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

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

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

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

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

      If Bergson arouses so much interest in Diagne, this is not only because he allows him to mediate between two such culturally distinct and religiously distant thinkers as the Indian Muslim Muhammad Iqbal and the Senegalese Catholic Léopold Sédar Senghor. Beyond his insistence on the emotional dimension, Bergson also attacked the opposition between primitive or pre-logical mentality and civilized or rational thought in his last book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). In sum, Bergson is not only the thinker of the élan vital, but also the philosopher of the coexistence of opposites and their unification within every individual. From this point of view, we can call him ‘postcolonial’ avant la lettre, since, in Diagne’s view, he always insists on the hybridity inherent in the human being (both body and mind, affect and judgement, belief and rationality), and thereby rejects the artificial binary oppositions between Westerners and non-Westerners disseminated by the ethnology of his time, as for example in the works of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl.

      ‘In searching for origin,’ he wrote in his book on Senghor, ‘one is always brought back to the exploration of one’s own hybridity, to the discovery that one is “legion”’, so that ultimately ‘all human civilization is only such because of mixture’.25 This is a lesson that the reader will easily be able to draw from the following interviews, and this defence of an ‘originary syncretism’ will also clearly signal the close connections between the thought of Souleymane Bachir Diagne and that of Jean-Loup Amselle.

      As presented in the bibliography of his works, the oeuvre of Jean-Loup Amselle might also seem perplexing: by adding a new title almost every year, it is constantly opening up new horizons and objects of research. Yet despite its very profusion, and its both pioneering and iconoclastic character, the thinking that underlies it still has a powerful drive towards synthesis. It ultimately appears, in all the senses of the term, ‘uncompromising’.

      In the best anthropological tradition, nothing human is foreign to Amselle’s work, and the intellectual curiosity it displays is unbounded; but it is also intransigent with regard to a certain number of demands and principles. For example, it rejects all essentialism, and, like Diagne’s work, it opposes all the culturalizations or continentalizations of thinking that would trap thought in predefined predicates such as European thought, African thought, Black thought, Mestizo (or ‘mixed’) thought, and so on. Moreover, Amselle’s work aims to overcome binary oppositions and all hierarchies presented as natural, so as to defend a concrete universality of all cultures in their openness to others, or in their fundamental porosity with their surroundings.

      An anthropologist by training, Amselle in fact broke with the rigid categorizations of his discipline (race and ethnicity as fixed units), while at the same time refusing to analyse social and cultural phenomena on a strictly local scale. From his earliest works, Les Migrations africaines (The African Migrations)26 and Les Négociants de la savane (The Traders of the Savannah)27 up to his recent studies Psychotropiques (Psychotropics)28 and Islams africains: la préférence


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