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The Subject of Coexistence
A B O O K S E R I E S CO N C E R N E D W I T H R E V I S IO N I N G G L O B A L P O L I T IC S
David Campbell and Michael J. Shapiro, Series Editors

Volume 28 Louiza Odysseos, The Subject of Coexistence:

Otherness in International Relations

Volume 27 Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race

Volume 26 Matthew Sparke, In the Space of Theory:

Postfoundational Geographies of the Nation-State

Volume 25 Roland Bleiker, Divided Korea: Toward a Culture

of Reconciliation

Volume 24 Marieke de Goede, Virtue, Fortune, and Faith:

A Genealogy of Finance

Volume 23 Himadeep Muppidi, The Politics of the Global

Volume 22 William A. Callahan, Contingent States: Greater

China and Transnational Relations

Volume 21 Allaine Cerwonka, Native to the Nation: Disciplining

Landscapes and Bodies in Australia

Volume 20 Simon Dalby, Environmental Security

Volume 19 Cristina Rojas, Civilization and Violence: Regimes

of Representation in Nineteenth-Century Colombia

Volume 18 Mathias Albert, David Jacobson, and Yosef Lapid,

editors, Identities, Borders, Orders: Rethinking International
Relations Theory

Volume 17 Jenny Edkins, Whose Hunger? Concepts of Famine,

Practices of Aid

Volume 16 Jennifer Hyndman, Managing Displacement: Refugees

and the Politics of Humanitarianism

For more books in this series, see page vi.

The Subject of Coexistence:
Otherness in International
Relations

L O UI Z A O DY S S EO S

B O R D E R L I N E S , V O L U M E 28

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis

London
Earlier versions of material published in this book have appeared as the
following: “Dangerous Ontologies: The Ethos of Survival and Ethical
Theorizing in International Relations,” Review of International Studies
28, no. 2 (2002): 403–18; “Radical Phenomenology, Ontology, and Inter-
national Political Theory,” Alternatives 27, no. 3 (July/September 2002):
373–405; and “On the Way to Global Ethics? Cosmopolitanism, ‘Ethical’
Selfhood, and Otherness,” European Journal of Political Theory 2, no. 2
(2003): 183–207; reprinted by permission of Sage Publications, Ltd.

Copyright 2007 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored

in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, elec-
tronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the
prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by the University of Minnesota Press

111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Odysseos, Louiza.
The subject of coexistence : otherness in international relations / Louiza
Odysseos.
p. cm. -- (Borderlines ; vol. 28)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-4854-2 (hc : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-8166-4855-9
(pb : alk. paper)
1. International relations--Philosophy. 2. International relations--
Methodology. I. Title.
JZ1305.O39 2007
327.101--dc22
2007001080

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and

employer.

15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Aris
Volume 15 Sankaran Krishna, Postcolonial Insecurities: India,
Sri Lanka, and the Question of Nationhood

Volume 14 Jutta Weldes, Mark Laffey, Hugh Gusterson,

and Raymond Duvall, editors, Cultures of Insecurity: States,
Communities, and the Production of Danger

Volume 13 François Debrix, Re-Envisioning Peacekeeping:

The United Nations and the Mobilization of Ideology

Volume 12 Jutta Weldes, Constructing National Interests:

The United States and the Cuban Missile Crisis

Volume 11 Nevzat Soguk, States and Strangers: Refugees and

Displacements of Statecraft

Volume 10 Kathy E. Ferguson and Phyllis Turnbull, Oh, Say, Can

You See? The Semiotics of the Military in Hawai‘i

Volume 9 Iver B. Neumann, Uses of the Other: “The East” in

European Identity Formation

Volume 8 Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams, editors, Critical

Security Studies: Concepts and Cases

Volume 7 Costas M. Constantinou, On the Way to Diplomacy

Volume 6 Gearóid Ó Tuathail (Gerard Toal), Critical Geopolitics:

The Politics of Writing Global Space
Volume 5 Roxanne Lynn Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics
of Representation in North–South Relations

Volume 4 Thom Kuehls, Beyond Sovereign Territory: The Space

of Ecopolitics

Volume 3 Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui, Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns,

and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in International Law

Volume 2 Michael J. Shapiro and Hayward R. Alker, editors,

Challenging Boundaries: Global Flows, Territorial Identities

Volume 1 William E. Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization

 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Subjectivity, Coexistence,

and the Question of Heteronomy xi

1. Manifestations of Composition 1

2. Toward a “Hermeneutics of Facticity” 29

3. An Optics of Coexistence: Dasein’s Radical

Embeddedness in Its World 57

4. Becoming-Proper: Authenticity
and Inauthenticity Revisited 95

5. Recovering the “Ethical” Self:

Global Ethics in Question 119

6. Coexistence, Community, and Critical Belonging 153

Conclusion 177

Notes 187

Index 241
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowledgments

A work is always a debt. This book began as a doctoral thesis in

international relations at the London School of Economics and
Political Science (LSE), where a great number of people, staff and
fellow students, provided intellectual stimulus as well as profession-
al and emotional support. Michael Bank’s Concepts and Methods
in International Relations seminar opened up a path for thinking
differently about international politics. His personal encouragement
and willingness to support this kind of philosophical curiosity was
instrumental (although we had plenty of debate as to the meaning
of this particular word) in getting this project started. A different
kind of stimulus was offered at the offices of Millennium: Journal of
International Studies. This was truly where the journey of this book
started, as colleagues such as Hideaki Shinoda, Hakan Seckinelgin,
Paris Yeros, Michi Ebata, Ralph Emmers, and Nelli Kambouri all
“called for thinking.” Hakan Seckinelgin especially deserves the
warmest of thanks for his encouragement and advice, as well as for
always pointing to the need for even deeper questioning.
At the LSE’s numerous research workshops, especially “Post-
modernism in International Relations” and “International Po-
litical Theory,” a great many interlocutors provided welcome cri-
tique and advice: I thank especially Erica Benner, Chris Brown,
Margot Light, Nicola Short, Peter Weinberger, Helen Kambouri,
Pavlos Hatzopoulos, Cathleen Fitzpatrick, and Fabio Petito. At the

ix
x · ack nowledgments

School of Oriental and African Studies the intellectual environment

made the question of otherness a concrete and worldly matter, and
I would like to thank my colleagues Stephen Hopgood, Sudipta
Kaviraj, and Mark Laffey for their encouragement. Moreover, I
would like to thank Fred Dallmayr, Tarak Barkawi, Patrick Thadeus
Jackson, Kimberly Hutchings, Richard Shapcott, Nicholas Rengger,
and David Owen, who discussed parts of the book at conferences
and other settings and helped improve the work and make me aware
of its limits. Most important, however, heartfelt gratitude goes to
Mark Hoffman, who as my doctoral supervisor always made time
in his busy schedule for advice, support, and critical engagement to-
ward my ideas.
Last but not least, I would like to thank Stefan Elbe, whose com-
bination of critique and companionship made this book both pos-
sible and an experience to remember. To my parents, Marios and
Maro Odysseos, I owe everything. But for their unfaltering support,
this book would never have existed. Finally, Aris arrived as the book
was being finalized and made our world a happier one. Therefore, it
is only fitting that it be dedicated to him.

Brighton, December 2006

Introduction: Subjectivity, Coexistence,
and the Question of Heteronomy

T H E I S S U E O F CO E X I S T E N C E A N D I N T E R N AT IO N A L R E L AT IO N S
Coexistence could be said to be paramount for international politics.
Exploring what coexistence might mean and what it might entail,
however, has not been directly addressed by the discipline of inter-
national relations (IR). That is not to say that IR scholars have not
turned their attention to specific and diverse issues of cohabitation
or living in common, but rather to suggest that what is considered to
be coexistence has yet to receive proper questioning. “Coexistence,”
in other words, is not presently regarded as a question for world
politics; it is, instead, a term whose meaning is considered to be self-
evident. Endowed with the literal meaning of copresence, its study
is bounded within a set of assumptions and parameters that serve to
revoke its status as a question, restricting reflection on coexistence
as an aporia of international politics.
The seeming self-evidence of “coexistence,” however, is rendered
unstable by world events, which often unsettle and disrupt the every-
day activities of world-political actors, what one might call, in its
collective form, “international praxis.” States, governments, inter-
national organizations, and other nongovernmental bodies alike are
(whether they are aware of it or not) continuously preoccupied by
specific concerns that arise from the fundamental question of co-
existence. As will be shown in greater detail, international praxis is

xi
xii · introduction

thus constantly required to address coexistence as a question.1 Such

preoccupation centers on issues within state borders, such as civil
war, secession disputes, resource conflicts, civic debate within multi-
ethnic or other diverse communities about issues of cultural diver-
sity, and so on. Additionally, it is an issue at the level of international
interaction for intergovernmental bodies that become increasingly
concerned with the regional or global repercussions of states’ in-
ternal disputes, such as refugee protection, asylum provision, and
economic migration. Especially since 1989, such interaction has fre-
quently resulted in military interventions in the form of assisting
in the cessation of hostilities and violence. These activities are usu-
ally undertaken in the name of certain values often considered to
be humanitarian, whose protection is regarded as imperative to the
current human rights regime. Interventionist measures, moreover,
are intended to promulgate these values in the aftermath of conflict
in the wider cause of international peace and order, although their
critics often consider these a disguise for power politics. Indeed, re-
cent preoccupation with the vertiginous changes brought about by
economic and cultural processes of globalization has made “coexis-
tence” all the more pertinent to policy makers and politicians. New
measures and policies are now regarded to be necessary to facilitate
multicultural coexistence, population movements, and increased
economic and cultural interaction.
It can be claimed, therefore, that while coexistence has hitherto
not been deemed particularly question-worthy for international
thought, it is nonetheless constantly surfacing as a problem for
international praxis. In this regard, international thought has clear-
ly failed to keep pace with international praxis in its consideration
of the meaning of “coexistence.” In the context of this book, co-
existence is therefore taken to be a concept whose aporetic nature is
obscured in international thought, and yet constantly preoccupies
international praxis, but is usually dealt with under other, more
specific, guises. This book illustrates how, in the absence of direct
questioning about coexistence, its more general meaning can only be
discerned from an examination of the ontological premises of inter-
national relations. Among these premises the modern subject stands
out in its ontological centrality2 —IR theory being embedded in the
larger context of modern philosophical and social inquiry. 3
Within this larger theoretical context, the modern subject is gen-
 introduction · xiii

erally understood as a completed self, already fully constituted when

it enters into relations with others, relations that are considered on-
tologically secondary to the subject itself. Its main attributes are
self-sufficiency, nonrelationality, and autonomy; these become in-
strumental in determining coexistence as the presence of multiple
units, in other words, as a composition of otherwise nonrelational
subjects. The book contends that, based on this ground of mod-
ern subjectivity, coexistence can only be articulated through what
might be called the “logic of composition.” When being-with-others
is understood solely as a composition of previously unrelated enti-
ties, the constitutive role of otherness in coexistence, and for self-
hood itself, is obscured. In particular, the other’s participation in
the constitution of the self, what might be called the “heteronomous
constitution of selfhood,” remains concealed. The other is grasped,
instead, as a similar nonrelational subject, its otherness reduced to
what is knowable about the self.4 Unless this heteronomous consti-
tution of selfhood is allowed to show itself, 5 coexistence appears
only as the mere composition of units or entities, as is often as-
sumed in IR, instead of being the prior and constitutive condition
of their being.
Before providing a fuller articulation of the juncture of subjectivi-
ty, coexistence, and heteronomy,6 however, it is important to review
the historical trajectory of IR discourses about coexistence in order
to bring to the fore the reduction of coexistence to the copresence
of entities. As will be shown in the next two sections, this reduction
runs through both cold war and post–cold war debates of world
politics. Despite the common assumption that these two eras of
world politics represent radically different historical configurations,
there is in fact an inherent unanimity in their prevalent determina-
tions of coexistence as copresence or composition. This continuity
suggests that received thinking about coexistence in international
relations implicitly relies on deeper assumptions about subjectivity
that need to be excavated and questioned more thoroughly—which
this book sets out to do.

T H E C O L D WA R , CO E X I S T E N C E , A N D ID EO L O G IC A L C O M P E T I T I O N
In the post-1945 world, various forces practically and conceptually
affected the meaning and study of coexistence. In the years follow-
ing the end of World War II, societal and political concerns revolved
xiv · introduction

primarily around the imminent nuclear confrontation between the

two superpowers. The very presence of nuclear arms meant that con-
flict resounded with the possibility of worldwide destruction. Thus,
the conflictual workings of the state system, without any higher au-
thority to guarantee peace, called for concerned academics, politi-
cians, and international activists alike to bring about “a conception
of coexistence which matches the needs of the nuclear age.”7 “[T]he
emergence of the thermonuclear truce of the cold war”8 meant that
thinking about the notion of coexistence revolved exclusively around
the nexus of survival.
Among politicians in the so-called first and second worlds, the
copresence of divergent political systems became the centerpiece
of a strategy aimed toward the accommodation of the ideological
differences of the superpowers. It was widely regarded that such co-
existence of contradictory, yet totalizing, ideological positions was
required for the very survival both of their incompatible political
systems and of the human species as a whole, considering the nu-
clear context within which the struggle among their competing ide-
ologies took place. Related to the potentially cataclysmic repercus-
sions of nuclear conflict, coexistence also became the sole means of
survival when one reflected on the various paths to development and
modernity available to postcolonial, developing countries that were
inevitably caught up in the international politics of the cold war.
Moreover, coexistence was established as a central concern for
peace movements that attempted to diffuse the nuclear tension by
calling for an end to the superpowers’ ideological struggle. Within
the antinuclear activist movement it was felt that the entanglement
brought about by the nuclear age rested with the politicians’ in-
ability to extract themselves from an old age of strife. “Pride, arro-
gance, fear of loss of face, and ideological intolerance have obscured
their power of judgement,”9 insisted one of its most vocal mem-
bers, British philosopher Bertrand Russell. In his extensive writings
against nuclear armaments, Russell clarified further the association
between survival and coexistence. “Coexistence,” he wrote in the
early 1960s, “must be accepted genuinely and not superficially as a
necessary condition of human survival.”10 That coexistence was the
hoped-for antidote to the possibility of nuclear annihilation served
to affirm and highlight the assumed opposition of coexistence and
conflict. This sanctioned the assumption that coexistence is the con-
 introduction · xv

dition that surpasses conflict; however, this has also led IR to ne-
glect its consideration as the primary condition in which entities
find themselves and to regard it as a state that must be actively, and
secondarily, brought about.
Despite the calls for a notion of coexistence to accommodate
the particularities of the nuclear age, it was a primarily conflictual
configuration of the concept that prevailed in the international po-
litical world. In the 1950s Nikita Khrushchev revived the Leninist
term “peaceful coexistence” both to signal that nuclear confronta-
tion was not only undesirable and unnecessary and also to suggest
that “peaceful coexistence” was a requirement for the progression
of socialism.11 While for many political commentators in the West
military and political coexistence with the USSR was considered
inconceivable, coexistence of the diverging systems was a fact of
international political life. As Y. Frantsev noted, “Socialism and
capitalism exist on the same planet and their coexistence is histori-
cally inevitable.”12 Ironically, V. I. Lenin had argued, it was “general
economic world relations, which compel them [capitalists] to estab-
lish intercourse with us.”13
Khrushchev’s revival of the term “peaceful coexistence” reassert-
ed the political necessity of promoting the copresence of conflicting
ideologies and political systems in order to avoid war with capitalist
states. He agreed in this regard with Lenin’s earlier argument that,
at the interstate level, coexistence between capitalist states and com-
munist countries was possible and the struggle against capitalism
could be carried out on the level of ideas. “Peaceful coexistence”
in the post-1945 world entailed, therefore, the desire to avoid inter-
state warfare in the name of ideological opposition, but revived the
pledge to maintain and encourage confrontation in the realm of ide-
ology in order to bring about the collapse of the capitalist system.14
As Khrushchev himself proposed in an article in Foreign Affairs,
peaceful coexistence intended “to keep the positions of the ideologi-
cal struggle, without resorting to arms in order to prove that one is
right.”15 It could be argued, then, that in the 1960s, “peaceful co-
existence between countries regardless of their social system” came
to form “the bedrock of international affairs.”16
Despite some political opposition, the West prudently embraced
the chance to challenge the Soviet articulation of the concept of
peaceful coexistence in order to reshape it for its own ends. The
xvi · introduction

Commission to Study the Organization of Peace, a member of the

American Association for the United Nations, defined “peaceful co-
existence” as “primarily a state of affairs in which the so -called
sovereign states seek to protect and promote their conflicting na-
tional interests by means other than war, or organized and system-
atic intimidation based upon the threat of war.”17 In its report on
this issue the commission reiterated that peaceful coexistence should
be considered as a compromise because this concept lay “between
war in the literal sense and peace in the ideal sense.”18 As a com-
promise necessitated by the nuclear context, “peaceful coexistence”
accepted that ideological struggle was the means of confrontation
and a mechanism of “diffusion” of the nuclear situation. With its re-
articulation of peaceful coexistence, the association sought to coun-
ter the Soviet hegemony over the term and to reiterate it in ways that
accorded a much greater role to international law in the workings
of international politics, in recognition of the fact that, in a time of
nuclear proliferation, “national security is unobtainable by military
force alone.”19
Peaceful coexistence, therefore, mitigated nuclear war by allow-
ing ideological competition among the superpowers, a contention
that resulted in many a proxy war fought with conventional weap-
ons in the periphery, as well as in the often violent intervention into
the political systems of developing and postcolonial countries. 20 Op-
ponents of peaceful coexistence in other countries, as well as several
social movements, resisted its initial acceptance by emphasizing that
Khrushchev’s proposal for “peaceful coexistence” included the no-
tion of ideological struggle as the site of contestation of the capitalist
world system and, as a result, “coexistence” became a paradoxical
term: “Bitter ideological struggle is central to their idea of coexis-
tence,” denounced Christopher Paget Mayhew, a British politician
in the 1960s. 21 When peaceful coexistence is the condition where
state interaction allows for a sustained ideological struggle, then
one can be said to be “waging peaceful coexistence,” no matter how
counterintuitive or oxymoronic this may seem. 22 This resistance to
the ideologically contentious configuration of coexistence once again
highlights the assumption that coexistence was regarded as a state
that transcends conflict and enables survival.
Furthermore, many in the West noted the danger that such an
ideological competition still entailed: the acceptance, and even en-
 introduction · xvii

couragement, of ideological propaganda on both sides of the world-

political spectrum, argued opponents of peaceful coexistence, could
lead to the reduction of ideological variety and complexity arising
from the multifarious social systems in the international political
world. Intense ideological struggle as the means of engagement be-
tween the two superpowers discouraged worldwide multivocality
and reduced the possibility of multiple interpretations of the world
system. More important, it captured the terms of international dis-
course and limited the alternatives available to political thought at
a time when they were most needed. Such a reduction of variety to
two monolithic ideologies was tantamount to the creation of ideo-
logical myths that were “a prime cause of international tension and
a major barrier to disarmament and peace.”23
Among those who attempted to think outside the parameters of
peaceful coexistence, a different type of concern as to the future of
peace arose precisely from the presence of too many voices. In 1957,
Sir Kenneth Grubb equated coexistence with the existing inter-
national system of sovereign states and their political interactions.
Understood in this way, coexistence meant taking “for granted an
unlimited compatibility of national aspirations”24 whose acknowl-
edgment did not, however, provide the requisite conditions or guide-
lines for the prevention of nuclear conflict. The fact of coexistence
alone, in other words, did not suggest how one may coexist. Taken
literally, coexistence is nothing more than copresence. As Grubb
noted, “Presumably coexistence simply means side by side: it does
not require that we live together in any meaningful way; it merely re-
cords that we live in the same limited space, the inhabited world,”25
astutely observing the spatial determination of coexistence, where it
is understood as copresence or the composition of units. In this way,
international thought and praxis about coexistence in the post-1945
era reduced the term to a primary concern with the organization of a
multitude of units, and the sustenance of the international state sys-
tem and its principle of state-centricity, whose survival was far from
assured in the nuclear context. Grubb called for a more meaningful
and instructive definition of what kinds of interaction coexistence
might entail, and highlighted the need to move beyond “mere co-
existence . . . into a closer partnership or community” among states
and peoples. 26 Coexistence, understood as the cohabitation of sov-
ereign states, harbored “a terrible lie,” suggested Grubb. This was,
xviii · introduction

of course, the norm of state sovereignty, which accorded the state

absolute control within its territorial boundaries. Such sovereign co-
habitation “almost seems to sanctify evil and condone the effects
of tyranny,”27 he noted, advancing an opposition to the kinds of
actions that were subsumed under the heading of coexistence, such
as war, violent incitement to struggle, proxy wars in the periphery,
and, finally, sustained ideological propaganda.
During the cold war era an understanding of peaceful coexistence
evolved to accommodate the nuclear threat. While there was a gener-
al acceptance of the progress that the concept of peaceful coexistence
brought to cold war political life, theoretically it sustained the con-
ceptual opposition between coexistence and conflict and led to the
ossification of the meaning of coexistence as the tentative and dan-
gerous copresence of ideologically incompatible units. Coexistence,
then, came to connote an ephemeral state, as it contained within
it the acceptance that conflict was inevitable, albeit momentarily
restricting it to the realm of ideology. The mitigation of nuclear war
in this way entailed the toleration of intense ideological struggle and
transposed actual conflict to the periphery, where proxy wars were
fought throughout the post–World War II years. This brief exposi-
tion suggests that international relations literature and institutional
or political practice were largely preoccupied and sought to address
the continued danger brought about by the production and deploy-
ment of nuclear arms on the one hand, and the perceived ideologi-
cal incompatibility of capitalism and really existing communism on
the other.

CO E X I S T E N C E I N CO N T E M P O R A R Y I N T E R N AT IO N A L R E L AT IO N S
Since the collapse of communism, the parameters of thought that
had guided international coexistence between opposing ideologi-
cal camps during the post-1945 era have undergone major changes.
Contrary to the political preoccupation with the possibility of nu-
clear annihilation during the cold war, since 1989 concerns with po-
tentially precipitous ideological competition have largely dissipated,
leaving concerns about issues of coexistence to evolve along three
main trajectories.
In the context of the first path, a certain unease and source of
concern was visible, arising from the perception that
 introduction · xix

the West [was left] without markers to identify potential threats to

its way of life or reasons to be prepared. With the collapse of com-
munist regimes in Eastern Europe, followed by the dissolution of
the Soviet Union itself, the global ideological confrontation that had
served so well to identify friend and foe vanished. 28

Cold war thinking about ideological struggle, as a result, trans-

formed its content by discursively shifting away from superpower
conflict toward “civilizational tension or struggle.” The most widely
known example of this strand of thinking is Samuel Huntington’s
“clash of civilizations,”29 although his theorization of the post-
1989 international political scene has come under severe criticism,
not only from critical theorists but also from more mainstream
authors. 30 Embedded within an alarmist ontology of decline, IR
thinking about civilizations sought to replace the formulaic role of
cold war ideological and military oppositions with mapped cultural
differences. 31 As Marc Lynch argues in this vein, “Huntington’s
‘clash of civilisations’ initially defined the terms of debate within a
realist conceptual universe which simply replaced ‘states’ with ‘ci-
vilisations.’”32 As such, it remains wedded to an understanding of
civilization, not as diverse and polymorphic, but as unitary. 33
The second trajectory reveals that the discipline of international
relations has been increasingly called on to theorize coexistence,
not among sovereign states where its traditional expertise lies, but
rather of substate groups and individuals. The emerging concern
with the coexistence of people as an issue that requires attention
in IR is evident when one considers the rise in civil wars, ethnic
conflicts, and other such internal matters that have preoccupied the
international community in the post-1989 world. 34 Similarly, there
is an increased scholarly focus toward individual or group conflict
at a more localized level, usually in the form of specific case stud-
ies. The concerns of conflict resolution scholarship evolve around
peacemaking and, in terms of peace maintenance and postconflict
reconstruction, include peacekeeping and peacebuilding. This strand
of thinking about coexistence inevitably responds to the consider-
ations of the international community about localized conflicts, ei-
ther couched in humanitarian language or considered with regard to
their international repercussions, or both.
xx · introduction

As Eva Bertram argues, a certain extension of the scope of multi-

lateral (usually United Nations) peace operations can be noted since
1990, when there occurred a move from the prevention of hostilities
to the active building of “the political conditions for a sustainable
peace,”35 a task that amounts to “remak[ing] a state’s political in-
stitutions, security forces, and economic arrangements,” in short,
nation-building. 36 Such on-the-ground widening in the scope of op-
erations within international praxis, as has occurred since 1989, has
thus far not been accompanied by a deepening of scholarly focus or
punctuated with reflection about the more general, yet foundational,
terms that bound that scope. Deepening of that sense would serve to
better clarify what it is that these operations are trying to achieve,
namely, coexistence, and would, moreover, enable the consideration
of this concept beyond specific issues of technical management of
transitions and cessation of hostilities.
It must be noted that the confrontational politics of the cold war,
compounded as it was by its location in a nuclear context, afforded
the tragic opportunity of reflecting on the meaning of coexistence
as such despite the fixing of dichotomies between coexistence and
conflict that that location had imposed on thinking. The post-1989
focus on peacemaking, peacekeeping, and peacebuilding has thus far
restricted itself largely to the technical issues of conflict prevention
or management within the generalized context of the “upkeeping” of
the world system. Despite its difference from the civilizational path
of post–cold war thinking, it, too, has the tendency to consider co-
existence in the post–cold war context as copresence in a new political
geography. It can be argued, therefore, that “a new political geography
of the world” has begun to dominate political understanding, where
new kinds of wars are associated with “violence-prone areas,” which
necessarily require the mobilization of world-political resources for
the management of international peace and security. 37
These reflective restrictions and self-imposed limitations of schol-
arly scope and debate, however, are understood by the discipline of
international relations not as limitations but, on the contrary, as
prudent responses to what is now perceived to be the mere main-
tenance of the international system. 38 This level of comfort only
makes sense if located within the “end of history” so optimistically
heralded by Francis Fukuyama, 39 which leaves but one historical al-
ternative: liberalism. Roland Paris has argued that the guiding para-
 introduction · xxi

digm of post-1989 peace operations is liberal internationalism with

its premises of free-market-oriented economy and liberal democratic
polity, which he collectively unites in the phrase “market democ-
racy.”40 Fukuyama’s proposition about the end of history, and the
prevalence of liberalism more generally, illustrates the acceptance
of the modern subject at the center of the political ontology of IR,
despite widely held pessimism in philosophical and social scientific
circles about the assumptions of modern subjectivity.41 Furthermore,
the widespread orientation toward technicity occludes the status of
coexistence as a question; it presents research as multiple and var-
ied, whereas, upon closer examination, such apparent multiplicity
takes place within the bounds of a greater unanimity about the sub-
ject of coexistence. Moreover, there are no attempts to think about
the meaning of coexistence and its conditions of possibility, nor are
there any discernible attempts to explore the possibility of grasping
coexistence as anything other than composition or copresence of
already constituted units.
The third and final contemporary strand of thinking about co-
existence comprises international attempts to encourage the “ex-
tension of moral inclusion in world politics.”42 It is suggested that
in international society, just as within the structures of national
societies, inclusion “depends crucially on finding ways of bringing
disadvantaged groups, women or men into the political process.”43
This mandate of greater inclusion has arisen more recently from the
destabilizing effects brought about by the globalization of world
politics and the intensification of social relations across a number
of spheres of interaction. There are two broad discourses aiming
at greater moral inclusion. The first and more influential discourse
wishes to achieve “higher levels of universality” by extending the
international human rights regime.44 Cosmopolitan thinkers such as
Ulrich Beck and Jürgen Habermas read “globalization” as a move-
ment away from the Westphalian “international society of states”
that underpinned human rights (in the sense that human rights were
instruments of positive law, grounded in state constitutional arrange-
ments, and safeguarded as such) and toward a “world society of in-
dividuals” in which human rights are prior to and serve to legitimate
states. In other words, this is a movement away from international
law (where states are prior) toward cosmopolitan law (where rights-
bearing subjects are prior), which expands, these authors suggest,
xxii · introduction

ethical regardedness toward the other and aims to provide protec-

tion through legal entitlements applicable internationally.45
The second discourse is related to the first in that it suggests
that something akin to a post-Westphalian era is now approaching,
which, in turn, might signal a more inclusive approach to the state
and community.46 This discourse provides an analysis of the im-
pact of processes of globalization on territorially sovereign nation-
states, as well as their evaluation of the possibilities arising from
novel political arrangements for the future of community, such as
the European Union. Constituting the community with the inclu-
sion of the other in mind is the bedrock of this new approach to
international relations, as seen in Andrew Linklater’s recent work.
Linklater’s monograph The Transformation of Political Commu-
nity sets out to move beyond the statist Westphalian “blind alley”47
in order to make the notion of community less exclusionary. For
Linklater, the drive for greater inclusion works both by reconstruct-
ing “the modern state and the international state system to permit
the development of higher levels of universality” and by “transform-
ing exclusionary political communities so that higher levels of re-
spect for cultural difference can evolve.”48 This transition toward a
post-Westphalian international environment entails the reworking
of states and communities where “universalistic loyalties have to be
reconciled with strong emotional ties to specific communities.”49
Linklater calls for a cultivation of a universality that encompasses
sensitivity and respect toward otherness, despite the traditional op-
position between the two. In this regard Linklater joins Beck and
Habermas as “proponents of a liberalism hospitable to particulari-
ties” and similarly exhibits a concern with otherness that aims to
bestow upon it “equality in the sense of legal egalitarianism.”50
Both manifestations of this third trajectory—the extension of
human rights and the transformation of community—question cur-
rent modes of exclusion of the other, a task that appears to cohere
with this book’s interest in why and how coexistence understood as
copresence occludes the role of otherness. Their inquiry into other-
ness, however, is limited both as to how community might be ex-
panded, as if greater inclusivity in terms of numbers alone might be
the decisive issue, or how others might be included and protected
through the bestowal of human rights instruments. These attempts,
moreover, do not engage with the even more fundamental and prior
 introduction · xxiii

issue —central to this book—as to how one could allow existence to

show itself as other-determined, that is, as being heteronomous and
coexistential from the start. As Werner Hamacher writes in response
to the debate on inclusion, thinking about politics and coexistence
must seek to go beyond addition, beyond mere counting. 51 This re-
quires not only an other-sensitive universality, as Linklater seems to
suggest, but also the calling into question of the edifice or institution
of the modern subject on which such liberal cosmopolitan accounts
rest. 52 As Diana Coole argues, “where the prevailing liberalism is
grounded in a philosophy of the subject,” as the majority of these
perspectives are, “the radical challenge is to rethink the political”
and coexistence in a more fundamental way, a challenge that
must entail something more fundamental than placing rational in-
dividuals within a communicative situation: what is needed is an
ontology of this interworld, in order to grasp the way rational forms
are engendered within the thick, adverse space between subjects.
The analysis of politics no longer begins with the juridico-theoretical
model (as Foucault will call it), with the state at its zenith and juridi-
cal subjects beneath, but with struggles for coexistence. 53

The reliance of the majority of these literatures on predominant

variants of the modern subject thus suggests that such attempts for
greater inclusion are limited in their ability to rethink coexistence,
unwittingly reducing its consideration to composition. This reduction
is what I will refer to throughout as “the logic of composition”54 —a
logic that will receive a fuller articulation later, where it will also be
shown how its reliance on prevalent assumptions about the modern
subject renders it inadequate for thinking about coexistence in inter-
national relations.

I N T E R N AT IO N A L O N T O L O G IC A L CO M M I T M E N T S
A N D T H E L O G IC O F CO M P O S I T IO N
Reflecting on the status of coexistence in international relations
brings into view a paradoxical situation. While the issue of co-
existence ought to be paramount for world-political understanding,
its meaning is taken as self-evident; in other words, coexistence is
not addressed as a question. Since coexistence is not regarded as an
aporia, there is no scholarly debate about what it is, how difficult
it might be to define and grasp, or, moreover, what other related
xxiv · introduction

theoretical issues about ethics and community, for example, it might

both reveal and conceal. According to the prominent stories that IR
tells about an anarchical society or system of sovereign nation-states
and, more recently, stories about individuals or substate groups, the
term “coexistence” is implicitly understood as a condition of enti-
ties coming together to cohabit a particular geographical, social,
and political space, as well as requiring the explicit act of staying
together. The definition of coexistence as a state of staying together,
therefore, presumes that it is a secondary condition: it is a state of
being that must be yielded from some prior purposive action. In
this sense, coexistence is “postontological” for IR, a term denot-
ing a condition not investigated at the level of the existential struc-
tures of these entities, but rather one that rests on other ontological
assumptions.
What are those assumptions, and can they be traced to a single
basis or guiding principle? Despite the substantially differentiated
contexts within which attempts to think about coexistence have
arisen, it can be argued that, in modernity, their grounding has been
centered on the individual subject, the historical development of
which is examined in greater detail in chapter 1. IR theory presents
the state as subject in much the same way as social theory takes the
self or individual as subject, in the sense of a unitary observable and
purposive agent. 55 Where IR turns to issues of individuals, as in re-
cent preoccupations with human rights, expanding the community,
or postconflict transitions, it joins other related social sciences in its
grounding on the modern subject. 56
Stephen K. White usefully describes this modern subject as an
“assertive, disengaged self who generates distance from its back-
ground (tradition, embodiment) and foreground (external nature,
other subjects) in the name of accelerating mastery of them. This
teflon [that is, nonstick] subject has the leading role in the modern
stage.”57 David Carr, similarly, notes that the modern subject has
invoked mastery over others and self-control “centered in such no-
tions as the cogito, the ‘I think,’ consciousness, self-consciousness,
self-transparency, self-determination.”58 Chapter 1 will outline these
characteristics of modern subjectivity in much greater detail, but
suffice it to say at present that the two main features of modern
subjectivity are its nonrelationality and self-control, features that
are often discussed as the values of autonomy and sovereignty. Non-
 introduction · xxv

relationality, in this context, does not suggest that the modern sub-
ject does not engage in relations with others, which of course it does,
but rather that these relations are not considered constitutive of the
subject; they tend to be viewed as nonconstitutive for selfhood.
In the past, discussions of the modern subject were customarily
conducted not in such critical terms, but rather more neutrally and
without explicit exploration as to how its main features affect the
subject’s relationality toward others. In fact, until recently the mod-
ern subject remained largely underthematized in the social sciences,
a historical outcome that ought to be taken as “at least a measure
of modernity’s self-confidence.”59 Perhaps it is a rising insecurity
about the modern subject, a dissipation of the once prevalent mod-
ernist confidence about its foundational capacities, that has led to
recent attempts to evaluate assumptions about human existence, to
gain access to the kind of entity “which we ourselves are,”60 part of
a type of inquiry called “ontology.” Scholars in philosophy, along
with social and political theorists, have recently expended consider-
able energy criticizing the hold that modern subjectivity has over
inquiry in the modern era and have called for different thinking
about “ourselves, and being in general.”61 Such unconventional and
challenging thinking is essential because ontology grounds political
narratives about political order (and coexistence).62 This can be seen
explicitly in international relations where coexistence is determined,
on the basis of the self-sufficient and nonrelational subject, as mere
copresence. While there has been a reluctance to engage in ontologi-
cal examination, due in part to the largely epistemological focus of
the third debate, ontology remains essential for reevaluating what
“the international world is made of”63 and for determining “what
actors there are, how they relate to one another, and what methods
are appropriate for the type of research we want to do.”64
This book endorses the call for an examination of the ontological
premises of IR, but understands this to require a more fundamental
reconsideration of the subjectivist ground of international relations
as a modern social science.65 It argues that this traditional ground
of modern subjectivity has severely constrained the ability of the
discipline to think through the question of coexistence in two key
respects. First, it becomes apparent that on the basis of this mod-
ern subjectivity coexistence can only be thought of and articulated
through a “logic of composition.”66 This logic ultimately leads to
xxvi · introduction

a phenomenologically unsatisfactory reduction of coexistence to

mere copresence. Second, the resulting mutual reinforcement of the
subject and practices of composition further ends up obscuring the
constitutive role of otherness in the formation of subjectivity, lead-
ing to what one might call at this stage a disconcerting effacement
of heteronomy. These two limitations are explored in the next two
sections.

The Moder n Subjec t and the Log ic of Composit ion

When inquiry is grounded in modern subjectivity, theoretical ar-
ticulations of coexistence become limited to composition. Put dif-
ferently, the ground of modern subjectivity ultimately restricts the
possibility of understanding coexistence as anything but a collection
of already constituted or preformed individuals. It is therefore also
the implicit commitment to the modern subject that continues to
determine, indeed limit, what being-together or coexistence might
mean for international political thought, and this necessitates closer
examination. Nancy, for example, observes how the construction of
the modern subject, the individual, is widely heralded as “Europe’s
incontrovertible merit of having shown the world the sole path to
emancipation from tyranny, and the norm by which to measure
all our collective or communitarian undertakings.”67 Yet, he asks,
how can this construct be considered a triumph, an achievement of
European thought, when it is at the center of the dissolution of co-
existence, more generally, and of community, more specifically? “By
its nature —as the name indicates, it is the atom, the indivisible —the
individual reveals that it is the abstract result of a decomposition. It
is another, and symmetrical, figure of immanence: the absolutely de-
tached for-itself, taken as origin and as certainty.”68 Within the meta-
physics of the detached and atomistic modern subject, coexistence
can only be grasped as composition of already formed subjects.69
Put differently, subscribing to the “logic of composition” means that
the predicate “together . . . is in fact only a qualification extrinsic to
subjects, not belonging to the appearing of each as such, designat-
ing a pure and indifferent juxta-position; or, on the other hand, it
adds a particular quality, endowed with a literal sense, which must
realise itself for all subjects ‘together’ and as an ‘ensemble.’”70 The
understanding of coexistence as extrinsic to the subject illustrates
 introduction · xxvii

the power of the ontological commitment to determine coexistence

as little more than a situation of subjects being simultaneously pres-
ent, its reduction to copresence.
Based on modern subjectivity, with its key features of self-sufficiency
and mastery prescribing a relation of mere copresence, the logic of
composition suggests that units or entities are nonrelational in their
constitution until “composed.” This determination of coexistence,
however, does not arise from the phenomena, the facticity of en-
tities; rather, it is based on an interpretative preconception, what
Martin Heidegger calls “a fore-having,”71 brought to considerations
of coexistence and affecting its articulation: this presupposition is
the nonrelational subject, whose ontological attributes render co-
existence as a secondary and fragile condition, as an act of compos-
ing previously unrelated and preformed subjects. The decisive effect
of the logic of composition is thus the restriction of relationality to
mere copresence of preconstituted entities.
One might object, asking whether the logic of composition can
be reduced to its reliance on the human subject in international rela-
tions. What about the system of states that provides the parameters
for the discipline of world politics? Surely, one might argue, the sys-
tem of states defies this logic by concentrating on the state as the
type of unit involved in coexistence. However, the logic of composi-
tion involves the understanding of collectivity according to the prin-
ciple of the subject. It not only assumes that collectivities are made
up of multiple individual subjects but also that as collectivities they
behave as subjects, which works by a reduction of the “we” to an
“I.” In other words, just as individuals within the state are thought
to coexist on the basis of preformed subjectivities, so too does much
of international relations theory assume the state to embody a uni-
tary, nonrelational subjectivity.
This logic of composition is not merely an aberration of the phi-
losophy of some thinkers, of liberalism, and so on, easily exorcized or
denounced. Rather, it becomes the sole means of grasping together-
ness once the metaphysics of the subject has become prominent. On
the basis of assumptions about modern subjectivity, coexistence be-
comes a technical problem instead of an irreducible aporia. The ten-
sion between “self” and “society,” the “I” and the “we,” arises only
with the arrival of the modern subject as the ground of inquiry:
xxviii · introduction

Only because insofar as man actually and essentially has become

subject is it necessary for him, as a consequence, to confront the
explicit question: Is it as an “I” confined to its own preferences and
freed into its own arbitrary choosing or as the “we” of society; is it
as an individual or as a community; is it as a personality within the
community or as a mere group member in the corporate body; is it
as a state and nation and as a people or as the common humanity of
modern man, that man will and ought to be the subject that in his
modern essence he already is?72

In other words, the question of self and collectivity cannot be asked

from any other position; it is a comprehensible concern only from
the perspective of subjectivism.
Since the question of being-in-common becomes settled through
the logic of composition, the question of the status of coexistence
is never properly raised: “An inconsequential atomism, individual-
ism tends to forget that the atom is also a world.”73 The atom, the
indivisible unit that the modern human subject is assumed to be, is
a world, that is, it is enclosed within itself in its certainty and mas-
tery. Its relations are relations of grasping, of presenting that which
is (beings) to itself as its object. Thus, thinking about coexistence
falls within a larger “metaphysics of the subject,” understood as
part of, or equal to, “the metaphysics of the absolute for-itself—be
it in the form of the individual or the total state —which means also
the metaphysics of the absolute in general, of being-ab -solute, as
perfectly detached, distinct, and closed: being without relation.”74
“Being without relation” does not mean that there are no actual
relations of the subject to that which is (world and other beings).
Rather, it suggests that the subject, having established itself as com-
plete and absolute, can only strive to preside over its relations: it is
unencumbered; it is solitary; it is unaffected in its self-constitution
by the objects of its representation and reflection.
Within this metaphysics of subjectivity the question of coexistence
can only be asked as that of composition, of a technical arrangement
of units, its success always fragile, its descent to conflict never surpris-
ing, always expected. Expectation of incompatibility and surprise at
any achievement of coexistence betrays that the logic of composition
determines it as an afterthought, as a secondary condition. This also
helps to clarify why in IR coexistence is primarily considered as the
 introduction · xxix

tentative state that might always slip back into conflict: it is because
the “with” is seen as that which must be constructed from the start-
ing point of subjectivism that it becomes a precarious achievement.
There is, in other words, a subterranean theoretical linkage between
coexistence and conflict that is sustained even by the people who
wish to imbue coexistence with a different meaning and those who
wish to emphasize that coexistence is a matter crucial to human
survival. Coexistence appears as a technical issue of how to arrange
units in a certain manner to bring about this condition of together-
ness crucial to “survival.”
I argue, therefore, that if coexistence is to be theorized otherwise
in IR, the disciplinary reliance on the premises of modern subjectivi-
ty must first be questioned. The current juncture of uncertainty at-
tributed to globalization, to the retreat of the state, to emergence
of concerns ungraspable within IR’s traditional parameters, might
present an opportunity for sustained ontological examination to
“unwork modern subjectivity”75 by, first, problematizing the onto-
logical commitment to the subject and, second, suggesting a recov-
ery of selfhood that, first and foremost, coexists. But why should
problematization of the reliance on the modern subject be consid-
ered so vital a task for IR? I suggest that the uncritical acceptance of
the modern conception of subjectivity severely limits IR’s ability to
thoroughly address the question of coexistence and that this leads
to more than theoretical neglect: the logic of composition, more im-
portantly, fails to recognize the priority of coexistence and the fun-
damental role that otherness plays in the constitution of selfhood,
a role that one might call “heteronomy.” As the next section illus-
trates, the logic of composition remains blind to the self’s heterono-
mous constitution; it effaces heteronomy because its assumptions
about the modern subject make it impossible to recognize that the
self, as Heidegger argued, is always already thrown into a world of
otherness.

The Ef facement of Heteronomy

Understanding human existence under the sign of modern subjectivi-
ty not only leads to a reduction of coexistence to copresence, it also
obscures the constitutive role of the other in the formation of the self.
Modern subjectivity produces a set of assumptions about the entity
xxx · introduction

“we all are, in each case” and assumptions about the other, based on
“a mindset of valuation, disposal, management, and objectification
in our care for our lives, a mindset whose overpowering force hems
us in throughout our everyday world, confuses freedom with the
condition of possibility for certain types of subjectivity, and gives
priority to correctness and measurement in matters of truth.”76 It
is through the production of certain assumptions about ourselves,
Charles Scott argues, that “we make ourselves present to each other
by reference to values that commonly identify us and have proven
trustworthy for our survival and well-being.”77 Yet the values that
are customarily considered as trustworthy guides for life are located
within “a history of thought and practice in which engagement in
the disclosure of beings is thoroughly overlooked and excluded from
thought.”78 The ontology of modern subjectivity does not allow en-
tities and beings to show themselves as they are; by assuming that
they exist, this ontology neglects to ask about their “facticity,” that
is, how they are in the world with others. In this way, “[t]he dis-
closiveness of beings is thus distorted into their presence and their
quality of will regarding other beings.”79 Therefore, to be is to be
present, and to coexist is to be copresent. When self-sufficient sub-
jectivity is the ground on which the question of “with” is thought,
coexistence becomes an act of bringing together subjects and man-
aging their copresence.
The attempt to shed light on heteronomy is thus of the utmost im-
portance to the critical enterprise within social science because it re-
fuses the effacement by modern subjectivity of its own constitution
by otherness; moreover, it allows otherness and selfhood to be dis-
closed outside of a subjectivist grasping. Rethinking the relationship
between selfhood and otherness, Thomas Trezise suggests, does not
merely seek to “reverse an oppositional dissymmetry while leaving
the opposition and its terms intact”; rather, the consideration of het-
eronomy “seeks to articulate a relation other than that of opposition
itself, a relation of differential intrication in which the involvement
of terms with each other constitutes their only identity or quidity.”80
The first step toward the grasping of heteronomy and the enabling
of coexistence beyond composition must begin with a challenge to
the assumptions of nonrelationality and self-sufficiency, usually
bound up in the notion of autonomy. Autonomy has to do with free-
dom and “absolute autoactivity, a spontaneity and a power of man
 introduction · xxxi

to determine himself on his own.”81 But why, asks Paul Standish,

“should we have anything to say against autonomy, why feel any
reservations about this sort of ideal,” intricately related as this is “in
a fundamental way with many aspects of our freedom and with the
related notion of our individuality.”82 Yet, what I seek to challenge
is precisely the fallout from this kind of autonomy as an attribute.
As Ute Guzzoni notes, autonomy has, in many a configuration of
the modern subject, been related to mastery over otherness: “The
subject is posited as autonomously determining in relation to an
object which is determined by it; its autonomy is revealed in a rela-
tion of domination over everything which is not itself.”83 Raising the
question of heteronomy, however, shows that the mandate of other-
ness refers not only to really-existing others, it also shows an equal
interest in the suppression of the otherness or strangeness of human
existence, which autonomy similarly effaces.
Prior to further exploration of the ontological basis of coexistence,
“heteronomy” as a term should defy a fixed definition, because any
definition, which might be given presently, has to come from within a
subjectivist ground. Yet, awareness of the futility of accessing heter-
onomy within the language of the subject does not obviate the need
for something like a working definition of the term. The term “het-
eronomy” ought to be taken at this stage as nothing but a formal
indication, in the sense that it indicates a potential meaning without
strict determination, leaving open the definition of heteronomy to be
illuminated through the discussion (see chapter 2). Thus, the term
“heteronomy” should be considered as a placeholder (Heidegger
would say “formal indicator”)84 for a phenomenon still obscured by
subjectivist thinking, still to be properly discussed.
The usage of “heteronomy,” therefore, warns of a phenomenal
awareness of something like heteronomy, but its determination
(which may very well require a reformulation in the assumptions of
formally indicated “heteronomy”) will be gradual. In some sense,
“heteronomy” means “constitutive otherness,” but also entails with-
in it another meaning, that of being-other-directed.85 Furthermore,
and this is the meaning that challenges the predominant feature of
nonrelational subjectivity, “heteronomy” could be seen to indicate
being-radically-in-relation. Yet another possible sense of the term
arises when one asks what it is that compels thinking toward the
questioning of modern subjectivity. How is an aporia created in
xxxii · introduction

something as complete and self-actualizing as the constellation of

modern subjectivity? As Foucault noted, the achievement of sub-
jectivity is a continuous process, a “ceaseless task” within which is
contained the possibility of the failure of totalization and closure.86
To think of this failure is to think of the space in which subjectivity
(putting this term under erasure) can be rethought. “The subject
is thus indeed already, between the lines (and thanks to a retro-
spective reading), what threatens. . . . But why is the subject threat-
ening? And what is it, in the subject, that threatens?”87 What is
it “which, in the subject, deserts (has always already deserted) the
subject itself” and leads to “the dissolution, the defeat of the subject
or as the subject: the (de)construction of the subject or the ‘loss’ of
the subject—if indeed one can think the loss of what one has never
had, a kind of ‘originary’ and ‘constitutive’ loss (of ‘self’)”?88 It will
be argued that not only something in the subject threatens its own
construction, but that in its making itself secure it fails to adequately
efface its own heteronomous constitution. Heteronomy, then, is the
remainder that subjectivity could not erase.
Finally, heteronomy also denies the premise of individuality under-
stood as self-constitution, but highlights instead the fact of singularity
because “behind the theme of the individual, but beyond it, lurks the
question of singularity.”89 As Nancy argues, “[S]ingularity never
has the nature of individuality. Singularity never takes place at the
level of atoms, those identifiable, if not identical identities”; rather,
singularity has to do with the inclination or disposition to other-
ness.90 It will be argued in the course of the book that it is only when
selfhood is grasped beyond the subject that coexistence itself will be
thought beyond addition or composition and the phenomenological
inadequacy of the self-understanding of self as subject will be re-
vealed, making possible a different disclosure of the self as a coexis-
tentially heteronomous being. In either case, it means there are three
concerns about otherness motivating the discussions of the book.
The first is how the logic of composition reduces the phenomena of
coexistence to copresence of already constituted subjects; the second
is how the other’s role in the constitution of the self, its heteronomy,
is concealed by this logic and how this might be reversed; and the
third relates to how the self’s otherness, how it is other to itself, is
obscured when it is grasped as subject.
 introduction · xxxiii

THE S TRUC T URE OF THE BOOK

The introduction and the first chapter are illustrative of manifes-
tations of composition in the grounding tradition of international
political thought.91 They provide a brief historical trajectory of the
modern subject and examine the interplay of subjectivity, otherness,
and coexistence in Thomas Hobbes’s account of the social contract
arising in the state of nature, which is one of the most lasting and
powerful manifestations of the logic of composition, especially for
international relations. The discussion of Hobbes’s contractarian-
ism remains a brief illustration of the logic of composition, how-
ever, because the book seeks to investigate the possibility of another
ontological account that allows the articulations of coexistence as
a question and gestures toward a possibility of theorizing it other-
wise than composition. The conditions of possibility for an alter-
native framing of coexistence lie in the initiation of a process of
“unworking modern subjectivity,” which is the focus of chapters 2
through 4. For this purpose, an ontological examination of the
being normally conceived as subject is called for in order to let its
heteronomous facticity, how it is, be seen. This process, however,
must have as its starting point the search for a method through
which to access and express the facticity of entities. This is found in
the early thought of German philosopher Martin Heidegger and his
rearticulation of interpretative phenomenology, which is examined
in chapter 2.
The turn to Heidegger for the purpose of unworking modern
subjectivity is familiar to readers of philosophy and political theory.
However, the claim that this unworking is undertaken in order to
prevent the effacement of heteronomy by the logic of composition
may be rather more surprising. The primary reason for this is that
Continental philosophy and to some extent international relations
have become suspicious of Heidegger’s thought, following Emmanuel
Levinas’s critique that his thought is emblematic of the broader West-
ern tradition’s blindness to the other.92 Furthermore, Levinas’s con-
cern was that phenomenology, the tradition within which he himself
worked, is a philosophy of power and violence; his work has, there-
fore, engendered a certain cautiousness toward, and one might say a
certain neglect of, Heidegger’s thought when it comes to the thought
of otherness. Chapter 2 thus describes the phenomenological method
xxxiv · introduction

alongside Levinas’s objections —objections that are invaluable be-

cause they have sensitized us to the question of the other within
Heidegger’s thought. The turn to Heidegger, therefore, is advocated
precisely in light of Levinas’s critique. Put differently, Levinas’s chal-
lenge that phenomenology and ontology are philosophies of violence
leads us to return to Heidegger to show precisely that within the on-
tological and hermeneutic turn that Heidegger gives to phenomenolo-
gy in Being and Time there can be found an account of the self (in
Heidegger’s term “Dasein”) as an other-constituted and coexistential
being, a being determined through and through by otherness.
Chapter 3, then, undertakes the phenomenological examination
of Dasein 93 largely contained within Heidegger’s seminal work Being
and Time. Responding to Levinas, the chapter argues that an “op-
tics of coexistence” can be found within Heidegger’s phenomenolo-
gy of everyday existence, comprising a host of elements that unwork
the presuppositions of the subjectivist ontology of IR and illustrate
the primary role of otherness. Through these elements, coexistence
is shown phenomenally to be the primary fact of Dasein’s existence.
Theoretically, such an account of primary sociality renders unstable
the terms of subjectivist discourse through which coexistence is con-
ceptualized. Such an optics puts forward a heterology or a discourse
where the other is primary, but also an other discourse, one that
attempts to defy the dominance of subjectivity and that shows that
selfhood is coexistentially heteronomous.94 Heidegger’s “optics of
coexistence” and his “calls for the overcoming of subjectivity as the
constitutive feature of man”95 engage in a process of “unworking of
subjectivity,” which lets heteronomy show itself. Following this dis-
cussion, chapter 4 continues this task by discussing how the self be-
comes aware of its own heteronomy through a process of becoming-
proper for the kind of being that it is. The discussion, moreover,
examines various prominent concerns about Heidegger’s account of
the self in order to better illuminate the contribution made by such
a coexistential reading of Heidegger’s analysis to a thought of co-
existence beyond copresence.
The task of the book does not stop here, however. It must be
noted that the account given by Heidegger in Being and Time
amounts to an existential heteronomy, which calls into question the
determination of coexistence as composition. The unworking that
chapter 3 undertakes does not seek to replace the subject with an-
 introduction · xxxv

other account of ontological certainty. On the contrary, it problema-

tizes subjectivist assumptions and aims at creating the possibility for
thinking of coexistence beyond composition, a task taken in paral-
lel in chapters 5 and 6. Chapter 5 examines recent cosmopolitan at-
tempts to protect others and conceive of coexistence by extending the
international human rights regime. It illustrates how the optics of
coexistence aids in the recovery of an ethical self that understands
itself as an opening to otherness and that, paradoxically, calls the
reliance on legal instruments and ethical construction into question.
Universal ethical construction based on rights is challenged through
the cultivation of silence and hearing that allow the voice of the
other, which Dasein carries within it, to be heard. This brings the
discussion back to Levinas’s incitement to recover from the analy-
sis of Dasein a selfhood that understands itself as an opening to
otherness.
Chapter 6 brings this recovery of the ethical self to bear on the po-
litical realm by examining how community and coexistence might be
conceptualized beyond the logic of composition. Yet, any discussion
of political coexistence deriving from the thought of Heidegger also
faces an additional difficulty: is not the thought of Heidegger marred
by his own political involvement with the National Socialists in the
1930s? I discuss the impact of the debate on Heidegger’s politics on
the attempt to reconceptualize coexistence and point to Heidegger’s
problematic discussion of community as containing critical possibili-
ties within it. Using the recent work of Peg Birmingham, I explore
the constitution of community as occurring through a process of
critical mimesis and leading to a mode of identification that might
be called critical belonging, which hopes to avoid both the reduc-
tion of coexistence to copresence according to the logic of composi-
tion and also the determination of it according to an essence, which
would be equally blind to otherness.
Finally, the conclusion brings together the trajectories of the
book, highlighting the contributions of this heterologous reading of
Heidegger in light of the questions of coexistence and otherness for
international relations.
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 1

Manifestations of Composition

We think restlessly within familiar frameworks to avoid thought about

how our thinking is framed.
w i l l i a m e . c o n n ol ly, P ol i t ic a l T h e ory a n d Mode r n i t y

How does coexistence come to be articulated through the logic of

composition, as a condition of joining distinct, previously unrelated
units? The equating of coexistence and composition, it is argued
here, becomes possible when political thinking is based on modern
subjectivity. It is necessary, therefore, to examine in greater detail
the historical emergence of “the subject,” in order to better illus-
trate the ontological commitment of international relations to mod-
ern subjectivity and how this determines coexistence according to
the logic of composition. On the ground of modern subjectivity, as
described briefly in the introduction, a number of accounts of po-
litical coexistence (and more specifically, of communal constitution)
have arisen in the modern age1 that take different perspectives on
government and the creation of political order. Martin Wight’s re-
flections on the traditions of international political thought suggest,
in this regard, a number of political philosophic accounts on which
the theoretical perspectives of international relations are grounded.
Wight distinguished between realist, rationalist, and revolutionist
legacies, loosely associated with Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and
Immanuel Kant respectively.2 Despite their diversity, these traditions

1
2 · ma nifestations of composition

determine coexistence on the basis of composition to a greater or

lesser extent.
Although it is beyond the scope of this project to exemplify in de-
tail how the logic of composition operates in all the traditions and the
breadth of thinkers included in Wight’s typology, this chapter seeks
to illustrate how the assumptions of subjectivity affect the under-
standing of coexistence in what may well be the most prevalent
traditional discourse prominent in IR. Examples of this effect are
certain aspects of the political philosophy of seventeenth-century
English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, as received within the disci-
plinary boundaries of IR. Hobbes is chosen for a variety of reasons.
First, Hobbes reconfigures the emerging attributes of early mod-
ern subjectivity for the purposes of his political theory by specifi-
cally formulating reason and mastery into a self-interested subject
concerned with survival and self-preservation. The Hobbesian in-
fusion of danger into the ontological basis of the modern subject
inserts the notion of self-preservation as part of the mastery of the
subject. Hobbes’s account is an example of how different modern
philosophies rearticulate the main features of modern subjectivity.
Although such rearticulations can vary widely, there exists a basic
concern about the subject that is distinctive of modern philosophy.
As Dieter Sturma and Karl Ameriks argue, modern philosophy “has
combined perspectives that construct and criticize the standpoint
of subjectivity . . . but without thereby giving up the notion of the
self.”3
Second, Hobbes’s account of the creation of a civil and orderly
commonwealth out of a state of nature through the mechanism of
the social contract has been one of the more lasting and powerful
manifestations of the logic of composition, a composition that, in
his case, is permeated by danger. Third, Hobbes’s political philoso-
phy clearly illustrates the interconnectedness of subjectivity, com-
position, and otherness. Hobbes’s Leviathan contains an extensive
heterology, a logos of/about the other, which sustains his political
theoretical construction. Specifically, his reconfiguration of modern
subjectivity leads to a specific understanding of the other-as-enemy,
where the other is encountered through an éthos of survival as an
enemy that must be survived.4 The result of the interplay between sub-
jectivity and composition is a political theory of coexistence, which
exhibits all the characteristics of the logic of composition as out-
 ma nifestations of composition · 3

lined in the introduction, namely, tentativeness, tendency to failure,

and nonconstitutive, controlled relationality.
There is a final reason for choosing Hobbes’s account with which
to illustrate the logic of composition, and it involves its reception in
international relations. Even when acknowledged as an origin to be
surpassed or being currently transformed, the Hobbesian parame-
ters still hold sway over the disciplinary imagination. Even recent
important contributions to the theoretical understanding of com-
munities such as that of Andrew Linklater or the delineation of sys-
temic environs by Alexander Wendt all begin from this account. 5
In this sense, what is important here is how IR understands the
Hobbesian account rather than its authenticity.

THE MODERN SUB JEC T IN HIS TOR IC AL CONTE X T

“The modern subject has been at the centre of social and political
inquiry even if by negation,” write Simon Critchley and Peter Dews
in their influential volume on subjectivity.6 The modern subject has
been holding court over the philosophical endeavors of the modern
era, and in this century it has become the focus of numerous diver-
gent philosophies with often contradictory aims and ends. To talk
about the modern subject is not to claim that a unifying conception
of it holds for all of modern philosophy. Rather, its importance sug-
gests that modern philosophy might be seen as “a set of variations
on a theme” of the subject,7 which originated in Continental phi-
losophy, and where it received extensive attention but also substan-
tive critique.8
Jane Flax suggests that since the seventeenth century two related
but distinct views about the subject dominated philosophic debate:
One is the Cartesian idea of the self as an ahistoric, solid indwelling
entity that grounds the possibility of rational thought. In turn the
self is accessible and transparent to such thought. The defining char-
acteristic of this self is to engage in abstract rational thought, in-
cluding thought about its own thought. . . . The second idea is the
Humean-empirical one. This self and its knowledge are derived from
sense experience.9

From its philosophical origins, the modern subject has become the
cornerstone, the underlying premise, of much theoretical inquiry
and has provided the unit of analysis for the majority of the social
4 · ma nifestations of composition

sciences. In order to elucidate the problematic of coexistence as one

that obeys a certain logic of composition, it is necessary to provide
an account of that which is operative in this logic and, moreover,
of that which makes this logic possible. This is to ask the question
“what is meant by subject?” The answer that this chapter offers can
only sketch, in summary form, a historical trajectory of the institu-
tion of the subject, while bearing in mind that any narration of its
story in such a setting can never be fully inclusive of the resistances
and critiques rendered against “the subject” nor of the forms of its
many reassertions.10

S u b j e c t a s Hy p o k e im e n o n
“Subject,” at first glance, appears to translate the term hypokeime-
non, which in Greek philosophy meant that which lies under, that
which predicates something else. This apparent relation or identity
between “subject” and hypokeimenon requires careful consider-
ation because the concept of the subject has undergone a reformu-
lation in the modern era that prohibits such an immediate equiva-
lence. In Greek philosophy hypokeimenon was generally understood
together with the term “substance” (ousia) because “[s]ubstance is
the underlying, persisting foundation which supports everything
else.”11 For something to be, therefore, it had “[to be] a substance
or to be a property or predicate of a substance. Substance exists in
the primary sense, everything else exists ‘in’ substance and thus has
a merely secondary and dependent way of existing.”12 In Aristotle’s
Physics and Metaphysics, hypokeimenon refers to “that of which all
other entities are predicated but which is itself not predicated of any-
thing else,” that which does not require further foundation.13 For
the Greeks, then, subject indicated a predicate that acted as a foun-
dation that “persists through change, the sub-stratum, and which
has a function analogous to matter (hule). It is matter which persists
through the changes that form (morphe) imposes on it.”14 These brief
references to a premodern meaning of “subject” as hypokeimenon
make clear that the term “names that-which-lies-before, which, as
ground, gathers everything onto itself.”15
What is missing from this description of what “subject” meant
in a premodern context for ancient Greek philosophy is any relation
or equation of hypokeimenon to man or human being. As Martin
Heidegger argued, “This metaphysical meaning of the concept of
 ma nifestations of composition · 5

subject has first of all no special relationship to man and none at all
to the I.”16 Opposing a subjectivist rereading of Greek philosophy,17
Heidegger emphasized the sea change that came about in modernity,
particularly with the principle ego cogito, ergo sum put forward
as the essential feature of subjectivity by French philosopher René
Descartes in the seventeenth century.18 Heidegger understood “all
metaphysics” to be “characterized by ‘subjectity,’ but in modern phi-
losophy this is transformed into ‘subjectivity.’”19 Whereas subjectum
or hypokeimenon had meant the underlying, unchanging predicate
that itself required no further foundation but denoted no relation to
man or the “I,” with the advent of modern metaphysics man asserts
himself as this final ground.

Man as Subjec tum

The inception of subjectivity is closely related to the increasing con-
cern with the ego or the individual in the seventeenth century. As
Paul Barry Clarke notes, “This is no mere accident”; such an interest
in the individual as subject is “a clear consequence of the breakdown
of the medieval order”20 and is evident in several thinkers of that
time. The creation of a relationship between man, seen as the ulti-
mate predicate (hypokeimenon), and constancy, in the sense of con-
tinuous presence and certainty, must be grasped within the context
of seventeenth-century metaphysics and the space created by the loss
of certainty associated with premodern cosmology. The collapse of
divine ultimate foundations, however, required the formulation of a
new ground. Man as final foundation
had not only to be itself one that was certain, but since every stan-
dard of measure from any other sphere was forbidden, it had at the
same time to be of such a kind that through it the essence of the
freedom claimed would be posited as self-certainty. 21

Thus, the disavowal of medieval metaphysics seeks a modernist

grounding that, in effect, works as “man’s making himself secure as
subiectum.”22 As Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe explain,
[T]he seventeenth century [brought about] the collapse of the view
of the cosmos as a meaningful order within which man occupied a
precise and determined place —and the replacement of this view by
a self-defining conception of the subject, as an entity maintaining
relations of exteriority with the rest of the universe. 23
6 · ma nifestations of composition

Heidegger sought to provide a sustained critique of early modern

metaphysics and, particularly, of the infiltration of all science by
subjectivity since the seventeenth century; for him, the philosophy
of Descartes, specifically, played a grounding role in the establish-
ment of man as subject. 24 Cartesian thought enabled the philosophi-
cal development of modern subjectivity as the primary ground by
emphatically placing the subject as the final foundation of rigorous
science. As Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins note in
their overview of the history of philosophy, “Descartes was the phi-
losopher who most dramatically insisted on the simultaneous turn
to subjectivity and the use of logic . . . to argue his way to objectivi-
ty.”25 David Carr goes as far to suggest that, in fact,
beneath the surface of a language that metaphysically valorizes the
“objective” over the “subjective” . . . lies an ontology that [is] pre-
cisely the reverse. For in spite of all orientation towards the objec-
tive, in modern philosophy and especially science, it is the subject . . .
which exists in the primary sense, while the objective is reduced to
something secondary. 26

The modern articulation of reflection as constitutive for subjectivi-

ty, in the form of the Cartesian cogito, played a grounding role for
subsequent philosophizing and theorizing. Heidegger regarded that
at the beginning of modern philosophy stands Descartes’ statement
Ego cogito, ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” All conscious-
ness of things and of beings as a whole is referred back to the self-
consciousness of the human subject as the unshakable ground of all
certainty. 27

The liberation of man from the medieval schematic of salvation re-

quired the creation of a different, human-based, and self-sufficient
kind of certainty. 28 Descartes enabled this by grounding “the meta-
physical ground of man’s liberation in the new freedom of self-
assured self-legislation”29 and provided in this way a “foundation
for the freeing of man to freedom as the self-determination that is
certain of itself.”30
The distinguishing feature of metaphysics in the modern age,
therefore, “is that the metaphysical foundation is no longer claimed
to reside in a form, substance, or deity outside of the human intel-
lect but is rather found in the human being understood as subject.”31
The assignment of man as subject came about, Heidegger argued,
 ma nifestations of composition · 7

because Cartesian inquiry relied on the existing idea of substance

with which to grasp the essence of man. Descartes disregarded an
analysis of man that would adequately account for his embedded-
ness within the world, relying instead on the idea of substance to
describe the world and inner-worldly entities. 32 Descartes equated
the Being of the world with substantiality, while defining the human
being by its distinction to substance, as the entity defined by its re-
flective capacity, the “I think.”
What about the human subject? Descartes’ ego cogito is distin-
guished from the res corporea, which is understood as res extensa,
namely, as “extended substance.”33 Examining solely the ego cogito
and defining it in distinction to substance led Descartes to forgo
serious investigation of the latter part of his now famous maxim: of
the sum, the “I am.” By focusing on the cogito, Descartes created an
opposition between the reflective “I think,” which makes me certain
that I am this entity, and the facticity and embodiment of the “I
am.” This oversight resulted in the equivalence of the “I am” with
that against which the “I think” is distinguished, namely, “extended
substance.” According to Heidegger, then, Descartes understood
human being “in the very same way as he takes the Being of the res
extensa—namely, as substance,” though to equate the “I am” with
the res extensa and substantiality in general was not phenomenally
adequate. 34
In sum, what distinguished the modern age from the prior me-
dieval era and from Greek philosophy is that in modernity “man,
independently and by his own effort, contrives to become certain
and sure of his human being in the midst of beings as a whole.”35
Michel Foucault concurs years later not only that certainty is self-
instituted but that “the modern cogito . . . is not so much the dis-
covery of an evident truth as a ceaseless task constantly to be under-
taken afresh.”36 This echoes Friedrich Nietzsche’s insight that “[t]he
subject is multiplicity that built an imaginary unity for itself.”37
The process of securing man as the ground of certainty is, in other
words, continuous and reiterative and has to be asserted through the
subject’s relations with others within its world.
Instituting man as foundation was far from effortless and in-
volved two related steps. The first is the pivotal role of thinking-as-
representing, and the second is the representing-as-securing, which,
taken together, render man as ground. “The freeing of the subject to
8 · ma nifestations of composition

freedom” liberated man from the medieval schema in which he had

been incorporated. Man as subject, however, inversely “assume[d]
a definitive relationship of domination with regard to the world in
which it represent[ed] itself as living.”38 The relation of man-as-
subject to existing entities was a relation of mastery: the subject re-
lates to the world, and entities within the world, as object. Dalia
Judovitz suggests, “The subject signifies a new way of being human,
one that has to do with the rationalization of human capabilities
through their delimitation and economization in order to master the
world through representation.”39

The Represent ing Subjec t

The “ceaseless task” of subjectivity is intricately connected to rep-
resentation not only of entities as objects but also of the subject to
itself as the subject of re-presentation, the subject that presents itself
to itself as subject.40 Having already noted that to exist for a subject
is “to be an object or representation for it,” it has been argued that
the relationship of human being to the world, to other entities and
other human beings within the world, becomes one of subject and
object.41 Richard Polt suggests, “Subjectivism pictures the human
situation in terms of the subject, object, and a representational con-
nection between the two.”42
This reduces relationality to representation. “What can appear
is determined in advance as what can be represented to a subject,
a subject whose self-representation is the ground of all that it rep-
resents to itself,” argues Bernard Flynn.43 But what does that mean
for otherness? In the first instance, it reduces the spectrum of rela-
tionality to self and other, grasped as subject and its object of repre-
sentation, leaving no space for an understanding of the self as per-
meated by alterity, constituted through and through by otherness.
Far from further elucidating the self’s constitution, the subject of
representation “is supposed to be in complete command of its own
consciousness, perfectly self-present or at least potentially so.”44 The
very character of this subject is representation. Otherness, as the ob-
ject, “is supposed to be a thing that occurs as present within a neu-
tral space,” becoming something knowable and intelligible because
“by representing it, that is, by following some procedure that will
yield the correct picture or account of the object” it is determined
as an object distinct and nonrelated to the subject that presents it
 ma nifestations of composition · 9

to itself.45 Representation, thus, “make[s] the object available for

manipulation,”46 whereas “[t]he human subject—as self, ego, or con-
scious, thinking thing—becomes the ultimate foundation upon which
entities are rendered intelligible, that in virtue of which entities are
understandable in their Being.”47 The representing subject reduces
relationships with otherness and with the world to a process of rep-
resentation and knowledge, although this knowledge is not of enti-
ties as they are but rather a conflation of otherness to sameness.
Subjectivity “takes over all being by objectifying it and reducing
it to calculable representations, framing it within a world-picture
which is a product of subjective (human) activity.”48 Through this
will and activity “in the philosophical era extending from Descartes
to Hegel, subjectivity ultimately negates its own negation, sublates
the other as or into itself.”49
As well as revealing the relations of domination woven by the
concept of the subject, the relationship between subjectivity, intel-
ligibility, and representation is of great ontological significance for
the very institution of subjectivity itself. Through the grasping and
determination of otherness as object the subject secures itself: in
representing the “object” “the subject is supposed to be capable
of representing itself with the object.”50 Thinking-as-representing,
therefore, does not affect only otherness. The invocation of the di-
chotomy of subject and object recalls “the very interval constitu-
tive of the modern metaphysics of subjectivity, in which a subject
entirely present to itself confronts an object present or op-posed to
that subject.”51 The emphasis placed on representation and intel-
ligibility, in other words, puts into focus the ego cogito: man as
subject becomes himself reduced to his reflective capacity and his
mind. Richard Williams and Edwin Gantt suggest, “The intellectual
spirit of modernism is captured and preserved in its finest creation,
the individual mind as subject, standing over against the world con-
ceived as object.”52 Carr further argues, “primary being or subjec-
tivity . . . is conceived as the activity, striving or will”53 reified as a
mind distinct from its embodiment and in control over it. With mind
in the ascent, the material world and otherness become purveyed
and thought of as nonconstitutive, the result of which is the con-
sideration of world and people as “resources.”54 The opposition of
subject/object, most prevalently taken as the pursuit of knowledge
of the world and inner-worldly entities in the name of manipulating
10 · ma nifestations of composition

them or putting them to use, is best exemplified in the domain of

scientific inquiry where science is transformed into human science.

Sc ience as Human Sc ience

The transformation of science into human science is of great impor-
tance in the historical emergence of modern subjectivity. Foucault
argued,
The simple fact that man, whether in isolation or as a group, and
for the first time since human beings have existed and have lived
together in societies, should have become the object of science —that
cannot be considered or treated as a phenomenon of opinion: it is an
event in the order of knowledge. 55

Political knowledge is, naturally, of special interest to us, and its

epistemic transformation from the classical age to modernity il-
lustrates three evident changes. First, “the claim of scientifically
grounded social philosophy aims at establishing once and for all the
conditions for the correct order of the state and society as such. Its
assertions are to be valid independently of place, time, and circum-
stances, and are to permit an enduring foundation for communal
life, regardless of the historical situation.”56 Second, the transition
from knowledge into praxis is now considered a merely technical
problem. General conditions for social and political order are con-
sidered knowable, resulting in narrowing the task of politics to “the
correctly calculated generation of rules, relationships, and institu-
tions.”57 The third change, most importantly, involves the subject
of politics, whose behavior now becomes “the material for science,”
itself transformed into the deduction and “construction of condi-
tions under which human beings, just like objects within nature,
will necessarily behave in a calculable manner.”58
The assertion of man as subject and its characteristic self-certainty
“leads to a conception of knowledge as information gathering and
processing, which can then be exploited to serve the interests of the
subject.”59 Thus, all science becomes, in some sense, anthropology:
in other words, science is now understood from man’s perspective.
“Anthropology,” in this instance, “designates that philosophical in-
terpretation of man which explains and evaluates what is, in its en-
tirety, from the standpoint of man and in relation to man.”60 As Fou-
cault concurred years later, “the anthropological configuration of
 ma nifestations of composition · 11

modern philosophy” suggests that “the pre-critical analysis of what

man is in his essence becomes the analytic of everything that can, in
general, be presented to man’s experience.”61 It is not, however, just
that this scientific configuration evinces technicity and calculability:
the transformation of science into human science or anthropology
entails overtly political determinations because “the modern enter-
prise is thus also inextricably tied to a kind of ‘metaphysical poli-
tics’ . . . striv[ing] for a complete universal self-authorization.”62 In
other words, the subject’s positing of itself as the object of science
and the reduction of science to what is representable to the subject
as part of its experience involve the desire toward self-knowledge
and the ability to make total claims about the world. In this way,
“we come to know the world ‘outside’ by looking ‘inside.’”63 This
paradoxical “arrogance of knowledge coupled with the seeming hu-
mility of critical self-examination,” however, means that a largely
situated perspective can make global claims about the objectivity of
its knowledge amassed subjectively.64 Thus, the rise of the subject
is not merely synonymous with the “apotheosis of reason, and the
successful pursuit of knowledge”; rather, the story of science as the
institutionalization of thinking-as-representing and representing-
as-securing is “also a story of power and politics.”65 Nevertheless,
Heidegger argues that
man assumes a special role in metaphysics inasmuch as he seeks, de-
velops, grounds, defends, and passes on metaphysical knowledge —
and distorts it. But that still does not give us the right to consider him
the measure of all things as well, to characterize him as the center of
all beings, and establish him as master of all things.66

The Subjec t of Inter nat ional Polit ics

While philosophy has been preoccupied with notions of subjectivi-
ty for the better part of this century and has initiated a process of
self-critique since the very advent of the Enlightenment,67 it appears
that in the more applied fields of the human and social sciences the
modern subject has taken hold and is still generally accepted as the
basis of social and political inquiry. C. Fred Alford has observed
that in political theory and political science, as well as social science
more generally, theorizations of the “self” always involve trade-offs.
Often authors will “weaken, split, and shatter the integrity of the
12 · ma nifestations of composition

self, in order to render it more tractable, or more ideal.”68 The pur-

pose of these manipulations of the self is, of course, to write social
or political theory that fulfills certain functions and allows certain
normative concerns to be realized theoretically. The self, thus, is
considered to be little more than “a dependent variable in this or
that social theory.”69 If Alford is correct in his view, this might also
explain why ontology is not a major concern in social and political
theory, although in some respects this may be changing.70 Alford
contends, not without irony, that for most social scientists “more
subtle and complex models [of the self] may be interesting, but they
are not necessary to do real social science.”71 It is interesting to ask
as to the extent to which his comment, ironic as it may be, would not
also be appropriate for IR as a social science, and significantly for IR
as a social science not really concerned with people at all, although
again exceptions can be found.72 Furthermore, “subtle and complex
models” of the self might be what is required for a reconsideration
of coexistence as an issue of primary importance for international
politics.
It might be contentious to suggest that the ontological assump-
tions on which IR grounds coexistence are centered on the indi-
vidual subject, given the presumed divergence between the three
traditions or paradigms and also the discipline’s focus on “states.”
However, IR as a social science lies within the modernist tradition
and shares its fundamental metaphysical positions about the sub-
ject as sovereign and self-sufficient. Wight classified IR theories into
three schools made up of realists, rationalists, and revolutionists
because these perspectives take their assumptions from philosophi-
cal movements or schools that bear those names, although, as he
rightly notes, these took hold in IR with some “debasement.”73
Can one really claim, however, that these modern philosophies,
as well as the theoretical traditions they have engendered in IR, rest
on a common understanding of subjectivity? Is this really the claim
put forward here? Not at all: the claim here suggests not identity
among philosophies of the modern era about their consideration of
subjectivity, but an inherent centrality within them of the notion of
the subject. The suggestion is that, with modernity, philosophy and
also social science become grounded in the human being as subject,
although there are a number of differentiated features of that sub-
ject proposed by various thinkers and schools of thought. Cartesian
 ma nifestations of composition · 13

philosophy effected a change in the terms of discourse so that in the

post-Cartesian era philosophical and social thought takes its prob-
lematic from the cogito.
Much like the modern philosophical endeavor in which it is lo-
cated, the discipline of IR avails a view of the ontological centrality
of the modern subject. Despite the renowned and sharp differences
regarding the characteristics they attribute to subjectivity, and the
theoretical result of these differences, modern subjectivity is what
allows the realist, rationalist, and revolutionist74 traditions to ar-
ticulate their political thought. Far from agreeing on the particulars,
these paradigms put the attributes of modern subjectivity to work in
radically differentiated political theories, which are united by their
grounding on modern subjectivity even if their reformulations of
it are varied. For example, as will be shown extensively, the realist
tradition based on Hobbes uses the features of modern subjectivity,
such as mastery and capacity for reason, to arrive at the subject’s
self-induced vulnerability that provides the context of an ontology
of danger and as a result a political theory of the social contract
with an absolute sovereign. By contrast, the rationalist school based
on Locke reinterprets many of the same features of the modern
subject as proprietary consciousness in order to arrive at a concep-
tion of society as “a body composed . . . of independently moving
individuals” who voluntarily consent to constitute themselves as a
“body.”75
Generally speaking, the ontological centrality of the modern sub-
ject for IR is evident in three ways. First, IR as the study of the
interactions of states seen through their statesmen and diplomats en-
gages with the modern subject in its utmost interpretation, namely,
the secular, self-interested subject of modern politics.76 Second, the
collective entities of IR undergo a process of anthropomorphization
so that nonhuman or pluralistic actors, the most prevalent being the
state, assume a number of the characteristics attributed to human
being as subject, such as purposive behavior, self-sufficiency, and ra-
tionality. This is not only an occurrence in IR but is the case with
social theory in general, which takes its object of inquiry, society or
community, as the “absolutization of subjectivity.”77
Third, the resurgence of critical theorizing in IR has returned dis-
ciplinary attention to, and has largely brought about an acceptance
of, the study of individuals.78 This had been customarily neglected by
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 double taxation on the cotton planter, which will drive him,
without much difficulty, to Texas, to Arkansas, and
Mississippi.”

Washington.—The inn, here, when we arrived, was well filled with

guests, and my friend and I were told that we must sleep together.
In the room containing our bed there were three other beds; and
although the outside of the house was pierced with windows,
nowhere more than four feet apart, not one of them opened out of
our room. A door opened into the hall, another into the dining-room,
and at the side of our bed was a window into the dining-room,
through which, betimes in the morning, we could, with our heads on
our pillows, see the girls setting the breakfast-tables. Both the doors
were provided with glass windows, without curtains. Hither, about
eleven o’clock, we “retired.” Soon afterwards, hearing something
moving under the bed, I asked, “Who’s there?” and was answered
by a girl, who was burrowing for eggs; part of the stores of the
establishment being kept in boxes, in this convenient locality. Later, I
was awakened by a stranger attempting to enter my bed. I
expostulated, and he replied that it was his bed, and nobody else
had a right to his place in it. Who was I, he asked, angrily, and
where was his partner? “Here I am,” answered a voice from another
bed; and without another word, he left us. I slept but little, and
woke feverish, and with a headache, caused by the want of
ventilation.
While at the dinner-table, a man asked, as one might at the North, if
the steamer had arrived, if there had been “any fights to-day?” After
dinner, while we were sitting on the gallery, loud cursing, and
threatening voices were heard in the direction of the bar-room,
which, as at Nachitoches, was detached, and at a little distance from
the hotel. The company, except myself and the other New-Yorker,
immediately ran towards it. After ten minutes, one returned, and
said—
“I don’t believe there’ll be any fight; they are both cowards.”
“Are they preparing for a fight?”
“O, yes; they are loading pistols in the coffee-room, and there’s a
man outside, in the street, who has a revolver and a knife, and who
is challenging another to come out. He swears he’ll wait there till he
does come out; but in my opinion he’ll think better of it, when he
finds that the other feller’s got pistols, too.”
“What’s the occasion of the quarrel?”
“Why, the man in the street says the other one insulted him this
morning, and that he had his hand on his knife, at the very moment
he did so, so he couldn’t reply. And now he says he’s ready to talk
with him, and he wants to have him come out, and as many of his
friends as are a mind to, may come with him; he’s got enough for all
of ’em, he says. He’s got two revolvers, I believe.”
We did not hear how it ended; but, about an hour afterwards, I saw
three men, with pistols in their hands, coming from the bar-room.
The next day, I saw, in the streets of the same town, two boys
running from another, who was pursuing them with a large, open
dirk-knife in his hand, and every appearance of ungovernable rage in
his face.
The boat, for which I was waiting, not arriving, I asked the landlady
—who appeared to be a German Jewess—if I could not have a better
sleeping-room. She showed me one, which she said I might use for
a single night; but, if I remained another, I must not refuse to give it
up. It had been occupied by another gentleman, and she thought he
might return the next day, and would want it again; and, if I
remained in it, he would be very angry that they had not reserved it
for him, although they were under no obligation to him. “He is a
dangerous man,” she observed, “and my husband, he’s a quick-
tempered man, and, if they get to quarrelling about it, ther’ll be
knives about, sure. It always frightens me to see knives drawn.”
A Texas drover, who stayed over night at the hotel, being asked, as
he was about to leave in the morning, if he was not going to have
his horse shod, replied:
“No sir! it’ll be a damn’d long spell ’fore I pay for having a horse
shod. I reckon, if God Almighty had thought it right hosses should
have iron on thar feet, he’d a put it thar himself. I don’t pretend to
be a pious man myself; but I a’nt a-goin’ to run agin the will of God
Almighty, though thar’s some, that calls themselves ministers of
Christ, that does it.”
 CHAPTER II.
A TRIP INTO NORTHERN MISSISSIPPI.

Vicksburg, March 18th.—I arrived at this place last night, about sunset, and
was told that there was no hotel in the town except on the wharf-boat, the
only house used for that purpose having been closed a few days ago on
account of a difference of opinion between its owner and his tenant.
There are no wharves on the Mississippi, or any of the southern rivers. The
wharf-boat is an old steamboat, with her paddle boxes and machinery
removed and otherwise dismantled, on which steamboats discharge
passengers and freight. The main deck is used as a warehouse, and, in place
of the furnace, has in this case a dram shop, a chandler’s shop, a forwarding
agency, and a telegraph office. Overhead, the saloon and state-rooms remain,
and with the bar-room and clerk’s office, kitchen and barber’s shop, constitute
a stationary though floating hostelry.
Though there were fifty or more rooms, and not a dozen guests, I was
obliged, about twelve o’clock, to admit a stranger who had been gambling all
the evening in the saloon, to occupy the spare shelf of my closet. If a
disposition to enjoy occasional privacy, or to exercise a choice in one’s room-
mates were a sure symptom of a monomania for incendiarism, it could not be
more carefully thwarted than it is at all public-houses in this part of the world.
Memphis, March 20th.—I reached this place to-day in forty-eight horns by
steamboat from Vicksburg.
Here, at the “Commercial Hotel,” I am favoured with an unusually good-
natured room-mate. He is smoking on the bed—our bed—now, and wants to
know what my business is here, and whether I carry a pistol about me; also
whether I believe that it isn’t lucky to play cards on Sundays; which I do most
strenuously, especially as this is a rainy Sunday, and his second cigar is nearly
smoked out.
This is a first-class hotel, and has, of course, printed bills of fare, which, in a
dearth of other literature, are not to be dropped at the first glance. A copy of
to-day’s is presented on the opposite page.
Being in a distant quarter of the establishment when a crash of the gong
announced dinner, I did not get to the table as early as some others. The
meal was served in a large, dreary room exactly like a hospital ward; and it is
a striking illustration of the celerity with which everything is accomplished in
our young country, that beginning with the soup, and going on by the fish to
the roasts, the first five dishes I inquired for—when at last I succeeded in
arresting one of the negro boys—were “all gone;” and as the waiter had to go
to the head of the dining-room, or to the kitchen, to ascertain this fact upon
each demand, the majority of the company had left the table before I was
served at all. At length I said I would take anything that was still to be had,
and thereupon was provided immediately with some grimy bacon, and greasy
cabbage. This I commenced eating, but I no sooner paused for a moment,
than it was suddenly and surreptitiously removed, and its place supplied,
without the expression of any desire on my part, with some other Memphitic
chef d’œuvre, a close investigation of which left me in doubt whether it was
that denominated “sliced potatoe pie,” or “Irish pudding.”
I congratulate myself that I have lived to see the day in which an agitation for
reform in our great hotel system has been commenced, and I trust that a
Society for the Revival of Village Inns will ere long form one of the features of
the May anniversaries.

COMMERCIAL HOTEL.
BY D. COCKRELL.

BILL OF FARE.

MARCH 20.
 SOUP.
Oyster.
FISH.
Red.
BOILED.
Jole and Green.
Ham.
Corned beef.
Bacon and turnips.
Codfish egg sauce.
Beef heart egg sauce.
Leg of mutton caper sauce.
Barbecued rabits.
Boiled tongue.
ROAST.
Veal.
Roast pig.
Muscovie ducks.
Kentucky beef.
Mutton.
Barbecued shoat.
Roast bear meat.
Roast pork.
ENTREES.
Fricasee pork.
Calf feet mushroom sauce.
Bear sausages.
Harricane tripe.
Stewed mutton.
Browned rice.
Calf feet madeira sauce.
Stewed turkey wine sauce.
Giblets volivon.
Mutton omelett.
Beef’s heart fricaseed.
Cheese macaroni.
Chicken chops robert sauce.
Breast chicken madeira sauce
 Breast chicken madeira sauce.
A stage-coach conveyed thekidney
Beef railroadpickle
passengers
sauce. from the hotel to the station,
which was a mile or two Cod out
fish of town. As we were entering the coach the
baked.
driver observed with aCalfMephistophelean
head wine sauce. smile that we “needn’t calk’late we
were gwine to ride very fur,” and, as soon as we had got into the country he
stopped and asked all the men FRUIT.to get out and walk, for, he condescended to
Almonds.
explain, “it was as much as his hosses could do to draw the ladies and the
baggage.” It was quite Rasins.
true; the horses were often obliged to stop, even with
Pecans.
the diminished load, and as there was a contract between myself and the
proprietors by which, for a VEGETABLES.
stipulated sum of money by me to them in hand
duly paid, they had undertaken to convey me over this ground, I thought it
Boiled cabbage.
would have been no more than honest if they had looked out beforehand to
Turnips.
have either a stronger Cold
team, or a better road, provided. As is the custom of
slaugh.
our country, however, Hotwe slaugh.
allowed ourselves to be thus robbed with great
good-nature, and waded alongbeets.
Pickled ankle-deep in the mud, joking with the driver
and ready to put our shoulders
Creole hominy.to the wheels if it should be necessary. Two
portmanteaus were jerkedCrout off in heavy lurches of the coach; the owners
cabbage.
picked them up and carried
Oyster them
plantonfried.
their shoulders till the horses stopped to
breathe again. The train of course
Parsneps had waited for us, and it continued to wait
gravied.
until another coach arrived,
Stewed when it started twenty minutes behind time.
parsneps.
After some forty miles Fried
of rail,cabbage.
nine of us were stowed away in another stage
coach. The road was bad, the weather spiced.
Sweet potatoes foul. We proceeded slowly, were often
Carrot.
in imminent danger of being upset, and once were all obliged to get out and
help the horses drag theSweet potatoes
coach out ofbaked.
a slough; but with smoking, and the
Cabbage stuffed.
occasional circulation of a small black bottle, and a general disposition to be
Onions, boiled.
as comfortable as circumstances would allow, four hours of coaching proved
Irish potatoes
less fatiguing than one of the ill-ventilatedcreamed and mashed.
rail-cars.
Irish potatoes browned.
Among the passengers Boiled
was a shellots.
“Judge,” resident in the vicinity, portly, dignified,
and well-informed; and a youngcarrots.
Scolloped man, who was a personal friend of the
member of Congress from Boiledthe district,
turnips drawnandbutter.
who, as he informed me, had,
through the influenceWhite of this
beans. friend, a promise from the President of
honourable and lucrative employment under Government. He was known to
all the other passengers, and PASTRY.
hailed by every one on the road-side, by the
Currant pies.
title of Colonel. The Judge was ready to converse about the country through
which we were passing,Lemon custard.
and while perfectly aware, as no one else seemed to
Rice pudding.
be, that it bore anything but an appearance of prosperity or attractiveness to
a stranger, he assuredCocoanut
me that pie. it was really improving in all respects quite
Cranberry pies.
rapidly. There were few large plantations, but many small planters or rather
Sliced potato pie.
farmers, for cotton, though the principal source of cash income, was much
Chess
less exclusively an object cake.
of attention than in the more southern parts of the
Irish pudding.
State. A larger space wasOrange
occupied
custard.
by the maize and grain crops. There were
not a few small fields ofCranberry
wheat. In shapes.
the afternoon, when only the Colonel and
myself were with him, Green
the Judge
peach talked
tarts.about slavery in a candid and liberal
spirit. At present prices,Green
he said,
peachnobody
puff paste.
could afford to own slaves, unless he
could engage them almost Grapeexclusively
tarts. in cotton-growing. It was undoubtedly
a great injury to a region
Huckle
like berry
this, which
pies. was not altogether well adapted to
cotton, to be in the midst
Poundof acake.
slaveholding country, for it prevented efficient
free labour. A good deal Rheubarb
of cotton
tarts.was nevertheless grown hereabouts by
white labour—by poorPlum mentarts.
who planted an acre or two, and worked it
themselves, getting theCalves
planters
feettojelly.
gin and press it for them. It was not at all
uncommon for men toBlamonge.begin in this way and soon purchase negroes on
credit, and eventually Orange
becomejelly.rich men. Most of the plantations in this
vicinity, indeed, belonged to men who had come into the country with nothing
within twenty years. Once a man got a good start with negroes, unless the
luck was much against him, nothing but his own folly could prevent his
becoming rich. The increase of his negro property by births, if he took good
care of it, must, in a few years, make him independent. The worst thing, and
the most difficult to remedy, was the deplorable ignorance which prevailed.
Latterly, however, people were taking more pride in the education of their
children. Some excellent schools had been established, the teachers generally
from the North, and a great many children were sent to board in the villages
—county-seats—to attend them. This was especially true of girls, who liked to
live in the villages rather than on the plantations. There was more difficulty in
making boys attend school, until, at least, they were too old to get much
good from it.
The “Colonel” was a rough, merry, good-hearted, simple-minded man, and
kept all the would-be sober-sides of our coach body in irrepressible laughter
with queer observations on passing occurrences, anecdotes and comic songs.
It must be confessed that there is no charge which the enemies of the
theatre bring against the stage, that was not duly illustrated, and that with a
broadness which the taste of a metropolitan audience would scarcely permit.
Had Doctor —— and Doctor —— been with me they would thereafter for ever
have denied themselves, and discountenanced in others, the use of such a
means of travel. The Colonel, notwithstanding, was of a most obliging
disposition, and having ascertained in what direction I was going, enumerated
at least a dozen families on the road, within some hundred miles, whom he
invited me to visit, assuring me that I should find pretty girls in all of them,
and a warm welcome, if I mentioned his name.
He told the Judge that his bar-bill on the boat, coming up from New Orleans,
was forty dollars—seventeen dollars the first night. But he had made money—
had won forty dollars of one gentleman. He confessed, however, that he had
lost fifteen by another, “but he saw how he did it. He did not want to accuse
him publicly, but he saw it and he meant to write to him and tell him of it. He
did not want to insult the gentleman, only he did not want to have him think
that he was so green as not to know how he did it.”
While stopping for dinner at a village inn, a young man came into the room
where we all were, and asked the coachman what was to be paid for a trunk
which had been brought for him. The coachman said the charge would be a
dollar, which the young man thought excessive. The coachman denied that it
was so, said that it was what he had often been paid; he should not take less.
The young man finally agreed to wait for the decision of the proprietor of the
line. There was a woman in the room; I noticed no loud words or angry
tones, and had not supposed that there was the slightest excitement. I
observed, however, that there was a profound silence for a minute
afterwards, which was interrupted by a jocose remark of the coachman about
the delay of our dinner. Soon after we re-entered the coach, the Colonel
referred to the trunk owner in a contemptuous manner. The Judge replied in
a similar tone. “If I had been in the driver’s place, I should have killed him
sure,” said the Colonel. With great surprise, I ventured to ask for what
reason. “Did not you see the fellow put his hand to his breast when the driver
denied that he had ever taken less than a dollar for bringing a trunk from
Memphis?”
“No, I did not; but what of it?”
“Why, he meant to frighten the driver, of course.”
“You think he had a knife in his breast?”
“Of course he had, sir.”
“But you wouldn’t kill him for that, I suppose?”
“When a man threatens to kill me, you wouldn’t have me wait for him to do
it, would you, sir?”
The roads continued very heavy; some one remarked, “There’s been a heap
of rain lately,” and rain still kept falling. We passed a number of cotton
waggons which had stopped in the road; the cattle had been turned out and
had strayed off into the woods, and the drivers lay under the tilts asleep on
straw.
The Colonel said this sight reminded him of his old camp-meeting days. “I
used to be very fond of going to camp-meetings. I used to go first for fun,
and, oh Lord! haint I had some fun at camp meetings? But after a while I got
a conviction—needn’t laugh, gentlemen. I tell you it was sober business for
me. I’ll never make fun of that. The truth just is, I am a melancholy case; I
thought I was a pious man once, I did—I’m damn’d if I didn’t. Don’t laugh at
what I say, now; I don’t want fun made of that; I give you my word I
experienced religion, and I used to go to the meetings with as much sincerity
and soberness as anybody could. That was the time I learned to sing—
learned to pray too, I did; could pray right smart. I did think I was a
converted man, but of course I ain’t, and I ’spose ’twarnt the right sort, and I
don’t reckon I shall have another chance. A gentleman has a right to make
the most of this life, when he can’t calculate on anything better than roasting
in the next. Aint that so, Judge? I reckon so. You mustn’t think hard of me, if
I do talk wicked some. Can’t help it.”
I was forced by the stage arrangements to travel night and day. The Colonel
told me that I should be able to get a good supper at a house where the
coach was to stop about midnight—“good honest fried bacon, and hot
Christian corn-bread—nothing like it, to fill a man up and make him feel
righteous. You get a heap better living up in this country than you can at the
St. Charles, for all the fuss they make about it. It’s lucky you’ll have
something better to travel on to-night than them French friterzeed Dutch
flabbergasted hell-fixins: for you’ll have the——” (another most extraordinary
series of imprecations on the road over which I was to travel).
Before dark all my companions left me, and in their place I had but one, a
young gentleman with whom I soon became very intimately acquainted. He
was seventeen years old, so he said; he looked older; and the son of a
planter in the “Yazoo bottoms.” The last year he had “follered overseein’” on
his father’s plantation, but he was bound for Tennessee, now, to go to an
academy, where he could learn geography. There was a school near home at
which he had studied reading and writing and ciphering, but he thought a
gentleman ought to have some knowledge of geography. At ten o’clock the
next morning the stage-coach having progressed at the rate of exactly two
miles and a half an hour, for the previous sixteen hours, during which time we
had been fasting, the supper-house, which we should have reached before
midnight, was still ten miles ahead, the driver sulky and refusing to stop until
we reached it. We had been pounded till we ached in every muscle. I had had
no sleep since I left Memphis. We were passing over a hill country which
sometimes appeared to be quite thickly inhabited, yet mainly still covered
with a pine forest, through which the wind moaned lugubriously.
I had been induced to turn this way in my journey in no slight degree by
reading the following description in a statistical article of De Bow’s Review:
“The settling of this region is one among the many remarkable
events in the history of the rise of the Western States. Fifteen
years ago it was an Indian wilderness, and now it has reached
and passed in its population, other portions of the State of ten
times its age, and this population, too, one of the finest in all the
West. Great attention has been given to schools and education,
and here, [at Memphis,] has been located the University of
Mississippi; so amply endowed by the State, and now just going
into operation under the auspices of some of the ablest professors
from the eastern colleges. There is no overgrown wealth among
them, and yet no squalid poverty; the people being generally
comfortable, substantial, and independent farmers. Considering
its climate, soil, wealth, and general character of its inhabitants, I
should think no more desirable or delightful residence could be
found than among the hills and sunny valleys of the Chickasaw
Cession.”[8]
And here among the hills of this Paradise of the South-west, we were, Yazoo
and I—he, savagely hungry, as may be guessed from his observations upon
“the finest people of the West,” among whose cabins in the pine-wood toiled
our stage-coach.
The whole art of driving was directed to the discovery of a passage for the
coach among the trees and through the fields, where there were fields,
adjoining the road—the road itself being impassable. Occasionally, when the
coachman, during the night, found it necessary, owing to the thickness of the
forest on each side, to take to the road, he would first leave the coach and
make a survey with his lantern, sounding the ruts of the cotton-waggons, and
finally making out a channel by guiding-stakes which he cut from the
underwood with a hatchet, usually carried in the holster. If, after diligent
sounding, he found no passage sufficiently shallow, he would sometimes
spend half an hour in preparing one, bringing rails from the nearest fence, or
cutting brushwood for the purpose. We were but once or twice during the
night called upon to leave the coach, or to assist in road-making, and my
companion frequently expressed his gratitude for this—gratitude not to the
driver but to Providence, who had made a country, as he thought, so
unusually well adapted for stage-coaching. The night before, he had been on
a much worse road, and was half the time, with numerous other passengers,
engaged in bringing rails, and prying the coach out of sloughs. They had
been obliged to keep on the track, because the water was up over the
adjoining country. Where the wooden causeway had floated off, they had
passed through water so deep that it entered the coach body. With our road
of to-day, then, he could only express satisfaction; not so with the residents
upon it. “Look at ’em!” he would say. “Just look at ’em! What’s the use of
such people’s living? ’Pears to me I’d die if I couldn’t live better ’n that. When
I get to be representative, I’m going to have a law made that all such kind of
men shall be took up by the State and sent to the penitentiary, to make ’em
work and earn something to support their families. I pity the women; I haint
nuthin agin them; they work hard enough, I know; but the men—I know how
’tis. They just hang around groceries and spend all the money they can get—
just go round and live on other people, and play keerds, and only go home to
nights; and the poor women, they hev to live how they ken.”
“Do you think it’s so? It is strange we see no men—only women and
children.”
“Tell you they’re off, gettin’ a dinner out o’ somebody. Tell you I know it’s so.
It’s the way all these people do. Why there’s one poor man I know, that lives
in a neighbourhood of poor men, down our way, and he’s right industrious,
but he can’t get rich and he never ken, cause all these other poor men live on
him.”
“What do you mean? Do they all drop in about dinner time?”
“No, not all on ’em, but some on ’em every day. And they keep borrowin’
things of him. He haint spunk enough to insult ’em. If he’d just move into a
rich neighborhood and jest be a little sassy, and not keer so much about what
folks said of him, he’d get rich; never knew a man that was industrious and
sassy in this country that didn’t get rich, quick, and get niggers to do his work
for him. Anybody ken that’s smart. Thar’s whar they tried to raise some corn.
Warn’t no corn grew thar; that’s sartin. Wonder what they live on? See the
stalks. They never made no corn. Plowed right down the hill! Did you ever
see anything like it? As if this sile warn’t poor enough already. There now.
Just the same. Only look at ’em! ’Pears like they never see a stage afore. This
ain’t the right road, the way they look at us. No, sartin, they never see a
stage. Lord God! see the babies. They never see a stage afore. No, the stage
never went by here afore, I know. This damn’d driver’s just taken us round
this way to show off what he can do and pass away the time before
breakfast. Couldn’t get no breakfast here if he would stop—less we ate a
baby. That’s right! step out where you ken see her good; prehaps you’ll never
see a stage again; better look now, right sharp. Yes, oh yes, sartin; fetch out
all the babies. Haint you got no more? Well, I should hope not. Now, what is
the use of so many babies? That’s the worst on’t. I’d get married to-morrow if
I wasn’t sure I’d hev babies. I hate babies, can’t bear ’em round me, and
won’t have ’em. I would like to be married. I know several gals I’d marry if
’twarn’t for that. Well, it’s a fact. Just so. I hate the squallin’ things. I know I
was born a baby, but I couldn’t help it, could I? I wish I hadn’t been. I hate
the squallin’ things. If I had to hev a baby round me I should kill it.”
“If you had a baby of your own, you’d feel differently about it.”
“That’s what they tell me. I s’pose I should, but I don’t want to feel
differently. I hate ’em. I hate ’em.”
The coach stopped at length. We got out and found ourselves on the bank of
an overflowed brook. A part of the bridge was broken up, the driver declared
it impossible to ford the stream, and said he should return to the shanty, four
miles back, at which we had last changed horses. We persuaded him to take
one of his horses from the team and let us see if we could not get across. I
succeeded in doing this without difficulty, and turning the horse loose he
returned. The driver, however, was still afraid to try to ford the stream with
the coach and mails, and after trying our best to persuade him, I told him if
he returned he should do it without me, hoping he would be shamed out of
his pusillanimity. Yazoo joined me, but the driver having again recovered the
horse upon which he had forded the stream, turned about and drove back.
We pushed on, and after walking a few miles, came to a neat new house,
with a cluster of old cabins about it. It was much the most comfortable
establishment we had seen during the day. Truly a “sunny valley” home of
northern Mississippi. We entered quietly, and were received by two women
who were spinning in a room with three outside doors all open, though a fine
fire was burning, merely to warm the room, in a large fire-place, within. Upon
our asking if we could have breakfast prepared for us, one of the women
went to the door and gave orders to a negro, and in a moment after, we saw
six or seven black boys and girls chasing and clubbing a hen round the yard
for our benefit. I regret to add that they did not succeed in making her
tender. At twelve o’clock we breakfasted, and were then accommodated with
a bed, upon which we slept together for several hours. When I awoke I
walked out to look at the premises.
The house was half a dozen rods from the high road, with a square yard all
about it, in one corner of which was a small enclosure for stock, and a log
stable and corn-crib. There were also three negro cabins; one before the
house, and two behind it. The house was a neat building of logs, boarded
over and painted on the outside. On the inside, the logs were neatly hewn to
a plane face, and exposed. One of the lower rooms contained a bed, and but
little other furniture; the other was the common family apartment, but also
was furnished with a bed. A door opened into another smaller log house in
the rear, in which were two rooms—one of them the family dining-room; the
other the kitchen. Behind this was still another log erection, fifteen feet
square, which was the smoke-house, and in which a great store of bacon was
kept. The negro cabins were small, dilapidated, and dingy; the walls were not
chinked, and there were no windows—which, indeed, would have been a
superfluous luxury, for there were spaces of several inches between the logs,
through which there was unobstructed vision. The furniture in the cabins was
of the simplest and rudest imaginable kind, two or three beds with dirty
clothing upon them, a chest, a wooden stool or two made with an axe, and
some earthenware and cooking apparatus. Everything within the cabins was
coloured black by smoke. The chimneys of both the house and the cabins
were built of splinters and clay, and on the outer side of the walls. At the door
of each cabin were literally “heaps” of babies and puppies, and behind or
beside it a pig-stye and poultry coop, a ley-tub, and quantities of home-
carded cotton placed upon boards to bleach. Within each of them was a
woman or two, spinning with the old-fashioned great wheel, and in the
kitchen another woman was weaving coarse cotton shirting with the ancient
rude hand-loom. The mistress herself was spinning in the living-room, and
asked, when we had grown acquainted, what women at the North could find
to do, and how they could ever pass the time, when they gave up spinning
and weaving. She made the common every-day clothing for all her family and
her servants. They only bought a few “store-goods” for their “dress-up”
clothes. She kept the negro girls spinning all through the winter, and at all
times when they were not needed in the field. She supposed they would
begin to plant corn now in a few days, and then the girls would go to work
out of doors. I noticed that all the bed-clothing, the towels, curtains, etc., in
the house, were of homespun.
The proprietor, who had been absent on a fishing excursion, during the day,
returned at dusk. He was a man of the fat, slow-and-easy style, and proved
to be good-natured, talkative, and communicative. He had bought the tract of
land he now occupied, and moved upon it about ten years before. He had
made a large clearing, and could now sell it for a good deal more than he
gave for it. He intended to sell whenever he could get a good offer, and move
on West. It was the best land in this part of the country, and he had got it
well fenced, and put up a nice house: there were a great many people that
like to have these things done for them in advance—and he thought he
should not have to wait long for a purchaser. He liked himself to be clearing
land, and it was getting too close settled about here to suit him. He did not
have much to do but to hunt and fish, and the game was getting so scarce it
was too much trouble to go after it. He did not think there were so many cat
in the creek as there used to be either, but there were more gar-fish. When
he first bought this land he was not worth much—had to run in debt—hadn’t
but three negroes. Now, he was pretty much out of debt and owned twenty
negroes, seven of them prime field-hands, and he reckoned I had not seen a
better lot anywhere.
During the evening, all the cabins were illuminated by great fires, and,
looking into one of them, I saw a very picturesque family group; a man sat on
the ground making a basket, a woman lounged on a chest in the chimney
corner smoking a pipe, and a boy and two girls sat in a bed which had been
drawn up opposite to her, completing the fireside circle. They were talking
and laughing cheerfully.
The next morning when I turned out I found Yazoo looking with the eye of a
connoisseur at the seven prime field-hands, who at half-past seven were just
starting off with hoes and axes for their day’s work. As I approached him, he
exclaimed with enthusiasm:—
“Aren’t them a right keen lookin’ lot of niggers?”
And our host soon after coming out, he immediately walked up to him,
saying:—
“Why, friend, them yer niggers o’ yourn would be good for seventy bales of
cotton, if you’d move down into our country.”
Their owner was perfectly aware of their value, and said everything good of
them.
“There’s something ruther singlar, too, about my niggers; I don’t know as I
ever see anything like it anywhere else.”
“How so, sir?”
“Well, I reckon it’s my way o’ treatin’ ’em, much as anything. I never hev no
difficulty with ’em. Hen’t licked a nigger in five year, ’cept maybe sprouting
some of the young ones sometimes. Fact, my niggers never want no lookin’
arter; they jus tek ker o’ themselves. Fact, they do tek a greater interest in
the crops than I do myself. There’s another thing—I ’spose ’twill surprise you
—there ent one of my niggers but what can read; read good, too—better ’n I
can, at any rate.”
“How did they learn?”
“Taught themselves. I b’lieve there was one on ’em that I bought, that could
read, and he taught all the rest. But niggers is mighty apt at larnin’, a heap
more ’n white folks is.”
I said that this was contrary to the generally received opinion.
“Well, now, let me tell you,” he continued; “I had a boy to work, when I was
buildin’, and my boys jus teachin’ him night times and such, he warn’t here
more’n three months, and he larned to read as well as any man I ever heerd,
and I know he didn’t know his letters when he come here. It didn’t seem to
me any white man could have done that; does it to you, now?”
“How old was he?”
“Warn’t more’n seventeen, I reckon.”
“How do they get books—do you get them for them?”
“Oh no; get ’em for themselves.”
“How?”
“Buy ’em.”
“How do they get the money?”
“Earn it.”
“How?”
“By their own work. I tell you my niggers have got more money ’n I hev.”
“What kind of books do they get?”
“Religious kind a books ginerally—these stories; and some of them will buy
novels, I believe. They won’t let on to that, but I expect they do it.”
They bought them of peddlers. I inquired about the law to prevent negroes
reading, and asked if it allowed books to be sold to negroes. He had never
heard of any such law—didn’t believe there was any. The Yazoo man said
there was such a law in his country. Negroes never had anything to read
there. I asked our host if his negroes were religious, as their choice of works
would have indicated.
“Yes; all on ’em, I reckon. Don’t s’pose you’ll believe it, but I tell you it’s a
fact; I haint heerd a swear on this place for a twelvemonth. They keep the
Lord’s day, too, right tight, in gineral.”
“Our niggers is mighty wicked down in Yallerbush county,” said my
companion; “they dance.”
“Dance on Sunday?” I asked.
“Oh, no, we don’t allow that.”
“What do they do, then—go to meeting?”
“Why, Sundays they sleep mostly; they’ve been at work hard all the week,
you know, and Sundays they stay in their cabins, and sleep and talk to each
other. There’s so many of ’em together, they don’t want to go visiting off the
place.”
“Are your negroes Baptists or Methodists?” I inquired of our host.
“All Baptists; niggers allers want to be ducked, you know. They ain’t content
to be just titch’d with water; they must be ducked in all over. There was two
niggers jined the Methodists up here last summer, and they made the
minister put ’em into the branch; they wouldn’t jine ’less he’d duck ’em.”
“The Bible says baptize, too,” observed Yazoo.
“Well, they think they must be ducked all under, or ’tain’t no good.”
“Do they go to meeting?”
“Yes, they hev a meeting among themselves.”
“And a preacher?”
“Yes; a nigger preacher.”
“Our niggers is mighty wicked; they dance!” repeated Yazoo.
“Do you consider dancing so very wicked, then?” I asked.
“Well, I don’t account so myself, as I know on, but they do, you know—the
pious people, all kinds, except the ’Piscopers; some o’ them, they do dance
themselves, I believe.”
“Do you dance in your country?”
“Yes.”
“What sort of dances—cotillions and reels?”
“Yes; what do you?”
“Well, we dance cotillions and reels too, and we dance on a plank; that’s the
kind of dancin’ I like best.”
“How is it done?”
“Why, don’t you know that? You stand face to face with your partner on a
plank and keep a dancin’. Put the plank up on two barrel heads, so it’ll kind o’
spring. At some of our parties—that’s among common kind o’ people, you
know—it’s great fun. They dance as fast as they can, and the folks all stand
round and holler, ‘Keep it up, John!’ ‘Go it, Nance!’ ‘Don’t give it up so!’ ‘Old
Virginny never tire!’ ‘Heel and toe, ketch a fire!’ and such kind of
observations, and clap and stamp ’em.”
“Do your negroes dance much?”
“Yes, they are mighty fond on’t. Saturday night they dance all night, and
Sunday nights too. Daytime they sleep and rest themselves, and Sunday
nights we let ’em dance and sing if they want. It does ’em good, you know, to
enjoy theirselves.”
“They dance to the banjo, I suppose?”
“Banjos and violins; some of ’em has got violins.”
“I like to hear negroes sing,” said I.
“Niggers is allers good singers nat’rally,” said our host. “I reckon they got
better lungs than white folks, they hev such powerful voices.”
We were sitting at this time on the rail fence at the corner of a hog-pen and a
large half-cleared field. In that part of this field nearest the house, among the
old stumps, twenty or thirty small fruit trees had been planted. I asked what
sorts they were.
“I don’t know—good kinds tho’, I expect; I bought ’em for that at any rate.”
“Where did you buy them?”
“I bought ’em of a feller that came a peddlin’ round here last fall; he said I’d
find ’em good.”
“What did you pay for them?”
“A bit apiece.”
“That’s very cheap, if they’re good for anything; you are sure they’re grafted,
arn’t you?”
“Only by what he said—he said they was grafted kinds. I’ve got a paper in the
housen he gin me, tells about ’em; leastways, he said it did. They’s the
curosest kinds of trees printed into it you ever heerd on. But I did not buy
none, only the fruit kinds.”
Getting off the fence I began to pick about the roots of one of them with my
pocket-knife. After exposing the trunk for five or six inches below the surface,
I said, “You’ve planted these too deep, if they’re all like this. You should have
the ground dished about it or it won’t grow.” I tried another, and after picking
some minutes without finding any signs of the “collar,” I asked if they had all
been planted so deeply.
“I don’t know—I told the boys to put ’em in about two feet, and I expect they
did, for they fancied to have apple-trees growin’.”
The catalogue of the tree-peddler, which afterwards came into my possession,
quite justified the opinion my host expressed of the kinds of trees described
in it. The reader shall judge for himself, and I assure him that the following is
a literal transcript of it, omitting the sections headed “Ancebus new,”
“Camelias,” “Rhododendrums,” “Bubbs Pæony,” “Rosiers,” “Wind’s flowers of
the greatest scarcity,” “Bulbous Roots, and of various kinds of graines.”
SPECIAL CATALOGUE
OF THE PLANTS, FLOWERS, SHRUBS IMPORTED BY
ROUSSET
MEMBER OF SEVERAL SOCIETIES.
At Paris (France), boulevard of Hopital, and at Chambery,
faubourg de Mache.

Mr Rousset beg to inform they are arrived in this town,

with a large assortment of the most rare vegetable
plants, either flowerd on fruit bearer, onion bulbous,
seeds, &c., &c. Price very moderate.
Their store is situated

CHOIX D’ARBRES A FRUIT.

Choice of Fruit Trees.
 Pear Trees.
1 Good Louisa from Avranche.
2 Winter’s Perfume.
3 Saint-John-in-Iron.
4 Leon-the-Clerc.
5 Bergamot from England.
6 Duchess of Angoulême.
7 Goulu-Morceau.
8 Tarquin Pear.
9 Summer’s Good (large)
Christian.
10 Good Turkisk Christian.
11 Grey (large) Beurré.
12 Royal Beurré from England.

1 Bon-Chrétien d’été.
2 —— d’hiver.
3 —— de Pâque.
4 Doyenné blanc.
5 Duchesse d’Angora-New.
6 Belle Angevine, fondante.
7 Crassane d’hiver.
8 Louise d’Orleans, sucré.
9 Double fleur hâtif.
10 Angélique de Tour.

1 Borgamotte de Milan, Gros.

2 —— d’Aiençon, très-gros.
3 Beurrê gris d’hiver.
4 —— Amanlis.
5 —— d’Hardenpont, précoce.
6 Fortunè, fondant.
7 Josephine, chair fine.
8 Martin-sec, sucrè.
9 Messire, gris.
10 Muscat d’etè.
11 Doyenné d’automne.
12 —— d’hiver, sucré.
13 Virgouleuse fondonte.
14 B L tt
 14 Bezy-Lamotte.
The Perpetual Rapsberry Tree, imported from Indies producing a
15 Gros-Blanquet.
fruit large as an egg, taste delicious 3 kinds, red, violet and
white. apples.
1 Renetto of Spain.
The Rapsberry Tree 2 ——from Fastolff, red fruit, very good of an
Green.
extraordinary size, 3very
Applehearty
Coin.forward plant.
4 —— Friette.
Cherry Currant Tree , withwhite,
5 Calville, largewinter’s
bunches,
fruit. it has a great
production. Its numerous
6 —— red,and long bunches
autumn’s fruit. cover entirely the
old wood and looks7 —— likered,
grapes; the fruit.
winter’s fruit of a cherry pink colour
is very large and8ofViolet
the best
or ofquality.
the Four-Taste.
9 Renette from England, or Gold-
Asparagus from Africa, Apple.new kinds, good to eat the same year of
their planting (seeds of twoRenette,
10 Golded years). 1000 varieties of annual and
a yellow
perpetual flower’s grains also ofplant.
backward kitchen garden grains.
11 White—of a great perfume.
PAULNOVIA INPERIALIS. Magnificent
12 Renette, hardyfruit.
red, winter’s plant from 12 to 15
yards of higth: its leave come to the size of 75 to 80 centimeter
and its fine and1 larg flowers
Renette, of aheavy
yellow, fine fruit.
blue, gives when the
spring comes, a 2 soft
—— and agréable
grey, perfume.
very delicate.
Besides these plants 3 —— Princess noble.
the amateur will find at M. Rousset, stores, a
4 Apple d’Api.
great number of other Plants and Fruit Trees of which would be to
long to describe. 5 —— d’Eve.
6 Winter’s Postophe.
7 Plein gney NOTICE.
fenouillet.
The admirable and8 strange
Renette plant
franc. called Trompette du Jugement
9 —— of of
(The Judgment Trompette) St.that
Laurent.
name having not yet found its
classification. 10 Sammers Numbourg.
11 Belle du Havre.
This marvellous plant was Hollandaise.
12 Belle send to us from China by the cleuer
and courageous botanist collector M. Fortune, from l’Himalaya,
near summet of the1 Chamalari
Violet Apple Macon.
or of the 4 taste;
the fruit
This splendid plant deserves themay
first be preserved
rank among all2 kinds of plant
years.has produce till now in spite of all the
which the botanical science
new discoveries. 2 Princess Renette, of a gold
yellow, spotted with red of a
This bulbous plant gives several stems on the same subject. It
delicious taste.
grows to the height of 6 feet. It is furnished with flowers from
3 White Renette from Canada, of
bottom to top. The bud looks by his from like a big cannon ball of
which the skin is lite scales
a heavenly blue. The center is of an aurora yellewish colour. The
strange by its size.
vegetation of that plant is to fouitfull that when it is near to
4 The Cythère Apple
 4 The Cythère Apple.
blossom it gives a great heat when tassing it in hand and when
5 The Caynoite Apple.
the bud opens it produces a naite Similar to a pistole shot.
6 Apple Trees with double
Immediately the vegetation takes fire and burns like alcohol about
flowers. Blooms twice a year,
an hour and a half. The flowers succeeding one to the other gives
Camélia’s flowers like.
the satisfaction of having flowers during 7 or 8 months.
106 others kinds of Apples of the
The most intense cold can choice.
newest not hurt this plant and can be
culvivated in pots, in appartments or gpeen houses.
Apricots.
Wa call the public attention to this
1 The Ladie’s plant as a great curiosity.
Apricots.
2 The Peack Apricots.
3 The Royal Apricots.
4 The Gros Muscg Apricots.
Havre—Printed by F. 5 The
HUE,Pourret
rue deApricots.
Paris, 89.
6 Portugal Apricots.
7 Apricats monstruous from
“But come,” said the farmer,America,
“go in;oftake
a gold yellow,
a drink. of
Breakfast’ll be ready right
smart.” an enormous size, and of
the pine’s apple taste.
“I don’t want to drink before breakfast, thank you.”
Peach
“Why not?” Trees.
“I’m not accustomed to1 it,
Peach
and IGrosse Mignonne.
don’t find it’s wholesome.”
2 —— Bello Beauty.
Not wholesome to drink before breakfast! That was “a new kink” to our jolly
3 —— Godess.
host, and troubled him as much as a new “ism” would an old fogy. Not
4 —— Beauty of Paris.
wholesome? He had always reckoned it warn’t very wholesome not to drink
5 —— From Naples! said without
before breakfast. He did not expect I had seen a great many healthier men
stone.
than he was, had I? and he always took a drink before breakfast. If a man
6 Brugnon, musc taste.
just kept himself well strung up, without ever stretching himself right tight, he
7 Admirable; Belle of Vitry.
didn’t reckon damps or heat would ever do him much harm. He had never
8 The Large Royal.
had a sick day since he came to this place, and he reckoned that this was
9 Monstruous Pavie.
owin’ considerable to the good rye whisky he took. It was a healthy trac’ of
10 The Cardinal, very forward.
land, though, he believed, a mighty healthy trac’; everything seemed to thrive
11 Good Workman.
here. We must see a nigger-gal that he was raisin’; she was just coming five,
12 Lètitia Bonaparte.
and would pull up nigh upon a hundred weight.
13 The Prince’s Peach, melting in
“Two year ago,” he continued,
the mouth.
after taking his dram, as we sat by the fire in
the north room, “when14I The
had Prince’s
a carpenter
Peachhere
fromto finish off this house, I told
one of my boys he must come Africa,inwith
andlarge
helpwhite
him. fruit,
I reckoned he would larn
quick, if he was a mind to.weighing
So he come
pound in,and
andhalf
a week arterwards he fitted
the plank and laid this floor,
each;
and nearly,
now younewjustkind.
look at it; I don’t believe any
50 others new kinds of Peach
 50 ot e s e ds o eac
man could do it better. That Trees.was two year ago, and now he’s as good a
carpenter as you ever see. I bought him some tools after the carpenter left,
and he can do anything with ’em—make a Ptable lum Trees.
or a chest of drawers or
1 Plum Lamorte.
anything. I think niggers is somehow nat’rally ingenious; more so ’n white
folks. They is wonderful2 apt
Surpasse
to anyMonsieur.
kind of slight.”
3 Damas with musc taste.
I took out my pocket-map, and of
4 Royale while studying it, asked Yazoo some questions
Tonrs.
about the route East. 5 Not having
Green yet of
Gage, studied
a violetgeography,
colour. as he observed, he
could not answer. Our6 hostLargeinquired
Mirabelle.where I was going, that way. I said I
should go on to Carolina.
7 Green gage, golded.
“Expect you’re going to 8 Imperial, of a violetincolour.
buy a rice-farm, the Carolinies, aint you? and I
9 Empress, of a white colour.
reckon you’re up here speckylating arter nigger stock, aint you now?”
10 Ste-Catherine, zellow, suger
“Well,” said I, “I wouldn’t mind
tastegetting
like. that fat girl of yours, if we can made a
trade. How much a pound will you sell her at?”
Cherry
“We don’t sell niggers by the pound in this country.” Trees.
“Well, how much by the 1 lump?”
Cherry from the North.
2 —— Royal, gives from 18 to 20
“Well, I don’t know; reckon I don’t keer about sellin’ her just yet.”
cherries weighing one
After breakfast, I inquired pound,
about the management
4 differentes of the farm. He said that
kinds.
he purchased negroes,3 as he was
Cherry Reina able, from time to time. He grew rich by
Hortense.
the improved saleable 4value
—— of his land, arising in part from their labour, and
Montmorency.
from their natural increase
5 —— and with improvement,
thort stalk (Gros-for he bought only such as
would be likely to increaseGobet).
in value on his hands. He had been obliged to
spend but little money,6 being
—— Leable to live and provide most of the food and
Mercier.
clothing for his family and
7 —— hisFour
people,
for abypound.
the production of his farm. He made
a little cotton, which he had to Beauty
8 Cherry send some distance to be ginned and baled,
of Choicy.
and then waggoned it9 seventy
—— Themiles to a market; also raised some wheat,
English.
which he turned into 10 flour at a neighbouring mill, and sent to the same
Cherry-Duck.
market. This transfer engaged much of
11 —— Creole thebunches.
with winter labour of his man-slaves.
12 —— Bigarrot or monster of
I said that I supposed the Memphis and Charleston railroad, as it progressed
new Mézel.
east, would shorten the distance to which it would be necessary to draw his
cotton, and so be of much service to him. He Currant
did not know that. He did not
know as he should ever use it. He expected they would
Trees. charge pretty high for
carrying cotton, and his
1 Currant
niggers Three
hadn’twith
any red
thing else to do. It did not really
cost him anything now to send
bunches
it to(grapes).
Memphis, because he had to board the
niggers and the cattle anyhow,
2 —— withandwhite
theybunches.
did not want much more on the road
than they did at home.3 Gooseberries of 1st choice
(Raspberries) six kinds of
alégery.
He made a large crop 4ofNew kind
corn, of currants,
which, of was
however, whichmainly consumed by his
the grapes are as big as the
own force, and he killed annually about one hundred and fifty hogs, the
wine grapes.
bacon of which was all consumed in his own family and by his people, or sold
to passing travellers. In the fall, a great many
Grapes drovers and slave-dealers
passed over the road with their stock, and theyWfrequently
ines. camped against
this house, so as to buy
1 corn and bacon
Chasselas of him. This they cooked themselves.
of Fontainebleau,
There were sometimes twowith large gold
hundred grains.
negroes brought along together, going
South. He didn’t always 2 Chasselas,
have baconblack very good.
to spare for them, though he killed one
hundred and fifty swine.3 ——Theyred,
wereof musc teste.bad characters, and had been
generally
sold for fault by their 4owners.
Verdal, Some
the sweetest and finest
of the slave-dealers were high-minded,
honourable men, he thought; fruit“high-toned
for desert. gentlemen, as ever he saw, some
of ’em, was.” 5 White Muscadine grape, or of
Frontignan.
Niggers were great eaters, and of
6 Muscat wanted more musc
Alexandrie, meat than white folks; and he
always gave his as much as they wanted, and more too. The negro cook
taste.
always got dinner for 7them, and took
Cornichon, what
white, sweetshesugar
liked for it; his wife didn’t
know much about it. She got as much as she liked, and he guessed she didn’t
like, very good.
spare it. When the field-hands were anywhere within a reasonable distance,
8 Tokay, red and white.
they always came up to the house
9 Verjus from to get theirlarge
Bordeaux, dinner. If they were going to
work a great way off, they would carry their dinner with them. They did as
yellow fruit.
they liked about it. When they hadn’t
10 St. Peter taken
large andtheir dinner, the cook called them
fine fruit.
at twelve o’clock with a conch. They ate in the kitchen, and he had the same
11 Red Muscadine Graper.
dinner that they did, right out of
12 Raisin the same frying-pan; it was all the same,
of Malaga.
only they ate in the kitchen, and he ate in the room we were in, with the door
13 The Celestial Wine Tree, or
open between them.
the amphibious grain,
I brought up the subject ofweighing
the costtwo of ounces, the and South. He had no
labour, North
apprehension that there wouldgrain ever
of a red and want
be any violet of labourers at the South,
and could not understandcolour.that the ruling price indicated the state of the
demand for them. He thought negroes wouldNew increase more rapidly than the
need for their labour. “Niggers,” said he, “breedStrawb faster than white folks, a
’mazin’ sight, you know; they begin younger.” erry
“How young do they begin?” Plants.
1 The Strawberry Cremont.
“Sometimes at fourteen, sometimes at sixteen, and sometimes at eighteen.”
2 —— the Queen.
“Do you let them marry so young
3 —— as that?”
monster, I inquired. He laughed, and said,
new kind.
“They don’t very often 4wait
——tofrom
be married.”
Chili.
“When they marry, do 5 Caperon
they have aofminister
a raspberry taste.them?”
to marry
6 Scarlat from Venose, very
“Yes, generally one of their forward
own preachers.”
plant.
7 Prince Albert, fruit of very great
 , yg
“Do they with you?” I inquired of Yazoo.
beauty.
8 Grinston
“Yes, sometimes they hev a whitecolalant,
minister,very
and large.
sometimes a black one, and if
9 Rose-Berry, big fruit and
there arn’t neither handy, they get some of the pious of a ones to marry ’em. But
longcome
then very often they only just form.and ask our consent, and then go ahead,
10 Bath cherry,
without any more ceremony. They justverycall
good.
themselves married. But most
11 The Big Chinese Strawberry,
niggers likes a ceremony, you know, and they generally make out to hev one
somehow. They don’t very weighing
often get 16 to a pound,
married for good, though, without trying
each other, as they say, for two or three weeks, round,
produce fruit all year to see how they are going to
like each other.” of the pine apple’s taste.
12 Vilmoth full.
I afterwards asked how far it was to the post-office. It was six miles. “One of
my boys,” said our host, “always gets the paper New every
Fig week. He goes to visit
his wife, and passes by the post-office every Sunday. TreesOur paper hain’t come,
of a
though, now, for three weeks. The mail don’t come very regular.” All of his
M onst
negroes, who had wives off the place, left an hour before sunset on Saturday
evening. One of them, who had a wife twentyruous miles away, left at twelve
o’clock Saturday, and got back at twelve o’clock Monday. Size.
1 Diodena white, of a large size.
“We had a nigger once,” said Yazoo,
2 Duchess “that had
of Maroc, greena wife
fruit.fifteen miles away, and
he used to do so; but3he did some rascality
Donne-à-Dieu, once, and he was afraid to go
blue fruit.
again. He told us his wife
4 Lawas so far off,yellow
Sanspareille, ’twas fruit.
too much trouble to go there,
and he believed he’d give her up. We was glad of it. He was a darned rascally
nigger—allers getting into scrapes. One time we sent him to mill, and he went
round into town and sold some of the meal. The storekeeper wouldn’t pay
him for’t, ’cause he hadn’t got an order. The next time we were in town, the
storekeeper just showed us the bag of meal; said he reckoned ’twas stole; so
when we got home we just tied him up to the tree and licked him. He’s a
right smart nigger; rascally niggers allers is smart. I’d rather have a rascally
nigger than any other—they’s so smart allers. He is about the best nigger
we’ve got.”
“I have heard,” said I, “that religious negroes were generally the most
valuable. I have been told that a third more would be given for a man if he
were religious.” “Well, I never heerd of it before,” said he. Our host thought
there was no difference in the market value of sinners and saints.
“Only,” observed Yazoo, “the rascalier a nigger is, the better he’ll work. Now
that yer nigger I was tellin’ you on, he’s worth more’n any other nigger we’ve
got. He’s a yaller nigger.”
I asked their opinion as to the comparative value of black and yellow negroes.
Our host had two bright mulatto boys among his—didn’t think there was
much difference, “but allers reckoned yellow fellows was the best a little; they
worked smarter. He would rather have them.” Yazoo would not; he “didn’t
think but what they’d work as well; but he didn’t fancy yellow negroes ’round
him; would rather have real black ones.”
I asked our host if he had no foreman or driver for his negroes, or if he gave
his directions to one of them in particular for all the rest. He did not. They all
did just as they pleased, and arranged the work among themselves. They
never needed driving.
“If I ever notice one of ’em getting a little slack, I just talk to him; tell him we
must get out of the grass, and I want to hev him stir himself a little more,
and then, maybe, I slip a dollar into his hand, and when he gits into the field
he’ll go ahead, and the rest seeing him, won’t let themselves be distanced by
him. My niggers never want no lookin’ arter. They tek more interest in the
crop than I do myself, every one of ’em.”
Religious, instructed, and seeking further enlightenment; industrious,
energetic, and self directing; well fed, respected, and trusted by their master,
and this master an illiterate, indolent, and careless man! A very different state
of things, this, from what I saw on a certain great cotton planter’s estate,
where a profit of $100,000 was made in a single year, but where five hundred
negroes were constantly kept under the whip, where religion was only a pow-
wow or cloak for immorality, and where the negro was considered to be of an
inferior race, especially designed by Providence to be kept in the position he
there occupied! A very different thing; and strongly suggesting what a very
different thing this negro servitude might be made in general, were the ruling
disposition of the South more just and sensible.
About half-past eleven, a stage coach, which had come earlier in the morning
from the East, and had gone on as far as the brook, returned, having had our
luggage transferred to it from the one we had left on the other side. In the
transfer a portion of mine was omitted and never recovered. Up to this time
our host had not paid the smallest attention to any work his men were doing,
or even looked to see if they had fed the cattle, but had lounged about,
sitting upon a fence, chewing tobacco, and talking with us, evidently very
glad to have somebody to converse with. He went in once again, after a
drink; showed us the bacon he had in his smoke-house, and told a good
many stories of his experience in life, about a white man’s “dying hard” in the
neighbourhood, and of a tree falling on a team with which one of his negroes
was ploughing cotton, “which was lucky”—that is, that it did not kill the negro
—and a good deal about “hunting” when he was younger and lighter.
Still absurdly influenced by an old idea which I had brought to the South with
me, I waited, after the coach came in sight, for Yazoo to put the question,
which he presently did, boldly enough.
“Well; reckon we’re goin’ now. What’s the damage?”
“Well; reckon seventy-five cents’ll be right.”
 CHAPTER III.
THE INTERIOR COTTON DISTRICTS—CENTRAL
MISSISSIPPI, ALABAMA, ETC.

Central Mississippi, May 31st.—Yesterday was a raw, cold day, wind

north-east, like a dry north-east storm at home. Fortunately I came
to the pleasantest house and household I had seen for some time.
The proprietor was a native of Maryland, and had travelled in the
North; a devout Methodist, and somewhat educated. He first came
South, as I understood, for the benefit of his health, his lungs being
weak.
His first dwelling, a rude log cabin, was still standing, and was
occupied by some of his slaves. The new house, a cottage,
consisting of four rooms and a hall, stood in a small grove of oaks;
the family were quiet, kind, and sensible.
When I arrived, the oldest boy was at work, holding a plough in the
cotton-field, but he left it and came at once, with confident and
affable courtesy, to entertain me.
My host had been in Texas, and after exploring it quite thoroughly,
concluded that he much preferred to remain where he was. He
found no part of that country where good land, timber, and a healthy
climate were combined: in the West he did not like the vicinage of
the Germans and Mexicans; moreover, he didn’t “fancy” a prairie
county. Here, in favourable years, he got a bale of cotton to the
acre. Not so much now as formerly. Still, he said, the soil would be
good enough for him here, for many years to come.
I went five times to the stable without being able to find a servant
there. I was always told that “the boy” would feed my horse, and
take good care of him, when he came; and so at length I had to go
to bed, trusting to this assurance. I went out just before breakfast
next morning, and found the horse with only ten dry cobs in the
manger. I searched for the boy; could not find him, but was told that
my horse had been fed. I said, “I wish to have him fed more—as
much as he will eat.” Very well, the boy should give him more. When
I went out after breakfast the boy was leading out the horse. I
asked if he had given him corn this morning.
“Oh yes, sir.”
“How many ears did you give him?”
“Ten or fifteen—or sixteen, sir; he eats very hearty.”
I went into the stable and saw that he had not been fed; there were
the same ten cobs (dry) in the manger. I doubted, indeed, from their
appearance, if the boy had fed him at all the night before. I fed him
with leaves myself, but could not get into the corn crib. The
proprietor was, I do not doubt, perfectly honest, but the negro had
probably stolen the corn for his own hogs and fowls.
The next day I rode more than thirty miles, having secured a good
feed of corn for the horse at midday. At nightfall I was much
fatigued, but had as yet failed to get lodging. It began to rain, and
grew dark, and I kept the road with difficulty. About nine o’clock I
came to a large, comfortable house.
An old lady sat in the verandah, of whom I asked if I could be
accommodated for the night: “Reckon so,” she replied: then after a
few moments’ reflection, without rising from her chair she shouted,
“Gal!—gal!” Presently a girl came.
“Missis?”
“Call Tom!”
The girl went off, while I remained, waiting for a more definite
answer. At length she returned: “Tom ain’t there, missis.”
“Who is there?”
“Old Pete,”