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Slaves Are Not Called: The Impact of Anthony Farley in Thinking Black Life and Law

Wed, October 13, 8:00 to 9:45am, (Eastern Standard Time), Virtual 5

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

"People will be able to liberate themselves only after the legal superstructure itself has begun to wither away. And when we begin to overcome and to do without these [juridical] concepts in reality, rather than merely in declarations, that will be the surest sign that the narrow horizon of bourgeois law is finally opening up before us."
--Anthony Farley, “Perfecting Slavery”

This panel explores the application, operation, and impact of innovations made over the past two decades by legal theorist Anthony P. Farley. For more than 20 years, Farley has published striking work on capitalism, critical race theory, cultural analysis, law and literature, the legal history of slavery, and libidinal economy. His work has been critically engaged by artists and scholars of afro-pessimism, animal studies, bioethics, civil rights, comparative literature, constitutional and criminal law, critical race theory, education, gender studies, post-Heideggerian philosophy, social psychology, social welfare, and more. His provocative claims-- that the narrative of historical progress post-slavery is narrated juridically vis-a-vis the imposition of anti-black law and order and that juridical pleas for freedom are “produced through an injury” and constitutively cannot succeed in producing any condition but unfreedom -- have informed generations of scholars interested in comprehending how anti-blackness constitutes the content and form of modern law in the United States. Echoing Saidiya Hartman’s landmark question, “What if the presumed endowments of man--conscience, sentiment, and reason--rather than assuring liberty or negating slavery acted to yoke slavery and freedom?” Farley has concluded that the submission of the slave gives rise to law: “There is no law before the slave bows down."

In the spirits of black feminist theory and black studies, continental theory, legal studies, psychoanalysis, and visual culture, panelists will propose a series of dynamic questions, including; How might we posit the life and oeuvre of neo-expressionist painter Jean-Michel Basquiat as a “perfection of slavery”? What is the relationship between abolition, class, and gender if one takes seriously Farley’s assertion that “the mark is the beginning of property and law”? How might reading Farley’s “Law, Trauma, and Repetition” alongside the sounds of Jimi Hendrix and late rapper Juice WRLD inaugurate a dialogue about the contemporary war on drugs as one preconditioned by law’s anti-black function?

Beyond charting the intellectual lives touched by his oeuvre, this panel is an interdisciplinary and intergenerational conversation highlighting the work of scholars who continue to cultivate the pessimistic and abolitionist juridical sensibility Farley's scholarship continues to make possible.

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