(p. 67), or as ‘movement in thought’, is seen as a way of ‘mobilizing Islam’ – in other words, ‘getting it on the move again’ – by leading it, via Bergson, to reconnect with its initial ‘vitalist philosophy’ (p. 79). Life must then be understood as a permanent renewal of the presence of God in the world, and the cosmology of the Qur’an as a ‘creative evolution’ according to a number of verses or sayings of the Prophet (the hadith), quoted on two occasions (pp. 85 and 111). Similarly, the Négritude of Senghor – who insists on emotion, who roots his outlook in a dynamic ontology (‘being is strength’, p. 47) and who highlights the importance of dance and rhythm as a ‘corporal cogito’ (p. 22) – flows directly from the ‘1889 revolution’ when Bergson, in his book of that year, Time and Free Will, underlined the primarily affective nature of the human mind.
If Bergson arouses so much interest in Diagne, this is not only because he allows him to mediate between two such culturally distinct and religiously distant thinkers as the Indian Muslim Muhammad Iqbal and the Senegalese Catholic Léopold Sédar Senghor. Beyond his insistence on the emotional dimension, Bergson also attacked the opposition between primitive or pre-logical mentality and civilized or rational thought in his last book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). In sum, Bergson is not only the thinker of the élan vital, but also the philosopher of the coexistence of opposites and their unification within every individual. From this point of view, we can call him ‘postcolonial’ avant la lettre, since, in Diagne’s view, he always insists on the hybridity inherent in the human being (both body and mind, affect and judgement, belief and rationality), and thereby rejects the artificial binary oppositions between Westerners and non-Westerners disseminated by the ethnology of his time, as for example in the works of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl.
So, if I were to summarize Diagne’s philosophical position in my turn, I would be obliged to conclude that he himself embodies a paradoxical style of thought that flies in the face of the accepted ideas of his time. Against the common idea that Africa is the continent of orality, this Senegalese thinker keeps coming back to the ancient and dynamic presence of written traditions – including philosophical traditions – in Africa, as in the manuscripts of Timbuktu. Against the idea that languages and cultural identities are distinct entities with rigid contours, he shows that they are in fact always fluid, that they borrow from other entities some of their constitutive elements, and that they are defined by subjecting these entities to operations of translation. Finally, while admitting that one can be (or think) ‘Negro’, he never reserves this privilege solely to the ‘Blacks’ of Africa or its diasporas, but insists, on the contrary, on the importance of the interbreeding and pluralism within each individual, each culture.
‘In searching for origin,’ he wrote in his book on Senghor, ‘one is always brought back to the exploration of one’s own hybridity, to the discovery that one is “legion”’, so that ultimately ‘all human civilization is only such because of mixture’.25 This is a lesson that the reader will easily be able to draw from the following interviews, and this defence of an ‘originary syncretism’ will also clearly signal the close connections between the thought of Souleymane Bachir Diagne and that of Jean-Loup Amselle.
Jean-Loup Amselle: an uncompromising anthropology
As presented in the bibliography of his works, the oeuvre of Jean-Loup Amselle might also seem perplexing: by adding a new title almost every year, it is constantly opening up new horizons and objects of research. Yet despite its very profusion, and its both pioneering and iconoclastic character, the thinking that underlies it still has a powerful drive towards synthesis. It ultimately appears, in all the senses of the term, ‘uncompromising’.
In the best anthropological tradition, nothing human is foreign to Amselle’s work, and the intellectual curiosity it displays is unbounded; but it is also intransigent with regard to a certain number of demands and principles. For example, it rejects all essentialism, and, like Diagne’s work, it opposes all the culturalizations or continentalizations of thinking that would trap thought in predefined predicates such as European thought, African thought, Black thought, Mestizo (or ‘mixed’) thought, and so on. Moreover, Amselle’s work aims to overcome binary oppositions and all hierarchies presented as natural, so as to defend a concrete universality of all cultures in their openness to others, or in their fundamental porosity with their surroundings.
An anthropologist by training, Amselle in fact broke with the rigid categorizations of his discipline (race and ethnicity as fixed units), while at the same time refusing to analyse social and cultural phenomena on a strictly local scale. From his earliest works, Les Migrations africaines (The African Migrations)26 and Les Négociants de la savane (The Traders of the Savannah)27 up to his recent studies Psychotropiques (Psychotropics)28 and Islams africains: la préférence soufie (African Islams: The Sufi Preference),29 he has constantly probed the deployment of identities within extensive networks, including commercial systems that are spreading across the world in the contemporary process of globalization.
From an epistemological point of view, his approach remains mainly genealogical, in other words, quick to spot significant paradigm shifts, the most important of which is certainly for him ‘the defeat of the continuum’.30 The various phases of European colonial expansion established a range of oppositional, hierarchical and binary schemas in the relations between the West and the rest of the world. These ethnological or raciological patterns then broke the great chain of entanglements, interweavings and concatenations that have always linked Europeans to other societies, cultures or epistemes.
This ‘defeat of the continuum’ subsequently led to two major upheavals. Firstly, the cultures that were brought into contact with each other slipped into relations of gradual differentiation, or ‘schismogenesis’, to use a term taken from the anthropologist Gregory Bateson.31 They thus gradually became specialized in attitudes that were sometimes symmetrical – the notorious mimeticism and all the games with mirrors and reflections so often criticized by Amselle – and sometimes complementary or mutually adapted (such as the relations of domination–submission, voyeurism–exhibitionism, assistance–dependence, highlighted by Bateson).
These various feedback processes not only favoured the triumph of ‘ethnological reason’ on both sides of the relationship, but they also changed the dominant axis of identity constructions. For a long time, in fact, such constructions favoured horizontality by integrating themselves – in a dialogic, even polemical, way – into networks or ‘chains of societies’ involving a series of lateral branchings or connections. In this context, the only verticalities stemmed, on the one hand, from the logics of empire or the distinction between ‘encompassed’ and ‘encompassing’ societies, and, on the other hand, from the inevitable class struggles in each society, struggles that could obviously take a racial turn, as in the slave societies of the New World.
But after the end of colonial empires and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and ‘in the post-Cold War situation’, ‘vertical clashes’, according to Amselle, were soon reconfigured: the historicist and Marxist paradigm of class struggle was abandoned, even though this struggle stemmed directly from ‘race struggle’. The vertical paradigm was reinvigorated and decisively assumed greater importance than lateral branchings or connections, or ‘horizontal conflicts’. From the old colonial relations we were left with ‘vertical, ethnic identities’ cutting across, fragmenting and now partitioning social bodies and intellectual, literary and artistic fields into so many ‘slices’ and ‘vertical gashes’. Today, we are witnessing a ‘return of race’, as well as a growing ethnicization of cultural relations and social conflicts, as Amselle has abundantly demonstrated in recent studies such as L’Ethnicisation de la France (The Ethnicization of France)32 and Les
