| Popis: |
Reading John Brown together with Black Reconstruction, Chapter 3 exposes the join of psychological and material concerns that Du Bois learns from Douglass. The anarchistic energy that Du Bois adopts to describe Brown is best articulated in Walter Benjamin’s early essay “On Violence.” As Judith Butler has argued, Benjamin borrowed the idea of the general strike from Georges Sorel to theorize a destructive power that is ironically pitched at violence itself. Such an idea matches the mesmeric notion of the “crisis state”: structurally it has a homeopathic dimension where an anticipated violence is reproduced to unmoor and undo its terror. Douglass shows his understanding of this unique destructive power when he expresses ambivalence about Brown’s invitation to join the raid on Harper’s Ferry, something Du Bois highlights by dwelling on the attention Douglass gives to Shields Green, the man who decided to “go down with the old man.” |
