ABSTRACT
Decolonization, as a product of the mid-century national liberation struggles, certainly aimed to remap the imperial cartography of “areas,” insofar as the very mapping of what constituted an “area” (something between a “target” and an “object of analysis”) was intimately and indissociably linked to the formation of empires and spheres of influence. This material and concrete decolonization cannot be said to have been achieved but rather remains a thwarted project, never completed, and perhaps destined to remain merely a rearrangement rather than a genuine transformation. In such circumstances, can today's decolonization as a conceptual trend and also as a political tendency push itself beyond the gestural and toward a questioning of the historically unstable character of “area” itself? Taking up a set of clues from the work of Carl Schmitt, Michel Foucault, Marx, and others, we will attempt to think this problematic in relation to the dynamics of empire, translation, and the political.
