“From Universal Emancipation to Capitalist Slavery”

March 1st, 2024 at 5PM

Room 4202

This talk by Nick Nesbitt (Princeton University) will examine the complex legacy of the Haitian Revolution in its relation to global capitalism. The Haitian Revolution incontestably constitutes the most advanced political intervention of the age of revolutions from the perspective of its immediate and universal abolition of slavery. At the same time, from the perspective of Marx’s critique of the subject of human rights and the capitalist social form, scholars must continue to interrogate the subject of 1804 and universal emancipation, to ask whether, paradoxically, that henceforth free subject is not precisely the necessary subject of global capital, a peripheral subject now free to offer up their labor power as the unique commodity capable of feeding what Marx called Capital, the automatische Subjekt.

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