Emancipation by Relay: The Transmission of Political Acts in Freud, James, and Kant

Abstract:This essay explores the transhistorical and intersubjective dimension of political acts. It focuses on the complex, contrapuntal relationship between the French and Haitian Revolutions as analyzed by C.L.R. James in The Black Jacobins, which I read alongside Freud's Moses and Monotheism. In exploring the transmission of monotheism from the pharaoh Akhenaton to the Egyptian Moses (and through him to the Jewish religion), and of the doctrine of emancipation from Robespierre to Toussaint L'Ouverture (and back to the French people), Freud and James allow us to think about the role of a founding act in transmitting a political legacy. The act is not of the order of a program or a project, but a real kernel that resists easy codification and translation. Freud describes the act as leaving a "stamp," a kind of impression or inscription. "How," he asks of Moses, "did one single man come to stamp [prägen] his people with its definite character and determine its fate for millennia to come?" This transmission, like that of the Jacobins and their Haitian counterparts, is further remarkable in being non-linear and discontinuous, skipping many generations and crossing continents, but imposing itself nonetheless.