|
a different spin to what is an echo of things said earlier in the thread:
equality is a legal construct--in the states, this means that all subjects/citizens within a given legal space are endowed with the same rights.
it is the fiction of the bourgeois legal subject.
what it means is a political question: if you are conservative in the states and prefer to work within an image of the world that reduces society to a collection of discrete individuals as a way to avoid questions of class (for example), then this legal subject fiction can be quite powerful; if you work from a political viewpoint that tries to link claims made by the dominant order to the social realities those claims create/obscure/define, then the legal subject tends to revert back to a fiction.
as for the matter of whether equality in the formal sense can be linked to identity between persons in any substantive sense...well.....since the conversation has veered off into the direction of innate capacities, then there is nothing to say on the matter. because the seperation of "the innate" from the social means i do not know what you are talking about.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|