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Epilogue
What is [the] sense of the tragic? It is, in my opinion, a sense of the inability of
man in society to overcome the evil which seems inseparable from social and political organisation. To have a sense of the tragic, is to be aware of this and to
judge humanity by the degree to which man is able to struggle against this overriding doom; to establish moral and psychological domination over the feeling
of impotence and futility which it would otherwise impose.
I have been trying over the course of this book, above all else, to engage
in a certain revisionary practice of historical criticism in the present and
to do so against the background of what seems to me the deadend of the
hopes that dened the futures of the anticolonial and (early) postcolonial projects. My general aim has been to make out a case for a practice
of criticism that is alert to the idea that propositions are always answers
to questions or interventions in a discursive context, because it seems to
me that keeping this idea in view is one way of helping us to determine
whether the questions we have been asking the past to answer continue
to be questions worth having answers to, and whether the stories we
have been telling ourselves about the pasts relation to the present continue to be stories worth telling. In pursuing this concern, my specic
aim has been to argue for changing the questions we ask about the colonial past as a way of beginning the work of imagining new answers for
the present and new horizons for the future. I do not assume this work
to be straightforward or easy.
I have been saying that, on the whole, anticolonialism has been written in the narrative mode of Romance and, consequently, has projected
a distinctive image of the past (one cast in terms of what colonial power
denied or negated) and a distinctive story about the relation between that
past and the hoped-for future (one emplotted as a narrative of revolu-
tionary overcoming). But after Bandung, after the end of anticolonialisms promise, our sense of time and possibility have altered so signicantly that it is hard to continue to live in the present as though it were a
mere transitory moment in an assured momentum from a wounded past
to a future of salvation. The horizon that made that erstwhile story so
compelling as a dynamo for intellectual and political work has collapsed.
It is now a superseded future, one of our futures past.
As I said at the beginning of this book, in my view we live in tragic
times. Not meaningless times, not merely dark or catastrophic times but
times that in fundamental ways are distressingly o kilter in the specic
sense that the critical languages in which we wagered our moral vision
and our political hope (including, importantly, the languages of black
emancipation and postcolonial critique) are no longer commensurate
with the world they were meant to understand, engage, and overcome.
And consequently, to reinvoke Raymond Williamss deeply poignant
phrase, we are living with the slowly settling loss of any acceptable
future. It seems to me, therefore, that a tragic sensibility is a particularly apt and timely one because, not driven by the condent hubris of
teleologies that extract the future seamlessly from the past, and more
attuned at the same time to the intricacies, ambiguities, and paradoxes
of the relation between actions and their consequences, and intentions
and the chance contingencies that sometimes undo them, it recasts our
historical temporalities in signicant ways.
This has been my broad preoccupation. I have routed it through
C. L. R. Jamess masterpiece, The Black Jacobins, because (as I hope by now
is abundantly clear) it is a book of enormous insight in many registers
simultaneously. Not only is it one of the founding anticolonial texts of
the twentieth century and a book about one of the founding anticolonial
struggles in the modern world, it is a book of profound historiographical self-consciousness. In The Black Jacobins, James is practicing eective
history. His acute sensitivity to his successive historical presents make
its composition (in the mid-1930s) an exemplary instance of anticolonialisms emplotment of the past and future in the present, and its (partial) recomposition (in the early 1960s) an uncanny intuition that this
mode of history-tellingRomancemay stand in need of displacement
by anothertragedy. I have read The Black Jacobinsin the disjuncture between its rst and second editionsas opening up a discursive space
in which to explore the contrast-eect of tragedy as a mode of emplot-
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ting the story of the relation between our pasts, our presents, and our
possible futures.
It may be helpful, though, as a way of closing o these reections,
to set beside James another intellectual whose sense of the tragic and
time was also worked out in relation to the problem of revolution and
the founding of freedom.
in the same year that Vintage issued the second and revised edition of
C. L. R. Jamess The Black Jacobins, 1963, another famous study of revolution was published (this one by Viking): Hannah Arendts On Revolution.1
It is a book that, however neglected it might be by contemporary students of Arendt, marks an important stage in the overall evolution of her
moral and political thinking between the 1950s and 1960s. But readers
of On Revolution will recall that Arendt brings her study to a close with
a meditative and moving evocation of tragedy as a mode of remembering the spirit of the revolutionary tradition. Signicantly, she invokes
Sophocless late play, Oedipus at Colonus, and quotes from it the memorable lines: Not to be born prevails over all meaning uttered in words;
by far the second-best for life, once it has appeared, is to go as swiftly
as possible whence it came. 2 These of course are the melancholy words
spoken by the chorus at one of the crucialtransguringjunctures in
the development of the dramatic action in Sophocless tragedy. It is that
moment when the blind and brokenbut also bitter and awesomely determinedOedipus is about to be confronted by the hypocritical pleas
of his son, Polynices, who is seeking to enlist his fathers support for
his fratricidal campaign against his brother and Thebes. Oedipus has
paid his debt, and although he carries upon his person the everlasting
stain of his unspeakable crime, the sign of his polluting negativity, he
has begun a reversal from an object of mere pity to a subject of an elemental and prophetic power. The scene is one of poignant choral reection on the grim and ennobling spectacle of humanity. Fully aware now
of who this shattered suppliant is, what the catastrophe was that befell
him, and the abject and humiliating life of wandering beggary to which
he has since been subjected, the chorus oers a plaintive requiem for the
helpless misery of old age and the death which is our nal and inescapable release from envy and enemies, rage and battles. 3 In contrast to
the earlier Oedipus play (Oedipus Tyrannus), the overriding note here is of
tragic reconciliation rather than tragic conict.4
Hannah Arendt does not tell us this, however. Instead she simply, and
somewhat enigmatically, points our attention in anothercharacteristically politicaldirection, foregrounding the great legislator Theseus
rather than Oedipus. She writes: There he [Sophocles] also let us know,
through the mouth of Theseus, the legendary founder of Athens and
hence her spokesman, what it was that enabled ordinary men, young and
old, to bear lifes burden: it was the polis, the space of mens free deeds
and living words, which could endow life with splendour. This is all she
says, but it is enough to encapsulate and evoke for us the consoling relation between political memory and poetic tragedy she is striving for.
The resonance with The Black Jacobins is uncanny. Oedipus at Colonus, written toward the end of his own life, was Sophocless great paean to the
passing glory of Periclean Athens and its embodiment in the gure of
Theseus, the mythic hero of Attic unity. With his usual solemnity, the old
poet and statesman returns to the theme of Oedipus, to place his equally
aging hero at yet another crossroads. The years of pain and desolation
visible in his bearing, bereft of every comfort save the unceasing companionship of his faithful daughter, Antigone, Oedipus has nevertheless
survived (if also survived with) his past. And now, on the outskirts of
Athens, near the village of Colonus (where Sophocles himself was born),
he has come to make a nal resting place for his mortal remains and to
oer himselfan embodiment of virtueas a sacricial blessing to his
chosen city in its future time of trouble.
What Arendt means us to bear witness to here is a contrasting political ethos: the contrast between the cold machinations of Creon and Polynices (both of whom aim at luring Oedipus back to Thebes for their own
instrumental purposes) and the magnanimity of Theseus who oers
Oedipus a haven of hospitality. It is the contrast between the boorish
authoritarianism of Thebes and Athens as the embodiment of forbearance and fellowship, gracious compassion and welcoming citizenship.
Part of the virtue of the Athenian polis, Arendt seems to be saying, is
that, as the birthplace of tragic thought, it was well attuned to the fact
of human actions exposure to contingencies, its vulnerability to the unexpected and the unplanned-for. Because the polis was the space of
mens free deeds and living words, it was necessarily a space in which
human action was at once indeterminately plural and concretely particular; therefore, it was also a space of collisions and negotiations of rival
wills and intentions, one that depended for its durability upon an acute
sense of human fragility and the inherent mutability of human ends.5
Revolution are fundamentally concerned with the problem of the founding of freedom and its relation to tragedy. James and Arendt, admittedly in dierent ways, through dierent historical instances and elaborations, and with dierent degrees of explicitness and focus, are both
concerned with the distinction between mere liberation from tyranny
and oppression, on the one hand, and the political project of creating
institutional conditions for the positive work of freedom, on the other.
James, I think, would have agreed with Arendt when early in On Revolution she writes: It may be a truism to say that liberation and freedom
are not the same; that liberation may be the condition of freedom but
by no means leads automatically to it; that the notion of liberty implied
in liberation can only be negative, and hence, that even the intention of
liberating is not identical with the desire for freedom. Yet if these truisms are frequently forgotten, it is because liberation has always loomed
large and the foundation of freedom has always been uncertain, if not
altogether futile. 9 Ultimately I want to suggest that both The Black Jacobins and On Revolution are informed by a tragic vision of freedom. Both
Arendt and James share a sense of the tragic (to use Jamess phrase);
they share a poignant sense of humanitys everlasting struggle with the
ineluctable contingencies of evil that, as James puts it, are inseparable
from social and political organization and that give rise to human suffering. Both, I think, were profoundly sensitive to the sense of futility
that is so often the crushing measure of our mortal lives in the face of
this evil; and both, moreover, saw tragedy as a way of thinking about the
fragility of the project of founding freedom and the fact that it has, by
and large, eluded the modern aspiration to revolution.
on revolution is sometimes thought of as the third and nal volume in
Hannah Arendts trilogy on political theory. And indeed, anyone familiar with the rst two, The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition (as well as the collection of essays that complements these monographs, Between Past and Future),10 will easily recognize that although the
mood and tone of each of these books is dierentregistering, in part,
their dierent occasions and dierent organizing subject matterthe
central preoccupations are much the same: the nature of freedom, the
virtue of public action and speech, the idea of authority, the concept of
politics and its distinctive realm, and so on.11 In many ways, Arendt is
pursuing an interconnected project of remarkable consistency and continuity. At the same time, however, On Revolution is its own profoundly
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original book.12 It is, above all, Arendts lament for what she calls the
lost treasure of the revolutionary tradition.13 All revolutions since the
French Revolution (the constitutive point of origin of the revolutionary tradition) have been carried out in the name of freedom, but all of
them, Arendt argues, have missed the opportunity to found freedom
that is to say, they have failed to give freedom an appropriate and durable
political-institutional form. As a consequence, she maintains, the revolutionary spirit embodied in the principles of public freedom, public
happiness, and public spirit (the principles that inspired and motivated
the eighteenth-century revolutionaries) has faded not only from practice
but even from memory. In The Black Jacobins too, as we have seen, James
is also asking a question about the fate and the legacy of the eighteenthcentury revolutionary tradition, how it shaped and how it doomed his
tragic hero, Toussaint Louverture.
In On Revolution, Hannah Arendt oers a story about the vicissitudes
of the French and American Revolutions, for her the dening revolutions of the modern age. In this account, the French Revolution began its
career as a demand for nothing less than political freedom, but went into
eclipse when, pressed by the surging multitudes of the poor, the social
question displaced the political one, and as she puts it, freedom had to
be surrendered to necessity, to the urgency of the life process itself. 14
The lasting and far-reaching importance of Marx (the greatest theorist the revolutions ever had), Arendt argues, was to give this shift its
most profound formulation. In his thought, she maintains, the preoccupation with history (the story of the objective course of events) rather
than politics (the problem of the foundation of freedom) distracted the
revolutionary tradition from its proper aim. With Marx, as she put it,
the abdication of freedom before the dictate of necessity had found
its theorist. 15 He did, she says, what his teacher in revolution, Robespierre, had done before, and what Lenin, his greatest disciple, was to do
after: he surrendered freedom to necessity.16 Henceforth, abundance
and not freedom would become the (misguided) aim of revolution. This
shift is the great theme of Arendts book.
By contrast with the French, the American Revolution has had little
impact on the development of the revolutionary tradition. Or rather,
such impact as it has had has been entirely negative; that is to say, it
has contributed largely to an antirevolutionary tradition. Arendt considers
this a pity because the American Revolution, she maintains, is the only
revolution that directed its attention and focused its energies entirely
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chords and awaken aspirations that sleep in the hearts of the majority of every age. But Pericles, Tom Paine, Jeerson, Marx and
Engels, were men of a liberal education, formed in the tradition
of ethics, philosophy, and history. Toussaint was a slave, not six
years out of slavery, bearing alone the unaccustomed burden of
war and government, dictating his thoughts in the crude words of
a broken dialect, written and rewritten by his secretaries until their
devotion and his will had hammered them into adequate shape.
Supercial people have read his career in terms of personal ambition. This letter is their answer. Personal ambition he had. But he
accomplished what he did because, superbly gifted, he incarnated
the determination of his people never to be slaves again.
Soldier and administrator above all yet his declaration is a masterpiece of prose excelled by no other writer of the revolution.
Leader of a backward and ignorant mass, he is yet in the forefront of the historical movement of his time. The blacks were
taking their part in the destruction of European feudalism begun
by the French Revolution and liberty and equality, the slogans of
the revolution meant far more to them than to any Frenchman.
That was why in the hour of danger Toussaint, uninstructed as
he was, could nd the language of Diderot, Rousseau, and Raynal, of Mirabeau, Robespierre, and Danton. And in one respect he
excelled them all. For even these masters of the spoken and written word, owing to the class-complications of their society, had
always to pause, to hesitate, to qualify. Toussaint could defend the
freedom of the blacks without reservation, and this gave to his
declaration a strength and a single-mindedness rare in the great
documents of the time. The French bourgeoisie could not understand it. Rivers of blood were to ow before they understood that
elevated as was his tone Toussaint had written neither bombast
nor rhetoric but the simple and sober truth.27
This is C. L. R. Jamess answer to Hannah Arendt. It is a moment in which
he shows Toussaint Louverture in the incomparable role of a political
statesman and strategist, the embodiment of the vita activa, stepping into
the political realm and acting with brilliant and eloquent decision.
However, if in all the conventionally recognizable ways Arendt was
a Eurocentric, this is not all that she was; nor is it the only or the most
important lesson to be drawn from On Revolution. The story of Toussaint
Louverture in The Black Jacobins is, I believe, the sort of story of the tragedy
of the revolutionary tradition that On Revolution wishes us to remember,
a solemn story of the surrendering of freedom to necessity, of the political to the social. Or at least in my view one can read The Black Jacobins as a story about the distinction between liberation and freedom and
the relation between these and tragedy. On this reading, the tragedy of
Toussaint Louverture is the tragedy of a leader who (like Robespierre and
Lenin) felt obliged to forgo the principles of public freedom, public happiness, and public spirithowever temporary he might have imagined
the contingency to be. It is a memorable and central theme in Jamess
narrative that the end of white domination and the tyranny of plantation slavery was one thing, the fashioning of a free black republic, the
creation of a public and constitutional arena in which the newly emancipated black could appear and have her voice heard, quite another. All
of Toussaints later errors were committed within the conicted space
of this insurmountable conundrum. Faced with economic devastation,
foreign military encirclement aiming to return the blacks to slavery, and
an increasingly restless, hungry, and suspicious mass of emancipated
slaves, Toussaint had precious little space within which to act. But act he
had to. And when he did, he (again like Robespierre and Lenin) opted to
secure the economic (necessity) over the risk of the political (freedom)
on the calculated grounds that the former was at least a guarantee of the
latter. Surely one of the sobering lessons of the story of the downfall of
Toussaint Louverture is that nothing guarantees freedom but the political commitment to its foundingand even this, James is likely to have
added, is often not enough.
what then is the sense of the tragic for our postcolonial time? Because tragedy has a more respectful attitude to the contingencies of the
past in the present, to the uncanny ways in which its remains come back
to usurp our hopes and subvert our ambitions, it demands from us more
patience for paradox and more openness to chance than the narrative
of anticolonial Romanticism does, condent in its striving and satised in its own suciency. The colonial past may never let go. This is a
hard truth. Toussaint Louverture, Jamess magnicent hero, arrived at
this insight by a long and dicult road and without the benet of precedent to guide him. Nor were there second chances, the option of starting
over. And Toussaint Louverture paid for the lesson of his insight with
his life. The knowledge of our postcolonial selves this insight has en-