Sylvia Federici

Violence is a global structural ordering and sorting mechanism in world politics. In producing the subjects the world order needs for its regeneration-i.e., those who are rulers and those who are ruled-as an innovative, zoning machine, it performs a series of violences as inscriptions on flesh, materializing ambiguous human bodies as regulatory ideals; male and female, heterosexual and homosexual, Western and Not-Westem, modem and primitive, citizen and alien. In this chapter we argue that this materialization occurs both as the ontologization of particular subjects and their ordering in relations of distance and propinquity as regards the hegemonic center. First, we de-center European narratives that normalize such violences as a neutral necessity for sovereign grounds, keeping intact a notion that modernity and capitalism self-started in Europe, and problematize the basic ontological and epistemological structures and premises of the writing of history and its affirmation (Agathangelou, 2019). Second, we argue, that the relationship, among the body, sex, violence, and the world, does not speak to the materiality of the global. Defining slavery as a prehistory of capital does not do much analytically for understanding this violence; rather, we must understand how the total value of enslaved life and labor continues to make global capital possible. It is not enough to reinsert these categories or to simply talk about the failure of theory to historicize the body and the world by challenging the normative narratives, nor is it enough to problematize masculinity or the White man. Instead, third, we argue how the colonial and the enslaved as "objects" of knowledge short-circuit structures and promises that govern juridical and ethical programs exposing this violence that they reconfigure. In engaging with various experiments, these colonial and enslaved subjects establish possibilities from a position that is not always an alibi to capital and enslaved to accumulation. As an ontological force, these subjects, unshackle potentialities without the compulsion to make them generate profits for capital.