Here/Hear Now Aimé Césaire! (South Atlantic Quarterly)

The South Atlantic Quarterly 115:3, July 2016 doi 10.1215/00382876-3608653 © 2016 Duke University Press

Gary Wilder

Here/Hear Now Aimé Césaire!

This essay offers a felicitous opportunity to step back from my recent book to reflect generally on Aimé Césaire as a distinctive thinker who war-rants our attention now. Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Wilder 2015) examines attempts by Césaire, from Marti-nique, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, from Senegal, to abolish colonialism while also transcending national autarchy.1 They envisioned a form of self-determination without state sovereignty and waged a constitutional struggle to transform the French empire into a decentralized democratic and socialist federation. This transcontinental pol-ity would allow them to pursue colonial emancipa-tion in the postwar world by instituting political autonomy, protecting cultural specificity, and pro-moting socioeconomic development. In their view, this political form might also serve as a model and basis for a different global order organized around mutuality, reciprocity, and solidarity. These consti-tutional initiatives thus expressed a deeper desire to redeem an alienated modernity and allow humanity to realize itself more fully—by allowing specific peoples to develop their distinctive poten-tialities and by creating new forms of differential

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unity. They thus regarded decolonization as a world-historical opening, opportunity, and responsibility to remake the world. Their aim was not only political independence, but what Marx (1992) called “human emancipation” on a global scale.

Freedom Time is both a political history of decolonization and an intel-lectual history of Césaire’s and Senghor’s reflections on freedom, futurity, and humanity between 1945 and 1960. It treats them as postwar thinkers of the global conjuncture who were concerned not only with affirming black subjectivity or redressing colonial harms but with theorizing modernity in order to create a more just world through which democratic self-manage-ment and human solidarity might be better reconciled.

Generations of critics have found it difficult to grasp these radically humanist and concrete cosmopolitan aspects of their thinking.2 This diffi-culty, I would suggest, is related to entrenched assumptions about the proper relationship between territory, ethnicity, and consciousness as well as the boundaries of intellectual traditions and fields. Such assumptions have fore-closed the opportunity to recognize Césaire’s and Senghor’s creative, if flawed, attempts to rethink self-determination and human emancipation through concrete political experiments in ways that may resonate with the challenges of our current postnational predicament.

In Freedom Time, I trace Césaire’s political and intellectual itinerary from 1940 to 1960 as he pursued an untimely vision of autonomy without autarchy. First, I read his work on the journal Tropiques in Martinique dur-ing the war as anticipating his postwar program for departmentalization. This, I argue, was refracted through the spirit of Victor Schoelcher and the 1848 abolition of slavery. Then I discuss his rejection of departmentalization and embrace of cooperative federalism, which, I argue, was refracted through the legacy of Toussaint Louverture. I thus explore how Césaire reoriented his objective from departmental assimilation to regional autonomy even as his overarching political aims remained the same: substantive emancipation for Antilleans in the postwar order through a novel relationship with the former imperial power. In the first part of this essay I introduce a cluster of related terms—political pragmatism, radical literalism, poetic knowledge, untimely vision, and situated humanism—through which we can distill guidelines for how we might read Césaire as a critical postwar intellec-tual and a contemporary interlocutor.3 In the second part, I discuss how Césaire’s distinctive intellectual and political orientation may inform criti-cal thinking today.



Wilder • Here/Hear Now Aimé Césaire! 587

Key Terms for Césaire

Political Pragmatism

My starting point is Césaire’s recognition that colonial emancipation posed a genuine problem whose institutional solution was not self-evident. For him, a national state was only one of many possible frameworks within which self-determination could be exercised. He saw no necessary relationship between colonial emancipation and national liberation. He therefore devel-oped a pragmatic relationship to the problem of freedom (Holt 1991). By pragmatism, I am not referring to the political moderate’s willingness to compromise principles in order to achieve something rather than nothing. I regard pragmatism neither as a synonym for realism or opportunism nor as an antonym for utopianism and idealism. Rather, I use pragmatic philo-sophically, to signal an antifoundational, nondogmatic, and experimental approach to truth and politics that refuses ready-made a priori certainties about necessary means to desirable ends (Dewey 1998; Rorty 1982). To say that pragmatists focus on what works is not to say that they settle for what can be got. The point is not to compromise on ends but never to presuppose the necessary route to any given end. Such pragmatism is consistent with principled, ethical, and utopian orientations.

Césaire’s pragmatic utopianism, or utopian realism, was evident in his transformative hope, nourished by the unrealized legacy of Schoelcher’s 1848 program for abolition, that departmentalization might initiate a pro-cess that would lead from formal legal liberty to substantive economic eman-cipation and social reorganization within the Antilles. In his view, the very process of integrating colonies on the basis of political equality would trans-form the republic radically. Twelve years later, Césaire’s pragmatic orienta-tion led him to reject departmentalization and embrace a federalist vision, refracted through the unrealized legacy of Toussaint’s 1801 constitution, which proposed a novel political relationship between a self-governing Saint-Domingue and the French republic. Césaire now sought to transform Marti-nique into an autonomous region within a postimperial democratic and socialist federation that would include former French colonies as freely asso-ciated members. Recognizing this pragmatic and experimental orientation in his predecessors, he praised Schoelcher for not being a prisoner of his own former acts and he admired Toussaint’s ability to recalibrate his revolu-tionary strategy in relation to a fluid political terrain. Césaire too reoriented his projects as his political experiments failed and conditions changed.




Radical Literalism

Césaire always sought to recognize the possible within the actual. His prag-matism thus was bound up with what I call a politics of radical literalism. Think here about Theodor W. Adorno’s insight about the revolutionary effi-cacy of a “literalness” that “explodes [an object] by taking it more exactly at its word than it does itself” (1983: 251).4 In this spirit, Césaire was interested less in rejecting than in reclaiming and refunctioning the categories that had mediated Antillean subjection. In 1958, at the height of the Algerian war and the constitutional crisis of the Fourth Republic, he called on politi-cians to revisit Schoelcher’s writings about emancipation, explaining: “Freedom, Justice, Humanity, these great ideas that we thought discredited and that we wanted to discredit in effect by qualifying them as utopian . . . because the world has suffered for having allowed these ideas to be invaded by rust, the world has again learned to cherish them” (Césaire 1958: 1). Rather than discard seemingly decrepit ideas, Césaire regularly sought to de-rust and reanimate them.

In a 1978 interview he declared: “I am not a prisoner of the French lan-guage! . . . I always wanted to inflect French. . . . I am re-creating a language that is not French. Whether or not French people recognize themselves in it is their problem” (Césaire 1978a: xiv–xv). Rather than turn away from French, he burrowed into it and attempted to turn it inside out, seeking within the linguistic legacy resources through which to create an uncanny object that was at once known and new, familiar and foreign, French and not. He insisted that while he did not feel alienated from French and France, perhaps those who assumed that he should—whether on the left or the right—needed to revise their understanding of these categories.

He thus demanded that the French state accommodate itself institu-tionally to the perversely cosmopolitan conditions that imperialism itself had created. His aim was not simply to negate colonialism by abandoning the republic but to sublate both, by reconstituting the imperial republic as a postnational democratic federation. Rather than counterpose autarchic notions of Antillean society or Africanity to a one-dimensional figure of France, he claimed within both metropolitan France and the Antilles those transformative legacies to which he believed Antilleans were rightful heirs. In a 1948 speech at the Sorbonne event commemorating the 100-year anniver-sary of abolition, he situated his utopian realist vision of departmentalization in “the luminous wake of 1848” by recognizing as his political predecessors not only Schoelcher but the “magnificent people of Paris” who, during the




February Revolution, deployed radical republicanism against bourgeois republicanism, as well as those Martinican slaves who launched a rebellion that anticipated, and thus called forth, the 1848 abolition decree (Césaire 1948b: 17–21; Schmidt 1994: 117).

Poetic Knowledge

We may read Césaire’s radical literalism as a form of immanent critique that attempted to awaken unrealized potentialities sedimented within existing forms and arrangements. This was simultaneously an aesthetic operation that regarded existing objects as multifaceted and self-surpassing images whose significance was neither self-evident nor static. Politically, critically, and poetically, Césaire pursued transformation through radically literalist practices of inflection and refraction whereby multilayered and polysemic images disclosed themselves to contain, or be, more, or other, than they first appeared. Confessing his preference for the richness of ancient poetic images to the poverty of modern logical concepts, Césaire explained, “All that was gained through reasoning was lost for poetry” (1978a: xiv–xv, xxiii–xiv). He thus sought to identify within European, African, and Antillean European history vital possibilities through which modern alienation could be overcome and a lost poetic relationship to knowing and being could be recuperated.

Césaire developed the concept of “poetic knowledge” in a 1944 essay first presented at the International Congress of Philosophy in Haiti. Here he contrasted poetic images to rational judgment, recounting how a “fulfilling knowledge” that humans once “discovered in fear and rapture” before “the throbbing newness of the world” in a state of “trembling and wonderment,” “strangeness and intimacy,” and “emotion and imagination” was gradually superseded by an “impoverished” scientific knowledge, “poor and half starved,” that “enumerates, measures, classifies, and kills.” This ancient form of knowing, Césaire argued, still persisted in “the nocturnal forces of poetry” (1990: xlii–xliv).

Note that Césaire was not rejecting reason as such from the standpoint of incommensurable African or Caribbean forms of life. He was criticizing modern abstract instrumental reason and scientific truth from the stand-point of embodied, intuitive, and aesthetic ways of knowing and forms of truth. He identified “poetic knowledge” and “poetic truth” as alternative modalities of knowing and more elevated forms of reason that “resolved . . . the antinomy of one and the other [and] . . . of Self and World” (xlix). They




superseded “the law of identity, the law of non-contradiction, the logical principle of the excluded middle” (li). He explains that “poetry is always on the road to truth . . . the image is forever surpassing that which is perceived because the dialectic of the image transcends antinomies. . . . When the sun of image reaches its zenith, everything becomes possible again. . . . Accursed complexes dissolve, it’s the instant of emergence” (lii).

In Césaire’s rendering, poetic images enable a revolutionary knowing that unsettles conventional coordinates. Invoking “poetic violence . . . poetic aggressivity, . . . [and] poetic instability,” he explains: “In this climate of flame and fury that is the climate of poetry, money has no currency, courts pass no judgment, judges do not convict, juries do not acquit. . . . Police functions are strangulated. Conventions wear out” (l). Yet this is not simply a nihilistic or apocalyptic vision of chaos and catastrophe. Césaire writes: “And at the end of all that! What is there? Failure! No, the flashing vision of his own destiny. And the most authentic vision of the world” (liv). Poetic knowledge thus moves through, and moves actors through, a state of violent upheaval the other side of which is a prophetic vision, an illuminated world, an elevated truth, and, presumably, alternative forms of exchange, law, and democracy. On another front, his conception, and use, of “poetic knowledge” reveals how past and future, heritage and destiny may be contemporaneous with one another, even as it also produces this contemporaneity.

Untimely Vision

Insofar as Césaire’s gestures of radical literalism sought to identify transfor-mative possibilities crystallized within given objects, it was bound up with his conception of poetic knowledge. Both also related directly to what I call Césaire’s untimely vision. For these operations were at once critical, aes-thetic, and temporal. Here I use untimely to refer to ways that a historical present is not, or no longer appears to be, identical with itself.5 Untimeliness in this sense may entail processes of temporal confusion or illumination when conventional distinctions between past, present, and future no longer obtain, when tenses blur and times (seem to) interpenetrate. Untimely pro-cesses also lead social actors either to misrecognize or to deliberately conflate one historical period for another, to act “as if” they inhabited an epoch that had already passed or had not yet arrived. Such untimely practices may be unconscious and symptomatic or intentional and strategic.

Decolonization was traversed by such temporal refractions (e.g., uncanny returns, repetitions, and reenactments; belated responses and nos-




talgic projections; proleptic practices of anticipation, prefiguration, and con-juration). And Césaire’s political and poetic sensibility was attuned to how the problem of freedom intersected with the politics of time. He often employed untimeliness as a political strategy, by conjuring predecessors and addressing them as contemporaries and by reclaiming unrealized potentiali-ties within seemingly outmoded projects. His initiatives were refracted through previous world-historical turning points when the problem of free-dom had been an open question. He thereby sought to awaken still vital “futures past,” to recognize how alternative possibilities might dwell within existing arrangements, and to act as if a future that had not yet arrived was already at hand.

Consider the passage in “Poetry and Knowledge” where he identifies “the ground of poetic knowledge” as “an astonishing mobilization of all human and cosmic forces” in which “all lived experience,” “all the possibil-ity . . . all the pasts, all the futures . . . everything is summoned. Everything awaits” (Césaire 1990: xlvii–xlviii). Or the speaker in “Fragments of a Poem,” who declares that “all one has lived sputters on and off” and “my ear to the ground, I heard Tomorrow pass.” He invokes the “second beginning of everything” that may be fashioned out of the “sacred whirling primordial streaming” because the “whole possible [is] at hand” (Césaire 1983: 101).6 This prophetic understanding of the poet as seer is underscored by an epi-graph from Arthur Rimbaud: “It is necessary to be a visionary [voyant], to make oneself clairvoyant [voyant]” (Césaire 1978b: 9). Césaire, in other words, did not merely employ poetry to mourn lost pasts; he called on poets to anticipate worlds yet to come.

If Césaire’s poets are clairvoyant seers, his political actors are no less visionary. He claimed that Schoelcher had a “lucid view of the conditions for true liberty” (Césaire 1948b: 27) and addressed him as a vital contemporary whose 1848 interventions and insights spoke directly to the conditions of 1948. Césaire also identified Toussaint as “the Precursor” (Césaire 1962: 345) whose 1801 constitution was 150 years ahead of his time and who chose to sacrifice his life for the prospect of future freedom. And speaking of A Season in the Congo, he observed: “[Patrice] Lumumba is a revolutionary inso-far as he is a visionary. Because, in reality, what does he have before his eyes? A miserable country. . . . The grandeur of Lumumba was to sweep aside all of these realities and to see an extraordinary Congo that is still only in his mind, but which will become a reality tomorrow. And Lumumba is great, through this, because there is always a beyond [au-delà] for him” (Césaire, interview with Nicole Zand, quoted in Ngal 1994: 250).




Césaire’s postwar plays may also be read as meditations on historical temporality and the politics of time. His King Christophe is haunted by specters from the past, while his Lumumba foresaw a future haunted by his historical present. Both were concerned with overcoming and creating living legacies (Césaire 1970: 196). By setting up a historical constellation that linked Christophe’s Haiti, Lumumba’s Congo, and the postwar Antilles, Césaire used theater to explore conventional assumptions about how past, present, and future relate to one another. He reminded his audience that untimeliness was at once a problem that decolonization had to confront and a possible resource that could subtend political struggle and sustain political imagination.

Decolonization, for Césaire, was as much about reworking time as it was about reworking space. It meant, on the one hand, interrupting the apparent historical destiny of colonized peoples by transforming Antilleans into history-making actors. On the other hand, as Césaire explained in “The Man of Culture and His Responsibilities,” black artists and writers had a “duty” to reestablish the spatial and temporal continuities that colonialism had “ruptured” when “imperialism divided history” and “balkanized” the time of overseas peoples (1959: 121). He thus hoped to decolonize history and create new forms of temporal, as well as spatial, solidarity.

It is crucial to grasp Césaire’s radical relation to time, his untimely and poetic orientation to politics, if we want to understand his hope that decolo-nization would not only abolish colonialism but inaugurate a new humanity that has recovered its poetic relationship to living, knowing, and making, that has reconciled human, natural, and supernatural realms, and that has reconjugated the relation between painful histories and possible futures.

Situated Humanism

I have suggested that Césaire’s struggle against imperialism was bound up with a program for human emancipation in and beyond the Caribbean. His untimely vision for decolonization was inseparable from a radically human-ist commitment to deprovincialize Africanity, universalize black thought, redeem humanity, and remake the world. In Discourse on Colonialism he famously expressed his aim: “to live a true humanism to the measure of the world [à la mesure du monde]” (Césaire 1976: 397). This hope, I believe, was both quantitative and qualitative: beyond calling for a truly global human-ism that would fit the size of the world, it also invoked a humanism that would be fitting for the world.




Césaire pursued a form of decolonization that would transcend the sterile opposition between abstract humanism and territorial nationalism, while retaining the universalism of the former and the embodied specificity of the latter. He hoped to fashion a political form that would allow colonizers and colonized to recognize their entangled histories and build a common future without recourse either to the humanism that authorized colonialism or to the parochial nationalism and culturalism that would obstruct the cre-ation of the kind of solidarities that both Antillean freedom and new planetary politics required. Thus in his “Letter to Maurice Thorez” Césaire, disaffected with departmentalization’s republican universalism and the Communist Par-ty’s internationalist universalism, demanded a politics that neither “burie[d] [him] in a narrow particularism” nor forced him to “lose himself in an emaci-ated [décharné] universalism” (1956: 15). Hoping to transcend both “walled-in segregation” and “dilution in the universal,” he envisioned an alternative “uni-versal rich with everything that is particular, enriched and deepened by all particulars, by the coexistence of all particulars” (15). Like Giuseppe Mazzini (2009), Senghor, and Frantz Fanon, he believed that particular peoples become more fully human (and therefore universal) by realizing their spe-cific qualities most fully.

For Césaire, in other words, a true humanism made to the measure of the world would have to be concrete and situated—one that worked through Antilleans’ history and lived experiences of racial and colonial domination. In his 1959 speech at the Second International Congress of Black Artists and Writers, Césaire called on “men of culture” to make black art and literature “sacred . . . by raising the particular situation of our peoples to the universal” (1959: 121–22). Rather than a humanism that searches for aspects of a pre-defined universal within particular peoples or societies, he believed that par-ticular peoples in specific historical situations, as well as their situated thinkers, could offer concrete forms of life as global gifts that could indicate how to live a more fully human life, one that was nourished by poetic knowl-edge and that avoided the twin pitfalls of imperialism and provincialism.

Césaire’s radical humanism did not abstract from differences in order to find some underlying or overarching sameness. Rather, it sought to join particular peoples within larger forms and networks of transcontinental soli-darity. Such formations would be composed of and inflected by the intersec-tion of distinct lifeworlds. At the same time, from his Caribbean or black Atlantic vantage, he questioned a view of world history or global politics that ontologized distinct forms of life. His situated humanism was founded on the recognition that the entwined histories of slavery, imperialism, capitalism,




republicanism, and modernism had bound metropolitan and Caribbean peo-ples to one another within a shared if asymmetrical modernity. On such grounds he refused to relate to European history, politics, and thought from the outside, as a foreigner. Rather, he claimed as his own proper inheritance those radical intellectual and political traditions that could no longer be con-ventionally figured as “French,” “European,” or “Western.”

At the 1959 congress Césaire argued that black creators had “a human duty” even more profound than their “particular duties” because “finally, there is a question that no man of culture can escape, regardless of his coun-try or his race, which is the following: ‘What kind of world are you preparing for us?’” Césaire responded to his own question by relating black self-deter-mination to human self-realization:

By articulating our effort with the effort of the liberation of colonized peoples, by struggling for the dignity of our peoples, for their truth and for their recog-

nition, it is by definition for the whole entire world that we fight, to liberate it from tyranny, from hatred, and from fanaticism. Beyond the struggles of the present, circumstantial as they are . . . we want a rejuvenated and rebalanced world, without which nothing will have any meaning . . . not even our struggle today . . . not even our victory tomorrow. Then and only then will we have been victorious and our final victory will mark the advent of a new era. We will have contributed to giving a meaning . . . to the most overused yet most glorious word: we will have helped to found a universal humanism. (1959: 122)

Here then was Césaire’s radically literalist gesture of reclaiming, de-rusting, inflecting, and refunctioning “humanism” and “universalism.” For him the problem was not merely that in the hands of Europeans these were hypocriti-cal claims and ideological screens, selectively enforced broken promises, or that these were provincial cultural notions born in the West and imposed on the world. Rather, he criticized these concepts for being abstract, empty, dis-embodied, unmediated, and nondialectical. It wasn’t humanism or univer-salism as such but their actually existing liberal, republican, and socialist forms that he challenged.

In Discourse on Colonialism Césaire imagined an alternative process of modernization whereby the communal and democratic possibilities that had already existed within African civilizations might have been enriched through noncoercive forms of contact with Europe (1976: 401). Such writings mir-rored his constitutional campaigns for nonnational forms of decolonization. Both enacted a radically humanist anticolonialism that called on colonial powers to act in partnership with colonized peoples to create plural postna-tional democracies that could enable new types of planetary solidarity.




Here/Hear Now: Deprovincializing Postcolonial Thought

These key terms illuminate crucial aspects of what made Césaire a distinc-tive thinker whose critical voice may continue to resonate for us today. But in order to attend to Césaire as he did his predecessors—as a contemporary—we should recognize how his intellectual orientation and insights brush against the grain of many current theoretical tendencies. In both critical theory and postcolonial studies, the standard operation is to unmask pur-portedly universal categories as socially constructed, culturally particular, and implicated in practices, systems, and logics of domination. These are indispensable critical moves. But this approach often devolves into a hunt for traces of universalism or humanism, whether in textual artifacts or political projects, in order to reveal the regressive or oppressive essence of the object. This “aha” moment thus becomes the punch line of the discussion rather than the starting point for analysis. Such fears of complicity with power do not only belie a longing for intellectual and political purity. They also make it difficult to think dialectically, to identify aspects of given arrangements that may point beyond their actually existing forms.

The current insistence on negative critique also makes scholars reluc-tant to identify desirable alternatives and specify the kind of world they might want to create. But what do we concede if we are unable or unwilling to risk affirming more just, more human, ways of being to which we can say “yes”? It is not easy for radical thinkers to reconcile a nonprescriptive orienta-tion to a radically open future with the imperative to envision more desirable arrangements (Coronil 2011). But ignoring or deferring the challenge does not make it disappear. Following anticolonial thinkers like Césaire, espe-cially those located within the black Atlantic critical tradition, may remind us not to forfeit categories such as freedom, justice, democracy, solidarity, and humanity to the dominant actors who have instrumentalized and degraded them.

Given this dilemma, the attention paid to Vivek Chibber’s recent polemic against subaltern studies is not surprising. Such attention, however, seems to be less about the merits of his universalist Marxism than about a sense of some of the limitations and impasses into which certain currents of postcolonial thinking have led (Chibber 2013).7 Partha Chatterjee himself has recently written, “The task, as it now stands, cannot . . . be taken forward within the framework of the concepts and methods mobilized in Subaltern Studies . . . what is needed are new projects” (2012a: 44). He suggests that such projects should probably focus on “cultural history” and “popular cul-ture” with a renewed focus on visual materials and embodied practices




rather than written texts and on ethnography rather than intellectual his-tory. Moreover, he links this invitation to study “the ethnographic, the practi-cal, the everyday and the local” to a focus on subnational “regional forma-tions” and “minority cultures” and languages whose specificities, he observes, had not been sufficiently engaged by earlier subaltern studies research on “India,” “Pakistan,” or “Bangladesh” (47–49). Valuable as such studies would surely be, it is not clear how a renewed focus on locality, with place-based assumptions about territory, consciousness, and categories, could do the kind of critical work necessary to grasp the deep shifts in politi-cal logics, structures, and practices that characterize the world-historical present. On the contrary, such approaches risk reproducing precisely the culturalist and territorialist assumptions about political identification and affiliation that need to be rethought in light of contemporary conditions.8

Chatterjee’s surprising emphasis on local ethnography seems consis-tent with one trend in postcolonial thinking that risks reviving the types of civilizational thinking, and associated assumptions about origins and authenticity, that it had earlier set out to dismantle (Chakrabarty 2007; Mah-mood 2005; Mignolo 2011). Consider the important ways that Talal Asad has invited us to rethink liberal assumptions about “tradition,” with respect to liberal and nonliberal forms of life. In dialogue with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alasdair MacIntyre, Asad (1986) has developed a powerful critique of liberal secularism—and the secularist logic that subtends many modern lib-eral states—from the standpoint of embodied and discursive traditions. On the one hand, he reminds us that “Islamic tradition” is neither singular nor unchanging; it is a structured and dynamic space for reasoned argument. On the other hand, he reminds us that despite liberalism’s claims to post-traditional neutrality, it too constitutes a particular tradition (albeit one that defines itself in opposition to inherited, embodied, and practice-oriented forms of tradition-based reasoning).

Asad’s genealogical insights have rightly informed recent critiques of Western liberal ideologies, states, and politics especially regarding their arro-gant, condescending, and violent responses to tradition-rooted practices and practitioners, whether outside or inside the West. But his interventions, how-ever unintentionally, have also led scholars to establish dubious chains of equivalence between modernity, the West, and liberalism. Such operations seem to disregard Asad’s important invitation to understand traditions as capacious, heterogeneous, and dynamic spaces of inquiry, disputation, and revision, not simply as a set of rigid behavioral scripts, unchanging cultural formulas, or dogmatic ideological precepts. This reduction of political moder-




nity to a one-dimensional liberalism obscures, for example, the many currents of progressive antiliberalism within the tradition of modern Western political thought. It fails to recognize the significant number of non-European colonial intellectuals engaged in anti-imperial struggles who were active participants in such “traditions within traditions.” It also disregards the contradictions within and redeemable fragments of even liberal political thinking, fragments that, if realized, might point far beyond, and possibly explode, liberalism itself.

To reify modern or Western politics into a static and stereotypical liber-alism is to risk practicing an unfortunate form of “Occidentalism” that would reinforce archaic civilizational assumptions about incommensurable and unrelated worlds (and worldviews) and disregard the actual history and open possibilities for practices of cross-cultural solidarity whereby anti-imperial actors outside Europe could enter into dialogue or affiliate with, or even discover ways that they are already situated within, counterhegemonic “Western” political traditions. Critics have rightly mobilized singularity, incommensurability, or untranslatability against liberal attempts to discover an abstract humanity and thereby discount situated and embodied forms of life. But the question is whether we treat incommensurability or untranslat-ability as an epistemological or political limit or as an always imperfect start-ing point for practices of dialogue, coordination, affiliation, reciprocity, soli-darity. For isn’t the impossibility of full transparency or undifferentiated unity simply the unavoidable condition within which all communication, sociality, and politics must be attempted?9

My point is not to congratulate dissident currents within the West, let alone to recuperate liberalism. It is rather to approach radical and emancipa-tory politics from a place of not-already-knowing, of not presuming to know a priori which aspects of a tradition are irredeemable, which traditions may become allies or habitations, what the boundaries of (thoroughly plastic) tra-ditions must be. This nondogmatic and experimental orientation to politics, traditions, and concepts is one of the most precious and timely gifts that Césaire may offer to us now. He practiced a concrete cosmopolitan relation-ship to modern traditions of philosophy, aesthetics, and politics, one that was highly developed by the robust tradition of black Atlantic criticism within which he was firmly rooted along with predecessors (e.g., Toussaint and W. E. B. DuBois), contemporaries (e.g., C. L. R. James, James Baldwin, Suzanne Césaire, Senghor), and descendants (e.g., Fanon, Edouard Glissant, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Achille Mbembe, David Scott).

Understandable concerns about totalizing explanation and Eurocentric evaluation have led a generation of scholars to insist on the incommensurable




alterity of non-European forms of thought. But perhaps we should be con-cerned less exclusively with unmasking universalisms as covert European particularism than with also challenging the assumption that the univer-sal is European property. I read Césaire not in order to provincialize Euro-pean concepts but to deprovincialize Antillean thinking. Césaire’s critical reworkings remind us that the supposedly European categories of political modernity properly belong as much to the African and Caribbean actors who coproduced them as to the inhabitants of continental Europe. Similarly, Afri-can and Caribbean thinkers, no less than their continental counterparts, produced abstract and general propositions about “humanity,” “history,” and “the world.” In contrast to invocations of multiple modernities, Césaire never granted to Europe possession of a modernity or universality or humanity that was always already translocal and fundamentally Caribbean. He never treated self-determination, emancipation, freedom, equality, or justice as essentially European and foreign. Césaire’s intellectual and political inter-ventions radically challenged reductive territorialist approaches to social thought. He refused to concede that “France” was an ethnic or continental entity, that Martinique was not in some real way internal to “French” society and politics, or that he was situated outside of modern critical traditions. Thus his ongoing and unapologetic engagements with Hegel, Marx, Proud-hon, Nietzsche, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Bergson, Freud, Breton, Frobenius, and Lenin, alongside his many African, Antillean, and African American interlocutors.

The sonic blurring between “here” and “hear” in the title of this essay is meant to signal not only the contemporaneity of Césaire’s thought for us here now but the imperative that we open ourselves to his presence and recognize his actuality across the epochal divide by hearing what he actually said. This gesture builds on Walter Benjamin’s insight that every now is a “now of rec-ognizability” whereby “what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation” through which past epochs become newly legible (1999: 462). I also follow Césaire himself, who engaged in dialogue with pre-decessors as if they were contemporaries and who addressed future interlocu-tors directly as if they were already present. Like Benjamin, Césaire practiced a form of radical remembrance that connected outmoded pasts to charged presents. This attention to vital histories was bound up with a poetic politics that identified transformative possibilities dwelling within existing arrange-ments and a proleptic politics that anticipated seemingly impossible futures by trying to enact them concretely in the here and now. But Césaire can only speak to us now if we listen rather than presume to know what someone like him in his situation must have, or should have, been saying.




Until very recently, scholarship on his work has been overdetermined by methodological nationalism (that puzzles over his refusal to pursue state sovereignty), identitarian culturalism (that debates how adequately Césaire expressed Antillean lived experience and whether or not he was an essential-ist), and a disciplinary division of labor (that too often splits his poetry, criti-cism, and politics into separate domains). Generally, Cold War scholarship was shaped by a need to evaluate him in relation to canonical anticolonial nationalists and fit him into a narrative of decolonization-as-national-inde-pendence. This has made it difficult to recognize the epochal character, world-making ambition, and global sensibility of his political reflections.

Faced with the promise of decolonization, Césaire conjugated concrete acts with political imagination in ways that displaced conventional opposi-tions between aesthetics and politics, realism and utopia, pragmatism and principle. Such efforts were animated by what I have been calling radical lit-eralism and utopian realism and which he called inf lection and poetic knowledge. He regarded freedom as a problem whose institutional solution was not self-evident and could only be situational. His interventions demon-strated the nonnecessary relationship between colonial emancipation, popu-lar sovereignty, and self-determination, on the one hand, and territorial state sovereignty and national liberation, on the other. He pursued cosmopolitan aims concretely through transcultural practices and by attempting to invent new political forms through which to ground plural and postnational demo-cratic arrangements.

We should recognize that Césaire formulated a critique not of Western civilization from the standpoint of African or Antillean culture but of modern Western racism, imperialism, and capitalism from the standpoint of Antil-lean and African historical situations and experiences. More generally, it was a critique of an alienated and alienating modernity from the standpoint of embodied and poetic ways of being, knowing, and relating (to self, others, and world). Above all, Césaire recognized residues of, and resources for, more just, human, and integrated ways of living together within Antillean, African, and European texts, traditions, forms, histories, and conditions. In his view, Antilleans—as culturally particular actors, imperial subjects, New World denizens, moderns, and humans—were their rightful heirs. He was con-cerned less with defining culturally authentic concepts, spaces, and arrange-ments for Antilleans (apart from Europe or uncontaminated by modernity) than with overcoming imperialism, in solidarity with other struggling peo-ples, in order to establish less alienated forms of human life globally.

Remembering Césaire’s insistence that modern currents of radicalism were shared legacies and common property may help us to rethink inherited




assumptions about the relation between territory, ethnicity, consciousness, and interest (Buck-Morss 2009, 2010). They invite us to deterritorialize social thought and to decolonize intellectual history. This is a matter not of valoriz-ing non-European forms of knowledge, as important as such a move certainly is, but of questioning the presumptive boundaries of “Europe” itself—by rec-ognizing the larger scales on which modern social thought was forged and of appreciating that colonial societies produced self-reflexive thinkers concerned with large-scale processes and future prospects. We can thereby recognize Césaire as a situated postwar thinker of the postwar world, one of whose pri-mary aims was to place into question the very categories “France,” “Europe,” and “the West” by way of an immanent critique of late imperial politics. He envisioned postnational arrangements through which humanity could attempt to overcome the alienating antinomies that had impoverished the quality of life in overseas colonies and European metropoles. His situated humanism and concrete cosmopolitanism should thus be placed in a constel-lation of modern emancipatory thinking oriented toward worldwide human freedom that included antiracist, anti-imperial, internationalist, and socialist thinkers from a range of traditions: black Atlantic, First Internationalist, global anarchist, Western Marxist, Marxist humanist, Third Worldist.

Césaire believed that the future of humanity depended in some sense on its recovering a lost poetic relation to “the throbbing newness of the world.” Why not regard Césaire’s “humanism made to the measure of the world” as a starting point for our critical thinking about the contemporary situation and the kind of world we would like to create. Césaire, like Tous-saint before him, addressed future interlocutors directly. At the same time, his thinking about future possibilities was refracted through dialogue with predecessors like Toussaint. This is how I understand what one of his heirs, Glissant, means by “a prophetic vision of the past” based on “the identifica-tion of a painful notion of time and its full projection forward into the future” (1989: 64; see also Glissant 2005: 15, 16). Césaire once wrote of Schoelcher, the socialist republican architect of the 1848 abolition of slavery in France, that it would be “useless to commemorate him if we had not decided to imi-tate his politics” (1948a: 28). In this spirit I hope that the recent resurgence of interest in Césaire is not only treated as an occasion to honor his memory but is seized as an opportunity to hear his transgenerational address. We can thus think with Césaire about the relation between existing theoretical frameworks, the world we are confronting, and urgent political desires—especially with regard to the history of empire and the role of colonial intel-lectuals as modern thinkers of global processes.




Notes

1 This essay was first drafted and presented before the book was published. English translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.

2 On humanism in postcolonial thinking, see Alessandrini 2014. 3 Of these terms, poetic knowledge is the only one he uses explicitly. The others are my

own analytic terms. 4 Elsewhere Adorno argues, “The fulfillment of [capitalism’s] repeatedly broken

exchange contract would converge with its abolition; exchange would disappear if truly equal things were exchanged; true progress would not be merely an Other in relation to exchange, but rather exchange that has been brought to itself” (2005: 159).

5 On deferred action, see Freud 1953; on duration as qualitative multiplicity, see Bergson 1913; on historical constellations, see Bloch 1977 and Benjamin 2003; and on the con-temporaneity of the noncontemporaneous, see Koselleck 2004.

6 This poem was originally published as “Fragments d’un poème” and later included in Césaire 1946.

7 For a Marxian critique, see Taylor 2013. 8 More relevant are his reflections on new practices of mass democracy in postcolonial

societies and the long-term structural relationship between empires and modern states. See Chatterjee 2004 and 2012b.

9 Compare the insistence on untranslatability in Apter 2013 to Liu 2014 on translingual circulation and pluralist universalism, Diagne 2014 on philosophy as a practice of translation, and Derrida 2002 (148) on Germans as unwitting Jews. See also Anderson 2007 and Goswami 2012.

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Documents

Here/Hear Now Aimé Césaire! (South Atlantic Quarterly)