SLAVERY, BODY, DEDISCOURSIFICATION: A (REPUBLICAN) DISCOURSE-BASED THEORY OF SLAVERY (original) (raw)

There is a highly visible lacuna in contemporary republican theory, which I aim to close by this research. Philip Pettit directed republican political theory towards the 'master/dominus' part of key republican vocabulary as he premised his theorization on the concept of 'arbitrary influence'. I think the cause is probably in a focus on Iustinian's Digest concept, which Pettit took over from Quentin Skinner. It is interesting to note that, long before Iustinian's Digest codification of the master-slave relationship, we have some inspiring guidelines for a construction of a discourse-based theory of slavery, primarily in Euripides and Thucydides (Pericles' speech from Book I). My aim is to revive the approach and give it a full body of welldeveloped and empirically sound theory. My starting premise will be a theory of dediscoursification, on the one hand, and a theory of language as a collective body maker, on the other, that is key political part of the former. Dediscoursification is a process whereby at least one co-discursant looses his or her faith in the ability of language to serve as a medium of interaction between him/her and the co-discursant; the process is generated normally by a violation of one of the key moral-discursive parameters of language, and may be culturally transmitted. One key aspect of the outcome of the process is in the disappearance of the normal bodily relations between the codiscursants-at least one co-discursant starts to be viewed as 'less-than-human', a kind of not yet domesticated, and highly unpredictable, animal. Apart from this being o en tied to the process of preparation of wars, we find a very similar dynamic in master-slave relationship, from which my research will commence. I aim to explore the process through the four pillars: 'war', 'law', 'body', and 'language'. My primary empirical focus will be on American pre-and post-civil war slavery, especially on Frederick Douglass (a famous ex-slave, orator, and American abolitionist). The research, of course, is likely to yield a wider set of implications; one pretty straightforward would be in the thesis that language is a primary, biologically and evolutionary driven and bodily, form and means of human sociality; and another in the thesis that language produces both wars and slavery, but not as poststructuralist theories frame it.