Roland Barthes’s grandfather had nothing to say

Who would have thought the French philosopher Roland Barthes is connected to the founding of Cote d'Ivoire and French colonialism.

Ronald Barthes' grandfather, Louis-Gustave Binger (Screen shot).

French philosopher Roland Barthes described his grandfather Louis-Gustave Binger, the archetypal French colonialist, thus: “Il ne tenait aucun discours.” He had nothing to say. And yet. An explorer of the Niger Loop, Louis-Gustave Binger was the author of Du Niger au Golfe de Guinée (1891). He was the founder of the Côte d’Ivoire colony and was appointed its governor in 1893. He was “officially” considered the “father” of the nation. He founded and set up the first capital, gave his name to the second. He features on the country’s stamps.

Binger also wrote Le Serment de l’Explorateur, a novel in which an explorer heads off “to Africa” leaving his wife and daughter behind. The photographs taken during Binger’s explorations are the first photographs ever taken in Côte d’Ivoire.

But, it is as if “… neither honors nor books ever existed for Roland Barthes.”

A few years ago, in 2009, Vincent Meessen has made a short film, “Vita Nova,” about Roland Barthes’ peculiar silence about his grandfather’s colonial life.

EDITOR: Asked about the inclusion of the references to Binger in the film, Meeson told an interviewer.

“… Contemporary critical thought should at least be conscious that insofar as it is a construct of modern rationality, it cannot obscure its darker side: colonialism. The way the Argentinian semiotician Walter Mignolo has built upon Michel Foucault’s thought, and more precisely, the epistemological effects of colonialism, is not only useful, it’s absolutely necessary in order to challenge Eurocentric perspectives. Decolonial conceptualization like Mignolo’s is thus needed in order to articulate future critical narratives, since European perspectives remain by definition very partial. What is important to me is the rhetorical dimension of the narrative of modernity, and the impossibility of expressing future thoughts without performing mythographic operations. I think these operations, like Vita Nova, need to assume colonialism as a power matrix that has forever affected the subjectivities of both the colonized and the colonizers. One of the possible ways of escaping from the simplistic colonial dialectic is to focus on objects, signs, and documents in which reciprocal possession is still vivid. It’s a way to grasp not only “the what” and “the how”, but also why Western modernity has decided to reject other sorts of affects and concepts, presumably felt as threats to its systemic differentiation principle. In my opinion, only research-based artistic practices offer the possibility of confronting not only the rational, but the sensible and transcultural dimensions demanded by these re-narrativizations.”

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