Beckett, Greg - The Ontology of Freedom The Unthinkable Miracle of Haiti

The Ontology of Freedom: The Unthinkable Miracle of Haiti
Author(s): Greg Beckett

Source: Journal of Haitian Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2, Special Issue on Michel-Rolph Trouillot
(Fall 2013), pp. 54-74
Published by: Center for Black Studies Research
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The Journal of Haitian Studies, Volume 19 No. 2 © 2013
The Ontology of Freedom:

The Unthinkable Miracle of Haiti
Greg Beckett
Bowdoin College
It is because of this element of the "miraculous" present in all

reality that events, no matter how well anticipated in fear or
hope, strike us with a shock of surprise once they have come to pass. The
very impact of the event is never wholly explicable; its factuality
transcends in pnnciple all anticipation.
Hannah Arendt, "What is Freedom?"
The events that shook up Saint-Domingue from 1791 to 1804 constituted

a sequence for which not even the extreme political left in France or
England had a conceptualframe of reference. They were "unthinkable"
facts in the framework of Western thought.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past
Sometimes events happen that exceed the limits of our concep

categories. For Hannah Arendt, the capacity to perform such "mira
to bring something truly new into the world through our action—
defining feature of the human condition.1 And yet these seem
improbable events are not always heralded as miracles by thos
witness them. Sometimes the improbable is so foreign to our fram
reference that it challenges the epistemological foundations upon
our understanding of the world is based. In those cases, the impro
remains imponderable.
Perhaps no other region of the world is home to more impond
miracles than the Caribbean. It was in the Caribbean that Eu
colonialism first took root, and no place has been more fully trans
by colonization. It was in the Caribbean that the plantation s
emerged, helping to give rise, in turn, to the industrial factory a
modern working class. And it was in the Caribbean that, in the m
of centuries of terror and brutality, slaves wrenched from Afric
The Ontology of Freedom: The Unthinkable Miracle of Haiti 55
whole new worlds. Unable to reproduce their own cultures, languages, and
religions, Caribbean peoples had no choice but to invent new ones. They
made syncretic religions, Creole languages, provision gardens, and much
more besides, all despite the natal alienation and social death of the slave
plantation system.2 It was also in the Caribbean that slaves found ways to
escape their social death by suicide, small acts of resistance, maroonage,
or, as was the case in Haiti, by a collective uprising that eventually became
a struggle for national independence.
The new worlds that emerged from Caribbean slave societies were
truly miraculous in a double sense. They were miraculous in Arendt's
sense of being a novel invention, and thus an act of human creativity and
agency. But they were also miraculous in the sense of taking place in a
context that seemed wholly opposed to the very possibility of such actions.
For the founding condition of these societies was slavery, and the basic
principle of slavery is that the slave is not a human and therefore lacks the
capacity for action or creativity. As Arendt notes, "Slavery's fundamental
offense against human rights was not that it took liberty away (which
can happen in many situations), but that it excluded a certain category
of people even from the possibility of fighting for freedom."3 The greatest
crime of slavery was thus the naturalization of the reification of human
beings; it was through this process that the institution of slavery gave birth
to a world in which some humans were born free while other humans were
deemed to lack such rights. In such a context, it is a miracle indeed that
slaves acted without accord to the fiction of their thinghood and rose up
to proclaim their own freedom.
But freedom in a world predicated on slavery is problematic. No
historical event—no miracle—better illustrates this problem than the
Haitian Revolution. By all rights, the revolution ought to be considered
a key part of what Eric Hobsbawm called the Age of Revolution.4 It was,
after all, an event of "global significance," since the French colony of Saint
Domingue "represented the apogee of the European colonizing process."5
Before the revolution, Saint Domingue was the wealthiest colony in the
world. It was the most important consumer of slaves in the Atlantic trade
and it was the most important producer of European export goods like
sugar and coffee. Despite its geographic separation, Saint Domingue was
very much at the center of the economic life of Europe. And yet, the
revolution remains largely absent from accounts of the making of the
modern world. (It is only a footnote in Hobsbawm's account.) As Michel
Rolph Trouillot shows, this silence is due to the fact that the revolution
so exceeded the conceptual framework of eighteenth-century Europe
that it was unthinkable.6 It took place in a world predicated on racism,
56 Greg Beckett
colonialism, and sla

necessary to conceiv
their own freedom.
imponderable miracl
In this article, I want
of the revolution by s
distinction between
begun to challenge T
possibility of slave u
philosophical texts
accounts give us a be
and the intellectual l
Trouillot's general cl
one in the colonies
self-determination n
examine how the sam
how it continues to
How το Think about the Unthinkable
When Trouillot uses the term "unthinkable," he means by it someth

different from related concepts like the unconscious (which suggests a for
of thought subjected to psychic repression) or the unsaid (which sugge
thought that is not articulated). If the revolution were merely unconsc
then we would only need to work back through layers of repression
recover it. And if the revolution had simply been undiscussed, then
we would need to do is write more and better accounts of its history
The problem is different, and deeper, than this. Trouillot uses the t
"unthinkable" in order to show how the material forms of social life—
our practical activity in a social world—give shape to particular ways of
experiencing and understanding that world. It is an argument about the
social ontology that provides the condition of possibility for the categories
and concepts with which people think. The term itself is a reference to
Pierre Bourdieu's discussion of the epistemological limits that determine
the thinkable and the unthinkable (l'impensable) in any given epoch. For
Bourdieu, the unthinkable is that which cannot be thought because social
actors lack the instruments—the concepts and categories—with which to
conceptualize it.8 It exists not at the limit of language or discourse but
at the limit of the political and ethical horizons that define an epoch.
The unthinkable "is that which one cannot conceive within the range of
possible alternatives, that which perverts all answers because it defies the
terms under which the questions were phrased."9
The problem of human freedom lies at the center of Western thought.

Given the importance of slavery to the thinking of freedom—as in fact the
antithesis to the concept of human freedom—it is remarkable how little
discussion there is of the Atlantic slave trade in the Western philosophical
canon. When slavery is raised (and it is always raised), it is either treated
as a metaphor or it is used to name a mode of servitude in the distant past,
usually Ancient Greece. If the existence of slavery in the colonies of the
New World could not be brought into debates about freedom in Europe,
is it any wonder, then, that the Haitian Revolution was unable to stand
as an answer to the question of human freedom?
Still, we must ask: why this persistent silencing of slavery in
Enlightenment thought? One obvious answer is that many people had
material interests in the economies of the slave-plantation system. Planters,
for example, exerted enormous pressure to keep the institution of slavery
going for as long as possible. Yet, as Trouillot warns us, it is too simple to
decry this inability to account for real slavery as an ideological or political
limitation. We have to look, instead, for the answer in the relation between
European thought and the material conditions governing social life. In
order to understand the structure of Trouillot's argument it will be helpful
to briefly consider Karl Marx's account of the historical emergence of the
concept of value.
In the first volume of Capital, Marx gives an account of the genesis of
the capitalist concept of value, a concept that relies on a mode of universal
equivalence by which all commodities can be made commensurate. Under
capitalism, value is expressed symbolically in money, but it is really
based on the equivalence of all the qualitatively different kinds of human
labor. This is only possible, Marx argues, because the social relations of
production (the factory system and wage labor) have made the idea of
human labor-power in the abstract into a concrete reality. Once this great
transformation has taken place in society, all kinds of labor—weaving,
sewing, baking, and brewing—can be rendered in terms of some quantity
of abstract human labor.
In the course of making this argument, Marx breaks off to discuss

Aristotle, who long ago commented on the relative basis of the value
of things. Already in Aristotle there is a clear sense of how the value of
one commodity can be expressed in terms of another (e.g., 5 beds = 1
house). As Marx notes, Aristotle also saw "that the value-relation which
provides the framework for this expression of value itself requires that the
house should be qualitatively equated with the bed, and that these things,
being distinct to the senses, could not be compared with each other as
58 Greg Beckett
commensurable magnitu
the exchange of any t
this commensurabilit
Aristotle stopped here
only be a social fictio
This break in the c
argues that Aristotle
lacked a concept of va
unable to conceive of
on the equivalence of
measured in time—tha
the equivalence of h
there were fundamen
indeed between kind
on the distinction bet
human beings preclud
equality of their labor
things. Thus, Marx no
the equality and equiv
as they are human lab
concept of human eq
fixed popular opinion
Trouillot's concept of
about value. In argui
Trouillot, like Marx,
conditions of social life and the consciousness that social actors have of
those conditions. When Marx says that Aristotle lacked a concept of value,
he is saying that a concept of value in the abstract—and thus a concept of
the equality of human labor as the source of value—was beyond Aristotle's
horizon of thought, given the kind of society in which he lived. It is an
argument for the socially necessary conditions of knowledge. Trouillot's
argument about unthinkability proceeds in much the same manner.
Discussions of the relation between slavery and freedom were very much
thinkable in the conceptual framework of eighteenth-century Europe,
but the spatial separation of Europe and the colonies helped obscure the
central place of Atlantic slavery in European society. It is tempting to
simply echo Marx and say that eighteenth-century Europeans could not
adequately conceive of the Haitian Revolution because they lived in a
society predicated on slavery. That is true to a point. But the revolution
was unthinkable not just because it challenged slavery (there were other
challenges to slavery) but because of the way in which it challenged it. The
Haitian Revolution put into action the idea of universal human freedom,
but it did so in a world predicated not just on slavery but also on the denial
of the humanity of the enslaved, a denial that refused to accord to slaves
the capacity for freedom or the right of self-determination.12 In short, it
was unthinkable because it defied the terms under which the question of
human freedom was posed in eighteenth-century Europe.
Slavery and Freedom
The Enlightenment ideas of human nature, freedom, progress, and

reason all emerged out of a world predicated on the institution of slavery
When the first coordinated uprisings began in the French colony of Sain
Domingue in 1791, European ideas of race were already a prominen
feature of "the ideological landscape of the Enlightenment on both sid
of the Atlantic.'"3 Within a few years of the initial uprisings, the Frenc
assembly abolished slavery in the colonies. But by 1802, it was reinstated
and French philosophers worked hard to justify the belief that th
principle of equality did not apply equally to all peoples. The reason they
turned to, time and again, was race. Saint-Simon, for example, famous
decried the abolition of slavery as a categorical mistake, since African
derived populations were not yet the moral or intellectual equal to white
Europeans.14 And so it was that as intense debates about freedom, politic
and rationality took place in Europe, African slaves and freed blacks in
the colonies were all deemed to be naturally inferior due to their place i
an international division of races.
The role of race in Enlightenment thought cannot be ignored.15

Racism, slavery, and colonialism were inextricably a part of the world of
the Enlightenment, just as they were inextricably a part of the Haitian
Revolution. The unthinkability of the revolution thus has much to do with
that world, and with the fact that racism, slavery, and colonialism were all
morally and intellectually plausible—that is, thinkable—enterprises in the
eighteenth century. The racial ideology of the time not only justified the
economic use of slavery but it also grounded a worldview in which there
was posited a fundamental distinction between kinds of human beings.
This categorical distinction between races made it possible for a European
philosopher or politician to proclaim human freedom as a universal good
and at the same time own a slave.
This was not an accidental contradiction. It struck at the very heart of

the concepts of freedom, personhood, agency, and rights that defined the
modern era. In an abstract sense, slavery was anathema to Enlightenment
thinkers. It would, after all, come to define the antithesis of the emerging
ideas of freedom and human agency that grounded the doctrine of natural
60 Greg Beckett
rights and that fueled

nineteenth centuries. An
the most radical form
between defense of a
abolished."16 Instead of
the Atlantic world as
from which to const
Enlightenment think
idea of universal freed
by treating slavery no
humans but rather a
human spirit.'"7
Consider how this cont
of Government,
foun a
the treatises, Locke us
of punishment and a m
(in which Locke defen
through revolution in
just form of punishme
or her right to life.18
the actual death of the
state of war between t
ended by a social contr
of "obedience," the co
the state of war, is ou
the slave has no claim
discuss Caribbean slave
in terms of contracts
As a form of punishm
that can legitimately r
all rights and political
But Locke does not fin
First Treatise he uses s
willful subjugation of
calls this political slav
that formed the basis
condition of servitude
of the divine right of
a political relationsh
we should justifiably
legitimacy of slavery as a punishment and as a practice of social death in

which a master has full power over the life and death of his slave.
Sibylle Fischer suggests that this slippage in Locke's thought reveals
the crucial role of racial difference in Enlightenment thought. She notes:
"What we see in Locke is a cleavage opening up between two kinds of
slavery, one defined in relation to the sovereign and the other in terms of
interpersonal domination."21 Locke argues that slavery should be banned
in politics but he allows it to stand as legitimate in the realm of personal
and property relations. Yet, why was Atlantic slavery not an example of
political servitude to an absolutist state too? Read against the grain, one
can interpret Locke as arguing that slavery was unjust in Europe but
perfectly legitimate in the colonies. For Fischer, "this cleavage, which
separates politics from race and makes race a nonpolitical issue, became
crucial for the foundation of modern politics in the Atlantic world."22
Locke was hardly alone in using the term slavery to denounce modes
of power he found to be illegitimate when applied to Europeans, while
at the same time ignoring the forms of domination and exploitation that
went by the same name in the colonies. Other examples abound, including
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who provided much of the intellectual foundation
for the political culture of the French Revolution.23 Rousseau's famous
dictum—that "man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains"24—is still
the conceptual kernel of Western liberalism. The idea that humans have
inalienable rights is a cornerstone both of the Enlightenment doctrine of
natural rights and of the contemporary doctrine of human rights. Voiced
in a universal register, natural rights—by definition—ought to extend
to all humans. In practice, the theory of natural rights only posed more
questions, including questions about the nature of being human. When
slavery entered into such discussions, it was never in terms of the natural
rights of slaves but rather of the legitimacy of the right of masters to
own them. This subtle but important distinction was clear in Rousseau's
work, where he notes that "the right of slavery is null, not simply because
it is illegitimate, but because it is absurd and meaningless. These words,
slavery and right, are contradictory. They are mutually exclusive."25 This is
a strong statement against the right to engage in slavery, but what of the
rights of slaves? And if the idea of slavery as a legally sanctioned activity
was so absurd, why was Rousseau silent on the existence of a specific
legal code—the Code Noir—that justified and codified both slavery and
the myriad forms of physical punishment that could be used on slaves?26
Nowhere in the foundational texts of the Enlightenment is there a
direct engagement with the practice of slavery in the Atlantic colonies.
62 Greg Beckett
And yet, whenever th

slavery soon appeared.
political representation
of unfreedom imaginab
and the loss of all soc
rights.27 Slavery thu
root, of Western ide
philosophical and pol
existential absurdity:
the will of another."28
This existential abs

lordship and bondage
used the condition of
on an individual's own
subjects accord to one
about Hegel's decision
noted above, slavery w
What was truly novel
relationship between
which the master and
related—and his insist
development of freed
His argument is brief
noting that common s
given his position as
the end of his explica
and argued that it is
to freedom—because t
labor. This partial rea
necessary for action, w
the domination of the
consciousness for any
free self. A slave cann
matter of course, ma
Why should it be the
As Robert Pippin has
freedom because he lin
social conditions (bindi
account of the master
abstractions—was m
help clarify his own concept of freedom. Agents are the proper subjects
of freedom, but to be an agent one must both be recognized as an agent
and responded to as an agent by another agent. As Pippin notes, "One
can be so recognized if the justifying norms appealed to in the practice of
treating each other as agents can actually function within that community
as justifying, can be offered and accepted (recognized) as justifying."31
Thus, the interest in slavery was not just rhetorical, for slavery was the
condition par excellence of the inability of the norm of recognition to function
as binding. Moreover, slavery helped to show the full moral and ethical
weight of Hegel's theory of freedom.
The ethical component of his theory never led Hegel to denounce
actually existing slavery, but this does not mean that slavery and
abolition were entirely absent from his thought. As Susan Buck-Morss
has convincingly shown, Hegel, like many other European philosophers
of the time, likely followed the coverage of the Haitian Revolution in
the German journal Minerva?2 It is always hard to recover the reading
practices of previous centuries, but as Buck-Morss notes: "The Haitian
Revolution was the crucible, the trial by fire for the ideals of the French
Enlightenment. And every European who was part of the bourgeois
reading public knew it."33 This puts his argument about masters and
slaves in a new context, since the Phenomenology of Mind was written in
1803-5, precisely during the final years of the revolution and just after
Haiti's declaration of independence. Hegel never mentions Haiti in his
discussion of slavery, but there is wide consensus that he implicitly refers
to the French Revolution in the Phenomenology, despite the absence of any
direct reference to that event either.34 This can be partly explained by the
genre of his writing, which uses analytic and normative claims to make
an argument about freedom. To appeal to an empirical case, such as the
Haitian Revolution, as the evidence of an ethical theory of freedom would
have been to derive an ought from an is.
Buck-Morss has done the most to recuperate the presence of Haiti
in Hegel's thought,35 and it is tempting to read her account as a critique
of the unthinkability of the revolution. She has, for example, succeeded
in showing that at least a few philosophers were trying hard to reconcile
their ideas about freedom with the fact of slavery and the events of the
revolution. She even suggests that Trouillot conflates the silencing of the
revolution after it occurred with the inability of actors at the time to
apprehend it or come to terms with it. She notes: "Eighteenth-century
Europeans were thinking about the Haitian Revolution precisely because
it challenged the racism of many of their preconceptions. One need not
have been a supporter of the slave revolution to recognize its central
64
Greg Beckett
significance to the political discourse."36 But attempts to deal with Haiti

or with slavery only went so far. In the vast tradition of Hegel studies there
is a systematic silencing of any references to Haiti or slavery, and most
scholars are content to trace the argument of the master-slave dialectic
to Ancient Greece rather than the Atlantic world. There were also clear
limits to Hegel's thinking, such as his inability or refusal to provide any

empirical content to his normative theory of freedom. Yet the most decisive
limitation is clearest in Hegel's later work, when he suddenly introduces
race, through the disguise of the concept of "maturity," into his account
of freedom. Thus, the later Hegel reiterates that slavery is unjust, because
"the essence of humanity is Freedom," but he qualifies this by noting that
for freedom, "man must be matured. The gradual abolition of slavery is
therefore wiser and more equitable than its sudden removal."37
On the one hand, this shift is part of a wider "retreat from radicalism"
that characterizes Hegel's later work.38 It may also be the case that Hegel
continued to follow events in Haiti, and that he, like so many others,
understood the postcolonial Haitian state only in terms of crisis and
failure.39 But on the other hand, this shift has enormous consequences for
Hegel's theory of freedom. To put it simply, the idea of gradual abolition—
that is, of freedom granted to slaves from their masters—is in direct
contradiction to the theoretical kernel of his concept of freedom, which says
that the dominated must risk their lives in a struggle to attain freedom. The
dialectical progression requires this risk, just as it requires the antithetical
positions of the master and the slave. Hegel's turn to gradual abolition adds
something different to this formulation: the concept of political maturity
and immaturity. In late Hegel, we see the general logic of all abolitionist
and decolonization movements, namely that those subjected to slavery,
colonialism, and domination must first be "civilized" before they can be
granted freedom.
To return to the category of the unthinkable, we might say that this
focus on the gradual ending of slavery reveals, perhaps more directly than
discussions of the revolution, the fundamental ontological principle that
supported the colonial enterprise and the slave trade: that is, the inherent
difference between kinds of humans.40 Finally, we are approaching the
core of that which was unthinkable about the revolution. It was perfectly
thinkable that some peoples—white European property-owning men—
would rise up against mastery to proclaim their own freedom. That was,
after all, the centerpiece of the Enlightenment project and of the political
revolutions against the absolutist state. It was also thinkable that a slave
would rise up against his or her master, as long as these were thought of
in terms of abstract categories. What was unthinkable was black slaves
rising up against white masters, Caribbean slaves rejecting European

domination. Thus, the dividing line between the thinkable and the
unthinkable was marked by race.
The Afterlives of Slavery
Nothing quite captures the unthinkability of black freedom in t

Atlantic world better than what happened after the end of slavery. Wh
Haiti declared independence, it did so in a world in which slavery wa
at the center of economic and social relations. Thus, when the Haitia
constitution proclaimed that any black would be free upon setting foot
Haitian soil, it represented a direct challenge to the very foundations of th
Atlantic world. The international response to Haitian independence was
impose a kind of political quarantine, as nearby colonies and the Unit
States tried to handle the outflow of exiled colonials fleeing Haiti and
limit the spread of what they considered to be contagious revolution
ideas. Although economic trade resumed quickly, Haiti was denied form
diplomatic recognition from France, Britain, the United States, and ev
the Vatican. After Simon Bolivar helped secure independence from Spa
the new Latin American states too refused to formally acknowledge H
as a free and independent state, despite the fact that Bolivar receive
substantial assistance from the Haitian government during his o
revolutionary anticolonial struggle.
The denial of political recognition gives new meaning to the mast
slave dialectic in Hegel's theory of freedom. In this case, political recognitio
was no mere philosophical problem; it had real effects, not the least
which was that Haitian governments consistently had to expend signifi
money and effort to ensure that they could militarily defend the nati
territory from an expected French invasion. In the context of internationa
relations, a state cannot exert its autonomy if other states do not recogniz
its sovereignty. The war of independence may have ended in victory o
the French forces, but there was no treaty or other document from Franc
in which it conceded its claim over the colony. Formal recognition did
come until 1825, when King Charles X extended provisional diplomat
recognition of the country's independence in exchange for payment of
indemnity of 150 million gold francs.
The terms of this agreement are important. France issued th
indemnity as a royal ordinance, not as a treaty, and in its very langua
it refused to recognize Haiti as an independent state, referring to it instead
by its colonial name. The ordinance stipulated two conditions: Ha
should open its ports to all trade, and the Haitian government sho
pay compensation to the former colonists. In exchange for the fulfillm
66 Greg Beckett
of these conditions, F
the French part of th
independence of their
emphasis. First, the o
state; rather, it agreed
the value of the indemn
exiled colonists, a sum
slavesceased to be pro
recognition to Haiti b
capacity or right of s
colonists into the inju
the first instance of T
a touchstone for repar
who demanded and re
In international law,
paid by the defeated
The Haitian indemnit
without precedent. T
who were dispossessed
British government g
after the abolition of
strange was that the m
When planters who lo
they treated the aboliti
damaged party by vir
frameworks by which
capital (or even future
challenge to any atte
rights In t themselves.
assets. Today, we thin
terms, typically as a d
gained the most from
have been numerous c
Western institutions
of slavery. These case
afterthe Holocaust, an
economic claim of com
In Haiti, the issue o
a specific population t
of a slave revolution
documented (the inde
under President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, prepared a legal case against

France for over US$21 billion in reparations. In response to this claim,
France sent a commission to Haiti to assess whether the case had any
merit. Philosopher Régis Debray, a prominent public intellectual in France,
headed the commission. Debray is well-known for his participation in Che
Guevara's failed revolution in Bolivia in 1967, for which he was sentenced
to thirty years in prison. (He was released in 1970 after much pressure
from the French government.) His revolutionary past and his involvement
with socialist governments in France afterward place him hrmly on the
far left of the political spectrum (although, like many intellectuals of
his generation, he has drifted to the right in recent years). He was thus
in a position curiously akin to that of the radical philosophers of the
Enlightenment, who, as noted above, were both drawn to strong claims
about universal freedom and unable to adequately conceive of their own
theories as applying to slaves.
The commission published its findings in a report given to the
French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in January 2004. The report begins
by first noting that the so-called democratic opposition to President
Aristide—the civil society movement called Group 184 and the political
amalgam of Aristide's opponents called the Convergence Démocratique—
uniformly rejected the Haitian government's claim against France, with
the implication being that the claim was politically motivated. It then
continues by drawing a distinction between two aspects of the claim.
As the report notes, the first part of the claim asks for restitution in the
form of a monetary repayment of the indemnity, while the second part
asks for reparations for the crime of slavery.43 In the end, Debray and the
other members of the commission conclude that both parts of this claim
lack legal and moral standing. It is not surprising that a commission sent
by the French government would side with that same government in a
legal claim that, had it gone forward, would have been both costly and
precedent-setting. But the manner in which the commission argued against
the claim is important, for it shares much in common with how slavery
and the Haitian Revolution were discussed in the eighteenth century.
The report outlines four key parts to the argument against the Haitian
claim for reparations and restitution, which can be briefly summarized
as follows:
(1) The claim of restitution for the indemnity is invalid because the
Haitian government tacitly or directly accepted the terms of the
indemnity by servicing the debt and by renegotiating the terms
of the debt in 1838 (when the amount was reduced from 150 to
68 Greg Beckett
90 million francs). T
place without milita
Haiti was formally
not the United State
(2) The claim of repa
into monetary terms
and injury in the p
already been address
a crime against hum
notes that France an
dispersed large sum
and other countries
(3) The terms by whi
a moral injury) and
for national indepen
and nineteenth cent
apply contemporary
(4) In light of all of th
moral) to Haiti. Rath
it is ultimately Fren
that allow Haiti to p
The report is stunning
civilizing parts of the
resonates with the late
maturity and his sense
the initial response to
Debray report is the f
When the report remin
of peoples did not exist
unthinkability. Debray
and the sovereignty of
until after World W
possibility for mutual
as a lack of a concept
range of social practice
always comes after the
of self-determination
all, the American and
founding moments in
worked out in practice
and social contract theory were precisely attempts to show that the right of
self-determination of a people has legal, political, and moral standing. And
there were plenty of precedents for treaties that recognized new political
boundaries after war. What was not recognized in 1838, or 1804, or 1791
was the right of self-determination for slaves, but it is a mistake to see the
refusal to accord slaves the right of self-determination as a lack of a concept
of such a right in general.
The Ontology of Freedom
At the time of the revolution only about five percent of the global popul
was "free" by contemporary standards.46 But there was nothing inh
in the doctrine of natural rights that prevented it from being extend
most of the world's population. It could not, however, be extended to slav
because slavery amounted to the reduction of a human to the statu
thing. The social death of the slave entailed and presupposed the rem
of the very capacity to have rights. The extent of this political alien
is captured well by Hannah Arendt,47 who refers to the loss of a con
in which one can act as a human being as the loss of "the right to h
rights." But Arendt was talking about the emergence of the doctri
human rights in Europe after the Second World War, when the Holo
and the mass refugee problem provided concrete examples of the t
dehumanization of people and of the erasure of human rights. Debr
might be right when he says we cannot retroactively apply human r
to the case of the Haitian Revolution or Atlantic slavery, but it is w
asking why the figure of "the human" emerged as a global norm on
after the experience of death and alienation in the concentration
refugee camps took hold within Europe itself. Why did racial slaver
the colonies not raise the question of human freedom?
The question of why the concepts of humanity, human rights,
human emancipation emerged as binding norms in the twentieth cen
is only partly a historical one. Historical explanations might he
understand the context of the doctrine of human rights, but we also
something more than a narrative account of what happened. To
understand the concept of humanity we need an ontological account
locates the concept in the experience of a fully human catastrophe. A
Orphir suggests, writing of the experience of the Holocaust, an ontol
account "must begin from the place where the historical narrative
or from the place where it transcends itself, and turns into an analy
the kind or kinds of human existence that appeared within, and out of, t
catastrophe, those for whose appearance the catastrophe was a nece
condition."48 The catastrophe of the concentration camp revealed in
70 Greg Beckett
concrete way a mode

of human freedom to
to have rights.49
While slavery has be

entered Western polit
the limits of human
that separates the hist
development of the W
the concept of value sh
order to have a concep
Trouillot's account of
is required for a truly
human equality. In a w
between races, human
It is tempting to thi
illegal around the w
racism, and the doctr
laws and norms that
there is something ab
oddly reminiscent of
the Debray report and
The Debray report
imponderable miracl
admired in the prese
responsible. In this se
restitution is based larg
that made the revolut
the following: there w
a binding agreement b
apologized for slavery
"mature" politically b
worldly language.
Yet the content of t
commission was sent to Haiti on the eve of the bicentennial celebration
of the declaration of independence. No other official group went to Haiti

to represent France, and in fact no French head of state had ever visited
Haiti. (Nicolas Sarkozy was the first to do so when he went to Haiti after
the 2010 earthquake.) The commission met with dozens of representatives
from the opposition, but none from Aristide's own government or his
political party. There was never any doubt that the report would find
against the reparations case. Just a month after the report was published,
the French government (along with the United States and Canada) blocked
a call from Aristide for a UN peacekeeping mission and instead supported
a group of armed insurgents who proceeded to remove Aristide from office.
France then helped set up an unconstitutional provisional government.
The new government, in turn, withdrew the reparations claim as one of
its first orders of business. Taking a cue from the report itself, we might
note that the right of self-determination now exists as a global norm and
that the international community had no right to back an insurgency
against a constitutionally elected and democratic government. Given the
historical context of the report and the coup, it is hard not to see in these
actions a repetition of the silencing of the revolution and of the declaration
of independence. Is sovereignty for contemporary Haiti unthinkable too?
Notes
See Arendt, "What Is Freedom?" and Arendt, Human Condition.
Cf. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death.
Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 297.
See Hobsbawm, Age of Revolution.
Geggus, "Saint-Domingue," 3; cf. Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies.
Trouillot, Silendng the Past.
These include Susan Buck-Morss ("Hegel and Haiti" and Hegel, Haiti, and
Universal History)·, Karin Schiiller ("From Liberalism to Racism"); Sibylle Fischer
(Modernity Disavowed); and Ashli White ("A Flood of Impure Lava").
Bourdieu, Le Sens practique, 14.
Trouillot, Silendng the Past, 82.
Marx, Capital, 151.

Ibid., 151-52.
Trouillot, Silendng the Past, 87-88.
Trouillot, Silendng the Past, 78; cf. Lewis, Main Currents in Caribbean Thought and
Eze, Race and the Enlightenment.
Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution, 38.
See Eze, Race and the Enlightenment.
Davis, Problem of Slavery, 262.
Ibid., 262-63.
72 Greg Beckett
18 Locke, Two Treatises of
19 Cf. Agamben, Homo S

Slavery and Social Death.
20 Locke, Two Treatises of
21 Fischer, "Haiti: Fanta

22 Ibid.
23 See Hunt, Politics, Cult
24 Rousseau, Social Contr
25 Rousseau, Basic Political

History, 33.
26 See Sala-Molins, Dark Side of the Light.
27 See Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism·, cf. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death.
28 Fields, "Ideology and Race," 161.

29 Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, 104-12.
30 Pippin, "What Is the Question."

31 Ibid., 163.
32 Buck-Morss, "Hegel and Haiti" and Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal
History, see also Schiiller, "From Liberalism to Racism."
33 Buck-Morss, "Hegel and Haiti," 836.

34 Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, 59.
35 Buck-Morss, "Hegel and Haiti" and Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal
History.
36 Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, 51.
37 Hegel, The Philosophy of History, quoted in Buck-Morss, "Hegel and Haiti," 859.
38 Buck-Morss, "Hegel and Haiti," 858.
39 See Beckett, "Rethinking the Haitian Crisis."
40 Trouillot, Silenâng the Past, 81.
41 Quoted in Dubois, Haiti,· The Aftershocks of History, 98-99.
42 See Dubois, "Confronting the Legacies of Slavery" and Dubois, Haiti: The
Aftershocks of History, 97.
43 Debray, Haiti et la France, 11 12.
44 Ibid., 13.
45 See Pippin, "What Is the Question."
46 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 88.
47 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 296.
48 Orphir, Order of Evils, 527.

49
See Agamben, Homo Saver and Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism.
Bibliography
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel
Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, 1968.
. "What Is Freedom?" In Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political

Thought, 142-69. New York: Penguin, 1954.
Beckett, Greg. "Rethinking the Haitian Crisis." In The Idea of Haiti: Rethinking Crisis
and Development, edited by Millery Polyné, 27-49. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2013.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Le Sens practique. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1980.
Buck-Morss, Susan. "Hegel and Haiti." Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4 (2000): 821-65.
. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh

Press, 2009.
Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1975.
Debray, Réris. Haïti et la France: Rapport au Ministre des affaires étrangères. Paris: La
Table Ronde, 2004.
Dubois, Laurent. Haiti: The Aftershocks of History. New York: Picador, 2012.
. "Confronting the Legacies of Slavery." New York Times, October 28, 2013.
Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi, ed. Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. Cambridge,
UK: Blackwell, 1997.
Fields, BarbaraJ. "Ideology and Race in American History." In Region, Race, and
Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Van Woodward, edited by J. M. Kousser and
James M. McPherson, 147-77. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Fischer, Sibylle. Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of
Revolution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
. "Haiti: Fantasies of Bare Life." In The Idea of Haiti: Rethinking Crisis

and Development, edited by Millery Polyné, 69-86. Minneapolis: University of
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Indiana Press, 2002.
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"Saint-Domingue on
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3~20. Bloomington: Un
Hegel, G. W. Ε The Phe

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of California Press, 2004.
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Harvard University Press, 1982.
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by Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
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The Ontology of Freedom: The Unthinkable Miracle of Haiti

Author(s): Greg Beckett

The Ontology of Freedom:

It is because of this element of the "miraculous" present in all

Hannah Arendt, "What is Freedom?"

The events that shook up Saint-Domingue from 1791 to 1804 constituted

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past

Sometimes events happen that exceed the limits of our concep

colonialism, and sla

How το Think about the Unthinkable

When Trouillot uses the term "unthinkable," he means by it someth

The problem of human freedom lies at the center of Western thought.

In the course of making this argument, Marx breaks off to discuss

Slavery and Freedom

The Enlightenment ideas of human nature, freedom, progress, and

The role of race in Enlightenment thought cannot be ignored.15

This was not an accidental contradiction. It struck at the very heart of

rights and that fueled

legitimacy of slavery as a punishment and as a practice of social death in

And yet, whenever th

This existential abs

significance to the political discourse."36 But attempts to deal with Haiti

limits to Hegel's thinking, such as his inability or refusal to provide any

rising up against white masters, Caribbean slaves rejecting European

The Afterlives of Slavery

Nothing quite captures the unthinkability of black freedom in t

under President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, prepared a legal case against

The Ontology of Freedom

concrete way a mode

While slavery has be

of the declaration of independence. No other official group went to Haiti

See Arendt, "What Is Freedom?" and Arendt, Human Condition.

Cf. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death.

Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 297.

See Hobsbawm, Age of Revolution.

Geggus, "Saint-Domingue," 3; cf. Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies.

Trouillot, Silendng the Past.

Bourdieu, Le Sens practique, 14.

Trouillot, Silendng the Past, 82.

Marx, Capital, 151.

Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution, 38.

See Eze, Race and the Enlightenment.

Davis, Problem of Slavery, 262.

18 Locke, Two Treatises of

19 Cf. Agamben, Homo S

20 Locke, Two Treatises of

21 Fischer, "Haiti: Fanta

23 See Hunt, Politics, Cult

24 Rousseau, Social Contr

25 Rousseau, Basic Political

26 See Sala-Molins, Dark Side of the Light.

28 Fields, "Ideology and Race," 161.

30 Pippin, "What Is the Question."

33 Buck-Morss, "Hegel and Haiti," 836.

36 Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, 51.

38 Buck-Morss, "Hegel and Haiti," 858.

39 See Beckett, "Rethinking the Haitian Crisis."

40 Trouillot, Silenâng the Past, 81.

41 Quoted in Dubois, Haiti,· The Aftershocks of History, 98-99.

43 Debray, Haiti et la France, 11 12.

45 See Pippin, "What Is the Question."

46 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 88.

47 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 296.