Empire of Language: Toward a Critique of (Post)colonial Expression

Chapter 3. The Revenant Phrase

57 Chapter 3 The Revenant Phrase The colonial phrase of possession is made possible by the encounter of multiple elements:these include a discourse relating to the appropriation of the earth, the language of the slave trade, and a description of the supernatural. Depending on the histories of the specific places and languages, this possibility is more or less achieved both in the colony and in the texts that contribute to the life of empire. Discursive exploration that is not merely ornamental effectively touches the world without being equivalent to it. One should also add that not all (post)colonial speech is destined to form and deform the phrase of possession. As soon as one forgoes totalization in favor of the singularity of worlds, one should no longer aspire to a universal explanation. My insistence on finding colonial haunting (and what it allows one to think) should only be considered as a complementary sign of enthusiasm for the research itself. In no way does the field allowed by the phrase limit speech: utterances are detached or articulated in different ways, formulating the colony in a distant or empty relation to haunting. Possession could very well not be everything; and it is not nothing. So much do I believe in the fallibility of the model; so much do I seek a reorganization for which the work will be meaningful; what we take for granted must be further parceled out, selected, displaced. Regarding this point, it therefore becomes pointless to object, for example, that the phrase does not encapsulate the totality—how could it? This is not my claim. 58 PHRASEOLOGIES I do, however, assert a persistent inequality among “colonialism” and “discourse ” and “society”—and “colony” and “speech,” and so on. That which is incommensurable authorizes another thought of empire than the contemplation crossing the phrase of possession. Nevertheless, this possible haunting exercises an influence in the theorization that must not be minimized, not even by its maximal inadequacy. After the Colony? The role of the phrase that we have just been locating is perhaps even more striking in the contemporary period. When a conqueror verbally takes possession of a land,as Champlain and a hundred others did,the words are effective . Does the law still announce that a black person is a property-being, or that an indigene will be dispossessed (of his land, his traditions, his abilities)? “So be it”: in performativity, the speech act provokes the law, and the action only has value through being said. When a war of independence succeeds, the territorial Possession disappears, in the retreat of weapons and of claims uttered. When a slave recovers freedom, he ceases to be the property of the master. Nonetheless, after the loss of the perlocutionary, the phrase may continue. The persistence here does not come from the mere phenomenon of discursive self-begetting or the weight of verbal concretion. It is explained by what it said, by the extraordinary possession that is never erased without wearing away its host. In particular, the modern experience of haunting lengthens, even perpetuates, the time before its remission. The said is imbricated with the saying, and in such a way that the colonial phrase that we are privileging will preserve itself until the time when all imperial property (human and territorial) ceases to exist. A classic materialist approach would doubtless return us to neocolonialism. If, as I am soon going to demonstrate, and as I suggested above, possession announces itself after the collapse of la plus grande France, is this not a consequence of the surreptitious maintenance of colonialism? And yet, to my mind, not fraudulent financial gain, nor political malfeasance,nor the segregation of immigrants,nor a military presence in the former territories signifies the maintenance of spoken colonialism. All these events combined fail to constitute a good reason for the differential perpetuation of a combination of utterances,for the continued presence of a rhetoric. The logos espoused its own logic of disorder in the colonial exercise of haunting and survives naturally, even after most of the moorings of its power have been severed. Its effectiveness has changed in aspect and intensity. The supposed fix of the neo corresponds,rather,to an age,one different from imperialism; the neocolonial is not colonial in general. On the other hand, THE REVENANT PHRASE 59 we are left with a still active phrase, as well as mechanisms of censure, which I will be describing in the second section below. This linguistic subsistence motivates the...