History and Catastrophe

Sibylle Fischer

It is in the days after the 12 January earthquake that destroyed Port-au-Prince that I am fin-
ishing this essay. I cannot allow my mind to wander. I do not dare to imagine what happened
to the people who lived in those cinderblock houses, perched high up the hillsides. Can we
wrest universal freedom out of the history of catastrophes? The question becomes almost
impossible to contemplate in the face of universal destruction and dead bodies lined up on
the sidewalk. The stakes have been raised yet again.
These reflections are dedicated to the memory of Destimare Pierre Isnel (aka Louko), one
of the sculptors in Port-au-Prince’s Grand Rue neighborhood. Here are his words: “There are
no limits here, there are so many things here. No limits to what I can do. Anything you find—
just give it to me. Everything they throw in the garbage, I use it. This is the thing you see: old
stuff. And then the transformation of objects into new things.” Once asked why he became
an artist, he said, “I am just saying I exist.” Louko died on 12 January 2010.1

Shifting Academic Grounds

When Susan Buck-Morss’s essay “Hegel and Haiti” came out in 2000 I was laboring obscurely
on a book manuscript on the Haitian Revolution and cultures of slavery that was raising more
eyebrows than interest among colleagues and students. Acquisition editors had shown little

1 Louko, interview with author, 18 November 2008. The Grand Rue artists work with the trash that litters the streets of Port-
au-Prince (see http://www.atis-rezistans.com). Louko was trained as a car mechanic and joined the Grand Rue workshop
in 2005. The question about why he became an artist was put to him at a panel discussion at the Ghetto Biennale in Port-
au-Prince, 18 December 2009.

small axe 33 • November 2010 • DOI 10.1215/07990537-2010-032 © Small Axe, Inc.

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 164  |  History and Catastrophe

Louko at work in the Grand Rue workshop, November 2008. Photographs by Daniel Morel.

enthusiasm for a project of uncertain disciplinarity that featured in its title a small Caribbean
state conventionally tagged as “the poorest country in the hemisphere.” Haiti, it seemed, was
just too much of a specialist interest: a limited kind of project. Why are you doing this? people
would ask. Are you Haitian?
“Hegel and Haiti” exploded like a bomb. What if the most famous piece of philosophi-
cal writing about liberation and the protracted advent of liberty—G. W. F. Hegel’s dialectic
of master and slave in the Phenomenology—was modeled on an insurgency of the enslaved
in a faraway colony of France? Buck-Morss had dug up some rather compelling pieces of
evidence. All of a sudden, Europe and the Caribbean seemed to be awfully close, even to
scholars who knew little about the slaveholding Atlantic, and the high-minded territory of
philosophical discourse seemed awfully provincial. “Hegel and Haiti” ignited a debate among
historians, social scientists, literary scholars, and theorists of varying specializations. The
ground had shifted.
The debate is far from over. At a recent workshop organized by the well-known historian
of the revolution in France, Jeremy Popkin, about the insurrection in Saint-Domingue, there
was a remarkable exchange.2 In his opening remarks, Popkin suggested that after almost two
centuries of silence about Haiti and the insurgency that led to its founding, things have finally
changed in recent years. Not only is Haiti now routinely included in accounts of revolutionary
age, but, more troubling for conventional wisdom, it has come to constitute the ground on
which questions are raised about the emancipatory nature of those Western revolutions that
took place in the name of liberty but had little to say about racial slavery, with some scholars
now declaring the Haitian Revolution the most universalist, radical, and democratic revolution
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although Popkin did not himself endorse such

2 Jeremy Popkin, “Stories of Saint-Domingue, Stories of Haiti: Representing the Haitian Revolution, 1789–2009,” at the Wil-
liam Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies, Los Angeles, 30–31
October 2009.

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 33 • November 2010 • Sibylle Fischer  |  165

extremes of enthusiasm, his remarks were countered by David Geggus, also a historian and
one of the finest scholars in the field of slave insurgency and the Haitian Revolution: Why
should an antislavery revolution be included under the heading of democratic revolutions when
the resulting state was notoriously militaristic and autocratic? Why should it be enlisted as a
universalistic revolution when the universalist aspirations ended at the borders, and even the
antislavery nature of the insurgency was only slowly worked out in the process of long and
bloody battles? Was this not just a jingoistic form of presentism?
The irony is, of course, that refusing a facile inclusiveness is no less presentist than
celebrating it, since both recognize certain narratives whose value is determined by con-
temporary political desires, hegemonic and otherwise. Unless we revise our core concepts,
we will continue to bounce back and forth between positivistically ratified particularisms and
a mawkishly multiculturalist inclusionism. It is one of the great merits of Buck-Morss’s new
essay “Universal History” to make that point absolutely clear: “Universal history engages in a
double liberation, of the historical phenomena and of our own imagination.”3 Subsuming the
slave insurgency under existing headings of emancipatory narratives does not help. There is an
interesting and perhaps surprising convergence here with David Scott’s Conscripts of Moder-
nity, which traces the transformation of C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins from the heroic
epic of the 1938 edition to tragedy in the second edition of 1962.4 Unlike Buck-Morss, who
passionately holds on to a vision of history—however fragmented—as a realization of universal
freedom, Scott interrogates the viability of emancipatory narratives in the postcolonial era.
Clearly it remains a matter of debate how and in what terms the events of the slave revo-
lution should be accounted for and whether a narrative of liberation, in particular, is useful.
Within the Caribbean, of course, there is a long and substantial engagement with the events in

3 Susan Buck-Morss, “Universal History,” in Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,
2009), 149. Buck-Morss’s earlier essay “Hegel and Haiti” comprises part 1 of the book, “Universal History” part 2, each
with an introduction. References to either essay hereafter cited in text.
4 David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

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 166  |  History and Catastrophe

Saint-Domingue and the double legacy of racial slavery and colonialism, and anyone familiar
with Caribbean literature or historiography might be surprised by the fact that “Hegel and
Haiti” caused quite so much commotion. But that is precisely the problem: Caribbean cultures
never had the luxury of thinking about themselves without reference to Europe and Africa,
while European culture apparently can, to this day, be thought of as somehow autonomous
and separable from the “unfortunate aberration” of slavery and the cultures that miraculously
grew out of it. It is this asymmetry that “Hegel and Haiti” tries to address.
Beyond differences in expectations, there is one thing most scholars across disciplines
and locations seem to recognize: while we know that the revolution in Saint-Domingue cannot
be understood as a purely local event on the periphery of world history, we do not have a
proper understanding of how to conceptualize the complex transatlantic history of the revolu-
tion in Saint-Domingue. I doubt this recognition of agreement and disagreement across disci-
plines would have happened without “Hegel and Haiti.” The title of Buck-Morss’s “Universal
History” is clearly a provocation. But it also captures (a certain) reality.

Bombs
Following the momentum created by “Hegel and Haiti,” Buck-Morss organized a colloquium
that was to take place on the weekend of 15 September 2001. On Tuesday the 11th, there
was the attack on the World Trade Center. Within hours, all planes were grounded. The fol-
lowing Sunday, President George W. Bush made a brief statement: “This crusade, this war
on terrorism, is going to take a while.” On 20 September 2001, he announced to the nation
that the United States was at war: “Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not
end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped
and defeated.”5 In the course of that fall, the naval base in Guantánamo Bay began to receive
the first prisoners from the battlefields in Afghanistan. The Haiti colloquium eventually took
place near the end of that long and dark fall, but it seemed that the stakes had somehow
changed. We had come together to discuss the Haitian Revolution, not Bush’s war on terror.
That is what we did. But it was difficult not to hear uncanny echoes of an age-old rhetoric
of modernity, liberty, and liberation in government declarations during those days; difficult,
too, not to see that that rhetoric would be supplemented by policies in plain disregard of the
enlightened principles that were supposedly being defended. Extraordinary renditions had not
yet become official policy, the category of enemy combatant not yet resignified to sidestep
the Geneva Convention, but I remember a feeling of foreboding that cast a long shadow over
the proceedings of the colloquium. There was a catastrophe unfolding in front of our eyes,

5 George W. Bush, remarks at White House, 26 September 2001, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/

releases/2001/09/20010916-2.html (accessed 6 July 2010). George W. Bush, address to a joint session of Congress,
20 September 2001, http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/09/20/gen.bush.transcript/ (accessed 6 July 2010).

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 33 • November 2010 • Sibylle Fischer  |  167

and the discussion of Western historiographic discourses and their shortcomings seemed
ultimately inadequate.
“Hegel and Haiti” could have been understood simply as an argument against Western
political and racial domination and its pitiful intellectual consequences, an admirable instance
of committed scholarship that works by inciting our imaginative capacity rather than merely
deconstructing existing discourses. “Universal History” picks up from there and tries to pro-
vide us with a theoretical ground on which the critique of Eurocentrism is more than just a
complaint about equal representation and recognition. The importance of the Haitian Revolu-
tion does not lie in that it “avenges the New World.” The terror of drones must not be justified
by the terror of suicide bombs. If “Universal History” lacks the straightforward rhetorical power
of “Hegel and Haiti,” this is because it seeks to show that we can—and must—hold on to a
universal notion of freedom, and that doing so does not mean a return to the false universalism
of much Western political philosophy. There are not many problems harder than this one.
“Universal History” takes a combative approach. On the one hand, it is directed against
relativistic beliefs in plural modernities and plural truths, the pieties of multiculturalist politics
of recognition, and against the high-minded certainties of Western emancipatory discourses.
On the other hand, it is an argument against a politics of revenge, the eye-for-an-eye logic of
jihad and drone bombs, against the defense of torture of prisoners in the interest of national
security and Islamist defenses of suicide bombings. In fact, a muted but noticeable subtext
runs through “Universal History” that keeps linking the slave insurrection to Islamic jihad. There
is for instance a hypothetical discussion of a “jihadist” Boukman,6 an offhand reference to tales
of redemption, “Hegelian, Marxist, Muslim, or otherwise,” and an invocation of the Western
revolutionary slogan “Liberty or Death” as a parallel to the calls for Islamic jihad (143). If “Hegel
and Haiti” is a striking vignette about blindness and insight in the stories the West tells about
itself, “Universal History” tries to reconstitute a ground on which the juxtaposition of Hegel
and Haiti acquires significance for the moral and political catastrophe we are facing today.
Under the title of “Universal History” the Haitian Revolution acquires emblematic meaning.

Hegel
“Hegel and Haiti” ends by gesturing at the idea of “universal human history” and the possibility
of rescuing it “from the uses to which white domination has put it” (74). Hegel’s “moment of
clarity” needs to be juxtaposed to similar epiphanies in Abbé Grégoire and Toussaint Louver-
ture (75). Universal history is not the immanent process that Hegel had imagined. It is grounded

6 Buck-Morss is careful not to claim that Boukman was indeed a Muslim, even less a jihadist. She merely suggests that
there is sufficient evidence that would make it plausible to entertain such a thought. There was a significant Muslim slave
population in Saint-Domingue and in some places Muslim slaves played a significant role in insurgencies. She also sug-
gests that the name Boukman might refer to his ability to read “the book,” that is, the Koran. Clearly, this purpose of this
argument is strategic: it is to test our knee-jerk sympathies for the insurgent slaves by forcing us to imagine a morally less
sympathetic cause.

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 168  |  History and Catastrophe

in the flashes of insight that catastrophes afford us and enacted in our interpretative acts.7
Still, Hegel plays quite a different role in the new essay. Buck-Morss now gives considerable
space to the voice of Hegel critics, such as the philosopher Robert Bernasconi, who have
documented at length that Hegel’s denigratory picture of Africa was by no means a mere
reflection of contemporary views, and that Hegel was, at the very least, a negligent copyist
who ended up distorting his sources on Africa to suit his narrative of reason. The picture of
Hegel that emerges is quite different from that of the young, embattled, lucid philosopher who
in a “moment of clarity” wrote Haiti into universal history. The stress has shifted and is on the
fact that it was a mere flicker of insight. The overall picture that comes across now is that
of a Hegel given to hubristic indifference to the manifold realities of history and geography.
Universal history must be located somewhere else: “Human universality values precisely the
‘unhistorical histories’ dismissed by Hegel, including the collective actions that appear out
of order within coherent narratives of Western progress or cultural continuity” (148). This is
an important qualifier to the and in the title of the first essay: the classic connector of epic
history—and—functions more like a placeholder for an exceptional collision.
As scholars our role is thus not to offer more complete, inclusive, balanced versions of
established stories but to attend to the extraordinary, the subterraneous, unexpected frag-
ments that hint at other histories, histories that perhaps never materialized except in these
“brief moments of clarity.” Interestingly, Buck-Morss wants to define this position as one
of “radical neutrality” (150), where we as scholars would refuse the demand to take sides,
refuse to distort historical realities in order to endorse particular stories of redemption, be
they on behalf of ourselves or of others, of winners or victims. Buck-Morss tries to conceive
of universality not as a narrative (the Hegelian march of freedom, the Kantian universal peace,
etc.) but as an insight that comes to us like a flash, like an epiphany when we venture outside
the well-guarded territories of nations and disciplines. The freedom that she stipulates as the
ultimate goal of human history is not available to a priori reasoning or to historicizing narra-
tive; it is accessible only at moments of rupture, radically out of order. We can see here how
the normative cast of her proposal for universal history is actually more methodological than
substantive. The points of collision and connection do not congeal into narratives that could
be redeployed whenever needed. “There is no end to this project, only an infinity of connecting
links” (151), which keep changing as our historical vantage point keeps moving. While Hegel
thought of the realization of reason and freedom as an immanent process, Buck-Morss tries
to think of it as radically out-of-bounds. Universal history in Buck-Morss’s sense comes into

7 In the introduction to “Universal History,” Buck-Morss defends her earlier reading of Hegel against the objection that in the
Phenomenology, unlike in Saint-Domingue, the slave does not become master through a life-and-death struggle, and that
if Hegel indeed knew about Saint-Domingue, then the dialectic in the Phenomenology amounts to a remarkable denial of
reality rather than an act of recognition. There may have been contingent reasons, Buck-Morss suggests—his desperate
living circumstances, his fear of political repercussions. I think that could explain why Haiti is not mentioned by name (but
then, France is not either), but not why the unnamed and unsituated dialectic suddenly breaks off. See Hegel, Haiti, and
Universal History, 79–86.

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 33 • November 2010 • Sibylle Fischer  |  169

being in the “critical writing of history” as the “continuous struggle to liberate the past from
within the unconscious of a collective that forgets the conditions of its own existence” (85).

“This raw, free, and vulnerable state”

There is another aspect to Buck-Morss’s argument that I find more difficult, and this has to
do with the subjective dimension of the essay. Let me cite one of the key passages at some
length here:
The definition of universal history that begins to emerge here is this: . . . 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 empathetic 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 non-identity with the collective allows
for subterranean solidarities that have a chance of appealing to universal, moral sentiment,
the source today of enthusiasm and hope. It is not through culture, but through the threat of
culture’s betrayal that consciousness of a common humanity comes to be. (133)

At first sight, this passage is simply as a response to the pieties of a multicultural politics of
recognition: culture divides us, and when absolutist claims are made in the name of culture,
all is lost. “Osama bin Laden meets Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Vladimir Lenin meets
George W. Bush” (143). Perhaps. But Buck-Morss’s argument actually tries to provide us with
an alternative. Discussing the controversial issue of the survival of African belief and ritual in
New World slavery cultures, she says, “I do not mean to imply that in the New World nothing
remained of the original intent [of African religious and social elements]. But it is inconceiv-
able, from a human point of view, that these brutally enslaved and expatriated persons carried
their rituals and gods with them in slave-ship holds like so much checked baggage” (128–29).
Now, I think we have good reasons to think, for instance, that Vodou is a profoundly
modern ritual, a thorough reworking of African belief and ritual under the pressures of slavery
and forced Christianization. I think Buck-Morss is quite right when she insists that a profound
change in meaning took place when elements of African religions and social life were reem-
ployed in the context of the slave plantation. But it is one thing to recognize the rupture of
the Middle Passage and the radically syncretic nature of the cultures that developed on the
other side of the Atlantic, and another to imagine humans as blank slates. Do we ever really
encounter a human being in a state that could be described as “raw, free, and vulnerable”? Is
this image of a human evacuated of all cultural meaning and stripped of all social ties not rather
always a metaphysical fantasy? Like primitive accumulation in Marx’s thought, the raw subject
needs to be assumed for theoretical reasons, but cannot actually be seen. Cultural rupture is
a systemic event, something that affects culture over time. There are striking resonances here

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 170  |  History and Catastrophe

with the imaginary subject of classical liberalism: an abstract human subject, unmarked by
gender, race, and culture, which then becomes the subject of certain entitlements.
There are other considerations. Assuming that the brutality of slave transportation and
plantation labor did indeed wrest humans out of their social and cultural networks in this most
radical sense, can we really call that person free? Again, one might say, there are resonances
of classical liberalism here. What kind of concept of freedom would this radical uprooting
generate? Is it really a freedom that can become the foundation of a universal history? We
might recall here Hannah Arendt’s powerful analysis of the predicament of Jews in Nazi
Germany. Why did the German state bother to strip Jews of their citizenship before hoard-
ing them into camps? Arendt’s answer is profoundly pessimistic: when the people of Europe
encountered those miserable beings who had indeed “lost all other qualities and specific
relationships—except that they were still human,” they “found nothing sacred in the abstract
nakedness of being human.”8 German authorities clearly assumed, rightly, that abjectness did
not necessarily produce empathy.
There is a deeply troubling, though rarely discussed, moment in John Locke’s Second
Treatise of Government that is particularly pertinent here, as it provides us with an example
of how slavery functions within a foundational account of inalienable human liberty. Having
introduced the conventional argument that prisoners taken in a just war can be enslaved
because they have “forfeited” their lives (a tale Locke knew did not correspond to the reality
of the Atlantic slave trade),9 he continues as follows: “Having quitted reason, which God hath
given to be the rule betwixt man and man, and the common bond whereby human kind is
united into one fellowship and society . . . ; and so revolting from his own kind to that of beasts,
by making force . . . to be his rule of right, he renders himself liable to be destroyed by the
injured person, and the rest of mankind, . . . as any other wild beast, or noxious brute, with
whom mankind can have neither society nor security.”10 What is remarkable here is not that
Locke, the theorist of liberty, justifies slavery. Practically all natural lawyers before him did so.
Rather, it is the tinge of what Lacan called jouissance, an almost gleeful fantasy of legitimate
cruelty that follows once the human being has been stripped of all his or her human bonds.
There was no need for Locke to engage in sadistic fantasy. His argument did not require it,
and predecessors such as Grotius or Suarez did not do this. But neither did they insist that
the enslaved had to loose all social and cultural ties. It seems as if the fantasy of the loss of
all human ties—this “abstract nakedness of being human”—opens a space where we can
imagine the unimaginable.

8 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1994), 299.
9 See, for instance, David Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatise of Government,” Political Theory 32, no. 5
(2004): 602–27.
10 John Locke, Two Treatise of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), sec. 172.

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 33 • November 2010 • Sibylle Fischer  |  171

Why Haiti?
There is another way of thinking about this issue, and after the catastrophe of 12 January
it became impossible for me to set this worry aside. True, Buck-Morss’s book is a brilliant
attempt to wrest universal freedom from history’s catastrophes and to ground the experience
of common humanity and liberty in the experience of the enslaved. But this freedom somehow
requires that our cultures be “pulverized,” as Buck-Morss, citing Alfred Métraux, says about
the slaves brought from Africa to the New World (126): Could our empathy with those who
have suffered historic catastrophe not also turn into to a certain perverse desire for destruction
and loss? Can we desire universal history but not the destruction it is predicated on? What
if the experience of catastrophe makes us merely numb and unable to comprehend? Does
violence, once removed from politics and our narratives of liberation, reproduce itself on the
level of psychical investment?
Perhaps we should not be surprised that these questions show up. Buck-Morss’s attempt
to turn classic political theory upside down and thoroughly rework the key terms of modern
political thought is an inherently paradoxical enterprise, and all the more radical for that
reason. It is not deconstructive, but it does share with deconstruction a certain characteristic:
it inhabits a dominant mode of philosophical thought and tries to undo it from within, drawing
its radical energies from the absurdities and contradictions of an existing body of thought. At
the same time light-years away from mainstream political thought and uncomfortably close,
Buck-Morss seems to be chipping away at the traditional vocabulary, always keeping alive
enough conventional language to make it possible to recognize the terrain where the argu-
ment takes place.
Just today, 15 January, there was a column on the opinion page of the New York Times
by the conservative columnist David Brooks, who offers his analysis of the root causes of
the disastrous effects of the earthquake and the failures of “poverty-reduction programs”
abroad. I was struck by the fact that one can recognize in Brooks’s piece, as if in a distorted
mirror, some of Buck-Morss’s core concepts and focal points. Citing Lawrence E. Harrison’s
The Central Liberal Truth (which is, incidentally, not about Haiti), Brooks offers this account
of the problem: “Haiti, like most of the world’s poorest nations, suffers from a complex web
of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which
spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social
mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized. Child-rearing practices often involve neglect
in the early years and harsh retribution when kids hit 9 or 10.” In the face of such evidence,
Brooks wants to refuse a politics of recognition. “We’re all supposed to politely respect each
other’s cultures. But some cultures are more progress-resistant than others, and a horrible
tragedy was just exacerbated by one of them.” What “we” need to do is promote an “intru-
sive,” “locally led” “paternalism.” Universal history is here refigured as authoritarian suppres-
sion of pockets of resistance to progress. Brooks also recognizes the opportunities offered

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by catastrophes: “Cultural change is hard, but cultures do change after major traumas. This
earthquake is certainly a trauma. The only question is whether the outside world continues with
the same old, same old.”11 In the end the subject of change is we specialists in the propaga-
tion of universal progress. Maybe, after this trauma, Haiti could also change, especially if we
dare to be intrusive enough in our support for the local strongmen.
This is the language of universalist political theory and development policy at its most
unapologetically brutal. It is remarkable that Buck-Morss’s idea of universal history and free-
dom retains just enough from this language that we never forget how the story would read if
we had not shifted the ground. Her refiguring of the core concepts of freedom and universality
rescues the emancipatory potential of ideas that otherwise might wreak havoc on the victims
of catastrophe. If we ever needed proof that Haiti, Hegel, and Universal History was needed,
Brooks’s comments have provided it.

11 David Brooks, “The Underlying Tragedy,” New York Times, 14 January 2010, A27. For a first-person account of the earth-
quake that disrupts the narratives of trauma and finds a way to think survival grounded in Haitian culture, see the interview
with the Canadian writer of Haitian descent Dany Laferrière, “Haïti: Le témoignage bouleversant de l’écrivain Dany
Laferrière,” Le Monde, 17 January 2010. Thanks to Anke Birkenmeier for pointing me to the article.

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