One may kill without a word; so they say. But every colonial empire speaks, and speaks of itself. The colony is also a site within language, often a topos. Writing both describes and alters it. This book is itself an addition to the seemingly innumerable texts already produced on this site, bookish continents. It thus interrogates, reflexively, the fact of speaking the colonial and the postcolonial. We have seen a growing body of research in recent years on the history of empires, as well as much theorizing about the effects of this colonial history. Literatures in European languages are still established in the formerly conquered territories and the remaining colonial sites. This long-standing phenomenon, whose invention will occupy us in part 2 of this book, may be confronted with the multiple legal provisions, scientific evocations, or political dogmas that the great powers issue in their control from afar. A murmur also rises up, mixing eloquent declarations with barroom talk, pedestrian conversation with lyrical song. Utterances are produced in language and languages, which of course are made up of countless discourses. I want to grasp these utterances over the course of this book. Part 1 of the book is devoted to distinguishing specifically the colonial phrase from among these discourses. In Greek, phrasis means a “way of speaking.” The term thus designates the configuration of words, the articulation of linguistic elements in an utterance—the sentence, the text. Through the discourses that we will read, we will construct the lineaments of a phrase that in turn constructs meaning and gets repeated from one speaker to another. Sometimes this will mean quotations that are transmitted, such as the emblematic French phrase “Nos ancêtres les Gaulois” (Our ancestors, the Gauls).1 However, even when repeated verbatim, a syntagma can change value. The phrase thus designates the variance of its invariance. Something is said of the colonies, which gets amalgamated into one composite but contradictory entity even as it changes. I mark tendencies, habits shared by the colonist and the indigene, by orators, smooth talkers, and dictators. I don’t deny it: I am indeed constructing the reality of the colonial phrase, yet I am able to do so only because voices and texts have responded to each other; encountered, battled, and missed one another.
The phrase is a sum of utterances and a subtraction from discourses. The latter exist, moreover, in their differences from each other. The constitution of the phrase is a relatively homogeneous block of meaning where one associates motifs, more or less independently from illocutionary specificities. This initial step in my critique is necessary in order to interrogate the other of logos—rationality—which sanctioned Europe’s overseas expansion. Nevertheless, understanding these languages requires a new division, demands that the unity of the phrase—at first untenable—again be cleaved by way of differential critical attention.
Part 2 of this book will, through the study of imperial language and its propagation, sunder the practice of speech from the verbiage of usage where censure becomes fixed. Part 3 will explore the distances between discourses of institutional knowledge in their attempts to understand the (post)colonial. Before this, we will have occasion to uncover a few literary singularities in the ready-made formulas disseminated by science and politics. The usual way a phrase comes into being, whether or not it is colonial, is in effect a phraseology: a stasis of enunciation, or rather, a slowing-down of meaning, which displaces almost nothing in the possibilities of its language.
“Ideology” has nothing to do with this process. This word has been rendered nearly unintelligible today by its shrill overuse. The term ideology refers, especially for the inheritors of the Marxist tradition, to forms of expression that are alienating, to the dissimulating veil that has fallen over the brutality of society. Ideology is still a system, a vision of the world. I have chosen, on the contrary, the phrase in order to insist on the operation of language in the invention of the real; I do not believe for a moment in the divorce between objective data and their translation (whether deceptive or veracious). Even phraseology carries with it its own failure. It is not that it fails when it gives itself away and contradicts itself; on the contrary, phraseology is all the stronger for finding coherence in its formulation, despite the hollowness in its proofs. Yet constituted as a dense body, its matter can cut against itself.