Preface: Evil Beyond Repair

1

On the evening of 17 June 2017, I had the pleasure of presenting a short paper to an audience at documenta 14, in Kassel, Germany, as part of what was called the Parliament of Bodies curated by the inimitable Paul Preciado. We were a panel of four; along with me were Pélagie Gbaguidi, Françoise Vergès, and Tavia Nyong'o (Colin Dayan was to have been there with us but, sadly, couldn't make it). This specific occasion of the "parliament" was devoted to a "trial" of the Code Noir, a copy of an original edition of which (a strangely diminutive text) was on display in a glass case at the nearby Neue Galerie as part of the larger exhibition. The title of my presentation was "Irreparable Evil." In what follows, although I do not intend to rehearse its argument in every detail, I want to clarify some of what motivates and propels this direction in my thinking about the contemporary afterlives of New World slavery.¹

2

In this conjuncture, my concern, above all, is to reorient our thinking about New World slavery in the direction of a moral and reparatory history. I want to think of New World slavery as part not only of the social, political, legal, cultural, and economic history of the present but also of its moral history. I am using "moral" history here restrictedly as the covering name for an interpretative historiographical orientation that centers our attention on the perpetration of past acts—social and systemic—of large-scale atrocity and especially on the moral-psychological harms that these have brought about.² Moral history, in other words, is a history-of-the-present of past orders of evil, forms of wrongdoing that involve the deliberate and systematic violation of dimensions of our common humanity.³ New World slavery belongs unequivocally to the orders of moral evil. Now, in particular, the form of moral history with which I am interested is reparatory history, by which I mean that instantiation of moral history concerned with those historical evils—like New World slavery—that remain unrepaired in the present, whose wrongs continue to disfigure generations, and which, in consequence, call out now for a just response. A reparatory history aims to reconstruct these evil pasts in ways that potentially enable us to rethink the moral responsibility that the present owes in respect of them. In this sense, moral and reparatory histories confront us with pasts that are not past but that remain unresolved or unreconciled such that they weigh upon the psyche like a blighted and hobbled and afflicted revenant.⁴ Evil has the quality of a postsecular presence that haunts.

Note, however, that from my perspective a moral or reparatory history does not suppose that all historical wrongs are such as can be repaired. In my usage, anyway, a moral and reparatory history is, expressly, not a progressivist history.⁵ Part of the significance of a moral and reparatory history is precisely that it emerges in the context of the exhaustion of progressivist histories to point a future beyond the present. A moral and reparatory history does not presuppose moral improvement. To the contrary, what a moral and reparatory history tries to do is to attune itself to the uncomfortable thought that some loss or damage or injury or failure can be permanent and irreparable. This is the kind of wrong that evil seeks to describe. To my mind, therefore, the sensibility of a moral and reparatory history is both catastrophic and tragic—catastrophic inasmuch as it registers the constitutive features of a founding social rupture and human devastation, and tragic inasmuch as it aims to be responsive to the fact that, once set in motion, some human actions are, quite simply, irreversible, their consequences, unstoppable. To my mind, New World slavery is one such irreparable world historical wrong.

3

The question of evil has been reflated in certain critical agendas, marked by the publication of a number of provocative philosophic texts.⁶ Without trying here to sort through the various approaches that run through these works, what is important for my purposes...