Albert Memmi Quotes on Politics
Albert Memmi (1920–2020), the Tunisian-Jewish novelist and theorist whose The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) gave decolonization-era political thought one of its most rigorous phenomenological analyses, defended the case that the colonial situation produces a structurally interlocking pair of social positions whose psychological and political dispositions cannot be understood apart from one another. The framework treats both the colonizer's bad faith and the colonized's self-rejection as systematic effects of the asymmetric institutional structure, with the consequent political conclusion that genuine liberation requires the dismantling of that structure rather than the moral reform of either party considered in isolation. Sartre's preface framed the book's reception in metropolitan Francophone thought.
Quotes
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Attributed to Albert Memmi:
“The colonizer cannot stop himself from being a colonizer; the colonized cannot easily stop himself from being colonized.”
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Attributed to Albert Memmi:
“Privilege is a deformation of the privileged.”
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Attributed to Albert Memmi:
“Decolonization is not the end of the colonial relation; it is the beginning of its long working out.”
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“It was in the Passage that I discovered tribal life and learned to hate it. How happy had been the intimacy of our blind alley, now lost for good! As long as I had lived alone, I had lived in peace.”
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“Travel if you wish, taste strange dishes, gather experience in dangerous adventures, but see that your soul remains your own. Do not become a stranger to yourself, for you are lost from that day on; you will have no peace if there is not, somewhere within you, a corner of certainty, calm waters where you can take refuge.”
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“If my nose had been too long that might have been fixed in a couple of weeks in a clinic, or a gangrenous arm could be amputated, but I had a heart that was defective. My misfortunes were never chance encounters, and I could not easily avoid them. The more I get to know myself, the more aware I become of this. To put an end to this state of affairs would mean putting an end to myself, to die or to go mad. My principal's temporary appointment would end one day, but I would never find the solution to my problem because I am that problem.”
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