"As an instrument of labor, the slave has a price. As a property, the slave has a value. The slave's labor is needed and used, so he is therefore kept alive, but in a state of injury, in a phantom-like world of horrors and intense cruelty and profanity. The violent terror of the slave's life is manifested through the overseer's disposition to behave in a cruel and intemperate manner, as well as in the spectacle of pain inflicted on the slave's body. Violence, here, becomes an element in manners, like whipping, or taking the slave's life itself: an act of caprice and pure destruction aimed at instilling terror. Slave life, in many ways, is a form of death-in-life." Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe (page75)
CAROLANN PEREZ
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