Hegel And Haiti Summary

Raymond Lei
POLS 3440
Final Paper

In a section of The Phenomenology of the Spirit entitled “Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness:Lordship and Bondage,” Hegel introduces his well known master-slave dialectic. This dialectic is an account of how a consciousness becomes aware of itself in a subject. For Hegel, the master is the One, or “the consciousness that exists for itself” (Hegel 190). The slave is the Other, his consciousness is one that is initially defined solely through its dependence on the master. The master then recursively gains a consciousness that is also dependent on the slave, so both consciousnesses become contingent with each other. The slave gains self-consciousness by working for his master, by putting his work
Thus, the slave’s consciousness is one of “thinghood,” a body with no human value. In “Hegel and Haiti,” the scholar Susan Buck-Morss writes: “The slave is characterized by the lack of recognition he receives. He is viewed as "a thing"; "thinghood" is the essence of slave consciousness-as it was the essence of his legal status under the Code Noir” (Buck-Morss 847). The link between the “thinghood” of Hegel’s slave and the decree of Code Noir is important here. Hegel’s account of the master-slave is widely considered to be an allegorical abstraction about the becoming of self-consciousness, but it nevertheless bears striking resemblance to political struggles that were actually happening during the time of his writing - namely the slave revolts in Haiti that lasted from 1791 to 1804. It is the Haitian Revolution, Buck-Morss asserts, that served as the material source for Hegel’s formulation of the master-slave
Wilderson III, this omission is not entirely accidental, for the relation of the slave contradicts the Marxian thesis of that the wage is the primary means of control within political economy. He writes in his essay, “The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal”: “A slave does not enter into a transaction of value (however asymmetrical), but is subsumed by direct relations of force. As such, a slave is an articulation of a despotic irrationality, whereas the worker is an articulation of a symbolic rationality” (Wilderson 13). It is urgent that socialist and other radical left politics notice this hole in their discourse for, as Wilderson notes, this despotic irrationality, this relation of enslavement, still exists today. The institution of slavery may have been abolished, but white supremacy’s libidinal desire to destroy black lives continued long after, from sharecropping and the KKK, to Jim Crow and segregation, to today’s means of controlling black populations: ghettoization, gentrification, police terrorism, and the carceral state. The positionality of the black subject is one of incoherence, it is a “‘scandal’ that renders civil society asunder” (Ibid 17). Modern society was built, not in spite of the colonization and enslavement of the African countries, but as a direct result of it. The liberal meta-narrative of providing liberty and individual rights to all its citizens thus cannot allow the presence of the black subject. Civil society