{"id":1177,"date":"2016-12-22T11:27:18","date_gmt":"2016-12-22T16:27:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/?p=1177"},"modified":"2017-03-31T13:36:17","modified_gmt":"2017-03-31T17:36:17","slug":"aime-cesaire-poetic-knowledge-vitality-negritude-and-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/aime-cesaire-poetic-knowledge-vitality-negritude-and-revolution\/","title":{"rendered":"Bernard E. Harcourt | Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire: Poetic Knowledge, Vitality, N\u00e9gritude, and Revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Bernard E. Harcourt <\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00ab\u00a0un homme sauve l\u2019humanit\u00e9, un homme la replace dans le concert universel, un homme marie une floraison humaine \u00e0 l\u2019universelle floraison\u00a0; cet homme, c\u2019est le po\u00e8te<\/em>.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n

\u2013 Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire, \u00ab\u00a0Po\u00e9sie et connaissance\u00a0\u00bb, Tropiques<\/em>, p. 163 (1944)[1]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire\u2019s encounter with Nietzsche\u2014in his own words, one of his essential reference points alongside Baudelaire, Breton, Langston Hughes, and others[2]<\/a>\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[3]<\/a>: 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>[\u201cPoetry and Knowledge\u201d]\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<\/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[4]<\/a><\/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

***<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 At the end of September 1944, the French poet and playwright, Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire (1913-2008), traveled from his native Martinique to Haiti to deliver a lecture at an international philosophical congress dedicated to the question of knowledge and held under the auspices of the Haitian and United States governments.[5]<\/a> The gathering commemorated, in part, the work of \u201cgreat thinkers\u201d who had been overshadowed by the occupation of France and the Vichy government in the Antilles. In Port-au-Prince, the young poet, only thirty-one years old, an official delegate of the French government, would deliver a powerful and radical lecture, Po\u00e9sie et connaissance <\/em>[\u201cPoetry and Knowledge\u201d], that shook the conventional Kantian foundations of the assembled philosophers through a quiet dialogue with Nietzsche.<\/p>\n

C\u00e9saire opened on the Aristotelian theme of the superiority of poetry to science\u2014or what Aristotle referred to as historia<\/em>\u2014a dichotomy that Nietzsche too had made his own. \u00ab\u00a0La connaissance po\u00e9tique nait dans le grand silence de la connaissance scientifique,<\/em>\u00a0\u00bb C\u00e9saire declared, and it is only the poet, he tells us, that can and will redeem humanity. The silent conversation with Nietzsche becomes even more salient a few paragraphs later, when C\u00e9saire makes it clear that it is not any poetry that will do. No, it is only a Dionysian form of tragedy\u2014the \u201crevenge of Dionysus on Apollo\u201d\u2014that would liberate us from the limitations of impoverished scientific knowledge and Kantian philosophy. So, C\u00e9saire writes, the recovery of poetry over science begins to take place in 1850, when Dionysus returns through Charles Baudelaire and later Andr\u00e9 Breton. Here, naturally, one hears the echoes of Nietzsche\u2019s The Birth of Tragedy<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Published in January 1945 in the review, Tropiques<\/em>, that C\u00e9saire founded in 1941 in Martinique under the censorship of the Vichy government\u2014a review that \u201copens under the sign of Nietzsche\u201d [\u201cTropiques <\/em>s\u2019ouvre sous le signe de Nietzsche\u201d][6]<\/a>\u2014C\u00e9saire drew on the theoretician of Dionysus to find a source of vitality for life and colonial resistance: a basis for the colonized former slaves to get back in touch with their ancestral knowledges and look forward to their true emancipation.<\/p>\n

As opposed to George Bataille before him, or Gilles Deleuze after him, C\u00e9saire would not mention Nietzsche by name, nor engage or analyze his thought out loud. The conversation was a silent one\u2014drawing on and developing themes that were central to Nietzsche. But the relation was pivotal, and it would highlight a key aspect of C\u00e9saire: the vitality of poetic knowledge as the truly human, life as an art form, and artistic creation as the source of political struggle and revolution. These would be central to the movement of N\u00e9gritude that C\u00e9saire, Senghor, L\u00e9on Gontran Damas (1912\u20131978), and others, especially Jane, Paulette and Andr\u00e9e Nardal in Paris,[7]<\/a> would develop during the decades after the war, and that would inspire and nourish liberation movements throughout Africa and the Caribbean. In this regards, C\u00e9saire was not alone. As Bachir Souleymane Diagne reminds us, Senghor as well was inspired by Nietzsche, and he repeatedly stressed that N\u00e9gritude philosophy was deeply connected to Nietzsche. In fact, Senghor would place N\u00e9gritude under the sign of the 1889 revolution, explicitly relating it to Nietzsche\u2019s Thus Spoke Zarathustra <\/em>(1883-85), where poetry is the ultimate expression of philosophy.[8]<\/a><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In C\u00e9saire\u2019s 1944 manifesto, Po\u00e9sie et connaissance<\/em>, the French poet and philosopher draws on and develops, he enriches Nietzsche\u2019s writings along at least five dimensions.<\/p>\n

The first has to do with the character of poetic knowledge. C\u00e9saire begins Po\u00e9sie et connaissance<\/em> with an ode to poetics and diatribe against science. Scientific knowledge, for C\u00e9saire, is one-dimensional and impoverished. The sciences classify things, but do not comprehend them. They offer at best surface knowledge. Physics does not get to the essence; mathematics is too abstract and unreal. The sciences are thin: they measure and classify, but give us nothing more.<\/p>\n

The problem, C\u00e9saire suggests, is that scientific knowledge isolates phenomena and, in the process, fails to comprehend the social and spatial relations and collectivities within which these phenomena exist. Science cannot get to the essence of things, it cannot achieve the richness of reality because, methodologically, it fails to grasp objects in their complex relation to others, in their collective setting.<\/p>\n

C\u00e9saire draws, for an illustration of this impoverishment, on a story from Aldous Huxley, Do What You Will<\/em>. It concerns knowing what a lion really is. One cannot know, the story goes, if one studies only the lion; to understand the lion, one also needs to know the antelopes and the zebras that the lions chase, the steppes where the lions live, the grass that the antelopes graze. \u201cThe same goes for knowledge,\u201d C\u00e9saire write. \u201cScientific knowledge is a lion without antelopes and zebras.\u201d It is barren. Scientific knowledge just delivers somewhat useless facts, \u201cjust-so\u201d knowledge.<\/p>\n

One can almost hear the provocation. The impetuous, the impertinent question in The Gay Science<\/em> \u00a7 373: \u201cDo we actually wish to have existence debased in that fashion to a ready-reckoner exercise and calculation for stay-at-home mathematicians?\u201d Nietzsche too had attacked science, famously in The Gay Science<\/em>, the title of which, of course, is so important here. The expression \u201cgay science\u201d comes from the Proven\u00e7al expression \u201cgay saber<\/em>\u201d that refers to the poetic tradition of the troubadours in the 13th<\/sup> century. The tradition enshrined poetic practices and included institutions, such as the \u201cConsistory of the Gay Science,\u201d a guild for troubadour poetry in Toulouse in the early 14th<\/sup> century dedicated to the art of lyric poetry.<\/p>\n

Nietzsche took a similar view of the uni-dimensionality of science. \u201cA \u2018scientific\u2019 interpretation of the world as you understand it might consequently still be one of the stupidest, that is to say, the most destitute of significance, of all possible world-interpretations,\u201d Nietzsche exclaimed. Taking the example of music, he wrote: \u201cSupposing we valued the worth of a music with reference to how much it could be counted, calculated, or formulated \u2013 how absurd such a \u2018scientific\u2019 estimate of music would be! What would one have apprehended, understood, or discerned in it! Nothing, absolutely nothing of what is really \u2018music\u2019 in it!\u201d<\/p>\n

For Nietzsche, it is the poverty of science that ultimately reveals the central role of moralizing to human existence. It is only when we question the myth of science\u2014namely, the myth that science itself rests on no convictions and seeks only the truth\u2014that we must pose the question of that \u201cwill to truth\u201d that inevitably takes us back to morals, to the good and the bad. In effect, it is precisely the critique of science that leads Nietzsche to his most important thesis, namely the moral foundation of knowledge.<\/p>\n

The passage is somewhat brilliant, and begins, at \u00a7 344 of The Gay Science<\/em>, by posing a puzzle to science\u2014or more precisely, to its main and most central conviction, namely that \u201cconvictions have no civic rights in the domain of science.\u201d This conviction of non-conviction is Nietzsche\u2019s starting paradox and raises the question why truth \u201cmust be affirmed to such an extent that the principle, belief, or conviction finds expression that \u2018there is nothing more necessary than truth, and in comparison with it everything else has only secondary value.\u2019\u201d This reflects an absolute will to truth that applies, as Nietzsche shows, not only to not being deceived, but also to not allowing oneself to deceive oneself<\/em>\u2014an absolute will to truth that rests not on empirical verification, but on a leap of faith, namely that truth is always somehow better than falsity. It rests on the conviction that \u201cnot-wishing-to-be-deceived [is] really less injurious, less dangerous, less fatal\u201d than deceiving; that truth, at all cost and in all situations, should trump deception. But that, of course, is just a belief, an unfounded conviction, a myth. And thus, Nietzsche concludes, first, that science itself rests on myth: \u201cit is always a metaphysical belief on which our belief in science rests.\u201d And, second, that science just throws us back to the realm of morality: \u201cand thus we have reached the realm of morality,\u201d Nietzsche exclaims. \u201cThus the question, Why is there science? leads back to the moral problem: What in general is the purpose of morality, if life, nature, and history are \u2018non-moral\u2019?\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, scientific faith reveals, more than anything, the moral dimension of truth\u2014it offers a genealogy of truth. This is precisely how Gilles Deleuze, in his 1962 book on Nietzsche and Philosophy<\/em>, will read Nietzsche\u2019s intervention: The will to truth, Deleuze too shows, is a moral quest. \u00ab\u00a0L\u2019homme qui ne veut pas tromper veut un monde meilleur et une vie meilleure\u00a0; toutes ses raisons pour ne pas tromper sont des raisons morales.\u00a0<\/em>\u00bb And to expose this, Deleuze will maintain, is the very basis of a truly critical philosophy\u2014the basis of true critique. We are here, with C\u00e9saire and Nietzsche, at the core, at the heart of what Deleuze will refer to as \u00ab\u00a0la vraie r\u00e9alisation de la critique\u00a0<\/em>\u00bb and \u00ab\u00a0l\u2019\u00e9l\u00e9ment critique<\/em>\u00a0\u00bb\u00a0: the moral value of truth, the value of values.<\/p>\n

For C\u00e9saire, then, the richness of humanity and life can only be grasped by supplementing science with poetry. And as a result, \u00ab\u00a0l\u2019homme a, peu \u00e0 peu, pris conscience qu\u2019\u00e0 c\u00f4t\u00e9 de cette connaissance scientifique et fam\u00e9lique, il y avait une autre sorte de connaissance. Une connaissance rassasiante<\/em>.\u00a0\u00bb This it is the poet alone who can inspire, and save, humanity.<\/p>\n

Second, C\u00e9saire\u2019s manifesto highlights the role of the Dionysian. It is not any kind of poetry that suffices. Poetic knowledge only reenlightens man when the Dionysian takes its revenge on the Apollonian, when prose passes to poetry, when man leaps into the poetic space. And this happens, in France, with Baudelaire and Rimbaud, with Apollinaire, and later with Andr\u00e9 Breton and surrealism. These are the figures who brought back poetic knowledge and saved man from the shallowness and superficiality of scientific knowledge. And in modern times, it is only in the nineteenth century, C\u00e9saire tells us, \u201cat the close of the apollonian era,\u201d he notes, \u201cwhen France was dying under the weight of prose,\u201d that the poets dared to remember:<\/p>\n

\u00ab\u00a01850. \u2013 La revanche de Dionysos sur Apollon.<\/p>\n

1850\u00a0 \u2013 Le grand saut<\/em> dans le vide po\u00e9tique.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

With that, France passed from prose to poetry, \u201cand everything changed,\u201d C\u00e9saire declares.<\/p>\n

What poetry gives us, C\u00e9saire writes, is \u00ab\u00a0l\u2019\u00eatre rendu au devenir\u00a0<\/em>\u00bb\u00a0: being turned over to becoming\u2014the ultimate Nietzschean transformation. Nietzsche\u2019s The Birth of Tragedy<\/em> would play a formative role for C\u00e9saire. As Souleymane Bachir Diagne notes, \u201cC\u00e9saire himself has indicated in many interviews that, at the time of writing And the Dogs Kept Quiet<\/em> [published in his collection of poetry, Les armes miraculeuse<\/em>, in 1946], Friedrich Nietzsche\u2019s The Origin of Tragedy<\/em> was his \u2018breviary\u2019\u201d.[9]<\/a><\/p>\n

The Dionysian is also, for C\u00e9saire, the moment of return to ancestral knowledges. 1850 may have been a re-birth of the Dionysian and a leap into the poetic space; but it also represents a return: a return to the earliest times of humanity. For it is back then, C\u00e9saire suggests, that man may have been closest to certain real truths: \u00ab\u00a0je crois que l\u2019homme n\u2019a jamais \u00e9t\u00e9 plus pr\u00e8s de certaines v\u00e9rit\u00e9s qu\u2019aux jours premiers de l\u2019esp\u00e8ce. Aux temps o\u00f9 l\u2019homme d\u00e9couvrait avec \u00e9motion le premier soleil, la premi\u00e8re pluie, le premier souffle, la premi\u00e8re lune. Aux temps o\u00f9 l\u2019homme d\u00e9couvrait dans la peur et le ravissement, la nouveaut\u00e9 palpitante du monde<\/em>.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n

Here too, the link to Nietzsche and critical <\/em>philosophy\u2014at least as it will be developed by Deleuze\u2014is central. In Deleuze\u2019s hands, as we will see later, the notion of the will to power is turned inside out: the will to power is not a will to domination, Deleuze will argue, but a will whose power is precisely willing. As he writes in 1962, but will also rehearse in 1965 and 1968, \u00ab\u00a0la puissance est ce qui<\/u> veut dans la volont\u00e9<\/em>\u00a0\u00bb. Yet, as Deleuze makes clear in his shorter book on Nietzsche<\/em> in 1965, the will whose power is to will is precisely Dionysus\u00a0: \u201cPower, as a will to power, is not that which the will wants, but that which<\/em> wants in the will (Dionysus himself<\/u>),\u201d Deleuze writes in 1965. Dionysus himself!<\/em> And Deleuze adds, \u201cThe will to power is the differential element from which derive the force at work, as well as their respective quality in a complex whole.\u201d In other words, Dionysus is the power of the will to power\u2014which is precisely what C\u00e9saire identified.<\/p>\n

Third, in an important passage that he delivered at his lecture in Haiti, but removed from the published version in Tropiques<\/em>\u2014but which figured in at least one published version\u2014Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire refers his readers to the \u00ab\u00a0Trait\u00e9 de la co-naissance au monde et de soi-m\u00eame\u00a0\u00bb of Paul Claudel (a figure whom C\u00e9saire and others would later distance themselves from because of his extreme catholicism). This concept of \u00ab\u00a0co-naissance\u00a0\u00bb is a play on words that relates the notion of knowledge (connaissance<\/em>) to the idea of birth (naissance<\/em>) together (co-<\/em>)\u2014and thus references Nietzsche\u2019s idea of the genealogy of knowledge, of the birth of knowledge. It is actually precisely in the context of alluding to the ancestry <\/em>of poetic knowledge that C\u00e9saire offers this reference, delivering orally and retaining in at least one published version the following: \u00ab\u00a0Aux temps o\u00f9 la connaissance \u00e9tait co-naissance, au sens claud\u00e9lien du mot. Je veux dire aux temps o\u00f9 tout naissait ensemble.<\/em>\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n

Fourth, the anti-dialectic: C\u00e9saire drew explicitly on Andr\u00e9 Breton, a formative influence, for his method. Some commentators trace Breton\u2019s method to the Hegelian dialectic, thereby linking C\u00e9saire and Hegel. \u201cThe dialectic C\u00e9saire invoked was that of Hegel colored by an occultism characteristic of Andr\u00e9 Breton\u2019s Second Surrealist Manifesto<\/em> and Pierre Mabille\u2026\u201d[10]<\/a> It is not entirely clear to me, though, that that is right. On my reading, there is more of an anti-dialectic here in C\u00e9saire\u2014one that is reflected more in Deleuze\u2019s reading of Nietzsche as the ultimate anti-Hegelian.<\/p>\n

For C\u00e9saire, the highest ambition, the ambition of poetry itself, is to find unity in difference. To get beyond the traditional oppositions\u2014but not by overcoming them. C\u00e9saire rehearses this passage from Breton:<\/p>\n

\u00ab\u00a0Tout porte \u00e0 croire qu\u2019il existe un certain point de l\u2019esprit d\u2019o\u00f9 la vie et la mort, le r\u00e9el et l\u2019imaginaire, le pass\u00e9 et le futur, le communicable et l\u2019incommunicable, le haut et le bas cessent d\u2019\u00eatre per\u00e7us contradictoirement. Et c\u2019est en vain qu\u2019on chercherait \u00e0 l\u2019activit\u00e9 surr\u00e9aliste un autre mobile que l\u2019espoir de d\u00e9termination de ce point.<\/em>\u00a0\u00bb<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, it is in this unity that C\u00e9saire finds vitality and life\u2014\u201cthe vital movement, the creative \u00e9lan<\/em>,\u201d joy, flowering. And it is here that the poet becomes savior, savior of mankind, of knowledge, of the vitality of life: \u00ab\u00a0un homme sauve l\u2019humanit\u00e9, [\u2026] un homme marie une floraison humaine \u00e0 l\u2019universelle floraison\u00a0; cet homme, c\u2019est le po\u00e8te.<\/em>\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n

We can locate this same overcoming of the distinction between high and low\u2014\u201cle haut et le bas\u201d\u2014in Deleuze\u2019s Nietzsche. The Deleuzian Nietzsche is also at odds with Hegel. His, as we will see later, is an anti-dialectic Nietzsche. An anti-Hegelian Nietzsche. \u00ab Il n\u2019est pas de compromis possible entre Hegel et Nietzsche<\/em>, \u00bb Deleuze will emphasize. \u00ab La philosophie de Nietzsche [\u2026] forme une anti-dialectique absolue, se propose de d\u00e9noncer toutes les mystifications qui trouvent dans la dialectique un dernier refuge<\/em>. \u00bb And for Deleuze, it is the same purported dichotomy between high and low that is at the heart of the critical move: \u00ab\u00a0Voil\u00e0 l\u2019essentiel\u00a0: le haut et le bas, le noble et le vil <\/em>ne sont pas des valeurs, mais repr\u00e9sentent l\u2019\u00e9l\u00e9ment diff\u00e9rentiel dont d\u00e9rive la valeur des valeurs elles-m\u00eames.\u00a0\u00bb That is the heart of critique for Deleuze.<\/p>\n

Fifth and finally, the importance of myth. For C\u00e9saire, the mythic is the space of poetry and invention. C\u00e9saire writes:<\/p>\n

\u00ab\u00a0Autrement dit la science r\u00e9pugne au mythe quand la po\u00e9sie y consent. [\u2026] Seul le mythe satisfait l\u2019homme enti\u00e8rement\u00a0: son c\u0153ur, sa raison, son go\u00fbt du d\u00e9tail et de l\u2019ensemble, son go\u00fbt du faux et du vrai, car le mythe est tout cela \u00e0 la fois. Appr\u00e9hension brumeuse et \u00e9motionnelle, plus que moyen d\u2019expression po\u00e9tique\u2026\u00a0\u00bb<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This myth is closely related to the Jungian archetype\u2014to which C\u00e9saire explicitly makes reference in \u201cPoetry and Knowledge.\u201d And it is through myth\u2014as well as words and images, love and humor\u2014that we find our vitality in the world. \u00ab\u00a0Premi\u00e8re proposition<\/em>\u00a0\u00bb.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 C\u00e9saire\u2019s dialogue with Nietzsche would extend far beyond his 1944 manifesto \u201cPoetry and Knowledge\u201d to his later plays and poems, such as And the Dogs Kept Quiet<\/em>, for which The Birth of Tragedy <\/em>as noted earlier was his \u201cbreviary,\u201d and A Season in the Congo<\/em>, published in 1966. As Bachir Diagne writes of the latter:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cWith A Season in the Congo<\/em>, Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire has created his most Shakespearean, his most Nietzschean\/Dionysian play and hero. He has made the best of the historical fact that Patrice Lumumba who was largely a self-educated man and political leader worked for many years as a travelling salesman for a beer company. Having represented him both as the tragic figure of a leader for independence and the Smoothtalker who uses beer as a metaphor for politics, C\u00e9saire\u2019s writing admirably mixes voices and registers, alternating tragedy and burlesque, poetry and its caricature (in the language of the bankers, for example). In this play the poet eminently manifests the art of being political in literature, of transforming anger into laughter, of undermining the established colonial order just by being mischievous to the highest degree which is what Nietzsche characterized as \u2018to be harmful with what is best\u2019\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The figure of Patrice Lumumba in A Season in the Congo<\/em> is indeed the tragic Nietzschean figure par excellence<\/em>\u2014betrayed by his military commander Joseph Mobutu [the character Mokutu in C\u00e9saire\u2019s play] and by Western powers, assassinated and mutilated, sacrificed by a power structure that would simply reproduce itself in the post-colonial setting. Lumumba is the one who had sought to get beyond the morality of colonialism, above the partisan squabbles, above past histories\u2014a kind of superman\u2014but who ultimately is defeated by the Western power structure. Lumumba is Zarathustra at the end, right before he is shot, right before \u201cThe mercenary gives the killing thrust to Lumumba\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

Lumumba<\/span><\/p>\n

I will be the field; I will be pasture<\/p>\n

I will be with the fisher Wagenia<\/p>\n

I will be with the shepherd of the Kivu<\/p>\n

I will be on the mount, I will be in the ravine.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

***<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 These five key theoretical dimensions of C\u00e9saire\u2019s poetics and philosophy would nourish his writings on \u201cN\u00e9gritude\u201d\u2014an artistic, cultural, and philosophical movement founded by C\u00e9saire, Damas, and Senghor during their early encounters in Paris in the late 1920s and 1930s. The \u201cN\u00e9gritude\u201d moment represents, in Souleymane Bachir Diagne\u2019s<\/a> words, \u201cthe self-affirmation of black peoples, or the affirmation of the values of civilization of something defined as \u2018the black world\u2019 as an answer to the question \u2018what are we in this white world?\u2019\u201d The word itself first appeared through the pen of C\u00e9saire in the journal L’Etudiant noir<\/em>, a journal he founded with Damas and Senghor in 1934\u20131935; and their ideas on \u201cN\u00e9gritude\u201d developed in discussions with others, especially Jane, Paulette and Andr\u00e9e Nardal in Paris. An early expression of the ideas can be read in Jane Nardal\u2019s article \u201cInternationalisme noir<\/em>,\u201d published in 1928.<\/p>\n

For C\u00e9saire, by contrast to Senghor, N\u00e9gritude was less a philosophy than a revolutionary way to reclaim one\u2019s past and identity. As Diagne explains, for C\u00e9saire, \u201cN\u00e9gritude was primarily the reclaiming of a heritage in order to regain initiative.\u201d Diagne points us to this passage from C\u00e9saire\u2019s Discours sur la N\u00e9gritude<\/em> (\u201cA Lecture on N\u00e9gritude\u201d), delivered in Miami in February 1987, where C\u00e9saire insisted that:<\/p>\n

N\u00e9gritude, in my eyes, is not a philosophy. N\u00e9gritude is not a metaphysics. N\u00e9gritude is not a pretentious conception of the universe. It is a way of living history within history: the history of a community whose experience appears to be \u2026 unique, with its deportation of populations, its transfer of people from one continent to another, its distant memories of old beliefs, its fragments of murdered cultures. How can we not believe that all this, which has its own coherence, constitutes a heritage?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

N\u00e9gritude is, then, for C\u00e9saire, an idea of a retrieved identity, of a heritage. What C\u00e9saire created, what he offered us, is a revolutionary reappropriation of one\u2019s self from the clutches of slavery, oppression, and domination. In an address delivered in Geneva in June 1978, C\u00e9saire brings together these elements, linking revolt and revolution to the act of reclaiming oneself and one\u2019s heritage:<\/p>\n

\u2026 when it appeared, the literature of N\u00e9gritude created a revolution: in the darkness of the great silence, a voice was raising up, with no interpreter, no alteration, and no complacency, a violent and staccato voice, and it said for the first time: \u201cI, N\u00e8gre.\u201d
\nA voice of revolt
\nA voice of resentment
\nNo doubt
\nBut also of fidelity, a voice of freedom, and first and foremost, a voice for the retrieved identity.[11]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

***<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 To be sure, the N\u00e9gritude movement was attacked from many sides\u2014for its essentialism, for its focus on Africa, for its culturalism, for its \u201cracism\u201d (in Jean-Paul Sartre\u2019s preface to Senghor\u2019s anthology of poetry, its \u201canti-racist racism,\u201d[12]<\/a> a term that would be turned back against the N\u00e9gritude movement), for its insufficient radicalism and anti-colonialism. C\u00e9saire would be attacked for his support of the departmentalization of Martinique, rather than its independence, and would eventually be treated as reactionary by some. His former student at the Lyc\u00e9e Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, Frantz Fanon, would severely critique what he called the \u201cbards of Negritude\u201d for failing to embrace nationalist agendas and for having nothing more than an \u201coutsider\u2019s relationship\u201d to the people.[13]<\/a> Fanon would be particularly brutal as well with Senghor.<\/p>\n

But none of this should in any way detract from the radical nature of C\u00e9saire\u2019s political interventions in their proper historical context. Only a narrow reading that would equate anti-colonialism with nationalism would so quickly dismiss C\u00e9saire\u2019s politics. As Gary Wilder shows so well in his book Freedom Time<\/em>, it would be short-sighted and simplistic to start from the assumption that decolonization was necessarily opposed to non-sovereigntist political solutions, such as departmentalization. Wilder offers a subtle portrait of C\u00e9saire as a pragmatic politician\u2014not in the sense of compromising, but instead a philosophical pragmatism that served \u201cphilosophically to signal an antifoundational, nondogmatic, and experimental approach to truth and politics that refuses ready-made a priori certainties about the best means to desirable ends.\u201d<\/p>\n

And it is here that C\u00e9saire\u2019s silent dialogue with Nietzsche was both formative and remains instructive. Like Nietzsche, C\u00e9saire \u201cdistrusted a priori approaches to knowledge and truth, whether idealist or materialist.\u201d[14]<\/a> It is precisely that kind of openness that would nourish both his radical poetics and his political commitments. Nietzsche\u2019s anti-foundationalism would foster a vitality and creativity that would nourish C\u00e9saire\u2019s writings and endeavors from the first issue of Tropiques[15]<\/strong><\/a><\/em> to his masterful later plays. It is the critique of Kantian philosophy and instrumental reason that would enable what C\u00e9saire referred to in 1944 as \u201cpoetic knowledge\u201d and \u201cpoetic truth\u201d: a \u201cvitalist vision of recovery, reconciliation, and salvation through poetry.\u201d[16]<\/a><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In a recent New York Times<\/em> article<\/a> titled \u201cThe Perils of Being a Black Philosopher,\u201d the philosopher George Yancy reflects on the long history of racism in Western philosophy. \u201cThe process of marking the black body as incapable of philosophical thought is longstanding,\u201d Yancy notes. \u201cIt is one of those major myths that grew out of Europe, even as Europe championed \u2018humanism.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

It is here, though, that Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire and others, like Frantz Fanon, who we will study later, offer such insight. And it is here that I will, then, end\u2014at least for now. With George Yancy, who writes:<\/p>\n

The poet Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire, through immanent critique, knew that European humanism was a farce. Of course, Jean-Paul Sartre knew this as well. And Fanon knew what it was like to embody reason and have it denied to him. In \u201cBlack Skin, White Masks,\u201d he argued that when he was present, reason was not, and when reason was present he was no longer. So, one might argue that reason and black embodiment, from this perspective, are mutually exclusive. And yet, at the end of that text, Fanon says, \u201cMy final prayer: O my body, make me always a man who questions!\u201d<\/p>\n

Fanon appeals to something that is beyond abstract political rights discourse. He appeals to his own body, something concrete and immediate. Fanon asks of his body not to allow him to be seduced by forms of being-in-the-world that normalize violence and dehumanization. Doubt can be linked to critique. In a society that hides beneath the seductions of normalization, critique is undesirable and deemed dangerous. Yet in our contemporary moment, the fulfillment of Fanon\u2019s prayer is desperately needed.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is ultimately in the poetic arts, in the Dionysian, that C\u00e9saire would find the vitality and life necessary to resist colonial domination. It is poetic knowledge that inspires the strength necessary to resist:<\/p>\n

\u00ab\u00a0Le po\u00e8te est cet \u00eatre tr\u00e8s vieux et tr\u00e8s neuf, tr\u00e8s complexe et tr\u00e8s simple qui aux confins v\u00e9cus du r\u00eave et du r\u00e9el, du jour et de la nuit, entre absence et pr\u00e9sence, cherche et re\u00e7oit dans le d\u00e9clenchement soudain des cataclysmes int\u00e9rieurs le mot de passe de la connivence et de la puissance<\/em>.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n

\u2013 Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire, \u00ab\u00a0Po\u00e9sie et connaissance\u00a0\u00bb, Tropiques<\/em>, p. 170 (1944)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

Notes<\/h2>\n

[1]<\/a> Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire, \u00ab\u00a0Po\u00e9sie et connaissance,\u00a0\u00bb in Tropiques<\/em>. Revue Culturelle<\/em>. No. 12, Janvier 1945, pp. 163.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> \u201cEntretien avec Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire par Jacqueline Leiner,\u201d p. v-xxiv, in Tropiques. 1941-1945 Collection Compl\u00e8te<\/em> (Paris, Jean-Michel Place, 1978), p. viii; Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World<\/em> (Duke, 2015), at p. 22.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> C\u00e9saire, \u00ab\u00a0Po\u00e9sie et connaissance,\u00a0\u00bb in Tropiques<\/em>, p. 159.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World<\/em> (Duke, 2015).<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Albert-James Arnold, \u00ab\u00a0Po\u00e9sie et connaissance. <\/em>Pr\u00e9sentation\u00a0\u00bb, in C\u00e9saire, Po\u00e9sie, th\u00e9\u00e2tre, essais et discours<\/em>. Ed. Albert-James Arnold. Paris: CNRS, 2014, p. 1373.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> \u201cEntretien avec Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire par Jacqueline Leiner,\u201d p. v-xxiv, in Tropiques. 1941-1945 Collection Compl\u00e8te<\/em> (Paris, Jean-Michel Place, 1978), p. v. In the first issue of Tropiques<\/em>, Ren\u00e9 M\u00e9nil drew on Nietzsche to discuss \u201cthe sphere of real art.\u201d See<\/em> Wilder, Freedom Time<\/em>, p. 27.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> See Souleymane Bachir Diagne, “N\u00e9gritude”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy <\/em>(Spring 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta\u00a0(ed.), available at\u00a0 https:\/\/plato.stanford.edu\/archives\/spr2016\/entries\/negritude<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> Bachir Diagne, intervention at Nietzsche 6\/13 here: https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/6-13\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> Souleymane Bachir Diagne, \u201cIntroduction,\u201d p. ix-xv, in Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire, A Season in the Congo<\/em>, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (London, Seagull Books 2010), at p. xi.<\/p>\n

[10]<\/a> Arnold, \u00ab\u00a0Po\u00e9sie et connaissance. <\/em>Pr\u00e9sentation\u00a0\u00bb, p. 1373. Note that Pierre Mabille also appears in C\u00e9saire\u2019s text, C\u00e9saire, \u00ab\u00a0Po\u00e9sie et connaissance,\u00a0\u00bb p. 168.<\/p>\n

[11]<\/a> C\u00e9saire, in Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire, pour regarder le si\u00e8cle en face<\/em>, ed. Th\u00e9bia-Melsan (2000), p. 28; quoted in Diagne, \u201cN\u00e9gritude,\u201d Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.<\/p>\n

[12]<\/a> Jean-Paul Sartre, Black Orpheus<\/em>, trans. S.W.Allen, Paris: Pr\u00e9sence Africaine (1976).<\/p>\n

[13]<\/a> Wilder, Freedom Time<\/em>, p. 134.<\/p>\n

[14]<\/a> Wilder, Freedom Time<\/em>, p. 21.<\/p>\n

[15]<\/a> See<\/em> especially Wilder\u2019s discussion at p. 27 regarding the first issue of Tropiques. <\/em><\/p>\n

[16]<\/a> Wilder, Freedom Time<\/em>, p. 30.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Bernard E. Harcourt \u00ab\u00a0un homme sauve l\u2019humanit\u00e9, un homme la replace dans le concert universel, un homme marie une floraison humaine \u00e0 l\u2019universelle floraison\u00a0; cet homme, c\u2019est le po\u00e8te.\u00a0\u00bb \u2013 Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire, \u00ab\u00a0Po\u00e9sie et connaissance\u00a0\u00bb, Tropiques, p. 163 (1944)[1]… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1641,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38959],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts-6-13"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1641"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1177\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/nietzsche1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}