3
“[W]hat the Romans did to other nations, was in a great degree done by Cromwell to the Scots; he civilized them by conquest, and introduced by useful violence the arts of peace,” the very British Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote in 1775.2 But the great poet John Milton, who was also English, offered a less complacent version of this civilizational epic. Like Rome, he wrote, “the forcible landing of a fierce Nation [could bring] Union, peace and plenty, greatness, and the flourishing of all Estates and Degrees,” or it could bring “Invasion, Spoil, Desolation, slaughter of many, slavery of the rest.”3 Throughout the colonial period, these two visions coexisted and at times conflicted with one another: two visions of the enterprise that constituted the modern world-system.4 According to whether one laid stress on the “civilizing” or the enslaving aspects of the colonial enterprise, one was on one side or another of the debate (although in Milton’s case, an emphasis on enslavement did not imply a denial of the “civilizing” aspects of colonialism). This debate would eventually lead to abolitionist movements critical of slavery. But perhaps, in these competing points of view, the differences are less stark than they at first seem. A first clue confirming this possibility is the reference, in both of the texts I have cited, to Roman colonization. As we read in López de Gomara’s Historia general de las Indias (1552):
Never, since there have been kings, did any Greek or Roman or anyone from any other nation achieve what Cortés achieved when he captured Montezuma, a very powerful king, in his own house, a very strong place surrounded by infinite numbers of people. Cortés did this with only four hundred and fifty men.5
All three of these texts refer to a “premodern” colonial enterprise whose specific difference from modern colonialism is that it did not give rise, as part of its world-system, to a thought of individual freedom, universal equality, or human fraternity – a thought that, in the modern world-system, would openly collide with the “material basis” of the economy founded on slavery and thus on a racism that was no less “modern.” It is not sufficient to say – although it is partially true – that these values were already at play in the Christianity in whose name and under whose banner the Conquest was fought. As is well known, early Christianity never seriously questioned the institution of slavery. Nor did it advocate for a radical transformation of socioeconomic and political structures. To be fair, it can be said that perhaps during the first centuries of its existence, slavery was still thoroughly naturalized. It still made up part of what we could call the “common sense” of the period. This is not, of course, an excuse that can be made on behalf of the Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century, who did question feudal servitude and “slavery” (though I will soon consider their conceptual limits), and who did argue for a radical – and even, as it happened, a “revolutionary” – transformation of the social and political order.
This flagrant contradiction between two complementary opposites cannot be fully comprehended and “overcome.” Rather, it must be adequately and critically addressed. Otherwise, what we could call, following Adorno, a negative dialectic – that is, a dialectic that lays stress on the conflictual moment of negativity rather than on the reconciliation or overcoming of Aufhebung – reinstates the “material basis” of the conflict (where “material basis” is defined in a broader and more profound sense than in “vulgar” Marxism).6
This was something that even the clearest and most honest critical minds of the Enlightenment were not able to do. It will soon become clear why I make this claim. We will also see that in Hegel and in Marx, who writes in Hegel’s bifurcated wake, the limit of this possibility is finally approached. I will conclude this chapter by trying to show that, before Hegel and Marx – that is, at a moment chronologically between the time of the Enlightenment philosophes and the works of these later philosophers – the Haitian Revolution and its textual “realization” in the original Haitian Constitution managed to confront the enormous (and possibly unresolvable) conflicts of the truncated modernity represented by the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Hegel, and even a certain Marx. First, however, I ought to say something, if only schematically, about the imperial ideology that is one of the defining traits of modernity, although certain forms of Eurocentrism seek to remove it from the center of the modern world.
“Imperial Ideology,” the Question of Slavery, and the Contradictions of Spanish Absolutism
From the very beginning of the sixteenth century, modernity was traversed – indeed, Anthony Pagden would say “presided over” – by the struggle for control over the non-European world, fought by three main powers: Spain, France, and England.7 These imperial powers perceived colonial territories as “a sort of new creation” (and this expression is not from a rabid imperialist ideologue but rather from … Voltaire). In other words, the “New World” was a sort of tabula rasa, a creatio ex nihilo that seemed to have emerged from the colonizers’ own minds. “Discovery,” exploration and conquest – all euphemisms for exploitation – became emblems, symbols, and allegories of national pride. The material economy of colonization was displaced by – or rather invested in – the auratic symbolism of Empire. The most powerful nation-states – recent inventions – immediately became imperial states, and the new state system quickly became a world-system. For each of these states, the opportunity arose to feel like a new Rome – the difference being, of course, that now they were in competition with other “Romes.” But in fact this competition provided further nourishment for the growth of national pride, which in turn led to even more competitiveness. Hobbes’s metaphorical description, written in 1651, proved to be apt: the “state of nature,” the “war of all against all,” became the plane of “international relations” for the relatively new European interstate system. The process of colonization, on the one hand, formed the world-system. On the other hand – or on the other side of the same coin – this process from the first fragmented a modern Europe that had only just begun to consolidate itself. Europe would only begin to exit this state of fragmentation after World War II, four and a half centuries after the process began.
But to return to the early sixteenth century, all of the great powers committed to the colonial enterprise harbored the fantasy of Universal Monarchy. The first, chronologically, was Spain, which was obsessed with establishing genuine “sovereignty over all the world.” But we already know that the word that came to prevail was Empire. An ancient and ambiguous signifier: imperium, in classical Latin, named the executive authority of the magistrates, and, like any other attribute of the Roman state, it was imbued with a sacred quality, an association with the sacrum, that would persist long after the beginning of modernity. Already in the humanism of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the Ciceronian etymology of imperium was forgotten, and the word came closer to meaning “sovereignty,” as in Machiavelli or Bodino. As Pagden explains, the term was also used in the context of power exercised in the heart of the city, or what the Aristotelians, following Aquinas, called the “perfecta comunitas” or perfect community.8 But the word was also used to refer to the state’s own territorial extension, achieved by conquest. Here authors turn again to Rome, and more specifically to the historian Sallust, who was possibly the first, in the first century ce, to use the phrase imperium romanum to refer to the geographical area under the auctoritas of the Roman “people.”
All these senses of the word imperium – as limited or independent government or “perfect community,” as a territory made up of various political communities, as the absolute sovereignty of a state over conquered territories – coexisted at least until the late eighteenth century and in some cases even later: Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic France is a case in point, as is Victorian England.
In any case, in addition to these denotative meanings, we need to consider a powerful connotation, not entirely explicit but always “overdetermined” as an ideological rationalization. Given that – even and perhaps especially during the French Revolution – the original and insistent reference was to classical Rome, the cradle of Western culture, together with Greece but even more influentially in juridical and political terms, the imperium became a synonym for Civilization, for all civilization as such. The three greatest European imperial powers, Spain, England, and France, described the conquest and colonization of the Americas as a universal project that would lead to the exportation of Christianity and European culture to “barbarian” and backward societies. In exchange, these societies had, the story went, “conceded” to imperial rule, rule by imperium. Or, to do away with euphemisms, they were controlled politically and economically; their lands and populations were under occupation. Today, this civilizational discourse can sound to us a bit like naive cynicism, nakedly or transparently ideological. But all of this was at the same time said with real conviction.
The new intellectual field that had begun to form in the Renaissance, even the most “progressive,” only very rarely managed to escape all the ideological pressures of national pride that, in Europe, were closely associated with colonization and with the material bases of the new world-system conceived as an imperium universalis. The same is true of slavery. For this reason, Enlightenment thought found an unconscious dissociation unavoidable. On the one hand, the “civilizing” imperium had been, in the last instance, “beneficial” to the parts of humanity that had been “left behind.” But, on the other hand, many “errors and excesses” had been committed. The worst of these was slavery. As we will see, these thinkers generally discussed slavery only obliquely, in a more or less metaphorical way. But even when it was discussed more “literally,” slavery was condemned on exclusively ethical grounds. If having “exported” civilization was culturally laudable, having imposed slavery was morally intolerable. It was impossible to see both sides of this opposition as extremes on a single spectrum, united by the “bridge” that was the world economy, the world-system. The result was a sort of (ideo-)logical compromise, in which the (insuperable) conflict between the part and the whole never acquired the necessary critical visibility. In what follows, I will consider this problem closely.
Before that, however, it is necessary to pause briefly to address what might at first seem like an enigma or paradox – because we never seem to fully learn the lesson of the logic of combined and uneven development. The apparent enigma or paradox is this: it was in “backward” Spain, a nation that is often said not to have had an “Enlightenment,” that the debate on the legitimacy of slavery (or at least on the enslavement of Amerindians) began, two centuries before such debates emerged in eighteenth-century French culture (where, in fact, as I have already shown, the problem of slavery was not really confronted). Spain thus did have, in its “imperfect” and contradictory way, an Enlightenment. It can be seen, for example – to take an example that is not the only one but is perhaps the best – in the debate between Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, and in a context that would have come as a surprise to the thinkers of the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment: the Catholic Church.
But, to take one step at a time: in what sense was Spain – “the Spain that conquered the New World” – “backward” or “behind”? Undoubtedly, if we seek to retain a stagist version of history, even in a Marxist vein, then the development of Spain’s productive forces, as well as the development of its relations of production, was far behind England and France. We already know that this is a key reason why it was not the “Spain that conquered the New World” (to cite Rodolfo Puiggrós’s title again) that took fullest advantage of its riches.9 On the contrary, in a sense these riches stalled Spain’s capitalist development.10
Does this mean that Spain, in the early sixteenth century, was a clearly feudal nation? The answer depends on one’s point of view. From a reductively “economistic” perspective, of course, it was closer to the ideal category of “feudalism” than to the ideal category of “capitalism.” But, apart from the fact that such ideal categories are guiding fictions rather than genuine historical categories – as their creator, Max Weber himself, knew very well – we should not forget that Spain was one of the first great powers to achieve state unity in modernity, thanks to the unification of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon. Spain was in this sense a “vanguard” state, and for this reason it earned the admiration of the founder of modern political philosophy, Niccolò Machiavelli. At the same time, however, Spain lacked some of the economic and especially the social structures that would have placed it at the forefront of political modernity. In Spain, a “national bourgeoisie” did not develop at the same rate as elsewhere. Such a bourgeoisie might have been capable of creating the material basis that would have made it possible for the enormous riches won in the Conquest to generate an accumulation of capital that would have been much greater than in England, the Netherlands, or France. We know from many sources and analyses that the Spanish aristocracy had a serious weakness for ostentatious consumption and was firmly resistant to intervening in the process of material production. For this reason, it depended exclusively on commercial, rather than productive, capital. This aristocracy thus could not “reinvent itself” as a bourgeoisie. But this does not mean that it continued to be fully feudal in the usual sense of the word. On the contrary, it was precisely Spain’s political unification and its centralization and political transformation into an absolutist state that radically altered the classical logic of feudalism even before a bourgeois logic existed to take its place. I cannot engage here with the complex twists and turns taken, for example, in the context of the Anderson–Poulantzas debate, on whether the absolutist state was the last political redoubt of the feudal lords in decline or the first political stronghold of the ascendant bourgeoisie.11 What matters to me in this context is that the absolutist state in general was, in early modern Europe, the product of a time of transition, an “undecided” time between the hegemony of the aristocracy and that of the bourgeoisie.
This is particularly true in Spain, where, because of the “backwardness” of the bourgeoisie, for a long time – much more than in England or France, of course – the “feudal” aristocracy managed to retain control of the state. But, by virtue of its “transitional” nature, this state had already ceased to be the aristocracy’s own arena of political representation. Juan Carlos Rodríguez has undertaken an extraordinary analysis of this apparent “contradiction,” and has shown that, in the period that interests me – the period of the “discovery” of America and the first wave of colonization – the Spanish aristocracy had to produce several syncretic ideologies in order to adapt to new political forms. This “contradictory” situation had effects in fields as apparently “apolitical” as literature or religion, whose structural function began to change radically after the emergence of an ever-stricter division between the public and the private, a division that would not have made sense during the heyday of feudalism.12 We are thus faced with the historical paradox of a proto-bourgeois state without a bourgeoisie, where superstructural hegemony is claimed by the aristocracy.
Now, why did a bourgeoisie capable of claiming this kind of hegemony not appear in Spain phenomenally, so to speak? Fernando Mires ventures a daring but very suggestive hypothesis. This hypothesis is Weberian, but it also allows for a serious critical interrogation of the Weberian argument, which associates capitalism with Protestantism alone. Mires suggests that the answer has to do with the expulsion of the Jews, an expulsion that famously took place at the same time as the conquest of America.13 This is something that Rodríguez had already suggested as one of the most “contradictory” symptoms of the Spanish absolutist state. In Spain, unlike in England or France, Rodríguez writes:
[T]he strategy of unity tries to “ignore” the private/public dichotomy, tries to recuperate the feudal “unity” (a unique field traversed by sacred elements and others relating to lineage). This tactic explains why the Inquisition, an instrument now destined for state control of the public realm, conceives itself not in “universal” terms, as the persecutor of heresy and of religious evil in general, as under feudalism, but as the guarantor of “public” (“national”) unity. And it does so as if this unity were also religious. … The ideology that pervades the Inquisition is the same one that is used – and the one that is lived: it is not a question of mere “hypocritical” convenience – in the process of the expulsion of the Jews (and also of the Moriscos), as previously in the process of their conversion.14
In other words, it was precisely the political and ideological hegemony of the Spanish aristocracy in the quasi-bourgeois state that prevented the formation of a full-fledged bourgeoisie. If there was, indeed, a social group that could develop in a capitalist direction and drive the formation of a “national bourgeoisie” on the Iberian Peninsula, it was the Jews, whose economic practices – trade, finance, small industry, craftsmanship – were more dynamic, and who also observed a certain “ethics of saving and frugality” that might have been as favorable to accumulation as the Protestant ethic. If this was not to be, it was on account of the irreducible ideological and political resistance mounted by the most aristocratic and “feudal” estates of the dominant class. And, of course, on account of the Catholic Church.
Suffice it to say, then, that the greatest obstacles to fully capitalist development in Spain were ideological and political. And to say “ideological and political” in the context of early sixteenth-century Spain is already to say “theological,” even if, as Rodríguez rightly notes, theology and the Church had changed their functions. It was within theology that the great philosophical and political debates of the period unfolded, and it was within theology that the best and the worst of those debates could be found, the most “enlightened” as well as the most “retrograde.” The “progressive” ideas of Las Casas as well as the “reactionary” ideas of Sepúlveda (although we will soon consider the complex way in which these somewhat rigid characterizations can be dialectically revised) could only emerge from within the Church. The paradox, then, is that this economic and social belatedness of Spain in fact made possible one of the most “enlightened” debates of the period – because as a result of this belatedness, there was still no strict separation between the economic and the religious spheres. Paraphrasing Richard Morse, we could say that Spain’s belatedness or backwardness impeded the production of the neatly typical bourgeois situation in which “conscience and virtue became private interest, and science, from the popular point of view, became utilitarianism.”15 Conscience and virtue had to enter into considerations of, for example, the legitimacy not only of the conquest but of the enslavement of indigenous people. Of course, “conscience and virtue” were also key factors in the French Enlightenment two centuries later. But in a completely different sense: by this time, France was already a fully bourgeois society in which, at least in the intellectual field, an ideal of the autonomous subject, capable of “thinking for himself,” had taken hold. Here debate was entirely “secular,” and “secularism” implied an individualist principle and of course took for granted a dichotomous division between the public and the private. For the Spanish conquistadores of the sixteenth century, by contrast, things were not so simple or so clear. As Mires writes:
Establishing an ideology of slavery became an enormous task for men of the Church, since slavery entailed the violation of the foundations of theology in general. In other words, this project could only be understood as an act of theological revisionism. “What God does not give, Aristotle lends” could have been the slogan of the theologians of slavery, who sought to reconstruct Aristotle’s arguments on “natural slavery,” thus opposing the traditionalist theologians, who were not resigned to seeing their conception of the world destroyed by purely philosophical means.16
Note that it is traditionalist theologians who raise doubts about the legitimacy of slavery, while it is the revisionists who construct convoluted philosophical arguments to justify it. It is these “revisionists,” to return to Rodríguez’s categories, who think of the enslavement of indigenous people (or Africans, since ultimately it amounts to the same thing) as a contribution to the formation of Spanish national unity. Indeed, Sepúlveda is such a revisionist when, in a series of very strange arguments that one might suspect of being “contaminated” by Protestantism, he seeks to separate inward faith from outward faith, in order to conclude that inner virtue does not necessarily need to be translated into public action. That is, in his way, Sepúlveda already opens the door to the “bourgeois” dichotomy separating public and private, defined as two autonomous spheres. For Weber, this separation and autonomy are typical traits of modernity and of an instrumental rationality that tends to separate a logic of ends from a logic of values.
Of course, however “revisionist” he may have been, Sepúlveda returns to Aristotle, an obligatory source for any theologian of the period. His scholasticism (“the natural light of reason”) exemplifies what Rodríguez calls the “dominant ideology of feudalism,” that is, substantialism.17 From this neo-Aristotelian perspective, the soul necessarily dominates the body because it is superior. In this way, according to the “light of right reason,” there can be no doubt that the morally and theologically correct thing is for the body to obey the soul. It is thus no great surprise to learn that this model is used to characterize the relationship between masters (souls) and slaves (bodies). Malcolm Read is thus undoubtedly not exaggerating when he says that this scholastic substantialism, which included the theory of “natural slavery,” was the main ideological support for Spanish imperialism.18 But this does not change the fact that, in addition to being guided by the tradition to which he submits, Sepúlveda made several important “compromises” with modernity and introduced significant innovations, including stylistic innovations like the use of a dialogic rhetoric that was meant to defuse the arguments of slavery’s critics, including the “traditionalist” Las Casas.
This is a new and extraordinary paradox, then: it was because the Spaniards of the sixteenth century had practically no sense or experience of the “freedom of opinion” – and because they thought that what the Church said was, literally, sacred – that Las Casas’s victory in the debate could signal a “progress” for indigenous peoples. (This was, to be sure, a progress within a regressive global catastrophe.) The obscurantism of the most encompassing form of thought in the period thus turned out to be a relative gain for an immense part of humanity. Is this an argument in favor of obscurantism and against “subjective autonomy”? Of course not. It is instead another testament – and not just any testament – to the fact that history, as Hegel noted, sometimes advances “on the side of the unjust,” not the just. Or, to be tedious, it is a testament to the “virtues” of combined and uneven development, virtues that can also be seen in the realm of ideas.
But, as we know, the same was not the case for African slaves, who did not at first enter into Las Casas’s theological and philosophical considerations. On the contrary, in this instance he did contribute, by action or omission, to a justification of slavery, consenting in 1516 to the importation of African slaves in order to alleviate the situation of indigenous communities. Apart from Las Casas, moreover, neither the Spanish Church nor the state worried much about the fate of African slaves (even if it is also true that Spain did not massively or directly participate in the slave trade but remained a “consumer” of slaves). Why? I do not have space here to consider this complex question at length, even if I did have the ability to do so. Instead I will simply underscore a few points:
To be fair, however, it was not as if there was no discussion of the slave trade, albeit discussion that was much more muted than Las Casas’s defenses of the “Amerindians” had been. The Jesuit Luis de Molina was perhaps the first great theologian to rigorously examine the problem of slavery. In the first of the three books that make up his De iustitia et iure (1593), Molina considers African slavery and the problem of its legality at length, and in terms that are not without significance.19 Among the black peoples of Africa, Molina explains, powerful kings were rare. The territory was divided among many kinglets, who had been at war with one another since ancient times “and without any good reason.” Many of the slaves bought by Europeans along the coasts of Africa were originally from these groups. (Generally speaking, this is true, in fact.) This was a first criterion used to give “legitimacy” to the slave trade: it was not a matter of “making” human beings into slaves, since those bought and sold were already enslaved. But, according to Molina, the Africans themselves confessed that they would sell their wives or their children “on a whim, because they felt like buying a bell or some other Portuguese goods.” (This is already a claim that is much more difficult to prove.) By contrast, Molina did not consider it lawful or legitimate for whites buying slaves to enslave those who had been condemned to slavery by their own people as punishment “for things like stealing a chicken.” In order for the crime of slavery to be permissible, the slave had to have done something that in Spain or Portugal would have led to imprisonment or a comparable form of punishment.
Did Molina therefore argue that slavery should be abolished, that Africans should no longer be enslaved? This was another story: it was necessary, he claimed, to find out whether each specific slave had been subjected to a “just” or an “unjust” servitude. “Finding this out” was, however, nearly impossible, since those who first enslaved these Africans had systematically refused to justify or explain their actions. Molina thus proposes a Solomonic solution: in case there is any doubt about the permissibility of continuing to keep a slave enslaved, the principle of a presumption of freedom, comparable to what we call the presumption of innocence, should prevail, just as, according to Las Casas, it had been allowed to prevail in relations with the indigenous peoples of Spanish America.
Another Jesuit, Tomás Sánchez, would refine Molina’s arguments a few years later, around 1610, and would do so at the very moment when an official commission – the Mesa da Consciência – was gathering, in a session that predictably concluded that “black” slavery was fully permissible. But it was a third Jesuit theologian, Alonso de Sandoval, who finally composed an entire treatise on the subject of slavery: Naturaleza, policía sagrada, profana, costumbres i ritos, disciplina i catechismo evangélico de todos los etiopes, first published in 1627 (and again later under the shorter and more programmatic title De instauranda Aethiopum salute). Purporting to endorse Molina’s arguments, Sandoval nevertheless underscored the possibility that all African slaves had been and were permissibly enslaved – which was absolutely not Molina’s opinion, as we have seen. In making this claim, Sandoval relied on the arguments of Luis Brandon, rector of the missionary Jesuit college of San Pablo de Loanda, or Luanda, who had purported to “show” in 1611 that the Indians themselves presumed that they were free, whereas blacks did not share this presumption of freedom, “because the most common and current thing was to be a slave and sell oneself as such.”20 To “sell oneself as such”? Was being sold a matter of the slaves’ own will, then? But in that case, wouldn’t voluntarily selling oneself presuppose precisely what the author has denied to black people: the presumption of their own freedom? It could not have occurred to Sandoval that, even if his argument were correct – which of course it wasn’t – this would not be a sufficient justification for the enslavement of blacks by whites. This would have required recourse to a “Kantian” line of reasoning (that is, the presumption of an “autonomous subject” who makes his or her own decisions, even if this decision entails selling him- or herself as a slave) that would not appear for more than a century, or a kind of “cultural relativism” that would not emerge for more than three centuries. On what basis did Sandoval argue that black people had what today we would call a “masochistic” disposition, such that their enslavement was nearly voluntary? He appealed to the well-known interpretation of the ninth chapter of Genesis, pointing to the curse that Noah placed on Ham and his descendants. According to this interpretation, Ham and his descendants were eternally condemned to slavery. Sandoval took this interpretation uncritically from Solórzano y Pereira, despite the fact that yet another distinguished Jesuit theologian, Francisco Salón, had already demonstrated that the interpretation was completely false and even “perverse,” since Noah’s words could in no way be taken as a precept but were instead meant at best as a mere prophecy.
I could continue in this vein, since the arguments made by Molina and Sandoval were repeated for nearly two centuries, during which the debate was not definitively resolved. But, as I noted above, these debates – debates that were much less heated and painstaking and that yielded fewer results than those that pertained to the “Indians,” but that did of course take place – unfolded in the context of theology. This made a whole series of complex, “disinterested” moral considerations unavoidable.
As I will show in the next section, the philosophers of the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment simplified matters. They wrote in a context in which a separation between theology and philosophy was firmly established, to say nothing of the separation between theology, on the one hand, and political and social theory, on the other. In any case, their contradictions derive from other sources.
Shadows in the Enlightenment: Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and “Slavery”
In the critical philosophical texts of the Enlightenment, from Rousseau to Montesquieu, from Voltaire to Diderot, the word slavery appears repeatedly. But in the vast majority of cases, slavery is a metaphor, or even, in the most impassioned texts, a hyperbole, used to refer to the “third estate”: the nascent bourgeoisie, the “middle class,” or what the English would call civil society. This oppression was imposed by a corrupt, decadent, and authoritarian aristocracy, an aristocracy that was also imagined to be particularist (a characterization and concept to which I will return). That is, this aristocracy defended its narrow “caste” interest (since social class was not yet a thoroughly developed category). The first sentences in the first chapter of Rousseau’s Social Contract are very famous: “Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains. A person deems himself the master of others, yet still remains more of a slave than they.”21 Here, slavery is, again, a metaphor, perhaps a foundational metaphor, since Rousseau is possibly the first to use it. We could also speak of an allegory, given that the text’s later insistence on the figure allows for the construction of a sort of philosophical narration of the “enchainment” of men. But which men? Rousseau’s allegory does not consider, for instance, the “Amerindians,” who instead serve as the paradigmatic examples of men who are naturally free (which can only be an involuntary but cruel irony in light of their colonial situation). The “good savage” is also a metaphor (one that is, in my view, overestimated and overanalyzed). What Rousseau is really addressing is an exclusively juridico-political form of “enslavement”: the “enslavement” of the emergent bourgeois, the citoyen who will soon be celebrated by the French Revolution.
There can be no doubt that this is a matter of metaphor. Otherwise, why would Rousseau say that there are men who believe they are masters, when really they are slaves? The actual colonial masters did not need to believe themselves anything; they simply were. Not a word in this absolutely foundational work of modern political philosophy addresses actual slaves, the slaves who were not at all metaphorical and who, under the whip in colonial plantations like Saint-Domingue, were creating the wealth of France and especially the fortunes of many of the bourgeois “enslaved” by aristocratic and ecclesiastical tyranny. Neither can any such word be found in an even more important text of Rousseau’s, a text that in its own title names inequality: the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality among Men.
This situation is, to put it mildly, at the very least an interesting point of departure for what we usually call an “analysis of ideological discourse.” Any moderately enlightened eighteenth-century reader “understands” the metaphor perfectly and can easily decipher what it “refers to.” It would not have occurred to any such reader that there was a real, material referent for the “chains” to which Rousseau refers: concrete and literal chains borne by millions of people in the plantations of the Antilles – including the French Antilles – or in Brazil. That “literal” slavery was unrepresentable, because its naturalization had rendered it invisible: it was far away in space and therefore absent from what a Freudian would call the “perception-consciousness system” of Europe. It was the dark side of the world-system – like the dark side of the moon. It was the hidden face of the imperium. Therefore, we must already abandon the metaphor of the bourgeois in chains as well as the notion of a more “rational” political model, where the “rational” is defined by civilized and civilizing Europe. To schematize, we could call this a universality of those rights that Marx would later say were the rights of the abstract citizen, not yet of man. This new universality is so powerful that it “naturally” displaces – or removes from view – the fact that this same “universal” depends for its very consistency on the strict exclusion of the “concrete particular” that gave the lie to the claim of “universality.” This exclusion was even operative at the level of language, since the material referent has become a pure, self-sufficient metaphor.
This question is not only philosophical in the strict sense. Yves Benot explains with characteristic rigor:
Even the most daring spirits succumb to another contradiction, one that we should recognize they could not assess scientifically at the time. Thus if Montesquieu or Voltaire loudly proclaim that slavery and the slave trade run counter to human reason … they know as well that the material progress from which they benefit and that, for them, is the very foundation of Reason has its roots in slavery and colonial conquest.22
It would be hard to find a clearer articulation of the correlation – mediated and dialectical, to be sure, but a correlation all the same – between the material base of French society and a necessarily partial, if also sincere, understanding of reason, convinced of its own status as “totality.” Confronted with realities like those of slavery and colonialism, this particularist understanding of reason – this reason, which in fact did not have the ability to critique itself – could only limit itself to the making of purely moral and “humanitarian” claims, as we have seen. The “science” or knowledge that was missing was replaced by compassion. This compassion is genuine and truly felt, undoubtedly. But it is also necessarily limited and ineffective. The problem is thus not that the philosophes were timid or wavering, but rather that they understood the economic reality of their own century all too well, and the exigencies and needs of the social class that they represented. The colonial question is thus at the center of the economic problematics of the Enlightenment (although, paradoxically, in the next century it will be more dissimulated as the source of mere “exigencies and needs”).
They all know it: after the Treaty of Paris of 1763 – which marks the loss of a considerable number of France’s colonies, but not its colonial possessions in the Antilles, which is also to say its richest, as we know – the colonial question becomes the order of the day. For many of even the most radical philosophes, the problem becomes how to conserve the colonies, how to recover, administer, and efficiently govern them, how to “solidify” them. In any case, it is on the basis of this question – in an enormous but only apparent paradox – that Enlightenment philosophy will be forced to advance in its effort to offer answers to the colonial question.
Let me be clear. I am in no way saying that Rousseau was consciously a racist, a reactionary, an ideologue who advocated the oppression of non-European peoples, or anything of the kind. Nor am I suggesting the same thing of any of the other great Enlightenment thinkers. They are all valuable examples of what today – or rather, the day before yesterday – we would call “committed intellectuals.” (The comparison is not an arbitrary notion of mine. Consider Sartre’s famous arrest in the 1960s, and the words of De Gaulle, who was then President, when he ordered the philosopher’s release: “One does not imprison Voltaire.”) However, among the various Enlightenment thinkers there are differences of degree when it comes to “commitment.” Some at times approach – without ever fully crossing – the limits of the absent “science” to which Benot refers. Diderot, for example, can be seen as one of the most consequential anticolonialist thinkers that modernity has produced, at least before the twentieth century.
Something very similar can be said of Condorcet. And for his part Montesquieu represents a highly original case. In the exhilaratingly satirical “philosophical fiction” called Persian Letters, Montesquieu views Paris from a perspective that is in every sense estranged: that of two Persian visitors, whose impressions produce a devastating parody of “Western” manners and customs.23 Here we can see a bold declaration of adherence to “multiculturalist” principles avant la lettre, as well as an anticipatory and ironic critique of colonialist Orientalism in Edward Said’s sense.24 Later, in Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, another monumental text of the Enlightenment, often cited as a founding text of French abolitionism, there are oblique references to colonialism and even to the “enslavement” of colonial peoples.
Of course, these reflections are followed almost immediately by Montesquieu’s famous arguments on the influence of physical and geographic environment, and even climate, on nations, and the familiar warnings about the lesser “laboriousness” and “industry” of the peoples from warmer regions, which often just happen to be colonized territories. These are also arguments on the benefit of “exporting” Western progress to these countries, for their own good.25 When it comes to the question of “race,” these arguments quickly devolve into the most exasperating kinds of racism: “Those concerned are black from head to toe, and they have such flat noses that it is almost impossible to feel sorry for them.” It is not possible, Montesquieu continues, that God, “who is a very wise being, should have put a soul, above all a good soul, into a body that was entirely black.”26 Still, we can at least see glimpses of anticolonial and even antislavery critique elsewhere in Montesquieu’s writings. Here, slavery may be a metaphor, but it remains a powerful one.
Nevertheless, there is something in all of this that does not fit with the whole. Christopher Miller has very astutely observed that many of the most powerful planter slaveholders were decidedly “enlightened” – and we have already seen that more than a few will become good republicans and even “Jacobins.”27 Miller also painstakingly shows (and several passages in Bell’s trilogy confirm this in the case of Haiti) that many of these planters had libraries that included books by Voltaire and Rousseau as well as the Encyclopédie. Nothing indicates that these were simply nouveaux riches who bought books by the meter to decorate their salons and convey a false sense of learning. But then – Miller asks himself with a hint of sarcasm – what happens to a slaveholder when he reads Rousseau or Voltaire? The response, in the briefest terms possible, is: nothing that mattered, or at least nothing that mattered to the slaves or to the world-system that depended on their labor, labor thanks to which the most refined masters could educate themselves and buy the expensive volumes of the Encyclopédie. I would underscore this point: in the 1767 edition of the Encyclopédie, any of these planters could have read the entry for the “Slave Trade,” written by Chevalier de Jaucourt. One part of this entry reads: “This buying of Negroes in order to reduce them to slavery is a trade which violates all religion, morals, natural law, and all the rights of man’s nature.”28
By this point in history, in fact, in the eyes of any moderately informed and intellectually honest person, whether or not that person was a slaveholding planter, the crudely ideological justifications for slavery had been demolished by the philosophes’ critique. We must therefore ask again: what happened, then?
Of course, it would be easy – perhaps too easy – to respond somewhat schematically, by saying that material interests allowed for what I have called the disavowal of contradictions. (But this would not explain the fact that, by contrast, many of the philosophes – as in the case of Voltaire, demonstrably, or as in the case of John Locke in the previous century, as we have seen – did have interests, if only indirect interests in the “business of slavery”: parcels of land in overseas plantations, investments in shipping companies whose profits derived largely from the triangular trade, and so forth.) But in addition, in this chapter I would prefer to limit myself to what is called “intellectual history,” avoiding sociological (and even more so biographical) reductionism as much as possible. Let me begin, then, by drawing again on Benot, who recalls that the Encyclopédie itself contains statements that are decidedly limited – when they are not openly contradictory – on the colonial question. Addressing the American colonies specifically:
Since these colonies have been established only for the needs of the metropolis, it follows:
Here again the “iron cage” (to abuse Weber’s phrase) of the economic base emerges with perfect clarity. Hence we also see the limit and (insoluble) contradiction internal to Enlightenment thought: the colonies must be maintained at any cost, but condemned to slavery. It is a pity that the “needs of the metropolis” referred to here depend absolutely on slave labor. Without slavery, there are no colonies, since at this point it is perfectly clear that “colony” is (not exclusively but decisively) an economic category. There is thus nothing to be done. We can only take a step back, condemning the excesses of slavery, again from a strictly moral perspective. That is: there is nothing to be done that would seriously threaten the sound sleep of the “Enlightened” planters. If their business was immoral, but at the same time they were obliged to continue for the sake of the “health” of the French state, then it was this state, at the time an absolutist monarchy, that should be blamed. Et voilà: one could (and it is a small step from “could” to “should”) be both a slave trader and “progressive” at the same time. But there is an additional question of what could be called style. The problem, at this level, is that the “demolition” of pro-slavery ideologies was limited, or, to cite Miller again, “replaced by irony.”30 In fact, the weapon of irony, which in the European context could often be truly “devastating,” intolerable for power, was haloed in a friendly lightness when other, non-European and nonmetaphorical, slaves were at issue. As E. D. Seeber notes, in the work of the philosophes, “there is a danger of finding negro slavery treated only in a spirit of levity and indifference.”31 “Levity” is in fact what we find in Voltaire and Montesquieu, and “indifference” (in the strict, etymological sense of non-differentiation) is what Rousseau demonstrates, as we have just seen. Montesquieu’s levity – and perhaps to a certain degree his inadvertent complicity – are evident already in the Persian Letters.32 There we find a harsh critique of the way slave labor, when used in the mining of precious metals in the Americas, ruined the lives of slaves. This is indisputably true. But only in the mines? Why does Montesquieu not devote so much as a word to Caribbean plantations? That is: what he is criticizing is implicitly Spanish slavery, or the use of African slaves in extractive mining. This use of slave labor was undoubtedly as wrong as all others, but, as we have seen, it was also much less quantitatively important. Montesquieu made these arguments at a time when France and Spain were engaged in longstanding conflicts. His critique can thus be seen as “patriotic” in this sense; and the price of his patriotism (its cost to “universal truth”) was a willingness to stay silent about France’s own terribly destructive plantation slavery. Moreover, in The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu everywhere speaks of the enslavement of Africans “in their colonies,” as if the Africans had always been in the Americas, and had themselves been the colonizers. In other words, Montesquieu presents a critique of slavery (albeit one downsized in the ways we have seen), but again he does not say a word about the traffic in slaves – the triangular trade that was constitutive of the new world-system, in which, as we know, France very actively participated. We can already anticipate that this move will characterize practically all French philosophy, journalism, and literature written during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as a good part of the twentieth. This includes both abolitionist and anticolonial literature, which share the tendency to deny or displace France’s specific responsibility, offering instead a general critique of the “evils” of slavery or colonialism.
Here again, fetishism is fully operative, though in an inverse way: rather than a part taken for the whole, we have a whole taken for the part. Through this operation, slavery, when it is not made into a mere metaphor for something else, functions as an “abstract universal” without concrete historical determinations.
But the fact remains that in the immense majority of cases it is a metaphor for the political “slavery” suffered under the Ancien Régime, which Montesquieu, like many other philosophes, rigorously distinguished from what he called civil slavery, that is, the real or veritable slavery of the plantations and mines. This distinction is of course a subcategory of the distinction canonically established by John Locke nearly a century earlier, between political society and civil society. This distinction served, among other things (not all of them “bad”), to render passive a “civil society” conceived as something different and separate from its political representatives. In the liberal tradition that Locke represents, “civil society” is a euphemism for the market, which remains “autonomous” from politics. In the more politicized thought of the French Enlightenment, “civil society” is the sphere of the citoyen, of the bourgeois, a sphere distinct from the state and still substantially continuous with Locke’s political philosophy.
The metaphor of “political slavery” thus implies a program for the emancipation of civil society from the “chains” of its oppression by the despotic state. But by definition this is applicable only to peoples who could reasonably conceive of a separation between the “political” (in the strict sense of state institutions) and the “civil.” Of course, this is not the case in “primitive societies” like those in Africa and elsewhere. Here, presumably, there is no “politics.” Here, everything is “civil,” or rather the distinction makes no sense. Hence the conclusion that material, concrete, nonmetaphorical slavery should be called “civil” and, in the best of cases, should be thought of as a moral evil (where “moral” is also defined in the strict sense, as relating to mores or customs), and not as an institution (a “wicked” one, to be sure) that was first of all political. Still less, from this perspective, should slavery be considered a systemic (economic, social, political, ideological, and cultural) structure that, at least until then, had been absolutely indispensable for the functioning of the world-system.
We can thus see why a white planter in Haiti, or in any of the other plantation colonies, would read Montesquieu in this way. Indeed, in what other way could he have read Montesquieu? He thus had no need to recognize the necessary contradiction between his sympathy for, or even his active participation in, the struggle against political slavery, on the one hand, and, on the other, his maintaining so-called civil slavery on an island far from the metropolis, an island mostly populated by illiterate “savages” who had nothing to do with “politics.” In the next section, I will show that the Haitian Revolution constitutes a devastating critique of what I have already repeatedly called all (false) philosophical and political “universalism.” So, too, does the document in which it resulted, the Haitian Constitution of 1805, a legal and political text that is in every sense exceptional and that is of course consistently unrecognized and ignored in debates among constitutional scholars and political scientists. But the revolution also constitutes a critique of the false separation between the political and the civil, in that it points to the problematic intersection of race and class. This makes the separation between the civil and the political truly unthinkable from any minimally logical point of view.
I will soon return to this enormously complex and exciting problem. Let me say, for now, that in order to proceed rapidly, I have made my argument under the rubric of “intellectual history.” But this does not in any sense mean that the question I am addressing is purely historical (at least in the conventional sense of the word, although it is historical in the Benjaminian sense to which I have frequently referred). On the contrary, this is an argument about the present in a double sense: on the one hand, because our modernity still maintains, in its essentials, the division between the political and the civil, whether implicitly or explicitly; and on the other hand, because our “postmodernity” has led to a veritable pandemonium around the question of multiculturalism. This pandemonium appears to be the great novelty of our “post-historical” times, though the question is in fact already present (which does not, of course, mean resolved – but then is it resolved today?) in the Haitian Revolution and Constitution, that is, in both the events and the texts. This demonstrates that the question is strictly modern, and not “postmodern” (if we even want to retain that notion). But it belongs to what I call a critical counter-modernity of which the Haitian Revolution and Constitution are the first expression, as well as one of the most radical and profound instances. I will return to this problem, too.
Let me now ask: what allows Rousseau, the radical Jean-Jacques, who in his Essay on the Origins of Inequality arrives at the very limit of a critique of capitalism (and of previous European modes of production), to locate the origin of all human injustice in the institution of private property and more specifically in the ownership of land?33 Would it not be logical that he would see in the private ownership of human beings an even more aberrant historical phenomenon? In fact, in Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse one of the key characters, Saint-Preux, recounts how, during his four-year voyage through “the four parts of the world,” he bore witness to the horrors of European domination, including the enslavement of Africans, and how he saw “a fourth part of [his] fellow men turned into beasts in the service of others.” He concludes: “I bemoaned being a man [j’ai gémi d’être homme].”34 It is difficult to find a literary declaration more dramatic than this one in the period – with the possible exception of the declarations made by the Abbé Pluche. But this is, precisely, a literary utterance. We are dealing with a work of fiction, though, to be sure, as was often the case among eighteenth-century Enlightenment authors, a polemical one, what today we might call a “thesis novel.” That is, again, we are dealing with a metaphor with purely moral import. Nothing comparable can be found in Rousseau’s properly philosophical – that is, his theoretical and political – works, not even, as I have already indicated, when the object of these works is precisely inequality and its origins. In his Essay on the Origins of Inequality, as in The Social Contract, the exclusive theme is “political servitude” in Europe. Which is understandable. After all, what did Africans – to take only the example that concerns us here – have to do with “politics”? In Émile, the verdict is clearly delivered: “Negroes don’t have the sense [le sense] of Europeans.” 35
But to be fair, in The Social Contract, there is a passage that not only refers to the question of slavery, but does so in terms that go beyond mere moral(izing) condemnation: “[T]he right to slavery is null, not only because it is illegitimate, but because it is absurd and meaningless. The words slavery and right are contradictory; they are mutually exclusive.”36 Here there is thus a consistent juridical, political, and logical argument that makes it possible to question the very structure of something like the Code Noir, to which I have already referred.37 It is patently “absurd,” Rousseau says, to try to legislate what is “illegitimate” from any point of view. It is as if a penal code were to painstakingly distinguish between different kinds of murder or robbery, not just to categorize them and discriminate between the penalties proper to each, but in order to realize these crimes within the law. The problem is that, here once again, the reasoning is abstract and general. We cannot detect any concrete historical referent for Rousseauvian “slavery,” except in asides in which he refers to slavery in ancient Greece, Rome, or Egypt. In other words, we are dealing with a metaphor, encore. It is aggravated – because a metaphor can indeed be grave – by another passage in The Social Contract, in which Rousseau addresses his contemporaries directly, delivering this surprising warning: “As for you, modern peoples, you have no slaves, but you are yourselves slaves; you pay for their freedom with your own. Well may you boast of this preference; I find in it more cowardice than humanity.”38 “You have no slaves”? This is truly stupefying. How far can disavowal go? The statement is that much more shocking because it comes from perhaps the most “progressive,” the most radical philosophe of the period.
In any case, it is a slip (if I can call it that) that is extremely interesting given all that I have been saying in this book. Explicitly addressed to “modern peoples,” these sentences attest precisely to a representation that has been rendered partial, fully Eurocentric and thus cropped, cut off from “modernity.” As though swatting away a fly, this representation removes from view what has made “modernity,” among many other things, possible, constitutively: what has made this modernity what it is.
Let me note in passing that it would be mistaken to believe that we are simply dealing with an ideological limitation inherent in even the most “advanced” eighteenth-century thought. To take just one well-known example from current European philosophy: when Jürgen Habermas famously speaks of “the unfinished project of modernity,”39 is he not endorsing the idea – an idea already detectable in Rousseau, though Habermas refers more frequently to Kant – that there is just one “modernity”? From our parts of the world, could we not respond that the project of that modernity – European modernity, which is obviously the one to which Habermas refers – is, in fact “finished,” and that this project included slavery? Could we not adduce numerous examples to show how this “finished project” was opposed from the first by what I have called a counter-modernity like the one represented by the Haitian Revolution? It is this counter-modernity that is, in fact, “unfinished,” and this makes it unnecessary to remain confined by the ideal that only the good old, unfinished, European modernity can counter the “post-modernity” that is Habermas’s unnamed enemy in his famous essay. Such confinement is unnecessary because we are dealing with something else, something that of course includes Europe but does not make Europe its center.
But I digress. In the passage I have quoted, the Rousseauvian critic clearly refers to the “representative” political system. As is well known, in Rousseau’s political philosophy the only irrefutable criterion of legitimacy is what he calls the general will. Although we may not know very well what this is – it is not the will of the majority, as in democratic liberalism, but nor is it the will of all, as in the various versions of “communitarianism” – we do know that for the Swiss philosopher it is strictly unrepresentable. For Rousseau, “slavery” thus refers to the fact that the people blindly accept their “representation,” are “enchained” by their “representatives.” That is: we have reached the height of metaphor. This is a lesson on which we should perhaps reflect, above all when Rousseau stunningly anticipates by more than two hundred years what political theorists and sociologists begin to call “the crisis of representation” in the late twentieth century. And Rousseau imparts this lesson at a time when the representation that will eventually undergo a crisis had only just begun, and when the idea of “representation,” closely tied to the idea of universal citizenship, was still clearly a vanguard political notion.
But conversely: formulated in the eighteenth century, and followed by the outrageous claim that “modern peoples” “have no slaves,” Rousseau’s lesson shows not exactly an ignorance but definitely what Miller calls a supreme “indifference” to the flagrant fact of the real enslavement of more than ten million human beings in Latin America and the Caribbean alone. (If “modern peoples” “have no slaves,” then one wonders: what has happened to the “fourth part” of the human race that made Saint-Preux bemoan his own humanity in a novel by Rousseau himself? Was this lament therefore simply “poetic license,” a fiction in which not even the author himself believed? Or is “truth structured like fiction,” as Lacan also says, and is it therefore only fiction that allows for a contradiction that in theory is not permitted?) I would call this indifference a colossal ideological disregard or non-knowledge, combined with a “psychic” disavowal. If this disavowal and this disregard could affect Rousseau, this is because he was necessarily inscribed in the logic of Eurocentric thought.
He was so inscribed as to be enmeshed in or incorporated into this logic, precisely because, as I have said, slavery had been absolutely indispensable for the construction as well as the functioning of the modern world-system, and at the same time intolerable and indefensible from the perspective of the most “enlightened” thought. Paradoxically, however, this thought was a product of the very world-system for which slavery had been indispensable. Such a tragic, irresolvable conflict could only be “resolved” by means of what a Lacanian psychoanalyst might call the most radical foreclosure.40 To be clear, I am not referring (and neither is Lacan, in my view) to a merely “psychological” form of denial, but rather to an exclusion from discourse that structures discourse itself. Slavery is the unthinkable that makes it possible to think the thought that excludes it. In the same way, the Haitian Revolution, as I have noted, following Michel-Rolph Trouillot, is the repressed, the unrepresentable that underwrites the representation of modernity in historiography, political theory, or sociology, as long as it remains unrepresented.
Let us return to Voltaire, who is perhaps, of all the philosophes, the most explicitly critical of “civil” slavery. In his Essay on Customs, he relies frequently on the most questionable chroniclers of the “Indies,” including Las Casas and Garcilaso, known as “el Inca” Garcilaso because of his mestizo origins and his profound identification with indigenous culture. Voltaire does this in order enthusiastically to praise pre-Columbian Peru as “the most industrious and civilized [nation] of the New World, and perhaps the most peaceful in the whole world.” Although there is no specific reference here to African-American slavery – which in Peru was quantitatively very important, though not at all comparable in scale to slavery in the Caribbean or Brazil – the word “slavery” is used to refer to the domination imposed by Europeans (which means we are already closer than in Rousseau to slavery defined as something concrete and not metaphorical). When, in a few passages, “Negroes” are referred to, these references serve to recall that Africans were bought in Africa and transported by force to Peru, like animals made to serve humans. Voltaire notes that neither these slaves nor the original inhabitants of the “New World” were treated “like a human species.”41 But, as Miller astutely observes, by referring to “a human species,” Voltaire seems to imply that there are several such species. Is this an excess of astuteness? Perhaps. But Voltaire’s chapter ends by noting – approvingly, of course – that “the Americans” are no longer slaves but merely “subordinated subjects [sujets soumis].”
First of all, this generalizing statement (pertaining to “the Americans”) again denies, as Rousseau had denied, the very real – and painstakingly codified – enslavement of African Americans, unless the latter are not, in Voltaire’s view, to be considered in any sense “American.” But recall that many of them were the descendants of several generations born in the Americas (something that of course produced problematic genealogies and identities). Even so, Voltaire, like the other philosophes, also uses the word “slavery” in many of his writings, as a metaphor for the political situation in Europe. He does not, however, feel the need to use this word to name the situation of the “first peoples,” who, though they may not have been (at least most of them) juridically enslaved, were under the encomienda system and at the very least worthier of the metaphor than a Parisian bourgeois was.42 Nevertheless, Voltaire not only employs this metaphor; elsewhere he takes great conceptual care here to distinguish “slaves” from “subordinated subjects,” claiming both that slavery has disappeared and that the subordinated nature of these subjects (“first peoples,” implicitly) derives from their belonging to one of several human species, namely the one that (by virtue of its “peaceful” nature? and despite its “industriousness” and the high level of its “civilization”) would appear fatally – perhaps, as in Montesquieu’s hypothesis, “naturally” – destined to be subordinate. We follow the same logic, then, as in Montesquieu, except now with some “politically correct” reservations. Which is still a kind of “progress,” although I should add that, again like Montesquieu, Voltaire is speaking of Peru, which is to say a Spanish colony. Of the Caribbean – never mind the French Caribbean – we hear nothing.
Or rather, not exactly nothing. There is a passage in which Voltaire refers directly – and in what seems at first to be a virulently critical tone – to Saint-Domingue, noting that “in 1757 this French colony already had thirty thousand persons and one hundred thousand black and mulatto slaves.” Voltaire further notes, with a critical flourish, that “this trade [in slaves] does not enrich any nation; on the contrary it leads men to perish and causes disasters: it is not good. But since men have developed new needs” – and here Voltaire is referring to the “need” for sugar, coffee, chocolate, tobacco, indigo, and so on – “France cannot, at a higher price, buy from foreigners a trifle that has become a necessity.”43
Now, I assume that it is unnecessary to underscore the distinction made here (if, to be generous, we can call it that, rather than a slip, as in the case of Rousseau), between “persons” and “slaves.” I note in passing the understatement: Voltaire claims that there were “one hundred thousand slaves,” when we know in fact that in 1757, there were around half a million. To be generous, again, we could attribute this understatement to misinformation. What is absolutely worth observing, in any case, is that what begins as a condemnation of slavery ends up being a justification of the plantation system, one that appeals to sound, “logical” French financial or business interests. For France, buying “trifles” (which do not justify slavery but have, however artificially, become “necessary”) would be an absurdly excessive expense, when France itself (that is, French slaves, but note that Voltaire says “France”) can produce these goods. This is an irreproachably modern and perfectly “rational” economic argument: one does not have to buy what one can produce oneself. But wait just a moment: haven’t we just been told two lines above that this vile “commerce” – by which we are to understand the slave trade – does not “enrich” any nation, but rather causes disasters? Which is it, then? Note that the signifier “riches” has two very different meanings here: the second time it appears, it names a strictly economic form of wealth, whereas at first it refers to a moral “enrichment” (or lack thereof). Thus, as we have seen repeatedly, the condemnation of slavery is delivered in exclusively moral terms, but morality remains “subordinated” (like the “first peoples,” we could say) to the logic of the economy. To drive the point home, perhaps obsessively: we are here in the midst of a full-fledged and flagrant modernity.
And then there is Condorcet, another of the central figures in French abolitionism. In his Réflexions sur l’esclavage des Nègres, published in 1781 under the pseudonym M. Schwartz (which was either meant to be ironic or a joke in bad taste, since Schwartz means “black” in German), Condorcet not only undertook systematically to demolish arguments in favor of slavery. He also sought to theorize the moral superiority of slaves over the “violent and decadent” colonizers: “If you were to search for a man in the American islands, you would not find him among the whites.”44 Here again, however, we find an exclusively “moral” argument. A few years later, however, the Marquis de Mirabeau publishes L’Ami des hommes; ou, Traité de la population (1756), which inspires those who are known as the Physiocrats when they argue for the economic inefficiency of slavery. According to this argument, slavery deprives “workers” of incentives, while also preventing the formation of an active population of producers. But we should ask: is this really a step forward? Because here we encounter an inverse kind of split: moral condemnation has completely disappeared, and the argument centers instead on economic rationality.
Finally, I will mention the strange case of the Abbé Sièyes, probably one of the intellectuals who was most influential for the political theory of the French Revolution. In his famous pamphlet What Is the Third Estate?, Sièyes claims that the French nation is “in the forty thousand parishes that embrace all the territory, all the inhabitants, and all that pertains to the public good.”45 In this scheme, the “parasitic” aristocracy would have to be excluded from the nation-state, since the latter is founded on the labor collectively carried out by the people. Here it might be said that we are approaching a “social-republican” program that verges on what in the twentieth century will come to be known as national populism. But Sièyes will later temper this position, explaining that “political responsibility” requires the “interest” of sectors of the population with “some wealth.” In fact, he ends up defending a sort of census-based republicanism, in which the dispossessed (or those we would today call “second-class citizens”) are “protected” by the state, but not “represented,” let alone “representatives.” And that is not all: Sièyes is well aware that he has begun to contradict the views that he presented in his earlier pamphlet, which argued that workers were “the soul” of the nation, and that their labor was “the foundation of the very existence of the state.” How does Sièyes propose to escape from this impasse? He proposes nothing less than the literal invention of a new “race” of workers, created by interbreeding different species of monkeys with … black Africans. This is undoubtedly a “surrealist delirium,” as Dubois notes. But it is something more as well. It is an indication or a symptom (“delirious,” to be sure, but not completely “insane” in the period) of the emergence of a racialized modernity. It is hardly necessary to note the metonymic contiguity that Sièyes establishes between “monkeys” and “black Africans,” in which we can already glimpse the “scientific” experiments with miscegenation that would soon be undertaken and that would (deliriously) prefigure today’s biopolitics. This is, moreover, a flagrant symptom of the omnipotence of an Adornian instrumental reason taken to an extreme. Although, after the successful cloning of Dolly the sheep, such reasoning may no longer strike us as altogether insane, at the time it was frankly extravagant, to put it mildly.
In any case, in all of these examples, we encounter a sort of split, a dichotomy separating the purely “ethical” condemnation of slavery from a hidden, persistent racism that determines the denial or nonrecognition of the material slavery that decisively founds the world-system.
This might seem to some readers like an exaggeration. Or it might seem that I am “overinterpreting.” Perhaps. I have already implicitly accepted, with Benot, that even the most advanced thinkers of the eighteenth century did not have the “scientific,” or the theoretical and critical, tools that we have today, or that Marx already had a century after them. But consider this: didn’t the very learned philosophes, including the authors of the monument to “universal knowledge” that is the Encyclopédie, have the ability to recognize more completely the horrors of real, nonmetaphorical slavery in the colonies, even if these colonies belonged to France? Didn’t they read the “chroniclers” of these horrors, the works of Raynal or Pluche or, before them, Montaigne, not to mention the innumerable travel narratives, some of which expressed genuine bewilderment or even righteous indignation? We can find a direct “reflection” of these accounts in the words spoken by Rousseau’s own Saint-Preux, when he returns from his journey through the “four parts of the world.” It is true, as Miller reminds us, that general knowledge of Africa or of slavery in the Caribbean was, as we would say today, “held hostage” by the triangular trade, or at best by the “enlightened” slaveholding planters to whom I have already referred. But how could Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and others like them – the most clear-sighted and critical minds of the period – settle for this general knowledge, remain at the level of this common sense? It is both reductive and implausible to simply suggest that they didn’t know. I do not want to be reductive either, but it seems more plausible to me to suggest that, for reasons to do with the “superstructural” necessities of the world-system, they had to construct their knowledge on the basis of an exclusion: the exclusion of a truth that they could not bear to know.
I will return to this question and consider it at length below. But for now, I will simply ask: did the great revolution of 1789 radically transform this framework? As in other cases, the answer can only be ambiguous. In one sense, yes, it could not be otherwise. But in another sense, not so much, because, without minimizing its enormous radicality, “1789” was not a moment cut off abruptly from a before and an after. In the context that I have been considering, it was a process, one that was both unstable and highly complex. Let me repeat what may by now seem obvious:
In 1789, whoever spoke of slavery spoke of the colonies, and vice versa. But if speaking of slavery was also speaking of a trade, then protesting against the trade did not automatically mean campaigning for the abolition of slavery as such. More specifically, this kind of protest could present itself as a demand that was a necessary, preliminary step toward abolition while at the same time postponing the end of slavery until a better time.46
Here we see the nature of the problem. Protesting against the “vile trade” in slaves was undoubtedly morally honest and consistent. But at the same time – in what is a primary example of a Freudian “compromise formation” – it could serve as a way of not resolving the contradiction between ethical indignation and economic necessity. Or in any case, like Lévi-Straussian myth, it could be a manner of resolving at the level of the purely imaginary what could not be resolved at the level of the real. Something similar happens with the question of colonialism, with the honorable exceptions that I have already mentioned. Just as we saw that the signifier “slavery” referred first and foremost to a metaphorical “enchainment” of the bourgeois, so “colonialism” very often referred to intra-European conquests. To cite Benot again:
The anticolonialism of the Enlightenment, when it existed, was connected to a more general condemnation of conquest. But this condemnation was very clearly and obviously applicable to European wars of conquest, without therefore being applicable to colonial conquests.47
Undoubtedly, there are exceptions here too, also noted above. But in general, antislavery, antitrade, and anticolonial positions were treated as distinct from each other in Enlightenment thought, differentially present in the work of different authors but almost never making up an integral structure recognized as residing at the heart of modernity. Here is the great – perfectly dialectical – paradox, in some ways homologous with the one that I analyzed in the case of the Spanish theologians two centuries earlier: it is the most reactionary defenders of the system who systematically link the three problems together (slavery, the slave trade, and colonialism) in their virulent efforts to refute the “philanthropic” arguments of the Enlightenment philosophers, however moderate the latter may have been. In other words, it was the pro-colonial and pro-slavery right that was perfectly clear about the connections between slavery (including the slave trade) and colonialism, and the necessary role that both played in sustaining French economic prosperity. These thinkers therefore needed no “compromise formations,” no schizoid solutions that would let them keep the realities of slavery and colonialism apart.
For the “progressive” thinkers of the Enlightenment, by contrast, things were much more complicated. The principles of the Revolution at first entailed a discontinuity in foreign relations, a break with monarchies and dynastic alliances and their territorial ambitions. In March 1790, the Revolution solemnly proclaimed its desire to promote peace among all the nations of the world. But this claim – a claim that logically should have run counter to colonialism, just as the Declaration of 1789 should have ruled out slavery – will later be upheld only by Jean-Paul Marat, who, in 1792, in keeping with his principles, will abstain from voting on the annexation of Savoy. In any case, as is well known, the revolution will soon be swept away in a wave of expansive “nationalism,” the result of war and the consequent need to fund it. In 1792, Brissot, known as, of all things, l’ami des Noirs, wages an intense campaign to defend France’s so-called “natural borders.” And since France “discovers” its “natural right” to annex certain European territories (nearly a decade before Napoleon), these “natural frontiers” logically also include the “overseas possessions” that were ipso facto “freed from monarchical tyranny.” As we have seen, the pro-colonial right correctly identified the link between colonialism and slavery. At this point, being against either colonialism or slavery meant nothing less than being a traitor … to the Revolution. This is a “perverse” dialectic, to be sure, but dialectic all the same.
To summarize, then, the moralizing reformism of the Enlightenment philosophes could only be irritating at most to the most retrograde minds of the age. It never reached the levels of the Spanish debates that had taken place two centuries earlier. Most importantly, this reformism never seriously called the logic of the colonial and slave system into question. It was, again at best, thus something like the “left wing” of this same system. Michèle Duchet is perfectly clear on this point when she writes:
These texts clearly show that antislavery “opinion” was based on reformism and that, in this sense, the agreement between the government and the encyclopédistes was total. It follows that all later texts that have built on the supposed anticolonialism of the philosophes or their opposition to slavery, should in fact be considered the expressions of a neocolonial politics, one that serves the interests of a metropolitan bourgeoisie and finds immediate support in these “enlightened” opinions.48
Thus the ideological climate of the Bonapartist restoration of slavery in the French colonies had been prepared long before abolition was even initially decreed. In a sense, it was already prepared, in a latent way, by the unresolved conflicts of Enlightenment thought itself. And even before this, as I noted in the first section of this chapter, it was prepared by the ambiguous ideology of the imperium, which the French Revolution never definitively overthrew in the way it did overthrow the absolutist monarchy of this same imperium. On this level, the emancipatory call of the French Revolution reached its moment of greatest resonance in 1794, with Robespierre’s abolition decree. But this was also a proverbial last gasp, the final sounding of a call that was about to fall silent.
Slavery without Scare Quotes: Between Hegel and Marx
Hegel is also – the play on words is unavoidable – “enchained” by the political metaphor of slavery. But as Susan Buck-Morss notes in her pioneering and now classic study, the allegory of the master and slave, or lord and bondsman, in the Phenomenology of Spirits was very probably inspired by the real, if still “foreclosed,” Haitian Revolution.49 Karin Schüller, among others, has offered irrefutable empirical evidence of the extent of the coverage of the Haitian Revolution by the German press.50 As Hegel himself notes, he was an almost “religious” reader of morning newspapers, which included coverage of both the events of the revolution and politics in the new “black” republic throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Between 1791 and 1807 – that is, during the period leading up to the composition of the Phenomenology – fully half of the news and analysis that the German press dedicated to the Americas was about Haiti. It is important to remember that “Germany,” which in fact did not exist as a unified nation-state (and much of Hegel’s historical and political philosophy can be traced to this fact), was not a colonial power and did not own slaves. Although intense abolitionist debates did take place, these unfolded against a more “theoretical” background in Germany than in France or England, where the results of these debates could have immediate practical consequences for powerful economic interests. German political thinkers’ interest in Haiti was mainly related to the fact that the Haitian Revolution was one of three modern revolutions (together with the US and the French, and it is worth noting in passing that of these three revolutions that would together define political modernity, two were non-European) that had forcefully questioned the old “estate” systems of representation, which were still in force in Germany.
Consider the fourth section of the Phenomenology. We can begin with a relatively minor question, but one that is not without importance. There has been an ongoing philological debate surrounding the most appropriate and precise translations of Hegel’s terms. Some commentators have sought to separate Hegel’s dialectic from all possible references to slavery in the strict sense, whether in classical antiquity or in its modern colonial forms. These commentators have argued that the precise words used by Hegel, Herr and Knecht, refer instead to the feudal relation between a “master” and a “servant” or more generally a “lord” and a “bondsman.”51 Malcolm Bull, however, relying on Christian von Garve’s learned annotated translation of Aristotle’s Politics, has painstakingly shown that Hegel’s terms in fact precisely correspond to two terms in ancient Greek: despotés (meaning the master who rules over the slaves he has purchased or those subjected to servitude, and here of course the homophonic translation of this Greek word as despot – or in French despote – facilitates the philosophes’ treatment of slavery as a political metaphor); and doulos (meaning “slave,” unmistakably). Bull adds that the latter word might not have been used to name the most abject forms of slavery, and that it might have served as a metaphor for other kinds of submission. But it never referred to the citizen ruled by the tyrant in the strictly political sense (that is, by the tyrannos, who, for the ancient Greeks, was the illegitimate king, as in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos, for instance).52
In the fourth section of the Phenomenology, the slave is defined as a “thing,” a vicarious entity whose only reason for being is to be at the service of the master, a pure object-for-the-Other, as Sartre would say in Being and Nothingness, a “dependent” deprived of all recognition.53 His relation to the master is one of absolute, “ontological” nonreciprocity: the master’s being is recognized by the slave (since he has no choice but to offer this recognition), but the latter’s own being is not recognized by the master. Therefore, his being is not; he does not exist. But is the master’s being any more consistent? After all, since it is the result of enforced obligation, the recognition of the master offered by the slave is a false, feigned, inauthentic, not a genuine recognition. Both the nonreciprocity and the falseness of the recognition make the “relation” between master and slave unstable, fragile. This “relation” hangs by a fictitious thread. The dialectical inversion of this relation takes place when the slave becomes conscious that it is the master who depends completely on him. Or at least on his labor – and this, of course, will be crucially important in the dialectic’s passage from Hegel to Marx. The slave can therefore (he can, which means this is not a fatal determination, despite the strongly “teleological” nature especially of Hegel’s later philosophy) perceive himself as an agent, a subject, capable of changing the world. The former Haitian slaves had just done this nonmetaphorically, in the most dramatic way possible, including by bringing about the defeat of the Hegelian “historical hero” par excellence, namely Napoleon. A “life and death struggle” – and this is certainly what had taken place in Haiti – ensues, then, between two “self-consciousnesses.” In Haiti, the struggle was more than a problem of “consciousnesses.” These did undoubtedly play a role, although Hegel never uses the word revolution, at least in this part of his text.
And yet it is also true that – symptomatically – in the whole, famous fourth section of the Phenomenology, Hegel never explicitly names the result of the dialectical confrontation between master and slave. This lends support to Sibylle Fischer’s argument, according to which, in the case of Haiti, we are dealing not just with an intentional hiding or disappearance (though this probably also took place), but with a disavowal.54 Here we should recall that Freud himself tells us that there can be no disavowal without some measure of recognition of what is disavowed. In any case, it is clear – and Buck-Morss shows this irrefutably – that the slave, for Hegel, will not gain his freedom as a result of being offered it “from above” (as France has persistently claimed of the “emancipations” of 1794 and 1848).55 On the contrary, Hegel writes, “it is only through staking one’s life that freedom is won,”56 and this is exactly what the Haitians did, at the extremely high price that we have already calculated. That Hegel is thinking here of the historical institution of slavery is made clear, as Bull notes, in the third volume of the Encyclopedia, where the dialectic of master and slave is illustrated with reference to slavery in antiquity and to the relation between tyrant and subject.57 The political metaphor persists, but here it appears alongside a more literal reference to slavery, where the “natural” synchrony in the Aristotelian relation between slaves and free men has become a historical diachrony. It is true that in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel will infamously claim that not all societies progress toward Reason and the consciousness of freedom at the same pace. This, according to Hegel, is what justifies the enslavement of people who are “behind” on the path to the Spirit, including Africans. By this account, colonial slavery is a phase in the education of humanity, since “[t]he African, in his undifferentiated and concentrated unity, has not yet succeeded in making th[e] distinction between himself as an individual and his essential universality.”58 Of course, this is a repellent idea and rampantly Eurocentric in its appeal to “an individual and autonomous, himself,” both Cartesian and Kantian. This is not a matter of immutable Nature, however, but rather a racialized product of History.
Whether or not this is a political metaphor, we are – it’s impossible not to sense – at a very far remove from the ambivalent and often confused, merely moralizing condemnations of the philosophes. In Hegel, the metaphor takes a monumental qualitative leap. It is no longer a matter of warnings, whether more or less severe, about the “evils” of men. Instead we find a very serious, rigorous, and complex attempt at a historical-philosophical (as well as metaphysical, ontological, psychological, and anthropological) analysis of the question of slavery, an analysis with undeniably political implications and one that reaches far beyond the philosophes. To be sure, this analysis remains truncated or “castrated” by Hegel’s excessive idealism. The dialectic that Aristotle, for all his “naturalism,” had established between the soul (of the master) and the body (of the slave) is transposed in Hegel into a realm of pure “consciousnesses.” All the same, however, the door is opened for a historical, and not merely moral, treatment of slavery. Although the political metaphor remains in force here, it is no longer absolutely exclusive. Instead, the historical and structural character of the dialectic of master and slave far exceeds the merely circumstantial status of “slavery” in the thought of the philosophes. With extraordinary intelligence and acuity, Adorno has noted that not even Hegel’s great idealist premise remains intact after the dialectic of master and slave:
We know that Hegel, in his chapter on master and servant, develops the genesis of self-consciousness from the labor relation, and that he does this by adjusting the I to its self-determined purpose as well as to heterogeneous matter. The origin of “I” in “Not I” remains scarcely veiled. It is looked up in the real living process, in the legalities of the survival of the species, of providing it with nutriments. Thereafter, Hegel hypostasizes the mind [or spirit], but in vain. To succeed somehow, he must blow it up into a whole, the total spirit – although according to the concept of the mind [or spirit], its differentia specifica is that it is a subject and thus not the whole.59
“From the labor relation”; “the real living process”; “the survival of the species”; “providing it with nutriments”: Adorno is not merely translating Hegel’s terms into Marx’s; he is reading what Hegel effectively says. In other words, he is extracting the materialist “kernel” from the idealist shell (which is also what Marx will do, of course). He is interpreting, almost as a psychoanalyst would interpret a parapraxis – literally a failed act – the undeniable failure of the hypostasis of the Spirit as a Whole, when the Spirit proceeds from concrete materiality, as it must – and Hegel knows this very well – when one has chosen the “metaphors” of master and slave. In a word, Adorno sees perfectly that the “negative dialectic,” which is in the last instance the unresolvable conflict between matter and the idea, the object and the concept, is already in Hegel, above all in the Phenomenology and more specifically in its famous fourth section. This implies that all of the philosopher’s later monumental constructions, culminating in his philosophies of history or of right, constitute equally monumental abstract negations (not “determinate” negations) of the “outbreak” of 1806–7.
And even if we did not know, or were not convinced, that the mediated reference (in the sense of dialectical mediation) at this moment in Hegel’s work is to the Haitian Revolution, we have just seen that, despite its moments of great abstraction, Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave is perfectly applicable to this concrete historical process. Moreover, we could say that the dialectic of master and slave, once it is “materialized” and reinterpreted through world-systems theory, functions as a philosophical operation, just as racial slavery and the Haitian Revolution function as historical operations. Hegel’s text and these historical processes, in other words, unfold on the same terrain; in each case, it is logically impossible to think of one side of the conflict without the other. As we have seen, a struggle of “consciousnesses” takes place between the master and the slave, a struggle for mutual recognition. But this struggle is the sine qua non of the formation of these consciousnesses as self-consciousnesses. Obviously (and I will soon return to this), it is this extraordinary Hegelian conceptualization that will support Marx in his effort to theorize class struggle and the passage from the class in-itself to the class for-itself, as Lukács very lucidly defined this passage in his classic work on the subject.60 But nothing prevents us from translating this logic into the logic of the world-system, as I have sought to do throughout this book, in order to conclude that it was the “struggle for recognition” that took place between the French and Haitian Revolutions (and not the abstract and solipsistic “self-consciousness” of the former alone) that constituted a truly universal event in modernity.
There is undoubtedly in Hegel a disavowal, as there is in the work of any of the philosophes, as we have seen. Indeed, in Hegel, this disavowal is even in excess of what we find in the work of the philosophes, given that in the Philosophy of History, as I already noted in passing, Hegel denies “historical” status to all of Africa (with the glaring exception of Egypt, which in Hegel’s day had been, and would remain through the rest of the nineteenth century, both “white-washed” and “Europeanized” through references to ancient Greece) as well as to all of the Americas south of the Río Grande. The “peoples without history,” for Hegel, thus included the Haitian people. Indeed, Haiti was included in a “privileged” way in this geography, given that it represented a kind of condensation of Africa and the Americas. Hegel’s Objective Spirit – the concrete historical expression of Absolute Spirit or the “Universal” Subject – had not deigned to pass through these territories, so that they had missed, as it were, “the train of History.”
This text of Hegel’s has a famously foundational status for later conceptions of history (all of them clearly inferior in terms of hermeneutic rigor and philosophical depth) that share this teleological, “universalist” (that is Eurocentric), evolutionist, or “stagist” view. In Fischer’s apt metaphor, beginning with Hegel, History became, for peripheral societies, a waiting room.61 Europe introduced these societies to a “universal” History from which they had been absent, just as it had sown the seed of a Reason of which they had been ignorant. Now all these societies had patiently to wait their turn, under the tutelage of “the West.”
There can be no doubt that all of this was an immense and sophisticated rationalization for colonialism. It was also, in a sense, a (surely unconscious) betrayal of the dialectic of master and slave introduced in the Phenomenology two decades earlier. There is no place left for the slave’s “self-conscious” rebellion. The determination of the Spirit, of Reason, in the ironclad logic of its historical unfolding, is total, not to say totalitarian. Any gesture capable of countering this determinism could be grandiose or heroic, but it was bound to be useless. Such a gesture would sooner or later be liquidated by the “cunning of reason,” which, like a skilled rider on a wild horse, would come to “mount” even what would seem to go against it, in order to push history toward its predetermined end. The possibility that a concrete historical subject might transform reality is thus withdrawn, and this withdrawal is underwritten by a “reality” that has already been thought out in advance, conceived by the only subject who counts: the absolute Subject of universal Reason. Or God, ultimately: the dialectic here becomes divine Providence. And from this point forward, it is the abstract Whole that governs the real world, and to this Whole of course all concrete objects and subjects are irremediably subordinated. This is paradoxical to say the least, given that already in the Phenomenology this had been Hegel’s precise critique of the actual development of the French Revolution: that the idea of absolute subjective liberty, made into an abstract Totality, led necessarily to the Terror, since that Totality crushed any singularity that sought to oppose it.
In addition, to return to a point I have already made, this Subject, with all its pretentions to “universality,” could not but be particularly racialized. As Laura Doyle has very rightly observed, and as Marx already forcefully argued, the Universal Spirit that is the protagonist of Hegel’s Philosophy of History and that will find its earthly realization in the Ethical State in his Philosophy of Right, where it represents the institutional incarnation of the fully realized self-consciousness of Freedom, is in fact nothing other than the Germanic “spirit” that was incarnated in the Prussian state in 1830.62 This is of the utmost importance: as I explained in the case of the philosophes, I am not saying that Hegel was consciously racist. But I am saying that, in his case as in theirs, the concept of freedom – since one has to have a concept of freedom in order to oppose “slavery” – was, for them, white. Given the premises, this is a perfectly logical conclusion: if slavery is “political” before it is “social,” then so must freedom be political first and foremost as well: the freedom of the citoyen, of the bourgeois. “Primitive,” non-European societies did not have “politics” or a separate political realm, as we know. Neither did they speak of “Ethical States.” Such an understanding of freedom was thus overwhelmingly identified with European whiteness. Although it may not have been knowingly racist, this reasoning fell only the slightest bit short of justifying the enslavement of the other by pointing to their previous ignorance of the concept of freedom. (This is Sandoval’s argument, made again nearly two centuries after he made it, and by a very Protestant and very Teutonic philosopher, no less.) So, too, had the colonization of the other been justified by pointing to their historical belatedness – in other words, in the name of progress.63 Indeed, even critical arguments today very correctly take it for granted that Eurocentric “evolutionism” was the ideology responsible for a linear understanding of “progress” that served to rationalize and justify both colonialism and slavery.
To my knowledge, however, the inverse sequence involved in this history has not received the same amount of critical scrutiny. I am referring to the contributions that colonialism and slavery involuntarily made to the ideals of linearity, evolution, and history. This is also perfectly logical: it was on the basis of historical phenomena like colonialism and the productivity of American plantations (resulting from their use of forced labor) that metropolitan societies enjoyed an unprecedented increase in economic “prosperity.” These societies could then begin to conceive of the very optimistic notion of an “infinite” progress for all humanity (or for white humanity, as we know, and not even for all of that part of the human population, as the “utopian” socialists would soon show, and after them the anarchists and Marx). This understanding of “progress,” generated at least in part by colonialism, would then retroactively be applied to the colonies, to rationalize their conquest in what became a veritable vicious circle. We might therefore say, remembering Rousseau’s quip, according to which men must be “forced to be free,” that the “Amerindians” and Africans had to be forced to progress – by slavery.64 The idea of a linear historical temporality was derived from Judeo-Christian religion, but had always competed with other temporalities until, in early modernity, it began to thoroughly displace ancient, “cyclical” understandings of time in the West. This linear temporality, associated with a moral progress subordinated to (and dependent on) technological and economic progress, owed at least as much to the material practices of colonialism and slavery as it owed to transformations in the proto-modern “mindset.”
This was the case even for Rousseau, who had the audacity, unheard of in his day, to argue – against individualist and liberal presuppositions, fashionable since Hobbes and Locke – that social “evolution” had begun with the figure of the free man (the “good savage”). It was only later, Rousseau claimed, that, through the social contract, individuals had “enchained themselves” and become subjects in the community. But in this context, community – and in this sense, as in others, Rousseau can be considered the founder of political Romanticism – carries a hint of racialization, connoting “European” and “white” (since, as we have just seen, the “primitive” person was an “individual” and was asocial and apolitical in the modern sense), even if it’s the case that Rousseau is implicitly referring here to a political community.
Hegel, by contrast, leaves no room for “suspicious” interpretations: his version of “community,” his “Ethical State,” is unequivocally shot through with Germanness. In this sense, too, Hegel was a typical “German” of his time, even if he was also the most brilliant of Germans. As I noted, Germany had neither colonies nor slaves, not because its dominant class didn’t want them but because of its relative economic and political “backwardness” with respect to other European powers like England or France. But the emergence of cultural and ethnographic studies of the Volk that characterized the Romantic period, as in the work of Herder or the Grimm brothers, had strongly “racialized” German thought, albeit in a cultural rather than a “biological” sense.65 This meant that Germans’ relative ignorance about African American cultures – an ignorance that was greater than in France or England for obvious reasons, though clearly in these countries contact with and knowledge of colonized communities was informed by racism – combined with a widespread tendency to discount the role of Africa in world history. Hegel could not but participate in this cultural climate or share this Weltanschauung.
To my knowledge, few studies to date have questioned the academic common sense according to which the Hegelian system is fully consistent, by pointing to these two logical (and not dialectical) contradictions: first, the contradiction between Hegel’s “universalizing” pretensions and his Germanic particularism; and, second, the contradiction between the dialectic of master and slave, which leaves the door open for the exercise of the latter’s agency, and the historicist hyperdeterminism of his later work. Here, however, I would like to consider another issue. In fact, Hegel’s late work does not cancel out his early work as much as it might seem to: he does not so much take back or renounce what he has written in the Phenomenology as he lightly changes his mind. If Buck-Morss is right – and I am convinced that she is – then Hegel’s disavowal comes earlier and can already be found in the Phenomenology itself: it is the “foreclosure” of the event and of the Haitian Revolution, which obscurely “inspires” the dialectic of master and slave. This foreclosure must then be redoubled by the argument that societies like Haiti’s have been left “without history.” But this denial, this disavowal, is inscribed in a system of such grandiose ideas – even if we take this system to be irredeemably wrong – that the failure also becomes grandiose. Suspending or forgetting the “Haitian background” or context of the dialectic of master and slave, Hegel manages to produce, if only unwittingly, an important philosophical hypothesis with which to understand Haiti. It is as if the “cunning of reason” has turned against its own creator: Hegel becomes a sort of philosophical sorcerer’s apprentice. And the unintended consequences of his apprenticeship are multiple: the enormous space that the Hegelian system leaves open – space, that is, for this system’s not having been consistently Hegelian, fully faithful to its idealist premises – will be occupied by Marx. With their oblique and merely moralizing or metaphorical references to “slavery,” the philosophes had only left a few small fissures at the edges of their work. This work was interesting as a pointed critique of the Ancien Régime, but it would hardly have been worth the effort to force one’s way into such a structure, leading to a limit or exit that had been blocked off, a door through which one could not pass. From within this structure, one could thus not enter or initiate a more radical and totalizing critique of the new regime and its profound logic: the logic of the capitalist world-system. The Hegelian edifice, by contrast, was an imposing monument whose foundations had been corroded, eaten away by idealist termites. This structure therefore offered a much better basis, a better point of departure than the French Enlightenment, if, like Marx, one was trying to reach the other side.
Here I will not consider the exhilarating complexities involved in the passage from the Hegelian to the Marxian dialectic. This is not the purpose of my text, and it would take too much time and lead me too far from my objectives. But I will begin by recalling this: that Marx, too, relies on the metaphor of “slavery.” But Marx is perfectly aware that it is only a metaphor, and, unlike in the work of the philosophes, it is not a juridico-political metaphor used to refer to the oppression of the citoyen or bourgeois. On the contrary: Marx takes the step beyond the limit, and now the bourgeois appears as the oppressor, since a new modern “slave” has emerged: the proletarian. The metaphor is thus not only just a metaphor; it has also changed its class, or its class coding. It now refers not to a merely “political” slave, but to a social slave. Indeed, this slave’s status was as social as the new mode of production that had produced him, the mode of production that could also explain (in a way that the famous tyranny and corruption of the aristocracy and the Church could not) why, “in the last instance,” it was necessary to work to bring about both the fall of the Old Regime (including the destruction of slavery as a relation of production) and the end of the newly consolidated capitalist mode of production, the existence of this new social slavery.
But then it becomes clear that we have passed from “political society” to “civil society.” Or rather the distinction between these two realms – which dominant thought continues to separate to this day – is shown to be pointless. Even if one could or should preserve the distinction analytically – as Gramsci will do, for instance, for very good strategic reasons that follow from the recognition of the relative autonomy of these spheres or levels, which require forms of response and political action that are also relatively autonomous but articulated – it is always necessary to remember that in reality they are not separate.66 They are instead convergent parts of a single mode of production that constitutes a concrete totality. The social metabolism of capital (though of course Marx himself does not use this term) is not reducible to the economic “last instance.” It is instead an articulation of “instances” whose most intimate logic is “economic,” but in the strict sense that Marx gave to this term, defined as a mode of production that includes and integrates social, political, ideological, and cultural phenomena. Marx is not “economistic,” then. On the contrary, the subtitle of his magnum opus, A Critique of Political Economy, explicitly signals his intention to critique the economism that still today remains in force and that would lead us to believe in a fragmentation of separate spheres, in which the economy va par elle meme [runs itself], as French liberals used to say. The category of mode of production, by contrast, connects all “spheres.” In order to produce, and especially in order to reproduce, the material existence of a society, specific, complex ideological and cultural forms are required. Although, on the one hand, these cannot be reduced to the “economic” in the narrow sense (as “vulgar” Marxists might hope), on the other hand they cannot be considered fully autonomous or separate from the economy (as bourgeois liberals wish). To return to my main theme, then: the ideology of racism, which derives from the exploitation of slave labor, is largely autonomous, but its autonomy remains relative (in the etymological sense of related to something else). As we have seen, this ideology appears in its specific, modern form, with all the mediations that this implies, as related to the exploitation of a massive labor force. The ideology of racism is connected to the emergence of the capitalist world-system.
Now, this is not a readymade formula that can be used to understand any and every complex, multifaceted historical reality. These claims cannot be used, in other words, to simply dissolve the object in the concept, as in Adorno’s account of “identitarian thought.” It is instead what I would call a mode of production of knowledge, one whose precise “contents” can vary infinitely. It is true, as we will see, that Marx himself does not always manage to avoid the temptations of “reductionism.” But the cure for this illness can be found in the logic of his own thought. This logic can be compared to and even identified with Freud’s, given the latter’s obsessive refusal to take the “evidence” of ideological common sense as given and his insistence on the mechanisms of the unconscious at work beyond, or beneath, this common sense, beyond historical differences. In Marx’s case, to be sure, such mechanisms come up against the limits of the mode of production in the broad sense. Are there other mechanisms? Yes, of course. But according to Marx, they are not sufficient, although they are necessary.
Let me return to the simultaneity that I have already referred to repeatedly, in my insistence that x and y happen “at the same time.” Here is the whole secret of Marx’s dialectic: the “totality of concrete determinations” that is the mode of production gives way to “combined and uneven development.” Again, in combined and uneven development, relations of production that linear, teleological, or evolutionist accounts might identify with successive stages, each of which overcomes or supersedes the last – slave, semi-feudal, and so on – are now articulated under the domination, or rather what Gramsci would call the “hegemony,” of the relations of production, which in capitalism means the relations between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Here it is possible to clearly separate the metaphorical “enslavement” of the proletariat from the literal enslavement of slaves properly speaking. Indeed, this distinction turns out to be essential for understanding the logic that “determines” the new mode of production “in the last instance.” At the same time, however, although the first, metaphorical enslavement is hegemonic in capitalism, the second, literal form of enslavement is not simply marginal or residual. Still less does it warrant only a moral condemnation, as if it were an unpardonable or incomprehensible “error” or aberration. At certain times and in certain places in the new world-system, slavery is a structural necessity, one that calls not simply for an “ethical” response, but for a philosophical, critical, historical, and scientific analysis of the kind provided in the famous twenty-fourth chapter of Marx’s Capital.
To sum up, then, Marx offers us another way of seeing the “modernity” that we find theorized in the philosophers of the Enlightenment. These philosophers include Kant, whose views I do not have time to analyze, but whose theory of the Transcendental Subject can be located squarely on the side of the celebration of the “exporting” of Reason to “primitive peoples” – in other words, on the side of the justification of colonization and even of slavery.67 Marx’s approach also differs from Hegel’s, of course, at least from the “mature” Hegel’s. To some, this may sound spontaneously “Althusserian,” but Lukács has shown that there is in fact a “young Hegel” who is much closer to Marx and whose work culminates in the Phenomenology.68 The late or mature Hegel, by contrast, renders the Subject’s teleological absolutization “universal.” Hegel thus clears a path for an instrumental rationality that dominates nature and human beings, and that therefore also (and perhaps even more forcefully) justifies colonialism. But it is also in Hegel – the “Haitian” Hegel, as it were – and not in the philosophes or Kant that Marx finds or salvages the actively world-changing role of the “self-conscious” slave.
From this point on, however, this will entail a historical materialization of the slave’s “consciousness.” (We will soon see how Marx defines these terms.) To be sure, this possibility was not, strictly speaking, absent in Hegel. But in the ostensible overcoming or Aufhebung of the conflict between the master and the slave, Hegelian idealism tends to forget or ignore the “conservation” of its material foundations – in other words, the very conservation that was supposed to coexist with and remain inseparable from “overcoming” in Hegel’s own definition of Aufhebung. León Rozitchner offers a psychoanalytic account of this moment:
What does the slave know that the master does not? He knows the value of the body; this is his foundational knowledge. First: the slave holds onto [conserva] the mother (the Mater, hence “material”) as a point of departure. He does not separate himself from her, or from her truth, which he safeguards [conserva]. The truth is tied to the knowledge that holds fast to [conserva] the mother as point of departure. The master is he who loves the abstract and legal but disembodied spirit of the father. Here self-consciousness emerges against the backdrop of the unconscious. Self-consciousness is a consciousness that has, thanks to Oedipus, come loose from its own knowledge and that manages to achieve, as Lacan says, a substitution of absolute pleasure with absolute knowing … The only unity promised by Hegelian rationality, a philosophy of absolute reason, is the non-contradictory unity of rational consciousness, defined as absolute and universal reason that will realize itself in the man who thinks like Hegel and in the organized rationality of the absolute and dominant State.69
An “ideal” Hegelian slave thus emerges as a result of a separation or split that Marx’s historical materialism will seek to reconstitute as a conflictual unity. The spirit comes loose from its flesh, so to speak, and the slave becomes at this moment an ahistorical abstraction. But clearly not in the philosophes’ sense. For them, the slave was a pure metaphor in which the real problem could not even appear as such. It is because Hegel does allow the problem to appear that Marx can attempt to find its solution. Marx will likewise look to the problem of slavery, but, again, not to metaphorical slavery but to direct slavery. Let me cite an example that also lends support to my hypothesis on the role of slavery in the formation of the capitalist world-system:
Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery, you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.70
It is true that in the “early” Marx – for instance, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 – this solution seems, at least on the surface, to be as abstract as the Hegelian one, since Marx speaks there of a “species being” proper to humanity. This will be “materialistically” historicized only later (after The German Ideology, according to Althusser’s periodization), when Marx theorizes the conflict between “relations of production” and “the development of productive forces.”71 Nevertheless, Mater and materiality are all fully present in “species being” – for instance, in the human being’s relation to the (mother) earth from which he will be alienated by private property. We will find this idea fully developed in the formidable conclusion of the first volume of the Grundrisse, in Marx’s analysis of “precapitalist” societies. It is in the Grundrisse as well that Marx asks how it is possible that cultural forms whose “material base” has been “superseded” for more than two millennia – Homeric epic, for instance, or Sophoclean tragedy – can continue to move us so deeply. Responding to this question, Marx hypothesizes with apparent naivety that these forms belong to the “infancy” of (Western) humanity. He thus in fact gestures toward a conception of history that includes a notion of nonchronological persistence, a “return of the repressed” that interrupts hegemonic historical linearity.72
This is not the place to undertake a detailed reading along these lines – that is, in keeping with the logic of the early Marx – of the widespread material enslavement produced by the modern world-system. But such a reading would demonstrate how Marx manages to show that the alienation from originary matter was both “objective” and worldwide. This is why a revolution like the Haitian one could allow for the goal of a return to “Mother Africa” to emerge in modernity: because only capitalist modernity could show the “concrete universality” of the forced separation from originary matter, from what Rozitchner calls the very “foundation” of being. The philosophes’ vulgar materialism could not have allowed for this. In this materialism, the relation between matter and spirit is a mere, mechanical opposition, a pair of mutually exclusive terms and not a dialectical conflict that attests to the unity of the historically existent.
Now, I am not trying to avoid the enormous difficulty that presents itself here. From what we could call a peripheral or Third Worldist perspective, or a postcolonial one, Marx has been severely criticized, not without reason, for his occasional lapses into partially Eurocentric, evolutionist, stagist, or teleological thought, especially with regard to colonialism and the relations between the center and periphery of the new world-system.
In fact, for a long time – and with renewed force during recent decades, since the emergence of postcolonial theory – scholars have been pointing out the “errors” in Marx’s and of many Marxists’ analyses of what would come to be called the Third World. The understandable and perhaps excusable but still real Eurocentrism of Marx and Engels (the latter of whom would even speak of “peoples without history,” in what is arguably a lapse into the worst kind of Hegelianism)73 has been seen to have seriously limited their analysis and critical knowledge of the complex realities of the non-European world. So, too, has their privileging of the proletariat (also understandable given the European situation, but not so easily applicable to the realities of Latin America, Africa, or Asia at the time) and even their internationalism (a product of their Eurocentrism and privileging of the proletariat) cast doubt on their ability to analyze the consequences of the colonization and “peripheralization” of much of the world that resulted from proto-bourgeois expansion and then fully bourgeois ascendancy beginning in the eighteenth century. These warnings are not entirely misleading, especially when they are brought to bear on Marx’s famous articles, written during the 1850s, on the British colonization of India. Here Marx certainly displays schematizing and evolutionist tendencies; he exaggerates or mischaracterizes the benefits of moving developed capitalism to a “backward” society.74 The warnings are even more applicable to Marx’s brief and rushed newspaper articles on Latin America, in which we can recognize his surprising ignorance of the processes of decolonization and nation building that were then taking place in Latin America, clearly evident in his discussion of Simón Bolívar as a “blackguard,” for instance, and in other, similarly nonsensical moments.75
Here there would seem to be a sort of “simple” historicism that displaces the more complex historical materialism that Marx outlines both before and after these writings, both in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and in the Grundrisse. It is this historical materialism that makes possible the idea of “combined and uneven development.” We should also acknowledge that, after Lenin and Trotsky, who themselves came from the only partly “European” periphery or semi-periphery, even heterodox Marxists in Europe had little or nothing to say about this question until the second half of the twentieth century. Two highly notable exceptions are of course Gramsci, who, strictly speaking, did not refer to the Third World, but who profoundly considered the peripheral situation in his analysis of the “Southern Question,”76 and Sartre, who already in the 1940s offered unrelenting analyses of French colonialism in Africa. Interestingly, according to Sartre’s biographers, it was this commitment to anticolonial struggle that led him to a Marxism that he had at first only timidly and obliquely approached. In any case, it is true that with a few marginal exceptions, we do not find important texts on the question of colonialism in Lukács, Ernst Bloch, Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, or Althusser, although we do find such texts in the work of the pioneering figures associated with Latin American Marxism, figures like José Carlos Mariátegui.77
Now, should these warnings suffice to convince us to discard the categories – and the logic – of Marx and his followers, to regard these categories as useless? I do not think so. This is first of all for historical reasons. Despite the always possible and pertinent, partial critiques of Marx and Marxism, much – if not the immense majority of – “peripheral” critical thought in the twentieth century that undertook to theorize the colonial and neocolonial condition of what was known as the Third World was either avowedly Marxist or at least acknowledged debts to the central categories of Marxism(s). From Mariátegui, whose work I have just mentioned, to dependency theory, from Frantz Fanon to postcolonial theory, from Darcy Ribeiro to Samir Amin, from Andre Gunder Frank to liberation theology, from Julio Mella to Aijaz Ahmad and many others, the elaboration of profound and complex analyses would have been impossible without reference to the basic categories of Marxism. (And we would have to add to this list certain First World theorists whose work has been enormously useful for peripheral critical thought, including Wallerstein, who developed world-systems theory, or Fredric Jameson, who influentially theorized both postmodernism and globalization.)
In fact, as István Mészáros notes correctly:
The fundamental difference between a speculative [for example, a Hegelian] and a materialist conception of history is not established by renaming the “cunning of Reason” as the “cunning of history,” but by identifying the dynamic constituents of actual historical development in their radical openness: i.e., without any preconceived guarantee of a positive outcome to the clash of antagonistic forces. This is why in the Marxian conception the “new historic form” can only be intimated (as Marx puts it in the Grundrisse), since its actual constitution involves the necessity (the one and only “inevitability” in these matters) of traversing the nuclear minefield of capital, with its far from happy implications for history itself.78
There is thus no fundamental teleology in Marx. To be sure, he does make the celebrated claim, so often misunderstood as “stagist,” that a social formation only presents itself with the problems that it is in a position to resolve. Or, rather, that social formations never disappear until all the productive forces necessary for their transformation into another social formation have been developed. An example like Saint-Domingue illustrates the truth of this claim: slave relations of production were both necessary and sufficient for the internal state of development of the productive forces of the plantation system. To transform these relations of production into others that were different (“proletarian” relations, for example) would have meant resolving a problem that could not be resolved in the framework of the world-system at that time, since the wage relation would have affected rates of profit. But, as we have already asked, where would the proletarians have come from on a “desertified” island like Saint-Domingue? Planters had already tried to import white workers, and this had failed, or at least come up against hard limits when an increase in market demand led to greater demands on production, and it became clear that higher levels of labor power were needed. This was a problem that could be resolved, through recourse to slavery. Ironically, then, if there were “stages” in this case, their order was the inverse of what a stagist conception of history would assume: first, there was an attempt to employ white workers, known as engagés, in what was relatively close to “proletarian” wage labor; then slave labor was deployed, precisely because the market was now more capitalist than it had been before. To speak of “stagism” or “teleology” in this case is thus completely misleading.
Real historical development is therefore in no way precisely datable, despite the “fatalism” that is attributed to Marx by his detractors – and unfortunately by many of his followers as well. When there is such a thing as “historical necessity,” it is nothing other than the necessity of transformations in material conditions (and not, in other words, “the cunning of historical reason”). These not only enable but also require specific solutions. But it is crucial to understand this requirement as a necessity that can either be fulfilled or not, depending on many converging and at times contradictory circumstances. We know, moreover, that this process is dialectical in the materialist sense of the word: the very satisfaction of the necessity – for instance, the use of slave labor when the development of the historical process demands it – can create the conditions for a break with the logic that led to this point. The Haitian Revolution is an example, and one of the most paradigmatic. There is, again, no teleology. To be sure, Marx argued that in general revolutionary transformation tended to take place in societies with highly developed productive forces. It is also true that actual history would seem to have proven him wrong. But to accept, even minimally, what I have just been saying is to see that the fact that certain tendencies have not been realized is not proof that they did not exist. In addition, it is well known that on several occasions Marx explicitly considered the possibility that revolutionary transformations might be produced in “underdeveloped” societies, as a result of uneven development. Again: the Haitian Revolution confirms this “exception”: this revolution took place long before global capitalism had developed its productive forces to the point where the possibility of a proletarian revolution could be contemplated. The Haitian Revolution is itself an “uneven” development, a scandalous advance or anticipation for which the world-system could in no way be prepared. Hence the Haitian Revolution’s displacement, which I have already discussed: the Haitian Revolution is not usually considered among the “models” for modern revolutions. Hence, too, the enormous difficulty of theorizing it, including from a Marxist perspective. I will return to this difficulty in the final section of this chapter.
Returning to Marx, we can see, again, that what matters most is his logic and method, which for our purposes can be summed up as follows:
These are the minimal conditions for the production of a critical, “peripheral” knowledge, one capable of combating both Eurocentrism and what Aníbal Quijano has called the coloniality of power and knowledge from the standpoint of its own situation, as Sartre would say.80 The coloniality of power and knowledge has a long history, but far from being dissolved or disempowered in the present, it has been reinforced by capitalist world-making, euphemistically called “globalization.” I say “reinforced” because it is doubly disguised in “politically correct” appeals to “multiculturalisms” and the other ideologemes that suggest a peaceful coexistence of particularisms. Celebrated as so many indices of the triumph of a “democratic” globalization, these in fact do nothing other than distract from the powerful if subterranean unity of global power, in another (even more subtle) instance of pars pro toto fetishization. This “new” globalization, whose profound logic of power is, in fact, far from new, has a corresponding image of the production of knowledge, one that figures knowledge either as a “deterritorialized” abstract universality (Science, in the singular) or as a sheer particularity (“local knowledge”) that is no less abstract and entirely unaffected by the domination of the universal. Of course, these extremes are complementary, and they are equally false and fetishistic. What is needed therefore is a way of constructing knowledge that would uncover and again denounce the conflict inherent in what Walter Mignolo calls the geopolitically marked place of knowledge.81
But if there is a conflict, then critical knowledge must take both parties of this conflict into account. It must take up a place in the midst of this tension, this battlefield. So, it would be a disservice to the “philosophy of liberation” if we were to renounce the modes of production of critical knowledge produced within European modernity, including Marxisms first of all. This would paradoxically mean locating ourselves in a place of exteriority precisely: a place of radical and absolute otherness, to which dominant thought (including perhaps especially a certain kind of “progressive” thought) would like to relegate us and in which it would like to enclose us. This would be another turn of the screw in the fetishist operation through which we are excluded from the production of knowledge. For we already know that, even in “progressive” ideologies, the periphery is the realm of feeling, art, and poetic expression, not the site of critical or scientific rationality. For this reason, it is crucial that we reclaim the capacity for epistemological contestation that Marxism has proven capable of opposing to hegemonic modes of knowledge production, and that we do so from our own, conflictual standpoints and situations. Of course, in the process we will need to also “correct” everything that remains to be “corrected” in Marxism. But we should not surrender in advance by refusing to situate ourselves and our own perspectives within the horizon of our times.
Having said this, then: in the context of the world-system under construction during the period of slavery and the Haitian Revolution, what occupied – and in a way still occupies – the place of the concrete particular that remained inassimilable to the “universal” of coloniality? The reader will have guessed the answer, or my answer, already: metaphorically speaking, the color black.
The Black Enlightenment: The Haitian “Constitutional Revolution”
Let me begin this section by venturing a bold hypothesis. The Haitian Revolution offered the first and most radical response to the false philosophical and political “universalisms” that I have been analyzing. (This includes, in advance, a response to the “errors” of Marx and Marxism.) And the Haitian Revolution offered this response both in practice, as we have seen throughout this book and especially in the last chapter, and in law – that is, in its texts, including most spectacularly in one of its first constitutional texts, as we will soon see.
Moreover, this textual production, like the revolution that gave rise to it, has been disappeared from political and juridical historiography, but also from cultural studies. It is unbelievable, but easily explicable, that even the most “critical” legal philosophy, so concerned with things like “differential rights” and “positive discrimination,” has not attended to the ethno-juridical problems that the 1805 Constitution of Haiti seeks to address. It’s even stranger that our “postcolonial” present, for all its theoretical obsessions with the problems of “multiculturalism,” “cultural hybridity,” “identity politics,” “undecidable identities,” and other, similar ideas, has not turned to a text as unprecedented (if not unique) as the “Dessalinean” constitution of 1805 or to its antecedents, the “Toussaintian” texts of 1801. Both sets of texts register the difficulties and aporias that these fields address, two hundred years before it became fashionable in the Western academy to take up such questions. The initial disavowal thus clearly continues its victory march.
I have mentioned the profound and scandalous meaning of Article 14 of the Haitian Constitution of 1805, which decrees that all Haitians would henceforth be known as “blacks.” This implies a resounding and sarcastic slap in the face to Western false universalism, including the false universalism of the French Revolution, which had to be persuaded by another revolution, the Haitian, that “black” particularity was worthy of inclusion in the discourse of the “universal” rights of man. Here I would underscore two things. First, the mere fact that a violent revolution was necessary to this end attests to the violence of the claims of a “universalist particular” to be the Universal as such. This latter violence was “symbolic,” to be sure, but its material effects were no less violent. Second, Article 14 stands “at the same time” (and we now know all that this phrase implies) against and for the French Revolution. If, on the one hand, it shows the French Revolution’s inconsequence, on the other, the French Revolution proves absolutely consequential in that its premises are also those of the revolution that it “inspires,” the point of departure for the Haitian Revolution.
Let me therefore put forward a succinct and paradoxical formulation. The Haitian Revolution is more “French” than the French Revolution. But this is the case only because “at the same time” it is Haitian. Only from the “periphery” excluded from the Universal could this revolution articulate what the “center” needed in order to become truly “universal.” This response was threefold: no longer only political, it was also (inseparably) social and ethnocultural or racial. Article 14 denounces the existence of an unresolvable conflict – a tragic negative dialectic – between the universal and the particular, between the (abstract) concept and the (concrete) object. At the same time, however, it proposes new terms for this conflict, different from those of the “center” of would-be universality. That is: to the universalist particular of the French Revolution and of Eurocentrism in general, Article 14, a distillation of all of the complexities of the Haitian Revolution, responds with a particularist universal. This shows that only the particular that cannot be fully reduced to the universal reveals the “open” truth of a supposed totality. This “totality” is in fact, as Sartre would say, a permanent process of de-totalization and re-totalization.82 Moreover, Article 14 also shows clearly that “in the last instance” what accounts for the unresolvable conflict is not an error of Enlightenment, one thought that can be corrected with more Enlightenment, but the material base (real, not metaphorical slavery) that overdetermines this thought. That is: the conflict is not caused by a logical contradiction but rather by the very structure of the world-system.
To be clear, then, when Adorno and Horkheimer, in their extraordinary essay on “The Concept of Enlightenment,” speak of the need to “enlighten the Enlightenment,” this must be understood in two different but complementary senses:
Given these premises, to “enlighten the Enlightenment” from within the Enlightenment itself implies a passage to a new “enlightened” logic, one based on respect for the singular materiality of the object. In other words, it implies taking up a place within the site of conflict of unreconciled tension, between the concept and the object. But this can precisely not be something done through the pure concept alone. This would be a lapse into “identitarian” thought, which aims at the identification of the object with the concept. At the same time, however, we cannot do without the concept except at the cost of falling into the most crass (and impossible) irrationalism. This is why Adorno, in his Negative Dialectics, proposes a philosophy that unavoidably continues to use the concept, but that uses it against itself. (This might be a minimal definition of critical thought, in fact.) More specifically, this thought leads the concept beyond itself, toward the limit that is the object’s singular, resistant materiality.
Theory is thus a permanently open “totality.” It is neither sutured nor closed in on itself in its pure, abstract conceptuality. Instead, it engages in a charged and conflictual conversation with the real, thinking the real from the point of view of the nonidentity of the Idea and Nature, defined in the broad sense as the “materiality of the real.” It is relatively easy to see that this proposal returns us to Marx’s critique of Hegel’s concept-centered and ultimately dematerialized idealism. Transposing this critique into another register and inflecting it to his own ends, Adorno continues this critique even while he is influenced by and responsive to a series of thinkers who came after Marx (Weber, Nietzsche, Freud, and, in a much more problematic way, Heidegger). More specifically, Adorno returns to and complicates the most profound philosophical implications of Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach.”83 As Adorno writes in Negative Dialectics, the task of changing the world, which Marx argues should take the place of the mere interpretation of the world, has not been completed.84 The time for the realization and consequent dissolution of philosophy in the “realm of freedom” has long since passed. Philosophy is thus left “floating in the air,” in the place beyond heaven or in the Platonic realm of the pure ideality of the Concept. Again, it should be brought back to earth in order to allow for a conflictual encounter: a nonidentitarian encounter with the Object that is both Nature, defined, again, in the broad sense as the materiality of the real, and History.
And this is my central hypothesis, the one that I will soon undertake to defend: Article 14 of the Haitian Constitution of 1805 does precisely this. Without renouncing Enlightenment thought or the ideals of the French Revolution, it builds on the concrete materiality of its own revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and on the particular place that the color black occupies for the slaves, in order to denounce from within the identitarian claims of the abstract universality of the Declaration of 1789. Clearly, neither Article 14 nor the Haitian Revolution as a whole could perform the metaphorical “realization” of philosophy alone. But both carry this impulse or this potentiality farther than the French Revolution could. In fact, both are closer to the “Theses on Feuerbach” or even to Negative Dialectics than Jacobin thought would ever be. Of course, Article 14 does not emerge like Minerva from the head of Jupiter. Nor does it emerge in a textual vacuum. But let us proceed slowly. As Fischer notes, the Haitian Constitution of 1805 – again, like its antecedents, including the draft constitution composed by Toussaint in 1801 – is, in addition to being the first of its kind, an extraordinary document in the context of the post-independence constitutions and political declarations of the nineteenth century. No other text speaks so eloquently of the truly unprecedented and (to return once again to Trouillot) unrepresentable nature of this revolution. No other document so clearly expresses the revolutionary character of the new state, the syncretic counter-modernity of what Alvin Gouldner might call its background assumptions, its basic, underlying presuppositions.85 Nor does any document offer so vivid an account of the challenges that the revolution had to face in the context of a world-system in which slavery was the rule, and in which colonialist expansion had begun to extend toward Asia and Africa, and “taxonomic” racialism was beginning to change into a more direct form of biological, “scientific” racism.
Against all odds, the Haitian Constitution – and its most compact and complex Article, Article 14 – inverts this tendency and politicizes distinctions based on “race” and skin color. As we will see, being black, white, or “mulatto” is, in the Haitian Constitution, a problematic political question inherited from history that has nothing to do with pseudo-scientific, “naturalist,” or biological fantasies. These all show how identitarian thought, as a form of domination by the Concept, founders on the resistance of the Object. Of course, I am not reducing this struggle to a matter of mere philosophy. What I am saying is that the unprecedented material violence of this revolutionary process, an effect of the centuries-old violence of colonization and slavery, was proportional to the foundering and conceptual failure of an abortive hegemony.
To begin by saying “we are all black” is to overturn the classificatory delirium that had claimed to identify more than one hundred different shades of “nonwhiteness.” But the statement does not imply a complete homogenization, a new abstract universal. Of course, it could not claim to be, or to speak for, such an abstract universal when, as we have just seen, it acts as if its own excluded particularity were universal. The as if becomes an as not, as in the remarkable formula suggested by Jacob Taubes in his study of Paul; that is, it becomes a metaphor or synecdoche for the incommensurable, the incomparable, the inassimilable.86 In this case: the color black acquires a fully political, denaturalized dimension. Here, however, “denaturalized” does not mean dematerialized, but rather exactly the opposite. It is “nature” defined as “racialized” that turns out to be the idealist, purely “spiritual” abstraction. The color black named in Article 14, by contrast, is political because (and not despite the fact that) it is a skin color, stuck to the flesh. It thus points to the recovery of a full, irreducible materiality at the heart of the “spiritualized” abstraction governing the self-representation of the world-system. In this sense – and in Adorno’s sense as well – it is an authentic “nature”: the material concreteness of the Object, of the Thing, whose naturalization had been effected by a metaphysics and of course a politics.
The Haitian Constitution thus enters a complex and labyrinthine heterotopia, to use a Foucauldian term.87 In other words, it enters a space that is characterized by the very opposite of the rectilinear homogeneity of official representations of modernity. Here “universalist” ideals of racial equality or identitarian demands for reparation for the injustices of the past, as well as desires for future redemption, are all re-founded on the basis of counter-modern criteria. This means, however, that “at the same time” as they counter modernity they do not give up on modernity as such but rather redefine it. Hence what we could call their utopian character in Ernst Bloch’s sense, according to which the not-yet, by virtue of its very “impossibility,” exposes the iniquity of the present.88
Of course, from the standpoint of a “possibilist” conception of the agreement between laws and the reality that they seek to legislate – or from the standpoint of what we could call juridical Realpolitik – the Constitution of 1805 is marked by a serious misalignment. The prescriptions that it articulates, in other words, do not fit the chaotic and fraught social, political, and ethnocultural situation in which the constitution intervenes, the situation of a new state that has just undergone a devastating revolutionary process. But this is exactly right: what the constitution can do, as a philosophical and political text rather than as a strictly juridical-realist one, is show the limits of Western juridical realism, its silence in the face of a reality that is unrepresentable in Eurocentric universalism. In a sense, the Haitian Revolution resembled nothing else. Its constitution was thus likewise singular. And in fact, it continues to be singular, incomparable. At least, it resembles no other text that we have today, in the early twenty-first century.
This strangeness – the strangeness of the 1801 draft as well as of the 1805 Constitution, its decentering of and its distance from the conventions and conceptions of other Western constitutions – can already be seen in its origins. Although they were signed by Toussaint (who also composed the 1801 constitution) and Dessalines (who was “illiterate” but had his secretary compose the 1805 version), respectively, both texts were the product of collective discussion, the outcome of assemblies that included both enlightened affranchis educated in France and former slaves who were “unlettered” (in the European sense). The constitution expresses without “synthesizing” the tensions between these sectors with their competing interests; it avows the unresolved nature of these conflicts. The Haitian Constitution of 1805 thus opposes the unitary pretensions shared by the vast majority of bourgeois constitutions, including those drafted later, in the newly independent nations of the Americas, guided by the ideological belief that there are no divisions of class, race, or gender in the new nation, as if this belief were not “utopian” in the disparaging sense. The Haitian Constitution displays a sort of conflictual dialogism that does not take any difference to be “overcome” or “superseded” in advance. Moreover, and perhaps even more importantly, the constitution likewise expresses another tension, a symptom of political and cultural decentering that can only appear as an incomprehensible contradiction to universalist Western thought: a contradiction between the “enlightened” statements promoting the individual liberties characteristic of “liberal” modernity (equality under the law, the right to privacy, the right to exercise one’s profession freely, and so on), on the one hand, and, on the other, a communitarian “paternalism” that strictly limits individual action and confers on the state the right to condition the free will of individuals according to the economic necessities of society. Such a contradiction can be to some extent explained, of course, by the abysmal economic and social situation in which Haiti found itself immediately after the revolution. For both Toussaint and Dessalines (whatever their differences in other respects), this situation called for a decisive and energetic response from the state then being reorganized. But this tension was also – and probably to a greater extent – the expression of an involuntary syncretism or a catastrophic transculturation, to adapt a notion from Fernando Ortiz. On the one hand, the “modern” ideas of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment inspired the Haitian Revolution and made it possible to a degree. On the other, the premodern communitarian traditions (whether real or imagined) of a mythic African past were now to be recovered, long after the “blacks” of Haiti had been torn away from these traditions in the most violent and violating way possible.
The “Toussaintian” constitution of 1801 played deliberately with the ambiguities of the revolutionary situation. It did not explicitly declare independence: Toussaint had taken over the role of Governor General by revolutionary means, but he was still exercising power in the name of the French Empire. But the 1801 Constitution did establish in its first article that, even if Saint-Domingue was part of the French Empire, it was “ruled under particular laws.”89 From the outset, then, the text avows a conflict of sovereignties, a conflict, that is, at the very heart of the imperium. In fact: how could the general law of France be exercised in a context that claimed for itself an irreducible particularity, above all in Article 19, which states that in the territory of Saint-Domingue, only the laws approved by the local National Assembly are valid?
Right away, then, the text points to the existence of an unresolvable political tension. And we soon recognize all the ethnic, cultural, and social complexities of the situation. Article 3 had decreed the abolition of all present and future slavery: “There cannot exist slaves on this territory, servitude is therein forever abolished. All men are born, live and die free and French.”90 Citizenship, though still French, is immediately associated here with a concrete liberty that follows from a ban on slavery. This is not, then, an abstract, juridical liberty, but rather a social matter. The concepts of citizenship and freedom depend directly on the elimination of a class: the class of slaves. But obviously this in fact means the elimination of two classes, since the class of masters must also be abolished simultaneously. Here again, Hegel is radically materialized several years before the Phenomenology has even been conceived.
What is abolished here, together with slavery, is the liberal distinction between the political and the social. But, as Fischer notes, the constitution also makes a further claim that is more than a little strange: namely, the claim that men are born, live, and die free – not just that they are born and live free, which would seem to suffice. This claim is notable for its polysemy. On the one hand, however, this can be understood as a clause meant to placate France by suggesting that there are no plans for a revolutionary declaration of independence in the works, since men will live and die free and French. On the other hand, it can be interpreted as a warning (informed by Toussaint’s suspicions that Napoleon was preparing to reinstitute slavery) that the former slaves are prepared to fight to the death to defend their (“French”) liberty. And there is a third possible reading, which does not rule out the other two: the claim that future Haitians are French also serves to show, again, that the “universality” of the French Revolution had left something out that the Haitian Revolution would now replace. And this “something” left out had a particular color – a “local color,” we could say. The color was black.
On January 1, 1804, one of these multiple tensions, at least, was resolved: Dessalines declared independence. The “blacks” are born, live, and die free, yes, but from this point on not French, but Haitian. A black republic is born, with an indigenous name standing as a new manifestation of intersecting pluralities. And here already another tension emerges. The myth of a return to Africa remains in force. Haiti, however, is the name of the land that once belonged to the Arawak or Taíno people. Now, the former slaves, even when they had been in the Americas for generations were not in any sense “aboriginal.” Instead, they had been forcefully transplanted, against their will. The choice of a Taíno (or perhaps Arawak) name for this new black state: does this not speak to a desire for roots, for integration, whether conscious or otherwise? But this would be a plural integration, both in ethnocultural terms (in which “Africans” join together with “Aboriginals,” if only through the symbolism of a name, since the indigenous people on the island had already been exterminated), and in terms of class. It is expressly, and in a Benjaminian fashion, the oppressed – those vanquished by history – who are founding the new nation.
If one needed yet more proof of the philosophical density of the revolution, it would suffice to cite the first paragraph of the preamble to the new constitution, which Dessalines promulgated on May 20, 1805:
In the presence of the Supreme Being, before whom all mortals are equal, and who has scattered so many species of beings over the surface of the earth, with the sole goal of manifesting his glory and might through the diversity of his works.91
Clearly this is no longer a matter of the simple abstract homogeneity of equality before the law, whether human or divine. There is first an affirmation of universal equality, followed immediately by an assertion of difference (“so many species”) and diversity. There is an appeal to the rhetoric of the enlightened theology of the French Revolution (“the Supreme Being”), followed immediately by the attribution of particular, concrete determinations to this Being. The Supreme Being is, in effect, “spoken in many ways,” but these are simultaneous. It is thus not a matter of choosing between the One and the Multiple – as if it were, say, a debate between Badiou and Deleuze. Instead, it is a matter of sustaining both in their irreducible tension. This is not a matter of mere, uncritical, liberal pluralism, the kind that would be satisfied with listing differences under the illusory guise of “peaceful coexistence.” There is one such difference – blackness – that does not and cannot occupy the same place as the others. This allows for the semiotic testing of the intelligibility of the system as a whole. But in order for this to become clear, a bloody revolution was necessary.
The following phrases appear immediately after those from the preamble that I have just quoted: “Before the whole creation whose disowned children we have so unjustly and for so long been considered.”92 Here again, the totality of “creation” is rendered specific through its inclusion of the part that has been excluded, “disowned”; the specification is also made on the “part of those who have no part,” as Jacques Rancière would say.93 In this case, this part is those of the ancient black slaves; here, “race” and class work together to define a non-place within the totality. Again, in the best negatively dialectical fashion, as this would be elaborated by Adorno a century and a half later, it is the “detail” irreducible to the totality that makes this totality specific, without, however, allowing it to be fully closed. The object, without denying its connection to the Concept, is at the same time an autonomous remainder that resists being identified with the Concept. Everything depends, as Fischer notes, on the textual architecture and “the complicated and dialectical fashion in which universalism and particularism are framed.”94 Indeed, universalism and particularism mutually refer to one another, although again they do so without an “overcoming synthesis.” Universal equality cannot be achieved without the particular demand made by the black slaves who have effectively been expelled from universality. And conversely, this particular demand makes no sense apart from its reference to universality.
This structure becomes even more clearly apparent when we read the articles in the body of the constitution that specifically address the questions of race and class. Article 12 warns: “No white person, of whatever nationality, shall set foot on this territory with the title of master or proprietor nor, in the future, acquire property here.” But the following article clarifies: “The preceding article shall not have any effect on white women who have been naturalized by the government, nor on their present or future children. Included in the present article are the Germans and Poles who have been naturalized by the Government.”95
We thus arrive at Article 14, which will by now be familiar:
All distinctions of color will by necessity disappear among the children of one and the same family where the Head of State is the father; Haitians shall be known from now on by the generic denomination of blacks.96
I have already commented on this article at length, perhaps in excess, but this is no coincidence. In a sense, I could say that my whole book is a commentary on Article 14. The strange stipulation in the preceding article including “Germans and Poles” responds to a fact that may appear merely anecdotal but that is in fact profoundly significant: the military that Napoleon had sent to Haiti in 1802 in order to repress the revolution was a “multinational” force that included a regiment of Germans and Poles. A significant part of this contingent joined the revolutionaries shortly after disembarking in Saint-Domingue. Clearly, after the revolution, they could not return to France, where they would certainly have been guillotined. They were therefore given the honor of Haitian citizenship. But, undoubtedly, their being mentioned in Article 19 is the height of particularism, further underscored by the fact that Germans and Poles – whom one would ordinarily think of as having the very fair skin and blonde hair associated with Saxons and Slavs – are now black according to the logic of Article 14, since if they have been “naturalized,” then they, too, are Haitians.
This simultaneous generalization and particularization, which might at first seem absurd, is in fact enormously valuable because, as Fischer notes, it disrupts biologistic or “naturalist” racialism.97 If even Poles and Germans can be declared “blacks” by a legal document like this constitution, then it is clear that the color black is a political “denomination,” or a political-cultural one. This is also to say that it is arbitrary in a more or less Saussurean sense, not natural and not necessary. Therefore of course it was always, had always been, arbitrary. The same gesture thus deconstructs both the racist fallacy that attributes different traits to different human “species,” as in Voltaire, and the nonsensical notion that there were 126 different shades of black. It is necessary to insist on this point: through a “speech act,” a veritable and powerful performative, a disquieting philosophical paradox is produced, in which the universal is derived from a generalization of one of its particulars.98 And not from just any particular but rather, again, from the one that until then had been materially excluded. As Fischer notes with a certain irony: “Calling all Haitians, regardless of skin color, black is a gesture like calling all people, regardless of their sex, women.”99 This, too, would undoubtedly be a performative that could seek to repair the injustice committed against one part, discursively excluded from the human species in all declarations of the rights of “Man.” (Incidentally, Fischer’s suggestion also reminds us that, surprisingly, feminists seem not to have been interested in the case of Haiti, at least not as interested as the case deserves. Is it not remarkable that in 1805, Article 13 confers rights specifically on women, even if this is only one brief moment in the whole constitution? Wouldn’t it be useful, for thinking the question of gender, to engage with the aporia of a black particularism that “realizes” egalitarian universalism?)
In any case, the political and cultural meaning of the clause is clear. After all, why was it legally necessary to introduce this clause, if the article had already begun by stating that no distinctions based on skin color would be permissible? In other words, the clause is not merely juridical. It refuses to hide or disguise the determining role of political conflict between races in Haitian history: the conflict between blacks and whites, first of all, but, as we have seen, there were also conflicts between “mulattos” and blacks and whites at certain times, and so forth.
As I noted above, Article 14 and the whole constitution to which it belongs offer a critique in practice, and in advance, of a constitutional logic and ideology that imagines the modern nation-state as a homogenous unity, unaffected by distinctions between classes, races, or genders. This is one more indication of what I would venture to call the Haitian Revolution’s exceptionality, although the term is a risky one. Indeed, as Waldo Ansaldi notes, “the emancipatory struggles in the Americas were political revolutions, in keeping with the understandings of revolution as entailing a transformation of the structures of the state, without necessarily entailing class struggle.”100 As we have already seen repeatedly, this is not the case in Haiti, where from the first the question of class struggle was posed, as was the question of conflict between “races.” At the same time, however, there is a unitary concept of the nation at work in the 1805 Constitution – and in fact in Article 14 itself. But note how this unity is qualified: “All distinctions of color will by necessity disappear among the children of one and the same family where the Head of State is the father.” Earlier I called this “paternalism,” and of course we could also call it “patriarchalism.” The nation is thought of as one big, indivisible “family,” one whose members, as we know, are all “black.” This family is led by a “father” serving as Head of State, though we have seen that there is also an allegorical return to the mother or mater(ial) implicit in the appeal to black flesh as inseparable from Haitian citizenship. This analogy between the state and the family (in the European context, already detectable in ancient Greece, with its distinction between polis and oikos, a distinction central as well to the conflicts shown in tragedies like Sophocles’ Antigone) was precisely what the first theorists of the modern European state, including Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke, struggled against. This was obviously first and foremost a struggle against feudal “paternalism” and the hereditary transmission of power. But precisely for this reason it was also an argument that tended to separate “political society” from “civil society,” or the state from society more generally. In any case, this was a “Western,” European matter.
Article 14 has nothing to do with these polemics. The political unity that it promotes as a program is, to be sure, the unity of a traditional, “premodern” structure, but an African one in which the logic of political power is indistinguishable from what anthropologists have analyzed as the structures of kinship. These structures, for instance for Lévi-Strauss, transform biological consanguinity into social and political alliance.101 This is another indication, then, of the politicization – that is, the materialization in the strict sense – of abstract nature undertaken by the Haitian Revolution. If this revolution can be said to have “enlightened the Enlightenment” in the Adornian sense, then we can also say that it revolutionized the (French) Revolution by introducing into its modernity a “traditionalism” that did not imply a backward movement but rather a new combination. As we have seen, the Haitian Revolution did not reject the modernity of the French Revolution, but rather deemed it insufficient. The combination that it formed with “traditionalism” was thus a combination that sought to address unevenness and inequality.
All of these factors make for what we might call, drawing again on a sort of psychoanalytic metaphor, a divided identity for Haiti. This was a new nation, founded from scratch. Unlike what would happen with the other independence movements in the Americas, there was a radical break with the colonial situation. This break was juridical, to be sure, but also and especially ethnocultural, since this was a “black” nation. But the novelty of the Haitian Revolution derived above all from its enactment of all the unresolvable conflicts inherited from the colonial situation and the ethic, social, and economic logic of the plantation. The ideals of the French Revolution are preserved and, at the same time, surpassed, taken beyond their limits – that is, the historical, political, and ideological limits of the period. This “beyond” was found in the color black, and what I have called this “local color” led to an apparent retreat – or to what looked like a retreat from the standpoint of evolutionism and “progressive” Eurocentrism. I am referring to the “retreat” to African traditions and myths: a retreat that in fact represented a leap forward, beyond the limits of Eurocentric modernity.
In a lucid essay, Doris L. Garraway points out the enormous difficulties – obviously ideologically “overdetermined” – that Eurocentric thought has had in conceiving the philosophical and political ex-centricity of the Haitian Revolution, which is systematically recast as a “reflection” of the French Revolution.102 The latter, by contrast, is considered the originary signifier of modern political values. This thought does not even consider the possibility that – to repeat a hypothesis that has been central to this section of the book – this signifier has been forced to expand and multiply its “signifieds” because the Haitian Revolution revealed its limits.
The Difficulties of Theorizing (the Haitian) Revolution
We should not conclude that this Eurocentric tendency – the impossibility of thinking the Haitian Revolution – is exclusively European. A figure as formidable as the postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha succumbs to a version of it when, considering the work of C. L. R. James, without rigorously noting how the supposedly universalist values of the French Revolution were initially subordinated to the interests of colonial capital and the world-system, he nevertheless presents Toussaint Louverture as a mere spectator, one who sits and watches as a tragic modernity unfolds, a modernity that began elsewhere, in Europe, of course.103 Another renowned postcolonial critic, Robert Young, devotes nearly half of his book Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction to what he calls (in a curiously Althusserian phrase) the “theoretical practices” of liberation struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Young mentions the Haitian Revolution only twice, despite the fact that it is, as we know, the first such liberation struggle. One of these references, moreover, appears in Young’s chapter on European anticolonialism.104
Both Bhabha and Young, who are, of course, by no means the only ones, write with the best of intentions, but they deprive the Haitian Revolution of all its significance as an autonomous anticolonial struggle, one that had to oppose the French Revolution in order to realize that revolution’s ideals. The Haitian Revolution instead becomes the colonial chapter of the French Revolution, where the latter remains the active agent, and the former the mere passive recipient of action. Such “progressive” Eurocentrism can be recognized as particularly symptomatic when we recall that already in the 1930s the Martinican poet and essayist Aimé Césaire forcefully refused the idea that the revolution in Saint-Domingue was a mere part or appendage of the French Revolution:
It is absolutely necessary to understand that there is no French Revolution in the French colonies. What there is, in each colony and especially in Haiti, is a specific revolution born on the occasion of the French Revolution and connected with that revolution, but unfolding according to its own laws and with its own objectives.105
The difficulty that many have had in grappling with the eccentric character of the Haitian Revolution is related to a series of problems with postcolonial theory, themselves closely related to one another. I have considered these in a previous book.106 First of all, postcolonial theory was developed from and for “late colonial” situations and the corresponding postcolonialisms in Africa and Asia, not for the “early” colonialisms and postcolonialisms of Latin America and the Caribbean. Indeed, it is problematic to apply the same analysis to societies that achieved formal political independence when the twentieth century was already well under way – for example, India, the countries of the Maghreb, or most, if not all, of the nations of Africa – that one applies to the nations in the Americas that achieved independence during the nineteenth century, when the modern world-system was already in force but long before the imperialist and neocolonialist system consolidated itself as such, strictly speaking. This is not the place to consider the problem in depth, but there are of course enormous differences in the symbolic self-understandings and imaginary identities of these two sets of nations. Consider, on the one hand, a nation like Algeria, which was constituted as such in the framework of a system of fully developed international dependencies, in the context of a global Cold War that pitted economic and political blocs against one another. This was also the context of a West on the way to a late capitalism that would lead to profound technological innovations as well as arms races, the threat of nuclear war, and a fully hegemonic culture industry. Then consider the case of Argentina, for example, founded a century and a half earlier when none of these things existed or were even imaginable.
Obviously, societies with radically different histories are bound to have different, if not incommensurable, cultural and symbolic productions. But there is another fundamental difference between these sets of societies: the anticolonial revolutions of the nineteenth century – that is, those in Latin America, apart from Haiti’s – were fought by local economic elites who were of European origin and who sought more “room to maneuver” in their business affairs and therefore greater autonomy from the metropolis. Only under the harsh leadership of these elites were certain forms of popular “leadership” permitted. The anticolonial or postcolonial revolutions of the twentieth century, by contrast – from Algeria to Vietnam, from Mexico to India, from China to Grenada, from Cuba to Angola, from the Mau-Mau to Nicaragua – were fundamentally and directly led by plebeian masses, by coalitions formed by different factions within the working class and peasantry, by the “people,” whether or not they were absorbed into or openly betrayed by emergent elites. Their popular character not only made these movements completely different from the revolutionary movements of the nineteenth century from the point of view of political practice; at the level of theory, this difference forced them to confront the troubling but persistent question of class: its articulation and its often-conflicted intersection with questions of ethnicity, culture, gender, language, and religion. In this sense – in yet another case of “combined and uneven development” – the historical polysynchronicity of the Haitian Revolution made it resemble the Third Worldist revolutions of the twentieth century more than the bourgeois revolutions of the nineteenth.
But as a theory of the “post-” that seeks to critically “deconstruct” all textuality suspected of enlightened modernity, postcolonial theory feels uncomfortable addressing the “enlightened” demands that appear in the declarations and constitutions of the Haitian Revolution. (I have argued, by contrast, that these should be seen as remarkable fulfillments of the Frankfurt School injunction to “enlighten the Enlightenment.”) I have already indicated that postcolonial theory’s discomfort with these texts reveals a paradoxical subjection to the hegemonic grand narrative according to which modernity is a homogeneous and unilateral phenomenon, as well as an equally paradoxical lapse into a kind of binary thinking that verges unconsciously on ideological fetishism. It is as if these critics were to say: the Haitian Revolution at times speaks the language of the French Revolution, so it must belong entirely to the logic of that revolution. It must be a mere part or appendage of the latter. Postcolonial critics thus forget or ignore the other aspects of the discourse and practice of the Haitian Revolution, to which I have drawn attention: its confrontation and conflict with the limits of Eurocentrism and the image of modernity produced and projected by the French Revolution. To sum up, then: what most postcolonial critics cannot see (and their myopia is ironically in tension with their own theories of hybridity) is that if the Haitian Revolution was a part of the French Revolution, then the opposite must also be true to the same extent. The two parts repel each other, keep their distance, even while they fit together at the same time, as in Walter Benjamin’s allegorical “constellations.”
Garraway has, however, introduced a third possibility, one that complements the two that I have just offered to account for the inability of much postcolonial theory to reckon with the case of Haiti. She relates this inability to the fact that the Haitian Revolution does not belong to or rely on the nationalist categories with which scholars (including but not limited to postcolonial critics) seek to describe modern anticolonial movements. These categories simply cannot account for the phenomenon of the Haitian Revolution. In Imagined Communities, one of the most influential accounts of nationalism – a book that, it is hardly necessary to note, never mentions Haiti – Benedict Anderson argues suggestively that nationalism was not produced by Europe after the French Revolution, as is conventionally asserted, even taken for granted.107 Instead, Anderson argues, it was “invented” in the colonial world, in the latter’s struggle to break with imperial powers. Still, Haiti cannot be made to fit into any of the paradigms that Anderson carefully develops. I have already noted this difficulty in my last chapter: Haiti’s was not a typical “creole” nationalism of the kind associated with movements for independence in the rest of Latin America, where bourgeois, mostly white, minorities devised what Garraway calls a “frontier nativism,” even while they preserved European cultural values and shored up white supremacy.108 But neither does the Haitian Revolution neatly parallel the anticolonial movements in India or Africa, whose demands for sovereignty were informed by the desire for an absolute difference from Europe, based on pure ethnocultural origins. By contrast, the Haitian Revolution, as we know, presupposed a conflictual transculturation or what I have also called a catastrophic transculturation, one marked by an unresolved tension between different cultural frameworks. Although Garraway does not address the problem from this perspective, the tension was based in large part on a fact that I have already considered: that at the moment of its emergence, the movement for emancipation in Saint-Domingue included many insurgent slaves (more than a third) who were not, in fact, “African” in the sense of having been born in Africa. Their ancestors came from Africa, to be sure, but these slaves already considered themselves Antillean or Caribbean.
In the case of Haiti, we thus find a sort of triangle of tensions, something like the inverse of the Atlantic triangle formed by the slave trade. Like the latter, the former’s three vertices are Africa, Europe, and the Americas. In other words, we are not dealing here with a linear or binary opposition, as in the other cases privileged by postcolonial theory: Africa–Europe, India–Europe, and so on. Nor does the Haitian Revolution presuppose a cultural continuity marked by merely juridical discontinuity, as in the other independence movements in Latin America. The African vertex of course marks the end of any possible equilibrium (however conflictual) between Europe and the Americas. Africa names, on the one hand, the notion of a mythical return to “Guinea” (a notion in tension with African American créolité) and, on the other, the whole question of blackness. At the same time, however, the Haitian Revolution stays true to the ideals of the French Revolution and modernity, while also exceeding the French Revolution with its “heterotopic” achievements.
But perhaps I am exaggerating in this account of postcolonial theory’s shortcomings. If so, this is because I would argue that, given its preoccupations and problematics, this theory should have turned to the case of Haiti and studied it with care. In fact, however, postcolonial theory inherits and, in its way, perpetuates, wittingly or unwittingly, the silence that, as I have shown following Trouillot, has surrounded the event of the Haitian Revolution and even more so its theoretical and political consequences.109 I have also noted that this silence – this denial or disavowal – even affects left and Marxist historiography, especially in France. Yves Benot has combed through and exhaustively analyzed the major histories of the French Revolution, showing how far this “distraction” or forgetting extends.110 The result is staggering: Benot writes that no collective memory of the Haitian Revolution has remained in France apart from the very little that French historians have wanted to preserve. Let us consider this problem in more detail.
The first major work that is worth mentioning is Madame de Staël’s Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution (1818).111 Here one might expect at least a passing reference to the Haitian Revolution, given that the text seeks to commemorate Jacques Necker, the author’s father, who was an energetic opponent of the slave trade. But we find not a word about this opposition, which was rare for a state functionary at the time. For his part, François-Auguste Mignet, in his History of the French Revolution, 1789–1814 (1824), severely condemns colonialism in general and in particular the colonialism of the Napoleonic era.112 But there is not a single reference in this work to the abolition decree of 1794, let alone the decisive role played by the Haitian Revolution in bringing about that decree.
Marie-Joseph-Louis-Adolphe Thiers, a close friend of Mignet’s, reconstructs the history of Saint-Domingue in the first volume of his History of the Consulate and the Empire of France under Napoleon (1845).113 He could not avoid showing prudent admiration for Toussaint Louverture as a “statesman” (and not as a revolutionary, clearly). He even goes so far as to call Toussaint a “black chief of genius and talent,” not without registering his amazement.114 But he does this precisely in order to oppose the figure of Toussaint to “the sight of … ignoble and barbarous idleness given by the negroes left to themselves, in the colonies recently emancipated.”115 This is undoubtedly a reference to the English colonies, since we know that the “second abolition” would not take place in France until three years after the publication of the first edition of Thiers’s book. None of this saves Toussaint from being called “frightful to the sight” though surrounded by “flatterers.”116 This is not to mention “the barbarous Dessalines.”117 Apart from this ideological and racist bias, what matters here is that in a multivolume work comprising thousands of pages, one that covers precisely the period of the defeat of the Bonapartists in Saint-Domingue and of Haiti’s achievement of independence, only about twenty pages are dedicated to these subjects. And in the rest of this monumental history, there is not a word about the French abolitionists.
Already in 1847, the History of the Girondins was published by the great poet Lamartine, who as a representative would fight persistently for the second abolition. Though not at all inclined to celebrate popular uprisings, Lamartine concedes that the slaves’ insurrection in the colonies was “inevitable,” a “just” response to the “neglect” of the Parisian assemblies.118 But at the same time, Lamartine argues that this insurrection was instigated and led by “mulattos,” who guided the savage masses “not to combat but to butchery.”119 This is the entirety of the “analysis” of the revolution (or of the revolutions, since he is not even specifically attending to the case of Haiti) that we can find in the abolitionist Lamartine’s text.
The same year, 1847, marked the first appearance of Jules Michelet’s History of the Revolution:120 a veritable masterpiece (one that, as Benot says, “will not be equaled except by Victor Hugo’s Ninety-Three”) and a text that, despite the many errors that later historians have pointed out, is animated by a strong political commitment.121 Except, of course, when it comes to the case of Haiti. The abolition decree of 1794 is once again “forgotten.” The first chapter of the fourth volume of Michelet’s history does refer to the Haitian insurrection, however. The beginning of that chapter is truly brilliant:
A terrifying column of fire could be seen rising over the ocean. Saint-Domingue was in flames. This was an outcome worthy of the travesties of the Constituent Assembly, which, on this terrible matter, hesitated between law and utility and seemed to have shown the wretched blacks freedom only so they could immediately take it away and leave them with nothing but despair.122
This is an impressive distillation of the problem. But it is followed by just two sentences on the revolution: “One night, sixty thousand blacks rose up, beginning the carnage, the fires, the most horrifying war fought by savages that has ever been seen.”123 Indeed, the war is evidently so frightening that Michelet will have no more to say about it, likely struck dumb by fear.
And what of the socialist Louis Blanc? In the sixth volume of his own History of the French Revolution (1854), there are exactly twenty-eight pages on slave insurrections including the Haitian Revolution, and in this case the historian does pause to consider the death of Dutty Boukman during the very first days of the revolution.124 C’est tout. To be sure, Blanc harshly criticizes the “criminal argument” made by the Amis des Noirs, who sought to improve living conditions among the “mulattos” as a way of ensuring the continuity of slavery. But, like the historians who preceded him, Blanc fails to mention the abolition of 1794, and he does not return to any of these issues except to lament the “disgraceful incident” that took place in Martinique on May 22, 1848, the “efficient cause” of the second abolition decreed that same year (a decree that Blanc himself helped to promulgate).
First-rate authors, including Alexis de Tocqueville, Edgar Quilnet, and Hypolitte Taine, did not even approach the Haitian Revolution. We can therefore skip ahead to Jean Jaurès and his Socialist History of the French Revolution (1901).125 Here, undoubtedly, “history” is something different. But yet again we don’t find any reference to the abolition of 1794, although Jaurès does engage rigorously with the debates of the Constituent and Legislative Assemblies during the French Revolution. In any case, Jaurès is the first historian to try to write a socialist history of this conflict, integrating his analysis of the assemblies’ debates into an analysis of the class struggle at the heart of the revolution, with the express aim of drawing conclusions applicable to his present: Jaurès steadfastly opposes French colonial policies, specifically in Morocco. He writes fittingly in his History:
On this colonial question, the Constituent Assembly, forced to choose between the rights of man and the narrow egotism of a faction of the bourgeoisie, sides with the latter: narrow egotism. … And the means employed were torturous, the way arduous. Until then, the revolution had been bourgeois, but careful. When it came to the colonial question, it showed itself to be a corrupt, Orleanist regime, a regime run by the capitalist and financial oligarchy. In the debates on this question, racial arrogance can be seen to contradict the ideal of equality.126
In other words, we are on a terrain where the colonial – and racial – question is no longer secondary to the revolution. Instead this question reveals the French Revolution’s contradictions and limits for the class struggle, or at least its ambiguity. Why, then, doesn’t Jaurès address abolition or at least mention the bloody struggles fought in its name? I do not know, but will venture several hypotheses in an effort to answer this question.
Let me begin, however, by mentioning another staggering fact: no one, not one of the most important historians after Jaurès, follows the path that he opened (which is not to say that he engaged with the colonial or racial questions, let alone the history of the Haitian Revolution, in depth). Not even those who consider themselves leftist historians and who criticize Jaurès for his moderate, social democratic tendencies. Let me therefore suggest the following. I note, for example, that the volume dedicated to the French Revolution in the monumental History of France edited by Ernest Lavisse was published in 1920, after the Treaty of Versailles and at the moment when French colonial power was at its peak. “National pride” in the imperium appears to remain stronger here than any ideological or political commitments: one can be a “socialist” and at the same time a colonialist (though criticical of the “errors and excesses of colonialism,” of course). In the first volume dedicated to the revolution, by Paul Sagnac, the slaves’ rebellion is in fact treated as matter of counter-revolution, of all things: “The counterrevolution was organized in the overseas departments. Revolts became widespread in the colonies, where mulattos, frustrated by the repression of their political rights, raided the property of the white colonizers and threatened their lives.”127 It would be difficult to find a more paradigmatic instance of incomprehension (which I prefer to simple bad faith), a more emblematic misunderstanding of the revolutionary process in the colony. The schematic linearity of this interpretation prevents us from seeing the complexities of what I have repeatedly called “combined and uneven development.” As a result, any uprising against “revolutionary” France can only be “counter-revolutionary.” Note that this linearity colludes with a reductive approach to the historical actors (here “the mulattos,” since we do not read a word about “the blacks”) to obscure the real historical, social, and cultural as well as political density that might have troubled the present of French colonialism. The amateur Jaurès, motivated by political rather than “scientific” considerations, was thus much more informed than this professional historian.
Very soon after the appearance of Sagnac’s volume, Albert Mathiez published three volumes on the French Revolution (in 1922, 1924, and 1927).128 Mathiez was “on the left,” a committed contributor to L’Humanité, the newspaper of the French Communist Party, and an ardent Robespierrist. By now it should not surprise us that in this three-volume magnum opus the abolition of 1794 has gone missing. And what of the insurgent slaves? They have earned the right to just a single line on the commercial and financial difficulties caused by the “race war” in Saint-Domingue. Again, to reduce the Haitian Revolution to a mere, abstract “race war” and then to imply that it was an economic obstacle to the French Revolution – this is worth only a sarcastic dismissal.
In 1938, the volume of People and Civilizations dedicated to the French Revolution, edited by G. Lefebvre, P. Guyot, and P. Sagnac, barely mentions Toussaint and refers to abolition in the context not of Haiti but of Guadaloupe. But the most surprising example that I have encountered comes from the very moment of France’s liberation from the Nazis. In 1946, the Marxist Daniel Guérin published The Class Struggle under the First Republic, a work that comprises two thick volumes that treat the period from 1793 to Thermidor.129 Here, only a few words on colonial trade appear in the introduction. This is all that Guérin has to say on the subject of Haiti, adding nothing at all about the abolition, despite the fact that the author minutely analyzes Robespierre’s report of November 18, 1793 on foreign relations. Guérin inexplicably skips over Robespierre’s reflections on slavery and the black residents of Saint-Domingue. Like Jaurès, who wrote nearly half a century earlier, Guérin is an ardent anticolonialist, but in his refusal to address Haiti’s history he is in fact far behind his predecessor. Why? Who knows. In any case, many other Marxist historians, including those who did not hesitate to offer harsh critiques of Guérin’s work, never addressed this question. In his History of the Revolution (1962), Albert Soboul mentions Haiti only three times in passing: Mathiez’s enigmatic “race war” has become “the uprising of the blacks of Saint-Domingue who were kept in slavery.”130 That’s all. Soboul then quickly moves on to other issues. And finally, in 1972 – that is, after the “May of ’68” had already happened, with all it implied – the New History of Contemporary France appeared, with three volumes dedicated to the Revolution. Here the abolition is mentioned only in the chronology provided in the second volume, in this astonishing sentence: “The abolition of slavery led to an uprising of the colonized blacks.”131 Coming from the pen of the professional historian Marc Bouloiseau, this distortion of the facts is scandalous to say the least. Not only does this sentence seriously misrepresent chronology, dating the uprising to a moment three years after it in fact began; it also inverts historical causality, making abolition, rather than enslavement, the cause of the slaves’ rebellion. Here again, we are left speechless.
To sum up, then, with the notable but still partial exception of Jaurès, who wrote in 1901, historians systematically devalue – when they do not altogether omit from their accounts – the struggle against slavery and colonialism not only in the colonies, but also in France itself. This situation has begun to change only recently, during the past two decades. But this shift has been timid, and it has been that much slower when it comes to the Haitian Revolution. Not even a book as important as Aimé Césaire’s Toussaint Louverture (1960) managed to change this situation, although it was published at the height of the Algerian war, at almost the same time as Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, which featured Sartre’s explosive preface.132 Césaire’s book also appeared after more than two decades of debate on the concept of négritude: a debate begun in the 1930s in Paris by Césaire himself and other Antillean and African intellectuals whose work continued to figure prominently in the journal Présence Africaine.
What happened? Benot’s response to this question, which combines a sociological analysis of the academy (that is, the work of professionals who deny the truth uncovered by Jaurès, whom they discount as a mere amateur, with a reading of the “national pride” that blinds historians to the horrors of current colonialism), is insufficient, as Benot himself recognizes. These factors are undoubtedly at work, and it would be foolish to deny their importance. But there is also the enormous difficulty to which I have repeatedly referred: the difficulty of giving an account of the Haitian Revolution’s singular universal by relying on habitual academic approaches. These include the approaches of an orthodox, institutional, or “armchair” Marxism that eschews real debate and is unable to account for the Haitian Revolution with its classificatory grids: its understanding of a linear evolution of modes of production, contradictory relations of production and productive forces, the class struggle between the “purely” defined bourgeoisie and proletariat, and so on. The revolutionary process in Haiti exceeds these rigid categorizations, without, however, ceasing to respond to them. Again, the object is too rich and complex, too concrete and particular, to be fully absorbed by the concept. This is clearly a case of what Adorno would call the negative dialectic of identity and nonidentity. It is a shame that Adorno did not take up this particular object from his own perspective, inevitably centered on Europe if not exactly Eurocentric.
Neither classic theories of nationalism – which, as we have seen, tend to treat it as a modern European phenomenon – nor Anderson’s theory – which seeks to avoid the Eurocentrism of previous accounts but cannot make sense of the case of Haiti – can account for what we could call the tripartite bifurcation that the Haitian Revolution had to confront. Nor can mainstream postcolonial theory, which, for all its “rhizomes,” “hybridities,” and “in-between spaces,” continues paradoxically to think the relation between the metropolis and the colony in binary terms. Nor, again, can orthodox Marxist theories, which approach the problem from a Eurocentric perspective according to which history is a matter of “advanced” societies that export development to “backward ones.”
The phrase “tripartite bifurcation” is in fact a pleonasm, though one that seeks to clarify what it names: despite the misleading prefix “bi-,” every bifurcation opens in three directions rather than two. This can be clearly seen in the case of what is called a fork in the road. When we come to such a place, we can head left, right, or back the way we came – back to “Guinea,” so to speak. As is well known, bifurcation is a key figure in what is called “catastrophe theory,” a branch of mathematics developed by René Thom and others in order to account for the absolutely singular site of encounter, where the “structure” that has been developing is radically transformed into something else.133 (The crest of a breaking wave is a paradigmatic example.) In another theoretical register, a fork in the road is where Oedipus meets his destiny. It is the crossroads (in Latin, the trivium, from which the adjective trivial derives) where, precisely because he does not want to backtrack, Oedipus murders his father Laius and thus precipitates the tragedy. (I note in passing, moreover, that in this context the title of the second volume of Bell’s trilogy of Haitian novels, Master of the Crossroads, becomes even more resonant.134) This, then, is why I refer to the Haitian Revolution as a tragedy, and why I characterize the philosophical and political alternatives that it presented as a catastrophic bifurcation.
In the previous section, discussing Marx, I speculated that, reversing the logic of the “universalization” of particularity that marked colonial Eurocentrism, the slaves in Haiti took on their status as the part projected toward the whole and capable of pointing to the false, truncated nature of the latter’s supposed “universality.” Earlier, I called this a particularist universalism, one that fulfilled the goal of an authentic critical thought: the goal of resituating, in the very heart of the “universal,” the unresolvable conflict with the excluded particular. This process discloses the violence entailed in the negation of the “other within” to whom Balibar refers. This is the profound meaning of Article 14, with its ironic – and politicized – universalization of the color black. What this logic does is construct and constitute this color as the privileged signifier – or perhaps as the semiotic carrier – of a critical materiality, a catastrophic bifurcation that marks the discursive (philosophical, essayistic, fictional, poetic, and aesthetic) production of the Antilles and, by extension, “postcolonial” Latin America in general.
Literature and Art Have Their Say
This peculiar, at times even aporetic situation has marked African American and especially Antillean culture: a permanent tension that resides at this culture’s very heart. Here I do not have space to do justice to the various cultural, literary, and artistic realms in which this tension can be seen to work, whether explicitly, implicitly, or even “unconsciously.” I will simply and schematically point to some of these realms, in reflections that should be further developed in future works.
In the realm of the “human sciences” in general, or of Latin American essay writing on culture and politics, we find exemplary efforts to grapple with this tension through oppositions: the contrast between the big house, or casa grande, and the slave quarters, or senzala, as in the work of Gilberto Freyre; or between tobacco and sugar, as in the work of Fernando Ortiz; or between Prospero and Caliban, as in the work of Roberto Fernández Retamar.135 In philosophical and literary works – works that do not therefore cease to be powerfully political at the same time – the tension is expressed, as I noted in passing earlier, through another opposition. On the one hand, an apparently exclusive – but in fact ambivalent – commitment to négritude, or blackness, emerges and is treated as a revolutionary slogan for the Third World in revolt during the anticolonial struggles of the twentieth century, as in the work of Aimé Césaire or Frantz Fanon. (This approach also influenced heterodox European intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre.) On the other hand, a créolité marks the work of figures including Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant, Maryse Condé, and Derek Walcott, who privilege categories like relation and in this way try to “renegotiate” and above all cultivate the broken and undecidable “hybridity” of the African American condition.136 A symptom of this can already be seen in the early nineteenth century, when, during the years immediately following the Haitian Revolution, even lily white authors like Prosper Mérimée, Eugène Sue, and Victor Hugo write works of fiction, plays, or poetry that clearly allegorize the Haitian Revolution or the problematic question of blackness.137
I would like to pause here to consider a particular moment in the twentieth century: the moment of Sartre’s other preface, entitled “Black Orpheus” and published in 1947 as the introduction to the first anthology of black (both African and Afro-Antillean) poetry compiled by Léopold Sédar Senghor.138 Here Sartre clearly explains his “Pascalian wager” in favor of the anticolonial revolutions. Sartre offers this explanation in terms that are not only political but also artistic and poetic (although for Sartre these three registers are strictly inseparable). In his text, Sartre makes abundant use of the concept of négritude developed by Césaire, an extraordinary poet from the French colony of Martinique. In the late 1930s in Paris, Césaire had introduced this polemical concept, defining the signifier négritude as an affirmation of the right to an African and Antillean art, literature, and identity opposed to the European culture of neocolonialism and white supremacy. Césaire’s basic argument is that there is a specifically black way of writing poetry that is irreducible and even untranslatable. This has to do not so much with content or themes, but rather with idiosyncrasies of grammar, syntax, lexicon, and rhythm, all defined as singularities that resist colonization by a supposedly “universal” European culture.
Césaire was harshly criticized for making this argument. Even many “progressive” intellectuals accused him of seeking to develop a sort of reverse exclusion or separatism, if not even a “reverse racism.” Césaire also stood accused of proposing an impossible, utopian return to “Mother Africa” for black Antilleans. For his part, Sartre takes up a totally different position. He understands that the concept of négritude is, for Césaire, undoubtedly part of an ideologically “defensive” argument, analogous to what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak would later call “strategic essentialism.”139 But it is also a new form of poetic and revolutionary thought, one that has the advantage of questioning in practice European claims to a superior and “universal” literature. Césaire manages to engage in this process of questioning without pamphleteering or merely schematizing.
Sartre likewise correctly understands – because he reads Césaire, as we say, to the letter – that there is no utopian “return to Africa,” that what Césaire is describing is the Atlantic triangle connecting Europe, Africa, and the Americas through the colonial slave trade. As Robin Blackburn has exhaustively demonstrated, this trade allowed for the foundation of what Samir Amin has named the globalization of the capitalist law of value.140 And Sartre notes something else in this context, something perhaps even more complex and profound: since the debate on négritude was begun in France by a group of intellectuals from the colonies who had, however, been educated in France (as had Fanon, who was also from Martinique), the concept of négritude was a way that “the other” had found to speak “for himself,” while also, in a sense, preserving the “triangularity” of that self in the midst of “enemy territory.” For this was not a matter of a dialog. I have already referred in passing to a comment that Sartre makes in his preface: that the poems in the anthology “have not been written for us,” for white Europeans. “It is to black men that these black poets address themselves; it is for them that they speak of black men.”141 From the point of view – or rather through what Sartre would call the gaze – of these “others,” Sartre’s famous claim that “hell is other people” acquires its true political force. Through this gaze, there are no more metaphysical ambiguities: the “infernal other” is the oppressor of whatever kind: the colonial, racial, class, or gender oppressor. The poetic signifier négritude produces a neat division in the other, or divides others into two categories so that there is now the “good” other, the oppressed, and the “bad” other, the oppressor. That is, the signifier creates a sensible and even chromatic distinction of the kind that, according to Carl Schmitt, founds politics: a distinction between friends and enemies.142
Now, where does this signifier of blackness, this négritude come from, whether Sartre knows this or not? Its origin is absolutely revolutionary, and it derives from a revolution that was unprecedentedly radical. Recall that both Césaire and Fanon are Afro-Antillean. And the conditions of possibility for this signifier indeed appeared in the Antilles, long before 1804.
The fact is that throughout the nineteenth century and then throughout the twentieth, we can find marks, both implicit and explicit, of the debate on blackness begun by the Haitian Revolution in literature (whether fictional, poetic, or essayistic), music, the visual arts, and, later, film in all of Latin America and the Caribbean, as in Europe and the United States. Indeed, the debate remains live today. In the wake of Césaire, Fanon, and Sartre, several of the most significant Antillean intellectuals (including the poet and philosopher Glissant and the writer Walcott, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1993), have returned to earlier debates on négritude during recent decades. They have often looked to the concept of créolité as a more “balanced” and “subtle” way of thinking through the amphibious and ambiguous forms of relation to the other. In fact, “the philosophy of relation” is Glissant’s coinage.143
Now, is this relativization of the signifier négritude or the concept of blackness necessarily an advance, an advantage? After all, as we have seen, in Césaire the poetics of négritude already implies a triangular dimension that critically interrogates the whole new “Atlantic” universe opened by the global expansion of capital through colonization and the “big business” of the slave trade. Relation was thus already there in négritude. But the tragic violence of relation was not displaced, and a forcefully absolutist connotation was retained in the signifier négritude, which questioned “abstract universalism” from the standpoint of an equally absolute, “sovereign” singularity. Recovering the original and radically revolutionary sense of the word, négritude produced a fracture and an unresolvable conflict within the false totality.
I will add here that the mark – or what we could call the negative image – of this signifier and of its revolutionary origin has traveled through the art, literature, and culture of the last two centuries. It is precisely this “autonomous moment” of absolute sovereignty that makes the signifier négritude – a signifier animated by the radically particular constituent power of the masses of Haitian slaves – a singular universal. This singular universal gathers together, in a Benjaminian constellation, the irreducible polarities and the other historical temporalities that are left for dead in the understanding of history as what “has already happened.” Revolution, art, and tragedy all distill the effects of the desire of the “wretched of the earth” in Haiti. Only those absolutely excluded from modernity could recuperate for modernity – in the “eternal” historicity of a “moment of danger” – the connections between what I have elsewhere called the three fundamental experiences of the human as such.144 The first is the experience of the political, defined as the creation of a “social bond” that differs radically from the actually existing one; the creation of a law that is always constructing and reconstructing its “object”; and the creation of a placeless singular [un singular sin-lugar] that is truly universal and that opposes the disguised particularism of the universality encoded in the masters’ Law. The second experience I have in mind is the experience of the poetic, which names those trans-aesthetic works of art that recover the historical experiences of subjects, as Benjamin would have wanted, using the event or irruption of now-time to transcend the immediacy of commodity fetishism. Finally, I refer to the experience of the tragic, which entails the recognition of an “originary” fracture or division. Whether this fracture takes the form of class struggle, the division of the subject, or the opposition between the included and the excluded, it cannot possibly be resolved under (or outside) current Law. For this reason, however, it generates the revolutionary desire for the Law’s transformation.
Notes
1 Translator’s Note: In this chapter title and throughout this chapter, Grüner uses the verb renegar, which he also frequently writes as (re-)negar. I have translated this as “to disavow,” both to bring out the word’s psychoanalytic resonances and to underscore the author’s debt to Fischer’s Modernity Disavowed, a debt that Grüner himself repeatedly acknowledges. There is, however, no precise English equivalent with renegar’s full range of meanings: to disavow or deny, but also to renege, renounce, repudiate, and, when written as (re-)negar, to negate or refuse again. 2 Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, 55. 3 Milton, History of Britain, 257. 4 On this concept, see above, page 9. 5 López de Gómara, Historia de la conquista de México, 135. 6 Adorno, Negative Dialectics. 7 Pagden, Lords of All the World. 8 Pagden, Lords of All the World, 18. 9 Rodolfo Puiggrós, La España que conquistó el Nuevo Mundo. 10 See Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501–1650.11 See, for this impassioned debate, Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State; and Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes.12 Rodríguez, Theory and History of Ideological Production, 35–92.13 Mires, En nombre de la cruz, 21 ff.14 Rodríguez, Theory and History of Ideological Production, 50–51.15 Morse, El espejo de Próspero, 25. Translator’s Note: My translation.16 Mires, En nombre de la cruz, 54. Translator’s Note: My translation.17 Rodríguez, Theory and History of Ideological Production, 55.18 Read, “From Feudalism to Capitalism,” 157.19 See Andrés-Gallego, La Esclavitud en la América Española, 36 ff.20 Andrés-Gallego, La Esclavitud en la América Española, 41.21 Rousseau, The Social Contract in The Social Contract and Other Late Political Writings, 43.22 Benot, Les Lumières, l’ésclavage, la colonisation, 107. Translator’s Note: My translation.23 Montesquieu, “Some Reflections on the Persian Letters,” 227–228.24 Said, Orientalism.25 See, for instance, Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, especially “How the Laws of Civil Slavery Are Related with the Nature of the Climate,” 246–263.26 Montesquieu, “How the Laws of Civil Slavery Are Related with the Nature of the Climate,” in The Spirit of the Laws, 250.27 Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle, 62–82.28 Quoted in Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle, 63.29 Forbonnais, “Colony.”30 Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle, 207.31 Seeber, Anti-Slavery Opinion in France during the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century, 56.32 Montesquieu, Persian Letters.33 Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, 55.34 Quoted in Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle, 71.35 Quoted in Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle, 72.36 Rousseau, The Social Contract in The Social Contract and Other Late Political Writings, 50.37 On the Code Noir, see Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 290–292.38 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery, 118.39 Habermas, “Modernity: An Unfinished Project,” 38–55.40 The concept of foreclosure, introduced into psychoanalytic theory by Jacques Lacan, refers to the psychic mechanism through which subjects unconsciously refuse the inscription of one or more traumatic signifiers, thus preventing their “symbolization.”41 Quoted in Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle, 73.42 The encomienda was a Spanish colonial institution in which a landowning encomendero would receive a group of indigenous people, supposedly to be educated and converted to Christianity. These people were in fact given to him so that their labor power could be exploited under semi-feudal working conditions.43 Quoted in Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle, 75.44 Quoted in Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, 177.45 Quoted in Dubois, A Colony of Citizens, 174.46 Benot, La Révolution française et la fin des colonies, 14. Translator’s Note: My translation.47 Benot, La Révolution française et la fin des colonies, 15. Translator’s Note: My translation.48 Duchet, Antropología e historia en el siglo de las luces, 141.49 Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History.50 Schüller, “From Liberalism to Racism,” 23–43.51 See, for example, Arthur, “Hegel’s Master–Slave Dialectic and a Myth of Marxology,” 67–75; Osborne, The Politics of Time, 72.52 Bull, “Slavery and the Multiple Self,” 105.53 Sartre, Being and Nothingness.54 Fischer, Modernity Disavowed.55 Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History.56 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 114.57 Bull, “Slavery and the Multiple Self,” 108.58 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 177.59 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 199.60 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, especially “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” 83–222. See also Lukács’s extraordinary analysis of the historical-materialist potentials latent in the Hegelian dialectic in The Ontology of Social Being, especially “Hegel’s Dialectic ‘amid the Manure of Contradictions,’” 62–113.61 Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 27.62 Doyle, Freedom’s Empire, 4; Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right.63 See Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, especially “How Progress Led to the Europeans’ Enslavement of Africans,” 5–81.64 Rousseau, The Social Contract, in The Social Contract and Other Late Political Writings, 55.65 See Safranski, Romanticism: A German Affair.66 Gramsci, “Brief Notes on Machiavelli’s Politics” and “Machiavelli and Marx,” in Selections from Prison Notebooks, 125–135.67 For an excellent analysis of the twists and turns by way of which the autonomous, Kantian, bourgeois, individualist subject can lead to an argument against cultural diversity, see Díaz-Polanco, Elogio de la diversidad, especially 49–72, “Kant y la diversidad.”68 See Lukács, The Young Hegel.69 Rozitchner, “Hegel.”70 Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, 94–95.71 Marx, “Alienated Labor,” in Early Writings, 120–134.72 Marx, Grundrisse.73 See Rosdolsky, Engels and the “Nonhistoric” Peoples.74 Marx, Marx on Colonialism and Modernization.75 Karl Marx, Letter to Friedrich Engels (February 14, 1858), in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 266.76 Gramsci, The Southern Question.77 See, for example, Mariátegui, Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality.78 Mészáros, Beyond Capital, 446.79 Balibar, “Ambiguous Universality,” 146–175.80 Quijano, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America,” 533–580.81 Mignolo, “Coloniality at Large,” 19–54.82 Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1.83 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Theses on Feuerbach,” 121–123.84 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 244.85 Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology.86 Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 38–54. For interesting discussions from other perspectives on the as not (the hōs mē) in Paul, see Agamben, The Time that Remains, especially 26ff; and Badiou, Saint Paul, especially “The Division of the Subject,” 55–64.87 Foucault, The Order of Things, xviii.88 Bloch, The Principle of Hope. Bloch’s idea of the not-yet is an adaptation of the Aristotelian concept of potentiality, according to which reality already contains a series of future possibilities that not have yet been actualized. The idea of the not-yet also draws on Hegel’s idea (found, for instance, in the Phenomenology) that the action of the Subject or Sprit is what allows “potentialities” to become reality. These potentialities are thus already part of current reality even before they are actualized.89 Haitian Constitution of 1801, translated by Charmant Theodore, Article 1, http://thelouvertureproject.org/index.php?title=Haitian_Constitution_of_1801_(English); emphasis added90 Haitian Constitution of 1801, translated by Charmant Theodore, Article 3; emphasis added.91 See Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 275; emphases added. For the 1805 Imperial Constitution of Haiti, see Appendix A in Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 275–281.92 Fischer, Modernity Disavowed.93 Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, 15.94 Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 231.95 Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 276; emphases added.96 Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 276; emphases added.97 Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 233.98 Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 233.99 Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 233.100 Ansaldi, “No por mucho pregonar se democratiza más temprano.” Translator’s Note: My translation.101 Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship.102 Garraway, “‘Légitime Défense,’” 63–90.103 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 244, 254.104 Young, Postcolonialism, 81.105 Césaire, Toussaint Louverture, 27; emphases added. Translator’s Note: My translation.106 See Grüner, El fin de las pequeñas historias.107 Anderson, Imagined Communities.108 Garraway, “‘Légitime Défense,’” 66.109 Trouillot, Silencing the Past.110 Benot, La Révolution française et la fin des colonies, 205 ff.111 Staël, Considerations on the Principal Events of the French Revolution.112 Mignet, History of the French Revolution.113 Thiers, History of the Consulate and Empire of France under Napoleon.114 Thiers, History of the Consulate and Empire of France under Napoleon, 472.115 Thiers, History of the Consulate and Empire of France under Napoleon, 421–422.116 Thiers, History of the Consulate and Empire of France under Napoleon, 423.117 Thiers, History of the Consulate and Empire of France under Napoleon, 471.118 Lamartine, Histoire des Girondins. Translator’s Note: My translation.119 Lamartine, Histoire des Girondins.120 Michelet, History of the French Revolution.121 Benot, La Révolution française et la fin des colonies, 210.122 Quoted in Benot, La Révolution française et la fin des colonies, 217. Translator’s Note: My translation.123 Benot, La Révolution française et la fin des colonies, 217. Translator’s Note: My translation.124 Blanc, History of the French Revolution of 1789.125 Jaurès, Histoire socialiste de la révolution française.126 Quoted in Benot, La Révolution française et la fin des colonies, 211. Translator’s Note: My translation.127 Quoted in Benot, La Révolution française et la fin des colonies, 212.128 Mathiez, The French Revolution.129 Guérin, La Lutte de classe sous la Première République.130 Soboul, La Révolution française.131 Bouloiseau, Nouvelle Histoire de la France contemporaine.132 Césaire, Toussaint Louverture; Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth.133 Thom, Parables, Parabolas and Catastrophes.134 Bell, Master of the Crossroads (New York: Vintage, 2000).135 Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves (Casa-Grande & Senzala); Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint; Fernández Retamar, Caliban and Other Essays.136 Glissant, Philosophie de la relation; Chamoiseau, Césaire, Perse, Glissant; Confiant, Nègre marron; Condé, La Belle Créole; Walcott, Omeros.137 See Doyle, Freedom’s Empire.138 Sartre, Black Orpheus.139 Spivak, “Subaltern Studies,” 281.140 Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery.141 Sartre, Black Orpheus, 11.142 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political.143 Glissant, Philosophie de la relation.144 Grüner, El fin de las pequeñas historias.