Thinking from Struggle: An Interview with Françoise Vergès

Abstract

In this interview, Françoise Vergès revisits the foundations of her political and intellectual formation, articulating lived experience, theoretical elaboration, and militant practice. Recalling her childhood on Réunion Island, marked by her parents’ anticolonial militancy, by the circulation of non-European intellectual repertoires, and by an early perception of racism and state repression, the author lays out the bases of a reflection oriented by a critique of domination. Throughout the conversation, she discusses the centrality of categories such as capitalism, imperialism, racism, patriarchy, dispossession, and consent, insisting on theory as an instrument of intelligibility and a weapon of revolt. The interview also addresses her critique of the university as a space for the neutralization of experience, as well as her reading of the museum as a mortifying institution linked to Western forms of classification, preservation, and cultural authority. Finally, Vergès analyzes the limits of liberal and universalist feminism, reaffirming the need for an anti-racist, anti-imperialist feminism attentive to the lives rendered most vulnerable by capitalism. Taken as a whole, the interview offers an overview of her thought, highlighting the inseparability of life and thought.