Is Europe redeemable?
For Aime Cesaire, colonialism is the inevitable culmination of Europe's Enlightenment, a vertical word order that rationalizes under the guise of paternalism what is necessarily a celebration of brute force, the uncritical hierarchizing of peoples, cultures, customs and modes of being that privileges Europe above all else.
Cesaire's unforgiving diagnosis of European civilization traces the "accident" or "mutation" of the Holocaust (a point defining debates about Western civilization in the 1940s) directly to its very core. It is not civilization gone awry, it is not collateral damage. It is in fact, perfectly aligned with what the essence of this Europe is, a belief in hierarchies that sets it up in opposition to, and privileged over, all other cultures and nations it encounters. In this worldview, genocide could be aligned with the desire for human improvement and a worldview that can reconcile the two is very apt to hold nothing sacred, leaving no one safe. According to Cesaire, having devoured and pillaged all else, this is the only end of an inherently violent civilization, to turn upon itself.
Cesaire calls this the "boomerang effect of civilization", which could reductively be understood as karma, but that understanding misses the point that certain acts destroy you in the act of destroying others. In this sense, there is no cosmic agent of retribution that's making sure you get what's coming to you, but the inherent violence in your mode of being erodes your very soul, even as your malice is directed outward. Literary works that echo this sentiment come to mind, one of the most memorable being Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. In this text, the elusive madness of Col. Kurtz is essentially that the very savagery of colonization has broken him mentally and physically, leading him to ever deeper levels of depravity. He comes to the Congo on a "civilizing mission" and ends with a note in his journal, "Exterminate all the brutes!" He is said to have glimpsed the true depths of human degeneracy and bears witness to the ultimate evil, what Cesaire would call the "Hitler" that exists in every Christian bourgeois humanist of European society and what Kurtz calls in his dying moments, "the horror, the horror!".
In this understanding, European civilization stands for the lowest a human being can sink to, the horror it invites and is capable of. With all this in mind, I turn to Cesaire's statement, "Europe is indefensible" and I explore whether a redemption of Europe is possible. To this end, the character of Kurtz personifies the very essence of Europe. Conrad could not have made this any clearer. In describing Kurtz's lineage as both French and English, he concludes, "All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz". It goes without saying that in Cesaire's writing and in Conrad's, the category of Europe is not reflecting a mere geographical entity, but a set of values, behaviours, and most importantly, history. Much like the Orient is a discursive formation which is very politically/historically situated, so it is with Europe.What brings France, Britain, Belgium, Spain and Portugal together as Europe is largely where their national differences are blurred into a single ethic of colonial acquisitiveness, Christian bourgeois morality, the color of their skin.The category of Europe becomes an inherently violent formulation, and the question now becomes, can this be redeemable? In short, no. It is born out of discourse of setting itself up against the homogeneous mass of non-Europe in a primarily aggressive enterprise that defined it as necessarily superior to everything that is not itself, and in so doing, has also blanketed over its own differences. Europe exists as a unit in action, that of its colonizing civilizing mission. Now, you can ask, are some cultural practices, beliefs, texts, and ideas that emerged from Britain, France, Belgium, Germany redeemable? And to this, one could say, "maybe". Divorced from their absorption into an inherently violent category, can one find value in the ideas of Kant, a seminal Enlightenment thinker? Can one appreciate Shakespeare, Dante, Flaubert? Can they possibly contribute something to the some imaginary aesthetic archive of the human race? To that, I say maybe. We are not so far from a past when these "bastions of culture" were lorded over us as proof of Europe's superiority and one would be hard pressed not to find deeply racist attitudes in most literary works published in that time and place, which is why I say, maybe. Cesaire himself believed in the value of intercultural exchange without which he believes civilizations "atrophy". Maybe there will be a point someday where the category of human becomes meaningful enough to allow us to appreciate an equivalent exchange of culture for collective human edification but, for now, we are too far from that reality.
Cesaire's unforgiving diagnosis of European civilization traces the "accident" or "mutation" of the Holocaust (a point defining debates about Western civilization in the 1940s) directly to its very core. It is not civilization gone awry, it is not collateral damage. It is in fact, perfectly aligned with what the essence of this Europe is, a belief in hierarchies that sets it up in opposition to, and privileged over, all other cultures and nations it encounters. In this worldview, genocide could be aligned with the desire for human improvement and a worldview that can reconcile the two is very apt to hold nothing sacred, leaving no one safe. According to Cesaire, having devoured and pillaged all else, this is the only end of an inherently violent civilization, to turn upon itself.
Cesaire calls this the "boomerang effect of civilization", which could reductively be understood as karma, but that understanding misses the point that certain acts destroy you in the act of destroying others. In this sense, there is no cosmic agent of retribution that's making sure you get what's coming to you, but the inherent violence in your mode of being erodes your very soul, even as your malice is directed outward. Literary works that echo this sentiment come to mind, one of the most memorable being Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. In this text, the elusive madness of Col. Kurtz is essentially that the very savagery of colonization has broken him mentally and physically, leading him to ever deeper levels of depravity. He comes to the Congo on a "civilizing mission" and ends with a note in his journal, "Exterminate all the brutes!" He is said to have glimpsed the true depths of human degeneracy and bears witness to the ultimate evil, what Cesaire would call the "Hitler" that exists in every Christian bourgeois humanist of European society and what Kurtz calls in his dying moments, "the horror, the horror!".
In this understanding, European civilization stands for the lowest a human being can sink to, the horror it invites and is capable of. With all this in mind, I turn to Cesaire's statement, "Europe is indefensible" and I explore whether a redemption of Europe is possible. To this end, the character of Kurtz personifies the very essence of Europe. Conrad could not have made this any clearer. In describing Kurtz's lineage as both French and English, he concludes, "All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz". It goes without saying that in Cesaire's writing and in Conrad's, the category of Europe is not reflecting a mere geographical entity, but a set of values, behaviours, and most importantly, history. Much like the Orient is a discursive formation which is very politically/historically situated, so it is with Europe.What brings France, Britain, Belgium, Spain and Portugal together as Europe is largely where their national differences are blurred into a single ethic of colonial acquisitiveness, Christian bourgeois morality, the color of their skin.The category of Europe becomes an inherently violent formulation, and the question now becomes, can this be redeemable? In short, no. It is born out of discourse of setting itself up against the homogeneous mass of non-Europe in a primarily aggressive enterprise that defined it as necessarily superior to everything that is not itself, and in so doing, has also blanketed over its own differences. Europe exists as a unit in action, that of its colonizing civilizing mission. Now, you can ask, are some cultural practices, beliefs, texts, and ideas that emerged from Britain, France, Belgium, Germany redeemable? And to this, one could say, "maybe". Divorced from their absorption into an inherently violent category, can one find value in the ideas of Kant, a seminal Enlightenment thinker? Can one appreciate Shakespeare, Dante, Flaubert? Can they possibly contribute something to the some imaginary aesthetic archive of the human race? To that, I say maybe. We are not so far from a past when these "bastions of culture" were lorded over us as proof of Europe's superiority and one would be hard pressed not to find deeply racist attitudes in most literary works published in that time and place, which is why I say, maybe. Cesaire himself believed in the value of intercultural exchange without which he believes civilizations "atrophy". Maybe there will be a point someday where the category of human becomes meaningful enough to allow us to appreciate an equivalent exchange of culture for collective human edification but, for now, we are too far from that reality.
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