BACK TO SERVITUDE

Having established slavery as a key antiphilosophical theme – whether considered primarily as an essential possibility of the animal body or as a necessity of the political one – I turn here to one of the extant ancient practices of ‘slave-speech’, those texts commonly generically recognised as ‘Aesopic fables’. I will argue here that ‘the Aesopic’ is always intimately connected with the problem of slavery, ‘real’ slavery, slavery in a real political sense. But the Aesopic is not simply the discourse of the slave as such; it is rather a discourse that is at once the expression and evidence of that slavery transfigured, although not entirely abolished. A penumbra of the threat of torture halos the Aesopic. I will also argue that the particular genre that exemplifies Aesopic discourse – ‘the fable’ – is a peculiarly primordial one in regard to human community, and in a number of closely connected ways. The Aesopic fable presents the enigma of the foundations of politics in a language that hovers ambiguously between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’.