Table Of ContentTHE RACIAL DISCOURSES OF LIFE PHILOSOPHY
New Directions in Critical Theory
New Directions in Critical Theory
Amy Allen, General Editor
New Directions in Critical Theory presents outstanding classic and contemporary
texts in the tradition of critical social theory, broadly construed. The series aims
to renew and advance the program of critical social theory, with a par tic u lar focus
on theorizing contemporary struggles around gender, race, sexuality, class, and
globalization and their complex interconnections.
Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Refl ective Judgment, María Pía Lara
The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Criti-
cal Theory, Amy Allen
Democracy and the Po liti cal Unconscious, Noëlle McAfee
The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment, Alessandro
Ferrara
Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, Adriana Cavarero
Scales of Justice: Reimagining Pol itic al Space in a Globalizing World, Nancy
Fraser
Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory, Axel Honneth
States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals, Jacqueline Stevens
The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy
Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity
DONNA V. JONES
Columbia University Press NEW YORK
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
Copyright © 2010 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Jones, Donna V., 1964–
The racial discourses of life philosophy : negritude, vitalism, and modernity /
Donna V. Jones.
p. cm.–(New directions in critical theory)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-231-14548-0 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-51860-4 (e-book)
1. Life in literature. 2. Race in literature. 3. Vitalism in literature. 4. Negritude
(Literary movement) I. Title. II. Series.
PN56.L52J66 2010
809'.93355—dc22
2009031388
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid- free paper.
This book is printed on paper with recycled content.
Printed in the United States of America
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author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or
changed since the manuscript was prepared.
Contents
Introduction: The Resilience of Life 1
1 On the Mechanical, Machinic, and Mechanistic 27
Descartes: The Animal Machine and the Human Spirit 30
Frühromantiks on the Mechanical State 37
The Natural- Selection Machine 43
The Multivalence of Mechanism and Comedy 50
2 Contesting Vitalism 57
Nietz sche, Lukács, Deleuze 57
Life as Hidden Force 72
Vitalism and the Occult 73
3 Bergson and the Racial Élan Vital 77
Bergson’s Last Interventions 81
The Unique 83
Intuition and Absolute Knowledge 86
Immediacy and the Art of the Detour 93
Racial Memory 102
Noumenal Racism 117
Racial Modernism 121
4 Négritude and the Poetics of Life 129
What Is Living and Dead in Senghor’s Bergsonism? 132
Connecting Epistemology and Cultural Morphology 150
vi Contents
Césaire’s Returns 163
Vital Difference 170
Ac know ledg ments 179
Notes 181
Index 217
THE RACIAL DISCOURSES OF LIFE PHILOSOPHY
INTRODUCTION
The Resilience of Life
We live in a biological age. The ecological crisis has heightened our
sensibilities of the intrinsic value of the life of all species and encouraged
the development of a biocentric ethics. From a different angle, the ability
to generate synthetic acellular life and to prolong the life of a brain- dead
human being presents us with new examples of bare life and again raises
the question of just what life inescapably is.1 The question is not only a
philosophical problem, as decisions about whether to prolong or termi-
nate life depend on how we understand what life is and what expressions
such as “good as dead” or “a life not worth living” should mean. As life
becomes the object of ever more sophisticated technical manipulation and
enters the circuits of commerce, we also have new questions about how
ge ne tic engineering and therapy and assisted reproduction should be regu-
lated, about whether the genome can be owned, about whether stem cells
are yet a life, about whether embryos have rights, and about whether ani-
mals should be cloned or made into commodities just for their hormones
or parts. Today, as Nikolas Rose has laid out in a brilliant phenomenology
of the new biosociety, scientists, bioethicists, and science-fi ction writers are
all tantalized by the new possibilities of knowing life not simply to restore
a lost normativity but to transform it at conception, in utero, and at the
molecular level.2 Such manipulation of life now overshadows biopol iti cal
concerns like state management of bodies for docility and population for
quality.
The more successful the manipulation of life (and the more lifelike our
artifacts), the greater are the scientifi c and expert doubts about our intui-
tive sense that the animate can be distinguished from the inanimate. How-
ever that distinction is drawn— for example, the prototypes of each and
the liminal types do vary cross-c ulturally; the tree is prototypical of the ani-
mate for the Malagasy and the virus the chief liminal form for us— the ten-
dency to want to draw a distinction between the animate and inanimate
2 The Resilience of Life
may itself be universal.3 Yet reductionist science has threatened to under-
mine the fundamental ontological division even though it cannot dislodge
our common- sense notion that living things are set apart by a few rather
astonishing properties— autonomy, robustness, adaptability to environ-
mental changes, self- repairability, and reproduction, to name a few of their
characteristics.
Still we seem now to have fully demystifi ed life, though not too long ago
it was held to be not only a marvelous but wholly mysterious thing. As late as
the early modern period— and long after the rise of mathematical physics— it
was believed, for example, that toads could be generated from ducks putrefy-
ing on a dung heap, a woman’s hair laid in a damp but sunny place would
turn into snakes, and rotting tuna would produce worms that changed fi rst
into fl ies, then into a grasshopper, and fi nally into a quail.4 How life—t his
special domain of the universe— reproduced, developed, and maintained it-
self was beyond any rational understanding, but life has now been put within
the grasp of scientifi c understanding if not technical control, and in the pro-
cess the animate has almost been collapsed into the inanimate.
That a reductionist understanding of life has been achieved is remark-
able, since the very plenitude of life—i ts fullness, variety, and complexity— is
one of the essential characteristics of life. For this reason, it may seem that
the things “we denote as ‘living’ have too heterogeneous characteristics
and capabilities for a common defi nition to give even an inkling of the
variety contained within this term.”5 Yet we now know that almost all life
forms—f rom unicellular bacteria to the higher animals— share the same
metabolic proc esses, or ga nized around the intricate Krebs cycle. And sci-
ence has also discovered that almost all life forms, from an oak tree to a
frog, express “their gen e tic information in nucleic acids, use the same ge-
ne tic code to translate gene sequences into amino acids, and (only with
some exceptions in the case of plants) make use of the same twenty amino
acids as the building blocks of proteins.”6 The discovery of DNA is widely
thought to have dissipated the belief that life was somehow a mysterious,
impalpable excrescence that lay beyond the scientifi c disciplines of physics
and chemistry. Life has now become nothing more interesting than a spe-
cifi c kind of information in an information age. As John Maynard Smith
notes, “code, translation, transcription, message, editing, proof- reading, li-
brary and synonymous: these are all technical terms with quite precise mean-
ings in molecular gen e tics.”7 Machines may not now or ever be lifelike, but
the gap between the inanimate and animate no longer seems u nbridgeable
without a divine breath of life. Reduced to information, life may in fact
