On thinking and uprooting systematic injustice: Note on 'Black Reason' and critical theory

Is Achille Mbembe the Luce Irigaray of African postcolonial theory? "Critique of Black Reason" is such a delight to read because of its Francophone lucidity. I only worry that he explains too much. He also writes in a poetic style that is highly syncretic, in what resembles much American theory making use of French theories consumed on a single plate, and the style is lucid like most French theory yet also reminds me of Adorno and Horkheimer's "Dialectic of Enlightenment" in its intricacy that makes me shudder with the thought that I am in a labyrinth, and must wonder if I am losing the thread of where the constitutive or tangent straight lines are. For it is one in which many individual sentences seem to me to incorporate or imply entire arguments. The labor of conjoining the many of them fills me with admiration for a deceptively poetic style of theoretical prose that seems relentless piquant. This style has a risk that is like a gorgeous fabric that I fear will unravel, as I think Adorno and Horkheimer's poetic dissertation unhappily does, leaving it only fruitful but not conclusive. The French language with its extraordinary tendency to linearity amid complex logical entailments precisely mirrored in syntax is an excellent resource for resisting this. But French academic society tends to particularize its leading lights in attractive suburban ghettos, and Mbembe is more like some American theorists (and imitators) in picking up threads and sewing them into a seemingly seamless fabric. In the process,

he seems to draw into his historical theory every categorical opposition the French and English languages and modern philosophical thought have posited. It is a potentiality of historicizing theory in the wake of Hegelianism, as in Foucault, who is the great master of that style, and the obvious progenitor of literary and art historical New Historicism. Of the concepts and categories that describe and mirror modern European thought, now colonialism seems to explain them all. And why shouldn't it? It begins in the Renaissance and Descartes and all that followed his radical foundationalism, no less than Shakespeare and his incredulous and subversive rethinking of all the forms of authority he could only trouble without failing to affirm, would be impossible without it. All of modern Europe after the Quattrocento is contemporary with the colonial project, so show us a map of one and then the other and you can bet you will find correspondences. Do they explain or only seem to? If a and b occur together, which c explains them? I could doubt some of this and still think I am reading a masterpiece to be recommended to sundry and all.

There is a pitfall to understanding of every naming of an injustice or explaining what it consists of and means. This always amounts to claims that demand recognition. Moralism may be defined as the political pitfall that results when such recognition is demanded in a way that becomes an idol as absolute. This can mean, as I think it does in America today, that scholars and those who would think about such questions, apt to doubt any conclusion or assumption as discourse motivated by curiosity and a will to doubt beliefs must, had better keep their thoughts to themselves or at least just to writing, lest they risk endless black eyes and punches in the face, from people who think disagreement is opposition and are used to experiencing the latter as the violence from above or below, that of either punishment or rebellion. Moralistic judgment, which only demands obedience, taking articulated truths as mots d'ordre that must be obeyed lest one be thought to deny what is true and so be faithless to self, community, and God, is the cul-de-sac of all critical social thinking that wants to end oppression or even make a bid for any action or change.

James Baldwin said that white people hate black people out of terror (of violence), and black people hate white people out of rage (at injustice). Both are wrong. This framework gives us the basic form of ideologies of policing, on the one hand, and militant rebellion, on the other. To see how this does not work, consider what happens when the predicates (to police people to maintain peace and the working order of the society and its economy, or to rebel and try to overturn systems of oppression and policing that the rebels are threatened or damaged by) shift in relation to the subjects. Suppose that the police man is black and the rebel is white. Perhaps, you think, the white person is a racist. The Confederacy claimed to be a rebellion, appealing to the liberty ideology that the state they would separate from was founded on in relation to the original colonial power. Perhaps neither exercising power nor rebelling against it is an automatic good. Thus, oppositely of Baldwin, the Talmud, a document certainly of Jewish culture at its more conservative, says 'Do not favor the rich man because he is rich; do not favor the poor man because he is poor'. Even though we also may want to have less poverty and less wealth dependent on it. Radical politics shipwrecks on claims that allow opposition to what is functional or systematic to be substituted for by representations of people whose very existence or ability to represent a subjectivity that can be affirmed is latent in their being the subjects, or rather objects, of oppression. In the modern world especially, with its bureaucracies and trends among populations, it is hard for agentive subjects to deal with problems that are not reducible to psychology and morality, that is to individuals and to a politics that attributes things to them, as is still true under monarchisms. Politics as organized action has to confront something that is known as sociology. Marxism at its best was that, and indeed, after Hegel philosophy in Europe became social theory normally as one of its objects and tasks. The fact of something like society as autonomous of individual moral subjects is a challenge for modern social movements. It is a challenge that has not always been well enough met.

I know that every story of civilization monumentalizes its barbarism. What I doubt is less which class of victims (the indigenous, women, sexual minorities, Jews, artists, schizos, the policed, workers, the lumpen wretched of the earth, the colonized, whoever is weaker, whoever cannot resist resisting, artists, intellectuals, the messiah himself, those who love God and man, those who choose to care...?) has the point of view that explains it all, the theory of everything as far as oppression or organized injustice is concerned, but also, whether the standpoint of the oppressed explains all of 'Western' modernity. It has other facets.

But of course: Cartesian philosophy and analytical geometry, the mathematics of probability and risk as used in insurance schemes, Renaissance architecture and perspective, classical English and French theater, German music and philosophy, the tragedy of Aeschylus, ... and so many other things, would not have been possible without citadels that had to be defended against the hapless poor outside them or the city's very language. So it is. So what cannot be doubted is that any critical theory based on who is oppressed marks one of its conditions.

Culture is always a mask of power; it is never only that. If that were not true, no one would go to the theater, as it would suffice to read what critics say. That it is mostly that is an alibi for endangered scholars, in a time when domination and violence are everywhere and haunt even our loveliest dreams. That of course is true enough. We live in a history that can hurt with each encounter. 'What is it?" we ask. Che cosa? Quest-ce que c'est? We know that something is happening, and aren't precisely certain what it is. I find this condition exciting, don't you?

Violence makes it obvious; what to think, what to say, is always more than that. I don't seek to be an object of violence, even less pursue it as a subject. I wish I could avoid it, but as much as I try I know I can't. I cannot exclude its possibility, so I question its meaning; I ask what sense we can make of it. That is indeed a way to oppose it. Opposing it with a labor of thought is, where it has sway, in a sense all I know how to do. I know that the imaginary force of 'history' must be said to have ruses that escape the intentions of all who would master it. Curiosity of the intellect, certainty of the will. Limited actions, unlimited thought. Message me and do not hesitate if you are an Ariadne who has found the thread to the way out. All I know is we live in dark times. The world sucks, and it is ruled by people who cannot fix it but only police the rest of us. The film 'Battle of Algiers' ends with a celebration and starts with a resounding "No!" Negation is one way to start.