Every sensible person at that time either ignored him or said- 'You're an ugly smelly French cunt. Fuck off.'
But Satre replied
for three thousand years the white man has enjoyed the privilege of seeing without being seen; he was only a look – the light from his eyes drew each thing out of the shadow of its birth; the whiteness of his skin was another look, condensed light. The white man – white because he was man, white like daylight, white like truth, white like virtue – lighted up the creation like a torch and unveiled the secret white essence of beings. (Sartre 1964, p. 13)
Everybody sensible replied- Oi, ugly smelly french cunt, you and the rest of your primitive tribe of cheese-eating surrender monkeys would be still being fucked over in Nazi Labour camps if it weren't for the rest of the World turning up and Liberating your dirty white asses. Get over yourself. You are shit and you know you are shit. Go fuck yourself.
In 2012, Prof. Engin Isin (a white dude) who works for the British Open University, wrote a paper, quoting Satre's passage glorifying Whitey given above, about the 'Unfinished Project' of black dudes like not swinging from tree to tree all the time and maybe becoming citizens or overcoming Orientalism or something of that sort.
Now, it is true that, not being a columnist for the Daily Maily, he doesn't actually come out and say- 'D-uh! Blacks are completely shit. Always have been, always will be. So of course, the project of them not being shit is unfinished- indeed, it hasn't gotten off the ground.'- still, that's what his essay cashes out as.
Why?
Reading a random snippet of his shite answers that question.
'...the language of politics and the vocabulary of citizenship are as sedimented as the history of negritude, which Sartre saw as having existed for ‘3000 years’. It is in these 3000 years – from Ancient Greece to modern Euro-America – that the figure not only of man (and much later of woman) but also of the citizen occupies a special place. This invented tradition marks out man and woman from citizen and designates the latter as the subject of politics or, more precisely, as the political subject. Notwithstanding the disagreement between Agamben (1998, pp. 126–135) and Derrida (2001, pp. 3–24) on what to make of this distinction between ‘man’ (and ‘woman’) and ‘citizen’, which Arendt (1973, pp. 267–302) had most clearly articulated as a question, it taught us how it functions in differentiating those who are considered as proper subjects of politics and those who are not. For Agamben, the distinction between zoē (man and woman) and bios (citizen) meant an opposition: the former standing for bare life while the latter signifying a political life. Derrida remained sceptical of this distinction not least because they were opposed terms, but also because he did not think that bare life (man and woman) and political life (citizen) could be separated as distinct terms. Yet, what did not seem to occur to Arendt, Agamben, or Derrida was how the distinction between man and citizen may have derived from a series of divides between the colonized and the colonizer, the orient and the occident, and the south and the north. On three occasions above I added, ‘citizen’ to ‘man’ and ‘woman’ precisely to draw attention to that difference that may have derived from the experience of coloniality.'
Okay. Time for a Reality Check. Dr. Ambedkar was a black dude. He wrote the Constitution of India. Was his language of politics and citizenship 'sedimented' with worthless shite culled ultimately from the Nazi fuckwit Heidegger who shat all over Greek philology? No. Not at all. Yet, Ambedkar was concerned with the Dalit- the 'broken man'- a concept with a formal homology with negritude. Unlike Derrida, Agamben, Arendt or Satre, Ambedkar's Project has most definitely got off the ground. Why? Ambedkar studied Law and Economics and Real World Sociology. Then- instead of getting a teaching job- he actually practiced Law and took well-researched, well-argued positions, as a Public Intellectual- one talking to grown ups- across a range of Socio-Economic policy issues.
He did not waste time on Ontologically-up-their-own-arse fuckwits of a sort which every Scholastic Classical Philology has a stinking stable full. Every fucking provincial High School or Teacher Training College has a bunch of shitheads ready to lecture you on how only the local dialect is fitted for true Phenomenology and all them foreigners from down the road or across the river are worse than monkeys whom one should be nice to because they just aint ever gonna be able to get with the program and rise to a level of anything we could recognize as genuine sentience- let alone humanity.
What about Fanon? Black dude surely? Yes, but he fucked up big time. He got it wrong on the Algerian junta- so did lots of smart people, including South Asian diplomats posted there in Sixties and Seventies- but then he was a Psychiatrist- i.e. crazy as a bed bug by definition.
Is it true he inspired 'anti colonial national liberation movements'? No. Successful movements inspired other successful movements. Movements which were clearly bullshit or marked 'EPIC FAIL' from the get go didn't inspire anything except cowardly poseurs trying to make out they were actually refugees rather than economic migrants. Still, I guess they have their hang-outs- I'm guessing Prof. Isin is a sort of wet-nurse or child-minder for one such play-group- and it makes sense that they graft their own stupidity to that of worthless Heidegger worshiping fuckwits or Foucault or Deleuze level Schizophrenics.
What about Walter Mignolo? This is the blurb of his 'The Darker side of Western Modernity-'
During the Renaissance, Europeans colonized time and space, inventing the historical eras Antiquity and the Middle Ages; mapping, appropriating, and exploiting the Americas; and establishing the idea that European modernity was the apogee of human history and the model for the world to emulate. Mignolo analyzes the “colonial logic” that has driven five hundred years of Western imperialism, from colonialism through neo-liberalism, and he describes resistance, from the sixteenth century onward, to the projection and violent forcing of modern European ideals onto the non-European world.
The Europeans colonized Time? Really? Does every Whitey have a Tardis in his broom closet? No wonder Whites are never late for appointments! I guess what went down at Versailles on the 28th of June, 1919, was Fanon and Ho Chi Minh and Dr. Ambedkar had arranged to meet at 12 o'clock at the Starbucks so as to overthrow Western Imperialism but, because them wily Europeans had colonized Time and Space, they were able to rig things so Fanon turned up at 1 p.m and stood around for a bit before hooking up with a young Simone de Beauvoir, and then Ambedkar turns up at 2 p.m, because Whitey dun messed with his time-line, and he stood around for a bit before hooking up with a still young, but noticeably disheveled Simone de Boudoir, and then Ho Chi Minh turns up and just loses his rice completely and goes back to Vietnam and kung fu kicks the shit out of Rambo.
Incidentally, the story I've just told you about isn't just me being silly and trying to raise a laugh. On the contrary it is what Prof. Mignolo calls -‘pluritopic hermeneutics’,
(by which term) Mignolo means an ‘… interactive concept of knowledge and understanding that reflects on the very process of constructing (e.g. putting in order) that portion of the world to be known’ (2003, p. 15). He opposes this against comparative studies – a fashion of telling a story from different points of view to show how the invention of reality is relative. By contrast,
what a pluritopic approach emphasizes is not cultural relativity or multiculturalism, but the social and human interests in the act of telling a story as political intervention. The politics of enacting and of constructing loci of enunciation are at stake, rather than the diversity of representations resulting from differential locations in telling stories or building theories. (Mignolo 2003, p. 15)
'If we assume that every culture in the world has to have activities similar to ours, although differently conceptualized, we have a false start, since one culture (the one to which the humanities and the social sciences belong) is attributed a universal value, and the possibility of looking at things otherwise is automatically ruled out. Thus, while comparisons continue to be made from the European perspective, questions in a different direction are seldom asked. (Mignolo 2003, p. 332)'
Clearly, the above is silly- at least from the European perspective because we Europeans have a notion of gauge invariances. However, if we re-write the Prof's thesis in operationalizable terms then we see that, provided there are no psychotic breaks on either side, all extensional terms are either going to match or have a non empty core for the underlying co-ordination problem. This holds even for ontologically dysphoric- as opposed to psychotic- concepts or world views.
As a matter of common experience, at least for English, non-European terms and concepts often supplant the indigenous variant- as in 'karma' replacing 'fith fath' or 'treading the weird' or even 'metempsychosis'- precisely because of a richer extensional domain.
Does 'Post-Orientalist Citizenship' mean anything? Yes, if there is a psychotic break in discourse such that Whitey gets magic properties and Blackie is revealed to have had the game stacked against her from the start. Does such a psychotic break actually exist in 2013? Fuck no. Some people are pretending it exists coz of corrupt Institutionalized Political Correctness and coz there is a rent-seeking Credentialized Academic Ponzi scheme still spewing out unemployable Post-Doc shitheads, but that oughtn't to worry the rest of us. Unless what's missing in your bed-side drawer- you know the one I mean- is a big tube of Pluritiopic Hermeneutics for when David Cameron comes round and he's brought Obama with him and you just can't bring yourself to watch even though you'd promised your Mom to live stream it on your i-phone.
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