by TIM LEWIS, Editorial Assistant
Therefore, comrade, you will hold as enemies…not only sadistic governors and greed bankers… not only corrupt, check-licking politicians and subservient judges, but likewise and for the same reason, venomous journalists, goitrous academics wreathed in dollars and stupidity, ethnographers who go in for metaphysics, presumptuous Belgian theologians, chattering intellectuals born stinking out of the thigh of Nietzsche… and in general, all those who, performing their functions in the sordid division of labor for the defense of Western bourgeois society…all henceforth answerable for the violence of revolutionary action. – Aimé Césaire [1]
There is a banal nouveau hysteria and fear at work across the white screens of America: ‘Democracy is over!’; ‘They will start targeting undocumented residents!’; ‘This was a nation founded on the freedom for religious expression!’; ‘It is just so surreal to live in a country run by an angry citrus’; and ‘This is how Hitler rose to power!’ etc. The American Left is in the thrall of what can be termed an awakening—not from some dream into the Matrix-like wasteland Baudrillard and Zizek describe, but an awakening into a new fantasy/dream-layer: Resistant Leftism. As a counter to this imaginary which takes on the disposition of aggressive bourgeois cynicism, I return to a text of anger—I return to Aimé Césaire’s surreal Discourse on Colonialism.
Associate of André Breton and founder of the negritude movement,[2] Césaire mobilized the language of his particularized oppressor (the French) to produce an occasion for unique resistance against the Colonial Real. This resistance is unique because it constitutes an opportunity to make the graying flesh (of what Césaire’s student Frantz Fanon would later describe as A Dying Colonialism) bleed out at the hands of the proletariat.[3] Césaire expands upon this idea in Discourse:
Associate of André Breton and founder of the negritude movement,[2] Césaire mobilized the language of his particularized oppressor (the French) to produce an occasion for unique resistance against the Colonial Real. This resistance is unique because it constitutes an opportunity to make the graying flesh (of what Césaire’s student Frantz Fanon would later describe as A Dying Colonialism) bleed out at the hands of the proletariat.[3] Césaire expands upon this idea in Discourse:
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I have said—and this is something very different—that colonialist Europe has grafted modern abuse onto ancient injustice, hateful racism onto old inequality. … Since then the animal has become anemic, it is losing its hair, its hide is no longer glossy, but the ferocity has remained, barely mixed with sadism. It is easy to blame it on Hitler.[4]
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Surrealism allows us to view this brutal sewing job in its most crude and sloppy patchwork and provides us with the means of resistance: violence.
This call for violence in Césaire’s (and, later Fanon’s) writing can seem disconcerting to those on the inside of the stomach of the bourgeoisie. In the midst of the celebration around the punching of white supremacist Richard Spencer, there were many on the Left who decried the assault as an absurd, surreal attack on freedom of speech—“Is this what our country has come to!?” weeps the Left. “To go further…” Césaire reminds us, “…the barbarism of Western Europe has reached an incredibly high level, being only surpassed—far surpassed, it is true—by the barbarism of the United States.”[5]
However, the only absurdity punctuated by the anarchist assault on a Nazi is that any American advocate of freedom would consider the views of a white supremacist protectable speech.
This call for violence in Césaire’s (and, later Fanon’s) writing can seem disconcerting to those on the inside of the stomach of the bourgeoisie. In the midst of the celebration around the punching of white supremacist Richard Spencer, there were many on the Left who decried the assault as an absurd, surreal attack on freedom of speech—“Is this what our country has come to!?” weeps the Left. “To go further…” Césaire reminds us, “…the barbarism of Western Europe has reached an incredibly high level, being only surpassed—far surpassed, it is true—by the barbarism of the United States.”[5]
However, the only absurdity punctuated by the anarchist assault on a Nazi is that any American advocate of freedom would consider the views of a white supremacist protectable speech.
THE SURREALIST IS CALLED . . .
in this silence of meaning to do violence against the operationalization of deluded hegemonic dyads that subtend the alleged Order.
In this silence of meaning to do violence . . .
NOT a simple violence linked to the propulsion of weapons towards bodies, but a violence that STRIPS away the filthy textiles of Absolute Knowledge TO REVEAL the fleeting traces of a fragile discourse dependent upon delusion, cannibalism, and isolation.
For me, this is SURREALISM AS SOCIAL CRITIQUE.
in this silence of meaning to do violence against the operationalization of deluded hegemonic dyads that subtend the alleged Order.
In this silence of meaning to do violence . . .
NOT a simple violence linked to the propulsion of weapons towards bodies, but a violence that STRIPS away the filthy textiles of Absolute Knowledge TO REVEAL the fleeting traces of a fragile discourse dependent upon delusion, cannibalism, and isolation.
For me, this is SURREALISM AS SOCIAL CRITIQUE.
Tim Lewis
Editorial Assistant
Interact with Tim on Twitter: @SP_TimLewis
NOTES:
[1] Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 54-55.
[2] Césaire, Discourse, 11.
[3] Ibid., 78.
[4] Ibid., 45, 65.
[5] Ibid., 47.
[1] Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 54-55.
[2] Césaire, Discourse, 11.
[3] Ibid., 78.
[4] Ibid., 45, 65.
[5] Ibid., 47.
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