevisionist discourse engages in the reen-
chantment of national mythology at the very moment in which France is con-
fronted with the predicament of its apparent decline and diminished status on
the international chessboard. The theme of decline is neither new nor exclusive
to this movement. It reappears at regular intervals in French history, generally
coinciding with periods of crises. One immediate effect of this discourse on loss
and melancholy is to exacerbate identity politics, reawaken nostalgia for grandeur,
and displace not only the sites of conict but also the political content and forms
of social antagonism.
62
Such was the case over the last quarter of the twentieth
century, when many (and not only the extreme Right) lamented the demise of the
great national narrative. This demise was not caused merely by transformations
in the French economy and the crisis of the republican model of integration; it is
also deemed to be a direct consequence of deconstructionist theory, as embodied
by the events of May 1968. Stable identity and the certitudes underpinning the
59. See Pierre Tvanian, La rpublique du mpris: Les mtamorphoses du racisme dans la
France des annes Sarkozy (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2007); Sad Bouamama, Laffaire du voile ou la
production dun racisme respectable (Roubaix, France: Geais Bleu, 2004).
60. Sylvie Tissot, Bilan dun fminisme dtat, Collectif Les mots sont importants, Febru-
ary 2008, lmsi.net/Bilan- d- un- feminisme- d- Etat. See also Eric Fassin, La dmocratie sexuelle et
le conit des civilizations, Multitudes, no. 26 (2006), multitudes.samizdat.net/La- Democratie-
sexuelle- et- le.
61. Ccile Laborde, Critical Republicanism: The Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Laborde, Virginit et burqa: Des accommodements drai-
sonnables? Autour des rapports Stasi et Bouchard- Taylor, La vie des ides, September 16, 2008,
www.laviedesidees.fr/Virginite- et- burqa- des.html.
62. Didier Fassin and Eric Fassin, eds., De la question sociale la question raciale? Reprsenter
la socit franaise (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2006).
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national narrative were allegedly carried away by the coursing waters of relativ-
ism and pronouncements about the death of the subject. One wondered: under
such conditions, how can one revive the national ideal if not by reinventing the
past and thus reappropriating its rich symbolic deposits? This explains recent
efforts to rehabilitate a cultural, sacricial, and almost theologico- political con-
ception of the history of France.
Inspired by schoolbooks of the turn of the century, this view of history is con-
sumed with past glories. It situates France characteristically in a francocentric
relationship to Europe and to the world and sees the discipline of history as the
task of teaching civics and morality. History is not only edifying; it must also
reect the essence of the nation, which has been forged through a chronology
of events. Thus, for instance, both the homogeneity of the French and Frances
unity supposedly have been accomplished at three distinct dates: the battle of
Poitiers in 732, which stopped the Arab invasion; the capture of Jerusalem in
1099, which bore witness to Christian Europe; and the revocation of the Edict of
Nantes in 1685, which conrmed Frances status as the eldest daughter of the
Church, demonstrating, symbolically, that France is exclusively Catholic and that
its identity is forged on the exclusion of Arabs, Jews, and Protestants.
63
French
history is a glorious history, the account of an array of daring deeds, a succes-
sion of great men, and the events of genius. It is likewise the history of exalted
patriotism. Finally, it is a form of historical accounting that gives central place
to the well- worn rhetoric of the civilizing mission. In this perspective, France
is depicted as a nation whose providential destiny is to bring enlightenment to
the colonies and to spread it throughout the world. Interestingly, colonization as
such is not being obscured; rather, it is acknowledged as an ideological matrix
for civic education, as was the case during imperial expansion, when one could
hardly conjure the republic without its colonies. For the most zealous, this shift in
perspective has entailed attributing heroic dimensions to colonial crimes and to
torture, offenses for which no repentance is necessary.
64
It is explained that, in the
63. Herv Lemoine, La maison de lhistoire de France: Pour la cration dun centre de recher-
che et de collections permanentes ddi lhistoire civile et militaire de la France, report to the
Minister of Defense and the Minister of Culture and Communication, April 2008, www.culture
.gouv.fr/culture/actualites/rapports/rapporthlemoine.pdf. See also Jean- Pierre Azma, Guy
Moquet, Sarkozy et le roman national, Lhistoire, no. 323 (2007): 6 11; Suzanne Citron, Le mythe
national: Lhistoire de France revisite (Paris: LAtelier, 2008); and Sylvie Aprile, Lhistoire par
Nicolas Sarkozy: Le reve passiste dun futur national- libral, Comit de vigilance face aux usages
publics de lhistoire, April 30, 2007, cvuh.free.fr/spip.php?article82.
64. Alain Griotteray, Je ne demande pas pardon: La France nest pas coupable (Paris: Rocher,
2001); Daniel Lefeuvre, Pour en nir avec la repentance coloniale (Paris: Flammarion, 2006); Paul-
PrcvinciaIizing france!
o
spirit of the times, these activities were, more than anything, markers of French
civilization a civilization capable of asserting itself through both weapons and
the mind.
65
For others, even though crimes and injustices may have been perpe-
trated, in the end, colonization had globally positive effects.
66
As such, France
is well within its rights to demand gratitude and recognition from those it once
colonized.
President Nicolas Sarkozy himself included more than the lineaments of this
sacricial and sanctied conception of history in a series of speeches he gave
both during his presidential campaign and after his victory. With regard to the
colonial question, we nd the same refusal to repent and the same urgency for
self- absolution, the urgency to be judged innocent. These speeches at Toulon
on February 7, 2007, and later in Dakar in July 2007, at which time he literally
declared that African man had not entered into history serve to ofcialize a
cultural project undertaken over several years in diverse neorevisionist networks.
Says Sarkozy:
The European dream needs the Mediterranean dream . . . ; the dream
that once sent knights from all of Europe down the roads of the Orient; a
dream that drew to the South so many emperors of the saint Empire, so
many kings of France; a dream shared by Bonaparte in Egypt, Napoleon
III in Algeria, Lyautey in Morocco. This dream was not so much a dream
of conquest as a dream of civilization. . . . The wellspring has never run
dry. We just need to unite our forces and it will all begin anew. . . . The
West has been long steeped in the sin of arrogance and ignorance. Many
crimes and injustices were committed. But most of those who headed
south were neither monsters nor exploiters. Many put their energies toward
building roads, bridges, schools, and hospitals. Many wore themselves out
cultivating a bit of thankless land that none had farmed before. Many went
only to heal or teach. We must stop blackening the past. . . . We can disap-
prove of colonization from the point of view of our modern values. But we
must respect the men and women of goodwill who honestly believed their
work was useful for an ideal civilization in which they believed. . . .
Franois Paoli, Nous ne sommes pas coupables: Assez de repentances! (Paris: Table Ronde, 2006);
Max Gallo, Fier dtre Franais (Paris: Fayard, 2006); Pascal Bruckner, La tyrannie de la pni-
tence: Essai sur le masochisme occidental (Paris: Grasset, 2006).
65. Paul Aussaresses, Services spciaux: Algrie, 1955 1957; Mon tmoignage sur la torture
(Paris: Perrin, 2000).
66. Marc Michel, Essai sur la colonisation positive: Affrontements et accommodements en Afri-
que noire, 1830 1930 (Paris: Perrin, 2009).
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I would like to say to all the adepts of repentance, who rewrite history
and judge yesterdays men without acknowledging the conditions in which
they lived and the challenges they faced, I would like to ask them: by what
right do you judge them? I want to say to them: by what right do you ask
sons to repent for the faults of their fathers, for sins that were committed
often only in your imagination?
67
The fourth diffrend concerns race and racism. Purposefully forgetting the
historical experiences of slavery and colonization, the neorevisionist networks
claim that racism was never a fully integrated trope of French society and that,
contrary to the United States, racial segregation in France has never been legal
or institutionalized. In France, racism has always been subject to a symbolic pro-
hibition and supposedly only ever been marginal. Accordingly, discrimination,
when it happens, is negligible and, as some portend, would disappear if economic
inequalities were greatly reduced. Others maintain that this marginal discrimina-
tion would be diminished if France could select its immigrants. Furthermore,
the countrys fundamental social problems are rooted in antiwhite racism. When
racism against nonwhites is acknowledged, it is treated as a mere cultural differ-
ence. Under such conditions, advocacy for afrmative action is stigmatized, for
afrmative action would put the republic at risk of ethnicizing its social ties.
Therefore, Finkielkraut, in his commentary on the riots that engulfed many
French banlieues in November 2005, noted what he saw to be a demonstration of
the hatred that blacks and Arabs harbor against France. For him, these riots con-
stitute a snapshot of the war that a part of the Arab- Muslim world has declared
against the West, the main target of which is the French Republic. According
to Finkielkraut, blacks who hate France as a Republic have the audacity to
claim that slavery has the same exceptional status, the same weight of destiny and
sacredness, and the same paradigmatic power as the Shoah. But, he explained,
if we put the Shoah and slavery on the same level, then we are forced to lie
because [slavery] is not the Shoah. And it was not a crime against human-
ity because it was not only a crime. It was something ambivalent. . . . It
started long before the rise of the West. In fact, the specicity of the West
with regard to slavery is precisely everything involving its abolition. . . .
Moreover, the republic worked only for the good of Africans. Did not
colonization aim to educate and, in so doing, bring civilization to the
savages?
68
67. Le Monde, November 24, 2005. Trans. Janet Roitman.
68. Le Monde, November 24, 2005. Trans. Janet Roitman.
PrcvinciaIizing france!
og
69. Alain Finkielkraut, What Sort of Frenchmen Are They? interview by Dror Mishani and
Aurelia Smotriez, Haaretz, November 18, 2005; and Le Monde, November 24, 2005.
70. Alain Finkielkraut, Au nom de lautre: Rexions sur lantismitisme qui vient (Paris: Gal-
limard, 2003). For similar theses, read Pierre- Andr Taguieff, La judophobie des moderns: Des
lumires au jihad mondial (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2008); and Taguieff, La nouvelle judophobie (Paris:
Mille et Une Nuits, 2002).
Therefore, the riots were not a response to racism but proof of supreme ingrati-
tude. For all that, French racism is a myth concocted by those who hate France.
Of course, there are the occasional French racists . . . who dont like Arabs
and Blacks. But how do you expect them to like people who dont like them?
Indeed, after the riots, they [the French] will like them [Arabs and blacks] even
less now that they realize how much they are hated by them. Moreover, Blacks
and Arabs do not consider themselves French. Do you have any idea of how they
speak French? Its French whose throat has been cut the accent, the words,
and the grammar. Their identity is elsewhere. These people are in France
for personal gain; they treat the French state like one big insurance company.
The republic undertakes enormous sacrices and receives in return only hatred
and jeers. Herein lies their radical difference, the demonstration that they have
never been, and never will be, a part of us. They are not integratable, and their
presence among us, over time, could endanger our very existence. According to
Finkielkraut, the real problem is antiracism, which, he presages, will be to the
twenty-rst century what communism was to the twentieth century. The pri-
mary function of this ideology is to produce from nothing a form of involuntary
guilt exacted by political correctness.
69
Worse, antiracism is the new name for
anti- Semitism.
70
CcIcniaIism and AiIments cf Memcry
One of the dening features of the French state is how it denes the nation as a
soul and a spiritual principle. The constitutive elements of this soul and spirit are
the shared possession of a rich legacy of memories (the past), on the one hand, and
the desire to live together and work to bring this heritage to light in the present.
French republican conscience, on the other hand, exhibits an extraordinary excep-
tionality by claiming to marry French singularity with the universal tout court.
Made of sacrice and devotion, the national past is conceived as heroic, glorious,
and Promethean a past of exertion, sacrice, and faithfulness. To valorize a
common heritage and shared memories, the French state historically instituted a
form of ancestor worship (le culte des grands hommes) echoed in a cult of sacri-
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o
ce. Because the nation was originally perceived as a moral conscience, it could
legitimately claim, as Ernest Renan insisted, the abdication of the individual
for the sake of the community.
71
In the aftermath of the revolution, the cult of
ancestors and their feats and the cult of sacrice yielded a political and symbolic
capital that became all the more crucial to the construction of the national idea
that, a mere generation after the regicide, France was confronted with a crisis of
representation and an apparent loss of sacrality.
72
Love of the fatherland and pride
in being French became embodied in public and ritual acts of civic piety: military
parades; museums; memorials; commemorations; monuments to the dead; stat-
ues; names of boulevards, streets, avenues, bridges, and important places; and,
ultimately, the Pantheon.
If policies dealing with national memory have always been a prerogative of the
state, these policies have also been at the origin of intense passions. Pierre Nora
observes that the invention of a republican memory was at once authoritarian,
exclusionary, and intensely oriented toward the past. Republican memory the
French form of civil religion achieved coherence only insofar as it relied on
both real and imagined enemies in order to dene itself.
73
The new regime that
came out of the revolution was contested as much by the Right as by the Left.
It had to face the dangers posed by clerics, a fragmented army, and the alliance
formed by the banking and industrial bourgeoisie and the peasant class. That the
politics of memory has historically proven to be a factor of national division can
be explained by the capacity of memory to awaken the wounds of a troubled past.
In turn, this accounts for the close relationship among death (in particular violent,
political death), debt, and forgetting that has existed in French political culture
since the revolution.
74
During the revolution, numerous funerary mechanisms
were launched, whose effects stretched all the way to the Restoration. The polity
witnessed an ination of honors accorded to human remains, the frantic marking
of burial sites, along with innumerable exhumations and reburials. At the same
time, public grieving provided an opportunity to show off political power, and
memory itself was used as an instrument of punitive justice. Thus in the politics of
the state, national memory has always tended to function as a space of expiation,
a midway point between the logic of incrimination and the desire for reparation.
71. Ernest Renan, a lecture delivered at the Sorbonne, March 11, 1882. Quest-ce quune nation?,
uvres Compltes, vol. 1, ed. Henriette Psichari (Paris: Calmann-Lvy, 1947), 907.
72. Anne- Emmanuelle Demartini and Dominique Kalifa, eds., Imaginaire et sensibilits au
XIXe sicle: tudes pour Alain Corbin (Paris: Craphis, 2005).
73. Pierre Nora, ed., Introduction, Les lieux de mmoire, Vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, Quarto,
1997), 560.
74. Paul Ricoeur, La mmoire, lhistoire, loubli (Paris: Seuil, 2000), especially 459 80.
PrcvinciaIizing france!

In the presence of the tomb, we nd what Franois- Ren Chateaubriand once
described as a eld of blood.
75
It is this spilled blood that monuments and cer-
emonies are called on to cleanse, and this is the reason they are assigned the task
of bearing witness to the effort of achieving reconciliation with loss.
In keeping with this cultural and deeply sacricial conception of the nation,
in 1873 a law stipulating the manner in which those who died in combat for the
nation should be commemorated was passed. This law provides for a detailed
account of the status of parcels of land and the type of ossuary tombs to be cre-
ated. For more than a century, the ofcial policy on memorialization commem-
orated, above all, those who died for France, a civic community originating
and reproducing itself symbolically through funeral celebrations, dening itself,
therefore, as a community of loss, but loss that is never forgotten. A funerary
revolution had already occurred at the turn of the nineteenth century. Political
passions were expressed by building new necropolises. Funeral processions criss-
crossed the cities. Eulogies were performed over tombs and a new cult for profane
relics was emerging. Under certain conditions, worship of the dead was believed
to produce consensus and legitimacy. But it could as well provide an opportunity
for the expression of dissent, since the blood of the vanquished could easily be
summoned as an instrument of vengeance.
76
From 1830 onward, this particular form of sacricial republicanism domi-
nated, and, to a certain degree, it is this paradigm that is being brought back to the
French contemporary scene. During the 1980s, however, a shift occurred: from
a politics of memory founded on the celebration of the death of those who died
for France (morts pour la France) arose another economy of commemorations
centered on those who died by France (morts causs par la France). For a very
long time, France had never wanted to acknowledge its part in the genocide of
Jews. This catastrophe was imputed to the Vichy regime, which was to bear the
infamy, alone. This attitude changed progressively, and the rst of those who died
by France to be acknowledged were those who died in deportation. The 1990
Gayssot Law denitively sanctied their status as victims and dened the role
of the state in the elaboration of a memory of the Shoah (mmoire de la Shoah).
In 1993 a decree established a national day commemorating victims of racist and
anti- Semitic persecutions committed under the authority of a de facto government
denominated as the government of the French state. It was followed in 1994 by
75. Franois-Ren Chateaubriand, Itineraire de Paris Jrusalem, uvres Compltes, vol. 7
(Paris: P.-H. Krabbe, 1852), 247.
76. Emmanuel Fureix, La France des larmes: Deuils politiques lage romantique, 1814 1840
(Paris: Champ Vallon, 2009).
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77. Lawrence De Cock, Fanny Madeline, Nicolas Offenstadt, and Sophie Wahnich, Comment
Sarkozy crit lhistoire de France (Marseille: Agone, 2008).
78. See Ministry of Defense, Rapport de la Commission sur la modernisation des commmora-
tions publiques, www.defense.gouv.fr/sga/content/download/103057/906795/le/rapport_comr
(accessed July 5, 2010).
the inauguration of the VeldHiv Memorial, dedicated to the memory of the vic-
tims of the Shoah. The last step in this process took place in 1995, when Jacques
Chirac admitted Frances responsibilities in the genocide of the Jews. In 2004 the
Milles national memorial (in Aix- en- Provence) was inaugurated, and in 2006
the Shoah Memorial (for the seventy- six thousand deported Jews) and the Wall of
the Righteous (for those who hid or saved Jews) were opened in Paris. The culmi-
nating point was in 2007, when the righteous entered the Pantheon.
If this new public policy of remembrance made room for deaths caused by
France, a distinction remains: whereas the deaths of those who died for France
are deaths endured by the French for their nation they are then transgured
into heroes those whose deaths were caused by France appear on the altar
of national remembrance as victims. This is notably the case for the Holocaust.
As it so happens, there are other cases where the French died because of France.
This is the case for colonization. Colonialism not only displaces the line that
generally separates our dead from theirs; it also divides the political civitas from
its core through to its periphery, because colonization offers itself up as its own
victim and its own executioner. This is one reason why colonialism is the very
eye of the memorial cyclone that has swept through the country. And for the past
few years, the state itself has aroused the tempest. For the reasons stated above,
the state seeks to ofcially modernize commemorations. In this proliferation
of commemorations, tributes, inaugurations, monuments, museums, and public
spaces, the boundaries separating history, remembrance, and propaganda have
been obscured.
77
Thus, in a project now under way, the First World War which
marked an unprecedented retreat from democracy and which ultimately paved
the way for the arrival of fascism and Nazism is dialectally reinterpreted as
having been the starting point of the European Union. The war of 1935 45 is
no longer a world war but rather an essentially European war with important
international repercussions. As for the colonial troops drafted for conicts that,
as we now admit, were foreign to them, it has been suggested that they died for
Liberty and Civilization and thus deserve the privilege of having been colonized.
In this case as in others, the military endeavor is gured as a crusade in which
the dead are martyrs who, in a patriotic fervor, voluntarily gave up their lives for
a just cause.
78
PrcvinciaIizing france!
j
Discourse against repentance seeks to calmly assume all aspects of Frances
history. Its goal is to rehabilitate the colonial enterprise. It is alleged that the true
victims of colonization are the colonizers, not the indigenous people. The latter
should be grateful to the former. This logic of self- absolution ares bright in the
case of Algeria, the memory of which is at the epicenter of the French ailment of
colonization.
79
France occupied Algeria for more than a century and a half. Four
to ve generations of Europeans took it as their native land between 1830 and
1962. Large numbers of auxiliary troops in the French army (the harkis, drafted
troops, and enlisted men) fought there. It is impossible to measure the trauma
caused by the loss of French Algeria, coming on the heels of the defeat at Dien
Bien Phu, and it was surely as traumatic as the defeat during the 1870 Franco-
Prussian war. Frances defeat in Algeria was different, however: it was not only a
military defeat; it was also a political and moral defeat that, among other things,
revealed the widespread use of torture by the French army. It was indeed the war
of Algeria, which for a long time remained nameless and, not long ago, was still
known in France under the euphemism of the events of Algeria it was this
war that was the penultimate object of organized practices of concealment and
willful colonial amnesia and melancholy.
But recently, since at least 2002, there has been a veritable outpouring of tes-
timonies; books; Web sites; press articles; lms (La trahison by Philippe Faucon
in 2005, Mon colonel by Laurent Herbiet and Indigne by Rachid Bouchareb
in 2006, Lennemi intime by Florian Emilio Siri in 2007); documentaries; and
television movies (Nuit noire by Alain Tasma in 2005, La bataille dAlger by
Yves Boisset in 2007).
80
The loss of Algeria is in large part at the root of the
famous law of February 23, 2005 a law initiated, perhaps, by a stratum of
junior parliamentarians,
81
but most denitely adopted by the French National
Assembly, along with its article 4, explaining the benets of a positive coloni-
zation. Jacques Chirac repealed article 4 in 2006, but the controversy has not
subsided. Its ramications extend to commemorations of the war and to questions
concerning museums, memorials, walls, and monuments to the dead in the south
of France (Marseille, Perpignan, and Montpellier), as well as accounting for the
79. Guy Pervill, Pour une histoire de la guerre dAlgrie (Paris: Picard, 2002); Benjamin Stora,
with Mohammed Harbi, La guerre dAlgrie, n damnsie (Paris: Hachette- Poche, 2005). See also
Pascal Blanchard and Isabelle Veyrat- Masson, eds., Les guerres des mmoires: La France et son
histoire (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2008).
80. Benjamin Stora, Guerre dAlgrie: 1999 2003, les acclrations de la mmoire, Hommes
et migrations, no. 1244 (2003): 83 96.
81. Bayart, Postcolonial Studies, 62.
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q
number of French deaths. On the other side of the Mediterranean, in Algeria, we
also hear calls for a precise accounting of the number of Algerians killed since
1830 by France, as well as of villages burned, tribes decimated, and wealth stolen.
And there is conict over the restitution of maps that show where the 11 mil-
lion mines were dropped or deposited during the war by the French army along
the Algerian and Moroccan border to prevent activists of the Algerian Army of
National Liberation (ALN) from reaching Morocco. According to Algeria, these
mines have provoked untold ravages up to forty thousand dead and injured
since the end of colonization. In addition, there is the calamitous legacy of nuclear
tests in southern Algeria during the 1960s and the question of medical care for
atomic radiation victims in the Sahara.
Citizens of former imperial possessions and their descendants are not the only
victims of colonial trauma in contemporary France; this is also the case for the
former French colonizers of Algeria and their descendants. This spectacle of
competing memories occurs in a context where the Holocaust was torn from the
horrors of the Second World War, becoming a unique event, a dominant political
and cultural element of Euro- American life. These ailments of memory must be
understood in relation to a crisis in French democracy as well as the spirit of the
times, which appraises the creation and expression of bruised and wounded iden-
tities. To be acknowledged politically, struggles for recognition increasingly must
be constructed around an exceptional signier my suffering and my wounds.
Archetypal and incomparable, this suffering must necessarily answer to a name
that is deemed worthier than all others. Insofar as ailments of memory (the chias-
mus in the present) often pave the way to absolute oppositions between victims of
the same executioner, the quarrel is inevitably about knowing which human suf-
fering should be sanctied and which is, ultimately, nothing but a mere incident
without value on a scale of truly meaningful lives and deaths. The struggle for
recognition therefore denies all equivalencies between different human lives and
deaths because, as some would have it, certain lives and certain deaths are taken
to be universal, while others are not and should never be.
In the spirit of todays world, many believe in the existence of a Fundamental
Mourning (un Deuil Premier), interminable and constantly evoked to remain on
the stage of symptoms, but never capable of bridging the chasm. In direct lineage
with the spirit of monotheism, this Fundamental Mourning cannot be measured
to any other mourning, for all other instances are but a simple pagan affair. Only
this Fundamental Mourning appears in the mirror of History. Devoid of a double,
it lls the surface of the mirror from one edge to the other: the single entity, the
One. All other events, no matter how terrifying, are forbidden access to the eld
PrcvinciaIizing france!
y
82. Read Achille Mbembe, introduction to La naissance du maquis dans le Sud- Cameroun
(1920 1960) (Paris: Karthala, 1996).
of speech and language because this eld is already consumed by the Event. But
by conceptualizing the Fundamental Mourning in this way, mourning ultimately
becomes impossible. Because of its impossibility and because it is interminable,
we end up in one of the major paradoxes of contemporary ailments of memory: my
mourning consists above all else of killing not my executioner but rather a third
party. Our aversion to the suffering of others is demonstrated in the death wish
at work in every consciousness of victimization, especially when this conscious-
ness can only conceive of itself in competition with other consciousnesses of the
same name. I must therefore either silence the other or, if not, force the other into
a state of delirium so that his or her historical suffering returns to a prelinguistic
state, a state anterior to all naming. What the French call la guerre des memoires
(memories war) is thus inscribed in the frame of struggles for transcendence in a
context of ideologies of victimization that mark the end of the twentieth century
and the beginning of the twenty- rst. These struggles are a fundamental aspect of
necropolitical projects. Indeed, insofar as one can never found the transcendental
on the basis of ones own death, the sacricial killing of another is necessary to
the constitution of the sacred.
CcncIusicn
As a general formula of domination, colonization created a new structure of per-
formance and signication, a new regime of historicity (or, better yet, a new pro-
saic). Of course, this process of ordering the eld for future interactions between
the colonizers and their subjects did not erase all preexisting indigenous customs
and logics. This process was fundamentally heteronomous. The invention of new
customs inspired new constraints, but it also freed up new resources and forced
colonial subjects to try to take advantage of the situation, to protest it, or to distort
it or to do all three simultaneously.
82

Furthermore, colonization was dened by multiple lines of ight. From
the beginning to the end, colonial regimes were riddled with ssures, gaps,
and breaches that needed to be constantly capped and sealed. Even when they
emerged as more or less central apparatuses, colonial regimes were still racked
by fragmentary logics. In most cases, each decision simply displaced the lines
of ight. As a world of microdetermination, the colonial world depended on the
management of small and great fears, the production and miniaturization of the
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6
insecurities shared by both the dominating and the dominated. This molecular
fear emerged from the fact that something always escaped the structure, and so
colonial regimes constantly enacted new laws and interdictions in a will to cap-
ture that which was eeing and leaking. And even when they succeeded, colo-
nial authorities never knew whether or not they had caught the true object of
their fear. Constant fear even paranoia also originated in the double bind of
powerlessness and ignorance so characteristic of this primitive mode of domina-
tion. The colonial masters could almost never distinguish mere imitation from
true opposition, a simple inversion from an apparent appropriation, or even that
what appeared to be a revolt had in fact more to do with a simple logic of desire.
From beginning to end, colonial regimes lived by the sentiment that something in
indigenous societies regardless of scale, size, or dimension was unattribut-
able (inassignable).
That said, the history of colonization is not only a history of ambivalence and
contingency, of profound coincidences and astonishing encounters, as certain his-
toriographical and sociological renderings often well documented, yet at times
disingenuous would have it. Taking distance from positivist conceits, we must
therefore reread the history of the West against the grain of Western accounts
of its own genesis, reading against its ctions, its obvious and sometimes empty
truths, its disguises, its ploys, and it bears repeating its will for power. For,
beyond the compilation of empirical detail, the critique of colonialism or imperi-
alism still has nothing to say about colonialism and imperialism until it confronts
this will for power and the constant obfuscation of its ontological, metaphysi-
cal, theological, and mythological dimensions. As a will for power, colonial rea-
son is simultaneously religious, mystical, messianic, and utopian. Colonization
is inseparable from the powerful imaginary constructions and the symbolic and
religious representations that are integral to the depiction of a terrestrial horizon
in Western thought. The critique of colonial situations and the facts of Empire
can thus accommodate a philosophical and ethical critique and a circumstantial
examination of what constitutes their inner ame. Practically speaking, the spirit
that carries colonial empires forth is, in large part, race. This is what, at base,
regulates their language, their perceptual schema, and their imaginaries.
Colonial regimes were also systems of signs that were continually deciphered
by different actors, each in his or her own way. They had particular procedures for
representing their own mythologies to themselves. They had words to designate
themselves. They knew how to delegate to the indigenous substitutes that were
their extensions. Colonial relationships of domination were neither simple nor uni-
lateral. They emerged out of the hollows. Nonetheless, they did have a frame the
PrcvinciaIizing france!

will for power and what that will had to say about general questions of might and
right, rights and justice, justice and responsibility. Colonizers and colonized were
invested with desires, beliefs, and interests. Different colonial regimes were not
merely political and economic entities; they were also unconscious constructs
and, as such, left indelible marks on colonial peoples imagination.
Finally, colonial domination was akin to a state of war. And indigenous people
often emerged from this permanent, low- intensity warfare in a broken, undone,
and disgured state. For their part, the colonizers risked dwelling in that war until
they destroyed everything they could possibly destroy. For all colonial practices
are inhabited by an inner drive, a nihilistic impulse. Beyond economic prot,
this pulse constructs itself on the crest of an intense line: the clear, cold line of
pure destruction. And this pulse runs even along the lines of ight that colonial
practice seeks to one day inhabit. The will for power axiomatic to all colonial
projects consists, from this point on, of a desire to interrogate everything. It
is a bet on the death of others, on a death that is supposed to happen to others, a
delegated death.
In a globalized humanity, these are precisely the questions that concern us
most distinctly in the very enigma of this present moment and in its full future
potential. It is indeed in part through the slave trade and colonization and thus
through these general questions that our common language was forged and that
the inhabitants of the earth were juxtaposed or brought together in a unity that is
both emblematic and problematic. We are thus compelled, through these events,
to pursue the question of all possible conditions of an authentic human encounter.
Yet this encounter cannot begin with acute amnesia, which transforms us into
sleepwalkers, or with a form of revisionism that barely masks an archaic scientic
positivism; instead, this encounter must begin through reciprocal disorientation.
This vital disorientation, in turn, requires the elaboration of forms of thought that
are at once profoundly historical and philosophical, sociological, hermeneutical,
and ethical memory and antimemory, militant and antimilitant, political, anti-
political, and poetic.
In the same vein, the question of the relationship between democracy and dif-
ference can never be resolved by a purely abstract conception of both humanity
and universalism. A citizen is someone who can personally answer the question,
who am I? He or she is someone who can speak publicly in the rst person. Of
course, speaking in the rst person does not sufce to exist as a subject. But there
can be no full citizenship when such a possibility is purely and simply negated.
Where primary afliations have been negated or obliterated by violence, domina-
tion, and racial stigmatization, the ascent to citizenship is not necessarily incom-
PubIic CuIture
8
patible with indexes of difference constituted by family, religious, corporatist, and
even ethnic ties. The abstraction of our fundamental differences is not a condition
sine qua non of a conscious belonging to a common humanity or, in the case at
hand, to a multicultural democracy based on the obligation of mutual recogni-
tion as a condition for convivial life.
83
As Jean- Luc Nancy reminds us, equality
does not entail a commensurability of subjects in relation to a random unit of
measure; it lies rather in the equality of singularities.
84
Stating the plurality
of the singular thus becomes an effective mode of navigating the Babel of races,
cultures, and nations produced by the long history of globalization. So that the
human and the universal are not reduced to pure ctions, we must turn our
backs on those forms of universalism that can only think the other in terms of
duplication and reproduction to innity in a narcissistic image, in a spiral form
that dominates the individuals on whom it preys.
85
The human is discovered and
recognized as human, each time, in different and unique gures. And no thought
of democracy could be complete that forgets that the subject only apprehends itself
through a distanciation of self and can only know and appraise (sprouver) itself
through the other, an elsewhere.
86
Recognizing difference and mutuality
is therefore hardly incompatible with the principle of a democratic society. Such
an acknowledgment does not signify that society proceeds without common ideas
and beliefs. To the contrary, this recognition is the very condition for these ideas
and beliefs to become truly common. And the recognition of this difference by
others is precisely the mediation through which we become the same (semblable).
It appears, then, that a communion of singularities is indeed prerequisite for a
politics of similarity and an ethics of mutuality.
Finally, ours is an era that hopes and strives to resuscitate the old myth by
which the West, and only the West, has a monopoly on the future. In these condi-
tions, it is hardly surprising that some seek to negate any paradigmatic signica-
tion of colonialism and imperialism, as well as to drown serious philosophical
and ethical dilemmas that arise with the European expansion in the world by con-
signing them to a register of unimportant detail. The rehabilitation of good colo-
nial conscience is based on the conviction that real and effective liberty is not the
product of any contract or treaty between equals. It issues from natural law ( jus
83. Paul Gilroy, After the Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2005).
84. Jean- Luc Nancy, Lexprience de la libert (Paris: Galile, 1988), 96.
85. Jacque Hassoun, Lobjet obscur de la haine (Paris: Aubier, 1997), 14.
86. Jean- Marie Vaysse, Linconscient des modernes: Essai sur lorigine mtaphysique de la psy-
chanalyse (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 389.
PrcvinciaIizing france!
g
naturale). Ours is also an era in which the only valid moral is one that is reduced
to an instinct for pity, to the thousands of forms of disdain hiding behind charity,
to the belief that the winner is right after all. And where might makes right, and
reason and might combine, why demand justice and reparations? Furthermore,
according to this moral, there is no place in the bowels of our world for guilt and
even less for repentance, since guilt and the desire for repentance are but cynical
manifestations of the perversity of the weak. In such conditions, the real question
asked of French intellectuals today concerns the refoundation of critical thought.
But for such a critical thought to have a future at all, we must rst turn our backs
on that form of anachronism we have come to know as Parisianism.