Bernard Harcourt - Susan Buck-Morss on Hegel, Phenomenology, and Haiti: An Introduction
Susan Buck-Morss’s project in the two essays, “Hegel and Haiti” and “Universal History,” is to recuperate an ideal of universality and of universal history from the critique of Eurocentrism that has, rightly, undermined those ideas. And the reason, as I understand it, is to highlight and thus inspire political acts of solidarity and emancipation. To bring forth the political acts, the revolutionary acts of those peoples who fought against their subjugation and oppression.
These are the political acts that Buck-Morss valorizes and think here of valorizing genealogies, which also may not be historical in the very last paragraph of “Hegel and Haiti”: the revolutionary acts of Toussaint-Louverture, the words and poetry of Wordsworth, the acts of the Abbé Grégoire, and, as Buck-Morss writes, even Dessalines; as well as the acts of the “French soldiers sent by Napoleon to the colony who, upon hearing these former slaves singing the ‘Marseillaise,’ wondered aloud if they were not fighting on the wrong side; the Polish regiment under Leclerc’s command who disobeyed orders and refused to drown six hundred captured Saint-Domiguans.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV54naJsQrw