Mbembe - On The Postcolony - A Brief Response To Critics

ON THE POSTCOLONY: A BRIEF RESPONSE TO CRITICS
Author(s): Achille Mbembe

Source: Qui Parle, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2005), pp. 1-49
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20685692
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ON THE POSTCOLONY: A BRIEF RESPONSE TO
CRITICS1
Achille Mbembe
This is hardly the place to provide detailed responses to all the cri
tiques ? for the most part valid ? to which On the Postcolony has
been subjected. I will, however, and in order to comment on them
in turn, pick up on two objections of fundamental concern for my
critics. The first has to do with my argument about the sensory life
of power in the postcolony. The second is about the conditions
under which an interpretation of the sexual politics of the post
colony might be possible. But before doing so, I will attempt to sit
uate the book within the intellectual context of its production ? in
a way of making precise its position within the archive of the mod
ern discourse on Africa. Along the way, I will provide the reader
with supplementary reflections that might better clarify and, I hope,
extend the problematic at the heart of the initial project.
Narcissism
Although On the Postcolony had been originally conceived, writ

ten, and published in French, it is in the Anglo-Saxon world that it
aroused the liveliest interest as well as the most creative criticism.2
The reasons for this disjunction are too well known and therefore
need not be dwelt on here.3
Qui Parle, Vol. 15, No. 2, 2005
2 ACHILLE MBEMBE
To a large extent, French academia, French public culture

(and the Francophone world) do not seem to have measured in its
true worth, the profound significance of the recent turns in the
human sciences in general, and in political and cultural critique in
particular. Indeed, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, four
intellectual currents ? postcolonial and subaltern studies, critical
race studies, diaspora studies, feminist and queer studies ? have,
more than any other discipline, placed a lasting imprint on the
manner in which society, politics, and culture are thought.4 This
revolution has been felt in different fields of knowledge, including
philosophy, history, visual arts, and literature. It is now established
that these four intellectual currents did not constitute merely pass
ing phenomena. They have, in effect, developed not only a specif
ic lexicon but also a theoretical arsenal, methods of analysis and
interrogation, and, in a word, paradigms around questions of race
and diasporas, sexual difference, not to mention the contemporary
circulation of all sorts of flows (public culture).
Wherever the problems brought to bear by these currents
have been taken seriously, the result has turned out to be a deep
ening of current thinking on the histories of freedom and moderni
ties, the nature of democratic order (the politics of citizenship), the
ethical conditions of living together (the politics of recognition and
of inclusion), questions of social justice, and the relation to the
world in general (cosmopolitanism).5 That this has been the case
can be explained by the fact that these intellectual currents have
been political all along. Indeed, they emerged from, or have enter
tained a symbiotic relationship with, various emancipatory move
ments and struggles especially during the last century (anti-colonial
struggles for self-determination in the Third World, the civil rights
movement in the United States, the struggle against apartheid in
South Africa and racial and minority struggles elsewhere, and gay,
lesbian, and feminist movements' struggles for equality).
These intellectual currents have also opened a path towards
renewed thinking regarding difference and alterity. Without neces
sarily adhering to all the postulates of the philosophical generation
that celebrated "the death of man/' postcolonial ism and critical
ON THE POSTCOLONY: A BRIEF RESPONSE TO CRITICS 3
race studies in particular have contributed to the revival of the cri

tique of Eurocentrism ? a sort of singular subject that, while trying
to pass for the universal tout court, always ends up legitimizing the
violence of its irrationality in the very name of reason. From a
philosophico-political point of view, these currents have also con
tributed to the project, certainly contested here and there, of a mul
ticultural democracy, founded on the obligation of mutual recogni
tion as the condition of a convivial life.6
If their place of burgeoning is the Anglo-Saxon world, these
intellectual currents have nevertheless been enriched, at least in
part, by aspects of post-war French thought. Crucial in this regard
has been the critique of essential ist conceptions of the human
being and of nature, of the relationship between the subject and
language in the formation of subjectivity. To this should be added
the renewed skepticism in regard to the concept of transcendental
reason; or the importance granted to the heterogeneity of tempo
ralities. Suffice it too, to evoke the often and quite critical re-read
ings and re-appropriations of the work of Barthes, Lacan, Foucault,
Deleuze, Derrida and others by the best intellectuals ? represen
tative of postcolonial, subaltern and feminist studies ? or the place
these French thinkers occupy in their theoretical arsenal, modes of
reasoning, and systems of argumentation.
It so happens, however, that in France, these currents have col
lided against a wall of political as well as cultural and intellectual
narcissism. This narcissism ? a form of racial ethno-nationalism ?
is surprising in that it cohabits with one of the most revolutionary
traditions of political thought in the history of Western modernity. It
is a tradition that has displayed a radical solicitude for the human
and for reason. According to this tradition, the political and philo
sophical categories of the human and reason are figures par excel
lence of the sovereignty of the subject. They also constitute the
deepest instances against which all knowledge and action are mea
sured. Finally they are the original scenes from which truth and
ethics spring. This radical solicitude for the human and for reason is
incarnated in the concept of "the republic." The latter's own ultimate
meaning is expressed in the idiom of liberty, equality, and fraternity.
4 ACHILLE MBEMBE
In the history of the French republic, the limits of this solici

tude have been widely revealed each time it has been necessary to
recognize and to identify with the human face of the Other disfig
ured by the violence of racialization. We might call race the noc
turnal side of the idea of the republic, the inert space where its rev
olutionary meaning comes to find itself stuck. In France, an impreg
nable tradition of abstract, yet militant, universalism, inherited from
the revolution of 1789 and the Terror, continues to deny the brutal
fact of racialization, under the pretext that race is about difference,
and the idea of difference fundamentally contradicts the republi
can dogma of universal equality.7
That such a noble ideal (the end of race and the advent of uni
versal equality) ends up re-inscribing race in the very process
through which it denies it is, without doubt, the mark of a typical
French paradox. In the context of objective multiculturalism, racial
and religious pluralism, and an all too recent colonial history, the
denial of racism in the very act through which racism is enacted
has ended up producing the exact opposite of that which the
republic affirms as its birth certificate. Indeed, the French version
of militant universalism is founded on a specific form of forgetful
ness. It is the refusal to consider that the human, each time, appears
under figures that are each time singular.8
To this blindness, there is added a difficulty in imagining his
tory and memory as responsibility. This applies particularly to the
French colonial past. In the rare cases where a reexamination of this
period has been sketched, colonization has been reduced to the
manifestation of a purely narcissistic wound.9 As Fernand Braudel
already foresaw, France's identity thus nourishes itself through, and
is the result of, a fundamental tension between republicanism and
differential ism or, between abstract universalism and cosmopoli
tanism.10 The existence of this tension and the weight of this double
consciousness explain, more than anything else, the hostile recep
tion in France of postcolonial studies, critical race studies, and dias
pora studies ? intellectual currents that have been amalgamated
and dismissed under the pejorative term, "Third Worldism." Far
from being the equivalent to cosmopolitanism, the French phrase
ology of universalism serves first and foremost as a screen: an

ethno-racial nationalism that refuses to disclose itself as such. It is
a universalism that can only imagine the Other in terms of duplica
tion, of an infinite doubling of a narcissistic image in which the
Other is imprisoned.11
Positions
Let us return now to On the Postcolony. The book's title clearly

indicates that to which the work turns its back. The book was writ
ten at a time when it appeared to many as if the study of Africa was
caught in a dramatic analytical gridlock. Three recent interventions
succinctly define the terms of the dilemma.
For economic anthropologist Jane Guyer, scholarship on
Africa has been anchored by three powerful analytical traditions
that, in the end, have served to block key realities from view. The
first, she argues, is "the monetary reductionism of practical eco
nomics" and the tyranny of quantitative models in a context in
which, in many parts of the continent, the creation of margins on
transactions has historically "involved configuring value scales
rather than reducing them all to number." In fact, she argues,
"number was only one ? albeit far more important a one than cul
ture theory so far accords ? of the measurement scales at play."
The second is "the philosophical commitment of economic think
ing to conservation principles in which a key parameter is held
constant so that the variability of others can be gauged." This is
crippling in a context in which the experience of turbulence pre
vails: "In West Africa . . . nothing has been consistently constant;
everything is referential. And analysis can only go so far by pre
tending that this is not the case." The third is "the cultural particu
larism of anthropology" ? something that tends "to make Africa
look like a pathological departure from a standard model based on
Western experience and institutions."12
These observations are not dissimilar to those made a few
years ago, in the first major critique of On the Postcolony by Ato
Quayson. Following V.Y. Mudimbe's well known insights in his
6 ACHILLE MBEMBE
Invention of Africa and The Idea of Africa, Quayson highlighted the

difficulty we face in engaging Africa "not as a stable identity, but as
itself a field of intersecting transitional realities/' The issue, he
added, "is not just that of saying something new about Africa, but
saying it under the full burden of a Western discourse that situates
one's own attempt in relation to it and repeatedly establishes the
new statement as an attempt to eradicate, validate, or ignore it." It
is by no means "clear that there is a way out of this impasse. The
Afro-centric impulse, which tries to excavate the glory of things
past as a means of rectifying the sorry contemporary picture of
Africa and to provide models of African achievement for the future,
is by no means unproblematic," he concluded. 13
More recently, in a set of comments on what he calls post
colonial entanglement (the very subject of the introductory chapter
of my book), literary critic Pius Adesanmi observes that one funda
mental consequence of the failure of the nation-state form in Africa
has been "the elaboration of discursive positions underpinned by
sentiments of despair and hopelessness." With one developmental
ist thesis after another "crumbling under the weight of civil wars,
famine, poverty, social inertia, and political stasis, it has become
the norm in various Africanist disciplines to homogenize the conti
nent's postcolonial space as one uniform site of dysfunctionality,"
he adds. Borrowing from literary critic Simon Gikandi, he locates
the roots of this pervasive form of "Afropessimism" in an unprob
lematized "schemata of difference" in which difference is under
stood as essential negativity.14
That this essential negativity persists is not due to the absence
of a rich archive. Nor is it that the archive cannot be rearranged in
new ways. It is not as if many were not familiar with the material or
that the latter could not be cast in a different light. On the Post
colony argues that there are at least two main reasons key realities
are still blocked from view. The first is that Africa as a name, as an
idea and as an object of academic and public discourse has been,
and remains, fraught. It is fraught in ways that go beyond even the
paradigm of orientalism introduced by Edward Said to speak to the
staging of the difference of the non-West from the West. Africa is not
only perpetually caught and imagined within a web of difference

and absolute otherness. So often, Africa epitomizes the intractable,
the mute, the abject.15 Any discourse on Africa has to take into
account the existence of an arche-writing, a first nomination that,
insofar as it operates as a primordial or constitutive violence the
role of which is to inscribe Africa into a system of differentiation
and classification, is in-and-of-itself already an expropriation. This
is a form of writing that endows Africa with an identity it never pos
sessed in the first place while never being able to open up a space
for the continent to manifest its self-presence.
The second reason is presentism. Presentism should be
defined as a discourse on the gap and the lack. It rests on a method
of reading the social that consists in simply turning to statistical
indices to measure the gap between what the continent is and what
we are told it should be. Partly because of its prescriptive nature,
this method has ended up constructing an image of Africa as a fig
ure of lack. It is a form of misrecognition that tells us what Africa is
not and hardly says anything about what it actually is. It operates
essentially by segmentation of time, excision of the past, and defer
ral of the future. This is the kind of reading the social, the political,
and the economic that underpins structural adjustment programs,
ideologies of good governance, and various projects of social engi
neering, including those spearheaded by international NGOs.16
Among the various responses to the analytical gridlock
referred to above, the most creative have come from a disparate set
of studies that could be brought together under the rubric of new
empiricism. It can be said that in African studies, new empiricism
as a methodology emerged first in anthropology. More specifically,
it came out of studies that were preoccupied with the following
four arenas of contemporary African social life: struggles for liveli
hood, the question of singularities (rather than of individuality or
even individuation), the logics of multiplicity (that is, of unfinished
series rather than a calculus of countable collections), and the log
ics of experimental and compositional processes.17
New empiricism departed from the discourse of the gap and
the lack in many ways. More fundamentally, it sought to elaborate
8 ACHILLE MBEMBE
a conception of rationality and subjectivity that was not entirely

tied to that of the individual, the self-interested, risky, and adverse
social actor. A close reading of these anthropological studies
showed that they were underpinned by a set of foundational state
ments that lurk in the background of On the Postcolony: The
self/singular is not only a fiction or artifice we come to believe
through habit; our lives, although precarious, are always in-the
making, in an ongoing process of fragile actualization; in many
ways they do acquire a certain unstable consistency included in
the midst of shifts, volatility and velocity.
Most of the works I now bring under this rubric did not direct
ly engage the debates going on in the humanities or in the general
field of philosophy and aesthetics. In fact, in most instances, they
were unaware of the latter. Because of this inability to speak
beyond the "local" and the "ethnographic," these works were
unable philosophically to think the very precariousness of life and
think of the social they were depicting so thickly. And from an aes
thetic point of view, they were unable to pay attention to contem
porary African life's intensive surfaces and the various ways in
which events coexist with accidents. To be sure, that this was the
case meant that other acts of thinking, reading, speaking and writ
ing were long overdue. In order to transcend the limits of our epis
temologica! imagination, such acts of thinking were, of necessity,
to take seriously the visual, the aural ? all that has to do with the
sensorial life of power.
In the process of writing On the Postcolony, it appeared to me
that the combination of an uncritical Marxist moral-political-eco
nomic evangelism and nationalist (nativist) rhetoric was of little use
in the attempt to transcend the limits of our epistemologica! imag
ination. In fact, when examined closely, both counter-discourses
have actively contributed to a spectacular contraction of the terms
of philosophical inquiry concerning this region of the world.18
First, it has been amply demonstrated that even when they
start as a counter-reaction to European vilification, most of these
counter-discourses are always deeply embedded in the conceptual
structures of the West (the arche-writing). To a large extent, they
ON THE P0STC0L0NY: A BRIEF RESPONSE TO CRITICS 9
have their roots in the West. They always draw, in their wake, from
key elements of imperial discourse. They are not only always
shaped by racialized and gendered elements of empire, colony and
nation.19 They belong to an epistemic system that begins and ends
in white fixations on blacks and black obsessions with whites ? all
in a framework in which politics is fundamentally understood as a
race struggle against racialized enemies.
Second, that the anger and compensatory nature of these
counter-discourses have hardly been noticed is surprising. All
along, the function of this anger in the verbal enactment of the rev
olution has been to erase the traces of the originary violence
described above. But anger ? the violence of the subaltern ? is
also a violence that refuses to face up to its own dependence on,
and enmeshment in, the primordial structure of the arche-writing
and its entanglement with that originary violence whose energy
and form it not only iterates, but repeats since its very protocols are
deeply implicated in the exact terms it aims to repudiate.
Third, the ties that bind these counter-discourses and
Eurocentric narratives of Africa expand to the question of responsi
bility. In Afro-radical and nationalist (nativist) discursive forma
tions, the address to the West seldom goes hand in hand with the
capacity to answer for oneself, that is, "to be held accountable not
simply by another but, already in advance, by and for oneself ? to
answer to oneself in the place of the other."20 In their attempt to
provincialize Eurocentric narratives of Africa and to imagine a pol
itics of black sovereignty, these discursive formations end up
describing Africa as an object apart from the world. They fail to go
beyond a simple reiteration of the paradigm of "African difference."
Fourth, because of the refusal to acknowledge that some of
the moral quandaries thrown up by our past and present may not
admit of any a priori solutions, too many intellectual corners are
cut far too hastily.21 For instance, the manifold experiences of the
self are too easily conflated with ubuntu ? the ideology of racial
communalism. Africa's own historicity is too easily reduced to a
matter of context: having-been-enslaved; having-been-colonized;
being-economically-marginalized. By easily fetishizing resistance
10 ACHILLE MBEMBE
and by relying heavily on an unqualified embrace of the politics of

disruption (if not destruction) in the name of "agency/' these
counter-discourses have not been able to produce the philosophi
cal resources that would help even to begin to consider deeply the
political and ethical ramifications of what it is to have been, and to
still be, a slave or to have been once named a native.
A student of the black radical tradition, Cedric J. Robinson
admits that some aspect of black life and experience is "unac
counted for" in the Marxist explication of the historical processes
of "calculated social destruction," routine brutality and systematic
exploitation. The brutal degradation of black life under slavery and
colonialism should be assigned to "something of a more profound
nature than the obsession with property" alone, he adds.22 In other
words, to come to terms with the slave/native predicament, the
materiality of capitalism has to be acknowledged and dealt with.
But capitalism, in its association with race, must also be read as a
symptom. Indeed, in contexts in which capitalism and race form a
single stream, property almost always signifies itself as something
else. Black life or survival, in such a context, is constantly inscribed
in a transformational network of crossings and reversals, of twists
and turns, some material, others not. In the process, it enters into a
specular realm (speculum) ? a regime of superfluity characterized
by the dissolution and volatilization of its value in the very act in
which such value is supposedly instituted.23
Finally, as shown by many critics, this is a mode of thinking
that lives the great Other's rejection as an emasculation.24 It is a
thought born from an original wound: an encounter between Africa
and the West that is l ived as a rape. Even when the discourse of Afro
radicalism or Afro-nationalism pretends to consider African-life-for
itself, its obscure object is always, first and foremost, the great Other,
the West. The ego (Africa) never appears in these discursive forma
tions except under the figure of an anal object given up to the vio
lence and cruelty of the Father (the West).25 It is difficult to have faith
in the redemptive potential of a discourse that is the manifestation
of a subject dispossessed of its subjectivity, of its voice, and of its
desire by a demonic power of which this subject is the prey.26
I wrote On the Postcolony as the deep shadow of Afro

Marxism was receding and the African novel was celebrating the
demise of the postcolonial nation-state's claims to stand for the
Father. If the book deliberately avoids the rhetoric of redemption, it
equally distances itself from the nihilism of despair and surrender.
It also avoids the apocalyptic intensity of those who seek the
cleansing power of violence, both figuratively and literally, as a
means to bring about the New Jerusalem. I wanted to write a book
in which, in the words of Ato Quayson, to think about Africa would
be akin to "shape a restless discourse that in the end abjures easy
discursive closure ? a discourse prepared to contemplate the
negation of its own categories of thought even as it... seeks a
form of disquisition that would help transcend the details of the
nightmare."
Some of my critics have been obsessed with the question of
the extent to which I rely, in the process, on European theory. At
times, they have lamented what they perceive as a lack of "a clear
ly defined theoretical position" ? or "conceptual systematicity" ?
in the book.27 At other times, they have labored to locate the theo
retical influences in On the Postcolony in Western phenomenology,
existentialism, post-structuralism or Derrida's philosophy of decon
struction. The "work appears, after all the oblique references and
allusions to Deleuze, Bergson, and Merleau-Ponty, to be most
strongly influenced, from the point of view of power, by a mixture of
Foucault, Sartre, and Hegel, with Nietzschean ressentiment hovering
at the margins," declares Jeremy Wheate in what is probably one of
the least imaginative and most misleading rejoinders to the book.28
In fact, both the book itself and the concept of the postcolony
should be read first and foremost as a form and as a Figure. A close
reader of texts, Ato Quayson was well on his way to capture this
dimension of form and Figure when he argued that the book "con
figures Africa in such a variety of discursive forms that it cannot be
explained in terms of any single or overarching model." Each chap
ter, he adds, "has these elements of form in different configura
tions," leading to what he describes as "the perspectival modula
tions of the text."
12 ACHILLE MBEMBE
The book, he writes, provides "what might be described as an

itinerary of discursive forms, each of which has at least three dimen
sions that can be isolated for discussion. These are: (1) a discipli
nary theme, sometimes historical . . . regularly political, and
... in the second part of the book, philosophical; (2) a resource
matrix of examples, research materials, and scholarly opinions from
which the text sets out its own distinctive positions; and (3) a style
of analysis, sometimes directly drawing from its resource matrix for
extrapolations and sometimes more abstract in its determinants.
These three dimensions of form are often supplemented by a fourth
one which largely remains understated ? the dimension of the per
sonally felt investment in the object under analysis."29
Indeed, as signaled by the various vignettes to various chap
ters of the book, most of which come from the field of painting and
fiction, a combination of political and aesthetic impulse nurtured
the writing of On the Postcolony. The vignette for chapter 6 ("God's
Phallus") is a quotation from David Sylvester's The Brutality of Fact:
Interviews with Francis Bacon 1962-1979?? Other vignettes bor
row from Joseph Conrad ("Introduction"), Congolese writer Sony
Labou Tansi (chapter 3, French edition) and Amos Tutuola (chapter
5). From a purely aesthetic point of view, it can be said that the
book is a silent wrestling with Deleuze's Francis Bacon: Logique de
la sensation^ on the one hand, and Sony Labou Tansi's ?criture on
the other hand ? especially L'?tat honteux,32 Les yeux du volcan,33
Les sept solitudes de Lorsa Lopez,34 and La vie et demie.35
I take the postcolony to be a Figure of a fact? the fact of bru
tality, its forms, its shapes, its markings, its composite faces, its fun
damental rhythms and its ornamentation. The book takes brutality
in its matter-of-factness, as a domain of representation that tends to
circumscribe and to obscure the very conditions of its representa
tion. This is one of the reasons why I attempt to read colonial and
postcolonial brutality as a workmanship that requires virtuosity,
creativity of the imagination, extravagance in expenditure of peo
ple, labor and materials, manufacturing of marvels as well as
superstitions ? in short, what the Greeks called a fantasia.
Writing fantasia in this context is not so much about theory
or systematicity as about critical thought and, more importantly,

figuration. This is what explains the sculptural and pictorial nature
of the thinking and writing, as I argue in chapter 4 ("The Thing and
Its Doubles") ? a chapter unfortunately little studied by the critics.
In the spirit of African sculpture, figuration itself has to do with the
terrifying, cathartic and therapeutic potential of images ? in this
case, the images of power and power as a form of imagination my
writing is attempting to "touch", to "seize" and to " capture" in a
mirror-like operation.36
It can only be said of On the Postcolony that it is Deleuzian
if by Deleuzian one means the writing of a Figure that is a form, but
a form that is connected to tactility and sensation. Indeed, the style
of writing I adopted in this book is not one that looked for synthe
sis. In most instances, this style of writing aimed at speaking direct
ly to the senses. I hoped to directly convey to my reader's nervous
system both the brutality of the Figure (the postcolony) or the Thing
(the autocrat), that of its Doubles (chapter 4), and the violence of
the sensation itself. But then, isn't this a style of writing character
istic of Fanon, C?saire or, for that matter, AmosTutuola, Sony Labou
Tansi or Yvonne Vera? Isn't it true that each of these African authors
has introduced us, in his or her own way, to a world in which
power is fundamentally the relationship of form and matter, of
materials and of forces made visible, as Deleuze would put it,
through their effects on flesh and nerves?
I used the notion of the postcolony (instead of the postcolo
nial) in order precisely to provide a clue to a methodology borne
out of a combination of aesthetic and political concerns. This is the
reason why I resorted to various archives and modes of thinking ?
the historico-economico-political (chapter 1 and 2), the literary, the
fictional, and the psychoanalytical (chapter 3, 5 and 6), the theo
logico-political (chapter 6), and the philosophical, everyday life
creativity, including the pictorial (chapter 4). In so doing, I was opt
ing not for an erasure, but for a very partial and indirect reopening
of the archives of black reflections on political modernity. This is
why On the Postcolony is not another narrative of modern black
revolutionary possibilities. Nor is its main concern about the polit
14 ACHILLE MBEMBE
ical ideologies of racial sovereignty and black internationalism of

the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ? a canonical aspect of
contemporary black criticism.
To be sure, the project of racial sovereignty that emerges in
the shadows of slavery and in the times of colonial empires is not
simply an ideology. It is also an epistemology (or a set of cognitive
propositions), a set of institutional practices, an aesthetics, a psy
chic economy. This project rests on the belief that black survival
and life chances in the colonies and in the New World are over
determined above all by race. As Michael C. Dawson shows, this
common belief did not prevent the emergence of radically differ
ent visions of the road to freedom and self-determination. But what
does remain constant "across evolving notions of nationalism is the
belief that race represents both the fundamental analytical catego
ry for understanding the plight of blacks in the Americas ? that
race remains the fundamental axis around which blacks need to be
mobilized for liberation."37
It is a project shaped by various discourses of longing ? the
longing for black freedom, black beauty, and black unity. That
black unity plays such a central role in the politics of self-determi
nation and that so much is invested in racial communalism is part
ly due to the reality of differentiated and heterogeneous under
standings of blackness prevalent in the immediate aftermath of
World War I in particular.38 Indeed, for black solidarities to emerge
across nations and colonies, these different languages of blackness
had to be transcended.
The concept of the postcolony equally allowed me to keep
my distance from postcolonial theory per se. No one can deny the
role played by this current of thought in the deconstruction of
imperial knowledge and in the critique of every form of universal
ism hostile to difference and, by extension, to the figure of the
Other. In carrying out a radical critique of the totalizing thought of
the Same, postcolonial theory enabled the positing of the founda
tions to think alterity, plural singularity even, this scattered multi
plicity [multiplicit? dispersante] to which Edouard Glissant refers.39
But by insisting too much on difference and alterity, this cur
rent of thought has lost sight of the weight of the fellow human [le
semblable] without whom it is impossible to imagine an ethics of
the neighbor, still less to envisage the possibility of a common
world, of a common humanity. On the other hand, insofar as post
colonial theory has considered the struggle between Father and
Son ? that is to say, the relationship between colonizer and colo
nized ? to be the most significant political and cultural paradigm
in formerly colonized societies, it has tended to overshadow the
intensity of the violence of brother towards brother and the status
of the sister and the mother in the midst of fratricide. In passing, it
has clouded our understanding of the relationship between sover
eignty, homicide, fratricide, and suicide.40
More fundamentally, and without doubt as a consequence of
its relative philosophical poverty, this current of thought has hard
ly been able to account for the fact of abjection and the impossi
bility of signification ? essential marks historically assigned to the
African sign in the theater of the world. I refer to the impossibility
of signification, not so much because the African sign resists every
process of symbolization, but because Africa has been, for so long,
the name of the irreducible outside, an impossible remainder
whose meaning and identity cannot be spoken about except by
way of an originary act of expropriation. This originary confine
ment in primitive difference ? it is this that Senghor, C?saire,
Fanon, and others tried hard to refute, at times no matter what it
took, according to the means available to them.41
But contrary to Senghor, C?saire, and Fanon, On the
Postcolony aimed at revisiting this archive of abjection, no longer
in the context of the call to murder the settler, but at a time when
brother and enemy have become one, and in an age in which the
sovereign right to kill is exercised against one's own people first:
the violence of brother towards brother. In so doing, the book was
trying to prolong an African tradition of critical reflection on the
politics of life.42
16 ACHILLE MBEMBE
Thinking With and Against Fanon
Fanon is the person who, in his time, formulated in the most haunt
ing way a series of questions concerning the politics of life. It is for
that reason that in many respects my book endeavors to think with
and against Fanon.
In regards, thus, to the politics of life in the African archives
of modernity, the questions can be formulated in the following
way: In a context where everything is likely to come in contact with
violence and death, summon violence and death while granting to
both a central place as much in the procedures for constituting
memory, in the quotidian technologies and practices of power, as
in the structures of imagination, what does it mean to say, "I am a
human being," "I am alive," or still, "I exist?" What does one mean
when one affirms "the desire to be free" and "the capacity to
decide for oneself?"43
In the most recent history of our modernity, the colony has
been the theater par excellence where the question of life has been
the most dramatized. But before the colony, there is the plantation.
That this is the case is explicable: Everything in the plantation as
well as in the colony, at every moment, was likely to be trans
formed into a figure of violence, indeed into a figure of demise. In
most instances, the struggle to remain alive tended to assume the
character of a fight to the death. As Karla Holloway writes in her
study of African-American mourning stories, "the cycles of our
daily lives were so persistently interrupted by specters of death that
we worked this experience into the culture's iconography and
included it as an aspect of black cultural sensibility."44 This pres
ence of death in life and life in death made it such that it became
impossible to develop a critical reflection on the politics of life
which was not at the same time an interrogation concerning the
structures of violence and of human destitution.
For Fanon, the genealogy of colonial structures of death
should be traced quite beyond political, cultural, military, and eco
nomic apparatuses. He situates this genealogy, quite centrally, in
the psychic domain. Violence, he says, is not only brought into the
house; it is also brought into the mind of the colonized. He shows

in this respect that, in the colony, racialization constitutes the pri
mal scene against which the life of the psyche deploys itself. It is
the obscure page where, imprisoned by the other's gaze, the native
(or for that matter the slave) experiences the impossibility of ever
knowing in what the essence of his or her work consists. More rad
ically, race is the abyssal region where the native/slave is forced to
abdicate the power to represent himself or herself in life, except in
the form of a specter. Race inaugurates therefore the time when the
human disappears, fades away, or quite simply ceases to exist at
all: the blind stain by virtue of which it becomes impossible to
know what the human truly consists of.
In other words, in the colony, race is the privileged site of all
phantasmal activity. It is in its name that the power to kill or to "civ
ilize" is exerted. To kill or civilize, moreover, are quite often inter
changeable. Here, race is not only the engine for sensorial life. It is
also a sort of original wound: the revelation of the extraordinary
precariousness of life. It is at once the instrument and the scene of
murder, its mirror, its unconscious, and its finery [parure].45 From
this point of view, colonial wars, when they take place, are always
somehow a war of races.46 The power to kill, which, moreover,
goes hand in hand with the power of degradation and violation,
always conceals itself behind the pantomime of right. For colonial
right is necessarily the daughter of violence. Right rests upon the
originary violence of race. Race legitimates colonial right, all the
while concealing its primal foundation ? the underlying desire to
murder, which, as we know, is hidden in the very depths of every
culture and every civilization.47
In the conditions that I just sketched out, and which are the
hallmarks of the colonial condition, Fanon argues that life is not
pre-given. Life is a trial ? a trial of the self and of the world, the
two together. The politics of life is that by which one tears oneself
out of one's own historical conditions, beginning with race. And in
refusing to let oneself be shut up in the gaze of the other, one works
to create the conditions in order that history remain always open
and the subject never closed.48 The labor of life, he asserts, is from
18 ACHILLE MBEMBE
one end to the other a "totalizing" and "violent praxis" in the midst
of a "great chain," of a "great violent organism" where each "is
made a link."49
To pose the problem of life in these terms ? to so tightly
articulate the politics of life and the politics of enmity ? forces us
to discuss the status o? death-as-such or, more precisely, of death's
life or the life of death. For Fanon, death represents the extreme and
paradoxical figure of politics. Fanon in effect seems to hold that the
historical event par excellence is, if not death-in-itself, then at least
the act of taking life. In his eyes, the taking of the enemy's life is the
privileged dialect of history, the language of becoming-subject or,
as he himself indicates, "the absolute practice" (DT, 82). Fanon
suggests that in the context of absolute subjection and abjection
owing to race, one attains the status of a true subject in the act in
which he or she transcends the inherent fear of taking the settler's
or enemy's life. In this context, death is clearly linked to enmity. To
live upright is to harness, for oneself, the power of giving death50
that the enemy tries to monopolize. More radically, Fanon seems to
suggest that in such contexts, to take the life of the enemy is not
only a duty, but a politico-ethical responsibility. "For the colo
nized," he maintains, "life can only arise out of the decomposing
cadaver of the settler" (DT, 89).
To define a politics of life and freedom so narrowly depen
dent on the life of death (or the act of taking the enemy's life) ?
and on the sign of the rotting corpse of the settler ? raises a num
ber of issues. First of all, one cannot take the life of a heavily armed
enemy without risking, in the same action, one's own life (self-sac
rifice). Bringing to life [faire na?tre ? la vie] ? the other name for
freedom ? is therefore thoroughly inscribed within a structure of
exchange ? the exchange of death. What is more, if taking life
equally signifies the possibility of taking one's own life in the grand
sacrifice of the self that the revolutionary war represents, then how
is the logic of murder different from the logic of suicide? Is taking
the life of the settler different, in a purely ethical point of view, from
the right to kill pure and simple? Can one seriously consider the
history of human freedom as fundamentally governed by the
unique, compulsory and unavoidable law ? that of the general

ized circulation of death?
One is familiar with Fanon's response: To give one's own life
for the sake of freedom, or still to kill the settler, is to be born in
freedom, to ascend within humanity [mont?e en humanit?]. For
him, this human ascension, this act of becoming human, is an
intrinsically political and moral act. There are moments in Fanon's
thought when this upsurge takes up the appearance of an orgiastic
mystery ? a rite at once of initiation, expiation, detoxification, and
purification: a moment of illumination.
On the Postcolony suggests that in order to exit the Fanonian
cul-de-sac ? the dead-end of the generalized circulation and
exchange of death as the condition for becoming human ? it is
important to examine in what way, in a context of a life that is so
precarious, disposing-of-death-itself could be, in fact, the core of a
veritable politics of freedom.51 This would be a politics that would
rest on a different foundation, "one in which sacrifice is exceeded,
surmounted, sublimated, or sublated."52 In these conditions, the
ethical relation would reside in the struggle to make the sovereign
right to kill unable ever to escape from the measure of a law each
time more sovereign ? the law of the unsacrificeable, the law of
the indestructible, the final disposal-of-death-itself.53
It is this radical utopia that runs throughout On the Post
colony. It emerges with force in the chapter entitled "God's
Phallus" ? unfortunately little studied by the critics. In this chap
ter, I indicate that one can only express the unconditionality of
such a utopia in a poetic, even dreamlike, form. Because dispos
ing-of-death-itself is precisely the kind of difference that can be
neither eradicated nor integrated or overcome, the radical utopia of
disposing-of-death-itself cannot be read literally. It can only be
read figuratively, poetically. It can only be left to the difficult and
never completed labor of decipherment. And in this absence of
closure lies a politics of life and freedom that would not be a sim
ple repetition of the originary murder.
The politics of life, that is to say, the conditions of possibility
for the African subject to exercise his or her own sovereignty, and
20 ACHILLE MBEMBE
to find in this relationship with oneself the fullness of his or her hap
piness ? such was thus the heart of my inquiry (see the conclu
sion). We will have understood that to pose the question in this way
indicates the concern of not conceding to the world its current con
dition. Yet contrary to an approach typical of postcolonial theory, I
critiqued the solipsism of the Western logos only in order to open
a path to the critique of the self, to a genealogy of responsibility.
Responsibility I understood not only as an attempt to restore
as much as possible the proper name, but also as a response to the
name by which one has come to be called and to the fate as well
as the promise prescribed by that name. In the case of Africa, it is
clear that such a response can only be found on the far side of its
very loss and never again in the originary face of the name proper.
Indeed, any serious critique of the West entails, of necessity, a crit
ical revisiting of our own fables and the various grammars that,
under the pretext of authenticity or radicalism, prosaically turn
Africa into yet another fiction.
Still it was necessary to find a way of writing about this trial
in a language by which its pulse could be felt. Faced with the cul
de-sac of the many discourses on Africa, it seemed to me that a
means for escaping the trap of the name could be found through
experimenting with the de-constitutive and propitiatory force of
language, and above all through an attempt to explode language
altogether. I attempted to carry out this labor of de-constitution
through shortcuts, repetitions, inventions, a manner and rhythm of
narration at once open, hermetic and melodious, made up of
sonorities ? in the tradition of Senghor's "shadow song" [chant
d'ombre]54 ? a song that can only be captured and truly under
stood by the entirety of the senses, and not by hearing alone.
I was searching for a mode of writing that would lead the
reader to listen to that shadow song with her or his own senses. But
these encounters with the senses only interested me insofar as they
were fragmentary, evanescent, chopped up, and even sometimes
unsuccessful. As far as I was concerned, it was a matter of encoun
tering those zones of contemporary African life overloaded with
memory, remembrance and debt ? regions of knowledge irre
ducible to those of the classical social sciences. This explains why

I granted such a place in the book to philosophy, religion, litera
ture, and psychoanalysis.
This mode of writing was intimately linked to a manner of
reading, notably, the reading of everyday life, which privileged
sites where the subject experiences her or his own history as pre
sent past. I insist on this notion of experience. Over the last quar
ter of the twentieth-century, African life has taken various forms,
some of which are unbearable. In most instances, naked pr?dation
and the brutality of horror have taken a phantasmal, even night
marish, outer appearance. The real and the fictitious have been
reflected in one another, provoking the loss of any stable reference
since each thing thereby always refracted in several others, in a
relationship that could be described as proliferating, but also falsi
fying: the power of the false.55
It is this power of the false that gives to the experience of the
postcolony if not its unique character, then at least its share of orig
inality. This unique character can be summed up as follows: the
absence of sharp ruptures and weak continuities; an unstoppable
and omnipresent force of multiplication and falsification; and,
finally, a tangle of whirling and unfinished logics. And it is pre
cisely this tangle that explains so well the share of ind?termination
and undecidability but also arbitrariness that the book considers ?
these two things in most cases going perfectly together.
Critiques
Many readers of On the Postcolony have shown interest in the

philosophical, political and literary aspects of the book.56 The most
creative critics have read the book mindful of what Ato Quayson
calls "the constitutive difficulties that any discussion of Africa must
contend with."57 Bruce Janz is right when he argues that the book
does not set out a general theory of Africa or of Africans. He ade
quately describes the project as a "set of exercises," a self-critical
account of African existence that aims at modeling "the complexi
ties of African life for Africans."58 I should add that it is also an
22 ACHILLE MBEMBE
attempt to theorize time and subjectivity (the consciousness of self

and of time) in the conditions of a life that is fundamentally con
tingent and precarious. This is the reason why such a central impor
tance is accorded to the life of brutality and to the life of death. But
to reflect on violence and death is not necessarily to lament on
"loss" and "negativity" or to renounce hope.
In the field of literary criticism, the debate has been centered
around what I have made of the relations between power, aesthet
ics and the production and circulation of signs. In a very suggestive
study entitled "On Laughter, the Grotesque, and the South African
Transition," Rita Barnard shows how an aesthetic of vulgarity in
which both blacks and whites participate is inscribed in Zakes
Mda's novel Ways of Dying. But she argues against my deployment
of Bakhtin's work in On the Postcolony and argues that vulgarity,
obscenity, and parody per se "are not for Bakhtin the defining ele
ment of carnival spirit." The quintessential aspect of the carniva
lesque is a peculiar and "productive ambivalence," she adds. "The
grotesque image, as Bakhtin repeatedly asserts, is one that empha
sizes the human body ? its openness to the world. For all its gross
materiality, the grotesque body is therefore also standing on the
'threshold of the grave and the crib;' it serves as a sign of particular
temporality." At stake in this ambivalence, she concludes, is thus "a
vision of the profound regenerative connection between life and
death, and the world of the living and the earthly netherworld."59
In their responses to the book, a number of anthropologists
have tended to use ethnographic material to challenge what they
perceive as my "sweeping generalizations."60 Others have called
for "a sympathetic critique" ? by which they mean an attempt at
"grounding" the practices I examine in determinate ethnographic
contexts. Thus, in his study of the "aesthetics and dialogics of
power" in contemporary Uganda, anthropologist Mikael Karlstrom
has examined what he calls my "analytical indeterminacies" and
raises doubts about my theoretical deployment of Bakhtin's per
spectives on medieval carnival and corporeal humor. With regard
to state ceremonialism and the discursive centrality of bodily
metaphors, he incorrectly argues that my analysis is "hampered by
an overestimation of the ideological power of the postcolonial state

and a radically and unjustifiably pessimistic portrayal of state-soci
ety relations in postcolonial Africa as terminally mired in inherent
ly dysfunctional political dispositions and practices/'
He goes on to explore the ceremonial practices whereby rela
tions of political authority are staged by rural communities in
southern Uganda. He identifies in such practices elements of reci
procity between state and people ? what he calls "ritualized dial
ogism." He then argues that the disabling paradoxes of postcolo
nial politics "do not arise out of any inherent pathology of the
African political imagination, but rather of the postcolonial state's
tendency to deploy local models and practices of the public sphere
in ways that evacuate them of much of their legitimating content."
In his view, local idioms provide resources for popular critical con
sciousness.61
As it is clear by now, most of the critique aims at salvaging
some notion of struggle, resistance, rebellion, and revolution ? mas
ter-tropes that have served to interpret and canonize histories of
Blacks in Africa and the African diasporas all the more to better blame
everything else on "the charades of neocolonialism" and "the manip
ulation of venal political puppets" (BM, 318). This concern underpins
most philosophically-inspired critiques of On the Postcolony whether
such critiques relate to questions concerning the apparently unprob
lematic use I make of Western philosophy in order to interpret an
object (Africa) that this same philosophy had previously expelled
from its field of rationality and rendered inert; whether they have to
do with the apparently unfinished reading of the Hegelian master
slave dialectic or the political impasses to which a "post-structuralist"
interpretation of violence is seen necessarily to lead. Critics have also
wondered about what they perceive as an ail-too pronounced
reliance on hermeneutic thought as a means to account for subjec
tivity. To many a reader, the book smacks of historicism. On the Post
colony, they argue, is a political history without a subject. It leaves
unresolved the question of the relationship between politics, theolo
gy, and aesthetics and fails to provide a clear political position on the
question of the future and the conditions of a politics of hope.62
24 ACHILLE MBEMBE
What other re-readings have above all retained from the book
are the arguments that concern the psychic topographies of sub
jection and domination ? what the book called the "command
ment." Even though they agree with me on the weight I accorded
to the interaction between politics and the symbolic in the consti
tution of the official postcolonial public sphere, they are equally
forceful in their attempt to rehabilitate one of the master-tropes of
late twentieth-century social theory, resistance, within the holy
trinity of race, class and gender. Anthropologists, for their part,
have interrogated the paucity of (empirical) ethnographic material
in the book, the little care the book seems to give to regional vari
ations in the constitution of that object which is the postcolony,
and the tendency to homogenize the contradictory practices of the
subaltern.63
The most controversial thesis of On the Postcolony has to do
with the sensory life of power and the logic both of mutual cor
ruption and conviviality uniting rulers and their subjects in one and
the same epist?m?. Whereas a very large part of the social theory
of the last decades of the twentieth century preoccupied itself with
the phenomena of identity, social control, and resistance, the cen
tral chapter of my book in effect affirms that the underlying force of
postcolonial venality and brutality is the fact that the political rela
tionship between the rulers and their subjects is inscribed in a
largely shared symbolic order. This order is governed by two kinds
of drives: on the one hand, the unlimited desire to acquire goods
and wealth (chrematistics), and, on the other, the stupefaction
experienced in pleasure (pleonexia). The dialectics of power as
enjoyment, enjoyment as possession, and possession as destruction
can be historically traced to the period of the Atlantic slave trade.
Then, the psychic life of power revolved around a paradox.
On the one hand, the most significant modalities of political inte
gration and surplus extraction came in the form of "wealth in peo
ple" ? a human retinue consisting of clan members, all manner of
fictive kin, "daughters and nieces offered to the king as wives, sons
and nephew loaned to the court as pages, and a few dependents
and unwanted kin conceded as criminals and slaves to work in the
fields and craft industries that constituted the modest "public

works" of the realm."64 On the other hand this "political economy
of human followers" firmly rested on the sale of slaves. Raying for
the imports with people was the dominant way to reimburse much
of the debt that the purchase of imported wares (textiles, alcohol,
hats, fabricated items of apparel, glassware, metalwares, crates of
muskets and kegs of powder, various adornments or signifiers of
rank) created.
In most cases, the use of human pawns to secure goods
advanced against the delivery of slaves was common practice. Very
often, African merchant rulers received goods on credit from the
slave ships and in return, left a pledge or security consisting of their
own relations.65 At the same time, luxury consumption made it
such that certain goods were easily converted into capital stocks of
human dependents. But in return, the access to these same goods
could only be possible by sacrificing the very dependents men of
power had set out to keep.66
The transformation of the political economy of goods and
people was not only inscribed within an aesthetics of sumptuous
ness. It also put "previously undreamt-of power in the hands of a
few armed individuals." As Joseph Miller argues, "guns made these
new men into a distinct genre of warlords who typically thrived by
preying" on large populations. Indeed, "more than any other cate
gory of imports, muskets undermined the humane political econo
my of western central Africa by rendering large, loyal followings of
people superfluous to the exercise of power." The symbolic realm
was itself affected by this hiatus.
The notion that "the ashes of the bones of people sent off as
slaves to the .. . Land of the Dead returned as gunpowder" gave to
these transformations a properly hallucinatory dimension. The lat
ter was itself dramatized by the belief, prevalent then, according to
which the large quantities of imported inebriants (Portuguese wine,
Brazilian rum, Dutch gin, French brandies) and the increased con
sumption of psychoactive substances intensified communication
with the magical components of power while enhancing the pow
ers of lords and elders to contact ancestors and other spirits (see
26 ACHILLE MBEMBE
chapter 3). This logic of expenditure was at the same time a sacrifi
cial one. It gave birth to a form of ghostly sovereignty the culmina
tion of which is the postcolonial massacre.67 Power was turned into
a specular image placed at the threshold of the visible world and
was firmly tied to a negative space constituted by the gap between
the real and its shadow, the imago of the body and the apparition
of its double in the heart of the psyche ? magic, fantasy, and delir
ium. It became the synonym of the anti-pharmakon.
The drives described above encircle power, devitalize it,
weigh it down, and participate in its dissipation, but in the same
way they dispel the possibility of its possible overthrow since, as I
argue, they are deeply shared by the ruled. The logic of expendi
ture described above is still at the heart of postcolonial imagina
tions of power. Since it is a question of expending lives or of con
suming goods, the sumptuous economy of the postcolony is an
economy of the sovereign type, at least in the sense Bataille spoke
of sovereignty ? that is, a manner of expenditure without the pos
sibility of reserve. This capacity not to "think the remainder," this
refusal of power to economize or conserve the life of its subjects,
never to defer expenditure, this willingness to be definitively mired
in the moment and free from the fetters of continuity ? it is that
which confers to the postcolony its exuberant spirit, its stylistics, in
short, its libertine character. This is also what shapes its aesthetics
of violence.
The central chapters of the book (chapter 3 and 4) consider
the ways in which power compels its subjects ritualistically to per
form, within and through the mundane practices of everyday pub
lic life, a ratification of its own theatricality and excess. In the
process, power does not simply lay claims to its subjects through
coercion and violence. "Coercive" power also compels its subjects
to rearticulate that power, to confer grandeur on it, and to do this
through a convivial participation in simulation ofthat power. I then
argue that this very process of ratification becomes itself the site for
a subtle de-legitimation of state power. The paradox is that this sub
tle process takes place through the very authorizing or ratifying rit
uals. Now, this kind of de-authorizing subversion that takes place
in and through the exercise of ratification re-authorizes that power

at the same time that it exposes its vulnerability. In order to hide
this vulnerability, power, in turn, increases its violence.
I then show that "resistance" is seldom located outside of
power. Moreover, power in the postcolony is itself always already
multiply situated. Commandment is never akin to a stable notion
of sovereignty. Instead of explaining the nature and causes of dom
ination in terms of colonization, imperialism, class struggle, race,
gender, ethnicity and so on, the book proposes to locate, in a gen
eral manner, the source of domination and subjection not so much
in the will of power to exercise domination, but in the rulers' and
the subjects' unconscious itself. The book does not deny that mutu
al corruption as well as the games of visible servility are anchored
in historical structures of inequality and power. Judith Butler is right
to argue that the commandment is not only produced by the sub
jects who ratify its power. It is also produced by "a history embed
ded in traditions of racism, colonialism, and both colonial and
non-colonial forms of misogyny."68
It is indeed the multiple layers of this genealogy that have to
be opened up to investigation. This having been said, the inter
twining of rulers and subjects is constantly masked, sanctioned,
and reiterated by way of both a ceremonial type of civility and the
banality of ritualized modes of coercion. Besides, the inequality
produced in this way is experienced by both sides as a form of
exchange and as a form of the gift. In this game of domination and
subjection, ceremonies, rituals, exchanges, and gifts permit, on the
one hand, the engendering (and pretense of settling) debts, and, on
the other, the institution of networks of reciprocal dependence that
are cemented to a same ethos by virtue of common participation.69
This is why the book pertains neither to Africanism nor to Afro-rad
icalism. Nor is my approach "postmodern" or "nihilistic" as alleged
by more than one critic.70
28 ACHILLE MBEMBE
The Horn of Plenty
The other major critique of the book picks up on the question of

the sexual politics of power. Judith Butler in particular has argued
that the theatricalization of power in the postcolony is first and
foremost a theatrical ization of the masculine body through which
the State is ritualistically ratified. She has also noted that the rituals
of ratification are markedly masculinist.
She asks whether postcolonial imaginarles of power, espe
cially in their association of power and bodily parts and functions,
can be read apart from the gender and sexual taboos that are
invested in them. "The effort of the commandment to install itself
as cosmogony requires hiding its own contingency," she argues.
"The vulgar references to orifices, then, are meant not only to
expose the vulgarity (over and against the grandeur) of the com
mandment itself, but to desacralize the body of the ruler as fetish,
i.e. significantly to reduce its size. And yet here I would suggest
that the figurative collapse of the ruler to his anus may also be a
way of underscoring his own penetrability, a way of admitting the
culturally marked "feminine" into the self-sufficient masculine
ideal. . . . The phallus requires women to be the repository of its
waste," she concludes ("MEP," 68-71).
She is right. It would not be enough to respond to the
extremely complex questions she raises by rehearsing here what
many feminist critics have already taught us about the intersection
of gender and nation ? that the concept of '"woman" has been
made to play a paradoxical role in national liberation and nation
building; that the institutionalization of unjust gender systems and
their reproduction in the law is a constitutive dimension of the
masculinist state. In a recent study, Veena Das, for instance, shows
how the figure of the abducted woman allowed the postcolonial
Indian state to construct "order" as essentially an attribute of the
masculine nation so that the counterpart of the social contract
became the sexual contract. The latter is a contract in which the
social scripts of patriarchy give us different valuations not only of
sons and daughters, but more radically, of any life built around
female connections in a world of men.71 The same argument could

easily be made of postcolonial Africa. Here, kin, community and
masculinity were weaved in the fabric of daily life in a way such
that state-building and nation-building became almost exclusively
a matter of genealogical connections between fathers and sons.
A proper response would require a genealogical analysis of
the symbolic systems that in Africa have historically tied the social
worlds of sexuality and of power to the phantasmal configurations
of pleasure [jouissance] on the one hand, and to structures of sub
jection on the other hand. There is no doubt that historically, sex
and gender norms were central to the fabric of power and eco
nomic life. But so were cultural and symbolic categories in the def
inition of what stood for womanhood and for manhood. But our
knowledge of how power operated through the medium of actual
bodies is, at the very least, lacunal.72 I will therefore limit myself
here to underlining some paradoxes and putting forward a few
hypotheses. In particular, I will try to highlight the kinds of imagi
narles of body, sex, and gender relationships that contribute, in a
decisive way, to the constitution as well as the psychic life of that
figure of brutality I have called the postcolony.
In the postcolony, power dons the face of virility. The polis is
above all equivalent to a community of men [soci?t? des hommes].
Its effigy is the erect penis. It can be argued that the whole of its
psychic life is organized around a particular event: the swelling of
the virile organ, the experience of turgescence. Power experiences
processes of turgescence as defining moments in the course of
which it redoubles its size and casts itself beyond its limits. During
this growth towards its limits, it multiplies itself and produces a
phantasmal double whose function it is to efface the distinction
between the real and the fictional. The effigy (the phallus) plays,
from this moment of growth, a spectral function. But in seeking to
exceed its own boundaries, the body of power (the phallus) expos
es its limits, and in exposing them, exposes itself and renders itself
vulnerable. Such is the sexual imagination of the postcolony.
This sexual imagination draws from diverse traditions, some
of which are autochthonous, while others are purely colonial and
30 ACHILLE MBEMBE
modern. In a study of Vodun sculptural representations of the body

and the dynamics of Vodun artistic expression, Suzanne Preston
Blier shows how cultural definitions of the body and anatomy are
at the same time discourses on being as well as figurai imagings of
the psyche. To be sure, sexuality and gender are not first and fore
most about anatomy or genitality. But nor are they completely dis
sociated from questions of how, what, and why particular part
objects (Melanie Klein), or organs, express and reveal and how
they are set apart in the mind and psychically valorized. Sexuality
and gender are both social imaginarles (norms, rules, languages,
values) materialized through different forms and a whole complex
of socio-historical institutions. This being the case, it can be said
that in ancient Africa, sexuality and gender are first and foremost
about the exercise of a certain capacity. There is no imagination of
sexuality and gender that does not revolve around the question:
"What can a body do?" In turn, a body's structure is fundamental
ly the composition of its relations.
For instance, Blier shows how in Vodun sculptural represen
tations, the stomach is imagined as the seat of human emotions
(especially the two sensations of appetite and satisfaction) and
how, as such, it is frequently referred to in the context of divination
and geomancy. Kidneys, for their part, are the place of concentra
tion of all sensations that penetrate the body by way of the eyes, the
ears, and the senses. The penis emerges in this imaginary under the
sign of the gap and of negation. It is a force of disruption associat
ed with Legba, a deity of trickery and deception. "Erect phalluses
distinguish this latter deity's shrines and ritual objects." Blier
observes that sculptures vary considerably with respect to the
amount of attention (and proportional size) given to the genital
area. The meanings attached to an erect penis are always poly
s?mie. Paradoxically, an enlarged penis might well allude to "fears
concerning infertility, sexual inadequacy, and impotence." But an
erect phallus may as well serve "to encourage erections." On the
other hand, adds Blier, erect or enlarged genitals may refer to
power and trickery, deception and danger.73
The vagina, by virtue of the manner with which it was sup
posed to be hollowed out by the penile erection, came to be con

strued at times as a container, at times as an envelope or a sheath
whose function it was not only to enfold, but also to discipline the
excess and immoderation of the penis. As in the Islamic contexts
described by Hachem Foda, the function of the vagina was to "bor
der, contain, mold, and delimit that which owed its existence to its
erectile status."74 Other qualities were attributed to the vagina: a
voracious and insatiable appetite (the abyss); a guarantee of life
(through its reproductive functions); the quintessential threat (the
hole in the other, the original wound notably symbolized by men
strual blood). These symbolic significations were almost always
contradictory. In the masculine imaginaries, the vagina oscillated
between attraction and repulsion,75 the obscure fear of engulfment
(the ostensible castrating power of woman), and the seat of life (the
maternal function).76 According to Blier, the term designating the
vagina could be used as an insult. But ancillary terms describing
the woman's genitals could also refer to inertia, tomb, and glutton.
Like its counterpart the penis, the word employed in reference to
the vagina, mi?ona, was the name of a powerful deity of both
witchcraft and motherhood (AV, chapter 4).
These examples point to the fact that body and sexuality were
fraught with uncertainty and danger. That this was the case testified
to the very precariousness of everyday life. The forces mobilized for
the performance of sex and the body were not transparent.
Vulnerability was a mode through which power and sex were
mutually constituted and circulated. In its combination of power,
vulnerability, and obscurity, to engage in sex was to place oneself,
man and woman, in a precarious position. Through its ethos of a
flesh devoted to penance, colonial Christianity added to the circle
of anxiety that already surrounded sex. In reinforcing the dra
maturgy already attached to precolonial understandings of sex and
the body, it fostered the internalizaron of sexual repression and
firmly inscribed sex within the realm of sin and death.77 Islam, by
contrast, glorified a celestial sexuality whose earthly counterpart
constituted a kind of foretaste.78
Among the many stereotypes of gender roles generated in the
32 ACHILLE MBEMBE
process of the confrontation between Africa and the West is the

womb-focused cliche of the African woman. In her study of the
complex historical negotiations of gender and other social hierar
chies in Late Imperial China, Francesca Bray argues that women
were neither purely seen primarily as biological reproducers, nor
victims of patriarchal control and oppression.79 The same can be
said of many precolonial African societies. To be sure, the pursuit
of maternal status and natural fertility were decisive criteria against
which womanhood was judged. But just as in Late Imperial China,
so was social motherhood. In a number of precolonial kingdoms
and under certain circumstances, it could even be more important
than giving birth. Even more crucial, it could not be confused with
the role of wife per se. Since most hierarchical societies functioned
according to the principle of a double public sphere, one visible
and, beneath it, an invisible architecture, social motherhood fun
damentally determined, to a large extent, women's ideas about
themselves and each other. It was also a crucial factor in the way
they were treated by men and how they treated each other.
Whatever the case, "bearing a child did not necessarily make one
a mother, nor did infertility necessarily make one not a mother"
(TC, 281).
To this should be added the existence of autonomous, exclu
sively feminine spheres beyond the world at home, including in
societies in which the practice of women's seclusion was the norm.
All these factors contributed to the development of traditions that
established a more or less clear distinction between, on the one
hand, libertine sexuality, and, on the other, sex for reproductive
purposes. The latter was all the more critical because the political
economy of the centuries of slave trade and colonialism was based
on the ability to reproduce dependents of all sorts (wives, sons,
strangers, slaves and so on). Although the reproduction of depen
dents did not entirely depend on the practice of sex, it is quite clear
that sex-as-such became a pivotal institution in a political econo
my of use-value. But libertine sexuality was just as important as sex
for reproductive purposes. Should it be written one day, the histo
ry of libertine sexuality in precolonial Africa would probably be
read from within a general anthropology of bodily appetites and

pleasures, including appetite for food.80 In part because of the
requirements of libertine sex, numerous practices of acting on the
body were invented. Most involved an array of herbal substances
and decoctions. Indeed, nurturing sex was, for men and women,
part of an ethos of happiness and good life.
Although no amount of guilt seemed to be attached to the
carnal act as such, an array of interdictions surrounded copulation.
A complex of ideas and taboos clearly delimited the extent to
which male power could be deployed. But even though male
power was not a boundless field, ancestral and colonial traditions
all shared the idea according to which the phallus was the verita
ble horn of plenty. The phallus was at the same time the privileged
organ of power and, in a word, the signifier of signifiers. Mono
theistic religions (Christianity and Islam) both regarded masculine
sovereignty as endowed, at once, with theological and juridical
properties. Indigenous imaginations espoused, without contention,
the idea according to which the difference between virility and
femininity rested on the material difference between two specific
organs.
The entanglement of these imaginarles was a decisive aspect
of the process by which gendered reality has been made up at least
since the nineteenth century. Such representations helped to legit
imize gestures, rules and ritualized enactments of sexual subjec
tion and autonomy. But gender symbolism and the male/female
antinomy were always contested categories.81 To be sure, social
actors did incorporate a masculinist habitus that exaggerated the
formal and symbolic opposition between male and female
domains, objects and moral qualities. But if anything, the tension
between the production of gender boundaries and processes that
constantly undermined them was a common occurrence. As cul
tural anthropologist Mariane C. Ferme argues in a detailed study of
gendered practices in Sierra Leone, zones of ambiguity and trans
gression abounded, and in fact, boundaries were almost always if
not overcome, at least unmade in what she calls "the context of
practice."
34 ACHILLE MBEMBE
Ferme pays particular attention to the performance of gen

dered differences and what she terms the logic of exaggerated dis
play of gender exclusiveness. The latter, she shows, could easily
mask both hierarchical distinctions among women and instances of
appropriation by women of ordinarily male domains. She suggests
that any account of the sexual politics of the postcolony should
take into consideration the co-existence of multiple public spheres
? some "open spaces" and others "concealed sites." It would
appear as if the tension between the "overt" and the "concealed,"
or between visible and esoteric orders of power is the source of: (1 )
the production of a vast array of significations around the under
standing of a gendered social world; (2) the nature of female power
and the constitution of sites identified entirely or partially as female
domains; and finally (3) the strategic uses of polysemy and covert
associations that can be appropriated by either men or women,
depending on the context.83
A dramatic figure of this strategic use of polysemy (and the
logic of display and concealment/dissimulation that underpins it) is
the figure of the mabole. The mabole epitomizes the absence of
transparent gender distinctions. A "middle-sex" character, the
mabole is supposed to combine elements of both sexes in an ongo
ing and unresolved dialectical tension. According to Ferme, she is
"both man and woman." As a "ritually male-identified woman,"
she participates in the social roles typically associated with both
genders. But because she has to manage "a regime of ambiguity
without resolving it dialectically into a stable order of meaning,"
she is "always on the brink of exclusion" (UT, 78-9).
All the above does not invalidate the centrality of the male
organ in the social imagination. Such a centrality consecrated, in
fact, the law of the Father and of the elderly [a?n?s]. And, as Lacan
argues, "It is with this penis that one will make a signifier of the loss
that appears at the level of jouissance by virtue of the function of
the law."85 It is this that explains the proliferation of practices and
rituals of phallus worship in different pre-colonial and contempo
rary African traditions. Indeed, in many traditions, the sexual act is
assimilated to a totemic feast governed by the dialectic of ingestion
? that is, an ingestion of the other and ingestion by the other.
The Anal and the Nocturnal
On the other hand, the postcolony's patriarchal traditions of power

are founded upon an originary repression. The central figure of this
repression is the anus. In effect, in the symbolic universe of many
pre-colonial African societies, the anus ? unlike the buttocks,
whose beauty, eminence, and curves are gladly sung by poets and
musicians ? was considered an object of aversion. Owing in part
to their prominent gourdlike shapes (and name), the buttocks in
particular are identified with capability and capacity. They consti
tute, according to Preston Blier, a critical part of an individual's
physical attractiveness. They are also identified with body move
ment. Large buttocks serve as signifiers of plenty. "Thus a well-off
woman, one who has acquired economic autonomy, often is called
gogonu, or 'mother of buttocks.'" (TG, 150)
In contrast to the buttocks, the anus is the accursed organ and
the sign par excellence of abjection. Its potency derives from its
supposed dangerousness and esoteric nature. In most instances,
the anal is akin to the nocturnal. It represents not only a potential
zone of entrapment, but also the principle of bodily anarchy ? a
horrifying anomaly. As a universal symbol of defecation and excre
ment, it is, of all the human organs (male or female), the quintes
sential "wholly other," shady and comical, imprisoned in a kind of
stupid obstinacy. Now, in indigenous imaginarles, the "wholly
other" equally represents one of the figures of occult power, and,
above all, of that "other of desire" which is unconquerable envy ?
the power to devour, manducation.84
The paradox here resides in the fact that the violence of
repression is only explicable by way of the heightened presence
[sur-pr?sence] of masculine homosexuality if not in ordinary sexu
al practices, then at least in the sacred rituals and the sexual
unconscious of society.85 The proclaimed denial of the existence of
homosexuality in pre-colonial African societies hardly signifies the
absence of desire, shared by each of the sexes, "to acquire and
36 ACHILLE MBEMBE
appropriate the ideal and idealized Penis/'86 To be sure, homosex

uality ? or same-sex practices, for that matter ? is not reducible
to anality. But the degradation and disgust with which anality is
made the object of public discourse goes hand in hand with the
recurrent appearance of the anus on the scene of the symptom, in
a variety of fantasmatic shapes.
One only has to consider the function anality plays in various
male sexual fantasies. Such is the case of fantasies of the permuta
tion of masculine and feminine roles, or masculine fantasies of
appropriating women via sodomistic acts. Such is also the case of
the desire ? experienced by men of power ? to subject those they
dominate to various forms of copulation, including anal penetration
or, in other contexts, the fetishization of the ruler's anus. To the pre
ceding should be added the existence, in various myths and leg
ends, of hermaphroditic creatures; or still the practice, in political
and social struggles, that consists in stripping the enemy of every
thing that constitutes the emblems of his virility and consuming
them (the principle of the manducation of power); or still the obses
sion with regenerating a dwindling virility by means of potions and
pelts.87 Homosexuality and same-sex practices thus belong to a very
deep stratification of the sexual unconscious of African societies.
If indeed the semiotics of power in the postcolony takes place
in the form of an infinite erection, can we therefore say that the post
colony is, as Judith Butler argues, "an impossible sign?" Yes, if we
consider that the psychic life of power originates from, and rests on,
power's desire for an infinite erection. The project of an infinite erec
tion itself corresponds to a longing for absolute sovereignty ? empty
infinity. This is a form of sovereignty that originates from the two
polarized impulses Bataille wrote about not long ago: excretion and
appropriation.88 This is, indeed, an insatiable desire. It is only explic
able in power's awareness of being surrounded at once by the threat
of vulnerability and feminization for which the vulva is the primor
dial emblem, and by the possibility of emasculation which anality ?
indeed, the seat of shame, but equally the symbol of the other of
omnipotence ? represents. Only by turning itself into an even more
powerful excrement can the Thing fend off the challenge of anality.
It is in this context that political struggles in the postcolony

are nearly always fought in the guise of sexual struggles, and vice
versa. For those holding power as much as for common men and
women, it is always a question of maximizing on each occasion
their virile or, as the case may be, feminine assets. It is as if one's
virility or femininity had to constantly undergo multiple rites of ver
ification. In this context, the object of power is to secure for
whomever possesses it a surplus pleasure [plus-de-jouir]. In the
masculine anatomy of the postcolony, the balls constitute the priv
ileged symbolic signifier of this surplus pleasure.
Among men, this surplus pleasure operates via the fantasy of
"consuming" as many women as possible. Sexual consumption
can only occur because the female body is found each time treat
ed as a foreign body. Akin to gluttony or drunkenness, sexual con
sumption has as its main goal the increase of masculine mana.
Now, since it is impossible to possess the female body once and for
all, pleasure [jouissance] is possible only in repetition. The act of
consumption must ceaselessly begin anew. Because of this neurot
ic compulsion to repeat, the male-female relationship is funda
mentally a frustrating relationship. In the exchanges between the
sexes, the female subject might seek if not to disempower the penis
[mettre hors-jeu l'instrument]89 in obtaining, by every means, its
flaccidity and failure, then at least to frustrate virility, and to despoil
masculine pleasure in such a manner that, the vain hope of total
satisfaction being ceaselessly deferred, male power is deflated by
the penis trapped by, and enslaved to, the vulva.90
Sexual commerce and the commerce of power consequently
acquire a purely repetitive character, in an always-open totality
within which only an inert sort of pleasure can be had. Men and
women then take, each in this case, to treating each other as
objects within a sexual economy dominated by the constant
attempts by men to control the flow of life-giving via various forms
of violence.91 Hence the apparent destructive character of desire ?
pure loss and pure expenditure.92 This seems to be particularly the
case in racialized social formations that have historically experi
enced brutal forms of degradation of life and calculated social
38 ACHILLE MBEMBE
destruction. In such formations, the assertion of manhood has, at

times, taken the form of the capitalization of women's bodies as
man's property.
Race, Memory and the Phallus
Since the everyday structures of gender domination that have

emerged in the process (as well as in the aftermath) of racial dom
ination tend to replicate the routine of colonial and racial brutality
toward black men, it is important to understand how the black
body came to be constituted in and through this economy of vio
lence in the first place.
In this regard, numerous studies have shown that what deter
mined the fate of manhood in a racist state was closely linked to an
ongoing war of races. As Michel Foucault has argued, racism does
make the relationship of war function in unexpected ways. On the
one hand, "racism makes it possible to establish a relationship
between my life and the death of the other that is not a military or
warlike relationship of confrontation, but a biological-type rela
tionship. . . . The fact that the other dies does not mean simply that
I live in the sense that his death guarantees my safety; the death of
the other, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or the
degenerate, or the abnormal) is something that will make life in
general healthier: healthier and purer." On the other hand, "the
enemies who have to be done away with are not adversaries in the
political sense of the term; they are threats, either external or inter
nal, to the population and for the population." In such a context,
"killing or the imperative to kill is acceptable only if it results . . .
in the elimination of the biological threat to and the improvement
of the species or race" (SMD, 255-56).
Indeed, whether in South Africa or in the United States (two
late modern racist states), the war between races was constructed
as a war between men, but a war in which the main assets were
women's bodies. Women's bodies were themselves imagined as
territories to be invaded, protected against the enemy or, when lost
to the latter, to be won back. At stake in these racist states was the
body as a territory of male power. The body was what gave sub
stance to the signifier (race) and what marked the limits of territo
rialization. Reflecting particularly on reproduction in bondage,
Dorothy Roberts has shown how the control of black procreation
not only helped to sustain slavery, but was a central aspect of
whites' subjugation of African people in America. Critical to the
dehumanization of slaves was the capitalization of black women's
wombs as vessels.
Two forms of sexual violation were particularly strategic in
the process by which black female slaves were disowned of their
personhood. The first was rape by the white master ? a weapon of
terror that reinforced whites' domination over their human proper
ty. As a matter of fact, sexual terror under slavery was a means to
subjugate both black men and women. Significant, in this regard,
was the fact that in addition to the rape of black women, the own
ership of the body of the white female by white masters became the
terrain on which to lynch the black male.93 As shown by Roberts,
white sexual violence attacked not only black men's masculinity by
challenging their ability to protect black women; it also invaded
black women's dominion over their own bodies.
The second form of sexual violation was the practice of
breeding. The latter consisted in compelling slaves considered
"prime stock" to mate in the hopes of producing children especial
ly suited for labor or for sale. Edward Covey purchased a twenty
year-old slave named Caroline as a "breeder", writes Frederick
Douglass. Covey mated Caroline with a hired man and was pleased
when a pair of twins resulted.94 Men of exceptional physical
strength could be rented to serve as studs: "The master was might
careful about raisin' healthy nigger families and used us strong,
healthy young bucs to stand the healthy nigger gals," recalls Jeptha
Choice, once a "stockman" or "breedin' nigger." "When I was
young they took care not to strain me and I was as handsome as a
speckled pup and was in demand for breedin'," he adds {KBB, 28).
As evidenced by the practice of lynching, the paradox of the
black male body and black sexuality was that the black male body
was seen as a site of threat and confrontation while black sexuali
40 ACHILLE MBEMBE
ty was a site of envy and fear. Precisely because the black male
body was perceived as a threat, it had to be regulated and posi
tioned in the juridical, economic and socio-political order. As a
way of internalizing white supremacy, it had to be isolated from a
sense of anything but its own vulnerability and abjection.95 It had
to be trapped in occupied and outlawed spaces (the township, the
reserve, the compound, the hostel) and other peculiar institutions.
But the fact of its being trapped in occupied zones and subjected
to trials of humiliation, torture, and death had to do with an even
darker ritual: the becoming-animal of a scapegoat, as dramatized
by the ceremonial of lynching ? the ultimate figure of castration
and a cruel form of negative breeding.96
Deleuze and Guattari use the notion of the becoming-animal
of a scapegoat to refer to the torturing of the body that occurs in the
confrontation with the face or the body of the despot (the sover
eign).97 In their mind, the scapegoat represents a form of increasing
entropy in the system of signs. From their argument, we can infer
that in the logic of the late modern racist states, body, sexuality, and
territory are brought together in a system in which every sign not
only refers to another sign, but is brought back to race ? the
supreme signifier. In this system, the black body is condemned as
that which constantly eludes or exceeds the supreme signifi?es
power of territorial ization. At the same time, the same body is
assigned a negative value. It is charged with everything that is
under a curse. It is dread as everything that resists meaning. As
everything that exceeds the excess of the supreme signifier, its face
has to be effaced. It has to be forcibly removed or placed between
the "goafs ass and the face of the god" (TP, 116).
Such was the logic of calculated destruction of black man
hood under early and late modern regimes of racialized sovereign
ty. This is one of the reasons why in most narratives of so-called
black emancipation, the "birthing of the nation" is almost always
akin to the "birthing of manhood." If love is involved in this process
at all, it always takes the form of an angry love itself linked to the
memory of a body (male and female) on the Cross ? the political
crucifixion and physical pain experienced over so many years in
the hands of an enemy-state. As shown by Robert Carr in his bril

liant study of black nationalism in the New World, it is in that con
text that the attempt to step outside the white man's law and the
project of becoming a law unto oneself (self-determination) almost
seem to entail, first and foremost, a confrontation with one's own
body.98
But because nationalism conceptualizes power as a mas
culinist prerogative and firmly inscribes resistance in the frame
work of a war between men, to wrestle one's body from the prop
erty of the racist state or to confront it as an irretrievably physical
and corporeal phenomenon is often reduced to a mere recapturing
of one's lost balls. It is obvious that in such a calculus of manhood,
women's bodies are still assigned to the status of territories as well
as superfluous and interchangeable assets. Power relations, in other
words, are still naked, as evidenced by the fact of rape.
The arguments above equally apply to the postcolony. Here,
the speech that articulates sexuation ultimately assigns to each sex
a place supposedly founded on a physical natural law that is at the
same time a law of destiny. A dominant part of sexuality is lived
according to the masculine model of discharge. As Judith Butler
has pointed out, the masculine drains itself in eliminating the over
load of semen that it has accumulated. The primordial terror that
power ceaselessly endures is that of aspects of its virility being
stolen from it (the terror of ablation).
But to say of the phallus that it is made the object of p?trifica
tion in the postcolony ? or still to affirm that radical political strug
gles here consists first of all in a manner of confrontation with the
statue (the phallic) ? does not mean that the vulva is not the subject
of a privileged decipherment. In fact, the vulva does not appear only
as a fragment of the body, but, basically, as a fragment of that which,
"within the corporeal itself, announces itself as the promise of anoth
er body and of another life, a life reassembled around this corpore
al reserve."99 Without making of these reproductive capacities the
only idiom of female power, it is this strategic control over the living
that is contested by men. Woman, in reality, is therefore never, nei
ther entirely nor only once, reduced to the position of the object.
42 ACHILLE MBEMBE
The Time that Comes
The question of the future ? which my critics press me to confront

? only makes sense if we take seriously the fact that the postcolo
nial commandment as a fetish is always a fake; it is a fake that fakes
the power of originating its own meaning. It is a set of signs, sym
bols, and narratives with diverse, complex, entangled origins.
Because it is fundamentally a fake, the commandment can only be
secure to the extent that its own origins (in death) are obscured and
the murderous impulse constitutive of its being constantly masked.
If we want, with only the most elementary seriousness, to inquire
into our possible futures, then a prerequisite gesture is necessary: It
is necessary to stare as closely as possible at the nihilism which a
politics of death that presents itself in the guise of a poetics of life
carries with it.
The risk of being devoured by the totemic animal, especially
when the latter wears a mask, is what must be probed.100 To imag
ine the future, we must first recognize ourselves in the trap and in
the gap, in the place of the gap, as witnesses to the Beast that
haunts the night. It is thus a matter, in the first place, of patiently
deciphering the deadly travail ofthat which mutilates life. This sup
poses, strictly speaking, the invention of a style of writing and a
language capable and suitable to encounter the spirit of the dead,
in a radical showdown with the nocturnal share of that which we
call life in the contemporary world.
I am quite conscious of the fact that next to the figures of pol
itics-as-the-work-of-death, there exist other imaginarles and
modalities of historical action. These imaginarles outline other his
torical alternatives.? that is, what is emerging: politics-as-gift, lan
guages of life, joy of festivity, a world beyond race.101 In contem
porary Africa, these other possibilities are still in a germinal phase
? multiple, fragile points of a dotted line that are not yet connect
ed. For it is difficult to deny that in regard to the scene of our world,
Africa is still to be awakened. Everything, here, or almost every
thing, is either yet to be aroused or to be begun anew. The signs of
what Africa could be must be deciphered, and the hope to which
the signs give birth nurtured. That said, there exists a qualitative dif
ference between the "principle of hope," which I hold, and the
optimism given at the command of those who, immured in the
short time of brute necessity (the wound that must be cured, the
body that must be dressed and sheltered, the well that must be dug,
the school that must be built, that dam that must be erected) cyni
cally pretend that On the Postcolony has succumbed to the temp
tation of postmodernism or nihilism.
Short of lapsing into divination, no one can predict the fate of
that which is to come. And the uncertainty as to that which is to
come, the tension between autonomy and determinism, need not
be resolved. What is necessary is that we use the uncertainty as an
epistemologica! asset in learning to read and to write and to act. It
is a question, therefore, of interrogating life and politics differently,
beginning from categories whose heuristic value follows above all
from their philosophical, literary, artistic, aesthetic, and stylistic
surplus value. Ethnography, sociology, history, and even political
science occupy a place in this project. But this place is not central,
and it is, perhaps, the price to pay in order to re-enchant Africa and
remove it from the ghetto in which our fables and fictions have
imprisoned it.
What an interrogation of hermeneutical and phenomenolog
ical nature attentive to history and culture ends up revealing is that
in certain situations, our habitual distinctions between death and
life, optimism and pessimism, ethics, politics, and aesthetics are on
strike, because the one, as by necessity, makes itself the unavoid
able and very real face of the other. At the ground zero of this
entanglement of life and death can be found the rift. Radical poli
tics consists, from then on, of patiently moving along the rift,
throughout these sites that seem to have been deserted by the
forces of life. For in these spaces apparently doomed to nothing
ness and to radical negation lie unsuspected possibilities, those,
even, that authorize us to resuscitate language and hope itself.
Translated from French by Nima Bassiri and Peter Skafish
44 ACHILLE MBEMBE
1 This is a modified translation of the preface to the 2005 French edition of On the
Postcolony. It includes original material not present in the preface.
2 See, nevertheless, in French: Tshikala K. Biaya's note, 'D?rive ?pist?mologique et
?criture de l'histoire de l'Afrique contemporaine' in Politique africaine, no 60
(1995), 110-116; Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch's contribution in H-Africa@h
net.msu.edu (March 2002), which was also reprinted in Cahiers d'?tudes africaines
no 167 (2002); and the debate around the book in Politique africaine, no 91, 2003,
pp. 171-194. The English version of the book, published under the title On the
Postcolony (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001) includes a supplemen
tary chapter entitled "The Thing and Its Doubles." An Italian translation of the book
appeared in 2005 under the misleading title, Postcolonialismo (Roma: Meltemi
Editore, 2005).
3 See Achille Mbembe, la France ? l'?re postcoloniale', Le D?bat, novembre 2005.
4 This is the case despite the availability in French of some of the basic texts of these
intellectual currents. See, in particular: Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New
York: Vintage, 1994); Arjun Appadurai, Apr?s le colonialisme. Les cons?quences
culturelles de la globalization (Raris, Rayot, 2001); Raul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic:
Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1993); Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Ralo Alto:
Stanford University Press, 1997). See also the special issue of the journal of French
anthropology, L'Homme, no 156 (2000), on "intellectuels en diaspora et theories
nomades."
5 See, for example, the following: Raul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political
Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); Iris
Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1990), and Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
Seyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference (Princeton, Princeton University
Press, 1996), and The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power
and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995);
Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the 'Postsocialist
Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997); Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994); and Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition:
The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).
6 Faul Gilroy, After the Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2005).
7 Cf. Pierre Rosanvallon, Le peuple introuvable. Histoire de la repr?sentation d?moc
ratique en France (Paris, Gallimard, 1998), 13.
8 Jean-Marie Vaysse, L'inconscient des modernes. Essai sur l'origine m?taphysique de
la psychanalyse (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), p. 389.
9 Nicolas Bancel and Rascal Blanchard, 'Les pi?ges de la m?moire coloniale,' Cahiers
fran?ais, no 303, 2003.
10 Fernand Braudel, L'identit? de la France (Raris: Flammarion, 1990). For a critique of
this position, see Jean Baub?rot, 'Une soci?t? multiculturelle: jusqu'o?,' Cahiers
fran?ais, no 316 (2003).
1 Jacques Hassoun, L'objet obscur de la haine (Paris: Aubier, 1997), 14.

12 Jane I. Guyer, Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2004), 171-2.
13 Ato Quayson, "Breaches in the Commonplace," African Studies Review, vol. 44, no
2,2001,153.
14 Pius Adesanmi, "Of Postcolonial Entanglement and Dur?e: Reflections on the
Francophone African Novel," Comparative Literature, Summer 2004.
15 Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall, "Writing the World From an African
Metropolis," Public Culture 16(3), 2004, 348-9.
16 Cf. James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Essays on Africa in the Neoliberal World
Order (forthcoming, 2005).
17 See for instance the works of Peter Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989), Sara Berry, Fathers Work for their
Sons (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), and later, Jane Guyer,
Marginal Gains (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
18 Achille Mbembe, "On the Power of the False," Public Culture, vol. 14, no 3, 2002.
19 Michelle Ann Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculinine Global Imaginary of
Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914-1962 (Durham, Duke University
Press, 2005), 15.
20 Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics
and Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 59.
21 For a similar observation in the Indian context, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations
of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2002), xxiv.
22 Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 308. Hereafter cited as BM.
23 Achille Mbembe, "Aesthetics of Superfluity," Public Culture, vol. 16, no 3, 2004.
24 Read Robert Carr, Black Nationalism in the World: Reading African-American and
West Indian Experience (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), especially chapter 5.
25 V.Y Mudimbe, L'odeur du p?re (Paris: Pr?sence africaine, 1977).
26 For a critique, see Achille Mbembe, "African Modes of Self-Writing," Public Culture,
Vol. 14, No 1 (2002), 239-274; as well as the controversy in Public Culture, Vol.
14, no 1, (2002), 585-628. See also Nira Wickramasinghe, "A Comment on 'African
Modes of Self-Writing'," in Identity, Culture and Politics, Vol. 2, (2001 ), 37^2.
27 Jeremy Wheate, "Achille Mbembe and the Postcolony: Going Beyond the Text,"
Research in African Literatures, vol. 34, no 4, 2003.
28 Jeremy Wheate, "Achille Mbembe and the Postcolony: Going Beyond the Text,"
Research in African Literatures, vol. 34, no 4, 2003, 32.
2, 2001, 152-3.
30 David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon 1962-1979
(New York, Thames and Hudson, 1987)
31 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Paris, Editions de la
Diff?rence, 1981).
32 Sony Labou Tansi, L'?tat honteux (Paris, Seuil, 1981 ).
33 ? Les yeux du volcan (Paris, Seuil, 1988).
46 ACHILLE MBEMBE
34 ? Les sept solitudes de Lorsa Lopez (Paris, Seuil, 1985).

35 ? La vie et demie (Raris, Seuil, 1981 ).
36 Achille Mbembe, "Life, Sovereignty, and Terror in the Fiction of Amos Tutuola,"
Research in African Literatures, vol. 34, no 4, 2003,1-26.
37 Michael C. Dawson, Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American
Political Ideologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 7.
38 Brent Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2003).
39 See, notably, Edouard Glissant, Po?tique de la relation (Raris: Gallimard, 1990), and
Tout-Monde (Paris, Gallimard, 1994). Also, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of
Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2002).
40 For a tentative interpretation of these facts in another context, see Domenica Mazz?,
Politiques de Cain. En dialogue avec Ren? Girard {Paris: Descl?e de Brouwer, 2004).
41 Cf. L.S. Senghor, Oeuvre po?tique (Paris, Seuil 1989), and, in English translation, The
Collected Poetry (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991 ), as well as Aim?
C?saire, Les armes miraculeuses (Paris: Gallimard, 1970).
42 See from this point of view, the work of Fabien ?boussi Boulaga: La crise du
Muntu. Authenticit? africaine et philosophie (Paris: Pr?sence Africaine, 1977), and
Christianity Without Fetishes: An African Critique and Recapture of Christianity
(New York: Orbis Books, 1981), as well as Jean-Marc Eia, African Cry (New York:
Orbis Books, 1985).
43 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 1967).
44 Karla FC Holloway, Fassed On: African American Mourning Stories (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2003), 6.
45 One can for all that understand this argument in the context of slavery. See, in this
regard, SaidiyaV. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in
Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), and Stephen
M. Best, The Fugitive Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2004).
46 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France,
1975-1976, Trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003). Hereafter cited as
SMD.
47 Sigmund Freud, Le malaise dans la culture (Raris: Quadrige/PUF, 1995), pp. 61-63.
See, in English, Civilization and Its Discontents, in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 21 (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute
of Psycho-Analysis, 1974), 59-145.
48 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), and, notably,
the conclusion.
49 Frantz Fanon, Les damn?s de la terre (Raris: La D?couverte, 2000), 90. Hereafter
cited as DT. See, in English, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 2005).
50 The proper translation of the French 'donation de la morf ? that is, "donation of
death" ? is not fully intelligible unless we know that donation is being employed
both in the sense of gift but also in the nominalization of the verb donner, wherein
donner la mort, that is "giving death," is used in French as "taking life" is employed
in English. ?Trans.
51 The phrase can be rendered taking the life of death. ?Trans.

52 Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 52.
53 For another approach to this question, read Jacque Derrida, The Gift of Death,
David Wills, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
54 Leopold S?dar Senghor, Oeuvre po?tique {Paris: Seuil, 1964).
55 Cf. Achille Mbembe, 'Notes sur le pouvoir du faux', Le D?bat, no 118 (january
February, 2002), 49-58.
56 See, in particular, Ato Quayson, "Breaches in the Commonsense," African Studies
Review, vol. 44, no 2 (2001), 151-166; and the contribution of Bruce Janz to the
debate organized by -AFRICA in http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~africa/ (March
2002). See also Adeleke Adeeko, "Bound to Violence? Achille Mbembe's On the
Postcolony," in vwvw.westafricareview.com/war/vol.3.2
2, 2001,151.
58 Bruce Janz, "Review of Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, -Africa, H-Net
Reviews, March, 2002.
59 Rita Barnard, "On Laughter, the Grotesque, and the South African Transition: Zakes
Mda's Ways of Dying", Novel: A Forum on Fiction (Summer 2004).
60 Carola Lentz, "The Chief, the Mine Captain and the Politician: legitimating Power
in Northern Ghana," Africa 68 (1), 47-67.
61 Mikael Karlstrom, "On the Aesthetics and dialogics of Power in the Postcolony,"
Africa, vol. 73, no 1,2003.
62 See the contributions to 'Autour d'un livre. De la postcolonie. Essai sur l'imagina
tion politique dans l'Afrique contemporaine d'Achille Mbembe, par Jacques
Pouchepadass, Mariane Ferme, Yves Alexandre Chouala et Juan Obarrio', Politique
africaine, no 91, 2003, 171-194.
63 See Mikael Karlstrom, "On the Aesthetics and Dialogics of Power in the Postcolony,"
Africa Vol. 73, No 1,2003.
64 Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade,
1730-1830 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 61.
65 Raul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, "Trust, Rawnship, and Atlantic History: The
Institutional Foundations of the Old Calabar Slave Trade," The American Historical
Review, vol. 104, no 2 (1999), 333-355.
66 David Richardson, "Western African Consumption Patterns and Their Influence in
the Eighteenth-Century English Slave Trade," in Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogen
dorn, eds., Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave
Trade (New York: Academic Press, 1979) 303-30.
67 Achille Mbembe, 'Essai sur le politique en tant que forme de la d?pense', Cahiers
d'?tudes africaines, XLIV (1-2), 2004.
68 Judith Butler, "Mbembe's Extravagant Power," Public Culture, vol. 5, no 1, (1992),
73. Hereafter cited as "MEP"
69 On this controversy, see, notably, the contributions of Michel Rolph-Trouillot, "The
Vulgarity of Power," John Pemberton, "Disempowerment. Not," Fernando Coroni I,
"Can Postcoloniality Be Decolonized?", Tejumola Olayinan, "Narrativizing Post
coloniality: Responsibilities," and Dan Borges, "Machiavellian, Rabelaisian,
Bureaucratic?" All are in Public Culture, Vol. 5, no. 1 (1992), 75-112.
48 ACHILLE MBEMBE
70 For this genre of critique, read Jeremy Weate, "Achille Mbembe and the Postcolony:
Going Beyond the Text," Research in African Literatures, Vol. 34, No 4 (2003),
27-56; African Identities, Tejumola Olaniyan, "Narrativizing Postcoloniality:
Responsibilities," Nkolo Foe, in Le Patrimoine. Also read Stephen Ellis, in African
Affairs, no 100, 2001, pp. 670-671.
71 See Veena Das, Words and Life: Exploring Violence and Descent into the Ordinary
(forthcoming).
72 See Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Muslim Society
(London: Al Saqi Books, 1975), and Scheherazade Goes West (New York:
Washington Square Press, 2001 ). See, for a more general treatment, Fethi Benslama
and Nadia Tazi, La virilit? en islam (Paris: ?ditions de L'Aube, 2004).
73 Suzanne Preston Blier, African Vodun: Art, Psychology and Power (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995), 149-50. Hereafter sited as AV.
74 Hachem Foda, 'L'ombre port?e de la virilit?', in Fethi Benslama and Nadia Tazi,
eds., La virilit? en islam (Raris: ?ditions de l'Aube, 2004), 163-164.
75 Henri Rey-Flaud, Le d?menti pervers. Le refoul? et l'oubli? (Paris: Aubier, 2002),
119.
76 See the articles in Signe Arnfred, ed., Re-thinking Sexualities in Africa (Almqvist &
WiksellTryckeri:AB,2004).
77 See, for example, Ratrick Vandermeersch, La chair de la passion (Raris: ?ditions du
Cerf, 2002).
78 Aziz Al-Azmeh, "Rhetoric for the Senses: A Consideration of Muslim Paradise
Narratives," Journal of Arabic Literature, No. XXVI (1995).
79 Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Hereafter cited as TG.
80 Cf. Tshikala K. Biaya, '"Crushing the Pistachio': Eroticism in Senegal and the Art of
Ousmane Ndiaye Dago," Public Culture, Vol. 12, No. 3 (2000).
81 See in particular Marcel Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmeli: An Introduction
to Dogon Religious Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), and Masques
Dogons (Paris: Institut d'ethnologie, 1938). See equally Dominique Zahan, La
viande et la graine (f?ris: Pr?sence africaine, 1969).
82 Mariane C. Ferme, The Underneath of Things: Violence, History, and the Everyday
in Sierra Leone (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 61-74. Hereafter
cited as UT.
83 Cited by Claude L?vesque, Par-del? le masculin et le f?minine (Faris: Aubier, 2002),
105.
84 Peter Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Post
colonial Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997).
85 See Stephen O. Murray, Will Roscoe, eds., Boy-Wives and Female Husband: Studies
of African Homosexualities (New York: St Martin's Press, 1998). On the subject of
the practice of "thigh-sex" between adult men and boys, see Dunbar Moodie,
"Black Migrant Mine Labourers and the Vicissitudes of Male Desire," in Robert
Morrei I, ed., Changing Men in Southern Africa (London: Zed Books, 2001). On sex
ual relations between women, see Kathryn Kendall, "Women in Lesotho and the
(Western) Construction of Homophobia," in E. Blackwood and S. Wieringa, eds.,
Female Desires: Transgender Practices Across Cultures (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1999).

86 Lucile Durrmeyer, 'Et changer de plaisir!' in Jacques Andr?, ed., La f?minit?
autrement (Pans: PUF, 1999), 57.
87 More so than social scientific literature, African literature takes account of this imag
inary. See, for example, the work of Sony Labou Tansi, or, more recently, Samy
Tchak, Place des f?tes (Raris: Gallimard, 2000).
88 Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (University of
Minnesota Press, 1999), 94.
89 This term was taken up by Lacan in the seminar of March 6, 1963 (L'Angoisse,
unpublished).
90 Callixthe Beyala, Femme nue, femme noire (Raris: Albin Michel, 2003).
91 On the subject of this distinction, see Oyew?mi Oy?r?nk?, "Family Bonds/
Conceptual Binds: African Notes on Feminist Epistemologies," Signs, Vol. 25, No. 4
(2000), and "Conceptualizing Gender: The Eurocentric Foundations of Feminist
Concepts and the Challenge of African Epistemologies," Jenda, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2002).
Concerning the circulation of women in relation to ideology and maternity, cf. Jane
Guyer and her concept of "polyandrous motherhood" in "Lineal Identities and
Lateral Networks: The Logic of Polyandrous Motherhood," in Bledsoe and Pison,
eds., Nuptiality in Sub-Saharan Africa: Contemporary Anthropological and Demo
graphic Perspectives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
92 Jean-Fran?ois de Sauverzac, Le d?sir sans foi ni loi. Lecture de Lacan (Paris: Aubier,
2000), 255.
93 Ida B. Wells, quoted by Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Repro
duction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 30. Hereafter
cited as KBB.
94 Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (New York: Crowell,
1966), 188-9.
95 Todd L. Savitt, Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in
Antebellum Virginia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981).
96 Michael Lobban, White Man's Justice: South African Political Trials in the Black
Consciousness Era (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); RobTurrell (on the death penal
ty in South Africa).
97 Gilles Deleuze, F?lix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 115-117. Hereafter cited as TP.
98 Robert Carr, Black Nationalism in the New World: Reading the African-American
and West Indian Experience (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), especially
chapter 5.
99 Monique Schneider, G?n?alogie du masculine (Paris: Aubier, 2000), 127:
100 For an approach to this genre, see Jacques Derrida, 'La b?te et le souverain,' in La
d?mocratie ? venir. Autour de Jacques Derrida (Raris: Galil?e, 2004), 433-^76, and,
by the same author, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Palo Alto: Stanford University
Press, 2005).
101 See, for example, the special issue of the review ie genre humain, Cassi et al. eds,
'V?rit?, r?conciliation, r?paration' (Raris: Seuil, 2004), and the special issue of
Cahiers d'?tudes africaines No. 173-174 (2004), edited by Bogumil Jewsiewicki, on
'R?parations, restitutions, r?conciliations'.

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ON THE POSTCOLONY: A BRIEF RESPONSE TO CRITICS

Author(s): Achille Mbembe

Although On the Postcolony had been originally conceived, writ

Qui Parle, Vol. 15, No. 2, 2005

To a large extent, French academia, French public culture

race studies in particular have contributed to the revival of the cri

In the history of the French republic, the limits of this solici

ology of universalism serves first and foremost as a screen: an

Let us return now to On the Postcolony. The book's title clearly

Invention of Africa and The Idea of Africa, Quayson highlighted the

only perpetually caught and imagined within a web of difference

a conception of rationality and subjectivity that was not entirely

and by relying heavily on an unqualified embrace of the politics of

I wrote On the Postcolony as the deep shadow of Afro

The book, he writes, provides "what might be described as an

or systematicity as about critical thought and, more importantly,

ical ideologies of racial sovereignty and black internationalism of

Thinking With and Against Fanon

house; it is also brought into the mind of the colonized. He shows

unique, compulsory and unavoidable law ? that of the general

ducible to those of the classical social sciences. This explains why

Many readers of On the Postcolony have shown interest in the

attempt to theorize time and subjectivity (the consciousness of self

an overestimation of the ideological power of the postcolonial state

fields and craft industries that constituted the modest "public

in and through the exercise of ratification re-authorizes that power

The Horn of Plenty

The other major critique of the book picks up on the question of

female connections in a world of men.71 The same argument could

modern. In a study of Vodun sculptural representations of the body

posed to be hollowed out by the penile erection, came to be con

process of the confrontation between Africa and the West is the

read from within a general anthropology of bodily appetites and

Ferme pays particular attention to the performance of gen

? that is, an ingestion of the other and ingestion by the other.

The Anal and the Nocturnal

On the other hand, the postcolony's patriarchal traditions of power

appropriate the ideal and idealized Penis/'86 To be sure, homosex

It is in this context that political struggles in the postcolony

destruction. In such formations, the assertion of manhood has, at

Race, Memory and the Phallus

Since the everyday structures of gender domination that have

the hands of an enemy-state. As shown by Robert Carr in his bril

The Time that Comes

The question of the future ? which my critics press me to confront

Translated from French by Nima Bassiri and Peter Skafish

1 Jacques Hassoun, L'objet obscur de la haine (Paris: Aubier, 1997), 14.

34 ? Les sept solitudes de Lorsa Lopez (Paris, Seuil, 1985).

51 The phrase can be rendered taking the life of death. ?Trans.

University Press, 1999).

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