Badiou in NLR

I have read a little about Badiou’s new book, De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?, mostly not good things. I’m not going to read the whole thing in the near future—certainly not in the next month—so I was pleased to see the New Left Review print a translated selection.

After Being and Event, I wanted to know a great deal more about the kind of philosophy of history that might come out of Badiou’s ideas. Metapolitics didn’t exactly answer the question. This little selection has, I think. For Badiou, history is a resolutely presentist and cyclical. This is easy to swallow (hard to avoid) speaking about the Revolution, but the ‘transcendental Pétainism’ of Sarkozy is a good example (Badiou cites 1815 as the first modern example of this political form). Match this to the cycles of ‘the communist hypothesis,’ in modern times—from 1792 to 1871, then again from 1917 to 1976, putting us, hopefully, at the beginning of a new period—and you’ve got a nice, weaving, repeating history, structured always by the regulative power of courageous fidelity, or, in the case of Pétanism, by fear.

Badiou is here advocating something he calls performative unity. I’m not convinced that this is a terribly useful idea. It does have a trifle more content than Zizek’s politics of refusal, but it seems to me born of the same kind of critical despair.

Most of what I read about this little book talked about Badiou calling various people rats. No doubt the whole book is different, perhaps more aggressive in tone. But from this selection, accusations of crypto-exterminationist leftism were greatly exaggerated.

Vincent Brown and John Wayne

Perhaps this wouldn’t have struck me as so very important not long ago: but since I just finished read Vincent Brown’s remarkable book The Reaper's Garden, I noticed when John Wayne, not a half-hour into The Searchers, shoots the eyes out of a dead Comanche’s head—because they believe such desecration will cause the spirit to wander forever, he says. This, I think, is exactly what Brown was talking about. Mortuary politics indeed.

Lewis - Main Currents

Lewis, Gordon K. Main Currents in Caribbean Thought: The Historical Evolution of Caribbean Society in Its Ideological Aspects, 1492-1900. Johns Hopkins, 1983.

One can object on several counts to Lewis’s book: his willingness to speculate about how ‘they must have felt;’ his casual use of the term ‘Asiatic;’ his sweeping and sometimes forced geo-historical comparisons. His prose often betrays him—sentences will occasionally be either meaningless or nearly tautological. He gives a degree of credence to the psychological dependency complex that is, to me, mystifying. (But what do I know?). His marxisant framework is married uncomfortably to a certain kind of idealist history of ideas. Lewis’s understanding of nationalism is highly teleological. He can sensibly point out that the legacy of slavery and colonialism were important for the development of nationalism in the Caribbean, but only in contrast to “the straightforward, linear character of European nationalism” (239). More seriously, although he says, strikingly, that “in a very real sense, the history of the Caribbean slave regime is the history of the sexual exploitation of the black woman” (232), it is as an aside, “a separate and final note.” Even inside the marxisant framework of ‘ideology,’ which allows him to discuss much that falls outside the purview of conventional intellectual history, he is not yet able to put gender at the center of his analysis in the same way that he puts class and race, though he is clearly aware that he somehow should.

To my mind the greatest fault of Main Currents in Caribbean Thought is that the introduction and the conclusion give only a very impoverished sense of the empirical richness of the text. Consider the important and telling examples of abolitionism and nationalism. In his conclusion, Lewis summarizes his findings on anti-slavery as an ideology by saying that it was “intrinsically revolutionary to the degree that it was essentially an ideology of protest on the part of the Caribbean masses...against an exploitative economic and political system seeking to justify itself in terms of a pseudoscientific doctrine of race” (323). The problem with this is that he has, over 150 pages, shown that most actual resistance against slavery was in no sense a “protest” against any kind of “exploitative economic and political system.” Rather, the various modes of slave resistance were generally of much more immediate and reactive nature. Revolts occurred when labor was especially hard, punishment especially cruel. Maroon communities (and here Lewis seems to largely be following Mintz and Price) were not intrinsically anti-slavery in the abstract, but would certainly fight to bloody death to avoid themselves being re-enslaved. In Jamaica in particular, the maroons established their safety and autonomy from the plantation system in part by agreeing to hunt down runaway slaves.

Contemporary research, above all in the French context, but also the British, would have tied abolitionism into imperialism much more closely. The conclusion says nothing about this connection. But Lewis has read Eric Williams, and if he doesn’t give the kind of attention to Haiti’s republicanism that one would today, he is nonetheless perfectly aware and articulate, in his discussion of Victor Schoelcher (213-216), about the way in which abolition generally went hand-in-hand with the ideology of Empire. In the British context as well, Lewis is clear that abolitionism in now sense entailed the dissolution of imperial control. Desire for independence (cast in terms of nation or not) was at first very much a thing of the planter class. The complex interaction and interference of anti-slavery, imperialism and nationalism comes out admirably in the body of Lewis’s text—but not in his summary of the work he’s done.

In the end, the documentary richness of Main Currents of Caribbean Thought saves the book from its shortcomings and the occasional awkwardness of construction. The simple fact is that the elites of various parts of the Caribbean wrote a great deal about themselves and their place in the world. If a lower percentage of the Caribbean population was literate and articulate, this does not mean that they had no thoughts, or that their way of making sense of the world wasn’t complicated and isn’t in need of explication (to use Rancière’s dirty word). Lewis’s work has the great merit of actually discussing some of the large amount of printed material that is available, and not shying away from thinking about how the lives of those with no access to printed voice would have effected and contributed to it. He takes the Caribbean seriously as its own region, with a certain coherence based on a broadly shared experience of slavery and colonialism. He even, in a somewhat odd and melancholy way, sees hope in the Caribbean past, compared to the US one: “In American society, money ‘talks’; in Caribbean society, money ‘whitens.’ If racial democracy is to survive anywhere in the twentieth century, then, it probably stands its best chance in the Caribbean” (10).

Cesaire and postwar France

Césaire, Aimé. Discours sur le colonialisme. Présence Africaine, 1989. [1950?]

Reading Aimé Césaire’s Discours sur le colonialisme (1950) has affirmed my belief that products of the post-war Parisian intelligentsia need very much to be contextualized. I bought my copy of Césaire’s famous pamphlet used; they had several copies, probably it had been assigned in a class. The library has a similar edition. The original date of publication isn’t even to be found anywhere (instead we get a 1989 Présence Africaine copyright). The austerity of this edition should be compared to the more recent English-language translation, which has a flashy cover and an introduction.

This is an excellent opportunity to practice what I have recently come to think of as one of the main techniques, or perhaps the central imperative, of contextual intellectual history: to push back down into the muck of context any text that attempts to transcend the circumstances of its production and reception. One may say, generously, that it is only by assiduously contextualizing that it is possible to see the true value of any given work; the true value meaning the degree to which it is able to escape from its context. Put in more Lacaprian terms: certain texts resist the reader more than others, these are the texts to which we return, which challenge us—which are valuable. I’m a bit suspicious of this rarely-articulated valorization of transcendence and resistance.

At any rate, to Césaire. In 1950 Césaire was a member of the PCF, and this to me is the loudest voice in the Discours. His position is difficult, because he wants to demonstrate both the utter bankruptcy of European civilization, but also to save certain elements of it. This is, I think, typical both of the French-educated anti-colonialists of this period, and also for the most part of the Communists. Colonialism and racism aren’t put in a causal relationship here, as far as I can tell, but they are both barbarous; it is by way of the bridge-head of barbarism provided by colonial culture that racism enters Europe at its very heart, and leads, ultimately, to Hitler. Colonialism is a poison at the heart of European civilization, which has rendered it weak and decadent.

In a remarkable feat of historical parallelism, Césaire argues that just as Rome ultimately opened its gates to barbarians by destroying all the other civilizations around it, so Europe is failing because it has so relentlessly snuffed out the civilizations around it. I’m paraphrasing here, but the language of civilization, Europe, decadence, barbarism, poison...this is all very much Césaire’s. In the final pages, Césaire asserts that in order to save itself, Europe must put everything it has in the service of the proletariat Revolution that is in process in the areas it previously colonized. Save itself from what?

Et alors, je le demande: qu’a-t-elle fait d’autre, l’Europe bourgeoise? Elle a sapé les civilisations, détruit les patries, ruiné les nationalités, extirpé ‘la racine de diversité.’ Plus de digue. Plus de boulevard. L’heure est arrivée du Barbare. Du Barbare moderne. L’heure américaine. Violence, démesure, gaspillage, mercantilisme, bluff, grégarisme, la bêtise, la vulgarité, le désordre. (57)

That’s quite a list. So it’s the Americans, as the new avatars of capital, that must now be fought. Indeed, in the next lines we go directly from Wilson being asked what America will do now that it is about to control the world (in 1913!), to Truman’s generous offers of assistance to a ruined Europe. There’s a certain amount of controversy in the historiography right now about Truman, the Marshall plan, and American involvement in Europe in the postwar period. Did the Marshall plan really restart the European economy? In what sense? There is evidence that well before American capital began to flow into Europe, things had begun to get better—so perhaps it is hope that the US imported, before dollars? The relationship between hope and money is not, I think, likely to be understood soon, though perhaps closer attention to 1945-1955 in Europe isn’t a bad way of looking into it. This aside, it is possible to look, without much trouble, at the front pages of L’Humanité and other leftist newspapers in this period, and you’ll find plenty of anti-American vitriole. Graphs demonstrating how basic foodstuffs are becoming more expensive as a result of the Marshall plan, which was broadly accused of being a form of colonialism—after all, the story would go, we Europeans certainly know what economic domination looks like, having practiced it for long enough. So in this sense Césaire isn’t stepping very far from the PCF platform.

Much of the Discours is taken up by quotes or critiques of various writers, from Renan to Roger Caillois. (The former more or less equals Hitler, for Césaire—I wonder if Said draws much on Césaire for his treatment of Renan in Orientalism? Probably not). The critique of Caillois is interesting for several reasons, and a nice way to discuss the smallness of the Parisian world. Caillois is exactly the same age as Césaire, and also attended the lycée Louis-le-grand, though they may not have overlapped there. Caillois, in the 1930s, was a student of the cutting edge of academic ethnography in France (Dumézil, Mauss), and also (not coincidentally) with certain offshoots of the Surrealist camp. He was involved with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris in the creation of the short-lived Collège de sociologie. He was a hard-left anti-fascist, but (especially like Bataille) strange and scary, interested in limit experiences. During the war, Caillois goes to Argentina. He becomes something of a literary power-broker after the war, and is instrumental in bringing various South American writers to the attention of Paris, most notably Borges. But he also, after the war, repudiates the Communism of his younger years. In 1951, he published a pamphlet called Description du marxisme, that attacked Marxist dogmas of various kinds, generally accused it of being incoherent and, as a description of social reality, simply rendered obsolete by more recent sociological work. The young Roland Barthes wrote two extremely negative reviews of the booklet in leftist papers. (Barthes, by the by, may actually have been at Louis-le-Grand at the same time as Césaire).

So if one asks why it is that Césaire devotes 7 pages of a 60 page pamphlet to Caillois, we can perhaps respond by putting the Discours next to the broader policy of hard-left French intellectuals in the postwar of reflexively and viciously attacking anyone who criticized Marxism as a way of understanding the world. There are shades here—not everyone is actually PCF, and people still have differing views about what things are like in the USSR, but we can divide the great mass of the French intelligentsia in the years just after the war between the harder left (Merleau-Ponty in Humanism and Terror) for whom the historical destiny of the Soviet Union must be defended unconditionally, and the softer left, for whom, at the very least, one can safely speak of the moral equivalency of the USA and the Soviet Union (Barthes, and others). It is this last position, really, that Tony Judt, for instance, is so intent on overturning. Cesaire should really be seen in terms of this debate, and his critique of colonialism should be seen as involved, at least instrumentally, with the ‘larger’ debate about Revolution and the Proletariat (both emphatically capitalized) going at this time.

Boaz Evron

Evron, Boaz. “The Holocaust: Learning the Wrong Lessons.” Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3. (Spring, 1981), pp. 16-26. [first published in ETON 77, 1980]

This short piece is almost 30 years old, but it sounds to me quite current. Has the situation not changed? Have the available arguments and ways of thinking not changed to reflect the new situation? Or, more likely, am I ill informed? The essential arguments, or way of seeing things, do not sound so very different from the scandalous Mearsheimer and Walt position paper on the Israel lobby from 2006 (also in the LRB). I suppose that Evron is addressing Israelis where Mearsheimer and Walt were addressing Americans; but the idea that the presence of the Holocaust (as a fact or provocation bound to the state of Israel) in international relations distorts things in dangerous ways is surely the key idea in both cases. Or would M and W say that their argument has nothing to do with uses of the Holocaust, that it’s all about a lobbying organization just like any other, only better? I’d have to look back at their paper with some care to see what they say about this.

Rosanvallon interview

The most recent issue of the Journal of the History of Ideas includes a translation of an interview with Pierre Rosanvallon, conducted by Javier Fernández Sebastián in Madrid in September of 2006. Sam Moyn provides some introductory paragraphs. The interview covers a great deal of ground, but a few things in particular piqued my interest.

I’d like to hear more of Rosanvallon’s thoughts on the role of the intellectual in contemporary society. Here he says “In France, the dominant model has been that of the individual who commits his academic legitimacy or his own academic projects in the public arena in order to take a stand. It's a vision that I've never shared. I don't see what special legitimacy an individual would have to interfere in a domain that is not his own. Granted, it's acceptable in a society where the access to public speech is very limited.” So Voltaire and Zola were doing the right thing, because if they didn’t speak, perhaps truth wouldn’t be spoken. But in today’s society, many voices are able to make themselves heard, and the academic has no special duty to speak for other people. Today, the intellectual’s “work has and ought to have the function of rendering contemporary society's difficulties more intelligible...A more lucid society that better understands its questions will perhaps be more rational, will be a society in which political deliberation will be able to be stronger and more active. Hence, I've defined the intellectual as someone who first and foremost possesses tools of comprehension, tools which may also become instruments of action.” (713)

I understand this to imply that I, as a historian (let’s say) of 19^th and 20^th century intellectual history, am not especially in a position to use my cultural capital or legitimacy to speak out against (for instance) police brutality. Rosanvallon gives two reasons for this that don’t exactly fit together. First, there are plenty of voices speaking, why, if I have no special knowledge, should I speak? Second, no one would listen to me anyway, since the intellectual is no longer able to aspire to meaningful celebrity status. Rosanvallon still, however, thinks that the intellectual should be filling the time-honored role of explaining society to itself--that is, to render society intelligible so that it can perhaps be changed for the better. I wonder if it really is possible to provide genuinely useful and new conceptualizations of society and politics without, also, engaging oneself with issues to which one has no deep ties.

At the end of the interview, Sebastián asks Rosanvallon whether he thinks the revolutions in the Spanish-speaking world—variously described as “Ibero-American,” and “Hispanic”—should be considered along with the North American and French as the third great revolutionary cycle of the period, crucial, in their own way, to the birth of modern political culture. Rosanvallon says yes, of course. I wonder how he would conceptualize the Hatian revolution? Would he take any interest in it, or would he regard it as an aberration, overturning as it did a slave society, rather than a feudal one, and replacing it not with a slowly liberalizing set of democratic institutions, but with long-term dictatorship? Would he make anything out of the republican rhetoric of the revolutionaries, or would its failure to produce a durable institutional structure disqualify it?

Kleinberg on deconstruction (light polemic)

Kleinberg, Ethan. “Haunting History: Deconstruction and the Spirit of Revision.” History and Theory. Vol 46 (December 2007). 113-143.

This essay essentially tracks the troubled and confused ways in which historians have talked about deconstruction as a method in historiography. This is largely a history of confusion and fear, allowing for a certain amount of play on deconstruction as a Derridean specter (following Specters of Marx). The story centers around the linguistic turns of the 1980s in intellectual and cultural history embodied in the volumes Modern European Intellectual History (1982) and The New Cultural History­ (1987), and subsequent debates in the 90s and post- 9/11 US academy. Kleinberg points out the various ways in which Derrida and other French thinkers, especially Foucault, were all reduced into the somewhat vague word ‘deconstruction,’ generally meaning ‘to upset hierarchies, value-systems and assumptions.’ Kleinberg pays close attention to the rhetorical invocation of the specter of deconstruction. The essay is a useful overview of several of these debates.

Now, I broadly agree with Kleinberg, but I can’t help but notice that his paper treats methodological essays alone. This was no doubt on purpose, but it seems to me to preclude the strongest argument for the historiographical usefulness of Derrida in particular, and poststructuralism more generally: all the good books of history that have been written in a deconstructive vein. To mention two books I’ve been thinking with lately, Sexing the Citizen (2006), and to a lesser extent, The French Imperial Nation-State (2005) both rely on what it is neither especially unfair nor reductive to call deconstructive methods. I suspect that one reason Kleinberg stayed away from actual books of history is that one often finds Derrida and Foucault together in them. Surkis is a perfect case in point. If we think of Derrida as having (through Scott), taught historians to look for the points of contradiction and silence in cultural formations or well-articulated elite self-justification, then we might think of Foucault as standing for the attention to power which so often ‘fills in’ the gaps in various cultural and intellectual logics. The Trouillot’s Silencing the Past (1995), whatever its faults, is surely right about this.

Of course one can object to this way of framing things. Are these uses of Derrida and Foucault at all fair to the body of work left behind by these two remarkable thinkers? Not at all. Is this the only way to do history? Certainly not. But I do think that Kleinberg, since he is mostly interested in uses of deconstruction as a word, and a few argumentative tropes associated with critiques of it, leaves aside the very real and deep impact poststructuralism (this more generic and historical term is, i think, safe) has had on historiography. He’s also not interested in answering what strikes me as the most serious critique of certain forms of academic history: that they render the historian ‘theoretically and morally naked’(paraphrase of Trouillot) before genuine political threats. He mentions this criticism but brushes it aside as though it were obviously false. I happen to think it’s a completely incorrect and intellectually lazy attack on various forms of radical critique. But that doesn’t mean it can go unanswered (though it will here, for the moment).

Kleinberg argues that historians have, especially in recent years, retreated back into ‘experience’ as either an explanatory category or at least a source of authority. He cites Scott’s argument against this concept. He also points out that it cannot, ultimately, lead to universalizable authority, since even collective experience cannot possibly ‘collect’ everyone. I’m not sure about this argument from a number of directions (also, I’m somewhat committing something of a heresy of paraphrase here with his argument). In the end, I would certainly range myself on the side of ‘deconstruction’ in history, though we’d then have to fight about what it meant. I would want it to be as material as possible (relatively easy), and to attend above all to sites of ambiguity through which power is exercised. I suspect this sentence sounds as though it was written in 1986—but so what? Is this set of questions ‘saturated’ (to use Badiou’s synonym for ‘boring’)? I think not.