Au commencement était le Crime, et le Crime était avec la Société, et le Crime était la Société : le criminel comme Christ démoniaque de la paternité sociale

Nous nous proposons de développer l’hypothèse selon laquelle l’imaginaire diabolique, attaché au criminel dans Ferragus et le « cycle Vautrin », viendrait non pas caractériser la dimension anomale du personnage mais définir son appartenance à la société même, exprimant l’irrémédiable association de celle-ci avec le Mal et le Crime. Le diabolique dépasserait donc chez Balzac la simple métaphore topique du Mal moral pour devenir le symbole d’un fonctionnement social perverti.Cette alliance est illustrée, de manière allégorique et exemplaire, par le motif du pacte diabolique, contracté entre un criminel – avatar du serpent tentateur ainsi que personnage anti-social – et un jeune homme en quête de pouvoir – être social – qui se damne. Ce couple, dont Balzac souligne l’essentielle unité, constituerait ainsi l’analogon d’un fonctionnement devenu celui du monde parisien dans lequel le pouvoir et la fortune – à tout prix – ont remplacé les hiérarchies et valeurs des siècles précédents. L’association du criminel et de l’arriviste mettrait ainsi au jour les mécanismes obscurs de l’ascension sociale en devenant l’image spéculaire et épiphanique de la naissance d’une société dénaturée, où toutes les métamorphoses sociales sont désormais possibles par l’intermédiaire du crime. Car il s’agit bien d’une naissance, exprimée dans les termes d’une création qui fait du criminel un véritable démiurge, modelant le jeune initié à son image. Au rapport tentateur/ damné succède celui de créateur/ créature, rapport qui fait du criminel un nouvel avatar du Père : diabolique et divin se confondent alors en un syncrétisme blasphématoire qui n’est autre que celui de la société post-révolutionnaire française. Mais l’allégeance de la société au Mal et au Crime constitue un véritable péché originel dont la tache doit être lavée : « sachez seulement vous bien débarbouiller : là est toute la morale de notre époque », tel est l’ultime conseil de Vautrin à Rastignac pour parvenir. Mais cette purification est opérée par l’instigateur même du pacte diabolique, ce qui transfigure le personnage démoniaque en un Christ faisant propitiation en lavant sa création de l’opprobre attachée à son origine. Il s’agirait alors de voir en quoi les rapports de force s’inversent, le pacte diabolique faisant de l’enchanteur l’enchanté et du damné l’idole maléfique à laquelle le criminel offre jusqu’à sa vie. Le pacte diabolique balzacien aboutit en effet, dans un paradoxe vertigineux, à la disparition du criminel, ultime révélation d’un transfert de la toute-puissance du crime à l’ambition.Le criminel serait ainsi l’Alpha et l’Oméga d’une société dans laquelle la boue obscure et informe de l’indistinction sociale peut se transformer par l’alchimie du crime en pouvoir doré. Le pacte diabolique ne nous raconterait alors rien d’autre que la Genèse d’une cosmogonie sociale

‘They Called Them Communists Then … What D'You Call ‘Em Now? … Insurgents?’. Narratives of British Military Expatriates in the Context of the New Imperialism

This paper addresses the question of the extent to which the colonial past provides material for contemporary actors' understanding of difference. The research from which the paper is drawn involved interview and ethnographic work in three largely white working-class estates in an English provincial city. For this paper we focus on ten life-history interviews with older participants who had spent some time abroad in the British military. Our analysis adopts a postcolonial framework because research participants' current constructions of an amorphous 'Other' (labelled variously as black people, immigrants, foreigners, asylum-seekers or Muslims) reveal strong continuities with discourses deployed by the same individuals to narrate their past experiences of living and working as either military expatriates or spouses during British colonial rule. Theoretically, the paper engages with the work of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. In keeping with a postcolonial approach, we work against essentialised notions of identity based on 'race' or class. Although we establish continuity between white working-class military emigration in the past and contemporary racialised discourses, we argue that the latter are not class-specific, being as much the creations of the middle-class media and political elite

Identity and Oppression: Differential Responses to an In-Between Status

Oppression operates at various levels, with varying degrees of negativity, and groups respond in markedly different ways. In this paper, the in-between status of the colored South African group is used to illustrate issues of identity and oppression under the Apartheid system—and differing ways in which oppression was experienced and used. The colored group had many social advantages over Blacks, but were also used to oppress that group. Habituation, accommodation, and relative advantage were identified as dynamics within the broader context of power and privilege that contributed to cultural and psychological marginality and status ambivalence of the coloreds. These processes must be understood within the historical, social, and political context of the community. What is evident from the data is that groups and individuals can take up various positions along a continuum of oppressor—oppressed, depending upon the contexts, time, and social and legal relationships involved in their interactions

Fanon's Letter Between Psychiatry and Anticolonial Commitment

The name of Frantz Fanon has become a symbol of anticolonial militancy and the struggles of national emancipation against colonial rule. However, Fanon was also a psychiatrist, who never abandoned clinical practice even after resigning from his post in colonized Algeria in 1956. The coexistence, in Fanon, of medicine and political involvement represents one of the most productive and contradictory aspects of his life and work. Fanon was highly critical of colonial ethnopsychiatry, but never abandoned his commitment to improving the condition of psychiatric patients. After his escape from Algeria, he wrote extensively for El Moudjahid, the journal of the anticolonial resistance, but also practised in the hospital of Charles Nicolle in Tunis. In this essay I propose a new assessment of the relation between psychiatry and politics by addressing Fanon's influence on Franco Basaglia, leader of the anti-institutional movement in Italian psychiatry in the 1960s and 1970s. Basaglia was deeply inspired by the example of Fanon and the contradictions he had to confront. Rereading Fanon through the mirror of Italian anti-institutional psychiatry will define a new understanding of Fanon as committed intellectual. Indeed, this may suggest a new perspective on the function of intellectuals in contexts signed by the aftermath of colonial history, drawing on the example of two psychiatrists who never ceased to inhabit the borderline between the clinical and the critical, medicine and militancy, the necessity of cure and the exigency of freedom

Disrupting the dynamics of oppression in intercultural research and practice

In this special issue we focus on exploring the tensions, challenges and possibilities for working in contexts where relationships between groups are characterized by dominance and resistance. Some of the impetus lies in our own struggles and frustrations with models, guidelines and ‘recipes’ that have been developed to guide sensitive, competent and empowering research and practice across boundaries of ‘race’, ethnicity and culture. These models and guidelines are often framed as tools that will enable culturally competent transactions across these boundaries

Dancing the Pluriverse: Indigenous Performance as Ontological Praxis

This article discusses ways that Indigenous dance is an ontological praxis that is embodied and telluric, meaning “of the earth.” It looks at how dancing bodies perform in relationship to ecosystems and entities within them, producing ontological distinctions and hierarchies that are often imbued with power. This makes dance a site of ontological struggle that potentially challenges the delusional ontological universality undergirding imperialism, genocide, and ecocide. The author explores these theoretical propositions through her participation in Oxlaval Q'anil, an emerging Ixil Maya dance project in Guatemala, and Dancing Earth, an itinerant and inter-tribal U.S.-based company founded by Rulan Tangen eleven years ago

Locating the ‘radical’ in 'Shoot the Messenger'

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below, copyright 2013 @ Edinburgh University Press.The 2006 BBC drama Shoot the Messenger is based on the psychological journey of a Black schoolteacher, Joe Pascale, accused of assaulting a Black male pupil. The allegation triggers Joe's mental breakdown which is articulated, through Joe's first-person narration, as a vindictive loathing of Black people. In turn, a range of common stereotypical characterisations and discourses based on a Black culture of hypocrisy, blame and entitlement is presented. The text is therefore laid wide open to a critique of its neo-conservatism and hegemonic narratives of Black Britishness. However, the drama's presentation of Black mental illness suggests that Shoot the Messenger may also be interpreted as a critique of social inequality and the destabilising effects of living with ethnicised social categories. Through an analysis of issues of representation, the article reclaims this controversial text as a radical drama and examines its implications for and within a critical cultural politics of ‘race’ and representation

Feeling, Knowledge, Self-Preservation: Audre Lorde’s Oppositional Agency and Some Implications for Ethics

Throughout her work, Audre Lorde maintains that her self-preservation in the face of oppression depends on acting from the recognition and valorization of her feelings as a deep source of knowledge. This claim, taken as a portrayal of agency, poses challenges to standard positions in ethics, epistemology, and moral psychology. This article examines the oppositional agency articulated by Lorde’s thought, locating feeling, poetry, and the power she calls “the erotic” within her avowed project of self-preservation. It then explores the implications of taking seriously Lorde’s account, particularly for theorists examining ethics and epistemology under nonideal social conditions. For situations of sexual intimacy, for example, Lorde’s account unsettles prevailing assumptions about the role of consent in responsibility between sexual partners. I argue that obligations to solicit consent and respect refusal are not sufficient to acknowledge the value of agency in intimate encounters when agency is oppositional in the way Lorde describes

The racist bodily imaginary: the image of the body-in-pieces in (post)apartheid culture

This paper outlines a reoccurring motif within the racist imaginary of (post)apartheid culture: the black body-in-pieces. This disturbing visual idiom is approached from three conceptual perspectives. By linking ideas prevalent in Frantz Fanon’s description of colonial racism with psychoanalytic concepts such as Lacan’s notion of the corps morcelé, the paper offers, firstly, an account of the black body-in-pieces as fantasmatic preoccupation of the (post)apartheid imaginary. The role of such images is approached, secondly, through the lens of affect theory which eschews a representational ‘reading’ of such images in favour of attention to their asignifying intensities and the role they play in effectively constituting such bodies. Lastly, Judith Butler’s discussion of war photography and the conditions of grievability introduces an ethical dimension to the discussion and helps draw attention to the unsavory relations of enjoyment occasioned by such images