{"id":34,"date":"2016-05-20T19:52:30","date_gmt":"2016-05-20T19:52:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/?page_id=34"},"modified":"2018-08-21T15:23:02","modified_gmt":"2018-08-21T19:23:02","slug":"6-13","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/6-13\/","title":{"rendered":"6\/13 | Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire"},"content":{"rendered":"

C\u00e9saire, Nietzsche, and the Struggle Against Colonialism<\/h1>\n

with Bachir Diagne<\/a>, Romuald Fonkoua<\/a>, Alex Gil<\/a>, Daniele Lorenzini<\/a>, and\u00a0Fran\u00e7oise<\/span> Verg\u00e8s<\/a><\/h2>\n

Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire\u2019s encounter with Nietzsche\u2014in his own words, one of his essential reference points\u2014nourished a vitality, an indignation, a passion for tragedy, for art, for knowledge and politics, in sum, a will to power that would enrich his poems and plays, but also propel his anti-colonialism and political struggles.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe revenge of Dionysus on Apollo\u201d: this theme from The Birth of Tragedy<\/em> refracted throughout C\u00e9saire\u2019s poetics and plays, and shot through his 1944 manifesto, Po\u00e9sie et connaissance <\/em>\u2014a text that would confirm and fuel C\u00e9saire\u2019s revolt against French colonialism and racism that would take the name of \u201cN\u00e9gritude.\u201d Nietzsche\u2019s privilege of the Dionysian element in early Greek tragedy, of Aristotelian poetics over scientific fact, of myths and becoming over doers and being\u2014these were inspirational to C\u00e9saire, weapons and intellectual ammunition that he would deploy to resist the oppressive, dominant discourse of scientific progress associated with white domination in the Antilles, and the forms of conventional rationality that dominated philosophical discourse in the West.<\/p>\n

Scientific progress, C\u00e9saire would call \u201cimpoverished knowledge\u201d that can only give us an \u201cimpoverished man.\u201d As for Kantian philosophy, C\u00e9saire would write, \u201cthe asylum keepers are all there. And singularly limiting.\u201d But C\u00e9saire would go further. By contrast to scientific knowledge or Western conventional rationality, C\u00e9saire wrote, it is only the revolutionary image that allows man to break through the limits:<\/p>\n

\u00ab\u00a0C\u2019est par l\u2019image, l\u2019image r\u00e9volutionnaire, l\u2019image distante, l\u2019image qui bouleverse toutes les lois de la pens\u00e9e, que l\u2019homme brise enfin la barri\u00e8re<\/em>.\u00a0\u00bb<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

C\u00e9saire gives voice to the radical potential in Nietzsche\u2019s writings on tragedy and poetics, a radical potential that would ultimately nourish an entire artistic and political movement, N\u00e9gritude, and motivate decolonization. With C\u00e9saire and L\u00e9opold S\u00e9dar Senghor (1906\u20132001), it would produce a unique combination of self-determination without nationalism or state sovereignty\u2014a distinctive view of decolonization and democratic federation that Gary Wilder analyzes brilliantly under the rubric \u201cFreedom Time.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is in the poetic arts, in the Dionysian, that C\u00e9saire would draw much of the vitality and poetic knowledge necessary to resist colonial and Western domination. In this sense, C\u00e9saire\u2019s writings demonstrate not only the influence of his early Nietzschean encounters, but rather how much more can be done\u2014in a revolutionary way\u2014with those early fragments and aphorisms. And so, it is to C\u00e9saire\u2019s art form and creativity, his poetic knowledge and political practice, that we can turn to for our own inspiration and resistance in these dark times.<\/p>\n

[Read full post here<\/a>. \u00a9 Bernard E. Harcourt]<\/p>\n

\"pink\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Negritude critique of colonial modernity in the interwar and postbellum period drew importantly on the vitalist philosophies of Nietzsche, Bergson, and Heidegger. Many of the central figures, including Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire, L\u00e9opold S\u00e9dar Senghor, and \u00c9douard Glissant found inspiration in these countercurrents of Western thought. C\u00e9saire and Senghor, especially, adopted the notions of the Dionysian and the Apollinean from Nietzsche\u2019s Birth of Tragedy<\/em> in their aesthetic philosophy. In this session we will explore this conversation with Nietzsche\u2019s thoughts on tragedy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

C\u00e9saire, Nietzsche, and the Struggle Against Colonialism with Bachir Diagne, Romuald Fonkoua, Alex Gil, Daniele Lorenzini, and\u00a0Fran\u00e7oise Verg\u00e8s Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire\u2019s encounter with Nietzsche\u2014in his own words, one of his essential reference points\u2014nourished a vitality, an indignation, a passion for tragedy,… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1603,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-34","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/34","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1603"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/34\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}