عبدالمحمد موحد

The modernist urge to fashion a better world through the so-called sublimity of the moral-rational man—a legacy, particularly, from the Enlightenment—has not always had desirable manifestations in the real world. In fact, far from being an all-encompassing civilizing program on the global scale, modernity had to overlook the ontological rights of other human and non-human beings of the planet for the sake of satisfying the material aspirations of its European proponents and organizers. This marks a phenomenon that can clearly find expression in the colonial project. Lyotard's theory of the "differend" enables us to see sublimity no longer in terms of Western rational-moral authority, but rather in the ability to "bear witness" to the miseries and "silence" of the "victims" that are unable to express and prove the "wrong(s)" done to them by means of the hegemonic "discourse." The Lyotardian ethics of the differend is a plea not for one single discourse but, in fact, for countless "incommensurable genres of discourse." In other words, it seeks to defend the equally legitimate claims of the weaker parties against the seemingly stronger claims of the dogmatists, and, in this ways, to show the relative nature of any hegemonic discourse. Conrad's Heart of Darkness well dramatizes the ethics of the differend against a colonial background. It not only undertakes to bear witness and encourage bearing witness to colonial wrongs done to African people and environment, but also shows where Western colonial discourse comes to meet its limits.