Anticolonial Synthesis in Trần Đức Thảo’s Philosophy: Shaping the Thinkable in the Production of Culture

The work of Vietnamese philosopher Trần Đức Thảo has clear applicability to postcolonial cultural production generally and Vietnamese lived experience more specifically. In this article, I promote Trần Đức Thảo’s understanding of the “thinkable,” or the way that individuals appreciate their lives as “horizons” of possibility tethered to historical and social experience, as a foundation of anticolonial resistance and postcolonial repositioning. What constitutes the thinkable is lived experience built through production—the making of and interaction with things. The lived experience of individuals emerges from their interaction with real conditions and manifests as culture. To study lived experience, Trần Đức Thảo interrogated the process by which individuals produce culture through synthesis or synthetic anthropology, which he formulated alongside the Les Temps modernes group in Paris in the 1940s. This synthesis involves a dialectical exchange between reality and lived experience and ultimately works towards liberation. His scholarship in French and Vietnamese between 1946 and 1958 builds this understanding. To explore the applicability of his approach, I examine the 1954 tune “Victory at Điện Biên Phủ” by Đỗ Nhuận as an example of synthesis and the making of a “unity of sensation” in a new cultural product of the nascent Vietnamese state.