Postcolonialism: “School of the South”: theater of war and place of longing

Theoretical history is a political battlefield. This is easy to see in the public reckonings that have been directed against the French theory for some time. It is agreed that “French theory”, deconstruction, post-structuralism, post-fundamentalism or simply post-modernism have actually caused us all the problems. The postmodern relativism in the thinking of Derrida and Co. led directly to the post-truth age of disinformation and the identity-political culture war, in which the right is now winning globally and the left is disappearing into insignificance, is the direct legacy of post-structuralism. Of course, this is a projection – which, incidentally, corresponds exactly to the culture war that has stripped itself of any truth – but it is a politically useful one. Like other disinformation, it develops its effect by being caught in a chain of associations. It is extremely difficult to dismantle the false belief and even then, enlightenment only has a comparably small effect.

The Berlin cultural scientist Onur Erdur made such an effort, even if this role of enlightener against postmodern bashing was constructed rather retrospectively. Because his essay collection “The School of the South” actually follows a different intention. He traces the colonial experiences of the central philosophers (and one female philosopher) of that French theory of the 60s and 70s.

Experience of contradiction

In Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia he seeks out the “colonial roots of French theory” so that that thinking is not “placed in a contextless, ahistorical and innocent space.” It is precisely such abstraction that makes the political interpretation of struggle possible, against which he tries to “make some historical corrections” in order to “not leave the mapping of the intellectual field to those who exclusively pursue their political agenda with the theoretical tribunals.”

Erdur’s essays are, above all, captivatingly beautiful. Alert and clear, he follows the protagonists into the political disputes, dilemmas and shattered beliefs that underlie their theories. In short, he follows them to the south and to the former French colonies, which became both a theater of war and a place of romantic longing. The Algerian War between 1954 and 1962 revealed the contradictions between the universalist republic and degrading and even cruel imperialism that had escalated into civil war. And from Erdur’s texts it becomes clear how desperately the protagonists of that theoretical movement were searching for a way out of these contradictions. They wanted to radically move beyond the unbearably pointed contradiction, the moral dilemma and the theoretical impasse.

This is the common denominator of those theoretical innovations, which were of course polyphonic and heterogeneous. But that French theory was based on these shared experiences, according to Erdur’s intuition. There is, for example, the famous Pierre Bourdieu, who was called up for military service in Algeria in 1955 and found himself caught up in the contradiction of having to act as an anti-militarist philosopher in the colonial war. The bad conscience fueled the need, on the one hand, to escape, i.e. to get into as civilian an activity as possible, and, on the other hand, to make oneself useful for the Algerian cause. Bourdieu became a sociologist of Algerian society and tried to give it justice. Even after the war, he stayed there and researched, driven on the one hand by “questions of identification, guilt and morality” and, on the other hand, benefiting from the “entanglement in colonial contexts” that his extensive research allowed him.

Bourdieu conducted his field studies in Algeria with “the secret and constant feeling of guilt.”

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With “the secret and constant feeling of guilt and rebellion in the face of so much suffering and so great injustice,” as Erdur quotes Bourdieu, he conducted his field studies on site and developed the concept that later made him a world-class sociologist. His concept of habitus was an attempt to grasp the alienation and deprivation of the “de-peasant peasants” of Algerian society as an “incorporated, i.e. incorporated structure”. After Bourdieu arrived back in France, he returned to his home region of Béarn and conducted auto-sociographical research into the French countryside. What was celebrated ten years ago in Germany as a great theoretical breakthrough by authors like Didier Eribon did not trigger a major reaction in France because Bourdieu had already undertaken this sociological exploration of a society in transition – in his own biography. The condition of possibility for this, according to Erdur, lay in the self-alienation caused by the colonial experience.

Guilt and gratitude

According to Erdur, Bourdieu’s effect can be generalized: the philosophers “became strangers to themselves, their language and their nation, and thereby found their philosophy and their style.” Self-reflection through alienation – for most intellectuals this happened through the turning point of the Algerian War. They therefore associated these experiences with a “feeling of guilt” (French this)”, which is always “accompanied by a kind of thanks (also this)« was. This influence was dealt with differently in the respective biographies. After returning from the war, Jean-François Lyotard smuggled weapons and money for the Algerian independence movement, while at the same time conducting research on behalf of the government. Roland Barthes avoided taking a political stance on the Algerian War, but had an awakening experience in Morocco that made him become an ideology critic. Michel Foucault even sympathized with Charles de Gaulle’s Algerian policy, while in Tunisia he presented the “image of a sun-hungry happiness seeker.”

As a student in Paris, Étienne Balibar took to the streets against the Algerian war and experienced the violence of the war through bomb attacks by Algerian terrorist organizations or police violence. On the night of October 17, 1961, police massacred 200 Algerian demonstrators and threw many of the dead Algerians into the Seine at night. Until the 1990s, silence covered this expression of state racism, which France actively repressed like a trauma. The French government only recognized the crime in 2011. For Balibar it was the impetus for a lifelong theoretical criticism of racism, while for Jacques Rancière it was the starting point for a thinking of disidentification. As he himself wrote: “As far as my generation is concerned, politics is based on the impossible identification with the Algerians who were beaten to death and thrown into the Seine by the French police in the name of the French people in October 1961.”

Abstract negation

The essays and portraits of intellectuals show how the contradictory situation of that time translated into ambivalence in the intellectual structures – and this alone contradicts all too uniform interpretations of French theory. So Rancière suddenly appears as an opponent of identity politics in the 1990s, who advocates a universalism of politics and is therefore closer to conservative republicanism. Foucault theoretically searched for “heterotopias,” counter-sites of emancipation, and found them in the tourist resorts of the Club Méditerranée. While his resistant thinking became an explicit point of reference for postcolonial theory, the latter dismissed him because of “his unconditional pro-Israel stance” during the Six-Day War in 1967. Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous struggled with criticism of French colonialism, “but also knew that Algerian independence could mean the loss of their homeland for their Jewish families.”

Even if Erdur wants to assign a concrete space to thinking, his descriptions of the intellectual search movements show how detached and free-floating they were. A political reality of sharp contradictions forced itself upon the theorists, but in their thinking they seemed to be free to recreate the conditions of thinking for themselves. What Erdur describes but does not recognize: that this free-floating thinking itself has a social basis that needs to be reflected theoretically. In this respect, the French free spirits would have benefited from a bit of materialistic enlightenment – even if none of them can be blamed for turning away from the hard-core party Marxism in the 1960s. Their suffering from the contradictions was not just intellectual practice, but a very real reality from which one cannot escape the idea.

In the end it becomes clear: the shared theoretical basis of the French Theory remains abstract negation, its thinking is therefore necessarily abstract – and this abstraction made it possible to twist and turn the theories until they finally became the cardboard comrades of today’s culture war. As true as it is that Erdur contradicts these interpretations, it would be equally important to show what this abstractness of French thought has to do with today’s regression.

Onur Erdur: School of the South. The Colonial Roots of French Theory. Matthes & Seitz 2024, 335 pages, hardcover, €28.