The Philosopher's Tarot: Revolutionaries and Docile Bodies

I didn’t set out to learn Algerian history, but it’s somehow been part of everything I did decide to research, so here we are.

(other draws, buy the deck from the publisher)

Today’s random draw gives me two named people holding swords, and one anonymous person holding a burden. Docile Bodies is the translation of a term from Foucault, the Hanged Man from a previous draw. Conveniently, it’s from the book of his I already highlighted in that post, translated Discipline and Punish. The traditional Rider-Waite version of the Ten of Wands is about someone so wrapped up in their labor for someone else that they’ve lost perspective and agency about their own situation. This is also pretty much what a Docile Body is in Foucault. This version of the card modifies the art to make the city in the background more developed, reflecting Foucault’s view of history, adds some whiplike smoke for the discipline part, and draws stars on the character.

Frantz Fanon takes us back yet again to Algeria, a place I’ve anachronistically referred to as the home of Saint Augustine, speculated to be an influence on the Treaty of Tripoli, and only yesterday noted as the birthplace of deconstructionism (or the birthplace of its inventor, anyway). Fanon was originally from a different French colony, but his driving cause and subject was Algerian independence, which was achieved in a war that Fanon lived almost long enough to see the end of. Although he was also a practicing doctor, he emphatically did not believe in “first do no harm” in his political philosophy. He viewed decolonization as necessarily (partly) violent, for roughly the same reason colonialism is necessarily violent—when the cultural distance is large enough, there’s no way to cross it through discourse alone. He writes:

Challenging the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of viewpoints. It is not a discourse on the universal, but the impassioned claim by the colonized that their world is fundamentally different. The colonial world is a Manichean world…the colonist turns the colonized into a kind of quintessence of evil.

This is basically Mao’s take on revolution, too, for all his occasional pretenses at being pro-discourse. I don’t feel like I need to quote him, he’s been quoted enough. Fanon’s nuance seems more sincere.

In my simplified version of Fanon’s model, violence emerges from the size of the gulf between colonized and colonizer culture. This context, bizarrely, makes Foucault’s more continuous model of oppression, where most people are in one sort of exploitative prison or another, actually feel optimistic. If subjugation is a matter of degree, if it’s fluid and diffused, then maybe we can have rational confrontation between some oppressors and some oppressed. After all, most of us are both.

During Algeria’s time under the rule of Vichy France, the biggest win Nazis were able to get for anti-Semitism was through hooking into the existing mechanisms of colonialism. They demanded that Algeria classify all Jews as “indigenous people,” a class with fewer rights, and debilitating quota systems, under French colonial law.

This wasn’t the first time they’d had that designation under the French. When Algeria was an independent, Muslim nation, though, Jews had dhimmi status, under which they were labeled as other, but enjoyed the privileges and protections of a citizen. Dhimmi is a common arrangement in Muslim history, with varying degrees of oppression involved. The jizyah tax, paid only by dhimmi, could be set to be roughly equivalent to the Muslim’s zakat and other responsibilities, or it could be punitively high, or just high enough to incentivize conversion. (Modern-day Muslim countries set it to zero.) Dhimmi could mean ghettos, but it didn’t have to. We can tell that Algeria was relatively decent, in some time periods, by the way Jews voted with their feet, fleeing Christian oppression to settle in Algeria.

Then, in 1830, the French conquered Algeria, and declared Jews and Muslims both to be second-class, “indigenous” people. This lasted until the Cremieux Decree of 1870, which declared “the indigenous Jews of Algeria” to be French citizens, with all rights thereby granted. Cremieux was a colonialist French Jew who wanted to civilize his African cousins. The Muslims, and other indigenous people, were not included in this decree, or any later decree. Algerian Jews began to identify, and be identified, more with the colonizers than the indigenous. Soon they spoke French, not Arabic, and mostly opposed independence. Even after their horrific experience under Vichy France, they still, for the most part, were content to have the Cremieux Decree reinstated.

Fanon had trouble thinking about Jews. In a formative moment, a teacher told him to always remember: “any time you hear somebody being anti-Semitic, they’re talking about you too.” If he was ever in denial about how oppressed Jews were, the Holocaust put an end to that. And yet, he also knew, and wrote, that they had white privilege. They could often pass, while Black people never could. They were bourgeoisie, that convenient intermediate layer between rich and poor that allows class resentment to be redirected into anti-Semitism. Jews were a challenge to his binary, one I think he died too young and angry to ever really come to grips with.

So, a grim but valid take on this is that we’re getting it from both sides. We’re targets of both colonialist anti-Semitism and anti-colonialist anti-Semitism. The more hopeful take is that we’re a bridge. We can speak to both sides and be understood. “Docile Bodies,” as a sort of generalized anti-colonialism, suggests that this dynamic can be generalized to economics, and to other oppressive ideologies.

Diaspora Jews, at our best, advocate for pluralism and tolerance in general, as a more effective long-term way of looking out for our interests than narrow decrees that help only us. Same for other diaspora cultures, at their best. Maybe a Foucauldian revolution could consist of us all, every body, realizing that we’re all in diaspora. None of us are, or should want to be, what cultural normativity demands that we be—it’s full of double binds and other traps. So we all have identities the world is trying to suppress. Maybe, for once, we can have a revolution without swords. Maybe we can free ourselves if we drop our burdens, see each other, see ourselves, and speak.