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At the very beginning of The Alchemy of Race and Rights , first published in 1991, Patricia Williams gives a brief account of a legal case history, Icar v. Suars , which casts the problem of defective merchandise in terms of the 'redhibitory vice of craziness' (Williams, 1993, p. 3). A 'redhibitory vice,' Williams explains, 'is a defect in merchandise which, if existing at the time of purchase, gives rise to a claim allowing the buyer to return the thing and to get back part or all of the purchase price' (ibid.). The case Williams is reading is an 1835 decision from the state of Louisiana involving a slave named Kate. Kate had been sold by the defendant - the seller, her owner - to the plaintiff for $500. Two or three days later, according to the buyer, 'it was discovered the slave was crazy, and run away, and that the vices were known to the defendant'; against this, it was contended by the seller that 'Kate was not crazy but only stupid, and stupidity is not madness; but on the contrary, an apparent defect, against which the defendant did not warrant' (ibid.). In this instance, the legal code that intervenes to settle the dispute comes down on the side of the buyer, as follows:
The code has declared, that a sale may be avoided on account of any vice or defect, which renders the thing either absolutely useless, or its use so inconvenient and imperfect, that it must be supposed the buyer would not have purchased with a knowledge of the vice. We are satisfied that the slave in question was wholly, and perhaps worse than, useless. (ibid.)
The initial burden of Kate's story in The Alchemy of Race and Rights is to introduce a relation to the law which is not that of a subject, not that of the owners and sellers or buyers (wronged or otherwise), but that of an object, a 'thing'. Neither plaintiff nor defendant, either stupid or crazy, the unwanted slave appears before the law in the form of a worse than useless property, and, as Williams puts it in the opening sentence of her book, 'subject position is everything in my analysis of the law' (ibid.). As...