by Nica Cornell
This
essay will discuss two of the ways in which the Haitian Revolution is
significant for the practice of contemporary theory. It suggests that the
Haitian Revolution unseals the silenced history of the contemporary praxis of
liberal democracy – issuing a warning of the long-term
consequences of silencing that which is deemed unthinkable at one time - and
in the process offers the emancipatory potential of an actual universal
doctrine of human rights.
It
will track the history of the hegemonic global political order that is now
understood to be that of “neo-liberal capitalism and democracy” (Neocosmos,
2011: 362) and its limitation to a negative, legal interpretation of human
rights (Nesbitt, 2009: 94). The contradictions and silenced chapter of that
history establish the need for a rethinking of human rights. This is necessary
for the practice of contemporary theory to constitute an emancipatory political
project. The recognition of the Haitian Revolution shifts the genesis of
contemporary human rights discourse – with emancipatory implications.
Nick
Nesbitt (2009: 95) specifies that human rights have attained “hegemony over the
concept of the political” as they have become the standards by which political
regimes are now judged. Their invention in the late eighteenth century was the
event that signalled a seismic political shift from “early-modern, slave-based
agrarian capitalism” to “liberal, wage-based industrial capitalism” (Nesbitt,
2009: 96). This new form of capitalism was founded in the American and French
Revolutions which fought for the rights of white men who owned property (Nesbitt,
2009: 97). The history of these Revolutions is the source of contemporary human
rights discourse which articulates the concept of a right as something one
possesses. With such a history, and a silenced third chapter, contemporary human rights
discourse has come to function as a tool of oppression instead of emancipation.
Outside
of the domain of civil society, people are not considered to be “citizens with
legally enforceable rights” (Neocosmos, 2011: 359) and political subjectivities
but rather as populations with certain entitlements. This domain is the one in
which most people encounter the rule of the state. Similarly, Nesbitt (2009:
94) discusses how contemporary human rights discourse locates human rights as a
problem that states and structures such as the United Nations have to fix –
they are “merely negative, beneficently bestowed upon passive populations reduced
to their suffering.” This means that rights are based on claims of what one
should not have – such as hunger, torture,
and death – and the means to be spared these is granted from some external
entity such as a state. This is different to a positive conception of human
rights which is centred in what constitutes a human being – the capacity to
make decisions and to act of one’s own free will. Negative rights are
guidelines to maximize the conditions in which human beings embody their humanity.
However, they are not human rights in their totality. When a negative interpretation of human rights
is practiced alone it becomes a tool of de-politicisation, reducing human
beings to their physical conditions and context.
One
of the central aspects of the dominant contemporary theory of Western liberal
democracy is that it grows alongside the inculcation of such a purely legal, negative
‘culture of rights’. The process of democratisation, which originates in the “struggles
of people from all walks of life for greater control over their daily lives,” is
therein made into a technical process under the control of a few legal and
structurally empowered experts (Neocosmos, 2011: 362). Such is the dominant
model of the practice of contemporary theory a process of political exclusion. This
stands in contrast to the activity of the slaves who lived in the southern
areas of Saint-Domingue who instituted their positive human rights from 1793
via a radical egalitarian practice – disproving the negative interpretation
that would posit human rights as depending on the state for enforcement
(Nesbitt, 2008: 20).
William
Rasch (cited in Nesbitt, 2009: 94) extends the critique of negative human
rights to ask which political power representing which order decides what
defines human rights – and “what it means to be properly human?” This question
of power and its role in the formation of contemporary theory is central to the
silencing of the Haitian Revolution in history. Partha
Chatterjee (2004: 27) specifies that the canonical moment at which the
potential of “enlightened modernity” seemed to unite with the “universal
political aspirations of citizenship within the nation was, of course, the French Revolution” [own
emphasis].
The
self-evident promise of that moment, suggested by the emphasized words, belies
the contradiction identified by Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995: 79) within the
title of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen drafted by the French
National Assembly in 1789. In relation to the colonies, the “citizen won over
the non-white-man” (Trouillot, 1995: 79). This is in line with Michael Neocosmos’
(2011: 365) distinction between those who are included in civil society and are
therefore considered to be citizens with positive rights, and those who are
excluded and are perceived as victims to be granted or denied rights by the
state. Contemporary human rights discourse prioritizes the law above including
those who are excluded and therefore sustains the possibility for there to be a
difference between a human and citizen.
The
limited nature of contemporary human rights discourse, as the ideology of
hegemonic contemporary political practice, seems inevitable when one encounters
its genesis. While Chatterjee (2004: 27) refers to the French Revolution as the
self-evident moment at which universal political aspirations combined with the
ideals of the Enlightenment, Nesbitt (2009: 98) clearly identifies the
selectivity of the two revolutions commonly referred to as constituting the
Revolutionary Age that birthed human rights. The French Assemblée Nationale
“actively side-lined demands for immediate abolition” of slavery as it aimed to
guard the interests of “Metropolitan property owners and their colonial
holdings” (Nesbitt, (2009: 98). This was in stark contrast to the first article
of the Declaration which proclaimed that “Men are born and remain free and
equal in rights” (Declaration of the Rights of Man, 1789: 1). The American
Revolution that preceded it announced “all men are created equal” while
fighting for the equality of “non-slaves: white, adult, male property-holders”
(Nesbitt, 2009: 97). The Boston declaration of 1772 stated that it was in
defence of the “Rights of the Colonists
to life, liberty and property” [own emphasis] (Nesbitt, 2009: 97).
Therefore,
the texts of the Revolutionary Age which informed the content of the 1948
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Humanium, n.d.: 1) were grounded in notions
of human rights that were hierarchical and exclusionary despite their
“auspicious initial propositions” of universal ideals (Nesbitt, 2009: 98). It is therefore almost inevitable that with
such a genesis, contemporary human rights discourse – an eminent aspect of the practice
of contemporary theory - is “inimical to the self-empowerment of the
politically excluded” (Neocosmos, 2011: 365).
However,
the Age of Revolutions – and the genesis of human rights – did not end with the
French Revolution. According to Trouillot (1995: 98), the Haitian Revolution
was the “most radical political revolution” of the Age. From 1791 to 1804, 500000
human beings (half of whom were born in Africa) “decided that slavery was
inhumane. Rather than live under it, it was better to fight it, to death, if
necessary without outside help of any kind” (Depelchin, 2007: 1)
In
August 1793, the leader of the army of emancipated slaves Toussaint Louverture
issued a proclamation for immediate and unconditional freedom and equality for
all. Importantly, as Carolyn Fick emphasizes, this proclamation was an
articulation of a struggle to construct an “emancipatory social structure” (cited
in Nesbitt, 2008: 14) that was conducted by the “whole multitude of Haitian
slaves.” Such a proclamation and its origin in the uprising of human beings,
who had been uprooted, abused, exploited and demeaned, four years after the French
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, “went further than the
enlightenment philosophers ever thought possible” (Depelchin, 2007: 1). Peter
Hallward (2004: 1) emphatically endorses this, describing how of the American,
French and Haitian Revolutions, only the last “forced the unconditional
application of the principle that inspired each one: affirmation of the
natural, inalienable rights of all human beings.” It was in the Haitian
Revolution alone that this declaration was “sustained at all costs, in direct
opposition to the social order and economic logic of the day” (Hallward, 2004:
1).
The
French and American Revolutions, in the current telling of the history of human
rights, are the site of their conception. This is apt – however they are the
source of a conception mired in contradiction, and a conception that has been
reduced to a purely negative framework that can be granted or denied to human
beings. Of the three revolutions, it is “Haiti’s that has the most to teach
those seeking to uphold” (Hallward, 2004: 1) because it offers an alternative –
a declaration of human rights that were fundamentally present in and equally
possessed by all human beings. This is demonstrated in its origin within those
who were understood as property rather than property and rights holders.
In
the French colony of Saint Domingue as it was known at the time, the colonial
apparatus was crumbling. From 1797 to 1798, that apparatus -military, political
and civil - was captured by Louverture and his closest lieutenants (Trouillot,
1995: 89-93). In 1802, the French launched an expedition to recapture the
colony. It failed. In 1804, the declaration of independence was issued and
Saint Domingue was named Haiti to honour one of the names the indigenous Taíno
names had for the island (Harvard Caribbean Law Association, n.d.: 1).
Trouillot
(1995: 88) specifies that the Haitian Revolution was the “ultimate test to the
universalist pretension of both the French and the American Revolutions. And
they both failed.” Nesbitt (2009: 95) establishes that the Haitian Revolution extended
the political philosophy of human rights first proposed in the French and
American Declarations. Through this reworking, the doctrine it articulated “continues
to pose – some two centuries since its formulation – a profound challenge to
the dominant western understanding of universal rights” (Nesbitt, 2009: 102). The
inclusion of the Haitian Revolution in the history of the human rights (as a
key ideology in the practice of contemporary theory) is therefore imperative
for “overcoming the contemporary impasse of human rights discourse” (Nesbitt, 2009:
93) as an exclusionary and limited framework. The exclusion of the Haitian
Revolution as a key and emancipatory chapter of the Revolutionary Age – to the
detriment of the practice contemporary human rights - is part of a silencing
that was and continues to be the dominant response of theory to the unthinkable
events of the Revolution.
Trouillot
(1995: 82) defines the unthinkable nature of the Haitian Revolution as “that
which perverts all answers because it defies the terms under which the
questions were phrased.” What is meant by this is that the possibility of the Revolution could not be conceived of within the
existing theoretical frameworks at the time, never mind its reality. Trouillot
(1995: 82) emphasizes this by stating the lack of any frames of reference for
the revolutionary events in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in even the
extreme political left in England and France. No resistance whatsoever was
recognizable within the dominant theories of the time as this required
recognizing the capacity of those who were enslaved to reason and organize and
therefore their ‘total’ human status. This was according to the Enlightenment’s
assertion of the capacity to reason being the defining answer to the question
of “’What is Man?’” (Trouillot, 1995: 78).
Trouillot
(1995: 82) highlights that he is not claiming that theorists at the time should have been able to conceive of the
fundamental equality of all human beings. Rather, he is claiming that they
could not have. The reality of the events of the Revolution could not be
contained within the available theories, and their conceptions of “Negroes”
(Trouillot, 1995: 72). Theoretical assumptions that black leadership would
entail anarchy continued to circulate and dominate after Louverture and his
supporters had established control over the colonial apparatus (Trouillot,
1995: 93). “Discourse always lagged behind practice” (Trouillot, 1995: 89)
which immediately suggests the fallibility of contemporary human rights
discourse that originated from the historical frameworks that already existed
by the time the Revolution occurred, and issues a warning to the practice of
contemporary theory to be aware that definitions of the unthinkable are
constantly in transition.
The
unthinkable was happening and the response was to force the reality to return
to the scope of established and entrenched belief systems, to “repress the
unthinkable and to bring it back within the realm of accepted discourse”
(Trouillot, 1995: 72). Such a response undermines the capacity of theory to guide
the comprehension of reality and retards the emancipatory capacity of theory
borne out of such reality. This is what renders Trouillot’s (1995: 73) claim
relevant to the practice of contemporary theory. The implicit capacity of
theory to propose and perpetuate an ontological hierarchy is demonstrated
therein – and the moral and academic necessity of contemporary theory
responding to reality and being receptive to the multiplicity of the totality
of humanity.
Trouillot
(1995: 86) highlights that it was the way
in which the Haitian Revolution challenged slavery and racism that
established its events as unthinkable. As he describes, the premises and
demands of the revolution were so radical that they could not be preconceived,
but were rather formed as they were enacted (Trouillot, 1995: 88). This sets an
important precedent for the practice of contemporary theory – the Haitian
Revolution was the “most radical political revolution” of the “Age of Revolutions”
(Trouillot, 1995: 98). However it continues to be ignored and silenced as a
significant political event.
This
demonstrates the long-term consequences of the failure of contemporary theory
to remain open to political events that do not conform to its criteria. It also
highlights the constraints of political theory – and the requirement that it be
practiced in awareness of such limits. The occurrence of a sequence of events
that were entirely unthinkable at that time demonstrates that no theory is
all-encompassing, and theory has to be responsive to real events. Real events
originate with real people, and as such can be unexpected, or even unthinkable.
As described by Peter Hallward (2004: 1), “historical ‘necessity’ emerges only
retrospectively.” It is thus vital that the practice of contemporary theory,
which is defined by retrospective assessment, remain fluid.
The
exploration of the Haitian Revolution by a practitioner of contemporary theory simultaneously
unseals the silenced history of the contemporary praxis of liberal democracy
and in the process offers the emancipatory potential of an actual universal
doctrine of human rights. Jacques Ranciére (cited in Neocosmos, 2011: 362) holds
that “politics begins exactly when those who ‘cannot’ do something show that in
fact they can.” This is supported by Nesbitt (2009: 95) who identifies the initial
revolt of 50000 slaves as involving both a process of “political
subjectiviation and identity” and a “strategic disidentification with their attributed roles.” The importance of
the Haitian Revolution in proposing an alternative, affirmative model of human
rights therefore supports Neocosmos’ (2011: 363) analysis of contemporary human
rights discourse as a process of “’de-politicisation.’” This is a process in
which people who were once meant to accept allocated roles as “slaves,
labouring beings, racialised sub-humans” (Nesbitt, 2009: 95) are in
contemporary times persuaded that they are merely victims of violence.
The
slaves of St. Domingue “depended only upon themselves” (Nesbitt, 2009: 98) and
“did not dwell on being slaves” (Depelchin, 2007: 1). This was impossible
according to the theoretical frameworks that existed before the revolution. The
dominant and unquestioned ontology was that of there being “degrees of
humanity” (Trouillot, 1995: 76) with “natives of Africa or the Americas” at the
bottom of the hierarchy. This ontology, inherited from the Renaissance, was the
basis of the ideological justification for the enslavement of Afro-Americans
and the stubborn belief that such slaves could not desire, never mind deserve, emancipation.
Such
thinking is in line with the contemporary human rights discourse that posits
rights as something one possesses. Nesbitt (2009: 101) cites John Donnelly a
leading contemporary theorist and defender of human rights as describing a
human being as a “right-holder authorised
to make special claims” against a
government to have those rights bestowed upon one. Neocosmos (2011:
359) holds that not everyone enjoys equal access to the making of such claims.
This negative contemporary understanding of human rights, as something one
either has or does not, depends on a
construction of human rights as objects. Such a practice of contemporary theory
is historically complicit in the construction of humans as objects with varying
degrees of humanity, and at present, victims who “can then lay claim to state
largesse” (Neocosmos, 2011: 363).
Nesbitt
(2009:101) is not critical of a negative interpretation of legal rights.
Rather, he is critical of legal rights – which are “bestowed upon citizens by a
transcendental governing apparatus” - being mistaken for human rights in their
totality, a phenomenon that Neocosmos (2011: 362) diagnoses in the current
practice of contemporary theory. Human rights are therein reduced to legal rights.
Revolution is reduced to a legal concept of change from authoritarianism to the
Western liberal-democratic model that is rooted in a “liberal notion of
development from the in-human to the human” (Neocosmos, 2011: 363).
The Haitian Revolution and its radical remaking
of the content of the Age of Revolutions into a “call to subjectivity” (Nesbitt,
2009: 103) enacted that call to propose something transcendent. Lynn Hunt (cited
in Nesbitt, 2009: 105) states that human rights or what were at the time
referred to as “the rights of man” could only be conceived of “when people
learned to think of others as like them in some fundamental fashion.” The
Haitian Revolution located the defining feature of that shared humanity in the
“mindset of those who, against all odds, refused to submit to dehumanisation,
not just in their own name, but in the name of the larger community, including
those who were dehumanising them” (Depelchin, 2007: 1).
It
was not only its challenge to the entrenched and productive doctrine of racism
and slavery that rendered the Revolution unthinkable – it was the particular
form in which it did so. The premises and demands of the revolution were so
radical that they could not be preconceived, but were rather formed as they
were enacted (Trouillot, 1995: 88). This is central to the capacity of the
Haitian Revolution to propose an extreme counter-model to the contemporary human
rights discourse – it was “at the limits of the thinkable, even in Saint-Domingue,
even among the slaves, even among its own leaders” (Trouillot, 1995: 88). This highlights the importance for
practitioners of contemporary theory to remain open to the possibility of that
which they view as being unthinkable.
Thought
out by its participants, as it was happening, the Haitian Revolution proposed
and enacted a definition of human rights as the capacity of any human being to
decide that they deserve to be free, and act to make it so. In relation to the
practice of contemporary theory, in stark contrast to current human rights
discourse that promotes politically passive victims who make claims on the
state’s generosity, the Haitian Revolution is the original historical
articulation of the capacity of the poor viewing themselves and therefore
endowing themselves as having the “capacity to overthrow the mindsets which
keep insisting they, the poor, can only be helped out of poverty by charitable
gestures and structures” (Depelchin, 2007: 1).
The
Haitian Revolution therefore proffers the ideological basis for an emancipatory
practice of contemporary theory by invigorating human rights – which have attained
hegemony over the notion of the political - as an articulation of the human
capacity to achieve the unthinkable. Enslaved people, located as the ‘least
human’ by an ontology that was the “most crushing form of ideological prejudice
ever faced by a resistance movement” (Hallward, 2004: 1), gave themselves the
right to be fully human. Through their actions, they defined their humanity as irreducible.
Such
a break with the two revolutions that preceded it, and extended ‘universal’
rights to white, adult, male owners of property has significant effect on the
practice of contemporary theory two centuries later, because the definition of
human rights, and therein humanity, prescribed by the contemporary hegemonic
ideology is an embodied oxymoron that does not reach the transcendence of the
Haitian Revolution’s claims regarding humanity. Such contradictions are
unavoidable when a history of selective universalism and omissions of that
which was unthinkable is their
celebrated origin.
Joseph
Jacotot (cited in Ranciere, 2010: 167) defines emancipation as the route out of
a scenario in which one has to be led because following one’s own sense of
direction would “lead you astray.” He specifies that the Enlightenment’s
rationale, in which elites have to guide those who are intrinsically less somehow,
fundamentally reproduces inequality. In contrast to this, emancipation means
starting with the premise of the “communism of intelligence, enacted in the
demonstration of the capacity of the ‘incapable’: the capacity of the ignorant
to learn by himself” (cited in Ranciere, 2010: 168). This is directly echoed in
the Haitian Revolution which was conceived and constituted by slaves who made a
new structure of knowledge – one not yet incorporated into the practice of contemporary
theory. This structure was founded on the starting assumption that “all humans
share an equal intelligence” (Nesbitt, 2008: 30) and therefore intrinsically
emancipatory.
This
essay has established that the Haitian Revolution is significant for the
practice of contemporary theory in its proposal of human rights not being
limited to a negative legal framework but expanding to include an embodied,
positive conception of human rights. Such an expansion depends on the
recognition of a silenced chapter of history and is a cautionary tale of the
long-term consequences of silencing. The Haitian Revolution therefore shifts
the genesis of contemporary human rights discourse, establishing both a conception
of humanity that is emancipatory and the importance of contemporary theory
being practiced with the awareness that the categories of unthinkable and
acceptable reality are and should be susceptible to change.
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