Caribbean Critique: Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant (Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures LUP) [1 ed.] 1846318661, 9781846318665

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part II
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part III
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Conclusion
Appendix: Letter of Jean-François, Belair, and Biassou/ Toussaint, July 1792
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

caribbean critique Caribbean Critique seeks to define and analyze the distinctive contribution of francophone Caribbean thinkers to perimetric Critical Theory. The book argues that their singular project has been to forge a brand of critique that, while borrowing from North Atlantic predecessors such as Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and Sartre, was from the start indelibly marked by the Middle Passage, slavery, and colonialism. Chapters and sections address figures such as Toussaint Louverture, Baron de Vastey, Victor Schoelcher, Aimé Césaire, René Ménil, Frantz Fanon, Maryse Condé, and Édouard Glissant, while an extensive theoretical introduction defines the essential parameters of ‘Caribbean Critique’. ‘This is a very important and exciting book. Extending to the whole of the French Caribbean his previous work on the philosophical bases of the Haitian Revolution, Nesbitt has produced the first-ever account of the region’s writing from a consistently philosophical, as distinct from literary or historical, standpoint.’ Professor Celia Britton, University College London Nick Nesbitt is Professor of French and Italian at Princeton University. His books include Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature (University of Virginia Press, 2003) and Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (University of Virginia Press, 2008).

caribbean critique

Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant

nick nesbitt

Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant

www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk Cover image: Tensión espacial by Mario Carreño (1957), courtesy of Juan Guillermo Levine. Designed by Emily Wilkinson

NESBITT COVER.indd 1

15/05/2013 10:58:13

Caribbean Critique Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 26

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 1

15/05/2013 08:44:12

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures Series Editors EDMUND SMYTH Manchester Metropolitan University

CHARLES FORSDICK University of Liverpool

Editorial Board JACQUELINE DUTTON University of Melbourne

LYNN A. HIGGINS Dartmouth College

MICHAEL SHERINGHAM University of Oxford

MIREILLE ROSELLO University of Amsterdam

DAVID WALKER University of Sheffield

This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contemporary French and francophone cultures and writing. The books published in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural and social developments which have taken place over the past few decades. All manifestations of contemporary French and francophone culture and expression are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary culture.

Recent titles in the series: 10 Celia Britton, The Sense of Community in French Caribbean Fiction 11 Aedín Ní Loingsigh, Postcolonial Eyes: Intercontinental Travel in Francophone African Literature 12 Lawrence R. Schehr, French Post-Modern Masculinities: From Neuromatrices to Seropositivity 13 Mireille Rosello, The Reparative in Narratives: Works of Mourning in Progress 14 Andy Stafford, Photo-texts: Contemporary French Writing of the Photographic Image 15 Kaiama L. Glover, Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon

18 Jean Duffy, Thresholds of Meaning: Passage, Ritual and Liminality in Contemporary French Narrative 19 David H. Walker, Consumer Chronicles: Cultures of Consumption in Modern French Literature 20 Pim Higginson, The Noir Atlantic: Chester Himes and the Birth of the Francophone African Crime Novel 21 Verena Andermatt Conley, Spatial Ecologies: Urban Sites, State and World-Space in French Cultural Theory 22 Lucy O’Meara, Roland Barthes at the Collège de France 23 Hugh Dauncey, French Cycling: A Social and Cultural History

16 David Scott, Poetics of the Poster: The Rhetoric of Image-Text

24 Louise Hardwick, Childhood, Autobiography and the Francophone Caribbean

17 Mark McKinney, The Colonial Heritage of French Comics

25 Douglas Morrey Michel Houellebecq: Humanity and its Aftermath

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 2

15/05/2013 08:44:12

N ick N esbitt

Caribbean Critique Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant

Caribbean Critique

LIV ER POOL U NIV ERSIT Y PR ESS

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 3

15/05/2013 08:44:12

First published 2013 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2013 Nick Nesbitt The right of Nick Nesbitt to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-84631-866-5 cased Web PDF eISBN is 978-1-84631-793-4

Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 4

15/05/2013 08:44:12

Frank Nesbitt Jr., in memory (1932–2013)

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 5

15/05/2013 08:44:12

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 6

15/05/2013 08:44:12

Contents Contents

Acknowledgements ix Preface xi Introduction: The Caribbean Critical Imperative

1

I. Tropical Equality: The Politics of Principle 1 Foundations of Caribbean Critique: From Jacobinism to Black Jacobinism

29

2 Victor Schoelcher, Tocqueville, and the Abolition of Slavery 66 3 Aimé Césaire and the Logic of Decolonization

86

4 ‘Stepping Outside the Magic Circle’: The Critical Thought of Maryse Condé

118

5 Édouard Glissant: From the Destitution of the Political to Antillean Ultra-leftism

133

II. Critique of Caribbean Violence 6 Jacobinism, Black Jacobinism, and the Foundations of Political Violence

159

7 The Baron de Vastey and the Contradictions of Scribal Critique 173 8 Revolutionary Inhumanism: Fanon’s On Violence

192

9 Aristide and the Politics of Democratization

216

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 7

15/05/2013 08:44:12

viii

Caribbean Critique

III. The Critique of Relation 10 Édouard Glissant: From the Poétique de la relation to the Transcendental Analytic of Relation

231

11 Césaire and Sartre: Totalization, Relation, Responsibility

251

12 Militant Universality: Absolutely Postcolonial 262 Conclusion: The Incandescent I, Destroyer of Worlds

271

Appendix: Letter of Jean-François, Belair, and Biassou/ Toussaint, July 1792

288

Notes

292

Bibliography

324

Index

339

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 8

15/05/2013 08:44:12

Acknowledgements Acknowledgements

The ideas in this book developed progressively in public lectures, graduate seminars, and discussions too numerous to list here, and whatever richness they may possess is a function of the spirit animating these dialogues. I am grateful to have had many such opportunities, and I want to thank friends and colleagues who have made particular contributions to this project. These include Chris Fynsk, Alberto Moreiras, A. James Arnold, Chris Bongie, Peter Hallward, Michael Syrotinsky, Alberto Toscano, Jean-Godefroy Bidima, Sarah Kay, Deborah Jenson, Celia Britton, Jean Casimir, Charles Forsdick, Eduardo Cadava, Jim Creech, Millery Polyné, Bruno Bosteels, Colin Dayan, Adlai Murdoch, Lorna Burns, Beth Lord, Jonathan Israel, Petr Kouba, Gary Wilder, Michael Dash, Paul Patton, Simone Bigall, Aurelian Craiutu, Valerie Kaussen, Alec Hargreaves, Bruno Chaouat, Lydie Moudileno, John Walsh, Maryse Condé, Peter Meyers, Valerie Loichot, Susan Buck-Morss, David Scott, Kaiama Glover, Laurent Dubois, Donald Moerdijk, Carrie Noland, Étienne Balibar, Paul Miller, Barry Maxwell, Jeremy Popkin, Jane Hiddleston, and colleagues at the Centre for Modern Thought at Aberdeen and the Princeton Theory Reading Group. Anthony Cond at Liverpool steadfastly saw the manuscript through its many iterations. Gavin Arnall generously and insightfully critiqued countless claims made herein, and though Jill Jarvis kindly brought to the entire manuscript her gift of a highly tuned ear for the modulation and revoicing of both logic and prose, all remaining shortcomings remain my own responsibility. Finally, it is Eva Cermanová’s love and support that inspire me every day and animate each of these pages. Versions of material contained in these chapters have previously appeared in the following books and articles: ‘Aristide and the Politics of Democratization’, SmallAxe 13.3 (2009): 137–147; ‘Deleuze, Glissant,

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 9

15/05/2013 08:44:12

x

Caribbean Critique

and the Production of Postcolonial Concepts’, in Deleuze and the Postcolonial. Paul Patton and Simone Bignall, eds. Edinburgh University Press, 2010: 103–118; ‘Deleuze, Hallward, and the Transcendental Analytic of Relation’, in Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze: Colonial Pasts, Differential Futures. Lorna Burns and Birgit M. Kaiser, eds. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012: 96–120; ‘Departmentalization and the Logic of Decolonization’, L’Esprit créateur 47.1 (2007): 32–43; ‘Early Glissant: From the Destitution of the Political to Antillean Ultra-leftism’, Callalloo, special issue on Édouard Glissant. Celia Britton, ed. 2013; ‘Honte, culpabilité, et devenir dans l’expérience coloniale’, in Lire, écrire la honte: actes du colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle, juin 2003. Bruno Chaouat, ed. Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2007: 235–250; ‘The Incandescent I, Destroyer of Worlds’, Research in African Literatures, special issue on Aimé Césaire. Adlai Murdoch, ed. 41.1 (2010): 121–141; ‘On the Political Efficacy of Idealism: Tocqueville, Schoelcher, and the Abolition of Slavery’, in America Through European Eyes. Aurelian Craiutu and Jeffrey Isaac, eds. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2009: 91–116; ‘Revolutionary Inhumanism: Fanon’s “On Violence”’, International Journal of Francophone Studies, special issue on ‘The Postcolonial Human’. Jane Hiddleston, ed. (2013); ‘Stepping Outside the Magic Circle: The Critical Thought of Maryse Condé’, Romanic Review, special issue on Maryse Condé. Kaiama Glover, ed. 94.3–4 (May–November 2003): 391–404; ‘Which Radical Enlightenment?: Spinoza, Jacobinism, and Black Jacobinism’, in Spinoza Beyond Philosophy. Beth Lord, ed. Edinburgh University Press, 2012: 149–167.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 10

15/05/2013 08:44:12

Preface Preface

Nous sommes … Pour les grands temps nouveaux où l’on voudra savoir, … – Ce qu’on ne sait pas, c’est peut-être terrible: Nous saurons! – Nos marteaux en main, passons au crible Tout ce que nous savons: puis, Frères, en avant! Rimbaud

Caribbean writing in French is commonly conceptualized in a number of now-familiar modes: as a poetics, from, say, Oswald Durand and Saint-John Perse to the incendiary surrealism of Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal and Édouard Glissant’s Poétique de la relation; as a literature, from Frédéric Mercelin or Jacques Roumain to Maryse Condé or Gisèle Pineau; as a history, from Columbus’s journals and plantation ledgers to the letters of Toussaint Louverture and the annals of departmentalization and decolonization. This book proposes instead that Caribbean writing in French is grasped in its most essential characteristics when conceptualized as a practice of critique. This is to argue that while the various genres of Antillean writing are manifold, encompassing letters and novels, histories and polemical tracts, poems and theoretical works, the unifying characteristic of the outstanding texts from this tradition is their status as works of critique – as writings, that is, that cry out in insubordination and aversion to the state of their world (above all, that of plantation slavery and colonialism), and that seek to articulate the promise that another world is possible. From a philosophical perspective, Caribbean Critique seeks to define and analyze the distinctive contribution of francophone Caribbean thinkers to post-Kantian critical theory, the latter understood not as an academic field, but as a project of practical reason called, as Marx famously argued, not merely to describing the world, but to changing it.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 11

15/05/2013 08:44:13

xii

Caribbean Critique

The book argues that the singular endeavor of these thinkers has been to forge a brand of critique that, while borrowing tools from North Atlantic predecessors such as Rousseau, Diderot, Robespierre, Hegel, Marx, and Sartre, was from the start marked indelibly by the experiential imperatives of the Middle Passage, slavery, and imperialism, as well as the contestatory resources of Vodun and African theoretical traditions such as the Mande human rights Charter of 1222. The historical development of Western modernity is unthinkable without reference to critique, embodied in transformative events such as the American, French, Haitian, and Russian Revolutions, the French Commune, Decolonization, May ’68, and the destruction of bureaucratic socialism in 1989. Caribbean Critique argues that the subjects of French Antillean colonialism, from the start of the Haitian Revolution in 1791 to the present context of global colonialism (Martinique/Guadeloupe) and neo-imperialism (Haiti) have articulated a distinctive and fundamental contribution to Critical Theory. Unlike most theories of classical Marxism, Antillean thought has responded primarily to the singularities of Caribbean plantation slavery and colonialism rather than affirming the universality of the capitalist mode of production and the proletariat as the universal revolutionary class. Unlike more conservative critical thinkers such as Kant or Hegel (though they too, I will argue, harbor an unsuspected radicalism) or the ultimately depoliticized negative dialectics of Horkheimer and Adorno, Caribbean Critique has been compelled to articulate the critical project not as an absolute idealism but as a materialist politics that would destroy and re-invent the very foundations of a slave-holding, colonial world dedicated to the most violent bestialization of human beings, while striving to remain faithful to the imperatives of the ideas of equality, justice, freedom, and truth that inform this struggle. The thinkers of this Caribbean Critique make clear that in the face of a world that refuses to acknowledge one’s most basic humanity, no negotiation with royalist or even parliamentary colonial orders is possible. To invent this new world required more than the immediacy of spontaneous violence; the non-violence of Gandhi or King has proven viable only in worlds in which the subjects of violence actually appear as recognized human subjects in a public sphere, no matter how hypocritical and degraded that world. For example, in post-war Martinique, with the election of a figure like Aimé Césaire to the French Assembly of 1946, a Gandhian critical dialogue with the imperial power became eminently possible. By stark contrast, in slave-holding Saint-Domingue or French

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 12

15/05/2013 08:44:13

Preface xiii

Algeria from 1945 to 1962, such negotiation was never possible. For any dialogue to occur, the subaltern party would have had to agree to terms of negotiation that were in themselves unacceptable; a negotiation of, say, how to make the existing slave system more ‘humane’ or how to improve the colonial system in ‘French’ Algeria were conditions the subjects of those regimes judged simply impossible to accept a priori. Slave uprisings have occurred repeatedly throughout Western history, from Spartacus onward. Though occasionally achieving some limited success, as in the Brazilian Quilombos, these remained isolated, quarantined, voluntarist, and, with time, universally defeated initiatives in the face of state appropriations of violence and repression in the post-Renaissance Atlantic world. The destruction of plantation slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the destruction of colonialism in the twentieth required something more: a critical understanding of the structures and practices of the world it sought to undermine. The inherent idealism of this critical thought has always been, as Fanon claimed, a radical, anti-essentialist humanism. In speculating beyond the limits of its given world, this form of critique has asserted unflinchingly that ideas such as freedom, emancipation, equality, and justice, when proposed with sufficient tactical clarity and force, can have a decisive and radically transformative impact upon their world, forcefully making what had been impossible in one world a radically new and suddenly possible mode of existence. From this basic proposition, Caribbean Critique unfolds a series of analyses that address the fundamental and recurrent problems of this critical/political theory: (1) the theory of a distinctly Caribbean mode of critique, (2) the deployment of a principle-based political theory and practice, (3) the critique of colonial violence, and (4) the critique of human relationality. In each of these sections, I have not attempted to offer complete portraits of the complex and prolific thinkers in question. Rather, Caribbean Critique can be thought of as a series of interrelated studies, each of which develops essential dimensions and problems of this mode of critique. My hope is that the resulting constellation of crises and interventions will reveal Caribbean Critique as a practical theory and theoretical practice of truth, in its immanent, intersubjective, and universal human reality.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 13

15/05/2013 08:44:13

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 14

15/05/2013 08:44:13

Introduction: The Caribbean Critical Imperative Introduction

Travailler un concept, c’est en faire varier l’extension et la compréhension, le généraliser par l’incorporation des traits d’exception, l’exporter hors de sa région d’origine, le prendre pour un modèle, bref, lui conférer progressivement par des transformations réglées, la fonction d’une forme. Georges Canguilhem

The generic prescription of universal justice as equality, premised upon the destruction of slavery, appeared fully formed as immanent critique from the first moments of the Haitian Revolution. In an extraordinary letter of June 1792, mere months after the initial uprising that had liberated the slaves of northern Saint-Domingue, three leaders of that movement (Jean François, Biassou, and Toussaint Louverture, signing as his fourteen-year-old nephew Belair) wrote to the colonial assembly. The three co-authors of this letter cast their demands to the assembly not in sectarian terms, nor on their own behalves, nor even on behalf of slaves or blacks in general, but rather as predicates of the universal class of human beings.1 From its very first iteration, Caribbean Critique appears concerned not with individuals or with classes but with a series of abstract, universal concepts of relevance to all human beings and not to any specifically regional, racial, or gendered experiences. 2 Yet these universal concepts – right, freedom, equality, justice – are formulated by enslaved, Caribbean subjects in ways that would have been unavailable or unimaginable for the white French subjects of 1789: ‘These are men […] whom you call your slaves, and who claim the rights to which all men may aspire’ (Nesbitt 2008a: 5–6).

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 1

15/05/2013 08:44:13

2

Caribbean Critique

The logic expressed by the signatories of the June 1792 letter is inclusive, not divisive: by their words, the human race is one, and all who are its subjects are to be counted as one human being, equal to another. If this has not been the case for blacks and slaves heretofore, it is because the colonial world of total violence rendered blacks and slaves invisible, uncounted, and unthinkable as subjects of right. Instead, as the writers of this letter point out, they were counted only as living machines for the production of profit: ‘Under the blows of your barbarous whip, we have accumulated for you the treasures you enjoy in this colony.’ They deem the violence of the slave regime both a barbaric state of nature and axiomatically illegitimate, the mere domination of might as right: ‘The human race has suffered to see with what barbarity you have treated men like yourself – yes, men – over whom you have no other right except that you are stronger and more barbaric than we.’ The terms of this letter prefigure Aimé Césaire’s condemnation of colonial violence in Discours sur le colonialisme by a century and a half. Here, in 1792, the voice of colonized reason announces to European colonizers that they have debased themselves by their actions, and have cast themselves from the realm of the human to that of uncivilized barbarians. 3 This universal prescription announced by the signatories of June 1792 is not the negation of specificity in some abstract universal, but rather the recognition that there is no possible politics of identity. The text of this letter indicates that its authors understood identity (here, blackness) as a phantasmatic illusion, the ideological expression of power as domination, social division and hierarchy: We are black, it is true, but tell us, gentlemen, you who are so judicious, what is the law that says that the black man must belong to and be the property of the white man? Certainly you will not be able to make us see where that exists, if it is not in your imaginations – always ready to form new [phantasms] so long as they are to your advantage.

For these writers, the realm of identity – specifically, racial identity – is purely negative. They argue, much like Fanon would in Peau noire, masques blancs (‘The negro is not. Any more than the white man’ (Fanon 1952: 231)), that one is made to become aware of oneself as colonized, as brutalized, as enslaved, insofar as one is subject to the brutality of a specific, limiting determination (black, African, etc.). By contrast, a politics – understood not as minoritarization or the parsimonious dispensation of freedom and benefits from above, but as self-emancipation to equality and the highest possible degrees of

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 2

15/05/2013 08:44:13

Introduction

3

expressive actualization – can take place only under the proposition of undivided universality. In its totality, from this first letter by Toussaint and the revolutionaries of 1792 to Fanon’s ‘Man is a yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies’ (ibid.: 8) to Aristide’s ‘tout moun se moun’ (every person is a person), Caribbean Critique repeatedly affirms this simple, universal proposition. The fundamental axiom of Black Jacobinism maintains the proposition that Truth is concrete universality, a universality whose subjective quality is always the imperative to force the untruth of a world toward justice in a politics of principle. The signatories of this founding document of Caribbean Critique enunciate their politics in the language of the radical enlightenment, codified as a politics of equality in the declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen: Yes, gentlemen, we are free like you, and it is only by your avarice and our ignorance that anyone is still held in slavery up to this day, and we can neither see nor find the right that you pretend to have over us, nor anything that could prove it to us, set down on the earth like you, all being children of the same father created in the same image. We are your equals then, by natural right.

This radical critique is enunciated in subtraction from positive law (whether the code noir or its suspension in the 1791 constitution).4 Law as right precedes any concrete instantiation or codification; law as truth is ontological, testified to by singular human conscience prior to any constituted state of affairs, which can only stand as a secondary, fallible support for critical conscience. Above all, this initial text of Caribbean Critique is paradigmatic of the genre in its affirmation of immanent critique. 5 Unlike related texts from Saint-Domingue in the period of 1791–1794 that indexify the justice of the rebels’ actions to a divine (Christian) authority or to the auratic legitimacy of the kings of Spain or France, this letter takes the crucial step of grounding its claims in truths derived from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen itself.6 The difference between what Marx would call ‘mere criticism’ and this radical critique is precisely to push beyond ‘ideology critique.’ The slaves of Saint-Domingue had no need of a Biassou or Louverture to tell them that they were radically exploited and bestialized. There was no ideological veil of illusion surrounding slavery, except perhaps that delusion of the very few Europeans who continued to argue that it ‘civilized’ barbarous Africans. The radical theory trio of Jean François, Biassou, and Belair/Louverture proposed

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 3

15/05/2013 08:44:13

4

Caribbean Critique

an alternative ideological structuration of social reality, and they refused all the compromising formations of the so-called ‘friends’ of the blacks who imagined utopian schemes to ameliorate the plantation slave system. While the two other members of this three-part collective would quickly disappear from the scene of struggle, Toussaint Louverture founded a tradition of Caribbean Critique beyond any mere criticism. For the next decade and until his capture and death, Louverture refused the false promise of ideological enlightenment. His actions illustrate his steadfast insistence that it is not sufficient simply to grasp a truth in the face of an injustice like plantation slavery. Rather, as Louverture’s actions reveal, the subject of that truth – in this case, of universal emancipation – must force reality to conform to the Idea. Decades before Hegel and Marx would codify and sharpen the tool of immanent critique, the authors of this founding document of Caribbean Critique wield the weapon of immanence against authority by calling the French colonial assembly to task based on its own organizing criteria: You, gentlemen, who pretend to subject us to slavery – have you not sworn to uphold the French Constitution? What does it say, this respectable constitution? What is the fundamental law? Have you forgotten that you have formally vowed the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which says that men are born free, equal in their rights; that their natural rights include liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression? So then, as you cannot deny what you have sworn, we are within our rights, and you ought to recognize yourselves as perjurers; by your decrees, you recognize that all men are free, but you want to maintain servitude for 480,000 individuals who allow you to enjoy all that you possess.

Immanent critique is the fundamental tactic of modern dissidence. We, scholars and students of Caribbean critique, find in this initial document of the Haitian Revolution the procedure of immanent criticism in its rhetorical (rather than systematic, philosophical) form. Seyla Benhabib usefully distinguishes between two primary modes of critique, immanent critique and defetishizing critique (Benhabib 1986: 9). The former bypasses the need for dogmatic normative grounds by seeking instead to reveal the immanent contradictions and inconsistencies of the material in question, while the latter seeks to reveal the historically and socially constructed nature of objects, methodologies that would find further development after Hegel in Marx’s critique of the commodity, Nietzsche’s genealogical critique, and Walter Benjamin’s call for a

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 4

15/05/2013 08:44:13

Introduction

5

critical destruction or ‘mortification’ of the ‘aura’ of any ideological object, to name only the most famous examples of defetishizing critique.7 If critique is etymologically related to the notion of crisis, as Benhabib points out, this proximity underscores the close relationship between critique and the political, what Marx would call the necessity not only to criticize, but to change an unjust world. The method of defetishizing critique that Hegel would later formalize in his critique of labor in the master–slave dialectic in the Phenomenology is formulated in this letter authored by Louverture as a means to demonstrate within the black Atlantic public sphere one thing: that what appears initially as a given fact, as ‘natural,’ is in fact historical. It is thus a revocable and transformable contingency (Benhabib 1986: 21). Marx and the Radicalization of Critique Marx radicalized this inheritance of enlightenment critique and drew a crucial distinction between ‘mere criticism’ and radical critique (Marx follows Hegel’s rejection of Enlightenment ‘criticism’) in his call for ‘the ruthless critique of all that exists’. As Marx’s famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach states, this ruthlessness involves not just criticizing the world, but changing it. If Marxian thought has constituted ‘the fundamental framework’ for anticolonial and postcolonial thinking, as Robert Young has cogently argued, critique was in turn fundamental to every stage of the Marxian project from its inception in the 1830s to its culmination in the various iterations of Marx’s mature ‘critique of political economy’ (Young 2001: 6). Marx first elaborated this concept of critique in an 1844 letter to Arnold Ruge. What Marx called ‘mere criticism’8 – from the enlightenment refutations of the logical possibility of slavery attacked by Rousseau to the criticism of the Young Hegelians castigated by Marx – stands outside the object of its contemplation to assert the truth of its normative universe against the falsity of facts and states of affairs. In its place, immanent criticism seeks to destroy ideological illusion by demonstrating the fundamental non-coincidence of a world with its own professed criteria and self-understanding (Benhabib 1986: 33). Mere criticism is utopian, content to project the resolution of actual injustice into a theoretical and temporal beyond. In its place, this ‘ruthless criticism’ must, Marx argued, draw and affirm the full implications of its own conclusions, nor shrink before the obligation to bring those conclusions to bear against the world, what Marx calls ‘the

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 5

15/05/2013 08:44:13

6

Caribbean Critique

powers that be, in the full measure of its injustice’ (Marx and Engels 1978: 13). This is necessarily so, as Marx argues in this seminal early text, because this critique reveals that ‘the state everywhere presupposes that reason as been realized,’ when, in fact, the state is the reign of universal injustice. If a Marxist notion of critique in this sense rejects utopianism, it also implies that the seeds of a true society are contained immanently, virtually, within an unjust society. There is no break between falsity and truth, injustice and justice, inequality and equality, but rather an untrue world must be forced to change, through the violence first of immanent critique and the transformation of consciousnesses (‘The world has long been dreaming of something that it can acquire if only it becomes conscious of it’) and subsequently of revolution itself.9 In this incipient statement of Leninist vanguardism, immanent critique is given the task of articulating the goals of clarity and insight (‘the work of our time is to clarify to itself [critical philosophy] the meaning of its own struggle’) (Marx and Engels 1978: 15). Following on the insights of such immanent criticism, a ‘ruthless’ critique must proceed to draw the full (political) conclusions of its analysis. As Marx would write elsewhere, in the crucial years of 1843–1844, ‘political emancipation is at the same time the dissolution of the old society, upon which sovereign power, the alienated political life of the people, rests’ (Marx and Engels 1978: 44). At that same time, Marx wrote perhaps his densest and most compelling early formulation of the project of immanent critique. His ‘Introduction to the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ highlights the immanence of any truth to a situation. In it, Marx argues that now that the critique of religion, as a product of human imagination, has been completed by Spinoza and Feuerbach, all transcendental realms of truth will have vanished, and truth will become immanent and political. He asserts that the essential task of criticism now becomes the struggle ‘to establish the truth of this world’ (Marx and Engels 1978: 54). Marx’s prescription is unyielding: ‘War upon the state of affairs […]! By all means! [Criticism] is not a lancet but a weapon. Its object is an enemy which it aims not to refute but to destroy’ (ibid.: 55). In language that prefigures Fanon’s defense of absolute violence in the overthrow of colonial exploitation and echoes the convictions of the Caribbean revolutionaries, Marx asserts that the radical critic’s task in a situation of injustice and exploitation is not to agree to civilized rules of engagement with an opponent who refuses to recognize one’s humanity, let alone agree to gentlemanly combat: ‘In such a fight, it is of

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 6

15/05/2013 08:44:13

Introduction

7

no interest to know whether the adversary is of the same rank, is noble or interesting – all that matters is to strike him’ (ibid.: 56). In his early statement of the critical project, Marx differentiates between two proper modes of critique beyond the Idealist speculations of ‘criticism’. The first mode, derived from Hegel’s Absolute Idealism and from the abstraction of the Kantian categorical imperative, is what Marx calls ‘speculative’ critique, or critique that remains in splendid isolation from ‘practical activity’ (Marx and Engels 1978: 60).10 To this dogmatic, absolute mode of critique, Marx counterposes a ‘radical’ mode of critique that is immanent in two senses.11 First, it draws the resources of its arguments and conclusions from the very material under its gaze, rather than importing its truths from beyond. Second, it remains immanent to the conclusions it draws in the imperative to make the untrue world fully adequate to these revealed, immanent truths: Critique ‘ends, therefore, with the categorical imperative to overthrow all those conditions in which man is an abased, enslaved, abandoned, contemptible being’. This process, Marx asserts, can only mean a ‘radical revolution, universal human emancipation’ (ibid.: 62). Marx then famously concludes that a universal class must become the agent of this process, one whose ‘sufferings are universal,’ one that has experienced not particular wrongs (against a class, gender, or race) but the denial of humanity itself, a class whose emancipation necessarily implies the emancipation of humanity as a whole, ‘which can only redeem itself by a total redemption of humanity’ (ibid.: 64). This is an imperative to universalize the struggle for equality as a general or generic emancipation, the subject of which can never be totalized or definitively named in a final instance. Marx’s response to this imperative was his critique of political economy, but it remained something of a deus ex machina because it never resolved the dilemma of precisely how a vanguardist critique would ‘seize the masses’. However, the uncertainty of the place of critique might have motivated Marx’s convenient turn from this early, insurgent humanism to the ontological scientism of Capital’s critique of political economy. In Capital, Marx pursued his dual project of immanent criticism, at once experiential and systemic, or subjective and scientific, in order to reveal the inherent contradictions of capitalism and to measure the actual processes that extract surplus value against the (bourgeois) norms of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. The wage laborer, possessing only his labor power, only has a freedom that is in fact the violent necessity that he sell that power to the capitalist in order

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 7

15/05/2013 08:44:13

8

Caribbean Critique

to survive. What Benhabib calls Marx’s ‘defetishizing’ critique is the analytical revelation of this immanent contradiction (Benhabib 1986: 108). Decades before Marx formulated this critical theory, the historical destruction of slavery in the Age of Enlightenment demanded more than the logical, depoliticized critique of slavery by the Encyclopedists or the perpetual postponement of immediate, universal emancipation by abolitionist critics like Condorcet and Grégoire, who argued for delaying emancipation until a point at which slaves were judged to be ‘prepared’ (over a matter of generations, if need be) for freedom.12 Such a judgment, need it be said, was to be made according to the criteria of the enlightened critics themselves, that is, by those who had never experienced a moment of actual enslavement in their lives. Immanent critique, in contrast, became a viable mode of politics from the moment the revolutionary state grounded itself via founding documents such as the 1776 or 1789 Declarations in the future United States and French Republics, by which fact these new states simultaneously entered into radical self-contradiction in their failure simultaneously to abolish slavery. Toussaint Louverture’s procedure of the radical dissidence is a politics rather than empty criticism because it discerns in the actual, real configuration of the present the (virtual) configuration of a more just world. The task of immanent critique is to reveal within the actual structure of the world, as only one, contingent formation in an ongoing process of historical transformation, the sketch of a truth still to be actualized. ‘It will then be shown’, wrote Marx, that the world already possesses the dream of something, of which it must also possess the consciousness, before it can actually take possession of it. It will be shown that the task is not to insert a line between the past and the future, but the fulfilment of the thought of the past. Finally it will be shown that humans begin no new task, but consciously bring old tasks to fruition. (cited at Benhabib 1986: 35)

Both Hegel (in the master–slave dialectic) and Marx (in the critique of capital), would later develop the immanent critique of slavery first announced by the colonized themselves in that 1792 letter signed by Louverture, Jean-Francois, and Biassou. These former slaves knew – before Hegel – that emancipation from slavery would involve the risk of a life-and-death struggle: ‘Here, gentlemen, is the request of men who are like you, and here is their final resolution: they are resolved to live free or die’ (Nesbitt 2008b: 7). This founding document of

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 8

15/05/2013 08:44:13

Introduction

9

Caribbean Critique suggests that emancipation from slavery would involve reappropriating the full creative powers of all human beings that had been alienated in the monstrous apparatus of slavery. It would entail destroying the juridical code that sustained that slavery in the post-1789 order, and creating a new order of universal and general humanity.13 Analytic and Subjective Critique Two modes of critique operate concurrently throughout the history of Caribbean Critique.14 The first is designed to reveal the objective contradictions of colonialism and to locate the potential for the concrete political transformation of that society in moments of systemic crisis. Its modality is primarily analytical, exploring the functional contradictions of slavery and colonialism. The second mode focuses on the subjective experience of exploitation and crisis, and its preferred form is literary: poetry, novel, play, or manifesto. While every great text in this tradition deftly combines dimensions of both modalities, examples in which the analytic mode predominates include Victor Schoelcher’s Des Colonies françaises: Abolition immédiate de l’esclavage, C. L. R. James’s Black Jacobins, Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre, and Édouard Glissant’s Le Discours antillais. Examples of the literary–subjective mode of critique range from the poetry, essays, and theatre of Césaire, to the novels of Glissant, Marie Chauvet and Edwidge Danticat.15 The French Revolution was the occasion for the first great crisis of French colonialism; its lived experience in the French Antilles in the 1790s opened the breach for the revolutionary movement to abolish slavery and include all humans under the purview of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.16 Put another way, one can argue that two relatively distinct critical positions are possible in relation to the colonial slave-regime’s imposition of slavery as the mode of production appropriate to the appropriation of surplus labor power and profit. One can reveal the systemic functionality and contradictions of this system, as did James and Eric Williams, to show how New World plantation slavery played a fundamental role in the primitive accumulation of capital prior to the industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century and the global imposition of wage labor upon a class possessing no other means of production than their raw labor power. More recently, Glissant’s 1981 Discours antillais analyzed the contradictions of late colonialism in the French départements et

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 9

15/05/2013 08:44:13

10

Caribbean Critique

territoires d’outre-mer (DOM), devoting significant attention to the functional modalities of the unique form of neo-colonialism developed in the French Overseas Departments since their accession to juridical rights within the French Republic in 1946. Alternatively, a literary– subjective mode of critique seeks to encapsulate the lived reality of colonial violence, exploitation, and alienation from the point of view of the colonized subject. Since this literary mode strives to express this experience as compellingly as possible, its preferred rhetorical modes are most often poetry, the novel, and theater. This division inevitably leads every critical thinker to a crisis in their own mode of production. Will they adopt an objective position external to the suffering of the exploited, to take advantage of their distance to gain a quasi-scientific insight into the functioning of a system, at the risk of speaking in the place of the exploited, and without any direct lived experience of that world, or will they seek to speak as the exploited, in the immediacy of poetic, theatrical vocalization or the inwardness of the psychological novel, at the risk of ventriloquizing the subaltern subject? Aimé Césaire’s writing is paradigmatic of this dilemma, but a similar contradiction confronts every writer whose work I consider in the following pages. To what extent do texts such as Discours sur le colonialisme, Peau noire, masques blancs, or Discours antillais reflect the critical thinker’s structural ambiguity as both critic and exploited subject? Alternately, to what extent is a writer able to move from the abstract opposition of distanced analysis and poetic description to an understanding of how historical transformation arises out of a necessary mediation of these two positions? Does Suffering Count? These questions are set in relief when contemporary theorists address the problem of slavery, the paradigmatic model of modern suffering. Alain Badiou is a case in point. Badiou explores the vicissitudes of slavery as a key topical excursus to the ontology he puts forward in the second volume of his magnum opus Being and Event, entitled Logics of Worlds.17 As it had for Césaire, ‘Toussaint Louverture’ names for Badiou the historical event of a universal emancipation from slavery and colonization in the years 1791–1804. Badiou’s reference to Toussaint is appropriate in this sense, but Badiou’s interpretation of Toussaint’s significance misses the mark. Badiou invokes the ‘astounding Toussaint

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 10

15/05/2013 08:44:13

Introduction

11

Louverture’ not to index the conquest of undivided universalism and the destruction of a world (plantation slavery) by an explosive event (the Haitian Revolution), nor even as a canonical example of the plurality of singular worlds that his volume seeks to ontologize. Instead, Badiou confusingly uses Toussaint only to exemplify the process he names the ‘resurrection’ of an eternal truth. In this misguided argument, Badiou links Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution to the ancient revolt of Spartacus, ‘the event which originates for the ancient world a maxim of emancipation in the present tense’ (Badiou 2006: 63). To make this connection, Badiou relies upon the fact that Étienne Laveaux – the French general who mentored Toussaint’s rise to governor general of Saint Domingue – calls his protégé: ‘the black Spartacus’ (ibid.: 64). Badiou’s representation of this might be factually accurate, but it is utterly mistaken in intent. As Badiou rightly points out, the Spartacan revolt was fundamentally an assertion of a claim by the slave who ‘wants to […] return home’, defining it as an archetypical conservative revolution that failed to envision the destruction of a world in its entirety, one that remained content to envision merely the escape of individuals from that system to an individualistic freedom. But – and this is what Badiou fails to recognize – the slaves of Saint-Domingue never envisioned a return ‘home’, and Laveaux’s description should be judged the inappropriate reference of a European unable to grasp the world-historical event unfolding before him. The Middle Passage had ensured that the slaves of Saint-Domingue were irretrievably severed from any originary African home or identity. The genius of Toussaint Louverture is not to have been a slave who desired, like Spartacus, to return home, but to have radicalized the gesture of innumerable slave revolts throughout history by producing a revolution that destroyed the world of plantation slavery in its entirety. While the drive for emancipation and universal equality can rightly be called an eternal truth in Badiou’s terms, it is precisely this truth of 1804 that Badiou fails to acknowledge. For Badiou, though the totality of any world will unfold through the transcendental determinations of a distinct logic,18 the true does not lie in this Whole, as it did for Hegel (Badiou 2006: 142), but outside the totality of any world. We find this disinterest in suffering at work in Logics of Worlds, especially in Badiou’s description of the Spartacan slave revolt. In describing what he calls in his typology of subjectivation the ‘reactive subject’ (the subject who, in response to an event, attempts to return to the old order of a world rather than remaining faithful to

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 11

15/05/2013 08:44:13

12

Caribbean Critique

the event), Badiou refers to those former slaves in Spartacus’s group who abandon the revolt in because of the suffering it has caused: Obviously, the terrible outcome of the sequence – thousands of rebels crucified all along the route that led the triumphant Crassus to Rome – will confirm and magnify the conviction that the genuine path of universally acceptable novelties, the ‘realist’ path, passes through the negation of the evental trace and the thoroughgoing repression of everything that resembles the subjective form whose name is Spartacus. (Badiou 2006: 56)

In Badiou’s system, suffering both thematically and logically does not count in relation to the truth of an event. The suffering of the crucified in Spartacus’s failed revolt is only negative, exemplary of the reactive subject who abandons the struggle for emancipation. Suffering, in Badiou’s world, counts for nothing.19 But for Hegel, as Badiou reads him, everything in a world counts, in all the senses of the word (Badiou 2006: 147). This Hegelian stance initiates a whole tradition of critical thought, including Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, as well as Césaire’s affirmation that a universal, non-identitarian Négritude is not a biological fatality or essence, but is to be measured ‘au compas de la souffrance’. For Hegel, Benjamin, and Césaire alike, ‘nothing’, in Benjamin’s famous statement, is lost to history’. 20 All the suffering, all the failed revolts and revolutions, all count in a redemptive, emancipatory vision of history. In Hegel’s words, ‘Non-being-there’, including all those who have failed and perished before we have arrived, ‘is itself a being; it is not-beingthere as a being’ (cited at Badiou 2009: 145). Not-being-(t)here: all the failed slave revolts before 1804, all those who have fallen before the triumphant march of history, the history of the victors. In this ethics, truth is formed in and through lived experience, past and present. Ethical content is not atemporal; the truth of universal emancipation is ineluctably bound to the falsity of slavery. Memory of the experience of suffering is constitutive of the truth that differentiates itself from and out of suffering. The event, as Deleuze liked to say, is a wound that we carry with us. For Badiou, in contrast, what is positively present in a world is not true, but only that which can be measured (ibid.: 146). Put in the terms of traditional Critical Theory, to what extent are Caribbean subjects not simply the subjects of slavery and colonialism, but the subjects of this critical tradition and the insights it offers? To what extent is Caribbean Critique in any instance limited to

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 12

15/05/2013 08:44:13

Introduction

13

the auratic imposition of a vanguard ascription (à la Lukàcs) of the ‘objective interests’ of the colonized, or, on the other hand, reduced to a mere poetic description, however compelling and accurate, of a lived experience that remains captive to the marronage of individual, voluntaristic subjectivism? Each text offers a different response to this question, and these responses cannot be generalized; instead, I will explore how these texts differently explore and resolve this inevitable and necessary contradiction of Caribbean experience. Benhabib argues that Marx was ultimately unable to think concretely of collective experience as a mode of critical practice (Benhabib 1986: 129). Might Toussaint Louverture’s turn to corporal agrarianism; Schoelcher and James’s focus on Toussaint himself as the messianic, vanguardist leader; or Césaire’s development of an incendiary poetic voice of the highest complexity and even obscurity fare differently? To what extent does Fanon’s invocation of a universal ‘humanism’ in the more lyrical moments of his oeuvre sidestep the problematic issue of empirical versus normative views of the subject (i.e., Antilleans’ actual lived experience versus a projected, disalienated future)? To what degree is this universal human subject actually operative as the actual agent of historical transformation, of, say, the destruction of plantation slavery in 1804 or of French colonialism in 1946, as opposed to being a mere utopian projection of the critical thinker herself? The answer here as well can only be sought case by case, in which the subject of emancipation explores the modes of practice that will allow her to unfold the truth of a critical awareness in various domains (defetishizing critique, literary self-objectification, political self-representation). In contrast to Marx, who could rely on the overdetermining functionality of a universal proletarian class as the transparent bearer of truth for both individual and collective, a work such as Glissant’s novel Malemort testifies all at once to the absence of this universal subject in the contemporary (post-1968) struggle for a postcolonial, universal justice, to the overall failure of a generalized collective consciousness on the part of the Antillean colonized, and to the foundering of any singular subject as the vehicle or singular manifestation of a unified teleological historical movement. The appearance of a multiplicity of other subjects (women, the insane) in the novels of Maryse Condé or Marie Chauvet, then, further explores this multiplicity of subjects of the struggle for emancipation, beyond the relatively impoverished vision of emancipatory subjectivity one finds in the work of the more phallocentric James or Fanon.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 13

15/05/2013 08:44:13

14

Caribbean Critique

Caribbean Critique succeeds to the degree that it mediates the objective and subjective modes of analysis and expression, both the translation of objective insight into experiential immediacy, and the critical analysis of suffering as a manifestation and necessary moment in the general process of universal emancipation. The Politics of Principle Peter Hallward has argued that the contemporary horizon of critique should be articulated through a ‘politics of prescription’. In terms that pursue the militancy of Marx’s ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, Sartre and Fanon’s theory of engagement and absolute violence, and the contemporary struggles of figures such as Aristide in Haiti, Hallward affirms that ‘against alignment with the way of the world, against withdrawal from engagement with the world, it is time to reformulate a prescriptive practice of politics’ (Hallward 2005: 771). For Hallward, political prescription relies upon a series of defining decisions, each of which corresponds to positions to be developed in various moments in the pages below. Such a politics is for Hallward the direct and immediate, rather than eternally deferred, ‘application of a universal principle’, such as that of justice as equality, coupled with an insistence that one push beyond a merely axiomatic reference to a principle such as equality to ‘undertake the concrete transformation of those relations that sustain inequality, exploitation, or oppression’ (ibid.: 773). Politics is not equivalent to the social or everyday in general, but is rather a specific, relational dimension of social existence that seeks to make the impossible possible; Hallward’s political prescription refers to a neo-Sartrean affirmation of binary confrontations in which one is either for or against any specific, situated instance of the general struggle for justice as equality. A prescriptive intervention, insofar as it will successfully transform social relations (say, by abolishing slavery or colonial exploitation) will only be true or admissible after the fact. From the perspective of the unjust world from which it arises, a struggle such as the slaves’ insurgency of 1791 in Saint-Domingue or the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN)’s struggle against French colonialism in Algeria will always appear, if it appears at all, as inhuman, ‘barbarian’, ‘terroristic’, an anarchistic a refusal of ‘civilization’. Finally, the implications and effects of any prescriptive politics will exceed their initial site of articulation. The universal egalitarianism of

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 14

15/05/2013 08:44:13

Introduction

15

the Haitian Revolution gradually produced shock-waves throughout the slave-holding Atlantic world of the nineteenth century, as one industrial center after another abolished the practice. As Toussaint Louverture and Robespierre showed, prescriptive politics undertakes the invention of novel, unheralded, ‘deliberate’ modes of intervention into any situation, one dimension of which is precisely subjectivation, the creation of novel modes of subjectivity. Prescription, in the face of the dominant way of any (unjust) world, carries an irreducible ‘dictatorial’ dimension that refuses representation and reproduction (Louverture and Robespierre are here again prototypical). The following chapters will argue that the defining characteristic of Caribbean Critique is not its ‘prescriptive’ intervention but its indexification to what I will call a politics of principle. Critique, as I use the term here, can be defined as the refusal to allow the abstract separation of theory and practice. 21 Critical thought since not only Marx, but Robespierre and Louverture’s critique of the contradictions of enlightenment, affirms that if pure abstraction remains powerless to change the world, thoughtless, anarchistic action remains volatile and subject to rapid dispersal or assimilation. It was above all, for example, the thoughtful, reflective conjuncture of a massive insurgent slave revolt with the concept of universal emancipation that carried the slaves of Saint-Domingue so much further than the many slave revolts that preceded theirs. A politics of principle shares with the concept of critique this dual commitment to holding together theory and practice; in its very definition the concept of principle itself unites a practical dimension (whether as ontological ‘first principle’ or as the active cause of human free will) that points to the transformation of the world, with a reflective, abstract and theoretical element (as pure a priori, axiomatic proposition or postulate). At the same time, principle carries a third moment in common with critique – understood as the process of sorting (krinein) or judging – insofar as the principle stands as a rule orienting action within a given situation, allowing one to articulate a response to the question ‘What is to be done?’. At its simplest, a politics of principle articulates the fundamental disjuncture between a basic contradiction of any democratic politics with universal (or cosmopolitan, to adopt Kant’s phrase) intent: (1) the possibility to construct human existence (as a politics in the largest sense) must remain potentially open to any thinking being, insofar as there exists a universal equality of reason and action as human potentials; but,

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 15

15/05/2013 08:44:13

16

Caribbean Critique

furthermore, (2) all statements are not veridical. Opinion, speculation, or mere knowledge of facts are not equal to the enunciation of universal truths, including those that would orient a cosmopolitan politics. The struggle to articulate together the radical democratic openness of the political to any thinking subject whatsoever, with the need to distinguish truths of universal scope from mere opinions (and, in particular, opinions that negate the universality of the first statement, of the type, ‘I am of the opinion that humans may justifiably be held by other humans as property’) is the struggle to determine what is just, and, in particular, justice under the imperative of universal or generic equality. 22 Justice, in other words, as equality. Louverture writes to the increasingly pro-slavery French Directory in 1797, ‘France will not renounce her principles. She shall not permit the perversion of her sublime morality and the destruction of the principles that honor her the most, and the degradation of her most beautiful accomplishment, by rescinding the decree of 16 pluviôse [abolishing slavery]’ (Nesbitt 2008a: 34). A standard reading of this passage might identify Toussaint as the alienated colonial subject affirming total identification with the colonizer (France) as the site of all power, value, beauty, and truth. In such a reading, Louverture’s alienation would eventually make him incapable of affirming independence from France, unlike Dessalines, whose hatred of slavery, the French, and affirmation of Vaudou cultural values ideally fitted him to defeat Leclerc’s troops and to take this momentous step. In fact, Louverture does not at all identify here with France as a white, European seat of power. Rather, he identifies directly, without Fanonian alienation, with a universal principle, one that contingently happened to be articulated and defended in a revolution in France in 1789. The statement ‘France will not renounce her principles’ affirms the sign-chain of the equivalency France = 1789 = universal emancipation. It is only insofar as France continues to identify with 1789 and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, and, furthermore, only insofar as that declaration or commandment is understood to imply the necessary destruction of plantation slavery, that Louverture identifies and will continue to identify with the signifier ‘France’. Furthermore, it is ironically he who in this letter is actually reminding the Directory of these principles that they are now abandoning (and will definitively abandon in 1802 with the reimposition of slavery in the French colonies: ‘These are the principles I transmit to you on [behalf of the people of Saint-Domingue]’ (Nesbitt 2008a: 35).

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 16

15/05/2013 08:44:13

Introduction

17

The politics of principle to be found in Caribbean critique can be summarized as a series of propositions:23 1 ‘Community’, whether deemed désouvrée (Nancy), à venir (Agamben), or Antillean (Glissant, Celia Britton) is not the name of the only possible mode of politics in the wake of the twentieth-century failures of mass politics (Nazism, state socialism, decolonization), but rather asserts the impossible coincidence of politics and truth in the wake of 1968 and 1989. The impossibility of community, which functions as the real or limit of the contemporary world, allows for the displacement of any mode of politics defined as the predicate of a truth. The only politics actually available under the domination of communitarianism is managerial distributionism and catastrophic response (Rwanda, 9/11, Irene, the Haitian earthquake of January 2010), both of which aim solely to sustain a given state of affairs (for the benefit, need it be said, of those included in its accounting of the entitled). Emancipatory politics, in the era of communitarian identity management, are maintained under strict quarantine and erasure as ‘impossible dreams’. 2 The truth in question at every step in this book is philosophic and above all Socratic; it is the truth that one does not know positively, yet which a subject loves and pursues (as philosophy), remaining steadfast before the anxiety of this non-knowledge, refusing to foreclose this knowledge with the full image of an embodied figure of truth. It is the endless experimentation of what a true world might resemble. Call it the truth (that we do not know). 3 The politics of principle breaks through consensus by the effective, improvised manipulation and militant embodiment of statements: ‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’; ‘Qu’est-ce que le Tiers état? Tout’; ‘Tous les hommes naissent et demeurent libre et égaux en droits’; ‘koute libete ki pale’; ‘Je suis Toussaint Louverture, et je veux que la liberté règne à St. Domingue’; ‘tout moun se moun’. A politics of principle thus already exists with the enunciation of such universal statements that prescribe an egalitarian emancipation, and takes its place in a world unconditionally (though certainly not without encountering resistances), as the enunciation of an impossible truth that, nonetheless, henceforth exists. The destiny of that truth, following on its initial enunciation, will be experimentally to follow through as rigorously as possible the consequences it implies for any world. The name of the support of this experimentation is a subject of truth/ politics (insofar as the two are understood to coincide). This subject, crucially, is not always already there, but necessarily takes place in the

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 17

15/05/2013 08:44:14

18

Caribbean Critique wake of such enunciations; the enunciation of a universal truth, one might say, has in the past and can at any time or place engender its subject. 4 The determinate improvisation of this politics creates the conditions of its truth. Boukman’s revolt, Louverture’s declarations or his 1801 constitution appear barbaric, impossible, inhuman, and ridiculously savage and devoid of all logic from the point of view of the situation they refuse (legal plantation slavery, Paris, entitled, moneyed bourgeois property, etc.). It is only in pursuing the implications of a truth such as tout moun se moun, a truth savage and barbaric in August, 1791, that it would become in 1804 a universal (though still embattled and contested) state that grounded what had been an abstraction. 5 The politics of principle refuses the false separation of idea and politics. Politics properly understood is the experimentation of a thought, the determination of the implications of its truth for a given situation. Once the plantations have been burned to the ground, the question remains, what is freedom? Once Schoelcher has forced through the 1848 abolition decree, the question remains, what is justice? Once Duvalier has been deposed, the question remains, what is democracy? Politics is itself the experimental articulation of this truth in which thought and the constitution of bodies are inseparable, one and the same process in two modalities. The politics of universal emancipation, once it exists, is always a site of thought to the highest degree, an abstraction from the injustice of a prior world. 24 6 The politics of principle, as a mode of critique, enforces and pursues the articulation of distinctions. Terror is not torture. Forced plantation labor under Louverture and Christophe is not slavery, but already a new, experimental regime of postcolonial violence in the context of the extreme precarity of global antislavery after 1804. 7 If ‘political philosophy’ names the analytical mode of politics as managerial distributionism and the ideological legitimation models applied to existing states of affairs, a politics of principle refuses the top-down, ‘sensible’ distribution of rights, goods and benefits to each according to their identities. The truth of such a politics makes no ‘sense’. The demands of Aristide in 1990 appear utterly unreasonable to the North Atlantic, Washington consensus; the demands of the 1792 revolutionary theory collective Jean-François/Biassou/Belair/ Toussaint appear absurd, impossible, insensé, to their destinataires in ‘revolutionary’ Paris. 8 Rights (as in the ‘Rights of Man’ and ‘Human Rights’), Law, and the state are strictly coextensive. The only valid expression of right is in

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 18

15/05/2013 08:44:14

Introduction

19

this view the assertion of a right without (attributed, legal, legitimate) Right. The Law of the French Assemblé in 1791, in refusing to abolish slavery, effectively continued to assert that slaves have no rights other than the Code noir; to this those same enslaved human beings declared and asserted their literally impossible, inadmissible rights exterior to all accreditation and legitimation. It is not truth, but rules that legitimate Right, and the force of rules, via the monopoly of legitimate violence, seeks to disable and delegitimize all taking place of the expression of right without Rights. Politics as managerial distributionism denies the interdependency of politics and truth, and the managerial state judges legitimacy or legality from mere procedural coherence; if the prescription of the law (Code noir) has been followed, the practice is legitimate. 9 The politics of principle does not erase difference, but judges difference to be irrelevant, not to count, in any political sequence. A politics of universal emancipation does not erase differences between men and women, queer and straight, black and white, citizen and stateless, but asserts the absolute irrelevancy of such distinctions and seeks strictly to enforce the consequences of such a prescriptive egalitarianism. 10 The transcendental descriptive name of this politics of prescription, independent of its specific situated instantiations, is ‘justice as equality’. Of the three principal terms available in the wake of the American, French and Haitian revolutions, freedom, fraternity or community, and equality, only the last continues to name politics as defined by the previous assertions. If community must be rejected for the reasons ascribed above, freedom, as in the immediate insurgencies of antislavery, such as the Saint-Domingue uprising of August 19, 1791, undoubtedly names an imperative of justice. It has, however, become so irremediably contaminated since 1789, first with the logic of liberalism and now neo-liberalism, that its assertion must be sustained as a necessary moment in an emancipatory politics, but only insofar as it remains subsidiary to another term (as in Étienne Balibar’s concept of égaliberté). That term, equality, must itself be subtracted from the economic logic of distribution, such as the proto-liberal Jacobin experiments with social welfare or the current ‘Washington consensus’, to indicate instead the bare assertion or presupposition of abstract equality, the logic of equivalence, prior to, governing as idea, a situation. In this sense, the slaves names the universal subject of emancipation precisely because it comes to stand not as a positive assertion of identity, but what must be universally erased so that the pure same, what Fanon called ‘humanity,’ may take its place.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 19

15/05/2013 08:44:14

20

Caribbean Critique

Europe, the Caribbean, and the Crisis of Critique Ironically, at the same moment Aimé Césaire began to develop an engaged model of critique (Négritude) that would culminate in Fanon’s celebration of the subject of emancipation from colonialism in his 1961 Les Damnés de la terre, European critical theory entered its own state of crisis. Max Horkheimer encapsulates this crisis of European Critical Theory – following the foundering of the Leninist project under both the Stalinism of the Show Trials, the rise of Fascism, and the earlier disintegration of the Western European revolutions in the 1920s – in his seminal 1937 essay ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’. While Horkheimer still asserted in 1934, as had Lukács in History and Class Consciousness (1919–1923), that the proletariat represented ‘the most progressive social forces’, he later abandoned this claim to assert instead the insight of the critical thinker in the face of the increasing ‘regression’ (what Horkheimer and Adorno would soon dub the ‘Culture Industry’ and the dialectic of enlightenment) of the exploited social classes (Benhabib 1986: 151). In Horkheimer’s obscure formulation, this amounts to the recognition that In the judgment of the critical theorist the loss of all rights with a determined content, a loss conditioned by the concentration of economic power and given its fullest form in the authoritarian state, has brought with it the disappearance not only of an ideology but also of a cultural factor which has a positive value and not simply a negative one. (Horkheimer 1973: 236)

This dilemma of the disjunction of theory and practice would find its subsequent, Caribbean variant in the aporias of postcolonial politics, after the ‘failures’ of Césaire’s departmentalization and decolonization. If Horkheimer could only offer a renewed critique of political economy in response to this dilemma in his 1937 essay, Theodor Adorno would go on to map out an aesthetic confrontation with this aporia. In this view, the depoliticized, even defeatist, nature of Adorno’s substitution of aesthetic theory for militant politics offers an early, Eurocentric variant of the aestheticism of the late Glissant, to be discussed below. As Benhabib summarizes this turn in terms as true for Glissant as for Adorno, ‘immanent critique becomes negative dialectics, defetishizing critique becomes the critique of culture, and crisis diagnosis is transformed into a retrospective philosophy of history with utopian intent’ (Benhabib 1986: 171).

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 20

15/05/2013 08:44:14

Introduction

21

The limits of Seyla Benhabib’s seminal yet eminently teleological reading of Critical Theory, culminating as it does in Habermas’s model of Dialogical Rationality, make it ultimately incompatible with the radical politics of Caribbean Critique. 25 From Toussaint through Césaire, Fanon, and Aristide, the practice of ‘ruthless critique’ starts defensively, in response to the denial of all dialogue on the part of the dominant party. If one’s very humanity is rejected by the enslaver or colonizer, no rational dialogue is possible, and emancipation must be conquered by other, more radical and often violent, means. The so-called non-violence of Gandhi, King, and Havel, like that of Césaire’s departmentalization, were possible only because each militant was recognized as the rational subject of a public sphere of debate and discussion by the state they called into question. 26 No such recognition was ever forthcoming from, say, the French pro-slavery forces in 1791 or the French state in Algeria circa 1954. Truth and Critique The foundation of political dissidence in the twentieth century undoubtedly originates in the anticolonial philosophy of Satyagraha of Gandhi. The ‘power of truth’, as it has been translated, offered a potent political force against a British imperial democracy whose policy and acts in colonial India stood in massive contradiction to the democratic self-image and ideology of the state and civil society. In this context, Gandhi developed civil disobedience into a magisterial, inventive form of social struggle, in which the right to salt (as a dimension of the right to life) or the right to produce goods for one’s minimal needs (to spin fabric for clothing) became mass theatrical dramatizations on the national and, indeed, world stages, to the consternation of the British authorities. 27 For the tradition of political dissidence, one idea has defined politics as a procedure of truth, from Socrates to the present: justice as equality. But, in the modern, post-1789 worlds we actually inhabit, justice as equality is merely virtual, yet to be actualized. Moreover, this dissonance between a virtual truth and its failed actualization is verifiable by all human beings, insofar as they exert their universal faculty of judgment and sustain the priority of conscience to any constituted, legitimate legal political order. In considering the world around us in light of this measure of justice as equality, we find that ‘measure is something

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 21

15/05/2013 08:44:14

22

Caribbean Critique

different from the measured’ (Patočka 2002: 183). The standard of justice as equality is both immanent – knowable by the human faculty of reason – and eternal; only its various appearances in a multiplicity of worlds are changing and imperfect. The idea of justice as equality, no fact of nature or divinity, but immanently conceived by humans, is, like the fabled international metre bar that we can travel to compare in Sèvres, France, something that can be revisited as historical conditions change. For Jefferson, this meant asking whether colonists were justly taxed by an index of equality; for Olympe de Gouges, whether women under the revolution were to be considered subjects of the Rights of ‘Man’; for Toussaint Louverture, whether slaves were being treated as subjects of these same, unchanging rights. A politics of principle affirms that what is uniquely and truly human is not our being-unto-death, but our capacity to accede, within time, to an eternal truth. The critical tradition of a politics of principle affirms that to live is not to live as a mortal animal, but to instantiate in time and place the idea of truth. 28 The familiar invocation of finitude in poststructural thought is, in the end, an anti-philosophy, to be contrasted with Spinoza’s affirmation that ‘the philosopher thinks of nothing less than death’, an anti-philosophy that leads directly to the celebration of sacrifice as the privileged path to truth. Any true politics, whether the overthrow of slavery in 1792, the destruction of French colonialism in Algeria in 1962, or the transformation of Egyptian, Libyan, or Syrian society today, has always required risking one’s life in the name of truth, of justice as equality, and not the affirmation of our unsurpassable finitude. The ideology of finitude stands in solidarity with the forces of subjection, and sacrifice is its sole political resource. Slavery itself is undoubtedly the archetypal discourse of finitude, the affirmation by all imaginable means of brutality that humans are no more than beasts of labor, disposable mortals who will die soon enough under the master’s unlimited repertoire of tortures. By contrast, the authors of the letter from Saint-Domingue of June 1792 that is the founding document of Caribbean Critique affirmed at once their humanity as (mortal) subjects and their apperception of the infinite and eternal truth of human equality in words that hold true across the infinite sites of global injustice: ‘Here, gentlemen, is the request of men who are like you, and here is their final resolution: they are resolved to live free or die’. Both the truths and the limits of immanent critique emerge in this founding document of political dissidence. Its closing lines announce the future failure of the Haitian revolutionaries, Toussaint

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 22

15/05/2013 08:44:14

Introduction

23

above all, to imagine another world, one not of mere reappropriated labor, but of freedom from labor itself. Louverture, like Christophe after him, would famously order Haitians back to work on the detested plantations, by gunpoint if necessary; the final promise of this dissident text already amounts to no more than a call to leave the regime of slavery for that of capitalist wage labor: ‘We will commit ourselves to the following: first, to lay down our arms; second, that each of us will return to the plantation to which he belongs and resume his work on condition of a wage which be set by the year for each cultivator who starts work for a fixed term’. Is this warm embrace of the alienation of wage labor not in essence the destiny of historical dissidence itself, from the triumph of the bourgeoisie in 1794, to 1848 and the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, to that of Central European dissidence since 1989 in its tragic and uncritical rush into Thatcherite neo-liberal privatization and the jaded or even cynical affirmation of ‘Democracy’ as mere parliamentary distributionism? This local failure of revolutionary critique to follow the destruction of plantation slavery with a critique of the political economy of the plantation itself prefigures at least two more general limitations of immanent critique as a mode of radical politics. For it is not only the tragedy of actually existing twentieth-century socialism to have regressed into the most brutal and destructive alienation of labor as mere statistical progress in production, typified in the infamous bureaucratic ‘five-year-plan’. Already, in Marx’s unyielding critique of Utopia and his stubborn refusal to abandon the mode of immanent critique, we find a failure to conceptualize the event as a radical break with the order of the world, and emancipation as the fidelity to that break in the ensuing attempt to spell out its consequences in a new ordering of a world. What Seyla Benhabib identifies as an unresolved contradiction in Marxian thought between the alternatives of socialism as the ‘fulfilment’ of the immanent promise of capitalism and ‘transfiguration’ as the radical break with that order (Benhabib 1986: 41) remain in suspension today in the present state of critique, in which various apostles of a New World Order arising from a transfigured present, from Deleuze’s unyielding univocity to the Empire of Hardt and Negri and Glissant’s Tout-Monde, confront the ‘transfigurative’ politics of Truth and the ‘communist hypothesis’ of Žižek and Badiou. The point to retain in Marx’s critique of critique is that the relation of critique to practice is not simply negative but necessarily dialectical. ‘It is not enough that thought should strive to realize itself,’ Marx famously

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 23

15/05/2013 08:44:14

24

Caribbean Critique

wrote. Furthermore, ‘reality must itself strive toward thought’ (cited at Toscano 2010: 198). Critique, in this view, must always strive toward what Alberto Toscano calls ‘non-dogmatic anticipation’, in contrast to the dogmatic fantasies of any model-based, utopian radical politics (ibid.: 199). The implications of such a non-dogmatic anticipatory critique for the politics of justice as equality are enormous. The struggle for equality has traditionally been taken to symbolize the dangers of political abstraction by most versions of conservative thought, not only, as Toscano argues, in its anti-communist variant, but, long before Marx, in the Thermidorian rejection of Jacobin egalitarianism as much as in the dismissal of the Haitian Revolution as mere barbaric fanaticism. In place of this critique of all politics of principle – and this is the essential point that must always be brought to bear upon the varieties of Caribbean Critique to be discussed in this book – Marx argues that the very concept of equality, insofar as it functions following the logic of comparison and judgment with an abstract standard, is still determined and limited by the very values that constitute post-1789 Atlantic modernity: above all, the presupposition of labor as the standard of value. Even after the destruction of plantation slavery for Louverture, Vastey, and Schoelcher, or colonialism for Césaire and Fanon, in other words, labor as the measure of value remained itself the bearer of structural inequalities: intensity, expressivity, productivity, and the like. ‘A political and philosophical notion of equality as a right, grounded on the idea of an abstract and universal measure or standard,’ Toscano observes, ‘still bears the birthmarks of a form of social measurement based on the value of labor’ (Toscano 2010: 200, my emphasis). The problem of the instantiation of a world without slavery or colonialism – in the forms those problems continue to take as at once historical and actual – remains inherent to the very concept of this critique itself. This mode of critique might take the final step of doing away not, I would argue against Toscano, with ‘any standard of right’, but with all external, moralizing judgment of a problem to which one is not a subject (and, need it be reiterated, anyone, absolutely anyone, can choose to become a subject to the truth of an event such as the invention of Haiti in 1804). In this understanding, the critique of violence, to take the example of this central and recurring problem of Caribbean Critique, would necessarily take the form of a systematic exposition of the logic of any situation (Haiti 1802, Fort-de-France 1945, Algeria 1958), including the internal necessity of the violence occurring in that situation. Such a

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 24

15/05/2013 08:44:14

Introduction

25

critique would avoid external, moralizing judgment (on the barbarity of former slaves in revolt or of Fanon as a putative ‘apostle of violence’), just as it would refuse to offer totalizing judgments on violence from on high. This basic criterion of analytical critique is itself not moralistic (‘no moralizing!’) but instead reaffirms in the form of a methodological prescription one of the key assertions of post-Hegelian philosophy from Heidegger to Adorno and Badiou: there is no possible apprehension of any single being (étant) that would be composed of the totality of all beings (étants). The Whole is not (Adorno). Thought stops before ‘being in totality’ (Heidegger). There is no set of all sets (Badiou). 29 The analysis of any situation must in this sense remain local, the exposition of the singular logic of that case in its untotalizable distribution. What called for the extreme forms of violence of the Haitian or Algerian revolutions, and do these sequences in fact share similar logics? What factors and operations determined and characterized the negotiated, relatively non-violent procedures of Césaire’s departmentalization initiative or Glissant’s gradual abandonment of Fanonian nationalism for an aesthetic of Relation? If, against Hegel and with Glissant and modern philosophy in general, analysis proceeds from the axiom that there is no One, but only the distribution of infinite, generic multiplicities in relation with no totality, this assertion holds as well for the categories of critique: violence itself has no single (total) logic or form, but as a phenomenon appearing in any world (and not simply as its mere lexical definition) calls for the critique, sorting and presentation of the various logics of its appearance in infinite situations. To take the measure of any situation is the necessary first step at the site of any event, to allow the unfolding of its consequences by any subject of a situation of suffering and injustice. Such a politics of principled equality would aim, in this view, not dogmatically to impose a specific, a priori model or image of social equality, but rather to render all relevant modes of social difference insignificant from the point of view of social justice. Toscano concludes in similar fashion that critique must be understood not prescriptively, but rather as the proper articulation of a problem (such as slavery or colonialism) such that this formulation itself ‘delineate[s] the problems and lines of solution’ that a politics of principle will call for. This non-dogmatic anticipation points beyond the destruction of colonial slavery toward the critique of political economy as production and labor, developed, for example, in what Jean Casimir has called the Haitian ‘counter-plantation’. 30 In this process, the tradition of Caribbean Critique tells us that the force of the idea has

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 25

15/05/2013 08:44:14

26

Caribbean Critique

always remained a central, explosive tool in the destruction of slavery and exploitation of the colonized. ‘True criticism’, as Marx wrote in the Rheinische Zeitung in 1842, ‘analyses the questions and not the answers. Just as the solution of an algebraic equation is given once the problem has been put in its simplest and sharpest form, so every question is answered as soon as it has become a real question’ (cited at Toscano 2010: 204). The history of Caribbean Critique is nothing other than a genealogy of such questions.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 26

15/05/2013 08:44:14

part i

Tropical Equality: The Politics of Principle

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 27

15/05/2013 08:44:14

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 28

15/05/2013 08:44:14

chapter one

Foundations of Caribbean Critique: From Jacobinism to Black Jacobinism Foundations of Caribbean Critique

Je ne connais qu’une France. Celle de la Révolution. Celle de Toussaint Louverture. Aimé Césaire

Why should a study of Caribbean Critique begin by examining French Jacobinism and its defense in the political writings of Kant? My motive in this chapter is not simply to pursue the lead C. L. R. James famously proposed when he entitled his classic study of the Haitian Revolution The Black Jacobins. Determining the precise relation between these two political sequences is certainly important, but I argue that 1789, Jacobinism, and Robespierre stand as the decisive refutation of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s famous assertion that the events of the Haitian Revolution from 1791–1804 were ‘unthinkable’ (see Trouillot 1995: 82). Trouillot’s claim is not simply that the Haitian political sequence remained misunderstood, if not actively stigmatized and debased, as it unfolded and in the two centuries since. To a certain extent, this empirical claim is true – but nearly two decades of intensive historiographic investigation of the Haitian Revolution since Trouillot made this assertion has begun to address this problem. Trouillot’s claim of unthinkability is a much stronger one, namely, ‘that the events that shook up Saint Domingue from 1791 to 1804 […] were “unthinkable” facts’. The unthinkable, Trouillot tells us, refers specifically to ‘that for which one has no adequate instruments to conceptualize. […] The unthinkable is that which one cannot conceive within the range of possible alternatives, that which perverts all answers because it defies the terms under which the questions were phrased’

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 29

15/05/2013 08:44:14

30

Caribbean Critique

(Trouillot 1995: 82). But, as I will argue, those ‘adequate instruments’ of thought were readily available, circulating throughout the Atlantic world and Saint-Domingue in particular in both printed matter (in colonial papers such as the Jacobin Créole Patriote) and oral debate, in the abstract, universalist, race-free axioms of the Declarations of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 and 1793, as well as the debates and proceedings of the French Revolution as reported in both French and colonial journalism and through oral communication by subaltern sailors and other travellers from Europe.1 The Haitian Revolution was in no sense unthinkable as its events unfolded; I would revise Trouillot’s claim to insist that there occurred a general failure to think through the simplest and most obvious implications of the universal truth that Tous les hommes naissent et demeurent libres et égaux en droits. Furthermore, as will become clear when I examine figures such as Schoelcher, Fanon, and especially Césaire in the chapters that follow, it is Robespierre’s specific practice of a politics of principle that forms the primary model for the politics of these later Black Jacobin militants of universal equality. This relation, then, can only become apparent if one puts aside uncritical, mythical images of L’incorruptible as some bloodthirsty demagogue, to examine the precise logic and historical determination of the radical egalitarianism that characterized Jacobin political militancy from 1789 to 8 Thermidor, l’an II. My intent is not to offer another free-standing study of Jacobinism and Robespierre, but briefly to suggest two things: first, that the materials of political critique and practice that allowed one to think the radicalism of the Haitian Revolution were readily available in the French Atlantic world of the 1790s, and, second, that the basic claims and militant, egalitarian orientation of the French Jacobin sequence would remain a fundamental and determinant reference for the theory and practice of the dominant figures of French Antillean critique. 2 In my previous book on the Haitian Revolution, I drew upon the arguments of Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment in an effort to extend its argument beyond the geographic and cultural confines of Western Europe to encompass the revolution in Saint Domingue of 1791–1804 (Nesbitt 2008b). I argued that Spinoza’s political philosophy – enriched, developed, and extended by political philosophers such as Rousseau, the late Diderot, and Robespierre – influenced not only the French Revolution and its struggle for popular sovereignty and universal natural rights, but also the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804. The

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 30

15/05/2013 08:44:14

Foundations of Caribbean Critique

31

Spinozian dimension my argument proposed, was that five of Spinoza’s basic axioms, in particular, filtered through these and other thinkers of the French Radical Enlightenment, founded and determined the concept of universal rights and the general will of the 1790s. Properly to grasp the concept of Black Jacobinism, and its founding relation to what I am here naming a politics of principle inherent to Caribbean Critique in its totality, it is essential to evaluate the relation of Haitian ‘Black Jacobinism’ to French Jacobinism itself. This will make it possible to assert both the originality and limitations of each of these autonomous, if fundamentally related, historical movements. What follows is an effort to sketch the theoretico-historical foundations that will permit me convincingly to assert the primacy of Jacobinism itself in the invention of radical democracy (as universal popular sovereignty) and of Robespierre, ‘l’Incorruptible’, as the initial (and enduring) proper name for the politics of principle that would be reconceived, radicalized, and perpetuated as the 200-year struggle for decolonization and postcolonial ­democratization from Louverture to Lavalas. This chronological move backward from Black Jacobinism to its origins in French Jacobinism makes possible a quite different understanding of the latter than does received political theory and historiography. We might be approaching the end of the revisionist, anti-Jacobin turn argued most forcefully in recent decades by François Furet, but this orthodoxy has no doubt come to dominate contemporary understanding of the French Revolution, in both France and the United States. To reconsider Jacobinism from the vantage point of Black Jacobinism (and with a viewpoint informed by the entire Caribbean tradition of principled politics grounded in the Black Jacobin tradition, from Vastey and Schoelcher to Césaire, Fanon and Glissant) compels a reader to challenge generations of reflexive, reactionary muckraking that have obscured historical understanding of the Jacobin sequence. This vantage point also invites us to rediscover a whole tradition of political historiography, from Buonarotti and Albert Mathiez to the neo-Jacobin school of French historiographers centered around the work of Florence Gauthier, Yannick Bosc, and Sophie Wahnach today that recognizes the unparalleled commitment to equality and, equally important, to the unrelenting experimentation of its possible forms of actualization undertaken in the all-too-brief Jacobin sequence. Jacobinism names in the 1790s the struggle for an absolute, immediate conception of democracy. Spinoza’s original concept of absolute democracy calls, axiomatically and, ontologically, for the direct rather

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 31

15/05/2013 08:44:14

32

Caribbean Critique

than mediated or represented expression of popular sovereignty. This axiomatic of absolute democracy was left undeveloped in Spinoza’s unfinished Tractatus Philosophicus. Rousseau then pursued first as a theoretical imperative, and subsequently Robespierre and Louverture exemplified it as a process of practical political struggle and experimentation typified by the ordering status of the declaration (‘I am Toussaint Louverture … ’) and the demands of consistency (‘ … and I will fight for the reign of freedom and equality in St. Domingue’). 3 Their defense of what we might call high-Jacobinism (1792–1794) and Haitian Black Jacobinism informs my denial that the political struggle that replaced Jacobinism, the politics known to posterity as Thermidor, is representative of the Radical Enlightenment in any sense. Rather, figures like Louverture, Dessalines, and Schoelcher sustained the radical democratic initiatives of Jacobinism, even as France reinstituted slavery in its colonies after 1802 and regressed first to Thermidorian Directory, Napoleonic Empire, and eventually reactionary Monarchy itself. Spinoza directly influenced the tradition of Radical Enlightenment on both sides of the Atlantic. Five of Spinoza’s basic axioms founded and determined the concepts of universal rights, undivided popular sovereignty, and the general will of the 1790s, as these concepts were taken up in both Saint-Domingue and Paris. These axioms are as follows: (1) the axiom of univocity, of a single undivided substance (Deus sive natura), (2) the proposition of the immanent self-moving force of any body (natura naturans), (3) the ethical directive that any body should and must strive to achieve its maximum power of expression and understanding, (4) the proposition that this perfect maximum (laetitia) can only be achieved by humans in society, rather than in a state of nature, and (5) the view that the only proper or true form of society that will allow for this maximum of human expression and reason is what Spinoza calls ‘absolute democracy’. Owing to Spinoza’s premature death at the very moment he set out to develop the precise model of ‘democracy’ to be deduced from his ontology, scholars have been left to speculate on the form of this model based on Spinoza’s ontology and comments on the topic elsewhere in his oeuvre.4 Spinoza directly influenced this Radical Enlightenment of undivided popular sovereignty in two ways. Positively, Spinoza and Rousseau agree unequivocally that humans must leave the state of nature and can only improve or perfect what both call their essence or nature – the faculty of reason – in society. Spinoza writes: ‘Men who live in barbarous fashion without any political organization live, as we see, a miserable

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 32

15/05/2013 08:44:14

Foundations of Caribbean Critique

33

and almost brutish existence […]. Without mutual help, men live in utter ­wretchedness, and are inevitably debarred from the cultivation of reason’ (cited at McShea 1968: 81–82). 5 Spinoza never separates reason from the will as conatus [Desire]. ‘Desire relates equally to [humans] in so far as we comprehend, or in other words, in so far as we act’ [Cupiditas ad nos refertur, etiam quatenus intelligemus, sive quantenus agimus] (E3P58D). For both Spinoza and Rousseau, general will is the active expression of human desire in the form or mode of Reason. The general will, in other words, is not the passive, contemplative truth of Descartes’s clear and distinct reason. Rather, what Spinoza called ‘Adequate’ truth affirms that such clear and distinct truths as the general will be expressed and actualized in the world. Desire, as Robert McShea observed in his classic study of Spinoza’s political philosophy, is the basic passion for Spinoza. For Spinoza, Desire is at the root of rationality, the passion to understand that is for Spinoza the essence of human being (McShea 1968: 50, 62). Finally, Spinoza’s concept of Absolute democracy, insofar as it can be derived from the Ethics and what was completed of the Tractatus Philosophicus, is by definition a direct rather than representative democracy, in which ‘absolutely everyone [in quo omnes absolute] who is bound only by the laws of his country and otherwise independent’ participates directly.6 Spinoza’s absolute democracy points not to the divided powers and representational conceits of Condorcet and other figures of the Progressive Enlightenment, but to the radical democratic experimentation of Robespierre because ‘absolute sovereignty’, in Spinoza’s words ‘is strictly equivalent to sovereignty held by the entire multitude’, in which there is no alienation of power, but in which right, as sovereign power, is maintained insofar as possible with the individual (i.e., individual body, whether individual person or the undivided body politic, which of course will correspond in absolute democracy) (cited at Negri 1997: 232). The forms of a complex state structure in absolute democracy would necessarily exist, but it seems fair to assume that in a properly Spinozist democracy these would be structured to multiply, rather than alienate, the powers of expression of the multitude. Since Spinoza never even began to explore the form those structures might take, he passed on to the Radical Enlightenment the task of imagining and articulating undivided popular sovereignty as absolute democracy, a process of experimental politics taken up to the fullest by the Jacobins during their short period of sovereignty. Thus, the French Revolution should

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 33

15/05/2013 08:44:14

34

Caribbean Critique

be understood as the great modern experiment in radical democracy, and Robespierre as the great experimenter of its pure Spinozist form as undivided popular sovereignty. Spinoza bequeathed to the eighteenth century an axiomatic prescription that humans must realize their rational powers in common (fully to realize human nature or essence ‘all must compose one mind and one body and strive together’). But this directive tells us nothing about whether the fastest and proper route to the amendation of the universal human intellect lies via the relative non-violence of discussion and a free press, or via revolution and a certain degree of ‘terror’ in the face of monarchist reaction and slave-owners’ determination to uphold their privileges. Only political struggle and experimentation, rather than any logic, could move society closer to an answer in the age of enlightenment. That is, does the violent struggle for immediate rather than deferred popular sovereignty in a site such as Saint-Domingue skip steps necessary to amending general intellect? Would the slow and gradual cultivation of a readiness for freedom in the minds of the enslaved called for by figures like Condorcet and even Grégoire be the more effective path to a radical enlightenment of universal freedom? Condorcet defended a terrifying calculus of this gradualist stance in his famous Réflexions sur l’esclavage des nègres when he concludes that slave owners should maintain the right to ‘s’en servir [des esclaves] à condition qu’ils deviendront libres à l’âge de trente-cinq ans’ (Condorcet 2001: 38). If the slaves of Saint-Domingue had waited for their emancipation from the likes of Condorcet and Grégoire, to say nothing of figures like Barnave, who actively sidelined the issue of emancipation, French slavery would not have ended until 1848, given how fundamental slavery was to the French economy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Crucially, we must distinguish between what I call Progressive and Radical Enlightenment politics because the former, typified by figures like Condorcet, proved utterly reluctant to restructure society around the imperative of popular sovereignty. The progressive agenda of the early revolution called for representative, constitutional monarchy and the legitimate representation of le peuple by what Jonathan Israel calls ‘those citizens best qualified to evaluate society’s condition, needs, and rights’ (Israel 2011: 815). Such a progressive enlightenment proved itself all too willing to maintain slavery and the exclusion of the poor majority while defending lesser imperatives such as freedom of the press and conscience. This is not radical enlightenment, but rather only the line

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 34

15/05/2013 08:44:14

Foundations of Caribbean Critique

35

of thought and political experimentation that called for the division and representation of popular sovereignty. As Rousseau and Robespierre never tired of reiterating, ‘representation’ is another name for the alienation of one’s power to act, its delegation to another party. It is misguided to argue that representation can in any sense stand as the fulfillment of Spinoza’s political project. Representation is, by definition, the negation of Spinoza’s determination (against Hobbes) to preserve natural rights as far as possible and to avoid their alienation to any sovereign body. How one might mitigate that tendency toward alienation in a modern, large-scale democratic state is a political dilemma to which representation is not the solution, but the problem itself. Parliamentary democracy may in any given iteration prove to alienate popular sovereignty less than another form of government (such as monarchy), and, given certain stipulations (duration of tenure, revocability, etc.) may even approach a true expression of the general will, but it is decidedly the latter, as theorized by Spinoza, Rousseau, and the Jacobins’s concept of popular sovereignty, rather than r­ epresentation, that is the political fulfillment of the Radical Enlightenment. Now, this is by no means to claim that these politicians and philosophers of popular sovereignty were infallibly right. Robespierre, Louverture, and Dessalines were indeed politicians, but of a special kind, guided from beginning to end by a single idea: the struggle for undivided popular sovereignty. But, as politicians, they were obliged to experiment with the possible forms that an actual popular sovereignty might take in 1790s France or Saint-Domingue. Whether or not decisions such as the laws of 22 Prarial or the defense of forced plantation labor after 1796 were the right decisions, both decisions were radically dedicated to a principled and incorruptible defense of the end of justice as equality and autonomy. My own study of the Haitian Revolution began by taking its cue from the title of C. L. R. James’s book, The Black Jacobins. It appeared obvious that the Black Jacobinism of Louverture was directly and explicitly derived from the universalism of Jacobin politics that was the first to refuse the absolute right of property (in 1793), and to mitigate that right to reflect the inalienability of personhood first asserted by Rousseau (in Robespierre’s proposal for the 1793 constitution); it was also first to draw the immediate implication of that argument and to ban slavery on 4 February 1794 (Gauthier 1992). My task required building a convincing argument, inspired by Israel’s Radical Enlightenment, that a direct line in the history of these radical political ideas should be drawn

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 35

15/05/2013 08:44:15

36

Caribbean Critique

back from the thinkers of the rights of man, Robespierre, Diderot, and Rousseau, whom figures like Louverture actually read, to one they had not: Spinoza. If Israel is correct to identify Spinoza’s thought hidden clandestinely behind eighteenth-century radical thought, then it is a logical move to call attention to the reception of those ideas beyond Europe in the eighteenth-century Atlantic region, and to underline the powerful impact of these ideas on struggle utterly foreign to the point of incomprehensibility and inadmissibility to the ‘enlightened’ pro-slavery French metropole. Robespierre himself failed to live up to his own principles, agreeing on this count with Grégoire that the slaves were not ‘ready’ for immediate emancipation (Boudon 2006: 32). Though hostile to the slave trade, l’incorruptible was on this count no different from so many other liberal thinkers and amis des noirs of the period, repeatedly denouncing immediate emancipation as a recipe for anarchy and disaster.7 Israel makes the surprising claim in A Revolution of the Mind that Rousseau and his disciple Robespierre are not the culmination of the Radical Enlightenment, but precisely its betrayal. A Revolution of the Mind struggles to paint a monochromatic picture of ‘the Republican deviationism of Rousseau’, and of Jacobinism as a political ‘theocracy’ (Israel 2010: 63, 60). Of course, Rousseau’s manifold contradictions included a powerful moralistic anti-intellectualism, a defense of moral immediacy and ‘natural sentiment’, and recourse to faith in a transcendent God, all decidedly un-Spinozist attacks on the Radical Enlightenment. But this one-sided portrait unconvincingly ignores Rousseau’s radical egalitarianism and its profound debt to the Spinozist tradition of universal and unqualified rights that has been well-documented since Paul Vernière’s Spinoza et la pensée française avant la Révolution (1954). Attention to the ten volumes of Robespierre’s writings, the most important of which are the thousand-some speeches he made in the five years between 1789 and 1794, reveals one of the great political minds of the modern world, and undoubtedly one of the most original and influential theoreticians of radical democracy. Robespierre’s political thought and action are distinguished above all by his unwavering (‘incorruptible’) fidelity to a single imperative, which C. Mazauric summarizes in the following terms: ‘The unceasing activity of Robespierre during the first five years of the revolution was inspired by only one imperative: the will and struggle to institute within the social order the natural rights of man’ (Soboul 1989: 916).

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 36

15/05/2013 08:44:15

Foundations of Caribbean Critique

37

If Robespierre sought to achieve this novel goal by any means possible, including the terrible injustice of the paranoid law of suspects of 22 Prarial, one should conclude only that in those final days and weeks following the attempt on his life and the turning of the Assembly against him, and in the wake of repeated military victories that should rightfully have lessened the need for restrictive Terreur, Robespierre for once allowed the safety of a faction or even a single person (himself) to be placed before that of the universal Salut public. Most importantly, this portrait of uncompromising political radicality in the name of popular sovereignty can hardly constitute a rejection of the Radical Enlightenment, but only a last, desperate attempt to save the revolution for popular sovereignty and justice as equality Robespierre had radicalized more than any other figure of the age.8 As Jean-Pierre Gross has argued, the Jacobins under Robespierre’s leadership undertook a politics in the short period of their power that, while derived from and oriented in reference to a few basic principles such as justice as equality and the imperative to make society the space for the expression of undivided popular sovereignty, was enormously inventive, one that managed to defend, articulate, and begin to implement many of the most basic political accomplishments that we now take for granted. The Jacobins asserted the then-novel human right to life, above all as a basic right to minimal nourishment for survival and basic bodily functionality. To do so, they extensively and repeatedly debated the proper line of demarcation between what we might call abject and humanly decent or honorable poverty, and asserted the necessity for all citizens to have access to a general market of exchange that would allow them to live from their labor (Gross 2003: 7). The Jacobins asserted the fundamental right to work and unemployment benefits, and defended and drew up legislation for free universal education. More broadly, Jacobin egalitarianism should be understood as an unsettled mix of a defense of the human right to everything necessary for the preservation and minimal flourishing of life (freedom from chattel slavery, food, shelter, education, labor, justice, political sovereignty), all of which were to be held in common by society, and a proto-liberal right on the part of any citizen to an unlimited potential excess (of wealth and property) beyond that minimum. The Jacobins, despite their reputation for egalitarian, leveling radicality, resorted to only the most gradual means of economic restructuration such as taxation and redistribution of confiscated property, to the limit of rationing food in the wartime context (Gross 2003: 45, 64; see also Mathiez 2010: 4–5).

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 37

15/05/2013 08:44:15

38

Caribbean Critique

The Jacobin-dominated Assembly put through what Gross terms a ‘vigorous’ program of land reform, one whose ultimate success may have been uneven, but was nonetheless quite real, culminating in the decision of 2 Frimaire to break up émigré plots into smallholdings. In this regard, the Jacobin land reform points not to the neo-plantocracies of Toussaint and Christophe but to the massive and unparalleled (in both scope and success) land reform of Pétion in the wake of Dessaline’s assassination and the division of Haiti into Northern and Southern states. Robespierre, like Condorcet, defended progressive taxation and price control (the maximum) of the price of bread. One of the most enduring successes of the Jacobin initiative, and one that reflects a radical extension of the high-Enlightenment coffee-house public sphere throughout all levels of society, was the development of a general culture of political sociability in the Jacobin clubs: some 5,332 clubs were spread at their height throughout all of France, open to anyone (Soboul 1989: 589–90). For Robespierre (as for Spinoza), reason is a universal attribute of humanity. In his speeches, Robespierre repeatedly claimed ‘universal reason’ to be the seat of the ‘principles’ such as justice as equality that orient his political thought. The political logic of Robespierre in this sense both develops the political implications of Spinoza’s Ethics while prefiguring the universal reason of Hegel’s Absolute Spirit. As Robespierre argued in a speech to the Convention on December 3, 1792: reason being universal, eternal, and invincible, the triumph of the Revolution is itself inevitable. For Robespierre, the Revolution is the immanent accomplishment of universal human reason in its political mode. For Robespierre, as for Spinoza, reason stands opposed to ‘prejudice’, ‘superstition’, and ‘fanaticism’. Reason and philosophy, as they never were for Rousseau, were for Robespierre strictly synonymous (Boudon 2006: 54, 559). The fundamental continuity between the political philosophy of Spinoza, Rousseau, the Jacobins and the Black Jacobins lies in the central concept of a social contract theory based upon the inalienability of popular sovereignty (with slavery, need it be said, constituting the primordial historical denial of popular sovereignty that it was left to the Black Jacobins to destroy). Democratic theory’s primary challenge is to outline the means of preserving popular sovereignty as fully as possible. For both the Jacobins and the Black Jacobins, this task involved the pursuit of justice as equality through the principled expression of the general will in legislation and the creation of egalitarian institutions.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 38

15/05/2013 08:44:15

Foundations of Caribbean Critique

39

Political representation threatens, perhaps necessarily, popular sovereignty because the people and the representatives, like doctors and patients, necessarily have different interests. In a modern state, this pursuit of justice as equality requires recourse to political representation. While Rousseau famously decries all representation in the Contrat social, less known is the fact that he later admitted its necessity in a large modern state like Poland, given necessary safeguards against the alienation of the popular will such as the revocability of elected officials. Julien Boudon has argued that Robespierre, once he took power and was forced after May 31, 1793 to abandon his antagonistic claim that all representation necessarily entailed an alienation of sovereignty, employed two principal tactics in the political struggle to mitigate this alienation of sovereignty: first, he called for the revocability of representatives (or mandataires), most notably in the 1793 constitution, which promised to give the citizens for the first time in a modern state the real opportunity of making the law, rather than alienating this power to representatives. The laws to be passed by the Assembly were explicitly proposals that required the sanction of the people. This approval was understood to be tacit if no objections were made within forty days; if a sufficient number of citizens protested, a process of referendum was to be initiated. The 1793 Jacobin constitution, a model for popular democracies throughout the world ever since, did not simply give citizens the means to control and survey their elected assembly, but, as Pertué concludes, ‘associated them [le peuple] directly and magisterially in the creation of the law’ (Soboul 1989: 284).9 Sustaining this immediacy required that the mandates of the élus must be brief, non-renewable, and subject to a strict separation of legislation and the executive. The challenge of the Jacobin attempt to institutionalize this radical enlightenment political theory of popular sovereignty lay in negating the hydra-like tendency of society continuously to form sovereign bodies of privilege separate from the people. Not only mandataires, but the military, police, juries, and priests, Robespierre argued, should either be elected by the peuple or closely monitored by the Assembly (Boudon 2006: 236). Although the Jacobins’ use of the concept of the general will tended to fluctuate with the political winds of any occasion in the pursuit of its expression, this pursuit of social equality proved as primordial for Robespierre as it had for Rousseau. Rousseau argues in the Contrat social that it is only when the plurality of particular interests are moderated through sacrifice to social equality, when, in reciprocity, all give up such

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 39

15/05/2013 08:44:15

40

Caribbean Critique

extremes, that the general will can find expression. This expression, in turn, is manifest in the systematic substitution of the rule of abstract and anonymous law for the rule of individuals such as kings and oligarchs. The general will can only become adequately true (to use Spinoza’s distinction) when all are truly equal under the law (Boudon 2006: 132). One of the primary characteristics that allowed Jacobin political culture to be affirmed in the periphery was the fact that, unlike Rousseau and Montesquieu before him, the Jacobins saw true, just laws as universal rather than local institutions. The Jacobins argued that, like the universal faculty of reason, laws should not in this view be adapted to the particularities (‘vices’) of differing climates and mores. A true law, for the Jacobins, was universality true. To argue otherwise would be to open the way to the various ‘particular’ legal regimes that the pro-slavery constituents of the period, from the slave owners of 1791 to Napoleon himself, repeatedly argued should exclude the Antillean colonies from the ‘universal’ rights of the metropole. The Commandments of (Black) Jacobinism Tracy McNulty’s theory of the symbolic can be helpfully extended to encompass the Jacobin and Black Jacobin struggles for universal justice as equality and popular sovereignty. Tracy McNulty advances her a compelling vision for a novel understanding of the symbolic that can be summarized as the generative agency of the limit. This moves against the now-dominant understanding of the symbolic as the mere dead letter of the law, of the symbolic order as the properly and seamlessly policed order of things. In McNulty’s formulation, the symbolic under the reign of a transcendental indexification or ordering can only amount to a police order or state of affairs (as it explicitly does, for example, in both Badiou’s narrative excurses to Logiques des mondes’ ‘Greater Logic’ [la manif] and Rancière’s concept of police). In contrast to this theoretical doxa, McNulty proposes that we distinguish two ‘registers’ or forms of the event: ‘the event of the real’ and the process at stake throughout all of her recent work, a defense of what she calls ‘the event of the letter.’ McNulty offers, in nuce, a fundamental critique of the event as the voicing of a truth. In her ‘Writing and Divine Justice in Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’’, McNulty struggles with the core enigma of Benjamin’s much-discussed essay, that is, the concept of a ‘bloodless’ divine violence.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 40

15/05/2013 08:44:15

Foundations of Caribbean Critique

41

In her study of this enigma, McNulty picks up Benjamin’s littleremarked emphasis on a ‘language of pure means.’ McNulty pauses before this enigmatic ‘language of pure means,’ and considers it a contrast to communicative reason, which stands unequivocally on the side of mythic violence. She follows through Benjamin’s suggestion that the ‘language of pure means’ finds its paradigmatic instance in the commandment structure of the Hebrew Decalogue. In this reading, the commandment as negative prescription (‘thou shalt not’) opens a site for a radical questioning of the proper (i.e., universalist, egalitarian) logic of social structuration. The Decalogue tells its subjects not how they are to structure society, but simply that they are to struggle themselves with this prescription as void. McNulty draws upon Kant’s writings on the sublime to argue that the negative form of the commandment as both beyond all communicative reason, and as limit, serves as a spur to the creation of novel social forms and products. If the order of divine might as right (as the mythic law of God, of King, of the Master, of the Father) is fundamentally linked to the absence of writing as vocal command (quite literally, as ‘dictatorship’) that fills in the void of the exception, the ‘letter of the commandment’ inscribes and fixes a registration of justice that stands as the invocation to pursue the consequences of the event, the latter understood as the appearance of the commandment(s) to true justice within any policed world. The unwritten, vocalized law ‘is inevitably tyrannical,’ McNulty writes, while the written commandment ‘demarcates the sphere of the human as off-limits to the capricious, retributive violence of the mythic order’ (47). McNulty argues that the symbolic cannot simply be reduced to the dead weight of the law, but that a specific, obscure, and rare form of symbolic production (the ‘language of pure means’) can and has historically served as the divine, rightful destroyer of all mythic law and its attendant monopolies of legitimate violence. McNulty’s analysis of the Benjamin text gives a new light to read the Jacobin critique of vocal order of sovereign contingency that Robespierre explicitly theorized in a speech to the National Assembly on January 4, 1791. In this little known intervention, Robespierre carefully draws a link between basic guiding theoretical principles of justice as equality and a practical question of minute detail or procedure. In this instance, debate turned around a report submitted by Duport on legal procedure, and more specifically, on this day, on the question of whether proceedings before juries would be transcribed or not. Robespierre begins by specifying the point in question, namely, whether ‘the evidence

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 41

15/05/2013 08:44:15

42

Caribbean Critique

and depositions upon which judges must decide on the destiny of the accused shall be conserved by writing [fixés par l’écriture]?’ Or will they, he continues, remain no more than ‘fleeting speech [des paroles fugitives], which, from the mouth of the witnesses will go on to vanish [expirer] in the minds and hearts of judges?’ Robespierre insists that only one proper path exists to find an answer to the question, ‘to return [remonter] to the true principle of all criminal legislation,’ principles that must, he affirms, constantly battle the tendency of judges, as human beings, to resort not to reason but to their passions and interests when deciding a case (1950: 8). Judges must instead have recourse to ‘general laws’ to decide particular cases, in order to avoid all arbitrariness of decision. Once these general rules have been determined, ‘there must be a means to make sure they have been observed; this means,’ Robespierre concludes, ‘is writing. Without it, there remains no trace of the proofs that account for the motives of the judgement […], nothing but uncertainty, obscurity, arbitrariness, and despotism’ (1950:9). This suggested to Robespierre that the written word is the foundation of any principled act of judgment, the negation of the arbitrary power of decision of the tyrant. While this emphasis on the written word might appear at least implicitly to disparage vernacular cultures such as that of Saint Domingue, I think such a conclusion would be illegitimate. A statement or commandment must indeed be written to counter the contingency of the vocalized command of the auratic leader, whether king or slave-master, and truth statements such as the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen may certainly appear within various communities utterly foreign to their site and moment of codification and inscription as written commandments from another site or world. Nonetheless, the process of their reception and interpretation will often – perhaps most-often – occur within an oral context of debate, discussion, and interpretation, whether in the coffee house, the Assembly, or in the ports, cane fields, and cases of a largely illiterate world such as Saint Domingue in 1789–93.10 McNulty’s critique of the productivity of the symbolic culminates in an extraordinary attempt to link Lacanian theory with insurgent processes of political subjectivation. In her ‘Demanding the Impossible: Desire and Social Change,’ McNulty begins from Peter Hallward’s focus on historical figures of political voluntarism to work through Freud’s Moses and Monotheism. McNulty reads Freud through a Lacanian lens to argue that the figure of Moses that emerges is that of the destroyer of paternal authority and the auratic voice of the all-knowing big Other.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 42

15/05/2013 08:44:15

Foundations of Caribbean Critique

43

The Decalogue of commandments that Moses the Egyptian gave to the Jews, as negative imperative, forces them into the clearing of anxiety, of being subject to the injunction to experiment new forms of social relationality in the absence of any authority figure. In this FreudianLacanian reading, Moses’ initiative fails insofar as he never provides the structuration that would allow the subjects of this event to sustain the anxiety of not-knowing, and the Golden Calf marks the reinvestment in an ego ideal that would repress the anxiety Moses sought to sustain in the Hebrew community. Freud and the practice of analysis then come to offer a sustainable practice of what I am calling here the Socratic love of the truth (that we do not know) via the production of dreams and the exploration of their symbolic consequences. McNulty’s critique of the symbolic as commandment thus points toward a quite novel understanding of the role of the commandment in the politics of principle in question in Caribbean Critique. Adopting McNulty’s Lacanian vocabulary, we might conclude that Robespierre, rather than Freud, is the Moses of modernity. The Decalogue that Robespierre imposed upon the world with incorruptible fidelity was the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen; the modernity of this gesture lay in its positive imperative. Against the Hebraic ‘Thou shalt not!,’ revolutionary France affirmed to l’univers entier that ‘Thou shalt make a world of justice, of liberty, equality, and fraternity’ – in a word, a republican democracy. This truth the Jacobins asserted was most decidedly a truth (that we do not know). What is democracy? What is equality? What is justice? Robespierre tirelessly opposed the desire to discover and know these truths to the ancien régime appeal to an all-knowing other, the divine king encharged with the fate of a nation, the incarnate, enthroned god whose word (and not, crucially, written commandment) stands as justice. Jacobinism names the tireless experimentation by the subjects of this democratic imperative, the will to passer à l’acte and to incarnate this truth (that we do not know) in the production of new, sublimated objects: a republic, a constitution, the infinitely varied experimental forms of radical democracy that flourished in the months of the Jacobin Terror. Like Freud’s evocations of the ‘great man’ who sublimates the anxiety of confronting this truth (that we do not know) into a new social object, the Jacobin radical democracy embodied in the’93 constitution was, like the objects of Moses or Leonardo, a sublimation not for an individual but for an entire age: the modernity of which we are still subjects. Robespierre, analogously to Moses’ evacuation of the place of the

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 43

15/05/2013 08:44:15

44

Caribbean Critique

leader, shattered the habitus of identification with the divine king, the subjection that bound the ancien régime community to its ego ideal in Versailles. The Jacobin republic is the new, modern community subject to a positive Decalogue of justice as equality, constituted on a non-imaginary basis (or was so until the affirmation of the Republican ‘Supreme Being’). L’Incorruptible, like Moses, refused the cult of the father, and instead affirmed an iconoclastic ethical doctrine that shattered the magical practices of divine authority, placing the citizens of the world before the imperative to follow through on the revolution they had begun, to follow their desire all the way. The capital punishment of Louis Capet is not the reaffirmation of a sacrificial bond, but itself the destruction of monarchic sacrificial logic, placing without respite all members of the community in the clearing of uncertainty, without an ideal big Other, King or Law, to fall back on. This anxiety of autonomy the Jacobins called, quite precisely, la Terreur. What is Thermidor? Thermidor is the name we have inherited for all counter-revolutionary terror, the reimposition of order and privilege after the attempt to restructure society in the name of justice and equality. Michelet, famously, disdained even to continue his magisterial history of the French Revolution beyond the fall of Robespierre. As Albert Mathiez argues in his recently reprinted masterpiece, La Réaction thermidorienne, Thermidor names not a beginning, but the systematic destruction of the institutions and practices of the Jacobin hegemony (Mathiez 2010: 57).11 In the wake of the Althusserian, structuralist critique of the metaphysics of productionism and Hegelian teleology, politics itself no longer can have any structural, systemic, or historical guarantee of its justice (whether of the mode of production, or of any putative inherent radical subjectivity of the subaltern or exploited due to their ‘objective’ existence). Instead, the destruction of plantation slavery under Louverture or Schoelcher and of colonialism under Césaire or Fanon, were each the result of situated, singular political interventions. The French and Haitian Revolutions were singular political events, with their own intrinsic logics and conceptual regimes. They each name a struggle to actualize the concepts of popular sovereignty, equality, and social justice, a struggle that culminated in France in the years 1792–94, and in Saint-Domingue/Haiti from 1791–1804. Thermidor, by contrast,

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 44

15/05/2013 08:44:16

Foundations of Caribbean Critique

45

names the triumph of economism, of profit and interest, at the expense of the univocally political struggle for justice as equality, a struggle to which economic considerations remained strictly subordinate under the domination of Robespierre’s political logic. Thermidor names the regressive political background against which the unfolding revolution in Saint-Domingue appeared and in fact became increasingly radicalized. Thermidor was predominantly a regressive reaction against the assertion of popular sovereignty, but, as P. Brunel has argued, it initiated a few sorry tendencies of our political modernity. The Thermidorian constitution of l’an III replaced the Jacobin attempt to eliminate privilege and oligarchy in the 1793 constitution with their restoration: in place of Jacobin universal emancipation, Thermidor names the post-1789 triumph of the oligarchy of propertied, bourgeois elites over both the ancien régime and the tiers état.12 Thermidor began the unfortunate tradition of the parliamentary coup d’etat, and managed to erase, for the first time since 1789, any and all reference to the ‘natural rights of man’ in the discriminatory preamble to the 1795 constitution. Thermidor witnessed the triumph of a politics of personal interest, passions, and resentments. In creating for the first time a permanent political class by the gerrymandering of its constitution, the infamous ‘république des camarades,’ the Thermidorian Convention culminated in a defense of oligarchic privilege. The particular interest of this new class of political functionaries was united only in their having universally profited from the Revolution, and they defended in their constitution the skeleton of the republic only because, having profited from the sale of émigrés’ property and, for many, having voted for the execution of Louis Capet, a return to monarchy would have meant their end, both politically and physically. Thermidor, in sum, was the republic of the bitter and resented, the reign of la petitesse. The systematic goal of Thermidor, if it can be said to have had one, was to eliminate all refuges of popular sovereignty. The very evening of 9 Thermidor, the Assembly’s first act was to purge the popular commissions that were redistributing property from suspects to the poor. Soon after, they would eliminate the subvention of 40 sous given to those who attended section meetings, assuring their desertion by le peuple. Eventually, the Paris Commune itself would be eliminated until its resurrection seventy-six years later, the city broken up into its now-familiar arrondissements in the name of effective policing.13 Thermidor stands not for the cessation and just punishment of Terror, but merely its changing sides. At least three modes of revolutionary

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 45

15/05/2013 08:44:16

46

Caribbean Critique

‘terror’ (in addition to that of the ancien régime itself) can be distinguished in the French Atlantic empire of the 1790s: Red, White, and the Black Terreur of the Haitian Revolution. The so-called ‘red’ terror of the Jacobins was the result of the very real and imminent threat that France would be defeated following the invasion of the allied forces of Austro-Hungary, Britain, and Spain on all three of its fronts in the wake of the execution of Louis Capet. Unlike the irrational internment of Japanese Americans in World War II, this undertaking was the more or less successful, more or less just response to a threat of destruction from actual internal and external enemies who had proven by their words and actions from Varennes to the Vendée that they would stop at nothing to destroy the new democracy. There was no private vengeance at work in this process. The Terreur Blanche of Thermidor occurred in a time of military victory, the republic successfully defended by its armies, and was pursued for the most part without even the aim of restoring the monarchy. It was instead the reign of personal vengeance by returning exiles who generally knew their victims personally. The Terreur Rouge was legal and formalized, taking place in courts of law and military commissions. Like Duvalier’s Macoutes and the right-wing terrorism of the battle of Algiers, the Terreur Blanche was in contrast a practice of hooded, nighttime assassinations that knew no law (Mathiez 288). Thermidor, in other words, was not the cessation of Terror, but its redeployment against those excluded from the corridors of power. One must conclude that Thermidor was not a beginning, but a closure, the destruction (in metropolitan France) of the rational, undivided egalitarianism of the Radical Enlightenment derived from Spinoza and consummated in the politics of Robespierre. Thermidor names the defense of the Terrorist state and its legitimate violence, a state devoted not to defending the general will of all against royalist regression, but to dominating and excluding the vast majority of the population to the profit of a tiny minority.14 In this Thermidorian republic of mediocrity and self-interest, the only politician of principles to stand out was the reactionary royalist Boissy d’Anglas. His influence on the drafting of the new constitution was ‘determinant,’ in the judgment of Marcel Dorigny, and it was he who as rapporteur for the commission of eleven drafters summarized in their name the principles it sought to enshrine. Like some evil twin of Robespierre, Boissy too based his politics on a single principle, which he summarized in his speech from 21 Ventose: ‘the legislator’s work […]

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 46

15/05/2013 08:44:16

Foundations of Caribbean Critique

47

must consist in […] establishing wise laws, immutable barriers […] that prevent poverty from violating the property of the rich’ (cited at Soboul 1989: 128). ‘Thermidor’ is the Golden Calf of the French Revolution. Terrified at their confrontation with their desire for democratic equality, confronted with the rigid, ‘fatal purity’ of Robespierre, the Jacobins themselves put to death their Moses in those months of repression and violence. Thermidor showed the Jacobins unable to sustain this revolutionary initiative to structure a democratic, egalitarian existence without an ego ideal, as they reaffirmed first the golden calf of self-interest and profit, and, before long, a new father figure was found in Napoleon to replace the fallen god of Versailles. Robespierre’s struggle had been the utterly faithful analytic work to productively sublimate of the dream of 1789 (cahiers de doléance), the construction of a democratic, egalitarian savoir that would replace the universal delusion of monarchic hierarchy and privilege. This is the ultimate meaning of the Jacobin emphasis on Vertu: it names the civic, republican love of the truth of justice as equality, the imperative to traverse the fantasy of monarchic seduction, to push all the way through the wilderness of the Terreur, to produce a social object or structure of universal justice as equality.15 This struggle for justice as Virtue is the memory savagely repressed by Thermidor, replaced by the fallacious ego-anti-ideal of the bloodthirsty dictator. One should rigorously distinguish the fallacious post-mortem vilification of Robespierre and the Jacobins from the work they actually performed before Thermidor to realize an immanent state of justice as equality. The word as positive commandment of 1789 (‘Tous les hommes naissent et demeruent égaux en droits’) created the possibility of a world in which a new subject could live, a world that had nothing to do with mere biological existence, a world in which neither king nor state was the guarantor of ‘human rights,’ but only those subjects themselves. Jacobinism and Black Jacobinism force the problem of violence to the center of all critique: Radical Enlightenment and the equality it calls for required the destruction of the world of privilege. It was the Jacobins alone, with the Black Jacobins in their wake, who pursued this destruction of propertied privilege (slavery by any other name). Jacobinism names this violence of natural right, the refusal to capitulate before the Allied Monarchies and Chouans who would stop at nothing to reimpose the society of their hierarchical privilege. Likewise, the rightful violence of the Haitian Revolution was the defensive refusal of former

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 47

15/05/2013 08:44:16

48

Caribbean Critique

slaves to re-enter that state of servitude. Toussaint Louverture warned the Directory in his famous letter of 1797 that these black Citizens of universal rights would die before submitting to re-enslavement, and their struggle from 1802–1804 proved his words prophetic: Do they think that men who have been able to enjoy the blessing of liberty will calmly see it snatched away? They supported their chains only so long as they did not know any condition of life more happy than that of slavery. But to-day when they have left it, if they had a thousand lives they would sacrifice them all rather than be forced into slavery again … France will not revoke her principles, she will not withdraw from us the greatest of her benefits … But if, to re-establish slavery in San Domingo, this was done, then I declare to you it would be to attempt the impossible: we have known how to face dangers to obtain our liberty, we shall know how to brave death to maintain it. (cited at James 1989: 197)

While Spinoza affirmed that, in the state of nature, any being has the ‘right’ to do whatever is in its power (as big fish eat little fish, to use his own example), this universalization of right is equivalent to its erasure as tautology: whatever happens happens, and is right because it happens. Rousseau and the Jacobins reject Spinoza’s terminology but retain his conclusions regarding violence and insurrection. Given their commitment to the universal rights of man (and not, as for Spinoza, right in general), they conclude that it is nonsensical to speak of a right to insurrection and defensive violence. Rousseau never wavers: there is no such thing as a right to overthrow tyranny, just as there is no right of the stronger. Defensive violence is a fact not a right, occurring in contexts of force rather than the rule of just (egalitarian, anonymous) law. Where force rules, a people can at any moment respond in turn with force, and need not await the recognition (were it ever to come) of a specious ‘right’ to revolt (Rousseau 2006: I, III, XVIII; Boudon 2006: 170). My argument is that defensive violence and insurrection are always decisions, ‘legitimate’ and ‘rightful’ only in the broadest Spinozist sense that, if one has the power to overthrow tyranny, one has the ‘right’ to. Violence is a sort of transcendental category for human’s being in the world; like language or sociability, it is transcendental to any given situation, and can take an infinite number of forms, modes, or orientations (universalist, reactionary, populist, royalist), as attention to an event as complex as the French or Haitian Revolutions shows. The decision to struggle for popular sovereignty, universal rights, royalist reaction, or in defense of one’s own personal right to own slaves and garner riches is just that: a decision, and ultimately an ungroundable

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 48

15/05/2013 08:44:16

Foundations of Caribbean Critique

49

one. Whether one chooses to pursue a Spinozist ‘adequately true’ society, in which all humans can flourish and develop their fullest potentialities, or whether one struggles for an exclusionary social hierarchy based on the enslavement and degradation of those who count for nothing, as Boissy d’Anglas in 1795 or Napoleon in 1802 chose, involves not the application of logical proof, but an act of will. Following Spinoza’s own logic, if we have the power to create a true, enlightened society, we have the right to, but no less by this measure do we have the ‘right’ to create a living hell or even to kill ourselves off as a species with atomic weapons and biocide. Spinoza, Rousseau, Robespierre, and Louverture can help us to understand how to identify and build an adequately true society, but we are still left at every moment with the obligation to choose that struggle rather than any other. This confrontation with the democratic imperative produced unbearable anxiety in the Jacobins who rose up against Robespierre, Saint-Just, or Couthon on 9 Thermidor. Indeed, if courage is the affect most characteristic of Robespierre’s Jacobinism, anxiety names its betrayal by the Jacobins of Thermidor.16 Justice, in contrast, names the transformative process in which the fixity of the law is surpassed as the ‘repetitive fabric if obsession’ (Badiou 2009: 159). Courage, in turn, denotes an insubordination to the symbolic order, and the struggle to dissolve its tyrannical reign. The courage of figures such as the ‘Incorruptible’ Robespierre or Louverture, Dessalines, and Christophe burning Saint-Domingue to ashes before Napoleon’s invading troops, is in this view that step beyond anxiety toward its immanent transformation.17 The courage of Robespierre, Louverture, and Dessalines is closest to what Spinoza identified as fortitudo. They hold fast in the ­consolidation of the rupture with the law in their pursuit of the coming of the new – in their cases a new right, a new situation that is, as Badiou has written, ‘capable of completely recomposing the whole logic of the decision’ ((Badiou 2009: 164). If all three figures courageously and to the very end affirm the right and justice of the Red and Black Terrors, and themselves as its subjects, each is in this always already beyond terror, at the displaced place of courage and justice, leaving the place of anxiety and the reaffirmation of anxiety and the unsurpassable law to the French Thermidoreans and figures such as Boyer in Haiti, who would usurp their places. For all that, anxiety remains a necessary moment in any disruption of the law of the symbolic order, to open its subjects to the void of the real, one that Robespierre incessantly strove to overcome in fidelity to the commandment of justice.18

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 49

15/05/2013 08:44:16

50

Caribbean Critique

Robespierre and Louverture, respectively the exemplary Jacobin and Black Jacobin, are the twin architects of an institutive disruption of the law of the worlds they destroyed; they refused in their respective insurgencies, as subjects of the commandments of 1789, ever to return to the order of the ancien régime, their struggle the effort to compose the coming and taking place of novel orders. Each names precisely the opposite of the proliferation of death; the Jacobin and Black Jacobin struggles sought to found the coming of justice through the destruction of the ancien order of right, the transcendence of anxiety before the mythic law as the coming of a novel subject, the subject of the commandments of 1789. In turn, this Jacobin and Black Jacobin politics of principle found, I wish to argue against received wisdom, its contemporary philosophical formulation and defense in the thought of a philosopher long-thought to have theorized, quite to the contrary, a conservative defense of monarchy and the illegitimacy of any and all revolution. Kant, Robespierre, and the Invention of Metapolitics My proposition in this section is that in thinking philosophically under the condition of Jacobin politics, Kant’s late thought is modulated by the sequence of Jacobinism. In turn, this philosophy of Jacobinism circulated throughout the European and Atlantic public sphere of the 1790s, constituting along with Jacobinism itself the primary critical tools that would have allowed any subject of that public sphere, from Paris and Königsberg to the Cap français, whether written or in oral – from coffee house to plantation – discussion and debate, to think the Haitian Revolution as the human struggle to implement the Rights of Man universally. Under the principled power of the French assertion of the Rights of Man, the destruction of feudalism, and the ensuing Jacobin terror, the philosopher of pure reason became a subject of that politics, a subject of the absolute and universalist character of Jacobin politics itself as a politics of principle, and strove in his political and practical writings to think through the fullest implications of 1789 and 1792 for thought itself. Edmund Burke’s rambling defense of the legitimacy of conservative tradition and hierarchical, oligarchic social structure of the 1790 England in which he wrote his Reflections on the Revolution in France has taken on a zombie-like life of its own, long beyond the context of its topical intervention. This impressionistic text initiated the tradition

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 50

15/05/2013 08:44:16

Foundations of Caribbean Critique

51

of hysterical denigrations of the French Jacobinism of 1792–1794 to inaugurate the manifold critiques of equality in all of the many forms of Thermidorianism that have recurred from 9 Thermidor an II to the post-François Furet historiography that dominates the present conjuncture since 1968. In it, Burke dismissed the ‘political metaphysics’ of principle-based politics of the Rights of Man and Citizen with endlessly inventive invective, as logically hollow as it was rhetorically explosive. Burke’s polemic, however, received an almost immediate response from Immanuel Kant in his defense of a complexly mediated necessity of the conceptual and the actual in any politics in conformity with the universality of human reason in his essay ‘On the Common Saying: That May be True in Theory, but it is of No Use in Practice’, published in the Berlinische Monatsschrift in 1793, at the height of the Jacobin Terror. While Kant has, since the mid-nineteenth century, arguably been thought of as a fundamentally conservative political thinker, a view that remains dominant to this day, in the final years of his life following the French Revolution he was in fact widely considered the most formidable theoretical defender of not only the French Revolution, but, though it may today seem implausible, its most radical, Jacobin phase, and it is in his 1793 essay that Kant condenses this defense of the French Revolution with polemical intensity. It is Kant’s philosophical defense of the Jacobin French Revolution, I am arguing, that constitutes the philosophical abstraction of Jacobin thought itself, and which materials taken together, circulating throughout the European and Atlantic public spheres of the 1790s, made the Haitian Revolution eminently ‘thinkable’ in its own time, if only one accepted as an a priori condition the abstract humanity of the former slaves of Saint-Domingue. Even as late as 1872, Heinrich Heine, in his Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland analyzed and reaffirmed Kant’s positive relationship to the political philosophy of Robespierre.19 Before that, figures as diverse as Haym, Schelling, Hegel, and many other lesser thinkers all agreed, as Dominico Losurdo has shown, that Kant’s thought after 1789 thinks through and affirms the Rights of Man and the French republican order as the social instantiation of pure practical reason itself. As his contemporaries recognized, conservative and radical alike, from Schiller and the Kantian Jacobin Johann Erhard to Heinrich Heine a century later, Kant offered in his critique of Burke’s defense of the conservative principle of tradition and inegalitarian entitlement an absolutization and formalization of the principle of undivided popular

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 51

15/05/2013 08:44:16

52

Caribbean Critique

sovereignty and justice as equality. Kant’s follower Friedrich von Gentz summarized in 1793 this contemporary understanding of Kant’s political thought as ‘containing the most complete theory of the rights of man, so often celebrated and so little understood […] and which, without fanfare or ostentation, but in an absolutely complete form, emanated straight out of the silent and modest reasoning of the German philosopher.’20 The crucial point to retain in interpreting Kant’s assessment of the French Revolution correctly, given the limitations of Prussian censorship he faced after 1793 – Kant, for example, never explicitly mentions the French Revolution by name in any of his publications – is that his insistent and repeated denial of the right of resistance, understood in the context of European politics of the 1790s, is not a conservative repudiation of the French Revolution, which Kant argued was legitimate for reasons to be addressed shortly, but the very means of affirming 1789 and even Jacobinism without having to say so explicitly. 21 In the years following 1789, and above all Varennes, the ‘second’ revolutionary days of August 1792, and the capital punishment of Louis Capet on January 21, 1793, the negation of the right to resistance amounted concretely to the assertion of the right of the new, revolutionary government to suppress reactionary, monarchist revolt. If any politically fluent reader in 1790s could be assumed capable of reading in this way between the lines, it is only as historical awareness of this context receded that the now-dominant cliché of a conservative Kant could deform our capacity to interpret his political writings appropriately. Seen in the light of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, the Shoah, and Eastern-block dissidence, the denial of the right of resistance may seem transparently conservative and even reactionary; in 1790s Europe, however, the negation of the right of resistance invoked unambiguously the defense of the new, fragile, republican institutions against pro-monarchy insurrections from the Vendée to the fragile European republics of Mainz and Naples. 22 Put in terms more formal than historical, one might say that the revolutionary and thermidorian regimes each mobilizes the rhetoric of the fragile new order to overcome internal conflict and resistance, but that the former does so in the service of the truth of equality while the latter does so in the service of the rights of property. 23 Kant’s 1793 response to Burke must be read in the context of Prussian censorship under the Prussian Minister of Culture Wöllner’s 1788 ‘Edict of Censorship’ suppressing writings judged atheistic or impious, and his direct censorship of Kant’s 1792 Religion Within the Bounds of Reason

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 52

15/05/2013 08:44:16

Foundations of Caribbean Critique

53

Alone. 24 The affirmation of limitations to the right of the state, such as those of the House of Lords Burke extolled must be understood as the defense of particular privileges and, ultimately, the denial of the legitimacy of popular sovereignty. In his writings after 1789, Kant regularly and without exception reaffirmed his sympathy for the French Revolution. 25 Even more, there is not a trace of the moralizing condemnation of the French Terreur and the execution of Capet that one finds in conservative writers across Europe after 1792. On the contrary, Kant writes that one must ‘respect devotedly the rights of man, even should it be at the cost of the greatest sacrifice by the dominant powers [herrschende Gewalt].’26 Kant’s preference for gradual reform over revolutionary violence is likewise not a moral condemnation but rather a practical one based on the likelihood of resulting anarchy, and the necessary stable institution of the democratic state itself out of the natural order, Kant recognizes with Rousseau, necessitates violence to put an end to anarchy. ‘Without violence,’ Kant writes, ‘no right can be founded, such that violence must precede right.’27 The limits of Kant’s Jacobinism are to be found on two points on which he refused to join Robespierre (and, implicitly, the Haitian revolutionaries struggling to overthrow the French slave regime): (1) the assertion of popular insurrection as the foundation of the state, as in the August 1792 revolution that justified the execution of Capet for L’Incorruptible, and, (2) limitations to the rights of bourgeois property. Like Robespierre after 1792, Kant judged direct democracy chimeric and a recipe for anarchy; unlike Robespierre, Kant found the French Revolution, including its Jacobin period, legitimate not because of a popular uprising but because of what Kant understood to be Louis XVI’s original, voluntary abdication of power in the 1789 convocation of the Etats généraux. In preserving by this strained logic the concept of revolution as non-contradictory foundation of the state, Kant’s defense of revolution ultimately comes to depend upon the goodwill of the sovereign, a rare and unreliable historical occurrence, from the perspective of the oppressed, to say the least. Kant in this way no doubt appears to make revolution dependent upon the sanction of the law and its incarnation in the paternal monarch, ensuring respect for His law even in its overthrow, reinscribing the disjunctive event of 1789 within the regularity of an ordered legality. Perhaps, however, the supposed abnegation of Louis XVI in calling the Etats généraux is no more than the mental fig leaf that Kant required

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 53

15/05/2013 08:44:17

54

Caribbean Critique

in order to affirm the rightfulness of the revolution, surreptitiously, like an uncertain yet daring and brilliant adolescent escaping into the night the harsh injustice of the revolution. Once Kant has allowed himself this cover, he feels free to go all the way, and does so ruthlessly, pursuing through to its end the rebellious logic of popular sovereignty and the general will that names the destitution of the royal Big Other, and Kant stops this pursuit not when he confronts the logic of the Terror but only before his unshakeable respect for bourgeois property as the just incarnation of the law. Kant thus parted ways with the Jacobins, not over the Terror, but regarding the proper degree of the restructuration of society to egalitarian ends; democracy and above all equality, are, as is hardly surprising coming from the author of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, ultimately limited in this way to formal, regulatory status. Republican democracy must in Kant’s view remain representational, and the denial of the right of resistance, though an affirmation of the right of the revolution to defend itself against counter-revolution, is no less a denial of the right to revolt on the part of Sans-culottes. Kant thus ultimately welcomed Thermidor and its 1795 Constitution as the assertion of bourgeois property rights, and formal, representational democracy as the determinate negation of the need for the right of resistance to begin with. In the context of Prussian censorship after 1789, Kant’s 1793 essay reads as a fundamentally palimpsest text. Beneath its manifest defense of the right of the sovereign to sustain the social contract, no matter how seemingly unjust, and the corresponding prohibition against any revolt whatsoever, there lies another text, only partially hidden, eminently visible to Kant’s contemporary readers, immediately visible in the recurring affirmation of the actual existence and justice not only of the social contract, but of the ‘general will’ itself, the fundamental theoretical principle not only of Rousseau’s Contrat social but of the Jacobins and Robespierre in particular. Kant’s essay, seeking to appear on its surface to reaffirm the absolute right of the sovereign monarch, requires no more than the slightest twist to reveal its true nature as a powerful philosophical defense of the doctrine of popular sovereignty and even the logic of counter-counter-revolutionary Terror.  In Abrégé de métapolitique, Alain Badiou defines the concept of Metapolitics as ‘the effects that a philosophy can draw, in and for itself, from the fact that actually existing politics [les politiques réelles] are thoughts. Metapolitics is opposed to political philosophy, which

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 54

15/05/2013 08:44:17

Foundations of Caribbean Critique

55

maintains that in so far as politics are not thoughts, it is up to the philosopher to “think” politics’ (7). Politics, in this view, are not to be thought after the facts, as a supplementary rump appended to blind action but, rather, the thought inherent in the political itself can serve as what Badiou calls a ‘condition’ for philosophy; if philosophy does not itself produce truths, it can nonetheless place itself under the condition of the truths to be abstracted from various events. Kant’s essay is, I would argue, among the first instances of this philosophical practice Badiou defines as Metapolitics. 28 Kant’s text opens with a densely knotted, almost impenetrably thick metapolitical definition of his project: A sum of rules, even practical rules, is called theory if those rules are thought as principles having a certain generality, so that abstraction is made from a multitude of conditions that yet have a necessary influence on their application. Conversely, not every doing is called practice, but only that effecting of an end which is thought as the observance of certain principles of procedure represented in their generality. (Kant 1996: 279; my emphasis)

Theory and practice are for Kant inextricably intertwined, not in every case, but in those that are of interest to him, rules ‘having a certain generality’ and doings observed under the generality or universality of ‘principles of procedure’. What Kant calls theory operates an abstraction from certain conditions – conditions that nonetheless remain integral to that theory. In turn, all practice, by Kant’s definition, contains within it the thought of generality as a ‘representation’. Theory and practice are a totality, almost two modes or dimensions of a single entity, not for every doing or thought, again, but for those of interest to Kant, action that is universalizable. Kant’s essay is divided in three sections, the first on the relation of the theory of practice to morals, the second on its relation to the right of a state, to which is appended a conclusion nearly as long as the section preceding it, and a final section on the relation of theory and practice to the cosmopolitan rights of nations. It is the second section that contains the philosopher’s radical defense of theory in politics and the French Revolution in particular. Kant begins his argument in this second section, which he entitles ‘Against Hobbes’, by defining the ‘social contract [Gesellschaftsverträgen]’ as the ‘union (of many) for some common end’ in a quite vague fashion, one that does not necessarily refer the reader back to Rousseau, to say nothing of the Jacobins or any other specific moment in the French revolutionary sequence.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 55

15/05/2013 08:44:17

56

Caribbean Critique

Kant next proceeds to discuss theory and practice in the three dimensions that define the minimal principles of the French Revolution: freedom, equality, and fraternity (as ‘citizenship’ in a political community) (Kant 1996: 291). In his discussion of liberty, the key passage is undoubtedly Kant’s defense of material inequality, ‘in terms of quantity and degree of their possessions, whether physical or mental superiority over others or in material goods’ (ibid.: 292). He qualifies this putatively just material inequality, however, as a formal equality of right: ‘In terms of right […] they are nevertheless all equal to one another as subjects.’ Right, Kant states in a parenthetical throwaway definition without comment or explanation (a definition that a censor might easily overlook), is for Kant ‘the expression of the general will [allgemeinen Willens]’ (ibid.: 292). This ‘general will’ is not bracketed by Kant, nor encased in scare quotes; it is neither the ‘so-called’ general will nor the misguided imposition of a blood-thirsty tyranny, nor even a mere proposition, a theoretical, utopian speculation drawn from Rousseau or the Jacobins themselves. It is simply for Kant the actually-existing, very definition of right itself in the political mode. This reference to the real and actual general will without qualification is the key to understanding Kant’s proscription of the right to rebellion. For the essay depends crucially upon the limitation of right by a sovereign who has the power to coerce subjects, even against their immediate happiness, in the name of general right. ‘Each member of a commonwealth has coercive rights against every other, the only exception being the head of state (since he is not a member of the commonwealth but its creator or preserver), who alone is authorized to coerce without himself being subject to a coercive law’ (ibid.: 292). This exception of ‘the head of state’ that Kant offers up to the dull censors cannot stand a moment of rational reflection, however, for it is itself in contradiction to Kant’s assertion of the universality of right, if the head of state is a single human being (i.e., a monarch); in other words, right cannot apply universally to all humans (or even the subset of all humans within a given state or commonwealth) if one of those humans stands in a state of exception. Rousseauian general will, as a real but non-embodied or empirical entity, is in fact the only ‘sovereign’ entity consistent with Kant’s demand for universality. Monarchy or any political form in which an executive stands above citizens to give law in a state of exception may stop an infinite regression (‘for if [the head of state] could also be coerced he would not be the head of state and the sequence of subordination would

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 56

15/05/2013 08:44:17

Foundations of Caribbean Critique

57

ascend to infinity’), but the general will would equally put a stop to this infinite regression, with the added benefit that right would then remain with all human beings, without sovereign exception, with the people, le peuple itself, actually embodying the sovereign. Again, Kant does not qualify or question the existence of the general will, but instead asserts unambiguously, if parenthetically, its actuality. Only under the sovereignty of the general will could a polis fulfill the a priori demand that right be universalizable or general, the basic criterion that Kant has established in the first sentence of the essay as its horizon of truth. The fig leaf of the sovereign monarch is simply re-appended ex nihilo by Kant to a logical argument that clearly and rigorously deprives it of any rightful logical status. Kant makes explicit in his preparatory notes what is less so in the published version: that the true telos of the state is the actualization of nothing less than the ideals of 1789, ‘liberty, equality, and cosmopolitan unity (fraternity [Verbrüderung]).’29 Only under the general will, then, can right in Kant’s analysis become universal: it is only possible not to abuse the rights of all ‘through [the sovereignty of] no other will than that of the entire people’. Furthermore, Kant writes, ‘the mere will of one [individual] can decide nothing […] that could not be wrong. […] No particular will can be legislative for a commonwealth. […] This basic law […] can arise only from the general (united) will of the people’ (ibid.: 295). One should thus systematically substitute the real concept of the general will for that of the ‘sovereign’ in every instance in Kant’s essay, but only in order to make its argument coherent within the explicit terms of its own logical horizon of ­universality. If one does so, it becomes limpidly clear that Kant is at his most Rousseauian in asserting that for ‘a people now subject to a certain actual legislation detrimental to its happiness’ there is ‘nothing to be done about it but obey’ (ibid.: 297). In other words, even though they may not recognize their own immediate empirical satisfaction or desires, they should, in Rousseau’s famous words, rightly be ‘forced to be free’. The proper referent of the argument of this 1793 text, if one takes the general will as the only coherent legislative and executive power within Kant’s universalist terms, is a defense of Robespierre’s political logic of undivided popular sovereignty and the right of the Terreur to force its dominion: Provided that it is not self-contradictory that an entire people should agree to such a law, however bitter they might find it, the law is in conformity with right. But if a public law is in conformity with this, and so beyond reproach with regard to right, then there is also joined with

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 57

15/05/2013 08:44:17

58

Caribbean Critique it authorization to coerce and, on the other’s part, a prohibition against actively resisting the will of the legislator […] and there exists no rightful commonwealth that can hold its own without a force of this kind that puts down all internal resistance, since each resistance would take place in conformity with a maxim that, made universal, would annihilate any civil constitution and eradicate the condition in which alone people can be in possession of rights generally. (Kant 1996: 298)

In unambiguous and impeccable logic, if one simply names the general will to be the only non-contradictory sovereign in Kant’s own terms, this is the pure logic justifying the suppression of the counter-revolutionary movements of the Chouans and the Vendée, the seizure of the property of suspects and émigrés. Indeed, the Jacobin Terror and even the execution of Capet can rightly be affirmed by Kant’s logic, because only the general will as sovereign is consistent with the prescription of universalizability; any sovereign standing apart and above as unequal, whether king or oligarchy, would invalidate general right as universalizable in conformity with reason. ‘From this it follows,’ Kant concludes in ringing terms, that any resistance to the supreme legislative power, any incitement to have the subjects’ dissatisfaction become active, any insurrection that breaks out in rebellion, is the highest and most punishable crime within a commonwealth, because it destroys its foundation. And this prohibition is unconditional, so that even if that power or its agent, the head of state [not a divine monarch, that is, but a mere agent], has gone so far as to violate the original contract and has thereby, according to the subjects’ concept, forfeited the right to be legislator inasmuch as he has empowered the government to proceed quite violently (tyrannically), a subject is still not permitted any resistance by way of counteracting force. (Kant 1996: 298)

Even the tyrannically violent laws of 22 Prarial, in this view, would stand against the assertion of private interests that would soon triumph under the Thermidorian reaction. While one might reasonably counter this argument with a demonstration that, empirically, the brief period of Jacobin hegemony did not embody the general will, Kant never makes this move, and to do so would moreover be a matter of merely empirical dispute strictly irrelevant to Kant’s formal claim. One might even argue, on marginally better logical grounds, some version of the claim that the very concept of the general will is itself incoherent or impossible or self-contradictory ‘nonsense on stilts’, to adopt Bentham’s famous phrase. Kant

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 58

15/05/2013 08:44:17

Foundations of Caribbean Critique

59

never engages in such speculation; he simply draws the crystalline conclusion that, given the existence of the general will, all particular and individual resistance against it is illegitimate, be it royalist, monarchic, counter-revolutionary, Vendéen, or Chouan assertions of particular, non-universalizable interests and rights. It is the clarity and force of such logic that made Kant the essential philosopher of the French Revolution in the Atlantic world of the 1790s. Toussaint Louverture and the Contradictions of Principle With its progressive destruction of the ancien régime order after 1789, the Jacobin initiative opened the possibility of a related struggle for popular sovereignty in the French colonies. In August 1793, at virtually the same moment the Jacobins began to radicalize the French Revolution that had to that point remained content to construct a parliamentary monarchy, the future leader of the Haitian Revolution publicly announced his commitment to the cause of general liberty. Toussaint Louverture is the initiator of the tradition of Caribbean Critique because he first united an articulate and principled critique of global slavery with the political struggle to end that system of human debasement and exploitation. Louverture stands as the proper name of the process of political ­subjectivation in the Caribbean under the imperative of justice as equality. This is evident at the moment of Louverture’s appearance within the world of Saint-Domingue, after he co-wrote the June 1792 letter that I analyzed as the founding document of Caribbean Critique. The foundational but disavowed violence of plantation slavery became manifest in Louverture’s words in August, 1793, when he announced: ‘Je suis Toussaint Louverture, et je veux que la liberté regne sur St. Domingue.’ In this phrase, a world flashes out of a void; the full consequences of Louverture’s statement could only be unfolded with infinite struggle over the years to come. This enunciation is not Louverture’s representation of a subjective identity but his speaking the truth of Liberté générale, general emancipation, an idea that blasts apart the world of Atlantic plantation slavery. General emancipation is a universal that breaks through the sedimented regime of violence to initiate a process of subjectivation that must be followed through from its first enunciation. Louverture announces a singular universal that had no place in the world it must destroy. This

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 59

15/05/2013 08:44:17

60

Caribbean Critique

singular universal took the form of a decision to break the regime of undecideablity by which brutal injustice perpetuated its reign. After 1789, the new world of the French Revolution created novel transcendental structuring coordinates, most clearly announced in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen: ‘Les hommes naissent et demeurent égaux en droits.’ Such a statement of universal, eternal and infinite truth created a situation of undecideability that would be fought over in subsequent years: who is the subject ‘homme’? Women? Jews? Mulâtres like Vincent Ogé? Slaves? The site of such a universal, then, is a point of decision on an undecideable question. First, in 1789: it is the Tiers état, which is henceforth to be, it is decided, ‘tout’. Then Olympe de Gouges declared it to be all women. It is mulâtres, said the revolutionary assembly, and then it isn’t, and then it was again in 1791. The event of August 29, 1791 destroyed a world in the flare of a fire-filled night, but, on the morning after, this event demanded to be followed through. 30 Louverture’s August 1793 emergence on the Caribbean scene is the incipient sign, one of the earliest consequences of this momentary event of August 29, 1791. The universal import of Haiti lies not in that night of 1791, which is only quantitively different from the many Caribbean slave revolts that preceded it. Rather, the politics of Haitian universalism are expressed in the qualitative leap that followed that evanescent event of revolt, that is, in the laborious struggle to follow through and develop the unfathomable, inadmissible, and unthinkable consequences of 1791. Louverture’s utterance constituted for the world – ‘pour l’univers entier’, as Louis Delgrès would reinterpret this event in Guadeloupe in 1802 – the statement of the truth of an event. By naming his desire for Saint-Domingue’s liberty, Louverture made a declaration, a statement, a decision. This was an axiom on an undecideable question in the post-1789 slave-holding world that generated an infinite network of consequences, a protocol of political subjectivation that unfolds into to the present, demanding the new world implied by this axiom. Political subjectivation in the Atlantic world of the 1790s names the attempt to force the world, in some way, to become more congruent with the measure of universal equality under the Rights of Man and Citizen. If one’s world refuses to conform to this measure, then the political subject acting in unswerving fidelity runs the risk of self-sacrifice to the point of death. Hegel, referencing the Haitian Revolution in the Phenomenology, was the first to analyze this risk. Though I have argued elsewhere that the Haitian Revolution should be understood as an archetypal sequence of populist reason, it is clear that

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 60

15/05/2013 08:44:17

Foundations of Caribbean Critique

61

the final moments of that revolution bear witness to the limitations of this explicative paradigm. 31 While politics, as I am using the term in this book, addresses only matters of pure, undivided equality, in the defense of the demand for universal justice, a populist logic remains entrapped within a vision of politics as negotiation. 32 This populist politics is not so much dedicated to the distribution of wealth, rights, and benefits, as in the Habermasian model, but rather formalizes the negotiation over a more fundamental struggle for hegemony over symbolic goods: who will have the right to decide how to define the signifiers of the political themselves – liberty, justice, equality? While the logic of populism clearly describes this negotiation and struggle, it says nothing about how to proceed with reference to an axiom of political truth, indifferently to those making differential claims on political truth. Populist logic is fundamentally sacrificial. In particular, what Aimé Césaire famously called the final ‘sacrifice’ of Toussaint Louverture should be critically understood as the logical culmination of this populist politics. The struggle for hegemony calls upon each party in the chorus of dissonant voices to sacrifice its cause, to give up on its desire, and to fall in line under the hegemony of the auratic leader. This is precisely the demand Toussaint Louverture made to the people of Saint-Domingue upon coming to power after 1794: give up on your bossale ideas of what general liberty might mean (refusal of plantation labor, reappropriation of surplus profit as labor-free time), and get to work under my model of political freedom as subjectivation to the law of neo-plantocratic order. 33 Toussaint remained faithful to this sacrificial model of populist politics to the end. In a famous (and famously unfathomable) final act, he was destroyed by the very sacrificial political logic he had so successfully implemented over the previous decade. Alberto Moreiras has claimed that ‘all political subjectivation occurs under a logic of sacrifice’. 34 Moreiras’s statement invites us further to interrogate the place of sacrificial logic in any politics of principle. I wish to begin by looking at Tousssaint’s so-called sacrifice, a decision that has confounded historians of the Haitian Revolution since its conclusion. The basic narrative of this sacrifice is as follows: On May 1, 1802, after a series of intensive battles with Napoleon’s troops, who had arrived in Saint-Domingue in February 1802 and were led by Leclerc, Louverture was compelled to surrender to the French. After this, Louverture retired to his plantation at Ennery. On June 7, 1802, he received a letter from General Brunet inviting him to meet with Leclerc. Everyone around Louverture warned him not to go, and he must have been aware of the

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 61

15/05/2013 08:44:17

62

Caribbean Critique

danger of responding to this invitation. In the fifteenth chapter of his Toussaint Louverture, Aimé Césaire describes Toussaint’s decision to respond to that invitation as a sacrifice. Here is Césaire: A la lecture de cette lettre trop honnête, il ne faut pas douter que Toussaint se défiât. Il sentait que c’était un piège … Et pourtant il irait. Il savait … Mais il irait: il le fallait. Lorsqu’il fut arrêté, tous les mémorialistes témoignent qu’il put être irrité, mais qu’il ne fut pas surpris … Comment expliquer son attitude? … Il se pénétrait peu à peu de cette idée que sa disparition seule pouvait la parfaire … Cela supposait son sacrifice, son acceptation de disparaître. (Césaire 1981: 311) [Upon reading this too-honest letter, we shouldn’t doubt that Toussaint was distrustful. He sensed that it was a trap … and he went anyway. He knew … yet he went: it was necessary. All of the chroniclers testify that as soon as he was arrested, he was upset, but not surprised … How can we explain his attitude? … An idea that only his disappearance could be perfect sank into him bit by bit … this idea required his sacrifice, his willingness to disappear.]

Why did Toussaint proceed with this sacrifice? Césaire tells us little, saying only that liberté générale, plus que jamais, son maintien était conditionné par l’union, par l’unité du peuple haïtien … J’y vois mieux qu’un acte mystique: un acte politique. (Césaire 1981: 313) [More than ever, the maintenance of general freedom was conditioned by the union and unity of the Haitian people … I see in it something more than a mystical act: it was a political act.]

In what way would Toussaint’s self-sacrifice and disappearance constitute a ‘political act’? Césaire says only: ‘Sa personne . . . faisait obstacle à l’indispensable fusion’ (Césaire 1981: 312) [His person … was an obstacle to that indispensable fusion/unity]. Césaire only glimpses what I wish to argue, which is that Toussaint’s risky act was a sacrifice that cuts to the heart of the process of political subjectivation. When Toussaint publicly announced his devotion to the cause of ‘liberty and equality’ on August 23, 1793, he effectively became one of the first political dissidents of the modern era. 35 The logic of this act would come to typify the act of modern dissidence as a whole: that is, the strategic invocation of the rule of law and right as it had been defined and promulgated by the oppressor, and demanding that the oppressor be held to the letter of his own claims. Dissidence has had a bad press since the 1970s, when the defense of lone voices such as Solzhenitsyn’s

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 62

15/05/2013 08:44:17

Foundations of Caribbean Critique

63

on the part of the nouveaux philosophes and their followers came to stand for the collapse of insurgent, broad-based politics after 1968, 36 but one might respond to this legitimate critique of a certain dissidence by arguing that all political subjectivation occurs as a process of dissidence. In this view, one would have to accept Moreiras’s thesis but with a proviso: yes, all political subjectivation is subject to sacrifice, but merely as liminal contingency, not as constitutive of the political itself. Sacrifice is the void of the political, its unnamable. The risk of self-sacrifice, which may or may not occur, is simply its operative presumption, one that tells us nothing about the mode of political subjectivation and fidelity itself. To become a political subject is to subject oneself to a standard of truth – for example, to the truth of ‘Freedom and equality of all’. To become a political subject is to become cognizant of a measure of this principle, and to perceive in what way one’s world fails to measure up to it. It is, in the words of the Czech phenomenologist and dissident Jan Patočka, to perceive the superiority of the measure over the measured. 37 Political subjectivation, in turn, is the effort to force the world to become more congruent with this measure. There are as many ways to undertake such a project as there are political subjects, from the non-violence of Gandhi and King to the anti-systemic violence of the slaves of Saint-Domingue. These dissident acts all imply what Patočka famously called ‘living in Truth’, that is, proceeding as if the world measured up to that truth. If one’s world refuses to conform to this measure, the political subject runs the risk of self-sacrifice, to the point of death, as Hegel argued in the most famous passage of his Phenomenology. In 1802, Louverture freely accepted the implications of such a risk. By accepting the invitation to meet Leclerc, Louverture behaved as if Saint-Domingue were subject to the rule of law and to the principle that humans must be free from slavery. He acted in keeping with this truth, despite the fact that he surely knew that he would most likely be captured. That is, Louverture knew that the world in which he happened to live did not measure up to the truth for which he would stake his life. In his samizdat lessons on Platonic dissidence entitled Plato and Europe, Patočka lists five criteria of living in truth, each of which corresponds to choices Louverture made. 1 The measure is superior to the measured. The measure is first self-conceived, immanent yet transcendental to any given, historical situation.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 63

15/05/2013 08:44:18

64

Caribbean Critique 2 Truth is mathematical. It is based upon the axiom of radical, undivided equality, as formulated in such Haitian axioms as tout moun se moun or the axiom of liberté générale articulated in 1793. 3 To live in truth means to remain faithful to that transcendental measure, to ‘embody what is eternal within time’ and to ‘stand firm when the care of the soul becomes dangerous for a human being’ (Patočka 2002: 87). 4 True life can only occur in society, not in isolation. There is, as Adorno liked to say, ‘no truth in untruth’. 5 The goal of politics is simply to create a society in which living in truth does not put one in mortal danger: a society in which none are enslaved, or a society in which one can walk to a meeting without being taken prisoner with no due process, charge, or trial and summarily shipped to a Guantanamo or Fort de Joux. 6 And, finally, Patočka makes an outrageously provincial claim: ‘What is characteristic of Europe as Europe is that its distinctive principle is: generality’ (ibid.: 221). This statement is not only politically incorrect but absurd, made from a transcendently Hegelian point of ignorance of the claims of Africans, among others, to the history of human rights since Soundiata Keita’s famous Charte du Mandé of 1222. 38 And yet, within the context of the age of Revolutions from 1789 to 1804, an axiom did indeed come overseas from France to the Caribbean, in defiance of all the racial politics and economic injustices of the time: this was a phrase, a concept that only took on its full meaning in Saint-Domingue, an ocean away from the racism of the Revolutionary French Assembly: liberté générale.

Self-sacrifice is not an inevitability of political subjectivation, but only its outermost possibility. Sacrifice is a possibility that the political subject acknowledges in risking her life in order to live in truth. This effort to make the world conform to one’s measure of truth can succeed even if universal freedom and equality remain an unrealized ideal. In many historical cases, we observe an increase in freedom relative to a transcendental measure following a given political intervention; the creation of the slaveless state of Haiti in 1804 is undoubtedly one of those moments. The dissident puts her own life rather than that of others at risk in fidelity to this truth. In order to escape from the solipsism and relativism of a personal, subjective truth claim, dissident activity crucially depends upon publicity, on the active, dialectical discussion of what it means to live in truth within a community. It is crucial that Louverture’s capture

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 64

15/05/2013 08:44:18

Foundations of Caribbean Critique

65

was quickly made known all across the island. It does not matter, and we will never know, what Louverture thought as he traveled to that meeting. What matters is that the news of his capture (as well as the news that slavery had been reinstituted by Napoleon in Guadeloupe) galvanized resistance to Leclerc’s troops. Within three months, the finest army in the world was routed in its first defeat, the modern world’s first slave-free state inaugurated on the ashes of the most profitable colony the world has ever known, and Louverture’s sacrificial politics redeemed in Dessaline’s declaration of Haitian Independence on January 1, 1804.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 65

15/05/2013 08:44:18

chapter two

Victor Schoelcher, Tocqueville, and the Abolition of Slavery Schoelcher, Tocqueville

Au principe commercial qu’il n’y a de prospérité coloniale que grâce à l’esclavage, Schoelcher sut opposer le principe révolutionnaire du droit de l’homme à disposer de lui-même. Aimé Césaire

Throughout the nineteenth century, the complexities surrounding the abolition of slavery were enormous. The events of Toussaint Louverture’s capture and sacrifice, the defeat of Louis Delgrès’s and Ignace’s 1802 rebellion in Guadeloupe, and the subsequent defeat of Napoleon’s troops in Haiti meant that slavery would be reimposed in the French Caribbean colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe at the same time that it was destroyed in the new state of Haiti. From 1802 to the 1848 abolition, this strange situation meant that slavery had been both abolished and reinstated in the remaining French colonies, while France’s only former colony became an international pariah. Slave labor persisted throughout the Atlantic world during the first part of the nineteenth century, even as the slave trade and eventually slavery itself were gradually abolished by Britain (1834), France (1848), and, eventually, the United States (1865) and Brazil (1888). One of the key figures of Caribbean Critique emerged at the moment of the 1848 French abolition of slavery. Victor Schoelcher’s writing during the few months of the short-lived Second Republic focalize the struggle around abolition with uncompromising clarity and unyielding fidelity to the imperative of universal, absolute abolition. Schoelcher’s was emphatically and self-consciously a politics of principle in the mode of Robespierre and Louverture, and it was particularly notable for its

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 66

15/05/2013 08:44:18

Schoelcher, Tocqueville

67

success in seizing the strategic opportunity available in the spring of 1848. The problem of slavery and its abolition was enormously important for thinkers across the spectrum of what we might now call ‘leftist’ thought in nineteenth-century France. In the period of the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe (1830–1848), two public intellectuals, in particular, forcefully and repeatedly placed the problem of slavery in France’s American colonies before the French public and paved the way for its eventual abolition on April 27, 1848: Alexis de Tocqueville and Victor Schoelcher.1 Each traveled extensively throughout the Americas, and each brought the experience of their New World encounters to bear upon his attempts to eradicate French participation in the brutally inhuman crime of slavery. While Schoelcher’s thought is relatively little known outside the field of abolition studies, Tocqueville’s is famous. However, despite Tocqueville’s canonical status in the fields of political theory, history, and American studies, insufficient attention has been given to his writings on slavery in the New World. 2 In what follows, I consider Schoelcher’s and Tocqueville’s respective positions on abolition, then open a discussion of the historical and philosophical contexts within which these two thinkers made their respective interventions. The conflict between the liberal Tocqueville and the Jacobin Schoelcher over abolition underscores the central role of critique and principle-based political struggle in Caribbean Critique, as well as its rejection of ‘moderation’ as the defense of oligarchic interests and property by another name. Alexis de Tocqueville unambiguously condemned slavery as a ‘violation of blacks’ human rights’ and called for its abolition on multiple occasions, in both Democracy in America and in his later writings and letters. 3 From 1835 on, he was a member of the abolitionist Société française pour l’abolition de l’esclavage. Like many other liberal abolitionists of the period, however, he argued that enfranchisement should occur gradually, as the slaves were ‘prepared’ for liberty; that is, they were to receive a sort of civic education in the rights and responsibilities of democratic society until such a time as the French state and the colonial plantocracy had successfully weathered the transition from a slave-holding system to one based upon wage labor. Tocqueville’s position in favor of the French imperial project, while common to French Liberal thought of the period, stood in stark contrast to the condemnation of imperialism that had developed in eighteenthcentury Enlightenment thought.4 As Jennifer Pitts argues:

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 67

15/05/2013 08:44:18

68

Caribbean Critique Postrevolutionary France offers a particularly stark example of anti-imperialism’s retreat to the margins of political debate. The nation’s unstable and unsettling domestic regime for much of the nineteenth century led liberals, including Tocqueville, to embrace imperialism as a kind of national salvation. […] The dominant strand of liberalism that was forged during this period was to be exclusionary and nationalist; and it would sit uneasily with the Revolution’s apparent legacy of universal human equality and liberty. (Pitts 2000: xxxiv)

The inherent contradiction between the defense of individual rights and the defense of the democratic nation state that assured and implemented those rights forced liberal July Monarchy politicians to make difficult choices; for Tocqueville, after 1839, that choice repeatedly tended to favor the interests of the democratic state. When context favored the defense of the Rights of Man, as in the question of slavery, so much the better. When it did not, as in the case of the colonization of Algeria, the rights of the colonized were to be sacrificed to greater French glory. 5 In contrast to the Liberals’ subordination of human rights to the interests of the nation state, Victor Schoelcher argued that the ideals of 1789 demanded nothing less than the full and immediate granting of the Rights of Man and Citizen to the slaves France had held in bondage. The distinction I wish to draw here, then, is not the one between colonialists who defended slavery in the interests of French imperialism and abolitionists dedicated to its eradication, but rather the inherent one between abolitionists such as Tocqueville who were willing to subordinate human rights to those of property, and those such as Schoelcher who, while attentive to property rights and the needs of the state, maintained that defense of the rights of all citizens must come before democratic state-building, even if this priority should cost France her American colonies. Among French abolitionists of the period extending from 1789 to 1848, we can distinguish between a pragmatic and an idealist approach to the elimination of slavery. The former might be best characterized by Condorcet’s 1781 ‘Réflexions sur l’esclavage des nègres,’ where the philosopher-mathematician’s radical universalist call for human rights was tempered by the historical expediency of a graduated and rational ‘preparation’ of slaves for freedom. Condorcet offered a series of ‘objective’ mathematical formulas to deduce the need for a gradual elimination of slavery over the course of one or two generations, rather than its immediate abolition.6 Never did Condorcet discuss whether those directly involved – the objects of such cold calculation – might prefer or

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 68

15/05/2013 08:44:18

Schoelcher, Tocqueville

69

merit a more rapid emancipation. For all Condorcet’s concern for what we now call human rights, the interests of hundreds of thousands of enslaved people were to be sacrificed in the interest of the state’s smooth transition to a regime based on wages rather than slave-labor. The arch-realist in matters of French slavery was no doubt Napoleon himself, who stands as the logical fulfillment of Condorcet’s utilitarian approach to the question of slavery in the period. Napoleon followed through the logic of placing the property rights of slave-owners before the human rights of 1789. His 1802 reimposition of slavery in all of France’s American colonies marked his attempt to recover the economic productivity of the world’s most profitable colonial enterprise (Saint-Domingue’s sugar alone accounted for over one-third of the country’s foreign trade in 1789), again reducing humans to mere machinic quotas of productive capacity. Such is the outcome of the logic of gradual abolition. Tocqueville echoed Condorcet’s hesitation before the outrage of slavery. In Democracy in America, he explicitly criticized slavery as the ‘violation of blacks’ human rights’ (Tocqueville 2003: 170) and built a critique of slavery grounded in both his Christian faith and his fidelity to the human rights tradition of the French Revolution.7 Democracy in America only addressed the problem of American slavery in passing, however, since, as he put the matter, slavery was ‘American but not democratic and it was the portrait of democracy I wanted to paint’ (cited at Gershman 1976: 469). Rather than discussing American slavery in full, Tocqueville referred his readers in search of a more detailed exploration of American slavery to his friend Gustave de Beaumont’s novel Marie. 8 However, his condemnation of the institution was total, characterizing slavery as an ‘evil which has crept secretly into the world […] [It] is cast like an accursed seed somewhere on the soil; it then feeds itself, grows without effort, and spreads naturally inside the society which has accepted it’ (ibid.: 399). In his public and private writings until 1848, Tocqueville repeatedly and unambiguously called for the elimination of the French state’s institution of slavery in the Americas. His critique of slavery and of the plantocracy that sustained it was detailed and insightful. These writings fully reveal Tocqueville’s subtly evolving views on the proper course for French abolition in light of the experience of France’s imperial rival England, which had abolished its own slavery regime in 1833. Tocqueville joined the French Chamber of Representatives as a liberal representative in 1839. During these final years of the July Monarchy from 1839 to 1848, Tocqueville wrote frequently on what he considered inextricably

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 69

15/05/2013 08:44:18

70

Caribbean Critique

intertwined problems of French imperialism and slavery. The bulk of his analysis of French imperialism focused on France’s contemporary initiative to colonize Algeria.9 A closer reading of this argument reveals the degree to which Tocqueville understood the problem of slavery in terms less defined by concern for human rights than for the greater good of the French Empire. Tocqueville’s writings on Algeria consistently subordinated the Rights of Man to those of the French Citizen. These texts reveal that Tocqueville placed the rights of French citizens and the need to shore up an infirm French democratic tradition before the human rights of its colonial subjects. Tocqueville could simultaneously defend the use of violence against Algerian subjects while condemning French slavery because his predominant criterion in all of these writings was not the problem of human rights but the glory and solidity of the democratic French state.10 The imperial project, and the conquest of Algeria in particular, were essential, Tocqueville argued, to enhancing France’s international standing; if the rights of Algerians were to suffer under French hegemony, this was an unfortunate but necessary evil. His writings on Algeria, albeit by 1847 coming to condemn the violence of Marshal Bugeaud’s military conquest as counterproductively excessive, unanimously defended a certain degree of imperialist violence as both legitimate and necessary to the greater good of successful colonization.11 Tocqueville’s writings on imperialism and slavery reveal a fundamental tension in his liberalism, a tension between the defense of individual liberties and the need to shore up and defend the democratic state that assured the implementation of those liberties for its citizens. Although Tocqueville’s Democracy in America had condemned the American extermination of native peoples as a consequence of democratic nationbuilding, he appears to have regarded colonized peoples (like slaves) to be less-developed and ‘barbarous’. Standing outside the democratic polis, these people fail, at least in Tocqueville’s Algerian writings, to qualify for the full civil rights of French citizenship. In the ‘Essay on Algeria’, Tocqueville explicitly defended the practice of the razzia, the need to ‘burn harvests, empty silos, and capture unarmed men, women, and children’, and the destruction of Arab towns, to secure French colonial hegemony.12 Tocqueville described French colonialism as a conflict between lesser-developed and more-developed human races, and this perceived inequality helped him to justify French colonizing violence: ‘In order for us to colonize to any extent’, he wrote, ‘we must necessarily use not only violent measures, but visibly

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 70

15/05/2013 08:44:19

Schoelcher, Tocqueville

71

iniquitous ones. The quarrel is no longer between governments, but between races’.13 Aside from the passages of Democracy in America dedicated to slavery, Tocqueville wrote two principal texts on the problem of French abolition. The first is the report of the government commission Tocqueville headed in 1839, and the second his 1843 essay on ‘The Emancipation of Slaves’, written for the journal Le Siècle.14 In all these texts, his condemnation of slavery is unambiguous: ‘Man has never had the right to possess another man,’ he wrote in the 1839 report, ‘and the fact of possession has always been – and is still – illegitimate’ (Tocqueville 1839: 19). ‘Emancipation’, he stated in the language of universal natural rights, is the realization of the ‘principles of justice, humanity, and reason’ (ibid.: 22). The Commission’s report, authored by Tocqueville, begins by asserting that the Commission’s task was neither to disprove the past justifications put forward to defend slavery nor to argue for necessary abolition. By 1839, it asserted, these commitments were to be taken as given. That slavery ‘can and must one day be ended’, Tocqueville wrote, ‘is today a universally recognized truth, one that slave owners themselves do not deny’ (ibid.: 2). The Commission was not concerned about the philosophical and moral status of slavery, but rather with the practical matter of ‘when and how it must end’. This text reveals Tocqueville’s position on abolition to be complex. His 1839 report and the articles of 1843 make similar arguments, though the implied audiences of these texts differ: one audience includes his fellow representatives, and the other a French public that Tocqueville wished to influence in favor of abolition. In consonance with Victor Schoelcher, Tocqueville’s 1839 text refutes the idea that slaves should be ‘prepared’ for freedom before emancipation can take place. Tocqueville argued that none of the processes called for by gradualists, such as civic and religious training or strengthening the institution of marriage, could be accomplished within the slave-holding system because the system itself fatally undermined their development. Given this fact, Tocqueville insists that ‘to demand that they be accomplished before slavery is ended [is] to declare that it should never end’ (ibid.: 3). He placed the blame for the slave’s moral underdevelopment (an underdevelopment he leaves unquestioned), not with the slave, but with the slave-holders who had systematically impeded that development: ‘How could one enlighten and fortify the reason of a man as long as he is kept in a state where it is useless to him and where it could be harmful for him to reason? (ibid.: 4). Tocqueville argued, then, that freedom was a necessary condition

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 71

15/05/2013 08:44:19

72

Caribbean Critique

for moral development: ‘only the experience of freedom […] can suggest and give to men the opinions, the virtues, and the habits appropriate for the citizen of a free country’ (ibid.: 6). The process of emancipation would inevitably be uncertain, Tocqueville asserted, indicating that his contemporaries must accept this fact or else ‘eternalize slavery’ (ibid.: 6). Tocqueville’s commission ultimately argued that delaying abolition would be ‘perilous’, and recommended that the French government not do so. Despite this apparent argument for universal and immediate abolition, Tocqueville remained more hesitant about the specific process of emancipation. Emancipation should be universal, he argued, rather than gradual (ibid.: 11), and anything less – as had been attempted in the English colonies – would lead to chaos (ibid.: 14). The only question for Tocqueville was whether universal emancipation would be unplanned and disorderly or (relatively) systematic. Tocqueville’s most problematic recommendation was his repeated suggestion that the colonists be partially indemnified for the loss of their slaves (who would nonetheless presumably continue to work for them) (ibid.: 22). Tocqueville recommended this despite his professed recognition, in Democracy in America, that ‘The Negroes may remain slaves without complaining but once they join the ranks of free men they will soon be indignant at […] not being able to become the equals of the whites. […] There is no intervening state that can last between the excessive inequality created by slavery and the complete equality naturally promoted by independence’ (ibid.: 423, 425). Such an indemnity would smooth the period of transition from the slave system to remunerated labor. The cost of indemnification, he argued, was a burden the state should shoulder for its past misdeeds. That this money should go to the slave-holders themselves rather than to benefit the slaves makes this a decidedly unconvincing argument.15 Tocqueville understood and claimed to sympathize with the desire of former slaves to possess and farm their own personal plots of land. Speaking of the English Caribbean colonies, where former slaves retained such plots and devoted much attention to their cultivation, he observed that ‘blacks prefer, in cultivating [these gardens], to work for themselves, rather than serving another’ (ibid.: 45). However, Tocqueville flatly rejected this form of autonomy in the context of abolition: ‘If it is judged necessary for the exploitation of colonial crops and for the permanence of the white race in the Antilles that the freed black sell his services permanently to the plantation owners, it is evident that no domain

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 72

15/05/2013 08:44:19

Schoelcher, Tocqueville

73

should have been created [in these English colonies] where he could live in comfort by working for himself alone’ (ibid.: 46). His use of the third person conditional in this official document suggests that Tocqueville sought, at least rhetorically, to distance himself from this qualification of the former slaves’ freedom, but it is precisely this conclusion that the report would ultimately recommend. This limitation of rights can only be called a deliberate form of discrimination, despite its reflecting Tocqueville’s lifelong desire to ‘moderate’ the forces of democracy,16 in other words, to find a balance in this case between the rights of slaves and colonial property owners. When it came to the economic success of the French plantation system, Tocqueville’s professed penchant for human autonomy was notably absent; in these instances, he clearly prioritized property rights over the natural rights of man. ‘Your Commission’, recommended Tocqueville to the French state, ‘thinks that a trial period, in which the Blacks, already given certain rights of the free man, would still be forced to work, is indispensable […] to prepare the education of the black population, and to bring it to a state able to bear liberty [la mettre en état de supporter la liberté’]’ (ibid.: 48; my emphasis). Tocqueville appears to have regarded this gradual abolition as a pragmatic, rhetorical gambit that was ultimately oriented toward complete abolition. He later wrote to Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard to explain the motives of his Commission report: You will see that I have avoided, to the point of coldness, all that smacks of harangue. Both my own natural penchant and the desire to avoid unnecessarily exciting the passions of the colonies led me to it. I wanted to be scrupulously just and moderate in an affair in which until now I think others have been violent even when they have been right. […] [In] working on the report, I always thought of the success of the measure and never of the success of the report. (cited at Gershman 1976: 477)

Despite his willingness to compromise, Tocqueville never managed to persuade his government to implement abolition. Instead, the French government issued a series of reports in the 1840s, each of which made recommendations that were either ignored or postponed by the decision to form a new committee on the subject. Whenever he faced the demand to ensure a regular flow of profit from the colonies, Tocqueville adopted a paternalistic tone that stands in marked contrast to the unequivocal condemnations of slavery elsewhere in his oeuvre. He asserted to his readers that plantation owners could

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 73

15/05/2013 08:44:19

74

Caribbean Critique

profit from the former slaves’ (putative) inclination to subservience, the result of their long experience of forced labor: During the period in which already promised freedom is not yet completely given; in which habits of respect that slavery had engendered are still maintained by forced labor, but in which the slave’s spirit already looks forward to the approach of independence; in this intermediary period the application [action] of power [to ensure their continuous labor] is easy and effective. (Tocqueville 1839: 49)

Tocqueville’s moral criterion in this case is not human rights, autonomy, or democracy, but rather the effective domination of the former slave’s spirit by sovereign power. Why should the former slave not be free, as a human being, to formulate his or her own conception of autonomy? Tocqueville and his colleagues considered the answer to this question so obvious that there was no need to state it explicitly: because, in matters of colonial policy, the economic viability of the large-scale plantation system overrode the natural right of slaves to articulate the conditions of their own freedom. Tocqueville may have called for ‘destroying in a single blow all the former relations that existed between the master and his slave’ (ibid.: 49), but he also recommended that these relations be immediately be replaced by a system of forced plantation labor that only differed from slavery in that it would be remunerated. In other words, the ‘abolitionist’ Tocqueville recommended replacing outright slavery with remunerated serfdom. In his 1839 text, Tocqueville characterized the former slaves not as fully autonomous human beings, but as moral and juridical minors who required the guardianship of the state after their long period of servitude: ‘The state thus becoming [upon emancipation] the tutor of the former slaves, it finds itself free to use all means that can best and most quickly prepare the latter for the use of independence’ (ibid.: 52). Tocqueville’s language reveals that it was not, in his view, the former slaves who would be free upon emancipation; rather, the state that should be ‘free’ to mold these beings – not into slaves, as it had attempted for two centuries, but into a docile, infantilized, and subaltern agricultural proletariat. The state ‘can impose upon them the conditions it judges indispensable, and force them to undergo the necessary ordeals before giving them over to themselves’ (ibid.: 52). Tocqueville concluded his recommendations by calling for a limited period of servitude and indoctrination after emancipation, a status without juridical limitation upon the state’s actions. During this period, the state would enjoy ‘full

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 74

15/05/2013 08:44:19

Schoelcher, Tocqueville

75

freedom’ to create a submissive labor force. That this social engineering would be limited in time and applied only to Africans would have been strictly irrelevant from the point of view of natural right. That, however, was neither Tocqueville’s nor the commission’s point of view. While Tocqueville’s 1839 and 1843 texts offered similar arguments in favor of abolition, the latter was in fact more progressive, given its immediate historical context. The French chamber had rejected Tocqueville’s 1839 report and convened a new commission, this time headed by the Duc de Broglie. In its 1843 report, the commission then called for a ten-year delay in implementing emancipation in order to ‘prepare’ slaves for republican citizenship. Though his article does not make this explicit, Tocqueville had again argued, this time unsuccessfully, that abolition should be immediate yet still qualified by state supervision of former slaves and counterbalanced by the indemnification of former slave-holders. The articles mark Tocqueville’s attempt to influence public opinion in the hope that this report would not be ignored and shelved like his earlier initiative. In his 1843 articles, Tocqueville’s rhetoric ranges from condemning the ‘detestable institution’ (ibid.: 222) of slavery to pragmatic consideration of the proper timing and implementation of abolition in light of France’s imperial economic and political interests. Tocqueville’s series of articles ‘On the Emancipation of the Slaves’ began by celebrating the ‘bold and remarkable’ event that was Britain’s 1833 abolition of slavery. This occurred, he noted, ‘not by the desperate effort of the slave, but by the enlightened will of the master; not gradually’ but ‘in an instant’.17 The colonists, Tocqueville implied, are an aristocracy like any other; like that of 1789, their unjust ‘privileges’ must be stripped from this race-based ‘nobility’ in the interest of the democratic state (ibid.: 200). While Tocqueville qualified both the slave trade and slavery itself as ‘infamous’, his moral condemnation remained secondary to his respect for the good of the imperial nation state. Tocqueville’s text explores this matter in depth: ‘[H]ow can the colonists who belong to the freest and most democratic nation of the European continent’, he asked, ‘flatter themselves that they can preserve [slavery]?’ (ibid.: 201). The interest France holds in its New World colonies, Tocqueville argued, is predominantly not economic but geo-strategic. The islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique were ‘colonies where 200,000 inhabitants speak our language, share our mores, obey our laws’ (ibid.: 206). Given the growing ascendancy of US global hegemony that Tocqueville so presciently foresaw, he argued that the citizens of these colonies must

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 75

15/05/2013 08:44:20

76

Caribbean Critique

become free members of the French nation as a geostrategic counterweight: ‘These two islands form two citadels from which France can observe at a distance what happens in these waters, which are to have such a great destiny, and where France can be ready to play the role that her interest or greatness indicates’ (ibid.: 206). These positions, Tocqueville argued, would be fatally weakened if France should attempt to maintain slavery on islands surrounded by free territories, sites whose status would inevitably infect the enslaved population with a will to revolt in the name of their freedom.18 Slavery must be abolished in order to ‘resist an external attack that would take as its point of departure the evident interests and passions [i.e., for freedom], so often excited, of the immense majority of its inhabitants.’ The ‘foremost truth’ of emancipation, for Tocqueville, is not one of social justice or human rights, but rather ‘that keeping the colonies is necessary for the strength and greatness of France’ (ibid.: 203). Tocqueville took an unambiguously Eurocentric perspective when he discussed the origins of the idea of emancipation. The question he repeatedly asked was paternalistic: ‘Should we, like the English, seek to abolish slavery?’ (ibid.: 200). The movement for abolition emanated unilaterally, in his view, from an enlightened Europe to its colonies. Tocqueville did not admit, or certainly did not mention, the possibility that the slaves of Saint Domingue might have actually seen beyond the French bourgeois consensus of 1791 that actively silenced and sidelined the issue of slavery; he does not entertain the thought that these former slaves may have actually radicalized the process of democratization in the French Revolution and compelled the first French abolition of 1794 fully four decades before the British abolition. Instead, he writes that ‘this great event [British abolition of 1833] was produced by the movement of the century […] The ideas, the passions, the ways of all European societies have pressed in this direction for fifty years. […] The idea of slavery in a sense grew from all our other ideas’ (ibid.: 201). Tocqueville completely suppresses the events of the Haitian Revolution from his narrative, even though these events led directly to the first immediate and total abolition of 1794. Had he paid attention to its progression, let alone to the accomplishments of its articulate and thoughtful leaders like Toussaint Louverture, Tocqueville might have paused before concluding that ‘If [the slave] gains his freedom, he often feels independence as a shackle heavier than slavery itself [ …] When reason becomes his only guide, he cannot recognize its voice’ (Tocqueville 2003: 372). Instead, Tocqueville flattered his presumed

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 76

15/05/2013 08:44:20

Schoelcher, Tocqueville

77

readers by asserting that the desire to end slavery arose purely from the French Revolution, and for the enlightenment of Europeans alone. The events of 1789, he claimed, gave to the world ‘this sentiment, disinterested yet impassioned with the love of men, which all at once made Europe hear the cries of the slaves – who propagated it, directed it, illuminated it? We were the ones’ (ibid.: 207). Tocqueville’s 1843 text, like his earlier report, reduced the problem of emancipation to a question of costs and benefits: given the unambiguous need to abolish slavery, how, Tocqueville inquired, could this be achieved with the least cost and greatest benefit for the French imperial nation state? To answer this question, he argued, one must take ‘the necessary precautions to ensure the benefits and to restrict the costs and perils’ in order to guarantee the ‘most economical means of succeeding’ in this endeavor (Tocqueville 2003: 207–208). Since the political and economic benefit of the French nation remained Tocqueville’s point of reference in these reflections, he considered the problem of work-stoppage by freed slaves the single most important impediment to a successful emancipation. It seems that Tocqueville never stopped to wonder whether there might exist a model of human autonomy that would give priority to the reappropriation of labor-free time as a valid measure of freedom for someone who had been a slave laborer.19 Tocqueville recognized that the British decision to implement an ‘apprenticeship’ after the nominal abolition of slavery in essence amounted to slavery under another name (ibid.: 214). Upon the completion of this delay, however, Tocqueville faulted the British for immediately granting full citizenship rights to the former slaves: ‘The workers of the colonies had precisely the same rights those of the metropole enjoyed; like them, they could, at their pleasure, decide with sovereign power how to use their time, set their rates, and determine what to do with their wages.’ Tocqueville concluded that ‘this complete transformation of colonial society into free society was premature’ (ibid.). Many of those who formerly worked the sugar plantations as slaves, Tocqueville observed, quite naturally preferred to work elsewhere: ‘That a certain number of workers would leave the sugar refineries, preferring other industries, was the necessary consequence of freedom’. The result of this labor scarcity was a rise in wages and decline in sugar production. The solution Tocqueville proposed was, here as in 1839, ‘to prohibit them for a certain time from becoming landowners’ (ibid.: 215). Tocqueville favored a remedy that subordinated the bourgeois defense of a free and open labor market to colonial capitalism’s need to maintain

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 77

15/05/2013 08:44:20

78

Caribbean Critique

an adequate supply of wage laborers. He maintained that the choice of former slaves to invest whatever capital they possessed in small, private land holdings rather than in their own wage labor on the sugar plantations threatened the survival of the plantation system itself. The English experience had demonstrated that the possession of privately held land sufficient to meet one’s basic needs meant that free laborers could demand higher wages than a landless proletariat. Tocqueville did not ask whether this incipient turn toward self-sufficiency would be to the benefit of the former slaves. Instead, he argued that self-sufficiency would ‘deliver a fatal blow to the sugar industry’, which in turn would necessarily lead to ‘a general crisis that, after first striking the whites, will necessarily extend to all the other classes’ (ibid.: 216). In his conclusion to the Broglie report, Tocqueville observed that the committee decided to institute a ten-year delay on abolition in light of the British experience of emancipation. Upon abolition, he remarked, the former slaves would not immediately enjoy the full rights of French citizens. The commission instead recommended: to qualify the freedom of the emancipated Negroes in the following three ways: The former slaves will be required to reside in the colony; although free to choose their profession and the master under whose direction they want to work, they will be neither permitted to remain idle nor to work only for themselves; the maximum and minimum wages will be fixed by the governor. (Tocqueville 2003: 219–220)

Tocqueville commented that these transitional arrangements would ensure the smooth change from a slave-holding regime to one based upon the free labor of the landless negroes (a class forced to undertake capitalist wage labor because they did not own the means of production). If ‘the emancipated Negroes were neither allowed to live as vagabonds nor to procure a little domain for themselves, and were reduced to hiring out their services for a living’, Tocqueville concluded approvingly, ‘it is very likely that most of them would remain in the sugar refineries, and that the cost of running these establishments would not increase immeasurably’ (ibid.: 221). This period of transition, the committee advised, ‘could end after five years’ (ibid.: 220). This five-year maintenance of wage-slavery was, Tocqueville maintained, something the state ‘owed the colonists’ (ibid.: 222). What France might have ‘owed’ to the Africans it had enslaved is a question Tocqueville did not ponder in these writings. He was more interested in calculating the proper indemnity due to the colonists for their loss

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 78

15/05/2013 08:44:20

Schoelcher, Tocqueville

79

of ‘property’: ‘As the capital owed for the colonies’ 250,000 slaves, at 1,200 francs a head, comes to 300 million, half that, or 150 million, represented by interest at 4 percent of 6 million, would be granted the colonists’ (ibid.: 224). The black slaves would be compelled to pay the remaining half of this indemnity through their own labor, a cost to be added to what they had already paid in suffering and forced labor. Among Tocqueville’s contemporary abolitionists, others defended both immediate abolition (like Tocqueville) and immediate enfranchisement (unlike Tocqueville). Victor Schoelcher exemplifies this strain of radical abolitionism in the period. Schoelcher, the architect of France’s second universal and immediate abolition of slavery in 1848, was the son of a successful porcelain maker. His inheritance allowed him to live as a bourgeois rentier and to travel around the world. Schoelcher made his first trip to the Americas (Mexico, Cuba, the southern United States) in 1829–1830, where he first encountered the reality of slavery, a discovery that would transform his life. In 1833, he published his first major condemnation of slavery, On the Enslavement of Blacks and Colonial Legislation. Schoelcher traveled again to the Americas in 1840–1841, this time visiting the Caribbean islands of Jamaica, Antigua, Dominica, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haiti. There, Schoelcher gathered extensive data on actually existing slavery and on the results of its recent abolition (1834) in the English colonies. 20 The result of this second trip was Schoelcher’s most famous book, On the French Colonies: Immediate Abolition of Slavery. 21 As its title indicates, Schoelcher had abandoned his early defense of gradual abolition by the time he made his second American journey. He called instead for universal and immediate abolition with no intermediary period of ‘acculturation’ to liberty or wage labor for the slaves. 22 After the revolution of 1848, François Arago, the Minister of the Marine and Colonies in the revolutionary government, appointed Schoelcher Vice-Secretary of State to the Colonies and President of the government’s Commission on the Abolition of Slavery. Schoelcher subsequently served as representative of Martinique and Guadeloupe in the French National Assembly, before going into a long period of political exile (1850–1870) after Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état. He once again served as representative for Martinique under the Third Republic, publishing regularly on subjects such as colonialism, slavery, and musicology until his death in 1893. Long familiar with the events of the Haitian Revolution, Schoelcher published his monumental study The

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 79

15/05/2013 08:44:20

80

Caribbean Critique

Life of Toussaint Louverture in 1889; this text is one of the finest studies of the Haitian Revolution to date. 23 A key moment in Schoelcher’s life occurred on March 4, 1848, when, upon returning from a trip to Senegal, he met with Minister of the Colonies François Arago. Arago had already held meetings with colonial delegates who assured him that it was necessary to proceed slowly with any eventual emancipation decree, because such a decree would inevitably lead to the economic ruin of the colonies (Schmidt 1994: 103). On March 4, Schoelcher met with Arago and convinced him to urge the government to adopt the principle of universal, immediate emancipation with full rights of citizenship. Arago proceeded to put Schoelcher in charge of the process, assigning him to lead a commission that would ‘prepare without delay the act of the emancipation of the blacks and the measures necessary for its success’ (cited ibid.). Tocqueville actually served on this commission alongside Schoelcher, frequently taking the side of the colonists in their debates and arguing against Schoelcher’s injunction to indemnify the slaves as well as the colonists (ibid.: 120). Though Schoelcher retained this position only until July 21, he was able to oversee the transformation of his ideas into political reality upon the abolition of French slavery on April 27, 1848. ‘I accomplished a great thing,’ he wrote in 1849, ‘I had this extraordinary happiness, rarely granted to a man, to witness the triumph of a cause by my efforts that was the object of my life’ (cited ibid.: 144). In addition to this success, Schoelcher’s proposals and speeches in the French Assembly largely defined development of the French Caribbean Overseas Colonies. In 1946, these would be renamed ‘French Overseas Departments’, just as Schoelcher had explicitly recommended over a century before. Both Tocqueville and Schoelcher were socially progressive in the context of the politics of the July Monarchy, but the distinction between the two is obvious on the matter of emancipation: while Tocqueville called for an immediate but limited emancipation, Schoelcher defended a more radical vision of immediate emancipation with full civil rights. His 400-page Des colonies françaises: Abolition immédiate de l’esclavage, published in 1842, explored the contemporary situation of slavery in the French colonies of the period. The book accumulates a persuasive wealth of detailed description, the result of Schoelcher’s onsite investigations. Successive chapters survey topics such as ‘The Condition of Slaves’, marriage, punishment, ‘the color prejudice’, labor, ­ indemnification, religion, and the process of emancipation itself.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 80

15/05/2013 08:44:20

Schoelcher, Tocqueville

81

Though most of this volume analyzes in detail the actual conditions of French slavery, Schoelcher makes clear at a number of points that he bases his call for abolition on the absolute inviolability of human rights. He writes: One can no longer simply examine the [empirical] vices and abuses of servitude […] we argue our case in the name of the imprescriptible rights of man; we pursue slavery, beyond any practical consideration, because it offends humanity. […] It is not a question of beneficent or cruel treatment. It is a question of principle. (Schoelcher 1998: 27)

The crime of slavery was precisely that it imposed limits on the autonomous development of a portion of humanity: ‘Does man have in his brain but mere instincts? Is man made to remain at the instinctual level, is it not a crime of lèse-humanité to impose limits upon his development?’ (ibid.: 49). Schoelcher understood slavery as the bestialization and exclusion of a part of humanity: ‘Servitude is the annihilation of all rights and faculties, an eternal civil and moral mutilation. […] A slave has hardly anything in common with a man, save his animal form. He is an isolated being who has no legal relation with the other members of society, he is a cultivation machine; he is a mere thing’ (ibid.: 54). And yet Schoelcher obviously considered a slave undeniably a human being: ‘he thinks, he feels the emotions of happiness and the anguish of pain; the desire for approbation leads him to heroic deeds, and egoism to reprehensible acts’ (ibid.: 149). The apparent differences between the races may ‘make of him another type of human, but they will never prevent him from being human; and that being so, nothing can excuse his enslavement’ (ibid.: 152). Like Tocqueville, Schoelcher argued that abolition was an inevitable process: ‘Whether the colonists agree or not, they must resign themselves to it. There is no longer any force in the world that can prevent its triumph; it is carried by the current of progressive ideas [idées de réforme] at such a height of demonstrated truth that to deny it today would be to lose oneself in mere opinion’ (ibid.: 255). Schoelcher considered the cause of abolition just and necessary, urging colonists to recognize that ‘it is in the name of the progress of human morality that torture is abolished and that France demands the abolition of servitude; [it is] in the name of charity that the nation has resolved to purify a social state that offends reason, justice, and all humanity’ (ibid.: 256). As Kant had argued in the Conflict of the Faculties, the idea of the French Revolution had become a world historical fate, as it remained in Schoelcher ‘s vision: ‘Liberty,

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 81

15/05/2013 08:44:21

82

Caribbean Critique

Equality, Fraternity; in these three words, lie the inevitable destiny of humankind. Whoever wishes to stand against it will be broken, in the Antilles as in Europe’ (ibid.: 257). Unlike Tocqueville, who invoked the same French Revolutionary ideals in reference to nationalistic grandeur, Schoelcher actually sustained the Jacobin view that the ideals apply universally, to all human beings. Schoelcher maintained strict fidelity to his vision of uncompromised abolition and enfranchisement, in distinct contrast to Tocqueville, whose recommendations to the French government belied a compromising ambivalence. Schoelcher considered any intermediary period between abolition and full accession of former slaves to their civic and human rights quite simply the persistence of slavery under another name: If to give the blacks the freedom due to them one thinks it necessary to pass through an intermediary regime; and if to obtain the desired and desirable assent of the colonists one left it up to them to indicate the nature of this regime, I submit that [the result would be] the prolongation of slavery under another name. (Schoelcher 1998: 366)

Unlike Tocqueville, who repeatedly tethered his recommendations to the needs of French capital and the imperial nation state, Schoelcher analyzed the question of emancipation and its modality from the subject-position of the slave: ‘This half-liberty [in a post-emancipation transitional period], after the heightened expectations that the proclamation of principle leads the blacks to conceive, [would be] a cause for discontent’ (ibid.: 367). Schoelcher argued that the future of French Caribbean society depended on an uncompromising equality of citizenship. ‘Any compromise could only embitter and poison the atmosphere […] Either leave servitude as it is or grant total liberty […] No intermediary class, no newly freed wards of the state, no half citizens, these would destroy the homogeneity that a society must have to move forward (ibid.: 367). 24 While Tocqueville recommended forbidding freed slaves from owning plots of land for a limited period, Schoelcher recommended proactive land-reform, the distribution of small plots of land, along with the much more radical proposal for remuneration both to the slave-owners and to the former slaves themselves; his commission refused to endorse these recommendations (Schmidt 1994: 109). Schoelcher had no illusions that the process of emancipation could be engineered to eliminate any possible social upheaval: ‘One must simply resign oneself to the turmoil that follows any great disruption of a political order, just as is true in the

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 82

15/05/2013 08:44:21

Schoelcher, Tocqueville

83

natural world’ (Schoelcher 1998: 368). He recognized that eliminating the institution of slavery in a society economically and socially based on it would inevitably induce upheaval and change. Schoelcher argued against those defenders of slavery and against pragmatic abolitionists like Tocqueville who claimed that freedom could only be learned by former slaves if its implementation was gradual. He writes: I will always believe that mass emancipation alone can permit the slaves to learn the duties of citizenship. […] To think one could teach freedom to a being remaining outside freedom! One might just as well try to teach an infant to swim without putting them into the water. […] The blacks will become accustomed to their rights by practicing them, to their duties in fulfilling them, just as French bourgeois become good jurors by exercising the eminent function of juror. (Schoelcher 1998: 370, 371)

Schoelcher places himself resolutely in the most radical Jacobin tradition: there is no proper time for something as revolutionary as absolute abolition. It must simply be pushed forward by all means available, so that the struggle itself – reflexively and dialectically (which is to say, never completely or perfectly) – can create the conditions for its own success in the new society that unfolds through that process. Schoelcher explicitly placed human rights and a radical vision of remunerative justice above the economic good of both the state and slave-owners. Like Robespierre before him, he went so far as to call explicitly for the abandonment of the colonies if they should prove to be workable only by slave labor: ‘I proclaim “no colonies if they cannot exist without slavery.” Slavery violates the principle of liberty, a principle that is not only a convention made among men, but also a natural truth that has become fully evident; […] it is the supreme destiny of man’ (Schoelcher 1998: 385). Schoelcher concluded his book in visionary and truly prophetic terms by reflecting on the very point that Tocqueville never deigned to consider: why, in fact, should the former slaves, if they are to be considered full citizens subject to all human and civic rights, be forced at all to work on the plantations where they had spent their lives as tortured captives? All the sophisms in the world cannot go against right. The blacks must be free, because it is just. If, when they are free, they do not wish to cultivate the land beyond their own needs, as we are told, either they should be replaced by immigrants who will work, or we should give back the islands to nature, which did not make them fit for man, since

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 83

15/05/2013 08:44:21

84

Caribbean Critique it is impossible to exploit them without violence toward our fellow man. (Schoelcher 1998: 387)25

Schoelcher was alone in his time. This white, French bourgeois remains one of the great figures of Caribbean Critique; unlike Tocqueville, who also knew the Americas intimately, Schoelcher chose to orient his critique of Caribbean plantation slavery from the subject position of the enslaved themselves. The measure he applied as he articulated his abolitionist ethics was not that of property-rights, but of justice as equality, measures he had inherited from the French Revolution. He applied this measure not to the rights of bourgeois slave-owners but to the lived experience of the enslaved. The correct path forward was obvious to him, and Schoelcher never swerved from its pursuit. We have seen that Tocqueville, despite arguing for the universal abolition of slavery, viewed slaves as morally unformed beings – humans, certainly, but not yet able to function autonomously in democratic society. The roots of Tocqueville’s paternalistic and condescending views of blacks are perhaps to be found in this laconic passage in Democracy in America, in which the Tocqueville observed with authority: ‘Up to the present, everywhere where the whites have been the strongest, they held the Negroes in debasement or in slavery. Everywhere where the Negroes have been the strongest, they destroyed the whites; this is the only account that has ever been opened among the races’ (Tocqueville 2003: 160). Here, Tocqueville’s tone of scientific objectivity simply echoes his epoch’s racist condemnation of the only successful struggle in human history to have overthrown a slave-holding system: the Haitian Revolution. In 1832, Tocqueville could be referring to no other event, one that had so outraged a world grounded and dependent upon the enslavement of a portion of the human population that enormous efforts had been made to silence it, to falsify it, and to demonize it as an eruption of pure, barbaric violence – in short to reduce Haiti as both idea and reality to no more than the ‘poorest country in the Western Hemisphere’. 26 Tocqueville repeated the predominant nineteenth-century clichés that characterized Haitians as bloodthirsty barbarians. In his 1839 Report, he even referred explicitly to the Haitian Revolution. Incorrectly, but tellingly, Tocqueville did not use the name of the world’s first black republic from whom France had extorted diplomatic recognition in 1825 (Haiti), but instead referred nostalgically to the former French colony (Saint-Domingue), which signified for him only ‘bloody confrontations, where expulsion, and the massacre of whites must follow’ (Tocqueville

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 84

15/05/2013 08:44:21

Schoelcher, Tocqueville

85

1839: 25). He either did not or could not recognize that the Haitian Revolution may have signified more than this, or that it may indeed have surpassed in some respects the French Revolution that inspired it, and that Tocqueville knew so well. Like Tocqueville, Schoelcher traveled to the Americas, in his case to New Orleans and the Caribbean, but he took from this empirical observation of slavery a principled determination that the claims of human rights trumped those of capital. Schoelcher had traveled to Haiti and studied its revolution in detail, much better than Tocqueville. His faith in the maturity and enlightenment of the former slaves was most likely born from this familiarity. Schoelcher expressed his radical conviction to the world in the idealist equation encapsulated in the subtitle of his most famous book: Immediate Abolition of Slavery. When the moment came to abolish slavery in 1848, it was Schoelcher alone who argued for an uncompromised, total and immediate abolition, against the tergiversations of his colleagues. In contrast to the delay tactics of the abolitionist pragmatists such as Condorcet and Tocqueville, and counter to their paternalist assurances that slaves were not ‘ready’ for freedom and had to be prepared for its coming over many years, Schoelcher’s human rights-based approach to continental abolitionism managed fully to transform slave-holding society in 1848. Schoelcher, the architect of France’s 1848 abolition, was the most radical, uncompromising champion of an idealist principledirected conception of emancipation since Toussaint Louverture. ‘The right of man to freedom, to the possession of one’s self,’ Schoelcher wrote, ‘contains at once for him both the moral and material good. This is not a convention of the age, of place and circumstances, it is a universally recognized truth, and it takes by this title the name of principle, in the same way that fidelity to a sworn faith is a principle that no one in the world can contradict’ (Cited at Césaire 2004: 13; my emphasis). Schoelcher’s was an unyielding and effective fidelity to a radical conception of universal human rights, one he inherited from the architects of the Haitian abolition of slavery. Schoelcher’s most famous interjection into the debate on abolition stands in powerful contrast to Tocqueville’s celebration of ‘legitimate’ French colonial violence (in Algeria) and the defense of the rights of property-holders over the human rights of the enslaved: ‘On ne règle pas plus l’esclavage humainement qu’on ne règle l’assassinat’ [One can no more abolish slavery humanely than one can redeem a murder] (cited ibid.: 24).

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 85

15/05/2013 08:44:21

chapter three

Aimé Césaire and the Logic of Decolonization Aimé Césaire

To prevent the development of all national consciousness in the colonized, the colonizer pushes the colonized to desire an abstract equality. But equality refuses to remain abstract. And what an affair it is when the colonized takes back the word on his own account to demand that it not remain a mere word! Aimé Césaire, ‘Décolonisation pour les Antilles’

Aimé Césaire’s struggle to define a politics of principle in the tradition this book is calling Caribbean Critique took shape with explicit reference to the legacy of Jacobinism, the Black Jacobinism of Toussaint Louverture, and the radical abolitionism of Victor Schoelcher. Both Jacobinism and Black Jacobinism became crucial to Césaire’s brand of critical thought and politics in the period of decolonization, but when Césaire made his first and perhaps most consequential political intervention, he was a young, inexperienced Martinican deputy to the French Assembly in the then-dominant French Communist Party. At that point, Victor Schoelcher was the abiding reference of Césaire’s politics of principle. Césaire recognized that Schoelcher had been the first to call for the juridical integration of France’s overseas colonies as ‘French Overseas Departments’ whose citizens would bear the full and undivided rights of the Republic. In the Jacobin and Black Jacobin traditions, one might argue, decolonization has always meant universal equality under not just any republican law, but specifically a constitution such as that of l’An II whose fundamental aim was the promotion of popular sovereignty. On

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 86

15/05/2013 08:44:21

Aimé Césaire

87

June 30, 1945, Césaire wrote in Justice, the newspaper of the Martinique section of the Parti communiste français (PCF), that: ‘l’ordre que je vous demande de respecter et de faire respecter c’est cet ordre révolutionnaire qui substituer le règne de la loi au règne du favoritisme, mettra à la raison l’insolence jusqu’ici munie des ennemis du Peuple’ [the order that I ask you to respect and make respected is that revolutionary order that substitutes the rule of law for the rule of favoritism, which will subordinate to the order of reason the insolence that has thus far armed the enemies of the People] (cited at Hale 1978: 254). The process that Césaire famously named ‘departmentalization’ was conceived and implemented with this single aim: to increase the popular sovereignty of the inhabitants of France’s colonies to the maximum degree possible, that is, to transform colonial subjects into full citizens of the Fourth Republic subject to its rights and laws without discrimination. The struggle for departmentalization that unfolded during the political complexities of post-war France stands alongside the Haitian Revolution and Schoelcher’s 1848 abolition as one of the pre-eminent moments in the history of Caribbean Critique. When the French elected their first post-war administration in October 1945, this First Constituent Assembly was constituted by a majority government of socialist and communist representatives. Destined to be short-lived, this left-wing administration pushed through a number of progressive laws related to colonial government before its dissolution in May 1946. Primary among these laws were the Houphouët-Boigny Act, which abolished forced labor in France’s colonies, and the Lamine Guèye Act, which made France’s colonial subjects into citizens. No sooner were new elections held in June 1946 than this communist/socialist/radical majority evaporated, and progress in this spirit of the early post-war period became infinitely more difficult to obtain. On March 19, 1946, Gaston Monnerville and Aimé Césaire had already managed to push through the French Assembly a law proclaiming the departmentalization of France’s ‘vieilles colonies’, including Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, and Réunion. Though this law marked the long culmination of a tendency toward the progressive integration of these colonies that extended back beyond 1848 to 1789, it was the weakening of France’s empire in the upheaval of the war that made possible its passage during this brief window of opportunity. When France capitulated to Germany in 1940 and became divided between the Vichy- and German-occupied sectors, the metropole was suddenly cut off from its colonies. Administrators in each colony were

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 87

15/05/2013 08:44:22

88

Caribbean Critique

forced to take sides, with or against the occupiers. Initially, only the governors of Chad and the New Hebrides (jointly controlled at the time by Britain and France) sided with De Gaulle. In the French Antilles, a population that had been citizens of France since 1848 and colonial subjects since the seventeenth century was suddenly set economically adrift. Inhabitants were forced to subsist autonomously with the scarce local resources that remained after centuries of economic underdevelopment. One result was a newly awakened political sensibility keenly attuned to the dynamics of concrete, day to day situations. At the same time, this development of quotidian political acumen was coupled with the moral imperative of the concrete choices, for or against Vichy, which had been the stuff of daily existence during the years of the Occupation. The Communist Party benefited greatly from its role in the fight against Nazism, and spearheaded the call for full integration of the vieilles colonies after the expulsion of the Nazis. It was Césaire, as deputy of the French Communist Party, who was primarily responsible for articulating the demands of the new law. Though prior to 1947 it was commonly referred to as a law promoting ‘assimilation,’ this was highly misleading since its primary goal was never to socialize Antilleans within metropolitan French communal and behavioral norms, but instead to democratize colonial political structures. The citizenship extended to the inhabitants of the vieilles colonies in 1848 had always been, as it remained in 1945, partial and subaltern. While the rights of citizens in the metropolitan French Republic were assured by the direct accountability of its representatives to their electorate, this had never been the case in the colonies. Since 1854, it was instead the executive head of state (first Napoleon III, later the president of the Republic) who had promulgated all laws in the colonies. Césaire expressly intended departmentalization to eliminate this quasi-feudalistic juridical relic. ‘These departments’, Césaire stated at the time, ‘no longer leave [lawmaking] to the ministers, but give it to Parliament and thus wish to have accepted the principle that assimilation should be the rule and derogation the exception’ (cited at Aldrich and Connell 1992: 74). The result of departmentalization was to replace the particularistic institutions of Third Republic colonialism such as the colonial gouverneur with structures systematically equivalent to those of the metropole: the préfet, conseil général, and an identical legal code and judicial system. Though Article 73 of the Fourth Republic constitution allowed for ‘exceptions determined by law’ to be applied in the

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 88

15/05/2013 08:44:22

Aimé Césaire

89

Départements d’outre-mer (DOM), the colonial order of attribution had effectively been reversed: if previously all colonial laws, decreed by the executive, had been exceptions to French laws by their very nature, and might only coincide with those laws contingently, now the opposite was true. Exceptions, though admissible, were henceforth precisely that: exceptions to the systematic application of all French laws to all of its departments, overseas or not. Retour de Guyane While Césaire worked energetically and unhesitatingly to enact departmentalization, it was not only the white béké elite of Martinique who stood opposed to the process. Surprisingly, given the received image of 1930s-era Négritude as a relatively homogenous movement of cultural critique, not all the thinkers of the Négritude movement shared Césaire’s optimism that it was the proper path for the vieilles colonies in their struggle for decolonization. Nowhere is the contrast to Césaire’s defense of departmentalization stronger than in the diametrically opposed recommendations of Léon-Gontran Damas, contained in his 1937 journalistic polemic against ‘assimilation’, Retour de Guyane. Damas had been in Paris as a student since 1928, far longer than his colleagues Césaire and Senghor. As a relatively poor colonial student, he had led a precarious existence at the mercy of bureaucrats who could at any moment draw the purse strings of his small bourse d’études. To support his studies in ethnology, Damas worked at various times as bartender, dockworker, and dishwasher. He was intimately involved with the left-wing politics of the Popular Front period, and his close contacts with Emmanuel Mounier (publisher of Esprit), Robert Desnos, Louis Aragon, and Michel Leiris directly led to Damas’s being invited, on behalf of the Musée de l’Homme and the French Ministry of Public Education, to undertake an ethnographic mission to French Guiana in 1934. The result of this invitation, Retour de Guyane, is a deeply conflicted text that reveals most clearly the compromised position of its author, caught between an array of antagonistic imperatives: a nascent critical, racialist self-awareness (Négritude), Marxian political theory, the economic insecurity of a young colonial student (Damas was only twenty-five at the time), the will to scientific thoroughness and objectivity of a precocious ethnologist, and the somewhat superficial

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 89

15/05/2013 08:44:22

90

Caribbean Critique

critique of the journalist, attempting to influence contemporary public opinion regarding colonial policy. In accord with its position at the epicenter of such intensive contradictions, Retour de Guyane exercises its full critical force in a penetrating analysis of the structural contradictions of Guyanese colonialism, contradictions that Gary Wilder has insightfully summarized as those obtaining between ‘metropolitan-parliamentary and colonial arbitrary forms of government in the French empire’ (Wilder 2005: 219). A decade before Césaire’s parliamentary initiative to eliminate the juridical distinctions between metropolitan France and its vieilles colonies, Damas locates the origins of Guyanese underdevelopment in the 1854 law of sénatusconsulte that institutionalized the decree-form of authoritarian colonial governance. Damas concludes from this analysis, as Césaire would in 1946, that the power of legislative decision should be devolved to Guyanese citizens themselves: ‘Éloignée comme elle l’est de la Métropole, il est inadmissible que son administration soit toute entière concentrée entre les mains du Ministre des Colonies’ [As far from the metropole as [Guiana] is, it is inadmissible that its administration should be entirely concentrated in the hands of the Colonial Ministry] (Damas 2003: 42). In Damas’s analysis, the contradictions of Guyanese colonialism arose from a coexistence of Republican universalism and a prejudicial colonial regime of distinction: ‘Two present regimes [are] opposed to one another; […] one of them is abusively maintained from a constitutional point of view [insofar as … ] democratic France, the France of the Third Republic, persists in applying to the colony dispositions that correspond to a state of affairs that has now disappeared [i.e., the imperialism of Napoleon III]’ (cited at Wilder 2005: 220). ‘Aujourd’hui où le Pouvoir Législatif appartient à une assemblée élue, il est inadmissible que la Guyane qui y est représentée tienne ses lois de Président de la République [‘Today,’ Damas concludes, ‘when legislative power belongs to an elected assembly, it is inadmissable that Guyana – which is represented [in that assembly] – should take its laws from the President of the Republic’ (Damas 2003: 43). Rather than conclude that Guyana should be indiscriminately integrated within the French legal system, Damas instead develops a diametrically opposed argument against ‘assimilation’. He argues this by at once critiquing the inegalitarianism of French colonial policy and interpreting the call for ‘assimilation’ in purely cultural terms. He rejects the call for the ‘assimilation’ of Guyana by referring not to legal norms but instead to the putatively ineradicable African cultural retentions

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 90

15/05/2013 08:44:22

Aimé Césaire

91

persisting in black cultures throughout the Americas. To grant assimilation in this view would amount to asking the colonized ‘to pay a price that the other cannot pay: they both agree to try to whiten the nègre, but that cannot happen’ (cited at Wilder 2005: 223). Instead, Damas offers, tongue in cheek, a single touchstone for all his region’s problems: the ‘rational exploitation of Guyana’s gold deposits. […] Everything for gold and gold for everything’ (cited ibid.: 230). Despite Damas’s Négritude credentials as a cultural critic of French colonialism (as in the contemporary Pigments [1937]), in Retour de Guyane this colonial subject deploys his formidable analytic powers to illuminate the contradictions of French colonialism for an implied metropolitan audience – the colonizers, not the colonized. In spite of occasional moments of irony, this argument explicitly serves the interest of a stronger, better colonialist practice. Damas systematically analyzes the shortcomings of French colonialism not to strengthen a nascent decolonization but in order to convince his metropolitan readers of the (economic) interest they have in further developing their colony: ‘Il est dangereux qu’une puissance comme la France, presque spécifiquement coloniale, outillée comme elle l’est, possédant des capitaux, n’y ait encore rien créé qu’une bagne’ [It is dangerous that a power like France, nearly specifically colonial, well-equipped and with plenty of capital, has still not created anything there but a penal colony] (Damas 2003: 28). The Négritude critique of cultural alienation, though present in Damas’s text, is in fact inconsequential to his actual recommendations, and Retour de Guyane might be characterized as a somewhat conflicted piece of pro-colonial propaganda offered up by the native informant with a spicy side dish of cultural critique for the delectation of the oppressor. On page after page, Damas offers his colonial sponsors recommendations for an improved, more rational ‘exploitation’ of their long-neglected colony. While Damas’s analysis of Guyanese alienation is complex and multi-dimensional, his recommendations uniformly neglect to address the question of who, precisely, would benefit from a Guyanese economic miracle (the total ‘exploitation of Guyana’s gold deposits’), should it ever come about. While such a solution to underdevelopment is no less technocratic than that of the 1946 departmentalization law, the profound difference between the two initiatives lies in the fact that the latter was systematically addressed to the benefit of the colonized. Damas makes no such distinction. While he invokes economic

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 91

15/05/2013 08:44:23

92

Caribbean Critique

development in the name of the oppressed (‘Quand on aura fait de six cent mille nègres des assimilés français, on n’aura pas fait rentrer ceux qui s’exilent, on n’aura pas ressuscité ceux qui meurent de faim, on n’aura même pas vêtu décemment les futurs assimilés’ [Once we have made 600,00 nègres into assimilated Frenchmen, we won’t have brought the exiled ones home, we won’t have revived the ones dying from hunger, and we won’t even have properly clothed the future assimilés] (Damas 2003: 133)), aside from some nebulous and distant trickle-down effect, one is hard-pressed to see how the uninhibited resource exploitation he recommends would benefit anyone but a few rich (and presumably non-Guyanese) investors. Damas rejects cultural assimilation as impossible, and political assimilation as beside the point. He instead reduces the transformation of colonialism to its purely economic dimension: ‘avant de songer à l’assimilation politique, il faudrait peut-être que les esprits généreux de la Métropole voulussent bien s’attacher à réaliser l’intégration économique’ [before thinking about political assimilation, the generous minds of the metropole had better commit themselves to making economic integration a reality] (ibid.: 130). In virtual bad faith, Damas appends the hollow outrage of the intellectual avant-garde to a program of resource exploitation worthy of the most cynical World Bank official. Again and again, Damas bows down before the objective ‘facts’ of French colonialism to invoke a nebulous ‘common sense’ that ‘commands’ us not to imagine a decolonized political future for Guyana, but instead ‘essayer d’abord d’appliquer rationnellement un système déjà existant’ [first of all, to try to rationally apply an already existing system] (ibid.: 140). In the end, only one criterion interests Damas: ‘il faut effectuer, avec le moins de frais possible, des travaux qui rapportent le plus possible, le plus vite possible’ [we must, at the lowest possible cost, create jobs that earn as much as possible, as quickly as possible] (ibid.: 144). With all criteria of welfare – most obviously that of the biosphere – strictly subordinated, the conclusion is entirely predictable, and Damas has the honesty to state it categorically and unambiguously: ‘il faut violer ce sol et en extraire de la vie humaine’ [we have to rape this earth to extract human life from it] (ibid.: 152). Whether Stalinist, Négritudist, or capitalist in shading, this is a pure logic of productionist violence that defers decolonization while seeking to rationalize and justify sacrifice in the name of (economic) progress: ‘Ceux qui travaillent à discipliner le Niger savent ce que le monstre dévore d’os chaque année’ [Those who work to tame the Niger know how many bones the monster

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 92

15/05/2013 08:44:23

Aimé Césaire

93

devours each year] (ibid.: 153), Damas concludes with all the coldness of a Stalinist prosecutor. Not to worry, Damas reminds us in his final paragraphs laced with irony, the Africans and their descendants are a hardy bunch who will resist such exploitation: ‘L’africain peut résister à n’importe quelle condition de vie, à cause, sinon encore de sa ­constitution physique, qu’à cause de son mépris de l’individu et de sa cohésion sociale’ [The African can withstand any kind of living conditions owing to his physical ­ constitution and especially to his contempt for the individual and his social cohesion] (ibid.: 154). In stark contrast to Damas’s rejection of ‘assimilation’ for an unbridled economic ‘exploitation’ of the French colonies’ natural resources, departmentalization was to an important degree a movement of dissidence on the part of the black intellectual class.1 Its call for objective juridical equality of the vieilles colonies was primarily aimed against the domination of the white béké elites. As Césaire recalled in 1985, En 1945, quand il s’est agi de transformer la Martinique en département français, les Békés martiniquais étaient contre. C’étaient surtout les fonctionnaires locaux qui étaient pour, car ils voulaient les mêmes traitements et les mêmes avantages que les fonctionnaires d’origine métropolitaine. Les ouvriers espéraient de meilleurs salaires et bénéficier des mêmes lois sociales qu’en métropole. Les seuls qui étaient contre l’assimilation étaient les Békés et ils se réfugiaient alors derrière des arguments économiques, mais ils n’osèrent pas s’opposer au mouvement en faveur de la départementalisation, car c’était un mouvement très général. (cited at William 1997: 319) [In 1945, when it was time to transform Martinique into a French department, the Békés were against it. The local civil servants, above all, were in favor, since they wanted the same salary and the same advantages as the civil servants of French origin. The workers hoped to get the better salaries and the benefit of the same social laws as did workers in the metropole. The only ones against assimilation were the Békés who hid behind economic arguments, but they didn’t dare oppose the movement in favor of departmentalization, because it was a very widespread movement.]

Departmentalization strove to weaken the economic domination of the béké landowners by subjecting the arbitrariness of their actions to an objective, egalitarian rule of law. Insofar as actual practice has lagged behind the strict egalitarianism of the law of March 19, 1946, departmentalization has since offered a lever of intervention for overseas French subjects, a strict and objective measure that has allowed these

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 93

15/05/2013 08:44:23

94

Caribbean Critique

citizens to force the French government to play by the rules of its own constitution, however reticently and slowly. 2 The constitutions of the Third and Fourth Republics, founded upon the inherited norms of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, offered colonial subjects a universal norm not as a distant abstraction but as the immanent content and normative structure of the political system that discriminated against its overseas citizens. Such a rule-based critique is the common currency of modern dissidence. It is the system itself that authorized its own critique. Departmentalization invoked the radical egalitarianism of 1789 and 1848 that founded the French Republic in order successfully to force the latter to observe more closely the rules of its own political game. On multiple occasions, Césaire makes explicit this grounding of his political practice. For example, he delivered one of his most powerful speeches on March 3, 1950. In it, he cites the 1789 Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (elements of which had been readopted in the 1946 constitution), then asks his audience: ‘Quelle liberté existe pour le citoyen s’il ne peut dire ce qu’il pense, par exemple, d’une guerre injuste, criminelle, d’une guerre de rapine et qu’il considère comme attentoire aux intérêts de la nation comme c’est le cas de la guerre au Viêt-Nam?’ [What liberty exists for the citizen if he cannot say what he thinks, for example, about an unjust criminal war, about a plundering war that he regards as undermining the nation’s interest, as is the case of the Vietnam war?] (cited at Hale 1978: 320). Likewise, in a speech delivered on the occasion of André Malraux’s ministerial visit to Martinique in September 1958, Césaire reaffirmed that his fidelity to France was precisely aligned to the radical republicanism of Robespierre, Grégoire, Schoelcher, and Hugo. We would not normally call a member of a majority parliamentary party a dissident, but Césaire’s dissidence functioned in the same manner as any other. For Césaire in 1946, as for generations of economically marginalized Martinicans since 1848, this practice of dissidence involved appealing to the norms of the French Republic in order to bypass the particularist, anti-democratic dimensions of French colonial policy. Thus, departmentalization must be understood not in opposition to decolonization, but as one of the original forms of decolonization’s twentieth-century historical sequence. Clearly, Césaire’s departmentalization is less ‘communist’ than Hegelian in intent: rather than any eventual ‘withering’ of the state, it envisions instead its rationalization. That said, the architects of departmentalization did not attack

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 94

15/05/2013 08:44:23

Aimé Césaire

95

colonization on the grounds of a psychological/culturalist striving for dis-alienation, nor by means of a Manichean vilification of the colonizer. Instead, and in perfect consonance with the Jacobin and Black Jacobin tradition, Césaire and his colleagues worked to enact decolonization immanently as egalitarian political form. They strived to counteract the quasi-universal structural tendency toward the concentration of political power in the hands of an oligarchy. The measure of any true decolonization, in turn, would therefore be the degree to which it managed to eliminate the juridical arbitrariness of the metropolitan decree, and to replace this alienation of sovereignty with democratic social structures that more fully realized the unmediated identity of citizen and state. Whether or not a geographic area is called ‘independent’ or a ‘nation’ would carry relatively little weight for the process of decolonization understood in this sense; in fact, in many cases, the struggle for such ‘independence’ might more accurately be understood as mere demagogy, as Fanon himself clearly understood, a pseudo-nationalistic distraction that diverts public attention from the real problem of affirming the constituent power of all citizens, a true decolonization, no matter what nominal status they eventually give themselves. 3 Needless to say, many, perhaps the majority, of the so-called ‘decolonized’ areas have since the 1960s become far more colonized – by global capital, by North Atlantic military hegemony, by endemic indebtedness to the World Bank – than they ever were before their nominal ‘decolonization’.4 Departmentalization, no matter what its failures and incomplete processes, was an act of decolonization if and only if it brought the societies of the vieilles colonies demonstrably and materially further within the purview of a universal (as opposed to ethnically or racially particular) rule of law of justice as equality. Departmentalization was a process of decolonization if it instituted a rule of law oriented, in other words, to the cultivation of human and social singularity. 5 As Césaire proclaimed in 1972: ‘C’est la création continue des hommes qui constitue la nation, création dont la cristallisation, toujours provisoire tant que la culture est vivante, permet l’identification d’une personnalité collective différenciée’ [It is the continual creation of men that constitutes the nation, a creation whose crystallization – always provisional because culture is living – permits the identification of a distinct collective personality] (Jos 1997: 349). From his very earliest public writings, Césaire always affirmed that the singularity of the colonized could not be attained by the erasure

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 95

15/05/2013 08:44:23

96

Caribbean Critique

of local particularism through assimilation to a pseudo (i.e., French) universal. He did not suggest that this singularity lie in some specious, neo-mythical nativist patrimony awaiting its cultural consumption. Instead, Césaire understood singularity from the very start as ‘à venir’, to be constructed through the complex mediation of universal norms and the existential, situational contingencies of the colonized life-sphere. ‘To be yourself requires action,’ Césaire wrote in his very first published piece, the 1935 article ‘Nègreries’. For Césaire, the goal of any immersion in the particularity of colonized experience was not the retreat into the blinded interiority of localism but instead to allow the colonized to develop their singularity beyond mere inwardness and to ‘contribute to universal life, the humanization of humanity’ (cited at Wilder 2005: 188). Gary Wilder has argued along similar lines that Césaire’s departmentalization initiative constituted a singular political logic of ‘emancipation without national independence’ in the period of decolonization (1945–1962). In marked contrast to Fanon’s call for decolonization as national independence, departmentalization in this view ‘may be read as politically untimely and [a] strategic utopian engagement with the complex problem of (colonial) freedom’ (Wilder 2005: 104). As representative of Martinique in the French Assembly, Césaire undertook an experimental process of political liberation, one that renewed the Black Jacobin tradition of experimental emancipation outlined in previous chapters in discussing Robespierre, Louverture, and Schoelcher. The primary shortcoming of Wilder’s penetrating analysis is his singular focus on the criterion of freedom (departmentalization is a ‘historically situated engagement with the refractory problem of freedom’), rather than on the struggle for the real equality of all citizens under the law of the French Republic (ibid.: 107). In his 1956 preface to Daniel Guérin’s Antilles décolonisées, Césaire makes clear that the dynamic process driving the Antilles toward national consciousness and independence is a politics of principle propelled by ‘the idea of equality and the increasing awareness (prise de conscience) of the conditions for emancipation’ (Guérin 1956: 2). Césaire made the secondary status of freedom to the principle of equality explicit in a 1951 speech commemorating the birth of Victor Schoelcher: ‘La grandeur de Victor Schoelcher est de ne s’être pas contenté de réclamer la liberté pour tous les hommes, mais d’avoir découvert que l’égalité était son complément naturel’ [Victor Schoelcher’s greatness was to not have been satisfied to ask for freedom for all, but to have discovered

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 96

15/05/2013 08:44:24

Aimé Césaire

97

that equality was freedom’s natural complement] (cited at Hale 1978: 337). In Césaire’s formulation, departmentalization was emphatically not a ‘utopian anticipation of a fantasmatic postcolonial order that did not yet exist’, but, as Wilder discusses in detail, a situated and singular political sequence and struggle, determined and overdetermined by the ­particularities of late colonialism in post-war Martinique (Wilder 2005: 108). By the 1950s, Césaire came to see departmentalization as a failure to be ‘negated’ in favor of Martinican political autonomy, but he never wavered in his defense of the departmentalization law itself as a legalistic promotion of Antillean singularization, a process made possible through the historical extension of radical republican universal rights since 1789. As he declared to De Gaulle’s Minister of Information André Malraux in 1958: ‘Dans un monde […] où les collectivités s’accrochent à tout ce qui peut les particulariser, les personnifier, les authentifier à leurs propres yeux, notre souci est de faire en sorte que notre peuple martiniquais ne soit pas le simple témoin de sa propre histoire’ [In a world in which communities cling to all that can particularize them, personify then, authenticate them in their own eyes, our concern is to do this so that our Martinican people will not be the simple witness to its own history] (cited at William 1997: 326). The process of departmentalization was deductive in its procedure, a politics of principle. Césaire’s approach was Robespierriste insofar as it proceeded from the application of universal norms of equality and of democratic participation and representation to deduce the political actions and forms most likely to realize that participation in a given context. Like Robespierre, Césaire’s every intervention in the French Assembly strove for the equal application of republican law to all citizens: ‘Nous demandons l’application de la loi française: la loi, rien que la loi; [pas] une mesure d’exception’ [We ask for the application of French law; the law, and nothing but the law; not a measure of exception] (cited at Hale 1978: 348). From a small number of premises, Robespierre had proceeded to explore the ‘grandes conséquences à tirer des principes’ [great consequences of forcing principles] (William 1997: 292). Césaire proceeded in analogous fashion. Négritude offered a criterion for political action that was grounded by particular, historical experiences of exploitation, an action oriented by the famous lines of the Cahier ‘au compas de la souffrance’ [with the compass of suffering]. Departmentalization answered not the question ‘how do we assimilate or become more “French”?’ but rather ‘what political

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 97

15/05/2013 08:44:24

98

Caribbean Critique

form best allows the development and flourishing of our singular capacities of expression?’ By the 1950s, this is what Césaire would come to call the expression of the Martinican ‘nation’, and a militant transformation of a structural context of exploitation, inequality, and suffering. René Ménil and the Critique of Antillean Identity Césaire’s political and critical profile stands in relief when considered beside the thought of less-well-known figures of Caribbean Critique such as Damas (discussed above) and his collaborator from Tropiques, the fellow Martinican René Ménil. Ménil voiced a complex critique of Césaire’s political and cultural production, combining a probing analysis of Antillean alienation that prefigures the work of Édouard Glissant with a militant and unyielding dedication to Caribbean socialism embodied in the Parti communiste martiniquais (PCM) that he co-founded in 1957 at the same time as Césaire’s Parti progressiste martiniquais (PPM). Little recognized beyond his early contributions to the journals ‘Légitime défense’ and ‘Tropiques’, René Ménil has become somewhat better known since the publication in 1999 of the majority of his writings under the double title ‘Antilles déjà jadis précédée de Tracées’. Ménil, a professor of philosophy, wrote no literary works, but the rich series of pieces collected in this volume reveals a critical vision of Martinican society that focuses, similarly to Césaire and a generation before the work of Édouard Glissant, on the alienated experience of its inhabitants and the imperative of political and cultural autonomy. Ménil was a thinker of Caribbean Critique who, from the first expression of his thought in the period of early Négritude in ‘Légitime défense’ to his nuanced appreciation of the Créolité movement in the 1990s, refused received wisdom to theorize Antillean cultural production and politics. Ménil’s writing is notable for its elaboration of an original political critique that refuses both colonial assimilation as well as the erasure of the lived contradictions of Antillean experience that Ménil identifies in Césaire’s politics. Since the publication of Antilles déjà jadis précédée de Tracées, Ménil’s thought has taken its rightful place beside the better-known writings of Césaire, Fanon, and Glissant. Ménil’s entire corpus, from his first writings in Légitime défense in 1932 to his final texts from the 1990s, can be described as a critical philosophy of Antillean consciousness.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 98

15/05/2013 08:44:24

Aimé Césaire

99

Ménil discerns a fundamental lack at the heart of Caribbean experience, an Antillean subjectivity plunged into the immediacy of violence and colonial exploitation. The critic’s work, as Ménil understood it in classically Marxian terms, is therefore to dismantle this reigning ideology. In his 1964 article ‘Problèmes d’une culture antillaise’ René Ménil affirms that in the face of De Gaulle’s unequal treatment of the DOM, the affirmation of an autonomous Antillean culture is not ‘the illusion of our unruly minds’, but that, ‘Oui, les Antilles existent et elles ont l’insolence d’être antillaises ! … Il n’y a aucun doute à ce sujet: il y a une culture, il y a une civilisation antillaises [Yes, the Caribbean islands exist, and they have the insolence to be Caribbean! … There is no doubt about it: there is a Caribbean culture and civilization] (Ménil 1981: 31). Nonetheless, the crucial point for Ménil is that these Antilles only exist in a virtual state. Like Césaire, Fanon, and Glissant in the same period, Ménil argued for the actual existence of a Martinican culture, and (in more classically Marxist terms) the consequential necessity of an Antillean autonomous nation. To overcome this state of mere virtuality, to concretize this ‘Antillanité’, Ménil traced three possible paths. The ‘recuperation of Antillean consciousness’ takes place on the terrain of the Antillean psyche, in the form of the struggle against alienation Ménil first described in the pages of Légitime défense. Following this existential critique, Ménil next addressed the necessity of a ‘recuperation of Antillean labor’. In 1964, the year Club Med arrived in the French Caribbean, he criticized – years before Glissant’s Le Discours antillais – the structural economic underdevelopment that the French government had imposed on the Antilles. In this context, all productive autonomy that could sustain the development of a political economy was, he argued, undermined, and a new dependence on tourism was coming to replace the monoculture of sugar and bananas that had been gradually disappearing since 1848. Thirdly, therefore, this conquest of Antillean autonomy would necessarily and above all require the recovery of political power, a recuperation that itself would require a historicization of Antillean lived experience. Freed from the eternal return of French colonial mythology, this historical becoming would be doubly oriented, Ménil argued, toward the past and future. Any construction of a progressive future, of an autonomous Antillean society, Ménil maintained, must necessarily arise from a reconceptualization of the Antillean past. Given this prescription, Ménil’s text ‘Psychanalyse de l’histoire’ is among the most important he ever wrote. The piece underlines the

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 99

15/05/2013 08:44:24

100

Caribbean Critique

negative effects of Antillean alienation for any possible working through of a traumatic past. Instead of forming ‘un film continu’ (Ménil 1999: 47), this history is made up of ‘visions fugitives, lacunaires, isolée’. Like Walter Benjamin’s ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, but in an entirely different colonial context, Ménil identifies the causes of this fragmentation of the past, not in some lack of objectivity, but finds them to reside ‘dans l’incohérence et l’inconsistance de notre actuelle conscience sociale. Le préalable à toute histoire de la Martinique est l’étude de notre conscience d’aujourd’hui. C’est dans la nature et le fonctionnement de notre présente conscience que se trouvent les raisons de notre vision distordue du passé’ [in the incoherence and the inconsistency of our present social consciousness. Prior to any history of Martinique must come the study of our consciousness today. The reasons for our distorted vision of the past lie in the nature and the operations of our present consciousness] (ibid.). Ménil’s critique initiates a materialist analysis of Antillean society in which he argues, on the one hand, that its structures and modes of thought emerge from the material constraints and forces of a colonized society, but that, on the other hand, the critical understanding of these forms of determination and domination offers the possibility for colonized subjects to overcome their heteronomy and dependency in a struggle for self-consciousness. Essentially Hegelian–Marxist in its mode of operation, and somewhat limited in its creative capacity to develop new conceptual apparatuses when compared to Fanon or Glissant, René Ménil’s critical thought nonetheless marks the essential inauguration of a project of Antillean alienation critique that Glissant would pursue to such brilliant effect throughout the 1970s in Le Discours antillais. René Ménil’s political criticism culminates in a polemical analysis of Négritude. The originality of this critique certainly derives in part from the intimate knowledge Ménil gleaned of the movement from Césaire and Senghor in 1930s Paris. Following their situation as Martinican comrades in the PCF beginning in 1945, Ménil and Césaire parted ways following the latter’s letter to Maurice Thorez in 1956 in which he resigned from the PCF to form the PPM one year later. Ménil, somewhat like Althusser after 1968, remained faithful to a party-based model of communist militancy. He inevitably conflicted with Césaire in the Martinican political-ideological field after 1956. Undoubtedly, Ménil’s mode of critique relies on an often-rigid Stalinist ideology that frequently comes off as theoretically unoriginal beside Fanon’s thinking or Césaire’s more supple tier-mondiste communism (to be discussed

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 100

15/05/2013 08:44:24

Aimé Césaire

101

below); above all, years after Althusser’s influential critique of ideology in Pour Marx as the structural, enabling condition of all social symbolic production in any human society, Ménil continued to rely on a doctrinal conception of ideology that viewed the alienation of the Martinican masses from a more avant-garde standpoint, one that implied that the critical thinker or the avant-garde party speaks and acts from an enlightened point outside all ideology. Instead, post-Althusserian thought offers the now-familiar affirmation that subjection to ideology is inevitable, that it is in fact another name for the process of subjectivation itself, though any subject whatsoever can become aware of the various modes of our ideological subjection and alienation.6 The quite traditional and even simplistic understanding of ideology that Ménil propounds is in the end simply inconsequential. By the 1960s, every Martinican (and not just the intellectuals or the communists or even the communist intellectuals, in Ménil’s case) surely perceived that the island and its citizens were subject to underdevelopment, dependency, and a fetishization of France and French culture. No one in Martinique needed Ménil to rend a putative veil of illusion. The point is precisely that Martinican culture has long thrived on this ambiguous relation to the metropolis: everyone knows the culture functions on the currency of alienation, and yet everyone (save a few hard-core indépendentistes) continues to affirm the relation.7 The reason why is surely just as obvious: as long as it is profitable to all to maintain this illusion that Martinique is part of France and Europe, such equivocality is precisely an essential modality of its sustenance and perpetuation. The compromise of Martinican ‘autonomy’ that the PCM promoted already in the 1960s in place of independence names precisely this ideology of having one’s (departmental) cake and eating it too: all Martinicans know that the island remains a French colony in fundamental respects, and all can even acknowledge this, all the while continuing to benefit from this economic and political arrangement. The real critique of this relation, then, would not merely be its accurate, analytical description, but the struggle for a different, somehow better ideological structuration of society. Despite this obvious limitation, Ménil’s analysis of Négritude goes beyond the moralistic criticism characteristic of Stanislas Adotevi or Raphael Confiant, thanks to Ménil’s penetrating perception of Césaire’s structural position in Martinican society itself. Ménil is a harsh if somewhat unoriginal critic of Senghor’s politicized Négritude; in his ‘Sens et non sens’, Ménil highlights the movement’s conservativism.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 101

15/05/2013 08:44:25

102

Caribbean Critique

The so-called characteristics of ‘Black Being’ – rhythm and emotion – ‘ne doivent pas être mises au compte de la race. Elles résultent des circonstances historiques, des conditions sociales, des structures qui déterminent les classes sociales et la pratique sociale, économique’ [need not be chalked up to race. They are the result of historical circumstances, of social conditions, of the structures that determine social classes and socio-economic conditions] (Ménil 1981: 71). Ménil undertakes a critical genealogy of Négritude, pointing out that it was elaborated ‘dans les milieux intellectuels réactionnaires de Paris, c’est à dire dans un milieu anti-intellectuel et antirationaliste’ [in the reactionary intellectual environments of Paris, which is to say in an anti-intellectual and anti-rationalist environment] (ibid.). Senghor’s Négritude is for Ménil ‘philosophie réactionnaire qui tourne le dos à la raison et à la science pour exalter le sentiment, l’émotion, les mysticismes les plus extravagants’ [a reactionary philosophy that turns its back on reason and science to exalt sentiment, emotion, and the most extravagant mysticisms] (ibid.: 72–73). Theoretically, it relies on thinkers such as ‘Novalis, Frobénius, Bergson, les surréalistes … Claudel, le Père Tempels, Teilhard de Chardin’ (ibid.: 73). Undoubtedly, this critique of Senghor’s Négritude is not particularly original, relaying ideas articulated by Alouine Diop and Frantz Fanon, among others. That said, Ménil’s analysis of Césaire’s Négritude of the 1950s and 60s is significantly more unusual. Senghor made Négritude into an ontological and essentialist political ideology largely devoid of historicity, and Ménil asserts that Césaire’s Négritude was no less ideological. He analyzes the 1956 letter to Maurice Thorez, arguing that it erases class struggle from anticolonial politics and panders to the French ruling classes to which Césaire, in Ménil’s judgment, remains beholden: ‘les thèses politiques de la négritude ont été élaborées de façon explicite et consciente pour escamoter la lutte des classes … et se concilier l’appui de la bourgeoisie indigène et de l’impérialisme’ [negritude’s political theses were explicitly and deliberately elaborated to erase the class struggle … and to win the favor of the native bourgeoisie and of imperialism] (ibid.: 74). Ménil considers Césaire’s Négritude no thought of difference but rather an ideology of identity: that of a black globalism, as when Césaire speaks of ‘la singularité de notre situation dans le monde’ [the singularity of our situation in the world] (ibid.: 75). Ménil denounces what he calls Césaire’s ‘gaullisme noir’ [black gaullism] as a ‘grossière mystification’ [crude mystification] since ‘cette politique qui se donne pour une politique au-dessus des classes est bel et bien la politique de

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 102

15/05/2013 08:44:25

Aimé Césaire 103

la bourgeoisie bénéficiant d’un budget et d’une économie commandés, dans ses grandes lignes, par l’impérialisme lui-même’ [this politics that takes itself to be above class is well and truly the politics of a bourgeoisie that benefits from a budget and an economy that is, in broad terms, controlled by imperialism itself] (ibid.: 75). Although his Stalinist langue de bois undoubtedly remained reductionist, Ménil’s critique of Césaire announces important elements of Raphael Confiant’s 1993 polemic against Césaire (Traversée paradoxale). Faced with what he sees as the dereliction of the pensée de la négritude, René Ménil calls for a transformation of Antillean consciousness that would overcome its ideology. What is essential, he argues, is to ‘déclencher un progrès de la pensée: mettre en place une perspective neuve de la morale et de la politique – la réalisation d’une société où, quelles que soient leurs races, les hommes se voient simplement hommes’ [to trigger a progress of thought: set up a new perspective of morality and politics – the achievement of a society in which, regardless of their race, men are simply men] (‘Le Spectre de Gobineau’ (ibid.: 98)). We might say that Ménil articulated an Antillean Idealism. For all his unceasing political activism, his critique retained a strong degree of Leninist elitism, compelling the alienated masses to recognize their illusions and fall into line behind the avant-garde Party. Militant Négritude Ménil published a handful of compelling critical studies of Antillean subjectivity and culture, but Césaire wrote prodigious texts that advance his original interventions in politics and in poetry, including many little-known speeches and articles. This body of work is essential to understanding Césaire’s political thought in all its complexity.8 The discovery in 2008 by Christian Filostrat of Césaire’s 1935 article ‘Nègreries: Conscience raciale et révolution,’ from the third issue of l’Etudiant noir, identifies the earliest appearance in print of Césaire’s neologism ‘négritude’; moreover, it demonstrates conclusively that Césaire’s single lifelong preoccupation remained the experimental, unsettled conjugation of a revolutionary, universalist communism with the free poetic enunciation and articulation of the singularity of colonized and racialized experience. Thanks to this discovery, we now know that this remains the case from Césaire’s very earliest writings of the 1930s through his 1972 celebration of Fanon and anticolonial

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 103

15/05/2013 08:44:25

104

Caribbean Critique

violence and his 1975 open letter to the victorious Vietnamese republic (both to be discussed below). Césaire’s brief article ‘Conscience raciale et revolution,’ – as A. James Arnold argues in the genetic edition of Césaire’s oeuvres complètes (CNRS-éditions 2013) – concisely refutes, via a critique of the mulatto Marxist Gilbert Gratiant, the priority of proletarian class struggle, and the corresponding precedence of the vanguard Stalinist party (PCF), over anti-imperialism and anti-racism, to assert instead the imperative of black self-consciousness: ‘We must not be revolutionaries who accidentally happen to be black [nègres], but truly revolutionary blacks [nègres révolutionnaires].’ The lived experience of racial subjection is in this view preeminent, and the recognition and assertion of the Martinican’s negritude, the article asserts, must occur prior to any truly revolutionary politics. In this écrit de jeunesse (Césaire was twenty-two in 1935), the author asserts what might be properly called a culturalist anarcho-communism, similar to that of Breton in the same period. ‘Shouldn’t we denounce,’ Césaire asks, ‘the soporific identitarian [white] culture, and place beneath the prisons that white capitalism has erected for us, each of our racial values as so many liberating bombs?’ Césaire here in 1935 already asserts what will form the horizon of the entirety of his thought: ‘l’humain universel.’ He likewise asserts in this precocious text that the path to attaining this universality lies in cultivating a language to enunciate the singular experience of racialized, colonized experience. In the writings of Césaire’s youth as a whole (1935–1939), I would argue that he as yet, however, possessed no clear means of articulating the passage from this cultivation of black identity and the poetics of negritude to the telos of an abstract ‘universal human.’ ‘Conscience raciale et révolution’ points to a tendency running through Césaire’s early writings, among which I would include the first versions of Cahier, the cultural essays of Tropiques, and the Surrealist poetry of Les armes miraculeuses (1946) and Soleil cou coupé (1947). The essay is drawn between a reflexive celebration of blackness (‘il est beau et bon et légitime d’être nègre,’ Césaire writes already in 1935) and the ultra-leftism of a Surrealist politics, a politics limited in ‘Conscience raciale et révolution’ to the throwing of cultural ‘bombs,’ without any clear procedure for the development of a militant Negritude of universal – rather than merely black or Antillean – scope. In this 1935 essay, one finds only the empty assertion that by exploring, celebrating and cultivating the experience of negritude, the revolution itself will somehow follow: ‘to make a true revolution, a destructive tidal wave and

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 104

15/05/2013 08:44:25

Aimé Césaire 105

not the shimmering of surfaces, one condition is essential: … to plant our négritude like a beautiful tree until it bears its most authentic fruits.’ Césaire, after 1956, would quickly abandon this language of racial, identitarian ‘authenticity,’ as he would similarly reject all subordination to the Stalinist party in favor of his own concatenation of an autonomous, tricontinental communism. One should not only affirm, with Christopher Miller, that this newly-discovered essay demonstrates that negritude was not born ‘in categorical opposition to Marxism or to the idea of general communist revolution,’ but conclude quite simply that from 1935 to 1975, Césaire remained, in various and evolving iterations, unapologetically committed to a revolutionary, communist third-worldism (Miller 2010). In the masterpieces of his maturity (the law of Departmentalization, the Cahier in its 1956 reworking, the Discours sur le colonialisme, and Christophe) he conjugated a singular language of unfettered expression with a politics of principle that he persisted in identifying with the proper names that fascinated him: Robespierre and Grégoire, Louverture and Schoelcher, the Commune and Lenin, Lumumba, Touré, and Fanon. To Césaire, departmentalization was explicitly a politics of principle. As he stated to the French Assembly in his initial call for departmentalization: ‘Nous vous demandons par une mesure particulière, d’affirmer solennellement un principe général, à savoir que […] il ne doit plus y avoir de place, pas plus entre les individus qu’entre les collectivités, pour des relations de maîtres à serviteurs’ [We ask you, by a specific measure, to solemnly affirm a general principle, that … there is no longer a place, neither between individuals nor between communities, for the master–slave relation] (cited at Hale 1978: 268). Césaire’s interventions in the French Assembly, like those of Robespierre before him, were in every case targeted matters of principle for which he struggled in very specific and limited points of debate, such as his call in 1946 for a strict equality of pay for all state functionaries. In 1948, Césaire called for the full and systematic extension of medical care and pensions to workers in the DOM, a strict equality of both payments and benefits for all French workers; while in an article from October 1949 he affirmed that departmentalization ‘n’a jamais été que la forme des aspirations de notre peuple, à la liberté, à l’égalité et à la justice, et que toute politique fondée sur des principes contraires: de la discrimination raciale déclarée ou hypocrite, de la violence et de l’obscurantisme ne peut que soulever le peuple martiniquais’ [has never been anything but the form of our people’s aspiration for liberty, equality, and justice,

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 105

15/05/2013 08:44:26

106

Caribbean Critique

and that all politics founded on a contrary principle – on overt or hypocritical racial discrimination, on violence, on obscurantism – can do nothing but cause the Martinican people to rise up] (ibid.: 277, 302, 315). Like Rousseau and Robespierre before him, Césaire eventually came to articulate a radical critique of parliamentary representation. He called instead for a strict revocability of all deputies (Césaire pointedly refusing the term ‘representative’), stating, in a February 2, 1973 speech, that the ‘tâche essentielle’ [essential task] of all delegates was ‘soulever au Parlement français et auprès du gouvernement le problème essential de la Martinique. […] Dès que l’on refuse d’y aborder son problème, votre député reviendra parmi vous […] il remettra son mandate à la disposition du peuple qui lui donnera de nouvelles instructions’ [to raise in the French Parliament and the government the essential problem of Martinique. … As soon as they refuse to take up its problem, your deputy will return to you … he will put his mandate before the will of the people, who will give him new instructions (Le Progressiste, February 5, 13, 16, 1973, cited at Hale 1978: 475). Césaire conceived his militancy as a strict adherence to the principle of justice not as freedom but as absolute equality. In multiple speeches delivered at the height of his parliamentary activism in the 1950s, Césaire both attacked the French government for its failure to live up to the promises of departmentalization and intervened repeatedly on the issue of legal egalitarianism (specifically, the issue of unequal treatment of state functionaries, artisans, court clerks, and teachers).9 ‘Pour notre part,’ Césaire affirms in a speech to the French Assembly on April 1, 1950, ‘nous nous battrons jusqu’au bout pour le triomphe de l’égalité intégrale, pour le triomphe du principe inscrit dans la Constitution, comme fondé sur l’équité la plus élémentaire: à travail égal, salaire égal’ [we will fight to the end for the triumph of total equality, for the triumph of that principle inscribed in the Constitution, founded on the most fundamental equality: equal pay for equal work]. In a June 10, 1953 speech delivered after a strike by Martinican functionaries, Césaire similarly referred to their demands as ‘l’égalité des charges, oui, mais assortie de l’égalité des droits’ [equal pay, yes, matched by equal rights]. In a later speech, delivered in December that same year, Césaire summarized his position: ‘C’est de poser le principe […] que deux fonctionnaires de même grade, de même compétence, effectuant le même travail, ne doivent pas être traités différents sous prétexte que l’un est d’origine autochtone et que l’autre est d’origine métropolitaine’ [It is to propose a principle … that two civil servants of the same grade,

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 106

15/05/2013 08:44:26

Aimé Césaire 107

of the same competence, and doing the same work should not be treated differently under the pretext that one is of native origin and the other from the metropole] (cited at Hale 1978: 324, 342, 345). As early as 1949, more than a decade before Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre and Glissant’s Les Antilles et la Guyane à l’heure de la décolonisation, Césaire took the crucial step beyond departmentalization. In a July 11 speech, he affirmed the existence of a Martinican national consciousness and warned his colleagues that by denying the full and equal rights of French citizenship to Martinicans ‘vous aurez fait naître chez ces hommes le sentiment national martiniquais, guadeloupéen, ou réunionnais’ [you will have aroused in these men the national sentiment of Martinique, Guadeloupe, or Reunion].10 At this early stage, Césaire evokes national consciousness not as a reality or even positive telos (as it would increasingly be for Césaire, Glissant, and Fanon during 1950–1962) but rather as a threat to the French state’s hegemony over its overseas departments. However, even at this early point, Césaire had already begun to affirm – as he does in this 1949 Justice article – that ‘il y a un peuple martiniquais: avec son âme, ses traditions, son originalité, sa dignité, sa fierté’ [a Martinican people exists: as do its spirit, traditions, originality, dignity, and pride] (cited at Hale 1978: 315). This early assertion of Martinican national consciousness was further developed in Césaire’s 1956 ‘Décolonisation pour les Antilles’. Here, in a study of the dialectical relation between departmentalization’s failure and the emergence of Martinican national consciousness, Césaire argued that the 1946 law created an enormous contradiction in Martinican society: ‘L’égalité était désormais totale dans le droit. L’inégalité s’aggravait chaque jour d’avantage dans les faits’ [From that point, total equality was in the law. But, in fact, inequality got worse every day]. The result of this legal and experiential contradiction was the inevitable appearance of a growing clarity and awareness of Martinican singularity. ‘Si aujourd’hui nous assistons à l’éveil d’un sentiment national aux Antilles françaises, c’est à la loi du 19 mars, 1946 que nous le devons’ [If we are witnessing the awakening of a national consciousness in the French Caribbean today, we owe it to the law of March 19, 1946]. Césaire affirms with conviction that the only escape from this dilemma was the same remedy that Fanon would resolutely defend just a few years later in Algeria: ‘une issue nationale’ [a national solution] (Césaire 1956: 11). Ten years after the promises of departmentalization, Césaire concluded, in a related article, Martinique remained unambiguously ‘une colonie’.11

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 107

15/05/2013 08:44:26

108

Caribbean Critique

By 1960, Césaire regularly affirmed the unambiguous colonial status of Martinique under departmentalization; its status was, in other words, what Édouard Glissant’s Le Discours antillais would identify as a unique example of ‘successful’ colonization in the period of post-war decolonization.12 In a February 26, 1960 interview with Le Figaro, Césaire compared Martinique to the new, postcolonial African nation states and underlined the regressive character of the DOMs: ‘Nous sommes bien obligés de constater que le colonialisme recule partout, sauf à la Martinique. Seul les Martiniquais se voient refuser le droit de participer dans leurs propres affaires’ [We can’t help but notice that colonialism is retreating everywhere except in Martinique. Only Martinicans find themselves denied the right to participate in their own affairs] (Hale 1978: 401). In a letter to Le Monde published May 18, 1961, Césaire made a statement of principled resistance to injustice by refusing to sign a joint statement of allegiance to France on the part of its departments. In the letter, Césaire distinguished between allegiance in general and allegiance to a particular form of affiliation (departmentalization), decrying ‘comme une véritable escroquerie intellectuelle la manœuvre de ceux qui voudraient spéculer sur le profond attachement des Antilles à la nation française pour légitimer le maintien aux Antilles d’un ordre de choses antidémocratique et d’un statut périmé préjudiciables précisément aux intérêts des Antilles comme aux intérêts bien compris de la nation’ [as a real intellectual swindle the maneuvers of those who wish to speculate about the deep attachment of the Antilles to the French nation in order to justify keeping the Antilles stuck in an antidemocratic order and in an outdated status] (cited ibid.: 413). Césaire’s principled defense of Antillean autonomy earned him multiple death threats, including one from the Antillean equivalent of the so-called Organisation de l’armée secrete (OAS). This puts him in the company of Glissant (along with his fellow antillais Albert Béville, banned from Martinique for his participation in the autonomist Front Antillo-Guyanais pour l’Autonomie) and Fanon (under constant mortal threat as a member of the FLN in Algeria from 1956 to his death in 1962). The OAS referred to Césaire’s ‘activités subversives et séparatistes’ [subversive, separatist activities] and threatened that these activites would result in ‘la pénible obligation de vous infliger les sanctions spéciales réserves aux traîtres de votre espèce’ [the painful obligation to inflict on you the special consequences reserved for traitors of your kind] (cited ibid.: 429). Such threats only confirmed Césaire’s move to call for a full and just decolonization in Martinique beyond

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 108

15/05/2013 08:44:26

Aimé Césaire 109

departmentalization. He made the OAS threat public in the April 1961 volume of the journal Critique, and remained resolute: ‘qu’on décolonise bien et que cette décolonisation ne débouche sur le chaos’ [that we decolonize well and that this decolonization does not end in chaos]. In other words, Césaire called for a step beyond departmental status to full autonomy.13 In one of his most important speeches, Césaire further developed his critique of departmentalization. This speech, delivered on March 23, 1968 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the founding of the PPM, openly affirmed the concept of a Martinican nation: ‘Il faut, sans ambages, appeler nations, les groupes humains que constituent, chacun pour sa part, la Martinique et la Guadeloupe’ [We must, without delay, call them nations, these human groups that together constitute Martinique and Guadeloupe]. This marks Césaire’s adoption of a Caribbean version of the brand of nationalism that had been articulated by Fanon in Les Damnés de la terre and in other articles for the FLN’s El-moujahid newspaper (collected posthumously in the volume Pour la révolution africaine). This new national imperative was, as Césaire argued, the result ‘d’une conscience nouvelle qu’il nous faut bien appeler la conscience nationale’ [of a new consciousness that we had better call national consciousness]. He maintained that fundamental transformation had occurred since 1946; a national self-consciousness had been born. Here is Césaire: ‘une conscience nouvelle est née aux Antilles, la conscience de ce qu’ils sont, la conscience de ce qu’ils ont été, la conscience de ce qu’ils veulent être, bref! Une conscience qu’il nous faut bien appeler la conscience nationale’(Césaire 1976: 520). Six years after the aborted intervention of Béville’s and Glissant’s outlawed and censored Front Antillo-Guyanais pour l’Autonomie, Césaire openly called for an identical political transformation, that is he demanded both autonomy and federated status for Martinique. This was to be an ‘autonomy’, which he defined as the shift of ‘le pouvoir de décider et d’agir, des mains de la bureaucratie colonialiste, aux mains du Peuple Martiniquais, dans son ensemble’ [the power to decide and to act, from the hands of the colonial bureaucracy to the hands of the Martinican people in its entirety] (1976: 523). Césaire’s 1967 speech closing the Third Congress of the PPM makes this demand even more precise. In it, he calls for the same political form of ‘federated’, devolved autonomy that Béville and Glissant had proposed during the 1961 Congress (to be discussed below): ‘Nous préconisons dès maintenant l’institution d’une assemblée délibérante martiniquaise souveraine dans un certain nombre

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 109

15/05/2013 08:44:27

110

Caribbean Critique

de domaines lesquels sont à délimiter, et d’un exécutive martiniquais’, an executive body that would have the power not simply to make laws, but to apply them (ibid.: 506).14 By 1971, in the face of the French government’s steadfast refusal to accord even the slightest recognition of the legitimacy of these claims for autonomy and federated status, Césaire perceived Martinique to be on the verge of revolution: ‘We are in 1788, on the verge of 1789,’ he stated in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur. In another statement, to L’Express, he affirmed that given the current extreme situation of inequality and colonial dependency, ‘either you preserve the current status [of the DOM], or else it’s total independence’ (Le Nouvel Observateur 329 (March 1, 1971), cited at Hale 1978: 469; L’Express 24–30 May, 1971, cited ibid.: 470). These lesser-known speeches and essays help to reveal Césaire’s career-long fidelity to a non-aligned or generic form of communism, a fidelity that clearly persisted decades after his celebrated official resignation from the PCF in 1956. In his open letter to his constituency published in the PCF forum Justice (June 25, 1945), the neophyte communist deputy from Martinique asserted the principled basis and revolutionary heritage of his anticolonial militancy: ‘L’ordre que je vous demande de respecter et de faire respecter c’est cet ordre révolutionnaire qui substitue le règne de la loi au règne du favoritisme, mettra à la raison l’insolence jusqu’ici impunie des ennemis du Peuple’ [The order that I ask you to respect and to make respected is this revolutionary order that substitutes the rule of law for the rule of favoritism, and that will bring to its senses the unpunished insolence of the enemies of the people]. Linking this militancy to the international communist movement and, at this initial stage in his political career, to the PCF more narrowly, Césaire made explicit this egalitarian logic in his 1946 statement ‘Pourquoi je suis communiste’: in a world of injustice and inequality, of exploitation and colonial violence, ‘le Parti communiste incarne la volonté de travailler effectivement à l’avènement du […] droit à la dignité de tous les hommes sans distinction d’origine, de religion, de couleur’ [the Communist Party embodies the will to work effectively for the advent of … the right of every man to dignity without respect to origin, religion, or color] (cited at Hale 1978: 254, 262). In the decades following his 1956 resignation from the PCF, Césaire very clearly remained – by conviction if not party affiliation – a militant defender of tier-mondiste communism. By the 1950s, Césaire had abandoned his struggle to force the French government fully to implement the promise of equality inherent in the

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 110

15/05/2013 08:44:27

Aimé Césaire 111

notion of departmentalization. Instead, he began to militate against the discretionary implementation of the actual law, insofar as this law created what he called ‘départements d’exception’ (cited at Wilder 2005: 115). The language of this militancy clearly places Césaire in line with revolutionary thinkers from Robespierre and Louverture to Lenin. Césaire deliberately and conscientiously refashioned Toussaint Louverture’s historic call to the French state for a federalist reconstruction of the French nation state, one that would mediate between the actual, continued inequality of Martinican citizens since 1945 and full independence, which Césaire steadfastly refused to endorse.15 The specificity of Césaire’s initiative at the moment of foundation of the Fifth Republic and its new constitution, however, becomes apparent in his call for a federation of Caribbean and African regions subject to French colonialism, with a Regional Council possessing legislative powers and an executive body; Césaire drew this model from the Italian example. As Césaire specified in his March 22, 1958 speech to the Constitutive session of the new PPM: ‘L’adhésion à l’idée fédérale nous donnera plus de force en nous installant sur le même terrain de revendication et de combat que nos frères d’Afrique et que les hommes de progrès en France’ [Support for the federal idea will increase our strength by putting us on the same fighting and negotiating grounds as our brothers in Africa and as the progressives in France] (Hale 1978: 489). We can read Césaire’s proposal of federalism as a unique mode of decolonization without national independence as his explicit reaffirmation of an essential dimension of (Black) Jacobinism.16 Jacobinism – from Robespierre and Louverture to the Lenin of State and Revolution and the Fanon of Les Damnés de la terre – has always affirmed the right to defend a revolutionary government, by violence if necessary, against reactive forces.17 In a fascinating article from Le Progressiste of August 2, 1958, Césaire offered a close reading of what is undoubtedly Lenin’s central theoretical text. Two years after Césaire’s resignation from the PCF, two elements in particular of the argument of State and Revolution continued to interest him. Lenin’s critique of not only the state in general, but of parliamentary, republican democracy in particular, offered Césaire ‘une mise au point […] précieuse’ [a valuable case in point]. Césaire deploys the Bolshevik analysis of the eventual and necessary ‘withering’ of the state under communism to forecast such a communist society as the eventual and natural outcome of federalist autonomy. Rather than the creation of an independent Martinican state, ‘Lénine montre que dans certains cas particuliers et dans certaines

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 111

15/05/2013 08:44:27

112

Caribbean Critique

conditions particulières, la République fédérative constitue un pas en avant’ [Lenin shows that in certain particular cases and conditions, the federal Republic constitutes a step forward] (cited at Hale 1978: 379). Césaire’s fidelity to a generic form of tier-mondiste communism ultimately rings forth in the closing lines of his telegram of support to the Vietnamese government on the occasion of its 1975 independence: Au grand jour de la libération totale du Viêt-Nam héroïque, le Parti progressiste Martiniquais exprime ses vives félicitations et sa joie fraternelle au grand peuple vietnamien dont le long combat courageux a permis et permettra la décolonisation définitive de tous les opprimés du monde. Vive l’internationalisme prolétarien. (Le Progressiste, May 3, 1975, cited at Hale 1978: 483) [On the great day of heroic Vietnam’s complete liberation, the Parti progressiste martiniquais expresses its warm congratulations and its fraternal joy to the great Vietnamese people whose long, courageous combat has enabled and will enable the definitive decolonizing of all the world’s oppressed. Long live proletarian internationalism.]

In a little-known 1972 text, Césaire explicitly affirms a quasiFanonian vision of the necessity and justice of anticolonial violence. This may come as a shock to those who, like Confiant, consider Césaire a proponent of assimilationist revisionism (departmentalization as the selling-out of the decolonization process). In his Preface to Guy Fau’s volume L’abolition de l’esclavage, Césaire reproduced his 1948 speech celebrating the 1848 abolition and, in particular, Victor Schoelcher. In this reproduction, Césaire suppressed a number of passages from the earlier version of the text. He replaced passages that had drawn implicit parallels for his Sorbonne audience of 1948 between the 1848 abolition and the Departmentalization Act from two years before with passages that announced his ringing call for the emancipation of the Martinican ‘nation’ as what Schoelcher himself envisioned as an ‘independent nation’ (Fau and Eugène 1972: 15).18 More astonishing are the concluding lines of this now-obscure text in which Césaire upholds the absolute necessity of anticolonial violence itself: the Martinican overthrow of slavery months in advance of the 1848 abolition was, according to Césaire, a ‘victory for violence’. Césaire here explicitly aligns himself with the views of the two great twentieth-century theorists of the justice of anti-imperial and anticolonial violence. He states that the events of May 23, 1848 were the ‘illustration and confirmation in advance of the views of Lenin and Fanon – in a story in which there is no place,

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 112

15/05/2013 08:44:27

Aimé Césaire

113

despite the wishes of all pure souls [cœurs pures], neither for idyll nor pious sentiments [les baisers de Lamourette]’.19 It was in fact Schoelcher himself, Césaire insists, who asserted the central function of violence in the process of emancipation. He actually quotes Schoelcher in order to make this point: ‘Since men have come together the oppressed have never obtained a thing from their oppressors except by force, and if each step in the path of freedom in the world is marked by blood, this fact is a necessity one must recognize, but the blame for which can only fall on powerlessness or the wickedness of providence’ (ibid.: 18). Une Saison au Congo Césaire’s 1966 play Une Saison au Congo is a veritable tragedy of decolonization. His earlier La Tragédie du roi Christophe had warned obliquely, in the light of past history, of the dangers confronting the decolonizing world, but Congo testifies to the brutal destruction of the promise of decolonization by the forces of neo-colonial hegemony. The play sustains a structural homology with its predecessor La Tragédie du roi Christophe. This parallel is most apparent in its focus on a hero of incipient black decolonization destroyed by the hubris of having forced, by all means available, a nominal national independence toward the construction of a new humanity. In this struggle, Césaire’s Lumumba, like his Christophe, has no time to spare: he must seize the moment of nominal independence to push forward at all costs. Here is Césaire’s Lumumba: Who are we? […] We are galley-slaves. I am a galley-slave, a voluntary one. You are, you should be, galley-slaves, men condemned to ceaseless work. You have no right to rest. You are at Congo’s disposal, 24/7! Private life, zero! No private life. […] It looks like I want to go too fast. Ah well, a band of sluggards, yes, we must move fast, we must move too fast. Do you know how much time I have to reassemble fifty years of history? Three months, gentlemen! And you think I have the time not to move too fast! (Césaire 2010: 38)

The aim of Lumumba’s sense of urgency is to historicize the colonized themselves and to compel them onto the stage of world history so that they become its subjects and not merely its objects. ‘The days the Congo has lived are like prehistoric times,’ says this Lumumba. ‘But with

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 113

15/05/2013 08:44:27

114

Caribbean Critique

independence we have attained the historic age, and the age of History, citizens, it’s the age of Work’ (ibid.: 36; translation modified). Césaire wrote Congo, his last masterpiece, in the wake of the scandalous cover-up following Lumumba’s brutal assassination and the forceful imposition of Belgian neo-colonial sovereignty. 20 If anything, Césaire’s text plays down the overt complicity of the US, UN, and Belgian powers that we now know, following the 1999 publication of Ludo De Witte’s The Assassination of Lumumba, colluded to dam the flood of Congolese democratization that Lumumba refused to compromise. 21 Césaire’s play casts the United Nations and Hammarskjöld in particular as naive pawns manipulated by evil forces (Césaire 2010: 120). As De Witte has shown, the cables Hammarskjöld sent at the time display his partiality and reveal that ‘the UN acted as a political but also a military buffer between the Congolese government and Tshombe’ (De Witte 2001: 13). In fact, the Belgian Lord Chamberlain, Gobert d’Asprement Lynden, explicitly gloated over the role the United Nations was taking in this destruction of a newly independent state, telegramming to Brussels Hammarskjöld is … preserving the de facto territorial integrity of Katanga … from now on we can be optimistic about the way the general situation in Katanga will evolve. Barring new accidents, the Katangan structures will be protected by UN troops and, in the not too distant future, by Katangan troops under the command of Belgian officers. (cited at De Witte 2001: 13)

While Césaire’s play drastically underplays the concerted complicity of Belgium, the United States, and the United Nations in this destruction of African democracy (Césaire could not fully have appreciated the scope of this complicity at the time), the play undertakes a breathtaking aesthetic condensation and intensification of the actual historical texts available to him. Act 1, scene 6 presents the independence-day speeches of the king Basilio, the feeble figurehead president Kasa Vubu (‘KalaLubu’ in Congo), and Lumumba himself. Césaire’s text draws upon the actual historical speeches of each figure in an act of savage, poetic cannibalization – Césaire was by that time an unsurpassed master of this poetics. While both Basilio’s and Kala-Lubu’s speeches borrow liberally and nearly literally from their historical versions, the Lumumba independence speech in Congo remains faithful in spirit to Lumumba’s historical text but rises to take its place as a poetic masterpiece, among the most powerful condensations of the poetic–political imperative that

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 114

15/05/2013 08:44:27

Aimé Césaire

115

Césaire had consistently and powerfully affirmed in texts ranging from ‘Maintenir la poésie’ to ‘L’homme de culture et ses responsabilités.’ This magnificent text begins: ‘Moi, sire, je pense aux oubliés’(Césaire 1973  : 30). In distinct contrast both to Basilio’s condescending paternalism and Kala-Lubu’s genuflections to continued Belgian domination, Lumumba’s speech is a performative affirmation of the subject of Négritude (‘et il est debout’ affirmed the Cahier prophetically in 1939). Here the ‘fleur terrible du “Je”’ stands in autonomous and majestic self-same self-determination. While Kala-Lubu began his speech with a pathetic ‘Sire!’, Césaire’s Lumumba affirms the novel primacy of the Congolese subject in an autonomous first-person pronoun. Césaire signifies this sudden separation from and equality with the Belgian rule with stunning economy by interjecting a single comma between the two nouns: ‘Moi, sire …’. Lumumba at once asserts self-sufficiency (‘Moi’) and the strict equality of the Congolese subject and the Belgian royalty. The two initial words of Césaire’s Lumumba reflect the destruction of privilege and hierarchy at stake in the process of decolonization itself. 22 Césaire here stages the incipient Congolese subject’s taking its place in world history, the primary assertion of human modernity since Descartes’ ‘je pense’. Césaire’s Lumumba not only thinks and exists, but announces that he exists not merely as bestialized subject of the Belgian monarchy, but unaided, autonomously, in the light of the universal faculty of reason. Lumumba closes his invocation of a universal self-governing human condition by invoking the most fundamental terms of Césaire’s Négritude. Césaire’s Négritude is that ‘plunging’ into the deepest and darkest roots of the human condition, into the depths of suffering itself. The historical Lumumba’s last letter from prison, written only days before his brutal execution, affirms the inextinguishable eternity of the idea of justice as equality. 23 Césaire’s Lumumba affirms this imperative to incarnate the timeless idea of justice within a situation, thereby – like every great figure of Caribbean Critique – transforming a world: C’est une idée invulnérable que j’incarne, en effet. Invincible, comme l’espérance d’un peuple, comme le feu de brousse en brousse, comme le pollen de vent en vent, comme la racine dans l’aveugle terreau. (Césaire 1973: 124) [I incarnate an invulnerable idea, in effect. Invincible, like a people’s hope, like a bushfire in the sticks, like the pollen in the blowing wind, like a root in the blind compost.]

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 115

15/05/2013 08:44:28

116

Caribbean Critique

Congo is undoubtedly Césaire’s most Beckettian play – not because of any stylistic similarity, but rather because of these powerful and resonant words. In the wake of the destruction of African autonomy from 1960 to 1965, Césaire’s final words on decolonization resonate inexorably with the legacy of decolonization as a yet-incomplete sequence, an imperative passed on by Lumumba and Césaire to our present, to ‘fail, fail again, fail better!’ In spite of Césaire’s own subsequent critique of the law he co-authored, the process of departmentalization retains its own moment of truth as a pure initiative of political decolonization. It proposed that a just rule of law can only occur in a society in which sovereignty has become universally distributed, such that all, universally, can give the law unto themselves. 24 Since the concept of sovereignty has traditionally been linked to the power of a state to command its subjects (Beaud), a universal distribution of sovereignty would imply: (1) the reappropriation of the power to legislate and construct social existence from the state to social actors (individuals, collectives) – i.e. a maximum coincidence of the multitude and the unalienated power of political decision-making, with no discernible difference inhering between rulers and the ruled; (2) consequently, the desublimation of the state as transcendent law-giving apparatus, the destruction of its monopoly on legislation, and the reappropriation of this power by the multitude; (3) the politicization of so-called civil life and the erasure of the public/private distinction upon which the modern state founds its powers; (4) the multiplication of what has traditionally been conceived of as an indivisible (state-centered) power, and the consequent reappropriation of legislative or ‘constituent’ power (as well as the powers of judgment and execution) by a multitude of subjects. While the 1946 departmentalization law fully achieved none of these goals, to the extent that it managed to decentralize political power, invest political power in popularly elected representatives such as Césaire, and to rationalize the legislative process under a universal and generalized rule of law, it constituted on each of these counts a concrete step forward toward decolonization, properly understood as the universal process of the democratization of political power. Recognizing the full extent of the French government’s failure to implement the egalitarianism of the 1946 departmentalization law, Césaire drew a number conclusions that radically inflected his political and artistic choices in the 1950s. His 1956 withdrawal from the PCF and his 1958 founding of the PPM signal a refocusing of Césaire’s political will; in this period, he did not so much reject a generic form of

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 116

15/05/2013 08:44:28

Aimé Césaire 117

i­nternationalist communism (to which he would long remain faithful) as refuse to dilute or erase the claims of the colonized he represented within the global struggle for bureaucratic State Socialism. In the artistic realm, the 1950s mark Césaire’s shift to an anticolonial socialist realism. His poetry, essays, and theater jettisoned the cosmogonic Surrealism that had characterized his creative production during the immediate post-war years (as in the original versions of Cahier, the essay ‘Maintenir la poésie’ from Tropiques, and the original versions of the collections Les Armes miraculeuses and Soleil cou coupé) in favor of the literality and topical specificity of works like Ferrements, Toussaint Louverture, La Tragédie du roi Christophe and Une Saison au Congo. These dimensions of Césaire’s critical and expressive production would be analyzed by one of the most remarkable practitioners of Caribbean Critique, Maryse Condé.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 117

15/05/2013 08:44:28

chapter four

‘Stepping Outside the Magic Circle’: The Critical Thought of Maryse Condé Maryse Condé

The writings of Maryse Condé are critical to their core. Her novels dismantle the pieties of everyday life to expose what lies beneath: the fragile narcissism of subjects who erect facades of ideology and self-importance around the naked core of their being to ward off ever-impinging social violence. This pervasive social violence takes a number of forms in Condé’s critical and creative vision – from the most intimate tribulations between mother and daughter to the anonymous violence of systemic dependency in a neo-colonial society that insistently reminds every individual – in employment, in consumption, in leisure and travel, in education, in language – that a distant metropolis determines the parameters of their existence. Condé is concerned with the survival of human beings in this undermining context; her writing constructs individuals as more than simply human animals, as subjects with a right to more than the minimal social benefits (health care, unemployment insurance, aid for single mothers, and other benefits that Guadeloupians enjoy in contrast to those living in many other Caribbean nations). The contemporary subjects of French neo-colonialism produce constantly, like the slaves who were their ancestors who refused to be reduced to animalistic quotas of production by their masters and produced a new culture from the shattered remains they found at hand – Wolof, Norman and Breton, Bantu, East Indian, Native American, Chinese, and many others. In a situation of structuralized dependency on the metropolis, however, certain paths of production remain blocked. Where would one find the capital to start a hotel when one must compete with Meridian, Sofitel, and Acor? How can one place locally produced goods

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 118

15/05/2013 08:44:28

Maryse Condé 119

in competition with mass-produced European items, particularly when a local preference for all that is European negates any value-added benefit from the marker ‘Made in Guadeloupe’? The colonial progression of modernity into every dimension of Guadeloupian life has captured colonized subjects in a net of systematic dependency, from consumerist consumption to political irrelevancy as subjects of Matignon and the European Union. Everything that human beings in this circumstance use to build a fortress of subjectivity – biological destiny, language, food, and belief-systems – comes from beyond the individual, from the pre-formed material of the given. When social violence forces subjects to flee into the masquerade of what Sartre called bad faith, every individual must bail out the encroaching floodwaters that seep through the cracks of that barricade. This is the sense in which Maryse Condé’s work is profoundly critical: rather than helping subjects to patch up these leaks in their individual belief systems (whether Créoliste, Africaniste, Doudouiste, Franciste, États-Uniste or any other -iste) or pandering to identity politics that would make one feel beautiful in an ugly world (both internal and external), Condé describes the illusory spells subjects weave around themselves. She rends this subjective veil. Condé’s critique is itself a violent gesture that shatters the force of the magic incantations we tell ourselves (‘I am free/beautiful/whole/at home/ loved’). In recognizing oneself in the fragile, fictional subjects described by Condé, a reader might be compelled by their own entanglement in these multiple webs of dependency masquerading as autonomy. Like an analysand gaining insight and, perhaps, some measure of control through knowledge of one’s own subjection (to the unconscious, to ideology), Condé’s writing is implicitly therapeutic. To acknowledge this would risk triggering a reader’s defense mechanisms (‘Who is she to tell me about being Guadeloupian?’), so each of Condé’s books holds a silent promise to those readers who might recognize themselves in the fragile characters that these texts describe. Anyone who has heard Maryse Condé speak or who has read her works of literary criticism knows she is not one to hold her tongue. In keeping with her own critical edge, I wish to focus here on an aspect of Condé’s work that, compared to her fiction, has received relatively little attention. While of modest proportions when compared to her voluminous production of novels and stories, Condé’s critical texts are an integral part of her project and crucial to understanding the full dimensions of her critique. This body of critical work consists of five

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 119

15/05/2013 08:44:29

120

Caribbean Critique

short books from the late 1970s (La Civilisation du bossale; La Parole des femmes; Le Roman and La Poésie antillaise, and Profil d’une œuvre: Cahier d’un retour au pays natal) and a number of shorter pieces from the 1990s. Although not overtly political in the sense of texts by Louverture and Césaire, these early texts lay the foundation of Condé’s project and explicitly place her work within the tradition of Caribbean Critique; they also clearly animate Condé’s fiction. In music, one speaks of a composer’s ‘materials’. A composer, like a writer, forms the tools of her trade from her immersion in all that has come before her, through an intensive study of what it means to compose, what it has meant to compose for all those she responds to as models and predecessors. Condé’s lesser-studied writings elaborate a scholarly critique of the materials that form the tools and content of her work. Condé’s critical texts testify to her methodical investigation of Antillean history, culture, and literature. These studies clearly inform Condé’s fictional writing, giving her novels and her stories their detailed richness and critical depth. Condé did not abandon her early scholarly investigations of Antillean culture in order to write fiction; rather, her fiction is an extension of the methodical investigation visible in these early non-fictional texts. Condé’s aim is not broadly to outline a history of the Antilles or Antillean literature, but to generate a multifaceted study of singular human experiences. Since Condé’s concerns are resolutely individual, she refuses grand universal abstractions; fiction is a form of representation in keeping with such a project. The series of texts Condé published around 1978 furnish the tools from which she would forge her science of Antillean experience. Her 1978 study of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal for Hatier’s Profil d’une œuvre series is atypical in its respect for Césaire’s poetic monument, but it announces and remains faithful to Condé’s overall critical project: the ‘dissipation [of] myth’ (Condé 1978: 6). This demythologizing project is consonant with Benjamin’s definition of the critical project as the destruction of aura: what presents itself to readers as a solid literary monument must be dissolved, broken down into its constituent parts to reveal its constructed, historical nature. The critic’s corrosive voice chips away at the solidity of every myth. Césaire’s Cahier is surely the Ur-myth of Antillean literary culture. Césaire, the Moses of Martinique, was a young genius who traveled overseas to Paris and the Ecole Normale Supérieure; from 1936 to 1938, he etched in virtual stone those verses that announced to the colonized the imperative of autonomy: to rise up and surge forth ‘debout et libre’ (Césaire 1995: 55).

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 120

15/05/2013 08:44:29

Maryse Condé 121

This gesture finds its echo in Condé’s critical voice: her most frequent rhetorical gesture the imperative: ‘Il faut avoir présent à l’esprit la société martiniquaise au début de ce siècle’ (Condé 1978: 6); ‘Il faut se rappeler ce que représente l’Afrique dans la conscience antillaise’ (ibid.: 7); ‘il faut hélas le dire …’ (ibid.: 9); ‘Il ne faut pas oublier que …’ (ibid.: 18); etc. Césaire’s text is forceful in its refusal to remain a hollow affirmation of black identity, and instead depicts the complex contradictions of Antillean unfreedom and dependency as a prolegomenon to a real freedom beyond wish-fulfillment. In consonance with the poem it analyzes, Condé’s Profil is an analogous call to the objectification of the Cahier, to our understanding the poem in its complex constructedness, an admonition to refuse its blind worship, and instead to reveal its machinations better to grasp the poem as the very performance of the autonomy it calls for. This critical study’s ambiguity is that it remains Condé’s most pious work of criticism. Its critical tone struggles repeatedly against the binds it has imposed upon itself: ‘Il convient peut-être pour conclure de …’ (Condé 1978: 50). The last thing we would expect of Maryse Condé – as of Césaire himself – would be to submit to socio-historical norms and expectations, simply to go along with what an editor expects of her. Condé remains surprisingly devout in her critique of the Cahier. The Cahier remains for Condé what André Breton called ‘the greatest lyrical monument of the age’. In its absence of irony, Condé’s closing comment will stun any reader familiar with her subsequent works: ‘Ce qui est certain, c’est que [Césaire] est une référence essentielle pour les écrivains négro-africains francophones. Il est sans contredit le fondement d’une littérature antillaise authentique’ (ibid.: 71). An ‘authentic’ Antillean literature! Condé momentarily allows herself to subscribe to a jargon of Antillean literary authenticity that she will later fustigate in the Créolité movement. Condé’s critical analysis of the Cahier is competent when seen in the context of the vast literature analyzing the poem (most of which appeared in the years following Condé’s study); what makes her study unique is its steadfast refusal blindly to reproduce an aura of sanctity that surrounds Césaire’s poem. Although Condé remains a devoted defender of the Cahier, she wins this standpoint by laboriously dismantling these inherited and reigning pieties. Condé repeatedly points to the mythic character of the poem’s reception. Haiti, the origin for Césaire of Négritude itself, ‘s’est édifié un véritable mythe’ [made itself a veritable myth] (ibid.: 14). Condé attends to the mythical qualities of Césaire’s poem itself (ibid.: 37–42), and this critical focus reveals the constructed,

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 121

15/05/2013 08:44:29

122

Caribbean Critique

temporal nature of any myth. What presents itself as timeless Being is ideological to its core; Césaire’s recourse to myth paradoxically reveals an impulse to the historicization of Antillean experience: ‘On peut considérer le Cahier comme une tentative de s’emparer des symboles et des images relatifs au passé, de donner à l’histoire un éclairage nouveau et d’emmener le peuple à prendre vie’ [We can consider the Cahier as an attempt to take up symbols and images related to the past, to cast a new light on history, and to lead the people to come to life] (Condé 1978: 37). Myth stands revealed under the gaze of critique as an invocation to history, to the self-transformation of Antillean colonial experience out of the ever-recurring circularity of dependency and unfreedom, a movement into a newly constructed historical existence. Césaire’s description of a putrid Martinican stasis, mired in the mythical world of colonial dependency, is a shocking cure for its reader, hypnotized by the siren song of French assimilation. Critique, for Condé and Césaire alike, is a psychological shock-therapy for the dependent: ‘Nommer son mal est un élément essentiel de cette cure psychiatrique à laquelle va se livrer Césaire’ [Naming his illness is an essential element of the psychiatric cure in which Césaire will engage] (ibid.). The Africa of Césaire’s Négritude stands revealed in Condé’s analysis as mythic invocation devoid of any experiential content: ‘L’Afrique dans l’œuvre de Césaire est donc une grande idée, un mythe. Un mythe ne saurait s’analyser à la lumière de la raison’ [In Césaire’s oeuvre, Africa is a great idea, a myth. A myth cannot be analyzed by the light of reason] (ibid.: 46). Condé strikes out against the academic worship of the Cahier as itself mythologizing: L’œuvre de Césaire est l’objet d’un véritable culte dans certains milieux universitaires … Pour qu’une œuvre reste vivante, il faut qu’elle soit soumise et réchauffée au feu de la critique et non pas transformée en pièce de musée dont on s’approche paralysé de respect. (Condé 1978: 30) [Césaire’s work is an actual cult object in certain university milieux … For a work to remain living, it must be submitted to and stimulated by the fire of critique and not transformed into a museum piece to be approached with paralyzed respect.]

Critical thought, far from putting to death the work of art in its act of dissection, reanimates what had become a ghostly zombie with the fire of insight. Condé’s analysis of the Cahier is successful because it mimetically reproduces, in diffraction, the ambiguities of the poem it analyzes. Césaire stands in reverential awe of mythical Africa, but simultaneously undoing the mythical awe of the prostrate colonized before the colonizer

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 122

15/05/2013 08:44:29

Maryse Condé 123

through the caustic, hortatory power of his verse – and Condé resurrects the Cahier as a monument to an ‘authentic’ Antillean literature in the very act of destroying its mythical solidity through critical analysis. In La Civilisation du bossale: Réflexions sur la littérature orale de la Guadeloupe et de la Martinique (Condé 1977a), Maryse Condé writes a pre-history of Antillean literature, recreating the origins Antillean modernity in a historically informed, imaginative reconstruction of undocumented events lost to the past. Condé names this oral history of slavery the bossale, extending the range of this term beyond the newly arrived African slaves to whom it was traditionally ascribed in Antillean culture (ibid.: 7). La Civilisation du bossale is organized in three movements: an examination of the negativity of colonialist slave-holders’ ignorance of their slaves’ psychic lives and identities; in counterpoint, a description of that psychic life in the only traces that remain to us, the oral literature of the contes; and finally the announcement of the transformation of this mutual alienation of slave-holders and slaves in the passage from an oral world to that of the written following the 1848 Abolition. Condé opens her analysis with a categorical statement of Antillean historical heteronomy: ‘Toute l’histoire des Antilles se situe sous le signe de la dépendance’ [The entire history of the Antilles is situated under the sign of dependence] (ibid.: 5). Antillean cultural history is therefore to be written not as the gradual unfurling of a hidden identity, nor as the persistence of a subterranean truth or being that will finally disclose itself as prejudice and social violence and retreat before the affirmation of a people’s eternal singularity, but instead as it reveals itself in the violence of unresolved contradiction. Condé seeks out the points of greatest paradox in Antillean culture, consistently underlining the gradual growth of social specificity arising from social violence itself. It is a violent clash of civilizations, and not a people’s hidden essence, that produces this cultural history: ‘Afrique contre Europe, … [qui] puisse produire une forme de culture originale et ne laissaient [à l’africain transplanté aux Antilles] d’autre choix que d’oublier son moi précédent pour naître au sein du Nouveau Monde’ [Africa against Europe … [produces] an original form of culture that leaves the African transplanted to the Caribbean no other choice but to forget his former self in order to be born within the New World] (ibid.: 6). Condé surveys colonialist writings that reveal a thorough alienation from the psychic life of Antillean slaves. Above all, the slave is perceived by the writers of these colonialist texts as a dehistoricized being, one utterly static in its essential, brutish nature (ibid.: 13). In the plantation,

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 123

15/05/2013 08:44:30

124

Caribbean Critique

the slave is reduced to a pure functionalism, an animal-machine that must simply give the greatest productive output for the least input and expense. In Condé’s reading, this dehumanization engenders the birth of Antillean society itself, ‘née du sang et de la violence’ (ibid.: 15). Amid this violence, the slave remains utterly opaque to the master: ‘Nous ne saurons jamais que ce qu’il [le maître] prétend voir, que ce qu’il dit voir’ [We know only what [the master] pretends to see, what he says he sees] (ibid.: 16). Our only knowledge of this (mis-)perception arises, paradoxically, from the traces of the effort to police and smother all signs of the slave’s autonomous subjectivity. While these records reveal little of slave’s experience, they are eloquent in testifying to the violent mercantilism and devotion to the abstraction of labor from their ‘possessions’ (ibid.: 17). Travelers to the Antilles wrote texts that contrast with those written by slave-holders; these narratives offer a somewhat less prejudiced examination of this world. While they frequently condemn certain excesses of violence and cruelty on the part of the slave-holders, these observers systematically fail to question the static, essentialist view of Africans they inherit as colonialist ideology. ‘(Le fait important à nos yeux est qu’en dépit de [leur] condamnation, ils ne remettent pas en question l’image du noir qui leur est proposée’ [To our eyes, the important fact is that despite [their] condemnations, they do not question the image of the black that is presented to them] (ibid.: 19). The contradictory status of a Père Labat lies in his profound implication in the mercantile industrialization of Antillean plantation life, in utter contradiction to the moral creed of his missionary faith: ‘C’est un véritable industriel’ (ibid.: 23). Having arrived in the Antilles to evangelize the slaves, in other words to transform those slaves through Christian faith, Labat merely reaffirms the profound and immutable ahistoricity of African being: ‘L’Ethiopien ne peut pas changer de peau quoiqu’on le lave’ [The Ethiopian cannot change his skin no matter how much you wash him] (cited ibid.: 23). These texts reveal not the truth of black experience, but rather its utter opacity to European colonizers: ‘Personne ne sait ce qu’est un noir’ [No one knows what a black is], Condé concludes (ibid.: 26). In contrast, the oral literature of the contes reveals to Condé’s critical gaze the obverse dimension of this ignorance. The self-knowledge of the contes is deceptive and mythical not simply in its external form, as imaginary stories of talking animals (Lapin, Zamba) and the heroic exploits of mythical humans (Ti-Jean), but in their ideological structure: these proverbs and stories reveal the illusory nature of any Antillean ‘identity’. Lapin, Bouki, Zamba, and others testify to the fabricated

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 124

15/05/2013 08:44:30

Maryse Condé 125

nature of identity itself; their subjectivity consists quite simply of ‘l’intériorisation du stéréotype’ (ibid.: 27). The world of the Antillean conte is the only surviving trace of l’univers mental de l’esclave et nous y voyons solidement implantés les traits qui figurent dans les descriptions et jugements des voyageurs et des missionnaires concernant les nègres. Lapin-Zamba se comporte comme le maître et ses acolytes attendent qu’ils se comportent, et n’envisagent pas eux-mêmes de se comporter autrement. (Condé 1977a: 39) [the mental universe of the slave, and we see firmly planted in it traits that figure in the descriptions and judgments of travelers and missionaries concerning the nègres. Lapin-Zamba acts like the master, and his acolytes wait to act the same, never imagining that they might act otherwise.]

Antillean identity has no ‘authentic’, non-alienated origin that we might discover in returning to the contes; its very substance is created heteronomously out of the violence of forced objectification that is slavery and the world of the plantation. Nor is the anthropomorphic figure of Ti-Jean a site of Antillean authenticity; his quasi-Christian moral code articulated in a world of utter moral depravity correspond chez l’esclave à un nouveau degré d’aliénation … où il s’efforçait de se forger un nouveau type de comportement, celui où il s’efforçait de réaliser l’ascension spirituelle vers ce qu’il croyait des qualités propres au maître … . [Ti-Jean] témoigne d’une totale intériorisation du stéréotype du Noir, d’un désir de fuite et d’une aspiration à entrer dans le monde du maître. (Condé 1977a: 41) [corresponds to a new degree of alienation for the slave … in which he was forced to forge a new kind of behavior, a behavior in which he was forced to execute the spiritual ascension toward what he had believed were qualities belonging to the master … [Ti-Jean] testifies of a total interiorization of the Black stereotype, of a desire to flee and an aspiration to enter into the master’s world.]

The search for an originary Antillean identity leaves us with nothing but the violent, reciprocal mirrorings of stereotyped perception of the self and other. La Civilisation du bossale draws from this critical reflection on the pre-history of Antillean literature a despondent picture; even after 1848, rien apparemment n’a change aux Antilles … Pendant toute la fin du XIXe siècle, le noir sera frappé de mutisme comme un enfant craintif qui n’ose parler en face des adultes dans sa terreur de commettre des fautes.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 125

15/05/2013 08:44:31

126

Caribbean Critique

Il n’osera ouvrir la bouche que lorsqu’il se croira en mesure de la faire, quand il saura réciter par cœur les leçons reçues. (Condé 1977a: 52) [apparently nothing had changed in the Antilles … Throughout the end of the nineteenth century, the black would be struck mute like a frightened child who dared not speak in front of adults out of terror of making mistakes. He wouldn’t dare to open his mouth until he thought he was worthy to do so, once he knew how to recite by heart the received lessons.]

Not until Césaire’s Négritude would this situation be reversed. La Parole des femmes: Essai sur des romancières des Antilles de langue française (1979) constitutes an act of sympathetic witnessing. Condé is particularly attentive to the interiorizations of social violence (‘honte, sentiment de culpabilité, malédiction’) that disfigure female subjectivity. She writes: Nous avons pensé qu’il serait intéressant d’interroger quelques écrivains femmes des Caraïbes francophones pour cerner l’image qu’elles ont d’elles-mêmes et appréhender les problèmes dont elles souffrent … . Nous avons adopté un plan très simple, voire simpliste, qui va de l’enfance aux grandes expériences féminines (la maternité surtout) et à la mort). (Condé 1979: 5) [We thought that it would be interesting to study some French Caribbean women writers to outline the image that they have of themselves and to understand the problems with which they struggle … We have adopted a very simple structure, perhaps simplistic, that moves from childhood through the great feminine experiences (maternity, in particular) to death.]

In Michèle Lacrosil’s Sapotille et le Serin d’Argile and Simone SchwarzBart’s Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle, Condé discerns the psychological ‘mutilations’, the ‘blessure intérieure inguérissable’ that reinscribe in the young Antillean female subject ‘le processus d’aliénation’ (ibid.: 13). First in family life, then in school, this ‘process of alienation’ leads young Antillean women to live always for another, never for their own fulfillment: for a parent, for a schoolmaster, for a husband (ibid.: 20). In contrast to this constant reinscription of ‘neurosis’ (ibid.: 22), Télumée’s grandmother leads the protagonist ‘to become conscious of the richness contained in ‘her living body’ and to offer it to others’ (à prendre conscience de la richesse contenue dans ‘son corps vivant’ et de l’offrir aux autres) (ibid.: 24). Beyond the primary mutilations of family and school, the social

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 126

15/05/2013 08:44:31

Maryse Condé 127

world Antillean women come to inhabit is no better in affirming of their autonomy. ‘La micro-bourgeoisie dont sont issus les personnages de Michèle Lacrosil ne peut fabriquer que des créatures en conflit avec elles-mêmes et partant avec les autres dans un univers où tout grince’ (ibid.: 33). At the same time, Condé discerns within this daily lived experience of alienation and psychological mutilation the contours of a politics of feminist practice: Ceux qui ont reproché au roman de Simone Schwarz-Bart d’être totalement apolitique ont à notre avis fait un contre-analyse. Ce n’est pas simplement la méchanceté, la légèreté ou un destin aveugle qui écartent les hommes de Télumée. C’est la structure sociale d’un pays dominé, l’exploitation dont les Nègres sont victimes qui ne permettent pas le bonheur des êtres, et détruisent les couples. (Condé 1979: 35) [In our opinion, those who have reproached Simone Schwatz-Bart’s novel for being entirely apolitical have misread it. It is not simply cruelty, laziness, or blind destiny that derails the men of Télumée. It is the social structure of a dominated land, the exploitation of which the Blacks are victims that will not permit individual well-being and that destroys couples.]

This passage reveals quite precisely the political, critical orientation of Condé’s own work. Her focus is not the objective determinations in society, whether historical, economic, or political, that limit the freedom of Antillean subjects (as has been the case in the thinkers considered up to this point), but rather to trace the effects of this macro-structural dependency and alienation as it manifests itself in the figures and dispositions of Antillean subjective experience. Condé searches out in the traces of Antillean women’s literature – in their visions of men, in the experience of maternity, of religion and the supernatural, of nature – the forms of reification, what she echoes Césaire by calling ‘chosification’ (ibid.: 63), in which women are reduced to mere objects and never autonomous subjects.1 In conclusion, Condé reaffirms her critical stance, refusing the facile and hollow recourse to ‘positive role-models’ in favor of a call to an enlightened self-awareness that identifies freedom in the consciousness we cultivate of our own limitations and unfreedom. She writes: On demande souvent à la littérature de tiers-monde de présenter des héros positifs … Mais exiger des écrivains des héros positifs nous paraît hautement dangereux. Cela conduit à un dirigisme littéraire où le slogan tiendrait lieu de pensée … [Il faudrait] s’interroger sur le rôle

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 127

15/05/2013 08:44:31

128

Caribbean Critique

de la critique, trop souvent conçue comme une condamnation ou une approbation, s’appuyant uniquement sur des critères politiques. Tous ces romans féminins qui n’abordent pas les problèmes politiques, qui ne font qu’effleurer certaines tensions, qui ne prétendent pas donner de leçons, n’en sont pas moins précieux pour la connaissance que nous pouvons avoir de nous-mêmes. (Condé 1979: 77) [Third-world literature is often required to present positive heroes … But to require positive heroes from writers seems to us highly dangerous. It moves toward a literary interventionism in which slogans will replace thinking … [We should] ask ourselves about the role of the critic, too-often conceived as condemnation or approbation, insisting only on political standards. These many ‘feminine’ novels that do not take up political problems, that do no more that elaborate certain tensions, that do not pretend to give lessons, are no less valuable to our potential self-knowledge.]

Through this call to self-awareness, Condé grounds her political practice in the recognition that the practice of everyday life constitutes the realm of the political in its smallest, often invisible forms. Readers of this book may remain skeptical that self-awareness alone can effectuate such radical changes in consciousness and existence. Condé, since her lived experience of Guinea under the rule of Sékou Touré in the 1960s, nonetheless lives under a sort of taboo of all Black Jacobin politics of principle that defines every moment of her work as a resolutely negative dialectics. After publishing these critical pieces in the 1970s, Maryse Condé turned to fiction as the form most suited to reveal the violences she first described in these early studies. During the 1980s and 90s, however, she wrote another series of essays that return to this earlier mode of cultural critique. Condé’s ‘Unheard Voice: Suzanne Césaire and the Construct of a Caribbean Identity’ (1998) might serve as an appendix to her earlier study of female writers of the French Caribbean. In this later essay, she draws attention to the under-appreciated work of Suzanne Césaire, whose short life in the shadows of her famous husband have earned her a mere footnote in most studies of Antillean letters. Condé offers a forceful reappraisal of Césaire’s importance, describing her as ‘one of the first intellectuals who tried to piece together the broken fragments of the Antillean identity and restore the shattered Caribbean history’ (Condé 1998: 62). Condé points to Césaire as the inventor, theorist, and practitioner of the ‘literary cannibalism’ that her husband would later describe in his well-known 1956 speech ‘Culture and Colonization’. 2 For

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 128

15/05/2013 08:44:31

Maryse Condé 129

Condé and for fellow Guadeloupian writer Daniel Maximin, Suzanne Césaire has become what Condé approvingly calls, in a rare moment of myth-making, ‘a Caribbean icon’ (ibid.: 63). Condé retraces Césaire’s literary trajectory through her articles in the wartime Martinican journal Tropiques. Césaire’s statement that ‘La poésie martiniquaise sera cannibale ou ne sera pas’ marks for Condé a reappropriation of a stigmatized label and a rebirth or ‘pathogenesis’ of Antillean identity. Unlike her husband’s ‘Négritude,’ however, Suzanne Césaire’s Martinican cultural cannibalism does not suggest to Condé stable identitarian black or African essence, nor does it imply a mere redirection of the destructive instrumental reason of European colonialism that would now become a tool for the liberation of the colonized. In contrast, cultural cannibalism invokes a mode of relating to the world that refuses destructive confrontation; unlike the actual ingestion of missionaries by the Brazilian Tupi Indians – what Oswald de Andrade called the ‘asorçao do inimigo sacro’ (absorption of the sacred enemy) – cultural cannibalism renews rather than destroys the culture it absorbs and transforms. European and African cultures do not cease to exist when they are cannibalized in the New World. Instead, they extend their compass, revalued, transformed, and renewed in novel cultural contexts. Condé recognizes Suzanne Césaire as an important Caribbean thinker and proposes that the general failure to recognize the importance of her contributions to Antillean letters reveals a reactionary, phallocratic dismissal of her independent mind (ibid.: 64). ‘Fifty years before these contemporary theoreticians [Glissant and the authors of Créolité], Suzanne Césaire rejects the binary opposition of black/white that impedes the multiculturalism of the Caribbean’ (ibid.: 65). Unlike later critics who share her concern for Caribbean unity, Suzanne Césaire founds her understanding of this world upon a ‘deep concern for the sociopolitical realities which are a legacy of the plantation system’ (ibid.: 65). Condé extends this critique of Créolité as a mere aestheticization of Antillean reality in her article ‘On the Apparent Carnivalization of Literature from the French Caribbean’, in which she links Mikhael Bakhtin’s theory of a ‘carnival sense of the world’ to the literature of the Martinican Créolistes (cited ibid.: 91). Beyond the presence of the Caribbean Carnival as thematic setting for much of this literature, Condé underscores the celebration of a graphic sexuality and sensuality particular to the work of Raphael Confiant and points out that Confiant and Chamoiseau rely upon a language of ‘verbal extravagance and

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 129

15/05/2013 08:44:32

130

Caribbean Critique

outrageousness’ (ibid.: 95). Condé sees past the titillation and taboobreaking of this language to wonder whether this extravagance, this tumultuous representation of Antillean sexuality with added spice of Creole satisf[ies] a need – that of the [French] Other? He is the one transported to an exotic locale. It is through his eyes that Antillean sexuality becomes mouth-watering, burlesque, almost folksy. In my opinion we would be wrong to consider the writing in these texts as the transgression of colonial taboos or the edification of a universe refusing norms and routine. On the contrary, they flatter the taste for the diverse, for the different exhibited in French culture (ibid.: 96). Condé’s critique deflates Confiant’s and Chamoiseau’s taboo transgressing language as self-aggrandizing and as outright pandering to the French desire to consume the Antillean other as eroticized object. ‘What is behind the apparent carnivalization of this literature?’ she asks. ‘What is behind the riot of words, the exaggeration of images, their total gratuitousness?’ In the era of globalization, when the independence movement in Guadeloupe has become a forgotten dream, she characterizes the Créolité writers as mouthpieces of the bad conscience of the past century’s rendez-vous manqués, from Négritude to decolonization, independence, and autonomy. Instead of a literature concerned with contemporary ‘creole’ reality of social displacement, the post-BUMIDOM blues, and economic and atavistic racial resentment, 3 this Créoliste bad faith hides itself behind mere verbal acrobatics. Condé suggests that these writers justify an aesthetic depoliticization of Antillean culture: ‘Deep down the writer is conscious that the intellectuals have failed their mission. So what is left? The pyrotechnics of the text’ (ibid.: 97). The most substantial of Condé’s critical texts might be her ‘Pan-Africanism, Feminism, and Culture’. In this 1988 talk, Condé revisits many of the themes of her earlier studies, placing particular emphasis on the categories of consciousness and production. The essay looks back upon the hopes and aspirations that she shared with other activists in the 1960s, hopes that pointed toward a trans-national unity of African Diasporic cultures understood not as a biological and historical unity but as a shared consciousness of those struggling for decolonization and social justice. Condé begins by telling two stories. The first recounts the travails of the Popular Movement for the Independence of Guadeloupe, whose leaders were arrested and sentenced to thirty years in prison by French authorities. Condé recalls her participation in public demonstrations at the time, when banners linked the movement’s leader Luc Reinette with the plight of Nelson Mandela (ibid.: 56). The problem

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 130

15/05/2013 08:44:32

Maryse Condé

131

of universal justice was pressing for Condé not only in the global fight against the South African Apartheid regime, but also because the French public’s failure to recognize the relevance of this fight to the situation in Guadeloupe underscored an ambiguity within the fight for social justice itself. ‘Was the life of one man not equal to the life of another? Were Luc Reinette and Nelson Mandela not fighting injustice and oppression?’ (ibid.: 56). Condé came to understand that the fight against neo-colonialism was itself riven by contradictions that mirror the overarching tendency to discount the plight of South Africans by the West. The deceptions and contradictions of Pan-Africanism extend into the innermost workings of the movement itself, making impossible any unitary front in the face of neo-colonial injustice. In a second anecdote, Condé describes her attempt to foster a consciousness of Caribbean unity in the face of the plight of migrant Haitian laborers in Guadeloupe. Condé’s book for children Haiti chérie (1988) constituted an attempt on her part to express to Guadeloupian children the plight of these Haitians who occupied the lowest rungs of their social world, despised and violated. Condé understands the book as a form of ideological critique, in which young Guadeloupians might be led to question the racist prejudice and economic exploitation of Haitians in the contemporary Guadeloupe of their parents’ generation. In her conclusion, Condé places these anecdotal works in the context of the failed aspirations of 1960s Pan-Africanism.4 While her own hopes for a decolonized world of autonomous black subjects were shattered following her experience living in Sékou Touré’s Guinea and post-Nkhrumah Ghana, Condé is nonetheless astounded at the degree of ignorance of African realities she observes in her fellow Guadeloupians (Condé 1998: 59). 5 In this forum, she briefly abandons her critical stance, and we are suddenly allowed to witness the hidden idealism of a 1960s radical utopianist, a Black Jacobiniste, and a faith that lies hidden behind the corrosive force, and even cynicism, of her unrelenting critique: ‘When I try to explain the African independence movements of the 1960s, or speak of the magic of leaders like Sékou Touré or Kwame Nkrumah, [Guadeloupians of today] simply do not understand. For them Sékou Touré was just another dictator who died in his bed. They do not even think about Africa’ (ibid.). Such an admission discloses the foundation of Condé’s critical project to reveal the magical belief structure of Antillean and Pan African ideology: she was herself once a subject of its magical incantations, knowing its spells most intimately. Her critical writing feeds upon the pain of such shattered hopes but

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 131

15/05/2013 08:44:32

132

Caribbean Critique

refuses to disavow them completely. ‘We were led to believe that Africa was an ideal home. When we discovered it was not, we suffered’ (ibid.: 60). In response to the shattered utopianism of the decolonization movement, Maryse Condé’s critical thought refuses to place hope in a transcendent beyond of disalienated subjectivity and non-coercive decolonized societies. Instead, her turn to critique constitutes a dissection of the actual world as the lived experiences of dependency, alienation, and suffering. What she finds in her examination of this world, of her world, is the radical disappearance of autonomous production: ‘The younger generation [in Guadeloupe have] become consumers rather than producers’ (ibid.: 63). Maryse Condé enunciates her critical thought imminently, from within the experience of neo-colonial alienation and vitiation of productive forces that she has experienced. As she put the matter in her memoir Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer (Condé 1999), ‘I was ‘Black skin/White mask’, it was for me that Frantz Fanon was going to write his book’ (ibid.: 102). The measure of truth, the justice and equality articulated by figures such as Touré and Mandela, are no longer available for her. Following bitter deception and the shattered hopes of the 1960s, Condé’s critical imperative is to describe in its every hidden detail the forces that prevent the dream of decolonization and autonomy from becoming a reality. She does this not by depicting that u-topic, non-existent world, but rather by discerning in the minutiae of the alienated life-experiences of the subjects she depicts, the outlines of an immanent, future possibility cast today in negative form. In so doing, by refusing all utopianism, and yet constantly producing work after critical work, Condé stands as the subjective, limited refusal of a contemporary capitulation of all autonomous productive forces. ‘I must show them [the younger generation, and women in particular] that writing is not something useless, but rather that it is full of creativity’ (ibid.: 63). This stance might be nothing less than a Caribbean variant of the Adornian celebration of aesthetic expressivity in the face of political deception. By redirecting her vision from the utopian ideal of global decolonization to the micro-politics of daily lived experience in the French Caribbean and African Diaspora, Maryse Condé rescues the traces of an autonomous, decolonized subjectivity and politics that lie not in any utopian beyond, but rather in the insight we gain into our own modes of subjection to violence in a neo-colonial, paternalist, consumerist society.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 132

15/05/2013 08:44:32

chapter five

Édouard Glissant: From the Destitution of the Political to Antillean Ultra-leftism Édouard Glissant

Like Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, Édouard Glissant combined a passionate engagement in the politics of decolonization with analysis of the modes and structures of French colonialism, from its origins to its singular perpetuation in the form it has taken since 1946 as the so-called ‘departmentalisation’ of the former ‘colony’ of Martinique (as well as Guadeloupe and French Guiana). In this chapter, I wish to focus on a number of Glissant’s most overtly ‘political’ texts, including his 1958 first novel La Lézarde, which tells the story of a group of young Martinican anticolonial militants circa 1946; the little-known 1961 Les Antilles et la Guyane à l’heure de la décolonisation, by some stretch Glissant’s most radically anticolonial and Fanonian text; and his masterpiece of Caribbean critical theory, the 1981 Discours antillais.1 La Lézarde, Glissant’s first novel, established the young author as a prominent voice in Antillean letters when it won the French Prix Renaudot in 1958. Though frequently read as a militantly anticolonial text, the novel does not narrate the awakening of a Martinican national consciousness that would lead teleologically from alienation and exploitation to the birth of a decolonized nation. Rather, it advances an aporetic critique of such political triumphalism in the face of the eternal, inevitable resurgence of the mythic violence of the colonial order and plantation slavery. La Lézarde describes the decision of a group of young Martinican militants in the fictional city of Lambrianne to assassinate a political operative of the colonialist opposition. A sort of Antillean version of Sartre’s Les mains sales, the novel is set in the time of the momentous 1945 elections that brought Aimé Césaire to power as the

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 133

15/05/2013 08:44:32

134

Caribbean Critique

communist mayor of Fort-de-France and deputy to the French Assembly. The novel turns around the debates over the demands and ethics of left-wing political militancy in the post-war period. The young peasant Thaël, engaged in this assassination plot, ultimately ‘succeeds’, but the novel stages this political violence not as the triumph of Martinican national consciousness but rather as the resurgence of the atavistic, mythic violence of colonialism and plantation slavery itself. Against a more prominent triumphalist reading of Glissant’s novel, H. Adlai Murdoch’s reading is decidedly dystopian. In his Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel (2001) Murdoch argues that La Lézarde might be read as the register of the antagonistic contradictions undermining any possible deployment of an Antillean general will. Murdoch considers La Lézarde not an ode to postcolonial progress so much as a narration of regression, one that ‘will eventually doom’ its protagonists ‘to an ending that is anything but a point of resolution’ (Murdoch 2001: 25). 2 Read within the arc of Glissant’s trajectory, this novel reveals that Glissant’s later rejection of a radical Fanonian politics of the Martinican nation is already inscribed in this, his earliest work. By this reading, Glissant in 1958 is already pessimistic about the viability of the triumphalist vision that defined the height of the decolonization movement and Césaire’s and Fanon’s calls for national independence; this novel suggests that he was already at least partly committed to a postcolonial aestheticism that values ‘certainty and beauty’ rather than the emancipation and justice at the heart of Fan­on’s struggle. At the height of the Algerian war and the drive toward the African independences, La Lézarde substitutes a universalist poétique for militant politics, a line of argument that would come to determine Glissant’s thinking after the 1990 publication ­of Poétique de la relation (Glissant 1990: 76). In contrast to Fanon’s assertion of the ‘absolute’ necessity of violence in Algeria, the novel’s adolescent activists (Glissant’s protagonists range in age, the narrator tells us, from eighteen to twenty-one) turn to violence in their search for self-identity, not due to the objective demands of their situation. ‘All is vague and diffuse,’ says Thaël early on in the text, ‘as long as the world hasn’t been defined and weighed by man. I don’t want to describe things, I don’t want to suffer, I want to know and to teach’ (ibid.: 29). For all its economic underdevelopment and political subjection, Martinique in 1945 was no Algeria; it would experience no large-scale massacres like that of Sétif, no torture, no OAS terrorism. The young militants’ will to assassinate Garin is drawn from thin air, the pure

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 134

15/05/2013 08:44:32

Édouard Glissant

135

spontaneity of an ultra-leftist ‘act’ that will ultimately prove to be a senseless acting-out that does nothing to lessen the injustice and inequality of post-war Martinique (ibid.: 85). Like Godard’s depiction of the exchange in La Chinoise between Anne Wiazemsky’s naive will-to-terrorism and pro-Algerian militant Francis Jeanson’s Sartrean humanism, Glissant characterizes his activists as utterly delinked from their society. Not only do the militants possess no manifest solidarity with the Martinican population, they demonstrate the ultimate bad faith in convincing themselves that it would be inopportune for one of their group to commit this political murder, and instead search out the peasant Thaël to do the deed, all the while maintaining the convenient fiction of a collective act (‘And who kills this dog?’ asks Mycéa rhetorically, the answer already at hand: ‘We do, all of us!’ (ibid.: 46)). The narrative polyphony of La Lézarde contains many moments that assert the nascent formation of a Martinican national consciousness. The River Lézarde itself is compared to ‘a people rising up’, while the narrator describes in Fanonian terms ‘a people slowly returning to their kingdom’, a people who ‘raise their heads and count themselves […] to discover in this every taste and every freedom’ (ibid.: 30, 51). Indeed, La Lézarde closes by celebrating the election results that brought Césaire and the Communist Party to power in Martinique, heralding the end of colonial status in the forthcoming legal act of departmentalization: ‘Exiting the black hole of the war, which had grafted a terrible appendix onto so many years of shadow and denial, the [Martinican] people were as though drunk to affirm their birth’ (ibid.: 189). Numerous passages evoke in critical terms the economic and existential ‘misery’ of Martinican existence. 3 Ultimately, even if Thaël attains a growing clarity and conviction that the political is ‘no longer a hollow game of those who would defend their miserable privileges’ but now the expression of ‘the strength of this people’, La Lézarde’s tragic ending undermines this conceit and reaffirms the unsurpassability not of Communism, as Sartre and Césaire claimed, but of mythic violence itself.4 At the novel’s conclusion, Valérie – La Lézarde’s figure of a pure, militant nationalism – is mauled to death by Thaël’s dogs, named Actaeon and Artemis. This horrifying death by mauling signals a veritable return of the repressed, of myth (Actaeon and Artemis), and above all of the mythic violence of plantation slavery itself. Revealingly, Thaël first thinks to kill his dogs for their crime by ‘dousing them with gasoline’ and setting them alight, but he quickly revises that choice. In the novel’s closing lines, he decides on the appropriate

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 135

15/05/2013 08:44:33

136

Caribbean Critique

punishment for these dogs: ‘attaching them solidly, with honey spread over their bodies, and calling the ants’ to devour them. This torture clearly evokes the most horrific punishments Antillean slave owners had devised to punish their rebellious slaves in previous centuries, 5 and mythic violence displaces the futility of politics in the final pages of Glissant’s first novel. This text opens to Glissant’s life-long critique of Antillean subjection to violence and alienation and to his countervailing celebration of the aesthetic. Before pursuing this aesthetic turn in coming decades, however, Glissant would participate in his most militant anticolonial work, a long-suppressed text that has not been examined by Glissant scholars in detail. In 1959, Glissant, Albert Béville, and Daniel Boukman were founding members of the separatist Front Antillo-Guyanais pour l’Autonomie. Because of his political activity, Glissant was barred from leaving metropolitan France for the Overseas Departments from 1961 to 1965 (Calmont 2007: 95). Les Antilles et la Guyane à l’heure de la décolonisation (Glissant 1961), the text that resulted from the three-day conference held to discuss and define the program of this political initiative for the decolonization of the DOM, is extremely rare; it was banned immediately upon its printing, and has to my knowledge never been closely analyzed in the half-century since its publication.6 Along with the contemporary writings of Fanon and the French Anarchist Daniel Guérin, this collection of speeches and letters of support from around the francophone world constitute the most radical and uncompromising statement of anticolonial Caribbean Critique of the period. More than 600 people attended the three-day conference in Paris, and statements of support came from figures including Frantz Fanon, Michel Leiris, Alioune Diop (the editor of Présence africaine), and Aimé Césaire. The volume’s longest texts are a series of critical analyses of the economic, cultural, and political situation in the DOM; its introduction summarizes the conclusions of these analyses as the two main points that would constitute the Front’s basic program: (1) To have done with the current legal status of the DOM, and, correspondingly, (2) to implement a ‘Legislative Assembly’ and an ‘Executive Power’ that would be responsible to the assembly (ibid.: 11). While it is not always possible to determine Glissant’s precise contribution to these jointly drafted texts (only two brief interventions appear in his name), it is clear that he, as ‘President’ of the conference and founding member of the Front, played a fundamental role in drafting and formulating every common statement. Other speakers included Albert Béville (aka Paul Niger), who presented

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 136

15/05/2013 08:44:33

Édouard Glissant 137

the primary document of the new Front, its economic and political ‘rapport’; Marcel Manville, who would go on to found the Martinican pro-independence Pati kominis pour lendépandans ek sosyalizm (PKLS) in 1984; Léonard Sainville, a collaborator in the famous 1930s journal L’étudiant noir with Césaire and Senghor; representatives from the Martinican and Guadeloupian Communist Parties, including Rosan Girard, a communist deputy alongside Césaire in the French Assembly from 1946 to 1958; and delegates from the Martinican, Guyanese, and Guadeloupian Student Associations. This volume’s closing report (‘On the Creation of the Front’) spells out the organization’s goals and emphasizes the non-aligned status of the organization, outside of any political party or ideological affiliation. Instead, the document defines the Front’s goal thus: ‘to struggle for the radical transformation of the political structures in our countries, in order to obtain their autonomy’. It further specifies that the primary challenge in such a process is to avoid falling into a neo-colonial relationship autonomous in name only: ‘The fundamental principle of the Front […] is that autonomy must not lead to a disguised perpetuation of colonialism, nor to the establishment of a new system of exploitation in our countries’ (ibid.: 139). The economic and political rapport Béville presented to begin the Congress is an extremely rich and complex analysis of the Antillean situation in 1961. I summarize its main points here because it constitutes a jointly conceived primary statement of the organization co-founded by Glissant, and because Béville himself is a little-known but important figure in the history of Caribbean Critique. His speech begins with a neo-Leninist critique of colonialism as a ‘manifestation’ of economic imperialism – that is, capitalism expanding into foreign sites in search of raw materials and new markets for its products (ibid.: 18). Following a brief summary of the key role of the French imperialist trade regulation known as the Exclusif in assuring the availability of these colonial markets to France, the text makes the key claim that the 1946 departmentalization initiative paradoxically reaffirmed this ‘tax-belt’ (cordon douanier), ‘isolating’ the DOMs from the rest of the economic world and rendering them ‘unable to protect themselves’ economically (ibid.: 19). Béville’s assertion leads him to conclude that departmentalization (as ‘assimilation’) is the highest form of a successful colonialism because it allows for extreme domination in the form of cultural alienation and political powerlessness in the face of total centralization (ibid.: 20–21). This is a conclusion shared by so many at this little-known event, and Glissant’s Le Discourse antillais would reiterate twenty years later. As

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 137

15/05/2013 08:44:34

138

Caribbean Critique

Béville states here, the result is a systematic ‘under-development’ of the DOM, a ‘backwardness’, and ‘dependency’ upon the metropolis, all due to an enforced monoculture of production and instability before historical and economic developments on the global level (ibid.: 22). The document offers in turn as a solution to this situation a single proposition, the content of which will be developed and debated in the discussions that make up the bulk of the conference itself: autonomy (ibid.: 23). This document’s second section, entitled ‘Our Political Options: Autonomy and Federalism,’ elaborates these two interrelated demands. Denouncing the half-measures and broken promises of the French government’s Antillean policy since 1945, the text asserts the primacy of political self-determination – that is, the imperative to take political decisions ‘internally’, the basic condition of which is political ‘autonomy’ (ibid.: 24). It argues that the precise form of such autonomy must address three demands: it should determine the degree and form of decolonization Martinique should pursue, the proper structure of internal social relations, and the nature of an autonomous Martinican foreign policy, or, as the text states more circumspectly, its ‘place in the world today’. This autonomy should be measured by its practicality: as the text states, it should ‘allow us to resolve our own problems’, including above all the systematic structural under-development described in its previous section. No matter whether relations with the French metropolis would take the form of a Federation, a Commonwealth, a Community, the text’s primary demands remain practical: those of ‘reciprocity and equality’ of any relation. The report is careful to point out that the precise nature and juridical arrangements of such reforms must remain indeterminate until a representative body could articulate them, and would be of secondary importance before the measure of practical efficacy. The document affirms that such an imperative ineluctably implies both the creation of ‘a legislative assembly’ and of ‘an Executive responsible to it’. The Congress’s resolutions subsequently formalized this as ‘the demand for immediate autonomy with its two fundamental bodies: for each of the countries, a legislative assembly and an executive responsible to it’ (ibid.: 164). The Front’s second demand is to create a Fédération Antilles-Guyane. The text argues that it is not only in small states’ interests to unite when confronted with much larger powers in the international arena, but that such a federation would help to overcome internal discord and might ultimately result in increased economic efficiencies (ibid.: 28). The document refuses to specify the exact structure of such a federation (for

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 138

15/05/2013 08:44:34

Édouard Glissant 139

example, the juridical forms that its autonomy might take), preferring to assert its absolute necessity as a formal political imperative. Finally, the Front asserts the common interests that this federation would have with its Caribbean neighbors. This is an economico-political version of Glissant’s later concept of a Caribbean ‘subterranean unity’, which he would formulate in Le Discours antillais, although the Front included a second vector of political unity that would embrace the newly independent African states in their common struggle to achieve a truly decolonized and autonomous status in the post/colonial context of 1961. Béville’s statement is followed by a series of much briefer interventions, the majority of which reaffirm the Front’s primary demands. Notable among these interventions is Rosan Girard’s restatement of the Guadeloupian Communist Party’s position. This is remarkable mainly for its Leninist assertion of the Party’s continued central role as leading the ‘front for the emancipation of the [Guadeloupian] country’, which stands in marked contrast to the unaligned political status of the Front, and Béville and Glissant in particular (ibid.: 34). In his first attributed intervention during the second day of the proceedings, Glissant denies that the Front demands to ‘set itself up as a Revolutionary Committee that wishes to direct from Paris an Antillean revolution’ (ibid.: 74). Speaking in the first person plural, he affirms that the political platform read by Béville (described above) should constitute the basis for all discussion in the forum, presumably seeking to cut short the personality and party conflicts that the reader senses creeping into various interventions throughout the congress. Glissant refuses to proscribe violent forms of action, preferring to maintain a stance of neutrality in the face of the demands of future events. ‘We are not the ones who should decide on the [necessary] forms of struggle, because, once again, we are not prophets; we are stating a position on ideas and theoretical questions that we are attempting to put into practice. We are not trying to predict the future’ (ibid.: 74). Such a quasi-Fanonian stance, which implies that certain situations may necessarily demand recourse to violence, is especially interesting in light of Glissant’s arguably more pessimistic assessment on the place of violence in La Lézarde. In brief closing remarks to the congress, Glissant asserts the necessity of cultural autonomy in the Front’s politics. This conclusion is an early statement of what will become Glissant’s philosophy of Relation: From the point of view of culture, we witness a development of a potential enrichment of humanity. Why? Because today the world is constituted by the contact of cultures, because today there are no values

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 139

15/05/2013 08:44:34

140

Caribbean Critique

of any one country that are not touched by the values of another. The world is shrinking, remaking itself, and the Antilles are in an ideal situation to promote the contact of cultures. They must develop the true values of their people. […] And I say to you that if the Antilles are autonomous, if Antilleans and Guyanese are free to organize their societies and their aspirations, they will testify to this contact of cultures in a World dominated by complex cultures. They will be able to realize for the first time values freely chosen and determined by themselves. In this way, they will be able to contribute as a people to the enrichment of humanity. (Glissant 1961: 157)

In the end, it is difficult to determine Glissant’s degree of commitment to the Front’s political project. On the one hand, Glissant explicitly reaffirms his support of the revolutionary platform read by Béville, and it seems fair to presume he participated directly in its drafting. On the other hand, Glissant’s published remarks are certainly no ringing affirmation of a Fanonian absolute necessity of anticolonial violence; rather, he expresses a guarded refusal absolutely to rule out some form of violence in the struggle for Antillean autonomy. Glissant’s final comments, cited above, announce his turn from anticolonial political struggle to an autonomy of cultural production, the position that Glissant would develop into a ‘poetics of Relation’. Given the pessimism already registered in La Lézarde, it seems fair to conclude that Glissant both played a central and enthusiastic role in conceiving and promoting the Front in its brief existence and harbored a strong degree of suspicion and even pessimism over the viability of its political project for Antillean autonomy. Le Discours antillais and the Negotiation of Cultural Politics Glissant’s somewhat conflicted nationalist, pro-independence political engagement underlies his literary and theoretical work throughout the 1960s and 70s, culminating in the 1981 publication of Le Discours antillais. Besides Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme and Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs, this text is the outstanding critique of post-1848 French colonialism in the Caribbean, and its 500 pages constitute the most incisive, original, and developed single work in the entire tradition of Caribbean Critique. Since the publication of Peter Hallward’s groundbreaking study Absolutely Postcolonial in 2001, the field of postcolonial studies has

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 140

15/05/2013 08:44:34

Édouard Glissant 141

been the object of a sharp critique focused on the political purchase of so-called ‘cultural politics’. While I am sympathetic to Hallward’s basic distinction, following Alain Badiou’s, between purely political activity (as undivided egalitarianism) and the compromised ‘politics’ of the worlds they break away from, my argument is that a willfully limited (axiomatic) concept of the political impoverishes our resources for addressing systematic injustice in light of the imperative of justice.7 Hallward’s critique of so-called ‘postcolonial’, ‘cultural’ and ‘identity’ politics as a ‘disastrous confusion of spheres’ is polemically incisive, but his bent for an axiomatic, antagonistic analysis of situations leads him to claim that ‘Glissant’s work in particular and postcolonial theory in general can only [my emphasis] obstruct what is arguably the great political task of our time: the articulation of fully egalitarian political principles which, while specific to the particular situation of their declaration, are nevertheless subtracted from their cultural environment’ (Hallward 2001: 47, xix, 26). Le Discours antillais advances a critical intervention at the point of suture of politico-economic critique and culture. Celia Britton and Charles Forsdick, among others, have argued that this text’s ‘cultural politics’ is an essential intervention; Peter Hallward and Chris Bongie read the text as a crucial step toward abandoning the political project of decolonization. I think that this must remain an open question. Like political sequences, an individual’s or community’s struggle for ‘identity’ cannot be subject to any abstract, external norm or moralizing judgment. As the formation of an invariant, as that which remains self-same in the face of time and finitude, identity can organize and motivate a militant struggle for justice, such as that of Dessaline’s Black Jacobin Haiti, Césaire’s Négritude, or Fanon’s neo-Jacobin conception of an Algerian national identity, even when that struggle calls for and leads to the historical transcendence and irrelevancy (rather than erasure or destruction) of particular, racial, linguistic, or cultural differences, as it did in each of these cases. The problem of identity in the tradition of Caribbean Critique does not point to the abstract irrelevancy or falsity of any identity or even of ‘identity politics’, nor to furthering divisive localism and hierarchy. Rather, this problem demands that we analyze specific modalities in which Caribbean Critique has consistently and repeatedly conceived, mobilized, forged, and deployed novel identities strategically to advance the struggle for a politics of principle, the transcendental horizon of which has remained the pursuit of justice as equality.8

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 141

15/05/2013 08:44:35

142

Caribbean Critique

Given Glissant’s long-standing and problematic antagonism to universalism, we should consider whether abstract dismissal of all claims to identity can adequately account for Le Discours antillais’s enormous critical and specific (in Hallward’s sense of the term) insight into the modalities of traditional and late French colonialism. Surely ‘the great political task of our time’ must go beyond merely ‘articulating’ principles to engaging concretely (antagonistically, transformatively, relationally) with actually existing situations and worlds and the transcendental logics that structure them? A political reading of Glissant might begin by focusing on his concept of the ‘nation’. Glissant conceives of this as the expression of the conscious, general will of the people, a people subtracted from all race-, class-, and gender-based specification. This neo-Jacobin Martinican nation, like the Haiti of 1804 and Fanon’s Algeria of 1961, would be ‘made up of all those who, whatever their cultural origin or “way of being”, collectively decide to assert (or re-assert) the right of self-determination’ (Hallward 2001: 127). Beyond the model of the French Revolution, both the Haitian revolution’s implementation of a post-racial nation state and Fanon’s idealization of the coming Algerian nation in L’an V de la révolution algérienne can be taken as the paradigmatic postcolonial models of a universalist despecification from all identity-based politics in the field of Glissant’s concern. Hallward is right to critique the facile and depoliticizing conflation of culture and politics in postcolonial studies, but what remains to be described are those rare moments when a radically subtractive poetics inhabits and seconds a political plane of universal emancipation. In contrast to the radical infidelity of Senghorian neo-colonial cultural politics, Césaire’s was just such a subtractive poetry.9 Césaire explicitly modeled this twentieth-century universalism on the Haitian example; I argued that his understanding of the process of neo-Jacobin decolonization was grounded in the politics of figures like Toussaint and Schoelcher. Le Discours antillais theorizes a dialectical relay of culture and politics. The chapter ‘Action culturelle’ asks, ‘Why at any given moment should one privilege the practice of cultural production? When should it be replaced or relayed by political practice?’ (Glissant 1981: 209).10 While Glissant never spells out the answer to this question in Le Discours antillais, he offers a series of propositions that articulate the quasi-aporetic dilemma of the Martinican situation. The alienation of Martinican society is a structural fact, its social classes themselves the creation of French

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 142

15/05/2013 08:44:35

Édouard Glissant 143

colonialism meant to service its domination. In Le Discours antillais, this fact persistently reframes the problem of political intervention as always already recuperated or vitiated by the all-encompassing system of domination. A revolutionary Event is the horizon that points beyond this despondent situation, but in Le Discours antillais this horizon appears as a merely analytic (when not simply utopian) potentiality: ‘Only a readjustment of the status of the social groups relative to their [actual] function in the system of production, that is to say, in the end only an overthrow [bouleversement] of the system (or non-system) of production could potentially overcome the structural disorder of Martinican society’ (ibid.: 210). After recapitulating elements of this critique of Martinican alienation, Glissant ultimately casts the priority of cultural critique over political intervention as a voluntary choice, an axiomatic decision, an il faut: ‘it is necessary [il faut] to show here that alienation has a history – our history to which we have passively submitted’ (ibid.: 219).11 Glissant’s general theory of Relation culminates in the more specific concept of creolization, the infinitesimal, unpredictable, hybrid variations of all beings in their relatedness, in which actual instantiations constantly reconfigure the virtual becomings of this ‘tout-monde’ (Hallward 2006: 162, Britton 1999: 13, 16).12 As Chris Bongie has shown, while the Discours antillais pursues a multiform exploration of the relations inhering (or potentially inhering) between culture and the pursuit of (or rather, I will argue, nostalgia for) a properly political nationalist autonomy, Glissant’s project is not to collapse the two categories into the confused and even meaningless hybrid Hallward decries (‘cultural politics’), but, rather, rigorously to distinguish the two (Bongie 2008: 345). Any revolutionary event is novel insofar only as it is a repetition, albeit one with a critical difference. In this way, for example, the Haitian Revolution names the repetition of all Spartacusian slave revolts, as well as of the French Revolution, but with a critical difference. The Haitian Revolution is against those revolutions (as failures; as the white, male, European perpetuation of slavery) as it is against the actual plantocracy in place in Saint-Domingue. The failure to end slavery in 1789 lived on as a virtual truth, awaiting its actualization on the periphery of the agrarian capitalist world system. The concept of the event (événement) that is central to the logic of Glissant’s Le Discours antillais also unites the majority of post-Heideggerien French thinkers, as François Zourabichvili has observed: ‘The theme of the event sits today at the center of philosophical

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 143

15/05/2013 08:44:35

144

Caribbean Critique

preoccupations, it animates the most daring and original attempts’ (cited at Bosteels 2011: 177). This fact alone is merely a superficial commonality, as Zourabichvili warns us (‘But the spirit of a time does not in and of itself produce a philosophy and it should not mask irreconcilable differences’). Although Le Discours antillais offers a thorough postcolonial theory of the event, it is crucial to highlight what distinguishes it from other post-Heideggerian theories of the event. The concept of the event is central to Le Discours antillais. While a number of key sections of this disparate book are entitled ‘Evénement’, Section 22 of Book I, Part two (Le vécu antillais [Lived Antillean Experience]) is an excellent introduction to Glissant’s concept of the event. Glissant’s event is pre-eminently ‘a fact that is produced [qui s’est produit] elsewhere’ (Glissant 1981: 100). This sentence is key to understanding the different iterations of the concept throughout the text. An event in its strongest sense can be said to initiate the fundamental transformation of a world at the level of its most basic coordinates (say, in the passage from a slave-based society to a republic of citizens in Haiti after 1804, or from colonial abjection to independent citizenship in Algeria after 1962). Glissant tells us that events in Martinique are both foreign (they happen elsewhere, in the metropole), and not really events at all, in the strong sense, but rather mere facts, modifications, one might say, in the relations of beings that nonetheless change nothing in the basic structure of existence (who counts as a subject, say, or whether a society is organized around the principle of hierarchy and entitlement or a presupposition of equality). ‘For us’, in the situation of late colonialism that is Glissant’s Martinique, there are no events. Le Discours antillais may be Glissant’s most sustained political anticolonial intervention, but it engages this critique in the mode of lamentation and mourning. Le Discours antillais shares with Deleuze an understanding of the event as wound precisely insofar as its 500 pages undertake the burial of the anticolonial politics of the nation that Glissant inherits from Louverture (Monsieur Toussaint) and Fanon. For Glissant, contemporary Martinique is a colonized world, the apex and summation of French colonization, a world from which all events have been obliterated; the event reaches us, ‘here and in us’, only as an echo [retentit]. The event is thus not a wound, as it is for Deleuze, but a cut. Glissant describes it as a cut in our world; it ‘cuts us from the world’. ‘What is done in the world’, the way of the world amid colonial alienation, perpetually renews this cut in its every act. We feel this cut,

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 144

15/05/2013 08:44:36

Édouard Glissant 145

both as isolation, being cut off from the world, and as painful desire, longing, for the event: decolonization, nation. Glissant names this alienating and painful cut ‘culture’. Culture is the way of the (colonial) world on the symbolic plane. As it was more explicitly for Deleuze in the Logic of Sense (Deleuze 1969: 152), Glissant’s world of culture is the world of the Heideggarian ‘they’, a world of anonymous lack and disengagement: ‘Everyone gives themselves up to it [culture], these days’ (Glissant 1981: 100). Culture is the realm of the anti-event, of depoliticization, of neo-colonial ‘departmentalization’. This is a culture of consumption, underwritten and served up by (French) subsidy. Instead, the only mode or plane (‘plan’) in which culture would count, for an unfree community, is in seconding the process of decolonization and of ‘liberation and [the] capacity for the creation’ of new worlds (ibid.: 100). Glissant’s Martinicans are a colonized people, a people unable to ‘express’ itself in acts that would reveal all that it, as a single body, can do (ibid.). Instead, he describes ‘a mentally enslaved [asservi] people’, one for whom ‘there are no events’ (ibid.). Instead, they possess only ‘non-history’. This ‘non-history’, is as much the sanctimonious repetition of dates, events, and names, even the most ‘radical’ (the revolutionaries of 1802 Delgrès and Ignace), as it is the cloud of ignorance and the perpetual present of colonial alienation. Non-history is for Glissant, as for Deleuze, an absence of will: ‘the absence of any decision’ (ibid.). It is a perpetual immaturity and subservience, a place where decisions are always made elsewhere (in the metropole), by others speaking in one’s putative ‘name’ (though this name is never the name of an event, but only the wound of its renewed obliteration). In fact, culture (whether ‘plays or canticles or symphonies or marionettes’ derides Glissant) is a matter of pure indifference from the perspective of the Event and its eternal truth (ibid.). While distinguishing rigorously between such cultural commodities and true Events, Glissant adds to his list the ‘political party’. To propose another political party is to deny the event its autonomy. The political party, for Glissant, is merely one more item of alienated consumption to be distinguished from any properly political event. Culture, at least in this passage from Discours antillais, is not to be understood as ‘cultural politics’. To speak of a cultural ‘event’ would mean restoring to culture its evental dimension; in this late colonial world, culture is first of all the ‘cultivation [culture] of sugar cane’, and a ‘cultural’ event would precisely be the ‘reformation’ and reform of the structures of exclusion

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 145

15/05/2013 08:44:36

146

Caribbean Critique

and alienation therein (sugar cane, the ‘scandal of housing’) (ibid.). The Glissantian event, though impossible in Martinique, would go beyond any punctual, local reform. The actualization of an event, the conquest of political maturity, would refound a system as a nation. Its virtual dimension is that of the idea, the articulation of a transcendental that opens onto another world: ‘the whole system [must be] challenged by a theory that envisages its positive replacement’ (ibid.). Anything less would prolong the disease of Antillean consumption, dragging on a mortally wounded system surviving on overseas life-support (‘these acts do no more than encourage the persistence of the system’ [ibid.]). The only road to politics leads out of the city: ‘All critique within the system reinforces the system’ (ibid.). This eventless people is a people without a body. It is ‘cut off from the world’, without senses, ‘it does not see itself, and does not think itself: that is our most certain calamity’ (ibid.: 101). To constitute this body (politic) is thus the highest exigency in a context of ‘depersonalization and cultural genocide’ (ibid.). Culture is not to be confused with ‘political action’. And yet the realm of culture, in the light of the event ‘is important’. How, Glissant asks, can political action be ‘linked’ or ‘relayed’ with ‘cultural creation’? In a formulation that Glissant would abandon after Poétique de la relation, in so far as he would arguably adopt the latter as the creed of the Tout-monde, he concludes: ‘Here, we must reject two extremes: “cultural nationalism”, which satisfies itself with its own options and generally misrecognizes the fundamental, socio-economic aspect of the problem; secondly, a priori internationalism, which often ignores the concrete analyses of a given situation and substitutes formulas for analysis [exposés]’ (ibid.). The Burial of the Event: Le Discours antillais The single section of Le Discours antillais that I have just analyzed does not alone constitute a philosophy of the event on the order of Deleuze’s Logic of Sense or Badiou’s Being and Event. As a whole, however, Le Discours antillais organizes the despondent spectacle of the event as postcolonial nation as the passing of that dream. Glissant never names the positive images of the event as nation, but he holds to two images of the event throughout his work. These two events are primordial for Glissant and for the history of Caribbean experience: the founding of the Haitian nation in 1804 (which Glissant describes, nostalgically, in

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 146

15/05/2013 08:44:36

Édouard Glissant 147

the dreamlike images of his 1962 play Monsieur Toussaint) and the Algerian war. Glissant’s formative experiences in 1950s Paris during this war – when Fanon’s experience as an alienated Antillean who becomes Algerian, a subject of anticolonial freedom and neo-Jacobin, universal equality open to any human being – marked the younger Martinican indelibly. The liminal epigraph of Le Discours antillais is a citation from Fanon that names the book’s project as the ‘colossal task of the inventory of the real’ (Glissant 1981: 7). In the absence of any envisageable event, Glissant undertakes such an ‘inventory of the real’, a critique of Antillean existence without event. His critical inventory must begin, as the book’s first words assert, ‘From a blocked situation’. Glissant’s ‘à partir de’ is fundamentally ambiguous. In one sense it clearly asserts the author’s determination to explore without detours the contorted alienations and contradictions of the Antillean situation, to begin from the situation in which he finds himself in 1970s Martinique and its late, even ‘successful’, colonialism that forms a ‘web of nothingness in which [Antilleans] find themselves stuck today’ (ibid.: 11). In another sense, ‘à partir de’ also holds the promise of a break, invoking Césaire’s caesura in the Cahier, the celebratory ‘Partir!’ that initiates that poem’s final ascent toward the liberatory subjectivity of Négritude in its ‘immobile verrition’. The following lines of Glissant’s opening section evoke the suffering of the world, of ‘fearless genocides’ and the ‘liquidation’ of the ‘resistance of peoples’. In the face of this unending wound, Le Discours antillais offers hope as a formally empty, unmotivated utopian promise, the assurance ‘that one day men will perhaps stop, overwhelmed by the unsuspected insight into Relation that will exist within them – and then they will salute these stammering intuitions’ (ibid.: 13). Unlike the interventions of Louverture, Césaire, and Fanon, each of whom sought to effect a radical break in the colonial world, Glissant’s methodology in Le Discours antillais is critically ‘accumulative’. He offers analytical, critical description rather than concrete call to transform the world of Martinique, claiming that ‘accumulation is the most appropriate method to reveal a refractory reality’ (ibid.:13). And so Le Discours antillais begins its critical, infinite labor upon the untruths and blockages of the Antillean situation, describing a world in which the promise of any event has finally disappeared beneath the blinding reality of successful colonization. To evoke the event in such a context, as Glissant repeatedly does, can only mean the reopening of a ‘gaping cut [and] a painful break’: the Middle Passage, slavery, and subjection

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 147

15/05/2013 08:44:37

148

Caribbean Critique

to an overwhelming and all-determining French colonialism (ibid.: ibid.:18). Amid Glissant’s interminable critique of the Antillean Real, the Fanonian ideal repeatedly reappears, but only as utopian promise unavailable to Antilleans in the present: ‘But all peoples are born one day’, writes Glissant in the first pages of Le Discours antillais, ‘arduous self-definition of peoples who are born into their freedom in solidarity’ (ibid.: 20). In the face of this muted promise, Glissant discovers in Antillean actuality not the traces of events but rather the constancy of the Detour, the delusional acting out of the Antillean’s own ‘burial within assumed negativities’. In past situations of militant, violent, and ultimately successful decolonization (Haiti in 1804? Algeria in 1962?), Glissant asserts, ‘Detour is impossible where the nation was possible […] when the community confronted an enemy known as such.’ For Glissant, Detour names the mode of existence of a community whose domination and alienation remains unknown, ‘occultée’ (ibid.: 32). The forms of such Detour can include Creole, Vodun, Négritude, or emigration to the metropole; what they share in common is that they ‘lead nowhere’, that they open onto no possibility of (self-)overcoming [dépassement]. While Césaire’s Négritude held a degree of ‘sublimity’ that took it beyond mere folklore, it is Fanon’s experience, Glissant asserts, that remains the most ‘significant’ example of the Detour, haunting Le Discours antillais with the image of the lost, tragic promise of a truly decolonized, postcolonial nation (ibid.: 35). Glissant considers Fanon’s becoming Algerian the only true event in Antillean history (other pseudo-events, such as Delgrès’s 1802 revolt and the 1848 emancipation that stand instead as the sustained objects of Glissant’s melancholic critique). For Glissant, Fanon has been the only Antillean truly ‘passer à l’acte’ and to accomplish an event in the strongest sense of the word (‘not only to struggle, to revindicate, to deploy a contestatory speech, but fully to assume the radical break’) (ibid.: 36). Yet, Le Discours antillais quickly concludes that Fanon’s ‘passion algérienne’ remains tragically unavailable to the Martinicans; Glissant details the reasons for this tragic unavailability in the critical investigation his text unfolds. Thus, the first section of Le Discours antillais abandons or at least postpones anticolonial politics for a critique of Martinican political economy. This critique catalogues the ‘dispossession’ of Antillean subjects from means and entire modes of production (economic, cultural, linguistic, historical), an analysis of alienated work and pseudo-labor (the djob). Amid this despondent experience of colonial alienation, the

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 148

15/05/2013 08:44:37

Édouard Glissant 149

only events that capture the imagination are the catastrophic Caribbean punctuations of routine by sublime, natural terror: the cyclone, the earthquake, and the attendant disruptions to the supply of provisions from the metropolis (ibid.: 39). Glissant shows in painstaking detail that, by 1981, French colonialism in Martinique has successfully constructed not just a system but an entire mental habitus of ‘non-production’. This ‘néantisation’ is key to Glissant’s despondent conclusion that the creation of a Martinican nation is in fact impossible, in contrast to the independent states and cultural communities of Haiti or Algeria. From Glissant’s perspective in 1981, Martinique bears witness to ‘the impossibility of constituting labor conflicts as a mode of resolution with a national dimension’. In other words, the conflicts and contradictions of capitalism that in Marx’s classic analysis had compelled societies toward socialist revolutions of the proletariat are fundamentally inoperative in Martinique because there is no ‘real’ labor or production actually undertaken in the colony. In its place is only what Glissant calls ‘activity in suspension’: all goods are imported, not produced. Following the final collapse of the sugar industry after 1946, this ‘activity in suspension’ is a pseudo-economy of superficial services that include tourism and the colonial service by a peripheral bureaucracy beholden to Paris for its very existence (ibid.: 42). In the face of late colonial under-development and overwhelming dysfunction, Glissant holds out the utopian promise of a leap beyond this world – the voluntarist, quasi-miraculous ‘radical mutation of the mentality of assistance, the taking hold of a globally conceived economy, creative initiative, audacity’. Even the author finds himself unconvinced by this vision. Glissant quickly concludes that that ‘We will not escape from this dilemma’ (ibid.: 44). In Search of the Event: Delgrès, Matouba, and the Hysterics of Truth Insofar as Le Discours antillais offers a theory of the postcolonial event, the two primary instances that the volume proposes as events are surely the 1848 Martinican uprising of May 22 in advance of the promulgation of the French abolition decree, and Louis Delgrès’s 1802 revolt against Napoleon’s invasion to reinstate slavery in Guadeloupe, led by General Richepanse. The 1848 emancipation constitutes for Le Discours antillais the archetype of a pseudo-event, the mere ideological

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 149

15/05/2013 08:44:37

150

Caribbean Critique

promise of change that ultimately constituted no more than the passage from the slave-based mode of capitalism to that of wage-labor (Glissant 1981: 44–47). In painstaking detail, Glissant analyzes the French delegate’s obsequiously paternalist proclamation to Martinique that was read to slaves and planters on March 31, 1848. This text, under Glissant’s discerning eye, reveals the full range of the modes of alienation that would come to constitute Antillean subjectivity after 1848. Glissant makes a long list of these outrages, including the steadfast assertion that all authority resides – and all true change comes from – elsewhere and the racist clichés of happy black subjects grateful to the white liberators (ibid.: 46–47). While it is true that the slaves who heard this text read to them (in both French and a ridiculous pseudo-Creole that Glissant brutally dissects in a later section of Le Discours antillais) rejected its paternalism, Glissant argues that this gesture of rejection failed to ‘open onto radical liberation’ (ibid.: 47). In the final pages of Le Discours antillais, Glissant reaffirms that the May 22 slave revolt, in anticipation of the French emancipation decree, was, like its contemporary celebration, a ‘collective phantasm’, a revolt that, ‘as in all other cases’, would fail to initiate any ‘feeling [sentiment] of the nation’ and would instead merely initiate the alienated cult of French domination (via the figure of Schoelcher) (ibid.: 463).13 The first nominal case of an ‘event’ that Le Discours antillais investigates immediately follows this critique of 1848; Glissant refers to the 1971 protests in Martinique that lead to the death of a local student. While this contestatory sequence might well have initiated a ‘prise de conscience’, once again, what Glissant calls an ‘event’ ultimately amounted to no more than a ‘fait divers’: ‘A military truck passes by, young people on the sidewalk, the sound of a detonation, smoke, and then nothing’. This is a brutal death, certainly, even a ‘murder’, but ultimately one that remains banal, ‘dérisoire’ (ibid.: 54). The ‘event’ is here no more than a news flash. It is a tragic, derisory fact that is banally void of consequences. The text’s final example of an ‘event’ is even less substantial; it describes ‘a few strikes’ in which no one died and there was no protest as in 1802, 1848, or even 1971 as a mere ‘collective phantasm’ that swept the country in 1980. In the final pages of Le Discours antillais, this phantasm remains the culmination of the Martinican pseudo-event, ‘the phantasm of opinion, unmotivated by anything in the real’ (ibid.: 452). In the face of the banality of such pseudo-events, Le Discours antillais

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 150

15/05/2013 08:44:37

Édouard Glissant

151

offers a substantial critique of Martinican political economy. One of the text’s main themes is that conventional Marxist categories (proletariat, infra- and superstructure, and even the category of labor itself) do not apply to the island, given the specificity of late colonialism as a functioning system of non-production in Martinique. In place of the Marxist categories that he rejects, Glissant generates a series of novel critical categories. These include Glissant’s description of the artificiality of production (which takes place elsewhere – France) and of social classes themselves, given the fact of this absence of all productive labor, whether exploitative or egalitarian; the absence of all economic investment other than to support alienated dependency; the absence of accumulation (of capital, of technical means, of progressive investment and projects) and a corresponding fear of accumulation; and, finally, a general habitus of non-productivity. The result is a colonial system of ‘dispossession’, in which all social groups exist in insurmountable antagonism. The outcome of this dispossession is that systematic resistance becomes impossible, as does any Martinican nation, producing an existential and psychological state of universal ‘morbidity, ambiguity, confusion’ (ibid.: 57, 60, 171). Confronted by this profound dispossession of Martinican society, Glissant denies that any political solution might be forthcoming. He registers his denial by explicitly rejecting the vision of Antillean radical postcoloniality that Aimé Césaire had described in his 1948 speech celebrating Schoelcher and the centennial of the 1848 abolition. Here is Glissant: It is difficult today to subscribe to such assertions [as Césaire’s]. Because we know that political freedom was here a constant diversion [leurre]. That [in the wake of the 1946 departmentalization] the Martinican is neither a total citizen (he has no City) nor a true proletarian (but a ‘dispersed’ proletarian). (Glissant 1981: 66)

Glissant casts the historical phenomenon of the maroon slave, which might have served as a figure of resistance, as one more example of the futility of all resistance in a topography with no hinterland to support a culture of resistance (especially so when compared to the very different maroon traditions and experiences of countries such as Jamaica, Surinam, or Brazil) (ibid.: 69). Given these overwhelming factors, all momentary flashes of resistance have universally failed to sustain ‘the growth of the nation’ (ibid.: 71). This nation indeed remains throughout Le Discours antillais its only category of truth, the name for what

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 151

15/05/2013 08:44:38

152

Caribbean Critique

would be, or has been elsewhere (Haiti, Algeria), for others (Dessalines, Fanon), an event, but one that is impossible for Martinicans. Glissant can only describe what might constitute this nation by using the utopian tense of the conditional: ‘The national project should take into account these impossibilities, explain them, define the original status of this country, find relations that would resolve these “impossibilities”, open onto solutions within the greater Caribbean, put to work a strategy that would be both radical and patient, continuous and sudden’ (ibid.: 73). In the face of this historical ‘sterility’, of the absence of any true event that would initiate the construction of a decolonized nation on the model of Haiti or Algeria, Martinicans have only one historical event of comparable distinction to which to refer. Following the arrival to Guadeloupe of Napoleon’s General Richepanse in May, 1802, the Martinican Colonel Louis Delgrès refused to allow his troops to join the French delegation, correctly judging that the latter had come to Guadeloupe with the sole intention of restoring plantation slavery to the colony.14 The insurgent soldiers split off; one group remained under the command of the black leader Ignace to retreat to the center of the island, while Delgrès led a group of insurgents first to the Fort de Basse-Terre (today Fort Delgrès) and then to the Matouba plantation in the hills above Basse-Terre at the foot of Mount Soufrière, where he and his 300 revolutionaries blew themselves up along with many of their Napoleonic adversaries on May 28, 1802.15 After 1945, Delgrès’ revolt became the topos of a struggle to recover popular memory of an indigenous resistance to slavery and colonization in the French Caribbean. Le Discours antillais offers a compelling critique of this erasure [raturage] of collective memory. Glissant argues: when Colonel Delgrès blew himself up on Mount Matouba in Guadeloupe (1802), to avoid capture by 6,000 French soldiers encircling their camp, the noise of this explosion did not immediately resound in the consciousness of Martinicans and Guadeloupeans. Delgrès was vanquished a second time by the ruses of the dominant ideology, which succeeded for a time in denaturing the meaning of his heroic act and erasing it from popular memory. (Glissant 1981: 131)

While I have analyzed elsewhere the dynamics of Glissant’s critique of Antillean history, memory, and subjectivity, here I want only to interrogate the status of 1802 as event, what Glissant quite accurately calls a mere act. In other words, if Delgrès or Matouba is the proper name in Le Discours antillais of the prototypical Antillean event,

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 152

15/05/2013 08:44:38

Édouard Glissant

153

this is not merely because the history of Martinique has known no political sequences on the order of the Haitian or Algerian Revolutions. Delgrès and 1802 can designate the exemplary Glissantian event above all because the author of Discours antillais has a theory of the event, as I have argued above, but not of a constitutive truth that could be derived from any singular event. If the Fanonian ‘nation’ names the only transcendental category of truth in Le Discours antillais, it is a truth under erasure, a vanishing truth, one the book itself puts to rest as the ultimately futile, unattainable dream of decolonization. In the face of this absence or mortification of truth, Delgrès is Glissant’s figure for the speculative cry of an Antillean ultra-leftism, a radical, apocalyptic explosion that seeks in an infinite desire for emancipation to ‘split the world in two’ in the flash of a moment, to adopt Nietzsche’s famous phrase, within an unsurpassable situation of the tragic unavailability of the means to pursue the realization of this desire.16 For Glissant, Delgrès names this tragic struggle of ends without means, the only outcome of which is death. For Glissant, the Delgrèsian event remains a pure acting out, the aesthetic of an expressive intensity devoid of political consequences; the explosion on Matouba that ended Delgrès’ still-born revolution would on the contrary open the way for the reimposition of slavery from 1802 to 1848. By this measure, if the 1848 protests in Martinique were impressive but devoid of consequences, Matouba counts all the more as the ultimate degree of an Antillean sublime, of a Martinican explosive acting out. Neither of these events (1802/1848) qualifies as consequential, in the sense of uniting a militant, national community struggling to realize the consequences of an initial uprising (as an incipient nation). Delgrès’s proclamation itself retains a properly hysterical character of futility that inflates the assertion of its truth in the proto-Romantic Sturm und Drang of a mere poetics of revolt.17 Delgrès’s proclamation is the aesthetic cry of a universal insubordination against slavery and racial hierarchy, addressed to ‘the entire universe!’ Delgrès’ resistance on Mount Matouba names the struggle to efface the objectivity of slavery, to initiate a revolutionary subjectivization, and to forge an emancipated Antillean nation, one that can do no more than echo beyond 1802 as the mere aesthetic sublime of the explosion and the axiomatic decision of an incipient subject not to submit to the Napoleonic order. It is not only Delgrès, the subject of 1802, who is divided between an allegiance to revolutionary France and the imperatives of 1789 and the 1794 abolition that Napoleon had

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 153

15/05/2013 08:44:39

154

Caribbean Critique

long before betrayed. The communal figure of the One, the unity of this Antillean group-in-rebellion and nation-in-potential that literally divides into two, as the mixed-race Martinican Delgrès and the former black, Guadeloupian slave Ignace separate their troops in the midst of the revolution. Delgrès’s cry is the last desperate attempt to prevent not only the reimposition of slavery, but the triumph of the Napoleonic, imperial meta-order of French slavery that would persist another half-century. If Delgrès names the refusal neatly to suture the falsity of the Napoleonic ideological order, the limitation of 1802 in Martinican history may be its status as an explosive, insubordinate act in an objectively blocked situation devoid of all other alternatives (unlike the contemporary dynamics of revolution in neighboring Saint-Domingue). Delgrès and the revolt that bears his name failed to place a measure on the infinite excess of the Napoleonic state order, to contain that order within the limits of universal rights, so Delgrès is a striking contrast to other leading figures of Caribbean Critique from Louverture to Césaire. Louverture, in his 1801 constitution following upon the 1791 revolt in Saint-Domingue, Victor Schoelcher in the 1848 abolition law following the French revolution of that year, Césaire in the 1946 departmentalization law in the wake of the doctrine of Négritude, even Aristide in the struggle for an egalitarian political structure in Haiti after 1986 – each crucially advanced the struggle to unfold the consequences of an ephemeral, explosive event, to articulate within a political sphere the various implications of the singular events to which they were subject. Ultimately, Glissant concludes that the tragedy of Martinican colonialism is the degree to which it rendered impossible any radical transcendence of colonial alienation, disappropriation, non-production, and development. In this sense, one might classify the French-Martinican soldier Delgrès both a subject faithful to the truth of 1789 like Louverture and an objectively obscurantist subject. Delgrès explicitly affirmed the truth of universal emancipation from slavery and racial hierarchy, but the objectively blocked situation to which he remained tied obscured the truth of an Antillean militant subjectivity for generations to come; this is the point of Glissant’s critique of 1802 in the ‘Histoire, histoires’ section of Le Discours antillais. The event of 1802 is ultimately the mere algebraic of an aesthetic intensity devoid of any truth (as nation). This is why it comes to stand, in Glissant’s Le Discours antillais, as the prototype of the Martinican event. Glissant describes the Antillean world as a monotonous universe of alienation and subjection to French hegemony

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 154

15/05/2013 08:44:39

Édouard Glissant

155

on every level – discursive, linguistic, cultural, political, economic – one that is no doubt occasionally punctuated by rare, explosive events (1802, 1848, 1971) that hold out the empty promise to shatter the world in two. This potential is quickly and apparently inevitably reabsorbed as the echoes of these events dissipates into the Antillean hills and forests. Glissant, a disciple of Fanon, clearly recognizes that every singular truth requires a forceful, subjective affirmation on the part of its subjects to unfold its consequences in the world it reveals in untruth. The tragedy of Delgrès is that this affirmation did not carry behind the hills of Guadeloupe’s Basse-Terre and lasted not longer than a in month 1802. It bore not fruit but the suffering of its subjects who would conclude their plea as an address to ‘posterity! Shed a tear for our sorrows, and we will die satisfied’.18 By this reading, Delgrès’s self-immolating revolt reveals why the theory of non-violence is so dysfunctional and even suicidal in the face of unrestrained imperial violence like that of Napoleon or Fanon’s Algerian colonialism (‘We are resolved to defend ourselves’, Delgrès writes, ‘but we will not become aggressors’). Because they were not so much unwilling as unable (owing to their small number) effectively to resist the reimposition of slavery, those African Americans of Guadeloupe and Martinique who fought Richepanse’s troops were slaughtered, while the remaining Antillean community found itself subject to forty-six more years of plantation slavery in all its violence and misery. Such is the pathos of the Glissantian event, the pure counter-example to C. L. R. James’s Black Jacobinism and to Fanon’s and Sartre’s affirmation of the absolute necessity of anticolonial violence in Algeria in Les Damnés de la terre. In a marginal aside to Le Discours antillais, Glissant appears to ascribe to a Fanonian concept of the necessity of anticolonial violence. He observes that ‘the collective unconscious of Martinicans […] is the negative result of non-consummated communal experiences’, and lists among these the absence of any ‘constructive [résolutoire] collective violence’. The models for this constructive collective violence are surely, if implicitly, Dessaline’s Haiti and Fanon’s celebration of the creation of a decolonized Algerian subject. Le Discours antillais offers no general theory of anticolonial violence on the order of James, Fanon, or Césaire, but it does offer a complex typology of the singular forms of violence that operate in the Martinican situation. In the section entitled ‘Violence, Identity, and Political Practice’, Glissant describes the hidden forms of violence of the system itself: economic exploitation, self-directed violence as alienated acting-out, the

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 155

15/05/2013 08:44:39

156

Caribbean Critique

‘compulsional’ violence of the political system, and the neurotic violence of a refused reality that culminates in the willfully chosen ‘psychotic violence’ of the radical choice of ‘insanity’ [folie]. To consider the complex status of a politics of the event in Édouard Glissant’s work is to grapple with the problem of the decolonization as a politics of principle. This grappling opens onto a renewed notion of the ‘postcolonial’ that is no mockery of the victims of colonialism. Glissant sustains the promise of decolonization as that of tragic loss, attending to the promises and the failures of decolonization as the intellectual and political inheritance of Caribbean Critique.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 156

15/05/2013 08:44:39

part ii

Critique of Caribbean Violence

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 157

15/05/2013 08:44:39

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 158

15/05/2013 08:44:39

chapter six

Jacobinism, Black Jacobinism, and the Foundations of Political Violence Black Jacobinism

If critique denotes in the Caribbean tradition the struggle to bring together a transcendental position of analysis and judgment over a given situation, with the effective means to intervene within that situation for its transformation, the promise of a critique of Caribbean violence is to allow us to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate violence, to sort and discriminate (from the Greek krinein) the rightful expression of power from the proscribed categories of illicit domination. If Kantian critique sought to establish and police the borders of legitimate reason, the critique of Caribbean violence has repeatedly rejected the transhistorical demarcation of the a priori conditions of reason, pure, moral, and aesthetic. Kant’s critique of reason is a court of justice, by which reason may secure its rightful claims while dismissing all groundless pretentions […] according to its own eternal and unchangeable laws; [this critique is] only negative, serving not for the amplification, but only for the purification of our reason, and for keeping it free from errors. (Kant 1997: 101, 133)

For Kant, critique is the tribunal overseeing the faculty of reason, the three critiques, the restrictive compendium of law, preventive and limitative in its function. Within this system, Kant’s defense of the French Revolution, described above, cogently refuses the legitimacy of any and all popular revolt, whether with democratic or reactionary intent, to reaffirm the sole legitimacy of the law itself, grounding his defense of 1789 in the quasi-miraculous exception of Louis XIV’s abdication of sovereignty (in calling the États généraux) rather than the popular revolts of July 1789 or August 1792.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 159

15/05/2013 08:44:39

160

Caribbean Critique

The lived experience of plantation slavery made any respect for the law on the part of the enslaved absolutely unbearable. C. L. R. James’s description is still unsurpassed: Though one could trap them like animals […] stable them and starve them, they remained, despite their black skins and curly hair, quite invincibly human beings. To cow them into the necessary docility and acceptance necessitated a regime of calculated brutality and terrorism […] There was no ingenuity that fear or a depraved imagination could devise that was not employed to break their spirit and satisfy the lusts and resentment of their owners and guardians – irons on the hands and feet, blocks of wood that the slaves had to drag behind them wherever they went, the tin-plate mask designed to prevent the slaves’ eating the sugar cane, the iron collar. Whipping was interrupted in order to pass a piece of hot wood on the buttocks of the victim; salt, pepper, citron, cinders, aloes and hot ashes were poured on the bleeding wounds. Mutilations were common, limbs, ears, and sometimes the private parts, to deprive them of the pleasures which they could indulge in without expense. Their masters poured burning wax on their arms and hands and shoulders, emptied the boiling cane sugar over their heads, burned them alive, roasted them on slow fires, filled them with gunpowder and blew them up with a match; buried them up the neck and smeared their head with sugar that the flies might devour them; fastened them near to nests of ants or wasps; made them eat their excrement, drink their urine, and lick the saliva of other slaves. […] These bestial practices were normal features of slave life. (James 1989: 9–10)

Here was violence, in its most terrible forms, transmuted into a regime, upheld by the rule of codified law, both before and after 1789, regularized and standardized, rationalized and reified. This was the world that continued its horrid existence unchecked in the years after 1789, a regime of ultra-violence rarely equaled in human history. Where was moderation in this world, respect for human dignity, the social contract, even the faintest recognition that slaves were human subjects at all? The violence of Caribbean plantation slavery knew no Kantian limits, and enforced its domination not only on enslaved bodies, but equally through the constant attempt to throttle enlightenment and to keep slaves in perpetual ignorance. If the slaves of Saint-Domingue had meekly respected this enlightenment order, they might have awaited many generations before their so-called masters, from Condorcet, Grégoire, and the so-called Amis des noirs to planters’ Club Massiac, decided, if ever, that they were ‘fit’ for freedom.1 The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, in its

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 160

15/05/2013 08:44:39

Black Jacobinism 161

generic prescription, opened the possibility for any and all to consider themselves subjects of universal emancipation and equality. In place of the proscriptive patrolling of the borders of reason and its legitimate usage – the Parisian bourgeois voice of reason that refused to consider Caribbean slaves as subjects of emancipation until long after they had asserted that right autonomously (1794) – Caribbean enlightenment initiated the ‘ruthless critique of everything existing’ (Marx) as early as August 29, 1791, in the great uprising in Northern Saint-Domingue, an event that destroyed the world of plantation slavery in a night of violence and devastation. Caribbean enlightenment pitted these former slaves as the articulate, uncompromising voices of universal, Black Jacobin emancipation, against the lawful police order of bourgeois moderation, patrolled for revolutionary capital by the likes of Antoine Barnave. In the world of Atlantic slavery, no moderate, Arendtian or Habermasian dialogue of reasonable subjects was ever possible, when the very humanity of slaves as autonomous beings was a priori banned from consideration. After 1789, only a violent intervention into the Atlantic slave order could hope to overthrow that world and its transcendental coordinates that formally banned African slaves from ever counting as subjects of emancipation. Only the violent destruction of a system bearing a total monopoly of the legitimate violence codified in the Code noir could hope to institute a world in which such violence would be immediately and universally banned, without qualification, as first occurred in Toussaint Louverture’s 1801 constitution. The Haitian Revolution was emphatically the destruction of a normative worldsystem, one that legitimized the enslavement, debasement, and torture of millions of Africans in New World slavery. It was no expression of unreflective, barbaric savages, but the expression of the radical enlightenment in its highest and most far-reaching manifestation, under the categorical imperative of universal justice as equality, the will to count each and every human being as one: not one piece of cargo on the slave ship, one quantum of pure labor bought or sold on the American market, but a single sujet de droit, a human being à part entière. This was justice as equality, succinctly stated by Badiou as the axiom that ‘everyone is referred back to their choice, and not to their position’ (Badiou 2009: 26). The transcendental critique of Caribbean violence is the struggle to lay bare the foundations of this rightful violence, to sort its expression from the illegitimacy of the world of plantation slavery destroyed by Louverture over the course of a decade in fidelity to the spontaneous

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 161

15/05/2013 08:44:40

162

Caribbean Critique

event of August 29, 1791. This critique of Caribbean violence, following Benjamin’s famous initiative, refused above all the jeremiads of constituted state power and its monopoly of legitimacy (‘you are slaves, exceptions to the prescriptions of the Rights of Man’), to affirm that, in its radical disjunction from the order of power, ‘the violence of an action can be assessed no more from its effects than from its ends, but only from the laws of its means’ (Benjamin, cited at Hanssen 2000: 22). Robespierre and the Foundations of Political Violence If Toussaint Louverture was the articulate voice of a Black Jacobin revolt that refused, categorically, to live in a world in which slavery was the order of the day, the precursor to the egalitarianism of universal emancipation is clearly the Jacobin revolutionary order, defined in Robespierre’s call for the execution of Louis Capet on December 2, 1792. Robespierre’s famous words are the direct negation of all legalistic moderation and its attendant police-order of the spirit: ‘There is no trial to be held here. Louis is not a defendant. You are not judges. […] You have no sentence to pronounce for or against a man, but a measure of public salvation to implement’ (Robespierre 2009: 57). Robespierre argues that Louis Capet’s continued existence, as he had proven by his secret collusion with foreign powers to overthrow the Republic, and, more immediately, in his flight to Varenne, had proven that his continued existence as a ‘deposed king’, could mean only one thing: the continued mortal threat to liberty, equality, and the nascent French Republic. If Louis could even be put on trial, this would be to assume his possible innocence, and, hence, ‘if Louis can be presumed innocent, what becomes of the revolution?’ (ibid.: 58). The crucial diacritical distinction Robespierre draws in this worldhistorical speech is itself the basis for any possible critique of violence: to argue that Louis can be tried as a citizen is to fail to distinguish between a society under the universal prescription of the social contract and the state of nature previous or exterior to it: ‘You are confusing the situation of a people in revolution with that of a people whose government is soundly established. You are confusing a nation that punishes a public official while conserving the form of the government, with one that destroys the government itself’ (ibid.). The citizens of a state under the universal, abstract rule of a social contract can all be tried legitimately, and the democratic state can hold a lawful monopoly of violence, allowing it to institute, chief among its highest accomplishments, the

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 162

15/05/2013 08:44:40

Black Jacobinism 163

proscription of capital punishment (‘I ask for the death penalty to be abolished’, Robespierre points out, ‘in the Assembly you still name Constituent’ (ibid.: 64)). The only contradiction in Robespierre’s arguing for both the execution of Louis Capet and the abolition of the death penalty is a temporal one; the society in which the tyrant finds his place is that of the ancien régime, with its infinite variations on corporal punishment, lettres de cachet, and code noir. But for a state that would succeed the general inequality and iniquity of the ancien régime, where capital punishment would be banned under the rule of the universal rights of man and citizen, Robespierre argues, the citizen Louis Capet must be executed, since his continued existence is a mortal threat to the constitution of that state of equality. Robespierre’s conclusion is compelling in its urgency: You are demanding an exception to the death penalty for the one individual who can justify it. […] A dethroned king in the middle of a revolution which is nothing unless consolidated by the laws, a king whose name alone calls down the scourge of war on the disturbed nation: neither prison nor exile can render his existence harmless to the public good. (Robespierre 2009: 64)

Robespierre’s general logic is clear, and it is, moreover, identical to that of all thinkers of the radical enlightenment from Rousseau to the late Diderot, Hegel, and even Kant: the overthrow of slavery and tyranny is justified, by force if need be against its mortal enemies, because no social contract barring that violence can be conceived to have been agreed to between a master and his debased, bestialized slave. 2 Only in overthrowing the slave-holding order, turning the state of a world into an ‘ancien régime’ relegated to the past, can a rule of justice as equality exist in which the ultra-violence of slavery itself is categorically proscribed. Robespierre’s speech is a call to radical enlightenment by those whose faculty of reason has been blunted by continued subjection to the logic of slavery (whether metaphorical or literal): ‘We have so long stooped under the yoke [of despotism] that we have some difficulty in raising ourselves to the eternal principles of reason’. Robespierre’s argument, contemporary to the 1792 letter of the former slaves of Saint-Domingue analyzed in this book’s Introduction, is thus its complement and the founding text in a defense of divine – rather than monarchic-mythical – violence that would culminate in Benjamin’s 1921 essay: ‘Anything that refers to the sacred source of all law seems to us to take on an illegal character, and the very order of nature seems to us a disorder’ (Robespierre 2009: 59).

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 163

15/05/2013 08:44:41

164

Caribbean Critique

Robespierre, Capet, and Divine Violence Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Critique of Violence’ turns on the fundamental distinction between what he calls ‘mythic’ and ‘divine’ forms of violence. 3 I wish to dwell at some length on Benjamin’s text; though it is not addressed to the experience of colonial or plantation violence, it offers the most powerful interpretative logic with which to initiate a critique of these forms of violence at the heart of Antillean experience. Benjamin’s text seeks to determine the relation between law and justice, and, in particular, under what conditions (if any) and what transcendental criteria violence can serve as the proper means to an end. While law tells us only whether any act of violence is legitimate, whether, in other words, an action conforms to or violates a law, Benjamin seeks to find a criterion to judge violence as a means, irrespective of its ends. Benjamin in fact begins his essay by equating the Jacobin Terreur with ‘natural law’, in perfect conformity with Robespierre’s argument in his speech of December 2, 1792 that the capital punishment of Capet is just because it occurs in a pure state of nature before any possible social contract and institution of the state (Benjamin 1996: 237). Such a formulation points to the continuity between Spinoza, Robespierre, Louverture, and Benjamin’s understanding of right, which each names as the constituent assertion of rightful action independently of any external, transcendental legitimation. Louverture, to take his example, steadfastly refused to limit the right of revolt of the former slaves of Saint-Domingue, in his letter to the Directory of 1797, before the threat of a return to slavery and debasement that would necessarily fall outside any conceivable social contract including, above all, that of the republican France of the universal rights of Man and Citizen.4 While Benjamin initially dismisses natural law as random and criterion-free, he will end up in fact affirming its justice in ‘Critique of Violence’, though reworked as the voluntarist concept of ‘divine’ violence: not the mere mechanistic play of the order of nature, but the militant decision to destroy constituted authority and law itself, outside of any legitimation bestowed by a state or social contract. If for Benjamin ‘mythic’ law refers to constituted law (as in a legal code), a law legitimated by its sublime aura, divine violence, ‘lethal without blood’, names the destruction of mythic law by the oppressed (Benjamin 1996: 250). This is a violence that can only be judged a posteriori, since, as a true revolution, it will create the conditions for its legitimacy (a democratic state without capital punishment, for example, or a state

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 164

15/05/2013 08:44:41

Black Jacobinism 165

without slavery) after its constitution. This divine violence affirms that there is something higher than the mere preservation of existence that is the telos of the mythic, but that it takes place instead as the articulation of an idea or principle (ibid.: 251). Divine violence is thus the suspension of state power (of the ancien régime for Robespierre, of the Code noir and the plantation for Louverture) that founds a new ‘historical epoch’ or world. Robespierre’s speech of December 2, 1792 initiated such a divine violence, describing the revolutionary republic in its struggle to institute a new political order with its corresponding unprecedented rules of order and counting: ‘When a nation has been forced to resort to the right of insurrection, it returns to the state of nature in relation to the tyrant. How can the tyrant invoke the social pact? He has annihilated it. […] The effect of tyranny and insurrection is to break [the nation] entirely where the tyrant is concerned; it places them reciprocally in a state of war. Courts and legal proceedings are only for the same side’ (Robespierre 1996: 59). The existence and sovereignty of the constitution that ensures the generic equality of the rights of man, of all human beings before the imperatives of justice as universal equality, Robespierre argues, is made impossible by the continued existence of the former king and the order of the ancien régime he represents and defends in his every measure; Louis Capet thus stands outside that social order and compact, irrevocably. ‘It is a gross contradiction to suppose that the constitution might preside over this new order of things; that would be to assume it had itself survived [this state of war]’. In this struggle to institute the world of universal rights, only the state of nature remained, and the outcome of this struggle would determine whether that world would regress back to the limitless tyranny of the old order or institute in its place ‘the salvation of the people’ (ibid.: 59). The Terror of Equality C. L. R. James’s postulation of a ‘Black Jacobinism’ in Haiti, never clearly described in the book of that name, identifies the universalist politics of justice as equality as a global phenomenon. As historians such as Jean-Pierre Gross have shown, the short-lived Jacobin experiment not only invented what would become a century and a half later the Western welfare state (an initiative quickly dismantled by Thermidor and the Directory in its threat to privilege), but exported, as an abstract political

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 165

15/05/2013 08:44:42

166

Caribbean Critique

logic, the most uncompromising image of egalitarian justice at the very same time that it denied abolition in the name of economic survival. The terror that an independent Haiti inspired demands further interrogation. For terror has stood as the principal referent in the disavowal of revolutionary action and its attendant violence since Burke’s famous denunciations of the French Revolution. The ritualistic denunciation of revolutionary terror has become so banalized and reflexive, from Burke to Furet, that even relatively sympathetic historians of Jacobinism utterly misrecognize its meaning. Neither the French Terreur nor the violence of the Haitian Revolution can, I would argue, be a matter of external judgment, of distanced, dispassionate observation. Rather, each possesses its own incommensurable political logic that can and must be critically understood. Robespierre, Olympe de Gouges, Toussaint Louverture may all have been subjects of 1789, but each pursued singular and irreconcilable political struggles under the transcendental, yet immanent, norm of the ‘Rights of Man and Citizen’. 5 The politics of each were, viewed under the heterogeneous logic of each other, incomplete and partial (in every sense of the word), yet each undertook a politics in fidelity to the transcendental prescription of universal equality. This norm of equality was transcendental not in an absolute, Kantian sense – that is to say, transcendental to all human reason – but remained available immanently, to any human who in fact encountered it as an enunciation in the public sphere, and chose actually and actively to refashion themselves into its subject. Terror is not torture. The instantaneous execution of Capet was the absolute negation of the supplice of Damiens or the multitude of legally tortured slaves Pompée de Vastey describes in Le Système colonial dévoilé. The classic, excruciating descriptions of plantation torture of enslaved bodies in C. L. R. James, Vastey, and their theorization in Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death, stand alongside the archetypal account of ancien régime tortures of the supplice in Foucault’s Surveiller et punir; these and other accounts all underscore the horrendous violence and suffering of these various forms of mythic, legitimate, state violence (authorized and codified by regulations such as the Code noir). This systematized brutality must be set in absolute contrast to revolutionary terror. Indeed, Foucault’s masterful analysis of disciplinary torture might itself be read as an explication of Benjamin’s concept of mythic violence. If in the ancien régime, as Foucault states, ‘The ceremony of punishment is an exercise of “terror”,’ Foucault’s scare quotes precisely

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 166

15/05/2013 08:44:42

Black Jacobinism 167

underline the distinction between ancien and Jacobin terror; it was the accomplishment of the latter, one might say, to have subtracted all torture of subaltern bodies (it was the aristocracy, Foucault reminds us, who enjoyed the privilege of instantaneous decapitation) from the act of punishment (ibid.: 49). This Jacobin terror without torture undoubtedly itself played what Foucault calls (speaking only of its torture-based predecessor) a ‘juridico-political function’. If this function, for Jacobins and Black Jacobins as it had been for Versailles, was in Foucault’s words ‘to make everyone aware […] of the unrestrained presence of the sovereign’, the key distinction, one might reply to Foucault in turn, is that after 1792 (in France) and 1804 (in Haiti) this sovereign became the ‘terrifying’ reality of undivided popular sovereignty and justice as equality, standing in absolute opposition to the sublime body of the king and its various courtly appendages as much as to the sovereignty of the Code noir (ibid.: 49). If the essential scene of Jacobin terror was the decapitation of Capet, the classic moment of Black Jacobin terreur was the promulgation of the Haitian declaration of independence, the proclamation to the world-system of Atlantic slavery of a post-racial, post-slavery ‘black’ state in the heart of the plantocracy. This was truly a moment of divine, bloodless, law-destroying violence, shattering, literally (if only in one geographically tiny site) and symbolically (as a new world of socio-political constitutionality) the foundations of the modern Atlantic political economy. Simply put, the disparagement of the terror of the French and Haitian Revolutions, has, in this view, from Burke and Thermidor all the way to the contemporary ‘war on terror’, always amounted to nothing more than the ‘terror’ felt by an entitled, propertied elite at the imminent threat of the loss of their privilege and possessions. As such, the related problems of terror and violence go to the heart of our ability to understand the political radicality of both the Jacobin and Black Jacobin revolutions. Hegel, of course, seems himself a Burkean reactionary, when he equates terror with abstraction in the Phenomenology. Far from limiting Terror to those few months of 1793 and 1794 when it was nominally in force, Hegel expands the concept of Terror to make it the very definition of the Revolution itself (Comay 2010: 76).6 As it had in the earlier master–slave dialectic, terror and dread are the affects that dissolve the reified solidity of an unjust world. If, in the former, this process was merely individual, in the later analysis of the French Revolution (in the section ‘Absolute Terror and Freedom’), Terror names the mortal dread

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 167

15/05/2013 08:44:42

168

Caribbean Critique

that seizes a moribund society, the ancien régime of feudalist iniquity and hierarchy. The Terror is for Hegel ‘the destruction of the actual organization of the world’ (ibid.: 359), and readers of Hegel have become so deadened by the repeated invocation of the famous description of the guillotine as ‘the coldest and meanest of deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of a cabbage’ (ibid.: 360), that one might be forgiven for assuming that Hegel’s conclusion is, as he writes, that the outcome of revolutionary Enlightenment as abstraction is ‘the death that is without meaning, the sheer terror of the negative that contains nothing positive, nothing that fills it with a content’ (ibid.: 362).7 This, in fact, is far from the dialectician’s final word, even in this section of the Phenomenology. The section actually continues for another page and a half. What Hegel does conclude of the Terror is that the meaningless death, the unfulfilled negativity of the self, changes round in its inner Notion into absolute positivity. […] What vanishes for it in that experience is abstract being or the immediacy of that insubstantial point, and this vanished immediacy is the universal will itself which it now knows itself to be in so far as it is a pure knowing or pure will. (Hegel 1977: 363)

As Susan Buck-Morss has urged readers to do for the master–slave dialectic, one should take this passage to refer at least as much to Haiti as to France: the Haitian Revolution is precisely this vanishing of the abstract critique of slavery, as well as it negates the insubstantiality and inconsequentiality of the actually existing slaves of colonial Saint-Domingue, who came to know themselves as the truth of ‘pure knowing’, the ‘pure will’ that was the creation of Haiti in 1804 against all historical odds and disbelief.8 Hegel, as commentators from Ritter to Rebecca Comay have not tired of reminding us, pursued from the beginning to the end of his public career a philosophy of human freedom, and like Kant before him unequivocally affirmed the French Revolution as the quintessential moment of that struggle for the modern world. Hegel’s Terror, then, must be understood as much to be the violence of the Haitian Revolution as that of the European Jacobins. Each progressed insofar as they forced what Hegel unambiguously calls ‘absolute freedom’ to ‘remove the antithesis between the universal and the individual will’. In fact, reading the closing lines of Hegel’s analysis of ‘Absolute Freedom and Terror’ in this fashion, it appears that Haiti gains the upper hand in the struggle

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 168

15/05/2013 08:44:42

Black Jacobinism 169

for human freedom, insofar as in this moment, Hegel tells us, ‘absolute freedom leaves its self-destroying reality’, the Thermidorian France of oligarchic privilege and entitlement, ‘and pass[es] over into another land of self-conscious Spirit where, in this unreal world, freedom has the value of truth’ (Hegel 1977: 363). If everything remained to be done in Haiti on January 1, 1804, if Hegel’s affirmation of revolutionary terror as abstraction described no more than the destructive event itself and not the painstaking unfolding of its consequences, this limitation points to the contradiction at the heart of Hegel’s equation of Terror as abstraction with the entirety of the Revolution itself. On the one hand, simultaneously to equate Terror with abstraction is to negate the common cliché that both white and Black Jacobins, Robespierre like Louverture, were bloodthirsty barbarians. But there is no such thing as a politics of mere affect, the evocation of a fear of equality for monarchs and slave owners alike. The politics of principle of Robespierre and Louverture went beyond mere sentiment and affect to re-found the very the standards of inclusion in a world: the measure of who counts or does not count in a society, and, even more, of who shall determine the transcendental criteria of inclusion themselves. Terror in the political struggles of the 1790s was merely a liminal insurgence, the enforced turning, overturning, and destruction of a previous state of general terrorization, one that stopped the ancien terror in its tracks, the sublime terrorization of intransigent ancien régime violence itself. If Jacobin Terror, whether black or white, was by this measure right, Hegel, it seems to me, is wrong to assert that it constitutes the truth of the revolution in its entirety. A mere politics of affect may serve a strategic point at key moments of counter-revolution, but the process of abstraction pushes beyond mere terror, and must be equated quite simply with a politics of undivided, universal, and immanent Truth.9 The Black Jacobins and the Dialectic of Violence Among the great accomplishments of C. L. R. James’s Black Jacobins is to have mounted for the first time a vigorous defense and justification of the revolutionary violence of the Haitian Revolution. In the face of near-universal denigration of this event as the work of bloodthirsty savages, James affirms the unity of the struggle for justice as equality based upon the universal, color-free principles of liberty and

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 169

15/05/2013 08:44:43

170

Caribbean Critique

equality, and their pursuit in the revolutionary politics of abstraction of Louverture and Dessalines. And yet, James’s defense of Black Jacobin violence is punctual and even muddled, at odds with the systematically rationalist, colonial enlightenment thesis of the book. Three passages in Black Jacobins illustrate this shifting and somewhat uncertain defense. The first occurs early in the key chapter ‘The San Domingo Masses Begin’, which describes the initial mass uprising of August 1791. The passage initially affirms the ‘tireless’ destruction of the insurgent slaves as an unspecified ‘salvation’, a thoughtless and reflexive lashing out against the immediate manifestations of oppression, human and material, before their eyes. ‘They were seeking their salvation in the most obvious way’, James writes, ‘the destruction of what they knew was the most obvious cause of their sufferings’ (James 1989: 88). James’s enslaved masses are unthinking, displaying no understanding of the structural, systemic causes of their subjection and suffering. Their exertions, immediately and simplistically reflexive, short-circuit all rational reflection: ‘if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much’. This is no more than the most basic rationality of the if/then calculation of the most rudimentary computation. And yet, the passage goes on to affirm a minimal awareness and reflection that goes at least as far as the eye can see: ‘They knew that as long as these plantations stood their lot would be to labor on them until they dropped’. That said, this proviso remains only the most basic, binary form of reflection, projecting thought, imagination and planning no further than the negative, binary erasure of such visible signs: ‘The only thing was to destroy [the plantations]’. This mass violence, if legitimate in James’s eyes, is no more than the most primary justice of vengeful retribution. ‘From their masters they had known rape, torture, degradation, and, at the slightest provocation, death. They returned in kind’. This initial moment of the revolution was, James concludes, an unthinking ‘frenzy, in which “Vengeance! Vengeance!” was their war-cry’. This initial reflex-based automatism is only the weakest defense of revolutionary violence, and James hardly strengthens it by concluding, without evidence, the insurgents were relatively ‘moderate’ insofar, James observes, as ‘the cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty’ (ibid.: 89). Quite different is James’s presentation of Louverture’s call to a just revolutionary violence. Toussaint’s call to a war of total, slash-and-burn guerrilla violence, occurs in his famous letter to Dessalines of February 8, 1801. The call to violence is no less total than that of the insurgent

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 170

15/05/2013 08:44:43

Black Jacobinism 171

slaves of a decade before. ‘Do not forget’, Louverture writes to his lieutenant, that we have no other resource than destruction and fire. Bear in mind that the soil bathed with our sweat must not furnish our enemies with the smallest sustenance. Tear up the roads with shot; throw corpses and horses into all the fountains, burn and annihilate everything in order that those who have come to reduce us to slavery may have before their eyes the image of that hell they deserve. (James 1989: 300)

If the invocation of violence is equally total, its defense unswerving and categorical, the logic of this defense is, in James’s reading, utterly opposed to that of the unthinking masses. For Louverture’s affirmation is not reflexive, but proleptic. The visionary Louverture is not reacting, amoeba-like, to a painful stimulus against which he lashes out, but sees forward in time to a future reimposition of slavery. His imaginative vision encompasses by this, perhaps tragically late, point, an understanding of slavery as a world-system. The consciously elaborated tactic of guerrilla violence is the result of an all-knowing, enlightened calculation. Above all, Louverture invokes in his call to general violence a concept, an abstract universal, the full negativity of which perhaps he alone, in James’s narrative, is able to grasp: slavery. If this concept is inextricable as much from the lived experience of the lash and the general regime of plantation torture, the Louverture James describes abstracts from this earlier experience, and possesses moreover a greater power of abstraction than all others involved in the struggle, above all the shortsighted Napoleon and his fellow strategists. If James goes on, in the final pages of Black Jacobins, to disparage the unjustified, merely reflexive retributive violence of Dessalines’s 1805 massacre of whites as mere ‘revenge’, a practice, James writes, which ‘has no place in politics’, as ‘purposeless massacres [that] degrade and brutalize a population’, the contradiction with his earlier defense of the masses’ 1791 uprising is blatant (ibid.: 373). If the Haitian Revolution was a politics of principle from start to finish, the forms this rationality took in the long and twisted course of those years were many. If Louverture, like his metropolitan Jacobin colleague Robespierre, was among the most articulate rationalist politicians of the 1790s, the Idea of universal emancipation, of justice as undivided and immediate, immanent equality circulated throughout the Atlantic world in the form of asubjective, despecified truth statements such as ‘tous les hommes naissent et demeurent égaux en droits’. This was the asubjective Idea

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 171

15/05/2013 08:44:44

172

Caribbean Critique

that animated and legitimated the destruction of plantation struggle in Saint-Domingue from the night of August 29, 1791 to its instantiation as a materialized, fully formed concept first in Toussaint’s inaugural 1801 constitution, and finally on the dawn of January 1, 1804. To reject James’s muddled defense of revolutionary violence without retreating to the shelter of the established and righteous rule of law, would be to assert that the Idea of universal emancipation, that destroyer of worlds, moved beyond all limits in the 1790s, beyond all state-based attempts to monopolize so-called ‘legitimate’ violence, beyond the confines of its formulation by any single subject, no matter how ‘world-historical’, to reappear in incommensurable situations and worlds, no matter how seemingly unfree or abject.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 172

15/05/2013 08:44:44

chapter seven

The Baron de Vastey and the Contradictions of Scribal Critique The Baron de Vastey

As scholars, including Laurent Dubois and myself, have argued, it was revolutionary Saint-Domingue that remained faithful to the Jacobin ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity in the wake of Thermidor and the rise of Napoleon and his administration’s ever-increasing determination to reimpose slavery upon the peripheral French colony. The events of the Haitian Revolution, Dubois writes, were ‘the most concrete expression of the idea that the rights proclaimed in France’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen were indeed universal’ (Dubois 2004: 3). Following the defeat of the French and the declaration of Haitian independence on January 1, 1804, however, this revolutionary project of universal emancipation and transnational abolitionism was immediately placed in a paradoxical double-bind. Sibylle Fischer has described in vivid terms the ‘extraordinary challenges the new state was facing in a world where slave-holding was the rule’ (Fischer 2004: 227). Indeed, across the Atlantic zone of economies still fundamentally dependent upon slave-based plantation labor for the extraction of surplus profit, Haiti’s mere existence as a slavery-free state was immensely threatening, and neither France nor the United States would extend diplomatic recognition to it for decades to come. As Deborah Jenson has shown in great detail (Jenson 2011: 81–224), France actively plotted to reinvade Haiti from the moment of its shocking defeat in 1804 through its eventual extortion of diplomatic recognition in 1825. Following the Bourbon restoration in April 1814, France made ever-increasing threats to reconquer Haiti with a new military invasion in order to reaffirm its hegemony over the territory and to reconstitute

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 173

15/05/2013 08:44:44

174

Caribbean Critique

plantation slavery, as it had in Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1802 In this context, the fragile and isolated young Haitian state was forced to retract any and all claims to export antislavery beyond its borders. It did so in order merely to consolidate and preserve the limited, if worldhistorical, accomplishments of the revolution itself, in order, that is to say, to dissuade the Atlantic powers from re-invading in the aim of reimposing plantation slavery.1 In Modernity Disavowed, Fischer brilliantly decodes the working through of this paradox of Haitian independence in the dialectic between the explicit anti-intervention clauses in the young state’s various constitutions and their more or less implicit, subversive offers of a post-racial citizenship to the Atlantic African diaspora. 2 The writings of Henry Christophe’s famous scribe and incipient postcolonial theorist the Baron de Vastey, I wish to argue in what follows, are not only another privileged site of response to this direct and very real threat the young country faced, but remain subject to contradictions analogous to those Fischer identifies in the various Haitian constitutions. Indeed, Vastey himself explicitly reiterates similar assurances of non-intervention in his writings. In his 1817 Réflexions politiques, for instance, he describes Christophe’s Haitian state in idyllic terms that predicate this will to insularity upon Haitian’s social contentment: happy and satisfied to live in peace on our island, content with the destiny the master of the universe has laid forth for us, we bear no ambitions upon what belongs to other peoples; all our efforts strive toward the perfecting of our social state and the assurance of our preservation. We limit ourselves to wishing for the happiness of humankind, without exception of color, country, or nation, and to living in peace and happiness at home, a felicity that we wish to the entire world. (Vastey 1817: xii–xiii)3

Like the constitutions that Fischer analyzes, the writings of the Baron de Vastey undoubtedly comprise a site for the acting out – if not the conscious working through – of this paradox. For Vastey, this paradox takes the form of a scribal critique forced to mediate between a violent and uncompromising denunciation of historical slavery, colonialism, and the various contemporary threats to Haiti’s fragile independence and, at the same time, a reading of the present lacking the positive emancipatory vision called for by the universalist antislavery that, as Vastey himself repeatedly underlines, is the very raison d’être of the Haitian state. Instead, Henry Christophe’s scribe retreats in his writings from a defense of the militant, universalist antislavery of Louverture and Dessalines to a conservative defense of the independence and mere

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 174

15/05/2013 08:44:44

The Baron de Vastey 175

self-preservation of his country.4 Black Atlantic universalism, no longer a politics of right, retreats in Vastey’s texts to its more constrained discursive modality, a black Atlantic revoicing of the Kantian call for a free and global public sphere of enlightenment. Doris Garraway has recently argued in a study of Vastey that the universalism of the Haitian Revolution and its immediate aftermath should be not only grasped in its progressive dimensions, but, as well, interrogated for the many paradoxes and contradictions that structure its deployment (Garraway 2012). Following her critical distinction between intensive and extensive universalist discourses, I want to suggest that Vastey’s writings themselves are structured by a series of analogous paradoxes. At the level of its intensive rhetoric and ideology, in its vociferous critiques of colonialism, slavery, and neo-colonialism, Vastey’s logic bears the mark of internal contradictions (between Europe and its periphery, civilization and barbarism, subjection and freedom), while at the same time it is structured from without, in the last instance and beyond the idiosyncrasies of Vastey’s own stylistic voice, by the contradictions of Haitian autonomy. 5 These various structural determinations limit the political or extensive scope of these texts; in other words, they limit Vastey’s political doctrine to the conservation of the fait accompli of Haitian independence. Correlatively, Vastey limits the concept of Haitian antislavery to its merely discursive (rather than transnational military or diplomatic) recapitulation and defense in the Atlantic public sphere as the historical memorialization of the inaugural struggle for freedom in Saint-Domingue alone. Vastey and the Invention of Caribbean Critique Vastey’s 1814 Le Système colonial dévoilé is undoubtedly the founding major work of a tradition of thought this book calls Caribbean Critique. In what follows, I wish to contextualize Vastey’s interventions within the development of this tradition, drawing particular attention to the complex circumstances of their composition, the conditions that forced Vastey into a number of contradictions on both historical and logical levels. Le Système colonial pursues a Caribbean tropicalization of the critique of European colonialism initiated by the Haitian Revolution itself. It expands this process of writing back to Europe from its periphery initiated by a series of Atlantic and black Atlantic texts critical of racism, slavery, and colonial violence. These include Diderot’s

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 175

15/05/2013 08:44:45

176

Caribbean Critique

critiques of slavery and colonialism in Raynal’s Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes, abbé Grégoire’s 1808 De la littérature des Nègres, and the epistolary interventions in the public sphere of the Age of Revolutions of figures such as Louverture and Dessalines. The letters and proclamations of Toussaint Louverture, Louis Delgrès, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, notwithstanding their brevity and situated nature, initiated this peripheral critique of slavery and the imperative of its revolutionary destruction by the colonized that Vastey would develop in his principal works: Le Système colonial dévoilé (1814), Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères (1816), the Réflexions politiques (1817), and Essai sur les causes de la révolution et des guerres civiles d’Hayti (1819). Louverture, Delgrès, and Dessalines, of course, were involved in a revolutionary struggle as soldiers and politicians; the public sphere was thus only one, if a nonetheless essential, arm in their struggle against plantation slavery and colonialism. It is Vastey, however, the scribe (as Chris Bongie has called him) and public intellectual in the service of Henry Christophe, who undertakes in his works a sustained critique of plantation slavery and colonialism.6 Vastey follows on the model of Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes in calling for a systemic, global view of colonialism, radicalizing as well that famous text’s vehement denunciations of slavery in the famous series of articles penned by Diderot.7 Vastey articulates a bivalent rhetoric of critique: on the one hand, at certain moments the author seeks to place himself in abstraction from the empirical immediacy of the experience of slavery and colonialism, in order cognitively to map the totality of its function in the Atlantic world of his time, while, on the other hand, offering elsewhere in his text detailed and even excruciating testimony to the actual suffering of the enslaved. It is this duality that marks at once the originality and limitations of Vastey’s thought and of Le Système colonial in particular. Vastey, as his title indicates, clearly intuits the systemic nature of colonialism as a global structure. And yet, beyond a few scattered reflections, one would look in vain in Le Système colonial for even a moderately detailed description of the operations, forms, and relations of global colonialism. As a quasi-systemic critique, Vastey envisions colonialism as a homological structure, with various, multiple modalities of function that roughly correspond to the colonial spheres of influence: Spanish, British, French, Portuguese, each articulated distinct colonial systems (Vastey 1814: 19). And yet, when it comes to defining the characteristics of each, these in fact turn out to be quite vague features

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 176

15/05/2013 08:44:45

The Baron de Vastey 177

of authoritarian systems throughout history: ‘la violence, le vol, la rapine et la perfidie’ [violence and theft, pillaging and lying] (ibid.: 23). Vastey, writing from peripheral Haiti, without major research libraries, intellectual communities of debate and discussion, and, above all, time, was forced in the few brief years preceding his death in 1820, in the face of Haiti’s ever-imminent recolonization and resubjection to slavery, to improvise a constitutive critique of colonialism and slavery as global systems. In the wake of Vastey’s premature death, this undertaking would have to await figures such as Eric Williams, C. L. R. James, Sartre, Fanon, and Wallerstein to carry through a scientific formalization of colonialism and slavery in the twentieth century. Marx had the library at the British Museum, a European community of socialist thinkers, and, above all, half a century to begin to construct a systemic and scientific critique of capitalism in the three volumes of Capital. Vastey clearly intuits a determining structure beneath the blinding immediacy of colonized experience, but does not manage in his works even to build on the systemic analysis of colonialism in Histoire des deux Indes, and is obliged instead to rely on first-hand experience – of slavery and colonial violence, of the Haitian Revolution, and of French neo-colonialism after 1804 – in constructing a postcolonial critical apparatus that ultimately might be called an ideological war machine rather than a scientific critique.8 This critical apparatus depends, crucially, as Kant first argued, upon a transparent public sphere of expression. Kant’s critical, journalistic polemics on the legitimacy of the French Revolution described above – in such essays as ‘The Contest of the Faculties’ and ‘On the Saying “While that may be true in theory it is of no use in practice”’, his attack on Edmund Burke – are the most direct predecessor of Vastey’s attempts to defend the legitimacy of the Haitian Revolution and post-1804 state on the stage of global opinion. Kant’s defense of the French Revolution and its struggle against the European forces of reaction affirms the sole legitimacy of post-revolutionary republican law against all efforts to reinstate the ancien régime in a manner that announces Vastey’s repeated critiques of French attempts to recolonize the territory they continued to call ‘Saint-Domingue’. Following the defeat of the Jacobin republic and its replacement by the oligarchies of interest that were Thermidor and the Empire, Vastey, scribal defender of an embattled Haitian state that dared to stand alone in the Atlantic world of its day in proscribing slavery for all human beings, takes up this Kantian mantle of the defense of human dignity and freedom in the global public sphere. Public opinion, writes Vastey in the

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 177

15/05/2013 08:44:45

178

Caribbean Critique

Réflexions politiques in impossibly idealistic and yet visionary terms, is ‘the queen that governs the civilized world, calling to her tribunal kings and peoples, dictating to them her impartial and irrevocable judgments, a … force independent of all human powers, one that spans time and space, embracing the past and future, extending her invisible empire over the entire universe’ (1817: xvi). Doris Garraway has forcefully argued that Vastey’s universalism is hobbled by a Eurocentric understanding of the civilization that is in Vastey’s logic the object not only of Haitian but of all human progress. Vastey repeatedly condemns the barbarity of European civilizations, all the more powerfully to underscore the progress of the Haitian nation of former slaves, and yet, in adopting a single, undifferentiated concept of (universal) civilization, as Garraway remarks, ‘Vastey both aligns himself with the culture of his [French] critics and presumes the universal validity of its standards of value’. In this narrative of universal history, Garraway claims, ‘there can be but one civilization’ (Garraway 2012: 13). Indeed, in Le Système colonial, Vastey frequently presents a critique of civilization normed not to universal concepts but to cultural behavior. Of the colonizers of the Americas, he writes: Tell me now, how do those savages from Africa compare to the Gauls, whom Tacitus and Cæsar have described to us as clothed in the skin of animals, with long beards and disheveled hair, feasting on the spoils of the hunt, armed with clubs and arrows? Idolatrous druids. Human sacrifices. Children burned in wicker baskets, offered as a holocaust to their god Teutates. People who deified mistletoe, who mercilessly cut the throats of any strangers unlucky enough to have been shipwrecked on their shores, and did the same to their prisoners of war. People who roamed about the forests, wandering from one region to the next. (Vastey 1814: 20)

Even today, Vastey notes, ‘there are any number of bastardized, degenerate peoples of white race from which you can pick: species of men who are sunk in the most complete ignorance; others who are coarse and cruel, plunged in barbarism, selling one another’ (ibid.: 21–22). Such passages, deploying the very logic they seek to critique rather than referring to any norm (such as liberty or justice) beyond the specificity of their iteration, undoubtedly reveal the limitations of Vastey’s rhetorical invective. While Garraway’s point is thus certainly valid, I think it is important nonetheless to differentiate between the universal human potential to progress toward communities based upon universal principles such

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 178

15/05/2013 08:44:45

The Baron de Vastey 179

as justice, reason and the humane treatment of our fellow beings, and civilization, whether in the singular or as the development of heterogeneous, non-identical cultures. For Vastey repeatedly defends the singularity and even incommensurability of the Haitian historical experience and people. In Réflexions politiques, for example, he writes of ‘the story of a people as interesting as the Haitian people’. It is not merely the extensive universalism of the revolution, as Garraway argues, that Vastey underscores in this instance, but ‘our mores [mœurs] and habits’ (Garraway 2012: xxii). The Haitian people are, Vastey argues, utterly heterogeneous to the French, ‘two distinct and separate peoples, possessing opposing national spirits, interests, and politics’ (Vastey 1814: 11). Vastey, in other words, defends an increasing sensibility and awareness of the universality of the human right to freedom from slavery as a marker of civilization or ‘enlightenment’ itself, while simultaneously underscoring the incommensurability of Haitian culture (‘mores and habits’) in its distinction from those of Europe and of France, above all. Haiti and the Radical Enlightenment The radical Enlightenment was no mere European phenomenon, but instead became a revolutionary force when it was taken up in the Caribbean by figures such as Louverture and Vastey. Le Système colonial is clearly one of the most extraordinary texts of this uncompromising critique of constituted, legitimate authorities and their attendant monopolies of violence and terror. Vastey repeatedly asserts that his goal is to carry ‘le flambeau de la vérité’ [the torch of truth] (Vastey 1814: 22) in order to ‘enlighten’ (éclairer) his readers and ‘unveil the truth’ of this brutal system to those who are ignorant of this structure of violence or who might still defend it (ibid.: viii). Vastey’s argument proceeds by a rhetoric of exemplification rather than logical theorization; his rhetorical assemblage seeks to find and express ‘des exemples de férocité et de destruction’ [examples of savagery and destruction] (ibid.: 3) that will forge the reader’s conviction of the injustice of this system of enslavement that, in 1814, was still widely believed throughout the Atlantic world to be a justified necessity for the economic expansion of the colonial nation states. Like Vastey’s other major works, Le Système colonial wields all the rhetoric of enlightenment critique: a vocabulary of ‘humanity’ and ‘the rights of man’ stands beside a defense of ‘liberty

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 179

15/05/2013 08:44:46

180

Caribbean Critique

and equality’, and the invocation of these egalitarian axioms in a ‘siècle de lumières’ [an enlightened century] ((ibid.: 30) that culminated in the French and Haitian Revolutions. In his passionate and irrepressible critique of global colonialism and slavery, Vastey is the first colonial intellectuel engagé, a forefather to this noble Francophone tradition of figures such as Zola, Sartre, and Fanon. If Vastey was undoubtedly a scribe pushing the agenda of Christophe’s beleaguered monarchy, his ‘independence’ was to stand in the face of the slave-holding world, one that continued after 1804 to maintain the justice and necessity of colonial slavery. In this sense, Vastey sustains a number of traits characteristic of the Jacobin and Black Jacobin projects. His writing betrays a defensive urgency, arising out of Haiti’s fragile independence after 1804, repeatedly threatened with reinvasion if not by Napoleon then by successive French neo-monarchs, subject to political and economic embargo and denial of diplomatic recognition that would culminate in the infamous French extortion of 1825. Vastey’s argument against colonial slavery grounds itself on a politics of principle that steadfastly maintains the truth that slavery is a monstrous denial of universal human rights. In his Réfléxions politiques, Vastey underscores the centrality of principles to his political thought. In questions of political doctrine, he writes, ‘one must always start with principles’ (remonter aux principes) (Vastey 1817: 28). Vastey, like Kant, considers enlightenment to be a historical process of universal scope: ‘Enlightenment and civilization have penetrated everywhere, and even among a horde [troupeau] of slaves’, he argues, so governments will be obliged to follow ‘the principles of reason, humanity, and justice. … The primary goal of tyrants (and such were the ex-colonists) is to bestialize [brutifier] men, to make slaves of them, while ours is to enlighten them, to make of them free men!’ (ibid.: 28–29). While ‘justice’ could undoubtedly stand as the common name given to the primordial principle of political ethics, whether by Louverture, Vastey, Schoelcher, or Césaire, it is clear that Vastey sustains a notably conservative understanding of this principle. Vastey’s political doctrine grounds itself upon the legitimacy of popular sovereignty, but only retrospectively, as the rightful foundation of the Haitian Revolution’s overthrow of plantation slavery from 1791 to 1804. Insofar as the Haitian state actually exists, the primary political goal Vastey pursues is not the extension and propagation of antislavery as a universal sequence but the security of an independent Haiti in a threatening international context. His ‘political reflections’ thus take the form of explicitly ‘conservative

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 180

15/05/2013 08:44:46

The Baron de Vastey 181

principles’, a doctrine devoted, in the words of that text’s dedicatory epistle, to the ‘security, freedom, and independence of this Kingdom’. What C. L. R. James famously termed ‘Black Jacobinism’ in his classic study of the Haitian Revolution names the political modality of this Caribbean radical Enlightenment typified by figures such as Louverture and Dessalines: the revolutionary struggle to institute a novel social structure oriented by the principle of justice as universal freedom from enslavement. It is less than clear, however, whether, in their wake, Vastey’s writings and Le Système colonial in particular should be counted as a work in this Black Jacobin tradition. Vastey unquestionably abandons the egalitarianism of a universal and axiomatic antislavery (that is to say, for all humanity, and not just Haitian citizens) characteristic of the Black Jacobin struggle. David Nicholls, in his pioneering study of Vastey, ‘Pompée Valentin Vastey: Royalist and Revolutionary’, maintains that Vastey was steadfastly opposed to the idea of social equality: ‘The only kind of legitimate equality, [Vastey] maintained, is equality before the law’ (Nicholls 1990: 112). Vastey, a scribe writing to defend Christophe’s postcolonial monarchy, wrote in this vein that ‘equality consists only in equality of rights before the law; any other form is imaginary and absurd’ (Vastey 1819: 82; cited ibid.). This was the purely formal, legal equality of Thermidor, the abstract equality that Marx would critique so brutally in texts such as ‘On the Jewish Question’. Vastey and his employer Christophe, moreover, stand radically opposed to the entire radical tradition of intellectual engagement against social hierarchy and exclusion that is perhaps best typified in the classic figures of Spinoza and Sartre. The paradox of this vehement defender of abolition and the absolutely equal ineligibility of all humans for enslavement simultaneously defending the intensive inequality of hereditary monarchy and authoritarianism culminates in Vastey’s manipulation of the example of the United States in his defense of Haitian independence. In the Réflexions politiques, Vastey argues that the enormity of Haitians’ suffering under slavery and colonialism is so much greater than that of the United States, whose revolution was merely a ‘revolt’ against ‘imposed taxes and trade restrictions’ (1817: 47). The Haitian right to independence must in fact be judged infinitely superior to that of the United States ‘when one compares their grievances to ours, to the loss of personal, civil, and political liberty with which we were threatened, to the massacres, tortures, and horrible sufferings we experienced […] to the injustices and tyranny beneath which we groaned for centuries’ (ibid.).

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 181

15/05/2013 08:44:47

182

Caribbean Critique

While Vastey’s denigration of the United States’ revolution as a mere tax revolt certainly underscores the extensive universality of the cause of Haitian antislavery from 1791 to 1804, his scribal silence regarding the cause of militant, transnational antislavery after 1804 forces on him a contorted logic of comparison, obliging him completely to silence and disavow the continued existence of slavery in the United States. Vastey describes these revolutionary ‘Americans’ – quite astoundingly for someone so sensitive to the plight of slaves and ‘Africans’ (a group in which he repeatedly includes himself) – as ‘free, property-holding white Englishmen’ who ‘enjoyed their natural, civil and political rights’ (ibid.: 49). Vastey’s ‘Americans’, in other words, are uniformly white, Haitians ‘African’ to a one. ‘Haitians were African or Creole [natifs], blacks and slaves’, Vastey continues, ‘without country, without property, stripped of their natural, civil and political rights, Haitians were what one calls civilly dead [civilement mort]’ (ibid.). While this is undoubtedly a prescient description of what Orlando Patterson has called the ‘social death’ of slavery, Vastey’s support of Haitian non-intervention puts him in the position of silence regarding its contemporary existence in the United States, rhetorically erasing all racial heterogeneity in a vision of a purely ‘white’ United States and an absolutely ‘African’ Haiti. Universal Emancipation? The distinction between extensive and intensive universality, which Doris Garraway adapts from Étienne Balibar, is deployed in her analysis to distinguish between the global scope of claims to universalism that would encompass all humanity (as in a process of universal emancipation of all humans from slavery) and the intensive demands of a community such as the Haitian peasantry and its systematic rejection of the constituted authority of the post-independence elite. Here, I would disagree somewhat with Garraway’s claim that ‘the extensive universalism of Haitian revolutionary claims to freedom was matched by an almost complete lack of an intensive dimension in the early history of Haiti’; this is true only if, as Garraway rightly points out, one limits consideration to ‘a tradition of political authoritarianism from the very inception of the project of radical antislavery’ (Garraway 2012: 7). While certainly true insofar as such an argument goes, this top-down view of Haitian social structures leaves out of consideration a compelling body of recent work on rural Haitian society – the

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 182

15/05/2013 08:44:47

The Baron de Vastey 183

so-called moun en deyo excluded from the post-independence elite – that has described the complex articulation of stateless egalitarian social structures that actively resisted for at least a century the delegation of power to representational structures both within and without their local communities.9 While ‘Haitian revolutionary leaders’ may well have left ‘largely unexplored the ways political freedom might be effectively achieved’, the same cannot be so easily said, I think, about the vast majority of the population itself (ibid.: 9; my emphasis). It may well be the case, as Garraway perceptively argues, that the extensive discourse of universal rights actually and paradoxically supported the ‘social and political subjugation’ of the mass of the Haitian population (ibid.: 19–20),10 but, here again, the problem lies not with the concept of universal emancipation, but rather with the ideological use to which it was put by leaders such as Christophe and his scribe Vastey. Garraway’s focus on the paradoxes of universalism is salutary in the context of recent affirmations of the singularity of the Haitian Revolution (and particularly apt, as I am arguing here, in the case of Vastey’s writings). That said, it is one thing to point to the various paradoxes of both the concept of the universal and the struggle for its instantiation, but quite another, however, to claim that the universalist orientation of the Haitian struggle for emancipation was itself a cause of Haitian authoritarianism, an authoritarianism Garraway claims to have been ‘supported in large part by the very universal categories in which it [emancipation] was proclaimed’ (ibid.: 4). I would argue that it was less the universalist claims of Haitian universalism that in any way caused a turn to authoritarianism on the part of its various leaders. Rather, it was the various structural paradoxes and limitations of the fight for universal emancipation in an Atlantic world-system dominated by the practice of colonialism and plantation slavery that motivated figures such as Louverture, Dessalines, and Christophe to opt, rightly or wrongly, for authoritarian practices in the struggle to ensure the survival of a fragile and weak slave-free society as what one might call the bastard concept of universal emancipation in one state. Extraordinary degrees of authoritarianism and injustice existed in Haiti after 1804, just as they had, in different forms, before the great uprising of 1791 under plantation slavery. What had changed, and what can be lost to view when focusing on the putative paradoxes of universalism itself, is the enormous structural shift between an ancien régime society in which slavery, colonialism, and its attendant forms of hierarchy, torture, and violence were fully legal and admissible (as defined and regulated

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 183

15/05/2013 08:44:48

184

Caribbean Critique

by colonial legislation such as the Code noir) and a society that had an entirely new and unique measurement of social justice against which authoritarian figures such as Christophe and Petion were to be judged and held accountable in their practices of governance. The paradoxical actions of Louverture and Vastey bear a chiasmic relation. For if Louverture, as James and others have argued, remained tragically faithful to the idea of 1789, of the rights of man and justice as equality, even as the actual French nation moved decisively after 1794 and Thermidor toward the reinstatement of slavery, Vastey, one might say, remained faithful instead to the actual slave-free Haitian state, while his structural position as Christophe’s scribe obligated him – no matter whether in good or bad faith – to defend various ancien régime ideologies including hereditary monarchy and its attendant forms of authoritarian inequality. Indeed, one senses that Vastey could well have defended any form of government, so long as it sustained a slave-free state, and he even implies as much when, in the Réflexion politiques, he writes that ‘people prosper under every form of government, when those who hold the reins are wise, just, enlightened and forthright’ (1817: 71). Vastey and the Critique of Caribbean Violence C. L. R. James’s descriptions of the horrors of plantation slavery are notably prefigured by Vastey’s invective against the horrors perpetrated on the plantations of Saint-Domingue. While the 1814 Le Système colonial focuses its descriptions on the horrors of the slave regime, his next work, the 1816 Réflexions supplements this with descriptions of the violence of the revolution itself. Its concluding section brings that work in its final pages to an apocalyptic finish: ‘We saw our fellow citizens, our friends, our relatives, men, women, children, old and young, with distinction of neither age nor sex, tortured by these monsters, some expired in the fire’s flames, other attached to the gallows were fodder for birds of prey, still others were given up to the dogs to be devoured while the luckiest perished before the blows of daggers and bayonets’ (Vastey 1816: 95). Vastey narrates the evacuation of black soldiers who had fought for the French, along with their wives and children, who no sooner boarded the ships than they were clamped in irons: ‘each night these barbarians brought a few hundred of them to the bridge, where they were tied, gagged, and thrown into sacks, often with children’, whereupon they were ‘stabbed through the sacks and thrown into the

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 184

15/05/2013 08:44:48

The Baron de Vastey 185

sea’ (ibid.: 96). In painstaking detail, he describes how he witnessed an auto-da-fé in Cap français organized by the French General Michel Marie Claparède, a veteran of Napoleon’s Army of the Rhine who was a member of Leclerc’s expedition: Claparède orders the pyre to be lighted. The fire catches immediately, and the victims’ feet are set aflame. Already we imagine they are crying out, that they must be writhing in their horrible torments. But no! What Stoic courage! What rare intrepidity! Immobile, not even their feet move, their gaze fixed ahead, they endure their execution and the fire that devours them. Quickly enveloped in flames, their bodies melt, the fat flowing onto the pyre, a thick smoke rising with the smell of grilled flesh. … A feeling of hatred and vengeance arises in the heart of the distraught Haytian [dans le cœur de l’haytien consterné]. (Vastey 1816: 98–99)

As Vastey’s final comment indicates, the intent of incorporating such graphic descriptions into his narrative is quite different from that of James, who wrote over a century after the events he describes. Vastey is both ocular witness and engaged in a vehement defense of the violent struggle of the Haitian Revolution, the achievements of which were by no means secure in 1816. From graphic descriptions of plantation violence in Le Système colonial to others such as these testifying to the extreme violence of the revolutionary period, Vastey’s concern is to defend the justice of the Haitian struggle in the first person, as witness and participant. ‘Wearied by so many crimes and such infamy, we took up arms. We measured ourselves against our executioners … to preserve our freedom, our existence, and that of our wives and children’ (ibid.: 103). It is the memory of such terrible violence and horror that justifies Haitian independence itself, that confirms ‘we have the right to liberty and independence, which we conquered at the price of such blood and sacrifice’ (ibid.). While James is concerned with presenting to the world the disavowed history of the Haitian Revolution, recovering it for the twentieth century and the nascent anticolonial struggle in a time when the Haitian’s state’s mere existence was no longer in question, Vastey seeks instead to justify the very right to existence of Haiti. A critique of violence is central to Vastey’s project, distinguishing the unjust terror of slavery from the just Haitian struggle against slavery at all costs from 1791 to 1804. Le Système colonial initiates this critique of colonial violence that will be carried through by C. L. R. James and Frantz Fanon. Vastey’s writings as a whole unfold this process as a double movement. First, a powerful condemnation of the utter illegitimacy of colonial domination and its ‘legitimate’, lawful violence as the torture of

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 185

15/05/2013 08:44:48

186

Caribbean Critique

enslaved bodies. Secondly, in texts such as the 1819 Essai, Vastey mounts a vehement defense of the rightful nature of the Haitian destruction of plantation slavery. ‘In order to destroy this System so deeply enrooted by time and prejudice, there were but two methods,’ Vastey writes in his Essai. Either gradually, by the will of the oppressors, or else despite them, through violent shocks that would necessarily entail a struggle fraught with crime, blood, and destruction, spread across many years. The latter would be sudden and violent, a conflict originating with the oppressed, contrary to the wishes of our tyrants and engendering a bloody and protracted clash between the oppressed and their oppressors, pregnant with crimes, carnage and horrors. This is what occurred. (Vastey 1819: 5)

Le Système colonial proceeds as a veritable genealogy or archeology of colonial violence and its attendant suffering and destruction. Speaking of the genocidal destruction of Native Americans, Vastey calls our attention to ‘ces débris qui attestent l’existence d’un peuple qui n’est plus’ [these shards bearing witness to the existence of a people who no longer exist] (Vastey 1814: 3). A description of the origins of the slave trade points to the contingent, willful nature of this historical violence, and the author urges his proslavery readers to consider the debasement of their predecessors, proclaiming: ‘Unrighteous man, or demon, whoever you might be! Gaul, German, Saxon, take up your history book, read the story of your origins, observe the customs of your ancestors, look upon what you were and what you are today’ (ibid.: 20). In this understanding, humanity is unquestionably a developmental and fluid concept rather than an essence. Progress, while indexed to a universal norm of enlightenment and freedom, bears for Vastey no absolute necessity. Le Système colonial repeatedly underlines the contingency of such development: any community can move toward enlightenment or utter depravity at any moment. In a similar vein, Le Système colonial mounts a critique of ‘sophism’. Our cruel enemies will still allege that civilizing Africa is impossible; they will argue that those wild savages will massacre the missionaries and that, in any case, the African having no aptitude for knowledge, it would be a fruitless undertaking, so much wasted effort. Wretched sophists! [Misérables sophistes!]. (Vastey 1814: 19–20)

While Vastey’s use of the term is somewhat vague, I think the Sophist can be properly understood to address in Le Système colonial the subject who emphatically denies the autonomy and axiomatic status of the universal

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 186

15/05/2013 08:44:48

The Baron de Vastey 187

truth of human emancipation and replaces it with language games and mere rhetoric. For Vastey, the single, axiomatic truth upon which he grounds his critique, though only implied in this passage, is undoubtedly the absolute inviolability of all humans for slavery. The Sophist, in contrast, speaks in fidelity not to truths, but to interests: of property, of position, of a legitimate sovereignty and a legitimate monopoly of violence, over the colonized and enslaved. Ironically, the accusation of sophistry can cut both ways, revealing another fundamental ambiguity of Vastey’s scribal critique. Vastey, one might say, is the servant of two masters: the truth of the Haitian Revolution and its destruction of plantation slavery, on the one hand, and the interested and partial defense of his employer Christophe’s post-1804 Haitian state. Like Sartre’s ‘Colonialism is a System’ from a century and a half later, Vastey argues that there are no ‘good’ colonialists or slave owners; if the system is wrong, all those who support its perpetuation are in the wrong (Vastey 1814: 38). The most telling difference between these two texts, however, is their stance on the necessity of a critique of colonial political economy. Like his contemporaries Césaire and Fanon, in ‘Colonialism is a System’ Sartre asserts the imperative to politicize the struggle against colonialism and to refuse all economic measures that would merely ameliorate a deplorable system with palliatives (Sartre 2006: 48). Echoing Marx, Sartre affirms that it is the entire political–economic system that must be the object of destructive critique (ibid.: 42). In contrast, Vastey is forced by his scribal position to avoid a substantial critique of the political economy of the plantation of Louverture and Christophe, who sent the former slaves back to forced labor on the plantations in the name of economic survival. What is Caribbean Enlightenment? Vastey’s ringing defense of freedom of the press points to the abandonment of any other universalist politics in post-independence Haiti. The antislavery of Toussaint Louverture had been explicitly universalist in its claims and pretentions. The scope of its address necessarily encompassed the entire world system; the persistence of slavery anywhere in the world was absolutely intolerable. One thinks here of the famous proclamations and letters of Toussaint to the French Directory or of Louis Delgrès in Guadeloupe, addressed not to a government, a class, or a nation, but to ‘l’univers entier’. The proclamations of Toussaint calling for the global

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 187

15/05/2013 08:44:49

188

Caribbean Critique

and universal destruction of slavery such as that of 18 May 1797 are indicative of this (Nesbitt 2008: 28). Haiti in 1804, after the destructive fury of Thermidor, subsequent rise of Bonaparte, and consolidation and strengthening of North American slavery after 1787, stood as the sole remaining defender of the call for universal emancipation. Christophe’s recourse to forced labor, however, was not a personal whim, but was necessitated, one might argue, by an inevitable realpolitik; to save the gains of the Haitian Revolution, to save what had already been achieved, could only be accomplished by enacting a defensive strategy that would preserve the gains of the revolution to that point, and avoid a suicidal desire to internationalize its struggle. Suicidal because, in a context of general enmity, any attempt to internationalize its struggle would have unnecessarily antagonized its more powerful, hostile neighbors. The threat against Haiti after 1804, and especially after 1814, was ‘encirclement’ by slave-holding states. The return of royalist governments in France meant a very real threat of invasion and recolonization, the result of which would certainly have meant re-enslavement. The poverty and underdevelopment of the new Haitian state were of course very real social problems, but that same poverty had enormous consequences for the struggle against slavery itself; Haitian poverty made the internationalization of antislavery as a practical, political agenda literally suicidal. In other words, the violence and inequities of Christophe, in one sense the betrayal of the universalist revolution itself, were a consequence not, or at least not only, of a personal struggle for power, but would never have occurred had the United States and France (as well as Britain, of course, in its own highly conflicted way) stood as partners in the fight against slavery, rather than its declared enemies. The instantiation of antislavery in a singular community far from the centre of enunciation of radical Enlightenment theory necessarily meant that this theory would morph into unheralded forms in that peripheral site. Before 1804, antislavery was an abstract, theoretical struggle (as in the case of Condorcet and Les amis des noirs). After the 1791 revolution, this struggle became the lived experience of a community, the ontological substance of a novel social experiment. Antislavery was radically transformed in this passage, to become the lived existence of Bossale former-slaves. Haiti became the incarnation of a philosophical truth, imperfect in many ways, but, in its very anomaly, a beacon for respective generations involved in the struggle for social justice. In this way, these uncivilized marginals of the time actually and actively

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 188

15/05/2013 08:44:49

The Baron de Vastey 189

subordinated the so-called enlightened western intellectuals. It was this marginal site that, in this reading, correctly understood the implications of the truth statements of the radical Enlightenment. In the wake of this revolution, radical theory found itself revealed in the full poverty of its abstraction; Toussaint to Napoleon, Dessalines to France, each was uncompromising in the denunciation of the poverty of mere theory as such. Vastey’s writings mark out this ambiguous status of Caribbean Critique in the wake of 1804, divided between a retrospective fidelity to antislavery and universal emancipation and the often contradictory demands an embattled state and monarch (Christophe) placed upon the scribes in his employ. ‘Antislavery’ after 1804 no longer stood for the entirety of the struggle to end slavery, but came to signify the intermediary state between an idealistic abolitionism and the fully instantiated reality of a slavery-free global order. Vastey’s texts are drawn between this contradiction. Haitian antislavery was in fact one of the great successes of the modern era, a world-historical revolution that, despite its initial quarantine, would decisively and actually transform the world system of slave-based labor over the course of the nineteenth century, with the various abolitions of New World slavery in 1838, 1848, 1865, and so on. This triumph of global antislavery after 1804, however, was to a large extent no longer a Haitian struggle. As such, Le système colonial dévoilé testifies to the limitations of Haitian universalism in the very moment it articulates a powerful and unheralded peripheral critique of slavery and neo-colonialism. These paradoxes informing Vastey’s critique of colonialism and slavery bear, as I argued above, intensive and extensive dimensions. In voicing a vehement critique of colonial violence and the horrific bestialization of slavery, Vastey inaugurates a tradition of Caribbean Critique that will culminate in texts such as Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme and Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre. Because of his scribal position, however, unlike the more free-standing positions of Césaire and above all Fanon – neither of whom was committed to defending the politics of an existent state from which they gained their livelihood, let alone a hereditary monarchy – Vastey is obliged to uphold the inherent inequities of the monarchic system and Christophe’s authoritarian state. It is not so much, in this reading, the concept of universality that is paradoxical; monarchy and forced plantation labor are fundamentally inegalitarian and, unlike various models of popular democracy, by definition render universal justice as equality impossible. Rather, the

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 189

15/05/2013 08:44:50

190

Caribbean Critique

absolute commitment to preserving the gains of 1804 in a global context hostile to the continued existence of the Haitian state drove both Christophe and his scribe into the defense of the paradoxical notion of antislavery in one state and to resort, like Louverture before them, to forced labor in defense of an impoverished, economically dysfunctional state that assured that order. Seen from the level of the extensive, structural paradoxes of the post-1804 Atlantic world informing Vastey’s thought, Christophe’s scribe appears as a key figure in a tradition of critique extending from Kant to Foucault. Indeed, it is not only the shared commitment to enlightenment that unites these thinkers. For Kant, enlightenment entailed an escape or sortie – as Foucault notes in his famous exegesis of Kant’s ‘What is Enlightenment?’ – from a subject’s minority (Foucault 1984: 1,383). Vastey’s model of enlightenment envisages an analogous break above all from the bestialization of slavery and colonialism into a universal becoming-civilized. Vastey, it might be argued, implicitly scores throughout his works a tropical injunction analogous to Kant’s ‘Argue as much as you will and about whatever you will, but obey!’: support the regime of the Haitian state as legitimate raison d’état insofar as it institutes a slave-free society, and do so regardless of its institutional form and secondary degrees of authoritarianism and inequity (Kant 1997: 18). Do so, moreover, without offering a positive doctrine of emancipation for the present and future (insofar as the expression of such a doctrine would endanger the actual preservation of the gains of 1804), and remain content merely to voice the injustice of colonialism and slavery retrospectively, in a strictly non-interventionist public sphere. The doctrine of universal, militant Black Jacobin emancipation that Louverture freely and publicly expressed becomes unutterable after 1804. For Kant and Vastey alike, power is always state power, right is always the right to preserve property (including the preservation of our self as property), with critical discourse in a free public sphere of expression a rhetoric of the critique of violence (whether as the threat to human dignity for Kant or the violence of slavery and colonialism for Vastey) without a corresponding emancipationist politics. If, for Kant, politics as the preservation of property rightfully culminates in the conservative Thermidorian regime as the revolutionary defense of bourgeois property, for Vastey, property is first that of our person in its slavery-free dignity. Its political modality, in turn, takes the form of the conservative preservation of the independence of the political nation

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 190

15/05/2013 08:44:50

The Baron de Vastey 191

(Haiti) as our property, as subjects of 1804, the lone state that assures the preservation of human freedom (from slavery). Unlike Fanon or Césaire, Vastey articulates no positive political doctrine for the present beyond such a preservation of independence as rightful property. Any politics of universal truth (as equal justice for all human beings) is strictly relegated to the past, as the event (1804) that founds the present state of law under Christophe in its absolute legitimacy. Only critical, public sphere discourse exists in this logic as a rightful, present force standing in subtraction from state power (rather than, say, transnational antislavery or popular revolution). Vastey, the defender of Haitian autonomy, paradoxically inscribes the forced retreat of Louverture and Dessalines’s politics of universal emancipation to the mere defense of the freedom of the press and the global public sphere, with Henry Christophe celebrated as Vastey’s ‘immortel protecteur de la liberté de la presse’ (Vastey 1819: 94). Vastey, scribe and incipient postcolonial theorist, thus stands in a world still dominated by plantation slavery as the guarantor of the freedom to recall the horrors of colonial Saint-Domingue and to defend the world-historical import of the Haitian revolutionary struggle and its destruction of global colonialism. He does so, however, as a citizen of a state tragically shorn of the means to pursue this struggle in a black Atlantic world that would remain largely under the yoke of slavery for decades to come.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 191

15/05/2013 08:44:51

chapter eight

Revolutionary Inhumanism: Fanon’s On Violence Fanon’s

On Violence

To read Fanon’s masterpiece, Les Damnés de la terre, today, a half-century after African decolonization and the triumph of the Algerian Revolution to which Fanon dedicated his life and thought, requires above all working through, critically and intensively, the complex and original critique of colonial, and defense of anticolonial violence that it contains. To do so requires above all rejecting all facile, unthinking dismissals of Fanon as an alleged ‘apostle of violence’ and to reject categorically the ridiculous, often-repeated claim of Hannah Arendt that Fanon celebrates ‘violence for its own sake’.1 Fanon was not writing in Les Damnés de la terre about violence in general, nor was he writing about urban riots, skinheads, the Shoah, or any of the other manifold forms of social violence characteristic of global modernity. He was rather writing about a specific situation and its particular forms of violence, that of French colonialism, and, even more specifically, as a leading member and intellectual voice of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), of French colonial violence in Algeria since the Sétif massacre in 1945 and in the Algerian War of 1954–1962. 2 Fanon’s anticolonial humanism takes the form in Peau noire, masques blancs of a Sartrean assertion of human freedom, the refusal of any fixed, a priori human essence in the face of the potential to ‘invent [my] existence’ and the absolute character of human ‘freedom’ (Fanon 1952: 187–188). The project of such a post-racial, militant humanism would consequently be to transcend the systematic ‘dehumanization’ of racism and colonialism and to ‘create the ideal conditions of existence in a humane [humain] world’ (ibid.: 188). Les Damnés de la terre concludes

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 192

15/05/2013 08:44:51

Fanon’s On Violence

193

in similar terms, famously ‘taking up again the question of man’ in order to ‘recommence a history of man’ that would leave behind all Western European hypocritical invocations of the human that are no more than the imposition of the provincial formation of European racial and ethnocentrism, to engage instead the ‘invention’ and ‘discovery’ of ‘a new man’ (Fanon 1961: 375, 376). While Fanonian humanism is most obviously a troping of Sartre’s existentialist humanism by the colonized subject, it is best understood not so much as a reworking of Marx’s classic theory of the liberation of the human species-being (in his writings from the 1840s) but as the thinking through of Kojève’s reading of the Hegelian master– slave dialectic as a revolutionary emancipation of the oppressed. The point of Kojève’s classic interpretation is that while the master remains necessarily and understandably a defender of the state of his world to his death (‘This man remains in fundamental solidarity with the given World’), only the slave who has experienced the full terror of the violence of that world that enslaves him, and risked his life to destroy it by any and all ­revolutionary means available, who can become free: It is not mere reform, but the ‘dialectical’, revolutionary suppression of the World that can liberate him [the slave], and – in consequence – satisfy him. This revolutionary transformation of the World presupposes the ‘negation’, the non-acceptance of the given World in its totality. And the origin of this absolute negation can only be the absolute terror inspired by the given World, or, more precisely, by that – or he whom – which dominates this World, by the master of this World. (Kojève 1947: 33; my emphasis)

The project of Fanon’s anticolonial humanism is to make the human, in the absence of God, take the place of the absolute. This project of a revolutionary humanism that violently destroys the unjust domination of the master has and will always, necessarily, appear – from the point of view of the Master – as utterly inhuman. Man, in Kojève’s reading of Hegel, is the being that man must invent; the externalization of human alienation in slavery is a becoming free insofar as it engenders the endless becoming of the human being as absolute necessity. Fanon’s project is the unreserved affirmation of the humanization of Being, beyond all its localized assertions as the mask of all racial and cultural dominions, in a trajectory of perpetual disalienation of the colonized and wretched of the earth. 3 Fanon had a personal horror of violence, as Simone de Beauvoir was surprised to discover, a repulsion that is evident whenever he speaks of

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 193

15/05/2013 08:44:51

194

Caribbean Critique

specific cases of violence, whether pro- or anticolonial.4 Fanon never glorifies violence, and, as David Macey underscores, ‘there are no descriptions [in Les Damnés de la terre] of what happens when a bomb explodes in a crowded café and when shards of glass slice into human flesh. The violence Fanon evokes is instrumental and he never dwells or gloats on its effects’ (Macey 2000: 475). Rather, Fanon describes a specific world (the colonial with Algeria as the representative example) in which violence is always already omnipresent as both subjective and objective reality. ‘Fanon’s violence is primarily the violence of Algeria and its history,’ writes Macey, and it is obviously not Fanon who brought about this violence, but the French colonizers (ibid.: 476). ‘In a sense’, Macey points out, ‘it is almost absurd to criticize Fanon for his advocacy of violence. He did not need to advocate it. […] By 1961, the violence was everywhere. It had even seeped into the unconscious. […] The children of Algeria dreamed of violence, and two of Fanon’s young patients in Blida acted out those dreams. 5 ‘Our prosperous societies’ do not have dreams about massacres in Sétif and Philippeville or torture in their school. Algeria had been having those nightmares for over a century’ (ibid.: 475). Every colonial site has its own degrees and forms of violence, and the logic of violence in each context determines the dynamics of violence and counter-violence: La violence du régime colonial et la contre-violence du colonisé s’équilibrent et se répondent dans une homogénéité réciproque extraordinaire. […] Le développement de la violence au sein du peuple colonisé sera proportionnel à la violence exercée par le régime colonial contesté. (Fanon 1961 : 122) [The violence of the colonial regime and the counter-violence of the colonized counterbalance and respond to one another in an extraordinary reciprocal homogeneity... The development of violence in a colonized people will be proportional to the violence practiced by the contested colonial regime.]6

Moreover, as the extraordinarily brutal reprisals by the French in Sétif (1945) and Phillipeville (1955) readily demonstrate, the violence of the colonizer, with his infinitely more powerful force of arms and technology, is utterly disproportionate to that of the insurgents (a point C. L. R. James had argued already in the context of the Haitian Revolution, and the Vietnamese would soon discover in turn): ‘Les mitraillages par avion ou les canonnades de la flotte dépassent en horreur et en importance les réponses du colonisé’ (ibid.: 122).

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 194

15/05/2013 08:44:51

Fanon’s On Violence

195

This extreme degree of colonial violence was by no means attained in every site of French colonialism, however. In Martinique, Sénégal, Guinée, or Guyane, decolonization could proceed in negotiated fashion, largely free of direct forms of violence. In at least three cases in the history of French colonialism, however, the degree of investment, repression, confrontation, alienation, torture, and bloodshed was so great that it led to the creation of militant, guerrilla insurgencies dedicated to the overthrow of colonial oppression by any and all means, at the risk of everything: Saint-Domingue, Vietnam, and Algeria. Though because of this similarity one might reasonably extend Fanon’s critique of violence to these other sites he never discussed, the political logic of every site of French colonialism was in each case eminently singular. This singularity of situation and logic in Algeria means that ‘On Violence’ most emphatically cannot be generalized to heterogeneous situations such as the contemporary struggle against exclusion in the French banlieues or even the struggle against institutional racism in the United States, as Fanon explicitly recognized in the final chapter on national culture in Les Damnés de la terre. In this view, to interpret the dynamics of any particular anticolonial struggle would require a hermeneutics of absolute incommensurability, in which each situation would be shown to bear its own fully singular logic. At its most basic, this would imply that insofar as any analytical judgment regarding the violence of a particular historical situation requires theoretical assumptions regarding not only the definition of violence but criteria of the validity of any violence and the relation of means to ends, incompatible assumptions would render meaningful comparison impossible. Conversely, one might also argue the corresponding positive version of this thesis, namely that superficially distinct historical situations and events can share structurally isomorphic determinations that make in turn understanding of the place of violence in each meaningful.7 Finally, the assertion of incommensurability at the level of revolutionary praxis, the level at which Fanon is principally arguing, would maintain that any given structure of the lived experience of colonialism (as in Fanon’s analysis of the structural, Manichean division of space and the primordial experience and preponderance of colonialist violence in French Algiers) determines in fundamentally singular and incomparable fashion the necessity and place of violence in an anticolonial struggle. Despite the many obvious historical and cultural differences between Saint-Domingue in 1791 and Algeria in 1954, for example, a number

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 195

15/05/2013 08:44:51

196

Caribbean Critique

of common factors may have contributed to the radicalization of their anticolonial insurgency and to the absolute status of violence in each. Both were settler colonies, with significant populations of settlers who had invested their lives and capital in the colony and were dedicated to preserving that investment at all costs; significant profits were at stake in the natural resources of sugar and oil, respectively; the anticolonial war in each reached extreme degrees of violence on each side, in which the rules of ‘civilized’ warfare were largely abandoned; each culminated in a world-historical defeat of French colonial power, and each led to the formation of a deracialized national culture open to all who subscribed to the new nation’s constitution. In a sense, one might say that Fanon’s ‘On Violence’ focused and concretized Hegel’s master–slave dialectic in light of his own experience as both a clinical psychiatrist in Blida and as an FLN militant, namely, that in a situation demanding a struggle at the risk of one’s life (‘Car si les derniers doivent être les premiers, ce ne peut être qu’à la suite d’un affrontement décisif et meurtrier des deux protagonistes’) the survivor draws from the radicality and violence of that struggle a transformed self-consciousness and identity (Fanon 1961: 67). Such was the case for Haiti, as Hegel recognized, as it was for Fanon’s Algeria. This transformation is the basis for Fanon’s ‘humanism’, simultaneously a critique (of European humanism as an ideological justification of imperial violence) and defense (of, in the final words of Les Damnés de la terre, ‘un homme neuf’ that would result from a true and total process of decolonization) (ibid.: 376). While Fanon’s famous conclusion taken on its own can appear as a miraculous deus ex machina, in which this ‘new man’ suddenly appears on the horizon of Third World insurgency as an empty, utopian promise, to grasp the full complexity of Fanon’s postcolonial humanism requires following the argument of Les Damnés de la terre as a whole, and, in particular, articulating its original and central logic as a phenomenological conversion theory, in which the colonized are gradually transformed through militant struggle for independence and a national culture. To read Les Damnés de la terre today, a half-century after the Battle of Algiers, requires that we grasp it as an unprecedented elucidation and defense of the absolute necessity of violence in that specific case and situation, and the ensuing relation between this absolute and the transformation of human experience. To do so, I will discuss the nature of the absolute in Les Damnés de la terre, which will require revisiting certain moments of Les Damnés de la terre taken as a dialectical whole.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 196

15/05/2013 08:44:51

Fanon’s On Violence

197

The argument will then conclude with a defense of Fanon’s critique of colonial violence as a complex negotiation of the distinction between contingent and necessary violence, presenting his theory of violence and its relation to national culture and universal humanism as a specific and original development of a conversion theory of violence, the origins of which Étienne Balibar has located in Marx and Hegel. While other apologies of the violence of the Haitian Revolution, as well as critiques of plantation slavery were written following Vastey’s Système colonial dévoilé, Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre constitutes the most original and famous development of this critique in the period of twentieth-century decolonization. His famous final book rejects the dialectical analysis of psychological alienation of the Antillean subject that largely maintains the earlier Peau noire, masques blancs within the horizon of mere critique without a politics. In contrast, Les Damnés de la terre affirms, beyond Fanon’s earlier psychological-existential analysis, what one might call a materialist dialectic of a philosophy of human emancipation and transformation. Determined in every page by the confrontation with French colonialism he was living through, Fanon’s famous critique of colonial violence reaches beyond dialogue, beyond all dialectical negotiation between colonizer and colonized, to affirm the absolute necessity of decolonization and its attendant violences. We know today that the first chapter in particular of Les Damnés de la terre is profoundly indebted to Fanon’s meticulous reading of Sartre’s Critique de la raison dialectique – that unjustly neglected, if unwieldy and horribly unedited, work of critical theory from 1960. In the wake of David Macey’s Frantz Fanon: A Life, Ben Etherington has recently written in this light one of the most important analyses of Fanon’s conceptual vocabulary.8 Etherington forcefully demonstrates the overwhelming impact of Sartre’s tome on a number of essential Fanonian concepts. This, moreover, is an argument that is only convincing if one attends to the French original of Fanon’s text. To mention only one egregious example, despite the merits of Constance Farrington’s recent translation, Fanon’s recurrent use of the arch-Sartrean concept of praxis in Wretched is utterly obscured in the English text, variously translated as ‘rule of conduct’ (68) ‘practice’ (73) ‘action’ (74), and ‘knowledge of the practice of action’ (118) (Etherington 2011: 5). If for Fanon violence is not a universal, but rather situated absolute (as in the Algerian case), merely the initial dialectical moment in the universal transcendence of colonialism, as critics such as Sekyi-Otu (1997) have argued in detail, Etherington shows how precisely the Fanonian dialectic

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 197

15/05/2013 08:44:51

198

Caribbean Critique

holds not to Hegel’s, but to the Sartrean understanding in particular. ‘Praxis’, ‘Manichaeism’, the ‘group’, ‘totalization’, and above all the proposition that a revolutionary process is ‘intelligible’ are literally and conceptually taken over by Fanon from Sartre. Fanon’s principal pursuit is precisely to comprehend the ‘intelligibility’ not only of decolonization in general, but of anticolonial violence in particular. Fanon’s concern, Etherington asserts, is not to argue that decolonization leads to the enlightenment of the colonized via their participation in some putative universal reason, since for Fanon (like Sartre) decolonization is itself, as praxis, always already the actualization of dialectical reason in situ. Among the conclusions of Etherington’s analysis of Les Damnés de la terre is his scrupulous demonstration that the much-misunderstood Fanonian concept of ‘substantification’ (‘la rencontre de deux forces congénitalement antagonistes qui tirent précisément leur originalité de cette sorte de substantification que sécrète et qu’alimente la situation coloniale’ [the encounter of two congenitally antagonistic forces that draw their originality from this sort of substantification that the colonial situation secretes and feeds]) is utterly misunderstood if we take it, as Said and others (including myself) have argued, to be an equivalent to Lukács’s concept of reification (Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, so the argument goes, and that is about as far as it ever goes, appeared in French translation in 1960). Fanon is not arguing that the colonial situation is productive of general commodification (though that is undoubtedly true as well). The actual relations between exploiter and exploited are not hidden by commodification, as they are for Marx and Lukács, but are exposed in all their naked brutality in the colonial scene (Fanon 1961: 12). Instead, the colonial situation is in Fanon’s view a sedimented practico-inert (though Fanon, certainly at this point the much better writer, does not in fact use this notoriously unwieldy Sartrean term); it is a praxis without an agent. The colonial situation itself has a sort of undead agency, predetermining the decisions and choices of all actors on the colonial scene, including the naked ultra-violence-amid-generalscarcity of the colonizer and the defensive violence of the colonized. The anticolonial violence Fanon analyzes lies beyond all dialectical, intersubjective, and reasonable interaction: ‘Le colonialisme n’est pas une machine à penser, n’est pas un corps doué de raison. Il est la violence à l’état de nature et ne peut s’incliner que devant une plus grand violence’ [Colonialism is not a thought-machine, nor a body endowed with reason. It is violence in the state of nature and can only bow before

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 198

15/05/2013 08:44:51

Fanon’s On Violence

199

a greater violence] (ibid.: 92). The colonial scene is not, Fanon asserts, characterized by some proto-Habermasian ‘rational confrontation of points of view’. It is, rather, the ‘affirmation […] of an originality posed as absolute’ (ibid.: 71). Though Fanon’s meaning is obscure here (he immediately launches into his famous description of the Manicheanism of the colonial space), this originality seems to refer to an ‘absolute’ truth of colonial ­subjectivity. The key point to grasp here is that Fanon’s analysis of the intelligibility of colonial violence as absolute is just the opposite of a claim that colonial violence is in any sense ‘legitimate’. Here, I would argue that Fanon holds rigorously to Benjamin’s distinction between mythic and divine violence. So-called ‘legitimate’ violence is that which the state, which any sovereign state of affairs whatsoever, brings to bear upon the subaltern, to enforce the mythic, auratic legitimacy of that sovereignty. Divine is that violence which shatters the auratic rule of law and legitimacy. The struggle to destroy a colonial regime of systematic dehumanization such as that which Fanon witnessed in colonial Algeria corresponds perfectly to Benjamin’s invocation of divine violence. Less obvious, perhaps, is the underlying logic linking Benjamin and Fanon’s invocation of ‘divine’ (Benjamin) or ‘absolute’ (Fanon) violence. Decolonization is defined by Fanon on the first page of Les Damnés de la terre by two characteristics, each posited as absolute: ‘decolonization is always a violent phenomenon’, insofar as it is, secondly, the ‘absolute’ substitution of one ‘species’ of human being for another (Fanon 1961: 71). This absolute substitution is of an ontological nature, rather than any relative, gradual, negotiated or mediated transformation of what Fanon calls in scare quotes a ‘species’. True (divine) or just decolonization, one might say, is the destruction not of people or buildings, but of the very transcendental rules of order that determine who and what count as one: one citizen, one subject of universal right, one nation, one people, one human being. If the colonized are putatively of another ‘species’, that is simply to say that they are actively and violently considered to be subhuman, barbaric, radically, absolutely outside the world of the most fundamental legitimate right (the right to self-determination, the right to life). It is precisely on this point, the very first, initial claim of Fanon’s text, that resolutely and absolutely places him in the line of the radical thinkers of affirmative, creative, divine violence: not only Benjamin, but Spinoza, Diderot, Kant, Robespierre, Hegel, Aimé Césaire, all defended not the legitimacy or rightfulness of subaltern violence and the overthrow of colonial slavery

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 199

15/05/2013 08:44:51

200

Caribbean Critique

and dehumanization, but its absolute truth. Robespierre’s argument for the absolute necessity for the capital punishment of Louis Capet, described above, best encapsulates this logic, though in a strange, inverted state: Capet, through his objective actions (collusion with the European aristocracies, flight to Varennes, etc.), and even more through his simple existence as what royalists continued to call ‘le roi’, makes impossible the existence of the democratic state of undivided popular sovereignty. Capet, for the democratic order, like the slave and colonized for the hierarchical orders of the ancien régime or colonialism, lies absolutely outside that order. Capet is at once absolutely exterior to, and an absolute threat to, the new, unsettled, threatened democratic republican order. Inversely, the slave and the colonized are the absolute outside or untruth of the colonial order, and have been systematically dehumanized by the colonizer, and this a point Fanon repeatedly stresses, to the point of obliteration, a néantisation totale. To assert their singular, entirely novel humanity, will in turn require the obliteration of the colonial state of affairs, of the logic of that world. In consequence, if one places oneself, initially and willfully, as subject to the axiomatic imperative not of social hierarchy as legitimate or so-called ‘divine right’, but as subject to a universal axiom of justice as equality, the mortal, absolute threat to the actualization of equality (Capet, the slave owner and plantation, ‘French’ Algeria with its attendant dehumanization of the colonized) must be destroyed. It is only then, upon construction of this new world with its own transcendental logic of justice as equality, that these new subjects can hope to institute an egalitarian, decolonized state of affairs, one that might abolish capital punishment (for Robespierre) or colonialism (for Césaire and Fanon), a state of affairs that might abolish slavery categorically and ontologically (for Toussaint Louverture and Dessalines), and which might distribute small plot farms to those former slaves and new citizens in the only successful land reform the Americas knew before the twentieth century. Fanon simply radicalizes and makes fully explicit this same logic that Diderot expounded in his famous passage in Raynal on the slave’s revolt, which Hegel then conceptualized in his defense of the rightful overthrow of the French colonial slave-order of Saint-Domingue in the Philosophy of Right (§57).9 For the dehumanized objects of this mythic violence, no social contract, no legitimacy or rightful social order can be said to obtain, beyond the absolute Spinozist right of any being to do whatever it is capable of doing. If the slave can overthrow the slave order, if the dehumanized colonized can destroy the colonial order, she has the ‘right’

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 200

15/05/2013 08:44:51

Fanon’s On Violence

201

to, not legitimately, but simply as the subject of an undivided, univocal, universal order of natural (as opposed to social, human, or historical) law. Legitimacy, the rule of law and right, can only unfold within the logic of an entirely new world or state of affairs. The primary difference between the explications of this logic of revolutionary violence one finds in Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Sartre, in Vastey, Césaire, or Aristide, versus what we find in Fanon, is simply the unparalleled degree to which Fanon unites an unyielding logic of the intelligibility of violence and revolt to an existential description of the fact of colonial racism as dehumanization (‘look mother, a black man!’). Beyond the critique of any and all metaphysics of power that Fanon inherits from Spinoza, Marx, and Césaire, the critique of all kings and colonizers, masters and slaves, electors and the elect, it remains to affirm the necessary groundlessness of all politics, or what I would call a Fanonian speculative anticolonialism. This is the politics that affirms absolutely that we do not know not only what another, decolonized world might be, but that the rules of any world, colonial or decolonized, are absolutely contingent. True decolonization is a total ‘disordering’ of the world, destroying the fundamental logical rules of presentation of that world (‘elle [la décolonisation] modifie fondamentalement l’être’ [It [Decolonization] fundamentally modifies being]), the rules determining who or what counts as a human being, a citizen, an Algerian.10 ‘La décolonisation, qui se propose de changer l’ordre du monde, est, on le voit, un programme de désordre absolu’ [Decolonization, which propose to change the order of the world, is, as we can see, a program of absolute disorder] (Fanon 1961: 66). This is the passage from one world to another, ‘le remplacement d’une “espèce” d’hommes par une autre “espèce” d’hommes. Sans transition, il y a substitution totale, complète, absolue’ [the replacement of one “species” of men by another “species” of men. Without transition, there is total, complete, absolute substitution] (ibid. : 65). This affirmation of a radical humanism frames Les Damnés de la terre from its first to last pages. While Les Damnés de la terre is undoubtedly structured as a neo-Hegelian phenomenology of colonized experience, as Atu Sekyi-Otu has demonstrated, Fanon’s call for the absolute rightfulness of decolonization by all means necessary is no mere dialectical moment in his argument, a misguided, one-sided ‘standpoint’ to be superseded by the concrete movement of colonized consciousness as the Les Damnés de la terre unfolds. To view the absolute of decolonizing violence as mere illusion in this way is to invalidate it hypothetically from the

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 201

15/05/2013 08:44:51

202

Caribbean Critique

external perspective of privilege, blissfully to dismiss the suffering and loss of life in these struggles as superficial, misguided, untrue, mere partial moments in the progression of some postcolonial Absolute Spirit. Instead, and in distinction from the dialectical movement of Fanon’s text as a totality, Les Damnés de la terre affirms that the absolute violence of decolonization described in the opening pages of Les Damnés de la terre is absolutely valid (whenever and wherever the most extreme forms of state and police violence have or will come to exist). While Fanon famously displaces the proletariat as the universal subject of revolution in favor of the global colonized, he remains at the same time in consonance with the tradition of Hegelian Marxism insofar as Les Damnés de la terre links its humanism to the cultivation of a national consciousness11 (for example, that of being an ‘Algerian’) from beginning to end. Decolonization, he writes on its first page, brings forth ‘le surgissement d’une nouvelle nation’ [the surging forth of a new nation]; the process of militant struggle against the violence of the imperial power ‘unifie ce monde […] sur la base d’une nation’ [unifies this world ... on the ground of a nation] (ibid.: 65, 76). The process of naming is central to this transformation of colonized consciousness. The naming of the incipient nation and national culture – Fanon writes repeatedly of ‘Algeria’ and ‘Algerians’ in the years before those entities were admitted to exist and welcomed onto the stage of the nation states – gives form to the desire and drive for decolonization. ‘Les dirigeants politiques’, he writes, ‘“nomment” la nation. Les revendications du colonisé reçoivent ainsi une forme’ [Political leaders “name” the nation. The revindications of the colonized thus receive a form] (ibid.  : 99). This naming, this celebration of the word that links the more prosaic Fanon with the poet Césaire, occurs, Fanon tells us, at an early stage in the struggle for decolonization, and constitutes what he calls ‘l’exigence minimum’ [minimal demand] of the process of absolute decolonization. The name is an objectification, the initial concretization of this struggle, which orients it and, in its simplification of a complex situation, serves to unify the diversity of demands, agendas, and positions of the individuals in revolt. Each section of Les Damnés de la terre presents an essential aspect of Fanon’s defense of the absolute status of anticolonial violence following its initial, nondialectical presentation in ‘De la violence’. The second section of Les Damnés de la terre, ‘Grandeur et faiblesses de la spontanéité’, can be thought of as a systematic critique of ultra-leftism, the anti-Leninist affirmation, that is, of a spontaneous anarchism of the masses that

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 202

15/05/2013 08:44:51

Fanon’s On Violence

203

would forgo systematic organization of revolutionary struggle in an vanguard party formation. The chapter begins in proper dialectical fashion, however, as a critique of political representation, both as an oxymoronic impossibility under colonialism, or as a false dimension of the neo-colonial order.12 Fanon describes how the nationalist party, when it comes to power, repeatedly betrays the aspirations of the masses, with its hollow invocations of incipient victory and affirmations of an actually achieved decolonization as the mere ideology allowing the neo-colonial elite to solidify its hold on power and disenfranchisement of the masses (ibid.: 145). The nature of the problem of the party in the anti- and neo-colonial context, Fanon observes, is that the very concept of the political party is abstractly imported from the European situation to a new, colonial reality: ‘La notion de parti est une notion importée de la métropole. Cet instrument des luttes modernes est plaqué tel quel sur une réalité protéiforme, déséquilibrée, où coexistent à la fois l’esclavagisme, le servage, le troc, l’artisanat, et les opérations boursières.’ [The notion of the party is a notion imported from the metropolis. This instrument of modern struggles is wrested onto a protoform, unbalanced reality, one in which slavery, serfdom, barter, handicraft, and the stock exchange coexist.] The nationalist party tends to address itself only to certain elite sectors of the new nation: ‘le prolétariat des villes, les artisans, et les fonctionnaires, c’est à dire, une infime partie de la population qui ne représente guère plus de un pour cent’ [the urban proletariat, artisans and government officials, in other words a tiny proportion of the population that hardly represents more than one percent] (ibid.: 146). This point leads to a second dimension of Fanon’s critique: it is not only political representation by the party that is inherently false in the neo-colonial order. The European concept of the proletariat as the group that can stand as the universal social class is impossible to import tel quel to the colonial scene; the colonial proletariat is not only intrinsically embryonic in the absence of extensively developed means of production but is inherently a relatively elite social group (‘conducteurs de tramway, de taxis, mineurs, dockers, interprètes, infirmières’) who should actually be more accurately characterized as the ‘bourgeois’ element of neo-colonial society (ibid.: 147). It is instead the disenfranchised masses, the ‘wretched of the earth’, who are for Fanon the universal subject of anticolonial revolution. In the face of the nationalist party’s hesitancy to initiate a violent anticolonial struggle (ibid.: 150–151), the masses alone, Fanon argues, will push forward and ‘interviennent de manière décisive

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 203

15/05/2013 08:44:51

204

Caribbean Critique

soit dans le processus de maturation de la conscience nationale, soit pour relayer l’action des partis nationalistes, soit plus rarement pour se substituer purement et simplement à la stérilité de ces partis’ [intervene in a decisive manner either in the growth of national consciousness or to second the actions of the nationalist parties, or more rarely simply to substitute themselves in place of the sterility of these parties] (ibid.: 152). Fanon critiques in turn the pretensions of colonial trade unions as a viable alternative to the defective representation of the nationalist parties, and for reasons that are strictly symmetrical to the inherent weaknesses of the latter. ‘Congénitalement isolés des masses rurales, incapables de diffuser des mots d’ordre au-delà des faubourgs, les syndicats adoptent des positions de plus en plus politiques’ [Congenitally isolated from the rural masses, incapable of articulating commands beyond the outlying neighborhoods, the unions adopt evermore political positions], that is to say, positions that would gain them political power, rather than increasing the power of the mass of the population directly (ibid.: 160). In the face of their betrayal by the nationalist parties and trade unions, however, Fanon argues that the colonized masses can, in certain situations (such as that of Fanon’s Algeria), overcome these inertial weaknesses of political representation in the colonial scene, ‘intervenir de façon décisive, à la fois dans la lutte de libération nationale et dans les perspectives que se choisit la nation future’ [intervene decisively, both in the struggle for national liberation and regarding the perspectives that the future nation will adopt] (ibid.: 161). The true nationalist militant (here Fanon obviously speaks from first-hand experience) will abandon the colonial city, and the nationalist party organizations and unions; ‘Ils se rejettent vers les campagnes, vers les montagnes, vers les masses paysannes’ [They fall back to the countryside, to the mountains, to the rural masses]. There, they will discover ‘la vraie voix du pays et leurs yeux voient la grande, l’infinie misère du peuple’ [the true life of the country and their eyes see the great, infinite misery of the people]. This direct experience of the anticolonial militant is Fanon’s version of the Maoist doctrine of the encounter, the intellectual’s confrontation with the masses (‘à l’école du peuple’, as Fanon puts it), understood as a process of transformative radicalization. In what can easily be read as a critical presentation of the radicalization of Fanon’s own thought on violence presented in the preceding chapter, he argues that anticolonial intellectual militants in this encounter with the rural, colonized masses ‘comprennent enfin que le changement ne sera pas une réforme, ne sera pas une amélioration. Ils comprennent, dans une sorte de vertige qui

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 204

15/05/2013 08:44:51

Fanon’s On Violence

205

ne cessera plus de les habiter, que l’agitation politique dans les villes sera toujours impuissante à modifier, à bouleverser le régime colonial’ [finally understand that the change will not be neither a reform nor an amelioration. They understand, in a sort of vertigo that will never leave them, that political militancy in the cities will always remain powerless to modify or overthrow the colonial regime] (ibid.: 164). Without a program, without speeches or resolutions, the rural masses simplify the struggle around a single demand: ‘Faites que la nation existe’ [Make the nation exist] (ibid.: 169). Fanon calls this radicalization of the anticolonial struggle ‘totalitarian’, insofar as it demands the total transformation of the colony and its web of injustice into a new entity, a veritable new world: the nation (ibid.: 170). Nonetheless, it is at this point that Fanon’s dialectic turns on itself to become a critique of the limitations of this spontaneous anarchism of the rural masses; devoid of structuration and leadership, ‘cette impétuosité volontariste qui entend régler son sort tout de suite au système colonial est condamné, en tant que doctrine de l’instantanéisme, à se nier’ [this volontarist urgency that seeks to deal with the colonial system immediately is destined, as a doctrine of instantaneity, to negate itself] (ibid.: 172). Rural guerrilla warfare devoid of centralized planning and organization quickly runs up against the massive superiority of force of arms and men of the colonizer’s army. ‘L’émiettement de la nation, qui manifestait la nation en armes, demande à être corrigé et dépassé. […] Les dirigeants sont amenés à nier le mouvement en tant que jacquerie, le transformant ainsi en guerre révolutionnaire’ [The breaking up of the nation demands to be corrected and overcome. ... The leaders are drawn to negate the movement as a jacquerie, thus transforming it into a revolutionary war.] (ibid.: 173). Thus, Fanon adopts in this chapter on the limits of anarchist spontaneity a neo-Leninist position, in which anticolonial consciousness will be modulated by an enlightened, revolutionary avant-garde, ‘éclairé par ces commissaires politiques [qui] devra les amener à nuancer [leur] position par la prise de conscience que certaines fractions de la population possèdent des intérêts particuliers qui ne recouvrent pas toujours l’intérêt national’ [enlightened by the political commissaries who will lead them to nuance their position through the realization that certain elements of the population bear particular interests that do not always correspond with the national interest]. At this crucial point of development of Fanon’s critique, the initial absolute confrontation between colonized and colonizer in ‘De la violence’ achieves a higher order of complexity: ‘Le peuple, qui au début

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 205

15/05/2013 08:44:51

206

Caribbean Critique

de la lutte avait adopté le manichéisme primitif du colon: les Blancs et les Noirs, les Arabes et les Roumis, s’aperçoit qu’il arrive à des Noirs d’être plus blancs que les Blancs.’ [The people, who at the beginning of the struggle had adopted the primitive Manicheanism of the colonizerWhites and Blacks, Arabs and Christians-realizes that some Blacks can be whiter than the Whites.] This process of complexification is the transformation of class-consciousness in action: Cette découverte est désagréable, pénible et révoltante. Tout était simple pourtant, d’un côté les mauvais, de l’autre les bons. A la clarté idyllique et irréelle du début se substitue une pénombre qui disloque la conscience. […] dans son cheminement laborieux vers la connaissance rationnelle le peuple devra également abandonner le simplisme qui caractérisait sa perception du dominateur. (Fanon 1961: 183) [This discovery is disagreeable, painful, and revolting. All was simple, before, on one side the bad, on the other the good. The idyllic and unreal clarity of the beginning is replaced by a darkness that dislocates consciousness. ... In its laborious striving toward rational knowledge, the people will also necessarily abandon the simplistic view that ­characterized its perception of the dominator.]

On other hand, certain ‘colons’ (such as Fanon himself, formally a French state employee and doctor of psychiatry) go over to the side of the revolution, ‘se font nègres, ou arabes et acceptant les souffrances, la torture, la mort’, becoming, as Fanon explicitly saw himself, ‘Algerian’ (ibid.: 184). As this anticolonial consciousness develops, expands, and becomes more complex, the truth of decolonization is no longer mere utilitarian expediency (as it is presented in ‘On Violence’ (ibid.: 81)), but is revealed to be at once absolute (as pure necessity in the face of the ultra-violence of a situation such as the Algerian) and plural, ‘partielles, limitées, instables’ (ibid.: 184). Fanon’s politics of principle thus conforms to a neo-Jacobin, Leninist model of enlightened avant-gardism: ‘Seule la violence exercée par le peuple, violence organisée et éclairée par la direction permet aux masses de déchiffrer la réalité sociale, lui en donne la clef. Sans cette lutte […] il n’y a plus que carnaval et flons-flons’ [only the violence practiced by the people, a violence organized and theorized by the leadership, permits the masses to decipher social reality, giving them the key. Without this struggle, ... all is carnival and noise] (ibid.: 186). Fanon’s is a top-down model of Kantian enlightenment, in which ‘la politisation des masses se propose non d’infantiliser les masses mais

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 206

15/05/2013 08:44:51

Fanon’s On Violence

207

de les rendre adultes’ [the politicization of the masses proposes not to infantalize them but to make them mature] (ibid.: 223). Chapter 3 of Les Damnés de la terre, ‘Mésaventures de la conscience nationale’, is in turn not simply a brilliant and prescient critique of the incipient forms of neo-colonialism that Fanon observed in the new African states he visited as a delegate of the FLN in the late-1950s, it also constitutes a substantial critique of the political economy of neo-colonialism that, from the perspective of this book’s study of Caribbean Critique, prefigures in fundamental ways Édouard Glissant’s more specific critique of Martinican underdevelopment and neo-colonial dependency discussed above, both in its initial form in the banned 1961 volume Les Antilles et la Guyane à l’heure de la décolonisation, as well as the further development and refinement of Glissant’s analysis in his 1981 Discours antillais. In this third chapter, Fanon continues his general critique of colonial and neo-colonial political representation via a critique of nominal postcolonial ‘democracy’ as mere parliamentary-progressivist ameliorism, as would turn out for example to be the case in Aristide’s Haiti in the 1990s, as the mere opening of the neocolony to the forces of neo-liberalism. Fanon here decries the underdevelopment of productive forces in the post-independence, neo-colonial state, and the reduction of economic activity to mere tertiary movements such as import-export. In this context, there can exist no true bourgeoisie, possessing the means of production, and the nationalist party becomes a mere shell for the reproduction of its own privilege, nationalism itself a mere flag-waving and hollow ideology trotted out to manipulate the masses (Fanon 1961: 191). As in Glissant’s Martinique, local artisanal products, tourism, and folklore are glorified by the nationalist ideology in the absence of all productive innovation, while exoticism in cultural production will be systematically critiqued in turn in ‘Sur la culture nationale’ (ibid.: 222, 269). These are the basic points that Glissant will explore and enrich in Discours antillais, which in this sense undertakes a specification and development of the logic of Les Damnés de la terre. Glissant’s critique, in other words, implies that what Fanon took as a general situation of neo-colonialism, in fact turns to a particularly dramatic process of ‘successful’ colonization in the Antillean DOM after 1945. For Fanon, in contrast, these contradictions of the postcolony lead more generally to the elevation to power of the autocratic ‘leader’, whose only goal is to ‘stoppe le peuple et s’acharne soit à l’expulser de l’histoire, soit à l’empêcher d’y prendre pied’ (ibid.: 210).

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 207

15/05/2013 08:44:51

208

Caribbean Critique

Fanon’s call for a true humanism leads him to develop a subtractive critique of the postcolony, in which a true and absolute decolonization would subtract from political life the various specific distinctions of language, race, and custom, what Fanon summarizes as ‘vulgaire tribalisme’; these ‘contradictions’ must be ‘resolved’, he writes (ibid.: 205). His own case, as a Martinican black who reinvents himself as ‘Algerian’ in a predominantly non-black, Muslim context, while obviously never explicit, is just as obviously paradigmatic to his analysis in every line of Les Damnés de la terre. The party cannot be a ‘dictature ethnique’ or ‘familial’, but must become ‘un instrument entre les mains du peuple’ [an instrument in the hands of the people] (ibid.: 227). In these pages, Fanon’s critique is at its most schematic and voluntaristc; the indications for how this process might be ensured amount to no more than affirmations of the necessity of ‘decentralization’, and the verb ‘devoir’ seems to appear in every other sentence as Fanon notes with trepidation that ‘l’heure d’une nouvelle crise nationale n’est pas loin’ [the hour of national crisis is not far] (ibid.: 228). Nonetheless, it is the Algerian case that proves that this subtractive unity can exist, in which specific differences are not violently erased, but no longer come to count in the face of national unity. ‘Le peuple algérien, cette masse d’affamés et d’analphabètes, ces hommes et ces femmes plongés pendant des siècles dans l’obscurité la plus effarante ont tenu contre les chars et les avions, contre le napalm et les services psychologiques, mais surtout contre la corruption et le lavage de cerveau.’ [The Algerian people, this starving, illiterate mass, these men and women plunged for centuries into the most frightening darkness, have stood up to tanks and planes, to napalm and torture, but above all to corruption and brainwashing.] The ultimate horizon of this process of ‘humanization’, for Fanon, the critical theorist of racism deconstructed in Peau noire, masques blancs, is the actual erasure of race as a category of distinction and exclusion from human society. When Fanon writes that ‘les nègres sont en train de disparaître’ [blacks are in the process of disappearing], this does not mean that skin-color phenotypes are lessening, but rather that these specific differences are ceasing to count as distinctions of social power and value (ibid.: 282). This, for Fanon, is the invention of a new humanity. Writing in the midst of the Algerian war, as a militant entirely dedicated to its success, Fanon, the former French Martinican, repeatedly writes in the first-person of ‘Nous, Algériens’, a critical objectification of his own first-hand experience (ibid.: 231). What can appear as

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 208

15/05/2013 08:44:51

Fanon’s On Violence

209

hollow invocations of humanism in the conclusion of Les Damnés de la terre in fact receives its substantial elaboration in these central pages of the book, where Fanon describes in the first-person plural his shared experience in Algeria in ‘1956–1957’, the transformation of a colonized, divided people into a single unified one fighting for its national existence. While Fanon’s analysis obviously simplifies a complex situation, his observations on the transformations he witnessed cannot simply be dismissed as biased and blind utopianism. Who are we in the twenty-first century, we might ask ourselves, external, non-participants, to judge the clinical observations of this militant doctor of psychiatry when he writes that ‘au niveau des individus, la violence désintoxique. Elle débarrasse le colonisé de son complexe d’infériorité, de ses attitudes contemplatives ou désespérées. Elle le rend intrépide, le réhabilitée à ses propres yeux’ [at the level of individuals, violence detoxifies. It strips the colonized of his inferiority complex, and of his contemplative or desperate attitudes. It makes him intrepid, and rehabilitates him in his own eyes]? (ibid.: 127). In page after page of Les Damnés de la terre, Fanon is not celebrating violence in general, but rather the specific transformations it wrought in individual and group psychology, transformations he observed as a trained medical observer and enthusiastic militant.13 Such transformations, for all their ideological simplifications of a complex reality, describe the logic of a particular world of extreme violence and suffering, in which, according to Fanon’s own observations, that violence can in certain instances lead to a ‘construction de l’homme’, to a general and systematic refusal to abide by the rules of French colonialism at all costs, leading in turn to his affirmation that ‘le peuple algérien est aujourd’hui un peuple adulte, responsable, conscient’ [the Algerian people are today an adult, responsible, and conscious people] (ibid.: 235). The extremely violent and protracted struggle of the Algerian War, with the eventual defeat of the French, despite massive military superiority and tactical defeats such as the dismantling of the FLN resistance network in the Battle of Algiers, all of this and more is testimony to the singular truth of Fanon’s observations, and this no matter what defeats the many neo-colonial Thermidors of the 1960s may have brought to this truth. To read Les Damnés de la terre today, when Third Worldism, decolonization, and the many varieties of Marxian critique (including Fanon’s own influential theorization) seem to have long ago receded into the past, to read Les Damnés de la terre with anything more than a folkloric, utopian, or antiquarian eye, to read it as a relevant and timeless

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 209

15/05/2013 08:44:51

210

Caribbean Critique

intervention into the politics of global imperialism today, requires addressing Fanon’s critical thought at the crossroads of ­contemporary critical theory and political militancy. Regarding the latter, as I write in 2012, as the Arab Spring rages on in the aftermath of its invention in Tunis and Cairo, following more fitful and uncertain paths in Libya and Syria, the least one can say is that it is clear that the questions Fanon raised so provocatively, questions of revolutions of the dispossessed and unentitled, of revolutions to be created in the immediacy of the here and now, questions of the power of the masses successfully to unify behind a single demand and to overthrow in a flash of bloodless, divine violence tyrannical regimes that only weeks before had seemed invincibly powerful and eternal, questions of the relation of state violence to revolutionary violence, these and many more questions Fanon asked so powerfully and provocatively in the few years remaining to him before his premature death from cancer in 1961, together announce the beginning of the end of the so-called ‘end of history’ that has nullified leftist political thought since the 1970s (as the dismantling of the international legacies of 1968) and 1989 (with the collapse of state socialism as both state form and ideology). Cairo and the Arab Spring suddenly bring back to life, in the flash of a revolutionary intervention and occupation of (political, social) space, a thinker whose final masterpiece was not long ago thought by many to be a mere relic of a failed, utopian moment. While it is beyond the scope of this book and my own knowledge to address the political truths of the Arab Spring as a global, universal (and not merely ‘Arab’) event, from the perspective of contemporary critical theory, perhaps no other recent work at once illuminates and so offhandedly dismisses the thought of Fanon than Étienne Balibar’s monumental 2010 critique of violence, Violence et civilité.14 Even superficially, although Balibar focuses his thought in this 400–page volume on the figures of Hegel and Marx, I would argue that what he calls ‘le cycle des luttes anti-impérialistes’ of the 1950s and 60s, and Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre in particular, forms the explicit critical telos of his prodigious deconstruction of revolutionary violence. This is the case, I believe, when at the same time Balibar describes Les Damnés de la terre as a ‘texte difficile à relire cinquante ans plus tard’ because of what he calls its ‘ultra-subjectivism’ (by which he means Fanon’s humanist thesis that violence as Sartrean praxis transforms the colonized subject into a ‘nouvel homme’), without actually engaging with Fanon’s extremely complex theories of anticolonial violence, political

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 210

15/05/2013 08:44:51

Fanon’s On Violence

211

power, and subjectivity beyond a single, putatively damning citation from ‘De la violence’ (Balibar 2010: 300). While Balibar sees only a philosophy of consciousness in Fanon, I would argue that his last work, in its logical structure, initiates a proto- or quasi-structuralist critique of the mode of production of colonial violence that remains hidden beneath its Sartrean vocabulary. So, while on the one hand I want to read Balibar against the grain of his own argument, immanently, this can perhaps become more than a game of blame, if Violence et civilité, read in this way, in fact proves to offer out of its own Hegelian-Marxian genealogy of revolutionary violence the means to a renewed understanding of Les Damnés de la terre itself. While Violence et civilité, in other words, only spends a few brief paragraphs discussing (and dismissing) Fanon, its theory of revolutionary violence as conversion, traced back to its origins in Hegel and Marx, should rightfully be taken not as a reductionist rejection of Fanon (as is the case for Balibar), but, on the contrary, as the most revealing means of articulating the true logic of absolute violence itself. Violence et civilité presents this theory of revolutionary violence as conversion in a dazzling analysis in the work’s central theoretical chapter, ‘Hegel, Hobbes, et la “conversion de la violence”’. Beginning with Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Balibar’s thesis is that the state serves in this model, from Hegel and Marx through Luxembourg, Lenin, Mao, Sartre, Fanon, and Gandhi, as the product of human creation that both converts and redeems senseless, contingent violence into meaningful history (ibid.: 60). For Hegel, whom Balibar credits with forging this basic concept, the state is the ultimate product of the transformation of violence into a historically productive force: productive, ultimately, of human freedom within a true and just social order (ibid.: 61). This basic thesis of the state as the product of the human conversion of senseless violence into human freedom continues to hold for Fanon, for whom, as we have seen, the truly postcolonial state is the telos of the violent struggle for decolonization. More specifically, one might say that it is the struggle for an Algerian nation and corresponding decolonized national consciousness (of a group of subjects who produce or bring themselves into existence through revolutionary struggle as ‘Algerians’) that converts the random violence of French colonialism (as massacres, as the random, often absurd violence and dehumanization of quotidian colonialism, as the extreme violence of torture) into the truth of human freedom in a decolonized nation on the immediate horizon for Fanon, writing in 1961.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 211

15/05/2013 08:44:51

212

Caribbean Critique

That Balibar writes of a ‘conversion’ and redemption of violence into the truth of the state, and not its sublimation or even spiritualization, points to the constant menace that this Hegelian defense of the conversion revolutionary violence, for Fanon as much as Hegel, would amount to a mere idealist metaphysics, a doctrine of the unexplained miracle (miraculous, in the sense of bearing no explanation of the necessity of its occurrence according to natural law), ultimately to become a theology of violence. As we have seen, this threat of explicatory underdetermination is ever-present in Les Damnés de la terre, a text much of which Fanon wrote in haste as he lay dying of leukemia, one that frequently substitutes mere assertion (that race is disappearing, that Algerian national consciousness actually exists as he describes it) for a systematic logic and history of absolute decolonization, and a methodical, fully developed critique of the many perils of neo-colonialism. That Fanon was nonetheless able to mount a coherent theory of the structures of colonial violence, of anticolonial violence as absolute, and of the many forms of neo-colonialism in this single volume is nonetheless testimony to its genius. Balibar’s central thesis that he brings to bear against the theory of revolutionary violence as conversion and redemption is the claim that there exist certain forms of violence – those he terms at various points ‘unconvertible’, ‘extreme’, or simply ‘cruelty’ – that are ultimately unconvertible and unredeemable by their dialectical sublation in the truth of a political state. In response to the philosophy of revolutionary violence that in Balibar’s genealogy stretches from Hegel’s analysis of history and the French Revolution, through Marx, Lenin, Mao, Fanon, and Gandhi, much of Violence et civilité is dedicated to the defense of another order that he calls, variously, ‘anti-violence’ or ‘civility’. Before pausing on some of the contradictions of Balibar’s counter-model, however, I want further to tease out some of the unnoticed symmetries of this philosophy of conversion with Fanon’s defense of absolute violence. Hegel’s defense of conversionary violence is indeed a defense of revolutionary violence, as Balibar shows, insofar as Hegel defends the absolute necessity of destructive violence as one world order destroys and replaces another, in which what from the perspective of the old, threatened order can only appear as a ‘crime’ (one thinks here of the various abuses and misuses of the epithet ‘terrorist’ and ‘terrorism’ by established orders of power through the ages), but which from the Hegelian perspective of ‘The March of History’ (title of the chapter of Hegel’s Philosophy of History that Balibar analyzes) appears as the passage to an ‘ordre

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 212

15/05/2013 08:44:51

Fanon’s On Violence

213

supérieur’ (Balibar 2010: 67). Balibar shows in detail how Hegel relies on a ‘great man’ theory of history (in which figures such as Ceasar and Napoleon figure prominently), standing in contrast, one might observe, to the future communist thinkers, from Marx to Fanon, who will adopt and adapt this theory of revolutionary violence as principally driven by the anonymous masses, the proletariat, or the rural peasantry. Nonetheless, the principal point to be retained in relation to Fanon and ‘De la violence’ in particular is that the conversion theory of violence, as Balibar reads it off from Hegel, involves a transformation of random, contingent violence into the pure reason of absolute necessity. Les Damnés de la terre, in light of Balibar’s theory of conversion, can be said to constitute a systematic argument for the absolute intelligibility of anticolonial violence, its reasonability grounded upon the thesis of its ultimate redemption in the immanent construction of a decolonized nation. In this reading, the disappearance of random senseless violence of the colonial world is dialectically converted into the justice of a decolonized nation, replaced by a state of human freedom incarnate. In this way, it is the critique of colonial violence Fanon undertakes in Les Damnés de la terre that itself serves to transform, in the consciousness of its readers, the absurd, contingent violence of colonialism, into the absolute necessity of, first, the destruction of that order, and, second, the production of a decolonized world. All of which leads me to conclude that, ultimately, it is Balibar’s postulation of an untranscendable, unconvertible, and unredeemable violence, what he calls cruelty (on the model of the various moments of ultra-violence in the twentieth century, the prototype of which is the Shoah itself), that, I would argue, might be taken in Violence et civilité to constitute in itself an absolute idealism. In other words, even if we forgo Hegel’s teleological presumptions of Absolute Reason and a totality of the Whole, to assert with thinkers from Adorno, Heidegger, Glissant, and Badiou, to Balibar himself, that the whole is not, that there is no One, nonetheless, within any site or world, for the subjects of that world, there can exist absolute, and not relative, truths, including, for Fanon in the midst of the Algerian Revolution, the absolute necessity of anticolonial violence, the destruction of an obscenely violent system by all means necessary. In this understanding, the absoluteness of anticolonial violence is absolute for the subjects of that world (the subjects of the Algerian revolution from 1954 to1962, in Fanon’s case), and for them alone. From the perspective of relative, external observation (such as that of

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 213

15/05/2013 08:44:51

214

Caribbean Critique

this book), one can only attempt, analytically, to reconstruct a logical, rhetorical model of that absolute necessity, in more or less convincing form. For external observers, the anticolonial violence of the FLN can appear as contingent, unmotivated, and unnecessary, no less than the contemporary recourse to torture by the French military will appear to a subject external to the absolute necessity of maintaining a French Algerian colony at all costs as pure contingency, a merely subjective, seemingly unmotivated willfulness. In certain worlds, Fanon tells us, the conflict of non-negotiable struggles, of violence and counter-violence, takes the form of an absolute: the absolute necessity of an independent, decolonized Algeria confronting the correspondingly absolute, diametrically opposed and non-negotiable necessity that Algeria remain a French colony. In reading Fanon, no less than when one considers the violence of the Jacobin Terror, the Haitian Revolution, or Lavalas in Haiti after 1986, the role of critical thought is not to offer moralizing judgments, but to figure and present the logic of such necessity from a universal standpoint. If one were to describe the logic of the necessity of the French massacres and torture in Algeria by the army and the OAS, such a standpoint might index these historical events to the universal rights of the civilized over the barbaric, of economic development as an absolute human right of dominion over the earth, of the historical destiny of the French nation, of greater power and technological force over underdeveloped societies, of enlightened Europe over its peripheries, in short, of the many ideologies justifying might as right. From Fanon’s anticolonial perspective of the wretched of the earth, in contrast, the anticolonial struggle is to be referred to the measure of a true humanity and justice as equality, a common project open to all, articulated in the creation of a nation and corresponding national consciousness, a process necessarily destructive of the inequalities whose most extreme measure is to be found in the colonial world of debasement and exploitation. If Balibar’s thesis of the absolute inconvertibility of certain forms of extreme violence itself tends toward a theology of cruelty, this is because in positing expressions of violence such as torture or the Shoah as absolute, the critical theorist takes the standpoint of universality not as measure or reference, but as observable, actually existent totality.15 Who are we, students and scholars of Caribbean critique, to presume that the violence of the Haitian or Algerian revolutions, culminating in the destruction of regimes of slavery, massacre, dehumanization, and exploitation, in the decolonization and creation of utterly novel, independent nations and

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 214

15/05/2013 08:44:52

Fanon’s On Violence

215

modes of citizenship, did not redeem the violence of those subject to slavery and torture for them as subjects? It is, one might argue, irrelevant that certain forms of violence are ‘irredeemable’ and ‘inconvertible’ for us. That we, as external observers, comfortably ensconced in our own various worlds of privileged inequality, ourselves only tangentially and secondarily ‘subjects’ of those events, may judge their recourse to violence barbaric, inhuman, or even absolutely inconvertible into a superior form of human existence, should be irrelevant to critical thought. Instead, we can hope to grasp the logic of worlds other than our own, in which revolutionary violence has taken the form of an absolute necessity, and has done so in reference to truths that transcend their various, situated articulations in the course of history. Critical thought will always involve choices and decisions regarding its orientation, and a logical defense of such choices by the powers of reason and analysis. One might reasonably orient critical thought to study the universal rights of property or power, to examine the logic of Colonel Massu’s successful destruction through torture of the FLN network in the Battle of Algiers as an absolute necessity to defend French imperial hegemony, just as critical thought might choose in absolute distinction to follow Fanon’s becoming a subject of the FLN and an Algerian, and his abstract formalization of this subjective process as a philosophy of absolute decolonization. The latter would involve not a judgment of Fanon’s putative psychological alienation as Martinican black in search of a non-French big Other (which it may have been as well), but as the struggle for a non-French absolute – in a world where France signifies torture, dehumanization, and massacre – that of justice figured as a new humanity. In tracing the historical profiles of such moments of absolute necessity, the promise of critical theory to delineate the historical shapes of universal concepts can reveal how, beyond the absolute singularity and pure inwardness of a situation such as that Fanon encountered in Algeria, absolute violence is not a call or diagnosis for a general politics of violence or hatred, but how, across time, space, worlds and cultures, there have repeatedly occurred instances of such extreme degrees of exploitation, debasement, and suffering, that the subjects of that violence have been compelled, absolutely, to overthrow the systemic and total injustice they experienced to instantiate a new situation and politico-social reality under the imperative of justice as equality. Such, I would argue, was the case of Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s struggle against internal and external interests of property, power, and entitlement of the few in Haiti after the overthrow of Duvalier in 1986.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 215

15/05/2013 08:44:52

chapter nine

Aristide and the Politics of Democratization Aristide

The arduous struggle for a more democratic order in Haiti since the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986 has sustained the imperative of an ongoing critique of postcolonial violence. Two recent books in particular delineate the contemporary stakes of this critical constant. Alex Dupuy’s The Prophet and the Power: Jean-Bertrand Aristide (2007a) and Peter Hallward’s Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment (2007) together extensively document the complex and contentious path of the post-Duvalier era in Haitian politics. They describe the invention of a post-authoritarian populist political sequence, one that after 1990 coalesced around the charismatic leadership of a previously unknown Roman Catholic priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Both volumes occupy a highly congruent critical terrain; beyond their shared focus on Aristide, both are highly critical of the role of American foreign policy and its systematic attempts to undermine the process of democratization in Haiti. Each is fundamentally supportive of the promise Aristide represented to open the political terrain to the excluded Haitian multitude, and both describe the degree to which North Atlantic neo-liberal policies in the era of globalization have undermined economic and political autonomy in Haiti. They agree as well on the close relation of these policies with the extension of US imperial hegemony, the intensive coalition of the US and the Haitian elite in the attempt to undermine Aristide’s progressive social and political reforms, and each condemns the hollow, Potemkin-like destabilization campaign that was the so-called ‘democratic’ opposition to Aristide’s second presidency.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 216

15/05/2013 08:44:52

Aristide 217

Where Hallward parts ways with Dupuy1 is in the latter’s affirmation that it is Aristide himself, along with his Famni Lavalas party, which is to blame for the dismantling of Haitian democracy after 2000: Aristide’s objective, [writes Dupuy] was to consolidate his and his party’s power and preserve the prebendary and clientelistic characteristics of the state he had vowed to dismantle in 1991. To maintain power, Aristide relied on armed gangs, the police, and authoritarian practices to suppress his opponents, all the while cultivating a self-serving image as defender of the poor. (Hallward 2007a: xv)

Hallward rejects Dupuy’s unconditional condemnation of Aristide’s populism, ironically pointing to the incoherence of this critique in light of Dupuy’s celebration of Haitian democracy. One might wonder, Hallward writes, whether [Dupuy’s] repeated preference for a ‘broad-based’ as opposed to a ‘mass-based’ government is altogether compatible with his apparent enthusiasm for democracy. [Such readers] may not grasp how a decision to pursue policies emphatically endorsed by the great majority of the population and authorised by several repeated and overwhelming election victories is best interpreted as a rejection of ‘consensus’. They may wonder whether Aristide was really mistaken in his distrust of the bourgeoisie and the United States, when a fair amount of Dupuy’s own book is devoted to a damning and perfectly accurate demonstration of their determination to frustrate, depose and then discredit him by all available means. (Hallward 2007b)

Above all, Hallward parts ways with Dupuy in the former’s willingness to defend Aristide’s ‘cautious’ recourse to popular mobilization to resist the violent dismantling of this nascent democratic movement: Still more intransigent sceptics may even find it strange that whereas the whole thrust of Dupuy’s book targets the deeply, institutionally entrenched corruption of the political class and the profoundly ‘predatory’ or ‘prebendary’ orientation of the status quo, he nevertheless condemns out of hand, and as a matter of dignified principle, Aristide’s rather cautious attempt to submit this status quo to the one and only source of non-predatory pressure available: the force of direct popular mobilisation. (Hallward 2007b)

Dupuy condemns Aristide’s occasional calls for popular violence (‘necklacing’) in absolute terms (Dupuy 2007a: 125). Hallward, given the enormity of the objective, world-systemic forces working to subvert Haitian democracy in these years, affirms in contrast the necessity

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 217

15/05/2013 08:44:52

218

Caribbean Critique

of subjective, popular violence in extreme situations that threaten to overturn the rule of law. Aristide’s infamous speech from July 1991 clearly does ‘allude to the use of deadly violence’, as Dupuy claims (ibid.), yet it just as clearly and heuristically limits the use of violence to situations that would overthrow constitutional, democratic order: ‘When you are in your literacy class you are learning to write “Père Lebrun”, you are learning to think about “Père Lebrun”, it’s because you have to know when to use it, and where to use it. And you may never use it again in a state where law prevails’ (Jean-Bertrand Aristide, my emphasis, cited ibid.: 124). The inherent, foundational relation between violence and democracy lies at the center of this debate. In defending this limited use of popular violence, I would argue that Aristide in fact remains faithful to one of the primary lessons of the Haitian Revolution. I argued above that in revolutionary France Robespierre had simultaneously called for the death of Louis Capet while refusing the death penalty in the new democratic state based on the distinction between a society of Rousseauian contractual democracy and the ancien régime’s pre-contractual ‘state of nature’. Similarly, the popular violence of the Haitian Revolution was rightful insofar as the situation of plantation slavery was, in the political language of the period, precisely a state of nature prior to any imaginable social contract between a slave and master. Thus, in the case of slavery, the necessarily violent imposition of a novel political order escaped any ban on revolutionary violence. Insofar as Haiti in July 1991 continued to exist under a (fragile and endangered) democratic rule of law, Aristide in fact explicitly and coherently condemned the use of “Père Lebrun” (popular, vigilante violence) in his July, 1991 speech. To conclude otherwise, as does Dupuy, is to ignore the heuristic nature of Aristide’s words, and to assert, against all evidence, that those listening to him were incapable of understanding the point Aristide makes and of bringing to bear their own judgment as to its correctness. There exist no absolute, categorical criteria to determine when a democratic order is threatened in its very existence and popular violence thus justified. For any fragile democracy, from those of the French revolution in the early 1790s, to that of Haiti in the years after 1804, and the Weimar Republic in 1933, such a decision will always remain an intensely political process of reflection, discussion, and negotiation in reference to universal democratic norms of equality and freedom. In the very few cases in which Aristide did invoke the possibility of popular violence, its use appears to have remained explicitly banned in

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 218

15/05/2013 08:44:52

Aristide 219

any consensual state of constitutional law. Aristide remained faithful to this injunction in his September, 1991 call to give the Macoutes ‘what they deserve’. Hallward mounts convincing evidence that Aristide’s democratic government was by that time mortally threatened by Cedras’s military insurrection, returned to a ‘state of nature’, to retain my earlier Rousseauian terminology. As outside observers looking back with the wisdom of hindsight, we may disagree on the precise moment this threat became overwhelming. Aristide’s invocation was nonetheless a coherent, reasonable, and political defense of democracy at the very limit of its continued existence. Democracy, in such a view, is to be understood not as the categorical (and suicidal, in such contexts) banishment of violence and its replacement by rational discussion on the part of competing interest groups. In contexts such as Haiti in 1991 and 2003, the irrational and violent party is the one refusing all overtures of rational discussion over the political process. Democracy in such limited cases is not some Habermasian ideal of communication and discussion, but precisely the necessarily violent claim for continued inclusion in the political process of those with no entitlement to such participation. 2 As Hallward points out and as Dupuy is intimately aware, the Haitian majority has a profound and harshly acquired historical awareness that the defense of their rights to inclusion will only be respected if they maintain a principled willingness to have recourse to violence, and if that readiness remains palpable to those who would disenfranchise them in an instant if given the chance. Among the pointed distinctions to be drawn from Hallward and Dupuy’s competing accounts of the period is a disagreement over the nature of democracy itself. Dupuy’s volume is structured around a fundamental distinction between what he calls minimalist and maximalist democracies. In this view, a minimalist political order seeks to ‘limit democracy as much as possible to the guarantee of civil and political rights’ (Dupuy 2007: 18). Whether avowed or implicit, Dupuy accurately describes such democracies as striving ‘not to disturb the extant system of unequal distribution of wealth, income, and resources and to maintain Haiti’s position in the international division of labor as a supplier of cheap labor, both domestically and in other parts of the hemisphere through labor migration’ (ibid.). Such ‘democracies’ define themselves in reference to mere procedural norms such as regulated markets and free elections, with the outcome being that, under the conditions of transnational capitalism, ‘democracy must disempower people if it is to serve the interests of capital’ (ibid.: 19).

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 219

15/05/2013 08:44:53

220

Caribbean Critique

In contrast, Dupuy describes a ‘maximalist’ democracy as profoundly ‘redistributive’ – one that seeks to secure ‘economic’ rights for the disenfranchised majority, without which ‘the exercise of all other rights would be limited for most citizens because the profound inequalities in wealth, income, and resources in Haiti would maintain them in conditions of autonomy’. Dupuy’s narrative describes the transformation of Haiti from such a ‘maximalist’ democracy under its ‘most progressive’ 1987 constitution and the early years of Aristide, to neo-Duvalierist authoritarianism. The underlying cause of this epic of degeneration arose, according to Dupuy, from the ‘unresolved struggles around [these] two alternative versions of democracy’ (ibid.: 20). Such a definition of democracy may seem plausible from a perspective in which neo-liberal global capital appears to reign dominant to the exclusion of all other imaginable political, economic, and social regimes. I would argue, however, that to limit ‘democracy’ in such a fashion, and, despite the accuracy of Dupuy’s critique of Haiti’s place in the contemporary system of what he calls ‘New World Order Imperialism’, is to subject the concept to a significant degree of impoverishment. Such a definition understands democracy to address only the debate over the distribution of goods. It limits the role of peripheral, structurally impoverished communities like Haiti to crying for handouts, the few crumbs that may fall from the table of those bearing the right to sit at the table of capital. It reduces democracy to the technocratic negotiation over such distribution, and accepts and reinscribes a peripheral community’s subaltern, dependent status, in which decisions regarding distribution will always be made elsewhere by those possessing a monopoly over such goods. It is to limit democracy to the political science of such distribution, identifying the just (‘maximalist’) norms of distribution, without ever calling into question the structures that reinforce – and which would continue to reinforce even after any ‘maximalist’ redistribution –Haiti’s systematic exclusion and dependency. 3 Such a redistribution-based definition of democracy ignores the lesson Haiti has represented to the North Atlantic world for two centuries, a world unable to perceive any ‘value’ other than that of capital accumulation and profit maximalization. In overthrowing the early modern world-system of slave-based agrarian capitalism after 1793, Haiti terrified the North Atlantic world precisely because it was not simply another slave ‘revolt’ calling for a few more crumbs and a few less lashes of the master’s whip. The creation of the Haitian state in 1804 was a successful bid to manage the process of modernization in terms inadmissible to the

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 220

15/05/2013 08:44:53

Aristide 221

world powers of the time (i.e., without slave-based labor). The creation of Haiti was, moreover, the comprehensive reinvention of a society, founding an entirely new social structure, the ontological foundations of which universally and immediately outlawed slavery in a world fully and structurally dependent upon it for the accumulation of profit. In this sense, it may indeed be correct to conclude that Dupuy goes no farther than Aristide himself, whose primordial ‘commandment of democracy’ is participatory (‘Everyone around the same table’) and primarily concerned (particularly after 1990) with redistribution (‘the condition[s] that govern the net transfer of the resources of our impoverished countries’) and not a revolutionary restructuring of the social order (the ‘table’) itself (Aristide 1993: 202). Haitian history tells us, however, that the concept of democracy must fundamentally, perhaps even exclusively, address the political struggle for expression by the uncounted, of those who have no right, authorization, or accreditation to sit at the ‘table’. Not a bureaucratic procedure or set of institutional norms, democracy on the Haitian model is the attempt to upset the well-ordered table, a necessarily violent process precisely because those sitting at the table are deaf to the claims of those it cannot and will not recognize in its scope of address. Haiti is imperceptible in North Atlantic modernity as anything but the eternal return on CNN of the ‘poorest nation in the Western hemisphere’. The successful outcome of any conceivable ‘maximalist’ redistributive endeavor would simply be to raise Haiti to the status of, say, second or third ‘poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere’, while allowing the structural impoverishment plans of the last two centuries to continue unabated. For all their surface similarities, I would argue that Hallward’s and Dupuy’s texts have fundamentally different objects of inquiry. While Dupuy’s The Prophet and Power is primarily concerned with the political individual Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Hallward’s Damming the Flood addresses a wider popular democratic movement making a decisive claim to redraw the coordinates of what counts as the political itself. Hallward’s conclusion is telling. This era [and not as for Dupuy the politics of one individual], in spite of the astonishing levels of repression it aroused, has indeed opened the door to a new political future. There is little to be gained by judging this opening by the standards of either armed national liberation movements on the one hand or entrenched parliamentary democracies on the other. Over the last twenty years, Lavalas has developed as an experiment at the limits of contemporary political possibility. Its history sheds light on some

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 221

15/05/2013 08:44:54

222

Caribbean Critique

of the ways that political mobilization can proceed under the pressure of exceptionally powerful constraints. (2007a: 314; my emphasis)

Haiti in the Aristide years, in other words, represents a far-reaching and powerful attempt to refound political ontology itself, to reconfigure ‘the limits of political possibility’. Precisely, the overturning of the table that Aristide had called for in The Parish of the Poor, a collection of his writings prior to 1990: The rich of my country, a tiny percentage of our population, sit at a vast table covered in white damask and overflowing with good food, while the rest of my countrymen and countrywomen are crowded under that table, hunched over in the dirt and starving. It is a violent situation, and one day the people under that table will rise up in righteousness, and knock the table of privilege over, and take what rightfully belongs to them. It is our mission to help them stand up and live as human beings. (cited at Hallward 2007a: 24)

Such an understanding views democracy not as an institution but as the enunciation of a contestatory claim on the part of the excluded, a claim that refuses to play by political rules that merely reinforce their own exclusion. Instead, this democratic politics is the struggle to recast the very terms of political process itself. Post-Duvalier Haiti has seen an extraordinary exploration of the limits and modalities of a radically inclusionary and egalitarian politics, a process Hallward documents extensively in his attempt to defend Aristide against charges of ‘messianism’ (Hallward 2007a: 312). If Aristide did not have the means to see through this refounding of the political itself, one should certainly not blame the victim, but rather the powerful forces mobilized to undermine this initiative since 1987. I read Dupuy’s explanation of Aristide’s rise as betraying a fundamental, if largely inchoate, underestimation of the Haitian majority. Rather than concluding, reasonably, that Haitians recognized in Aristide someone capable of voicing and expressing their concerns in the strongest and most eloquent fashion, Dupuy instead characterizes the radical investment of the huge majority of Haitians as sheer passivity, a leap of faith on the part of the ignorant before a promise of transcendent, miraculous intervention: ‘Through his sermons at Saint Jean Bosco church and his radio broadcasts, Aristide inspired his followers, gave them hope, explained to them the nature of the system that imprisoned and impoverished them, and galvanized them into action against the neo-Duvalierist forces’ (Dupuy 2007: 76). Dupuy

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 222

15/05/2013 08:44:54

Aristide 223

would have us believe that Aristide owed his success not to his capacity to give voice to systemic injustice, but to the auratic charisma of a figure who stood (quite admirably and remarkably, needless to say) firm before the violent forces allied against him. By appearing to be undaunted by [three unsuccessful] assassination attempts, Aristide proved his prophetic quality to his followers. He defied the forces of evil and emerged victorious. It was understandable, then, that he galvanized the population behind him when he decided to run for president. […] Guided by the light of God, [Aristide was the only one in their eyes who] could rid the country of the Duvalierist scourge. (Dupuy 2007: 83)

Dupuy describes an unenlightened, credulous, and uncritical Haitian petit peuple, leaving the reader to wonder how such a putatively ignorant, gullible, and superstitious folk could possibly have survived the extreme conditions of poverty and exclusion to live off an exhausted land, and to survive, as well, such radical exclusion, discrimination, and systemic violence for the past two centuries. Instead, he implies that this population must necessarily be stripped of any constituent power it would hold directly to fashion social relations. They must surrender any such powers, since ‘between the leader and the masses there must exist a structured organization controlled by enlightened and responsible people’ (Dupuy 2007: 95). In other words, a neo-Hegelian technocratic elite that would enlighten the Haitian Pöbel as to its rightful (maximalist) share and (subaltern) place in the harmonious totality of the Global Order. In his desire to focus on the processes and pitfalls of day-to-day political organization, however, I think Hallward goes too far in underplaying the radical intervention Lavalas and its epigones represented, at least prior to Aristide’s ouster in 2004, to North Atlantic political hegemony. In this sense, and without accepting Dupuy’s stigmatization of Aristide as a neo-Weberian ‘charismatic leader’ (ibid.: 75), one can indeed say that the appearance of Lavalas was a ‘messianic’ event, a rupture in the temporal and causal logic of a world, if (and only if) one is able to judge such a ‘miraculous appearance’ from the standards of neo-liberal capital alone. In the world of global capital, the creation of a highly successful and legitimate populist political sequence after 1987, as well as the sudden hegemonic focalization of this process in 1990 around Aristide’s claim for a ‘priority of the poor’, was, for the North Atlantic powers, indeed,

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 223

15/05/2013 08:44:55

224

Caribbean Critique

‘miraculous’. It represented the scandal and threat so-called ‘miracles’ have always represented to established order, in which the epithet ‘miracle’ serves to stigmatize and marginalize a threatening intervention. While Haitian independence in 1804 was an event calling for the defense of its existence and flourishing on the part of the subjects of Haiti (whether ‘Haitian’ or not), for those, on the other hand, who would reactively deny or obliterate the truth of this event since 1804 – again both within and without the confines of that island or nationality – Haiti has always only appeared as a miraculous anomaly without legitimacy in an Atlantic world order. The threat of Haiti to the global ‘New World Order’ is palpable and real, and it has terrified out of all proportion the North Atlantic powers for some two centuries. This Haiti, expressed in recent years under the signifier Lavalas, has with varying levels of success enacted the reformation of the order of politics along the lines of the radical egalitarianism that is the legacy of the Haitian Revolution. Critique of Populism Hallward and Dupuy disagree significantly on the place of populism in a legitimate movement of democratization. For Dupuy, the coalition that formed around Aristide in 1990 was a step backward from the ‘broad and decentralised democratic movement’ (Dupuy 2007: 59) that emerged in Haitian civil society after 1986. Rather than the effective crystallization of a political movement that could successfully stand up to the Haitian elite in the name of the excluded, as Hallward describes Lavalas, for Dupuy, in the face of Lavalas, these movements ‘in effect surrendered their autonomy and their ability to criticize Aristide, to serve as checks and balances to his powers, and to articulate independent agendas’ (ibid.: 95). Hallward reads Dupuy, here and elsewhere, as interpreting events from the point of view of the bourgeoisie: ‘Aristide shouldn’t have opted for the isolation of the masses’, is how Hallward sums up Dupuy’s analysis. ‘He should have trusted the bourgeoisie, and he should have trusted the US’. Hallward interprets Aristide’s first administration as a model of a successful populist endeavor. Lavalas was then, in this analysis, ‘a vehicle for [Haitians’] own empowerment’. Hallward spends considerable energy demonstrating that ‘this popular investment in Aristide remains the single and most decisive and divisive element of Haitian politics’. Aristide, in this view, was not a demagogue, but a vector for the

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 224

15/05/2013 08:44:55

Aristide 225

processes of popular self-organization. ‘Aristide helped us to organize, [people in Cité Soleil or Bel Air] say. Of course his own freedom of movement was limited, but he helped us to mobilize for the first time as active participants in national politics’ (Hallward 2007a: 136, 137). Hallward’s fundamental assertion that the ‘persistence of emancipatory politics demands discipline and unity and that it depends on a capacity to resist the various kinds of fragmentation and betrayal that its very existence is bound to provoke’ (ibid.: xxxiv) underscores the political logic of this fundamentally populist political sequence. Haitian society has traditionally been divided over an unbridgeable, non-dialectical antagonism between the elite and the moun endeyo. No democratic, Habermasian negotiation has ever been possible between these two groups across the unbridgeable divide of Haitian social structure. The moun endeyo was not one more party that could be included among the participants in the Haitian political system. As the Haitian political system was itself based upon the exclusion of the poor majority, any substantial recognition of the validity of the latter’s claims would necessarily call into question the very foundations of the existing, exclusionary political system itself. Dupuy, in contrast, takes this lack of institutionalization to constitute one of the primary weaknesses of Lavalas: Lavalas, in fact, had no formal structure. It was neither a political organization, nor a political party, with clearly defined principles of membership, rules of decision making, methods of choosing the party leadership, and responsibilities of the leadership to the constituent members and vice versa. As such, it is difficult to know the mechanisms by which it developed its ideas and its overall orientation, or who spoke for the movement and with what authority. (Dupuy 2007: 92)

Democracy in this view is a mere matter of ‘principles and procedures’, and Dupuy is forced into extremes of logical contortion in trying to maintain the vision of an Aristide who ‘substitutes himself […] for those he claims to represent and arrogates to himself the right to speak and set goals [for the masses]’ while simultaneously in the same paragraph asserting that Aristide’s positions in fact ‘corresponded to the real aspirations and demands of the excluded majority’ (ibid.: 93). Following the breakdown in social order after Baby Doc’s sudden departure in 1986, a situation of structural uncertainty and fluidity allowed for the articulation and enunciation of a claim for democratic expression on the part of the excluded majority. For all the promising developments in the public sphere in these years, these demands

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 225

15/05/2013 08:44:56

226

Caribbean Critique

continued to meet structural resistance on the part of the elite minority, understandably hesitant to call into question the system that had empowered them for two centuries. In 1990, these diverse, unfulfilled demands for social justice coalesced around a single figure. Not simply reducible to the historical person Aristide, this popular investment focused instead upon the deficit of social justice in Haitian society, an absence that was embodied by a person (Aristide), a series of truth statements (tout moun se moun …), and a populist movement (Lavalas). The deficiency of a situation of the most extreme social injustice fueled a desire to transform that void into the actuality of an inclusive, egalitarian democracy that Aristide described to the United Nations in his ‘Ten Commandments of Democracy in Haiti’ in 1991: ‘Hungry for liberation – that emptiness suggests a legitimate expectation, the essence of which dwells in the spirit of the poor. It lives and gives life to democracy. It is for us who have been democratically elected to be faithful to their rights’ (Artistide 1993: 192). Hallward attributes Aristide’s success to two factors, one strategic, the other symbolic: ‘Aristide emerged as the crystallisation of Haitian demands for social transformation because he managed to combine a concrete strategy for acquiring practical political power with the uncompromising inspiration of liberation theology’ (Hallward 2007a: 18). The vast diversity of particular claims that were articulated in the years 1987–1990 were suddenly subsumed under the signifier Lavalas in the successful democratic bid to hegemonize political power in 1991. In this process, a single element of Haitian society, the excluded majority, suddenly came to stand in for the untrue whole, universalizing its claim to represent Haiti in its totality (tout moun se moun). Furthermore, the election of 1991 brought to fruition the process of political subjectivation begun in 1986 (or, more properly, 1791), in a bid to institutionalize the status of the moun endeyo as the political embodiment of the universal claim for social justice, and to make of that previously excluded, uncounted, and peripheral population a political actor at the center of radical democratic politics at the turn of the twenty-first century.4 This hegemony of the Lavalas movement emerged in 1990 in the context of a structural antagonism endemic to Haitian society that Hallward dubs Titid ou lame. Hallward figures the emergence of Aristide around this ineluctable confrontation: one was either for the army or Lavalas, with no middle ground possible. Aristide ‘understood that this mobilization could only proceed in direct confrontation with the army and with the elite that the army protects’ (Hallward 2007a: 18).

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 226

15/05/2013 08:44:56

Aristide 227

In a context of parliamentary consensus, those entitled by qualification of birth, citizenship, wealth, or other entitlements to inclusion can stand outside the necessary compromises and negotiations of institutional politics. The entitled can allow representatives of their interests to make delegated decisions regarding the distribution of the profits taken from local and global outsourcing, and go on to pursue ‘private’ lives in ignorance of the price others pay for the elite’s entitlement. When one is utterly excluded from this realm of consensus, the political comes instead to represent the very claim and struggle for (self-) recognition, along with the consequent attempt to found a political order that would allow for an excluded majority not only to be counted, but, more precisely, quite simply to have the power to count and to undertake the process of counting, that is to say, to determine who and what counts in the global colonial order of the Washington Consensus.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 227

15/05/2013 08:44:57

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 228

15/05/2013 08:44:57

part iii

The Critique of Relation

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 229

15/05/2013 08:44:57

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 230

15/05/2013 08:44:57

chapter ten

Édouard Glissant: From the Poétique de la relation to the Transcendental Analytic of Relation Édouard Glissant

The concept of Relation is among the most central to all of Caribbean Critique. This chapter will argue that two models of relation have typified the field: Glissant’s influential discussion of Relation from 1990 on as an aesthetic (in the encompassing sense of a sensual experiencingthe-world-as-totality taken to constitute the elemental – and perhaps unsurpassable – mode of human being) and a model common to Césaire, Sartre, Fanon, and the Glissant of the Discours antillais that perceives social relationality-initially-as alienation and structurally determined subalternality, the experience of which leads, however, to a call for a radical politics of disalienation and – for Fanon above all – revolutionary decolonization that would rework the very foundations of appearance and sensibility in any world. This binary model of relation – aesthetic-descriptive versus revolutionary modes – thus implies a further three-way distribution of relationality. In contrast to an aesthetic satisfaction and pleasure to be taken in the world as it actually exists, the alternative apperception of the world as radically unsatisfying and alien, a forceful summons to critique and transformation rather than contemplation, implies the existence of an initial primary experience of relation as what one might call, policing – the structuring of social order by various forms of legitimate violence – that precedes a militant relationality of emancipatory politics.1 Fanon’s descriptions of the lived experience of the black subject (in Peau noire, masques blancs) and of the structurally alienating effects of the colonial social space (in the opening pages of Les Damnés

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 231

15/05/2013 08:44:57

232

Caribbean Critique

de la terre) undoubtedly stand as the pre-eminent critique of such colonial and racial policing. Consequently, one arrives at the following outline of the Caribbean Critique of relation: an initial critique of alienated or policed relationality, the disarticulation of which is, almost by definition, an imperative for all figures of the Caribbean critical tradition from Vastey to the early Glissant. Following this initial deconstructive analysis, however, two paths forward appear: a Nietzschean antipolitics of epicurean delight that finds its principal depiction in Glissant’s late writings, which I will call a Caribbean expressive corporealism, and the constitution of a militant subject, articulated by figures such as Louverture, Césaire, and Fanon, a Caribbean materialist dialectic. If the former engages an interminable, unsurpassable analysis of the impasses of the real as relation (as analyzed above in the masterpiece of Caribbean Critique Le Discours antillais), the latter affirms the assertion of truths (such as that of justice as equality) in a politics of principle that relies on the axiom that these truths, while disproportionate and transcendental to any given situation, are nonetheless material and immanent. Policed Relation A formal presentation of this first moment of the Caribbean Critique of relation, the analytic of policing, can be found not so much in the writings of Rancière (who invents a post-Foucauldian concept of la police) as in Books II, III, and IV of Alain Badiou’s Logiques des mondes, which should, I think, be read as a formal logic of the police state, of existence as pure subjection to domination and control. In other words, Badiou’s task in these sections of Logics is to theorize how what he calls the ‘transcendentals’ imminent to any given, actually existing world allow for the appearance of any single entity (the ‘atom’, in Badiou’s parlance, ‘that which counts as one’) within that world (Badiou 2006: 193). Badiou’s narrative example in this section of his book should clue us in to his intention: the policing or ‘flicage’ of a leftist rally by the forces of order, overseeing that event to identify the constituent elements of its communal protest against a state of affairs. The policing of this event allows les flics to identify the members of the manif as a whole in their determinate identities (anarchists, Kurds, postal workers, students, etc.). While it is beyond the scope of this study to present Badiou’s extremely

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 232

15/05/2013 08:44:57

Édouard Glissant 233

complex theoretical apparatus in these central sections of Logics, a certain number of key concepts can be said to allow for a formal critique of the ‘police’ state (of which the slave plantation and Fanon’s Algerian colony are doubtless the primary examples of this phenomenon in Caribbean Critique). 2 First, Logics offers a critique of relation insofar as this formal logic posits the transcendental conditions governing the appearance of entities in any given world. The ‘transcendental’, then, proves to be the key concept in this presentation. It is Badiou’s conceptual answer to his version of the basic ontological question ‘Pourquoi y-a-t-il des mondes plutôt que le chaos?’ [Why and how are there worlds rather than chaos?] (Badiou 2006/2009b: 111/101). 3 The transcendental serves as a referential determination of the identity of any member of a set, allowing for the identification of that element’s ‘function of appearance’ [fonction d’apparaître], the determination of the different degrees of ‘identity’, or in other words, the measure of the force of any element in its assumption of an identity. Put more simply, if reductively, in Badiou’s leftist manif, for example, the unionist leader speaking through a megaphone has a stronger degree of identity (as unionist) from the point of view of the police surveillant than those listening to him. Similarly, in Fanon’s policed Algeria, women were able to penetrate the French center and to place bombs more easily during the Battle of Algiers precisely because they did not register with the French military as ‘terrorists’ to the same degree as Algerian men. While a constituted world is thus made up of all the objects that ‘appear’ in that world in this formal sense, there are always, in any world, objects that do not appear, that do not ‘count as one’, which are, in Badiou’s terms, ‘des inaparaissants’ or ‘inexistants’: slaves and women, say, in the count of citizens after 1789 (Badiou 2006/2009b: 610/587). The transcendental refers not to the structure of a world itself, but constitutes instead a sort of evaluative ‘measure’ that allows for the identification and distinction of any element in a world (Badiou 2006/2009b: 168–169/156–157; see also Rabouin 2011: 36). If any world can be described as the systematic relations of a given set of objects, the most basic conditions governing this police mode of relation, Badiou argues, are the evaluation of the ‘existence’ of any given element in a set or situation, and the ‘localization’ of that element (cited Badiou 2006/2009b: 28/19).4 If one sought to identify the classic cinematic depiction of this form of relation, it would undoubtedly be LieutenantColonel Mathieu’s blackboard lecture to his paratroops in Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers, in which he describes the structural decoding of the

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 233

15/05/2013 08:44:58

234

Caribbean Critique

terrorist network as an elemental series of relations, in which nothing need be known about the singular identity of any element/member of this network. It is sufficient to identify any one of them as the enemy, and to place him or her within this network in structural relation to any other member. This sort of ‘diagram’ is the representation of objects without content, the pure formality of police surveillance. Crucial for this interpretation is the fact that, while Badiou carefully specifies that this operation of indexification is structural and asubjective, the phenomenological exemplification of this identification is explicitly presented in Logics as the operation of an anonymous, panoptic police subject à la Mathieu. ‘Il y a une sorte d’opérateur qui associe à tout degré du transcendantal l’ensemble des éléments de l’objet qui ont en commun d’avoir une existence mesurée par ce degré. On appelle cet opérateur le foncteur transcendantal de l’objet’ [What we have here is a sort of operator, which associates to every degree of the transcendental the set of the elements of the object whose common characteristic is that their existence is measured by this degree. We call this operator the transcendental functor of the object], Badiou writes (Badiou 2006/2009b: 293/278; emphasis added). Rhetorically, Badiou repeatedly describes this ‘asubjective’ process in the passive voice, a sleight of hand that allows the police ‘subject’ to disappear, as it does in actuality (whether this ‘subject’ is human or machinic, as in the generalization of contemporary surveillance technology): the various manifestants ‘seront collectivement assignés par le foncteur à un degré [variable] d’existence’ [will be collectively assigned by the functor to a [variable] degree of existence]. ‘On peut penser les relations […] assignés transcendentalement …’ [One can think the relations ... Which are transcendentally assigned] (ibid., 294/278; 322/306). In a prescription of judgment, any individual being in this world, then, will be identified by this asubjective operator (le foncteur) not as a singularity, but rather as a more or less powerful instance of correspondence to a fixed (transcendental) measure or reference (as criminal, leftist, terrorist, unionist, anarchist, postal worker, bystander, etc.). The attribution of any identity in such a world is thus entirely a question of greater or lesser equivalence attributed by an external, invisible observer. The result of this police operation will be a static, bureaucratic ‘tableau [qui] enregistre la diversité’ [this tableau names the diversity] of the elements constituting any world and which ‘maintien et accroît les identités’ [preserves existences and augments identities] (Badiou 2006/2009b: 323/307, 327/310, translation modified). Any

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 234

15/05/2013 08:44:58

Édouard Glissant 235

anomaly, anything that does not correspond to some degree of this scale will thus either not appear at all in that world, or else appear as an inassimilable monstrosity. This police mode of colonial relationality was explored most powerfully in its subjective mode as the lived experience of the colonized by writers such as Vastey, Césaire (Cahier d’un retour au pays natal), and Fanon (Peau noire, masques blancs), and in its objective, historical forms by C. L. R. James (Black Jacobins) and Fanon (Les Damnés de la terre). Édouard Glissant, like many of the figures of Caribbean Critique, combined both such modes of analysis in his work, narrating the lived experience of Martinican subjects in novels such as La Lézarde, Le Quatrième Siècle and La Case du commandeur, and the structural systematicity of French Caribbean colonialism in critical works such as Le Discours antillais. Among Glissant’s primary concerns has always been to theorize the relationality of human subjectivity and its implications for the critique of the exploitative power relations of the plantation and empire more generally. Both Hegel and Marx after him spent little time pondering what a ‘true’ world would look like, and instead deployed the tool of a fully immanent critique of the existing world to destroy existing opacities and injustices on the path toward a fully articulated Totality they named, respectively, World Spirit and Communism. In the wake of James, Césaire, and Fanon, Glissant furthers this critical inheritance in an Antillean dialect, describing in his voluminous legacy the blockages and ‘detours’ of Antillean alienation. Glissant’s relational, dialectical understanding of experience originated in the context of the French recuperation of Hegel’s master–slave dialectic in the wake of Alexandre Kojève’s influential interpretation. Though this influence was particularly powerful for Césaire and Fanon, Édouard Glissant’s early work, culminating in his 1969 study L’Intention poétique, can be read as a quite original adaptation of post-war neo-Hegelianism. 5 Though such an analysis exceeds the scope of this study, Glissant’s text constructs its model in terms perfectly congruent with the Hegelian model of the specification of beings through their dialectical, negative, mediated relation to others. As the title of Glissant’s earliest theoretical work Soleil de la conscience (1956) implies, the author’s concern at this stage was to develop, through the three modes of fiction, poetry, and theory, a phenomenology of Caribbean consciousness and, indeed, self-consciousness, in which ‘all truth lies in dialectical consummation’ Glissant 1997b: 16). Glissant’s essays from the 1970s, collected in Le Discours antillais, reflect in turn the abandonment of such post-Sartrean

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 235

15/05/2013 08:44:59

236

Caribbean Critique

situational phenomenology, critique, and anticolonial engagement, and the celebration of discourse critique. Glissant’s Hegelian framework gradually moves into the background of his work after 1981, as he further develops and articulates his own original conceptual arsenal. His fundamental concept of Relation, in turn, then becomes in this later period less a dialectical one, and increasingly a model of a universal becoming-singular. In this later concept of Relation, most thoroughly articulated in Poétique de la relation (1990), Glissant describes a single world, a world without transcendence, in which all differentiation occurs on a Deleuzian register of infinitesimal variation and ‘infinite change’ (Traité du Tout-monde, 84). All beings, rather than gradually distinguishing themselves in negative relation to others, are understood by the mature Glissant in neo-Spinozist fashion to be self-differentiating, engaged in a cosmic process of infinite becoming.6 The Persistance of the Tout-Monde: The Poetics of Relation Peter Hallward’s Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific (2001) set the stage with what is perhaps the most philosophically insightful and original critique of Glissant’s project. Among the far-reaching claims of Absolutely Postcolonial is that the struggle for the recognition of minority rights, so-called ‘identity politics’, though certainly necessary in specific situations, is not to be considered properly ‘political’ at all. Hallward’s polemical conclusion is already in this early text based upon the Universalist logic of a ‘politics of prescription’ that the author has more recently elucidated (Hallward 2005). The claim deserves to be cited at length: Glissant’s work in particular and postcolonial theory in general can only obstruct what is arguably the great political task of our time: the articulation of fully inclusive, fully egalitarian political principles which, while specific to the particular situation of their declaration, are nevertheless subtracted from their cultural environment. We must strive to prescribe principles whose coherence does not rely upon any notion of community, any kind of cultural proximity, any cultural criteria of sharing or belonging. All progressive politics must presume the cultural despecification of its participants as much as it resists the singular transcendence of a simply sovereign legitimation. (Hallward 2001: 126)

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 236

15/05/2013 08:44:59

Édouard Glissant 237

While it is undoubtedly necessary to struggle for the preservation of the threatened patrimonies of the world, human and otherwise, from languages and cultures to species biodiversity, these fundamentally conservative struggles do not in Hallward’s understanding themselves constitute the political per se. Politics in this view refers not to the reactive defense of local specificities, but, Hallward writes, the procedural ‘despecification’ of individuals and communities alike from all processes of categorization that would allow for the regulated distribution of social goods and benefits (with the many discriminatory norms and limitations of that process that work merely to perpetuate structural inequalities). The defense of local specificities is not a politics, one might say with Hallward, because once all of the singularities in a Glissantian Totality have developed in their fullest singularity, when Blacks will be fully determined as Black, Gays as Gay, Women as Women, Jews as Jews, and so on, and, of course, when White, male, adults from elite North Atlantic socio-economic backgrounds will be themselves be ‘rightfully’ identified, each will then have found their proper place in the Tout-monde, and the various legitimate authorities of that totality can then peacefully (and parsimoniously) hand out the goods and services of that totality from on high. An aesthetic of developmental singularization avoids calling into question the transcendental regimes of the tout-monde – what were still called ‘structures’ in Le Discours antillais – the determining modalities of singularization, and the indexification of who and what counts as a recognizable singularity, such that an individual ‘counts as one’ in that totality.7 Each ‘local’ community will queue up for its rightful piece of the pie, hold out their collective and individual hands, and, on that day, one might say with Adorno and Horkheimer, the enlightened Glissantian totality will radiate with the triumphant calamity of the universal Empire of identificatory prescription. Politics, the universalist Caribbean politics to which the early Glissant of the Front des Antilles-Guyane pour l’autonomie is a rightful inheritor, the politics of Louverture and Dessalines, of Schoelcher, C. L. R. James, Césaire, and Fanon, each in their way struggled to unfold the implications of the single and sufficient axiom of all politics of emancipation: justice as universal equality. Chris Bongie, in his book Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature (2008) has pursued Hallward’s vision of an increasingly depoliticized Glissant in and through the most recent of the Martinican’s abundant stream of writings. Bongie focuses on the increasingly aestheticized tenor of Glissant’s work. The late Glissant,

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 237

15/05/2013 08:45:00

238

Caribbean Critique

Bongie argues, replaces any earlier defense of the struggle for sovereign, decolonized nationhood with a merely subjective, quasi-touristic understanding of the (postcolonial) subject’s place in the single differentiated totality of the tout-monde. ‘Glissant is disarmingly forthright when it comes to insisting that no combat against globalization will be “true” unless it has first arrived at this point, which can only be arrived at through a process of aesthetic enlightenment in which we learn how to sense what is already right there in front of us: Mondialité’ (Bongie 2008: 335). Bongie goes on to show how Glissant’s late texts perform a symptomatic slippage from this affirmation of the aesthetic apperception of totality as a prelude to political action, to passages that ‘[give] the impression that this poetics is sufficient unto itself and, as a consequence, that it is not politicians, or people armed with principles, who will be of the most help to us in our dealings with the forces of globalization and Empire, but poets’ (ibid.: 337). Glissant’s late thought remains encapsulated within the horizon of a Caribbean expressive corporealism, the unsurpassable axiom of which is that there exist only bodies and languages.8 Indeed, the very centrality of the concept of the Tout-monde as ‘totality’, a recurrent figure through all Glissant’s work, testifies to the unsurpassability of this body-language doublet. If ‘truths’ exist in any sense within Glissant’s greater poétique de la relation, in the wake of Le Discours antillais’ definitive dismissal of the Fanonian nation as a real possibility for Martinique (discussed above), it is only as relativistic language experiments or ‘truth effects’ of the disposition of particular bodies and the powers they express in the context of late Antillean colonialism, as the truths of a given structural assemblage and the possibility of deconstructing its operations. In fact, Celia Britton’s pathbreaking study of Glissant is revelatory in precisely this sense: the author is convincingly able to account for the hugely complex totality of Glissant’s theoretical production under the single rubric of, as her subtitle succinctly put it, Strategies of Language and Resistance (1999). Britton describes for readers how this ‘contre-poétique’, as Glissant termed his critical endeavor, addresses problems such as resistance, lack, subalternality, otherness, mimesis, creolization, alienation and delirium, camouflage, detour, ruse, and relay. The primary conclusion of this compendium, from the perspective of the entirety of the Caribbean tradition of the politics of principle, is that Glissant’s critical project, even when it is not directly addressing questions of poetics or language, avoids the affirmation of any measure of truth external to the dynamics of Antillean ‘discourse’.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 238

15/05/2013 08:45:00

Édouard Glissant 239

This, I would argue, is the reason why Glissant must ultimately abandon any constitutive politics of decolonization, beyond the immediate dilemma of Martinique’s seemingly ‘unsurpassable’ integration into the French state system. Martinican ‘alienation’ and late colonialism were arguably no different qualitatively in 1990 than in 1961, when Fanon could unambiguously celebrate an inclusive, universalist, and neo-Jacobin Algerian nation and Glissant himself, along with Albert Béville, affirmed the absolute necessity of an autonomous Antillean nation. On the other hand, neither was an emancipatory political horizon extinguished by 1981 in the Caribbean, for all the despondency of Le Discours antillais, as Aristide’s Lavalas would show within the decade. Glissant’s corpus is the single most developed and philosophically sophisticated body of work in the tradition of Caribbean Critique. While the other figures named in these pages articulate to various degrees of sophistication and complexity principles of critique and politics that bear fundamental implications for philosophy, some of which this book has sought to describe, Glissant alone constructed a properly theoretical body of thought.9 At its most general level, Glissant’s ontology of Relation constitutes a properly Antillean elaboration of the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics, a concern he shares with the vast majority of philosophers of his generation, from Sartre to Badiou. The proper name Glissant gives this metaphysics is the One (l’Un), a reified totality whose alienating untruth he steadfastly contrasts to the fact of universal Relation. This Caribbean Critique of metaphysics is recurrently thematized as a passage ‘from the One to the Diverse’ (Glissant 1981: 14). The initial decision of a Glissantian ontology is thus to maintain that Being, insofar as it is thinkable, takes the form of a radical multiplicity, a multiplicity of beings in Relation that negates, escapes, or subtracts itself from the power of the One. Relation, the universal fact of being-in-the-world that Glissant will eventually name the tout-monde, is thus a pure multiplicity of beings (Glissant throughout his work uses the standard French translation of the Heideggerian Seiendes or ‘beings’: les étants), one that deploys the powerful resources of singularization and becoming in withdrawal from all domination of the One. To remain truly consistent, however: to truly escape from the metaphysics of the One, this multiplicity would doubtless need to remain without predication, without definition, without even a name; Glissant’s Relation itself would have to remain a pure multiple of multiples devoid of any single nomination, definition, or concept that would reify it as a

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 239

15/05/2013 08:45:01

240

Caribbean Critique

totality (as, in other words, a being and not Being itself). Here, Glissant’s descriptions and definitions of universal Relation and the tout-monde undoubtedly reimport to some degree a metaphysics of the One that Heidegger and all his French disciples from Deleuze and Derrida to Badiou struggled mightily, and, like Glissant, more or less successfully, to avoid. Like Heidegger, however, Glissant ultimately concludes that the proper discursive tool for thinking the being of the multiple as radical, generic multiplicity is not politics, but poetry. Given this fundamentally theoretical dimension of Glissant’s thought, one should therefore step back from an immersion in the Glissantian dialectics of Totality and Relation, to pose a properly critical question that, it seems to me, remains under-theorized in contemporary studies of Glissant.10 This is the problem of truth: if all commentators agree that Glissant explores in infinite variation the relation of singular multiplicities to the totality that encompasses them throughout his work, disagreeing merely on the particulars of continuity and break, the modalities of politics and aesthetic creation, and other such questions, absent from consideration is an interrogation of the judgmental criteria establishing the validity of any and all such procedures as they are variously unfolded in the Glissantian Tout-monde. Indeed, the category of truth, highly suspect in the poststructuralist, Deleuzian world that Glissant has increasingly claimed as his own, is largely absent from Glissant’s oeuvre.11 The problem of truth, however, is intimately related to that of totality and relation. What are the normative criteria, explicit or not, that allow Glissant to affirm the rightful development of the Tout-monde as a fully articulated set of singular multiples? My claim is that, quite simply, Glissant never speaks of ‘truth’ in an emphatic sense for the simple reason that his conception of universal Relation, regardless of its modes of developmental articulation, whether mediated or immediate, Sartrean dialectical negation or Deleuzian infinitesimal becoming-singular, early or late, allows for no outside, no truth independent of the actual unfolding multiplicity of the elements of the Tout-monde itself. Instead, Glissant’s procedure is aesthetic, its (Deleuzian) ethics limited to the affirmation of the greatest possible determination or singularization of any being in Relation. This seems to be a widely accepted understanding of Glissant: Britton herself reaffirms the point that Glissant’s ‘late form of Relation does not relate to anything outside itself’ (Britton 1999: 8). Likewise, Hallward asserts that in Glissant’s thought there is ‘no “hors-monde”’ (Hallward 2001: 72).

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 240

15/05/2013 08:45:01

Édouard Glissant 241

If Hallward is correct in asserting that Glissant relies throughout his work on variously mediated and immediate transformations of a neo-Hegelian model of totality, one could supplement Glissant’s assertion that there is no outside to Relation and the tout-monde with Hegel’s familiar retort to the Kantian assertion of the noumenon, the thing-initself inaccessible to apperception: in conceiving of that noumenon as a thing and of the limit that prevents our access to knowledge of it, we have already passed beyond that limit, in a movement of aufhebung. Indeed, for Glissant, by the time of his final theoretical work, Philosophie de la Relation, no border is absolute. All borders are merely experiential, aesthetic, constituting a clichéd invitation to the delectation of the Other: ‘The idea of the border henceforth helps us to defend and appreciate the taste [saveur] of different beings [des différents] when they stand opposed to one another’ (Glissant 2009: 57). Just as Hegel himself had enormous difficulties enunciating the normative parameters of any ethics beyond the imperative fully to articulate the world as Geist and infinite relationality, so Glissantian ethics remains eminently aesthetic. ‘The poem’, he writes conclusively in this final work, ‘is in fact the only dimension of truth of permanence’ (ibid.: 19). In this critical, negative dialectic, truth figures only as the truth of pure inwardness, the shattered subjectivity of an Oedipus (‘the truth that is in him [Oedipus]’), a subject whose only salvation is an aesthetic one (Glissant 1990: 65). This is a truth not in the emphatic sense, but a purely relative, impressionistic and aesthetic truth of furtive desires: ‘The truth of the poet is also the desired truth of the other’ (ibid.: 96). The ‘impuissance à sortir de l’impasse’ that structures even Glissant’s most politically engaged study Le Discours antillais is symptomatic of this absence of any measure external to the Tout-monde (Glissant 1981: 11). Close analysis of the entirety of Le Discours antillais reveals, amid its dazzling, multiform complexity, not an emancipatory imagination (this possibility is, I argued above, definitively abandoned as the unavailable truth of the Fanonian nation), but a critical aesthetics. The Discours is an aesthetics insofar as it seeks to trace the expressive modalities of Antillean existence, from poetry to politics, kreyol to gwo-ka, the languages of bodies and the languages of social relationality. It is a critical aesthetics insofar as Le Discours antillais persistently and patiently unfolds these often contradictory expressive modalities of Antillean existence as both subjectively alienating and an objectively ‘blocked’ system in precisely the sense Vastey and Sartre described colonialism (in the movement Glissant describes ‘à partir d’une situation bloquée’).

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 241

15/05/2013 08:45:02

242

Caribbean Critique

Le Discours antillais marks the disappearance in Glissant’s oeuvre of the last traces of an explicit measure that would gauge the truth or falsity of this impeded, estranged existence. The volume’s final, most ‘engaged’ lines witness the vanishing into a vague, utopian beyond devoid of any such concepts. Fanon’s Peau noire and Les Damnés de la terre famously culminate in the invocation of a new ‘humanity’ that would arise from the struggle against colonialism, and against which model one should, he argues, measure the accomplishments of actual decolonization, while Césaire similarly has a character in Une saison au Congo, though perhaps his most pessimistic play, cry out affirmatively, ‘Nous avons accédé à l’humanité!’ [We have attained our humanity!], the promise of which claim stands as the eternal measure of the falsity of an ‘independent’ Congo under Mobutu. For Fanon and Césaire, concepts such as humanity, equality, and independence were certainly transcendental to any specific iteration of colonialism, but were never transcendent, remaining strictly immanent to specific anticolonial sequences (Haiti, Algeria, Martinique, Guinea …). In marked contrast to this repeated affirmation of such truths beyond the given situations of bodies and their languages, Glissant’s Discours can only invoke in its conclusion the last traces of vanishing ideals such as ‘nation’, ‘independence’, ‘responsibility’, and a vaguely recalled ‘republican ideal’ as utopian, barely tenable concepts seemingly transcending any actual possible future of Martinique. As I argued above, Le Discours antillais pointedly avoids exploring the political modalities of decolonization, Martinican or otherwise, as had Fanon’s Les Damnés de la terre a generation before. Without any measured exploration of such a process as immanent and within the realm of the Martinican possible, Glissant’s final invocations of the ‘vital […] independence of Martinique’, of ‘direct democracy’, and of a ‘revolution in mentalities’ come off as utopian, amounting to little more than a few closing aesthetic musings thrown out to give a vague veneer of political investment devoid of any sense of what might be involved in constructing the ‘collectivity’ he invokes (ibid.: 466). Witness the semantic contortions Glissant enters into when he does mention ever-so-briefly the concept of ‘class struggle’ at the conclusion of Le Discours antillais: ‘On ne saurait inscrire cette sensibilité nouvelle [de la poétique de la Relation] dans un cadre neutre où les acuités politiques s’éroderaient étrangement, et où nul n’oserait plus parler de lutte de classes sinon à voix basse et voilée’ [It is impossible to inscribe this new sensibility [of the poetics of Relation] in a neutral framework

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 242

15/05/2013 08:45:02

Édouard Glissant 243

in which political demands would oddly disappear, and in which no one would any longer dare to speak of class struggle except in hushed tones.] (ibid.). Glissant is ostensibly telling us in these final lines of a 500-page volume that one must in fact persist in speaking openly about ‘class struggle’, and that this articulation can only occur arising out of an analysis of the specificity of the Antillean situation (which situation this volume has of course masterfully conceptualized). This critical vision, however, pointedly does not allow readers to draw any conclusions about how to remain faithful to the process of ‘class struggle’ in Martinique. The nebulous concept of ‘class struggle’ thus appears furtively in these concluding pages, a distant echo of the volume’s initial, cursive dismissal of the concept of ‘social classes’ as ‘artificial’ and in any case inapplicable to the specificity of the Martinican case (ibid.: 56–57). These final lines thus conclude, not in a politics of Relation, but in a call to the reader passively to appreciate, in all its contradictorily contorted beauty, the ‘Aesthetic of Relation’ that is the volume’s final word on the nature of its endeavor (ibid.: 467). The concept of truths, rather than serving to orient an ethics or politics, constitutes the threat of the latter’s destitution: The ‘certitude’ of ‘clear truths’ lead inevitably, in Glissant’s neo-Thermidorian formulation, to political ‘errements’, the unstated implication being the refrain familiar from Burke to Furet that a politics of universalist prescription leads not to justice but to the guillotine and the Gulag. That said, no truth is absolute, Glissant reassures readers, and all such political ‘débordements’ founder upon the limits of ‘absolute truth’ (Glissant 1990: 208). When confronted with the putative limits to absolute truth of the Tout-monde, Glissant can only wonder ‘how to draw these limits without ending up in skepticism or falling into paralysis’ How indeed? Only, Glissant asserts, by affirming the absolute relativity and subjective nature of any truth, ‘by conceiving that it is impossible to reduce anyone to a truth that he will not have generated himself. That is to say, in the opacity of his time and of his place’. In the dark forest of the Tout-monde, surrounded by injustice and suffering at every turn, the Glissantian subject can be happy to know that she need not look any further than her own self-same identity to find the measure of truth: ‘The City of Plato for Plato, the vision of Hegel for Hegel, the city of the griot for the griot’. Such an affirmation of identity, Glissant affirms in conclusion, constitutes in turn the unsurpassable limit of an ethics of opacity itself: ‘the general acceptance of particular opacities is the simple equivalent of non-barbarity’ (ibid.: 208).

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 243

15/05/2013 08:45:03

244

Caribbean Critique

‘This is what binds us to poetry. Even if we […] can conceive of the leap of the political […] there remains before us, henceforth held in common, this rumbling, a tranquil cloud or rain or smoke. […] We shout the shout of poetry’ (ibid.: 21). Such a statement is not the fulfillment, but the negation, of Glissant’s early commitment to the redemptive transformation of Antillean society as Fanonian nation. ‘A poetics of depth [des profondeurs …] may be the guarantee of our knowledge [of an archetype of humanity], at the same time as the ultimate goal [of humanity]’ (ibid.: 36). Ethics, in such a view, entails not the creation of a world, the unfolding of a situated truth in some way transcendent to a given context, or even the gradual modification of this world, such that the suffering that the poet has to some degree made his reader’s experience, might be lessened or eliminated, but points merely toward the fully articulated totality-at-hand as the aesthetic moment incarnate. The aesthetic imagination that Glissant’s early works cultivated so powerfully remains, with that of Césaire, the paradigmatic testimony to the necessary place of human suffering in any ethics. One could say that Gissant’s cultivation of memory as a ‘prophetic vision of the past’ in novels such as Le quatrième siècle and Malemort remains faithful to the two axioms of any Benjaminian ‘historical materialism’: ‘The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption’ and ‘Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history’ (Benjamin 1968: 254). The first describes a cultivation of shattered memory that opposes the mere relativist concatenation of facts (‘historicism’) with their indexation upon a truth that Benjamin, in turn, famously figures as ‘redemption’. The second, however, asserts that all that has happened must count in a materialist understanding of history. Though every detail of the past must be considered and weighed, all occurrences remain consubstantial with the elaboration of truths. Justice as equality is not merely anticipatory, but must cast its gaze over the entire catastrophe of history. Glissant’s late theorization of Relation, however, leaves aside this fidelity to suffering, and the allied imperative to imagine other worlds, to celebrate instead the triumphant delectation of the Tout-monde as aesthetic package tour, in which suffering and alienation seem attentively erased from the itinerary. The positive narration of an unsurpassable Relation, the horizon of totality, and Tout-monde underwrite a poetics of pure affirmation. Glissant’s postcolonial theory of Relation marks an important moment in the history of the transcendental critique of metaphysics and ideology, from Kant and Hegel to Marx and Heidegger, and beyond. And yet the

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 244

15/05/2013 08:45:03

Édouard Glissant 245

philosophical critique of universals and corresponding rejection of any dogmatic, absolute metaphysical claim seems at odds with the tendency of the various Caribbean politics of the universal operative since 1791. In other words, if the critique of dogmatic universals and ideology – of which Discours antillais constitutes one of the most compelling moments in the history of critique – refuses the hypostatization of any absolute authority, and replaces all claims to absolute truth within the horizon of their articulation and conditionality, the various Caribbean politics of the universal from 1791 to the present have repeatedly indexed their claims upon the measure of certain truths, an index (such as justice as equality) that is held to be true in some way independently of its subjective, situated articulation. Glissant’s project has analyzed and described, with poetic brilliance and insight, the manifold modalities of Martinican underdevelopment, historical amnesia, exploitation, late-colonialism, and dependency. As a project of mere criticism rather than critique, however, Glissant’s ‘Poetics of Relation’ definitively abandons the Fanonian struggle for an alternative structuration of social reality (as nation) that motivates to varying degrees Glissant’s writings from the 1950s to Le Discours antillais. Is it not the case, moreover, that the Discours antillais offers the tacit admission that all Antillean subjects in fact already know that they are colonized, and thus honestly does no more than provide a new language and the conceptual resources to articulate in enormous detail this alienation? Until departmentalization becomes so unbearable – as did colonial Saint-Domingue or the FLN’s Algeria after the Sétif and Phillipesville massacres – that it must be rejected, by all and any means available, until that time, is it not right to affirm departmentalization? Is it not correct, in other words, to judge that insofar as Césaire’s brand of late French colonialism (départementalisation) is precisely not unbearable, it constitutes – as I argued above – a highly conflicted mode of ‘decolonization’? Aimé Césaire and the Revolutionary Critique of Colonialism To understand the concept of relation not as infinitesimal aesthetic differentiation on the Glissantian model, but as consubstantial to the Caribbean tradition of prescriptive truth politics from Toussaint to Lavalas, one might begin with Aimé Césaire’s explosive intervention Discours sur le colonialisme. Césaire’s text famously articulates a

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 245

15/05/2013 08:45:04

246

Caribbean Critique

violent critique of colonialism as décivilisation (Césaire 1955: 11). In terms that point directly to Sartre’s subsequent critiques of colonialism, Césaire assails colonialism as ‘universal regression’, a process for which all are responsible in whose name colonial violence is perpetrated: ‘Nul ne colonialis innocemment’ (ibid.: 11, 15). The colonial situation, Césaire tells us, is one demanding absolute and unavoidable decisions; a situation in which the only dialectical relations are those of progressive brutalization and dehumanization (ibid.: 19). The response to such bestialization (of the colonizer, above all) can only be correspondingly absolute: ‘revolution’ (ibid.: 59). For Césaire, this is a process that, like Fanon’s ‘absolute violence’ of the Les Damnés de la terre analyzed above, seeks to substitute a truly universal humanity for the tyrannie étroite of colonial and capitalist dehumanizing violence (ibid.: 59).12 Césaire’s gift for anticolonial invective reaches its point of conflagration in the extraordinary paragraphs of the Discours condemning the universal responsibility of all those in whose name colonial violence and dehumanization are perpetrated. These incendiary lines retain a power that transcends their moment of articulation, a ‘general’ responsibility leaving, one senses, no one unscathed (least of all any putative ‘subjects of Négritude’): Therefore, comrade, you will hold as enemies – loftily, lucidly, consistently – not only sadistic governors and greedy bankers, not only prefects who torture and colonists who flog, not only corrupt, check-licking politicians and subservient judges, but likewise and for the same reason, venomous journalists, goitrous academics, wreathed in dollars and stupidity, ethnographers who go in for metaphysics, presumptuous Belgian theologians, chattering intellectuals born out of the thigh of Nietzsche, the paternalists, the embracers, the corrupters, the back-slappers, the lovers of exoticism, the dividers, the agrarian sociologists, the hoodwinkers, the hoaxers, the hot-air artists, the humbugs, and in general, all those who, performing their functions in the sordid division of labor for the defense of Western bourgeois society, try in diverse ways and by infamous diversions to split up the forces of Progress – even if it means denying the very possibility of Progress – all of them tools of capitalism all of them, openly or secretly, supporters of plundering colonialism, all of them responsible, all hateful all slave-traders, all henceforth answerable for the violence of revolutionary action. (Césaire 1955/1972: 31/54; my emphasis)

This is a responsibility that cannot be denied by ‘good intentions’ and the pious sentiments of ‘good’ colonials (any more than the existence of the ‘kind master’ negated the absolute necessity for the destruction of

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 246

15/05/2013 08:45:04

Édouard Glissant 247

plantation slavery). And so Césaire’s tirade continues, unabated, to its monstrous, cataclysmic dénouement: And sweep out all the obscurers, all the inventors of subterfuges, the charlatans and tricksters, the dealers in gibberish [charabia]. And do not seek to know whether personally they have good or bad intentions. Whether personally – that is, in the private consciousness of Peter or Paul – they are or are not colonialists, because the essential thing is that their highly problematical subjective good faith is entirely irrelevant to the objective social implications of the evil work they perform as watchdogs of colonialism. (Césaire 1955/1972: 32/55)

While the dangers of such assertions of ‘objective guilt’ are obvious, the truth they retain is a subjective absolute: not a call to the witch-hunt, Césaire’s text is properly understood as an assertion of universal responsibility for colonialism, such that absolutely anyone can (and must) interrogate and ruthlessly critique their own complicity in such a disaster, and, in turn, work for the destruction of colonialism as an objective system. If Césaire’s critique of colonialism invokes the insights of an emergent decolonized reason, the latter is itself primarily performatively demonstrated in masterful tours de force of anticolonial invective such as the Discours and his 1956 demonstration of anticolonial reason, ‘Culture et colonization’.13 If the latter begins by invoking the imperative to address the problem of colonialism in any consideration of ‘afro-black’ culture, the system of colonialism and its necessary destruction in fact largely disappears by the end of the speech, to be replaced by an invocation of the individual voluntarism of the black ‘homme de culture’, who must find a precarious ‘balance’ between tradition and modernity (Césaire 1976: 204).14 By the time of the later speech ‘L’homme de culture et ses responsibilités’ (1959), however, Césaire had returned to the vibrant militancy of the Discours. Here, he explicitly addressed the fact that without the dismantling of the system of colonial exploitation and alienation, the cultural inventivity called for and made manifest in the 1956 speech (as in so much of Césaire’s creative production) could not take hold as a general, communal process. Only such a revolutionary process, he now held, would allow for the actual flourishing of the visionary, poetic genius who cultivates, against the world, ‘la fleur terrible du “Je”’. Pointing beyond the earlier avant-gardism of Tropiques, and the Surrealist poetics of Les Armes miraculeuses and Soleil cou coupé,

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 247

15/05/2013 08:45:05

248

Caribbean Critique

Césaire articulates in this 1959 speech his most explicit and radical statement of a revolutionary, Black Jacobin critique of colonialism, calling for immediate, total emancipation via the destruction of colonialism as a world-system, and the refusal of all gradualist reformism (all the while refusing to comment on the ambiguity of his own 1946 politics of departmentalization). In the time of decolonization, Césaire concludes, the role of the homme de culture noir is to serve as a vanguard, in which the actual process of cultural creativity would itself constitute the fashioning of a general aptitude for liberation on the part of the colonized: Au sein même de la société coloniale, c’est l’homme de culture qui doit faire à son peuple l’économie de l’apprentissage de la liberté. L’homme de culture, écrivain, poète, artiste, fait faire à son peuple cette économie, parce que dans la situation coloniale elle-même l’activité culturelle créatrice, devançant l’expérience collective concrète, est déjà cet ­apprentissage. (Césaire 1976: 120)

‘L’homme de culture et ses responsabilités’ thus articulates an original, neo-Hegelian theory of a cultural–political vanguard, a vanguard that, in certain historical situations such as the global decolonization sequence circa 1959, can play an essential role in an emancipatory political sequence.15 In contrast to Glissant’s more contemplative and celebratory poetics of the Tout-monde, and even the skepticism of his earliest novel of anticolonial political militancy La Lézarde (analyzed above), Césaire’s understanding of the place of culture in the colonial world affirms its situated and incommensurate efficacy in moments of revolutionary social transformation. Césaire is not arguing in ‘L’homme de culture et ses responsabilités’ that the visionary artist can or should offer models of correct, disalienated and decolonized thought (though she may do this as well). Rather, he employs the Hegelian logic of externalization to argue that cultural production is in itself already the initiation of revolutionary, decolonized social existence. The creation of cultural objects – such as Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal or Tragédie du roi Christophe – are in this way argued to be at once the actual production – on a limited rather than general scale – of free human social existence, as well as the thematic exploration of the process of decolonization. Whether Césaire’s programmatic and performative assertion of this avant-gardist cultural politics is correct is, one might add, a matter not of objective, but subjective, judgment; one could just as easily imagine a given colonized subject deciding upon a reading of Cahier to devote their

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 248

15/05/2013 08:45:05

Édouard Glissant 249

entire existence to the destruction of the colonial system, as one could any other colonized subject judging the poem opaque, incomprehensible, or simply wrong in its condemnation of colonialism.16 Césaire’s work allows one to move beyond the sterile polemic surrounding ‘cultural politics’ described in preceding chapters. What is necessary is to develop a complex, dialectical understanding of the possible knottings or intertwinings of art and political procedures in their multiple, heterogeneous iterations. Some years before the Situationists or the events of May ’68 made this imperative explicit, Césaire’s affirmation in his ‘L’homme de culture’ speech already placed the colonized before this imperative. To do justice to the complexity of Césaire’s cultural politics, critical thought would undoubtedly need to address the extreme formal, historical, and political complexity of Césaire’s oeuvre, to examine how poetry and theatre, theoretical reflection, and political action form a dense network and relay of situations and statements, texts and interventions, principles and consequences. Culture and politics form an intensely complex articulation in Aimé Césaire’s work, the goal of which, one might say, has been to effect a diverse range of forcings or torsions to the situations in which he has intervened, from French colonialism to poetics. Négritude was just such a knot, an interventionist explosion into the complex of racism, colonialist complacency, alienated subjectivity, and doudouist poetic mediocrity, one that announced on the cultural plane a project (decolonization), the revolutionary consequences of which would only subsequently be unfolded in their political mode, from 1945 to 1962.17 The works of anticolonial cultural critique Césaire called for in his 1959 speech are explicitly posited as manifestations of a truth and an invocation of a self-fashioning militant anticolonial body: ‘Parce que nous sommes des forces de vérité, nous sommes les réintroducteurs au monde de nos peuples, et d’abord les réinventeurs de cette solidarité entre nous dont le colonialisme a essayé d’offusquer ou de détruire l’idée’ (Césaire 1976: 121; my emphasis). The existence of the engaged work of art in an anticolonial public sphere constituted in sites such as the 1956 and 1959 Paris conferences and the pages of anticolonial forums such as Présence africaine initiate, Césaire contends, sites of rupture in the weave of the colonial world. Anticolonial cultural production, Césaire argues, is essential in the initial strengthening of this rupture that will then subsequently take shape as a true event, the destruction of one (colonial) world, and its measured replacement by another, decolonized world. Césaire’s call to the imagination and fabrication of

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 249

15/05/2013 08:45:06

250

Caribbean Critique

a decolonized world in a global, anticolonial public sphere in this 1959 speech maintains that cultural production can offer anticolonialism an essential quotient of these resources and force necessary both to affect a revolutionary break from colonialism, and to avoid the subsequent gravitational pull back into neo-colonialism.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 250

15/05/2013 08:45:06

chapter eleven

Césaire and Sartre: Totalization, Relation, Responsibility Césaire and Sartre

Césaire’s initial critique of alienated colonial relationality received decisive theoretical formulation in Sartre’s phenomenology of political and ethical responsibility, developed during the years of the Algerian war in dialogue with Frantz Fanon. Although Sartre’s explosive preface to Les Damnés de la terre and his articles condemning the Algerian war and the torture done there in the name of all French citizens are well-known, the theoretical logic that lead Sartre famously to conclude that ‘We are All Murderers’ is less clear. I believe this is because that theorization lies buried, disbursed here and there through the many hundreds of pages of his Critique de la raison dialectique, in particular in the manuscript of the second volume of that work, which would not be published until 1985, long after Sartre’s star had waned on the French (and American) philosophical scene. In fact, Sartre’s theorization of what he calls the process of ‘totalization’ in those two volumes forms the basis of an ethico-political philosophy of relation and intersubjectivity, one that goes beyond the earlier and more famous, largely depoliticized model of intersubjectivity elaborated in L’Etre et le néant and plays such as Huis clos. I have argued above that that theory was the single most important model for Fanon’s critique of colonial violence in Les Damnés de la terre. Sartre’s articles condemning the Algerian war and the use of torture by the French military include the 1956 speech ‘Colonialism is a System’, his 1957 piece ‘You are Wonderful’ and ‘We are All Murderers’ and ‘A Victory’ from the following year, each quite brief speeches or journalistic pieces, each searing indictments of French imperial brutality, hypocrisy,

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 251

15/05/2013 08:45:06

252

Caribbean Critique

and guilt in the unfolding Algerian war. In the face of what Sartre unhesitatingly calls the ‘war crimes’ revealed in publications such as Des Rappelés Témoignent and Henri Alleg’s La Question, the pieces condemn the ‘gangrene […] of the cynical and systematic use of absolute violence’ (Sartre 2006: 63). The crucial aspect of Sartre’s argument in these texts (as in his description of colonialism as a ‘system’ and his call for its violent overthrow in the Fanon Preface) is not simply to denounce the use of torture or colonial exploitation. Sartre’s primary rhetorical mission in these anticolonial texts from this period (roughly from his radical politicization following Budapest through the abandonment of the second volume of the Critique and the death of Fanon in 1961) extends much further than pointing the finger at the rogue ‘bad apple’. Sartre in all of the texts from this period wants to convince his readers of their total responsibility for the torture being done in their name in Algeria. Sartre’s articles appear to be decisively influenced by Césaire’s earlier (1955) Discourse on Colonialism. To an even greater extent than Césaire’s anticolonial cultural politics, Sartre’s assertion of universal guilt and responsibility crucially and explicitly depends on the transparent ubiquity of a functioning, democratic public sphere, on a general knowledge shared by ‘all’ French citizens of what is going on in a site such as Algeria. ‘Everyone knows it’, Sartre reminds his readers in his anticolonial journalism. Each of these topical pieces is published in response to the publication of a book or documentation of torture, and this widespread, shared communal awareness allows Sartre to proceed based upon the universal knowledge of French citizens that torture is occurring in Algeria. ‘Everybody has heard about the torture; in spite of everything, something has filtered through into the national press’ (ibid.: 4). If we know, Sartre argues, we are responsible for the violence done in our name. ‘We vote, we give mandates, and, in a way, we can revoke them: the stirring of the public opinion can bring down governments’. The condemnation is unsparing and brutal: ‘We personally must be accomplices to the crimes that are committed in our name, since it is within our power to stop them’. The awareness of these crimes, Sartre argues, brings with it an ethical responsibility that is not lessened by the fallacious distancing of political representation, by the argument that it was not we who actually physically performed or institutionally vetted such acts. ‘We have to take responsibility for this guilt’ (ibid.: 2). In contrast, to remain silent in the face of this awareness is complicity. ‘He who says nothing consents’ (ibid.: 6). How, exactly, though, does

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 252

15/05/2013 08:45:06

Césaire and Sartre 253

silence equal consent? In what way precisely are we responsible for the acts done in our name? Sartre’s polemical texts remain merely assertive on this count. The theoretical justification of these claims is only articulated in the long-forgotten pages of the second volume of Sartre’s ­contemporaneous Critique. In the second chapter of the manuscript of Critique de la raison dialectique II, Sartre theorizes the relation between individual acts and the social totality. The key conceptual operator in this analysis is his concept of totalization. In Sartre’s somewhat idiosyncratic use of this term, totalization refers to the process that infers meaning (‘intelligibility’) to the social totality, to a world. It is a sort of ‘cognitive mapping’ (to adopt Jameson’s famous concept) by which subjects progressively come to understand the totality of relations in their world. Totalization is an unending, infinite process, but, nonetheless, Sartre argues that human subjects can come to grasp these relations in their phenomenological complexity with sufficient, if always tentative and contingent, understanding to gain true insight into this global (or ‘even interplanetary’) intelligibility. This process of totalization occurs on at least two registers: epistemological and relational. On the first count, Sartre reaffirms in the opening statement of this chapter, a sufficiently rich and insightful understanding of a totality of relations can lead us to affirm ‘that there is a dialectical meaning of the practical ensemble’. But, secondly, and this will be the focus of his phenomenological examination of general responsibility in the pages that follow, ‘each individual event totalizes in itself this ensemble in the infinite richness of its individuality’. The latter is the key theoretical proposition of Sartre’s endeavor, the axiom that underpins all his political and ethical writings of this mature and uncompromisingly militant period of his work. If each individual can be shown to be in some sense monadic, if our each and every action and way of being in the world expresses the totality of the world, then we are not only indissolubly linked to our world as totality (an affirmation that announces Glissant’s notion of the Tout-monde), but, and this is what Sartre must demonstrate, in some sense responsible for all that occurs in it. Sartre’s claim is that any single struggle (for struggle in a situation of universal – if unequal – scarcity is the ontological foundation of the Critique) expresses or ‘totalizes’ all others in that world. In the initial stage of his argument, Sartre proceeds abstractly. An absolute ‘totalization of all totalizations’ is never to be attained, but merely posited, and, indeed, given the unfinished nature of Sartre’s abandoned

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 253

15/05/2013 08:45:08

254

Caribbean Critique

manuscript, it remains unclear precisely what status we are to attribute to this endpoint of total knowledge, Sartre’s materialist equivalent to the Hegelian Absolute Spirit. Still, it is clear from what follows that Sartre believes we can nonetheless attain sufficient insight into the totality of our situation to perceive our general responsibility and to commit to act accordingly. Sartre’s thought proceeds through narrative exemplification. In this case, he famously chooses the example of a boxing match. Sartre seeks to draw his reader in to witness this event ‘taking place before our eyes’. The first degree of analysis places this match (it can be any match occurring within the ‘sport’ or what Bourdieu might call the ‘field’ of boxing, professional or amateur) as a competition for a title within a general hierarchy ‘recognized by all’ and which forms an ‘objective structure’. This phenomenology of a match precisely pushes us to grasp the greater reality beyond our limited perception of immediacy, and instead to grasp the degree to which ‘spectators, organizers, boxers live this hierarchy in its unfolding’ in any and every match as a totalization of the entire field of boxing. Whether mediocre or champions in a title fight, in their objective ranking ‘they contain within them the opponents they have already defeated [or by whom they have been defeated] and, via this mediation, the entire universe of boxing’ (Sartre 2004: 2.19). At this level of analysis, it is a relatively simple thing to grasp that the fight only has meaning or ‘intelligibility’ if it is understood in this way as a totalizing moment within a structure of competitive relations. For an alien being (‘some Micromegas’) unfamiliar with this symbolic structure, the two men flailing at each other to the point of bloody unconsciousness is incomprehensible (though that alien might guess: one has stolen a good from the other, they have traded insults, etc.). And, thus, Sartre can make his real point about this (or any) match: ‘that boxing in its entirety is present at every instant of the fight as a sport and as a technique, with all the human qualities and all the material conditions (training, physical condition, etc.) that it demands’ (ibid.: 20). It is not simply the fight as an abstract totality that totalizes the field of boxing that night, but in every instant, every gesture, every blow, of that fight the entire system is consummated. This is true insofar as the event is precisely unpredictable. This genius for improvisation is what made Muhammad Ali, for example, the greatest. This, then is the level at which most spectators (fans) grasp or totalize the world of the match they witness, as a struggle within the hierarchy of a sport at any given moment. Sartre has barely begun his analysis,

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 254

15/05/2013 08:45:08

Césaire and Sartre 255

however (it will go on for some thirty pages), and he now moves to the level of perception that is truly at stake in this description: the place of boxing as codified, ritualized struggle within a much more general and even ubiquitous situation of social violence (and thus, I am arguing, the relevance of his analysis of boxing to the critique of colonial violence of Césaire, Fanon, or Sartre himself). He must now go on to show how ‘these organized rifts in the social fabric are, in themselves, a totalization of all rifts in that same ‘society’’ (ibid.: 22). The remainder of this phenomenological narrative will thus pursue this general understanding of social violence as totality in two dimensions: directly and via its various ‘mediations’. To the immediate totalization of social violence in an act, Sartre gives the term incarnation. ‘The fight is a public incarnation of every conflict’ (ibid.: 22). It is simply an immediate manifestation of the general reality of scarcity that the Critique argues founds all social relations. Each fight does not represent (in the imaginary or symbolic realm) violence, or even, Sartre observes, present the abstract concept of ‘violence’; the boxers ‘are too busy fighting’ (ibid.: 23). Each moment of every match is rather the ‘perfect realization’ of the total fact of social violence. From the perspective of the spectator, the danger and risk of the spectacle invoke libidinal investment. There is no distanciation possible for the spectator of the violent event; if a theatrical representation maintains an ‘unbridgeable distance’ (despite any and all Brechtian subterfuges, the actors will not die or live happily ever after) – and this is the key point – for ‘the spectator of that purified brawl […] his violence is wholly present and he strives to communicate it to the combatants. […] He is the incarnation of violence, sometimes to the point of hitting his neighbor’ (ibid.: 25–26). If Sartre’s logic at this point is still mere affirmation, its thrust is clear. At a subjective level, the engaged ‘spectator’ or witness of an violent act is in fact at a very real level a true participant. This, then, is a more general level of the incarnation of social violence in any one of its manifestations. ‘The two boxers gather within themselves, and re-exteriorize by the punches they swap, the ensemble of tensions and open or masked struggles that characterize the regime under which we live – and have made us violent even in the least of our desires, even in the gentlest of our caresses’ (ibid.: 26). Incarnation is thus what Sartre terms the ‘individual’ form of totalization; in other words, the operative function of a singular point in all its fully determined richness and specificity: this boxer on this day in this

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 255

15/05/2013 08:45:09

256

Caribbean Critique

fight in all its infinite determinations. Any single event is the localized incarnation of a totality; totalization, in contrast, is the global sum of all points of incarnation, past, present, and future. Sartre is careful to distinguish this action of incarnation from mere representation; rather, he argues that the fight ‘encloses’ the general regime of violence ‘within itself, as its real substance’. In other words, as a totality, the violence of society is indivisible, it ‘is always entire wherever it exists’ (ibid.: 28). Any single act of social violence forms a dynamic totality with a complex network of participants; but, and this is Sartre’s point, any one member of that network totalizes that violence, including above all ‘witnesses’. ‘In each violent action […] all violent action exists as unification – in and through this deed – of all the oppositions which pit all men against each other and have provoked it’ (ibid.: 28). This assertion leads in turn to the basic proposition of Sartre’s entire phenomenological critique of violence: that ‘an act of violence never has witnesses. […] The so-called witness is a participant’ (ibid.: 29). Precisely as Václav Havel would argue in his famous 1978 phenomenology of state socialism, ‘The Power of the Powerless’, Sartre affirms that if you know an event is occurring, you are, to a relative but always real degree, supporting and enabling that action. Otherwise, as Sartre observes, the various laws of ‘non-assistance’ to victims of a crime would be meaningless. Though this momentary reliance on positive law rather than logic is obviously to some degree specious, here Sartre has prepared the reader (that is, in an ethics of engagement) to accept this proposition. In a building where certain tenants beat their children, sometimes to death, the other tenants are necessarily thrown into a situation which imperatively demands a choice: either to inform […] or else to make themselves accomplices. […] If the victim dies, they are themselves the executioners. (Sartre 2004: 2.30)

Though the argument is similar to Sartre’s existentialist logic of engagement and choice, this responsibility for violence has here taken on much richer and fuller implications. Beyond the individual’s obligation to choose (when even not choosing is a choice full of implications), Sartre’s Critique strives in its two enormous volumes to present a total picture of social relations as general, universal responsibility. It is not simply that we cannot evade choosing within the parameters of a given situation. Such choices, particularly those involving forms of social violence, are a political and not merely individual fact. So-called non-violence is a misnomer; it is rather, in Sartre’s eyes, a form of complicity, all the worse

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 256

15/05/2013 08:45:09

Césaire and Sartre 257

for its bad faith. It is complicity with the oppressor above all insofar as non-violence allows a system to continue to function with all its normalized regimes of legitimate violence.1 The final section of Sartre’s phenomenological narrative moves then to the level of what he terms the ‘mediated totalization’ of ‘singularization’. This level of understanding passes beyond the subjective awareness of participants in an event, from, as we have seen, the simplest degree of immediate sense certainty (to adopt Hegel’s term) to a more general awareness or cognitive mapping of the ways in which that event incarnates the a more general social violence. Now, the cognition of this mediated totalization is revealed to be perceptible only to a subject detached from the unfolding event itself, in distinct, yet distanced relation to it. Analyzing the style of a series of imaginary, individual fighters, Sartre revels in the details of the sport that so fascinated him in his youth. Sartre’s point is straightforward, and Hegelian to the core. Incarnation must, in this sense, be understood as a reformulation of Hegel’s ‘concrete universality’. ‘Incarnation is […] the concrete universal constantly producing itself as the animation and temporalization of individual contingency’ (ibid.: 38). What Sartre’s phenomenology brings to this familiar theory is a precise modality of comprehending and holding before our mind’s eye (totalizing) this co-generation of singularity and universal that he calls the incarnation of this (any) ‘lone exploited individual’, the professional boxer (ibid.: 44). Boxers are not only commodified objects of a specific subsector of the capitalist market (sport). They actually behave like commodities: in the struggle of any match, each boxer fights to raise his value within that market, or fades back into his social class following defeat (‘I could’ve been a contender’). Unlike Hegel’s phenomenology of labor, it is not that men work on inert matter, but they who constitute that very matter themselves, and every punch materializes the ‘transformative’ labor that creates value, even as that labor uses up and eventually destroys its objects, no matter how successful in their commodification and escape from their class origins. In conclusion, Sartre turns to the principal ethical problem of his thought in this period: the violence of the oppressed. In situations of general policing and economic subordination of the oppressed, this violence remains repressed and ‘impotent’, limited to individualistic explosions (theft, brawls, domestic violence). In this sense, boxing reveals itself to the phenomenological observer as a particular – and particularly developed – moment in the general regime of mythic violence, such that all the spectacles of codified violence, from Spartacus to the ‘Rumble in

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 257

15/05/2013 08:45:10

258

Caribbean Critique

the Jungle’ should be read as the various mises-en-scène of the legitimate violence of the state. It is not just that the boxer is a money-making commodity within the late capitalism of online, on-demand viewing at ever-higher prices (though of course he is that too); we should extend Sartre’s analysis to conclude that these spectacles of regulated, codified violence, like the embedded videos and laser-bomb footage of our late imperial era, are the tools of enthrallment to state legitimation. Against the illegitimate (‘barbaric’, ‘savage’, ‘terrorist’) others swarming like insects in such Pentagon videos (if, indeed, they are visible at all, and not replaced by the simple flash of an explosion that holds the place for human lives extinguished, saving viewers from having to confront the actual possibility that these newly vaporized molecules were once human beings equal to any other, leaving in their wake untold human tragedies to unfold beyond any retreat and withdrawal), such spectacles reaffirm at every moment the legitimate violence of the state, the forces of law and order going in to ‘clean up’ another zone in the ‘wild’ East. In the end, boxing is, Sartre concludes, the total and most radical alienation of the ‘sole emancipatory power’ of the oppressed (ibid.: 46). The horror of boxing is not only that in every punch, in the dogged, animalistic struggle of the loser merely to stay standing, only to fall flat on his face unconscious or even dead, in this abjection we witness our own subjection to social violence. The jellied brains of the former champion are not so much analogous but the counterpart to the victims of torture, Agent Orange, and depleted uranium; his bulbous, mutilated, pendulous lower lip the legitimate collateral damage and the local affirmation of the ‘rightful’ violence that elsewhere melted the flesh of the citizens of Hiroshima or incinerated the napalmed victims of North Vietnam. In the end, Sartre’s is an immanent, materialist philosophy of the absolute. The concept of incarnation states that the totality of all relations in a world are manifest before our eyes in each and every moment, each and every gesture, if only we could have the force of perception to grasp this totality. Against the postmodern stigmatization of putative intellectual authorities who would grasp the truth of a totality and transmit this, Sartre’s narrative phenomenology seeks to convince the reader, any reader, no matter their position or a priori identity in a world that she can come to a relative, yet substantial, grasp of her implication in a social system. That we do not, and perhaps cannot, in any ultimate sense, grasp this totality, does not lessen the fact that our concerted effort to grasp any moment of incarnation can allow

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 258

15/05/2013 08:45:10

Césaire and Sartre 259

us concrete understanding of the full degree of not just our interdependency but of a general ethico-political responsibility for the many violences done in our name. This in turn points simultaneously to the enormous strengths and weaknesses of Sartre’s ‘method’. Like any phenomenology, only more so, given his overwhelming dependency on narrative description and assertion rather than logical proof, Sartre must elicit an awareness and concern in his reader through the force of the imagination to evoke compassion, in which we comprehend every punch of the boxer, or electric shock of the torturer, to be our own act. To enjoin his readers to take as Sartre the public intellectual did the next step of a public refusal of such complicity, and then actively to move to destroy such regimes of ‘legitimate’, mythical violence as did Fanon the ‘Algerian’, Sartre the writer can only wager on the fragile, furtive power of the human imagination to respond to description, and its capacity to participate in the active construction of another world. Sartre’s attempt to assert the dialectical intelligibility of history, as Robert Young has shown, ultimately remains just that, the mere reiteration of an infinitely reasserted, unproven intelligibility that presumes the existence of the very totality it has set out to prove (Young 1990: 67). The boxing match, as a distinct, particular instance of social violence, is never shown by Sartre to be scaleable to the level of society in general, but rather remains a mere, if singularly compelling, case of violence. In the final sections of the second volume of the Critique, on the point of abandoning his interminable project, Sartre in apparent desperation even postulates the multiplicity of worlds and their logics that it had been his precise goal to disprove (‘Might there not be … several totalizations without any links between them except coexistence?’); it is moreover this ‘multiplicity’ of logics of violence (as I argued above in discussing Fanon’s ‘De la violence’), a multiplicity unsubsumable to Sartre’s totalized History, that constitute precisely what Althusser would affirm as ‘incommensurability’ and Badiou after him as the doubly plural ‘logics of worlds’. Self-consciousness and Anticolonial Totality Whether, moreover, certain individuals or communities (say, slaves for Louverture, blacks for Césaire) might have exceptional access to such understanding is entirely another question Sartre never addresses.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 259

15/05/2013 08:45:11

260

Caribbean Critique

This is, however, precisely what Georg Lukács famously maintained in the central concept of History and Class Consciousness: totality. Fredric Jameson has recently argued that Lukács, and more precisely his concept of totality, must be grasped in just this manner, such that certain experiences make it ‘unavoidable’ for some individuals or communities (whether slaves or proletarians, blacks or women) and not others ‘to see and to know, features of the world that remain obscure, invisible, or merely occasional and secondary for other groups’ (Jameson 2010: 216). Where Lukács goes beyond Sartre’s largely individualistic/intellectualist conception of totalization is in the former’s steadfast assertion that it is only class consciousness (which, as Jameson points out, is not to be reduced to some specious ‘collective conscious’), and not the individual’s reified awareness, that can gain insight into the totalizing structures of any social situation. ‘Class consciousness’ in this reading indicates only that particular positions and experiences allow for differing ‘conditions of possibility’ of awareness. It would be unlikely in the extreme, say, for a banker or merchant to understand slavery in any substantial, rather than abstract, profit-based terms without significant intellectual struggle. ‘Class consciousness’ says only that for any other group or individual to achieve such insight requires substantially more intellectual labor (to say nothing of displacing oneself from one’s social habitus along the lines of Victor Schoelcher’s travels in pre-1848 Martinique and Haiti). Lukács’s point is precisely that the subjects of reification (proletarians), like Sartre’s proletarian boxers or the subjects of slavery or colonialism in Fanon’s Algeria, that is to say, in various other incommensurate contexts, are uniquely prepared to grasp the totality of the system of capitalism (whether manifested as boxing, slavery, or colonialism) as something more than mere abstraction, as what Lukács calls the ‘subject-object’ of history. Ultimately, then, what is at stake for Jameson in such an invocation of Lukács is to sustain the very notion of revolution in these decades of its eclipse. The first step in such a struggle, Sartre, Lukács, and Jameson all agree, is to defend with all our intellectual resources the primordial concept of totality, along with its parent concept system, in the absence of which systemic change is of course meaningless (ibid.: 300). Jameson’s contemporary point, a point previously defended by Fanon, Sartre, and Césaire, is that in a context of ever-increasing economic totalization (‘late capitalism’), a law of inverse proportions holds: the more global capital and legitimate, state-based policing become, it is only

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 260

15/05/2013 08:45:11

Césaire and Sartre 261

systemic change that will ever have a chance at substantially increasing the justice and equality of our world (ibid.: 332). It is this notion of totality that forms the critical core of what surely constitutes the most far-reaching theorization of francophone postcolonial theory to date, Peter Hallward’s 2001 book Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 261

15/05/2013 08:45:12

chapter twelve

Militant Universality: Absolutely Postcolonial Absolutely Postcolonial

The Sartrean model of dialectical relation as the immanent totalization of any system is among the most basic antecedents and conceptual materials for the most comprehensive critique of postcolonial theory in general, and Glissantian Relation in particular, to date: Peter Hallward’s first book, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific.1 A general critique of postcolonial theory, followed by a series of specific critiques of postcolonial thinkers makes up the greater part of that volume. I want to draw attention here to Hallward’s two very brief, yet absolutely central, theoretical ‘excurses’ at the heart of the book. These texts can serve, I believe, as indications of the contemporary theoretical horizon of a critique of postcolonial relation responsive to what Badiou has called the ‘obscure’ disasters of the late twentieth century: the conjoined and ongoing crises of neo-colonialism, postcommunism, and general depoliticization. The primary operative distinction Hallward’s study draws lies between what he calls ‘singular’ and ‘specific’ modes of relation. Hallward defines the former as ‘what creat[es] the medium of its own universe’ (2001: 177). Speaking of Deleuze in particular, he specifies that ‘all existent individuals […] are immediately produced, direct actualizations of one and the same Creative force’ in which all differences are ‘singular’ insofar as they remain ‘free from the limits of constituent relations between the differed’ (ibid.: 12). While this absolute absence of mediation, of what Hallward calls (and will repeatedly call for) ‘constituent relations’ is emphatically not what key theorists of the singular such as Spinoza or Hegel, both grand thinkers of mediation if ever they existed, understand

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 262

15/05/2013 08:45:12

Absolutely Postcolonial

263

by the singular, what is essential to grasp is how such a focus on the absolute is in fact essential to Hallward’s most fundamental claims. 2 In the theoretical excurses to Absolutely Postcolonial, Hallward seeks to ground the two central concepts of his philosophico-political project. The first of these, which he circumscribes in Excursus III, is the universal, while the second, the particular, he addresses in Excursus IV. An emphatic definition of the universal is crucial to Hallward’s project, in order to avoid not only the relativist politics of might as right, but also the language-based equivalent of this amoral order, the world of Habermasian dialogue, in which (one might argue with some exaggeration) any political end is acceptable so long as it follows the proper, rational procedures (which procedures are themselves supposed to guarantee a priori the illegitimacy of various fascistic political scenarios). Only universal principles that would transcend merely empirical conflict (might as right), empirical dialogue (Habermas), or language games (Wittgenstein) can in this view hope to offer a grounded orientation for communal political action (which is ultimately, I think, what is always at stake for Hallward). Nor can capitalism, in the Marxist model, or patriarchy, in the feminist, or racism, count in Hallward’s estimation as universals in this strong sense, given their unavoidably empirical status. Instead, they are to be understood more as what Hallward calls ‘tendencies’, to which exist many exceptions to their predominance both in time and place (cf. Hallward 2001: 179). Following this series of refutational delimitations of what would count as a true philosophical universal, Hallward moves to make the key positive distinction of his ontology. On the one hand, he tells us, human beings find themselves a priori determined, as a species and in every case, to be ‘relational beings’. This ahistorical, ontological ground of human being-in-the-world Hallward proposes to call the ‘transcendental of the specific’, in the sense that it is a transcendental predetermination that itself allows any specific, empirical determinations of individuals of the human species. This ‘transcendental of the specific’, then, is a strong universal in the sense not only that it is said to hold universally, in all cases, for all human beings (no human being is not relational), but even more insofar as it itself transcends all empirical cases; it is not itself a case, but is of an entirely different order; it is, one might say, a purely and unrelatedly singular concept. The transcendental of the specific is what enables any human existence to take place. One thinks, for example, of the animalistic ‘human beings’ raised in the wild that so fascinated enlightenment thinkers such as Itard’s Enfant Sauvage, and Truffaut’s

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 263

15/05/2013 08:45:13

264

Caribbean Critique

own fascinating contemplation of the ultimately dehumanizing effects of pure arelationality. In contrast, the universal is for Hallward to be understood in a very precise sense, as the unfolding of this relationality through the articulation of ‘universalisable principles valid for all relations’ (ibid.) Here Hallward explicitly mentions only the two principles that we can safely presume ground the entirety of his work: justice and equality. In what can perhaps be taken for the condensation of an entire theoreticopolitical project that he has called a ‘politics of prescription’, Hallward summarizes: ‘Given that we are relational creatures, ‘universal’ here will apply to the prescription of certain unconditional principles (as opposed to empirical regularities) that circumscribe how we are relational. Principles of justice and equality, for instance’ (ibid.). In other words, justice as equality serves as a strong universal, and not merely a relative claim in the marketplace of ethical imperatives, because it is a ­‘universalisable principle’. Hallward does not explain or defend this neo-Kantian ‘universalisability’ of the principles of justice and equality, and readers are left to ponder why justice would be any more relational than injustice or inequality than equality. If relationality itself is unavoidably and a priori a human category, and if it seems undebatable that humans can express their relationality as much through injustice and inequality as their opposites, then Hallward has not in any sense provided an a priori ground to a politics of prescriptive equality. One might argue in a Kantian mode, however, that fully to universalize injustice and/ or inequality would imply the destruction of humanity (whether as the indignity of a situation of pure arelation as inequality or as a species via the ultimate and fully universal injustice of planetary mass destruction), and is thus self-contradictory. But, of course, Hallward is explicitly not claiming that justice and equality are transcendental, but just the opposite, that they are potentially universalisable modes of instantiation (and thus empirical cases) of a universal category (the ‘transcendental of the specific’). Justice as equality simply offers a, perhaps the only, non-contradictory universal mode of instantiation of human relationality. In other words, the universal fulfillment and unfolding determination of human being-in-the-world as justice and equality would witness precisely the infinite deployment and richness of what Hallward has already claimed to be the very defining characteristic of that humanity: relationality. One of the many ways that Hallward’s argument goes against recent

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 264

15/05/2013 08:45:13

Absolutely Postcolonial

265

theoretical doxa is thus in its explicit assertion of a fundamental and universal human nature. Though relationality is the transcendental category of particular interest to Hallward, he also mentions language and even subjectivity itself, as well as ‘certain properly basic degrees of agency, subjectivity, relationality, sexuality, identification, and so on’, based on the putative authority of ‘cognitive science’ (ibid.: 180). These basic categories are transcendental in the strict Kantian sense, Hallward claims, that all empirical human experience is inconceivable without them. Hallward’s question is formally, if not in its content, perfectly Kantian: he asks, not ‘How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?’ but ‘How is relation a priori possible?’ The transcendental conditions that Hallward claims allow for human relation are said to be purely formal, devoid of all content. Though many quite powerful critiques of this type of Kantian formalism have been offered, from Hegel to Adorno and beyond, Hallward avoids having to mount any strong defense of this absolute distinction between pure, empty transcendental forms and empirical content by simply assuming this division to be true axiomatically, and then proceeding to assert that the description of these transcendental conditions ‘is not properly a philosophical so much as a scientific problem’ (ibid.: 180). 3 In this view, the transcendental, which a few lines before was said to be devoid of all empirical content, is suddenly instead claimed to be understandable only by the empirical sciences, and is to be located in ‘our peculiar biological history’ (ibid.). Aside from a certain skepticism regarding the irrelevancy of philosophical thought and the sole validity of empirical science to further our understanding of such pure, content-free categories of experience, Hallward’s argument suffers from a more basic logical contradiction. As Nathan Brown convincingly argues in what is the most far-reaching and considered critique of Hallward’s thought to date, the author of Absolutely Postcolonial describes the universal, ahistorical structures of human experience as having developed in various historical and situational contexts that contributed to the development of the species. ‘The contradictory nature’ of Hallward’s argument, Brown writes, is of a piece with the vicious circularity of the sociobiological account upon which Hallward relies – a circularity that is symptomatic of the idealist, teleological concept of ‘man’ upon which that account relies. […] Man implicitly precedes his own production, in [this] account, because ‘he was selected’ to reproduce his own production. Rather than critically confronting the teleological circularity of this account, Hallward attempts

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 265

15/05/2013 08:45:14

266

Caribbean Critique

to evade it by subtracting species requirements absolutely from any process of development. If Hallward’s account of the specific can in fact be deconstructed, it is because the unconditional status of relationality upon which it relies […] is grounded upon the ahistorical extraction of the transcendental from the empirical: that is, quite precisely, upon the non-relationality of relation as a transcendental condition. But since the development of human animals is indeed specific – conditional and historical – the critical point is that the evolutionary processes through which this development occurs are incompatible with […] the exemption of transcendental structures from history and from context upon which Hallward relies. (Brown 2011: 152)

The contradiction Brown identifies is that transcendental species conditions are said to be at once purely formal, timeless, and without empirical content (‘it is impossible to become transcendental’ (Hallward 2001: 330)), yet to have evolved in time and place; in other words, they presuppose their own existence, such that any empirical scientific description of their evolution would presuppose their timeless transcendental functioning. While Kant and Husserl sought to escape this contradiction by arguing that purely formal categories were indeed timeless, and while Badiou, in Logics of Worlds perhaps offers a more promising account of the appearance of what he in turn calls ‘transcendentals’ in any world, Hallward simply begs the question by shunting it off as a problem for the empirical sciences to resolve, such that the evolutionary appearance of human transcendentals becomes in Hallward’s account a sort of miraculous apparition rather than the labor of a subject of truth. Militant Universalism The second moment of Hallward’s excursus on the universal moves from an account of human transcendentals to a sort of transcendental deduction of categories of the properly universal, the principles such as justice and equality that are ‘criteria prescribed as valid for all relations in the situation concerned’, such that their legitimacy depends not on the particular instance or context of their application but ‘on normative criteria applied to relationality in general’. Universal principles such as justice and equality are thus external to any situation, and are not derived from that situation but axiomatically imposed from an elsewhere. ‘Universality persists as a fragile assertion’, Hallward writes,

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 266

15/05/2013 08:45:14

Absolutely Postcolonial

267

‘a projection from the specific: it holds only insofar as its proponents are able to make it stick’ (Hallward 2001: 183). In other words, though universals ‘transcend’ a situation, they are not in Hallward’s formulation transcendental because they require both a decision in favor of their assertion and the empirical fidelity of a subject to uphold them and struggle for their implementation. Universals such as justice and equality, thus, have a merely prescriptive and subjective, rather than a priori validity, while only transcendentals like relation are for Hallward a priori ‘valid’. The universal is in the end the site of a decision and the ensuing struggle to make that universal ‘stick’ in any world. ‘Enabled by its transcendental conditions, grounded in the evolution of social and political institutions’, Hallward concludes his transcendental analytic of relation in a decidedly Sartrean tone: ‘the prescription of universalizable criteria is always a project in the most concrete – and most subjective – sense’ (ibid.: 187). Following on this transcendental deduction of the categories of relation (specifically, justice and equality), the problem for Hallward then becomes one of conjoining the universality of a politics of prescription and its militant subject(s) with this strong (i.e., transcendental) model of relation. In essence, Hallward wants to retain the ethical prescriptivity of Kant and the activist subjectivity of Badiou while conjoining this with the dialectical relationality of Hegel and Sartre. Unlike both Hegel and Sartre, however, Hallward denies that relationality is itself necessarily dialectical, while admitting that many specific forms of relations are clearly dialectical in form (cf. ibid.: 252). Moreover, it is precisely at this point in his argument that Hallward returns to reformulate his critique of Glissantian Relation in light of the preceding theoretical articulation. His argument with Glissantian Relation is not that there do not exist many instances of relation that follow Glissant’s model, as is obviously the case. Rather, it is the illegitimate move to deduce the exemplarity and even ethical legitimacy of Glissantian Relation and creolization on the basis of their ubiquity – rather than as subjective decision – that Hallward denies. If relationality is simply one of the universally transcendental categories of human being-in-the-world, it can have no particular ethical or political orientation per se. Brown shows that in order to be thought at all, the correlational structures Hallward describes as absolute must instead be posited as absolutely contingent, capable of becoming and perishing. ‘The very possibility of [what Hallward calls] the specific, then – the factical non-necessity of that which is the case – requires

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 267

15/05/2013 08:45:15

268

Caribbean Critique

us to think the necessary contingency of the structural invariants of our experience’ (Brown 2011: 155). In other words, relation cannot be hypostatized as singular, timeless, and quasi-miraculous absolute any more than the manifold ontic situations in a world. Such an orientation can only come, as Hallward has already argued, through the choice or decision of subjects in any particular world or situation. ‘Identities are banally relational’, as Hallward observes: Simply, there is nothing in this condition that orients the expression of these differences toward an anarchic dissemination any more than toward a disciplined coordination. There can be no automatic derivation of a politics of creolisation and hybridity. The question of whether to organize our differences in terms that privilege heterogeneity or homogeneity is in every case to be answered by a political decision. It is not something to be deduced from a more primitive meditation on Being, difference, community or humanity. (Hallward 2001: 252)

In consequence, Hallward argues that subjectivation is both always a consequence of despecification and subtraction from the various constituted (specified) identities that have formed us as individuals, while at the same time the various modes of relation must always be subjectively chosen, never derived from a transcendental teleology, ‘be it consensus, hybridity, responsibility, or dissemination’ (ibid.: 253). In short, Hallward concludes, such an understanding of the transcendental, unsurpassable nature of relation and its irrelevance to political and existential decisions (we cannot opt out of our status as relational beings) leave us as subjects of relation two principal tasks: always to despecify our identities, to subtract ourselves from the prefabricated roles we are called upon to play and freely to choose, here again Hallward adopts Sartrean terminology, our ‘essence’, and, second, ‘to demystify the pretensions of a singular disinterest’ (ibid.: 253); in other words, to pursue an uncompromising critique of the existing world. We must continue to criticize the mystified naturalness of our institutions and elites in order to reveal the manifold legitimized forms of violence and domination that assure their predominance. In any situation, we are always already obliged to choose, as Sartre never tired of reminding us, and to ‘deciding a relation in one way or another’, as Hallward puts it (ibid.). In this fundamental, unsurpassable situation of human freedom, there are no authorities or big others to make such decisions for us, no incontrovertible or undeconstructable moral or ethical guidelines. At the same time, in making such choices, Hallward reminds us that the criteria we rely on, such as justice and equality or profit and utility, are

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 268

15/05/2013 08:45:15

Absolutely Postcolonial

269

always external to the particular situation itself, and thus, he concludes, ‘a matter of conflict, deliberation, and decision’ (ibid.). The Critique of Haitian Antipolitics Seen in the light of this critique of singular reason, it becomes clear how fully Hallward’s transfixing and stunning review of Haitian antipolitics, Damming the Flood: Haiti and the Politics of Containment, is the direct manifestation and fulfillment of the author’s ontology of relation. For what first appears merely as a compelling archival reconstruction of a moment of contemporary history reveals itself in light of the formal schema of Absolutely Postcolonial to be a sort of anthropology (to continue the Kantian metaphor) of Haitian antipolitics, tracing its manifold forms and degenerations, from Port-au-Prince to Washington and Paris and back, articulating a neo-Sartrean totalization of Haitian specification and global responsibility, an unparalleled phenomenology of the destruction of Haitian popular sovereignty from the rise of Aristide to the 2004 coup, as well as a celebration of Haiti’s post-1986 sequence of political subjectivation following the universal prescription of the egalitarian truth statement tout moun se moun in the Lavlas movement. Beyond Relation If Absolutely Postcolonial stands as perhaps the only properly transcendental critique of postcolonial reason to date, the monumental theoretical reference of the field it surveys, the critical project it sets forward compels its readers to question and perhaps to ‘demystify’ the book’s point of unquestioned faith and even dogma: that relation itself is an unsurpassable, ‘undeconstructable’ limit to critical thought. I would argue that Hallward’s insistent hypostatization of relation as a content-free, transcendental condition of human being-in-the-world is a particular form of the contemporary turn to so-called ‘political ontology’. Alberto Moreiras has rejected as sacrificial all logic of evental truth, as, precisely, sacrificing ‘what is not tied to the event’. ‘The nonsubject’, Moreiras writes, ‘is that which the subject must constantly subtract in a kind of self-foundation that extends into virtue’ (quoted at Bosteels 2011:

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 269

15/05/2013 08:45:16

270

Caribbean Critique

113). Is not such a defense of the nonsubject in effect a call to quietist depoliticization? Such ‘nonsubjects’ of the event were, for example, Louis XVI after Varennes, or the slave-holders of Saint Domingue after the uprising of August 1791. These ‘nonsubjects’ of their respective revolutions were indeed ‘sacrificed’ to the Terreur insofar as they actively sought to undermine and destroy the struggle to articulate a new, more egalitarian world beyond all forms of enslavement. Robespierre and Louverture were precisely such militant subjects of an event whom Moreiras rejects, subjects whose ‘self-foundation’ (‘I am Toussaint Louverture. I want liberty and equality to reign in St. Domingue’) was that of a subject to the truth (that we do not know), the opening of a question that we must ourselves seek answers to, rejecting all kings and masters: What is freedom? What is equality? What is popular sovereignty? This terrifying and exhilarating opening was predicated on a political ‘virtue’ and dedication to the common good that refused the various comprises of all Thermidorian, reactionary politics of interest (profit and utility).4

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 270

15/05/2013 08:45:16

Conclusion: The Incandescent I, Destroyer of Worlds Conclusion

The love of truth is the love of this weakness whose veil we have raised; it is the love of what the truth hides. Jacques Lacan Nous sommes des forces de vérité Aimé Césaire

If Toussaint Louverture is the founding figure of Caribbean Critique, Aimé Césaire is surely its greatest and most steadfast practitioner. Césaire’s legacy is to have remained faithful to a single axiom in the face of unmitigated and intolerable injustice: fidelity to the r­ evolutionary imperatives of freedom, equality, and fraternity, the unknown implications of which must be at every moment interrogated and experimentally confirmed in the pursuit of the universal, undivided equality of all. While he rightly celebrated the legacy and accomplishments of afro-Atlantic cultures, these specificities never served to ground the ethical and political claims he made against global imperialism. Following his initial invocation of Négritude, Césaire’s every intervention brought the claims of universal equality to bear on diverse planes of being, from the poetic to the political. Slavery, racism, colonialism, imperialism: the inaugural master of Francophone writing wielded these words with political mastery to shatter the inertial resistance of an intolerable situation. The lived experience of racism, exclusion, and the systematic impoverishment and dependency of colonized Martinique and Guadeloupe defined Césaire’s commitment to overcome the divisive and pernicious effects of colonial subalternity, racial classification, and stigmatization.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 271

15/05/2013 08:45:16

272

Caribbean Critique

Following his encounter with Senghor in the 1930s, Césaire sought to affirm the universal legacy of black culture in the face of its systematic debasement, but – as I have argued throughout this book – Césaire largely shunned what we now call ‘identity politics’. Rather, he sustained and renewed the dedication to universal rights he discovered in the struggles of Toussaint Louverture, Grégoire, and Victor Schoelcher. In this struggle, Césaire’s unparalleled mastery of an incendiary poetic language was, in a dazzling multiplicity of forums, genres, and modalities, the unerring arme miraculeuse of a singularly Caribbean modality of bloodless, divine violence. The initial period of political insurgency in the francophone world, in which culture and politics were fundamentally linked under the general name of decolonization, stretched from the 1930s to the 1960s. During this phase, culture and politics, while remaining separate spheres of creativity, they yet informed and responded to one another. In this sense, the founding call of francophone postcolonial studies remains Césaire’s injunction from the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal: ‘Assez de ce scandale!’ [Enough of this outrage!] (Césaire 1995: 98). This tight interdependency between poetry and politics was sustained into the 1970s, culminating in studies such as Édouard Glissant’s 1981 collection Le Discours antillais and the hysterical realism of René Depestre’s anti-Duvalier Le Mât de cocagne. The field of francophone postcolonial studies, having gained a fragile institutionalization in the last decade, is, as H. Adlai Murdoch and Anne Donaday’s outstanding survey of the field argued already in 2005, ‘evolving so quickly that it is not an exaggeration to say that it is at a new juncture in its history’ (Murdoch and Donaday 2005: 13).1 Today this juncture requires something more than the incorporation of post­colonial thought within the purview of ‘la francophonie’. If the field has now successfully integrated postcolonial theory, the next vital step for francophone postcolonial studies is to undertake a thorough critique of postcolonial theory, one that goes far beyond questioning its (highly problematic) tendency to anglocentrism. 2 As it has done with the even more problematic term ‘francophone’, the field must incorporate within its self-definition a critique of ‘postcoloniality’ as an epistemological regime and practice. There is a need to sustain and renew the legacy of critical acuity that inaugural thinkers such as Césaire and Fanon brought to bear upon the various regimes and modes of global colonialism. These thinkers remained faithful to the universal commandments of the French and Haitian revolutions

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 272

15/05/2013 08:45:16

Conclusion 273

(‘Thou shalt be free, equal, and fraternal!’), to the Kantian positive imperative to construct a universal humanity, but this as investigations into a series of problems, referenced to eternal truths (that we do not know). There is nothing inherently Caribbean or black about such problems. The problem of universals has been a principal philosophical preoccupation since at least Socrates, and has been interrogated by thinkers from Aristotle to Duns Scotus, from Nietzsche to Jan Patočka (all of whom, it just so happens, turn out to have been colonized and/or marginalized subjects of imperialism). 3 This book has argued that the singular modalities and unbearable urgency of Caribbean experience compelled the thinkers of Caribbean Critique to construct new worlds beyond the abjection of colonial slavery. Césaire, like C. L. R. James before him, repeatedly affirmed that the world-historical importance of the Haitian Revolution was its transcendence of identity-based politics to and its politicization of the idea of the universal human right to be free from enslavement. ‘When Toussaint Louverture came’, wrote Césaire in 1960, ‘it was to take the Declaration of the Rights of Man at its word […] to show that there is no pariah race, that there is no marginal country, that there is no extra-ordinary culture or people. He strove to incarnate and particularize a principle’ (Césaire 1981:344). The Idea of 1791 In an important sense, the entire historiographic debate over the role of ideas in the Haitian Revolution is misguided.4 If we want to discern the influence of the French and American revolutions, the Radical Enlightenment, Rousseauian political philosophy, and other ideas upon the Haitian Revolution, it is naive to seek traces or ciphers of ‘ideological influence’ in the archive, as historians have done. Instead, the ‘Idea of 1804’ must be emphatically distinguished from conscious articulation of a political doctrine by individual participants in the revolts from 1791 on. In an important sense, universal emancipation – the idea of the Haitian Revolution – is, like any Idea, pre-conscious, and independent of its representation under the aegis of a reflexive cogito. 5 The idea of universal emancipation was the Kreyol understanding of Libete. This idea emerged in Saint-Domingue in the summer of 1791 from the experiential ground of suffering (‘mesuré au compas de la souffrance’ [measured by the compass of suffering] (Césaire 1981: 124)),

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 273

15/05/2013 08:45:18

274

Caribbean Critique

as Césaire wrote of Négritude more generally) that was slavery and the plantation. Libete, the eruption of an Idea into global awareness on the night of the great revolt of August 29, 1791, was not an abstraction but a swarming multiplicity that cannot be localized in any individual consciousness. Prior to the great uprising of August 1791, this idea was only a potential. Historiography cannot assign it to any pre-given identity or actor; it remained subjectively unrecognizable as an idea even after the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (despite the fact that the contradiction between the contents of the 1789 Declaration and the persistence of slavery was immediately obvious to everyone). Universal emancipation was unthinkable not in Trouillot’s sense (I argued above that Kant’s defense of the French Revolution and Jacobinism renders the Haitian sequence eminently thinkable, if one only considers the slaves of Saint-Domingue as a priori human), but quite simply because there were no categories in the limited, interested, and profit-based order of plantation society to account for the (potential, virtual) universal freedom of humans, as opposed to the infinite ancien régime categories for the distribution of race and class. To introduce those categories necessarily implied the complete destruction of the plantation system and the creation of an entirely new world. As a pure (but real) idea, universal emancipation implied the uprising of pure difference free from all subordination to the transcendental norms of the slave system. The idea of 1804, as a pure multiplicity, first took shape as a disembodied claim of absolute equality in the Bois Caïman ceremony and in Boukman’s famous call to the slaves to ‘Koute libete li pale nan kè nou tous’ [Listen to the voice of Liberty that speaks in all our hearts] (cited at Fick 1990: 93). This call for Libete engendered a non-localizable chain of connections between the elements of an anonymous, subaltern multitude who enjoyed no place in their post-1789 world. That multiplicity linked up to a series of adjunct fields that informed this pure idea (including the unfulfilled promise of the incomplete and partial French and American revolutions and the political implications of Vodun), and moved to operate a specific condensation or actualization of the singular nature of their claim. This claim, as ideal, found no identity or place in the world of Saint-Domingue and focused around signifiers such as the Kreyol libete. At the same time, it evinced an enormous power to enact, to unfold, and to dramatize on the world stage the implications of this idea. This idea was pre-conscious, literally a dream, in the way that we recall King’s phrase, ‘I have a dream’.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 274

15/05/2013 08:45:18

Conclusion 275

This ideal multiplicity was self-defining. On the night of August 29, 1791, it first began to actualize this pre-individual idea as a complex, unfolding differentiation of relationships and elements. The most famous of these differentiations include the collective call for general emancipation of July, 1792 with which this book began, and Toussaint’s inaugural 1793 definition of the revolution as a struggle for ‘liberté générale’. Together these interventions culminated in the 1804 declaration of Haitian independence. In fact, it would be more accurate to contrast the actual concept of 1804 to the properly virtual Idea of 1791, and, moreover, to conclude that 1804 represented, inevitably, an enormous impoverishment of the idea of 1791.6 The idea of universal emancipation was at first only a pure problem (that of actual slavery prior to the 1791 uprising), but quickly modulated into the struggle to instantiate a real solution to that problem. Along these lines, I argued that one should take seriously Fredric Jameson’s defense of Lukács’s infamous concept of an ‘imputed’ class consciousness. It is group experience, Jameson argues, that offers the key to this concept, rather than a chimerical search for the archival trace of some positivist logical operation of abstraction (via the hunt for a miraculous Spinozist slave-thinker who would ‘prove’ the influence of the radical enlightenment in Saint-Domingue …). Jameson’s claim, in my understanding, is that the specificity of the experience of subalternality (as, for example, under plantation slavery) pushes phenomenological experience toward an understanding of a situation structurally unavailable or quite literally impossible for members of a dominant class.7 The structural possibility of this insight arises from the experience of slavery itself, not from the reading of Spinoza, Diderot, or even the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Where we should go beyond Jameson is by also affirming the role of the (organic) intellectual in clarifying, articulating, objectifying, and propounding this idea. The history of Caribbean Critique, from Louverture and Vastey through Césaire and Aristide, illustrates and affirms this proposition. It is one thing to have a vague, inchoate, intersubjective ‘Idea’ when one is burning down the plantations in August 1791. It is quite another intellectual and political labor to articulate that Idea as an operative concept of a politics of principle with world-historical impact, such as in drafting a constitution, founding a nation or a state, or creating a culture of the counter-plantation.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 275

15/05/2013 08:45:19

276

Caribbean Critique

Critique of Colonial Shame Among it many striking accomplishments, Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal is the first critique of guilt in anticolonial literature.8 The Cahier articulates a phenomenology of the experience of the colonized. The overarching problem confronting Césaire is above all experiential: how to end the unbearable scandal that is the colonization of lands, bodies, and minds to which his poem bears witness? Césaire’s intervention refuses the ready-at-hand ethnographic contrast between so-called (premodern, undeveloped) shame and (modern, Freudian) guilt cultures and rejects the contemporary conception of an ontological, primordial, always already present shame.9 This conception of shame received canonical formulation in the second section of the second part of Heidegger’s 1927 Being and Time: ‘The Attestation of Da-sein of an Authentic Potentiality-of-Being, and Resoluteness’. In this key chapter, Heidegger sets out in search of ‘an authentic potentiality-of-being of Da-sein’ [ein eigentliches Seinkönnen des Daseins] (Heidegger 1996: 247) that could ‘attest’ [bezeugen] to an authentic identity, a true ‘potentiality-of-being-one’s-self’. In Heidegger’s analysis, this ‘authentic’ ‘existentiell possibility’ seeks to move beyond the falsity of the daily existence of Dasein, an untrue experience that is mere loss of the self [Verlorenheit] in the ‘they’ [das Man-selbst]. Heidegger locates this ‘attestation’ in a particular phenomenon of daily experience, the ‘voice of conscience’ (ibid.: 248). Heidegger’s famous text theorizes guilt as primordial and foundational, a vision that would be violently and decisively rejected by Césaire. For Heidegger, the voice of conscience and the feeling of guilt [Schuld] are a priori facets of human experience, something that we ‘have in advance’ imposed upon us by the common and good sense of our daily experience [die alltägliche Verständigkeit] (ibid.: 248). Given this pre-critical immediacy of the putative ‘fact’ of the feeling of guilt, Heidegger’s conclusion is inevitable: ‘Being guilty does not result from a fault committed, but the other way around: the fault only becomes possible “on the basis” [auf Grund] of a primordial being guilty’ (ibid.: 262; translation modified). Guilt is an ontological ground or structure to human existence, Heidegger goes on to claim, writing that ‘Beings […] are guilty in the ground of their being’ [ist im Grunde seines Seins schuldig] (ibid.: 264; emphasis in original). Given this ontological, a priori status of guilt as a universal fact of human experience, it is a small step for Heidegger to name the ‘authentic’

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 276

15/05/2013 08:45:19

Conclusion 277

behavior of Dasein: its ‘ownmost possibility of existence’ is nothing other than ‘one’s ownmost authentic potentiality for becoming guilty’ (ibid.: 265). Heidegger’s argument is impeccably circular: the freedom of Dasein lies in its recognition that it is ineluctably guilty, thrown into the world, free to ‘choose’ its proper destiny in guilt. Heidegger’s reliance on tautology pervades this section of Being and Time. He asks: ‘But where do we get our criterion for the primordial, existential meaning of “guilty”’? Not, he answers, from any insight into the ground of Being, but precisely from the contingent, daily, ontical experience his fundamental ontology claims to ground. This criterion comes ‘from the fact that this “guilty” turns up as a predicate of the “I am”’ (ibid.: 259). Such a claim is problematic, to say the least, generalizing from we do not know whose (the author’s?) experience to all of humanity. The argument presumes precisely what remains to be proven: that ‘everyone’ feels shame and guilt. And were this to be proven, clinically, statistically, sociologically, or through some other tool of universal divination, would this imply that this has always been the case, and, above all, that guilt is a fatality? Is it impossible to imagine a world freed from shame and guilt?10 Heidegger disdains even to respond negatively to such a question; in fact, it seems he cannot even entertain it as a possibility. Like the gospel of some Nietzschean priest, Being and Time tells its reader: ‘admit that you are guilty, feel this shame in your innermost, truthful being; everyone feels this, and you, reader, are no exception. There is no exception; such is the law of Being. You have only to admit your guilt, and to make of it your “ownmost” authentic identity’. Such a voice, Heidegger’s voice, intones the doxa of subjection and ideological interpellation in its most repressive form. But what if it was not us, but Heidegger’s text that was shameful? Heidegger savagely represses one of Nietzsche’s fundamental lessons: that every psychic and moral formation, and guilt, above all, has a genealogy. As much for the species as for any individual, though we may have no more than the most conjectural access to either. If we find ourselves unable to escape from a psychic disposition to shame and guilt, guilt and above all shame still require the violence of certain social relations to manifest themselves. Shame, more clearly intersubjective than guilt, will be the object of Césaire’s attention. The feeling of guilt that I have in myself can be worked through, alone, or on the shrink’s couch; but the shame of living in a shameful world cannot be cured by any individual subject. That

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 277

15/05/2013 08:45:20

278

Caribbean Critique

people still go hungry, that one’s own country terrorizes vast parts of the globe with a wealth that could instead alleviate so much suffering, that the richest potentialities of life both near and far are devastated unnecessarily, all this and more is certainly a fatality in the present, but one which can become not only a shame, the object of passive judgment, but a common responsibility, if the future is not entirely predetermined. In 1930s Paris, Aimé Césaire found himself thrown into a context of racist humiliation, and his response was precocious and brilliant. Perhaps the shame of this world is a destiny; but this ‘perhaps’, this ‘what if’, shone out as Césaire’s only hope. Being, what is, he knows all too well: ‘I am hated, pointed at, called a dirty nègre, a slave, a colonized subject, an untouchable, a subhuman animal. What’s of interest to me as a free human being is how things might be otherwise’. Phenomenologically, let’s imagine for a minute the young Césaire getting off the ship from Martinique in 1933 for his hypokhâgne, khâgne, and then Normale Supérieure, where he will remain until 1939. He was not the first black Martinican to study there, but the second. During these six years of study and experience in Paris, Césaire forged the poetic and political consciousness that would make him one of the outstanding figures of the twentieth century. Though he spoke little of the racism he encountered during these years, we know that the stresses of this period, both scholastic and existential, led to his eventual collapse in 1939. In contrast to Heidegger’s neo-Lutheran assertion of a fundamental, unavoidable human guilt, Césaire’s 1939 poem undertakes a deontologization of guilt at the very moment of the ascendency of the arguments of Being and Time in French thought. As a colonized, racialized subject of French imperialism, Césaire’s understanding of shame and guilt stand in stark opposition to the pontifical arguments of the Rector of Freiburg. The sixty-some pages of the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, written by a young normalien, invented the historical movement of Négritude and initiated an enormous prise de conscience in the French and, subsequently, global colonies. In the vast, cosmic scope of the poem, the scene of shame is primordial. The passage is among the most famous in the Cahier, undoubtedly the narrative pivot point of the poem. Until that moment, the thirty-three initial pages of the poem describe with brutal force the ‘putrefaction’ (Césaire 1995: 72) of the Martinican colony and the alienation of its inhabitants, ‘cette foule à côté de son cri de faim, de misère, de révolte, de haine’ [This crowd alongside its cry of hunger, of misery, of revolt, of hate] (ibid.: 74; translation modified). This memory

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 278

15/05/2013 08:45:20

Conclusion 279

of a Martinique ‘étouffée’ [asphyxiated], ‘gluante’ [slimy], haunted by ‘rêves avortées’ [aborted dreams] (ibid.: 82) is an initial source of shame for the narrator. It is a ‘shame’ [une honte], this colonized people, ‘prosterné’, never rebelling against their ‘destiny’: Une honte, cette rue Paille, / un appendice dégoûtant comme les parties honteuses de bourg qui [s’étend] … tout au long de la route coloniale … c’est là … que la mer déverse ses immondices, ses chats morts et ses chiens crevés. (Césaire 1995: 85; translation modified) [A shame, this rue Paille, / a revolting appendix like the private parts of the town which … spreads along the colonial road … and here the sea dumps its refuse, its dead cats and dead dogs.]

One scene above all in the poem stands as a founding moment in anticolonial francophone literature. When I reread this passage, one besotted with shame in my memory, it seemed even more interesting than I had originally envisioned. The word ‘shame’ [honte] has been replaced by another: C’était un nègre grand comme un pongo qui essayait de se faire tout petit sur un banc de tramway / […] Il était COMIQUE ET LAID / COMIQUE ET LAID pour sûr. / J’arborai un grand sourire complice … / Ma lâcheté retrouvée! (Césaire 1995: 108; translation modified) [A nigger tall as a pongo who was trying hard to make himself small on a tram seat / … He was COMICAL AND UGLY / COMICAL AND UGLY, for sure / I exhibited a wide smile of complicity … / My cowardice recovered !]

Separated by two generations from the direct experience of slavery, Césaire remains a laboreur of words: he has no choice, he must work, but his choice is to work on words, and through them, upon minds. If his work is a phenomenology, and not an ontology of colonial shame, this is true in a precise sense. Césaire’s investigation, like that of Fanon after him, is a phenomenology of consciousness par excellence. The production of (poetic) objects becomes productive in turn of consciousness. And in this scene of the Cahier, it is the materiality of objective, incarnate shame that is productive of self-consciousness. ‘Cowardice’ [la lâcheté]. ‘Un soir dans un tramway en face de moi, un nègre’ [One night on a tramway in front of me, a nigger] (ibid.: 107). In the first section of the poem, shame signifies the ontological immersion of the poet in his island and colonized community as though by fate, as destiny. For all the violence of his condemnation, the narrator is at

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 279

15/05/2013 08:45:21

280

Caribbean Critique

first subject to his own passivity and inability to escape this distress. But faced with this ‘nègre hideux’ [hideous nigger], the objectivation of his own shame, suddenly all certainly dissolves. In the sudden experience of la lâcheté [cowardice], tout se lâche, every certainty gives way, that of the brilliant Normalien, the genial ‘évolué’ colonial subject, he who knows his ‘ownmost’ identity. His cowardice was of course to have put himself on the side of those in the tram who laughed at this ‘nègre’: ‘J’arborais un grand sourire complice’ [I harbored a wide smile of complicity]. His freedom is suddenly to find himself face to face with the contingency of his own shame, in a vertiginous mise-en-abyme that reveals the abased alienation of the colonized and destroys in a blaze the world of his abjection. At the very moment he encounters his own abjection, an opening beyond this world flashes up. The poem-object that we hold in our hands is not a testimony to shame and guilt, but testimony to the work that the poet has done to these raw, over-determined experiences. The passage from shame to truth is signaled in the poem by the replacement of the former by the word ‘lâcheté’ (cowardice). In this moment, the narrator finds himself confronted objectively by his own shame as an ontological fatality, in the very moment in which, by the force of things, by the color of his skin, he comprehends both that it is he himself who is being mocked, but also that this ‘nègre hideux’ is not only himself. They are at least two. The power of this prise de conscience will from this point on be multiplied by poetic labor. His shame will not remain the personal shame of the poet/narrator. This alienation and consciousness of the self and the other will be repeated in a second moment of objectivation. This poetic objectivation will set out in search not of any communal or racial identity, but will attempt to arrive at the universal – as Césaire was fond of saying – by passing through the intimate specificity of singular experience. If successful, this scene will interpolate every reader, no matter their previous ‘identity’, but will do so via their own singular specificity. If this scene was first of all a moment of objectivation in which generations of colonized subjects of the African diaspora recognized themselves, it nonetheless in its essence invokes a universal community in and through the specificity of its poetic detail. ‘La lâcheté’ is one of those archetypal bicephelous Césairien words. While it looks backwards, recalling the dissolution of the self and of lived shame, it simultaneously looks forward, toward the ascendant movement of the subject’s consciousness of her ‘Négritude’, toward the point at which the poetic subject will be able to say: Et elle est debout

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 280

15/05/2013 08:45:21

Conclusion 281

la négraille. … debout et libre’ [Negridom is standing … Standing and free] (ibid.: 130). From this moment, the poetic subject will accept all that she is, all that previously covered her with shame, and in the final twenty pages of the poem will embark on an extraordinary recapitulation of this biographical, cultural, and historical baggage, only to cast aside [lâcher] this onto-ideological ballast and to arrive at the point where she is free to proclaim: J’accepte … j’accepte … entièrement, sans réserve […] ma race rongée de macules […] et la fleur de lys qui flue du fer rouge sur le gras de mon épaule […] et la négritude, non plus un indice céphalique, ou un plasma, ou un soma, mais mesurée au compas de la souffrance. […] j’accepte, j’accepte tout cela. (Césaire 1995: 120, 124) [I accept … I accept … completely, with no reservation […] my race blemished with maculas […] and the fleur-de-lys flowing from the red-hot iron on the fleshy part of my shoulder […] and Négritude, not a cephalic index any more or a plasma or a soma but measured with the compass of suffering.]

To reach this point of (subjective) freedom, it will have been necessary to pass through the most desperate sense of shame, a shame whose caustic force constitutes the basis and force of a communal subjectivity, that of an individual, a subject of the event we refer to as Négritude. And yet, having passed through this process, through the historical moment of Négritude and the many Thermidors of decolonization, we must ask again: in the name of which subject are we to jettison the sense of shame? Who, precisely, is the subject of Négritude? Precisely, we know, this subject without shame, the subject who wishes to deny his cowardice, who puffs himself up with courage and bravery, is he not the phallocratic subject who must constantly reaffirm his virility and domination? Three of these ‘subjects of Négritude’ come to mind, each of them more shameless than the other. Ahmed Sékou Touré, who in 1958 propelled Guinea to vote ‘no’ to De Gaulle, who no sooner constructed his own concentration camps in which, for twenty-five years, were buried all those who could dare to believe that this independence was for them. Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti, whose ‘authentic’, ‘ownmost’ version of Négritude went under the sectarian appellation of noirisme, and who policed his politics of ‘authenticity’11 with the machetes and guns of the Macoutes. Joseph Mobutu, finally, who assassinated the freely elected prime minister Patrice Lumumba, with an apparently clean conscience, a tranquility sustained by Belgian troops, US dollars and American

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 281

15/05/2013 08:45:22

282

Caribbean Critique

counselors, with the complicity of the CIA and the shameful and categorical non-intervention of the United Nations. With all this priestly counsel, Joseph Mobutu never seems to have suffered from regret till the day he died. Shameless. That is to say, our shame. But does recognizing this violence of the tyrannical subject freed from any sense of shame imply that we must live in a society of generalized, ‘ontological’ shame in order to inhibit an equally ineluctable will to domination? We find ourselves torn between two abstractions: to live in shame would mean to submit to a universal reign of the will to power, and, in reaction, we have nothing more than an equally abstract, Levinassian absolute: to tell oneself that the place I occupy in the world, that the air I breath, is itself an infringement of the other, that to live is shame. Let us say instead that there is no good shame, if only because such crimes will persist in the face of all Levinassian restraint-inducing shame. A good shame is no longer shame, it has been transformed into something else. Aimé Césaire spent his career testifying to this shame-free subject he first imagined as a young student. Not a subject of terror, the Henry Christophe’s and Joseph Mobutu’s his theatre ceaselessly critiqued, but, on the contrary, the singular subjects of universal rights his politics sought to instate. Aimé Césaire never stopped asking, ‘who is the subject of the universal rights of man that we inherit from the Haitian Revolution? Who is the subject who instantiates the right never again to be enslaved? Who affirms this right, or, on the contrary, contests all law that would make of her a colonized or untouchable subject?’ Césaire tells us that this subject is she who becomes conscious of an absence or lack in her world. This is the subject who becomes aware of both the dehumanizing force of the Master’s law, and of the lever of absolute right that can pry open the window to another world. She becomes conscious of a surfeit of law, and an absence of right, of justice, an absence whose reality she can nonetheless conceive and imagine. Sékou, Mobutu, Papa Doc, each so quick to invoke a positive and actual freedom that no sooner revealed itself as destruction incarnate, were never subjects of Négritude. Césaire, like the Toussaint and Lumumba he celebrated, was himself such a subject. As poet, as leader of a political movement for undivided, universal rights, Césaire never stopped fighting the terrible forces unleashed by his invocation of ‘Négritude’, a neologism that played its own small part in both the glories and monstrosities of decolonization. Despite this protean critique of shame, an important facet of Césaire’s Endeavour nonetheless echoes the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics, and this already in the 1939 Cahier: this is the fundamental affirmation

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 282

15/05/2013 08:45:22

Conclusion 283

of a poetics and the poet himself (for Heidegger, this poet is above all Hölderlin). As Césaire argues in ‘Poésie et connaissance’, it is the poet who, in the wake of the retreat of God, after Nietzsche, in a disenchanted world, carries forth within a language of the highest pitch, the promise of an event that would, as Nietzsche prophesied, break the world in two. While A. James Arnold has argued that this messianic dimension of Césaire’s poetry is strongest in the original, staunchly Surrealist version of Soleil cou coupé, a strain of nostalgia (for Africa) first appears as Césaire’s Négritude in the form of the retour, ultimately to resound as the melancholy resignation of the poems collected in Moi, laminaire. Fanon ultimately refused such melancholia and resignation to affirm the actuality of the Algerian nation; he rejected the retreat into poetics as a refuge from politics to affirm instead a subject of truth Fanon called the ‘Algerian’, a subject born of revolutionary struggle (‘Cet oxygène qui invente et dispose une nouvelle humanité, c’est cela aussi la Révolution algérienne’ (Fanon 1968: 174)). Glissant would ultimately affirm a poetics of Relation in the face of the unviability of any possible Martinican nation. Césaire, characteristically, also struggles against this Heideggerian temptation, but – unlike Fanon and to a far greater degree than Glissant – within poetry itself, as a struggle to make a poetics of revolution and a politics of culture. It is this struggle that animated the greatest of Césaire’s works. Césaire’s poetry, theater, essays, and political interventions from the Discours sur le colonialisme through his final masterpiece, Une saison au Congo and his corresponding political struggle for Martinican autonomy together force the repeated renegotiation of an alliance, rich yet problematic, between politics and poetics – a struggle on two fronts for an elusive decolonization. The Persistence of Decolonization That twentieth-century decolonization may seem a belated, melancholic, or tragic endeavor says more about our own situation than about the persistence and terrible effects of imperialism today in places like Haiti and the Congo. To understand decolonization in this manner as a politics of universal emancipation, one should refuse any abstract opposition between culture and politics and remain faithful to the Césaireian imperative: ‘ne pas céder sur le verbe!’ To remain faithful to this imperative is to know that politics, like poetry, is an intervention

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 283

15/05/2013 08:45:23

284

Caribbean Critique

into the symbolic realm, the profound torsion of the transcendental coordinates by which any world is indexed. The primary lesson of the Haitian Revolution is not to give up on the word.12 The historical import of this political event is its uncompromising fidelity to the two words of the French Revolution, libete and egalite (to invoke the Kreyol variants of these paired French concepts). These two words were quite simply false and ideological in the mouths of French republicans before 1794; after Thermidor they were progressively abandoned, leaving Haiti (and, for a brief moment in 1802, Guadeloupe) as the vanguard of the French Revolution amid the encroaching return of inequality in a world system based essentially on slave labor. These two words came from beyond the world of slavery, bypassing the mediations of masters who insisted that they apply only to white, male, adult others. These words were the world-shattering destroyers of all identity, the subjects of which were not slave or master, but simply human. Caribbean Critique has repeatedly postulated that fidelity to the word is the active negation of the mythic voice of the sovereign. When Robespierre and Louverture affirmed Jacobin and Black Jacobin fidelity to the written commandments of 1789 (the universal imperatives of liberty, equality, fraternity, and the affirmation of undivided and inalienable right), they simultaneously denied the voice of authority and negated the king’s divine right (as, say, lettres de cachet), or rejected the slave master’s invention of a thousand modes of torturing enslaved bodies. From Schoelcher to Césaire, the Caribbean critics sustained fidelity to the word as commandment and remained faithful to a language of pure, bloodless means in contrast to mythic law. Césaire’s founding the law of departmentalization or Schoelcher’s universal abolition of 1848 both involved explicit fidelity to the commandments of 1789 (France) and of 1804 (Haiti). Césaire originally affirmed the word as the constitutive, minimal unit or term that determines the visibility or invisibility of any being in a world. One might thus describe both the critical and insurgent dimensions of Césaire’s undertaking as a vast poetics of post-imperial reason. In unfolding the ontology of any world in order to find one’s way out of the inequality of that world, the word names thresholds of appearance separating the void, as pure, indifferent multiplicity, from ‘l’être-là’, being-there. Consider, for example, Césaire’s manipulation of one name for this void: ‘nègre’/‘nigger’ remains even now a volatile, incandescent Césaireian word if ever there was one.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 284

15/05/2013 08:45:23

Conclusion 285

La politique du verbe To move beyond a banal postcolonialism of difference and the oxymoron of ‘cultural politics’ to a politics of the word, we might ask what it meant for Aimé Césaire to write this phrase in 1943 Vichy Martinique: ‘Ici, poésie égale insurrection’ [Here, poetry equals insurrection]? In the extraordinarily dense text ‘Maintenir la poésie’ [Sustaining Poetry], first published in the wartime journal Tropiques, Césaire defended his inimitable vision of an incendiary, insurgent poetics (reproduced in Delas 1991: 115). Where, one might ask, was this ‘ici’ (‘here’) in which poetry equals insurrection? Not, obviously, in the world of the politics of truth, a world in which political decisions, for or against Admiral Robert and his Vichy Martinican government, implied a politics of dissident subtraction. That was a distinct, if related realm, one in which Césaire also decisively intervened. Instead, Césaire’s condensed, axiomatic proposition names a world in absolute subtraction from both the immediacy of Vichyist repression and censorship, as well as the overarching 400-year-old legacy of French slavery, colonization, and post-1848 imperialism in Martinique. For Césaire, this insurgent poetics is fundamentally a mode of subjectivation. His wonderful opening to ‘Maintenir la poésie’, to which my chapter title alludes, clarifies this: ‘Se défendre du social par la création d’une zone d’incandescence, en deçà de laquelle, à l’intérieur de laquelle fleurit dans une sécurité terrible la fleur inouïe du “Je”’ [To defend oneself from the social through the creation of an incandescent zone, within which, inside of which flourishes in a terrible security the unheard of flower of the ‘I’]. Subjectivation, in this Césairian model, is neither the selfsame persistence of an identity nor the unfolding of an essence. It is not the recognition of the traumatic impossibility of any identity – the mere recognition, as Césaire wrote in 1945, ‘que l’homme est un sujet vide d’erreurs’ [that man is an empty subject of errors] (cited ibid.: 124). If the subject lies beyond the determinations of any actual state or situation, it cannot be a formal or epiphanal act of conversion, a punctual irruption into the plenitude of a truth. Instead, the construction of a world involves a laborious articulation and sequencing of the consequences of an event. The subject of this insurgent poetics of truth involves herself in the arduous process of the ‘création d’une zone’. This zone is not one of constant subjection to terror, to torture, to an absence of right (such as the world of slavery or the contemporary world of extraordinary

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 285

15/05/2013 08:45:24

286

Caribbean Critique

rendition) but rather a world of justice, of infinite right: in Césaire’s words, a ‘terrible sécurité’. It is ‘terrible’ because its construction requires destroying an inert, unjust situation through a politics of confrontation such as the Haitian Revolution or the Algerian war. The emergence of this ‘Je’ (‘I’) defines Césaire’s poetics as materialist, rather than as idealist. With this enunciated ‘I’, a traumatic core or structural lack of the symbolic order undergoes a torsion that opens onto a new consistency. It becomes I, but an incomplete subject, ‘unheard’, says Césaire, a subject indexed not to plenitude (as in Senghorian Négritude or Duvalierist noirisme) but to the void of its world and the truth (that it does not know). The incandescent ‘I’ is the experimental subject constructed out of that black hole, an intervention to make the impossible possible in a forcing of an unjust world. Césaire tells us that his subtractive, insurgent poetics is a ‘dépouillement’ (‘dispossession’) that withdraws from the universal untruth of actual ‘material existence’ to create a ‘zone of fire’ or of ‘frozen silence’. This is a zone of integrity and fidelity to the demands of this poetic truth that alone will allow this insurgent subject to ‘flourish’. It is a zone of systematic and radical subtraction from the identitarian specifications of race, of gender, of nation. Poetry is ‘cette force qui au tout fait […] de l’existence et de l’individu’ [that force that to the completedness […] of existence and of the individual], to the state of any situation in which all is predetermined and normatized, stands opposed ‘le tout-à-faire de la vie et de la personne’ [all-to-be-done of life and of the person], in which all remains to be accomplished. This insurgent subtraction is, as Césaire insists, a systematic ‘inadaptation’ and disruption of the transcendental coordinates of a world. Such a zone appears, from afar, as incomprehensible hallucination – surreal, illogical, arbitrary, discontinuous. The poetic trace of this event, what will constitute the lifelong labor of a truth for its subject, remains unrecognizable from outside that truth. However, for the subjects interpolated by any such call for universal emancipation, this is the ‘ici’ where ‘poetry equals insurrection’. Like C. L. R. James before him, Aimé Césaire invoked this poetics of hope and insurgency in his lifelong fidelity to what Walter Benjamin called ‘the language of pure means’, a word beyond the mere communication and manipulation of information. Here is Césaire: Des mots? Quand nous manions des quartiers de monde, quand nous épousons des continents en délire, quand nous forçons de fumantes portes, des mots, ah oui, des mots! Mais des mots de sang frais, des mots qui sont des raz-de-marée et des érésipèles et des paludismes et des laves

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 286

15/05/2013 08:45:25

Conclusion 287 et des feux de brousse, et des flambées de chair, et des flambées de villes. (Césaire 1995: 98) [Words? As we handle quarters of the world, as we marry delirious continents, as we break down steaming doors, words, oh yes, words! But words of fresh blood, words which are tidal waves and erysipelas and malarias and lavas and bush-fores, blazes of flesh, and blazes of cities …]

Writing in Vichy Martinique, Césaire asserts that ‘to sustain poetry’ will entail destroying the untruth of this world and constructing a community to come that is based on a commitment to universal right and emancipation, and to exploring what those empty imperatives can mean. To construct this community to come, in Césaire’s words, requires that its subjects remains ‘fidèles à la poésie, la maintenir vivante: comme un ulcère, comme une panique, images de catastrophe et de liberté, de chute et de délivrance, dévorant sans fin le foie du monde’ [faithful to poetry, keeping it alive: as an ulcer, as a panic, images of catastrophe and liberty, of desolation and deliverance, endlessly devouring the fears of this world]. Césaire committed both his poetry and politics to fidelity to the word of infinite truth and undivided equality. This is the word that gave form, shape, and terrible beauty to the monstrous: ‘En nommant les objets, c’est un monde de monstres que le poète fait surgir sur la grisaille mal différenciée du monde’ [In naming objects, it’s a world of monsters that the poet brings forth against the indistinct grey of the world] (ibid.: 5). Césaire’s was a language beyond functional communication that pushed idiom itself to its limit, pointing out and giving name to the void at the edge of the given world. This masterful poetic and political voice draws its authority from itself alone; it has no other master. Between the poetic ‘word’ and the political ‘world’, there is but a line, a lien, a critical link that remains for us to draw. We must make these critical links to clarify each of these procedures in their specificity and to elicit from them the furtive, contingent events that live on, unfulfilled, even after failure. These words that have defined the singularity of the Afro-Caribbean intervention into Atlantic modernity are words that travel across oceans and worlds. They are words that defy all boundaries, limits, and quarantine as easily as they move between languages like French and Kreyol: libete, egalite, justice, verite.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 287

15/05/2013 08:45:26

Appendix Appendix

Letter of Jean-François, Belair, and Biassou/Toussaint, July 17921 Lettre originale des chefs des Nègres révoltes, à l’assemblée générale, aux commissaires nationaux, et aux citoyens de la partie française de Saint-Domingue du mois de juillet, 1792. Messieurs, ceux qui ont l’honneur de vous présenter ces Mémoire est une classe d’hommes que vous avez jusqu’à présent méconnus pour vos semblables, et que vous avez couvert d’opprobre en les accablant de toute lignominie attaché à leur malheureux sort, ce sont des hommes qui ne savent choisir les grands mots mais qui vont vous montre ce et à toute la terre la justice de leur cause; enfin, ce sont ceux que vous appelez vos esclaves et qui réclament les droits que toute hommes peut prétendre. 2 Trop longtems Messieurs par un abus qu’on ne peut que trop accuser d’avoir lieur par notte peu d’entendement et notte egnorance depuis long-tems dis-je nous avont été les victimes de votte cupidité et de votte avarice, sous vos coups de fouet barbare, nous vous accumulions les trésors, dont vous jouissiez dans cette Colonies, l’espece humaine souffrait de voir avec quelles barbaries vous traitiés ces hommes comme vous oui des hommes et sur qui vous n’avez d’autre droit que celui du plus fort et du plus barbare de nous vous en faisiez un traffique vous vendiez des hommes pour des chevaux et c’est encore le moindre de vous forfaits aux yeux de l’humanité, notre vie ne dépendoit que de vos caprices, et quant il s’agissent de vous recreer cetait sur un homme commes vous qui bien souvent n’avait d’autre crime que celui d’être sous vos ordres.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 288

15/05/2013 08:45:26

Appendix 289

Nous sommes noirs, il est vrait, mais detes nous Messieurs vous qui etes si judicieux qu’el est cette loy qui dit que l’hommes noir doit appartenir et etre une propriété à l’homme blancs certainement que vous ne pourrez pas nous la faire voir ou si elle existe ce n’est que dans votte imagination toujours prête à en former de nouvelles des lors que c’est à votte avantage, oui Messieurs nous sommes ne libres comme vous, et ce n’est que par votre avarice et notre ignorance qui est tenu dans l’esclavage jusqu’à ce jour, et nous ne pouvons voir ni trouver le droit que vous prétendez avoir sur nous, ni rien qui puisse nous le prouver, placé sur la terre comme vous étant tous enfants d’un même perre créé sur une même image nous sommes donc vos egaux en droit naturel et si la nature se plait a diversifier les couleurs dans l’espèce humain il n’est pas un crime detre noir ni un avantage detre blanc et s’il y a quelques annés qu’existoient des abus dans la Colonies, c’etoit qu’avant une heureuse révolution qui a eu lieux dans la Mere Patries et qui nous a frayé le chemin que notre courage et nos travaux sauront nous faire gravir pour arriver au Temple de la Liberté comme ces braves Français qui sont nos modèles, et que tou lunivers contemple, trop long-tems nous avons porté nos chaînes sans penser à les secour, mais toute autorité qui n’est pas fondé sur la vertu et sur l’humanité, et qui ne tente qu’à assujetir à l’esclavage celui qui est son semblable, doit avoir une fin et telle est la votre et vous Messieurs qui prétendez nous assujettir à l’esclavage n’avez vous pas, jurer de maintenir la consitution française dont vous etes membres et qui ait elle c’ette respectable constitution et quelle est sa loix fondamentale, avez vous oublié que vous avez formellement jurés la déclaration des droits de l’hommes qui dit que les hommes naissent libres et égaux en droit et que les droits naturels sont la liberté, la propriété la sureté et la résistance à loppression, si donc comme vous ne pouvez le nier vous avez juré nous sommes dans nos droits et vous devez vous reconnoitre parjure et par vos décrets vous reconnoissez que toute homme est libre, et vous voulez maintenir la servitude pour quatre cens quatrevingt mille individus qui vous font jouir de tout ce que vous possadez vous nous offret par vos envoyés de nous donner la liberté aux chef c’est encore une de vos maximes en politiques c’est à dire que ceux qui nous aurait été de moitié dans nos travaux serait livrés par nous pour êtres vos victimes non nous preferons la mort mille fois que dagir de cette sorte vis à vis de nos semblables et si vous voulez nous accorder des biens faits qui nous est due il faut qu’il rejaillissent sur tous nos freres. Vous Messieurs de l’Assemblé Général en qui le sort de cette Colonies est confié, il est encore temps de la préserver de sa destruction totale,

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 289

15/05/2013 08:45:27

290

Caribbean Critique

réflichisset à ce mémoire peset vos intérêt, et apprenet que nous saurons mourir si vous persister à nous refuser ce qui nous et nos semblables demande. Vous Monsieur le Commissaire Nationale vous qui êtes venu dans cette colonie pour pacifier les troubles, et qui etes envoyé par la Nation et le Roi, vous avez été témoin des debats qui a eu lieux à l’Assemblée Nationale pour la liberté de l’homme, remplissez vos devoirs et soyet juste à l’égard de tous les hommes, ils sont également chers à l’humanité qui fait la base de vos principes. Vous Citoyens de la Colonie en général ne voyet plus en l’homme noir qu’un de vos freres, ne lui refuset pas ce titre d’homme qui lui appartient et soyet juste envers lui alors vous verrez la prospérité regnet dans cette Contré, alors vous jouiret de vos revenus vous serez chez vouz ils vous aimera comme son pere et son bienfaiteurs. Vous Citoyens de Couleurs en particulier n’oubliez jamais que si vous tenez ce titre respectable ce n’est que par le travail des hommes que vous voulez égorger souvenet vous qu’ils sont vos freres vos parents et que leur sang coule dans vos vaines souvenet vous dis-je que un de vos braves Freres fut victime pour vous, et qu’il y eut nombre d’autres sacrifiés par vos ennemis, n’oubliet sur-tout qu’Ogé est mort victime de la liberté et souvenet vous qu’on fit le sermen dans l’execrable Assemblé Provincial de verser jusqu’à la dernière goutte de sang plutôt que de permettre lexecution du decret du 15 mai, en votre faveur. Et vous qui avez traversé mêres pour combattre des hommes qui veulent reclamer leur droit c’est à dire ceux qui leur appartient et que vous avet vous même jurer de faire observer avez vous oubliez tous vos travaux pour parvenir a l’égalité avez vous oublié que si vous aviet succombé, ce que vous auriez souffert vous êtes victorieux vous êtes parvenu au but que vous cherchiez a atteindre et bien patriote français penset en vous que ceux que vous voulez combattre soutiendront jusqu’au moment où leur droit leur seront accordet, et qu’il prefere vivre libre que de vivres ésclaves. Messieurs vous avet vu en peu de mots notre façon de pensé elle et c’est après avoir consulté tous ceux à qui nous sommes liés pour une même cause que nous vous présentons nos demandes, que voici. Premierement la liberté général de tous les hommes détenus dans l’esclavage. Deuxièmement amnistie général pour le passé. Troisièmement la garantie de ses articles par le gouvernment Espagnol. Quatrièmement les trois articles ci-dessus sont la base et le seul moyen

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 290

15/05/2013 08:45:27

Appendix 291

de pouvoir avoir une paix qui soit respectable pour les deux partis sauf après l’acceptation qui sera faite au nom de la Colonies at approuve de M. le Lieutenant Général et des commissaires nationaux civils de la présenté au roi et à l’assemblée nationale si comme nous le desirons les articles ci dessus soient accepté. Nous nous obligeons à ce qui suit savoir premierement de mettre bas les armes, deuxiemement de rentrer chacun dans l’habitation ou il appartenait et d’y reprendre ses travaux moyennant un prix qui sera fixé par anné pour chaque cultivateur qui commencera a courir du tems qui sera fixé. Voilà Messieurs la demande des hommes qui sont vos semblables et voilà leur dernier résolution et qu’il sont résolu de vivre libres ou de mourir. Nous avons l’honneur d’être Messieurs, vos très-humble et obbéissant serviteur, Signé, Biassou, Jean-François, et Belair.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 291

15/05/2013 08:45:28

Notes

Introduction 1 The letter was published by the journalist Milscent on February 9, 1793 in Le Créole Patriote, a colonial paper that covered events in Europe and the colonies, focusing on the debates in the revolutionary French assemblies and the Jacobin club (Piquionne 1998: 132). See Piquionne and the Appendix to this volume for the full text of the letter. Though, given the strange nature of the grammatical mistakes in the French text the possibility that Milscent may have forged the letter cannot be categorically ruled out, the fact of its circulation throughout the public sphere in Saint-Domingue in this crucial period of the radicalization of the slave revolt after August 1791 implies, quite to the contrary of what David Geggus (2001) has asserted, that it can objectively have served no other cause than that of universalist emancipation, whoever its author may ultimately have been. 2 It is this continuously renewed concern for abstract, universal concepts first articulated following the fall of the Bastille in 1789, and the powerful potentials they hold to transform the actual, specific lived experience of a multitude of non-identical subjects, that justifies the focus of this study on the francophone Caribbean thinkers of Saint-Domingue/Haiti, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. As Robespierre says in his final speech of 8 Thermidor (utterly discounting any originality to the American colonial events), ‘The revolutions that, before ours, changed the face of empires, had no other object than the replacement of a dynastie or the passage of power from one to many. The French Revolution is the first to be founded on the theory of the rights of humanity and on the principles of justice’ (Robespierre 2009: 282). 3 This text should be compared with the later declaration of the 147 ‘New Citizens’ of Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe that asserts their legitimate ‘exercise’ of

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 292

15/05/2013 08:45:28

Notes to pages 2–3

293

the rights of man, in light of these former slaves’ ‘consciousness of our rights’. This affirmation that the signatories are indeed subjects of the prescriptive rights of 1789 is already formulated as a highly militant politics of truth, in which the signatories affirm, in language to be reprised in Louverture’s famous letter to the French Directory, that they will ‘spill, if necessary, to the last drop of our blood to force the respect of the laws of liberty and equality, which are the foundation of our political existence’ (cited at Dubois and Garrigus 2004: 121). 4 As Daniel Maximin has one of his fictional characters observe in his postmodern historical novel L’Isolé soleil, ‘We were refused Europe’s Rights of Man, and we fought to impose the recognition of respect, freedom and equality in the form of the laws in force for Europeans. I don’t call that alienation, I call it taking advantage of a series of circumstances and choosing the best opportunity to take the enemy to battle’ (Maximin 1981: 225). 5 This book shares a fundamental concern for the relation of theory and practice with theorists of Africana Studies such as Angela Y. Davis’s African American Philosphers: 17 Conversations (‘Critical Theory envisions philosophy not so much as an abstract or general engagement with questions of human existence; rather, it envisions […] the use of this knowledge in projects radically to transform society’) and Reiland Rabaka’s dense and fascinating study Africana Critical Theory: The ‘major preoccupation [of Africana critical theory] has been and remains synthesizing classical and contemporary black radical theory with black revolutionary praxis’ (Rabaka 2009: 1, 5). Despite the fact that this book shares not only its theme but a focus on many of the same Caribbean thinkers as Rabaka’s (James, Césaire, Fanon), the argument to be developed below is ultimately opposed to that of Africana Critical Theory, and this on at least two counts. First, methodologically, as a work of Africana Studies, Rabaka is rightly concerned to critique the ways in which the ‘Frankfurt School and the more Marxian brands of critical theory have long overlooked racism, sexism, and colonialism’ and to affirm instead a ‘theory critical of domination and discrimination in classical and contemporary, continental, and diasporan African life-worlds and lived-experiences’ (ibid.: 16). Rabaka rightly seeks to avoid all hypocritical ‘cosmetic multiculturalism and tired textual tokenism’ (ibid.: xiii). But, in that spirit, I would affirm against any conception of critique as racial identity-mapping (like that of Africana Critical Theory) that race is not the answer: not only morally and historically (as racism), empirically (as pseudo-biological species mapping), but, above all, methodologically. For Rabaka, secondly, critique is conceptually a matter of ‘accenting the dialectics of deconstruction and reconstruction’ in which ‘dialectics’ is defined as the ‘art of demonstrating the interconnectedness of parts to each other and to the overarching system or framework as a whole’ (ibid.: 23). Africana Critical Theory proffers this encyclopedic model of critique as ‘dialectics’ in the context of an exhaustive and highly engaging, nearly 400-page study of critical theorists such as the Hegelians Dubois, James, Césaire, and Fanon, in a study

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 293

15/05/2013 08:45:28

294

Notes to pages 3–7

that nonetheless does not hold even a single reference to either Kant or Hegel in its rich and substantial 107-page bibliography. It is this writer’s conviction that critique, if it hopes to move beyond a mere existential, cognitive mapping of the state of subjection of the subaltern, must axiomatically remain in every instance transcendental and subtractive, as it constructs the concepts adequate to its object. This is the post-Kantian model of critique that I will argue informs the totality of francophone Caribbean Critique, the systematic and principled dismantling of race, slavery, and colonialism, the still-actual struggle to make race absolutely inconsequential to human existence. Similarly to Rabaka, Silvio Torres-Saillant’s An Intellectual History of the Caribbean (TorresSaillant 2006) proffers a nominalist concern for pure (Caribbean) difference in itself. To speak of a universal ‘we’, he writes, ‘assumes that people across the planet know the same world and know it the same way.’ Instead, ‘one must concede the multitudes that inhabit the “we” while acknowledging the variety of worlds that the multitudinous “we” inhabits’ (ibid.: 1–2). An Intellectual History of the Caribbean ultimately neglects, I would argue, the history of Caribbean concepts in their situated universality and offers instead an anti-universalist project of local indexification (indeed, the bulk of TorresSaillant’s study is spent narrating the intellectual autobiography of the author and his father, whom we must suppose are to stand in as authentic informants for Caribbean singularity). It is the wager of this book that while its author is a white male employed by an elite Ivy League institution, this fact is both thoroughly accurate and absolutely inconsequential to the truth or falsity of its argument. 6 On the former, see Nesbitt 2008b: 143–144. 7 For an extensively developed elaboration of Marx’s concept of critique, see Rancière 1965. 8 ‘Up to now, the philosophers had the solution of all riddles lying in their lectern, and the stupid uninitiated world had only to open its jaws to let the roast partridges of absolute science fly into its mouth’ (Marx and Engels 1978: 13). 9 Benhabib, however, discerns two competing strands of thought in Marx: a more predominant, immanent, and developmental discourse she names ‘fulfillment’, and a minor, utopian thread she terms ‘transfiguration’ that ‘vacillates between the perspectives of continuity and break’ (Benhabib 1986: 41, 61). 10 Similarly, Marx writes in the second thesis on Feuerbach that ‘The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, that is, the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question’ (Marx and Engels 1978: 144). 11 Marx’s polemical genius rises to its highest, infernal powers in the

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 294

15/05/2013 08:45:28

Notes to pages 7–9

295

German Ideology’s condemnation of the mere ‘speculative’ rationations of the Young Hegelian philosophers: ‘When the last spark of its life had failed, the various components of this caput mortuum began to decompose, entered into new combinations and formed new substances. The industrialists of philosophy, who till then had lived on the exploitation of the absolute spirit, now seized upon the new combinations. Each with all possible zeal set about retailing his apportioned share. […] Later, when the German market was glutted, and the commodity in spite of all efforts found no response in the world market, the business was spoiled in the usual German manner by fabricated and fictitious production, deterioration in quality, adulteration of the raw materials, falsification of labels, fictitious purchases, bill-jobbing and a credit system devoid of any real basis. The competition turned into a bitter struggle, which is now being extolled and interpreted to us as a revolution of world significance, the begetter of the most prodigious results and achievements’ (Marx and Engels 1978: 147). 12 Cf. Nesbitt 2008b: chap. 2. 13 Hardt and Negri read Marxian critique in Commonwealth as the history of its phenomenologization. They give various examples to substantiate this claim, including readings of Adorno and Horkheimer, Althusser, and anticolonial and feminist thought, to argue that the Marxist critique of property eventually transforms into a phenomenology of bodies (Hardt and Negri 2009). Many thanks to Gavin Arnall for pointing this out to me. 14 These two modes, which I am calling objective and subjective, are similar to the two modes of critique Benhabib finds at work in Marx’s critique of capital, in which she distinguishes between his various critiques of the lived experience of capitalist exploitation by the proletariat versus the analysis of the objective process of the exploitation of surplus labour power by the capitalist (Benhabib 1986: 123). 15 Banhabib writes of the critical project that ‘Social critique must show crises not only to be objectively necessary but experientially relevant as well. In the final analysis, it is the success of the theory in translating the functional language of crisis into the experiential language of suffering, humiliation, oppression, struggle, and resistance, which bestows upon it the name of “critical theory”’ (Benhabib 1986: 142). 16 It should be noted that Marx’s famous critique of the ideology of the Rights of Man in ‘On the Jewish Question’, while rightfully identifying the hollow and self-serving nature of these rights in the post-1789 bourgeois and Napoleonic republics, performs its own sleight-of-hand in erasing the Jacobin period from its purview. Marx focuses on the 1795 Thermidorian constitution, which of course was itself a regressive articulation of the exclusion of the majority from political life, and, as such, ‘the term “equality” has here no political significance. It is only the equal right to liberty as defined above; namely, that every man is equally regarded as a self-sufficient monad’ (Marx

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 295

15/05/2013 08:45:28

296

Notes to pages 9–12

and Engels 1978: 42). While Marx does mention the Jacobin’s (compromised, never-implemented) 1793 constitution, he remains brutally silent regarding the Jacobins’ efforts to implement a real, substantial egalitarian republic (Gross 2003). I will return to the distinction between Jacobin and Thermidorian revolutionary politics and their relation to Black Jacobinism in the following chapter. 17 Why, the reader may wonder, is it Alain Badiou’s philosophy rather than that of any other French, Caribbean, or African thinker (or any other, for that matter) that constitutes the theoretical framework and horizon of this study of the theoretical–historical phenomenon of Caribbean Critique? Why refer so emphatically to the thought of a philosopher who has written nothing on the Caribbean beyond a handful of (theoretically inaccurate) paragraphs about Louverture? It is Badiou’s philosophy alone, I am convinced, that allows one to theorize the Jacobin and Black Jacobin principle-based politics that I claim unifies the entire tradition of French Caribbean Critique from Louverture to Aristide, and this for a fairly simple reason. Unlike all the other philosophers of the French 1960s, from Derrida and Deleuze to Glissant and Rancière, and their foreign epigones and disciples such as Žižek or Laclau, Badiou alone has attempted to formulate the unity of a thought of the militant subject with a thorough, unyielding critique of structure. Badiou, unlike these other thinkers, has always remained highly determined by his initial encounter with Sartrean thought, in conjunction with the common experience of Lacanian and Althusserian structuralist critique. ‘Despite everything’, Badiou has observed in an interview with Bruno Bosteels, ‘I have always been concerned in a privileged way by the question of how something could still be called “subject” within the most rigorous conditions possible of the investigation of structures’. Like Fanon and Sartre before him, and unlike those other, slightly younger thinkers of the so-called ‘generation’ of the 1960s, Badiou (born in Rabat, Morocco) directly experienced the crisis of the Algerian war with a Fanonian, Sartrean militant subjectivity he has never abandoned, ‘in which progressive positions could be taken up from within the philosophical categories that were Sartre’s own. These were the categories of commitment, of anticolonialism, and the kind of Sartrean thesis that colonialism is a system’ (cited at Bosteels 2011b: 295). In this view, Badiou’s thought is utterly unique in its pursuit of the highest degree of theoretical, philosophical formalization of the militant Jacobin and Black Jacobin politics that this book argues is the foundation of all Caribbean Critique from Louverture to Césaire and Aristide. 18 This ‘logic’ is what Badiou dedicates the first book of Logics of Worlds to describing. 19 Badiou’s position on suffering ultimately manifests his continued fidelity to the fundamental doctrine of Althusserian structuralism: the priority of the concept over experience. On this rejection of the tenants of the Sartrean (and Hegelian) phenomenology and psychology of experience, and the corresponding

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 296

15/05/2013 08:45:28

Notes to pages 12–21

297

conceptual elaboration of a ‘science’ of structures that builds on the philosophies of Jean Cavaillès and Georges Canguilhem, see Hallward 2012. Though Althusser famously relegated all experience to the status of mere ‘ideology’, Lacan and his followers (including Badiou) sought to retain a place for the subject and experience, but always as secondary to that of the determinations of structure: ‘An exact integration of the lived into the structural must now be made to operate’. ‘Structure’, in Jacques-Alain Miller’s 1964 post-Althusserian founding manifesto ‘Action of the Structure’, thus becomes ‘that which puts in place an experience for the subject that it includes’ (Miller 2012: 71). The key rule of this structuralism is thus that ‘It is by starting from structure that we must enter into the theory of the subject’ (ibid.: 74). Such, one might add, will be the philosophical project of Badiou that culminates in his 2006 Logiques des mondes. Badiou has steadfastly pushed beyond the Lacanian concept of subject as the split placeholder at the point of suture of the Real to theorize a subject of the Event in subtraction from the structural (and untrue) state of any world. In the field of Caribbean Critique, I will argue below, it is ultimately Fanon’s ‘On Violence’ that comes closest to this Althusserian rejection of all neo-Hegelian humanism and production-based subjectivity, to initiate in his final work the beginnings of such a ‘scientific’ structural critique of colonialism. 20 The same holds for a Deleuzian ethics of the eternal return of differenciation, an ‘ethics of intensive quantities’ that ‘affirm[s] even the lowest’ (Deleuze 1994: 305; Nesbitt 2009). 21 In this, the Caribbean assertion of a principled politics, from Louverture to Aristide, goes against not only the theoretical doxa (the origins doubtless go back to Edmund Burke) that, in the words of Jacques Rancière, ‘politics is not the actualization of a principle’ (cited at Bosteels 2011b: 259). Against even Rancière’s radical anarchism, Caribbean Critique asserts that a subject must carry forward the universal truth of emancipation to reconfigure any situation as an interventionist singularization. 22 See Badiou 2011a: 38. 23 The politics of principle to be described below tropicalizes (displaces/ relocalizes) the juncture of politics and philosophy that Alain Badiou has theorized in a remarkable, extremely dense text, ‘Philosophy and Politics’ (Badiou 2003b). 24 Politics, Badiou writes, ‘amounts to an immanent site of thought that disposes its nominations, its sites, and its statements in accordance with the law of a specific fidelity to an event’ (2003b: 163). 25 See Benhabib 1986: 229 for a particularly problematic and utopian statement of the author’s belief in the seemingly infinite potential of rational discussion to ‘entail a decreasing degree of repressiveness and rigidity’ and ‘socialization without repression’. 26 This point is a clear limitation to Étienne Balibar’s fascinating discussion of Lenin and Gandhi (Balibar 2010): the ‘public sphere’ or ‘historical conditions’

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 297

15/05/2013 08:45:28

298

Notes to pages 21–25

in which a revolution such as that of Saint-Domingue, French Algeria, or Mubarak’s Egypt today precluded any access to a printed public sphere on the part of the oppressed. Nonetheless, this did not prevent those communities from forming ideologically coherent and ultimately successful revolutionary movements, predominantly through the network of an oral public sphere of discussion that escaped the control of the state as a printed forum could not. 27 Balibar develops a fascinating comparison of Gandhi and Lenin on violence and revolution in his short piece ‘Lénine et Gandhi: Une rencontre manquée?’ (Alternative Roma 6 (November–December 2005). The literature on Gandhi and satyagraha is immense. See, for example, Biku Parekh, Gandhi: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: 1997); David Hardiman, Gandhi in His Time and Ours: The Global Leacy of His Ideas (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); and Krishnalal Shridharani, War Without Violence: A Study of Gandhi’s Method and its Accomplishments (New York: Garland, 1972 [1939]). Faisal Devji’s The Impossible Indian rewrites non-violence precisely as a conversion theory à la Balibar, as a series of experiments that propose not to avoid but to convert violence into non-violence: ‘Ghandi himself had always been clear about the fact that his movement had nothing to do with avoiding violence, but was meant rather to invite and in so doing convert it’. For Ghandi, Devji writes: ‘violence enjoyed a positive existence and was implied in all action’, and the Mahatma thus sought to ‘sublimate violence by inviting and directing it through a series of political experiments, both theoretical and practical’ (Devji 2012: 8). 28 Jan Patočka wrote from underground in the depths of Czechoslovak repression in 1973, four years before he would die at the Socratic age of seventy while under interrogation by the state police: ‘Where do I have some kind of model in which I see the soul in its action? […] This model is there where justice and injustice are visible – in the community’ (Patočka 2002: 116). 29 Cf. Badiou 1998b:190. 30 The starting point of such a critique of production, of, that is to say, the classic Hegelian-Kojèvian model of the productive subjectivity of the slave who discovers truth in the object of her labour (as the freedom to transform the world) would surely be Balibar’s classic critique of the ideology of production in Reading Capital (on this production-based subjectivity, see Nesbitt 2003). Balibar’s point is in fact extraordinarily powerful in its simplicity: though the subject of labour thinks she is creating objects, in fact this is ideological misrecognition. What labour in fact accomplishes is the perpetually renewed reproduction of capitalist relations themselves. ‘Production is not the production of things, it is the production and conservation of social relations’ (Althusser and Balibar: 302). With the notable exception, one might add, of the slave or colonized who steal the tools of labor and pervert them to their own, ­emancipatory ends.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 298

15/05/2013 08:45:28

Notes to pages 30–33

299

Chapter One 1 On the circulation of the discourse of the Rights of Man throughout the oral and written public sphere of Saint-Domingue by the fall of 1789, see Nesbitt 2008b: 71–78. The Créole Patriote was published in Saint-Domingue from September 21, 1792, to February 21, 1793, in the key period, that is, when the initial slave revolt of August 1791 became radicalized into a universalist revolution for human rights and its consequent imperative to destroy slavery, immediately and without qualification. After the paper’s suspension in February 1793, its editor Milscent went on to publish in the Bulletin des amis de la vérité. Yves Bénot famously called attention to Milscent’s tropical Jacobinism, and, more recently, Jean-Daniel Piquet has written in greater detail about the evolution of the Créole patriote’s critique of slavery. 2 Of the plethora of studies of Robespierre, in addition to the pioneering work of Albert Mathiez, two stand out to my mind for their clear and methodical exposition of Robespierre’s politics of principle and their avoidance of thoughtless invective: Peter McPhee’s A Revolutionary Life (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2012), which nonetheless at times privileges anecdotal detail over political practice, and Jean Massin’s still-unsurpassed, Lefebvrian biography, Robespierre (Paris: Le club français du livre, 1956). 3 This is the case to a much lesser (and above all less-coherent) extent, however, for secondary figures such as Saint-Just and Dessalines, who figured a vitalist politics of revolt, emotion and sensibility rather than the deduction of militant procedural logics from concepts and the orders of prescriptive reason. Deborah Jenson (2011) has mounted a compelling counter-argument to this vision of an emotive, irrational Dessalines, arguing instead that he stands as the first postcolonial subaltern theorist, one whose politics are based upon the rigorous defense of a single principle: absolute independence at all costs, against the imminent threat of reoccupation and re-enslavement by France after 1804. 4 My own feeling is that there is an important division to be drawn between the situated, practical nature of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus and the more abstract and rigorous schematicism of the Tractatus Politicus: a distinction made palpable in the abandonment of social contract theory in the Tractatus Politicus and its replacement by a formal logic of absolute popular sovereignty, defined by Spinoza as ‘the sovereignty held by the entire multitude’ without division or alienation of human powers of expression (cited at Negri 1997: 227). 5 Rousseau in turn famously critiques the state of nature and offers an éloge de la raison humaine in the Contrat social: ‘This passage from the state of nature to l’état civil produces in man a change so remarkable, in substituting in his conduct justice for instinct, and giving to his actions the morality they formerly lacked; it is only then that the voice of duty surpassing physical

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 299

15/05/2013 08:45:28

300

Notes to pages 33–42

impulse, right overcoming appetite, that man, who till then had only looked to himself, finds himself forced to act on other principles, and to consult his reason before following his desires. Though he deprives himself of various advantages that he holds from nature, he comes to possess others so great, his faculties expand and develop themselves, his ideas so extend themselves […] that he should forever bless the happy moment that took him forever from that previous state, and which, from a stupid and brutish animal made of him an intelligent being and a human being’ (Contrat social 60–61). 6 ‘All the evidence’, concludes McShea, ‘points to Spinoza’s democracy as a direct democracy’ (McShea 1968: 128). 7 On November 17, 1793, that is to say two full years after slaves in Saint-Domingue had overthrown the plantations of the island’s northern plain, he denounced the faction ‘that wished to free and arm in an instant all the nègres and to destroy our colonies’ (Œuvres complètes de Maximilien Robespierre, vol. 10, p. 174). Garran-Coulon in fact confirms this conservative dimension to Robespierre thought and politics: ‘Robespierre, for one, was absolutely opposed to the decree of General Liberty’ issued by the Jacobin Sonthonax in August 1793 (Rapport). 8 Mazauric writes, ‘Robespierre est la figure centrale de la Révolution française. […] Il en a généralement exprimé l’essence profondément roturière et démocratique. Il sut en traduire le mouvement au cours des cinq années cruciales de 1789 à 1794 qui ont vu basculér l’ancien ordre social […] grâce à l’ascendant de sa parole et la clarté de ses positions’ (Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution française (Soboul 1989): 917, 919, q.v. ‘Robespierre’). Beside the magisterial struggle of Albert Mathiez to reveal the true originality, complexity, and democratic radicality of the incorruptible’s political theory and practice, Mazauric’s brief article is the most limpid explication of Robespierre’s importance I know of. 9 Unlike this authentic yet never implemented solution, however, an increasingly pervasive solipsism was adopted by the Jacobins who sought to get around the problem of representation as alienation by a more or less sophistic and rhetorical (to the degree that it was or was not true) equation of the representatives with the peuple themselves in full immediacy (Soboul 1989: 216, 242). 10 That said, this would still leave open the question of the critique of this sovereignty of exception or divine right in predominantly oral societies such as the moun en deyo and contre-plantation of Gérard Barthélémy and Jean Casimir. One might say in this sense that the modalities of stateless egalitarianism Barthélémy describes are alternative mechanisms to counter the contingency of sovereign decisions (by ensuring that no such sovereign distinct from the peuple actually takes power), alternative practices to that of the inscription of the commandment in a written document such as the 1789 Declaration or a progressive constitution such as that of the Jacobin an II, with

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 300

15/05/2013 08:45:28

Notes to pages 42–49

301

each tactic bearing its own strengths and weaknesses in the struggle to defend the inviolability of undivided popular sovereignty. 11 The story of how Mathiez’s 1929 book could remain out of print until 2010, through not only the post-1989 period that has seen Thermidor in the light of the end of bureaucratic socialism but through the preceding period of the Marxist historiography of the Lefebvre-Soboul school, is recounted by Yannick Bosc and Florence Gauthier in their Editors’ Introduction to Réaction thermidorienne. One is tempted to conclude that since its publication in 1929 this field in its totality – not only in its neo-liberal variants from Furet and Baczko to their various Anglo-American epigones, but encompassing as well the earlier Stalinist school of Lefebvre, Soboul, and their followers that displaced Mathiez after his death in 1932 – has radically misrepresented both the Terror and Jacobinism in general. For Mathiez, the Jacobin Terror stands not for the dictatorship of an individual (Robespierre), or even a party (the Jacobins), but of an Idea in the fullest power of its abstraction from the untruth of a world: the Terror, Albert Mathiez argued, was precisely the performative modality of ‘la dictature du bien public’, the latter understood as the various political procedures that would force the world of the ancien régime to submit to the truth of egalitarian emancipation and justice (Mathiez 2010: 57). 12 One statistic among many: in place of Robespierre’s unyielding, rational, and egalitarian attack on the infamous ‘marc d’argent’ (poll tax), Thermidor restricted suffrage to a mere 30,000 electors for all of ‘democratic’, ‘revolutionary’ France. 13 Mathiez 2010: 65, 97, 145. 14 Babeuf only briefly and somewhat naively supported the Thermidorian regime and its hysterical anti-Jacobin purge in the hope that they would end the hegemony of the Committee for Public Safety (which they did) and institute the democratic 1793 constitution (which they decidedly did not). The great egalitarian thus knew of what he was speaking in his first-hand assessment of this government. In his Tribun du peuple of 28 frimaire, he concluded: ‘All the vices and rot of the old regime have audaciously reappeared, effacing the men and principles of the Republic. Everywhere one encounters nothing but debasement, moral depravation, prostitution, corruption. The worker is dying of hunger. Some might argue that the Convention has only shut down the Jacobins in order to open the Temple [in which the Dauphin Louis XVIII was imprisoned]’ (cited at Mathiez 2010: 161). 15 This definition of vertu is taken by Robespierre and Saint-Just straight from Montesquieu, who writes in the avertissement to the Esprit des lois: ‘Ce que j’appelle la vertu dans la république est l’amour de la patrie, c’est à dire, l’amour de l’égalité. Ce n’est point une vertu morale ni une vertu chrétienne, c’est la vertu politique’ (Montesquieu 1864: 3). 16 This is the key point where I would push beyond Tracy McNulty’s political reading of Lacan referred to above, which affirms anxiety as the

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 301

15/05/2013 08:45:28

302

Notes to pages 49–51

primary affect to be sustained by the subject in the psychoanalytic space. Alain Badiou argues in Theory of the Subject that if Antigone – in Lacan’s influential reading – remains locked in anxious, mortified subjection to the superego, a subject put ‘back in its place’ as subject to the reinscribed law of the Father (Creon), Aeschylus offers a quite different model of subjectivation, one in which anxiety is overcome in reference to justice and courage (Badiou 2009d: 158–168). See also Bruno Bosteels’s rich and nuanced discussion of Badiou’s political thought in Badiou and Politics, where he writes regarding this section of Badiou’s Theory of the Subject: ‘Between anxiety and the superego a subject only oscillates in painful alternation, without the event of true novelty, just as the insufferable experience of formlessness without a law provokes in turn the reinforcement of the law’s excessive form. […] Lacan’s psychoanalysis gives us only half of this theory [of the subject] – that is, the structural and algebraic strand that remains caught in an endless vacillation between the twin figures of anxiety and the superego, or between the vanishing object/cause of desire and the violent restoration of the archaic law – to which a supplementary strand of courage and justice, of a transformative process and a consistent new truth, ought to be added’ (Bosteels 2011b: 89–90). Lacan speaks of justice and courage in his 1953–1954 Seminar on Freud’s Papers on Technique (in Jacques-Alain Miller 1988: 102). 17 ‘Courage’, Badiou writes, ‘is identical to anxiety, but as a disruptive force within the splace, it functions as its inversion. Courage positively carries out the disorder of the symbolic, the breakdown of communication, whereas anxiety calls for its death’ (Badiou 2009d: 160). 18 ‘Instead of remaining caught in a chiasmatic relation to the cycle of violence and revenge’, Bosteels observes, ‘the possibility of a new law emerges at the precise point where the old law is found wanting. Anxiety, thus, retains its indispensable diagnostic value as that which never fails to put us on track toward the real – except that courage now breaks anxiety’s death-driven nature by inverting its orientation’ (Bosteels 2011a: 94). Need it be added that Robespierre increasingly played out this dialectic between an incorruptible courage in the drive toward social justice and an anxious subjection to the death drive both at the level of legislation (the affirmation and reaffirmation of the Terror as a political logic, culminating in the laws of 22 Prarial), and his own personal existence (from physical exhaustion to death threats and his own dramatic awareness of his impending death). 19 Losurdo 1993: 19. Dominico Losurdo’s fundamental study of Kant’s political thought demonstrates with subtlety and enormous erudition that Kant’s thought is the actualization of philosophy subject to the condition of the French Revolution in general and Robespierre’s Jacobinism specifically. My argument in the following paragraphs draws heavily on his demonstration in order to counter the reigning and utterly false misperception of Kant as a conservative critic of revolution and Jacobinism specifically. Many thanks to

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 302

15/05/2013 08:45:28

Notes to pages 51–60

303

Alberto Toscano for calling my attention to this crucial volume, currently available only in French and its orginal Italian versions. 20 Cited at Losurdo 1993: 159. Gentz would in fact quickly turn against this celebration of the French Revolution, translating Burke’s text into German in 1794 and going on to critique the course of the Revolution in a series of journals and publications. A. W. Rehberg’s critical review of Kant’s essay similarly, if negatively, identifies Kant’s defense of theory in politics with the French Assemblée Nationale and goes on to note the perfect harmony of Kant’s logic with that of Rousseau’s Contrat social (ibid.). 21 Losurdo points out that following the Prussian authorities’ warning to Kant in October 1794 to avoid all further ‘deformation and denigration’ of church doctrine, Kant specified that in his view ‘to retract and deny one’s intimate conviction is pure cowardice; but to remain silent in a case such as this is the duty of a subject, and if all that one says must be true, it is not however an obligation to publicly express all truths’. Cited at Losurdo 1993: 199. The problem in reading Kant is thus to recognize that in making the choice to remain a published author, to avoid being remonstrated and even silenced by the censors – as would in fact occur to Kant’s less circumspect followers Erhard and Fichte – Kant was forced in every moment of his writings on politics and religion to escape censorship without being untrue to his own logic. 22 Ibid.: 33, 37. 23 Thanks to Gavin Arnall for making this point. 24 In fact, in a different context of lessened censorship, Kant’s 1797 Metaphysics of Morals could more explicitly affirm both the rightful hegemony of the peuple in a just state as legitimate legislative power, as well as the exclusion of the right to resistance based upon the necessary and rightful suppression of feudal privilege and particular rights of the clergy and nobility. 25 I will argue below that this is even true in the complex question of the legitimacy of the execution of Louis Capet in the Metaphyics of Morals. 26 Cited at Losurdo 1993: 54. 27 Cited ibid.: 59. 28 Badiou himself stands as a contemporary exemplar of this now-dominant cliché of a conservative Kant, of a certain Kant who has always been for Badiou the ‘Kant of limits, rights, and unknowables’, when, in putative contrast, Badiou’s entire philosophy, with the exception perhaps of his brief and quickly abandoned defense of the concept of the unnameable in Ethics, has always refused all horizons of unsurpassable finitude, to assert that in addition to bodies and languages there are the exceptions to any world that are truths (cited at Bosteels 2011b: 211). 29 Cited at Losurdo 1993: 157. 30 David Geggus has pointed out that a number of plantations on the Northern Plain of Saint-Domingue actually survived this initial uprising and continued to function largely intact through the 1790s. My point is simply

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 303

15/05/2013 08:45:28

304

Notes to pages 60–70

that the dominant mode of structuring the society of the Northern Plain was destroyed that night, even if echoes of that former slave-holding regime continued to function in minoritarian fashion. 31 Nesbit 2008b. See Laclau 2004. 32 See Rancière 1998. 33 On this new political order in the 1790s’ Saint-Domingue, see Fick 2007. 34 In discussion in the conference ‘Comparative Imperialisms’ at the Centre for Modern Thought, University of Aberdeen, May, 2007. 35 See Nesbitt 2008b. 36 See Gauchet 2002. 37 See Patočka 2002. 38 See Nesbitt 2008b: 45. Chapter Two 1 See Blackburn 1988 on the history of abolitionism in the July Monarchy. 2 Jennifer Pitts’ Introduction to Tocqueville’s Writings on Empire and Slavery (Tocqueville 2000) offers readers a balanced and convincing account of Tocqueville’s complex, often contradictory views on what were, for him, inextricably connected issues. Previous to this edition by Jennifer Pitts, Sally Gershman’s ‘Alexis de Tocqueville and Slavery’ (Gershman 1976) presented the most balanced treatment of this element of Tocqueville’s thought, though the article tends to underplay the inherent conflict between Tocqueville’s simultaneous dedication to both democracy and the economic liberalism of the July Monarchy. Also of interest is Melvin Richter’s polemical ‘Tocqueville on Algeria’ (Richter 1963), which concludes that in his support for French colonization of Algeria the historian was ‘deceived’ and ‘inconsistent’ with his own convictions. 3 Tocqueville 2003: 402. 4 On the latter, see Muthu 2003. 5 ‘How were European societies to make the transition from the old autocratic regimes to republics without succumbing to anarchy or state terror? Tocqueville’s writings on Algeria imply that this transition required the exploitation of non-European societies, that nation-building legitimated the suspension of principles of human equality and self-determination, and that French glory justified any aggression the nation could muster’ (ibid.: xxxv). 6 Condorcet 2001: 38, 44. 7 Tocqueville 2000: 399. See also Gershman 1976: 467. 8 ‘Those who want to understand to what excesses of tyranny men are steadily driven, once they begin to abandon nature and humanity, should read M. de Beaumont’s work’ (Tocqueville 2000: 399). Beaumont’s novel is more accurately described as a reflection upon racial prejudice in the United States, rather than the institution of slavery itself. 9 These include his first and second ‘Letter[s] on Algeria’ (1837); ‘Notes’

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 304

15/05/2013 08:45:28

Notes to pages 70–79

305

on ‘the Koran’ (1838) and his 1841 voyage to Algeria, the ‘Essay on Algeria’ (1841); an ‘Intervention on the Debate Over the Appropriation of Special Funding’ (1846); and his first and second ‘Report[s] on Algeria’ (1847), all reproduced in Pitts 2000. For more on these texts, see Richter 1963. 10 ‘France, in Tocqueville’s view, required new occasions for virtuous or glorious action. The conquest of Algeria, and in the 1840s the debate over the abolition of slavery in the French Antilles, provided precisely such occasions. The abolition of slavery would be a noble, moral act and would regain for France some of the luster of her humanitarian reputation, which had passed over to Britain when that country abolished slavery in its colonies in 1833. Conquering and settling Algeria would constitute a national project: it would capture the public’s attention, unify the fractured political scene, and gain Europe’s respect’ (Pitt 2000: xvii). That recourse to imperial violence (if only against non-citizens) in defense of the ideals of 1789 might actually undermine those same ideals was not a line of argument he chose to pursue. 11 The problem with French colonial violence in Algeria, Tocqueville’s 1847 texts argue, is not that it is inherently wrong, but rather that its excessive application under Bugeaud had left ‘Muslim society much more miserable, more disordered, more ignorant, and more barbarous than it had been before knowing us’ (cited ibid.). 12 Cited ibid: xxi. 13 Cited ibid: xxiii. 14 While the first text is not reproduced in Pitt’s volume, the report is available as Tocqueville 1839. 15 Gershman is at pains to square Tocqueville’s support of indemnification, in both his 1839 report and the 1843 articles, with his belief that ‘Man never had the right to possess man, and the fact of possession has always been and still is unlawful’ (cited at Gershman 1976: 476). 16 On Tocqueville’s complex political moderation, see Craiutu 2005. 17 At Pitt 2000: 199. All further references to this text refer to this edition. The ‘desperate effort of the slave’ is no doubt an oblique, dismissive reference to the Haitian Revolution, as well as to New World slave revolts in general. 18 Here again, the memory of the Haitian Revolution, ever-present yet perpetually disavowed, is undoubtedly the spectral, unnamed other lurking beneath Tocqueville’s text. On this widespread tendency of nineteenth-century thinkers to repress the political implications of the Haitian Revolution, a theme to which I will return below, see Fischer 2004. 19 Carolyn Fick has shown in detail how the conflict in late 1790s Saint-Domingue between the peasant class and Toussaint Louverture centered around precisely this dispute over the nature of the freedom they had won from France. See Fick 1990. 20 Schoelcher was in fact the founder of comparative historical study of the Americas in France.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 305

15/05/2013 08:45:29

306

Notes to pages 79–95

21 Schoelcher 1998. 22 See Schmidt 1994: 30. 23 Schoelcher 1982. 24 Schoelcher is most likely explicitly addressing many of his comments to Tocqueville’s report, which he refers to at one point as ‘the famous Toqueville report’ (1998: 373). 25 This is exactly what will happen in the decades following the 1848 emancipation, when Martinique and Guadeloupe would bring significant numbers of East Indian and Chinese workers to the sugar plantations. 26 See Trouillot 1995 and Geggus 2001. Chapter Three 1 Here, I strongly disagree with Wilder’s claim that the ‘Negritude members did not translate [their] vision of radical alliance [between a black cultural elite and culturally authentic rural masses] into a concrete political program’ (2005: 227). Strictly and unfortunately limited to the pre-war period, Wilder’s otherwise magisterial study draws together for the first time the complex constellation of historical, cultural, and theoretical forces that in fact culminated in the 1946 process of departmentalization. Wilder’s argument leads one in fact to draw precisely the opposite conclusion from the author’s (that ‘the Negritude critique was notable precisely because it promised a way into rather than out of the imperial nation state’), if only one looks beyond 1939 (ibid.: 204). 2 The rapidly perceived failure of departmentalization did not lie in the law itself, but was quite simply a failure on the part of Paris to departmentalize the vieilles colonies in comformity with the law of March 19, 1946: ‘Quel est le grand fait qui domine la politique martiniquaise depuis 1946?’, asked Césaire in 1949. ‘C’est le refus du gouvernement français de traiter la Martinique en département français et sa volonté de continuer à nous imposer fondé sur le colonialisme’ (cited at William 2005: 322). 3 Of course, as everyone from Hegel to Césaire has remarked, to baptize oneself is inherently an act of constitutent subjectivity, particularly in the historical context of slavery and imperialism. 4 The vast historical problematic of nationalism in the context of decolonization falls largely beyond the confines of this study. Partha Chatterjee’s question in Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World nonetheless remains unavoidable when addressing the legacy and continued relevance of Césaire and, all the more so, Fanon, as I will argue below: ‘Why is it that non-European colonial countries have no historical alternative but to try to approximate the given attributes of modernity when that very process of approximation means their continued subjection under a world order which only sets their tasks for them and over which they have no control?’ This is a situation in which, seemingly irregardless of whether the outcome of the passive (Gandhian)

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 306

15/05/2013 08:45:29

Notes to pages 95–111

307

revolution that is Chatterjee’s focus or the violent overthrow of (French Algerian) colonialism that is Fanon’s, the result would seem to be in every case that ‘the national state now proceeds to find for “the nation” a place in the global order of capital, while striving to keep the contradictions between capital and the people in perpetual suspension’ (Chatterjee 1986: 10, 168). 5 To what degree departmentalization may or may not have accomplished this process is of course a highly complex and contentious question that is beyond the scope of this chapter to address. The articles in Constant and Daniel’s 1997 volume offer a highly nuanced overview of the question. 6 Althusser develops this conception of ideology in texts such as his article ‘Marxisme et humanisme’ (in Althusser 1996). 7 See Žižek 1989: 11–53; Toscano 2010: 90; and Bosteels 2011a for elements of such a critique of ideology. 8 See Moutoussamy 1993 for a presentation of the totality of Césaire’s interventions from 1945 to 1993. 9 Hale 1978: 319. 10 Cited at Moutoussamy 1993: 41. 11 Justice, February 3, 1956. Cited at Hale 1978: 361. 12 Césaire would further develop this critique of Martinican dependency and under-development of productive forces in anticipation of Glissant’s classic analysis of 1981 in a speech to the French Assembly on October 26, 1971 in which he argues that the French départements et territoires d’outre-mer (DOM) ‘cessent de plus en plus d’être des terres de production pour tender à ne devenir que des centres de consommation’. Cited at Hale 1978: 471. 13 La vie africaine 44 (February, 1964), cited Césaire 1976: 433. 14 This call for a Martinican legislative and executive was in fact already implicit in Césaire’s evocation of the Italian federal constitution and its ‘organe exécutif qui s’appelle la Junte régionale’ in his 1958 speech to the PPM (Césaire 1976: 490). 15 See Wilder 2005: 116–123 and Césaire’s analysis of Toussaint’s federalist overture to Napoleon in Toussaint Louverture. 16 Though Robespierre often reacted to calls for federalism and the critique of the dictatorship of the comité du salut public as disguised anti-republican reaction, the Jacobins engaged a complex process of decentralization that was only reversed by Thermidor. The constitution of 1793 mandated that ‘Il y a dans chaque commune de la République une administration municipal, dans chaque district une administration intermédiaire, dans chaque département une administration central … Les administrateurs sont nommés par les assemblés électorales de département et de district’, and Robespierre himself, in a much-cited and much-reproduced speech of May 11, 1793, called on citizens to ‘Fuyez la manie ancienne des gouvernements de trop gouverner. Laissez aux communes, laissez aux familles, laissez aux individus … le soin de diriger eux-mêmes leurs propres affaires en tout ce qui ne tient point essentiellement

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 307

15/05/2013 08:45:29

308

Notes to pages 111–114

à l’administration générale de la République’. Even in his federalism, Césaire remained to the core Robespierriste (cited at Rougerie 1988: 84). 17 Lenin’s brilliant and often surprising 1917 text reaffirms the right of revolutionary self-defense against reaction that is a constant of Jacobin theory from Robespierre and Kant to Louverture. State and Revolution affirms the necessary ‘withering’ of the state under communism: Lenin in this fashion explicitly placing himself in consonance with anarchist thought, with the single and crucial difference that he, like the Jacobins before him, states that before this withering can occur there must exist an interim ‘dictatorship’ of the people/proletariat (what the Jacobins called the ‘Terreur’) of undefined duration. Lenin thus calls for exactly the opposite of the hypertrophy of state capitalism that went under the name of ‘socialism’ in the Eastern block through the twentieth century following Stalin’s seizure of power in the USSR. The clear and obvious limitation of Lenin’s text, seen in hindsight in light of the twentieth-century disaster of this nationalized capitalism, is its pious faith and psychological ingenuousness, explicit in the putatively necessary and automatic tendency of productivity to increase exponentially under common ownership the unleashing of ‘un essor gigantesque des forces productives’, while the corresponding ‘expropriation des capitalistes entraînera nécessairement un développement prodigieux des forces productives de la société humaine’ (185–186). 18 This hard-to-find publication is rarely cited because it was the original 1948 speech that was retained for Césaire’s Œuvres complètes in 1976. 19 The phrase ‘baisers Lamourette’ refers to the famous scene in the French Assembly in June, 1792 when the Lyons representative Lamourette’s sentimental exclamation caused a momentary reconciliation between the Gironde and the Jacobins, the inconsequentiality of which was revealed the next day when the factions immediately resumed their conflict. 20 While many poems of Moi, laminaire remain remarkably inventive, their tone is decidedly one of mourning and (determined) resignation. Gone are the power and drive of the poetic subject who announced to the world ‘Moi qui Krakatoa’, who ‘commanderai aux îles d’exister!’ This volcanic experience of creative invention is replaced in these final poems by a late moment of stocktaking, a weighing in the balance of ‘l’inégale lutte de la vie et de la mort, de la ferveur et de la lucidité’. This is a Beckettian subject of fatigue, ‘[qui] tourne en rond’, mired in ‘la condition-mangrove’ and the ‘torpeur de l’histoire’, resignedly awaiting ‘le vent’, a volcano now nearly extinct, merely ‘surviving’ (Césaire 1994b: 384, 404, 427). 21 Quite incredibly, the 2010 introduction of Gayatri Spivak’s (highly problematic) translation of the play makes no mention of this Belgian, American, and United Nations complicity in the destruction of the new democratic state, much less to De Witte’s monumental archival work, and is instead content to evoke only the vaguest ‘weight of actual history’ (Césaire 2010: xi).

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 308

15/05/2013 08:45:29

Notes to pages 115–128

309

22 Compare the opening phrase of this speech with Lumumba’s actual historical speech, similar in intent, but far less rhetorically and theoretically dense: ‘Congolais et Congolaises, combattants de l’indépendance aujourd’hui victorieux. A vous tous, mes amis qui avez lutté sans relâche à nos côtés, je vous demande de faire de ce 30 juin 1960 une date illustre que vous garderez “ineffaçablement” gravée dans vos cœurs, une date dont vous enseignerez avec fierté la signification à vos enfants, pour que ceux-ci à leur tour fassent connaître à leurs fils et à leurs petits-fils l’histoire glorieuse de notre lutte pour la libertés’. http://leko2labs.free.fr/lumumba.htm. Accessed December, 12 2011. 23 The letter is reproduced in De Witte 2001. 24 Again, I wish to insist that I am not claiming that departmentalization actually accomplished this universal devolution of sovereignty, but rather that it was a legalistic initiative entirely devoted to this goal (and not some specious cultural ‘assimilation’ or Frenchification), and that its failure was a failure to implement structural norms of universal equivalency specified in the law of March 19, 1946. Chapter Four 1 Césaire’s concept of ‘chosification’ is essentially a rhetorically brilliant elaboration of Marx’s critique of slave labor in the Grundrisse, where he writes that ‘In the slave relation, [the slave] belongs to the individual, particular owner, and is his labouring machine. As a totality of force-expenditure, as labour capacity, he is a thing [Sache] belonging to another, and hence does not relate as subject to his particular expenditure of force, nor to the act of living labour. In the serf relation he appears as a moment of property in land itself, is an appendage of the soil, exactly like draught cattle. In the slave relation, the worker is nothing but a living labour-machine’ (Marx and Engels 1978: 255). At the same time, ‘chosification’ should be rigorously distinguished from Lukács’s ‘reification’. The latter, as Tim Bewes has argued, should be understood not as the description and critique of empirical instances of the treatment of people as things (such as one finds in Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme), but rather as a specific (capitalist) modality of the logic of appearance, analogous to what Badiou calls the ‘logic’ governing the appearance of beings in any world. Reification, by this understanding, determines precisely what appears or counts as one in a world (Bewes 2011). 2 It would perhaps be more accurate to describe Suzanne Césaire as the first to adapt this practice to Francophone culture, since the Brazilian modernist poet Oswald de Andrade had already borrowed the term from Francis Picabia to describe the cultural practices of New World Societies in his 1928 Manifesto anthropofagico.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 309

15/05/2013 08:45:29

310

Notes to pages 130–141

3 See Condé’s article ‘Chercher nos vérités’ (in Condé 1995). 4 The talk itself was originally given at a conference on Pan-Africanism in Claremont, California. 5 See Condé’s reflections on this period in her life, in Pfaff 1993: 18–33. Chapter Five 1 I will focus on this first phase of Glissant’s work, culminating in Le Discours antillais, in this chapter, and address the philosophy of Relation developed in Glissant’s post-1981 work in Part III below. 2 Other incisive readings that judge La Lézarde a more politically optimistic text include those of Chris Bongie in Islands and Exiles, and Michael Dash’s ‘Writing the Body: Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Re-membering’ (in Condé 1992a). 3 Glissant 1958: 50, 60, 80, and 133. Glissant has evoked this period of his life in a 2007 interview with Celia Britton. There he describes his participation in the group of young Martinican militants who adopted the name ‘Franc-jeu’ during Césaire’s election campaign: ‘We founded this group in Lamentin, and I was the youngest, as I always was at that time. It was a group of poeticopolitical militants [un groupe d’agitation poético-politique]. I was between fifteen and seventeen – I didn’t have the right to enter a voting booth, for example – but I directed electoral campaigns, choosing speakers, for example, for certain neighborhoods, etc. We helped Césaire, it was his first electoral campaign, and he signed up with the communist party on that occasion’ (Britton 2007: 102). 4 La Lézarde thus offers a precocious document of the turn from the militant politics of decolonization to a mournful sense of tragic inevitability articulated in David Scott’s Conscripts of Modernity. Sartre famously asserted the ‘unsurpassable’ nature of communism as a political orientation in Questions de methode (1960). 5 C. L. R. James famously describes these and other historical forms of plantation torture in Black Jacobins (James 1989: 12–13). 6 I was able to consult a copy of the book at the Institut des hautes études de l’Amérique Latine in Paris in July, 2012. The single other copy in French libraries – at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) – is still designated ‘hors d’usage’. 7 Indeed, Hallward himself has been consistently critical of Badiou’s failure to articulate a relational ontology, in and through his latest Logics of Worlds: ‘The task remains’ for Badiou, writes Hallward in a review of Logics, ‘to ensure that [an axiomatic politics of truth not be] weakened by simplification or abstraction. This will require a thoroughly relational ontology’ that Badiou, in Hallward’s reading, has yet to supply (2008b: 121). On the concept of the political as the egalitarian claim for justice in subtraction from any state

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 310

15/05/2013 08:45:29

Notes to pages 141–150

311

of affairs, see Badiou 2003a. I will return in the final section of this book to the problem of relation in thinkers such as Sartre, Glissant, and Hallward. 8 Though the book’s focus avoids the problem of post/colonial politics to focus on the cultural, H. Adlai Murdoch’s rich and fascinating Creolizing the Metropole describes many of the complexities of such a notion of identity conceived not as essence but as ‘forever incomplete and constantly in process’ (Murdoch 2012: 26). 9 The figure of the infidel is, I would argue, the fourth mode or ‘operation’, to use the terminology of Logics of Worlds, to be added to the ‘faithful’, ‘reactive’, and ‘obscure’ subjects of any event Badiou describes. Without addressing the problem in detail, let me just say here that the infidel (defined by the Robert dictionary in perfectly Badiousian terms as a subject ‘qui manque à la vérité’) is a subject such as Senghor who is immediately involved in the event (of cultural Negritude and political decolonization) itself (and not merely the legacy of its trace), but one who betrays the event in subjecting it to the tyranny of a transcendent body (what Badiou notes as ‘C’) (cf. Badiou 2006: 61–68). The infidel is thus a combination of the reactive subject who negates the event (without actively destroying its trace), yet who is nonetheless subject to the ideological tyranny of the transcendent body (‘C’), which in Senghor’s case went under names such as ‘Negritude’, ‘femme noire’, tradition, law, or even rhythm. Quite simply, the figure of the ‘infidel’ is another name for the subject of cultural/identity politics. 10 All citations are taken from the unabridged French edition of Le Discours antillais. Translations are my own, unless otherwise noted. 11 A further defense of cultural critique in the Antillean context occurs in the section ‘Poétique et inconscient’ when Glissant writes, ‘If we propose that the axis of collective, mute deaths must be extricated from the economic system, if we affirm that their only resolution can be a political one, it appears as well that poetics, the implicit or explicit science of language, is at the same time the only memorial recourse against such destruction and the only true site in which to illuminate them, at once within a consciousness of our planetary species and a meditation on the necessary and non-alienated relation to the other. To name oneself is to write the world’. 12 One task remaining in Glissant studies would be to follow Hallward’s lead in order to describe the complex articulation of a late-Hegelian dialectical logic in Glissant’s work, from the Fanonian-Sartrean dialectics of enlightenment of Soleil de la conscience (1956) and L’Intention Poétique (1969), through the Lukácsian analysis of reification and false- and class-consciousness in Discours antillais (1981), and on to the bad infinity and hypostatisation of totality in the late Glissant (cf. Hallward 2002: 72). 13 Compare Glissant’s pessimistic reading to Aimé Césaire’s roughly contemporary, explicit endorsement of a Leninist and Fanonian model of revolutionary anticolonial insurgency in the little-known 1972 conclusion to

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 311

15/05/2013 08:45:29

312

Notes to pages 150–160

Césaire’s original 1948 Sorbonne speech celebrating the centenary of the 1848 abolition. In this rare text, Césaire judges the uprising of May 22 to have been a veritable ‘victory for violence: the illustration in advance of the views of Lenin and Fanon – in a story in which there is place, despite the wishes of all pure hearts, neither for idylls nor pious sentiments’ (Fau and Eugène 1972: 18). Rather than simply judging Glissant to have produced the more ‘objective’ and ‘realistic’ assessment of the hopes for revolution in Martinique, might it not be possible to revisit Césaire’s radical anticolonial vision and sustained fidelity to a generic, non-aligned form of global communism? In this view, against the now-familiar disparagement of Césaire by Raphaël Confiant, it would be Césaire the elder statesman who by the 1970s had become the most visible Antillean inheritor of Fanonian radicalism, the figure who remained faithful to the promise of decolonization, never knowing when the proper moment for a revolutionary event might arise, and whether in fact it might not arise (as it did not, in his lifetime), all the while continuing to assert publicly in speeches and interviews not what seemed ‘realistic’ to hope for, but what is right? 14 For historiographic discussion of Delgrès’ revolt, see Dubois 2004: chaps 14–15; Saint-Ruf 1977; and Adélaïde-Merlande 1986. I discuss the relation of this event to cultural memory in Guadeloupe in Nesbitt 2003: chap. 1. The text of Delgrès’s decree, a printed copy of which has not survived in the archives, was originally reproduced in Auguste Lacours’s 1855 Histoire de la Guadeloupe, and can be consulted at Dubois and Garrigus 2006: 171–172. 15 Both André Schwarz-Bart (La mulâtresse Solitude) and Daniel Maximin (L’Isolé soleil) have offered compelling fictional narratives on this event that draw heavily from the existing historical documentation of the revolt. 16 Ultra-leftism classically refers to a militant revolutionary desire for the total destruction of an unjust world and its replacement by a more egalitarian one, an anarchist struggle more specifically undertaken in the absence of or subtraction from any direct engagement with the structures of the actually existing state and state of affairs. 17 Auguste Lacour, who first published the text, asserts that it was in fact drafted by ‘Monnereau, a Creole adjudant [warrant officer] from Martinique’ (Lacour 1855–1858: 253). As Deborah Jenson has argued for Toussaint Louverture’s relation to his secretaries, one should similarly presume that Delgrès took an active role in the final drafting of this immensely important document issued in his name alone. 18 Cited at Dubois 2004: 392. Chapter Six 1 Should any doubt remain as to the justice of the defensive violence in the Antillean struggle to destroy plantation slavery from 1791 to 1804, Daniel Maximin documents the horrific regimes of retributive torture visited upon

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 312

15/05/2013 08:45:29

Notes to pages 160–164

313

all those in Martinique and Guadeloupe who had unsuccessfully resisted Napoleon’s desire to reinstate slavery in 1802: ‘They hung men head down, they drowned them, bound in sacks, crucified on boards, buried alive, ground in mortars. They forced them to eat human excrement. And, after having torn their bodies apart with the whip, they threw them into anthills, or attached them to poles by lagoons to be devoured by insects. They threw them into boiling sugar cauldrons. They put men and women into barrels studded with nails, closed at both ends, rolled to the summits of mountains, to then throw the unfortunate victims into abysses. They had our unfortunate Blacks devoured by man-eating dogs, until these dogs, gorged with human flesh, filled with horror or remorse, refused to serve any longer as instruments of vengeance for these executioners who finished off their half-dead victims at knife- and bayonette-point’ (cited at Maximin 1981: 65). 2 Kant’s ban on absolute revolt against the sovereign only holds in the context of a social contract. When humans are treated as mere bestialized objects devoid of all human dignity, no possible contract can hold, Kant argues, and thus no law can conceivably apply in consequence legitimately to proscribe revolt. Such a Kantian situation is thus identical to Spinoza’s state of nature, in which ‘big fish eat little fish’ and by absolute right all do anything that they are capable of. I develop this interpretation of Kant and revolution in Universal Emancipation (Nesbitt 2008b). 3 Properly to address the scope and implications of Benjamin’s astoundingly rich essay would demand a book unto itself. Suffice it to say that among the multitude of writings interpreting this opaque work of genius in the years since Derrida’s influential study ‘Force of Law’ (2002), I have profited immensely from the readings of Beatrice Hannsen and perhaps above all from Tracy McNulty’s fascinating interpretation in ‘The Commandment Against the Law: Writing and Divine Justice in Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence”’ (McNulty 2008b). McNulty focuses on Benjamin’s enigmatic philosophy of language in the essay, arguing that what Benjamin calls the ‘language of pure means’ offers the possibility of a bloodless destruction of the mythic state order, insofar as through the commandment (of which the Decalogue is exemplary) as statement the divine right of kings capriciously to voice any sovereign decision whatsoever is checked and limited (ibid.: 47). Though I think McNulty is exegetically wrong to describe Benjamin’s essay as a neo-Kantian affirmation of the limit rather than its destruction as the essence of divine violence, her reading nonetheless is extraordinarily productive in pointing to the divine power of the command in the destruction of mythic order. While McNulty focuses on the negative, limiting examples of such statements such as the Decalogue or Kantian morality, I have argued above that the modern commandment adopts in 1789 an affirmative – if still infinitely questioning and Socratically unknowing – formulation as the imperative: ‘Thou shalt treat all humans as equals, as free, as brothers!’ Robespierre, not Freud, in other words, is the Moses of modernity.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 313

15/05/2013 08:45:29

314

Notes to pages 164–175

4 Reprinted at James 1989: 195–197. 5 ‘Il n’y a que des politiques [au pluriel]’, writes Alain Badiou in a critique of Arendt’s neo-Kantian theory of political judgment, ‘irréductibles les unes aux autres, et qui ne composent aucune histoire homogène. […] Le point d’où une politique peut être pensée […] est celui de ses acteurs, et non celui de ses spectateurs’ (Badiou 1998a: 33). 6 Like so many authors writing on the Terror, Comay’s fascinating book (Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution) is fundamentally weakened by its initial presupposition that the actual Jacobin Terror was morally reprehensible and irredeemable, precisely the point that must be interrogated in any contemporary examination of the relation of revolutionary violence to historical progress. 7 This condemnation of terror as abstraction, in which Hegel seems to do no more than theorize Burke’s critique of any politics of abstract principles, is of course echoed in Hegel’s later writings, as for example in the Philosophy of Right: in ‘the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution, during which all differences of talents and authority were supposed to be cancelled out[,] this was a time of trembling and quaking and of intolerance towards everything particular’. 8 See Buck-Morss 2009. 9 On such a politics of courage in opposition to all politics of anxiety and resentment, see Badiou’s astounding lecture of May 7, 1977, pitting Aeschylean courage and justice against the (Lacanian) terror and anxiety of Sophocles’ Antigone. Chapter Seven 1 ‘Cut off from the world by a cordon sanitaire imposed by the imperial powers who feared a spread of the slave revolution’, concludes Fischer, ‘Haiti is caught in a cold war of preventive measures and becomes increasingly isolated’ (Fischer 2004: 244). See also Dubois 2012: 76–84. 2 ‘As Haiti was forced to respond to international pressure to provide assurances that it would not try to export its revolution (remember that the Girondin wars of revolutionary France would have been on everybody’s mind), it compensated by introducing constitutional clauses that would offer a right of residency to all people who had escaped slavery or genocide’ (Fischer 2004: 240). 3 See also Vastey 1817: 56–58 for similar, more extensive assertions of unqualified Haitian neutrality. 4 ‘Let the sacred flame of liberty that we have won lead all our acts’, Louverture enjoined the soldiers under his command in a speech published in 1797 in the Bulletin officiel de St.-Domingue. ‘Let us go forth to plant the tree of liberty, breaking the chains of our brothers still held captive under the

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 314

15/05/2013 08:45:29

Notes to pages 175–193

315

shameful yoke of slavery. Let us bring them under the compass of our rights, the imprescriptible and inalienable rights of free men. [Let us overcome] the barriers that separate nations, and unite the human species into a single brotherhood’ (quoted at Nesbitt 2008a: 28). 5 ‘Tied to the goal of defending Haitian independence,’ writes Garraway, ‘Vastey elaborated philosophical arguments about racial equality and the humanity of blacks in an effort to stir up international opposition to slavery and the slave trade and to promote more humane forms of colonization. Yet, he also set out to defend the legitimacy of the regime of Henry Christophe, a hereditary monarchy in which he held the rank of baron’ (Garraway 2012: 12). 6 See Bongie 2008. 7 In Le Système colonial, Vastey (1814: 23–25) cites two episodes from the Histoire lauding the author he calls the ‘immortal Raynal’ (ibid.: 24). Jonathan Israel makes the claim that of all the publications of the radical Enlightenment, ‘none provided a more challenging general outlook or had a greater effect on both sides of the Atlantic and the rest of the world’ than Raynal’s Histoire (Israel 2011: 413). 8 The distinction I am making here between science and ideology is motivated by Vastey’s own reference to the system of colonialism. This distinction is of course the basic analytical criterion of any structuralist analysis, one to be found not only in a canonical study such as Althusser’s Reading Capital, but even, I would argue, in a text such as Fanon’s quasistructural analysis of the colonial social space and its determination of colonized ­subjectivity in the first chapter of Les Damnés de la terre. 9 See, for example, Barthélémy 1990; Casimir 2001; and Nesbitt 2009. 10 Garraway insightfully describes the many contradictions of Vastey’s justifications of royal authority in Christophe’s civilizing mission in the name of freedom (Garraway 2012: 17). Chapter Eight 1 Cited at Macey 2000: 475. 2 On May 8, 1945, French authorities broke up a peaceful demonstration in Sétif; in the ensuing violence, 108 French settlers were killed, and 20,000– 30,000 Muslims were massacred in reprisals by the military (Planche). This extreme violence can rightfully be thought of as the initial French terror in Algeria (though the French had used extreme forms of violence to colonize Algeria since the 1840s, as David Macey points out), the extremity of which radicalized the Algerian situation beyond any possible negotiated independence, driving the situation in Algeria toward its explosive, revolutionary conclusion. 3 Alain Badiou (Badiou 2005: chap. 13) makes an analogous assertion in regard to Sartre’s radical humanism in The Century.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 315

15/05/2013 08:45:29

316

Notes to pages 194–217

4 Macey 2000: 461. 5 Fanon worked in the Blida-Joinville psychiatric clinic in Algeria as a psychiatrist till his resignation in 1956, when he went into exile in Tunis as a core member of the Front de Libération National. 6 Translations are my own, unless otherwise noted. 7 Louis Althusser offered just such a hermeneutics in his concept of the problematic in Pour Marx, locating the meaning of any text (such as Marx’s German Ideology) or event (such as the Russian Revolution) neither in its origins nor its telos but instead in the structural logic of the object of investigation itself (Althusser 1996: 51–67). It is a fascinating correspondence that Althusser articulates his concept of the problematic at exactly the same time that Kuhn and Fayerabend, in 1962, independently develop their famous theories of the incommensurability of scientific theories as the absence of a common unit of measure between two variables. 8 Etherington 2011 (unpublished manuscript). 9 See Nesbitt 2008b. 10 The struggle for decolonization, Fanon observed in his clinical work with Algerians, brings forth dreams of the transformation of the very laws of physics themselves: ‘Je rêve que j’éclate de rire, que je franchis le fleuve d’une enjambée, que je suis poursuivi par des meutes de voitures qui ne me rattrapent jamais’ (Fanon 1961: 83). 11 Jane Anna Gordon (Gordon 2011) makes a suggestive argument that Fanon’s concept of national consciousness is in fact a postcolonial version of Rousseau’s general will. 12 The chapter thus draws insights from the experience of decolonization to prefigure the general critique of the party form that would occur after 1968 under the guise of French Maoism. 13 As, for example, in his nuanced description of colonized psychology (Fanon 1961: 266), or, indeed, the entire final section of the book taken from Fanon’s own clinical observations at Blida (‘Guerre colonial et troubles mentaux’, ibid.). 14 Balibar initiates a preliminary development of this critique of violence in his 1995 text ‘Violence, Ideality, and Cruelty’ (Balibar 2002). 15 In this, one might say that Balibar is not alone but rejoins certain tendencies of the critiques of Fanon made by Hannah Arendt and Judith Butler. Thanks to Gavin Arnall for pointing this out to me. Chapter Nine 1 Peter Hallward has written an extensive review of The Prophet and Power entitled ‘Aristide and the Violence of Democracy’. www.zcommunications.org/aristide-and-the-violence-of-democracy-by-peter-hallward. September 9, 2007. Consulted March 19, 2013.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 316

15/05/2013 08:45:29

Notes to pages 219–240

317

2 Jurgen Habermas develops his theory of communicative action in the book of that title (Habermas 1981). 3 Benhabib’s critique of Hegelian bureaucracy in the Philosophy of Right points to the origins of this top-down, Habermasian model of democratic managerialism (Benhabib 1986: 98–101). 4 See Laclau 2004 for a further description of such a model of populism. Chapter Ten 1 For Rancière, la police refers even more fundamentally to the structure of order that defines the very distribution of the sensible, such that it precludes the development of egalitarian politics. 2 David Rabouin offers a concise and illuminating presentation of Badiou’s formal apparatus in his article ‘Objet, relation, transcendental: une introduction au formalisme de Logiques des mondes’ (Rabouin 2011). 3 All Badiou citations in this section are taken from Badiou 2006 Logiques des mondes, followed by translations from Badiou 2009b, Logics of Worlds, unless otherwise noted. 4 Again, this description of this logic of appearance as policière, in Rancière’s sense, is my interpretation of what for Badiou is a largely formalistic presentation. 5 For a discussion of the influence of Hegel, and the master–slave dialectic in particular, on French Caribbean thought, see Nesbitt 2003. For a Hegelian reading of Fanon, see Sekyi-Otu 1997. Peter Hallward has analyzed in detail the specifically Hegelian dimensions of Glissant’s early work (Hallward 2001: 72–73). 6 Hallward makes a similar argument in his chapter ‘Édouard Glissant: From Nation to Relation’, in this author’s view the single most important critique (rather than interpretation or analysis) of Glissant to date. ‘Like Deleuze,’ Hallward writes, ‘Glissant arrives at a theory of la Relation defined primarily by its transcendence of relations with or between specific individuals (Hallward 2001: 67). 7 I take the phrase ‘le compte-pour-un’ from Badiou 1988: 32. 8 Cf. Badiou 2009b: 4. 9 Despite this high degree of theoretical articulation, Glissant’s work constitutes not so much a philosophy as an Antillean anti-philosophy in the vaunted tradition of the critique of aesthetic existence and expression from Nietzsche to Lacan. On the concept of anti-philosophy, see Bosteels 2011a and Badiou 2011c. 10 If my discussion of Glissant in Voicing Memory sought to bring a negative dialectical critique to Antillean aesthetic modernism, and my more recent Universal Emancipation explores the implication of a Spinozist discourse of universal singularization (drawing on Negri’s reading) and hegemony

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 317

15/05/2013 08:45:29

318

Notes to pages 240–249

(primarily influenced by Laclau), these comments on Glissant seek to take a third critical step to reflect upon the conditions for an emphatic postcolonial philosophy of singular universals and incommensurable worlds, and to think about related notions such as break, void, the outside, a plurality of worlds in absolute incommensurability, truth, revolution and its consequences, and the like. 11 To my count, it appears precisely once in the 500 pages of Le Discours antillais, in section 82, at the precise moment when Glissant will abandon all discussion of the nation as even a vanishing, utopian horizon for Martinique, to be replaced definitively by the purely cultural, aesthetic plurality of Antillanité that names the ubiquity of poetics in the Glissantian ontology (Glissant 2010: 423). 12 In this, the ‘humanism’ of Fanon and Césaire and their explicit support for revolutionary decolonization in this period can be read as an anticolonial radicalization of Kant’s famous enthusiasm for the French Revolution in ‘The Conflict of the Faculties’. Alberto Toscano has pointed out that beyond the stance of disengaged spectatorship for which Kant has so often been taken to task, the latter in fact made in this text a quite radical gesture of support for the French Revolution as objective and rightful proof of the existence of ‘humanity’ as an immanent universal, above and beyond all local tradition, custom, nation, and race. 13 For such a defense of decolonized reason, see Césaire 1955: 7, 33. 14 I analyze this speech in detail in my book Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Antillean Literature (Nesbit 2003). 15 Such a claim, of course, stands in direct contrast to Hallward’s assertion in Absolutely Postcolonial discussed above that a ‘cultural politics’ is ­axiomatically oxymoronic. 16 Kevin Meehan argues that Aristide took a similar avant-gardist stance, though his fascinating discussion of the functioning of the testimonial in the writings and practice of Jean-Bertrand Aristide posits the testimonial as a counter-model to Césaire’s modernism. Meehan points out that the form ‘poses a horizontal model that questions the privileged status of literary intellectuals and resituates literary labor as a form of solidarity practice’ (Meehan 2009: 135). Again, no a priori judgment is available regarding these hierarchical and non-hierarchical models adopted by Césaire and Aristide, respectively. Both authors unquestionably, if distinctively, adopted a vanguardist position in relation to their communities, just as each was dedicated to furthering the process of decolonization and justice as equality. 17 Badiou himself has come to reject precisely this simplistic polemic regarding ‘cultural politics’ that is really only an epiphenomenon of some of his minor writings (Ethics, Saint Paul). See the discussion on this still-tobe-articulated development of his thought in Bosteels’s Badiou and Politics (Bosteels 2011b: 124–125 and 314–315. ‘Yes,’ Badiou admits in an interview

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 318

15/05/2013 08:45:29

Notes to pages 249–263

319

with Bosteels, ‘it is evident that we must conceive of a theory of the network of conditions and, thus, we must come back to the question of culture, which in Saint Paul had an essentially polemical function. […] We need a theory of what I call the networking or tying together of truth procedures’ (ibid.: 314–315). Chapter Eleven 1 In the wake of this Sartrean phenomenology of responsibility before violence, it remains imperative to critique any static duality between violence and so-called non-violence. Étienne Balibar, in his comparison of Lenin and Gandhi, points to two fundamental intersections on key points of their theory: (1) both initiate a radical critique of all political representation, calling instead for the immediate and immanent action of the masses against an intolerable state and state of affairs, and (2) as a consequence of the first point, both call for forms of action that are in radical conflict or subtraction from legality as defined by the state they are contesting (Balibar 2010: 312). Balibar further points out that it is Lenin’s thought alone that addresses the key problem in situations (like that of slave-holding Saint-Domingue or French Algeria) of extreme colonial violence that allow for no discussion or negotiation within a public sphere (no matter what degree of distortion and inequality it may sustain under colonialism). That is to say, Lenin ‘is alone’, Balibar writes, ‘in posing the question of the internal transformation of a situation of extreme violence and destruction of democratic forms of civil society by means of collective action, through the initiative of the organized masses. In other words, [Lenin] is alone in not inscribing violence at the level of fatality, and to search, through historical experience itself, for the modes of an action that would [negate] the causes and decision centers of extreme [state] violence’ (ibid.: 317). Chapter Twelve 1 Hallward has repeatedly marked his continued debt to Sartre, particularly in two more recent articles: ‘The Politics of Prescription’ (2005) and ‘The Will of the People: Notes Toward a Dialectical Voluntarism’ (2009). 2 Hegel’s famous meditation on the spontaneous aufhebung of the universal out of the particularity of sense-certainty explicitly (and, of course, dialectically) is only the most famous refutation of such a non-relational notion of singularity. Of course, Hallward is not making an argument about Hegel or Hegelian dialectics, but rather about Deleuze’s idiosyncratic notion of the singular, and, through Deleuze, to postcolonial, Deleuze-inspired thought such as that of Glissant. My point is simply that Hallward’s concept of the singular ignores its fundamentally relational status for thinkers such as Spinoza and Hegel, a fact that only becomes important if one accepts

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 319

15/05/2013 08:45:29

320

Notes to pages 263–270

the proximity of Hallward’s own thought to a more Hegelian or Sartrean dialectical understanding of the term. 3 See in particular Adorno’s critique of Kantian formalism in the opening pages of Part II of Negative Dialectics (Adorno 1973: 135, 140). 4 The logic of Gayatri Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak? (Spivak 2010) would presumably reject such a text as Louverture’s as the very paradigm of the ideological affirmation of the self-same (male) Subject of Power, and the editor (myself) of his letters as one more example of the ‘transparent’ Western male intellectual in search of insurgent ‘heroes’ to ‘ventriloquize’ (ibid.: 27). The phallocratic nature of Louverture’s struggle is of course indisputable, and would be confirmed in the misogynic restrictions of his 1801 constitution, the determinate negation of his initial break from slavery to traverse the infinite problem or question the French Revolution opened up: Liberté? Egalité? Fraternité? Spivak’s ‘Subaltern’, even in its 1999 revision and 2010 republication, parodies and pillories the Western male leftist intellectual (‘Foucault’ and ‘Deleuze’), all the while continuing to ignore to the point of absurdity the critique of ideology and above all of representation (the two concepts the essay struggles affirmatively to reconceptualize) one finds in these thinkers’ properly philosophical works. In other words, in choosing to reject Foucault and Deleuze based on the evidence of a single (if influential) informal discussion rather than via consideration of their philosophical work, and, moreover, in defending this as a valid critical methodology, as attention to the symptomatic ‘margins’ of a thinker’s production (ibid.: 229), Spivak’s famous essay is free to proceed as though the rejection of ideology and representation by Deleuze and Foucault in their conversation were simplistic and uninformed. (Derrida, need it be said, is never subjected by Spivak to this show trial methodology of critique via the informal interview). In fact, of course, Deleuze (to say nothing of Foucault) spends hundreds of pages (in Difference and Repetition and Spinoza and the Problem of Expression) articulating an extremely complex critique of representation, of ideology, of Freud, etc., none of which ‘Subaltern’ cites even parenthetically (let alone engages with), even still in its 1999 and 2010 versions, as though these two enormously complex and influential books never existed. This leaves Can the Subaltern Speak? free to pursue – while simultaneously disavowing – its quite traditional project of good old top-down vanguardist ideology critique (ibid.: 53). To continue to ‘mark the fact that knowledge of the other is theoretically impossible’ is to state a psychologistic truism (ibid.: 48); instead, what one can know are statements and the archival indexes of their effects and impacts on the worlds they have traversed. The point, of course, is not just that Spivak’s Deleuze and Foucault are straw men (a perfectly legitimate rhetorical device for any thinker) but that Deleuze in fact offers an entirely different and theoretically rigorous response to Spivak’s famous question, a response figured precisely in the terms of concern to ‘Subaltern’ itself: a critique of representation, of recognition and ideology,

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 320

15/05/2013 08:45:29

Notes to pages 270–273

321

and of ‘constitutive contradiction’ (as Hegelian dialetics), and a corresponding affirmation of Nietzschean–Spinozist expression without mediation. The point then, in reference to a text such as Louverture’s (the same could be said in the realm of gender of Olympe de Gouge’s Declaration of the Rights of Women) is that it is in fact irrelevant that the subaltern cannot be heard within a structure of domination (whether colonial India or French plantation slavery before and after 1789) and that the subaltern is ‘not succeeding in being heard [lacking any] valid institutional background for resistance’ (ibid.: 228). Any subaltern non-Subject cannot wait for the top-down construction of such an institutional framework, anymore than for the right moment to receive subjecthood and ‘recognition’, for that recognition will never come for the subaltern slave or woman. The lesson of Deleuze, of Rancière, Žižek, Badiou, of a whole school of thinkers who, for all their differences, reject the deconstructionist misérabilisme of an infinitely repeated (re)quest for recognition, is that the opening onto subjectivity, through the event, arises in the impatient passage à l’acte. Simply to step out of Spivak’s prison-house of representation, and to present a truth statement (in a general context of the subaltern’s unrepresentability, unthinkability, or even impossibility), as an unmediated expression of a truth, as did both Louverture and Gouges, immediately, without seeking representation or recognition by a mendacious system. Scholarship, in turn, can bear witness to the capture of that place (by a Louverture or Gouges), and to relay, intensify, and recode or transform (as one says of electrical grids) insofar as possible an initial, situated event in its timeless, eternal truth. The real reason, in other words, why the critique of Can the Subaltern Speak? is quite simply irrelevant to the exploration and elaboration of the various truths that happen to go under proper names such as de Gouges or Louverture (or 1804 or Lavalas … ) is that the subject of such truths is not to be understood as a psychological self-presence (under erasure) or the source or foundation of enunciation, but rather as the formal support, exterior to all considerations of historicity and intersubjectivity, that projects the implications of an event in the form of truths. Conclusion 1 See also Charles Forsdick and David Murphy’s equally substantial and informative call for the newly conceived field they call Francophone Postcolonial Studies (Forsdick and Murphy 2003). 2 On the latter, see ibid. 7. 3 The case of Scotus is particularly interesting: a lowland Scot raised in the years of Edward I’s brutal imperial annexation of Scotland, Scotus’s precocious formulation of the social contract and the ‘consent of the governed’ as the basis of political legitimacy seems to have been crucial in the formulation of one of the earliest existing declarations of anticolonialism and independence,

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 321

15/05/2013 08:45:29

322

Notes to pages 273–276

the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320. Some four centuries before Locke and Rousseau, Scotus wrote in the Ordinatio (IV, dist. 15, q. 2: ‘De lege positiva humana et auctoritate civili’) that ‘political authority […] whether it resides in one person or in a community, can be just by common consent and election on the part of the community’ rather than divine right [potest esse iusta ex communi consensus et electione ipsius communitatis] (cited at Wolter 1986: 315). If it turns out that Scotus was also radically anti-Semitic, and went beyond the common anti-Semitism of his day to call for the forced conversion to Christianity of both Jewish children and adults, as well as the relegation of the few remaining Jews to some medieval ‘island’ Konzentrationslager beyond a purified Christian imperium, neither fact, but only the theory itself, should influence our judgment of whether his philosophy of universals helps us to think about contemporary universalism and anti-imperialism (Marmursztejn and Piron 2004). 4 On this debate, see Nesbitt 2008a: 133–137. 5 For such a concept of the Idea as I am describing here, see Deleuze 1994: 214–279. 6 On the Deleuzian distinction between the pre-conscious, pre-individual Idea and the sedimented, representation-based concept, see ibid.: 271. Deleuze’s distinction between Idea and concept points to the limitations of my presentation of Kant’s philosophy of difference and singularization (Nesbitt 2008), insofar as the Kantian celebration of singularization inevitably tends toward the establishment of sedentary identities, as the universal equality of an abstract ‘diversity’, that Kant called ‘anthropology’ (see Deleuze 1994: 282). Kantian singularization ultimately ‘arranges things in the order of time and under the conditions of extensity such that they negate themselves’. Sedentary Kantian good sense is ultimately the ‘universal rule of distribution’, with each element in its proper role and (self-same) identity and habits (ibid.: 283, 284). In Kantian singularization, as Deleuze remarks of common sense in general, ‘difference tends to be distributed throughout diversity in such a manner as to disappear, and to render uniform the diversity it creates’ (ibid.: 285). 7 ‘Owing to its structural situation in the social order and to the specific forms of oppression and exploitation unique to that situation,’ Jamseon writes, ‘each group lives the world in a phenomenologically specific way that allows it to see and to know, features of the world that remain obscure, invisible, or merely occasional and secondary for other groups’ (Jameson 2010: 216). 8 For a transcript of the talk at Cerisy-La-Salle in which I first articulated the following analysis, see Nesbitt 2007b. Many thanks to the participants in that colloquium, including Bruno Chaouat, Jim Creech, Jean-Godefroy Bidima, and Jonathan Strauss, in helping me to refine my earlier analysis. 9 Césaire’s critique of shame prefigures Bruno Bosteels’s compelling assertion that shame forms the putatively unsurpassable, neo-Heideggarian horizon of theoretical melancholia and antipolitics, from Levinas, Lacan,

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 322

15/05/2013 08:45:29

Notes to pages 276–288

323

and Derrida to Agamben, a doxa that rejects the legacy of decolonization and 1968 to retreat into the ontology of finitude and the ‘shame of being human’ (Bosteels 2012: 188). 10 On the problematic distinction between shame and guilt, which I do not go into here, see Nesbitt 2007b: 238–239. 11 The term is not just Heidegger’s, but refers here explicitly to the Haitian noiristes – politicians who called themselves ‘les authentiques’ in the administration of Dumarsais Estimé (1946–1950). On the political history of noirisme, see Matthew J. Smith’s brilliant study Red and Black in Haiti (Smith 2009) and Trouillot 1990, and, for an examination of the cultural movements of indigenisme and noirisme, see Dash 1981; Kaussen 2008; and Munro 2007. 12 Obviously, I am doing some injustice here to the concept of the verbe, which in its etymological meaning is primarily linked to the Christian parole of God as commandment, rather than the Mosaic (and Freudian) emphasis on the agency of the letter as a Benjaminian language or letter of pure means. In interpreting Césaire’s usage in this way, I would argue that, as a poet, he is pre-eminently concerned with the written rather than spoken word, but that that the written word must come alive in turn as it resonates with a subject (of Negritude) and throughout a (universal) community. Thus, Césaire’s turn to the theater in the 1960s would in this reading indicate not an abdication of poetry and the word but an ever-increasing desire to remain faithful to the word in its capacity to be encountered by anyone whatsoever, and to initiate the process of subjectivation as fidelity to the imperative commandment of justice as equality inherited by Césaire from 1789 and 1804. Appendix 1 An English translation of this text is to be found in Bell 2007: 39–41. 2 Piquionne 1998 reproduces the orthography of the original letter printed below.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 323

15/05/2013 08:45:29

Bibliography Bibliography

Adélaïde-Merlande. 1986. Jacques. Delgrès: La Guadeloupe en 1802. Paris: Karthala. Adorno, Theodor. 1973. Negative Dialectics. London: Routledge. Aldrich, Robert, and John Connell. 1992. France’s Overseas Frontier: Départements et Territoires d’Outre Mer. Cambridge University Press. Althusser, Louis. 1996 [1965]. Pour Marx. Paris: La Découverte. Althusser, Louis, and Étienne Balibar. 2009. Reading Capital. New York: Verso. Andrade, Oswald de. 1928. ‘Manifesto Anthropofagico’. Revista de anthropofagia. 1:1. São Paulo. Les Antilles et la Guyane à l’heure de la décolonisation. Congrès des 22 et 23 avril 1961. Paris: Louis Soulanges. Arendt, Hannah. 1963. On Revolution. New York: Viking. ——. 1970. On Violence. Orlando, Fla: Harcourt. Aristide, Jean-Bertrand. 1993. An Autobiography. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Armstrong, Aurelia. 1997. ‘Some Reflections on Deleuze’s Spinoza’. In Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer, Keith Ansell-Pearson, ed. London: Routledge. Badiou, Alain. 1988. L’être et l’événement. Paris: Seuil. ——. 1998a. Abrégé de métapolitique. Paris: Seuil. ——. 1998b. Court traité d’ontologie transitoire. Paris: Seuil. ——. 2003a. Infinite Thought. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens, trans. London: Continuum. ——. 2003b. ‘Philosophy and Politics’. In Infinite Thought. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens, trans. London: Continuum: 69–78. ——. 2003c. L’Ethique. Paris: Nous. ——. 2005. Le Siècle. Paris: Seuil. ——. 2006. Logiques des mondes. Paris: Seuil.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 324

15/05/2013 08:45:29

Bibliography 325 ——. 2009a. Conditions. London: Continuum. ——. 2009b. Logics of Worlds. Alberto Toscano, trans. London: Continuum. ——. 2009c. ‘On the Idea of Communism’. Public lecture, Birkbeck College, London. ——. 2009d. Theory of the Subject. Bruno Bosteels, trans. London: Continuum. ——. 2011a. La Relation énigmatique entre philosophie et politique. Paris: Germina. ——. 2011b. Le Reveil de l’histoire. Paris: Lignes. ——. 2011c. Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy. Bruno Bosteels, trans. London: Verso. Balibar, Étienne. 2002. ‘Violence Ideality, and Cruelty’. In Étienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene. New York: Verso: 129–145. ——. 2010. Violence et civilité: Wellek Library Lectures et autres essais de philosophie politique. Paris: Galilée. Barthélemy, Gérard. 1990. L’Univers rural haïtien: Le pays en dehors. Paris: L’Harmattan. Beaud, Olivier. 2003. ‘Souveraineté’. Dictionnaire de philosophie politique. Philippe Raynaud and Stéphane Rials, eds. 2nd edn. Paris: Presses universitaires de France: 735–742. Bell, Madison Smartt. 2007. Toussaint Louverture: A Biography. New York: Pantheon Books. Benhabib, Seyla. 1986. Critique, Norm, Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1968. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. In Illuminations. Harry Zohn, trans. New York: Schocken. ——. 1996. ‘Critique of Violence’. Selected Writings, vol. 1. 1913–1926. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings, eds. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press: 236–252. Bewes, Tim. 2011. ‘Is Representation Possible Without Reification?’ Radical Philosophy, New York conference, Columbia University, October 21, 2011. Blackburn, Robin. 1988. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848. London: Verso. Blérald, Alain Philippe. 1997. ‘La Citoyenneté françaises aux Antilles et ses paradoxes’. In 1946–1996: Cinquante ans de départemenalisation outre-mer. Fred Constant and Daniel Justin, eds. Paris: L’Harmattan: 193–204. Bloch, E. 1987. Natural Law and Human Dignity. Dennis J. Schmidt, ed. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Blumrosen, A., and R. Blumrosen. 2005. Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution. Naperville, Ill: Sourcebooks. Bongie, Chris. 1998. Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature. Palo Alto, Calif: Stanford University Press.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 325

15/05/2013 08:45:31

326

Caribbean Critique

——. 2008. Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature. Liverpool University Press. Bosteels, Bruno. 2011a. The Actuality of Communism. London: Verso. ——. 2011b. Badiou and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ——. 2012. Marx and Freud in Latin America. London: Verso. Boudon, Julien, 2006. Les Jacobins: Une traduction des principes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Bibliothèque constitutionelle et de science politique, 128. Paris: Librairie générale de droit et de jurisprudence. Bowden, Sean. 2011. The Priority of Events: Deleuze’s Logic of Sense. University of Edinburgh Press. Breton, André. 1983. ‘Un grand poète noir’. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Paris and Dakar: Présence Africaine: 77–87. Brière, J.-F. 2004. ‘Abbé Grégoire and Haitian Independence’. Research in African Literatures 35.2: 34–43. Britton, Celia. 1999. Édouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. ——. 2007. ‘Souvenirs des années 40 à la Martinique: Interview avec Édouard Glissant’. L’Esprit créateur 47.1: 96–104. ——. 2009. ‘Globalization and Political Action in the Work of Édouard Glissant’. SmallAxe 13.3: 1–11. Brown, Nathan. 2011. ‘The Speculative and the Specific: On Hallward and Meillassoux’. In The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman, eds. Melbourne: re.press: 142–163. Bryant, Levi, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, eds. 2011. The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialsim and Realism. Melbourne: re.press. Buck-Morss, Susan. 2009. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press. Calmont, A. 2007. Dynamiques migratoires de la Caraïbe. Paris: Karthala. Casimir, Jean. 2001. La Culture opprimée. Delmas: Imprimérie Lakay. Castoriadis, Cornelius. 2005. Une Société à la dérive: Entretiens et débats 1974–1997. Paris: Seuil. Césaire, Aimé. 1955. Discours sur le colonialisme. Paris: Présence africaine. ——. 1956. ‘Décolonisation pour les Antilles’. Présence africaine 7 (April– May): 3–6. ——. 1973. Une Saison au Congo. Paris: Seuil. ——. 1976. Œuvres complètes, vol. 3, Œuvre historique et politique. Fort-deFrance: Éditions Désormeaux. ——. 1981 [1960]. Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution française et le problème colonial. Paris: Présence africaine. ——. 1994a. Interview in Le Monde. April 12. ——. 1994b. La Poésie. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. ——. 1995. Notebook of a Return to My Native Land / Cahier d’un retour au

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 326

15/05/2013 08:45:31

Bibliography 327 pays natal. Mireille Rosello and Annie Pritchard, trans. Tarset: Bloodaxe Books. ——. 2000 [1972]. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press. ——. 2004. Victor Schoelcher et l’abolition de l’esclavage, suivi de trois discours. Paris: Le Capucin. ——. 2010. A Season in the Congo. Gayatri Spivak, trans. London: Seagull. Chamberlain, Muriel E. 1998. Decolonization in the Twentieth Century. London: Longman. Chatterjee, Partha. 1986. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Comay, Rebecca. 2010. Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Condé, Maryse. 1977a. La Civilisation du bossale: Réflexions sur la littérature orale de la Guadeloupe et de la Martinique. Paris: L’Harmattan. ——. 1977b. La Poésie antillaise. Paris: Fernand Nathan. ——. 1977c. Le Roman antillais. Paris: Fernand Nathan. ——. 1978. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal: Césaire. Collection Profil d’une œuvre no. 63. Paris: Hatier. ——. 1979. La Parole des femmes: Essai sur des romancières des Antilles de langue française. Paris: L’Harmattan. ——. 1988. Haiti chérie. Paris: Bayard. ——. 1992a. L’héritage de Caliban / sous la direction de Maryse Condé. Pointe-à-Pître: Éditions Jasor. ——. 1992b. ‘Order, Disorder, Freedom, and the West Indian Writer’. Yale French Studies 2.83: 121–136. ——. 1994. ‘Pan-Africanisim, Feminism, and Culture’. Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora. New York: Verso: 55–65. ——. 1995. ‘Chercher nos vérités’. Penser la créolité. Maryse Condé and Madeleine Cottenet-Hage, eds. Paris: Karthala: 305–311. ——. 1998. ‘Unheard Voice: Suzanne Césaire and the Construct of a Caribbean Identity’. Winds of Change: The Transforming Voices of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars. Adele S. Newson and Linda Strong-Leek, eds. New York: Peter Lang: 61–66. ——. 1999a. ‘On the Apparent Carnivalization of Literature from the French Caribbean’. Representations of Blackness and the Performance of Identities. Jean Muteba Rahier, ed. Westport, Conn: Bergin and Garvey: 91–97. ——. 1999b. Le Cœur à rire et à pleurer: Contes vrais de mon enfance. Paris: Robert Laffont. Condé, Maryse, and Madeleine Cottenet-Hage, eds. 1995. Penser la créolité. Paris: Karthala.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 327

15/05/2013 08:45:32

328

Caribbean Critique

Condorcet, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de. 2001 [1781]. Réflexions sur l’esclavage des nègres. Paris: Mille et une nuits. Constant, Fred, and Daniel Justin, eds. 1997. 1946–1996: Cinquante ans de départemenalisation outre-mer. Paris: L’Harmattan. Craiutu, Aurelian. 2005. ‘Tocqueville’s Paradoxical Moderation’. Review of Politics: 599–629. Damas, Léon-Gontran. 2003. Retour de Guyane. Paris: Jean Michel Place. Danticat, Edwidge. 2007. Brother I’m Dying. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Davis, David Brion. 1975. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. De Witte, Ludo. 2001. The Assassination of Lumumba. London and New York: Verso. Delas, Daniel. 1991. Aimé Césaire. Paris: Hachette. Deleuze, Gilles. 1990 [1969]. The Logic of Sense. M. Lester and C. Stivale, trans. Constantin Boundas, ed. New York: Columbia University Press. ——. 1991. Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty. New York: Zone Books. ——. 1994. Difference and Repetition. London: Continuum. ——. 1995. Negotiations. 1972–1990. M. Joughin, trans. New York: Columbia University Press. Depestre, René. 1979. Le Mât de cocagne. Paris: Gallimard. Devji, Faisal. 2012. The Impossible Indian: Ghandi and the Temptation of Violence. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Donadey, Anne, and H. Adlai Murdoch, eds. 2005. Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Literary Studies. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Donnelly, J. 1989. Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ——. 2003. Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice. 2nd edn. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dosse, François. 2007. Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari: Biographie croisée. Paris: La Découverte. Dubois, Laurent. 2004. A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ——. 2012. Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. New York: Metropolitan Books. Dubois, Laurent, and John D. Garrigus. 2006. Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789–1804: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford. Dupré la Tour, Nathanaël. 2009. ‘“Politique des droits de l’âme”: La Charte 77 et ses échos français’. Esprit (February): 135–149. Dupuy, Alex. 2007. The Prophet and Power: Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the International Community, and Haiti. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 328

15/05/2013 08:45:32

Bibliography 329 Etherington, Ben. 2011. ‘Decolonizing Reason: A New Consideration of the Influence of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason on Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth’. unpublished manuscript. Fanon, Frantz. 1952. Peau noire, masques blancs. Paris: Gallimard. ——. 1961. Les Damnés de la terre. Paris: Gallimard. ——. 1968. Sociologie d’une revolution: L’an V de la révolution algérienne. Paris: François Maspero. ——. 1979. Pour la revolution africaine. Paris: François Maspero. Fatton, R. 2002. Haiti’s Predatory Republic: The Unending Transition to Democracy. Boulder, Colo: Lynn Rienner Publishers. Farmer, Paul. 2006 [1994]. The Uses of Haiti. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press. Fau, Guy, and Sue Eugène. 1972. L’abolition de l’esclavage. Martinsart: Éditions du burin. Fick, Carolyn. 1990. The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution From Below. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. ——. 2007. ‘The Haitian Revolution and the Limits of Freedom: Defining Citizenship in the Revolutionary Era’. Social History 32.4: 394–414. Filostrat, Christian. 2010. Négritude Agonistes: Assimilation against Nationalism in the French-Speaking Caribbean and Guyane. Africana Homestead Legacy Publishers. Fischer, Sibylle. 2004. Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Forsdick, Charles, and David Murphy, eds. 2003. Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction. London: Arnold. ——. 2009. Postcolonial Thought in the French-Speaking World. University of Liverpool Press. Foucault, Michel. 1984. ‘What is Enlightenment?’ In The Foucault Reader. Paul Rabinow, ed. New York: Pantheon Books. ——. 1995. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage. ——. 2001. Dits et écrits II. 1976–1988. Paris: Gallimard. Garraway, Doris L. 2012. ‘Empire of Freedom, Kingdom of Civilization: Henry Christophe, the Baron de Vastey, and the Paradoxes of Universalism in Postrevolutionary Haiti’. Small Axe 39 (special issue). Gay, J.-C. 2009. ‘Outre-mer à la dérive’. www.cafe-geo.net/article.php3?id_ article=1547. March 19, 2009. Accessed March 6, 2013. Gauchet, Marcel. 2002. La Démocratie contre elle-même. Paris: Gallimard. Gauthier, Florence. 1992. Triomphe et mort du droit naturel en Révolution: 1789–1795–1802. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Geggus, David, ed. 2001. The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Gershman, Sally. 1976. ‘Alexis de Tocqueville and Slavery’. French Historical Studies 9.3: 467–483.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 329

15/05/2013 08:45:33

330

Caribbean Critique

Glissant, Édouard. 1958. La Lézarde. Paris: Seuil. ——. 1961. Les Antilles et la Guyane à l’heure de la décolonisation. Paris : L. Soulanges. ——. 1981. Le Discours antillais. Paris: Gallimard. ——. 1990. Poétique de la relation, Paris: Gallimard. ——. 1997a. L’Intention poétique. Paris: Gallimard. ——. 1997b [1956]. Soleil de la conscience, Paris: Gallimard. ——. 1997c. Traité du Tout-monde. Paris: Gallimard. ——. 2005. La Cohée du lamentin. Paris: Gallimard. ——. 2008. Les Entretiens de Baton Rouge. Paris: Gallimard. ——. 2009. Philosophie de la Relation. Paris: Gallimard. Gordon, Jane, Anna. 2011. ‘Revolutionary in Counter-Revolutionary Times: Elaborating Fanonian National Consciousness into the Twenty-First Century’. Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 19.1: 37–47. Gross, Jean-Pierre. 2003. Fair Shares for All: Jacobin Egalitarianism in Practice. Cambridge University Press. Guérin, Daniel. 1956. Antilles décolonisées, with preface by Aimé Césaire. Paris: Présence Africaine. Habermas, Jürgen. 1981. The Theory of Communicative Action. Boston: Beacon Press. Hale, Thomas A. 1978. Les écrits d’Aimé Césaire: Bibliographie commentée. Montreal: Presses de l’université de Montréal. Hallward, Peter. 2001. Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific. Manchester University Press. ——. 2005. ‘The Politics of Prescription’. South Atlantic Quarterly 104.4: 769–789. ——. 2006. Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation. London: Verso. ——. 2007a. Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment. London: Verso. ——. 2007b. Review of Alex Dupuy, The Prophet and Power. ‘Aristide and the Violence of Democracy’. www.zcommunications.org/aristide-and-theviolence-of-democracy-by-peter-hallward. September 9, 2007. ——. 2008a. ‘Anything is Possible: Book Review of After Finitude by Quentin Meillassoux’. Radical Philosophy 152: 51–57. ——. 2008b. ‘Order and Event: On Alain Badiou’s Logics of Worlds’. New Left Review 53: 97–122. ——. 2009. ‘The Will of the People: Notes Toward a Dialectical Voluntarism’. Radical Philosophy 155: 17–29. ——. 2011. ‘Anything is Possible: A Reading of Quentin Meillassoux’ After Finitude’. In The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, eds. Melbourne: re.press: 130–141.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 330

15/05/2013 08:45:33

Bibliography 331 ——. 2012. Introduction: ‘Theoretical Training’. In Concept and Form, vol. 1. Key Texts from Cahiers pour l’analyse. New York: Verso: 1–56. Hanssen, Beatrice. 2000. Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory. London and New York: Routledge. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2009.Commonwealth. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Hartman, S. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Havel, Václav. 1989. Eseje a jiné texty z let. 1970–1989, Dálkový Výslech, vol. 4. Prague: Torst. ——. 1991. Open Letters: Selected Prose. 1965–1990. Paul Wilson, ed. Boston: Faber and Faber. Heidegger, Martin. 1996. Being and Time. Joan Stambaugh, trans. Albany: State University of New York Press. L’Hermitte, Nicolas. 2010. ‘Un dialogue manqué’. Seminar paper, Princeton University, December. Hiddleston, Jane. 2009. Understanding Postcolonialism. Stocksfield: Acumen. Horkheimer, Max. 1973. Critical Theory. London: Continuum. Hunt, L. 2007. Inventing Human Rights: A History, New York and London: W. W. Norton. Hurley, E. Anthony. 2005. ‘Postcoloniality and Frantz Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs’. In Anne Donadey and H. Adlai Murdoch, eds. Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Literary Studies. Gainesville: University Press of Florida: 21–36. Israel, Jonathan. 2001. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750. Oxford University Press. ——. 2010. A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intelletual Origins of Modern Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ——. 2011. Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750–1790. Oxford University Press. James, C. L. R. 1989. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage. Jameson, Fredric. 2010. Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso Jenson, Deborah. 2011. Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution. University of Liverpool Press. Johnson, Adrian. 2011. ‘Hume’s Revenge: Adieu, Meillassoux?’ In The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, eds. Melbourne: re.press: 92–113. Jos, Emmanuel. 1997. ‘Identité culturelle et identité politique: Le cas martiniquais’. In Fred Constant and Daniel Justin, eds. 1946–1996: Cinquante ans de départementalisation outre-mer. Paris: L’Harmattan: 335–372.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 331

15/05/2013 08:45:35

332

Caribbean Critique

Kant, Immanuel. Practical Philosophy. 1996. Cambridge University Press. ——. 1997. Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge University Press. Kaussen, Valerie. 2008. Migrant Revolutions: Haitian Literature, Globalization, and US Imperialism. Lanham, Md: Lexington Books. Kinkelman: 2001. Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson. 2nd edn. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe. Knight, F. 2005. ‘The Haitian Revolution and the Notion of Human Rights’, Journal of the Historical Society 3: 391–416. Kojève, Alexandre. 1947. Introduction à la lecture de Hegel: Leçons sur la Phénoménologie de l’esprit professées de 1933 à 1939 à l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes, réunies et publiées par Raymond Queneau. Paris: Gallimard. Laclau, Ernesto. 2000. ‘Structure, History, and the Political’. In Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso. ——. 2004. On Populist Reason. London: Verso. Lacour, Auguste. 1855–1858. Histoire de la Guadeloupe: 1798 à 1803, vol. 3, 1798–1803. Basse-Terre: Imprimeur du gouvernement. Latour, Bruno. 1983. ‘Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World’. In Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science. Karin Knorr and Michael Mulleny, eds. London: Sage: 258–275. Lazzeri, C. 1998. Droit, pouvoir, et liberté: Spinoza critique de Hobbes. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. 1975. The Lenin Anthology. Robert C. Tucker, ed. New York: Norton. ——. 2012. L’État et la révolution: La doctrine du marxisme sur l’État et les tâches du prolétariat dans la révolution. Foreword: ‘Lire Lénine aujourd’hui’ by Laurent Lévy. Paris: La Fabrique. Locke, John. 1965. Two Treatises of Government. New York: Mentor (reprint of 1960 Cambridge University Press edn). Losurdo, Dominico. 1992. ‘La “philosophie allemende” entre les ideologies, 1789–1848’. Genèses 9: 60–89. ——. 1993. Autocensure et compromise dans la pensée politique de Kant. Presses universitaires de Lille. Louis, Patrice. 2007. Conversation avec Aimé Césaire. Paris: Arléa. Lundahl, Mats. 1979. Peasants and Poverty: A Study of Haiti. New York: St Martin’s Press. Macey, David. 2000. Frantz Fanon: A Life. New York: Picador. MacLeod, D. 1974. Slavery, Race and the American Revolution. Cambridge University Press. Marmursztejn, Elsa, and Sylvain Piron. 2004. ‘Duns Scot et la politique: Pouvoir du prince et conversion des Juifs’. In Duns Scot à Paris 1302–2002: Actes du colloque de Paris, 2–4 septembre 2002. Olivier Boulnois, ed. Turnhout: Brepols: 21–64.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 332

15/05/2013 08:45:35

Bibliography

333

Marx, Karl. 1973. Grundrisse. New York: Vintage. ——. 1976. Capital, vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Robert C Tucker, ed. 1978. The Marx– Engels Reader. 2nd edn. New York: Norton. Massin, Jean. Robespierre. 1970 [1956]. 2nd edn. Paris: Le club français du livre. Matheron, Alexandre. 1988. Individu et Communité chez Spinoza. Paris: Les editions de minuit. Mathiez, Albert. 1917–1918. Études Robespierristes. Paris: Librairie Armand Colin. ——. 1921. Robespierre terroriste. Paris: La renaissance du livre. ——. 2010 [1929]. La réaction thermidorienne. Paris: La fabrique. Maximin, Daniel. 1981. L’Isolé soleil. Paris: Seuil. ——. 2006. Les fruits du cyclone: Une géopolitique de la Caraïbe. Paris: Seuil. McNulty, Tracy. 2008a. ‘Demanding the Impossible: Desire and Social Change’. Differences 20.1: 1–39. ——. 2008b. ‘The Commandment Against the Law: Writing and Divine Justice in Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence”’. Diacritics 37.2–3: 34–60. ——. 2008c. ‘The Event of the Letter: Two Approaches to the Law and its Real’. Cardozo Law Review 29.5: 101–131. McShea, Robert. 1968. The Political Philosophy of Spinoza. New York: Columbia University Press. Meehan, Kevin. 2009. People Get Ready: African American and Caribbean Cultural Exchange. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Meillassoux, Quentin. 2009. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Ray Brassier, trans. London: Continuum. Ménil, René. 1981. Tracées. Paris: Robert Laffont. ——. 1999. ‘Psychanalyse de l’histoire’. In René Ménil, Antilles déjà jadis. Paris, J.-M. Place. Miller, Christopher. 1998. Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture. University of Chicago Press. ——. 2010. ‘The (Revised) Birth of Negritude: Communist Revolution and “the Immanent Negro” in 1935’. PMLA 125.3 (May 2010). 743–49. Miller, Jacques-Alain. 1988. Seminar on Freud’s Papers on Technique. In Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book 1, Freud’s Papers on Technique. 1953–1954. John Forrester, trans. Cambridge University Press. ——. 2012. ‘Action of the Structure’. In Concept and Form, Peter Hallward and Knox Peden, eds. vol. 1. Key Texts from the Cahiers pour l’analyse. New York: Verso: 69–84. Montag, Warren, and Ted Stolze, eds. 1997. The New Spinoza. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Montesquieu. 1864. Esprit des lois. Paris: Librairie de Firmin Didot.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 333

15/05/2013 08:45:36

334

Caribbean Critique

Moreiras, Alberto. 2001. The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Moutoussamy, Ernest. 1993. Aimé Césaire: Député à l’Assemblée nationale, 1945–1993. Paris: L’Harmattan. Munro, Martin. 2007. Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature. Liverpool University Press. Murdoch, H. Adlai. 2001. Creole Identity in the French Caribbean Novel. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. ——. 2012. Creolizing the Metropole: Migrant Caribbean Identities in Literature and Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Murdoch, H. Adlai, and Anne Donaday. 2005. Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Literary Studies. Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida. Muthu, Sankar. 2003. Enlightenment Against Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Negri, Antonio. 1997. ‘Reliquia Desiderantur: A Conjecture for a Definition of the Concept of Democracy in the Final Spinoza’. In The New Spinoza, Warren Montag and Ted Stolze, eds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 219–248. Nesbitt, Nick. 2003. Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. ——. 2005. ‘The Explusion of the Negative: Deleuze, Adorno, and the Ethics of Internal Difference’. SubStance 107 34.2: 75–97. ——. 2007a. ‘Departmentalization and the Logic of Decolonization’. L’Esprit créateur 47.1: 32–43. ——. 2007b. ‘Honte, culpabilité, et devenir dans l’expérience coloniale’. In Lire, écrire la honte: Actes du colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle, juin 2003. Bruno Chaouat, ed. Presses universitaires de Lyon: 235–250. ——. 2008a. Toussaint Louverture: The Haitian Revolution. London, Verso. ——. 2008b. Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. ——. 2009. ‘La société égalitaire sans état: Gérard Barthélémy et le problème du pouvoir dans la Révolution Haïtienne’. La revue haïtienne d’histoire et de géographie. Special issue on the writings of Gérard Barthélemy, 83.236: 131–146. ——. 2010. ‘Deleuze, Glissant, and the Production of Postcolonial Concepts’. In Deleuze and the Postcolonial. Paul Patton and Simone Bignall, eds. Edinburgh University Press. Nicholls, David. 1990. ‘Pompée Valentin Vastey: Royalist and Revolutionary’. Revista de Historia de América 109. Patočka, Jan. 2002. Plato and Europe. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 334

15/05/2013 08:45:36

Bibliography

335

Patton, Paul. 2000. Deleuze and the Political. London: Routledge. Pfaff, Françoise. 1993. Entretiens avec Maryse Condé. Paris: Karthala. Piquet, Jean-Daniel. 1993. ‘Le Créole Patriote, apôtre de l’insurrection de St-Domingue’. Annales historiques de la Révolution française 293–294: 519–521. Piquionne, Nathalie. 1998. ‘Lettre de Jean-François, Biassou et Belair, juillet 1792’. Annales historiques de la Révolution française 311: 132–139. Pitts, Jennifer. 2000. Editor’s ‘Introduction’. Writings on Empire and Slavery, Alexis de Tocqueville. Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press. Planche, Jean-Louis. 2010. Sétif: Histoire d’un massacre annoncé. Paris: Perrin. Rabaka, Reiland. 2009. Africana Critical Theory: Reconstructing the Black Radical Tradition, From W. E. B. Dubois and C. L. R. James to Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral. Lanham, Md: Lexington Books. Rabouin, David. 2011. ‘Objet, relation, transcendantal: une introduction au formalisme de Logiques des mondes’. In D. Rabouin, O. Feltham, and L. Lincoln, eds. Paris: Éditions des Archives contemporaines: 23–48. Rancière, Jacques. 1965. ‘Le concept de critique et la critique de l’économie politique des “Manuscrits de 1844” au “Capital”.’ In Louis Althusser. Lire Le Capital. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ——. 1998. Aux bords du politique. Paris: Gallimard. ——. 2004. ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’ South Atlantic Quarterly 103.2/3: 297–310. Rasch, W. 2003. ‘Human Rights as Geopolitics: Carl Schmitt and the Legal Form of American Supremacy’, Cultural Critique 54: 120–147. Raynal, Abbé G. T. 2001. Histoire philosophique et politique des deux Indes. Paris: La Découverte. Richter, Melvin. 1963. ‘Tocqueville on Algeria’. Review of Politics 25.3: 362–398. Robespierre, Maximilien. 1952. Œuvres de Maximilien Robespierre. vol. 7. Discours, 2e partie, janvier–septembre 1791. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. ——. 1965. Discours et rapports à la Convention. Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions. ——. 2000. Pour le bonheur et pour la liberté: Discours. Paris: La fabrique-éditions. ——. 2009. Discours par Maximilien Robespierre, 17 avril 1792–27 juillet 1794. Daniel Fromont, ed. gutenberg.org. www.gutenberg.org/ files/29887/29887-h/29887-h.htm. Robinson, D. 1971. Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765–1820. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Rougerie, Jacques. 1988. La Commune de 1871. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 2006. Du contrat social. Paris: Flammarion.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 335

15/05/2013 08:45:37

336

Caribbean Critique

Saint-Just, Antoine Louis Léon de. 2003 [1963]. L’Esprit de la révolution; suivi de Fragments sur les institutions républicaines. Paris: 10/18. Saint-Ruf, Germain. 1977. L’Épopée Delgrès: La Guadeloupe sous la Révolution française. Paris: L’Harmattan. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2004.Critique of Dialectical Reason. vols. 1 and 2. London: Verso. ——. 2006. Colonialism and Neocolonialism. London: Routledge. Schmidt, Nelly. 1994.Victor Schoelcher et l’abolition de l’esclavage. Paris: Fayard. Schoelcher, Victor. 1982 [1889]. Vie de Toussaint Louverture. Paris: Karthala. ——. 1998 [1842]. Des Colonies françaises: Abolition immédiate de l’esclavage. Paris: Éditions du CTHS.  Schwarz-Bart, André. 1972. La mulâtresse Solitude. Paris: Seuil. Scott, David. 2004. Conscripts of Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sekyi-Otu, Ato. 1997. Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Sepinwall, A. 2005. The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shusterman, Noah. 2012. Review of Peter Mcphee, Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life’. H-France Review 12: (August), No. 113. www.hfrance.net/vol12reviews/vol12no113shusterman.pdf. Accessed March 11, 2013. Smith, Matthew J. 2009. Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change. 1934–1957. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Soboul, Albert, ed. 1989. Dictionnaire historique de la Révolution française, Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Spinoza, Benedict de. 1956. Traité de l’autorité politique. Madeleine Francès, trans. Paris: Gallimard. ——. 1958. The Political Works. Oxford University Press. ——. 1994. Spinoza Reader. Edwin Curley, ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ——. 2007. Theological–Political Treatise. Cambridge University Press. Spivak, Gayatri. 2010. Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea. New York: Columbia University Press. Stafford, Andy. 2003. ‘Frantz Fanon, Atlantic Theorist; or, Decolonization and Nation State in Postcolonial Theory’. In Francophone Postcolonial Studies: A Critical Introduction. Charles Forsdick and David Murphy, eds. London: Arnold: 166–180. Sutter, Laurent de. 2009. Deleuze: La pratique du droit. Paris: Michalon. Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1839. ‘Rapport fait au nom de la Commission chargée

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 336

15/05/2013 08:45:38

Bibliography 337 d’examiner la Proposition de M. de Tracy, relative aux Esclaves des colonies … 23 juillet 1839’. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k845061. Accessed March 11, 2013. ——. 2000. Writings on Empire and Slavery. Jennifer Pitts, ed. and trans. Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press. ——. 2003. Democracy in America. Gerald E. Bevan, trans. London: Penguin Books. Torres-Saillant, Sylvio. 2006. An Intellectual History of the Caribbean. New York: Palgrave. Toscano, Alberto. 2010. Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea. London: Verso. ——. 2011. ‘Against Speculation, or, A Critique of the Critique of Critique: A Remark on Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude: After Colletti)’. In The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Levi R. Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, eds. Melbourne: re.press: 84–91. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1990. Haiti: State Against Nation. The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism. New York: Monthly Review Press. ——. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon. Vastey, Pompée-Valentin. 1814. Le Système colonial dévoilé. Cap-Henry: P. Roux. ——. 1816. Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères: ex-colon français, adressée à M. J.C.L. Sismonde de Sismondi, sur les noirs et les blancs, la civilisation de l’Afrique, le royaume d’Hayti, etc. Cap-Henry: P. Roux. ——. 1817. Réflexions politiques sur quelques ouvrages et journaux français concernant Hayti. Sans-Souci: De l’Imprimerie royale. ——. 1819. Essai sur les causes de la révolution et des guerres civiles d’Hayti. Sans-Souci: Imprimerie nationale. Vernière, Paul. 1954. Spinoza et la pensée française avant la Révolution. 2 vols. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Villaverde, Maria José. 1999. ‘Rousseau, lecteur de Spinoza’. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la lecture. Tanguy L’Aminot, ed. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. Wahnich, Sophie. 2003. La liberté ou la mort: Essai sur la Terreur et le terrorisme. Paris: La fabrique. Welborn, Max. 1969. ‘Victor Schoelcher: A Superior Breed of Abolitionist’. Journal of Modern Negro History 54.2: 93–108. Wiedorn, M. A. 2008. ‘Glissant’s Deleuze: Vitalism and the Seduction of the Tout-Monde’. PhD dissertation. University of Pennsylvania. Wilder, Gary. 2005. The French Imperial Nation-State: Négritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars. University of Chicago Press. ——. 2009. ‘Untimely Vision: Aimé Césaire, Decolonization, Utopia’. Public Culture 21:1. 101–140.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 337

15/05/2013 08:45:39

338

Caribbean Critique

William, Jean-Claude. 1997. ‘Aimé Césaire: Les contrariétés de la conscience nationale’. In 1946–1996: Cinquante ans de départemenalisation outre-mer. Fred Constant and Daniel Justin, eds. Paris: L’Harmattan: 315–334. Wolter, Allan B., ed. 1986. Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Young, Robert J. C. 2001. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Malden, Mass: Blackwell. ——. 2004 (1990). White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. 2nd edn. New York: Routledge. Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. ——. 1991. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London: Verso. ——. 2000. ‘Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Yes, Please!’ In Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso. ——. 2008. In Defence of Lost Causes. London: Verso. Zuckert, M. 1996. ‘Natural Rights in the American Revolution: The American Amalgam’. In Human Rights and Revolution. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Lynn Hunt, and Marilyn B. Young, eds. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 338

15/05/2013 08:45:39

Index Index

Adorno, Theodor 20, 25, 64; and Horkheimer xii, 20, 25 Agamben, Giorgio 17, 323n9 Algeria 134–135, 152–153, 192, 233, 242; colonization of 68; and Glissant 148–149; and Saint-Domingue xiii, 14, 21, 22; and Tocqueville 68, 70, 85, 304n2, 304n5, 305n10 See also Fanon, Frantz Algerian Revolution 194–202, 206, 208–209, 211–215, 298n25; and the Haitian Revolution 24, 25, 286; impact on Badiou 296n17; and Sartre 251–252 See also FLN; Fanon, Frantz; Sétif; Sartre; violence Althusser, Louis 307n6, 316n7; and incommensurability 259; and Ménil 100; and structuralism 45, 296n17, 296n19 American Revolution 273, 274 ancien régime 43–46, 200, 218, 274; and Robespierre 163, 165; and terror 166, 168–169, 301n11; and Vastey 177, 183–184 Antigua 79 Arab Spring 210

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 339

Arago, François 79–80 Aragon, Louis 89 Arendt, Hannah 161; on Fanon 192, 316n15; Badiou’s critique of 314n5 Aristide, Jean-Bertrand 3, 14, 18, 21, 153, 201, 207, 216–226, 239; and Hallward 316n1; and Meehan 318n16; rise of 269 Arnold, A. James 104, 283 Badiou, Alain 24, 25, 49, 162, 239, 301–303, 310n7, 311n9, 314n9, 315n3; as key to theoretical framework for Caribbean Critique 296n17; Being and Event 146; and cultural politics 318n17; defining Metapolitics 54–55; Logics of worlds 232, 259, 266; misreading of Toussaint Louverture 10–12; on the ‘police’ state 232–235; on suffering 296n19 Beaumont, Gustave de 69, 304n8 Benhabib, Seyla: and critique 4–5, 8, 13, 20–21; on modes of critique in Marxian thought 23, 294n8, 295n14; on rational discussion 297n25

15/05/2013 08:45:39

340

Caribbean Critique

Benjamin, Walter: and critique 4, 120, 161–162; on distinction between mythic and divine violence 40–41, 163, 164, 166, 199; Theses on History 12, 244 Béville, Albert 108–109; at 1961 Congress 136–140, 239 Biassou, Georges 1, 3, 8, 18 Black Jacobinism 3, 29–65, 86, 159–172, 181 See also Dessalines, Jean-Jacques; James, C. L. R.; Louverture, Toussaint; politics of principle; violence Boissy d’Anglas 46, 49 Bongie, Chris: and Glissant 141, 143, 237–238, 310n2; and Vastey 176 Bossale community 61, 188; analyzed by Maryse Conde 123, 125 Bosteels, Bruno 302n18; and Badiou 296n17, 302n16, 318n17; on shame 322n9 Boukman Dutty 18, 274 Boukman, Daniel 136 Brazil 129, 151; abolition in 66; Quilombos of xiii Breton, André 104, 121 Britton, Celia 17; and Glissant 141, 238, 240 Brown, Nathan 265 Buck-Morss, Susan 168 Bugeaud, Marshal 70, 305n11 Burke, Edmund 50, 177 Butler, Judith 316n15 Canguilhem, Georges 296n18 Capet, Louis: execution justified by Robespierre 162–165, 200; implications of execution 44, 45, 46, 52, 53, 58, 166, 167, 218 See also Jacobinism; Terror Césaire, Aimé: Cahier d’un retour au pays natal 97, 104–105,

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 340

120–123, 147, 235, 248, 272; Cahier as critique of guilt 276–282; and critique 20; and decolonization 20, 86–117; Discours sur le colonialisme 2, 10, 105, 140, 189, 245–246, 283; and Sartre 251–261; Toussaint Louverture 61–62, 117; Tragédie du roi Christophe 113, 117, 248; Une saison au Congo 113–117, 242 See also communism; decolonization; departmentalization; Martinique; Négritude Césaire, Suzanne 309n2; Condé’s discussion of 128–130 Chouans 47, 58, 59 Chauvet, Marie 9, 13 Christophe, Henri 18, 23, 38, 49, 187; defended by Vastey 174, 176, 180–181, 184, 188–191, 315n5; Tragédie du roi Christophe 105, 113, 117, 262 code noir 3, 19, 161; as state violence 163, 165, 166–167, 184 colonial shame 276–283, 322n9 communism: and Césaire 100, 103–105, 110–112, 117, 311n13; and Lenin 308n17; as totality 235 See also PCF; PCM; socialism Condé, Maryse 27, 118–132 Condorcet, Marquis de 8, 188; and gradual abolition of slavery 68–69, 85, 160; and Progressive Enlightenment 33–34, 38 Confiant, Raphael 101, 129–130; critical of Césaire 103, 112 See also Créolité, Négritude Congo see Lumumba, Patrice Créolité 98, 121, 129–130 See also Confiant, Raphael; Ménil, Réné

15/05/2013 08:45:39

Index 341 Damas, Léon-Gontran 89–93, 98 Daniel Guérin 96, 136 Danticat, Edwidge 9 de Witte, Ludo 114, 308n21, 309n23 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen 3, 9, 16, 42, 43, 60, 94, 161, 173, 273, 289 decolonization: apparent failures of 17, 20, 132, 209, 283–284; and Balibar 211–215; and Césaire 86–117, 248–249; and Condé 132; Fanon argues for necessity of 96, 197–203, 206; and Glissant 141, 145, 148, 153, 156, 231, 239, 245; and nationalism 306n4; of Africa 192; of the DOM 136–137; period of 272 De Gaulle, Charles 88, 99, 281 Deleuze, Gilles 23, 262, 296n16; and event 12, 144; and Glissant 145, 146, 240; and singular 319n2, 322n6; and Spivak 320n4 Delgrès, Louis 60, 66, 145, 148, 149, 176, 187; historiography of 312; as leader of rebellion 152–155 departmentalization 135, 154, 245, 306n1, 309n24; Césaire’s criticism of 106–109, 116; Césaire militates against 110–112; Césaire’s politics of 20, 21, 25, 87–89, 93–98, 248, 284; and Glissant 137, 145, 151; as politics of principle 105–106 See also DOM Dessalines, Jean-Jacques 16, 35, 49, 152, 299n3; and Toussaint Louverture 170–171, 174, 176, 181, 183, 189, 191, 200 See also politics of principle; Radical Enlightenment Diderot, Denis xii, 30, 275; and Robespierre 163; and Vastey 175,

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 341

176; and Toussaint Louverture 36; on violence 199, 200 Diop, Alioune 102, 150 DOM 10, 89, 99, 105, 108, 110, 136–138 See also Césaire, Aimé; departmentalization; Glissant, Edouard Dominica 79 Donadey, Anne 272 Dubois, Laurent 173 Duns Scotus 273, 321n3 Dupuy, Alex 216; and Aristide 217–225 Duvalier, Baby Doc 225 Duvalier, Papa Doc 281, 282 Egypt 22, 297n25 El-moujahid 109 See also Fanon, Frantz; FLN emancipation 8–9; general 59, 275; gradual v. immediate 34, 36, 68; and Marx 6–7; and Tocqueville 71–85; universal 4, 10–16, 18, 59, 182–184, 187–191 See also Condorcet, Marquis de; Grégoire, Henri (Abbé); Louverture, Toussaint; Tocqueville, Alexis de Erhard, Johann 51, 303n21 Etherington, Ben 197–198 Eurocentrism: and Adorno 20; and Tocqueville 76; and Vastey 178 event 10, 24, 25; and Badiou 12; as concept central to Discours Antillais 144–146; complex status of in Glissant’s work 147–156; French and Haitian revolutions as 44, 53, 60, 143; Marx fails to conceptualize 23; McNulty distinguishes two forms of 40–42

15/05/2013 08:45:40

342

Caribbean Critique

existentialism 193, 268; and Fanon 197, 201; and Ménil 99; and Sartre 256 Fanon, Frantz: and Condé 132; contrasted with Glissant 134–135, 148; Les damnés de la terre 9, 20, 109, 192, 231; dialogue with Sartre 251; on violence 192–215, 242; Peau noire masques blancs 2, 10, 192, 197, 208, 231, 235; Pour la révolution africaine 109 See also Algeria; Algerian Revolution; FLN; violence feminism 13; of Condé 126–130; of de Gouges 22, 60 Fischer, Sibylle 173–174 Foucault, Michel: analysis of torture 166–167; and Kant 190 French Revolution 34, 60, 143; denounced by Burke 166; and Hegel 167–169; and Kant 51–59, 159, 177; occasion for critique of colonialism 9, 30; orthodox historiography of 31, 44; and Schoelcher 81–82, 84; and Tocqueville 69, 76; and the word 284 See also Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen; Jacobinism; Robespierre , Maximilien; Terror; Thermidor Freud, Sigmund 42–43 Front-Antillo-Guyanais pour l’Autonomie 108, 109, 136 Front Liberation Nationale (FLN) 14, 108, 192, 207, 209, 214, 215, 245 Gandhi, Mahatma 12, 21, 63; Balibar’s discussion of 211, 212, 298n27, 319n1

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 342

Garraway, Doris 175, 178–179; on extensive v. intensive universality 182–183 Glissant, Edouard 17, 133–158, 231–250; late aestheticism of 20, 25; La Lezarde 133–136, 139, 140; Malemort 13, 244; on the concept of relation 231–232; political activity of 136; Tout-monde 23, 236–245 Gouge, Olympe de 22, 60, 166, 321n4 Grégoire, Henri (Abbé) 8, 34, 36, 160; and Césaire 94, 105, 272; and Vastey 176 Gross, Jean-Pierre 37–38, 165 Guadeloupe xii, 60, 65, 66; and Schoelcher 79; and Tocqueville 75 Guinea 242; under Sékou Touré 128, 131, 281 Guyana 90–92 Haitian Revolution xii, 1, 4, 15; and Aristide 218; as expression of radical enlightenment 161; faithful to Jacobinism 173; and Hegel 168; as idea 273–275; legacy in modern Haiti 224; primary lesson of 284; as revolutionary event 44–45, 143; and Spinoza 30; and Tocqueville 76–77, 84–85; and Toussaint Louverture 59–65; and unthinkability 29–30; and Vastey 173–191; world-historical importance of 273 See also Black Jacobinism; Christophe, Henri; Dessalines, Jean-Jacques; James, C. L. R.; justice as equality; Louverture, Toussaint; radical enlightenment; politics of principle; Terror; Vastey, Pompée; violence

15/05/2013 08:45:40

Index 343 Hallward, Peter: Absolutely Postcolonial 140–142, 262–270; and critique of Glissant 236–241; Damming the Flood 216, 269; and Dupuy on Aristide 217–22; and political prescription 14; and populism 224–226 Hardt, Michael 23, 295n12 Havel, Václav 21, 256 Hegel, G. W. F. 5; and Badiou 12; and Balibar 211–213; and Fanon 196; and Glissant 235, 241; and Haitian Revolution 60; and Kojève 193; and Marx 6–8; Philosophy of Right 200, 211; and sacrifice 63; and Sartre 257; and Terror 167–169 Heidegger, Martin 25, 213, 239–240, 244; conception of shame and guilt 276–278, 283 Heine, Heinrich 51 Hiroshima 258 Hobbes, Thomas 35, 55; and Balibar 211 Horkheimer, Max: and Adorno 237, 295; and crisis of Critical Theory 20; negative dialectics of 12 Hugo, Victor 94 human rights 18–19, 47, 299; Mande Charter of 1222 xii, 64; and Schoelcher 81–83, 85; and Tocqueville 67–70, 74, 76; and Vastey 180 See also Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen humanism: and Marx 7; Fanonian xiii, 13, 19, 242; Fanonian anti192–209; neo-Hegelian 296n19; Sartrean 135, 193 immanent critique 1, 3–4, 6, 8, 20, 22, 23 Israel, Jonathan 30, 34–36

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 343

Jacobinism (French) 37–38, 159–172; and ideal of equality 24, 38, 86, 165, 173; and Kant 50–59; legacy of 86; neo-Jacobinism 141–142; relationship to Black Jacobinism 30–31, 32, 38, 47, 50, 284; and universalism 35, 38, 40, 45, 82; and violence 47, 111, 159–165 See also Robespierre, Maximilien; terror; Thermidor; violence Jamaica 79, 151 James, C. L. R. 9, 155, 165, 177, 184, 237; Black Jacobins 9, 29, 35, 169–172, 181, 235; compared to Césaire 273; compared to Vastey 184–185; defense of revolutionary violence 13, 169–172, 194; descriptions of plantation slavery 160, 166, 184 See also Black Jacobinism Jameson, Fredric 253, 260, 275 Jean-François 18, 288 justice as equality 1, 19, 21–22, 200, 264; and Aristide 215; and decolonization 95; and Fanon 214; and James 165; and Lumumba 115; and Robespierre 36–41, 163; and Schoelcher 84; and Toussaint Louverture 59, 184 King, Martin Luther 21, 63, 274 Kojève, Alexander 193, 235 Kreyol 241, 273, 274, 284, 287 See also Créolité L’étudiant noir 137 Labat, Père 124 Lacan, Jacques 42–43, 296n17, 296n18, 301n16 Laclau, Ernesto 296n17

15/05/2013 08:45:42

344

Caribbean Critique

Lavalas 31, 217, 221, 224–227, 239, 245, 321n4; as ‘messianic’ event 223–224 Laveaux, Etienne 11 Légitime Défense 98–99 Leiris, Michel 89, 135 Lenin, Vladimir 211, 212, 297n27, 308n17, 311n13, 319n1; and Béville 137, 139; and Césaire 105, 111; and Menil 103; and Fanon 202, 205, 206; State and Revolution 111–112 Libya 22, 210 Louverture, Toussaint 59–65; 1801 constitution of 161; and Badiou 10–11; and Césaire 111, 117, 273; and critique 4; letters of xi, 1, 48, 176; and radical dissidence 8; and Schoelcher 80 See also Black Jacobinism; Haitian Revolution; politics of principle; Radical Enlightenment tradition; sacrifice Lukács, György 13, 275; and the concept of totality 260; History and Class Consciousness 20, 198; and reification 309n1, 311n12 Lumumba, Patrice 105, 113–116, 281, 282, 309n22 Macey, David 194 Malraux, Andre 94, 97 Mandela, Nelson 132 Martinique xii, 66, 138, 174, 195, 242; and Césaire 87, 89, 120, 271, 278–279, 285, 287; departmentalization of 93–97, 106–110, 133; and Glissant 134–135, 144–155, 207, 239, 243; and Ménil 100–101; and Schoelcher 79, 260; and Tocqueville 75

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 344

Marx, Karl xi, 149, 177, 181, 235, 244, 294–295; and Balibar 210–213; and the practice of critique 3–5, 5–8, 13–15, 23–26, 161; and Fanon 193, 198, 201, 202, 209; and Sartre 187 Massu, Jacques 215 Maximin, Daniel 129, 293n4, 312n15 May ’68 xii McNulty, Tracy 40–43, 301n16, 313n3 Ménil, René 98–103 Middle Passage xii, 11, 147 Mobutu, Joseph 242, 281–282 Montesquieu, Baron de 40, 301n15 Moreiras, Alberto 61, 63, 269–270 Moses and Monotheism see Freud, Sigmund moun endeyo 225, 226 Murdoch, H. Adlai 272, 311n8 Nancy, Jean-Luc 17 Napoleon Bonaparte 23, 40, 47, 49, 65, 213; empire of 32; and reimposition of slavery 66, 69, 149, 154–155, 173; and Toussaint Louverture 61, 171, 189 negative dialectics 12, 20, 128 Negri, Antonio 23, 295n12 Négritude: and Césaire 12, 20, 97, 103, 105, 115, 274, 278; and Condé 130; and Damas 89–91; and Ménil 98–103; and Glissant 148; Senghorian 142, 286, 311n9; subjects of 280–283 Nietzsche, Fredrich 4, 153, 232, 273, 277, 283, 317n9 non-violence 155, 256–257 See also King, Martin Luther; Gandhi, Mahatma; satyagraha; violence Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS) 108, 109, 134, 214

15/05/2013 08:45:42

Index 345 Parti Communiste Français (PCF) 87, 100, 104; Césaire’s resignation from 110–111, 116 Parti Communiste Martiniquais (PCM) 98, 101 Parti Progressiste Martiniquais (PPM) 98, 100, 109, 111, 116 Patočka, Jan 63, 64, 273, 298n28 Platonic dissidence see Patočka, Jan politics of principle 3, 22, 24–25, 275; and Césaire 86, 96–97, 105; decolonization as 156; defined 15; and Fanon 206; and Glissant 232, 238; Haitian Revolution as a 171; and Robespierre 30, 43, 169; and Schoelcher 66; summarized as propositions 17–19; and Vastey 180 See also Haitian Revolution; Jacobinism; Black Jacobinism Popular Front 89 Prarial 35, 37, 58, 302n18 principle xiii, 3, 14–19, 22, 31; of the French Revolution 56; and Kant 55; and Robespierre 38, 41–42; and Toussaint Louverture 17, 59–65 Radical Enlightenment tradition 3, 30–37, 39, 46–47, 161–163; and Haiti 179–181, 188, 273, 275; and Jonathan Israel 30, 315n7 Rancière, Jacques 40, 232, 296n16, 297n20, 317n1 Raynal, Guillaume Thomas 176, 200, 314n7 relation see Glissant, Edouard Richepanse, General Antoine 149, 152, 155 Robespierre, Maximilien de xii, 15, 29, 33–40, 41–47, 49–50, 270, 284, 301–302, 307n16; and Césaire 94, 96–97, 105–106,

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 345

111; and Kant 51–54, 57; as ‘Moses of Modernity’ 313n3; and political violence 162–169, 199–200, 218; and Schoelcher 80, 83; studies of 299n2 See also Capet, Louis; Jacobinism; politics of principle; radical enlightenment; violence Rousseau, Jean Jacques xii, 5, 30; and contractual democracy 218, 303; and Césaire 106; and general will 316n11; and Kant 53–57; and Spinoza 32–33, 35, 36, 38–40, 48–49; and state of nature 219, 299n5 sacrifice 22, 39, 270; and Hegel 60; of Toussaint Louverture 61–65, 66 Sainville, Léonard 137 Sartre, Jean-Paul 251–261, 268; ‘Colonialism is a System’ 187; Critique de la raison dialectique 197; impact on Fanon 197–198, 210–211 See also Algerian Revolution; existentialism; humanism; violence satyagraha 21, 298n26 See also Gandhi, Mahatma; non-violence Schiller, Friedrich 51 Schoelcher, Victor 18, 66–68, 79–85; Césaire 96, 112–113, 151, 284; and Des Colonies françaises 9 Schwarz-Bart, Andre 312n15 Schwarz-Bart, Simone 126, 127 Scott, David 310n4 Sekyi-Otu, Ato 197, 201, 317n5 Senghor, Leopold Sedar 89, 100, 101–102, 137, 142, 272, 286 See also Négritude Sétif 134, 206, 194, 245, 315n2 Shoah 52, 192, 213, 214

15/05/2013 08:45:43

346

Caribbean Critique

socialism xii, 17, 23, 98, 117, 256 Socrates 21, 273 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 62 Spartacan slave revolt xiii, 11–12, 143, 257 Spinoza, Benedict de 22; political philosophy of 31–36, 49; and Haitian revolution 30 See also Black Jacobinism; Haitian Revolution; Israel, Jonathan; Jacobinism; politics of principle; Radical Enlightenment Spivak, Gayatri 308n21, 320n4 Stalinism 20, 92, 100, 103–105, 301n11, 308n17 See also PCF subjection: and Badiou’s analytic of policing 232–235; and Césaire 285; and Condé 119, 132; and Glissant 136, 154–155; and Sartre 258; post-Althusserian understanding of 101; racial 104 subjectivation 15, 101; and Badiou 11; and Hallward 268; and McNulty 42; and Toussaint Louverture 59–64; Césaire’s poetics as 285; in modern Haiti 226, 269 surrealism 11, 117 Syria 22, 210 Terror (French Revolutionary) 44, 165–167, 214 See also Capet, Louis; Jacobinism; Robespierre, Maximilien; Thermidor Thermidor 32, 44–50, 51, 165, 169, 184, 270, 284; and Kant 54, 58, 190 Ti-Jean 124–125 Tocqueville, Alexis de 66–85 Tonton macoutes 46, 219, 281 torture 18; and Algerian Revolution 134, 194, 208, 214–215,

Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique.indd 346

251–252; and Foucault 166; and plantation slavery 22, 136, 161, 166, 170–171, 183, 185; and Schoelcher 81 Toscano, Alberto 24–25, 318n12 Touré Sekou 105, 128, 131, 132, 281 Tout-monde see Glissant, Edouard Tropiques 98, 104, 117, 129, 247 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 29–30, 274 United Nations 114, 226, 282 Vastey, Pompée de 24, 31, 166, 172–191, 201, 232, 235, 241, 275 Vendée 46, 52, 58, 59 Vichy 87–88; and Martinique 285, 287 Vietnam War 194, 195, 258; Césaire’s response to 94, 104, 112 violence 48; anticolonial 112, 155; Benjamin distinguishes between divine and mythic violence 199; colonial 13, 245–250; divine 40, 164–165, 199, 210, 272; mythic 41, 133–136, 166–167, 200, 257; postcolonial 18, 216; revolutionary 53, 169–172, 210; state 166, 210; and Vastey 185–187 See also Algerian Revolution; Benjamin, Walter; Fanon, Frantz; Haitian Revolution; Kant, Immanuel; Robespierre, Maximilien de; Sartre, Jean-Paul; Terror (French Revolutionary); Thermidor; torture Vodun xii, 16, 148, 288 Wilder, Gary 90, 96–97, 306n1 Young, Robert 5, 259 Žižek, Slavoj 23, 296n16 Zola, Emile 180

15/05/2013 08:45:43