“For histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious does not take us forward; we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world.”
Benjamin, “Surrealism,” 189–90; translation modified
During the first decade of the twenty-first century, while several Latin American countries were preparing to commemorate two hundred years of national independence, Eduardo Grüner began the research on which he based this book.1 The book’s composition could be thought of as a sustained reading prompted by the experience of an enduring silence. This silence persisted even under the progressive governments then in power, governments that had allowed for the problematization of national histories throughout the region. Not even this process of problematization, which in many ways challenged more traditional approaches to local historiography, could account for the “strangeness” of the Haitian Revolution. It could not accommodate the complexities associated with that revolution, fought in the Caribbean in 1791 by slaves of African descent against a slaveholding colonial power that had just fought its own bourgeois revolution, centered in Paris. To be sure, in some Latin American countries, bicentennial celebrations became the occasions for rereadings of the past that sought to oppose the apologetic commemorations organized by oligarchs a century earlier. Still, Grüner argues, the forgetting of Haiti persisted even in these rereadings. With their exclusive focus on Latin America’s bourgeois revolutions, these rereadings ignored the one revolution in the Americas that was fought by slaves, who had been made into slaves by a European capitalism in the process of global expansion.
In the particular context of Argentina, this way of calling attention to the persistence of absences – or to a continuous absence that could be read in the discontinuities of the politics of memory – was also a way of underscoring the need to keep critically reflecting on the official histories forged by the region’s antipopular governments. Such histories sought to legitimate the various genocides and systems of exploitation of which they were the direct successors. But Grüner’s insistence on the importance of the Haitian Revolution was also a way of pointing to the limits of the various historical genealogies offered by national-popular governments, and of keeping alive a critical interrogation of revolution, a category at the time widely considered superseded. Grüner’s response was thus a double gesture: at once a critique of reigning capitalism and an effort to recover a revolutionary inheritance. In this latter effort, Grüner can be seen to continue the critical project that he had begun in his responses to arguments made by others, including Carlos Portantiero (La producción de un orden), José Aricó (“La búsqueda de una tercera vía”), and the members of the Club de Cultura Socialista, or Socialist Cultural Club. During the most recent, post-dictatorship phase of Argentina’s history, these authors had given renewed centrality to the problem of democracy, which they privileged over the quest for socialism.2 Grüner’s continued engagement with the question of how to subvert the capitalist regime in its especially extreme “peripheral” forms follows, in this sense, from the position that he had previously taken in the Argentine – and global – debate on the “crisis of Marxism.” In this debate, Grüner also took distance from contemporary interlocutors who, like Ernesto Laclau (1990; 2005), emphasized populism and the need to bring a post-Marxist thought into being. Such a thought would, according to these critics, inherit some aspects of the Marxist critique of capitalism, but would be freed from its economic essentialism and historical determinism.
Although Grüner shared a general commitment to questioning tendencies in Marxism that had become reductively economistic and/or teleological, he argued that “the case of Haiti” – and not only that case – made it necessary to think through a reality that was rendered unintelligible by the renunciation of totalizing categories. These categories included the “mode of production” and the “world-system,” and they tended to be displaced in the new theories of radical democracy, with their emphasis on the autonomy of the political. If, as Grüner argued contra Laclau and others, these categories needed to be retained, this was precisely because abandoning them meant giving up on the possibility of theorizing the forms of domination, the “combined and uneven developments,” and the internal tensions that characterized modernity. This complexity clearly marked the implantation of capitalism in Latin America and the Caribbean, and yet it could be ignored thanks to the linear temporalities that sustained historical reductionisms. Reflecting on “the case of Haiti” – on what Louis Althusser would have called the internal exclusion, the case that did not have a place in the bicentennial commemorations in Latin America and that, Grüner writes, had even less of a place in the memory and historiography of the French Revolution – offered an opportunity for thinking through the constitutively global, uneven, and “anachronistic” character of capitalist globalization. It thus also offered an opportunity to think through relations and dependencies that remained unthinkable: relations and dependencies between the political modernity that the revolution of 1789 had introduced into the metropole and the slavery that it perpetuated in the Antillean colonies.
All of this means that it is not enough to attempt simply to “restore” the silenced history of the Haitian Revolution or to correct the usual omissions in the historical record. Grüner’s argument, which continues the meditation on Marxism and psychoanalysis in which he has engaged for several decades, not least through an intense dialog with the Argentine philosopher León Rozitchner (1972; 1985; 1997), does not merely seek to remedy the forgetting of Haiti. Instead, Grüner argues that it is necessary to interrogate this forgetting as such. Like many theorists before him – including notably Susan Buck-Morss in her famous rereading of Hegel (Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History) – Grüner is fundamentally interested in asking what the difficulty of imagining the Haitian Revolution says, what this difficulty is about, and what theoretical schema might enable a rereading of this not-saying and not-knowing of the event of that revolution. Approaches that conceive of the problem as a mere deficit of historical memory, a shortage that could be remedied by an expansion of historical knowledge, are unable to register the expressive character of the omission or silence itself. These approaches are incapable of interpreting the not-saying as itself a kind of saying, and incapable of asking how this statement – a statement made up of words and silences, but also of material practices that are not reducible to speech – makes it possible to rethink modernity.
But what of the culturalist approaches and postcolonial theories that rose to prominence in the context of a crisis in the philosophies of history that was global in its scope? Can these offer the frameworks necessary for interpreting the “symptom that is Haiti,” and can they do justice to the contradictory nature of the modernity that has persisted in forgetting this symptom? Since the 1990s, Grüner’s writings have been engaged in a persistent, interested, and polemical dialogue with these theoretical perspectives. In El sitio de la mirada [The Site of the Gaze], Las formas de la espada [The Forms of the Sword], and, especially, El fin de las pequeñas historias: De los estudios culturales al retorno (imposible) de lo trágico [The End of Small Histories: From Cultural Studies to the (Impossible) Return of the Tragic], Grüner underscores the need for reflection on the theoretical present, even while he offers a critique of ideology that combines aesthetic reflection with symptomatic readings of the cultural objects of the past. In the form of critique that interests Grüner, critique cannot be brought to bear on “cultural monuments” without at the same time committing itself to an attentive listening to what “sounds hollow,” in Althusser’s words, in critique itself – what “sounds hollow,” that is, in the here and now of the thought that would undertake to analyze those monuments (“From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy,” 30). According to Grüner’s diagnosis, in the context of a triumphant capitalism that perceives itself as post-ideological, frictionless, and freed from all borders, it was necessary to produce such a symptomatic reading of certain tendencies in cultural studies.
When these approaches rejected the concept of ideology altogether, refused all totalizing perspectives,3 and let themselves be seduced by the metaphor of deterritorialization – as in the case of Renato Ortiz (1996), Grüner writes – cultural studies tended to make the proliferation of micro-histories into the inevitable fate of all forms of reflection that were not content to be identified with the philosophy of history or with the European understandings of reason that were dominant in modernity. But such a proliferation of micro-histories was disempowering for situated theories of emancipation in a world that, though characterized by an unprecedented homogeneity, imagined itself to be reconciled and multicultural, a world in which culture itself had become capital’s primary productive force and means of production. In this context, cultural studies ran the risk of losing their critical edge. The reaction against the dogmatism of the British Communist Party, begun in the middle of the twentieth century by Raymond Williams, William Hoggart, E. P. Thompson, and the young Stuart Hall, had signaled the importance, for Marxism, of attending to the specificities and to the autonomies of what had formerly been called mere “superstructures.” But, for Grüner, the dominant trends in cultural studies during the 1990s made it instead clearly continuous with a mode of domination whose self-characterizations could not be questioned or contested in the terms on which these trends relied. Hence Grüner’s insistence that if the work of interpretation “remains content to chart the deconstructive ‘dispersion’ of the subject in the textuality of an aestheticizing mode of production, without reconstructing the critical analysis of the mode of production (or what Jameson calls the totality) that has made the subject possible, then we are not far from being complicit … with the veritable physical, cultural, and ‘civilizational’ genocide that the mode of production is carrying out and that aestheticization serves to mask, dissimulate, and displace” (El fin de las pequeñas historias, 39).
The spirit of nondialectical overcoming that, according to Grüner, animated most of the then-proliferating approaches to “postmodernity” was especially worrying because of its underlying or explicit faith that these approaches had left Marx behind. In this complacent self-representation of a present without Marxism, the present not only prematurely celebrated the advent of difference and of reconciliation in a world in fact increasingly leveled by equivalences and yet profoundly unequal; at the same time, this present deprived itself of irreplaceable theoretical tools for critique. The innovations introduced at the ideological and political levels first by post-Fordism and then by the fall of the Berlin Wall cannot be accounted for exclusively in the terms made available by categories like neoliberalism. They must also be read against the backdrop of the continuity of the capitalist mode of production, which Marx and Marxisms – that is, both political and theoretical Marxisms – made it possible to conceptualize.
But this is not a matter of returning to the pristine doctrinal unity of a tradition. It is instead a call for conceptual rereading, rereading prompted by current injustices and marked by a willingness to be surprised by the tensions, discontinuities, and unforeseen interconnections that constitute this Marxist tradition, which is not self-identical but rather “out of joint” and “in crisis” from the first. On the one hand, in a world of global capitalism it becomes impossible to imagine a critical perspective capable of de-totalizing this regime that does not inherit and learn from Marxism. On the other hand, to “inherit” from Marxism is, for Grüner, to avoid hermetically sealing oneself off in its tradition and responding only defensively to its crisis. Reckoning with the crisis of Marxism means not becoming entrenched in it, but rather rediscovering it as always already besieged by its philosophical, aesthetic, and political “others.” This reckoning means continuing Marxism’s internally dissonant trajectories and exposing oneself to these, undergoing the experience of them. In a more tragic register, reckoning with the crisis of Marxism implies learning “to be astonished” again, in Walter Benjamin’s words: astonished by its internal tensions and its constitutive openness to what is unresolved in the past and what is unpredictable in the future (“What Is Epic Theater?” 150).
In Grüner’s reading of Marxism, an ongoing reflection on the conditions and dialectical processes4 involved in the production of the given is combined with Marxist theory’s characteristic openness to what is not theory, to what theorists ranging from Lukàcs to Althusser would have called history or political practice. This makes Marxism particularly well suited for understanding modernity and its differences from and continuities with our present. But this means understanding modernity as an aporia rather than a coherent identity, thinking of it as marked by returns and anticipations rather than as a unidirectional process. It means, in other words, understanding modernity as this book explicitly proposes. In the terms that Grüner introduces in his Prologue, Marxist theories make it possible to understand modernity as “an epoch divided against itself,” one that has sought to “resolve” this division in different ways.
Thus, building on some of the arguments made by the Frankfurt School critical theorists, and by Theodor Adorno in particular, this books invites us to ask, first, to what extent the modernity that speaks in and through the universal aspirations of the French Revolution is – and to what extent it is not – the same as the modernity that speaks in and through the traffic in, and exploitation of, African slaves in the Americas that continued to take place at the very same moment in history, the moment when European capitalism was consolidating itself. Pursuing this interrogation means addressing complex problems, including, for instance, the need to “invent” new forms of slavery and racism that would allow for the development of what, according to linear and stagist logics, should have already overcome reliance on slavery altogether: the establishment of capitalist relations of production that were “free” precisely by virtue of being capitalist. As in the metaphor of darkness and light taken up in Grüner’s original Spanish title, La oscuridad y las luces [Darkness and Enlightenment], a title that implicitly referred to Max Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, this promise of universal freedom implied casting shadows over much of the planet. Modernity was thus divided from within. But Grüner also asks us to understand both European Enlightenment thought and the Haitian Revolution as two different ways of relating to this division, to the internal incoherence of modernity. In this way, his book deactivates the question that we might otherwise be tempted to ask: is this, then, a book about the Haitian Revolution – “Grüner’s book about Haiti,” as we have taken to calling it in Argentina – or is it instead a critical reflection on modernity, one that attends in particular to modernity’s Eurocentric biases? Formulated in this way, the question is itself Eurocentric, since there would be no felt need to choose between the supposedly universal and the particular case if the book were about, say, the French Revolution. When we are asked to choose between modernity and Haiti, the problem of the modern seems already to have been resolved, not a matter of debate and internal division. It is as if we were dealing with a neutral term, one immediately identifiable with universality. But it was precisely the biases underpinning “universal modernity” that the Haitian Revolution exposed with its insistence that these biases were irreconcilable with its demands. When slaves literally seized the claims of universal liberty and equality, they made the unconscious particularism of what was called “universal modernity” legible. That is, they shed light on European thought by showing that it only considered free and equal those who were not slaves, not black, not African, and not American. The “universal,” in other words, in fact belonged only to certain white European men.
As the reference to “Counter-Modernity” in Grüner’s subtitle suggests, this book does not ask us to choose between modernity and Haiti. Instead, Grüner argues that it is in the Haitian Revolution that we can find a way of resolving the conflict of modernity, one that was not equally available to every political subject. This resolution – never guaranteed to emerge, let alone to triumph – could only be achieved by those who very clearly bore the symptoms of the not-all that was Europe’s “everyone.” That is, it could only be achieved by those who bore the symptoms of the structurally unequal nature of the modern European distribution of “universal equality.” To put the matter in somewhat more epistemological terms, we could say that the “cases” in question here are not mere “examples” of the aporias of modernity. Instead, these cases emerge as singular inflections – unequally consecrated in subsequent history – of the conflict of the modern. These different inflections imply different relations to the materiality of the aporias of modernity, and they open onto social and political futures that are also different. The “cases” that Grüner considers are thus not the passive objects of his analysis; they prompt uneven, situated reflections like those offered here.
By “here” I mean “in this book,” but also “in this South.” This South has read – but, Grüner insists, it has also written – the modernity that has come to be. This South does not simply “receive” from the North. On the one hand, it suffers what the North has imposed and continues to impose on it. On the other hand, however, the South constitutes the condition of possibility for the North’s emergence at the economic, political, and philosophical levels. To sustain the tension between these two immediately contradictory statements is a political and interpretive task that is indispensable for both the possibility of justice and the fulfillment of the modern promise of universal emancipation. Because Haiti is in Hegel – even despite Hegel himself – we should not consider it only a passive point of arrival. Nor should we approach its history by adopting a disciplined localism, or let ourselves be seduced by fantasies of disconnection, or convinced that we can get rid of problems by replacing the great German idealist with other, local authors – “our” authors – in our bibliographies.5 If what Grüner calls counter-modernity acts from a symptomatic place that is not just any place, and if the Haitian Revolution in no way contents itself with “replicating” the French Revolution, then this singular place of action is not singular in a proprietary or originary way. This is because it is nothing more and nothing less than the site of a tension. It is less a place external or prior to the modern than a place where the tension between modernity’s violence and its emancipatory promise is maximally heightened.
In fact, both the image of a passive South, destined merely to undergo and transcribe “history,” and the fantasy of an unscathed, fully self-sufficient South, found in counternarratives written from the standpoint of our “native soil,” are rendered inoperative in the pages of this book, which lets us recognize something sinister in the antithesis itself. Or rather, Grüner’s book lets us recognize as sinister the suggestion that we must choose between these two alternatives: an impoverished “autonomy,” won at the cost of ignoring the uneven social and political distribution of inequality, and a minoritization that requires that we recognize ourselves either as impotent victims, the recipients of international charity, or as attesting to a new barbarism that blights the world while Western civilization looks on, aghast.6
The “universalist” illusions of equidistance and symmetry, the paternalist gaze, and the sense of horror that some in the West feel before what they experience as absolutely other are all simultaneously brought into crisis by this book.7 And these crises take on a new urgency in a turbulent Latin American present, one characterized by supremely contradictory phenomena. On the one hand, as is well known, during the past few years neoliberal and authoritarian forces have taken power through formally free elections. These regimes not only envision a massive widening of the breaches of inequality and call for increased reliance on repressive apparatuses; they also openly proclaim the legitimacy of persecuting their political adversaries, as in the notorious case of the President of Brazil, elected in October 2018. On the other hand, mass popular mobilizations have multiplied and continue to multiply, with people peacefully taking to the streets to show that the conditions that those in power seek to impose are intolerable. As in the case of the powerful women’s movement in Argentina, these demonstrations also highlight the protestors’ willingness to defend their right to search for new horizons for life, horizons whose existence has so far been unsuspected. In this context, we might wonder, or rather, we are compelled to wonder: how are we to read these events? Are they merely “Third World outbursts,” located at a convenient remove from the “normal” course of world events? Are they signs of an uncontaminated insurgency, alien to historical developments in other latitudes? Are they a simple continuation of these developments, transposed into the periphery? If the theoretical frameworks forged to understand the European present often fail when they seek to give an account of this kind of emergency – this kind of contemporary political conflict – in Latin America and the Caribbean, simply renouncing the effort to understand such situations means participating in their exoticization, if only unwittingly. Such dilemmas call instead for a dialectic like the one offered in the following pages, one that is capable of rediscovering mystery in what is closest to us and a certain familiarity in what seems to be most foreign. This dialectic can become both a means of understanding and a flash of light at a moment of danger.
Translated by Ramsey McGlazer
Bibliography
Notes
1 Eduardo Grüner is the author of many books that combine subtle reflections on art, engagements with Marxist philosophy and psychoanalysis, and profound insights into the present situation of late capitalist societies. He has played a foundational role in the development of critical thought in Argentina and Latin America. A sociologist, Grüner completed a PhD in Social Science at the University of Buenos Aires, where he has since taught for several decades and served as Vice Dean at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Director of the Instituto de Estudios de America Latina y el Caribe (Institute for Studies of Latin America and the Caribbean). Since the end of the last dictatorship in Argentina, he has been a frequent contributor to many journals, publishing cultural and political criticism, and a collaborator in critical artistic endeavors, including the Red Conceptualismos del Sur (Network for Conceptualisms of the South). In 2011, Grüner was awarded the Argentine National Literary Prize for his body of work and for his book on the Haitian Revolution in particular. This translation is a revised and abridged version of that study (La oscuridad y las luces: Capitalismo, cultura y revolución). 2 For a very interesting analysis of the drift toward democracy in Argentine political thought, see Martín Cortes’s book on Aricó’s work, Un nuevo marxismo para América Latina. 3 Including those in which totality is not affirmed but appears “only polemically,” in Theodor Adorno’s words (“The Actuality of Philosophy,” 120). 4 By “dialectical processes,” I mean here processes that are neither linear nor mechanical nor marked by a single meaning. 5 Consider the authors who are given pride of place in Grüner’s work. Simply listing these authors suffices to offer a practical sense of his resistance to the exclusion of European philosophers or their substitution by “local” authors in work written from the standpoint of the South. Instead, Grüner brings these figures together in unusual combinations that estrange them from their traditional places in Western philosophy. Sartre, the Frankfurt School critics, and Althusser thus come to share space in Grüner’s work, where they are indispensable references – European references who nevertheless somehow cease to be European precisely in their encounter with one another, as this encounter is staged in Grüner’s texts. This kind of theoretical syncretism leads to an estranging redefinition of terms that are, taken on their own, familiar in the context of European thought. But they are only familiar when used at a reasonable distance from one another. This is a distance that the Latin American theorist does not respect. 6 At the end of the 1930s, considering the rise of fascism in Europe, Benjamin wrote this famous sentence: “The current amazement that the things that we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical” (“Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 257). He called for a philosophy that would be guided by its own estrangement and attentive to the secret affinities between things that would appear to be opposed, absolutely distinct from and without any relation to one another. This book of Grüner’s is heir to Benjamin’s call in at least two key ways. On the one hand, the book insists that not only the stigmatizing overrepresentation of Europe’s others, but also the impossibility of imagining these others, constitutes a form of violence (in this case, racist violence) that makes the resemblance between Europe and its others unimaginable. On the other hand, Grüner insists that, in the exercise of such forms of violence, the self-understanding of Europe itself is also damaged. More concretely, by remaining unable to understand the Haitian Revolution, Europe truncates its own understanding of itself. By denying or disavowing historical processes in the Americas, Europe not only remains blind to its own civilizational violence – a violence also exercised within Europe’s territories, including in its most extreme form in Nazi concentration camps, which, Grüner writes, might not have been imaginable were it not for plantation slavery. Europe is also “expropriated” of the possibility of imagining a modernity – and a revolution – that would be alternatives to modernity’s dominant form and to bourgeois revolution. A Europe that does not understand Haiti thus does not understand itself. 7 The “illusion of equidistance” is sustained by modern universalism, which relies on understandings of reason, equality, and freedom that do not attend to the asymmetry that in fact inheres in power relations. This universalism thus errs by ignoring difference or asymmetry. By contrast, both what I am calling “the paternalist gaze” and the sense of horror produced by the “barbarous” other exaggerate difference and ignore similarity. Paternalism ignores similarity because it imagines us in the South as pure victims, while imagining itself as omnipotent. The horrified Western gaze ignores difference because it imagines us in the South as frenzied, absolutely other, and thus incomprehensible, capable of committing all manner of political atrocities because of a “deficit of institutions.” Although these sets of images or fantasies may seem to grant us a great deal of (barbarous) power, in reality they make us into passive subjects, prey to the power of impulses that we are (unlike those in the North) entirely unable to control.
Praise
We demand the right to Opacity. Through which our anxiety to have a full existence becomes part of the planetary drama of Relation: the creativity of marginalized peoples who today confront the ideal of universal Transparency, imposed by the West, with secretive and multiple manifestations of Diversity.
Edouard Glissant
The lost causes are exactly those which might have saved the world.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
In what used to be called Hispaniola (today Haiti and Santo Domingo) the native population numbered about one hundred thousand in 1492, but had dropped to two hundred a century later, since people died of horror and disgust at European civilization …
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Haitians shall be known from now on by the generic denomination of blacks.
Article 14, the 1805 Constitution of Haiti