What struck me when I read this book devoted to the limits of language, and even to the breakdown of language or “logoclasm,” according to the neologism coined by Lapidot, is precisely an absence, something left unsaid: what I would call the missing subtitle. The introduction defines the book’s focus as the uncovering of a conception of politics opposed to the Aristotelian paradigm of politics as speech, logos, argumentation: the politics of not speaking. The issue is therefore a very general one. But the content of the text actually offers something more precise, which I propose to describe as a genealogy of postcolonial thought.
I do not mean to say that Lapidot has attempted to trace the origins of the field of postcolonial studies in its entirety, to inventory its different varieties, and to retrace the debates it has sparked over the last fifty years. But his book focuses on tracing a lineage, or perhaps lineages, that begin in interwar Germany, pass through the period of anti-colonial struggle—the chapter on Frantz Fanon is very important—and arrive at two thinkers who belong to postcolonial thought: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Jacques Derrida.
In reality, the book must be read backwards: Carl Schmitt’s agonistic definition of politics in terms of the friend/enemy divide is invoked as a key for analysing of Frantz Fanon’s call to exercise violence capable of countering colonial violence. And Martin Heidegger’s dialogue with a Japanese philosopher on the possibility of translating philosophical concepts across linguistic and cultural boundaries appears as a prelude to the analyses of Spivak and Derrida, who each point in their own way to the inability of logos to address social, cultural, and linguistic otherness.
Let us begin with Schmitt. His famous thesis that the argumentative conception of politics comes up against an irreducible divide is not invoked here as a revelation of the essence of politics. The aim of the book is not to overturn the dialogical and pacifying conception of politics, but to diagnose its flaws and limitations in order to challenge it and, ultimately, to revive it. The role that Lapidot assigns to Schmitt’s definition is rather to serve as an analytic key of a particular political situation that embodies the failure of intersubjective dialogue at its highest level, namely the colonial situation. His reading aims to point out a paradoxical effect of the primacy given to logos in politics, namely the negation of the very humanity of the enemy. When one side presents itself as the sole holder of logos, it ends up rejecting all forms of resistance outside the political sphere, as evidenced by the reduction to animality and the accusation of terrorism invariably used to disqualify anti-colonial struggle movements. Against the colonial conception of “pacification,” which often tips over into a logic of extermination, the virtue of the polemical conception of politics is, in this perspective, to restore the very existence of the colonized as political actors.
The second chapter is also structured around the question of colonization, although Heidegger never uses the term. Lapidot’s approach is to read this philosophical dialogue on the incommunicability of cultures as a dialogue on epistemic violence and the subjugation of non-European cultures by European imperialism. The interest of this chapter lies in the fact that it provides elements for answering the thorny question of why Heidegger is a central reference for postcolonial authors, who have often sought resources in his writings to articulate a non-imperialist conception of difference. This has always struck me as paradoxical, given his compromise with the Nazi regime, whose politics of difference was particularly lethal. Lapidot shows that Heidegger rejects the act of translation itself. The appropriation of European philosophical concepts by non-European thinkers is described not only as a doomed attempt, but above all as an act of violence.
Heidegger’s holistic conception of language as the medium of a world closed in on itself, and therefore incommunicable to those who are not part of it, has been taken up in certain variants of postcolonialism. It is in particular to set limits on the translatability of non-European “life-worlds” that Dipesh Chakrabarty turns to Heidegger in Provincializing Europe. But Heidegger’s condemnation of the attempts at cultural mediation made by his Japanese interlocutors also illustrates one of the blind spots of postcolonialism: the rendering invisible of the work of non-European intellectuals, who, since the colonial encounter, have never ceased to appropriate, criticize, and reformulate concepts imported from Europe. Edward Said’s assertion that there is no such thing as “Occidentalism,” that is, the study of the West by Eastern intellectuals, which could counterbalance Euro-American Orientalism, is a good illustration of this.
From the third chapter onwards, we are first fully immersed in the anti-colonial struggle with Fanon, then in postcolonialism with Spivak and Derrida. The general question raised by the book is therefore why there is such a close link between the failure of logos and the colonial situation. Answering this question requires us to return to what exactly is dysfunctional, or breaks down, in what Lapidot calls “logoclasm.”
The answer is not speech as such. For both Schmitt and Fanon, what is breaking down is certainly not the ability to speak: after all, it often takes a structured, mobilizing discourse to produce a genuine relationship of enmity. War is and has been, long before the total wars of the 20th century and their impressive propaganda machines, a great producer of discourse. The writing of The Wretched of the Earth in the midst of the Algerian War is proof that it is not enough to exercise violence, but that one must also exhort it. For Fanon, it is certainly not a question of making speech the driving force behind the insurgency, which is rooted in lived experiences of exploitation and humiliation rather than in intellectual constructs. But the call to violence is necessary as a catalyst for armed struggle.
What is breaking down in the colonial situation is therefore not speech as such, but communicative action, according to Jürgen Habermas’s formula. That is to say, an exchange governed by a series of ethical rules, geared towards understanding, and in which critical reflexivity is capable of mediating antagonisms. To put it in Aristotelian terms, what is broken is the ability to deliberate together on the rules of right and wrong, that is, to form a city. For Aristotle, joint deliberation on what is just and unjust, which constitutes political praxis, only makes sense against the backdrop of a shared belonging to the city. In modern terms, this means belonging to the same society.
However, it is precisely on this point that the colonial situation introduces confusion. The colonial situation is not one of open warfare—at least if we exclude the initial phase of conquest and the moment when national liberation movements acquire sufficient strength to sustain a war, as was the case in Algeria. But neither does it correspond to a city, understood as a space united by common norms.
I really liked the passage on Fanon’s Manichaeism, that is, on the idea that what the colonizers consider to be the norms of justice on which the social order is legitimately based are in fact norms of injustice for the colonized, because these same norms structurally condemn them to “damnation”—a term whose theological connotations the book strives to highlight. The fundamental asymmetry between colonizers and colonized, enshrined in legal statutes, economic conditions, land ownership, and the spatial distribution of cities, is such that no dialogue can overcome it. This is why Fanon attacks the conciliatory strategy of the colonized elites, who thought they could gradually wrest concessions that would eventually put them on an equal footing with their masters within the normative framework defined by the colonial power. The problem, in his view, is that the norms of the colonial world are norms for the colonizers, which inherently work against the colonized. Without a common normative horizon, however, no mediation of conflicts is possible, and dialogue loses all meaning.
And yet, The Politics of Not Speaking in no way expresses a fascination with physical violence as a response to the systemic injustices suffered by colonized populations. This can be seen in “Corollary 1,” which is devoted to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, considered here from the perspective of academic boycott. Lapidot emphasizes that the very principle of a boycott of speech by Palestinian intellectuals only makes sense if a common normative horizon is not entirely absent. In fact, the refusal to speak can only be perceived as a problem where the theoretical inclusion of interlocutors remains the norm. Here, the politics of not speaking becomes a tool for diagnosing borderline situations in which the common normative order no longer functions, but where it has not been irrevocably destroyed either.
Moreover, the last two chapters do not focus on situations of extreme colonial violence, but on the paradoxes involved in speaking out in a world whose rules were set by the colonial power and have resisted decolonization.
Just as the third chapter, on Fanon, followed from the first one on Schmitt, the fourth chapter, devoted to Spivak, is a continuation of the second, on Heidegger. Through a reading of the famous “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, Lapidot questions the very act of giving voice to the subaltern as a form of epistemic violence against them. In this text, Spivak builds her argument against Foucault and Deleuze who rejected the attitude of speaking for the dominated, that is, on their behalf. They defended the ability of the “masses” to speak for themselves. However, for Spivak, the idea that it is enough to give subalterns the floor so that they can speak obscures the conditions that enable a subject to constitute itself and be recognized as a producer of meaningful political speech. This obscuring leads to a surreptitious universalization of a Eurocentric and elitist paradigm of the autonomous subject. Her provocative thesis that subalterns cannot speak is the best illustration of the centrality of what Lapidot calls logoclasm in postcolonial criticism.
To understand the value of Spivak’s logoclasm, however, it is important to bear in mind that her argument is not only constructed against the positions of Foucault and Deleuze, who claimed that subalterns did not need any mediation. It is also directed against a diametrically opposed position defended by Subaltern Studies. Ranajit Guha’s seminal book, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, argued that it is not enough to listen to the words of insurgents, which can sometimes be found recorded in colonial archives when their repression led to interrogations or trials, in order to understand the political value of their mobilization. Guha argues that these speeches, which sometimes invoke divine injunction as justification for the insurgency, cannot be accepted as valid explanations in the epistemic space of modernity. It is therefore in the forms of collective action rather than in the discourses of their leaders that Guha endeavours to decipher the political value of anti-colonial insurrections. The reconstruction of the “elementary forms” of peasant insurgency was, in this sense, a work of translation.
It is surprising, and in my view regrettable, that Spivak does not discuss in detail the procedures developed by Guha and the other members of the Subaltern Studies collective to reconstruct the meaning of subaltern political action. Here we find the Heideggerian gesture described in Chapter Two. Spivak’s embrace of deconstruction, which favors exposing the non-universality of intellectuals’ discourse over any attempt to describe, through the social sciences, a social or cultural exteriority such as that of Indian peasants, marks the turning point between Subaltern Studies and postcolonialism. Rather than constructing a counter-narrative, the postcolonial strategy prefers to highlight silence.
However, there is a risk of overestimating this difference. In fact, in the case that, according to her, served as the starting point for writing her text, namely the suicide of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri—one of her grandmother’s sisters—Spivak is led to make the subaltern speak. To show that she was not heard, Spivak sets out to reconstruct the political significance of her suicide. Although it takes place at the individual rather than the collective level, this operation is not fundamentally different from that of Guha.
In other words, logoclasm emerges in Spivak only against the backdrop of the dual exhibition of the meaning of subaltern discourse and the censorship that led to its deletion. The paradox is thus that in order to show that subalterns cannot speak—or at least that they cannot be heard—one must first make them speak, that is, reconstruct the political meaning of their actions. Making the silence to which subalterns are condemned heard does not in any way allow us to dispense with reflection on the procedures that can be used to reconstruct their discourse. This is especially true if we subscribe to the conception of logoclasm defended in the conclusion of The Politics of Not Speaking, which defines it as a moment of suspension rather than a definitive exit from discourse.
The final chapter, on Derrida, offers a paradoxical follow-up to Spivak’s reflections and, at the same time, a surprising point of arrival for the trajectory followed in The Politics of Not Speaking. On the one hand, it could be said that Derrida, in Monolingualism of the Other, engages in the exercise that Spivak invited European intellectuals to undertake: reflecting on the specificity of their position of speech in order to situate themselves, rather than pretending to give voice to others. It is in fact an autobiographical reflection by Derrida on his own neurotic relationship with the French language, which he defines himself as a purist of while asserting that it is not “his” language.
Reflecting on his experience as a Jewish student in the school system of colonial Algeria, Derrida believes that it reveals a “universal structure.” Echoing Albert Memmi’s idea that the position of Jews in the French colonies of North Africa gave them a particular lucidity about the colonial situation, Derrida observes that the Jewish community in Algeria coincided neither with the Arabic and Berber language and culture of the colonized, nor with the French language and culture of the colonizers. But he adds that it didn’t even coincide with itself, since its assimilation, in his view, caused it to lose its own “Jewish memory.”
But the privilege he claims is of a different order. It does not concern the colonial situation, but the relationship to language in general. Having no “mother tongue” to oppose that of the colonizer, transmitted by the school system, the “assimilated” Algerian Jews would bear witness better than any other group to the impossibility of maintaining a relationship of identity or ownership with their language. This leads to the paradox that, far from relativizing the position of the intellectual, Monolingualism of the Other instead universalizes it.
By asserting that “all culture is originally colonial” because it imposes names, Derrida proceeds to radically de-specify the colonial situation, dissolving its violence into a much more general experience of the primacy of otherness and heteronomy in language. At the same time, one may wonder whether it is not the specificity of logoclasm that also disappears in this last chapter. For what interests Derrida—here as elsewhere in his work—is not the silence or inability to speak engendered by the non-recognition of the other, but a much more general form of non-fullness of the logos which, in opposition to speech, he calls “writing”.
It may seem strange that The Politics of Not Speaking ends with such a generalization of the concept of logoclasm, when the political issue that interests Lapidot is precisely the operation by which colonial states establish a divide between an area devoted to the politics of logos and an area outside logos: the colonized territories, where any resistance, dismissed as terrorism, is doomed to annihilation. But perhaps we can see a Derridian element in the gesture of revealing the false completeness of European political logos, which can only coincide with the ideals it promotes on condition that it draws a line beyond which the paroxysmal violence of colonialism can be presented as a civilizing action. It is because the division leaves no room for recognizing an interlocutor on the other side of the boundaries that delimit the space of democracy that logoclasm deserves, for Lapidot, to be described as one of the instruments of postcolonial politics. Conversely, the ability or inability of insiders to hear the silences that arise on the other side of the borders drawn by colonizing societies around themselves, to perceive them as the echo of missing voices, and to identify them as scandals that call into question their spontaneous delineation of the political sphere, may constitute, for the victims of colonialism, an indication of whether they can place their hopes for a more just world in something other than violence.
