revenantchabert

Le Colonel Chabert

mercredi, mai 21, 2008

Fate and Fortuity

For the "superman" in Nietzsche, beyond the influence of French romanticism (and in a general way the cult of Napoleon), there are also the racist tendenancies, which culminate in Gobineau and Chamberlain and in panGermanism (Treitschke, the theory of power, etc.). But perhaps the popular "superman" of Dumas has to be seen as a "democratic" reaction to the conception of racism, with its feudal origins, that one has to link to the exaltation of French "chauvinism" in the novels of Eugène Sue.

As a reaction to this tendency in the French popular novel, we must note Dostoevsky: Roskolnikov is Monte Cristo "critiqued" by a Christian panSlavist.

- Gramsci

"But when I have no more money left to pay you?" asked the
infuriated Danglars.

"Then you must suffer hunger."

"Suffer hunger?" said Danglars, becoming pale.

"Most likely," replied Vampa coolly.

"But you say you do not wish to kill me?"

"No."

"And yet you will let me perish with hunger?"

"Ah, that is a different thing."

"Well, then, wretches," cried Danglars, "I will defy your
infamous calculations -- I would rather die at once! You may
torture, torment, kill me, but you shall not have my
signature again!"

"As your excellency pleases," said Vampa, as he left the
cell. Danglars, raving, threw himself on the goat-skin. Who
could these men be? Who was the invisible chief? What could
be his intentions towards him? And why, when every one else
was allowed to be ransomed, might he not also be? Oh, yes;
certainly a speedy, violent death would be a fine means of
deceiving these remorseless enemies, who appeared to pursue
him with such incomprehensible vengeance. But to die? For
the first time in his life, Danglars contemplated death with
a mixture of dread and desire; the time had come when the
implacable spectre, which exists in the mind of every human
creature, arrested his attention and called out with every
pulsation of his heart, "Thou shalt die!"

Danglars resembled a timid animal excited in the chase;
first it flies, then despairs, and at last, by the very
force of desperation, sometimes succeeds in eluding its
pursuers. Danglars meditated an escape; but the walls were
solid rock, a man was sitting reading at the only outlet to
the cell, and behind that man shapes armed with guns
continually passed. His resolution not to sign lasted two
days, after which he offered a million for some food. They
sent him a magnificent supper, and took his million.

From this time the prisoner resolved to suffer no longer,
but to have everything he wanted. At the end of twelve days,
after having made a splendid dinner, he reckoned his
accounts, and found that he had only 50,000 francs left.
Then a strange reaction took place; he who had just
abandoned 5,000,000 endeavored to save the 50,000 francs he
had left, and sooner than give them up he resolved to enter
again upon a life of privation -- he was deluded by the
hopefulness that is a premonition of madness. He who for so
long a time had forgotten God, began to think that miracles
were possible -- that the accursed cavern might be
discovered by the officers of the Papal States, who would
release him; that then he would have 50,000 remaining, which
would be sufficient to save him from starvation; and finally
he prayed that this sum might be preserved to him, and as he
prayed he wept. Three days passed thus, during which his
prayers were frequent, if not heartfelt. Sometimes he was
delirious, and fancied he saw an old man stretched on a
pallet; he, also, was dying of hunger.

On the fourth, he was no longer a man, but a living corpse.
He had picked up every crumb that had been left from his
former meals, and was beginning to eat the matting which
covered the floor of his cell. Then he entreated Peppino, as
he would a guardian angel, to give him food; he offered him
1,000 francs for a mouthful of bread. But Peppino did not
answer. On the fifth day he dragged himself to the door of
the cell.

"Are you not a Christian?" he said, falling on his knees.
"Do you wish to assassinate a man who, in the eyes of
heaven, is a brother? Oh, my former friends, my former
friends!" he murmured, and fell with his face to the ground.
Then rising in despair, he exclaimed, "The chief, the
chief!"

"Here I am," said Vampa, instantly appearing; "what do you
want?"

"Take my last gold," muttered Danglars, holding out his
pocket-book, "and let me live here; I ask no more for
liberty -- I only ask to live!"

"Then you suffer a great deal?"

"Oh, yes, yes, cruelly!"

"Still, there have been men who suffered more than you."

"I do not think so."

"Yes; those who have died of hunger."

Danglars thought of the old man whom, in his hours of
delirium, he had seen groaning on his bed. He struck his
forehead on the ground and groaned. "Yes," he said, "there
have been some who have suffered more than I have, but then
they must have been martyrs at least."

"Do you repent?" asked a deep, solemn voice, which caused
Danglars' hair to stand on end. His feeble eyes endeavored
to distinguish objects, and behind the bandit he saw a man
enveloped in a cloak, half lost in the shadow of a stone
column.

"Of what must I repent?" stammered Danglars.

"Of the evil you have done," said the voice.

"Oh, yes; oh, yes, I do indeed repent." And he struck his
breast with his emaciated fist.

"Then I forgive you," said the man, dropping his cloak, and
advancing to the light.

"The Count of Monte Cristo!" said Danglars, more pale from
terror than he had been just before from hunger and misery.

"You are mistaken -- I am not the Count of Monte Cristo."

"Then who are you?"

"I am he whom you sold and dishonored -- I am he whose
betrothed you prostituted -- I am he upon whom you trampled
that you might raise yourself to fortune -- I am he whose
father you condemned to die of hunger -- I am he whom you
also condemned to starvation, and who yet forgives you,
because he hopes to be forgiven -- I am Edmond Dantes!"

Ernesto "Che" Guevara's biographer Paco Ignacio Taibo II, himself a novelist, famously called Che's anti-imperialism Salgariano in origin - that is, inspired by Emilio Salgari's swashbuckling heros Sandokan and Il Corsaro Nero.

Le Comte de Monte Cristo, which was published as a serial in French between 1844 and January 1846, appeared complete in both English and German in 1846. The Communist Manifesto is at least somewhat Dumasian in origin. Not only did the spectre of the opening line conjure Dumas' hugely popular tale - the one contemporary story with which all readers of the Manifesto, middle class and proletarian, could not but have been familiar - but the portrait in the Manifesto of a bourgeoisie creating its own "gravedigger" and the character of that gravedigger's power, and the nature of the appropriator-exploiter class' vulnerability, represent a kind of systematic digestion, adjustment and theorisation of the disparate observations, themes and motifs we find in Dumas' narrative. In 1851, in a letter to Engels, Marx wrote:

So far as his historical works are concerned, he [Louis Blanc] wrote them in the same way that A. Dumas wrote his feuilletons. He never studies more material than is needed for the next chapter. This is how such books as the Histoire des dix ans are produced. In this way it lends a certain freshness to his accounts. For what he’s conveying is at least as new to him as it is to the reader; on the other hand the thing as a whole is weak.

A certain freshness, perhaps allowing a certain defamiliarisation which precedes recognition.

It was probably the influence of Croce on Gramsci that accounted for the latter's judgement that a Dumasian heritage was conspicuously enough more lowly than a Nietzschean one to serve as a put-down:

That one would be somewhat ashamed to justify one's conceptions with the novels of Dumas and Balzac is easy enough to understand: and this is why they are justified with Nietzsche instead and one admires Balzac as an artist and not as a creator of romantic characters in the serial novel style. But the real linkage is certain from the point of view of culture. The "superman" type is Monte Cristo, liberated from that particular halo of "fatalism" which is proper to lowbrow romanticism and rests even more heavily on Athos and Joseph Balsamo.

For Croce, as Eco reminds his reader, Dumas produced mere "writing", letteratura not poesia. There can be no doubt of course, as Eco also remarks, that from the point of view of style, The Count of Monte Cristo is the "worst written" famous novel ever, with all the marks of an author - or rather two, Dumas and Maquet - paid by the word and obliged as well to recap the content of the previous installments. (One might add that Nietzsche's books are by far the worst written canonical philosophy, though the faults are distinctive.) Eco recounts how during an aborted attempt to produce an Italian translation of Monte Cristo which reduced the length of the text by a quarter, he came to view this prolongation - by digression, redundancy, frivolous dialogue, recapitulation - as indispensible to the effects of the machine that is this most popular of popular novels, to its visceral effects on the reader, the reader as a body, seized by the guts. But it also may be what undercuts the necessity and fatalism which Gramsci emphasised, and gives the relentlessly inevitable plot of The Count of Monte Cristo a simultaneous flavour of contingency, and of dependence on chance combinations of human purpose, skill, knowledge, collaboration, (the authors' as well as the protagonists') accident, conditions and opportunity.

"Tout le monde existe, sans doute, mais pas dans des conditions pareilles"

- Oui, mais tout cela n'empêche pas mon comte de Monte-Cristo d'exister !
- Pardieu ! tout le monde existe, le beau miracle !
- Tout le monde existe, sans doute, mais pas dans des conditions pareilles. Tout le monde n'a pas des esclaves noirs, des galeries princières, des armes comme à la casauba, des chevaux de six mille francs pièce, des maîtresses grecques !
- L'avez-vous vue, la maîtresse grecque ?
- Oui, je l'ai vue et entendue. Vue au théâtre Valle, entendue un jour que j'ai déjeuné chez le comte.
- Il mange donc, votre homme extraordinaire ?
- Ma foi, s'il mange, c'est si peu, que ce n'est point la peine d'en parler.
- Vous verrez que c'est un vampire.
- Riez si vous voulez. C'était l'opinion de la comtesse G..., qui, comme vous le savez, a connu Lord Ruthwen.
- Ah ! joli ! dit Beauchamp, voilà pour un homme non journaliste le pendant du fameux serpent de mer du Constitutionnel ; un vampire, c'est parfait !
- Oeil fauve dont la prunelle diminue et se dilate à volonté, dit Debray ; angle facial développé, front magnifique, teint livide, barbe noire, dents blanches et aigus, politesse toute pareille.
- Eh bien, c'est justement cela, Lucien, dit Morcerf, et le signalement est tracé trait pour trait. Oui, politesse aigu et incisive. Cet homme m'a souvent donné le frisson ; un jour entre autres, que nous regardions ensemble une exécution, j'ai cru que j'allais me trouver mal, bien plus de le voir et de l'entendre causer froidement sur tous les supplices de la terre, que de voir le bourreau remplir son office et que d'entendre les cris du patient.
- Ne vous a-t-il pas conduit un peu dans les ruines du Colisée pour vous sucer le sang, Morcerf ? demanda Beauchamp.
- Ou, après vous avoir délivré, ne vous a-t-il pas fait signer quelque parchemin couleur de feu, par lequel vous lui cédiez votre âme, comme EsaŸ son droit d'aînesse ?
- Raillez ! raillez tant que vous voudrez, messieurs ! dit Morcerf un peu piqué. Quand je vous regarde, vous autres beaux Parisiens, habitués du boulevard de Gand, promeneurs du bois de Boulogne, et que je me rappelle cet homme, eh bien, il me semble que nous ne sommes pas de la même espèce.
- Je m'en flatte ! dit Beauchamp.
- Toujours est-il, ajouta Château-Renaud, que votre comte de Monte-Cristo est un galant homme dans ses moments perdus, sauf toutefois ses petits arrangements avec les bandits italiens.
- Eh ! il n'y a pas de bandits italiens ! dit Debray.
- Pas de vampires ! ajouta Beauchamp.
- Pas de comte de Monte-Cristo, ajouta Debray. Tenez, cher Albert, voilà dix heures et demie qui sonnent.
- Avouez que vous avez eu le cauchemar, et allons déjeuner », dit Beauchamp.
Mais la vibration de la pendule ne s'était pas encore éteinte, lorsque la porte s'ouvrit, et que Germain annonça :
« Son Excellence le comte de Monte-Cristo ! »

"Yes," said Albert, "but this has nothing to do with the
existence of the Count of Monte Cristo."

"Pardieu, every one exists."

"Doubtless, but not in the same way; every one has not black
slaves, a princely retinue, an arsenal of weapons that would
do credit to an Arabian fortress, horses that cost six
thousand francs apiece, and Greek mistresses."

"Have you seen the Greek mistress?"

"I have both seen and heard her. I saw her at the theatre,
and heard her one morning when I breakfasted with the
count."

"He eats, then?"

"Yes; but so little, it can hardly be called eating."

"He must be a vampire."

"Laugh, if you will; the Countess G---- , who knew Lord
Ruthven, declared that the count was a vampire."

"Ah, capital," said Beauchamp. "For a man not connected with
newspapers, here is the pendant to the famous sea-serpent of
the Constitutionnel."

"Wild eyes, the iris of which contracts or dilates at
pleasure," said Debray; "facial angle strongly developed,
magnificent forehead, livid complexion, black beard, sharp
and white teeth, politeness unexceptionable."

"Just so, Lucien," returned Morcerf; "you have described him
feature for feature. Yes, keen and cutting politeness. This
man has often made me shudder; and one day that we were
viewing an execution, I thought I should faint, more from
hearing the cold and calm manner in which he spoke of every
description of torture, than from the sight of the
executioner and the culprit."

"Did he not conduct you to the ruins of the Colosseum and
suck your blood?" asked Beauchamp.

"Or, having delivered you, make you sign a flaming
parchment, surrendering your soul to him as Esau did his
birth-right?"

"Rail on, rail on at your ease, gentlemen," said Morcerf,
somewhat piqued. "When I look at you Parisians, idlers on
the Boulevard de Gand or the Bois de Boulogne, and think of
this man, it seems to me we are not of the same race."

"I am highly flattered," returned Beauchamp. "At the same
time," added Chateau-Renaud, "your Count of Monte Cristo is
a very fine fellow, always excepting his little arrangements
with the Italian banditti."

"There are no Italian banditti," said Debray.

"No vampire," cried Beauchamp. "No Count of Monte Cristo"
added Debray. "There is half-past ten striking, Albert."

"Confess you have dreamed this, and let us sit down to
breakfast," continued Beauchamp. But the sound of the clock
had not died away when Germain announced, "His excellency
the Count of Monte Cristo."

Spectres

1846:

- C'est le visage de M. de Monte-Cristo ! s'écria Villefort les yeux hagards.
- Ce n'est pas encore cela, monsieur le procureur du roi, cherchez mieux et plus loin.
- Cette voix ! cette voix ! où l'aide entendue pour la première fois ?
- Vous l'avez entendue pour la première fois à Marseille, il y a vingt-trois ans, le jour de votre mariage avec Mlle de Saint-Méran. Cherchez dans vos dossiers.
- Vous n'êtes pas Busoni ? vous n'êtes pas Monte-Cristo ? Mon Dieu, vous êtes cet ennemi caché, implacable, mortel ! J'ai fait quelque chose contre vous à Marseille, oh ! malheur à moi !
- Oui, tu as raison, c'est bien cela, dit le comte en croisant les bras sur sa large poitrine ; cherche, cherche !
- Mais, que t'ai-je donc fait ? s'écria Villefort, dont l'esprit flottait déjà sur la limite où se confondent la raison et la démence, dans ce brouillard qui n'est plus le rêve et qui n'est pas encore le réveil ; que t'ai-je fait ? dis ! parle !
- Vous m'avez condamné à une mort lente et hideuse, vous avez tué mon père, vous m'avez ôté l'amour avec la liberté, et la fortune avec l'amour !
- Qui êtes-vous ? qui êtes-vous donc ? mon Dieu !
- Je suis le spectre d'un malheureux que vous avez enseveli dans les cachots du château d'If. A ce spectre sorti enfin de sa tombe Dieu a mis le masque du comte de Monte-Cristo, et il l'a couvert de diamants et d'or pour que vous ne le reconnaissiez qu'aujourd'hui.
- Ah ! je te reconnais, je te reconnais ! dit le procureur du roi ; tu es...

"It is the face of the Count of Monte Cristo!" exclaimed the
procureur, with a haggard expression.

"You are not exactly right, M. Procureur; you must go
farther back."

"That voice, that voice! -- where did I first hear it?"

"You heard it for the first time at Marseilles, twenty-three
years ago, the day of your marriage with Mademoiselle de
Saint-Meran. Refer to your papers."

"You are not Busoni? -- you are not Monte Cristo? Oh,
heavens -- you are, then, some secret, implacable, and
mortal enemy! I must have wronged you in some way at
Marseilles. Oh, woe to me!"

"Yes; you are now on the right path," said the count,
crossing his arms over his broad chest; "search -- search!"

"But what have I done to you?" exclaimed Villefort, whose
mind was balancing between reason and insanity, in that
cloud which is neither a dream nor reality; "what have I
done to you? Tell me, then! Speak!"

"You condemned me to a horrible, tedious death; you killed
my father; you deprived me of liberty, of love, and
happiness."

"Who are you, then? Who are you?"

"I am the spectre of a wretch you buried in the dungeons of
the Chateau d'If. God gave that spectre the form of the
Count of Monte Cristo when he at length issued from his
tomb, enriched him with gold and diamonds, and led him to
you!"

"Ah, I recognize you -- I recognize you!" exclaimed the
king's attorney; "you are" --

lundi, mai 19, 2008

Who's There?

Spectres of Marx opens with an exordium, and the appearance of a spirit. A ghost. It is not a ghost of Marx, but of the arch anti-communist, Nietzsche, ventriloquising Jesus, among the most famous of all ghosts, in The Anti-Christ:

The deep instinct which prompts the Christian how to live so that he will feel that he is “in heaven” and is “immortal,” despite many reasons for feeling that he is not “in heaven”: this is the only psychological reality in “salvation.”—A new way of life, not a new faith....

Derrida summons it. It appears; it possesses Derrida and his audience, and, as at a seance, speaks through one of them, it's impossible to know which body, in the dark:

Someone, you or me, comes forward and says: I would like to learn to live finally.

Though it is Heidegger's spirit, the holy spirit, what Derrida understands as a certain, "ideology-free", spirit of Nazism* - spirit as Führer, always in front, the will to know, eternal critique, the problem of modernity as technology and, above all, "a spiritual renewal of life in its entirety, a reconciliation of social antagonisms and a deliverance of Western existence from the dangers of communism"** - which triumphs in Spectres of Marx, it is not the Father - Stirner - but the Son of the anti-communist Trinity, the Holy Alliance, Nietzsche, who sets events in motion, announcing the unknown truth of the crime, that time is out of joint, that the intellectuals must "learn to live" (finally), and calling the faithful to messianicity:

The “kingdom of heaven” is a state of the heart—not something to come “beyond the world” or “after death.” The whole idea of natural death is absent from the Gospels: death is not a bridge, not a passing; it is absent because it belongs to a quite different, a merely apparent world, useful only as a symbol. The “hour of death” is not a Christian idea—“hours,” time, the physical life and its crises have no existence for the bearer of “glad tidings.”... The “kingdom of God” is not something that men wait for: it had no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it is not going to come at a “millennium”—it is an experience of the heart, it is everywhere and it is nowhere.... (The Anti-Christ)

Derrida informs us at once:

From the lips of a master this watchword [learn how to live, finally] would always say something about violence. It vibrates like an arrow in the course of an irreversible and asymmetrical adress, the one that goes most often from father to son, master to disciple, or master to slave...And yet nothing is more necessary than this wisdom. It is ethics itself: to learn to live - alone, from oneself, by oneself. Life does not know how to live otherwise.

So, this is why we gathered here. To learn to live - alone, by oneself. To learn to practise ethics. Which begins with learning to live, finally. To live finally, to die - alone, by oneself. To practise philosophy in the grand style.

And thus, to be ethical individuals, learning to live finally, to philosophise. And, additionally, through this philosophising, as this philosophising, to join the new, secretive, atomised international, whose patron saints are here invoked, for the conjuration.

We are gathered at this seance to conjure, to swear together a secret alliance. Because "it would...be possible to form a secret alliance against the spectre." Not to summon any spectres of communism or Marx (for that section in which the ghost of Marx is staged, we have some choice Cock Lane quackery, with a footlit clown in white paint), but to call forth, to conjure, the holy hosts of anti-communism to preside over a(nother) burial. Finally. To bury the body, that which is "ideological", and raise in its place a certain spirit of Marx, a spiritualised Marx, purified in some drive-through purgatory and emerging from the soapy flaps as "questioning", quelque fântome, a Marxism with neither substance, nor essence, nor existence. Just the communism anti-communism ordered. Finally.

Spectres of Marx: [W]here...is Marxism going? where are we going with it?...what stands in front of it must also precede it like its origin, before it.

Well then, whither? What do we know of spirits?

Of Spirit, Heidegger and the Question: As nothing ought to dictate the question, or precede it in its freedom, the Führen is already questioning. It comes before, it is an already questioning forecoming of the question, a prequestining, ein Vor-fragen. In this way, if nothing precedes the question in its freedom, not even the introduction to questioning, then the spirit of spiritual conduction – spoken of in both the Rectorship Address and Introduction to Metaphysics – can be interpreted, through and through, as the possibility of questioning….This discourse on spirit is also a discourse on the freedom of spirit….Spirit wakes, awakens rather – earlier – from the Vor-fragen of the Führung. Nothing anticipates this power of awakening, in its freedom and its resolution. What comes before and in front, what anticipates and questions before all else, is spirit, the freedom of spirit. As Führer, it goes and comes on the way, in front, up in front, before all politics, all psychagogy, all pedagogy.

For in all honesty, we must make clear the fact that at the very moment at which he runs the risk of placing this thematics of the Führung in the service of a determinate politics, Heidegger gives it to be understood that he is breaking in advance with any such service. In its spiritual essence, this free conducting must not gve rise to any camp following, one should not accord it any following, any follower, any Gefolgschaft, any aggregation of disciples or partisans….Undoubtedly it will be difficult to understand what can be meant by a Führung which mandates, demands or commands without being followed, obeyed or listened to in any way.

Indeed.

The task of the neologism, spectrality is to abolish the distinction between the living and the dead, the crucial distinction in Capital, and in all of Marx' oeuvre, that between labour and capital itself, between living human beings and their dead labour, enclosed in private property. Or rather, Derrida is out to occlude, spiritualise, and transfigure one half of this antagonism - capital as dead labour enclosed in private property - and replace it with a new state of non-being, spectrality. (Capital is spectral for Marx, of course; but the labour that produces it is dead.) Derrida will then remind us the living are but spectres as well, ever more so due to "tele-technics". And as it happens tele-technics and capital can't really be distinguished either. The point of this being to transform Marx' class antagonists - living labour, capitalists accumulating dead labour (capital) - equally into spectres, undead, living and living on, thus both deserving of "justice", which could be described with Heidegger as "a reconciliation of social antagonisms".

In pursuit of the aim to collapse the distinction between living labour and capital (dead labour), Derrida engages in a kind of doggedly "spiritualising" wordplay, gutting the entirety of Marxist vocabulary of reference, an exercise which might at first glance appear nothing more than an embarrassing case of excess of personal style straining for wit were its service to the principal rite less evident: "Value" is redfined as meaning (a feature of previous work), "surplus value" then of course is multiple meaning or ambiguity, and "capitalisation" becomes an abundance of poetic and/or rhetorical effects, a thing to be celebrated: no exploitation or enclosure is involved in either:

The word conjuration has the good fortune to be put to work and to produce, without any possible reappropriation, a forever errant surplus value. It capitalises first of all on two orders of semantic value.

This will be pursued, this mystification by linguistic metaphor of the subjection of living labour to the exploitation by the proprietor accumulators of dead labour, as we've seen already, even through the confrontation with famous passages of Capital.

So then once again:

Spectres of Marx:

[W]here...is Marxism going? where are we going with it?...what stands in front of it must also precede it like its origin, before it....To be just: beyond the living present in general -- and beyond its simple negative reversal...."

Derrida then evokes an axiom, an axiom about axiomatics, that is, about

some supposedly undemonstrable obvious fact with regard to whatever has worth, value, quality (axia).

(If we recall this is supposed to pertain to Marx, we know what the "supposedly obvious" value is - human liberty, leisure and happiness.)

And even and especially dignity (for example man as example of a finite and reasonable being), that unconditional dignity that Kant placed higher, precisely, than any economy, any compared or comparable value, any market price. This axiom [which marginalises or invalidates the notion of 'the living' by evoking a 'time out of joint'] may be shocking to some. And one does not have to wait for the objection: To whom, finally would an obligation of justice ever entail a commitment, one will say, and even be it beyond law and beyond the norm, to whom and to what if not to the life of a living being? Is there ever justice, commitment of justice, or responsibility in general which has to answer for itself (the living self) before anything other, n the last resort, than the life of a living being, whether one means by that natural life or life of the spirit? Indeed. The objection seems irrefutable. But the irrefutable itself supposes that this justice carries life beyond present life or its actual being-there, its empirical or ontological actuality: not toward death but toward a living-on [sur-vie], namely, a trace of which life and death would themselves be but traces and traces of traces, a survival whose possiblity in advance comes to disjoin or dis-adjust the identity to itself of the living present as well as of any effectivity. There is then some spirit. Spirits. And one must reckon with them.

Here in this fanfare of spiritualisation, were it not set in the exordium of a series of lectures called Spectres of Marx, one might hear very little content at all, Heideggerian echoes, priestly sentiments. But as the follow up to Nietzsche's remote performance as master of ceremonies through the medium of Derrida, offered as the preamble to an answer to the question "whither Marxism", the gesture is one of pre-emptive rejection of Marx in toto, of Marx' analysis and Marx' project, the liberation of living humanity from subjection to and exploitation by the owners of its alienated dead labour. And there is more than a hint already that Derrida will be speaking of a world of immense suffering, unimaginble horrors, incureble, in a fashion spectacular or spectral enough to allow for the insistence that the only hope for amelioration lies in the imagination of spectators of spectres, initiates into the all powerful philosophical ethical thought, those individuals learning to live - alone. And to watch (over). Those invited to channel the spirit of Nietzsche in the first line of the exordium. Learning to philosophise. And soon it will become clear that the privileging of this "trace of which life and death would themselves be but traces and traces of traces, a survival whose possiblity in advance comes to disjoin or dis-adjust the identity to itself of the living present as well as of any effectivity" serves as the formula to transpose all political and economic problems into the narrow space of this genre and its concerns, presided over by the sainted Trinity, capable of spiritualising exploitation and profit and even of the conversation of the Israeli occupation (as Praxis remarked elsewhere) into a drama of the idea, a ghostly armageddon, battle of three messianic monotheisms for the "appropriation of Jerusalem", with Jerusalem understood as a spectre of the same order as those who, symetrically, struggle over it.

Which Marxist spirit then? It is easy to imagine why we will not please the Marxists, and still less all the others, by insisting in this way on the spirit of Marxism, especially if we let it be understood tht we intend to understand spirits in the plural and in the sense of spectres...And of course we must never hide from the fact that the principle of selectvity which we will have to guide and hierarchise among the "spirits" will fatallly exclude in its turn. It will even annihilate, by watching (over) its ancestors rather than (over) certain others....But whoever said that someone had to speak, think, write in order to please someone else?

An astounding thing to ask, rhetorically, when talking about Marx! But that too, as every other sentence in this text, is doing its duty in the rite, allowing for the assimilation of this eviscerated, boiled and distilled spirit to the heaven of the Trinity:

To continue to take inspiration from a certain spirit of Marxism would be to keep faith with what has always made of Marxism a radical critique, namely a procedure ready to undertake its self-critique....It is heir to the Enlightenment which must not be renounced. We would distinguish this spirit from the other spirits of Marxism which rivet it to the body of Marxist doctrine, to its supposed systemic, metaphysical or ontological totality (notably to its "dialectical method" or "dialectical materialism"), to its fundamental concepts of labour, mode of production, social class, and consequently to the whole history of its apparatuses (projected or real: the Internationals of the labour movement, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the single party, the State and finally the totalitarian monstrosity.)...For this apparently chemical analysis that will isolate in sum the spirit of Marxism to which one ought to remain faithful by dissociating it from all the other spirits - and one will observe perhaps with a smile that the latter will include almmost everything - our guiding thread this evening will be precisely the question of the ghost.

If this all sounds a bit familiar, this spiritualisation, it is because Derrida has written of the operation he considers himself to be performing before. "I shall speak of ghost, of flame, of ashes..."

*Of Spirit, Heidegger and The Question:

On the one hand, Heidegger…confers the most reassuring and elevated spiritual legitimacy on everything which, and in all before whom, he commits himself, on everything he thus sanctions and consecrates at such a height. One could say that he spiritualises National Socialism. And one could reproach him for this, as he will later reproach Nietzsche for having exalted the spirit of vengeance into a “spirit of vengeance spiritualised to the highest point.”

But on the other hand, by taking the risk of spiritualising Nazism, he might have been trying to absolve or save it by marking it with this affirmation (spirituality, science, questioning, etc..) By the same token, this sets apart [démarque] Heidegger’s commitment and breaks an affiliation. This address seems no longer to belong to simply to the “ideological” camp in which one appeals to obscure forces – forces which would not be spiritual but natural, biological, racial, according to anything but spiritual interpretation of “earth and blood”.

The force to which Heidegger appeals, and again in conclusion when he speaks of the destiny of the West, is thus a “spiritual force.” And we find this theme of spirit and of the West again, though displaced, in the text on Trakl.

What is the price of this strategy? Why does it fatally turn back against its “subject” – if one can use this word, as one must, in fact? Because one cannot demarcate oneself from biologism, from naturalism, from racism in its generic form, one cannot be opposed to them except by reinscribing spirit in the oppositional determination, by once again making it a unilaterality of subjectity, even if in its voluntarist form. The constraint of this program remains very strong, it reigns over the majority of discourses which, today and for a long times to come, state their opposition to racism, to totalitarianism, to Nazism, to fascism, etc, and do this in the name of spirit, and even of the freedom of (the) spirit, in the name of an axiomatic – for example, that of democracy or “human rights” – which, directly or not, comes back to this metaphysics of subjectivity.

….In the Rectorship Address, this risk is not just a risk run. If its program seems diabolical, it is because, without there being anything fortuitous in this, it capitalises on the worst, on both evils at once; the sanctioning of Nazism and the gesture that is still metaphysical. Behind the ruse of quotation marks of which there is never the right amount, (always too many or too few of them), this equivocation has to do with the fact that Geist is always haunted by its Geist: a spirit, or in other words, in French [and English] as in German, a phantom, always surprises by returning to be the other’s ventriloquist.

** Heidegger to Marcuse, 1948

Toy Soldiers

While Dumas' hero is a petty bourgeois phantasy of anachronistic military virtues attached to the power of the united masses with right and justice on their side - in the tradition of Byron and Bonaparte, modelled most closely on his father, General Thomas Alexandre Dumas, and the popular images of Simon Bolivar and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, liberators of Latin America - Nietzsche's lordly species of the future is a feverishly hallucinated hybrid of a petty bourgeois aesthete crossbred with the inhuman, international, immortal, amoral might of capital. Not capitalists, but capital. In Nietzsche's imaginary future we can recognise a distortedly perceived present as the setting for the ordinary petty bourgeois phantasy of lucking in or marrying up into the crème de la crème, personalised and twisted by pessimism, anxiety, indigestion, and sour grapes working on an active imagination. From the combination of longing and disappointment, envy and fear, the dream of a newborn species emerges, elbowing the sentimentally philanthropic, snickering, contemptuous, self-confident financiers from the stage and, with a terrible, Vathekian, but rather nicely tasteful, glance, subduing the awesome unwashed - philistines both. The petty bourgeois art-lover turbocharged with the real power, invulnerability, and impersonality of imperialist global capital running in his veins, entwined in his sinews, property, proprietorship in this new, unfettered, mobile form, takes the planetary field victorious. The superman is Nietzsche as Capital, a reverse Pinocchio. Nietzsche feelingless, relieved of his torment and weakness, and so rich he can exact his vengeance, so rich nobody can push him around, so rich he has all the beautiful women of the world in his seraglio, so rich, and surrounded by such obedience and powerlessness and destitution, he need obey no one, flouting divine and earthly law, but at the same time, Nietzsche still, as ordinary a petty bourgeois as one could imagine. The Count of Monte Cristo crashes the bourse, drives his enemies to suicide, comes to doubt the justice of his own vengeance and possession of such unchecked power. With all this godlike power, having become one with capital, fused, a Capital-Man Centaur, Nietzsche will spend the morning examining his minatures, his collection of antique coins, take two poached eggs for nuncheon, and pass the afternoon writing in his diary little complaints, a headache, a clumsy servant, coffee too hot. Only, in the fantasy, unlike in life, he can dash off a note to order the maid pilloried and stoned to death, the children playing noisily outside his window smothered, gutted and served up for his dinner.

After a long day spent so, he will be carried upon the shoulders of tame brutes in a tasselled chair to bed, borne through files of bowing slaves and applauding readers, eager to kiss the hem of his dressing gown as he passes by.

One must make one’s self superior to humanity, in power, in loftiness of soul,—in contempt.

Like popular novels, Nietzsche's phantasies offer consolation, but of a different stripe, appealing to different emotions and impulses, geared to produce a different effect.

Dumas' hero is a work of art and craft, built by an artisan, out of carefully selected materials, to function as a certain kind of aesthetic, ideological machine; Nietzsche's superhero is authentically phantasy, pulsing with irrational passion, issuing like smoke and sparks from the combustion of fears, resentments, contorted intuitions, and frustrated desires.

Umberto Eco picked up on Gramsci's observation that it was really Dumas' protagonists, and those of his imitators, and not Nietzsche's phantasy figure and future, who afforded the discontented petty bourgeois men of Italy, rank and file blackshirts, their phantasy surrogate avenger. Gramsci's implication is that this source, popular, serialised adventure novels, is less dignified than the grand philosophical genre and tradition Mussolini and his fellows claimed for an intellectual pedigree, as well as less glamorous than the racy reputation Nietzsche enjoyed as a dissident or subversive - elite - writer. Gramsci's intention was clearly to pop the bubble of fascist pretension to elite intellectuality and culture by offering this alternative geneology of its imaginitive vocabulary.

While Nietzsche once enjoyed a reputation for "originality", in the past thirty years or so works devoted to showing his texts are a patchwork of elements lifted from Stirner, Carlyle and Emerson - the incommensurability of the borrowed or imitated materials giving rise to the celebrated fragmentation of Nietzsche's oeuvre - have altered this perception of his uniqueness and peculiarity to something even more interesting: now Nietzsche is celebrated as perhaps the first paradoxical and spectacular "cliché eccentric", the Figure of The Eccentric, the Type of The Atypical, whose eccentricity consists of characteristic gestures already recognised and marked as eccentric, in "shocking" statements already associated with exemplary surprise, predictably shocking - like Surprise! shouted by birthday party guests leaping out of closets and up from behind sofas as the lights go up. "I am dynamite!" Genocidal cannibal tchochki collector, central casting nihilist kook.

But most of the work tracing Nietzsche's influences maintains a certain etiquette of generic isolation, less common (but not unknown) to literary criticism taking imaginitive fiction and poetry as its object, confining the field of possible influences on Nietzsche's work, or possible earlier expressions of similar notions, to previous writings in the same genre. While it would be perfectly uncontroversial for an account of say Edith Wharton to include references to Nietzsche, on the understanding that a novelist might very well read philosophy and "take it in", the reverse is rarely the case in accounts of philosophical texts. Bourdieu has explored the advantages of this rule of quarantine for the philosophical field itself; further explanation is probably required. But that such practises regarding the interpretation and reading of generically philosophical texts remain the norm is clear. Gramsci's observation, however, opened the question not only of the genesis of the specific contemporary fascist ideology and culture product he was then confronting, but of the genesis of the elite culture influences to which it laid claim. The question of what fascist "superhumanity" owed to the Count of Monte Cristo, as opposed to what it owed to Zarathustra, also raises the question of what Zarathustra owed to the Count of Monte Cristo, and what both owed to popular culture, to newspapers, to theatre, etc.. And this inevitably raises the Gramscian questions of what all these products owe to life experience generally, which includes culture consumption and production, in specific socio-economico-politcal conditions. Both Nietzsche's phantasy supermen and the phantasy future that is their environment and Dumas' heroic protagonists arise as cultural and artistic, individual and collective confrontations with a reality whose greatest and most occulted disruption and problem is capital. Dumas' contains a faustian theme of instrumentalisation proving the power of the new supreme force, pitting the apparently democratising potential - its corrosive impersonality against hereditary and social privilege, capable of making and unmaking political agency - against a vivid dramatisation of its inescapably tyrannical, pitiless, arbitrary tendency. The relations of people to and through capital in Dumas are complex and revealing for all the romanticism and formula. In contrast, Nietzsche's daydream belongs to a genre of the irrational fantastic, the conjuring of a landscape where thought and imagination are omnipotent, and yet having granted itself this liberty can think of nothing more adventuresome than to submit itself, wholly, to the status quo; this unbridled imagination granting itself limitless creativity can think of nothing better to do than imagine itself marrying the bourse. Breeding a bold new race of boursepuppies which are perfectly identifiable as the bonds already daily traded. Nietzsche's unfettered thought, the power of the unleashed genius, spawns only the observable, commonplace present, reproduced, without addition, but viewed through a haze of egoist wishing and bitterness which blots out causes of petty bourgeois unease, gratifies vanity, and allows an imaginary mastery and control. Thus is inaugurated spectacular pseudo-critique.

If I understand anything at all about this great symbolist [Christ], it is this: that he regarded only subjective realities as realities, as “truths” —that he saw everything else, everything natural, temporal, spatial and historical, merely as signs, as materials for parables. The concept of “the Son of God” does not connote a concrete person in history, an isolated and definite individual, but an “eternal” fact, a psychological symbol set free from the concept of time. The same thing is true, and in the highest sense, of the God of this typical symbolist, of the “kingdom of God,” and of the “sonship of God.” Nothing could be more un-Christian than the crude ecclesiastical notions of God as a person, of a “kingdom of God” that is to come, of a “kingdom of heaven” beyond, and of a “son of God” as the second person of the Trinity. All this—if I may be forgiven the phrase—is like thrusting one’s fist into the eye (and what an eye!) of the Gospels: a disrespect for symbols amounting to world-historical cynicism....

These two topoi, the popular, sometimes "populist", democratic revenge fantasy, and the proto-fascist metamorphosis fantasy of mastery and fusion with the immortal substance that is capital, continue to be reproduced and consumed for different class and professional niches by both our newfangled fascists (neolibs) and the traditional retro-fascists whose quarter century long revival continues to gain steam. But the Nietzschean version is dominant, while the Dumasian is both modified in its direction (V for Vendetta) and narrowly targeted to dissenting centrists. Any apparent conflict between these strains of bourgeois reaction is today rapidly fading from view, as Bush, Sarkozy and Berlusconi, chief figures of the former, crown themselves openly bosses of the latter as well, supplementing the economic agenda of the former with persecutory policing, quasi-legal, terroristic anti-immigrant policies of round ups, lethal detention, fortress walls, propaganda programmes designed to incite hatred, contempt and induce paranoia, pogroms, and expulsions. Nietzsche can be credited, if that's the word one wants, with (gleefully) noticing something profound and true about capitalism and race: that the ruling class is raceless, nationless, free of cultural determinations, imagining itself a seperate and superior species, as international, impersonal, amoral, immortal and protean as its form of property, while the rest of humanity - almost all - those whom he wished and predicted would be more formally and permanently enslaved, remain bodily, culturally and historically determined, moral, mortal and thus raced and race-able.

mercredi, mai 14, 2008

Hallward Discussing Haiti

Lengthy discussion with Peter Hallward. Other good stuff there too.

Not A Paradox

...but a nifty "reversal" he unaccountably missed:

At this point, every apology for the Israel regime is - necessarily - anti-Semitic.

Necessarily.

mardi, mai 13, 2008

More Than Halfway Out Of The Closet

Tough decisions:

If we take Western Europe in the last fifty years, let’s be frank. One should give to the devil what belongs to the devil. OK, we can say this was because of economic exploitation of third world, but nonetheless, I don’t think there was, in the entire history of humanity, an era where so many people lived comparatively, in comparative way, such—in such relative welfare and freedom that’s there. ... The problem is, I think, it cannot last. The new divisions are getting visible … [W]e will have to make tough decisions....If you don’t have a basic patriotic identification—not nationalism, but in the sense of “we are all members of the same nation and so on”—then democracy doesn’t function. You cannot have a living democracy in this pure multiculturalist liberal dream…. [W]e will be approaching–and this is a serious perspective, some French sociologist warn—a kind of a subdued, not all the times active, but nonetheless, always in the background, civil war in all developed countries, like what’s happening now in Paris, you know. Everybody knows, again and again, car burnings, all this permanent civil unrest… It was like a big phatic “Hey, here we are. Note us.” That was the message, no?

J Peterman In Haiti

le silence
plus déchirant qu’un simoun de sagaies
plus rugissant qu’un cyclone de fauves
et qui hurle
s’élève
appelle
vengeance et châtiment
un raz de marée de pus et de lave
Sur la félonie du monde
et le tympan du ciel crevé sous le poing
de la justice

- Jacques Roumain

Marguerite Laurent dissected the colonialist myths recycled in the msm's Haiti reporting:

There are perhaps two common stories about Haiti that are retold ad nausea:

One is, the convenient black-on-black crime dismissal where the manipulated Haiti image displays the fighting "troubled" Haitians with the "winner take all politics and attitudes" who won't allow Western countries to help them modernized and who are continually killing each other in "civil unrest" and who simply cannot absorb foreign aid or use effectively the generous help provided by the benevolent, heroic and wealthier U.S./Euro white world.

The Tallahassee students' article ("Trip to Haiti changes students") is a good example of the second common news story on the "needy (and pitiful but proud) Haitians" of Haiti.

That article tells the perpetual story of the poor, pitiful, proud and victimized Haitians and of the young, innocent, compassionate white American come to “do good” in Haiti. It's a true article and I've read a thousand of them with different faces, same storyline on Haiti.

One group is heroic and self-less, one group is helpless and proud victim and forever shall that be, as is intended, by the powers always not allowing there to be any relief from these pre-ordained roles and the racists and cultural biases it extends about Haitians from the time Haitians chose Africa instead of Europe at Bwa Kayiman, on August 14, 1791.

What such stories don't tell, is most important.

[...]

The neocolonial storylines serve and reinforce the white settlers' Tarzan/Superman mythical compassion, sacrifice and heroism towards needy Black Haitians/Africans and to blunt and obfuscate the truth of U.S./Euro corporate, governmental and imperial bullying, injustice and barbarity in Haiti. These storylines extend white hypocrisy to the nth degree, fostering the "godliness" of the Westerner convincing himself he bore the brunt of the ravages of Haiti's struggles and "helped" the needy Haitians. When the uncomplicated truth is that it's white systemic tyranny, ethnocentricity and neocolonialism and its consequences of underdevelopment in Haiti that leaves Haitians without access, opportunity and the material structures to protect themselves against acts of nature such as Hurricane Dean. Nowhere in these storylines will you learn how the U.S. citizen's individual compassion (sincere as it may well be for some) extends dependency, paternalism and co-exists and is vastly overwhelmed by the white settlers' official and systemic, political, military, diplomatic, media and corporate tyranny and economic exploitation of Haiti and Haitians.

But Haitians are not as pitiful as being trumpeted by these neocolonial storylines. For, it may be observed that Haitians are so powerful that the greatest superpowers on earth and their mainstream medias spend their printing space spreading these two storylines and half truths on Haiti, in willing efforts, to ignore, diminish and re-cast Haiti's noble David-against-Goliath-Herculean struggle. This reality also brings to mind that we are in the month of August and that August 14, 2007 marked the anniversary of the ceremony that began the Haitian revolution where Haitians forever changed world history, annihilated (for a time) those two storylines and broke their chains themselves, found “relief flights” for themselves. It reminds me that though Haiti still suffers for that great feat everyday, and in a myriad of ways, it can never actually be undone.

Examples are endless, but this year's "Gentleman Explorer J. Peterman In Haiti" award would have to go to Michael Deibert for his (almost) unbelievably vile and shocking "review" of Peter Hallward's superb book Damming the Flood. Hallward replied to this with breathtaking forebearance, rightly noting the pointlessness of any attempt to "defend" the book from this "review" as the latter scarcely even mentioned the content of the former and sedulously avoided engaging with its analysis. Which analysis is, actually, of the US-France-Canada aggression against Haiti, Haitians and Haitian democracy, a fact which escapes Deibert who seems convinced the only genre in which it is possible to write about imperialism in Haiti would be travelogue cum memoir of J. Peterman, gentleman explorer's, exciting, perilous and benevolent adventures there.

Out Of Africa

Between the years 1906 and 1939, a trickle, then a light rainfall, then a downpour, of Englishmen, Germans, Scots, and some remarkable women, began to fall upon the immense gorgeous plateau of East Africa.

Some came for a year, and stayed a lifetime. Some came to farm; or make a fortune; or to put something awful far behind. Don’t ask what.

All came to start life over again. Fresh.

Discovered they hadn’t been expelled from a Garden of Eden after all, but were just now entering one.

That first night they lay awake listening, hearing Africa, hearing for the first time how to hear.

And how to read a flattened blade of grass: who or what had passed through here, exactly how long ago.

It was paradise. It lasted three decades. There will never be anything else like it again.

(Days of laughing, dancing, talking all night; ostrich omelettes the morning after; walking thirty miles to see an ocean of oryx, a river of hippos; flying low over a sea of wildebeest; driving among elephants in a maharajah’s 3-axel Buick; great luxury; great simplicity. Never again anything like it.)

Striding through the coffee fields with a strong walk that means business. No mincing. No dainty, uncertain steps.

Stretchy cotton with buttoning contour waistband. On-seam side pockets. Buttoning watch pocket and fly front. The sweeping, ankle-length cut is slenderizing, too. (Those big Edwardian breakfasts.)

Deibert in Salon, 2000:

Haiti, a country I love and where I lived for months in 1997, seems once again to be drifting, inexorably, toward its own terrible, particular marriage of anarchy and dictatorship....

A shellshocked Reuters correspondent, just arrived from the States, appeared at the house I was staying at in Port-au-Prince to inform us that his car had been detained as a group of young men ran past, smashing bottles and carrying tires under their arms. Word on the street had it that they were angry because Lavalas still hadn't paid them for their "work" during the elections. Zenglendos (armed thugs) stuck a gun in my friend's sister's face as she sat stuck in traffic on a downtown street. Finding notebooks that indicated she was a student, they threw them back at her through the car window as they drove away on their motorcycles.

As a friend of mine, a wealthy progressive mulatto, said, "The security situation here is not good." The fact that the streets of a city of 2 million people are empty at 8 p.m. is testimony enough to that.

I got a taste of how unstable that situation was firsthand when a group of friends and I ventured out one night to a hotel in the affluent suburb of Petionville. We went to see a concert by Sweet Micky, the legendary "president" of compas, Haiti's singularly slinky and sensual popular music. Micky is an unrepentant supporter of the 1991 coup against Aristide, and is as famous for his scabrous double-entendres as for his anti-Lavalas politics. His sweaty, exhilarating shows are known to attract a raucous crowd of ex-secret police, soldiers and gang members.

Sure enough, once we arrived among the massive, dressed-to-kill crowd, the audience scattered over the demurely arranged deck chairs and around a pair of illuminated pools -- not once but three times -- as groups of men drew their guns on one another, spitting invective and threatening violence. After one particularly nasty stampede, where I badly twisted my ankle knocking over a table to get away from any potentially flying bullets, a teenage Haitian boy got up with his girlfriend from their own pile of scattered chairs, looked at me and said simply, "Blan," the Creole world for foreigner. He was doubled over with laughter.

But in the face of such terror, kindness persists. A musician insisted that I partake of his young daughter's first Communion cake. An evangelist minister drove me the whole, hot, long, dusty way from Aristide's foundation at Tabarre to drop me off in downtown Port-au-Prince and then refused to take any payment for his services. A Haitian English teacher in a frayed suit who had lived near my own home in Brooklyn for 14 years began a conversation with me, unsolicited, just to hear what New York was like these days. As we walked down the street, he asked me with a sad shake of his head to tell people "what they [Lavalas] did to these elections."

..."I came down here in 1985 to research voodoo rhythms," says Richard Morse, a surpassingly tall New York transplant, as he takes a drag off an early morning cigarette. We're in the lobby of the hotel he runs, a space where his group, Ram, also plays regular weekly gigs. The hotel itself is one of the outstanding examples of gingerbread architecture in Port-au-Prince.

"I took over the hotel in 1987, formed a band in 1990 and stopped counting governments in 1996." He remembers a time in the early 1990s when coups and counter-coups gave the country three governments in 12 hours. Morse, a Haitian-American educated at Princeton, is not hopeful about the current state of affairs in his adopted country. He says the lines between the old military regimes and Lavalas are getting fuzzier.

Before Hallward, Justin Podur had to deal with this character, and concluded:

Why I did not want to debate Deibert

I was convinced, reluctantly, into replying to Deibert. My inclination was not to do it. After going through the long and painful process of reading 450 pages of his writing, I know enough to realize that debating him is a waste of time. For a debate to occur, there would have to be some limit on personal attacks and demonization. There would have to be some separation of allegation from evidence. There would have to be some sense that the other person was paying attention to what you were actually saying. Deibert is manifestly incapable of any of this....

...He refrained from critiquing my physique (I assume he'll get around to it if he ever sees it), but he assigned me (listing slurs in order that they appear) a "cursory knowledge" of Haiti, "an inch-deep grasp" of its history, accuses me of "chastising" Haitians, of "lies", of "fealty" to Haitian politicians, of taking "shelter in shop-worn rhetoric learned in the safety of North American universities and activist circles", of being "unable to conceive of a Lavalas partisan [I] wouldn't like", of having "skepticism about corporate motives" which "becomes wide-eyed credulity when confronted with the dubious financial dealings of Haiti's former government", of calling people "chimeres", of "seeming to dissemble for political effect", of "ignorance of the demographic and political makeup of Haiti and its people", of taking a "novice approach".

Of course, as he did with Chomsky and Farmer, Deibert is contrasting me, with my ignorance, my fealties, and my shop-worn rhetoric, with himself, the main hero of his book and his reply. He has "a decade's worth of experience there" (I suspect some creative accounting is going on. Though his book jacket says that he first visited Haiti in 1996, it says he was a Reuters correspondent there from 2001-2003. The book suggests he was there from late 2001 and left in mid-2003, with shorter trips after that) after all, he has an "ache within" him for Haiti (pg. 434), and his book views the country "through the eyes of Haiti's poor".

In case anyone is tempted to believe any of the midwest MFA Phil Gourevitchism of Deibert's "reporting", Podur's inquiries regarding the book turned up plenty of discouragement to credulity:

Some of Deibert's book is first-hand reporting, and as such is difficult for the reader to verify. I did have a rare opportunity to verify one of Deibert's claims. I met Haitian activist Patrick Elie (who I found, from a brief interaction, to be a very courageous and brilliant individual) in Port au Prince in September 2005. When I saw him mentioned in Deibert's book, I wrote to him (on January 2, 2006):

Hi Patrick.

I am going through Deibert's book the second time today and reached the part where he describes you. It's page 285. December 3, 2002, at the memorial of journalist Brignol Lindor, he describes "chimere" who showed up and chanted for Aristide under the direction of Hermione Leonard.

"I stood on the steps and watched as journalists who had been honoring Lindor began to come out and the ! chimere advanced to the cathedral steps, flinging Aristide pictures at them, shrieking 'git mama w, blan' and about how they worked for 'colon blan'. As Michele Montas descended the stairs, one stood screaming 'Aristide a vie' about five feet away from her... Patrick Elie, the head of the Eko Vwa Jean Dominique organization that had strung those damning banners around Port au Prince on the second anniversary of Dominique's death, shook his head and looked disgusted."

-J.

Patrick replied immediately:

Justin,

I never attended any religious ceremony for Lindor and have not set foot in the cathedral since February 7, 1991, the day of Aristide's first inauguration, when I was in charge of his security. Deibert sure has a creative writing style, which is a nice way to say that he is a goddamn liar.

Patrick

Hallward's book needs no defence; it is unquestionably the most thorough, thoughtful and informative account of imperial policy toward Haiti in the post-Duvalier period available. Its existence serves as a mere pretext for Diebert's performance of the colonialist routine - and that performance is absolutely complete, missing not a single trick.

Deibert - whose blogger profile describes his "Interests" as Travelling the world in search of adventure - begins his attack on Hallward with the linked questioning of credentials and suspicion of motives already familiar from his abuse of Podur:

In early 2004, a few days after the February ouster of Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide following months of massive protests against his rule and an armed rebellion of former soldiers and once-loyal street gangs, Peter Hallward, an academic working in the United Kingdom specializing in modern French philosophy, weighed in with his take on Haiti’s situation.

Writing from London, Hallward, who had never visited Haiti, wrote in the British newspaper the Guardian that “Aristide was forced from office…by people who have little in common except their opposition to his progressive policies and their refusal of the democratic process.”

This move of course is rivalising, Deibert positioning himself as the expert in contrast to the sheltered philosophy professor dilettante. But it is much more than the privileging of his own point of view, or superior expertise, for these familiar types in the form of which Deibert presents himself and Hallward belong to an established genre of colonialist writing, and their introduction implies much more than it states. As an "opening scene", juxtaposing the equivalent of newsreel from Haiti (montage: massive protests, gangs, soldiers) and (cut to) only days later, our story begins, far away in London, (French philosophy, Hallward, professor) the leading paragraphs introduce a genre. Among the themes we are alerted to expect is the folly and arrogance of intellectuals and bureaucrats, "ensconced" "safely" (favourite Deibert words, applied to Hallward, Podur, Jeb Sprague, the anonymous Type they represent, and others) somewhere against whom the heroic explorers, the Tarzans whom Laurent mentions above, who get their hands dirty and dodge bullets, must constantly fight if some helpless land with its helpless and enduring natives are to be saved from the rapacity and barbarity of the uppity and ridiculously madly ambitious native leadership without being simply abandoned to the incompetence, neglect, out of touchness, cowardice, etc. of civilised but soft, vain, self-interested professors and politicians, those who shirk their duty to shoulder the white man's burden.

So it is not merely that Deibert is attempting to throw suspicion on Hallward's ability to collect and interpret enough information to write intelligently about his own government's coup which overthrew Aristide's administration and the Lavalas government. The two characters - desk-man and adventurer - immediately set out tell the reader a great many things surreptitiously: what kind of story this is, and what kind of place Haiti is. Imagine a "review" of a book about the late credit crisis which noted that the author "writing from Switzerland, who had never visited the floor of the New York Stock Exchange".... With his opening, Deibert immediately establishes that somehow an understanding of US-France-Canada policy toward Haiti and the coup requires some physical, sensual consumption of Haiti (alone - not Paris, not Washington, not Wall Street, god knows not anywhere in Canada). Unlike Washington, Haiti is a place which has to be smelled, heard, seen, felt, to be known. It's bodily. It's a scene of adventures. Anecdotes. Violence. Guys who know guys you know. Their sisters. Colourful characters, "voodoo rhythms", kindness and communion cakes. Somehow one can better understand Bush regime policy toward it by standing around in Pétionville bars than by reading publications of international lenders, think tanks, NED, IRI, and the financial press. The philosophy professor in London has had no such adventures; he has not immersed himself, gone half-native, talked to the guy who knows a guy you know; he probably wouldn't recognise "a Glock" if you knocked his little wire glasses off with it; and Haiti is one of those places one cannot learn about by telecom. Knowledge of Haiti is absorbed and experienced, through the senses. Research is pointless - we are dealing with something too visceral and primitive for language. But this does not imply that Haitians, with lots of such experience, can know Haiti. Certainly not enough to communicate anything worthwhile about it by words, telephone, email, newspaper, government press conferences, ambassadors. Haiti and Haitians are the known, Deibert, the adventurer, the knower. He brings to Haiti what only his character possesses, the intellect and desire to know this body without self-knowledge that is Haiti. Deibert is explicit about Hallward's failure to seek, or inability to fulfill, this role as explorer-adventurer-consumer-saviour, which marks him as the incompetent, ignorant, bookish, self-interested, desk- bound foil to Deibert's Heroic Tarzan Jorno:

Admitting freely that he has “visited Haiti only twice” and has “ no special interest in the peculiarities of Haitian society, of its remarkable languages or even more remarkable religions,” these facts nevertheless do not stop Hallward from holding forth on Haiti’s tortuously complex recent political history.

If he's not into "voodoo rhythms" what possible interest could he have in Haiti? Deibert will conclude: "I believe knowing whether or not Peter Hallward operated in similar good faith [to Deibert's own] is open to debate, but the evidence is not encouraging."

Hallward's investigation into the crimes of the government of his own country smells fishy to Deibert's canine nose for the safely ensconced intellectual romanticisers of self-proclaimed tyrants and the slum-dwelling riff raff they whip up into frenzies of anarchy and mayhem. Having set out the protagonist and his foil, Deibert proceeds swiftly to introduce the most important stock character of this colonialist tale: the Absurd And Terrible Mad Black King. Ridiculous and brutal. It is somewhat shocking to see Deibert produce this cliché absolutely without mincing words - Aristide is "the latest manifestation" of a type, identified as "noirist"; he is only an avatar of the eternal Figure, the risible and horrifying black man in power, (whip in hand, astride a furious beast that is the Haitian citizenry) and before he was even elected was covered in gore and drenched in the blood of slaughtered "mulattos", because he is only Duvalier, who was himself only a copy of the ancient original, with a new name:

One of the major flaws of Hallward’s account becomes apparent early on and it is a major one for an undertaking of this nature: The book has no historical memory. In seeking at all costs to prove the author’s thesis of the essential uniqueness and saintliness of Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas political party, Hallward ignores the inescapable fact that Aristide and Lavalas did not come out of a vacuum, but rather represented simply the latest manifestation by which bright, ambitious political leaders sought to harness the popular discontent at the criminal poverty that Haiti’s poor majority is forced to exist in on a daily basis. It is a discontent that had been harnessed with varying degrees of effectiveness in the late 19th century by Lysius Salomon, and in the mid-late 20th century by Dumarsais Estimé and François Duvalier (both of whom made it to the presidency), as well as by more marginal figures such as Daniel Fignole, the Port-au-Prince political leader who oratory was so skillful at whipping his slum-based followers into a frenzy that they became know as his rouleau compresseur (steamroller).

These historical periods are viewed by Hallward as needless distractions from the task at hand, which is to rush headlong , very much in the manner of the novice though ultra-confident commentator that he is, into proving his thesis, but unfortunately for him, the periods of Jean-Pierre Boyer, Faustin Soulouque, Salomon and Estimé (as well as the tenures of more minor presidents such as Sténio Vincent and Elie Lescot) all left profound impacts on Haiti’s political culture, leading up to today. One scans the book’s pages in vain for any discussion, or even acknowledgment of Boyer’s 20 year annexation of the Dominican Republic, of Soulouque‘s arming of irregular loyalists known as zinglins (precursors of Duvalier’s Tontons Macoutes paramilitaries and Aristide’s chimere bands in later years), of Salomon’s virtual destruction of the commercial districts of Port-au-Prince in 1883 (and along with it the murder of at least of 1,000 of the president’s enemies) and of Estimé's ascension to the presidency in 1946 (breaking 20 years of mulatto hegemony of the office), but none is to be found.

Hallward's skimming over Haitian history up until 1991 (during which he tenuously links wealthy industrialists and importers - millionaires - with working-class local journalists and academics as being part of the country’s “bourgeois” elite), asserts that “class rather than race exerts the most powerful influence on Haitian society.”

It is actually extraordinary and startling how unashamedly Deibert makes these assertions - listing the names of the presidents who are, he insists, a Single Figure, demanding "historical memory" which is nothing other than recognising the Figure and Aristide as the "latest manifestation", somehow hinting a promise of drawing some actual connections but brazenly casting that aside with a textual wink-wink, you know what I mean. He comes right out and complains that Hallward has gone off-script. He simply asserts that Hallward is telling the wrong story, with the wrong paradigm, and because it is impossible for him to rebut this or support his objections, he merely emphatically rehashes the official ancient tale against the painted backdrop with the palm trees and huts. One "scans the text in vain for an acknowledgement" that Aristide in his former incarnations invaded the Dominican Republic and led the notorious Tonton Macoutes; one looks for the "acknowledgement" of what Aristide is. (In the Salon article, Deibert tells us Aristide is Robert Mugabe. Not Nelson Mandela. "Haitians, meanwhile, are left wondering whether they will have a heroic, visionary Nelson Mandela or an authoritarian, scapegoating Robert Mugabe (two other third-world leaders who came to power on a tide of popular movements) on their hands...." Because that's the choice, these Figures, those are the two dolls in the shop. He anticipates the reader's mind filled with these images, and admits, nowadays, yes, you have the long shot that the audience will picture a black President as a copy of that other Figure. Deibert knows that other doll is out there somewhere, and he tells you straight, no, no, not that one, this one. This is the Aristide doll, sunglasses, limo, spear. The old one, the usual one, not the exception but the rule.)

As if this were yet too subtle, Deibert continues to hammer away, emphasising that Aristide, being black, and President, is nothing other than the current version of the Figure:

Though Hallward does not explore the theme in any detail, since the late 1950s advent of the noiriste dictatorship of François Duvalier and continuing on with the rise to power of Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his Fanmi Lavalas party in the 1990s, a nouveaux riche black political class has emerged in the nation to share the country’s economic stage with the traditional mulatto elite, an elite who historically through Haiti’s history, via its surrogates in politics and the military, wrestled for control of the levers of power in the country with populist demagogues agile at exploiting the very justified feelings of exploitation that the majority of Haitians - black, impoverished and poorly educated and cared for by the state - felt against them. Until the Duvalier dictatorship brought the mulatto elite to its knees with arrests and pogroms (most notably in the southwestern city of Jeremie in 1964, where entire families of mulattos were wiped out) this, along with fears (some realized) of foreign intervention, had been the dominant theme of much of Haiti’s history.

As you will be expecting, the insistent drumbeat of this dominant theme of pseudo-"Haitian history", a pageant of racist caricatures monotonously re-staged as if it were combined evidence and explanation, will loop back to the beginnning to conjure one of the earliest incarnations of the Figure of the Mad Savage Black Man In Power, talented but mentally unstable, delusional and cruel, afflicted with genocidal "moods", ridiculously "proclaiming himself" what it is simply unnatural for him to be, laughably mimicking his betters:

This dynamic appears to allude [freudian sic] Hallward, though, and instead he rapidly detours into an explanation of why, in an historical context, the “battered guns” of Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas party were never any match for the “better guns” of Haiti’s elite, before returning - apparently without irony - to laud Jean-Jacques Dessalines as a “proto-socialist.” Dessalines, a brilliant military strategist, was nevertheless capable of mass slaughter verging on genocide when the mood seized him, and promptly proclaimed himself emperor after declaring Haiti a republic in 1804.

In his sum up, Deibert fills out the supporting characters his genre requires with cartoon crowds of the long-suffering and worthy of patronage, assuring us that when Haitians are isolated, downtrodden, helpless, waiting in vain for their civilised saviours to finally liberate them from this monstrous risible mad black man in power - when they are not uppity, becoming politicians, engaging in collective action, meddling in the management of their country, proclaiming themselves Emperors, (in which moulds of self-assertion and agency of course the Haitian substance becomes invariably wicked, corrupt, murderous and incompetent, that's the theme, the dynamic, of Deibert's "historical memory") - they are quite acceptable and noble. Deserving of more humanitarian rescue coups. In their proper place,** Haitians are at their best:

It may have been many years since Haiti’s hugely decent, gentle, honest, hardworking and always-struggling populace have felt like they have glimpsed the promised land, and in the past decades of turmoil no doubt they have always felt the net, whether it be that of poverty or oppression, tightening around them. They have been failed on so many counts, by the lack of vision and the predatory nature of their own political leaders, by the short memory and dithering approach and often naked self-interest of the international community, by foreign journalists who often seem more concerned with moving on before they really even bother to get to know the place, and by overweening “experts” like Hallward, ever-eager to lecture Haitians on what their history means without ever bothering to even listen to what the Haitians themselves have to say.

But in the million small kindnesses on display to visitors to the country, and with the Haitians’ own acute sense of their history, one must still, however tenuously, have faith that the delicate task of repairing Haiti’s torn social fabric, of rebuilding its economy, and of creating a genuinely representative system of democracy based on strong institutions and the rule of law is an eminently possible undertaking, and the Haitians will get to that promised land someday.

In between the opening and this conclusion, Deibert goes on at length with a pseudo-factual, frenzied catalogue of violence which he, groundlessly and mainly by insinuation, attributes to President Aristide, spewing a context free chronicle of vividly described murders and rapes. A flurry of unnecessary sensational details, resembling, as the prose of J Peterman in Haiti must, the technique of fashion journalism as Barthes described it,* is intended to distract from the utter vacuousness of the text. During this, as if by accident, Deibert stumbles into a glancing contact with the book he is purportedly reviewing:

Hallward dismisses the concerns of the students of Haiti’s state university system - overwhelmingly poor and hardly members of the “bourgeois elite” that he so enjoys obsessing over - as “a trivial dispute.” In fact, the July 2002 “hunger strike” by seven Lavalas-affiliated students (out of a student body of 12,000) - an event that the Aristide government used as an excuse to oust the system’s rector, Pierre-Marie Paquiot before scheduled (though delayed) faculty elections were held - was viewed by these young, materially (though not intellectually) impoverished scholars as anything but trivial. Though Hallward focuses on the role the students played in late 2003 (and the “training” some student leaders received that year from organizations such as the International Republican Institute in the Dominican Republic), the genesis and development of the student movement against Aristide was far more organic to the particularities of Haiti at the time than Hallward would ever let on to his readers.

Consider the inverted commas hugging the word training. In them is condensed Deibert's whole function, and that of the colonialist mythos he reproduces.

*It is the very preciseness of the reference to the world [of copy like: a raincoat for evening strolls along the docks at Calais] that makes the function unreal; one encounters here the paradox of the art of the novel: any fashion so detailed becomes unreal, but at the same time, the more contingent the function the more 'natural' it seems. Fashion writing thus comes back to the postulate of realist style, according to which an accumulation of small and precise details confirms the truth of the thing represented. - Roland Barthes, The Fashion System. In his review of Deibert's book of open imperialist apology, Justin Podur vividly captures Deibert's deployment of this style as simulacrum of "the Foreign Correspondent diary of dispatches": The narrative is essentially experiential: our man in Port-au-Prince leaves his flat, attends a demonstration, breathes the air, encounters various characters who mutter ominous words about Aristide or sigh about what's happening to the country. An aerosol of local colour: blue skies, crowded lanes, pungent smells, snatches of kreyol, barefoot kids, throbbing music: is spray-painted over a framework supported at all key points by international officialdom. Time and again, the clinching argument of a passage will be made by 'a member of the OAS team', 'a veteran of international observer missions', or a seemingly ubiquitous 'US official'. Further claims are attributed to still more anonymous sources: 'many said', 'most said', 'critics wondered', 'it appeared'; or simply to 'rumours', some of which were 'unusually detailed rumours'....Experiential narrative has the advantage of avoiding any necessity to evaluate evidence, weigh contrasting claims or reckon with data (Chomsky, a particular bogey for Deibert, is haughtily dismissed for his 'flurry of numbers'). Instead, it's on to the next bar, the next faceless OAS source....Deibert must thus rely heavily on insinuation to make his case. Predictably, Aristide is likened to the Duvaliers (ten times) and Pol Pot, and a pro-government newspaper to Streicher's Der Stürmer. Pro-Lavalas youth, and the opposition to the Convergence Démocratique and the paramilitaries, are almost universally referred to as chimères in these pages: though Deibert never tells us how he distinguishes a chimère from any other teenage boy: and linked whenever possible to a suggestion of nameless vodou horrors.

**Deibert is rather repetitive with his emphasis on the approved and proper station of Haitians and the dangers arising when they get thoughts above it, as it is important to his own role (personification of as well as publicist for US Empire), protector of those who remain patiently meek and helpless and isolated, (those imagined grateful to work for almost nothing are credits to their nation, making it worthy of better imperial care), fearless, indignant and contemptuous opponent of the mad, ambitious and uppity who strike, demonstrate or dare aspire to management and "miserable power": The Haiti I know and love is full of people who, in their everyday struggles, display twenty times the heroism that any politician I have seen in the country ever has: A man working late hours at his media support group despite the danger of being kidnapped if he is late returning home; a father, out of work for three years, who dutifully gets up to pound the pavement every day in order to search for a job to support his family and restore his sense of dignity, and his wife, who braves strikes, demonstrations and the daily threat of violence to go teach school at a facility often lacking the basic instruments for education such as books, pens and paper; the woman fleeing a gang war sheltering in the parking lot of a Baptist mission who has nothing in mind more than keeping her children safe from the struggle for miserable power. These are the real heroes of Haiti, not the politicians.

Of course, there are people engaging in those everyday struggles all around the world, and I, for one, have to go out and report on them today.

vendredi, mai 09, 2008

...Wastepaper

All the critiques of Edward Said's Orientalism, even Ahmad's (which is generally justified), miss the main point, which is that Orientalism is not about only, or even mainly, defining, controlling and dominating the explicit object, "the Oriental". It is the implicit - elusive, allusive, and thus ideologically effective and invunerable - production of the West, of Yerup, of Yerup and the Yerupeen as subject, as subjectivity itself, as subjectivity understood in the form of capitalist private proprietorship, created by the relation to the Oriental object that is the primary object of Said's attention. The inability of readers and critics to grasp this, to see Orientalism and Yerup as an object, rather than a subject to be criticised as a subject - indeed many of the critiques express a sense of affront, that it is offensive to the individuality and liberty of the intellects of European Orientalist scholars to even contemplate treating their product collectively as something irreducible to individual personal authorial gifts, erudition and intentions only the "flaws", "limitations" and "errors" of which can be attributed to extra-authorial context and historical and discursive pressures, and as an object in any way analogous to the object they address and produce - seems to prove Said's principal point better than any element of the book's argument. Of course the specific character of the Oriental created by Orientalism is of great interest, but it is understood to alter historically; the criticisms of this book which point to some neglected German scholarship fail - amazingly really - to note that this scholarship, producing perhaps a slightly different Oriental, slightly more complex, which if (illegitimately) removed from the historical context of Orientalist ideology and European imperialism, and examined very superficially, might seem even "untainted" by its themes, motifs, and assumptions, nonetheless produces the very same Yerup as subject and subjectivity, the Ego and His Own, as do the grosser or more typical French and British products Said chooses for explication. This conjuration of Yerup, Yerup created through the practise and production of Orientalism but on the sly, as an apparent side-effect, achieves what would be impossible to carry off in a more straightforward undertaking, that is, were the European to be objectified (catalogued, explained) as the Oriental is in the Orientalist tradition. The peculiarly flexible quality of the European (gentleman, scholar, proprietor, it's always assumed) - because it is capital, capitalism, liberalism and bourgeois individualism, with all the contradictions this constellation involves, that are naturalised through Orientalism - immune to objectfication, to commodification (Yerup is the subject who objectifies and commodifies) could be produced in no less indirect a manner. I comes into being and takes (protean) shape through the construction of Mine. The contrast is key. In Orientalism we have not to do with rivals, Occident and Orient, two objects describable by parallel lists of attributes. We have to do with the asymmetry of proprietor and property, capital and labour; it is Yerup in it's evidently natural state as Capital, eternally and essentially, beyond scrutiny, going without saying, requiring no investigation or explanation, which the practise and production of ideological Orientalism (not alone of course) principally conjures and sustains.

jeudi, mai 08, 2008

Yerupitude

Championed by and embodied in its protagonist, the Ego and His Own à la Stirner, I and Mine, indissoluble, agent-proprietor free of all historical and social determinations, the spiritual Yerup is made fantastically elastic and indestructible. Privé - the spectral Figure can in a single word complain of everything "the Other" withholds and simultaneously claim to house "the Other" within himself, as proper to himself. His patria the spiritual Yerup can expand to swallow continents and oceans and the next minute shrink to fit into the watch pocket of a philosophe in a Paris salon, as its reputation and security require. The efforts, then, of cultural workers to expose, indict, halt and repair this spectre's despoilation of history, its acts of cultural and intellectual plunder, proceed always at risk. Among the most serious hazards faced by such intellectual workers is the possibility that the re-expropriation of history, culture and intellectual product in the name of humanity or some portion thereof can be digested by and nourish the monster's other-commodification enterprise, described by Said in Orientalism re: "the Semite" but more widely applicable, an early form of which in Stirner came under Marx' attack, which transforms creative humanity into expressions of eternal essences, exemplars of a brand, transhistorical spirits the reptitive manifestations of which are collected in curio cabinets and catalogues, deprived of agency or individuality which then become the defining characterstics of the Yerupeen, Collector, Stirner's Caucasian Caucasian.

Haiti's "image problem" is thus more than a matter of some bad press and psyops which a good publicist with an adequate budget could solve. It is a particularly acute case of the image problem of Yerup.

So how can radical and dissident intellectuals and artists a) re-expropriate world history from the insatiable spirit of Yerup, universal proprietor, creator and owner of all value, without affirming the categories of its fables and reinforcing its imposition of the gallery of Figures fixed (flexibly) by the regime of the image and b)liberate the living from Yerup's pantomime prison? The complexity and delicacy of this undertaking came sharply into focus for perhaps the first time in the négritude movement, which encompassed a range of strategies from the revolutionary work of Aimé Césaire to the client or comprador version of racist formulas typified by Senghor ("l'émotion est nègre, comme la raison est hellène", 1937) which proceded with a mechanical effort simply to valorise whatever cultural, historical, symbolic properties and events Yerupitude had marked as obsolete, inferior, degraded and assigned to its others....

Image Problem

It's not insecurity that makes people not come and invest in Haiti. There is an inordinate amount of kidnappings, if not more, in other countries whose names I won't mention. The problem in Haiti is a lack of political security ... Once you can guarantee that there is political stability, that another government is not going to come and change the game, there will be investments... It's a problem of the image of Haiti.

- President Rene Preval, Miami Herald, 2006

Mais le plus terrible sont les Noirs qui, entendant que la cocarde est pour la liberté et l'égalité ont voulu se soulever. On en a conduit plusieurs à l'échafaud dans les grands quartiers. Cela a tout apaisé. Grands dieux! Faut-il que notre intérêt nous force à soutenir la mauvaise cause et à applaudir aux actes d'inhumanité exercés envers ces malheureux.

- Francis Raimond in Saint Domingue to Julien

Wednesday, October 30, 2013