Unarchived Histories

The "mad" and the "trifling" in

colonial and postcolonial world

Edited by Gyanendra Pandey

13 Routledge
g

Taylor & Francis Croup

LONDON AND NEW YORK

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Bhattacharyya

40 Sumanta Banerjee, The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Cultures in
Nineteenth Century Calcutta (Calcutta. 1989), 78-146; while his work focuses on the
practices and performances, others have worked on the popular press and the extant
texts o f these performances. For that see, Sukumar Sen, Battalar Chhapa O Chhabi
(Calcutta, 1984); Sripantha, Battala (Calcutta, 1997); Anindita Ghosh, Power in Print:
Popular Publishing and the Politics of Language and Culture in a Colonial Society
(Kolkata, 2006); Gautam Bhadra, Nyada Battalai Jai Kaw 'bar? (Kolkata, 2011).
41 Interview with Sankar Dnere, April 8, 2012.
42 Interview with Dnere, April 8, 2012.
43 Dnere, Jelepara, 66 [translation mine].
44 "Texture takes us into the warp and weft of a text and demands attention to each of its
threads. A historical quality is something that makes itself felt in the weaving of the
work as a whole on the basis of markers internal to its frame or process." Rao, Schulman
and Subramanyam, Textures of Time, 253. A n attentive reading of the temporal and
narrative "textures" of Dnere's account can perhaps help us probe and open up urban
historiography to new propositions.
45 Henri Lefebvre, Production of Space (Oxford, 1991), 118; For a studying of
geographical naming and the hidden routes of history, see Paul Carter, Dark Writing:
Writing Past Colonialism (Honolulu, 2008).
46 Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World History (New York, 2002), 64. One has to
be attentive to the epistemological charge in the element of "wonder" that this curious
narrative invokes. Taking Guha's brief excursion into wonder further, I treat it not
merely as another rhetorical device, but rather attempt to be attentive to its "curious"
internal logic and its relation to historiography and knowledge practices.
47 Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (New
York, 1988).
48 "Farewell," in The Country without a Post Office (New Delhi, 1997), 7-9.
49 Vico's The New Science gives us the conceptual framework to open historiography to
these murmurs. Vico scholar Donald Verene has argued that Vico is a philosopher of
placenot because his theories produce an ontological primacy o f space but a "sense
of place" in Vico's Science of Imagination (New York, 1981), 183.
50 Studies coming out of Australia and Canada help us re-think land ownership beyond
the recorded deeds and documents and recognize native rights to the land. Paul Carter
shows that, while juridical property rights formalize use and possession of land, native
rights in Australia being founded on occupation and connection gives rise to other
representations of land and makes us rethink exclusive property rights. Carter, Dark
Writing, 103-39.
51 In his readings o f Vico, Ernst Cassirer points out that Vico's contribution to historical
thinking is not content-based but methodological. Although Vico saw the importance of
myth and imagination, he did not give up the claim to the idea of truth. Ernst Cassirer,
The Logic of the Humanities, trans. C.S. Howe (New Haven, 1960), 52.
52 Vico The New Science, 338 and 429 Bk I I .
53 Donald Kunze, "Giambattista Vico as a Philosopher of Place: Comments on the Recent
Article by Mills," in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series,
Vol. 8, No. 2 (1983), 237^18, 241.
54 According to Vico: "But, giving up hope of knowing how languages and letters began,
scholars have failed to leam that the first nations thought in poetic characters, spoke in
fables, and wrote in hieroglyphics." The New Science, 429, Bk I I .
5 5 Ranajit Guha, Rule ofProperty in Bengal: An Essay on the Idea of Permanent Settlement
(Raleigh, 1996).
56 Guha, Rule of Property, 3-4.
57 Pandey, Chapter 1, this volume.

10 Un-archiving Algeria
Foucault, Derrida, and Spivak
Lynne Huffer

This essay engages the archive o f French philosophy to reflect on h o w it has

un-archived Algeria. Returning to one o f the most visible debates i n the history o f
poststructuralism, I reflect on a deleted passage about the Algerian Revolution
from the 1963 lecture by Jacques Derrida that triggered his famous dispute w i t h
Michel Foucault. The vast majority o f Derrida's readers are unaware o f the
passage i n question because Derrida removed it from the definitive version o f his
lecture, "Cogito et histoire de la folie," published i n 1967 i n L'Ecriture et la
differenced Locating this fairly routine revision as an instance o f "archive
trouble"where something i n the archive o f French philosophy "unarchives
itself," to use Derrida's w o r d s 2 I consider the legacy o f the Foucault-Derrida
debate for us, today, i n what some call, rather inelegantly, our post-postcolonial
age. I focus on the removal o f the 1963 A l g e r i a fragment not to approve
or condemn Derrida's politics, but to explore a broader un-archiving process
that has produced what H o m i Bhabi calls the "restless and revisionary energy" o f
the "post." 3
I n closely reading the deleted passage, I approach the French poststructuralist
un-archiving o f Algeria w i t h i n a larger frame that includes not only the early
1960s philosophical m i l i e u i n w h i c h Derrida first responded to Foucault, but also
a present academic culture whose theoretical ethos has moved "beyond"
poststructuralism even as it continues to rely on its tools. W i l l the "restless and
revisionary energy" o f our o w n time "transform the present into an expanded
and ex-centric site o f experience and empowerment"? 4 I n 2014, the triumphal
political investments o f " p o s f ' - t h i n k i n g often seem out o f proportion to any
realistic assessment o f the actual efficacy o f essays, books, and lectures i n the
world. I do not offer these thoughts i n the mode o f moral correction or as a fecipe
for a better politics.
N o r is my inquiry a side-taking move in the Foucault-Derrida debate. Fifty
years later, the dispute feels a bit like a period piece whose details are o f interest
primarily to specialists. Rather, I want to rethink Foucault and Derrida as fragments
o f discourse whose emergence and disappearance might be conceived w i t h i n the
frame articulated by Gyan Pandey, where "the very process o f archiving is
accompanied by a process o f 'un-archiving.'" 5 Such a process includes, i n m y
analysis, an engagement w i t h the question o f subaltern speech introduced by

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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak i n her classic essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?"
(1988). 6 Spivak's repeated, public attempts to rethink her o w n w o r k display a
revisionary impulse she shares w i t h Derrida and Foucault. I n her repeated returns
to the question o f subaltern speech she posed i n 1988, Spivak has helped shape the
contours o f postcolonial theory and its reception o f the t w o thinkers she engages
in her famous essay: Foucault ( w i t h Deleuze) and Derrida. Whatever one's
position regarding the debate, I suggest that today we read Foucault, Derrida, and
Spivak as the residual fragments o f a postcolonial archive that can be taken up
into the series o f events to w h i c h they belong. 7 Such an undertaking w i l l hardly
stabilizein a better, more complete, less violent archive 8 the ground o f our
historical knowledge. Rather, to r i f f on Foucault, taking up these fragments can
restore to our archival present "its rifts, its instability, its flaws," un-archiving a
ground "that is once more stirring under our feet." 9
Rethinking the Foucault-Derrida debate and its uptake by Spivak i n that uneasy,
un-archiving, postcolonial interface between history and philosophy, I bring to the
fore conceptual and methodological issues that might challenge our received
understanding o f French poststructuralism and the question o f its relevance to our
age. U p to the present, and f o l l o w i n g Derrida's lecture and Foucault's 1972
response i n " M y Body, This Paper, This Fire," commentary on the debate has
focused primarily on philosophical questions regarding the t w o thinkers' divergent interpretations o f Descartes. 10 I n highlighting the antihumanist stance
Foucault and Derrida share i n their familiar critique o f the epistemic violence o f
Enlightenment humanism, I want to insist on the historical question o f Algeria's
absence from discourse related to their debate. B o t h Foucault and Derrida asserted
that the same humanist ideals w h i c h ushered i n the A g e o f Reason also served to
justify Europe's territorial expansion and the subjugation o f its supposedly irrational colonial others." A n d yet, neither the debate itself nor the commentary on
it has had much to say about the very specific colonial relation that directly
affected the Foucault-Derrida generation: the 132-year French occupation o f
A l g e r i a that ended after a brutal war (1954-1962) i n the year that falls exactly
between the publication o f Foucault's book and Derrida's response to i t .
E x a m i n i n g the un-archiving o f A l g e r i a in Derrida's response to Foucault offers
a w a y to approach the historical " w o r k o f remembering" French poststructuralism
as what Pandey calls "a project o f forgetting." 1 2 A l t h o u g h Pandey refers to
Foucault's History of Madness and the rationalist limits o f the archive in making
this point, the formulation is also Derridean: i t articulates the Heideggerian disclosure o f being i n concealment that Derrida reworks, i n the late 1960s, as the
spacing and temporalization o f w r i t i n g through differance. Regarding Algeria,
the particularity o f its appearance, disappearance, and reappearance i n poststructuralism can be explained, i n part, by the temporal disjuncture between events and
the discourses that describe them. Un-archiving expresses not only the material
exclusions o f "untouchability" 1 3 that structure the archive but also the temporal
out-of-syncness that separates discourse from lived events. A s Foucault famously
puts it on the final page o f The Archeology of Knowledge: "Discourse is not life;
its t i m e is not your t i m e . " 1 4

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This means, more concretely, that an assertion like Robert Young'sthat

poststructuralism is a "product" o f the Algerian Warcan be helpful but also
conceptually reductive. " I f so-called post-structuralism is the product o f a single
historical moment," Young writes i n the first sentence o f White Mythologies
(1990), "then that moment is probably not M a y 1968 but rather the Algerian War
o f Independence." I am less sure than Young is about the linear causalities that
undergird his claim. Only the stability o f a present that ends i n us can allow us to
grasp, i n "a single historical moment," the definitive origin o f our o w n "post"condition. Nonetheless, Young's statement has been taken up as a starting point
for more detailed explorations o f the Algerian roots o f poststructuralism. 1 5
A n d although Young h i m s e l f does not pursue the specific Algerian question
w i t h w h i c h he opens his book, his provocative statement provides a good place to
begin this essay's inquiry into the implications o f the un-archived Derrida passage.
H o w does the received history o f French poststructuralism simultaneously bring
Algeria into v i e w and, at the same time, make it slip away? A n d h o w might this
question implicate us, i n our o w n contemporary mal d'archive?

Un-archiving Algeria
As a Sephardic Jew whose forebears had lived i n N o r t h A f r i c a long before the
1830 French invasion, Derrida's relation to Algeria is complex. As the French
historian Edward Baring explains i n "Liberalism and the Algerian War" (2010),
although the 1940 abrogation o f the Cremieux decree by the Vichy regime revoked
the citizenship status o f French Jews, that loss o f citizenship during the N a z i
occupation reinforced Jewish allegiance to a French republican ideal and
produced, as Derrida h i m s e l f recalls, "a desire for integration i n the non-Jewish
community." 1 6 I n Baring's view, this allegiance to France provides a context for
Derrida's defense o f Algerian liberalism i n the early 1960s. A s Baring explains, i n
a private letter dated A p r i l 1961, Derrida responded to his friend, Pierre Nora,
whose scathing condemnation o f the Frangais d'Algerie (1961) had just been
published. I n the letter, Derrida supports Nora's pro-independence political
position, but regards his condemnation o f Algerian liberals as unfair. Derrida had
left Algeria i n 1949 to attend the elite Parisian high school, Lycee Louis-le-Grand,
w h i c h w o u l d launch h i m toward his career as a philosopher and academic star.
Over the course o f the 1950s Derrida supported the expansion o f political rights
to all Algerians i f not actual independence from France. B u t like many French
Algerian liberals, by 1961 Derrida's position had changed i n favor o f Algerian
independence. Indeed, as the historian o f French Algeria Todd Shepard explains,
"the conviction that Algeria was part o f France remained dominant throughout the
1950s. Legally, as is sometimes forgotten, all Algerians were French citizens and
all o f Algeria was part o f the French Republic." 1 7 After 1962, however, "French
elites came to see Algerian independence as necessitated by the logic o f history
itself," the result o f what one French report called "that unavoidable and planetary
evolution that has been called decolonization." Baring's claim that, in the early
1960s, Derrida maintained the position that French republican ideals d i d not

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contradict the dismantling o f French colonial rule is consistent w i t h French

government policy and the prevailing views o f the French elite at the time. But as
my reading o f the deleted passage w i l l suggest, Derrida's o w n relation to this
position is more complex than this.
The 1963 passage that was later removed elaborates the theme o f a "revolution
against reason" that structures the entire paragraph. I n the sentences that precede
the un-archived passage, Derrida claims that a "revolution against reason" can
only operate, "according to a Hegelian d i m e n s i o n , . . . inside reason." 18 Here then,
is the original passage, later removed, i n w h i c h Derrida develops his point:
A b i t like the anticolonial revolution can only de facto liberate itself from
Europe or the empirical West i n the name o f transcendental Europe, that is
Reason, and first let itself w i n w i t h its values, language, sciences, techniques,
and arms; a contamination or irreducible incoherence, that no c r y I
am t h i n k i n g o f Fanon'scan exorcise, however pure and intransigent it
may be. 1 9
Interpreting this 1963 passage both as evidence o f Derrida's pro-French politics
and as a "seminal text for deconstruction," Baring draws attention to Derrida's
proto-deconstructive framing o f the possibility o f internal disturbance " i n terms
o f the Algerian War". Baring also singles out Derrida's replacement o f this passage
i n 1967 by "a more abstract analysis o f the rationality o f history" as the only
instance i n Derrida's extensive revisions to the essays collected together as
L'Ecriture et la difference "where such political claims were silenced." 2 0
Baring's meticulous archival w o r k , coupled w i t h his sophisticated understanding o f phenomenology, M a r x i s m , structuralism, and deconstruction, makes his
interpretation o f Derrida's early years invaluable for anyone interested i n the
history o f 20th century French philosophy. A t the same time, I want to argue that
even as Baring re-archives the deleted passage, "something . . . unarchives itself'
in the process o f selection, classification, framing, and authorizing 2 1 through
w h i c h Baring, and perhaps any historian, explores and reconstitutes a history. In
the case o f Baring's recuperation o f a still retrievable i f somewhat obscure published passage, that un-archived "something" is not "outside" the history o f
French philosophy, but rather one o f its constitutive features. Indeed, the journal
i n w h i c h Derrida first published the un-archived passage was the leading philosophical j o u r n a l o f its t i m e and continues publishing to this day. I n the year that
Derrida published his essay, the j o u r n a l published another article about decolonization that explicitly discusses the Algerian uprising, as w e l l as a meditation on
Islam and Christianity i n "Orient and Occident: I b n ' A r a b i and Kierkegaard." 2 2
A close reading o f the un-archived passage suggests something more complex
at w o r k than a politically motivated act o f suppression. What has been passed over
i n our k n o w i n g o f Derrida? A s Foucault points out i n History of Madness, passing
something over by k n o w i n g i t too much describes the constitutive absence that
structures reason. 23 I t is reason, w e might say, that un-archives. Re-archiving the
un-archived does not mean m a k i n g the invisible appear or m a k i n g silence speak.

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As Derrida puts it i n Monolinguism of the Other, his o w n identity as "FrancoMaghrebin" " w i l l never have been given, only promised or claimed," and "the
silence o f that hyphen" remains. The silence, moreover, is not empty. Derrida
notes: "The silence o f that hyphen does not pacify or appease anything, not a
single torment, not a single torture
A hyphen is never enough to conceal
protests, cries o f anger or suffering, the noise o f weapons, airplanes, and bombs." 2 4
A n d as Foucault famously noted, "there is not one but many silences," 25 that
against w h i c h "the plenitude o f history" erects itself, i n a space "both empty and
peopled . . . o f all the words without language." 26 M y reading, then, is inspired by
this sense o f a restless, un-archiving plurality o f silences that can be signaled, like
Lyotard's differend, even i f they cannot be directly named or spoken. 27
Just as I resist the "suppression" narrative about Derrida's relation to an
Algerian past, so too I resist the recuperative claims o f a tenacious tradition o f
humanist history w r i t i n g . A n j a l i Arondekar asks, w i t h regard to sexuality i n the
colonial archive o f nineteenth-century India: "What i f the recuperative gesture
returns us to a space o f absence?" For Arondekar, the critical task o f archival w o r k
lies i n an approach "that articulates against the guarantee o f recovery." 2 8 The recuperative force o f such a guarantee not only appears to make silence speak, as
Arondekar notes, but also arranges archival fragments into grids o f conceptual
coherence. I n the case o f Derrida's un-archived fragment, Baring's helpful exposure o f the deleted passage inadvertently participates i n a recuperative logic that
makes Derrida's Algerian silence speak i n an archivally based political interpretation. Baring's reading o f the text as "a classic reaffirmation o f the French Algerian
liberal creed, o f the importance o f French ideas, and the necessity o f their use i n
the critique and overturning o f French power" 2 9 is an example o f the k i n d o f "consignation" Derrida describes as a gathering o f heterogeneity into "a single corpus,
in a system or synchrony i n w h i c h all the elements articulate the unity o f an ideal
configuration." 3 0 Baring's interpretation rests on an analogy Derrida makes
explicit i n the 1963 passage between the logic o f reason i n History of Madness
and that o f the anticolonial struggle. " I n arguing that the critique o f reason could
only be made from w i t h i n reason," Baring writes, "Derrida suggested, i n parallel
fashion, that anticolonial thinkers were only able to fully extricate themselves
from Europe using European ideas." While Baring's reading is not technically
incorrect, his political interpretation o f the paragraph papers over an "irreducible
incoherence," to redeploy Derrida's phrase, at the heart o f the passage. 31
I n what follows I offer a close reading o f the 1963 fragment that complicates
the recuperative gesture through w h i c h it might be used either to signal Derrida's
suppression o f Algeria from the mid-1960s to the 1990s or, concomitantly, as
evidence o f Derrida's Eurocentric political commitments. I n The Deaths of the
Author, Jane Gallop invokes an "ethics o f close reading" w h i c h , for her, "has
something to do w i t h respecting what is alive, what is l i v i n g i n theory, trying to
value theory's life, trying to resist all that deadens i t . " She goes on to explain that
Derrida's close reading o f Levinas is "a source for [her] ethics o f reading." 3 2
D r a w i n g on Gallop, I want to suggest that there is a relation between un-archiving
and the practice o f reading that can be conceived i n ethical terms. What is more

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"ordinary" than reading? A n d yet, as Gallop and other skilled close readers demonstrate, there is more to a sentence than meets the eye. Reading, then, engages
the same play o f absence and presence, what w e acknowledge and what we miss,
what deserves comment and what gets passed over i n silence. Close reading might
be regarded as a methodological choice to signal some o f the "silences" i n the
archive.
Let me begin w i t h an obvious observation about the passage as a whole: it is not
simply or even primarily a passage about the Algerian War. A l t h o u g h Baring
refers to it i n these terms, no direct reference to Algeria appears there. This does
not mean the passage does not address the question o f the French colonial relation
to Algeria. B u t the entire passage, awkwardly introduced by the simile"a bit
l i k e " i s presented i n a metaphorical mode: the relation Derrida is about to
describe is "a bit l i k e " the Hegelian dialectical structure that produces the revolut i o n against reason as an internal agitation. Thus, concomitantly, both "Algeria"
and "France" appear not directly, but through figures o f substitution. I n the first
part o f the passage, Algeria appears as "the anticolonial revolution" w h i l e France
becomes "Europe," the "West" and, ultimately, "Reason." I n the last part o f the
passage, Algeria is figured i n the " c r y " o f "Fanon" whose Les Damnes de la terre
[The Wretched of the Earth] (1961) about the Algerian nationalist struggle against
France had been published the same year as Foucault's History of Madness. Given
that metaphorical structure, Baring's interpretation o f the fragment as marked by
an Algerian particularity that is replaced by a "more abstract" passage should give
us pause.
This is not to say that Derrida should have been more precise or particularistic
i n order to "capture" the Algerian reference and, i n so doing, demonstrate his
solidarity w i t h the anticolonial Algerian cause. 33 Rather, the philosophical problem
o f particularity and generality, empiricism and abstraction, frames Derrida's
" p o l i t i c a l " 3 4 reflections on the role o f Europe i n the anticolonial struggle. What
first appears simply as "Europe" quickly bifurcates into "the empirical West" and
"transcendental Europe." A s B a r i n g explains at length i n The Young Derrida and
French Philosophy, the problem o f the relation between the empirical and
the transcendental dominated French phenomenology throughout the 1950s.
I n the passage, that phenomenological pairing reengages the Hegelian dialectic to
w h i c h Derrida alluded (as "the Hegelian dimension") i n the sentences immediately
preceding the passage. This move corresponds to Derrida's early w o r k on Husserl,
where he demonstrates that the Husserlian attempt to dialectically bridge the two
Kantian poles o f empirical realism and transcendental idealism constitutes a
"rupture at the heart o f phenomenology". 3 5 L i k e Paul Ricoeur, w h o taught Derrida,
Derrida concluded that the Hegelian dialectic was not a solution to that tension.
A s he put i t i n his 1954 student thesis, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's
Philosophy, dialectic does not "efface the d i l e m m a " but, rather, allows "the aporia
[to] 'understand i t s e l f as a 'real' aporia." 3 6 A n d as Baring explains, Derrida
repeatedly conceived this aporia as defining the relation between history and
philosophy, between empirical and transcendental k n o w i n g . A s an aporia, the
relation between philosophy and history was paradoxical and therefore irreducibly

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incoherent. "The aim was to show," Baring writes, " h o w philosophy both was
anchored to its time"and therefore historical"and transcended i t . " For
Derrida, philosophy and history were "both constituted and constituting." 3 7 F r o m
this perspective, one could plausibly argue that i n the opposition between an
empirical and a transcendental Reason we see i n the passage, Derrida is w r i t i n g
not so much about the Algerian War as he is about French Hegelian readings o f
Husserl i n the 1950s and the aporetic knot that moved French philosophy from
existential phenomenology to poststructuralism over the course o f the 1960s.
In the passage, Derrida has much more to say about transcendental Europe than
he does about the empirical West, and he has little to say about de facto liberation.
Rather, his comments are focused on the problem o f thinking, o f the law, and what
happens, dejure, i n the name o f a transcendental reason that is inseparably linked
to de facto subjugation. It is here that we can begin to link the Derrida passage to
its most immediate " w o r l d l y " context: a lecture given at the College Philosophique
in response to History of Madness. It is significant, i n that context, that a capitalized
"Reason" comes to dominate the logic Derrida exposes. The logic goes like this:
either the anticolonial revolutionaries liberate themselves i n the name o f something
other than Western Reasonthe same Reason that justified colonial expansion i n
the nineteenth centuryor they fight i n the name o f something other. Foucault
alerts us to the same logic when he calls that "something other" madness. Foucault
further articulates the logic i n explicitly anticolonial terms that have often been
overlooked by readers w h o , f o l l o w i n g Spivak, criticize Foucault for "ignorfing]
both the epistemic violence o f imperialism and the international division o f
labor." 38 But Foucault makes the imperialist stakes o f his critique o f reason clear
in the 1961 preface to History of Madness: " I n the universality o f the Western
ratio, there is this division w h i c h is the Orient: . . . the Orient offered to the
colonizing reason o f the Occident, . . . the Orient is for the Occident everything
that it is not." 3 9 The consequence o f this logic is that liberation itself becomes
intelligible only as a function o f Enlightenment thought. That i n the name o f w h i c h
the colonized must free themselves is the same Reason that subjugated them.
When framed i n this way, Derrida's argument about colonialism is very close
to Foucault's analysis o f the "merciless language o f non-madness" 40 i n History of
Madness. To speak madness is "doubly impossible"; to speak madness is to betray
it, because madness can only speak against itself, i n the language o f reason. Just
as Foucault's History of Madness debunks the m y t h o f Pinel, the father o f modern
psychiatry, w h o on the eve o f the French Revolution supposedly "freed" the mad
from their chains i n the Salpetriere, so too i n the Derrida passage the purity o f
liberation is demystified. I n History of Madness the de facto liberation o f the mad
from their chains in the name of Reason not only confines them further but, as
Foucault's w o r k throughout the 1970s shows, ushers i n a power o f normalization
that simultaneously produces and represses the mad and the "abnormal." A n d
while the history o f colonization and decolonization is hardly identical to that o f
the management o f madness, the logic Foucault exposes is not irrelevant to the
constitutive exclusions o f Western reason that postcolonial theorists have explored
at length.

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A s Baring points out, the Derrida passage applies this logic to the anticolonial
revolution. But as mentioned above, I depart from Baring's conclusion that
Derrida's views simply reflect a "classic . . French Algerian liberal creed" and a
loyalty to "French ideas." 41 Rather than interpreting Derrida's presentation o f
Reason as an embrace o f French republican ideals, could w e not just as plausibly
read it as an indictment o f transcendental Europe's "merciless" power to colonize
the mind? H o w does one unthink a colonized thinking? H o w does one decolonize
the m i n d ? 4 2 A n d what is the relation between that decolonization and de facto
liberation? Derrida goes so far as to suggest that de facto liberation requires,
["d'abord"], a l l o w i n g oneself to fight w i t h the master's tools: "its values, language, sciences, techniques, and arms ["armes"]. This may be less an embrace o f
continuing French influence over its former colonies than a diagnosis o f the same
constitutive paradox Foucault exposes i n History of Madness: i n their liberation,
i n the name o f humanism, the m a d were once again, and more insidiously,
confined.
Does decolonizing the m i n d u n t h i n k i n g Western thinkingmean a fall into
madness? Is that the only option w h e n faced w i t h Reason's "merciless" language?
Derrida alludes to this question i n the second half o f the passage, where he introduces "contamination" and an "irreducible incoherence." The former colonies'
"contamination" by Reason is not an impurity that can be surgically removed;
indeed, after 132 years o f occupation, the anticolonial is constitutively "impure":
the colonial and the anticolonial, Reason and madness, are inextricably connected
but i n a relation that is radically asymmetrical. Indeed, the "contamination" suggests that the anticolonial is itself irreducibly contained w i t h i n Reason, w i t h i n the
colonial. The anticolonial is thus also the colonial: an "irreducible incoherence."
A n d just as History of Madness narrates a shift from the leper model o f exclusion
"outside" to the plague model o f exclusion " w i t h i n " represented by the Great
Confinement, so too the story o f a separate, precolonial A l g e r i a that became part
o f Franceand therefore colonialreveals a similar relation o f exclusion within:
the Algerian "other" is excluded w i t h i n France, w i t h i n the West, w i t h i n Reason.
I n this reading, Derrida's diagnosis o f the situation i n the immediate aftermath of
the Algerian War both aligns w i t h Foucault's argument and anticipates the later
t h i n k i n g o f postcolonial scholars.
L i k e the constitutive paradox o f madness as a product o f reason, this "contamination" o f anticolonial revolution by the colonial produces an "irreducible incoherence" at the heart o f the liberation struggle. Indeed, Derrida's key terms in the
second part o f the passage repeat Foucault's i n History of Madness: contaminat i o n and incoherence are part o f the fabric o f the historical divisions Foucault
traces between intelligibility and unintelligibility and the "purification" of
madness by reason. The final part o f the passage, where Derrida invokes a " c r y I
am t h i n k i n g o f Fanon's"both exposes this logic and performs a crucial displacement, unsettling Baring's reading o f the fragment as a pro-French, political
claim that Derrida w i l l later have to silence.
Thus "Fanon" becomes a metaphor for Algeria itself. M o r e specifically, t h e
proper name, Fanon, stands i n for the Algerian revolutionary whose pure cry of

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freedom can only be heard as something other than a cry or even a "no c r y "
[aucun cri]: something translated into the language o f Europe. Paradoxically,
Fanon's " c r y " is both that non-language and, at the same time, the language o f
Europe. Most immediately, w e can take Fanon's cry to refer to a text, written i n
French and published i n Paris i n 1961a cry then, that appears, i n the language
o f Reason. That text, as I mentioned, is Fanon's 77ze Wretched of the Earth,
published t w o years before Derrida's lecture, where Fanon exhorts his comrades
to "leave this Europe." "We must find something different," Fanon asserts: "We
today can do everything, so i o n g as we do not imitate Europe." Fanon concludes:
" I t is no good sending them back a reflection, even an ideal reflection, o f their
society and their thought. . . . We must turn over a new leaf, we must w o r k out
new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man." 4 3
I n reading Fanon's cry i n this way, we could say that Derrida clearly refutes the
very possibility o f any "pure" revolutionary intransigence vis-a-vis the colonizing
power, and that he therefore directly rejects Fanon's political, anticolonial call at
the end o f The Wretched of the Earth. But the " c r y " o r is it a "no cry"?is more
complex than this. Indeed, the " c r y " ricochets out from the lived experience o f
the Algerian Revolution toward History of Madness, Derrida's passage, and The
Wretched of the Earth to undermine the very Reason whose production and contamination o f its Other seems ineluctable and inescapable. Specifically, Derrida
links the " c r y " to an exorcism that draws together Foucault, Derrida, and Fanon in
their exposure o f the epistemic violence o f Western Reason. Derrida writes that
"no c r y I am thinking o f Fanon'scan exorcise" the contaminating incoherence
o f Western Reason. Here Foucault's analysis o f reason and madness allows us to
trace Derrida's displacement o f his initial claim about the inescapability o f transcendental Europe. I n History of Madness, Foucault repeatedly uses exorcism to
describe the operations o f Reason as a rite o f purification and exclusion. 4 4 Foucault
opens the 1961 preface w i t h an image o f exorcism: i n describing "that other trick
that madness plays," Foucault writes that "we need to identify the moment o f that
exorcism [conjuration]."45 A n d again, i n the first paragraph o f History of Madness
itself, Foucault opens the book w i t h a description o f the medieval exclusion o f
lepers into "the domain o f the inhuman" through constantly renewed rites o f
"purification and exclusion." A n d finally, w i t h regard to Descartes, over the course
o f History of Madness Foucault elaborates the productive and repressive logic o f
exorcism as both a conjuration and an expulsion. A l l u d i n g perhaps to Descartes's
o w n invocation and exorcism o f an " e v i l genius" i n the Meditations, Foucault
writes, "the Cartesian progression o f doubt is certainly the great exorcism
o f madness." This act o f exorcisma driving out o f the mad demon summoned
by Descartes i n the repeated incantations that constitute systematic doubt
paradoxically fills i n the v o i d produced by the exclusion o f madness from
the cogito. Thus madness as an absenceas exorcised error, as reason's negation, as the nothingness that shatters thinking, as the "inhuman"becomes,
paradoxically, the conjured "plenitude" o f reason.
I n a similar fashion, although more elliptically, Derrida's reference to exorcism
exposes the "madness" o f Western reason and the violence o f its rites o f purification

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and exclusion. W h e n he writes about an "irreducible incoherence" that no pure

cry can exorcise, he has displaced the Enlightenment terms through which the
colonizer as reason defines itself i n relation to a colonized madness. The madness
or incoherence at the heart o f this passage is the madness o f transcendental
Europe that both conjures and excludes its colonial other as the "Self's shadow,"
to b o r r o w Spivak's terms. 4 6 N o cry can exorcise the demonic logic o f Western
exorcism. This means, importantly, that after the first part o f the sentence, after the
semicolon, after afirst attempt at liberation by using the master's tools, it turns out
that the master's tools w i l l not dismantle the colonial house. Fanon's exorcising
cry cannot undo the conjuring power o f Cartesian exorcism because the madness o f reason's colonial other turns out to be the madnessthe "irreducible
incoherence"at the heart o f colonizing reason.
F r o m this perspective, i n the second h a l f o f the passage Derrida's apparent
refutation o f Fanon may i n fact be read as an alignment w i t h h i m . W h e n Derrida
writes that "no cry . . . can exorcise" a contaminating Reason he redeploys the
same term used by Fanon, w h o writes in The Wretched of the Earth: "independence
is not a w o r d w h i c h can be used as an exorcism."4'' I n Derrida, however, Fanon's
"word""independence"becomes a "pure" and "intransigent" "cry." Derrida
and Fanon w o u l d agree that both " w o r d " and " c r y " are powerless i n their attempts
to undo colonial power: no w o r d , no cry.
A n d yet, i n the paradoxical logic o f Western reasonwhere madness is reason
and where the anticolonial is colonialFanon's "no c r y " instantiates the aporia
that not only constitutes reason but also undoes it. W i t h i n the logic o f madness,
the cry signals what Foucault calls the "absence o f an oeuvre," an absence he
associates w i t h "Nietzsche's last c r y " when, marking the moment when Nietzsche
goes mad, the cry marks "the destruction o f the oeuvre itself, the point at which it
becomes impossible, and where i t must begin to silence itself: the hammer falls
from the philosopher's hand." 4 8 I f the philosopher's hammer is, indeed, the tool of
Reason, w i e l d e d " i n the name o f transcendental Europe," then perhaps Derrida's
seeming dismissal o f Fanon is not a dismissal at all. I n the context o f the logic of
the cry i n History of Madness, Fanon's cry is not an exorcismhis cry is a "no
cry"because exorcism, like language and like Fanon's " w o r d , " 4 9 is the
philosopher's most "merciless" tool.
B u t i f Fanon's cry is not an exorcism, i t might just be, like the Nietzschean cry
i n History of Madness, "the constitutive moment o f an abolition" 5 0 not easily
grasped i n a wordless space o f "physical suffering and terror" that Fanon,
Foucault, and Derrida can only name, i n the language o f transcendental Europe,
i n their w r i t i n g . N o w o r d can name "the silence o f the hyphen," the sounds without
language"the cries o f anger or suffering, the noise o f weapons, airplanes, and
b o m b s " 5 1 o f Reason's merciless violence. A n d no w o r d n o master's t o o l w i l l
b r i n g an anticolonial revolution, because the thinking that brings the w o r d is the
colonizing thought o f Western reason and transcendental Europe. Derrida s
paradoxical invocation o f Fanon's "no c r y " signals an absence that is not just
the philosophical aporia that both binds and separates the empirical and the
transcendental: it is an inscription o f a refusal, not o f Fanon, but o f what Arondekar

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describes as "the desire to add and fill in the gaps w i t h voices o f other unvoiced
subalterns." 52 L i k e Nietzsche's cry w h i c h , for Foucault, marks "the collapse o f his
thought", 5 3 Fanon's cry i n Derrida marks the collapse o f a Reason whose
"irreducible incoherence" cannot be thought.

An un-archived history of the vanishing present

What are the implications o f this reading for us today, as a way o f rethinking what
it means to say that the " w o r k o f remembering" twentieth-century French
philosophy has also been "a project o f forgetting"? 5 4 H o w is this formulation a
specifically archival one, and what might it tell us about poststructuralism's
relation to a post-postcolonial mal d'archive! M o r e specifically, what has been
forgotten i n the decades o f commentary on the Foucault-Derrida debate, and h o w
might a return to it help us to negotiate the un-archiving forces o f what Spivak
calls "the social text as vanishing present"? 55
I turn to Spivak here as an influential early theorist o f the subaltern and
postcoloniality w h o also, since the 1990s, has increasingly complained about the
insidious appropriation o f the field she helped to found by a post-Fordist
multiculturalism whose "globality is invoked i n the interest o f the
financialization
o f the globe." Academic knowledge productionincluding poststructuralism and
postcolonial theoryis, for Spivak, complicit w i t h a logic that continues to
un-archive the subaltern even, or especially, through n o w pervasive "academic
assertions" o f "difference." For Spivak, those assertions support "the simulated
specificity o f a radical position, often d i s s i m u l a t i n g ] the i m p l i c i t collaboration o f
the postcolonial i n the service o f e o - c o l o n i a l i s m . " The result, Spivak writes, is
that "the racial underclass and the subaltern South step back into the penumbra." 5 6
This penumbral space is both the same and different than the one Spivak
invoked i n "Can the Subaltern Speak?" republished w i t h slight revisions i n A
Critique of Postcolonial Reason over a decade after its initial appearance. I n her
essay, Spivak brought attention to the figure o f the subaltern woman through a
meditation on the colonial construction o f the spectacle o f Indian w i d o w sacrifice
or sati. " W i t h i n the effaced itinerary o f the subaltern subject," Spivak writes, "the
track o f sexual difference is doubly effaced
I f , i n the context o f colonial
production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female
is even more deeply i n shadow." The "more deeply" refers back to an invocation
o f shadow earlier i n the essay, where she castigates Deleuze and Foucault for their
"intellectual c o m p l i c i t [ y ] i n the persistent constitution o f Other as the Self's
shadow." 57 That invocation o f shadow i n "Can the Subaltern Speak?" repeated
in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, signals a recurrence-with-a-difference i n
Spivak's text that is the hallmark o f her Derridean thinking.
In the context o f that thinking, h o w might we reengage Spivak's explicit commitment to deconstruction over and against the early Foucault i n light o f m y
analysis o f the 1963 un-archived Algeria passage i n Derrida? A n d h o w might this
reengagement w i t h Spivak v i a the Foucault-Derrida debate reframe the question
o f poststructuralism's relation to postcolonial theory? I n "Can the Subaltern

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Speak?" Spivak argues that Foucault (and Deleuze) are guilty o f generalization
epistemic violence, and a Utopian desire to allow the other to speak that amounts
to an archival silencing. 5 8 Regarding generalization, Spivak argues that the "concealed Subject" o f Foucault's antihumanist critique o f the subject "has 'no geopolitical determination'" and therefore "actually inaugurates a Subject." O n the
epistemic violence charge, Spivak asserts that Foucault's histories o f clinics,
asylums, and prisons function as "screen-allegories that foreclose a reading o f
the broader narratives o f imperialism." Spivak singles out History of Madness
as the place where Foucault "locates epistemic violence . . . i n the redefinition o f
sanity at the end o f the European eighteenth century" w h i l e obliterating any trace
o f the colonial project. A c c o r d i n g to Spivak, not only does Foucault "ignore" the
broader "epistemic violence o f imperialism and the international division o f
labor," but he, along w i t h Deleuze, indulges i n a "reverse-ethnic sentimentality"
that "leads to an essentialist, Utopian politics." Foucault thus commits an epistemic violence o f his o w n by simultaneously ignoring imperialism and suggesting
that "the oppressed can k n o w and speak for themselves." 59
T h i r d , Spivak's critique regarding archival silencingher claim that Foucault
i m p l i c i t l y silences the subaltern i n his "sentimental" assertion that she can speak
for herself as Other even as the West ignores herbrings out the crux o f what we
m i g h t n o w see as an un-archiving question: "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Locating
a "violent aporia between subject and object" i n the example o f sati as the
"disappearance" o f "woman-in-imperialism," Spivak concludes i n 1988 that "the
subaltern cannot speak." 60 A n d although Spivak repeatedly lays claim to her identity as a literary critic and not a historian, she supports this conclusion on historiographical, archival grounds. 6 1 Reclaiming the archive as a site o f political
intervention, Spivak argues that our charge is not to make the subaltern speak, as
Foucault supposedly does w i t h the mad, but to engage i n an "archival, historiog r a p h y , disciplinary-critical, and, inevitably, interventionist w o r k " as "a task o f
'measuring silences.'" That task, Spivak knows, is a difficult one, and skirts the
danger o f i n v o k i n g the ineffable or what we might call the French sublime.
Perhaps the historian's methodological grounding i n the archive is one way to
avoid that philosophical danger: the archive is the concrete site where silence
imprints its traces. As Spivak points out after consulting the "grotesquely mistranscribed names" o f the "sacrificed w i d o w s " i n the East India Company police
reports that record nineteenth-century cases o f sati: "one cannot put together a
' v o i c e ' . " "The most one can sense," Spivak writes, "is the immense heterogeneity
breaking through even such a skeletal and ignorant account." 62
W h i l e I agree w i t h Spivak's sense o f our archival task, her articulation o f that
task contra Foucault weakens an otherwise persuasive argument. Regarding
Foucault, m y purpose here is not to engage i n a point-by-point contestation o f
Spivak's claims. 6 3 Let me simply summarize what I v i e w as three general problems
i n Spivak's critique o f Foucault: (1) an inaccurate reading o f what Foucault
actually writes regarding utopianism, archival silence versus speech, and the
othering logic o f a "colonising reason," especially i n History of Madness; (2) a
non-investigation o f the Foucault archive and the numerous instances where

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Foucault speaks explicitly about capitalism and anticolonial struggle; 6 4 and (3) a
theoretical and methodological investment i n Derridean deconstruction that
structures

Spivak's comments

i n opposition to Foucault according to the

entrenched divisions o f an institutionalized debate rather than an actual reading

o f Foucault's texts.
I n "Can the Subaltern Speak?" and perhaps inadvertently echoing Foucault
himself, Spivak's point is not that Foucault is bad, but that he's dangerous. 65 A s
she puts it at the end o f her essay: " I find [Derrida's] morphology much more
painstaking and useful than Foucault's and Deleuze's immediate, substantive
involvement w i t h more ' p o l i t i c a l ' issues . . . w h i c h can make their influence more
dangerous for the US academic as enthusiastic radical." B y contrast, Spivak
argues, Derrida's less explicitly political w r i t i n g "is less dangerous when understood than the first-world intellectual masquerading as the absent nonrepresenter
who lets the oppressed speak for themselves." 66
Spivak importantly reminds us that the role o f the first-world intellectual is a
crucial question. But i n a w o r l d where "everything is dangerous," as Foucault puts
it, i t seems unhelpful to weigh the relative dangers o f a Foucauldian versus a
Derridian position. 6 7 This is not to diminish Spivak's incisive interventions into
the insidious logic through w h i c h the Other is constructed and appropriated as the
shadow o f the radical multicultural Self. N o one knows better than she that even
the most left-leaning postcolonial intellectual is complicit in that logic. I f "Western
intellectual production is, i n many ways, complicit w i t h international economic
interests," Spivak is aware o f "the precariousness o f [her o w n ] p o s i t i o n " 6 8 as an
intellectual producer w h o straddles a distorting Western/non-Western binarism
that, nonetheless, continues to enlist her in its logic. A n d as Spivak points out i n A
Critique of Postcolonial Reason, even i n the terminological and geographical
switch o f metaphors from West/non-West to North/South, "the Woman from the
South" continues to be "the favored agent-as-instrument o f transnational capital's
globalizing reach" 6 9 i n ways that repeat-with-a-difference an earlier colonial
template.
Sadly, perhaps, this leaves i n Spivak a rhetoric o f failure regarding the progressive political project to rethink the postcolonial. The sense o f failure is all the
more poignant given the immense effort behind what we might call a Spivak
archive, stretching over decades, that provides a theoretical foundation for a postcolonial reading o f the un-archived Derrida passage. In bringing Spivak forward,
as I have in this section, I do not simply re-archive "postcolonial w o m a n " i n order
to chase away the sadness or soften the failure. A s Spivak herself repeatedly
points out, there is no triumphalist reversal to be made i n w h i c h the formerly colonized are, as Fanon puts it, "truly liberated" 7 0 from their colonial masters. There is
no replacing silence w i t h voice, because the un-archiving force o f silence is constitutive o f what we call our archive. I n this reading o f Derrida, Foucault, and
Spivak, I have greatly expanded the concept o f the archive, perhaps to the consternation o f historians. B u t i f un-archiving means more than the static, material nonpresence o f the "voice" o f the mad or the subaltern i n the official records that form
the foundation o f our histories, we must attend to its philosophical structure: the

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Lynne Huffer

construction o f an alterity that buttresses an Enlightened self whose violence is

masked by its claims to uphold justice and freedom. Whether read, a la Derrida,
as a catachrestic origin that forces us to confront our complicity w i t h the forces
that assimilate and silence the other or, a la Foucault, as the paradox that frames
the speaking o f alterity as its constitutive betrayal, I want to insist that this philosophical attention to Enlightenment Reason's betrayal is also, as Pandey suggests,
a "political challenge." 71 B o t h Derrida and Foucault teach us that we cannot know,
ahead o f time, where those contestations w i l l leave us. A s Spivak puts it in her
titular reprise o f what is, after a l l , the Foucauldian concept o f a history o f the
present, she is "one w o m a n teetering on the socle mouvant o f the history o f
the vanishing present, running after 'culture' on the run, failure guaranteed." 72
One o f the specific names Spivak gives to that failure i n A Critique of
Postcolonial
Reason is " A l g e r i a . " Spivak recounts her experience behind
"European podiums" where she "earned the ire" o f her audiences because she
"warned that much o f US academic postcolonialism was bogus." It was the
Algerians, she notes, w h o reacted differently than the others because, she says,
"they were confronting their difference from the failure o f decolonization in
A l g e r i a . " 7 3 Spivak does not elaborate, but her insinuation that the struggle for
Algerian independence might be viewed as a failure is unmistakable.
To be sure, we need to nuance this language o f failure. F r o m Nelson Mandela
to Yassir Arafat, James B a l d w i n , and Angela Davis, the A l g e r i a n Revolution has
long functioned as a powerful symbol o f liberation for the marginalized and the
oppressed. This continues to be the case even today, especially i n the Arab world.
Nonetheless, Spivak's story o f a vanishing present points to another, less celebratory discourse about the Revolution, especially among Algerians themselves.
W i t h i n Algeria, there is a gap between the official presentation o f Algerian decolonization as a picture o f t r i u m p h and the less rosy v i e w o f Algeria's people. The
fraught reception o f the 2012 celebration o f Algeria's fiftieth anniversary o f independence illustrates this point. 7 4 The Bouteflika government staged festivities at
the stadium o f Algiers that included a symbolic reenactment o f the French invasion i n 1830 and a dramatization o f the War o f Independence as a story o f freedom.
A t the same time, Algerians themselves continue to criticize the "nebulous nature"
o f the r u l i n g power o f the Bouteflika government and its "paranoid form o f neropolitics" as "the paradigmatic symbol o f post-colonial power." A s M u r i a m Haleh
Davis sees i t , for example, a neocolonial m i m i c r y "rules A l g e r i a " through an
"internal colonialism." After a decade o f c i v i l war i n the 1990s that suppressed the
Islamist party at the cost o f 200,000 lives, the result today is a "pervasive bitterness at the fact that, fifty years [after independence], the regime has done very
little to improve the lives o f the population." 7 5
Other commentators describe a "collegial despotism" i n a contemporary
Algerian government whose o i l revenues reinforce the regime and pacify the population through the "redistribution o f petro-dollars a la Bouteflika." 7 6 Hamza
Hamouchene describes the "thwarted independence" o f an Algerian people who
"realise that the corrupt pouvoir betrayed the r e v o l u t i o n . " 7 7 A n d if, as Davis suggests, algerianite "has become the buzzword o f postcolonial studies," 78 it is also

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true that Algeria's authoritarian government is increasingly the darling o f the US

and the United Nations i n the global war on terror. A s a 2009 Carnegie Endowment
report describes it, especially since 9/11 "Algerian expertise i n counterterrorism
[is] an international resource to be shared." 79 N o t only does Algeria assist the
global war on terror through intelligence networks and participation i n multilateral counterterrorism projects sponsored by the US and the U N , 8 0 but A l g e r i a is
also considered to be o f strategic importance as the sixth-largest supplier o f o i l
and gas to the US. A n d despite the riots that began i n Algeria days before
Mohammed Bouazzizi's self-immolation i n Tunisia i n December 2010, the " A r a b
Spring" that followed i n Tunisia, Egypt, and L i b y a has so far bypassed Algeria.
The 2012 parliamentary election that was boycotted by 60-80 percent o f the
Algerian population was derided by most Algerians as a sham, 81 even as US
Secretary o f State and former First Lady H i l l a r y Clinton, i n what Spivak w o u l d
call "UN-style universalist feminist" 8 2 fashion, "praised the vote and, in particular,
the h i g h number o f w o m e n elected as 'a welcome step i n Algeria's progress
toward democratic r e f o r m . ' " 8 3
"The failure o f decolonization i n A l g e r i a " : m y b r i e f elaboration o f what
Spivak's phrase might mean today is a superficial sketch o f the distance traveled
between a fragment o f a lecture i n the early 1960s and our contemporary postpostcolonial moment. B u t even a sketch makes it clear that there is as much at
stake n o w i n the un-archiving o f Algeria as there was immediately f o l l o w i n g
independence. If, as A h l u w a l i a claims, Algeria is the name we can give to a certain
"failure o f poststructuralism to confront or acknowledge the colonial experience", 84
Spivak's critique o f a "neoliberal" postcolonial reason points to yet another,
theoretical "failure o f decolonization" that reverberates w i t h the Algerian story.

Coda
Let me end this essay w i t h a turn to the ordinary lives o f ordinary people. What is
the link between these massive "failures"of revolutions, o f attempts to
decolonize the m i n d , o f poststructuralism's postcolonial resistance to Western
Reasonand what Khadija Patel calls the lives o f "ordinary Algerians"? 8 5 A n d
what is being invoked i n this turn to the ordinary? Spivak too makes this move: " I
want to dwell on this very ordinariness," she writes, describing her archival
investigations into the Rani o f Sirmur w h o "died a natural death." Turning toward
"the final Foucault" w h i l e remaining dissatisfied w i t h the early one, Spivak
explains that she wants "to dwell on [this very ordinariness] because w o r k w i t h
deconstructive approaches to the subject and w i t h the ethical concerns o f the final
Foucault have made [her] more and more aware o f the importance o f the neglected
details o f the everyday." 86
This " f i n a l " convergence o f Foucault and Derrida i n Spivak's invocation o f the
"everyday" death o f her archival subject might feel like a stable platform from
w h i c h to launch a re-archiving project that w i l l take the ordinary into account and,
so doing, temper what Derrida calls "archival violence" 8 7 w i t h a heavy dose o f
ethics. But even i f we decide, as so many have done since the 1960s, to closely

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examine the ethical conditions o f our politics, through attention to the local, t h e
particular, and the everyday, I doubt there is much peace or stability to be found
i n that move. N o r can ethics be an escape from politics. A s Julian Bourg puts it ^
his study o f the post M a y 1968 turn to ethics i n French philosophy and "the truly
popular explosion o f ethical fascination throughout the West during the 1990s""ethics is a necessary yet insufficient condition for social and political life." 8 8 Our
ethics, like our politics, w i l l remain unstable, contested, fraught: our only platform
is a " m o v i n g base" where Spivak stands "as [her] text seeks to catch the vanishing
present." That " m o v i n g base" is the same socle mouvant Spivak invoked
immediately after her description o f the Algerians i n Europe and their sense of
"the failure o f decolonization i n A l g e r i a . " The scene at the "European podiums"
left her "teetering," she wrote, " o n the socle mouvant o f the history o f the vanishing
present." 89
What better image for the archival foundation o f an un-archived present than a
thinker teetering before an angry audience, behind a podium that threatens to tip
over? The ground o f our intellectual w o r k i n 2012 is the socle mouvant o f a
present that disappears. That socle mouvant is as m u c h Spivak's image as it is
Derrida's and Foucault's: a "catachrestic concept-metaphor" that Spivak borrowed
from Foucault i n an earlier essay, " M o r e on Power/Knowledge" (1992) i n which,
four years after "Can the Subaltern Speak?," she attempted to think Foucault and
Derrida together. 90 W i t h the socle mouvant as her guiding metaphor i n A Critique
of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak elliptically reclaims her 1992 effort to make
Foucault and Derrida converge. A t the same time, i n republishing the more
oppositional arguments that frame "Can the Subaltern Speak?," Spivak reinscribes
a Foucault-Derrida divergence. But as the image o f the m o v i n g base makes clear,
neither convergence nor divergence can capture the anti-thinking chill o f an
"ethical aporia" or "aporetic b i n d " 9 ' that characterizes this particular vanishing
present. Forget the angry audience. I n 2014, when the thinker speaks, is anyone
there to hear her? Spivak's socle mouvant offers a perfect metaphor for what
un-archiving might mean from such an "everyday, ordinary" academic perspective.
N o use despairing. Better to keep trying. A s Gallop puts it i n her reading of
Spivak, the m o v i n g base describes "the strategic temporality o f daily effort that
. . . w e m i g h t call 'persistent r e v i s i o n . ' " 9 2 Persistent revision includes not just the
writerly efforts that contribute to knowledgesome o f i t canonical, some o f it
n o t i n w h i c h some passages emerge while others disappear. Let persistent
revision also describe the rift-restoring, political practice o f t h i n k i n g
un-archiving our presenteven as our present, like the ground beneath our feet,
tends to slip away.

Notes
1 For the original 1963 Derrida lecture, see Jacques Derrida, "Cogito et histoire de la
folie," Revue de metaphysique et de morale 68.4 (1963): 460-94, hereafter cited as
R M M . For the 1967 version of the essay see "Cogito et histoire de la folie," L 'Ecriture
et la difference (Paris, 1967), 51-98, hereafter cited as ED. For the English translation
of the 1967 essay see Jacques Derrida, "Cogito and History of Madness," in Writing

Un-archiving Algeria: Foucault, Derrida, and Spivak

175

and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978), 31-63. Derrida's lecture responds to
Michel Foucault's History of Madness (trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa
[London, 2006], hereafter cited as HM), originally published in 1961 as Folie et deraison: Histoire de la folie a I 'age classique [Madness and Unreason: History of Madness
in the Classical Age]. The un-archived passage was brought to my attention by Edward
Baring in his 2010 essay, "Liberalism and the Algerian War: The Case of Jacques
Derrida," Critical Inquiry 36.2 (2010): 239-61. Baring cites the deleted 1963 passage
in the context of his broader analysis of Derrida's complex relation to the politics of the
Algerian anticolonial struggle in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Baring's book-length
study of Derrida's early formation as a French intellectual devotes several pages both to
the 1963 lecture and to the revisions Derrida made to the essays that constitute Writing
and Difference, but he does not explicitly discuss the deletion of the Algerian reference
from the "Cogito" essay in his book. See Edward Baring, The Young Derrida and
French Philosophy, 1945-1968 (Cambridge, 2011), especially 194-7 and 184-9.
2 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz
(Chicago, 1996), 91.
3 The Location of Culture (London, 1994), 6.
4 Ibid.
5 Gyan Pandey, Chapter 1 of this volume.
6 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana, 1988)
271-313.
7 See especially Michel Foucault, "Preface to the 1972 Edition," History of Madness, for
his description o f his book as an "object-event" (xxxviii) that ruptures and disappears.
8 Both Derrida and Foucault describe the archive as violent. See Derrida, Archive Fever:
"What is at issue here," he writes, "is the violence o f the archive itself, as archive, as
archival violence" (7, original emphasis). Foucault's most sustained reflection on the
violence of the archive can be found in his "Lives o f Infamous Men" (1977), where he
returns to the archive that allowed him to write History of Madness. There he encounters,
in the archival traces o f "lowly lives reduced to ashes" (158) a "jostling violence" in
"the facts they tell" (157). See Michel Foucault, "Lives of Infamous Men," in Essential
Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol. 3, ed. James Faubion (New York, 2000), 157-75.
9 In the preface to The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New
York, 1970), Foucault, writes: " I am restoring to our silent and apparently immobile
soil its rifts, its instability, its flaws; and it is the same ground that is once more stirring
under our feet" (xxiv).
10 Michel Foucault, " M y Body, This Paper, This Fire," Appendix I I o f 1972 Edition,
History of Madness, 550-74.
11 See especially Falguni Sheth, Toward a Political Philosophy of Race (Albany, NY, 2009),
especially Chapter Three, "The Unruly: Strangeness, Madness, and Race," 65-85.
12 Pandey, Chapter 1, this volume.
13 Ibid, 21, 23.
14 Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A . M . Sheridan (New York,
1972), 211.
15 See especially Pal Ahluwalia, Out of Africa: Post-Structuralism's Colonial Roots
(London, 2010).
16 Jacques Derrida, in Baring, "Liberalism and the Algerian War," 246.
17 Todd Shepard, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking
of France (Ithaca, 2006), 7, for this and the quotations in the next two sentences.
18 R M M 466, translation mine. These sentences immediately preceding the deleted
passage can be found in Derrida, ED, 59.
19 R M M 466. Here is the French original: "t/npeu comme la revolution anti-colonialiste
ne peut se liberer de I'Europe ou de I'Occident empiriques de fait, qu'au nom de
I'Europe transcendentale, c'est-a-dire de la Raison, et en se laissant d'abord gagner

176

Lynne Huffer

par ses valeurs, son langage, ses sciences, ses techniques, ses armes; contamination ou
incoherence irreductible qu 'aucun crije pense a celui de Fanonne peut exorciser,
si pur et si intransigeant soit-il." As I explain in note 25 below, I have slightly modified
Baring's translation in the 2010 Critical Inquiry article.
20 Baring, "Liberalism and the Algerian War," 257. The passage that replaces the deleted
passage introduces the concept of history as a rational concept. It also puts forward the
concept of a writing which, exceeding the values o f origin, reason, and history, cannot
be contained by the metaphysical closure of a (presumably Foucauldian) archeology.
The replacement passage appears in ED, 59.
21 Pandey, Chapter 1, this volume.
22 See Jacques Berque, "Valeurs de la Decolonisation," Revue de metaphysique et de
morale 68.3 (1963): 302-18 and M . A . Askari, "Orient et Occident: Ibn 'Arabi et
Kierkegaard," suivi de Jean Wahl, "Quelques reflexions," Revue de metaphysique et de
morale 68.1 (1963): 1-24.
23 H M x x x i v .
24 Jacques Derrida, Monolinguism of the Other; or, Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick
Mensah (Stanford, 1998), 11. For an extended analysis of Derrida's Algerian past in
Monolinguism of the Other see Lynne Huffer, "Derrida's Nostalgeria," in Algeria and
France, 1800-2000: Identity, Memory, Nostalgia, ed. Patricia M.E. Lorcin (Syracuse,
2006), 228-A6. I have since revised my view, presented primarily in the essay's
conclusion, regarding abstraction in Derrida.
25 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York, 1990), 27.
26 H M xxxi.
27 Jean-Franqois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den
Abbeele (Minneapolis, 1988). On the differend, the subaltern, and British colonial
conceptions of sati see Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak," 300.
28 Anjali Arondekar, For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India
(Durham, 2009), 1 and 4.
29 Baring, "Liberalism," 257.
30 Derrida, Archive Fever, 3.
31 Baring, "Liberalism," 257.
32 Jane Gallop, The Deaths of the Author: Reading and Writing in Time (Durham, 2011),
24 and 24-5.
33 Kristin Ross's denunciation of structuralist abstraction in the face of anticolonial
struggle is an example of a logic that implicitly enlists empiricism as more politically
aligned with the goal of liberation than theoretical abstraction. "Structural man," Ross
writes, "takes the real, decomposes it, then recomposes it in view of creating the general
intelligibility underlying the object" (161). This critique o f abstraction drives many of
the ongoing debates in the guise o f a "theory versus practice" divide that is actually
about the same empirical versus transcendental opposition Derrida confronts in the
passage. See Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering
of French Culture (Cambridge M A , 1995).
34 Baring, "Liberalism," 257.
35 Ibid, 133.
36 Ibid, 136.
37 Ibid, 143.
38 Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" 289. For influential critiques see especially Ann
Staler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History ofSexuality and the Colonial
Order of Things (Durham, 1995) and Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault ana
the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago, 1995).
39 H M , xxx. In a different interpretation, Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson read this
passage as reinforcing the East-West dualism of a colonial order, concluding tha
"Foucault was probably an Orientalist" (20).

Un-archiving Algeria: Foucault, Derrida, and Spivak

177

40 H M , xxvii.
41 Baring, "Liberalism", 257.
42 For a classic exploration of this question see Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Decolonizing the
Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (New Hampshire, 1986).
43 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York, 2004)
311,312,316.
44 For a detailed analysis of this logic see Lynne Huffer, Madfor Foucault: Rethinking the
Foundations of Queer Theory (New York, 2010), especially chapter 3.
45 H M xxvii, translation modified. The quotations in the rest o f the paragraph are from
ibid, 3, 242 and 244.
46 Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?", 280.
47 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 310.
48 H M , 536.
49 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 310.
50 FIM536.
51 Derrida, Monolinguism, 11.
52 Arondekar, For the Record, 6.
53 H M , 537.
54 Pandey, Chapter 1, this volume.
55 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of
the Vanishing Present (Cambridge M A , 1999), 337.
56 Ibid, 364 and 361.
57 Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?", 287 and 280.
58 Spivak's critiques o f Foucault (and Deleuze) are based on "Intellectuals and Power," a
1972 conversation between Deleuze and Foucault that was published in English
translation (by Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon) in Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice, ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca, 1977), 205-17. The interview was republished
under the same title in 1996 in Sylvere Lotringer's edited collection, Foucault Live:
Interviews, 1961-1984 (New York, 1996), 74-82. The slippage between Foucault and
Deleuze in Spivak's analysis deserves an extended analysis that is beyond the scope o f
this essay.
59 Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?", 271, 272, 291, 289, 276 and 279.
60 Ibid, 306 and 308. In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak revises what she wrote
in her original essay "in the accents of passionate lament: the subaltern cannot speak!"
In 1999 she writes that this "was an inadvisable remark"; better to say that "the
subaltern as female cannot be heard or read" (308).
61 " I am no historian," Spivak writes (Critique, 222); specifically, she claims to have "no
training or aptitude for archival research" (238).
62 Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?", 286 and 297.
63 For a more detailed critical engagement with Spivak's reading o f Foucault, see Pheng
Cheah, "Biopower and the New International Division of Reproductive Labor," in Can
the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, ed. Rosalind C. Morris
(New York, 2010), 179-212.
64 Foucault's comments on his experience living in Tunisia during what he describes as a
postcolonial student resistance to the repressive Tunisian government in 1968 are
especially relevant here. Some o f these comments appear in published interviews,
while others are tucked away in the unpublished Foucault archive.
65 As Foucault famously puts it: "My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything
is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad." See Michel Foucault, "On the
Genealogy of Ethics," Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, Vol. 1, ed. Paul
Rabinow (New York, 1997), 256.
66 Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?", 308 and 292, emphases added.
67 Foucault, "Ethics", 256.
68 Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?", 271.

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70
71
72
73
74

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76

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78
79

80

81

82
83

84
85
86
87
88
89
90

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Lynne Huffer

Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 200-1.

Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 310.
Pandey, Chapter 1, this volume.
Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 359.
Ibid, 358.
See especially Muriam Haleh Davis, "Borders and Bobbing Heads: Postcoloniality and
Algeria's Fiftieth Anniversary o f Independence," Jadaliyya, July 7, 2012, http://www.
jadaliyya.com/pages/index/6330/borders-and-bobbing-heads_postcoloniality-andalge, accessed August 4, 2012.
Ibid, 2 and 3 for preceding quotations.
Hamza Hamouchene, "Algeria and the Arab Spring," Open Democracy, 25 May 2012,
http://www.opendemocracy.net/hamza-hamouchene/algeria-and-arab-spring, accessed
August 4, 2012.
Ibid, 3.
Davis, "Borders and Bobbing Heads", 1.
Mhand Berkouk, "US-Algerian Security Cooperation and the War on Terror," Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, June 2009,
http://carnegieendowment.
org/2009/06/17/u.s.-algerian-security-cooperation-and-war-on-terror/322u,
accessed
August 4, 2012.
Those multilateral projects include the African Center for Studies and Research on
Terrorism (CAERT), hosted by Algeria; the counterterrorist NATO project, Operation
Active Endeavor; the Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Initiative (TSCTI), and the UN
Global Counterterrorism Strategy. See Carnegie Endowment report, 2009.
Adam Nossiter, "Algerians Belittle Elections, but Not Enough to Protest," New York
Times, May 19, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/19/world/africa/in-algeriabelittling-elections-but-no-arab-spring.html, accessed August 4, 2012.
Spivak, Critique, 361.
"Is Algeria Immune to the 'Arab Spring?'" Al Jazeera, May 14, 2012, http://www.
aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestory/2012/05/201251465357500445.html, accessed
August 4, 2012.
Ahluwalia, Out of Africa, 19.
Khadija Patel, "Algeria: What Arab Spring?" Daily Maverick, May 10, 2012, http://
allafrica.com/stories/201205100807.html, accessed August 12, 2012.
Spivak, Critique, 238.
Derrida, Archive Fever, 7.
Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French
Thought (Montreal, 2007), 17.
Spivak, Critique, x, 358, 359.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "More on Power/Knowledge," in Rethinking Power, ed.
Thomas E. Wartenburg (Albany, 1992), 149-73; republished in Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York, 1993), 25-52. The term "socle
mouvant" comes from a description of power in Michel Foucault, Histoire de la
sexualite I: La Volonte de savoir (Paris, 1976): "c 'est le socle mouvant des rapports de
force qui induisent sans cesse, par lew inegalite, des etats de pouvoir, mais toujours
locaux et instables" (122). The English translation by Robert Hurley renders the term
as "moving substrate" rather than Spivak's less metaphysical "moving base": "it is the
moving substrate o f force relations which, by virtue o f their inequality, constantly
engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable" (93). The
multiple meanings o f "socle" in French include base, basis, pedestal (of a statue),
bedrock, core (knowledge), platform, or socket (in information technology).
Spivak, Critique 287, 430.
Gallop, The Deaths of the Author, 124.

Index

academic knowledge production

169
Administrative Report for Ranker State
(1941-46) 130-1
African-American community 10; family
life 98; middle class 14; political
movements 9, 17; workers 10, 98; see
race
agricultural/non-agricultural 35; see
peasant
Ahluwalia, Pal 161, 173
Algeria 160-1, 163-4, 166, 169, 172-4;
(failure of) decolonization 161-2,
165-6, 172-4; French occupation
160; un-archiving 160, 169;
Revolution/War of Independence 159,
161-2, 164-7, 172
Algiers 172
A l i , Agha Shahid 153
Ambedkar, Bhimrao Ramji 12-3
Andrews, Viola Perryman 9-11
anga dev (log god) 137^10
appearance of poverty 117
APRA (The Party o f the People), also
known as Aprista 59
Arab Spring 172-3
Arafat, Yassir 172
archive-denial 16
archival configuration 90; fragments 163;
hierarchy 7; obscurity 96; present
160; "reluctance" 133; silencing 170;
"violence" 173
Arondekar, Anjali 163, 168-9
Art Digest 4\
artistic production 42
Atlanta 9-10, 41-2
Atlanta Journal 41
avant-garde 48-9, 51-2
Awadh court poetry 78
"awkward classes" 58-9

bainama (transfer deed) 148

Baldwin, James 172
bandobast (administrative/settlement
arrangements) 28, 39n 23, 132; see
settlement
Banerjee, Prathama 135-6
Banerjee, Sumanta 150
Baring, Edward 161-6; "Liberalism and
the Algerian War" 161
Bastar (former princely state) 130-3, 136,
139-40
Beauvoir, Simone de 46-7, 49, 51
belonging 145, 152-5
Benjamin, Walter 76, 79
beds (daughters) 80
betrayal 62, 70, 172
Bhabha, Homi 159
bhasha (vernacular) 76
bio-power 53, 55; "bio-politics" 41
birahani 11, 84, 86-90, 92; definition o f
87
Birla, Ritu 24, 38n 3
birth and death certificates 41-2
body 7, 13,92
boli (speech) 78
bombardment of the public sphere 66-7
Bouazzizi, Mohammed 173
Bourg, Julian 174
Bouteflika, Abdelaziz 172
Braj (or Brajbhasha or Brajboli) 77, 90-1,
93; Lakhnavi innovations 78
Brayne, Frank 24
Buddha 13
Butler, Judith 54
Calcutta: debate about origin 148;
elements of popular culture 150;
ghost canals 145; Kalaburo village
152-3; lime trade 148, 153; name
146; various early spellings 146