Please activate JavaScript!
Please install Adobe Flash Player, click here for download
ePaper created 2014-06-21, 10:32:49 | version 1.31.00
Untimely Vision 113 can see here how, for Césaire, a certain practice of radical remembrance could challenge the reifying and depoliticizing operations of official commemoration. By calling on the spirit and legacy of Schoelcher, Césaire implicitly con- structed what Walter Benjamin would have referred to as a historical constellation that linked abolition in 1848 to departmentalization in 1946.27 Both projects were envisioned as self-surpassing. Each anticipated that legal emancipation would propel socioeconomic reorganization in the Antilles and transcend the existing imperial order immanently through integration rather than separation. And their respective advocates were prepared to recalibrate their strategies if these consti- tutional initiatives proved unable to address the problem of freedom adequately or if they were superseded by evolving historical conditions. Césaire wrote that Schoelcher had “a very lucid view of the conditions of true liberty” and that “his grandeur is precisely in the fact that he knew not to be a prisoner of his own work, that he knew how to surpass [dépasser] it.”28 He outlined how the focus of Schoe- lcher’s political vision evolved over time, from the formal abolition of slavery to the fundamental transformation of Antillean colonies into peasant democra- cies that would be integrated into the French nation as official departments with proper parliamentary representation. Recognizing that Schoelcher was a longtime advocate of political assimilation for the Antillean colonies, Césaire insisted that the great abolitionist was the true progenitor of the March 1946 departmentaliza- tion law.29 And when, one hundred years after abolition, departmentalization also proved unable to ensure substantive freedom for Antilleans, Césaire similarly refused to be a prisoner of his own previous work. When, as after 1848, the radi- cal possibilities for social equality that were opened by departmentalization were obstructed by the restricted civic equality that it actually established, Césaire revised his political project without abandoning his underlying vision. 27. On “constellations,” see Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 2003), 27 – 56; Benjamin, The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 462 – 63; Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, 261, 262, 264; Theodor Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor (London: Blackwell, 2000), 23 – 39; Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics (New York: Free Press, 1977); and Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berke- ley: University of California Press, 1994), 90 – 106. 28. Césaire, “Victor Schoelcher et l’abolition,” 26 – 27. 29. Césaire, “Victor Schoelcher et l’abolition,” 27. But when Césaire later became an advocate of autonomy for Martinique, he criticized how the Right retrospectively recuperated Schoelcher as a departmentalist (JORF, Assemblée nationale, 2e séance, December 17, 1982, 8489 – 90).