This essay critically engages aspects of Susan Buck-Morss' much acclaimed Hegel, Haiti and Universal History. While appreciating Buck-Morss' scepticism of Europe's presumption of authoritative self-knowledge, the essay raises two principal doubts: the first concerns whether indeed something significant about Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit stands or falls on his knowledge of the Haitian Revolution; and the second concerns her curious reading of C.L.R. James' The Black Jacobins, as mainly “information,” rather than itself an attempt to theorize the Haitian Revolution as universal history.
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Small Axe, Inc.
2010
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