Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris (1970)

it was, in a sense, all for you.

in the language of colonialism, to document means to seize. and in Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris (1970) what is documented is the impotency of this very language; to put it very bluntly: there is something the filmmakers do not know because they cannot see it. Baldwin never speaks of this contradiction as much as he speaks the contradiction: he makes a vacancy sensible. when he’s asked about being a revolutionary he prefers to define himself as somebody in a revolutionary situation. the difference appears small but its logical consequences are enormous: a revolutionary is fundamentally a free subject, whose own freedom, whose own subjectivity, is realized precisely in the moment of their revolutionising — a non-subject, like Baldwin, someone who’s in a position “in which everyone in the world... can claim [him] and has the right to claim [him]” cannot aspire to this freedom. to find oneself in a revolutionary situation means not to seek freedom, but a way out, to quote Kafka. the logic of capital shatters the moment this unfreedom speaks for itself.