Revolution, Historicity and the Absolute

 1. Another way of seeing a barricade

Barricades are makers of cities as we have learnt over the last few months, and if all goes well makers of the fates of a people, beyond the darkness they find themselves in. Barricades have both materiality and force. The immediate force of the barricade is apparent in the fact that the beyond, the street itself can be seen, but we feel in our gut on seeing one, especially now, in this city, a wrenching, a sign that says 'stop, or else'. Distance which seemed to be a property of the street discloses itself as a political relationship, that many have had to feel 'in their bones'. 

This strange part of urban life is not new to the city as such, as a general abstract entity. Walter Benjamin talks of a few into the start of his arcades project. In the section titled 'Haussman and the Barricades, the modern boulevard appears less as a work of urban aesthetics and capitalistic speculationi as much as it does of dissent, and its control. Under Napolean III, George-Eugene Haussman's rebuilding of Paris from 1853 onward cleared crowded streets, demolished working class neighbourhoods, re-organized circulation, made expensive new building frontages and created long, straight prospects. While on the one hand these prospects could be admired they could also be traversed efficiently by Soldiers. Broad avenues are built to obstruct the by then century old revolutionary technique of errecting barricades across a narrow street. Large straight routes made the movement of troops easier.

Such barricades were constructed from random objects: barrels, carts, paving stones, furniture. The modern city (through Mimesis across other parts of the post-colonial world) acquires a history of revolutoinary occupation and anticipated the denial of that occupation. 

2. Snowballing Interests

The history of such a culture of course necessarily begins in 1795 with the monarchical crisis in France which was at once fiscal and constitutional. The crown needed money, while deputies of the third estate asked who had the authority to speak for a nation. On 17th June the National Assembly was declared. Not finding a meeting place available the assemly gathered in a tennis court and vowed not to leave till a constitution was produced. This very displacement of space it would seem also displaces the authority of the King on this group of people. The occupation of space, a first declaration of independence form monarchical authority. 

In the first days of July royal troops gathered around Paris and Versailles. On 11th July the King dismissed the finance minister Jacques Necker, who was widely regarded as sympathetic to reform. Many thought the king intended to crush the assembly. Muskets and other weapons were seized from the Invalides military complex. On 14th July crowds attacked the Bastille, an old fortress and prison where the gunpowder was held. Its governor eventually surrendered after hours of fighting and was killed by the crowd. The fortress was was a visible instrument of royal coercion. 

Lefebvre's history of the reovlution widens the picture. Paris was only one of several theatres in which different people remade the revolution. Across rural France in the summer of 1789, rumours circulated that aristocrats had hired brigands to destroy crops and punish villages. Peasants armed themselves, marched on manor houses and in many districts burned documents specifying feudal dues and rents. On 4th August deputies in versailles responded by renouncing many hereditary priveleges and feudal rights; on 26th August they adopted the declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen. But the actual operation of the rights remained unresolved. The newly constituted assembly defended property even as rural cultivators tried to escape inherited obligations; it praised equality while separating people deemed politically active from those who had no vote. 

Another large movement began in 5th October led by women in the Paris food markets. Bread was scarce and expensive. Women marched through the rain towards versailles, which was more than 20 kilometers away, demanding political accountability. Some national guards followed as well. The crowd surrounded the palace and violence followed in the early hours of 6th october. The royals agreed to march with the protesters to Paris. This was a pshyical relocation of the heart of french politics. 

It was through such a process that a people acquired their reality. The revolution did not begin with a single idea, each intervention snowballed into a force that eventually could not be stopped. 

3. Building and Rebuilding the Barricade

As I have pointed out earlier, the Parisisan barricade had a history before Haussman tried to make it obsolete. In July 1830 Kind Charles X tried to silence opposition newspapers, and dissolve the recently elected chamber of deputies and restrict the electorate by emergency co-ordinates. Journalists protested. On July 28th Protesters errected barricades across narrow streets and raised the tricolour over public buildings and fought royal troops who advanced only to confront fresh obstacles built behind the ones they had cleared. On July 29th the protestors had taken over paris and the monarchy collapsed. But rather than a republic that many participants had envisioned the result was a new King. In February 1848 Paris again saw demonstrations and street fighting. The new kind Louis-Phillipe's regime had restricted parliamentary participation to a wealthy electorate. This built resentment articularly since planned gatherings and pulic feasts were often banned. WHen a planned paris banquiet was banned, crowds filled the streets. After fatal shootings and further barricade, the kind abdicated on 24th February and a Second Republic was proclaimed. Universal male sufferage was announced as well as a right to work. Unemployment was addressed by National Workshops, which paid jobless men to work on public projects or register for paid employment. 

Within four months the agreement shattered. Many prosperous republicans regarded the workshops as costly, inefficient and politically threatening. On 21st June the fovernment anncounced measures that effectively dissolved them: younf workers would be channeled towards military service. The affected persons protested, and on 23rd June working-class neighbourhoods erected barricades. The republican government called on the army, national Guard and the mobile forces. For four days soldiers attacked barricades in eastern and central districts. Artillery was used thousands died and many survivors were arrested. 

A republic born from the barricade in February, fought the barricade in June.

Haussman's project now becomes clearer. In December 1851 Louis-Napolean Bonaparte seized power in a coup and was crowned Emperor Napolean III. In 1853 he appointed Haussman prefect of the Seine and gave him great latitude to reconstruct the capital. Old streets were cut through, buildings were demolished (historical deja vu?) sewerage and water systems rebuilt, avenues and parks laid out. A person evicted as always historically lost more than a roof, the entire set of networks that helped them survive were destroyed. The new broad boulevards carried traffic and commernce. They also offered soldiers direct routes towards districts were the barricades had once been effective. Benjamin calls this strategic embellishment. The beautification of the city as a way to curtail revolution. 

However the newly embellished urban geometry did not prevent the Paris commune. In july 1870 Napolean III went to war against Prussia, where French armies suffered disastrous defeats. The emperor was caputred at Sedan in September and the empire collapsed. Paris was under seige for months from Prussian forces. Winter, shellings, shortaes and hunger exhausted the city. France agreed to an armistice in January 1871, and a conservative National Assembly chose Adolphe Thiers to lead the government. Many Parisians feared that the government would disarm the capital, and restore an order hostile to them. During the Seige the Paris National Guard, a citizen militia including many workers acquired cannon. Its units moved them through the hills of Montamarte. Heavy pieces of artillery hauled away. 

Before dawn on 18th March, Theirs sent regular solders to Montamarte to seize the cannons. They reached the guns but the cavalry to remove them had not arrived. Residents began gathering and spoke to the soldeirs, with the national guards joining them. 

Accounts of the morning describe troops refusing to fire on the crowd

Two generals were subsequently killed by the revolutionaries. Theirs withdrew the government forces and officials to versailles. On 26th March Parisians elected a commune council, and on 28th the commune was proclaimed. Its members belonged to several political traditions: radical republicans, jacobins, socialists and interanationalists- and they collectively disagreed about policy. Several small political organizations fought for separate rights. The Union des femmes defended women's labour and the Commune, Louise Michel became one of its best known participants. The commune was a radical experiment: the city governed itself against the national government installed outside it.

In April the Versaille government began military operations against the city. On 21st May its troops entered Paris from the west, and during the Bloody Week of 21-28 May, fought from street to street against Communard defenders. Barricades rose again, including across Haussman's wide aenues. Artillery shattered buildings, fires cconsumed parts of the city, hostages were killed and government troops summarily executed many insurgents. Thousands were killed. 

The boulevard assisted some military approaches but it had not removed the revolutionary capacity of urban space. 

4. Hegel and the French Terror

By 1792 the constitutional monarchy fashioned after 1789 had become usntable. Louis XVI had tried to flee paris in June1791 and was intercepted at Varennes; many revolutionaries concluded he could not be trusted, War began against AUstria in April 1792. In Paris, revolutionaries suspected the court of conspiring with foriegn powers. On 10th August armed parisians and provincial volunteers attacked the Tuilieries palace, overthrowing the monarchy: hundreds were killed. September brought massacres of prisoners due to fears that enemies within the city would join invading armies. The new National Convention, abolished monarchy, proclaimed a republic, and in January 1793 executed Louis XVI. War rebellion, collapsing trust and disputes over bread and property made the repulican government's survival uncertain. 

The radical Jacobin-led government of 1793-94 increasingly used emergency bodies to govern. The commitee of public safety coordinated war and domestic policyl the law of suspects expanded the grounds of detention, and revolutionary tribunals judged alleged enemeies. The republic developed coercive institutions thorugh which its political rivals could be removed. The leader of the Jacobin, Danton and Roberspieere were guilotined on 9 Thermidor. 

Hegel's Phenomenology of spirit, published in 1807, analyses this experience in the section 'Absolute freedom and terror'. The problematic begins at a seemingly magnificent political moment: individuals no longer accepted inherited estates and kings as the necessary shape of the world. Each undertood the political soveriengty to arise from UNiversal Freedom. But the universal itself has its work cut out for it. It must decide how to distribute grain, organize an army, nforce a law and appoint a judge. Every actual decision has agents, a procedure and a bounded field of effects. If freedom is concieved as a pure will in which no particularity may stand out from the whole, then each singular instutiion begins to look like betrayal. Those acting in the name of an ALL can suspect every other person of concealing a private will, destruction can seem the only action thta is sufficiently universal. 

Hegel's argument is hardly that the Bastille should have remained standing, nor that royal privelege was justified. The entire German ROmantic movement, from Hegel to Schelling to Fichte and the rest was built on an absolute idolatory of the Frensh REvolution. In fact any fairly perspicacious reader of Hegel knows that his is primarily a philosophy of freedom. His critique of the revolution concerns what happens when the UNiversal refuses the determinate life through which it must act. The women seeking bread, the sans-cullote needing wages and food, the peasant contesting dues, the soldier defending the border- all appear as particulars whose requirements have to be organized. Freedom for Hegel needs institutions but also such institutions whose particular form can be judged and altered. 

5. Haiti: The neglected universal

At the moment the French Assembly declared the rights of man, France's most pfitable atlantic colony depended on slavery. Saint-Domingue occupied the western part of Hispaniola, today's Haiti. Its sugar and coffe production pants supplied French merchants with vast profits. In the fields enslaved Africans and their descendants faced excruicating labour, punishement familial separation and 'sale'. A small white population was divided between powerful planters and less wealthy caucaisans. Free people of colour occupied another legal and economic position, sometimes themselves owning property and enslaved labour; the enslaved made up the overwhelming majority. LIberty and property  clebrated in france in 1789, were formed in a different way here: the property on which the colony's prosperity depended included persons denied liberty. 

The news from France incited a wave of rebellion at various levels. White planters wanted more autonomy from metropolitan regulation but did not want general racial equality. Free men of colour demanded the civil and political rights implied by French universalism. Vincent Oge, a wealthy free man of colour returned from france and attempted an armed assertion of political rights in 1790. He was defeated, captured and brutally executed in 1791. His demand did not amount to a general abolitionist program. For thousands who remained eslaved, the fundamental question was not whether wealthy free men of colour could vote but the legal power a plantation owner had to sell them. 

On August 1791 a large uprising began among the enslaved people in the colony's northern plantations. Men and women communicated between estates, armed themselves attacked plantations and burned buildings tied to the slave economy. Early revolutionary memoery associates the figure of Boukman with religious and political gathering precdeing the uprising. The violence included killings of slav e owners and destructoin of plantations. Workers moved into an armed struggle whose size and endurance made it impossible for colonial officials and metropolitan appointees to decide their fate without them. Sanit-Dominugue became a complex war zone. British forces hoped to capture the french colony; while spain ruled the eastern half of the island and supported the revolutionaries. Even white colonists fought one another as royalists and republicans; fre people of colour organized militia, while black insurgent commanders made and broke alliances. Toussaint Louverture, a formerly enslaved man who became a gifted organizer , emerged from this conflict as a leader. In August 1793, facing invasion and counterrevolution the French comissioner proclaimed emancipation in the north of the colony. ON February 4 1794 the national convention in paris abolished slavery across the french colonies. 

Toussaint changed his military allegiance from spain to the french republic after abolition and helped defeat French imperial rivals. Over the following years he became Saint-Dominigue's leading political and military figure. The problem of freedom did not ease up once legal eslavement was abolished. Plantation agriculture still supplied revenue, exports and military resources; TOussaint sougth to keep former slaces working under strict conditoins on plantations. Many cultivators regarded this as a severe betrayal. In 1801 Toussaint brought out a constitution that guarenteed abolition and made him governer for life. 

Napolean Bonaparte, ruling France as first consul, dispathced an expedition under a General in 1802 to restore direct French authority. His regime was moving towards the restoration of slavery elsewhere in the Carribean. Black haitaians feared the same future for themselves. Touissantnegociated and withdrew but was siezed and deported to France, where he died imprisoned at Fort de Joux in 1803. 

The struggle against French military power continued. Haitian forces defeated the french at Vertieres on 18th november 1803. On January 1 1804 Haitie proclaimed independence. 

Susan Buck-Morss in Hegel and Haiti asks a disturbing question of the history of philosophy. Hegel clearly wrote the famous lordship and bondage chapter of the Phenomenology in a European world where newspapers reported the uprising of eslaved people against their owners. The question is why philosophical accounts treat mastery and slavery as purely conceptual drama whose historical sources are found only in other European books.But while Hegel does not explicitly identify haiti as the chapter's source, the historical juxpaosition resotres the philosophical seriousness of enslaved self-emancipation. The slave becomes a political subject; the declaration of universal freedom in France acquired a different content when those excluded from it forced the question of its universality. The dead of the haitian revolution become part of what freedom has to mean whenever an institution invokes the same word. 

5. What the archive calls rebellion

In India, the 19th century was similarly a tumultous time. British officials did not need to deny that peasants were political subjects. 

They merely named any political movement differently. Rule by classification replaces rule by force (which did not exlcude force of course).

Again as we build towards the current protests in Delhi (October 2026) tactics of naming seem significant to a history of revolution and rebellion in India. THe British could describe the bruning of a moneylender's papers as criminal damage, attacks on a police station as a riot and a village assembly gathering as fanatical. Once the colonial state defined 'peace' as the uninterrupted collection of rents and obedience to authority, rebellion appearaed as a breakdown of order. Ranajit Guha's Elementary Aspects of Peasant INsurgency in colonial India (1983) begins with this precise problematic.

Guha works through official reports, testimonies and the record of agrarian disturbances between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to reconstruct action from the insurgent point of view. The book's six chapters are called Negation, Ambiguity, Modality, Solidarity, Transmission and Territoriality. 

In May 1875 cultivators in the western Deccan, including Pune and Ahmednagar turned against village moneylenders. Agricultural households had become dependent on credit and debts were documented in bonds and account books that could be used in court to claim property or payment. At Supa, a market settlement, peasnats broke in to moneylender's houses and shops, and burned the papers in the street. This was of course seen as an attack on private property. The piece of paper usually read as evidence of the lender's right, becomes the object against which borrowers exert their claim to a different order. 

Guha names the first elementary form negation. The insurgent describes the possiblity of a new positionality by reversing signs of authority, those who always had to bend, refuse to bend, the master's court is attacked, the landlords records are burned; the symbols of another person's superioirty are stripped of their power. This is not some reduced sense of a thesis-antithesis. Guha argue that the peansat did not recognize himself through his own positive soical attributes. Instead he learned who he was through a diminution or negation of the properties, priveleges and attributes of his social superiors. In this way the peasant's consciousness is negatively constituted. 

Guha also looks at the way colonial reports repeatedly identify rebels as misled, spontaneously emotional or religiously deluded. Religious signs and charistmatic authority sometimes did enter insurgent organization- as in the Santal uprising- but their presence does not make the action politically unconcious. A collective may articulate political purpose through idioms unavailable to its administrators. Conversely, to name something an uprising does not guarantee that every participant wants the same social order. Guha's achievement is methodological: he refuses to let the state decide in advance what can count as thought in the lives of people against whom it exercises authority. 

His later Dominannce without Hegemony (1997) extends this problem to colonial power as a whole. Guha distinguishes dominance secured primarily through coercion from hegemoy in which rulers obtain a broader measure of consent. Briish liberal society cultivated representative claims in the metopolis while its Indian colonial state retained an autocratic relation to the governed. Colonial rulers could seek legitimacy through persuasion, law, patonage and institutional reform; Guha's argument is that coercion reained predominant and the regime could not absorb the colonized into a civil society in which it actually led through their consent. The title does not imply that colonial rule used naked violence at every minute. It names the structured insufficiency of consent at the level of the political order. 

6. Delhi- 10th-12th October 2026

The immediate Delhi protests over the last few days have been about electoral rolls: the official lists of people permitted to vote. The Special INtensive Revision of electoral rolls, constitutes an action rather akin to the Nazi dissolution of democratic power. However here the compairsn to Nazism itself is necessary though insufficient. India as a republic retains a certain core of democratic value, that is difficult to destroy even with a Nazi playbook in hand. Reuters reported nearly 130 million names struck in the national verification excercise. The youth movement popularly called the cockroach movement organized by the CJP demanded the resignation of the Chief Election Comissioner Gyanesh Kumar and a public reckoning over the roll revision. THe intended gathering to protest was at Jantar Manter, a site near pariliament street that has long functioned as a recognizable place of public protest in Delhi. 

Before the planned protest of Saturday 10th October, police and security forces reorganized central Delhi. Roads were blocked, yellow metal barricades were placed along possible approaches; orange detention buses were parked nearby; transit acces on metros and railways was restricted. This was preparation for war. The organizers, Das, Dipke and Ranka were detained from inside the an airplane. 

THe outcome of the protest over the weekend was brutal. Thousands were detained and tortured in custody. On Sunday students with affiliate left organizations, including SFI gathered at Connaught Place and Rajiv Chowk. 

Groups of right wing mercenaries were deployed by the ruling party, much in remiscnece of early Right-wing militia in Germany that preceded and accompanied Nazi forces. In several horrific encounters these forces assaulted young school and college students. Four men were caputred in a filmed incident where they assaulted and tore the clothes of a young woman. An organization called the Hindu Raksha Dal actually 'claimed responsibility' for this historically degraded and repugnant act. 

There is a historical reason here to linger on the roads where these protests and assaults took place. The British colonial city, the post-Independence capital, the ceremonial protest avenaue, the metro interchange all belong to different layers of Delhi's political organization. A large part of the present struggle, especially since Jantar Mantar yesterday was denotified as an official site for protest, has been to determine what public spaces are for. A barricade across a road is a way to control movement. But the argument enacted around that barrier concerns citizenship itself: the body allowed to pass, the body detained and tortured and the body that speaks for the people. We can see a clear analogy with the French commune. In Paris the right to assemble and command political space passe repeatedly through rooms, streets, barricades and guns. In Delhi the dispute about electoral identity of the citizens has emerged as a dispute about where those citizens may stand together. The question raised by Guha returns: when a state describes a gathering in the language of pubic order, what political act is taking place within the gathering itself? 

7. The absolute

Stephen Houlgate, in his article 'Absolute knowing revisited' opposes the interpretation that Hegel's conclusion is cheifly that the subject disovers objective conditions in language, society and history. This would be a strong materialist reading of Hegel, Houlgate argues that cannot be substantiated with the play between logic and lagnuage that I have alluded to several times before on this blog. Historical mediation is crucial but Houlgate argues Hegel's absolute knowing, the thought that concludes the Phenomenology of SPirit and begins the Science of Logic, is fundamentally logical and ontological: 'thought thinking itself'. 

The phenomenology overcomes the standpoint where concsiouenss treats truth as an object over against it, while the Science of logic develops the determinations of being from within thought's own immanent movement. Houlgate's claim is that the structures diclosed by thinking 'properly' (wherein thought submits to being, or transcendental consciousness merely provides a minimal form to the movement of empirical consciousness) are structures of being itself. When we understand category as quality, we discover something of the intelligiboility of quality as such, not merely a feature or a private mental picture. 

This claim throws us both in and out of comfort. Really when reading Hegel we are asked to submit out 'bright ideas' to the movement of thought itself, which reveals itself through repeated paradoxical truths. While our everyday experience is hardly challenged by Hegel (remember that for Hegel the 'real' is not separated from everyday experience, hidden in a noumenal realm). However this does not mean that Hegel is arguing for a world of 'pure imagination' : that there are no trees unless I think of them. The point concerns the categorical intelligbility of existence. The philosopher must let determinations of the matter dislcose themselves and resist te temptation to replace their movement with a preconcieved scheme. 

Now to return to the barricade, not to embellish it with Hegelese but to reconsider it. We call it a thing of iron and paint, yet the meaning of its shape includes a street, the street includes a passage and restriction; the restriction includes an authroity claiming jurisdiction; contenstatino itself has a history whose institutions and memories of said institutions continue to form the present. We haven't travelled from a simple object into an unrelated political allegory. We have followed determinations that are active in the actual existence of this object.

Moreover in the final instance the barrier is more than history, our confrontations with this object and with city space, and our attempts to occupy city space count for more than just history. They are a making of historicity. this is fundamentally Hegel's point. The POS is nota text that simply says we are the products of history and society, but one that pushes us to the suppression of one's own private thoughts, one's own private desires, not in the Kantian sense to make the public the only known location for discourse, but to place the private itself into a movement which it carries to the very end to the absolute where thought thinks itself or in another way of putting it, where tthought thinks a thinker into existence. 

8. The sublation of time

OUr usual picture of history is a calender with events placed inside it. First 1789, then 1791, then 1848, then 1871, and the night of October 10th 2026. Time looks here like a spacious but rather indifferent corridor through which revolutions pass. Kant's trascendental account gives this picture a strong philosophical form: time is the a-priori form of inner intution, a condition under which appearances are experienced in succession. Hegel deneies this temporal form of experience. 

He asks what happens when time itself is thought through the movement that makes determinate experience intelligible. 

The calender is a necessary time keeper but insufficient for a sense of historicity. 

At the end of the Phenomenology, in the chapter on Absolute KNowing Hegel makes the claim that time is the COncept itself in its existent form, although it is presented to consciousness as empty intuition, as kant argues. 

Spirit appears in time so long as it has not grasped its pure Concept; when the Concept grasps itself it sublates temporal form. To sublate, is neighter to simply keep a sequence of moments exactly as they appear, nor to smash the chronological existence of some thing into nothingness. Hegel's text explicitly speaks of overcoming the form in which thought merely intuits its own unfolding as something external to itself. It would be wrong to interpret this merely as historical change, or that the phrase 'thought thinking itself' merely means a community's consciousness of the collective past. Although as so many of Delhi's young revolutionaries have demonstrated this too, the returns to Gandhi and Bhagat Singh, to old revolutionary songs, the comparisns to the British Raj of the Modi government, all these are necessary conditions for the path to the absolute. The stronger interpretive possiblity is: historicity is what temporal experience becomes when its determinations are comprehended as internally related rather than arraged as items in an empty container.  

The Concept is not the last event standing at the end of history. 

The power of the concept of time in Hegel is distinctly Proustian. It is the power of the a determination to alter what preceded it. The contestations of discourse between the INDIA bloc, AISA and CJP against the BJP and vice versa are fundamentally contestations across time. It is this fact that makes the past neither a museum of dead facts nor an inexhaustivle well of analogies. History is no longer a neutral backdrop. 

9. For those who are to come

Imagine a barricade after the demonstrators have been taken away. A little piece of tape remains on one of its bars. One end has caught dust; the other moves in the wind. There is nothing majestic about it. SOmeone will peel it off tomrrow. The roads will reopen. Cars will travel from one traffic signal to the next, and everything we see will be everything we have always seen on an ordinary weekday road. It is this ordinariness that power looks to restore. It is also what politics must continualy reexamine, because the normality of the street has always depended on a judgement about who may use it and for what. 

The Hegelian Absolute is not waiting behind the police line as the future victory of a preferred party. It demands more. If thought and being have the same intellegible structure, no political conception is adequate based on the solemnity or rhetorical character of its comportment (this is preciesly where thinkers like Nietzche fail. Not only did Hegel announce a Genealogy of Morals that far exceeds Nietzsche decades before Nietzsche,  he also produces a real sense of history, by going beyond theStoic impulse. In this sense the post-modern characterization of Hegel has been nothing but a revelation of its own Oedipal and opportunistic tendency- Post-Modernism misses the point, politics is not about rhetoric, it is about the truth of revolutionary force). 

The street remembers. It remembers through institutions and buildings and the repeated efforts of people who have never met to assert a right to appear. It remembers in the routes taken by the living and the names given to the dead. The barricade itself is retold again and again through history. The community of revolutionaries, is never finished or empty, it is the continual retelling of the very ground on which thought stands.