Small Axe

The Gift of the Past

Susan Buck-Morss

I am indebted to Sibylle Fischer and David Scott for their perceptive critiques of my book
Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, critiques that pushed me to think further regarding the
problematic of universal history, clarifying to myself what such a project entails.1 When com-
mentary is as rigorous and engaged as theirs, theory becomes a form of collaboration. It also
has made my task more difficult, and writing this response take longer, which is why I give
special thanks to David Scott, as editor of Small Axe, for his patience.

I
Universal history makes no claims as an overarching philosophical system. Sibylle Fischer is
right to speak of it as a method. The goal is to disrupt the intellectual order by exposing the
blind spots that hinder conceptual, hence political, imagination. The method undermines the
dominant historical narratives by burrowing mole-like into the deeply entrenched typologies of
time (periodization, progress, modernity) and space (boundaries of nations, cultures, civiliza-
tions) that hold those narratives in place. While I am notoriously bad at naming, this approach
might be called theoretical pragmatics. It is a practice of theorizing that demonstrates its truth
by the reading experience itself.2 There is no historical metanarrative. Universal here does not

1 Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).
2 Use of the word pragmatics drags along the historical residues of multiple philosophical and daily meanings that make its
application here cumbersome. I ran into a similar problem in 1992 by coining a phrase—synaesthetic system—to describe
not the scientific/poetic translation of one sense into another (synaesthesia) but simply the organization of human sense
perception, the structure of which changes historically. That attempt to appropriate a word for different uses was singularly

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mean uniformity. But this does not make the project arbitrary or random. In the rearrangement
of knowledge, facts matter. They have the potential to release energy in the present that is
ethically (politically) charged.
Both Sibylle Fischer and David Scott, in their own work, are sensitive to the ethical dimen-
sion of history, and it is precisely here that they focus their concern regarding my attempt
to resurrect the principle of universality. Their critiques are all the more trenchant given our
affinities. They share my discomfort with the fragmentation of intellectual labor that the recent
emphasis on multiculturalism has produced. On the one hand, while, as Scott reminds us, the
postcolonial attack on Eurocentrism has done much to rectify the colonial distortions of global
knowledge, it has splintered the political response at the same time that the celebration of
cultural difference has been assimilated into neoliberal discourse and marketing rhetoric with
surprising ease. On the other hand, a return in knowledge-production to a discussion of univer-
sality threatens to merge, if not with George W. Bush’s claim to champion universal values in the
war on terror to which Fischer refers, then more plausibly with the ideological needs of a newly
constituted, global, ruling class, one that is increasingly oligarchic despite the democratization
of its national/ethnic composition. These issues are central to the present state of theory.
So, we are groping our way with caution. I will concentrate my response on the ethico-
political warnings that Scott and Fischer raise. A crucial issue is how the present receives the
past, and how the claim to universality is related to the historical event in that process. Scott is
explicit on this point. He appreciates my exposure of the connection between colonial events
and the modern idea of freedom, a connection that contradicts stories Europe tells about itself.
As he writes, “The vector of history runs both ways.” But he questions the way I construct the
relationship between the Haitian Revolution and the concept of historical universality. Scott
says I “miss the dimension” of the local that can best inform the project of universal history.
Such a connection was made by C. L. R. James, whose influence Scott finds missing from
my account. Now, no one can write on the Haitian Revolution’s relation to the idea of freedom
without the aide of C. L. R. James’s masterful narrative, The Black Jacobins, in which the figure
of Toussaint Louverture gives dramatic form to the slaves’ struggle for self-emancipation. I
spent a year with this book as my constant companion, reading and rereading James’s pas-
sionate, factual recounting of the unfolding of modern freedom as a complex drama of human
agency and human frailty.
But a second stage of the project involved a theoretical rather than narrative rendering
of the logic of freedom, one that shifted the focus from history-writing within the frame of
modernity to the construction of the frame itself. Narration yielded to a philosophical attitude
toward the past—no longer telling events in terms of exemplary human actors who embodied
the emancipatory idea but analyzing the singularity of the event without epistemological con-
straints as to where it belonged in historical time or geographical space. That move allowed

unsuccessful. See Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,”
October 62 (Autumn 1992): 3–41.

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thinking G. W. F. Hegel and Haiti together in terms of a logic of freedom historically based,
yet not historically contained, so that it could animate present consciousness with a different
force. Now the question was not how the local Haitian story can inform a universal history
of European-claimed modernity but how the singular event of the Haitian Revolution can
transform the structural logic whereby the conceptual distinction of global and local is made.
The goal is to free the universal idea from pre-given representations, those schemata of the
imagination that keep past events in bounds.
Yes, of course, a narrative like James’s is already what Scott calls a “theoretical interven-
tion.” It is not easy to articulate what is different in these apparently similar approaches. What
I admire in Scott’s work is his extreme sensitivity to the present as the context in which the
truth of the past is recognized. In Conscripts of Modernity, he argues that the “constitutive
ambiguities” leading to the tragedy of colonial enlightenment, captured so well in James’s
account, “opens up space for ethical political theorizing about the postcolonial present”;3
Scott celebrates The Black Jacobins precisely because of the critical force it released in
James’s own political present. In his commentary here, he focuses on James’s “cognitive-
political move in an ideologically fraught argument about race and empire in the first third of
the twentieth century,” while I am asking what cognitive-political moves are possible today
that James himself could not have seen.
The difference can be described as topological. It has to do with holding the historical
past in place. Rather than recalibrating the relationship between the global and the local, I am
interested in the blurry boundary zone that belongs to neither—blurring it further, to the point
that it alters our cognitive expectations. It is not a matter of learning lessons from history, or
even adding parts to history that have been forgotten, but of inhabiting an indeterminate, in-
between space, rummaging around in its historical traces until a new possibility of mapping
comes into focus as the necessary precondition for thinking the past at all. It is in a sense a
critical genealogy of the global, the goal of which is not just correcting the balance between
center and periphery but, rather, seeing the universal as always a boundary concern. In the
process, the investigation, having passed through the discipline of history, leaves it to occupy
a liminal space where human universality comes fleetingly into view.
The meaning of the singular, historical event will never be exhausted. Its potential to
influence a changing present is infinite. But its afterlife is endangered if the event is so deeply
embedded in historical context and cultural specificity that we can consider ourselves to be
done with it. This mode of inheriting the past leads to Whiggish presentism, the comfortable
belief that we no longer need to recognize the radical idea of antislavery as our own concern.
Scott shares none of this complacency. He views the theoretical role of the historian as one
of discovering human universality within the singular, but for him, it is the artwork that pro-
vides the model. As a counter to the “fundamental scandal” of the Haitian Revolution to the

3 David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004),
177.

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European world order that has been the source of its long silencing, Scott argues that the
strength of James’s narration is that it releases the universality of history from the singular
story of Toussaint Louverture’s tragic life, and he asks whether our postcolonial present can
yet leave the tragic mode behind.
But the safety of even this mode of universal history is not guaranteed. On two counts
Grégory Pierrot’s recent (2008) article provides a corrective. First, far from forgetting the Hai-
tian Revolution, “[European] authors have never stopped writing about it. The revolution, this
whole time, was hiding in plain sight, covered by the very pages written about it.”4 Militarily
undefeated, the slave revolutionaries have been incessantly subject to attempts of cultural
mastery by Europeans. Second, Pierrot documents how Toussaint’s struggle for liberty was
incorporated into the anti-French, European story precisely because it was a tragedy. It was
the British, enemies of France yet fearful of slave revolutions in their own Caribbean colonies,
who first articulated Toussaint’s life in the tragic mode.5 Central to Pierrot’s argument is the
repeated publication of Marcus Rainsford’s book, discussed by both Scott and me, An Histori-
cal Account of the Black Empire of Hayti (1805), a chapter of which was translated in Minerva,
the journal that Hegel read. The British were delighted to depict Toussaint as the tragic hero,
still standing, yet safely in chains.
Narrative form does not determine impact. While I recognize the power of James’s
approach, it makes me uncomfortable in several ways. By concentrating on the personal-
ity of the leader, the universally human is articulated in terms of individual protagonists who
easily slip into the role of founding fathers of the national story. Such historical accounts as
the basis of collective identity are at odds with the boundaryless idea of antislavery. Basing
political solidarity on a literary model implies a poetics of human universality that, since the
Greek tragedies, has coexisted with the actual course of history, where rulers are viewed as
humanly tragic without losing their right to rule. James’s colonial history may take us, as Scott
claims, “beyond the limits” set by Hegelian world history. But if the limits are crossed, is the
Hegelian pattern of history thereby transformed?
In a literary approach, narration is key, the life of the hero as a model of the emancipatory
idea. In a philosophical approach, the event is seen as the birthplace of a new conception
of freedom that is not embodied in anthropomorphic form. It is a matter of how the present
receives the past, or more specifically, how the present is situated in a topology of time as
well as space. In historical narration, Haiti figures in a genealogy of modernization in order
to correct our understanding of how we came to where we are today. It acknowledges the
present as a perpetuation of modernity. In a philosophical reconstruction, the present is con-
ceptualized as a dividing point. Haiti figures in a global investigation of history to ask how we
might move away from modernity, which seems eternally to chain us to its postmortem forms.

4 Grégory Pierrot, “ ‘Our Hero’: Toussaint Louverture in British Representations,” Criticism 50, no. 4 (2008): 581.
5 “Toussaint was already at the confluence of two literary templates Britons of the time would have been highly familiar with:
the ‘black avenger’ and its literary exorcism, the tragic black hero” (ibid., 596). Pierrot makes it clear that the British praised
or blamed Toussaint in order to support their side in the propaganda struggle, claiming ownership of the universalism that
he represented.

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Scott perceives, as a residue in my work, a “longing” for Hegel’s originary text. I feel no
melancholy for the triumphalism of the Hegelian system, or for the Romantic overcoming on
which the dynamics of that system is based. But there is something Hegelian in my insistence
on a dialectical relationship between facts and ethics, history, and ideas, something that
makes conventional historians nervous and perhaps contemporary theorists as well. Still, is
Scott’s approach so different? If there is, in Scott’s words, a “spiritual connection” between
European ideas and colonial events, then what is to prevent us from adopting a dialectical
model, not as a Hegelian synthesis but simply and quite unmetaphysically as an account of
the way ideas “play themselves out in the contingent field of political action.”6 A theoretical
(rather than narrative) account of that logic is what my book seeks to provide, describing not
only the contradictory dynamics within the concept of freedom, but the indeterminacies and
contingencies of its historical realization.
When historical events do not live up to freedom as an idea, theoretical pragmatics
focuses on the gap between them, as a mode of immanent critique. This is universal history
in the negative. But there are moments when actors in history accomplish more. Sometimes,
the idea “plays itself out” in a singular historical event by so radically transforming it that a
new idea emerges. That is what happened in the Haitian Revolution. People conceived of as
slaves by Africans and Europeans, acting in the name of freedom, broke free of the idea of
slavery itself.7
An idea—freedom—that claims universal validity “plays itself out in the contingent field of
political action,” and is transformed in the process. If this formulation sounds Hegelian (and
why would it not, if Hegel was describing just this contemporary event?), the understanding
of history is totally different. The singularity of the historical event that gives birth to a new
idea—in this case, radical antislavery—is not compatible with Hegelian phenomenology,
wherein the Idea comes into historical existence necessarily, in terms of its own, innerdialecti-
cal unfolding. By 1817, Hegel was arguing that the abolition of slavery in Europe was inevitable
because it was in contradiction to the spirit of Christianity.8 This claim conveniently ignored
not only the continued existence of slavery in the Christian Americas and Christian colonies,
but also, of course, the originary event of slavery’s overthrow in the Haitian Revolution that
had been news at his breakfast table a decade before. Logic trumped fact in Hegel’s phi-
losophy of history. For him the endgame was already guaranteed. Nothing could be further

6 I am citing Karuma Mantena’s work on colonial India. She writes: “I want to insist, a critical understanding of liberal impe-
rialism cannot limit itself to a criticism of the theoretical assumptions of liberalism’s norms in abstraction from the ways
these ideals play themselves out in the contingent field of political action.” Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of
Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 185.
7 In referring to the singularity of this event, any similarity to the recent use of this term by others (Badiou, Žižek) is strictly
coincidental. I have in mind something close to Adorno’s and Benjamin’s theory of the proper name.
8 “The universal is a thought that took millennia to enter into men’s consciousness; and it only achieved its full recognition
through Christianity. . . . But the genuine reason why there are no longer any slaves in Christian Europe is to be sought in
nothing but the principle of Christianity itself. The Christian religion is the religion of absolute freedom, and only for Chris-
tians does man count as such, man in his infinity and universality.” G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, trans. and with
introduction by T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1991), 240–41.
Christianity and slavery had been compatible for eighteen hundred years. If the end was inevitable, history was taking its
time.

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from the position argued here. The universality of the idea, the total elimination of slavery for
all people, was born in the Haitian Revolution. It was, according to Michel-Rolph Trouillot,
“unthinkable” until historical actors in Saint-Domingue proved otherwise.9 This extraordinary
contribution to human freedom has not been superseded. Hegel, for whom empirical history
was the disposable occasion for the coming-into-being of the Idea, was unable to plumb the
depths the singular event.10
Scott is not convinced that I make the case for the actual impact on Hegel of the slave
revolution. Because Hegel scholarship was not the essay’s major concern, I relegated the
copious material relevant to this issue to the footnotes. This material was the consequence
of months of research, involving multiple editions of Hegel’s Jena lectures and notes, some
only recently published. It was, in fact, my persistent scrutiny of the Hegel sources through-
out the 1990s that led me to the connection with Haiti—not vice versa. If this question is of
interest to readers, I urge them to take advantage of the footnote references given. Particu-
larly irksome is the recent review of my book in the New Left Review by Anders Stephanson,
who totally ignores this archival work and concludes on his “own hunch, nothing more,” that
Haiti was no more relevant to the thirty-five-year-old, unemployed, Girondin-leaning Hegel in
1805 (expecting a child with his landlord’s wife), than it was to Hegel as a fifty-five-year-old,
comfortably bourgeois, pro-monarchy, chaired professor of philosophy in Berlin.11 Going on
a hunch, nothing more, I would find that difficult to believe.
Let me state it plainly. Hegel is not my hero. I really do not care how Hegel processed his
knowledge of the Haitian Revolution. But I do care that he saw Haiti—and that my education
occluded this fact, so that I did not know what Hegel himself knew, and therefore could not
think through and past him, and past the European genealogies of the modern disciplines
that his thinking played such a decisive role in founding. In theoretical pragmatics as an act
of historical remembering, Hegel himself is not the point. Freedom is.

II
Fischer’s ethical concerns revolve around the issue of violence. She questions whether the
historical catastrophe that pulverizes cultural meaning is necessary before progress can occur.
I recognize that violent destruction cannot be the desired prelude to manifestations of human
universality. But a singular event by definition is not the particular case of a general rule. If
history is acknowledged as a contingent field of action, then there is no possibility of deriving
from one unique convergence of people and events a necessary precondition that applies to

9 See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995).
10 Hegel’s language is violent: “What human beings strive for in general is cognition of the world; we strive to appropriate it
and to conquer it. To this end the reality of the world must be crushed as it were; i.e., it must be made ideal” (Encyclopedia
Logic, 85).
11 Anders Stephanson, “The Philosopher’s Island,” New Left Review 61 (January–February 2010): 197–210.

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all.12 I am saying that in this case the violence done to the slaves was turned by them into a
creative act. But not directly. The loss of preexisting cultural and social ties was not the only
determinant of slave existence. On the plantations, these Africans developed a multi-cultural
solidarity that was the precondition for political success. Moreover, precisely through their
labor that produced the incredible wealth of the sugar-exporting colony, they became aware
of their collective power to initiate action. (Again, if this last point sounds Hegelian, it should,
because that is what Hegel saw happening in Saint-Domingue before he described the dialec-
tic of mutual recognition in terms of master and slave. The slaves’ action in Saint-Domingue
came first; Hegel’s articulation of the dialectic followed.)
Fisher is right to insist that people are never blank slates, devoid of cultural markings.
There is no existence outside the mediation of culture. The imaginary subject of classical
liberalism—abstract, precultural, and free by nature—has always been a myth (no Crusoe
without Friday13). But, one might ask, is the imaginary subject of cultural belonging any less
mythical? Do we have a culture? Or does culture have us? The possessive form of the question
is revealing. The status of slave in the colonies was very much a cultural fact—literally one of
belonging. As a possession, the slave was vitally necessary for colonial society’s reproduction.
The same issue is manifested in a different way in postcolonial India, where independence
did not eliminate the traditional cultural meaning and social significance of castes, and where
changing the status of untouchables necessitated their own political struggle.14 The point is
that you are vulnerable to human degradation not only outside a culture’s boundaries, but also
within them. The destruction of cultural meaning also destroys what is unequal in a society,
its justification of hierarchy, exploitation, and intra-cultural exclusions. Keeping cultures intact
cannot be the sine qua non of political ethics. It is not the unconditional goal.
Culture is often imagined as if humans belonged together by nature or by choice. But
where cultures are politically autonomous, it is sovereign power that determines the lines of
inclusion and exclusion. For that reason, I am not a great fan of culture as the source of soli-
darity. And I am indeed suggesting that the capacity of human beings to maintain a critical
distance—what Adorno would call the nonidentical in the acculturated subject—provides the
possibility of another kind of collective loyalty, precisely the universal, human solidarity that
becomes visible in the liminal spaces between topological boundaries, and in the past-present
constellations that provide the “flashes of insight” that Fischer describes. The moment of
mutual recognition between us and the slaves in Saint-Domingue is such a constellation, in
which the idea of universal history is fleetingly revealed.

12 In another context—in the British colonies—such an act of liberation by slaves did not take place. Instead, liberal
reformism played out its contradictions, as it did in India, where colonialism was structured quite differently.
13 This was Hegel’s note to himself (see Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, 10, 61).
14 The Hindu caste tradition was constitutive of postcolonial nationalism, whereas the individualist alternative of liberal
tolerance did not bring social equality. For an excellent account of the Dalits (untouchables) and their continued struggle
for recognition, see Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2009).

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Returning to Fischer’s question—can we desire universal history but not the destruction
on which it is predicated?—there is another aspect of violence, that of the historical event
itself. Hegel was quite comfortable thinking human progress and human violence as neces-
sarily correlated. So were, for different reasons, Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, and Ernest Renan.15
From the standpoint of universal history, however, the issue is not so clear.
To argue that the birth of a new idea of humanity—whether by slave revolution, class
revolution, or national liberation—must be bloody makes a first principle out of violence, a
cult of bloodletting that grants too much legitimacy to the masculinist culture of the warrior.
Fanon’s psychology of violence as a purging of colonial consciousness is compelling in theory,
but problematic as a principle of practice. Is the blood that stains the midwife of a different
order? Surely, helping to bring life into the world is qualitatively different, from a human point
of view, from the blood that stains by taking life away. Marx’s rhetoric justifying revolutions
as the midwives of history, hinged on this distinction. But the historical necessity of violence
is not thereby established.
Perhaps the familial metaphor, whether birth-by-blood or brotherhood-by-blood, is not
to be salvaged in political discourse.16 In modernity, nation-states are the cultural preserv-
ers of movements initiated by revolutions of whatever kind. Haiti, the United States, Mexico,
Russia, France, China, and Iran all have this in common. Revolutionary violence produces
the legitimating birth certificate of sovereign power. It transfers to present rulers exclusive
ownership of the historical contribution of the past, appropriating history as a form of enclo-
sure. There is cause to be uneasy with the kind of solidarity that the geopolitical accident of
national birth sustains.
One might contrast this political model of modernity with another that emerged in the
course of the twentieth-century, the idea of nonviolent political resistance. Its birth was the
promiscuous consequence of multiple unions. The politics of nonviolence counts among its
forbearers British feminist suffragettes, South Africa’s colored, and Indian Dalits (untouch-
ables). Nurtured by the African American civil rights movement, it is kept alive today by resist-
ers on the streets of Tehran and BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) activists in Israel.
This idea claims universality in the absence of cultural exclusiveness, however local its execu-
tion. Moreover, however inspiring the lives of its leaders as individuals, it is the consequence
of collective agency.17 It looks like humanity to me.

15 Renan commented in 1882: “Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation
of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle of] nationality. Indeed,
historical enquiry brings to light deeds of violence which took place at the origin of all political formations, even of those
whose consequences have been altogether beneficial. Unity is always effected by means of brutality.” Quoted in Ernest
Renan, “What Is a Nation?” in Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Becoming National: A Reader (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996), 45.
16 For an intriguing account of a late-nineteenth-century attempt by British liberals influenced by Hegel to incorporate the
family ideal into the politics of the nation in opposition to the classical liberal subject, see Jeannie Morefield, “Hegelian
Organicism, British New Liberalism, and the Return of the Family State,” History of Political Thought 23, no. 1 (2002):
141–70.
17 Gandhi’s variant of nonviolence—satyagraha—was criticized as patronizing when he rejected as “violence” the action of
Dalits against the property of the Hindu temples that excluded them. Ambedkar, himself a Dalit who as a constitutionalist

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If we consider the point that the legitimacy of sovereign violence turns the table on cultural
belonging, then the question is not only why the German fascist state stripped Jews of their
citizenship before hoarding them into camps, as Fischer asks—but how is it that they were
able to? How did the leaders have the power to name Jews a foreign presence, hence subject
to “legitimate cruelty” in the first place? This articulation of the problem turns Hobbes inside
out. Within the state, life can be poor, nasty, brutish, and short. There is no protection via the
sovereign for our natural vulnerabilities. Political excommunication is a leitmotif in the history
of modernity. Universal history articulates an effort to break from this tradition. The idea of
porosity, the porous space between national cultures, weakens the imagined sovereignty of
power. All of us are vulnerable to its threat. But less so if our most precious values maintain
dual and permanent residence in this porous space, as the medium in which the memory of
the past is preserved.18
Is there a possible consensus here? How can we claim that the humanity we see is
universally legitimate, once the criterion of sovereign legitimacy has been abandoned?
It should be clear by now that my use of the pronoun we addresses that nonidentical, non-
acculturated aspect of our critical consciousness. Solidarity with humanity is what we experi-
ence through a sense of not being at home in our world. But this self-estrangement has to be
understood as historically specific, not some general existential state (I part company from
the Heideggerian tradition here). It is in this critical, cognitive sense that self-estrangement
can be shared. Just as the French soldiers in Saint-Domingue, when they heard the fighting
slaves sing the “Marseillaise,” wondered aloud whether they were not fighting on the wrong
side, we maintain the right to judge against the political sovereign or the cultural collective that
claims us. I have called this stance one of radical neutrality. It supports those, wherever in the
world, who act in the name of all of humanity rather than particular self-interest. Its criterion
of solidarity is the antithesis of liberal individualism. It is the capacity to perceive instances of
a common humanity without the prejudice of personal belonging. Far from robbing political
life of passion, it enables partisan conviction.
Fischer focuses our attention on this claim to universality. Can it ever escape the logic
of hegemony? How, she asks, is Bush’s foreign policy so very different, when it echoes “the
age-old rhetoric of modernity” in asserting a “universal notion of freedom” that turns invading
armies of the United States into freedom fighters for humanity’s cause? Her concern is that
my vision, “however fragmented,” is still to reinstate the Hegelian grand narrative of history
as “a realization of universal freedom.” This is similar to Scott’s fear that I long to save the
European project. But universality for both Bush and Hegel is understood in a place-centered

and politician worked ceaselessly for caste equality, wrote that this was taking the principle of nonviolence too far. Again,
the idea of universal humanity (to borrow Mantena’s terms) “plays itself out in the contingent field of political action”—in
this case, one of caste inequality as well as ethical action (see Rao, The Caste Question, 93–95).
18 I am aware of Hannah Arendt’s strong argument that human rights cannot be guaranteed without citizen belonging, the
right to have rights. Her evidence is historical fact: the political refugee, far from protected, has hardly been recognized as
human. But what is true of the modern world order need not be inevitable.

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way that channels the past through the proprietary presumptions of one nation or civilization.
By what historical distortion does the concept of universality, or humanity, or freedom belong
to the European West? Was it not precisely the achievement of the Haitian Revolution to prove
otherwise? Today in criticizing the partiality of human rights discourse, Muslims emphasize
the idea of human dignity, and I do not find it necessary to protest against Muslim-centrism
in order to embrace that contribution. The values of dignity, rights, and freedom are not
exclusionary civilizational possessions.
Human universality, as theoretical pragmatics, cannot remain on the existentially abstract
level of ethics. As soon as history is brought into the picture, the discussion of values turns
into political critique. Freedom from slavery, achieved in Haiti, was distorted by the ideology
of free labor. The idea of human rights, applied within the nation-state order, cannot protect
those not at home in the world from the perilous status of refugee. And human dignity does not
exist where independent judgment (ijtihad) is silenced. But perhaps history is the least contro-
versial term. It does not compare to the wasp nest that the word universality stirs up. I need
to be clearer as to my reason for resurrecting this term. Universality has a specific valence in
the present—our present, in which time is described in spatial terms. Our time, by accidental
consensus, has acquired the name globalization. However vague and intellectually unsatisfying
the term, that name is here to stay. So, why does it matter in the context of this discussion?
Globalization displaces the discourse of modernity, connecting instead to the companion
discourse of development—modernization. That is, it returns to economic roots. I disagree
with Scott’s saying that the economic history of capitalism is “entirely material, and therefore
external,” to a discussion of the “spiritual, and therefore internal” (Scott’s emphasis), way that
Europe’s identity has been fundamentally shaped by the colonial experience. Again, our dif-
ferences are topological. I have my own “Fanonian doubt” about the postcolonial tendency
(not shared by Fanon, C. L. R. James, or Eric Williams) to treat Marx as a “dead dog” (as
Lenin warned had happened in his time with regard to Hegel). If there is a common human
condition in our time, it is the structuring of collective existence by the dynamic and unstable
system of global capital.
Global capitalism is, of course, not new. Its national-imperial form first made moder-
nity possible. But contemporary globalization structures experience differently, in ways that
strain the imaginary of nation-states. I have described this new situation as one of “global
immanence.”19 It refers to the fact that in our era, characterized by global labor migrations and
global networks of communication, there is no spatial outside, no other of peoples, territory or
environment against which some of us could conveniently define ourselves apart. Global space
is overdetermined. Our lived experiences are simultaneous and incongruous, resisting division
into distinct nationalities, pure ethnicities, or religious differences. But if there is no Archimedean
point outside of this interdependency, then this historical present deserves its own genealogy.

19 Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (London: Verso, 2003), 93.

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Can one speak of an ethics of remembering that confronts the political challenges of
globalization? If history addresses a porous space, then the telling of the past opens up to
multiple, indeed, limitless contemporary receptions that ignore the bounded structures of
place. This means in the first instance that genres cannot be isolated—not a political history
of freedom that excludes the economic, not national histories that presume territorial borders
of culture, and not histories of continuous progression as if this were one with the triumph of
humanity, because these will not capture the momentary ruptures, the transient successes,
the anomalies to history’s course that can release their stored energy in the present. The
goal is indeed, as Scott says, “idiosyncratic” history-writing, across the fields and disciplines
now established. The conceptual formations emerging from porous social spaces cannot be
incorporated within existing notions of sovereign and imperial power—nation-states and civi-
lizations that presume a legacy, a passing down of the past reserved exclusively for legitimate
descendents. This is why, when it comes to human history, the distinction between gift and
legacy is so important: legacy is the fate of the gift under the sovereign regime of property.

III
Levinas speaks of the gift of the other, Derrida of the gift of unconditional hospitality, but if we
shift this concept out of the topology of existentialism (individual death, ethical action) and into
history (transitoriness, the fleeting moments of humanity), it expands beyond the confines of
ethics and becomes political. It is not the being of those who acted in Saint-Domingue that
is crucial, not the singularity of their identities, their place, their context. We are dealing here
not with ontology (who we are in the world) but with action (what we aspire to in the world)—a
historical pragmatics of the idea. Events in Saint-Domingue, accomplished by multiple, anony-
mous actors, actualized a new human condition, a universal gift because of the radicality of
its claim to free not just Haitian citizens but all human beings from the politically sanctioned
institution of slavery.
History is a gift of the past to the present unconditionally, with no expectation of reciproc-
ity, no possibility of a counter-gift—indeed, with no assurance that the gift will be received at
all. History’s giving is not restricted to the specific political or social context of the event, and
hence no privileged collective can appropriate its legacy. The concept of the gift is useless
to imperialism. Rejecting the move to treat the past as a domain of enclosures, it escapes
the logic of property. It opposes the trickle-down theory of beneficence, whereby access to
the accomplishments of the past is restricted to those deemed “ready” to inherit them. His-
tory’s gifts are experienced through the mediation of written texts, cultural objects, material
ruins. Their truth is lost if the present does not recognize in them its own concerns. We need
each other to defend the past as the storehouse of human possibility. Universal history is a
communism of the idea, transforming the very structure of collective memory.

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184  |  The Gift of the Past

Does history, conceived as a gift, undermine the gains in power that oppressed collectives
have acquired precisely by staking a claim to their own ground of history and culture, defend-
ing their past against encroachment, misrepresentation, or simple neglect? Perhaps. But this
form of defense does nothing to eliminate the distorting structures of memory that result from
history’s privatization. It does not resolve the dialectic of inequality, which it addresses merely
by reversing the terms. The claim to minority entitlements makes a virtue of minority status.
Historical claims to land run roughshod over the lives of present inhabitants. The demand for
money restitution endorses the logic of property, mimicking France’s claims to massive com-
pensation for the loss of colonial property that left Haiti financially hamstrung for half a century.
Within the existing model, universal history is cosmopolitanism for the privileged. The past
is considered universalized when UNESCO incorporates it into the project of World Heritage,
declaring historical sites as cultural treasures—“masterpieces of creative genius”20—that
remain the property of the state on whose territory they are located, and whose past greatness
they display. The list of sites has been democratized by further additions (the present number
is over 800), but this is as far as the logic of property can take us. The World Heritage program
channels the idea of human universality through the existing nation-state order at the same
time that it caters to the global, ruling class of new cosmopolitans, who bring tourist coins
to the locals as they visit Palmyra, the Taj Mahal, Lalibela, Machu Pichu, and the Egyptian
pyramids. The crowd of peddlers swarming at the gates to these tourist sites, so troubling to
officials, reminds us of Walter Benjamin’s warning that what we call cultural treasures belong
to the rulers: “And all rulers are the heirs of prior conquerors. . . . Whoever has emerged vic-
torious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which current rulers step over
those who are lying prostrate.”21
Fischer, writing her response immediately after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, insists
that our discussion of universal history cannot be silent on this contemporary catastrophe. I
agree. But the challenge is not one that can be addressed simply in terms of Haitian history,
as it involves multiple levels of connection. The first reaction of people the world over in view-
ing the terrible destruction in Haiti was, I believe, genuinely one of human solidarity. But this
sense of a common humanity was undermined by the false immediacy of the media image.
The instant empathy that these images evoked was thwarted by the very media that produced
it. The desire to come to the aid of the Haitians at the sight of such a traumatic event—felt
viscerally, as bodily innervation—was cut off from immediate action, forced to channel itself
through governments, nongovernmetal organizations, and the media itself.
Descriptions of the earthquake were contextualized in a discourse of victimhood that
limited the universal humanity of our response to the fear that we too could be caught in a

20 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) criteria for selection of World Heritage sites,
http://whc.unesco.org/en/criteria.
21 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 391.

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natural disaster. But, as Fischer observes, after the “natural” catastrophe in Haiti began to
be described as not inevitable but the consequence of a “culture of poverty,” the New York
Times commentator David Brooks could argue for a positive side to the destruction: a dif-
ferent Haitian culture could now be built. Is this not a classic case of what Naomi Klein calls
the “shock doctrine”?22 Catastrophic destruction, she argues, provides the opportunity for
neoliberals to apply “shock therapy” in terms of a total restructuring of the economy. We are
indeed witnessing foreign investment in Haiti, new textile factories especially, that make Haiti’s
low-wage labor force profitable precisely by reproducing the “culture of poverty,” continuing
the economic model of production for export that has recurrently plagued this island since
the days of the sugar plantations.23
Mainstream media, at least in the United States, provided news coverage of the earth-
quake intensively, while barely mentioning Haiti’s revolutionary past. But is reminding the
world of past glory the adequate alternative? If we are taught to appreciate Haitian history as
specific to that island and its people, we cut its ties to ourselves. In our imaginations, the slave
revolution belongs to them—a them that is not us. Public discourse dwindles off with vague
references to the traditional resilience of the Haitian people, while the impulse of solidarity that
was the immediate response to the earthquake is submerged, and then forgotten.
A universal history worthy of the name will go far beyond the notion of correcting the
Eurocentricity of history writing. The goal is nothing short of a different world order. It will
need to be based on a deprivatized, denationalized structure of collective memory. There is
little danger of a new triumphalism in this task. Human universality is a scarred idea, and the
sources of the scarring must be remembered along with its moments of inspiration. Extreme
inhumanities are a part of a communist transmission of the past. The genocide in Darfur does
not belong to the Sudanese any more than the Holocaust belongs to the Germans. Both Haiti’s
triumph and its tragedy are our own.
If the present is imagined not as the culmination of the past but rather as its rescue, then a
radical pedagogy practices this gesture in its mode of historical recuperation. History-making
and history-writing are co-labor that constitutes meaning. The singular past collaborates with
us, and we with it, in keeping the idea of universal humanity alive. If Hegel remains in the
picture, it is because his entanglement in freedom’s logic exposes the empirical inadequacy
of this idea as it is traditionally thought (and taught). Politics includes a program of pedagogy.
Theoretical pragmatics respects the lack of closure of the past and welcomes its intrusion in
the present. A communist mode of reception alters the structure of collective memory. It views
history as a gift, given to all of us, without restrictions.

22 See Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Henry Holt, 2007). Klein cites the
champion of neoliberal economics, Milton Friedman: “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change” (7).
23 Other plans exist—models of peasant farming and decentralized production that have worked in Haiti the past. See, for
example, Steven Stoll, “Towards a Second Haitian Revolution,” Harper’s Magazine (April 2010): 7–10. Whether these have
a chance of implementation is a test of Klein’s thesis.

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