Impossible freedoms: slavery and (in)capacity in Kant’s Enlightenment
Trafford, Tia (2025) Impossible freedoms: slavery and (in)capacity in Kant’s Enlightenment. Political Theology. ISSN 1462-317X
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The figure of slavery is of central importance to Enlightenment accounts of individual and collective freedom. The slave appears in these accounts as negative infraction of liberty, with freedom defined as self-mastery against the mastery of another’s whim. This paper suggests a speculative reconstruction of the Kantian trajectory of thought shaping freedom’s relation to slavery by drawing on Afro-pessimism’s engagement with the aporias generated through the racial slave. For Kant, freedom becomes measurable along a continuum of capacity to escape our enslavement both to external despotism and internal savagery through reason and self-mastery. Metaphorizing slavery collapses racial slavery into a generalized condition through which we are driven toward emancipation. I suggest that the capacity for reason and self-mastery is not only made quantifiable through the metaphorization of slavery as freedom’s negation, but the conceptual coherence of freedom requires slaveness-as-incapacity as impossibility for the subject even in enslavement to their nature.
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