Exhaustion, Intolerance, Justice in John Brown

I’m gonna sew your asshole shut & keep feedin ya   

"Method Man", Wu-Tang Clan, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) 

 

Slavery, Exhaustion & Cruelty

Is there a better expression of a specifically American cruelty & the utter exhaustion of possibility than this lyrical afterlife of slavery’s historical trauma & intergenerational violence? Is not a sewed anus and continued feeding a model of the exhaustion, of the intolerability of boundaries and rules, of law?

Exhaustion is an experience of presentation, not a representation of a total “annihilation” to echo Pascal. Exhaustion is a lived state of intolerability at the threshold of the possible and impossible, of presence and absence where “mere possibility” is experienced as subordinated, subjugated. Derrida read this relation in the exhaustion of justice-as-law in Montaigne and Pascal and an unsettling of a “mystical foundation of authority”, but we feel this same exhaustion in Method Man’s words. The same restricted, cruel relationship exists in both. The law exists like a realist needle and thread on justice sewing it shut around the confines of the law, producing heinous, violent but legal laws over the centuries like those punishing Black folks reading or writing with death (as well as those who taught them); or the ⅗ compromise in the US Constitution that stated Black folks were ⅗ human; or the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision that ruled no Black person could claim citizenship in the United States of America and therefore could not claim emancipation having escaped from a slave state into a free state. 

It’s perhaps uncouth to write about writing in the writing but I will break that rule: I write today on December 2, 2020. The 161st anniversary of the execution of John Brown who gave his life, along with 18 other people, at Harper’s Ferry in Virginia (now West Virginia) in 1859 as an attempt to start a war that would emancipate all slaves held in bondage in the United States of America. I write this in December 2020 because our assholes are still sewed shut and they are still feeding us. 2020 is the year a pandemic swept the globe, and the same year the largest anti-racist rebellion in the history of the United States of America shook the foundations of power, and exposed what most Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) already know: slavery never ended.

The Civil War was never resolved. Slavery is ongoing. Like Saidiya Hartman says, “I, too, live in the time of slavery, by which I mean I am living in the future created by it” (Hartman 133). After the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment freed Black folks from chattel slavery, slavery endured. Capitalism and white supremacy transformed chattel slavery into new programs and institutions (Jim Crow, Redlining, Mass Incarceration, The War on Drugs) producing what Hartman calls "skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.” And these live on to this December 2nd in 2020 where a former president, the first Black President of the United States of America seeks to neutralize the largest anti-racist rebellion in US history, and say Defund and Abolish the Police is impossible. Much like the 1850’s United States, the message to abolitionists is realist: abolition is not possible; you can’t build a majority on abolition. What they seek is clear, the object already lies fully formed voluntaristically: to curtail the possible by telling us in advance what is possible and what is not. But the words of Angela Davis ring out, “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time” (Davis). This is how you do impossible, abolitionist justice. You experience the presence and absence of the limit of this world and another possible, impossible world. An experience Derrida does in his always only Derridean way, and an experience I will and have take up in my own way. 

I write the preceding in order to argue for John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry as a model of impossible, abolitionist justice. Due to the (un)nature of deconstruction, of justice, of abolition, of truth, of (you get the picture), we can only talk about justice indirectly. Implicit to my argument here is that we can talk about justice in terms of concrete and historical human action, and that this is, at once indirect and direct. Staying true to the impossibility of Derrida’s justice is an act of reading as writing, one cannot be passive or remain untransformed by the work. 

My project is to weave the in-progress movements of becoming outlined earlier that characterize Derrida’s involuntarist justice (of impossibility: unguaranteed, exhausted, intolerable) and read them through John Brown’s life for Brown’s life embodies the lack of “prior possession” that is the involuntarist move. For the history of John Brown’s life and the perspective on the Harper’s Ferry raid, I will read largely from Frederick Douglass’ speech on John Brown in 1881. 

 Harper’s Ferry: Intolerance & Commitment

On October 16, 1859, 19 men, 14 white and 5 Black, took control of the arsenal, rifle factory, and armory at Harpers Ferry, along with prisoners from the neighborhood’s most prominent citizens. They took Harper’s Ferry in anticipation of more Black folks joining them, but not because they knew they would. They believed they would be joined by slaves flocking to be free and once emancipated would fight for the total emancipation of all slaves everywhere. They did not know in advance what would happen, but they risked it all in a total commitment based in exhaustion. There was no longer any room for any other kind of justice, to paraphrase Derrida. And we see this embodied most powerfully in the inevitability that they were prepared, that they were going to die trying to end slavery and they did die, either by gunfire at the arsenal or by execution like Brown. 

All other action had become intolerable. The given possibilities were exhausted. The impossibility of approaching an end to slavery was the only confrontation they had before them in the line of justice. Douglass writes of this building pressure, “The bloody harvest of Harper's Ferry was ripened by the heat and moisture of merciless bondage of more than two hundred years.” The point had come to take unguaranteed action, action that takes as granted the possibility, the likelihood of giving one’s life. 

“Giving one’s life” is  a powerful phrase, one echoed by prisoner, Black Panther and abolitionist George Jackson when he urgently declared 120 odd years after Harpers Ferry:

Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love of Revolution. Pass on the torch. Join us, give your life for the people.

Giving one’s life to the people can mean two things: 1) actually dying for the people and 2) devoting every day to the people in a way that risks dying every day; the commitment is that great. As we can feel, though, the lines are blurred between the two variations: the second everyday devotion makes that only-possible-one-time devotion of death more likely. Jackson gave his life to the people in escaping from prison and getting assassinated by the state, unleashing a series of prison uprisings across the country. I read Jackson’s call to give our life for the people because the most central part of reading Douglass on Brown is to introduce this line between life and death, this commitment to a new field of the possible, a world without slavery, born of exhaustion and intolerability. What is certain in this commitment is an intolerance for life proceeding while Black folks are still enslaved, but mostly what is certain is: taking up the commitment in the face of tremendous uncertainty, of impossibility, of a lack of guarantee. To live the old way, the existing way under slavery offered safety and security, but nothing other than an experience of the intolerable allowed Brown to accept the uncertainty of possibility and of a new world without slavery. Douglass writes,

Science now tells us when storms are in the sky, and when and where their violence will be most felt. Why may we not yet know with equal certainty when storms are in the moral sky, and how to avoid their desolating force? (Douglass)

Brown was motivated by morality, by an intense experience of justice as an exhaustion of the existing world which carries with it not only all the concrete structures and people but all the conceptions of possibility. The abolitionist devotion to end slavery was impossible and confronted the limits of the possible in a way that called into being an exhaustion of the existing world and demanded devotion of one’s life in the everyday and the final sense. One did not know. Abolition was not a guarantee. One risked one’s life willingly, knowingly, in taking abolition up as both a presence and an absence: a presence of absence in the destruction of slavery which simultaneously posits itself as a presence of the new and of the possible, of a world beyond slavery.

Frederick Douglass’ decades of work to free Black people situates him as probably the most famous abolitionist in history, equal to Harriet Tubman’s work in the underground railroad. What is remarkable in this speech is that Douglass pushes on the tension in both of the readings of the phrase “giving one’s life.” Douglass sees in  Brown something that he Douglass does not have: this commitment to give one’s life so much that giving one’s life is a giving of one’s death. 

[Brown’s] zeal in the cause of my race was far greater than mine - it was as the burning sun to my taper light - mine was bounded by time, his stretched away to the boundless shores of eternity. I could live for the slave, but he could die for him. (Douglass)

The etymology of “zeal” traces back to 14th Century French and their usage tracks with our common conception, “passionate ardor in pursuit of an objective or course of action.” Certainly, Brown’s actions make sense as a fiery commitment to act that is based on a goal. Here, the goal of ending slavery is very much an impossible goal. One that asks much more than rote enactment of a rule or guide. It meant devoting one’s life in both senses, to exhaust the intolerable possible, to commit his life everyday and to commit his life in the form of the end of his life, his death. This is the impossible, unguaranteed work of justice I believe Douglass and I both see in John Brown. 

I’m going to close by going further back in the etymology of zeal and then pulling out one Douglass section that resonates. Past the confirmation of the notion of “zeal” in the Middle French, the Greek root of zeal is “zelos” meaning “emulation.” Who or what is John Brown emulating in raiding Harpers Ferry in trying to start a war that ends slavery? Brown himself is legendary for taking up the abolitionist cause in the name of Christianity and the Lord Jesus Christ, to do his justice in the form of freeing every slave in the U.S. In popular depictions in movies and novels, Brown quotes the Bible in support of the cause of ending slavery, but is he truly emulating Jesus Christ in a schematic sense? Does Brown’s abolitionist work in the name of Jesus negate the possibility of involuntarism, that he is calling up Christ pre-formed? 

There is much to be said on this relationship between Brown and Christianity, but the guiding issue seems to be in this meaning of “emulate”, to strive to be equal. What is being equaled here in Brown and Jesus is not a schematic. There is no schematic to the justice of Jesus in John Brown, but a poetry of interpretation that moves impossibly like Derrida’s justice: the work is in the striving, not calling forth a pre-formed justice of Jesus, but making that justice in the world, which is what Brown takes up in giving his life at Harpers Ferry. Douglass wrote,

Free from all conventional fetters, true to his own moral convictions, [John Brown was] a

‘law unto himself,’ ready to suffer misconstruction, ignoring torture and death for what he believes to be right (Douglass)

Douglass turns up the volume on Brown’s impossible justice: Brown openly flouted the rule, that abolition was impossible, that the only possibility was a world of slavery. Brown did not limit himself to the possibility of the given possible that would be dictated by custom: how could you possibly win a majority to abolish slavery? He did this in the most Derridean fashion possible: he made a law unto himself. He subordinated law to justice. 

In presence and in absence, John Brown made justice provide its own force and submit a new law: there is no law but the fight to end slavery and open up that new field of the possible. A world of slavery was so intolerable and exhausted for Brown that he gave his life in all the ways you can give your life, and in the end, like Douglass says, “The war being waged in this land is a war for & against slavery & the Brown army didn’t end the war but fired the first shot” (Douglass). The justice Brown sought in the end of slavery was not won that day, nor was it won in the end of the Civil War, or the Emancipation Proclamation or the 13th Amendment, but he fired a major shot that cracks out, still in our ears today if we listen to hear the impossible justice he not only pursued but made in giving his life and death for abolition, to end slavery, in exhausting the possible and moving past the intolerable given world.