Full Description
Manorial Capitalism, Enslavement, and the Logic of Dividuation proffers three perspectives on the plantation slave economy of the Antebellum South. The first explores the paternal function as exemplified in the structural authority of the lord of the manor both symbolically and operationally. This figure of masculine authority persisted from the Medieval period to orchestrate what is called here Manorial Capitalism. The second examines the exploitation and alienation that epitomize the logic of capitalism from the plantation economy to the present. And the third deploys retroactively the logic of dividuation to the plantation, a logic that draws its inspiration from neoliberal financial capitalism as well as from anthropological accounts (which distinguish the dividual from the Cartesian-Kantian individual). This book argues that reducing individuals to dividuated components continues to enable a dehumanizing capitalist mindset to fixate on abstracted labor power rather than seeing laboring individuals.
Contents
Introduction Part I Manorial Capitalism Chapter 1: The Paternal Figure (or Father Complex) as the Site of Power Relations Chapter 2: Incorporation into the Political Economy Canon Part II Enslavement Chapter 3: Exploitation as the Constitutive Feature of Capitalism Chapter 4: The Afterlives of American Enslavement Part IIIThe Logic of Dividuation Chapter 5 The Dividual, the Individual, and the Loss of Social Fabric Chapter 6 The Fractured Human Being By Way of Concluding
