Souleymane Bachir Diagne

Keeping Africanity Open

A chille Mbembe’s text (“African Modes of Self-Writing,” Public Culture 14 [winter 2002]: 239–73) can be read as carrying out a double movement of desubstantiation: on the one hand, desubstantiation of difference, and on the other, desubstantiation of identity. The first movement corresponds to a critique of discourse about what it means to be “African” in some unique sense—the “metaphysics of difference,” as it is called. The second aims at answering that question by explicitly stating that “Africanity” must be seen as an open question. It appears to me that what is at stake in this essay is authenticity. And one of the essay’s great achievements is to propose a quite new understanding of that concept. 1. Authenticity here conveys the idea that meaning does not come from the past (the figure of tradition, or repetition); that it is not a projection of tradition on the present and the future. On the contrary, it is the future that continuously sheds its light on the African past and present and endows them with meaning. Mbembe is dealing here with a philosophy of time conceived as creative duration, as a continuous unfolding of multiple possibilities that are open to true— that is, authentic or affirmative—subjectivity. This conception is quite contrary to a notion of time understood in terms of space rather than of duration proper— of time as the transmission (or tradition) of a meaning from the past toward the future, whence the notion of disruption of the continuum as a loss of meaning. In a word, what the essay calls for is an authenticity that could be defined as an anticipatory attitude toward the world.

The Life Force and the Utopia of the Post-Human

Immortality is humanity’s great quest, the supreme utopia. In his science fiction novel Le Grand Secret, René Barjavel reflects on the convergence between love that defies time, science that conquers sickness and wisdom that triumphs over death. Spinoza reminds us that death cannot ontologically have a place in thinking about the living and Bergson assumes a ‘current of life’ running through bodies and generations, dividing up and flowing together without losing its force. That life force has no connection with the new philosophies of the trans-human or post-human which imagine a post-humanity living longer, healthier and less miserably, thanks to biotechnology. If human beings were an exceptional diversion in the course of evolution, it is one of intensification, creation and emancipation, and not of extension and addition as the life-sciences would have it.

Islam and Philosophy: Lessons from an Encounter

This contribution is a presentation of the encounter between Greek philosophy and Islam and of the way in which philosophical thought was consequently appropriated by the Muslim world. What made this encounter possible was the existence, within the Muslim world, of a spirit of openness able to overcome the fear of a ‘pagan’ thought: this spirit helped develop the position that Greek philosophy, qua wisdom, could not be ‘foreign’ to the universe of the Koran. The Arabic language, as it became a philosophical language, bears traces of such an appropriation. Today, in Africa, the debate on philosophy could usefully take into account the tradition of Islamic philosophy which is also African to some extent and which would help enlighten, in particular, the question of transforming African tongues into philosophical languages.