ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 expands our sense of how physical vulnerability and natural slavery work together to construct two versions of humanity. I follow tropes of Human negative exceptionalism from the work of Michel de Montaigne and Étienne de La Boétie to John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (c. 1614) to show how Man represents Homo sapiens in a bifurcated fashion rather than in absolute, universal terms. On the one hand, Humans are depicted as exceptionally subservient creatures. On the other, the Human body is represented as ontologically sick and debilitated. Each account overrepresents itself as the whole of humanity while actually dividing the species into two groups. In the first version, Man is naturally prone to forms of subjection to which non-Human animals would never allow themselves to submit. This trope is central to anti-tyrannical discourse, which equates political servitude with natural slavery. Chattel slavery often becomes indistinguishable from slavery as a metaphor for tyranny. Thus, while Man is the most servile of all creatures, he is concurrently depicted as exceptionally weak and vulnerable. Human bodies are fragile, sick, and in need of care. These two images of the Human should not be understood as equivalent or comparable. To the contrary, this weak version of Man is an inversion of the previous one. It justifies enslaving people who are depicted as naturally predisposed to servitude.
