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In Search of Africa(s). Souleymane Bachir DiagneЧитать онлайн книгу.

In Search of Africa(s) - Souleymane Bachir Diagne


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intellectual traditions and forms of knowledge to the realms of belief, magical or primitive thinking and, at best, mere folklore.

      This unequal organization of the world continues today in other forms, since (despite the two waves of independence, in the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in Africa and Asia in the twentieth century) global capitalism has merely given a new lease of life to the fundamentally dichotomous and hierarchical structures of the world system that divides the human population into Whites and non-Whites, centre and periphery, North and South, superior and inferior, and so on. Taking note of this, decolonial thought, as its name indicates, proposes a radical decolonization that would involve, on the one hand, the rehabilitation of ancient and non-Western forms of economic and social organization, as well as the quest for new forms of solidarity between the various Souths and, on the other hand, a fundamental break with epistemological and cultural Eurocentrism and its claim to be the sole embodiment of scientificity and universality.

      Postcolonial thinking in its turn denounces this Eurocentrism as well as the binary oppositions and purely linear evolutions that it established between ‘the West and the rest’. But decolonial thought goes further insofar as it does not simply plead for ‘epistemological plurality’, that is, the recognition of traditional cosmologies and epistemologies as having the dignity of forms of knowledge every bit as legitimate as Western scientific-technical rationality. It shows that these kinds of knowledge, often local, indigenous or ‘native’, are today highly valued, desired and more and more often appropriated by the Western economic and industrial powers themselves, in the context of a new transformation of global capitalism, moving from the exploitation of ‘natural capital’ (raw materials and the products derived from them) to the exploitation of a ‘human capital’ which now values the knowledge, skills and experiences of diverse social actors.

      However, this new age of capitalism, cognitive in some ways since it accords a central role to knowledge (including the most traditional forms of knowledge, suddenly promoted to the rank of the ‘intangible heritage of humanity’), never renounced what Enrique Dussel calls its ‘structural heterogeneity’, namely the consubstantiality and interdependence between modernity and coloniality; instead, it has reprogrammed it according to its new needs and objectives. Thus, biodiversity and traditional knowledge are the new ‘green gold’, part of what is now conceived of as sustainable development, and we are witnessing a new appreciation, in postmodern form, of other types of knowledge, non-scientific, non-rational and non-Western, which had hitherto been excluded from the realm of legitimate knowledge.

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

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

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

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


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