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African Philosophy And The Quest For Autonomy: A Philosophical Investigation. (Studien zur interkulturellen Philosophie 11) (Studies in Intercultural Philosophy)

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Africa exists as the image of the colonial powers who eviscerated and shattered what they found, when and where they found it. But it also only exists as the inverse of this image - a strange hybrid of destruction/creation in the form of derision: the west finds its undoing in the "doing to" of others.

Enough has been "done to" Africa. But similarly, "the West" - or at any rate, the tutelage of the Enlightenment - has done enough to itself. The impossibility of African philosophy then, resides not in the negative exclusion of possibility (an African philosophical articulation does exist), but in the articulation of its autonomy.

As Praeg puts it, "An autonomous African philosophy is not possible - in any sense of the word "autonomous" that would justify the distinction between African philosophy and any other philosophy" where autonomy is conceived as "constituting an independent African thought system to be founded on authentic epistemological structures of thought and practices."

Such a thought system is properly the realm of the ethnophilosophical "desire to represent and give content to the pre-colonial or the pre-political" in reaction to colonisation.

The book problematizes this uncritical notion of autonomy (and here the reader can construct an interesting possibility for the formation and specifically excessive nature of the State in Africa) as being "undecidable". That is, such an autonomy can only be constituted, conceived, and legitimated within the context of "post-coloniality", even though it is "post-coloniality" itself that enables such an autonomy in the first place, through nationalism.

Praeg holds that "the continuous and critical re-appropriation of the traditional African past [is] indispensable to African philosophy." As such, he sees no value in attempting to resolve the "undecibable" aspect of this debate.

The "re-evaluation" of autonomy will be the difference between a Western and an African philosophy. This re-evaluation itself, will be the very active/critical component of African philosophy. This is why Praeg suggests this challenge using the term "impossibility" - not because the re-evaluation itself is an impossible task, but because it is the re-evaluation itself, which can never be anything but a continuous activity.

To put this another way, and to address the fundamental problem of nationalism as the short-circuit of such a critical re-evaluation (in both thinking and in politics), one can say that nationalism is blind to this double thought (that is, the thinker's thinking is not independent of, or neutral towards, the "thought about,") required for true autonomy and instead achieves an "illegitimate" (or simulated) autonomy through violent sacrifice of the "other".

Africa today - the "post-colonial con-text" as Praeg puts it - is articulated by a rhetoric of emancipation, an emancipatory narrative - the "disfigurement" of Africa and its thinking about itself.

"...the rhetoric and assumptions [underpinning narratives of] "repressed knowledge" and "the need to liberate knowledge" are not the condition of possibility of "talk about Africa". Rather, it is a "thinking against the self that constitutes the subject of African philosophy" that needs to be "incorporated as an historical necessity" into philosophy.

And so to the new type of philosopher required for Africa. No longer the pro-State happy diplomat exporting African philosophy to a "United Philosophical Nations" which would function "both as regulative ideal and source of legitimating" but one whose "responsibility before thought consists ... in detecting differends and in finding the (impossible) idiom for phrasing them" instead of collapsing them into litigations "for the sake of political hegemony".

Disfigurement - the non-alignment of meaning to things, things to meanings, and language to itself, things and meanings - is productive insofar as it enables the formulation of untimely questions.

And so the call for the ethical re-evaluation of autonomy.

African philosophy's embrace of its own impossibility as an autonomous body of knowledge based upon a very specific notion of individualism and epistemology (both of which become undone), and the incorporation of an ethical awareness of the presence of the other will be the new (state of) autonomy.

In order to kick-start an embrace of impossibility, Praeg shoots African philosophy like an arrow into the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), not to kill it (we're talking philosophy here, nothing but philosophy) but to read it (heuristically) as a (new) social contract. The arrow is the new quest for the autonomy of an African philosophy concerned with constructing differends (their conditions of possibility) through phraseologically impossible idioms: philosophy in action.

A differend is "a damage accompanied by the loss of the means to prove the damage." It is an idea borrowed from Jean-Francois Lyotard. This "case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of rule of judgement applicable to both arguments" is an attempt to limit the damage - the disfigurement - transcendental conceptions of justice inflicted on those who have suffered a wrong.

The TRC then is viewed as a social contract, one that privileges the properly "African" ethical imperative of telling stories - "because their telling will re-enact the social, bond which in turn is good because it constitutes an act of love" - thereby leaving behind the temptation to "resolve" that which is seemingly unresovable.

Such public grieving (receiving as it does/did the racist slur of being a circus or exhibition) is antithetical to the "western" interiorised experience of subjectivity, and short-circuits anxieties such as the commodification of suffering.

Narrating the nation in this way reconciles the "traditional value of ubuntu" (I am because we are) with the Christian "koinonia" (the function of confession as enabling forgiveness and allowing reconciliation with the community) and enables this reconciliation through a limited, or highly provisional, nationalism.

The value of a work such as Praeg's is in its insistence on bracketing the production of meaning until such time as its constitutive conditions have become transparent to a sufficient degree to neutralise or at least "bracket" their clamorous insistency.

And to ask untimely questions, or, to ask for the impossible, brackets the short-circuit of philosophy and politics into a murderous Nationalism or Statist philosophy, opening a space within us, rather than between us.