Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009) is a republication of Susan Buck-Morss’ essay “Hegel and Haiti,” originally published in 2000, together with another substantial piece and some introductory material. The original essay has at its core the empirical argument, put most conservatively, that Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave was written with the Haitian Revolution in mind. The more radical formation of the claim is that the Haitian Revolution was—and remains—at the very center of modernity as such; Hegel, as a profound and originary thinker of modernity, recognized this and therefore built his philosophical system around the ‘work’ already done by this Revolution. The essay’s goal is to rescue, or recast, universal history as a project of human emancipation. This can be done, according to Buck-Morss, only by reading modernity from what are nominally its edges, by recognizing its porous nature, and by accepting universal history as essentially momentary. Hegel is a sort of failed hero of the story—the particularity at the origin of his work must be used to destroy the bad universality into which his philosophy of history eventually turned.
Buck-Morss in several places objects to disciplinary specialization. She is proud that her narrative doesn’t have a place in an academic discipline. Yet, it seems to me, it certainly does. Her text is easily recognized as Theory; it and her certainly have a well established institutional place in the US Academy. This is an issue about which much could be said.
I should say that on a certain level I am convinced by the evidence Buck-Morss is able to marshal for her central claims about Hegel and Haiti. I was simply unaware, for instance, of the textual antecedents to the master-slave dialectic in Hegel’s lectures at Jena before he wrote the Phenomenology. I had been suspicious of the desire to read Hegel’s Knecht as ‘slave,’ and then yet more suspicious of what I took to be the rather quick connection of slave to black. Yet apparently in earlier versions of the dialectic, Hegel uses Sklav, which is a clearer reference. This, together with Buck-Morss’ discussion of the coverage of Haiti in this period in Minerva, a political journal Hegel read, is the kind of evidence that I hadn’t realized existed. Together with the great deal that I’ve learned about Haiti since I last thought at all about the probability of a Haitian reading of Hegel, it simply convinces me—although I remain skeptical, for empirical and political reasons, of attempts to read, for instance, Du Bois and Frederick Douglass, in terms of the master-slave dialectic.
For broad historical reasons, it makes sense to take Haiti, and the constellation of the Atlantic slave economy, as a central to the historical development of Europe and the so-called West. The empirical existence of the ‘New World’ was crucial to Enlightenment thought—see Michèle Duchet’s foundational work on this. I have recently heard it argued that the commercial exploitation of the Spanish domains in Mexico was a crucial force behind the development of scientific modes of description and thought in the 16th century. (It would be interesting to ask David Israel what he thinks about these suggestions). Buck-Morss argues that the Haitian Revolution, in the center of all this, was the moment of radical emancipation. It was only in Haiti—and even there only briefly—that the principles of radical political equality were not only asserted, but actually written into law and even practiced.
My question is about the relevance to all this of the dialectic of master and slave. It seems to me, in fact, to be positively counter-productive as a guide for thinking about human emancipation. Taken on a subjective, psychological level, it seems to me that it leads nowhere good—not only bondage but psychic dissolution and the real acceptance of death become necessary moments in the path to the genuinely human. Buck-Morss herself rejects the pseudo-Marxist ‘stagist’ interpretation of the dialectic, whereby the proletariat overthrows the bourgeoisie, thus entering the historical realm of freedom. Without being simply Marxist, though, Buck-Morss does want to argue that the dialectic treats collective subjects (54).
The particularity of the Haitian Revolution itself is supposed to be a moment that indicates the universality of the emancipatory struggle for recognition. She says, “If we understand the experience of historical rupture as a moment of clarity, temporary by definition, we will not be in danger of losing the world-historical contribution of the Sant-Domingue slaves, the idea of an ends to relations of slavery that went far beyond existing European Enlightenment thought” (147). More generally, modernity as a universal condition is understood to have its origin in the particular configuration of the Atlantic slave economy. All of this is fine, but I don’t quite understand what this way of conceiving of politics, even of emancipatory politics, has to do with the dialectic of recognition. The final pages of the essay slide off into the messianic language of critical theory. Here is the second to last paragraph:
Between uniformity and indeterminacy of historical meaning, there is a dialectical encounter with the past. In extending the boundaries of our moral imagining, we need to see a historical space before we can explore it. The mutual recognition between past and present that can liberate us from the recurring cycle of victim and aggressor can occur only if the past to be recognized is on the historical map. It is in the picture, even if it is not in place. Its liberation is a task of excavation that takes place not across national boundaries, but without them. Its richest finds are at the edge of culture. Universal humanity is visible at the edges. (150-151)
Much of this makes good sense, but not the idea of a genuine dialectic of mutual recognition with ‘the past.’ This is to be distinguished from, for instance, Dominic Lacapra’s notion of dialogic encounters with texts. The dialogic is defensible both practically and philosophically in a way that mutual recognition of past and present is not. I would argue, in fact, that human collectivities also cannot recognize one another in the sense in which the word is being used here. Buck-Morss’ broader political goal is clearly to recover some kind of universal political project. It is self-defeating to say that such a project will come from ‘the edges.’ The point, it seems to me, is to grasp the world anew in such a way that what had seemed like the edge no longer is.
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