HEGEL AND HAITI

When I was in Ottawa for the C.L.R. James conference in October, a frequent topic in our discussions was the Critical Inquiry essay by Susan Buck-Morss on Hegel and Haiti. Like many others, I had first known of Buck-Morss by way of her intriguing work on Benjamin, particularly her book on the Arcades Project. I'd followed with interest her turn to other subjects in political philosophy, evidenced in such work as Thinking Past Terror, but was still surprised to see her take up the place of Haiti in the evolution of modernity, a subject of interest to me since the days I used to pursue the topic in undergraduate history classes taught by C.L.R. James.

Now "Hegel and Haiti" has been conjoined to a new essay, "Universal History," and published as a book by the University of Pittsburgh Press. [Find the Amazon page for the book here.] Buck-Morss picks up on the arguments that James and DuBois were advancing in the 1930s, the point I was explicating in my chapter for the Geomodernism collection:

"The Haitian experience was not a modern phenomenon too, but first."

That argument appears in the new "Universal History" addition, and no matter what you may think of the disputes about the possibilities of the universal, or the propsects of some "new humanism," the book is well worth reading on that score alone. Still, it has much more to recommend it.