Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Lévi-Strauss, and the work of Emmanuel Levinas.
In the report he presented in 1958 to his colleagues with the aim of setting up a Chair in Social Anthropology for Lévi-Strauss at the Collège de France, Merleau-Ponty distinguished two kinds of universalism: overarching universalism and lateral universalism.16 By ‘overarching universalism’, Merleau-Ponty means the elementary, unconscious structures that Lévi-Strauss detected in kinship, with a focus on the universality of the nature/culture distinction and of the prohibition of incest.17 To this formalistic mathematics of ‘atoms of kinship’ – a mathematics that is perfectly inhuman, being attached to no given society or culture – Merleau-Ponty opposes a ‘lateral universalism’, based on the concreteness and richness of the society or culture that is the subject of the work of the ‘ethnographer’, a term which has in fact been largely abandoned by contemporary anthropology. As Merleau-Ponty puts it:
It’s about building a general reference system where the point of view of the native, the point of view of the civilized person, and the errors made by one about the other can find their place; it’s about constituting a broadened experience which may in principle become accessible to people of another country and another time.18
In this case, it is not a matter of applying a mathematical or logical apparatus on unconscious social actors from above, as a grammar is imposed on speakers, thereby flattening out all differences; rather, the aim is to establish an empirical communication between radically distinct cultural spheres. However, for Merleau-Ponty, this process of communication goes further, since he maintains that anthropologists must not only apprehend exotic societies, but also free themselves from the force field of their own society so as to see their own culture as if it were another, rather like Montesquieu, who, in The Persian Letters, looks at French society from the outside, or like François Jullien, who uses Chinese culture to apprehend his own (French) culture.
It is thus a kind of intercultural friction that Merleau-Ponty is proposing, a friction which should also allow Western anthropologists to find the ‘savage side’ within them – the ‘savage mind’ (Lévi-Strauss) which does not belong to so-called ‘primitive’ societies alone, but is common to all societies.19 Interculturalism, or the translation of cultures into one other, is thus for Merleau-Ponty a source of knowledge for human beings in general.
One striking contradiction, however, deserves to be noted. Merleau-Ponty bases his theory on the existence of discrete cultures in the mathematical sense of the term ‘discrete’, that is, discontinuous. To conceptualize translation, or interculturalism, he needs a concept of the discontinuous, just as the thinkers of hybridity need to base their arguments on the hypothesis of supposedly ‘pure’ cultures.
But there is another problem. Merleau-Ponty’s position with regard to what might be called exotic otherness or the ‘oblique universal’, which he locates exclusively in India and China (the only civilizations he knows – and even then it is through their philosophical ideas alone), is not without its ambiguity, as is evident from his discussions of this topic in Signs,20 a work that was published in 1960, at around the same time as a report supporting Lévi-Strauss’s candidacy for a chair at the Collège de France. Merleau-Ponty follows an evolutionist tradition leading from Hegel to Husserl, and sees Indian and Chinese thought as a kind of unfinished ‘prematuration’ of Western thought, which, in his view, is alone capable of reaching universality. But, at the same time, he echoes Léopold Sédar Senghor21 and looks forward to Michel Foucault22 in the way he views this ‘prematuration’ as simultaneously a source of primitivism capable of regenerating a Western thinking based solely on the development of (frigid) reason, and thus able to ‘learn from them [these non-European cultures] to rediscover the relationship to being’.23 It is surprising, in this respect, that Diagne did not view Merleau-Ponty as a postcolonial author avant la lettre.
An analysis of certain aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s work demonstrates that considering certain societies as unfinished, owing to their occupying an earlier phase of the history of humankind, and viewing them in an ahistorical way, also turns this defect into a quality, a certain soulfulness that might be able to breathe fresh life into an enfeebled, withered West. All the ambiguity of what is called the ‘reversal of the stigma’ (the stigma of ‘Négritude’ in particular) is summed up by this episode in the history of thought, and it is the same ambiguity that we find in certain aspects of the various different types of postcolonialism.24 It is easy to understand why the work of Merleau-Ponty, who championed Lévi-Strauss and was attentive, for better and for worse, to exotic otherness, managed to seduce Diagne.
Emmanuel Levinas is also a major philosopher on whom Diagne relies to develop his idea of the universalism of translation. It should be borne in mind that Levinas’s particularly rich and complex work combines, in a contradictory way, both a hymn to cultural diversity and a vision, or conception, inspired by Platonism. On the one hand, what Levinas acknowledges in Greek philosophy is a superiority of the (personal) other (autrui) over being, of ethics over ontology. For him, the ‘Greek’ is the man open to all seas, so that ‘the Good is a matter more of the delta than the source: it is the Greek element, also a source in its own way, but the pre-eminent model of openness, interpretation and infinite translatability’.25 So the universality of the ‘Greek philosopher’ is the place where all cultures can potentially overlap and be translated into one another. Levinas thus presents us with the hypothesis of a de-Westernized, de-Platonized world, one that is not subject to the affirmation of the human regardless of culture and history, in a word, de-moralized. It is this relativist conception of culture, as expressed in some of Levinas’s works, which Diagne embraces.
But, on the other hand, in Humanism of the Other, a book which plays a major role in Diagne’s argument, Levinas follows another line of thought, one that is strictly Platonic:
The saraband of innumerable and equivalent cultures, each justified within in its own context, has created a world that is certainly de-Westernized, but it is also a world that is dis-oriented. To see the meaning of a situation which precedes culture, to perceive language from the revelation of the Other […] is to return to Platonism in a new way.26
After opening Greek philosophy up to the plurality of cultures, Levinas therefore dismisses cultural relativism and returns to what he refers to as the Other (Autre), the figure of the Divine that takes shape on the face of the Other-as-person (Autrui), a figure which in fact resembles the figure of the One. In Levinas, the overarching universal actually pre-exists what he somewhat condescendingly calls the ‘saraband’ of cultures, the infinite shimmer of cultural diversity that in itself bears no real meaning. For our philosopher, this infinite wealth, this infinite diversity, in short the ‘noise’ that the cultures of the world make in their mad saraband, is an embarrassment for the serenity which should preside over our reflection on, and quest for, Being. For the author of Humanism of the Other, who constantly plays on the difference between ‘other’ and ‘Other’, the philosophy of Being is prior and superior to anthropology, in the sense that anthropologists give this term.
For Diagne, cultural diversity, the infinite profusion and shimmer of all the cultures of the world, cannot be conceived as a ‘saraband’ – at best, a lascivious oriental dance, at worst (and this is doubtless the meaning intended here by Levinas), a way of making a noise, kicking up a racket. This is not Diagne’s view: he sees no contradiction between the quest for the universal and the appreciation of cultural diversity. Indeed, while he rejects ‘overarching universalism’ as understood by Merleau-Ponty, that is, the search for categories or structures valid at all times, in all places and for all people – categories derived from the questions about kinship or sorcery that the anthropologist forces onto his or her informers or that the West seeks to force onto the rest of the world (in the guise of human rights) –, he nevertheless declares himself be a staunch defender of universalism. But, for Diagne, this universalism is based on the possibility of a translation, that is,
