Jean Prince-Mars resolves in
his anthropology the Haitian contradiction, logical in its emergence from the
French crisis; and which bet on a political miscegenation, which did not
respond much to its cultural reality, as neither in Cuba. As everyone
recognizes, in its cultural nature, this is the basis of Negritude as a
political projection; and its consistency is dangerous as an alternative to the
entropic development of the West, heading for its own apotheosis.
From this point of view,
Haitian Negritude is a phenomenon politically appropriated by Western
liberalism; not born of it, as in the case of the United States, which responds
to the same political determinism of this entropy; or in the case of its African
extension, where it is based on the anti-colonial thought of that same liberalism.
That is also why it is so dangerous and more effective, responding to its own
contradictions and not external ones; or as the second aspect of the American
case[1],
which was only an alternative —obviously more pragmatic— to the original
idealism.
There is a mistake when
Depestre quotes Fanon, and probably of Fanon in his original definition of
Negritude; which for Fanon it was the black man's reaction to his ostracism by
the white, singing and admiring himself[2].
That may be precisely part of the Bovarism that Mars denounces, but it still
has a deep meaning; just that it’s existential, because it resolves in
aesthetic reflection its singular understanding of reality, as culture.
Then, it’s not an extension
of that Bovarism, but of the logical space created by it, in its reflexive
function; so that Mars —and Negritude as his space— is not a genius but a
logical apotheosis of the American black. This is what escapes Depestre, who
thus enters into the difficulties of the foreign country as his own[3],
into that of proletariat; but when he himself is not a proletarian, but
participates in the intellectual elitism that usurps that representation of the
popular class; and even worse, because it becomes the black mask that the white
spirit assumes, in that expansion of its entropy.
The illusion that the Negro
is endowed with a particular nature would refer first to his political
marginality; and immediately there, to this as a reservoir of his cosmological
singularity, defined by contrast. This is the spiritual supplement that the West
needs, like the rainbow of its own poetics[4],
even if he does not know it; just not in that inconsistency of the dialectical
loop that is the proletarian paradise, dystopian like any utopia forced in
history.
What happens there is the
divergence of interest and meaning, between liberalism and blackness, explaining
each one; but which was already exposed by Sartre in the Black Orpheus,
and which was logical in its whiteness, but which is now assumed by the black.
The conflict is always of that defective ontology, only now harsher in its
incomprehension of the bourgeoisie; but because of that hermeneutical defect of
Transcendental Idealism in which liberalism is born, even in its Marxist
theory.
The defect, coming from
dialectics, consists in economic determinism, reducing culture to the social;
but in what individual power is subordinated to the collective, from the
Kantian imperative to the Hegelian dialectic. Culture as a historical reality,
and as a human reality transcends this determinism, in the functional relations
with which it is structured; and capital is not only financial but also
spiritual, as the set of resources with which existence is resolved.
That is what makes the
Western defect of an ontological hermeneutical nature, typical of his
understanding; And that is what the alternative development of Negritude can
provide, as a political reference, in its spirituality. The restoration of
culture, of that anthropological disaster caused by the humanist apotheosis,
correcting that defect; as in fact the Belgian Liyan Kestekoot postulates
—cited by Depestre himself[5]—,
alluding to that same restorationism.
[1]
. It refers to Booker's accommodation strategy. Washington, in its Atlanta
Commitment.
[2]
. Cf: René Depestre, Welcome and Goodbye to Negritude.
[3]
. It alludes to the poem Notebook of a return to the native land, from
Aime Cesaire
[4]
. He is referring to his play A Rainbow for the Christian West, Casa de las Americas
Award.
[5] . Cf: René Depestre, Op. Cit.
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