Blending commercial, art-house and genre cinema, Tarantino's "Django Unchained" develops an unexpectedly complex reflection on the forms of political domination. The film critiques mostly envisaged “Django” through the lens of “cultural politics” and critical approaches (postcolonial studies, labeling theories, race studies). This presentation will show that these approaches actually miss the structural point of the movie: Django's theme is less about the social/cultural features of racism and slavery than the legal and economic features of the American social contract. According to me, the first part of the movie assumes that slavery is just a coherent expression of the ways American contractualism overlaps with the legal private and public institution of the contract. The second part of the film proposes then a radical and nihilist critique of this institution - the only way to escape deprivation of self-property being violence, and the only way to escape violence being aesthetic irony.
