#impouvoir

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Qui veut écrire et produire, il lui faut sans cesse endormir en soi cette exaltation.

Maurice Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire, Gallimard, 1955

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De son impouvoir même, la pensée tire sa toute puissance ultime, splendide et dérisoire ; elle ne s’arrête jamais ; elle flue le long de la mort ; elle manifeste la vie jusque dans les plus profondes souffrances ; elle affronte le non-sens mais pour glisser encore dessus ; elle ressasse mais pour mieux montrer l’inanité du ressassement (en ce sens, le plus terrible est peut-être quand la pensée ne peut même plus ressasser) ; elle n’intervient pas, elle ne change rien, mais elle rappelle continûment la vie à la vie et c’est peut-être déjà énorme.

Pierre Zaoui, La Traversée des catastrophes, Seuil, 2010

[erkjhnsn]

What distinguishes the postcolony from other regimes of violence and domination, then, is not only the luxuriousness of style and the down-to-earth realism that characterize its power, or that it prefers to exercise particularly raw power; peculiar also to the postcolony is the way the relationship between rulers and ruled is forged through a specific practice: simulacrum (le simulacre). This explains why dictators can sleep at night lulled by roars of adulation and support only to wake up to find their golden calves smashed and their tablets of law overturned. The applauding crowds of yesterday have become today a cursing, abusive mob. That is, people whose identities have been partly confiscated have been able, precisely because there was this simulacrum, to glue back together their fragmented identities. By taking over the signs and language of officialdom, they have been able to remythologize their conceptual universe while, in the process, turning the commandement into a sort of zombie. Strictly speaking, this process does not increase either the depth of subordination or the level of resistance; it simply produces a situation of disempowerment (impouvoir) for both ruled and rulers. The process is fundamentally magical; although it may demystify the commandement, even erode its supposed legitimacy, it does not do violence to the commandement's material base. At best it creates potholes of indiscipline on which the commandement may stub its toe.

Achille Mbembe, "The Aesthetics of Vulgarity" in On the Postcolony, trans. Janet Roitman and Murray Last (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 110–11. Originally published as Achille Mbembe, "Provisional Notes on the Postcolony," Africa 62, 1 (1992), 3–37.