Search Results

This chapter supplies a crucial reinterpretation of Hegel’s master/slave--or better, “lord/bondsman”--dialectic. Scholars from Kojève on have misrecognized the ways in which Hegel writes this episode as a fundamentally feudal narrative depicting the struggle for possession (specifically, for land) between the Herr and the Knecht. For Hegel, this episode has contemporary significance not because of any supposed reference to ancient slavery or the Transatlantic slave trade, but because he himself lived in a time when feudalism (Grundherrschaft or Herrschaft) was still practiced in Germany, as historians have long acknowledged. Hegel, in short, is critiquing contemporary social and economic conditions as powerfully as would Marx. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Marx’s insights into the Herrschaftsverhältnis (master-servant relation) and suggests that Marx learned to demystify capital by contrasting it with feudalism, as conceived in Hegelian terms. In particular, Marx and later theorists follow Hegel in understanding that the uneasy coexistence of feudalism and capitalism necessitates the use of dialectics.

This chapter develops the language of rector, actor, and other, and of "persons with projects" to work toward a new theory of power. It does so in dialogue with pragmatist theories of action and the theories of Orlando Patterson, Rene Girard, James Coleman, Judith Butler, and G.W.F. Hegel. In hierarchical relations, a figure is elevated to a superior position with enhanced capacity, and to such a figure discretion accrues. This is the person or group who rules, and rule enables the accomplishment of projects. Such mastery—which accrues to rectors—is dependent upon allies and subordinates (actors, who become agents) to whom tasks are delegated and from whom knowledge and expertise are gained, advice is taken, profits are stolen, and value is extracted. Power is dependent on its dependents, and an agent both stands in for, and works on behalf of, the rector. Actor becomes an agent by abdicating, in part, actor's own projects. If actor is an ally to rector, other stands outside the project, profaned. The radical uncertainty that other represents to rector and actor can become an synecdoche for the uncertainty of the world itself. There are four types of extreme alterity: enemy in war, slavery, invisibility, and scapegoat.