Gérard Bensussan Interview | Alex Gilbert #255

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.

Dear friends, dear colleagues,

I speak with humility and caution after these two days of intense and very rich exchanges.

With humility because I will have a hard time fully considering everyone’s contributions due to my inability to understand them as they were presented in Portuguese; with humility, consequently, because I feel a deep frustration at not having learned as much from your interventions as I would have wanted, should have, or could have.

I also advance with caution because my intention is limited. I would like to propose for our discussion some critical elements regarding what decolonial thoughts have revived from a theoretical and political reflection of primary importance. I will certainly speak too broadly, neglecting their internal dissensions and overlooking the gaps in my knowledge of them.

One might object: why undertake a critical analysis of decolonialism under these conditions, even provisionally? Because I want to share with you a concern and a disturbance. It is this perplexity that I will try to express, which leads me to attempt to give it some philosophical substance and submit its content to your sagacity.

I will randomly and non-exhaustively distinguish three groups of questions – whose decolonial reappropriation constitutes a decisive political issue today. These somewhat haphazard sets, which arouse suspicion in me, I will summarily call Origin/ Identity/ Difference. They do not exclude other questions but condense particularly significant signs and indices. These three themes also relate to specific sequences in the history of metaphysics while now being at the center of burning political confrontations in Latin America, Brazil, Europe, and France.

Origin

In many decolonial discourses as I have encountered them, origin is the subject of a particular construction, supposed to open up a better understanding of our current situation, that is, of the non-original, evolved, transformed state of things, generally determined as “capitalist.” Decolonial genealogy proposes to trace back to a space not yet contaminated by the non-identical, the difference, the history, the hypothetical-deductions of all kinds. This myth-place can have several, variable names. The origin is then said in multiple ways, referring to a kind of blank, virgin void, free of any colonization or conquest drive. However, this tracing back to the origin lacks consistency because before the origin, there is still the origin, something even more original, the “pre-original” as Levinas put it.

Rather than a precise genealogy of the origin that could reach its zero point, this movement refers to the abyss, to a bottomless black hole, the unattainable origin of the world. The idea of origin mobilized by decolonial constructions, circumscribed by its designations, seeks instead to establish a foundation, Grund. Where vertigo, the Ab-grund, the bottomless, presents itself, it declines its identity through its naming of the origin. For example, the poet Jean Genet grounds his anti-Zionism on the challenge to the supposed Jewish origin of the West, its “morality” and its “myths.”

The metaphysical substitution for this Origin-Fund of a magnified “Palestine” would be the historial, primo-original antidote: “if she had not fought against the people who seemed to me the darkest, the one whose origin wanted to be the origin, who proclaimed to have been and wanted to remain the Origin, the people who called themselves Night of Times, would the Palestinian revolution have attracted me with such force? By asking myself this question, I believe I am giving the answer. Carving itself on a background of the Night of Beginnings – and this, eternally – the Palestinian revolution ceased to be a usual fight for a stolen land; it was a metaphysical struggle. Imposing its morality and myths on the entire world, Israel was confused with Power. It was Power” [1].

Origin designates a beginning, a night of times, a hole that it plugs in thought by giving it a substitute name, “Palestine” for Genet. The obstruction calls for the formation of a place where a void opened. Origin proposes its determination according to various geopolitical, indigenous, ab-original, primordial, having-been-there-before translations. In Genet’s terms, one understands the mimetic rivalry that sets in between Zionism, notably, and decolonialism. It is a disputation about origin, between those “whose origin wanted to be the origin” and the noble savages of antisemitism that the Palestinians would be according to Genet, even more original than the original. The problem, suggested by the representation of an abyss where origin falls and falls again, despite the names it gives itself, is that there is no performativity of Origin.

Origin cannot be decreed, it cannot be traced back like a river to its source, it cannot be found. It has a theoretical-political function to fill and then designate what I just called too abstractly a “place.” Indeed, this place actually and practically relates to a territory – proper, native, inhabited, identifiable, the forest for example, the Urwald, the primitive and original forest (Ur-), the archi-forest. But other spaces still lend themselves to this archaeology which calls, calls for, an architecture to come for which they provide the proper toponymies. Here, in Brazil, it is obviously the Amazon rainforest that I think of above all, considering everything that has been said and shown about it during these days. In his Yesterday’s World, Stefan Zweig, arriving in Brazil and fleeing Nazi Europe, wrote: “Here /in Brazil/ man is not separated from man by the absurd theories of blood, stock, origin” [2].

By an interesting and ironic return of things, which one must probably refrain from overinterpreting, it is here in Brazil and through its decolonial thinkers, that one sees how origin, identity (the “blood”?) and territory (the “stock”?) are rooted again, not in the service of colonial or neocolonial domination, of course, but asserting themselves against domination, turning its old weapons against it, or opposing new ones from a reconsidered origin.

It remains very troubling, for an old “white” European (?), to see notions immediately associated with the murderous ideologies of the 20th century, and bearing mass exterminations – origin, territory, rooting – invoked without trembling or anxiety – as far as I know, of course.

Certainly, it must be seen, to begin with, as a sign of something that demands to be recognized, accomplished, satisfied, perhaps a call: the decolonial claim must be heard. It unfolds first as decolonization, that is to say, according to a history, a political demand, an ethical and practical fact, which were at the center of the commitments and struggles of the 20th century, in their truth and their ambivalences. But the decolonial is far from only signifying a historical struggle, the intercontinental fight of the wretched of the earth. It intends to propose the “colony” as a paradigm, a universal key to understanding the most diverse contemporary geopolitical situations. It is no longer a matter of describing and analyzing systems of dependence, especially economic, or of revisiting Leninist theory of imperialism.

The colony informs all kinds of symbolic, even cognitive structures, and encompasses political theory itself. Detached from European colonialism and its concrete history, it aims to provide the systemic concept opening up to the complete understanding of Power, powers, all powers whose general framework would be colonial, regardless of their empirical history and specificities. A grand apologetic narrative then sets in. It endlessly unravels and denounces, and at the price of an endless escalation, modern and democratic universality as an ideological illusion, an imaginary cover of the only effective, bare reality, the colony and the omni-explanatory decolonial.

I return to the question of origin. There is no doubt that many contemporary conflicts, wherever one looks, are fueled by endless disputes of origin, historical anteriority, ancient settlement, primal-territoriality: who is more indigenous than the other, and therefore more legitimate? This factual observation cannot be bypassed, reduced, or denied by the ontological-political approach to the question of origin. The gap between, on the one hand, the thematization by thought of an object proposed to it, its philosophical taking charge, and what, on the other hand, remains external to it, escapes it, massive, compact, which can even contradict or disarm it – this gap is not reducible or absorbable.

Ontology and politics meet, at least since Aristotle, but they do not overlap. No more than species and singularity, exemplar and existence, being and city. I think here of Michelet’s words in The Bird when he becomes an observer, armed with all his knowledge of ornithological species, and ends up, listening to bird songs, abandoning classification, taxonomies, all zoo-logies, concluding: “nothing resembles anything else.” The most elementary probity commands to think also in this gap of thought with itself and with what irremediably escapes it and does not resemble it.

The question of origin is an old metaphysical question. On the one hand, as I have just said, it would be inappropriate to think it without attempting to benefit from this venerable heritage, which invites us to doubt that it is possible to fix the origin, immobilize it, circumscribe it, assign it a purely “decolonial” topicality. On the other hand, one cannot further neglect, in the name of the truth of thought

One must tremble doubly when approaching the origin, with a “pre-original” tremor provoked by the proximity of the abyss, but also with unease in the face of decolonial assurance and its certainties. A statement like Derrida’s in Monolingualism of the Other, strange and unsettling: “all culture is originally colonial,” itself derived from Benjamin’s view that “all culture,” by itself, is also a “document of barbarism,” these statements, which are fundamental hypotheses, including about origin, can they not shift some of the foundations of decolonial thought, that is, make its anchors move? This movement, deconstruction, and différance of the origin, affects and touches the identity of what is assigned to an original, territorialized, named place, and it necessitates not overlooking the allochthonies and their destabilizing power.

“Différance,” as we know, is not a concept but the movement I have just described in a word, from auto- to allo-. Silent movement (the “a” is read but not heard), différance carries a force of opening through separation, like a work fortunately deprived of its product, partly because it delays production, accomplishment (“différer” = to postpone, temporize, leave problems open, each according to its temporality); and partly because it multiplies differentiations (“différer” = to uncover the differential gaps hidden in heritages and cultures, in so-called “systemic” positions and identity thoughts that lurk therein). There is in différance an ethics of differentiating delay that can be usefully invoked against the decolonial.

Reflections that block movement by letting it freeze in a single sequence, or in a sovereign paradigm, thoughts whose coherence is paid for by abusive simplifications, run the risk of a certain violence that would not seek to save. The salvation animates différance as a rule of reading, understanding, interpretation, which never ceases to open it to otherness since it continuously traverses it. This is why I theoretically rely on Derridean différance amid our discussions. It permeates them, it seems to me, and even, in its ethical dimension or scope, it “inspires” them (Levinas). Différance rejects (non-difference, indifference) and maintains (difference). In a word, concerning everything we have talked about, it destabilizes. It is foreign to speculative reconciliation. To differ is neither to eliminate nor to preserve.

Deconstruction is not a dialectic, which, in its political uses, leads to a strange social or historical constructionism. Throughout, différance proposes another regime of thought: it is not enough to rectify, inform, enlighten, explain, surpass, to lift what is much more than a lexical misunderstanding or a logical-speculative contradiction. Everything here is a matter of trace, salvation, movement—and I would also say passion. Decolonialism is a political passion—there are others, of course, including within decolonial deconstructions.

Différance, as a deconstructive protocol, allows for deepening distinctions, for a desubstantialization of Power, for its dis-imagination, if I may say so. The question of domination, essential, cannot be related to an immutable configuration (without deferral) and homogeneous (without differences). Always more than one, more than two of the oppositions that go two by two, more than three of the speculative triads. More of…: more than one language, Derrida often insists, who writes: “one must never forget the plural in deconstruction.”

Domination each time takes variable forms that are more than countable figures or simple images of a background reflected in its surface. A morphology of dominations also allows us to see how the origin, in decolonial thoughts, fixes an identity, which in turn refers back to the origin, according to a double metaphysical and political territorialization.

—

Notes:
[1] Un captif amoureux, Paris, Gallimard, 1986, p 239.
[2] Belfond, 1993, p. 488.

Next article:
*Decolonial ontalgic: Identity and Difference