Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays

Ato Sekyi-Otu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138611771
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429878015
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays presents a defense of universalism as the foundation of moral and political arguments and commitments. Consisting of five intertwined essays, the book claims that centering such arguments and commitments on a particular place, in this instance the African world, is entirely compatible with that foundational universalism. Ato Sekyi-Otu thus proposes a less conventional mode of Africacentrism, one that rejects the usual hostility to universalism as an imperialist Eurocentric hoax. Sekyi-Otu argues that universalism is an inescapable presupposition of ethical judgment in general and critique in particular, and that it is especially indispensable for radical criticism of conditions of existence in postcolonial society and for vindicating visions of social regeneration. The constituent chapters of the book are exhibits of that argument and question some fashionable conceptual oppositions and value apartheids.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in the fields of social and political philosophy, contemporary political theory, postcolonial studies, African philosophy and social thought.

1

Is She Not Also a Human Being?

The declaration that ‘we too are human beings’ is at the bottom of any revolution.

– Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Materialism and Revolution’

If the Left turns its back on its foundations, it will be unable to make statements that are truly its own.

– G.A. Cohen, ‘Back to Socialist Basics’*

Left Exercises in Retrieval

‘To go back to retrieve that which you forgot is no vice’: So goes a saying of the Akan people of Ghana. Ever since C.B. Macpherson’s Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval, ¹ the work of thinkers of the Left whom Frank Cunningham famously named ‘retrievalists’ appears to have grown in gravity and credibility in recent years.² Awakened to the urgency of recuperating principles and practices of which the Left can rightly claim to be progenitors but which it has sometimes consigned to disuse if not downright disdain, it is no longer embarrassed to recognize as its very own precious but erstwhile disavowed inheritances. Not least among these inheritances is the very idea of inheritance, now refigured not as finished heritage awaiting joyous restoration but rather as an invitation to the exacting practice of possibility: remembrance of things not yet done with promissory notes, inventive pursuit of their radical implications, what Ayi Kwei Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons calls their ‘farthest meaning,’³ excavating them in the service of unenvisioned but impelling ends by reviving that which the same thinker’s first novel named ‘intimations of belief’⁴ in a time of incipient nihilism. The names of such discursive forms proposed for the pressing labor of re-appropriation are manifold: ‘Transformative constitutionalism’ and ‘left legalism.’⁵ The idea of freedom understood and pursued as a right which, pace Isaiah Berlin,⁶ is indissociable from the conditions of its possession and the ability to exercise it. Individualism both as an ideal of personal autonomy and singularity, particularly in new or refurbished orders of asphyxiating conformism, and as a principle of responsible agency beyond possessive egoism: no kin of two imposters with a shared pedigree, which enlist the generic vocabulary of individuality in the service of unjust ends – settler colonialism’s policy of ‘[implanting] a spirit of individual responsibility’ into Indigenous communities by destroying their ‘tribal or communist system’ of land ownership;⁷ and neoliberalism’s censorious commandment of ‘responsibilization’ with its concomitant contempt for the salvaging offices of public goods,⁸ its cruel theology of abandonment sanctifying its enforcement of freedom as capitalist market economy. Left individualism, then, as an enabling and exacting paradox: a vision of the egalitarian conditions and ends of individuation. The demand for radical democracy instigated by a suspicion of representation,⁹ committed, thanks to a well-earned ‘misarchism’ – Nietzsche’s scornful neologism for the ‘democratic idiosyncrasy’¹⁰ – to decentralized, even acephalous, forms of political association and practice. Vindication of the nation not as the ultimate territory of our political and ethical attachments but as the potential embodiment of popular sovereignty, object of the compelling rhetoric which proclaims that this land is our land, yεn ara asase nyi, again, not in the service of an organicist and xenophobic nativism but rather to combat capital’s dominion and avarice without borders, its violent contempt for local needs and rights and ‘customs in common,’ but also to contest the sophistic nationalism of an ascendant class that in one breath abets the alienation of our lands and resources and in another invokes the name of the nation for its self-serving acquisitive ambitions.¹¹ Human rights, even as natural rights, taking rights extremely seriously by crossing the narrow horizon of their ‘negative’ libertarian auspices – to say nothing of their provincial provenance and perverse uses – and wresting from that etiolated tradition commitments and claims beyond proscriptive limitations upon the state; rather, enlarging the province of rights to entail entitlement to social and moral goods, positive principles and practices of recognition – in private and public spheres of life alike – which are our due simply in virtue of our common humanity and necessities of the times. Listening to religion not by accepting its truth-claims but by understanding the radical needs to which it ministers and thereby returning its vaunted redemptory mission to this inverted world; that is to say, reframing the sacred as the earthly holiness of every single one of us, and, consequently, our equal moral standing, dignity and right to all that is conducive to human self-fashioning and flourishing – egalitarian perfectionism as the matter of reverence, the vital ‘substance of things hoped for.’ Above all, the ‘ethical turn’ in the argument for communism, that is to say, communism as first and foremost an ethical imperative rather than history’s unwilled consequence, the idea of communism as the quintessential incarnation of ‘radical normativity’ demanded by ‘spirit’s ethical will as a protest against capital’ and social subjugation;¹² communism as eidos and ideal. What is to be done with forgotten premises of such articles of belief and projects? How to bring back to life their tabooed and utopian implications, what Fanon called valeurs inédites, ¹³ values left unspoken, not yet made explicit, expressed but inchoately in the vindicatory language of historical action, although intimated and implicit in what Bessie Head called the ‘moral logic’ of antecedent or contiguous acts, claims, assertions, avowed commitments, what I would describe as elective entailments?¹⁴ An even more challenging task: how to redeem and deploy anew utterly renounced and abandoned legacies, legacies left by the Left only to be suborned by those who would enlist them for adversary ends; in which case to recover them would be veritable acts of expropriating the expropriators. Today, the Left is laying claim to these critical substantives and metacritical cognates: say, ‘leftist ontology,’¹⁵ontology as hortatory description, description with ‘deontic’ consequences and so flouts the Humean separation of ‘the is’ and ‘the ought,’ not least because it has history’s scars to show.¹⁶ Thanks to that testimony, such an ontology resists invocations of motionless substances, although it recuperates with Herbert Marcuse ‘the concept of essence’ and with Armah the thought of ‘living essences,’¹⁷ prompted by a rekindled suspicion that, without the distinction of essence and appearance, criticism of the existing state of human affairs is impossible, radical hope inexpressible. Likewise, a certain foundationalism, visionary foundationalism, the thought of foundations as promises of things to come, grasping the grounds of principles, practices and claims as anticipated achievements of our groundwork. Retrieval, then, of precepts and proverbs forgotten and forsaken, even unacknowledged and disavowed. But of these exemplary exercises in recovery, the principal metadiscursive instance is universalism: the criticism or vindication of an arrangement and a convention, an idea and a practice, an event and an action; the justification or confutation of a moral assertion and a claim, a belief and a principle, in the inquiring name of the human and human universals.

The principal instance but also the most contested among the discursive forms that are candidates for urgent retrieval. A venerable tradition of thinking on the Left has persistently administered a joint interment of universalism and kindred ideas such as humanism together with supportive metadiscursive conceptions like foundationalism. In particular, adherents to a dominant school of strong historicists have always served as enthusiastic pallbearers. The latter’s stance derives its putative warrant from such texts in the Marxist classics as The German Ideology and The Holy Family, especially those passages in which Marx and Engels mock the more subjectivist and history-amnesiac versions of German idealism, those ideas that substitute ‘pious desire’ for knowledge of the determinate and determining conditions of communism; but also, later, the acerbic criticism of the rhetoric of rights in the Critique of the Gotha Programme and the sardonic parody of the idea of innate human rights in the first volume of Capital:¹⁸ texts in which, in a classic case of rhetorical overreaction with momentous consequences, Marx and Engels enact what appears to be a stance of radical historicism, even historical determinism, in moral and political discourse – above all, in the critique of capitalism and vindication of the communist future. To history and the enabling constraints of specific socioeconomic forms, not some enduring human essences and requirements or some irrevocable ethical imperatives and ideals, belonged the very possibility and justification of the communist project. So went a recurring version of the tradition. And ‘after Auschwitz,’ Adorno will subsequently ask with withering sarcasm, who was the callous fool who would invoke as ground for our evaluative judgments and redemptory visions human universals and their telic promise, save our invariant proclivity to slaughter and to maim with ever more refined instruments bearing the telltale marks of their inglorious ancestry? It was only a matter of time before Foucault administered the final funeral rites to ‘Man,’ inspiring his postmodernist epigones to utter with macabre glee ritual refrains denouncing and renouncing ‘Enlightenment humanism.’ But now after the spectacular collapse of the Soviet experiment, with the haunting persistence of the old questions it undertook to answer, confronted with new catastrophes and horrors, staring at atrocious forms of injustice and inhuman yet alterable conditions of existence, we have been asking ourselves whether the fashionable agnosticism of the recent past permits us even to name the world’s disorders, let alone begin the work of repair. It is thanks to this wondering that the necessity of disinterring forsaken legacies, powerful proverbs of criticism, has disclosed itself. And above all, disclosure of the question of the human and human universals as subjunctive possibility. Bemoaned by some as ‘the return of abstract universalism,’¹⁹ this is the argument that condemnation of our conditions of existence and vision of social regeneration are devoid of meaning and persuasive force unless they are informed by a foundational question of human requirements. Once more, we can hear the famous words in amended translation: To be radical is to take things by the root, but for the human being the root is the very idea, better, the very question of the human. Against the taboos of our time, I am willing to describe this as an argument for the transcendental grounding of an ethical and political project, on condition that this is not confused, as it is all too often done, with a transcendental warrant. Transcendental grounding is no more and no less than that project’s condition of possibility, generative justification and constraining measure, not a guarantee of its realization and happy consummation. I am tempted to call it, in an Aristotelian language tinged with a certain heretical voluntarism, the formal cause of regenerative ethical action.

Left Universalist, African, Black: Postrace for the Postcolony

But suppose you are left, African and black – what then? Doesn’t it mean that the historicist suspicion of transcendental arguments and critical inquiry addressing what Angela Davis calls ‘questions of human existence,’²⁰ to say nothing of universalizing normative visions of social transformation, has found, thanks to ‘the singularity of “our situation in the world”’ (Césaire),²¹ its unanswerable validation? Doesn’t it mean that a theoretical practice that presupposes ‘the … universality of the colorless normative’ is utterly unjustifiable?²² The elephant in the room is, of course, race, its specific gravity and lethal obduracy still undisturbed. If the discursive retrievals this work is essaying require that we subordinate the ordinance of race to their defining preoccupations, so much the worse for them, one might say. Trayvon Martin and countless young souls before and after his callous murder are in the company of unavenged ancestors, their ghosts still haunting the living, demanding of us a just accounting, one that is unlikely to be forthcoming for as long as the empire of race endures. On the way to his ascendancy, a certain Donald Trump, willfully mistaking a reprehensible pose for laudable enlightenment, could blurt out that radical contempt for individuals and individuality which defines the vulgar metaphysics of race – no less lethal for being just words: ‘I have a great relationship with the blacks.’ George Zimmerman’s eyes and gun were equally trained not to know unique individuals among ‘the blacks’: a visceral case study in the ‘epistemology of ignorance’ and the banality of evil that is its inescapable corollary, murderous violence as casual consequence of perverted knowledge in racist culture, consequence of habituation to not knowing persons.²³ In South Africa white supremacy and white privilege still reign, with a little help from the ‘black diamonds’ and the ‘patriotic bourgeoisie,’ that is to say, with the collusive ascendancy of a black elite which, while by no means inconsequential, nonetheless leaves whiteness as material force and metaphysical judge intact, an ‘unfinished history’:²⁴ a persistence that renders premature, as Gillian Hart has cautioned us, the temptation to describe South Africa under the neoliberal dispensation as having undergone a conclusive ‘shift from race to class apartheid.’²⁵ Under these circumstances, at a time when to declare, from Cape Town to Texas to London, that ‘black lives matter’ is no pleonasm, is it not an obscene evasion of palpable reality that proclaims that the postracial day in human history and the constitution of the social world is here?

But does it follow that it is an irremissible idealist mystification to think postrace, to make postrace thinkable? Or rather is thinking postrace paradoxically the most materialist thing to do, that which is mandated, according to The German Ideology, by ‘the language of real life’²⁶? Is postrace thinkable not as a performance for the narcissistic complacency of the privileged self or the comfort and easy listening of the other but rather as the illocu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Is She Not Also a Human Being?
• 2. Difference and Left Universalism
• 3. Ethical Communism in African Thought
• Postscript to Chapter 3: Rereading ‘Masks and Marx’ after G.A. Cohen and the Ethical Turn
• 4. Individualism in Fanon and After
• Postscript to Chapter 4: Egoism and Conformism: Pathologies of the Moral Life in Ghana
• 5. Enigmas and Proverbs
• Index