In this, Zaire’s catastrophe emerges not as sui generis, but as an extreme variant of a wider pattern of financial mise-en-dépendance.
Leopold’s ‘Free State’ was a paradigmatic Raubwirtschaft (predatory economy)
Violent extraction reached its apogee under the Belgians, following the establishment of King Leopold II’s Congo Free State in 1885, gifted by the European powers assembled at the Congress of Berlin
A basic feature of our postmodern world is that it tries to dispense with this agency of the ordering Master- Signifier: the complexity of the world needs to be as serted unconditionally. Every Master-Signifier meant to impose some order on it must be deconstructed, dis persed
When a hidden amanuensis is revealed under the aegis of Romanticism, it would seem an outrage—as if signing one’s name on something someone else has painted was fraudulent
quoting Winnie Won Ying Wong
