Date: Wed, 16 Apr 1997 12:40:13 +0100 (BST)
From: "A.R. Moore" <arm29-AT-hermes.cam.ac.uk>
Subject: Re: Frantz Fanon




I read the recent brief polemical review posted by Julian Samuel with a
great deal of interest; it seems to me to condense a faulty critical
opposition which surfaces regularly in discussions of how colonialism
'takes place', as well as suggest a rather narrow imperative for colonial
studies. 
 The opposition Samuel arranges is between violence and theory (the world
and the academy, the inside and the outside, the tower and the plain, the
flesh and the word etc. etc.) where violence stands as a series of
anterior ur-acts via which colonialism can be said to have truly taken
place. But what exactly is this celebrated violence? And what is elided in
speaking of violence in and of itself? 
 Violence is announced, perpetrated and excused within the circle of
representation, which involves thought down to the level of grammar
itself, and a struggle at that level. I am uninterested in validating the
writings of Bhabha etc., but I take the hope for the cleansing simplicity
that Samuel advocates to be dubious in its own way. 

Alex






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