Matthieu Renault

A Decolonizing Alethurgy: Fanon after Foucault

In the inaugural speech of Michel Foucault’s 1984 Lectures at the College de France, The Courage of Truth, he traces the process through which he came to problematize parrhesia. He explains why and how he replaced the question of ‘epistemological structures’ with that of ‘alethurgic forms’; in other words, how he replaced the problem of truth and ‘true discourse’ with that of the ‘production of truth’ and ‘the act by which it is manifested’. Foucault recounts his shift from an exploration of the practices and discourses of truth about the subject to a study of ‘the discourse of truth which the subject is likely and able to speak about himself’ (Foucault, 2011: 3) — hence, the attention paid by Foucault to a range of practices such as avowal, confession or the examination of conscience. This shift occurred in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, The Will to Knowledge: ‘Since the Middle Ages at least, Western societies have established the confession as one of the main rituals we rely on for the production of truth’ (Foucault, 1998: 58). Confession, spontaneous or extorted, ‘became one of the West’s most highly valued techniques for producing truth’: ‘Western man has become a confessing animal’ (59). In each of these statements, Foucault precisely locates his object of inquiry as if, here more than elsewhere, he had to limit the (geographical) scope of his own discourse; as if the very practice and concept of ‘confession’ threatened to be confined to the West.

Rupture and New Beginning in Fanon: Elements for a Genealogy of Postcolonial Critique

There is no other way open, to us in the East, but to go along with this Europeanization and to go through it. Only through this voyage into the foreign and the strange can we win back our own self-hood; here as elsewhere, the way to what is closest to us, is the longest way back. (Mehta 1976:466) These are the words of Indian philosopher Jarava Lal Mehta. They are the translation of Heidegger’s notion of “homecoming” in postindependent India. The voyage to which Mehta refers is a “voyage of theories,” a displacement and a recon-textualization of doctrines born on European ground. Mehta’s interpretation has influenced historians from subaltern studies, first and foremost Dipesh Chakrabarty, who expands upon this interpretation: European thought is at once both indispensable and inadequate in helping us to think through the experiences of political modernity in non-Western nations, and provincializing Europe becomes the task of exploring how this thought—which is now everybody’s heritage and which affects us all—may be renewed for and from the margins. (Chakrabarty 2000:298) What Mehta, Chakrabarty, or others such as Ashis Nandy—as well as many non-Indian postcolonial theorists—have shown is that one knows not how to define postcolonialism but as a double movement of decentering (provincialization) and translation, of wrenching and appropriation of the “gifts” of the West, as a severing and a renewal; a movement founded on a series of epistemological displacements and an interrogation of the politics and perspectives (places) of knowledge.