ABSTRACT
In political philosophy and theory, both the figure of the human and its corollary, the nonhuman animal, share a proximity with the slave. While this is inaugurated in the annals of political philosophy with Aristotle’s categorization of man as a speaking and political animal and the slave—as well as the foreigner—as lacking reasoned speech, the status of the slave undergoes a historical torsion with the anti-black incarnation of the racial slave and Middle Passage modernity. The political grammar of the human as an anti-black dispositif has been brilliantly deconstructed and radically upended in Afropessimist inflected writing where the slave is disclosed as the ground for the modern political subject. These Black radical interventions and cuts into political theory, simultaneously penetrate while also remaining in a fugitive relation to its philosophical edifice. I trace the presence of the figure of the animal in Marx, to discern how what Nicole Shukin terms “animal capitalism” always already inheres in Marx’s writing and analysis prior to the explosive growth of the factory farm, agribusiness, animal protectionism and carceral animal law. Taking a different approach, I consider how Marx theorizes capitalism as an animalizing violence that dispossesses the worker of humanity, as seen primarily in his early writings. I then turn back to Black radical thought and cinema, to consider the ways in which blackness, animality, and the (lumpen)proletariat are put into relation in the films of Charles Burnett. Finally, I end with a consideration of Sylvia Wynters whose prodigious work and fugitive humanism inspires this essay.
