Response+to+Mbembe

Quotes from the text are **bold.**


 * “To someone who is a slave we can also give the forename ‘thing.’ By ‘thing,’ we must understand the contrary of the substantive—that is, something that somewhere is //nothing//” (235).**


 * “The second hollow is what colonial vocabulary calls ‘the Negro’” (180).**


 * “In the colonial principle of rationality, the native is thus that //thing that is, but only insofar as it is nothing//. And it is at the point where the thingness and its nothingness meet that the native’s identity lies” (187).**


 * “Thus, there is no violence in a colony without as sense of contiguity, without bodies close to one another, fleetingly or longer, bodies engaged in particular forms of fondling and concubinage” (175).**

Despite the thingness of the colonized subject, the thingness that is almost a nothingness, it is only through contact, through “conviviality,” that the colonial project is accomplished. There must be contact, very close contact. Though the story of coloniality defines the colonized as a thing/nothing, is this what they are? Mustn’t the colonized in reality be more than this, in order to even exist in order to press against, to articulate in relation to, even if in a relation of violence?

The similarities between the colonizer and the colonized are many. In addition, similarities between the postcolonial state and the colonizer are many; similarities between the postcolonial autocrat and the postcolonial subject are many. The excessive consumption, the //commandement//, the phallus as a legitimizing force are all borrowed by the autocrat from the colonizers who have gone.

Then, because they are all thrown together so closely in the postcolony, the rulers and the ruled rub together as did the colonizers and the colonized. Again, the autocrat has complete power over the subject. Part of this power lies in the display of excessive consumption and sex. However, the subjects undermine the power of the autocrat by also taking these displays as signs that the autocrat is only a man:


 * “Indeed, the purest expression of //commandement// is conveyed by a total lack of restraint, a great delight too in getting really dirty” (108).** Lack of restraint are symbols of power, they convey the //commandement.//

However: **“Debauchery and buffoonery readily go hand in hand” (108).** What conveys power is also laughable, and the people //do// laugh.

But this laughter is not necessarily a sign of resistance, a precursor to revolt. Sometimes people laugh, sometimes they join in wholeheartedly in the rituals and excesses that convey the autocrat’s power. In both cases, **“these are the primary signifiers, it is these that have force, that get interpreted and reinterpreted, and feed further significance back into the system” (108).**

Through this process of feedback, the people who are subjected to violence are rendered incapable of truly escaping this system of significances; laughter is only a means of getting by. They are still subject to very real beatings and abuses. In addition, the autocrat is denied the true absoluteness, pure self-constitution of his own subjectivity that he desires, since his subjectivity is constituted through jokes at his expense as mere human subjectivity, as a body that farts and eats and copulates. This articulation results in mutual powerlessness: the **“practices of those who command and those who are assumed to obey are so entangled as to render both powerless” (133).**


 * “Colonial discourse, an aberrant product of the madness that threatens all domination, is stuck deep in the thick clay of contempt, condescension, and hatred. Meanwhile, the colonizer gorges on food, scrambles up the tree of language, goes on an orgy of pleasure, farts, and collapses into a drunken stupor. The colonizer pinches words, scratches them, dilates them, slams them, and then erupts violently” (181).**

Here it is suggested that the colonizer does a similar violence to language as that which he does to the colonized.


 * “But to enter fully into the spiral that leads to the act of coition, colonial discourse must, as in the act of copulation and rape, grope, lick, and bite, rise and descend—in short, work hard, butt against its object, again and again until final relief. It must literally expend by repeating. This is one reason it is a //discourse of incantation//. Picking up rumor and gossip, amplifying them in the telling, it claims to throw light on things that haunt and obsess it, but about which, in truth, it knows absolutely nothing” (178).**


 * “ ‘In the colonial world,’ says Fanon, ‘the colonized’s emotional sensibility is kept on the surface of his skin like an open sore which flinches from the caustic agent.’ It is literally in a state of erection. Retraction, relaxation, retention, obliteration, and discharge are its main components. This is why the colonized is said to seek exhaustion ‘in dances which are more or less ecstatic…[this is] a huge effort of a community to exorcise itself, to liberate itself, to explain itself’” (182).**

Colonization as coitus: **“Furthermore colonial violence is linked to the exercise of language, to a seris of acts, gestures, noises, and sounds, and also participates in the phallic gesture: a phallic and sometimes sadistic gesture, insofar as the colonizer thinks and expresses himself through his phallus…Without a phallus, the colonizer is nothing, has no fixed identity” (175).**

Another similarity between the colonizer, the autocrat, and the colonized: all seek orgasmic relief. In all cases, this requires a “pressing against,” a repetitive energetic motion. If Nietzsche’s fundamental principle was the will to power, Mbembe’s is the drive to ejaculation. From Hegel to Jesus, from the conquerer, to the conquered, the autocrat to the oppressed African civilian, this is the motivating drive. And, like with the will to power, once its ubiquity is pointed out, it is a compelling concept.