Les Nègres (Alain David)  

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"Negroes" is a text by Alain David first published in Racisme et antisémitisme : Essai de philosophie sur l'envers des concepts:

I am going to speak—I am going to try to speak—about “Negroes.” About “Negroes,” therefore, not about “Blacks” or “Africans,” or about the geopolitical or social or cultural reality of Africa, about which I don’t know more than what everyone in Europe and France knows—that is, that Africa is far away and complicated—scarcely anything. Which is, all the same, a bit more serious than a simple not knowing—something that is not mine to describe, but that makes it such that I do not feel very proud before you. Something, therefore, that, barring further commentary, I can only confide to you. At least, with this half-confession (it is from the start my hope and the condition of possibility of the account that I will offer), I will have indicated the register in which philosophical discourse—the philosophical discourse of culpability, of the recognition of debt—must be inscribed today, with all the difficulty of specifying what “today” means. Likewise, recognition of debt can mean many things, but in any case it does not mean the attempt to assess this debt and settle accounts.

So, I will speak about Negroes, in accordance with the harshness of this word, as they figure without figuring in philosophical discourse, an absent presence and the absence of a presence, returning therefore, following this same emphasis, to philosophical discourse so as to point out the impact of a crisis there. The effects of this crisis are doubtless more immediately noticeable in the African reality, which is forced to take on Western rationality (there is perhaps no other), and thus traces out, but in terms inscribed in lieu of rationality—which does not mean in the “irrational” either—the contours or the promise, in the immanence of cultures, of a common human condition. All this could also be summed up in a phrase in the form of a joke, doubtless therefore more decisive than what my account proposes—“I am going to speak about Negroes.” The phrase is in fact a title in a cartoon by Claire Bretecher, which is on the mark in its great irreverence—“Heidegger in the Congo.” 1 I would like this “Heidegger in the Congo,” which I did not dare write as a title, to be understood in the manner that I will now try to make heard: as meaning a humanism, another humanism, the humanism of the other man, as meaning, therefore—I say it still with a smile, but much more seriously— “Levinas in Africa.”

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