This dissertation focuses on the intellectual history of a particular strand of European-Martiniquais political and philosophical writing on guilt between 1927 and 2007, combining archival work with intellectual historical analysis to reconceive the thinking of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Frantz Fanon, and Édouard Glissant. More specifically, I consider guilt and moral responsibility, using archival research to trace the unusual lineage of writing on moral responsibility that has lain unexamined in their work, and to undo scholarly misconceptions concerning their ethical and political theory. More broadly, my work suggests that in historically tracing this account of guilt and moral responsibility from Heidegger to Glissant, we might conceive a more grounded understanding of the relation of guilt to moral responsibility, in ways that allow us to rethink the moral illogic of certain democratic institutions, in particular certain Western penal structures.

The first chapter offers an analysis of Heidegger, attempting via his engagement with Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse to rethink the nature of guilt, and the assumption that moral responsibility and guilt are intrinsically intertwined. By tracing Adorno’s historically shaped position on guilt and its self-conscious relation to Heidegger, employing such sources as Adorno’s unpublished ‘Probleme’ lectures and notes on Beckett, Heidegger’s marginalia, and Marcuse and Heidegger’s postwar letters, this section reexamines the nature of guilt as it stood in German debates of the 1920s through the 1960s. The dissertation then moves to a chapter on the reception in France of Heidegger’s understanding of guilt between 1940 and 1961, centering on Merleau-Ponty’s late adaptation of Heideggerian ontology. Engaging with such sources as Merleau-Ponty’s manuscripts and schemata for his final, unfinished work, The Visible and the Invisible, and his notes from courses in the 1950s, this section suggests a particular understanding of moral ontogenesis that has not been read in Merleau-Ponty’s late work on nothingness and the inhuman. In the last two chapters, the dissertation then turns to more recent interpretations of this strand of thinking on guilt in Martinique, Algeria, and the U.S. in the work of Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant. Analyzing such sources as Fanon’s library and marginalia, his coursework with Merleau-Ponty at the University of Lyon, and his ‘Society and Psychiatry’ lectures at the University of Tunis, as well as Glissant’s personal writings on both Heidegger and Fanon, I attempt to show the ways in which Fanon’s and Glissant’s accounts of criminality and their indirect ethical understandings of guilt torque Heidegger’s work, offering a more grounded understanding of the relation of guilt to moral responsibility. In a final section I suggest that this understanding might help us restructure the moral logic that underlies Western penal structures, and their self-subversive relation to guilt.