Sadri Khiari - The Colonial Counter-Revolution : From de Gaulle to Sarkozy

SEMIOTEXT(E) INTERVENTION SERIES

La Fabrique ditions, 2009.

This edition Semiotext(e) 2021.

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Inside cover photograph: Hassane Mezine

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10987654321

ISBN: 978-1-63590-146-7

Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England

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I'd like to express all my gratitude to my friends Sonia Al-Barbecha, Hakim Bouzellouf, and Houria Bouteldja for their critical revisions of this text. Thank you as well to Eric Hazan for his belief.

For my sister Samira

In what I tell you, there's the almost-true, the sometimes-true, and the half-true. That's what telling a life is like, braiding all of that like one plaits the white Indies currant's hair to make a hut. And the true-true comes out of that braid. And Sophie, you can't be scared of lying if you want to know everything.

Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco, 1997 [1992]

All right, gentlemen, I'm taking over now.

Jonathan Jackson

Our generation, therefore, like the generation before us, tried to give our children all that we had never had. And sometimes forgot, or sometimes lost sight of the factagain, paraphrasing Andythat the battle our forebears fought with the limits gave them the strength to raise us to be men and women. This strengthisourrealinheritance,anditmustnot be betrayedcertainly not for the Yankee-Western mess ofpottage.

James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen

smelling their stench. It would mean knowing its own negation: the Republic exists through its indigenous. Today's indigenous were yesterday's colonized or the slaves of the day before. Equality is the opposite of equality. Citizenship is the denial of citizenship. Fraternity is contempt. The nation is the race.

another abstraction to talk about us without talking about us. The nice humanist would say the Other, as in, We must accept the Other, tolerate them. If it's a white person on the left, they will talk about scape-goats: The vile right-wing government uses immigrants as scapegoats to turn workers away from their legitimate struggles. A scapegoat does not act and therefore does not exist. Scapegoat yourself! Otherwise, they will talk about scare-crows: Fascists use immigration as a scarecrow, etc. A scarecrow is scary but does not act or exist any more than a bale of hay. Scarecrow yourself! In sum, the anti-racist left says this: only the racist illusion makes one believe that Arabs and blacks exist in France. It is also what is meant by the wellknown anti-racist argument: Unlike what the Right claims, immigration is not increasing. Good people of France, take assurance in the fact that immigrants exist no more today than they did in the past and they continue to vote for the Left!

The white people on the left also have a soft spot for undocumented immigrants, probably because they do not exist at all. And because to exist, even a little bit, they have to ask the Left for help. Undocumented immigrants do not exist at all because in order to exist they must threaten to put an end to their own existence. The proof that I exist, they say, is that I am dying. And they stop eating. And the Left finds a good excuse to denounce the Right: Give them papers so they will eat and stop existing! Because if they get their papers, they stop being undocumented, and if, as undocumented immigrants they did not exist at all, once they get their papers, they do not exist, that's all. Which is a form of progress. Undocumented immigrants do not exist at all because they are not even foreigners, since the law clearly states what foreigners look like and they do not meet this definition. They are outlaws, delinquents, illegal immigrants, irregular. A lot of terms for those who do not exist. They are irregular humans. Regularization for all undocumented immigrants! says the left-wing militant who leans strongly to the left. That way undocumented immigrants will become regularhumans.

It must be progress, since the Right, if it knew about it, would have probably suggested they be vacuum-packed to keep them from spoiling.

Incidentally, if immigrants are not on the left, it means they are on the right. They cannot be themselves. They never exist for themselves. France is the Right and the Left; the world is the Right and the Left; if immigrants claim to be themselves, they return to the void; they no longer exist. They were miserable ghosts, victims, scapegoats, proof that the Right-is-bad. They become another kind of specter: communitarians, Islamists, anti-white racists, and the list goes on! In sum, for the Right, we are muscle; for the Left, we are on the left.

So, we don't exist. We exist through Them. Which comes down to the same thing. We do not exist because we must not exist. We do not exist because recognizing our existence would mean recognizing our political existence and recognizing our political existence would mean recognizing that They do not want this political existence. It would mean recognizing that politics must happen without us, outside of us, behind us, through us, over our heads, but never with us. Maybe, if anything, against us. That would be tolerated. If anything! But the phrase does not hold. When politics is against us, it is never really against us. It is against the workers, the popular masses, the socially excluded; the Right uses racism to make things difficult for the Left, that is all. We are not even victims, but indirect victims, collateral damage from another fight. Scapegoats, they say.

But also this: recognizing our political existence would mean recognizing our struggles; the ones we lead for ourselves and that disrupt France. It would mean recognizing that not everything filters through them. That the conflict between the right and the left, between Progress and reaction, between Modernity and obscurantism, or between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, is not universally accepted. Recognizing our political existence would lead them to this horrific discovery: in contemporary society, the social tie is also racial. The word race is scary; it stinks. Tell them that society itself stinks! And that word is scary not because it was used to keep blacks in slavery and subjugate people from the colonies at the expense of multiple genocides, but because it was used for whites who were in a rush to exterminate other whites.

The social tie is racial. Which means that politics are racial. Society is racial, which means that the social tie occurs around racial inequality. Politics are racial, which means that racial inequality is the struggle of the dominated social race against the dominant social race. And viceversa. The social power relations that are being woven in that confrontation are political relations of power and these political relations of power are power relations between social races.

we exist because we exist politically and we exist politically because we are the objects and subjects of the political relations of power between races.

They don't want to hear about that.