Review of Donna Jones' The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Negritude, Vitalism, and Modernity

Here's my review Donna Jones' The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity. As a quickie: I adored this book, it's easily among my favorites that I've read this year.

This is one of those books that, although about a very specific topic, branches and sprawls out about itself in such a way as to detail an entire culture of thought, one which still persists today, and whose relevance has anything but waned. The topic is this: the work of Henri Bergson and his relation, or, better to say, his uptake among the writers of the Négritude movement. But if this is the narrow prism though which the book's light is reflected, that light itself blankets the entire noon of modernity stretching from Ezra Pound to Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein and D. H. Lawrence - so many stars among others in the constellation of modernity through which not just Bergson, but Bergsonism, would wind its way through. A meditation on life and race, and the ways in which both have been braided, this is really a book of astonishing scope.

To say this at all is to be reminded, first of all, of just how captivating the discourse of 'vitalism' has been for generations past and present. As anything but an outmoded form of thought, left behind with the advent of scientific triumph, vitalism - roughly and crudely: the idea that 'life' can't be reduced to the workings of 'mechanism' - vitalism was a reaction to the success of the sciences, a counter-weight and a promise of something other that escaped the clutches of the calculable. As compellingly demonstrated by Jones, for the whole history of modernity, vitalism brooked the lure of the exotic and the magical, if not the occult - to which one could either conjure up or return to. It was as a prophet of just this movement then, that Bergson appeared on the scene, with a body of work channeling, if not exactly life itself, then at the very least a certain… élan.

For Bergson, it was the surging, branching force of Creative Life that underlay even the most abstract of human endeavors, and unsurprisingly, it was to the figure of the ‘primitive’ that he looked, at least in part, to give colour (forgive me) to his descriptions. Drawing on the now discredited anthropology of Lucian Lévy-Bruhl, Bergson ingeniously reworked the ‘primitive mentality’ of the latter as characteristic not just of societies and cultures past, but as one living tendency present among all things, sometimes dominant, sometimes suppressed. Moreover, insofar as Bergson’s philosophy gave pride of place to ‘memory’ as a kind of motor for thought, his writing opened the door to conceptualisations of ‘racial memory’, memories stretching back beyond the individual and rooting itself collective kinds of humanity to which the individual belonged.

While this ambience of thought - anything but attributable to Bergson alone - would give rise, at its limit and against Bergson’s own mild mannered politics, to fascist doctrines of national racial purity, Jones’ argument is that it is from this same well that the champions of Négritude drew upon to found their own political project. Attending to the writings of Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire in particular, their explicit debts to Bergson are brought out all the better to mark what, for Jones, is one of the central paradoxes of the Négritude movement in general: its reliance upon a European philosophy of High Modernity to ground claims of African essentialism. Ultimately then, the book is exploration of the political ambiguities of vitalism: its multifaceted character, its ability to be taken in one way here and another way there, sometimes for the better, sometimes not, in fact almost always a mix of both.

As such, while I haven’t touched on many of them here, some of the book’s best moments are with its engagements with thinkers other than Bergson who have threaded the vitalist wire: Nietzsche, Lukács, Deleuze, and Horkheimer (among others) all make an appearance, each given their due with respect to their nearness and distance from the question of vitalism’s equivocal political prospects. As a professor of English, Jones also includes some wonderful readings of works like Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men, H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, and D. H. Lawrence’s Woman in Love. A work of deep comprehension then, spanning philosophy, history, art, and politics, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy is a truly brilliant book, one whose slim page count belies the inexhaustible richness within.

 

Lastly, here's the Table of Contents because, well, just look at this beauty: