Scenes of Subjection

Chapter 4 begins the discussion of “the refiguration of subjection” that occurs with emancipation (203). In other words, Hartman argues that emancipation is a “nonevent” because it merely “refigures” the basic conditions of enslavement. The insistence on extreme pain and simultaneous denial of pain in Blackness that characterizes slavery now, with emancipation, metamorphoses to the “burdened individuality” of the freed person who is held to impossible standards of “responsibility.”

The chapter revolves around the defining and describing this state of “burdened individuality,” which attempts to convey the movement out of property and into Lockean property-in-self that occurs with emancipation: The formerly enslaved are now “owners” of themselves. Yet, this ownership is troubled—thus generating a “burdened individuality”—since this new Black subject was legally “equal” but nonetheless socially inferior, “free” yet still subjugated.

This new individuality was a form of conscription that ensured that the newly liberated became indebted and thus beholden. The central question of the chapter is thus: “How did emancipatory figurations of a rights-bearing individual aimed at abolishing the badges of slavery result in burdened individuality?” (213). Theoretically, emancipation created equality, yet Hartman notes that this is too “clean” an interpretation, as there is a “gap” between the endowment of rights and the exercise of those rights.