Out of the Dark Night by Achille Mbembe;

Author:Achille Mbembe;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

5

THE HOUSE WITHOUT KEYS

It is one thing to make a normative and outside judgment on African objects without taking into account their history, their heterogeneity, or the enigma of which they are the expression.1 It is another to seek to grasp, through their distinctive properties, their substance and their functions, the ways of being and seeing of Africans, or again, taking them as an intermediary, to want to learn about the metaphysical kernel on the basis of the world authored by Africans made sense to them.2

Indeed, whether or not they were linked to the exercise of particular cults or rituals, whether or not they were taken as works of art, these objects, often viewed as disconcerting, have always aroused on the part of the West all sorts of sensations, ambiguous feelings, visceral and even contradictory reactions—obsessive fear, fascination and wonder, horror, frustration and repulsion, or even execration. Everywhere that they made their appearance, they tended to give rise to effects of blindness. Considered from the start as dirty, ugly, and monstrous objects, as signatures of the shadow resisting all translation, they shook up existing ocular frameworks and put back on the agenda the old question of understanding what an image is and how it differs from a simple silhouette, about what art or aesthetic experience in general is, and how it manifests itself in its pure truth.

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