/lit/ - Literature

>All this becomes clear in the genealogy of the slave. First, the prisoner of war is purely and simply put to death (one does him an honour in this way). Then he is 'spared' [epargne] and conserved [conserve] (servus), under the category of spoils of war and a prestige good: he becomes a slave and passes into sumptuary domesticity It is only later that he passes into servile labour However, he is no longer a 'labourer', since labour only appears in the phase of the serf or the emancipated slave, finally relieved of the mortgage of being put to death. Why is he freed? Precisely in order to work.

>Labour therefore everywhere draws its inspiration from deferred death.

>It comes from deferred death. Slow or violent, immediate or deferred, the scansion of death is decisive: it is what radically distinguishes two types of organisation, the economic and the sacrificial. We live irreversibly in the first of these, which has inexorably taken root in the differance of death.

>The scenario has never changed. Whoever works has not been put to death, he is refused this honour. And labour is first of all the sign of being judged worthy only of life. Does capital exploit the workers to death? Paradoxically, the worst it inflicts on them is refusing them death. it is by deferring their death that they are made into slaves and condemned to the indefinite abjection of a life of labour.

>This changes every revolutionary perspective on the abolition of power.

>If power is death deferred, it will not be removed insofar as the suspension of this death will not be removed. And if power, of which this is always and everywhere the definition, resides in the act of giving without being given, it is clear that the power the master has to unilaterally grant life will only be abolished if this life can be given to him - in a non-deferred death.

-- JB/SE&D