thought.^65 She convincingly argues through extensive archival research that Hegel’s famous
master/slave dialectic, contained within the pages of Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology of the Spirit,
was not metaphorical but based on Hegel’s knowledge of the Haitian Revolution. After quoting
Hegel’s own notations about the importance of newspapers and in keeping up with world events,
she concludes:
We are left with only two alternatives. Either Hegel was the blindest of all the
blind philosophers of freedom in Enlightenment Europe, surpassing Locke and
Rousseau by far in his ability to block out reality right in front of his nose (the
print right in front of his nose at the breakfast table); or Hegel knew ---knew
about real slaves revolting successfully against real masters and he elaborated his
dialectic of lordship and bondage deliberately within this contemporary context.(^66)
Although the details as to how she arrives at her eventual conclusion are too complicated
to be treated here, the importance of such a discovery lies with “the potential for rescuing the
idea of universal human history from the uses to which white domination has put it.”^67 In this
way, Buck-Morss’ study can be seen to coincide with other efforts by historians and cultural
theorists to counter the silence which has typically concealed the Haitian Revolution in western
studies.^68
To cite another recent text which will lead us to Ardouin’s and Nau’s poems, Nick
Nesbitt’s 2004 article “Troping Toussaint, Reading Revolution,” is in dialogue with much of
Buck-Morss’ argument and expands to focus on two additional interpretations of the Haitian
Revolution which have also received little attention: another by Hegel, Philosophy of Right, and
(^65) Susan Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti,” Critical Inquiry 26.4 (2000): 821-865.
(^66) Buck-Morss 844.
(^67) Buck-Morss 865.
(^68) Buck-Morss quotes Michel-Rolph Trouillot from his book Silencing the Past which states that the Haitian
Revolution was unthinkable at that time in history. Sybille Fischer’s Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures
of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004) is another recent book which argues
that including the previously suppressed events of the Haitian Revolution would mean a complete revision of the
Western notion of modernity.