philosopher avecdominique pagani(Sub-Saharan) Paths of Praxis×

Photo essay · Dominique Pagani

(Sub-Saharan) Paths of Praxis

Translated with AI, to be reviewed — read the French original

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Hombori MountainsMali · 15°17′ N · 1°42′ W

Between Tahoua and AgadezNiger · 15°54′ N · 6°36′ E

Bandiagara EscarpmentMali · Dogon · 14°21′ N · 3°37′ W

Northern BurkinaBurkina Faso · 13°36′ N · 1°36′ W

Northern NigeriaNigeria · 12°00′ N · 8°31′ E

Northern GhanaGhana · 10°47′ N · 0°51′ W

Somba fortified farmNorthern Benin and northern Togo · 10°09′ N · 1°06′ E

Northern CameroonCameroon · 10°36′ N · 14°18′ E

In these times when, from the immense murmur of history, our inner ear has once more been able to perceive, since last autumn, the formidable resurgence of the popular storm, emerging, like the ancient ‘evohe!’, from the silence in which the iron law of Kapital thought it had immured it for ever, relegated to the darkness that the author of ‘Neo-Fascism and the Ideology of Desire’ had dared, more alone than Job, to submit to the dialectical light, thus wresting it from the most implacable of censorships, the one exercised by ‘The unconscious of the unconscious’, to commemorate the anniversary of the final agony which carried off, 10 years ago already, Michel Clouscard, that friend no less immense, seems to me the least homage we owe to his thought, vindicated, today as never before, doubtless the most astonishingly lucid ever expressed since the Liberation.

Below, these ‘(Sub-Saharan) Paths of Praxis’ are a humble sketch of the ‘Defence and Illustration’ of his analyses, but also, ‘Like long echoes that merge in the distance’, a trace of the unforgettable exchanges we had (tele)-shared between the Sahel and Paris, the dense Guinean forest and Gaillac, the banks of the Seine, the Tarn and/or the Niger.

A brief geography of the setting

A very brief introduction to establish the setting criss-crossed by these ‘Paths’.

A brief geography of the setting that follows: On this map, the Sahel is this pale ochre fringe that unfolds over nearly 7,000 km, from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. The term, of Arabic origin, means ‘shore’, ‘margin’... However, the frontier, the ‘edge’ (border), is not, here, a line, but a space, a vast and grandiose aridity.

This is the zone known as ‘agro-pastoral’.

Vaster still, immense, the ocean of this shore is ‘the great desert’ (in Arabic, ‘Sahara’)...

... ‘But the place was none other than the desert’ (Hölderlin/Patmos)

Hombori MountainsMali · 15°17′ N · 1°42′ W

Long dry season and short ‘hivernage’

(as the rainy season is called here) produce, for each place, a highly intermittent geography (compare the following 2 images of the same place, a few weeks apart)

Hombori Mountains / Mali

A land without limit

Leaving his kindred and the land of his birth, it was to these parts that ‘Abraham came from the land of Ur, in Chaldea’ [Genesis]

‘Abraham grazed his herds on a land without limit’ [Hegel]

More or less dry, but always limitless...

....braving the droughts....

....braving ‘the 7 plagues of Egypt’....

....fleeing the scourge of the sand winds, ‘Simoom’ or ‘Khamsin’. [...] ‘It is a dry, hot and very dusty wind, with the burning breath of the deserts, from south-eastern Egypt to southern Israel. At a speed of 150 km/h, it tears the leaves from the trees and gives the sky a dark orange tint; the air becomes laden with dust, which makes breathing oppressive. It causes a few violent storms.’ [Wikipedia]

III

Great turning point

GREAT TURNING POINT:

But if the burning cloud, the driest of all, heralds ‘violent storms’, then the immensity, the hostile unmeasured, becomes FORESEEABLE at the same time as the earth BECOMES WORKABLE: This is the passage from the nomadic herder to the sedentary cultivator, the one that imposed, for ever, the security of the finite or the deTERMINED, in the face of the threats of the indefinite.

No, this did not happen on some 31st of December at midnight. It took time.

‘For long is the time, But it comes to pass, the True’ [Hölderlin/Mnemosyne]

Everything begins with Elevation.

In the face of the unlimited

.....Timid at first, soon more assured, limits, enclosures of thorn, ramparts, soon parapets were raised in the face of the unlimited of indifference.

‘Beauty attains such perfection, in this life, that the noble ambition of man comes to terms with it’

Hölderlin / last writings

As if sprung from the water without contours, the figure at last emerges from the ground, the form, the Idea, ‘the eidos’, the essence at last brought into existence. ‘I do not dwell in the infinite, because in the infinite, one is not at home’ [G. Bachelard]

‘O good cities, by no means formless, but without violence, with the enemy mingled’

The mere possibility of the sacred

This miracle, a secular one, of praxis, at last produces not only the mere possibility of the sacred, but its inscription in the hic et nunc of the real: Below, a transhumance mosque, overwhelming in its minimalism. Before being drawn vertically upward via the minaret [al Mnar] or the cathedral spire, one first had to dare to trace, in the horizontality of the ground, the enclosure by which a space, even a flat one, becomes SACRED, clearly distinct from the profane.

Thus the very first words of the Eternal to Moses, resounding from the flames of the bush, even before the 10 Commandments, are an imperative: ‘Take off your sandals, for you tread upon holy ground.’

Even in the remotest time out of time, behold, time is pressing to break into the earth, workable at last. Man’s granaries are stirred at the miracle of soon being filled. The mason’s stilts reduce the peril of nocturnal and gnawing teeth: the masons of Being must be celebrated in the episode that follows.

The festival of granaries... tabernacles of survival

The festival of granaries

Between Tahoua and AgadezNiger · 15°54′ N · 6°36′ E

Niger, between Tahoua and Agadez.

Bandiagara EscarpmentMali · Dogon · 14°21′ N · 3°37′ W

Mali/ Dogon/ Bandiagara Escarpment

Bandiagara EscarpmentMali · Dogon · 14°21′ N · 3°37′ W

Mali/ Dogon/ Bandiagara Escarpment

These are the nocturnal abodes of the gnomes who come back every morning to rake the gardens along the banks of the Rhine or the Elbe...

Northern BurkinaBurkina Faso · 13°36′ N · 1°36′ W

Burkina = ‘Land of men of dignity -or integrity-’
Thus did Thomas Sankara, the unforgotten, christen the former Upper Volta.

Northern BurkinaBurkina Faso · 13°36′ N · 1°36′ W

Northern Burkina

Northern NigeriaNigeria · 12°00′ N · 8°31′ E

Northern Nigeria

Northern GhanaGhana · 10°47′ N · 0°51′ W

Northern Ghana

Thank you, little brother, who knows that materialism, provided it be even a little dialectical, is the true access to supernature, that is, ‘to the spiritual daylight of presence’.

(Hegel / Phenomenology of Spirit)

Somba fortified farmNorthern Benin and northern Togo · 10°09′ N · 1°06′ E

Somba fortified farm (northern Benin and northern Togo, among the Tamberma)

Overwhelming simplicity of the contents, revealed at last, at the opening of the tabernacles of praxis.

‘In Beauty itself, he dwells’

Hölderlin / ‘The Ister’

VII

The care of water

After the gruelling carrying of water, and the quest for it in torrid country, after the exhaustion of the wood carried, to heat the water, in the land of the rare tree, behold the multiform miracle of the praxic cooperative: fecundity, of the ears of millet, and of children. Relentless determination of the Sahelian woman to produce the human earth...

What Amazons of fable were ever so valiant as these heroines of daily exhaustion?

‘The care of water, your conjugal faith, O Wife’ (Rimbaud/last poems)

HOW MANY MILLIONS OF OUR MOTHERS HAVE EXHAUSTED THEMSELVES SECURING THE DAILY MIRACLE OF WATER BEFORE THE SIMPLE TURN OF THE TAP THAT THE OBSCENE DEGROWTHISM OF THE POWERFUL SEEKS TO PASS OFF AS A LUXURY!

And again...

And always...

Wells and springs, origins of language... and of the metamorphosis of sexuality-zoological-into eros, anthropological!

‘There the first bonds of families were formed, there were the first rendezvous of the two sexes. The young girls came to fetch water for the household, the young men came to water their herds. There, eyes accustomed to the same objects since childhood began to see sweeter ones. The heart was stirred by these new objects, an unknown attraction made it less wild, it felt the pleasure of not being alone. Water became imperceptibly more necessary, the cattle were thirsty more often: one would arrive in haste, and leave with regret’. JJ Rousseau / Essay on the Origin of Languages.

VIII

Man

Northern CameroonCameroon · 10°36′ N · 14°18′ E

‘You gave me your mud and I have made gold of it...’

(Baudelaire/ ‘Draft of an Epilogue’)

‘Shell-shaped’ hut of northern Cameroon.

‘But the night, with all its stars, is no purer, if I dare say so, than Man, who must be called...’

[Hölderlin/ ‘In Lovely Blueness’]

‘Then, in the violet grove, burgeoning, Eucharis told me that it was spring.

− Well up, pond, − Foam, roll over the bridge, and over the woods; − black drapes and organs, − lightnings and thunders − rise and roll; − Waters and sorrows, rise and raise the Deluges again.

For since they have dissipated, − oh the precious stones burying themselves, and the open flowers! − it is a weariness! and the Queen, the Witch who kindles her embers in the earthen pot, will never be willing to tell us what she knows, and what we do not know.’

A. Rimbaud / ‘After the Deluge’ [Illuminations]