How we answer these questions speaks to our ongoing attempts to locate and articulate life's significance. For example, in Roe v. Wade the Court utilized what, at the time, was deemed cutting-edge science to argue abortion could not take place after fetal viability, defined as the "interim point at which the fetus becomes ... potentially able to live outside the mother's womb, albeit with artificial aid." To reach their controversial decision, the Court balanced decades of case law against two ill-paired strands: belief in a definite, biological delineation of life functions as those that oppose death and a critical cultural belief that life itself is something vital beyond scientific measure.

 

This dual-sided approach is not new. Though we currently operate under the aegis of biological rationalization, vitalism--the doctrine that phenomena are only partly controlled by mechanical forces--is quite often deployed as biology's counter. Élan vital, the "vital impetus," was a major part of French philosopher and Nobel laureate Henri Bergson's intellectual project. First appearing in his 1907 Creative Evolution, Bergson defines Élan vital as the source of causation and evolution in nature. This concept's introduction could not have been more timely; in the decade following Creative Evolution's publication, the Great War produced heretofore unimaginable slaughter. Western civilization was taxed with the cartwheeling task of justifying mass killings while simultaneously articulating life's value. Responses were, as we well know, far from unified. Fascist reactions to the First World War made monetary abstraction the opposite of an Aryan creative life force; artists and thinkers became increasingly obsessed with the caged intensity of battlefield experience, privileging it contra lives lived in cities and towns, and politicians heaped value upon narrowly defined markers of national health and national identity. Within all of these responses, one finds attempts to delineate worthwhile lives from those that lack merit.

 

This month's Berkeley Books selection, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity, by Assistant Professor of English Donna V. Jones, probes the oftentimes incongruous ends vitalism and Bergson's vital impetus have been pressed to support. Blending insightful work in critical theory with rigorous analyses of autobiographical writings by major figures in the Négritude movement, Jones offers the reader an invigorating, meticulously argued mapping of the the parallels and disjoints that occur when a discursive mantle employed by European ethnic nationalists is colonized by an ethnic other. In tracing these junctures, Jones reanimates the logic and possibilities of "mnemic vitalism:" the project of actively recovering and articulating cultural inheritance in a world hostile to such acts and articulations. Through close comparative readings of Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor, Jones shows two very different paths vitalism has taken in twentieth-century black thought.

 

Mark Antliff, Professor and Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University, writes: "Jones's book reveals how race discourses in interwar Europe was appropriated by anticolonialists in order to position Négritude as the regenerative counterpart to a moribund Europe...This is a remarkable achievement."

 

At Berkeley, Professor Jones serves as Core Faculty for the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory and the Science, Technology and Society Center. She is also affiliated with Gender and Women's Studies. She has published numerous articles and delivered many talks on Bergson, colonialism, and biopolitics. She is currently working on a new project entitled The Ambiguous Promise of European Decline: Race and Historical Pessimism in the Era of the Great War.

 

Visit the Biblio-file to view books that shaped Professor Jones' thinking while working on The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy.