Black Thought, Hegel's Burden, and Other Matters

Moyọ̀ Òkédìjí, Before the Amistad

Options for resolving the battle of “consciousness” are three (life, death, or captivity) and not two (life or death). No sane person enters a battle with the intent of getting killed or captured, although the potential for either outcome is not unknown. Warriors risk lives aiming to survive, to capture, or to kill their adversaries. If they end up with captives, the burden of sustaining the life of the unkilled, but defeated, adversary falls on the captor. The warrior that enslaves thus brings upon itself the responsibility of managing a reluctantly living person. Hence, a permanent tension that frequently breaks into outright wars between the master and the enslaved obtains in slaveholding societies. Slavery breeds permanent unrest because the enslaved is constantly attempting to be free of the “normative” circumference instituted at the moment the effort to die was truncated. The master, knowing that the enslaved has no reason to be grateful, issues one draconian regulation after another to prevent the slave’s rebellion, one that will reinstate the war of existence and, perhaps, enable the enslaved to fulfill its “death wish." (Yes, the master devises preoccupations, or instruments of “social death,” that would prevent the enslaved from thinking about restarting the war of captivity.)

Preventing the slave’s literal death, I am saying, is the beginning of mastery. Once lordship is instituted death becomes an anathema to the master. The master is not defined alone by the will to live, as conventional readings of Hegel’s allegory suggest, but by the will to prevent the defeated from dying.

Within slavery, the subjected continues to seek an opportunity to exercise the will to “die,” or, to say the same thing, to be free of the master's lordship. The master is incapable of becoming something else. The enslaved does. Mastery is stasis. For the enslaved, the opportunity to rebel sustains continuation.

The condition of being enslaved is inseparable from the wish to terminate the sham “deferral” of death which the master believes it has earned the power to give and take when the slave is captured. When the inimitable C.L.R. James says that slavery is the cause of slave rebellion, he is not just being curt; he is stating a phenomenological truth that Hegel did not analyze in Lordship and Bondage. The enslaved may be melancholic, as Hegel suggests. It may also be true that the slave’s consciousness entails, as Paul Gilroy surmises, an “extended act of mourning.” The source of the slave’s sadness is the unending regret of the master’s stalling of the slave’s literal death. It is no less true that the motivation for the slave’s death seeking struggle also arises from the anxiety attached to the necessity of resuming literal life.

The alternative captivity milieu being presented here is meant in part to reaffirm the claims of the intellectual tradition that says existence for the enslaved inherently consists of battling against the forces to which its instituted stiffling matters. When Fanon, for instance, applies the Hegelian allegory to chattel slavery, he finds that what the master in the modern Atlantic world seeks from the enslaved "is not recognition but work."

The analysis that imagines the enslaved becoming the master qua master is mistaken. The captivity environment against, and within, which the enslaved fights can accommodate only one master who, once deposed, cannot be replaced and not be called master. Knowing this, the object of the right thinking slave’s striving is always for the elimination of mastery. That is why leaders of slave insurrections often speak in millenarian and apocalyptic terms of a new earth and a new heaven.

If slavery is “social death,” as Orlando Patterson argues, what is slave rebellion? A short and direct answer will be that it is a sure means to “literal death.” But the qualifiers will not let us forget that death is more than the cessation of breath. A more expansive answer should say that the slave’s rebellion is a name given to the path to a revolution (the annihilation of master and slave alike) that has no model. The world sought by the slave rebel, fundamentally a realm without masters and slaves, is always different from the one against which the struggle is launched.

Evidence in modern history indicates that the future never arrives exactly as envisaged. But  that does not mean that striving against normativity is futile. Judith Butler's words offer a way out of inertia: “without a repetition that risks life—in its current organization—how might we begin to imagine the contingency of that organization, and performatively reconfigure the contours of the conditions of life?”