In August 1791, after a massive gathering of slaves held in the Bois Caïman, culminating in an equally massive Vodou ceremony, the first revolution for independence in Latin America and the Caribbean broke out. This happened in Haiti, then the French colony of Saint-Domingue, by far the richest possession of any colonial power in the Americas. Although Haiti declared independence in 1804, no Latin American country, with the predictable exception of Cuba, held a bicentennial celebration in 2004. Such celebrations were delayed until 2010, and they instead commemorated the bourgeois and “white” revolutions that took place in the rest of Latin America. It would be impossible to try to reconstruct the infinite complexities of a revolution as atypical and unprecedented as the Haitian one: never before or since, in all of human history, did slaves take power and found a nation. I can, however, try to indicate, if only in shorthand, the importance of what the Haitian Revolution allows us to think. This will be the purpose of the rest of this book. Here I begin with somewhat more general reflections.
The use and hyperexploitation of the labor power of African slaves was generalized throughout the Caribbean islands and in the most productive parts of Brazil, but it was also prevalent in what are now Honduras, Panama, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Belize, and Peru, and, to a lesser extent but no less consequentially, in Mexico and along the Río de la Plata. This was one of the most horrifying and unspeakable ethnocides (and genocides) in the history of human societies, comparable only to the genocide (and ethnocide) of indigenous cultures in what came to be called the Americas, which took place during the same period and was closely connected to slavery. Slavery thus played a substantial and decisive role in the formation of modernity. It was integral to the consolidation of the capitalist mode of production, centered in Europe; to the emergence of properly modern forms of racism (or perhaps of racism as such, given that premodern imperial forms of slavery were not particularly “racist” in the modern sense of this term); and to the technical and rational foundations of a despotic and cruel regime that wielded power over millions of defenseless human beings.
The American slave plantation contained in advance all of the horrific forms of exploitation that would appear in the first industrial factories as well as in that other modern invention, the concentration camp. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to claim that without the precedents of African American slavery and Amerindian semi-slavery, the Nazis’ crimes would have been infinitely less conceivable. So, too, would the crimes that followed theirs (or, as in the case of Armenia, preceded these crimes) have been difficult to imagine: wars of extermination targeting entire populations from Hiroshima to Lebanon, from Vietnam to Bosnia, from Rwanda to Iraq, from Palestine to Darfur. Every reader will have his or her own further examples in mind, among them the bloody military coups that assailed the Southern Cone in the 1970s. All such “rational” extermination campaigns made the twentieth century the most violent and ruinous in history. It is as if the centuries of slavery and colonialism had created a sort of buffer or margin of tolerance for the intolerable, as if these centuries had led to a sinister blurring of the boundaries between the possible and the impossible, the believable and the unbelievable, or what we might call, in another register, the imaginable and the real. Setting aside the details of the comparison between plantations and concentration camps, in the rational and despotic institution of slavery, in its regime of “total administration,” and in slaveholders’ willingness to exterminate their slaves whenever this was deemed necessary – for instance, when these slaveholders sought to suppress uncontrollable slave rebellions – we can recognize the American origins and logical and political foundations of what in the twentieth century would come to be called totalitarianism. Hence Hannah Arendt’s association of the latter with colonialism in general. Five centuries of naturalization – which have included the naturalization of critiques, which have become routine and ritual in “progressive” thought – have effectively anesthetized our consciousness and deprived us of the language that would make it possible for us to fully account for the extent to which we are the descendants of the horrors of slavery. Neither this book nor any other, taken alone, could claim to remedy this forgetting. No will to language can take the place of what can only be constructed through material and social practices. Nevertheless, I hope – and this is my highest aspiration – that this book might modestly serve as a protest against the complicit silence of governments, institutions of all kinds (including academic institutions), and, of course, the dominant mass media, whose members are the all but unconscious spokespersons for an equally dominant globalized ideology. These people and institutions all fall silent when they are asked to consider the role of slavery in the formation of modernity in general, and in particular the role of the Haitian Revolution in presciently and radically questioning the internal, irresolvable contradictions of this modernity.
The clearest indication of such a widespread, complicit silence can be seen in a simple and apparently banal fact: again, the “bicentennial” celebrations commemorating the independence movements in Latin America took place in 2010. The controversies surrounding this emblematic date show the political and ideological importance of symbols. But in fact there was no “bicentennial” for all of Latin America and the Caribbean. The first and most important revolution took place not in 1810, but in 1804, in Haiti, formerly the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Why, then, was the bicentennial not celebrated in 2004? Was this a symptom of racism, given that, as is well known, the vast majority of Haitians are the descendants of slaves “imported” from Africa? Or was this a matter of a contagious forgetting of the “slave revolution,” which our bourgeois nations preferred not to remember? Were we dealing with a discomfort caused by the memory of the Haitian Revolution, a discomfort related to the current cooperation of many Latin American governments in the “peacekeeping” occupation of the poor island nation, which the President of the United States of (North) America recently called a “shithole,” along with the countries of Africa?
The history of racial slavery forces us to confront a dilemma that may be unresolvable: given that this history is consubstantial with and inseparable from what we have come to call “modernity,” does reckoning with it – and acknowledging the moral disgust that the origins of Western modernity produce in us – mean renouncing or repudiating modernity and the West as such, as a whole? Modernity is clearly European and Eurocentric, and we must wield all of the theoretical, ideological, and political weapons at our disposal as we seek to counter its Eurocentrism and the coloniality of power that persists in the present. But does this mean that we should throw the baby – the undeniable, if not inevitable, ethical, political, and cultural achievements of modernity – out with the bathwater? Or should we seek a more “balanced” position, one that would let us, as we say, separate the wheat from the chaff, weighing modernity’s unprecedented human horrors against its benefits? Surely these include the gift of a social, political, and symbolic sensibility that is rightly said to give us tools with which to counter these horrors, with incomparably greater sophistication than our ancestors could?
But where are we to draw the line? Common sense suggests that without the horrors brought about by modernity, the much-touted weapons that we now possess for countering these horrors might not have been necessary. How is it that we have come to ignore this fact? We can, of course, as always, return time and again to Walter Benjamin’s celebrated dictum, according to which civilization and barbarism are inextricable. Wasn’t Greco-Roman antiquity also founded on and sustained by slave labor? And didn’t this antiquity give us things – things like Homeric epic or Sophoclean tragedy – that have proven essential for our culture as well as our politics? And weren’t the cultures of the “barbarian” Middle Ages likewise sustained by the servitude of serfs, or by the Crusades (the first great, proto-modern genocide, which set a precedent, as many have noted, for the colonial enterprise)? Didn’t these same Middle Ages also produce Dante and Giotto? And what of the violent passage from premodernity to modernity, made possible by the violent constitution of nation-states or wars of religion? Did these not produce Shakespeare and Cervantes, Boccaccio and Góngora, Corneille, Racine, and Rabelais? But do we therefore have the right to excuse these epochs on the grounds that they gave rise to these figures? What if we were to conclude that the work of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Racine was in some way made possible by slavery, serfdom, or the wars of religion? This kind of reasoning is, moreover, not unique to Western modernity. For example, is it possible to separate the marvel of the Egyptian pyramids from the thousands of innocent lives that were sacrificed so that they might be built?
Obviously, we do not have definitive answers to these questions. It is also obvious that we cannot renounce Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. And it is equally obvious that we do not have a right to distance or exempt ourselves from the many instances of modern barbarism. Thus I can at best formulate an inconclusive – and not at all consoling – hypothesis: the most intellectually honest approach is to sustain the contradiction to the extent possible, to stay with the tension and conflict without the hopes of “overcoming” that characterize Hegelian Aufhebung, among other processes. As soon as we arrive at such a position – giving up the ideological or imaginary consolations of equilibrium, or the notion of a reconciled reality, as Adorno would say – we have already reached a point of no return. At this moment, the whole world – including primarily the world of ideas, of “symbolic competences” – appears as a site of struggle, an undecidable battlefield from which we cannot flee and that we cannot enter with impunity. The problem, moreover, is that this battlefield is not at all homogenous or balanced; the forces that confront one another here are not at all symmetrical. On the contrary, modern coloniality has in fact produced a profound – and unprecedented – asymmetry, an asymmetry that operates at all levels (social, economic, ideological, symbolic, and cultural) and for the first time on a truly global scale. And where there are asymmetries produced not by nature, but by exploitation, illegitimate domination, and racism, there can be no “equilibrium” or balance. The dominators and the dominated cannot be judged by the same standard. Siding with the victims thus becomes an ethical task, to be undertaken without idealization or romanticization. Their memory requires not consolation, but rather a stake in the search for the truth, however difficult this search may prove to be. Only from what Sartre would have called this situated perspective can we aspire to a kind of “objectivity.” Only from this standpoint and on the basis of this solidarity can we “redeem” what is redeemable in modernity – that is, what knowingly or otherwise is more than merely culpable of or complicit with barbarism.
I hope that all of this can be read in what follows, if only between the lines. Of course, the set of questions or problems that this book addresses – racial slavery, the Haitian Revolution, and its political, theoretical, philosophical, and cultural consequences, which are treated in the following chapters – is first of all historical. But this is not a work of “professional” history. To be sure, I will have to reconstruct the facts “as they really were,” as Leopold von Ranke urged, and I will do so by drawing on the secondary sources that seem to me to be most trustworthy and serious. But I will also remain mindful that “facts” are not always already made, but rather continue to be made in and through our situated interpretations of them. Still, in their very nonexistence – their no-longer-existing – these historical facts continue to mark modernity, like ghosts that return to haunt the living, like Hamlet’s father demanding justice. This is because the facts decisively marked the origins of the modern, despite all of the efforts that have been made to deny them. They also mark “postmodernity,” if such a time can be said to have taken place. Paradoxically, so-called “postmodernity,” in its effort to dilute history and to deny the solidity of both past and future, becomes all but indistinguishable from the shabbiest nineteenth-century positivism in its understanding of history as an absolute, unrepeatable past. Historical epochs are not the mere sum of singular facts, or the accumulation of events that are over and done with. They are also, and above all, logics. On account of the coloniality of knowledge and power, the logic of modernity is the logic of an epoch divided against itself, like Freud’s divided subject, to deploy another analogy. But the modern epoch has also struggled to displace this internal division, to remove it from view, to hide the fact that modernity can appear to be a harmonious, homogenous “totality” only because it denies the deep fracture at its origin.
The tradition of thought that has been called Eurocentric has proceeded through a double movement. On the one hand, it has engulfed the different historicities of its others (who have been many, in fact the majority), including its “African American” others, to take the example nearest to hand, in order to sustain its own effort to recast a particularism as universalism, to lay claim to Civilization, Reason, and History as such. On the other hand, and at the same time, in its “tolerant” and “progressive” forms, this thought has indeed acknowledged the Other’s difference, but it has done so by attributing an absolute and radical alterity to this Other. It has constructed the Other as its own outside, its exteriority, as if to say: “There they are, those Others who have nothing to do with us.” As if this particular, modern otherness were not the product of colonial barbarism, which today we call “globalization.” Likewise, in Marx’s account of commodity fetishism, we “forget” the process of production – and even more consequentially the relations of production, which are relations of exploitation and domination – and instead regard the finished product from a distance. For this reason, the uncritical celebration of Difference – so fashionable today in certain relativist, more or less “progressive,” right-thinking circles – is extremely dangerous. Such celebration risks becoming complicit with the erasure of the process by which our modern history was produced. And in any case, no: there is no pure Difference. Modernity is an epoch of contamination that has – I would underscore this point – produced difference through the exercise of power.
This book therefore seeks to develop a critical philosophy of culture. This is a matter of de-totalizing (to abuse another Sartrean category) the false totality of Eurocentrism. It is also a matter of showing, again, that the latter can only represent itself as a totality because it is not able to acknowledge what it lacks, because – here the language of psychoanalysis is apposite, although the question is profoundly political – it is a castrated totality that refuses to acknowledge its own castration, even in the current moment of its “decadence.” This refusal is not without its own logic – because if the acknowledgment were to take place, then the totality would become something else altogether. It is extraordinary and horrifying – but it should not come as a surprise – that the old Europe of the Enlightenment has today become a nightmarish inferno for the millions of refugees who manage to reach its shores, after having to abandon thousands of others who are left to drown in the bottom of the Mediterranean. The repressed returns without fail, and anyone who does not know how to, or who cannot, or who does not want to face the continuities between the slavery of yesterday and the genocides of today should be regarded as complicit, whether by action or omission.
Considering the history of racial slavery, and in particular the history of the Haitian Revolution, has seemed to me to be the best way to approach these questions, not least because this revolution was the most radical, the most decisive and therefore also the most “forgotten” in modernity. The Haitian Revolution clearly refused the pretensions of “false totality,” of the European “general equivalent,” even, and especially in its most “progressive” versions, as these were embodied contemporaneously in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
This book thus does not aspire to be only a history of racial slavery or of the Haitian Revolution. Indeed, it does not even seek to be such a history first and foremost, although it will devote plenty of space to “facts,” not all of them well known. What I seek to do instead is to critically examine the implications – the actual and potential, hypothetical, even imaginary, and in no sense definitive implications – of the “facts” of this history, their relevance to the project of de-totalizing Eurocentrism.
Of course, I think first and foremost as a Latin American. This should not go unmentioned. And above all it should not be avoided as a question. Addressing it should be an inevitability, even a fatality, like the one Borges had in mind, but one whose acknowledgment leads to a “suspicious” relation to unconscious Eurocentrism. After all, there are no camels in the Koran, to repeat another phrase from Borges, who notes that here camels can be taken for granted. But this is not always the case, obviously.
Having said this, I return by way of conclusion to the problem with which I began. Racial slavery and the Haitian Revolution will be at the center of the text that follows. But they also constitute the pre-text, in the strongest sense, for an essay on the mode of production of “Latin American” critical thought. Addressing such a pre-text, this book, like any other, cannot aspire to say everything, not even when it comes to its main theme. I can only aim to say what seems to me to be essential, or at least unsilenceable in the context that I discuss and in light of the “strategic” considerations that I have sketched out above. Undoubtedly, I have left many questions unaddressed. I hope that these will be problems for other books to address, and not only my own.