‘You be my body for me’

I Hegel’s parable: From desire to work to dispossession

The brief section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit known as the ‘master slave dialectic’ is so dominated by Alexandre Kojève’s famous ‘anthropological’ reading of it that it can almost stand alone, as a kind of meme, for Hegel’s thought itself. It bears noting, however, that Charles Taylor’s emphasis on the importance of recognition for those engaged with questions of multicultural citizenship emerged directly from his reading of this same section of Phenomenology and thus also made it a touchstone in North America in the 1990s. ¹ Judith Butler and Catherine Malabou’s recent exchange, ‘You Be My Body for Me: Body, Shape and Plasticity in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit’, is remarkable, because it dispenses with the preoccupations passed to us by both Kojève and Taylor. ²

Rather than focusing on recognition, work, or even desire, Butler and Malabou each wonder about how Hegel contributes to a new way of thinking about ‘having’ a body and how coming to ‘be’ a body necessarily involves a kind of dispossession. Thus, from Hegel they discover a key philosophical query which is ‘what it means to be bound up with another’. Because of that bind, they argue, there can be no experience of owning a determinate body (YBMB: 624): ‘there is no body that is mine without the other’s body, and no final appropriation of the other’s body either’ (ibid.: 611). The surprise that they find in their reading of Hegel is an analysis of ‘being’ bodies beyond the logic of possession, property, or ownership. For this reason, central to their debate about how to read Hegel is the question of how a determinate shape [gestalt] comes to be attached to life. In other words, what are the terms by which I come to understand that this life – this shape that defines the limit of me – is mine?

If Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel became so important because it spoke to the circumstances in France between the wars, and Charles Taylor’s rereading of this same part of Hegel’s work became almost as important insofar as it was part of a decisive debate concerning the politics of ‘identity’ and multiculturalism at the end of the 20^th century, this article asks about the specific political/cultural shift that licenses or sets the scene for Malabou and Butler’s new reading. The answer, in part, lies on the path following Butler’s thinking of dispossession ‘in two valences’ as she put it in her recent book with Athena Athenasiou. ³ There, and in other recent work, Butler has pointed out that notwithstanding the liberal valuation of autonomy, there is a limit to self-sufficiency as such conditions as childhood, illness, age, or infirmity are always there to remind us. And it is at this limit of autonomy that we experience ourselves as relational and therefore interdependent beings. As Butler says, ‘in its surface and its depth, the body is a social phenomenon: it is exposed to others, vulnerable by definition. Its very persistence depends upon social conditions and institutions … which means that in order to be … it must rely on what is outside itself’ (2009: 42). She argues that we are thus always-already dispossessed of ourselves, so to speak; we are bound together through a constitutive self-displacement.

At the same time, Butler is very aware that dispossession does not only refer to the limits of autonomy or self-sovereignty; much more commonly it is a term that refers to ‘what happens when populations lose their land, their citizenship, their means of livelihood and become subject to military and legal violence’ (Butler and Athenasiou, 2013: 3). Indeed, in their recent book Dispossession, Butler and Athenasiou set out to ‘think about dispossession outside the logic of possession’ by looking at the forces that lead to forced migration, colonialism, homelessness, etc., without falling back on the neo-liberal discourse of property and ownership as the primary factors of subjectivity (ibid.: 7).

Thought in these terms, it is impossible to separate out her collaboration with Malabou from Butler’s so-called ethical turn, from the politics of gender performativity that preoccupied her in the 1990s towards a politics of precarity represented by such books as Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000) and Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004). ⁴ This ‘ethical turn’ has coincided with Butler’s increasing criticism of the state of Israel, and her support for the claim that Israel is an apartheid state, a position she put most definitively in her 2012 book, Parting Ways.^5,6 Butler and Malabou’s reading of Hegel, then, is congruent with a current shift on the left away from a liberal politics of recognition to a (post-)Marxist analytic of dispossession: a move, in other words, away from liberal ‘solutions’ of redistribution – of either goods or recognition – towards thinking through issues of settler colonialism, forced migration and empire. ⁷ This all puts the challenge and the terms of Sois Mon Corps into stark relief. How does Malabou and Butler’s intervention help us think through the current political moment, one that Robert Nichols has called ‘a new global politics of the dispossessed’ (Nichols, unpublished MS)?

My argument is that Butler and Malabou’s piece points towards the insight that Hegel’s parable must be thought in terms of the political history of possessive individualism, and so in terms of the history of juridically defined property relations; the history of regarding of both the body and land as property. The ‘two valences’ of dispossession, in other words, refers in fact to a logic of property relations, one between those who ‘have’ property (either land or the property of their own bodies) and those who are juridically defined as propertyless.

To show this, I first look at Butler and Malabou’s rereading of Hegel before turning to the logic of self-possession as John Locke articulated it in the 17^th century. The discussion then outlines Marx’s account of the origins of wage-labour in England in the 16^th and 17^th centuries, and the continued relevance of this analysis for the current moment. Locke and Marx together provide a critical view on the relationship between an articulation of the political subjectivity (possessive individualism) subtending both legal personhood and property rights, and so-called primitive accumulation as a vital dimension of the workings of capitalism. I then turn to Brenna Bhandar’s recent work on the emergence of property as title in England in the 19^th century. Bhandar’s analysis demonstrates that the form of property as title in the 19^th century co-emerged with a form of juridical citizenship: the self-possessing citizen. The condition for both of these forms of property and citizenship was the juridically decided unfree subject – the native, and the principle of terra nullies. This led to the emergence of the self-possessing legal subject alongside the project of dominion over the territories that were and continue to be settled by colonial powers. This article will pull these threads together to illustrate the contribution that Butler and Malabou’s piece makes, as well as its stakes.

The emphasis that Judith Butler and Catherine Malabou put on the passage from animal to human is not, as it is for Kojève, about the power of work, nor the limitation of death, nor is it, as Taylor describes, about the requirements for recognition. Rather, Butler and Malabou powerfully focus in on the nature of attachment to life in the form of mortal bodies. In Butler’s arresting phrase, the master’s injunction to the slave is ‘You be my body for me, but do not let me know that the body you are is my body’.

What Butler is pointing to in this sentence is, first, that on Hegel’s account, the master attempts to delegate his own embodiment to another, to have his body ‘appear’ over there, in another’s, and in that sense, to de-link his subjectivity from his mortal existence. But second, and in some ways more importantly, when the two consciousnesses ready themselves for what turns out to be a struggle for recognition, Hegel says they are seeking to show they are ‘not attached to life’. On Butler’s reading in particular, the two consciousnesses are actually faced with the requirement of living, and indeed grasp that they are required to live together. As Butler says, ‘If desire is always a desire to overcome bodily existence, it is equally bound by the necessity of preserving it’ (YBMB: 633). More significantly still, these shapes – or consciousnesses – must be bound together before they can emerge as bodies: ‘there is no singular shape that exists outside of this differentiated relation to other shapes’ (ibid.: 632). So while Butler and Malabou both note that Hegel does not speak of ‘the body’ in this portion of the Phenomenology, Butler says, ‘[M]aybe there is something about the body that cannot be named as such, or that is always conceptualized exclusively as a determinate shape, and so misrecognized when it becomes “the body”’ (ibid.). As I hope to show, what lies latent, but nonetheless clear in their reading, is that there is something about ‘the body’ that cannot be named without its being understood, first, as located elsewhere – in another who is dispossessed of his or her attachment to life – before it is understood as an object of possession.

In emphasizing the attempt to de-link subjectivity from certain ways of being attached to life (such as self-ownership), a series of questions emerges. How do we make sense of the persistence of individual life if there is something important to becoming shaped (into a body) in the being bound-together Hegel describes so compellingly? In other words, what are we to make of the attachment to life that Hegel ascribes to the bondsman if it does not imply the kind of ‘animal-like’ servility that Kojève made central to his analysis? Instead, what if this points toward the ways that ‘the body’ must be, as Butler puts it, ‘evacuated, found, and located elsewhere, in order to be understood as one’s “own”’?

As Butler tells it, there is indeed a kind of education at work here – a humbling lesson in discovering that ‘I’ am not bound by space as I thought, and that this unboundedness entails ‘a surprising recurrence of myself’ at a distance from myself, so that I am bound up over there ‘with you’. So in my ‘freedom’ from my form or shape, I am also face to face with the limit to what I will come to call ‘myself’ and, ultimately, my self as a body I possess. Of course, as Butler knows well, in this discovery of the limit to ‘me’ through the attempt to form an impression of a ‘determinate’ myself, I must be first distinguished from other concrete things, and there must be a way to account for that distinction. A shape, in other words, is ‘assumed and maintained to the extent that it is not some other shape’ (YBMB: 626). And ultimately – without rehearsing the transition from determinate to dialectical negation – Butler reminds us that, for Hegel, the ‘shapes’ that consciousness assumes is the entire wager of The Phenomenology of Spirit. Each ‘shape’ must enter onto a scene, or must be made to appear. Shape, then, is no simple matter, but comes into being – it is both the process and end result of shaping – and passes from being, and, in dissolving, loses its shape. So, Butler asks, when Hegel refers to shape, can we assume that he is also referring to ‘the body’? On the face of it, the answer for both Butler and Malabou is no, given that nowhere in this section of the Phenomenology does Hegel mention bodies. But for Butler, despite the ‘absence’ of the body in Hegel’s description of the coming onto the scene of the ‘shapes’ of consciousness, it is nonetheless the mediating term between the two consciousnesses. Another’s body – a body that is not ‘owned’– must intervene in the dialectic of self-ownership. But this other’s body must be understood as nobody. It is on this point, on their attempt not just to read the body but to read it through life rather than death – and through self-fashioning rather than work – that Butler and Malabou’s intervention comes together. To get at this, it is important to underscore that Malabou and Butler both focus on the impossibility of actualizing the master’s injunction ‘you be my body for me’. This is to say that they both focus on the impossibility of separating subjectivity from the body. ⁸

Perhaps the most intense moment of Malabou and Butler’s confrontation is the way in which it pits their particular conceptual innovations, plasticity in the case of Malabou and subjection/attachment in the case of Butler, in relation to Hegel’s text. Specifically, in asking the question of the form of the body, Malabou says that Butler moves too hastily over the distinction between shaping the body and the body as a shape or form. Reminding Butler of the sections of the Phenomenology where Hegel speaks directly and explicitly about ‘bodies’ – in his account of the Unhappy Consciousness and ‘Observing Reason’, for example – she notes that, for Hegel, the ‘body’ is the expression of the subject’s own production at the same time that it is a sign of its own work on a ‘naturally existing’ or animal-like body. By paying attention to the difference between shape and shaping, she counters Butler’s Foucaldian reading of Hegel with a Hegelian reading of Foucault.

What makes this possible is Malabou’s concept of plasticity, the capacity to give and receive form. Indeed, Malabou insists not just on the plastic relationship between the individual and her body – as she puts it, ‘between the natural, unshaped and animal part of it, on the one hand, and the labored and spiritually sculpted part of it, on the other’ (YBMB: 634) – but on the possibility that this is a way to read Hegel. Specifically, Malabou suggests that the plastic operation of shaping one’s body as Hegel presents it is indeed very close to what Foucault describes as the ‘stylization of oneself’. She notes, however, an important difference between them in that ‘the critical self that Foucault is defining can always become aware of the kind of self-transformation in which it is involved’ (ibid.: 635). It can ‘oversee’ its own transformation. Turning implicitly towards Foucault’s extensive work in the second volume of the History of Sexuality, she points out how critique here is ‘akin to virtue’, ‘an instrument, a means for a future or a truth that it will not let itself know or happen to be’ (Foucault, 2003[1968], cited in ibid.). The self, on this view, affects itself, but it does not do it in terms where it is constantly aware of the effect or the process of this self-stylization. For Hegel, Malabou points out, ‘critique is never negative enough, it is never critical enough to challenge the auto-affective structure of subjectivity … The structure of auto-affection, that is, of attachment, involves a determined relationship between me and the other, my current bodily shape and the form into which it will soon be transformed.’ On the basis of this insight, Malabou proposes that Hegel – unwittingly – challenges the structure of auto-affection. And with that, in a ‘malicious tribute’ to Butler’s own text, she asks Butler, ‘[T]o what extent are you attached to the Foucaultian articulation of self-transformation, that is, to his possible stubborn attachment to self-attachment’ (YBMB: 636)?

In Butler’s response to Malabou, she suggests that this attachment to life – approached in different ways but, nonetheless, what they both find in Hegel’s text – could be thought as a persistence that is very like what Freud meant by the life-drives. Thus, if we can never fully escape either attachment or detachment, then ‘perhaps we are referring to a chiasm that gives shape, as it were, to the problem of life’. She concedes to Malabou on this one central point: ‘You are clearly right’, she says, ‘to remind us that in Hegel there is “hetero-affection” from the start, since to attach oneself to one’s own life turns out to be impossible without a certain dispossession of the self. To be alive … is to discover that life is never exclusively one’s own’ (2011: 637). In this instance, as in many others, ‘ownness’ undergoes a constitutive crisis.

This crisis in the meaning of ‘ownness’ – a crisis in the hieroglyphic named as ‘property’ – has a long history, and so it is very helpful and instructive to have Butler and Malabou point out a version of this crisis articulated in an early 19^th-century text like The Phenomenology of Spirit. As C. B. MacPherson famously argued, the case for exclusive individual property, beginning with the ‘property in each person’, emerged in Europe in the 17^th century as a result of the rise of the crisis of accumulation that led to capitalist market relations. Market- based relations required property understood as an exclusive, alienable right to all kinds of material things, including both land and capital, at the same time that it was assumed that ‘land and capital always necessarily would be, as they always had been, held by less than all men’ (MacPherson, 1972: 129). The new kind of universal property that emerged was the property each man was said to have first in his own body, and thus in his own labour. MacPherson comes to this understanding in his reading of John Locke, who argued that given that each man owned his own labour, the land with which he mixed his labour was also understood to be exclusively his own. MacPherson notes that it was John Locke’s particular genius to articulate together a theory of ‘possessive individualism’, one in which each has a ‘Property in his own Person’, with a peculiarly modern, juridical and economic political subjectivity. ⁹ The possessive individual – the person who owns, first of all, his or her own body, and the labour that proceeds from it – was a necessary corollary to the rise of the alienation of labour under capitalist relations of production.

Locke offers his own parable of the transition from the state of nature to civil society in his Second Treatise: when there was still plenty of land, man confronted his natural environment in such a way that rational behaviour consisted in subduing nature (land) through labour. As he argued:

God, gave the world to men in common; but since he gave it to them for their benefit … it cannot be supposed he meant it to remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the Industrious and the Rational (and labour was to be his title to it) not to the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious. (Locke, 1994: 21)

Like MacPherson, James Tully has also argued that the self-possessing political subject is the logical expression of capitalist relations of production (which operate by the ‘alienation’ or selling of one’s privately owned laboring power). But Tully extends MacPherson’s argument to show that the self-possessing subject is also the logical expression of settler societies, in which the land is understood to be available for ownership by colonial powers and settlers precisely because it is ‘unoccupied’ by anyone understood to be rational, hard-working, or self-possessing. ¹⁰

For of course Locke says that by including the vacant lands of America there may be still enough land in the world for everyone to have as much as she or he can work and use. With the discovery of money, on Locke’s account, natural law, which limited the amount anyone could appropriate so that everyone could have as much as he or she could use, does not now hold; it ‘would hold … had not … money introduced … larger possessions, and a Right to them’ (1980: 33). The reason the rule does not now hold is not that the land has run out – there is more than enough of that. The law no longer holds once we include those parts of the world where money has never been introduced. There where the old rule still holds, there are ‘great Tracts which lie waste’. By those parts of the world, Locke is clearly referring to the so-called ‘new world’ – the Americas ¹¹ – where the ‘wild Indian’ knew no enclosure and thus had no private property. Brenna Bhandar’s recent work on the history of property relations in Britain and its colonies is fundamental to making sense of this philosophical trajectory. She traces the logic of abstraction that shaped the emergence of the legal form of property in the 19^th century, looking specifically at how the technique of title by registration facilitated ‘the realization of land in its abstract form as a commodity’, making land in the colonies available to be ‘claimed, partitioned, securitized and cultivated’. This is where ‘land as a commodity and the abstract figure of the Savage co-emerge from the social and historical grounds of settler colonialism’ (2015: 257). Here, a discourse of primitivism conflates with a racial discourse of savagery and tribal life, both defined by the absence of property. As Bhandar writes:

In registers produced by colonial administrators and customs officers, everything from each bushel of wheat that was produced in the British North American colonies and imported into Britain, to the number of tonnes of cotton exported from India, to parcels of land carved up for sale in [British colonies], were recorded in registers and thus became a crucial instrument in creating colonial taxonomies of productivity, income and expenditure. (Bhandar, 2015: 259)

On the basis of this insight, Wolfe argues that the primary motivation for the elimination of the native was and is not race but access to territory. The figure of the savage in Locke, in Hobbes and in Rousseau, like the figure of the bondsman in Hegel, has no property and no territory because, like women, madmen and children, these figures are understood to have no reason and thus no capacity to accumulate. It is precisely this ideology that underlies the specificity of what Wolfe called ‘the obtaining and the maintaining – of territory’ (2006: 388). As Bhandar argues, in the Canadian case, the legal status ‘Indian’ set out in the 1866 Indian Act ‘provided for the forced (or compulsory) labour of Indians on their reserves’ and it also ‘established a regime of governance over land and identity that wreaked havoc on pre-existing social relations and governance structures in native communities’ (Bhandar, 2016 [online]). What the Indian Act accomplished was two completely different economies: that of those on the reserve and that of the settlers. As Audra Simpson says, ‘[t]he Indian Act, a specific body of law that recognizes Indians in a wardship status in Canada – not a nation-to-nation arrangement by any stretch – created the categories of personhood and rights that severed Indian women from their communities when they married white men’ (2014: 221).

II Settler colonialism and primitive accumulation

The question of whether this approach to self-possession can shed light on the process by which indigenous people were uprooted from land returns us to Marx, who writes about ‘primitive accumulation’, which as he reminds us is ‘the process which divorces the worker from the ownership of the conditions of his own labour’ (Marx, 1976: 874). Rather than offer a moral account of accumulation – those with reason are able to accumulate – Marx offers an historical one. Silva Federici proposes that Marx introduced the concept of ‘primitive accumulation’ in chapter 8 of Capital, vol. 1, in order to describe the social and economic restructuring that the European ruling class initiated in response to the accumulation crisis of the 15^th century (2004: 61–8). Primitive accumulation identifies both a logical and a historical condition for the development of the capitalist system insofar as ‘primitive’ (as in original) accumulation of land involved the dispossession of peasants and freeholders from land that was made ‘private’ through recurring attacks and/or massacres. As she argues, Marx ‘analysed primitive accumulation almost exclusively from the viewpoint of the waged industrial proletariat: the protagonist, in his view, of the revolutionary process of his time … Thus, in his account, primitive accumulation consists essentially in the expropriation of the land from the European peasantry’ (ibid.: 63).

Marx himself tells us that ‘primitive accumulation … is nothing other than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production’ (2004: 874–5). For Marx, the appropriation of land was the primary means to dispossess European peasantry. But equally important was the way that, with the rise of merchant capitalism, money power began to hold sway over the feudal order. While for Locke the discovery of money eliminates the natural law, on Marx’s account, money dissolves the traditional community, so that we move from a world where ‘community’ is defined in terms of structures of interpersonal social relations to a world where the community of money prevails. In Marx’s words, ‘the forcible expropriation of the people received a new and terrible impulse in the sixteenth century’ such that the resistance of the traditional social order started to crumble (ibid.: 883). The theft of communal property was led by a grand movement of enclosing the commons, which meant that ‘forcible usurpation, generally accompanied by the turning of arable into pasture land … extend[ed] into the sixteenth century’ (ibid.: 884).

As David Harvey points out, while no one before Marx had told the story of the transition from feudalism to capitalism with such systematicity, ‘the story Marx tells is partially true in some places’ (2010: 304). However, historians and political economists have recounted instances of primitive accumulation that have been ‘relatively peaceful … The story of primitive accumulation is, therefore, more nuanced and complicated in its details than the one that Marx tells’ (ibid.). Seen from another point of view, Silvia Federici proposes that ‘the concept of the “transition to capitalism” is in many ways a fiction … The concept of transition … suggests a gradual, linear historical process whereas the period it names was among the bloodiest and discontinuous in world history’ (Federici, 2004: 62). Harvey agrees there are serious issues with viewing this transition as peaceful, arguing that there is ‘a real problem with the idea that primitive accumulation occurred once upon a time, and that once over, it ceased to be of real significance’ (2010: 304). On such significance existing to the current day, Federici writes:

A return to the most violent aspects of primitive accumulation has accompanied every phase of capitalist globalization, including the present one, demonstrating that the continuous expulsion of farmers from the land, war and plunder on a world scale, and the degradation of women are necessary conditions for the existence of capitalism in all times. (2004: 12–13)

Although inequalities in the distribution of wealth and sociological determinants like life-expectancy or incarceration rates are serious problems for indigenous communities in Canada and the United States, they do not name the central political problem. Indeed, as Audra Simpson has argued, the Canadian and US governments have shown many times over that they are well able to tolerate a policy of letting indigenous populations die (2014). Against the dominant story that processes of colonialism are complete, the argument proffered by Smith, Simpson, Coulthard, Alfred and others, is that colonialism is in fact intensifying. ¹³

One important symptom of this intensification of colonialism is what Andrea Smith calls the ideology of the rapeability of Native women’s bodies. In her classic work Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, she points out that ‘because of complex jurisdictional issues, perpetrators of sexual violence can usually commit crimes against Native women with impunity’ (2005: 31). As she says, ‘[t]he project of colonial sexual violence establishes the ideology that Native bodies are inherently violable – and by extension, that Native lands are also inherently violable’ (ibid.: 12). On the first count, the perpetration of violence against Native women with impunity, it is striking to note that according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, between 1980 and 2012, there were over 1,500 missing or murdered Aboriginal women in Canada, and many reports put the number at twice that. ¹⁴ These numbers relate to Audra Simpson’s recent argument that

… [s]ince the 1850s, Indian women have been legally mandated to disappear in various forms, either through the Indian Act’s previous instantiation of Victorian marriage rules whereby an Indian woman who married a non-Indian man lost her Indian status (her legal identity) and as such her right to reside on her reserve. With this legal casting out was the casting out as well of the possibility of transmitting that status to her children, a loss as well of governmental power with Indigenous governance itself, the political form that her body and mind signifies. (Unpublished paper, 2014)

The question of self-ownership, self-possession and bodies finds itself articulated in the history of western political philosophy, including in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. And Butler and Malabou’s attention to the question of bodily self-possession in terms of the question of dispossession’s ‘two valences’ – of being both dispossessed of ourselves and bound together by that dispossession, and of the wider dispossession of lands – is best understood in terms of the above history and politics. If the specific conjunction of the relationship between ontology and plasticity is the delicate point upon which Butler and Malabou’s difference hinges, can plasticity replace ontology, as Butler asks? Can it, in a sense, precede it? Is there a kind of plasticity of ontology? Indeed, whatever ‘self’ to which I seek to attach both exceeds and confounds my attempts at self-attachment, because if it is a living body, it is a body among other bodies, but also one that is fundamentally dependent on those other bodies to receive and impart its shape. This question of ontology – in terms of ‘having’ a body, rather than ‘being’ a body – is central to the question of how the term ‘dispossession’ works in both subjective and objective terms. In other words, Butler and Malabou’s central point may be that Hegel himself balked at linking the body to subjectivity through a discourse of ownership, but they do not take their analysis (nor do Butler and Athenasiou in Dispossession) towards the question of the relationship of political subjectivity thought through in terms of self-ownership and market- based economies, within which that self-ownership becomes the basis for the alienation of labour on the one hand, and the grounds for declaring the Americas ‘terra nullies’ on the other.

Sois Mon Corps shows how the philosophical articulation of the so-called ‘modern’ self-possessing, juridical, economic and political subject relies on and requires its other: a dispossessed, unfree native/slave/bondsman. For the self-possessing sovereign subject of liberal market-based modernity is not simply the corollary of liberal and capitalist democracy as C. B. MacPherson argued so compellingly 50 years ago. The emergence of the self-possessing subject of rights, of property and of legal personhood is also central to understanding colonialism, empire and the territorial dispossession of indigenous peoples. And so Butler and Malabou’s reading of Hegel points towards what Frantz Fanon’s reading made of this text 50 years ago: the important relationship between what the ‘bondsman’ or the slave in Hegel’s narrative is expected to do and the demands on the native or the colonized. Butler and Malabou’s reading, in other words, foregrounds the impossible demand made on the ‘slave’ or bondsman of Hegel’s set-piece: be available to the whims of the master and at the same time disappear – a demand that their reading captures with ‘you be my body for me, but do not let me know that the body you are is my body’ (YBMB: 612). To put this in more concrete terms, the link between dispossession’s two valences is between the takability (indeed, rapability) of certain kinds of juridically described bodies, and the plundering of land, territory and livelihood. Without a juridically decided unfree subject – the native – not only could the self-possessing individual not have emerged, neither could the project of dominion over the territories that were and continue to be settled by colonial powers.

So, to return to my provocation, the question hanging between Butler and Malabou, about the possibility of self-fashioning, about the relationship between life and death, of the shaping or sculpting of the human body, about the possibility that one could find a kind of ‘death drive’ at the heart of Hegel’s concern with the emergence of ‘self-consciousness’ that plasticity – as the capacity to receive and give form – always exceeds ontology. But all of this misses the political question of both personal and territorial dispossession. Without an unfree subject – the slave or the native – not only could the self-possessing individual not have emerged, neither could the project of dominion over territories that were and continue to be settled by colonial powers. This logic of property relations is the ‘chiasm’ that gives shape, as it were, not to the problem of life, but to the problem of how the body is understood in legal, property relations. And this is really what is at stake in Sois Mon Corps.