FREDERICK DOUGLASS

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FREDERICK DOUGLASS

• TRIALS OF THE SELF-MADE MAN

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What is literature?

• Making a mark
• Legible imprint, trace alphabet
• Exists when marker does not
• Utilizes existing forms, genres, styles

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marked (un)remarked
history
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Imagining America

• Aesthetic
• Sublimation
• Poetics
• Imaginary

• Ethical
• Materiality
• Politics
• Rhetoric

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Say no to sentiment!

• Cauterized emotional register
• I becomes the child becomes it
• Under slavery, the child is an object
• The personal becomes the sociological

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Slavery subject and object

• Social matrix subjectifies white body
  objectifies black body
• Subjectivity produced and not given

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Mulatto

• Legal black
• Ideological trouble
• Plantation rape
• Gothic figure
• Deconstructs the white-black opposition
• Radical critique of America pure product of
  impurity

W. E. B. DuBois
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The urban

• Better chance of escape
• Better treatment of slaves
• Street life, community
• Literacy
• Sale of labour, not of labourers
• Civilization

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Plantation pastoral

• Pastoral as punishment
• Covey as snake
• behold a man transformed into a brute!
• Tree of Knowledge uneaten

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Slavery and subjectivity

• Denial of access to literacy objectification
  from within
• Being bestial (life as an object) contentment
  thoughtlessness
• Language begins to hollow out being I am not
  what I am
• Literacy evacuates being I am a walking civil
  war

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Literacy and unhappy consciousness
They gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my
own soul, which had frequently flashed through my
mind, and died away for want of utterance. The
reading of these documents enabled me to utter my
thoughts and to meet the arguments brought
forward to sustain slavery but while they
relieved me of one difficulty, they brought on
another even more painful than the one of which I
was relieved.
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Literacy and unhappy consciousness
And as I read and contemplated the subject,
behold! that very discontentment which Master
Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to
read had already come, to torment and sting my
soul to unutterable anguish. As I writhed under
it, I would at times feel that learning to read
had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had
given me a view of my wretched condition, without
the remedy.
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Literacy and unhappy consciousness
In moments of agony, I envied my fellow slaves
for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a
beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest
reptile to my own. Anything, no matter what, to
get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting
thinking of my condition that tormented me. There
was no getting rid of it.
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Unhappy consciousness explained!

• Literacy produces/installs the concept of
  freedom
• Consciousness inspired by concept
• Literate consciousness (subjectivity) is but a
  ghostly more than
• Torture liquidates the subject

• Slavery (indeed every social state) does not
  instantiate freedom
• Body beaten by Master
• Torture unaffected by the ghostly more than of
  subjectivity
• Torture redoubled by subjectivity

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Fred Douglasss ethical proposition

• Literacy Violence Freedom
• OR
• Literacy Violence Death
• No truck with the status quo
• First mark the mark of blood
• Second mark the mark of ink

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Mr Covey seemed now to think he had me, and could
do what he pleased but at this moment from
whence came the spirit I dont know I resolved
to fight and, suiting my action to the
resolution, I seized Covey hard by the throat
and as I did so, I rose. My resistance was so
entirely unexpected, that Covey seemed taken all
aback. He trembled like a leaf. This gave me
assurance, and I held him uneasy, causing the
blood to run where I touched him with the ends of
my fingers.
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This battle with Mr Covey was the turning-point
in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few
expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me
a sense of my own manhood. It recalled the
departed self-confidence, and inspired me again
with a determination to be free. He can only
understand the deep satisfaction which I
experienced, who has himself repelled by force
the bloody arm of slavery. I felt as I never felt
before. It was a glorious resurrection, from the
tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom. My
long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed,
bold defiance took its place and I now resolved
that, however long I might remain a slave in
form, the day had passed forever when I could be
a slave in fact. I did not hesitate to let it be
known of me, that the white man who expected to
succeed in whipping, must also succeed in killing
me.