Black Orpheus is a systematization of black aesthetics, in that very sense
of excellence that Negritude sought; the problem is not that it is wrong —a
perspective cannot be wrong— but the function it fulfills in that exact
sense. As this, it is understood that a
perspective is always correct, because it is functional and responds to an
object of its own; It therefore has no absolute or objective value, insofar as
it is an understanding of its object, not its own value.
The problem with Black Orpheus is that it does not obey the interests of
the blacks, whom it seems to represent; but subordinates it, just like the
tradition against which it stands, although in intelligence and not economics. After
all, it is the culture that has evolved, already from the economic apotheosis of
modern capitalism; focusing now on that of the idealistic transcendentalism of
its intelligence, as the new capital in its political determination.
The Negro must maintain his same position in this transcendentalism, together with the
worker with whom he is identified; all under the aegis of the intellectual
elites, who emulate in its conventionalism the
bureaucracy of the palace eunuchs. That is the importance of this book,
whose critique will then establish the new existential reference for the black
thought; just as Platonic transcendentalism was critically adjusted with realism,
at the base of the West culture we are looking at.
This is also then the importance of this critique of the Orpheus, as an
introduction to the introduction of blackness; providing the parameters for a
more systematic and total correction of the ontological tradition of the West. In short, the errors of Sartre's critique of the claims of
Negritude were not ideological; as a perspective too, it is exempt from that
objectivity that would confer absolute and dogmatic value. Sartre's errors are
of the ontology on which it is based, and therefore do not allow him to
understand Senghor's proposal; which is the alternative ontology of the realist
tradition, opposed to the idealist (Kantian-Hegelian), in its aesthetic
reflection.
In short, that was the tradition resolved as mythological, in its
representation of the determinations of reality; always in function of the
concrete entity, in a cosmology as the hermeneutical spectrum of reference for
its existential reflection. That is what art resolves, just in the face of the crisis
of modern transcendentalism, in moral opposition to its immanentism; all as a
false contradiction, by the (Christian) Manichaeism to which dialectics has been
reduced, with the moral pressure of
politics.
In this sense, Sartre compares —in the Orpheus— the black problem to this of the Jewish problem,
in the Marxist approach; it is wrong in both cases, because the problem is not
political —Senghor's mistake—nor can Marx comprehend it, within the limitations
of his ontology. That is what this
critique of Sartre's critique introduction of the Senghor’s anthology of the
black and Malagasy poetry is about; a clarification with which to reinaugurate the
New Black Thought, in a total rethinking of Negritude.
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