This brings us to the next elementary definition of communism: in contrast to socialism, communism refers to singular universality, to the direct link between the singular and the universal, bypassing particular determinations.
When Paul says that, from a Christian standpoint, “there are no men or women, no Jews or Greeks;’ he thereby claims that ethnic roots, national identities, etc., are not a category of truth. To put it in precise Kantian terms: when we reflect upon our ethnic roots, we engage in a private use of reason, constrained by contingent dogmatic presuppositions; that is, we act as “immature” individuals, not as free humans who dwell in the dimension of the universality of reason. (104)
In his vision of public space characterized by the unconstrained exercise of Reason, he invokes a dimension of emancipatory universality outside the confines of one’s social identity, of one’s position within the order of (social) being —precisely the dimension so crucially missing in Rorty.
This space of singular universality is what, within Christianity, appears as the “Holy Spirit” -the space of a collective of believers subtracted from the field of organic communities, or of particular lifeworlds (“neither Greeks nor Jews”) . Consequently, is Kant’s “Think freely, but obey!” not a new version of Christ’s “Render therefore untoCaesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” ? ” Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s” : in other words, respect and obey the “private” particular life —world of your community; “and unto God the things that are God’s”: in other words, participate in the universal space of the community of believers. The Paulinian collective of believers is a proto-model of the Kantian “world-civil – society;’ and the domain of the state itself is thus in its own way “private”: private in the precise Kantian sense of the “private use of Reason” in the State administrative and ideological apparatuses (106).
The ex-slaves of Haiti took the French revolutionary slogans more literally than did the French themselves: they ignored all the implicit qualifications which abounded in Enlightenment ideology (freedom-but only for rational “mature” subjects, not for the wild immature barbarians who first had to undergo a long process of education in order to deserve freedom and equality . . . ) . This led to sublime “communist” moments, like the one that occurred when French soldiers (sent by Napoleon to suppress the rebellion and restore slavery) approached the black army of (self-)liberated slaves. When they heard an initially indistinct murmur coming from the black crowd, the soldiers at first assumed it must be some kind of tribal war chant; but as they came closer, they realized that the Haitians were singing the Marseillaise, and they started to wonder out loud whether they were not fighting on the wrong side. Events such as these enact universality as a political category. In them, as Buck-Morss put it, “universal humanity is visible at the edges”:
rather than giving multiple, distinct cultures equal due, whereby people are recognized as part of humanity indirectly through the mediation of collective cultural identities, human universality emerges in the historical event at the point of rupture. It is in the discontinuities of history that people whose culture has been strained to the breaking point give expression to a humanity that goes beyond cultural limits. And it is in our emphatic identification with this raw, free, and vulnerable state, that we have a chance of understanding what they say. Common humanity exists in spite of culture and its differences. A person’s nonidentity with the collective allows for subterranean solidarities that have a chance of appealing to universal, moral sentiment, the source today of enthusiasm and hope. (112-113)
Buck-Morss provides here a precise argument against the postmodern poetry of diversity: the latter masks the underlying sameness of the brutal violence enacted by culturally diverse cultures and regimes: “Can we rest satisfied with the call for acknowledging ‘multiple modernities: with a politics of ‘diversity: or ‘multiversality,’ when in fact the inhumanities of these multiplicities are often strikingly the same?” But, one may ask, was the ex -slaves’ singing of the Marseillaise ultimately not an index of colonialist subordination-even in their self-liberation, did not the Blacks have to follow the emancipatory model of the colonial metropolis? And is this not similar to the idea that contemporary opponents of US politics should be singing the Stars and Stripes? Surely the true revolutionary act would have been for the colonizers to sing the songs of the colonized?
The mistake in this reproach is double. First, contrary to appearances, it is far more acceptable for the colonial power to see its own people singing others’ (the colonized’s) songs than songs which express their own identity — as a sign of tolerance and patronizing respect, colonizers love to learn and sing the songs of the colonized . . . Second, and much more importantly, the message of the Haitian soldiers’ Marseillaise was not “You see, even we, the primitive blacks, are able to assimilate ourselves to your high culture and politics, to imitate it as a model!” but a much more precise one: “in this battle, we are more French than you, the Frenchmen, are —we stand for the innermost consequences of your revolutionary ideology, the very consequences you were not able to assume.” Such a message cannot but be deeply unsettling for the colonizers— and it would certainly not be the message of those who, today, might sing the Stars and Stripes when confronting the US army.
(Although, as a thought experiment, if we imagine a situation in which this could be the message, there would be nothing a priori problematic in doing so.)
🙂 Žižek says the politically correct guilt felt by Western countries over its colonialist past, inhibits their ability to see things clearly
The French colonized Haiti, but the French Revolution also provided the ideological foundation for the rebellion which liberated the slaves and established an independent Haiti; the process of decolonization was set in motion when the colonized nations demanded for themselves the same rights that the West took for itself. In short, one should never forget that the West supplied the very standards by which it (and its critics) measures its own criminal past. We are dealing here with the dialectic of form and content: when colonial countries demand independence and enact a “return to roots;’ the very form of this return (that of an independent nation-state) is Western. In its very defeat (losing the colonies) , the West thus wins, by imposing its social form on the other (115).
… the point is simply that the British colonization of India created the conditions for the double liberation of India: from the constraints of its own tradition as well as from colonization itself (116).
The standard position adopted by the unconditional defenders of the rights of illegal immigrants is to concede that, at the level of state, the counter-arguments may well be “true” (ie., of course a country cannot accept an endless flow of immigrants; of course they compete in ways which threaten local jobs, and may also pose certain security risks), but their defense moves at a different level altogether, a level which has a direct link with demands of reality, the level of principled politics where we can unconditionally insist that “qui est ici est d’ici” (“those who are here are from here’) . But is this principled position not all too simple, allowing for the comfortable position of a beautiful soul?
I insist on my principles, and let the state deal with pragmatic constraints of reality . . . In this way, do we not avoid a crucial aspect of the political battle for the rights of immigrants: how to convince the workers opposing those immigrants that they are fighting the wrong battle; and how to propose a feasible form of alternative politics?
The “impossible” (an openness to immigrants) has to happen in reality-this would be a true political event.
But why should the immigrant not be satisfied with his normalization? Because, instead of asserting his identity, he has to adapt to his oppressor’s standards: he is accepted, but defacto in a secondary role. His oppressor’s discourse defines the terms of his identity. One should remember here the programmatic words of Stokely Carmichael (the founder of Black Power) :
“We have to fight for the right to invent the terms which will allow us to define ourselves and to define our relations to society, and we have to fight that these terms will be accepted. This is the first need of a free people, and this is also the first right refused by every oppressor.”
The problem is how, exactly, to do this. That is to say, how to resist the temptation to define oneself with reference to some mythical and totally external identity (“African roots”) , which, by way of cutting links with “white” culture, also deprives the oppressed of crucial intellectual tools for their struggle (namely, the egalitarian emancipatory tradition) as well as potential allies.
One should thus slightly correct Carmichael’s words: what the oppressors really fear is not some totally mythical self-definition with no links to white culture, but a self-definition which, by way of appropriating key elements of the “white” egalitarian-emancipatory tradition, redefines that very tradition, transforming it not so much in terms of what it says as in what it does not say —that is, obliterating the implicit qualifications which have defacto excluded Blacks from the egalitarian space. In other words, it is not enough to find new terms with which to define oneself outside of the dominant white tradition —one should go a step further and deprive the whites of the monopoly on defining their own tradition.
In this precise sense, the Haitian Revolution was “a defining moment in world history. The point is not to study the Haitian Revolution as an extension of the European revolutionary spirit, that is, to examine the significance of Europe (of the French Revolution) for the Haitian Revolution, but rather to assert the significance of the Haitian Revolution for Europe.
It is not only that one cannot understand Haiti without Europe —one cannot understand either the scope or the limitations of the European emancipation process without Haiti. Haiti was an exception from the very beginning, from its revolutionary struggle against slavery which ended in independence in January 1804: “Only in Haiti was the declaration of human freedom universally consistent. Only in Haiti was this declaration sustained at all costs, in direct opposition to the social order and economic logic of the day:’ For this reason, “there is no single event in the whole of modern history whose implications were more threatening to the dominant global order of things.” (Hallward Damning the Flood) 121