Poetics of the Antilles: Poetry, History and Philosophy in the Writings of Perse, Césaire, Fanon and Glissant 1803741961, 9781803741963

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
Note on Translations and References
Aimé Césaire
Frantz Fanon
Abbreviations
Introduction: Poetry, History, Philosophy
of the Antilles
Part I: Poetry and Subjectivity
Chapter 1: The Plane and the Discrete: Virtual Communities in French Caribbean Poetry. From Mallarmé and Perse to Césaire and Glissant
Prose du tout-monde and fragmentation of history
I Perse: Heteroclite, heraclitean and erotic
II Mallarmé: Chalice/Calyx
III Césaire: Verrition, Ptyx, Armadillo …
IV Black salt
Chapter 2: Pustules, Spirals, Volcanoes: Images and Moods in
Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal
Chapter 3: Ontology and Subjectivity: On Césaire’s Late Poetry
Appendices
A A Commentary on Négritude in Cahier d’un retour au
pays natal
Paris nègre
Composition of the Cahier
Négritude and the prophetic stance
B Deux néologismes de Césaire
C Obituary: Aimé Césaire (1913–2008)
Part II: History: Negritude, Alienation and Freedom
Chapter 4: The Heart of the Black Race: Parisian Negritudes in the 1920s
Populations
Political transformations and individual destinies
The word ‘nègre’
Chapter 5: Corps Perdu: A Note on Fanon’s Cogito
Chapter 6: Alienation and Freedom: Fanon on
Psychiatry and Revolution
Importance of the doctorate of 1951 on ‘mental alterations’
Organogenesis and psychogenesis
Value and limits of neuropsychiatric treatments
Socialtherapy and culture: The experience of Blida
Beyond the institution
Chapter 7: L’Afrique de Fanon
Part III: Philosophy: Chance, Event and Consciousness
Chapter 8: The Idea of an Impersonal Consciousness:
Deleuze and Sartre
Thought as event
An impersonal consciousness
A short history of immanence
The plane of immanence as a field of
impersonal consciousness
An expressive but non-representational subjectivity
The unconscious: Desiring machine and
not theatre of representation
Body without organs and faciality
Chapter 9: Poétique de l’identité vécue comme hasard
(Perse, Michaux, Deleuze, Glissant)
Dispersion
Turbulences
Problème du problème
Prose du tout-monde
Bibliography

Citation preview

Poetics of the Antilles

Jean Khalfa

Poetics of the Antilles Poetry, History and Philosophy in the Writings of Perse, Césaire, Fanon and Glissant

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. The German National Library lists this publication in the German National Bibliography; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023906517

Cover image: Aimé Césaire and Pablo Picasso, Corps Perdu (Paris: Fragrance, 1950). Source: British Library. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London, 2016. ISBN 978-1-80374-196-3 (Print) ISBN 978-1-80374-197-0 (ePDF) ISBN 978-1-80374-198-7 (ePub) © 2023 Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne Published by Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne, Switzerland [email protected] - www.peterlang.com First published in 2016 by the same author in the series Modern French Identities (Vol 124, ISBN 9783034308953). All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed.

Contents

Acknowledgementsvii Note on Translations and References List of Abbreviations

ix xiii

Introduction: Poetry, History, Philosophy of the Antilles

1

Part I  Poetry and Subjectivity

9

Chapter 1

The Plane and the Discrete: Virtual Communities in French Caribbean Poetry. From Mallarmé and Perse to Césaire and Glissant

11

Chapter 2

Pustules, Spirals, Volcanoes: Images and Moods in Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal

69

Chapter 3

Ontology and Subjectivity: On Césaire’s Late Poetry

97

Appendices119   A A Commentary on Négritude in Cahier d’un retour au pays natal 119   B  Deux néologismes de Césaire 132   C  Obituary: Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) 148

vi 

Part II  History: Negritude, Alienation and Freedom

153

Chapter 4

The Heart of the Black Race: Parisian Negritudes in the 1920s

155

Chapter 5

Corps Perdu: A Note on Fanon’s Cogito

183

Chapter 6

Alienation and Freedom: Fanon on Psychiatry and Revolution

209

Chapter 7

L’Afrique de Fanon

255

Part III  Philosophy: Chance, Event and Consciousness

279

Chapter 8

The Idea of an Impersonal Consciousness: Deleuze and Sartre

281

Chapter 9

Poétique de l’identité vécue comme hasard (Perse, Michaux, Deleuze, Glissant)

323

Bibliography349

Acknowledgements

Many friends, former students and colleagues have helped me in reading early drafts of these texts, in pointing out some correlations or in giving me access to crucial documents. Among these, I thank in particular Fiona Abercromby, James Arnold, Mark Chinca, Amélie Blanckaert, Olesya Dmitracova, Jérôme Game, Mireille Fanon-Mendes-France, Olivier Fanon, François Gèze, Neil Hopkinson, Mike Iraske, David Midgley, Numa Murard, Carol O’Sullivan, Andrew Rothwell, Libby Saxton and Robert Young. Trinity College, Cambridge, made most of this research possible, and the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust supported my work on Fanon through the award of a Senior Research Fellowship. Among all those who helped, I am exceptionally grateful to Joshua Heath for his meticulous work and constantly judicious questions and remarks throughout the long process of reformatting and rewriting these essays into a book. Jean Khalfa Cambridge 2016

Note on Translations and References

All quotations in foreign languages are given with an English translation in the form of a footnote following the original quotation. I have endeavoured wherever possible to use published English translations of the works cited, although I have occasionally modified these translations. References to both the original and the translation (if published) are given following the English translation. For the sake of economy, where the source of the translation is obvious, I have given only the title of the work in French, followed by both page references, separated by an oblique. Where no reference is given, it can be assumed that translations are either my own or by Joshua Heath.

Aimé Césaire The publication and translation history of the work of Aimé Césaire requires particular attention. All references to the work of Césaire in the original are to Aimé Césaire, Poésie, Théâtre, Essais et Discours, ed. Albert James Arnold (Paris: CNRS Éditions / Éditions Présence Africaine, 2014). In the case of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, this collection has the particular advantage of containing all the various published editions of this work. A significant number of translations of Aimé Césaire’s work has been produced, and particularly of the Cahier. This highly populated landscape is complicated further by the numerous editions of the Cahier, with English translations not all working from the same edition. For this volume, I have chosen to use the translations produced by Clayton Eshleman, in collaboration with either A. James Arnold or Annette Smith. For translations of quotations from Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, I have referred first to Arnold and Eshleman’s The Original 1939 Notebook of

x

Note on Translations and References

a Return to the Native Land, bilingual edition (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013). Unless indicated otherwise, I have used this translation, the most accomplished in its rendering of the original text, throughout this book. Where I have cited passages from editions of the Cahier subsequent to the original 1939 publication, I have used the translation given in Eshleman and Smith’s Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). For translations from Césaire’s lyric poetry, the most complete translation of this body of work is Eshleman and Smith’s The Collected Poetry, and I have used this where possible. This collection does not, however, contain a translation of Césaire’s collection moi, laminaire. For this collection, I have used Eshleman and Smith’s Lyric and Dramatic Poetry: 1946–82 (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia, 1990). Nor does it include a translation of the posthumous collection Comme un malentendu de salut, compiled by Daniel Maximin and Gilles Carpentier for the 1994 Seuil edition of Césaire’s poetry. For translations of quotations from Comme un malentendu de salut, and for modifications of all the translations listed above, I am grateful to A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman for sharing with me the translations from their forthcoming edition of The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire, due to be published in 2017 by Wesleyan University Press.

Frantz Fanon All references to the work of Fanon are to his collected writings, published by La Découverte. The first volume, Œuvres (Paris: La Découverte, 2011), contains Peau noire, masques blancs, L’An V de la révolution algérienne, Les Damnés de la terre and Pour la révolution africaine. The second volume, Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté, ed. Jean Khalfa and Robert Young (Paris: La Découverte, 2015), collects his theatrical and psychiatric writing, together with some of his political writings, all of which were either unpublished or inaccessible before. For the sake of clarity, I have given the original titles of the works collected in the Œuvres in references.

Note on Translations and References

xi

I have used the following translations of Fanon’s work, all published by The Grove Press, for Les Damnés, Richard Philcox’s The Wretched of the Earth (2004); for Peau noire, Philcox’s Black Skin, White Masks (2008); for L’An V, Haakon Chevalier’s A Dying Colonialism (1994); for Pour la révolution, Chevalier’s Toward the African Revolution (1994).

Abbreviations

CP  Aimé Césaire, The Collected Poetry, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1983). EAL  Frantz Fanon, Écrits sur l’aliénation et la liberté, ed. Jean Khalfa and Robert Young (Paris: La Découverte, 2015; trans. London: Bloomsbury, 2017). LDP  Aimé Césaire, Lyric and Dramatic Poetry: 1946–82, trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1990). OC  Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres Complètes, ed. Bertrand Marchal, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1998–2003). Henri Michaux, Œuvres Complètes, ed. Raymond Bellour, 3 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1998–2004). Saint-John Perse, Œuvres Complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1972). PNMB  Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, in Œuvres (Paris: La Découverte, 2011). PTED  Aimé Césaire, Poésie, Théâtre, Essais et Discours, ed. Albert James Arnold (Paris: CNRS Éditions / Présence Africaine Éditions, 2014).

Introduction: Poetry, History, Philosophy of the Antilles

The contribution of writing from the Caribbean to poetry in French in the twentieth century was recognised early: Saint-John Perse published Anabase in 1924, Walter Benjamin and Bernard Groethuysen translated it into German in 1929, and T. S. Eliot into English in 1930. Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal was first published in Paris in 1939. André Breton read it in 1941 and in 1944 declared it ‘no less than the greatest lyrical monument of this time’. In his preface to the translation into Spanish published by Lydia Cabrera in Cuba, in 1943, Benjamin Péret wrote: ‘J’ai l’honneur de saluer ici un grand poète, le seul grand poète de langue française qui soit apparu depuis vingt ans’.1 It is certainly one of the most translated poems in French in the century.2 As for Édouard Glissant, he published his first collections of poetry in the 1950s and 1960s, first with Le Seuil and then with Gallimard, and continued writing poetry all his life, conceptualising both his prose and his philosophical thought as a poetics of the diverse and of relation.3 One could argue that in effect poetry inhabited all of his writing, and occasionally that of other writers to whom he was close: 1

2

3

[I consider it an honour to hail here a great poet, the only new great poet the French language has seen over the past two decades.] Aimé Césaire, Retorno al pais natal, trans. Lydia Cabrera, pref. Benjamin Péret, illustrations Wifredo Lam (Havana: Molina, 1943). In English, see in particular: Cahier d’un retour au pays natal: Memorandum on My Martinique, French and English edition, trans. Lionel Abel and Ivan Goll, pref. André Breton (New York: Brentano’s, 1947); Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry, ed. and trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Notebook of a Return to My Native Land/Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, trans. Mireille Rosello with Annie Pritchard, Bloodaxe Contemporary French Poets, 4 (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1995). Édouard Glissant, Poétique de la relation (Paris: Gallimard, 1990); Introduction à une poétique du divers (Paris: Gallimard, 1996).

2 Introduction

Patrick Chamoiseau’s remarkable novel depicting the flight, errance and self-construction of an old slave hunted by his aging master and an ancient dog, L’Esclave vieil homme et le molosse, is composed of chapters that are responses to poems by Glissant.4 In the meantime, Césaire, who had turned to theatre, history, and political action in the post-war period, nevertheless continued to write very significant poetry until the late 1980s and in retrospect, this later work sheds a new light on his early poetry. In ‘Orphée noir’, his preface to Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, Sartre called the poetry of negritude the ‘sole great revolutionary poetry of this time’ and saw in it a necessary step in the specific process of inner liberation from colonialism. En un mot, je m’adresse ici aux blancs et je voudrais leur expliquer ce que les noirs savent déjà : pourquoi c’est nécessairement à travers une expérience poétique que le noir, dans sa situation présente, doit d’abord prendre conscience de lui-même et, inversement, pourquoi la poésie noire de langue française est, de nos jours, la seule grande poésie révolutionnaire.5

The essays gathered in the first part of the present volume tackle the question raised by Sartre of the constitution through writing of a form of consciousness, a ‘subjectivity’, in francophone poetry and thought, focusing on the Antilles. Here is a series of responses to a very particular historical situation, resulting from deportation, erasure of culture and métissage – in other words, a context where identity was permanently in question: no longer an inheritance but not (yet) assumed as a pure construction. At first sight, there are few shared themes or formal features among the writers I consider, although Glissant has repeatedly acknowledged the considerable 4 5

Patrick Chamoiseau, L’Esclave vieil-homme et le molosse (Paris: Gallimard, 1997). [In a word, I am talking now to white men, and I should like to explain to them what black men already know: why it is necessarily through a poetic experience that the black man, in his present condition, must first become conscious of himself; and, inversely, why black poetry in the French language is, in our time, the only great revolutionary poetry.] Léopold Sédar Senghor, Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), xii/‘Black Orpheus’, trans. John MacCombie, The Massachusetts Review 6/1 (autumn 1964–winter 1965), 16.

Introduction

3

importance of Perse, and both Fanon’s theatre6 and some of his theoretical writings bear the influence of Césaire’s poetry and early theatre. But, looking more closely at Perse, Césaire, Fanon and Glissant, it was clear to me that they all pursued in their own way an attempt to reflect on, and produce, subjectivity as ‘becoming’, as process rather than identity (with fixed identity being a notion that Fanon, for his part, most violently rejected). In other words, although in a sense all of these writers could be (and were) read as epic poets, their poetics was not one of origins, of foundational myths. Origins were only valued through their loss, and this lyricism was that of a subject that can only be found at the end of a process of erring or detour, a psyche which does not preexist the voice supposed to ‘express’ it. These were all dit d’errance, to use Césaire’s phrase, in Corps perdu.7 Such a poetics entailed the invention of original forms of representation of time and space. Thus Perse insisted that the ‘keys’ to his poetry were not to be found in his own life but in the rhéisme of some of the preSocratic philosophers, who described reality, natural and historical, as a ‘flow’ of events. Several formal features of his writing aimed at producing an experience corresponding to this ontology. Poetry for Perse focuses on the active, institutive dimension of language (natura naturans, rather than natura naturata); it is praxis rather than mimesis. Its content may originate in personal memory, but this it uses exclusively as material for the institution of an a-personal subjectivity. Such a conception of poetry is indebted to that of Mallarmé, which is why, in order to explain Perse’s poetics, I propose in the first essay, ‘The Plane and the Discrete’, a rereading of Mallarmé’s reflection on the relationship that language could entertain with the preconceptual in poetry. In spite of obvious differences with Perse, Césaire shared this preoccupation. A formal analysis of the Cahier, also in the first chapter, shows in it a variety of modes of representing the experience of space and time, but, in spite of and perhaps due to the appearance of the 6

7

The two plays authored by Fanon, L’Œil se noie and Les Mains parallèles, have been published for the first time in EAL, 65–133. See also Robert Young’s introduction to these works in the same volume, 15–64. For the list of abbreviations used in this book, see page xiii. PTED, 508–10.

4 Introduction

notion of négritude, never in terms of historical foundations or origins. It is striking in this regard that Césaire too referred to Mallarmé and was particularly interested in neologism. Poetic writing in exceptional circumstances is essentially neologism, institutive language, and this for him related to the creation of a new, dis-alienated consciousness. I pursued this line of enquiry in detail in two separate studies of the poetry of Césaire: ‘Pustules, Spirals, Volcanoes’ (Chapter 2) is an analysis of the structure and images of the Cahier, and ‘Ontology and Subjectivity’ (Chapter 3) focuses on his last published collection, moi, laminaire … (1982). Although this collection of late poetry could be compared to the ‘metaphysical’ poetry that seemed to dominate the French scene in the decades following World War II, say, since Char, Bonnefoy, du Bouchet and Dupin displaced Surrealism, it in fact continued and revealed some of the principles that guided Césaire’s poetics half a century earlier in the Cahier. Three appendices complement this part, the first two focusing on specific examples in Césaire’s Cahier, the appearance and meaning of négritude and the purpose of neologisms, with particular reference to the final word of the poem, verrition. The third one is an obituary of Césaire that reflects in particular on his historical role in forcing the left to face the colonial issue, and serves as a transition to the second, historical part of this volume. * However much subjectivity and history were questioned in their metaphysical dimensions (can a subject be instituted, does it still make sense to speak of a unified historical time), politics was always present. In ‘Orphée Noir’, Sartre linked the invention of the notion of négritude to this poetic endeavour: ‘Ainsi reparaît la subjectivité, rapport de soi-même avec soi, source de toute poésie […]’.8 Poetic writing and reading, as individual modes of ‘subjectivation’, were related to a historical-political situation. It is not surprising that most of the writers considered here had a historical role: Perse, as general secretary of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was

8

[Thus subjectivity reappears: the relation of the self with the self; the source of all poetry] Sartre, ‘Orphée noir’, xv/19–20.

Introduction

5

instrumental in negotiating the Locarno Treaties; Césaire (the longest serving parliamentarian in the Fourth and Fifth Republics), who had advocated the transformation of Martinique into a French département because of its dire economic situation, became a major theoretician of anticolonialism and dramatised the pitfalls of decolonisation. His early descriptions of the rift between the French Communist Party and anticolonial movements, which peaked during the Algerian War, are among his most lucid political texts. As for Fanon, whose first published book, Peau noire, masques blancs (1952) [Black Skin, White Masks] was an essay on the ‘désaliénation du Noir’, but who had already written tragedies on identity, subjectivity and political freedom, he became the greatest theoretician of the emancipation of the ‘third-world’, a world that seemed at the margins of the two dominant historical narratives of the time and yet made up the majority of the world’s populations. As for Glissant, his narrations and analyses of métissage and Tout-Monde are an early attempt at a theory of the differing integrations of minorities within the modern self and a precursor of altermondialisme. The poetics of ‘relation’ defines the conditions of possibility of communities that would refer neither to inherited identities, identités ataviques [atavistic identities] nor to an abstract universalism, both now perceived as forms of alienation, yet without falling into a culturalist bricà-brac. Glissant read Perse’s poetry as portraying the paradoxical relativity of universalism, and Fanon had showed him that a local culture only truly exists as a living culture when it invents the present, negating by its own means its heritage. I look at the development of this relationship of subjectivity, history and politics in relation to two moments of rupture. The first one, historically, was the creation of the notion of négritude. It is sometimes portrayed as reflecting a step in a natural movement towards Pan-Africanism and the great anti-colonial struggle of the 1950s. In ‘The Heart of the Black Race: Parisian Negritudes in the 1920s’ (Chapter 4), I argue that such a teleology is a retrospective illusion, and that in the decade that followed World War I a range of possibilities was available. Political assimilation was initially an important aim for French colonial subjects, a desire the French state actively resisted from the end of the nineteenth century (the Colonial Exhibition of 1931 in effect confirms its rejection). The first claims

6 Introduction

of négritude, the construction of an ‘authentic’ subjectivity in relation to a cultural or mythical Africa, was in fact a reaction to this resistance as well as a result of the incapacity (or reluctance) of the French left, in particular the French Communist Party, to fully embrace the anti-colonialist movements developing in France in between the two World Wars. This thesis developed from the study of journals that are sometimes mentioned but are rarely the object of critical attention (for instance La Voix des Nègres, Le Cri des Nègres and La Dépêche Africaine). This chapter thus draws a genealogy of the redemption of the word nègre and focuses on the interactions between African, Caribbean and African American writers in this transition period, and on some rather forgotten historical figures such as Blaise Diagne, Lamine Senghor and René Maran, to sketch a historical genealogy of négritude no longer indebted to the narrative of the renaissance of a forgotten consciousness. The second moment of rupture is that of Frantz Fanon who, following Sartre’s statement that négritude was a negative (if necessary) moment in a dialectical process of liberation, started by drawing a phenomenology of the different stages through which a consciousness alienated by racism must pass. This is the object of ‘Corps Perdu: A Note on Fanon’s Cogito’ (Chapter 5). This text considers Fanon from two points of view: first, the phenomenological perspective – and I demonstrate here the extent to which Fanon used concepts acquired from Merleau-Ponty and Sartre – and secondly, the point of view of psychopathology. Working on Fanon’s archives whilst preparing the publication of Fanon’s theatre as well as his psychiatric texts, I could see the link between this phenomenological description of alienation and his attempts at developing a clinic for the psychopathologies caused by colonialism. The crucial notion here is that of schéma corporel [body schema] which unifies, for Fanon, the two perspectives. Thus it is essential to his analysis of the consciousness of race as well as his explanation of the role of the veil in Algeria, and of violence both in the asylum and in colonial society. The psychiatric question of the reconstruction of the body (or postural) schema is gradually linked by Fanon to the idea of a national struggle. This incidentally shows how wrong it is to separate his early work on identity from his later work on liberation struggles and violence, as has often been done, and to privilege one of these two dimensions.

Introduction

7

A close study of Fanon’s psychiatric texts as well as his political reflections on the notion of identity in the decolonisation process in ‘Alienation and Freedom’ (Chapter 6) confirms this homology of his psychopathological and political thought, strikingly underlined in his famous letter of resignation of 1956.9 From this perspective, his later work, Les Damnés de la terre [The Wretched of the Earth] as well as the texts gathered in Pour la révolution africaine [Towards the African Revolution], could be read not just as anticolonial texts but also as warnings on the risks faced in the decolonisation process, a reading I argue for in ‘L’Afrique de Fanon’ (Chapter 7). * Francophone writing is often remarkably attuned to the intellectual movements that dominate in the métropole at a given time and particularly to philosophy, but as the laboratory where new dimensions of this thought are invented. It was the case of Perse’s relationship with Bergson’s philosophy of duration, and his corresponding attempt at reflecting on alternative experiences of historical time (ultimately theorised by Glissant); Césaire gave political and historical weight to Surrealism and in turn raised Sartre’s attention to the historical dimension of alienation in colonialism; Fanon found in Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, Lhermitte and Ey, the instruments to conceptualise the inscription of the body in history; Glissant turned Deleuze’s theories of becoming and minor literature into the foundation of his theory of Antillanité and Tout-Monde. The notions often used in the first two parts of this volume, in particular chance, event and consciousness are studied for themselves and in their interrelationships in a final part, composed of two texts: in Chapter 8, I study the idea of a conscience impersonnelle as the main object of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy. He encountered it in Bergson, Proust and Sartre and ceaselessly worked on it, from one of his first philosophical studies, Empirisme et Subjectivité (1953), to his final texts. This idea of an impersonal consciousness, elaborated in Deleuze’s philosophical work, is the foundation of the ideas of becoming, multiplicity and minority at the heart of Glissant’s appropriation of the analogy of the 9

See his ‘Lettre au ministre résident’ (1956), published in EAL, 366–8.

8 Introduction

rhizome. The ninth and final chapter, ‘Poétique de l’identité vécue comme hasard’ focuses on Perse, Michaux, Deleuze and Glissant. The theme of the ‘encounter’ is crucial in the thought of these writers, in that they all portray subjectivity as a continuously variable effect rather than a condition of encounters. In their texts, Perse and Michaux stage a consciousness that constantly reflects on the conditions under which it constitutes an objective world from the infinite diversity of sensations. Deleuze tries to portray authentic philosophical thought not just as the specific response that a preexisting individual consciousness, a cogito, would give to a problem inherited or found by chance, but rather as a specific actualisation of a problem, like a throw of the dice actualises a possible configuration of differential elements within the ensemble of all possibilities, each configuration constituting a consciousness. This immanentist conception of subjectivity became, for Glissant, a tool to understand the new forms of diversity within the self, as well as the resistance to it that is produced by our current historical situation. This volume is born of a number of self-contained essays written over a decade. They have been reviewed and in some cases updated, but some repetitions were unavoidable or useful, as the material is envisaged from different angles. Most chapters have been published in both English and French, and French versions are easily available. So, rather than producing an unwieldy bilingual volume, I decided to keep in each part of the book a paper in French, summarising for the French reader the main points of that particular part, but from an angle or on a theme not studied in the chapters in English, so that they too could be of interest to the Englishspeaking reader who reads French.

Part I

Poetry and Subjectivity

Chapter 1

The Plane and the Discrete: Virtual Communities in French Caribbean Poetry. From Mallarmé and Perse to Césaire and Glissant1

[…] la poésie commence avec l’excès, la démesure, les recherches frappées d’interdit, dans le grand tam-tam aveugle, dans l’irrespirable vide absolu, jusqu’à l’incompréhensible pluie d’étoiles. — Aimé Césaire2 Ainsi croissantes et sifflantes au tournant de notre âge, [de très grandes forces en croissance sur toutes pistes de ce monde] descendaient des hautes passes avec ce sifflement nouveau où nul n’a reconnu sa race, Et dispersant au lit des peuples, ha ! dispersant – qu’elles dispersent ! disions-nous – ha ! dispersant Balises et corps morts, bornes milliaires et stèles votives, les casemates aux frontières, basses comme des porcheries, et les douanes plus basses au penchant de la terre ; les batteries désuètes sous les palmes, aux îles de corail blanc avilies de volailles ; les édicules sur les caps et les croix aux carrefours ; tripodes et postes de vigie, gabions, granges et resserres, oratoire en forêt et refuge en montagne ; les palissades d’affichage et les Calvaires aux détritus ; les tables d’orientation du géographe et le cartouche de

1 2

Originally published in Mantis: A Journal of Poetry, Criticism and Translation 1 (2000), 147–88. [[…] poetry starts with excess, with a lack of measure, with forbidden quests, amidst the great blind tom-tom, in the unbreathable absolute void, [and goes] as far as the incomprehensible rain of stars.] Aimé Césaire, ‘La poésie de Lautréamont belle comme un décret d’expropriation’, Tropiques 6–7 (February 1943), 11. (First published in Fort-de France, Martinique. Reprint, Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1978). Also repr. in PTED, 1340. This text is quoted in André Breton’s famous article ‘Martinique charmeuse de serpents. Un Grand poète noir’, Tropiques 11 (May 1944), 126. Translation in CP, 15.

12

Chapter 1 l’explorateur ; l’amas de pierres plates du caravanier et du géodésien ; du muletier peut-être ou suiveur de lamas ? et la ronce de fer aux abords des corrals, et la forge de plein air des marqueurs de bétail, la pierre levée du sectateur et le cairn du landlord, et vous, haute grille d’or de l’Usinier, et le vantail ouvragé d’aigles des grandes firmes familiales … Ha ! dispersant – qu’elles dispersent ! disions-nous – toute pierre jubilaire et toute stèle fautive, Elles nous restituaient un soir la face brève de la terre, où susciter un cent de vierges et d’aurochs parmi l’hysope et la gentiane. […] Enlèvement de clôtures, de bornes ! Semences et barbes d’herbe nouvelle ! Et sur le cercle immense de la terre, apaisement au cœur du Novateur … — Saint-John Perse3

3

[Increasing and whistling thus at the turn of our time, they came down from the high passes with this new whistling wherein no one has known his own race, And scattering on the bed of the peoples, ha! scattering – let them scatter! we were saying – ha! scattering Beacons and buoys, milestones and votive stelae, the casemates on the frontiers and the lanterns on the reefs; the casemates on the frontiers, low as pigsties, and the customhouses down lower still to the sloping of the earth; obsolete batteries under the palm trees on white coral isles defiled by poultry; the turrets on the headlands and the crosses at the crossroads; tripods and lookout posts, blinds, barns and sheds, forest chapel and mountain refuge; the billboards and the Calvaries amid the refuse; the geographer’s tables of orientation and the explorer’s tablet; the flat stones piled by the caravan leader and the geodetic surveyor, by the muleteer, perhaps, or the driver of llamas? and the iron bramble at the approaches to the corrals, and the cattle brander’s open-air forge, the votary’s stone upright and the landowner’s cairn, and you, tall gilded iron gate of the Mill-Owner, and the eagle-crested portals of the great family firms … Ha! scattering – let them scatter! we were saying – every jubilee stone and every faulty stele, One evening they restored to us the sharp face of the earth, thereon to conjure forth a hundred virgins and aurochs amid the hyssop and the gentian. […] Removal of enclosures, of boundary stones! Seeds and beards of new grass! And over the earth’s immense circle, gratification in the heart of the Innovator …]. Vents (1946), in OC, 184/Saint-John Perse, Collected Poems: Complete Edition, trans. Auden, Chisholm, Devlin, Eliot, Fitzgerald, Fowlie, Howard and Varèse (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 235. This collection is used for all English translations of Perse.

13

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à toute géographie torturée Non pas l’œuvre tendue, sourde, monotone autant que la mer qu’on sculpte sans fin – mais des éclats, accordés à l’effervescence de la terre – et qui ouvrent au cœur, par-dessus le souci et les affres, une stridence de plages – toujours démis, toujours repris, et hors d’achèvement – non des œuvres mais la matière elle-même dans quoi l’ouvrage chemine – tous, liés à quelque projet qui bientôt les rejeta – premiers cris, rumeurs naïves, formes lassées – témoins, incommodes pourtant, de ce projet – qui, de se rencontrer imparfaits se trouvent solidaires parfaitement – et peuvent ici convaincre de s’arrêter à l’incertain – cela qui tremble, vacille et sans cesse devient – comme une terre qu’on ravage – épars. — Édouard Glissant4

Prose du tout-monde and fragmentation of history Migration and communication have uncoupled boundaries of place from those of language, culture and history. Borders have become fuzzy, through proliferation rather than obsolescence: they no longer coincide within any single individual or group, and the clashes of singular trajectories or destinies with those of communities are a rich mine for fiction. As a result (and response), claims for differences and identities (national, ethnic, sexual, and 4



[to every tortured geography Not the strained work, deaf, monotonous as the sea that one interminably sculpts, but bursts, granted to the effervescence of the earth and which reveal to the heart, beyond cares and torments, a stridency of beaches, forever out of joint and reset, beyond completion; not works but the matter itself in which the work develops, all – bound to a project that will soon reject them – are first cries, naive rumblings, wearied forms (witnesses, awkward all the same, to this project) which, finding themselves imperfect find themselves in perfect solidarity, and which can here convince one to stop at the uncertain (that which trembles, hesitates and endlessly becomes) like a land that one is devastating, dispersed.] Le Sang rivé (Paris: Présence africaine, 1961) ; quoted here in the collection Le Sel noir (Paris: Galimard/Poésie, 1983), 21.

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all other traits permitting the definition of ‘communities’) are so strong that the post-war unifying focus on class-struggle, anti-racism and antiimperialism seems in retrospect to be a mere pause within a process of fragmentation and reflection that started much earlier and which can now find its expression in writing. The very idea of ‘regionalist literature’ as a separate category has lost meaning. Carried by this worldwide growth of literatures dealing with identities, communities and myths, in a time of cultural métissage,5 Caribbean prose in French flourished at the end of the twentieth century. It is significant in this respect that while Africa (largely mythical, and approached through German anthropology and surrealism) and Black America (through the music and literature of the ‘Harlem Renaissance’) served as references for the Caribbean during the négritude period,6 as far as ideological alternatives to the métropole were sought, it is now the very specific situation of the Caribbean that has assumed global relevance. Not only did the mixture of cultures there anticipate a more general créolisation, of which contemporary events are either the confirmation or the violent refusal, but this history and present reality sharply revealed the more grainy reality beneath the universalistic horizons of both colonial expansion and liberation struggle. Vocabulary is important here: if créolisation, a linguistic process of alteration (in reality the genesis of a language), has come to name such a radical transformation, it is because language is what communities used to reflect themselves in, often what they ultimately based their identity on. Édouard Glissant wrote that in ‘communautés ataviques’, ‘l’épique traditionnel rassemble tout ce qui constitue la communauté et en exclut tout ce qui n’est

5 6

See Serge Gruzinski, La Pensée métisse (Paris: Fayard, 1999). We will question the importance and meaning of this notion in Part II, but it conveniently defines a period going, say, from the 1930s to the end of the 1950s (1931: a boycott of the international colonial exhibition in Vincennes is organised by the Surrealists (in particular by Breton, Éluard, Crevel, Péret, Aragon and Char); 1932: publication of Légitime Défense by a group of Caribbean students (Léro, Monnerot, Ménil); 1934: L’Étudiant Noir (Césaire, Gratiant, Senghor, Diop); 1952: Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs).

The Plane and the Discrete

15

pas la communauté’.7 In retrospect, the language of these works tended to assume a function of sanctification of the community. By contrast, in the ‘cultures composites nées de la créolisation’, literature cannot propose founding myths: ‘La véritable Genèse des peuples de la Caraïbe, c’est le ventre du bateau négrier et c’est l’antre de la Plantation’,8 conditions which, by nature, suppose a history prior to that of the community. In those cultures, and now, with the general créolisation now taking place, in most cultures, a work can only be relational, not exclusive: ‘Aujourd’hui, l’œuvre littéraire convient d’autant mieux au lieu, qu’elle établit relation entre ce lieu et la totalité-monde’.9 As a consequence, in an important text on the myth of an absolute transparency and the role of opacity in writing, Glissant linked language, politics and poetics, and attacked claims of ‘universality’ on behalf of the French language, both on political and poetical grounds: Ni la fonction d’humanisation, la fameuse universalité porteuse d’humanisme, ni l’harmonieuse prédestination à la clarté, à la rationalité jouissive, ne résistent à l’examen. Il n’y a pas de vocation des langues. […] L’observateur attentif repère, chez le discoureur, la volonté inquiète de s’en tenir à la fausse transparence du monde qu’on dirigeait, de ne pas entrer dans la pénétrable opacité d’un monde où tout simplement on est, ou accepte d’être, avec d’autres et parmi eux.10

7 8 9 10

[The traditional epic assembles everything that constitutes the community and excludes everything that is not the community.] Édouard Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 35. [Composite communities born out of créolisation], [The real Genesis of the peoples of the Caribbean is the belly of the slave ship and the cave of the plantation.] Ibid. [Today, a literary work is befitting of a place in the extent to which it establishes a relation between that place and the world-totality.] Ibid. 34. [Neither its humanising function, however (the famous universality of French as the bearer of humanism), nor its concordant predestination to be clear (its pleasurable rationality) stand up to examination. Languages have no mission. […] An attentive observer will notice that such windbags are anxiously intent on confining themselves to the false transparency of a world they used to run; they do not want to enter into the penetrable opacity of a world in which one exists, or agrees to exist, with and among others.] Poétique de la Relation (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 128/Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 114.

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Glissant’s reflection on these phenomena, on orality and on the complex relationship (and difference) between ‘globalisation’ and créolisation, is among the most thorough. The crux of his theoretical work,11 as well as of his fiction, is to understand and celebrate créolisation as a process of encounter, a becoming, to use a concept popularised by the two philosophers he refers to most, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: a process as removed from the quest for roots and identities as it is from the safe homogeneity or neutralisation promoted by the unification of the world’s cultural markets, where ‘ethnic’ has paradoxically become a global style: ‘[in créolisation,] les éléments hétérogènes les plus éloignés sont mis en présence et produisent un résultat imprévisible’.12 Seen in that light, ‘the poetic act can be compared to creolisation’. Indeed, when asked about the link between this definition of créolisation and the definition of the poetic image given by Breton and Reverdy (‘[image] qui rapproche deux éléments aussi éloignés que possible l’un de l’autre, et c’est de cet éloignement et du choc que naît quelque chose d’imprévisible qui s’appelle l’image’,13 in the words of Robert Mélançon), he answered: ‘Absolument. Cela confirmerait que l’acte poétique est un élément de connaissance du réel’.14 Class is no longer perceived as the ultimate gatherer (and divider); origins and ‘roots’ remain ultimately impalpable; languages are perceived again in their permanent diversification and invention; and orality, as situation of the verb in the world, incarnation in a voice, rather than mnemotechnic vehicle for myth, is appropriated by writing as a system of literary tools. History itself has fragmented into apparently irreconcilable sequences of parallel hypothetical stories, stories therefore of or about an opaque but inexhaustible ‘other’. This is particularly due to the difficulty 11 12 13 14

In particular: Poétique de la relation; Introduction à une poétique du divers; and Traité du tout-monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1997). [the most distant, heterogeneous elements are put together and produce an unpredictable result.] Introduction à une poétique du divers, 26. [An image which brings together two elements that are as distant from one another as possible, and it is from this distancing and from shock that something unpredictable is born, to which is given the name of ‘image’.] Ibid. [Absolutely. That would confirm that the poetic act is a constitutive part of knowledge of the real.] Ibid.

The Plane and the Discrete

17

of writing a history of slavery which would be a history of the slaves, as opposed to the history of the trade, because, by definition, slaves, being property, had nothing proper to them, not even a name or an identity of their own; nothing worth recording separately. Individuality can only be retrieved obliquely, through trade or police records on colonial abuses, marronage, etc., or by reviving oral culture or some rare written testimonies. In other words, by exploring, in traces, the margins of historical memory. ‘Les histoires lézardent l’Histoire’, wrote Glissant, ‘elles rejettent sur des bords irrémédiables ceux qui n’ont pas eu le temps de se voir au travers des lianes amassées’.15 On the question of historical time, Glissant, like Fanon, was influenced by a number of French phenomenological philosophers. His

15

[History is fissured by histories; they relentlessly toss aside those who have not had the time to see themselves through a tangle of lianas.] ‘Saint-John Perse et les Antillais’, in La Nouvelle Revue Française 278: Hommage à Saint-John Perse (1887–1975) (February 1976), 73/Caribbean Discourse, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 230. (This text is reprinted in Le Discours antillais (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), 742–9, with a note on Caillois’ interpretation of Perse.) Presenting Perse as a sort of horizon of créolité (see Le Discours antillais, 749), Glissant defines in contrast the stuff of the Caribbean novel as unredeemable margins. His first novel, published in 1958 and awarded the Prix Renaudot, is entitled La Lézarde. On this theme, see also the texts gathered in the section of Le Discours antillais entitled ‘Histoire, histoires’, in particular, ‘Histoire, temps, identités’. In the first preface to his Histoire de la folie, Michel Foucault stressed that his project was above all an attempt to draw the history of madness (and of the mad), not of psychiatric institutions, which only considered madness negatively, as unreason. The first title of the book was Folie et déraison (‘Madness and Unreason’) (see Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), I, 159–67; History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), xxvii–xxxvi). He never really abandoned the preoccupation of writing a history of the insignificant, the singular, the marginal or the borderline, as is shown by his introduction to a projected ‘recueil de l’infamie’, entitled La Vie des hommes infâmes (Michel Foucault, Œuvres, ed. Frédéric Gros, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 2015), II, 1305–23. On the history of this text, see also 1623). Borders are swarming, but hardly ever directly visible in their multiplicity, in the lives they harbour.

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interest in the philosophy of Jean Wahl in particular is well documented.16 As for Merleau-Ponty, he had already concluded in 1960, in philosophical terms, as to the death of the idea of a universal History: Déception pour qui a cru au salut, et à un seul moyen de salut dans tous les ordres. Notre histoire, où reparaît l’espace, où la Chine, l’Afrique, la Russie, l’Occident ne vont pas du même pas, c’est une décadence pour qui a cru que l’histoire, comme un éventail, allait se replier sur elle-même. Mais si cette philosophie du temps était encore une rêverie de la vieille misère, pourquoi donc en son nom jugerions-nous de si haut le présent ? Il n’y a pas d’horloge universelle, mais des histoires locales, sous nos yeux, prennent forme, et commencent de se régler elles-mêmes, et à tâtons se relient l’une à l’autre, et exigent de vivre […]. Le monde est plus présent à lui-même dans toutes ses parties qu’il ne le fut jamais.17

16

See Romuald Fonkoua, ‘Jean Wahl et Édouard Glissant: philosophie, raison et poésie’, in Jacques Chevrier (ed.), Poétiques d’Édouard Glissant: proceeds from the international conference ‘Poétiques d’Édouard Glissant’, Paris-Sorbonne, 11–13 March 1998 (Paris: Presses Paris Sorbonne, 1999), 299–313. Fanon’s library contains annotated books by Wahl, and a note on the ‘instant’ in Kierkegaard that is clearly related to Wahl’s work on the philosopher. See EAL, 593, 612 and 633. 17 [A deception for whoever believed in salvation, and in a single means of salvation in all realms. Our history, where space reappears and China, Africa, Russia, and the West are not advancing at the same pace, is a fall for whoever believed that history, like a fan, is going to fold in upon itself. But if this philosophy of time was yet another reverie born of the age-old distress, why then should we judge the present from such a height in its name? There is no universal clock, but local histories take form beneath our eyes, and begin to regulate themselves, and haltingly are linked to one another and demand to live […] The world is more present to itself in all its parts than it ever was.] Signes (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 47; repr. in Œuvres, ed. Claude Lefort (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 1582/Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 35. From Sartre’s notes for a second volume of his Critique de la raison dialectique, it is clear that a reflection on the transformation of the understanding of historical time following decolonisation would have been a significant section of this work (see Critique de la raison dialectique, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), II (unfinished), 410). But Fanon, who gave lectures on Sartre’s book to officers of the Algerian National Liberation Army, had already noted the importance of the criticism of philosophical anthropology and totalising history in the first volume. The possibility of a historical totalisation in relationship to that margin of philosophy and society which is madness

The Plane and the Discrete

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* The dark side of the transformation that Glissant diagnosed is that if there is no unified historical time and no blank historical page, the very idea of a historical purpose or project can soon be presented or experienced as just another oppressive tale or myth. There is no lack of criticism of such a perspective. Annie Le Brun, for instance, saw the créolité movement as a celebration and legitimisation of the very alienation produced by colonialism that Césaire had denounced in the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal.18 René Ménil, one of the founders of Légitime Défense (1931) and Tropiques (1941), criticised this movement with a vigour equal to that which he once deployed against the degradation of the poetic energy behind Césaire and Damas’ négritude into Senghor’s philosophy of identity: Nous avons là les réactions d’une conscience colonisée qui se dégage difficilement, quoi qu’elle dise, de l’emprise coloniale et qui a du mal à s’autonomiser. […] Et voici qu’elle annonce un projet, en réplique et revanche mécaniques : puisque nous avons été créolisés et injurieusement méprisés en tant que métis, nous avons l’obligation logique et morale de créoliser et de métisser l’univers qui nous a été hostile.19

18

19

was then the object of the famous querelle de la folie opposing Foucault and Derrida. See my introduction in Michel Foucault, History of Madness, xiii–xxv. Annie Le Brun sharply criticised the créolité movement, launched by Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau and Raphael Confiant in their Éloge de la Créolité (Paris: Gallimard, 1989) and developed by Raphael Confiant into a critique of négritude in Aimé Césaire: une traversée paradoxale du siècle (Paris: Stock, 1993). See Annie Le Brun, Pour Aimé Césaire (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1994) and Statue cou coupé (Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1995). Her analysis of the commercial strategies behind the vogue of the créolité novel is quite revealing. [We have here the reactions of a colonised consciousness that, whatever it may say, finds it difficult to free itself from the colonial grasp and struggles to become autonomous […] And lo and behold, it sets forth a project that is an equal and opposite reaction: since we have been creolised and unjustly despised as half-caste, we are under a logical and moral obligation to creolise and hybridise the universe that has been hostile to us.] René Ménil, Tracées (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1981; 2nd edn, Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1999), 244. See also 80 and 241. For a different perspective on the Caribbean novel as a response to this identity crisis, see Dominique Chancé, L’Auteur en souffrance (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), 169.

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Chapter 1

Finally, one wonders whether the ambiguous psyche of the Créole novelist, emblematic of the period, was not already questioned in the work of Frantz Fanon, another Caribbean writer and psychiatrist who spent a large part of his life studying the psychopathology resulting from the dispossession of the past, the breaking up of identities, the loss of cultural borders and the consequent loss of limits, rules or bearings, within the self.20 It is not just that créolité would be a third alienated response to the situation described in Peau noire, masques blancs, beyond the antithetic postures of denial (white masks) and reactive assertion (négritude). More deeply, the history of the colonised was still to be made – not just told or reinvented – through a revolutionary struggle, not just a national one. Fanon, a reader of Hegel and, until the end, of Sartre, though he did not share any of the former’s dialectical optimism, saw issues of identity as belonging to a negative (if very real) phase in a process towards liberation and greater lucidity. In that sense, his writing would be much closer to the ‘poetic act’ of Glissant, which is process and production of a new, dis-alienated consciousness, rather than to a philosophy or a representation of a world. That would link him to a poetics derived from Surrealism by Césaire. It is probably too early to decide whether the later, striking efflorescence of francophone prose fiction in the Antilles reflected wishful thinking or a period of historical deflation. But this issue should not mask in retrospect the major, earlier poetic contribution to literature in French and its role in setting the new scene. This contribution was recognised early: Saint-John Perse published Anabase in 1924, with Walter Benjamin and Bernard Groethuysen translating it into German in 1929, and T. S. Eliot into English in 1930. Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal was first published in 1939. Breton came across it in 1941 and, in 1944, called it ‘rien moins que le plus grand monument lyrique de ce temps’.21 In his

20 Beyond ancien-régime colonies such as Martinique, the Algerian war was the ultimate laboratory in which to study this collapse of limits, due to the assimilative nature of French colonisation there. Its effects are still visible. See Frantz Fanon, L’An V de la Révolution Algérienne (1958) and Les Damnés de la terre (1961). I have gathered and introduced all of Fanon’s psychiatric texts in EAL. 21 [no less than the greatest lyrical monument of this time]

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21

preface to the translation into Spanish, published by Lydia Cabrera in Cuba in 1943, Benjamin Péret wrote: ‘J’ai l’honneur de saluer ici un grand poète, le seul grand poète de langue française qui soit apparu depuis vingt ans’.22 It is certainly one of the most translated poems in French of the century.23 Yet how can we explain the immediate sovereignty of these works? At first sight, no common theme seems to explain it, and of course no law of supply and demand, akin to that which exists for prose, can be invoked in the case of poetry. However, some aspects of the history and situation of these islands could here too be related to the particular form of this poetry. Sartre, for instance, in his famous preface to Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française,24 stressing the link between poetry and subjectivity, noted its importance in the constitution of a revolutionary consciousness: ‘Ainsi reparaît la subjectivité, rapport de soi-même avec soi, source de toute poésie […]’.25 It was not surprising for him that poetry should be the prime literary expression of former slaves, of

22 [I consider it an honour to hail here a great poet, the only new great poet that the French language has seen during the past two decades.] 23 Aimé Césaire, Retorno al pais natal, trans. Lydia Cabrera, pref. Benjamin Peret, illustrations Wifredo Lam (Havana: Molina, 1943). In English, see in particular: Cahier d’un retour au pays natal: Memorandum on My Martinique, French and English edition, trans. Lionel Abel and Ivan Goll, pref. André Breton (New York: Brentano’s, 1947); Aimé Césaire, The Collected Poetry, ed. and trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Notebook of a Return to My Native Land/Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, trans. Mirelle Rosello with Annie Pritchard, Bloodaxe Contemporary French Poets, 4 (Newcastle-uponTyne: Bloodaxe, 1995); The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, bilingual edn, ed. and trans. A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013); and Aimé Césaire, The Complete Poetry, ed. and trans. A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2017). 24 Léopold Sédar Senghor, Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, pref. Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948). 25 [Thus subjectivity reappears: the relation of the self with the self; the source of all poetry] ‘Orphée noir’, Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie, xi/‘Black Orpheus’, trans. John MacCombie, The Massachusetts Review 6/1 (autumn, 1964 – winter, 1965), 16.

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those who had been actively denied all access to reflection and were now fighting this alienation. However, does this apply to the first poet in this great line, Saint-John Perse? Or should we consider that his work floats above and beyond its historical, Caribbean ‘situation’, in a sort of Claudelian elevation? Surely it cannot be reduced to the abundant ‘colonial’ poetry of his time, a poetry for which the Caribbean is simply a décor. If that were the case, then Césaire and Glissant would not have regarded him as a major poet. Glissant, reflecting on the notion of exoticism, gives us a clue: […] son universalité ne fréquente pas l’exotisme, elle en exprime, non pas seulement l’austère critique, mais la négation naturelle.26

*

I Perse: Heteroclite, heraclitean and erotic In an article of 1942 entitled ‘Misère d’une poésie’, Suzanne Césaire presents the now quite forgotten John Antoine-Nau as the archetype of the colonial poet: ‘Nul n’a plus sincèrement chanté les “charmes” de la vie créole’.27 In ironical support of this claim she cruelly quotes some of his texts, such as the following: Vêtus d’éclairs, de soleil rouge ou smaragdin Des djinns ailés et nains becquetaient les bananes Qui sont de lourds bonbons à l’ambroisie

26

27

[[…] his universality has nothing to do with exoticism, severely criticising it instead, and serving as its natural negation.] Poétique de la Relation 50/38. The ‘Universality’ of Perse is, according to Glissant, a new aesthetic form: ‘the narration of the universe’, as opposed to a grasp of the history of the place where he was born. [Nobody has sung more sincerely of the ‘charms’ of Creole life]

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Et tout l’air était lourd d’ambroisie sous le lacis Des longues et flexueuses lianes.28

Such texts are interesting, if only to measure Perse’s difference. Apart from Antoine-Nau’s embarrassing a-rhythmicity (one wonders whether this text was intended as a pastiche), the structure of the image is totally different from those one finds in Perse, even when at his most ‘exotic’: J’ai rêvé, l’autre soir, d’îles plus vertes que le songe … et les navigateurs descendent au rivage en quête d’une eau bleue ; ils voient – c’est le reflux – le lit refait des sables ruisselants : la mer arborescente y laisse, s’enlisant, ces pures empreintes capillaires, comme de grandes palmes suppliciées, de grandes filles extasiées qu’elle couche en larmes dans leurs pagnes et dans leurs tresses dénouées. Et ce sont là figurations du songe […]. Amers29

The point here is not to decorate a stage with separate props, taken from the great storeroom of pre-existing signs of ‘otherness’,30 but to elaborate on the constructivist process (‘figurations …’) of desire within consciousness (‘… du songe’): a free process, typically elicited by ambiguities of background and foreground (‘pures empreintes capillaires’), or by visual metaphors (‘mer

28 29

[Robed in rays of red or emerald sun, Winged, dwarf genies were gobbling bananas Which are heavy, ambrosious sweets And all the air was heavy with ambrosia beneath the lacis Of long and sinuous lianas] quoted in Tropiques 4 ( January 1942), 48. [I dreamt, the other evening, of islands greener than any dream … And sailors landed on the shore in search of blue water; they saw – it was ebb-tide – the new-made bed of streaming sands: an arborescent sea had left there, as it sank, its pure capillary prints, like those of great tortured palms, or of tall enraptured girls laid down in tears among their loincloths and unbraided tresses. And these are figurations of a dream. […]] OC, 327/455. 30 Be they cultural (‘djinns’, ‘ambroisie’), natural (‘bananes’), visual (‘lacis’, ‘lianes’), or lexical (‘flexueuses’, ‘smaragdin’, the latter meaning ‘Qui a la couleur verte de l’émeraude’ [Which has the green colour of emerald]. Littré places it in the entertaining category of ‘termes didactiques’, not far from ‘sébifère’ and ‘théopneustie’).

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arborescente’, ‘s’enlisant’).31 In Perse, desire is not the obsession born of the lack of an other, but, rather, an auto-production of the self by exploring in language virtualities of form that consciousness discovers in its other, the given. This dual creation is what lovers celebrate in this poem, in their ‘témoignages en faveur de la mer’. Exoticism assembles pictures of the other that are exclusively made up of features antithetical to what the self takes its own nature to be. It does celebrate the beyond, but only inasmuch as this reinforces, by contrast, the self within the borders of its own identity. From this point of view, Perse is a heteroclite rather than exotic poet, who often composes somehow familiar fragments (of things and events) into impossible images, but in such configurations and in such registers that they impose on the reader the mysterious points of view of the civilisations they seem to illustrate. In that he is comparable to the Michaux of Ailleurs,32 except perhaps for the fact that, in Perse, points of view shift more often within the same piece. Hence, for instance, the properly disconcerting beginnings of his texts: the use of the imperfect (im-perfect, a present of the past, without any absolute localisation on a retrospectively unified timeline, as with the definite past), the second person (singular or plural), or simply, sometimes, openings with ‘et’, immediately install the reader within the realm of the outlandish (in time as well as space):33 Palmes … ! Alors on te baignait dans l’eau-de-feuilles-vertes ; et l’eau encore était du soleil vert ; et les servantes de ta mère, grandes filles luisantes, remuaient leurs jambes chaudes près de toi qui tremblais …

31

Alain Robbe-Grillet works with similar variations at the beginning of the third volume of his ‘proetic’ autobiography, Les Derniers jours de Corinthe (Paris: Minuit, 1994). 32 See infra Ch. 10. 33 Perse continuously plays on ‘règne’ (realm, dominion but also reign, era). His poems could be seen as the chronicles of the sovereignty of desire over its own realm. ‘Outlandish’ is the English translation Gilles Deleuze proposed for his own ‘déterritorialisé’.

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( Je parle d’une haute condition, alors, entre les robes, au règne de tournantes clartés.). ‘Pour fêter une enfance’, Éloges (1910)34 Il naissait un poulain sous les feuilles de bronze. Un homme mit des baies amères dans nos mains. Étranger. Qui passait. Et voici qu’il est bruit d’autres provinces à mon gré … ‘Je vous salue, ma fille, sous le plus grand des arbres de l’année.’ Anabase (1924 and 1960)35 Et toi plus maigre qu’il ne sied au tranchant de l’esprit, homme aux narines minces parmi nous, ô Très-Maigre ! ô Subtil ! Prince vêtu de tes sentences ainsi qu’un arbre sous bandelettes, aux soirs de grande sécheresse sur la terre, lorsque les hommes en voyage disputent des choses de l’esprit adossés en chemin à de très grandes jarres, j’ai entendu parler de toi de ce côté du monde, et la louange n’était point maigre […]. ‘Amitié du prince’, La Gloire des Rois (1924)36

Typically Persean is the use of comparatives and superlatives : ‘plus maigre’, ‘Très-Maigre’, ‘grande sécheresse’, ‘de très grandes jarres’, ‘le plus grand des arbres’, ‘haute condition’. Elsewhere, it is the vocabulary which indicates 34 [Palms …! In those days they bathed you in water-of-green-leaves; and the water was of green sun too; and your mother’s maids, tall glistening girls, moved their warm legs near you who trembled … (I speak of a high condition, in those days, among the dresses, in the dominion of revolving lights.)] OC, 23/21. In this ambiguous image, seen from below, by a child, the maids’ movements are also the movements of the light in-between their dresses. This spontaneous attentiveness to vision itself perhaps constitutes a ‘haute condition’ in the Mallarméan sense of ‘condition vraie’ in ‘Crise de vers’, as we shall see. All italics within quotes are mine, unless otherwise indicated. 35 [Under the bronze leaves a colt was foaled. Came such a one who laid bitter bay in our hands. Stranger. Who passed. Here comes news of other provinces to my liking. – ‘Hail, daughter! under the most considerable of the trees of the year’] OC, 89/101. 36 [And you on the keen edge of the spirit, leaner than is fitting, man of the thin nostrils among us, O Very-Lean! O Subtle! Prince attired in your sayings like a tree wrapped in bands, evenings of great drought on the earth, while men on journeys argue the things of the spirit, leaning against very big jars to rest on their way, I have heard you spoken of in this part of the world, and praise was not meagre […]] OC, 65/79.

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elevation (‘les feuilles de bronze’, ‘Prince’). Of course, this grants these facts or objects value in the eyes of the narrator or observer, but equally important is the contrast between these indications and the sometimes very ordinary realities they qualify. The reader has the feeling of dealing with shifting scales, or unknown coordinates, making measurement very difficult, as if the gaze could not, or did not care to stand out of the plane of what there is, in order to evaluate it. The opening of Vents reflects upon this production of the immense, of what is beyond measure: C’étaient de très grands vents sur toutes faces de ce monde, De très grands vents en liesse par le monde, qui n’avaient d’aire ni de gîte, Qui n’avaient garde ni mesure, et nous laissaient hommes de paille, En l’an de paille sur leur erre … Ah ! oui, de très grands vents sur toutes faces de vivants ! Vents (1946 and 1960)37

Beneath the immediately perceived meanings (aire/area, gîte/shelter, erre/erring, errantry) run reinforcing ones: Littré gives several for ‘aire’, in particular: ‘Terme de marine. Aire de vent, direction du vent’, and ‘Nid, c’est-à-dire surface plane de rocher où l’aigle fait son nid, et, par extension, nid des grands oiseaux de proie’.38 Here, in proximity to ‘En l’an’, it also evokes ‘ère’ [era]: it is as if the winds had their own chronology, their calendar being a function of their dispersing movement. So the interlocking of meanings suggests the paradoxes of a ‘pure’ speed, a speed without parameters in time or space, and of a movement without direction, as if

37

[These were very great winds over all the faces of this world, Very great winds rejoicing over the world, having neither eyrie nor resting-place, Having neither care nor caution, and leaving us, in their wake, Men of straw in the year of straw … Ah, yes, very great winds over all the faces of the living!] OC, 179/227. 38 [Nautical term. Aire de vent, wind direction], [nest, i.e., flat rock surface where an eagle makes its nest and, by extension, nest of large birds of prey].

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pure concepts could be immediately presented by poetry, avoiding reference to specific situations in time and space.39 Significant also is the lack of definite article after ‘tout’ when used in the plural (‘sur toutes faces de ce monde’, and, later ‘sur toutes pistes de ce monde’, ‘sur toutes choses saisissables’). It has a similar paradoxical effect of elevating towards the simplicity of abstraction that which, at the same time, is kept multiple and therefore concrete. As if the project was neither the imitation of the real, nor the imagination of an abstract possible world, but, rather, the production of the virtual, to be experienced as such, in its conscious genesis. Finally, once the absolute, impersonal or inhuman plane of out-ofscale entities and movements has been established (Vents, Anabase …), then the contours of a subjectivity, and some elements of a civilisation can be discerned. To the winds, men are straw, but an ‘homme de paille’ is also a front, a substitute, a stand-in or a scarecrow. Facets (of the world) become fleeting faces when a poetic voice arises, animated by such forces: Flairant la pourpre, le cilice, flairant l’ivoire et le tesson, flairant le monde entier des choses,

39 Does one need to know the forgotten meanings of words such as aire, gîte, erre to understand this poetry? One certainly needs to learn them, and work on language, but not because poetry would be about recovering original meanings, perhaps in the edenic or cratylic hope that they would somehow reveal the essence of things better than current ones. The idea that the evolution of language is metaphorical, always drifting away from original designations of immediate experience or feelings towards abstractions is itself a poetic myth. Rather, what poetry does through this work on language is to opacify, even to a minimal degree (the mere possibility of an enjambment – a disjointing of semantic and syntactic lines instituted by metre – is enough). This is not obscuring, as this degree of opacity simply draws attention to the medium of thought itself, not some unreachable meaning. Thus poetry is an art of attention, an art of the advent and outlining of thought in language. Does it necessarily require effort, and take time? It is effort: sustained attention is an ‘athleticism’ of the mind. But it is not clear that it ‘takes’ time. It arrests, and thus gives back the present we busily ignore when following ready-made tracks and living as if in a film, which could be accelerated or slowed down at will without losing any of its content, thus bearing no true relationship to time itself in its essential open-endedness.

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Chapter 1 Et qui couraient à leur office sur nos plus grands versets d’athlètes, de poètes, C’étaient de très grands vents en quête sur toutes pistes de ce monde, Sur toutes choses périssables, sur toutes choses saisissables, parmi le monde entier des choses …40

Far from celebrating a pre-existing beauty, poetic verse equates ‘toutes choses’, ‘pourpre’ and ‘cilice’, ‘ivoire’ and ‘tesson’. Far from exhibiting the unusual or the extraordinary within the borders of an exotic stage (or even the world itself as an object, a perspective which, for Césaire, defines the Western gaze) and thus comforting the self and the other in their spectacular as well as infinitely specular relationship, it seems that the project equally described here as poetry and athleticism is a training into the perception of the singularity of all that happens (‘choses périssables’, ‘choses saisissables’), what one could call the ‘eventuality’ of the given, whether nature or culture. This is why Perse often stages prophetic figures. A prophet is a voice which does not so much predict as open up the consciousness of time as advent (as à venir):41 Et vous aviez si peu de temps pour naître à cet instant! Vents42

What Perse is interested in is thus not transcendence, historical origin or eschatology, but birth, and birth within the poem itself:

40 [Scenting out the purple, the haircloth, scenting out the ivory and the potsherd, scenting out the entire world of things, And hurrying to their duties upon our greatest verses, verses of athletes and poets, These were very great winds questing over all the trails of this world, Over all things perishable, over all things graspable, throughout the entire world of things …] OC, 179/227. 41 On messianic prophecy and its relationship with ‘operational time’, see Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 65. On the link between time to come and the ‘whatever’ (L’essere che viene è l’essere qualunque), see Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 1. 42 [And you had so little time to be born to this instant!] OC, 248/351.

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[…] cette fonction enfin du poème qui est de devenir, de vivre et d’être la chose même, ‘conjurée’, et non plus le thème, antérieur au poème.43

We shall see that this theme and structure are essential to the poetry of the Antilles.44 Moving further within the poems, the reader keeps on feeling what Roger Caillois named – in a word which needs to be taken literally – dépaysement: Il est porté à croire que le poète rédige les annales imaginaires de quelque civilisation problématique, en tout cas depuis si longtemps révolue ou située sur un rivage si lointain que n’ont jamais pu l’atteindre le voyageur ou l’historien. En outre, dans ces textes, presque tout est allusif ; rien n’y porte son explication. De longues et solennelles énumérations résument des mœurs insolites, mais à coup sûr empreintes d’une très ancienne dignité. D’autres fois, des discours, dont on ne saura ni qui les prononce ni qui les écoute, élèvent dans le vide des sortes de panégyriques presque sans objet, s’attardent en d’obscures confidences ou, pure expression des transports de l’âme, ne sont qu’une suite d’exclamations enthousiastes ou désolées […]

43 [[…] this function, then, of the poem, which is to become, live and be the thing itself, ‘conjured’ and no longer the theme, prior to the poem.] OC, 574. 44 On poetry and athleticism, Perse’s main poetic reference is Pindar’s Olympian Odes, which he translated. See Michel Briand, ‘“Ô mon âme, n’aspire pas à la vie immortelle” … Sur les avatars de Pindare, Pythique III, 61–2, des scholiastes anciens à Saint-John Perse, Paul Valéry, Albert Camus, et à l’entour’, Rursus 6 (2011) accessed 27 August 2015. It is important to keep in mind this definition of poetry as act, circulation, displacement or race on a surface (similar to what Césaire aims at with ‘verrition’), but not representation. On the relationship between measurement and events (or Incorporeals), see the chapters on Stoicism and on Lewis Carroll in Deleuze’s Logique du Sens (Paris: Minuit, 1969). I have discussed these notions in their relationship with the motif of the wind in the work of Deleuze in ‘Deleuze et Sartre: Idée d’une conscience impersonnelle’, Les Temps Modernes 608 (2000), reproduced infra as Ch. 10. The Deleuzian ‘concept’ is not a ‘contour’ standing ‘above’ or summarising a multiplicity, rather it should be thought of empirically as an activity of the mind constantly connecting singular points in space as well as time.

30

Chapter 1 Ces répertoires rassemblent mille objets épars, mille conduites clairsemées dans l’univers. Les conditions de temps et de lieu les vêtent et les déguisent chaque fois, suivant une mode particulière. Mais gestes et choses n’en sont pas moins issus d’une même lointaine origine, difficile à supposer et à découvrir. C’est elle que le poète cherche à restituer par de surprenants rapprochements, comme les linguistes restituent une racine non attestée par la comparaison des formes subséquentes.45

In other words, if there was exoticism here, it would be of a radical type, a depiction of the absolutely outside, beyond all borders (Littré: ‘Lat. exoticus, terme grec provenant d’un mot se traduisant par hors’),46 beyond all origins and, even and above all, beyond the received limits of thought. Perse does not simply assemble astonishing facts or objects, worthy of a newspaper or ‘cabinet de curiosités’. These would just bear witness to the character and limits of an individual mind, or illustrate a point of view. The work of the poet is indirect: not only are these singular facts or objects measured against vanishing scales, not only are they simply alluded to in medias res and therefore detached from the chain of ordinary causes and circumstances which might have brought them about, but they have no perceptible value or significance in themselves that could at least oppose 45 [He is led to believe that the poet edits the imaginary annals of some problematic civilisation, which in any case disappeared so long ago or is found on such a distant shore that neither the explorer nor the historian has ever managed to reach it. In addition, in these texts, nearly everything is allusive: nothing brings its explanation. Long and solemn enumerations summarise customs that are indeed unusual, but nonetheless marked by very ancient dignity. At other points, discourses, whose origins and audience are unknown, raise within the void apparent panegyrics that are almost without object, linger on obscure secrets, or, as a pure expression of the movements of the soul, are nothing other than a chain of enthusiastic or despondent exclamations […] These registers gather up a thousand disparate objects, a thousand customs dispersed throughout the universe. The conditions of time and place clothe and disguise them simultaneously, in accordance with a singular style. But for all that, gestures and things are no less the issue of a single, distant origin, difficult to infer or discover. It is this origin that the poet seeks to reconstitute through surprising appositions, just as linguists reconstitute an unknown root through the comparison of subsequent forms.] Roger Caillois, ‘Poésie de la réalité’, in Poétique de St-John Perse (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 100 and 137. 46 [Lat. exoticus. A Greek term originating in a word that translates as outside.]

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them to a type, a rule, an expectation, and, by contrast, define them. That is precisely their poetic value: the composition is such that we perceive them as odd insofar as we cannot immediately relate them to the abstractions we have instituted in order to deal unthinkingly with the mass of singularities we constantly experience in the world. Poetry here is the continued consciousness of the effort necessary to constitute a world. This has important consequences. In particular, it makes it meaningless to refer elements within the poem to the ‘original events’ that inspired the author, as if the poem was a sign or a representation of such events, and to think that by doing so one could ‘understand the poem’. They are only bypasses through which the uniqueness of all events, otherwise masked by the evidence that ordinary language imparts to abstractions, is revealed. Caillois elegantly named this process ‘Richesse de l’unique’.47 But the explanation he proposed for Perse’s fascination with the ‘plural’ (the multiplication of the singular) is disappointing: ‘C’est grâce à lui […] que s’effectue la promotion poétique, la généralisation qui, donnant à l’événement inimaginable une valeur d’archétype, lui permet de prendre place dans les annales humaines’.48 In certain circumstances (for instance, in his Nobel acceptance speech), Perse himself may have encouraged the idea that the purpose of poetry was to celebrate and give substance to the sublime but fleeting in

47 [The richness of the singular.] Ibid. 149. Caillois stresses that it would be misguided, ‘devant une donnée trop déroutante, d’accuser le poète de prendre plaisir aux inventions les plus saugrenues !’ [in the face of an excessively puzzling datum, to accuse the poet of taking pleasure in the most peculiar inventions!] The same could be said of Michaux. Their techniques and styles are very different, but one could certainly draw links with the descriptions of a mind neutral to worlds of oddities in Ailleurs, or with the scrupulous recordings (verbal or pictorial) of the proliferation of the discrete, of ideas as items within the field of consciousness (formal, but not objective or representative realities, in the vocabulary of Scholastics), when under the effect of mescaline. As reflection always takes place in time, rhythm, more than pitch or harmony, is of the essence here. See infra, Ch. 10. 48 [It is thanks to him […] that the poetic elevation or generalisation is effected which, giving to the unimaginable event the value of an archetype, permits it to take its place in the annals of humanity.] Ibid. 152.

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human history and in the human soul. But he also wrote, precisely in a letter of 1953 to Caillois: Mon œuvre, tout entière de recréation, a toujours évolué hors du lieu et du temps : aussi attentive et mémorable qu’elle soit pour moi dans ses incarnations, elle entend échapper à toute référence historique aussi bien que géographique ; aussi vécue qu’elle soit pour moi contre l’abstraction, elle entend échapper à toute incidence personnelle. A cet égard, la deuxième partie de mon œuvre publiée ne tend pas moins que la première aux transpositions, stylisations et créations du plan absolu. […] Rien ne me paraît d’ailleurs, plus surprenant, comme contradiction, que de vouloir jamais expliquer un ‘poète’ par la ‘culture’. En ce qui me concerne plus personnellement, je m’étonne grandement de voir des critiques favorables apprécier le poème comme une cristallisation, alors que la poésie pour moi est avant tout mouvement – dans sa naissance comme sa croissance et son élargissement final. La philosophie même du ‘poète’ me semble se ramener, essentiellement, au vieux ‘rhéisme’ élémentaire de la pensée antique – comme celle, en Occident, de nos Pré-Socratiques.49 Et sa métrique aussi, qu’on lui impute à rhétorique, ne tend encore qu’au mouvement et à la fréquentation du mouvement, dans toutes ses ressources vivantes, les plus imprévisibles. D’où l’importance en tout, pour le poète, de la Mer.50

49 This discreet allusion to the ‘rheism’ of Western as well as non-Western thought could relate equally to Chinese thought (which Perse studied at length during his stay in China, from 1916 to 1921) or to the Hinduism (and perhaps Tantra) into which he was initiated during his childhood. On the influence of Taoism on Perse, see Lorand Gaspar’s article in Détours d’écriture, special issue: Saint-John Perse : métissage des écritures, écriture du métissage (Paris: Sillages, 1987). There is a clear affinity between Perse and the author of Sol absolu. 50 [My entire work, which is one of re-creation, has always moved in regions beyond place and time. Allusive and full of recollections as it may be for me in its final form, it seeks to avoid all historical, and likewise geographical, points of reference. And however ‘lived’ it may have been for me in its avoidance of abstractness, it seeks to transcend all personal allusions. In this respect, the second part of my published work tends, no less than the first part, toward transpositions, stylisations, and creations on an absolute plane. […] Nothing, moreover, strikes me as more surprising, as a contradiction, than the desire to explain a ‘poet’ in terms of his cultural acquisitions. And as for what concerns me in a more personal way, I am astonished to see favorable critics finding my art an art of crystallisations, when poetry, to me, is, above all, movement–in its inception, as well as in its development and final liberation. It seems to me that the philosophical concept ‘poet’ may be, in its essence, brought back to the old and elemental ‘rheism’ of ancient thought–like the rheism, in Occidental thought,

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A poetry which is lived,51 against abstraction, and yet not the crystallisation of personal affects or impressions; creations of the absolute plane;52 the experiencing of becoming and movement, not through the depictions of their objects, causes and effects (as in traditional epic poetry), but from the inside, so to speak, and before concepts, which fix movement; metre, not as a rhetorical tool or mnemotechnics, but as a tendency towards movement or its fréquentation (its frequent visitation), as opposed to its representation – this Heraclitean rheism indicates an attempt at going beyond all views, particularly human ones (but also mythical or divine), upon or about what happens. What is at stake is not to raise the singular in the human towards

51

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of our pre-Socratics. And the metrics of poetry, too, which is ascribed to rhetoric, is motivated only by movement, in all its living manifestations, which are the most unpredictable ones. Whence the importance in all things, for the poet, of the sea.] OC, 562/Saint-John Perse, Letters, ed. and trans. Arthur J. Knodel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 492. ‘À la question toujours posée: “Pourquoi écrivez-vous?” la réponse du Poète sera toujours la plus brève: “Pour mieux vivre”’. [To the question that is forever asked, ‘Why do you write?’, the Poet’s response will forever be the shortest: ‘To live better’.] OC, 564. The plane of what there is is absolute. Deleuze and Guattari also saw in the vision of an absolute plane of the discrete by the Presocratics an act of thought and not a given: ‘[…] les premiers philosophes sont ceux qui instaurent un plan d’immanence comme un crible tendu sur le chaos. Ils s’opposent en ce sens aux Sages, qui sont des personnages de la religion, des prêtres, parce qu’ils conçoivent l’instauration d’un ordre toujours transcendant, imposé du dehors par un grand despote ou par un dieu supérieur aux autres […]. Il y a religion chaque fois qu’il y a transcendance, Être vertical, État impérial au ciel ou sur la terre, et il y a Philosophie chaque fois qu’il y a immanence, même si elle sert d’arène à l’agôn et à la rivalité’ [The first philosophers are those who institute a plane of immanence like a sieve stretched over the chaos. In this sense they contrast with sages, who are religious personæ, priests, because they conceive of the institution of an always transcendent order imposed from outside by a great despot or by one god higher than the others […] Whenever there is transcendence, vertical Being, imperial State in the sky or on earth, there is religion; and there is Philosophy whenever there is immanence, even if it functions as arena for the agon and rivalry] Qu’est-ce que la Philosophie? (Paris: Minuit, 1991), 45–6/What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 43.

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the universal, or to create heroic examples. It is rather, as we have seen, to practice an athleticism of singularity, or to release the fonds, the resource (but not the capital), which is referred to in this reflexive passage of Vents: Aux porches où nous levons la torche rougeoyante, aux antres où plonge notre vue, comme le bras nu des femmes, jusqu’à l’aisselle, dans les vaisseaux de grain d’offrande et la fraîcheur sacrée des jarres, C’est une promesse semée d’yeux comme il n’en fut aux hommes jamais faite, Et la maturation, soudain, d’un autre monde au plein midi de notre nuit … Tout l’or en fèves de vos Banques, aux celliers de l’État, n’achèterait point l’usage d’un tel fonds.53

The ‘porches’, ‘antres’, ‘vaisseaux’, ‘jarres’ of the poem harbour an infinity: the singular and the infinity of worlds that one can engender out of it. No currency, no ‘numéraire’, as Mallarmé would have said of the ordinary, representative use of language, with its received abstractions or hoarded up denominations, could ever release it.54 Poetry is thus not only a form of life, but, beyond the separation of ‘connaissance’, a ‘nouveau commerce’, or a community of the self and the infinite other within. One understands why Perse abhorred exoticism, and inscribed his chosen name into dispersion.55 53

[On the porches where we raise the reddening torch, in the caves wherein our sight goes plunging down, like women’s arms, bare to the arm-pits, in vessels of offertory grain and the sacred freshness of the jars, It is a promise, sown with eyes, such as never was made to man, And the sudden ripening of another world in the high noon of our night … All the golden beans of your Banks, in the vaults of the State, would not purchase the use of such a fund.] OC, 228/313. 54 Mallarmé’s ‘antres’ are famous, and ‘transposition’ is his definition of Verse. The night sky (‘midi de notre nuit’), as a ‘promesse semée d’yeux’, echoes perhaps Un coup de dés. 55 ‘Ha ! dispersant – qu’elles dispersent ! disions-nous […] Ainsi croissantes et sifflantes elles tenaient ce chant très pur où nul n’a connaissance’. [Ha ! scattering – let them scatter! we were saying – […] Increasing and whistling thus, they maintained this very pure song whereof no one has understanding.] OC, 185/237.

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Let us now return to our initial question: whether there is a reason for the emergence/ eminence of a Caribbean poetry in French, and thus some link between writers such as Perse, a poet of movement and of the absolute, who celebrates winds and the sea; Césaire, who wrote a Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, and was constantly trying to reclaim a time and a place for a community; and Glissant, whose work is the defence and illustration of an aesthetics of multiplicity, difference and relation.56 A first answer is precisely this baroque desire to release a world of singularities through the continued act of questioning within language of the forms and limits that we take for granted, and which have made us believe that reality is just to be recognised. Of course, there has been an important link in French thought between poetry and this experience of limits since at least Mallarmé, but it is clear that one could also find, in the tormented history and geography of the Caribbean, an environment propitious for such a preoccupation.57 Perse was born not even on an island, but on an island’s island, as Glissant noted: Si Perse était venu à un autre monde, s’il était venu ailleurs au monde, il eût certes été plus contraint par des enracinements, des atavismes, une glu de terre qui l’eût attaché ferme. La naissance antillaise au contraire, le laisse ouvert à l’errance. L’univers pour l’errant n’est pas donné comme monde que le concret limite mais comme passion d’universel ancrée au concret.58

56 Édouard Glissant’s most notable poetic work is perhaps the collection Le Sel noir. Were space available, other francophone poets should be considered and from a wider geographical area. Perse, Césaire and Glissant stand out because of the degree to which they have invented their own language, and thus differ. 57 History and geography, but also natural history, which is the object of a quasiscientific attention in Perse. The initial confrontation of the scientific mind with reality as proliferation is an important phase of the poet’s work. The same attention to Caribbean nature is striking in Tropiques, and explains the function of the articles on botanical nomenclature published in Césaire’s otherwise largely poetic journal. 58 [If Perse had come to another world, if he had come into the world elsewhere, he would certainly have been restrained by being rooted, by ancestral impulses, by a sense of attachment to the land that would have located him firmly. On the contrary, his being born in the Caribbean exposes him to wandering. The universe for the restless wanderer does not appear as a world limited by the concrete but as a passion for the

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And, when Glissant returned to Perse much later: Le poète consacrera l’alliance de l’ailleurs et du possible par deux ascèses qu’il revendique et soutient: l’impossible pour lui de la maison natale (l’antillaise), mais aussi, et comme par dérivée, l’écart résolu par rapport à tout ici qui serait donné d’avance (qui ne serait pas médité dans un vouloir).59

These texts constantly work with borders or limits. But their aim is not that of a metaphysical poetry or a negative theology which, properly sublime, would haunt borders in order to manifest a transcendence otherwise unknowable, and to humiliate subjectivity. Rather, it is an attempt to regain for language, as the fundamental human act, the power to create forms or – to speak the language of perspective – draw vanishing lines (lignes de fuite) within the indefinite plane of what is given to consciousness, a power which had been restricted by the philosophies or religions of transcendence and kept in exclusivity for a hovering ‘old, ragged, evil plumage’: god,60 or superior authorities. Their differences are fundamental, but these are all poetries of life. Now, more than Baudelaire, Rimbaud or Lautréamont, Mallarmé is the poet who has most thoroughly analysed the play of limit and movement, to the point that for him poetry is about dispersing borders, whether

universal anchored in the concrete.] ‘Saint-John Perse et les Antillais’, 69/Caribbean Discourse, 226. On the distinction between limits (Schranken), determining an inside and borders (Grenzen), thresholds which always presuppose a space beyond, see Kant’s Prolegomena § 57. See also Agamben, The Coming Community, Section XVI: ‘Outside’. 59 [To consecrate the union between elsewhere and possibility, the poet demanded of himself permanent abstinence from something impossible for him: the house of his birth in the Antilles but also, and as if attributable to this first abstinence, he kept a resolute distance from any Here conferred in advance (not wilfully meditated).] Poétique de la Relation, 51/37. 60 ‘[…] ma lutte terrible avec ce vieux et méchant plumage terrassé, heureusement, Dieu’ [[…] my terrible struggle with that old and evil plumage, which is now, happily, vanquished: God] Mallarmé, letter of 14 May 1867 to Henri Cazalis. English translation in Selected Letters of Stéphane Mallarmé, ed. and trans. Rosemary Lloyd (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 74.

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those of conceptual thought or those of the page, margins or blanks, and even those of the volume itself, thought of as both instrument and script for performances. In addition, he has done it from the point of view of the foundation of a possible human community. A detour via this thought, which had a surprising influence on the authors we are considering, is thus important, if we want to understand the complicated links which unite and separate the notions of poetry and community. *

II Mallarmé: Chalice/Calyx Bord, bordure: border, edge, but also contour, outline. A border encloses and defines, unifies and identifies. Yet at the same time, in de-limiting and de-fining, it points to an out-side of the territory it circumscribes (limes: limit, boundary line, difference, but also path or track; finis: borderline, end, but also aim, object, purpose). More secretly, as we have seen, every limit harbours a beyond that is, so to speak, inside: the in-definite (and in-finitely combinable) mass of singularities it ignores, out-lines or delineates: the real. It constantly refers to it, but, by the very nature of signs, it can never ‘fully’ signify it. A beyond therefore also within all concepts and expressions, if conceptual thought is bound to and by language. It is in that sense too that determinatio negatio est.61 61

See Spinoza’s important letter to Jelles of 2 June 1674: ‘It is manifest that pure matter, when considered as indefinite, cannot have a figure (figura), and that there can only be a figure in finite and determinate bodies. […] A figure is thus nothing else than a determination, and as all determination is a negation, the figure can only be, as I said, a negation’. If all concept is, in a sense, a contour, or a border, borders themselves are concepts, often of a rather fuzzy sort, as is shown by the classical threshold paradoxes, as well as by well-known logical and empirical difficulties in defining national, gender or ethnic borders. Thus, in a poem-demonstration, Jacques Roubaud, mathematician

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Mallarmé famously presented poetry as an act of speech (une voix), through which the contours ordinarily delineated by language are, in turn, negated, not in order to assert the existence of an ineffable or metaphysical ‘other’, or the radical isolation of the order of the signifier from the order of the real, but, rather, through the continued act and experience of such a negation, to try to use and inhabit language reflexively, which he saw as the highest ambition of poetry. Thus perhaps, the only border known to poetry is that between voice (‘rythme’, ‘chant’, ‘musique’) and the ordinary (‘journalier’) use of language. This border is drawn by the line (‘le vers’, which he sometimes calls ‘la ligne’). Je dis: une fleur! et, hors de l’oubli où ma voix relègue aucun62 contour, en tant que quelque chose d’autre que les calices sus, musicalement se lève, idée même et suave, l’absente de tous bouquets.

62



and OuLiPian poet (as such a specialist in questions of forms and limits, and therefore, like Valéry, interested in Zeno: ‘Zénon, cruel Zénon, démon zélé!’), proved that the French population is infinite and eternal, using the politician Jean-Marie Le Pen’s definition of Frenchness: ‘are French those who have two French parents’ and the postulate that there is at least one French person (presumably the inventor of the definition of Frenchness). As the parents of the postulated Frenchman must have been French by definition, their parents too must have been, etc. See his Poésie etcetera: ménage (Paris: Stock, 1995), 16. Natural borders are not easy to define either. See, for instance, Benoît Mandelbrot on the difficulty of measuring Brittany’s coastline, in Les Objets fractal: Forme, hasard et dimension (Paris: Flammarion, 1975), Ch. 2. In Le Sexe prescrit: La Différence sexuelle en question (Paris: Aubier, 2000), Sabine Prokhoris analyses the notion of gender limits. Used in an affirmative context ‘aucun’ first means ‘some’. But it is already an archaism for Littré. One therefore tends to hear ‘none’. Some even read ‘none’. Thus, Maurice Blanchot, in a perceptive and elegant study of this text (‘Le mythe de Mallarmé’, La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949)), quotes it erroneously: ‘hors de l’oubli où ma voix ne relègue aucun contour’. This use of ‘aucun’ is typical of Mallarméan dynamic polysemies (or disseminations), where one of the meanings anticipates upon the result of what is being said. Such tropes are the instrument of the ‘transposition’ that he defines as one of the two main ‘visées’ of poetry: ‘À cette condition s’élance le chant, qu’une joie allégée. Cette visée, je la dis Transposition – Structure, une autre’ [Under those conditions arises song, which is joy made even less heavy.

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Au contraire d’une fonction de numéraire facile et représentatif63 le dire, avant tout,64 rêve et chant, retrouve chez le Poète, par nécessité constitutive d’un art consacré aux fictions, sa virtualité. Le vers qui de plusieurs vocables refait un mot total, neuf, étranger à la langue et comme incantatoire, achève cet isolement de la parole : niant, d’un trait souverain, le hasard demeuré aux termes malgré l’artifice de leur retrempe alternée en le sens et la sonorité, et vous cause cette surprise de n’avoir ouï jamais tel fragment ordinaire d’élocution, en même temps que la réminiscence de l’objet nommé baigne dans une neuve atmosphère. ‘Crise de vers’, Variations sur un sujet.65

This aim, I call Transposition; Structure, another] OC, II, 210/Divagations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press, 2007), 208. Visée’, ‘gestes de l’Idée’, ‘joie’: these terms point to a Kantian aesthetics of poetry as a reflexive game or play of the mind with the structures it imposes on the manifold of perception. See also ‘Sur le vers’, OC II, 474, and the important letter to Edmund Gosse of 10 January 1893 (OC, II, 806). 63 Mallarmé often compared the ordinary use of linguistic signs to that of monetary ones, of which the only value is a representative or exchange value. On the politics implied, see Jacques Rancière, Mallarmé: la politique de la sirène (Paris: Hachette, 1996). 64 Here ‘avant tout’, oddly isolated by commas, first stresses the act of saying, above all other means of communication. It could also mean before all, therefore before the world it constructs, and which the ‘numéraire’, denominational or representative conception of language takes for granted. Finally, the ‘dire’ is, above all, ‘rêve et chant’. There are many echoes of Rousseau’s thought in Mallarmé. Rousseau wrote in the Essai sur l’origine des langues: ‘Mais le langage le plus énergique est celui où le signe a tout dit avant que l’on parle’ [But in the most vigorous language, everything is said by the sign before anything is spoken] (this quote heads Glissant’s Le Discours Antillais). Commas in Mallarmé’s critical poems play a role similar to that of enjambment in verse ones: de-coupling the semantic and the syntactic line. First, this multiplies meanings in compacting the form, turning syntax into virtual paths and reading into an orienteering act within the space of the page. Secondly, it draws the attention back to the word itself and to its linguistic motivation, eliciting a reflexive consciousness of language at the lexical level. 65 [I say: a flower! and beyond the oblivion where my voice relegates any contour, as something other than the known calixes, musically rises, idea itself and suave, the absent from all bouquets. Contrary to a function of cash, facile and representative, as the crowd treats it at first, the utterance, above all, dream and song, re-finds in the Poet, its virtuality, necessarily constitutive of an art devoted to fiction.

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The example is significant: ‘une fleur!’ The exclamation mark makes it a speech-act, an in-vocation or an in-cantation, a use of language aiming at an effect,66 not simply a nomination or a designation. This is why the line (‘le vers’) is called a ‘mot total’ (‘total word’), a meaningful but not referential entity. It is based less on syntax, like a sentence, than on pragmatic indicators, on rhythms, caesurae and enjambments, spacing on the page, etc. – all modes of interference with syntax. Its unity is closer to that of a musical phrase or a prayer.67 Such an incantation inscribes the subject of the enunciation within the text and brings language back within the sphere of an individual voice, hence the insistence on saying (‘le dire, avant tout, rêve et chant’). But it also draws the reader in: this ‘mot total’ is not ‘nouveau’, but it is ‘neuf’; the line adds reflection and surprise (‘[le vers] vous cause cette surprise de n’avoir ouï jamais tel fragment ordinaire d’élocution’), thus negating not language itself, but language when it abolishes itself into habit, into the obviousness of the traditional, the inherited (‘les mots de la tribu’), which now appears to the reader as absolutely contingent to his or her mind. This is why Mallarmé constantly stresses that poetry is an attempt at banning chance from language (‘le hasard demeuré aux termes’): chance, that is meanings which circulate un-reflected, largely unconscious, never re-instituted or reinvested by a consciousness, solidified, so to speak, by the assumption that words signify from within the isolation of their phonic or graphic borders, like labels attached to pre-existing things (Mallarmé often uses the word ‘termes’ to mark this illusion), and not through an act of thought.



The verse which from several vocables remakes a total word, brand new, a stranger to the language and as if incantatory, completes this isolation of the word (the separation above): denying, with a sovereign stroke, the chance remaining in terms despite their alternate retempering in the sense and sonority, and causes for you that surprise of never having heard a certain ordinary fragment of elocution, at the same time as the reminiscence of the named object bathes in a new atmosphere.] OC II, 213/English translation by Robert Greer Cohn in Mallarmé’s Divagations: A Guide and Commentary (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 251. 66 ‘Incantation’: ‘Emploi de paroles magiques’ [Using magic words], says Littré. 67 Or another speech-act: giving. Reviewing the numerous references to flowers in Mallarmé’s texts, Jean Starobinski notes that they are often linked to the theme of the gift which runs through the work. See his ‘Sur quelques apparitions de fleurs’, in Yves Peyré (ed.), Mallarmé 1842–1898: un destin d’écriture (Paris: Gallimard, 1998).

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Commenting on Igitur, Yves Bonnefoy has linked Mallarmé’s reflections to the invention of photography. Suddenly, and for the first time, detail became visible. Not details chosen by perception, always oriented towards a purpose within life, nor details significantly chosen by an artist, ordered to the plan of a creation, but the indifferent, simultaneous, contingent granularity of the real, beyond concepts and their labels: […] Remarquons cette fois que celui-ci [le détail], ce n’était pas seulement ce qui pouvait inquiéter des peintres académiques, toutes les écailles sur un poisson, un bouton de guêtre de plus dans une scène d’histoire, c’était aussi et d’abord le craquèlement d’un flanc de vase, la ride sur un visage, la granulation d’une pierre, c’est-à-dire non seulement la différenciation infinie des aspects de la donnée sensorielle mais leur disposition au hasard, dans une simultanéité évidemment dépourvue de sens […] [La photographie] faisant entendre, si j’ose dire, le silence de la matière.68

The real appeared as the limit of all meaning,69 and therefore all meaning appeared as a human act. This is why several of Mallarmé’s works portray reality as if seen in absentia: [In Igitur, Mallarmé succeeds in recreating] le lieu de la vie mais comme si on le voyait sans y être, par résorption de la conscience de soi […] [À] donner presque la

68 Yves Bonnefoy, ‘Igitur et le photographe’, in Mallarmé 1842–1898: un destin d’écriture, 63. [[…] Let us remark here that this [the detail] was not only that which had the power to disturb academic painters, all the scales of a fish, or yet another gaiter button in an historic scene, but was also and above all the crazing on the side of a vase, the wrinkle of a face, the granulation of a stone, which is to say not only the infinite differentiation of the aspects of a sensory datum, but their accidental arrangement, in a clearly meaningless simultaneity […] [photography] made audible, dare I say it, the silence of matter.] 69 See Christian Prigent’s brilliant reflection on Mallarmé, and his panorama of twentieth-century French poetry as the typology of possible reactions to this endeavour, in ‘Réel point zéro: poésie (l’absent de tout bouquin)’, in Jean-Claude Pinson and Pierre Thibaud (eds), Poésie & Philosophie (Marseille: Farrago, 2000), esp. 235: ‘Je nomme “poésie” un geste d’écriture qui tâche à désigner le réel comme trou dans le corps constitué des langues’ [I call ‘poetry’ a writing gesture that seeks to point to the real as a hole in the constituted body of language].

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Chapter 1 sensation de la chose perçue dans son être-là infiniment étranger à toute pensée, à toute présence au monde.70

But this hypothesis only points to a condition of the project itself. The aim is not a poetry which would try to name the singular or the unique, instead of naming abstractions. Bonnefoy notes that for Mallarmé, on the contrary: Il faut que ce soit dans la donnée même [des mots] que soient effacées leurs habitudes anciennes, défaites leurs modalités conceptuelles.71

In an important text on the difficulty of translating French poetry, Saint-John Perse defined English poetry as ‘de source rationnelle, et par là même portée aux enchaînements formels d’une dialectique intellectuelle et morale’.72 He goes on to define French modern poetry by contrast, in a similar, essentially Mallarméan manner: La poésie française modern au contraire, ne se croit poésie qu’à condition de s’intégrer elle-même, vivante, à son objet vivant ; de s’y incorporer pleinement et s’y confondre, substantiellement, jusqu’à l’identité parfaite l’unité entre le sujet et l’objet, entre le poète et le poème. Faisant plus que témoigner ou figurer, elle devient la chose même qu’elle ‘appréhende,’ qu’elle évoque ou suscite ; faisant plus que nommer, elle est, finalement, cette chose elle-même, dans son mouvement et sa durée ; elle la vit et ‘l’agit,’ unaniment, et se doit donc fidèlement de la suivre, avec diversité, dans sa mesure propre et dans son rythme propre : largement et longuement, s’il s’agit par exemple de la mer ou du vent ; étroitement et promptement, s’il s’agit de l’éclair. Indépendamment de la part faite au subconscient pour la naissance même du poème, cette poésie, dans la poursuite de son information comme dans l’exercice de sa métrique, peut accepter

70 [[In Igitur, Mallarmé succeeds in recreating] the place of life but as if we saw it without being there, by the reabsorption of self-consciousness […] in giving almost the sensation of the thing seen in its being-there infinitely foreign to all thought, all presence to the world.] ‘Igitur et le photographe’, 71/‘Igitur and the Photographer’, 336. 71 [It must be in the very giving of the words that their ancient habits are wiped out and their conceptual modalities undone.] ‘Igitur et le photographe’, 73/338. 72 [[…] rational in its origin, and by that very fact given to the formal sequences of an intellectual and moral dialectic.] ‘A letter from Saint-John Perse, August 10, 1956, to George Huppert, The Berkeley Review’, trans. A. J. Knodel, in The Berkeley Review 1 (1956), 36.

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hardiment l’imputation ‘d’ésotérisme,’ si l’on veut bien réserver à ce mot son acception étymologique : poésie instruite et animée ‘de l’intérieur’.73

Blanchot also insisted on the exceptional position of Mallarmé, who is acutely aware of the original capacity of language to modulate, and to keep us at a distance from the things it gives us. Far from deploring it, he wants to restore it through verse: Le vers, en substituant aux relations syntaxiques des rapports plus subtils, oriente le langage dans le sens d’un mouvement, d’une trajectoire rythmée, où seuls comptent le passage, la modulation, et non les points, les notes par où l’on passe.74

From our point of view, what is interesting in these texts is that the poem thus attempts a return to an essentially institutive, rather than institutional, and active, rather than mimetic use of language. The poem may always be a throw of the dice, forever unable to abolish chance, or the contingency

73

[Modern French poetry, on the contrary, feels it is not really poetry unless it merges with its living object in a live embrace, unless it informs the object entirely and even becomes a part of its very substance, to the point of complete identity and unity of subject and object, of poet and poem. Seeking to do much more than point out or designate, it actually becomes the thing which it ‘apprehends’, which it evokes or calls forth. Going far beyond any mimetic action, it finally is the thing itself, in that thing’s own movement and duration. This poetry lives the thing and ‘animates’ it totally and must scrupulously and with infinite variation submit to the thing’s own measure and rhythm: spaciously and at length when, for example, the sea or the wind is concerned; tightly and suddenly where the lightning-flash is concerned. Quite apart from the role played by the subconscious in the actual birth of the poem, this poetry in its search for all relevant materials, as well as in the working-out of its metrics, can boldly accept the imputation of being ‘esoteric’, provided that the meaning attached to the word is its etymological one: namely, a poetry taking its orders and set in motion from within.] Ibid. 36–7. Italics in the original. 74 [Verse, substituting more subtle links for syntactic relationships, turns language to a sense of movement, a rhythmic trajectory, in which only passage and modulation count, not the periods, the notes by which one passes.] ‘Le mythe de Mallarmé’, 41/‘The Myth of Mallarmé’, The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 33.

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of meaning,75 but it is nevertheless essential, for speaking beings, because it is the first foundation of all community, and precisely this community which is utterly lacking in the Caribbean context of forced exile, dispersion and alienation.76 We are far from the ‘structuralist’ image of a Mallarmé supposed to have equated the abolition of the author with the negation of all subjectivity in the production of meaning (‘L’œuvre pure implique la disparition élocutoire du poète, qui cède l’initiative aux mots …’).77 For the essential ‘virtualité’ which, for Mallarmé, speech (as ‘dream and song’) has lost and 75

Littré’s first entry for ‘hasard’ is: ‘Sorte de jeu de dés (sens propre et ancien, aujourd’hui inusité)’ [A kind of dice game (archaic, literal meaning, now obsolete)]. Bonnefoy suggests that Mallarmé’s failure is inherent in the faculty of language: ‘le vouloir d’interprétation et de communication qui est dans les mots est irrépressible, si bien que la parole ne peut jamais qu’étouffer l’expérience de non-savoir qui, si elle la faisait sienne, la dissuaderait d’exister’ [[…] the will to interpret and communicate residing in words is irrepressible, so that language can never fail to stifle the experience of nonknowing that, if it could, would dissuade language from existing] ‘Igitur et le photographe’, 76/339. 76 Jacques Rancière has written perceptively on this political dimension of Mallarmé’s reflection on language and poetry: ‘Le problème est de reprendre au Verbe ses caractères de parole originaire qui crée au lieu de décrire et qui se fait corps au lieu de désigner les corps ou de mimer leur ressemblance. Il est de les reprendre non pour constituer une “noblesse fantôme” qui n’a pas besoin de relever un héritage aussi lourd, mais pour instituer un séjour nouveau de la communauté. […] ce langage pur n’est pas comme le veut la vulgate contemporaine, un langage “intransitif” ou “autotélique”. C’est un langage qui est lui-même puissance de communauté […]’ [The challenge is to restore to the Verb its features as originary word, which creates rather than describes and which makes itself a body rather than designating bodies or imitating their resemblance. It is to restore them, not in order to establish a ‘phantasmal nobility’ that has no need of lifting such a weighty inheritance, but in order to institute a new dwelling place for the community […] this pure language is not as the common credo of today would have it, ‘intransitive’ and ‘autotelic’. It is a language that is itself capacity for community […]] ‘L’intrus’, in Europe 825–6 (1998), 50. Bernard Marchal has stressed the involvement of Mallarmé in the ‘République des lettres’, and writes of a sort of ‘syndicalisme poétique’ [poetic syndicalism], in his ‘Mallarmé et la république des lettres’, in Mallarmé 1842–1898: un destin d’écriture, 117. See also his La Religion de Mallarmé (Paris: José Corti, 1988), esp. 365. 77 OC II, 211.

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can regain through poetry, is also the opening up of a space of freedom through which a subjectivity can shape itself. Le remarquable est que, pour la première fois, au cours de l’histoire littéraire d’aucun peuple, concurremment aux grandes orgues générales et séculaires, où s’exalte, d’après un latent clavier, l’orthodoxie, quiconque avec son jeu et son ouïe individuels se peut composer un instrument, dès qu’il souffle, le frôle ou frappe avec science; en user à part et le dédier aussi à la Langue. Une haute liberté d’acquise, la plus neuve ; […] Selon moi jaillit tard une condition vraie ou la possibilité, de s’exprimer non seulement, mais de se moduler, à son gré.78

Here, a fine network of links within the metaphor carries the idea: these ‘grandes orgues’ (set of fixed pipes, singularity of the player, hieratic and hierarchical religious and architectural context, which permeates even a secular use) with their latent keyboard (fixed pitches, grid or contours preorganising the sound mass) are the rules and canons of a literature used as an instrument of power within language: not only great founding myths of ‘cultures ataviques’, to use Glissant’s phrase, but also the tyranny of the alexandrine under the towering figure of Hugo. They are opposed to the freedom of winds, strings and percussions, and a science now made available to ‘quiconque’ (or to the yet un-defined ‘on’, a concept as important to Mallarmé as the ‘quelconque’).79 Thus authenticity, ‘la condition vraie’, 78 OC II, 207–8. [The remarkable thing is that for the first time in the literary history of any people, concurrently with the great general and centuries-old organs on which orthodoxy enthuses according to a latent keyboard, anyone with his individual play and his hearing can compose an instrument for himself as soon as he blows, strums or beats it with knowledge; use it on his own and dedicate it also to the Language. A high liberty acquired, the newest; […] According to me there springs up belatedly a true condition or the possibility not only of expressing oneself but of modulating oneself as one wishes.] 79 Thus at the beginning of his talk on Villiers de l’Isle-Adam: ‘[…] c’est, ce jeu insensé d’écrire, s’arroger, en vertu d’un doute – la goutte d’encre apparentée à la nuit sublime – quelque devoir de tout recréer, avec des réminiscences, pour avérer qu’on est bien là où on doit être (parce que, permettez-moi d’exprimer cette appréhension, demeure une incertitude)’ [It is, this mad game of writing, to assume, by virtue of a doubt – the

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is not in playing with pre-defined possibilities, in a lyricism that would express what is supposedly already there, latent in an ‘interiority’. Rather it is to ‘modulate’ (one may also hear modeler) the self. But how does the line, now perceived as act, bring about this modulation of the self ? Sentences refer to a real by organising (through syntax) separate, given determinations (qualities of things and types of events symbolised within language by ‘terms’), together with ontological operators (articles, aspects, etc.) These determinations are negations of the singularity of the given, which they permanently present through abstracted ‘contours’, while going unnoticed in that role. As we have just seen, the line first breaks up the sentence, creates polysemies, and in doing so blurs the contours, those ‘calices’ only known and not created (‘calices sus’). This is sufficient to inscribe the sayer in the said. And then the Mallarméan ‘idea’ arises, precisely as other (‘en tant que quelque chose d’autre’) than a specific known contour or conceptual chalice.80 In isolation, unspecified, drop of ink allied to the sublime night – some duty to recreate everything, with recollections, in order to affirm that one is truly where one ought to be (because, if I may express this fear, some doubt remains)] OC II 23. Again, in the absence of all theological-political transcendence (‘la divinité’ is ‘éparse’ here), the poetic task is the paradoxical act through which a self is produced as well as legitimised. So in this process, memory serves not only to record discrete images, but to integrate a whole in the present, a task Proust was to import into the novel. 80 One can also read ‘contour’ as silhouette, shadow, as in ‘on n’en voit plus que le contour’ and hear a dynamic polysemy: contour is what results from the relegation into oblivion of what is not the flower. But the continuation of this notion in the image of the ‘calice’, in French calyx as well as chalice, shows that what counts most is the question of the form, inasmuch as it is unreflected in the ordinary use of language. Littré has two entries for ‘calice’. While the second is the botanic sense (calyx), the first (chalice) is oddly illustrated by a quote whose content Littré goes on to criticise in the etymological section of the entry: ‘Vase qui sert à la messe pour la consécration du vin. Calice d’or. Élever le calice. Nos calices avaient cherché leurs noms parmi les plantes, et le lis leur avait prêté sa forme, CHATEAUB. Génie, IV, I, 2’ [Cup which is used during the Mass for the consecration of the wine. A golden chalice. To lift the chalice. Our calyx had sought their names among the plants, and the lily had lent to them its form, CHATEAUB, Genius, IV, 1, 2]. In the etymological section, perhaps with a nuance of republicanism, Littré criticises Chateaubriand’s fanciful etymology: there is no true link between the (royal) lily flower and the recipient/container

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‘l’absente de tous bouquets’ is a linguistic sign, obviously absent in its generality from all the existing bouquets. ‘Une fleur!’: first negation. But it is also absent from any bouquet one could conceive of (Mallarmé, in this archaic construction, omitting the definite article les, also suggests ‘tout bouquet’), and thus from the concept of a bouquet: ‘Une fleur!’: second negation.81 Neither extension nor intension: we have left the regime of the separation between object and subject, and are, as usual in Mallarmé, in the in-between, entre,82 closer to the Cartesian dream, or to the hypothesis of

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of Christ’s blood: ‘[…] de calix, du grec, vase à boire et cavité. Chateaubriand, dans l’exemple cité au commencement, suppose que calice a été dit du calice des fleurs, c’est une erreur ; il a été dit de calix, vase’ [From calix, Greek, drinking cup and cavity. Chateaubriand, in the example cited at the beginning, supposes that chalice had to derive from the calyx of flowers, this is wrong; it derived from calix, cup]. Mallarmé must have been amused by Chateaubriand’s political-theological form of cratylism. And happy to toy, even in order to negate it, with the illusion of the poem as a vessel for real presence. The flower’s calyx is precisely what circumscribes the shape of the flower itself (‘enveloppe extérieure en forme de coupe’ [exterior envelope in the form of a cup], says Littré in the second entry, hastening to stress the difference between ‘calix, coupe, et calyx, calice de fleurs’ [calix, cup, and calyx, the calyx of flowers]). In ‘Le Mallarmé des sixties, l’absente de tout bouquet’, Europe 825–6 (1998), Gérard Dessons presents an impressive list of misquotings of the famous sentence (usually quoted as ‘tout bouquet’ instead of ‘tous bouquets’). He sees in that error a sign of a metaphysical obsession of critics (‘radicalisation de l’idéalisme hegelien’ [radicalisation of Hegelian idealism]), who want to see Mallarmé’s line as the nomination of an absence, while Mallarmé always presented it as an act. It is not clear that this obsession is really typical of the ‘sixties’. Jacques Derrida, for instance, in ‘La Double séance’, La Dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), precisely sets out to show the limits of such an interpretation. Dessons proposes to replace metaphysics with historicity, following Henri Meschonnic (‘Mallarmé savait que le sujet du poème, c’est l’historicité radicale du sujet’ [Mallarmé knew that the subject of the poem is the radical historicity of the subject]), but this is also what the ‘sixties’ did, in reaction to the spiritualist interpretations of the beginning of the century. Jean-Claude Milner’s Mallarmé au tombeau (Paris: Verdier 1999) proposes an interesting interpretation of ‘Le Vierge, le vivace …’ precisely from the point of view of the question of historicity. See also André Stanguennec’s Mallarmé et l’Éthique de la poésie (Paris: Vrin, 1992), Ch. III. Derrida’s subtle analysis of Mallarmé’s notion of ‘hymen’ (see ‘La Double Séance’) is a reflection on the status of the in-between in the poet’s work. In particular, it shows that any thematic analysis of literature necessarily reaches structural limits when faced

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madness, when consciousness is not yet proper representation and there is no criterion of the truthfulness of mimesis. What is left is movement, transition and transposition, acts of a subject forced to deal with the poem in that manner. Such an ‘idée’ has little to do with the platonic Eidon. In this very simple example, we get a particular construction within the sensible, at the interface or border between the self and the thing, which Mallarmé qualifies here as ‘suave’ (‘idée même et suave’), one of the rare qualifiers equally applicable to all the senses. The ‘idée’ is therefore the subjective content of sensory impressions released in the poetic process, through which the form (or contour) is abolished.83

with Mallarmé, as the crux of his poetry precisely demonstrates the impossibility of grounding semantic transformations within the text on ultimate core meanings (a conception which could be linked to Wittgenstein’s reflection on the concept as ‘family resemblance’). In the chain of transformations of a particular theme in the text, there must be an in-between, common to the terms, and which, as such, is not part of the chain, even though it may be at other moments, when it does not fulfil that function. ‘Le pli, donc, et le blanc: qui nous interdiront de chercher un thème ou un sens total au-delà des instances textuelles dans un imaginaire, une intentionnalité ou un vécu’ [The fold, then, and the blank: these will forbid us to seek a theme or an overall meaning in an imaginary, intentional, or lived domain beyond all textual instances] La Dissémination, 282/Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 252. Marian Hobson has offered a detailed analysis of this argument in Jacques Derrida: Opening Lines (Abingdon: Routledge, 1998). This pre-emption of any attempt at a complete phenomenological reading of the text, for instance that of Jean-Pierre Richard, and, more recently, Michel Collot’s interpretation in terms of horizon structures (see ‘Signifiance et référence’ in Poésie & Philosophie, 205), ignores the fact that what is at stake is not necessarily a subjectivity which would at last regain in poetry its world, a presence in the sensible – perhaps even in the invisible – (what Derrida calls the eudaemonist interpretation), but rather a process of collective subjectivation. The function of poetry would then be to reclaim invention in language within a world of dispossession. Derrida quotes (244) the famous text where Mallarmé declares ‘il n’est pas de Présent, non – un présent n’existe pas … Faute que se déclare la Foule, faute – de tout’ [there’s no such thing as a Present, no – a present doesn’t exist … For want of a Crowd, for want of – everything] (Divagations, 218). But he does not comment on it. 83 Littré’s definition of ‘suave’ is: ‘Qui fait sur les sens une impression douce et flatteuse. Un parfum, une odeur suave. Un mets d’un goût suave. Une mélodie suave. Une

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In a letter to Huysmans, congratulating him for À Rebours, he wrote: Non ! C’est cela, rien n’y manque, parfums, musique, liqueurs et les livres vieux ou presque futurs; et ces fleurs ! vision absolue de tout ce que peut, à un individu placé devant la jouissance barbare ou moderne, ouvrir de paradis la sensation seule.84

In verse, the production of musical and suave ‘ideas’ is a way of suspending both the separation of object and background and that of perceiver and perceived, implied in the visual model of the idea. Merleau-Ponty would have said that the purpose of the line (like the arabesque of the painter) is to show the invisible which is the stuff, as well as the condition, of the visible, and, by contrast, to reflect on visibility. Jean Hyppolite spoke of a ‘matérialisme de l’Idée’.85 Mallarmé’s reflection on contour and the line thus leads to a conception of poetry as a paradoxical use of language, on the border of sensation and representation, and at once reflexive and institutive. It is clear that such a subject, which permanently constitutes itself in this process of reflection on the very operation of thought, when it constructs

couleur suave. Terme de peinture. Coloris suave, coloris doux et gracieux. Des tons de couleur suaves et bien fondus. Ce peintre a une manière suave’ [That which makes a gentle and pleasing impression upon the sense. A suave scent, a suave smell. A dish with a suave flavour. A suave melody. A suave colour. Art term. Suave colouring, soft and graceful colouring. Suave and judicious tones. This painter has a suave style.] It is striking that Littré should reverse the traditional order of the senses, going from smell to vision, from the ‘material’ to the ‘formal’, as presented for instance in Plato’s hierarchy of the arts in the Greater Hippias. As for vision, this sensus communis only refers to the matter of the sensation (coloris, colour, nuance, shade), again signifying a mode of its experiencing, no shape or sign which could refer to an ‘external’ object. On poetry and music in Mallarmé, see Michel Deguy, ‘L’idée suave’, in’hui 37 (1992). 84 [But that’s not so with this book! There’s nothing missing, perfumes, music, liquors and the old books as well as those which are almost in the future. And those flowers! It’s an absolute vision of everything which can reveal to an individual set before a barbarous or modern pleasure the paradise of pure sensation.] 18 May 1884, OC I, 781/Selected Letters, 135. 85 [Materialism of the idea.] Jean Hyppolite, ‘“Le coup de dés” de Stéphane Mallarmé et le message’, in Figures de la pensée philosophique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971), II, 880.

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virtualities in the given through language, was not there at the outset: it is historical and, to some extent, tends to reinvent the collective. This is clearly the sort of conception Perse had in mind in his poetics. However, his work seems to remain a poetry of the pure Universal, in places an epic of History itself, and not of real becoming, perhaps because there is in it, secretly, a negation of the diverse that is so essential to his Caribbean situation.86 It is true that Perse was a poet of departure and exile (and we have seen how much this made him fundamentally a poet of the diverse), but as a dispersion of the self into the absolute plane of what exists. His theme in the end remained pure matter, in the movement of its elements (winds, sea, desert), and therefore in the infinity of configurations it can assume. This is perhaps where he differs fundamentally from Césaire’s necessarily historical project, and in a sense does not assume the totality of the Mallarmean political inheritance. It is also clear that Perse’s own experience in history goes towards explaining the absence of any perspective for the constitution of a historical subject. After all, as a diplomat, he engineered Locarno and then had to witness its catastrophic failure, while dealing personally with Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. The possible foundation of a community, and the role of poetry in this process of reflection and resistance were to be the purpose of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. *

86 This is the criticism of Ménil and, to some extent, the early Glissant. From this point of view, Gérard Dessons has proposed an interesting analysis of the evolution of creolisms in Perse’s writing, in ‘Saint-John Perse: le sujet entre créole et français’, in Détours d’écriture, 59. Dessons shows how the creolisms of the first versions of the poems were of a syntactic and rhythmical, rather than lexical, nature. This has been reversed in the published work, where, according to Dessons, they are now largely lexical, and therefore quotational or even folkloric, not the mode of assertion of a specific, culturally determined subjectivity, but rather the negative against which a universal poetic subjectivity defines itself.

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III Césaire: Verrition, Ptyx, Armadillo … In the Cahier, there is one fundamental border, a crack which runs through the self, alienation: ‘L’homme antillais a été colonisé de l’intérieur, il a été profondément aliéné’.87 Slaves have been constantly denied the capacity to reflect, the temporality of their condition is fragmented and repetitive, there is no memory, not even of death: Au bout du petit matin ces pays sans stèle, ces chemins sans mémoire, ces vents sans tablette.88 87 [The Antillean man has been colonised from the inside, he has been profoundly alienated.] Interview with François Beloux, Magazine Littéraire 34 (November 1969). See also his interview with Edwy Plenel in Le Monde, 23 August 1991: ‘Est-ce qu’il y a encore une identité martiniquaise? La question se pose tant le mal profond de la société antillaise est l’aliénation’. [Is there still a Martinican identity? The question cannot but pose itself, such is the extent to which alienation is the profound ill of Antillean society.] 88 [At the end of the wee hours this land without a stele, these paths without memory, these winds without a tablet.] Cahier, 194/49. This verse was added to the 1956 edition of the Cahier. There is perhaps here a reminiscence of Perse, with some irony in what follows: ‘Au bout du petit matin ces pays sans stèle, ces chemins sans mémoire, ces vents sans tablette. Qu’importe ? Nous dirions. Chanterions. Hurlerions. Voix pleine, voix large, tu serais notre bien, notre pointe en avant’ [At the brink of dawn these countries with no stela, these roads with no memory, these winds with no tablet. What does it matter? We would speak. Sing. Scream. Full voice, wide voice, you would be our right and our pointed spear]. In Les Damnés de la terre, Frantz Fanon noted: ‘On n’a peut-être pas suffisamment montré que le colonialisme ne se contente pas d’imposer sa loi au présent et à l’avenir du pays dominé. Le colonialisme ne se satisfait pas d’enserrer le peuple dans ses mailles, de vider le cerveau colonisé de toute forme et de tout contenu. Par une sorte de perversion de la logique, il s’oriente vers le passé du peuple opprimé, le distord, le défigure, l’anéantit’ [Perhaps it has not been sufficiently demonstrated that

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This is what Césaire calls a closed intimacy, which needs to be summoned to assume its freedom,89 a paradoxical intimacy closed even to itself. In its exploration of alienation, poetry, seen from the context of the Caribbean, was thus perceived as revolutionary, even before any political stance was explicitly taken. This is why in the landscape of the Cahier, which depicts an absolutely non-exotic Martinique, poetry is presented as the volcano in the depths of which all sufferings have fused, but which still manages to rise above a flattened, shattered, fragmented city of corruption, plague, pustules and scrofula. Poetry is the eminent vantage point of a consciousness born through a resistance, a demand, ‘situation éminente d’où l’on somme’, writes Césaire (summoning: a Mallarméan echo).90 It is not by chance that, rather than claiming a fixed identity, seeking shelter in a contour made up of abstract cultural, historical or racial traits (either ‘Frenchness’ or africanité), the first thing Césaire did was to coin a ‘mot total’: négritude, an ironical clash of the derogatory gaze of the coloniser (nègre) and the philosophical vocabulary of his Parisian Hegelianism (-itude). A word which, at that time at least, embodied the poetic endeavour of detachment and reflection upon

colonialism is not content merely to impose its law on the colonised country’s present and future. Colonialism is not satisfied with snaring the people in its net or of draining the colonised brain of any form or substance. With a kind of perverted logic, it turns its attention to the past of the colonised people and distorts it, disfigures it, destroys it] (592/148). Fanon made alienation the heart of his analysis of the specific situation of the colonised. The first title of Peau noire, masques blancs was Essai sur la désaliénation du noir. In Le Discours Antillais, Glissant explored further this specific aspect of a timeless consciousness, in particular in relationship to sexuality, which is necessarily an-erotic in a world where pleasure can only be stolen (503). 89 ‘la sommer libre enfin de produire de son intimité close la succulence des fruits’ [to summon it free at last to generate from its intimate closeness the succulence of fruit] Cahier, 205/CP, 71. 90 [The preeminent place from which to summon.] Extract from a letter to Lilyan Kesteloot, reproduced in Aimé Césaire, La Poésie, ed. Daniel Maximin and Gilles Carpentier (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 6.

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language. Let us see how this transformation of the alienated consciousness operates through the Cahier. The first moment is the description of the colonial Caribbean space as strikingly fragmented and heteroclite. Separation, division partes extra partes, pulverisation rather than diversity, even of life. In a sense, as in the first moment of the Mallarméan negation, naming is negating and no contour can be recognised here anymore; the exotic referents (creeks, tropical abundance, rhum …) have dissolved into a nightmare. The condition of the slave, with no memory and no future, is fragmented and repetitive: Au bout du petit matin bourgeonnant d’anses frêles les Antilles qui ont faim, les Antilles grêlées de petite vérole, les Antilles dynamitées d’alcool, échouées dans la boue de cette baie, dans la poussière de cette ville sinistrement échouées.91

‘Au bout du petit matin’: instead of the early sign of dawn (as in ‘au petit matin’), this marks an end in time and a multiplicity of enclosures in space: ‘Au bout du petit matin bourgeonnant d’anses frêles’, ‘Au bout du petit matin cette ville plate’, ‘Au bout du petit matin le morne accroupi’, ‘Au bout du petit matin l’échouage hétéroclite’, etc. ‘Bourgeonnant’, ‘grêlées’, ‘dynamitées’, indicators of growth, fragmentation or explosion in space appear to reinforce a limit in time, ‘échouées’ (stranded). The present results from chance. Being purposeless, directionless, the temporal sequence is discrete, a mere succession of instants, as all sense of historical bearings are lost. Hence: […] une vieille misère pourrissant sous le soleil, silencieusement; un vieux silence crevant de pustules tièdes, l’affreuse inanité de notre raison d’être.92

91

[At the end of the small hours burgeoning with frail coves the hungry Antilles, the Antilles pitted with smallpox, the Antilles dynamited by alcohol, stranded in the mud of this bay, in the dust of this town sinisterly stranded.] Cahier, 186/3. For a more detailed analysis of these passages, see infra, Ch. 2. 92 [[…]an aged poverty rotting under the sun, silently ; an aged silence bursting with tepid pustules the dreadful inanity of our raison d’être] Cahier, 186/3. The images have a secret coherence: ‘crevant’ can indicate an abject death as well as the bursting of bubbles or abscesses. In ‘inanité’, one should hear both emptiness and pointlessness.

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The rich repertoire of growth links fragmentation in space and in time. The skin of the decaying body-island is affected by ‘pustules tièdes’, ‘petite vérole’, ‘syzygie suppurante des ampoules’, ‘lèpre’, ‘scrofules’, and ‘les arlequinades, les estropiements, les prurits, les urticaires […] la parade des risibles et scrofuleux bubons, les poutures de microbes très étranges […] les fermentations imprévisibles d’espèces putrescibles’, etc.93 The poem then progresses as a sequence of negations of the fragmentation of this radically contingent world, the colonial Antilles, and soon there appears another time, a time of origins, while space now figures a link through time: Et nos gestes imbéciles et fous pour faire revivre l’éclaboussement d’or des instants favorisés, le cordon ombilical restitué à sa splendeur fragile, le pain, et le vin de la complicité, le pain, le vin, le sang des épousailles véridiques.94

This passage introduces the evocation of a night of festivities at Christmas. […] Il avait l’agoraphobie Noël. Ce qu’il lui fallait c’était toute une journée d’affairement, d’apprêts, de cuisinages, de nettoyages, d’inquiétudes, de-peur-que-ça-ne-suffise-pas,

Littré, which Césaire also used, gives emptiness as its literal meaning, and adds that it is only found in the ‘locution de chronologie’: ‘temps d’inanité, années du monde qui se sont écoulées avant la loi de Moïse’ [time of inanité, years of the word that passed before the Law of Moses] ‘Inanité’ names a time without content or direction. 93 [the harlequinades of poverty, the cripplings, the pruritus, the urticaria, the tepid hammocks of degeneracy. Right here the parade of laughable and scrofulous buboes, the forced feeding of very strange microbes, the poisons without known alexins, the sanies of really ancient sores, the unforeseeable fermentations of putrescible species.] Cahier, 188/9. 94 [And our idiotic and insane stunts to revive the golden splashing of privileged moments, the umbilical cord restored to its ephemeral splendour, the bread, and the wine of complicity, the bread, the wine, the blood of veracious weddings.] Cahier, 188/9. In the description of these moments the image of the hole is replaced by that of the splash. The hole of the rediscovered instant is a presence and not a lack. In the same way, the living volcano will replace the dead craters of a pox-pitted land.

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de-peur-que-ça-ne-manque, de-peur-qu’on-ne-s’embête […]95

Agoraphobia: retreat from space and its fragmentation. The sudden vertical alignment indicates the intense co-presence of intentions and desires within the busy consciousness. It is strikingly different from the enumeration of the discrete at the beginning, with most words now marking actions and affects. And the apogee of the following immense sentence, meandering through the feelings and acts of the night, is a spiral (the ‘boudin’ as well as the ascending motion of joyful conversation) which mirrors the poetic text itself as a distillation of intensities: […] et il y a du boudin, celui étroit de deux doigts qui s’enroule en volubile, celui large et trapu, le bénin à goût de serpolet, le violent à incandescence pimentée, et du café brûlant et de l’anis sucré et du punch au lait, et le soleil liquide des rhums, et toutes sortes de bonnes choses qui vous imposent autoritairement les muqueuses ou vous les distillent en ravissements, ou vous les tissent de fragrances […]96

The poem is built on such contrasts between the static, the fragmented and the divided on the one hand, and the changing, the mobile, the collective and the concentric, on the other – line, mot total, spiralling flow, opposing pulverisation and dust. Such an opposition is also found in Perse, for instance in a famous passage on libraries in Vents: Ha! qu’on m’évente tout ce lœss ! Ha ! qu’on m’évente tout ce leurre ! Sécheresse et supercherie d’autels … Les livres tristes, innombrables, sur leur tranche de craie pâle …

95

[[…] It had agoraphobia, Christmas did. What it wanted was a whole day of bustling, preparing, a cooking and cleaning spree, endless jitters, about not-having-enough, about-running-short, about-getting-bored […]] Cahier, 189/11. 96 [[…] and there are blood sausages, one kind only two fingers wide twined in coils, another broad and stocky, the mild one tasting of wild thyme, the sharp one spiced to an incandescence, and steaming coffee and sugared anisette, and milk punch, and the liquid sun of rums, and all sorts of good things that drive your taste buds wild or dissolve them into subtleties, or distill them to the point of ecstacy or cocoon them with fragrances […]] Cahier, 189/13.

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Chapter 1 Et qu’est-ce encore, à mon doigt d’os, que tout ce talc d’usure et de sagesse, et tout cet attouchement des poudres du savoir ? comme aux fins de saison poussière et poudre de pollen, spores et sporules de lichen, un émiettement d’ailes de piérides, d’écailles aux volves des lactaires[…] – cendres et squames de l’esprit. […] S’en aller ! s’en aller ! Parole de vivant !97

But in Césaire it culminates in the definition of négritude, which we can now better understand. First, this is not a racial category, the claim of an essential difference or another border. In fact, it denotes the refusal of a specific ontological attitude, the exclusively instrumental stance of those who can only think in terms of mastery, that is, in terms of the separation of the self from the other, and the rediscovery of another stance: ô lumière amicale ô fraîche source de la lumière ceux qui n’ont inventé ni la poudre ni la boussole ceux qui n’ont jamais su dompter la vapeur ni l’électricité ceux qui n’ont exploré ni les mers ni le ciel mais ceux sans qui la terre ne serait pas la terre gibbosité98 d’autant plus bienfaisante que la terre déserte davantage la terre […]

97 [Ha ! let all this loess be aired out ! Ha, let all this delusion be aired out. Fraud and sterility of altars … The tomes, innumerable and sad, on their pale chalk edges … And what is all this talc again to my finger of bone, talc of wear and wisdom, and all that dusty touch of scholarship? like powder and dust of pollen at the season’s end, spores and sporules of lichens, a crumbling of wings of the Pieridae, of flaking volvas of the lactaries […] – ashes and scales of the spirit. […] Let us be gone! be gone ! Cry of the living!] OC, 186/241. 98 This remarkable apposition illustrates well the occasional use by Césaire of rare (rather than obscure) words. At first, it seems to designate a manner of being or an attitude (like sérénité) perhaps even a value (fraternité). When the meaning is checked, one realises that it simply denotes a bump, a growth, but the initial understanding remains in the semantic background, and ‘gibbosité’, the stance of belonging to the earth, can now be called ‘bienfaisante’. In the choice and the placement of this word at this specific point of the line, several transitions operate: from the fragmented to the continuous via the transformation of the malign growth into a benign one; from belonging to uprising, since the refusal of the mechanistic stance of the West is in itself a resistance; and from substance to disposition or attitude.

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mais ils s’abandonnent, saisis, à l’essence de toute chose ignorants des surfaces mais saisis par le mouvement de toute chose insoucieux de dompter, mais jouant le jeu du monde […] Tiède petit matin de vertus ancestrales99

This moment opposes the detachment of the unhappy poetic consciousness to the immemorial sense of belonging to the world. Winds are now ‘souffles’, and they have found an ‘aire’, a ‘fraternelle’ one. Dawn is no longer referred to as an end in space (‘au bout du petit matin’) but as an origin (‘vertus ancestrales’). Movement is no longer displacement, but palpitation and belonging to a nature. It is now possible to imagine an alternative to the domination of colonial values which, under the guise of universalism, brought only alienation from nature and the human. This is a fundamental revolt, in that it opposes the most fundamental of all oppressions: that which, behind the fence of race, fixes the person into an absolute other, a given. So négritude is painted in the red of blood and earth, rather than black: elle plonge dans la chair rouge du sol elle plonge dans la chair ardente100 du ciel elle troue l’accablement opaque de sa droite patience.101

99

[O friendly light O fresh source of light those who invented neither powder nor compass those who could harness neither steam nor electricity those who explored neither the seas nor the sky but those without whom the earth would not be the earth gibbosity all the more beneficent as more and more the earth deserts the earth […]



but who yield, seized, to the essence of all things ignorant of surfaces but captivated by the motion of all things indifferent to conquering, but playing the game of the world

Tepid first light of ancestral virtues] Cahier, 203/37. 100 The metonymy of the sun for the sky, via the ambiguous ‘ardent’, is another way of negating the distance involved in vision, replaced with haptic and even proprioceptive closeness (chair). 101 [it takes root in the red flesh of the soil it takes root in the ardent flesh of the sky it breaks through opaque prostration with its upright patience.] Cahier, 203/37.

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By contrast, the white world is steel blue: Écoutez le monde blanc Horriblement las de son effort immense Ses articulations rebelles craquer sous les étoiles dures ses raideurs d’acier bleu transperçant la chair mystique.102

Fusion against fragmentation; belonging against separation; time now perceived as life, as a cycle of creation, rather than the linear and repetitive vanishing of the instant. The Cahier is a quest for time as birth, just as À la recherche du temps perdu is in the end an attempt at regaining time in itself. It is in that active sense that one needs to return to a ‘pays natal’, a native land, even if, in its ultimate, extraordinary incarnation, the journey, the land and the birth are combined in the image of a slave-ship in revolt. In a very perceptive article on the role of neologisms in Césaire’s poetry, James Clifford wrote that ‘négritude is not about roots but about present process in a polyphonous reality’.103 One could add that it is about the present in all process and the polyphonous in all reality. Négritude is thus poetry, and also refusal of myth, if a myth constantly subsumes the present under the ‘always already’ of a monodic narrative, which inscribes its end in each of its moments (as the perspectival painting had its point of view inscribed in each of its details). The other famous neologism of the

102

[Hear the white world horribly weary from its immense effort its rebellious joints cracking under the hard stars its blue steel rigidities piercing the mystic flesh.] PTED, 203/The Original 1939 Notebook, 39. Here we find again the images of stiffness and fragmentation (joints cracking) and opposition (‘under the hard stars’) of the beginning of the poem. The image of piercing is negatively attributed to the ‘white’ world through the refusal on the part of négritude of a vertical stance that would imply transcendence or detachment from the earth: ‘ma négritude n’est ni une tour ni une cathédrale’ [my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral]. 103 ‘A Politics of Neologism: Aimé Césaire’, in The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 179.

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poem,104 the final word: ‘verrition’, precisely names the solution. Clifford questions Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith’s attempt at isolating its ‘original’ meaning. In their edition, they mention that Césaire told them he had coined the word ‘verrition’ using the Latin verb ‘verri’, which means to ‘sweep’, ‘to scrape a surface’, ‘to scan’: enroule-toi, vent, autour de ma nouvelle croissance pose-toi sur mes doigts mesurés je te livre ma conscience et son rythme de chair […] je te livre mes paroles abruptes dévore et enroule-toi et t’enroulant embrasse-moi d’un plus vaste frisson embrasse-moi jusqu’au nous furieux embrasse, embrasse NOUS […] lie ma noire vibration au nombril même du monde lie, lie-moi, fraternité âpre puis, m’étranglant de ton lasso d’étoiles monte, Colombe monte monte monte Je te suis, imprimée en mon ancestrale cornée blanche. Monte lécheur de ciel et le grand trou noir où je voulais me noyer l’autre lune c’est là que je veux pêcher maintenant la langue maléfique de la nuit en son immobile verrition!105

104 Clifford traced the genealogy of another, much later neologism: ‘marroner’ (from ‘marron’, a fugitive slave, sometimes managing to establish an independent society). He points out that Césaire extends marronage from rebellion and escape to ‘reflexive possibility and poesis’. This is another example of Césaire’s conception of politics as a form of the poetic, which Breton pointed out in ‘Martinique charmeuse de serpents’. 105 [coil, wind, around my new growth light on my cadenced fingers To you I surrender my conscience and its fleshy rhythm […] To you I surrender my abrupt words

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Clifford notes that ending with a neologism is a way of indicating that poetry is essentially a process (not a depiction, which could be completed): in a sense there is no end to a poem.106 It also stresses that this is a process through which language regains its institutive power and that the reader is to adopt a reflexive stance on this power. But it would be wrong to strictly oppose the process of meaning to meaning itself in the poetic constitution of a subject. The creation of this neologism is also the genesis of a specific meaning. When one pays attention to the poem as a whole, it is clear that the image (or semantic matrix) of the spiral is crucial.107 The last verse of this text clearly winds through it, via the series enroulement/lien/lasso/ nombril, and frisson/furieux/vibration. This abandonment of the self to a

Devour and encoil yourself And coiling round embrace me with a more ample shudder Embrace me unto furious us Embrace, embrace US […] bind my black vibration to the very navel of the world Bind, bind me, bitter brotherhood Then, strangling me with your lasso of stars rise, Dove rise rise rise I follow you who are imprinted on my ancestral white cornea Rise sky licker And the great black hole where a moon ago I wanted to drown It is there I will now fish the malevolent tongue of the night in its immobile veerition!] Cahier, 212/55–7. 106 A question Giorgio Agamben has explored in relationship to the last line of a poem, which in principle cannot be part of it (or cannot be the last one), if at least the possibility of an enjambment is structural to all poetic text. See ‘Idea of the Poem’, in Ideas of Prose, trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), and The End of the Poem, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 107 For a detailed analysis of the role of this matrix through the Cahier, see J. Khalfa with J. Game, ‘Pustules, Spirals, Volcanoes: Images and moods in Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal’, Wasafiri 31 (spring 2000); reproduced infra, Ch. 2.

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rhythmic consciousness (or trance), and its elevation into a ‘NOUS’ turns out to be a process where verticality (ascent: ‘monte’, ‘étoiles’, ‘nuit’; descent: ‘trou’, ‘noyer’, ‘pêcher’) and thus separation are absorbed into the surface of ‘le grand trou noir’.108 Thus one need not know that Césaire had verri in mind to sense this meaning, even before ‘verrition’ was given. The whole poem constructs it continuously and dually, as a reflection upon what it does. Poetic meaning is a spiral, the (finally) free verrition of the mind through the absolute plane of singularities, compared to a ‘lasso d’étoiles’. In the end, Eshleman and Smith were not wrong to ask. In an astonishing text on Mallarmé and Villiers, Césaire wrote about the famous sonnet rimed in ‘yx’, later called ‘Sonnet allégorique de luimême’:109 ‘De toute manière […] cet “inintelligible” sonnet me semble capital’.110 He then invented a dictionary entry for ‘ptyx’, the famous word Mallarmé hoped was a neologism in all languages:111 À tous ceux que courroucent très fort les mots savants je signale les deux rimes : ptyx et nyx, sur lesquels le dictionnaire est muet, et pour cause. J’interprète: 1) ptyx : mot, parole, en tant que matérialisation de la pensée. Transposition du grec : ptux qui désigne essentiellement toute superposition : p. ex. couches de cuir, lames de métal superposées dont se compose le bouclier. Ici, peut-être, superposition du mot à la pensée ; ou bien, sens second du mot ptux : pli ; le mot en tant que vibration. Cf. Pindare : ptuchai umnôn : inflexions ou modulations de la pensée du poète. […] Mallarmé : ‘Magnifique, total et solitaire’.112 108 Clifford notes in general that the poem needs to swerve extravagantly between vertical and horizontal momentums (176). One finds here a reason for that. 109 OC I, 37. 110 [In any case […] this ‘unintelligible’ sonnet seems crucial to me.] 111 On this question, among many commentaries, see Paul Bénichou, Selon Mallarmé (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 135. 112 [To all those who are enraged by learned words I point out those two rhymes, ptyx and nyx, before which all dictionaries fall silent, and with good reason. I interpret: […] ptyx: word or speech as manifestation of thought. Taken from the Greek ptux, which essentially denotes any kind of superposition, e.g. layers of leather, superposed

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Remarkable representation of the poem as armour or fan, made up of the overlapping borders, folds or vibrations of thought and word: all these metaphors – overlapping, fold, vibration – represent thought as a plane or even simply a line, the inflections of which are able to generate reflection, or a consciousness, but, crucially, without having to postulate an ‘interior’ or an ‘outside’. They are similar in that to the Leibnizian metaphor of the world as a (baroque) painting, bearing in mind that here the vision of God, alone able to construe a painting of infinitely proliferating details as a world, would paradoxically be immanent to it. ‘Mot total, neuf ’, the poetic neologism in general indicates that meaning is a process, an act of appropriation and reorganisation of the plane of the real, which, in itself, when perceived ‘photographically’, is contingent, repetitive, granular. But Verrition is not any neologism. It is the name of this movement of occupation of the absolute plane, which is not flight into memory, interiority or prophetic superiority, but rather a movement of gathering the singular into novel configurations, inflexions or modulations: spiral of desire or simply poetry. Within a historical context of extreme alienation, in its refusal of the reification of consciousness, this act appeared political.113

sheets of metal of which a shield is made. Here, perhaps, superposition of word upon thought. Or, perhaps, a second meaning of the word ptux: fold; the word as vibration. Cf. Pindare: ptuchai umnôn: inflections of modulations of the thought of the poet. […] Mallarmé: ‘Magnificent, absolute and solitary’.] ‘Vues sur Mallarmé’, Tropiques 5 (April 1942), 56 and 61; PTED, 1334. The text by Pindar that Césaire refers to is from the First Olympian, line 105. On the influence of Pindar on French poetry in the period, see Michel Briand, ‘“Ô mon âme, n’aspire pas à la vie immortelle” … Sur les avatars de Pindare …’ 113 In the chapter on ‘L’expérience vécue du Noir’ of Peau noire, masques blancs, Fanon wrote: ‘“Sale nègre!” ou simplement: “Tiens, un nègre!” J’arrivais dans le monde, soucieux de faire lever un sens aux choses, mon âme pleine du désir d’être à l’origine du monde, et voici que je me découvrais objet au milieu d’autres objets’ [‘Dirty nigger!’ or simply ‘Look, a Negro!’ I came into this world anxious to elicit a meaning out of things, my soul desirous to be the origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects] 153/89 (modified translation).

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Wind, dust, spiral, vibration, fan and fold: among the rare texts that Deleuze wrote directly on poetry, there is a remarkable page on Mallarmé as a baroque poet. Here again, the two moments are identified: – pulverisation : ‘[l’éventail] “pli selon pli” révélant la ville, mais aussi bien en révèle l’absence ou le retrait, conglomérat de poussières, collectivités creuses, armées et assemblées hallucinatoires’ ;

and – inclusion : ‘le pli ne va plus vers une pulvérisation, il se dépasse ou trouve sa finalité dans une inclusion, “tassement en épaisseur, offrant le minuscule tombeau, certes, de l’âme”. Le pli est inséparable du vent’.

These two moments are united in the project of ‘Le Livre’: Ce ne sont pas deux mondes, pourtant: le pli du journal, poussière ou brume, inanité, est un pli de circonstance qui doit avoir son nouveau mode de correspondance avec le livre, pli de l’Événement, unité qui fait être, multiplicité qui fait inclusion, collectivité devenue consistante.114

Indeed, when, finally, ‘Je’ turns into a ‘Nous’ (‘embrasse-moi jusqu’au nous furieux’), it is hard not to think of what Deleuze wrote with Guattari about ‘minor literature’:

114 [‘fold after fold’, revealing the city, the fan reveals absence or withdrawal, a conglomeration of dust, hollow collectivities, armies and hallucinating assemblies. […] the fold no longer moves toward pulverisation, it exceeds itself or finds its finality in an inclusion, ‘thick layerings, offering the tiny tomb, surely, of the soul’. The fold is inseparable from wind. […] However, these are not two worlds: the fold of the newspaper, dust or mist, inanity, is a fold of circumstance that must have its new mode of correspondence with the book, the fold of the Event, the unity that creates being, a multiplicity that makes for inclusion, a collectivity having become consistent] Gilles Deleuze, Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque (Paris: Minuit, 1988), 43/The Fold, trans. Tom Conley (Athlone Press, 1993), 30. On the fold in Mallarmé, see also Derrida, ‘La Double séance’. On Mallarmé’s project of Le livre, see Anna Sigrídur Arnar, The Book as Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé, The Artist’s Book, and The Transformation of Print Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), Ch. 7.

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Chapter 1 […]si l’écrivain est en marge ou à l’écart de sa communauté fragile, cette situation le met d’autant plus en mesure d’exprimer une autre communauté potentielle, de forger les moyens d’une autre conscience et d’une autre sensibilité.115

Forging the tools for another consciousness: one sees better now how to understand this idea of a ‘revolutionary poetry’. *

IV Black salt Glissant too situated his work in relationship to Mallarmé: La Relation contamine, ensuave, comme principe, ou comme poudre de fleur.116 [La poétique de Mallarmé] sanctionne le moment où la langue, comme satisfaite de sa perfection, cesse de se donner comme objet le récit de son rapport à un entour pour se concentrer sur sa seule ardeur à outrer ses limites, à manifester à fond les éléments qui la composent – sur sa seule science à les manigancer. Cette pratique ne va pas sans divagations, pour la raison que la divagation récuse en absolu le récit : Mallarmé le savait. Il ne s’agira pas de découvrir ni de raconter le monde, mais d’en produire un équivalent, qui sera le Livre, où tout sera dit, sans que rien soit rapporté. […] Le monde comme livre, le Livre comme monde. Son héroïsme dans l’enfermement est une manière de célébrer la totalité, désirée, rêvée, dans l’absolu du mot.117

115 [[…] if the writer is in the margins or completely outside his or her fragile community, this situation allows the writer all the more the possibility to express another possible community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility.] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Minuit, 1975), 31–2/Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 17. 116 [Relation contaminates, sweetens, as a principle, or as flower dust.] Poétique de la relation, 199/185. 117 [[The poetics of Mallarmé] sanctions the moment when language, as if satisfied with its perfection, ceases to take for its object the recounting of its connection with particular surroundings, to concentrate solely upon its fervour to exceed its limits

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But he notes that Le Discours antillais was precisely an attempt at questioning the very possibility of such an equivalence today. This is because the very idea that a book could plan and master, in the isolation (‘dans l’enfermement’) of its very structures, all the virtual relations elicited by the act of a consciousness constructing a world, and thus attempt at abolishing chance and time, seems an impossible (if heroic) dream, because there is no such thing as a separate and unified consciousness: Toutes les expressions des humanités s’ouvrent à la complexité fluctuante du monde. La pensée poétique y préserve le particulier, puisque c’est la totalité des particuliers réellement saufs qui garantit seule l’énergie du Divers. Mais un particulier, à chaque fois, qui se met en Relation de manière tout intransitive, c’est à dire avec la totalité enfin réalisée des particuliers possibles.118

As a consequence, if contemporary poetry cannot satisfy itself with dispersion in the contemplation of the pure diverse, an exile of the self within an a-personal consciousness – as in the poetry of the later Perse – neither can it be content with the lyrical, sur-realist attempt at reconciliation, the feverish creation of a continuity out of the fragmented, as in the Cahier.119 and reveal thoroughly the elements composing it – solely upon its engineering skill with these. This practice does not proceed without rambling, because rambling – as Mallarmé well knew – is an absolute challenge to narrative. Rather than discovering or telling about the world, it is a matter of producing an equivalent, which would be the Book, in which everything would be said, without anything’s being reported. […] The world as book, the Book as world. His heroism within confinement is a way of celebrating a desired, dreamt-of totality within the absolute of the word.] Poétique de la relation, 37/25. 118 [Every expression of the humanities opens onto the fluctuating complexity of the world. Here poetic thought safeguards the particular, since only the totality of truly secure particulars guarantees the energy of Diversity. But in every instance this particular sets about Relation in a completely intransitive manner, relating, that is, with the finally realised totality of all possible particulars.] Poétique de la relation, 44/32. 119 A ‘détour’ Glissant comments on in relation to both Césaire and Fanon: ‘ni Césaire ni Fanon ne sont des abstracteurs. Les tracés de la Négritude et de la théorie révolutionnaire des Damnés sont pourtant généralisants. Ils suivent le contour historique de la décolonisation finissante dans le monde. Ils illustrent et démontrent le paysage d’un Ailleurs partagé. Il faut revenir au lieu. Le Détour n’est ruse profitable que si le

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Both points of view abolish the border, while for Glissant it has become precisely the object of poetry, when it is perceived as trace. Les Africains traités dans les Amériques portèrent avec eux par-delà les Eaux Immenses, la trace de leurs dieux, de leurs coutumes, de leurs langages. Confrontés au désordre implacable du colon, ils connurent ce génie, noué aux souffrances qu’ils endurèrent, de fertiliser ces traces, créant, mieux que des synthèses, des résultantes dont ils eurent le secret.120

Early poetic endeavours, great founding myths or epics, were one of the sources of the historical consciousness of ‘cultures ataviques’: their function was to create filiations and legitimacies, on lands which became territories.121 By contrast, we are now in a ‘post-historical’ world, at least in the sense that the Earth has been mapped and divided and what happens is of the order of relations rather than definition and identity (nationalist, gender and ethnic resurgences – even claims of créole ‘identities’ – being violent reactions to this new situation). Poetic creation is thus more interested in traces, within what there is, of the other. Not to celebrate a new orthodoxy of the multiple, this time, or the impossibility or naivety of the new, but rather because poetry is now perceived as the experience of the in-between.

retour le féconde : non pas retour au rêve d’origine, à l’Un immobile de l’Être, mais retour au point d’intrication, dont on s’était détourné par force […]’ [Neither Césaire nor Fanon are abstract thinkers. The guiding lines of Negritude and the revolutionary theory of Wretched of the Earth are, however, generalising. They follow the historical curve of the ending of decolonisation in the world. They illustrate and establish the landscape of a shared Elsewhere. We must return to place itself. Diversion is not a useful ploy unless it is nourished by reversion : not a return to the longing for origins, to some immutable Unity of Being, but a return to the point of entanglement, from which we forcibly turned away […]] Le Discours antillais, 56–7/26. 120 [The Africans traded to the Americas carried with them, beyond the Immense Waters, the trace of their gods, their customs, their languages. Confronted with the relentless disorder of the coloniser, they possessed this genius, bound up with the suffering they endured, of fertilising these traces, creating, better than any syntheses, results of which they held the secret.] Introduction à une poétique du divers, 70. 121 See Introduction à une poétique du divers, 59. On land and territory, Glissant’s reference is Deleuze and Guattari’s introduction to Mille Plateaux: ‘Rhizome’.

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But this is not a ‘post-modern’ version of exoticism. In Glissant, relations remained ‘nouées à la souffrance’. Thus, Le Sel noir, a major poetic work, of which Glissant’s abundant theoretical work could be seen as the continuation, states: J’ai fait demeure d’un tel cri, où il n’est terre qui se lève;122

This complex poem would require a detailed analysis, but it is sufficient for our purpose here to note that, if at first sight it is built on a cosmological, Persean model, starting with the sea, to which the book is dedicated (‘Pour le sel qu’elle signifie’),123 there is no fascination here for the ‘monotony’ of the sea. Rather, the poem ends with the inhabited earth: ‘Entends les pays, derrière l’îlet’.124 The ocean is where, amazingly, history unfolds from, but it is also always fissured by a scream it cannot absorb: ‘rumeur inlassable que le cri fêle’.125 This is why the unifying ‘theme’ here, salt, is described, in Mallarméan terms, as a ‘pure idée’.126 This means that ‘black salt’ is not négritude either, this finally rediscovered ‘cri’ that the crowd of Martinique at the beginning of the Cahier is lacking. It is indeed the salt of the earth, those ‘corps brûlés par le temps’ whom the ‘conteur’ addresses, but it is also all the ‘vibrations’ of the idea of salt: fundamental savour as well as bitterness, sweat and toil, ultimate taxation, instrument of preservation of dead flesh (on-board the boats of the Atlantic trade), torture, blood and semen. Glissant draws an extraordinary imaginary genesis of the island, from the silence prior to the discovery to the present of the city and the poem itself, always weaving together along the different figures of the salt, the historical encounters and the experiences of conquerors and slaves, of force and suffering. Again we are in the in-between, in the articulations of relations, the movement of poetry.

122 [I made my dwelling in such a cry, where no earth rises], 142. 123 [For the salt it signifies] Mary Ann Caws (trans.), ‘Black Salt’, Callaloo 36, 4 (2013), 848. 124 [Hear the lands, behind the islet] 125 [untiring sound the cry cracks open] (ibid.). 126 [pure idea] (ibid.).

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Chapter 1 En ce qui me concerne, je cite la Caraïbe comme un des lieux du monde où la relation le plus visiblement se donne, une des zones d’éclat où elle paraît se renforcer. Le mot éclat est à prendre ici au double sens d’éclairage et d’éclatement.127

In the end, what explains why this poetry would have flourished there, is that perhaps more than anywhere else, nothing will have taken place there but the place. This place is ‘éclat’, that is discontinuity in time (burst) and in space (splinter), but also a certain lucidity.

127 [The Caribbean, as far as I am concerned, may be held up as one of the places in the world where Relation presents itself most visibly, one of the explosive regions where it seems to be gathering strength.] Poétique de la relation, 46/33.

Chapter 2

Pustules, Spirals, Volcanoes: Images and Moods in Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal1

Alors quid de la poésie ? Il faut toujours y revenir: surgie du vide intérieur, comme un volcan qui émerge du chaos primitif, c’est notre lieu de force; la situation éminente d’où l’on somme; magie; magie. — Aimé Césaire2

In ‘Orphée noir’, his famous preface to Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that the poetry in this anthology was the only great revolutionary poetry of the day.3 Part of what he meant was indeed that most of the ‘revolutionary’ poetry of the time was far from great. Who celebrates now the Aragon and the Éluard of that period? But then what did he mean by ‘revolutionary poetry’? Most of the texts in Senghor’s anthology are far removed from political statements, while the poetry that Sartre would have called ‘petite’ relies on them. He meant that this poetry was revolutionary in itself even though it was not about revolution, as a lot of the poetry

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Originally published as ‘Pustules, Spirals, Volcanoes’, Jean Khalfa with Jérôme Game, Wasafiri 15/31 (2000), 43–51. [So what of poetry? One must always return to it: surging from the inner void, like a volcano emerging from the primal chaos, it is our energy centre, the preeminent place from which to summon … magic … magic.] Extract from a letter to Lilyan Kesteloot, reproduced in Aimé Césaire, La Poésie, ed. Daniel Maximin and Gilles Carpentier (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 6. Léopold Sédar Senghor, Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, pref. Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948).

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of the time was or postured to be.4 What we would like to suggest here is that Césaire’s poetry in the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal is indeed only political to the extent that it is real poetry, but that in turn this derives from its being a ‘Black’ poetry in the sense of Senghor’s anthology, which separates Africa and the Caribbean from Madagascar, a poetry which works on the structures of a consciousness born from slavery. Sartre stressed the link between poetry and the questions of consciousness or the production of a subjectivity: it was particularly striking that poetry should be the prime means of literary expression of those who had been actively denied all access to reflection: ‘Ainsi reparaît la subjectivité, rapport de soi-même avec soi, source de toute poésie […]’.5 However, he soon emphasises in this poetry the process of construction of a particular identity, the invention or celebration of specific qualities, subsumed under the notion of négritude, be they the primitive values of ‘Africa’ (nature, pan-sexuality, etc.), or the authenticity derived from shared historical suffering (slavery). He then goes on to posit negritude as a minor term in a dialectics, in which it will be superseded by a new humanism.6 But it seems to us that in the 4

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Benjamin Péret’s manifesto of 1945, Le Déshonneur des poètes denounced such a posture: ‘Pas un de ces “poèmes” ne dépasse le niveau lyrique de la publicité pharmaceutique et ce n’est pas un hasard si leurs auteurs ont cru devoir, en leur immense majorité, revenir à la rime et à l’alexandrin classiques […] Par contre de tout poème authentique s’échappe un souffle de liberté entière et agissante, même si cette liberté n’est pas évoquée sous son aspect politique ou social, et, par là, contribue à la libération effective de l’homme’ [Not one of these ‘poems’ surpasses the poetic level of pharmaceutical advertising, and it is not by chance that the great majority of their authors has believed it necessary to return to classical rhyme and alexandrines […] From every authentic poem, on the other hand, issues a breath of absolute and active freedom, even if this freedom is not evoked in it political or social aspect: in this way the poem contributes to the real liberation of humanity] ‘The Dishonour of the Poets’, trans. James Brook, in Death to the Pigs: Selected Writings of Benjamin Péret, ed. Rachel Stella (London: Atlas Press, 1988), 203. [Thus subjectivity reappears: the relation of the self with the self; the source of all poetry […]] ‘Orphée noir’, xv/‘Black Orpheus’, trans. John MacCombie, The Massachusetts Review 6/1 (autumn 1964–winter, 1965), 19–20. ‘En fait, la Négritude apparaît comme le temps faible d’une progression dialectique: l’affirmation théorique et pratique de la suprématie du blanc est la thèse; la position de la Négritude comme valeur antithétique est le moment de la négativité. Mais ce

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case of the Cahier at least, Césaire introduces under the term négritude, not so much issues of identity, as a reflection on time, or rather on modes of experiencing time: if subjectivity is essential here, it is because the subject is shaped through an experience of time and because poetry stages a conflict of temporalities. It always starts with the suspension of the linear or prosaic fragmentation of speech (and therefore of consciousness) in time, trying, through rhythm, metre, assonance, rhyme, enjambment, or, later, the space of the page, to keep open the possibility of a discrepancy between the semantic and the syntactic lines, and thus to resist passage, to hold back, to construct the structures of a duration. Césaire insisted time and again on the notion of alienation: ‘L’homme antillais a été colonisé de l’intérieur, il a été profondément aliéné’.7 The condition of slavery combined with economic exploitation to destroy the faculty of standing back and constructing one’s own world. The slave inhabits a desperately shallow time, devoid of memory and, even and above all, of the memory of death: Au bout du petit matin ces pays sans stèle, ces chemins sans mémoire, ces vents sans tablette.8

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moment négatif n’a pas de suffisance par lui-même et les noirs qui en usent le savent fort bien ; ils savent qu’il vise à préparer la synthèse ou réalisation de l’humain dans une société sans races. Ainsi la Négritude est pour se détruire, elle est passage et non aboutissement, moyen et non fin dernière’ [In fact, negritude appears as the weak moment in a dialectical progression: the theoretical and practical affirmation of the supremacy of the white man is the thesis; the position of negritude as antithetical value is the moment of negativity. But this negative moment is not sufficient in itself, and the blacks who use it know that very well. They know that it aims at preparing the synthesis or realisation of the human in a society without race. Thus negritude is in order to destroy itself, it is transition rather than result, means rather than ultimate end] ‘Orphée noir’, xli/49 (translation modified). [The Caribbean man has been colonised from the inside, he has been deeply alienated.] Interview with François Beloux, Magazine Littéraire 34 (November 1969). The unwillingness of the French Communist Party to take into account this added dimension, specific to black history, is one of the causes of Césaire’s resignation from it. See his Lettre à Maurice Thorez in PTED, 1500. [At the end of the wee hours this land without a stele, these paths without memory, these winds without a tablet.] Cahier, 194/CP, 49.

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This is what Césaire calls a closed intimacy (‘intimité close’), the paradox of an intimacy closed even to itself. In such circumstances, revolution had to be poetic first, if poetry was the disclosing of intimacy in a reflexive stance.9 More than an identity determined by a set of cultural or historical traits, what Césaire had in mind when he coined, with Senghor, the term négritude – an ironic clash of the derogatory gaze of the coloniser (nègre) and the philosophical essentialism of his Parisian Hegelianism (-itude) – was the expression of this very endeavour of reflection. Conversely, in its exploration of radical alienation, poetry was already revolutionary, even before the necessary political stance was explicitly taken. Hence the recurrent image of poetry as a volcano, in which all sufferings have fused, but which rises above a flattened, shattered city of corruption, plague, pustules and scrofula. Césaire did not waver in this geological conception of poetry as the eminent vantage point of a consciousness never given in advance, but, rather, born through a resistance and a summoning, what he calls a situation éminente d’où l’on somme. Yet this ‘situation’ is also to be taken literally, since Césaire, reflecting in his final years on his poetic life, links it to his birthplace: Il y a une identification fondamentale qui s’est accomplie entre moi et mon pays. Je vis mon pays avec tous ses handicaps, ses ambiguïtés, ses angoisses, ses espérances et, où que j’aille, je reste un nègre déraciné des Antilles, où que j’aille j’emporte avec moi mon pays, je reste lié à ce rocher volcanique qui s’appelle La Martinique et qui finalement est un petit point à peine lisible sur une carte, rien d’autre. Mais le paradoxe

9

Senghor has often stressed the link between this conception and Surrealism. For instance: ‘André Breton, dans sa préface au Cahier d’un retour au pays natal de Césaire, donne comme commun diviseur aux conditions de la poésie majeure, “l’intensité exceptionnelle de l’émotion devant le spectacle de la vie (entraînant l’impulsion à agir sur elle pour la changer)”’. [Andre Breton, in his preface to Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, gives as the common denominator of the conditions of major poetry ‘the exceptional intensity of emotion before the spectacle of life (entailing the compulsion to act upon it in order to change it)’.] Négritude et humanisme (Paris: Seuil, 1964), 136.

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c’est que mon aventure poétique est une tentative pour reconstruire le monde à partir de ce rocher, pour retrouver l’universel à partir de ce point singulier.10

* The temporality of the condition of slavery is linear, but fragmented and repetitive. Linear, that is without memory: the perpetual vanishing of the present into a past to which one never returns. Fragmented and repetitive too, as nothing is ever engendered in it, no moment ever gives birth to a new stage, no project is possible. Au bout du petit matin bourgeonnant d’anses frêles les Antilles qui ont faim, les Antilles grêlées de petite vérole, les Antilles dynamitées d’alcool, échouées dans la boue de cette baie, dans la poussière de cette ville sinistrement échouées.11

Au bout du petit matin: far from a new dawn, this marks both an end in time and, as this end point in time is always spatially determined (‘Au bout du petit matin bourgeonnant d’anses frêles’, ‘Au bout du petit matin cette ville plate’, ‘Au bout du petit matin le morne accroupi’, ‘Au bout du petit matin l’échouage hétéroclite’, etc.12), an enclosure in space: no future, no exit. Conversely, bourgeonnant, grêlées, dynamitées – all these indicators of fragmentation in space anticipate échouées (stranded). The present results from contingent causes or chance, never from an aim. Being purposeless,

10 [A fundamental identification between myself and my country has developed. I live my country in all its weaknesses, its ambiguities, its sufferings and its hopes, and wherever I go, I remain an uprooted negro from the Antilles; wherever I go I carry my country with me, I remain tied to this volcanic rock that bears the name of Martinique and which is ultimately a small, barely perceptible dot on the map, and nothing else. But the paradox is that my poetic adventure is an attempt to reconstruct the world from this rock, in order to find the universal from this singular point.] Bernard Pivot, Écrire, lire et en parler (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1985), 174. 11 [At the end of first light burgeoning with frail coves the hungry Antilles, the Antilles pitted with smallpox, the Antilles dynamited by alcohol, stranded in the mud of this bay, in the dust of this town sinisterly stranded.] Cahier, 186/3. 12 [At the end of first light burgeoning with frail coves], [At the end of first light, this town sprawled–flat], [At the end of first light, the morne squatting], [At the end of first light, this disparate stranding].

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directionless, the temporal sequence is discrete, a mere succession of instants or an échouage hétéroclite [disparate stranding], with all sense of historical bearings or points of departure having been lost. Hence: […] une vieille misère pourrissant sous le soleil, silencieusement; un vieux silence crevant de pustules tièdes, l’affreuse inanité de notre raison d’être.13

The rich repertoire of growth expresses fragmentation in both space and time. Seen from the point of view of the organism, a growth is a biological process going against its integrity as well as its development, a paradoxically unpredictable organic process. Thus, the skin of the decaying body-island is affected by ‘pustules tièdes’, ‘petite vérole’, ‘syzygie supurante des ampoules’, ‘lèpre’, ‘scrofules’, and ‘les arlequinades, les estropiements, les prurits, les urticaires […] la parade des risibles et scrofuleux bubons, les poutures de microbes très étranges […] les fermentations imprévisibles d’espèces putrescibles’, etc.14 In his essay on laughter, Henri Bergson defined the comical as resulting from the application of the mechanical to the living. Here the parade 13

[[…] an aged poverty rotting under the sun, silently; an aged silence bursting with tepid pustules, the dreadful inanity of our raison d’être.] Cahier, 186/3. In ‘inanité’, one should also hear, beyond futility, emptiness. The Littré dictionary, which Césaire used, gives emptiness as its literal meaning, and adds that it is only used in the ‘locution de chronologie’ (chronological expression): ‘temps d’inanité, années du monde qui se sont écoulées avant la loi de Moïse’ [time of inanité, the years of the world that passed before the Law of Moses]. ‘Crevant’ reinforces the coherence of images since it can indicates colloquially an abject death as well as the bursting of bubbles or abscesses. 14 [the harlequinades of poverty, the cripplings, the pruritus, the urticaria, the tepid hammocks of degeneracy. Right here the parade of laughable and scrofulous buboes, the forced feeding of very strange microbes, the poisons without known alexins, the sanies of really ancient sores, the unforeseeable fermentations of putrescible species.] Cahier, 188/9. Some critics have noted biblical connotations here, and have compared Césaire to poets such as Agrippa d’Aubigné or Jean-Baptiste Chassignet, whose sonnets also describe pustules and ‘ampoules venteuses’. See D. Combe, Aimé Césaire: Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993), 57. But this ‘parade’ could also be linked to the poetry of Rimbaud, whose influence is

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of scrofulous buboes is ‘risible’ (laughable), and the living is now inhabited by the mechanical. In the end, these descriptions are timeless or, better, tenseless: most of the sentences introduced by the twenty-six repetitions of the phrase ‘Au bout du petit matin’ are nominal. Verbs qualify, either as participles or within relative clauses; they never relate an action to a subject. But soon, within the poem, this is contrasted with another time: a time of origins; Chronos rather than Aiôn, to use the famous distinction

obvious throughout Césaire’s work. For instance, in an early poem by Rimbaud, ‘Les Assis’:

Noirs de loupes, grêlés, les yeux cerclés de bagues Vertes, leurs doigts boulus crispés à leurs fémurs Le sinciput plaqué de hargnosités vagues Comme les floraisons lépreuses des vieux murs.

[Dark with knobby growths, peppered with pock-marks like hail, their eyes ringed with green, their swollen fingers clenched on their thigh-bones, their skulls caked with indeterminate crusts like the leprous growths on old walls.]

In his edition of Rimbaud (Paris: La Pochothèque, LGE, 1999), Pierre Brunel notes Rimbaud’s invention of abstract substantives used in the plural (such as ‘hargnosités’ from ‘hargneux’) (see esp. 269). This technique is in evidence throughout the Cahier, as is that of the ‘illumination’:

nous chantons les fleurs vénéneuses éclatant dans des prairies furibondes; les ciels d’amour coupés d’embolie; les matins épileptiques; le blanc embrasement des sables abyssaux, les descentes d’épaves dans les nuits foudroyées d’odeurs fauves. [we sing of venomous flowers flaring in fury-filled prairies; the skies of love cut with bloodclots; the epileptic mornings; the white blaze of abyssal sands, the sinking of flotsam in nights electrified with feline smells.] Cahier, 196/55.

See also Pierre Brunel, ‘Une mythologie du volcan’, in Europe 832–3: Aimé Césaire (August–September 1998).

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Gilles Deleuze borrowed from Victor Goldschmidt;15 duration and presence, rather than succession; recollection and dwelling, rather than passage. And now both pace and images change radically, the instant expands and, through metaphors such as ‘the splash of gold of privileged moments, the umbilical cord’, space figures a link through time: Et nos gestes imbéciles et fous pour faire revivre l’éclaboussement d’or des instants favorisés, le cordon ombilical restitué à sa splendeur fragile, le pain, et le vin de la complicité, le pain, le vin, le sang des épousailles véridiques.16

This passage introduces the great contrasting scene of the first part of the poem, the evocation of a night of festivities at Christmas. […] Il avait l’agoraphobie Noël. Ce qu’il lui fallait c’était toute une journée d’affairement, d’apprêts, de cuisinages, de nettoyages, d’inquiétudes, de-peur-que-ça-ne-suffise-pas, de-peur-que-ça-ne-manque, de-peur-qu’on-ne-s’embête […]17

Agoraphobia: retreat and interiority, clearly, but also time, tenses and tension. Most words mark actions and affects, or even turn into verbs (via hyphenation or invention, as in the ‘cuisinages’ which reactivates the activity dormant in ‘nettoyages’). And the apogee of the following, immense sentence, meandering through the feelings and acts of the night, is the spiral of the ‘boudin’, compared to an ‘enroulement en volubile’ [coiling like volubles], which of course refers not only to the tropism of the volubilis, Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit, 1969). Victor Goldschmidt, Le Système stoïcien et l’idée de temps (Paris: Vrin, 1953). 16 [And our idiotic and insane stunts to revive the golden splashing of privileged moments, the umbilical cord restored to its ephemeral splendor, the bread, and the wine of complicity, the bread, the wine, the blood of veracious weddings.] Cahier, 188/9. 17 [[…] It had agoraphobia, Christmas did. What it wanted was a whole day of bustling, preparing, a cooking and cleaning spree, endless jitters, about not-having-enough, about-running-short, about-getting-bored […]] Cahier, 189/11. 15

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but to the dynamics of voices in joyful conversation. This spiral motion mirrors the text itself as a distillation of intensities, almost detached from their causes, again via the substantivising of qualities (‘incandescences pimentées’, ‘soleil liquide’) and the proliferation of adjectives: […] et il y a du boudin, celui étroit de deux doigts qui s’enroule en volubile, celui large et trapu, le bénin à goût de serpolet, le violent à incandescence pimentée, et du café brûlant et de l’anis sucré et du punch au lait, et le soleil liquide des rhums, et toutes sortes de bonnes choses qui vous imposent autoritairement les muqueuses ou vous les distillent en ravissements, ou vous les tissent de fragrances […]18

The poem is built on a sequence of three such contrasts. We have just considered the first one, which could be entitled Pustules/Spirals, because both the temporal structures of this part and the elements of its images share formal traits with one of these two images: fragmentation in time and space, ‘poussières d’îles’ and growth (even ‘bourgeonnement’, budding, takes on a sinister dimension), or at the other end, forms of linkage through time and space: duration, processes of increasing intensities, remembrances which are at the same time a deepening of understanding. We are thus presented with a sort of historical geography of Martinique that opposes the corroded, the putrescent, the dusty, the extended and fragmented, in a town viewed in the bleak and indifferent light of the ‘petit matin’, to the fluid, the organic, the intense and involuted, specific to the dreams of childhood nights spent in hamlets among the surrounding hills (or ‘mornes’) where fugitive slaves once tried to hide. But these perspectives are not simply opposed. Instead, there is always a subtle transition. This is how the Christmas scene is introduced:

18

[[…] and there are blood sausages, one kind only two fingers wide twined in coils, another broad and stocky, the mild one tasting of wild thyme, the sharp one spiced to an incandescence, and steaming coffee and sugared anisette, and milk punch, and the liquid sun of rums, and all sorts of good things that drive your taste buds wild or dissolve them into subtleties, or distill them to the point of ecstacy or cocoon them with fragrances […]] Cahier, 189/13.

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Chapter 2 Et cette joie ancienne m’apportant la connaissance de ma présente misère, une route bossuée qui pique une tête dans un creux où elle éparpille quelques cases; une route infatigable […], une route follement montante, témérairement descendante […]19

The meandering road is bumpy, it scatters a few shacks, but at the same time it follows a purpose, it is tireless, mad and reckless. It leads to a house with a plancher grossier où luisent des têtes de clous, les solives de sapin et d’ombres qui courent au plafond, les chaises de paille fantomales, la lumière grise de la lampe, celle vernissée et rapide des cancrelats qui bourdonne à faire mal …20

Again, here all the images of fragmentation or division (nail heads, joists, straw,21 cockroaches) are linked or smoothed by the reflection of light or the movement of its shadows. It then becomes clear that in the transcendental aesthetics of the ‘more essential land’, precise, formal properties of space and time, rather than just diffuse childhood memories, awaken an erotic appetite, with ma gourmandise adding to the mere need in ‘appétit’ the activity, the constructivism of desire, through which the self comes to reflection: Au bout du petit matin, ce plus essentiel pays restitué à ma gourmandise, non de diffuse tendresse, mais la tourmentée concentration sensuelle du gras téton des mornes avec l’accidentel palmier comme son germe durci, la jouissance saccadée des torrents et depuis Trinité jusqu’à Grand-Rivière, la grand’lèche hystérique de la mer. Et le temps passait vite, très vite.22

19

[And this joy of former times making me aware of my present poverty, a bumpy road plunging into a hollow where it scatters a few shacks; an indefatigable road […], a road foolishly climbing, recklessly descending […]] Cahier, 188/39. 20 [[…] the rough floor where nail heads gleam, the beams of pine and shadow across the ceiling, the spectral straw chairs, the gray lamp light, the glossy flash of cockroaches in a maddening buzz …] Cahier, 188/39. 21 See also the description of rue Paille (Cahier, 190/85), following that of the childhood house, which is rhythmed by the repetitive and endless sound of the mother pedalling at her sewing machine, in a hut covered in blisters, metal patches, etc. 22 [At the end of the small hours, this most essential land restored to my gourmandize, not in diffuse tenderness, but the tormented sensual concentration of the fat

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The images here link a specific duration (tormented, jerking, hysterical) with a corresponding spatial structure (morne, torrent, sea inlet), the whole forming a sexual exploration of the essential land experienced as a unified, living body.23 At the other end of a night culminating in a fusion of memory and sensations (‘et la créature tout entière qui se liquéfie en sons, voix et rythme’),24 and in pure desire, joy bursts forth in the daylight of the early morning, in a movement of spatial dispersion: Arrivée au sommet de son ascension, la joie crève comme un nuage. Les chants ne s’arrêtent pas, mais ils roulent maintenant inquiets et lourds par les vallées de la peur, les tunnels de l’angoisse et les feux de l’enfer. […] et l’odeur de purin des cacaoyers, et les dindons qui égrènent leurs pustules rouges au soleil, et l’obsession des cloches, et la pluie, les cloches … la pluie … qui tintent, tintent, tintent … Au bout du petit matin, cette ville plate – étalée … Elle rampe sur les mains sans jamais aucune envie de vriller le ciel d’une stature de protestation.25

tits of the mornes with an occasional palm tree as their hardened sprout, the jerky orgasm of torrents and from Trinité to Grand-Rivière the hysterical grandsuck of the sea. And time passed quickly, very quickly.] Cahier, 188/11. 23 Such description evokes some of the surrealist, eroticised landscapes in works by Masson and Lam. ‘Dans une société où la machine et l’argent ont démesurément agrandi la distance de l’homme aux choses, Wifredo Lam fixe sur la toile la cérémonie pour laquelle toutes existent: la cérémonie de l’union physique de l’homme et du monde’ [In a society in which money and the machine have immeasurably widened the distance between people and objects, Wifredo Lam fixes upon the canvas the ceremony for which all things exist : the ceremony of the physical union of the human with the world] Aimé Césaire, ‘Wifredo Lam’, Cahiers d’art 20–1 (1945–1946), 357. 24 [And your entire being that liquefies into sounds, voices and rhythm.] Cahier, 189/13. 25 [At the peak of its ascent, joy bursts like a cloud. The songs don’t stop, but roll now anxious and heavy through the valleys of fear, the tunnels of anguish and the fires

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Images, whose coherence is clearly to be found beyond descriptive realism, revert to multiplication, proliferation in space and time: turkeys and the pustules that seem to make up their heads, bells ringing, the clattering noise of the rain on the corrugated iron roofs even though it is sunny, and, again, the corresponding attitude of subservience, an inability to stand and pierce or, better, drill (vriller). Now what is revolutionary in this notebook of a return to the native land26 is not simply the brutal description of Césaire’s birth place (La Martinique) as the composite scum deposited randomly by the colonial wave. Neither is it the nostalgic celebration of the land of all births, a primitivist utopia sometimes code-named ‘Africa’. It is rather the weaving together of the two contrasting perspectives, the desolate here which can never link with any mythical then, and the resulting perception of the world inherited from slavery and colonialism not only as exploitative, but as the very negation of the human. This is a world built by a consciousness which asserts itself only in denying the Other the possibility of a reflexive consciousness, of all consciousness that could rise above the flow of

of hell. […] and the liquid manure smell of the cacao trees, and the turkeys shelling their red pustules in the sun, and the obsessive bells, and the rain, the bells … the rain … that tinkle, tinkle, tinkle … At the end of the small hours, this town sprawled–flat … It crawls on its hands without the slightest desire to drill the sky with a stature of protest.] Cahier, 189–90/13. 26 A translation of ‘retour au pays natal’ as ‘return to my native land’ would be too narrow. Although that is the usual meaning of the phrase ‘retour au pays’, we know that Césaire wrote the poem prior to returning to Martinique, and it is not immediately clear which of the ‘lands’ within the text – Martinique or Africa – is the true pays of the title. It is not even clear either that the island is a pays or a ‘land’ at all, let alone the land of any birth. It is only towards the end of the poem that all the contrasting lands fuse into a possessive ‘my country’ (Cahier, 208–9/48). By then the subject of this possessive has been transfigured by the very process of the poem.

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the event, and therefore of all consciousness that could retain a presence beyond the instant:27 Et voici que je suis venu ! De nouveau cette vie clopinante devant moi, non pas cette vie, cette mort, cette mort sans sens ni piété, cette mort où la grandeur piteusement échoue, l’éclatante petitesse de cette mort, cette mort qui clopine de petitesses en petitesses; ces pelletées de petites avidités sur le conquistador; ces pelletées de petits larbins sur le grand sauvage, ces pelletées de petites âmes sur le Caraïbe aux trois âmes, et toutes ces morts futiles […].28

* The first contrast opposed two spatial and temporal structures: first, the fragmented time and space of the present, symbolised by the fragmentation of the body/island and characterised, in a reversal of colour values that is typical of Césaire, as a dawn which only marks the end of the night; second, the life and depth of a regained past in a Christmas night. The night was, for the slaves, a refuge, before the bleakness of dawn. The second contrast builds on this autobiographical shift, and opposes the young poet’s aspiration to the surrounding reality of compromise and betrayal. This is the time of a juvenile ‘Je’, the early poetic self, master of a Verb that aims at producing the real, and of verbs too, always used in the conditional, the mood of hope and prospect: Je retrouverais le secret des grandes communications et des grandes combustions. Je dirais orage. Je dirais fleuve. Je dirais tornade. Je dirais feuille. Je dirais arbre. Je serais 27 The phenomenology of the colonised consciousness in the Cahier has echoes in another great text on the systematic alienation of the slave, but in the context of the concentration camp: Robert Antelme’s L’Espèce humaine (1st edn, Paris: Cité Universelle, 1947). 28 [And behold here I am come home! Once again this life hobbling before me, what am I saying this life, this death, this death without meaning or piety, this death that so pathetically falls short of greatness, the dazzling pettiness of this death, this death hobbling from pettiness to pettiness; these shovelfuls of petty greeds over the conquistador; these shovelfuls of petty flunkies over the great savage; these shovelfuls of petty souls over the three-souled Carib, and all these deaths futile […]] Cahier, 192/17–19.

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But this poetic aspiration is also, immediately, a desire to leave, to abandon the present of oppression and, perhaps more importantly, the sight of unbearable subservience and the betrayal of duty that it produces. For in the dispersion that constitutes this land, a people cannot form, barely reaching the stage of a crowd: Et dans cette ville inerte, cette foule criarde si étonnamment passée à côté de son cri […], cette foule à côté de son cri de faim, de révolte de misère, de haine, cette foule si étrangement bavarde et muette. Dans cette ville inerte, cette étrange foule qui ne s’entasse pas, ne se mêle pas […]: habile à découvrir le point de désencastration, de fuite, d’esquive […] Cette foule qui ne sait pas faire foule.30

No collective consciousness is available to people who have given up and concentrate only on ‘avidités, hystéries, perversions, arlequinades de la

29 [I would rediscover the secret of great communications and great combustions. I would say storm. I would say river. I would say tornado. I would say leaf. I would say tree. I would be drenched by all rains, moistened by all dews. I would roll like frenetic blood on the slow current of the eye of words […] all I would need is a mouthful of jiculi milk to discover in you always as distant as a mirage – a thousand times more native and made golden by a sun that no prism divides – the earth where everything is free and fraternal, my earth.] Cahier, 203/ CP, 45. 30 [And in this inert town, this squalling throng so astonishingly detoured from its cry […] this throng detoured from its cry of hunger, of poverty, of revolt, of hatred, this throng so strangely chattering and mute. In this inert town, this strange throng that does not huddle, does not mix […] clever at discovering the point of disencasement, of flight, of dodging […] This throng that does not know how to throng […]] Cahier, 186–7/3–5.

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misère’ (again, a world of pretence as well as a world made up of patchwork: Harlequin’s coat).31 Au bout du petit matin, le vent de jadis qui s’élève, le vent des fidélités trahies, du devoir incertain qui se dérobe et cet autre petit matin d’Europe … […] et toutes ces morts futiles absurdités sous l’éclaboussement de ma conscience ouverte tragiques futilités éclairées de cette seule noctiluque et moi seul, brusque scène de ce petit matin […]32

Such a futility is obvious only to the furious intellectual, who constantly feels detached from the reality of his birthplace, and now, as a consequence, empty too, but for his wordy dreams: Partir. Mon cœur bruissait de générosités emphatiques.33

For soon this opposition between generosity and submission appears superficial, as the true conflict cuts through the poetic self in this second moment: the refusal of the compromises of poverty and the flight into poetry were an interiorisation of the oppressor’s gaze. But the reflection upon this inner contradiction, which will lead to a different mode of consciousness, occurs [[…] the greeds, the hysterias, the perversions, the harlequinades of poverty] Cahier, 188/9. The word ‘criarde’ (squabbling) above, also marks a fragmentation, in sound, as opposed to the unity of a scream. It is clearly opposed to the possessive and therefore reflexive stance of ‘son cri’, a possessive which, in turn, brings an imagined intimacy: ‘[…] on le sent sien lui seul; parce qu’on le sent habiter en elle dans quelque refuge profond d’ombre et d’orgueil’. [[…] it alone feels at home in this town; because one feels that it inhabits some deep refuge of shadow and of pride] Cahier, 188/5. 32 [At the end of the small hours, the wind of long ago – of betrayed trusts, of uncertain evasive duty and that other dawn in Europe – arises … […] and all these deaths futile absurdities under the splashing of my open conscience tragic futilities lit up by this single noctiluca and I alone, sudden stage of these small hours […]] Cahier, 191–2/17–19. The aptly named noctiluca is another announcement of negritude’s luminance. But it is still solitary. 33 [To leave. My heart was humming with emphatic generosities.] Cahier, 192/17. 31

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through a chance reversal of role, rather than via the inner dialectic of a Hegelian negativity:34 in his estrangement from and derision of a miserable ‘nègre’ seen in a tramcar, presumably in Paris, the poet in exile forgets the history of oppression,35 and suddenly realises that he shares the racist gaze: Et moi, et moi, moi qui chantais le poing dur Il faut savoir jusqu’où je poussai la lâcheté. Un soir dans un tramway en face de moi, un nègre. […] Un nègre comique et laid et des femmes derrière moi ricanaient en le regardant. Il était COMIQUE ET LAID, COMIQUE ET LAID pour sûr. J’arborai un grand sourire complice … Ma lâcheté retrouvée !36

Conversely, the predicament of those who suffer now appears, as Sartre noted, as patience rather than passivity. Césaire linked the notion of negritude to his reading of the Phenomenology of Mind (under the influence of Senghor): the universal only ever makes its way through the singular. And it would not be absurd to read the Cahier as a ‘Phenomenology of the Colonised Mind’. Thus Sartre quotes the famous: ‘Nos faces belles comme le vrai pouvoir opérateur de la négation’ [Our beautiful faces as the true operative power of negation], but one could perhaps see here an example of surrealist (or black) humour. On the debate concerning Césaire’s alleged Hegelianism, see Mireille Rosello’s introduction to her translation, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land/Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, trans. Mirelle Rosello with Annie Pritchard, Bloodaxe Contemporary French Poets, 4 (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1995), 47. 35 ‘Et ce pays cria pendant des siècles que nous sommes des bêtes brutes; que les pulsations de l’humanité s’arrêtent aux portes de la négrerie […]’ [And this land screamed for centuries that we are bestial brutes; that the human pulse stops at the gates of the barracoon […]] Cahier, 200/27. 36 [And I, and I, I was singing the hard fist, You must know the extent of my cowardice. One evening on the streetcar facing me, a nigger. […] A comical and ugly nigger, with some women behind me sneering at him. He was COMICAL AND UGLY COMICAL AND UGLY for sure. I displayed a big complicitous smile … My cowardice rediscovered!] Cahier, 200–1/31. 34

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This allows us to understand the introduction of négritude at this stage: it is not a racial category, a claim of essential difference; rather, it denotes the refusal of an attitude, of the instrumental stance of the masters who can only think, precisely, in terms of mastery, that is, in terms of detachment and separation of the self and the other: ô lumière amicale ô fraîche source de la lumière ceux qui n’ont inventé ni la poudre ni la boussole ceux qui n’ont jamais su dompter la vapeur ni l’électricité ceux qui n’ont exploré ni les mers ni le ciel mais ceux sans qui la terre ne serait pas la terre gibbosité37 d’autant plus bienfaisante que la terre déserte davantage la terre […] mais ils s’abandonnent, saisis, à l’essence de toute chose ignorants des surfaces mais saisis par le mouvement de toute chose insoucieux de dompter, mais jouant le jeu du monde véritablement les fils aînés du monde poreux à tous les souffles du monde aire fraternelle de tous les souffles du monde lit sans drain de toutes les eaux du monde étincelle du feu sacré du monde chair de la chair du monde palpitant du mouvement même du monde ! Tiède petit matin de vertus ancestrales38

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One must pause at this extraordinary apposition, which explains Césaire’s often criticised use of obscure words. At first, it seems to designate a manner of being or an attitude (like sérénité), perhaps even a value (fraternité). When the meaning is checked, one realises that it simply denotes a bump, a growth, but the initial understanding remains in the semantic background, and ‘gibbosité’, the stance of belonging to the earth, can now be called ‘bienfaisante’. In this word there are thus several transitions at work: from the fragmented to the continuous via the transformation of the malign growth into a benign one; from belonging to uprising, since the refusal of the mechanistic stance of the West is in itself a resistance. [O friendly light O fresh source of light those who invented neither powder nor compass those who could harness neither steam nor electricity

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Thus this second moment, in an astonishing reversal, now opposes the detachment of the unhappy poetic consciousness to the immemorial sense of belonging to the world. Dawn is no longer referred to as an end in space (‘au bout du petit matin’) but as the origin (‘vertus ancestrales’). Movement is no longer displacement on a surface. It is palpitation and belonging to an originary or elemental world, a nature: earth, water and fire, and as the colour of the earth is red, blood, as a fluid, will unify these elements. Dawn is also qualified by its warmth (‘tiède’ here means ‘warm’, not ‘tepid’), rather than by the coming of light and, in general, the poem switches from visual connotations to haptic ones, vision being associated with separation or distance, for instance in the contemplation of the blue of steel (in the weapons of the coloniser) and of the sky, or the cold light of stars. While before, one still thought within the terms of oppression (in the form of lament no less than contempt), it is now possible to see an alternative to the domination of the oppressor’s values, which, under the guise of universalism, only realised the separation of the human from the natural. It is this revolt which assumes universality, because it opposes the most fundamental of all oppressions: that which, particularly through race, reduces the person to an absolute other, a given:

those who explored neither the seas nor the sky but those without whom the earth would not be the earth gibbosity all the more beneficent as more and more the earth deserts the earth […] but [Eia for those] who yield, seized, to the essence of all things ignorant of surfaces but captivated by the motion of all things indifferent to conquering, but playing the game of the world truly the eldest sons of the world porous to all the breathing of the world fraternal locus for all the breathing of the world drainless channel for all the water of the world spark of the sacred fire of the world flesh of the world’s flesh pulsating with the very motion of the world!

Tepid first light of ancestral virtues] Cahier, 203–4/37.

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vous savez que ce n’est point par haine des autres races que je m’exige bêcheur de cette unique race que ce que je veux c’est pour la faim universelle pour la soif universelle la sommer libre enfin de produire de son intimité close la succulence des fruits39

And while négritude is shown in red, rather than black: elle plonge dans la chair rouge du sol elle plonge dans la chair ardente du ciel elle troue l’accablement opaque de sa droite patience.40

the white world is steel blue: Écoutez le monde blanc Horriblement las de son effort immense Ses articulations rebelles craquer sous les étoiles dures ses raideurs d’acier bleu transperçant la chair mystique.41

39 40

[[…] you know that it is not from hatred of other races that I demand of myself to be a digger for this unique race that what I want is for universal hunger for universal thirst

to summon it free at last to generate from its intimate closeness the succulence of fruit.] Cahier, 205/41. [it takes root in the red flesh of the soil it takes root in the ardent flesh of the sky it breaks through opaque prostration with its upright patience.] Cahier, 203/37. Thanks to the implied colour of the sun (‘the blazing flesh of the sky’) a parallel can be drawn between sky and the earth, both thought of as flesh and therefore united in a continuum. 41 [Hear the white world horribly weary from its immense effort

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* Fusion against fragmentation; belonging against separation; time, now perceived as life, as a cycle of creation, rather than the linear and repetitive vanishing of the instant: Sang! Sang! Tout notre sang ému par le Cœur mâle du soleil ceux qui savent la féminité de la lune au corps d’huile l’exaltation réconciliée de l’antilope et de l’étoile ceux dont la survie chemine en la germination de l’herbe! Eia parfait cercle du monde et close concordance!42

Again, the transition to a different stance operates through a subtle transformation of some of the fundamental imagery. Earlier, blood was blood spilled or shed and therefore corrupted: ‘fleurs du sang’, ‘sang impaludé’, ‘le morne seul et son sang répandu’, ‘l’eau sanieuse’, ‘marais de sang putrides’, ‘sanies de plaies bien antiques’, ‘que de sang dans ma mémoire! […] Ma mémoire a sa ceinture de cadavres!’, ‘terres rouges, terres sanguines, terres consanguines’, ‘eschare’, ‘plaie béante’, ‘Îles cicatrices des eaux / Îles évidentes blessures’.43 Now blood reappears as life, within another form of spiral, a



its rebellious joints cracking under the hard stars its blue steel rigidities piercing the mystic flesh] Cahier, 204/39. Unsurprisingly we find again the images of stiffness, fragmentation (joints cracking) and opposition (‘under the hard stars’) of the beginning. The alliance of military might and transcendentalism are symbolically attributed to the white world, through the refusal of architectural structures that imply a detachment from the earth: ‘ma négritude n’est ni une tour ni une cathédrale’ [my negritude is neither tower nor cathedral] Cahier, 203/CP, 67. 42 [Blood! Blood! all our blood aroused by the male heart of the sun those who know about the femininity of the moon’s oily body the reconciled exultation of antelope and star those whose survival walks on the germination of the grass! Eia perfect circle of the world and enclosed concordance!] Cahier, 204/37–9. 43 [the flowers of blood], [malarial blood], [the morne solitary and its blood shed], [the sanious water], [marshes of putrid blood], [the sanies of really ancient sores], [So much blood in my memory […] My memory has a belt of corpses!], [Land red,

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movement without displacement, a continuous and intense gathering of the totality of a surface towards a centre: Et voici soudain que force et vie m’assaillent comme un taureau [et je renouvelle ONAN qui confia son sperme à la terre féconde]44 et l’onde de vie circonvient la papille du morne, et voilà toutes les veines et veinules qui s’affairent au sang neuf et l’énorme poumon des cyclones qui respire et le feu thésaurisé des volcans et le gigantesque pouls sismique qui bat maintenant la mesure d’un corps vivant en mon ferme embrasement.45

Veins and veinlets diffusing life through a surface, cyclones, a seismic pulse and the musical measurement of time: the volcano clearly embodies several traits of the spiral structure.46 But, in parallel, a subtler image inversion has taken place: growth, no longer cancerous, is linked to awakening and to birth. It had already introduced the celebration of negritude in the following line: Et ces têtards en moi éclos de mon ascendance prodigieuse!47

44 45

46

47



sanguineous, consanguineous land], [eschar], [gaping wound], [Islands scars of the water / Islands evidence of wounds]. This passage was removed in the 1956 edition. [Suddenly now strength and life assail me like a bull and I revive ONAN who entrusted his sperm to the fecund earth and the water of life circumvents the papilla of the morne, and now all the veins and veinlets are bustling with new blood and the enormous breathing lung of cyclones and the fire hoarded in volcanoes and the gigantic seismic pulse that now beats the measure of a living body in my firm embrace.] Cahier, 208/47. One would like to see it also in the trumpeting of ‘the vertiginous lambi’, the conch which carries the message of freedom. On the theme of the volcano in Caribbean literature, Dominique Chancé shows that there is a great similitude between the writings of Césaire, Glissant and Maximin in his L’Auteur en souffrance (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), esp. 138 sq. [And these tadpoles hatched in me by my prodigious ancestry!] Cahier, 202/35. What brings ‘têtards’, more than the etymology (being made of a head), is the dark colour and the proliferation, but also perhaps the homophony with ‘têter’, to suckle. As to the visual analogy with sperm, it is reinforced by the following lines: ‘vienne de dauphins une insurrection perlière brisant la coquille de la mer vienne un plongeon d’îles […]

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It then developed in a remarkable celebration of the birth of the radically new: il y a dans le regard du désordre cette hirondelle de menthe et de genêt qui fond pour toujours renaître dans le raz-de-marée de ta lumière (Calme et berce ô ma parole l’enfant qui ne sait pas que la carte du printemps est toujours à refaire) […] et toi veuille astre de ton lumineux fondement tirer lémurien du sperme insondable de l’homme la forme non osée que le ventre tremblant de la femme porte tel un minerai!48

The sexual imagery is then woven, through the image of the prow of a pirogue slicing the ocean, into the image of the island as a ship: Îles annelées, unique carène belle Et je te caresse de mes mains d’océan. Et je te vire de mes paroles alizées. Et je te lèche de mes langues d’algues.49

viennent les ovaires de l’eau où le futur agite ses petites têtes’ [the pearly upheaval of dolphins cracking the shell of the sea let a plunge of islands come […] let the ovaries of the water come where the future stirs its testicles] Cahier, 202–3/ CP, 67. Here, also, via the analogies of shape, movement and colour (tadpoles–dolphins–drops of water–pearls), we have gone from dust to sperm: the fragmentation of the islands has become organic proliferation and life. 48 [in the glance of disorder there is this swallow of mint and broom which melts always to be reborn in the tidal wave of your light Calm and lull oh my voice the child who does not know that the map of spring is always to be drawn again […] and you star please from your luminous foundation draw lemurian being – of man’s unfathomable sperm the yet undared form carried like an ore in woman’s trembling belly.] Cahier, 203/CP, 67. 49 [Annulose islands, single beautiful hull And I caress you with my oceanic hands. And I turn you

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In its ultimate, extraordinary incarnation, the island turns into a slave-ship in revolt: Je dis hurrah ! La vieille négritude progressivement se cadavérise l’horizon se défait, recule et s’élargit et voici parmi des déchirements de nuages la fulgurance d’un signe le négrier craque de toute part … Son ventre se convulse et résonne … L’affreux ténia de sa cargaison ronge les boyaux fétides de l’étrange nourrisson des mers! […] Il y a encore une mer à traverser oh encore une mer à traverser pour que j’invente mes poumons […] Le maître des rires? Le maître du silence formidable? Le maître de la paresse? Le maître des danses? C’est moi!50

Thus, the final contrast is between a request for birth, a ‘virile prayer’, and the realisation that in this very stance lies, finally, the present. Stylistically,



around with the tradewinds of my speech. And I lick you with my seaweed tongues] Cahier, 207–8/CP, 75. 50 [I say hurray! The old negritude progressively cadavers itself the horizon breaks, recoils and expands and through the shredding of clouds the flashing of a sign the slave ship cracks from one end to the other … Its belly convulses and resounds … The ghastly tapeworm of its cargo gnaws the fetid guts of the strange suckling of the sea! […] There still remains one sea to cross oh still one sea to cross that I may invent my lungs […] The master of laughter? The master of ominous silence? The master of laziness? Master of the dance? It is I!] Cahier, 210–11/CP, 81–3.

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again the text works on both moods and tenses. We have now moved to the imperative: donnez-moi la foi sauvage du sorcier donnez à mes mains puissance de modeler […]51

A passage from prayer to prophecy, from the imperative of imploration to that of the imperious assertion of life, this movement finally defines the role of the poet: À moi mes danses et saute le soleil sur la raquette de mes mains mais non l’inégal soleil ne me suffit plus enroule-toi vent, autour de ma nouvelle croissance pose-toi sur mes doigts mesurés je te livre ma conscience et son rythme de chair […] je te livre mes paroles abruptes dévore et enroule-toi et t’enroulant embrasse-moi d’un plus vaste frisson embrasse-moi jusqu’au nous furieux embrasse, embrasse-NOUS.52

One could write at length on this passage and stress again the image of coiling; wind as continuity, as opposed to the periodic nature of the sun; measure and rhythm as the foundations for a consciousness made flesh, rather than a conscience (Merleau-Ponty would have spoken of a 51 [grant me the savage faith of the sorcerer grant my hands the power to mould] Cahier, 204/CP, 69–71. 52 [Rally to my side my dances and let the sun bounce on the racket of my hands But no the unequal sun is not enough for me coil, wind, around my new growth light on my cadenced fingers To you I surrender my conscience and its fleshy rhythm […] To you I surrender my abrupt words Devour and encoil yourself And coiling round embrace me with a more ample shudder Embrace me unto furious us Embrace, embrace US] Cahier, 212/55.

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proprioceptive consciousness, before the separation of the subject and the object); the striking kinship with Saint-John Perse, and, astonishingly, Valéry, in the celebration of the wind; and also the important idea of poetry as abrupt speech (a theme essential in the poetry of Char and, later, Dupin). But one must at least note that through the image of a plus vaste frisson (a ‘wider shudder’, similar to that of a wave, earlier), the role of the poet is now to forge within himself a community, the unity of a movement, out of the multiplicity of a crowd. In these final pages, we have moved from the distant Vous in the prayer, to the equality of the Tu in the demand and, finally, Je here turns into a Nous (‘embrasse-moi jusqu’au nous furieux’). It is hard here not to think of what Deleuze and Guattari wrote of ‘minor literature’: […] parce que la conscience collective ou nationale est ‘souvent inactive dans la vie extérieure et toujours en voie de désagrégation’, c’est la littérature qui se trouve chargée positivement de ce rôle et de cette fonction d’énonciation collective, et même révolutionnaire: c’est la littérature qui produit une solidarité active, malgré le scepticisme; et si l’écrivain est en marge ou à l’écart de sa communauté fragile, cette situation le met d’autant plus en mesure d’exprimer une autre communauté potentielle, de forger les moyens d’une autre conscience et d’une autre sensibilité.53

Forging the tools for another consciousness: one sees better now how to understand this idea of a ‘revolutionary poetry’. As is often the case, Deleuze and Guattari were exploring further an important Sartrian intuition.54 * 53

[[…] Because collective or national consciousness is ‘often inactive in external life and always in the process of break-down’, literature finds itself positively charged with the role and function of collective, and even revolutionary, enunciation. It is literature that produces an active solidarity in spite of scepticism; and if the writer is in the margins or completely outside his or her fragile community, this situation allows the writer all the more the possibility to express another possible community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility.] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Minuit, 1975), 31–2/ Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 17. 54 See infra, Ch. 10.

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Two words, finally: amure and verrition. faites de moi un homme de recueillement mais faites aussi de moi un homme d’ensemencement […] donnez-moi sur l’océan stérile mais où caresse la main la promesse de l’amure donnez-moi sur cet océan divers l’obstination de la fière pirogue et sa vigueur marine.55

According to Littré, amure refers to the rope fixing the lowest point at the angle of a sail, facing the wind. But he adds that, in earlier times, it referred to the tip of a spear. As is often the case in Césaire, the distance from immediate meaning that is introduced by a rare word allows the fusion of a multiplicity of images: here the erotic imagery of the virile prayer, of the island as a ship, and of a birth (it is hard not to hear, in ‘promesse de l’amure’, ‘promesse de l’amour’). Just as À la recherche du temps perdu is an attempt at regaining a certain experience of time, the Cahier is a quest for time as birth. It is in that sense that the land is native. lie ma noire vibration au nombril même du monde lie, lie-moi, fraternité âpre puis, m’étranglant de ton lasso d’étoiles monte, Colombe monte monte monte […]

55 [make me into a man of meditation but also make me into a man of germination […] grant me on the ocean sterile but somewhere caressed by the promise of the clew-line grant me on this diverse ocean the obstinacy of the proud pirogue and its marine vigor.] Cahier, 205/41–3.

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et le grand trou noir où je voulais me noyer l’autre lune c’est là que je veux pêcher maintenant la langue maléfique de la nuit en son immobile verrition!56

Poetry as the final incarnation of the maelstrom.

56 [bind my black vibration to the very navel of the world Bind, bind me, bitter brotherhood Then, strangling me with your lasso of stars rise, Dove rise rise rise […] And the great black hole where a moon ago I wanted to drown It is there I will now fish the malevolent tongue of the night in its immobile veerition!] Cahier, 212/55–7. Eshleman and Smith note that Césaire coined verrition using the Latin verb ‘verri’, which means to ‘sweep’, ‘to scrape a surface’, ‘to scan’. Mireille Rosello’s interesting proposal of ‘Revolvolution’ has the merit of carrying an erotic connotation (volv), certainly present here, and it clearly stresses the underlying motion, but it is perhaps too long to translate the final word of the poem. See her translation, 148–9, for a justification of this choice.

Chapter 3

Ontology and Subjectivity: On Césaire’s Late Poetry1

From the outset, Césaire was celebrated as a lyric poet for his Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939), described by Breton as ‘le plus grand monument lyrique de notre temps’.2 Sartre, in his famous ‘Orphée Noir’,3 read Césaire’s poetry as the myth of a pure act of subjectivity: the poet plunged deep inwards to free the black soul and lead her back up to the light, to fight the world of oppression where the self, through colonial alienation and slavery, had been reduced to mere physical existence. Yet, when he published his final, great collection of poems in 1982, moi laminaire …,4 after decades spent writing theatre, history and essays, whilst also pursuing a political career, Césaire’s writing had astonishingly become a poetry of rocks, of the mineral. In this poetry, the self was neither liminaire, liminal to poetic expression, nor luminaire, inspirational, but rather humble and obscure, an i laminaria, named after a long, flat seaweed that may venture far but nonetheless remains attached to its rock. This word could also be read as an adjective, referring, as in fluid mechanics, to the thin, ribbon-like regime of flow of winds and liquids when turbulences are at their weakest. A self half-way between the vegetal and the animal, and thus far from Cartesian freedom, if we remember that in his

1 2 3 4

First published as ‘Césaire volcanique’, L’Esprit Créateur 45/2 (Summer 2005), 52–61. André Breton, ‘Martinique charmeuse de serpents. Un Grand poète noir’, Tropiques 11 (May 1944), 122. Written as a preface to Léopold Sédar Senghor, Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948). First edition: moi, laminaire (Paris: Seuil, 1982); repr. in PTED, 607–712. These poems were written over a long period, since some of them were published in the 1976 Désormeaux edition of the complete works. For further discussion of the composition and publication history of this collection, see PTED, 609 sq.

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correspondence with the Marquess of Newcastle, Descartes used oysters and sea-sponges to ascertain by contrast the privilege of human reason, noting that we cannot grant a soul to animals who look like us but do not have language, because if we did so we would also have to grant one to these creatures, so obviously imperfect.5 With this image of a self moved by oceanic undercurrents, Césaire remained within the surrealist inspiration of the early period, although we are far here from the turbulences of the inner infinite that mescaline had revealed to Michaux, Artaud, or Sartre. These poems depict a world devoid of human beings and even, for the most part, of biological life, a world much closer to that of poets like Dupin and Du Bouchet in the same period. However, it would be reductive to view this evolution of Césaire’s writing simply in terms of the general evolution in poetry written in French during the period away from Surrealism, or to reduce it to the disappointment that followed hopes placed in the decolonisation process. These are significant factors,6 but there is also in these final texts the quintessence of a continuous reflection on writing itself, which had in fact always been presented by Césaire, in his reflexive moments, in material terms. More precisely, Césaire presented poetry throughout his writing life in geological terms, and this through a singular image of poetry as volcano. What we are witnessing here is a late poetic reflection on the nature of this volcanic process that Césaire considers poetry to be; in other words, something of an ars poetica. The theme of the volcano is recurrent throughout Césaire’s work and always carries positive connotations, which is astonishing in a writer born ten years after the 1902 eruption of Mount Pelée in the North of Martinique,

5 6

Letter of 23 November 1646, in René Descartes, Œuvres philosophiques, ed. Ferdinand Alquié, 3 vols (Paris: Garnier, 1973), III, 696. ‘Ainsi va ce livre, entre soleil et ombre, entre montagne et mangrove, entre chien et loup, claudiquant et binaire. Le temps aussi de régler leur compte à quelques fantasmes et à quelques fantômes’ [Such is this book, between sun and shadow, between mountain and mangrove swamp, between dawn and dusk, lame and divided. Time also to settle one’s account with a few phantoms and a few ghosts] PTED, 617/ LDP, 81.

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which instantly destroyed Saint-Pierre, the old colonial capital known as le Paris des Antilles, together with its thirty thousand inhabitants, incinerated by a ‘nuée ardente’: a pyroclastic flow or current of gases reaching temperatures of a thousand degrees Celsius. Sometimes Césaire refers to volcanoes that have fallen silent, but this is to use them as symbols of an alienated consciousness, empty of all capacity towards insurrection, literally withdrawn, repliée sur elle–même, solely preoccupied with the repetitive unfolding of daily life, le quotidien, l’ordinaire, or what he calls la conditionmangrove [mangrove-syndrome]: On tourne en rond. Autour du pot. […] On peut très bien survivre mou en prenant assise sur la vase commensale L’allure est des forêts. La dodine Celle du balancement des marées7

A mangrove is a swamp, common in coastal areas on the South of the island, and in Césaire’s work it is always depicted as a space of decomposition – not as a place of escape or resourcing, nor as a metaphor for intermingling and métissage, as is the case in the later Créolité literature. Tourner autour du pot [beating around the bush], as is often the case in Césaire, joins a temporal connotation (repetition of circular motion) with a spatial one (enclosure), in order to express hesitation, alienation from a free will (a repetitive movement but not a spiralling one, as in verrition, the final word of the Cahier).8 So too does the swaying movement of trees in the forest 7 [Round and round we go. Around the pot. […] We can survive quite well limp by anchoring ourselves in the commensal mud The look is that of forests. The rocking that of the balancing of the tides] PTED, 633/LDP, 116. 8 See Appendix B infra on the question of translating Césaire’s neologisms.

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in the wind, as well as that of the rocking chair (dodine), or of the tides. Conversely, if the volcano is a geological and often geographical reality, as with Mount Pelée, it is much more than décor or a thematic element in a regionalist or exotic poetry; it is a centre around which Césaire’s poetic effort seems to revolve, object and form of the poetic activity itself. In the text used as a preface to the volume of his complete poetry, Césaire wrote: Alors quid de la poésie ? Il faut toujours y revenir: surgie du vide intérieur, comme un volcan qui émerge du chaos primitif, c’est notre lieu de force; la situation éminente d’où l’on somme; magie; magie.9

Surgie: surrection, event, verticality, imminence and eminence, hence the idea of magic (another poem in the collection is entitled ‘mot-macumba’). Something is summoned out of nothing, out of interiority, as void or nothingness. In a poem entitled ‘Sommation’ (‘summoning’, but also ‘warning shot’), published in Corps perdu – the 1950 collection that marked the transition from the Cahier period towards a more ontological use of surrealist imagery10 – Césaire wrote: Je chante toute chose plus belle la chancellerie du feu la chancellerie de l’eau une grande culbute de promontoires et d’étoiles une montagne qui se délite en orgie d’îles en arbres chaleureux

9

10

[So what of poetry? One must always return to it: surging from the inner void, like a volcano emerging from the primal chaos, it is our source of strength, the preeminent place from which to summon, magic, magic.] Extract from a letter to Lilyan Kesteloot, reproduced in Aimé Césaire, La Poésie, ed. Daniel Maximin and Gilles Carpentier (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 6. PTED, 479–519. For ‘Sommation’, see 506–7. Césaire and Picasso went on to make of this collection one of the great livres d’artistes of the twentieth century: Aimé Césaire and Pablo Picasso, Corps Perdu (Paris: Fragrance, 1950).

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les mains froidement calmes du soleil sur la tête sauvage d’une ville détruite11

In the early years of Tropiques, Césaire discovered in Mallarmé this summoning of reality as a function of poetry,12 a notion perhaps best expressed by Manet in the formula he had chosen for the letterhead he used when writing to Mallarmé: ‘Tout arrive’, the whole of what there is at a given moment in the end only happens. But at the same time, this happening is of the essence of the miracle,13 hence the exclamation ‘tout arrive!’, anything can happen.14 In one of the last poems Césaire published, in 1989, in Michel Deguy’s journal Po&sie, poetry was defined as Dire d’un délire alliant l’univers tout entier à la surrection d’un rocher.15

11

[I sing all things more beautiful



the chancellery of fire the chancellery of water



a huge somersault of promontories



and stars



a mountain exfoliating into an orgy of islands into glowing trees

the coldly calm hands of the sun over the wild head of a destroyed city] PTED, 506/TCP, 249. 12 See his article ‘Vues sur Mallarmé’, first published in Tropiques 5 (April 1942), 52–61; repr. in PTED, 1329–36. 13 On Césaire’s relationship with Surrealism at the end of World War II and the genesis of Les Armes miraculeuses, see Pierre Laforgue’s presentation in PTED, 223. 14 On this motto, see Dominique Fourcade, Est-ce que j’peux placer un mot? (Paris: P. O. L., 2001), 59. Part of this text was published separately under the title Tout arrive (Paris: Michel Chandeigne, 2000). 15 ‘Configurations’, published in La Poésie and PTED, 739–41, as part of the collection ‘Comme un malentendu de salut’. On this collection, see PTED, 715.

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Poetry in its dire would convey the experience of the birth of the whole in the singular, an experience which used to be the preserve of possession or mystic delirium. In his essays too, Césaire defined poetry as a cosmogony. For instance, in an address he gave in 1944 to the Congrès de Philosophie de Port-au-Prince (Haiti), of which the theme was ‘knowledge’: Revenons au poète … Gros du monde, le poète parle. Il parle et sa langue ramène le langage à l’état pur. État pur, je veux dire soumis non pas à l’habitude ou à la pensée mais à la seule poussée du cosmos. Le mot du poète, le mot primitif : dessin rupestre dans la matière sonore. La phrase du poète : la phrase primitive ; univers joué et mimé. Et parce que dans tout poème vrai, le poète joue le jeu du monde, le poète vrai souhaite abandonner le mot à ses libres associations, sûr que c’est en définitive l’abandonner à la dictée de l’univers.16

So, this poetry is a poetry of revolt or insurrection, of the refusal of a certain order: that organisation of human space and time which culminated in the regulated universe of slavery and the plantation, and which was continued, for Césaire, in twentieth-century concentration camps,17 where space inhabits you totally, taking over temporality and consciousness without any remainder; where the structure of the habitation (the original name of the plantation)18 makes life a habitus. But it is that, a poetry of rebellion, only because it asks from beginning to end the question of 16 17 18

[Let us return to the poet … Pregnant with the world, the poet speaks. He speaks, and his tongue restores language to a pure state. Pure state, I mean to say no longer submitted to habit or thought, but to the sole thrust of the cosmos. The poet’s word, the primitive word: a cave drawing in sonorous form. The poet’s sentence, the primitive sentence: a universe played out and copied. And because in every true poem, the poet plays the game of the world, the true poet hopes to abandon the word to its free associations, certain that to do so is to definitively abandon it to the dictation of the universe.] Poésie et connaissance (1944), PTED, 1384. Discours sur le colonialisme (1956), PTED, 1443. See Chantal Claverie, ‘Topologie imaginaire de l’Habitation’, in Jean Bernabé, JeanLuc Bonniol, Raphaël Confiant and Gerry L’Etang (eds), Au Visiteur lumineux:

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the sudden appearance of something out of nothing or out of a primitive chaos, an insurrection which is both birth and act of consciousness: pays natal would be the name of such a consciousness of existence. Hence the importance of the image of the volcano, as one of those rare natural objects (the sun is another, present in the Cahier as ‘chair ardente du ciel’) that gives immediately the experience of a life of the mineral, a life before the repetitive unfolding of life, a conjunction of space, in the form of mineral matter, and pure time, that is pure event: moment of the appearing and configuration of beings (empty space and time without event cannot be imagined). A jolt of matter before life and often against life, and in particular, in Césaire, before and against the life of the cities, petrified in their routines and daily occupations, where the future is predictable and time is projected onto the line of a chronology, whereas in the volcanic eruption, which is the irruption of things themselves, space is subordinated to time and things are defined as ‘plissements’ (folds), ‘coulées’ (slides), ‘éboulis’ (screes). The first things can only be named by verbs. Two models of existence correspond to this ontology: la conditionmangrove (mangrove-syndrome) and the volcanic event, or the geographic and the geologic, and the conflict of these models is what generates writing. Poetry, that is, volcanic writing, as opposed to the continuity that prose imposes on time, stages the conflict of two experiences of time, or temporalités. One is repetitive and composed of homogeneous parts, the succession of instants on a linear axis, or time conceived by means of a spatial representation. The other, chronic and chthonic, is the cosmic time, the time of origin and end, which Césaire calls in moi, laminaire …, le Grand Temps, perhaps recalling Plato’s definition of time in the Timaeus. The effort of the poet consists in tearing the reader away from ‘ordinary’ vision, to force a confrontation with rocks, not at all as inert beings, but rather as éclats, bursts, sparks and splinters, signs or residues of the extraordinary creation

Des îles créoles aux sociétés plurielles, Mélanges offerts à Jean Benoist (Petit-Bourg, Guadeloupe: Ibis Rouge, 2000).

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of which they are a part. Thus the rock that composes the morne (the name for hills in the Antilles) is described as frémissante, trembling, quivering: mornes mornes mâles mornes femelles tendres cous d’animaux aussi frémissant au repos mornes miens mornes témoins effort19

In the next poem in the collection, called ‘Torpeur de l’histoire’, the silence of the volcano measures human unhappiness. To survive according to the clepsydra, drop by drop, is to live in a time that has been mapped onto space, a fragmentary time, partes extra partes, as Bergson wrote in Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience,20 without the possibility of beginning or end, without variations of intensity: entre deux bouffées d’oiseaux personnels l’hébétude et la route à mi-côte gluante d’un sperme cétacé le malheur au loin de l’homme se mesure aux silences de ce volcan qui survit en clepsydre aux débris de son courage21

19 [mornes male mornes female mornes also tender necks of animals quivering at rest mornes mine mornes witnesses effort] PTED, 651/LDP, 153. 20 The influence of Bergson’s Essai of 1899 on Senghor is well documented. The distinction between reason and intuition is at the heart of Senghor’s metaphysics. Césaire probably read Bergson as a student, too, but this influence is more to be found in his conception of historical time as invention. 21 [between two puffs of personal birds hebetude and the road halfway up gluey with whale sperm calamity at a distance from man can be measured by the silences

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In Corps perdu, Césaire already spoke of a victory of time over space: l’Espace vaincu le Temps vainqueur moi j’aime le temps le temps est nocturne et quand l’Espace galope qui me livre le Temps revient qui me délivre le Temps le Temps la Liberté ô claie sans venaison qui m’appelle intègre natal solennel22

22

of this volcano that survives clepsydra-like in the debris of its courage] PTED, 652/LDP, 155. [Space conquered Time the conqueror



me I like time time is nocturnal



and when Space galloping gives me up Time comes back to set me free

Time  Time Freedom O creel without venison summoning me whole

native

solemn] PTED, 507/TCP, 249.

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The vortex of the volcano – vortex in the sense of Ezra Pound, an imagestructure which underpins and engenders a proliferation of images, or a matrix of forms of consciousness – thus casts an unexpected light on the poetry of Césaire, as a poetry of space and matter perceived in their genesis. Each poem in moi, laminaire … seems an attempt at revealing matter not as an inert datum, but as both the result and the sign of a prodigious pulsation. For instance, in ‘Calendrier lagunaire’: J’habite du basalte non une coulée mais de la lave le mascaret qui remonte la valleuse à toute allure […] j’habite la débâcle j’habite le pan d’un grand désastre j’habite le plus souvent le pis le plus sec Du piton le plus efflanqué – la louve de ces nuages –23

Later on, poetry, linked to the quest for opalescence in flint stone or obsidian, stones which produce or contain fire or light, is defined as the theft or ravishing of words, a breaking into language: les chercheurs de silex les testeurs d’obsidienne ceux qui suivent jusqu’à l’opalescence l’invasion de l’opacité les créateurs d’espace allons les ravisseurs du Mot les détrousseurs de la Parole24 23 [i inhabit not a flow of basalt but the tidal wave of the lava that runs back up the gulch at full speed […] i inhabit the debacle i inhabit the surface of a great disaster i inhabit most often the driest udder of the skinniest piton – the she-wolf of these clouds – ] PTED, 618–19/LDP, 83–5. 24 [the flint hunters the obsidian assayers

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For Césaire, political thought is never foreign to poetry, with Fanon thus appearing in this collection as a flint warrior, in a poem entitled ‘par tous mots guerrier-silex’ (flint warrior through all words’), which forms part of a series of tombeaux or homages to dead artist and poet-friends. His words too are referred to the mineral:25 Aurore ozone zone orogène par quelques-uns des mots obsédant une torpeur et l’accueil et l’éveil de chacun de nos maux je t’énonce FANON tu rayes le fer tu rayes le barreau des prisons tu rayes le regard des bourreaux guerrier-silex vomi par la gueule du serpent de la mangrove26 25

those who follow to opalescence the invasion of opacity the creators of space

come off it the abductors of the Word the highwaymen of Speech] PTED, 623/LDP, 95. Césaire might also have had in mind the meaning of the noun ‘fanon’ in French, a whalebone. 26 [aurora ozone orogenic zone by some of the words obsessing a torpor and the welcome and awakening of each one of our hurts i enunciate you FANON you strike out iron you strike out prison bars you strike out the gaze of torturers flint warrior vomited by the mug of the mangrove serpent] PTED, 624/LDP, 97–9.

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Fanon’s words, his demands, departures and ruptures, generate the sensitive zone of an eroticised dawn. It is not known whether Fanon sent the manuscripts of his plays to Césaire, whose poetry and theatre he admired. In any case, there is a striking resonance here with Les Mains parallèles and its dialectics of pure light and dark torpor.27 Finally, cosmology, geology and geography come together in a text reflective of the history of twentieth-century writing in the Antilles (and probably of Césaire’s poetic life): a poem entitled ‘sentiments et ressentiments des mots’ (sentiments and resentments of words). The first moment is a turn to epic writing, in which words, as ‘archanges du Grand Temps’ and thus far ‘prisonniers d’un protocole sidéral’,28 seem to come down to earth and stand at the threshold of shacks. In the second, Surrealist phase, words function as ‘capteurs solaires du désir’,29 in anticipation of cold times to come. Césaire’s priority is made clear in a statement reaffirming the superiority of the intensive over an abstract, spatialised time: ‘dévoltages du Temps’ should not resist ‘survoltages du Sang’.30 But in the end, history is such that tumbling or coming down hard (‘dévaler dur’) to face the mangrove again is inevitable: dévaler dur contourner aux lieux choisis de la gravité historique quelques abîmes revenir dans cette mangrove buisson de lèvres et de mancenilliers encore toujours encore c’est la rancœur des mots qui nous guide leur odeur perfide (bavure faite de l’intime amitié de nos blessures comme leur rage n’était que la recristallisation d’incendies de ghettos)31

The two plays authored by Fanon, L’Œil se noie and Les Mains parallèles, have been published for the first time in EAL, 65–133. See also Robert Young’s introduction to these works in the same volume, 15–64. 28 [archangels of Great Time], [prisoners of a sideral protocol] 29 [solar captors of desire] 30 [voltage reductions of Time], [voltage boosting of the Blood] 31 [to come down hard to pass around a few abysses

27

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The final evocation of the death to come seems a rereading of the opening geography of the Cahier: l’abandon est plus loin au crépuscule sur le sable mal sade et fade et l’atroce rancune de salive ravalée du ressac32

In the opposition of the volcano and the mangrove, the volcano is the temporarily solidified verb of being, the unmistakable sign of the constant birth of matter, even when it is sleeping.33 From this point of view, Césaire’s poetry is no less a rhéisme than that of St John Perse.34 But we should not forget that, for Césaire, if the self is constantly abolished into the in places chosen for their historical weight to return to this mangrove shrubbery of lips of manchineels again and ever again it is the rancor of words that guides us their perfidious smell (slime made from the intimate friendship of our wounds just as their rage was merely the recrystallization of ghetto fires)] PTED, 626/LDP, 103–5. 32 [surrender is more distant at dusk on the sand sapid and insipid evil the atrocious spite of saliva reswallowed by the surf ] PTED, 627/LDP, 105. 33 ‘Désespérer ce serait démissionner, se croiser les bras, Et même si en poésie je suis resté longtemps sans publier, je n’ai jamais cessé d’être en activité comme un volcan. D’ailleurs, je dis souvent que ma poésie est “péléenne”, à cause de la montagne Pelée, ce volcan de la Martinique qui explosa en 1902. La montagne Pelée était considérée comme un volcan éteint. Or, pas du tout. Ma poésie c’est un peu pareil : ça s’accumule, ça s’accumule et, un beau jour, ça explose’ [To despair would be to stand down, to sit back. And even if in poetry I went a long time without publishing, I have never ceased to be in a state of activity as a volcano remains active. Besides, I often say that my poetry is ‘Pelean’, because of Mount Pelée, that volcano in Martinique that erupted in 1902. Mount Pelée was considered to be extinct. But that turned out to be very wrong. My poetry is a bit similar: it builds up and builds up and then, one day, it explodes] Aimé Césaire, November 1982 conversation with Pierre Boncenne on moi, laminaire …, in Bernard Pivot (ed.), Écrire, lire et en parler … (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1985), 175. 34 On Perse’s ‘rhéisme’ see Chapter 1, supra.

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multiplicity of the real, it is also reborn through eruptions. Critiques have generally underlined the ambivalence or irony in the astonishing tombeau Césaire wrote for Saint-John Perse, ‘Cérémonie vaudou pour Saint-John Perse …’ [Voodoo Ceremonial for St.-John Perse]. There is here, no doubt, a cruel pastiche of the poet who signals vast landing fields: pour fournir le gîte aux plus grands monarques du monde qui sont en noblesse d’exil et papillons de passage35

However, the difference is truly marked in the dual metaphor of the final valediction to Perse and to a certain form of poetry (‘l’ultime Conquistador’): Césaire calls for the arc of the horizon (or the arc of the Antilles and Central America) to fire up like a chain of volcanoes, or as a sequence of guns on a Spanish Galleon on its last journey: et que l’arc s’embrase et que de l’un à l’autre océan
 les magmas fastueux en volcans se répondent pour de toutes gueules de tous fumants sabords honorer en route pour le grand large l’ultime Conquistador en son dernier voyage36

In the epigraph to the first poem of Corps perdu, the self is multiple from the outset: MOT

35

Parmi moi37

[to provide shelter for the greatest monarchs of the world who are in the nobility of exile and transient butterflies.] PTED, 765/CP, 375. The monarch here is just a butterfly. 36 [and may the arch catch fire and from one ocean to another may the sumptuous magmas in volcanoes answer each other to honor, with all muzzles all portholes smoking, under sail toward the high seas, the ultimate Conquistador on his last voyage] PTED, 766/CP, 375. 37 [WORD Among me] PTED, 490/CP, 229.

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Meanwhile, the epigraph of the central poem, ‘Corps perdu’, turns the name of another volcanic island into a verb denoting the writing of poetry: ‘Moi qui Krakatoa’ [I who Krakatoa]. The sexual eruption of existence coincides with the disaggregation of the self: et par mes branches déchiquetées et par le jet insolent de mon fût blessé et solennel je commanderai aux îles d’exister38

The movement of poetry is to consider being as existing ‘à corps perdu’, a phrase meaning something like ‘headlong’, or ‘without paying attention to risk’. Within the imagery of the poem, bodies must be perceived as what remains of the élan, the momentum, or the bond.39 The preface to moi, laminaire indicates clearly the purpose of poetry, which is to adopt in the present the point of view of a genesis always begun again, of a continuous creation. Otherwise, Le non-temps impose au temps la tyrannie de sa spatialité.40

In this effort to revert the retrospective, substantialist illusion that is produced by what exists, and to manifest time directly in things, beyond the mask of their sheer physical existence, the living volcano, the insurrection or permanent revolution of matter, became the poetic image par excellence.41 38

[and with my branches torn to shreds and with the insolent jet of my wounded and solemn shaft

I shall command the islands to exist] PTED, 409/TCP, 245. 39 As in Char’s aphorism about latter-day resistance, or about what becomes of the avant-gardes: ‘Être du bond, n’être pas du festin, son épilogue’. Feuillets d’Hypnos, 197, in Œuvres Complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 222. 40 [Nontime imposes on time the tyranny of its spatiality] PTED, 617/LDP, 81. 41 Fanon’s thought displays a strikingly similar suspicion vis-à-vis ‘pensée spatialisée’, formulated even in his medical dissertation: ‘[Notre] insatisfaction provient de ce que notre pensée n’arrive point à se libérer de l’anatomo-clinique. Nous pensons organes et lésions focales quand il faudrait penser fonctions et désintégrations. Notre optique médicale est spatiale, alors qu’elle devrait de plus en plus se temporaliser’

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* There are echoes here of the evolution of metropolitan poetry in the postwar period, which moved away from the self, even in its unconscious drives, and rejected Breton’s interest in psychoanalysis. One could consider, for instance, the poetry of Bonnefoy, Du Bouchet and particularly Dupin, whose collection Suites Basaltiques42 illustrates a poetics of the mineral: anfractuosités (crevices), éboulis (scree), éclats de silex (sparks and splinters of flint stone), embrasement (blaze) compared to embrasure, that is an opening or a window onto being, well beyond what is seen and yet nothing other than what is visible. Did Césaire therefore abandon in his later texts the humanist cry of négritude, in favour of a poetry devoid of living beings? If so, he would have twice been unconsciously determined by the point of view of the coloniser. First, as the writers of the créolité movement insisted, his call to Africa ignored that the cultural métissage of the Antilles exemplified the obsolescence of all models of origin and roots. In this case, such a call ultimately derived from the fascination of the West for the primitive.43 The second illusion would be a neo-Heideggerian fascination with being [Our dissatisfaction stems from the fact that our thought fails to free itself from the anatomo-clinical [view]. We think in terms of organs and focal lesions when we ought to think in terms of functions and disintegrations. Our medical perspective is spatial when it ought to be more and more temporalised.] ‘Altérations mentales, modifications caractérielles, troubles psychiques et déficit intellectuel dans l’hérédodégénération spino-cérébelleuse. À propos d’un cas de maladie de Friedreich avec délire de possession’, in EAL, 178. 42 Jacques Dupin, L’embrasure, preceded by Gravir and followed by La Ligne de rupture and L’Onglée (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 15–27. 43 See ‘The Heart of the Black Race’, Chapter 4, infra. Fanon, who abundantly quotes anti-colonial passages in Césaire’s writings, nevertheless parodied the metaphysics of negritude: ‘Eia! le tam-tam baragouine le message cosmique. Seul le nègre est capable de le transmettre, d’en déchiffrer le sens, la portée. À cheval sur le monde, les talons vigoureux contre les flancs du monde, je lustre l’encolure du monde, tel le sacrificateur l’entre-deux yeux de la victime’ [Eia ! The drums jabber out the cosmic message. Only the black man is capable of conveying it, of deciphering its meaning and impact. Astride the world, my heels digging into its flanks, I rub the neck of the world like the high priest rubbing between the eyes of his sacrificial victim] PNMB, 164/103–4.

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beyond beings, perhaps again imported from the métropole: a poetry devoid of all living beings, human or otherwise, celebrating exclusively the nuée ardente of the birth of being out of nothingness. Such readings fail to see the continuity of Césaire’s thought. At the heart of the poetry of négritude, as well as in his theatre (in particuliar Et les chiens se taisaient) and his political thought, was always present the model of the volcano, or the opposition between the perception of a ‘pulsation’ in the being of singular things, of which poetic subjectivity would be the recovery or the reinvention, and the mechanical and spatialised conception of existence, partes extra partes, as material for exploitation, physical and human, where subjectivity would only arise through its supposed interests. As we have seen in the preceding chapters, the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal is in effect organised thematically on a tension between the fragmentary, the discrete in space and time, and a sweeping movement of gathering and deepening, a movement symbolised by the recurrent image of the spiral, the cyclone (trombe), or, at the very end of the Cahier, navel and vibration, ‘lasso d’étoiles’, and the famous ‘verrition’. What this Black Orpheus spirals up to, away from the fragmentation of a bleak daybreak, is the depth of cosmic night. To summarise what has been shown in the previous chapters, the poem begins with fragmentation in space: Au bout du petit matin bourgeonnant d’anses frêles les Antilles qui ont faim, les Antilles grêlées de petite vérole, les Antilles dynamitées d’alcool, échouées dans la boue de cette baie, dans la poussière de cette ville sinistrement échouées.44

Far from a new dawn, first light marks both an end in time and, as this end point in time is always spatially determined (‘anses frêles’, ‘ville plate’, ‘morne accroupi’, ‘échouage hétéroclite’, ‘boue’, ‘poussière’, etc.), an enclosure in space: no future, no exit. Indicators of fragmentation in space, such as ‘bourgeonnant’, ‘grêlées’, ‘dynamitées’, anticipate ‘échouées’ (stranded). The present is always an end here, but only as the result of exhausted, contingent

44 [At the end of first light burgeoning with frail coves the hungry Antilles, the Antilles pitted with smallpox, the Antilles dynamited by alcohol, stranded in the mud of this bay, in the dust of this town sinisterly stranded.] PTED, 186/3.

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processes; never as an aim that would have unified a historical time. Being purposeless, directionless, the temporal sequence is discrete, a mere succession of instants, or an ‘échouage hétéroclite’ [disparate wreckage], all sense of historical bearings, or points of departure, having been lost. Hence the fragmentation in time underlined by the participial mood: […] une vieille misère pourrissant sous le soleil, silencieusement ; un vieux silence crevant de pustules tièdes, l’affreuse inanité de notre raison d’être.45

This comparison of the geography of the island to the flotsam and jetsam of a shipwreck, which was in the Cahier the background of the call to revolt, becomes the theme of Césaire’s late poetry, where the aqueous element is essentially corruption. Astonishingly, moi, laminaire … contains a ‘song of the seahorse’ (‘chanson de l’hippocampe’), which follows the poem on the mangrove-syndrome and precedes one called ‘wreckage’ (‘épaves’), where the impossibility of a poetic voice (compared to ‘réels chevaux hennissant’)46 is associated with Fatras de houles de criques d’herbes froissées Leur odeur seule transmission de la vomissure47

The poet sees himself galloping away from the sea astride the seahorse: Un jour rétif Nous t’enfourcherons48

In the Cahier, fragmented and linear temporality, with its accompanying state of mindlessness (abrutissement) or alienation, the inability

45

[an aged poverty rotting under the sun, silently; an aged silence bursting with tepid pustules the dreadful inanity of our raison d’être] PTED, 186/3. 46 [real horses neighing] PTED, 630/LDP, 111. 47 [jumble of swells of coves of crumpled grasses their smell sole sure transmission of the vomit] PTED, 630/LDP, 111. 48 [one restive day we shall mount you] PTED, 629/LDP, 109.

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to stand, to reflect and the absence of any ‘situation éminente d’où l’on somme’, was overcome in the secret moments where the fragmentary was reappropriated in the spiralling motion symbolised by the neologism verrition. The spiral of the ‘boudin’ (blood sausage) on Christmas night was compared to the ‘enroulement en volubile’ (twining in coils) of joyful voices and continued in the final metaphor of the ‘lasso d’étoiles’ (lasso of stars).49 The poet’s voice was very much portrayed then as the voice of the prophet of a people to come, its task being to extend to collective consciousness the infinite attempt at a reappropriation of the fragmentary, in order to give it a historical sense. So the return to the native land was not so much a rediscovery of the subject in childhood memories as the call for a continuous process of subjectivation, an intimate politics pursued through language. The point of this lyricism was not a return to a lost essence of the self, beyond the repetitive, the multiple and the fragmentary, mud and rot of alienation, but an attempt at seizing the present as birth. This is why négritude was never defined as a racial or even cultural essence then, as is often the case with Senghor, but geologically: elle plonge dans la chair rouge du sol elle plonge dans la chair ardente du ciel50

The sun is now perceived as volcanic fire, not as a marker of time, and, by opposition to the geometrical or geographical point of view of the white world, the inventor of the compass and of navigation, the world of négritude is presence: chair de la chair du monde palpitant du mouvement même du monde !51

49 See supra Chapter 2. 50 [it takes root in the red flesh of the soil it takes root in the ardent flesh of the sky] PTED, 203/36. 51 [flesh of the world’s flesh pulsating with the very motion of the world!] PTED, 204/36.

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So rather than an opposition between the two periods, one lyrical and subjective, the other more ontological or mineral, there is continuity and reflection on what had been initially characterised as lyricism, a continuity visible in the later collections, where the tension of the vortex and the heteroclite reappears: avec des lassos lacérés avec des mailles forcées de cadène avec des ossements de murènes avec des fouets arrachés avec des conques marines avec des drapeaux et des tombes dépareillées par rhombes et trombes Te bâtir 

‘maillon de la cadène’52

It is true that looking back on a long and difficult political life in 1976, Césaire saw a desolate landscape: marcher non sans entêtement à travers ce pays sans cartes dont la décomposition périphérique aura épargné je présume l’indubitable corps ou cœur sidéral marcher sur la gueule pas tellement bien ourlée des volcans  ‘j’ai guidé du troupeau la longue transhumance’53

52 [with lacerate lassos with forced links of the chain with bones of morays with torn-away whips with sea conches with flags and mismatched tombs by rhombuses and waterspouts to build thee] PTED, 637/LDP, 125. 53 [to walk not without stubborness through this uncharted land whose peripheral decomposition will have spared i presume the indubitable body or sidereal heart

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However, the last poem in Comme un malentendu de salut, the final collection, repeats the parallel portrait of the poetic voice and the surrection of an island: Rien ne délivre jamais que l’obscurité du dire Dire de pudeur et d’impudeur Dire de la parole dure. Enroulement de la grande soif d’être Spirale du grand besoin et du grand retour d’être nœud d’algues et d’entrailles nœud du flot et du jusant d’être. ‘Configurations’54

So what is the point of this geological or telluric obsession? Can it be reduced to a geographical origin, the proximity to a volcano? Would Césaire be the regionalist poet of a volcanic island, as Char was sometimes characterised as a provençal poet? The founders of the Créolité movement and particularly Raphaël Confiant, but also, to a limited extent, Glissant, have objected that négritude, as a metaphysical vision, missed real history, or rather histories and concrete memories.55 That what was at stake was not a polar opposition between Africa and the West, geo-logy and geometry (where logos is opposed to reason), between an ontological and an to walk on the rather clumsily rimmed muzzles of volcanoes] PTED, 638/LDP, 127. 54 [Nothing ever frees but the obscurity of the word

The word of modesty and immodesty The word of hard speech.

55

Encoilment of the great thirst for being spiral of the great need and the great return of being knot of algae and entrails knot of the flow and the ebb tide of being.] PTED, 741. See Édouard Glissant, Le discours antillais (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), and Raphaël Confiant, Aimé Césaire: une traversée paradoxale du siècle (Paris: Stock, 1993).

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ontic point of view, in the terms of Heidegger, or a Bergsonian opposition between duration and abstract, repetitive, linear and scientific time. They argued that the new world required a new ontology, where what is at stake is a multiplicity of singular meetings, a mondialité or tout-monde, where at each of its points the world is present in all its differences, however violently that was resisted in return by atavistic thoughts. An alter-world made up of interactions and differences, of becomings rather insurrections, narrations rather than erections. So they replaced the image of the coulée de lave, lava flow, with that of the trace or the lézarde, the crack, in Deleuzian terms. However, it is not clear that such a debate was meaningful for Césaire, since what he had in mind was not History, if only because what this very history showed was devastation, disaster, that is the loss of bearings and of memory. History opened only onto the recovery of memory and prose. Rather, his problem was that of Sartre or Fanon: that of a finally dis-alienated consciousness, a consciousness of the present, which he calls a poetic or volcanic subjectivity, or rather a ‘surjectivity’ or sursaut (jolt), burst or spurt, a process of subjectivation that is eminently mysterious because, as Sartre noted, it cannot just be derived from a past and thus is necessarily born at each instant from a void, as, for Césaire, is the earth.

Appendices

A A Commentary on Négritude in Cahier d’un retour au pays natal1 ô lumière amicale2 ô fraîche source de la lumière ceux qui n’ont inventé ni la poudre ni la boussole ceux qui n’ont jamais su dompter la vapeur ni l’électricité ceux qui n’ont exploré ni les mers ni le ciel

1 2

5

Originally published in Twentieth-Century French Poetry: A Critical Anthology, ed. Hugues Azérad and Peter Collier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 123–32. The poem was written in 1939 and revised several times. This passage, quoted here in the 1956 Présence Africaine edition, introduces ‘négritude’ for the first time and was preceded by two different versions of the text, in the 1939 Volontés edition (PTED, 85–6) and the 1947 Brentano’s edition (PTED, 124). Following the line: ‘Mais quel étrange orgueil tout soudain m’illumine?’ (PTED, 85, 119, 168, 202), Césaire inserted several, different stanzas. Such variation shows how important for Césaire the transition to this new phase of the text was.

Volontés (1939):   Tiède petit matin de chaleurs et de peurs ancestrales par dessus bord mes richesses pérégrines par dessus bord mes faussetés authentiques

Mais quel étrange orgueil tout soudain m’illumine ?



O lumière amicale […]



Brentano’s (1947):

120 Appendices mais ceux sans qui la terre ne serait pas la terre gibbosité d’autant plus bienfaisante que la terre déserte davantage la terre silo où se préserve et mûrit ce que la terre a de plus terre ma négritude n’est pas une pierre, sa surdité ruée contre la clameur du jour ma négritude n’est pas une taie d’eau morte sur l’œil mort de la terre ma négritude n’est ni une tour ni une cathédrale elle plonge dans la chair rouge du sol elle plonge dans la chair ardente du ciel elle troue l’accablement opaque de sa droite patience.

10

15

Eia pour le Kaïlcédrat royal ! Eia pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien inventé pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien exploré pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien dompté mais ils s’abandonnent, saisis, à l’essence de toute chose ignorants des surfaces mais saisis par le mouvement de toute chose insoucieux de dompter, mais jouant le jeu du monde véritablement les fils aînés du monde poreux à tous les souffles du monde aire fraternelle de tous les souffles du monde lit sans drain de toutes les eaux du monde étincelle du feu sacré du monde chair de la chair du monde palpitant du mouvement même du monde ! Tiède petit matin de vertus ancestrales



20

25

Au bout du petit matin – qui tire ses petites langues et lèche avec application chaque fruit et chaque minute – l’été – je vois passer par chaque pore de l’air de longues aiguilles qui sont des poissons volants très violents À travers une tabagie de fenêtres et une fumée de dentelles des oiseaux qui parlent en défaisant leur gilet écarlate. Puis la Lumière en éphèbe. Puis le Noir en taureau. Guerriers. Ils échangent un long regard d’amants brefs et se tuent dans une dernière passe de la muleta. Ô lumière amicale […]

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Sang ! Sang ! tout notre sang ému par le cœur mâle du soleil ceux qui savent la féminité de la lune au corps d’huile l’exaltation réconciliée de l’antilope et de l’étoile ceux dont la survie chemine en la germination de l’herbe ! Eia parfait cercle du monde et close concordance !

30

Écoutez le monde blanc horriblement las de son effort immense ses articulations rebelles craquer sous les étoiles dures ses raideurs d’acier bleu transperçant la chair mystique écoute ses victoires proditoires trompeter ses défaites écoute aux alibis grandioses son piètre trébuchement

35

40

Pitié pour nos vainqueurs omniscients et naïfs ! Eia pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien inventé pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien exploré pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien dompté Eia pour la joie Eia pour l’amour Eia pour la douleur aux pis de larmes réincarnées.

45

et voici au bout de ce petit matin ma prière virile que je n’entende ni les rires ni les cris, les yeux fixés sur cette ville que je prophétise, belle, [donnez-moi le courage du martyr]350 donnez-moi la foi sauvage du sorcier donnez à mes mains puissance de modeler donnez à mon âme la trempe de l’épée je ne me dérobe point. Faites de ma tête une tête de proue et de moi-même, mon cœur, ne faites ni un père, ni un frère, 55 ni un fils, mais le père, mais le frère, mais le fils, ni un mari, mais l’amant de cet unique peuple.

3

This line was only present in the 1939 edition.

122 Appendices Faites-moi rebelle à toute vanité, mais docile à son génie comme le poing à l’allongée du bras ! Faites-moi commissaire de son sang faites-moi dépositaire de son ressentiment faites de moi un homme de terminaison faites de moi un homme d’initiation faites de moi un homme de recueillement mais faites aussi de moi un homme d’ensemencement

60

65

faites de moi l’exécuteur de ces œuvres hautes voici le temps de se ceindre les reins comme un vaillant homme. Mais les faisant, mon cœur, préservez-moi de toute haine ne faites point de moi cet homme de haine pour qui je n’ai que haine car pour me cantonner en cette unique race vous savez pourtant mon amour tyrannique4 vous savez que ce n’est point par haine des autres races que je m’exige bêcheur de cette unique race que ce que je veux c’est pour la faim universelle pour la soif universelle

70

75

la sommer libre enfin de produire de son intimité close la succulence des fruits.

Paris nègre The Cahier stages the birth of a historical consciousness in the colonised, and though it was first published in a fairly obscure journal, Volontés, in Paris in 1939, going unremarked due to the circumstances, it played a significant part in this birth after the war. Césaire often said that he discovered Africa in Paris in 1931, initially in the person of his fellow student Léopold Sédar

4

1939 edition: ‘catholique’ instead of ‘tyrannique’.

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Senghor (1906–2001), who had arrived from Senegal two years earlier, and who became his mentor and friend. Then, in what they called their ‘ardent years’, Césaire not only immersed himself in classical Western culture but also read and met writers, artists and political thinkers who fervently debated ideas of a Negro or African identity. A multiplicity of factors had made it a compelling theme. First, hopes of full citizenship for the subjects of France’s empire in the African colonies had faded, even though the colonial troops who had fought in France during World War I had paid a heavy price. This led to the beginning of a politicisation of those who had stayed, mostly as workers, waiters, servants and dockers. Lacking a true anti-colonial perspective, the French Communist Party failed to capitalise on the situation in the twenties, and Pan-Africanism started to appear as a historical alternative to assimilation as well as class struggle.5 Second, the fascination of the French intelligentsia for art nègre had reached a peak. It had been initiated by artists, notably the Cubists and then the Surrealists, and reinforced by the extraordinary popularity of jazz, brought to France by African American troops. More generally, the celebration of magic and the unconscious, of image and rhythm and of whatever seemed to oppose the previously dominant ideology of rational progress, occupied the intellectual scene. Third, extraordinarily influential thinkers of the time, such as Péguy (1873–1914) and Bergson (1859–1941), had initiated a rebirth of spiritualism, in politics and history as well as in metaphysics and epistemology. In 1941, Césaire published a celebration of Péguy in the first issue of his journal Tropiques.6 Later on, Senghor repeatedly acknowledged his debt to Bergson’s philosophy of time, which questioned the reducibility

5

6

See Philippe Dewitte, Les Mouvements Nègres en France, 1919–1939 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985). In 1919, a Pan-African Congress was organised in Paris by the African American writer and activist W. E. B. Du Bois, the Senegalese deputy Blaise Diagne and the deputies from Guyane and the Antilles. On the chronic incapacity of French communists to deal with colonialism in Africa, see Césaire’s Lettre à Maurice Thorez (1956), PTED, 1500–7. Aimé Césaire, ‘Charles Péguy’, Tropiques 1 (April 1941), 39–40. On the importance of Péguy for the young Césaire, see PTED, 1303–19.

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of experienced time to the mechanisms constructed by science.7 Fourth, social anthropology was becoming one of the dominant social sciences. The well-publicised ethnographic expedition Mission Dakar-Djibouti took place from 1931 to 1933. Meanwhile, the 1931 Exposition Coloniale (which attracted thirty million visitors) celebrated the achievements of colonisation, but could also be seen as the greatest celebration of difference ever. Its organisers represented an intellectual thread that had moved French colonial thought towards the notion of separate development and away from the assimilationism that had dominated until the 1920s (and remained the hope of most of the colonised at the time).8 A significant figure in this transformation had been a colonial administrator, Maurice Delafosse, who had written several volumes on Negro arts and cultures, and was read and highly praised, for instance by African American writers of the ‘Harlem Renaissance’.9 There was political opposition to the Exhibition, and the Surrealists and Communists jointly held an Anti-Colonial Exhibition, but La Revue du Monde Noir praised it because it showed that traditional societies had civilisations. The Revue was published between 1931 and 1932 by the Nardal sisters from Martinique, who held a salon in Clamart, a 7

8

9

See Souleyman Bachir Diagne, ‘Senghor and Bergson’, in Codesria Thirtieth Anniversary Conferences: ‘Canonical Works and Continuing Innovation in African Arts and Humanities’, Accra, 17–19 September 2003 accessed July 2016. But not for intellectuals such as Césaire, who wrote that from the outset the very idea of ‘assimilation’ seemed to him ‘l’aliénation, la chose la plus grave’ [alienation, the worst thing.] Aimé Césaire, Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai, entretiens avec Françoise Vergès (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005), 28. See Benoît de l’Estoile, Le Goût des Autres: de l’Exposition Coloniale aux Arts Premiers (Paris: Flammarion, 2007). The polemic between Delafosse and René Maran is symptomatic of the transformations of the time. In 1922, Maran, a colonial administrator from French Guyana who worked in Africa, was the first black man to win the Goncourt prize for his novel Batouala, an event widely celebrated by the African American press in the US. Its preface violently attacked colonialism and the novel itself drew an equally unflattering picture of colonisers and colonised. The scandal was such that Maran had to resign. Delafosse violently attacked Maran for having no real understanding of African cultures and for judging them from a European point of view.

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leafy Parisian suburb, attended by all the Caribbean, African and African American writers of the period. Finally, one should mention the influence of the German anthropologist Leo Frobenius, who was also published by Aimé and Suzanne Césaire in Tropiques. Frobenius saw Africa as a supremely orderly and aesthetical society. He thus violently opposed the dominant idea of the barbarity of the continent.10 Among the morphologies of cultures that he outlined, Frobenius opposed civilisations that had an antagonistic relationship to the earth to those (‘Ethiopian’ as well as ‘Germanic’) that were linked to plants and the germinative cycle and aimed for a fusion, the first being civilisations of space, the others of time.11 Composition of the Cahier Writing the seventy-page Cahier was such an intense personal experience for Césaire – bringing him close to madness, according to Senghor – that he had to convalesce afterwards. This process of painful metamorphosis of the self through writing is not just what this poem does and manifests but also what it is about, at two levels, personal and collective. At the personal level, it can be read as a sequence of three moments, each inhabited by a contradiction: a) Dismay at the bleakness of colonial reality, pictured as fragmentation in space, decay in time and general insignificance, as opposed to 10 On Frobenius’ ‘Germanic’ vision of Africa, see Christopher L. Miller, Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 11 Christopher L. Miller noted the importance German ‘mysticism’ had for Senghor. A. James Arnold analysed the ideological influence of Frobenius and Péguy on Césaire in ‘Beyond Postcolonial Césaire: Reading Cahier d’un retour au pays natal’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 44/3 (2008), 258–75. For a detailed study of the conditions for the emergence of negritude listed above, see Jean Khalfa, ‘The Heart of the Black Race: Parisian Négritudes in the 1920s’, Wasafiri (December 2008), reproduced Chapter 4 infra and Jean Khalfa, ‘Naissance de la négritude’, Les Temps Modernes 656 (2009), 38–63 accessed September 2016.

126 Appendices

what Césaire calls ‘éclaboussement d’or / des instants favorisés’.12 The development of images is what shapes meaning in Césaire, and in this case the image/matrix of this first aspect, repeated over many stanzas, is that of the island as a disparate wreckage (‘échouage hétéroclite’), seen in the cold light of a bleak dawn, portrayed as end rather than rebirth: ‘au bout du petit matin’. Space is fragmentation and time is either the mechanical repetition of labour, or the organic process of decay or corruption. The opposite image is not about extension and repetition but intensity: the childhood memory of an extraordinary creole Christmas, a single moment in time, but rich with intensities of sound and taste. The young poet’s hope is to reflect such intensities and bring meaning to this people through his writing, and to finally discover ‘la terre où tout est libre et fraternel, ma terre’.13 b) But the alienation of this colonised people, ‘cette foule qui ne sait pas faire foule’,14 is such that no collective consciousness seems possible. The only solution is escape from the island and in this second moment, two fundamental scenes are opposed again. First, the vision of a miserable ‘nègre’, seen in a tramcar, presumably in Paris, described through the degradation produced by abject poverty, and as an animal (a ‘pongo’, an ape). The effect of this vision on the aspiring poet is an ethical awakening: he realises suddenly that he had shared the gaze and the derisive smile of other passengers on the tram. The counter-image is an astonishing reversal, opposing the immemorial, ‘native’ sense of belonging to the world of the ‘nègre’ to the unhappy detachment of the colonisers’ consciousness. This is where our text is situated and where négritude, defined not racially, but as a trait of civilisation, is first introduced and celebrated. c) This elicits a third moment and a new stance: creating a poetry that participates in life. In an extraordinary prayer, the poetic voice assumes the long history of the suffering and oppression of the fundamental

12 13 14

[the golden splashing of privileged moments] Cahier, 188/9. [The earth where everything is free and fraternal, my earth.] Cahier, 192/CP, 45. [This throng that does not know how to throng] Cahier, 187/5.

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race, which is like the genesis of a new poetic voice: ‘je te livre ma conscience et son rythme de chair’.15 Soon the prayer turns into its opposite, a prophetic vision. The poetic voice will produce the consciousness of a new people, who will discover in négritude their hidden identity: ‘et le grand trou noir où je voulais me noyer l’autre lune/c’est là que je veux pêcher maintenant la langue maléfique de la nuit en son immobile verrition!’16 At the same time, the Cahier can be read not just as the performance of an individual spiritual trajectory, but also as the expression of a collective historical phenomenon: the transformation of the consciousness of the colonised. It had been deeply alienated and was unable to define its values other than by reference to those of the coloniser. This is what, for Césaire, distinguished the colonial situation from ‘simple’ exploitation. Here, subjectivity is not just constrained, it is also emptied out from the inside, devoid of autonomy, a phenomenon that the Martiniquais psychiatrist and political thinker Frantz Fanon described meticulously in his Peau noire, masques blancs (1952). Like Césaire, Fanon considered that racism, as the main instrument of alienation, was consubstantial with colonialism. The Cahier expresses a revolt, no longer asking for the respect of the universal human rights that had been alleged to justify Europe’s ‘mission civilisatrice’, but rather in the name of a collective identity. In 1948, Sartre explained this process through the myth of Orpheus. In order to regain the soul they had lost, the colonised had to explore the darkest areas of their selves and history, and learn to celebrate their identity by defiant opposition. Then they would be able to return to the light of the universal on their own terms. He noted that revolution always produces

15 16

[To you I surrender my conscience and its fleshy rhythm] Cahier, 212/55. [And the great black hole where a moon ago I wanted to drown/It is there I will now fish the malevolent tongue of the night in its immobile veerition!] Cahier, 212/57. On the meaning and translation of ‘verrition’, see Jean Khalfa, ‘The Discrete and the Plane: Virtual Communities in Caribbean Poetry in French’, Mantis 1 (December 2000), reproduced supra as Ch. 1. See also Appendix B, infra.

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a new subjectivity, and he saw in subjectivity a ‘rapport de soi-même avec soi, source de toute poésie’.17 The orphic poetry of négritude was therefore for him the only revolutionary poetry of the time. Négritude and the prophetic stance Our excerpt stages the crucial transition between the second and the third moments of the Cahier. It starts with a third-person celebration (‘ô fraîche source de la lumière/ceux qui […]’ (ll. 2–3)) and ends with a first-person prayer: ‘et voici au bout de ce petit matin ma prière virile […]’ (l. 48). The first moment is the revelation of négritude, while the second expresses the desire for a transformation of the poet into a prophet. Négritude is defined as a particular attitude towards the earth and a relationship to the elements of the world, made of belonging in space and acceptance in time. Its opposite is the technological stance of the white world: separation and effort. The second moment translates in historical terms what the first revealed in cosmological ones: it is a prayer for reconciliation of the self with its people, the poet’s voice becoming the repository of this people’s inheritance of suffering and authenticity. It prays to be able to predict and elicit a future: faites de moi un homme de recueillement mais faites aussi de moi un homme d’ensemencement (ll. 64–5)

In the first moment, the main quality of the images is synaesthesia: light comes from a fresh spring (l. 2), the day is clamour (l. 10), the sky ardent flesh (l. 14), dawn is tepid (l. 29), the moon’s body oily (l. 32). This sets the scene for the emphasis on the mystical relationship of these people

17

[the relation of the self with the self; the source of all poetry] Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Orphée noir’, preface to Léopold Sédar Senghor, Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), xv/‘Black Orpheus’, trans. John MacCombie, The Massachusetts Review 6/1 (autumn 1964–winter 1965), 16.

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to the world: ‘Eia parfait cercle du monde et close concordance!’ (l. 34).18 Perceptions normally linked to separation (in sight and hearing) are now physically linked to their objects via traditional associations of colour and touch: not only is the (African) soil red like flesh, but the sky too is red and not translucent blue, because it is ablaze with the fire of the sun, ‘chair ardente’ (l. 14). Red is the colour of négritude. Blue will be the colour of the white world’s steel: ‘ses raideurs d’acier bleu transperçant la chair mystique’ (l. 38). This experience of fusion allows Césaire to turn a historical opposition into an ethical and then metaphysical one. The bearers of négritude are first defined by what they never did: inventer, dompter, explorer – actions which suppose a distancing of the self from the world it maps and upon which it acts, often violently (gunpowder as well as compass). This instrumental or technological relationship to the earth is probably what made history possible,19 but there were also values other than domptage or domination: those of people who belong to their domain of action, and are the product of what they do. In space, négritude is compared to a ‘silo’ (the deep underground grain reserves of traditional societies), or a gibbosité, a hump, an inflection on the spine of the earth, where it ‘plunges’. As for their relationship to time, it is one of abandonment: ‘saisis par le mouvement de toute chose’, an allusion to mythological thought. A whole web of images express visually this opposition of values. For instance the (military) tower and the cathedral of the colonisers symbolise in their verticality a transcendence (of secular or sacred power), the detachment of people from the earth and thus its desertion (l. 7), and while the white world rends and pierces the

18 19

‘Eia’ means ‘courage!’ in classical Greek. A concordance is an index but also a reconciliation of all the apparent contradictions between and within the books of the Bible. A theme Césaire probably encountered in Latin poetry, in Rousseau, in Frobenius, in the contemporary renewal in spiritualism and vitalism, and perhaps in the recently imported philosophy of Martin Heidegger.

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mystical flesh, or is described as blind and stone-deaf, négritude sees life even in the inanimate.20 These visual associations are in turn supported by a multiplicity of syntactic and metrical means. For instance, there is a subtle transition from the objective and collective to the subjective and personal through appositions, a technique often used by epic poets: ‘ceux qui’, ‘gibbosité’, ‘silo’, ‘ma négritude’. ‘Gibbosité’ (l. 7) and ‘silo’ (l. 9) are pivotal points. The closure of the sentence starting with ‘ceux qui’ is delayed by a series of subordinate clauses, so that when we reach these points, highlighted by their position and unexpected technicality, we feel that they celebrate ‘ceux’. But there is no punctuation, and we soon discover that they also start a new sentence and qualify ‘ma négritude’. Retrospectively then, ‘ceux qui …’ is read as qualifying ‘lumière’. It is as if waves of text overlapped rather than succeeded each other. In the process, from the multiple (‘ceux’) through the general (‘silo’) we finally reach the personal and, later on and in a similar way, the first-person plural,: ‘Sang! Sang! Tout notre sang’… / ceux qui’ (l. 30). Africa is not named here21 and négritude is not defined racially (it is not opposed for instance to ‘les blancs’ but to ‘le monde blanc’ (l. 35)). Rather it is a mode of belonging to a world. So this is not just a great ecological celebration, but the attempt to overcome a metaphysical loss – that of the presence of the world to humanity. It is marked in the text by the passage from ‘terre’ to ‘monde’ (which ends each line from 22 to 28) and by the addition to earth of the elements of traditional ontologies: ‘souffles’, ‘eaux’ and ‘feu’. In this mythical, primary civilisation (‘fils aînés du monde’) ‘exaltation’ is ‘réconciliée’ and eros (‘coeur mâle du soleil’ and ‘féminité de la lune’ (ll. 30–1)) is an instance of the general concordance. We are now in a better position to understand the final prayer, where the poet mirrors this stance of acceptance, fusion and exaltation, but this time in his relationship to his people: ‘je m’exige bêcheur de cette unique 20 On Césaire and life in the mineral, see Jean Khalfa, ‘Césaire volcanique’, in L’Esprit Créateur 14/2 (summer 2005), 52–61. Reproduced supra in Ch. 3. 21 Though it is evoked through the red soil, the antelope and the royal cailcedra, a Senegalese tree endowed with medicinal properties and mythological associations, as a tree that forbids lies.

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race’ (l. 73), ‘la sommer libre enfin/de produire de son intimité close/la succulence des fruits’ (l. 79). It is also clear why négritude is not racial hatred but hatred of hatred (l. 69). A similar analysis of the structure of images and syntactic tools can then easily be carried out. But the comparison between the two moments highlights an additional set of tools Césaire uses: sounds and rhythm. Sound is often linked to meaning here. For instance, the arthritis (‘articulations rebelles’ l. 37) of the white world is echoed by a proliferation of harsh consonants, while in the previous stanza, emotion is celebrated by a multiplicity of ‘m’ and ‘n’. Repetitions of similar sound patterns over the long duration of the text show how the poet works on words as acoustic material. In addition, Césaire noted that in his poetry, 2 + 2 = 5, meaning that, as in African music, it was not measured by default in equal units. So here, the lengths and rhythms of the lines mimic the phases of the consciousness they express. For instance, phases of exaltation correspond to lengthening lines and accelerating rhythms (ll. 1 to 7 through 8, or 23 to 28 and then 29). In the second phase (ll. 48–79) we find a much more regular pattern. The imperative dominates the prayer, a certainty has already been gained, and both affects and voice are stabilised. The object was the process of a transformation of consciousness, so here again there is concordance of form and content. Césaire’s prophetic tone has been criticised and may be hard to relate to today. To understand it, one needs to bear in mind the astonishing inner transformation and assertion that this assumption of an African ‘identity’ meant for a Martiniquais at the time. It is useful to bear in mind, as well, the historical function that poetry can assume in the constitution of a potential community under conditions of oppression. The philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari wrote of minority cultures: c’est la littérature qui produit une solidarité active, malgré le scepticisme; et si l’écrivain est en marge ou à l’écart de sa communauté fragile, cette situation le met d’autant plus en mesure d’exprimer une autre communauté potentielle, de forger les moyens d’une autre conscience et d’une autre sensibilité.22

22 [It is literature that produces an active solidarity in spite of scepticism; and if the writer is in the margins or completely outside his or her fragile community, this

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In the prophetic, and in particular the apocalyptic voice, the self disappears into its vision. This astonishing poem turned out to be the programme of Césaire’s life.

B  Deux néologismes de Césaire De la difficulté de traduire la poésie on infère parfois que cette écriture aurait le privilège d’exprimer l’indicible, c’est à dire ce qui ne peut faire l’objet de paraphrase ou de « translation » dans toute langue autre que celle de sa première expression. Or les problèmes concrets de traduction du texte poétique montrent que le difficile n’est pas de traduire des significations mais de transposer les réseaux virtuels de signification inhérents à un texte poétique, la complexité de son processus de ses rapports sémantiques. Ainsi un mot peut avoir un champ sémantique très différent de celui du terme qu’on lui associe usuellement dans une autre langue, mis à part un noyau de sens courant. De ce fait, la syntaxe qui les assemble peut très bien être également compatible avec une série de lectures incompatibles entre elles. Le travail poétique consiste à en profiter pour perturber la linéarité du déroulement sémantique en la dédoublant, usant de multiples instruments sémiotiques, juxtaposant des combinaisons virtuelles de champs sémantiques parfois complexes, entre lesquelles le lecteur doit louvoyer. Le traducteur devra autant que possible reproduire ces réseaux virtuels de combinaison de sens. Ainsi, lorsque Apollinaire écrit dans « La Chanson du Mal-Aimé » : un soir de demi-brume à Londres un voyou qui ressemblait à mon amour vint à ma rencontre

situation allows the writer all the more the possibility to express another possible community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility.] Kafka: pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Minuit, 1975), 31–2/Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 17.

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la magie de l’enjambement au deuxième vers est de produire deux lignes de lecture possibles, également compatibles avec le texte: « un voyou, qui ressemblait à mon amour », narration rétrospective d’une hallucination où le moi se raconte à la troisième personne, et « mon amour vint à ma rencontre », restitution d’une expérience présente de l’hallucination à la première personne (proposition renforcée par l’unité métrique de la strophe même si elle frappe rétrospectivement la syntaxe du deuxième vers d’incomplétude). Ces deux lignes de lecture ne cesseront de s’entrelacer en arabesque dans la suite du texte, jusqu’à l’explosion simultanéiste finale. Le traducteur devra autant que possible reproduire non pas seulement des sens mais la juxtaposition de lectures virtuelles qui constitue tout autant la réalité de ce texte. La traduction révèle que l’affaire de la poésie est de manifester un acte originaire de signifier, et ce dans l’expérience active, inquiète, de lecture qu’a ouvert l’exercice d’une souveraineté créatrice dans la langue, celle du poète. Mallarmé considérait ce partage d’une expérience de souveraineté comme vocation de la poésie moderne, et la définissait comme modulation plutôt qu’expression de la subjectivité : Le remarquable est que, pour la première fois, au cours de l’histoire littéraire d’aucun peuple, concurremment aux grandes orgues générales et séculaires, où s’exalte, d’après un latent clavier, l’orthodoxie, quiconque avec son jeu et son ouïe individuels se peut composer un instrument, dès qu’il souffle, le frôle ou frappe avec science ; en user à part et le dédier aussi à la Langue. Une haute liberté d’acquise, la plus neuve ; […] Selon moi jaillit tard une condition vraie ou la possibilité, de s’exprimer non seulement, mais de se moduler, à son gré.23

Ce que Maurice Blanchot commentait ainsi: Le vers, en substituant aux relations syntaxiques des rapports plus subtils, oriente le langage dans le sens d’un mouvement, d’une trajectoire rythmée, où seuls comptent le passage, la modulation, et non les points, les notes par où l’on passe.24

23 Mallarmé, OC II, 207–8. 24 ‘Le mythe de Mallarmé’, La Part du feu (Paris : Gallimard, 1949), 41.

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La métaphore de Mallarmé était d’une grande cohérence: les « grandes orgues » (un groupe de tuyaux à son fixe, dont joue un instrumentiste solitaire, hiératique même dans l’usage profane) avec leur « clavier latent » (touches fixes, contours prédécoupant la masse sonore), sont les thèmes et les règles utilisés pour fonder un pouvoir au sein même de la langue: depuis les grands mythes fondateurs des « cultures ataviques » pour reprendre l’expression de Glissant, jusqu’à la tyrannie de l’alexandrin sous la figure tutélaire de Victor Hugo. À ces orgues s’opposent la liberté des vents, des cordes et des percussions, ainsi que d’une science désormais à disposition de « quiconque » veut l’acquérir, ce « on » qui est un concept essentiel chez Mallarmé, ensemble politique encore indéfini, communauté à venir. Ainsi la condition vraie, l’authenticité, ne réside pas dans le fait de jouer en fonction de possibilités prédéfinies pour extérioriser ce qui était déjàlà, latent dans une intériorité, mais dans la capacité de moduler et par là modeler la subjectivité dans l’expérience effective de la langue. Césaire a conçu très tôt l’exercice d’une telle souveraineté poétique dans la langue comme l’amorce d’un processus de libération dans le contexte colonial. Le lecteur du Cahier d’un retour au pays natal se trouve dès le départ face à une langue poussée à ses limites lexicales pour représenter la psychogéographie de l’environnement insulaire : l’essoufflement des lâchetés insuffisantes, l’enthousiasme sans ahan aux poussis surnuméraires, les avidités, les hystéries, les perversions, les arlequinades de la misère, les estropiements, les prurits, les urticaires, les hamacs tièdes de la dégénérescence. Ici la parade des risibles et scrofuleux bubons, les poutures de microbes très étranges, les poisons sans alexitère connu, les sanies de plaies bien antiques, les fermentations imprévisibles d’espèces putrescibles.25

Le riche répertoire de la croissance ou plutôt de l’excroissance proliférante caractérise la décomposition de l’univers colonial antillais dans l’espace et dans le temps. Ainsi, la peau corrompue de l’île-corps est affectée de « pustules tièdes », « petite vérole », « syzygie suppurante des ampoules », « lèpre », « scrofules », « les arlequinades, les estropiements, les prurits, les urticaires (…) la parade des risibles et scrofuleux bubons, les poutures de 25

PTED, 188.

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microbes très étranges (…) les fermentations imprévisibles d’espèces putrescibles », etc. Processus organique certes, mais d’excroissance spatiale plutôt que de croissance et donc imprévisible, image d’une condition de passivité forcée, en l’absence de toute perspective temporelle, de tout projet. Cette étonnante prolifération verbale caractérise comme décomposition l’aliénation de la vie aux Antilles,26 et s’en détache donc déjà par son contraste violent tant avec la littérature exotique qu’avec la rhétorique de la belle langue si prisée dans les colonies. Mais bientôt, on va le voir, la prolifération s’interrompt en deux endroits sous l’irruption de deux termes neufs, négritude et verrition, actes de création dans la langue, néologismes marquant au contraire le retour ou rassemblement en soi de la conscience en cours de libération, conscience d’intensité plutôt que de fragmentation partes extra partes, à tout le moins le début d’un processus poétique de création de soi dans la langue. Ce n’est pas un hasard : ces deux inventions césairiennes, se sont soutenues, on le verra pour finir, d’une réflexion peu connue de Césaire sur le néologisme mallarméen. * Dans le Cahier, il y a une frontière fondamentale, une faille qui lézarde le moi, l’aliénation coloniale : « L’homme antillais a été colonisé de l’intérieur, il a été profondément aliéné ».27 La capacité des esclaves à réfléchir a constamment été déniée, il n’y a plus de mémoire, pas même pour la mort : Au bout du petit matin ces pays sans stèle, ces chemins sans mémoire, ces vents sans tablette.28

26 Sur le vocabulaire médical utilisé par Césaire voir René Hénane, Aimé Césaire, le chant blessé : biologie et poétique (Paris : Jean Michel Place, 1999). 27 Interview avec François Beloux, Magazine Littéraire 34 (novembre 1969). Voir aussi son interview avec Edwy Plenel, Le Monde (23 August 1991) : « Est-ce qu’il y a encore une identité martiniquaise ? La question se pose tant le mal profond de la société antillaise est l’aliénation ». 28 Dans Les Damnés de la terre, Frantz Fanon, un des disciples de Césaire, tout comme Glissant, remarque : « On n’a peut-être pas suffisamment montré que le colonialisme ne se contente pas d’imposer sa loi au présent et à l’avenir du pays dominé. Le colonialisme ne se satisfait pas d’enserrer le peuple dans ses mailles, de vider le cerveau

136 Appendices

C’est ce que Césaire appelle « une intimité close », le paradoxe d’une intimité close à elle-même. Dans sa critique en acte de l’aliénation de la pensée dans l’usage commun de la langue (comme chez Mallarmé, et peut-être plus profondément que chez Rimbaud), la poésie vue depuis le contexte des Caraïbes était ainsi déjà révolte, avant même toute prise explicite de position politique. C’est pourquoi dans le paysage du Cahier qui dépeint une Martinique, en aucune manière exotique, la poésie est identifiée au volcan, dans les profondeurs duquel la multiplicité de toutes les souffrances est fondue, et qui parvient à s’élever au-dessus d’une ville aplatie, fracassée, fragmentée ; une ville de corruption, de plaies, de pustules et de scrofules. La poésie est ce sommet éminent d’une conscience jamais donnée par avance mais plutôt née d’une résistance, d’une exigence, situation éminente d’où l’on somme, écrit Césaire (sommer : écho mallarméen). Ce n’est donc pas un hasard si, bien loin d’affirmer une identité figée, de se réfugier dans un contour caractérisé par les traits d’ordre culturel, historique ou racial, d’une supposée africanité, comme on le dit souvent, Césaire s’est empressé de forger un « mot-total » : négritude – riposte ironique au regard dévalorisant du colonisateur (nègre) par le détour des procédés de conceptualisation du vocabulaire philosophique hégélien alors en vogue (–itude).29 Un mot qui déjà incarne l’effort poétique de détachement et de réflexion, et qui viendra interrompre le long cortège des effets de la corruption coloniale. Voyons comment opère cette transformation de la conscience aliénée dans le Cahier.

colonisé de toute forme et de tout contenu. Par une sorte de perversion de la logique, il s’oriente vers le passé du peuple opprimé, le distord, le défigure, l’anéantit. » (Œuvres, 592). Fanon a revisité le concept de l’aliénation à la façon du jeune Marx lecteur de Hegel, l’appliquant à la situation spécifique du colonisé. Le titre du manuscrit de Peau noire, masques blancs était Essai sur la désaliénation du noir. Dans Le Discours Antillais, Glissant a approfondi cet héritage spécifique d’une conscience privée de temporalité, en particulier dans la relation à la sexualité, laquelle est nécessairement an-érotique dans un monde où le plaisir ne peut être que dérobé (503). 29 Pour une généalogie de la revendication du terme « nègre » par les mouvements anticoloniaux des années vingt, avant la célébration de la négritude, voir Jean Khalfa, « Naissance de la négritude », Les Temps Modernes 656 (2009) ; version anglaise, infra, Chapitre 5.

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Au début, l’espace colonial caribéen est décrit comme essentiellement fragmenté. Fragmentation, séparation, division partes extra partes, pulvérisation davantage que diversité, même de la vie. Dans un sens, s’opère ici le premier moment de la négation mallarméenne de la langue, aucun contour ne peut plus être ici distingué. Le fragmentaire et le répétitif caractérisent aussi la temporalité de la condition d’esclave. Le présent s’évanouit en permanence dans un passé auquel on ne reviendra jamais, qui n’engendre jamais rien, ne donne naissance à une nouvelle étape, aucun projet. Au bout du petit matin bourgeonnant d’anses frêles les Antilles qui ont faim, les Antilles grêlées de petite vérole, les Antilles dynamitées d’alcool, échouées dans la boue de cette baie, dans la poussière de cette ville sinistrement échouées.30

Au bout du petit matin : loin d’une nouvelle aurore, c’est à la fois une fin du monde et, comme ce point final dans le temps est toujours spatialement déterminé, une frontière irrégulière, délimitant un lieu clos dans l’espace, sans issue : « Au bout du petit matin bourgeonnant d’anses frêles », « Au bout du petit matin cette ville plate », « Au bout du petit matin le morne accroupi », « Au bout du petit matin l’échouage hétéroclite », etc. Inversement bourgeonnant, grêlées, dynamitées, toutes ces indications d’excroissance, de fragmentation ou d’explosion dans l’espace renforcent une limite dans le temps, échouées. Le présent en ce lieu résulte du hasard. Là où tout sens des repères historiques, des points de départ a été perdu, la séquence temporelle est défaite, pure succession d’instants dépareillés, échouage hétéroclite. De là : … une vieille misère pourrissant sous le soleil, silencieusement ; un vieux silence crevant de pustules tièdes, l’affreuse inanité de notre raison d’être31 30 PTED, 186. 31 Ibid. 186. Les images ont une cohérence secrète : « crevant » peut indiquer une mort abjecte aussi bien que l’éclatement des bubons u des abcès. Dans le mot « inanité », on peut voir à la fois le vide et le non-sens. Le Littré, que Césaire a aussi utilisé, désigne le vide comme étant le sens littéral de ce mot et ajoute qu’on ne le trouve que dans la locution de chronologie : « temps d’inanité, années du monde qui se sont écoulées avant la loi de Moïse ». « Inanité » désigne une époque sans contenu ni direction.

138 Appendices

Une autre indication de séparation réside dans le fait que ces descriptions sont hors du temps, ou mieux, sans tension, figées : la plupart des phrases introduites par les vingt-six répétitions de la séquence « Au bout du petit matin » sont nominales. Si des verbes qualifient, c’est soit en tant que participes, soit à l’intérieur de relatives ; ils ne lient jamais une action à un sujet. Or le poème, pris dans son mouvement global, est une série de négations de la fragmentation de ce monde radicalement contingent. Bientôt en effet apparaît un autre temps ; le temps des origines, Chronos plutôt que Aiôn, pour reprendre la fameuse distinction que Gilles Deleuze a empruntée à Victor Goldschmidt,32 durée et présence plutôt que succession, regroupement et enracinement plutôt que passage. Immédiatement, rythme et images se transforment, l’instant s’étend et, à travers des métaphores telles « l’éclaboussement d’or des instants favorisés », « le cordon ombilical », l’espace vient à représenter un lien à travers le temps : Et nos gestes imbéciles et fous pour faire revivre l’éclaboussement d’or des instants favorisés, le cordon ombilical restitué à sa splendeur fragile, le pain, et le vin de la complicité, le pain, le vin, le sang des épousailles véridiques.33

Ce passage introduit la grande scène de rupture de la première partie du poème, l’évocation de la nuit de festivités, à Noël. […] Il avait l’agoraphobie Noël. Ce qu’il lui fallait c’était toute une journée d’affairement, d’apprêts, de cuisinages, de nettoyages, d’inquiétudes, de-peur-que-ça-ne-suffise-pas, de-peur-que-ça-ne-manque, de-peur-qu’on-ne-s’embête […]34

Gilles Deleuze, Logique du Sens (Paris : Minuit, 1969). Victor Goldschmidt, Le Système stoïcien et l’idée de temps (Paris : Vrin, 1953). 33 PTED, 188. L’image du gouffre est remplacée par celle de l’éclaboussement. Le vide de l’instant redécouvert est une présence et non pas un manque. De la même manière, le volcan vivant remplacera les cratères morts d’un pays vérolé. 34 PTED, 189. 32

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Agoraphobie : repli psychologique, intériorité, complicité, sans doute, mais aussi retrait hors de l’espace et de sa fragmentation, et donc aussi hors du temps et des tensions. L’alignement soudain vertical des mots indique l’intense coprésence des intentions et des désirs à l’intérieur de la conscience mobilisée, et s’oppose à l’accumulation des éléments disparates du début. La plupart des noms indiquent désormais des actions ou des émotions, ou deviennent des verbes par le biais de traits d’union ou de néologismes familiers, tels « cuisinages » qui réactive l’activité sous-jacent contenue dans « nettoyage » et peut-être celle d’affairement emplissant un espace déterminé. Et l’apogée de l’immense phrase suivante, dont les méandres épousent les sentiments et les actes de la nuit, c’est la spirale du « boudin » comparée à un « enroulement en volubile » (ce qui renvoie bien sûr non seulement au mouvement du volubilis, mais aussi à l’euphorie des voix en volute de joie). Ce mouvement en spirale reflète le texte poétique lui-même en tant que distillation des intensités, presque détachées de leurs causes, à travers la substantivation des qualités (« incandescences pimentées », « soleil liquide ») et la prolifération des adjectifs : […] et il y a du boudin, celui étroit de deux doigts qui s’enroule en volubile, celui large et trapu, le bénin à goût de serpolet, le violent à incandescence pimentée, et du café brûlant et de l’anis sucré et du punch au lait, et le soleil liquide des rhums, et toutes sortes de bonnes choses qui vous imposent autoritairement les muqueuses ou vous les distillent en ravissements, ou vous les tissent de fragrances […]35

Le poème est construit sur une série de contrastes entre le statique, le fragmenté, le divisé d’une part, et le changeant, le mobile et le concentrique – vers ou ligne, « mot total », flux, coulée en spirale résistant à la pulvérisation et à la poussière,36 d’autre part. Ce mouvement culmine dans la définition de la négritude, qui peut maintenant être mieux comprise.

35 Ibid. 189. 36 Une opposition que l’on trouve également chez Perse, par exemple dans le fameux passage sur les bibliothèques dans Vents : « Ha ! qu’on m’évente tout ce lœss ! Ha ! qu’on m’évente tout ce leurre ! Sécheresse et supercherie d’autels … Les livres tristes, innombrables, sur leur tranche de craie pâle …

140 Appendices

D’abord elle n’est définie ni comme catégorie raciale, ni comme affirmation d’une différence substantielle. Elle marque simplement le refus d’une attitude ontologique spécifique, celle, instrumentale, de ceux qui ne peuvent penser qu’en termes de maîtrise, c’est à dire de séparation du Soi et de l’Autre : ô lumière amicale ô fraîche source de la lumière ceux qui n’ont inventé ni la poudre ni la boussole ceux qui n’ont jamais su dompter la vapeur ni l’électricité ceux qui n’ont exploré ni les mers ni le ciel mais ceux sans qui la terre ne serait pas la terre gibbosité37 d’autant plus bienfaisante que la terre déserte davantage la terre […] mais ils s’abandonnent, saisis, à l’essence de toute chose ignorants des surfaces mais saisis par le mouvement de toute chose insoucieux de dompter, mais jouant le jeu du monde véritablement les fils aînés du monde poreux à tous les souffles du monde aire fraternelle de tous les souffles du monde lit sans drain de toutes les eaux du monde

Et qu’est-ce encore, à mon doigt d’os, que tout ce talc d’usure et de sagesse, et tout cet attouchement des poudres du savoir ? comme aux fins de saison poussière et poudre de pollen, spores et sporules de lichen, un émiettement d’ailes de piérides, d’écailles aux volves des lactaires […] – cendres et squames de l’esprit. […] S’en aller ! s’en aller ! Parole de vivant ! » (OC, 186). 37 Il faut s’arrêter sur cette extraordinaire apposition, et expliquer l’opacité de certains mots utilisés par Césaire, objets de certaines critiques. Au premier abord ce terme semble désigner une manière d’être ou une attitude (comme sérénité) peut-être même une valeur (fraternité). Quand le sens est vérifié, on s’aperçoit qu’il désigne simplement une bosse, une excroissance, mais la compréhension initiale demeure à l’arrière-plan sémantique, et cette « gibbosité », devenue attitude d’appartenance terrestre peut maintenant être dite « bienfaisante ». Il y a donc plusieurs transitions à l’œuvre : du discret au continu à travers la transformation de l’excroissance maligne en excroissance bénigne, de l’appartenance au soulèvement, puisque l’ignorance de l’idéologie mécaniste de l’Occident est invoquée comme une résistance.

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étincelle du feu sacré du monde chair de la chair du monde palpitant du mouvement même du monde !

Tiède petit matin de vertus ancestrales38

Ce moment oppose le sens immémorial d’appartenir au monde au détachement de la conscience malheureuse du premier mouvement. Les vents sont désormais des « souffles » et ils ont trouvé une « aire fraternelle ». L’aurore ne renvoie plus à une fin dans l’espace (« au bout du petit matin ») mais à une origine (« vertus ancestrales »). Le mouvement n’est plus un déplacement à la surface. Il est palpitation et appartenance à un monde originaire ou élémentaire, une « nature » : terre, eau et feu, et comme la terre est rouge, le sang, comme un fluide, va unifier ces éléments. L’aurore est qualifiée par sa tiédeur plutôt que par l’arrivée de la lumière et, en général, le poème passe du visuel au haptique, la vision exprimant séparation et distance, par exemple dans la contemplation du bleu de l’acier (les armes du colonisateur), celui du ciel, ou la lumière froide des étoiles. Le néologisme annonce donc une alternative : les valeurs des oppresseurs, sous couvert d’universalisme, ont seulement légitimé une séparation de l’humain et du naturel. La résistance assume une universalité authentique parce qu’elle refuse le fondement de l’oppression, qui, par la barrière de la race, fige la personne et les groupes dans l’altérité absolue d’un donné : vous savez que ce n’est point par haine des autres races que je m’exige bêcheur de cette unique race que ce que je veux c’est pour la faim universelle pour la soif universelle la sommer libre enfin de produire de son intimité close la succulence des fruits39

Et tandis que la négritude est peinte en rouge plutôt qu’en noir : 38 39

PTED, 204. Ibid. 205.

142 Appendices elle plonge dans la chair rouge du sol elle plonge dans la chair ardente40 du ciel elle troue l’accablement opaque de sa droite patience.41

Le monde blanc est bleu d’acier : Écoutez le monde blanc Horriblement las de son effort immense Ses articulations rebelles craquer sous les étoiles dures ses raideurs d’acier bleu transperçant la chair mystique42

Fusion contre fragmentation ; appartenance opposé à séparation ; temps, maintenant, perçu comme vie, comme cycle de création, plutôt que dissolution linéaire et répétitive de l’instant et de la purulence : le retour au pays natal est quête d’un temps de naissance plutôt que d’un pays perdu, tout comme À la recherche du temps perdu était fondamentalement une tentative de se réapproprier le temps. C’est dans ce sens actif que l’on a besoin de retourner au « pays natal », une terre native, même si, dans une incarnation ultime et extraordinaire, le voyage, le pays et la naissance sont fondus dans l’image d’un navire négrier en révolte. et voici parmi des déchirements de nuages la fulgurance d’un signe le négrier craque de toute part … Son ventre se convulse et résonne … L’affreux ténia de sa cargaison ronge les boyaux fétides de l’étrange nourrisson des mers ! […] il y a encore une mer à traverser oh encore une mer à traverser pour que j’invente mes poumons […] Le maître des rires ?

40 La métonymie du soleil pour le ciel, à travers l’adjectif ambigu « ardent » est un autre moyen d’effacer la distance impliquée dans la vision, remplacée par une proximité palpable et même proprioceptive (chair). 41 Ibid. 203. 42 Ibid. 203. Nous retrouvons ici les images de raideur, de fragmentation (des jointures qui craquent) et d’opposition (« sous les étoiles dures ») déjà présentés au début du poème. Transpercer est attribué de manière négative au monde « blanc », liant la lame à la quête d’une maîtrise, d’une transcendance et d’un détachement de la terre : « ma négritude n’est ni une tour ni une cathédrale ».

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Le maître du silence formidable ? Le maître de la paresse ? Le maître des danses ? C’est moi !43

Dans un bel article sur le rôle des néologismes dans la poésie de Césaire, James Clifford écrit que « la négritude ne renvoie pas aux racines mais à un processus actuel dans une réalité polyphonique ».44 Le néologisme s’impose lorsqu’il s’agit d’exprimer un mouvement de transformation plutôt qu’une réalité donnée, le présent au cœur de tout processus et la polyphonie dans toute réalité. Il est donc poésie au sens mallarméen, s’éloignant du mythe, si le mythe subsume constamment le présent sous le perpétuel « déjà-là » d’une narration monodique, inscrivant sa fin en chacun de ses instants.45 C’est pourquoi lorsqu’il aborde l’autre néologisme célèbre du poème, son point culminant, son mot final, verrition, Clifford s’interroge sur l’effort de Clayton Eshleman et Annette Smith pour déterminer à l’occasion de leur traduction, son sens « original ».46 Dans leur édition, ces derniers mentionnent que Césaire leur a dit qu’il avait forgé le mot « verrition » à partir du verbe latin « verri » qui a le sens de « frotter, gratter une surface, balayer » : enroule-toi, vent autour de ma nouvelle croissance pose-toi sur mes doigts mesurés je te livre ma conscience et son rythme de chair […] et t’enroulant embrasse-moi d’un plus vaste frisson

43 Ibid. 210. 44 «  A Politics of Neologism : Aimé Césaire  », in The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1988), 179. 45 D’où le malaise de Mallarmé face à Wagner et sa préférence marquée pour Whistler. 46 Clifford s’intéresse aussi à un autre néologisme césairien, plus tardif, « marronner » (de « marron », terme qualifiant l’un de ces esclaves fugitifs qui réussirent parfois à créer une société libre). Il note que Césaire a étendu la notion de marronnage, non seulement de rébellion et de fuite mais aussi d’institution politique vers « une possibilité réflexive et une poiesis ». Césaire a toujours considéré le poétique comme un aspect du politique dans le contexte colonial. Breton l’a souligné dans son hommage, « Martinique, charmeuse de serpents », publié par Tropiques 11 (mai 1944).

144 Appendices embrasse-moi jusqu’au nous furieux embrasse, embrasse-NOUS […] lie ma noire vibration au nombril même du monde lie, lie-moi, fraternité âpre puis, m’étranglant de ton lasso d’étoiles monte, Colombe monte monte monte […] et le grand trou noir où je voulais me noyer l’autre lune c’est là que je veux pêcher maintenant la langue maléfique de la nuit en son immobile verrition!47

Eshleman et Smith traduisent les dernières lignes comme suit, formant un néologisme (veerition) sur la base du verbe to veer, tourner, changer de direction : bind my black vibration to the very navel of the world bind me, bind me, bitter brotherhood then strangling me with your lasso of stars, rise, Dove rise rise rise […] and the great black hole where I wanted to drown a moon ago this is where I now want to fish the night’s malevolent tongue in its immobile veerition!48

Clifford a raison de noter que terminer sur un néologisme est un moyen d’indiquer que la poésie est essentiellement un processus (et non une représentation) : en un sens, il n’y a pas de terme à un poème puisque le poème est exercice de signifiance plus que sens déterminé.49 C’est aussi 47 PTED, 212. 48 CP, 85. 49 Question que Giorgio Agamben a soulevée, au sujet du dernier vers d’un poème, qui en principe ne peut pas être une partie de ce poème (ou ne peut pas être le dernier), si la possibilité d’un enjambement c’est à dire d’un découplage des lignes syntaxiques et

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pointer un processus à travers lequel le langage recouvre son pouvoir institutif originel et qui oblige le lecteur à adopter une attitude réflexive sur ce pouvoir. Mais on aurait tort d’opposer trop strictement le processus de signification à la signification elle-même dans la constitution poétique du sujet. La création d’un néologisme est aussi la genèse d’une signification inédite. Lorsque l’on considère ce poème comme un tout, il est clair que l’image (ou la matrice sémantique) de la spirale est cruciale.50 D’un point de vue lexical, la dernière strophe du texte déploie le motif de la vrille, par le biais des séries enroule/lie/lasso/nombril, et frisson/furieux/vibration. Cet abandon du moi en transe à une conscience rythmique, et son élévation dans le « NOUS » se transforme en un étonnant processus où la verticalité (ascendante : monte/étoile/nuit ; descendante : trou/noyer/ pêcher) et donc la séparation, sont résorbées dans la surface du « grand trou noir ». Ainsi on n’a pas besoin de savoir que Césaire avait « verri » en tête pour percevoir cette visée de sens même avant que le mot « verrition » soit donné. Le poème tout entier le construit continuellement, et doublement, comme réflexion aussi sur ce qu’il fait. Le sens de la spirale est que la signification est spirale, verrition enfin libre de l’esprit à travers le plan absolu des singularités, « lasso d’étoiles ». Finalement, Eshleman et Smith n’avaient pas tort de poser la question. Dans un texte sur Mallarmé et Villiers, Césaire a écrit à propos du célèbre sonnet à la rime en « yx » (texte appelé plus tard « Sonnet allégorique de lui-même ») :51 « cet « inintelligible » sonnet me semble capital ». Il inventa même une définition de dictionnaire pour le fameux « ptyx », un mot dont Mallarmé espérait qu’il était un néologisme dans toutes les langues connues,52 définition dédiée ironiquement à « tous ceux que courroucent très fort les mots savants […] sur lesquels le dictionnaire est muet »:

sémantique est essentielle à la structure de tout texte poétique. Voir Giorgio Agamben, Idée de la prose, trad. Gérard Macé (Paris : Christian Bourgois, 1988), 21 sq. 50 Voir supra, Chapitre 2. 51 OC I, 37. 52 Sur cette question, parmi de nombreux commentaires, voir Paul Bénichou, Selon Mallarmé (Paris : Gallimard, 1995), 135.

146 Appendices ptyx : mot, parole, en tant que matérialisation de la pensée. Transposition du grec : ptux qui désigne essentiellement toute superposition : p. ex. couches de cuir, lames de métal superposées dont se compose le bouclier. Ici, peut-être, superposition du mot à la pensée ; ou bien, sens second du mot ptux : pli ; le mot en tant que vibration. Cf. Pindare : ptuchai umnôn : inflexions ou modulations de la pensée du poète.

Mallarmé : ‘Magnifique, total et solitaire’53

Remarquables conceptions du poème en structure d’armure ou d’éventail, fait de bordures qui se chevauchent, de plis ou de vibrations de pensées et de mots. Ces métaphores – superposition, pli, vibration – représentent le donné perçu comme un plan ou simplement une ligne unique, mais toujours capable d’engendrer une réflexion, ou une prise de conscience, sans qu’on ait pourtant à postuler un « intérieur » ou un « extérieur », ou un antérieur à l’acte d’expression. Elles sont similaires en cela à la métaphore leibnizienne du monde comme peinture (baroque), étant entendu toutefois qu’ici la vision divine, seule capable de percevoir comme totalité, en un tableau, un monde dont les détails prolifèrent à l’infini, est néanmoins immanente à celui-ci. « Mot total, neuf » : le néologisme poétique indique donc en général que le sens est un processus, un acte de réorganisation du plan du réel qui, en lui-même, quand il est perçu « photographiquement », est contingent, répétitif, granuleux. Mais verrition n’est pas n’importe quel néologisme. C’est le nom de ce mouvement de prise de possession du plan absolu, qui n’est pas un repli dans la mémoire, l’intériorité ou la vision prophétique, mais plutôt un acte de recomposition du singulier dans des configurations, inflexions ou modulations originales : spirale d’un désir, poiesis émancipatrice. Dans un contexte historique d’extrême aliénation, ce refus de la réification dans la langue, c’est-à-dire au plus près de la conscience, était déjà politique.

53

Tropiques 5 (avril 1942), 56 et 61; PTED, 1334.

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Vent, poussière, spirale, vibration, modulation, et pli : parmi les rares textes écrits par Deleuze sur la poésie, une page remarquable sur Mallarmé le définit comme poète baroque. De nouveau, les deux moments sont identifiables : pulvérisation (« le « pli contre pli » révélant la ville, mais aussi bien en révèle l’absence ou le retrait, conglomérat de poussières, collectivités creuses, armées et assemblées hallucinatoires ») et inclusion (« le pli ne va plus vers une pulvérisation, il se dépasse ou trouve sa finalité dans une inclusion, « tassement en épaisseur, offrant le minuscule tombeau, certes, de l’âme. » Le pli est inséparable du vent. ») Ces deux moments sont unis dans le projet de « Le Livre » : Ce ne sont pas deux mondes, pourtant : le pli du journal, poussière ou brume, inanité, est un pli de circonstance qui doit avoir son nouveau mode de correspondance avec le livre, pli de l’Événement, unité qui fait être, multiplicité qui fait inclusion, collectivité devenue consistante.54

Quand finalement Je devient Nous (« embrasse-moi jusqu’au nous furieux »), on ne peut s’empêcher de se rappeler ce que Deleuze a écrit avec Guattari à propos d’une « littérature mineure » : […] parce que la conscience collective ou nationale est « souvent inactive dans la vie extérieure et toujours en voie de désagrégation » , c’est la littérature qui se trouve chargée positivement de ce rôle et de cette fonction d’énonciation collective, et même révolutionnaire: c’est la littérature qui produit une solidarité active, malgré le scepticisme; et si l’écrivain est en marge ou à l’écart de sa communauté fragile, cette situation le met d’autant plus en mesure d’exprimer une autre communauté potentielle, de forger les moyens d’une autre conscience et d’une autre sensibilité.55

Forger les moyens pour une autre conscience : on peut mieux comprendre l’idée d’une « poésie révolutionnaire ».

54 Gilles Deleuze, Le Pli. Leibniz et le baroque (Paris : Minuit, 1988), 43. Sur l’inanité et le temps, voir la note 50. Sur le pli chez Mallarmé, voir aussi Jacques Derrida, ‘La Double séance’, La Dissémination (Paris : Seuil, 1972). 55 Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, Kafka, pour une littérature mineure (Paris : Minuit, 1975), 31–2.

148 Appendices

C  Obituary: Aimé Césaire (1913–2008)56 In the weeks that followed Aimé Césaire’s death on 18 April 2008, many French politicians paid a vibrant homage to him and, for a while, there was much talk of having him rest in the Panthéon, where great men are buried. The inhabitants of his native island, Martinique, were split, as they often are, between pride and offence. No doubt, he was one of the greatest French poets and politicians of the past century and deserved the honour, but would that not be the ultimate colonial appropriation? The President of the Republic flew specially to Martinique. He had had two previous appointments with Césaire. The first was in December 2005 when he was Minister of the Interior. A law had been passed in February, requiring school teachers to teach not just the negative aspects of colonisation but its benefits as well. In addition, in October the Minister had declared that he would clean the suburbs of their ‘scum’. To protest, Césaire refused to meet him and the trip was cancelled. The second attempt was successful and they met in February 2006, but, according to Le Monde, Césaire gave him a forty-minute lecture on colonialism. He had just published his final book, entitled Negro I am, Negro I Shall Remain. Among those present at his funeral were also a former Minister of Education (and recent presidential candidate), and his former chief of staff, now himself Minister of Education. In 1994, under their ministry, an unheard of event had happened: Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (1950), which had just been placed on the national curriculum for the Baccalauréat, was abruptly removed, under the pressure of right-wing parliamentarians. The text was replaced with a work by Louis Aragon, who seemed to the Minister ‘more representative of French literature’. Perhaps in the hope of erasing the memory of this decision, the current minister recently declared that the greatest homage the Republic could pay Césaire would not be to have him in the Panthéon, but to teach his works in schools. He would see to it. 56

First published in Wasafiri 23/4 (2008), 74–5.

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These anecdotes say a lot about Césaire, his greatness and integrity, and his difficulties. He was from the outset celebrated as a great lyrical poet for Cahier d’un retour au pays natal [Notebook of a Return to the Native Land] (1939). In 1943 André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, said he had written ‘the lyrical monument of our time’ and saw in him the writer who showed that life was still possible after years of mental corruption and despair. In 1948 Sartre, in a famous article, ‘Black Orpheus’ saw in this poetry the pure act of a free subjectivity. It moved first to inner depths, in the quest for a black soul, but then came back to light to stand up against a world of oppression, where the self had been reduced to mere physical existence through slavery, or to alienation through colonisation. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal has probably been translated worldwide more than any other poem in the French language in the twentieth century and, in itself, would justify his panthéonisation. It is often presented as a manifesto of négritude, but Césaire repeatedly stated that it was not about race, but about regaining a particular experience of the world lost through alienation. This poetry is visionary. In it the visual world, from the fragmentation and rot of the colonial city to the maelstrom of the volcano, gives form to experience. It is easy to see why Césaire felt a kinship with the Surrealists as well as with African art and poetry, which he discovered in Paris in the early 1930s, in particular through his friendship with Léopold Sédar Senghor. He soon published books in dialogue with artists such as Picasso and Wifredo Lam. But his poetic career did not stop there. He continued writing poetry and his final collection, Moi Laminaire (1980), shows him as the equal to the next generation of French poets, who came back to a poetry of pure presence. His theatre, largely a reflection on the postcolonial condition as it unfolded, has never been so relevant, in particular in its parallel reflection on the becoming of the Haitian revolution (The Tragedy of King Christophe, 1963) and on Lumumba’s dreams for Africa (A Season in the Congo, 1966). He saw in theatre an instrument of political communication, but for him political communication was poetic. Even his Discourse on Colonialism and his ‘Letter to Maurice Thorez, Secretary of the French Communist Party’ (1956) could be read as poems. One should mention also his Toussaint L’Ouverture: The French Revolution and the Problem of Colonialism (1961), a history of the Haitian revolution and the difficult birth of the first black

150 Appendices

republic. He considered this work the most useful for his own understanding of the present. He also published countless circumstantial texts on politics, negritude and freedom, Césaire was also a major politician, the longest serving Deputy in the French parliament (1945 to 1993) and Mayor of Fort-de-France, the capital of Martinique, for fifty years. This was not easy. When I met him in 2000, in the old Mairie, where he had his office above a small baroque theatre, he very graciously answered my questions on an enigmatic text he had written on Mallarmé in 1943 and, having totally forgotten about it, went on to read it aloud, magnificently. But what he really wanted to talk about, at great length, was the sewerage system in Fort-de-France. When he was elected mayor, totally unexpectedly (he had put his name down, at the request of the Communist Party, ‘as one signs a petition’), there was no proper sewerage because the city was at sea level (which, incidentally, sheds light on many of the organic images of the city’s decay in the Notebook). Typhus was endemic. His first decision, as a young, inexperienced mayor, against the scepticism of a largely white municipal council, was to trust an engineer who proposed a new system. It worked and he was very proud of that. His constituency was the poorest on the island and, like the Africans he met in Senegal, they understood his poetry better than the bourgeoisie, because they could feel its intensity. They consistently re-elected him against all odds. This explained his decision to campaign for the ‘departmentalisation’ of Martinique – its integration into the Republic on an equal footing – a decision which was criticised much later. The abject poverty of the island made it impossible, he thought, to claim independence immediately. Also the situation was very different from that of recent colonies. Links with Europe were too deep (he himself was a classicist, and taught Greek and Latin for several years) and the US was looming large over the island. It was probably the most difficult decision he took and, much later, he did not hide that he felt that his expectations had not been met by De Gaulle. In 1956, after the Hungarian uprising, he took another difficult decision and left the Communist Party, writing one of the most lucid texts on the Party’s historical incapacity to deal with colonialism, and on the crimes of Stalinism. Together with the Discourse, it is one of the century’s greatest political texts in French. He had tried his best, he said later on, reading

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Marx, Lenin and even Stalin, but could not be blind to the crimes and the contempt he witnessed. The Party was then at the peak of its influence. For many years he was vilified with rare violence, while at the other end of the political spectrum, he was ostracised by the state for his criticism of the conditions in former colonies. Until the left came to power in 1981, with François Mitterrand, Prefects had orders to avoid meeting the Mayor of Fort-de-France. His political life was not as easy as the consensual ceremonies surrounding his funeral would seem to indicate. Césaire mentioned that one of the revelations he had had, as a student with Senghor at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, just next to the Panthéon, was to read in Hegel that in history the universal only comes to life through the singular. This, he said, made them understand négritude, which, he hastened to add, he had not invented, but only named. The unending quest for the nègre fondamental remained the bedrock of his inspiration. He was beautifully singular. He has now entered the universal.

Part II

History: Negritude, Alienation and Freedom

Chapter 4

The Heart of the Black Race: Parisian Negritudes in the 1920s1

There is an abundance of images of black Paris from the first half of the past century. We have, for instance, Josephine Baker in the Tumulte Nègre lithographs by Paul Colin, modern in her pure silhouette, primitive in her movements and jungle attire; or Dooley Wilson, in a famous flashback of Casablanca, playing the piano and drinking champagne with Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart in ‘La Belle Aurore’, a very Parisian caférestaurant complete with a stand for glasses in the shape of the Eiffel tower;2 perhaps also photos of Senegalese Riflemen on the march at the end of World War I; Malagasy musicians or waiters in the Colonial Exhibition of 1931; or, later, the black child of the astonishing single-parent detective played by Louis Jouvet in Quai des Orfèvres. Less often, we are confronted with the image of the ‘nègre comique et laid’ in a tramcar, ‘grand comme un pongo qui essayait de se faire tout petit sur un banc de tramway’, shaped or disfigured by absolute poverty, the very sight of whom horrifies the well-to-do ‘coloured’ student from Martinique in Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, if only because it elicits in him the gaze of the racist.3 Some of these images in turn evoke artistic and literary movements of the 1 2

3

The Heart of the Black Race: Parisian Negritudes in the 1920s’, Wasafiri, 23/4 (December 2008), 15–24; ‘Naissance de la négritude’, Les Temps Modernes 656 (2009), 38–63. During most of the film, Dooley Wilson plays Sam, sitting at his piano under Ingrid Bergman’s gaze, which is alternatively maternal or tearful. Imagining him standing next to them is instantly seeing a very different film. He does stand in the exodus scene at the train station, just before the German army enters Paris, but he carries suitcases and a message. [A comical and ugly nigger]; [big as a pongo trying to make himself small on the streetcar bench] Cahier, 200–1/29.

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period: Cubism, Simultaneism, Primitivism, the birth of a French passion for jazz and improvised art, and Surrealism and its influence on the first thinkers of négritude: a few African and Caribbean students who met in Paris in the early 1930s and also discovered there the writers of the Harlem Renaissance.4 This unique coincidence of avant-gardes and diasporas is often considered as the origin of the first consciousness of and then pride in a black or negro identity that had been obliterated by colonialism, at last rediscovered and sacralised as négritude. This renaissance of a dormant identity would in turn explain the divergence of later African anti-colonial struggles from universalist communism, the invention of Pan-Africanism, or of new forms of nationalism based on this ideology. There is some truth in this historical narrative and it clearly had a performative function, but notions of ‘renaissance’ are always teleological and mask the complex and often contradictory genesis of new discourses or forms of experience that archival work can uncover. In this case, we need to consider processes that took place over several decades, involving diverse populations, different political and cultural motivations and movements, as well as conflicting individual strategies. Most of the essential transformations took place in the crucial decade following World War I, a decade much less studied than the following one, probably because, however richer it may have been, that later one seems in retrospect to lead to and culminate in the great celebrations of négritude published in 1939: Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal and Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Ce que l’homme noir apporte.5 The myth of an unavoidable return to an identity that had hitherto been concealed or negated says a lot about the time but little about this identity itself. Much more revealing is a focus on the multiplicity and conflicts of its genesis.

4 5

See Michel Fabre, ‘Du Mouvement nouveau noir à la négritude césairienne …’, in Jacqueline Leiner (ed.), Soleil éclat: Mélanges offerts à Aimé Césaire à l’occasion de son soixante-dixième anniversaire (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1984), 148–59. Léopold Sédar Senghor, ‘Ce que l’homme noir apporte’, in L’Homme de couleur (Paris: Plon, 1939); repr. in Liberté 1: négritude et humanisme (Paris: Seuil, 1964).

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Populations It is notoriously difficult to form a precise idea of the size of the population from sub-Saharan Africa that was living in France during the interwar period. But in his reference work, Les Mouvements Nègres en France, 1919–1939, Philippe Dewitte quotes a 1926 Ministry of the Colonies census that counted 2,580 residents in France from Western and Central Africa and Madagascar.6 Since the clandestine population was probably at least twice as large, there were up to 10,000 sub-Saharan Africans living in France at the time, a third of whom were in Paris and whose vast majority was made up of manual workers, waiters, servants and, in port cities, sailors and dockers. By contrast, the census counts only twenty-three registered students from Africa. Léopold Sédar Senghor recalled being one of about ten African students in Paris during his time there.7 More than 160,000 colonial troops from Western and Central Africa had fought in France during World War I, of whom 30,000 never returned home.8 Some avoided repatriation, staying on and working in the métropole. Here they experienced conditions which were usually so bad that, by the late 1920s, the myth of the Mère Patrie, this motherland for which they had risked their lives, was severely tarnished. But it is important to note that until then their aim had been complete assimilation and not in any way a separate development. Most of those who were aware of it rejected the point of view of the reformers in the Ministry of Colonies who advocated separation and the replacement of the policy of assimilation with one of association, either out of respect for the diversity of cultures, or the necessity to recognise clearly what the aims of colonisation had truly been

6 7 8

Philippe Dewitte, Les Mouvements Nègres en France, 1919–1939 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985), 25. Nadine Dormoy Savage, ‘Entretien avec Léopold Sédar Senghor’, The French Review 47/6 (May 1974), 1065–71. Marc Michel considers that with the addition of soldiers already serving and the originaires fighting as French citizens, the number rises to about 200,000. See his Les Africains et la Grande Guerre (Paris: Karthala, 2003), 191.

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(exploitation, not enlightenment), or a combination of both. Colonised assimilationists claimed that such a trend was contradictory not just to the interests of resident black populations, but also to French republican ideals and to the properly understood duty of the Empire’s mission civilisatrice [civilising mission], a recurrent theme of the period. The legal status of most of these people was usually that of ‘subjects’ of the Empire rather than citizens, except for the few originaires from Senegal, that is, the residents of the four main cities created by the colonising power. These largely formed an assimilated elite and had enjoyed French civil rights since the nineteenth century, in particular the right to elect a member to the French National Assembly. These originaires considered themselves as French by essence and black only by accident: noirs (colour) but not nègres (identity). In 1914, they had elected the first African and black member of the French parliament, Blaise Diagne (1872–1934), who successfully pursued their agenda by lobbying for the incorporation of African troops into the regular national army to fight in World War I. The reward was the 1916 Diagne Act, which guaranteed the originaires French citizenship.9 However, his recruiting campaign had involved the whole of France’s West African colonies. When peace came, the suffering and sacrifice of these troops for the Republic, known as an impôt du sang [blood tax], was naturally perceived in the African colonies as creating a dette du sang [blood debt], to be repaid by complete assimilation and full French citizenship for all the colonial populations, not just the originaires. That the latter should be treated better than the rest of the colonial troops, for no clear reason other than their place of residence, made it seem even more unfair. French politicians did not see it that way and instead granted disabled colonial veterans reduced

9

Michael C. Lambert, ‘From Citizenship to Negritude: “Making a Difference” in Elite Ideologies of the Colonized Francophone West Africa’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 35/2 (1993), 239–62. Lambert writes that ‘many originaires were as passionate about their right to serve in the French Army as they were about their right to citizenship’ (244). They asked to be incorporated into the regular national army, rather than colonial regiments. Diagne successfully negotiated their citizenship in exchange for their participation in the war.

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pensions, while confirming their status as indigènes.10 This was one of the turning points in the perception of French colonisation by the colonised. The disenchanted Senegalese Riflemen (Tirailleurs Sénégalais), together with other troops who remained in the métropole and clandestine immigrants, were courted by trade unions that were often under communist influence, and through them they started to acquire a political consciousness. In 1921, following the Comintern directives to work with the working class from the colonies, the French Communist Party created the Union Intercoloniale, whose main publication, Le Paria (The Pariah), was edited by Nguyên Ai Quôc, one of the several pseudonyms of the future Hô Chi Minh. Ai Quôc paid particular attention to the issue of colonialism in Africa and, more generally, to the oppression of people of African origin. Before coming to London and then Paris, Ai Quôc had lived in the USA during World War I and apparently spent time in Harlem, where he would have attended one of the early Marcus Garvey meetings, although what is confirmed of the chronology makes it unlikely.11 He later claimed to have witnessed lynchings in the South. Le Paria did not have a very large readership, but was taken very seriously by the police, who would buy most of the issues in an attempt to prevent its distribution in the colonies, thus effectively subsidising it. Together with similar publications, it aimed at creating an anticolonial consciousness devoid of any sense of racial identity or pride, since these movements were mostly intercolonial. The authorities kept a close watch on all colonial immigrants, and secret reports manifest above all the fear of an inter-colonial solidarity that would lead to the bolshevisation of masses who had so far been apolitical. They feared particularly a ‘fraternisation entre Jaunes et Noirs’12 under the influence of Vietnamese militants.13 As for an African national feeling, it could only

10 11 12 13

Marc Michel, Les Africains et la Grande Guerre, 202. William J. Duiker, Hô Chi Minh: A Life (New York: Hyperion, 2000), 50–1. [Fraternising between Yellows and Blacks] Dewitte noted the first mention of such a fear in a 1926 police report. For the Ministry of the Colonies the priority became to prevent the return of politicised migrants home, for fear that they would spread Bolshevik ideas in the colonies (Les Mouvements Nègres en France, 39–40).

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rarely be discerned at the beginning of the 1920s. Brent Hayes Edwards quotes as an exception a remarkable fable that Ai Quôc published in the official Communist daily, l’Humanité, in September 1922. It portrays the 1998 celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of an African Republic supposedly created in 1948. However, the republic he imagined was ‘federative’ and resulted from a communist revolution, organised under the influence of ‘a white comrade’.14 A second, very different Parisian population of African origin had come from the Caribbean colonies. Claude McKay’s novel Banjo (1929) contains perhaps the best description of the differences between these two black populations in the métropole and their perceptions of the colonial situation, and introduces a third point of view that we will examine later: that of the Americans. One of the great writers of the Harlem Renaissance, McKay, a native of Jamaica, had a good knowledge of the Antilles. His perspective was different from that of the francophone Caribbean as well as from most of the other Harlem writers. He had spent six months in the Soviet Union in 1922 and went on to spend a decade in Europe, mostly in France, an experience that made him quite suspicious of the myth of a colour-blind France, common among African American intellectuals who mostly contrasted French attitudes to American segregation. Banjo clearly distinguished between recent immigrants from Africa on the one hand, and the population from the old colonies – Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyane (French Guiana) and Réunion – on the other, who had been shipped to the New World several centuries before the colonisation of Africa. The latter had French citizenship and in times of war fought in regular, not colonial, regiments.15 It is estimated that they numbered several thousands in Paris and tens of thousands in France overall.

14 15

Brent Hayes Edwards, ‘The Shadow of Shadows’, Positions 2/1 (2003), 11–49. During World War II, the Free French Forces maintained this division. Fanon and his friends, who volunteered in Martinique, discovered institutional racism when they compared the conditions of colonial troops with those of the regular regiments to which they belonged. They were first stationed in Algeria and discovered at the same time the realities of North African colonisation and anti-Arab racism.

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These négropolitains – a familiar category in Martinique and Guadeloupe for French Antilleans living in France, as opposed to métropolitains, French people who had recently moved to or were visiting the Antilles – usually belonged to the West Indian bourgeoisie or had won government bursaries and considered themselves not only superior to the lower classes at home, but also more truly French than the average métropolitain. When McKay’s semi-autobiographical main character in Banjo, an African American, questions a ‘Negro student from Martinique’ about his origins, the student professes his admiration for Napoléon’s wife, the Empress Joséphine, who was born in Martinique, with the other replying: ‘I don’t see anything in that for you to be so proud about … She was not colored’. The student’s answer is that she was créole and that ‘Down there the best people are very distinguished and speak a pure French, not anything like this vulgar Marseilles French’.16 So these Antillais did not see themselves as nègres at all, nor even as noirs, but as Français de couleur, and felt that they had nothing in common with the indigènes des colonies. The first black student at the elite École Polytechnique in Paris had been admitted in 1859 (eleven years after the final abolition of slavery) and came from Guadeloupe. He had a brilliant civil service career and ended up organising the air defence of Paris during World War I. A black bourgeoisie had developed, such that when the Parisian Caribbean population started to link up with another population of African descent in the 1920s and 1930s, it was, apart from a few African students, with a different group: the Americans. Out of the 370,000 African Americans serving in World War I from 1917, about 200,000 were stationed in France. US troops were segregated and General Pershing, who headed the expeditionary forces, had initially assigned black soldiers to a subaltern role, mostly logistical. Black men

16

Claude McKay, Banjo (London: The X Press, 2000), 171. Banjo was translated into French in 1931 and published by Éditions Rieder (translation by Ida Trent and Paul Vaillant-Couturier). This passage was reprinted in French in 1932 under the title ‘L’étudiant antillais vu par un noir américain’ (‘The West-Indian Student as Seen by an American Negro’) in the first and only issue of Légitime Défense, a Marxist and Surrealist journal published in Paris by students from Martinique. See Légitime Défense (repr., Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1979), 13.

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should not fight and be in a position to kill white men, even Germans, and above all, should not be offered the opportunity to distinguish themselves. However, at that point in the war, Marshal Foch had little time for such subtleties and, to avoid difficulties, African American troops were incorporated with French troops and, significantly, with regular rather than colonial ones.17 These American-French regiments were successful and several received decorations, as did individual soldiers. The most famous was the US 369th Infantry Regiment (15th Heavy Foot Infantry), otherwise known as the Harlem Hellfighters, the first allied regiment to reach the Rhine. One of its soldiers, Henry Johnson, was the first American to receive the Croix de Guerre. But these Hellfighters also made artistic history with their jazz band, the first to tour Europe and perform in France, under the leadership of the famous James Reese Europe.18 In their letters home, these soldiers often commented on the lack of segregation under French command, and on the warm welcome they received from local populations.19 This was widely reported in the African American press at home, which spread the image of a country devoid of racial prejudice – a myth which became a useful argument in the fight for civil rights at home, but which also generated and reflected a great attraction to Europe. For instance, in June 1919 W. E. B. Du Bois20 published in 17

Pershing’s biographers sometimes present this incorporation with French troops as an enlightened move on the part of Pershing. The evidence points to the opposite, in particular the racist instructions passed on to his French counterparts to try to prevent all fraternisation of the local populations with these regiments. According to the New York State Military Museum and Veteran Research Center, the American military put pressure on French authorities to prevent these troops from marching in Paris during the victory celebrations. See accessed August 2016. 18 See William A. Shack, Harlem in Montmartre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 20, and Reid Badger, A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 19 Michel Fabre, La Rive noire: les écrivains noirs américains à Paris (1830–1995) (rev. edn, Paris: André Dimanche Éditeur, 1999), 45. 20 One of the founders (in 1909, with Henry Moskowitz) of the national Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the first civil rights movement in the USA.

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his journal, The Crisis, an ‘Essay Toward a History of the Black Man in the Great War’, which opened with an extraordinary image: the mayor of the small Normandy town of Domfront singing the Marseillaise. with the vibrant voices of a score of black American officers who sat round about. Their hearts were swelling – torn in sunder. Never have I seen black folk – and I have seen many – so bitter and disillusioned at the seemingly bottomless depths of American colour hatred – so uplifted at the vision of real democracy dawning on them in France.21

He adds that, unaware as yet that Du Bois had been officially mandated by the NAACP to investigate the situation of black troops in Europe, Domfront’s mayor had apologised for not having organised for him a formal reception at the Town Hall, ‘me whom most of my fellow-countrymen receive at naught but back doors, save with apology’.22 Du Bois, always a strategist, thus created an iconography to promote the struggle at home, but there is little doubt that at that time he did experience the condition of ‘black folk’ in France as remarkably different. He was proved right: not only did black veterans receive a mixed reception on their return, but in the summer of 1919 the Ku Klux Klan organised a racist campaign in Washington that resulted in the lynching of several of them, some in uniform. This bloody summer of 1919 inspired the young McKay to write the famous poem ‘If we must die’, later on quoted by Churchill in a speech to the Commons during World War II.23 So, by contrast, France was increasingly perceived as a haven by a number of African Americans who stayed on after the war or returned later, in particular as musicians in the many new jazz clubs. Their presence in Paris extended even to gastronomy. Indeed, Langston Hughes, another great poet from Harlem who spent a year in Paris in 1924 cleaning dishes

21 22 23

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1986), 879. Ibid. 879. See Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls (eds), The Cambridge History of TwentiethCentury English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 566.

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at Le Grand Duc, notes in his autobiography regarding the establishment’s extravagant chef that because he could fry the best chicken à la Maryland in Paris, with corn fritters and gravy, because he could bake beans the way Boston bakes them, and make a golden brown Virginia corn bread that would melt in your mouth, Bruce had a public all his own, was a distinct asset to the place, and his little vagaries were permitted.24

Le Grand Duc was the foremost jazz club in Paris. At dawn, Hughes could observe ‘the cream of the Negro musicians then in France’, gathering when the other night clubs had closed, to weave out music that would almost make your heart stand still at dawn in a Paris night club in the rue Pigalle. […] Blues in the rue Pigalle. Black and laughing, heart-breaking blues in the Paris dawn, pounding like a pulse-beat, moving like the Mississippi!25

Jazz musicians were followed to Paris by most of the Harlem intelligentsia, the most historically significant being writers such as Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer and Countee Cullen, who initiated in Paris the triangular debate on the question of a ‘negro identity’.26 But African American artists, painters and sculptors came too. Henry Ossawa Tanner had already achieved fame at the end of the nineteenth century, and in the 1920s and 1930s, early African American tourists would make a point of going to see his work, which was on permanent display in the Musée du Luxembourg.27 In the interwar period, several African American 24 Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (1st edn, 1940; repr. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 153. 25 Ibid. 162. 26 The novelists and poets of the Harlem Renaissance were read and translated into French very early on. Césaire wrote his PhD dissertation on them before World War II and Senghor, in a lecture of 1950, declared McKay the true inventor of Négritude (Liberté 1 (Paris: Seuil, 1964), 116). 27 Tanner died in Paris in 1937. Another sight on the African American tourist map was the Château d’If in Marseilles where Alexandre Dumas’ hero, Edmond Dantès, is supposed to have been jailed. The author of The Count of Monte Cristo and of The Three Musketeers, the most widely read and published French writer of all time, was the grandson of a black slave. There is already here the feeling of a racial pride beyond

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sculptors were active in Paris, where they discovered Primitivism and the arts of Africa. Augusta Savage, for instance, noted how difficult it was for artists who had been trained at home in a neo-classical representation of the face and the body to use as models the African sculptures they discovered. In Paris, artistic recognition required destroying rather than aping Western canons.28 As for the metropolitan French population, it seems that, beyond the fads and enthusiasm of artists and music lovers,29 their attitude towards black populations ranged from indifference to paternalistic benevolence: these people had fought for them and now brought them some artistic relief after the grim years of war. Later, the Allied occupation of the Rhineland seems to have reinforced this attitude, with race being used as an instrument by both sides: the Allies sending colonial troops not only out of necessity, but also with the intention to signify to the Germans the extent of their defeat, while the Germans responded with violently racist press campaigns against the ‘black horror’ that menaced European civilisations.30 Such

all historical and national differences, independent of the content of the works, and which would probably not have been tarnished by the ambiguities contained in the rare texts where Dumas mentions race, had they been widely known. See Graham Robb’s review of Dumas’ Georges, in the New York Review of Books 55/4 (20 March 2008). 28 Fabre, La Rive noire, 69. See also James Clifford, ‘Histories of the Tribal and the Modern’, in The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 189–215, and Jean Laude, La Peinture Française et L’Art Nègre 1905–1914 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1968; repr., 2006). 29 See Karen C. C. Dalton and Henry Louis Gates, Jr, ‘Josephine Baker and Paul Colin: African American Dance Seen through Parisian Eyes’, Critical Inquiry 24/4 (summer 1998). Rip, the best known satirist of the time, wrote in his preface to Paul Colin’s Tumulte Noir (1927): ‘we vied at Negrifying ourselves’. For a more qualified assessment, see Anne-Marie Mercier-Faivre & Yannick Seité, ‘Le jazz à la lumière de JeanJacques Rousseau’, L’Homme 158–9 (April/September 2001): Jazz et Anthropologie, 32–52, an interesting study comparing the reception of Jazz by French musicologists in the interwar period with that of African music by philosophers of the eighteenth century. The latter were often more enlightened. 30 See Jean-Yves Le Naour, La Honte Noire: l’Allemagne et les troupes coloniales françaises, 1914–1945 (Paris: Hachette, 2004). In Les Africains et la Grande Guerre, Marc

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campaigns were widely reported in the French press and probably reinforced the support of the population for troops of African origin in general.

Political transformations and individual destinies The unmet promises of World War I, together with exchanges between the populations from Africa and those from the diaspora who were assembled for the first time in Paris, were undoubtedly a significant influence in the reversal of the dominant political trend in the colonies: the demand for assimilation. But this process was slow and ambiguous, not only because of the conflicting motivations of these very different populations, but also because the celebration of a diversity of ‘civilisations’ and of different ‘identities’ did not imply per se a questioning of colonialism itself. In fact, the greatest such celebration of difference ever, the Colonial Exhibition of 1931, aimed at promoting colonialism. Its organisers did not spare anything in their efforts to avoid exoticism and present ‘scientifically’ the diversity of civilisations. In 1919, W. E. B. Du Bois, eager for populations of African origin to influence the Versailles redistribution of colonial territories, organised a Pan-African Congress in Paris with the help of Blaise Diagne and the deputies from Guadeloupe and Martinique. Diagne was by then a member of the Prime Minister’s cabinet and arranged for Clémenceau to open the Congress. Few diplomatic results were achieved because of the conflicting

Michel reproduces some of the iconography of the period. For instance, a German medal shows a naked woman chained to a giant phallus wearing a French helmet on one face, while the other shows a caricatural portrait of an African man wearing a helmet, surrounded by the French Republican motto, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. This campaign was continued by the Nazis. The famous poster for the 1938 Düsseldorf exhibition on ‘degenerate music’ (widely available on the internet under Entartete Musik) shows a black saxophone player bearing the top hat of capitalism, a heavy African ear-ring and a Jewish Star of David on his lapel.

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perspectives of the organisers, but these perspectives came to public attention for the first time. Du Bois hoped that a free African state would be constituted out of former German colonies, but Diagne refused all ideas of African nationalism and tried to stir the Congress towards a celebration of enlightened French colonial policies, as opposed to American segregationism. Thus, the final resolution ended up characterising identity and culture as popular traditions or ‘ancient usage’, and as a compromise, called for the creation of ‘a code of law for the international protection of the natives of Africa’ and a gradual progress towards the participation of natives in the administration of colonial states.31 In 1921, Diagne abruptly quit the subsequent Pan-African Congress, held in Brussels, considering Du Bois too dangerously internationalist. In November 1922, in an Editorial Letter to The Negro World entitled ‘Senegalese Negro Deputy Traitor To His Country, Africa’, Marcus Garvey violently attacked Diagne because he had described Garveyism as a dangerous utopia that could not serve the

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‘Les indigènes d’Afrique doivent avoir le droit de participer au Gouvernement aussi vite que leur formation le leur permet, et conformément au principe selon lequel le Gouvernement existe pour les indigènes et non l’inverse. Ils devront immédiatement être autorisés à̀ participer au gouvernement local et tribal, selon l’ancien usage, et cette participation devra graduellement s’étendre, au fur et à̀ mesure que se développent leur éducation et leur expérience, aux plus hautes fonctions des États ; de façon à̀ ce que l’Afrique finisse par être gouvernée par le consentement des africains …’ [The natives of Africa must have the right to participate in the Government as fast as their development permits, in conformity with the principle that the Government exists for the natives, and not the natives for the Government. They shall at once be allowed to participate in local and tribal government, according to ancient usage, and this participation shall gradually extend, as education and experience proceed, to the higher offices of state; to the end that, in time, Africa is ruled by the consent of the Africans]. This text is available, together with a collection of many Pan-Africanist documents, on the website of the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie: Le Mouvement panafricaniste au vingtième siècle, 86 accessed August 2016. The English version of the declaration was sent by Du Bois on 23 June 1921 to Charles Evans Hughes, then US Secretary of State. It is reproduced in The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, IX: Africa for the Africans, June 1921–December 1922 accessed August 2016.

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interests of African people, ‘diverse and lacking in cohesion’ and questioned the very idea of an ‘African nation’.32 Diagne obviously defended French interests, but he did so because they coincided with his own and those of the populations which consistently gave him landslide electoral victories.33 In the 1920s, this ambivalent attitude towards the idea of an African nation was not the privilege of the assimilated black colonial elites. In addition to the communist press already mentioned, the decade witnessed the emergence of a number of movements that were critical of colonialism, but nevertheless did not immediately see in a general ‘African nationalism’ a realistic or even desirable solution. The Ligue Universelle de Défense de la Race Noire (LUDRN) [Universal League for the Defence of the Black Race], for example, which was created in 1924 and published an important journal, Les Continents, violently denounced the poor treatment of colonial veterans and the fact that those considered communists or simply rebellious were either prevented from going home, or harassed and even executed when they managed to get there.34 In its cultural pages, it also started to question the idea of the inferiority of Africans, published articles on the history of African civilisations and reviewed contemporary black art. Thus Dewitte notes of Les Continents that ‘at the heart of the assimilationist citadel, the hierarchy of civilisations, which is the founding postulate of colonial legitimacy, starts to be called into question.35 Yet at the same time,

32 Dewitte, Les Mouvements Nègres en France, 59. Garvey’s letter is reproduced in The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, IX: Africa for the Africans, June 1921–December 1922 accessed August 2016. 33 Michael C. Lambert, ‘From Citizenship to Negritude’, 245. 34 See Iheanachor Egonu, ‘Les Continents and the Francophone Pan-Negro Movement’, Phylon 42/3 (1981), 249; Dewitte, 67, who insists on the ambivalence of the journal; J. Ayo Langley, ‘Pan-Africanism in Paris, 1924–36’, The Journal of Modern African Studies 7/1 (April 1969), 69–94; Guy-Landry Hazoume, Jean Suret-Canale et al., La Vie et l’Œuvre de Louis Hunkanrin: Suivi de deux écrits de Louis Hunkanrin (Cotonou: Librairie Renaissance, 1977). 35 ‘C’est au cœur de la citadelle assimilationniste que s’ébauche une remise en cause de la hiérarchie des civilisations, ce postulat sur lequel repose la légitimité coloniale’ [It is in the heart of the assimilationist citadel that a calling into question of the

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Continents attacked those who, in the Colonial School (the Grande École where colonial administrators were trained), opposed assimilationist policies – for instance those who, in the League’s view, considered the teaching of French to natives a crime, thus denying them the benefits of civilisation which a sound colonial policy should provide. Kojo Tovalou Houénou, then director of Les Continents, wrote in 1924 an editorial column that embodies the ambiguities of the period. Here Houénou’s attacks George Hardy, Director of the École Coloniale and a theoretician of the move from assimilationist policies to a policy of ‘rediscovery of traditions’ (‘redécouverte des traditions’), as well as Maurice Delafosse, Professor in the École and the author of numerous volumes on ‘negro’ cultures. They had approved of a book by a professor of the Belgian École Coloniale, Louis Verlaine, who declared that in his opinion ‘the French language should not be taught’. In a remarkably violent paper, Houénou writes: L’ancien inspecteur de l’instruction publique dans les colonies M. G. Hardy et M. Delafosse applaudissent frénétiquement à cet avis qu’ils partagent entièrement. « Je n’hésite pas à affirmer que je considère l’admission du principe du fouet comme absolument indispensable. » Voilà ce qu’un professeur belge ose écrire et enseigner au lendemain de la guerre de 1914–1918 où les nègres ont sauvé sa patrie de l’écrasement. Doivent-ils regretter que les Allemands ne l’eussent soumise définitivement à la loi du knout dont il fait l’apologie ? Que dire de cet autre savant français, M. Delafosse, qui fait l’éloge d’un tel livre, et le considère comme la base de son enseignement à l’École coloniale française. […] Le programme colonial est donc le suivant : pas d’instruction, pas de liberté civile, économique, politique, la condamnation de toute la race noire aux travaux forcés comme justice, la loi du vainqueur : le fouet. Maintien des coutumes pour arrêter et figer toute évolution. L’enseignement du français considéré comme un crime. Quand je vous dis que ces messieurs du Ministère des Colonies et de l’École coloniale font une œuvre antifrançaise.

hierarchy of civilisations is beginning, that postulate upon which colonial legitimacy depends] Dewitte, Les Mouvements Nègres en France, 80. Émile Derlin Zinsou and Luc Zouménou’s rich book, Kojo Tovalou Houénou (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 2004), contains useful information on the history of the journal (in particular Ch. 9: ‘Les Continents, journal pannègre’).

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A good example of the mistreatment of civil rights militants was that of Louis Hunkanrin, a school teacher from Dahomey (now the Republic of Benin) who had created a local section of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme (Human Rights League) before World War I and who had campaigned against abuses by colonial administrators, as well as the poor educational standards which, in his view, prevented real assimilation. Hunkanrin joined Diagne in 1918 and advocated the participation of Dahomey in the War, but in 1920 he refused Diagne’s offer of a directorship in the colonial security services of Dahomey and instead started to publish Le Messager Dahoméen 36

[Mr G. Hardy, former inspector of public education in the colonies, and Mr Delafosse fervently praise an opinion that they wholeheartedly share. ‘I do not hesitate in affirming that I consider as absolutely indispensable the recognition of the principle of the whip.’ Here is what a Belgian professor dares to write and teach in the wake of the War of 1914–18, in which his homeland was saved from destruction by the Negroes. Oughtn’t they therefore regret the fact that the Germans did not definitively submit it to the law of the knout, of which they have made themselves the apologists? What can we say of that other French scientist, Mr Delafosse, who eulogises such a book and considers it the basis of his own teaching in the French Colonial School. […] The colonial programme is thus the following: no education, no civil, economic or political freedom, the condemnation of the entire black race to forced labour as an act of justice, the law of the victor: the whip. The maintaining of customs in order to do away with and frustrate all evolution. The teaching of French considered as a crime. Again I say that these gentlemen of the Ministry of the Colonies and the Colonial School are carrying out an Anti-French act. Right up to the benefits of civilisation, which are publicly denied by those who are charged with their dissemination and have used them as a pretext and excuse for barbarity and the unjust conquest of harmless peoples.] Prince Kojo Tovalou Houénou, ‘Doctrines et Doctrinaires de l’École Coloniale’, Les Continents, 15 July 1924. In fact, in his review of Verlaine’s book, what Delafosse praises is its historical bluntness, without necessarily deriving from it his politics. I thank M. Daniel Frydman and Mme Chloé Truong, at ACRPP, who communicated copies of Les Continents.

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in Paris, which he co-edited with Max Bloncourt, a lawyer from Guadeloupe who later became the editor of Le Paria after Hô Chi Minh’s departure for Moscow. Le Messager principally fought against misapplications of colonial policies and was strongly in favour of assimilation, but Bloncourt occasionally quoted Garvey’s call to end colonisation. Hunkanrin was soon deported to Senegal (his birthplace), but returned clandestinely and was then sent to Dahomey, where he took part in the Porto-Novo unrest of 1923, before finally being interned in Mauritania.37 The two successive editors of Les Continents, René Maran and Houénou, are also interesting figures. Maran, born in French Guiana and partly raised in Martinique, was a colonial administrator in Africa. He was the first black winner of France’s top literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, in 1922, for his novel Batouala.38 The novel described African life without excessive exoticism, though largely from the point of view of a colonial administrator. Its preface, however, was a violent indictment of colonialism and of the corruption, hypocrisy and murderous consequences of the mission civilisatrice. The controversies were such that Maran had to resign his post and the book was banned in the colonies.39 But some of the criticism he received came from surprising corners. He wrote from an assimilationist point of view and was criticised by the new Africanists, such as Maurice Delafosse. As we have seen, Delafosse, a former senior colonial

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Dewitte insists on the assimilationist content of the journal (Les Mouvements Nègres en France, 67). See also J. Ayo Langley, ‘Pan-Africanism in Paris, 1924–36’, 69–94; GuyLandry Hazoume, Jean Suret-Canale, et al., La Vie et l’Œuvre de Louis Hunkanrin; Dov Ronen ‘The Colonial Elite in Dahomey’, African Studies Review 17/1 (April 1974), 55–76. Hunkanrin, who died in 1964, is regarded in Benin as the initiator of the national movement. René Maran, Batouala: véritable roman nègre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1921). In the encounter we have mentioned, in Banjo, of an African-American and a student from the Antilles in Marseilles, the American asks whether the student has heard of Batouala. The student declares his approval of the ban in the Antilles: ‘“C’était un livre dangereux, très fort, très fort”, disait l’étudiant en manière de défense de l’interdiction’ [‘It was a naughty book, very strong, very strong’, said the student, defending the act].

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administrator and author of several books on African civilisations, was now lecturer at the École Coloniale. His long-standing fight against the dominant assimilationist policies and in favour of separate development was finally victorious. He claimed that Maran only had a superficial vision of Africa and did not truly understand local negro identities.40 The African American press, through writers of the African Renaissance, celebrated Maran’s prize, which they saw again as a sign of France’s lack of racial prejudice. But Maran himself dissented in Les Continents from Alain Locke, a well-known professor at Howard College (then the main black university) and former student at Harvard, who had attended the College de France before the war and had just published The New Negro, an anthology-manifesto of the Harlem writers and artists. Locke had become a member of the French Académie des Sciences Coloniales on the nomination of Delafosse, precisely because of his celebration of cultural pluralism and identité nègre (negro identity).41 Maran accused Locke of naivety in an article he had published on the German racist campaigns against colonial troops in the Rhine (Black Watch on the Rhine), which he contrasted with France’s benevolence towards the colonised.42 The debate with Locke remained friendly, but in 40 In his history of the display of non-European art in France, Benoît de l’Estoile notes that Delafosse uses the word ‘civilisation’ in the plural, and introduces a number of new ideas, such as the principle of nationalities. See Le Goût des Autres: de l’Exposition Coloniale aux Arts Premiers (Paris: Flammarion, 2007), 83. In his important study of the birth of cultural nationalism in French Africa, François Manchuelle analysed school syllabi and noted that France’s colonial policy was only assimilationist until the end of the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the twentieth century, colonial educational authorities emphasised the teaching of local culture and of African history from the time of the great Sudanese empires, and asked school teachers to help collect local folklore. This is how Alioune Diop, the founder of Présence Africaine, said he discovered African culture. Some of the locals seem to have resented this syllabus, which they thought inferior, and asked for the metropolitan one. See François Manchuelle, ‘Assimilés ou patriotes africains? Naissance du nationalisme culturel en Afrique française (1853–1931)’, Cahiers d’Études africaines 35/138 (1995), 333–68. 41 Alain Locke’s collection The New Negro was published in New York in 1925 and immediately well received in France. 42 See Iheanachor Egonu, ‘Les Continents and the Francophone Pan-Negro Movement’, 251.

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1924, when Maran suggested that Diagne had benefited personally from the recruitment campaign in Africa, Diagne sued him, won the trial and Les Continents had to stop publication.43 It seems that until the end of his life, Maran was split between his admiration for France and his lucid assessment of colonial reality. He remained an influential pioneering figure, equally respected for Batouala and for Les Continents. Kojo Tovalou Houénou was also a strong personality, but more capable of playing with contradictions than Maran. Presenting himself as a Dahomean prince (according to the police, he was in fact the son of a wealthy merchant who had helped French expansion in Dahomey), he studied medicine in Paris before World War I, volunteered to serve in the French army and, after the war, became a figure on the Parisian scene. Langston Hughes, for instance, mentions him in his autobiography as a Parisian celebrity and Eslanda Goode Robeson, the wife of the American singer Paul Robeson, who wrote a PhD in London and published a study on ‘Black Paris’ in 1936, notes that He knows and is known in nearly every inch of Paris, and numbers his friends in aristocratic, intellectual, artistic, musical, theatrical, academic, legal, medical, and ordinary circles there. He was born Kojo Tovalou Houenou, at Portonovo, Dahomey, a prince of royal blood.44

Following a racist attack in a Montmartre club in 1923 (by a group of white Americans), he became a cause célèbre and President Poincaré made a solemn declaration in the Chamber on this issue.45 In 1921, he had published the first and apparently only volume of a metaphysical treatise,

43 Ibid. 251. 44 Eslanda Goode Robeson, ‘Black Paris’, Challenge ( January 1936), 18. This literary quarterly was published by Dorothy West, another member of the Harlem Renaissance. (Document kindly communicated by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library). 45 According to Melvyn Stokes, this case led to the banning in France of D. W. Griffith’s film, Birth of a Nation, as a racist film. See ‘Kojo Tovalou Houénou: An Assessment’, in Transatlantica 1 (2009): ‘Homage to Michel Fabre’, 1 accessed August 2016.

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L’Involution des Métamorphoses et des Métempsychoses de l’Univers, a somewhat Wittgensteinian reflection on evolutionary phonetics, analysed both structurally and historically, where each instance of the use of a sign is considered a singular fact, with phonetics and then grammar considered as a posteriori generalisations (the volume comes with a table describing the law of gravitation of phonemes). By extension, the world is nothing else than the totality of facts, and categories and laws are a posteriori reflexions on these phenomena. From this analysis, he ultimately derived an ontology justifying assimilation on the one hand and celebrating difference on the other since, according to him, La vie est une et universelle dans son involution, multiple et diverse dans ses mouvements évolutifs […] Nous sommes noyés dans l’infini comme la goutte d’eau dans l’océan et comme elle nous reflétons l’univers.46

Houénou’s metaphysical work was dismissed by Dewitte, with some justification, as amphigoric.47 However, a sustained reading shows that this ontology of multiplicities in fusion served as the foundation of his political thought on the interaction of civilisations. It probably allowed him to reconcile the contradictory impulses of so many actors of the period, torn between a deep francophilia and an indignant anticolonialism.48 In this

46 [Life is one and universal in its involution, multiple and diverse in its evolutive movements […] We are immersed in the infinite like a drop of water in the ocean, and, as it does, we reflect the universe.] Kojo Tovalou Houénou, L’Involution des métamorphoses et des métempsychoses de l’univers, I: L’Involution phonétique ou méditations sur les métamorphoses et les métempsychoses du langage (Paris: self-published, 1921), 60. On Houénou, see also Langley, ‘Pan-Africanism in Paris’, 69–94; Christopher Miller, Nationalists and Nomads, Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 48–54; Patrick Manning, Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa 1880–1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 80. 47 Dewitte, Les Mouvements Nègres en France, 74. 48 The biography published by Émile Derlin Zinsou and Luc Zouménou, Kojo Tovalou Houénou, summarises it well. Houénou was ‘français autant qu’on pouvait l’être, africain de même’ [as French as can be, and likewise African] (10). Zinsou (1918–2016), an important politician and briefly a president of Benin (then Dahomey), knew and

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regard, Houénou was both lucid and prophetic. In a section on ‘truisms’, he wrote N’ayant pas abdiqué mon âme, en venant en Europe, j’ai compris que la civilisation est une immense bouffonnerie qui s’achève dans la boue et le sang, comme en 1914.49

Yet a page later, he predicts: L’Afrique n’a pas encore apporté sa contribution à la vie de la cite, à la civilisation, son tour viendra. Méfiez-vous de ces hommes de bronze, leur force et leur lumière étonneront vos pays de brumes: le soleil est de chez eux.50

In a speech he gave on 19 August 1924, at a convention of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Carnegie Hall in New York, he declared: [L’Afrique] relève la tête après avoir été soumise pendant des siècles à un pillage éhonté, et après avoir subi des guerres désastreuses provoquées par des bandits européens, dont le seul but était de se procurer des esclaves, crimes indélébiles commis sous le fallacieux prétexte de la civilisation et du dogme stupide de la suprématie de la race blanche. Consciente de son génie et de sa destinée, l’Afrique veut désormais se régénérer.51

admired Houénou in his youth. No doubt a Frenchman according to the values of 1789, but not to what he perceives as their colonial deviations and treason. 49 [I had not abdicated my soul when I came to Europe and understood that civilisation is an immense buffoonery that ends in mud and blood, as in 1914.] L’Involution, 59. 50 [Africa has yet to bring its contribution to the life of the city, to civilisation, its turn will come. Beware of these men of bronze, their strengths and their light will astonish your fogy countries: the sun inhabits their land.] L’Involution, 70–1. It is interesting that in this rare reference to Africa in the book, ‘bronze’ should be the colour of Africans. At this time in his thought, ‘noir’ or ‘nègre’ are not yet connoted positively. 51 [Africa raises her head after having spent centuries in submission to barefaced looting, and after having endured disastrous wars provoked by European bandits, whose sole goal was to gain slaves for themselves, unspeakable crimes committed on the false pretext of civilisation and the idiotic dogma of the supremacy of the white race. Conscious of her genius and her destiny, Africa henceforth seeks to renew herself.]

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He thus celebrates UNIA as the ‘Zionism of the black race’,52 inviting the audience to return to Africa, and ends his speech with ‘Vive l’union de tous les Noirs, et vive l’Afrique!’53 Yet in the same speech, he declared ‘La France est le seul pays qui, non seulement n’a pas le préjugé des races mais lutte pour sa disparition’.54 Which is why Paris was, for him, ‘the heart of the Black Race’, and thus the natural seat for a Universal League for the Defence of the Black Race.55 52

‘Votre Association, M. le Président Marcus Garvey, est le Sionisme de la Race Noire. Elle a l’avantage dans son radicalisme de préciser nettement le problème, de tracer la route large et lumineuse qui doit nous conduire au salut’ [Your Association, President Marcus Garvey, is the Zionism of the Black Race. In its radicalism it has the advantage of clearly specifying the problem, of tracing the wide and shining road that will lead us to salvation]. A number of theoreticians of an ‘African identity’ in the period saw themselves as ‘Black Zionists’, eager to organise a return to their native land as Herzl had done for another enslaved people. This is how Marcus Garvey (who occasionally described himself as the Black Moses), saw his movement. See E. David Cronon, Black Moses: The Story of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). This parallel between the two movements had been common since the end of the nineteenth century in the USA and in that at least, Garvey echoed Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. In France a number of movements soon advocated a sionisme africain or sionisme noir, an expression also used in French police reports to characterise the project of ‘reconstituting the original land’ attributed to the Ligue de Défense de la Race Noire (see Dewitte, Les Mouvements Nègres en France, 81, and J. Ayo Langley, ‘PanAfricanism in Paris’, 77, 85). In Chester Himes’ remarkable Cotton Comes to Harlem (New York: Putnam, 1965), the seventh instalment in his Harlem Cycle, detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones uncover a fraudulent return-to-Africa scheme, clearly inspired by Garvey’s programme. 53 [Long live the union of each and every Black, and long live Africa!] 54 [France is the only country which not only does not possess racial prejudice, but fights for its disappearance.] ‘Paris, Cœur de la Race Noire’, Les Continents, 1 October 1924. 55 See Babacar M’Baye, ‘Marcus Garvey and African Francophone Political Leaders of the Early Twentieth Century: Prince Kojo Tovalou Houénou Reconsidered’, The Journal of Pan African Studies 1/5 (September 2006), 8. M’Baye notes that in spite of his community of views with Garvey, who saw in the Ligue Universelle de la Race Noire an associate movement to his own, Houénou was still fundamentally an assimilationist. On the link between Garvey and Houénou, the UNIA papers contain an

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Houénou, who dedicated his book to Béhanzin, the late King of Dahomey, as his uncle, was a monarchist: La monarchie diffère de la démocratie comme le médecin de la peste. Certes beaucoup de médecins sont des assassins, mais la peste tue à coup sûr ; mon ambition est de devenir roi de France, je ferai si bien à côté du lys.56

He also clearly had a sense of humour. But the interesting point is that if these judgements do indeed reflect some of the anti-democratic feelings of the time, this aristocratic stance expresses a confidence in traditional structures of ‘negro civilisation’, progressively shared to the point of obsession by the black press. Marcus Garvey dreamed of the creation of a black aristocratic republic in Africa, and Léopold Sédar Senghor later declared that he owed his sense of negro poetry to his childhood in an aristocratic family: he used to listen to the learned poetry of the griots who accompanied the King when he visited his father’s villa (he calls griots ‘troubadours’, and notes that ‘villa’ is to be taken in the sense of a Roman villa). The refined politeness of these exchanges made him reject the ‘allegedly barbaric condition of Negro-Africans’ taught at school, and this well before his encounters with ‘artists, writers and professors at the Institut d’Ethnologie, in Paris’.57 Later on, he approved of Sartre’s ambivalent description of négritude and

account of the launch of the LUDRN dated 5 May 1924, in Paris, published in the Baltimore Afro-American. It announces ‘French Garvey now in Paris’. (The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers: Africa for the Africans, 1923–1945, vol. X). Garvey was known in France and used this notoriety. The UNIA papers contain the English translation of a report on one of his Madison Square Garden meetings, published in Paris in l’Œuvre (which was then a left-wing paper) with the title ‘Un Moïse Noir’, on 17 April 1924. 56 [Monarchy is to democracy like a doctor is to plague. Many doctors are indeed murderers, but the plague never fails to kill. My ambition is to become the King of France; I would look good next to a lily.] L’Involution, 72. 57 Savage, ‘Entretien avec Léopold Sédar Senghor’, 1066. Senghor often acknowledged the influence of European anthropologists of the period, in particular Leo Frobenius and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl had on him as a student. Césaire published translations of Frobenius in Tropiques during World War II.

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noted that his attitude and that of his friends then had been somewhat racist: ‘fervent in its autocontemplation’.58

The word ‘nègre’ It is thus clear that while, politically, assimilationism still dominated, the foundations for a cultural nationalism were being laid, almost reluctantly in some cases, and from odd corners. Paris was probably its main centre. This is particularly striking in the trajectory of another remarkable character of the period, Lamine Senghor (who bore no kinship with the future poet-president). Lamine Senghor, a former Senegalese Rifleman who survived Verdun but was wounded and caught in a gas attack, later testified about Diagne’s ‘false promises’ at the trial that opposed Diagne and Maran. After the war he had become a postal worker in Paris, joined the French Communist Party (PCF) and the Intercolonial Union, and soon was probably the most active of its African militants, tirelessly organising the African working class throughout France. In his detailed and moving portrayal of Lamine Senghor, Dewitte notes that the greatest homage to this figure is perhaps a colonial police report of September 1926 in Marseilles, which noted the prodigious energy of a man who suffered from tuberculosis and by then was legally classified as being a total invalid: Moving from boat to boat, company to company, and going wherever he could find a man of colour, he publicised himself so well that many Blacks already consider him their future liberator. It seems that urgent measures against this activist should be considered, so as to prevent him from intensifying his pernicious propaganda, which could have regrettable consequences.59

But from the beginning, the PCF was suspicious of anticolonial struggles, fearing that the racial question would obliterate the class struggle 58 Ibid. 1067. 59 Dewitte, Les Mouvements Nègres en France, 128.

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(hence the use of the word ‘Pariah’, which in effect glossed over this distinction). In May 1925, the PCF asked a reluctant Senghor to run in the municipal elections for the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris, where he gathered only 956 votes and realised that he had simply been used as a token of the PCF’s supposed anticolonialism. The same year, when he was invited to a congress of black workers in Chicago by the American Communist Party, the PCF suggested that he either pay for his crossing, work on board the ship or travel clandestinely. Senghor resigned from the party in October 1925, and in 1926 created the Comité de Défense de la Race Nègre (CDRN) which in effect replaced the Ligue de Défense de la Race Noire. He published a new journal, La Voix des Nègres and, in its first issue of January 1927, justified the choice of the word nègre instead of noir, in a manifesto stating that imperialism, in order to break ‘the very unity of the race’, had created three categories: ‘coloured’, ‘black’ and ‘negro’. ‘Coloured’ (homme de couleur) was an empty notion since all human beings have a colour, while ‘black’ (noir) did not apply to negroes, since there were white negroes and negroes of all shades. Only nègre could designate the race, and all of it: Les jeunesses du CDRN se sont fait un devoir de ramasser ce nom dans la boue où vous le traînez, pour en faire un symbole. Ce nom est celui de notre race. […] Oui, messieurs, vous avez voulu vous servir de ce nom comme mot d’ordre scissionniste. Nous, nous en servons comme mot d’ordre de ralliement : un flambeau ! Nous nous faisons honneur et gloire de nous appeler Nègres, avec un N majuscule en tête. C’est notre race nègre que nous voulons guider sur la voie de sa libération totale du joug esclavagiste qu’elle subit.60

60 [The youth of the CDRN have made it their duty to pick this word back up out of the mud where you have been dragging it, to make it into a symbol. This is the name of our race.] La Voix des nègres, January 1927. Translation by Christopher L. Miller, in Nationalists and Nomads, 34. This is the sense in which Aimé Césaire adopted the word ‘nègre’ from the outset. See his Nègre je suis, Nègre je resterai: Entretiens avec Françoise Vergès (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005).

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In this remarkable move the supposedly neutral, descriptive terms of racial classification are dismissed from the outset, and it is only the derogatory one that can be redeemed, because it reflects the reality of oppression. Thus in Paris after World War I, characters such as Hunkanrin, Maran, Houénou, Senghor and many others, however diverse their own personal destinies, developed de facto, in the course of their struggles, a new, diasporic form of universalism, detached equally from those of the coloniser and of its communist opponent and, by the end of the decade, gave rise to a new consciousness. The following years largely focused on the long work of production of a ‘negro identity’, and culminated in what is now recognised as the proclamation of négritude. There was nothing linear or automatic in this process either. The role of several transitional parallel works, events and characters should be studied in this regard. For instance, the famous Martinican sisters Jane, Paulette and Andrée Nardal. Their literary salon in the Parisian suburb of Clamart was attended by all the important figures of the period. They published first La Dépêche Africaine (1928–1932) and then the bilingual La Revue du Monde Noir/The Review of the Black World (1931–1932). These journals had an audience ten times as large as that of the journals of the previous decade, and constituted a real forum for the dialogue of communities that had started to perceive themselves as related or sharing an essential bond.61 Nevertheless, a systematic reading of the journal shows that it was a slow and sometimes paradoxical process. For instance, the first issue of The Review of the Black World62 contains a celebration of the 1931 Colonial Exhibition (and its 30 million visitors) by the President of the French Students’ Union. The Review’s articles on jazz or on black artists have often been quoted; less so the texts devoted to showing that Africans were civilised human beings. Thus one finds an extensive discussion on whether ‘the mentality of Negroes is inferior to that of white men’ in Issue Two; an astonishing analysis of ‘cannibalisme et avitaminose’ 61

Jennifer Anne Boittin quotes police estimates of print runs of 12,000 to 15,000 copies. See her ‘In Black and White: Gender, Race Relations, and the Nardal Sisters in Interwar Paris’, French Colonial History 6 (2005), 121. 62 The Parisian publisher Jean-Michel Place reprinted the complete collection of the Revue in 1992.

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[Cannibalism and vitamin deficiency], studied from a biological point of view, mostly on animals but also with reference to shipwrecks, but with a subtext not hard to discern; a readers’ survey on whether negroes can dress as Europeans without provoking laughter (Issue Three); or, in the sixth and final issue, an open letter to Admiral Castex, who had called for France to sell its Caribbean territories, reminding him that The Old Colonies, which form an integral part of the national domain legislatively since 1790, are not estates to be portioned out. Herein your knowledge of politics will clearly show you that souls are no longer to be sold in the twentieth century.63

In other words, the abolition of slavery implied that France had to keep its old colonies. As for the new ones, it was bound by ‘the so called [tant proclamée] civilising mission of France, the guardian of belated peoples [tutrice des peuples attardés], lessons taught by the Colonial Exhibition of 1931’.64 In their moderation, their will to engage with a much larger audience and sometimes their naivety, these publications reveal the persistence of limits and inhibitions that several of their now forgotten predecessors had already broken, as well as the main contradictions of négritude. At the end of Peau noire, masques blancs, his first book, Frantz Fanon declared: ‘La découverte de l’existence d’une civilisation nègre au XVe siècle ne me décerne pas un brevet d’humanité.65

Most of the famous chapter on ‘L’expérience vécue du Noir’ [The Lived Experience of the Black Man] could be read as a historical phenomenology of the successive, always unsatisfactory, stations through which the colonised consciousness tries to either embrace or forge an ‘identity’, without ever really superseding these positions through a Hegelian dialectics. In

63 The Review of the Black World, 6, 18. 64 Ibid. 65 [The discovery that a black civilisation existed in the fifteenth century does not earn me a certificate if humanity.] PNMB, 246/199–200.

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Les Damnés de la terre, his last book, he came back to the issue in a section on ‘National Culture’ and concluded that: L’intellectuel colonisé cependant tôt ou tard se rendra compte qu’on ne prouve pas sa nation à partir de la culture, mais qu’on la manifeste dans le combat que mène le peuple contre les forces d’occupation. Aucun colonialisme ne tire sa légitimité de l’inexistence culturelle des territoires qu’il domine. On ne fera jamais honte au colonialisme en déployant devant son regard des trésors culturels méconnus.66

Fanon took seriously the history of négritude, seeing in it a series of psychological complexes, in an ambiguous, often pathological relationship with colonialism and anthropology. A closer look at the archives of the remarkable decade that followed World War I in Paris confirms the complexity of this crucial and conflictual phase of the construction of a new experience which was only perceived much later as the renaissance of an identity.

66 [Sooner or later, however, the colonised intellectual realises that the existence of a nation is not proved by culture, but in the people’s struggle against the forces of occupation. No colonialism draws its justification from the fact that the territories it occupies are culturally nonexistent. Colonialism will never be put to shame by exhibiting unknown cultural treasures under its nose.] Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés 602/159. See Wasafiri 44 (spring 2005): Frantz Fanon Special Issue, ed. Jean Khalfa, and the special issue of Les Temps Modernes 635–6 (November 2006): Pour Frantz Fanon, ed. Jean Khalfa.

Chapter 5

Corps Perdu: A Note on Fanon’s Cogito1

Mon ultime prière: Ô mon corps, fais de moi toujours un homme qui interroge !2

Peau noire, masques blancs ends on the enigmatic note of a prayer to the body. Fanon does not simply wish to be a perpetual questioner, otherwise he would have written ‘fais de moi un homme qui interroge toujours’. The focus is on the body, which should always make of him the particular type of person who questions. But why should the interrogative stance be a prerogative of the body? Clearly my body must not simply be a body within the world, a material object, if what is at stake in it is a stance, an attitude vis-à-vis the world, a manner of facing it, questioning it. My body would be the origin of my ‘style’ of being in the world or ‘facing’ it.3 And yet there is, for Fanon, a risk, a danger that this body might not be what it should be: the body of this man and perhaps of a person in general. There is clearly an 1

The material in this chapter comes from the following publications: ‘My body, this skin, this fire: Fanon on flesh’, Wasafiri 20/44 (spring 2005): Frantz Fanon Special Issue, ed. Jean Khalfa, 42–50; ‘Fanon, corps perdu’, Les Temps Modernes 635–6 (2006): ‘Pour Frantz Fanon’, ed. Jean Khalfa, 97–117, reprinted and augmented in S. KassabCharfi and M. Bahi (eds), Mémoires et Imaginaires du Maghreb et de la Caraïbe (Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 2013), 33–50. 2 [My final prayer: O my body, always make me a man who questions!] PNMB, 251/206. 3 On the various links of the body to the notion of style in the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, see Yasuhiko Murakami, ‘Silence, style, rêve: Merleau-Ponty et la métamorphose du sujet’, Bulletin d’Analyse Phénoménologique 5/7 (2009) accessed 11 August 2016. On the relationship of Fanon with Merleau-Ponty, see EAL, 140, 616, 643.

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urgent, almost desperate insistence in ‘fais de moi toujours’ rather than ‘fais toujours de moi’. The tone is indeed that of a prayer, but it is a paradoxical one since it does not open onto a transcendence. Rather, it is an injunction signalling and creating an inner dialogue of the self with its physical being, aiming at a continual creation of the self through the immanence of the body. Or better, perhaps, a meditation, an exercise or a path along which the self forms or reforms, a paradox since it could not do that if it was not from the beginning what it is becoming: a being that constantly fashions itself, however unknowingly so far. For who would make such a prayer if not one who interrogates radically, in particular one who questions even the familiar evidence of the body as a thing? A ‘metaphysical meditation’ therefore, in a sense, but reversing the Cartesian movement, since what is asserted in the prayer is the inseparability of thought (as questioning) from body, since consciousness can only come to know itself through the body. Remarkably, Fanon’s prayer was chosen as an epitaph on his memorial plate in the family plot in Fort-de-France,4 but it was altered to: ‘Mon ultime prière: fais de moi toujours un homme qui interroge!’. ‘Ô mon corps’ has disappeared, and the prayer now seems addressed to another being, a transcendence.5 This is perhaps for religious reasons, or simply because a prayer to the body in the environment of a cemetery would have been too paradoxical. Or perhaps in a land where, according to Fanon, the colour of skin is masked, such reference to the insistence of the body was not acceptable. Whatever the case, there is in this choice and transformation both the irreducibility of the figure of the questioner and a resistance to the issue of the body that should alert us. Fanon himself was particularly aware that in his writing (and perhaps all writing that interested him), what was important was not so much the ideas expressed as what resisted expression. This is perhaps why the conclusion of Peau noire, masques blancs is a sequence of aphorisms. In his preface to the first edition of the book, commenting on their correspondence concerning the manuscript, Francis Jeanson reports that Fanon had told 4 5

A simple plate, since Fanon was clandestinely buried on Algerian soil just before independence. David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Life (2nd edn, London and New York: Verso, 2012), 7, n. 10.

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him that some of his sentences aimed at communicating an experience, at reaching the reader’s affectivity, rather than at giving an explanation through a system of concepts: Ainsi arrive-t-il que Fanon jette soudain au cœur d’une idée, en plein milieu d’une argumentation, cette charge des mots, cette dynamite qui se révèle en eux dès qu’ils ne sont plus neutralisés par leur sage enrôlement, dans un discours suivi. A ces moments où il fait exploser le contexte, Fanon désorganise d’un coup nos assurances intellectuelles et reproduit en nous, magiquement, l’explosion même à laquelle il fut soumis pour s’être trop brutalement cogné à l’absurde, télescopé aux limites de la condition humaine.6

We can sense in this limitation of discursive writing and final recourse to the body and prayer something truly ‘ultimate’ that is essential and final, but not religious, as was implied in the removal of his reference to the body.7 Rather, Fanon sought the foundation of an ethics in an age when it could no longer be grounded in transcendent or universal values, religious or secular: Depuis longtemps le ciel étoilé qui laissait Kant pantelant nous a livré ses secrets. Et la loi morale doute d’elle-même. En tant qu’homme je m’engage à affronter le risque de l’anéantissement pour que deux ou trois vérités jettent sur le monde leur clarté essentielle.8

6

7 8

[Thus it can happen that in the midst of an argument Fanon will suddenly throw into the heart of an idea that charge of words, that dynamite which is revealed in them when they are no longer neutralised by their decorous enlistment in a coherent discourse. In these moments in which he explodes context, Fanon in one fell swoop disorganises our intellectual certainties and reproduces in us as if by magic the same explosion he experienced in slamming himself too brutally against the absurd, in telescoping himself against the limits of the human condition.] Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1952), 12. As is often the case, Jeanson chose interesting metaphors. ‘Cogné’, ‘télescopé’: Fanon’s thought is one that opposes confinement, inner and outer, in and of the body. It is true that Fanon’s life and writings always manifested a sense of urgency and a presence to death, but he wrote this text well before developing the leukaemia that was to kill him. [The starry sky that left Kant in awe has long revealed itself to us. And moral law has doubts about itself. As a man, I undertake to risk annihilation so that two or three truths can cast their essential light on the world.] PNMB, 248/202.

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His own experience of racial discrimination, discovered in particular during the long journey that took him from Martinique to North Africa and across Europe during World War II as a volunteer in the Free French Forces, had soon dispelled for him the illusions of humanist universalism. This disillusionment would only to be reinforced in the post-war period when, under the guise of secular, universalist republicanism, troops were sent to Algeria by a Socialist government, supported by the Communist Party. Fanon thus looked for this foundation for a new ethics in the reflexion on the links between body, consciousness and history that is Peau noir masques blancs. * ‘Sale nègre !’ Ou simplement : ‘Tiens un nègre !’ J’arrivais dans le monde, soucieux de faire lever un sens aux choses, mon âme pleine du désir d’être à l’origine du monde, et voici que je me découvrais objet au milieu d’autres objets.9

Peau noire, masques blancs could be read as a phenomenology of the colonised consciousness. ‘Phenomenology’ in a Hegelian sense: a narration of the various stations and figures of consciousness through which mind, in History at large as well as in the history of an individual, first experiences and then tries to resolve the various forms of its own alienation. Accordingly, the exposé is simultaneously subjective and objective, with Fanon constantly confronting the scientific ‘nous’ (the psychiatrist/philosopher), the subjective ‘je’ (the self as consciousness) and the objective ‘il’ 9

[‘Dirty nigger!’ or simply ‘Look, a Negro!’ I came into this world anxious to elicit a meaning out of things, my soul desirous to be the origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects.] PNMB, 153/89. (Translation modified). ‘Faire lever un sens aux choses’, literally to leaven things by meaning. In Merleau-Ponty’s vocabulary, this is not so much to give meaning to things from the ‘outside’, as to be a consciousness, a being through which this meaning that is a world takes place. A parallel genesis of the world as world, not just of a collection of things and facts, and of the subject as freedom and not just thing within the world. Fanon could be called a thinker of the origin or of a renaissance, but not in the sense of the rebirth of a first identity as in the negritude movement. Origin and rebirth are always in the present for him.

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(the self as ‘nègre’). He was particularly aware of the inherent complexity of this voice, attempting to describe objectively what could only be perceived from the inside: the subjective experience of being objectified through a historical construction of the body. This complexity meant that the book had to contain substantial material of a sociological or historical nature, and could not be submitted as a doctoral dissertation in psychiatry.10 But there was no other way. At the same time, considering the body not only as a thing within the world but also as a ‘posture’ or as a condition for a primordial interrogative relationship to the world, a condition for the constitution of the given as world, is a view which defines the intellectual world of Fanon’s formative years in Lyon, a world fundamentally influenced by Husserl’s phenomenology. He encountered it first, of course, through Merleau-Ponty, whose lectures he attended in Lyons, but more generally through all those in the French phenomenological tradition who considered the incarnation or embodiment of thought here and now as structural to it, under the name of existence. Sartre also elaborated this position and would later publish Fanon in his journal, Les Temps Modernes, as well as writing his famous preface to Le Damnés de la terre.11 For these philosophers, before the concepts of abstract thought can grasp it, the world is constructed in space as a synthesis of perspectives or projections from a situated point of view, and in time or history as the synthesis of a multiplicity of possible projects within a specific situation. Here is a summary Merleau-Ponty gave of this view:

10 11

On this question, see my introduction to Fanon’s psychiatric writings in EAL, 139–43, and infra, Ch. 6. Fanon admired him so much that, during their memorable meeting in Rome in the Summer of 1961, he said to Claude Lanzmann: ‘Je paierais vingt-mille francs par jour pour parler avec Sartre du matin au soir pendant quinze jours’ [I would pay 20,000 francs a day to talk with Sartre from morning to night for a fortnight] quoted in Simone de Beauvoir, La Force des choses, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1963) II, 421 (Folio Edition). On the circumstances of Fanon’s meeting with Beauvoir and Sartre, see ‘Jean Khalfa interviews Claude Lanzmann’, Wasafiri 20/44 (spring 2005): Frantz Fanon Special Issue, 19–23.

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Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on the body answers a classical difficulty in Husserl’s phenomenology: an object, as such, and not just as a singular perceptual image, is the synthesis of an infinity of possible aspects or ‘profiles’, given in apperception. On the other hand, the world is understood as a synthesis of the infinity of all possible objects. Far from having a divine comprehension of the world as a whole or in each of its details, we only perceive within horizons; there is always a beyond to all of our perceptions. Given that no world is perceptible without things and no thing is conceivable without at least the possibility of relationships with other things, each of these two horizons – the internal horizon of the thing and the external horizon of the world – depends on the other. The problem is that such a

12

[One’s own body is no longer simply another object in the world, held beneath the gaze of a detached mind, it shifts to the side of the subject, it is our point of view on the world, the place from which our mind invests itself in a certain physical and historical situation […] It is through the situation of the body that we grasp external space. A ‘body schema’ or ‘postural schema’ gives us at every instant a practical and implicit global notion of the relations in which our bodies and things find themselves, and so to speak its mapping upon them. A bundle of possible movements or ‘motor projects’ shines out from us upon our surroundings. Our body is not in space likes objects are; it inhabits it or haunts it.] ‘Un inédit de Merleau-Ponty’, published by Martial Guéroult in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 4 (October 1962), repr. in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Parcours deux, 1951–1961, ed. Jacques Prunair (Paris: Verdier, 2000), 39. Cognitive sciences came back to the problem of the postural schema when it needed to be modeled in view of creating an artificial intelligence. See Daniel C. Dennett, ‘Cognitive Wheels: The Frame Problem of AI’, in Zenon W. Pylyshyn (ed.), The Robot’s Dilemma: The Frame Problem in Artificial Intelligence (Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1987).

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structure of horizon seems to presuppose a focus, a centre of organisation and totalisation, in other words an Idea, which in a sense would be nothing other than the thing or the world: where would the tendency to link all these specific aspects come from, if not from a preconception of the object or of the world? At the same time, these preconceptions or centres of organisation can be neither the object nor the world, since the object is and is only the collection of all ‘its’ aspects, and since none of these aspects taken individually is an object or a world: Ainsi, il semble que nous soyons conduits à une contradiction, la croyance à la chose et au monde ne peut signifier que la présomption d’une synthèse achevée – et cependant cet achèvement est rendu impossible par la nature même des perspectives à réaliser, puisque chacune d’elles renvoie indéfiniment par ses horizons à d’autres perspectives.13

In other words, is it possible to avoid postulating, under the guise of a will to stick strictly to the phenomenal alone, the very ontology that one had set out to ground in the phenomenal in the first place? MerleauPonty’s solution is not Husserl’s postulation of a transcendental consciousness, a hypothesis severely criticised in Sartre’s seminal essay of 1937, La Transcendance de l’ego, but rather the idea that the body itself, through the dialectic of its interaction with the world, gives sense to the given. La Structure du comportement (1942) shows in particular, through a study of the failure of behaviourism, that even at the most elementary levels of animal behaviour, the organism constructs structures of behaviour which allow it to act according to the stimuli of its environment, rather than simply reacting to it. Thus when the conditioning labyrinth is flooded, the laboratory rat will swim towards food, which shows that through learning the animal has drawn a map of the relevant data of its environment,

13

[So it seems we are led into a contradiction: the belief in the thing and in the world can only signify the presumption of a completed synthesis – and yet this completion is rendered impossible by the very nature of the perspectives to be tied together, since each of them refers indefinitely to other perspectives through its horizons.] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, in Œuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), 1030/Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 345.

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suitable for a variety of behaviours, and not just a precise and invariable sequence of muscular responses. The main notion that such an explanation was based on and to which Merleau-Ponty would refer until his death, that of a schéma corporel [body schema], had been developed by the psychiatrist Jean Lhermitte in 1939.14 This notion is so essential to Fanon that he too constantly came back to it, using it to describe scientifically the psychopathology of the ‘lived experience of the negro’ (‘l’expérience vécue du nègre’) and later, as we shall see, in a political reflection on the transformations of Algerian women’s relationships to their own body, brought about by the Algerian war. ‘Tiens, un nègre !’ C’était un stimulus extérieur qui me chiquenaudait en passant. J’esquissai un sourire. ‘Tiens un nègre !’ C’était vrai. Je m’amusai. ‘Tiens un nègre !’ Le cercle peu à peu se resserrait. Je m’amusai ouvertement. ‘Maman, regarde le nègre, j’ai peur!’ Peur! Peur! Voilà qu’on se mettait à me craindre. Je voulus m’amuser jusqu’à m’étouffer, mais cela m’était devenu impossible. Je ne pouvais plus, car je savais déjà qu’existaient des légendes, des histoires, l’histoire, et surtout l’historicité, que m’avait enseignée Jaspers. Alors le schéma corporel, attaqué en plusieurs points, s’écroula, cédant la place à un schéma épidermique racial. Dans le train, il ne s’agissait plus d’une connaissance de mon corps en troisième personne, mais en triple personne. Dans le train, au lieu d’une, on me laissait deux, trois places.15

14 Jean Lhermitte, L’Image de notre corps (Paris: Nouvelle Critique, 1939). 15 [‘Look! A Negro!’ It was a passing sting. I attempted a smile. ‘Look! A Negro!’ Absolutely. I was beginning to enjoy myself. ‘Look! A Negro!’ The circle was gradually getting smaller. I was really enjoying myself. ‘Maman, look, a Negro! I’m scared!’ Scared! Scared! Now they were beginning to be scared of me. I wanted to kill myself laughing, but laughter had become out of the question. I couldn’t take it any longer, for I already knew there were legends, stories, history, and especially the historicity that Jaspers had taught me. As a result, the body schema, attacked in several places, collapsed, giving way to an epidermal racial schema. In the train, it was a question of being aware of my body, no longer in the third person but in triple. In the train, instead of one seat, they left me two or three.] PNMB, 155/91–2.

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Here is the scandal, the true risk to the body: what was proper to consciousness is suddenly abolished, the pre-philosophical, interrogative stance which is fundamental to ‘perceptual faith’. This incarnated interrogation is an essential freedom or play in the individual’s relationship to the world, even though this freedom and this play are constantly masked by the obvious, massive presence of the world that is also their work. Philosophy and art, in their reflexive practices, simply make this work explicit in their own interminable interrogation.16 The system of racism is the loss of the interrogative body revealed by phenomenology, suddenly replaced by a thing. Such a system is therefore based not just on the racist gaze, but also on the alteration of the consciousness it produces, on the interiorisation of this gaze by its object, who necessarily responds to it either through selfhatred or in the affirmation of a difference: servility or négritude. On this point, Fanon relies both on Sartre’s ‘Orphée noir’17 and on his Réflexions sur la question juive.18 For the racist gaze, the opacity essential to the body 16

17 18

For Merleau-Ponty, the world exists ‘on the interrogative mode’, so that philosophy is nothing else than the detailed unfolding of this fundamental interrogation, rather than the exposition of a knowledge on the totality of being. He constantly returned to the famous statement by Husserl in his Cartesian Meditations: ‘C’est l’expérience […] muette encore qu’il s’agit d’amener à l’expression pure de son propre sens’ [It is the experience … still mute which we are concerned with leading to the pure expression of its own meaning.] Quoted in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l’invisible, ed. Claude Lefort (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 171/The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 129. See Ch. 2 supra. Jean-Paul Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive (Paris: Gallimard, 1946); ‘Orphée noir’, preface to Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948). Both texts are constantly referred to by Fanon. On the impact that Sartre’s Réflexions had when it was published, see Pierre Vidal-Naquet, ‘Sartre et la question juive, Réflexions d’un lecteur de 1946’, in Ingrid Galster (ed.), Sartre et les juifs (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), 49–62. Nicole Lapierre, in her important book, Causes Communes (Paris: Stock, 2011), compares the parallel treatments of the Black and Jewish ‘questions’ by Sartre after the war and their influence on Fanon (see esp. 155–67). She notes ‘[…] dans Peau noire, masques blancs, son premier et très célèbre livre publié en 1952, Fanon adhère plus volontiers aux Réflexions sur la question juive dont il s’est

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of the Other as an Alter Ego (Autrui), that is as the irreducibly unpredictable source of possible worlds, has vanished.19 What is left is a surface, immediately interiorised as such:

19

largement inspiré, qu’à l’introduction à l’Anthologie de Senghor, à laquelle il ne se réfère que sur fond de désaccord’ [in Black Skin, White Masks, his very famous first book, published in 1952, Fanon adheres more willingly to the Reflections on the Jewish Question, from which he took much inspiration, than to the introduction to the Anthology of Senghor, to which he refers only on the basis of disagreement] (167). She is certainly right on the Réflexions, but like that of many critics, her reading of Fanon’s reaction to ‘Orphée noir’ confuses the point of view of the négritude enthusiast, adopted in the presentation of a subjective experience in the first phase of the analysis, and Fanon’s own philosophical/psychiatric point of view which then goes on to negate this initial perspective. On this text too, Fanon agrees with Sartre, and it will nourish his analysis of négritude (and other identity claims) as a ‘mystification’, albeit an unavoidable one, in Les Damnés de la terre. In his work on Michel Tournier’s rewriting of Robinson Crusoe and the idea of a world without alter-ego, Deleuze clarified this idea of the alter-ego (autrui) not as object but as structure: ‘Mais quelle est cette structure? C’est celle du possible. Un visage effrayé, c’est l’expression d’un monde possible effrayant, ou de quelque chose d’effrayant dans le monde, que je ne vois pas encore. Comprenons que le possible n’est pas ici une catégorie abstraite désignant quelque chose qui n’existe pas : le monde possible exprimé existe parfaitement, mais il n’existe pas (actuellement) hors de ce qui l’exprime. Le visage terrifié ne ressemble pas à la chose terrifiante, il l’implique, il l’enveloppe comme quelque chose d’autre, dans une sorte de torsion qui met l’exprimé dans l’exprimant. […]. Autrui, c’est l’existence du possible enveloppé. Le langage, c’est la réalité du possible en tant que tel. Le moi, c’est le développement, l’explication des possibles, leur processus de réalisation dans l’actuel. D’Albertine aperçue, Proust dit qu’elle enveloppe ou exprime la plage et le déferlement des flots : “Si elle m’avait vu, qu’avais-je pu lui représenter ? Du sein de quel univers me distinguait-elle ?” L’amour, la jalousie seront la tentative de développer, de déplier ce monde possible nommé Albertine. Bref, autrui comme structure, c’est l’expression d’un monde possible, c’est l’exprimé saisi comme n’existant pas encore hors de ce qui l’exprime’[But what is this structure? It is the structure of the possible. A frightened countenance is the expression of a frightening possible world, or of something frightening in the world – something I do not yet see. Let it be understood that the possible is not here an abstract category designating something which does not exist: the expressed possible world certainly exists, but it does not exist (actually) outside of that which expresses it. The terrified countenance bears no resemblance to the terrifying thing. It implicates it, it envelops it as something else, in a kind

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Ce jour-là, désorienté, incapable d’être dehors avec l’autre, le Blanc, qui impitoyable, m’emprisonnait, je me portai loin de mon être-là, très loin, me constituant objet. Qu’était-ce pour moi, sinon un décollement, un arrachement, une hémorragie qui caillait du sang noir sur tout mon corps?20

The living, signifying body, source of all ‘orientation’ or ‘perspective’, of all direction constitutive of an exteriority, is now perceived as that of a something, a nègre. A black skin has taken its place. Phenomenology has thus played a considerable role in the development of Fanon’s thought, but one also needs to note a second domain of reference, directly related this time to his training in psychiatry: the growth of an experimental psychology revealing, on the one hand, the role of the body in the construction of the fundamental structures of objectivity in the child’s development, and also, on the other hand, confirming the existence and functions of such structures, by studying psychopathologies in the relationship of self to body and of body to world. Piaget is probably an influence of the first sort: in La naissance de l’intelligence chez l’enfant (1936) and La construction du réel chez l’enfant (1937), he argued that during the phase which precedes the apparition of language, the first

of torsion which situates what is expressed in the expressing. […] The other is the existence of the encompassed possible. Language is the reality of the possible as such. The self is the development and the explication of what is possible, the process of its realisation in the actual. Proust says of the perceived Albertine that she encompasses or expresses the beach and the breaking of the waves: ‘If she had seen me, what could I have represented for her? At the heart of what universe was she perceiving me?’ Love and jealousy will be the attempt to develop and to unfold this possible world named ‘Albertine’. In short, the Other, as structure, is the expression of a possible world; it is the expressed, grasped as not yet existing outside of that which expresses it] Gilles Deleuze, ‘Michel Tournier et le monde sans autrui’, Logique du Sens (Paris: Minuit, 1969), 357/The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (London: Athlone Press, 1990), 307–8. 20 [Disoriented, incapable of confronting outside the Other, the white man, who had no scruples about imprisoning me, I transported myself that day far, very far, from my existence, and gave myself up as an object. What did this mean to me? Peeling, stripping my skin, causing a haemorrhage that left congealed black blood all over my body.] PNMB, 155/92.

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ontological categories (object, space, causality and time) are produced via physical interactions with the world, along more and more complex sensory-motor correlations (‘schèmes sensori-moteurs’). Fanon was aware of these theories directly and through his philosophical readings, again particularly through Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. Thus, the idea that play is an ontological apprenticeship is considered as common knowledge by Sartre in L’Être et le Néant, an ‘essay in phenomenological ontology’ that Fanon knew very well. It underlies the famous analysis of inauthenticity in the example of the waiter’s ‘ballet’: Considérons ce garçon de café. Il a le geste vif et appuyé, un peu trop précis, un peu trop rapide, il vient vers les consommateurs d’un pas un peu trop vif, il s’incline avec un peu trop d’empressement, sa voix, ses yeux expriment un intérêt un peu trop plein de sollicitude pour la commande du client, enfin le voilà qui revient, en essayant d’imiter dans sa démarche la rigueur inflexible d’on ne sait quel automate tout en portant son plateau avec une sorte de témérité de funambule, en le mettant dans un équilibre perpétuellement instable et perpétuellement rompu, qu’il rétablit perpétuellement d’un mouvement léger du bras et de la main. Toute sa conduite nous semble un jeu. Il s’applique à enchaîner ses mouvements comme s’ils étaient des mécanismes se commandant les uns les autres, sa mimique et sa voix même semblent des mécanismes; il se donne la prestesse et la rapidité impitoyable des choses. Il joue, il s’amuse. Mais à quoi donc joue-t-il? Il ne faut pas l’observer longtemps pour s’en rendre compte: il joue à être garçon de café. Il n’y a rien là qui puisse nous surprendre: le jeu est une sorte de repérage et d’investigation. L’enfant joue avec son corps pour l’explorer, pour en dresser l’inventaire; le garçon de café joue avec sa condition pour la réaliser.21 21

[Let us consider this waiter in the café. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally, there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope-walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually reestablishes by a light movement of the arm and hand. All his behaviour seems to us a game. He applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café. There is nothing there to surprise us. The game is a kind

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The difference is that at that stage the child plays without reference to an external norm, while the game the waiter plays ‘with’ his body only makes sense in relation to a third term, a norm or a ‘condition’, the condition precisely which defines a waiter in general, or what is expected of him. Hence the contrived appearance of his behaviour: ‘a little too precise, a little too quick … a little too solicitous …’ In his body, the relationship of the self with the self is mediated by a third term, his ‘employment’, the exterior norms of a job, and the waiter performs his ‘ballet’ for other human beings. But the empire of this norm is an illusion: he could always be something other than a waiter, and the ritualistic style of his choreography immediately proves to all that he is something altogether different from a specific ‘incarnation’ of the norm. So rather than being imprisoned by his own interpretation, through the variations, the style he imprints onto it, he is immediately recognised as other than what he is or rather does, at any given time. However, being black is neither a game nor an ‘occupation’. It is a ‘condition’ in a deeper sense. In the case of the nègre, that is, a consciousness seen and defined within the racist historical-social environment as pure thing without any inner freedom, the third term, the norm or form of being, determines existence, not just the representation of the self. Thus the nègre cannot directly affirm his difference from all and any specific incarnations, either through his work or in the fight for recognition with other individual alter-egos, as in the case of love. He always has to go through a third term to do that: the White. This is why, well before Fanon’s psychiatric experience in Blida and his conclusion as to the impossibility of real psychotherapeutic work in Algeria,22 a psychology of the individual like that of Adler was for him no longer sufficient in the colonial environment:

of marking out and investigation. The child plays with his body in order to explore it, to take inventory of it; the waiter in the café plays with his condition in order to realise it.] Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Être et le Néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 95–6/Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Methuen, 1969), 59. 22 See his famous letter of resignation of 1956 in EAL, 366. On Fanon’s psychiatric work and the social dimensions of mental alienation, see, infra, Ch. 6.

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Chapter 5 Le Martiniquais ne se compare pas au Blanc, considéré comme le père, le chef, Dieu, mais se compare à son semblable sous le patronage du Blanc. […] La comparaison adlérienne comporte deux termes ; elle est polarisée par le moi. La comparaison antillaise est coiffée par un troisième terme: la fiction dirigeante n’y est pas personnelle, mais sociale.23

The formation of the colonised self is therefore perverted from the very beginning. Hence Fanon’s constant reference to but also constant suspicion vis-à-vis psychoanalysis. The self of the colonised is essentially neurotic, but this is because it is inexorably constituted by human history, not by that of a family. In her biography of Fanon, Alice Cherki stresses that this was also the view Lacan expressed in the fifties about patients from Africa: Leur inconscient n’était pas celui de leurs souvenirs d’enfance, cela se juxtaposait seulement, leur enfance était rétroactivement vécue dans nos catégories familiales [françaises]. C’était l’inconscient qu’on leur avait vendu en même temps que les lois de la colonisation.24

Fanon displays a similar ambivalence towards Hegel’s analysis of the process of recognition through the dialectic relationship of domination and servitude, popularised by Alexandre Kojève (whose pre-war lectures on Hegel were published to great acclaim in 1947).25 He accepts the model of a constitution of subjectivity through the antagonistic process of recognition: consciousness only gains determination through a contest with 23

[The Martinican compares himself not to the white man, seen as the father, the boss, God, but to his own counterpart under the patronage of the white man. […] The Adlerian comparison comprises two terms; it is polarised by the ego. The Antillean comparison is topped by a third term: its governing fiction is not personal but social.] PNMB, 237/190. 24 [Their subconscious was not that of childhood memories, these had been simply juxtaposed; they were experiencing their childhood retroactively, taking their cues from our [French] categories of the family. This was the subconscious they had been sold together with the laws of colonial rule.] Alice Cherki, Frantz Fanon: portrait (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 38/Frantz Fanon: A Portrait (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 22. 25 Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). See esp. 12–34.

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another consciousness, ultimately gaining recognition as alter-ego (autrui), and not simply as other (autre). But when race is the foundation of domination, the slave is forever unable to transform and to change his or her relationship to the world through work, since he or she is made a prisoner of general physical determinations: a thing in the world and not a creator of this world, and thus unable to see in the master an alter-ego that will soon become superfluous, as in Hegel’s dialectics. In colonial history, the ‘white’ master has had no need to fight for recognition and the ‘black’ slave26 has never been able to experience recognition in the transformation of the world through work, since this world excluded her or him a priori by its very ‘nature’ (or naturalisation of relationships of power). It is only when the colonised participates in a fight for freedom (and not simply when freedom is ‘granted’) that he or she will experience recognition and then properly exist as an autonomous consciousness.27 An assessment of the possible relationship of ‘le nègre et Hegel’ must take into account geographical and ‘racial’ dimensions of the conflict as well as historical ones. In that sense, if Marxism had a growing influence on Fanon’s writing, he nevertheless considered, like Césaire in his Lettre à Maurice Thorez of 1956, that the classical Marxist analysis of class struggle could not account for colonial alienation. Since his ‘body schema’ is pathological from the outset in this society, the black man may very well try to take refuge in a room, next to a fire, like Descartes in the Discours de la méthode or the Méditations métaphysiques. There he will discover neither his irreducible soul nor the certainty of his own rationality, but rather his body as a skin, the livery of a slave, and the risk of madness: Je m’assieds au coin du feu, et je découvre ma livrée. Je ne l’avais pas vue. Elle est effectivement laide.28

26 Or simply the ‘coloured’ slave, in this binary of uncoloured/coloured that turns the opposition of self and other into an ontology. 27 PNMB, 238–43/191–7. 28 [I sit down next to the fire and discovery my livery for the first time. It is indeed ugly.] PNMB, 156/94.

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The slave is denied the radical experience of the Cogito: skin has become the crystallisation of history, an inheritance suddenly bearing down so heavily that crawling is the only possibility for a body now flattened and fragmented into the anonymous taxonomies of a clinical gaze: J’arrive lentement dans le monde, habitué à ne plus prétendre au surgissement. Je m’achemine par reptation. Déjà les regards blancs, les seuls vrais me dissèquent. Je suis fixé. […] Je me glisse dans les coins, rencontrant de mes longues antennes les axiomes épars à la surface des choses, – le linge du nègre sent le nègre – les dents du nègre sont blanches, les pieds du nègre sont grands – la large poitrine du nègre, – je me glisse dans les coins, je demeure silencieux, j’aspire à l’anonymat, à l’oubli.29

In the end, these Kafkaesque descriptions of a becoming-animal are perhaps more reminiscent of the descriptions of the psychopathology of the image of the body, which was a major theme of study in the psychiatry of the period, than of the psychoanalytical and Hegelian descriptions of alienation. It is through the study of these pathologies that Lhermitte was led to his hypothesis of a schéma corporel, a function of integration of sensations and perceptions, which was clearly disturbed in patients who perceived their body as objects or as fragments of objects within the world, rather than as projects of action within the world.30 29 [I arrive slowly in the world; sudden emergences are no longer my habit. I crawl along. The white gaze, the only valid one, is already dissecting me. I am fixed. […] I slip into corners, my long antenna encountering the various axioms on the surface of things: the Negro’s clothes smell of Negro; the Negro has white teeth; the Negro has big feet; the Negro has a broad chest. I slip into corners; I keep silent; all I want is to be anonymous, to be forgotten.] PNMB, 158/95–6. 30 On the psychiatry of the period, see Stéphane Thibierge, Pathologies de l’image du corps (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), which shows how neurologists studying patients who were unable to recognise their own image, following neurological lesions, described syndromes which confirmed a contrario psychoanalytical theories of the relationship of self and body (184–5). In such cases, the image of the self tends to vanish and reveal the material reality it usually masks: ‘Ce que l’ensemble de ces phénomènes invite en définitive à considérer, c’est la manière dont des lésions neurologiques amènent au premier plan la mention, dans le discours de ces patients, de quelque chose qui fait obstacle à la reconnaissance de leur image. Or il suffit de

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Apart from the similarity of décor and the parodic description of a self withdrawing temporarily from historical turbulences into a phase of introspection, there is no direct reference to Descartes in this passage of Peau noire, masques blancs. But the comparison is revealing. When Descartes, in the third paragraph of the first of his Méditations Métaphysiques, questions the nature and existence of his body, the fire he is seated next to and the piece of paper he holds in his hands, he is far from experiencing the real reprendre ce qu’ils en énoncent pour constater que ce dont il s’agit ne peut se définir seulement négativement comme un déficit. Leurs propos témoignent plutôt de ce que, à l’occasion d’une atteinte de l’intégrité de l’image du corps, émerge dans le champ de la reconnaissance […] quelque chose de l’ordre d’une autonomie et d’une extranéité dont le sujet serait bien en peine de dire en quoi elle se rapporte à lui, bien qu’il en soit encombré, puisqu’elle peut parasiter son corps et l’image dans laquelle il reconnaît celui-ci. Nous trouvons évoqué là un ordre de réalité qui n’est pas très éloigné de ce que la psychanalyse a pu isoler comme la dimension de l’objet en tant que celui-ci est normalement “habillé” par l’image, c’est-à-dire neutralisé et refoulé à la faveur de la forme qu’elle y substitue pour la reconnaissance’ [In the end, what the totality of these phenomena invites us to consider is the way in which neurological lesions bring to the foreground the mentioning, on the part of these patients, of something which stands in the way of their recognising their image. In addition, it is sufficient to pay attention to what they say about it, to notice that what we are dealing with here cannot be defined in simply negative terms as a lack. Rather, their statements testify to the fact that, at the onset of a compromising of the body image, there emerges in the field of recognition […] something in the order of an autonomy and an externality, concerning which it would be difficult for the patients to say how exactly it relates to them, even though they are indeed encumbered by it, since it is able to leech off their body and the image by which they recognise it. We find evoked here an order of reality that is not far removed from what psychoanalysis has managed to isolate as the dimension of the object, insofar as this is normally ‘dressed up’ by the image, which is to say insofar as it is neutralised and repressed in favour of the form which is substituted for it for the purposes of recognition] (184–5). Fanon often refers to Lacan’s text on the mirror stage, but he always does so from the point of view of the pathologies of the relation to the body that it explains. Thibierge also comments on Merleau-Ponty’s reading of these neurological studies in his Phénoménologie de la perception, when relating Descartes’ dualism and Lhermitte’s analysis of asomatognosia (Pathologies de l’image du corps, 157, n. 3). See also Catherine Morin, Schéma corporel, image du corps, image spéculaire. Neurologie et psychanalyse (Paris: Éres, 2013), Ch. 1 and 2.

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danger of the reification or alienation of the subject that Fanon describes. In a similar scepticism vis-à-vis classical rationalism, Michel Foucault has argued that an authentic consideration of the possibility of madness had been eliminated from the outset – through the choice of the meditative, discursive form – from the process that ultimately leads to the Cogito and to the certainty of the real distinction of body and soul.31 Fanon’s analysis of the historical-social determination of existence through the body is close to Foucault’s notion of discipline, and his practice as a psychiatrist and particularly his refusal of the institutionalisation of madness anticipated the antipsychiatry of the 1960s. However, he consistently defined madness as an alienation of freedom, and wrote in his letter of resignation to the Ministre Résident: ‘La Folie est l’un des moyens qu’a l’homme de perdre sa liberté’.32 We should now be better able to understand the meaning of Fanon’s prayer, and also perhaps the link he saw and constantly wove, in all his books, between an analysis of the psychopathology of the colonised and the necessity of an anticolonial struggle. For instance, the first chapter of Sociologie d’une revolution,33 ‘L’Algérie se dévoile’, is a study of the perception, within the colonial context, of the body of Algerian women and 31 32

33

See ‘My body, this paper, this fire’, appendix to Michel Foucault, History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 550–74. [Madness is one of the ways people have to lose their freedom.] Lettre au ministre résident (December 1956), in EAL, 367. In his postface to the 2002 edition of Les Damnés de la terre (Paris: La Découverte), the historian of the Algerian War, Mohammed Harbi, wrote: ‘l’inspiration de Fanon passe aussi dans la manière dont il comprend sa pratique de psychiatre […] C’est du côté de la folie que se trouvent une vérité et une authenticité auxquelles il faut laisser son libre exercice’ [Fanon’s inspiration extends also to the way in which he understood his psychiatric practice […] It is on the side of madness that a truth and authenticity are found, whose free exercise one is obliged to respect] (311). It is important to note that this truth and authenticity are those of an alienation, and can only indirectly be part of the revolutionary process. On Fanon’s psychiatric work, see infra, Ch. 6. Paris: Maspero, 1959. Also published as L’An V de la révolution algérienne, Œuvres, 259–418. On the history of this work, see Fanon’s correspondence with François Maspero, EAL, 550–4.

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the impact of this perception upon their corporeal schema. Within precolonial culture, the veil, says Fanon, is a traditional item of clothing (like the fez, the djellabah, etc.). Under the colonial gaze, the veil is reified as an essential feature of the culture and needs to be eradicated (the perception of cultures as monolithic wholes is a trait of colonialism, often reflected in early developments of ethnology). Under the pretext of liberation, it must be removed: Chaque nouvelle femme algérienne dévoilée annonce à l’occupant une société algérienne aux systèmes de défense en voie de dislocation, ouverte et défoncée.34

This produces a reaction and the veil suddenly becomes alive: Face à la violence de l’occupant, le colonisé est amené à définir une position de principe à l’égard d’un élément autrefois inerte de la configuration culturelle autochtone.35

Associating the Sartre of Réflexions sur la question juive with the Sartre of ‘Orphée noir’, Fanon notes that ‘C’est le blanc qui crée le nègre. Mais c’est le nègre qui crée la négritude’.36 The final moment in this paradoxical dialectics where objectification and liberation seem to exchange roles is when the veil is removed by women taking part in the struggle themselves, in order to infiltrate the coloniser’s society. Their former corporeal schema is destroyed, but in circumstances such that it is now possible to invent a new one, with the structure of the traditional society thus effectively transformed, but from the inside: Il faut avoir entendu les confessions d’Algériennes ou analyser le matériel onirique de certaines dévoilées récentes, pour apprécier l’importance du voile dans le corps vécu

34

[Every new Algerian woman unveiled announced to the occupier an Algerian society whose systems of defense were in the process of dislocation, open and breached.] L’An V, 280/42. 35 [In the face of the violence of the occupier, the colonised found himself defining a principled position with respect to a formerly inert element of the native cultural configuration.] L’An V, 283/46. 36 [It is the white man who creates the Negro. But it is the Negro who creates negritude.] L’An V, 284/47.

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In a note to this phenomenological description, Fanon adds: Engagé dans la lutte, le mari ou le père découvre de nouvelles perspectives sur les rapports entre sexes. Le militant découvre la militante et conjointement ils créent de nouvelles dimensions à la société algérienne.38

That said, Fanon had clearly anticipated the risk, in ‘neocolonial’ societies, of an osmosis between the old and the new order. He would probably had been dismayed but not surprised to see these societies moving back against their own history and returning to the veil as a cultural or religious symbol, adopting paradoxically the point of view he described as that of 37

38

[One must have heard the confessions of Algerian women or have analysed the dream content of certain recently unveiled women to appreciate the importance of the veil for the body of the woman. Without the veil she has an impression of her body being cut up into bits, put adrift; the limbs seem to lengthen indefinitely. […] She experiences a sense of incompleteness with great intensity. She has the anxious feeling that something is unfinished, and along with this a frightful sensation of disintegrating. The absence of the veil distorts the Algerian woman’s corporeal schema. She quickly has to invent new dimensions for her body, new means of muscular control. She has to create for herself an attitude of unveiled-woman-outside. […]The Algerian woman who walks stark naked into the European city relearns her body, re-establishes it in a totally revolutionary fashion. This new dialectic of the body and of the world is primary in the case of one revolutionary woman.] L’An V, 284/59. (Translation modified). [Involved in the struggle, the husband or the father learns to look upon the relations between the sexes in a new light. The militant man discovers the militant woman, and jointly they create new dimensions for Algerian society.] L’An V, 294, n. 8/59, n. 14.

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the former coloniser. Several testimonies show that he was aware quite early on of the danger that the national fight might be transformed into a traditionalist one, the revolutionary stance being then replaced by a forced obedience to transcendent values and ossified styles of existence. This constant attention to the relationship between colonialism and a power exerted through the body also explains Fanon’s impatient attitude towards the liberal left in France which, at the beginning, mostly protested against the generalised use of torture in Algeria (it is only from 1960 that independence became the main objective of the Left). For Fanon torture was not an aberration: En réalité, l’attitude des troupes françaises en Algérie se situe dans une structure de domination policière, de racisme systématique, de déshumanisation poursuivie de façon rationnelle. La torture est inhérente à l’ensemble colonialiste.39

In a section of the same article entitled ‘La torture, nécessité fondamentale du monde colonial’ [Torture as a Fundamental Necessity of the Colonial World], he added: La torture en Algérie n’est pas un accident, ou une erreur, ou une faute. Le colonialisme ne se comprend sans la possibilité de torturer, de violer ou de massacrer. La torture est une modalité des relations occupants–occupé.40

39 [In reality, the attitude of the French troops in Algeria fits into a pattern of police domination, of systematic racism, of dehumanisation rationally pursued. Torture is inherent in the whole colonialist configuration.] ‘L’Algérie face aux tortionnaires français’, in El Moudjahid 10 (September 1957), repr. in Pour la révolution africaine, Œuvres, 745/Toward The African Revolution, 64. 40 [Torture in Algeria is not an accident, or an error, or a fault. Colonialism cannot be understood without the possibility of torturing, of violating, or of massacring. Torture is an expression and a means of the occupant-occupied relationship.] Pour la révolution, 747/66. This position is similar to that of Césaire, who writes about the ‘très distingué, très humaniste, très chrétien bourgeois du XXe siècle’ [very distinguished, very humanist, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century], that ‘ce qu’il ne pardonne pas à Hitler, ce n’est pas le crime en soi, le crime contre l’homme, ce n’est pas l’humiliation de l’homme en soi, c’est le crime contre l’homme blanc, c’est l’humiliation de l’homme blanc, et d’avoir appliqué à l’Europe des procédés colonialistes

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In the conclusion to Peau noire, masques blancs, Fanon had already noted the conundrum of the colonised, reified by the very nature of the colonial system, and then running the risk of being reified again in the identity created by the struggle against this system: Il ne faut pas essayer de fixer l’homme puisque son destin est d’être lâché. La densité de l’Histoire ne détermine aucun de mes actes. Je suis mon propre fondement. Et c’est en dépassant la donnée historique, instrumentale, que j’introduis le cycle de ma liberté.41

These Sartrean themes, expressed in the paradox of a ‘destin d’être lâché’ while being perpetually at risk of reification, announce Les Damnés de la terre, a description of a hell on earth where temporality is lost and all project impossible. Yet those souls who have faced hell through their skin are now returning, as Sartre had noted in ‘Orphée noir’. Again, when Fanon analyses the complicated links between national culture and liberation struggle, understanding the body as the seat of an interrogative stance towards the world underpins his thought: […] assez rapidement, dans la situation coloniale, le dynamisme est remplacé par une substantification des attitudes. […] Tous les efforts sont faits pour amener le colonisé à confesser l’infériorité de sa culture transformée en conduites instinctives,

dont ne relevaient jusqu’ici que les Arabes d’Algérie, les coolies de l’Inde et les nègres d’Afrique’ [what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa] Discours sur le Colonialisme, PTED, 1450/Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 14. 41 [There should be no attempt to fixate man, since it is his destiny to be unleashed. The density of History determines none of my acts. I am my own foundation. And it is by going beyond the historical and instrumental given that I initiate my cycle of freedom.] PNMB, 250/205.

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à reconnaître l’irréalité de sa nation et, à l’extrême, le caractère inorganisé et non fini de sa propre structure biologique. […] Au bout d’un ou deux siècles d’exploitation, se produit une véritable émaciation du panorama culturel national. La culture nationale devient un stock d’habitudes motrices, de traditions vestimentaires, d’institutions morcelées. On y décèle peu de mobilité. Il n’y a pas de créativité vraie, pas d’effervescence.42

By contrast, in the process of revolution itself, ‘Le contact du peuple avec la geste nouvelle suscite un nouveau rythme respiratoire, des tensions musculaires oubliées et développe l’imagination’.43 His later work is largely dedicated to trying to prevent an ossification of this initial impetus in the new societies. In his 1965 postface to the second edition of Peau noire masques blancs, Jeanson noted: Ce qui d’abord m’avait atteint, dans cette pensée, dès le moment où il me fut donné de lire le manuscrit de Peau noire et d’en rencontrer l’auteur, c’est sa démarche exceptionnellement incarnée, où je persiste à voir le plus sûr garant de sa dimension universelle et de son efficience révolutionnaire. Fanon argumentait à corps perdu, à cœur perdu, il s’avouait blessé dans sa chair même, il nous disait avoir crié, avoir explosé, avoir failli devenir fou.44

42 [[…]in a colonial situation any dynamism is fairly rapidly replaced by a reification of attitudes. […] Every effort is made to make the colonised confess the inferiority of their culture, now reduced to a set of instinctive responses, to acknowledge the unreality of their nation and, in the last extreme, to admit the disorganised, halffinished nature of their own biological makeup. […] After one or two centuries of exploitation the national cultural landscape has radically shriveled. It has become an inventory of behavioral patterns, traditional customs, and miscellaneous customs. Little movement can be seen. There is no real creativity, no ebullience.] Les Damnés, 613–14/170–2. 43 [The people’s encounter with this new epic elicits a new breathing rhythm, arouses forgotten muscular tensions and develops the imagination.] Les Damnés, 616/174. 44 [What first struck me about this thought, from the moment I was given the manuscript of Black Skin, White Masks to read and on meeting the author, was his exceptionally incarnated approach, in which I continue to see the surest guarantee of his universal dimension and revolutionary potency. Fanon argued à corps perdu, à cœur perdu, he avowed himself wounded in his very flesh, he spoke of having screamed,

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Human thought for Fanon, is À corps perdu, a useful metaphor: it throws itself headlong into action or creation. In a sense all body, for Fanon, is a ‘corps perdu’, except when it is irremediably objectified by colonialism.45 * David Macey devotes serious attention to the role of phenomenology in Fanon’s thought, but largely in a negative way: Just why Fanon chooses to analyse his Erlebnis [experience vécue, lived experience] in Sartrean and Merleau-Pontyan terms is a surprisingly difficult question to answer […] The question ‘why phenomenology’ is hard to answer, mainly because we do not have any documentary evidence: there are no preparatory materials or drafts, no correspondence, and no helpfully revealing diaries or notebooks. We know relatively little of what Fanon had read, or of when he read it. We have only the evidence of the text itself. And the text suggests that Fanon turns to phenomenology after a process of elimination. Of the theoretical discourses available to him it is, apparently, the most suitable for his purposes.46

Phenomenology would have been appealing because of its concentration on experience and immediacy, and because it is a philosophy in the first person: ‘no other philosophy would have allowed Fanon to say I with quite such vehemence’.47 But the crucial question is why Fanon would have been interested in the first place in a body of thought that made immediate experience (thought of as inseparable from the situation of a specific body in space and time) a condition of the institution of a subjectivity, thus turning philosophical rationalism on its head. Macey is also quite critical of having erupted, of having almost gone mad.] (221). This preface, one of the most perceptive readings of Fanon’s work, mentions several other passages on the colonised body. 45 For Fanon, true thought is act and in that it is close to poetry. The same transformation of the self seems to animate Fanon’s Journal de Bord from Mali, published under the title ‘Cette Afrique à Venir’, in Pour la révolution africaine (Œuvres, 860–71), and that of the poetic voice in Césaire’s Corps perdu. 46 David Macey, ‘Fanon, Phenomenology, Race’, Radical Philosophy 95 (May/June 1999), 11. 47 Ibid. 12.

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of Fanon’s treatment of psychoanalysis, accusing him of interpreting the destructuring of the racist gaze through ‘the obscure notion’ of corporeal schema, rather than as the re-experiencing of a traumatic moment: To speculate, which is all we can really do here: when Fanon is gazed at by that child, he is experiencing anew a traumatic moment in Martinican history and in the Martinican imaginary: he is being looked at by the béké [the white coloniser] and his eyes are burning.48

But it is clear in Peau noire, masques blancs that Fanon uses anecdotes in the manner of Sartre, to reveal what can be meaningful in a specific lived experience: in this case, the birth of a mode of being that is induced by a gaze accompanied by a generalising, racist commentary. We have seen that the notion of corporeal schema, when it is analysed as an important articulation of the neurological and the psychological, far from being obscure, is an essential element in Fanon’s conscious attempt at inventing a new psychiatry, attentive to the historical and sociological context of the trauma. We have known, at least since the empiricists, that thought does not face reality as God faces the world. Rather, it develops as it moves within it. Fanonian freedom presupposes the structural incarnation of all thought, and its essentially open temporality, in the endless construction of a world.

48 Ibid. 13. In his excellent biography of Fanon, Macey is more positive about the relationship between Fanon and phenomenology: he gives more evidence of the extensive philosophical readings of Fanon, focusing mostly on French phenomenology and on Hegel, and concludes: ‘The classics of French phenomenology – MerleauPonty’s Phénoménologie de la perception and Sartre’s L’Être et le néant – are obviously not treatises on racism and anti-racism, but they provided tools that were much better suited to the analysis of “the lived experience of the black man” than either Marxism or psychoanalysis’ (124–5). On Fanon and phenomenology, see also Lou Turner, ‘Frantz Fanon’s Phenomenology of Black Mind. Sources, Critique, Dialectic’, Philosophy Today 45 (Supp.) (2001), 99–104. Alice Cherki’s biography proposes a more nuanced reading of Fanon’s relationship to psychoanalysis. In the meantime, a substantial amount of documents, as well as Fanon’s library, have become available, and provide clear evidence and explanation of Fanon’s interest in phenomenology and psychoanalysis. See, in EAL, Fanon’s psychiatric texts and the annotated inventory of his library.

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Thus seeing the body of another being, perceived as conscious, is not seeing a thing. It is, rather, the assignation of an intentionality and the immediate perception of another perspective, of another world. There is, however, a historical-geographical situation which destroys such a perception: colonialism and its inherent racism. Very early on, Fanon violently rejected white masks – the self-denegation joined to an acute consciousness of race that was so widespread in his native Antilles. Born and raised in a place where no historical stance was possible, Fanon was to become an écorché vif  (literally ‘skinned alive’) when he was confronted with the reality of the racist gaze, his body flattened to a thing in the world, insignificant and yet considered vaguely menacing. In such a situation, in order to be perceived in its opacity, freedom could only manifest itself through acts. Freedom had to be the result of a fight, a stance. It is thus no wonder that in the end he would so eagerly embrace a nation-building struggle and adopt a new ancestry,49 like Perse or Césaire. It was for him, paradoxically, the first step towards a freedom from all identity.

49 See Albert Memmi, ‘The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon’, Massachusetts Review 9/39 (winter 1973), and Édouard Glissant, Le Discours antillais (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 56–7.

Chapter 6

Alienation and Freedom: Fanon on Psychiatry and Revolution1

Commenting on Fanon’s writings on the psychopathology induced by colonisation, critics sometimes mention his psychiatric publications, but these texts – which he wrote from 1951 to 1960, throughout his professional career – are rarely studied for their own sake and in their evolution. This may be due to their technical nature, or to Fanon’s interest in thérapies de choc such as electroshocks and insulin-induced coma therapy, which he practised and wrote about, or to his experiments with first-generation neuroleptics. There may also be some unease at his subsuming of psychoanalysis under a more general neuropsychiatric approach, at least when he looked at it from a clinical point of view. In addition, the wealth of his political work and its impact are such, especially for such a short life, that it seems improbable that he would have had the time to produce a body of scientific work of real significance. Nevertheless, it is clear that Fanon always saw himself above all as a psychiatrist and rarely stopped practising, whether in France, Algeria or Tunisia. Had it just been a job running in parallel to his main interests, he would probably have developed a private practice, a flourishing business at the time.2 But instead he concentrated on hospital work, pursued original 1

2

The material in this chapter comes from the following publications: ‘Fanon and psychiatry’, Nottingham French Studies 54/1 (2015), 52–71; ‘Soigner les pathologies de la liberté. Fanon psychiatre’, Les Temps Modernes 683 (2015), 229–55; ‘Fanon, psychiatre révolutionnaire’, in EAL, 137–67; ‘L’Afrique de Fanon’, in Catherine Delpech-Hellsten (ed.), Franz Fanon, Kateb Yacine, Edouard Glissant: Relation et indépendances (Paris: Hermann, 2016), 118–28. Charles Geronimi, one of Fanon’s interns, made this point in conversation with the author, 24 May 2013.

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research, published it, presented it at professional congresses, directed doctoral dissertations and had a considerable impact on the vocation and careers of those who came to work with him, attracted by his reputation as a revolutionary psychiatrist. His psychiatric texts refer to the most interesting contemporary debates in the field, at a time when the discipline was redefined, and taken as a whole they appear, retrospectively, as essential elements of the ecology of his thought. Like his published books, they reveal his remarkable creativity and deserve to be studied in their own right.3

3

François Maspero draws attention to this body of work in his introduction to Pour la révolution africaine, noting that at the same time as he produced his political works, Fanon ‘accomplit un remarquable travail médical, novateur sur tous les plans, profondément, viscéralement proche de ses malades en qui il voit avant tout les victimes du système qu’il combat. Il accumule les notes cliniques et les analyses sur les phénomènes de l’aliénation colonialiste vue au travers des maladies mentales. Il explore les traditions locales et [leurs] rapports à la colonisation. Ce matériel capital est intact, mais lui aussi dispersé, et nous espérons pouvoir le réunir en un volume à part’ [carried on a remarkable medical activity, innovating at many levels, deeply, viscerally close to his patients whom he regarded as primarily victims of the system he was fighting. He collected clinical notes and analyses on the phenomena of colonialist alienation seen through mental diseases. He explored local traditions and their relations to colonisation. This material remains untouched, but it too is scattered, and we hope to be able to assemble it and present it in a separate volume]. See François Maspero, ‘Note de l’éditeur’, in Frantz Fanon, Pour la révolution africaine, 685–8 (686)/viii. Maspero’s planned edition did not materialise in his lifetime, but Fanon’s psychiatric texts, his unpublished works and correspondence are now available in EAL. For an overview of Fanon’s psychiatric practice and publications, see David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography (2nd edn, London: Verso, 2012), 132–42, 145–50, 217–24, 234–7, 315–23; and Alice Cherki, Frantz Fanon: portrait (Paris: Seuil, 2000)/Frantz Fanon: A Portrait, trans. Nadia Benabid (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2006), in particular the chapters on Blida and Tunis. A number of special issues of journals have been devoted to Fanon’s psychiatric texts: L’Information psychiatrique 51/10 (1975); History of Psychiatry 7/28 (1996); Sud/Nord 14 (2001) and 22 (2007); Tumultes 31 (2008); L’Autre 13/3 (2012). See also Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression (New York: Plenum Press, 1985); Jock McCulloch, Black Soul White Artifact: Fanon’s Clinical Psychology and Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Jock McCulloch, Colonial Psychiatry and the ‘African Mind’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995);

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Fanon’s scientific work started with a reflection on the specificity of psychiatry as opposed to neurology, which is the topic of his doctoral dissertation, defended in 1951. He then published papers on his experiments with neuropsychiatric treatment and their limits, before moving towards a sociotherapeutic approach, which led him to consider the essential role of culture in mental illness. From the outset, he had refused all naturalisation of psychiatric syndromes and was soon to violently reject colonial ethnopsychiatry – essentially a racist biologism – which had shaped the very structure of the psychiatric hospitals built before the war, especially at Blida-Joinville, where he practiced during his time in Algeria. Fanon invented, as he went, an approach which makes him one of the pioneers of modern ethnopsychiatry. He finally moved away from institutional socialtherapy and dedicated a substantial part of his life in Tunis to creating an institution of psychiatric care outside of the asylum, which he saw as a blueprint for mental health care in the future. We will follow this progression in this essay. But let us first briefly indicate why it is important to pay careful attention to Fanon’s psychiatric work in its totality.

Importance of the doctorate of 1951 on ‘mental alterations’ The first text that needs to be considered is the dissertation in psychiatry that Fanon defended in Lyon in November 1951, as part of his qualifying for a PhD in medicine. He was then twenty-six years old.4 This dissertation has often been presented as a technical work, produced in haste in order to

4

and Richard Keller, Colonial Madness: Psychiatry in French North Africa (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Frantz Fanon, ‘Altérations mentales, modifications caractérielles, troubles psychiques et déficit intellectuel dans l’hérédo-dégénération spino-cérébelleuse. À propos d’un cas de maladie de Friedreich avec délire de possession’, EAL, 168–232. A chapter of the thesis, ‘Le Trouble mental et le trouble neurologique’, was also reproduced in L’Information psychiatrique 51/10 (1975), 1079–90.

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obtain his qualification and in place of Peau noire, masques blancs, which his supervisor deemed too subjective.5 But Fanon gave a different reason: Quand nous avons commencé cet ouvrage, parvenu au terme de nos études médicales, nous nous proposions de le soutenir en tant que thèse. Et puis la dialectique exigea de nous des prises de position redoublées. Bien qu’en quelque sorte nous nous fussions attaqué à l’aliénation psychique du Noir, nous ne pouvions passer sous silence certains éléments qui, pour psychologiques qu’ils aient pu être, engendraient des effets ressortissant à d’autres sciences.6

This dialectic is that of psychiatry and sociology, subjectivity and history, and Fanon had stressed this crucial point in the introduction: Réagissant contre la tendance constitutionnaliste de la fin du XIXe siècle, Freud, par la psychanalyse, demanda qu’on tînt compte du facteur individuel. A une thèse phylogénétique, il substituait la perspective ontogénétique. On verra que l’aliénation du Noir n’est pas une question individuelle. A côté de la phylogénie et de l’ontogénie, il y a la sociogénie.7

Fanon, who had no hesitation in measuring up to illustrious predecessors, was thus aware, from the start, of what would later give his political thought its strength and originality: the importance of considering the notion of alienation in the three dimensions of organogenesis, psychogenesis and sociogenesis. This implied proving that alienation cannot be reduced to disorders of a patient’s organic constitution or individual history,

5 6

7

See Claudine Razanajao and Jacques Postel, ‘La Vie et l’œuvre psychiatrique de Frantz Fanon’, Sud/Nord 22 (2007), 147–74 (149). [When I began this book, having completed my medical studies, I thought of submitting it as my thesis. And then the dialectic required that I develop my position further. Although in one way or another I had tackled the psychic alienation of the black man, I could not ignore certain elements, however psychological they may be, which generate consequences in the realm of other sciences.] PNMB, 96/30–1. [Reacting against the constitutionalising trend at the end of the nineteenth century, Freud demanded that the individual factor be taken into account in psychoanalysis. He replaced the phylogenetic theory by an ontogenetic approach. We shall see that the alienation of the black man is not an individual question. Alongside the phylogeny and ontogeny, there is also sociogeny.] Ibid. 32/xv.

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independently of social determinations, and this is why it is important to take the psychiatric thesis seriously, both in itself and in relation to Fanon’s other works. There are several reasons that show that this work was important to Fanon. First, the medical case at the heart of the dissertation – a hereditary neurological disturbance often, but not always, accompanied by psychiatric symptoms, which themselves can vary – is that of a patient he observed over a long period of time. Fanon studied in a department specialising in neurology and had the resources he needed in order to study the problem of relationships between neurological and psychiatric causalities. Assuming that this disease could offer a key to this issue, he reviewed cases in the literature going back to the nineteenth century, as well as recent ones in nearby clinics, with the explicit aim to question empirically the organic reductionism that dominated pre-war psychiatry. Solving this initial problem was a theoretical precondition to his later psychiatric works, which focus on the impact of social and cultural factors on the development of mental illness, and would in turn feed into his political texts. Secondly, Fanon makes some important points in his dissertation that anticipate his own future professional and intellectual career. On the nature of neuropsychiatry and the respective functions of the neurologist and the psychiatrist, for instance, he declares: ‘Loin de proposer ici une solution, nous croyons nécessaire une vie d’études et d’observations’.8 Moreover, in a section on Gestalt Theory’s refusal of atomism and brain localisation, and on Von Monakow’s insistence on time and not just spatially located lesions as a crucial factor in the development of mental illness, the dissertation makes an explicit link with other aspects of Fanon’s thought and announces a book to come, probably Peau noire, masques blancs [Black Skin, White Masks], which was published a little later: Nous aurons l’occasion, dans un ouvrage auquel nous travaillons depuis longtemps, d’aborder le problème de l’histoire sous l’angle psychanalytique et ontologique. Nous

8

[Far from proposing a solution here, we believe a life of study and observation to be necessary.] ‘Altérations mentales’, 206.

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In a later section, Fanon focuses on Jacques Lacan’s theory of a psychogenesis of madness – as opposed to the moderate organogenesis advocated by the great psychiatrist of the time, Henri Ey – and notes its relationship to the social constitution of personality. He deemed this idea essential in Lacan’s work, which he had read closely, probably under the influence of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose lectures he followed.10 In this section, Fanon stresses Lacan’s insistence on the social constitution of personality (‘he considers madness from an intersubjective perspective’) and adds, in an interesting praeteritio: ‘La Folie’, dit-il ‘est vécue toute dans le registre du sens.’11 […] Nous aurions aimé consacrer de longues pages à la théorie lacanienne du langage. Mais nous risquerions de nous éloigner davantage de notre propos. Pourtant, à la réflexion, nous devons 9

10

11

[We will have the opportunity, in a work on which we have been working for some time, to address the problem of history from the psychoanalytical and ontological angle. We will show then that History is only the systematic validation of collective complexes.] Ibid. 215. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Psychologie et pédagogie de l’enfant. Cours de Sorbonne, 1949–1952 (Paris: Verdier, 2001), particularly the lecture on Lacan, entitled ‘Les Stades du développement enfantin’ (108–16). It seems likely that Merleau-Ponty gave in Lyon, where he held a chair in psychology, at least some of the lectures he gave on child psychology and pedagogy at the Sorbonne between 1949 and 1951. This is suggested by various aspects of Fanon’s thesis: the same references to Lacan are given in these lectures and are explained in the same way, and Fanon takes as given ideas on which Merleau-Ponty focuses, such as the importance of the complex, not just as pathological but as the form that social relations give to personality. In addition, several less well-known authors referred to in Peau noire, masques blancs and in Fanon’s later psychiatric texts – such as Germaine Guex, Jacob Moreno and Kurt Lewin – are also studied in the lectures. Fanon’s library contains copies of La Structure du comportement (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1942) and Sens et non-sens (Paris: Nagel, 1948). Peau noire, masques blancs also refers to Phénoménologie de la perception. From a paper given at a conference held at Bonneval: L. Bonnafé, H. Ey, S. Follin, J. Lacan, and J. Rouart, Le problème de la psychogenèse des névroses et des psychoses (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1950), 34.

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reconnaître que tout phénomène délirant est en définitive un phénomène exprimé, c’est-à-dire parlé.12

It is clear, then, that Fanon invested serious thought in this research on a group of mental illnesses that could not be reduced to their sole neurological origin, and that he saw no hiatus between his scientific research and what he intended to do later, even in other areas. Thirdly, Fanon’s interest in the biological aspects of psychiatry should not be underestimated. Maurice Despinoy, under whom Fanon did his internship at Saint-Alban hospital, notes that Fanon showed a great interest in his own pioneering experiments with lithium salts and suggests that, had he remained at Saint-Alban, ‘il [Fanon] aurait fait une thèse de biochimie’.13

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[‘Madness’, says Lacan, ‘is lived entirely on the level of the meaningful.’ […] We would have liked to devote many pages to the Lacanian theory of language. But we would risk straying even further from our goal. However, on reflection, we must recognise that all phenomena of delirium are ultimately expressed, which to is say spoken, phenomena.] Fanon, ‘Altérations mentales’, 224. In Peau noire, masques blancs, Fanon reaffirms how important Lacan’s critique of ‘constitutional’ morbidity is to him: ‘En 1932, il a, dans sa thèse, fait une critique violente de la notion de constitution’ [In 1932 his thesis was violently critical of the notion of constitution] (124). Jacques Tosquellas, ‘Entretien avec Maurice Despinoy’, Sud/Nord 22 (2007), 105–14 (107). At the end of 1952 Despinoy left Saint-Alban to run Colson, the psychiatric hospital in Martinique. He and Fanon remained in correspondence. Fanon also continued experimenting with lithium salts, as Charles Geronimi notes: ‘Plus intéressants furent les essais thérapeutiques des sels de lithium pour lesquels Fanon montra un réel enthousiasme; curieusement il les utilisait comme traitement de l’agitation et non pas comme c’est devenu classique dans la dépression. Leur utilisation impliquant un contrôle strict de la lithémie, Fanon avait obtenu du pharmacien de l’hôpital l’acquisition d’un photomètre’ [Of greater interest were therapeutic experiments using lithium salts, for which Fanon showed a real enthusiasm. Curiously, he used them in treating agitation and not, as became classic, for depression. As their use required a strict control of lithium levels, Fanon had persuaded the hospital pharmacist to acquire a photometer] ‘Fanon à Blida’, unpublished manuscript, n. p., kindly provided by the author.

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Fourthly, we know that Fanon was a fast worker, dictating his books without the use of notes and rarely correcting himself.14 So this dissertation, which follows academic standards, may in fact have taken him as much time to write, if not more, as his published books: the historical review of relevant documented cases and the bibliography are extensive, the references are enlightening, his quotations (which are generally accurate) reflect a careful reading of the literature and his analyses go to the heart of the problems that were at stake at the time. It is true that it is a short dissertation, because the number of cases directly studied is low and that it does not follow bibliographical conventions closely, but it goes straight to the heart of the matter and one sees easily here how Fanon’s style of thought defined itself. And finally, it is by no means clear that it would have been impossible to submit a psychiatric dissertation mixing first- and third-person analysis on the ‘the disalienation of the black man’, such as that contained in Peau noire, masques blancs. After all, this was a time when the need for such a phenomenological approach to mental illness was at the heart of psychiatric debates in France, under the influence of, among others, Henri Ey and Merleau-Ponty, both of whom were, like Fanon, readers of Jaspers. Such a psychiatry dissertation would probably be less acceptable today than it was back then. David Macey correctly notes that Peau noire, masques blancs, which Fanon started writing before embarking on his psychiatric studies, was not initially intended as a doctoral thesis.15 More fundamentally, both works have very different points of departure: the thesis establishes the ontological ground on which Peau noire, masques blancs stands, by showing that, even if it has its origin in neurological problems, a mental illness unfolds only within a socially determined relational space that in turn explains its form. As for the book, it is a specific psycho-historical study of alienation in an Ancien Régime colony in the French Caribbean, 14 Marie-Jeanne Manuellan, to whom Fanon dictated L’An V and Les Damnés de la terre, and who typed them, described in great detail Fanon’s way of working during several conversations with me in 2013 and 2014. I am very grateful to her for her time and generosity. 15 David Macey, Frantz Fanon, 127.

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where interiorised subordination to the metropole was absolute, whether as identification or as an oppositional identity (such as négritude). This goes far beyond a psychiatric thesis. It is true that Fanon may well have thought of rewriting and submitting the two ‘psychological’ chapters: one subjective, ‘L’Expérience vécue du noir’ (already published in Esprit in May 1951), and the other, which could be called more objective, ‘Le Nègre et la psychopathologie’. But a dissertation on the psychopathology of the black man, separated from the socio-cultural and historical dimensions added in Peau noire, masques blancs, would have risked pandering to the essentialism typical of the colonial psychiatry that Fanon had already violently denounced in ‘Le Syndrome nord-africain’, written at the same time and published in Esprit in February 1952.16 From Fanon’s point of view, this book was also 16

This article was reprinted in Pour la révolution africaine (Œuvres, 691–703). It draws the genealogy of a racist attitude from the presupposition that all symptom involves injury: ‘Devant cette douleur sans lésion, cette maladie répartie dans et sur tout le corps, cette souffrance continue, l’attitude la plus facile et à laquelle on est plus ou moins rapidement conduit, est la négation de toute morbidité. À l’extrême, le NordAfricain est un simulateur, un menteur, un tire-au-flanc, un fainéant, un feignant, un voleur. […] Le Nord-Africain prend place dans ce syndrome asymptomatique et se situe automatiquement sur un plan d’indiscipline (cf. discipline médicale), d’inconséquence (par rapport à la loi : tout symptôme suppose une lésion), d’insincérité (il dit souffrir alors que nous savons ne pas exister de raisons de souffrir). Il y a une idée mobile qui est là, à la limite de ma mauvaise foi, et quand l’Arabe se dévoilera à travers son langage : “Monsieur le docteur, je vais mourir”. Cette idée, après avoir parcouru quelques sinuosités, s’imposera, m’en imposera. Décidément, ces types ne sont pas sérieux’ [In the face of this pain without lesion, this illness distributed in and over the whole body, this continuous suffering, the easiest attitude, to which one comes more or less rapidly, is the negation of any morbidity. When you come down to it, the North African is a simulator, a liar, a malingerer, a sluggard, a thief. […] The North African takes his place in this asymptomatic syndrome and is automatically put down as undisciplined (cf. medical discipline), inconsequential (with reference to the law according to which every symptom implies a lesion), and insincere (he says he is suffering when we know there are no reasons for suffering). There is a floating idea which is present, just beyond the limit of my lack of good faith, which emerges when the Arab unveils himself through his language: ‘Doctor, I’m going to die.’ This idea, after having passed through a number of contortions, will

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a critique of the idea that pathological constructions attributed to a ‘race’ could have any source other than history. Showing that mental illnesses are not natural ‘entities’, while accounting for the possibility of their organic origin, was therefore not just an important thesis to support in medical debates in this period, but one Fanon defended forcefully because it allowed him to attack the foundations of colonial ethnopsychiatry. He was equally passionate about the relationship of the mental and the organic and that of history and alienation. Writing a psychiatric thesis within the framework of a neurologically oriented research environment was therefore the opportunity to begin a reflection on the essential philosophical problem for him: the space for freedom and history that an empirical proof of the distinction between the neurological and the psychiatric would reveal.17 It is to this point that we shall turn next,

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impose itself, will impose itself on me. No, you certainly can’t take these fellows seriously] Pour la révolution, 694–7/7–10. Series D of Chapter 5 of Les Damnés de la terre is dedicated to ‘psychosomatic disorders’. Fanon employs the materialistic terminology, ‘cortico-visceral’ of Soviet psychosomatic medicine, developed in the wake of Pavlov’s work that dominated now the thinking of communist psychiatrists, who saw in the brain the ‘matrix where is specifically developed the psyche’. But he hastens to temper it with a critique of ethnopsychiatric essentialism: in the colonial context, the psychosomatic disorder is not a property of the mind of the native, but a physiological adaptation to a particular historical situation. In her remarkable biography, it is perhaps the case that Alice Cherki simplifies the thought of Jean Dechaume – director of the department in which Fanon studied and a member of the jury before which Fanon defended his thesis – when she writes: ‘Dechaume ne s’intéresse qu’à la psychochirurgie, et toute l’activité proprement psychiatrique est réduite à une neuropsychiatrie très organiciste, où à tout symptôme correspond un médicament et à tout traitement un internement’ [Dechaume was interested solely in psychosurgery, and he viewed things through a neuropsychiatric lens that attributed all psychiatric conditions to organic origins – every symptom had a corresponding therapeutic drug and confinement was a given in any and all therapies] Frantz Fanon: portrait, 31/17. In his thesis, Fanon twice cites the chapter written by Dechaume in the multi-volume work Traité de médecine, ed. André Lemierre et al., 17 vols (Paris: Masson & Cie, 1949), XVI, 1063–75. There Dechaume vigourously defends the point of view of psychosomatic medicine: ‘Les maladies viscérales les plus localisées peuvent avoir un retentissement psychique’ [The most localised of visceral diseases can have a psychic impact] (passage cited by Fanon), while, conversely, a

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before considering the various papers in which he presented his research on clinical treatments.

Organogenesis and psychogenesis Fanon’s dissertation uses a hereditary neuro-degenerative disease, Friedreich’s ataxia,18 in order to test the reducibility of the mental to the neurological. It concludes by showing experimentally the relational – and by extension social – dimension of the development of mental illness and of the forms that it takes: in most serious cases, there is an organic, neurological disturbance, which requires whatever medical treatments are available at a given time; but they will not be enough to cure the disorder. Mental illness therefore cannot be reduced to its occasional cause: it has its own dynamic and will require a treatment of a different sort. That said, if there is no pure organogenesis of mental illness, there is no pure psychogenesis either. Fanon deems the opposition obsolete because, for him, the forms that mental illness takes are determined by the structure of relations in which the individual is able or unable to participate, and therefore by ‘external’ factors: forces that are neither organic nor psychological, but institutional and social. The neurological disturbance will be considered a cause only inasmuch as, by ‘dissolving’ some higher functions (for instance, controlling learning or motion), it alters the possibility and the structure of social relations and, by way of consequence, personality. Over time the mind will

18

mental disturbance can have a visceral effect. Even if Fanon cited Dechaume out of obligation, he was interested in psychosomatic medicine. It is well known that the body seemed to him to be a crucial element in the complex explanation of the human reality that he studied. Even if Dechaume was unaware of the social dimension of mental illness, it is perhaps because of this psychosomatic interest that Fanon decided, in spite of everything, to end his study with him, as Cherki observes. A relatively rare genetically inherited disease (affecting perhaps 50,000 persons in Europe and the USA). It was first identified in 1861 by the German neurologist Nikolaus Friedreich (1825–1882).

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react by reconstructing the personality with what has been left after the mental dissolution. The various possible forms of this reconstitution are then classified into as many types of mental illness. The dissertation’s preamble states the purpose of the work: between 1861 and 1931, a number of sets of clinical symptoms clustered, so to speak, under a family of hereditary neurological degenerations, so as to ‘parvenir à la dignité d’entité’.19 However, Fanon contends that this long, complex history shows that here neurological and psychiatric symptoms ‘obéissaient à un polymorphisme absolu’.20 It was possible and indeed necessary to unify the neurological diseases, but this task proved impossible for their psychiatric correlates. The well-known paralysie générale, described by Antoine Laurent Bayle in 1822, had seemed so clearly linked to a specific mental syndrome – megalomaniacal delirium and progressive dementia – that it had been used by Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours, followed by nineteenth-century medical positivism in general, as a proof of an organic substratum to all mental illness and thus as a foundation for an organogenetic conception of madness.21 By contrast, in the family of hereditary neurological degenerations linked to Friedreich’s ataxia, if a proportion of cases were accompanied by mental disorders, these alterations were rarely the same. So these diseases seemed to question the simplicity of ‘causal and mechanistic explanations’: À une époque où neurologues et psychiatres s’acharnent à délimiter une science pure, c’est-à-dire une neurologie pure et une psychiatrie pure, il est bon de lâcher dans le débat un groupe de maladies neurologiques s’accompagnant de troubles psychiques, et de se poser la question légitime de l’essence de ces troubles.22

19 [Reach the dignity of an entity] Fanon, ‘Altérations mentales’, 169. 20 [Conform to an absolute polymorphism] Ibid. 170. 21 On ‘paralysie générale’, see Jacques Postel and Claude Quétel, Nouvelle histoire de la psychiatrie (Paris: Dunod, 2012), 203–14. 22 [At a time when neurologists and psychiatrists strive to delimit a pure science, namely a pure neurology and a pure psychiatry, it is a good idea to let loose in the debate a group of neurological disorders that are accompanied by psychic disturbances, and to pose the legitimate question of the essence of these disturbances.] Fanon, ‘Altérations mentales’, 170.

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And, in a section of ‘general considerations’ Fanon states: Nous ne croyons pas qu’un trouble neurologique, même inscrit dans le plasma germinatif d’un individu, puisse engendrer un ensemble psychiatrique déterminé. Mais nous voulons montrer que toute atteinte neurologique entame en quelque sorte la personnalité. Et cette faille ouverte au sein de l’Ego sera d’autant plus sensible que le trouble neurologique empruntera une séméiologie rigoureuse et irréversible. […] Nous pensons organes et lésions focales quand il faudrait penser fonctions et désintégrations. Notre optique médicale est spatiale alors qu’elle devrait de plus en plus se temporaliser.23

Such epistemological and disciplinary caution is present throughout Fanon’s work: however convenient, classification does not prove an ontology. We should always be ready to think in terms of processes rather than entities. He probably inherited such a caution first from phenomenology and the debates at the heart of French psychiatry during the previous decade, in particular those which opposed Henri Ey to Jacques Lacan and to the neurologists Julian de Ajuriaguerra and Henri Hécaen.24 But this 23

[We do not believe that a neurological disturbance, even if it is inscribed in the germplasm of an individual, can give rise to a determinate psychiatric ensemble. But we want to demonstrate that every neurological impairment affects in some way the personality. And this crack opened at the heart of the ego will be all the more sensitive if the neurological disturbance assumes a trying and enduring set of symptoms. […] We think in terms of organs and focal lesions when we ought to think more and more in terms of functions and disintegrations. Our medical perspective is spatial when it ought to be increasingly temporalised.] Ibid. 177–8. 24 Fanon read and cites the proceedings of some of the famous conferences Ey organised in Bonneval, in particular Henri Ey, Julian de Ajuriaguerra and Henri Hécaen, Neurologie et psychiatrie [1943 conference] (Paris: Hermann, 1947), and H. Ey and others, Le Problème de la psychogenèse des névroses et des psychoses [1946] (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1950). Fanon’s library includes a copy of the first two volumes of Ey’s Études psychiatriques: Études psychiatriques 1: historique, méthodologie, psychopathologie générale (2nd edn, Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1952); Études psychiatriques 2: aspects séméiologiques (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1950). See also EAL, 602. In these, Fanon read closely the studies that related to the somatogenesis of mental illness, in particular the third one, in which Ey observes: ‘Ne serait-il pas possible cependant de se demander si la notion de “Psychose” n’est pas précisément contradictoire avec l’idée d’ “entité” et cela en analysant simplement la pathologie de la Paralysie Générale’

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scepticism is also essential to the works of Georges Canguilhem and the early Foucault.25 We shall see that Fanon used it in a more directly political [Might it not, however, be possible to ask whether the notion of ‘psychosis’ is not precisely contradictory to that of ‘entity’, and this simply by analysing the pathology of General paresis] Études psychiatriques 1 (2nd edn), 44; (new edn, Perpignan: CREHEY, 2006), 63. In a footnote in his dissertation (213, n. 2), Fanon, always attentive to psychosomatic perspectives, mentions the title of the announced (but never published) fourth volume of Études psychiatriques: ‘Les processus somatiques générateurs’ [Generative Somatic Processes]. 25 Fanon’s library includes a copy of Gaston Bachelard’s Le Nouvel esprit scientifique (1st edn, 1934; 2nd edn, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949), which defends a non-substantialist epistemology. Several of the sections on the importance of building in temporal parameters into research are marked in Fanon’s copy, including this passage: ‘L’énigme métaphysique la plus obscure réside à l’intersection des propriétés spatiales et des propriétés temporelles. Cette énigme est difficile à énoncer, précisément parce que notre langage est matérialiste, parce qu’on croit pouvoir par exemple enraciner la nature d’une substance dans une matière placide, indifférente à la durée. Sans doute le langage de l’espace-temps est mieux approprié à l’étude de la synthèse nature–loi, mais ce langage n’a pas encore trouvé assez d’images pour attirer les philosophes’ [The most obscure metaphysical enigma resides at the intersection of spatial properties and temporal properties. This enigma is difficult to state, precisely because our language is materialist, because we believe to be able, for example, to root the nature of a substance in a placid matter, indifferent to duration. No doubt the language of space-time is more appropriate to studying the nature–law synthesis, but this language has not yet found enough images to attract the philosophers] Le Nouvel esprit (2nd edn), 60–1/The New Scientific Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984), 64–5. Foucault, himself influenced as much by phenomenology as by the teaching of Ey, is thus close to what Fanon argues: ‘Tant de fois repris, ces problèmes [opposition de l’organogenèse et de la psychogenèse de la maladie mentale], aujourd’hui, rebutent et il serait sans profit de résumer les débats qu’ils ont fait naître. Mais on peut se demander si l’embarras ne vient pas de ce qu’on donne le même sens aux notions de maladie, de symptômes, d’étiologie en pathologie mentale et en pathologie organique. S’il apparaît tellement malaisé de définir la maladie et la santé psychologiques, n’est-ce pas parce qu’on s’efforce en vain de leur appliquer massivement des concepts destinés également à la médecine somatique ? La difficulté à retrouver l’unité des perturbations organiques et des altérations de la personnalité, ne vient-elle pas de ce qu’on leur suppose une causalité de même type ? Par-delà la pathologie mentale et la pathologie organique, il y a une pathologie générale et abstraite qui les domine

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way to expose the vacuity of colonial ethnopsychiatric concepts, but within the scope of the dissertation itself it essentially leads to a structural approach to mental illness. It has been said that the university in Lyon was a psychiatric desert during this period.26 A student’s decision to pursue such research would therefore show both remarkable ambition and an astonishing ability to engage immediately with the most interesting discussions of the time. It is likely that these debates, which Ey had amply documented, were available to Fanon through Merleau-Ponty’s lectures and his published works, with which he was very familiar. Also in Lyon, Fanon came into contact with the most progressive current within French psychiatry.27 In particular, he was introduced by mutual friends to Paul Balvet, a distinguished psychiatrist at Le Vinatier hospital, who had published, in the September 1947 issue of l’une et l’autre, leur imposant, comme autant de préjugés, les mêmes concepts, et leur indiquant les mêmes méthodes comme autant de postulats. Nous voudrions montrer que la racine de la pathologie mentale ne doit pas être dans une spéculation sur une quelconque “métapathologie”, mais seulement dans une réflexion sur l’homme luimême’ [These problems [the contrast between organogenesis and the psychogenesis of mental illness] have been discussed ad nauseam, and it would be quite pointless to go over once more the debates to which they have given rise. But one might ask oneself whether our distaste does not spring from the fact that we give the same meaning to the notions of illness, symptoms and etiology in mental pathology and in organic pathology. If it seems so difficult to define psychological illness and health, is this not because one is trying in vain to apply to them, en masse, concepts that are also intended for somatic medicine? Does not the difficulty in finding unity in organic disturbances and personality changes lie in the fact that they are presumed to possess the same type of structure? Beyond mental pathology and organic pathology, there is a general, abstract pathology that dominates them both, imposing on them, like so many prejudices, the same concepts and laying down for them, like so many postulates, the same methods. I would like to show that the root of mental pathology must be sought not in speculations on ‘metapathology’, but in a certain relation, historically situated, of man to the madman and to the true man] Michel Foucault, Maladie mentale et personnalité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954), 1–2/Mental Illness and Psychology, trans. Alan Sheridan, with a foreword by Hubert Dreyfus (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), 1–2). 26 See Razanajao and Postel, ‘La Vie et l’œuvre psychiatrique de Frantz Fanon’, 148. 27 See Macey, Frantz Fanon, 139.

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Esprit, an important article on ‘La Valeur humaine de la folie’ [The Human Value of Madness], which Fanon compares with Lacan’s work in his dissertation. He had been a director of the clinic in Saint-Alban where Fanon was later to do his internship under François Tosquelles (who had been recruited by Balvet) and Maurice Despinoy. In March 1950 Balvet contributed to the special issue of Esprit entitled ‘Médecine, quatrième pouvoir: L’Intervention psychologique et l’“intégrité” de la personne’ [Medicine, The Fourth Power: Psychological Intervention and the ‘Integrity’ of the Person], an issue with articles on neurosurgery, shock therapies, narcoanalysis and psychoanalysis.28 It is likely that their discussions would have drawn on these debates, which were at the forefront of intellectual life at the time. When made aware of these issues, Fanon, a tireless reader of philosophy, literature and psychiatry, would naturally have been eager to take a position and make his mark in this field. From the outset, therefore, the dissertation adopts the perspective of a comparison of philosophy and psychiatry. What is at stake could almost be said to lie in the two apparently contradictory epigraphs with which it begins. The first is from Nietzsche: ‘Je ne parle que de choses vécues et je ne représente pas de processus cérébraux’.29 The second is from a presentation Under the title Misère de la psychiatrie, Esprit later published, in December 1952, an important issue on the reform of psychiatric institutions. It includes articles by Henri Ey, François Tosquelles, Paul Sivadon and Georges Daumezon, whom Fanon knew. 29 [I speak only of lived things and I do not represent cerebral processes.] ‘Altérations mentales’, 168. Fanon suggests that the quotation is from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, but it is in fact from an early draft (autumn 1884) of Ecce Homo: ‘Ich will das höchste Mißtrauen gegen mich erwecken: ich rede nur von erlebten Dingen und präsentiere nicht nur Kopf-Vorgänge’ (Kritische Studienausgabe, 14, 361). No French edition of Ecce Homo included this variant when Fanon was writing, but it is translated in two works to which Fanon had access: Bernard Groethuysen’s Introduction à la pensée philosophique allemande depuis Nietzsche (Paris: Librairie Stock, 1926), a copy of which figures in Fanon’s library and in which it is translated as ‘je ne parle que de choses vécues, et je ne me borne pas à dire ce qui s’est passé dans ma tête’ [I speak only of lived things and do not limit myself to speaking only of what has gone on in my head] (20) (repr. in B. Groethuysen, Philosophie et histoire (Paris: Albin Michel), 100); and in Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche: introduction à sa philosophie, trans. Henri Niel, pref. Jean Wahl (Paris: Gallimard, 1950) – one of the first volumes published in the 28

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to the Société Médico-Psychologique on 8 February 1934 by Paul Guiraud and Julian de Ajuriaguerra: ‘La fréquence et l’importance des troubles mentaux dans les maladies nerveuses familiales ne permet pas de les considérer comme des accidents fortuits’.30 Paul Guiraud was a very senior neurologist at the time, working on the link between neurological lesions and psychological disorders, while Julian de Ajuriaguerra was to become a world authority in the field. At the same meeting of the Société Médico-Psychologique Guiraud also presented, with Madeleine Derombies, the study of ‘Un cas de maladie familiale de RoussyLévy avec troubles mentaux’ [A hereditary case of Roussy-Levy with mental disturbances]. This illness was accompanied by a psychological syndrome comprised of depression, irritability and disorders of muscular sensitivity leading to a breakdown of the synthesis of the self (when walking the patient felt he was walked rather than walking, or transported, as in a car).31 In ‘Bibliothèque de philosophie’, a collection created by Merleau-Ponty and Sartre – where it is translated as ‘Je parle seulement de choses vécues et n’expose pas uniquement des événements de tête’ world war[I speak solely of lived things and do not only present events in the head] (387). Jaspers does not underline vécues but adds: ‘Nietzsche voit dans la connaissance intellectuelle, la subjectivité d’une vie …’ [Nietzsche sees in intellectual knowledge the subjectivity of a life …]. Nietzsche’s quote concludes the dedication of the dissertation to Fanon’s brother, Joby. The object of the dissertation, the space between the psychiatric and the neurological, clearly lies in this quote, but it may also be an allusion to these ‘choses vécues’ which are studied in the first person in Peau noire, masques blancs. My thanks to Mark Chinca and David Midgley for helping me track down this fragment. 30 [The frequency and the importance of mental disturbances in familial nervous diseases does not allow us to consider them as fortuitous accidents.] Paul Guiraud and Julian de Ajuriaguerra, ‘Aréflexie, pieds creux, amyotrophie accentuée, signe d’Argyll et troubles mentaux’, Annales médico-psychologiques 92/1 (1934), 229–34 (233). 31 ‘Il n’y a plus appropriation à la personnalité de l’activité musculaire, le sujet a l’impression de subir passivement les mouvements de la marche, il ne marche pas, il est transporté, comme si j’étais en voiture, dit-il. Le résultat de ce déficit est un fléchissement de la notion du moi, de la personnalité, à tel point, dit le malade, que s’il ne s’arrêtait pas, il perdrait connaissance’ [Muscular activity is no longer appropriated by the personality, the subject has the impression of passively undergoing the movements of walking : he does not walk, but is transported, as if I were in a car, he says. The result of this deficit is a weakening of the notion of the self, of the personality, to such

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addition, a tendency to childish delusions of grandeur accompanied this pathology. As for the neurological front, the young man displayed all the muscular and physiological symptoms of Roussy-Lévy disease (hereditary areflexic dystasia), confirmed by the study of his heredity. Now if the authors obviously concluded that there was a coexistence of a mental syndrome with a neurological syndrome, they also noted that such a strict neuropsychiatric correlation is not universal, in a text which may have very possibly inspired Fanon’s dissertation topic: Nous estimons que, dans notre cas, la lésion encore inconnue (puisque la maladie de Roussy-Lévy attend encore son anatomie pathologique) ne se confine pas à la moelle, mais vient atteindre les voies ou les centres terminaux de la proprioceptivité dans ces régions mêmes où le neurologique devient psychique. Il est en effet amplement démontré que la privation simple d’impressions kinesthésiques, ou de tout autre ordre, ne suffit pas pour provoquer des troubles tels que le défaut d’appropriation au moi et le sentiment de passivité des actes moteurs. A plus forte raison, il faut autre chose pour expliquer les troubles du caractère l’impulsivité, l’état dépressif, etc … Par contre, dans la maladie de Friedreich, les troubles mentaux sont bien connus. Mollaret les a soigneusement étudiés dans sa thèse. Il note, assez fréquemment associés à la débilité mentale, les troubles de l’humeur et du caractère, l’impulsivité, l’instabilité. Mais dans aucune de ses observations, on ne trouve une liaison aussi étroite que dans la nôtre entre le syndrome neurologique et le syndrome mental.32

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a degree, says the patient, that if he did not stop, he would lose consciousness] Paul Guiraud and Madeleine Derombies, ‘Un cas de maladie familiale de Roussy-Lévy avec troubles mentaux’, Annales médico-psychologiques 92/1 (1934), 224–9 (225). [We consider that, in our case, the as yet unknown lesion (since the Roussy-Lévy syndrome still awaits its pathological anatomy) is not confined to the marrow, but rather reaches the paths or terminal centres of proprioception, in those very regions where the neurological becomes psychic. It is in fact amply demonstrated that the simple privation of kinesthesic impressions, or those of any other order, are not enough to provoke disorders such as the self ’s failure of appropriation and the feeling of passivity with regard to motor acts. A fortiori, something else is necessary to explain disturbances of character, impulsiveness, instability. But in none of these observations does one find as close a relation as in ours between the neurological and mental syndromes.] Ibid. 228–9. Mollaret’s thesis, a far more detailed neurological thesis that contained a greater number of observed cases than Fanon’s, only devotes two paragraphs to the ‘Pathogenesis of Mental Disturbances’ in Friedreich’s Ataxia. Mollaret gathers possible explanations under three headings: pure coincidence

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These considerations concerning the neuropsychiatric differences between these two diseases are crucial in understanding Fanon’s thought. What is at stake here is the nature of the psychical: Friedreich’s ataxia makes it possible, even necessary, to develop a theory of its independence from the neurological within a scientific approach, that is, without recourse to a dualist spiritualism. Another case presented by Guiraud on that day, this time with de Ajuriaguerra, displayed a syndrome of ‘aréflexie, pieds creux, amyotrophie accentuée, signe d’Argyll et troubles mentaux’.33 Again we find a set of neurological disorders linked to mental ones – ‘déséquilibre mental’, ‘troubles du caractère’, ‘accès cyclothymique’ and sometimes ‘atteinte intellectuelle originelle’34 – within a neurological syndrome not yet fully identified, though undeniable and quite similar to Friedreich’s disease. The authors’ conclusion includes the sentence which Fanon quotes as the second epigraph at the beginning of his dissertation: the mental disturbances in evidence in these hereditary nervous diseases are so frequent and so significant that they cannot be considered as merely fortuitous. However, a doubt had arisen at the heart of each of the three presentations: do these links, which are not just coincidental, alone explain the form and content of the mental troubles themselves? Should we be content with speaking of ‘processus cérebraux’, as Fanon wrote to translate

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between disease and mental disturbance; direct causation of pathologies by neurological lesions (in the cerebellum) ; the third heading, which seemed to him most likely, it that of Saquet, who indicates that ‘il existe chez ces malades une prédisposition évidente, et les lésions du cortex cérébral résultent d’un processus associé’ [an evident predisposition exists among these patients, and the lesions of the cerebral cortex are the result of an associated process]. However, he concludes: ‘Nous ne prendrons pas parti dans cette discussion. Nous avons tenu simplement à souligner l’existence assez fréquente de pareils symptômes dans la maladie étudiée par nous’ [We will not take sides in this discussion. We have set out simply to underline the frequent existence of similar symptoms in the illness that we have studied] (Pierre Mollaret, La Maladie de Friedreich. Étude physio-clinique, PhD dissertation (Paris, 1929), 180). [Areflexia, pes cavus, accentuated amyotrophy, Argyll Robertson pupils and mental disturbances] [Psychological imbalance], [personality disturbances], [onset of cyclothymia], [intellectual impairment].

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Nietzsche’s ‘head events’, or should ‘choses vécues’ – forms or states of consciousness – be studied in their own right? And could that be done within a scientific framework? The careful, detailed analysis of the literature on Friedreich’s ataxia, together with the specific case on which Fanon focused (‘cas de délire de possession à structure hystérique’, with symptoms such as ‘agitation, attitudes extatiques, propos sur des thèmes mystiques ou érotiques’)35 show that the extreme variety of these forms jeopardises in advance all simple reductionism. The solution comes in a long section of the dissertation comparing the ideas of Ey, Goldstein (together with von Monakow) and Lacan. Even though Fanon seems to have remained closer to Ey’s organodynamisme and to an understanding of the nature of mental illness as a pathological personality-reconstruction – the work of a consciousness affected in the first place by unrelated, underlying neurological troubles and reacting to them – he showed considerable interest in Lacan’s insistence on the social dimension of the complex and its impact on the development of mental illness.36 In the specific medical case on which Fanon focused, the cerebellar degeneration produced dementia and mental immaturity, but the delirium, hysterical manifestations and mysticism (délire de possession) had to be explained as the reactional behaviour of an ego deprived of social relationships. The original, unrelated neurological disorder had inhibited the patient’s cognitive and affective development by impeding motricity and therefore socialisation (an idea which may reflect the influence of Henri Wallon, perhaps through Merleau-Ponty): ‘Les délires systématisés, les manifestations hystériques, les comportements névrotiques, doivent

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[A case of delusion of possession with an hysterical structure […] agitation, ecstatic attitudes, talk on mystical or erotic themes] Fanon, ‘Altérations mentales’, 203. ‘La catégorie sociale de la réalité humaine à laquelle personnellement nous attachons tant d’importance, a retenu l’attention de Lacan’ [The social category of human reality, to which we personally attach such importance, captured Lacan’s attention] Ibid. 223.

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être considérés comme des conduites réactionnelles d’un moi en rupture de relations intersociales’.37 Ey famously called ‘écart organo-clinique’ (organo-clinical gap) the space of the ‘trajectoire psychique’ (psychic trajectory) of self-reconstruction by consciousness following a neurological dissolution, which results in what we see as mental illness.38 This space will increasingly appear to Fanon as structured by a multiplicity of external factors, social as well as cultural. This is why his subsequent professional articles and manuscripts on the necessary use of available neuropsychiatric treatments always also underline their limits. Then, when he was faced with the social divisions proper to the colonial setting, he focused more directly on the role of society and culture in relation to mental illness and on the consequent

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[Systematised delusions, hysterical manifestations, neurotic behaviours, these must all be considered as reactive behaviours of an ego at odds with intersocial relations.] Ibid. 228. Writing on cases of ‘débilité mentale’ in childhood, linked to a neurological motor disease, Fanon notes: ‘Il est facile d’expliquer la débilité mentale de ces malades. La paralysie consécutive à l’évolution clinique interdit la fréquentation scolaire D’où, naturellement, impossibilité de développement intellectuel. D’ailleurs la liaison débilité motrice-débilité mentale est une tentative extrêmement séduisante. L’affectivité de ces malades est pareillement atteinte puisqu’ils ne peuvent franchir les différentes étapes de la génétique décrite par la psychanalyse, étapes qui sont comme on le sait, en rapport étroit avec la motricité’ [It is easy to explain the mental debility of these patients. The paralysis that follows the clinical development prohibits school attendance. Whence, naturally, it is impossible to develop intellectually. In addition, the link between motor debility and mental debility is an extremely seductive one to make. The affectivity of these patients is similarly impaired since they are unable to proceed through the various stages of the genetics described by psychoanalysis, stages that are, as is well known, related to motor function] Ibid. 178. This conclusion on the role of the body in mental development has obvious resonances with Fanon’s analysis of the impact of the racist gaze in the colonial situation. But there is also here an interesting reflection on the relationship between the destruction of the corporeal schema and mysticism. On the importance of physical movement, and the concepts of schéma corporel and its dissolution under the racist gaze in Peau noire, masques blancs and L’An V de la révolution africaine, see Ch. 5. See, for instance, Études Psychiatriques (new edn, Perpignan: CREHEY, 2006), I, 168.

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advantages and limits of social therapy and psychotherapy as treatments within the context of the psychiatric hospital.

Value and limits of neuropsychiatric treatments The dissertation made it possible to imagine a neuropsychiatric approach to the treatment of mental illness. In all the subsequent texts that Fanon published in this domain, this cure comprises two steps: first an initial organic treatment, consisting usually of shock therapies – electroshocks (thérapeutique de Bini), insulin comas (cure de Sakel) or a combination of both – or sleep therapy (cure de sommeil), aimed at wiping the slate clean of previous reactive constructions. This treatment, which is only a preliminary phase, is followed by long psychotherapeutic work aimed at rebuilding the personality and bringing the patient back to some normal social existence.39 Mental illness is never seen as an extreme form of 39

Neuroleptics were not yet used and these new methods of shock therapy then raised significant hopes (the antipsychotic effects of the first neuroleptic, chlorpromazine, were not known until 1952; Jean Delay organised in 1955 an international symposium on chlorpromazine and neuroleptic drugs, of which the proceedings, published in 1956, are in Fanon’s library). On electroshocks, Fanon refers to Paul Delmas-Marsalet, L’Électro-choc thérapeutique et la dissolution-reconstruction (Paris: J.-B. Baillière et Fils, 1943), in particular Ch. VII, ‘La théorie de la dissolution-reconstruction’ [Theory of Dissolution-Reconstruction], which uses an architectural metaphor to describe mental illness as a defective reorganisation of the constitutive blocks of mental functions. If these blocks are all there and if the building plans have been preserved (in other words, provided there is no major neurological damage), it seems that shocks reposition functions within the original plan. In its general structure, this conception is similar to that which Henri Ey found in the English neurologist Hughlings Jackson (1835–1911), and of which he proposed a psychiatric reinterpretation in a book that became a reference: Essai d’application des principes de Jackson à une conception dynamique de la neuropsychiatrie [Essay on the Application of the Principles of Jackson to a Dynamic Conception of Neuropsychiatry] (1st edn, Paris: Doin, 1938; new edn, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000). The passages concerning the speed of mental dissolution

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freedom, but rather as a pathologie de la liberté, a phrase Fanon used in several texts in reference to Ey, who himself had borrowed it from an eponymous paper by Günther Anders.40 Fanon opposed this conception of madness as a pathology of freedom to that of Lacan, who saw in the possibility of madness an essential dimension of human existence, in a certain proximity to the Surrealists.41

are annotated in the copy of Fanon, who adds references to Jaspers and Lacan. On insulin coma therapy, Fanon refers to the inventor of the method, Manfred Sakel, in particular his presentation at the 1950 ‘Congrès international de psychiatrie in Paris’, entitled ‘Insulinotherapy and Shocktherapies: Ascent of Psychiatry from Scholastic Dialecticism to Empirical Medicine’, in Congrès international de psychiatrie, Paris, 1950, 6 vols (Paris: Hermann, 1950), IV, 163–232. Among Fanon’s papers, kept at Institut Mémoire de l’Édition Contemporaine, a long typescript turned out to be a French translation of this text. 40 See Günther Anders, ‘Pathologie de la liberté. Essai sur la non-identification’ [Pathology of Freedom. Essay on Non-Identification], Recherches philosophiques 6 (1936–1937), 2–54. Fanon’s library contains a set of Recherches philosophiques: in this volume, the pages for this article are cut. Fanon refers to this text indirectly in Peau noire, masques blancs: ‘Certains hommes veulent enfler le monde de leur être. Un philosophe allemand avait décrit ce processus sous le nom de pathologie de la liberté’ [Some men want the whole world to know who they are. One German Philosopher described the process as the pathology of freedom] 247/200. 41 On this particular point, Fanon clearly takes the side of Ey in the debate with Lacan: ‘Il faut avoir lu “La Psychiatrie devant le surréalisme” de Ey pour comprendre à quel point cet auteur sait poser le problème des limites de la liberté et de la folie. La même chute prend valeur différente selon qu’elle est libre ou irréversible. Selon qu’elle est envol ou conséquence du poids psychique de l’organisme. Dans le premier cas, on a affaire au Poète, dans le deuxième, au Fou’ [One has to have read Ey’s La psychiatrie devant le surréalisme, to understand the degree to which this author is able to present the problem of the limits of freedom and madness. The same fall takes on a different value depending on whether it is free or irreversible. Depending on whether it is a taking wing or a consequence of the psychic weight of the organism. In the first case, one is dealing with a poet, in the second, with a mad person] ‘Altérations mentales’, 211. Ey’s article in L’Évolution psychiatrique (13/4 (1948), 3–52) was published as a separate volume by the Centre d’Éditions Psychiatriques in 1948, with a drawing by Frédéric Delanglade, a friend of Breton and Ey. The copy in Fanon’s library is annotated throughout. On Ey and Lacan’s differing positions on Surrealism, see Paolo

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After his studies in Lyon and a short stint at the psychiatric hospital of Saint-Ylie de Dole and in Martinique, in April 1952 Fanon went to the hospital of Saint-Alban-de-Limagnole to work as an intern with the revolutionary psychiatrist François Tosquelles, one of the inventors of socialthérapie (which later became psychothérapie institutionnelle), and published with him and a number of other colleagues a series of texts centred on shock therapies. What is interesting here is that these treatments are never considered as cures in themselves, but as preparations for the psychotherapeutic work properly speaking.42 The papers describe cases of patients who presented serious psychotic disorders. Fanon and Tosquelles recall at length the various debates on the risks and ethics of shock therapies, and note that one of the reasons for the reluctance to use them (and for their wrong assimilation to lobotomy, a technique they oppose) is a naïve belief in the permanence of personality: ‘N’y a-t-il pas derrière cette attitude une méconnaissance du dynamisme de la personnalité tel que la psychanalyse nous le montre?’43 The personality that the shock-therapies will decompose is not a fixed essence but a pathological construction, built as a reaction to the initial disturbance and dissolution.

Scopelliti, L’Influence du surréalisme sur la psychanalyse (Paris: L’Âge d’homme, 2002), 85–8. 42 At the ‘Congrès des médecins aliénistes et neurologues de France et des pays de langue française’ in Pau in July 1953, Fanon delivered three papers with Tosquelles: ‘Sur quelques cas traités par la méthode de Bini’ (EAL, 238–42), ‘Indications de la thérapeutique de Bini dans le cadre des thérapeutiques institutionnelles’ (EAL, 243–9) and ‘Sur un essai de réadaptation chez une malade avec épilepsie morphéique et troubles de caractère graves’ (EAL, 250–5); and with Maurice Despinoy and W. Zenner, who were also from Saint-Alban, he gave ‘Note sur les techniques de cure de sommeil avec conditionnement et contrôle électro-encéphalographique’ (EAL, 256–9). 43 [Is there not, behind this attitude, a misunderstanding of the dynamism of the personality, such as it is revealed to us by psychoanalysis?] Frantz Fanon and François Tosquelles, ‘Indications de la thérapeutique de Bini dans le cadre des thérapeutiques institutionnelles’, in Congrès des médecins aliénistes et neurologues de France et des pays de langue française (Paris: Masson, 1953), 545–2; repr. in EAL, 243–9 (245).

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These shock therapies (which Fanon kept on using extensively in Blida and in Tunis) were seen in turn as instruments of a second ‘dissolution’, this time of the pathological reconstructions themselves. But that implied that special conditions and processes should be set up to help the patients reconstruct their personality, and this is where psychotherapy (most often in the form of group therapy) was developed and practiced in Saint-Alban. Institutional therapy consisted in the construction of a microcosm of the ‘real world’, an opening to the world within the hospital such that the patient was made to assume throughout the day an active role, through work and the organisation of various activities. The construction of a social structure was therefore a crucial factor in the reconstruction of personality: Nous insistons sur le fait que, pour traiter les malades dans cette perspective, il faut, à la fois, accorder la plus grande importance au dispositif hospitalier, au classement et au groupement des malades, à l’établissement concomitant des thérapeutiques de groupe. La coexistence de l’atelier des quartiers et de la vie sociale de l’ensemble de l’hôpital est aussi indispensable que l’étape d’analyse active, interventionniste, qui précède la cure. La cure de Bini, hors de cette possibilité d’enchaînement thérapeutique, nous semble un non-sens.44

It has often been said that thérapie institutionnelle rested on the idea that the institution of the asylum – not just its patients – was itself in need of a cure. The first neuroleptics came into use in the mid-1950s, and Fanon was among the first to experiment with them, in particular in Tunis.45 Prior to these treatments, the asylum remained in many cases a place of internment, and patients who may not have had serious problems in the first place reacted to its conditions in a cycle of violence that in turn condemned 44 [We insist on the fact that, in order to treat patients within this framework, the greatest consideration must simultaneously be given to the organisation of the hospital, the classification and grouping of patients, and to the simultaneous establishment of group therapy programmes. The coexistence of the ward workshop and the social life of the entire hospital is as indispensable as the stage of active, interventionist analysis that precedes the cure. The Bini cure, outside of the possibility of such a therapeutic programme, seems to us nonsensical.] Ibid. 246. 45 See Frantz Fanon and Lucien Lévy, ‘Premiers essais de méprobamate injectable dans les états hypocondriaques’, EAL, 390–6.

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them to perpetual confinement. World War II, with its combination of slow extermination through hunger in French asylums and its legacy of images from concentration camps,46 had made the reality of psychiatric hospitals untenable. However, the diagnosis that patients developed mental diseases largely unrelated to their initial illness because of the structure of the institution was not in itself new: it had already been made in the mid-nineteenth century by Maximien Parchappe de Vinay (1800–1866), inspecteur général des asiles pour aliénés, who oversaw the second wave of asylum constructions in France and wrote that most mental diseases were produced by internment. Fanon knew these texts via Philippe Paumelle, a contemporary from his medical studies, who republished them and became himself a pioneer of institutional therapy in Paris and created ‘psychiatrie de secteur’.47 There was an obvious need for radical reform, and in France these reforms partly 46 See Isabelle von Bueltzingsloewen, L’Hécatombe des fous: la famine dans les hôpitaux psychiatriques français sous l’Occupation (Paris: Aubier, 2007). 47 For an indication of Philippe Paumelle’s pioneering work, see his ‘Le Mythe de l’agitation des malades mentaux’, in Entretiens psychiatriques, ed. Henri Ey [1953] (Paris: L’Arche, 1954), 181–93, and ‘Réflexion sur les Principes à suivre dans la fondation et la construction des asiles d’aliénés de Parchappe, 1853–1953’, L’Information psychiatrique 29/10 (1953), 270–7. In this article, Paumelle quotes a text written by Parchappe in 1853: ‘Dans les temps où l’on a commencé à s’occuper des conditions spéciales d’habitation à créer pour les aliénés, l’agitation était considérée comme l’état en quelque sorte habituel de l’aliéné. Et l’asile d’aliénés a été exclusivement ou presque exclusivement constitué par une réunion de cellules en nombre à peu près égal à celui des malades. Mais à mesure que la psychiatrie a fait des progrès, on a reconnu que l’agitation chez les aliénés peut être restreinte à un nombre de moins en moins considérable suivant que les conditions matérielles et médicales du traitement palliatif et curatif sont de plus en plus perfectionnées’ [At the time when the creation of particular living conditions for the insane became a concern, agitation was considered to be something like the normal state of the insane. And the insane asylum was exclusively or almost exclusively made up of a collation of cells of more or less equal number to that of the patients. But as psychiatry progressed, it was acknowledged that agitation among the insane could be reduced to an increasingly smaller number of occurrences, insofar as the material and medical conditions of palliative and remedial treatment were increasingly improved]. On Maximien Parchappe de Vinay’s rise to prominence and the birth of statistical analysis in the management of asylums and penitentiaries,

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found their origin in the solutions developed by Tosquelles in Saint-Alban, who aimed to abolish all the structural constraints linked to internment – not just the instruments of restraint but also forced idleness and routine – and to recreate within the hospital and under medical supervision the structures of external society, paying great attention to the texture of daily life, as opposed to the traditional routine of the morning visit followed by a vacuous day. The hospital was to be run in all its material and social dimensions jointly by the patients and the nurses, the latter needing complete retraining. Slowly, in a controlled way, most patients recovered at least to the extent of being able to interact with each other. Institutional therapy was at the origin of the ‘antipsychiatry’ movement of the 1960s, in particular the experiments of Félix Guattari and Jean Oury in La Borde clinic. Oury, who had also been an intern under Tosquelles in Saint Alban, knew Fanon well.

Socialtherapy and culture: The experience of Blida When Fanon arrived in Blida in November 1953, equipped with his organodynamic and non-essentialist conception of mental illness and his experience of institutional therapy, he found himself thrown into a situation which was to have a remarkable impact on the evolution of his thought. Blida-Joinville was a deuxième ligne hospital, after Mustapha in Algiers. This meant that patients there were likely to be considered incurable. As soon as he arrived, Fanon set out to reform the wards under his responsibility. He was offered a unique experimental situation, insofar as the wards were segregated along ethnic lines between Européens and Indigènes. He was given two wards, one of ‘European’ women, the other of ‘Indigenous’ men.48 see Frédéric Carbonel, ‘L’Asile pour aliénés de Rouen: un laboratoire de statistiques morales de la Restauration à 1848’, Histoire et mesure 20/1–2 (2005), 97–136. 48 Psychiatry in Algeria had been organised by Antoine Porot, who justified the use of segregation thus: ‘Nous ne pouvions prendre la responsabilité de laisser en commun

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It turned out that while socialthérapie worked wonders with the European women, it was a complete failure with the Algerian men. Fanon wrote a paper on this failure with his intern, Jacques Azoulay, whose dissertation he supervised.49 Going beyond the specific colonial experience, they took the opportunity to reflect in greater depth on the process of social therapy. For instance, if the film club, the music society, the hospital journal (all of which were run by patients) could have a therapeutical function, it was not just because of the films, the music or the texts in themselves, but because they were instruments through which the patients could re-learn to impart meaning to elements constitutive of an environment: Le cinéma ne doit pas rester une succession d’images avec un accompagnement sonore: il faut qu’il devienne le déroulement d’une vie, d’une histoire. Aussi la commission du

indigènes et européens; la communauté hospitalière, acceptable et réalisée du reste dans des hôpitaux généraux, ne pouvait intervenir ici: dans des esprits troublés, les divergences de conceptions morales ou sociales, les tendances impulsives latentes peuvent à tout instant troubler le calme nécessaire, alimenter des délires, susciter ou créer des réactions dangereuses dans un milieu éminemment inflammable’ [We cannot take responsibility for leaving Europeans and natives all lumped together: the hospital community, which is acceptable and established within general hospitals, is unable to intervene on this matter: in disturbed minds, differences of moral or social conception, or latent impulsive tendencies, can disrupt the necessary calm at any moment, can fuel delusions, and trigger or create dangerous reactions in an eminently inflammable milieu] Antoine Porot, ‘L’Assistance psychiatrique en Algérie et le futur Hôpital psychiatrique de Blida’, L’Algérie médicale 65 (1933), 86–92 (89). On the historiography of psychiatry in colonial Algeria, see Richard Keller, ‘Madness and Colonization: Psychiatry in the British and French Empires, 1800–1962’, Journal of Social History 35 (2001), 295–326. 49 Frantz Fanon and Jacques Azoulay, ‘La Socialthérapie dans un service d’hommes musulmans: difficultés méthodologiques’, first published in L’Information psychiatrique 30/9 (1954), 349–61, repr. in EAL, 297–313. This article is a slightly modified version of a section of Azoulay’s dissertation. On alienation as an impairment of the ability to impart meaning onto one’s environment, see, supra, Chapter 5.

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cinéma, en choisissant les films, en les commentant dans le journal dans une chronique spéciale, donne-t-elle au fait cinématographique son véritable sens.50

This worked and soon, as in Saint-Alban, Fanon was able to discard straightjackets and other instruments of restraint in the ‘European’ ward. But why did these reforms fail with the ‘indigenous’ men, who remained within the old cycle of indifference, withdrawal and agitation? The answer was to be found not in some racial features, but in the fact that the cognitive work of assigning meaning can only be carried through within certain frames of reference, and that these are not universal but culturally determined. The colonial situation revealed it clearly: À la faveur de quel trouble du jugement avions-nous cru possible une sociothérapie d’inspiration occidentale dans un service d’aliénés musulmans ? Comment une analyse structurale était-elle possible si on mettait entre parenthèses les cadres géographiques, historiques, culturels et sociaux?51

Charles Geronimi suggested that this failure had been intended by Fanon as a necessary step towards creating new therapeutic structures: On peut légitimement se demander si Fanon s’est réellement ‘trompé’ en essayant de plaquer les techniques ‘européennes’ dans un service de musulmans ou s’il s’est volontairement engagé dans ce qu’il savait être d’emblée une impasse. Jack Azoulay pense que, selon son expression, ‘on s’était planté’. Quand je m’étonnais auprès de Fanon

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[The cinema must not remain simply a succession of images with a sound accompaniment. It is necessary for it to become the unfolding of a life, of a story. So, the cinema committee, in choosing the films, in commenting on them in a special chronicle of the newspaper, gives to the cinematographic fact its true meaning.] Ibid. 350. EAL, 299. The therapeutic use of film in psychiatric hospitals was to be the subject of four papers published by André Beley in L’Information psychiatrique between 1955 and 1959. [What disturbance in our judgement could have led us to consider as a possibility the implementation of a socialtherapy programme of Western inspiration within a service for mentally ill Muslim men? How was a structural analysis possible if we bracketed out the geographical, historical, cultural and social frameworks?] EAL, 305. On the significance of the failure of these reforms, see Alice Cherki, Frantz Fanon: Portrait 106/71.

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So Blida presented Fanon with the ideal experimental situation in which to address the two problems that had been haunting him since his dissertation and Peau noire, masques blancs, namely those of the connection of the neurological with the psychiatric and of the psychiatric with

52

[It can be legitimately asked whether Fanon had really been ‘misguided’ in attempting to apply ‘European’ techniques to a Muslim ward, or whether he deliberately opted for what he knew to be a dead-end from the outset. Jack Azoulay thought that, in his words, ‘we were mistaken’. When I expressed my surprise at Fanon’s ‘impaired judgement’, a surprising thing for someone who had just written Peau noire, masques blancs and the article published in Esprit ‘The North-African syndrome’ – works that highlighted the impossibility of an authentic encounter in a colonial framework – he smiled and replied: ‘You know, you only come to understand things through gut feeling. For me the issue was not to impose methods more or less adapted to the “indigenous mentality” from the outside. I had to show several things: that Algerian culture carried other values than colonial culture; that these structuring values ought to be taken on board confidently by those who bear them, that is Algerian patients or staff. I had to do this to gain the support of the Algerian personnel, to arouse in them a feeling of revolt of the sort: “We are just as able as the Europeans”. It was up to the Algerian staff to suggest the specific forms of sociability and to incorporate them into the process of social therapy. That is what transpired’. And he added: ‘Psychiatry must be political’.] Charles Geronimi, Fanon à Blida.

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the social. With his interns (in particular Jacques Azoulay and François Sanchez), he set out to study, in local cultures, the ways in which diseases were conceptualised.53 They studied and wrote papers on exorcisms 53



See Numa Murard, ‘Psychiatrie institutionnelle à Blida’, Tumultes 31 (2008), 31–45, which draws on the author’s interview in October 2007 with Jacques Azoulay. Here is an essential passage of the transcript of this interview, kindly provided by Numa Murard: ‘Il [Fanon] a cherché d’abord à se renseigner sur la culture spécifique des Arabes algériens et c’est là qu’on a vécu une période très pittoresque et très stimulante, lui était très actif, moi je l’étais moins que lui, mais il m’a entraîné dans des cérémonies de traitement des hystériques dans les bleds kabyles où on enchaînait des femmes dans crises cathartiques pendant toute la nuit. Et ce qui est frappant, c’est qu’il était capable de rester toute la nuit, il s’intéressait de l’intérieur à ces pratiques qui étaient la façon traditionnelle de répondre à certains aspects de la pathologie mentale, bien sûr certains aspects limités aux réactions hystériques alors que quand les choses n’allaient plus, comme pour les psychotiques graves, les gens étaient envoyés à l’hôpital de Blida. On a été beaucoup aussi voir les marabouts, qui étaient les recours de tous les problèmes de mauvais œil, de mauvais esprit, de djnoun, de transmission de l’impuissance masculine, puisque ceux qui étaient impuissants étaient censés avoir reçu un mauvais esprit d’une personne jalouse, et ces marabouts, avec sans doute des succès suffisants, intervenaient en écrivant des choses, en faisant des cérémonies, et arrivaient à éponger une partie de cette pathologie qui aujourd’hui va voir le psychiatre ou le psychanalyste mais qui à l’époque était de pratique courante et était un des systèmes de régulation sociale très utilisé et dominant le côté culturel. Donc Fanon s’est intéressé à tous ces aspects et s’est plongé dans la culture algérienne. Et il a cherché à transposer ça tant bien que mal dans son pavillon de malades musulmans, et c’est là qu’on a fait les réunions avec l’activité des infirmiers qui étaient plongés dans la même culture que les malades, on a fait aussi, je me souviens, le café maure dans le pavillon, ce qui a bien sûr entraîné les critiques ironiques des autres médecins. Il a aussi fait venir des conteurs, qui [maintenaient] une tradition qui avait cours, des conteurs qui reprenaient le folklore traditionnel, et il y a eu là un changement palpable dans l’atmosphère du pavillon. […] Je ne sais pas s’il y a eu beaucoup de sorties, mais il y a eu en tout cas un effet spectaculaire de la validité de l’esprit de la socialthérapie dans le fait de rendre vivant un pavillon d’HP [hôpital psychiatrique] et donc […] je le dis avec mon expérience d’aujourd’hui, de [permettre] à une partie des patients qui peuvent se réengager dans un échange avec le monde, que ça se fasse, que ce soit possible’ [He [Fanon] sought first to inform himself of the specific culture of Algerian Arabs and it was then that we lived through a particularly picturesque and stimulating period, him being very active, I less so, although he dragged me along to ceremonies for the treatment of hysteria in Kabylian villages, in which women were chained

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performed by marabouts (holy men), which were based on the belief in Djinns (forces deemed to have taken over the personality of mental patients), as well as on the impact of colonisation on these cultures. As far as treatment in Blida was concerned, the solution became obvious and a complete reorganisation of the socialtherapeutic activities followed – the opening of a café maure, the celebration of traditional festivals, regular evenings with story tellers and local music groups – all of which soon involved more and more patients. A keen footballer, Fanon also had patients build a football pitch of which he was very proud and which is still in use. In the paper written with Azoulay, these solutions are described very rapidly, while the problem had been analysed in great detail. What was essential

down during cathartic fits that lasted the whole night. And what is striking is that he was able to stay the whole night there, he was interested in the inner workings of these practices, which were a traditional means of responding to certain aspects of mental pathology. Of course, these aspects were limited to hysterical reactions; when nothing worked, as with cases of serious psychosis, people were sent to the hospital at Blida. We also often went to see the marabouts, to whom people had recourse whenever the evil eye, malevolent spirits, genies and the transmission of male impotence were concerned (since those who were impotent were supposed to have received a bad spirit from a jealous person), and these marabouts, no doubt with satisfactory success, would intervene by writing things, performing ceremonies, and managed to clear up a certain part of this pathology which would nowadays be seen to by a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst, but which at the time was a common practice and was one of the more used systems of social regulation, dominant in the cultural dimension of mental treatment. So Fanon was interested in all these aspects and threw himself into Algerian culture. And he sought to transpose that, as best as he could, into his ward for Muslim patients, and it was there that we held get-togethers animated by the nurses, who were rooted in the same culture as the patients. We also organised, I remember, the Moorish café in the ward, which naturally provoked sarcastic critiques from the other doctors. He also had storytellers come in, who continued a tradition that had some kind of purchase, storytellers who took up traditional folklore, and there was at that point a palpable shift in the atmosphere of the ward […] I don’t know if there were many discharges, but there was in any case a remarkable proof of the validity of the spirit of socialtherapy in the very fact of bringing a ward of a psychiatric hospital to life, and therefore […] I say it with the experience I have accumulated, in allowing those patients who are able to re-engage in an exchange with the world, that it should happen, that it should be made possible].

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was to show the necessity of a radical conceptual shift, of which the success would in turn undermine the prevalent ethnopsychiatric gaze.54 The psychiatric works that Fanon went on to publish, especially those on mental illness in North Africa, explore the major theoretical issues revealed by this experience and directly attack pre-war colonial psychiatry as fallacious, in that it naturalised mental disorders which now clearly appeared as determined by features of a social and cultural environment. It is true that neurological problems are often at the origin of mental illness, but what the Blida experiment showed was that psychiatric syndromes in themselves are irreducible to them. Scientist reductionism flourished in the colonies (in particular under the influence of Antoine Porot (1876–1965) and his influential ‘école d’Alger’) because it served to give a pseudoscientific foundation to racism. Speaking at the ‘Congrès des médecins aliénistes et neurologues de France et des pays de langue française’ in Nice in September 1955, Fanon and his colleague Raymond Lacaton addressed the subject of mental illness in North Africa by tackling a legal problem: in North Africa, while most ‘European’ criminals would confess once the evidence against them has been presented to them, ‘indigenous’ ones rarely did so, even when faced with irrefutable evidence – and they did not try to prove their innocence either. The reaction of the police and public opinion was to naturalise this behaviour, by saying that the North African is a liar by constitution. ‘Primitivist’ psychiatrists such as Porot explained it more subtly. For them, first, criminality is part of the ‘mentalité’ of the ‘indigènes’: La criminalité indigène a un développement, une fréquence, une brutalité et une sauvagerie qui surprennent au premier abord et qui sont conditionnées par cette impulsivité spéciale sur laquelle l’un de nous a déjà eu l’occasion d’attirer l’attention.55

54 55

See ‘Réflexions sur l’ethnopsychiatrie’, first published unsigned in André Mandouze’s anticolonialist journal Consciences maghribines 5 (1955), n.p.; repr. in EAL, 342–4, which is a satire of this gaze and its consequences. Antoine Porot et Come Arrii, ‘L’impulsivité criminelle chez l’indigène algérien. Ses facteurs’, Annales Médico-Psychologiques 5 (December 1932) [note by Porot and Sutter].

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Chapter 6 Sur 75 expertises mentales indigènes demandées à l’un de nous en ces 10 dernières années, 61 avaient trait à des meurtres ou tentatives de meurtre d’apparence injustifiée. Dans les douars, on ne pouvait se défendre contre de tels malades qu’en les chargeant de chaînes ; dans nos modernes hôpitaux psychiatriques, on a dû multiplier les chambres d’isolement qui s’avèrent encore insuffisantes à contenir le nombre surprenant d’‘agités indigènes’ que nous y devons placer. Or c’est encore le primitivisme qui nous fournit l’explication de cette tendance à l’agitation. On doit, à notre avis, considérer ces manifestations psycho-motrices désordonnées, selon l’idée de Kretschmer, comme la libération soudaine de ‘complexes archaïques’ préformés ; réaction explosives ‘de tempête’ (peur, panique, défense ou fuite) dans le cas de l’agitation. Alors que l’individu ‘évolué’ reste toujours, pour une part, sous la domination de facultés supérieurs de contrôle, de critique, de logique, qui inhibent la libération de ses facultés instinctives, le primitif, lui, réagit, au-delà d’un certain seuil, par une libération totale de ses automatismes instinctifs, on retrouve ici la loi du tout ou rien : l’Indigène, en sa folie, ne connait pas de mesure.56

As for the tendency to deny the obvious, Porot and his disciple, Jean Sutter (1911–1998) – who started his career with Porot in 1938 as head of a ward 56 [Indigenous criminality has a development, a frequency, a brutality and a savagery that are surprising at first and that are conditioned through that special impulsiveness on which one of us has already been able to draw attention. Out of the seventyfive indigenous mental assessments one of us has had to perform over the last ten years, sixty-one of them concerned seemingly unmotivated murders or attempts at murder. In the douars, the only way to shield oneself from such madmen was to burden them with chains: in our modern psychiatric hospitals, it was necessary to increase the number of solitary confinement rooms, which proved to be still insufficient to contain the surprising number of ‘agitated natives’ that we have had to place there. Well, it is again primitivism that provides us with the explanation for this tendency toward agitation. One ought, in our opinion, consider these disordered psychomotoric manifestations, in accordance with Kretschmer’s idea, as the sudden liberation of preformed ‘archaic complexes’; as explosive reactions ‘of protest’ (fear, panic, defence or flight) in the case of agitation. Whereas the ‘evolved’ individual still remains, in part, under the domination of higher faculties of control, critique, logic, which inhibit the liberation of his instinctive faculties, the primitive, as for him, reacts, beyond a certain threshold, with a total liberation of his instinctive automatisms. We rediscover here the law of all or nothing: the native, in his madness, knows no measure.] Antoine Porot and Jean Sutter, ‘Le “primitivisme” des indigènes Nord-Africains. Ses incidences en pathologie mentale’, Sud Médical et Chirurgical (15 April 1939), 11–12. Fanon’s library contains a copy of this brochure.

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in Blida-Joinville – cite a constitutional stubbornness, an inability to integrate the data of experience into a common objectivity, such as when very young children deny misdeeds they have seen their parents observe, with the caveat that children can develop. It is as if these people had remained at an earlier, ‘primitive’, phylogenetic stage: La seule résistance intellectuelle dont ils [les indigènes] soient capables se fait sous forme d’un entêtement tenace et insurmontable, d’une puissance de persévération qui défie toutes les entreprises et qui ne s’exerce en général que dans un sens déterminé par les intérêts, les instincts ou les croyances essentielles. L’indigène lésé devient vite un revendicateur tenace et obstiné. Ce fonds de réduction intellectuelle avec crédulité et entêtement rapprocherait à première vue la formule psychique de l’Indigène musulman de celle de l’enfant. [Ce puérilisme mental diffère pourtant de celui de nos enfants, en ce sens qu’on n’y trouve pas cet esprit curieux qui les pousse à des questions, à des pourquoi interminables, les incite à des rapprochements imprévus, à des comparaisons toujours intéressantes, véritable ébauche de l’esprit scientifique, dont est dénué l’Indigène.57]58

In a hitherto unpublished typescript, Fanon again wipes the slate clean of prejudices and starts from a philosophical reflection on the cultural conditions and legal history of confession, citing Sartre, Bergson, Nabert, Dostoyevsky and, importantly, Hobbes:

57 Antoine Porot, ‘Notes de Psychiatrie Musulmane’, Annales Médico-Psychologiques (May 1918) [note by Porot and Sutter]. 58 [The only intellectual resistance of which they [natives] are capable takes the form of a tenacious and insurmountable obstinacy, a power of perseveration, which defies all undertakings and which is only exercised in general in a direction determined by interests, instincts or essential beliefs. The wronged native quickly becomes a tenacious and obstinate plaintiff. This base of intellectual regression, coupled with gullibility and obstinacy, at first appears to invite comparison between the psychic composition of the native Muslim and that of the child. This mental puerilism nonetheless differs from that of our children, in that it is devoid of the curiosity that leads the latter to formulate questions, to pose interminable ‘whys’, that urges their minds to draw unforeseen connections, to make always interesting comparisons, which is the veritable beginning of the scientific mind, which the native lacks entirely.] Ibid. 4–5.

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Chapter 6 Il y a un pôle moral de l’aveu : ce que l’on nommerait sincérité. Mais il y a aussi un pôle civique et l’on sait qu’une telle position était chère à Hobbes et aux philosophes du contrat social. J’avoue en tant qu’homme et je suis sincère. J’avoue aussi en tant que citoyen et j’authentifie le contrat social. Certes une telle duplicité est noyée dans l’existence quotidienne mais dans des circonstances déterminées il faut savoir la retourner.59

A confession can make sense only within a homogeneous group which is recognised by the individual and which recognises the individual. Its role is minimal in modern judicial procedures, since it does not have the status of proof (one could confess under duress or in order to absolve the guilty). The acceptance of culpability is therefore better understood as a way of initiating a reintegration within the social group. But this implies that there is one group in the first place, an ultimate framework, and that the individual belonged to it at some point, even if in practice this framework remains unseen, precisely because of its obviousness and necessity. The published article picks up from this point: there cannot be reinsertion within a group if there was no belonging to it in the first place. Because the indigenous North Africans are part of a different group, with its own ethical-social norms, including a different code of honour, they cannot legitimise the foreign system through a confession. They may well submit fully to the judgement, but as a decision of God. Fanon crucially insisted that submitting to a power is not the same as accepting it:

59 [There is a moral pole of confession: what one might call sincerity. But there is also a civic pole, and we know that such a position was dear to Hobbes and to the philosophers of the social contract. I confess as a man and I am sincere. I confess also as a citizen and I authenticate the social contract. Certainly, such a duplicity is submerged in daily existence, but in certain circumstances, it is necessary to know how to lay it bare.] Frantz Fanon, ‘Conduites d’aveu en Afrique du Nord (2)’, EAL, 349–52 (351). This text, only signed by Fanon, may be that of his oral communication of a first draft of the paper he published later with Lacaton. Alice Cherki notes that Fanon had been passionate about forensic medicine during his studies (31n./17n.). According to his brother Joby, he practiced it during his stay in Martinique in 1952. This interest probably also contributed to Fanon’s admiration for the crime novelist Chester Himes.

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Pour le criminel, reconnaître son acte devant le juge c’est désapprouver cet acte, c’est légitimer l’irruption du public dans le privé. Le Nord-Africain, en niant, en se rétractant, ne se refuse-t-il pas à cela ? Sans doute voyons-nous ainsi concrétisée la séparation totale entre deux groupes sociaux coexistants, tragiquement, hélas ! Mais dont l’intégration de l’un par l’autre n’a pas été amorcée. Ce refus de l’inculpé musulman d’authentifier par l’aveu de son acte le contrat social qu’on lui propose signifie que sa soumission souvent profonde, que nous avons notée en face du pouvoir (judiciaire en l’occurrence), ne peut être confondue avec une acceptation de ce pouvoir.60

In the end, as the Blida experience has done, this question of forensic medicine serves to reveal that there is no shared social contract in colonial society. There appears here an irreconcilable contradiction between colonialism and the contractual understanding of the social that was one of its justifications. Again, the ideology of a mental disorder and a ‘mentality’ that would naturally be linked to a race, however spontaneous it appeared, was nothing else than a construct masking this contradiction. Under its scientific trappings, the advocated naturalisation of mental illness along racial lines was in reality an attempt to secretly make a cultural structure, imported from Europe, a natural norm.61

60 [For the criminal, to recognise his act before the judge is to disapprove of this act, it is to legitimise the irruption of the public into the private. The North African, by denying, by retracting, does he not refuse this? Without a doubt we see here thus concretised the total separation between two social groups, coexisting tragically alas! But the integration of one by the other has not been started. This refusal of the accused Muslim to authenticate the social contract offered him through the confession of his act, means that his often profound submission in the face of power (judicial in this case), which we have noted, cannot be equated with an acceptance of this power.] Frantz Fanon and Raymond Lacaton, ‘Conduites d’aveu en Afrique du Nord’, first published in Congrès des médecins aliénistes et neurologues de France et des pays de langue française (Paris: Masson, 1955), 657–60; repr. in EAL as ‘Conduites d’aveu en Afrique du Nord (1)’, 345–8 (348). 61 Fanon criticised neuropsychiatry in the same way during the Algerian War: ‘Cette forme particulière de pathologie (la contracture musculaire généralisée) avait déjà retenu l’attention avant le déclenchement de la Révolution. Mais les médecins qui la décrivaient en faisaient un stigmate congénital de l’indigène, une originalité (?) de son système nerveux où l’on affirmait retrouver la preuve d’une prédominance chez le

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The problem raised by applying socialthérapie to the Algerian men on the ward in Blida was, therefore, that ‘le biologique, le psychologique, le sociologique n’avaient été séparés que par une aberration de l’esprit’.62 In order to explore the real links between these dimensions and understand the links between individual members of a group and the social whole, Fanon went back to his books. He read, in particular, sociologists and anthropologists like Marcel Mauss, André Leroi-Gourhan63 and George Gursdorf to understand the relationship of individual members of a group to a social whole, and he adopted Mauss’s concept of fait social total.64 Among the crucial practices which define a society at the intersection of economics, law, religion, magic and art, Fanon placed its attitudes to madness. In a paper co-written with François Sanchez in 1956, the most interesting of his papers on the subject, Fanon focuses on popular attitudes to mental illness, studied by observing the therapeutic procedures of marabouts and commissioning translations of the treatises of demonology to

colonisé du système extra-pyramidal. Cette contracture en réalité est tout simplement l’accompagnement postural, l’existence dans les muscles du colonisé de sa rigidité, de sa réticence, de son refus face à l’autorité coloniale’ [This particular form of pathology (systemic muscular contraction) already caught our attention before the revolution began. But the doctors who described it turned it into a congenital stigma of the ‘native’, an original feature of his nervous system, manifest proof of a predominant extrapyramidal system in the colonised. This contraction, in fact, is quite simply a postural concurrence and evidence in the colonised’s muscles of their rigidity, their reticence and refusal in the face of the colonial authorities] Les Damnés, 658/217. 62 [the biological, the psychological, the sociological were only separated by an aberration of the mind.] Fanon and Azoulay, ‘La Socialthérapie dans un service d’hommes musulmans’, 356. 63 Fanon et Azoulay reproduce long passages from a text by Leroi-Gourhan almost verbatim, which give a sketch of the legal, cultural and demographic situation of the ‘indigenous’ population of Algeria, while subtly modifying them in order to underline the colonial nature of this situation. See A. Leroi-Gourhan and J. Poirier, Ethnologie de l’Union Française, I: ‘Afrique’ (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953), 121. Fanon attended the classes of Leroi-Gourhan in Lyon (Razanajao and Postel, ‘La Vie et l’œuvre psychiatrique de Frantz Fanon’, 148). 64 See Marcel Mauss, ‘Essai sur le don (1923–24)’, in Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), 274–5.

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which they refer. What is striking, according to Fanon and Sanchez, is that in Europe, even though madness is now conceptualised in terms of illness and not of evil, social attitudes outside as well as within the hospital are still very reliant on a moral, as opposed to a medical stance. Even trained psychiatric nurses tend to ‘punish’ the patients who cause trouble, and members of their families feel personally hurt by their attitude, therefore assigning to them some moral responsibility: L’occidental croit en général que la folie aliène l’homme, qu’on ne saurait comprendre le comportement du malade sans tenir compte de la maladie. Cependant cette croyance n’entraîne pas toujours en pratique une attitude logique, tout se passe comme si l’occidental oubliait souvent la maladie: l’aliéné lui paraît montrer quelque complaisance dans le morbide et tendre à en profiter plus ou moins pour abuser son entourage.65

The North African vision, by contrast, is very different: S’il est une certitude bien établie c’est celle que le maghrébin possède au sujet de la folie et de son déterminisme. Le malade mental est absolument aliéné, il est irresponsable de ses troubles; seuls, les génies en supportent l’entière responsabilité.66

65 [The Westerner believes that, in general, madness alienates people, that we are unable to understand the patient’s behaviour without taking the illness into account. Nevertheless, this belief does not always lead in practice to a logical attitude. Everything transpires as if the Westerner had often forgotten about the illness: to them, the alienated person appears to show some complacency in the illness and to take advantage of it in order to exploit those around him.] Frantz Fanon and François Sanchez, ‘Attitudes du musulman maghrébin devant la folie’, first published in Revue pratique de psychologie de la vie sociale et d’hygiène mentale 1 (1956), 24–7; repr. in EAL, 356–60 (356). (See also EAL, 287–93, the editorial notes written by Fanon for Notre Journal, a publication of the Blida-Joinville Hospital, in November and December 1956). 66 [If one certainty is established, it is that which the Maghrébin possesses on the topic of madness and its determinism. The mentally ill person is absolutely alienated. He is not responsible for his disorders; only the genies bear total responsibility for it.] Ibid. 357.

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If you truly believe that the mad are ill because they are ruled by external forces (the djinns), you will not adopt an intentional stance, let alone a moral one, towards the mentally ill: La mère insultée ou battue par son fils malade, ne songera jamais à l’accuser d’irrespect ou de désirs meurtriers, elle sait que son fils ne saurait en toute liberté lui vouloir du mal. Il n’est jamais question de lui attribuer des actes qui ne relèvent pas de sa volonté qui est de part en part soumise à l’emprise des génies.67

Fanon thus implies that these societies are more advanced in terms of hygiène mentale (care in the community) than European ones, but not because of some fascination with madness itself, and, as we have seen, Fanon on this point is far from the Foucault Folie et déraison [Madness and Unreason]:68 ‘Ce n’est pas la folie qui suscite respect, patience, indulgence, 67 [The mother who is insulted or beaten by her ill son would never dream of accusing him of a lack of respect or of murderous desires, for she knows that her son would not, were he in full possession of his freedom, wish her harm. It is never a question of attributing his acts to him, since his will is entirely in the grip of genies.] Ibid. 357. 68 In his texts on literature, in particular, Foucault presented the possibility of madness as a deep form of freedom: ‘J’ai l’impression, si vous voulez, que très fondamentalement, en nous, la possibilité de parler, la possibilité d’être fou sont contemporaines, et comme jumelles, qu’elles ouvrent, sous nos pas, la plus périlleuse, mais peut-être aussi la plus merveilleuse ou la plus insistante de nos libertés’ [I have the impression, if I can put it this way, that, very fundamentally, within us, the possibility of speaking, the possibility of being mad, are contemporaneous, and like twins they reveal, beneath our steps, the most perilous but also, possibly, the most marvellous or the most insistent of our freedoms] Michel Foucault, La Grande étrangère (Paris: EHESS, 2013), 52/Language, Madness, and Desire: On Literature, trans. Philippe Artières and Jean-François Bert (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 25. In his doctoral dissertation, Fanon noted the importance of language in madness, as Lacan had insisted, but finally sided with Henri Ey. In 1969, L’Évolution psychiatrique devoted its annual study days to ‘La conception idéologique de L’Histoire de la folie de Michel Foucault’. The published proceedings contain interesting texts by psychiatrists, some of whom Fanon had known. Ey violently attacked a thought which, in his mind, judged ‘que la Démence vaut la Raison, que le Rêve vaut l’Existence, que l’Erreur vaut la Vérité, que l’Aliénation vaut la Liberté … [that Insanity is equal to Reason, that the Dream is equal to Existence, that Error is equal to Truth, that Alienation is equal to Freedom …] (L’Évolution psychiatrique, 36, fascicule 2 (1971), 257).

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c’est l’homme atteint par la folie, par les génies; c’est l’homme en tant que tel’.69 Europe has to learn from these attitudes if it is to develop different systems of mental assistance, but this in no way implies, for Fanon, abandoning European psychiatry, as the statement at the end of the paper makes clear: ‘Si l’Europe a reçu des pays musulmans les premiers rudiments d’une assistance aux aliénés, elle leur a apporté en retour une compréhension rationnelle des affections mentales!’70

Beyond the institution Fanon’s experience in Blida confirmed that cultural as well as social aspects had to be considered, in order to make the institutional therapy model work. He then went further still, asking whether it was possible to dispose of the institution itself. In a 1957 paper on the question of ‘agitation’ (patients’ violence and its link to the institution), co-authored with Slimane Asselah, Fanon indicates for the first time a distance with Tosquelles, and questions the idea that the hospital could ever be the exterior milieu, adding that if it were so, then external relations of power would also be transposed into it: Ici, il ne nous semble pas inutile de rappeler que la compréhension de la nécessité d’organiser le service, de l’institutionnaliser, d’y rendre possibles des conduites sociales ne doit pas provoquer une mystification à base de référence externe. C’est ainsi que l’on peut entendre des réflexions comme : l’hôpital-village ; l’hôpital, reflet du monde extérieur ; à l’hôpital c’est comme dehors, le malade doit être comme chez lui … De telles expressions, on s’en doute, sont une tentative de masquer la réalité sous des

69 [It is not madness that arouses respect, patience, indulgence; it is the person struck down by madness, by the genies; it is the person as such.] ‘Attitudes du musulman maghrébin devant la folie’, 359. 70 [If Europe received from Muslim countries the first rudiments of a kind of assistance to the alienated, it has given them in return a rational understanding of mental afflictions!] Ibid. 360.

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Chapter 6 préoccupations humanitaires faussement psychothérapeutiques. Et Le Guillant a mille fois raison de condamner ces attitudes déréelles.71

This is why from 1957, during his final years in Tunis, in addition to his work for El Moudjahid and his political activities, Fanon spent a considerable amount of time setting up and running a psychiatric day centre attached to

71

[It does not seem useless to us here to recall that an understanding of the necessity of organising the ward, of institutionalising it, of making social behaviours possible within it, ought not elicit a mystification grounded in reference to the outside world. It is thus that one can understand reflections such as ‘the hospital-village’, ‘the hospital, a reflection of the outside world’, ‘inside the hospital is like outside, the patient should feel at home’, etc. One can be sure that such expressions are an attempt to conceal reality beneath falsely psychotherapeutic humanitarian concerns. And Le Guillant is absolutely right to condemn these unrealistic attitudes.] Frantz Fanon and Slimane Asselah, ‘Le Phénomène de l’agitation en milieu psychiatrique: considérations générales, signification psychopathologique’, first published in Maroc médical 36/380 (1957), 21–4; repr. in EAL, 369–77 (376). This paper is a response to a critique by Tosquelles of Paumelle’s denunciation of the ‘myth of agitation’. See François Tosquelles, ‘Introduction à la sémiologie de l’agitation’, L’Évolution psychiatrique 1 (1954), 75–97. In their response, Fanon and Asselah stress the importance of the Marxist psychiatrist Louis Le Guillant (one of the founders, in 1950, of the journal La Raison, with Lucien Bonnafé, Sven Follin and Henri Wallon, which defended a communist viewpoint on psychiatry). He had published in the same issue of L’Évolution psychiatrique a study entitled ‘Introduction à une psycho-pathologie sociale’ (1–52). In his editorial of 15 November 1956 in Notre Journal (EAL, 288–9), Fanon asks whether the desire to re-adapt and thus normalise the patient is linked to a désir de pénaliser, a desire to punish. He clearly expresses here his worries about the tendency toward repressive bureaucratisation on the part of social-therapeutic committees. From 1959 to 1960, Fanon gave a series of lectures entitled ‘Rencontre de la sociéte et de la psychiatrie’ [The Encounter of Society and Psychiatry] at the Tunis Institute of Advanced Studies, for a course in social psychology. The sociologist Lilia Ben Salem, who attended, notes that Fanon asks the question thus: ‘On a dit que la sociothérapie crée une société fausse. Est-ce qu’on peut domestiquer le milieu social comme le milieu naturel?’ [It has been said that sociotherapy creates a false society. Can the social milieu be domesticated like the natural milieu?] (EAL, 497). On these apparently very popular lectures, see also Michel Martini, Chroniques des années algériennes, 1946–1962 (Saint-Denis: Bouchène, 2002), 369.

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a general hospital, Hôpital Charles-Nicolle, in order to replace psychiatric hospitalisation. The last of his published psychiatric papers, published in 1959, is a long report on this experiment, covering almost two years of activity. Fanon seems to have been proud of this achievement and saw it as an advanced model of psychiatric care, suitable for development in recent or future decolonised countries and everywhere else in the world, because of its low cost and much superior psychiatric efficiency.72 The advantage of a day centre, rather than an institution of internment, is that socialtherapy could take place within the normal social environment of the patients, who would return home every evening, having undergone a suitable course of treatment during the day, including, if necessary, an initial course of shock therapy or hypnotherapy, together with a variety of psychotherapies, individually or in groups. In this paper, Fanon reiterates several times the view inherited from Ey that madness is a pathology of freedom: La maladie mentale, dans une phénoménologie qui laisserait de côté les grosses altérations de la conscience, se présente comme une véritable pathologie de la liberté. La maladie situe le malade dans un monde où sa liberté, sa volonté, ses désirs sont constamment brisés par des obsessions, des inhibitions, des contre-ordres, des angoisses. L’hospitalisation classique limite considérablement le champ d’action du malade, lui interdit toute compensation, tout déplacement, le restreint au champ clos de l’Hôpital et le condamne à exercer sa liberté dans le monde irréel des phantasmes. Il n’est donc pas étonnant que le malade ne se sente libre que dans son opposition au médecin qui le retient. […] À l’Hôpital de Jour […] l’institution en fait, n’a aucune prise sur la liberté du malade, sur son apparaître immédiat. […] Le fait pour le malade de se tenir en mains à travers l’habillement, la coupe de cheveux et surtout le secret de toute une partie de la journée passée en dehors du milieu hospitalier renforce et 72

Frantz Fanon, ‘L’Hospitalisation de jour en psychiatrie: valeur et limites’, La Tunisie médicale 37/10 (1959), 689–732; repr. in EAL, 397–429. Fanon would have been aware of ‘open-door’ psychiatric clinics from reading G. Boittelle and C. BoittelleLentulo, ‘Quelques réflexions sur le fonctionnement d’un open-door’, L’Information psychiatrique 29/1 (1953), 15–18, about an experiment in the psychiatric hospital in Cadillac; and through the study of H. Ueberschlag, ‘L’Assistance psychiatrique hospitalière en Angleterre’, L’Information psychiatrique 31/7 (1955), 332–47, and 31/9 (1955), 476–98, which has a section on Mapperley Hospital in Nottingham and its director Duncan Macmillan, a pioneer in day psychiatry.

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Chapter 6 en tout cas maintient sa personnalité à l’opposé de l’intégration dissolvante dans un Hôpital psychiatrique qui ouvre la voie aux fantasmes de morcellement corporel ou d’effritement du moi.73

Corporeal fragmentation, a crumbling of the self, a medical gaze and psychiatric institution that only reinforce instead of treating these pathologies: these are notions that Fanon had already used in Peau noire, masques blancs to describe the alienation induced by the racist gaze and the colonial institution, the ‘lived experience’ of the black man.74 In Fanon’s thought, the colonial dissolution is analogous to the neurological one in the genesis of mental illness.75 But the world was changing and the aim now was to 73

[Mental illness, in a phenomenology that would set to one side great alterations of consciousness, appears as a veritable pathology of freedom. The illness situates the ill person in a world in which their freedom, their will, their desires are constantly broken by obsessions, inhibitions, countermands, anxieties. Classic hospitalisation considerably limits the patient’s field of action, prohibits all compensation, all movement, restricts them to the closed field of the hospital and condemns them to exercise their freedom in the unreal world of fantasy. It is therefore hardly surprising that the patients only feel free in their opposition to the doctors who restrain them. […] In fact, at the day hospital […] the institution has no control over the freedom of the patient, on his immediate appearing/appearance. The fact that the patients can take things into their own hands, whether through dressing, hairstyling or, above all, the secrecy of an entire part of the day spent outside the hospital milieu, reinforces and in any case maintains their personalities, in contrast with the process of dissolutive integration that occurs in a psychiatric hospital, which opens the way to phantasms of bodily fragmentation or the crumbling of the self.] Frantz Fanon, ‘L’Hospitalisation de jour en psychiatrie: valeur et limites’, EAL, 419 and 424. 74 See Fanon, PNMB, 158, and Ch. 5, supra. 75 The heart of Peau noire, masques blancs is the alienation produced by the obsessional consciousness of the body/object induced by the encounter with the racist gaze on its surface, the skin. Fanon describes this primordial event as a dissolution, the analogue of the split soma/psyche caused by the neurological diseases he studied. Both open up a world of fantasies and delusions. The chapters of the book can be read as a description of the pathological reconstructions that follow, within the historical and sociological context of Ancien Régime colonies. They can take the form of the white mask, with all its trappings (language, seduction, etc., each reflecting some dissociation), but these reconstructions also includes its opposite, the black masks of the négritude movement, perceived in Sartre’s terms as a negative moment in a

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avoid perpetuating, in medicine, structures generating alienation. Fanon’s paper about a day centre in Tunis reads like the blueprint of a public mental health programme for a new country, but it also lays the groundwork for what was to become, under the guise of psychiatrie de secteur, an essential dimension of psychiatric care in Europe too. Fanon’s scientific and clinical work cannot be separated from all his other lives; rather, it inspires them. There is no doubt that he enjoyed the life of the revolutionary, the journalist and the ambassador. But it is clear also that his intention was to dedicate his time, once independence was acquired and decolonisation real, to the organisation, within his own expertise, of the social institutions best able to tackle ‘pathologies of freedom’.

dialectical phenomenology of the colonised mind, and later on, within the context of nascent neocolonialism, as political mystification (Œuvres, 171; EAL, 558; and infra, Ch. 7).

Chapter 7

L’Afrique de Fanon1

Dans le beau texte sur le retour et le détour qui ouvre Le Discours antillais, Édouard Glissant dit de Fanon qu’il est celui des intellectuels antillais francophones qui est passé à l’acte, c’est-à-dire qui a assumé à fond la coupure radicale. Pourtant, dans la coupure de celui qui n’a effectivement cessé de partir, en particulier pour assumer une autre cause, pour vivre sa « passion algérienne », Glissant voit non pas un abandon mais un détour, c’est à dire la préparation d’un certain retour : Ils [Césaire et Fanon] illustrent et démontrent le paysage d’un Ailleurs partagé. Il faut revenir au lieu. Le Détour n’est ruse profitable que si le Retour le féconde : non pas retour au rêve d’origine, à l’Un immobile de l’Être, mais retour au point d’intrication, dont on s’était détourné par force ; c’est là qu’il faut à la fin mettre en œuvre les composantes de la Relation, ou périr.2

Texte énigmatique, mais qui s’éclaire lorsque l’on considère d’un peu plus près ce qu’a été le rapport de Fanon à l’Afrique, qu’il ne perçut jamais comme identité ou utopie, mais comme le projet d’une unité toujours à construire, idée régulatrice plus que concept déterminé, même si, comme on le verra, l’Afrique réelle a joué un rôle essentiel dans le développement de la pensée de Fanon. * Fanon rencontre l’Afrique au Maroc, en mars 1944, puis en Algérie en juillet, avant de participer au débarquement en Méditerranée en

1 2

« L’Afrique de Fanon », in Catherine Delpech-Hellsten (éd.), Franz Fanon, Kateb Yacine, Edouard Glissant – Relation et indépendances (Paris : Hermann, 2016), 118–28. Édouard Glissant, Le Discours antillais (Paris : Gallimard, 1997), 56 sq.

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septembre. Cette rencontre fut aussi celle de la misère et de la ségrégation des hommes : Dans les camps de concentration des hommes se sont tués pour un morceau de pain. Je me souviens d’une scène horrible. C’était à Oran en 1944. Du camp où nous attendions l’embarquement, les militaires lançaient des morceaux de pain à de petits Algériens qui se les disputaient avec rage et haine.3

Jeune psychiatre, Fanon retournera en Algérie en 1953, pour prendre un poste à l’hôpital psychiatrique de Blida-Joinville. Il s’engage progressivement dès 1954 dans la guerre d’indépendance et, expulsé d’Algérie en décembre 1956, rejoint le FLN à Tunis en janvier 1957 où il continue d’exercer et d’écrire sur la psychiatrie, en parallèle à son œuvre politique et à sa collaboration à El Moudjahid, organe officiel du Front de Libération Nationale. En février 1960 il est nommé ambassadeur itinérant du Gouvernement provisoire de la République algérienne (GPRA) en Afrique, et chef de mission à Accra, au Ghana. Il y a eu de nombreuses polémiques sur le rapport de Fanon à l’Afrique, où il aura écrit les deux tiers de son œuvre. On l’a accusé d’avoir surévalué le rôle de la paysannerie dans les processus révolutionnaires. On a discuté de son influence réelle sur le tiers-mondisme, sur le panafricanisme ou sur les leaders africains qu’il a connus, tels Patrice Lumumba au Congo, Felix Moumié au Cameroun, Amilcar Cabral en Guinée Bissau ou Holden Roberto en Angola. On a mis en doute la pertinence de sa pensée concernant les évolutions qui ont suivi sa mort en décembre 1961. Les uns disent qu’en extrapolant à l’Afrique sub-saharienne son expérience du mouvement national algérien, qu’il s’acharnait à considérer révolutionnaire, il se privait de comprendre les réalités locales et minimisait le tribalisme au bénéfice d’un nationalisme qui allait se révéler désastreux. D’autres au contraire voient dans son œuvre l’analyse lucide, prémonitoire de ce qui allait se passer si les bourgeoisies locales prenaient le pouvoir seules : elles singeraient les colonisateurs, à ceci près que leur oppression se fonderait sur une fétichisation de la nation en termes ethniques ou religieux, et non sur un projet d’émancipation. Puis dans les années 80, échaudées par le 3

Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés de la terre, 671.

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devenir des indépendances, les études postcoloniales se sont en bonne partie détournées de la dimension géographique et historique de sa pensée pour y trouver une réflexion sur les contradictions de la subjectivité dans la condition postcoloniale sans plus vraiment prêter attention aux projets de « désaliénation » qui formaient son but maintes fois affirmé. Une bonne partie de ces débats résultent de lectures très partielles de l’œuvre. Les remarques suivantes visent à les compléter, notamment à partir de son œuvre psychiatrique qui constitue, me semble-t-il, le soubassement théorique de sa pensée. * Fanon, qui défendit sa thèse en 1951, exerça la psychiatrie et publia sur sa pratique continûment, et il est clair que malgré les interruptions dues à ses activités politiques et à la maladie, il avait l’intention d’y revenir après l’indépendance de l’Algérie. Paru en 1959, son dernier article à ce sujet, un bilan de ses innovations cliniques à Tunis, peut se lire comme un programme pour le service de santé mentale d’un pays neuf.4 La pensée psychiatrique de Fanon avait été formée par la lecture de philosophes tels que MerleauPonty et Sartre, et de psychiatres tels que Jaspers, Henri Ey et Lacan, c’està-dire par une pensée née de la phénoménologie, s’intéressant, bien au-delà des perturbations neurologiques, aux transformations pathologiques des structures de la conscience.5 Sa pratique clinique avait été déterminée par son internat avec François Tosquelles, à l’hôpital de Saint Alban, inventeur de la « socialthérapie » et précurseur du mouvement antipsychiatrique. Or les textes de Fanon sur l’agitation en psychiatrie publiés avec Tosquelles, puis seul ou avec ses internes, éclairent bien des textes politiques sur l’aliénation coloniale et la violence qui en résulte, dont on n’a souvent pas vu qu’ils en faisaient le diagnostic plus qu’ils ne la célébraient. Ainsi écrit-il dans le célèbre chapitre sur la violence des Damnés de la terre : Monde compartimenté, manichéiste, immobile, monde de statues : la statue du général qui a fait la conquête, la statue de l’ingénieur qui a construit le pont. Monde sûr de lui, écrasant de ses pierres les échines écorchées par le fouet. Voilà le monde

4 « L’hospitalisation de jour en psychiatrie, valeur et limites », EAL, 397 sqq. 5 Voir infra, Ch. 5 et 6.

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Chapter 7 colonial. L’indigène est un être parqué, l’apartheid n’est qu’une modalité de la compartimentation de ce monde colonial. La première chose que l’indigène apprend, c’est à rester à sa place, à ne pas dépasser les limites.6

Une telle description, et bien d’autres du même ordre dans ce livre ainsi que dans Peau noire, masques blancs, correspondent bien à celle de l’asile : La maladie mentale, dans une phénoménologie qui laisserait de côté les grosses altérations de la conscience, se présente comme une véritable pathologie de la liberté. La maladie situe le malade dans un monde où sa liberté, sa volonté, ses désirs sont constamment brisés par des obsessions, des inhibitions, des contrordres, des angoisses. L’hospitalisation classique limite considérablement le champ d’action du malade, lui interdit toute compensation, tout déplacement, le restreint au champ clos de l’hôpital et le condamne à exercer sa liberté dans le monde irréel des fantasmes. Il n’est donc pas étonnant que le malade ne se sente libre que dans son opposition au médecin qui le retient.7

Les conséquences de ces enfermements sont similaires. Ce que l’on appelle « agitation » en psychiatrie trouve son équivalent dans la violence sociale qui caractérise les sociétés coloniales : Le colonisé est pris dans les mailles serrées du colonialisme. Mais nous avons vu qu’à l’intérieur le colon n’obtient qu’une pseudo-pétrification. La tension musculaire du colonisé se libère périodiquement dans des explosions sanguinaires : luttes tribales, luttes de çofs, luttes entre individus. […] Autodestruction collective très concrète dans les luttes tribales, telle est donc l’une des voies par où se libère la tension musculaire du colonisé. Tous ces comportements sont des réflexes de mort en face du danger, des conduites-suicides qui permettent au colon, dont la vie et la domination se trouvent consolidées d’autant, de vérifier par la même occasion que ces hommes ne sont pas raisonnables.8

Plus loin dans ce chapitre, ayant analysé le monde de fantasmes religieux, de transes et de « tourmente onirique » comme autre forme compensatoire de comportement dans l’enfermement colonial, Fanon note que s’il n’y a pas d’organisation politique capable de canaliser ces décharges 6 7 8

Les Damnés, 463. « L’hospitalisation de jour », 419. Les Damnés 465 sq.

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émotionnelles vers une construction sociale, il n’y a plus que « volontarisme aveugle avec les aléas terriblement réactionnaires qu’il comporte ».9 Or en psychiatrie, cette construction est ce que Fanon développe à Blida sous le nom de « socialthérapie », création au sein de l’hôpital de structures analogues à celles du monde réel, où le patient sera constamment mis en nécessité de prendre des décisions et pourra progressivement retrouver une autonomie:  Dans le cadre de la nouvelle société mise en place, on assiste à la mutation de la vieille symptomatologie à l’état pur, désocialisée, envahie de plus en plus par la sphère motrice (stéréotypies, agitations subintrantes, catatonisation …) telle qu’on en voyait dans les asiles. Il y a au contraire, pour le malade, nécessité de verbaliser, d’expliquer, de s’expliquer, de prendre position. Il y a maintien d’un investissement dans un monde objectal ayant acquis une nouvelle densité. La socialthérapie arrache le malade à ses fantasmes et l’oblige à affronter la réalité sur un nouveau registre.10

Texte qu’il faut mettre en parallèle à la confrontation politique avec le réel : Toutefois, dans la lutte de libération, ce peuple autrefois réparti en cercles irréels, ce peuple en proie à un effroi indicible mais heureux de se perdre dans une tourmente onirique, se disloque, se réorganise et enfante dans le sang et les larmes des confrontations très réelles et très immédiates. Donner à manger aux moudjahidines, poster des sentinelles, venir en aide aux familles privées du nécessaire, se substituer au mari abattu ou emprisonné : telles sont les tâches concrètes auxquelles le peuple est convié dans la lutte de libération.11

On pourrait ainsi multiplier les citations pour montrer que si Fanon a longuement réfléchi à la violence, il l’a fait d’abord sous l’angle de la déréalisation et des fantasmes d’agitation qu’engendre un monde « compartimenté » dans une conscience désormais incapable de projets,

9 Ibid. 469. 10 « L’hospitalisation de jour », 420. 11 Les Damnés, 467.

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chosifiée, comme il le dit, d’une phrase sartrienne, dans Peau noire, masques blancs : « Sale nègre ! » ou simplement : « Tiens, un nègre ! » J’arrivais dans le monde, soucieux de faire lever un sens aux choses, mon âme pleine du désir d’être à l’origine du monde, et voici que je me découvrais objet au milieu d’autres objets.12

Une autre mécompréhension de Fanon consiste donc à penser qu’il se posait en prophète d’un dénouement historique inéluctable, dont la violence serait l’accoucheuse, n’imaginant pas que ce qu’il appelait de ses vœux pourrait tourner en tragédie ou en farce. En fait, s’il fait l’éloge de la lutte de libération nationale lorsqu’il la compare aux indépendances octroyées par le colonisateur, c’est parce qu’il y voit une garantie contre les futurs dictateurs. Il se peut d’ailleurs fort bien pour lui que cette violence soit symbolique : Au niveau des individus, la violence désintoxique. Elle débarrasse le colonisé de son complexe d’infériorité, de ses attitudes contemplatives ou désespérées. Elle le rend intrépide, le réhabilite à ses propres yeux. Même si la lutte armée a été symbolique et même s’il est démobilisé par une décolonisation rapide, le peuple a le temps de se convaincre que la libération a été l’affaire de tous et de chacun, que le leader n’a pas de mérite spécial. La violence hisse le peuple à la hauteur du leader. D’où cette espèce de réticence agressive à l’égard de la machine protocolaire que de jeunes gouvernements se dépêchent de mettre en place. Quand elles ont participé, dans la violence, à la libération nationale, les masses ne permettent à personne de se présenter en « libérateur ». Elles se montrent jalouses du résultat de leur action et se gardent de remettre à un dieu vivant leur avenir, leur destin, le sort de la patrie. Totalement irresponsables

12

PNMB, 153. Comme Marx à propos du fétichisme de la marchandise, Fanon pense toujours l’aliénation comme chosification. Au moment où il écrivait ses textes sur la violence politique, Fanon lisait Chester Himes dont la réflexion finale sur la violence semble prophétique, du point de vue de la violence contemporaine, comme on pourra le constater en lisant le dernier roman, inachevé, du cycle de Harlem, Plan B (Chester Himes, Cercueil et Fossoyeur (Le cycle de Harlem) (Paris : Gallimard, 2007)). Fanon n’a pas pu lire ce dernier roman publié après sa mort, mais il se réfère aux premiers romans du cycle à plusieurs reprises, en particulier dans ses conférences de Tunis, « Rencontres de la société et de la psychiatrie », EAL, 441.

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hier, elles entendent aujourd’hui tout comprendre et décider de tout. Illuminée par la violence, la conscience du peuple se rebelle contre toute pacification. Les démagogues, les opportunistes, les magiciens ont désormais la tâche difficile. La praxis qui les a jetées dans un corps à corps désespéré confère aux masses un goût vorace du concret. L’entreprise de mystification devient, à long terme, pratiquement impossible.13

Et dans la célèbre conférence « Les mésaventures de la conscience nationale » Fanon écrit : Après la libération nationale obtenue dans ces conditions, il n’y a pas cette indécision culturelle si pénible que l’on trouve dans certains pays nouvellement indépendants. C’est que la nation dans sa forme de venue au monde, dans ses modalités d’existence influe fondamentalement sur la culture. Une nation née de l’action concertée du peuple, qui incarne les aspirations réelles du peuple, qui modifie l’État ne peut exister que sous des formes de fécondité culturelle exceptionnelle.14

Cette insistance sur la « forme de venue au monde, dans ses modalités d’existence », sur une nation née d’une certaine action montre bien combien l’œuvre de Fanon peut se lire comme une critique de la notion d’identité, qu’il s’agisse d’ailleurs de l’identité de la personne (ici l’influence du Sartre de la Transcendance de l’Ego est essentielle) aussi bien que de l’identité d’une nation. « Nation » doit s’entendre dans sa parenté étymologique avec la naissance, comme processus inscrit dans le temps et hors de toute réification identitaire. Il le souligne lui-même au début de Peau noire, masques blancs : L’architecture du présent travail se situe dans la temporalité. Tout problème humain demande à être considéré à partir du temps. L’idéal étant que toujours le présent serve à construire l’avenir. Et cet avenir n’est pas celui du cosmos, mais bien celui de mon siècle, de mon pays, de mon existence. En aucune façon je ne dois me proposer de préparer le monde qui me suivra. J’appartiens irréductiblement à mon époque.15

13 14 15

Les Damnés, 496. Je souligne. Ibid. 621. PNMB, 67.

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Dès sa thèse de psychiatrie, Fanon ne cessait d’ailleurs d’affirmer qu’il faut injecter une dimension temporelle et circonstancielle dans toute explication, qu’une simple généalogie organogénétique ou psychogénétique des maladies mentales ne suffit pas à en expliquer les formes spécifiques. C’est en fait l’objet même de sa thèse.16 Au même moment il mettait en scène la question de la décision politique et la difficulté d’en calculer les conséquences dans l’une de ses pièces de théâtre, Les Mains parallèles.17 Dans Peau noire, masques blancs que l’on peut lire comme une phénoménologie de l’esprit de la conscience colonisée, Fanon n’en critique pas moins le modèle hégélien de la dialectique appliquée au temps historique. De fait, ses textes postérieurs sur le nationalisme ne font que souligner l’incertitude du développement historique. Ainsi, parlant de l’impréparation des élites et de leur lâcheté : La conscience nationale au lieu d’être la cristallisation coordonnée des aspirations les plus intimes de l’ensemble du peuple, au lieu d’être le produit immédiat le plus palpable de la mobilisation populaire, ne sera en tout état de cause qu’une forme sans contenu, fragile, grossière. Les failles que l’on y découvre expliquent amplement la facilité avec laquelle, dans les jeunes pays indépendants, on passe de la nation à l’ethnie, de l’État à la tribu. Ce sont ces lézardes qui rendent compte des retours en arrière, si pénibles et si préjudiciables à l’essor national, à l’unité nationale. Nous verrons que ces faiblesses et les dangers graves qu’elles renferment sont le résultat historique de l’incapacité de la bourgeoisie nationale des pays sous-développés à rationaliser la praxis populaire, c’est-à-dire à en extraire la raison.18

Le Journal de bord du Mali, tout occupé à imaginer un élan panafricain en soutien de l’Algérie, note cependant lucidement ces « failles » et ces « lézardes », soulignant comment dans les discussions avec la bourgeoisie de ce pays récemment décolonisé l’accent est placé sur la race et sur l’Islam, ce qui, note-t-il, suggère que la plus grande prudence doit être observée 16

17 18

« Altérations mentales, modifications caractérielles, troubles psychiques et déficit intellectuel dans l’hérédo-dégénération spino-cérébelleuse. À propos d’un cas de maladie de Friedreich avec délire de possession », EAL, 168–232 (v. 177 et le chapitre sur Lacan, 219 sq.). EAL, 91–133 (v. 130 sq.). PNMB, 543.

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dans les futures négociations entre l’Algérie et le Mali.19 Du point de vue de la conscience nationale ce sont des « formes sans contenu », des formes réifiées de culture qui masquent les lézardes du processus révolutionnaire lorsque les nouvelles bourgeoisies se l’approprient sans voir que le seul fondement de la souveraineté serait la praxis populaire en tant que processus historique neuf. Mais cela ne l’empêche pas Fanon de profiter des pauses de ce voyage pour lire des livres d’anthropologie et d’histoire de la région. Il n’y a donc chez Fanon aucune nécessité de la naissance du rationnel à partir du réel mais bien plutôt le besoin d’une vigilance20 permanente concernant les détournements de l’histoire, qui, bien plus que le colonialisme mourant, sont présentés dans ce texte comme le vrai danger qui menace l’Afrique, les nouvelles bourgeoisies gérant leur nouveau pouvoir comme on fait du négoce. On peut imaginer que les célèbres conférences aux cadres de l’armée des frontières sur la Critique de la raison dialectique de Sartre eurent aussi pour but d’avertir contre ces détournements. * Le fondement de ces mésinterprétations de Fanon est donc de ne pas voir qu’il pense toujours en termes de processus, transformations complexes, plutôt que d’entités déterminées : de même que telle maladie mentale ne dérive jamais directement de tel trouble neurologique, de même que la violence peut refléter une multiplicité de processus souvent contradictoires, l’histoire n’est jamais donnée. Il l’indique dans ce journal de bord, lorsqu’il écrit :

Pour la révolution africaine, Œuvres, 860–71 (867). On trouve la même prudence concernant la religion dans une lettre à Ali Shariati de 1961 (EAL, 543–4). 20 Le thème de la vigilance est présent dès le départ, point central de cette pensée de l’engagement dans le présent et de la méfiance vis-à-vis de toute institutionnalisation. Le premier éditorial du journal intérieur de l’hôpital de Saint-Alban rédigé par Fanon en 1953, « L’homme face aux choses », lui est consacré (EAL, 234 sq). Fanon y reviendra tout au long de son œuvre, qu’il s’agisse du rôle du militant ou de celui de l’infirmier (ibid. 8, 370, 414, 496). Il est significatif que lorsqu’il créera le journal intérieur de son pavillon à l’hôpital de Blida, le premier numéro sera consacré à l’idée d’un ‘journal de bord’ (ibid. 263).

19

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Chapter 7 Depuis près de trois ans, j’essaie de faire sortir la fumeuse idée d’Unité africaine des marasmes subjectivistes, voire carrément fantasmatiques de la majorité de ses supporters. L’Unité africaine est un principe à partir duquel on se propose de réaliser les États-Unis d’Afrique sans passer par la phase nationale chauvine bourgeoise avec son cortège de guerres et de deuils.21

Fanon se méfiait on le sait de Senghor (et de sa version de la négritude comme identité) ainsi que d’Houphouët-Boigny qu’il considérait comme un des nouveaux « laquais de l’impérialisme ».22 Pour réaliser cette unité, il avait un temps mis ses espoirs en Lumumba. Mais ce qui est clair est qu’il n’y avait pas pour lui d’identité africaine donnée, mais seulement le potentiel d’une unité ou, dans les termes de Glissant, de « mise en œuvre de la relation ». Au-delà des compromis et des corruptions qu’il dénonce sans cesse, c’est précisément ce qui l’intéressait dans l’Afrique : elle n’était justement pas origine, mais, toute à faire, un point de départ dans le présent. Elle représentait un lieu où l’humanité pourrait aller bien au-delà de l’Europe, comme il le dit à la fin des Damnés de la terre, un espace possible de modernité, vision sartrienne d’un monde qui serait la somme de tous les projets, plutôt qu’héritage. Il est frappant de ce point de vue qu’après avoir envisagé un premier titre géographique, Alger-Le Cap, pour cet ouvrage, Fanon ait ensuite décidé d’y substituer le refrain de l’Internationale. Cette Afrique n’est donc pas vraiment un lieu déterminé mais plutôt une idée régulatrice pour un devenir de la terre elle-même et la constitution d’une nouvelle subjectivité historique. * Cela ne veut pas dire que l’Afrique réelle n’ait pas joué de rôle dans le développement de sa pensée, en particulier psychiatrique. Fanon s’était passionné pour la pensée de Sartre (qu’il lisait avec avidité et rencontra deux fois, en particulier durant l’été 1961) et pour la vision phénoménologique de

21 22

Pour la révolution africaine, 868. « Les laquais de l’impérialisme », EAL, 537 sq. Sur la négritude comme « mystification » voir 558 : le dernier chapitre du premier plan des Damnés de la terre se serait intitulé « Négritude et civilisations négro-africaines, une mystification ».

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la psychologie développée par Merleau-Ponty, dont il est clair qu’il suivit les cours à Lyon.23 Il participa aussi aux débats intenses qui ont animé la psychiatrie française entre 1943 et le milieu des années cinquante, certainement l’une des périodes les plus intéressantes de la discipline. C’est à la lumière de ces réflexions que Fanon aborde donc la réalité Algérienne, à commencer par cette idée qu’aucune culture, pas plus qu’aucune identité ne se reçoit comme héritage car les cultures n’existent que dans un processus dynamique de création au présent. Très tôt il avait dénié toute valeur à l’origine et à toute identité qui s’y fonderait, par exemple dans la poésie de Césaire, qu’il admire par ailleurs mais dont il parodie la célébration de la négritude dan Peau noire, masques blancs : Eia ! le tam-tam baragouine le message cosmique. Seul le nègre est capable de le transmettre, d’en déchiffrer le sens, la portée. À cheval sur le monde, les talons vigoureux contre les flancs du monde, je lustre l’encolure du monde, tel le sacrificateur l’entredeux yeux de la victime. […] Sang ! Sang ! … Naissance ! Vertige du devenir ! Aux trois quarts abîmé dans l’ahurissement du jour, je me sentis rougir de sang. Les artères du monde, bouleversées, arrachées, déracinées, se sont tournées vers moi et elles m’ont fécondé. Sang ! Sang ! Tout notre sang ému par le cœur mâle du soleil. Le sacrifice avait servi de moyen terme entre la création et moi – je retrouvais non plus les origines, mais l’Origine. Toutefois, il fallait se méfier du rythme, de l’amitié Terre-Mère, ce mariage mystique, charnel, du groupe et du cosmos.24

La négritude ne peut servir de fondement à une morale, et Fanon à ce sujet, la met de façon étonnante en parallèle avec le sommet éthique des Lumières, la philosophie morale de Kant et sa tentative d’une déduction transcendantale de la loi morale : En aucune façon je ne dois m’attacher à faire revivre une civilisation nègre injustement méconnue. Je ne me fais l’homme d’aucun passé. Je ne veux pas chanter le passé aux dépens de mon présent et de mon avenir.

23 Sur ces lectures, voir ibid. 616 sq. et 625–30. 24 PNMB, 164–5.

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Chapter 7 Ce n’est pas le monde noir qui me dicte ma conduite. Ma peau noire n’est pas dépositaire de valeurs spécifiques. Depuis longtemps, le ciel étoilé qui laissait Kant pantelant nous a livré ses secrets. Et la loi morale doute d’elle-même.25

Le projet de déduire la morale de la structure même de la raison humaine a fait long feu, et comme la négritude, il n’est au fond pour Fanon qu’un de ces substantialismes anhistoriques qu’il ne cesse de dénoncer dans tous les domaines, comme le font ses deux philosophes favoris, Nietzsche et Sartre. Le regard ethnographique du colonisateur n’avait fait que réifier identité et origine à fin de domination, ce qu’il reprochera plus tard à certains partisans de la négritude de faire à nouveau. On le voit bien dans l’An V de la révolution algérienne (1959) dont la plupart des chapitres illustrent la dialectique suivante : un certain objet est mort dans la culture locale soit parce qu’il a été réifié par un regard ethnographique colonial, soit parce qu’il est perçu comme un instrument d’oppression : le voile, la radio, la structure familiale, la médecine. Durant la guerre d’indépendance, pour des raisons circonstancielles, ces objets ou structures sont appelés à revivre et deviennent parfois des instruments de résistance. Mais leur réappropriation opportuniste mène à son tour à des transformations sociales imprévues. Ainsi, le voile d’avant la colonisation n’était qu’un morceau de tissu inerte, une habitude vestimentaire. Lorsque l’armée organise des cérémonies de dévoilement public au nom de la modernité et de l’émancipation, le colonisé résiste en se réappropriant le voile. Lorsque la police commence à se méfier du voile comme manière de se cacher ou de cacher des armes, les femmes d’apparence européenne se dévoilent pour tromper la police. Alors se produit pour Fanon une transformation familiale : les frères et pères s’habituent à cette autonomie et cette transformation sociale permet qu’enfin le voile soit pour ainsi dire authentiquement abandonné. Fanon se souciait peu du voile en tant que symbole ou objet matériel. Ce qui l’intéressait était de montrer qu’un élément de culture ne peut prendre sens que lorsqu’il est approprié dans le cadre d’un projet d’action au présent. Ce pourquoi il analyse les rêves des dévoilées. Il en ira de même pour le poste de radio, approprié lorsqu’il s’agit d’écouter les nouvelles du combat, et des autres 25 Ibid. 248.

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réalités socio-culturelles examinées dans ce livre qui, bien plus que le bilan d’une période historique doit se lire comme l’analyse d’un processus vécu de désaliénation, de production d’une subjectivité à partir d’un changement historique dans l’expérience d’une réalité matérielle donnée. Nous avons noté que la plupart des textes psychiatriques de Fanon sont habités d’un anti-essentialisme épistémologique, sa thèse de doctorat en faisant dès l’abord la théorie. Il s’agit de prendre position sur l’un des débats-clefs de l’époque : comment dépasser l’opposition apparemment insoluble de l’organogenèse et de la psychogénèse des maladies mentales ? La thèse de Fanon étudie les trois grandes positions de l’époque, celle d’Henri Ey, sans doute le plus important psychiatre français de son temps, celle des psychologues de la Gestalt, et celle de Lacan. Il les compare au cas neuropsychiatrique qu’il étudiait, une dégénérescence du cervelet accompagnée de troubles mentaux tels que des délires de possession religieuse. Sa conclusion est que l’origine neurologique de la maladie n’en explique pas les formes, car la pathologie mentale n’est qu’une reconstruction de la personnalité venant en réaction au trouble neurologique, reconstruction elle-même déterminée par des facteurs multiples, en particulier sociaux et culturels. « La folie, dit-il en reprenant une formule de Ey, est une ‘pathologie de la liberté’ ».26 On se fourvoie lorsque l’on considère ses formes comme des produits nécessaires de lésions organiques déterminées. Dans un article de 1952, « Le Syndrome nord-africain », on trouve déjà la généalogie d’une attitude raciste à partir du présupposé que tout symptôme implique lésion : Devant cette douleur sans lésion, cette maladie répartie dans et sur tout le corps, cette souffrance continue, l’attitude la plus facile et à laquelle on est plus ou moins rapidement conduit, est la négation de toute morbidité. À l’extrême, le Nord-Africain est un simulateur, un menteur, un tire-au-flanc, un fainéant, un feignant, un voleur. […] Le Nord-Africain prend place dans ce syndrome asymptomatique et se situe automatiquement sur un plan d’indiscipline (cf. discipline médicale), d’inconséquence

26 Ey emprunte cette notion à Günther Anders. Fanon la reprend à plusieurs reprises (EAL, 419, 422). Sur l’origine de cette citation, voir EAL, 152, 161, 612.

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Chapter 7 (par rapport à la loi : tout symptôme suppose une lésion), d’insincérité (il dit souffrir alors que nous savons ne pas exister de raisons de souffrir).27

Or quand Fanon arrive en Algérie, il va se donner pour tâche de montrer que les théories psychiatriques qu’il y découvre, portant sur les maladies mentales des Nord-africains, se fondent elles aussi sur cette illusion substantialiste. Ce que l’organicisme ethnopsychiatrique nous présente comme spécifique de la psyché de l’« indigène » est le produit d’un environnement socio-culturel historiquement déterminé, celui du colonialisme. À Blida, où il arrive en novembre 1953, Fanon fort de sa conception organo-dynamique, non-essentialiste de la maladie mentale et de son expérience de la thérapie institutionnelle, se trouve plongé dans un environnement qu’il transforme rapidement en une situation expérimentale unique et qui allait avoir un effet décisif sur l’évolution de sa pensée.  On lui avait confié deux pavillons, l’un de femmes « européennes », l’autre d’hommes « indigènes ». Il découvre donc des patients séparés selon un critère ethnique.28 Or il s’avère que si la socialthérapie marchait à merveille avec les femmes « européennes », c’était un échec complet chez les « indigènes ». Fanon et son interne Jacques Azoulay, qui décida de consacrer sa thèse au problème, publièrent un important article sur cet échec et sur les leçons à en tirer.29 Au-delà de la singularité de l’expérience coloniale, 27 Article publié dans la revue Esprit en février 1952 et repris dans Pour la révolution africaine, 691–703. 28 La psychiatrie en Algérie avait été organisée par Antoine Porot, figure majeure de l’ethnopsychiatrie coloniale, qui justifiait ainsi cette ségrégation : « Nous ne pouvions prendre la responsabilité de laisser en commun indigènes et européens; la communauté hospitalière, acceptable et réalisée du reste dans des hôpitaux généraux, ne pouvait intervenir ici : dans des esprits troublés, les divergences de conceptions morales ou sociales, les tendances impulsives latentes peuvent à tout instant troubler le calme nécessaire, alimenter des délires, susciter ou créer des réactions dangereuses dans un milieu éminemment inflammable ». Voir A. Porot, « L’Assistance psychiatrique en Algérie et le futur Hôpital psychiatrique de Blida », L’Algérie médicale 65 (1933), 86–92 (89). 29 Frantz Fanon et Jacques Azoulay, « La Socialthérapie dans un service d’hommes musulmans : difficultés méthodologiques », L’Information psychiatrique 30/9 (1954), 349–61 ; EAL, 297–313. Cet article est une version légèrement modifiée d’une section

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ils y trouvèrent une chance unique de réfléchir plus en profondeur sur les processus de la socialthérapie elle-même. Si le ciné-club, l’association de musique ou le journal de l’hôpital (tous tenus par des patients) pouvaient avoir une fonction thérapeutique, ce n’était pas seulement grâce aux films, musiques ou textes pris en eux-mêmes, mais plutôt en ce qu’ils étaient des instruments grâce auxquels les patients pouvaient réapprendre à imposer un sens aux éléments constitutifs d’un environnement : Le cinéma ne doit pas rester une succession d’images avec un accompagnement sonore : il faut qu’il devienne le déroulement d’une vie, d’une histoire. Aussi la commission du cinéma, en choisissant les films, en les commentant dans le journal dans une chronique spéciale, donne-t-elle au fait cinématographique son véritable sens.30

Cela fonctionnait, et bientôt Fanon avait été en mesure de remiser les camisoles et autres instruments de contention, dans le pavillon européen. Or les « indigènes » demeuraient pris dans leur cycle d’indifférence, de retrait et d’agitation avec son corrélat de répression. La réponse ne pouvait évidemment pas se trouver, pour Fanon, dans quelque caractéristique raciale, mais dans le fait que les assignations de sens ne peuvent se faire que dans certains cadres de références, et que ceux-ci ne sont pas universels mais culturellement déterminés, ce qui se manifeste clairement dans une société coloniale : À la faveur de quel trouble du jugement avions-nous cru possible une sociothérapie d’inspiration occidentale dans un service d’aliénés musulmans ? Comment une analyse structurale était-elle possible si on mettait entre parenthèses les cadres géographiques, historiques, culturels et sociaux ?31

Avec ses internes (en particulier Jacques Azoulay et François Sanchez), Fanon entreprit alors d’étudier dans la culture locale la façon dont les de la thèse d’Azoulay. Je remercie la famille de Jacques Azoulay de m’en avoir aimablement communiqué copie. 30 Ibid. 299. L’usage thérapeutique du cinéma dans les hôpitaux psychiatriques a fait l’objet de quatre textes publiés par André Beley dans L’Information psychiatrique entre 1955 et 1959. 31 Ibid. 305.

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maladies mentales étaient conceptualisées.32 Ils étudièrent les exorcismes des marabouts, fondés sur la croyance en des Djinns (des forces censées prendre le contrôle des malades mentaux), mais aussi l’impact de la colonisation sur ces cultures. D’un point de vue institutionnel, à Blida, la solution devint évidente et une refonte complète des activités de socialthérapie s’ensuivit : ouverture d’un café maure, célébration de fêtes traditionnelles, soirée avec conteurs et groupes de musique locale, le tout impliquant de plus en plus de patients.  Dans l’article écrit avec Azoulay, ces solutions sont décrites très rapidement alors que le problème lui-même avait été analysé en grand détail. Ce qui comptait était de révéler la nécessité d’un bouleversement conceptuel dont le succès pratique permettait à son tour de saper le regard ethnopsychiatrique dominant, qui attribuait la différence culturelle à un « primitivisme » biologique.33 Les travaux psychiatriques ultérieurs, en particulier ceux sur la maladie mentale en Afrique du Nord, confirment théoriquement ce qu’avait révélé cette expérience et attaquent directement la psychiatrie coloniale d’avantguerre, fondamentalement viciée en ce qu’elle naturalisait des troubles mentaux qui apparaissent désormais clairement déterminés par des facteurs sociaux et culturels. En retour, cette expérience thérapeutique en Afrique vient confirmer l’irréductibilité des syndromes psychiatriques au

32

33

Voir Numa Murard, « Psychiatrie institutionnelle à Blida », Tumultes 31 (2008), 31–45, qui s’appuie sur une interview d’octobre 2007 avec Jacques Azoulay dont voici un passage : « Il [Fanon] a cherché d’abord à se renseigner sur la culture spécifique des arabes algériens et c’est là qu’on a vécu une période très pittoresque et très stimulante, lui était très actif, moi je l’étais moins que lui, mais il m’a entraîné dans des cérémonies de traitement des hystériques dans les bleds Kabyles où on enchaînait des femmes dans des crises cathartiques pendant toute la nuit, et ce qui est frappant c’est qu’il était capable de rester toute la nuit, il s’intéressait de l’intérieur à ces pratiques qui étaient la façon traditionnelle de répondre à certains aspects de la pathologie mentale ». Regard ironiquement décrit dans « Réflexions sur l’ethnopsychiatrie », Consciences Maghribines 5 (1955), n.p. (13–14) ; EAL, 342–4. Ce texte non signé a été attribué à Fanon par André Mandouze qui dirigeait cette revue anticolonialiste. Il y attaque très violemment tant l’ethnopsychiatrie de l’école d’Alger, que celle, de langue anglaise, de J. C. Carothers.

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trouble neurologique. Le réductionnisme scientiste ne pouvait se maintenir aux colonies, en particulier sous l’influence d’Antoine Porot et de son influente « école d’Alger », qu’en offrant au racisme un fondement pseudo-scientifique.  Dans une communication au congrès des médecins aliénistes et neurologues de Septembre 1955 à Nice, Fanon et son collègue de Blida, Raymond Lacaton, abordent le sujet de la maladie mentale en Afrique du Nord sous l’angle original d’un problème de médecine légale : si la plupart des criminels « européens » passent aux aveux quand on leur présente des preuves, la plupart des criminels « indigènes » nient les faits, même en présence de preuves accablantes, sans d’ailleurs tenter de prouver leur innocence. La réaction de la police et de l’opinion publique est de naturaliser ce comportement en disant que le Nord-Africain est constitutionnellement menteur. Les psychiatres « primitivistes » l’expliquaient de manière plus subtile. Pour eux tout d’abord, la criminalité est inscrite dans la « mentalité » des indigènes : La criminalité indigène a un développement, une fréquence, une brutalité et une sauvagerie qui surprennent au premier abord et qui sont conditionnées par cette impulsivité spéciale sur laquelle l’un de nous a déjà eu l’occasion d’attirer l’attention (34). Sur 75 expertises mentales indigènes demandées à l’un de nous en ces 10 dernières années, 61 avaient trait à des meurtres ou tentatives de meurtre d’apparence injustifiée. Dans les douars, on ne pouvait se défendre contre de tels malades qu’en les chargeant de chaînes ; dans nos modernes hôpitaux psychiatriques, on a dû multiplier les chambres d’isolement qui s’avèrent encore insuffisantes à contenir le nombre surprenant d’ « agités indigènes » que nous y devons placer. Or c’est encore le primitivisme qui nous fournit l’explication de cette tendance à l’agitation. On doit, à notre avis, considérer ces manifestations psycho-motrices désordonnées, selon l’idée de Kretschmer, comme la libération soudaine de « complexes archaïques » préformés ; réactions explosives « de tempête » (peur, panique, défense ou fuite) dans le cas de l’agitation. Alors que l’individu « évolué » reste toujours, pour une part, sous la domination de facultés supérieurs de contrôle, de critique, de logique, qui inhibent la libération de ses facultés instinctives, le primitif, lui, réagit, au-delà d’un certain seuil, par une libération totale de ses automatismes

34 Antoine Porot et Come Arrii, « L’impulsivité criminelle chez l’indigène algérien. Ses facteurs », Annales Médico-Psychologiques 5 (décembre 1932) [note de Porot et Sutter].

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Quant à la tendance au déni de l’évidence, elle s’explique pour Porot et Sutter par une sorte d’entêtement constitutif, une incapacité à intégrer les données de l’expérience dans une objectivité commune, comme lorsque de jeunes enfants nient leur désobéissance même lorsqu’ils ont vu leurs parents les observer (à ceci près que les enfants ont la capacité d’évoluer) : La seule résistance intellectuelle dont ils [les indigènes] soient capables se fait sous forme d’un entêtement tenace et insurmontable, d’une puissance de persévération qui défie toutes les entreprises et qui ne s’exerce en général que dans un sens déterminé par les intérêts, les instincts ou les croyances essentielles. L’indigène lésé devient vite un revendicateur tenace et obstiné. Ce fonds de réduction intellectuelle avec crédulité et entêtement rapprocherait à première vue la formule psychique de l’Indigène musulman de celle de l’enfant. [Ce puérilisme mental diffère pourtant de celui de nos enfants, en ce sens qu’on n’y trouve pas cet esprit curieux qui les pousse à des questions, à des pourquoi interminables, les incite à des rapprochements imprévus, à des comparaisons toujours intéressantes, véritable ébauche de l’esprit scientifique, dont est dénué l’Indigène.36]37

Les indigènes étaient donc fixés non pas à un stade de développement ontogénétique antérieur mais dans une profonde différence phylogénétique. Porot et Sutter concluent leur essai ainsi : Car le primitivisme n’est pas un manque de maturité, un arrêt marqué dans le développement du psychisme individuel […]; il a des assises beaucoup plus profondes et nous pensons même qu’il doit avoir son substratum dans une disposition particulière sinon de l’architectonie, du moins de la hiérarchisation « dynamique » des centre nerveux.38

35 36 37 38

Antoine Porot et Jean Sutter, « Le ‘primitivisme’ des indigènes Nord-Africains. Ses incidences en pathologie mentale », Sud Médical et Chirurgical (15 avril 1939), 11–12. Antoine Porot, « Notes de Psychiatrie Musulmane », Annales Médico-Psychologiques (mai 1918) [note de Porot et Sutter]. « Le ‘primitivisme’ des indigènes Nord-Africains », 4–5. Ibid. 18.

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Dans un tapuscrit non publié de son vivant, Fanon fait à nouveau table rase des présupposés et part d’une réflexion philosophique sur les conditions culturelles et l’histoire légale de l’aveu, citant Sartre, Bergson, Nabert, Dostoïevski, et surtout Hobbes : Il y a un pôle moral de l’aveu : ce que l’on nommerait sincérité. Mais il y a aussi un pôle civique et l’on sait qu’une telle position était chère à Hobbes et aux philosophes du contrat social. J’avoue en tant qu’homme et je suis sincère. J’avoue aussi en tant que citoyen et j’authentifie le contrat social. Certes une telle duplicité est noyée dans l’existence quotidienne mais dans des circonstances déterminées il faut savoir la retourner.39

L’aveu n’a donc de sens que dans un groupe reconnu par l’individu et qui reconnaît l’individu. Hormis les juridictions totalitaires, son rôle est minimal dans les procédures judiciaires modernes puisqu’il n’a pas le statut de preuve (on peut s’accuser sous contrainte ou bien pour disculper le coupable). La reconnaissance de la culpabilité doit donc se comprendre plutôt comme un moyen d’amorcer la réintégration dans le groupe social. Or cela implique qu’il y ait un groupe homogène, cadre ultime, et que l’individu y a eu sa place à un moment donné, même si en pratique ce cadre passe inaperçu en raison précisément de son évidence et de sa nécessité. Le texte publié de cette intervention commence à ce point de la réflexion : il ne peut y avoir réinsertion dans un groupe si l’individu n’y avait pas sa place initialement. De par leur appartenance à un groupe distinct, avec ses propres normes éthiques et sociales (parmi lesquelles un code de l’honneur différent) les « indigènes » nord-Africains ne peuvent légitimer par leur aveu un système qui leur est étranger.40 Ils peuvent très bien se soumettre

39 Frantz Fanon, « Conduites d’aveu en Afrique du Nord (2) », EAL, 349–52 (351). 40 Dans la section sur « Le vécu antillais » du Discours antillais, Édouard Glissant a exploré en détail ce décalage entre structuration du groupe et valeurs importées. Voir en particulier le Chapitre 20, qui reprend les discussions du groupe martiniquais d’études initialement rapportées dans la revue Acoma qu’il publie entre 1971 et 1973 (Acoma, 1 (janvier–mars 1971). La série complète de cette revue a été republiée aux Presses universitaires de Perpignan en 2005).

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au jugement, mais en n’y voyant que décision de Dieu. Fanon n’a de cesse de le souligner, se soumettre à un pouvoir ne revient pas à l’accepter : Pour le criminel, reconnaître son acte devant le juge c’est désapprouver cet acte, c’est légitimer l’irruption du public dans le privé. Le Nord-Africain, en niant, en se rétractant, ne se refuse-t-il pas à cela ? Sans doute voyons-nous ainsi concrétisée la séparation totale entre deux groupes sociaux coexistant, tragiquement, hélas ! Mais dont l’intégration de l’un par l’autre n’a pas été amorcée. Ce refus de l’inculpé musulman d’authentifier par l’aveu de son acte le contrat social qu’on lui propose signifie que sa soumission souvent profonde, que nous avons notée en face du pouvoir (judiciaire en l’occurrence), ne peut être confondue avec une acceptation de ce pouvoir.41

L’intérêt de ce problème de médecine légale est donc de révéler que dans la société coloniale il n’y a pas de contrat social partagé, pas d’adhésion de l’individu à un tout social et juridique. Ici se révèle une contradiction irréductible entre une compréhension contractuelle du social et le colonialisme, en eût-il d’ailleurs agité l’étendard comme l’une de ses justifications. Encore une fois l’idéologie d’une pathologie mentale et d’un caractère naturellement liés à une race, toute spontanée qu’elle parût, n’était qu’un dispositif destiné à masquer cette contradiction. Sous ses oripeaux scientifiques, la naturalisation de la maladie mentale sur une base raciale revenait secrètement à faire d’une certaine structure culturelle importée d’Europe une norme naturelle.42 Au-delà de cette critique théorique, Fanon s’est d’ailleurs aussi intéressé à tout l’appareil pratique de l’institution psychiatrique perpétuant, consciemment ou non, ces stéréotypes. Ainsi ses

41 Frantz Fanon et Raymond Lacaton, « Conduites d’aveu en Afrique du Nord », Congrès des médecins aliénistes et neurologues de France et des pays de langue française (Masson, Paris, 1955) ; « Conduites d’aveu en Afrique du Nord (1) », 345–8 (348). 42 Fanon attaqua la neurologie de même façon durant la guerre d’Algérie : « Cette forme particulière de pathologie (la contracture musculaire généralisée) avait déjà retenu l’attention avant le déclenchement de la Révolution. Mais les médecins qui la décrivaient en faisaient un stigmate congénital de l’indigène, une originalité (?) de son système nerveux où l’on affirmait retrouver la preuve d’une prédominance chez le colonisé du système extra-pyramidal. Cette contracture en réalité est tout simplement l’accompagnement postural, l’existence dans les muscles du colonisé de sa rigidité, de sa réticence, de son refus face à l’autorité coloniale » (Les Damnés, 658).

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textes sur les tests d’évaluation de la personnalité couramment utilisés alors, qui montrent combien de présupposés culturels habitent la conception même des images utilisées et rendent impossibles leur utilisation dans un milieu culturellement différent.43 Charles Geronimi, qui fut son interne à Blida, rapporte ainsi ses souvenirs des travaux avec Fanon sur le Test d’apperception thématique : D’autres travaux seront entrepris : élaboration d’un test de projection, le TAT (Thematic aperception test, test dans lequel le sujet est prié de raconter une histoire à partir d’une image qu’on lui présente), adapté à la société algérienne, une étude préliminaire ayant démontré que les planches classiques étaient inopérantes en milieu algérien. Des photos avaient été faites dans cette perspective, mais la réalisation du test, son échantillonnage, etc., remis une fois encore après l’indépendance. Nous pouvons cependant affirmer que Fanon était très attaché à cette réalisation.44

* Fanon et Azoulay avaient noté que les difficultés d’application de la socialthérapie aux hommes algériens dans le service de Blida venaient du fait que « le biologique, le psychologique, le sociologique n’avaient été séparés que par une aberration de l’esprit ».45 Afin d’explorer les rapports réels de ces dimensions et de comprendre les liens unissant les membres individuels d’un groupe à un tout social, Fanon reprit ses livres, en particulier de sociologues et d’anthropologues tels André Leroi-Gourhan,46 George Gursdorf

43 Voir Frantz Fanon et Charles Geronimi, « Le TAT chez les femmes musulmanes, sociologie de la perception et de l’imagination », EAL, 361–5. 44 Charles Geronimi, Fanon à Blida, manuscrit non publié, aimablement communiqué par l’auteur. 45 Fanon et Azoulay, « La socialthérapie dans un service d’hommes musulmans », EAL, 306. 46 Fanon et Azoulay reprennent presque verbatim de longs passages d’un texte de Leroi-Gourhan dressant un tableau de la situation démographique, culturelle et légale des « indigènes » d’Algérie, mais les modifient subtilement pour souligner la nature coloniale de cette situation. Voir A. Leroi-Gourhan et J. Poirier, « Ethnologie de l’Union Française », vol. I, « Afrique » (Paris : Presses universitaires de France, 1953), 121 sq.

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et Marcel Mauss, dont il adopte le concept de fait social total.47 Parmi les pratiques cruciales qui définissent une société, à l’intersection entre l’économie, la loi, la religion, la magie, et l’art, Fanon place le rapport d’une société à la folie. Nous avons plusieurs manuscrits intéressants dans ce domaine, mais le texte le plus frappant est un article co-écrit avec François Sanchez en 1956 sur les « Attitudes du musulman maghrébin devant la folie ». Plutôt que de revenir à la grande tradition d’écrits médiévaux arabes sur la folie comme maladie mentale, Fanon et Sanchez se concentrent sur les réactions populaires face aux malades. Ils les étudient en observant les procédures thérapeutiques des marabouts et en se faisant traduire les traités de démonologie sur lesquels ces pratiques se fondent. Ce qui est frappant, selon eux, c’est que bien qu’en Europe la folie soit désormais pensée comme maladie et non comme perversion, les réactions tant à l’extérieur qu’à l’intérieur de l’hôpital restent fondées sur un schéma mental moral plutôt que médical. Les infirmiers psychiatriques tendent à « punir » des patients qui posent problème, et les membres de leur famille se sentent personnellement blessés par leur attitude : L’Occidental croit en général que la folie aliène l’homme, qu’on ne saurait comprendre le comportement du malade sans tenir compte de la maladie. Cependant cette croyance n’entraîne pas toujours en pratique une attitude logique, tout se passe comme si l’occidental oubliait souvent la maladie : l’aliéné lui paraît montrer quelque complaisance dans le morbide et tendre à en profiter plus ou moins pour abuser son entourage.48

La perspective nord-africaine sur la folie est différente : S’il est une certitude bien établie c’est celle que le maghrébin possède au sujet de la folie et de son déterminisme. Le malade mental est absolument aliéné, il est irresponsable de ses troubles : seuls les génies en supportent l’entière responsabilité.49

47 Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don (1923–1924), dans Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris : Presses universitaires de France, 1950), 274–5. 48 Frantz Fanon et François Sanchez, « Attitudes du musulman maghrébin devant la folie », Revue pratique de psychologie de la vie sociale et d’hygiène mentale 1 (1956), 24–7 ; EAL, 356–60 (356). 49 Ibid. 357.

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Si l’on pense réellement que le fou est malade parce qu’il est contrôlé par des forces extérieures (les djnoun ou génies) on ne peut assigner d’intentionnalité, a fortiori de moralité aux comportements des patients : La mère insultée ou battue par son fils malade, ne songera jamais à l’accuser d’irrespect ou de désirs meurtriers, elle sait que son fils ne saurait en toute liberté lui vouloir du mal. Il n’est jamais question de lui attribuer des actes qui ne relèvent pas de sa volonté qui est de part en part soumise à l’emprise des génies.50

Fanon considère donc que ces sociétés sont plus avancées en termes d’« hygiène mentale », c’est-à-dire en soins dispensés localement, par rapport aux sociétés européennes, mais pas en raison de quelque fascination pour les puissances de la maladie elle-même (et en cela Fanon est loin du Foucault de Folie et déraison) : « Ce n’est pas la folie qui suscite respect, patience, indulgence, c’est l’homme atteint par la folie, par les génies; c’est l’homme en tant que tel ».51 L’Europe doit donc tirer des leçons de ces attitudes si elle veut développer de meilleurs systèmes d’assistance pour les patients, mais cela ne signifie pas, selon Fanon, que l’on doive abandonner une perspective scientifique en psychiatrie. L’article se termine par un encadré contenant la proclamation suivante : « Si l’Europe a reçu des pays musulmans les premiers rudiments d’une assistance aux aliénés, elle leur a apporté en retour une compréhension rationnelle des affections mentales! ».52 * On pourrait citer bien d’autres textes où l’expérience africaine de Fanon a déterminé sa pensée psychiatrique, laquelle à son tour a nourri sa réflexion sur l’aliénation coloniale. Mais il est clair qu’il ne s’intéressait pas plus à l’idée d’une essence spécifiquement africaine qu’il n’acceptait l’idée d’une pathologie qui serait déterminée par cette essence. Il est d’ailleurs frappant qu’il ait été peu intéressé par le physique du lieu lui-même. Dans le Journal

50 Ibid. 357. 51 Ibid. 359. 52 Ibid. 360.

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de bord du Mali, alors que les descriptions des visages et des corps sont remarquables, voici à peu près tout ce qu’écrit Fanon du paysage : Et nous voilà partis sur près de 1 000 km de piste. Cette partie du Sahara n’est point monotone. Même le ciel là-haut change constamment. Il y a quelques jours nous avons assisté à un coucher de soleil qui faisait violette la robe du ciel. Aujourd’hui c’est un rouge très dur qui limite le regard. Aguel’hoc, Tessalit, Bouressa.53

C’est un texte remarquablement sec pour Fanon, peut-être par défiance de cette métaphysique de la nature et de l’identité qu’il pastichait chez Césaire. Mais surtout, il s’intéressait à toute autre chose : Après avoir porté l’Algérie aux quatre coins d’Afrique, remonter avec toute l’Afrique vers l’Algérie africaine, vers le nord, vers Alger, ville continentale. Ce que je voudrais : de grandes lignes, de grands canaux de navigation à travers le désert. Abrutir le désert, le nier, rassembler l’Afrique, créer le continent.54

Et, dans une conférence prononcée au Congrès Panafricain d’Accra en décembre 1958 : Chaque africain doit se savoir engagé dans la lutte du continent et très concrètement doit pouvoir répondre physiquement à l’appel de tel et tel territoire.55

Loin des pensées de la négritude, l’Afrique fut donc pour Fanon d’une part l’occasion concrète de comprendre bien mieux ce qui l’intéressait depuis toujours, les mécanismes psychologiques de l’aliénation, et d’autre part, comme le disait Glissant, l’espace d’un « ailleurs partagé », projet où les possibilités humaines se réaliseraient mieux que dans le vieux monde engoncé dans ses identités.

53 Pour la révolution, 867. 54 Ibid. 862. 55 Ibid. 522. ‘Afrique’ est donc devenu pour Fanon, à ce moment, le nom du processus révolutionnaire.

Part III

Philosophy: Chance, Event and Consciousness

Chapter 8

The Idea of an Impersonal Consciousness: Deleuze and Sartre

Thought as event Talking about the philosophers whom he admires, Deleuze often uses the image of a breath or gust of air (un courant d’air). Thus ‘c’est sur Spinoza’, he writes, ‘que j’ai travaillé le plus sérieusement d’après les normes de l’histoire de la philosophie, mais c’est lui qui m’a fait le plus l’effet d’un courant d’air […]’.1 The image recurs frequently in connection with Spinoza and Foucault,2 as well as with Sartre, of whom Deleuze says: À la libération, on restait bizarrement coincé dans l’histoire de la philosophie. […] Sartre, c’était notre Dehors, c’était vraiment le courant d’air d’arrière-cour […]. Parmi

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[it was on Spinoza that I have worked the most seriously by the norms of the history of philosophy, but he more than any other gave me the feeling of a gust of air […]] Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), 22/Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 15. Or, again, ‘Beaucoup de commentateurs aimaient suffisamment Spinoza pour invoquer un Vent quand ils parlaient de lui. Et, en effet, il n’y a pas d’autre comparaison que le vent’ [Many commentators have loved Spinoza sufficiently to invoke a Wind when speaking of him. Indeed, no other comparison is adequate] Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Philosophie pratique (1st edn, Paris: Minuit, 1970; rev. edn, 1981), 175/Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1988), 130 On Foucault: ‘La logique d’une pensée est comme un vent qui nous pousse dans le dos, une série de rafales et de secousses’. [A thought’s logic is like a wind blowing on us, a series of gusts and jolts.] Gilles Deleuze, Pourparlers (Paris: Minuit, 1990), 129/ Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 94.

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Chapter 8 toutes les probabilités de la Sorbonne, c’était lui la combinaison unique qui nous donnait la force de supporter la nouvelle remise en ordre. Et Sartre n’a jamais cessé d’être ça, non pas un modèle, une méthode ou un exemple, mais un peu d’air pur, un courant d’air […]3

When Deleuze started to write, in the years immediately after World War II, the French intellectual terrain was divided into two camps: on one side, the human sciences presented themselves as a type of knowledge which would make philosophy redundant; on the other, a highly scholarly but purely historical discourse on philosophy relegated it to the museum. Both thus equally supposed the death of philosophy as creative thought. More generally, hopes for a true intellectual renaissance in the wake of the Liberation had been crushed. Apart from important but marginal thinkers such as Sartre,4 of course, but also Jean Wahl and later figures such as Gilbert

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[At the Liberation, we were still strangely stuck in the history of philosophy. […] Sartre was our Outside, he was really the breath of fresh air from the backyard […]. Among all the probabilities of the Sorbonne, he was the unique combination able to give us the strength to tolerate the new restoration of order. And Sartre has never stopped being that, not a model, a method or an example, but a little fresh air, a gust of air […]] Dialogues, 18–19/12. Following Sartre’s refusal to accept the Nobel Prize, the review Arts published a tribute by Deleuze, under the title ‘Il a été mon maître’ [He Was My Master] (Arts, October/November 1964). It contains an interesting comparison between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, in which one can see the beginnings of the theme of an a-personal individuation in relation to that of the fold: ‘Sartre assimilait volontiers l’existence de l’homme au non-être d’un “trou” dans le monde: petits lacs de néant, disait-il. Mais Merleau-Ponty tenait pour des plis, de simples plis et plissements’ [Sartre was inclined to identify man’s existence with non-being, a ‘hole’ in the world: little lakes of nothingness, he would say. But Merleau-Ponty preferred the idea of folds, simple folds and enfoldings]. Later on, in his book on Leibniz, Deleuze reversed this evaluation (Le Pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (Paris: Minuit, 1988), 36/The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London: Athlone Press, 1993), 146, n. 28). Not only the Sartre of La Transcendance de l’Ego [The Transcendance of the Ego] and L’Être et le néant [Being and Nothingness], works which defined consciousness as distance and negativity, and adherence to the given as bad faith, but also the founder of Les Temps Modernes (with Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty), a journal and an intellectual movement which radically opposed the establishment and particularly colonialism.

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Simondon or Raymond Ruyer, nothing new seemed possible within the dominant philosophical production. Such an atmosphere was particularly stale for a philosopher such as Deleuze, who would later say that he had always (even naïvely) opposed the idea of the end of philosophy as a creative activity, judging creative thought to be, on the contrary, more urgent than ever.5 It is certainly in this capacity that his philosophy has met with the exceptional audience that it enjoyed very early on. In the conformist ambiance of the late 1960s, it too had the effect of a breath of fresh air. But there is also something deeply Deleuzian in the application of this image of a gust of air to a philosophy. Like an ocean current, a breath of air is not, properly speaking, a body, but rather a complex series of local events, affecting different masses of air and producing effects on certain bodies, such as a door or a face. In ‘breath of air’ we should hear a kind of impersonal verb: ‘it breathes’, rather than a substantive. We could compare it to a nerve impulse in the brain, often imagined as a unified, complete pathway, starting out from a localisable centre of decision or intention and then passing along to a centre controlling movements and thus actions. But what happens is in fact a discrete sequence of local events, synapse activations, which should be represented in three dimensions and with feedback loops, since the thickness and the folds in the brain are essential (without it being possible to postulate a hidden orchestra conductor coordinating all this activity, since the same question would arise in connection with what would have to be called its brain). Even though ‘it’ usually follows likely directions or ‘paths’, which have been determined by evolution and development, the impulse is not a line, nor even a route on a map, but a series of events of a geological kind, rather like a seismic tremor.6 Thus, one 5

6

‘Je n’ai jamais eu de souci concernant un dépassement de la métaphysique ou une mort de la philosophie. La philosophie a une fonction parfaitement actuelle, créer des concepts’ [I have never been worried about going beyond metaphysics or any death of philosophy. The function of philosophy, still thoroughly relevant, is to create concepts] Pourparlers, 186/136. On the brain, see Mille Plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1980), 24/A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988), 15–16; Pourparlers, 204/149; Qu’est-ce que la Philosophie? (Paris: Minuit, 1991), 196/What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 208.

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must understand this imperative of a creativity in philosophical thought as a similar play or event within the order of received thoughts, opinions and established systems. This image of the breath of air used to characterise philosophy takes us straight to the concept of the event, discussed in particular in Logique du sens [Logic of Sense], where Deleuze examines the idea of the ‘incorporeal’ as the true object of knowledge, which led the Stoics to base their physics on a logic of events rather than of things and predicates, and on a grammar of verbs rather than nominal attributes, thus opposing the substantialism of the Platonists: Ce que nous voulons dire par ‘grandir’, ‘diminuer’, ‘rougir’, ‘verdoyer’, ‘trancher’, ‘être tranché’, etc., est d’une tout autre sorte : non plus du tout des états de choses ou des mélanges au fond des corps, mais des événements incorporels à la surface, qui résultent de ces mélanges. L’arbre verdoie […]7

Thus, in itself this idea is not new and since the time of Galileo and then Newton, the general view has been that scientific knowledge of physical reality is a knowledge of laws linking incorporeals, that is, events. But what Deleuze insists on in all his books is that thought itself should also be thought of as an event. This is paradoxical, since this imperative of reflection implies that reflection (which is thought and therefore event) cannot be the object of an imperative, a classical problem in the philosophy of mind: Les vraies Entités sont des événements, non pas des concepts. Penser en termes d’événement, ce n’est pas facile. D’autant moins facile que la pensée elle-même devient

7

[What we mean by ‘to grow’, ‘to diminish’, ‘to become red’, ‘to become green’, ‘to cut’, and ‘to be cut’, etc., is something entirely different. These are no longer states of affairs – mixtures deep inside bodies – but incorporeal events at the surface, which are the results of those mixtures. The tree ‘greens’ […]] Gilles Deleuze, Logique du sens (Paris: Minuit, 1969), 15/The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (London: Athlone Press, 1990), 6. The main references here are Emile Bréhier, La Théorie des Incorporels dans l’Ancien Stoïcisme (Paris: Vrin, 1928), and Victor Goldschmidt, Le Système Stoïcien et l’Idée de Temps (Paris: Vrin, 1953). In his analysis of the concept of an event, Deleuze presents an important analysis of the paradoxes on which Lewis Carroll based Alice.

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alors un événement. Il n’y a guère que les stoïciens et les Anglais pour avoir pensé ainsi.8

This perspective requires a different way or style of thinking or being. These ‘English’ are the great British empiricists, especially Hume, who advocated a Newtonian study of the human mind and whose philosophy was the subject of Deleuze’s remarkable study of 1953, Empirisme et subjectivité [Empiricism and Subjectivity], which ends with the claim that ‘la philosophie doit se constituer comme la théorie de ce que nous faisons, non pas comme la théorie de ce qui est’.9 Whitehead too, whom Deleuze compares to Leibniz in his discussion of the relation between event, individuation and creation,10 whilst also noting novelists who, like Thomas Hardy, characterise the individual as a flow of events and not as a person: ‘[…] la chance unique que telle ou telle combinaison ait été tirée. Individuation sans sujet’.11

8

[The true Entities are events, not concepts. It is difficult to think in terms of the event. All the harder since thought itself becomes an event. Scarcely anyone other than the Stoics and the English have thought in this way.] Dialogues, 81/66. 9 [Philosophy must constitute itself as the theory of what we are doing, not as a theory of what there is.] Empirisme et subjectivité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953), 152/Empiricism and Subjectivity, trans. Constantin V. Boundas (New York and Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1991), 133. Within a philosophical context dominated by Hegelian or Heideggerian approaches, Deleuze’s interest in an empiricist philosopher was an act of resistance. 10 See Le Pli, Ch. 6: ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un événement?’ [What is an event?]. 11 [[…] the unique chance that this or that combination has been drawn. Individuation without subject.] He goes on to write: ‘[…] les Anglais sont précisément ces nomades qui traitent le plan d’immanence comme un sol meuble et mouvant, un champ d’expérience radical, un monde en archipel où ils se contentent de planter leurs tentes, d’île en île et sur mer. […] Ils se font de l’habitude une conception extraordinaire: on prend des habitudes en contemplant, et en contractant ce qu’on contemple. L’habitude est créatrice. […] Nous sommes tous des contemplations, donc des habitudes. Je est une habitude’ [[…] the English are precisely those nomads who treat the plane of immanence as a movable and moving ground, a radical field of experience, an archipelagian world where they are happy to pitch their tents from island to island and over the sea. […] They develop an extraordinary conception of habit: habits are taken on by contemplating and by contracting that which is contemplated. Habit is

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The notion of event leads to a second notion, equally essential to this philosophy: that of individuation. In a celebrated paper on musical time delivered in 1978 at IRCAM, the avant-garde centre for musical research in Paris, Deleuze remarked, in connection with the individuation of a musical phrase in time, that there are individuations which are not necessarily those of a form (something) or of a subject (someone): ‘l’individuation d’un paysage, ou bien d’une journée, ou bien d’une heure de la journée ou bien d’un événement. Midi-Minuit, Minuit l’heure du crime, quel terrible cinq heures du soir, le vent, la mer, les énergies, sont des individuations de ce type’.12 And, speaking of his collaboration with Félix Guattari: ‘Nous ne sommes pas du tout sûrs d’être des personnes : un courant d’air, un vent, une journée, une heure de la journée, un ruisseau, un lieu, une bataille, une maladie ont une individualité non personnelle. Ils ont des noms propres. Nous les appelons “hecceités”’.13 Anyone wishing to study Deleuze’s thought in a Deleuzian way must then consider it as a series of philosophical events, much more than as a doctrine to be extracted, unfolded and commented on, and must refuse to treat the philosopher as a personality, a sage or a guru, the guardian of a profound meaning. When he speaks of thought as a series of events, and not as the act of a unifying subjectivity, what Deleuze is criticising is the very idea of a content, of an interiority of thought relative to the text or the utterance supposed to express it. He replaces this contrast of interior and exterior with the idea of a machinery, an arrangement of utterances, or, in the case of a philosophy, an ‘assemblage’ [agencement] of relations that

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creative. […] We are all contemplations, and therefore habits. I is a habit] Qu’est-ce que la Philosophie?, 101/105. [the individuation of a landscape, or of a day, or of an hour in the day, or else of an event. Midday-Midnight, Midnight the hour of crime, what a terrible five o’clock in the evening, the wind, the sea, energies, are individuations of this type.] accessed August 2016. [We are not at all sure we are persons: a breath of air, a wind, a day, a time of day, a stream, a place, a battle, an illness all have a nonpersonal individuality. They have proper names. We call them ‘haecceities’.] Pourparlers, 193/141.

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the text maintains not only with other texts, but also with other realities.14 So there is no question of representing the thought of a philosopher who had so many doubts about the very idea of representation and the correlative distinction between the interiority of the subject and the exteriority of the object, a problem made twice as difficult when this object itself is a thought. Does that mean that the myth of the wise man, of thought as the absolute master of itself, must been replaced by that of the madman, and that this work must be regarded simply, say, as the symptom of its troubled time? It is true that paradoxes and nonsense, impossibilities of thinking deriving from the nature of language, play a central role here, as they did in the writings of the Stoics, of Nietzsche, Lewis Carroll, Artaud or Beckett. But when studying the totality of Deleuze’s work, which spans fifty years, one is struck by its real, if original, coherence: its concepts do not so much develop in breadth or depth, as duplicate and multiply, forever reappearing in new guises, defining a whole variety of domains.15 From the first book to the last, whether the subject is animal behaviour, literature, cinema, psychoanalysis or politics, similar questions are dealt with, but in each case the sense of each concept is changed by its new context, its ‘arrangement’, in short by its connections within a new network of thought 14 In this respect he is very close to the Foucault of L’Archéologie du savoir [The Archaeology of Knowledge] and L’Ordre du discours [The Order of Discourse], whom he celebrated as ‘a new archivist’. The archivist, like the archaeologist, works above all on the materiality of the trace, its insertion in a system of material traces, before endeavouring to find a meaning or an origin. 15 One could say of Deleuze what Proust says of Wagner, namely that his work is made of agrégations [aggregations] and ajoutages [additions]. Boulez says that ‘Proust a admirablement compris la façon de procéder de Wagner: une façon qui ne retourne jamais en arrière, mais qui utilise toujours les mêmes motifs, les mêmes ressources de base pour arriver à un développement continu extrêmement serré et extrêmement libre à la fois’ [Proust completely understood how Wagner worked, never going back on himself but always using the same motifs, the same basic resources, in order to achieve a continuous development that is both extremely concise and extremely free] quoted by Jean-Jacques Nattiez in Proust musicien (2nd edn, Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1999), 44/Proust as Musician, trans. Derrick Puffett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 111, n. 2. Deleuze shares this method, and Proust’s ‘additions’ have their equivalent in his ‘assemblages’.

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which it thereby reorganises. In this sense, the concepts are immanent to the work in question. This can be seen in the case of the notion of immanence itself, which figures not only in the context of reflections on metaphysics, but also in most of the texts that Deleuze devotes to the notion of a work or œuvre, in particular when dealing with the ideas of author and topic. For instance in the preface to Mille plateaux: Un livre n’a pas d’objet ni de sujet, il est fait de matières diversement formées, de dates et de vitesses très différentes. Dès qu’on attribue le livre à un sujet, on néglige ce travail des matières, et l’extériorité de leurs relations. On fabrique un bon Dieu pour des mouvements géologiques. Dans un livre comme dans toute chose, il y a des lignes d’articulation ou de segmentarité, des strates, des territorialités ; mais aussi des lignes de fuite, des mouvements de déterritorialisation et de déstratification.16

The notion of an author results from a desire for transcendence. The point of exploring the geological metaphors at the core of the notions of immanence and transcendence is to eliminate the idea that relations, of whatever type, can take place between an exterior and an interior. What seemed interior or hidden is simply a matter of plateaus, of strata, of folds and recesses: there is no absolute interior and the idea of an author, taken in the sense of a singular intention or thought, behind the complexity of a text, is unnecessary. Now, if there is no content of a book which a commentator could in turn extract, comment on and interpret, studying a philosophy cannot mean summarising it or reconstructing it into a system that would at last be coherent (why would it never be coherent in the first place, if coherence

16

[A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds. To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations. It is to fabricate a beneficent God to explain geological movements. In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialisation and destratification.] Mille Plateaux, 9–10/3. See also, in Logique du sens, the important series ‘Des singularités’ [Of Singularities], especially 126/104.

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was the only purpose?)17 Studying a philosophy must, rather, follow the way its main concepts transform, depending on the contexts in which they intervene. Deleuze once wrote that the aim of each of his monographs on philosophers was to correct a mistake, to restore what had been forgotten and to construct at least one concept.18 In the case of Deleuze, the concepts one ideally ought to consider are numerous. They all define, in a sense, what Maurice Blanchot called la pensée du dehors: a thought that attempts to reformulate the problems that we usually end up solving by means of a transcendence – whether in psychology, ethics, politics, history or aesthetics – without recourse to an interiority, a beyond, a totality, an end or a meaning. In other words, the fundamental concept we want to construct here is that of immanence. Deleuze may have failed in this endeavour, and it would be important to analyse some of the criticism that has been addressed to such an attempt, in particular by philosophers wary of its Nietzscheism. But one must first understand it, and this requires clarifying some essential notions and references, and providing the background knowledge required for their understanding.

An impersonal consciousness Authentic thought is immanent to the text (or the work) that puts it into action, and thus can only be found in the working of the text itself, the composition of its material, which can come from very different origins.19 17 18 19

See Gilles Deleuze, ‘Spinoza et la méthode générale de M. Guéroult’, in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 74/4 (October–December 1969), 426–37. In an important letter to Arnaud Villani of 29 December 1986, quoted in Arnaud Villani, ‘Méthode et théorie dans l’œuvre de Gilles Deleuze’, Les Temps Modernes 586 (January–February 1996), 151. Deleuze has never hidden the fact that the link between all the references and interests in his texts is often contingent, dependent on his encounters, which is very different from ‘having a culture’. See the entry ‘culture’, in L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze (Paris: Editions Montparnasse, 2004).

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Deleuze adds that philosophy itself begins precisely at the moment when, facing reality, one abandons the attitude of hermeneutics, interpretation and commentary, when the sages and priests start to lose their power, to the benefit of thinkers who try to think first and foremost the chaos that the world is, independently of any reference to a beyond, a meaning or a transcendence: […] Les premiers philosophes sont ceux qui instaurent un plan d’immanence comme un crible tendu sur le chaos. Ils s’opposent en ce sens aux Sages, qui sont des personnages de la religion, des prêtres, parce qu’ils conçoivent l’instauration d’un ordre toujours transcendant, imposé du dehors par un grand despote ou par un dieu supérieur aux autres […]. Il y a religion chaque fois qu’il y a transcendance, Être vertical, État impérial au ciel ou sur la terre, et il y a Philosophie chaque fois qu’il y a immanence, même si elle sert d’arène à l’agôn et à la rivalité.20

From this point of view, far from being a failing, conflict is essential to philosophical activity. But the history of philosophy soon turns out to be the history of the difficulties that have to be confronted in instituting such a plane of immanence. Immanence most often ends up being conceived no longer in itself, but simply as a property, an attribute, as when we say ‘being immanent to something’: this implies there is something else and so the immanence is no longer absolute. Thus, Descartes begins by eliminating all relation of ideas to an exteriority and, in the celebrated episode of radical doubt in the first of his Méditations métaphysiques [Metaphysical Meditations], posits a pure field of consciousness, a plane of the immanence of ideas. But consciousness almost immediately becomes a unity transcendent to the ideas it contains. Who am I? I who, at this very moment, am thinking 20 [[…] the first philosophers are those who institute a plane of immanence like a sieve stretched over the chaos. In this sense they contrast with sages, who are religious personae, priests, because they conceive of the institution of an always transcendent order imposed from outside by a great despot or by one god higher than the others. […] Whenever there is transcendence, vertical Being, imperial State in the sky or on earth, there is religion; and there is Philosophy whenever there is immanence, even if it functions as an arena for the agon and rivalry.] Qu’est-ce que la Philosophie?, 45–6/43.

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these two ideas, namely that I think and that I am? A thinking thing, he replies. The verb ‘cogito’, ‘I think’, becomes a substantive: ‘a thought’, no longer in the sense of having a thought, but of being a thought, a thinking thing. That is why we traditionally talk of the Cogito to designate subjectivity in the Cartesian sense, as if the first person were enough to change the verb into a substantive. But this ‘thing’ is necessarily other than what I had bracketed when I started to meditate and which I called the ‘exterior’ (bodies and essences), since all of that remains suspended. The name of a thinking thing is ‘soul’. So I am a soul, and what is more a pure, that is to say incorporeal, soul. This, with the existence of God, is the very object of the Méditations.21 Which brings us back, right from the start of the second Méditation, to a new metaphysics of transcendence. The only classical philosopher who, in Deleuze’s opinion, absolutely avoided this relapse into religiosity and is thus the ‘Prince’ of philosophers – Deleuze even calls him, perhaps mischievously, ‘the Christ of philosophers’ – is Spinoza, the subject of two of his books.22 Among his contemporaries we should also mention, besides Sartre and Foucault, François Châtelet, the thinker of the institution of the political, of which Deleuze says that ‘aucune philosophie ne s’est installée plus fermement dans un pur champ d’immanence’.23 It is Châtelet who, as a theorist of the processes of rationalisation, rather than as a rationalist, understood most clearly the way that the Greeks conceived the original articulation of the philosophical and the political: On définit, ou on invente un processus de rationalisation chaque fois qu’on instaure des rapports humains dans une matière quelconque, dans un ensemble quelconque,

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This is brought out by their successive titles: Meditationes de prima philosophia in qua Dei existentia et animae immortalitas demonstratur (1641, Paris); Meditationes de prima philosophia in quibus Dei existentia et animae humanae à corpore distinctio, demonstrantur (1642, Amsterdam). Spinoza et le problème de l’expression [Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza] (1st edn, Paris: Minuit, 1968) and Spinoza: Philosophie pratique [Spinoza: practical philosophy]. [no philosophy has established itself more firmly in a pure field of immanence] Périclès et Verdi: La philosophie de François Châtelet (Paris: Minuit, 1988), 7.

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Chapter 8 dans une multiplicité quelconque. L’acte lui-même, étant rapport, est toujours politique. La raison comme processus est politique. Ce peut être dans la cité, mais aussi bien dans d’autres groupes, dans de petits groupes, ou en moi, rien qu’en moi. La psychologie, ou plutôt la seule psychologie supportable, est une politique, parce que j’ai toujours à créer des rapports humains avec moi-même. Il n’y a pas de psychologie, mais une politique du moi.24

This strict immanentism entails some of the most important elements in Deleuze’s practice of philosophy: the rejection of the unity of Ideas in favour of the multiplicity of events; the rejection of the contrast between interior and exterior, or of the idea of meaning as a content; a critique of the idea of the subject as substance in favour of an analysis of processes of individuation or subjectivation; the rejection of any transcendence, of the tyranny of priests, sages, and, as we shall see, psychoanalysts; finally, and above all, the institution of philosophy as the opening out of a field of immanence, which is what Sartre had imagined as an a-personal consciousness. But how does Deleuze, as a philosopher, characterise his own field of immanence? How does this thought without transcendence develop, and what new concepts are created as this activity of liberating thought evolves? Keeping this question in view, I shall first outline the genealogy of the definition of the plane of immanence as transcendental field without a subject, that is as a field of constitution of objects and the world that does not refer to active syntheses of phenomena (or at least which does not posit the syntheses as requiring an authority, that is, a spontaneity of a higher order). So it is an impersonal consciousness, without any interiority vis-à-vis the phenomena which are organised ‘in it’, as indeed the image of the breath of air applied to Sartre suggested: a breath of air is exteriority coming in. So the first step is to dispense with the myth of interiority

24 [A process of rationalisation is defined, or invented, each time human relations are instituted in some material form, in some group, in some multiplicity. The act itself, being a relation, is always political. Reason as a process is political. It may be in the city, but also in other groups, in small groups, or in me, just in me. Psychology, or rather the only tolerable psychology, is a politics, because I always have to create human relations with myself. There is not a psychology but a politics of the self.] Périclès et Verdi, 9–10.

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and with metaphysical psychology. The next will be to ask how we can think of the individuality of consciousness if it is not based on the unity of a subjectivity. On this point the constant reference is Leibniz and his monadology, in other words a conception of the individual as expression and no longer as representation of a world. But we will then have to ask why thought always tends to reflect or synthesise its own flow of existence with regard to some transcendence. The answer is that it is a question of power, and that a process of subjectivation always, in Deleuze’s view, risks leading to a subjection, a submission of life. Hence the famous critique of psychoanalysis as one of the last endeavours to hierarchise the mind in the form of a representational system. To counter this, it will be necessary to draw on the properly Surrealist attempt to produce, by various means, but especially through art, a ‘corps sans organes’ [body without organs], that is, purely intensive lines of existence, or, in Deleuze’s vocabulary, ‘une vie’ [a life], consisting solely of degrees of intensity of sensations that are coextensive with the constructions or arrangements that desires are. This is the concept that will be used to counter that of ‘visagéité’ [faciality], as the transcendent individuation of a person on the surface of the body.

A short history of immanence In a striking passage of Qu’est ce que la Philosophie? Deleuze and Guattari sketch out a brief history of Western philosophy from the point of view of the difficulty it has experienced in fully instituting a plane of immanence and its tendency to constantly reintroduce some form of transcendence.25 In Greek philosophy (the first ‘moment’), whether or not philosophers are physicalists or noologists is of little importance, but it is essential that they should be monists. What counts is the unity of the plane of immanence on which they trace their concepts. However, soon a division appears, and

25

‘Example III’, 46–9/44–9.

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hence a transcendence to the plane. Thus in Plato, despite the fact that he eliminates the gods, beings cannot be explained in their multiplicity except by reference to a superior unity, that of the pure forms or Ideas, and the plane of immanence is then conceptualised as the plane of phenomena, defined as appearances of the essential realities. From then on, philosophy is contemplation. With Christianity, this first moment comes to a miserable end, for philosophers are risking their lives when they try to inject a local dose of immanence into the world or thought. The second moment asks the question in terms of subjectivity, since it is inaugurated by Descartes, who suspends belief in all objects exterior to consciousness and thereby opens up a plane of immanence from which every concept which would presuppose an objectivity is initially banished.26 Thus, when he asks himself what he is, he who thinks and who knows that he exists every time that he thinks, he refrains from describing himself as a rational animal, for example, since he would already have to know what an animal is. The Cogito is the first certainty because it is based on a knowledge of a pragmatic kind, entirely circumscribed within the sphere of the I: I know what it is to think or be by thinking or being. I don’t even know what ‘I’ is other than by pronouncing the word, said Wittgenstein.27 We have already seen how, in spite of everything, Descartes relapsed, so to speak, into transcendence the minute he distinguished between having a thought and being a thought, and attributed to a thinking substance the field of pure consciousness he had just instituted. Kant criticised him on this score, and opened up the possibility of a transcendental thought as opposed precisely to a thought of transcendence. Deleuze notes that the 26 It is well known how far this move goes beyond the traditional sceptical preamble in its radicalism. It conditions Descartes’ entire ontology. From it he will draw the negation of the impossible demand of scepticism – the demand that one should compare knowledge with its objects – by positing that there is no object except for (mathematical) thought and that the demand rests on the most naïve of distinctions. 27 On this point, see the articles in which Jaakko Hintikka analyses the Cogito not as an inference but as a sort of private performative, stating the existence of the subject in the process of thought: ‘Cogito, ergo sum: inference or performance?’, The Philosophical Review 71 (1962), 3–21, and ‘Cogito, ergo quis est?’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie 195 (1996), 5–21.

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transcendental subject is ‘le sujet du champ d’immanence de toute expérience possible auquel rien n’échappe, l’extérieur autant que l’intérieur’.28 However, ‘Kant récuse tout usage transcendant de la synthèse, mais il rapporte l’immanence au sujet de la synthèse comme nouvelle unité, unité subjective’.29 Kant criticises Descartes, pointing out that if the Cogito consists of going legitimately from a determination, ‘I think’, to the affirmation of my existence, I can infer nothing from this affirmation of existence about my nature. Whether I think of an object as existing or not existing adds or subtracts no determination to or from that object (as is well known, ten thalers in thought do not turn into eleven thalers by coming into existence). However much one tries, it is impossible to conceive in what way thinking of a thing as non-existent would differ from thinking of that thing as existent, if the thing is considered merely in itself, whence the celebrated refutation of the ontological argument. Being (which is what I am, at this stage of the epoché), is the absolutely undetermined. If I now want to know what this being which thinks is, I must thus determine this existence, as every other existence, with the help of concepts. But – and this is the fundamental idea that Kant took from Hume – an existence cannot be determined by any concept whatever, except within a prior form or framework of organisation of existence, namely time. So it is impossible to determine the existence implied by the ‘I think’ as the transcendent foundation of a plane of immanence in which phenomena would unfold. It can only be a phenomenon, or an event within the field of consciousness, which is a temporal field. This explains the difficulties Descartes had in accepting the very idea of temporality, whose intelligibility 28 29

[the subject of the field of immanence of all possible experience from which nothing, the external as well as the internal, escapes] Qu’est-ce que la Philosophie?, 48/46. [Kant objects to any transcendent use of the synthesis, but he ascribes immanence to the subject of the synthesis as a new, subjective unity.] Ibid. Deleuze often analysed Kant’s critique of Descartes. See especially La Philosophie critique de Kant (1st edn, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), 21/Kant’s Critical Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Athlone Press, 1983), 15–16, and Différence et répétition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), 116–17/ Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone Press, 1994), 85–7.

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he denied (‘Descartes ne concluait qu’à force de réduire le Cogito à l’instant, et d’expulser le temps, de le confier à Dieu dans l’opération de la création continuée’).30 In short, one could say that far from being the operations of a subjectivity that would constitute them, ideas and subjectivity themselves mutually produce each other in a field to which they belong and which subsumes them. This is precisely the objection brought by Pascal to the very idea of method so dear to Descartes: ‘Hasard donne les pensées et hasard les ôte. Point d’art pour conserver ni pour acquérir’.31 For Deleuze, Kant’s contribution is to have demonstrated that the subject is divided or ‘fractured’, or indeed ‘cracked’, because it cannot know itself (determine its existence) other than as passive or receptive, as a sequence of phenomena subject to the succession of causes and effects in time, even though at the same time, in the ‘I think’, a consciousness of oneself as spontaneity repeatedly arises. This spontaneity is therefore merely represented, not active. This otherness of the I to itself in time, which Kant described as a ‘paradox of inner sense’ is what Deleuze sees as ‘Différence transcendantale’ [transcendental Difference], that is, a ‘Différence interne, et qui rapporte a priori l’être et la pensée l’un à l’autre’.32 Time signifies

30

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[Descartes could draw his conclusion only by expelling time, by reducing the Cogito to an instant and entrusting time to the operation of continuous creation carried out by God.] Différence et Répétition, 117/86. See also Deleuze’s lecture on Kant of 28 March 1978, available at accessed August 2016. [Thoughts come at random, and go at random. No device for holding on to them or for having them.] Pensée 542 (Lafuma). For the English translation, see Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 218. Empirisme et subjectivité contains a series of reflections on this subject, in connection with associationism. In an earlier text on Hume, David Hume, sa vie, son oeuvre avec un exposé de sa philosophie [David Hume: His Life and Work, with an Exposé on His Philosophy] (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952), André Cresson and Deleuze suggest a link between Hume, Pascal and Montaigne (38–9). [an internal Difference which establishes an a priori relation between thought and being] Différence et répétition, 117/86.

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[…] Une faille ou une fêlure dans le Je, une passivité dans le moi, voilà ce que signifie le temps ; et la corrélation du moi passif et du Je fêlé constitue la découverte du transcendantal ou l’élément de la révolution copernicienne.33

That is why Deleuze said of Kant that he rejects the transcendent use of the synthesis, that is, of the bringing together of sense data under concepts. If all existence must be determined in time, it becomes impossible to apply the concepts which organise our knowledge, the categories, to a domain which would be exterior to the plane of consciousness, the sequence of phenomena, now conceived as appearances or events in time.34 And if, from a Kantian point of view, neither time nor space can be realities within the field of consciousness, it is because they are the very forms of this field, the pure forms of succession and simultaneity. The problem is that if Kant showed that there can be no transcendent usage of synthesis that would give us either a knowledge of God as source of all phenomena – in the idea of an ultimate cause of the world – or of the Self as a source of our concrete actions or thoughts in the idea of a free 33

[[…] a fault or a fracture in the I and a passivity in the self, and the correlation between the passive self and the fractured I constitutes the discovery of the transcendental, the element of the Copernican Revolution.] Ibid. He also says, in the third Leçon sur Kant [Lecture on Kant]: ‘C’est la ligne pure et vide du temps qui traverse, qui opère cette espèce de fêlure dans le je, entre un “je pense” comme détermination et un “je suis” comme déterminable dans le temps. Le temps est devenu la limite de la pensée et la pensée ne cesse d’avoir à faire avec sa propre limite’ [It is the pure and empty line of time which cuts across, which causes this kind of fracture in the I, between an ‘I think’ as determination and an ‘I am’ as determinable in time. Time has become the limit of thought and thought never ceases having to engage with its own limit]. This brings out particularly clearly Deleuze’s method in the history of philosophy, a method which always immediately organises his commentary in the vicinity of the limit-points of the ideas that he is studying. On the theme of the ‘fracture’, that archetype of the incorporeal, see his excellent readings of Fitzgerald, Lowry and Zola, in Logique du sens, 22nd series, ‘Porcelaine et volcan’ [Porcelain and Volcano], and Appendix V. 34 This is well known as far as causality is concerned, since causality presupposes temporal determinations. Hume had shown that what the verb ‘to cause’ means is not the concept of a particular property of a body, which would explain why and how this body can have an effect on another body, but a regular succession in time.

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subject,35 he nevertheless created a new transcendence, precisely by positing a transcendental subject (one that is neither psychological nor metaphysical) that is able to perform the empirical synthesis of what appears. This is because, for Kant, the mere synthesis of representations within a consciousness is not enough to relate these representations to an object. Indeed, Descartes had already clearly noted in the famous analysis of the piece of wax (second Méditation) that imagination is not enough to produce objects, but only representations. The manifold of sensibility, under the syntheses of imagination, is not enough by itself to relate to an object. These representations, says Kant, still have to be related to the form of an object in general (= x). Now none of the specific properties of a perceptual object are related to what could be called objecthood in general, because none of them are shared by all possible objects.36 So we must postulate, beyond the field of consciousness, beyond the plane of immanence of phenomena, a superior activity which relates all these representations to an object. This activity is that of the understanding, of a faculty of judgment or of a transcendental subject, whose categories (i.e., the concepts determining any possible object) are simply the means of operation. The table of categories can be traced from the table of the logical functions of judgment37 and thus, as Deleuze writes, ‘L’objet quelconque est le corrélat du Je pense ou de l’unité de la conscience, il est l’expression du Cogito, son objectivation formelle’.38 The I as active synthetic identity, or transcendental subject, thus comes to fill in the temporal fracture which cut across the passive self. The unity of the rational faculty of judgment is reflected in the unity of a self, all of whose representations, says Kant, must always 35

In this respect Kant showed that ‘la mort spéculative de Dieu entraîne une fêlure du Je’ [the speculative death of God entails the fracture of the I] Différence et répétition, 117/87. 36 Not even extension, unless one presupposes that thought can be extended or that it never constitutes an object properly speaking. Mathematical, aesthetic and theological objects would also have to be accounted for. 37 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Transcendental Analytic, Ch. 1: ‘The Clue to the Discovery of All Pure Concepts of the Understanding’ (A66/B91). 38 [The object in general is the correlate of the ‘I think’ or of the unity of consciousness, it is the expression of the Cogito, its formal objectivation]

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be able to be accompanied by an ‘I think’. After the Greek contemplative moment, philosophy thus entered a reflexive phase in which the subject rediscovered transcendence in itself.39 But a third phase in the history of the philosophical invention of subjectivity can already be discerned: the phenomenological phase.40 Here, transcendence comes in even later, since it is in phenomena, in the very flux of consciousness, that the form of the world must be found. What is interesting in Husserl is the role that the other (another consciousness) plays in the constitution of my own subjectivity, not only as a being who appears within the field of my own consciousness, but as the condition of the unity of the world, and of everything within the world as I perceive it. What I see in a room is furniture, human beings, and not – to parody Quine – woody agglomerations, successive phases or concretions of humanity. So what I see are layers of meaning that I have received from all the other subjectivities, particularly through language, and which cover the phenomena. Thus, although they always flow within a single field of consciousness, phenomena are paradoxically always impure. When I see an object as object, and not as a mere modification of my field of consciousness, as a mere perceptual phenomenon (a shape, an assemblage of colours), for instance, I see in it the potential gaze of others who will necessarily perceive some other aspect of it, depending on their positions: I know that they too will see my potential gaze as capable of perceiving this or that aspect that they cannot see – and moreover these ‘others’ may very well be myself at another moment in time. In other words, the other (autrui or alter-ego), that is, absolutely anyone, or an originary common sense, is spread out, so to speak, just as much over a table or chair as over a face and in my very gaze. The world is suddenly populated with Selves

It could be said that Différence et répétition is an attempt to return to Kant’s original inspiration, before he characterised the plane of immanence as a passivity conceived of as non-synthetic, or as a receptivity that was then contrasted with a spontaneity conceived as synthetic (see the excellent analyses of the relations between time and thought in 116–28/85–96). 40 Qu’est-ce que la Philosophie?, 48–9/46–8. 39

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or subjectivities. As Deleuze puts it, ‘on ne se contente plus d’attribuer l’immanence, on lui fait partout dégorger le transcendant’.41 This is all quite familiar. One need simply think of Sartre’s novel, La Nausée, which describes the experience of a world that at times is emptied of autrui, the Other, a world of pure matter. Matter appears then as repetitive, proliferating with singularities. In this world, words, and thus concepts, have come adrift from things. We will just note the parallel sketched out in Logique du sens between Kant’s method and Husserl’s, ‘lorsqu’il infère un “Voir” originaire et transcendantal à partir de la “vision” perceptive’.42 Deleuze denounces the ‘tour de passe-passe’ [sleight of hand]43 of the Husserlian genesis, which consists in characterising the meaning of the proposition as a predicate, as the attribute of some object or other and not as a verb, or as concept rather than event. From then on, as in Kant, the attributes are related to an object = x. On this point, Deleuze always opposes to Husserl’s point of view that of Leibniz, who gives the name ‘predicate’ not to an attribute, but to an event (such as ‘crossing the Rubicon’). Conversely, when he pays tribute to Husserl, it is because he preserved in his philosophy certain Leibnizian points of view. He thus judges it important that Husserl ‘inscrit dans le champ transcendantal des centres d’individuation et des systèmes individuels, des monades et des points de vue, des Moi à la manière de Leibniz, plutôt qu’une forme de Je à la manière Kantienne’.44

41 Ibid. 49/47. 42 [when he deduces an originary and transcendental ‘Seeing’ from perceptual ‘vision’] Logique du sens, 118/98. 43 Ibid. 118/97. 44 [inscribes in the transcendental field centres of individuation and individual systems, monads, and points of view, and Selves in the manner of Leibniz, rather than a form of the I in the Kantian manner] Logique du sens, 121/99. In fact, Deleuze could have gone right back to Descartes, who infers the intervention of a rational judgment in the constitution of the objecthood (but not yet the reality) of the wax, beginning from the way this constitution implies a potential infinity of aspects: ‘je la conçois capable de recevoir une infinité de semblables changements’ [I can grasp that the wax is capable of countless changes of this kind] AT, IX, 24. (English translation in Descartes, Selected Philosophical Writings, trans. John Cottingham, Robert

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If Eidetics and Critique were two ‘âges de la philosophie’ corresponding to two philosophical attitudes towards transcendence: contemplation (the Greek point of view) and reflection (the point of view of the philosophers of the Cogito, from Descartes to Kant), then Phenomenology opens up a third, corresponding to communication. Deleuze’s later philosophy contains a radical critique of communication, as well as a critique of the philosophy of dialogue or of majority democracy, in favour of a theory of the minority, or rather of the becoming-minor, which is an astonishing rediscovery or reinterpretation of Plato’s aristocratic stance. Les droits ne sauvent ni les hommes ni une philosophie qui se reterritorialise sur l’État démocratique. Les droits de l’homme ne nous feront pas bénir le capitalisme. Et il faut beaucoup d’innocence, ou de rouerie, à une philosophie de la communication qui prétend restaurer la société des amis ou même des sages en formant une opinion universelle comme ‘consensus’ capable de moraliser les nations, les États et le marché. […] Si la philosophie se reterritorialise sur le concept, elle n’en trouve pas la condition dans la forme présente de l’État démocratique, ou dans un cogito de communication plus douteux encore que le cogito de réflexion. Nous ne manquons pas de communication, au contraire nous en avons trop, nous manquons de création. Nous manquons de résistance au présent.45

Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch, intro. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 83). In the field of immanence constituted by radical doubt, these changes can only be changes of aspect. See Appendix VIII of Husserl’s Crisis, and also Deleuze’s entertaining Ch. 11 of Critique et clinique (Paris: Minuit, 1993), ‘Un précurseur méconnu de Heidegger, Alfred Jarry’ [An Unrecognised Precursor to Heidegger: Alfred Jarry] (116/92, on the ‘epiphenomenon’). 45 [Rights save neither men nor a philosophy that is reterritorialised on the democratic State. Human rights will not make us bless capitalism. A great deal of innocence or cunning is needed by a philosophy of communication that claims to restore the society of friends, or even of wise men, by forming a universal opinion as ‘consensus’ able to moralise nations, States and the market.[…] If philosophy is reterritorialised on the concept, it does not find the condition for this in the present form of the democratic State or in a cogito of communication that is even more dubious than that of reflection. We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present.] Qu’est-ce que la Philosophie?, 103/107–8.

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This critique of communication is always accompanied by a critique of the historical conception of time, in favour of a Nietzschean, ‘untimely’ point of view, that of the multiplicity of becomings. That is why, for Deleuze, May 1968 was neither a democratic nor a historical event: Mai 68 fut un devenir faisant irruption dans l’histoire, et c’est pour ça que l’histoire l’a si mal compris, et la société historique, si mal assimilé. […] de plus en plus, j’ai été sensible à une distinction possible entre le devenir et l’histoire. […] Le devenir n’est pas de l’histoire ; l’histoire désigne seulement l’ensemble des conditions si récentes soient-elles, dont on se détourne pour ‘devenir’, c’est-à-dire pour créer quelque chose de nouveau. C’est exactement ce que Nietzsche appelle l’Intempestif. Mai 68 a été la manifestation, l’irruption d’un devenir à l’état pur.46

46 [May 68 was a becoming breaking through into history, and that’s why history found it so hard to understand, and why historical society found it so hard to come to terms with. […] I became more and more aware of the possibility of distinguishing between becoming and history. […] Becoming isn’t part of history; history lays out merely the set of preconditions, however recent, that one leaves behind in order to ‘become’, that is, to create something new. This is precisely what Nietzsche calls the Untimely. May 68 was a demonstration, an irruption, of a becoming in its pure state.] Pourparlers, 209, 230/153, 170–1. These excerpts can be compared with the words of a poet who shared Deleuze’s passion for the painting of Francis Bacon, Jacques Dupin, who wrote in L’Ephémère 6 (1968): ‘Ce qui retient, au-delà de l’analyse des causes, des circonstances et des effets d’un phénomène de société, c’est le non-sens de l’événement. Son obscurité qui nous lie. Son devenir et son rayonnement qui nous questionnent […] Ce qui vient de naître et de prendre corps, et refuse de projeter une ombre, d’être vêtu, de s’adosser à la paroi. Ce qui vient de naître d’une secousse et qui se confond avec elle’ [What holds our attention, beyond the analysis of the causes, circumstances and effects of a social phenomenon, is the non-meaning of the event. Its obscurity which binds us. Its becoming and its influence which question us […] What has just been born and assumed bodily shape, and refuses to cast a shadow, to clothe itself, to lean against the wall. What has just been born from a shudder and is indiscernible from it].

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The plane of immanence as a field of impersonal consciousness At the end of the history of abortive attempts to institute a plane of immanence, there often appear two characters, Sartre and Spinoza. Thus: La supposition de Sartre, d’un champ transcendantal impersonnel, redonne à l’immanence ses droits.47 C’est quand l’immanence n’est plus immanente à autre chose que soi qu’on peut parler d’un plan d’immanence. Un tel plan est peut-être un empirisme radical : il ne présenterait pas un flux du vécu immanent à un sujet, et qui s’individualiserait dans ce qui appartient à un moi. Il ne présente que des événements, c’est-à-dire des mondes possibles en tant que concepts, et des autruis, comme expressions de mondes possibles ou personnages conceptuels. L’événement ne rapporte pas le vécu à un sujet transcendant = Moi, mais se rapporte au contraire au survol immanent d’un champ sans sujet ; Autrui ne redonne pas de la transcendance à un autre moi, mais rend tout autre moi à l’immanence du champ survolé.48

47 Jean-Paul Sartre, La Transcendance de l’Ego (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1965) (invocation de Spinoza, p. 23) [reference to Spinoza, p. 23] [Note by G. Deleuze.]. 48 [Sartre’s presupposition of an impersonal transcendental field restores the rights of immanence. When immanence is no longer immanent to something other than itself it is possible to speak of a plane of immanence. Such a plane is, perhaps, a radical empiricism: it does not present a flux of the lived that is immanent to a subject and individualised in that which belongs to a self. It presents only events, that is, possible worlds as concepts, and other people as expressions of possible worlds or conceptual personae. The event does not relate the lived to a transcendent subject = Self but, on the contrary, is related to the immanent survey of a field without subject; the Other Person [autrui] does not restore transcendence to an other self but returns every other self to the immanence of the field surveyed.] Qu’est-ce que la Philosophie?, 49/47–8. It would be tedious to compile a list of all these references as they occur throughout Deleuze’s œuvre. But it is worth noting that one of the first published texts, ‘Du Christ à la bourgeoisie’ (Espace, 1 (New Series) (1946)) includes a long, unattributed quotation to Sartre’s famous 1939 article on intentionality in Husserl (repr. in Situations I (1st edn, Paris: Gallimard, 1947; new edn, 2010) and that several of Deleuze’s works mention La Transcendance de l’Ego: Logique du sens; Différence et Répétition; Qu’est-ce que la Philosophie?; and ‘L’immanence, une vie …’, Philosophie 47 (September 1995)/‘Immanence: A Life’, trans. Nick Millet, in Jean

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Logique du sens refers to ‘l’article décisif de 1937’ [the decisive article of 1937], and describes Sartre’s ‘objections décisives’ [decisive objections], in these terms: L’idée d’un champ transcendantal ‘impersonnel ou pré-personnel’, producteur du Je comme du Moi, est d’une grande importance. Ce qui empêche cette thèse de développer toutes ses conséquences chez Sartre, c’est que le champ transcendantal impersonnel est encore déterminé comme celui d’une conscience, qui doit dès lors s’unifier par elle-même et sans Je, par un jeu d’intentionnalités ou de rétentions pures. […] la question de savoir comment le champ transcendantal doit être déterminé est très complexe. Il nous semble impossible de lui donner à la manière kantienne la forme personnelle d’un Je, d’une unité synthétique d’aperception, même si l’on confère à cette unité une portée universelle ; sur ce point les objections de Sartre sont décisives. Mais il n’est pas davantage possible de lui conserver la forme d’une conscience, même si l’on définit cette conscience impersonnelle par des intentionnalités et rétentions pures qui supposent encore des centres d’individuation.49

It is clear that Deleuze defines his own philosophy in relation to the problem raised by this text. And he will continue to do so right up to the end, since in the last text published in his lifetime we read:

Khalfa (ed.), An Introduction to the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (London and New York: Continuum, 2003), 170–3. 49 [The idea of an ‘impersonal or pre-personal’ transcendental field, producing the I and the Ego, is of great importance. What hinders this thesis from developing all its consequences in Sartre’s work is that the impersonal transcendental field is still determined as the field of a consciousness, and as such it must then be unified by itself through a play of intentionalities or pure retentions. […] the question of knowing how the transcendental field is to be determined is very complex. It seems impossible to endow it, in the Kantian manner, with the personal form of an I, the synthetic unity of apperception, even if this unity is given universal extension. On this point, Sartre’s objections are decisive. But it is no more possible to preserve for it the form of consciousness, even if we define this impersonal consciousness by means of pure intentionalities and retentions, which still presuppose centres of individuation.] Logique du sens, 120, 128/343–4 (n. 5), 105.

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Le transcendant n’est pas le transcendantal. À défaut de conscience, le champ transcendantal se définirait comme un pur plan d’immanence, puisqu’il échappe à toute transcendance du sujet comme de l’objet.50

And, in a note following yet another reference to La Transcendance de l’Ego: Sartre pose un champ transcendantal sans sujet, qui renvoie à une conscience impersonnelle, absolue, immanente : par rapport à celle-ci, le sujet et l’objet sont des ‘transcendants’ […]51

This is not the place to embark on a detailed commentary on either the remarkable conclusion of Sartre’s article, referred to by Deleuze, or on its concepts, the example it mentions, or on the premonitions of Sartre’s later work contained within it.52 I simply wish to point out, not influences, but four singular points of encounter or inspiration which will be essential to Deleuze’s work. First of all, the definition of transcendental consciousness as an impersonal spontaneity: ‘Cette sphère transcendantale est une sphère d’existence absolue, c’est-à-dire de spontanéités pures, qui ne sont

50 [The transcendent is not the transcendental. Without consciousness, the transcendental field would be defined as a pure plane of immanence, since it eludes any transcendence either of subject or object.] ‘L’Immanence: une vie’, 74/170. 51 [Sartre posits a transcendental field without subject, which relates back to an impersonal, absolute, immanent consciousness: with respect to this, subject and object are ‘transcendents’ […]] Ibid. 87/202, n. 2. 52 This later work has often been perceived as repudiating the position articulated in La Transcendance de l’Ego, as in the following quote by Alquié: ‘Si la subjectivité qu’il [l’existentialisme] invoque était impersonnelle, ou transcendantale, les choses y pourraient, en effet, briller d’un éclat évident et garder leurs couleurs. On sait que Sartre fut d’abord tenté par cette interprétation, et critiqua même Husserl en ce sens’ [If the subjectivity which it [Existentialism] describes were impersonal, or transcendental, things would indeed be able to shine in it, with an obvious brilliance and all their colours intact. As is well known, Sartre was at first tempted by this interpretation, and even criticised Husserl on its basis] ‘Surréalisme et existentialisme’ [1948], in Solitude de la raison (Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1966), 80. On the history of the Sartre-Husserl connection on this subject, see Rudolf Bernet, La Vie du Sujet (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), 300.

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jamais objets et qui se déterminent elles-mêmes à exister’.53 (Sartre is here commenting on Rimbaud’s famous exclamation in the so-called ‘lettre du voyant’ [seer’s letter], ‘Je est un autre’ [I is an other], to which Deleuze regularly returns). Secondly, this structure means that ‘chaque instant de notre vie consciente nous révèle une création ex nihilo. […] Sur ce plan l’homme a l’impression de s’échapper sans cesse, de se déborder, de se surprendre par une richesse toujours inattendue […]’.54 In other words, if consciousness is a nothing, that does not mean it is a lack. It is fundamentally creative, an idea which is at the heart of Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of desire as constructivist. And this conception implies, thirdly, a critique of the naivety of psychoanalysis which, under the name of the unconscious, merely substantialises or naturalises that spontaneity. Sartre concludes: Ces psychologues ont donc naïvement imaginé que les consciences spontanées ‘sortaient’ de l’inconscient où elles existaient déjà, sans s’apercevoir qu’ils n’avaient fait que reculer le problème de l’existence, qu’il faut bien finir par formuler et qu’ils l’avaient obscurci puisque l’existence antérieure des spontanéités dans les limites préconscientes serait nécessairement une existence passive.55

Finally, attention should be drawn to the connection made by Sartre during this early period between his conception of consciousness and an intelligent Marxism (one not reduced to a mechanistic materialism), since from now on the Self is ‘un existant rigoureusement contemporain du monde et

[This transcendental sphere is a sphere of absolute existence, i.e. a sphere of pure spontaneities, which are never objects and which determine themselves to exist.] La Transcendance de l’Ego, 77/The Transcendence of the Ego trans. Andrew Brown, intro. Sarah Richmond (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 45. 54 [each instant of our conscious life reveals to us a creation ex nihilo. […] At this level man has the impression of ceaselessly escaping from himself, of overflowing himself, of being surprised by riches which are always unexpected] Ibid. 79/98–9. 55 [These psychologists therefore naively imagined that the spontaneous consciousnesses ‘came out’ of the unconscious where they already existed, without realising that they had merely deferred the problem of existence, which would have to be formulated sooner or later, and which they had obscured, since the antecedent existence of spontaneities within preconscious limits would necessarily be passive existence.] Ibid. 79/98 53

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dont l’existence a les mêmes caractéristiques essentielles que le monde’.56 This is why the Marxism that L’Anti-Œdipe will claim to follow is Sartre’s – in particular his ‘analyses des groupes-sujets, leurs rapports avec le désir et avec la causalité’.57 The following passage shows a remarkable structural similarity with the passage we have just quoted: L’analyse de Sartre dans la Critique de la raison dialectique nous paraît profondément juste, d’après laquelle il n’y a pas de spontanéité de classe, mais seulement de ‘groupe’ : d’où la nécessité de distinguer les ‘groupe en fusion’ et la classe qui reste ‘sérielle’, représentée par le parti ou l’État. Et les deux ne sont pas à la même échelle. C’est que l’intérêt de classe reste de l’ordre des grands ensembles molaires ; il définit seulement un préconscient collectif, nécessairement représenté dans une conscience distincte dont il n’y a même pas lieu de se demander à ce niveau si elle trahit ou non, aliène ou non, déforme ou non. Le véritable inconscient, au contraire, est dans le désir de groupe, qui met en jeu l’ordre moléculaire des machines désirantes.58

Conversely, as they did for Freud, Deleuze and Guattari accused Althusser of having reduced the discovery of the ‘machine’ of social production to ‘une représentation structurale et théâtrale’.59

56 Ibid. 86/105. 57 [his analyses of subject-groups and their relations with desire and with causality] L’Anti-Œdipe (1st edn, Paris: Minuit, 1972; rev. edn, 1973), 453/395. 58 [Sartre’s analysis in Critique de la raison dialectique appears to us profoundly correct where he concludes that there does not exist any class spontaneity, but only a ‘group’ spontaneity: whence the necessity for distinguishing ‘groups-in-fusion’ from the class, which remains ‘serial’, represented by the party or the State. And the two do not exist on the same scale. This is because class interest remains a function of the large molar aggregates; it merely defines a collective preconscious that is necessarily represented in a distinct consciousness that, at this level, does not even present any grounds for asking whether it betrays or not, alienates or not, deforms or not. The true unconscious, on the contrary, is situated in the group desire, which concerns the molecular order of desiring machines.] Ibid. (1973 edn) 305/256–7. 59 [a structural and theatrical representation] Ibid. 365/306.

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An expressive but non-representational subjectivity We can now examine Deleuze’s question in greater depth: what is an individuality, insofar as it is not thought of in terms of transcendence with regard to the field of phenomena, that is in terms of personality, subjectivity or interiority? Deleuze always thinks of individuality in Leibnizian terms as individuation or becoming, and becoming as a bundle of lines marked by singular points (Sartre’s ‘spontaneities’), which define individuations by vicinity. Les individus se constituent au voisinage de singularités qu’ils enveloppent ; et ils expriment des mondes comme cercles de convergence des séries dépendant de ces singularités. Dans la mesure où l’exprimé n’existe pas hors de ses expressions, c’est-àdire hors des individus qui l’expriment, le monde est bien l’‘appartenance’ du sujet, l’événement est bien devenu prédicat, prédicat analytique d’un sujet. Verdoyer indique une singularité-événement au voisinage de laquelle l’arbre se constitue ; ou pécher, au voisinage de laquelle Adam se constitue ; mais être vert, être pécheur sont maintenant les prédicats analytiques de sujets constitués, l’arbre et Adam.60

60 [Individuals are constituted in the vicinity of singularities which they envelop; they express worlds as circles of converging series which depend upon these singularities. To the extent that what is expressed does not exist outside of its expressions, that is, outside of the individuals which express it, the world is really the ‘appartenance’ of the subject and the event has really become the analytic predicate of a subject. To green indicates a singularity-event in the vicinity of which the tree is constituted. To sin indicates a singularity-event in the vicinity of which Adam is constituted. But to be green or to be a sinner are now the analytic predicates of constituted subjects – namely, the tree and Adam.] Logique du sens, 136/111–12. These notions of singularity and vicinity are crucial. Deleuze takes them from topology and phonology: ‘Aux déterminations des rapports différentiels correspondent des singularités, des répartitions de points singuliers qui caractérisent les courbes ou les figures (un triangle par exemple a trois points singuliers). Ainsi la détermination des rapports phonématiques propres à une langue donnée assigne les singularités au voisinage desquelles se constituent les sonorités et significations de la langue. La détermination réciproque des éléments symboliques [ici les phonèmes] se prolonge dès lors dans la détermination complète des points singuliers qui constituent un espace correspondant à ces éléments’ [To the determinations of differential relations there correspond singularities, distributions

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The main thing is thus that identity is conceived of by Leibniz as a process of individuation, instead of individuality being defined as the intersection of concepts or pre-existing generalities. In one of their last books, Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque, Deleuze and Guattari go into this idea in detail, and define the plane of immanence as ‘life’ or monad. This final return to the history of philosophy, long after the appearance of those two philosophical treatises that make up Capitalism and Schizophrenia, suggests that it is in Leibniz, perhaps just as much as in Spinoza, that their ontology is to be found. What is a monad? It is well known that what characterises a Leibnizian monad is the fact that it expresses the world rather than representing it, without in the least communicating with the other monads (it has neither door nor window, without for all that being an interior theatre or a camera obscura). A monad expresses the world merely by being what it is, or, more precisely, by becoming what it is, that is, a particular sequence of events, ‘compossible’ with an immense number of other convergent sequences, which together form a possible world (when the series diverge, we have another world, incompossible with the first). The best of all possible worlds (the real or existing world) is the most productive among the infinity of other possible worlds, that is, the infinite series of compossible series of events. The fact that Adam commits original sin, that Caesar crosses the Rubicon, these events determine an entire world, and there is another possible world in which neither of them happens. But it is difficult to conceive of a world in which Caesar crosses the Rubicon without Adam having committed original sin, which suggests that the sequences of events these two possibilities define are incompossible and cannot contribute to

of singular points which characterise curves or figures (a triangle for example has three singular points). Thus the determination of the phonematic relations proper to a given language assigns singularities in whose vicinity the sonorities and meanings of the language are constituted. The reciprocal determination of the symbolic elements [in this case the phonemes] extends thereafter to the complete determination of the singular points which constitute a space corresponding to these elements] Gilles Deleuze, ‘À quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme?’, in François Châtelet (ed.), Histoire de la Philosophie (Paris: Hachette-Pluriel, 1973), VIII, 309).

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the establishment of one and the same world. From this point of view, an individual is a flux of events and not an intersection of attributes, and to say that this flux exists is the same as saying that it is compossible with all those others which constitute the best of all possible worlds: Bref, chaque monade possible se définit par un certain nombre de singularités pré-individuelles, est donc compossible avec toutes les monades dont les singularités convergent avec les siennes, et incompossible avec celles dont les singularités impliquent divergence ou non-prolongement. Mais pourquoi donner le nom propre d’Adam à tous ces individus divergents, dans des mondes incompossibles ? C’est qu’une singularité peut toujours être isolée, excisée, coupée de ses prolongements : alors il n’importe plus que le jardin où Adam pèche ne soit pas le même que le jardin où Adam peut ne pas pécher, la singularité devient indéfinie, elle n’est plus qu’un jardin, et le prédicat primitif n’est plus saisi dans tel ou tel monde, mais seulement considéré ‘sub ratione generalitatis’ en même temps que son sujet devient un Adam en général, un Sextus … On n’en conclura pas que l’individuation parte de ces prédicats généraux, quitte à les spécifier de plus en plus. L’individuation ne va pas d’un genre à des espèces de plus en plus petites, sous une règle de différenciation, elle va de singularité en singularité, sous la règle de convergence ou de prolongement qui rapporte l’individu à tel ou tel monde.61

That is why, despite being without doors or windows, monads express a world. Of course, finite monads can express only obscurely or unconsciously

61

[In short, every possible monad is defined by a certain number of pre-individual singularities, and thus is compossible with all the monads whose singularities converge with its own, and incompossible with those whose singularities imply divergence or non-prolongation. But why give the proper name ‘Adam’ to all those divergent individuals, in incompossible worlds? Because a singularity can always be isolated, excised, cut off from its prolongations: then it no longer matters that the garden in which Adam sins is not the same in which Adam may not sin, the singularity becomes indefinite, it is no longer any more than just a garden, and the primitive predicate is no longer grasped in this or that world, but merely considered sub ratione generalitatis at the same time as its subject an Adam in general, a Sextus … One should not draw from this the conclusion that individuation starts from these general predicates, although it may mean specifying them more and more. Individuation does not go from a genus to smaller and smaller species, following a rule of differentiation, it goes from singularity to singularity, following the rule of convergence or prolongation which relates the individual to this or that world.] Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque, 85–6/64. (Translation modified).

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the infinity of their antecedents, their repercussions and the impossibility of their repercussions, all of which together constitute this world. So the unconscious is nothing other than the presence of the world ‘in’ me. This is what the famous theory of little perceptions brings out.62 Consciousness, for Leibniz, is merely the qualitative threshold or the integration of the perception of an infinity of discrete quantities: the world as a distant roar. If the monad is without a door or a window, it isn’t because it is enclosed in its psychological being, it is because it is exteriority through and through.63 The hierarchy of beings is thus simply a hierarchy of degrees of clarity and distinctness. Already the school textbook which Canguilhem commissioned from Deleuze, Instincts et institutions (1953), was secretly devoted to tracing a continuous line between beings. All the later texts on animality (Spinoza and the tick, Melville, Kafka and ‘becoming-animal’, etc.) take up this theme. And if one feeling were to sum up Deleuze’s ethic, it would be neither pity nor respect, but the shame, at times, of being human (and here, the reference is always to the work of Primo Levi). Sartre described pre-war idealism as a ‘philosophie alimentaire’ [alimentary philosophy] which reduced things to ‘des contenus de conscience’ [contents of consciousness], and postulated a ‘Spider-spirit’, ‘qui attirait les choses dans sa toile, les couvrait d’une bave blanche et lentement les déglutissait, les réduisait à sa propre substance’.64 If all monads, even the humblest, express the totality of the universe, it is because they do not represent it within any interiority. They express the world simply as a series

62 I am walking along the sea and I can hear its roar. What I hear, in fact, is an infinite number of noises made by wavelets. See too Leibniz’s theory of music: ‘Music is an occult arithmetical exercise of the soul which is unaware that it is counting, as it does many things in confused or insensible perceptions which it cannot notice through distinct apperception. For those who believe that there cannot be anything in the soul of which it is unaware are mistaken’. (G. W. Leibniz, letter to Goldbach, 17 April 1712). See also Principles of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason, §17. 63 On this point, see Chapter 2 of Le Pli, especially 36–7/146, n. 28, where Deleuze contrasts the readings of Leibniz by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, notably on the question of being present to, in, or for the world. 64 [which lured things into its web, covered them with spittle and slowly ingested them, reducing them to its own substance] This text is quoted, without reference to Sartre, in ‘Du Christ à la bourgeoisie’.

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of points of view, that is, a line of life traced on a plane of immanence. This idea of the unconscious as the world as I live it, and not as I represent it to myself, was already developed in the book on Proust, Proust et les signes [Proust and Signs].65 À la recherche du temps perdu [In Search of Lost Time] can be read as a series of variations on a fundamental theme: the essence of the self is the point of view on the world that it envelops. It is, of course, reminiscence: the tea and the flowers of folded paper (the concept of the fold is Leibnizian), but we should also think of the repeated experience of the desire of the other as agencé [arranged] within a landscape, a path to somewhere or the side of someone’s home (as in, Du côté de chez Swann, which in effect means ‘on the way to Swann’s’), or else with an image, as in the case of the Duchess of Guermantes and the windows of the church at Combray. That is why the texts at the end of Le Temps Retrouvé [Finding Time Again] always describe the creation of a work of art as the development of an unconscious essence of the deep self, and thereby impose an astonishing, retroactive reading on the entire work, as the work makes the unfolding of this critical point of view on creation (the point of view of the deep self, as opposed to the ‘biographical’ point of view of a Sainte-Beuve) precisely its own creation.66 So it is not only feeling (as in the ‘madeleine’ episode), but also thought which has to be conceived of as a process of development depending neither on the good will nor on the decision of a thinker. Thus the first conclusion of the book, ‘L’image de la pensée’ [The Image of Thought], focuses on Proust and philosophical method. And if the metaphor of the spider is repeated in the final conclusion, entitled ‘Présence et fonction de la folie. L’Araignée’ [Presence and Function of (1st edn, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964; rev. 4th edn, 1976)/Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (London: Athlone Press, 2000). 66 Pierre Clarac, in his preface to the essay ‘Contre Sainte-Beuve’, in the volume of the same title in the Pléiade edition of Proust (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), maintains that although for Proust the theoretical essay was for a long time linked to the novel, the two plans finally diverged. The texts he himself quotes seem to us to indicate the opposite, since, for Proust, the novel finally replaces the essay (‘mon roman bouche tout’ [my novel fills every gap]). In any case it is clear that in a deep sense, the essay against the biographical method contains the genesis of the Recherche, especially its darker parts. 65

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Madness. The Spider], it now has a meaning which is the opposite of Sartre’s. The emphasis is now not on ingestion, but on the web, that is, on a body without differentiated organs, a pure sensory surface, perceiving nothing but degrees of intensity of vibrations, corresponding to no particular sense organ and thus to no exterior quality. The work is thus like the madness of the ‘Narrateur-araignée, dont la toile même est la Recherche en train de se faire, de se tisser avec chaque fil remué par tel ou tel signe’.67 And if the self is nothing outside the work, ‘a life’ can correspondingly be thought of as a work of art or a creation, an art of the self. It is easy to understand why this aesthetics was the subject of a chapter in the work on Foucault (‘Les plissements ou le dedans de la pensée (subjectivation)’).68 There Deleuze considers Foucault’s final philosophy and the relation between Greek ethics and the aesthetics of the self, but the problem is the same: how can one explain individuations, or subjectivations, without transcendence? This description of the self as the unconscious integration of the infinity of the world and as a process of creation (or desiring machine) is clearly contrasted by Deleuze and Guattari with the conception of the unconscious as a theatre of representation that one finds in psychoanalysis. They consider such a conception, with all its variants, as a new machine of oppression, characteristic of societies which henceforth are not societies of sovereignty or discipline but, as Foucault pointed out at the end of his life, of control.69

67 [Narrator-spider, whose very web is the Recherche in the process of being made, of weaving itself with every thread pulled by this sign or that] Proust et les signes, 218/181. 68 [Enfoldings, or the inside of thought (subjectivation)] Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Paris: Minuit, 1986). Pourparlers reprints a conversation devoted to this book, with the title ‘La Vie comme œuvre d’art’ [Life as a Work of Art] (129–38/94–101). See also 153/111–12. 69 In his ‘Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle’ [Postscript on Control Societies], Deleuze draws a picture of a widespread crisis in all systems of discipline (prison, hospital, factory, school, family) and sketches out the description of a society of continuous control, where the password has replaced the old matriculation number, and continuous education has replaced the straitjacket of discipline. (Pourparlers, 240–7/177–82).

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The unconscious: Desiring machine and not theatre of representation Clément Rosset dit très bien : chaque fois qu’on insiste sur un manque dont manquerait le désir pour définir son objet, ‘le monde se voit doublé d’un autre monde quel qu’il soit, à la faveur de l’itinéraire suivant: l’objet manque au désir; donc le monde ne contient pas tous les objets, il en manque au moins un, celui du désir; donc il existe un ailleurs qui contient la clef du désir (dont manque le monde)’. Si le désir produit, il produit du réel. Si le désir est producteur, il ne peut l’être qu’en réalité, et de réalité. Le désir est cet ensemble de synthèses passives qui machinent les objets partiels, les flux et les corps, et qui fonctionnent comme des unités de production. Le réel en découle, il est le résultat des synthèses passives du désir comme autoproduction de l’inconscient. Le désir ne manque de rien, il ne manque pas de son objet. C’est plutôt le sujet qui manque au désir, ou le désir qui manque de sujet fixe; il n’y a de sujet fixe que par la répression. Le désir et son objet ne font qu’un, c’est la machine en tant que machine de machine.70

Psychoanalysis, inasmuch as it defines desire as a lack, is still an attempt to reintroduce a form of transcendence, the object of desire, instead of conceptualising the positivity of desire as a production of agencements [arrangements]. Conversely, Deleuze always insists on what he calls a ‘constructivist’

70 [Clément Rosset puts it very well: every time the emphasis is put on a lack that desire supposedly suffers from, as a way of defining its object, ‘the world acquires as its double some other sort of world, in accordance with the following line of argument: there is an object that desire feels the lack of; hence the world does not contain each and every object that exists; there is at least one object missing, the one that desire feels the lack of; hence there exists some other place that contains the key to desire (missing in this world)’. If desire produces, its product is real. If desire is productive, it can be productive only in the real world and can produce only reality. Desire is the set of passive syntheses that engineer partial objects, flows, and bodies, and that function as units of production. The real is the end product, the result of the passive syntheses of desire as autoproduction of the unconscious. Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression. Desire and its object are one and the same thing: the machine, as a machine of a machine.] L’Anti-Œdipe, 33–4/26.

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conception of desire: to desire is, as it were, to draw in space and in time, synthesising a thing with a being, and a scene or a landscape, for example.71 L’Anti-Œdipe could thus have been called Critique of Pure Desire. Kant had shown how Reason became entangled in paralogisms when it spoke, for example, of a supreme cause or of free will, hypostatising its own regulative principles into metaphysical objects (the transcendent use of synthesis). This critique, as we have seen, sprang from a radicalisation of the initial phenomenalism of Descartes. In the same way, here, desire refers to nothing other than its own operations. When he speaks of passive (non-subjective) syntheses fabricating partial objects, Deleuze contrasts fabricating (machiner) with organising: the latter always means, in his work, arranging in a hierarchy so as to facilitate representation. The subject which psychoanalysis constructs in the familial trinity and which it defines as lack – this is what we must free ourselves from. Psychoanalysis flattens out desire and by so doing, constantly brings it back under the thrall of authorities other than itself, instead of seeing its extraordinary productivity. Psychoanalysis plays thereby a political role, for what is at stake in all this is the formation of the individual within a social field (via the family, the school and sometimes the hospital72). So it is a serious matter. Foucault notes this when he writes concerning the authors of L’Anti-Œdipe: Ils ont essayé de montrer que ce fameux triangle œdipien constitue, pour les analystes qui le manipulent à l’intérieur de la cure, une certaine façon de contenir le désir, d’assurer que le désir ne vient pas s’investir, se répandre dans le monde qui nous entoure, dans le monde historique, que le désir reste à l’intérieur de la famille et se déroule comme un petit drame presque bourgeois entre le père, la mère et le fils.73

L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze, entry ‘D comme désir’ [D for desire]. This theory of desire is easy to grasp if compared with what Deleuze says about montage in his books on cinema. It is also at the heart of the book on Proust. 72 On the topic of the ‘social’ sector, see Deleuze’s postface to Jacques Donzelot’s La Police des familles (Paris: Minuit, 1977). 73 [They have tried to show that the well-known Oedipal triangle constitutes, for the analysts who manipulate it in the course of treatment, a certain way of containing desire, of ensuring that desire does not come to invest itself and spread into the world 71

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He then proceeds to propose a reading of Sophocles’ drama, not as expressing ‘une structure essentielle et fondamentale du désir’,74 but as a text on sovereignty and on Greek judicial practices. Although this is a serious matter, it can also be amusing, as can be seen in Politique et psychanalyse [Politics and Psychoanalysis]:75 Interpréter, faire régresser, régresser. Parmi les pages les plus grotesques de Freud, il y a celles sur la fellatio : comment le pénis vaut ici pour un pis de vache et le pis de vache pour un sein maternel. En d’autres termes, la fellatio, c’est quand on n’a pas de vache sous la main, ou qu’on n’a plus de mère ou qu’elle n’a plus de lait. Façon de montrer que la fellatio n’est pas un ‘vrai désir’, mais veut dire autre chose, cache autre chose, cache un autre désir. C’est que la psychanalyse dispose d’une grille parfaite à cet égard : les vrais contenus de désir, ce seraient les pulsions partielles enfantines ; la véritable expression de désir, ce serait Œdipe (pour structurer ‘le tout’). Dès que le désir agence quelque chose, en rapport avec un Dehors, avec un Devenir, on défait l’agencement, on le casse, on montre qu’il renvoie d’une part à un mécanisme partiel d’enfant, d’autre part à une structure globale d’Œdipe. Ainsi la fellatio : pulsion orale de suçotement de sein plus accident structural œdipien.76

around us, the historical world – that desire remains within the family and unfolds like an almost bourgeois domestic drama between father, mother and son.] Michel Foucault, ‘La vérité et les formes juridiques’ [1974], in Dits et Écrits (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), II, 553. 74 [some essential and fundamental structure of desire] 75 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Politique et psychanalyse (Paris: Des Mots Perdus, 1977) n.p. See also Ch. 3 of Dialogues. 76 [Interpreting, regressing, forcing someone else to regress. Among the most grotesque passages in Freud are those on fellatio: how the penis is in this case the equivalent of a cow’s udder and the cow’s udder the equivalent of the mother’s breast. In other terms, fellatio is when you don’t have a cow handy, or you don’t have a mother any more, or she has run out of milk. It’s a way of showing that fellatio is not a ‘real desire’, but means something else, conceals something else, conceals another desire. Psychoanalysis has at its disposal a perfect interpretative schema: the true contents of desire are supposedly the child’s partial drives; the authentic expression of desire is then the Oedipus complex (there to structure the ‘totality’). As soon as desire arranges something, in relation with an Outside, with a Becoming, you undo the arrangement, you smash it up, you show that it refers on the one hand to one of the child’s partial mechanisms, and on the other to an overall Oedipal structure. Hence fellatio: an oral drive to suck the breast, plus a structural Oedipal accident.] n. p.

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If the unconscious is not a theatre of representation, theatre (dramatic art) must not be one either. Much has been written on Deleuze’s works on cinema, without much attention being paid to the fact that he says that they are not books on cinema, but philosophical books on image, time and movement, which cinema also happens to treat in its own way, as indeed the first film directors such as Jean Epstein thought. On the other hand, Superpositions (1979), a work composed with the theatre (and cinema) director Carmelo Bene, contains a meditation on theatre, the author, the actor and the producer. A Leibnizian meditation, in fact.77 Bene’s method is on the one hand a technique of amputation and on the other an operation of constitution: Si vous amputez Roméo, vous allez assister à un étonnant développement, le développement de Mercuzio, qui n’était qu’une virtualité dans la pièce de Shakespeare. […] La pièce se confond d’abord avec la fabrication du personnage, sa préparation, sa naissance, ses balbutiements, ses variations, son développement.78

So what we have here is a quasi-musical theatre, a theatre of variation, much more than one of the representation and unfolding of identities, powers and destinies.79 This leads to an original discussion of the relations between theatre and politics. Bene’s theatre is not concerned with conflicts, because they are always already codified, institutionalised in the guise of confrontations between character types belonging to the majority. As such, conflicts are already trapped in the straitjacket of representation and always refer

77 Deleuze says clearly that in accounting for the genesis of the ego, ‘il faut toujours revenir au théâtre [baroque] de Leibniz – et non pas aux lourdes machines de Husserl’ [we must always return to the [baroque] theatre of Leibniz – and not to the cumbersome machinery of Husserl] Logique du sens, 138/113. On theatre as presentation, and not representation, see also his texts on Artaud and Beckett. 78 [If you amputate Romeo, you will witness an amazing development, that of Mercutio, who was merely a virtual figure in Shakespeare’s play. […] The play is at first indistinguishable from the fabrication of the character, his preparation, his birth, his first uncertain steps, his variations, his development.] Gilles Deleuze and Carmelo Bene, Superpositions (Paris: Minuit, 1979), 88. 79 Ibid. 113.

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to an Other. What interests Bene, on the contrary, is the presentation of variations, of multiplications of type: Cette fonction anti-représentative [du théâtre moderne], ce serait de tracer, de constituer en quelque sorte une figure de la conscience minoritaire, comme potentialité de chacun. Rendre une potentialité présente, actuelle, c’est tout autre chose que représenter un conflit. On ne pourrait plus dire que l’art a un pouvoir, qu’il est encore du pouvoir, même quand il critique le Pouvoir. Car, en dressant la forme d’une conscience minoritaire, il s’adresserait à des puissances de devenir, qui sont d’un autre domaine que celui du Pouvoir et de la représentation-étalon.80

The politics of this text is yet again a politics of the ‘intempestif ’ [untimely], of a becoming, and not of a history, of a dream of past or future.81 The theatre, henceforth viewed as presentation, and not representation, is a good means to this end.

Body without organs and faciality If Deleuze extols desire, it is not in the sense of Psychoanalysis and its roles, but in the sense of a philosophy of life as variation and creation, in the sense of Surrealism, of an extremism of reality (the phrase is Artaud’s, who is a

80 [This anti-representative function [of modern theatre] would thus consist in outlining, in constituting as it were a figure of minority consciousness, as the potentiality of each and every person. To make a potentiality present and actual is quite different from representing a conflict. It would no longer be possible to say that art has a power, that it is still a form of power, even when criticising Power. By forming a minority consciousness, it would address the potential powers of becoming, which belong to a different realm from that of Power and the yardstick of representation.] Ibid. 125. 81 Ibid. 95.

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constant and crucial reference point for this philosophy).82 Literature is then constantly posited as what shatters the limits of the Self: Certes, les personnages littéraires sont parfaitement individués, et ne sont ni vagues ni généraux ; mais tous leurs traits individuels les élèvent à une vision qui les emportent dans un indéfini comme un devenir trop puissant pour eux : Achab et la vision de Moby Dick. […] Il n’y a pas de littérature sans fabulation, mais, comme Bergson a su le voir, la fabulation, la fonction fabulatrice ne consiste pas à imaginer ni à projeter un moi. Elle atteint plutôt à ces visions, elle s’élève jusqu’à ces devenirs ou puissances.83

By taking the notion of ‘corps sans organes’ [body without organs] from Artaud, Deleuze ultimately defines being as sensation. What makes this notion difficult is the fact that it is most often presented negatively. The organised body is a hierarchical, fixed structure, the end product of an evolution. The body without organs is at first the origin, the egg and its surface, smooth but crisscrossed by zones of potentiality. Now if we study the practices that Deleuze investigates in Présentation de SacherMasoch and (with Félix Guattari) in Mille plateaux: masochistic contracts, anorexia, the experiences with drugs of Michaux or Burroughs, Artaud’s schizophrenia, etc., what they all have in common is the way they produce, in the body itself, the experience of a ‘nomadic’, ‘deterritorialised’ desire, a desire unlinked to any object, interior or exterior, a desire that could not be encapsulated as a lack hollowing it out, or as a pleasure that could satisfy

82

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Deleuze often refers to Artaud’s article on the body without organs published in 84, 5–6 (1948). See also the texts in Suppôts et suppliciations (Antonin Artaud, Œuvres complètes, 28 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), VIII. René Girard astutely noted the link with Surrealism, in a deeply critical review of L’Anti-Œdipe (Critique 306 (November 1972), 990). [Of course, literary characters are perfectly individuated, and are neither vague nor general; but all their individual traits elevate them to a vision that carries them off in an indefinite, like a becoming that is too powerful for them: Ahab and the vision of Moby-Dick. […] There is no literature without fabulation, but as Bergson was able to see, fabulation – the fabulating function – does not consist in imagining or projecting an ego. Rather, it attains these visions, it raises itself to these becomings and powers.] Critique et clinique, 3/Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 13.

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it, and so could not be assigned to any organic function or subjectivity. A desire conceived as the construction of a series of intensities and not as a tendency. Without this, of course, we would see the return of transcendence, of priests and gurus.84 So it is not surprising that at this point, references to the fifth part of Spinoza’s Ethics, and to Spinoza’s theory of affects and the conatus, appear.85 The opposite of this theme, dated 28 November 1947 in Mille Plateaux (the date of a letter written by Artaud), is the theme of visagéité [faciality], which is dated to the year zero.86 This is the theme of Christ and an evolution in western civilisation, in which subjectivation is carried out by the development of a particular device, the face. On this point, Deleuze’s thinking has not changed since his 1946 article ‘Le Christ et la bourgeoisie’. This supposes to begin with that ‘la tête, même humaine, n’est pas forcément visage, [que] le visage est produit dans l’humanité, mais par une nécessité qui n’est pas celle des hommes en général. […] Ce qui compte, ce n’est pas l’individualité du visage, mais l’efficacité du chiffrage qu’il permet d’opérer’.87 So if the abstract machine of faciality (abstract with relation to the head and the body) is put into operation, it is because ‘certains agencements de pouvoir ont besoin de production de visage’.88 Some surprise has been expressed at the analyses of faciality as a process of subjection by the machines of power. This process was linked to the invention of racism as a way of defining as deviant certain differences, a system which replaced previous systems of exclusion. But it is easy to read these analyses as a new critique of philosophies of communication and their correlative notions of the other and alterity. This is confirmed, from a radically different point of

84 Mille Plateaux, 190/154. 85 See in particular, in Spinoza. Philosophie pratique (2nd edn), the article ‘Affections, affects’, and Ch. VI: ‘Spinoza et nous’. 86 Mille Plateaux, 205–34/167–91. 87 [the head, even the human head, is not necessarily a face, [that] the face is produced in humanity, but through a necessity which is not that of men and women in general. […] What counts is not the individuality of the face, but the efficiency of the assessment it makes possible.] Mille Plateaux, 209/170. 88 [certain arrangements of power need a face to be produced] Mille Plateaux, 215/175.

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view, by Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy of the face, which indeed posits the face as transcendence, and sees in it the first assignation to an ethical order.89 But what interests us from the point of view of Deleuze’s conception of individuation is the idea that the body without organs is first and foremost a body without a face, a body which refuses to accept transcendence. It is perhaps in his discussion of Francis Bacon’s painting that Deleuze has most clearly brought out this logic, not of sense, but of sensation, in which the body without organ consists.90 For what Bacon constantly attempts to do is escape from the domination of representation, to return to a faceless head, a body that effaces itself, or defaces itself, displaying, in negative fashion, what the features of faciality or identity are. It thus detaches itself from figuration towards the Figure,91 but without ever wanting to pass over into abstraction. Now this path of the Figure, according to Cézanne (followed here by Bacon), is to paint in such a way as to directly produce a sensation, the affect of a sensible form immediately related to the nervous system. Hence the link between Artaud and Bacon.92 Modern painting, forced by

89 Levinas speaks of the ‘droiture extrême du visage du prochain déchirant les formes plastiques du phénomène’ [extreme uprightness in the face of my fellow man, rending the plasticity of the phenomenon]. He continues: ‘Droiture d’une exposition à la mort, sans défense; et, avant tout langage et avant toute mimique, une demande à moi adressée du fond d’une absolue solitude; demande adressée ou ordre signifié, mise en question de ma présence et ma responsabilité’ [Uprightness of an exposure to death, defenceless; and, before all language, and before all mimicry, a demand made of me from the depths of an absolute solitude; a demand addressed to me as an order issued, a putting in question of my presence and my responsibility] (Emmanuel Levinas, ‘La conscience non-intentionnelle’, in Entre nous: Essais sur le penser-à-l’autre (Paris: Grasset, 1991), 149/Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (London: Athlone Press, 1998), 130). These texts could be compared with Proust’s descriptions of faces as traps organised around points of fascination. A good example is the celebrated passage describing monocles at the beginning of the Sainte-Euverte soirée, in Du côté de chez Swann (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), I, 321–2/The Way By Swann’s, trans. Lydia Davis (London: Penguin, 2002) 329–30. 90 Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation, 2 vols (Paris: La Différence, 1981). 91 Ibid. 27. 92 Ibid. 33.

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photography to liberate itself from representation (an obsessive theme in Bacon) ‘se propose directement de dégager les présences sous la représentation, par-delà la représentation’.93 Painting has, adds Deleuze, a fundamental relation with hysteria, in the total self-abandonment to presence.94 Présence interminable. Insistance du sourire au-delà du visage et sous le visage. Insistance d’un cri qui subsiste à la bouche, insistance d’un corps qui subsiste à l’organisme, insistance des organes transitoires qui subsistent aux organes qualifiés. Et l’identité d’un déjà-là et d’un toujours en retard, dans la présence excessive. Partout une présence agit directement sur le système nerveux et rend impossible la mise en place ou à distance d’une représentation. C’est ce que Sartre voulait dire aussi quand il se disait hystérique, et parlait de l’hystérie de Flaubert.95

This figural painting depicts the dissolution of the transcendence of form over matter. Thus, even the horror of life can be transformed into a very pure and very intense life. Baudelaire had noted the same thing, and he too developed an aesthetic uniting the figure (the preliminary sketch) to the event. Indeed, Deleuze quotes Baudelaire,96 in connection with Leiris’ text on the poem ‘Une Charogne’ [A Carcass], a text which had struck Bacon. Thus it is not surprising that the final obsession of the paradoxical portrait painter and the singular philosopher should be a becoming-imperceptible. Becoming which they also call a ‘devenir-Sahara’ [becoming-Sahara], simultaneously pure multiplicity and infinite individuation.

93

[sets out directly to bring out the presences beneath representation, beyond representation] Ibid. 36. 94 ‘Hysteria’ is taken in Francis Bacon in the sense of the psychiatric picture of it that emerged during the nineteenth century: a catalogue of spasms and trances. 95 Ibid. 36. 96 Ibid. 80.

Chapter 9

Poétique de l’identité vécue comme hasard (Perse, Michaux, Deleuze, Glissant)1

Quand Lautréamont définit la beauté comme rencontre, c’est pour y injecter, contre la tradition classique, du fortuit, de l’aléa. On peut aller chercher quelqu’un ou assembler deux objets, mais aller à la rencontre de quelqu’un, faire se rencontrer deux choses, c’est déjà se donner le supplément d’un imprévu, ne serait-ce que sur le point d’intersection ou sur l’effet de l’agencement. La rencontre ne peut toutefois se réduire au hasard des trajectoires de deux mobiles. Certes c’est une étrange image que cette table de dissection où se rencontrent fortuitement une machine à coudre et un parapluie, puisque au lieu qu’y soient méthodiquement détachées les parties intégrantes d’un organisme biologique, on y trouve rapprochés des artefacts sans lien aucun. Mais elle a le mérite de souligner que pour être fortuite, c’est-à-dire non pré-ordonnée dans un esprit, il n’en faut pas moins que toute rencontre ait lieu dans un espace qui lui soit propre en ce qu’il la sépare et la distingue de l’infinité des coexistences observables dans le monde. Loin d’être seulement un tiers objet, juxtaposé aux deux autres, la table de dissection délimite un espace précis, cliniquement pur de tout tiers contingent, où peut s’observer (ou non) une coprésence singulière et s’effectuer cette prise involontaire mais inexorable qui caractérise la série de comparaisons où figure celle-ci chez Lautréamont.2 Lorsque s’ouvre un espace de rencontre, en dépit de 1

2

Une première version de ce texte a été publiée dans La Rencontre, sous la direction de Dominique Berthet, Recherches en Esthétique (revue du Centre d’Études et de Recherches en Esthétique et Arts Plastiques de l’Université des Antilles et de la Guyane), 12 (octobre 2006). « Il est beau comme la rétractabilité des serres des oiseaux rapaces ; ou encore, comme l’incertitude des mouvements musculaires dans les plaies des parties molles de la région cervicale postérieure ; ou plutôt, comme ce piège à rats perpétuel, toujours

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son étrangeté même, une association de hasard peut acquérir un contenu déterminé, selon plusieurs axes possibles : forme (carré/ligne : la machine est carrée, le parapluie linéaire), matière (lourd/léger), espace (intérieur/ extérieur), ergonomie (inamovible/portable), fonction (production/protection), psychosociologie (mère/père), etc., et leurs combinaisons. Il n’y a donc rencontre que s’il y a d’une part distance, différence et même opposition (le « contre » de rencontre et de contradiction) entre deux entités, mais aussi, d’autre part, la possibilité que s’abolissent ou s’estompent leurs frontières propres au bénéfice d’une démarcation les englobant, l’espace (temporairement) unifié de leurs différences qui permet une détermination nouvelle de chacun des éléments. On ne peut donc faire une rencontre, que si l’on s’ouvre à (ce) qui advient. « S’ouvrir à » doit s’entendre ici aussi comme pronominal car une rencontre, comme telle, et à la différence du simple choc ou de l’intersection sans lendemain, suppose une transformation des termes de la relation, l’acquisition d’une nouvelle « identité ». Il résulte souvent de cette transformation l’oubli de sa contingence initiale. C’est le cas de tous les processus de familiarisation : il n’est pas facile de se remémorer l’étrangeté ou l’indifférence première d’un visage ou d’un lieu devenus familiers. L’espace de la table de dissection, tout comme celui de la galerie ou du musée, pour les ready-made de Duchamp, réalise donc l’ouverture d’un champ de conscience qui soit continument la condition et l’effet d’une rencontre. L’idée d’une transformation ou même d’une autoproduction du moi, ou du moins d’un champ de conscience transitoire (à supposer qu’il y ait une différence), pour et par la rencontre de l’autre, est un thème constant de la modernité. Ainsi, avec l’empirisme en philosophie, les idées sont-elles conçues comme naissant de la rencontre répétée des événements. Le sujet peut alors se réfléchir non comme spectateur détaché mais comme la synthèse continue de l’histoire de ses rencontres. Dans la conception empiriste de la causalité comme probabilité, le moi, comme nature humaine (au sens retendu par l’animal pris, qui peut prendre seul des rongeurs indéfiniment, et fonctionner même caché sous la paille ; et surtout, comme la rencontre fortuite sur une table de dissection d’une machine à coudre et d’un parapluie ! » Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), VI/3.

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newtonien de « nature ») n’est pensable que comme la somme des forces d’association des événements de conscience. Deleuze y a insisté à propos de Hume dans Empirisme et Subjectivité,3 conception de la subjectivité figurée plus tard à l’ouverture du Neveu de Rameau de Diderot, où d’emblée la linéarité méditative d’un ordre des raisons ne peut plus représenter l’espace du dedans, lequel est plutôt comparé à l’espace bi- ou tridimensionnel d’un jardin public ou d’un café, espace du hasard des rencontres. La poétique de Mallarmé étend cette conception de la subjectivité au langage puisque dans sa poétique le sujet rencontrera le réel dans l’acte renouvelé, rafraichi, de nomination, par un travail qui rende toujours perceptible l’étymologie, l’origine réelle ou supposée des mots les plus courants. Cela passe par la dis-location des structures syntaxiques, désormais projetées sur l’espace de la page et par la combinatoire des virtualités de sens qui en résulte – un espace mental qui libère l’« intériorité » psychologique de sa temporalité où se tenaient fort à l’étroit, auparavant les virtualités du texte poétique. Avec le surréalisme, l’imaginaire est pensé non plus comme représentation d’un objet possible par le moi « au sein » d’une conscience rêveuse, mais comme synthèse d’objets aux rapports aussi distants (mais justes) que possible, selon la formule de Reverdy. On pourrait multiplier les exemples, mais on voit bien qu’au lieu que le monde soit pensé comme spectacle total, faisant face à un moi préconstitué dans ses structures perceptives, conceptuelles et discursives, les subjectivités résultent de rencontres réelles ou imaginaires « dans » le monde, rencontres qui font et défont continuellement ces structures de représentation ou d’action. La subjectivité semble naître, comme événement ou avènement continué, dans l’espace de la rencontre. Or ce modèle du moi libéré du mythe d’une identité originaire ou, comme dit Glissant « atavique », suscite une pensée du tout-monde (l’intériorité comme un espace baroque où l’un reflète tous les autres), mais produit aussi paradoxalement, dans la pratique littéraire ou artistique, la volonté de maîtriser ou au moins de susciter les conditions de la rencontre, ne serait-ce qu’en voulant « choquer ». Certes on retrouve avec l’idée de choc une notion plutôt naïve de la rencontre, mais la naïveté peut être 3

Empirisme et Subjectivité (Paris : Presses universitaires de France, 1953). Voir supra, Chapitre 9.

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revendiquée comme valeur car le choc lui-même peut être instrument de production, par exemple dans Dada ou dans le Lettrisme.4 Mais peut-on vouloir systématiquement se déprendre des cadres du familier sans tomber dans l’exotique, l’artificiel ou l’extravagant, et du coup recréer presque aussitôt la familiarité la plus profonde, celle de l’altérité de l’objet et de l’identité du sujet, c’est à dire la différence du non-moi ? Il y a bien peu d’avant-gardes qui ne se laissent récupérer comme spectacle, car on a vite fait d’y percevoir la décision d’un sujet surplombant le plan des rencontres inattendues qu’il orchestre, et qui se donne ainsi en représentation, même si ce sujet s’attaque aux structures de la perception des ensembles et de l’espace, à la langue, aux rythmes de la conscience, aux traditions et systèmes intellectuels, et en général à toutes les formes qui organisent une culture donnée et produisent ce que l’on appelle un sentiment de familiarité. Du rejet moderne de l’ontologie substantialiste du moi (individuel ou collectif ) on croit naïvement pouvoir passer directement à une technologie de production de nouvelles identités alors qu’on retrouve en fait le vieux schéma du génie.5 Certains auteurs ont fait des écueils de la dissolution volontaire du moi dans l’orchestration littéraire ou philosophique de la pure rencontre un axe de leurs œuvres. Les remarques qui suivent envisagent brièvement quatre exemples, qui la considèrent selon des perspectives différentes, la perception de l’espace extérieur, la vitesse et les rythmes de la conscience, le problème de l’origine des problèmes qui mettent une pensée en mouvement

4

5

Isou fait d’ailleurs physiquement du roman un espace de rencontre par l’entrechoc des objets qu’il y insère. Ainsi par exemple son roman au titre autoréférentiel, Le Grand désordre, roman, précédé d’Essai sur la fresque ou Le Roman hypergraphique polyautomatique (Paris : Auteur-Éditeur Isidore Isou, 1963). Voir Frédéric Acquaviva : « Le Grand désordre, roman supertemporel, […] se présente sous la forme d’une enveloppe contrecollée dans une mince brochure, où l’on doit enlever ou déposer n’importe quel élément susceptible de faire rebondir la dite narration romanesque […] ». F. Acquaviva, « Jean-Petithory et le livre lettriste », in Jean Khalfa (éd.), Hands free/ Les Mains libre (Cambridge: Black Apollo Press, 2013), 48. C’est d’un tel dilemme que Foucault traite dans un remarquable texte repris en appendice à L’Histoire de la folie, « La folie l’absence d’œuvre » (Michel Foucault, Œuvres, 2 vols (Paris : Gallimard, 2015) I, 615–23. Voir aussi la préface à la première édition de ce livre (1961), Ibid. 661–9).

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et en ce sens la définissent, et la question des rapports de la pensée moderne à d’autres pensées. Les auteurs sont Saint-John Perse, poète de la dispersion dans l’espace, mais toujours soucieux d’éviter l’exotisme ; Michaux, fasciné, emporté presque, par l’ailleurs que les psychotropes révèlent au sein du moi, mais artisan méthodique d’une lucidité supérieure; Deleuze, s’attachant paradoxalement et secrètement à construire une philosophie de l’histoire de la pensée philosophique comme événement et non comme avènement; Glissant, s’attachant à définir un nouveau mode où l’écriture ne serait plus que la synthèse de différences.

Dispersion L’un des premiers écueils d’une poétique de la rencontre, c’est bien entendu l’exotisme. La ligne est mince qui sépare l’exaltation d’un étranger bariolé que les autochtones finissent bien souvent par imiter et même à revendiquer comme originaire, et la dissolution que l’on voudrait irrémédiable des certitudes constitutives de sa propre culture. C’était déjà l’une des préoccupations de Montesquieu, dans ses Lettres persanes. Bien que poète de l’errance et de l’exil, Saint-John Perse est l’un des poètes qui se soit le plus distingué de l’exotisme, peut-être parce que comme antillais, il en était le plus menacé : […] Son universalité ne fréquente pas l’exotisme, elle en exprime, non pas seulement l’austère critique, mais la négation naturelle.6

Perse voyait dans la poésie la vitalité d’une perspective philosophique présocratique, visant à restaurer dans l’expérience du poème l’authenticité de la conscience dans son rapport premier ou sauvage au monde, avant les idées et la culture. Aussi écrivait-il à Roger Caillois qui lui consacrait un livre (le 26 janvier 1953) : 6

Édouard Glissant, Poétique de la Relation (Paris : Gallimard, 1990), 50.

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Un rhéisme qu’illustre bien ce passage de Vents : Ainsi croissantes et sifflantes au tournant de notre âge, [de très grandes forces en croissance sur toutes pistes de ce monde] descendaient des hautes passes avec ce sifflement nouveau où nul n’a reconnu sa race, […] Ha ! dispersant – qu’elles dispersent ! disions-nous – toute pierre jubilaire et toute stèle fautive, Elles nous restituaient un soir la face brève de la terre, où susciter un cent de vierges et d’aurochs parmi l’hysope et la gentiane.8

Sa quête fondamentale, celle d’un rapport à l’infini actif, en expansion continuée, quête de véritable dispersion, implique un questionnement du moi par une écriture privilégiant structurellement le mouvement dans l’espace et le devenir dans le temps. Si nous sommes loin d’une poésie exotique, qu’il s’agisse d’un exotisme archéologique (les grandes civilisations englouties) ou géographique (poésie doudou des Antilles),9 c’est que bien loin d’admirer le spectacle de l’autre, le moi persien est toujours emporté par son objet. Il s’exotise lui-même. Lorsque l’espace perd ses bornes, lorsque le déplacement est sans but, sans origine, sans claire direction, alors le temps, pensé ici non comme cadre formel stable ou géométrique de l’expérience, mais comme « face brève de la terre », peut nous être enfin « restitué ». 7 8 9

OC, 562 sq. OC, 184. Suzanne Césaire marque bien les limites de la poésie exotique dans un important article de Tropiques 4 (1942), 49. (Reprint Paris : Michel Place, 1978).

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Comment Perse procède-t-il pour effectuer une telle « déterritorialisation » ? Considérons un texte d’apparence particulièrement exotique : J’ai rêvé, l’autre soir, d’îles plus vertes que le songe … et les navigateurs descendent au rivage en quête d’une eau bleue ; ils voient – c’est le reflux – le lit refait des sables ruisselants : la mer arborescente y laisse, s’enlisant, ces pures empreintes capillaires, comme de grandes palmes suppliciées, de grandes filles extasiées qu’elle couche en larmes dans leurs pagnes et dans leurs tresses dénouées. Et ce sont là figurations du songe. […] Amers10

Il ne s’agit pas ici d’ornementations ou d’accessoires puisés dans un fond commun de clichés, comme dans la poésie coloniale, clichés qui représenteraient l’ailleurs par négation du même ou par simple convention. C’est plutôt la représentation d’un processus d’élaboration dynamique (« figurations » et non « figures » du songe), désir construisant, structurant un champ de conscience défini comme rêve ou songe actif, tableau avec projection verticale du vert de l’île et le bleu de la mer, mais où « descendent » les navigateurs vers le rivage. Le déclencheur de ces figurations est une illusion d’optique : les empreintes en creux de la mer dans le « lit refait des sables » – sables et eau, modèle rhéiste, s’il en est, de l’univers en perpétuelle métamorphose –, créent le relief de grandes filles extasiées par l’intermédiaire de leur forme de palmes suppliciées. La violence d’un désir donne forme à l’ambiguïté du donné perceptif, le transforme, et la métaphore du rêve de l’île sensuelle est comme phagocytée par la prolifération imaginaire (la mer arborescente, s’enlisant, les palmes suppliciées, les pagnes et les tresses). Ce désir n’est pas désir d’un Autre, comme non-moi, à l’instar de l’exotisme traditionnel, mais plutôt processus d’altération ou création du moi à partir des virtualités de composition de formes que la conscience découvre dans le donné sensible. Il pourrait donc être dit nomade, non pas fixation sur une chose en elle-même, mais plutôt synthèse renouvelée du paysage où l’on se meut. Inversement, le paysage n’est jamais seulement un spectacle extérieur, mais suscite un moi éperdu, matrice de mondes possibles. L’exotisme ne célèbre l’ailleurs que pour renforcer par contraste les certitudes du moi 10

OC, 327 sq.

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à l’intérieur d’une identité délimitée. Poésie du paysage comme désir, la poésie de Perse est un érotisme plus qu’un exotisme.11 Plus généralement d’ailleurs, on pourrait dire que la poétique de la rencontre se fonde davantage sur l’hétéroclite que sur l’exotique. Souvent, chez Perse, il s’agit de rassembler des fragments, de choses ou d’événements, pour créer des images à la fois familières et inattendues, des configurations semblant témoigner de mystérieuses civilisations. Ainsi, Amitié du prince semble s’ouvrir sur une incise au sein d’une harangue prophétique : Et toi plus maigre qu’il ne sied au tranchant de l’esprit, homme aux narines minces parmi nous, ô Très-Maigre ! ô Subtil ! Prince vêtu de tes sentences ainsi qu’un arbre sous bandelettes, aux soirs de grande sécheresse sur la terre, lorsque les hommes en voyage disputent des choses de l’esprit adossés en chemin à de très grandes jarres, j’ai entendu parler de toi de ce côté du monde, et la louange n’était point maigre […] La Gloire des Rois, 192412

L’effet produit par l’abrupt de ces ouvertures est le sentiment de vivre tout à coup l’ordinaire d’un monde autre (comme dans l’Ailleurs de Michaux, mais sans l’indicateur d’extériorité qu’est la voix du voyageur ou du reporter). Perse n’assemble pas simplement des faits et des objets étonnants, dignes d’un journal de voyage ou d’un « cabinet de curiosités » et qui témoigneraient par contraste d’une culture et d’une perspective particulière, choses qui sont précisément ce qu’il cherche à dépasser. Les faits, les personnes et les objets singuliers sont évalués, mesurés en fonction de critères obscurs, ou sont simplement évoqués au détour d’une phrase, détachés d’une chaîne ordinaire de causes et de circonstances qui auraient pu justifier leur présence. Ils n’ont aucune valeur ou signification perceptibles en eux-mêmes, qui pourrait les définir comme exceptionnels par rapport à une norme. Mais c’est en cela que réside précisément leur fonction poétique : l’écriture du texte est telle que nous ne pouvons que les percevoir

11

12

Voir Jean Khalfa « Saint-John Perse, immanence et création du plan absolu », Actes du Colloque « Saint-John Perse : Atlantique et Méditerranée », Tunis, 2004, textes réunies et présentés par Samia Kassab-Charfi et Loïc Céry, La Nouvelle Anabase – Revue D’études Persiennes 3 (novembre 2007), et, supra, Chapitre 1. OC, 65.

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comme étranges, irréductibles aux abstractions, aux contours et aux bornes que nous utilisons machinalement pour classifier la masse des singularités expérimentées constamment dans le monde. Si Perse est hétéroclite, c’est donc qu’il se veut héraclitéen. Il faut lire beaucoup de ces textes et lorsqu’est établi ce qu’il appelle le plan absolu, impersonnel, sans hiérarchie conceptuelle, constitué par des réalités et des mouvements échappant encore à toute mesure commune, alors seulement une subjectivité créatrice peut être aperçue, mais elle n’est que mouvement, et la voix poétique s’apparente aux mouvements des vents : Flairant la pourpre, le cilice, flairant l’ivoire et le tesson, flairant le monde entier des choses, Et qui couraient à leur office sur nos plus grands versets d’athlètes, de poètes, C’étaient de très grands vents en quête sur toutes pistes de ce monde, Sur toutes choses périssables, sur toutes choses saisissables, parmi le monde entier des choses … Vents (1946 et 1960)13

Loin de célébrer une beauté préexistante dans le monde, forcément définie par contraste avec un certain état de la culture, Perse met sur le même plan « toutes choses » : « pourpre » et « cilice », « ivoire » et « tesson ». S’il ne faisait qu’exhiber l’inhabituel, l’extraordinaire, ce serait un spectacle, et il conforterait ainsi le moi et l’autre dans une relation à la fois spectaculaire et spéculaire. Or il abandonne les normes qui permettent de relier toutes les singularités d’un niveau donné sous des unités de niveau supérieur, objets et buts, concepts ou narrations. Le travail poétique nous entraîne ainsi à percevoir la singularité de ce qui advient (« choses périssables », « choses saisissables »), ce que l’on pourrait appeler l’« éventualité » du donné, qu’il soit naturel ou culturel. Cela ne signifie pas que la poésie soit rencontre et célébration d’un ineffable, d’un impensable, mais qu’elle est conscience continuée ou présence à l’acte d’organisation d’un monde à partir de l’expérience. En eux-mêmes les éléments du poème n’ont donc de signification que comme matériau brut de l’intuition. Même s’ils ont pour origine la vie et la culture du poète, ils sont détachés, élaborés, et deviennent le truchement par lequel peut se 13

OC, 179.

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révéler la singularité des événements, habituellement dissimulée par l’évidence que le langage accorde aux abstractions qui les regroupent. Roger Caillois nomme élégamment ce processus : Richesse de l’unique.14 Perse lui écrivit dans la lettre que nous venons de citer : [La] deuxième partie de mon œuvre publiée ne tend pas moins que la première aux transpositions, stylisations et créations du plan absolu.15

Cette poésie est vécue,16 contre l’abstraction, mais aussi détachée d’impressions ou d’affects personnels. Instrument des créations du « plan absolu »,17 elle permet l’expérience du devenir et du mouvement de l’intérieur, pour ainsi dire, non à travers les représentations de leurs objets, de leurs causes et effets (comme dans le traditionnel poème épique), et avant les concepts qui figent le mouvement. Sa métrique n’est pas un outil rhétorique ou un accompagnement, mais une tension vers le mouvement ou sa fréquentation, pas sa représentation. Ce « rhéisme » héraclitéen indique un effort pour aller au-delà de tout point de vue, en particulier humain, mais aussi mythique et divin, « sur » et « à propos de » ce qui est, au-delà donc aussi de toute biographie au sens d’une expression ou célébration d’un

14 15 16 17

Roger Caillois, « Poésie de la réalité », Poétique de Saint-John Perse (Paris : Gallimard, 1954), 149. OC, 562 sq. « A la question toujours posée : pourquoi écrivez-vous ? » la réponse du poète sera toujours la plus brève : « Pour mieux vivre » OC, 562. Le plan de ce qui est, est absolu, plan d’immanence sans au-delà. En son sein de multiples structurations ou synthèses ont lieu. Certaines engendrent même l’idée qu’elles résultent d’un point de vue supérieur, Dieu transcendant ou bien Moi transcendantal. Il faut en fait les percevoir comme des figurations ou compositions possibles au sein du plan. Il est difficile de ne pas citer ici Deleuze et Guattari sur les présocratiques : « […] les premiers philosophes sont ceux qui instaurent un plan d’immanence comme un crible tendu sur le chaos. Ils s’opposent en ce sens aux Sages, qui sont des personnages de la religion, des prêtres, parce qu’ils conçoivent l’instauration d’un ordre toujours transcendant, imposé du dehors par un grand despote ou par un dieu supérieur aux autres […]. Il y a religion chaque fois qu’il y a transcendance, Être vertical, État impérial au ciel ou sur la terre, et il y a Philosophie chaque fois qu’il y a immanence, même si elle sert d’arène à l’agôn et à la rivalité. » Qu’est-ce que la Philosophie ? (Paris : Minuit, 1991), 45–6.

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moi existant. Ce qui est en jeu n’est pas d’élever le singulier à l’universel, de donner une légende ou des héros. Il s’agit plutôt de créer les instruments pour s’ouvrir encore à la rencontre du fonds où se trace la vie : Aux porches où nous levons la torche rougeoyante, aux antres où plonge notre vue, comme le bras nu des femmes, jusqu’à l’aisselle, dans les vaisseaux de grain d’offrande et la fraîcheur sacrée des jarres, C’est une promesse semée d’yeux comme il n’en fut aux hommes jamais faite, Et la maturation, soudain, d’un autre monde au plein midi de notre nuit … Tout l’or en fèves de vos Banques, aux celliers de l’État, n’achèterait point l’usage d’un tel fonds. Vents18

Les « porches », « antres », « vaisseaux » et « jarres » de ce poème abritent un infini : le singulier, et l’infinité des mondes ou des paysages qu’il permet à chacun de composer. Nulle monnaie, nul équivalent universel, nul numéraire, pour reprendre l’expression de Mallarmé désignant l’usage ordinaire, à valeur représentative, du langage, avec ses abstractions reçues, ses sédimentations de sens, ne pourrait libérer cet infini. Ainsi, la poésie n’est pas seulement un autre style de vie, mais au-delà de la séparation qu’est la « connaissance », un « nouveau commerce » ou une communauté de la conscience et de l’infinie singularité, toujours déjà présente mais toujours aussi obscurcie par l’exercice ordinaire du langage. On comprend pourquoi Perse abhorre la bipolarité de l’exotisme, et inscrit le nom qu’il s’est choisi dans la dispersion. Soulignant paradoxalement l’importance de certains lieux comme espaces d’errance (plutôt que terres natales) Glissant, qui écrivait de Perse que le poète « consacrera l’alliance de l’ailleurs et du possible », le résume bien : Si Perse était venu à un autre monde, s’il était venu ailleurs au monde, il eût certes été plus contraint par des enracinements, des atavismes, une glu de terre qui l’eût attaché ferme. La naissance antillaise, au contraire, le laisse ouvert à l’errance. L’univers pour l’errant n’est pas donné comme monde que le concret limite mais comme passion d’universel ancrée au concret.19

* 18 19

OC, 228. Le Discours antillais (Paris : Gallimard, 1997), 226.

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Turbulences L’expérience de la dispersion dans l’espace et le temps du monde, peut aussi avoir lieu dans « l’espace du dedans » comme l’a nommé Michaux,20 et ce en particulier quand se révèlent le choc des diverses temporalités de la conscience : Celui qui a pris une drogue hallucinogène, et celui qui n’est victime que de la drogue sécrétée en son corps par ses organes mêmes, l’un comme l’autre il ne sait quoi de mouvant le traverse, fait de multiples, insaisissables, incessantes modifications. Fini le solide. Fini le continu et le calme. Une certaine infime danse est partout.21

Autre poète de l’ailleurs, Michaux n’a cessé de tenter de résoudre le dilemme de la rencontre mais par l’autre bout : comment se déprendre de soi et dépasser les cadres de la représentation sans tomber pour autant dans le chaos ou le spectacle (la « foire ») ? Les œuvres sur et sous divers hallucinogènes traitent peut-être plus radicalement du problème que ses récits de voyages, réels ou imaginaires, car c’est à l’attaque directe de lui-même que part ici le soi. L’expérience de la drogue chez Michaux peut le plus souvent se lire à trois niveaux : tout d’abord une fascination un peu ironique pour le miraculeux, le clinquant de l’imaginaire libéré par l’hallucinogène. Michaux parle souvent de ces images sur un ton assez réjouissant de distance amusée,22 un peu comme d’une transhumance d’animaux trop insistants ou de catalogues de dieux populaires et bariolés. Fastidieuses théogonies, assez piètre miracle en effet. Puis vient un intérêt précis, scientifique, non plus pour les formes et matières de la représentation, mais pour les rythmes d’apparition 20 L’Espace du dedans (1927–1959), Pages choisies (Paris : Gallimard, 1944 ; éd. revue et augmentée, Collection Poésie/Gallimard, 1998). 21 OC III, 102. 22 Blanchot note très justement que « Michaux a toujours été extraordinairement naturel dans l’extraordinaire, mais ici [Misérable miracle] il est naturel avec une calme autorité qui réjouit l’esprit […] ». « L’infini et l’infini », Cahier Michaux, éd. Raymond Bellour (Paris : L’Herne, 1966).

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et de déformation des images et des sensations. Tel est l’objet des relevés sismiques, des dessins et des peintures mescaliniennes. C’est ici, et non pas dans le bric-à-brac imaginatif, qu’il trouve à la fois le matériau de son art pictural et la plus grande proximité de la folie, car la conscience, loin d’être seulement spectatrice émerveillée, est immédiatement emportée. Ce qui est en jeu alors, fondamentalement, c’est la vitesse des mouvements de formation et de modification du champ de conscience. Mais il s’intéresse aussi finalement au « merveilleux normal », c’est à dire à cet état de normalité ou de maîtrise où l’on « revient à soi », écrit-il,23 un soi maître chez lui, mais à distance, et qui se perçoit désormais non plus comme un être, mais comme un ralentissement et une réflexion de la pensée sur les processus infiniment rapides qui constituent son essence, réflexion toutefois jamais détachée du souvenir et du risque des expériences dont la mémoire désormais l’habite. L’objet de cette rencontre finalement, ce ne sont pas les dieux extravagants de l’Infini turbulent, mais une compréhension du « moi ». La première étape est découverte du réel comme infini proliférant, dans sa matérialité aussi bien que sa forme. Ainsi, pour la matière, avec le haschisch : Le grès, le schiste (dont je me fiche bien en temps ordinaire), les scories, le soufre natif, le silex, des pépites d’or ou de cuivre, des tuyaux de plomb, le cuir, la peau, une couenne, apparaissaient comme au regard d’un géologue ou d’un artisan. Tapis de haute laine, sabots de cheval ou de brebis, et aussi le grenu, le piquant, le bosselé, le ligneux, le ridé, le poreux, le noueux, l’humide aussi et le creux, le coudé, tout cela revient « nature ».24

Maintenant domine ce que cachait la conscience ordinaire ou plutôt ce qu’elle résumait ou intégrait, énorme réservoir présent d’inaperçu. Submergé de détails, le drogué se perd dans la matière, l’expérience du monde de la sensation, un contenu dont Leibniz disait qu’il était infini mais toujours obscur à la conscience en fonction de sa place dans la création, comme le bruit de chaque vaguelette est imperceptible dans le grondement de l’océan et pourtant constituant indispensable de la perception d’ensemble. 23 Michaux, OC III, 316. 24 Ibid. III, 71.

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Ou bien, en particulier avec la baroque mescaline, ce sont les formes et les virtualités de formes qui prolifèrent : Des ruines, de fausses ruines tremblantes. Des ornements emberlificotés (ornements dans l’ornement de l’ornement) qui se mettent partout jusque, par exemple, dans une troupe de coureurs que vous regardiez et qui, sans raison, soudain s’enrubanne, s’enserpentine, s’enroule en boucles, en boucles de boucles, en volutes inarrêtables …25

Enfin, fourmillement de matières et de formes se combinent pour intensifier la présence des objets, en particulier par la couleur : Des palais aux tourelles innombrables qui filent en l’air sous une pression inconnue. Des arabesques, des festons. De la foire. De l’extrémisme dans la lumière qui, éclatante, vous vrille les nerfs, de l’extrémisme dans des couleurs qui vous mordent, vous assaillent, et brutales, blessantes, leurs associations. […] (Quand on rouvre les yeux, les objets que l’on voit autour de soi paraissent parfois fourmiller sur place, n’être plus à une distance précise et permanente. Ils présentent un aspect plus intéressant, comme embués d’une rosée de punctiformes colorations variées.)26

Il y a donc déjà ici une première rencontre du réel de la perception, et l’état extrême, l’aliénation, loin d’être illusion, apparaît comme présence paroxystique du monde, du moins à son stade initial. Un tel « dérèglement » du cerveau révèle par contraste une fonction primordiale de la conscience, celle d’atténuer la perception, d’effacer les images : L’habituelle pensée-association est faite d’une liaison d’images à ce point effacées qu’elles n’arrêtent plus mais permettent avec aisance leur glissement relativement abstrait.27

La drogue permet donc une première « connaissance par les gouffres » en un double sens de gouffre : absence (l’absence d’un organe permet d’en connaître la fonction) et vide ou le sujet s’abîme. Mais non pas perte, car 25 Ibid. III, 6. 26 Ibid. II, 807. 27 Ibid. III, 103.

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on rencontre ici de plein fouet le trop plein de ce qui n’était jusqu’alors qu’obscurément perçu. Au second niveau, c’est une étrange mécanique ondulatoire de la pensée qui se révèle une fois levée la fonction inhibitrice de la conscience. Non seulement les images, les désirs, les concepts, les propositions et contrepropositions se succèdent à une vitesse folle, mais ces successions se font comme par vagues. Ce sont les danses internes figurées depuis les premiers dessins ou calligraphies de Mouvements jusqu’aux relevés ondulatoires de L’Infini turbulent.28 Dans plusieurs des ouvrages sur l’expérience de la mescaline et les états aux limites de la folie, Michaux suggère que ce dont on fait l’expérience ici, c’est la vibration physique des cellules même (perspective ondulatoire, surtout dans Misérable miracle et Connaissance par les gouffres), ou l’alternance des décharges d’électricité au niveau des neurones (perspective corpusculaire, surtout dans Les Grandes épreuves de l’esprit).29 Dans la drogue ou la folie, tout se passe comme si la matérialité même du penser pouvait se rencontrer dans ce qui en semblait le plus éloigné, les configurations de sens censées résulter de la maîtrise subjective : À toute allure, à une allure dont un homme normal ne peut se faire une idée, il dévale le chemin pensant. Les idées apparaissent et disparaissent sans qu’il y puisse rien, sans qu’il puisse, si fort qu’il le désire, ni les arrêter, ni les retarder, ni les ralentir, ni en retenir une, même si plus particulièrement elle l’intéressait. […] Vitesse des pensées, vitesse des images, vitesse des envies, tout arrive à une excessive vitesse, disparaît dans la même vitesse, qu’aucun sentiment n’influencera. Ça pense, ça n’a pas besoin de lui pour penser. Ça se passe entièrement de lui.30

L’aléatoire sidérant des contenus de pensée dans les états extrêmes semble donc révéler un réel, la pensée, qui se donne avec une imperturbable nécessité, même si cette nécessité n’a rien de logique. C’est donc que Voir à ce sujet les belles analyses de Franck Leibovici dans Henri Michaux : voir (une enquête) (Paris : Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2014), 205 sq. 29 Raymond Bellour souligne à juste titre combien cette conception du penser a eu d’écho dans la psychologie moléculaire de Deleuze et Guattari (Michaux, OC, III, 1557). On pourrait ajouter qu’elle est à la base des théories néo-darwinistes du fonctionnement de la conscience chez certains cognitivistes modernes, par exemple Daniel Dennett. 30 Michaux, OC III, 134. On songe à nouveau ici aux métaphores de Lautréamont. 28

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la tranquillité logique de la pensée n’est pas première ou « naturelle ». Elle réfléchit un constant effort de ralentissement (« l’homme est un être à frein »).31 Le processus lui-même est masqué par les pensées (sécrétions du penser), en particulier les images et les paroles, termes ou repos final de la pensée, sans rapport pour Michaux avec l’abstraction, qui, elle, est activité intense : Qu’est-ce donc qui lui apparaissait tout à l’heure d’une façon si claire et allant de soi ? C’est la nature unique du penser, sa vie à part, sa naissance soudaine, son déclenchement, son indépendance qui le tient à cent coudées au-dessus du langage à quoi il ne s’associe que peu, que momentanément, que provisoirement, que malaisément.32

Michaux parle peu du troisième niveau, celui du « merveilleux normal ».33 On sait désormais l’infini travail ouvrier de la pensée, même sous les plus paresseuses rêveries. On sait aussi que la pensée logique, qui suppose retour en arrière, comparaison, généralisation requiert un ralentissement de la pensée en quoi consiste en fait le moi, aidé de la langue avec sa « fructueuse lenteur ».34 Et donc au sortir d’une crise de folie ou de drogue, le moi « chute dans la verbalisation ». Mais désormais il n’est plus tout à fait le même. Face au ménage pensée-parole, il est « comme qui, ayant fait un séjour à l’étranger, n’aura plus sa naïveté nationale, n’est plus tout à fait solidaire, a pris ses distances ».35 Ce niveau-là, celui d’une distance constante à

31 32

Ibid. III, 133. Ibid. III, 320. Le ton rappelle immanquablement le Descartes de la fin de la seconde Méditation Métaphysique. La drogue a ici l’effet inverse de la flamme qui révélait, derrière le chatoiement des apparences sensibles du morceau de cire, l’indifférenciation géométrique de la matière conçue. C’est que Michaux prend au sérieux l’hypothèse de la folie que Descartes écartait dans la première Méditation. (Voir Michel Foucault, « Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu », Œuvres I, 624–50.) 33 Robert Bréchon note que l’on ne sait « lequel de ces deux mots est le substantif et lequel l’épithète ». Henri Michaux : La poésie comme destin (Bruxelles : Aden, 2005), 172. 34 Michaux, OC III, 325. 35 Ibid. III, 324.

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maintenir au sein de l’adhésion à soi, on peut finalement comprendre que c’est en fait celui du travail de l’œuvre poétique.36 *

Problème du problème Tranquillement les phrases vont par-dessus des abîmes de vitesse. Ne pas en être dupe. L’homme est un être lent, qui n’est possible que grâce à des vitesses fantastiques. Son intelligence l’aurait depuis longtemps deviné, si précisément ce n’était elle-même.37

L’idée qu’une vitesse (ou un ralentissement) spécifique de la pensée détermine la possibilité d’une conscience, injecte directement du quantitatif et donc du matériel dans l’essence de la conscience, et du coup le normal n’est plus qu’un point sur un continuum de variations possibles. La « personne » que définit une conscience particulière doit donc se percevoir non pas comme une origine stable, cause transcendante au processus de pensée, mais plutôt comme un effet transitoire et contingent, continué plutôt que continu (de même, dit Michaux, que la santé par rapport aux processus physiques). Deleuze, on le sait, est l’un des philosophes qui ont tenté de penser avec rigueur la pensée comme vitesse et la conscience comme événement.38 Dès le départ la question de la rencontre s’est posée à lui sous la forme de l’origine du problème philosophique. Peut-on concevoir un problème (tel justement celui de l’immanence), comme un simple donné extérieur, qu’un individu philosophant recevrait, légué par la « tradition », 36 Parmi les peintres contemporains, Kate Palmer illustre bien ce parcours qui s’élève du saisissement de la représentation à l’expérience des processus mentaux comme énergie. Voir Jean Khalfa, Visible Energy consulté août 2016. 37 Michaux, OC III, 328. 38 Voir Jean Khalfa, « Deleuze et Sartre : idée d’une conscience impersonnelle », Les Temps Modernes 55–608 (mars–avril 2000), supra, Chapitre 9.

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un peu comme un problème de mathématiques que l’on reçoit un jour d’examen ? Le défaut d’un tel modèle, c’est qu’il sépare le problème de la réponse, faisant de la réponse la réaction d’une subjectivité particulière à cette rencontre et donc, finalement, une série d’opinions qu’un examinateur ou un historien pourrait ensuite juger. Or dans ses livres d’histoire de la philosophie, Deleuze s’est toujours gardé de la méthode qui consiste à résumer des systèmes d’idées, préférant toujours voir dans la pensée d’un philosophe la vie d’un problème particulier (par exemple celui de l’expression chez Spinoza, ou celui du temps chez Kant). C’est que l’on peut penser une philosophie non pas comme la réponse particulière d’un individu à un problème rencontré par hasard, mais plutôt comme l’actualisation d’un ou de plusieurs problèmes, à la manière dont un coup de dés réalise une configuration de points, une détermination spécifique d’éléments différentiels dans l’ensemble de toutes les possibilités.39 Le problème de la survenue du problème n’est donc pas d’ordre psychologique ou biographique, et Deleuze l’examina selon plusieurs perspectives ontologiques. La première est influencée par les pensées de Heidegger et de Blanchot, pour qui les questions fondamentales en philosophie sont comme des commencements de monde, mais qu’elles ne commencent pas elles-mêmes. On peut seulement les répéter et, si on les répète dans leur authenticité, et non selon des modes intellectuelles, les possibilités qu’elles contiennent sont révélées. Il y a donc un éternel retour du problème philosophique. Dans chaque philosophie, le problème réapparaît, étranger aux opinions censées avoir donné ses solutions, et toujours sous une forme neuve, comme à son origine. Une autre perspective est le modèle biologique-topologique de Raymond Ruyer, basé sur l’embryologie : ce qui intéresse l’historien de la philosophie est le processus interne de différentiation des éléments de l’Idée, sur le modèle du développement topologique et chronologique de l’embryon à partir de l’homogénéité de l’œuf. 39 Toute pensée est un coup de dés. Les Chapitres 3 et 4 de Différence et répétition (Paris : Presses universitaires de France, 1968), forment une critique de l’idée qu’une philosophie est une réponse à une question reçue du dehors, et que la vie d’une pensée peut se réduire à la vie d’un individu. La vie se révèle lorsque la personne disparaît.

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Le monde entier est un œuf. La double différenciation des espèces et des parties suppose toujours des dynamismes spatio-temporels. Soit une division en 24 éléments cellulaires doués de caractères semblables : rien ne nous dit encore par quel processus dynamique elle a été obtenue, – (2 × 12), ou (2 × 2) + (2 × 10), ou (2 × 4) + (2 × 8) … ? Même la division platonicienne n’aurait aucune règle pour distinguer deux côtés, si les mouvements et les orientations, les tracés dans l’espace, ne venaient lui en donner une. […] Ce sont les processus dynamiques qui déterminent l’actualisation de l’Idée. Mais dans quels rapports sont-ils avec elle ? Ils sont exactement des drames, ils dramatisent l’Idée. […] Le monde est un œuf, mais l’œuf est lui-même un théâtre : théâtre de mise en scène, où les rôles l’emportent sur les acteurs, les espaces sur les rôles, les Idées sur les espaces.40

C’est donc ici le début d’une longue description de l’embryogenèse de l’idée comme un théâtre formaliste, tenant compte des différenciations internes des parties dans l’espace (qui ne peut être réduite à une division arithmétique), des relations complexes entre ces processus, de la relation de l’idée avec d’autres idées dans des processus similaires (écologie des idées), et bien sûr les dimensions temporelles de ces dynamismes: « Ils constituant des temps d’actualisation ou de différenciation, non moins qu’ils tracent des espaces d’actualisation ».41 Voilà pourquoi Deleuze décrit le processus de différenciation des concepts philosophiques spécifiques comme la production de configurations topologiques : finalement, Kant ou Leibniz, même Platon, posent rarement, la question Quoi ? – à savoir la question de l’essence, mais plutôt comment ? (Par exemple, chez Kant, non pas « qu’est-ce qu’un objet ? », mais « comment un objet est-il possible ? », et « que devons-nous être pour que des objets nous soient donnés ? », plutôt que « qu’est-ce qu’un sujet ? »). C’est pourquoi le but du lecteur-historien n’est pas de résumer la concaténation des essences depuis l’extérieur, mais plutôt d’analyser la dynamique du processus de différenciation des concepts.42 40 Ibid. 279. 41 Ibid. 280. En littérature, on doit rapporter ces considérations non seulement au drame des idées étudié par Deleuze chez Becket, mais aussi son travail avec Carmelo Bene (Gilles Deleuze et Carmelo Bene, Superpositions (Paris : Minuit, 1979)), et ses remarques sur le rôle génératif du bégaiement dans la poésie de Gherasim Luca. 42 Différence et répétition, 243.

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La présentation la plus complète de cette méthode se trouve dans une importante conférence de 1967, donnée à la Société Française de Philosophie, « La Méthode de dramatisation ». Ici Deleuze présente sa méthode aux principaux historiens de la philosophie à l’époque en France. Ses descriptions de la logique du développement de l’idée vont peut-être plus loin ici que dans les analyses contemporaines de Différence et répétition et anticipent sur l’Anti-Œdipe. Le débat qui suivit la conférence montre l’originalité de Deleuze. Ferdinand Alquié (grand spécialiste de Descartes et ancien professeur de Deleuze) ne comprend pas la nature du projet, ce qui révèle leur divergence fondamentale sur la nature de l’histoire de la pensée philosophique. Alquié affirmé l’extériorité de la pensée d’un philosophe aux problèmes auxquels il est confronté, et donc ne voit pas dans la méthode de Deleuze une analyse philosophique, mais simplement l’étude de dynamismes psychologiques, un jugement particulièrement péjoratif dans le contexte intellectuel de l’époque, où la psychologie était généralement considérée par les philosophes comme une pseudoscience.43 Dans tous les cas, qu’il adopte la perspective Heideggérienne ou la perspective Ruyérienne, pour Deleuze l’historien de la philosophie ne pose pas tant la question de l’origine personnelle d’une pensée philosophique que celle de la qualité de son problème initial, et il le fait par l’étude de la création de concepts visant à le résoudre et en évaluant la forme de vie que cette création incarne. Ainsi Deleuze décrit-il son propre développement d’une ontologie de la pure différence (par opposition à une dialectique, une ontologie de la contradiction), comme la solution au problème que selon lui Jean Hyppolite affrontait dans son dernier livre, Logique et existence.44 Cela peut paraître surprenant puisqu’Hyppolite est le philosophe

43 L’Île déserte et autres textes : textes et entretiens 1953–1974, éd. David Lapoujade (Paris : Minuit, 2002), 131–44. 44 Aussi le compte-rendu qu’en publie Deleuze en 1954 (L’Île déserte, 18–23) se lit-il rétrospectivement comme un texte autobiographique. « Après le livre si riche de M. Hyppolite, on pourrait se demander ceci : ne peut-on faire une ontologie de la différence qui n’aurait pas à aller jusqu’à la contradiction, parce que la contradiction serait moins que la différence et non plus ? La contradiction n’est-elle pas seulement l’aspect phénoménal et anthropologique de la différence ? » (23).

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qui introduisit Hegel au public philosophique français immédiatement après la guerre. Deleuze dit qu’il considère Hegel comme traître à la philosophie (en particulier dans son livre sur Nietzsche). Mais c’est qu’il avait conçu une telle ontologie comme la solution qu’Hyppolite n’avait pu trouver, après avoir épuisé toutes les possibilités hégéliennes, à la question de la relation entre ontologie et historicité. Pour lui, Hyppolite avait pris le risque d’un retour à une anthropologie, comme Kojève dans sa célèbre lecture de Hegel, bien que ce soit ce qu’il avait expressément prévu d’éviter, comme Deleuze le reconnaît. L’anthropologisme, comme le psychologisme, son dérivé, présuppose une séparation du pôle de la réflexion et du pôle de l’être (la subjectivité est traitée comme un fait, et l’anthropologie est la science de ce fait). La connaissance est alors toujours extérieure à son objet, avec tous les paradoxes sceptiques bien connus qui découlent de cette extériorité et aussi les détours complexes, souvent théologiques et toujours transcendantes, nécessaires pour les résoudre et de concilier vérité et certitude, comme chez Descartes. Les deux possibilités – le scepticisme et le rationalisme dogmatique – commencent avec l’hypothèse d’une séparation fondamentale de la conscience et de l’être. On peut l’éviter dans une philosophie du concept où la pensée, loin d’être opposé à l’être, est l’objet d’une ontologie, et la conscience apparaît alors comme un épiphénomène. C’est donc ce que Deleuze se mit à rechercher, en particulier justement dans son histoire de la philosophie. Donc, plutôt que de décrire sa philosophie comme une réaction d’opposition à la perspective de son ancien professeur, il serait préférable de la voir comme l’instanciation d’une solution possible au problème qu’Hyppolite avait identifié. De ce point de vue, la lignée des philosophes que Deleuze étudie dans ses livres les plus historiques commence à faire sens. Les Stoïciens, Spinoza, Nietzsche et Bergson,45 penseurs considérés comme marginaux dans le canon officiel, avaient tous essayé de développer des ontologies de la pure différence, étrangères à la dialectique des contradictions. Deleuze considère d’ailleurs Spinoza comme le plus grand dans cette lignée et dit qu’il lui a consacré son étude la plus sérieuse selon les normes de l’histoire de 45 Sur Bergson, voir l’article of 1956, « La conception de la différence chez Bergson » (L’Île déserte, 42–72).

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la philosophie. Pourtant, encore une fois, lorsqu’on la lit on voit bien que ce qui y est en jeu n’est pas tant un système que sa dynamique. Donc, même dans le domaine où pourrait s’exprimer le plus la maîtrise d’un moi lucide et transparent à lui-même, le travail de l’historien de la philosophie, s’il doit avoir une valeur, n’est pas de résumer des solutions mais d’analyser la dynamique du processus de différenciation des concepts au sein d’un champ problématique, chaque philosophie n’en étant qu’une incarnation. Ici donc plus qu’ailleurs encore se révèle illusoire l’idée d’un moi qui se voudrait souverain dans sa sphère. *

Prose du tout-monde à toute géographie torturée Non pas l’œuvre tendue, sourde, monotone autant que la mer qu’on sculpte sans fin – mais des éclats, accordés à l’effervescence de la terre – et qui ouvrent au cœur, par-dessus le souci et les affres, une stridence de plages – toujours démis, toujours repris, et hors d’achèvement – non des œuvres mais la matière elle-même dans quoi l’ouvrage chemine – tous, liés à quelque projet qui bientôt les rejeta – premiers cris, rumeurs naïves, formes lassées – témoins, incommodes pourtant, de ce projet – qui, de se rencontrer imparfaits se trouvent solidaires parfaitement – et peuvent ici convaincre de s’arrêter à l’incertain – cela qui tremble, vacille et sans cesse devient – comme une terre qu’on ravage – épars.46

Les flux migratoires et les réseaux de communication ont surajouté aux frontières géographiques des limites définies par les langues, la culture et l’histoire ; toutes ces bornes devenant de plus en plus floues en raison de leur prolifération plutôt que par leur effacement. Ainsi ont-elles cessé de

46 Édouard Glissant, Le Sang rivé (Présence africaine, 1961) ; citation tirée de l’édition Le sel noir (Paris : Gallimard/Poésie, 1983), 21.

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coïncider au sein de l’individu comme du groupe si bien que les conflits qui séparent les trajectoires ou destins individuels de ceux des communautés constituent une précieuse source d’inspiration pour la fiction littéraire. Les revendications en faveur des différences et des identités (nationale, ethnique, sexuelle, et tout autre élément de nature à permettre de caractériser une communauté) sont si puissantes que, rétrospectivement, l’idéal unificateur de l’après-guerre et de la période des décolonisations, fondé sur la lutte des classes, l’antiracisme et l’anti-impérialisme, semble désormais n’être qu’une parenthèse dans un processus de fragmentation et de réflexion bien plus ancien et qui parvient aujourd’hui à trouver son expression dans l’écriture. L’idée même de « littérature régionaliste » en a perdu toute pertinence sans même que l’on s’en aperçoive. C’est à la faveur de l’expansion mondiale d’une production littéraire élaborée à partir des thèmes des identités, des communautés et des mythes, dans un contexte de « métissage » culturel,47 que la prose caribéenne s’est épanouie. Il est significatif, à cet égard, que si, pendant la période de la « négritude » l’Afrique (largement mythique ou perçue à travers une certaine anthropologie allemande) et l’Amérique noire (par le biais de la musique et de la littérature) servaient de modèles à la Caraïbe, la situation très particulière de cette dernière a pris durant au moins un temps la dimension globale (largement inaperçue en métropole) d’une alternative au conflit de la mondialisation et des replis ethniques, sous la forme d’une identité paradoxale, la « créolité ». Or le langage prend ici toute son importance : si un processus d’altération linguistique (qui correspond en fait à la genèse d’une langue, le créole) en est venu à nommer un tel phénomène, c’est précisément parce que le langage est le moyen par lequel les communautés se sont représentées elles-mêmes. Édouard Glissant note que dans « les communautés ataviques », « l’épique traditionnel rassemble tout ce qui constitue la communauté et en exclut tout ce qui n’est pas la communauté ». Célébrant les origines, ce type d’écriture sacralise à la fois la communauté et une langue désormais considérée pure. En revanche, dans les « cultures composites nées de la créolisation », la littérature ne

47 Cf. Serge Gruzinski, La Pensée métisse (Paris : Fayard, 1999).

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peut fournir de mythes fondateurs (« La véritable Genèse des peuples de la Caraïbe, c’est le ventre du bateau négrier et c’est l’antre de la Plantation » : conditions qui, par nature, supposent une histoire antérieure à celle de la communauté). Avec ces littératures, qui jouent de langues en fusion dans le processus général de créolisation, la culture se fonde donc sur la relation et non sur l’exclusion : « Aujourd’hui, l’œuvre littéraire convient d’autant mieux au lieu, qu’elle établit relation entre ce lieu et la totalité-monde ».48 Ainsi, opposant le mythe d’une transparence absolue et la fonction de l’opacité en écriture, Glissant peut établir un lien entre la langue, la politique et la poétique, et dénoncer la prétention à l’universalité attachée à la langue française au plan de la politique comme à celui de la poétique : Ni la fonction d’humanisation, la fameuse universalité porteuse d’humanisme, ni l’harmonieuse prédestination à la clarté, à la rationalité jouissive, ne résistent à l’examen. Il n’y a pas de vocation des langues. […] L’observateur attentif repère, chez le discoureur, la volonté inquiète de s’en tenir à la fausse transparence du monde qu’on dirigeait, de ne pas entrer dans la pénétrable opacité d’un monde où tout simplement on est, ou accepte d’être, avec d’autres et parmi eux.49

La réflexion de Glissant sur ce phénomène, sur l’oralité et la relation complexe de similitude (et de différence) entre la « globalisation » et la « créolisation » est cependant fort complexe.50 Le point central de son approche théorique aussi bien que de sa création littéraire est de mettre en évidence, dans la créolisation, le processus de rencontre, d’un « devenir » qui va à l’encontre de la quête des racines et des identités tout comme il échappe à l’homogénéisation ou à la neutralisation à quoi tend à aboutir la généralisation mondiale des marchés culturels, où l’ « ethnique », paradoxalement, est devenu un style universel. Or pour lui il ne s’agit en rien de créer de nouvelles identités, même hybrides : « [Dans la créolisation] les éléments hétérogènes les plus éloignés sont mis en présence et produisent un

48 Introduction à une Poétique du Divers (Paris : Gallimard, 1996), 34. 49 Poétique de la Relation (Paris : Gallimard, 1990), 128. 50 Voir en particulier : Poétique de la relation et Traité du tout-monde (Paris : Gallimard, 1997).

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résultat imprévisible ».51 Envisagé sous cet angle, « l’acte poétique peut être comparé au processus de créolisation ».52 De fait, quand on lui demande s’il y a un lien entre sa définition de la créolisation et celle de l’image poétique surréaliste donnée par Breton et Reverdy (« [image] qui rapproche deux éléments aussi éloignés que possible l’un de l’autre, et c’est de cet éloignement et du choc que naît quelque chose d’imprévisible qui s’appelle l’image »53 – selon Robert Mélançon), Glissant répond : « Absolument. Cela confirmerait que l’acte poétique est un élément de connaissance du réel »).54 Les classes sociales ne sont plus perçues comme le dernier lieu de rassemblement (ou de division), les origines et « les racines » demeurent finalement impalpables, les langages sont à nouveau perçus comme processus, dans leur irréductible diversité et inventivité, et l’oralité, désormais « situation » des voix d’une communauté dans le monde plutôt que transmission des mythes, est transposée dans l’écriture. L’Histoire ellemême s’est fragmentée en séquences inconciliables d’histoires parallèles et hypothétiques, histoires donc d’un « autre » opaque mais inépuisable. Il est difficile d’écrire une histoire de l’esclavage qui serait une histoire des esclaves, différente d’une histoire de la Traite, parce que, par définition, les esclaves, en tant que propriétés, n’ont rien qui leur soit propre, pas même une identité, rien qui ait été jugé digne en soi d’être consigné. À part quelques témoignages, les individualités n’ayant pu être préservées que de manière indirecte à travers les registres de commerce ou de police sur les abus coloniaux, le marronnage, etc., il faut faire revivre la culture orale, c’est-à-dire explorer, à travers les traces du passé, les marges de la mémoire historique. « Les histoires lézardent l’Histoire, [écrit Glissant], elles rejettent sur des bords irrémédiables ceux qui n’ont pas eu le temps de se voir au travers des lianes amassées ». En 1960, Merleau-Ponty avait déjà brossé cette conclusion historique sous la métaphore d’un retour aux horloges locales : « Il n’y a pas d’horloge universelle, mais des histoires locales, sous nos yeux, prennent forme, et commencent de se régler elles-mêmes, et à tâtons se 51 Introduction à une poétique du divers, 26. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid.

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relient l’une à l’autre, et exigent de vivre […]. Le monde est plus présent à lui-même dans toutes ses parties qu’il ne le fut jamais. »55 Toutefois, une conséquence majeure de cette nouvelle réalité est que s’il n’y a pas de temps historique unifié, ni de point de vue partagé où un choix puisse être fait, l’idée d’un projet historique humain risque d’apparaître comme un mythe, ou bien d’être utilisée pour fonder de nouvelles légendes nationales justifiant comme avant l’oppression. Comme psychiatre, Frantz Fanon avait passé une bonne partie de sa vie à étudier la psychopathologie de ceux qui avaient été dépossédés de leur passé, la rupture identitaire, la perte des références culturelles et par conséquent celle des limites, des règles et des repères constitutifs du moi. Pour Fanon, une telle dissolution, si elle pouvait s’inscrire dans un processus mondial de désaliénation par la production ou la « renaissance » d’identités précédemment opprimées ne pouvait cependant y suffire, une fois la décolonisation réalisée. Dans ses textes sur la culture nationale il appelait à la plus grande vigilance contre ce que l’on pourrait appeler les identités compensatoires ou de substitution. L’histoire véritable du colonisé était à faire de fond en comble et c’est seulement dans cette prise en charge de soi-même contre toute autorité hiérarchique et tout pouvoir disciplinaire (y compris celui des « libérateurs » et leaders) et par la transformation du réel que le colonisé pourrait conquérir sa subjectivité. Lecteur de Sartre, Fanon voyait donc l’ensemble des problèmes d’identité comme appartenant à une phase négative dans un processus de libération et de prise de conscience où la subjectivité serait ultérieurement enfin capable de se former comme capacité de rencontrer le contingent. De ce point de vue d’ailleurs, son œuvre elle-même, inclassable, serait un bon exemple de « l’acte poétique » tel que l’entend Glissant. Prendre au sérieux la rencontre, qu’on la considère dans l’espacement d’une errance, dans le jeu des vitesses et des rythmes du champ de conscience où se construisent les mondes, dans le déploiement des systèmes de pensée ou dans les processus historiques que pourraient libérer une certaine diversité contemporaine du moi, ce serait donc substituer au modèle de l’ego phagocyte la mise en place d’une éthique et de processus par lesquels se déplierait et s’approfondirait enfin l’extériorité. Ce n’est pas simple.

55

Signes (Paris : Gallimard, 1960), 47 ; Œuvres (Paris : Gallimard, 2010), 1582.

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