AIME CÉSAIRE, WRITING THE (NON) HUMAN AND THE ONTOLOGICO-EXISTENTIAL SCANDAL

Aimé Césaire scandalised the question of the human subject by exposing the deceit and hypocrisy of the idea of Europe and its myth of civilisation. The question of the human is foundational and constitutive in Césaire’s subjectivity, which originates from the site of the dehumanised and also railing against all forms of dehumanisation that plagued the colonised subject. The human is interrogated here in the light of the distance and proximity to the non-human. It is from the positionality of being non-human that Césaire opposes faux humanism, which presents a scandal and it having a tendency of preaching humanism while engaging in dehumanisation. In order for there to be the insurrection of the colonised subject to become human, Césaire’s conception of ‘the return’ is re-engaged from the standpoint of Negritude as decolonial humanism and reconceptualising it in its complexity. This then serves as the launching pad to imagine the possibility of the emergence of another humanity coming into being through the end of the modern colonial world – the decolonised world.