Corps Perdu: Une saison au Congo and Aimé Césaire's Theory of Tragedy

Abstract

This article engages, through a close reading of the play Une saison au Congo, Aimé Césaire's dramatic tragedies. I argue that Césaire did not write tragedies simply to mourn the failure of anticolonialism or to reject teleological accounts of freedom. Rather, through tragedy, Césaire inaugurates a form of philosophical investigation that recovers lost revolutionary figures and forms of resistance as what he called “poetic knowledge.” Dissolving the psychoanalytic divide between mourning and melancholia, Césaire, like Walter Benjamin, conceives of melancholy as a philosophical mood, one that facilitates a descent into loss. It is only such a descent that makes discernible and presentable the point at which the human becomes “veritably cosmic.” Resurrecting the disappeared Patrice Lumumba at this “cosmic” scale, Césaire brings to life the sights and sounds of the play between two decolonizations: one, a legally circumscribed process of national independence and, the other, an artistic critique and practice of resistance.