“Race wars
are perhaps going to start up again. Within a century, we shall
see several million men kill one another other in one fell swoop.
The entire East against the entirety of Europe, the Old World
against the New! Why not? In another form, great collective projects
like the Isthmus of Suez are perhaps rough drafts, preparations
for conflicts whose monstrosity we cannot even conceive.”
In his Correspondance,
Gustave Flaubert could not avoid the mind-numbing fears of his
time, a period that was avid for exoticism as well as keen for
political passions caught up in the decline of the West. We now
have thinkers, writers, and artists who have unconsciously fashioned
the rods by which they are to be punished and, just as much, to
punish themselves for a terribly awkward legacy. Obviously, the
debate will not end anytime soon about the new Quai Branly Museum
or in any other museum. For, we now know that every such site
involves an ordering of the world in the name of the worship of
art. The sole exception today seems to be those temples of culture
where people still do not want to raise the problem of how one’s
explicit and implicit world views are expressed in actual fact.
Tzvetan Todorov
has told us better than anyone else how crushing and oppressive
the history of the discourse on the other has been. “In
all times,” he writes, “men have believed that they
were better than their neighbors; the only things that have changed
are the vices and defects imputed to them.” In his preface,
Todorov paid tribute to Edward Saïd’s seminal book
on Orientalism because he felt the need to recount, finally, the
interlocking fates of power and knowledge.
We now know that Napoleon read the Orientalists before occupying
Egypt. Indeed, “one of the most tangible results of this
invasion was an immense amount of philological and descriptive
work.” Trouble will always come from the discourse on the
others. For, he who is the master on the level of speech will
be, quite simply, the master of everything. Whether one speaks
well or ill of the other, the very act of designating him is a
sort of violence.
Through their respective studies, books, and exhibition catalogues,
Rémi Labrusse and Benoît de l’Estoile have
the merit that comes not only from the richness of their scholarship
but also from the newness of their thinking. Both invite us to
pose in another way the question of the connections between taste,
knowledge, and power. Each one reminds us, after his own fashion,
in what way, aesthetic or scientific, knowledge--knowledge of
any kind, anywhere and whenever, yesterday, today, or tomorrow--can
be organized, instrumentalized, and debased.
