Reconstruire la philosophie à partir de l'Afrique : une utopie postcoloniale

This thesis focuses on the reasons, the conditions and the methods to be taken for the decolonization/reconstruction of the discipline of philosophy from a viewpoint drawing from African philosophy and taking seriously into account the concepts of “race” and “Africa”. The decolonization of philosophy is not synonym of a mere inclusion inside the core of an “established philosophy” of epistemic perspectives that were historically marginalized, even if the teaching of the those traditions is, of course, one of its basic requirements. Indeed, the philosophical production in Africa self-evidently demonstrates the depth of the double discourse developed over many centuries by the philosophical tradition in the West in view of those that it represents as radical Others. The historiography of African critical thought provides evidence of the Sisyphean task that continental intellectuals still have to cope with, long after Independences, in order to emancipate themselves from the alienating injunctions enforced by colonial reason. Therefore, the acknowledgement of the existence of a deep-rooted offence inflicted by this “colonial library” must also lead mainstream philosophy to a critical self-examination, the deconstruction of its usual assumptions and the reconsideration of its canon. This radical deconstruction requires, particularly, to take the racism of some canonical authors seriously (Kant and Hegel are studied here) in order to elucidate the function “race” occupies normatively in their theoretical systematizations and its effects on canonical understandings of some disciplinary core concepts, such as egalitarianism, universalism, cosmopolitism, freedom, self-determination, etc. A close examination of the place occupied by racial categories in the history of Western modern thought univocally leads to the conclusion of their centrality in Enlightenment’s mantra of progress.  Whereas the discipline of African philosophy gradually institutionalizes, some contender discourses benefit more than others from criteria by which they are considered “philosophical” although their invasive power was extensively explored by philosophers from the continent. In this regard, feminist theory, notably, is confronted with a denial of relevance while its most prominent propositions (i.e. those that circulate in feminist transnational research, often produced in academic institutions from the North) resort to oversimplifications, widely condemned by continental women for their empirical harmfulness. Their critics underline the inherent risk of romanticising the emancipatory power of traditions per se. Indeed, although it is not forbidden to reflect on the critical potential that lies in African ancestral cultures, gender studies, the African feminist movement and philosophers stand against the temptation to decolonize philosophy while resorting solely to “indigenous epistemologies”, without any further ado. It is actually not without precautions that intellectuals address traditions, allegedly timeless, of which many are lived by contemporary Africans, even more women, like conservatisms refractory to criticism (i.e. to philosophy). It does not prevent some philosophers to engage with them under certain conditions, thus expanding new theoretical horizons. The arguments considered by feminist, de/post-colonial or African philosophy compel us to reject the pretention of mainstream philosophy to speak “from nowhere” and to acknowledge the situatedness of any kind of reasoning, may it be normative. Philosophical Modernity has raised its peculiar view as a referential category for the rest of the world, while instructing its submissiveness. Even though this overhanging universal is condemned to nullity by the very standpoints it has enslaved, the deconstruction of its foundations does not hinder the possibility of another universal. Indeed, African philosophers are jointly concerned with thinking their historical condition together with their position as agents in the world. Bringing together contributions from Africans and African-descendants in the West, the social and theoretical analysis of Pan-Africanism are able to testify, simultaneously of the (partial) irreducibility of an historical anchoring falsely presented as a unified and, nevertheless, of the possibility of a common movement toward universal. In other words, from Africa, epistemic decolonization does pursue the project of a disciplinary recognition of a constellation of subfields classified by cultural era, but the reconstruction “from below” of a sole vocational practice of philosophy. Its is only by analyzing Enlightenment in the context of its emergence (colonial imperialism) that we understand that ideals of freedom, equality, citizenship, cosmopolitanism, etc., were conceived, from the start, upon segregation generated by the color line. Conversely, the Haitian Revolution, the Pan-African Conferences or the Bandung Conference enable us to understand that the real agents of the “universalization of universa” are those that Modernity excluded upstream.

Keyphrases: pensée postcoloniale, Kant, Hegel, race, postcolonial thought, epistemic decolonization, critics of Modernity, colonial library, African feminist theory, pan-Africanism, cosmopolitanism, lateral universal, indigenous knowledge, Haiti, racism, neo-colonialism, African philosophy