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Alexandre Gilbert

Gérard Bensussan Interview | Alex Gilbert #256

Gérard Bensussan (Wikipedia CC BY 4.0)
Gérard Bensussan (Wikipedia CC BY 4.0)

In June 2024, Gérard Bensussan gave several lectures in Brazil, at the invitation of the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (Minas Gerais) in particular. The following text, slightly modified, reflects the content of one of them, devoted to the discussions he had with his Brazilian colleagues on the decolonial question.

For Jimmy, Gisella, and Maria Estrella.

Previous article:
*Decolonial ontalgic: Origin

Identity

The question of origin is intertwined with that of identity – the identity of the origin posited at the beginning, the origin of the identity deposited in the course of its determinations. Despite the glaring evidence of the differential “nothing resembles anything,” the implacable task of thought, unless it despairs of itself, compels the thinker to “identify the non-identical” according to Adorno’s phrase. Since time immemorial, since the Greeks, since that origin (there are others, again), thinking has meant subsuming a sensible diversity, unidentifiable by itself, under a concept, under the concept that will identify it according to a determined, proper logic.

This operation, identifying the non-identical, affirms and enables the understanding of the real despite its abundance – and thus the access to meaning, which assembles what does not resemble. Yet this task of Reason, fruitful, has aroused from within Reason itself, that is, in its historical figurations (Europe, the West, Christendom), a sharp questioning about the risk of destruction of exteriority it might entail.

Within its own tradition, its “modern tradition,” Reason interrupts its tradition, it demands its own excess, and it exceeds its calculations, as J.L. Nancy explains throughout his work: “the interruption of meaning: that is simply what thisera called the ‘West’ is” [3]. Reason was, from the outset or almost, self-critical of Reason, anxious about the threats it itself imposed on nature, turned into a stock of human resources, on its possible disappearance, on the complete deforestation of a world delivered to man as its “master and possessor.” Like Penelope’s work, the work of Reason has therefore been accompanied, not without cunning or calculations, by a profound, salutary concern to disidentify the identical, by undoing its results, by casting suspicion on identity as such.

In contrast, those who uphold the “systemic” nature of racism, coloniality, and everything that crushes minority differences, confine the dominated, the “racialized” for example, in an incurable identity, irremediably assigned.

The decolonial paradigm is caught in an internal conflict between the construction and “deconstruction” of identity: construction of an origin, a territory, a native difference and otherness; deconstruction of a white, virile, Western, “colonial” sovereignty, identical to itself; and moreover, this deconstruction is sometimes reduced to a self-deconstruction, or essentially to a religious or sectarian conversion, to self-work, as they say. In decolonialisms, or some of its figures, the indeterminable, the heterogeneous, always seem to be outmaneuvered by a subjective will that presides over particular existences. I am born but I am reborn, and my rebirth or trans-birth abrogates my birth. I sovereignly witness that one whereas my birth presents the disadvantage that I was not there. Existence does not exist.

To put it in the terms of medieval scholastic thought, very appropriate here, the most radical forms of decolonial thought proceed from an indigenist aseity, a sovereign being signifying itself by and for itself from its own characteristics, identity, place of birth, origin. To this aseitas, Thomas Aquinas opposed the abalietas of a creature born of the other, ab alio, coming from one older than myself, ego. Otherness as abalieness inscribes me in a time before me – where the other’s otherness facing me takes its obscure source, where existences are guessed to be subjected, ego ab alio.

From the presupposition of the aseity of decolonial subjects, individual or collective, one understands that Western institutions, all contaminated by the colony as a paradigm, but also those assigned to a birth sex, for example, might be invited to “deconstruct” themselves, as one would repent, as one would shed an old burden. It is as futile as lifting oneself by pulling on one’s shoelaces. This has nothing to do, I might add, with Derrida, for whom deconstruction means analysis of the structures of discourse, the sedimentations that compose it, the histories that constitute it. It implies, adds Derrida, and this is very important, a “mistrust towards words, concepts and certainties that we inhabit by recalling that no language is innocent, that it is composed of decisions, exclusions and ‘structures’ that must at least be made perceptible” (Letter to a Japanese Friend, 1985). Examining the discourses that, in their desire for decolonization, claim deconstruction, one quickly realizes they often rest on a confusion, sometimes deliberate, between deconstruction and destruction, cancel. The error, if that is what it is, is gross.

Deconstruction, in its intention and procedures, has nothing to do with destruction. It has to do with the question of heritage, legacy, transmission ab alio. Deconstruction is necessary to better transmit, that is, to restore before bequeathing. Heidegger, in §6 of Being and Time, speaks of stripping down, disjoining, renovating, oiling the elements of an old rusted machine, that is, of deobstructing. The “authorized” translation by F. Vezin suggests translating Heidegger’s Destruktion, or deconstruction according to Derrida, as deobstruction. In any case, beyond the games of translation and interpretation, deconstruction is in no way destruction; it undoes to repair, it restores before passing into testimony. It does not act like a dismantling intended to return to a supposed origin – as if it were necessary to “deconstruct” Brazil, for example, as a colonial state, return it to its precolonial origins, and repatriate imaginary “Brazilians” to a Portugal in period costumes!

Moreover, in Derrida’s thought, which is often a rethinking of limits, deconstruction is subject to a kind of indestructible stop he calls Justice. The difficult question of the universal, too quickly revoked without much philosophical precaution, returns here – entirely transformed, however, renewed in its fundamental position by its resumption within Derridean deconstructive pluralization. A deliberately pluralized universality, or a pluralization of the uni-versal, will first consist in a disidentification of the identical and the uni-form. The “mistrust” towards “innocence” as well as the “plural” promoted by deconstruction, once theoretically mobilized together, counter any praise of identity per se.

To those, decolonial and anticolonial, who say: one, one only, and also one universal/one universalism – therefore one single meaning, a multiplication table must be proposed. Some years ago, I advanced the idea of a translative universal, modeled on world literatures, written in a singular language and whose multiplication of translations into other singular languages increases power, influence, worldliness. Several particular propositions, as long as they are proposals of particular universality, do not diminish the amplitude of their effects, they generalize it.

I focused on deconstruction because its stakes, convocations, and uses are at the center of decolonial thoughts. I want to remind you that the idea that the West was constructed in a deliberate closure of its “universal,” according to a strategic calculation and cunning intended to conquer the world, is hardly tenable for long. Philosophically, from Plato to Hegel, the universal opens by closing particularity, according to diverse conceptualities. It determines or self-determines as “the element of the universal,” as a famous Hegelian formula states, this element having to “include in itself the particular.”

There is no typically Western and exclusive closed universal, contrary to a oft-repeated assertion. The universal unfolds in an incessant movement of closures and openings regulated by its relationship to particularity. If it were this absolute closure, this fortress locked on itself that some decolonial thinkers describe, one wouldn’t even understand how the anticolonialist struggle could put Europeans and their colonialisms in default and failure, by turning the West against itself, that is, a universal broadened into multi-versal, altered, sent back to its sender – which its extreme plasticity authorized and even inevitably prompted.

Self-nomination and self-determination, self-imagination and imagination of others, are operations inherent in “culture” in its universal constitutions and countless different constructions, in all “cultures.” The West does not have exclusivity (in the Tupi-Guarani language, I am told, the Tupinambas called themselves “men,” to the exclusion of other “men” otherwise named). But it alone bears the burden because of its colonial and neocolonial globalization. In this process, a sort of unilateral and unequal exchange takes place. The universal as a procedural power of determination by form according to Kant, or the “universal including in itself the particular” of Hegel, once translated into the terms of a planetary geopolitics of European colonial expansion in the 19th and 20th centuries, reveal unsuspected meanings, especially of the verb “include” whose painful experience the colonized peoples endured.

In this sense, deconstruction, if it seems to me to open decolonialism to a suspicious perspective, is no less entirely on the side of anticolonialism. For it always questions texts, practices, and discourses by liberating them from their compactness, by suspending their meanings through the displacement of a sign and the wavering of a word. This is the price for the “voice of the subaltern” (G. Spivak) to be heard, better than by constructing an identity stability.

Identity is produced by the quest for Origin as the latter comes to be obstructed. Identity is the obstruction of Origin. This raises another old metaphysical question: what distinguishes?

Difference

Ethically, difference can only be thought of as the difference of the other. In this regard, what we were discussing, the “minority differences,” forms a kind of tautology, likely beneficial as tautologies generally are. Opposite me, the other is always “minority”; their difference can never balance out with “my” difference. Following Levinas, I would even say that when faced with the Face, I can never invoke or summon my own alterity as different. Ethically, that would be a kind of monstrosity. But not politically. Politically, meaning in the field where the demands of different people confront and seek to equalize, I can indeed assert my difference, my alterity as dispossessed, my aseity.

“I am the Other,” “I have a Face,” and I deserve that my status as “Different” be respected: this concern and self-assertion are politically legitimate, correct. However, the ethics of asymmetry, as outlined by Levinas, disrupts this certainty, much like deconstruction does, compelling it to question the relationship it promotes between justice and ethics, between the claim for oneself and the torment for the other who is not oneself. The question of political and cultural reappropriation that drives decolonial or indigenous critiques of the hegemony of postcolonial thoughts is exemplary of the problematic self-affirmation of a self-posited alterity.

To decree “you do not have the right to speak about the experience of the racialized because you yourself are only a heteronormative white”—of the racialized, of women, of indigenous people, etc.—to say this and engage in what is sometimes called a “cannibal” practice, is to renounce all knowledge or, at the very least, to reduce knowledge to the repetition of an axiomatic discourse of hypostatized difference. It exacerbates the inversion whereby the other is posed as oneself, the different, the dominated, the oppressed, claiming that I am the only other, and that the other others are hypocritical simulacra that must be “deconstructed” until their pure and simple erasure.

This stance, moreover, is counter to thought itself. For thought is a transcendental attempt to articulate the a priori possibility of knowledge with everything that comes to us from a posteriori experience. Can thought exist without being conditioned by immediate, sensory experience, while also driven by a push beyond the strict immanence in which this experience incarcerates us? In the decolonial critique of cultural appropriation and the matrices of domination it transports, lies a denial of thought, a retreat to an identity-specific root—much like the Barresism or Maurrassism of their times, which asserted that a Jew, due to his fixed and irreducible difference from the French lineage, could never speak slang or understand a verse of Racine, despite deceptive appearances. This epistemological and political proposition, the indigeneity inspired by decolonialism, reproduces, knowingly or unknowingly, the essentialist assignments of thought to an insurmountable autochthony, to a boundless immanentism.

But this gnoseological critique, I repeat, does not negate the political necessity of the recentralization claimed and enacted by the dominated when they advocate a return to the Self, to a propriety. There is a difference between the two approaches, a philosophical gap between ontology and politics. Decolonial thoughts often seem rooted in a pre-reflective decision of essence, leading them to construct an anthropological difference that is subsequently difficult to avoid reducing to an abstraction and integrating into a hierarchy. Only difference, as I have programmatically indicated, can shift these foundations, displace and bring forth pluralized, minority, disseminated differences where sovereign Difference stands. This is why it is salutary to distinguish between the “colony” as a paradigm and colonialism—whose history must be revisited through differences, as the history of cruelty towards all those whose deaths “did not count,” as has been said about the countless victims of European colonizations.

Just as the “camp” as a paradigm, norm, or nomos, is certainly not the key to understanding modern politics and democracy (Agamben), so too the “colony” alone does not allow us to better understand contemporary geopolitics and its “geothought.”

The few critical elements I have indicated in bulk, regarding origin, identity, and difference, are they an unnecessary luxury, a supplement of soul, or worse, a guilt amortizer? I do not think so, of course. I am convinced that the thought of colonialism, and the dominations and oppressions it induces, is fundamental. It must be worked on, investigated, continually revisited—this is obvious and necessary.

One should not overlook its ontalgic dimension, to borrow a word from Queneau, the poet. A pain inhabits the thought of colonialism, like the phantom limb syndrome, a pain of being, like a ghost, a past that does not pass. On the contrary, quests for original innocence, even when politically justified, run the risk of an inherent indecency tied to any self-legitimation.

To this desire for innocence, for a blank slate and a new beginning from origin, one might oppose “the laughter of the Medusa” by D. Haraway, an ontalgic laughter, cruel perhaps because it reveals the indecency of innocence [4]. Are we certain that we are better than our past? Are we virtuous with a corrective virtue that seeks to abolish the vices we inherit from our colonizing ancestors, to destroy them, to condemn them, by the “grace” of having been born “after”?

The “colonial time” no longer exists. But justice does, now, a demanding presence whose absence defies time, more present than many presences. It demands that we allow ourselves to be haunted by the memory of all those deaths that did not count, by the imperative request for their rehabilitation and naming. Justice and thought demand that these deaths be reinstated, acknowledged, and taken care of among us, resurrected. This temporal disjunction, and the decolonial interruption of the Western interruption, in the différance carried by this thought and this justice, generate requests for us, immediately, which does not imply that the colony is everywhere and always the effective and virtuous paradigm.

Notes:
[3] Demande. Littérature et philosophie, Paris, Galilée, 2015, p. 326.
[4] Habiter le trouble avec Donna Haraway, Paris, Ed Dehors, 2019, p. 62-63.

Precedently:
*Dialogue avec Gérard Bensussan
*Antisionisme, en finir avec la confusion
*A vos caricatures!
*Hegel, Bensussan et la sortie de la philosophie
*Gérard Bensussan, contre toute attente
*Philosopher à Strasbourg, Jean-Luc Nancy et Gérard Bensussan, rencontres et désaccords
*La Guerre et les deux Gauches
*L’homme au caleçon de bain
*Tragédie et démocratie
*Politiques fictions
*Après le 7 octobre
*How to ‘think’ without reducing the Holocaust?

About the Author
Alexandre Gilbert is the director of the Chappe gallery.
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