email: ct2994@nuy.edu
In unpayable debt Denise-Ferreira-da-Silva starts by giving us the concepts separability, determinacy and sequentially the ‘three pillars’, that sustain linear temporality. These concepts are understood through Dana, a character taken from Octavia Butlers Kindred. She is used as an example of how to move beyond separability, determinacy and sequentially. Through the use of Non-linear time that defies separability.
Denise-Ferreira-da-Silva talks us through how popular writers have understood racial dispossession, firstly, Wynter and Quijano. Wynter, da-Silva states, views racial dispossession biologically, through the creation of the category of the human, while Quijano views racial dispossession socially. Da-Silva disagrees with both writers and builds a case for understanding racial dispossession from Marx that connects the economics of global capital to the Juridical.
This is where it starts to get juicy for me but also very complex. The Juridical-economic method is said to hide under a modern moralism the violence it maintains. ‘Post enlightenments ethical grammar’ is linked to universality that ‘restricts liberty to humans indigenous to Europe’ as the very ‘distinction between universality and the particular is modern invention’ articulating human difference. (p.98)
Denise-Ferreira-da-Silva, draws our attention to Marx’s understanding of property (103). Stating that he spilt his understanding of property into two. One he sees as Capitalist as it separates labourer and means of production and one, he sees as non-capitalist as it doesn’t separate means of production and the labourer. Da-Silva thinks this conception overlooks how the Juridical-economic made public property in the first place as it ‘obscures the significance of the total value appropriated in the colonial formation prior to capital’. For Marx and Luxemburg, surplus value is created though capitalism which separates capitalism from colonialism.
The racial dialectic
Cause and affect
The Unpayable
Total violence.
Knowledge devices
REFERENCES
Butler, Octavia E. 1979. Kindred. Boston: Beacon Press.
Silva, Denise F. da. Unpayable Debt: Reading Scenes of Value against the Arrow of Time.
Debt: Reading Scenes of Value against the Arrow of Time.