Natural Slavery, Real Abstraction, and the Virtuality of Anti-Blackness

This essay challenges the generic dialectic of the "political animal" and "natural slave" through a provisional mobilization of Karl Marx's methodological innovation "real abstraction." While Marx conceptualizes slavery as the historical limit to Aristotle's reflections on the significance of value, I contend that race (and blackness in particular) is the historical limitation to the philosophical and political abstraction of slavery. My close reading of Politics complicates the transcendent recuperation of the Ancients for critical theory by arguing that an epistemic shift—the overdetermination of slaveness as black and with global-ontological consequence—infuses the methods and modes of our backward retrieval.