Previous
Dominique-Octave Mannoni
Roger Caillois was a French intellectual who argued that non-European people are “incapable of logic” (even though they invented mathematics and philosophical rationalism) and therefore that ethnography must remain “white”—meaning that Europeans are worthy of studying other cultures, but other cultures are incapable of intelligently studying Europe. Although Caillois’s arguments are obviously false, Césaire notes that they were never intended to be taken as true, but rather to simply offer a way for Europeans to justify their colonialism. Caillois’s white supremacist thought shows how colonialism affects the power dynamics of knowledge: by claiming that scholarship only counts if it is written by white people, academics like Caillois justified colonialism as part of Europe’s supposedly universal quest for knowledge. In other words, Caillois’s logic goes, since only Europe can be universal, Europe has a right to rule the whole universe. According to Césaire, this is equivalent to justifying robbery by housing the stolen items in a museum: Caillois acts as though the knowledge that Europeans have gained about the world is valuable enough to justify the mass murder, rape, and enslavement of millions of non-European people around the world. However, Césaire does find one redeeming quality in Caillois’s thought: he does not openly advocate genocide, which makes him a “moderate” compared to many European thinkers and politicians.
Roger Caillois Quotes in Discourse on Colonialism
The Discourse on Colonialism quotes below are all either spoken by Roger Caillois or refer to Roger Caillois. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Section 5
Quotes
His doctrine? It has the virtue of simplicity.
That the West invented science. That the West alone knows how to think; that at the borders of the Western world there begins the shadowy realm of primitive thinking which, dominated by the notion of participation, incapable of logic, is the very model of faulty thinking.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
And the museums of which M. Caillois is so proud, not for one minute does it cross his mind that, all things considered, it would have been better not to have needed them; that Europe would have done better to tolerate the non-European civilizations at its side, leaving them alive, dynamic and prosperous, whole and not mutilated; that it would have been better to let them develop and fulfill themselves than to present for our admiration, duly labelled, their dead and scattered parts; that anyway, the museum by itself is nothing; that it means nothing, that it can say nothing, when smug self-satisfaction rots the eyes, when a secret contempt for others withers the heart, when racism, admitted or not, dries up sympathy; that it means nothing if its only purpose is to feed the delights of vanity; that after all, the honest contemporary of Saint Louis, who fought Islam but respected it, had a better chance of knowing it than do our contemporaries (even if they have a smattering of ethnographic literature), who despise it.
No, in the scales of knowledge all the museums in the world will never weigh so much as one spark of human sympathy.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Discourse on Colonialism LitChart as a printable PDF.
Roger Caillois Quotes in Discourse on Colonialism
The Discourse on Colonialism quotes below are all either spoken by Roger Caillois or refer to Roger Caillois. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Section 5
Quotes
His doctrine? It has the virtue of simplicity.
That the West invented science. That the West alone knows how to think; that at the borders of the Western world there begins the shadowy realm of primitive thinking which, dominated by the notion of participation, incapable of logic, is the very model of faulty thinking.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
And the museums of which M. Caillois is so proud, not for one minute does it cross his mind that, all things considered, it would have been better not to have needed them; that Europe would have done better to tolerate the non-European civilizations at its side, leaving them alive, dynamic and prosperous, whole and not mutilated; that it would have been better to let them develop and fulfill themselves than to present for our admiration, duly labelled, their dead and scattered parts; that anyway, the museum by itself is nothing; that it means nothing, that it can say nothing, when smug self-satisfaction rots the eyes, when a secret contempt for others withers the heart, when racism, admitted or not, dries up sympathy; that it means nothing if its only purpose is to feed the delights of vanity; that after all, the honest contemporary of Saint Louis, who fought Islam but respected it, had a better chance of knowing it than do our contemporaries (even if they have a smattering of ethnographic literature), who despise it.
No, in the scales of knowledge all the museums in the world will never weigh so much as one spark of human sympathy.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
