The Invisible Armada

2024/11/15

1- Without doubt what the European revolutions of the 17th and 17th centuries and the total democracy of today could have in common, despite everything that separates them, would be their conflicts with the Universal. Or, conversely, their common affinities with what we could call the lame Universal, their propensity to inscribe their promises on a horizon line which is that of a universality proclaimed and claimed but which does not resist the the test of reality – that of its encounter with History in the present.

The American and French revolutions are inhabited by a powerful presumption of universality, in the extension of classical political philosophy, the message they convey is addressed to generic humanity, they are staged in a horizon where the particularities fade away in the face of the universality of principles and values, where the figure of Man is firmly established. The Universal is the natural element in which the speeches, addresses, proclamations of their great orators are established, their grandiloquence supports a rhetoric of the Universal. But this representation or self-presentation is a trompe l'oeil. The human race or Man without particular determinations in whose name the major actors of these revolutions speak and act does indeed have a color and their intrinsic whiteness is indeed their unthought 1. The Universal that they promote does not take into account or include slaves, people of color, savages. The lame Universal  is constantly caught up by what is off-screen – slavery, the condition of the black man, the plantation economy, this inexhaustible windfall (manna) for European societies and North America of the time.

To assert the universality of the principles, values and ideals that they put forward, to promote the inseparable promise of what they become, as a heritage, these European revolutions (in their subsequent destiny, as treasure and heritage), can assert their pact with the Universal only on the condition of placing in a blind spot the only modern revolution which, in fact, really signals in the direction of the Universal – the Haitian revolution 2.

It is in fact by demonstrating that even the forgotten (or banished) of the white Universal promoted by the European revolutions, the black slave, has the capacity to expose its full humanity and its condition of majority ( by rejecting the chains of slavery, by entering into revolution) that the Haitian revolution draws a line of flight away from the capture of the figure of the Universal associated with that of the generic man by an individual – the European White or of European origin. The Universal can only cease to be lame on the condition of the staging of this " even the black slave...", " even the one whose humanity is denied by the slave traders and the plantation owners...", this " same ..." demonstrating his full humanity through and in the very fact of this unprecedented event that is the Haitian revolution.

However, the specific nature of the constitution of the American Revolution and the French Revolution as heritage and patrimony intended to mark the paths for the future of all humanity is to prosper not only on oblivion (the non -heritage registration), but the rejection of the Haitian revolution. Where there was the germ of the true Universal, growing on the soil of the irruption of the very one that had not been invited to the banquet of the white Universal (the black slave), the Great White Narrator of political modernity placed under the sign of Progress and Reason, reintroduced a condition of exclusivity, a drastic restriction - not only is the black revolution not registered as heritage, but what preserves its trace (Haiti as a black republic, populated by the descendants of slaves who went to revolution) will be the subject, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, of merciless vindictiveness on the part of the former colonial and slave powers – particularly France and the United States . The Haitian people have been relentlessly, endlessly punished for daring to overthrow white power, defeating white armies, and depriving Europe of the wealth extracted from the big island.

The Radical Enlightenment clearly grasped the issue of this repression of the figure of the black slave in revolution just as it well grasped that of the putting out of play, out of scope (of the Universal) of the savage of the islands at the end of the world (Diderot, Supplement to the voyage of Bougainville ) 3. They clearly understood that the Universal the European revolutions established (as topos , figure, discourse, heritage) was a conditional Universal, amputated of its power of deterritorialization and decentering of the Euro-blancocentric prejudice – An appropriate Universal, ferociously re-territorialized and subjected to the norms of white hegemony. The placement of the Haitian revolution off-scope, during this operation of capturing and recounting the Universal in its interactions with the propagation of the “promise” supposedly emitted by the European revolutions – this is an integral part of the institution of the lame Universal as a central figure of Euro-blancocentric hegemonic discursivity.

Conversely, this exclusion has the effect that this revolution has become, throughout History based on this founding lie, the ghost which haunts the false Universal through which the white narrator continues to assert the titles and rights of his story of the world and to monopolize the position of speaker of the morality of History 4.

The erased trace of the Haitian revolution, from the point of view of a history of the vanquished, retroactively draws the path of another possible History – one whose horizon would have been a Universal including people of color and savages; a History which would not have been placed under the sign of a Universal compatible with the colonization and hierarchization of human races; there is a line of force which leads from the blancocentrism of the American and French revolutions to provinciality of the Universal which they subsequently promote as their heritage. This Universal is falsified insofar as it is based on a prejudice rather than on a misunderstanding; or, more rigorously, a dispute (différend) : it sets to music the great motifs of emancipation, freedom, equality, justice and rights – but in an exclusivist perspective – in truth, the promises attached to these great motives only address a fraction of humanity. It is therefore only too expected that the progressivism, humanism and rationalism which “dress up” the promotion of these motives place the Haitian revolution in a blind spot – it is that it implacably accuses and highlights the provinciality of the operation organized around the promotion of this mutilated Universal. It is by starting from the Haitian revolution that a radical critique and a rigorous genealogy of European and white-centric political modernity can discover and expose the nudity of the king . The Haitian revolution reveals the color of the revolutions with universalist pretensions of the 18th century .

It is here in fact that the bad fold of this diverted Universal, its constitutive vice, is formed. The Haitian revolution must be put under a bushel by the great discourse of modern political Enlightenment, precisely insofar as it is insoluble in the white-Euro-centric heritage of the revolutions established at the origins of political modernity; it is for this reason that it persists in being the wound through which the blood of the false Universal flows. It is today that this hemorrhage becomes completely visible, exposed (indicted) as it is by the decolonial counter-discourse. But the fact is that it was never sealed, even at the time when the religion of Progress and Reason took unrestricted swipes at the calibrated heritage of the Enlightenment and the great white revolutions. What shows this well is the rise, very early, of suspicion as to the consistency or real constitution of the generic Man established at the center of this great discourse – an abstraction, says Marx, which opposed him, long before Sartre, already, the lives of real men.

Now, this generic Man is indeed the most precious capital of the Universal promoted by the white province of the world. It is not only the base or the matrix of the infinity of discursive productions around human knowledge and sciences (the continent of global and multidirectional anthropology which emerged in the 19th century). It is also, constantly, what is (re)questioned , object of the dispute, put to the test of the History of the time, at the age of the formation of colonial empires (where the dissociation between the white man as conqueror and the colored man as conquered is exposed in full light), then wars of mass destruction which shatter the ideals and promises associated with the promotion of this beautiful form, beautiful abstraction – Man; this, even before the rise of fascism and the implementation on European soil of programs of racial extermination which will throw the last shovelful of earth on this great corpse – Man.

The latter drags down with its fall the biased Universal from which it came. In this very sense, the return of the generic Man equipped by law, in the canonical form of the Declaration of Human Rights (only capital letters), in the aftermath of the Second World War, has many aspects of  an impossible restoration ; the reason why, this solemn proclamation, inscribed in the horizon of a Universal in search of refoundation (we distinctly hear the echo of the concerns of emerging peoples) appears today more than ever not as an inspiration (the driving force of a continuous fight inscribed in the horizon of emancipation), but rather as that of which each article constitutes an indictment of the forms of domination, exploitation, oppression, discrimination prevailing more or less universally , in multiple and varied (variable) forms all around the planet – this today as yesterday and the day before yesterday.

The discursive machine of the Universal revived by human rights has a short breath: Human Rights and the rhetoric that goes with them have been monopolized by the States and the elites of the Global North who have made it a war machine against their enemies. The people, the oppressed, those who suffer state violence, have never had the opportunity to sustainably, strategically appropriate this machine in order to lead their fights for emancipation. Abstract, floating universalism is not the element in which practical resistance to concrete situations or conditions of inequity can take root. This is the reason why, in their best use, Human Rights are put forward in the fight against abuse of power, state violence, discrimination – in a manner defensive; in the horizon of immunity, and not that of emancipation.

We can clearly see here how the aporias which emerge when we undertake a history of the Universal forged in the crucible of the great white revolutions of the modern era constitute the prelude to those which burden the destiny of contemporary democracies. The fall of the Soviet empire gave new impetus to a democratic universalism which is inseparable from the spirit of conquest – this universalism takes on the colors of exclusivism, its premise being that the democratic regime and, beyond that, democratic culture and the promotion of homo democraticus would henceforth be, for all of humanity, a path and a horizon without alternative.

It is a universalism based on a minimalist “promise”: Human Rights, multi-partyism, elections, the often fallacious appearance of the separation of powers and, above all, a solid articulation of this system on the market and integration into the globalized trade system. Here we touch on the difference in quality between this universalism and that which inspired the white revolutions of the 18th century. The promise to which these latter gave substance relates to the passage from the state of minority to the state of majority, it is indeed a question of making the leap which leads the ordinary man (the woman remains stranded for a long time) from the state of subject to that of citizen. It is a promise of infinite power , despite its limitations, implicit or explicit, and which supports the struggles for emancipation throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Even hampered as it is by its provinciality, it remains paradoxically appropriable by the very people it leaves out of the field or excludes - it is the sense of the "even us” which gave its impetus to the Haitian revolution and, after it , to all movements of emancipation of the so-called “peoples of color”, of colonized peoples, of the wretched of the earth.

Contemporary democracy (the one which imposes its general conditions and its regime after the end of the Cold War and the disappearance of the Soviet bloc) is not supported by any promise whose power compares to that which accompanies the inaugural revolutions of political modernity in Europe and North America. It's not just that what it hopes for is vague and subject to infinite variations, depending on places and circumstances. Above all, this promise has never emancipated itself from the camp spirit and the spirit of conquest, as is clearly shown by the relentlessness with which the Western powers are working to establish war in Ukraine over time. The supposed values and principles that they invoke as their foundation are perpetually oriented against what resists the conquest of the planet by total democracy - Human Rights are, for the Western/white governing elites, a product of export and a weapon of war against the regimes which persist in embodying another mode of government of the living – China, Iran, Cuba, North Korea... In Western democracies, Human Rights, that never serves to sweep ahead its door and any attempt to do so is denounced by the people of the State as partisan agitation, even subversion – the French Minister of the Interior points the way when he demanded, very recently, the suppression of public subsidies granted to the... League for Human Rights 5.

The discourse of human rights which accompanies like its shadow the expansion of total democracy today is radically dissociated from any promise of emancipation . When it is not a speech of attack against what resists the infinite expansion of this power bloc whose center of gravity is and remains the white world in ceremonial garb (democracy is for the white world what the black habit, as a sign of respectability, was for the bourgeois, in the time of Baudelaire), this discourse is mainly immune-oriented . The promise (always revocable and uncertain) that it conveys consists of a principle of moderation in the use of violence that the State is likely to exercise against citizens – there is democracy when, with some exceptions, we do not fire live ammunition against people who take to the streets to demonstrate against the elites of power. But between a rigorous acceptance of the notion of “respect for Human Rights” and such extremes lies a vast gray zone which is the one in which, as we are well placed to know in France, an ultra- militarized and conditioned mercilessly represses any collective and public demonstration of opposition to power. In Western democracies, the discourse of human rights increasingly tends to be put on the back burner in favor of the imperatives of maintaining order. For internal use, it now has an ornamental and less and less regulatory function for state practices - France, “homeland of Human Rights”.

We can also, if we want to take the measure of the dissociation between any form of promise of emancipation and the discourse of human rights associated with the spread of total democracy today, take a brief look ( grieved and heartbroken, of course)  on what remains of the supposed democratic revolutions which accompanied and followed the collapse of the regimes subservient to the USSR in Eastern, Central and Balkan Europe: ultra-reactionary and obscurantist regimes, regimes cultivating a combative nationalism and an uninhibited xenophobia sometimes flirting with white supremacism, regimes plagued by corruption, mafia regimes, and often maintained, for obvious geo-strategic reasons, by a Eurocracy rivaling in zeal with the US political elites in the promotion of neo-liberal democracy for all, even and especially for those who do not want it. And, with this, depressed, violently divided and unequal societies, prey to resentment and sometimes nostalgia for the era of relative egalitarianism in force at the time of real socialism, societies in which "friendship between peoples" facade has given way to hatred of neighbors, the return of anti-Semitism, the vomiting of refugees and migrants 6.

Freed from Soviet tutelage, this “other Europe” has also taken leave of an “oriental” world to join the camp of Western democracy as true white world , a rallying in the form of cultural and racial upgrading, therefore coinciding with the crossing of the line of separation between a certain Orient (political, defined here by its association with Russian and Soviet “Asianism”) and the West democratic, embodied above all, for these Eastern European countries, by the United States much more than Western Europe. The Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall were, throughout the Cold War, the materialization of this dividing line between oriental despotism revamped as totalitarianism in the Soviet version, on the one hand, and liberal democracy in the Anglo-Saxon fashion. the other.

Geo-politically and, to a certain point, culturally, in their lifestyles and ways of doing things, the societies of Eastern Europe moved to the West with bag and baggage and, so to speak, without transition, to following the disappearance of the Soviet empire.

In the imaginary idiom or under the regime of colors or species, this is indeed a magical operation, more than a real transition anchored in reality: by joining the camp of Western democracy and market economy, the people who thus fall into the Western world cease in doing so to be suspect Whites, second-class Whites, Eastern Whites crippled by despotism, backward and in some way locked in a world without History; they become real white people, first class white people, fully established on the white planet. They consequently adopt, in a pathetically mimetic mode,  its manners and vision of the world, the habitus spontaneously and naturally autocentric - here they are now joined at the heart of the world, refocused, at the very top of the pyramid of human species and prone, as such, to all the overdoings specific to neophytes; this is the reason why they were, during the first major migratory crises, the precursors in terms of closing borders to migrants (undesirable as well as non-White, deemed to constitute a vital threat to European civilization as well as Christian civilization - this term being here the (supposedly) culturally presentable version of the true qualifier: white , white Europe and not dago or swarthy.

They were the first to erect rows of barbed wire and walls intended to stop invaders from other worlds. Initially denounced by the leaders and educated and decent elites of Western European democracies as xenophobic and obscurantist, the promoters of these policies of rejection based on supposedly cultural and indeed racial criteria quickly proved to be prophets in the land of Europe – ex Oriente lux , Orban and his Polish or Czech equivalents have never done more than pave the way not only for Western European government identitarians, but for the celestial bureaucracy of the European Union itself. Over time, the policies of quotas and refoulement of migrants driven by European institutions have only become ever more openly racialized . Each ship loaded with migrants that sinks in the Mediterranean mercilessly exposes the issue of racial sorting taking place at the gates of Europe. Even Syrian refugees now see any chance of becoming adopted whites on European soil disappearing.

The way Poland welcomed Ukrainian refugees with open arms in the months following the outbreak of the Russian offensive presents the sharpest contrast with the rigor and inhumanity with which it closed its eastern border to non-European migrants who reached the borders of the European Community via a complacent and cynical Belarus. On the one hand, the reception of Ukrainian refugees (in all the former ex-Soviet countries of Eastern Europe) confirms Ukraine's symbolic transition to the West , belatedly completing the process which followed the collapse of the Soviet bloc. But just as much, the Ukrainians are welcomed as they are white and supposedly Christian, while the migrants to whom Belarus has facilitated access to the doors of the European community are perceived as belonging to other worlds, belonging to other species, other topographies. By the grace of Putin, Ukrainians are becoming, somewhat belatedly, real white people. As long as the geo-strategic positioning of their country remained uncertain in a field structured or overdetermined by the divide separating the world of white Western democracy from that of Eastern neo-despotism embodied by the Putin regime and, beyond, by the oriental "small difference » of p the Russian people, the question of knowing to what extent the Ukrainians were real White was not settled . Now that their rulers and warlords are clamoring for membership in NATO and holding the front line against the great post-Soviet Other, the question is settled: they are part of the family, like the Poles , like the Romanians, like the Bulgarians, Westerners from the eastern confines of the West in love with democracy. However, this geo-strategic configuration has a color - white understood as the hue and complexion of democracy, as opposed to the uncertain and suspicious colors  of totalitarian Russia or, equally, of Turkey placed under the thumb of the authoritarian sultan.

The symbolism and imagination of color is the unconscious of the discourse of the conquering total democracy today, its archaic fund of primitive images. Since the end of the Second World War, the discourse of the hierarchy of races, which fueled both colonial conquests and fascist supremacism, has fallen into discredit. As a result, the effectiveness of color as an operator of vital separations between what must be defended and what must be rejected, between what is at the center, at the top, and what remains eccentric or subordinate manifests itself in a mode surreptitious, implicit; it took refuge in the dark zones of the unsaid, unsayable, of the unthought. But it is in practice that the intact power of these images is manifested: suddenly , under the effect of the Putin offensive, the immemorial disputes which opposed the Poles to the Ukrainians are erased on the magic slate of the new Cold War and in the hearts of peoples who have long been in dispute with the Ukrainians over territorial, religious, linguistic (etc.) issues. They become more than allies or friends - brothers , fellow human beings - here they are the guests of honor at the banquet where the wedding of the new frontiers of Europe and quintessentially white total democracy is celebrated. All this waiting, if the stars are favorable, of the Georgians, the Moldavians, the Armenians, of course,  other Whites in the making, on the condition of their definitive separation from the power which, today, embodies the perseverance of Russian Asianism 7.