Stephanson on Hegel and Haiti

THE PHILOSOPHER’S ISLAND

Anders Stephanson

New Left Review 61, January-February 2010

"Lots of people have of course thought about the Haitian Revolution, as well as slavery, in Hegelian terms. It has been hard, indeed, to think of slavery in any other way, as it has been hard to think of identity and difference outside of that dialectic, certainly until Gilles Deleuze’s frontal assault on the dialectic itself in the name of (Nietzschean) frontal assault. In the Caribbean context, specifically the Francophone one, there is a distinguished lineage of engagement with Hegel going back at least to Aimé Césaire in the early 1940s. We are always already in Hegel, as the staunchly anti-Hegelian Michel Foucault once implied. What’s new in Buck-Morss’s account, then, is not that one might profitably read the Haitian master–slave relationship in Hegelian terms but that Hegel himself read that relation in Haitian terms, in his first great publication, the Phenomenology of Spirit (or Mind if you prefer) in 1807.

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The empirical argument is set up by means of a gloss on David Brion Davis’s epochal work from the 1960s and 70s: the massive conceptual presence of ‘slavery’ in the Enlightenment, as the antithesis of ‘freedom’ on the part of the properly autonomous, free-willing Self, is contrasted with the astonishing lack of interest in actually existing slavery; a supreme case of ideological misrecognition, so to speak, which fails egregiously to see that the institution of slavery was integral to the whole operation of ‘Europe’, that indeed it was an economic condition of possibility for the very emergence of the enlightened bourgeoisie itself. In the French Revolution this paradox (is it a paradox?) came to its sharpest possible expression, courtesy of the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue that broke out in August 1791. Saint-Domingue, on the eve of the Revolution in 1789, was less the jewel in the crown than an enormous chunk of the bank accounts of the expansive French bourgeoisie. The island was the supreme envy of every rapacious maritime entrepreneur in Europe: by far the greatest money-machine in the colonial world. Five hundred thousand slaves, a majority born in Africa and imported at accelerating pace in the 1780s, produced half of all the sugar and coffee consumed in Europe and the Americas. Mercantilist policies ensured that the metropolitan French made enormous profits in the re-exporting business. Upwards of a million people in France probably depended for their wherewithal on the colony, but the trade was also strategic, the surpluses underwriting naval expansion. It made some sense for France to concede its Canadian possessions in the 1760s to secure Saint-Domingue and the smaller colonies in the Caribbean. It was this prized possession, then, that was lost after an exceedingly bloody war, or series of wars, beginning in 1791 and ending with the declaration of independence on 1 January 1804, when Saint-Domingue was renamed Haiti/Hayti in accordance with an ancient Amerindian designation."