“Raise the Black Flag!”

The Conceptual Persona of the Pirate against the Law

Abstract

The pirates were (and, perhaps, are) for the state apparatus and its law the outsider par excellence, a miasma and transgressor which needed to be hunted down and exterminated before it manages to infect the “good citizens” with its immorality, brutality and complete ignorance of a sense of duty. On the other hand, radical literature presents a more positive image of the pirates and their societies. It argues that pirate societies were characterised by a sense of mutual aid and equality, based on different ways of living, sense of justice and understanding of a (non)law. The article focuses on the Golden Age of piracy (between mid-17^th to early 18^th century) to shed more light on this conflicting image of the pirates.

Furthermore, the article draws from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s idiosyncratic terminology, especially terms such as those of the conceptual persona and the nomad and presents the figure of the pirate as a similar conceptual persona to that of the nomad. In doing so, it aims to argue that the persona of the pirate could be an interesting one in an effort to rethink our ways of existing beyond the current oppressive state’s apparatus and its official law, towards a way of living that aims to disorient the dogmatism and hierarchy of the law and which aims do politics following its own (non)law.