The colonial phrase that we are assembling will speak first in French. We may then see how our examination might be extended to other languages. This choice of language is clearly a function of the space I am privileging in this work. The concern with discrepancies among languages will make extrapolations possible. We will have the opportunity to remember that language is not irrelevant when it comes to colonial politics; it, too, commands configurations and positions of discourses.
One word will detain us and contain other words: possession. Possession is a common synonym for colony during the ancien régime. Like “colony,” the word “possession” is well attested during moments when France extends its empire overseas; both words are used to describe this new expansion, as well as the control and the settlement they imply. The French conqueror, in the sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth century, is often an explorer who arrives on an island, a land he decides to take charge of, in his own name or that of the king. In doing so, he is said to take possession of the colony, that place he annexes.
In 1620, Samuel Champlain returns to North America, to the “New France” he had previously penetrated (between 1604 and 1618), this time equipped with royal orders. The day after his return to Quebec he has Mass celebrated. “The Récollet father delivered a sermon of Exhortation” to obtain the obedience of all to the king and the nobles.
After this exhortation we left the chapel, I assembled all the people, and commanded Commissioner Guers to read the King’s commission aloud to the Viceroy, and that of his Grace the Viceroy. This made everyone shout “Vive le Roi,” the cannon was fired as an expression of joy, and thus I took possession of the habitation and the country, in the name of my Lord the Viceroy. The aforementioned Guers stood as witness to the time and place. (Champlain, La France d’Amérique 211)1
The political novelty here resides in an act of appropriation that is determined by a delegation between the king, the viceroy, and Champlain. Champlain had crossed a small part of the continent, named places and built structures, engaged in commerce and created alliances with the “savages.” He can now legally arrogate to himself his discovery during a ceremony where speech is transmitted. The discovery is declared by the Word of God incarnate in the Eucharist and in the sermon by the priest, followed by two readings of edicts and the cries of the assembly. The cannon then speaks, and Champlain “takes possession” in the “name” of the sovereign; all this will be archived on paper. In addition to expressing “joy,” the cannon fire indicates military force and specifies the nature of its language. There is no space to oppose the verbal operation of the colonial declaration made through the use of weapons. I am not masking the other side of this violence. On the contrary, the striking summary Champlain gives us inscribes violence, with its voice, in a process of diction, in a system of echoes. I only want to highlight the interlacing knots that Champlain ties between the public exhortation and reading, and the proclamation and the inscription in a register—a narrative. This knot is exemplary of what we must look for. At least in this material, I do not find an uncrossable chasm between the two putative orders of the oral and the written. This is also why, in this book, “speech” (parole) and “text” do not refer in a systematic way to one of these two poles rather than the other. Of course, the majority of utterances we will analyze—the majority, but not all—will derive from printed material. Yet an orality (that of the slogan, for example) can be heard there, which is itself worked over by writing, if only in the Derridean sense.
The colony is possession achieved through a performative gesture. Place-names sometimes guard the memory of this. In La Réunion, there is a city called La Possession. An Ile de la Possession figures in the Crozet Archipelago.2 In all these cases, “possession” corresponds to the commandeering of a country. The register does not entirely coincide with a polemical lexicon: it is less about conquering an already-existing state than about managing what is found there. In contrast to the classical wars against established powers, what we see in colonial wars, more than anything else, is the taking of a territory—which is inhabited, as if by chance. In his descriptions, Champlain scarcely seems hampered by the presence of Indians. They are “our savages,” since they happen to reside in a new portion of the kingdom of France. Champlain’s imperative is “to attract a small number of savages near to us” in order to do business with them. One asks them for beaver pelts, and they will go away “very satisfied.” “This is a step in the right direction” (Champlain, La France d’Amérique 231). If the Indians resist, it will suffice to force them to obey, to crush them, if necessary, to play one side against the other (Algonquins against Iroquois, for example). From this point of view, colonization plunders the local riches, despite the autochthonous peoples.
The phrase develops as soon as this legal possession communicates with the description of the indigenous people as “possessed by an evil spirit” (Champlain, La France d’Amérique 231). In the passage I am citing, Champlain makes the distinction among the different savages and describes “our own” (183) as more ignorant of God than perpetually demonic. He glimpses their successful conversion. However, he also notes that in the absence of God, these people “have some respect for the devil” (197). Shamanic rituals are a matter of the “possessed”: “They would say…that the devil Oqui or Manitou (if we must name them thus) possesses them” (201). Four decades before these descriptions, in Brazil, Jean de Léry says of the Tupis: “These poor people throughout their life are just as afflicted by this evil spirit…as I have seen on multiple occasions, they even spoke to us in this way, feeling tormented, and crying out suddenly as if enraged, they would say, ‘Alas! Defend us from Aygnan who beats us!’ ” (Histoire d’un voyage 386).3 This omnipresent cliché from the conquest of the New World, of which I have cited but a tiny number of examples,4 will amply serve the missionary activity that accompanies the rapid development of commerce and power. It joins a specific meaning at the heart of the phrase that justifies possession by possession, and it is not surprising that authors who are more skeptical about the imperialist right over the “savages” refuse to give credit to the demonic thesis, as is the case with Baron de Lahontan, who will declare in 1703: “I say this about the devil, with whom one claims that the Savages are acquainted…. All these suppositions are ridiculous, since the Devil has never manifested himself to these Amériquains” (Nouveaux Voyages 126).
The collusion of terms of possession definitively marks the imperial language of the colony from the second half of the seventeenth century onward. With the increased recognition of a necessity for expansion, along with the growth of the triangular slave trade, colonization becomes even more a question of possession. Individuals are also transformed into goods. The slave is a “property-being” (un être meuble). It is the Code noir, written by Colbert and signed by Louis XIV in 1685, that expresses this notion in this way (in article 44).5 The edict determines the legal practices of slavery (that Louis XIII had previously reestablished). Some historians think that the Code was little applied by merchants and owners, but the text is no less essential in its systematicity and the colonial philosophy it develops.
The black person whose work is compulsory in the decimated islands becomes, through slavery, an acquisition transmitted through inheritance (Code noir, art. 44). Dispatched to the overseas possessions, he enters into the property of this or that person. Then in article 2, it is made obligatory for masters to baptize the Nègres. The Christian faith must be imposed on the slaves. Like that of the Indians the conquerors torture, their life naturally takes place in the company of Satan. The sacrament and a rudiment of religious instruction will assure the salvation of their souls.
After their salvation, it is only a question of the body of the slaves: fed, cared for, clothed (arts. 22–27), whipped (arts. 15–17), mutilated, marked with shame, assassinated (arts. 36–40). The article on baptism textually achieves a legal ecstasy. Once it is uttered, the black people will have become organic machines, transformed by instinct, apparently deprived of all capacity for judgment.6 With the case of the emancipated slave a possible moral intention reappears, indistinguishable from the command to respect the former master (art. 58). After an absence lasting as long as slavery, the Nègre would recover a soul that the Catholic Church had already entrusted to God, as after death.
Geographical possession is thus accompanied by human possession—slaves, for example, which one buys, ships off, buys back again. The act of human ownership is understood as a delivery from paganism, a weakening of demonic possession. The king drives the evil spirit out of the body of the Nègre. In response, he in turn enchants: he becomes a ravisher of souls, located next to God.7 The colonial slave-master needs to rule over people who are possessed in order to authorize his own act of taking possession (over places, bodies, and spirits). A new semanteme is created that will exploit the different values of possession, the material seizure underwritten, more or less explicitly, by a spiritual act. The configuration of motifs and meanings forms the phrase that I have announced, and which most colonial and anticolonial texts up through the twentieth century will reprise and modify. To reiterate, it is indeed the interweaving of these meanings and figures that allows for the phrase. Neither state possession nor demonic possession is the unique property of this colonial speech. However, something particular is invented in the crossing of these two schemes. The contradictory meaning of possessions becomes elevated in a way that we will unfold later.
Hostility to slavery or to imperialism in no way signifies that one has moved outside its phrase of possession. Instead, one will blame the centralized power for usurping an absolute, inhuman, and extraordinary control. Victor Schoelcher calls for the second abolition of slavery in the 1830s and 1840s. His insistent activism is done in the name of equality, which is demanded in the name of reason. This activism also describes servitude against a magical background where haunting is connected to seizure. Schoelcher affirms that black people “do not have possession of themselves” (Abolition de l’esclavage 5), and that they “deal with their possessors, [who are] irritated that their property should elude them” (156). Schoelcher does not confuse them with proletarians: “Among us, the rich man still exploits the poor man: this is criminal; but he does not possess him” (Des colonies françaises 61). Each time, “property,” “possessor,” “possess,” are in italics, as if Schoelcher were seeking the unspeakable truth of these terms. The author considers one psychological effect of slavery that he names abrutissement (literally, “a mindless or brutish stupor”),8 a state marked by apathy and the renouncement of all personal will. The symptom exists “among these poor people who do not themselves understand their desire to escape,” who “believe their fate has been cast” (Schoelcher, Des colonies françaises 111), and who demand “exorcism” masses so they will not succumb to the temptation to escape (le marronnage) (99, 111). So, Schoelcher notes, abrutissement does not cease at the same time that the master’s “ownership” of the slave ends: “The deadly effects of servitude make themselves felt a long time after it has been abolished, like the ravages of a long and disastrous illness” (De l’esclavage des noirs 41). It is as if the will remains in chains; slavery “strips the soul of all vitality” (Des colonies françaises 111). Possession persists after the end of property. Another thought was imposed on the mind of slaves, then substituted for it. We are now fully in the realm of the most clear-cut instance of haunting, with the transfer of souls and the annihilation of wills. All this is what is meant by abrutissement.
A century later, Frantz Fanon, in Peau noire masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks), will prefer the medical and political term “alienation.”9 The great Martinican thinker situates the aftereffects of colonial heritage within the individual complex, which brings subjects to self-destruct and present themselves as strangers. “Alienation” translates Entfremdung, which Hegel puts into place in the dialectic of Lord and Bondsman.10 Fanon aims for a “disalienation” of “blacks and whites” (Peau noire 203). In this Freudo-Marxist operation, the share of social and economic freedom corresponds to the psychic work required by each person (with more urgency, perhaps, for blacks). The importance given to language is crucial, a point made clear in the first chapter. In fact, Fanon declares that “in the possession of language, there is an extraordinary power” (201). According to the author, the Antillean context prevents people with black skin from speaking freely. Martinicans are put in a double bind. If they speak Creole, they give the impression of recognizing what whites see as their deep-seated inability to master a language that is not a patois (35). If they speak a language that is not a patois, they confirm the cultural and linguistic superiority of the colonists. It is even true that an Antillean “who possesses the mastery of the language is excessively feared; one must keep an eye on him, he’s almost white” (35); one form of possession calls forth another form. “Le Noir et le langage” does not supply the explicit surpassing of the contradiction; the last word of the chapter (continuons, “let us continue”) has the effect of something like a suspension. At the individual level, it is in the act of writing the chapter that one must seek the exorcism of the Antillean Frantz Fanon. The fact of writing this linguistic impossibility is a way for the author to escape the alternative between a Creole that he devalues and a conventional and polite speaking up (prise de parole). “A man who possesses language possesses as a result the world expressed and implied by this language” (35). Thus the “disalienation” rejects confinement within a diminished and debased ego but wastes no time in reproducing a reified alterity; and despite everything, it is inscribed in the (post)colonial fact by its wish to possess “the white world.”
These discontinuous yet decisive examples (Colbert, Schoelcher, Fanon) help us to constitute a phrase among the discourses, situating the colony in relation to possession. We take a fact of speech beyond the imbrication of motifs because one word serves as a pivot. Ultimately, these texts demonstrate the importance of language for acting in society. Like Champlain in Quebec, they speak to change reality. Thus must we also consider the resources of the phrase of possession in the evocation and understanding of colonial experience.
In its movement, colonial possession brings with it a potent resource: a truly concrete dispossession. Whatever old systems of property may have existed (sacred, collective, etc.) in the territories acquired, the indigenes of the empire must henceforth accustom themselves to new economic laws that put them at a disadvantage. In a work of philosophical fiction published in 1951, Tran Duc Thao outlines a mystical history of appropriation. The author discovers an “originary mystification that will justify the entire ulterior process of exploitation” (Thao, Phénoménologie et matérialisme dialectique 6). In the societies that Tran Duc Thao qualifies as primitive, “the exclusivity in the possession of the object entails the negation of its effective reality and its absorption into the transcendence of a pure self-consciousness where the mystical union of the owner with his property takes place.” Thus, an aborigine “is the kangaroo he possesses” (6; my emphasis). The succession of eras depicted by the author shows how this mystical ferment is subsequently concealed. With capitalism, “the exclusivity of private appropriation…is revealed as trickery and alienation” (35). No legitimation can again allow for the violence of appropriation to be contained. The supernatural participation in mana or philosophical conceptualization can no longer mask reality.
Tran Duc Thao is quick to confirm the progressive Marxist narrative, scarcely questioning the categories of the primitive and the savage. About this—the socialism he advocates—we would decidedly have much to say. Yet it is interesting that this thinker, who mentions “Western thought” on several occasions, clearly sees in it an attempt at a perpetual revival of mysticism. Tran Duc Thao does not understand that revolutionary messianism is but one more displacement into imaginary speech (la parole fantastique), and just how very difficult it is to escape it. I therefore suggest that we read these fragments for what is not given in evidence, as a description of the supernatural substrate at work in colonial appropriation. Tran Duc Thao—beyond his hasty acceptance of one Western discourse—highlights possession in the act of imperial ownership. Colonialism is also his colony, according to the ambiguity of the word, which designates the territory, the autochthonous population, and the new arrivals. The mystical union transforms all the ordinary rules of property.
At the end of the 1880s in Algeria, the French bemoan “the instability of indigenous property” (l’instabilité de la propriété indigène) (Recueil des délibérations du Congrès colonial international 84). Let us agree that this way of parceling out property is not identical to that of modern France. In the new incarnation of possession, it will be a question of dispossessing the inhabitants of their own system of property. Thus in Algeria,
the administration endeavored to remedy the problem by entrusting to an army of land surveyors the task of limiting and establishing individual property for the indigenes. This illusory operation (for it still has not been restarted) cost in 1887 the enormous sum of 11,395,594 francs, provided by the Arab Tax. (84)
Foncin, the author of the report I am citing, is being critical here. He declares himself in favor of more radical solutions, such as the extension of francisation (frenchification), which would bring an end to indigenous property by making specific ways of calculating and other such conceptions disappear. Beyond this individual position, imagine the scene of a country striated, plowed by surveyors undoing the old borders. In this scenario, the entire process will be paid for by a tax collected precisely from the very people who are to be stripped of their fields. In this case, the colonizer takes possession of a country without immediately requisitioning the entire expanse of the land. Yet from the indigenes he takes more than their property; he wants to deprive them of their theory of property. He identifies himself with the new measure of wealth at the expense of the colonized. Such a position is revealing in terms of the multiform attack against indigenous property. Even though it did not lead to the total ruin of codes and practices predating colonization, it is uttered from the depths of the possession that dispossesses. The republican empire, with its own expressive forms and vocabulary, reproduces in this sense the royal interdiction of all Nègre property: “We declare that slaves shall have nothing that is not their master’s” (Code noir, art. 28).
The size of the possession holds an erotic value as well. To possess is also used to describe sexual relations, generally indicating a masculine “possession” of the feminine. During the ancien régime, métissage in particular is the result of this type of ancillary sexual activity, or of rape. However much the scholarly bibliography tells us about this question, it would be difficult to estimate the extent of these kinds of relations. The Code noir, which dedicates several articles to marriage (arts. 10–13) and the freeing of slaves (arts. 55–59), also responds to the multiplication of relationships that would today be called interracial or mixed. In the time of the second colonial empire, the sexual component is clear. The attraction to the Oriental woman—this Other, who is prone to do everything, as the deformed image of the legitimate spouse—becomes part of the colonial adventure. Exoticism celebrates the easiness of women from “over there” or, more directly, alerts the foreigner to the number of brothels that will be accessible to him there. Prostitution has often undergone colonial reformations, as in India or the Maghreb. The westernization of commerce corresponds to its normalized expansion. It also responds to demand, so to speak. The colonial country, seen from the metropole, represents a world of phantasmatic frenzy.
Popular song recorded this movement of desire. An army is also led by chants, as all who have had the misfortune of being a soldier for even a day cannot forget. In 1895, a certain Colette (no relation to the author) accompanies the military efforts of France while belting out “Les Bleus à Madagascar.” Included among the many charms adorning the couplets is the opportunity to “sip some negress milk / For two cents a liter, it ain’t expensive” (sirot[er] du lait d’négresse / A deux sous l’litr’, ça n’est pas cher), and to see “in Adam’s suit / Venuses black as shoe-shine” (dans l’costume’d’Adam / Des Vénus noir’s comm’du cirage). Of course, “it’s a dishonor over there / For a young lass / To be virtuous” (c’est un déshonneur là-bas, / Pour un’jeun’fill, d’être rosière) (Ruscio, Que la France était belle 127). The same year, the singer Reschal promises on the subject of the “Z’hovas”: “They’ll all be cuckolds!” (125).11
Erotic rhetoric is recurrent in the greatest hits of colonial song.12 Possession in the name of France is incarnated, on the individual level, by the eventual emergence of an alternative sexuality. This is so notorious that Alphonse Daudet, beginning in 1872, will ridicule Tartarin of Tarascon, newly disembarked in Algeria. The great lion hunter “seeks his Moor, he must have his Maghrebine!” (cherche sa Mauresque, il lui faut sa Maugrabine!) (Daudet, Oeuvres 517). Incorrigible, Tartarin will subsequently feel deep passion for the Kanak princess of the colony he founded, Port-Tarascon.13 Daudet’s cycle is revealing in terms of its inflection of colonial exoticism, whose point of departure is the distance between the preconceived dream and the sordid reality. This world is degraded because of colonial (and civilizing) activity, which nevertheless allows for the presence of the Westerner in these lands. Pierre Loti also laments the “bastard of the beach and the morals of the colonized city” in Tahiti (Le mariage de Loti, pt. 1, chap. 20). Loti is another Tartarin, but without the slightest trace of irony. In his first two works, where the author remains anonymous (“Loti” being the first name of the main character), the story is similar. A naval officer comes to a distant land (Turkey, Tahiti), takes a wife, then abandons her. This narrative scheme will be repeated ad nauseam by the writer who ends up taking the name of his protagonist. He makes known the possibility of this extension of masculine desire toward an exciting feminized foreignness, stripped of remorse. This taste for physical overseas possession also informs contemporary sexual tourism in the Third World. A tourist guide from 1943 could encourage its readers to visit the red-light district of prostitutes under colonial control in Casablanca, “[who are] cloistered behind impenetrable walls and…living in a scene not lacking in poetry.”14
To go “over there” is a transgressive act. The idea of the colony as a “safety valve” (soupape de sûreté) for metropolitan society, which would vent elsewhere its deviances and violence, was, after all, theorized from the beginning of the conquest of Algeria and increasingly affirmed at the end of the nineteenth century.15 In addition to the sexual commerce between men and women, better documented now, attraction also comes from practices outside the norm, suddenly rendered commonplace. Masculine-masculine desire is found directly in the homosexual legend of Tangier, which leads to the Moroccan world described today in the works of Rachid O. In 1900, the marching chant of the troops marshaled against Igli, in western Algeria, sums up erotic ambivalence in these coded terms: “The Arabs in this place / Brought us what we needed / To wash our heads / In exchange for la galette / And so for a few rounds / Easily we found / Women and even onions” (Les arbis de l’endroit, / Nous apportaient de quoi / Pour nous laver la tête / Moyennant d’la galette / Et puis pour quelque ronds / Facilement nous trouvions / Des femmes et même des oignons) (L’Afrique française, 1932, 187). “La galette,” like the “round,” designates money that buys alcohol (“to wash our heads”) and prostitutes; and true as it may be that the onion is a plant found in Algeria, I think that the hierarchy suggested by the adverb “even” leaves no doubt: oignon means “anus” in slang, and Aristide Bruant’s dictionary explains oignon as a synonym for the expression “the world of pederasts.” Situational bisexuality enters into the desiring fable of colonialism.
I am not making the colony into a pure enterprise of sexual exploitation, but it is difficult to separate imperial expansion from the pursuit of pleasure. Motive, or reward? When the French begin conceptualizing the exercise of power during the Third Republic, the vocabulary becomes eroticized. In 1884, Louis Vignon, an architect of French colonial policy, sees two irrefutable advantages to the expeditions to the new world: alongside the “growth of industry” he mentions the “increase in pleasures” (Les colonies françaises 5). In 1897, Jean-Louis de Lanessan, the former governor-general in Indochina, finds in the first colonial temptation the culmination of “natural curiosity,” of the “desire that all peoples have to increase their sphere of influence,” and of “the pursuit of physical and intellectual pleasures” (Principes de colonisation 1). Later, “the desire to procure such pleasures becomes dulled or rather gets transformed” (2). Desire and the pursuit of pleasures are then “converted” into the exercise of ordinary power. While waiting for the day of their hypothetical obliteration, these desires remain part of the administration of the territory. Sometimes they surface, and a colonist lets himself “caress the sweet little faces that please him, often to abuse them in the most odious manner.” Lanessan, who was an important influence on practical doctrine, preaches in favor of a redirection of libidinal forces. The latter should be transformed into a “desire for less brutal satisfactions” (59). Physical craving metamorphoses into missionary necessity. If I may use Freudian vocabulary for a moment, Lanessan provides us with a description of sublimation, where raw desire becomes civilizing desire. But desire it remains. To prolong possession, to pursue pleasure: we will rediscover this imperative in various parts of this book, where colonial hysteria will still be understood as a desiring claim.
It is not surprising that the major theoreticians of colonialism, such as Octave Mannoni, Frantz Fanon, and Homi Bhabha, developed their ideas while passing through psychoanalysis. Before them, psychology was everywhere present in the colonial manuals, but in a diffuse state—as in contemporary management treatises. Psychology, half hidden in Lanessan, or impoverished (as in the isolated Psychologie de la colonisation française, by Léopold de Saussure), recalled the interest in the mental interiority of the indigene. But it did not focus very much on the motifs of the colonist, which Albert Memmi or Mannoni compare during the period of the disintegration of the empire. Against the grain of a habit that has become deeply rooted in postcolonial studies in particular, I will often suspend the analytic route in considering the phrase. It might seem strange to insist on desire and jouissance and to appear to not make more systematical leaps to Freudianism. Allow me here to give the two main reasons that I opt for the quasi-archaic conservation of force of haunting, possession, and enchantment. First, regarding the level on which this reflection is unfolding, we quite simply have no need to interrogate the establishment of the support that would be the subject of analysis. My hypothesis is different. Written and spoken words aggregate what exists before us—and what, ready-made, offers itself to us and can serve for us as thought. This is the nature of every phrase in general. One of the particularities of the colonial phrase resides in the fact that it articulates a possession that, moreover, resembles the process of its appearance. Here, we discover an imperative: it is necessary to colonize, that is to say, to dominate, to seize flesh and language (prendre corps et langue), to subjugate, to penetrate without ceasing. The exploitation of slavery or the civilizing mission is revealed as a fit of violence, a pursuit of power that could not stop itself. Nothing prevents us from speaking here of Freudian “drives” or “libido.” Indeed, colonization exists through the people who live it and maintain it. So, perhaps, as Mannoni suggested in his Psychologie de la colonisation, the colonist is a child who takes himself for the father. Yes, perhaps. But to my mind one is not required to join speech to the subject in order to find a motivation that would be more profound because it is more individual. Whoever would like to venture further into the connection between my description of the (post)colonial verbal and psychic construction may do so. My point is not to explain the subjective reason for the “birth” of modern colonization—rather, it is to read how it is spoken, maintained, undone. One would have cause to point out that I neglect the psyche of the actors as much as the economic reality of the (post)colonial experience. Clearly, there is a need for men and women who feel in themselves the call of desire; and trade is organized as a function of mercantile exchanges, under the imperative of the financing and the rise of capitalism. However, I do not think that Oedipus or the economy explains the phrase of possession. Rather, the establishment of an un-thought in speech that becomes thought itself in its places of escape is another model, an alternative, for understanding this phenomenon. The phrase explains as much—or as little. At the same time, each type of approach—here: economy, psychoanalysis, critique of language—constructs and thus modifies that which it studies. It would therefore be illusory to want to correct one optic with another; separate images will not give a perfect panorama. The failure will remain, and it is about this in particular that we must think.
The appeal to possession itself becomes an interpretive decision, which demands at least a temporary suspension of the analytical doctrine—because Freud tries to get rid of possession, in favor of a more phantomatic and less contradictory Unheimlichkeit. The enterprise succeeded so well (thanks to Freud and others) that today it makes the difference between unsettling strangeness and possession incomprehensible in the eyes of many people. I noticed this fact at my own expense during my research on literary possession, which was partially inaudible due to the spectral preconceptions it sought to combat. To be sure, bringing possession back into the discussion runs counter to Freudian scientism, which is not a simple accident of analytical theory but indeed one of its forces (and limits). If one would dissolve enchantment solely in favor of phantasms and transferences, it would be better to launch this operation after having examined what magical possession offers us. In this case, with possession, the (post)colonial phrase can be reorganized out of its words and utterances. It still tells us the history of a civilization that does not even bother with repressing magic—which, instead, recognizes it quite officially, but only in reserving an increasingly marginal place for it. In other words, (post)colonial possession is neither an unconscious motif nor an unconscious value. On the contrary, it was consciously and constantly planned, up through the differential repetition of the colony in our own discourses. Freud, to my mind, tries too hard to locate the supernatural in the unconscious or the pathological. He acts in such a way because he himself participates in the civilizing parlance that has resounded since the end of the nineteenth century. As it happens, this gives me a third reason to stall the analytical reduction of possession: I will be speaking about it again shortly.
I think it is worth conserving the extraordinary violence of possession or risk losing much in the current discussion. I am not in favor of colonial possession—this goes without saying—but, not believing in life free of haunting, I would be wary of an explanation that seeks to suppress the intellectual and vital register of the supernatural. What matters is knowing how to tame the event, how to keep it from destroying us, how to escape from the trap, how to choose our demons. Shamanism or literature is a means, practical and divergent, for changing the share of death at work in enchantment. So-called rationalization does not strike me as a desirable solution to the unforeseen nonrational; it is content to limit the field of experience. Rationalization then has no trouble secretly joining forces with a spiritual commerce that it hastily baptizes.
My interest in the phenomenon of possession goes beyond the question of the colony, and I was initially chagrined to find the first in contact with the second. Since I think that interpretation establishes itself out of its own thought, the collusion did not really surprise me; still, I feared repeating myself. Whatever the case may be, I will let readers decide for themselves. Examining texts convinced me that there was a connection, after the Enlightenment, between the literary elaboration of a reading-writing of haunting and the phrase of colonial possession. This is not to say that one brings about the other. On the contrary, the two gestures correspond to a moment of great rational exorcism. Literature finds itself charged, in a certain sense, with speaking possession, which more and more tends to be lacking in the self-description of European society. It is pulled together by the very notion of possession it assembles. The figures of the vates, or the “inspired”—although never the exclusive privilege of poetry—authorize this idea, as does the antiquity of a nonrational literary discourse. The social body favors this placement of magic in literature, encoding it in the category of fiction. Possession, in the nineteenth century, gets pushed out toward the margins of rational society. When it is not impugned as superstition, or medically translated as hysteria, it ends up in literature. Whether this quota functions remains to be seen, and I have demonstrated in my work on Maupassant, Artaud, and Blanchot that the marginalization of possession instead restructured an unbounded literary life.16
The colony, at first just one site of the possessed (in the same way that certain parts of the French countryside were peopled with witches and demons), becomes the geographical location where enchantment will come to reign. With the concurrent concepts of magic, possession, and shamanism, ethnography never ceased speaking about the witches’ Sabbath of the indigenes. The attention paid to the extraordinary outbursts of others has its corollary in the refusal to consider our own rapture. However, the proof of colonization appears in language, like an act of possession carried out by the so-called West against all the Orients. The colony must be all the more possessed in all areas because it receives haunting and enchantment in the form of an exclusive present. Sigmund Freud begins his Totem and Taboo with the evocation of prehistoric peoples. “We” must try to “know” them, but how? Luckily, “there are men still living who, as we believe, stand very near to primitive man, far nearer than we do” (Freud, Totem and Taboo 1).17 “We” are even to grasp that which separates “us” from prehistoric man, as from “these poor naked cannibals” (2). The repetition of “us” and of “our” (a dozen cases of uns and wir on the first page alone) will subsequently subside, but it serves the purpose of introducing the problem. “Our own development” (1) may be guessed from the study of those underdeveloped ones who believe in animism or magic. The division between peoples (civilized or not) is less notable than the book’s thesis about the psychic proximity between neurotics and savages. Although he finds, for “us,” mental processes that are comparable to those of indigenes, Freud takes advantage of this to localize such affinities in the childhood of history or clinical childishness. But the inaccessible “we” that is the modern Westerner, civilized and sound of mind, will always distance himself from primitive savagery—it is he, in addition, who needs the fact in order to socially deviate when the neurotics do not need it. And the savage finds himself henceforth the only “natural,”18 essential carrier of taboo and magic. For “us,” this will only be an accident on the journey, a mistake to correct, a stage through which we have passed that only certain events can reanimate.19
The works of historical psychoanalysis written by Freud are rooted in the affirmation of a great “process of civilization.” This term comes from Norbert Elias, although he did not invent all of its contours. Elias, however, even more than Freud, built up a good story into a doctrine that still holds sway. France and Germany—the two countries especially studied by Elias— contributed to the advent of “civilization,” which includes, among other distinct criteria, “psychologization,” and “rationalization,” as the extension of the sentiments of “shame” and “modesty.” The first edition of Elias’s book Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation appeared in 1939. Its argument always implicitly refers to the idle state of nature of primitives, for whom France or Germany provided the correct process. It is known that savages have no psyche; during the Renaissance, it was asked whether they even had a soul. They go about naked; they lack reason. Elias’s main points read like the daily affirmation of the colonists, the syllabary of their Coué method. We have civilization (and a soul, reason, modesty); they do not. The colonial implications of Elias’s book are admitted toward the end of the conclusion. The sociologist explains that the movement facilitates a passage from one state of civility to another, thanks to a parallel with “the Orient” and the “colonial territories” (Elias, Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation 436). From generation to generation, the process passes through a “phase of assimilation” (435). Europeans emerging from the Middle Ages and indigenes newly assimilated (to the European powers) thus find themselves staring at each other in the mirror.
By focusing on possession, I am contesting this grand narrative. Elias records the self-hypnotic text of thought that seeks to convince itself that it has superseded that which troubles it—and consigns the others (ancestors, savages) to their own hauntings. Hans Peter Duerr has conducted an immense investigation into the behavioral chapter, in the form of a response to Elias. I do not share the fairly universalist conclusions of Duerr, but the cluster of facts that he assembles seems sufficient to demonstrate the interested partiality of Elias’s thesis.
The conjoined absence of ratio and of psyche among the primitives was clearly affirmed by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. From this perspective, Elias is content to historically rearrange the elements of an analysis developed against savages at the beginning of the twentieth century. Lévy-Bruhl, out of his admitted respect for the differences of the people he studies, explains primitive mentality as a typically non-Western way of functioning. Early on, the scholar admits that the gap does not originate from any biological inferiority. Instead, he finds a rule to explain the breach between “us” and “them”: the “law of participation,” as distinct from the “law of contradiction” (Lévy-Bruhl, Les fonctions mentales 112). The latter, as Aristotle described it, makes it impossible for one thing to be itself and its opposite; this law founds, according to Lévy-Bruhl, the logical attitude in the West. “Here is an inheritance of which no one in our society has been deprived, and which no one can even think of rejecting. The discipline of logic thus imposes itself, irresistibly, on the operations of each mind” (113). The rest of the book nevertheless joyfully disproves this thesis. Further on, Lévy-Bruhl in fact evokes “the faithful person who feels one with his God.” “This experience of intimate and complete possession of the object” (453) abolishes the barrier of contradiction and, according to the author himself, illustrates the law of participation, although it had been decreed exotic. Lévy-Bruhl uses this as grounds for seeing a vestige, in religion, of a state that is elsewhere outdated (444, 455). From this point of view, “participation” is in fact “prelogical.”
Lévy-Bruhl’s study of “inferior societies” thus casts “our” world in a new light: it reveals our archaic depths. Like Norbert Elias, Lévy-Bruhl in fact seeks to free Western mental activity from its irrationality. The counterpart is the absolute making savage (ensauvagement) of the primitive. What is theirs by rights is this “law of participation,” the identification of opposites. “The mentality of primitives does…more than imagine its object: it possesses it and is possessed by it” (Lévy-Bruhl, Les fonctions mentales 426). The ratio does not exist, since Aristotelian logic is not inherited. Nor is the psyche, in the great collective outburst of illusory forces. “The soul, properly speaking,…only appears, in my view, in relatively advanced societies” (92–93). Here is a credo whose “relativity” is measured against the yardstick of Europe, and which persists, alas, to this day. So strong a credo is it, that Lévy-Bruhl himself crosses the “line of demarcation” (66), which, it appears, is still respected in Western science.
Similarly, in L’âme primitive (The Primitive Soul, 1927), Lévy-Bruhl devotes himself to showing methodically that for the indigenous, “the meaning of their own individuality”—what Elias names “psychologization”—has no meaning. The truth of the primitive soul is that it does not exist. Relating an anecdote about a false resurrection that he finds in the narrative of a missionary in South America (W. Grubb), the sociologist thus rapidly gets rid of the term “soul,” which he finds in his sources:
In order to translate, to the degree possible, the thought of the Indian who…says in a solemn voice, “This is the soul of Yiphenabanyetik!” [Grubb’s Indian name], we will leave aside the word “soul,” which belongs to M. Grubb. The Indian most likely wanted simply to say, “Yiphenabanyetik who was dead, and who is resuscitated.” (L’âme primitive 349; my emphasis)
As it happens, Grubb’s text reports an entirely different statement from the one cited by Lévy-Bruhl: the Indian would have said, “There sits the body of Yiphenabanyetik” (Grubb, An Unknown People 267). “Body,” not “soul.” In his obsession with the erasure of the primitive soul, Lévy-Bruhl ends up confusing opposites. After the exchange that he himself creates, he will have the even greater pleasure of revoking the possibility that the word “soul” could come from an Indian speaker. The savage has his words taken right out of his mouth. Lévy-Bruhl performs here what he elsewhere merely evokes. Logical judgment, the Western individual “receives it at the same time that he learns to speak”; his “demands” are “established, then confirmed in each individual mind through the uninterrupted pressure of the social milieu, by means of language itself, and of what is transmitted in the forms of language” (Lévy-Bruhl, Les fonctions mentales 113–14).
Sigmund Freud, Norbert Elias, and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl constructed performative texts, speaking the logic and the civilization of the colonizer against the primitive pre-logic of those who are more indigenous. The process of rationalization is not a historical fact outside the incantatory speech that situates its advent in a period and a space. Yet language itself betrays this desperate attempt to circumscribe reason and the colonizing civilization. In a lecture entitled La mentalité primitive, which was published in 1931, Lévy-Bruhl devotes himself to a condensation of his hypotheses. In this most concentrated form, Lévy-Bruhl’s illocutionary site reveals itself. Speaking about others, he speaks only about us, in a troubling copresence. On twelve out of twenty-four pages “our” echoes ceaselessly: pages 7, “ours” (mentality); 8, “ours” (mentality), “our psychology and our logic,” “ours” (mentality); 9, “ours” (mentality); 10, “ours” (mentality), “one’s,” “ours” (mind/spirit, esprit) vs. “others,’ ” “primitive minds”; 11, “ours” (languages), “our admiration,” “ways of thinking different from ours,” “our psychology and our traditional logic”; 14, “our society”; 15, “his sense organs and his cerebral apparatus are the same as ours”; 20, “ours” (mentality), three times; 21, “ours” (mentality); 23, “minds like ours”; 24, “ours” (mentality); 26, “ours” (mentality), two times.
The purpose of his research is indeed the establishment of a rhetoric of reassurance, which must speak and command us as much as it orders and commands the savages. However, if he is trying to eradicate excess, Lévy-Bruhl can only miss his goal, and his own style tells us more: his thesis and its opposite. Let us examine the following passage, where the same, the other, and ours echo each other:
Primitive mentality does not have the same mind [raisons] as ours…. However, it can] count in conformity with the principle of contradiction: when it is a question of bartering or wages, for example. In this same way, in its eyes, the image is a being [un être], the original is an other [un autre]: they are two beings, yet they are the same being. It is equally true that they are two and that they are one. It does not see in this anything extraordinary. We are of another mind [d’un autre sentiment]. (Lévy-Bruhl, La mentalité primitive, 24; my emphasis)
“It is equally true” that “our,” through the insistence of the signifier, comes to reveal an other.20 As for the same, follow it: it wants to speak the principle of identity—and it ends up constructing a strange comparison. Let me summarize the trajectory of the same in this passage: the primitives do not have the same minds (raisons) as us, although, despite the reign of the principle of participation over them, they know about the principle of noncontradiction (phrased here, as it is ordinarily, in reverse, as the “principle of contradiction”), and just the same, they distinguish and confuse. The syntax, as much as the phonetic envelope, emphasizes the inflection points in the thought of Lévy-Bruhl and how he can no longer manage to distinguish “participation” from “contradiction” in the places where the absolute difference between ours and the others’ occurs. The development is contaminated by primitive logic, for it is just as much ours as it is theirs.
Finally, Lévy-Bruhl achieves the proper undoing of his reasoning. That this hiatus is first heard in language makes a good deal of sense for the kind of investigation I am undertaking in this book. One can add that at the end of his life, Lévy-Bruhl, while still refusing the savage use of this concept, will reconsider the entirety of his project. In his notes written in 1938–39, the ethnologist admits: “[I] had concluded—wrongly, it seems—that these minds are more indifferent than ours are to contradiction. In fact, there is no distinction to be made on this point between primitive mentality and our own, if one rigorously considers the word ‘contradiction’ ” (Lévy-Bruhl, Les carnets, 159; my emphasis). Doubtless, Lévy-Bruhl still wants to maintain a difference, but he loses the opposition on which all his previous works had dwelt. We are also our own others. In every way, Lévy-Bruhl is possessed—captive to that grandiloquence concerning the primitive, obsessed by the enchantment of others, then had or confounded by the return that makes an other of the same.
The recognition of a phrase of possession within the range of (post)colonial diction, particularly in French, has profound consequences. In the first place, the continuing effort of concentrating enchantments in the exception zone of the colony provides an account of a historical will of rational exorcism. One endows the savage with an owner’s responsibilities in relation to haunting. Yet this move—which is combined with other moves, such as the intensification of inspiration in literature—fails in a performative way. In fact, it simultaneously instantiates a greater belief in omnipotent rationality. In doing so, it must undertake an enormous discursive and coercive enterprise. The spiritual exchanges, ecstasies, and mystical copresences found in so many civilizations become, in an ever-neater way, attributed to the indigene alone—even as the troubling preoccupation with these hauntings emerges from the European possession of territories and peoples. Rationalization only decreases the irrational it pursues at the cost, as is the case here, of its own mystification. Later, this process can only try to interdict, without being able to reduce the share of the nonrational as such, as it thinks and signifies precisely by escaping both madness and ordinary logic. Possession is not just anything at all, although it experiments with the impossibility of a multiple and contradictory reality. It opens up another logic—persistent, lacking continuity—where something is said that crosses the normal limit. In this other logic, it is possible to be this and that and this again, together and separately. We can thus approach the (post)colonial anew, without trying to diminish the violence of contacts, not in unitary identity or in mere mixing or in dialectical exchange or in the error that would inevitably perish. Not only does possession form the framework of the phrase of domination; it also contains the most violent interrogation of the myths of rationalization (from the civilizing mission to the imperatives to modernize the Third World), and it helps us to renew critical thought. Possession is no longer the private business of colonization, just as it was not the nature of the savages. However, possession allows us to reconsider colonists and colonized outside their unique encounter, and to go even further, to reconnect the (post)colonial to other political and social prescriptions.
Possession is perhaps not in itself desirable. It is always more valuable to recognize the paradoxical force of the impact possession has if one wants to gain something from it, or even achieve an unexpected deliverance. It is not part of my project to try to correct (post)colonial haunting through demystification. By commenting on texts, one does not bring about the counterimage of the truth that would deliver us from the evil of illusion. Curative lucidity—consider me as having little faith in it. Essai sur la colonisation (Essay on Colonization), which Carl Siger in 1907 hoped would be among the first books to consider the question philosophically, ended with the author’s visitation by the devil. At the other end of the political spectrum, Frantz Fanon announces, in L’An V de la révolution algérienne (translated into English as A Dying Colonialism), that as a result of decolonization, “the old superstitions are beginning to crumble,” and that we will soon see the end of “witchcraft,” “maraboutism,” and the “belief in the Djinn,” that “spirit” that “haunts the houses and the fields.”21 The death of archaism among the “most under-developed people” for the greater glory of the “most modern forms of technology” (Fanon, A Dying Colonialism 135)—this is a surprising statement from a thinker of such remarkable anticolonial acuity. It is because, beyond his attachment to Marxist presuppositions, Fanon is still on the same level as the phrase of possession, as we have seen. Even if “superstition” were to fall to the influence of technological modernity, which remains to be proven, in Africa as in France—this in no way means the dissipation of all spirit of haunting.
Let’s take another, quite recent, example. In his latest studies, Johannes Fabian brilliantly presents the ecstatic quest that informs the narratives of nineteenth-century explorers and ethnographers. These European authors interested in the curiosities of the indigene spent their time moving outward: out of their country of origin, out of their senses, out of their minds. This point corresponds to the example detailed above, since the force of colonial possession is neither ordinary nor measured. On the contrary, the attempt at exorcism has devastating effects. But I am not questioning the limited conclusions that Fabian draws in his presentation. What the investigator proposes, in light of his rereading, is to augment rationality. He thus rejects any contact between empathy or ecstasy and knowledge, leaving the thing to “mystics, perhaps to artists” (Fabian, Out of Our Minds 281), in the purest tradition of “pure reason.” Fabian then clears anthropology of its collusions with colonialism, finding this to be only an accident—an accident typical of the “errors” caused by a poor adherence to the “demands of reason” (281). The wager of my research is that the failure of reason not only comes from the lack of logical application or the mad abandon of the spirit. The defect will not be concealed,22 but we can signify a thought from the sites of fracture. The (post)colonial scene configures the vibrance of the nonrational otherwise, singularly. And in this case, trying to emend the error committed by modern technology or argumentational rationality is only ever the modified echo of a colonialist “process of civilization.”
Certainly “possession” does not equal “colonization”—beyond my claims, there are many other hypotheses to formulate. Indeed, it always surprises me to hear that an interpretation must settle all questions or provide a comprehensive account of a problem; such satisfaction exists only in the impressive and futile style one sees in advertising slogans. This book is as broad as it is partial; it does not intend to furnish a definitive solution. The wish, rather, is that in thinking in this way, one might renounce if not the worst, at least some of the pain. Among the many advantages of reconsidering possession, I would like to develop the response it offers (in two moments) to the jargon of victimization. We are living in a time when the indispensable critique of universal dogmatism,23 borne by the practices of decolonization, among other forces, leads to opposing attitudes. If the One gives way, if its irresistible power is contested, must we take the side of the others, those who have been denied, deformed, canceled out? Politically, and dialectically, perhaps yes—for a time. On the other hand, when the majority of minorities demand reparations, I am troubled. If I truly follow the impulse of recognition (and the desire for gain, as social and financial as it is narcissistic), I know that this is also a confirmation of the colonizer’s supremacy. The French state can only grant reparations on the condition that it recognizes its own victims, once again sorting out the deserving from everyone else. The “executioner” who had designated his prey may again specify it and enjoy the privilege of writing and signing his name to the charges he has brought against himself. A victim who must be recognized as such by those who have violated him remains, in this regard, the victim of the other, even when given rights or compensation. The risk lies in the fixing of roles, a concerted attribution of predetermined functions, where domination will finally remain oriented in the same position. The use of international authority does not necessarily rescue us from this aporia, especially in the case of a phenomenon as global as colonization. Lastly, the brutal reversals of partitions, where the victim becomes executioner—and which happens more through war than through law—is only a practical alleviation, the reality of which might change the direction of oppression, but not its thrust.
Possession, through the copresence it implies, revokes in advance the freezing of identities. It also always signals a beyond: for example, the existence of colonization as a force invading all parts and parties. And yet a new danger might reside in that circulation and superimposition. Must we claim that each of us, inside, is “the wound and the knife” (la plaie et le couteau)?24 It would seem that the language of enchantment would lead to the obliteration of the specific, leading to a mixing of master and slave. We have read this; we will read it further on: the (post)colonial phrase of possession also aims to accomplish a simple substitution. But there is only possession to the degree that difference exists. If I am myself and another, it is because the other is also not me. When contradiction ceases, possession stops—in the return to normal, to consumption, death, decay. Possession thus designates an intransitivity of the supernatural: a transformation of form, and the decline of separation. But it survives only in the maintenance of differentiation. Here, possession rests on a transitivity: someone came who created the fate of domination. The colonist is possessed by that which he has unleashed, a progressive invasion that will not spare him, despite all his precautions. There will always remain the transitivity, even if imaginary, of the first act, and the phrase of possession cannot neutralize this seizure of control. That the one might let the other speak in itself does not mean that they are both equal. Locally, domination is now reversed, as power finds itself subjugated by the haunting it has unleashed, as the indigene bursts the seams of the social bodice, and the colonist finds himself in the anticolonialism of the colonized, and so forth. Such shifts in direction do not correspond to the extinction of possession. For instance, the Nègre who speaks up (qui prend la parole) becomes neither blanc nor métisse. Possession’s almighty negation also contains the unheard-of power of an inflection. Finally, even if there is possession, intransitive, there also exists a utopic art of avoidance, a deterritorialization of suffering, which can be immediately constructed. My aim in these pages is to show how prescription has organized itself through its own linguistic effectiveness; how speaking can have a prodigious effect of displacement that threatens the fabric of domination; how one can also break with a phrase by not forgetting it, but instead by traversing it from end to end. All this will be developed in each part of this book. But before this, we must continue to signal the parts of a proliferating phrase.