Reconstructing Classical Philology: Reading Aristotle Politics 1.4 After Toni Morrison

Abstract:In the course of his discussion of the role of slavery in the domestic economy of the ancient Greek city, Aristotle makes the claim that "the slave is a kind of animate piece of property" (Pol. 1253b32). This article reexamines Aristotle's choice of language through the lens of the Black radical philology of Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers, and Christina Sharpe. In particular, it uses Sharpe's concept of the orthography of the wake as a practice of dysgraphia to pose questions of Aristotle's embrace of the idea of a human being as property. Rather than taking Aristotle's formulation as a normative expression of the concept of slavery as property in Greek law, this approach analyzes Aristotle's use of metaphor and vacillation to buttress an ideological fiction. This dialogue between antiquity and American modernity gains additional significance from the fact that Aristotle's linguistic choices in Book 1 of the Politics bear comparison with the strained grammar of American slave codes, critiqued by Hortense Spillers, as they attempted to normalize the counter-intuitive idea of human beings as property. As other scholars have observed, the potential analogies between Aristotle's theory of slavery in Politics 1 and ideologies of slave-owning in the American South were not lost on pro-slavery advocates, who condoned and adopted Aristotle's metaphors.