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36 When it is uttered in a political space,the phrase of possession also helps us to grasp the principal colonial and postcolonial doctrines, which tend both to invoke and to revoke enchantment. Reestablishing the tacit links these doctrines bear to haunting is thus a supplementary gesture of interpretation. I want to show here that theories and words are articulated all the same, and that it is permissible to rearrange them in their connection to (post)colonial possession. (Post)colonial languages make use of multiple paradigms that tell without telling (qui disent sans dire). Each dogma thus contains an internal tension that both makes the phrase of possession speak and attempts to displace it in the direction of another system. Each utterance is in fact likely to repeat and to modify itself. Our reading has reconstructed possession not in order to craft a tangible and preliminary critical model, but rather to choose a new, dark enlightenment. The great modern political themes of colonization appear, in this sense, as so many confirmations of the phrase of possession and of ad hoc deformations of it. To this are added major contradictions. In truth, the partisans of slavery and those who sought liberation from it have more in common than is sometimes believed. Fanon and Schoelcher also confirm the logic of subjugation that was in place during the time of Louis XIV. Nevertheless, the discourses diverge, and I do not claim that apartheid and assimilation are equal—under the pretext of affirming their colonial substratum. The first part of this book Chapter 2 Haunting and Imperial Doctrine HAUNTING AND IMPERIAL DOCTRINE 37 described the normal exercise of a phrase, which allows for the execution of that phrase in very different forms. Beyond this internal tension, we further recognize the flaws, gaps, and oppositions between each text, plea, song, or statement. These differences are such that they might tempt us to reject comparison (between countries and positions). On the contrary, I think that this linguistic chaos does not discredit the idea that one colonialism exists, or of such a thing as the postcolonial. Precision and prudence are necessary, however. It is not a question of returning positions to what would be their Urgrund. The phrase emerges from discursive communication, it passes from one person to the next and then arrives assembled and ready to be remade again; we come to know the phrase at last through our reading. The phrase thus designates one possible field in the usage of speech. The phrase comes before us because it bears a history that situates it in an active past; it is not to be considered an originary structure—the weight of its longevity is enough. The phrase is always understood after itself, because our interpretation composes it, and because it is not a given. I assume that this double movement of recognition and reconstruction is at work in the performance of (post) colonial discourses; from this movement emerges the hypothesis of a tension that contributes to speech. We must not forget, however, that we, too, do the work of establishing. It is by this gesture of instantiation, despite the irreducibilities and conceptual intolerances, that I am deliberately suggesting a colonial phrase. Here one approaches the fractioning of a singularity,1 and not some legendary unity (that would be uniquely Western, material, temporal, etc.). Moreover,the lack of coherence in a text (or even in texts that are supposed to be related) must not be taken as an automatic revelation of failure, nor as the obligatory discovery of an inherent and more comprehensive logic that would explain the cracks on the surface. The phrase of possession is articulated in the copresence and the altercations of utterances. The phrase will never collapse under the weight of its contradictions, for it is through contradiction itself that the phrase is produced. Assimilation, Counterassimilation Indigenous policy was no more monolithic under the Third Republic than at any other time. In 1953,toward the end of “Greater France”(“la plus grande France”),2 Hubert Jules Deschamps (1900–1979),colonial administrator and historian,declared that “Cartesian universalism . . . leads to assimilation”(Les méthodes et les doctrines 76). Such a statement summarized an opinion that was widely shared both before and after him: that la France (rational, Cartesian , universalist) has always privileged the assimilation of the colonized. 38 PHRASEOLOGIES Numerous historians have pointed out, however, that the methods used did in fact vary according to the place, the period, and the people involved. Territories...

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