4       Abstract Commodity Form and Bare Life

In this chapter I diagnose the violence inflicted on women’s bodies by the abstract formalism operating in political and social life. I argue that the problem of abstraction in political life (the forms of citizenship and sovereignty) finds its correlative in economic violence in civil society (the relations of production and exchange). I develop this argument through the juxtaposition of different paradigms of power that have not yet been thought together: the commodification of female bodies, the damage of enslavement, and the biopolitics of sovereignty. More specifically, I focus on Irigaray’s analysis of the commodification of women’s bodies, Hortense Spillers’s and Orlando Patterson’s discussion of slavery, and Agamben’s theory of bare life. Why do we need to think these heterogeneous paradigms of power together? What the commodification of bodies, enslavement, and the biopolitics of bare life have in common is the possibility of violently severing collective forms from the remnants of materiality, which becomes the target of different kinds of violence. On the one hand, the biopolitics of bare life confronts us with the damaged body stripped from its cultural signification, with the abject body separated from symbolic and political forms of life, expelled beyond the realm of the possible, and exposed to violence that does not count as crime. Yet if bare life can be so violently stripped from its form of life—from the protection of rights, cultural genealogy, and values—this means that the modern political forms of citizenship and human rights are separable from life/embodiment. This separation/destitution does not only concern the exceptional case of bare life but all politically invested bodies. It is precisely this total separation of form/value from the materiality of the objectified body that comes into view in another, apparently competing paradigm of modernity, that is, in the production and exchange of commodified bodies. It is the commodity form that reveals the abstract determination of the form of value in total separation from the particularity of the object, that is, its materiality, and shows the erasure of all traces of nonidentity, otherness, and materiality. Consequently, I argue that the feminized commodity form mirrors not only the reified relations of exchange but also the violent division in the structure of citizenship, namely, the split between bare life and abstract human rights.¹ This is especially the case in the instance of enslavement, where the violent commodification of human bodies and their expulsion from political status—what Orlando Patterson calls social death—coincide. Although ignored by Irigaray’s discussion of commodification and Agamben’s notion of bare life, enslaved bodies reveal a disastrous intertwining of the violence directed at bare life and the violence of commodification directed at bodies and nature.

On the Abstraction of Commodity Form

I begin my diagnosis of the violent schism between abstract forms and damaged materialities in Western modernity by focusing on Irigaray’s reading of Marx’s theory of commodity in Capital. In her classical essay “Women on the Market” in This Sex Which is Not One, Irigaray discusses the extreme abstraction and violence of commodity form structuring the conception of gendered bodies in the family and civil society.² Irigaray’s critique of violence and the formalism of value has been missed by most of her feminist interpreters because she has been read through the lens of the protracted debate in feminist theory between essentialism (false immediacy) and social construction (sociopolitical process of mediation).³ However, as I have suggested elsewhere, the essentialism/antiessentialism opposition fails to address the violence of political formalism because it itself reproduces the same problem.

By reinterpreting Irigaray’s reading of Marx, I argue that the dichotomy of essentialism and social construction arises out of the double and antithetical form of the commodity manifesting itself as exchange value and use value, together with all the oppositions underlying this structure: materiality and form, the natural and the social, the passivity of matter and the activity of production/construction. At stake here is the split between the abstraction of the commodity form, which determines the value of commodified objects and bodies in total separation from their specificity and materiality, and the concomitant reduction of the nonsublated remnants of materiality to mere waste or markers of social death. This schism between the abstraction of social values and nonsymbolizable material refuse is itself a source of social injustice that is inscribed in modern conceptions of racial and sexual differences. Thus, in order to contest this injustice, feminist theory has to not only expose and contest the obscured mechanisms of power and the normalization of bodies but also criticize the economic abstraction of form as the often invisible source of bodily injury.

Irigaray argues that in Marx’s theory of commodity form “the commodity, like the sign, suffers from metaphysical dichotomies. … A commodity—a woman—is divided into two irreconcilable ‘bodies’: her ‘natural’ body and her socially valued, exchangeable body.”⁴ Consistently associated with the “physical body,”⁵ substance and coarse materiality, “natural” form constitutes the use value of the object, whereas value form, characterized by “total” separation from and indifference to the diverse physical qualities of the product, expresses a homogeneous social substance: undifferentiated social labor. For Marx, “there is nothing mysterious” (CA, 163) about the “plain, homely, natural form” of use value (CA, 138), even though this form is already an effect of the social negation of nature by concrete labor. The mystery of the commodity, like the enigma of femininity, resides in its social form expressing the value of labor, which in turn resonates with the value of “social construction” in feminist theories. This contradiction of the double value of commodified bodies points to the total dissociation of social form from the sensuous body, which, as a result of this separation, is reduced to passive, coarse matter. What Marx’s concept of the commodity diagnoses, therefore, is the indifference and separation of social form from the “coarsely sensuous objectivity” (CA, 138) of matter and concrete labor under capitalist conditions of exchange. On the basis of this schism, Irigaray claims that when women are exchanged their bodies are split into “two things at once: utilitarian objects and bearers of value” (TS, 175); into “matter-body” and the ungraspable, mysterious “envelope” of value (TS, 176).

What the essentialism/social construction debate fails to analyze is the crucial feature of commodity fetishism, namely, the abstraction of the social form of value. Yet it is precisely this abstraction and the damage it inflicts on materiality that is at stake in Irigaray’s and Adorno’s critiques of commodification. As Irigaray points out, “money as a means of mediation represents … a universal abstracted from the natural without a suitable spiritualization of this natural.”⁶ In contrast to the concreteness of use value, or the “coarse” materiality of the body, the social form of the commodity is characterized by a triple abstraction. First of all, labor (construction), as the source of the commodity’s value, is abstracted from concrete, diverse social activities and reduced to the pure expenditure of homogeneous labor power. This leveling of diverse social activities into homogeneous abstract labor is an effect of capitalist exchange, which conflates the political equality of people with the equality of labor and misrepresents both as abstract economic equivalence. Second, time becomes abstracted from discontinuous and unpredictable becoming by being reduced to mathematical units of measurement.⁷ Finally, the social form is abstracted from all the material particularity of the object. That is why Irigaray argues that commodified women’s bodies become abstractions without any intrinsic value: “Woman has value on the market by virtue of one single quality: that of being a product of man’s ‘labor’” (TS, 175). This utter “indifference” to matter and particularity is especially striking in the case of the relative value of the commodity that is expressed not in its own body but in the body of another commodity serving as its equivalent. As Marx puts it, “the value of the commodity linen is therefore expressed by the physical body of the commodity coat. … Thus the linen acquires a value-form different from its natural form. … Its sublime objectivity as a value differs from its stiff and starch existence as a body, it says that value has the appearance of a coat” (CA, 143–144). Consequently, the “sublime” mediation characteristic of commodity form performs an erasure of all particularity pertaining to the object, temporalization, and concrete labor, and substitutes for it the “phantomlike objectivity” of abstract, homogeneous social labor (CA, 128). Furthermore, the language of Marx’s analysis suggests that the obverse side of abstraction is an infliction of bodily injury: By “extinguishing” all sensuous characteristics, the value form mortifies and wipes out the physical body and leaves no trace (CA, 128).

These three kinds of abstraction performed by the commodity form—abstraction from the heterogeneity of concrete labor, temporalization, and particularity of the object—are mutually interdependent. As Adorno argues, what is at stake in the separation of abstract labor from physical work is the denial of the necessary dependence of concrete labor on its other: on the material, on “nature,” on the remainder of the nonidentical, which cannot be appropriated by the spirit of capitalism.⁸ According to Adorno, “there is nothing in the world that shall not manifest itself to human beings solely through social labor. … But the step by which labor sets itself up as the metaphysical principle pure and simple is none other than the consistent elimination of the ‘material’ to which all labor feels itself tied, the material that defines its boundary for it … and relativizes its sovereignty” (H, 26, emphasis added). By eliminating this “tie” to the material and nonidentical, the abstraction of social form denies that there is any “outside” to the principle of capitalist exchange based on equivalence. In so doing, the abstraction of commodity form turns labor into an ideological principle of sovereignty, which is coextensive with the appropriation of the labor of others and the domination of their bodies. Working in the service of equivalence and domination, this ideology of abstract, sovereign labor dissolves not only every qualitative difference but also every trace of the nonidentical and the incommensurate. We may wonder at this point whether feminist theories of social construction are not vulnerable to a similar critique of the ideology of labor, which sets up production as “absolute.”⁹ Insofar as these theories consider any “outside” to the abstract mediation of bodies to be the remnant of essentialism, they turn social construction into a “metaphysical principle pure and simple,” to use Adorno’s term—that is, into a metaphysics of autonomous social production that knows no limits. That is why essentialism/social construction opposition fails to account both for political violence and for form/content binary in modern aesthetics.

This transformation of multiple concrete activities into a metaphysics of production is nowhere more evident than in the so-called spiritualization of bodies. Both Irigaray and Marx associate the abstraction of socioeconomic form with the spiritualization of the commodified body. By endowing the object/body with a soul, commodification bestows social significance upon bodies, while at the same time transforming them, in Irigaray’s words, into “value invested idealities” (TS, 181). As the culmination of metaphysics, the commodity form discloses the historical truth of the Hegelian spiritualization of matter—that is, the complete transformation of matter into a mere reflection of human values through social praxis or what Hegel and Adorno call spirit. (Let us note in passing that although the term social spirit has different meanings in dialectical traditions—for instance, it refers to the progress of knowledge and freedom in Hegel, to the social organization of labor in Marx, or to the movement of concept and the formation of economic/political institutions in Adorno—in all cases it implies different forms of social praxis and the realization of freedom through that praxis). Thus, as Marx points out, the “body” of the commodity, which is consistently compared in Capital to the body of the prostitute, is transformed into a “mirror” of value, into a reflection of “abstract human labor” (CA, 150). Extending Marx’s analysis of this process of reflection, Irigaray, like Virginia Woolf before her, points to the analogous imaginary function of femininity: “commodities, women, are a mirror of value of and for man. In order to serve as such [mirrors], they give up their bodies to men as the supporting material of specularization, of speculation” (TS, 177). For Irigaray, the spiritualization of matter is intertwined with the specularization of female bodies, that is, with their transformation into narcissistic “mirrors” of masculine value: “participation in society requires that the body submit itself to a specularization, a speculation, that transforms it into a value-bearing object” (TS, 180). Or, as Woolf observes in A Room of One’s Own, the bodies of white women, insofar as they reflect social values, “have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size” (RO, 35). Furthermore, Woolf draws the connection between the specularization of femininity and political/domestic violence: “mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action” (RO, 35).

What is paradoxical about this process of specularization, which turns bodies into a reflection of abstract social labor, is that it erases its movement of mediation, through which the body/commodity acquires its social value. Thus commodification of objects and subjects presents its speculative result as if it were an inherent property of the object “endowed … by nature itself’” (CA, 149). As Marx puts it, “the movement through which this process has been mediated vanishes in its own result, leaving no trace behind” (CA, 187). It is this vanishing process of mediation that can be most readily associated with essentialism insofar as the most mediated ideality—the abstract soul of the commodity—appears as the concrete immediacy of the body. Let us notice here a striking parallel between the speculative “soul” of the commodity produced through the reiteration of market exchanges and the speculative character of sex constituted by the reiteration of gender norms, as analyzed by Judith Butler. According to Butler, “‘sex’ is a regulatory ideal whose materialization is compelled, and this materialization takes place … through certain highly regulated practices.”¹⁰ By extending Butler’s influential argument, we could say that sex, like the soul of the commodity, is the most ideal effect of the economic formation of gender, which nonetheless appears as the most material property of the body. As Marx’s famous definition of commodity fetishism similarly suggests, the “phantom” immediacy of value is a speculative effect of capital, which reflects the social relations between men as well as their labor as the “fantastic” properties of things (CA, 165).

The compelling precedent of feminist theoretical debates about the commodification of female bodies and art can be found in women’s modern literary texts. For example, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand diagnoses the split between the abstract soul of the prostitute and the fantasmatic immediacy of the body attributed to black femininity by the white artist. Helga Crane, the main biracial protagonist in the novel, is the figure of an oppositional black taste, of an aesthetic judgment, which calls for an alternative political community. When she repeatedly fails to find such a community in racist America, she visits her rich white relatives in Europe. Seemingly accepted by the white elites of Copenhagen, Helga, donned by her aunt in all the attributes of exoticism and primitivism, is put on the marriage market in order to attract the interest of the rich and well-established artist Herr Olsen, who might add cultural capital to the financial fortune of her relatives. By “gently” forcing Helga to wear exotic outfits, which make her feel “like a veritable savage” (Q, 69), Helga’s aunt “had determined the role that Helga was to play in advancing the social fortunes of the Dahls of Copenhagen” (Q, 68). According to the predictable modernist plot, Helga is to be stripped of her aesthetic judgment and transformed at once into a figure of the prostitute, primitive sexuality, and commodified, passive aesthetic object. By eventually proposing marriage, the white painter proclaims: “‘You know, Helga, you are a contradiction…. You have the warm impulsive nature of the women of Africa, but, my lovely, you have, I fear, the soul of a prostitute. You sell yourself to the highest buyer. I should of course be happy that it is I” (Q, 87). In his brutal bluntness, the white artist considers his price of marriage to be too high for a black woman, but he is willing to pay it not just for the sake of his sexual desires but for the sake of the priceless “immortality” (Q, 86) of art. The painter unwittingly admits the contradiction in the racist construction of black femininity but fails to understand that the same contradiction pertains to his art. Yet, as Larsen ironically points out, the body of white hegemonic art as well as the body of the black woman are caught in the same dualism of value: violent formalism, on the one hand, and phantom immediacy, or phantom primitivism, on the other hand; the “soul” or the idealism of artistic value and the prostitution of market transaction. What enables Helga to reject the racist values ascribed to her for the sake of economic fortune or for the sake of the aesthetic status of modernist art is her critical aesthetic and political judgment: Helga not only flatly declares that she is “not for sale. … Not to any white man” (Q, 87), but also rejects the aesthetic value of her portrait. She finds the whole aesthetic project “disgusting,” despite the fact that white “collectors, artists, and critics had been unanimous in their praise” of Olsen’s painting (Q, 89).

To expose the illusory immediacy, the false “naturalness” or primitivism of sexuality, as the most speculative result of social mediation—its “soul”—is the first step of a feminist critique of the commodification of white and black female bodies. The second necessary move is to contest the abstract formalism of social mediation/construction, separated from materiality and nonidentity. As Adorno’s and Hegel’s critiques of abstraction show, the abstraction of social form “can never be made absolutely autonomous vis-à-vis what it is abstracted from. … The quality of what it has been abstracted from is always, in a certain sense, preserved in it at the same time” (H, 15). To assert the absolute autonomy of social construction, to deny its dependence on the residue of the material and nonidentical, would, paradoxically, lead to another form of free-floating idealism. In the aftermath of Adorno’s and Irigaray’s work, we could say that feminist critiques of essentialism likewise have to “acknowledge the insolubility of an empirical, nonidentical moment” within social mediation, “a moment that doctrines of the absolute subject, idealist systems of identity, are not permitted to acknowledge as indissoluble” (H, 17).

Ultimately, the reinterpretation of the essentialism/social construction binary in the context of use/exchange value contests the fixity of this opposition and the abstract character of economic mediation. First of all, both these terms emerge from, and to a large extent reproduce, the historical process of the commodification of bodies. Furthermore, it is only through the mutual negation of their untruth that these opposites can demonstrate their partial insight. Thus the falsity of antiessentialism lies in the “absolutization” of the autonomy of construction, in the denial of the persistence of the material and nonidentical even in the most abstract form of mediation. Nonetheless, it reveals the truth of the historical fact that in capitalism there is nothing, including the bodies of women, that is not mediated by social production and economic exchange. On the other hand, the obvious untruth of essentialism lies in immediacy, as if it were possible to transcend production and mediation and find a positive value in bodies themselves, or, in the context of aesthetics, in the sensibility of artwork. The essentialist argument forgets the fact that the limits of social construction can be indicated only by exposing its internal contradictions and “not through recourse to something transcendent” (H, 27). Yet, through this falsity, the recurrent suspicions of essentialism inadvertently bear witness to the remainder of damaged materiality, exteriority, and otherness, which, although reduced to social waste, nonetheless constitute nonsublatable limits of construction/social labor. By misreading this remainder as essentialism and by disregarding the damaging abstraction of social form, the feminist social construction argument remains in complicity with the metaphysics of production, which asserts the “absolute” autonomy of labor and “tolerates nothing outside itself” (H, 26). Because of its failure to diagnose abstraction, social construction fails not only to account fully for political violence but also to overcome form/content binary in modernist aesthetics.

The abstract formalism of commodification shows that the domination is perpetuated not only by the concealment of social mediation behind the appearances of immediacy but more importantly by the “total” separation of social values from all remnants of materiality, becoming, concrete labor, and the vulnerability of bodies. Irigaray famously argues that this separation of commodity form from objectified bodies and concrete labor means that mediation is performed by the work of death: “death as the rallying place of sensible desires, the real or symbolic dissolution of the citizen in the community, and enslavement to property or capital” (ILTY, 23). Feminist criticism has addressed very well the problem of immediacy by reconstructing again and again the obfuscated process of mediation and by demonstrating that what is posited as an intrinsic signification of the body is in fact produced by social domination. Yet this reconstruction of the social mediation/regulation of embodiment neither diagnoses the full extent of bodily injuries inflicted by the work of death nor poses a sufficient challenge to essentialism, which is why the problem of essentialism keeps reappearing in feminist theory. What also has to be contested is the specific mode of social mediation characteristic of commodity fetishism, namely, the abstraction and autonomy of social form that, reproduced under the rubric of “social construction,” disavows the traumatic limits of signification and expels every trace of nonsublatable otherness and matter into social nonexistence.

On the Destruction of Sexual/Racial Differences and Bodily Violence

It is only through the negation of both immediacy and the deadly abstract formalism of value that we can diagnose the injury of racialized, sexed bodies inflicted by the process of commodification. Let us begin such diagnosis with Luce Irigaray’s claim that the damage of commodification manifests itself primarily in the mortification of female bodies and the destruction of any possibility of a culture of sexual difference. As she argues, Marx’s definition of commodity fetishism as the abstract “social relation among men” reveals the fact that the economic regulation of gender is predicated on sexual indifference—an indifference which constitutes a paradoxical compromise between patriarchy and the dissolving power of capital. Such an erasure of sexual difference in the economic regulation of gender produces a homosocial order of exchange in which women mediate misrecognized, sublimated relations between men, in which any alternative sexualities, such as homosexuality or transgender sexualities, are prohibited, and in which the hegemony of monosexual, white heterosexuality is predicated on the erasure of difference and the mortification of the body: “What is spirit if it forces the body to comply with an abstract model …? That spirit is already dead … the capitalization of life in the hands of a few who demand this sacrifice of the majority” (ILTY, 25). Because of its reduction of difference into abstract equivalence, the economic formation of gender repeats the subject/object dialectic in which the feminine object is dominated by the (white) subject. In this dialectic, femininity occupies the side of the pseudo-object whose value is produced by a process of exchange based on equivalence and “total” mortification or abstraction from materiality. Consequently, its “objectivity” is merely an illusory effect of the disappearance of the specular process of mediation, which nonetheless completely determines its value or nonvalue. However, as we shall see, the objectification of female bodies assumes different forms of violence across the color line.

Yet, the primacy of the masculine subject in this dialectic can be maintained only at the price of a misrecognition of its dependency on the object and on the presumption of the whiteness of such a subject. Thus the economic formation of heterosexual white masculinity is characterized not only by a misrecognition of the homosocial relations deposited in the object but also by the denial of the economic reification of white masculinity.¹¹ According to Balibar, this denial takes the form of an introjection of the value objectified in the commodity back into the interiority of the subject.¹² Through this internalization, the social value of alienated labor appears as its opposite, namely, the subjective value of free will. Because it is not accompanied by a change in the relations of production, such introjection is merely an ideological mechanism that disavows the alienation and commodification of social relations between white men by sustaining the fiction of individual free will. Balibar describes this internalization of the objectified social value of labor as “juridical fetishism,”¹³ since the ideology of free will is central to the bourgeois conception of law. By reinterpreting his analysis in the context of gender, we can say that commodity exchange produces “juridical fetishism”—or the ideology of free will—on the masculine side and “economic fetishism”—the phantom immediacy of the object—on the feminine side.

In contrast to the abstract economic equivalence of gender, Irigaray proposes another labor of mediation based on sexual difference. By stressing the “disappropriating,” “impossible,” and “asymmetrical” character of sexual and social relations, such mediation foregrounds the internal limitation of the sexed subject and its exposure to exteriority. It thus contests both the autonomy of free will and the autonomy of social production, emphasizing instead the irreducible alterity of the self and the other: “The mine of the subject,” Irigaray argues, “is always already marked by disappropriation. … Being a man or a woman means not being the whole of the subject or of the community or of spirit, as well as not being entirely one’s self. I am not the whole [ je ne suis pas tout ]” (ILTY, 106).¹⁴ In her A Politics of Impossible Difference, Penelope Deutscher has brilliantly analyzed this impossible status of sexual difference as both a historically excluded possibility—the pair of empty brackets—and as a mark of futurity, as that which is yet to come.¹⁵ Yet, in the psychoanalytic context, the notion of impossible sexual difference also has to be related to the register of the real as the limit of social mediation. According to Slavoj Žižek, “the claim that sexual difference is ‘real’ equals the claim that it is ‘impossible’—impossible to symbolize, to formulate as a symbolic norm.”¹⁶ Furthermore, the impossible and disappropriating character of sexual difference not only maintains indeterminacy within social mediation but also contests its abstraction from all vestiges of materiality. As Irigaray’s invention of the neologism “sensible transcendental” suggests, “the impossible” of sexual difference is intertwined not only with the excess of signification but also with sensibility, passion, and the traumatic vulnerability of the body.

If Irigaray claims that the damage of commodification produces the erasure of sexual difference, her own analysis reproduces the racial indifference characteristic of so many foundational texts of white feminism. A symptom of widespread historical and textual blindness, Irigaray’s failure to take race into account ignores the fact that the economic equation of blackness with property under the regime of slavery, as well as the persisting racist representations of black female sexuality in terms of exoticism and primitivism, constitute, as Hortense J. Spillers, Patricia Williams,¹⁷ and Deborah E. McDowell, among others, point out,¹⁸ the most horrific paradigm of the commodification of human bodies.¹⁹ As Nella Larsen, for example, has shown, the commodification of black female sexuality in terms of exoticism and primitivism represents a striking example of the “phantom” immediacy of unrestrained sexuality produced through highly mediated, abstract systems of cultural, aesthetic, and economic exchanges.

However, Irigaray’s reading of Marx betrays not only a historical but also a textual blindness. Although Irigaray is an extremely attentive reader of the persistent rhetorical references to the feminized body in Marx’s Capital, she ignores the explicit racialized meaning of these references, ranging from the evocations of “tribal religions” to the appropriation of the crucial term fetishism. Originating in sixteenth-century European trade with West Africa, the term fetishism, as William Pietz has documented, was intertwined in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with the colonial, racist representation of the “primitive” mentality of Africans as based on religious superstitions, irrational fear, and institutionalized social delusion.²⁰ Thus, Hegel, for instance, concludes that the African Fetich is but one manifestation of the Africans’ lack of any awareness of universality and their “contempt for humanity, which … is the fundamental characteristic of the race.”²¹ It is precisely by appropriating and disavowing the racist connotations of fetishism that Marx can extend this term to describe the “contempt for humanity” and irrationality of commodity exchange in capitalist societies.

Yet what is at stake in the critique of Irigaray’s white solipsism is not only a necessary contestation of the exclusion of black femininity from the foundational texts of white feminism. What is also crucial in this critique is the analysis of the damage inflicted on captive black bodies that at once exemplify the process of commodification as such and at the same time constitute an exception to commodified gender regulation. As Hortense J. Spillers’s influential essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” suggests, the commodification of gender relations cannot take fully into account the traumatic reality of black flesh stripped from values and reduced to social illegitimacy. Spillers’s argument that the traumatic legacy of the enslavement of black bodies still threatens to disarticulate the very conception of gender and kinship makes a necessary intervention in both feminist psychoanalysis and Marxist criticism alike. As her analysis of the 1965 Moynihan report, which blames black mothers for the destruction of the black family, shows, the grammar of racialized bodies remains “grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography … shows movement.”²² One of the deadly contradictions of the “grammar” of slavery is that the commodification of the captive body was in fact synonymous with the destruction of the social significance of gender. Enslaved African persons, Spillers writes, “were the culturally ‘unmade.’ … Under these conditions, one is neither female, nor male, as both subjects are taken into ‘account’ as quantities” (MBPM, 72). In the juridical codes of slavery: “‘Slave’ appears in the same context with beasts of burden, all and any animal(s) … and a virtually endless profusion of domestic content from the culinary item to the book” (MBPM, 79).

In the grammar of slavery, the “re-gendering” of black flesh occurs only retrospectively, through the conjunction of enforced biological reproduction and the social reproduction of slavery as social illegitimacy (MBPM, 79). The enforced maternal reproduction of the social nonvalue of slavery, passed from the black mother onto a child of either sex, had catastrophic but different consequences for both sexes. It excluded black masculinity from both the symbolic law of the father and from juridical rights. And it degraded black femininity to compulsory maternity robbed of all parental function. In contrast to white femininity, the economic value of enslaved female flesh does not reflect white homosocial relations but reproduces the social nonvalue of slavery. Thus, contrary to Irigaray’s claim, enslaved female bodies are not divided into a natural substratum and “bearers of value” but are rather seen as the bearers of nonvalue. In her novels Nella Larsen bears witness to this persisting bitter legacy of white supremacy and the reproduction of the nonvalue of black bodies, even when they are ascribed the racist value of “primitivism,” which is consumed by white artists and spectators. In the midst of the Harlem Renaissance, she points out in her novels that for black women motherhood is still the most threatening possibility because of the reproduction of illegitimacy and vulnerability. As Clare, one of the characters in Passing, proclaims, “being a mother is the cruelest thing in the world” (P, 197). And the ending of Quicksand, Larsen’s first novel, in which forced motherhood kills the main character, Helga, confirms this diagnosis: “she would have to die. She couldn’t endure it. Her suffocation and shrinking loathing were too great” (Q, 134).

Through the juxtaposition of Irigaray, Larsen, and Spillers, we can see more precisely the racist division of labor and the damage suffered by white and black female bodies. Whereas white bodies erase their materiality in the reflection of social values, enslaved bodies reproduce the failure of the spiritualization of matter that is associated either with the destruction of social values or with the racist “value” of primitivism. In so doing, they become the bearers of death, illegitimacy, or the exotic unrestrained sexuality. This racist attribution of the failure to specularize matter to black bodies consolidates the white monopoly on the production of social value. Consequently, the difference between the commodified white female body and the black female body is that the economic and aesthetic value of the latter depends on its inability to spiritualize/specularize matter. In Hegel’s philosophy of history, the racist attribution of the “failure of spiritualization” is extended to Africa itself,²³ used to justify the enslavement and exclusion of the entire black race from the historical progress of freedom: “What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World’s History.”²⁴ By displacing onto black bodies the remnant of materiality that a racist metaphysics of production cannot spiritualize away, white supremacy associates these bodies with enslaving nature and, in so doing, excludes them from the realm of the social spirit, that is, from the historical realization of freedom.

Bare Life, Social Death, and the Biopolitics of Race and Gender

Hortense Spillers’s analysis of destroyed black female flesh, stripped of its political significance, language, and genealogy, provides an important insight into another violent separation constitutive of Western politics, namely, the separation of political forms from what Agamben calls bare life. One of the most important contributions of Agamben’s work is his claim that the possibility of isolating and expelling bare life from politically constituted ways of being is foundational to the Western conception of sovereignty and politics. The notion of bare life not only allows us to revise the Foucauldian theory of biopower, and the numerous cultural, feminist, queer, and postcolonial studies of the body that take Foucault as their point of departure, but also to analyze another case of a violent political formalism. Although Agamben does not address this issue directly, the violence of implicit political formalism is a consequence not only of the well-known separation of the political status of the citizen from the biological and private existence but, more importantly, of the threat of another severance and destruction: this time, the political severance of subjects from their worthless bodily remainder or what Agamben calls bare life. In other words, if political beings can be stripped of their political significance and reduced to bare life, such severance implies that the institution of the political is characterized by violent and abstract formalism. Thus, if Irigaray and Spillers diagnose the violent production of abstract values that mortify objectified female bodies in so-called civil society, Agamben’s theory of sovereignty reveals the violation of the body stripped of its abstract political significance. The double body of the commodity (split between its “natural” use value and abstract exchange value) encounters the double body of a political being, split between political form and bare life.

To develop the violent consequences of political formalism, I want to focus in greater detail on Agamben’s theory of bare life and Patterson’s analysis of social death. According to Agamben, bare life constitutes the original but “concealed nucleus” of Western biopolitics insofar as its exclusion founds the political realm. Thus, the most fundamental categories of Western politics are not the social contract or the friend and the enemy, as has been claimed in political philosophy, but bare life and the sovereign power that captures and excludes it. Reworking Aristotle’s and Hannah Arendt’s distinctions between biological existence (zoē) and the political life of speech and action (bios),²⁵ between natural life and a good life,²⁶ in his Homo Sacer Agamben introduces a third term—“bare life”—and traces its selective genealogy from antiquity to modernity. As the counterpart and target of sovereign violence, bare life is stripped of its political significance, expelled from the political, and exposed to murderous violence. To avoid misunderstanding, I would like to stress the point that is made sometimes only implicitly in Agamben’s work and not always sufficiently stressed by his commentators: namely, the fact that bare life, wounded, expendable, and exposed to violence, is not the same as biological zoē but rather the remainder of the destroyed political bios.²⁷ In fact, bare life is captured by the political in a double way: first, by being excluded from the polis—it is included in the political in the form of an exclusion that marks its borders—and, second, by being exposed to unlimited violation that does not count as a crime. To evoke Theodor Adorno, we could say that it is damaged life, life stripped of its political significance, of its specific form of life. Or, as Andrew Benjamin writes, “there could never be ‘bare life’ except as an aftereffect.”²⁸

The production of bare life is thus the effect of a twofold political operation: sovereign violence, on the one hand, and the constitution of abstract political forms as potentially separable from denuded life, on the other. In fact, what is implied by bare life is that the political itself is abstract, defined by the threat of the violent separation from the bodily remainder: “There is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion” (HS, 8). The absence of the relation between the abstract, political ways of being and bare life is what enables the sovereign decision on the state of the exception, the referent of which is damaged life. As Thomas Wall argues: “Between bare life and its ways of living, there can be only decision. Every sovereign and every state has always confronted this. … Bare life is the nonrelational and thus invites decision. It is the very space of decision … and, as such, is perpetually au hasard.”²⁹ Yet what are the consequences of this claim for the status of the political forms of life? Because political ways of being can be abstracted from damaged flesh, because there is no inherent relation or interaction between political forms and the body, political formalism is the counterpart of sovereign violence.

As Agamben’s broad outline of the political genealogy of the West suggests, the position and political function of bare life change historically. For Agamben, this genealogy begins with the most distant memory of bare life expressed in ancient Roman law as the obscure notion of homo sacer— that is, the notion of the expelled, banned man, who, stripped of all political and cultural significance, can be killed with impunity by all, but is unworthy of either juridical punishment or religious sacrifice. Neither the condemned criminal nor the sacrificial scapegoat, and thus expelled outside both human and divine law, homo sacer is the target of sovereign violence exceeding the force of law and yet anticipated and authorized by that law. Banished from the political realm, he is the referent of the sovereign decision on the state of exception, which both confirms and suspends the normal operation of the law. In Agamben’s genealogy the major shift in the politicization of bare life occurs in modernity. With the mutation of sovereignty into biopower, bare life ceases to be the excluded outside of the political and in fact become its inner hidden norm: bare life “gradually begins to coincide with the political realm” (HS, 9). However, this inclusion and distribution of bare life within the political does not mean its integration with political existence; on the contrary, it is the disjunctive inclusion (the inclusion without integration) of the inassimilable remnant that still remains the target of sovereign violence. As Agamben argues, “Western politics has not succeeded in constructing the link between zoē and bios … that would have healed the fracture” (HS, 11). Given this failure of the political, we might ask whether feminist aesthetics can construct such a link between zoē and bios—I will return to this question in the next chapter.

In contrast to the ancient ban, or the inclusive exclusion from the political, the new form of disjunctive inclusion of bare life within citizenship emerges with modern democracies: the “nascent European democracy thereby placed at the center of its battle with absolutism not bios, the qualified life of the citizen, but … bare, anonymous life” (HS, 124). In democratic regimes this hidden incorporation of bare life both into the political realm and the structure of citizenship manifests itself, according to Agamben, as the inscription of “birth” within human rights—an inscription that establishes a dangerous doubling between national and biological existence. As the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen proclaims, men do not become equal by virtue of their political association but are “born and remain” equal. Democratic citizens are thus bearers of both bare life and abstract rights. They are, at the same time, the targets of disciplinary power and free democratic subjects. In a political revision of Foucault’s formulation of modern subjectivity as an “empirico-transcendental” doublet,³⁰ Agamben argues that the modern citizen is “a two-faced being, the bearer both of subjection to sovereign power and of individual liberties (HS, 125, emphasis added). As this doubling suggests, the democratic subject of rights is characterized by the hidden aporia between political freedom and the subjection of mere life, without mediation or reconciliation between them.

Since, according to Agamben, bare life is included but not integrated within Western democracies and as such cannot mark their borders, modern politics is about the search for new racialized and gendered targets of exclusion, for the new living dead (HS, 130). In our own times, such targets, no longer limited to political subjects, multiply with astonishing speed and infiltrate bodies down to the cellular level: from refugees, illegal immigrants, inmates on death row subject nonetheless to suicide watch, comatose patients on life support to organ transplants, sperm banks, frozen eggs, and fetal stem cells. For Agamben, the violence of this disjunction between bare life and abstract forms of life becomes catastrophically apparent with the reversal of the democratic state into the totalitarian regime at the beginning of the twentieth century. As the disasters of fascism and soviet totalitarianism demonstrate, and as the continuous traumatic histories of genocide and ethnic and racial cleansing show, by suspending abstract political rights, totalitarian regimes can reduce whole populations to disposable bare life that could be destroyed with impunity. This genocidal possibility is actualized for the first time, according to Agamben, in the unprecedented horror of Nazi concentration camps where the extreme destitution and degradation of political beings to bare life leads to mass extermination: “Insofar as its inhabitants were stripped of every political status and wholly reduced to bare life, the camp was also the most absolute biopolitical space ever to have been realized, in which power confronts nothing but pure life, without any mediation” (HS, 171). If Agamben controversially claims that the concentration camp is not just the extreme aberration of modernity but its “fundamental biopolitical paradigm” (HS, 181), which shows the “thanatopolitical face” of power (HS, 142, 150), it is because concentration camps, for the first time, actualize the danger implicit in Western politics, namely, the total genocide made possible by the reversal of the exception signified by homo sacer into the new thanatopolitical norm. According to Agamben, such collapse of the distinction between exception and norm, the destruction of abstract rights, and the “absolute” and unmediated subjection of life to death constitute “the supreme political principle” of genocide.

The most compelling force of Agamben’s work is his diagnosis of the ways the violent separation of bare life from its political distinctions gives rise to new forms of domination and catastrophic turns of Western history culminating in reversals of democracy into the “thanatopolitical” totalitarian politics of fascism. This catastrophic reversal is a consequence not only of sovereign violence but also of the abstraction of political forms from any interaction or dependence on embodiment. Yet, despite its importance, Agamben’s theory of bare life does not sufficiently address two questions: first, the role of bare life in the struggle for freedom and, second, the negative differentiation of bare life with respect to the destroyed political, racial, and gender differences that used to characterize a political being. Both these questions contest the absolute severance of anonymous life from political forms and indicate the possibility of an interaction between political relations and the body. It is these questions, I would argue, that are at the center of any critical feminist engagement with the biopolitics of sovereignty and its impact on modern aesthetics.

Thanks to Agamben’s revision of biopolitics, it becomes immediately apparent that the task of resistance cannot be limited to contestation of the law or institutionalized power structures; in fact, I would argue that one of the most pressing political questions raised by Homo Sacer is whether bare life itself can be mobilized by emancipatory movements. The second issue we need to reconsider is the way bare life is implicated in the gendered, sexist, colonial, and racist configurations of the political and how, because of this implication, it suffers different kinds of violence.³¹ I argue that the central paradox bare life presents for political analysis is not only the erasure of political distinctions but also the negative differentiation such erasure produces with respect to racial, gender, ethnic, or class differences that used to characterize a form of life that was destroyed. These two questions of resistance and negative differentiation are interrelated because they point to the fact that complete separation and exclusion of bare life from the political is in fact impossible. They reveal a hidden dependence of both sovereign power and constituted political distinctions on damaged flesh.

As several commentators and critics, most notably Ernesto Laclau, argue, what is lacking in Agamben’s political theory is the question of the “emancipatory possibilities” of modernity.³² Laclau claims that the excess of the political vis-à-vis the juridical cannot be limited to the sovereign ban of homo sacer because such excess is also characteristic of the plurality of movements that organize themselves in opposition to the existing law. Through this act of contestation, such movements form an identity that is partially internal and partially external to the existing law. However, in the context of Agamben’s work, the question of resistance cannot be limited to the contestation of the law; in fact, I would argue that one of the most pressing political question is whether bare life itself can be mobilized by oppositional movements. By focusing on the way bare life functions exclusively as the referent of the sovereign decision, Agamben, unfortunately, answers this question in the negative and cautions us against a certain naive optimism that sometimes seems to characterize the “politics of the body”: “The ‘body’ is always already a biopolitical body and bare life, and nothing in it or the economy of its pleasure seems to allow us to find solid ground on which to oppose the demands of sovereign power” (HS, 187, emphasis added). Such a claim implicitly repeats the formalism of the political that Agamben himself otherwise wants to contest. And it is because of such an implicit formalism that Agamben ignores the way bare life is implicated in the gendered, sexist, colonial, and racist configurations of biopolitics. If we argue that bare life emerges as the aftereffect of the destruction of the symbolic differences of gender, ethnicity, race, or class—differences that constitute political forms of life—this means bare life is still negatively determined by the destruction of a historically specific way of life. This paradox is a simultaneous erasure of the political distinctions of gender, ethnic, and class differences, and the negative differentiation of bare life retrospectively produced by such erasure reveals a hidden dependence of power on flesh and matter even in the instances of their violent destruction.

Let us consider these two issues—the differentiation of bare life and its potential role in emancipatory movements—in turn. Although Agamben’s heterogeneous examples of bare life—for instance, the father/son relation in antiquity, the Nazi euthanasia programs for the mentally ill, the extermination of already denationalized Jewish life in the Final Solution, the destruction of the Gypsies, the ethnic rape camps in the former Yugoslavia, the comatose body of Karen Ann Quinlan, and especially the paradigmatic example of the Muselmann—are always diversified along racist, gendered, and historical lines, his conceptual analysis runs up against, but does not follow, the implications of such heterogeneity. Consider, for instance, Agamben’s brief comment about the difference between the ethnic rape camps and Nazi camps: “If the Nazi never thought of effecting the Final Solution by making Jewish women pregnant, it is because the principle of birth that assured the inscription of life in the order of the nation-state was still—if in a profoundly transformed sense—in operation. This principle has now entered into a process of decay” (HS, 176). Needless to say, the sexually and racially marked difference between these two forms of sovereign violence—genocide and rape—cannot be reduced to the principle of birth alone. And if Agamben refrains from further explorations of rape as a political weapon, it is because such analysis would complicate his definition of bare life (let us recall that his paradigmatic definition is always a life that can be killed but not sacrificed). Furthermore, Agamben’s comment that it is only “now,” that is, in the aftermath of WWII, that the principle of birth is made inoperative shows a historical ignorance of the fact that natality had been a target of destruction since antiquity, at least in the case of slavery.

Because Agamben does not consider the hidden dependence of power on bare life, he is unable to formulate either the possibility of resistance or the role of bare life in democratic struggles for freedom. Agamben is right to argue that the possibility of resistance and the praxis of freedom demand a new ontology of potentiality in excess of historically determined actuality. My main point of critique, however, is that Agamben’s ontology of potentiality does not consider the role of bare life in acts of resistance. Consequently, the politicization of bare life means that it is the referent of the sovereign decision over the state of exception, but never the object of contestations between different political forces. The sovereign decision over the exception and bare life captured as the target of violence are always two sides of the same political paradigm. By contrast, I stress both the political and ontological ambiguity of bare life, which escapes the very distinction between potentiality and actuality, presence and absence, life and death. Such political ambiguity means that bare life cannot function only as the target of sovereign decision, but that it can also be reclaimed for the sake of political transformation by oppositional democratic movements.

To show the necessity of supplementing Agamben’s notion of bare life in the context of the politics of race and gender, I would like to consider briefly its relation to Aristotle’s, Hortense Spillers’s, and Orlando Patterson’s discussions of slavery and its destruction of gender and cultural/political genealogy. In terms of Agamben’s history of bare life, slavery is an important case to consider for several reasons: First of all, ancient and modern racialized forms of slavery represent instances of bare life coextensive with both the Greek polis and modern democracy and yet irreducible to the category of either homo sacer or the camp. Thus, on the one hand, the history of slavery, spanning both antiquity and modernity and extending beyond the history of the West, would strengthen Agamben’s insistence on the premodern origins of biopolitics; yet, on the other hand, this history forces us to supplement the sovereignty/homo sacer paradigm with master/slave dialectics and commodity exchange. Rather than keeping these paradigms separate or arguing for the relative centrality of one or the other to the politics of Western modernity, we need to consider instead possible substitutions, interactions, and contradictions between them. For instance, how can sovereign violence be transformed into the seemingly “privatized,” but also absolute, power of the slave holder? In what sense can the sovereign destruction of bare life be substituted by the “living” death of slavery? What is the relation between the banned life of homo sacer and what Orlando Patterson calls the “liminal incorporation” of enslaved life? And, finally, how could the biopolitics of sovereignty, commodification, and slavery coexist?

In order to explore these questions in a preliminary manner, I begin with the supplementary yet obfuscated relation between mere life and enslaved life in the text that is foundational for Agamben’s political theory, Aristotle’s Politics.³³ As soon as Aristotle introduces the crucial distinctions between zoē and bios, oikos (home) and polis, he is confronted with the place and legitimation of enslaved life, which does not seem to fit easily into these distinctions. Thus, it is not only the case that, as Thomas Wall argues, in the Greek polis the bare life of slavery “was abandoned to the home, the oikos” or, “tragically trapped” between oikos and polis, but, more fundamentally, Aristotle’s defense of slavery creates a conceptual aporia undermining his definition of slavery as an “animate instrument” belonging to the household. Implicated in the whole network of differences fundamental to the differentiation of the public space of the city—such as the differences between body and soul, male and female, human life and animal life, master and statesman, passion and reason—enslaved life, defined by Aristotle as property, does not have a “proper” place. In his apologia Aristotle writes the following: “The soul rules the body with the authority of a master: reason rules the appetite with the authority of a statesman. … The same principle is true of the relation of man to other animals. … Again, the relation of the male to the female is naturally that of the superior to the inferior. … We may thus conclude that all men who differ from others as much as the body differs from the soul, or an animal from a man … are by nature slaves.”³⁴ As these multiple levels of analogous reasoning show, the political subjection and exclusion of femininity and slavery is “like” the subjection of the body to reason and animality to the human. Perhaps bearing witness to the threat of enslavement in war, this analogy potentially makes the body of the free Greek citizen “like” the enslaved or inhuman body. And, conversely, the enslaved body both mediates and blurs the distinction between the human and the animal, the household and the city. Because of its in-between position on the “threshold” (to use Agamben’s apt term), slavery in Aristotle’s text begins to haunt the Greek polis from within and from without, making the Greek citizen, like its modern counterpart, already a double being, subjected to the mastery of reason and a political being among equals. Furthermore, even though Aristotle rigorously distinguishes the political rule of the statesman from the domination of the master, the analogies between the political rule of the statesman, the authority of reason, and the power of the master in the household once again blur these distinctions.

Although subjected to the violence of the master rather than to sovereign banishment, enslaved life in Aristotle’s Politics, like the obscure figure of homo sacer in Roman law, blurs the boundaries between the inside and the outside of the political. It is Orlando Patterson’s influential study of slavery from antiquity to modernity that gives a full account of the liminality of the slave’s paradoxical position in the social order. Thus if Agamben in Homo Sacer focuses on the paradoxes of sovereignty, Patterson, in his seminal work Slavery as Social Death, argues that the enigma of slavery exceeds both the juridical and economic categories of law, production, exchange, and property. What all these categories fail to explicate is both the “total” domination of enslaved life and the liminality of slaves’ position. Like the indistinction, or threshold, between the inside and outside marked by homo sacer, the slave’s liminality collapses both the political and ontological differences between the human and the inhuman, monstrosity and normality, anomaly and norm, life and death, cosmos and chaos, being and “nonbeing” (SSD, 38), and as such a borderline phenomenon, it could never be contained in the Greek oikos (household). In one of the most suggestive passages, devoted to an interpretation of the Anglo-Saxon representation of slavery/servitude in Beowulf, Patterson writes: “In the role of the slave as guide to the dragon’s evil world we find one of the most remarkable statements of the slave’s liminal status. … It was precisely because he was marginal, neither human nor inhuman, neither man nor beast, neither dead nor alive, the enemy within who was neither member nor true alien, that the slave could lead Beowulf and his men across the deadly margin that separated the social order above from the terror and chaos of the underground” (SSD, 48). Similarly to the state of exception, the institutionalized anomaly of slavery “emphasized what was most important and stable” in the nonslave population (SSD, 464), yet, unlike homo sacer, such liminality could also position an enslaved being as a guide who could cross the borders of the inhabitable world. It is this notion of liminality as subversive trespassing that Larsen will transpose into her aesthetic project.

What is then the relation between these two different expressions of subjugation and liminality represented, on the one hand, by homo sacer and, on the other hand, by enslaved life? If we once again juxtapose Patterson’s and Agamben’s work, the key concept that links bare life captured in the political sphere of sovereignty with the master slave/dialectic is the substitutability of slavery for death: either for the death of the external enemy seized on the battle field or the death of the internal “fallen” member of the community. According to Patterson, this substitution of enslavement for imminent death is echoed in the “archetypal” meaning of slavery as social death (SSD, 5, 26). It is also registered in Roman terminology (captivus) and the Greek regulations of slavery associated with war. Needless to say, the substitution of enslavement for death does not give pardon but, on the contrary, creates the anomaly of the socially dead but biologically alive and economically exploited being. Because the expropriation of a slave’s life constitutes him or her as a nonperson, or a socially dead person, it produces another instance of bare life as violently stripped of genealogy, cultural memory, social distinction, name, and native language, that is, of all the elements that form Aristotle’s zoē. Akin to “secular excommunication,” slavery, in all its different historical formations from antiquity to modernity, was institutionalized as the extreme destruction of the social and symbolic formation of subjectivity. As a mark of illegitimacy and exclusion from the realm of symbolization, from the polis as well as from the household and kinship, this extreme mode of deracination reconstituted enslaved life as a nameless, invisible nonbeing—as a pro nullo, according to Roman law (SSD, 40).

As we have seen, Hortense Spillers argues that such exclusion of black enslaved bodies from symbolization leads to the destruction of kinship and gender structures. All these social distinctions collapse into what Spillers calls a “lacerated” black flesh as the traumatic zero degree of social and political differences. In order to analyze bodily crimes inflicted by enslavement, Spiller’s analysis of the economics of slavery adds the new category of “flesh.” By functioning as the traumatic, invisible double of the socially valued white body, black flesh, as Alexander Weheliye persuasively argues,³⁵ is reminiscent of Agamben’s bare life. Spillers writes: “Before the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh,’ that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse. … Even though the European hegemonies stole bodies—some of them female—out of West African communities … we regard this human and social irreparability as high crimes against the flesh. … If we think of the ‘flesh’ as a primary narrative, then we mean its seared, divided, ripped-apartness” (MBPM, 67). The “ungendered” flesh suffers a double damage: not only traumatic physical violations but also a traumatic symbolic destruction of the social significations of kinship, gender, and name. Spillers’s notion of lacerated flesh functions as the linchpin between Irigaray’s and Marx’s analysis of “the total mortification” of the body by economic exchange and Agamben’s bare life as target and the effect of sovereign violence. Emerging in the aftermath of the destruction of the social and symbolic signification of the body, the “hieroglyphics” of wounded flesh (MBPM, 67) nonetheless bear witness to the crimes of white supremacy and preserve the bloody traces of the forms of life that have been destroyed. These unbearable “hieroglyphics” of violated black flesh—“a primary narrative” of its “seared, divided, ripped-apartness”—contests the total exclusion of bare life from its symbolic meaning and of commodity form from its mortified bodily remainder. As we shall see, these hieroglyphics are also a source of the struggle for freedom. Nonetheless, Spillers argues that violated black flesh is excluded from a “cultural seeing” obsessed with the visibility of color, from a white feminist analysis of “‘The Female Body in Western Culture’” (MBPM, 67) and, we should add, from political philosophy.

The notion of slavery as a substitute for death complicates Agamben’s central thesis that the sovereign decision/bare life constitutes the foundational political paradigm in the West. First of all, although the extreme delegitimation and nullity of enslaved life makes it another instantiation of bare life, the very fact that such life undergoes substitutions of one form of destruction for another undermines from the start any theoretical claims about the centrality of just one paradigm of politics. In fact, as Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, and Alexander Weheliye, in different ways, argue, the institution of slavery as social death is not merely a historical phenomenon but rather “engenders the black subject in the Americas” and constitutes a matrix of Western political modernity.³⁶ According to Weheliye, “as opposed to being confined to a particular historical period, echoes of new world slavery rest in many contemporary spaces.”³⁷ Slavery raises the question whether the destruction of the human form of life is a “condition” of exchangeability as such. As Patterson argues, the destruction of the political forms of life turned human beings into “the ideal of a human tool, an instrumentum vocal—perfectly flexible, unattached, and deracinated” (SSD, 337). Because of its fungibility, the idea of such a human tool, is also a perfect commodity; and indeed, Patterson notes historical instances where slavery functioned as money (SSD, 167–169). On the basis of Spillers’s analysis, we can argue, therefore, that the violent production of social death functions as the hidden ground not only of politics but also of exchange, even though it cannot be explained in these terms. Consequently, the substitution of the living social death for biological death indicates the possible transformation of the sovereign ban into ownership, exchange, and use. As Patterson’s discussion of the ancient Roman doctrine of dominium suggests, here an absolute power over human beings merges with the absolute ownership of res (SSD, 30–32).

The biopolitics of substitution inscribed in the power relations of slavery changes the character of both death and birth. Deprived of its finitude, the anomaly of social death denotes a spectral duration of nonbeing beyond the categories of absence and presence, potentiality and actuality. On the one hand, the spectrality of social death constitutes a permanent threat of anomaly and aberration; on the other hand, it is continually put to work in order to produce profit and, as such, is the lynchpin of biopolitics and economics. As the ending of Larsen’s novel Quicksand suggests, this spectral character of social death, which continues to endure in the form of nonbeing, also destroys the principle of natality, understood broadly to include not only biological birth but also the claims of genealogy, the principle of a new beginning. Indeed, for Patterson, even the concept of social death is not sufficient to express the most drastic destruction of being—hence its supplementation by “natal alienation.” By signifying the erasure of both biological and social origins, “the term ‘natal alienation’ … goes directly to the heart of what is critical in the slave’s forced alienation, the loss of ties of birth … a loss of native status, of deracination” (SSD, 7). As the destruction of genealogy and history, as exclusion from the past as well as from the future, the lost natality marks the enslaved person not only as socially dead but also as an unborn being. According to Claude Meillassoux’s and Michael Izard’s apt formulation, as quoted in Patterson, “the slave will remain forever an unborn being (non-né) ” (SSD, 38). The paradox of a being that is not only dead but forever unborn makes indeed “time out of joint”—it destroys the temporal and modal distinctions between finitude and transcendence, presence and absence, inauguration and repetition, and potentiality and actuality.

These institutionalized anomalies of death and birth—the deadly paradox of a life that cannot be born but continues to endure as social death—suggest that slavery, like homo sacer, implies a paradigm of biopolitics intertwined with thanatopolitics. What both slavery and homo sacer have in common is the production of bare life stripped of its human form of life. But, what distinguishes them is the contrast between the sovereign ban and the marginal inclusion of enslaved life. If the sovereign decision on the state of exception captures bare life in order to exclude it, the biopolitics of slavery is confronted with the opposite task, namely, with profitably including the socially dead beings while keeping them in the limbo of nonbeing. Hence, Patterson argues that after the stage of violent depersonalization and “social negation,” which most closely corresponds to the sovereign ban, the next stage of enslavement introduces “the slave into the community of his master, but it involves the paradox of introducing him as a nonbeing” (SSD, 38). Since, unlike homo sacer, the socially dead being has to be included within and made profitable, this second stage of the biopolitics of slavery poses the dilemma of “liminal incorporation” (SSD, 45). The paradox of the liminal incorporation of a life that is already socially dead is the opposite of the sovereign ban, even though it creates similar effects of indistinction. On the one hand, we have an institutionalized containment within the law of a permanent anomaly that confounds the differences between life and death, destruction and profit. Yet, on the other hand, the enslaved, exploited beings mirror the hidden, potential threat that biopolitics presents for so-called free citizens: the destruction of their way of life and violent reduction to bare life that can be killed with impunity.

As we can see, the notion of “bare life” can open new interpretations of the biopolitics of race and gender for contemporary political philosophy, feminist thought, and critical race studies. Yet, as my discussion also shows, such a reconsideration of “bare life” in the context of racial and sexual politics calls for some fundamental revisions of that concept. First of all, bare life cannot be regarded as completely separate from all cultural/political characteristics. If bare life emerges as the remnant of a destroyed human form of life, then its formulation has to refer, in the negative way, to the racial/sexual/ethnic/class differences that used to characterize this form of life. In other words, bare life has to be defined as the remnant of a specific form of life that it not yet or no longer, is. To repeat Spillers’s haunting formulation, these destroyed symbolic remnants are inscribed as a bloody hieroglyphics on wounded flesh. Furthermore, bare life cannot always be considered as the exclusive referent of sovereign decision, but has to be reconceptualized as a more complex, contested terrain where new forms of domination, dependence, and emancipatory struggle can emerge.

***

By juxtaposing the commodification of female bodies, the brutality of enslavement, and the biopolitics of bare life, I have diagnosed the violent effects of abstract formalism in political life and their correlative, damaged materialities. What this juxtaposition reveals is the possibility of the violent severance of collective forms from the remnants of materiality, which becomes the target of violence. The destruction of bare life threatening so-called free citizens is catastrophically realized in the two other paradigms of Western modernity: the social death of enslavement haunting the history of democracy from within and the reversals of democracy into totalitarianism. The separation of social form from materiality is also at stake in another, apparently unrelated formation of modernity, namely, the production and exchange of commodified bodies, labor, and objects. Characterized by the abstract determination of value in total separation from the particularity and materiality of the object, the commodity form mirrors the schism in the structure of citizenship, the split between bare life and abstract human rights. Such disastrous intertwining of the violence directed at bare life and the violence of commodification is what produces the social death of captive bodies. Yet what is at stake in the configuration of political violence, abstract forms, and damaged materialities is not only a new diagnosis of the brutal oppression and destruction of gendered and racialized bodies but also a new formulation of emancipatory political struggles and aesthetic inventions. As I will show in the next chapter, political and aesthetic contestations cannot be limited to either the symbolic politics of recognition or even the politics of redistribution because they also have to oppose the violent split between materiality and form.³⁸ Evocative of the severance between the signifier and affect in melancholia, this violent schism calls for new modes of mediation, or interaction, between abstract forms and damaged materialities to be invented in political and aesthetic practices.

In fact, despite the different trajectories and philosophical genealogies I reconstructed in this chapter, all the thinkers I have discussed implicitly or explicitly call for a rethinking of embodiment and materiality outside the violent and abstract regulation of bodies in modernity: outside exchangeability and abstract commodity form (Irigaray), outside sovereign decision on the state of exception (Agamben), and outside the violence of white supremacy (Spillers and Patterson). Contesting both sovereign decision on bare life and abstract forms of exchange, this different form of mediation between bodies and forms of living cannot be confused either with a dialectical reconciliation, social construction, or especially with a naive celebration of prepolitical life. On the contrary, as Agamben suggests at the end of Homo Sacer, such a task would involve thinking the inseparability of form and life beyond the binaries of Western metaphysics:

This biopolitical body that is bare life must itself instead be transformed into the site for the constitution and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoē. … Yet how can a bios be only its own zoē, how can a form of life seize hold of the very haplos [bare being] that constitutes both the task and the enigma of Western metaphysics? If we give the name form-of-life to this being that is only its own bare existence and to this life that, being its own form, remains inseparable from it, we will witness the emergence of a field of research beyond the terrain defined by the intersection of politics and philosophy, medico-biological sciences and jurisprudence.

(HS, 188)

In this difficult passage Agamben only hints at what this new interconnection between form and life might look like.³⁹ By making their separation and unification equally impossible, the conflicting inseparability of bare life and political form—bios and zoē—takes us beyond the three alternatives that govern the discussion of the body in politics: the paradigm of biopolitics, the nostalgic return to the remains of the natural body, and the equally naive social construction of a new technological body.