Fighting "Humanism" on Its Own Terms

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differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Volume 14, Number1, Spring 2003, pp. 53-73 (Article)

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Fighting “Humanism” on Its Own Terms

In the extended prose poem that would at once ensure Aimé In the extended prose poem that would at once ensure Aimé ICésaire’s reputation as a premier avant-garde poet and link him to the knotty term of negritude, there comes a moment when the speaker shifts from autobiographical reminiscence to hypothetical imaginings:

To go away.As there are hyena-men and panther-men, I would be a jew-manA Kaffir-manA Hindu-man-from-CalcuttaA Harlem-man-who-doesn’t-vote

the famine-man, the insult-man, the torture-man you can grab anytime, beat up, kill—no joke, kill—without having to account to anyone, without having to make excuses to anyonea jew-mana pogrom-man

Todd Holmberg

54 Fighting “Humanism” on Its Own Terms

a puppya beggar( Notebook 43) 1

Lists such as this abound in Notebook of a Return to the Native Land and in dCésaire’s later poetry as well: images in varying degrees of disparity are joined rhythmically, if not always logically, by the repetition of particular words within the sequence. But this list stands out not just because the logic uniting the terms appears more transparent than it often does in Césaire’s lyric poetry. What seem incongruent are the speaker’s elabo-ration throughout the Notebook of the idea of negritude (its Martinican particularities and its global reach) and his sense of identification with the disempowered generally, even those whose ancestry and historical experience put them outside negritude’s scope. At the same time, Césaire’s formulations and defenses of negritude tend to contain within them simi-larly conjoined appeals to black solidarity and human community, as when he writes:

[. . .] entrenched as I am in this unique raceyou still know my tyrannical loveyou know that it is not from hatred of other racesthat I demand a digger for this unique racethat what I wantis for universal hungerfor universal thirst (71)

Throughout his career, Césaire has put in relief the racism inherent in the claims to benevolence and rationality advanced by colonial apologists—“benefactors of mankind,” as he ironically calls them—who use universalizing humanist rhetoric to promote social hierarchiesand the violence necessary to maintain them (Notebook 53). Variously defined by its first proponents—Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, andLéon Damas—and by those who have since rejected it, negritude has most often been interpreted in recent years as a racial essentialism that retainsonce traditional Western classifications of people based on their imputed “racial” characteristics and merely inverts the positive and negative con-notations of those characteristics. If Senghor’s conception of negritude has generated the most criticism on these grounds, Césaire’s has generated the least; Césaire has always been more abstruse, less straightforward in representing black difference than Senghor. Some of his writings, how-ever, such as early essays published in his surrealist journal, Tropiques,

d i f f e r e n c e s 55

do privilege creativity, emotionality, and an assumed prehistoric frater-nity over rationality, science, and utilitarianism in a way reminiscent not only of Romanticism but also of some longstanding racialist stereotypes of European attributes putatively acquired through evolution, in contrast to more “primitive” African ones.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. has objected that “[w]hen we attempt to appropriate, by inversion, ‘race’ as a term for an essence—as did the negritude movement, for example (‘We feel, therefore we are,’ as Léopold Senghor argued of the African)—we yield too much: the basis of a shared humanity” (“Writing” 13). Given his characterization of negritude and his objection to it, we might wish Gates had considered the notion of negri-tude elaborated by Césaire—a negritude legitimated by universalizing humanist presuppositions not unlike Gates’s own invocation of “the basis of a shared humanity.” For despite all Césaire’s emphasis on Africa—the ancestry of descendents of the diaspora, their lost communal lifestyle, their rich artistic heritage—he appears to foreground blacks’ distinctions in precisely those areas—the familial, the social, the artistic, the emo-tional—within which he believes all human communities must distinguish themselves, however diversely. Because all of us live through history and are shaped by it, he implies, the distinctions we acquire over time are worthy of recognition within the broader sphere of human activity. Thus, it is not recognition of African greatness, or of the horrors of diaspora, or of Martinican suffering that emerges as the great desideratum of Césaire’s appeals. It is the recognition, through these references to shared human-ity, of those who must lay claim to negritude for the renewal of their senseof self-worth as human beings and for the awakening of those who would deny their humanity. As Césaire once put it:

If blacks were not a people, let us say, of conquered ones, in short, a wretched people, a humiliated people, etc., reverse History, make them a people of conquerors, I believe, for me, that there would be no negritude. [. . .] I feel solidarity with people only when there is a community of sufferings, a sort of denial of justice that shocks me profoundly. (“Entretien” xxi, my translation)

First published in French in 1950, the polemical Discourseon Colonialism is among Césaire’s clearest and most powerful contribu-tions to this complex of ideas about the human. To protest colonialism, he focuses on its language, the body of theory that has sanctioned and perpetuated its violence. He not only exposes its logical inconsisten-cies, both within the discourse and between theory and practice, he also


appropriates terms to which his opponents have frequently laid claim and mobilizes them on behalf of his own cause, transforming their meanings, their allegiances, as he transforms their use. Just as the European social critic might attempt to legitimate his racial or national chauvinism by cit-ing the authority of what he calls a universally applicable law, so Césaire offers his own “laws”:

[I]t is an implacable law that every decadent class finds itself turned into a receptacle into which there flow all the dirty waters of history; [. . .] it is a universal law that before it disap-pears, every class must first disgrace itself completely, on all fronts, and [. . .] it is with their heads buried in the dunghill that dying societies utter their swan songs. (64)

And another:

There is a law of progressive dehumanization in accordance with which henceforth on the agenda of the bourgeoisie there is—there can be—nothing but violence, corruption, and barba-rism. (68)

In the same way, he ascribes the qualities of “savagery” and “barbarism” to the apologists and beneficiaries of colonialism, giving the lie to their pre-sumption of a divide between the “civilized” Westerner and the “barbar-ian” peoples whom they dominate in the name of furthering civilization. Taking off his “cannibal’s hat” in ironic deference to the “cannibalistic hysteria [. . .] in the French National Assembly” (Discourse 48), Césaire reminds us of the line in his Notebook that follows the list with which this essay began: “but can one kill Remorse, perfect as the stupefied face of an English lady discovering a Hottentot skull in her soup-tureen?” (Notebook43). Bringing a charge of cannibalism against those who in the past have brought it against others so as to strengthen their case for “civilizing” them, Césaire reminds us that complacent politicians and citizens alike have fattened themselves and their economies on the labor and natural resources of the colonized. Césaire’s ironic acknowledgment of his own “cannibal’s hat” indicates his solidarity with those represented in colonial-ist discourse as savage and echoes another figurative use of “cannibalism” in the Notebook :

Because we hate youand your reason, we claim kinship


with dementia praecox with the flaming madnessof persistent cannibalism (49)

Whereas in the Discourse Césaire applies the term to those who have tra-ditionally used it to denigrate others, in this passage from the Notebookhe recuperates it, together with “madness,” as a figure for all that propo-nents of colonialism have deemed abhorrent or threatening, and therefore antithetical to themselves. This manipulation of the terms of identity and value, terms already made potent by nineteenth-century theorists of race, does not produce a coherent alternative identity for the colonized—such a pursuit is blocked by the very limitations of the oppressor’s language. But to Césaire’s mind, the poet may subvert his oppressor’s common sense by complicating and rendering less legible his privileged terms and the logi-cal underpinnings of their definitions. Five years before the publication of the Discourse, Césaire had said as much in Tropiques, though with more idealism than polemicism:

Pregnant with the world, the poet speaks.He speaks and his tongue returns language to its pure

state.By pure state, I mean not submitted to habit or thought, but

to the flow of the cosmos alone. The poet’s word, the primitive word [. . .] .

The poet’s phrase: the primitive phrase [. . .]. (“Poetry” 140)

We will return to the implications of this passage and itsprimitivism. Before that, let us consider further the terms that Césaire most insistently lifts from colonialist discourse and directs towards his own ends: “humanism” and “the human.” For Césaire, the “humanist” tradition of European social theory amounts to flagrant ethnic chauvin-ism: “At the end of formal humanism [. . .] there is Hitler” (Discourse 37). Taken together, his careful selections of quotations by colonial apologists underscore not only the extent to which many of France’s most renowned historians, ethnologists, and moralists were culturally elitist or xenopho-bic, but also the regularity with which they advocated their Eurocentrism or Aryanism in a language that, whether Christian or scientistic, bor-rowed from an Enlightenment discourse of universalist humanism: “Who is speaking? The western humanist, the ‘idealist’ philosopher. That his name is Renan is an accident” (37). Renan, Gobineau, Gourou, Mannoni, Tempels, Caillois—one writer after another formulates “the human” to


nationally or culturally partisan ends. It is, in fact, their failure to univer-salize the humanism they claim for their “race” alone that most disgusts Césaire. In an important passage, he repudiates

their insistence on the marginal, “separate” character of the non-whites, and [. . .] their barbaric repudiation [. . .] of Descartes’sstatement, the charter of universalism, that “reason [. . .] is found whole and entire in each man,” and that “where individuals of the same species are concerned, there may be degrees in respect of their accidental qualities, but not in respect of their forms, or natures.” (56)

This passage clearly indicates Césaire’s sympathy for what would evolve into Enlightenment humanism (with all its universalizing claims) and his disdain for what some self-professed humanists have made of it.2

(This is not to say that he is disposed to approve of Enlightenment sci-entism, as we shall see.) As Tzvetan Todorov has done in recent years, Césaire differentiates sharply between a universalist humanism andthe racialisms that masquerade as humanism.3 Given his rejection of aEurocentric humanism, his admiration of ethnography is not surprising, notwithstanding those “ethnographers who go in for metaphysics” like Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Roger Caillois (54).4 He esteems the ethnography of such anthropologists as Michel Leiris and Claude Lévi-Strauss for its relativizing of Western values and for its attack on the cultural hierarchy of evolutionism. Ideally, for him, ethnography illuminates differences that enlarge conventional notions of what constitutes the human.5

Unlike “cannibalism,” then (the ethical import of which is left untheorized by Césaire beyond its utility as a label transferable to colo-nialist practices), the terms of humanism are elaborated throughout the Discourse in order to overturn a racist “humanism” in the name of some-thing truly universal. Césaire distinguishes again and again between false humanisms and an ideal, inclusive one: “And that is the great thing I hold against pseudohumanism: that for too long it has diminished the rights of man, that its concept of those rights has been—and still is—narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist” (37).6 Indeed, Césaire’s belief in “humanism” and “universalism” challenges the multiculturalist propensity to hold these terms theoreti-cally and politically suspect. In fact, it is precisely their potential to effect political and moral good that Césaire is asserting, once their corrupted forms have been exposed and cleared away. This position puts him (like Todorov) at odds with critics who argue that the very universalist human-


ism conceived by Descartes and later developed by such Enlightenment theorists as Montesquieu and Rousseau is irreparably Eurocentric and incapable of accommodating cultural values alien to those intrinsic to its formation.

Throughout his discussion, Césaire deflects attention awayfrom the intentions of individual critics and towards their complicitywithin a historical system rife with reductive and dehumanizing concep-tual categories. This mode of criticism recalls his treatment of identity throughout the Notebook as inextricably bound to historical experience, both one’s own experience (such as the speaker’s life in Martinique) and that of the people who constitute the larger communities with which one identifies oneself (such as the speaker’s African ancestors and blacksworldwide). In this mode, Césaire reveals how very far he is from being a racial essentialist; it is precisely the conceptions of “race,” of African barbarism and black inferiority, that he shows to be historically generated fictions that may be fought and refashioned on their own terms. He argues with critics and scientists not as unique thinkers but rather as echoes of each other, agents of the same system of ideas. Thus, the philosophy of Caillois, “a thinker who, while claiming to be dedicated to rigorous logic, sacrifices so willingly to prejudice and wallows so voluptuously in clichés,” is insignificant in itself. It is worth careful rebuttal, Césaire argues, because it is representative “of the state of mind of the Western petty bourgeoisie,” which “at the very time when it most often mouths the word [. . .] has never been further from being able to live a true human-ism” (Discourse 73). Césaire shows how a triumphant cultural discourse that presents itself in humanist terms limits its adherents’ ability to per-ceive rightly, which is to say, to see inhumanity for what it is. Instead of seeing exploitation and suffering in themselves, these intellectuals focus on a thick web of ideas in which such human realities are caught: “[T]he striking thing they all have in common is the persistent bourgeois attempt to reduce the most human problems to comfortable, hollow notions: the idea of the dependency complex in Mannoni, the ontological idea in the Rev. Tempels, the idea of ‘tropicality’ in Gourou” (62).

And this takes us back to Césaire’s primitivism. As often and as insistently as Césaire distinguishes between an authentic, universally applicable humanism on the one hand and its debased forms on the other, so does he also distinguish between a putative reality of human experi-ence and a complex of ideas that obscures this reality. By “primitivism” I refer not simply or primarily to an admiration of nonliterate cultures, though Césaire certainly does not hesitate to idealize premodern forms of


social organization. I refer rather to the related tendency of modernists in the first half of the century to try to “plumb the depths,” as Césaire would later describe it, or to expose an unknown and largely unknowable mode of natural or “primitive” being beneath the historically specific conven-tions that constitute the “surface” of culture (“Interview” 84).7 This, for Césaire as for many of his avant-garde contemporaries, was the great task to be attempted: “I felt that beneath the social being would be found a profound being, over whom all sorts of ancestral layers and alluviums had been deposited” (84). Césaire’s many volcanic metaphors in the Note-book, inspired by the geographical specificity of Martinique, exemplify this modernist fascination with surfaces and underlying depths. His prose, too, is replete with assertions that knowledge derived from Western epis-temological conventions is necessarily incomplete, misleading, and even malignant when allowed to displace or stand in for “the real”:

Science offers [man] a perspective on the world. But a summary one. One that is superficial.

Physics classifies and explains, but the essence of things eludes it. The natural sciences classify, but the quid propriumof things eludes them.

As for mathematics, what eludes its abstract and logical activity is the real.

In short, scientific knowledge enumerates, measures, clas-sifies and kills. [. . .]

Man has sacrificed everything to acquire it: desires, fears, feelings and psychological complexes. (“Poetry” 134)

Césaire and many of his fellow surrealists made capitalism a primary focus of their critique of Western cultural conventions. In the Discourse, Césaire writes that he has no illusions about the possibility of making “a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat the past” (52). Still, he writes nos-talgically of what he alternately calls “the non-European civilizations” and “our old societies”:

They were societies that were not only ante-capitalist, as has been said, but also anti-capitalist .

They were democratic societies, always.They were cooperative societies, fraternal societies. [. . .]They were the fact, they did not pretend to be the idea [. . .].

They were content to be. (44)


Like his description of the poet as able to return language to a pure and primitive state, this passage brings together both senses of primitivism asdefined above. On the one hand, there is an inclination to glorify a distant culture seen as less advanced and hence closer to nature; on the other hand, there is a sharp distinction assumed between a base of authen-tic human experience and a superfluity of ideas that has accumulated gradually throughout history. As when he criticizes Mannoni, Tempels, Gourou, and the rest, Césaire here denounces the subordination of “being” to uncritically received “ideas.”

In persistently alluding to what he takes to be beyond particular cultures, particular languages, to what in humans and other elements of nature transcends the ephemera that restrict and distort “natural” being, Césaire denaturalizes racist and culturally elitist concepts and practices constructed in colonialist discourse as inevitable. This he achieves by appealing to a supracultural state of commonality and interconnected-ness that, in his view, transcends cultural particularities, including, and especially, the fictive idealism of the West.

If Césaire opposes Eurocentric humanism by recourse to the modernist primitivist concept that there exist fundamental structures or modes of being beyond the fictions of culture, however elusive and incomprehensible they may remain to human beings, this understand-ing of culture and the human articulated primarily in the first half of the century operates at a distance from that in circulation among literary critics since the advent of poststructuralism. The modernists’ recurrent figuration of known surfaces and unknown but definitive depths haslargely disappeared from cultural criticism and experimental literature, which together have transformed the earlier skepticism about our ability to perceive rightly into a skepticism that there is anything “out there” that is any less fictive than the representations with which we are familiar. Since Derrida’s spectacular suggestion in Of Grammatology that “there isyno outside-text,” it has been difficult to interpret the notion of an essence beyond or beneath culture as anything other than yet another idea based in historically determined discursive conventions (158). This sense of what is beyond, outside, or underneath the outgrowths of culture, essential to the historical avant-garde’s conception of social upheaval, loses its privi-leged status in the second half of the twentieth century, but does not, as we shall see, lose all efficacy.

The frequency with which numerous cultural critics todaymobilize categories of the human and the universal in a positive sense


indicates the extent to which the antihumanist developments of post-structuralism and multiculturalism (which is to say, a politics of identity and cultural difference) coexist uneasily with humanisms articulated in varying degrees of explicitness. The relationships among these currents of thought are difficult to negotiate, particularly because of the rhetoric of radical contingency that their representatives often share and that, perhaps more than any other common feature, could be said to mark them as “postmodern.” Ross Posnock has noted the rejection of identity-based politics in the work of Todorov, Edward Said, and Kwame Anthony Appiah, among others, a tendency that one might attribute to these critics’ resistance to cultural relativism on the subject of human suffering (323). Whatever sympathy they show for the multiculturalist and, essentially, historicist commitment to respect cultural particularities not one’s own, they still assume, as Césaire does, that human beings are morally obligated to act in accord with their knowledge of each other’s fundamental poten-tial for suffering. The potential for suffering, then, delimits with relative clarity the moral obligation to respect cultural particularities. Thus, for them, the universalist “politics of equal dignity” that Charles Taylor has traced back to particular texts by Kant and Rousseau wins out when in conflict with the anti-universalist (hence antihumanist) “politics of differ-ence” associated with multiculturalism (Taylor 38). Appiah, for instance, has proposed that “maybe [. . .] we can recover within postmodernism the postcolonial writers’ humanism—the concern for human suffering [. . .] while still rejecting the master narratives of modernism” (155). He approves of the postcolonial novelist’s appeal to an “ethical universal” when accompanied by a rejection of the modernist imputation of universal aesthetic criteria to non-Western works such that their value is “seen as legitimated by culture- and history-transcending standards” (148). And Todorov has countered the “excessive relativism” of recent years by argu-ing that “we are not only separated by cultural differences; we are also united by a common human identity” (“‘Race’” 374).

Todorov’s debate with Gates in “Race,” Writing, and Differenceindicates how central to contemporary cultural criticism the definitional subtleties of “universalism” and “humanism” have been. Notwithstand-ing Gates’s criticism of negritude in the name of an unspecified “basis of a shared humanity” that, to his mind, the negritude movement denied, Todorov criticizes Gates’s position on the grounds that Gates’s identity politics are not sufficiently universalist. Responding to the essays in the volume, Todorov questions whether some contributors, including Gates,


might not be “postulating the existence [. . .] of a thing” behind the word “race,” despite their ostensible consensus that “race” itself does not exist (371). For instance, it troubles Todorov that Gates would assert, “I now believe that we must turn to the black tradition itself to develop theories of criticism indigenous to our literatures” (“Writing” 13). For Todorov, this amounts to saying “that the content of a thought depends on the color of the thinker’s skin”(376); in other words, it is not as different from post-Enlightenment racial discourse as it purports to be.8 On the one hand, there is no doubt that Gates is defending the marginalized, rather than defending their marginalization as earlier racial theorists had done. On the other hand, Todorov claims, Gates bases his defense in an “ideology of cultural difference” that shares with post-Enlightenment racial theories such as those of Gobineau, Taine, Renan, and Le Bon a rejection of the “universalist and egalitarian” ideology of the Enlightenment (373). This ideology Todorov considers antithetical to racism, whereas to Gates it is itself a form of racism, because it represents certain culturally specific val-ues as universally valid and superior to others that conflict with it. In his concluding essay, “Talkin’ That Talk,” Gates writes, “To adopt Todorov’s ideology of egalitarianism and universalism is to allow our discourse to be incorporated into the discourse of Europe and then to be naturalized (seemingly) and colonized.” Therefore, he contends, “we must attack the racism of egalitarianism and universalism in as many languages as we can utter” (408–09). In other words, Gates addresses Todorov’s criticism not so much by clarifying the relationship between his own universalist and particularist claims as by exposing what he takes to be the implicit Eurocentrism (i.e., insufficient universalism!) of Todorov’s method.

We have seen that proponents of a multiculturalist ethics (whichis to say, an ethics based in a “politics of difference”) sometimes seem to take for granted a notion of the human not altogether dissimilar to that assumedby those seeking to recuperate humanism, as Gates does when he refers to “a shared basis of humanity,” the validity of which seems to him so obvious that he does not explain or justify what this basis might be. So the relation-ship of multiculturalism to poststructuralist theorizations of ethics is not always clear-cut. In Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, a recent collabo-y, a recent collabo-yration by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Žižek’s assertion that Derrida’s “hyper-self-reflective approach [. . .] denounces the questionof ‘how things really are’” (232) prompts Butler to remind us of Derrida’s continual questioning of “truth” and to speculate on its implications for post-humanism. She writes, “If the ‘truth’ of how things are must be presented


in some way—if truth, indeed, never appears outside a presentation—then it seems to follow that there is no way to dissociate truth from the rhetoricity that makes it possible” (“Dynamic” 278). Furthermore, she argues,

To make this claim is not to say that there is no truth, [. . .] but only that we are fundamentally dependent on language to say and understand what is true, and that the truth of what is said (or represented in any number of ways) is not separable from the saying. [. . .] There are conditions of discourse under which certain concepts emerge, and their capacity for iteration acrosscontexts is itself the condition for an affirmative reinscrip-tion. Thus, we can ask: what can the “human” mean within a theory that is ostensibly anti-humanist? Indeed, we can—and must—ask: what can the human mean within post-humanism? (278–79)

Unfortunately, Butler does not attempt to answer her own intriguingquestions about antihumanism and posthumanism, and we are left to contend with them on our own. Clearly, “post-humanism” for Butler is what comes after the dissolution of consensus not only on what constitutes the “human” but, more decisively, on what constitutes “truth” per se.9 Shefollows Gayatri Spivak in disputing the widespread assumption among cultural studies critics that one must (or even could) avoid making uni-versalist pronouncements in the interests of one’s own ethical agenda.10

Nevertheless, she appears to conceive of this process of vacillation between the claiming of the universal and the particular as a continually shifting and contingent historical process, and not one founded on realities that transcend that process. Thus, her concession that “[t]his is not to say that there is no truth” would seem to necessitate a recodification of “truth” such that the word’s inherent claim to static transcendence would be separated off from the critic’s use of the term and replaced with multiple continu-ally transformative and transformable “truths” (“Dynamic” 279). In that case, “truth” would be the critic’s descriptive term for ideas or values on which particular groups or communities had reached a consensus, and which they had deemed transcendent of historical particularities. This ytakes as given that there are no truths that actually transcend culture, and therefore implies the presence, at least the possible presence, of a critical outsider capable of approaching with skepticism the particular “truth” that the consenting community does not question. The hypothetical presence of the outsider is consistent with Butler’s implication that the production and disruption of consensus, like that of democracy, is a continual, unre-


alizable process, presumably because no claim to universal applicability can ever be all-inclusive, as this would mean being inclusive of values that contradict the values on which the claim is based.

It goes without saying that the critical outsider implied inButler’s notion of consensus is hardly, like Césaire’s poet, outside all rep-resentation in a “pure” and “primitive” place. Such a notion presupposes the very foundational stasis that Derrida’s work has put in doubt:

The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a play based on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which itself is beyond the reach of play. [. . .] It could be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated an invariable presence [. . .]. (Derrida, “Structure” 279)

In keeping with Derrida’s reading, Butler’s essays on universality present language as something outside of which the human being can never hope to be. In her words, “universality is not speakable outside of a cultural language, but its articulation does not imply that an adequate language is available. It means only that when we speak its name, we do not escape our language, although we can—and must—push the limits” (“Restaging” 41). Hence, the activism inherent in the reinscription of terms, activism the like of which we saw in Césaire’s reinscriptions of “humanism,” “can-nibalism,” “madness,” and so forth, becomes all the more urgent. Without recourse to an ideal sphere impervious to enculturation, all that is left to the critical activist is the possibility of claiming or reclaiming terms and thereby transforming not only the discursive conventions of our opponents but also, by this means, the (apparent) grounds for consensus.

In the absence of transcendent truths that we have only to discover and acknowledge, what compels consensus, Butler argues, is translation:

[T]here is no cultural consensus on an international level about what ought and ought not to be a ctlaim to universality, who may make it, and what form it ought to take. Thus, for the claim to work, for it to compel consensus, and for the claim, perfor-matively, to enact the very universality it enunciates, it must undergo a set of translations into the various rhetorical and cultural contexts in which the meaning and force of universal claims are made. [. . .] Without translation, the very concept of


universality cannot cross the linguistic borders it claims, in prin-ciple, to be able to cross. Or we might put it another way: without translation, the only way the assertion of universality can cross a border is through a colonial and expansionist logic. (35)

But doesn’t the possibility of translation as Butler conceives of it depend on a common ground? And if there is no common ground, how might one faction negotiate with the other without one of the two imposing its “truth” on the other? Extrapolating from her related discussion of Spivak’s theory of cultural translation, Butler’s response to this would seem to be that, for the translator confronting the dispossessed, “[t]here is nowhere else to stand” but on the “line between the speakable and the unspeakable.” The best that the translator can do, therefore, is to keep always in mind that “there is no ‘ground’ there,” and to “keep as one’s point of reference the dispossessed and the unspeakable, and to move with caution as one tries to make use of power and discourse in ways that do not renaturalize the political vernacular of the state” (“Competing” 178). Here again, Butler does not theorize the status of the translator’s values in relation to those she is compelled—by her own values—to keep as her “point of reference.” What happens when they conflict? Tread lightly? And are the interests and practices of “the state” always and necessarily at odds with those of the disempowered? Still, what we can discern from these passages is Butler’s sympathy with a “politics of difference” even as she refutes the position widely held by multiculturalists that universalizing claims are theoreti-cally indefensible. As we have seen, Butler concurs with the poststructural-ist assumption intrinsic to these critics’ relativist critique of universalism, that there is no transcendent basis on which to base universalist claims; however, following Derrida and Spivak, she persuasively argues that, even though there is no ground, one must nonetheless ground one’s claims in order to make them at all. Hence, she argues,

I do believe that, contra Žižek, the kinds of translations that are needed politically involve an active engagement with forms of multiculturalism, and that it would be a mistake to reduce the politics of multiculturalism to the politics of particularity. It is better understood, I believe, as a politics of translation in the service of adjudicating and composing a movement of compet-ing and overlapping universalisms. (168–69)

We shall now turn to another appeal, another protest against racism as a discourse that makes imaginable and practicable the atrocities


committed in its name or, more often, in the service of a “humanism” that is not its name. “[T]here’s no racism without a language,” Derrida asserts in “Racism’s Last Word,” which he wrote in 1983 for the catalog of the trav-eling exhibition “Art contre/against Apartheid.”11 He continues: “The point is not that acts of racial violence are only words but rather that they have to have a word” (“Racism’s Last Word” 331). Again he exposes the fictive nature of the idea of “essence,” this time with respect to “apartheid,” the essence of separation or being apart:

By isolating being apart in some sort of essence or hypostasis, the word corrupts it into a quasi-ontological segregation. At every point, like all racisms, it tends to pass segregation off as natural—and as the very law of the origin. Such is the monstros-ity of this political idiom. (331)

And yet, even in the absence of essence, the human is pre-cisely what Derrida turns to in denaturalizing this racism: “Even though it offers the excuse of blood, color, birth—or, rather, because it uses this naturalist and sometimes creationist discourse—racism always betrays the perversion of a man, the ‘talking animal’” (331). In concluding this sen-tence with the apposition of “man” and “talking animal,” Derrida unites human beings in their capacity for speech and, by extension, for sense-making. But there is more to be said about this, for without a notion of what constitutes a proper conception of man, a conception not perverted, not monstrous, not a “sinister swelling on the body of the world,” how can one criticize racism at all, particularly in terms of its perversity or its monstrosity (333)? Derrida’s altogether different sense of the word “mon-strosity” (monstruosité) elsewhere, in his famous essay on the discourse of the human sciences, appropriately enough, is revelatory with respect to this usage. In concluding “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Derrida delineates “two interpretations of interpreta-tion,” of which the first “seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign,” while

the other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirmsplay and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology—in other words, throughout his entire history—has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play. (292)


Anticipating Spivak’s theory of cultural translation and Butler’s response to it, Derrida calls on us to “try to conceive of the common ground” of these two interpretations, even though they are “absolutely irreconcilable” (293). He appeals for this “conception”

with a glance toward those who, in a society from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away when faced by the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity. (293)

Given the logic of this passage, one could well expect Derrida to use “monstrosity” in “Racism’s Last Word” to refer to whatever as yet unrec-ognizable idea of the human might still be born, an idea that carries with it none of the old idea’s exclusionary and exclusivist connotations with regard to (“racial” as well as sexual) physicality. But the “monstrosity” positively coded in “Structure, Sign, and Play” as potentiality beyond con-vention, however horrifyingly strange it may at first appear to his society and even to himself, is clearly not the “monstrosity” that already exists, is already immediately recognizable, and that signifies what Derrida does not hesitate to condemn in “Racism’s Last Word.” The latter “monstrosity,” in fact, appears not to be a monstrosity at all in the former sense, for hav-ing declared it “like all racisms” in that “it tends to pass segregation off as natural,” Derrida attributes its monstrosity to just this signifying operation that he has called typical of all racisms. How to explain this difference, given the prominence the word is given in both contexts?

The “monstrosity” of apartheid is like the “cannibalistic hys-teria” of the French National Assembly in the Discourse on Colonialism, and the “racism of egalitarianism and universalism” that Gates ascribes to Todorov, and those discursively constituted “truths” that Butler sees forever competing with each other and being transformed in the process. All are violators of an established usage, all subvert the dominant mean-ing or application of a term either by signifying the opposite meaning to the one expected (e.g., “racism of egalitarianism”; “truths” that do not transcend discourse) or by signifying a familiar meaning but applying it to people or practices the justifying rhetoric for which precludes this application (e.g., the “monstrosity” of a political idiom that represents itself as based in God-given nature; the “cannibalistic hysteria” of the self-proclaimed rational and benevolent representatives of the highest form of civilization).12


Derrida’s argument may be read as dispensing with one notion of universality—the naturalness of segregation—through the performa-tive calling-into-being of another universality, namely, the inhumanity of racism. An appeal to the “ethical universal” of shared human rights may be heard throughout “Racism’s Last Word.” The traveling art exhi-bition, this “satellite of humanity,” as Derrida calls it more than once, becomes a figure for the continual process of bearing witness, remind-ing us of a past system of thought and rule and generating a consensus about the meaning of that system, imploring, “Do not forget apartheid, save humanity from this evil” (332). Again, what unites this humanity? Answering this question is not Derrida’s concern. Instead, he appeals to us in the name of this ethical universal of shared human rights to remember apartheid, the realities of apartheid—“daily suffering, oppression, poverty, violence, torture inflicted by an arrogant white minority” (332)—and also to conceive “another mode of thinking,” for “the customary discourse on man, humanism and human rights, has encountered its effective and as yet unthought limit, the limit of the whole system in which it acquires meaning” (336, 337). That Derrida sees the proof of this in the failure of the Western nations to react to apartheid—already pronounced a “crime against humanity”—with the urgency its victims deserve, affords stillanother instance of a twentieth-century writer repudiating “humanism” in the name of “humanity.”

Like Césaire, then, Derrida seeks a state of being and thinkingbeyond the known: “It is necessary to appeal unconditionally to the future of another law and another force lying beyond the totality of this present” d(337, my emphasis). But where Césaire, like so many modernists in the first half of the century, aspires to get beyond cultural discourse, Derrida hopes to get beyond the present limitations of cultural discourse to newly transformed ones. Where Césaire dreams of stripping away the extraneous matter of “civilization,” which fellow surrealist and ethnographer Michel Leiris once compared to “the thin greenish layer—the living magma and the odd detritus—that forms on the surface of calm water and sometimes solidifies into a crust, until an eddy comes to break it up,” Derrida dreams of translating one language into another (Leiris 19). Another way of put-ting this is that Césaire assumes in primitivist fashion a divide and even a degree of antagonism between a superficial and ephemeral culture and a deeper reality of the human invulnerable to cultural contingencies. For Derrida, on the other hand, there is no such divide; “the human” is neces-sarily constituted in and through cultural codes. And yet, as we have also observed, Césaire’s “nostalgia for origins” coexists in the Discourse on


Colonialism and the Notebook of a Return to the Native Land with a discur-dsive activism that to some extent anticipates poststructuralism’s methods of subverting truth claims constructed as natural and essential.

Let us close with two images with which Derrida and Césaire close essays of their own. Early on in “Racism’s Last Word,” Derrida had contended that in the exhibition “Art contre/against Apartheid,”

pictural, sculptural idioms will be crossing, but they will be attempting to speak the other’s language without renouncing their own. And in order to effect this translation, their common reference henceforth makes an appeal to a language that cannot be found, a language at once very old, older than Europe, but for that very reason to be invented once more. (333)

What language is this, we might ask? Derrida’s closing words give us an idea. The silence of the paintings in the exhibition is “just,” he argues, for

[a] discourse would [. . .] let itself be reappropriated again.This silence calls out unconditionally; it keeps watch on that which is not, on that which is not yet, and on the chance of still remembering some faithful day. (338)

Is the promise of the artworks’ silent resistance to the compul-sory codes of representation the same as the promise Césaire perceives in the source of poetry? Césaire declares, “Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge” (“Poetry” 134). Furthermore, he says, “[t]he music of poetry cannot be external. The only acceptable poetry comes from somewhere beyond sound” (146). This turn from discourse in the moment of greatest urgency, this turning away by two writers who have devoted themselves above all to revolutionizing the language knownto them, reminds us of how very far each remains from the ideal beyond that beckons to him.

mara de gennaro is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She has published an article on Georges Bataille and surrealist primitivism in European Avant-Garde: New Perspectives, and her essay “What Remains of Jean Genet?” will appear in The Yale Journal of Criticism in spring 2003. She is currently completing her dissertation, “Outside of Fiction: Modernist Primitivism, ‘Race,’ and the Humanist Tradition.”


1 Though the Cahier d’un retour aupays natal was first published in1939, two subsequent revisions of the poem were published in 1947 and 1956; the Notebook quoted here is a translation of the now official 1956 version.

2 Where Césaire does depart from this humanism is in his refusal to raise up the human as supremeover and against other naturalelements; he is entirely consis-tent in refusing humankind’s claims to dominance within thenatural universe. A central motif of his lyric poetry, especially thesurrealist poetry of the 1940s, is the merging of the human withthe vegetal in particular, but also with the bestial and insec-toid—horses, dogs, birds, centi-pedes—as well as with inanimate natural imagery including water, sun, sky, fire, and so forth.

3 See Todorov’s On Human Diver-sity. He also discusses these ideas y. He also discusses these ideas ybriefly in “‘Race,’ Writing, and Culture” 372–74.

4 For Césaire’s discussion of Lévy-Bruhl’s theory of primitive men-tality and of Caillois’s reliance on it, see Discourse 68–73. As Césairenotes, Lévy-Bruhl himself laterrejected this theory.

5 Note that this clearly distin-guishes his position from that of late-twentieth-century poststruc-turalists for whom a mere expan-sion of humanism to includethose formerly excluded from it is inadequate. I will discuss the latter, “posthumanist” position in greater detail shortly.

6 Césaire does not always pre-cede his references to this falsehumanism with a qualifier thatidentifies it as such, as when he writes of “formal humanism” or “pseudo-humanism.”

7 Of course, “primitivism,” like “humanism” and “universalism,” carries numerous meanings, andwhen Césaire refers pejorativelyto social scientists’ “views on ‘primitivism,’” he presumably has in mind a very different sense of primitivism as a discourse that denigrates the intellectual and artistic abilities of colonizedpeoples. See Discourse 56.

8 Todorov dates the heyday of racialism, or theories of race,from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. See “‘Race’” 372.

9 More generally, “posthumanism” may be defined as a discourse that understands “the human”to be a continually shifting ideaarising out of historically contin-gent discursive norms rather thanout of any stable and transcendent truth about the human. Thus, itspurpose is “not to broaden thecategory of the human to includepreviously abjected and excluded others, but to engage in a moreradical interrogation of the pro-cess by which the human comes tomean in the production of cultural difference” (Fuss 2).

10 Spivak has argued that “univer-salisation, finalisation, is an irreducible moment in any discourse.” See Spivak 11.

11 Translation of “Le dernier mot du racisme.” The discussion that follows responds to the slightly modified version Derrida pub-lished two years later.

12 Of course, Derrida challenges the legitimating terms of apartheid more straightforwardly as well—“so-called state of law,” “would-be original hierarchy”—in a way reminiscent of Césaire’s “formal humanism,” “pseudo-humanism,” and so forth. But the prefixes and qualifiers that explicitly mark these usages as ironic and opposi-tional appear only sometimes.

Notes


Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern.” In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. 137–57.

Butler, Judith. “Competing Universalities.” Butler, Laclau, and Žižek 136–81.

. “Dynamic Conclusions.” Butler, Laclau, and Žižek 263–80.

. “Restaging the Universal.” Butler, Laclau, and Žižek 11–43.

Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso, 2000.

Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. 1972. Trans. Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review, 2000.

. “Entretien avec Aimé Césaire par Jacqueline Leiner.” Tropiques 1941–1945: Collection complète. Vol. 1. Paris: Jean-Michel Place, 1978. v–xxiv.

. “An Interview with Aimé Césaire, conducted by René Depestre.” Trans. Maro Riofrancos. Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism 79–94.

. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. In Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry.y. yTrans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983. 32–85.

. “Poetry and Knowledge.” Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Carib-bean. Trans. Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski. London: Verso, 1996. 134–46. Trans. of “Poésie et connaissance.” Tropiques 12 (1945): 157–69.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. 1974. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Corrected y. 1974. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Corrected yed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.

. “Racism’s Last Word.” Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Gates, “Race,” Writing, and Dif-ference 329–38.

. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978. 278–93.

Fuss, Diana. Introduction. Human, All Too Human. Ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1996. 1–7.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes.” Introduction. Gates, “Race,” Writing, and Difference 1–20.

. “Talkin’ That Talk.” Gates, “Race,” Writing, and Difference 402–09.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ed. “Race,” Writing, and Difference. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985.

Leiris, Michel. “Civilization.” 1929. Brisées. Trans. Lydia Davis. San Francisco: North Point, 1989.

Posnock, Ross. “How It Feels to Be a Problem: Du Bois, Fanon, and the ‘Impossible Life’ of the Black Intellectual.” Critical Inquiry 23.2 (1997): 323–49.y

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. Ed. Sarah Harasym. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Taylor, Charles. “The Politics of Recognition.” Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition. Ed. Amy Gutmann. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994. 25–73.

Works Cited


Todorov, Tzvetan. On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1993.

. “‘Race,’ Writing, and Culture.” Trans. Loulou Mack. Gates, “Race,” Writing, and Difference 370–80.

Žižek, Slavoj. “Da Capo senza Fine“Da Capo senza Fine.” Butler, Laclau, and Žižek 213–62.

Fighting "Humanism" on Its Own Terms

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