This new work opens with a powerful statement that resembles a Manifesto. “Europe is no longer the world’s center of gravity,” he writes, and "this demotion opens up new possibilities – but also poses dangers - to critical thinking." Such are the possibilities and dangers Mbembe explores. The other strong thesis of the work deals with what the author calls the “becoming-black of the world." From his point of view, the “designation ‘Negro’ no longer refers only to the condition assigned to people of African origin during the time of the first capitalism." Today, the word “black” [i.e., “nègre,” or “negro”] designates all subaltern humans no longer necessitated by capital at this moment, which is defined more than ever by the model of an animist religion: neoliberalism. He explores the theme of racial difference to its ultimate consequences.
In this new book, Mbembe remains true to form, that is, as an atypical thinker and writer of the French language of the highest order. The power of the writing, the incandescence of ideas, historical depth, decidedly provocative aesthetic, originality of argument and enormous erudition; all this balances to make of this work a fireworks display of ideas.
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With On the Postcolony in 2001; Sortir de la grande nuit [2010]; and now, Critique de la raison nègre: we are facing the contours of a true oeuvre. Can you delineate in a few words, at this moment of the publication of the new book, the main course of his intellectual project?
My concern is to contribute, from the Africa where I live and work, toward a political, cultural and aesthetic critique of the time that is our time in the world. It is a time marked, among other things, by a crisis of relations between democracy, memory, and the idea of a future that humanity as a whole could share. This crisis is compounded by the confluence of capitalism with animism and the ongoing recodification of the intersecting fields of our lives in and through the language of economics and neuroscience. This recoding has come to call into question our production of the idea of the human subject and the conditions of its emancipation since at least the eighteenth century.
One of the strong theses of your new book is that one of the effects of neoliberalism is to "universalize” the black condition. What do you understand 'neoliberalism' to mean?
Contemporary thought forgotten that, for its operation, capitalism has always had since its origin, the need for racial supports. To be sure, its function has always been not only to produce commodities, but also races and species. By neoliberalism, I understand the age during which capital wants to dictate every relationship of filiation. It seeks to multiply in an infinite series of structurally insolvent debts. There ceases to be a difference between fact and fiction. Capitalism and animism are nothing but one and the same.
Thus, the systemic risks to which only the black slaves were exposed at the height of the first capitalism constitutes hereafter the norm, at least the situation of all subaltern humanities. There thus exists a universalizing tendency of the black condition. This goes hand in hand with the emergence of unprecedented imperialist practices; a re-Balkanization of the world and the intensification of practices of the delimitation of zones. These practices are, in essence, a way of producing new human subspecies condemned to abandonment, indifference, if not destruction.
Your book opens with a resounding statement that is almost a manifesto. That Europe is no longer the center of gravity of the world. However, it still draws from its archives. Why?
We are obligated to confront this archive. It contains a part of ourselves and, therefore, is also our own. When it comes to Euro-American worlds, we cannot afford the luxury of indifference or permit our ignorance. Ignorance and indifference are the privileges of the powerful.
Why this inflection by the West when, in your opinion, its hegemony is totally destroyed?
This is not a detour. It is more an inhabitation of the tradition in ways which, in one way or another, do not estrange us, and in which we are not strangers. We are an essential part in the process of its formation. It would therefore be a loss if we were to separate ourselves from that we helped to bring into being. I think of African-Americans, for example, or Afro-Europeans. They are, by every right, Western.
With regard to Africa, the challenge is to inhabit different worlds and forms of intelligibility at the same time, not in a gesture of gratuitous distance, but by shuttling, which authorizes the articulation of a thought of the crossing, of circulation. This kind of thinking runs enormous risk. However, these risks would be even more serious if we class ourselves within the cult of difference.
What do you object to in European thought?
There are people who object to its solipsism, its attachment to the fiction according to which the Other is our reverse. Or even its inability to recognize that there are plural timelines of the world we inhabit and that the task of thinking is to go through all these textual loops. In this gesture, which implies movement, translation, conflict and also misunderstanding, there are issues that dissolve of their own and this dissolution gives rise, with relative clarity, to common exigencies; requirements of a possible universality, and this possibility of movement and encounter of different intelligibilities required by thinking the world.
Is there a European thought?
There is no 'one' European thought. There are, however, power relations at the heart of a tradition, which, incidentally, have not stopped reinventing themselves. And in the ongoing effort, especially in the [global] South, to develop a true reflection on a world scale, our job is to play with these power relations and reflect on these internal frictions, not to dig the gap between Africa and Europe or to "provincialize” the latter, but to widen avenues that facilitate resistance to the forces of racism that are, at bottom, forces of violence, closure and exclusion.
Should we call it a theory of post-colonialism?
To introduce me as a theorist of post -colonialism it is necessary not to have read me.
But, France is included in this turn. And, incidentally, this is also the case in Africa.
Those who do rarely know what they are speaking about. Many pundits of postcolonial studies in Africa utilize ideological arguments in place of a disciplined and rigorous critical analysis of the works that they claim to oppose. In effect, there is no better critique of the postcolonial turn than the post -colonial turn. In France, there are many who liked what we were mute, people who did not speak and especially amongst themselves. They could thus construct our discourse instead of continuing to address us. Post-colonial thought has interrupted this exclusive power of address. And that's why it bothers them.
Until now, you have worked with relatively brief historical periods. With Critique de la raison nègre, you become something of the historiographer. How do you explain this inflection?
The very nature of the subject demanded a return to a longer period. The Negro is an invention of that which, in the book, I call "the first capitalism." The time of the first capitalism - at least as I conceive it is dominated by the Atlantic. The modern era proper begins with European expansion, the dispersion of peoples and the formation of large diasporas, an accelerated exchange goods, religions and cultures. Black slave labor plays an important role in this process. It was therefore necessary to dwell on this long dureé without which one perceives nothing of contemporary reality.
The 'Negro' is nothing but an invention of Atlantic capitalism? What significance do you attribute to the worlds of the Indian Ocean and the Arabian and Sub-Continent in its construction?
Atlantic Slavery is the only multi-hemispheric slavery complex that transforms people of African origin into commodities. It is, therefore, the only one to have invented the Negro, that is, a kind of human-thing, metal-human, human-money, plastic human. It is in the Americas and the Caribbean that humans are transformed for the first time in universal history into living graves of capital. The Negro is the prototype of this process.
I assign quite a central place to the history of diaspora and, in particular, African-American, insisting, in particular, on the ambiguity of the relations between African-Americans and Africa.
The history of people of African descent in the United States, in particular, is a story that has always fascinated me. The African American is, to a large extent, the ghost of modernity. The history of Blacks in the United States should be taught in all schools, particularly in Africa.
You devote lengthy discussion to the concept of ' race ' and ' racism.' In your view, how, does one recognize racism?
Beyond the consecration of a structural inequality in social relations, racism is a figure of phobic, obsessive, and even hysterical neurosis. The racist is one who is reassured by hatred, constituting the Other not as his semblance, but as a threatening object against which to defend itself, to dispose itself, or quite simply, one which would be necessary to destroy, if not fully master. In large measure, the racist is a sick man, lacking in himself, and dissipating.
The most poetic chapter but also the most confusing of the book is entitled “Requiem pour l' esclave” [Requiem for the Slave].
This chapter constitutes the underground of the book. Here, I try to show the manner in which, in Africa and in black things, many saw two obfuscating forces: a clay gently molded by the statue, or a shadowed animal, and always a mystical, metaphoric figure, capable of explosive flow. It also seeks to show how the black slave was, at bottom, a plastic subject, that is, an individual who has undergone a transformational process of destruction.
Your writing is one of the most beautiful on the part of a contemporary African thinker. To what do you attribute this gift?
In order to enunciate Africa in a way that is not mere repetition, I am forced to resort to a figural writing, a writing that ranges from the vertiginous to dissolution and dispersion. And a writing made of interlocking rings and whose edges and lines joining the vanishing point.
At this stage, what is the object of your investigations and what will be the theme of your next book?
My research focus is on what I have called “Afropolitanism.”
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Interview conducted by Arlette Fargeau published in Le Messager October 3, 2013
Translation from French to Portuguese by Maria José Cartaxo.
Translation from Portuguese to English by Damien-Adia Marassa.
Sourced online in Portuguese at:
Cara a cara | October 21, 2013 | capitalismo, Europa, negro, razão negra
http://www.buala.org/pt/cara-a-cara/a-europa-ja-nao-e-o-centro-de-gravidade-do-mundo
(last accessed November 20, 2013)
and
Raíz Africana | November 18, 2013 |
http://raizafricana.wordpress.com/2013/11/18/a-europa-ja-nao-e-o-centro-de-gravidade-do-mundo/
(last accessed November 20, 2013)
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