Abstract
If early Caribbean philosophy is characterized by its pan-African flourishes, what is less well known is its flirtations with existentialism. Although C.L.R. James’s 1965 Heideggerian reading of Wilson Harris’s novel Palace of the Peacock and his 1966 lecture “Existentialism and Marxism” are cited in books on both James and Harris, oddly, there has been no substantial reading of Heidegger’s own philosophy along with Palace of the Peacock, or, of James’s misreading of Heidegger’s technical term Dasein. In this article, I attempt that reading, while revealing a link between Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, through existentialism, to Harris’s work and thought. Harris’s novel offers a radical critique of colonial racism through a re-working of Spinoza’s metaphysics of Substance, and subsequently, although he only started the task, C.L.R. James’s odd articulation of Harris with Heidegger is acute, notwithstanding existentialism’s fall from fashion.
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