Ep. 211: Sartre on Racism and Authenticity (Part Three)

0:00 Wes: So this is an introduction to a book of poetry by black authors. What is that called, Mark?

0:06 Mark: Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française.

0:13 Wes: All right. Some of it is just Sartre’s reflection on the poetry that’s in the volume. And he turns that into an overall thesis about black consciousness, which he says requires poetry. And by black consciousness he’s talking about something on analogy to class consciousness. What you achieve when you no longer subject to the ideology of the ruling class. So for Marx, in the case of class dynamics, it’s the idea that classes are just natural. And one ends up in a certain class through natural conditions. And there’s no way out of it. It’s just the way of things.

Class consciousness tells you that this actually can change and that things are a contingent product of the relations of the means of production or certain underlying economic conditions. Some of this is going to be a comparison of what it means to obtain consciousness as a black person versus consciousness as a member of the proletariat. And one of the differences is that you need poetry, according to Sartre, for black consciousness and black liberation. Whereas the proletariat is more focused on the technical, on scientific know how, for instance, and related things.

And the reason for that is the racism is more viscerally directed at the subject than is the ideology of the ruling class towards the proletariat. So the ruling class will tell you that it’s a natural thing, but there’s not the same level of you are in essence inferior. And doing that for Sartre requires a certain amount of appeal to subjectivity. And he sees poetry as a language of subjectivity. And then he’ll go into great detail about what that means and we can talk about that. But basically it has something to do with exploring as a black person one’s negritude.

And he has a bunch of points about what negritude means. And that’s basically the essay.

2:13 Mark: So it’s a different task than what he was doing in Anti Semite and Jew, which was trying to directly address the racism issue and do a psychological analysis. Analysis here that’s lurking in the background. But really, he explicitly says this is an intro that he’s doing for a white audience to explain why they should be interested in this poetry. It seems like you’re looking over the shoulder of black people talking to other black people. And why should that be interesting? He says, actually, though, it seems like this is, you know, a niche market,

2:45 Dylan: it’s actually the most revolutionary poetry that’s out there right now that exists in the world.

2:50 Mark: Yes. And it’s of universal appeal.

2:52 Seth: Well, that’s the third point. The first point is he’s saying why white people should be interested in this. The second is, as Dylan mentioned, that it’s the most revolutionary poetry that’s out there. So if you’re interested in revolution, but it’s also an attempt to thematize. So this anthology, it’s not an anthology of just poetry by black people. It’s an anthology of French speaking poets of former French colonies. He’s attempting to create a theme that could explain Senegalese and Guyana and Martinican. Yes. What do they have in common? Like what is the commonality that brings all these things together into that one single volume?

You know, you could say it’s just that they were colonized by the French. He’s trying to say that that oppression is essentially what brings them together. Even though they come from very different places. Islands in the Caribbean as well as countries in Africa. But he’s trying not to do it in terms of saying, well, this is just a collection of formerly colonized black men. What is it about the experience of being colonized that brings them together?

3:58 Dylan: It requires an interpretation of poetry, of how poetry works and the function of poetry and how it’s related to prose that’s gone through in the article and then in its functioning as poetry. Why, it makes sense that this visceral distinction that Wes talked about is most aptly articulated through poetry as opposed to prose. And then I guess there’s the proletariat that lurks around in the background.

4:26 Wes: I thought when Mark mentioned that it’s addressed to a wide audience, I thought it might be worth reading some of that beginning. When you removed the gag that was keeping these black mouths shut, what were you hoping for? That they would sing your praises? Did you think that when they raised themselves up again, you would read adoration in the eyes of these heads that our forefathers had forced to bend down to the very ground? Here are black men standing, looking at us. And I hope that you, like me, will feel the shock of being seen. For 3,000 years, the White man has enjoyed the privilege of seeing without being seen.

He was only a look. The light from his eyes drew each thing out of the shadow of its birth. The whiteness of his skin was another look, condensed light. The white man white because he was man. White like daylight, white like truth, white like virtue, lighted up the creation like a torch and unveiled the secret white essence of beings. Today these black men are looking at us. And our gaze comes back to our own eyes. In their turn, black torches light up the world and our white heads are no more than Chinese lanterns swinging in the wind. And on page 15, there we are, finished our victories, their bellies sticking up in the air show their guts our secret defeat.

If we want to crack open this finitude which imprisons us, we can no longer rely on the privileges of our race, of our color, of our technics. We will not be able to become a part of the totality from which those black eyes exile us unless we tear off our white tights in order to try simply to be men. I mean, it’s great. The metaphor of a victory is something that’s lying dead with its belly up in the air. You know, it’s great stuff.

6:08 Mark: I mean, after reading Fanon, it’s of course hard to read this and not feel like how are we using this poetry for our own benefit and therefore not focusing on it, not focusing on the experience of these artists themselves, but somehow using it as a tool to improve our own self consciousness or something like that. But if you had not read just Fanon making that critique, this would seem pretty motivating, that this is another way that we can obey the Socratic command to know Ourselves to self examine. And of course, even if it was just white people regarding others as equals in the past, well, that’s observing.

Right. It’s not like it was an individual human. So he’s speaking metaphorically here. But if there is something that is common to the white people, you know, their unacknowledged privilege or something like that, then gaining this extra perspective certainly adds something. Recontextualizes white Europeans might have thought they were the center of the universe and the story of history is them gradually crushing nature and reaching greater enlightenment. And reading this just gives a totally different perspective that kind of marginalizes you and actually centers these poets, these voices.

This, I think, is where some of this. The fact that he actually uses this term privilege, and talks in this way, I think he’s prefiguring the ancestry of some of the language that we use now to describe this.

7:31 Wes: Yeah. So this phrase cracking open, this finitude which imprisons us, tearing off our white tights. So he’s talking about the liberation of white consciousness as well. Right. Even though at the very end of the section, he’s going to say two things about the purpose of his introduction, which is one, to say this poetry, which seems racial at first, is actually a hymn by everyone, for everyone. So that’s one thread. And the other is to explain to them what black men already know, them being white people, why it is necessarily through a poetic experience that the black man in his present condition must first become conscious of himself and then the mark about it being the only great revolutionary poetry.

So in my mind, that makes it look like a threefold project, you know, the raising of white consciousness, the raising of black consciousness, or the explanation of why the poetry is necessary to the raising of black consciousness. And then this more universalistic idea of a hymn by everyone for everyone.

8:29 Mark: Do you feel, though, after reading Fanon, that feel a little icky here in terms of him. I think Sartre is being as careful as he can, given this weird project of characterizing the essence of a race, to say, well, no, I don’t actually mean an essence. It doesn’t, you know, it’s not in their DNA that I’m talking about a mode of being that I’m seeing in these particular poets. But he is using it to romanticize. He’s saying that white people can have their consciousness raised not just by seeing through black eyes how oppressive they’ve been and how they’ve been arrogant over the years, but also to take off our white tights and become just men again.

That there’s Something in advanced European civilization that we’ve gotten divorced from nature. And by reading this, you know, so it’s kind of glorifying the black soul as primitive and more purely human. Something that we need to get back to. That’s at least what Fanon was saying

9:27 Wes: about this in general, as more naturally poetic.

9:30 Dylan: Which Fanon criticizes. Right.

9:32 Wes: Yeah. As he criticized it as one of the sort of stages that he went through believing that sort of thing. Yes. That’s my value as a black man. But seeing that as limited and. Yeah. Ultimately, I think, somewhat racist in the association between that and primitiveness. Right. Being closer to certain primitive roots.

9:51 Seth: I didn’t get icky and feel that until the end, where he talks about fecundity and agriculture and sexuality and all that. I thought what he was trying to say was that Sartre didn’t say you couldn’t just return to some ancestral, primitive language or primitive land and appeal to some kind of alternative ancestral cosmogony or something like that. That the experience and the reason why poetry is necessary is that the black man has to go into himself and work through the experience of being colonized. And part of that is an appeal to the tradition. But it’s not simply just going back to a real or imagined tradition from a home country and setting it in opposition.

10:36 Dylan: Part of that is central to being poetry. Because you have the visceralness that the experience of being oppressed and being colonized and the racism involved there is really tied to your body and being identified as an other. And then also as part of the colonization is your very language is torn from you. So you still have, in your way of articulating your life and thinking, even is in the language of the colonizer.

11:06 Seth: Right.

11:07 Dylan: These are all French writers. But one way to sort of obviate that a little bit is to engage in poetry, even if it’s French poetry, even if it’s in the language of French. Because it allows you to subvert the language itself. And subvert isn’t quite the word that he uses, but destroy it, he says.

11:26 Wes: Ruin systematically the European knowledge he has acquired.

11:30 Dylan: That’s why poetry is working. Because for Sartre, part of his interpretation of the activity of poetry is to actually ruin the language itself. It undermines prose, and it is in that way, it’s chaotic and it’s full of life, and it’s visceral. And because of the experience that you’re trying to articulate for yourself as a colonized person, as a colonized race, that poetry is the natural and Powerful mode for articulating that in word that you have available to you.

12:05 Wes: Can I read some of this? Please do, because it’s great. Because he gives this argument in this section about the poetic arising out of frustration with prose language, and language being, in essence prose, but that for that reason, prose is, in essence, failure. And we can capture being only through silence. I am at the top of 25. Being stands erect in front of us like a tower of silence. And if we still want to catch it, we can do so only through silence. Evoke in an intentional shadow the object to. By elusive words, never direct, reducing themselves to the same silence. He’s just quoted somewhere in there.

12:45 Dylan: Mallarme.

12:46 Wes: Yeah, Mallarme. No one has better stated that poetry is an incantatory attempt to suggest being in and by the vibratory disappearance of the word. By insisting on his verbal impotence, by making words mad, the poet makes us suspect that beyond this chaos which cancels itself out, there are silent densities. Since we cannot keep quiet, we must make silence with language. Anyway. That’s great.

13:14 Seth: You shouldn’t stop. I feel like we could just spend the whole episode reading this thing out. From Mallarme to the Surrealist. The final goal of French poetry seems to me to have been this auto destruction of language. A poem is a dark room where words are knocking themselves about quite mad. Collisions in the air.

13:33 Wes: Yeah. And this is so the sense in which he thinks that this idea that you can speak the oppressor’s language in order to destroy it is paralleled by the way in which you use poetry to evoke silence, to evoke things that are unavailable through impotent prose language.

13:52 Seth: I think when we had the first part of the conversation, Wes and I talked about how much we liked this essay. And Dylan wasn’t entirely sold. But. So what Wes just described was his talking about poetry as an art form and giving almost like a literary critique. He’s talking about the difference between poetry and prose and the purpose of poetry. But he ties this into his Marxist theme, where earlier on in the essay he says that, you know, language for the proletariat, for the working class, the white working class, is pragmatic. And because language for the white working class is pragmatic, they have no poetry.

And so in the white world, the poetry of the future revolution. I don’t even know if it’s redundant to say poetry and language of revolution, but essentially the poetry of class struggle, the poetry of class struggle has fallen into the hands of the bourgeois. And because the bourgeois don’t experience the class struggle the same way as the white worker does. It’s basically not a fertile ground for articulating. The people who need poetry have the language for it in the white world, and the people who have the language for it can’t articulate the revolutionary future.

And he says the Negro is a victim, like the white worker, of capitalism, but his oppression is because he’s black. And so he has to go through this subjective examination to become conscious of his race. And because the only tool he has for that is the language of the oppressor, he must adopt poetry to undertake that exploration which simultaneously is the articulation of this revolutionary future. Whether you agree or not, it’s a phenomenal interweaving of these themes and articulation of it. It’s brilliant.

15:34 Dylan: Yeah.

15:35 Wes: And I just want to say, Seth, since you alluded to this in this section prior to the one where we just read, where he’s basically making these connections to class, he says that class consciousness on the part of the proletariat requires objectivity in the sense of. It requires that the proletariat see its objective situation. What’s going on with class relations and economic relations. But the reason you need the subjective poetic approach in the case of black consciousness is because there needs to be this, what he calls a moment of negativity or separation.

What he also calls anti racist racism as a means to self discovery. One’s identity has sort of been swallowed by the colonial situation. In the case of the proletariat, again, it’s not as visceral a situation where you are taken to be this sort of inferior, conquered being. I guess that’s when he first mentions the idea of negritude. So he says racism aimed at the black heart must be opposed with a more exact view of black subjectivity. What is black subjectivity? In other words, what is the quality common to the thoughts and conduct of Negroes, as he puts it?

It’s negritude. Any exploration of black consciousness involves an attempt to discover negritude and what it is. This is on page 19. So since the term is often used in this anthology on a certain quality to the thoughts and conduct of Negroes, which is called negritude. That’s what race consciousness is based on.

17:11 Seth: What he doesn’t want to do, I think in this essay is say, okay, I’m trying to thematize this anthology of poetry from black skinned people from the previously colonized by the French. He’s trying to thematize it and he doesn’t want to say, here’s what Negritude is. This is how I’m thematizing it, that if they speak in this rhythm or they allude to these types of things, or if they use this type of language, that somehow that classifies them. What he says, and this is on page 35, he contrasts a poet named Diop with another one named Aimé Césaire.

I read this little thing about Césaire, and Fanon was a student of his, and that’s why Fanon quotes him all over the place. Plus, he was a phenomenal, amazing human being. But Sartre finds Diop lacking because he’s black and he’s formerly colonized. But his poetry, I don’t want to say it doesn’t meet the criteria of Negritude. It doesn’t achieve the articulation of Negritude. And so on page 35, he says, and finally, Negritude objet is snatched from Cesaire like a cry of pain, of love and of hate. Here again he follows the surrealist tradition of objective poetry.

Césaire’s words do not describe Negritude. They do not designate it. They do not copy it from the outside. Like a painter with a model, they create it, they compose it under our very eyes. He goes on to say that insofar as this exploration, this use of the French language to explore the colonized black soul is not a scientific use of the language, it’s a poetic use of the language. Because these poets are trying to destroy, right? They’re going to use the language of the oppressor to destroy it. The very act of writing poetry is a becoming of something new.

It’s a creation. It’s an act of creation and not an act of description or designation.

19:08 Mark: Let me read another quote along those lines from earlier, page 20. The black man who asks his colored brothers to find themselves in quotations is going to try to present them an exemplary image of their Negritude and will look into his own soul to grasp it. He wants to be both a beacon and a mirror. The first revolutionary will be the harbinger of the black soul, the herald, half prophet and half follower, who will tear blackness out of himself in order to offer it to the world. So that’s the idea here. If we sort of compare this to the authenticity, being an authentic Jew. I’m not sure if we can completely equate the two, but it sounds like.

19:43 Wes: I think it’s all about that.

19:44 Mark: Yeah, yeah. To find themselves that there is in this situation of being a formerly colonized person.

19:51 Wes: Well, later on he’ll use this phrase existential unity. He’s obliged to reconquer his existential unity as a Negro from foreign thinking, basically from this foreign schema that’s imposed with language and culture.

20:06 Mark: It’s just interesting. You know how he says in the anthology which I’m introducing to you here, there’s only one subject that all the poets attempt to treat more or less successfully. From Haiti to Cayenne, there is a single idea. Reveal the black soul. Black poetry is evangelistic. It announces good news. Blackness has been rediscovered. He’s trying to generalize. But then in the example that you gave of the poet that he doesn’t like as much, he’s essentially saying, well, that guy’s just not doing it right. He’s not merely reporting what he’s gotten from reading these poems. He’s come up with a hypothesis of what they are all about. And if the ones that don’t seem to be about that, he’s just saying, well, they’re trying to be about that. They’re just not being successful about that.

20:51 Seth: Prophecy is not a truth function. You can’t prophesy and do it correctly or incorrectly. Either you are preaching or you’re not. It’s not a question of whether you can preach truly or falsely. And maybe this is a semantic distinction, but I made a note of where he said black poetry is evangelistic. It reminds me of the whole concept of, like, truth versus revelation. There’s no truth function to be applied to the articulation of the announcing of a future state. I understand that things can come to pass or not, but you don’t judge John the Baptist on what you don’t say. Well, he prophesied, or he was an evangelical. True or falsely. Whether or not the thing comes to pass is something else. But the act itself cannot be judged against a truth function.

21:39 Dylan: That sounds right. But there’s another piece that Sartre points to in the Functioning of Poetry. This is on page 29, which is this dialectical and mystical return to origins.

21:52 Wes: Yeah, this is the objective part. So he’s distinguishing these two elements, the objective and the subjective. And the subjective is where he gets into Césaire and Léro and surrealism. The objective has more to do with the return to origins. You know, primitive rhythms, all that stuff.

22:09 Dylan: Yeah, Both discovering and becoming. What he is is the dialectical law of successive transformations. It is not a matter of knowing, nor of ecstatically tearing himself away from himself, but of rather discovering and becoming what he is. There are two convergent means of arriving at this primordial simplicity of existence. I wrote, you know, contra Fanon.

22:29 Wes: Yeah, right. Because the two means are the objective and the subjective. So it’s not like the objective is that you abandon that, although he is going to give a lot of weight obviously to the subjective. But the distinction between Césaire and Léro is that basically Léro is, you know, as a surrealist, he’ll say what Cesaire destroys is not all culture, but rather white culture. Right. So Léro is doing all the typical surrealist stuff, throwing words around and hoping that some of them are going to line up meaningfully. That almost like random use of language is going to produce these interesting patterns and relations.

Cesaire is doing something way more specific. He’ll say what he brings to light is not desire for everything, but rather the revolutionary aspirations of the oppressed Negro. So he’s using surrealism for. He says he gives surrealism a quote, unquote, rigorously defined function. And in that he is getting at negritude in a way that Léro doesn’t.

23:33 Mark: Yeah, which is interesting looking back at, you know, thinking about Debord, society, the spectacle Marxist white guy in France, a little later than this, 20 years later, was connected to the surrealists of his time and definitely saw surrealism as a way of freeing the mind from ordinary bourgeois thinking of your programming. And so I think Sartre is just saying that he thinks Léro’s poetry is just a schoolboy imitation, that he just thinks it’s bad poetry. But there’s nothing about surrealism itself that’s objectionable or that is a mere distraction from the revolutionary project.

That I think that Sartre is painting ordinary surrealism as being navel gazing bourgeois kind of stuff and unworthy of inclusion in here. Debord certainly felt differently about that. I’m wondering whether Sartre is really just saying I don’t like Léro’s poetry as much or. Well, because Léro is not consumed with the black soul in particular, because he really is writing straightforwardly universalist poetry about just freeing the imagination of whatever reader comes along, that somehow he’s failing in his mission of displaying blackness. Right.

In which case, like, I’m not down with the Sartre trying to impose that on all the authors that he’s introducing.

24:54 Seth: But that’s the same argument from anti Semite and Jew, isn’t it? It’s the argument of the liberal that if you take the universalist approach, the universal man, you want to subsume all particularity underneath this generalized universal that you’re ultimately effacing some of the important differences that make it possible for people to identify. Right.

25:17 Mark: So it is kind of coming back to that is what is the importance. And I think this is just a key question for Fanon and for the anti Semite Jew and for this. But what is the importance of that step of solidarity with your fellow victimized to then achieving full the ordinary existential problems of just man? I mean, it’s interesting that Sartre reverses how I’d interpret Fanon putting it that if, you know, on my interpretation of Fanon by saying the future is white was that black folks have to achieve this liberating solidarity and deal with their own, pose just the problems that come with being a member of a colonized group and then they can get to the normal existential human being problems.

Whereas I think Sartre at the beginning of this by saying we white people have to take off our white tights and become merely men. It’s actually that black folks right now in their position have a more authentic grasp of the human condition, that we’ve sort of lulled ourselves as the pretended victors of history and into a false sense of security and not feeling like we actually have to self determine that we have to engage in the Socratic project or whatever it is you think you need to engage in to be an authentic human being?

26:37 Wes: See, I don’t know that he says that. Right. I’m sure he would think there are a lot of inauthentic black people as well as white people.

26:46 Dylan: No one escapes that judgment from Sartre.

26:48 Wes: I think he does see black poetry as the revolutionary key. But he doesn’t directly say, and I’m skeptical about the idea that he would think that. That there’s something especially enlightened about black people because of their suffering. I don’t think that’s the idea.

27:04 Mark: I’m remembering a quote about suffering in particular, page 41, bottom to the absurd utilitarian agitation of the white man. The black man opposes the authenticity gained from his suffering. The black race is a chosen race because it had the horrible privilege of touching the depths of unhappiness.

27:22 Dylan: This is related in this section to the primacy of agriculture, to the technical at the beginning of 39 has a sort of the passionate peasant versus the technical peasant, roughly speaking. Right. And he also links this up with like the Dionysian experience of the world, à la Nietzsche. So that word that you used at the beginning, Wes of visceral, I think is like the one that ties it all. It’s all about body and Blood and suffering and fecundity and the natural experience through blue planet type. I mean, it’s that kind of thing. The authentic understanding of the world is pre technical from Sartre’s. At least the way Sartre’s talking about it here.

28:07 Wes: Right.

28:07 Dylan: And that’s one of the failures of the bourgeois articulation of the class struggle is it’s all technical.

28:14 Wes: Yeah, I guess, Mark, you’re right. Although I wonder if he’s saying that universally or if he’s, you know, he’s just quoted a poem. So if he’s saying. When you use that for your poetry, that’s sort of the impression I got. The section we’re in now is where he’s basically defining Negritude. And he goes through all these different ways of defining it. So I thought we’d back up a little bit and start with the first way he defines it. It’s as an effective attitude or a way of being in the world.

28:44 Seth: Yeah. And that’s what I was saying. It’s not a set of qualities you can enumerate. It’s an affectation. It’s a comportment towards the world.

28:52 Wes: Yeah. Although he does go on. That’s one of the things he enumerates, in my view. I have a bunch of bullet points. And the first one is this affective attitude idea which he leaves kind of empty. I think it’s meant to be filled in by what comes later.

29:07 Mark: I think he was just contrasting it with an essence. Right. It’s an attitude rather than an essence. It’s not that they’re trying to find something that’s imprinted on their DNA.

29:16 Wes: Right. It’s in line with existence and choice. Right. A choosing oneself, he calls it. So it’s not an essence, it’s a free choice.

29:23 Dylan: Bottom of page 36. Negritude is portrayed in these beautiful lines of verse more as an act than as a frame of mind. But this act is an inner determination. It is not a question of taking the goods of this world in one’s hands and transforming them. It is a question of existing in the middle of the world. But a prelude to this is he self consciously uses Heidegger’s language of being in the world.

29:46 Seth: Yep. For the white man, to possess is to transform. And this is a fundamental difference. That’s the function of the capitalist system. And it’s also the role of the white worker in the capitalist system is to use tools to transform the world. Blah, blah, blah, bigger system, capitalism.

30:06 Wes: He’s going to flesh out this effective attitude.

30:08 Seth: Yeah.

30:09 Wes: And that’s when he gets into. He has the idea that negritude is comprehension through instinctive congeniality. So this is on page 38. So because of his tools, a white man knows all, but he only scratches the surface of things. He is unaware of the duration of things, unaware of life. The duration of things is a reference to Bergson. Negritude, on the contrary, is comprehension through instinctive congeniality. The black man’s secret is that the sources of his existence and the roots of being are identical. This is where I kind of sympathize with some of Mark’s icky feeling when we start getting into this.

30:47 Seth: Yeah, this is where it starts to go off the rails. Page 37, a technical rapport with nature reveals nature as a simple quantity, inertia, exteriority. Nature dies by his haughty refusal to be Homo faber. The Negro gives it life. Again. Again, it’s this idea. There’s this sense in which he’s framing a black authenticity that is tied to cultivation, nurturing, letting nature be right. The whole concept of growth. And you water the plant and you let the plant grow, as opposed to mining the earth and taming things. And this is where I think he starts to create a really uncomfortable dichotomy that is probably not supportable.

31:34 Mark: And I think you could raise some of the same criticisms, parallel to what was made of the inauthentic Jew in the previous essay, to say blacks were told, you don’t own reason, that’s a white thing. You don’t own the scientific method, you don’t own tools, nothing of that is yours. And so in reaction to that, they said, we own rhythm. And Sartre would call that, insofar as a reaction, inauthentic. So I just don’t see the difference between, if you want to say it’s part of the Jewish spirit because of their oppression, that they then embraced reason because the anti Semite said, no, we have this sentimental, primitive attachment to the land, ownership of the land, that then the inauthentic Jew retreats into abstraction to say, no, there is, but you know, just like the abstract things that the democrat would say that we all have the same abstract rites and things, and that there’s something wrong, according to Sartre, in that retreat to the abstract.

And so why isn’t there something similarly along to a retreat to the concrete?

32:37 Wes: Because that’s not juitude and this is negritude.

32:44 Dylan: This is exactly what Fanon criticizes in the end. And in that way it seems like Fanon is out Sartre Ing Sartre on

32:54 Mark: this point, did you want to give more of the qualities of Negritude before we get to the dialectical piece?

33:00 Wes: I could just run through a few of these things. And if you guys want to pause on any of them, we could.

33:04 Mark: Let’s just run through more before we say how these are ultimately overcome. And Negritude is a temporary thing on the way to full equality.

33:12 Wes: Yeah. So he’ll call it an agriculturalist poetry instead of engineer prose. He will call it vegetal patience, sexual pantheism. And then he will talk about it as a unity of vegetal and sexual symbols and a unity of phallic erection and plant growth. And then ultimately kind of getting to the Dionysianism. And then the congeniality with nature becomes a sexual congeniality with nature. And there’s talk about rhythm. And then the final part, before we get into the dialectical self abolition of all this stuff, which is very similar to the anti Semite and the Jew, is that through suffering, black consciousness will become historic. I don’t know if we want to say a little bit about that and what that means.

33:56 Mark: I do want to stop on this patience point because I think that maybe is something that people writing about black literature might find more sympathy with in some of these other things. So, 42. I see there’s only one proud upheaval which can be equally well described as desire plunging its roots into suffering. Or a suffering fixed like a sword across a vast cosmic desire. This righteous patience that Césaire evokes is both vegetal growth and patience against suffering. It resides in the very muscles of the Negro. It sustains the black porter going a thousand miles up the Niger under a blinding sun with a 50 pound load balanced on his head.

34:31 Wes: Well, yeah. The fecundity of nature to a proliferation of suffering. That actually is an important connection. I left out this connection between nature and patience, vegetal patience and suffering.

34:42 Seth: It’s not just patience and suffering. It’s this idea of generative increase. So on page 38, he says, whereas the worker finds in the manufactured product only as much as he put into it. Man grows along with his wheat from minute to minute. He goes beyond himself and becomes more golden. He intervenes in this watchful weight before the fragile, swelling belly, only to protect ripe wheat is a microcosm. Because the cooperation of sun, wind, rains was needed for it to come grow A blade of wheat is both the most natural thing and the most improbable chance.

And so it’s this concept of the Fecundity and the gener. It’s again, I used the word nurturing before. It’s not technical in the sense of schematic. And you know, there’s a certain amount of work that gets put into something and there’s an output instead the earth generates. It’s allowing the earth to be the generative thing as opposed to creating a manufacturing of a certain thing. And what you described is that same difference between constructing and experiencing within the boundaries of something versus this generative, both capacity for tolerating suffering, but also contrasted against the suffering that this technical world imposes.

35:59 Wes: This is all. Regardless of what one thinks about the accuracy of this. It is really brilliant. That’s just. I mean, I don’t know how he does it. It’s just. As a social analyst, he’s brilliant. The danger is that it’s sort of. He’s in the realm of cliche in a way and stereotype, but he’s doing a lot with it.

36:17 Dylan: Characterizing the farmer is an existence in great vegetal patience. His work is the yearly repetition of holy coitus.

36:25 Mark: I’ll take the Nietzschean tack of saying that these are not supposed to. I mean, he’s already said that these are ways of being. They’re not essential to the race or something like that. So does this mean. It’s not a racist way of putting it just the way that Nietzsche used to do it, that this is just a characteristic of the Geist that we see present in. If he’s talking about Christianity or talking about Judaism or talking, you know, he talks about these things. Not necessarily in a way that, well, if you don’t act like this, you’re not a true Christian.

Like. No. In fact, if you were free from some of the psychological deformities in that case that Nietzsche was attributing to Christianity, all the better for you. You’ve avoided that. And by saying that this is a hymn of everyone to everyone, I think he’s ultimately saying this is just part of the human experience and it’s a way of being that maybe a lot of you readers might have lost touch with and that reading this poetry can allow you to reconnect to. So that’s pulling it away from the particular.

37:23 Dylan: This distinction he has, like just thinking about farming and not applying it to white peasants versus black peasants or something like that. Is this distinction of agriculture, on the one hand, being about taming the earth to work the earth to do your bidding, versus being part of the natural cycle of things and being one with that Process that’s a tension in agriculture and attention with understanding the role of technique and science with respect to the natural world already. And in that way, you know, he’s making a distinction between a kind of understanding that an authentic life is embedded in the world where we are radically specific, particular individuals with bodies and places in time and surrounded by contingent facts.

And that we are reacting and interacting with them as opposed to abstracting from that and acting as if we are controlling all of that and trying to make the world submit to ourselves. So in that way, it feels very Heideggerian. Right. That kind of romantic art versus technology kind of thing.

38:40 Seth: Yeah, but with the same degree of naivete. No country would become a colonizing country unless it needed land and resources. So colonization is, by definition, the exploitation of nature. It’s just going someplace from where you’re from. So there’s nobody here. The French didn’t colonize the Congo. The Belgians did. We don’t need to go into that. But it’s not like they went there to get land to farm it. They went there to get land to mine it. So the experience of the colonized peoples in the Congo is very different than the experience of the colonized people in a Caribbean land where they were farming, right?

39:16 Dylan: No, I would say that they were exactly the same kind of thing.

39:18 Unknown speaker: Right.

39:18 Dylan: It’s that radical utilitarian view of the earth and nature. And in this case, throw in the people that live there. I’m just gonna use them as objects in my pursuit to conquer the earth.

39:33 Seth: Totally. I think the point I’m trying to make is that it feels to me like Sartre is trying to say, like, oh, left to their own devices, the black man will have a much more harmonious relationship to nature. And he talks about agriculture.

39:47 Mark: I’m not sure about this whole left to its own devices thing. Because I think a lot of the point of this, just like in Anti Semite and Jew, is that this is not about what the black person left alone from white imperialism would be like.

39:59 Seth: You’re right. I misspoke.

40:00 Mark: Given the experience of suffering. Yes. What is the thing that would get them less alienated from themselves, to reconnect with them? This Negritude. It’s not just that. All the slaves and the former slaves, and you know that they all reek of Negritude. No, they should be reading this poetry to have Negritude preached to them and release it in themselves. And by extension, maybe so should the rest of us.

40:26 Seth: I think what I’m trying to say is that Sartre’s valoration of the agricultural life as being somehow more. I won’t say more authentic. I’ll say it’s more respectful of nature. It’s more of a cooperation with nature versus the white European approach to nature. It’s a romantic view to say that that can be somehow associated with. The black man has a more respectful approach towards nature. It’s just this contrast of agriculture with industry. And then the association of the industry is white, agriculture is black, or an authentic agriculture is black, as opposed to the raping of the earth somehow feels to me to be like not warranted or not a valid. Not a valid statement.

41:09 Wes: So I think of this more as a metaphor. So things like vegetal patience, for instance, the idea that to suffer is something like being fertile and there is a productiveness to it. And the nature stuff is really just a matter of metaphor. Although I don’t think that’s entirely right. But I think that’s mainly what’s going on.

41:32 Mark: Well, he’s pointing to metaphors used in the poems as examples of these things. I think you’re right.

41:38 Wes: Yeah.

41:38 Mark: It’s not necessarily that the poets themselves are saying agriculture is the best. They’re making these analogies to try to get themselves, get their readers in touch with something natural. You can be in love with poetry about farming and not actually do any farming.

41:54 Wes: Yeah. And shortly after this, right. The contrast is between what he called. And I think Seth quoted this early on white utilitarian agitation and suffering. So it’s not that white people don’t suffer. That would be an absurd idea. But it’s a particular kind of suffering. The utilitarian agitation, the technical concerns that he associates with white people and the kind of work that they do. There’s that sort of suffering, but then there’s just suffering. There’s the suffering of being, say, marginalized, oppressed, despised. That’s a different sort of thing. And he does use the word essence here.

42:32 Seth: He talks about suffering in the context of Christianity. So there is a really nice. He basically says that the black man understands the lie of Christianity better than anybody else. Because, of course, we’re talking about suffering in the context of Christianity, Christian suffering, right. So it’s suffering with a higher purpose of Jesus on the cross. And he talks about how white people, you know, try to talk about slavery and then redemption from slavery, Right. And they tie it to the Christian narrative. And he says here on page 45, the difference being, however, that the expiable fault that the black man discovers in the back of his memory is not his own.

It belongs to the white man, like unlike original sin and Christian redemption from original sin. But the black man is the innocent victim of it. And he goes on, he says, only yesterday I was reading in Esprit these lines from a correspondent in Madagascar. I am as certain as you that the soul of a Malagasy is worth the soul of a white man, just as before God, the soul of a child is worth the soul of his father. However, if you have an automobile, you don’t let your children drive it. That’s a quote. And Sartre says one can hardly reconcile Christianity and colonialism more elegantly so.

He says in here that the truth that is misunderstood or masked by Christianity, suffering carries within itself its own refusal. It is by nature a refusal to suffer. It is the dark side of negativity. It opens onto revolt and liberty. So he’s characterizing Christian suffering as effacing the truth of suffering. You’re supposed to suffer, but without wanting to revolt against that suffering and to liberate yourself from that suffering. Instead, you’re supposed to embrace it. That’s what Christian suffering is. And he says, you know, the black man is basically rejecting that.

And that feels very Nietzsche. And that’s, you know, this comes after his introduction of Nietzsche and the Dionysian. But it feels very Nietzsche to me to reject suffering for some higher purpose.

44:42 Wes: He rejects masochistic humility.

44:45 Mark: This reflects to me when you have a response like all lives matter to black lives matter, or a response to white privilege by saying, come on, a lot of white people aren’t privileged or response to any point of facticity about how hard it might be for black people to get a break by saying, look, it’s hard for all of us to get a break. It’s life is hard. Like, that’s the Christian thing that he’s objecting to is this. Everybody’s a sinner. We all have problems. We all in some way deserve our problems, maybe because of original sin. And that, though it’s true in a sense, but it does paper over the specific historical situations like that for Sartre, going to be like what the Democrat was saying, that, yes, everybody should have equal opportunity and individual rights, and we’re just not going to pay attention to what group you are in applying those.

That’s a matter of, you know, individual equality and forget what happened in the past. We’re interested in the future.

45:46 Wes: I don’t entirely agree with that, but I don’t want to argue about white privilege.

45:50 Seth: And I. I didn’t think you would.

45:52 Mark: But no, and I think our positions on these are fairly clear. But I had not related that to the objections to those to Christianity in particular because you know, of course Mill is not relying on Christianity. Well, I guess that’s an open historical debate of what the democrat position of is that covertly Christian in some way. And I think that, you know, Nietzsche would have some cutting things to say in that regard that I think Sartre is following in vain.

46:17 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I thought Seth put this very well with the whole. The main point of this Christian stuff is just the idea of succumbing to one’s suffering and masochistic humility versus the idea that one must refuse and rebel and revolt. Because he’s leading here into a similar. A section that’s similar to the way he ends up in the anti Semite and the Jew, which is that all of this anti racist racism and Negritude that’s going to pass because we are going to get a classless socialist society eventually and that will destroy all of them. This is one revolutionary moment, but another one. There’s the moment of black liberation, but then there’s the moment of universal liberation

47:01 Dylan: which will subsume it, creating an anti racist racism.

47:05 Seth: But the significance of this first revolution, this black revolution, is that black men, and we’re intentionally saying that because that’s what Sartre was talking about. There’s definitely an issue there that we’re not talking about black women, but this revolution that Negritude brings to bear is he is turning black men into historical beings, into proper subjects of a sort that they’re going from being property, objects, part of nature that gets mined and consumed and manufactured. That this first revolution is the revolution into becoming historical beings with a past and a present and a future.

And only when they become historical and have a future can you talk about that revolution to come. So on page 47 he says, Strange and decisive turn. Race is transmuted into historicity. The black present explodes and is temporalized. Negritude with its past and its future is inserted into universal history. It is no longer a state or even an existential attitude. It is a becoming. Yeah.

48:15 Wes: And then he’ll say things like, you know, the black contribution is no longer rhythm and so on. It is revolution itself. In other words, this sort of revolution can become the seed of a larger revolution and a larger liberation. The liberation is the essence of Negritude, but that is something that is given to all of us. The hymn sung by all for all.

48:39 Mark: So I think there’s an ambiguity, just as there was in Fanon about exactly how essential this step of Negritude is and how long you have to live in it. Is it just that the colorless society is something of the future? And what we need to do is, just like he explicitly said in Anti Semite and Jew, is to acknowledge the Jewishness, acknowledge the Negritude, and sort of live that with your whole being. And then in the future, us doing that will then be overcome historically and in the future we can go without these designations. Or is it so? On page 50 at the bottom is perhaps the ultimate nudity of man that is snatched from him the white rags that were concealing his black armor and that now destroys and rejects that very armor.

It is perhaps the colorless nudity that best symbolizes Negritude. For Negritude is not a state. It is a simple going beyond itself. It is love. It is when Negritude renounces itself that it finds itself. It is when it accepts losing that it is won. The colored man, and he alone, can be asked to renounce the pride of his color. He is the one who is walking on this ridge between past particularism, which has just climbed, and future universalism, which will be the twilight of his Negritude. He is the one who looks to the end of particularism in order to find the dawn of the universal.

And he goes on about this, which makes it sound like if you’re being authentically Negro, if you’re embracing Negritude, then you will actually realize in that very doing that in a sense, you’re overcoming it. It doesn’t mean that you stop, you know, liking jazz and engaging in farm imagery in your poems, but that you realize that you are not merely a black man, that you have, like, ascended to the universal right there in that very doing. You’re trying to ultimately expunge blackness from your heart by pulling it up and looking at it objectively.

50:29 Wes: But isn’t this a future historical moment? Or are you thinking that’s what?

50:34 Mark: I don’t know.

50:35 Wes: Yeah, okay, I don’t know either. But now that you say all this, but because it did seem like he was in the same way that in the anti Semite of the Jew, he seemed to be saying, yeah, for now, there’ll be authentic consciousness of being Jewish, as Jewish. And then later on, once the socialist revolution comes, and then all that gets washed away. And I thought he was saying the same thing here. There’s this dialectic of white supremacy, then Negritude, then a synthesis in a raceless society which requires Negritude to essentially destroy itself, but that for now, we get racist consciousness.

51:11 Mark: It is the existential attitude chosen by free men and lived absolutely to the fullest. That’s the still on page 51. So, yes, that doesn’t sound like you’re overcoming it for the present.

51:20 Dylan: What I find confusing here is another way in which we talked about Sartre, which was earlier is. Is how to take this universalism in which you seem to obliterate difference in particularity and you no longer are embedded in anything in the world and this very abstract existence. And what seems to be his praise for. And in some ways what I might even take being existential to mean as being present in who you are and in your own particularity, even if you have somewhat. The right word isn’t ironic, but a view on that as well. You would be understanding that you’re seeing the world and experiencing it through a set of particulars, that you’re black, or that you’re Jewish, or that you’re whatever your particulars are, but also understand that you are part of a universal human experience.

Not that you obliterated those distinctions, but that you held them in a. Well, I guess the word I would use is authentic way, which was not understanding them as primary, but understanding them as being central but not exclusive or something like that as part of your humanity.

52:34 Mark: Well, and understanding that it’s a choice that’s the key to all Sartrean authenticity, that I’m going to embrace my Negritude, but in that I’m not saying I’m essentially that. I’m just saying this is what I am embracing. And ultimately, is there a reason for embracing that?

52:49 Dylan: That’s why this part confuses me, because it seems to me like in the way that you and Wes were talking about it, that there’s this gesture towards a universalism that obliterates the particulars of the individual in which there’s nothing you’re choosing anymore, right? You’re choosing the universal. That’s a bunch of crap. I mean, no one chooses obliteration of their self. I mean, maybe if you’re a Buddhist, I don’t know, but that’s not what I thought this was.

53:15 Wes: Well, he talks about a renunciation of pride and color, right? So class solidarity requires submerging our sense of pride in any other smaller identity groups. So I think he believes that, and I think that’s why the liberal and the Marxist actually have some strong affinities. And it’s possible, as you know, Orwell has been described as a libertarian socialist. I think there’s a Similar focus on universality ultimately with the Marxists. It’s the universality of the classless society.

53:47 Dylan: Yeah. Universality of property.

53:49 Wes: But also there’s that psychological component of solidarity of all humanity as opposed to, you know, I’m one of the bourgeoisie, I’m one of the proletariat, I’m one of the workers. Those sort of identities fade away. And I think we’ve seen in both the anti Semite and the Jew and this essay that he also thinks that racial and ethnic identities as a strong point of solidarity and pride have to fade away once we get to the overall to the larger revolution.

54:18 Mark: All right, any last. Do you want to give any closing thoughts?

54:22 Seth: I do. I’m still struggling to reconcile antisemite and Jew and black Orpheus in the sense of. In Anti Semite and Jew he says the Jew is defined by the anti Semite and the anti Semite is a disease of the culture. In this case, he talks as if colonialism is over and that it’s entirely up to the black man to go inside himself and find this essence and become this thing that can transform and through an act of generosity pave the way for our raceless, classless, proletarian, revolutionary future. And it feels to me like there’s something fundamentally wrong with requiring generosity of the black man and not of the other oppressed races, but also not getting a sense of accountability.

It’s not like colonialism was over with. There’s a responsibility that the white man has even in the post colonial period, and that is essentially that even the colonial structure was an imposition of a certain types of exploitation of nature via capitalism. But essentially what’s happened after colonialism is that the dynamic of Anti Semite and Jew is now in place for the black man as well. And so why is the black man obligated to go into himself and the Jew is not. The anti Semite is still the racist, still the same person. It’s still the same thing in society.

Just because colonialism is gone, that dynamic doesn’t disappear. I’m still struggling to figure out to reconcile these two things, even though I love the way it’s written and appreciate the insights and a certain amount of restraint with what could have been contemporary cultural cliches.

56:12 Mark: When I was reading Black Orpheus in preparation for this on my iPad, I actually got a news alert, you know, a story about white splaining. At the very moment that I was reading this thing by a white guy describing the black soul, you know, of course made me think about that is very Much relevant to whether you buy humanism or whether you buy some sort of particularism in terms of the points of view of these groups being impenetrable in a certain way. That Sartre is saying that, you know, this is ultimately a hymn of all to all. So I think he’s trying to make a balance between those things because he’s saying there is something specific here, a black soul here, but that we can, if not understand it and sympathize and know what exactly what it’s like to be that kind of person.

We can at least be educated by it. We can learn from it. We can find something of ourselves in it. So I think he’s skating a good line in that we’re all existentially separate from one another and we’re all each in our own private hell. But on the ground of ideas, you can read something at great length about somebody else’s experiences and understand it a great deal. Now, whether he is being as sympathetic as he could have been. You know, as we said that the people that wrote the intro to the anti Semite and Jew, it doesn’t sound like for that he did enough research.

At least in Black Orpheus, he’s reading and quoting the poems themselves. Now, it might be nicer if he had talked to the poets and knew about what they had to say about the poems. Maybe that would have helped too. You know, it is 1948. There was not the taboo against a white guy deigning to give explanations of the points of view of groups that he’s not a member of. Given that, you know, I think he did as good a job as we could reasonably expect. And certainly these are wonderfully insightful, and it’s a great exercise to go through. And I think I was surprised in our anti Semite Jew part how much of just the psychology of political action we got into and, you know, the stuff related to Fukuyama and how we should organize a society to treat groups when there is group identification afoot.

I think these are prime philosophical, general philosophical issues. And I would just add to that. You know, again, I kind of see that this decision as to whether the negritude is an essential step or something that you should just overcome as quickly as possible is coming roughly down on the Martin Luther King vs. Malcolm X thing, right? If the Malcolm X side is no, we need Negritude, we need solidarity. We need pride within the group. And that’s going to battle against Martin Luther King’s, I think, generalized humanism that we just all need to black Girls and boys holding hands.

And that should be the goal. You know, I think if you don’t understand why both of those are appealing positions, then you’re missing something. So I was very excited by this little taste of what poetry was according to Sartre. So I suggested that we read in the near term, as an extension of this, Sartre’s essay, what is literature from 1947? So it’s a book. We’ll read the first couple of chapters of that. So that’s going to be the next thing. And then we’ll be on to Thus Speak Zarathustra by Nietzsche.

59:24 Wes: So it’s not just going to be the Sartrely Examined life for the rest of it.

59:31 Mark: Our closing song is by Kevin Godley. It’s called Punch Bag. It has to do with anti Semitism. And we discussed this track in particular on Nakedly Examined Music Episode 3. So check that out@nakedlyexaminedmusic.com I want to remind you all again about Partially Examined Life. Live brave new world coming up very soon on April 6th, if you’re in the New York City area, you should please come out, get a ticket. You can meet us afterwards. We’re going to figure out somewhere to go hang out for that evening. And if you can’t be in there in person, we are going to live stream it. You can get details at partiallyexaminedlife.compel- all right, thanks, guys. Folks should go to Facebook, go to partiallyexaminedlife.com, go to Twitter, or email us@peltialexaminedlife.com to give us your thoughts on this and and other topics that you would like us to cover. Thanks and good night.

1:00:19 Wes: Good night.

1:00:20 Dylan: Good night.

1:00:20 Seth: Good night.

1:00:22 Unknown speaker: If I brought a note to school that said my days were numbered they’d leave me numb and bleeding or strangle

1:00:30 Mark: me with chump please.

1:00:35 Unknown speaker: In my world the birds don’t sing the bells don’t ring the bells don’t ring the bicycle bell Bicycle bells I wish that I could blend into the background I’m no excuses for my lack of guts Lack of guts what is it about me that draws attention? Punch bag Got a hand? Head back. I’ve never been a natural at physical things. I’ve never been good at cross country running since the first football hit me in the air like a frozen cannonball and the knees buckled and stay bent and the laughs came and the nerve went and dirty Jew was written on the blackboard. Running through the corridors far too many obstacles Bursting, bursting, bursting for the crap I know they’ll never let me have

1:02:23 Wes: for.

1:02:41 Unknown speaker: Oh God, I wish that I was thicker than I am you thinner than I am. Oh God, I wish that I had no ears and clearer skin? I’m praying for the day when Hansel’s out and uglies in for punch back for fall Punch back. Jesus, I pray for strength to survive? You’re Christian soldier Sm I torture myself in private to prepare me for the pain. I talk to myself in public on the buses and the train. My father just ignores it cuz it goes against the grave. Come help me. Fourth corridor Fall Punch back For fall Punch back.

1:04:58 Wes: Sam.