The work of Homi Bhabha diverges between what it says and the saying of it. Interdisciplinarity is in no way adventitious, but its ambition must be distinguished from the concept of hybridization that it explains. In general, the new forms within the Anglo-American university must pass through interdepartmental clusters. Bhabha moves beyond the logic of the multiple, where Spivak decided to remain. The inter is not, however, commanded by the hybrid, nor is it secreted by an internal necessity for postcolonial enunciation. If interdisciplinarity is reappropriated by Bhabha, there is nonetheless no constraining postcolonial nature that leads to the creation of an in-between—as the Neoplatonic renewal of the third demonstrated.1 In addition, the crossing of disciplines is a demand of thought that corresponds to a moment in the historical production of discourses. Postcoloniality is understood within this epochal phenomenon, but it is not the determining factor. Bhabha certainly gives in to a common temptation here: he tries to reinvent a method as a function of the problem he needs to solve. He strives to establish the complete coherence of his practical theory.
Bhabha wants to deliver a text that would be fully adequate to the colony. In doing so, he reveals that this quality is also inadequate (hybridization as the nothos logismos, or as dialogism). The fullness of Bhabha’s essay leads us to think, if this was not already clear enough, that the best possible vocation for knowledge about the colonies is an adequate inadequacy. This oxymoron was first called for by the phrase of possession and the copresence of contradiction in the colonial adventure. It is reinforced, in particular, in the defectiveness at work in the conceptual discourse. The assemblage of oppositions becomes the decisive criterion to judge the pertinence or value of a discourse. For my part, I claim the inadequacy of my speech. Not that I want to move in the direction of an objectivity that in advance should maintain a distance. Separation is precisely the pursuit of a retraversal, the obvious departure from the continent that has been crossed. The disjunction comes afterward; it designates an exit from colonial space (through the struggle for independence, epistemic transformation, etc.), which will at least have commenced.
The time has come again for me to be more specific about what I am trying to do, for my own sake, and for that of this book. Bhabha with theory and Spivak with critique indeed designate the space of intellectual intervention where the epistemic diction of the colony occurs. We can claim a critical, theoretical discourse. My goal is not to remake the doctrine of the Frankfurt school. Let me simply remind readers that the Institute for Social Research was the site of a real exchange between disciplines. The role attributed to literature and philosophy still holds my attention. Kritische Theorie attacked social constraint and power. Max Horkheimer thus situated critical theory in opposition to the “conformism of thought” (Traditionnelle und kritische Theorie 56). These questions retain their full value today, independently of the (quite dissimilar) doctrines that were put forward by the Frankfurt school decades ago.
It seems important for critical theory to continue to pass through a critique of its theory. This includes a questioning of the institutions of knowledge and of methods or discourses. I am advocating critical excessiveness, which would be the time of our thinking. Regarding the colony—but not exclusively—the objective is to pass the disciplines through a sieve, and to move beyond their defining protocols. Indiscipline is a term we have played with for a long time in the review Labyrinthe; it almost became the subtitle of the journal in 2001, occasionally reappeared in the section devoted to Jacques Rancière, and has figured in the argument since the first issue I edited, in 2003.2 Since Labyrinthe is not a publication with a manifesto, the members of the editing board do not entirely agree about indiscipline, nor do they attempt to think about it in the same way. I claim from indiscipline the mark of an epistemic negativity that results from its methodical formation. No preconceived negation. The very structure of the disciplines makes them inoperative at a certain point, and at certain points. From there, indiscipline grows and could project us into a heterodox enunciation. It is useless to claim to discipline if one primarily wants to reject methodical forms of coercion. Native speech and dogmatic originality are historical constructions, in the same way that sociology and philology are—and not necessarily more productive in the light of their limitations. It is better to establish disciplinary incapacity in actuality (and the impotence of specialization all the more so) in order to gain from it the strength for a reformation. In this way, a theory is empowered by its own critique. Let us understand what we are separating ourselves from, and why.3
This is what I wanted to risk in this work. My use of “I” is significant: it has a collective ambition, one may presume; but it has no universal calling. The critique of other discourses is a theory of its singularity. I make no attempt by this to inform Gayatri Spivak how she should write, but I do question her choices and take from them some thoughts for myself. Relativity is not relativism. The differences in expression prevent me from speaking either of others or to them. I think that the examples of Spivak and Bhabha prompt us to reformulate the interdiscipline, or indiscipline, otherwise, in an understanding of colonialism.
In my view, the critique of institutional discourses wears itself out from disciplinary exhaustion. It brings to the surface the indication of the norm or the restriction. It will not do to forget history, for example. On the other hand, it is strange to devote oneself to history as a transcendental force, neglecting the polysemous uniqueness of the word in French or English. In thinking the postcolonial in its historic reality, the scholar confronts the usage of historical protocols. I thus consider chronology to be one thing and history to be something else. I will not now hide the fact that I myself constructed the periods and the events that interested me: the colonial continuance of slavery into the twentieth century, mulatto eloquence and the “opening”/ouverture of black speech, the gradual improvement of the linguistic trap, the repeated revisions to ethnography. These constructions critique historiographic unitemporality or the taboo against interpretation. Hasn’t the nonsense (so popular among scholars) of pitting discourses against facts, of opposing words with acts gotten old? University standards, however, must not limit critique. Alter-history is itself prone to be altered in a wave of epistemic negativity. Spivak satisfies herself with too-easy examples, as it were; Bhabha emphasizes the temporary value of his analyses, but he is too concerned with locating himself in a history of thought. He specifies the relation between the postcolonial and the postmodern (or the modern) in his final two chapters. When he reads in Derek Walcott’s poem, “the great history of the languages and landscapes of migration and diaspora” (Bhaba, The Location of Culture 337), and—in general—when he writes about the creation of hybrids, nothing is said about the process. When does one become hybrid? At the beginning of the empires, at the end, after them, at each of these times, according to the specific moment? Once and for all, or on different occasions? Are there functional differences between the colonial powers? The silence on these points is only the consequence of an insufficient attention to the production of history by knowledge—in addition to peoples, circumstances, and facts.4
In short, critique demands to be reconfigured. Since the eighteenth century, it has been claimed by politics, philosophy, and textual (and artistic) commentary. These concurrent evocations are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, they help to organize an activity that uses divergent aspirations to great effect. The critical practice I am imagining separates itself from social prescription and uses conceptual analysis as it is practiced by philosophical argumentation. It would then reintegrate a part of the discourse analysis that the reader is prompted to provide in his interpretations and judgments. “Literary criticism,” pushed to its limits, is my primary choice, because it is in itself an opportunistic multidiscipline (or an indiscipline).5 Never unified among its proliferating postulations (philology, rhetorical analysis, stylistics, specialized history, poetics, journalistic narratives, etc.), it offers us a deliberately chaotic spectacle. This disparity, once one has abandoned totalization or hegemonization, provides the opportunity to explore critique as a discursive behavior. Is not literary criticism the establishment of the connection to a work being addressed in the transport of its reading?
The range of critique is engendered by literary energy, which disassembles knowledge. Here, to say literature is to say non-knowledge (non-savoir), or at least knowledges (savoirs), or effraction and diffraction of all knowledge (connaissance). Through its thinking, literature manages to deplete established discourses. The event of its signification abandons the circumstances of its appearance. Through this feat, it lives outside of the Academy, that site where a few rare writers go only to die. Literature is also always landless (hors sol): from this position it shows us the strangeness of a critical situation where another word might be attempted that would speak the interaction of worlds and colonial intercession.
I hope to have sufficiently illustrated the desires I have just formed, once again, in a more didactic mode. They should be considered propositions, which I would like to see debated and transformed—even if one must indeed believe in one’s own statements, right? In the previous section, we have therefore just ascertained the cumulative importance of the adequate and the inadequate. By seeing in indiscipline a shareable exigency, I have not stolen a privilege of theoretical enunciation from the colony. It is a matter of pursuing the critique of the colony all the way into the defection of the postcolonial. To help us do this, we will first return to two other discourses that make use of history and literature. Written long before this book, they could serve as alternative models of literary criticism. They testify to the urgency of textual behavior, outside the forms given here.
Les théoriciens au pouvoir (The Theoreticians in Power) appeared in 1870. Demesvar Delorme, a Haitian, wrote the book, which takes the form of a long dialogue of more than seven hundred pages. Delorme studies the hypothesis being discussed by the best “men of [political] imagination” (Les théoriciens au pouvoir 3). Two friends, Paul and George, engage in a debate. They plunge into history as they travel across the island of Haiti. Three “epochs” are systematically brought into consideration: Greek, Latin, and French. The chronological division bears the traces of the educational model of the French humanities, but Delorme inscribes Haitian reality and contemporary events in the very course of a meditation that seems to be disconnected from his place and time. The tripartite division in the style of les lettres classiques is in fact a strangeness allowing a parallel return to the current moment. A sequel is announced at the end of the volume (“We will meet them a little later, perhaps” [732]), which might have explored the consequences of the historical scheme in the present state of affairs. In addition, in the first portrait (Pericles), the two interlocutors compare antiquity and modernity. Several pages are thus devoted to the United States in relation to the other countries of the Americas (48–53). This provides the occasion to evoke Haiti as “the attempt,” by a “new race,” to achieve “autonomy” and establish “its own civilization” (52). “Independence” is an effect of the fight “for the principle of the equality of the races” (52). The focus on the Greeks, Romans, and French cannot be reduced, therefore, to a desire for whiteness, nor to contempt for the race question or Haitian particularity. The periodization used would today seem rather dubious to many thinkers, but understanding it as a simple mark of subscription to the great civilizational narrative does not suffice. Delorme goes to the most classical period, to the supposed foundations of European culture, in order to claim their contributions. The entire Haitian nineteenth century is traversed precisely by this idea: black people have no less a right to have Greco-Latin antiquity be reborn. There are no natural lineages in this matter. My ancestors are not naturally the Gauls. Haiti has exactly the same capacity to activate a part of Greece as did Erasmus, Rabelais, and Michelangelo. The claim made on a chimerical past also becomes significant in this intellectual undertaking. Delorme sings the praises of France, a bit too much for my taste, and likely for yours as well—a point to which I will return. Let us be sure to note, however, that the French part begins with the Enlightenment—the French Revolution, especially—and that the ancien régime and the empire are omitted. Delorme engineers a significant selection and reorients France even more than Gratiant does.
Moreover, Delorme complicates the development of his essay by introducing multiple digressions toward the contemporary. Both the tripartite structure and other statements concerning the gradual advancement of civilizations confirm the linear model of time, which, without being “the Western conception,” as I have repeated throughout, does in fact constitute a major representational feature of European modernity. The excurses, however, happen to challenge this massive apparatus. As George says, the discussion regularly surrenders to “a prodigious leap,” between, for example, Pericles and Ulysses S. Grant (Delorme, Les théoriciens au pouvoir 53). The “prodigious” (prodige, also “wonder” or “marvel”) names a quality of history that escapes the fable of progress. In this way, a distant event can be connected to what would seem to be an incomparable situation. The author responds to a unified history by constructing a temporality that splits apart, thus displacing the grand narrative. These forking paths are truly in solidarity with a traditional humanism that takes a perennial view of the nature of societies and peoples, and thus authorizes itself to close the gaps of dissimilarity. This much is certainly true, and much more to my mind, since most of the digressions emerge from offstage in the historical theater: in general, they are provoked by the forgotten—America’s Indians and slaves.
Another striking example: the French era begins with a “Before ’89,” which presents the Enlightenment before the Revolution. This section of the text is preceded by a visit to a cave, understood as a religious site for Carib Indians (Delorme, Les théoriciens au pouvoir 386–90). The site inscribes the testimony of a denied past. The cave is the representation of the vestiges succeeding colonization; it speaks of “those tanned Indians of the Mexican peninsula whose very history, almost entirely erased by blood, now exists only in confused traces” (389). The traces, interrupted, characterize the history of colonized peoples. The walls of the vault are nonetheless covered with “inscriptions” that are “perfectly readable,” abandoned ever since the “sixteenth century” by “Europeans” (389). The Haitians, Paul and George, verify the rarity of the discontinuous traces of Indian history and their substantiation by the “dates and names” (389) given to them by the colonial conquerors. In the candlelight, at the stolen site of an obliteration and a recovery, the two characters remake the history of the European Renaissance, discovering its dark side—the colonial massacre. The Indians are recognized as the authors of an “original civilization” (396) that is all but lost. Paul and George, descendants of slaves brought over to replace the indigenes in the workforce, are the ones who say this. Delorme thus accomplishes still more than he perhaps thinks (the evocation of the “slow steps of progress”). His text gives an account of the interruptions of linear history by subaltern narratives. From this place, in this cave, from offstage, he reconstitutes a new history that integrates the fate of the colonized and reassembles the facts in anachrony—to read these “Carib druids” (386), “this Luther [as] a Robespierre of the dogmatic and religious order” (395).
Delorme is closest to our contemporary moment in his writing, if not in his descriptive reflection. Dipesh Chakrabarty has recently situated his own method in the encounter between two levels of history. What he calls “History 1” corresponds to the critical narrative of the rational progress of power such as Marx configured it. Chakrabarty finds in this a positive value from the Enlightenment, provided that its unitarism be immediately accepted and challenged. Such is the work of “History 2,” which is born of “the infinite incommensurabilities through which we struggle—perennially, precariously, but unavoidably—to ‘world the earth’ in order to live within our different senses of ontic belonging” (Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe 254). Delorme confirms the break with precolonial history among the indigenes and there locates a power for rewriting history, akin to what Chakrabarty calls a “universal narrative” (254) and a migration of meaning through fragmentation.
As one might imagine, I consider Demesvar Delorme as an author entirely apart from today’s postcolonial theory. The articulation between current research and Delorme is a supplementary homage to his subterranean manner of refashioning history, at the very moment that he seems to be sacrificing to the disciplinary procedures of the Weltgeschichte that was then at its zenith in the work of Leopold von Ranke (progress, stages, centrality of Europe). Les théoriciens au pouvoir takes up the cause of the contemplators, writers, and philosophers in the exercise of the public thing (the res publica), but the book is also an appropriation of theory. The independence of the black people of Saint-Domingue, “born of African blood,” finds the “proclamation…of the social verities of 1789” as a “point of departure” (Delorme, Les théoriciens au pouvoir 52). As such, France “theoretically supported” the rebels “in this first struggle” for racial equality. The Haitian Revolution rises out of the theory of 1789, the event and its doctrine.
The motif of disciplinary exchange would keep us from making Delorme into a postcolonial critic. His book adopts the form of the philosophical dialogue in order to discuss politics and history. Literature plays a bit part between these discursive gaps. Lamartine, in the book’s final portrait, is celebrated in particular for his “language,” which escapes “the disciplined and somewhat courtly language of the seventeenth century” (Delorme, Les théoriciens au pouvoir 614). Paul praises the coherent project of the style, the argument, and the political attitude: “Lamartine continued the great principles of the Revolution, accomplishing this in his art and his language” (615). The role continually attributed to style—as an object of commentary and the substance of thought—also becomes the final common trait linking Delorme’s thought and the theory of the day.
Demesvar Delorme inaugurates postcolonial theory. Now let me immediately retract this statement that I have just proposed, in order to analyze it, to contradict it. In this instance, primacy is not given; I have constructed it in the interpretation. The connections that I have established were, to my mind, truthful ones; it only becomes possible to articulate them, however, from the position of this time we call ours. Likewise, the reading that I offer produces my own speech as a nonindigenous postcolonial: it activates the reformation of possible histories through the interpretation of narratives. Moreover, the retrospective gaze supposes the advent of texts linking the theoretical, the critical, and the postcolonial. Inauguration can function only as a trompe l’oeil. We can admire art only on the condition that we recognize the gap it opens in the real. Delorme is the first, meaning that most likely he had predecessors, whose anteriority will once again require confirmation and reconfirmation by interpretation. The event gets reiterated in thought. Many and various first times are required. If I consider the wider context, and not only that which relates to the colony, a problem we have already encountered returns: why is it that the postcolonial is so eager to think itself the first, today? By mentioning that Bhabha pays homage to Fanon, one emphasizes that the theory of today benefits from that of yesterday. Bhabha’s concern is not so common; at its source, he still designates a text dating from after the war, not before. I have given a broad explanation, at least in the francophone context, concerning the tendency to protect innovation, as a tactic. The situation becomes extrapolated—and I am worried about the surreptitious occultation of the past that it involves. The attitude is both very contemporary, tied to the artificiality of phraseological ephemerality, and colonial, in the forgetting it accomplishes. When I qualify Delorme as a precursor, I hope to be taken seriously, I suppose. By claiming Delorme in this way, I am primarily trying to undo the unity of today. It is not a question of returning to Demesvar Delorme. His complacency regarding France is rooted in an idealization in the literal sense, which disturbs me no less. The black universalism that he incarnates, this Enlightenment and Revolutionary extremism, shared with other Haitians, such as Anténor Firmin or Louis Joseph Janvier, is it still up-to-date. I wouldn’t say it is.6 The moderate rationalism that Delorme casts in revolutionary hyperbole has no points of contact with the power of violence that I find in social and political organization. For all these and other reasons, I am in no way dreaming of a reaction where works would go to recharge themselves in the thought of predecessors. However, I do believe in the usefulness of seeking out half-erased traces, in order to initiate discontinuous histories of our pasts and our presents. The title Delorme the First would not make sense in itself, but only in the consideration of colonialism. The trompe-l’oeil primacy fractures today’s originality. It demands that we offer up our theories to historical criticism. Prompted by these pages to situate the aim of my book more firmly, I would sum up the illusory and real problem that Delorme’s anteriority prompts us to consider. First, I recognized a substantiality of history in the postcolonial, to such a degree that I took my inquiry back into the past, all the way to slavery. Next, whereas there is a chronological existence and a density of time, history is created precisely from the reformation of what has already been formed, by the gestures of actors or by discursive gestures. This is how history gets told. It escapes discipline in its capacity as lived value. This is also true for scholars, by the very nature of their own statements, which must consequently examine the histories they are peddling, using, reinventing. The primacy of Delorme is thus a provocation, a call to other types of speech allowing for the opening always to be started again. The recommencement implies the choice of a diction that abandons the pure origins just as much as the uninterrupted tradition. History, at this price, can escape from revisionist manipulations, the dogmas of a tabula rasa. reconstruction, confirming its work within the temporal parameters, is valuable for the colony. The colony does not derive entirely from its historical reconstruction, according to a phantasmatic causal linearity that I find suspect. The colony deserves the proclamations of its specificity, indeed of its singularity; it must not be the beginning and the end. If this book proves to be postcolonial, it will also be so for the reconnection between the colony and its beyonds. In other words, the critical theoretical history of the colony can free itself in a premeditated consummation.
It is thus toward a certain end that we are headed, but this end is not really a conclusion. And as one should beware of limits and edges, I have decided to call the space between here and the (real) final pages an epilogue. An epilogue, as outside the work. Or an improbable synthesis of all that I have said, and of everything else as well.
In any case, here is another critic of theory, Ralph Ellison, to whose celebrated Invisible Man this epilogue now turns. It is worth clarifying that the celebrity of the novel is quite relative in France, which can perhaps be explained by nothing more than the traditional lag of the hexagonal publishing world. Published in 1952, Invisible Man, is to my mind the greatest Bildungsroman of the period. The narrator, a black man from the American South, moves from impossible situations into inextricable difficulties. His age, city, and occupation all change; he is a student in high school and college, unemployed, a spokesman for a nebulous Brotherhood, a renegade. And always black, he progressively comes to learn what the prologue announces: he is invisible. The opening lines speak the phrase of possession with irony:
I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. (Ellison, Invisible Man 3)
The entry into the subject matter is symptomatic of Ellison’s art, which is marked by its intensive complexities and folds. I am rereading here within the perspective we have established in this book, a few moments away from parting; not all of Ellison will be included. But let us reread: the “I” calls itself invisible and then immediately rejects bewitchment, the magic of the cinema or that of literature. The cause comes from a refusal of vision. Is this to say that the black narrator is produced only by blindness? Are we then in Sartrean territory, with an inferior black man “thingified” by the white man’s dominating gaze? Certainly, Ellison evokes these discourses. He also brings to the surface their unitary and rationalist reduction, through the exercise of language. “I am not a spook.” The writing alters already here, since “spook” evokes not just “ghost” but also the offensive racial slur. I am not this spook, this ghost, but perhaps I am the other, the black man. “To possess a mind,” after the reference to Poe and his “haunting,” continues in this same register. Those who say what “might even be said” are the white colonizers, finally granting a soul or an intellect to the indigenes, after having stripped them of it (via slavery, theological controversy, or ethnography). It is even possible that the “I” who speaks already possesses a mind: that of the reader. The last sentence of the novel will ask us: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” (581). The “lower frequencies,” broadcast from the cellar where the narrator lives, also function in a subliminal way in the minds of those who hear these words.
Comparing the first and last pages brings forth another difficulty. In the end, the “I” admits he has not overcome the problems he encountered. He fears the recriminations of the public, who expected more than mere talk. He then justifies himself by asking a rhetorical question: “Being invisible and without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do?” (Ellison, Invisible Man 581). The prologue, supposedly uttered at the same time as the novel’s epilogue (that is, the revelation of invisibility), assures us, however, that “I am a man of substance.” Ellison plays with the contradictions of writing. Since he has substance, the “spook” is a Negro, and not a literary ghost; but as narrative voice, he has no substance, and he is also that specter that possesses the mind of the reader. The spook is a spook is a spook… Invisibility does not thus equal the blinding of others. From being visible, the “I” became invisible. “Well, I was and yet I was invisible, that was the fundamental contradiction. I was and yet I was unseen” (507). Social enchantment becomes displaced in the passage to literature, which creates an additional fantastic future (devenir) for the “I.” The irrational is conjured up in the sense of a resurrection of the impossible, which actively participates in the formation of the New Spook—as Alain Locke spoke of the New Negro. The disembodied voice results from the result: it is the accession to a language that surpasses the ventriloquist possession of postcolonial and racial power.
The material between the two boundaries of the prologue and the epilogue forms a black logos, the discourse of the quasi slave (presque esclave) progressively exiting from the world’s view. I have just multiplied the questions concerning vision because Invisible Man provides a theory of social (non)seeing. Théo¯ria has always been connected to spectacle, and for Plato, to the contemplation of Ideas by the soul. Ellison derides one theory in favor of another. His main character spends a long period within a political movement, where “theory” is considered both essential and dangerous. Jack, the head of the organization, at first tries to promote the narrator, calling to order his comrades who resist. Are they “skilled theoretical Nijinsky[s]” (Ellison, Invisible Man 349) or “a bunch of timid sideline theoreticians arguing in a vacuum” (351)? When the wind changes direction, and Jack hears the reproaches made against the “I,” the term “theoretician” resurfaces, derisively; the “I” was only asked to be the speaker, the spokesman of ideas before the crowds ready to be recruited. The theory of the “Brotherhood” corresponds to what Marxist organizations were doing at the time. Supposedly indispensable, theory is the privilege of the elites; in the case of the narrator’s polemic, it becomes synonymous with inaction, with contempt for experimentation. The “I” learns to not depend on anything in all these political returns and detours.
On the contrary, his thinking consists of a critical theory of society and of its contestations (by religion, the union, the political party, and even the racial struggle of the black activist, Ras the Destroyer). It is theory, because both black and white people are caught in the specter of the visible and the invisible. The “I” that speaks to us is that eye that sees itself become invisible. Among so many highly comic episodes, the most eloquent, to my mind, is found in chapter 10. The narrator has succeeded in finding a job in a paint factory. In the basement, he helps an old black worker who soon becomes wary of his technical competence. The goal of all their effort is the production of a perfect color called “Optic White.” Brockway, the artist of absolute whiteness, is devoted to the company, and a violent opponent of unions. He boasts of having found the slogan for Optic White, “If It’s Optic White, It’s the Right White” (Ellison, Invisible Man 217), a line the “I” reads as “If you’re white, you’re right.” I should also do justice to Ellison’s comic descriptions of the subterranean machinery, which requires two black men to produce the perfect white. The “I,” decidedly not convinced of the necessity of fabricating a paint that can whiten the least “chunka coal” (217), will be punished by Brockway, who triggers an explosion in the pipes. Brockway is guilty, but he uses the narrator to unleash the accident, telling him to turn the wrong valve wheel—the white one, of course (229).
In this rich passage, Optic White is what interests me the most. It is literally a “way of seeing” that is reserved neither for the former masters nor for their contemporary servants. Its counterpart, Optic Black—the “black racism” of Ras the Destroyer in Harlem—remains void of seduction for the narrator. Ras unknowingly plays the role of catalyst for the Brotherhood, which uses him in order to radicalize the struggle (see chapter 25). Ras is not a blind seer like the great orator Homer (!) A. Barbee, the black pastor who makes such an impression on the “I” as a student at his black college. Ras is a visionary who sees nothing coming. He remains Jack’s pawn, the political leader whose glass eye the narrator notices quite late (“a buttermilk white eye distorted by the light rays” [Ellison, Invisible Man 474]). Optic White sees white everywhere, Optic Black exalts black power, the glass eye wants neither one (“Black and white, white and black…. Must we listen to this racist nonsense?” [469]). One-eyed Jack will not prove to be any more lucid than his political enemies, and the “I” hesitates, asking: “Which eye is really the blind one?” (478).
The “I” will find an unexpected and unsatisfactory way out of this great spectacle, but to which he will consent nonetheless. Wanting to escape from Ras, he wears sunglasses and notices that no one any longer recognizes him. Or rather, he is identified, but poorly. The simple act of hiding his eyes behind tinted glass changes the “I” into a protean character named Rinehart, part-time pastor and “Spiritual Technologist” (Ellison, Invisible Man 495). The Christian supernatural, with its “invisible,” its “seen” and “unseen” powers, manages to reveal to the narrator the advantages found in the malediction of invisibility.
After the riots in Harlem, the “I” takes refuge in another cave, a basement that he lights with countless lightbulbs, and where he elaborates his monologue. The end of the novel recalls the great attitude types by the names of the heroes who bore them. Jack, the political man; Emerson, the owner of Liberty paints; Bledsoe and Norton, director and trustee, respectively, of the Black College; all are cited for “the beautiful absurdity of their American identity” (Ellison, Invisible Man 559). In this recapitulation, invisibility forms a system with the blindness of the social body. The individual recognition of invisibility displaces the problem of the “political situation” onto the “I” itself. Can one escape “the real soul-sickness of the soul” (575) that follows social possession? “It’s worse because you continue stupidly to live. But live you must. And you can either make passive love to your sickness or burn it out and go on to the next conflicting phase” (576). The next phase remains the problem. The “I” admits that “after having been ‘for’ society, then ‘against’ it” (576), he opts for his underground no-man’s-land, for the transmutation of speech, in the utopia that literature, perhaps, can secure. This retreat, which is in no way a renunciation—I can say that I really understand it. I imagine that it dismays partisans of committed literature. Yet part of the force of Ellison’s narrative is that it refuses to conclude, and I would like to keep that sense of adventure open. Yes, but what is the next phase? This becomes a question for the long term. In particular, it is linked to the construction of each “I” (and each one can be more than itself) within society’s constraints, such as the postcolonial.
The narrator’s theo¯ria passes from the contestation of society to the critique of critique. It creates a sense of ghostly and demonic transformation. The man whom the blind cannot see will be the invisible voice articulating itself in our reading. The protagonist must take responsibility for himself, and we must, in turn, produce ourselves and persist in the space that we inhabit.
Invisible Man positions the wealth of meanings that remain for us to construe. Nothing prevents us from linking these final positions to other essays Ellison wrote, and then extrapolating from there, as Danielle Allen has recently done. In her book, Talking to Strangers, she links the Little Rock crisis, Hobbes, Aristotle, and Ellison. She proposes a reevaluation of the trust in American politics, which would move beyond the (racial) differend in favor of a xenophilia, a friendship with others. Aiming to democratize democracy, Allen records the necessary changes in habits that would change political violence through the improvement of citizenship. This, she assures us, would be the response of the “I” of Invisible Man, which “aspires to brotherhood, and proposes techniques for attending to the intricacy of our world, and reciprocity among citizens” (Allen, Talking to Strangers 118). While admiring Allen’s desire to reunite the multiple, I remain skeptical about the proposition that the narrator would be making here. Rather, I think that Danielle Allen takes up the contradictory example of the invisible man, and that she tries to think “the next phase,” the after of postcoloniality, where race is more difference than deviation. The work of activists such as Elizabeth Eckford and of writers such as Ellison is historically renewed here, in another contemporary.
The pursuit of the critical theory of narrative can also give rise to external rereadings. The phrase of colonial possession is concretized in the subcategory of invisibility or appearance. One example of this would be Camus’s The Stranger, in the ordinary xenophobia of Meursault, who always speaks of Arabs in general. He does not see one who is not another. This occurs throughout the story. Glancing at chapter 6, which closes the first part of the novel with the scene of the murder on the beach, we read: “a group of Arabs,” “Arabs,” “two Arabs in overalls,” “the Arabs,” “the Arab,” “the other Arab,” “our two Arabs,” “the Arabs,” “the Arab,” “the Arab,” “the Arab”—and “he” or “they,” of course.7 The vague distinctions are due to a more Western outfit (“overalls”) or a physical particularity, a part of the body (“widely spread toes”). Then Meursault kills his indigene because of temporary blinding:
The Arab drew his knife and held it up to me in the sun. The light shot off the steel and it was like a long flashing blade cutting at my forehead. At the same instant the sweat in my eyebrows dripped down over my eyelids all at once and covered them with a warm, thick film. My eyes were blinded behind the curtain of tears and salt…. My whole being tensed and I squeezed my hand around the revolver…. I shook off the sweat and sun. I knew I had shattered the harmony of the day. (Camus, The Stranger 59)
The murder on the colonial beach comes from the onset of blindness, the invisible disappearance of the omnipresent other. Naturally, I say this for my own sake, prolonging the words of the invisible man differently, and responding to his question. He was indeed also speaking for me.
Ellison’s fecundity, in both his critique of theory and his theory of all criticism, reveals to us another precursor, effective and impossible. It also brings us to the threshold. Literature, which splits knowledge apart, returns us to the consequences of an epistemic discourse about postcoloniality. Defection is not failure, and I prefer to seek out the nearest inadequacy rather than claiming to totalize the colony in theory. This is what the poetic crisis teaches me. I must interrogate language, examine its uses and usages (phrase, speech, verbiage, institutions), and try to produce meaning through language. A discourse of knowledge, undisciplined, is invented at these sites, taking its strength from events, traditions, and books. The colony, slavery, and racism are so many social commands that aim for the maintenance of order, in one way or another. Like the narrator of Invisible Man, it remains our task—using our means, our words, and our luck—to invent a singularity that shatters political prescription and its rhetoric. I do not think that the colony is the greatest form of coercion today, nor the most pervasive. Yet the success of its operation of silence, its unquestionable core, prompts us to speak about it, anew, again. Like you, I speak to be myself, and to open a way in what has already been said, already been thought, which alters and persists. If we live in postcolonial countries, it is up to us each time we speak to prove to ourselves that we can pass through them and beyond.