The aff reinforces the system of property law, recreating logics of racial ownership and commodifying Blackness. These logics perpetuate social death and trap Black being outside human signification.

So nothing lies outside this more general state of powerlessness, not even language, which, as Spillers shows, reproduces the terms of racial ownership by which slave offspring are “possessed” and fathered “without whatever benefit of patrimony” (74). In this way, by means of the loss of the patronymic, Spillers shows how the confusion of tongues becomes a figure for the confusion of inheritance in the Middle Passage: the literal suspension of the grammar of kinship has been succeeded by the issuance of owned-created property; and this was both the achievement of slavery and its failing; in short, it gave birth to a subject that can only perpetuate, in consequence, the decadent excess of social death as its own most extravagant expenditure. Spillers shows the importance of the invasion-elision of black kinship ties; using the term “ungendering,” she focuses on how fathering-reproduction relies on a production that is also an evacuation or emptying-out of kinship. The slave child is exposed through its servitude to an elision that delivers it over to insecure kinless being. There are exclusively historical and social reasons for this transformation, which emerged alongside the modern capital-plantation system, but what I want to stress here is the affect of the slave’s obedience to its own extravagant elision, which demands that it reproduce itself as a being that has no symbolic immanence as a modern subject. And it was because the condition of the black slave was that of a zero sum that s/he[they] could be so decadently stripped of human being and turned into a commodity. And in this way it is as the excess of a generalized impropriety that white plantation culture managed to line up sexual interest with its idea of virtue, the idea of a forced and forcefully used-up subject with that of partus sequitur ventrem – literally “that which is brought forth follows the womb.” The whole idea of an extravagant, socially dead subject issues from this condition of the slave, whose systematic effacement as a zero sum is the route to its wealthy reconversion – all this is described effectively by Spillers as a “perversion of judicial power,” but there is no outside of this perversity by which black property becomes identified with a pleasure that enslaves itself and is, therefore, socially dead (78). Here again, Spillers can only see the sexual intimacy between masters and slaves as an example of “unrelieved crisis” in “the customary lexis of sexuality” (76). But such intimacy cannot be said to be perverse by virtue of humanism, since sexuality here isn’t so much outside the customary laws or lexis of human recognition as it is the extravagant enjoyment of its destruction – the first act of which is to proscribe pleasure as a paradoxically useful, profitable remnant. Let us say that this is an enjoyment that always signifies destruction as a “property plus,” in which coitus is an excretory reabsorption (65). I am deliberately choosing an oxymoron to speak of the unity here between ejaculation and enjoyment-domination. This locution permits us to glimpse how the raping and torture of slaves is always a pleasurable enrichment in which the right to power is bound up with the operation of violence and rule. That pleasure is moreover an operation that makes the slave, shorn of all sentiment and symbolic value, enslaved by its own passionate attachments to reproduce life as social death. At the same time, this presumed desire for enslavement contains another consequence: For if mastery is always presumed to be sovereign in its rapacious domination, doesn’t the master too end up submitting his desire to property law? Is not this extravagant enrichment through sex already slavish in having its issue made into flesh, in losing its ancestral name to flesh, in reproducing a profit that borrows from social death a lien of social virtue as symbolic extravagance? That is why, even with the death of the slave, the endless expenditure of mastery remains the negative truth of a supernumerary economy, rather than the sign of a lasting sovereign power. This would also mean that all racial mastery is necessarily servile. But this conclusion is immediately impaired by another: such social death meets its necessary limit in a kind of decadence that cannot finally be captured by the moral legacy of humanism, and whose pleasure cannot be said to be located either exclusively in language (whether of nouns or names) or in a sovereignty that is slavishly perverse.