Theorizing Francophonie

Francophonie is:

• a problem of nomination and nominalism
• a planetary cartography
• a postcolonial ontology
• a linguistic platform not a place
• a possible world of language
• a multiplicity of linguistic life-forms
• synonymous with Creole
• a literary market
• a poetics of the Idea (Dependency, Empire, Racism, Love, Kinship, Groups, Universals, the Relation, Singularity, the Event, Extension, Transit, Capitalism, Citizenship, Logics of the World)
• the passage from tiermondisme to toutmondisme
• a condition of untranslatability (Francophonie lays special stress on phonic, aural, and oral quotients of textuality unaccounted for in translation)
• identifiable as an aporia
• a limit condition of translatability
• a new comparative literature

Francophonie names multiple regions marked by the French language rather than a specific nation or theory. Defined as a new comparative literature, often but not necessarily housed in French studies, it becomes a disciplinary site of theory much like Comparative Literature at the dawning of its institutional formation in exile during and after World War II. Like Comparative Literature, Francophonie negotiates the planetary extension of a field whose critical paradigms originally sprang from predominantly European languages and literatures. But where Comparative Literature escaped the legacy of a single national language, Francophonie defaults to France, and to a postcolonial map of discrepant French-speaking communities. Comparative Literature has translation studies to fall back on when seeking to measure incommensurability among languages and literatures, whereas Francophonie maintains a unipolar orientation around "French" and offers few criteria of comparison among the French-cognate vernaculars that it subsumes. Where Comparative Literature has been historically marked by empire, Francophonie—as a territory of languages with French colonialism as common ground—has a more specific history of colonial dependency and disciplinary effacement to overcome, as Réda Bensmaïa reminds us in an important polemical essay published in Yale French Studies in 2003. Bensmaïa placed Francophonie under erasure, adopting Martin Heidegger's transcript of the barred metaphysics of presence as an X superposed over Dasein (Being), and recalling Jacques Derrida's use of the grapheme in placing the originary logos on a path of deferral and différance. The X over Francophonie, in Bensmaïa's ascription, marks a history of disciplinary scotomization; that is to say, of historical subjection by non-European French literatures to "primal interdict" or "built in, pre-programmed in-existence." ¹ Francophonie—shining through the lateral bar—resembles an early prop plane; not yet fully airborne, but prime for theorization.

To theorize Francophonie is to work through a disciplinary negation that defines what the field is by virtue of what it is not: not the French canon; not the literature of the hexagon; not a discrete linguistic territory. In naming the problem of its own nomination, Francophonie points to what comes after the identity politics of language politics as the field takes on a deconstructive epistemology; breaking the isomorphic fit between French as the name of a language, and French as the name of a people. As Samuel Weber notes:

the linguistic systems between which translations move are designated as "natural" or "national" languages. However, these terms are anything but precise or satisfactory. [. . .] The imprecision of these terms is in direct proportion to the linguistic diversity they seek to subsume. [. . .] The difficulty of finding a generic term that would accurately designate the class to which individual languages belong is indicative of the larger problem of determining the principles that give those languages their relative unity or coherence— assuming, that is, that such principles really exist.²

"French" as the name of a language contains the predicate of a national subject that is silently enunciated. Read as a problem of nominalism, "French" replaces linguistic and national heterogeneity with an abstract generality; a universal sign on the order of Wittgenstein's Urzeichen. It is left to ungrammatical expressions such as "translated from the Frenchman" to sound out the forçage of nation-subject and language-subject in the process of nomination. An equivalent disjunct is heard in David Georgi's exhumation of...