Provincialism? Not at all. I am not burying myself in a narrow particularism. But neither do I want to lose myself in an emaciated universalism. There are two ways to lose yourself: walled segregation in the particular or dilution in the ‘universal’.

My conception of the universal is that of a universal enriched by all that is particular, a universal enriched by every particular: the deepening and coexistence of all particulars.
—Aimé Césaire, ‘Letter to Maurice Thorez’^[1]

An empiricism of the subject always corresponds to an idealism of the essence (or an empiricism of the essence to an idealism of the subject).
—Louis Althusser, ‘Marxism and Humanism’^[2]

Starkly put, can we working thinkers of the African world, answering the call of our time, practice philosophical anthropology, social ontology, class analysis, moral and political philosophy, literary interpretation, as critical exercises in ways that give pride of place to the question of the human and in so doing bracket race, suspend what Fanon called the ‘racialization of thought’ and its life-depleting corollary—this unending preoccupation with what the empire and the racial order legislated by word and deed; this seemingly permanent colonization of our discursive horizon? The answer, unsurprisingly, is, yes we can; we always have.
—Ato Sekyi-Otu ‘Is She Not Also a Human Being?’^[3]

I.

‘And so the seasons, they tell us/ are more important, than ourselves…Should you want one, a self any way’ commences Amiri Baraka’s query in the poem ‘Sounding: A Measure, A Song, A Curse’ (1996, p.15). Bertolt Brecht’s Lehrstücke [learning-play] entitled DIE AUSNAHME UND REGEL [The Exception and the Rule, written between 1929-1930] stages the so-called ‘Coolie’^[4] protagonist singing to a boorish merchant who conscripts him as guide to traverse a dangerous body of water: ‘‘We’ and ‘you and I’/ Don’t mean the same thing. /We defeat the river/ Then you defeat me’ (Brecht 1930, 2001, p. 47).

The following paper engages debates surrounding humanism and anti-humanism to consider a related problem: the a priori privileging of certain revolutionary subject-agents over others. The refusal to reify categories and prescribe privileged revolutionary agents– independent of their unfolding in the actuality of struggle– unites the best of Marxist and Black radical thought. The dialectic of the concrete disciplines, calibrates and recalibrates anew the particular and the universal– Césaire’s ‘two ways to lose yourself’. I engage and supplement Ato Sekyi-Otu’s Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays to consider how the Los Angeles doo-wop outfit The Olympics 1960 single ‘Big Boy Pete’, as evoked by Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael), proffers a theory of contingent revolutionary defeat. I conclude with some parting words about dramatic form, revolution, and parable. Juxtaposition of Sekyi-Otu’s radical humanism with Althusser’s critical anti-humanism serves as a framework to engage Ture’s ode to living the fight another day. Critique is waged against a misguided historiographic assertion that Ture’s turn to Africa (functioning as universal)—the transformation of Stokely Carmichael to Kwame Ture– relinquishes the careful, immersive particularity of his earlier grassroots Civil Rights and Black Power praxis in North America. Such staged encounters do not happen within the electric pages of Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays, but are hopefully authorized by and are tribute to Sekyi-Otu’s brilliant analytic. Psychoanalytical insights highlight the contingent, open-ended nature of revolutionary struggle and attendant questions of method in the following propositions. Positions for and against humanist universalism are treated here not as antitheses, but as dialectical counter-point. This essay immerses itself in the question: What if their humanism and our humanism do not mean the same thing? Sekyi-Otu’s prioritization of humanism as Africacentric freedom-protocol is unwavering and without apology grounded in materialist dialectics and African diasporic resistance thought:

What I am arguing is an alternative to European supremacist exceptionalism, the ‘multiversalist’ rejoinder and the pragmatist story of human universality as contingent disclosure or historical epiphany proffered by Buck-Morss in Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. And that alternative is the argument for the transcendental priority of what Engels called the human being’s ‘native thirst for freedom’, a material expression of the idea, more precisely, the question, of the human posed by the Akan interrogative exclamation and the Luo declarative: the transcendental made flesh in the howls and insurrections and demands of the slaves, the most visceral occasion and vindication imaginable of what Jeff Noonan has named ‘materialist ethics’’ (Sekyi-Out 2019, p. 31).

Akan and Luo particularity and insurrectionist demands function here as a corrective to exceptionalism framed as universalism by asserting freedom as both humanist and materialist prerogative. An aphoristic form of propositional logic engages the nodal differences between human, hero, and self as a Pan-African and radical materialist problem for thought. Propositional logic strives towards the characteristic jump-cut succinctness of aphorism (emblematic of Césaire’s two-ways maxim). Discursive aphoristic isolation, like the parable as theorized by Sekyi-Otu, wears a mask of isolated concision, heralding future expansiveness and relationality.

The laddering of propositions that follow strive to adhere to a protocol set by Peruvian Marxist Jose Carlos Mariátegui: the insistence on taking seriously la coyuntura politica [the political conjuncture] when waging critique– a few variations on the theme of Aimé Césaire’s cautionary plotting of course (the ‘two ways to lose yourself’) from his letter of resignation from the French Communist Party addressed to party leader and former Deputy Prime Minister, Maurice Thorez. Césaire’s non-dogmatic dialectic refuses a restrictive understanding of the universal and the particular. Such refusal offers clues for future directional-possibilities, charting a multiplicity of disparate but congruent routes offering one of many cognitive maps for Black Radical thinking pertaining to humanist/anti-humanist debates.

II.

1. Proliferating Lack: In her slim but penetrating study entitled Why Psychoanalysis: Three Interventions, Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič (2008, 2014) defines subject in a Lacanian register as ‘the conceptual name for that point of regularity, of substance, or of structure, in which the latter breaks down, or displays an inner difficulty, contradiction, negativity, contingency, interruption, or a lack of its own foundation. Subject is the place where a discontinuity, a gap, a disturbance, a stain becomes inscribed into a given causal chain’ (2008, 2014, p.34). Subject (like sexuality) is an always insufficient, faltering stop-gap measure to stabilize and fill-in an empty content. Coupling sexuality with ontology, Zupančič insists on not ‘giving up on the matter of sexuality as the sine qua non of any true psychoanalytic stance’ (2008, 2014, p.13). Fixing the signifying play that is sexuality concretizes and gives provisional-form to characteristic lack. For Zupančič, ‘playing down the role of the sexual’—the marker of a watered down psychoanalytic stance– degrades the psychoanalytic insight of sexuality (that there is no there there), morphing into what she calls ‘human interest philosophy’ (2008, 2014, p.13). Such is perhaps an expression of a veiled Althusserian weariness of the turn to the human. Zupančič mobilizes a different sense of particular/universal, challenging the common-sense ‘insistence on [how] the sexual ‘particularizes’ psychoanalysis, and hence deprives it of a more universal scope, which philosophy has’ (2008, 2014, p.13). She resists thinking of sex as a particularized epistemological subset and causal lever (contrasted against the grandeur of philosophy’s universalism). Pivoting this line of logic to think about radical politics, a Black Radical sense of contingent becoming-particularity announces its clarity by unabashedly claiming universality as its own. This is against the misguided lament that giving primary of place to Black liberation struggles in a given historical conjuncture and privileging Black self-determination struggles as particularity compared to the class struggle distorts universalist aims. Corrective is found in Césaire’s insistence on embracing ‘the full breadth of his singularity’ (Césaire 2012, p.33), the four tier-singularity he designates in his letter to Thorez as [our] ‘situation in the world’, ‘problems’, ‘history’, and ‘culture’, resonating with the aforementioned gloss on Lacanian subject formation and its concomitant content-less sexuality. This is in the service of understanding in order to change the world, what Baraka in conversation with our friend bassist William Parker signals as comparable to what ‘Brecht said… the causal connections of things… how shit works’.^[5] Evoking the class-struggle as sole representative of revolutionary universalism and limiting such class struggle to given agential parameters, posit a kind of ahistorical, free-floating phenomena dispersing far and wide. It forgets that outside the relationality of specific historical conjunctures such signification is mere empty lack.
2. To Not Mean The Same Thing: Gloria T. Hull’s 1978 essay for Black American Literature Forum entitled ‘Notes on a Marxist Interpretation of Black American Literature’ argues that, ‘because of their historical and present experiences, black writers could never accept these conditions as being ‘in the nature of things’ and thus succumb to the defeatist, nihilistic attitude that characterizes modernism. Joseph Walker, the popular playwright and actor once affirmed that he and other young black writers still believe in human possibilities and thus have not abandoned the concept of ‘the hero’’ (Hull 1978, p. 594). An enduring utilization of and fidelity to resistance strategies, tropes, and figures to negate enduring structural oppressions are bound by concrete historical conjunctures– A different array of weapons for a different set of structural constraints and negating insurgent possibilities. Again, the emphasis of this speculative encounter is on radical becoming against the a priori constitution of revolutionary subjects. This resonates with anxieties around the particular and the universal erroneously claiming such as exclusive intellectual property of one continent over another. Early in Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays, Sekyi-Otu throws down the gauntlet:

But such is the vicious paradox of some critiques of ‘universalism’ from Africa and the global South: their obsessive-compulsive Eurocentricism; their willful captivity to the very discourse they are avowedly sworn to divulge and dethrone; their exclusive preoccupation with the things the West does with words in order to enforce its particulars as universals; their trained habit, in contrast, of being utterly incurious regarding what our grandmothers do with words of evaluative judgement that have universals for their predicate. It is as if the purveyors of Eurocentricism and their critics drink from the same cup and end up inebriated in separate beds but with kindred distractions. That must be the reason why ‘universalism’ is chief among those ritual anathemas of anti-imperialist or, as they say, ‘counter-hegemonic’ discourse. (2019, p.15)

Hegemonic discourse is so wed to the presumptive, repressive logic of its categories that it brazenly admonishes counter-offensives for not going the distance. Its investment in the correctness of its own mastery cannot entertain the possibility that homonymic concepts might not (pace Brecht) ‘mean the same thing’.

The humanism entry of translator Ben Brewster’s Glossary supplementing Louis Althusser’s For Marx signals the ‘epistemological break’ borrowed from Althusser’s teacher Gaston Bachelard’s study The Philosophy of No: A Philosophy of the New Scientific Mind (1968). Epistemological break announces a transition from left-idealism and its Hegelian vestiges to scientific Marxist thought (the famous transition from Marx’s 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts to the first volume of Capital). For Althusser, the attempt to negate bourgeois humanism with a self-professed revolutionary humanism is insufficient. The latter does not cohere to the integral level of the concept [a telling semantic return to Hegelianism, Althusser’s protests notwithstanding]. It is rather a ‘signal’ a ‘notice-board that ‘points out’ what movement is to be put into effect and in what direction’ (Althusser 1965, p. 243). Upon further interrogation, Althusser’s anti-subject, anti-humanist insistence is as wholeheartedly conjunctural as it is prescriptive. Here is the glossary entry from For Marx.

HUMANISM (humanisme). Humanism is the characteristic feature of the ideological problematic…from which Marx emerged, and more generally, of most modern ideology; a particular conscious form of humanism is Feuerbach’s anthropology, which dominates Marx’s Early Works…As a science however, however, historical materialism, as exposed in Marx’s later works, implies a theoretical anti-humanism. ‘Real-humanism’ characterizes the work of the break…: the humanist form is retained, but usages such as ‘the ensemble of social relations’ point forward to the concepts of historical materialism. However the ideology… of a socialist society may be a humanism, a proletarian ‘class humanism’ [an expression I obviously use in a provisional, half-critical sense. L.A.] (Althusser 1965, pp. 251-252).

The capital letter initial-tagged emphasis on the provisional houses an intricate theoretical backstory—there is a dialectical fidelity to mobilizing the very words your critique simultaneously occupies and shuns off. This is how the backstory is often told: After 1845, Marx repudiates and makes a clean break from the conceptual pride of place of alienation–what Althusser calls ‘man’s practical reappropriation of his essence’ (Althusser 1965, p. 226) — in his 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and the concurrent idealist humanist concept of ‘species being’. The first volume of Capital in 1855 grounds its categories and conclusions in the actuality of the production process itself, in other words, the relations and forces of production. For Althusser, 1844 constituted an epistemological break-lite. In 1844, Marx steps away from his humanist inclinations, a ‘liberal-rationalist humanism closer to Kant and Fichte than to Hegel’ (Althusser 1965, p. 223). Althusser’s is not a so-called ‘class reductionism’, but rather a relentless unwillingness to shift pride of place away from the [capitalist] mode of production. It is not, for example, the declaration of epistemological priority of let’s say class over gender; but rather, capitalism over everything.

Althusserian anti-humanism is often framed as a manifestation of the vulgar scientism characteristic of Soviet Marxism. The problem with this account is that it is precisely Soviet party-line thought—Soviet Socialist Humanism– that is the object of Althusser’s anti-humanism critique. For Althusser, the Soviet humanism of the new man provides cover for real crises—the rightist supersession of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ as well as the ‘cult of personality’—that which for Althusser constitutes a ‘mode of political behavior’ as opposed to a political concept. The announcement of the new philosophy in the form of a humanism is a diversionary answer to grave political problems, problems demanding new forms of organization. What Althusser is chastised for enabling is precisely what his theoretical work labors painstakingly to thwart. His insistence that, ‘History is a process without a Subject or a Goal where the given circumstances in which ‘men’ act as subjects under the determination of social relations are the product of class struggles. [And that] History therefore does not have a Subject, in the philosophical sense of the term, but a motor: that very class struggle’ (Althusser 1973: 99) transcends a dogmatic dialectic, vying instead for openness and the becoming of process. Althusser’s anti-humanism is not necessarily the negation of the ‘new humanism’ announced by Frantz Fanon^[6] or the Fanon-inflected humanism theorized by Anthony Alessandrini (2014) and others in the work of Fanon and Edward Said. Rather, this is a rejection of humanism that dogmatically ossifies its categories beforehand, failing to achieve the status of category and organizational framework to actualize the importance of the Afro-American radical imperative as Robin D.G. Kelley and Earl Lewis (2000) emphasize ‘to make our world anew’. Althusserian over-determination (its theoretical debt to Mao Tse-Tung’s delineating of primary and secondary; antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradiction) might be thought of as rapprochement between Black Radical and Marxian pathways.

3. Readiness, Revisionism, and Black Radical Versagen: Aimé Césaire’s letter to Thorez houses a repudiation and reply to his interlocutors–’Provincialism? Not at all’. In many English language-versions of Freud’s writings, the German versagen is translated as frustrate or fail. An etymological gloss of versagen’s multiple signification introduces a complication of interest. Consider these two primary definitions and related examples: 1) Versagen as fail: Das Boot verstage (The boat failed) and 2) Versagen as repudiation or refusal: Das Boot versagte den Dienst: The boat denied operation. This is analogous to the difference between risking the battle and faltering, as opposed to repudiating the very (conceptual) grounds in which a battle is fought. Lewis Gordon’s recent account of failure as a Fanon-psychoanalytical protocol resounds with the following discussion of ‘Big Boy Pete’s’ narrative arc:

The work [Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks] challenges the viability of any single science of the study of human beings and presents a radical critique premised on the examination of human failure. In classical psychoanalysis, neurosis and psychosis emerge as aim-inhibited activity rooted in subconscious and unconscious life. Failure there emerges as not achieving—or seeming incapable of achieving—one’s goals. But failure by itself is not properly psychoanalytical. One could experience failure without neurotic or psychotic content. The psychoanalytical emerges through either one’s response to failure or one’s role in the constitution of failure. It is where one is the source of one’s failure that classical psychoanalysis comes into play. Semiological psychoanalysis moves to the level of structural failure, but there is on the level of meaning. Instead of failure, ‘lack’ or ‘difference’ is the focus. What one lacks—or the social meaning of oneself as ‘lack’ or ‘difference’—provides clues into one’s failure, which in such a case is a lack of having what one wants. But again, failure is necessarily psychoanalytic here. One could necessarily mean to be a source of failure. Psychoanalysis is thus within the set of human sciences that are limited by its critique, but it is so paradoxically because its failure is as a philosophy of failure; that is, if it succeeds, it fails, and if it fails, it, or at least Fanon, succeeds. (2015, pp.72-73)

I am interested here in this movement, the repertoire of ‘moves to the level of structural failure’. Gordon with virtuoso expository clarity models a taunt balancing act: psychoanalytic procedures do not just provide an archive of failure; they are a science of failure as such. A revolutionary enlistment of psychoanalysis pairs the theorization of the subject’s resistances to the resistances of the subject. Gordon’s larger discussion of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks solidifies its status as a book of process and becoming, what Sekyi-Otu (1997) so brilliantly theorized as the text’s dramaturgical unfolding.

The revolutionary’s praxis-repertoire is one of voluntarist striving towards her own obsolescence. Such praxis is premised on not shying away from entanglement in what one opposes—the going through in order to get beyond. In a gloss on revisionism by way of Althusser’s essay ‘Sur Marx et Freud’, Zupančič argues that, ‘both Marxism and psychoanalysis are situated within the conflict that they theorize, they are themselves part of the very reality that they recognize as conflictual and antagonistic’ (2008, 2014, p. 28). The ‘conflictual sciences’ of Marxism and psychoanalysis share the same nemesis: ‘their worst enemy is not a direct opposition, but revisionism’ (Zupančič 2008, 2014, p. 28). The Black Radical Tradition is most certainly ‘situated within the conflict that they theorize’, even if such a tradition cannot be, as Cedric J. Robinson demonstrates with great care, ‘understood within the particular context of its genesis’ (1983, 2000, p. 73). The momentum and narrative arc of ‘Big Boy Pete’ refuses to turn away from failure as such. The song chronicles Pete’s failure to win a round of combat against Bad Man Brown—it tarries with both allegory and parable. The Olympics stage Pete’s failure by way of the instrumentation propelling the song’s narrative progression, never abandoning the song’s libidinal attachment to its namesake protagonist despite his defeat. Kwame Ture’s subsuming of Pete’s vantage point functions as a dialectical counterpoint against a caricatured and falsified notion of his militancy as machismo.

In August 1996 Kwame Ture sat down for an interview with veteran television journalist, Gil Noble for the Sunday morning network-television news show, Like it Is. Topics of discussion between these two friends included: Ture’s critique of what Marx and C.L.R. James famously theorizes as ‘the great man theory of history’, the opposition between organizing and mobilizing, the blunders and theoretical misunderstandings of the Clinton presidency, the political dialectics of Reverend Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign, the dialectic of quantity and quality, Fidel Castro’s Pan-Africanism, stage theory and Kwame Nkrumah’s leadership in Ghana, spontaneity versus protracted action (and their relationship to readiness), the difference between unconscious and conscious rebellion, the imperative of socialism, the function of religion in African diasporic social movements, the pitfalls of exporting revolutionary models, and on and on. Ture speaks at length about the question of bearing arms as a precondition for readiness. His tone is humble, exacting, and without any hint of patriarchal bravado. He speaks with sad yet sober resolve about the 1965 murder of civil rights worker Viola Luizzo as well as the need for Lowndes County field workers to arm themselves against white racist terrorism. In the same breath, Ture prioritizes political as opposed to military aspects of revolutions in the African diaspora. He refers flippantly to his organizational role in the Lowndes County Freedom Organization as ‘sitting on the guns’.

Ture with characteristic humor asserts: ‘Talk is cheap said Big Boy Pete. But I got a 45 on my side…’ This is a curious citation. Recall the song’s lyrics:

Brown pulled a knife, he jumped on Pete
They fought from the counter right on out to the street
They swung from north, they swung from south
Brown cut that black cigar right outta Pete’s mouth!
Pete hit the ground, he yelled and screamed
(Pete took his Stetson hat and beat the scene)
Now if you’re ever down on the corner (yeah-yeah)
Down on-a Honky Tonk Street (yeah-yeah)
Don’t mess with Brown (yeah-yeah)
He’ll cut you down
Take a message from-a Big Boy Pete

Here the emphasis on the importance of arming oneself is paired with identification with the defeated in this ‘down on the corner’ tussle. Such identification complicates thinking about the need to be armed as patriarchal symptom. ‘Pete took his Stetson hat and beat the scene’: this is a dialectics of defeat that is neither pessimistic nor fatalist. Radical readiness incorporates in its philosophical standpoint and theoretical tool box a contemplation of contingent defeat. It is battle-ready partiality in the face of totality. Ture (and for that matter The Olympics) center their attention on the defeated subject, performing what Jacques Rancière calls a ‘distribution of the sensible’ (2004, pp. 12-45) that privileges both partisan failure and the repudiation-refusal necessary to fight another day. The Olympics’ movement-process, the shifting of vantage points from Big Boy Pete to Bad Man Brown, all the while maintaining an insurgent fidelity to the proper-name Big Boy Pete, constitutes a sonic analog and refusal of what Lewis Gordon theorizes as ‘epistemic closure’ (2015, p.49). The succinct enclosed repetition structure of the music winds down, but not without conjuring the probability of Pete’s return.

The question of Black Radical biography and revisionism is always fraught. Consider Freud’s meditation on his former colleague, Carl Jung’s revisionist deviations: ‘Jung, by his ‘modifications’ has furnished psychoanalysis with a counterpart to the famous knife of Lichtenberg. He has changed the hilt, has inserted into it a new blade, and because the same trademark is engraved on it he requires of us that we regard the instrument as the former one’ (Freud 1916, p.454). One argument in Peniel Joseph’s biographical study, Stokely: A Life asserts that as Ture cultivates an anti-capitalist Pan-Africanism, he abandons the more grounded tactics of his pragmatic, early, grass-roots organizing (2014, pp. 319-327). Here emerges a variation of the logic of particular/universal, the unwillingness to concede universality outside a specific geographical (continental) and ideological paradigm. This is amongst other things, a problem of scale. As if, according to Joseph’s thought process, the turn to Africa as continental field of struggle marks an abandonment of a more appropriately scaled particularity characteristic of his younger Civil Rights to Black Power activism. On one hand, this is the hallmark of revisionism. Yet, Joseph’s text works against its own tendencies. Its dedication to the subject matter and more importantly, the dynamism of its subject and archival draw exceeds narrow biographical judgment and claims of propriety vis-à-vis ‘Black Power Studies’. Mapping Kwame Ture’s ideological development across a vast theatre of battle, captured so comprehensively in Joseph’s study, puts any attempt to frame particular-universal, local-global binaries in acute crisis.^[7] Revisionism here is less about deviation from some consensual dogmatic norm; rather, it is the abdication to think the revolutionary conjuncture (the historicity of the movement) and how such a conjuncture binds analysis and tempers one’s presumptions. In Joseph’s interpretation, Pan-Africanist insistence on continental unity as universal and aspirational goal abdicates the discipline to pay attention to local, regional (and American) particularities. At the same time, the energy and force of Joseph’s subject of analysis (and the force of his archive) immanently critiques and exceeds the limits of its own conclusions.

III.

Amiri Baraka’s poetic eulogy for Kwame Ture, ‘Understanding Readiness’, asks the question: ‘Can we name those who are our heroes?’ (2003, p. 22) The poetic stanza itemizes and particularizes Ture’s ideological changes and political commitments, fusing such particularities in dialectical relation. The poetic stanza speculatively conjures a totality of struggle. The organizing locus that can accommodate such a procedure is identified as the ultimate marker of particularity– the proper-name– yoked to the ultimate marker of particular-universality– that of revolutionary struggle:

And what is this Brother’s name?

Organizer, Black Panther, Lowndes County,
SNCC, Black Power!, Black United Front,
Pan-Africa, Nkrumahist, Scientific Socialist
Ready for the Revolution,
Undying Love for the People,
All African Peoples’ Revolutionary Party,
Stokely Carmichael, Kwame Toure [sic], Comrade,
Warrior, Ideologue, Thinker, Revolutionary,
Leader Hero, My Man, Brother!
Our Dear Brother! (Baraka 2003, p. 23)

Question gives way to organization, which gives way to principles, slogans, appellations, and an affirmation of collective fraternal love: one friend missing another. Baraka’s stanza problematizes the conceit of linear-periodization and accentuates its core principal: The phenomena (and the human being) is greater than the law.^[8]

Here is Bertolt Brecht speaking to GDR scholar and journalist Ernst Schumacher about the revolutionary efficacy of the parable and its utility for dramatic form:

…the parable form is still the best. Do you think that Lenin spoke by chance about climbing high mountains? This made the difficulties which at that time confronted a part of the socialist movement so clear to everybody that at the same time they lapped up the theoretical considerations.

‘Let us assume’, Brecht continued his deductions, ‘that The Good Person of Sezuan was not written in parable form. I would then have to show a proletarian who became a member of the bourgeoisie or of the petty bourgeoisie, and subsequently, of course, has to change his tune completely in order to remain bourgeois or petty bourgeois; that is to say a negative hero. The bourgeois would say: Look, we are not wicked at all, and would introduce quite different problems with which I want nothing to do, for instance in the sense of the ‘bourgeois as a nobleman’. (In his ‘Bed-bug’ Mayakovsky showed the proletarian as a bourgeois.) The result would be a comedy in the style of Puntila roughly on the themes ‘riches impose obligations’. In order to bar this road to the heroes and traders, all that remains is the parable form, which discloses without trouble and without possibility of evasion how shabby and imperfect a society is in which a man can only be good and decent when he is regularly bad. Without it being stated, everybody is forced to the conclusion that this society deserves to be changed, indeed that it must be changed. In the field of ‘direct realism’ this could only have been done with difficulty. Such a play would be ponderous compared to a parable-play; it would not be very jolly or assuming. I am firmly convinced that with the increase in civilisation [sic] in Communism the parable has a great future, since it enables the truth to be presented so elegantly.^[9]

This is an astonishing assertion. For Brecht, the direct simplicity of the parable form is the royal road to complex understanding. It is a formalist hedge against obfuscation and evasion, building its momentum to reach its urgent conclusion: We must change where we live. For Ato Sekyi-Otu, the purchase of proverb is in how it ‘assert[s] a metaphoric equivalence or isomorphism between manifestly non-identical entities’ (2019, p. 197). He concludes his study by fashioning ‘a literary universal’ framed by an Akan meta-discourse on causality and literary form. A proverb on the etiology of proverbs: ‘Crisis is the occasion of proverbs’ (Sekyi-Otu 2019, p.234).

Brecht’s The Exception and the Rule generalizes its dramatis person to the point of parable—The Merchant, The Guide, The Coolie, The Policeman, The Innkeeper, The Judge, The Coolie’s Wife, The Leader of the Second Caravan, and the Two Associate Judges are less characters and more aggregate place-holders whose function it is to illustrate and adjudicate a conflict. Brecht simultaneously generalizes, concretizes, and signifies on Carl Schmitt’s fascist theorization of the sovereign’s prerogative to declare the exception to the rule. There is a meta-reflection on display here. A ‘not meaning the same thing’ that concretizes Schmitt’s categories by way of the particular action on stage, generalized in parabolic form. Brecht extends the parabolic moral lesson in the protracted form of a didactic play. In The Exception and The Rule, a merchant kills his guide—mistaking the merchant’s water-bottle for a stone brandished as weapon— when being helped across a river. The adjudication of the merchant’s deeds according to Brecht’s aesthetic and political design is a task not just for the court, but Brecht’s audience writ large. The merchant’s rationale is presented as follows: since the merchant’s relationship to the guide was one of exploitation, it only makes sense that the guide would attempt to kill him. The problematic of the drama is announced at the start by ‘The Players’ in their meditation on the structural obstacles hindering human flourishing and the modeling of a revolutionary hermeneutics of suspicion (characteristic of Brecht’s Epic Theatre):

We are about to tell you
The story of a journey. An exploiter
And two of the exploited are travelers
Examine carefully the behavior of these people:
Find it surprising though not unusual
Inexplicable though normal
Incomprehensible though it is the rule.
Consider even the most insignificant, seemingly simple
Action with distrust. Ask yourselves whether it is necessary
Especially if it is usual.
We ask you expressly to discover That what happens all the time is not natural.
For to say that something is natural,
In such times of bloody confusion
Of ordained disorder, of systematic arbitrariness
Of inhuman humanity, is to
Regard it as unchangeable. (Brecht 1930, 2001, p.37)

Here is a dramatization of the dialectical interdependence of opposites. Such a strategy of invocation and negation can also reveal itself by proliferating variations of the same word. Consider the following variations on the problem of selves. Baraka’s use of anaphora in ‘Sounding: A Measure, A Song, A Curse’ enacts a cautionary warning against humanity’s annihilation by nuclear warfare, advancing its multi-stanza claims by repeating and variating the line ‘no selves’. Every moment of evocation of self is partnered an countered by its negation: ‘But no selves, hear? No breathing, No dancing. Except if you bounce…Be for bouncing, Bounce. And Death. Be for death. Death from the skies. Death as a result of barbarian economics… No selves. No collections of them. Kill collections of selves. Alone is O.K. solipsism. Greed. Individualism. Death’ (Baraka 2003, p. 18). Repetition pairs alongside negation. The dramaturgical unfolding apparent in the triumvirate clusters of Sekyi-Otu, Zupančič, Althusser; ‘Big Boy Pete’ and Kwame Ture; Baraka and Brecht command concision. Anxiety-free and in motion– Not only Daring to Struggle and Daring to Win; but hazarding a question. What if their humanism and our humanism do not mean the same thing?

References

Alessandrini, A. C. 2014. Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics: Finding Something Different. London: Lexington Books.

Althusser, L. 1 May 1973. ‘Remark on the Category: ‘Process without a Subject or Goal(s).’ Essays in Self-Criticism. Translated by Lock, Grahame. London: New Left Books.

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