THE BOOMERANG EFFECT

In the aftermath of the Second World War, as thinkers from varied perspectives surveyed the wreckage, they were confronted with a grave but simple question: what had become of man? If they were European, or otherwise initiated in the ideas generated in that continent, they could not help but observe the deep chasm that now separated the enlightened man of liberty, equality, and fraternity from the modern man who murdered, pillaged, and operated gas chambers. Depending on temperament, the next step might be to assert the perseverance of the former by bracketing out the latter—perhaps casting the Holocaust as an exception in an otherwise sterling record, a regrettable anomaly, a dark chapter indeed. Colonialism, however, and its long history threw a hitch in the story. Should we isolate that dark chapter too? And if we did, what was left?

Aimé Césaire famously began his Discourse on Colonialism, which first appeared in 1950, with a damning and unequivocal allegation:

Césaire was not alone in identifying a historical link between colonization and Nazi crimes. The roster of figures who in the immediate postwar period charted colonialism and the Holocaust on to a single plane included Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and C. L. R. James, among others.Footnote ² Such “boomerang” claims called attention to a profound contradiction, one that unsettled Europe's most entrenched beliefs about itself—the story it told to itself about itself. If the Holocaust was the outlier then one could continue to maintain that the arc of moral, scientific, and cultural progress in the West trended upwards, in a linear fashion.Footnote ³ But if colonialism was taken into account, then one was forced to concede this trend: Western advances had always coincided with more sinister phenomena; progress was a contradiction, accompanied as it was with practices of barbarism.

The “boomerang claim” thus figured less as an empirical argument linking colonialism and fascism in a relation of cause and effect. Rather, I argue that for select anticolonial thinkers—especially Césaire, Senghor, and Fanon: the double experience of colonialism and fascism served as the starting point for a much broader, more penetrating critique of “humanism”—the idea that the rational, human subject was capable of creating conditions more favorable to its existence, and that there was something called “humanity” that united all such projects. This article situates anticolonial thinkers into the concurrent “humanism debate” in postwar French thought, and, in so doing, calls on us to rethink the intellectual and political motivations behind both the postwar humanism debate and the transition to the so-called antihumanism of structuralism and post-structuralism in the 1960s and 1970s.

In particular, I argue that beginning in the 1930s, the “crisis of man” prompted Césaire, Senghor, and Fanon to reconsider the claim, promoted by their curricula in the metropole, that to know the world was to filter its objects through the concepts and methods available to a reasoning subject.Footnote ⁴ To put it differently, their critique of humanism—that it conferred “universal” rights in a wholly uneven manner, that its concept of the rights of “man” was, as Césaire maintained in his Discourse, “narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist”Footnote ⁵—forced an effort to identify a basis for solidarity organized around something other than the species’ characteristic capacity to reason. The despotism of reason was held as the legitimating discourse at the source of a long history of violence, colonial or otherwise. Moreover, when anticolonial thinkers in the inter- and postwar periods looked to articulate alternatives to subject-centered reason, they found themselves in conversation with a generation of thinkers in Europe confronting many of the same questions. As Senghor observed,

The task in either case was, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote in 1959, to “broaden our reasoning and make it capable of grasping what, in ourselves and in others, precedes and exceeds reason.”Footnote ⁷

The first half of this article situates Césaire, Senghor, and Fanon within postwar European intellectual history by showing that, in their efforts to “grasp” that which “precedes and exceeds reason,” they were prompted in turn to locate alternatives to conceptual thought either in a more primordial, pre-conceptual relation to the world, one which pre-dated the division between thinking subject and encountered object and for which Heidegger's thought proved suggestive; or by trying to articulate a relation to the unconscious, for which surrealist poetry helped to inspire new language; or by employing the terms of phenomenology to articulate particular dimensions of concrete, lived experience. Thinking the nonconceptual—whether as embodied existence, unconscious force, or Being as such—allowed Césaire, Senghor, and Fanon to give life to new forms of black solidarity posed in critical opposition to now-degraded humanism. As I will show, that opposition helped, in part, to furnish the Négritude project with its positive aspirations, to—as in the case of Senghor—recover modes of “black being” (Neger-sein) that Cartesian methods had obscured and that colonization had effaced, or to—as in the case of Césaire—give expression to the contingent, diasporic identity of “those who have known voyages only as uprootings.”Footnote ⁸ By contrast, Fanon faulted Négritude thinkers for recapitulating the racist discourse they had meant to combat by essentializing black identity, and making an abstraction of the concrete, lived experiences of colonial subjects. Fanon's 1952 Black Skin, White Masks would, in response, provide a phenomenological account of just such an experience.

While definitions of Négritude, especially those proffered by Senghor, no doubt trafficked in the essentialist rhetoric that Fanon identified, the second half of this article follows the modifications that rhetoric underwent after the war had tempered some of the stronger claims to fixed, racialized categories of identity—curing them, Senghor wrote, of the desire “to only build on the foundation of one's own race.”Footnote ⁹ Although Négritude remained a distinctive political, aesthetic, and cultural project in its own right, it would also serve as the basis from which to think anew the universal “human” implied in all humanisms. As I will show, this did not involve an effort to expand black subjectivity into a wider, universal subject, which would have done no more than reinstate this new subject on the grounds of the old. Instead, Senghor and Césaire articulated a humanism founded in the relation between the thought of the nonconceptual—which had in part afforded Négritude its positive content—and the inherited, “European” thought it had been their intention to overturn, a humanism constituted by the relation between reason and its other. Fanon was no less concerned to rethink the universal, but he would locate it initially in a humanism of solidarity grounded in the shared experience that might have joined, for example, the colonial subject and the Jew in a recognition of their common fate. However, by the time Fanon published The Wretched of the Earth in 1961, he had moved to forge a new kind of humanism, based in the “unconditional, absolute, total, and seamless” substitution of “one ‘species’ of mankind by another,” and understood as a corollary to the Algerian bid for independence; to invent the nation, the liberation movement was called upon to reinvent man.Footnote ¹⁰ Drawing on the “technical vocabulary” of Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, Fanon defined the “project” of decolonization as both a negative project, one that sought to reject present conditions by negating or destroying the colonized subject, and a positive project that sought to create a new future and a “new man.”Footnote ¹¹

In revealing the variety of ways in which anticolonial writers negotiated the legacy of Western humanism, this article makes the case not only for their inclusion in commonly held, strictly “hexagonal” narratives in the history of postwar French thought; it also seeks to revise our understanding of the political backdrop against which such narratives unfolded. Postcolonial scholars have long contended that anticolonial nationalists such as Fanon anticipated the totalizing critique of “man” that would take hold among French thinkers in the 1960s and 1970s under the banner of “antihumanism.”Footnote ¹² They have made it possible to see the Algerian war for independence, as much as May 1968 or Nazi occupation, as a marker dating the “end of man,” a force quietly generating the tide that would wash away Foucault's “face drawn in sand at the edge of a sea.”Footnote ¹³ However, contributions made by Césaire and Senghor and the political context prior to 1960 tell a new story.

As recent studies by historians Frederick Cooper and Gary Wilder have revealed, between roughly 1945 and 1960 political leaders in both the metropole and the colonies, including Césaire and Senghor, entertained proposals for federalist, nonnational routes out of empire. They envisioned a framework that would secure the independence of colonial subjects while acknowledging the web of interdependence that the history of colonization had spawned. In particular, they advocated for a new, democratic federation that would transform former colonies into autonomous member states.Footnote ¹⁴ This article insists that the process of reconfiguring the empire and those who contended with the possibilities that process inspired constitute an important, but overlooked, dimension of the history of postwar European thought. I want to suggest that the thought of an empire reimagined along the lines of autonomy and reciprocity gave rise to a way of thinking distinct from the logic of national liberation that would soon determine the map of the postwar world; that even as its empirical realization was foreclosed, the “federalist imagination” bequeathed to twentieth-century thought a distinctive legacy: a new way of thinking about the relation between reason and its other, or between humanism and whatever might pose as its alternative.

As evidence of such a legacy, we might consider the critique posed by Jacques Derrida. When in 1963 Derrida delivered a lecture on Folie et déraison, he voiced his criticism of Foucault's work—that one could not make “unreason” speak except in the language of reason—by drawing parallels between the “imperial grandeur of the order of reason” and the rule that had prevailed in the colonies. In a passage that was removed from the version of the text published in L’écriture et la difference in 1967, Derrida linked the operative logic of projects, like Foucault's, that seek to escape reason's charge, to the framework of the anticolonial revolution, which, he wrote, “Can only liberate itself from factual Europe or the empirical West, in the name of transcendental Europe, that is Reason, and first win with [Western] values, language, sciences, techniques, and weapons; an irreducible contamination or incoherence, that no cry—I am thinking of Fanon's— can exorcise, however pure and intransigent it may be.”Footnote ¹⁵ National liberation, however, was not the sole demand animating the anticolonial revolutionaries’ cry, as recent histories have shown—and nor were calls to purge one's toolbox of European “Reason” the sole means of resistance on the battlefront of ideas, as this article will reveal. I would suggest, too, that Derrida's own politics in the period prior to Algerian independence might not have been so far removed from the federalist proposals entertained by Senghor, Césaire, and others.Footnote ¹⁶ This article centers, however, not on Derrida, who made few public statements on colonial politics—despite having grown up in Algeria. Instead it takes as its focus anticolonial thinkers, who, of course, could not afford to remain silent on matters political, and whose politics both shaped and were in turn shaped by their engagement with ideas circulating in the metropole. I return, then, to Derrida's contribution to the postwar humanism debate at the end of this article not to suggest a strong causal link between his writings and those considered here, but to draw attention to certain affinities in the way they navigated the constellation of proposed efforts to rethink man. This is, once again, not to suggest that Derrida be seen as the fulfillment of the tradition I chart. Instead, I hope to make the case for a distinctive body of ideas that emerged prior to both the calls for national independence in the colonies and the “end of man” announced by structuralism. I seek, ultimately, to restore to the legacy of those ideas its properly political dimension, and to recapture the possibilities, both political and philosophical, that the “federalist imagination” generated.

This is important because—in addition to allowing us to more fully integrate the history of the French empire into our understanding of postwar thought—such revisions might offer a rejoinder to more recent debates among postcolonial scholars. In particular, “materialist” critics charge that postcolonial theory, which gained prominence in response to the disillusionment with Third World liberation politics after decolonization in the 1960s, has sapped anticolonial thought of the revolutionary energy that first inspired it. As such critics would have it, accounts of, for example, the instability of the colonial binary carried out by someone like Homi Bhabha reflect the decontextualized imposition of the methods of deconstruction on the texts of colonial history, more than the actually existing conditions that enabled those texts.Footnote ¹⁷ Critics are not wrong to observe that deconstruction has enjoyed a long second life in the field of postcolonial studies. That the former should prove so productive for the latter is, however, as Robert Young has argued, no coincidence—as “many of [post-structuralism's] main theoretical inspirations, contrary to today's student primers on the subject, were themselves Third-Worldists.”Footnote ¹⁸ This article seeks, in part, to strengthen Young's claim. Moreover, at the heart of these more recent criticisms is the presumed quietism of both postcolonial theory and the methods that inspired it—that, as critics would have it, only the logic of total transcendence seems to lend itself to a prescriptive, worldly corollary (revolution, independence, liberation). In either case, by suggesting a clear political backdrop for ideas thought to be apolitical, the “federalist imagination,” as I have been calling it, might then constitute a missing piece in the narrative.

ASSIMILATION OR ALIENATION

The critique of humanism undertaken by anticolonial thinkers was in part facilitated by their engagement with subjects they studied in the course of their education. As C. L. R. James would say of Césaire, “He was able to make this ferocious attack upon Western civilization because he knew it inside out.”Footnote ¹⁹ The education of top students from its colonies embodied the French government's assimilationist approach to colonial politics.Footnote ²⁰ Thus, by the force of circumstance, Césaire, Senghor, and Fanon all passed through institutions that had educated generations of the intellectual and political elite in France—and were therefore exposed to many of the same influences that shaped students in the metropole during the inter- and postwar periods. Césaire, born in 1913 in Martinique, came to Paris in 1931 to study at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. In 1935 he was admitted to the École normale supérieure, where he wrote a thesis on Harlem Renaissance writers.Footnote ²¹ Senghor came from his native Senegal to Paris, in 1928, to attend the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where he befriended fellow students including Césaire and Georges Pompidou.Footnote ²² And Fanon, born in 1925 in Martinique, attended a lycée in Fort-de-France where he met and befriended Césaire, his French literature instructor. Fanon joined the Free French Forces during the war and in 1945 began his studies in psychiatry in Lyon, where he attended lectures by Merleau-Ponty.Footnote ²³ Of his time at Lycée Louis-le-Grand Senghor wrote, “Thus I could, little by little, decrypt the meaning of history, which is to be found in economic and social facts; the meaning of philosophy, which resides in the dialectic.”Footnote ²⁴ Similarly Césaire, citing Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Nietzsche, noted, “These were the readings of my generation; I was subjected to the same influences that all French students, more or less cultivated, were subjected to during this period.”Footnote ²⁵

At the same time, their education was inflected by the particular experience of being black and from the colonies, and it was in France that they came to understand most starkly that assimilation, as it was promoted by the curriculum, could be won only at the cost of profound alienation. Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, which he wrote in 1938 and first published in 1939 in an avant-garde literary magazine in Paris, offered an extended meditation on the experience of returning to Martinique following his years of study in Paris and revealed, among other things, the tension at the heart of efforts to reject French assimilation through a language and an inheritance that was nevertheless French, and could not be otherwise.Footnote ²⁶ In a 1978 interview he noted, “my task had been to inflect the French language, to transform it.”Footnote ²⁷ And when asked whether Tropiques, the journal he helped found in 1941, would have reached a wider audience had it published material in Creole, he responded, “It is a question which makes no sense, because such a journal is not conceivable in Creole . . . French is the language in which I always wrote.”Footnote ²⁸

This tension furnished the insights that would motivate Césaire's most charged and evocative calls for a renewed sense of solidarity built on the colonial wreckage, and fostered among “those who explored neither the seas nor sky / but knew in its most minute corners the land of suffering.”Footnote ²⁹ Senghor too reflected upon the ambivalence of their lessons in the metropole: “our masters, who had been trained in the mould of rationalism . . . had tried to teach us. Because, when, from our jungle, we ‘ascended’ to Paris, it was, of course, with the intention of taking from the colonizers their weapons, but also, dialectically, to contest the efficacy of those same weapons and to discover the secret that would allow us to sharpen our own.”Footnote ³⁰ It was from this perspective that they were poised to register the contradiction that not only undermined but defined European humanism, or, rather, to register European humanism as a contradiction.

L'UNIVERSALISME FRANÇAIS

The anticolonial critique, thus conceived, registered humanism as problematic both in content and in form. In content, because those who spoke of man as the bearer of liberty and equality were responsible precisely for the denial of those things (Fanon: “Let us leave this Europe which never stops talking of man yet massacres him at every one of its street corners”Footnote ³¹). And in form, because implied universalisms—of man, of humanity referred in point of fact to narrow realities. “That is the great thing I hold against pseudo-humanism,” Césaire wrote, “that for too long it has diminished the rights of man, that its concept of those rights has been—and still is—narrow and fragmentary.”Footnote ³² And Senghor: “I know no people more tyrannical [than the French] in their love of Man. They want bread for all, culture for all, liberty for all; but this liberty, this culture, this bread will be French.”Footnote ³³

The response, in the first instance, was to identify worthy alternatives to the degraded content of “pseudo-humanism.” Négritude, a term Césaire coined as a way of positively appropriating the pejorative nègre, represented an effort to establish solidarity on the basis of their common African ancestry, while also reinvesting the contents of the racist discourse of precolonial societies so that it functioned as affirmation rather than negation. Doing so led the Négritude thinkers to challenge the Cartesian methods taught in the Latin Quarter—where, Senghor wrote, “we had learned to distrust emotion and to allow ourselves to be guided by discursive reason alone”Footnote ³⁴—and identify an alternative to those methods in a recoverable Négro-Africain culture. In a formulation that would be heavily criticized for embracing precisely the racist, ethnological discourse that Europeans had long employed to mark their colonial subjects as different, Senghor wrote, “The White European holds an object at a distance; he looks at it, he analyses it, he kills it—or at least tames it—in order to utilize it.” By contrast, “The Black African feels the object . . . intuitive reason is thus at the basis of an ontology, of the Black conception of the world.”Footnote ³⁵ Senghor drew explicitly on Heidegger, Husserl, and the work of German ethnologist Leo Frobenius to define this—often controversial—Négro-Africain ontology, posed in critical opposition to the discursive reason of the Blanc européen.Footnote ³⁶ As Sandra Adell writes, “Négritude cannot be thought without the category of intuition and the notion that there exists a recoverable original ‘Negro-African’ culture.”Footnote ³⁷ Senghor even made explicit the affinities he identified between Heidegger's thought and the Négro-Africain ontology he sought to articulate: “Martin Heidegger—who, in his philosophy of language, leads to this proposition: that the speech of the poet is ‘the foundation of being’—is closest to the Black African.”Footnote ³⁸

While Senghor misreads Heidegger, mistakenly placing “him back in the domain of metaphysical reflection,” by identifying the alternative to discursive reason in an appeal to feeling or emotion that Heidegger would have denigrated as a subjectivist lapse, we might nonetheless recognize in both thinkers a similar critical gesture, an effort to reach beyond inherited modes of thought.Footnote ³⁹ In his 1947 “Letter on Humanism” Heidegger criticized the “technical interpretation of thinking” that had “seized control” of Western philosophy and insisted, “Thinking does not become action only because some effect issues from it or because it is applied—thinking acts insofar as it thinks.”Footnote ⁴⁰ His response to the question posed to him—“How can we restore meaning to the word ‘humanism’?”—was to call for the recovery of the understanding of the movement of thought that the division between subject and object, “inappropriate terms of metaphysics,” had obscured, and to liberate “language from grammar into a more original essential framework . . . reserved for thought and poetic creation.”Footnote ⁴¹ Césaire too would write, in language that resonates with Heidegger's critique in his “Letter” (“The human being . . . must first learn to exist in the nameless . . . Before he speaks the human being must first let himself be claimed again by being”Footnote ⁴²):

In addition to locating the alternative to conceptual thought or “discursive reason” in an original, pre-conceptual relation to the world—an effort to “penetrate to a level where the categories of sense and non-sense are not yet invoked”Footnote ⁴⁴—access to the nonconceptual could also be sought by way of poetry. Poetry provided, Césaire observed, “the only way to break the stranglehold the accepted French form held on me.”Footnote ⁴⁵ And much as Heidegger had registered, Césaire wrote, “Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge.”Footnote ⁴⁶ In particular, Césaire saw in surrealist poetry a means of “summon[ing] up unconscious forces,” which reason alone could not access.Footnote ⁴⁷ As he explained,

In particular, Césaire had met André Breton in 1941 when Breton, fleeing Europe, stopped in Martinique on his way to the United States. Of that encounter, Césaire would later reflect, “Breton brought us boldness . . . I would say that my meeting with Breton was confirmation of what I had arrived at on my own . . . The encounter was extraordinary.”Footnote ⁴⁹

While the Négritude thinkers entertained alternatives to the “sordidly racist” content of European humanism, their critique also engaged the contradiction in the humanist form—that its universal aspirations could not but be circumscribed by concrete realities (and to pretend otherwise was to risk upholding lofty ideals at the expense of this-worldly practices of exclusion). In response, they insisted that the bonds of black solidarity be conceived concretely; Senghor wrote, “for us, race is not an entity: a substance. It is the child of geography and history.”Footnote ⁵⁰ And Césaire spoke of “the world map made for my own use, not / tinted with the arbitrary colors of scholars, but with the geometry of my / spilled blood.”Footnote ⁵¹ But while both Césaire and Senghor insisted that the “concrete consciousness of what we are” was the product of their distinct history, rather than any essentialized racial substance, at times their language suggested otherwise. Senghor would speak repeatedly of a “Negro soul” or the “Negro spirit.” We might ask, however, whether this language does not perhaps represent what Gayatri Spivak calls “strategic essentialism”; that is, the tactic of drawing attention to a shared identity for the purposes of establishing the sense of unity necessary to achieve particular political aims.Footnote ⁵² Even so, Fanon remained highly critical of Négritude—writing, for example, in a 1954 essay that it was a “black mirage” that had simply displaced “the great white error.”Footnote ⁵³ In his 1952 Black Skin, White Masks, the critique of essentialism, white or black, leads Fanon both to dismiss Négritude—“The discovery of the existence of a Negro civilization in the fifteenth century confers no patent of humanity on me”Footnote ⁵⁴—and to counter its essentialist discourse with an analysis of the concrete, lived experience of the black man. Thus while Césaire and Senghor sought access to the nonconceptual through an articulation of pre-conceptual or unconscious forces, Fanon drew on the resources provided by the existentialist phenomenology of the 1940s, which sought to overcome the primacy given to subjective reason by providing concrete descriptions of the world simply as it appeared to a perceiving subject.Footnote ⁵⁵ “Man cannot be explained,” Fanon wrote, “outside the limits of his capacity for accepting or denying a given situation.”Footnote ⁵⁶

But Fanon's text was marked by an effort not only to analyze the pathologies occasioned by colonial racism for the colonized—that the “black Antillean” believes that the more he “assimilates the French language, the whiter he gets—i.e. the closer he comes to becoming a true human being”—but also to pathologize the experience of the white colonizer. That is, Fanon wrote “on the one hand of alienated (mystified) Blacks, and on the other of no less alienated (mystifying and mystified) Whites,” and observed, “both the black man, slave to his inferiority, and the white man, slave to his superiority, behave along neurotic lines.”Footnote ⁵⁷ His analysis thus exposed the apparently universal “human” in its particularity: as both white and situated among “the arsenal of complexes that germinated in the colonial situation.” Thus, for all three thinkers, the diagnosis of the latent contradictions of European humanism would inspire, first, an effort to rethink the bonds of black solidarity, and then, particularly after the war, to reclaim humanism in its universal form.

POSTWAR NÉGRITUDE

If Cesaire's 1939 Retour au pays natal was the starting point for an awakening, a “plumbing the depths” of black consciousness, by the time, after the war, of his Discours sur le colonialisme he had turned his attention back to Europe, where he observed or otherwise sought to induce an awakening on the part of the European bourgeoisie in the form of “un formidable choq en retour,” a boomerang effect. The point now was that there was a relation—between the fate of the colonies and the fate of Europe, between an Africa pillaged and a Europe defeated. The task was not, as we might have thought, to restore “negro civilization” to its precolonial grandeur (or to return Man, which was European man, to his supposed former dignity) but to move beyond this impasse; Europe ravaged, Africa plundered. This shift in thinking was reflected in the modifications Césaire made when he published subsequent editions of Return in 1947 and 1956. While, as A. J. Arnold has shown, the 1939 version favored religious and romantic imagery and the two editions published in 1947 made extensive use of surrealist “free-associative metaphors,” “Césaire was concerned in 1956 with reducing the black/white, or African/European opposition on which the poem had initially been conceived and constructed.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Senghor too reflected on this change. On the subject of their student days in the 1930s, he wrote, we “refused nearly everything of Europe, especially its politics, which we considered the most monstrous expression of Reason.” Senghor would even acknowledge that in those days Négritude was “tainted by racism.”Footnote ⁵⁹ But it was his experience in a German POW camp, where he was both confronted with Nazism and able to devote his time to studying classics, learning German, and reading Goethe, that “cured” him by leading him to an awareness of the dangers of “cultural solitude . . . of the wish to only build on the foundation of one's own race,” and to the discovery that the “miracle of Greek civilization” was the result of the productive encounter between Hellenic and pre-Hellenic peoples, a métissage of cultures.Footnote ⁶⁰ Or as Césaire wrote in his Discourse, “I admit that it is a good thing to place different civilizations in contact with each other . . . that for civilizations, exchange is oxygen.”Footnote ⁶¹ And it soon became evident, Senghor wrote, that “Négritude alone, the amorous abandonment of desire to telluric forces, cannot resuscitate Eden . . . we have to borrow from Reason its own weapons: the technical logic of Europe.”Footnote ⁶² The recognition of this “borrowing” relation would compel Césaire and Senghor to formulate a humanism that was based solely neither in concrete solidarity with fellow black men nor in the abstract appeal to a shared humanity where the dialectic of difference might be transcended. In so doing they distinguished their ideas from the possibilities proposed by Jean-Paul Sartre.

If Sartre located in “human reality” (a translation of Heidegger's Dasein) the possibility of a union between man as subject and man as object, then Négritude seemed to offer a unique opportunity to theorize this union. In opposition to the rational subject's pretensions to mastery, Césaire and Senghor had identified “black being” as involving a more originary relation to nature—the “flesh of the world's flesh pulsating with the very motion of the world,” Césaire wrote.Footnote ⁶³ Sartre responds by casting Négritude in a bit part in the dialectical performance whose final act is the creation of a universal human community. In his preface to an anthology of Négritude poetry, edited by Senghor and published in 1948 (and then published subsequently as “Black Orpheus”), Sartre wrote,

While Sartre rejected the essentialism that characterized the “assertion of the supremacy of the white man” as much as “the position of Négritude,” he was ready to employ its terms both because he recognized that the latter served as a response to the former and because such rhetoric could be justified in so far as it belonged only to a moment in the “dialectical progression” that would eventually empty essentialized racial rhetoric of its contents.Footnote ⁶⁵ As Paige Arthur argues, “Black Orpheus” represented an important turn away from the radical conception of individual freedom proposed in Being and Nothingness (1943) and towards an account of collective otherness theorized against the backdrop of colonialism, and which would emerge more prominently in his later Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960).Footnote ⁶⁶ Thus Sartre tempered his earlier account of individual freedom with the recognition of the limits imposed by situation—a recognition that the transcendence promised by liberation needed to be balanced by an attentiveness to the particularity of condition. But the dialectical model nonetheless allowed him to inscribe racial particularity within the universal: “the realization of the human in a society without races.” It allowed him, that is, to accommodate the reality of racial difference but only in so far as it provided the roadmap that would lead to that reality's eventual dissolution. He wrote, “The unity [L'unité finale] which will come eventually, bringing all oppressed peoples together in the same struggle, must be preceded in the colonies by what I shall call the moment of separation or negativity: this anti-racist racism is the only road that will lead to the abolition of racial difference.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Similarly, while Sartre conceded the regulative role played by history, that the past determines the possibilities of the present, he insisted that, as Paige Arthur writes, “in the future, situation, history, and experience will no longer matter” thanks to “a rather vague historical process,” which Arthur identifies with decolonization.Footnote ⁶⁸ Sartre thus remained committed to an orientation towards the future where the importance of both present and past might be dissolved, holding fast “to a conception of freedom in which human beings create future-oriented projects that transcend what is given in the present.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Thus, whether concerned to accommodate the particulars of race or of history, the transcendence guaranteed by the dialectical model would realize the universal by dissolving difference—whether of continent or condition. By contrast, Césaire, Senghor, and, to a lesser extent, Fanon, responding in part to Sartre's advances, rejected the thought of “final unity,” and sought instead a means of articulating the universal that would operate in productive tension with the particulars of black solidarity. As Souleymane Bachir Diagne writes, “The paradox of Sartre's preface to the Anthology by Senghor is that in many respects the Négritude movement had, after Black Orpheus, to define itself against Sartre's positioning of its philosophical meaning.”Footnote ⁷⁰

While his Black Skin was “greatly indebted” to Sartre—and especially to works like The Anti-Semite and the Jew and What Is Literature?, Fanon nonetheless offered a pointed critique of Sartre's reading of Négritude.Footnote ⁷¹ He would, for example, cite the above passage and then respond directly, “We had appealed to a friend of the colored peoples, and this friend had found nothing better to do than demonstrate the relativity of their action.”Footnote ⁷² Against “Black Orpheus” Fanon argued, “Black consciousness is immanent in itself. I am not a potentiality of something; I am fully what I am.”Footnote ⁷³ He thus insisted that only a humanism based in concrete solidarity can escape racialized assumptions, white or black. He wrote, “The black man is not. No more than the white man. Both have to move away from the inhuman voices of their respective ancestors so that a genuine communication can be born.”Footnote ⁷⁴ As David Macey explains, the fundamental political message of the text is “a humanism of solidarity, and not some form of black nationalism.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Drawing on Karl Jaspers's description of “metaphysical guilt,” Fanon grounded this humanism in the recognition of a shared responsibility for the injustice inflicted on another.Footnote ⁷⁶ “Anti-Semitism cuts me to the quick [me touche en pleine chair],” Fanon wrote, “I cannot disassociate [désolidariser] myself from the fate reserved for my brother.”Footnote ⁷⁷ But, where the critique of both confident, universal humanism and essentialist difference leads Fanon to advocate for a humanism of solidarity based in an appeal to shared guilt and responsibility, Senghor and Césaire's postwar writings would take an alternative approach.

To understand this departure we might consider, briefly, the political imperatives that animated both Césaire and Senghor, which both reflected and reinforced their more overtly philosophical or poetic works. Those imperatives are perhaps best captured by the distinction between what Senghor called “horizontal solidarity” and “vertical solidarity”—the latter describing the relationship between Africa and France, the former the relationship among Africans, and both premised upon the concrete realities of geography and history. But the call for “vertical solidarity” represented a further recognition that the colonial relation, the “borrowing” from Europe, could not be abandoned wholesale. In a 1948 essay Senghor wrote, “Independence is a dream in a world where the interdependence of peoples affirms itself so manifestly.”Footnote ⁷⁸ As Cooper explains, Senghor recognized that “horizontal solidarity without the vertical would be unity in poverty, a failure to understand the nature of interdependence in the world as it was.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Incorporating these insights, Senghor and Césaire recognized that a humanism of horizontal solidarity needed to be complemented by a similarly concrete, but—for the moment—radically unequal relation. The work towards a new humanism would involve the simultaneous recognition of this inequality and the revolutionary effort to reform it.

TOWARDS A NEW HUMANISM

Discourse on Colonialism provides Césaire's most pointed critique of humanism, while also suggesting his positive aspirations to create “a humanism made to the measure of the world.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Much like Sartre's “Black Orpheus,” Césaire's Discourse (as well as Fanon's Black Skin) employs Hegelian logic to reveal how colonialism de-civilizes the colonizer as much as it dehumanizes the colonized. But rather than resolve the antagonistic relation by dissolving it into a “final unity,” Césaire suggests how that relation might instead be reimagined. He insists, on the one hand, that “for civilizations, exchange is oxygen.” On the other hand, his analysis makes clear that the contact inaugurated by colonization promotes anything but exchange. His concern, then, is to reformulate the colonial equation, but neither by overturning that equation through an embrace of a closed, essentialized racial identity, nor by dissolving the equations’ constituent parts into a greater unity. Indeed, the “abolition of racial difference” was far from his aim; instead he would, for example, criticize his fellow black, francophone poets for their “abstract” communism, explaining in a 1967 interview, “There was nothing to distinguish them either from the French surrealists or from the French Communists. In other words, their poems were colorless.”Footnote ⁸¹ And in a 2004 interview, “To liberté, égalité, fraternité, I always add identité.”Footnote ⁸² In 1956 Césaire famously penned a letter of resignation from the French Communist Party, which explained his resignation as a response to the party's failure to make the problem of colonialism an integral part of its agenda. Why, he asks, should solidarity with the proletariat be more meaningful than the “living fraternity” that binds those in the colonial struggle? He wrote,

Vertical solidarity with the French, he suggests, is untenable if it ignores existing horizontal relations. The task is not to choose between them, but to attend to a notion of the universal through which particular allegiances would stand in an ongoing relation. As he wrote in his Discourse, “I systematically defend our old Negro civilizations: they were courteous civilizations. So the real problem, you say, is to return to them. No, I repeat. We are not men for whom it is a question of ‘either–or’.”Footnote ⁸⁴ And similarly in his 1956 letter:

This “deepening and coexistence of all particulars,” much like Fanon's description of “our blackness or our whiteness . . . locked in our own particularity,”Footnote ⁸⁶ thus suggests something other than a synthesis of particulars in the manner of Sartre's “realization of the human in a society without races.” Jane Hiddleston writes, “Apparently moving towards a Hegelian dialectic, Césaire never completes the synthesis. Indeed, the very ethics of Césaire's humanism lies in his refusal to fix and pigeonhole difference in the manner of the colonizer and slave owner. An endpoint would serve only to establish a newly static form.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Just as Césaire rejects the either/or choice posed by the colonial binary, Senghor writes, “The problem is to transcend the false assimilation–association antinomy to the extent that this latter word signifies the conservation of indigenous civilizations, to render to culture its dialectical movement, to make of it a fecund dialogue between two civilizations.”Footnote ⁸⁸ However, moving past this antinomy does not, for Senghor, entail a final synthesis. Refusing to either fall back on an “emaciated universalism” or to elevate their precolonial heritage at the exclusion of their inescapably French education, Senghor, like Césaire, gave new life to the universal terms (man, humanism) by articulating a universal built on the relation between their double allegiance. By suggesting that France and Senegal or France and Martinique might stand in a continued, reciprocal relation, Senghor and Césaire sought to transform the colonial relation without wholly leaving it behind. Senghor would, for example, cite the “integral humanism” of Jacques Maritain and describe “culture” as involving a dynamic relation “between ideas and facts, thought and action, which realizes integral Man; not a linear movement, but an oscillating dialectic, a double movement centripetal and centrifugal.”Footnote ⁸⁹ While the language of “realizing” Man recalls the Sartrean reconciliation between the subject and its other, Senghor denies the teleology that frames Sartre's construction: “Culture, in short, appears to us as an unceasingly renewed effort, which tends towards an ever-elusive equilibrium, sooner broken than achieved. It is there, in this Sisyphean effort, where the grandeur of Man resides.”Footnote ⁹⁰ As Wilder notes, “Senghor's humanism lies perhaps less in the desired new community in which French and Africans would be united, but in a much more tentative recognition of a reliance on the other . . . [his] vision of a shared humanity integrated into the world is a tenuous, fragile but essential goal that his writing ceaselessly strives to reach without ever successfully grasping.”Footnote ⁹¹

By contrast, by the time of Wretched of the Earth, Fanon advocated a politics and articulated a humanism premised on the possibility of a large-scale rupture with present conditions—theorized in part according to the framework provided by Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason.Footnote ⁹² Even if Césaire and Senghor were not so naive as to advance the return to a precolonial past, their interest in it helped to imbue their writing with a strong sense of history as a kind of inheritance; so long as it defined present conditions, it would continue to orient one's sense of belonging. Césaire would express this ambivalent relation to history in Return, writing, “I have sworn to leave nothing out of our history (I who love nothing better than a sheep grazing his own afternoon shadow).”Footnote ⁹³ And Senghor—who, as Cooper writes, “both assumed the history of colonization and transcended it”Footnote ⁹⁴—would say in a 1966 speech, “we wish to deny nothing of our history, be it ‘colonial,’ which has become an element of our national personality.”Footnote ⁹⁵ But for the Fanon of Wretched of the Earth, the arrival of the colonist signified “the death of indigenous society.”Footnote ⁹⁶ And the response could only be to treat decolonization and the bid for liberation as unfolding on an abandoned plane out of which a new, independent nation would be born.Footnote ⁹⁷ If European “man” had become an empty signifier, then the task for the fledgling postcolonial state would be “to invent a man in full, something which Europe has been incapable of achieving.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Nationalism, Fanon wrote, needed to be “enriched and deepened by a very rapid transformation into a consciousness of social and political needs, in other words into humanism.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Before, however, it became a foregone conclusion that the postcolonial order would be organized around independent nation-states, and situated along the road between Sartre's humanism and the critical impulses of Foucault or Lévi-Strauss, between the search for the universal in human experience and the rupture spelled by the celebration of ethnic difference, Césaire and Senghor engaged in an effort to rethink their French education from the perspective of their colonial reality, and to chart the terms of their inheritance anew.

THE ENDS OF MAN

I turn now to Derrida's intervention in the postwar humanism debate—his 1968 lecture “The Ends of Man”—in order to show that Derrida, like Césaire, Senghor, and Fanon before him, worked through the proposals to rethink subject-centered reason only to situate himself, by the end of the lecture and much like Césaire and Senghor in the period after the war, somewhere between those proposed alternatives. This is not to suggest any direct lines of influence; it is only to make room within the narrative of postwar intellectual history for a distinctive mode of antihumanist thought—one which, I have been arguing, both mapped onto and was conditioned by the possibilities imagined for the future of the French empire.

Derrida's lecture begins with the observation that the antihumanism that is the dominant motif in current French thought fails to engage with the critique of the same humanism undertaken by Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ That is, current pronouncements of the “end of man” overlook the critique of anthropologism—the “near end of man”—implied in the successive attempts to give phenomenological accounts of spirit, consciousness, and Being. Instead, Derrida's contemporaries amalgamate such accounts with the old metaphysical humanism that put man at the center of philosophical inquiry—precisely what Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger had set out to dismantle. This is due, in part, to the “anthropologistic readings of Hegel” given by Alexandre Kojève in his lecture course in the 1930s, as well as Sartre's misreading of Heidegger, which translated his Dasein as “human reality.” And yet, Derrida writes, “Dasein, though not man, is nevertheless nothing other than man.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Or, in the case of Hegel, the ambition to transcend the finitude of empirical man was precisely the end, or telos, of man. Thus the pronouncement of man's “end,” as in displacement or overcoming, reinscribed his philosophy within the horizon of man's “end,” as in essence or telos; the trace of man was preserved even at the moment of his intended erasure. Herein lies the problem. And Derrida's lecture, which starts out sounding like an attempt to salvage the antihumanist strain in the thought of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger—that is, “the heritage of the systems of thought that had been disfigured, or in which rather, the figure of man too quickly had been discerned”—instead takes shape as a warning to those thinkers, his structuralist peers, who naively declare themselves outside man, opting to articulate the structures that define and give meaning to his existence, and of which he need not be aware.Footnote ¹⁰² Derrida reveals this to be only the latest development in a long history of self-deception on the part of Western philosophers by showing how the pretension to have accessed a truth higher than man, or to have stepped outside him, will time and again be reabsorbed by the very system it allegedly deconstructs. The structuralists may think they have escaped the province of man but, like the phenomenologists before them, their claims to truth are conditioned by assumptions that place them back squarely within that self-same province. Both sets of thinkers claim to have overcome the messy business of the subject by providing access, though by different means, to objective existence. But this claim can never be more than a deception. Why must this be the case?

For Sartre to be able to speak of something called “human reality,” he had to presuppose both that there was a measure of unity to this experience and that he held some privileged access to it. But Sartre was only making explicit a possibility that lingered in Heidegger's thought, one that Heidegger professed to have overcome (Dasein is not man and nevertheless nothing other than man). Heidegger's Being and Time begins by acknowledging that we have lost our sense of the meaning of Being because it goes unquestioned. So let us ask, what is Being? The very fact, Heidegger says, that we can ask the question means that we have a “vague average understanding” of Being, even if we may not know what it is. But who is this “we” who have at their disposal that vague, average understanding? Derrida writes, “In the absence of every other determination or presupposition, the ‘we’ at least is what is open to such an understanding.”Footnote ¹⁰³ The “we humans” underlying discussions of humanism, the “we in the horizon of humanity,” as Derrida writes, thus only makes explicit the elision that philosophers have long made between access to philosophical truth and the “we philosophers” who claim that access.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ But as soon as we consider this implicit “we,” we are forced back on our old humanism, with all its hazards and metaphysics: the supposed unity of experience and the pretension to its access. How can we instead shake up, make tremble (ébranler), our universal pretensions? In fact, Derrida says, this trembling is already taking place: “A radical trembling can only come from the outside . . . This trembling is played out in the violent relationship of the whole of the West to its other.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ But we have to be careful: “the ‘logic’ of every relation to the outside is very complex and surprising. It is precisely the force and the efficiency of the system that regularly change transgressions into ‘false exits.’”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ How, then, is one to proceed?

Derrida lays out the choice between two strategies: one can undertake, in the mode suggested by Heidegger, a “deconstruction without changing terrain,” or one can, like Derrida's contemporaries, “decide to change terrain, in a discontinuous and irruptive fashion.” The first approach, in evidence in the opening pages of Being and Time, develops a critique of metaphysics from within the language of metaphysics, effected through a return to the founding concepts of that tradition to reveal what is implicit in its language, prior to any metaphysical suppositions—that “We do not know what ‘Being’ means . . . But this vague, average understanding of Being is still a fact.” The second approach affirms an “absolute break” with that tradition, by “brutally placing oneself outside” man, in the manner proposed by structuralism. But just as, in the first case, Heidegger could not but fall prey to the very language he was seeking to overcome (we at least have a vague, average understanding of Being), the dream of stepping outside man would, Derrida observed, “ceaselessly [reinstate] the new terrain on the oldest ground.” This, too, was because the new terrain could not but be charted in the language and concepts of an already existing “we.” There could be no absolute break with history or with epistemology as long as language was introduced—and indeed there was no way around this. The only option was to develop a new writing, a new style, that would move back and forth between these “two motifs of deconstruction,” to destabilize the “we” by introducing an outside that undermined its universalist assumptions, but without ever presuming to have left this “we” behind. Derrida begins to effect this movement through his use of the indefinite pronoun “one” (on), which hovers between a “we” and a “they,” both possibilities operative at any given moment: “From the inside in which ‘we are,’ one has nothing but the choice between two strategies” (italics added).

Such an approach represented more than simply a stylistic mode or preference. In fact, I want to suggest that “the choice between two strategies” bears certain structural similarities to the choices posed by the demand to rethink, or shake up, the relation between France and its colonies. Derrida himself would recommend such a comparison when, for example, in his 1963 critique of Foucault's attempt at a “change of terrain,” cited above, he drew an analogy with Fanon's “anticolonial revolution.” Moreover, that Derrida's “new writing” would “weave between the two motifs of deconstruction,” that he would stake a position between phenomenology and structuralism, between “confirming, consolidating” current ground and enacting a revolutionary “change of terrain,” should suggest a further parallel with his own politics in the period leading up to Algerian independence. As Edward Baring writes, like other French Algerian liberals, Derrida “attempted to find a third way between colonialism . . . and Algerian nationalism.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This history, according to Baring, “provides a crucial and much-neglected context for understanding Derrida's philosophy of deconstruction.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Césaire and Senghor were not, of course, French Algerian liberals, but in charting their inter- and postwar political and philosophical itineraries, I have tried to suggest that, as with Derrida, their critique of humanism was refracted through their anticolonial politics, and in particular their insistence—not unlike Derrida's—that between colonial assimilation and national independence there might be a “third way.” Reading “The Ends of Man” alongside works by Césaire, Senghor, and Fanon enables this perspective. Consider, for example, that surrealism and phenomenology—both crucial in Derrida's formative yearsFootnote ¹⁰⁹—would provide for Césaire and Fanon, respectively, the means with which to express modes of thought that the “imperial grandeur of the order of reason” had effaced or obscured. Consider, too, that it was Heidegger who inspired in both Derrida and Senghor a critique of humanism through a return to something prior to or preexisting the imposition of “reason.” Where for Derrida this involved a “deconstruction without changing terrain,” making explicit what is implicit in the founding concepts of the Western tradition, for Senghor the search for the “foundation of Being” would provide the resources with which to think the recovery of “black being.” Fanon was not wrong, then, to observe that Négritude merely displaced the “great white error” with a “black mirage”—the strategy of replacement (relève) was precisely what, for Derrida, marked any declaration of man's end as premature; for such a strategy risked “confirming . . . that which one allegedly deconstructs.” But we saw too that Césaire and Senghor would supplement their “strategic essentialism” with the recognition that, as Senghor wrote, “we have to borrow from Reason its own weapons.” Thus, rather than call for an absolute break with “the order of reason,” Césaire and Senghor sought a dynamic that, much like Derrida's “new writing” or “plural” style, would weave together their double inheritance—“not a linear movement, but an oscillating dialectic.” I conclude, now, on the suggestion that such thinking, and the context that informed it, might continue to speak to our postcolonial condition, situated as we are—after the end of formal empire—in the world that empire made.

THE ENDS OF EMPIRE

Derrida's critique of the structuralist “change of terrain” finds notable echoes in the critique of the national liberation narrative, undertaken by postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak. As they would have it, the logic of national liberation belonged to a set of assumptions that were themselves propagated by colonial authorities. That logic was understood to depend upon the link between the prescription, the revolutionary call to arms, and the description of the colonial relation as involving essential difference, opposition, and asymmetry. However, this description, which cast the identity of the native as “other” and fixed in opposition to the identity of the white colonizer, was itself a myth promoted by the colonizer. Resisting colonial authority, from the postcolonial perspective, required both disavowing the liberation narrative, now revealed as a colonialist ruse, and disavowing the description that made it possible. If the negative moment of the critique was one of disavowal, the positive moment—the intervention—was to offer readings that revised the supposedly binary relation by revealing the ambivalence of colonial authority, those moments when the exercise of that authority produced hybrid, rather than univocal, identities and in which the colonial presence is experienced not as totalizing and oppressive, but as partial and diffuse. If the colonizer saw himself bringing history and civilization to a site that previously had none, then such a reading, showing, for example, how the native negotiated the differences between the culture of the colonizer and her own, exposed the myth of that self-understanding for what it was.Footnote ¹¹⁰

The colonial encounter understood on the model of antagonism and opposition thus gives way to one of agonism, dialogue and negotiation; and the critical, prescriptive energies that, in the hands of other thinkers, had animated calls for insurrection, are unleashed at the level of the descriptive. Such descriptions, or redescriptions, are meant both to highlight instances in which the actual exercise of colonial authority belies the received wisdom regarding its command, and in so doing to produce a counterdiscourse whose effects may be called liberating, though they are articulated and experienced, at least initially, in the cultural, rather than political or economic, sphere. It is with this aim in mind that, for example, Homi Bhabha reads the “psychic ambivalence” of Fanon's Black Skin as testifying to the “subversive slippage of identity and authority” produced by the colonial condition.Footnote ¹¹¹ Bhabha's critics, notably Neil Lazarus, charge that such a reading willfully ignores the revolutionary narrative culminating in a call for Algerian independence, which frames Fanon's later works like Wretched of the Earth. This reading, Lazarus insists, merely reflects later readers’ imposition of their own modes of analysis on anticolonial texts.Footnote ¹¹² In response, Lazarus calls for a “more strenuously contextualized and politically discriminating engagement with Fanon and his work,” one which reads the revolutionary politics of anticolonial nationalism and humanism back into his texts.Footnote ¹¹³

Instead, this article has suggested that the early Fanon might actually be read as belonging to a distinctive and overlooked context, a dimension of the story of decolonization that Lazarus and others have not accounted for, and one that Macey alludes to when he writes, “There is no hint that Fanon believed in 1953 that Algeria should be an independent nation.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ That is, rather than see readings of anticolonial thinkers that emphasize hybrid identities, the instability of the colonial binary, or the possibility of dialogue or negotiation displacing the antagonistic, colonial relation as reflecting an anachronistic imposition of “theory” that ignores the material realities within which anticolonial actors operated, we might instead see such ideas as having in fact been formulated within a distinct political context, and specifically by those who did not yet conceive of independence on the model of territorial nation-states. I have tried to read Césaire, Senghor, and the early Fanon not as testifying to the ambivalence of colonial authority, as Bhabha might, but as articulating a philosophy and a politics that sought to do precisely what Bhabha has done at the descriptive or theoretical level—that is, to transform a relation, historically, of domination into one of negotiation and reciprocity. This should, in turn, encourage us to see something like the agonistic model not as a postmodern literary preference but as the product of a distinctive political vision—one which emerged when the logic of national liberation had not yet foreclosed alternative arrangements and which would reemerge when national independence could no longer serve as a rallying call.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Those who, in the window of time prior to independence, advocated for decolonization—fought, that is, to realize the empire's end—negotiated their demands in relation to two “ends” of empire: on the one hand, contact, interdependence, belonging across difference; on the other hand, colonization, exploitation, belonging according to hierarchy. The imperial frame thus reinforces a dimension of political belonging that continues to haunt the neocolonial imaginary: that the formation of empire entails both domination and also, however, as Jean-Luc Nancy has more recently written, “the distancing, spacing, and plurality opposed to the concentration of interiority required by political sovereignty. The question then becomes: How is one to think the spacing of empire against its domination?”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Or, to put it differently, if the configuration of the political space of empire—if not in its formal guise—brings together distinct political identities on unequal terms (i.e. white citizen/black subject), it serves, equally, to undermine the imagined closure of the “we” who claim those identities. The task would then be to reformulate, rather than transcend or abolish, the terms of inclusion—perhaps on something like the model imagined by proponents of federation.

In following the generation of francophone writers whose thinking was motivated by this very problematic, this article has argued that the movement of thought called for in reshaping the dynamics of empire constitutes an indispensable part of the story of the postwar dismantling of Western philosophy; that keeping in mind those who took on this “Sisyphean task,” as Senghor called it, can only enrich our understanding of this project and of the politics at stake; and that those who both engaged in an effort to rethink the relation of an exclusionary “we” to its outside and who, at the same time, had at their disposal the texts belonging to the subject-centered, humanist tradition were led to reconfigure that tradition beginning from the recognition of the complicity of its values in a long history of violence. If they were also attentive to the claims that tradition nonetheless placed on their thought, that there could be no removing oneself from it entirely, and that instead a new kind of relation, a new writing, was called for, then they might have happened upon something distinct from Sartre's “realization of the human in a society without races,” from Heidegger's profession to have overcome humanist metaphysics, and from the structuralist's “change of terrain,” while drawing on elements from all three.

In 1950 Senghor wrote that “the problem par excellence” was “that posed by colonization” which was, he said, the problem of Man. “However,” he wrote, “I can only reflect on this by way of my concrete experience as a black African historically situated in the French Republic.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ The specter of colonialism and of a war fought in the name of a liberated, democratic France had dissolved the philosophical enterprise into a question: “How can we restore meaning to the word humanism?” The response, though not Heidegger's, was a half-answer, another question, the recognition that the best one could do was to ceaselessly pose that question in relation to a different one: who's asking?