Social Death as a Kind of Deconstruction: The Figure of the Slave Under Erasure

This essay explores the theoretical resources generated by a critical reading of deconstruction with the theory of social death. Both offer accounts of life and death in which life is dependent upon a certain form of death. What to make of that dependency? And what would it mean to exceed that dependency, in the mode of deconstructive supplementarity? I work these questions through three examples: John Locke's account of property and propriety, Immanuel Kant's notion of the categorical imperative, and G.W.F. Hegel's description of world history. In each, I identify how the argument turns on a figure of the slave – an unremunerated rhetorical and logical element that, when re-read under erasure, fails to buttress the system in which it is deployed and instead destabilizes the argument and its historical-cultural politics.