The Haitian Revolution and the Early United States: Histories, Textualities, Geographies

In the 1820s, Balzac’s go-to mesmerist, Doctor Chapelain,¹ published records from the Socièté Magnétique du Cap-François that, I will argue, provide an overlooked yet critical perspective on one of the most important incidents leading to the Haitian Revolution. The records include a list of members of the society, descriptions of mesmeric treatments performed on the island, and a speech on Mesmer’s doctrine of “animal magnetism” delivered in 1784 at various receptions. As we will see, this speech is an ardent statement of support of black self-emancipation and radical antislavery that should figure prominently in the history of human rights as a crucial event occurring between the 1781 publication of Condorcet’s Réflexions sur l’esclavage des nègres and the 1788 creation of the Société des Amis des Noirs. Less than seven years before the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), colonial authorities perceived Mesmer’s doctrine and the spread of its “magnetic” practices among the slave population as a major source of civil unrest. In what follows I will show how those authorities proceeded to defeat the threat of mesmerism on scientific grounds, and how their rationale provides a critical case study for examining the complex interactions of colonialism, human rights, and modern science.

The French colony of St. Domingue stood as one of the leading scientific outposts of the New World when, in 1784, Mesmer’s controversial hypnotic therapy known as “animal magnetism” made its official debut on the island.² Due to the alleged success of its cures, its practice quickly spread to all levels of colonial society. Colonial authorities considered animal magnetism a threat because it became a source of distraction and empowerment for slaves. The introduction of animal magnetism in St. Domingue also coincided with the arrival of a scientific report refuting Mesmer’s theories and signed in Paris by a royal commission of luminaries headed by Benjamin Franklin. Franklin’s report inspired the colony’s leading scientists to form their own ad hoc scientific commission in order to purge mesmerism from the island. In its attempt to maintain control over the slave population, St. Domingue’s scientists mimicked the Franklin commission and its occultation of hypnotic states rendered manifest by the mesmerized body.

As we will see, unwelcome similarities between animal magnetism and slave rituals also motivated the creation of the colonial antimesmerism commission. These similarities displayed an intimate link between master and slave cultures that undermined the sovereignty of colonial power and science. Significantly, these similarities—particularly those between magnetic somnambulism and Vodou possession—provide essential material for the Haitian revision of modernity undertaken by Colin (Joan) Dayan and Susan Buck-Morss because they open up a larger frame of reference that includes the genealogy of psychoanalysis and its contributions to trauma and mourning theory.

The transgressive link between animal magnetism and slave rituals appears in the first detailed description of what we now refer to as “Haitian Vodou.” A founding member of the colonial anti-mesmerism commission, Moreau de Saint-Méry, wrote this unprecedented account for his encyclopedic study of St. Domingue, which he published in exile during the Haitian Revolution. At the beginning of his wide-ranging study, Saint-Méry considers the subject of slave music and dance on the island, including what he calls the “Vaudoux dance.”³ Before this dance begins, the participants congregate around their “King” and “Queen,” and a box containing a snake (une couleuvre) that channels “Vaudoux”—“An all-powerful supernatural being on which depend all the events on earth” and “knowledge of the past, present and future.” The devotees plead for the magical power of “Vaudoux” to help them solve their problems and fulfill their aspirations, as well as, Saint-Méry significantly notes, to give them the ability to control their master’s mind. Then, the queen, possessed by the snake’s spirit, enters into a trance and becomes the clairvoyant mouthpiece of “Vaudoux.”⁴ Once the queen responds to the solicitations and receives the tributes from her followers, the “Vaudoux dance” starts.

Saint-Méry refers to this scene as a “monstrous absurdity” and warns of the danger that such gatherings represent for the colony. In this passage, Saint-Méry inadvertently formulates a critique of his own position through the description of a slave ritual that clearly mirrors the structure of colonial power. For him, “Nothing is more dangerous in all its aspects than the cult of Vaudoux,” especially due to the relationship established between the king, the queen, and their followers, which he describes as “on one hand a system of domination and, on the other, of blind submission.” Saint-Méry’s perception of Vaudoux as dangerous arises from his own complacent role in perpetuating the terror of slavery that made plantations in St. Domingue such a profitable undertaking for the Bourbon family. Saint-Méry’s biased description of Vaudoux is, then, the site of a paranoid projection that expresses the power of fascination at work in domination and blind submission that keeps the vastly outnumbered king, queen, or master in control.

Saint-Méry’s portrayal of the Vaudoux queen’s possession inadvertently manifests another undesirable link between master and slave cultures, which becomes apparent as he comments on the contagious aspects of the Vaudoux dance: “What is very true of Vaudoux and at the same time very remarkable, is the kind of magnetism, which brings the members to dance right to the edge of consciousness. The prevention of spying is very rigorous. Whites caught ferreting out the secret of the sect and tapped by a member who has spotted them have sometimes themselves started dancing and have consented to pay the Vaudoux Queen to put an end to this punishment.”⁵ Saint-Méry conveys the irresistible contagious force exerted by the “Vaudoux dance” and the way it even dangerously attracts whites through its “magnetism.” In addition to the reference to magnetism, the whole scene, with its descriptions of convulsive states and clairvoyant possession, recalls Mesmer’s magnetic séances, which were wildly popular in Paris at the time. To better understand the importance of Saint-Méry’s conflation of Vaudoux and animal magnetism, I will now briefly examine Mesmer’s polemical doctrine and its impact on colonial society in St. Domingue.

Mesmer attributed illnesses to an obstruction in the circulation of the body’s “magnetic fluid.”⁶ He believed that he could project his own “magnetic fluid” to help reestablish its harmonious flow, and in turn the patient’s health. Such projection often provoked a “crisis” manifested by convulsions and swoons. The rapid success of animal magnetism brought it under the scrutiny of the medical establishment. For the most part, they saw animal magnetism as a threat to their own (often shaky) practices, and in turn forcefully tried to discredit animal magnetism with the publication of hostile reports. With the distance of history, Mesmer’s “magnetic fluid” theory actually proved to be fruitful because it pointed to an imperceptible yet crucial influence at work in the healer-patient relationship. As the ancestor of hypnosis and suggestion, Mesmer’s new therapeutic approach has also been recently acknowledged by historians as a major step toward modern psychotherapy and as an important precursor of psychoanalysis. Mesmer’s loyal disciple, Armand-Marie-Jacques de Chastenet, Marquis de Puységur (1751–1825), is, in fact, now receiving credit for initiating what are now commonly called “talking cures.”⁷

In May 1784, Puységur discovered that, with the help of “magnetic passes,” some of his patients would fall into a state similar to sleep, but would retain their ability to interact with the magnetizer. In these first cases of artificially induced “magnetic” somnambulism, Puységur observed that his patients were developing remarkable gifts. Under the influence of the magnetizer, their oral communication skills improved; they started to diagnose their own cases, prescribe treatments, and predict their outcome. After coming back to their wits, they did not remember what happened during the somnambulic state. Puységur’s claim that under magnetic sleep his patients turned into the mouthpiece of another self arguably became the first credible medical record of an entity that would later be labeled as the unconscious.⁸

The similarities between Puységur’s account of magnetic somnambulism and Saint-Méry’s description of the Vaudoux queen’s possession are striking. In the same encyclopedic book that contains the description of the “Vaudoux dance,” Saint-Méry also chronicled the official arrival of mesmerism in St. Domingue. In June 1784, a month after the discovery of magnetic somnambulism, Puységur’s brother, Count Anne Chastenet de Puységur, at the head of a cartographical mission, brought with him the knowledge and the procedure of the hypnotic cure to the island.⁹ His fourteen-month stay in St. Domingue helped spread the enthusiasm for animal magnetism to all levels of colonial society.

A 1785 letter from plantation owner Jean Trembley sums up Anne Chaste-net’s impact in the colony: “Marvelous cures that could hardly be attributed to any play of the imagination have been reported. A cripple brought from the plain to Cap-François on a litter walked freely afterward. A female slave paralyzed for fourteen years was entirely cured in a short time…. A plantation owner on this plain made a big profit in magnetizing a consignment of cast-off slaves he bought at a low price…. The rage for magnetism has taken hold of everyone here.”¹⁰ In addition to the profits masters gained, the slaves appear to have enjoyed the curative virtue of animal magnetism and incorporated some of its techniques in their rituals. A scandal eventually broke out in the parish of Marmelade, where, Saint-Méry reports, the European ideas of animal magnetism had particularly flourished.¹¹ Colonial authorities caught a “mulatto” and his black assistant promoting their own kind of magnetic treatment and, to dissuade others, severely punished them.

Karol Weaver has reason to argue that Mesmer was perhaps not too far off the mark when, later in his life, he boasted “that Haiti owed its independence to him.” Colonial authorities quickly perceived the introduction of mesmerism as undermining their control over the slaves. For Weaver, mesmerism became a source of civil disobedience: “The practice of mesmerism by slaves was a political act of revolution. In order to participate in magnetist treatments, slaves violated numerous restrictions—they ran away, they assembled, they traveled without permission, they practiced an illegal form of medicine, and they carried weapons. All these undertakings paid off in the slave rebellion of 1791.”¹² Slave mesmerism became a source of civil disobedience because, as with the “Vaudoux dance,” it empowered and sidetracked its followers. To discredit animal magnetism, colonial authorities organized an ad hoc scientific commission that drew its inspiration from Benjamin Franklin’s royal commission.

Robert Darnton has shown how the Franklin commission had also served political ends in France. During the years preceding the storming of the Bastille, the democratic tone of Mesmer’s theory of a pervasive “magnetic fluid” accessible by all had become an important source of inspiration for French revolutionaries and pamphleteers who had been marginalized by the Enlightenment establishment and who saw in the backlash against mesmerism a despotic government working through its official institutions.¹³ During the 1820s in France, records from the Socièté Magnétique du Cap-François established by Anne Chastenet upon his arrival in St. Domingue, surfaced in the leading journal dedicated to defending the cause of animal magnetism.¹⁴ According to the editor, these documents came from Doctor Chapelain, one of the leading authorities of animal magnetism at the time. The documents include a list of members of the society, descriptions of magnetic treatments performed on the island, and an anonymous speech on Mesmer’s doctrine delivered in 1784 at various “receptions.” Although imbued with paternalist rhetoric, this forgotten speech should have a prominent place in the history of human rights due to its ardent support of black self-emancipation and radical anti-slavery—support that far surpasses the democratic aspirations of the Parisian pamphlets examined by Darnton. I quote at length this remarkable document:

Humanity! How has the word echoed out in the new world? Ghosts of Americans out of the past, rise up from your native land! Miserable Africans, rise up from your chains! And you, white man, their oppressor, arrogant European …, listen to me: America displays the most terrifying contrast! In the north, the savage is free as the wind; in the south, the debased man is sold and treated like lowly cattle; Europe tears Africa’s children away to have them water the soil of America with their sweat, that soil which is still stained with the blood of the first inhabitants.

We detest these atrocities…. They are not the crime of the individuals governed by that policy. Although the disciples of Mesmer cannot emulate the children of Penn in freeing their brethren; although that great act of justice is forbidden to us, it is at least in our power, gentlemen, to allay the plight of our Negroes. America’s power elite can still be benefactors to humanity. In overseeing our labor gangs let us retrace the patriarchal government of the first men; let the word subject, which, by the knots of mutual kindness, links the subordinate to the superior, replace the word slave…. The prosperity of the colonies and the multiplication of blacks that has been the necessary byproduct, each day changes the relationship between the power conferred on those applying the shackles and the weakness conferred on those receiving them.

O my fellow citizens! Let us be fair, and let us prepare ourselves for the calamities that threaten us. Let us organize our estates on the immutable basis of justice and humanity; they shall become legitimate, they shall become unshakeable; let us treat our Negroes with kindness, they shall cease to be our enemies, and they shall become both the foundation and the motor of our prosperity.

The levers of policy are not at all in our hands; it may well be however that certain members of the [Magnetic] Society do have influence with the heads of the public administration, the bureaus of the legislation. Let us avail ourselves of that influence, gentlemen, for the welfare of humanity; that welfare can never oppose that of the State….

Let us formally commit ourselves, in the future and under all circumstances, to do all that we possibly can to bring the status of the Negro slaves to that of men governed by the normal laws of the State. Whenever we are unable to go all the way in this regard, let us promote, with all our strength, the emancipation of individual slaves, and let us procure, by all means authorized by the laws, the inalienable rights to be exercised by each man and by each citizen for our brothers who live in oppression and wretchedness.¹⁵

Less than seven years before the 1791 slave insurrection, this piece of mesmerist propaganda begins by invoking the first victims of white oppression, the ghosts of the decimated indigenous population of the Americas, and hinges on a revolutionary call for justice against slavery in the name of a shared humanity in order to prevent the looming catastrophe. This anonymous text shows clearly and to an unprecedented extent how some of Mesmer’s missionaries operated against colonial power. Authorities quickly perceived the subversive influence of mesmerism in St. Domingue and planned to defeat it on scientific ground by mimicking the Franklin commission’s refutation of Mesmer’s theories.

The Franklin commission, which included luminaries such as Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and Jean-Sylvain Bailly, published a report that proved experimentally that Mesmer’s “magnetic fluid” did not exist and that the magnetizer’s influence on patients could be simply attributed to the latter’s “imagination.”¹⁶ Whereas the report has been praised as a pioneering piece of modern scientific writing, it also shows its limits.¹⁷ The Franklin commission can explain the strange states of convulsion, dissociation, and “sympathy” witnessed during the magnetic cure only in terms of the convalescent’s “imagination” and its stimulation by dramatic staging (music, “le baquet”),¹⁸ the magnetizer’s touch (“magnetic pass”), and the imitation of other patients. An Enlightenment euphemism for the nonrational and the illusionary, the term “imagination” reduces liminal states to unreal causes and, in turn, dismisses what Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud would bring to the fore a century later in their studies of hypnotized hysterics, namely, the unconscious and the desiring body. In relegating mesmerism to mere occultism by rejecting the “magnetic fluid,” the Franklin commission report also negated a foreign body, an occult other that it nevertheless rendered manifest through its multiple descriptions of the magnetized and desiring body, and through its perception of it as a danger to reason and public order.

The fact that Franklin, then the American ambassador to France, presided over the official refutation of Mesmer’s “magnetic fluid” also helps to explain why mesmerism did not take hold in the United Sates until the 1830s. Franklin had actually met Mesmer a few years before the experiments he conducted in his home in Passy to refute animal magnetism. In 1779, Mesmer had made an early attempt to export animal magnetism to North America when he invited Franklin to discuss the glass harmonica. The influential American leader had contributed to perfecting the instrument that Mesmer played as background music during his magnetic treatment. But Franklin appears to have been more interested in listening to Mesmer’s skillful performance than to his doctrine.¹⁹ In 1784, the same year Anne Chastenet arrived in St. Domingue, another of Mesmer’s most enthusiastic students, the Marquis de Lafayette, French hero of the American Revolution, crossed the Atlantic and presented the discovery of animal magnetism to Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society and personally to George Washington.²⁰ Thomas Jefferson, who was about to succeed Franklin as the American representative to France, had witnessed the Parisian craze for animal magnetism and sided with the staunch rationalism of Mesmer’s opponents. It was he who most likely prevented the spread of mesmerism at home by sending the commission’s report to influential friends in order to undermine Lafayette’s proselytizing mission.²¹

As it did with Lafayette, the report of the Franklin commission also followed Anne Chastenet to St. Domingue, where it turned up during the fall of 1784.²² For colonial authorities, the report became instrumental for protection against the emancipatory rhetoric declaimed by mesmerists and the disruptive appropriation of their hypnotic techniques by slaves. It was at this point, in 1785, that some of the leading scientific figures of St. Domingue formed the Cercle des Philadelphes to pay homage to Franklin, the president and founder of Philadelphia’s American Philosophical Society and the internationally recognized bearer of the Enlightenment spirit. By 1787, the Cercle des Philadelphes, which counted Franklin as an honorary member, received official recognition and support from the crown, and was renamed the Société Royale des Sciences et des Arts du Cap François.

Saint-Méry was one of the founding members of the Cercle des Philadelphes. He deplored the introduction of animal magnetism in St. Domingue and, like the Franklin commission, rebuffed Mesmer’s new cure as an “illusion” and “superstitious doctrine.”²³ His aversion to slave rituals and mesmerism prompted him to conflate the two in his description of the “Vaudoux dance,” where he can convey the phenomena of possession and of the white master’s contagious attraction only in terms reminiscent of a séance of animal magnetism. In other words, the “monstrous absurdity” of slave rituals described in terms of the “superstitious doctrine” of mesmerism accounts for the presence of a foreign body that syncopates Saint-Méry’s text and that, as in Franklin’s report, he cannot acknowledge, even though he perceives it as a threat to colonial power and science.

Beyond their Caribbean and European specificities, Vodou and mesmerism established a transgressive transatlantic link between master and slave cultures. What slips out from Saint-Méry’s paranoid description of slave rituals is an overlapping space between the “Vaudoux dance” and animal magnetism, and between Vodou possession and magnetic somnambulism.²⁴ Although they do not analyze Saint-Méry’s passage on the “Vaudoux dance” and mention the 1784 speech quoted above, Gabriel Debien, who first chronicled mesmerism in St. Domingue in the 1960s, and François Regourd, who did so in 2008, argue that there is no clear evidence that Vodou incorporated any aspect of mesmerism. References in colonial records to “black mesmerism seem to have been nothing but a smokescreen set between the rationality of French judges, and the frightening manifestation of black Vodou nocturnal ceremonies,” according to Regourd. “In that context, the use of words designating at that time a familiar and reassuring form of charlatanism was doubtless a way to publicly disqualify any kind of black occult knowledge and also gave words to judges to describe and condemn such hypnotic effects.”²⁵ I would argue, however, that the debate concerning whether “mesmeric elements” were included in Vodou ceremonies appears to be a false one since the occult nature of the ceremonies’ “hypnotic effects” made them highly compatible with mesmeric states while rendering the search for tangible proof very difficult.

Around the same time that Saint-Méry’s antimesmerism commission struggled to protect the sovereignty of colonial power in St. Domingue, one of Mesmer’s most enthusiastic students and future distinguished member of the Société des Amis des Noirs, the Marquis de Lafayette, promoted the achievements of mesmerism in North America. In a letter from Hartford dated October 12, 1784, Lafayette, evoking his visit to the sect of Shakers and to a Native American dance, candidly refers to a transatlantic cultural link made apparent by mesmerism: “I should talk to you of a new sect of Shakers who make contortions and miracles; all this is connected with the great principles of magnetism. I should tell you that I can make a book … having the title Essay on the Savage Dances and especially on the new dance brought here from the woods of the occident … applied to the principles of Doctor Mesmer.”²⁶

For Lafayette, consonant liminal states such as trance, possession, and magnetic somnambulism brought into contact transatlantic cultures that, for Saint-Méry, had to remain separate in order to protect the sovereignty of colonial and scientific authority. The Franklin scientific commission and its St. Domingue offshoot reinforced such a cultural split by occulting the mesmerized and possessed bodies.

Colin Dayan and Susan Buck-Morss have perceived the important political repercussions of such scientific shortcomings and have attempted to counteract their detrimental impact with the elaboration of a historical epistemology derived from Haiti’s pioneering experience of modernity and its articulation in Vodou rituals.²⁷ In what follows, I examine some of the defining features of their groundbreaking mobilization of Haitian Vodou to rethink modernity and argue that their accounts might productively be amplified further by attending to ambiguous phenomena that Vodou possession makes apparent, specifically those associated with amnesia, melancholia, and healing. The similarities between Vodou possession and magnetic somnambulism that presented a threat to colonial and scientific authority in St. Domingue contribute essential material to the exploration of these ambiguous phenomena by opening a larger frame of reference that includes the genealogy of psychoanalysis and its contributions to trauma and mourning theory. Laurence Rickels has traced this genealogy back to a famous nineteenth-century mesmeric cure and emphasized how, much like Vodou possession, its healing power blurred the line between mourning and melancholia, the nonpathological and the pathological, truth and delusion.

In Haiti, History, and the Gods, Dayan reconstructs a rich and nuanced alternative history of modernity from the point of view of the slaves’ brutal experience of “white enlightenment.”²⁸ The traumatic experience of slavery has profoundly shaped Haiti’s post-independence history. For instance, Haiti’s color-coded society and its legacy of internal conflicts spring from the development of an elaborate and hierarchical taxonomy of colonial subjects based on skin, and were instigated by the Enlightenment’s obsession with classification and the supposed natural order of things. From white to black, each descending gradation received a name—some like “Marabou” and “Griffe” closely tied with sorcery and the monstrous—that contributed to turning people into exploitable things.

Relations of proximity and promiscuity between master and slave in St. Domingue brought Africa, Europe, and the Americas into intimate contact and rendered boundaries between master and slave ambiguous, creating in turn, what Dayan calls a “reversible space,” a kind of subversive space that eluded the scientific categories structuring Enlightenment classification. As seen above with the transgressive intermingling of mesmerism and Vodou in St. Domingue, the existence of reversible spaces in the Atlantic world has important political and epistemological implications. To tap into the critical energy of reversible spaces, Dayan’s work displaces Enlightenment binary thinking and its logic of opposition and mastery with a more ambiguous historical epistemology issued from the slaves and their descendants, and embodied in Vodou syncretism and possession. Dayan writes the “vodou history” of colonialism in St. Domingue in order to demolish “such straightjacket pairs as victim and victimizer, colonized and colonizer, master and slave” and unearth the critical agency of those who had been silenced by history.²⁹

Dayan’s notion of “vodou history” hinges on syncretism and spirit possession. Vodou syncretism manifests the free association of “seemingly irreconcilable elements, taking in materials from the dominant culture even as it resists or coexists with it.” The interpenetration and coexistence of African, European, and Native American elements in Haitian divinities illustrate this principle of syncretism. Possession is the central event of the Vodou ceremony and occurs in a state of trance when the body of a practitioner is taken over by a spirit called a Iwa. Each Iwa of the Vodou pantheon has its own personality that becomes the practitioner’s in the state of possession. Dayan considers the manifestation of Vodou divinities via possession a “ritual of knowing” and “collective physical remembrance” that reconnects slave descendants to their “unwritten history.” As Dayan’s study demonstrates, Vodou possession, along with Haitian folklore, provides legitimate and rich materials that give the silenced slaves of colonial Haiti a voice. Such unwritten materials also expose the limitation of Enlightenment science because the inherent ambiguity of memory and orality will always resist mastery.³⁰

Beyond the retrieval of otherwise lost slave experiences, Dayan argues that “vodou history” dissolves the rigid opposition between master and slave. Her argument depends on a distinction between the phantasm of the “zombi” and the phenomenon of possession. In Haiti, zombies are bodies of victims who are collectively believed to have been brought back from the dead and turned into soulless slaves by sorcerers. As Dayan puts it, “The zombi tells the story of colonization.” It reincarnates the structure of terror and control that Haitians’ ancestors had successfully fought off during the revolution. From the proto-industrial plantations of Haiti to a global figure popularized by mass media during the American occupation of Haiti and the Great Depression, the zombie also tells the story of the monstrous side of modernity, particularly the commodification of the human workforce. Vodou possession, on the other hand, is “not another form of slavery.”³¹ She stresses that Vodou possession is in fact described by practitioners as a relation between rider and horse. Possession as spirit horse riding implies a more reciprocal relationship between the divine and the human.³² The relation between the host who temporarily surrenders his or her body and the spirit who harnesses it expresses a form of reciprocity that is not based on ownership and domination but on “the enhancement of ambiguity” between dichotomies such as the sacred and the profane, memory and history, self and other, master and slave.³³

Although she associates most of the critical potency of her revision of modernity and colonial history with her compelling account of Vodou possession, Dayan does not examine the function of the important event that takes place after the trance when the spirit departs: amnesia. The actions and words produced under the influence of a Iwa will not be remembered by the host who welcomed it.³⁴ Amnesia is significant for two main reasons. First, it helps establish a communal space for freedom of speech by absolving the host from the transgressive actions that might have happened during the trance. Amnesia thus creates a state of exception where disenfranchised members of the community can have a voice.³⁵ Ordinary Haitians tend to mistrust the official legal system and rely on “alternative judicial orders” to solve local issues.³⁶ By undermining social norms and power relations, the unconscious host of a Iwa provides at times such an alternative way to seek justice.

Amnesia is also significant in the way it blurs the line between the pathological and the nonpathological. This medical ambiguity is manifest in the reversal of the psychological and anthropological interpretation of Vodou possession from illness during most of the twentieth century to its recent rehabilitation as a healing practice.³⁷ To be under the sway of a foreign body while not being able to remember it is divine and serves a social purpose, but it can also express the symptomatic behavior of a melancholic fragmented self and community that have been profoundly marked by traumatic events. Vodou possession embodies both the symptom of a traumatic experience (amnesia, state of dissociation, haunting) and its treatment. The treatment occurs through the triangular exchange that takes place among the spirit, host, and congregation and through the cathartic experience of the trance.³⁸

The host’s memory of what happened during the trance is not lost, but entrusted to the congregation, which provides a safety net for the profound crisis entailed by the displacement of the self by a foreign body. The congregation’s bearing witness to the host’s memory helps prevent amnesia from turning pathological. The amnesia that follows a traumatic experience blocks access to the event responsible for one’s symptomatic behavior and, in turn, hinders an important step in the healing process. Such pathological amnesia appears to be at work in the cyclical alternation between oppression and emancipation that has marked Haitian history. The succession of brutal regimes and uprisings that followed Haitian independence manifests a melancholic compulsion to repeat, which, during the Duvalier era, Haitian authors such as Frankétienne and René Depestre interpreted, through the trope of collective zombification, as the periodical return of a colonial past that still haunts Haitians.³⁹ As an influential religious network, Vodou often played an integral part in fomenting the cycles of both oppression and emancipation.⁴⁰ But, alongside the national melancholic history, a “vodou history” has thrived as a ritual of knowing and healing through spirit possession. Recognizing the therapeutic necessity of remembrance as well as temporary amnesia, “Vodou history” emphasizes the ethical imperative of bearing witness to the other’s memory.

In Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, Susan Buck-Morss builds upon Dayan’s work when she invokes a Vodou inspired “syncretic epistemology” in her revision of the Enlightenment project of “universal history,” particularly in its Eurocentric, teleological, and Hegelian form. To Dayan’s account of composite gods linking transatlantic spiritualties in St. Domingue, Buck-Morss adds freemasonry as another significant example of syncretism. Unlike mesmerism, the influence of freemasonry on slave rituals is more apparent because it left visual evidence. Slaves adopted and adapted freemason practices and symbolism, particularly some of its emblems that were integrated in ceremonial Vodou cosmograms (vèvè).⁴¹ Despite fundamental differences, such correspondences hint at “porous” boundaries between Vodou and freemasonry; these could be due to their shared role as secret transcultural societies, as well as to similarities in their respective syncretic philosophies.

Buck-Morss chooses to rethink modernity and “universal history” in terms of an epistemology she gleans from Vodou rituals because these rituals registered the catastrophes of modern slavery and the politically unprecedented events of the Haitian Revolution—specifically, the radical antislavery principle first articulated in Toussaint Louverture’s 1801 constitution.⁴² Vodou became the site where, beyond cultural and linguistic differences, a very diverse slave population could achieve a sense of recognition through its shared traumatic experiences of dispossession, loss, and meaninglessness. The melancholic compulsion to repeat the cycle of oppression and emancipation that characterizes Haiti’s post-independence history, as explored through the trope of the zombie by Frankétienne and Depestre, is a symptom of these past traumatic experiences. Buck-Morss notes that a melancholic compulsion to repeat also transpires in Vodou possession since remote divinities must constantly be brought back through the host’s body, and the vèvè must continuously be redrawn at the beginning of each ceremony. Vodou emerged from catastrophes and diverse cultural ruins, giving rise to what Buck-Morss calls, building upon Walter Benjamin, an “allegorical mode of seeing”—that is, a mode of interpretation that registers the transience of life and meaning, repeatedly constructing it anew through syncretic connections or “porous” boundaries that resist mastery and totalization.⁴³

Buck-Morss puts into practice her revised version of “universal history” as a Vodou “allegorical mode of seeing” when she turns her attention to the slave ceremony of Bois Caïman, which supposedly triggered the insurrection leading to Haitian Independence. This key event survives only in ruins, in disparate and fragmentary secondhand accounts that could never bring certainty to what happened during this fateful and perhaps imagined night of August 1791, and to the actual role it played in fomenting the revolution. The uncertainty informing what has been referred to as the founding moment or myth of the Haitian Revolution gave way to various jubilant and biased interpretations that fail to account for the extreme violence and the wars within the war that actually made up this historical event, and in turn are unable to think beyond the reductive opposition between “victim and aggressor.” Through an exercise of inclusive “empathic imagination,”⁴⁴ whereby she makes a compelling yet speculative case for an important Muslim influence on the slave ceremony of Bois Caïman, Buck-Morss hopes to establish a politically subversive dialogue between the past and the present, which would undermine current Western views downplaying the role played by the Arab world in the emergence of modernity.

Unlike Dayan, who models her historical inquiry on and finds key materials in Vodou possession, Buck-Morss is more interested in Vodou as a syncretic philosophy based on an “allegorical mode of seeing,” as well as being interrelated with the notion of modernity due to their common roots in the politically unprecedented events that marked the Haitian Revolution. However, by leaving out the centrality of the phenomenon of possession in Vodou ceremonies from her Haitian revision of “universal history,” Buck-Morss ends her essay on a strange note: “The politics of scholarship that I am suggesting is neutrality, but not of the nonpartisan, ‘truth lies in the middle’ sort; rather, it is a radical neutrality that insists on the porosity of space between enemy sides.”⁴⁵ The designation “radical neutrality” implies an “empathic imagination” attuned to all ambiguities but its own. In other words, it does not emphasize the haunting influences at work in the reversible space and time explored by Dayan, Frankétienne, and Depestre, which, between possession and dispossession, can turn one into the medium of a spirit and of unwritten and silenced history, or into a zombie.

By providing a striking reversible space where the silenced dialogue between black and white spirits slips out, including Franklin’s and Mesmer’s, Saint-Méry’s examination of a “Vaudoux dance” that took place not too long before the alleged ceremony of Bois Caïman contributes essential material to the Vodou revision of modernity by including the genealogy of psychoanalysis and its contributions to trauma and mourning theory to the discussion. This inclusion is important because it adds a rich and nuanced conception of the modern self to the philosophical abstraction offered by “radical neutrality.” Vodou possession, mesmerism, and psychoanalysis teach that the modern self can never wholly personify “radical neutrality” because it is haunted by remote divinities and unmourned losses. Possession manifests melancholic amnesia as well as, as Dayan’s historical inquiry demonstrates, a legitimate medium to access unwritten history and heal. A Haitian revision of modernity must then retain the perplexing relation between unmourned losses and remembrance embodied in Vodou possession.

I would argue that this perplexing relation between loss and remembrance might be illuminated by using mesmerism as a relay between Vodou and the interfacing of Benjaminian allegory with Freudian “endopsychic perception,” or what Laurence Rickels calls “endopsychic allegory.” Rickels defines Freud’s conception of endopsychic perception as “the inside-out view of the inner workings of the psyche projected outward as the delusional representation or mass mediatization of our funereal identifications.”⁴⁶ As in Benjaminian allegory, Vodou myths and religious rituals mirror the psyche as a stricken world structured around the recent traumatic experience of catastrophe, loss, and meaninglessness. According to Dayan, they also mediate in part the “colonial myth” through delusional representations such as evil spirits that reflect the perverse logic and paranoid fantasies of the master.⁴⁷ Paranoid projections manifest psychotic symptoms as well as an engagement to negotiate with catastrophe that can lead to partial healing and that “offers another way to get around losses that’s not the one-way consumer choice between mourning and melancholia.”⁴⁸ To substantiate this latter claim, Rickels looks back at the genealogy of talking cures and the successful treatment of a psychotic patient reported by Justinus Kerner and enabled by the clairvoyant visions of his magnetic somnambulist.⁴⁹ Elaborating on Herbert Silberer’s interpretation of this case, Rickels underscores that the healing process operated along the reversibility of the endopsychic structure of the somnambulist’s prescriptive visions and the patient’s delusions. Later, Freud would perceive the unsettling similarity between his own therapeutic science and the paranoid system developed by Daniel Paul Schreber, and thus address “Schreber’s endopsychic perception at the undecidable intersection between the possible truth of Schreber’s delusions and the possible delusional dimension of his own theories.”⁵⁰

Reciprocally, a Vodou revision of modernity might learn from Freud’s moment of self-reflexive clarity and recognize “the undecidable intersection” between the truth of Vodou’s delusions and the possible delusional dimension of its theories. The prerevolutionary intermingling of Vodou and mesmerism in St. Domingue provided the stage for a transatlantic confrontation between Franklin and Mesmer that, for its part, brought out the delusional dimension of Enlightenment science. Moreover, in addition to provoking civil disobedience, the reversibility of Vodou possession and magnetic somnambulism points to the compatibility of their endopsychic structures and, as in the magnetic treatment reported by Kerner, to the possible healing effect of their exchange. This reversibility also contributed to making master and slave cultures porous and, in turn, certainly contributed to breaking the spell of the “colonial myth” that was necessary to trigger the 1791 slave insurrection.