Abstract
The concluding lesson makes a selection from the immense literature devoted - without waiting for the 19th century - to the criticism of Europe in the vision of non-Europeans or anti-Europeans.
We find a first type of external reflection on the " essence " of Europe - conceived as a complex of Germanic and Romanic peoples - in the construction of an irreconcilable opposition between " Russia and Europe " in the thinking of the co-founder of the Panslavist movement, Nikolai J. Danilevsky. In Danilevski's portrait (published in St. Petersburg in 1871), Europe displays three essential traits that differentiate it, to its detriment, from its Russian counterpart : warlike cruelty, party disunity, and the false distortion of true Christianity by Western denominations. Danilevsky's ideas have regained political importance of late, since Vladimir Putin has claimed them for his anti-Western conceptions of a " Eurasian space ".
Brazilian essayist and poet Oskar de Adrade presents a second type of critical reflection on Europe in his 1928 Anthropophagic Manifesto , in which the author develops the idea that the colonized culture should " devour " the colonizer rather than allowing itself to be consumed by it. A third type of confrontation with European theory and practice appears in the project presented by Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe of a Critique de la raison nègre, Paris, 2013. This text, whose title parodically takes up the Kantian idea of the " critique ", impressively illustrates the fact that the perception of Europe cannot stop at external reflection, but - beyond the stage of appropriation or anthropophagic " vaccination " - leads to a deployment of the self-critical potentials held by European rationality. With the hyperbolic thesis of " devenir-nègre du monde ", Mbembe attempts to show how the global capitalist economy produces a globalization of the conditio nigra.
Perspective : Beyond imperialism and declinism : A decentralized Europe in the age of metamorphosis, moving further away
