The Singularities of Postcolonial Literature: Preindividual (Hi)stories in Mohammed Dib’s ‘Northern Trilogy’

Abstract

In his analysis of the relations between Deleuzian philosophy and postcolonial literature in Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific (2001), one of Peter Hallward’s main points of contention is singularity Hallward unravels his intervention into postcolonial studies and his critique of Deleuzian philosophy along the distinction between singularity and specificity something he had argued already in ‘The Limits of Individuation, or How to Distinguish Deleuze and Foucault’ precisely by way of attributing singularity to Deleuze and specificity to Foucault. As the article holds, Deleuzian philosophy ‘pursues a fully singular conception of the individual’ (2000, p. 93), while Foucault’s historical analyses are investigations of specific constellations of power and work with the notion of a ‘specific subject [that] is inevitably partial, interested: “he is necessarily for one side or the other […]”‘ (2000, p. 99). Foucault himself indeed uses the term ‘specific’ when, in ‘Truth and Power’, he speaks of the ‘specific intellectual’ (Foucault 2000, p. 129) as no longer an ‘“absolute savant” […] who bears the values of all’ (p. 129), but as a ‘person occupying a specific position — but whose specificity is linked, in a society like ours, to the general functioning of an apparatus of truth’ (p. 131). The biologist or the nuclear physicist are the examples he gives.