Lorna Burns & Birgit M. Kaiser, eds.

Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze:

Colonial Pasts, Differential Futures.
1
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012: 21-36.
Forget Deleuze
Broce B. Janz

When thinking about the possibility that Deleuze might be relevant

or useful to postcolonialism it is worth asking two questions: what
problems or questions within postcolonialism might potentially be
addressed in a new way (which is to further ask, which questions con­
tinue to be unsatisfactorily addressed), and what does it mean to be true
to Deleuze in a context such as this?
The first question has many possible answers. Postcolonial. theory
has had much success in highlighting ways of being and becoming
that were not apparent, or were wilfully ignored, under other types of
theory, but there are always more to be named and critically appraised.
as political and economic events spawn new communities and produce
new inequities. While postcolonial praxis has worked toward greater
subjective and community awareness, social equity and opportunity,
and recognition of past oppression, new forms of domination and mar­
ginalization always arise out of the victories of awareness and justice.
The questions that postcolonial theory has taken up are vast. They
include the question of subjectivity (who can be seen and heard, and
in what manner, and who cannot?), the question of recognition (whose
voice counts, and how does it count?), the question of elitism and cul­
tural inequity (how does it emerge, why is it problematic, where does
it reside, and what can be done about it?), the question of discourse
(how do forms of expression and representation succeed or fail in being
adequate to individual and group identity and aspiration, and how
do the subtleties of discourse re-inscribe problematic power relations
or alienated subjectivities?), the question of resistance (what is being
resisted and what constitutes effective resistance?), and the question
of place (who determines the nature of a place, even provisionally,
and whose narratives can become part of political, economiC, social
21
22 Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze
and literary life?). These are, of course, not the only questions possible
within postcolonial thought, and each of these questions stands as
shorthand for a host of others as well. But I term these 'questions' in
order to make room for an open-endedness about them.
The questions that form the core of postcolonialism have not, of
course, been fully answered - there is always more to say about the nature
of subjectivity, cultural inequity, place, and so forth. But the central nar­
rative is clear. There is a well-worn path which is based not so much in
the questions, but in the answers to the questions, or rather the types of
answers (by which I mean, the types of claims, and the concepts they
draw upon) that are seen as legitimate. There is some irony to this, in that
a centrepiece of postcolonial thought is the recognition and affirmation
of difference. What has sometimes emerged, though, is a fairly unified
sense of a set of central concepts, which are seen as applicable to a wide
range of particularities. Concepts such as tradition, hybridity, Violence,
exile, and so on, flow back and forth over the wide world of postcolonial
experience, functioning as universals even as they are presented as linked
to place. And how could they not? How else could there be an area that
generalizes on postcolonial experience enough to have a name, other
than transporting concepts largely intact from one milieu to another?
The response will no doubt be that this overstates things, that in fact
there is a great attention to the specificity of concepts. And, it is true, there
is some attention to this. But the large-scale narrative of dispossession,
immiseration, explication of that immiseration, and resistance/emancipa­
tion is replicated time and again across a wide range of writings from a
variety of disciplinary perspectives. The narrative itself is not something
I am objecting to, but rather the implicit assumption that it continues to be
basically the same narrative everywhere, that differences are aberrations
from the central narrative, rather than potentially productive moments.
Being true to Deleuze in this context is the other issue at stake
here, and is significant because of past critiques. Arguably the single
most important essay in the history of postcolonial theory, Gayatri
Spivak's 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' is directed against both Deleuze and
Foucault, and maintains that neither can deal with history sufficiently
to imagine a form of representation adequate to the subaltern. '[I]n
the Foucault-Deleuze conversation,' she says, 'a postrepresentationalist
vocabulary hides an essentialist agenda' (Spivak 1988, p. 285), which
becomes manifest in the tendency to ;talk about the 'masses' or the
'workers' in an over-generalized manner. Julie Wuthnow argues that
a truly Deleuzian approach is incompatible with postcolonial theory, in
that it reasserts a colonial discourse and does little to enable 'effective
Janz: Forget Deleuze 23
indigenous politics' (Wuthnow 2002, p. 185). Christopher Miller
points out that several of Deleuze and Guattari's sources in A Thousand
Plateaus (1987) contradict and undermine their non-representational,
realist philosophy when it comes to colonialism, and also notes the
book's inability to produce a true concept of difference (Miller 1993).
And, Peter Hallward, in the most ambitious and nuanced critique,
argues that Deleuze like many other thinkers presents a 'singular' or
essentially monistic approach to the world, in the sense that there is an
account of existence that subsumes Deleuze's well-known philosophy
of difference under the seemingly unified concept of 'creativity'
(Hallward 2001).
So, there are some significant questions about the possibility that
Deleuze might have anything useful to say in a postcolonial context
(see Kermally 2008 for more such questions). These issues cannot be
easily dismissed or waved away as if the critics don't understand the
'real' Deleuze. If difference matters, it must matter here as well. It is
worth noting before we continue, though, that in many cases, Deleuze's
central task, or motivating question, is taken to be one of explanation.
Can he offer an account that makes sense out of the experience of those
who are elided or missed by theory rooted in the Enlightenment West?
Each of these critics argues that he cannot, that he is either as indebted
to his European place as anyone else is or the concepts he develops are
sufficiently tainted as to render them useless. There is no new account
of the postcolonial experience here, the critiques conclude.
But what if that was not his pOint in the first place? Neither explain­
ing nor interpreting are the primary goals of Deleuze and Guattari's
thought. Being true to Deleuze must mean more than just getting
Deleuze correct, or more than Deleuze getting postcolonialism correct,
whatever that means. What seems clear is that it cannot mean that
Deleuzian concepts must neither be 'applied' to new situations, nor be
used to 'interpret' or 'explain' existing phenomena. Deleuze is not an
applied philosopher, nor a hermeneuticist, nor a closet social scientist.
And it seems that many critics of Deleuze want him to be one of these.
It should be said, many enthusiasts want the same thing. My sense
of his work, though, and of the work he did in friendship with Felix
Guattari, is that it should serve as a loose model for the creation of con­
cepts in new areas. Deleuzian philosophy can be distilled briefly:
• Step 1: Learn Deleuze
• Step 2: Forget Deleuze
• Step 3: Begin
24 Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze
Deleuzian thought requires, in a strange way, its own erasure, before it
can be truly creative. One should not ask, does Deleuze speak about X,
or how can we apply Deleuze to Y? If he does that is no guarantee that
what he says will apply; if he does not, he may be more useful than
immediately apparent. The way to reach the point of usefulness of
Deleuze is in the second, often missed step: Forget Deleuze. Not 'deny
Deleuze', or 'reject Deleuze', but 'forget Deleuze'.
Forgetting Deleuze means that we will not apply Deleuze. We will
not look to see whether he gives us a new tool to solve an old problem.
He will not do that, although he might help to redefine the problem. He
will not provide another technique for analysis, another concept that
captures a bit of human experience hitherto missed or ignored. Not are
we necessarily faced with the Scylla and Charybdis of clearly explaining
him in lucid prose, on the one hand (and thus missing or distorting his
work), or embodying his aesthetic, on the other, keeping the sensibil­
ity intact but just slightly out of reach. There is no virtue in the patoiS
of this tribe, but neither is there any in the plainspoken distillation of
concepts, ready to be wielded as if they were a new set of weapons.
Forgetting Deleuze means walking with him, sometimes running ahead,
sometimes following. And then - striking out on a new path. The well­
known concepts - bodies without organs, planes of immanence, the
and so many others - are not fetishes or idols, they are just concepts, made
to be stretched, changed, re-appropriated. That is how they are honoured.
If we were to not forget Deleuze, if we instead thought we would
use him as a theorist within postcolonial theory, there are some obvi­
ous strategies we might adopt. We could see postcolonial literature as
minoritarian. \fI{e could equate the state apparatus with the colonizing
impulse. Colonizers might play chess, taking justification from their
milieu of interiority, while the colonized play Go, engaging in and capi­
talizing on the milieu of exteriority. Colonizers may territorialize while
the colonized deterritorialize, colonizers build cities while the colo­
nized, in some cases literally, are nomadic. The postcolonial situation
might be seen as pure becoming. We could multiply the superficial ways
that Deleuze might be pressed into service as a theorist, to be applied to
a situation which he did not write about directly, or to explain a set of
circumstances in some totalizing manner.
Or we could forget Deleuze, and then begin.
Mbembe and the Postcolony .
Achille Mbembe leaves the reader of On the Posteolony with some
tantalizing hints of a creative, hopeful future, even in the wake of the
!anz: Forget Deleuze 2S
institutional and existential violence he has chronicled throughout
the book. It is worth asking just what might be creative here, and how
one might hope. Mbembe has a concern for place-making, not in the
phenomenological or Heideggerian sense but in the sense that actual
life moving through and within space creates concepts adequate to
their situation. There are, for instance, intimations of lines (as too with
Tim Ingold [2007] and V.Y. Mudimbe [2008]), which sketch out figures
in cartoons, or form segments, or trace out the workings of power, or,
as with the lines of flight, chart new paths. There is a concern with the
life that emerges, that unfolds within the regime of biopower. And there
are the concepts of becoming and death, used apparently differently by
Deleuze and by Mbembe, but which in both cases raise the question
of how, as Mbembe puts it, 'the lines between resistance and suicide,
sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom are blurred' (Mbembe
2003, p. 40). Under these conditions, is the only option to be part of
the 'living dead', or is there still creation, as he seems to indicate at the
end of On the Posteolony?
In a previous review I did .of On the Posteolony (Janz 2002), I chose
the connecting thread of 'nothingness'. Mbembe's book is suffused
with negation (or as he puts it, absence): 'absences of those presences
that are no longer so and that one remembers (the past), and absence
of those others that are yet to come and are anticipated (the
(Mbembe 2001a, p. 16). This would seem to make him less than ideal,
from a Deleuzian point of view. But I suggested in that review that one
might also tell the story using time or place, and it is this path I want to
take up now. The lines that Mbembe uses to trace life in the postcolony
are, despite appearances in most of the book, lines of hope for the crea­
tion of something out of nothing, or out of negation.
Mbembe deliberately uses the term 'postcolony' instead of 'the post­
colonial' because he wants to distance himself from 'modern black
revolutionary possibilities' and a critique of 'the political ideologies of
racial sovereignty and black internationalism of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries' (Mbembe 2006, p. 152). He wants to distance
himself from 'postcolonial theory per se', as it has, in his opinion, focused
more on the struggle between 'Father and Son' than on the 'violence of
brother toward brother and the status of the sister and the mother in the
153). This sense of omission may be overstated,
but more importantly, it paves the way for Mbembe to be less concerned
about explanation at a systemic level, and more concerned about
how individuals can act meaningfully given the situation they find
themselves in. As I suggested in my earlier review of On the Posteolony,
Mbembe explicates a world of authenticity that takes violence as a fact
26 Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze
of existence. 'This is how it is to live in Africa [... ] now, is the hope of
existence confined to the struggle to overcome that violence, or can one
find one's subjectivity in a meaningful manner if overcoming violence
seems remote?' (Janz 2002, p. 6).
There is, in fact, a sense of hope for Mbembe, at the end of a recitation
of the ways in which the violence inherent in colonial sovereignty
has become part of both governing structures and social reality in
contemporary Africa. One might not expect hope at the end of the grim
assessment that Mbembe delivers, or perhaps more to the point, one
might wonder as to the basis for hope, given that assessment.
Hope?
Mbembe's brief concluding chapter offers an interesting opportunity
to think about whether it is possible to acknowledge the analysis he
has done throughout the rest of the book, and at the same time justify
hopefulness in the final two sentences:
What is certain is that, when we are confronted by such a work of
art, Nietzsche's words regarding Greek tragedy are appropriate: 'We
must first learn to enjoy as complete men'. Now, what is learning to
enjoy as complete men - and women - unless it is a way of living and
existing in uncertainty, chance, irreality, even absurdity? (Mbembe
2001a, p. 242)
What is interesting here is that the hope implicit in 'learning to enjoy as
complete men' almost echoes mid-twentieth century existential answers
to the hopelessness of the human condition. We were all instructed to
believe because it was absurd, or in the face of absurdity. It was the rad~­
cally free, supremely difficult choice that we had available to us. While
this isolated ending might suggest such a view, passe and oblivious to
political reality as it is, such an answer is not clearly where the rest of
the book leads us. There is no stoicism here, nor is there quietism, nor
is there vain hope.
What there is, possibly, is an ecology in which both people and con­
cepts take root and develop in response to the situation. Emmanuel Eze,
in On Reason, argues that there are many forms of reason, and these
are not sorted along cultural or racial lines, as many have believed (Eze
2008; see also Janz 2008). They are, rather, forms of reason appropri­
ate to different kinds of objects. Rationality is the ability to creatively
assemble those forms of reason. Rationality is a kind of emergent
Janz: Forget Deleuze 27
property of forms of reason in a particular place. It is an ecology in
which some manoeuvres and strategies have borne fruit, and others
have not. Such ecologies can be invaded, and can be dominated, but
they can also respond to such domination.
Speaking of place at all in a postcolonial context may seem jarring.
Postcolonialism has in many ways been suspicious of place talk. There
is placelessness - people are either taken or forced out of their places (in
the case of slavery and forced migration), or places are taken from their
people (in the case of occupation of land). This sense of placelessness
has its roots in a phenomenological sense of belonging or dwelling.
We might also speak of the non-place, a different concept not based
in phenomenology but in structuralism. Signifiers become unhinged,
meaningless, as they all point to something meaningful which is absent.
And thirdly, the debt that postcolonialism owes to neo-Marxian analysis
manifests itself in the dissolution of place in favour of the homogeniz­
ing effects of the global flows of capital and labour. Globalization leads
to cosmopolitanism. Place, then, seems at least quaint and at most out
of touch with the reality of life in the wake of colonialism.
And yet, Mbembe's effort throughout On the Postcolony has not been
to deliver a generalized theory of colonialism, or of postcolonialism. He
is more interested in what it means to be on the ground, place-bound,
unable or unwilling to simply leave. Most of those facing the political
and social structures that exist after colonialism cannot leave them. They
are part of the ecology. Throughout On the Postcolony, African subjectiv­
ity struggles to assert and define itself in the face of the negation that
manifests itself at every level of society. Existence in the postcolony is all
violence, some of it overt, but by our pOint in history mostly woven into
the fabric of SOciety, into the public discourse, even into the humour. This
violence, pervasive as it is, always becomes manifest in the struggle of
subjectivity to find clarity and some sort of direction. It is, in other words,
a struggle to define one's location in a place shot through with negation,
that is, with the tendency to devalue, ignore, or pathologize place.
Place, then, is a concept both foreign to the postcolonial condition,
and central to it. People are both rooted in material circumstances and
alienated from the places that might allow those circumstances to be
unambiguously and transparently experienced. For Mbembe, there is
the abiding desire to see the end of the violence inherent in everyday
life, but at this pOint, long after the fall of many overt colonial struc­
tures, there is little sense that that day will come.
It is worth noting that the negation of which Mbembe speaks in con­
nection with life inAfrica might not yield a kind of existential or even
28 Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze
Hegelian situation, that is, one in which the negative is the prerequisite
for freedom, or a moment on the road to a higher form of being. His
account of the violence inherent in the postcolony is remarkable for
its specific nature. 'The' postcolony is, in fact, many postcolonies, and
the position one holds in that place is multiple, complex, and in some
cases, even contradictory. Mbembe is not the only one to emphasize
this - as Hallward points out, the hallmark of postcolonialism is its
attention to heterogeneity (Hallward 2001, pp. 20-21). And, that hetero­
geneity is not just the diversity of multiple cultures or experiences, but
of multiple places.
Why does this matter? Well, places are more than the Heideggerian
notion of dwelling that suggests belonging and home. Place exists iri a
variety of ways, simultaneously. It is assembled at different levels - we
might, for instance, speak of 'African philosophy', and we might speak
of 'Kenyan philosophy', and further, 'Luo philosophy' or 'Odera Oruka's
philosophy'. Each of these conceptual ecologies is assembled from
'topemes', sub-significant elements that those who engage in a place use
to articulate that place. 'African philosophy' is not merely 'lower-level'
philosophies added up or averaged out. There are different questions at
these different levels, and the process of answering those questions is
the process of living in that place.
It is apparent, using this simplified example, that heterogeneity is not
just a function of diverse experience or cultural codes of meaning. If we
are in place, we are engaged with the questions of that place, the live
issues that must be addressed by a competent person engaging in life in
that place. At the same time, any particular place draws on other topemic
levels of place. While African philosophy is not simply the addition of
more specific philosophies, neither is it an unrelated enterprise.
Postcolonialism's relationship to place is, as has already been sug­
gested, complex and contradictory. What is clear, though, is that it is
a different kind of relationship that exists in postcolonial situations
than that which obtains in relatively non-postcolonial settings (note,
I do not suggest a binary opposition between postcolonial situations
and non-postcolonial situations - every society, at this point in world
history, is to some extent implicated by some aspects of postcolonial­
ism). Consider: the topemic levels of some social actors move relatively
smoothly between the levels of place. This may be the result of being
close to the imaginary limit of dwelling, pure engagement in a place
that allows a person to be transparent to their place, and the place to
them. But, of course, no one ever exists in that 'pure' form. But the
postcolonial situation is closer to the other extreme. While place is
Janz: Forget Deleuze 29
clearly important, in the sense that actors are localized and owe 'debts
and duties' to a place (to use Derrida's term), there is also a disconnect
between the actor and the place. The colony, after all, is no longer the
place that the prior inhabitants recognize, and the slave has been taken
from place into a new place.
Mbembe's whole book is about the loss of place, or the disconnect
between the actor and the place in which action has meaning. And this
occurs at a variety of topemic levels, ranging from personal relations,
to social relations, to the narrative of a country, to international rela­
tions and diasporic communities. It is, then, the discontinuity of places
and those who exist in them that describes the vast array of conditions
imperfectly collected under the heading 'postcolonial'.
And it is important to recognize this. There is not 'postcolonialism',
there are 'postcolonialities'. They do not have a single defining charac­
teristic. There were different kinds of colonies that people exist in the
wake of. There are different kinds of organization that have emerged
from those colonial structures. These places are not the same places.
What is striking about Mbembe's narrative is the hope that he has at
the end of it all. Can someone really be a 'whole man', in the face of
this? Not if we suppose that the point of the exercise of postcolonialism
is to construct an infrastructure that returns power, self-determination
and agency from the perpetrators, heirs and beneficiaries of colonialism
to those affected by it. This is the often-assumed hope of postcolonial­
ism, and most regard the first step toward this as being a clear and
thorough analysis and explanation of the colonial situation.
Notably, though, no matter how nuanced the explanatory account,
and no matter how much of a voice the marginalized achieve, .little
seems to change. Democratic structures emerge even as neo-liberal
and capitalist assumptions about the nature of those structures remain
widespread. People are given agency, but quickly become little more
than emerging markets. Self-determination finds its place, and then it
is immediately lost as it is incorporated into globalized flows of capital
and labour. To the extent that postcolonialism has an emancipatory
dream, it seems to be a dream always deferred, always open to being
co-opted. Mbembe's dream, as well, seems to remain at that place,
having sketched out the place of concrete life in Africa, but with a new
place only hinted at.
But place may not be so simple, and that may be the way out of this
problem. Much of postcolonial thought has been directed at describ­
ing and explaining the mechanisms of oppression and domination,
along with finding ways out of such oppression. The central concepts
30 Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze
at stake are freedom and self/group determination, but these exist in
an ecology with other concepts, and relate to other formations of such
concepts elsewhere in the world. There is no single sense to any of these
concepts - they all have a provenance, and despite the illusion of simi­
larity brought on by the use of similar or identical words in different
contexts, careful attention to place usually shows that these concepts
have subtle but significantly different shadings and meanings. 'Freedom'
does not mean the same thing in all situations, or in all postcolonial
situations, or even among different subgroups, all of which have been
subjected to similar colonial political, economic or social structures.,
Despite the oft-heard value of diversity and difference in postcolonial­
ism, Peter Hallward's critique has been that, in fact, postcolonialism itself
has been such a vague term that it has presented only the illusion and not
the reality of meaningful difference. Perhaps, though, as I have already
argued, explanation or understanding is not the point, or not the only
point, that postcolonialism might pursue. Perhaps it should be genera­
tive. Of what? Of concepts. What kind of concepts? Concepts adequate
to a place. How do we know when a concept is adequate? When those
who are fluent in the place can adapt it to the existing ecology. That
does not mean making the concept transparent, in some Heideggerian
manner, such that there is a continuity between intention and means. It
means that the concept is engendering, rather than obfuscating.
A Thousand Tiny ... Concepts
Ultimately, Peter Hallward's critique must be overturned, in the case
of postcolonialism, by actually providing the grounds for differences
which lead to new places. Ultimately, the goal of the postcolonial theo­
rist is to work him/herself out of a job. The means and subtleties of
colonialism had to be made clear, and we had to learn how to listen to
voices that were rendered unavailable by the structures of colonialism.
We have not fully completed those tasks, but we have come to the point
of recognizing that there is no easy solution to neo-colonial structures,
no magiC infra structural change or programme or artistic endeavour or
literature that cannot be co-opted, commodified, and shifted so that
those who speak are merely re-packaged as actors in a neo-liberal nar­
rative. Since the Marxist dream of emancipation in this clear and direct
sense is not an option, Mbembe's quotation from Nietzsche takes on all
the more urgency. How do we enjoy as 'complete men and women'?
The answer is in this creation of adequate concepts. That does not
mean that material needs are unimportant - exactly the opposite. Those
Janz; Forget Deleuze 31
concepts are only adequate inasmuch as they bring those who hold
them into life. Obviously, this cannot Simply be wished into existence,
and a host of thinkers from Fanon on demonstrates the massive odds
against social and political equality. What can be done is to find ways of
making material and conceptual difference and struggle into a creative
moment. Some examples will help to illustrate this.
Arun Saldanha (2006) re-theorizes race, tuming it from being a prob­
lem to being an opportunity. FollOwing Elizabeth Grosz's use of
Deleuze's 'thousand tiny sexes' idea, he argues that we should not
de-ontologize race, but rather tum back to the materiality of race. This
move is not meant to recover some lost notion of race as biological in
some determinist sense, but rather to move it from being solely a matter
of social convention (which could not be brought into creative tension)
to being contingently biological. He thinks that what is needed 'is an
affirmation of race's creativity and virtuality: what race can be. Race need
not be about order and oppreSSion, it can be wild, far-from-equilibrium,
liberatory' (Saldanha 2006, p. 21). This is not a denial of racism, but the
recognition that racism does not define and exhaust all the 'creative'
potential of race, and that throwing out the material sense of race
because of its potential racism is an overreaction. .
Saldanha's proposal, put in the terms I have been using here, is to use
race as a creative concept in an ecology. It means something different
in different places, but that does not mean that it loses its materiality
in favour of being solely socially constructed. What might be creative
about race? The creativity exists not in the contingent reality itself, but
in the development over time that has occurred in the presence of race,
and in the tension between some of those thousand tiny races. Without
question some of those reactions have formed the basis of colonialism,
domination and genocide. At the same race has also served as
one of several milieus in which people have worked out viable and rich
forms of life. Jews, Muslims and Christians during the Middle Ages, for
example, found ways to work together on intellectual problems, often
appealing to the same thinkers in different ways, and their work served
to define their faiths, their groups and their identities.
It is important to note that I am not suggesting that the historical
problems will just vanish in some new era of cooperation grounded on
nothing at all. There is tension at various levels. But not for everyone,
and not at all times, and not for every issue. And where there is tension,
it does not always take the form of hostility. Most importantly, even
when there is deep suspicion and a history of exploitation, the call here
is to find the moment of creativity within that space. Mbembe, recall,
32 Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze
spends over two hundred pages sketching out the violence inherent in
the postcolony, and yet at the end, life still exists, and finds a way. It is
that moment I am interested in.
Another example: in my recent Philosophy in an African Place (Janz
2009), I argued that one of the common features of African philosophy
over the past several decades has been its tendency to try to answer
a question that was not rooted in its own place. The question is 'Is
there an African philosophy?', and it is a question that comes largely
from a sceptical West. It assumes that there is no philosophy in Africa,
and puts the onus on Africans to prove that there is, or that it is :qot
simply derivative. The field has largely been an extended answer to
this challenge, an answer which has tried to claim a territory in the
name of African philosophy, by identifying concepts that can be truly
philosophical and truly African. So, concepts such as tradition, reason,
wisdom, culture, language, and practicality have all been pressed into
service. I argued that African philosophy must become 'philosophy­
in-place', that is, philosophy that recognizes the concepts that exist in
an ecology. All the concepts just mentioned can be seen in that manner,
but they have to be reconfigured so that they are not simply addressing
a foreign question. Only then will they be able to become creative in the
place where they matter, to the people to whom they matter.
So, to take an example, tradition must recognize its provenance as
a concept in a Western setting as developing through the medieval
church, being questioned in the Enlightenment, being recovered in
often-problematic ways in Germany in the nineteenth century, and
existing today in relation to discourses on modernity. Is that the prov­
enance of a viable concept of tradition. in Africa, or in some specific
place within Africa? I think not. I think that there will be different
questions that inform a concept of tradition, questions that will be
related to but not identical to the Western concept. Perhaps it will end
up being so different that another term gets used, but more likely it
will continue to bear a family resemblance. But it is the difference in
provenance that matters, that only becomes apparent as someone who
requires a concept to express life in a place puts these other concepts
in tension with what is available in the culture itself, and .creates some­
thing new.
Learning to Enjoy as Complete Men (and Women)
These examples should help to orient us toward the kind of thing we
need to look for in Mbembe. The explicit theoretical language he uses
Janz: Forget Deleuze 33
tends to be Heideggerian (his use of concepts such as negation, death
and place all have their roots there), but in fact, his development of
concepts gives every evidence of working toward a philosophy-in-place.
Some examples follow.
Mbembe recognizes the ways in which concepts are being created
that are adequate to another version of an ecology, one based not in the
justification of the past among former colonizers or oppressors but in the
reconfiguration of that past into a new age. Mbembe details this within
the South African context by showing how terms like 'transformation',
'rights', 'equality', and so forth become a kind of code that is used to
maintain white supremacist ideology (Mbembe 2008). His critique fol­
lows a familiar postcolonial path by showing the ways in which colonial
power reinscribes itself in postcolonial discourse. What is interesting,
though, is what happens next. Mbembe sketches out a useful histori­
cal analysis that shows how concepts can be co-opted to a particular
ideology. But at the same time, he recognizes that concepts with· a
dubious history, such as the Afrikaner model of 'empowerment' (Mbembe
2008, p. 16), might also have something to say about equal opportunity
within South Africa. It was a concept that implied particular kinds of
political, social and economic structures, and even though it had been
used for the privilege of one group at the expense of others, Mbembe
recognizes that there are some aspects which could still be useful, in a
new context. What is interesting is that, by the end of the article, his
conclusion is that 'Real freedom means "freedom from race'" (Mbembe
2008, p. 18), which, if we take Saldanha seriously, is not necessarily free­
dom at all as it would undermine the possibility of using race as a driver
of difference that might make a philosophy-in-place possible. Mbembe
shows how a concept that had been implicated in the defence of social
inequality could in fact have elements that lead in a very different
direction, but from that he concludes that we need to move past race.
Elsewhere, though, he draws a different conclusion.
In an earlier article, Mbembe actually makes race into a creative
concept by looking at Jewish and Black experiences in a manner that
superficially looks like it confiates the two, but which actually uses
them to illuminate each other (Mbembe 2005). From Judaism, Mbembe
locates a particular kind of homelessness and rootlessness (articulated
by Hannah Arendt) which 'came to symbolize a life and a death outside
the pale of the law' (Mbembe 2005, p. 295). Because of this particu­
lar experience, a conceptual ecology emerged which 'more than any
other, has unveiled the profound connection that ties any ethical
practice of freedom to a moral concern with vulnerability - especially
34 Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze
as manifested in the figure of the stranger and, to a lesser extent, of the
enemy' (Mbembe 2005, p. 295).
The same history does not exist in the Black experience, but a different
trajectory exists with its own insight. The issue is again a platial one - it
is not homelessness and rootlessness, but 'captivity, bondage, colonial
subjugation, and racism' (Mbembe 2005, p. 296). Mbembe goes further,
to localize the conceptual ecology to Francophone Africa. And, in that
place, he finds that, as with the Jews, there is a concern about death in
relation to freedom, but the narratives are not the same. Instead, there is
rhetoric about the right to self-determination as central to freedom, and
the idea of self-ownership. Because of this, the discourse on freedom
ends up being about transcending oneself in death, which means that
violence is connected to freedom.
Mbembe concludes by telling the reader that the difference between
these two experiences of freedom explains the difference between South
Africa and Israel. If we push him out of the mode of explanation, though,
we see a model for the creation of concepts which are adequate to a
place. What happens when a concept of freedom that walks the path of
Jewish experience encounters the freedom-path of African experience?
Difference, certainly, but perhaps also something new. This is because
concepts are a distillation of the narratives that their provenance makes
possible, but that provenance could be otherwise. The clear narrative
sketched by Fanon and others about the implications of conquest and
slavery and its trajectory into violence might be met by another narra­
tive, a 'what if' provenance which takes homelessness and rootlessness
as possibly meaningful experiences despite never having left one's land.
Exile could happen at home just as easily.
These are not the only two possible lines of provenance in relation
to the concept of freedom (or, by this pOint, the cluster of related
yet distinct concepts, all of which are summarized by the word
'freedom'). Even within Africa, freedom has not, and cannot, mean the
same thing everywhere, since its provenance varies. Mbembe traces.a
racial provenance in this article, but that is not the only possible trajec­
tory for understanding freedom. If the concept could travel, it could
bring the traces of its place to a new place.
The introduction to the issue that Mbembe edited of African Studies
Review is another example of the ways in which he lays the ground­
work for the production of new concepts (Mbembe 2001b). The stated
purpose of the issue is to 'highlight a significant body of social science
research conducted in Africa by African researchers living and working
Janz: Forget Deleuze 3S
there - as "insiders'" (Mbembe 2001b, p. 2). The pOint in doing this is
to both avoid the two common analytic tendencies, which he identifies
as the 'expert/consultant and the activist/militant', and also avoid the
most common alternative, which he calls 'nativism', or the tendency
to celebrate difference through ideologically loaded binary categories
(native versus settler, victim versus killer). The analytic tendencies 'are
more concerned with stating what African should be rather than with
describing what Africa actually is', while nativism 'claims to explain,
almost always in a mechanical and literal fashion, events or processes as
complex as colonialism and its aftermath, the nature of the postcolonial
state, and even genocide' (Mbembe 2001b, p. 3).
And it is this recognition of Mbembe's which opens the door to
something new, something other than neo-liberal positivism, Marxist
dogmatism, or nativism. The paths of thought and practice can be
traced, and with them, the kinds of meaningful interaction which
actually exist within Africa can begin to be understood. Mbembe's
introduction to the papers in the special issue lead him to see at
least two new forms of cosmopolitanism that have emerged in recent
years - a 'practical cosmopolitanism' which occurs when migrants
are integrated into new and different networks, and another form of
cosmopolitanism which 'seeks to reconstruct African identity and the
public sphere according to the universal principle of reason' (Mbembe
2001b, p. 11). This second one is concerned with the 'emergence of a
deterritorialized self' (p. 11). In other words, Mbembe presents us with
a new option, true to the spirit of post colonialism but with an attention
to the details of experience, a sympathy for the new intellectual possi­
bilities that that experience offers, and the potential for a politics based
somewhere other than in neo-liberal abstractions or identity politics.
We could continue with the examples from Mbembe's recent work,
but in all of them we would see the connecting thread to a hopeful
production of concepts and experiences. This is the hope Mbembe
alludes to at the end of On the Postcolony. The path that he travels is
a regular one. He keeps coming back to the same central questions,
ones rooted in the place from which he comes and constitutive of
that place. The value here is that, in refUSing to tackle the traditional
questions of postcoloniality in their universalist form, he is able to
tease out some new conceptual directions that in the end will certainly
prove more useful. They are concepts that are adequate to their places.
And their adequacy can be the prelude to turning them into 'travel­
ling concepts', to quote Mieke Bal (2002), which then makes them
36 Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze
into generative concepts in new places, rather than new examples of
intellectual colonization.
Works Cited
Bal, Mieke (2002) Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. B. Massumi.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Eze, Emmanuel (2008) On Reason. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Hallward, Peter (2001) Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the
Specific. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Ingold, Tim (2007) Lines: A Brief History. New York: Routledge.
Janz, Bruce (2002) 'Review ofAchille Mbembe, On thePostcolony', H-Africa. Available
at: http://www.hnet.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path= 122821016818245
(2008) 'Reason and Rationality in Eze's On Reason', South African Journal of
Philosophy, 27.4: 296-309.
(2009) Philosophy in an African Place. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Kermally, Jenny (2008) Towards a Deleuzian Postcolonialism. Unpublished PhD
dissertation, University of Dundee. Supervisor: James Williams.
Mbembe, Achille (2001a) On the Posteolony. Berkeley, CA: University of california
Press.
of Seeing: Beyond the New Nativism. Introduction', Special
Studies Review, 44.2 (September): 1-14.
'NecropoHtics'. Trans. Libby Meintjes. Public Culture, 15.1: 11-40.
(2005) 'Faces of Freedom: Jewish and Black , Interventions, 7.3
(November): 293-298.
(2006) 'On the Posteolany: A Brief Response to Critics', African Identities, 4.2:
143-178.
(2008) 'I/Passages to Freedom": The Politics of Racial Reconciliation in South
Africa', Public Culture, 20.1: 5-18.
Miller, Christopher L. (1993), 'The Postidentitarian Predicament in the Footnotes
of A Thousand Plateaus: Nomadology, Anthropology, and Authority', Diacritics,
23.3, Histoires Coloniales (Autumn): 6-35.
Mudimbe, V.Y. (2008) 'What Is a Line?', Quest: An African Journal of Philosophy,
21: 23-62.
Saldanha, Arun (2006) 'Reontologizing Race: The Machinic Geography of
Phenotype', Environment & Planning D: Society & Space, 24: 9-24.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988) 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' in Marxism and
Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana, IL:
of Illinois Press), pp. 271-313.
Wuthnow, Julie (2002) 'Deleuze in the Postcolonial: On Nomads and Indigenous
Politics', Feminist Theory. 3.2: 183-200.
2
The Bachelor Machine and
the Postcolonial Writer
Gregg Lambert
The question 'what is a minor literature?' concerns the distinctly
modern relationship between a writer and a people; that is, either a
particular people, or as Deleuze and Guattari often say, of a people who
are 'missing'. However, Deleuze and Guattari state from the very begin­
ning that this relationship should not - must not! - be understood in
representational terms: the writer neither represents a people according
to a dominant modernist representation of the writer as the authentic
creator of national consciousness in exile, nor in the quasi-elective and
social function assigned to certain writers who are assumed to
represent minority or subaltern experience (even though this experi­
ence is almost always addressed to a majority viewpoint). As Deleuze
argues concerning the relationship between literature and life,
write is certainly not to impose a form (of expression) on the matter of
lived experience' (1997, p. 1). This is because literature (apart from other
kinds of written expression) always involves a becoming that surpasses
the lived experience of the writer determined as a subject or an indi­
vidual. Therefore, in order to further clarify the often misunderstood
. refrain the vocation of a writer is to create a limguage for a people who are
missing, Deleuze will return to this phrase in Essays Critical and Clinical
and add that it means 'not in place of' but rather 'to the attention of'
(1997, p. 4. Translation modified). Following this sense, I would suggest
that there is a closer relationship between Deleuze-Guattari's concep­
tion of the writer and Sartre's earlier response to the question 'for whom
does one write?' Although the method of arriving at this question will
no doubt be different, the goals of what Deleuze and Guattari call minor
literature, on the one hand, and what Sartre defines as 'a literature of
commitment', on the other, are similar in determining the conditions
37