still interested in the value produced by a colony like Haiti, still competing with Great Britain, still willing (often extremely willing) to maintain slavery. We see here the complicated dynamic between false (and idolatrous) liberal derived notions of universal and natural rights on the one hand and the slaves’ engagement with those ideals for purposes that are diametrically opposed to such intentions. In his own analysis of the Haitian revolution, Illan rua Wall offers us a critical insight into how, not only leaders like Toussaint Louverture, but the Haitian slaves in general, received the complicated legacy of the French revolution. Wall writes: [The Haitian slaves] (mis)understood the meaning of the idealistic phrases [such as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Ctiizen]. It was a misunderstanding, of course, because the ideals of the revolution were hardly meant to apply to women and Jews, let alone slaves! However, the slaves knew that they were to be excluded from these declarations; theirs was not a mistake of ignorance. Thus, when they took up the words, they did so out of a purposive misunderstanding of the implicit logic and therefore they do not represent some sort of tabula rasa on which the enlightenment norms were projected, but rather active, thinking subjects who resisted ‘enlightenment’ with its own norms. In his notion of “purposive misunderstanding,” Wall offers us a helpful way to think about the functioning and importance of the Haitian revolution. The term, in its very apparent self-contradiction, suggests the kinds of engagement with phantasm that can escape totalization. In a sense, we always “misunderstand” the nature of such false promises; our understanding of truths that seem to present themselves as natural and unavoidable are always suspect, always a “miss.” Yet to speak of “purposive” misunderstanding suggests something different, a way to engage with phantasm that does not lead to just more of the same. Here, we must be careful because one could easily think that by being “purposive” one is in control of an engagement with a political form of fetishism that
of misinterpellation. We see here that, given such subject positions, it is possible both to be bound by the phantasmagoria in one sense even as it is resisted in another. It is this ability to both “believe” in and thwart such an ideological system that is the focus of this paper. Wall makes one other point that is helpful for thinking about resistance that is both part of and subversive to the phantasmagoria. He notes that: “Haiti present[s] the actual revolt of the objects themselves. Haiti is a slave revolt, as such it is ‘the property’ itself that is challenging the ‘property system.’” Here, at least in symbolic terms, we see the idea that “objects” (i.e. slaves) can revolt against the idolatry that they are part of. This is consistent with Benjamin’s own idea that objects are both sources of fetishism and the means by which that fetishism is overcome. He tells us, for example, in the Origin of German Tragic Drama that “[t]he language of the baroque is constantly convulsed by rebellion on the part of the elements which make it up.” His work in general is replete with instances of how objects thwart the representational phantasms we foist on them, allowing the failure of idolatry to always be legible to us. In the specific case of Haiti, we are not, of course, dealing with literal objects but with human beings who have been objectified but in any case, for Benjamin, under conditions of phantasmagoria, human beings, as much as anything else can be, and are, objectified and commodified; they too can be a source and a site of fetishism. And, by the same token, human beings too can serve to reveal the failure of that fetishism; this is why we are capable of misinterpellation in the first place. While for Benjamin such acts of resistance and subversion are a constant force in the world (a “weak messianic power” as he puts it), as I will argue further in the conclusion to this paper, in the case of the Haitian
Revolution this process takes on a special, uniquely subversive, connotation (as Wall suggests too). In Haiti the question of commodification and its defiance, the means by which idolatry is combatted (by its own mechanisms) is rendered exceptionally literal and readily exportable, a source, as we have already seen, of radicalization of other movements, other places and (potentially) other times. With these thoughts in mind, let us turn to a consideration of some of the specifics of the Haitian Revolution. As previously noted, I will first turn to a consideration of Toussaint Louverture and the way he understood the “universal” rights bestowed (or not) by the French Revolution, before turning to a consideration of the larger Haitian community of ex-slaves and their own reception of these principles. As we will see, when we move from a consideration of the revolution’s leader to “the masses,” we also move closer to an anarchist, collective response to the problem of political phantasm. This is not to take away from Toussaint’s genius as a military and political leader but only to note the tremendous subversive power that comes with greater degrees of misinterpellation. The “hesitations” of Toussaint Louverture In his own considerations of Toussaint, C.L.R. James directly tackles the strange duality of the revolutionary leader’s approach to French/universal law. James cites Toussaint as writing “I took up arms for the freedom of my colour, which France alone proclaimed, but which she has no right to nullify. Our liberty is no longer in her hands: it is in our own. We will defend it or perish.” Here we see an idea which will be quite persistent in Toussaint’s writings and sayings; the idea that French law is true, even if the
In terms of how he understood, or represented, his own perspectives, we see for example that in his “Mémoires,”--his account of his final struggle with General Leclerc, the French military leader who was dispatched by Napoleon to retake the colony and ultimately restore slavery via “special laws”-- Toussaint gives his own justification for why he reimposed the plantation system on the ex-slave population: “if I made my fellow Haitians [mes semblables] work it was to give them a taste of the price of true liberty without license; it was to stop the corruption of morals; it was for the general good of the island [le bonheur general de l’île], for the interest of the republic. And I effectively succeeded in my task because in all the colony one doesn’t see a single man who isn’t working and the number of beggars has been reduced to the point where one sees only a few in the cities and none at all in the countryside.” Here we see that at the end of his life (he wrote these memoirs while imprisoned in France) Toussaint continued to demonstrate a strong allegiance to the enlightenment ideals that spurred the French Revolution (and hence, his own), despite all that he had suffered at the hands of France. It may be that over time, the careful balance that we find in Toussaint’s “hesitations” began to tilt towards the phantasmagorical, that, as with the Bolsheviks too, an open ended revolutionary spirit began to resemble—at least in the way that Toussaint conceived of things--the very regime it had replaced. Toussaint’s “Mémoires” (written by his own hand) are some of the longest extant records of his own words but they are complicated by the fact that he is in a desperate situation; he is reduced to being a spectator of the revolution in Haiti (now led by Dessalines who goes on to become Haiti’s emperor) worried about his family, and in increasingly poor health. It is hard to know what Toussaint’s intentions were in writing them. The overriding theme of this document is his own continued loyalty to France and
notions like freedom became simply the fact of not being a slave, of tilling one’s own land without a master, there is no longer much space for ideology or phantasm. And this simplicity, this denuding of rights to the point where it is no longer totalizing and determinant (so that it is not a “hesitation” as with Toussaint but a full throttled subversion in their case) can spread, as we already saw, from the colony to the metropole. Here, the radical, largely phantasm proof kernel of Haitian radicalism was exported to other contexts, other revolutions. As we have seen, James tells us that it is the experience of the slave uprising in Haiti that helped to radicalize the masses in France. After they witnessed the experience of the slaves in Haiti, when the idea of freedom became as tangible, as legible as casting off of actual chains, the Parisian masses were able to subvert their own phantasms, similarly using a notion of freedom that was not really intended for them as a means to upend their own subservience to liberal ideology. And, of course, the French revolution went on to become the revolution, the model for leftist uprisings (and even not so left ones) ever since, hence smuggling the Haitian revolution’s radicalism in a new and “universal” (because French) guise. By showing how false right like freedom can be the basis for its own resistance, for producing, if not “authentic” and “true” freedom then at least a freedom that serves, a freedom that is not part of the intentions of phantasmic capitalism, the slaves of Haiti show us all not only that it is possible to subvert idolatry through misinterpellation but further that it has been done, not just in small individual moments (something that Benjamin informs us happens all the time, at every moment) but in a widespread and collective movement that changed the whole world.