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Africa, a headless figure threatened with madness and quite innocent of any notion of the center, hierarchy, or stability, is portrayed as a vast dark cave where every benchmark and distinction come together in total confusion, and the rifts of a tragic and unhappy human history stand revealed: a mixture of the half-created and the incomplete, strange signs, convulsive movements – in short, a bottomless abyss where everything is noise, yawning gap, and primordial chaos. (3)

It flows from there being hardly ever any discourse about Africa for itself. In the very principle of its constitution, in its language, and in its finalities, narrative about Africa is always a pretext for a comment about something else, some other place, some other people. More precisely, Africa is the mediation that enables the West to accede to its own subconscious and give a public account of its subjectivity. (3)

Flying in the face of likelihood or plausibility, these systems for reading the world attempt to exercise an authority of a particular type, assigning Africa to a special unreality such that the continent becomes the very figure of what is null, abolished, and, in its essence, in opposition to what is: the very expression of that notion whose special feature is to be notion at all. (4)

...African subject does not exist apart form the acts that produce social reality, or apart from the process by which those practices are, so to speak, imbued with meaning. (6)

The upshot is that while we now feel we know nearly everything that African state, societies, and economies are not, we still know absolutely nothing about what they actually are. (9)

More precisely, it is the current face of arbitrariness over the longue duree, yet not just any arbitrariness, but arbitrariness as human and contingent violence with the distinctive feature of committing acts of destruction that, in their starkness, scale, and “knock-out” effects, have the peculiar characteristic of concealing human suffering, burying it in an infinite circle centered, so to speak, everywhere. This is, then, the arbitrariness that accomplishes its own work and validates itself through its own sovereignty, and thereby permits power to be exercised as a right to kill and invests Africa with deaths at once at the heart of every age and above time. (13)

The intuition behind this idea was that, for each time and each age, there exists something distinctive and particular – or, to use the term, a “spirit” (Zeitgeist). These distinctive and particular things are constituted by a set of material practices, signs, figures, superstitions, images, and fictions that, because they are available to individuals’ imagination and intelligence and actually experienced, form what might be called “languages of life.” (15)

In the postcolony, the commandement seeks to institutionalize itself, to achieve legitimation and hegemony (recherché hegemonique), in the form of a fetish. The signs, vocabulary, and narratives that the commandement produces are meant not merely to be symbols; they are officially invested with a surplus of meanings that are not negotiable and that one is officially forbidden to depart from or challenge; To ensure that no such challenge takes place, the champions of state power invent entire constellations of ideas; they adopt a distinct set of cultural repertoires and powerfully evocative concepts; but they also resort, if necessary, to the systematic application of pain. (103)

It is only through such a shift in perspective that we can understand that he postcolonial relationship is not primarily a relationship of resistance or of collaboration but can best be characterized as convivial, a relationship fraught by the fact of the commandement and its “subjects” having to share the same living space. Precisely this logic – the necessary familiarity and domesticity in the relationship – explains why there has not been (as might be expected from those so dominated) the resistance or the accommodation, the disengagement or the “refusal to be captured”, the contradiction between the overt acts and gestures in public and covert responses “underground” (sous maquis). Instead, this logic has resulted in the mutual “zombification” of both the dominant and those apparently dominated. This zombification means that each has robbed the other of vitality and left both impotent (impouvoir). (104)

And, by laughing, it drains officialdom of meaning and sometimes obliges it to function while empty and powerless. Thus we may assert that, by dancing publicly for the benefit of power, the “postcolonized subject” is providing his or her loyalty, and by compromising with the corrupting control that state power tends to exercise at all levels of everyday life, the subject is reaffirming that this power is incontestable – precisely the better to play with it and modify it whenever possible. (129)

As a figure of speech, the image is always a conventional comment, the transcription of a reality, a word, a vision, or an idea into a visible code that becomes, in turn, a manner of speaking of the world and inhabiting it. (142)

To publicly articulate knowledge consisted, to a large extent, in making everything speak – that is, in constantly transforming reality into a sign and, on the other hand, filling with reality between “speaking” and “representing” where more than simply those of near neighbors. (144)

But it is on reinstituting fantasy that effort is made to cast a generalized suspicion, even total discredit. In the figurative expressions discussed, the obvious aim is “weakening” the “thing” and its signs. The fact, however, is that there is no way of weakening the thing that does not, at the same time, account for its shadow and its doubles. To the violence of the fantasy another violence, the laughter of those crushed, endeavors to respond, striving to humiliate “the thing” utterly. But this second violence, far from signing the “thing” in death, rather intensifies its presence by enclosing the subject in a mixture of fascination and dread, as a sort of consciousness whose peculiar feature is to be hallucinated – not in the Lacanian sense of hallucination as “objectless perception,” but to the extent that it is the autocrat who offers speech, commands what is listened to and what is written, and fills space to the point of still being talked of even as the act of creating in claiming to debase him. (165)

This indwelling manifests itself in several ways: everyday suffering, laughter dragged from the bottom of the chest and which “surprises beyond any warning,” mortification of the flesh, the torment and torture and beatings that overtakes the native faced with soldiery, the shaking and raw expressions of horror and terror when, for example, pummeled with blows, he faints, falls down, and eyes bulging, slobbers – or, again, when he is made to sing both literally and figuratively, for days and nights, without a break, to the oint of making him laugh and dance despite himself, thus causing him to blot out his own sufferings, incapable of responsibility for what he says and does, put at the disposal of power, in a sort of duplicity and servile repetition. (167)

This is the kind of mirror held up before the continent at the end of a frenzied century. What do we see in it? A brief and dissipated life in every sense. Men and women who pass by and change, forms, languages, animal figures deprived of sound. The spectacle of the world marked by unbridled license. The power of the negative and the sweet poison of corruption. A vast scaffolding of dead elements. Obscure memories of what used to exist. Mummies lying broken on the earth. Cadaverous statues and idols, whose souls have fled the form and, vanquished and driven to the edge of reality, to the sinister frontiers of the world, suddenly begin to stutter and dance on the public square, filling the living with terror. The comedy of a self that chews itself up, along with anything that it gets between its jaws. A world that remains transfixed before the inexplicable, and that flies apart with large and small explosions, unveiling, as it does, the excess of an age that exults, so to speak, in suffering, festivity, and drunkenness mixed together. (239)

In other words, what we designate by the term “Africa” exists only as a series of disconnections, superimpositions, colors, costumes, gestures and appearances, sounds and rhythms, ellipses, hyperboles, parables, misconnections, and imagined, remembered, and forgotten things, bits of spaces, syncope’s, intervals, moments of enthusiasm and impetuous vortices – in short, perceptions and phantasms in mutual perpetual pursuit, yet co-extensive with each other, each retaining on its margins the possibility of, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, transforming itself into the other. (242)