In Search of Africa(s). Souleymane Bachir Diagne

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But in this new postmodern and postcolonial framework (in the historical sense of the term ‘postcolonial’), there is still a strict hierarchy between dominated South and dominant North, and the transfer of knowledge remains a one-way street, with the pharmaceutical, agri-food and biotechnological industries granting themselves the right to document, to preserve and soon to patent traditional knowledge and genetic heritages for their sole benefit. From this point of view, postmodernity and postcoloniality do not in the least imply the end of modernity and of its colonial substratum; they are, rather, a reorganization and extension of these phenomena: ‘Just as coloniality is the other constituent face of modernity, postcoloniality is the structural counterpart of postmodernity. On this view, postcolonials are the new updated forms of coloniality in the postmodern stage of the history of the West,’ writes the Colombian philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez.¹⁴ Here, he agrees with the critique voiced in 1992 by the Anglo-Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, who waxed ironical about postcoloniality, writing: ‘Postcoloniality is the condition of what we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligentsia: a relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained group of writers and thinkers who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery.’¹⁵

Convergences

      The reader will indeed note, in the following pages, many convergences between the views of Souleymane Bachir Diagne, those of Jean-Loup Amselle, and decolonial thought. In particular, the two thinkers share with decolonial thought a scathing criticism of Eurocentrism and its erroneous identification with the universal. They also declare themselves to be sceptical about so-called ‘postcolonial breaks’, when these breaks merely invert the stigmas or values associated with non-Western worlds and thereby reinstate the usual hierarchies, such as the hegemonic domination of the West. Amselle’s critique of postcolonialism as the ‘new ruse of reason’ (p. 17), whether this reason be colonial or simply ‘ethnological’ (p. 33); Diagne’s parallel denunciation of ‘epistemological colonialism’ (p. 97); their shared willingness to ‘break with the Cartesian mechanical view that provided the enterprise of transforming “nature” into “natural resources” with its philosophy’ (p. 27); their desire to go back and produce a ‘history of philosophy in Africa’ integrated into the history of philosophy in the Western world and into ‘the history of philosophy in the Islamic world in general’ (p. 98) – all these points of agreement are so many decolonial gestures that mark real convergences between the two thinkers. These convergences are actually even more prominent when we explore their respective oeuvres. For that, we need to conduct a brief overview of their work: this will enable us to put the following dialogues into perspective, to draw the line of convergence where two parallel and distinct itineraries could finally meet.

Souleymane Bachir Diagne: a philosophy of translation

      One need merely glance at the bibliography of the Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne to discover that he is the author of an oeuvre as demanding as it is disparate, since it has three distinct aspects. First of all, it includes works on various European thinkers (George Boole, Henri Bergson), such as studies in critical epistemology on the type of thinking and logic inherent in mathematics, especially algebra (Boole, 1815–1864),¹⁶ followed by an edition with commentary of Boole’s Laws of Thought.¹⁷ Then come books devoted to philosophical practices in the Islam world: Islam and Open Society¹⁸ and Open to Reason.¹⁹ Finally there are the works on philosophical practices in Africa, such as African Art as Philosophy²⁰ and, more recently, The Ink of the Scholars.²¹

      Diagne is clearly working at the crossroads where different disciplines and different worlds meet, and he embodies a form of transcultural thought that straddles and ceaselessly interrelates continents and eras. When you look more closely, his work appears de facto driven by two imperatives: on the one hand, it strives to be rooted in ‘specific’ thought traditions (algebraic logic, the Muslim world, the African world), and, on the other hand, it aims to bring these traditions into dialogue with one another.

      Whenever he talks about Boole, Diagne reminds us, following Descartes, for example, that algebra came to Europeans via the mediation of the Arab world, so we need to constantly bear in mind the existence of other traditions of thought that make similar demands on rationality. All things being equal, and as if in a spirit of symmetry, Diagne stresses that the act of philosophizing as it developed in the Muslim cultural world itself came largely from the thinkers of ancient Greece with whom Arab and Persian thinkers entered into dialogue by translating their works. This dialogue was pursued in other Muslim areas: the Indian thinker Muhammad Iqbal, for instance, engaged in a veritable philosophical conversation with the works of European philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson.

Translation, of course, involves written traditions, and inevitable shifts of emphasis. Diagne looks back at the different intellectual disciplines that filled the shelves of the Islamic library, and focuses on three discursive practices: rational theology (kalam), philosophy (falsafa) and Sufism (tasawwuf). In his view, philosophical reflection goes beyond the limits of falsafa alone in order to manifest itself in other discourses, or even other human practices, such as art. This means that two additional dimensions become important for him.

      Diagne pays particular attention to the question of the becomingphilosophical of languages: for him, all thought is built not only in a language, but also in the ordeal of its passage or its translation into another. Over the years, he has produced some remarkable analyses of the transformations of Arabic into a philosophical language (Open to Reason), via translations of Greek texts; and more generally he has investigated all the practices of philosophizing in non-European languages, especially in African languages (The Ink of the Scholars).

      In tandem with this observation, which might border on a certain conceptual if not linguistic relativism, Diagne comes to a quite different and almost antithetical conclusion. Noting that, thanks to symbolic writing, thought can also be emancipated from the limitations of a given language – especially in the context of algebra –, and can thus be transmitted otherwise than by oral means, he emphasizes what we could call a ‘cognitive universalism’ that always ultimately transcends differences in culture and language.

      Finally, this question of the symbolic underpinnings of language goes beyond the strictly linguistic dimension, since other practices can themselves proceed from a form of philosophizing and arouse thought in their turn. In the West, of course, as we know especially from the work of the art historian Daniel Arasse, ‘painting thinks’, it produces and stages thought through modes of non-verbal figuration (such as framing, perspective and composition).²² But in his study of Léopold Sédar Senghor, Diagne shows that, in Africa, art (and, in particular, sculpture) is also a way of producing thought, or ‘a certain approach to reality’, just as ‘scientific knowledge is another [such approach]’. From this point of view, ‘“Negro art” is philosophy’, insofar as it is ‘interpretable as philosophical observations about the nature of the world’.²³

      What does African art, as philosophical expression, actually think about? Senghor’s answer lies in insisting on rhythm as the ordering force behind Negro style, while at the same time rhythm is mainly for him the manifestation of a ‘vital force’, or, more precisely, a vitalism of strengths. We can of course compare this answer with the one proposed by Muhammad Iqbal, who characterizes philosophizing in Islam as a ‘movement in thought’, as Diagne puts it in Islam et société ouverte.

It is indeed a real tour de force on the part of Diagne to have drawn a comparison, in his Bergson postcolonial,²⁴ between some of the key ideas in Iqbal and Senghor, and to have related them to the influence СКАЧАТЬ