Early modern jurisprudence was a site at which the Indian’s relationship to justice was decided, giving birth to new theological forms of law and legitimacy; but the African slave’s relationship to questions of justice and legitimacy remained undetermined. This panel investigates the relation between theology, philosophy, and law through the aperture of race and the construction of the difference between the voluntary and the involuntary. Panelists will explore how the rhetorical and philosophical conjunction “voluntary slavery” opens new genealogical lines of inquiry between freedom and unfreedom, will and coercion in Christian theology, early modern jurisprudence, and modern political philosophers from Hobbes to Spinoza. While critical theorists continue to engage the particular moral and political dimensions of a modern subjectivity produced through subjection, focusing on the peculiar voluntarism of the modern subject, this panel will shift emphasis, exposing how “voluntary slavery” is also productive of distinct forms of slavery.
This paper investigates a largely forgotten 1567 debate early between two Jesuit missionaries in Brazil as a cipher for growing anxieties around the enslavement of the wrong people. Influential Jesuit leader Manuel da Nóbrega’s argument against voluntary slavery sought to continue his reformist Aldeias, while relative newcomer Quirício Caxa, disinclined by his superior’s ardent belief in the redeeming power of persuasion and conversion, argued native peoples can sell themselves into slavery if they so choose. Following Sylvia Wynter, I identify another dimension of the encounter: the necessary suspension of the justice of African’s enslavement. Drawing attention to the Jesuit debate’s importance for emerging conceptions of subjective right, I argue that blackness is the point where all origin stories of slavery—war, debt, nature, will—condense and can be seen as legitimate without just cause, in ways that have profound consequence for secularizing narratives that reverberate through contract theory and political economy.
This paper tracks a doubling of the slave in Kant’s repudiation of ‘contractual slavery’ in the Metaphysics of Morals, placing it in the context of early modern theological and jurisprudential debates over the status of the voluntary slave in the Americas and the West Indies. I argue that Kant–in line with a long history of theological debate–positions the racial slave ‘outside’ the question of justice. But in line with the dictates of the critical philosophy, he also insists that whoever is rational must see all things, even those that fall outside the ambit of morality and right, as law-governed. The racial slave’s unspoken status in Kant’s philosophy is thus extrajudicial, but not extralegal; while the legitimate slave is ‘no longer’ a person in the eyes of justice, for the racial slave, justice–not only as achievement but as possibility and demand–is ‘not yet.’
Black Emancipation marks a paradigm shift in the political and theological reproduction of the image of freedom. Under the call of the theological imitation of Christ and the political imitation of the free laborer, the formerly enslaved came to be known under the banner of the Freedmen. This image of freedom served to cultivate black and national political and social unity by reorienting the significance of blackness’ political theological and ontological status as slaveness. A near indelible mark of a social disinheritance, post-Emancipation writings see black people’s journey from slavery to Emancipation as living images that tell of God’s redemptive work. Through education and exhortation to take on the form of the Freedmen, they incarnate domestic and civic virtue and so legitimate the truth of Christian and national redemption. Read from the underside, we can see the figure of the Freedmen as an instrument for resolving the crisis of black political and theological illegitimacy. By redirecting the significance of blackness, the Freedmen aim to reproduce a redeemable form of black subjectivity by making willful agents in the narration of black subjection as incarnating the truth of Christian and national redemption.
The theological problem of evil is also a problem of sovereignty. Manicheanism - the possibility of two sovereign powers, rather than one - lurks in the background of Christian accounts of the devil. If power has been thought in divine terms, how are the ideas of sovereignty inherited from Christianity transposed into political philosophy so as to enable an account of politics which recognises the existence of multiple legitimate powers - multiple sovereign nations? How does this shift shape early modern political philosophers’ understanding of power - both divine and demonic? This paper will explore the role of demonology in Hobbes’ account of political sovereignty, suggesting that it is only by removing God from the sphere of history and demythologising demonology that Hobbes is able to effect a transition from the paternal patriarchy of the medieval world to the fraternal patriarchy of early modernity.