The Haitian Revolution

Critical SouthThe publication of this series was made possible by the

support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Nelly Richard, Eruptions of MemoryNéstor Perlongher, Plebeian Prose

Bolívar Echeverría, Modernity and “Whiteness”Eduardo Grüner, The Haitian Revolution

The Haitian RevolutionCapitalism, Slavery, and Counter-Modernity

Eduardo Grüner

Translated by Ramsey McGlazer

polity

First published in Spanish as La oscuridad y las luces © Edhasa, 2017. All rights reserved.

This English edition © Polity Press, 2020

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3547-7ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3548-4 (pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Gruner, Eduardo, author.Title: The Haitian Revolution : capitalism, slavery, and counter-modernity / Eduardo Gruner.Other titles: Oscuridad y las luces. EnglishDescription: English edition. | Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2019. | In English, translated from the original Spanish. | Originally published in Spanish as La

oscuridad y las luces : capitalismo, cultura y revolucion by Edhasa in 2010. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019008490 (print) | LCCN 2019012898 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509535491 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509535477 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509535484 (pbk.)Subjects: LCSH: Haiti--History--Revolution, 1791-1804. | Slavery--Caribbean Area--History. | Slavery--Latin America--History. | Capitalism--Social aspects--

Caribbean Area--History. | Capitalism--Social aspects--Latin America--History. | Revolutions--Philosophy--History.

Classification: LCC F1923 (ebook) | LCC F1923 .G7813 2019 (print) | DDC 972.94/03--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019008490

Typeset in 10 on 12pt Sabonby Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NLPrinted and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Limited

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com

For Carina BattagliaIn memoriam León Rozitchner

For the people of Haiti, and for all oppressed peoples in a world whose end only they can bring about

Publisher’s Note

This English-language edition consists of the prologue, three chapters, and the epilogue from La oscuridad y las luces: Capitalismo, cultura y revolución by Eduardo Grüner, originally published in Spanish in 2010 (Buenos Aires, Edhasa). All of the material was revised by the author for this edition.

Contents

Introduction by Gisela Catanzaro ix

Prologue 1

1: The Category of Slavery and Modern Racism 9Elements for an Ethnohistorical Sociology of Slavery 10The Concept of Slavery 19Ancient and Modern Slavery 28The Question of Racism 34Racism in “Early Modernity” 43The Traces of Time 52A Better World? 54

2: The Rebellion of the (Slave) Masses and the Haitian Revolution 57On the Combined and Uneven 58From Particularism to (False) Universalism:

A “Philosophical Revolution” 60The (Uncertain) Logic of Slave Rebellions 69The Rest of the Americas 79Enter Saint-Domingue/Haiti: A Portrait of “Sugar Island”

in 1791 82An Excursus on Vodou and its Revolutionary Character 90The Social Complexities of Saint-Domingue 94

viii Contents

The Confused Dynamics of the Revolution 104The Meaning(s) of the Haitian Revolution 110On “Creative” Violence 118

3: The Disavowed “Philosophical Revolution”: From Enlightenment Thought to the Crisis of Abstract Universalism 128“Imperial Ideology,” the Question of Slavery, and the

Contradictions of Spanish Absolutism 130Shadows in the Enlightenment: Rousseau, Montesquieu,

Voltaire, and Slavery 140Slavery without Scare Quotes: Between Hegel and Marx 159The Black Enlightenment: The Haitian “Constitutional

Revolution” 180The Difficulties of Theorizing (the Haitian) Revolution 194Literature and Art Have Their Say 205

Epilogue 210

Notes 214References 227Index 239

Introduction

Gisela Catanzaro

“For histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious does not take us forward; we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world.”

Benjamin, “Surrealism,” 189–90; translation modified

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, while several Latin American countries were preparing to commemorate two hundred years of national independence, Eduardo Grüner began the research on which he based this book.1 The book’s compo-sition could be thought of as a sustained reading prompted by the experience of an enduring silence. This silence persisted even under the progressive governments then in power, governments that had allowed for the problematization of national histories throughout the region. Not even this process of problematization, which in many ways challenged more traditional approaches to local histo-riography, could account for the “strangeness” of the Haitian Revolution. It could not accommodate the complexities associated with that revolution, fought in the Caribbean in 1791 by slaves of African descent against a slaveholding colonial power that had just fought its own bourgeois revolution, centered in Paris. To be sure, in some Latin American countries, bicentennial celebrations became the occasions for rereadings of the past that sought to oppose the apologetic commemorations organized by oligarchs a century earlier. Still, Grüner argues, the forgetting of Haiti persisted even

x Introduction

in these rereadings. With their exclusive focus on Latin America’s bourgeois revolutions, these rereadings ignored the one revolution in the Americas that was fought by slaves, who had been made into slaves by a European capitalism in the process of global expansion. In the particular context of Argentina, this way of calling attention to the persistence of absences – or to a continuous absence that could be read in the discontinuities of the politics of memory – was also a way of underscoring the need to keep critically reflecting on the official histories forged by the region’s antipopular govern-ments. Such histories sought to legitimate the various genocides and systems of exploitation of which they were the direct successors. But Grüner’s insistence on the importance of the Haitian Revolution was also a way of pointing to the limits of the various historical geneal-ogies offered by national-popular governments, and of keeping alive a critical interrogation of revolution, a category at the time widely considered superseded. Grüner’s response was thus a double gesture: at once a critique of reigning capitalism and an effort to recover a revolutionary inheritance. In this latter effort, Grüner can be seen to continue the critical project that he had begun in his responses to arguments made by others, including Carlos Portantiero (La producción de un orden), José Aricó (“La búsqueda de una tercera vía”), and the members of the Club de Cultura Socialista, or Socialist Cultural Club. During the most recent, post-dictatorship phase of Argentina’s history, these authors had given renewed centrality to the problem of democracy, which they privileged over the quest for socialism.2 Grüner’s continued engagement with the question of how to subvert the capitalist regime in its especially extreme “peripheral” forms follows, in this sense, from the position that he had previously taken in the Argentine – and global – debate on the “crisis of Marxism.” In this debate, Grüner also took distance from contemporary interlocutors who, like Ernesto Laclau (1990; 2005), emphasized populism and the need to bring a post-Marxist thought into being. Such a thought would, according to these critics, inherit some aspects of the Marxist critique of capitalism, but would be freed from its economic essentialism and historical determinism. Although Grüner shared a general commitment to questioning tendencies in Marxism that had become reductively economistic and/or teleological, he argued that “the case of Haiti” – and not only that case – made it necessary to think through a reality that was rendered unintelligible by the renunciation of totalizing categories. These categories included the “mode of production”

Introduction xi

and the “world-system,” and they tended to be displaced in the new theories of radical democracy, with their emphasis on the autonomy of the political. If, as Grüner argued contra Laclau and others, these categories needed to be retained, this was precisely because abandoning them meant giving up on the possibility of theorizing the forms of domination, the “combined and uneven develop-ments,” and the internal tensions that characterized modernity. This complexity clearly marked the implantation of capitalism in Latin America and the Caribbean, and yet it could be ignored thanks to the linear temporalities that sustained historical reductionisms. Reflecting on “the case of Haiti” – on what Louis Althusser would have called the internal exclusion, the case that did not have a place in the bicentennial commemorations in Latin America and that, Grüner writes, had even less of a place in the memory and historiography of the French Revolution – offered an opportunity for thinking through the constitutively global, uneven, and “anach-ronistic” character of capitalist globalization. It thus also offered an opportunity to think through relations and dependencies that remained unthinkable: relations and dependencies between the political modernity that the revolution of 1789 had introduced into the metropole and the slavery that it perpetuated in the Antillean colonies. All of this means that it is not enough to attempt simply to “restore” the silenced history of the Haitian Revolution or to correct the usual omissions in the historical record. Grüner’s argument, which continues the meditation on Marxism and psychoanalysis in which he has engaged for several decades, not least through an intense dialog with the Argentine philosopher León Rozitchner (1972; 1985; 1997), does not merely seek to remedy the forgetting of Haiti. Instead, Grüner argues that it is necessary to interrogate this forgetting as such. Like many theorists before him – including notably Susan Buck-Morss in her famous rereading of Hegel (Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History) – Grüner is fundamentally interested in asking what the difficulty of imagining the Haitian Revolution says, what this difficulty is about, and what theoretical schema might enable a rereading of this not-saying and not-knowing of the event of that revolution. Approaches that conceive of the problem as a mere deficit of historical memory, a shortage that could be remedied by an expansion of historical knowledge, are unable to register the expressive character of the omission or silence itself. These approaches are incapable of interpreting the not-saying as itself a kind of saying,

xii Introduction

and incapable of asking how this statement – a statement made up of words and silences, but also of material practices that are not reducible to speech – makes it possible to rethink modernity. But what of the culturalist approaches and postcolonial theories that rose to prominence in the context of a crisis in the philosophies of history that was global in its scope? Can these offer the frame-works necessary for interpreting the “symptom that is Haiti,” and can they do justice to the contradictory nature of the modernity that has persisted in forgetting this symptom? Since the 1990s, Grüner’s writings have been engaged in a persistent, interested, and polemical dialogue with these theoretical perspectives. In El sitio de la mirada [The Site of the Gaze], Las formas de la espada [The Forms of the Sword], and, especially, El fin de las pequeñas historias: De los estudios culturales al retorno (imposible) de lo trágico [The End of Small Histories: From Cultural Studies to the (Impossible) Return of the Tragic], Grüner underscores the need for reflection on the theoretical present, even while he offers a critique of ideology that combines aesthetic reflection with sympto-matic readings of the cultural objects of the past. In the form of critique that interests Grüner, critique cannot be brought to bear on “cultural monuments” without at the same time committing itself to an attentive listening to what “sounds hollow,” in Althusser’s words, in critique itself – what “sounds hollow,” that is, in the here and now of the thought that would undertake to analyze those monuments (“From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy,” 30). According to Grüner’s diagnosis, in the context of a triumphant capitalism that perceives itself as post-ideological, frictionless, and freed from all borders, it was necessary to produce such a symptomatic reading of certain tendencies in cultural studies. When these approaches rejected the concept of ideology altogether, refused all totalizing perspectives,3 and let themselves be seduced by the metaphor of deterritorialization – as in the case of Renato Ortiz (1996), Grüner writes – cultural studies tended to make the proliferation of micro-histories into the inevitable fate of all forms of reflection that were not content to be identified with the philosophy of history or with the European understandings of reason that were dominant in modernity. But such a prolif-eration of micro-histories was disempowering for situated theories of emancipation in a world that, though characterized by an unprecedented homogeneity, imagined itself to be reconciled and multicultural, a world in which culture itself had become capital’s

Introduction xiii

primary productive force and means of production. In this context, cultural studies ran the risk of losing their critical edge. The reaction against the dogmatism of the British Communist Party, begun in the middle of the twentieth century by Raymond Williams, William Hoggart, E. P. Thompson, and the young Stuart Hall, had signaled the importance, for Marxism, of attending to the specificities and to the autonomies of what had formerly been called mere “super-structures.” But, for Grüner, the dominant trends in cultural studies during the 1990s made it instead clearly continuous with a mode of domination whose self-characterizations could not be questioned or contested in the terms on which these trends relied. Hence Grüner’s insistence that if the work of interpretation “remains content to chart the deconstructive ‘dispersion’ of the subject in the textuality of an aestheticizing mode of production, without reconstructing the critical analysis of the mode of production (or what Jameson calls the totality) that has made the subject possible, then we are not far from being complicit … with the veritable physical, cultural, and ‘civilizational’ genocide that the mode of production is carrying out and that aestheticization serves to mask, dissimulate, and displace” (El fin de las pequeñas historias, 39). The spirit of nondialectical overcoming that, according to Grüner, animated most of the then-proliferating approaches to “postmodernity” was especially worrying because of its underlying or explicit faith that these approaches had left Marx behind. In this complacent self-representation of a present without Marxism, the present not only prematurely celebrated the advent of difference and of reconciliation in a world in fact increasingly leveled by equiva-lences and yet profoundly unequal; at the same time, this present deprived itself of irreplaceable theoretical tools for critique. The innovations introduced at the ideological and political levels first by post-Fordism and then by the fall of the Berlin Wall cannot be accounted for exclusively in the terms made available by categories like neoliberalism. They must also be read against the backdrop of the continuity of the capitalist mode of production, which Marx and Marxisms – that is, both political and theoretical Marxisms – made it possible to conceptualize. But this is not a matter of returning to the pristine doctrinal unity of a tradition. It is instead a call for conceptual rereading, rereading prompted by current injustices and marked by a willingness to be surprised by the tensions, discontinuities, and unforeseen inter-connections that constitute this Marxist tradition, which is not

xiv Introduction

self-identical but rather “out of joint” and “in crisis” from the first. On the one hand, in a world of global capitalism it becomes impossible to imagine a critical perspective capable of de-totalizing this regime that does not inherit and learn from Marxism. On the other hand, to “inherit” from Marxism is, for Grüner, to avoid hermetically sealing oneself off in its tradition and responding only defensively to its crisis. Reckoning with the crisis of Marxism means not becoming entrenched in it, but rather rediscovering it as always already besieged by its philosophical, aesthetic, and political “others.” This reckoning means continuing Marxism’s internally dissonant trajectories and exposing oneself to these, undergoing the experience of them. In a more tragic register, reckoning with the crisis of Marxism implies learning “to be astonished” again, in Walter Benjamin’s words: astonished by its internal tensions and its constitutive openness to what is unresolved in the past and what is unpredictable in the future (“What Is Epic Theater?” 150). In Grüner’s reading of Marxism, an ongoing reflection on the conditions and dialectical processes4 involved in the production of the given is combined with Marxist theory’s characteristic openness to what is not theory, to what theorists ranging from Lukàcs to Althusser would have called history or political practice. This makes Marxism particularly well suited for understanding modernity and its differences from and continuities with our present. But this means understanding modernity as an aporia rather than a coherent identity, thinking of it as marked by returns and anticipations rather than as a unidirectional process. It means, in other words, under-standing modernity as this book explicitly proposes. In the terms that Grüner introduces in his Prologue, Marxist theories make it possible to understand modernity as “an epoch divided against itself,” one that has sought to “resolve” this division in different ways. Thus, building on some of the arguments made by the Frankfurt School critical theorists, and by Theodor Adorno in particular, this books invites us to ask, first, to what extent the modernity that speaks in and through the universal aspirations of the French Revolution is – and to what extent it is not – the same as the modernity that speaks in and through the traffic in, and exploitation of, African slaves in the Americas that continued to take place at the very same moment in history, the moment when European capitalism was consolidating itself. Pursuing this interrogation means addressing complex problems, including, for instance, the need to “invent”

Introduction xv

new forms of slavery and racism that would allow for the devel-opment of what, according to linear and stagist logics, should have already overcome reliance on slavery altogether: the establishment of capitalist relations of production that were “free” precisely by virtue of being capitalist. As in the metaphor of darkness and light taken up in Grüner’s original Spanish title, La oscuridad y las luces [Darkness and Enlightenment], a title that implicitly referred to Max Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, this promise of universal freedom implied casting shadows over much of the planet. Modernity was thus divided from within. But Grüner also asks us to understand both European Enlightenment thought and the Haitian Revolution as two different ways of relating to this division, to the internal incoherence of modernity. In this way, his book deactivates the question that we might otherwise be tempted to ask: is this, then, a book about the Haitian Revolution – “Grüner’s book about Haiti,” as we have taken to calling it in Argentina – or is it instead a critical reflection on modernity, one that attends in particular to modernity’s Eurocentric biases? Formulated in this way, the question is itself Eurocentric, since there would be no felt need to choose between the supposedly universal and the particular case if the book were about, say, the French Revolution. When we are asked to choose between modernity and Haiti, the problem of the modern seems already to have been resolved, not a matter of debate and internal division. It is as if we were dealing with a neutral term, one immediately identifiable with universality. But it was precisely the biases underpinning “universal modernity” that the Haitian Revolution exposed with its insistence that these biases were irreconcilable with its demands. When slaves literally seized the claims of universal liberty and equality, they made the uncon-scious particularism of what was called “universal modernity” legible. That is, they shed light on European thought by showing that it only considered free and equal those who were not slaves, not black, not African, and not American. The “universal,” in other words, in fact belonged only to certain white European men. As the reference to “Counter-Modernity” in Grüner’s subtitle suggests, this book does not ask us to choose between modernity and Haiti. Instead, Grüner argues that it is in the Haitian Revolution that we can find a way of resolving the conflict of modernity, one that was not equally available to every political subject. This resolution – never guaranteed to emerge, let alone to triumph – could only be achieved by those who very clearly bore the symptoms of the not-all

xvi Introduction

that was Europe’s “everyone.” That is, it could only be achieved by those who bore the symptoms of the structurally unequal nature of the modern European distribution of “universal equality.” To put the matter in somewhat more epistemological terms, we could say that the “cases” in question here are not mere “examples” of the aporias of modernity. Instead, these cases emerge as singular inflec-tions – unequally consecrated in subsequent history – of the conflict of the modern. These different inflections imply different relations to the materiality of the aporias of modernity, and they open onto social and political futures that are also different. The “cases” that Grüner considers are thus not the passive objects of his analysis; they prompt uneven, situated reflections like those offered here. By “here” I mean “in this book,” but also “in this South.” This South has read – but, Grüner insists, it has also written – the modernity that has come to be. This South does not simply “receive” from the North. On the one hand, it suffers what the North has imposed and continues to impose on it. On the other hand, however, the South constitutes the condition of possibility for the North’s emergence at the economic, political, and philosophical levels. To sustain the tension between these two immediately contradictory statements is a political and interpretive task that is indispensable for both the possibility of justice and the fulfillment of the modern promise of universal emancipation. Because Haiti is in Hegel – even despite Hegel himself – we should not consider it only a passive point of arrival. Nor should we approach its history by adopting a disciplined localism, or let ourselves be seduced by fantasies of disconnection, or convinced that we can get rid of problems by replacing the great German idealist with other, local authors – “our” authors – in our bibliographies.5 If what Grüner calls counter-modernity acts from a symptomatic place that is not just any place, and if the Haitian Revolution in no way contents itself with “replicating” the French Revolution, then this singular place of action is not singular in a proprietary or originary way. This is because it is nothing more and nothing less than the site of a tension. It is less a place external or prior to the modern than a place where the tension between modernity’s violence and its emancipatory promise is maximally heightened. In fact, both the image of a passive South, destined merely to undergo and transcribe “history,” and the fantasy of an unscathed, fully self-sufficient South, found in counternarratives written from the standpoint of our “native soil,” are rendered inoperative in the

Introduction xvii

pages of this book, which lets us recognize something sinister in the antithesis itself. Or rather, Grüner’s book lets us recognize as sinister the suggestion that we must choose between these two alternatives: an impoverished “autonomy,” won at the cost of ignoring the uneven social and political distribution of inequality, and a minor-itization that requires that we recognize ourselves either as impotent victims, the recipients of international charity, or as attesting to a new barbarism that blights the world while Western civilization looks on, aghast.6

The “universalist” illusions of equidistance and symmetry, the paternalist gaze, and the sense of horror that some in the West feel before what they experience as absolutely other are all simultane-ously brought into crisis by this book.7 And these crises take on a new urgency in a turbulent Latin American present, one charac-terized by supremely contradictory phenomena. On the one hand, as is well known, during the past few years neoliberal and authori-tarian forces have taken power through formally free elections. These regimes not only envision a massive widening of the breaches of inequality and call for increased reliance on repressive appara-tuses; they also openly proclaim the legitimacy of persecuting their political adversaries, as in the notorious case of the President of Brazil, elected in October 2018. On the other hand, mass popular mobilizations have multiplied and continue to multiply, with people peacefully taking to the streets to show that the conditions that those in power seek to impose are intolerable. As in the case of the powerful women’s movement in Argentina, these demonstrations also highlight the protestors’ willingness to defend their right to search for new horizons for life, horizons whose existence has so far been unsuspected. In this context, we might wonder, or rather, we are compelled to wonder: how are we to read these events? Are they merely “Third World outbursts,” located at a convenient remove from the “normal” course of world events? Are they signs of an uncontaminated insurgency, alien to historical develop-ments in other latitudes? Are they a simple continuation of these developments, transposed into the periphery? If the theoretical frameworks forged to understand the European present often fail when they seek to give an account of this kind of emergency – this kind of contemporary political conflict – in Latin America and the Caribbean, simply renouncing the effort to understand such situa-tions means participating in their exoticization, if only unwittingly. Such dilemmas call instead for a dialectic like the one offered in

xviii Introduction

the following pages, one that is capable of rediscovering mystery in what is closest to us and a certain familiarity in what seems to be most foreign. This dialectic can become both a means of under-standing and a flash of light at a moment of danger.

Translated by Ramsey McGlazer

Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor. “The Actuality of Philosophy.” Translated by Benjamin Snow, Telos 31 (1977).

Althusser, Louis. “From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy.” In Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital. Translated by Ben Brewster. London: Verso, 1997.

Aricó, José. “La búsqueda de una tercera vía,” La ciudad futura 25–26 (1990–1). Reprinted in Aricó, Dilemas del marxismo en América Latina: Antología esencial. Edited by Martín Cortes, 981–992. Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 2018.

Benjamin, Walter. “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia.” In Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Edited by Peter Demetz. New York: Schocken Books, 2007.

Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.

Benjamin, Walter. “What Is Epic Theater?” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.

Buck-Morss, Susan. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009.

Cortes, Martín. Un nuevo marxismo para América Latina. José Aricó: traductor, editor, intelectual. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2015.

Grüner, Eduardo. Las formas de la espada: Miserias de la teoría política de la violencia. Buenos Aires: Colihue, 1997.

Grüner, Eduardo. La oscuridad y las luces: Capitalismo, cultura y revolución. Buenos Aires: Edhasa, 2010.

Grüner, Eduardo. El fin de las pequeñas historias: De los estudios culturales al retorno (imposible) de lo trágico. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2002.

Grüner, Eduardo. El sitio de la mirada: Secretos de la imagen y silencios del arte. Buenos Aires: Norma, 2001.

Laclau, Ernesto. New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time. London: Verso, 1990.

Laclau, Ernesto. On Populist Reason. London: Verso, 2005.

Introduction xix

Ortiz, Renato. Otro territorio. Buenos Aires: Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 1996.

Portantiero, Juan Carlos. La producción de un orden. Buenos Aires, Nueva Visión, 1988.

Rozitchner, Leon. La cosa y la cruz: Cristianismo y capitalismo. Buenos Aires: Losada, 1997.

Rozitchner, Leon. Freud y los límites del individualismo burgués. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 1972.

Rozitchner, Leon. Perón entre la sangre y el tiempo. Buenos Aires: CEAL, 1985.

We demand the right to Opacity. Through which our anxiety to have a full existence becomes part of the planetary drama of Relation: the creativity of marginalized peoples who today confront the ideal of universal Transparency, imposed by the West, with secretive and multiple manifestations of Diversity.

Edouard Glissant

The lost causes are exactly those which might have saved the world.Gilbert K. Chesterton

In what used to be called Hispaniola (today Haiti and Santo Domingo) the native population numbered about one hundred thousand in 1492, but had dropped to two hundred a century later, since people died of horror and disgust at European civilization …

Claude Lévi-Strauss

Haitians shall be known from now on by the generic denomination of blacks.

Article 14, the 1805 Constitution of Haiti

Prologue

In August 1791, after a massive gathering of slaves held in the Bois Caïman, culminating in an equally massive Vodou ceremony, the first revolution for independence in Latin America and the Caribbean broke out. This happened in Haiti, then the French colony of Saint-Domingue, by far the richest possession of any colonial power in the Americas. Although Haiti declared independence in 1804, no Latin American country, with the predictable exception of Cuba, held a bicentennial celebration in 2004. Such celebrations were delayed until 2010, and they instead commemorated the bourgeois and “white” revolutions that took place in the rest of Latin America. It would be impossible to try to reconstruct the infinite complexities of a revolution as atypical and unprecedented as the Haitian one: never before or since, in all of human history, did slaves take power and found a nation. I can, however, try to indicate, if only in shorthand, the importance of what the Haitian Revolution allows us to think. This will be the purpose of the rest of this book. Here I begin with somewhat more general reflections. The use and hyperexploitation of the labor power of African slaves was generalized throughout the Caribbean islands and in the most productive parts of Brazil, but it was also prevalent in what are now Honduras, Panama, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Belize, and Peru, and, to a lesser extent but no less conse-quentially, in Mexico and along the Río de la Plata. This was one of the most horrifying and unspeakable ethnocides (and genocides)

2 Prologue

in the history of human societies, comparable only to the genocide (and ethnocide) of indigenous cultures in what came to be called the Americas, which took place during the same period and was closely connected to slavery. Slavery thus played a substantial and decisive role in the formation of modernity. It was integral to the consoli-dation of the capitalist mode of production, centered in Europe; to the emergence of properly modern forms of racism (or perhaps of racism as such, given that premodern imperial forms of slavery were not particularly “racist” in the modern sense of this term); and to the technical and rational foundations of a despotic and cruel regime that wielded power over millions of defenseless human beings. The American slave plantation contained in advance all of the horrific forms of exploitation that would appear in the first industrial factories as well as in that other modern invention, the concentration camp. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to claim that without the precedents of African American slavery and Amerindian semi-slavery, the Nazis’ crimes would have been infinitely less conceivable. So, too, would the crimes that followed theirs (or, as in the case of Armenia, preceded these crimes) have been difficult to imagine: wars of extermination targeting entire populations from Hiroshima to Lebanon, from Vietnam to Bosnia, from Rwanda to Iraq, from Palestine to Darfur. Every reader will have his or her own further examples in mind, among them the bloody military coups that assailed the Southern Cone in the 1970s. All such “rational” extermination campaigns made the twentieth century the most violent and ruinous in history. It is as if the centuries of slavery and colonialism had created a sort of buffer or margin of tolerance for the intolerable, as if these centuries had led to a sinister blurring of the boundaries between the possible and the impossible, the believable and the unbelievable, or what we might call, in another register, the imaginable and the real. Setting aside the details of the comparison between plantations and concentration camps, in the rational and despotic institution of slavery, in its regime of “total administration,” and in slaveholders’ willingness to exterminate their slaves whenever this was deemed necessary – for instance, when these slaveholders sought to suppress uncontrollable slave rebellions – we can recognize the American origins and logical and political foundations of what in the twentieth century would come to be called totalitarianism. Hence Hannah Arendt’s associ-ation of the latter with colonialism in general. Five centuries of

Prologue 3

naturalization – which have included the naturalization of critiques, which have become routine and ritual in “progressive” thought – have effectively anesthetized our consciousness and deprived us of the language that would make it possible for us to fully account for the extent to which we are the descendants of the horrors of slavery. Neither this book nor any other, taken alone, could claim to remedy this forgetting. No will to language can take the place of what can only be constructed through material and social practices. Nevertheless, I hope – and this is my highest aspiration – that this book might modestly serve as a protest against the complicit silence of governments, institutions of all kinds (including academic institu-tions), and, of course, the dominant mass media, whose members are the all but unconscious spokespersons for an equally dominant globalized ideology. These people and institutions all fall silent when they are asked to consider the role of slavery in the formation of modernity in general, and in particular the role of the Haitian Revolution in presciently and radically questioning the internal, irresolvable contradictions of this modernity. The clearest indication of such a widespread, complicit silence can be seen in a simple and apparently banal fact: again, the “bicen-tennial” celebrations commemorating the independence movements in Latin America took place in 2010. The controversies surrounding this emblematic date show the political and ideological importance of symbols. But in fact there was no “bicentennial” for all of Latin America and the Caribbean. The first and most important revolution took place not in 1810, but in 1804, in Haiti, formerly the French colony of Saint-Domingue. Why, then, was the bicentennial not celebrated in 2004? Was this a symptom of racism, given that, as is well known, the vast majority of Haitians are the descendants of slaves “imported” from Africa? Or was this a matter of a contagious forgetting of the “slave revolution,” which our bourgeois nations preferred not to remember? Were we dealing with a discomfort caused by the memory of the Haitian Revolution, a discomfort related to the current cooperation of many Latin American govern-ments in the “peacekeeping” occupation of the poor island nation, which the President of the United States of (North) America recently called a “shithole,” along with the countries of Africa? The history of racial slavery forces us to confront a dilemma that may be unresolvable: given that this history is consubstantial with and inseparable from what we have come to call “modernity,” does reckoning with it – and acknowledging the moral disgust that the

4 Prologue

origins of Western modernity produce in us – mean renouncing or repudiating modernity and the West as such, as a whole? Modernity is clearly European and Eurocentric, and we must wield all of the theoretical, ideological, and political weapons at our disposal as we seek to counter its Eurocentrism and the coloniality of power that persists in the present. But does this mean that we should throw the baby – the undeniable, if not inevitable, ethical, political, and cultural achievements of modernity – out with the bathwater? Or should we seek a more “balanced” position, one that would let us, as we say, separate the wheat from the chaff, weighing modernity’s unprecedented human horrors against its benefits? Surely these include the gift of a social, political, and symbolic sensibility that is rightly said to give us tools with which to counter these horrors, with incomparably greater sophistication than our ancestors could? But where are we to draw the line? Common sense suggests that without the horrors brought about by modernity, the much-touted weapons that we now possess for countering these horrors might not have been necessary. How is it that we have come to ignore this fact? We can, of course, as always, return time and again to Walter Benjamin’s celebrated dictum, according to which civilization and barbarism are inextricable. Wasn’t Greco-Roman antiquity also founded on and sustained by slave labor? And didn’t this antiquity give us things – things like Homeric epic or Sophoclean tragedy – that have proven essential for our culture as well as our politics? And weren’t the cultures of the “barbarian” Middle Ages likewise sustained by the servitude of serfs, or by the Crusades (the first great, proto-modern genocide, which set a precedent, as many have noted, for the colonial enterprise)? Didn’t these same Middle Ages also produce Dante and Giotto? And what of the violent passage from premodernity to modernity, made possible by the violent constitution of nation-states or wars of religion? Did these not produce Shakespeare and Cervantes, Boccaccio and Góngora, Corneille, Racine, and Rabelais? But do we therefore have the right to excuse these epochs on the grounds that they gave rise to these figures? What if we were to conclude that the work of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Racine was in some way made possible by slavery, serfdom, or the wars of religion? This kind of reasoning is, moreover, not unique to Western modernity. For example, is it possible to separate the marvel of the Egyptian pyramids from the thousands of innocent lives that were sacrificed so that they might be built?

Prologue 5

Obviously, we do not have definitive answers to these questions. It is also obvious that we cannot renounce Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. And it is equally obvious that we do not have a right to distance or exempt ourselves from the many instances of modern barbarism. Thus I can at best formulate an inconclusive – and not at all consoling – hypothesis: the most intellectually honest approach is to sustain the contradiction to the extent possible, to stay with the tension and conflict without the hopes of “overcoming” that characterize Hegelian Aufhebung, among other processes. As soon as we arrive at such a position – giving up the ideological or imaginary consolations of equilibrium, or the notion of a reconciled reality, as Adorno would say – we have already reached a point of no return. At this moment, the whole world – including primarily the world of ideas, of “symbolic competences” – appears as a site of struggle, an undecidable battlefield from which we cannot flee and that we cannot enter with impunity. The problem, moreover, is that this battlefield is not at all homogenous or balanced; the forces that confront one another here are not at all symmetrical. On the contrary, modern coloniality has in fact produced a profound – and unprecedented – asymmetry, an asymmetry that operates at all levels (social, economic, ideological, symbolic, and cultural) and for the first time on a truly global scale. And where there are asymmetries produced not by nature, but by exploitation, illegit-imate domination, and racism, there can be no “equilibrium” or balance. The dominators and the dominated cannot be judged by the same standard. Siding with the victims thus becomes an ethical task, to be undertaken without idealization or romanticization. Their memory requires not consolation, but rather a stake in the search for the truth, however difficult this search may prove to be. Only from what Sartre would have called this situated perspective can we aspire to a kind of “objectivity.” Only from this stand-point and on the basis of this solidarity can we “redeem” what is redeemable in modernity – that is, what knowingly or otherwise is more than merely culpable of or complicit with barbarism. I hope that all of this can be read in what follows, if only between the lines. Of course, the set of questions or problems that this book addresses – racial slavery, the Haitian Revolution, and its political, theoretical, philosophical, and cultural consequences, which are treated in the following chapters – is first of all historical. But this is not a work of “professional” history. To be sure, I will have to reconstruct the facts “as they really were,” as Leopold von Ranke

6 Prologue

urged, and I will do so by drawing on the secondary sources that seem to me to be most trustworthy and serious. But I will also remain mindful that “facts” are not always already made, but rather continue to be made in and through our situated interpretations of them. Still, in their very nonexistence – their no-longer-existing – these historical facts continue to mark modernity, like ghosts that return to haunt the living, like Hamlet’s father demanding justice. This is because the facts decisively marked the origins of the modern, despite all of the efforts that have been made to deny them. They also mark “postmodernity,” if such a time can be said to have taken place. Paradoxically, so-called “postmodernity,” in its effort to dilute history and to deny the solidity of both past and future, becomes all but indistinguishable from the shabbiest nineteenth-century positivism in its understanding of history as an absolute, unrepeatable past. Historical epochs are not the mere sum of singular facts, or the accumulation of events that are over and done with. They are also, and above all, logics. On account of the coloniality of knowledge and power, the logic of modernity is the logic of an epoch divided against itself, like Freud’s divided subject, to deploy another analogy. But the modern epoch has also struggled to displace this internal division, to remove it from view, to hide the fact that modernity can appear to be a harmonious, homogenous “totality” only because it denies the deep fracture at its origin. The tradition of thought that has been called Eurocentric has proceeded through a double movement. On the one hand, it has engulfed the different historicities of its others (who have been many, in fact the majority), including its “African American” others, to take the example nearest to hand, in order to sustain its own effort to recast a particularism as universalism, to lay claim to Civilization, Reason, and History as such. On the other hand, and at the same time, in its “tolerant” and “progressive” forms, this thought has indeed acknowledged the Other’s difference, but it has done so by attributing an absolute and radical alterity to this Other. It has constructed the Other as its own outside, its exteri-ority, as if to say: “There they are, those Others who have nothing to do with us.” As if this particular, modern otherness were not the product of colonial barbarism, which today we call “globali-zation.” Likewise, in Marx’s account of commodity fetishism, we “forget” the process of production – and even more consequentially the relations of production, which are relations of exploitation and domination – and instead regard the finished product from a

Prologue 7

distance. For this reason, the uncritical celebration of Difference – so fashionable today in certain relativist, more or less “progressive,” right-thinking circles – is extremely dangerous. Such celebration risks becoming complicit with the erasure of the process by which our modern history was produced. And in any case, no: there is no pure Difference. Modernity is an epoch of contamination that has – I would underscore this point – produced difference through the exercise of power. This book therefore seeks to develop a critical philosophy of culture. This is a matter of de-totalizing (to abuse another Sartrean category) the false totality of Eurocentrism. It is also a matter of showing, again, that the latter can only represent itself as a totality because it is not able to acknowledge what it lacks, because – here the language of psychoanalysis is apposite, although the question is profoundly political – it is a castrated totality that refuses to acknowledge its own castration, even in the current moment of its “decadence.” This refusal is not without its own logic – because if the acknowledgment were to take place, then the totality would become something else altogether. It is extraordinary and horri-fying – but it should not come as a surprise – that the old Europe of the Enlightenment has today become a nightmarish inferno for the millions of refugees who manage to reach its shores, after having to abandon thousands of others who are left to drown in the bottom of the Mediterranean. The repressed returns without fail, and anyone who does not know how to, or who cannot, or who does not want to face the continuities between the slavery of yesterday and the genocides of today should be regarded as complicit, whether by action or omission. Considering the history of racial slavery, and in particular the history of the Haitian Revolution, has seemed to me to be the best way to approach these questions, not least because this revolution was the most radical, the most decisive and therefore also the most “forgotten” in modernity. The Haitian Revolution clearly refused the pretensions of “false totality,” of the European “general equiv-alent,” even, and especially in its most “progressive” versions, as these were embodied contemporaneously in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. This book thus does not aspire to be only a history of racial slavery or of the Haitian Revolution. Indeed, it does not even seek to be such a history first and foremost, although it will devote plenty of space to “facts,” not all of them well known. What I seek to do