Bodies to the Slaughter: Global Racial

Reconstructions, Fanon’s Combat

Breath, and Wrestling for Life
Anna M. Agathangelou

Introduction

‘Past Over Present’, about the African struggles published in Al-Ahram,

an online Cairo newspaper, engages present tensions in the
possibilities for political transformation (Nkrumah 2000). Gamal
Nkrumah, son of Kwame Nkrumah, a founder of Pan-Africanism,
opens with a photo of seven chained slaves; the accompanying
text states that in German South-West Africa, the Herero uprising
against European settler colonialism was ruthlessly put down when
the Germans killed 500,000 people. Nkrumah argues that today’s
assembling of this European-world-order of violence and instability
depends on negotiation and peace but also on the extermination of
millions in the name of democracy. He comments on the critical need
to do what Fanon talks about in The Wretched of the Earth (1967d):
disrupt and transform the central relation of ontological violence that
it takes to re-assemble and reconstruct imperial powers.1 Foreseeing
the crises generated by the postwar liberal international order, African,
Arab, and Asian leaders designed and worked to implement an
alternative to this order, or what Siba Grovogui (2007) calls ‘multiple
orders of justification’ which were interested in addressing ‘diverse
political and moral concerns’, seeking to put in place the contours of
a global ‘order of justification’ that embodied justice, freedom, and
democracy. Their interventions disrupted the dominant methods of
reassembling imperial-sovereignties, opening up space for not only
Africans but for all colonised peoples to avoid naturalising and

Somatechnics 1.1 (2011): 209–248

DOI: 10.3366/soma.2011.0014
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essentialising their ongoing struggles; now they could ‘reread them

and reposition . . . them in terms of the new problem-space, the new
context of questions, that define[d] their present’ (Scott 1999: 224).
These multiple struggles point to the problem-spaces of
‘embodiment’ (Bosnak 2007; Ihde 2001; Seremetakis 1994; Merleau-
Ponty 1962) and Fanon’s theory of ‘combat breath’ (Fanon 1967c: 65).
Fanon understands ‘combat breathing’ as the lived struggle of the
slave and colonised subject contending with foreign violence and
surveillance and the ‘monopolizing notion of humanity that gives to
the colonizer’s values all ontological weight’ (Maldonado-Torres 2005:
154). He sees freedom as a structuring ontology, not just a political
experience and practice; this gestures back to the Stoics, for whom
air, breath and soul are one. Anaximenes states that ‘our soul (yuch
),
being air (aera&), holds us together, so do breath (pneuB ma) and air


(a
era&) encompass the whole world. Yuch
is air; air and pneuma are
synonyms; therefore the soul is also pneuma’ (Anaximenes 1898,
quoted in Benso 2008: 14; Vamvacas 2009). I read Fanon’s idea of
combat breath to point beyond violence to the relation of the materiality
and immateriality of the breath (pneuB ma) to open up a ‘different idea
of the polis from that envisioned by the metaphysical (and Roman)
West’ (Spanos 2000: 206). I work with Fanon to understand the
new problem-space that shapes our present. Combat breath, I argue, is
not an event of the past, or what remains after slavery and colonialism,
nor the ‘end’ of anti-colonial projects (such as development, national
liberation, socialisms and communisms) but living practices constituted
in involuntary constrictions of specific peoples’ lives. With Fanon,
I articulate combat breath as lived existential struggles that bring
together the ‘infinite and the finite without collapsing them into a
monolithic process’ (Žižek and Milibank 2009: 17). This combat breath of
the living disrupts and exceeds the dominant implicit spatial schism of
ecology and body, sovereign subject and its soma or flesh, person and
living being (the phenomenon and the noumenon) in political projects
and their desired contingent orders.
Since the 1990s, political projects changing the world order
and institutions alike have involved intensified war and slaughter
(Goodman 2010), pauperisation, and restructuring institutions such as
the state and the market, ecologies, and corporealities in the name of
progress. Such restructuring has become the focus of contestation in
many parts of the world, though often in more complex ways than
most analyses acknowledge: what kinds of expenditures, for instance,
are required to erect such order(s) and sovereign bodies, and make
viable such projects?

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Worldwide, a diverse (neo) liberal leadership has intensified its

involvement in (post) and (neo) reconstructions by focusing on
grammars and ethics of suffering in the name of security and
humanitarian regimes. Direct force is extended and refined in the
name of ‘saving the state and the market’ and securing world peace
and order; venturist states and markets stalk opportunity by leveraging
somata’s ‘surpluses’ (taxes, extraction of more value from labour,
sale of body parts and ‘body bits’, regeneration of bodies), buffering
the state’s capacity to incur substantial debts and carry out executions,
whether this entails deployment of forces, structural financial repairs,
policing action, or suffocating people. Such interventions point to
the deployment and limits of temporal and spatial reassemblages
and derivative reconstructions across political, social, economic, and
corporeal registers. Thematically speaking, derivative reconstructions
disclose the power of a derivative-slave-colonisation death discourse
with definite practices and purposes: the use of vital energies of
‘black’ states, slaves, and ‘black’ ecologies even at the moment of their
execution to generate capable somata (such as land, bodies).2
In this article, I articulate Fanon’s theory of combat breath and
work with theorists like Spillers, Hartman, and Wilderson to critique
Mbembe’s necropolitics and Montag’s necroeconomics. I argue
that many disputed points during postwar and post financial
reconstructions concern ‘bringing back’ a new imperial order (à la
Bush, whom I cite in due course) whose virile viability is infinitely
reconstructed through force, slavery and the killing of those ‘black’
bodies already deemed ontologically dead and structurally impossible
(Agathangelou 2009, 2010; Wilderson 2005, 2010). I examine CPA
planners in Iraq and the financial derivative discourses in Greece and
argue that these debt financial reconstructions are terrains of world
political antagonisms seeking to resolve global political tensions with a
‘new slave soma’ (a social death where some bodies are deemed
structurally impossible and ontologically dead) and a ‘new place’ by
engineering ‘anew’ global institutions and order. I conclude the article
by drawing out the ‘daily pulsations’, which contest, disfigure and
antagonise present markets, states, and their ontological executions/
annihilations. These struggles (combat breath) practice a ‘default’
from this order to wrestle for life.

Reconstructing A (Neo) Imperial ‘Global’ Order?

When Foucault began to write and joined the French communist party,
anti-colonial struggles and revolutionary projects were brutally evident

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worldwide including Algeria. Fanon’s famous book Black Skin, White

Masks (1967a) was published in 1952, two years before Foucault
published his dissertation (1954). But before this, Fanon fought as
a Frenchman against the Nazis. Macey (2000) writes that he was cited
for ‘distinguished conduct’ and awarded the Croix de Guerre with
a bronze star. Fanon’s experience of French republicanism in
Martinique, France and Algeria convinced him that seeking to
include/integrate slaves, blacks, or the colonised within the historical
strictures of imperial political (universal) orders and their contingent
humanist projects was not viable because of their slave-racio-colonial
underpinnings, or what Achille Mbembe (2001: 24) calls the imperial
commandment.
Foucault published Maladie mentale et personnalité (1954) two years
after the two major American political parties put aside their differing
geopolitical interests to support NATO and other international
institutions, recognising that such structures could link the United
States to the prevailing world order and expand its influence
worldwide (Kupchan 2009).3 In this work, Foucault recognises
that modernity (and its liberal humanist foundations) is a problem.
Even so, he is ambivalent about undertaking a genealogy (Muppidi
2009; Grovogui 2007; Trouillot 2005)4 of the emergence of liberal
sovereignty to demonstrate that, historically, capitalism is a zero-sum
game in the exploitation of territories and peoples.
Critical theorists in International Relations (IR) such as
Ashley (1988) and Weber (1999) recruit Foucault to understand
global power but remain mostly within the deconstruction of the
liberal interstate structure. IR Marxists problematise these analyses
and others that articulate the emerging global sovereignty as ‘an
international state dominated by the US’, not guided by a single
biopolitical ‘logic of rule’ (Kiersey 2009: 35). These IR Marxist
critiques are, thus, more concerned with the imperial genealogy of
globalisation and the American state’s articulation and ordering of the
world.5
While Foucault is critiqued by IR Marxists regarding his
theorisation of the formation of the imperial, he demonstrated its
connections with political economy, biopolitics, and power in a series
of lectures between 1975 and 1979: ‘Society Must be Defended’,
‘Security, Territory, Population’ and ‘The Birth of Biopolitics’
(Foucault 2004, 2008). Nevertheless, his theorisations are embedded
in the French liberal and a white supremacy project, so that his
analyses are delimited by a universalisation that is not truly global6
because it presumes the structuring and subject of politics to be

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ontologically European, masculine, and propertied. For instance, he

does not explicitly address French colonialism.
How do those who read his texts today feel this silence? Said, for
one, compares him to Fanon to critique his narrowly French
experience: ‘Fanon represents the interests of a double constituency,
native and Western, moving from confinement to liberation; ignoring
the imperial context of his own theories, Foucault seems actually
to represent an irresistible colonizing movement that paradoxically
fortifies the prestige of both the lonely individual scholar and the
system that contains him’ (Said 1994: 278). In re-reading Foucault with
Fanon,7 Said gestures to the limits of his and other Western writers’
work whose contributions are at once indispensable and inadequate in
their understanding of the realities of (neo) colonial and global
multiple worlds.
Why is Fanon ‘contestatory’, whereas Foucault is not? How are
these contestations crucial for today’s struggles, specifically the crises
of governance in the postwar liberal international order? What if our
vantage point in critiquing practices, theories, and normative orders
began with the violence of the wretched, ‘laying the groundwork for a
theory of antagonism’ (Wilderson 2010: 7) where demands and claims
cannot be satisfied by simply transferring ownership of an organisation
within existing strictures (Wilderson 2005: 7)?
Fanon scales colonisation to the level of the slave and colonised
body. He illustrates the incommensurability of the intimate encounter
of black flesh with the body of the coloniser and focuses on the
structuring processes required to make it possible. He begins his
critique with the normative imperial order of slavery and colonisation
and those humanist interventions claiming to protect the sovereign
subject. He tells us that the constitution of this sovereign subject
depends on an asymmetrical segregated-order :
This world divided into compartments, this world cut in two is inhabited
by two different species . . . When you examine at close quarters the
colonial context, it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin
with the fact of belonging to a given race, a given species . . . The cause is
the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white
because you are rich. (Fanon 1967d: 39–40, emphasis in original)

Fanon points out that this order’s constitution depends on direct

violence that turns a species into slaves, black, and colonised. This
violence makes it possible for zones to become ‘civil’ spaces of
‘generalized trust’ and security for the sovereigns; the species
occupying them possess ‘generalized trust’ and are racially white.

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This relation ends up being taken for granted: belonging to a given

race of property relations is the precondition for any ‘civil’ encounter.
Indeed, as Wilderson argues, ‘Fanon makes clear how some are zoned,
a priori, beyond the borders of generalized trust’ (Wilderson 2010: 33).
The establishment of gratuitous violence zones, positions and
constitutes simultaneously the species and the colonised.
Further, ‘the condition of possibility upon which subjectivity’
(Fanon 1967d: 39–40) is based must be recognised and theorised. The
creation of colonised zones, the interstate state system, racialised
whiteness, and property relations require theorising if we are to disrupt
those relations which unify and entify a normative ‘ethical order’.
Fanon, of course, is clear: without the vertical existence of breath, that
is, giving one’s breath as nourishment for blackness, slavery, and
colonisation, there is no such order. This order, even when it claims
inclusion, segregates subjects of recognition from ‘species’. Subjects
are positioned into the interstate structure of worlds with sovereign
protection, able to take by force and accumulate anything, from things
to life itself.
Fanon seems to have anticipated Foucault who argues: ‘Power is
employed and exercised through a net-like organisation. And not only
do individuals circulate between its threads; they are always in the
position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising power . . . The
individual . . . is not the vis-à-vis of power; it is I believe, one of its
prime effects’ (Foucault 1980: 98). However, Fanon does not begin
with this prime effect of power, as he wants us to learn to read social
relations, racism, and economies of violence as if experiencing
our own gratuitous violence, in an attempt to think the impossible
place of the slave, the black body, and the colonised – in other words,
the living being whose existence is already assumed as structurally
impossible and, hence, as breath which can never be synonymous with
life.
The basis of the (inter) state structure, Fanon recognises, is
already the juristic sovereign person whose essence, or what Goodrich
calls the sovereign that the state has a right to kill, is already secured
from the threat of mutilation. On the one hand, Foucault (1990: 138)
asks this about state power: ‘How could power exercise its highest
prerogative by putting people to death, when its main role was to
ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order?’ On the
other hand, Fanon makes explicit the matrix of violence which
requires and makes sure that species are zoned as black and colonised:
‘Individualism is the first to disappear . . . the colonialist bourgeoisie
had hammered into the native’s mind the idea of a society of

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individuals where each person shuts himself up in his own subjectivity,

and whose only wealth is individual’ (Fanon 1967d: 47):

Their first encounter was marked by violence and their existence

together – that is to say the exploitation of the native by the settler – was
carried on by a dint of a great array of bayonets and cannons. The settler
and the native are old acquaintances. In fact, the settler is right when he
speaks of knowing ‘them’ well. For it is the settler who has brought the
native into existence and who perpetuates his existence. The settler owes
the fact of his very existence, that is to say, his property, to the colonial
system. (Fanon 1967d: 36)

But why such insistence? What tension does Fanon want to

foreground?
Fanon actually has a different ‘locus of enunciation’ and insists
on a long trajectory of the effects of the imperial, colonial, and slave
order and vertical relations of what he calls ‘combat breath’ (Fanon
1967c: 65). By drawing out Fanon’s idea of ‘combat breath’ and
articulating it as struggles that disrupt the practices of violence and
the final destruction of countries and people, we see that enforcing
the right to life of the radical individual (the propertied man of
a structure of white supremacy which depends on slavery and
colonisation) will authorise thanatopolitics and necroeconomics, not
by suspending a right to life but rather by enforcing a right to that
‘liberal’ life. But this minimalist right to life could preclude crucial
relations in the everyday continuum-spaces of the human and the non-
human, including ecologies and it does by deploying practices of
disfigurement and destruction.
Fanon exposes the imperial European re-assemblage of power
and demonstrates that state power shifts are connected to the
emergence of an ‘international’ order and apparatuses that make
possible a particular sovereign-master-colonising subject. In his view,
colonial power says: ‘Since you want independence, take it and starve
. . . A regime of austerity is imposed on these starving men; a
disproportionate amount of work is required for their atrophied
muscles’ (Fanon 1967d: 96).
Fanon notes the prevalence of suffocation and starvation in world
politics, the devouring of the flesh and the subsequent redistribution
of its existential vital energy that is turned into wealth. Amelioration
requires more than changing working conditions and setting up less
exploitative structures (such as socialism and communism). Rather, it
requires ‘regime[s] which [are] completely oriented toward the people
as a whole’ which prioritise the principle ‘that man is the most

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precious of all possessions’.8 Such a locus will preclude ‘that caricature

of society where all economic and political power is held in the hands
of the few who regard the nation as whole with scorn and contempt’
(Fanon 1967d: 98).
War, for both Fanon and Foucault, is part of the violent process
that makes it possible to ‘rule over the ordering of the colonial world’
(Fanon 1967d: 44). Fanon posits that war involves politico-ontological
claims whereas Foucault wonders about the war that gave birth to the
state. For him, ‘peace itself is a coded war. We are therefore at war with
one another; a battlefront runs through the whole of society,
continuously and permanently, and it is this battlefront that puts us
all on one side or the other’ (Foucault 2003: 50). He adds, ‘war is both
the web and the secret of institutions and systems of powers’ (2003:
110–11). For his part, Fanon knows that war’s effects on the species are
horrendous.
Fanon discusses the case of two Algerian boys, 13 and 14, who stab
a European classmate to death, in order to make the point that, like
the European colonialist, the black slave may shirk his/her humanity
by pursuing violence to establish political equality. The 13-year-old
describes the dead child as ‘our best friend’, targeted simply because
he was a friend and thus easily lured to his death. The pair is
remorseless. Fanon speaks of the racial tensions in this case and
recounts ‘long conversations’ with the 14-year-old, who describes the
murder as an act of revenge:

‘I wanted to take to the mountains, but I’m too young. So [the other
boy] and I said . . . we would kill a European’.
‘Why’?
‘In your opinion, what do you think we should have done’?
‘I don’t know. But you are a child and the things that are going on are
for grown-ups’.
‘But they kill children, too’.
‘But that’s no reason for killing your friend’.
‘Well, I killed him. Now you can do what you like’.
‘Did this friend do anything to you’?
‘No. He didn’t do anything’.
‘Well’?
‘That’s all there is to it’. (Fanon 1967d: 201)

Many theorists read these passages as confirmation that Fanon is a

theorist who incites violence and proposes it as the only option against
colonisation. Consequently, they underrate the extent to which Fanon,
a ‘dissident’, considers it important to be present completely to the

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slave-colonial order and its traumatic effects which are not easily
disentangled, good from bad. For him, this allows a nuanced
understanding of its genesis, violence, and offers the possibility of
transforming systems of valuation ranging from one’s breath to
universal orders.
In fact, in telling this story, Fanon makes visible the multiple costs
of slavery and colonialism. For him, imperialism is buried in the bones
of the native (Fanon 1967d: 40). He notes the costs of an imperial and
sovereign-democratic form of life, while insisting on the timing and
limitations of alternatives (such as national cultures): ‘the violence
which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world . . . will be
claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to
embody history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden
quarters’ (Fanon 1967d: 40). He says that violence does not necessarily
replace a degraded slave with a self-actualised man. In essence, Fanon
invites us to take a hard look at the myriad ways we avoid the inter-
existentially onto-politically-structured violence in our everyday lives.
Fanon begins his analysis of war by analysing slave and colonial
(structural) violence. For him, war is crucial, but which war? Is it the
distinction between enmity and war between brothers (war between
liberal and democratic states) and war against strangers, the object of
polemos? Or is it the ‘rational’ war calculated to enable a ‘kind of
stabilisation’ in the interstate system (among the colonial sovereign
states themselves), thereby evading questions about the doctrine of
imperialism, its forced universal order (currently led by the US), its
reason, and the freedom of the individual? Fanon unequivocally
answers by demanding an inquiry into a fundamental process of world
politics (including imperial relations, colonial relations, and slave
relations) ignored by those who want to keep this order in place by
violence. For Fanon, it is not enough to talk of war and the subjects
who fight these wars, as both war and racial bodies are already
technologies, inscribed in the economy of slave and colonial violence
through which the ‘I’ (the subject) attains individuality within a
politico-juridical order that enforces its actuality antagonistically; the
human body (and not sentient flesh) and war are already vertically and
horizontally positioned as legitimate forms of human formation.
Fanon concisely says: ‘Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor
a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural
state’ (Fanon 1967d: 48). This requires more than biopolitical
functions such as managing bodies and things, life and wealth. Its
fundamental grounds are inter-antagonistically and inter-existentially
set up. It is a relationship that depends on the slave-colonial-racist

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dynamics that create and systematically dehumanise and black(en) the

person. Fanon writes: ‘the Black man has no ontological resistance in
the eyes of the white man’ (Fanon 1952: 33). He adds:

Colonialism . . . is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when
confronted with greater violence. The policeman and the soldier, by
their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action, maintain
contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm
not to budge. It is obvious here that government speaks the language of
pure force. The intermediary does not lighten the oppression nor seek to
hide the domination; he shows them up and puts them into practice with
the clear conscience of an upholder of peace; yet he is the bringer
of violence into the home and into the mind of the native. (Fanon
1952: 91)

Fanon repeatedly articulates this antagonistic relationship as if he

wants to split asunder the dominant and normative belief that slavery
and colonialism consolidate politics to fit all desires and serve
the interests of all.
Instead, Fanon argues that slavery and colonialism create in the
native a tendency towards violence, a ‘tonicity of muscles’ deprived of
an outlet. On both personal and social registers, men can free
themselves socio-ontologically once this violence is expressed: ‘For the
native, life can only spring up again out of the rotting corpse of
the settler’ (Fanon 1952: 43). He adds:
The mobilization of the masses, when it arises out of the war of
liberation, introduces into each man’s consciousness the ideas of a
common cause, a national destiny and of a collective history. In the same
way the second phase, that of building up the nation is helped by the
existence of this cement which has been mixed with blood and anger.
(Fanon 1952: 83)

Fanon disrupts the dominant idea that the colonised are dominated by
contingent machinations of the state and war. He argues that natives
and blackness are constituted by violence ontologically in the first
instance. So politics for Fanon is a politics of ontology. In my view, his
philosophical gesture is not arbitrary or necessarily metaphysical in the
modern sense; thus, he insists on talking about the slave and the
colonised and the tensions that emerge in the erection of the species
and the flesh. When he mentions the native’s life springing up from
‘the rotting corpse of the settler’, he not only incites violence by
employing its grammar but also challenges the normative and popular
understandings of the materiality of violence and our understanding of

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the body itself. In effect, in explaining what ‘combat breath’ is in the

everyday struggles against the coloniser whose project is the final
destruction of the colonised, he is also able to point to the reasons why
combat breathing enables alternative worlds and worldviews.
There is not occupation of territory, on the one hand, and independence
of persons on the other. It is the country as a whole, its history, its
daily pulsation that are contested, disfigured, in the hope of a final
destruction. Under these conditions, the individual’s breathing is an
observed, an occupied breathing. It is a combat breathing. From this
point on, the real values of the occupied quickly tend to acquire a
clandestine form of existence. In the presence of the occupier, the
occupied learns to dissemble, to resort to trickery. (Fanon 1967c: 65)

Anaximenes said: ‘It is breathing, not simple air, that individualizes the
human being, that gives him or her subjectivity, and that ultimately
constitutes his or her soul. Such an activity of breathing provides
physiological as well as psychological, physical as well as spiritual life;
and in this sense, more than a material element (as air is), pneuma is a
force, a life-force’ (quoted in Benso 2008: 14). What politics can empty
this life force? If pneuma, air, and psyche ‘interact and feed each
other . . . [and] each nourishes the other’ (Anaximenes quoted in
Benso 2008: 16), what happens when this breathing is disrupted by
violent bloody means? Nothing less than ontological slaughtering
unless one already presumes that breathing or what makes a
human being a subject is only reserved for the coloniser, the settler
who cannot hear the breathing of the slave and the colonised. Fanon
recognises that the ‘stability’ of the coloniser’s being is directly
connected to the native’s hallucinatory whitening that is, annihilation
and also his/her ontological suffocation. Ultimately, for this
antagonism to be disrupted, that is the suffocation, that theft of air
that is assumed to be required for stability, violence is required:

Decolonization which sets out to change the order of the world, is,
obviously, a program of complete disorder . . . Decolonization is the
meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature which
in fact owe their originality to that sort of substantification which results
from and is nourished by the situation in the colonies . . . The native and
the settler are old acquaintances. In fact, the settler is right when he
speaks of knowing ‘them’ well. (Fanon 1967d: 36)

Fanon first distinguishes the materiality of the life force from the
fact of property relations. For him, without politico-ontological
antagonisms about this life force there is no coherency in property

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relations and juridical subject formations. However, these politico-

ontological antagonisms cannot be transformed and consolidated
into a supposedly ordered world. Foucault presumes that war and
biopolitics remain technologies of societal coherence even when he
recognises that the idea of the universal subject is constituted by force,
but Fanon disrupts this dominant idea. For him, direct force is not
merely the theft of land and labor but that mere breath that keeps alive
the ongoing-relationship of ecologies and being. Consequently, for
Fanon, while decolonisation emerges out of these antagonisms, its
constitutive energy is the combat breath itself – the disruptive force
required for transformation.
Without Fanon’s theorisations, Foucault’s schema of war and
biopolitics remains within the realm of European and intra-settler
relations, for the process of war rests on the originary and ongoing
amputation of those deemed structurally impossible. This amputation
‘re-monumentalizes the [white man] because it sutures, rather than
cancels, formal stagnation by fortifying and extending the material life’
(Wilderson 2010: 29) of European intra-settler-state relations. Of the
technology of war, Foucault writes:

How can one not only wage war on one’s adversaries but also expose
one’s own citizens to war, and let them be killed by the million . . . except
by activating the theme of racism? In the nineteenth century – and this
is completely new – war will be seen not only as a way of improving
one’s own race by eliminating the enemy race . . . but also as a way of
regenerating one’s own race . . . How can one both make a biopower
function and exercise the rights of war, the rights of murder and the
function of death, without becoming racist? (2003: 257, 263)

The state’s transformation into biopolitical life is secured through

the elimination of one’s enemy to improve and regenerate one’s
own race (such as the material for structuring whiteness). He goes on
to ask how biopower and the exercise of the rights of war and death
(or necropower) can happen without the process of ‘racism’. Clearly,
improving and regenerating one’s race depends on racism. But
what is the temporality and spatiality of this racism? Foucault talks
about the struggle for existence that becomes a justifying tool in
the hand of the racist, but it remains the justification and not the
basis for this racism. So the question remains: could Foucault’s
biopower itself depend on a fundamental corporeal whiteness made
possible only through the continued mutilation of those subjects
presumed as dead somata? Death and killing here are not one and the
same.

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Foucault’s questions are answered by Fanon whose theorisations

go back and forth between the body of the subject and the body of
the world, which cannot be contained by the normative spatial
articulation of Europe. He draws on three sites – Martinique, France,
and Algeria – because sovereign France is too small to contain
the encounter of colonisation and transatlantic slavery. Slavery,
colonization, and the necropolitical function of ‘the murderous . . .
State’ (Fanon 1967d: 257) are not one and the same, he says. And what
is the role of the ‘white’ subject in this state? Could the subject be in a
cathectic relation where it turns into the unruly other by the entrance
of carnality? Foucault’s theorisations disrupt the subsuming of the
biopolitical function of the murderous state under colonialism and
racism. This subsuming, though symptomatic and having theoretical
value, loses track of the existential costs of drawing upon the vital
force, the corporeal life energies to ‘realise’ the liberal and juridical
humanity by suffocating those deemed already dead ecologies,
colonised, and slaves.
Re-reading Foucault with Fanon brings to the fore the tensions
that guide the production and regeneration of an interstate, colonial
(and racist) structure and its ‘functional surrogates’, a political
ontology that depends on gratuitous violence in which a body is
rendered dead flesh to be expended repeatedly. Otherwise, why does
one need ‘death-in-life’ commerce or racial slavery? Fanon argues that
the ‘murderous . . . State’ develops in tandem with colonization, the
latter played a significant role in the ‘remaking of Europe . . . to
competition among states and to economic domination as
characteristic of Europe’s relation to the rest of the world from the
seventeenth century’ (Crouze 2009: 209; Sexton 2010).
While Foucault’s recognition of colonialism opens up space for us
to reconstruct a much longer genealogy of the international, he is
ambivalent about the nature of colonialism and the species that
colonial violence generates or kills. But Fanon insists on critiquing
what Trouillot calls the projections of ‘North Atlantic universals’ or
those fictional universals that ‘do not describe the world’ but ‘offer
visions of the world’ (Trouillot 2002: 847). Modern struggles alter
relations and practices, and plots reconfigure the historical structures
that order the world by ignoring that capital and the ‘West’ are not
‘universally unmarked’ (Trouillot 2002: 855) or universally practiced as
claimed. Nor is the human universally marked, and racism is not a
generalised phenomenon but one that instrumentalises life force and
human existence and murders human bodies and populations in the
‘realisation’ of an ethics that abstracts the body by cleansing its

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rampant carnality from its praxical and ethical universe (Mbembe

2003: 14).
Fanon’s critique disrupts the logic that the ‘murderous . . . State’
and its assertion of its rights are merely about racism temporally
contained within Europe on the bodies of Europeans of different
classes and racial backgrounds. He writes:

I have no wish to be the victim of the Fraud of a black world. My life

should not be devoted to drawing up the balance sheet of Negro
values . . . There is no white world, there is no white ethic, and any more
than there is a white intelligence . . . There are in every part of the world
men who search . . . I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there
for the meaning of my destiny . . . I should constantly remind myself that
the real leap consists in the introduction of invention into existence . . . In
the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself . . . I do
not have the right to allow the slightest fragment to remain in my
existence. (Fanon 1952: 229–30, emphasis in original)

Fanon reminds himself, and us, that creating the world needs more
than just work and the epistemology of visibility (Agathangelou
forthcoming). It requires hearing one’s combat breath, generating a
copious flow of energy, transforming one’s fragments and sustaining
one’s existence in a colonising world that desires nothing but
suffocation. Fanon engages with the most significant relation of the
wretched of the earth, namely, colonial violence as suffocation or
rather the theft of the slave’s and the colonised’s breath:

When you examine at close quarters the colonial context, it is evident

that what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to
or not belonging to a given race, a given species. In the colonies
the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the
consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because
you are rich. This is why Marxist analysis should always be slightly
stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem. Everything
up to and including the very nature of precapitalist society, so well
explained by Marx, must here be thought out again. (Fanon 1967d: 40)9

Fanon, unlike Foucault, problematises the idea of biopolitics and its

boundaries ever remaining within a specific territory. In his view, the
whole world is segregated into zones, peoples, black and white, in
order to be governed. Indeed, the whole structure is based on a racial
segregation and displacement of ecologies and beings. However,
governance does not depend on a generalised instrumentalisation of
human existence as Marx argues (for example, the commodification of

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labour only). Pushing at Fanon’s logics allows us to recognise that

governance erects itself on the material it draws out by suffocating
one’s ecologico-connections and simultaneously one’s life force for the
generation of another life. Fanon exposes that Foucault’s articulation
of liberal-humanism’s governance is not encompassing a critique of
the violent approaches constituting the world, and the ways alternative
and multiple worlds are disrupted, when he writes:
The truth is that the study of an occupied people, militarily subject to an
implacable domination, requires documentation and checking difficult
to combine. It is not the soil that is occupied. It is not the ports or the
airdromes. French colonialism has settled itself in the very center of the
Algerian individual and has undertaken a sustained work of cleanup, of
expulsion of self, of rationally pursued mutilation. (Fanon 1967b: 64–5,
emphasis in original)

In his later works, Foucault critiques the technologies of (neo)

liberalism in Europe, saying that ‘liberalism understands the borders of
the state to be incongruent with the reason of the market’. The zero-
sum power dynamic governing the ideal peace between mercantilist
states is anachronistic displaced by a ‘new type of global calculation . . .
political economy that comes to reframe European peace as necessarily
dependent upon a “commercial globalization” ’ (Kiersey 2009: 39).
Economic competition is seen as the pathway to peace by those who
have capacity (that is, those able to amputate with impunity) and is
not necessarily a ‘global peace’ (Kiersey 2009: 39). The shift from
impoverishment to ‘collective and unlimited enrichment’ requires
that Europe ‘act as an economic subject that takes the world as
“its economic domain” ’. It requires an orientation where ‘the game is
in Europe, but the stake is the world’ (Crouze 2009: 214).
Foucault problematises the idea of the invisible hand that
limits the economic processes of the individual and ‘disqualifies the
political sovereign’ (2008: 283),10 and the idea that European states
interested in peace and in expanding the European marketplace must
‘mitigate their perpetual pursuit of zero-sum games’ and ‘engage
in transnational risk-mitigation initiatives’ (2008: 283). The market’s
nature changes liberal ‘naturalness’ into artificial formalism where the
market surveils the state (Terranova 2009: 244). Foucault says:
‘Competition has an internal logic; it has its own structure . . . in the
same way competition as an essential economic logic will only appear
and produce its effects under certain conditions which have to be
carefully and artificially constructed’ (2008: 120). Competition as a
political rationality seeks to regulate the ‘concrete and real space

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 Somatechnics

wherein the ideal/formal structure of competition can function’

(Terranova 2009: 246). Theorising this shift points to the
intensification of social relations, power is now pre-emptive, able to
alter the international conditions of emergence. The shift is specific
to European neoliberalism and Ordo-liberals who imagine the
homo oeconomicus to be ‘a form of life that must be incited to
engage in risk-taking and entrepreneurialism [but] a certain social
interventionism is required to secure the condition of possibility for a
market economy’ (Kiersey 2009: 39).
Foucault is analysing European neoliberalism, but his comments
point to a relationship that ‘impels . . . a potential more of life to come’
(Massumi 2009: 167). What happens to those environments, those
relations in the world (Foucault 2004: 306) amputated and already
deemed dead in life? What kind of diegetic labour (including that of
theorists like Foucault) is required to remove those already considered
ontologically incapacitated in the hope of telling and/or critiquing
life-productivity within newly emerging ecologies?
Foucault pushes our thinking on neoliberal shifts, and he places
the politico-ontological component of the discourse of power within
the frame of biopolitical power, but he does so without asking
what secures the ‘collective enrichment’ or the ‘balance of Europe’
(Foucault 2004: 332) within an international and/or global realm.
What secures the boundaries of the biopolitical power of which he is so
accurately critiquing?
The articulation of the birth of politics and its violence remains
within the idea of contingency, the events that follow a breach in
the realm of the international. For Foucault, the birth or rather the
constituent material of politics is not what takes place, that is, a
gratuitous violence or a matrix of corporeal impossibility (as Fanon
says, turning human bodies into species). Could this theorisation of
the birth of biopolitics become a strategy, the detour required long
enough if you will, to fortify and extend the interlocutory life of an
imperial order that wants to inscribe both ontological and economic
possibilities (even on those deemed structurally impossible or a dead
species) as a technological device? Put otherwise, could Foucault’s
analysis engage illiberal disorder within limits set by the international
order’s territorialisations (such as ecological mutilations)?
I argue, along with Fanon (1952, 1965, 1967d and 1967b),
Hartman (1997), Spillers (2003), and Wilderson (2005, 2010) that this
genealogy of the birth of biopolitics with its focus on European
neoliberalism limits our understanding of the ethicality that depends
on an antagonistic process within a global ecology; it depends on

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corporeal isolation and the presumed death of a captive flesh made

fungible (Hartman 1997)11 with regard to articulating imaginaries
about the multiple worlds that repeatedly disrupt the limits set up by
capital. This articulation begins by understanding the processes
by which the intertwining of the neoliberal market, the use of force,
neo-colonial penetrations, and slaveries of somata, ecologies, lands,
and frontiers become possible. How is it that such processes do
not merely marketise and militarise but come to reconstruct and
regenerate through the presumed structural death and amputation of
black gendered ecologies and corporealities, the environments and
conditions that enable the regeneration of venturist masters and
entrepreneurs (white neoliberals and neoconservatives) in a world
context that is actively being enslaved, colonized, and turned into a
ground for not only war but structural violence (Mbembe 2001;
Martinot and Sexton 2003; Sexton 2010)?

Enterprise Emergencies: Of Markets, Wars, and

Other Incursions12
In a discussion of post-Civil War reconstruction, Frederick Douglas
said:
The people . . . demand such a reconstruction as shall put an end to the
present anarchical state of things in the late rebellious States . . . where
frightful murders and wholesale massacres are perpetrated in the very
presence of Federal soldiers. This horrible business they require shall
cease. They want a reconstruction such as will protect loyal men, black
and white, in their persons and property; such a one as will cause
Northern industry, Northern capital, and Northern civilization to flow
into the South, and make a man from New England as much at home
in Carolina as elsewhere in the Republic . . . The South must be opened
to the light of law and liberty, and this session of Congress is relied upon
to accomplish this important work. (Douglas 1866: 761–6)

Some of these issues are central today: the formation of the state, the
market, the subject, and the body are not ‘finished projects’; they
require the ‘horrible business’ of ‘frightful murders and wholesale
massacres’ and insist that capital and industry be under the protection
of the law. Albeit on a worldwide scale, reconstruction once again
concerns itself with the integration of powers, the fracture of legal
frameworks of the market, sovereign relations – and bodies.
Despite theorisations that neoliberalism requires the constitution
of a normative order and its contingent subjects, I argue that

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 Somatechnics

normativity is no longer a central concern, as neoliberalism is

reassembling amputated flesh to constitute a global supremacy
(Kupchan 2009: 2). More specifically, the US and European Union
(EU) countries are leading the reconstruction13 of a new imperial
regime of capitalist amputations and accumulation. With the
dissolution of the former Soviet Union and shifts in capital relations,
the US saw the opportunity to claim more power. To this end, they
pursued the ‘idealist’ (liberal) policy of shaping the international
environment according to American values (Kagan and Kristol
2000: 6). The US articulated policies and involved itself in practices
that would allow it to dominate the world, beginning with a series of
wars against Yugoslavia (Krauthammer 1990: 46–9) to rid the new
world order of the last ‘vestige’ of socialism on European grounds and
outside it – especially in Africa.
I begin with the Bush Doctrine.14 In his West Point speech of
2 June 2002, Bush states that current threats call for a proper
understanding of the right of self-defense. Further, because the US
is facing ‘a threat with no precedent’, namely, the proliferation of
weapons of mass destruction and the emergence of global terrorism,
familiar strategies of deterrence and containment are no longer
sufficient. Waiting is not an option: ‘If we wait for threats to fully
materialize, we will have waited too long’ (Bush 2002). This speech,
along with the US National Security Council’s ‘Prevent Our Enemies
from Threatening Us, Our Allies, and Our Friends with Weapons of
Mass Destruction’ (US National Security Council 2002) makes an
explicit argument for pre-emptive defense. The latter document
invokes international law as governing the practice of ‘just
preemption’, an internationally sanctioned form of self-defense,
thereby disrupting the familiar understanding of preemption and
prevention. Bush’s pre-emptive defense theory notes the legal
contexts within which states are expected to act; yet it shows a shift
that makes possible the detachment of preemption from the context of
international law.
The Bush Doctrine (arguably the ‘masterwork’ of Dick Cheney)
was to maintain military preeminence ‘at an acceptable cost in the
post-Cold War context’ (Dunmire 2009: 206), shifting from a focus
on ‘known-threats’ to ‘new and unknown challenges’ (Dunmire 2009:
206). Despite this shift from prevention to preemption (Goodnight
2006), the Doctrine construes suspicion as having a ‘visible
manifestation of aggression’ (Cole and Lobel 2007). The Bush
Doctrine culminated in ‘a Plan’ (Armstrong 2002) whose goal was to
move beyond maintaining ‘dominion over friends and enemies alike’

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(Armstrong 2002) to capture elements which no longer yield to

incorporation or reconstruction.15
The preservation of pax Americana in the changing security
context post-Cold War and post-9/11, or what the Bush Doctrine
calls the ‘new security environment’, requires changes in America’s
National Security Institutions: ‘It is time to reaffirm the essential
role of American military strength. We must build and maintain our
defenses beyond challenge . . . and decisively defeat our adversary
if deterrence fails’ (US National Security Council 2002: 25). In
‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses’, the administration defines a
‘coherent security and military strategy’ to ‘protect American global
interests’ (Project for the New American Century 2000: 13). Its primary
goal is to continue to be ‘the essential defender of today’s global
security order’ no matter what it takes (2000: i). Since the demise of
the former Soviet Union, the ‘American security perimeter’ (2000: 74)
has expanded ‘slowly and inexorably . . . as far into the future as
possible’ (2000: i).
These documents articulate American interests worldwide.
The US must provide ‘the geopolitical framework for widespread
economic growth and the spread of the American principles of liberty
and democracy’ (Project for the New American Century 2000: 1).
The articulation of a ‘just peace’ points to a particular kind of
‘international security order’, in which the world will embrace the
‘political and economic principles of [the US] universally’ (2000: iv);
these values and benefits are ‘right and true for every person, in every
society’ and are sought by ‘freedom loving people across the globe and
across the ages’ (2000: 1). In the end, the Bush administration moves
to outright rejection of international law:

Global leadership is not something exercised at our leisure, when

the mood strikes us or when our core interests are directly challenged;
then it is already too late. Rather, it is a choice of whether
or not to maintain American military preeminence, to secure
American geopolitical leadership, and to preserve the American peace.
(2000: 76)

The document challenges the idea that states defend themselves

when facing material threats; it also urges the prevention of the
‘materialization of potential capabilities’ (Dunmire 2009: 216).
This discourse establishes a national-defense policy as a ‘technology
of power’ (Lazar and Lazar 2003: 245) and shifts the role of
the US reconstructions to generating conditions for the emerging
empire.

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 Somatechnics

So what does this generating of conditions entail? What kinds of

captures are required to generate them? More specifically, how did
Bush envision the intervention in Iraq generating conditions for the
emergence of a new world order and empire? I answer this question
with a few questions: Why did the US want to fight a war in Iraq? How
was this generation of conditions realised through war? What effects do
these events have on our theorising?
In January 2000, Barnett and his colleagues argued: ‘In the end,
the military and financial markets are in the same business: the
effective processing of risk. As such, it is essential that these two
worlds – military and financial – come to better understand their
interrelationships across the global economy’ (quoted in Roberts,
Secor and Sparke 2003: 886). Barnett writes: ‘They tell us how we are
doing in exporting security to these lawless areas (not very well) and
which states they would like to take “off line from globalization” . . .
when we enter into the Gap, we enter a different set of rules’ (quoted
in Roberts et al. 2003: 892–3). Arguably, this ‘uneven and asymmetrical
image of a divided world ruled by an aggressively assertive American
systems administrator . . . cannot be effectively squared’ with the
‘capitalist prosperity imagined by other neoliberals’ (Roberts et al.
2003: 894).
Hence, Barnett (quoted in Roberts et al. 2003) and Bremer
(2006), neoliberal evangelists, work to realise what they understand
as the generation of new conditions. Their project begins with a
campaign that articulates the multiple ways in which the Iraqi public
sector is weak and corrupt, requiring counter-corruption strategies
and neoliberal constitutionalism (Brown and Cloke 2004: 272–94).
In addition to charging Saddam Hussein with the possession of
weapons of mass destruction, the US administration condemns the
‘tyranny of Saddam’s planned economy’, which has bred ‘lawlessness’,
‘economic corruption’, an ‘insecure business environment’ and
‘decades of subsidies for Iraqi industry’. Therefore, the problems
facing neoliberal reconstruction stem from the ‘cultural and social
legacy from the command economy system’ (Sovacool and Halfon
2007: 223–43).16
In short, the campaign to invade Iraq encompasses both pre-
emptive war in the name of ridding Iraq of its weapons of mass
destruction and a number of neoliberal economic interventions.
The use of direct force presupposed a quick operation that would be
precise, efficient, and predictable, requiring new leadership but
keeping the body in place. But could this strategy be pointing to the
limits of capital’s technologies of political economy, of reconstruction?

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 Bodies to the Slaughter

Did Fanon foresee that the technology of imperial capital would

require ‘a form of its prior operation of property relations specific
to the institution of chattel and the plantation-based agrarian economy
in which it was sustained’ (Sexton 2010: 37) to reconstruct and
re-generate itself through the breathing of the sentient flesh which
without its ecological connections cannot live?
At any rate, Fanon proves prophetic. The desire to decapitate the
‘head’ (leadership) and leave the body in place is central to this
paper’s understanding of reassembling international power and life,
reconstructing and generating ecologies and corporeality.17 More
specifically, liberal theories dominate the metaphorical presumption
that the West is the subject of reason and those outside it mere
corporeality, anarchy, and chaos; this evades the concrete ecologies
and flesh terrains of racialised and gendered conflict and antagonism.
By drawing on basic premises of liberal internationalism, the US
administration has revolutionised defence bureaucracy, as epitomised
by Rumsfeld, ‘the bureaucratic reformer’ who wants ‘speed, agility, and
lightness’, and ‘the war-fighter’ who depends ‘on an indefinite battle
that relies, to a notable extent, on endurance and armor for its
success’. For good or ill, the world will have to live with Rumsfeld’s
revolution for a long time (Light 2005: 143). In Rumsfeld’s view, a
revolution was required to reconstruct and generate anew the
leadership of the US in capital and power relations, a revolution
calling on the pre-emptive use of force and changing the conditions of
enterprise to ‘bring life . . . back’.
In short, the US has turned Iraq into the contestation site for the
liberal strategies of neoliberal colonialism, a permanent battleground
for more than oil (Whyte 2007), and the terrain for the contestation
of global power in the 21st century by imperial leaders, including
Germany, France, Japan, China, Iran, Russia, India, and Turkey.
According to Whyte (2007), the global contestation requires more
than military revolution and economic intervention. It requires subject
reconstruction. But how is this subject reconstruction to take place?
If Fanon’s idea that imperial-capital-power politics is about the politico-
ontological deracination of ecologies and species, could we read the
US interventions in Iraq as politico-ontological antagonisms intended
to generate or ‘bring . . . life back’? My answer is affirmative but with
a twist.
The appropriation of Iraq’s resources and interventions to
reconstruct its subjects depend not on lawlessness or inhumanity
but on ontological reconstructions. Of course, even when ‘we know
nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words,

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 Somatechnics

what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with
other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that
body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions
with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 1987: 257) the leaders of neoliberalism move to
experiment and provoke those ‘cancerous tissue[s]’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987: 162–3) with the underlying possibility of generating of
bodies anew by stealing, with impunity, combat breath. The imperial
US dominant leadership presumes ‘objects’ upon whom force can be
unleashed with impunity, and flesh amputated that can turn into the
material to make anew those deemed ontologically not dead and
structurally revivable. Briefly stated, it requires politico-ontological
structures that provoke again and again the capacity to draw upon
a deracinated tool, the slave, flesh to generate anew the conditions
that make possible the emergence of an imperial entrepreneurial-
sovereign, who comes to be constituted as the subject of experience
conflict as opposed to the sentient flesh of antagonism and gratuitous
violence. As a result, it is increasingly difficult for capital to segregate
national from international, native from non-native, reason from
the body, and market from state. Everything and everyone who is in the
way must be amputated and unmade to be brought back anew.
Capturing Iraq through war was not enough. The US used
neoliberal shock therapy to disrupt the economies of Iraq and
incorporate them into the ‘universal’ economy. This therapy
involved ‘the removal of regulatory controls upon individual
economic actors and the creation of new sets of rules that encourage
intense economic activity in particular fractions of the economy . . .
The pursuit of neo-liberal policies encourages liminal spaces to be
developed at a pace faster than systems of regulation can be
established’ (Whyte 2007: 179). It also introduced about 100
Administrative Orders which laid the foundation for Iraq’s
new economy, criminal justice, and political structure. These Orders
led to:
[the erection of] the pillars of the neo-liberal economy: the abolition of
state production and commodity subsidies; the eradication of import
tariffs and trade barriers (Order 12); the deregulation of wage
protections and the labour market (Order 30); tax reform (Order 37);
monetary reform and reforms in the banking sector (Orders 18, 20, 40,
43, 74 and 94); the establishment of international trade rules on the
World Trade Organization (WTO) model (Orders 54, 81 and 83); and
the privatization of state enterprises (Orders 39, 46 and 51). (Whyte
2007: 181)

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The new regime in Iraq is founded on ‘trickle down’ economics, a

practice that claims wealth and development can be spurred by
generating the conditions for capital to surveil the mediations of state
interests on its own terms and for its own interests (Whyte 2007: 181).
For instance, Order 39 permits full foreign ownership of Iraqi state-
owned assets, allowing the dismantling of 200 state-owned enterprises,
including electricity, telecommunications, and the pharmaceutical
industry. It permits 100 percent corporate ownership of Iraqi banks,
mines, and factories, and allows corporations to move their assets out
of Iraq (Whyte 2007: 181).
In addition, the rule of law is suspended to give access to all
ecologies for gendered, racialised, and class reconstructions. Bremer
argued that the bureaucratic delays in securing US and UN sources
for reconstruction were problematic; the alternative to ‘the slowness of
Washington’ was to ‘find the money somehow in the Iraqi budget’
(Bremer 2006: 206). In other words, granting legal immunity to US
personnel investing in the reconstruction economy made the process
easier. Not surprisingly, Al Khudhairy, leader of the Iraqi Contractors’
Federation says that CPA Order 12 and the subsequent ‘dumping of
foreign commodities on Iraq [have] killed the country’s industries’
(quoted in Whyte 2007: 182):
The Iraqi economy quickly became a target for the economic ‘dumping’
of manufactured products, food and raw materials. Within a few days of
the order being passed, surplus chicken legs from the United States
were being shipped in to Iraq by American company Tyson, forcing the
market price of chicken down to 1.25 a kilo – five cents below the
cheapest price that Iraqi producers could sustain. (Whyte 2007: 182)

But how is the neoliberal imperial, as acts of governance unfolding?

Is it possible to rid Iraq of its ‘reason’, its head, and to rule its
body through market rules without also suffocating its subjects and
corporeality? Answers come from Nadje Al-Ali who traces the historical
gendered effects of the Iraqi reassembling of power under Hussein’s
rule and the reconstructions of gendered and racialised relations in
the family, state, and market structures under the US and British rule.
She argues that since 2003 ‘over 70 percent of the more than two
million displaced people inside Iraq are women and children’ who
have ‘found shelter with relatives who share their limited space, food
and supplies’; this leads to ‘rising tensions between families over scarce
resources’ (Al-Ali 2008: 405).
Is it viable for the reconstruction and reassembling of
pax Americana to consolidate without subjugating the norms of

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 Somatechnics

international law to the norms, values, and rules of the new emerging
market and without suffocating the life force of women, children,
and men, upon which it depends? Is it viable to forcefully inject breath
into a derivative market whose political existence is predicated on the
vitality of sentient flesh?
Fanon answers in the negative by engaging Hegel and his
understanding of the slave. For him, neither the ‘Master nor the
Structural White Man wants recognition from the nègre ; each wants
work and bodies, as we have seen in the many eclipses of the black,
without points of view’ (Gordon quoting Fanon 2005: 24). As Gordon
notes, this Hegelian idea of Master/Slave and the Structural White
Man fails to articulate ‘the nègre’s condition on the basis of Self–Other
relations’ as it presupposes a ‘symmetry of “Otherness” ’:
White-black relations are such that blacks struggle to achieve Otherness;
it is a struggle to be in a position for the ethical to emerge. Thus, the
circumstance is peculiarly wrought with realizations of the political.
Fanon ends Black Skin, White Masks, then, politically and existentially.
Politically, he imagines what eventually became known as Martin Luther
King, Jr.’s Beloved Community, where all join hands and sing, ‘free at
last!’ but through the very different, tortuous route of a majestic, violent
struggle. The message of the failures, then, is systemic: The modern
system of human difference is such that it does not by itself hold the
resources of human salvation. That the system itself must be attacked is a
revolutionary call; it is the call to fight, to struggle against oppression,
against, that is, dehumanization. (Gordon 2005: 24)

In his A Dying Colonialism Fanon (1967b: 215–6) makes explicit his

belief that combat breath is vital to the creation of ‘a new human’
relation: ‘I do not carry innocence to the point of believing that
appeals to reason or to respect for human dignity can alter reality . . .
For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must cast
the slough, work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man’.
Fanon calls on pedagogy to build ‘through the tremors of beckoning
bodies, a questioning humanity’:

Was my freedom not given to me then in order to build the world of the
You? At the conclusion of this study, I want the world to recognize, with
me, the open door of every consciousness . . . My final prayer: O my body,
make of me always a man who questions! (Fanon 1967b: 224)

In this final call, Fanon identifies the most dramatic requirement of all
imperial relations: the corporeal mediation needed to continue the
infinite search for combat breath. For Fanon, the disruption of this

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mediation would disrupt once and for all the socius whose existence
depends on the breathing of black sentient flesh. Fanon declares:
I arrived in the world anxious to make sense of things, my spirit filled
with desire to be at the origin of the world, and here I discovered myself
an object amongst other objects. Imprisoned in this overwhelming
objectivity, I implored others. Their liberating regard, running over my
body that suddenly becomes smooth, returns to me a lightness that
I believed lost, and, absenting me from the world, returns me to the
world. But there, just at the opposite slope, I stumble, and the other, by
gestures, attitudes, looks, fixed me, in the sense that one fixes a chemical
preparation with a dye. I was furious. I demanded an explanation . . .
Nothing happened. I exploded. Now, the tiny pieces are collected by
another self. (Fanon 1967b: 242, 316)

In Fanon’s view, all agents of comprador capitalism have a globalising

impetus that requires this segregated mediation that inoculates them
from death, thus prompting states and conglomerates to grab
ecologies, assume slaves as dead, mutilate them with impunity, and
set up neo-colonial regimes worldwide. It is crucial that this structure
be recognized for what it is: a politico-ontological one, a structure built
on a ‘grid of violence, where positions of contingent violence are
divided from positions of gratuitous violence (from the Slave position)’
(Wilderson 2010: 91, quoting Fanon 1967a). This structural grid of
violence and its effects can no longer be hidden because the dominant
global racist order cannot redress its mutilating practices even when it
so says. Much of this order’s energies and resources are used to hide
the ontological and social distinctions it makes about the relationship
of life and death (Wilderson 2010: 91). As Fanon states, ‘all the
innocent blood that has flowed onto the national soil has produced
a new humanity and no one must fail to recognize this fact’
(Fanon 1967b: 27–8).
In the case of Iraq, the US (along with Germany, France, China,
Turkey, Iran, Russia, and Japan) has worked to reconstruct and
generate anew conditions of emergence through the technologies of
war and capitalisation. Yet to paraphrase Fanon, Iraqis worldwide
respond: ‘This oxygen which creates and shapes a new humanity – this
too is the [Iraqi] revolution’ (Fanon 1967b: 174).

Debts and More Seductions (Thefts)

The financial crisis that broke out in the United States in the
summer of 2007 and crested in the autumn of 2008 had destroyed
US34.4 trillion of wealth globally by March 2009 when the equity

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 Somatechnics

markets hit their lowest points. Greece is one of many countries

continuing to feel the impact. Many commentators have focused on
Greece’s irresponsibility and what Paggalos calls the ‘eating together’
of Greek money (2010), but these positions avoid problematising the
neoliberal politics that depend on conflict as a necessary premise for
a social contract even when they claim otherwise. They also ignore the
hierarchising process as an extension of accumulation: the mediation
of social relations and the subservience of the state to the market.
Calling this mediation of and subservience to market
‘necroeconomics’ the process through which ‘death establishes the
conditions of life’, Montag says: ‘The market reduces and rations life;
he who with impunity may be allowed to die, slowly or quickly, in
the name of the rationality and equilibrium of the market’ (2005: 15).
He alerts us to the fact that death is the contested side of market
relations. However, he presumes this to be a new phenomenon.
Drawing on Mbembe’s ideas of necropower which spans across
‘distinct, if overlapping, social formations’ (Sexton 2010: 31–56) that
‘generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material
destruction of human bodies and populations’ (Mbembe 2003: 14),
Banerjee issues a challenge, shifting our attention to the accumulation
in colonial contexts by specific economic actors (multinational
corporations for example) that involve ‘dispossession, death,
torture, suicide, slavery, destruction of livelihoods and the general
management of violence’ (2008: 3). While Montag and Banerjee
agree that states and markets force people in gendered, racialised,
and classed ways to die as a constitutive element of colonisation
and capitalism, they merely invoke capitalism rather than analysing its
temporal structuring or its spatial effects on specific corporealities.
What if they argued that these relations constitute an instance of
an amputation, the ‘hardly discernible terror’ (Sexton 2010: 34)
fundamental to the consolidation and erection of imperial structural
violence? As Fanon notes, slaughter/slave relations are not contingent
on but fundamental to the configuration of the political ontology of
the structuring of white supremacy and colonisation. This is a combat
relation, the ‘singular commodification of human existence (and not
just labour power), that gratuitous violence in which a body is
rendered as flesh to be accumulated and exchanged’ (Sexton
2010: 38), as Sexton and Wilderson (2010) argue. Moreover, the
contestation site becomes the body and its vitality. As Fanon would say,
it is a combat relation to steal another’s breath by suffocating him/her.
What if the temporality of the object ‘who may be allowed to die,
slowly or quickly, in the name of the rationality and equilibrium of the

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 Bodies to the Slaughter

market’ (Montag 2005: 15) enables human time? What if, before that
object is allowed to die with impunity, we have another object whose
temporal finitude or temporal infinity does not register structurally as
it is already amputated, and who becomes the co-constitutive material
of ‘Absolute Being’? What if before the legitimate institutions/sites of
politics such as the polis, we have other sites whose temporal finitude or
infinitude do not register structurally, as these are already non-existent
and become co-constitutive material of ‘Absolute Politics’? Such are
the sites of oikos that can never be subsumed under the polis as some
theorists argue. These are outside sites where slaughtering can happen
with impunity.
In response, Fanon questions materialism. But what does it mean
when places do not register structurally? My contention is that Fanon’s
questioning of materialism (and Anaximenes does the same) is
relevant to our quest to understand the present global crisis created
by global finance. He seems to have foreseen that the materialism of
Marx and/or the political economy’s focus on production and
labor exploitation precludes our hearing the most crucial breath:
without it, co-constitution of the material of an international, its polis
and its oikos (Cooper and Mitropoulos 2009), could not be a life
force. Such an evasion locks us into a fundamentalist reactive relation
to power as capital (the most central relations are commodities
and value) and oikos as subsumed under the entrepreneurial sovereign
polis, thereby conflating social conflicts with politico-ontological
antagonisms.
In pursuing my theoretical trajectory, I go back to Anaximenes’
worldview that ‘basic stuffs and qualities are not opposed, but different
stages of a continuum’ (quoted in Cohen 2006) and Fanon’s ‘zone of
nonbeing’ to question the present moment. What is the relevance and
value of centralising the ‘zone of nonbeing’? What is the relevance
and value of analysing the politics of the financial market and its
constitution? What is the relation of sexual economies of oikos,18 of
slave and colonising site, to the imperial capital household?
What are the relations between life force (not just living labour)
and the ‘growing liquidity captured by stock markets’? What is
finance at this moment and in this phase of imperial capital
reconstructions? In response, in the next section, I turn to the crisis
that global finance, along with Greek leaders, created in Greece
and argue that like (post) war reconstructions, (post) debt financial
reconstructions are technological terrains of world political
antagonisms intended to engineer or ‘bring back’ anew a universal
order not truly global.

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 Somatechnics

Financialisation revolutionises its techniques of violence and the

political economy of labour relations and sovereignty; it re-spatialises
an ‘ensemble of common existential concerns’ to make possible the
reconstruction and generation of conditions for the emergence of
those deemed masters (Lucarelli 2010). It orients itself towards
derivatives, new money-forms that allow businesses and states to
hedge against adverse events, ranging from exchange rate fluctuations,
to political turmoil, to dramatically changing weather conditions.
Governments and the private sector secure derivative relations in
which human bodies deemed structurally impossible and ontologically
dead are adjusted and ‘operate at the most intimate of material levels,
investing the transversal relations that connect and combine the entire
worlds of priceable risk’ (Cooper 2010: 179).
Cooper argues that ‘the turbulence that becomes tradable even
or indeed especially when its parameters of variation are knowable’
makes sense within the dominant logic of capitalism that seeks infinite
possibilities to ensure that its growth and accumulation regimes are
‘capable of responding to contagion across multiple jurisdictions’
(2010: 181). But financialisation recognises reconstruction and
generation as a structuring ontologic, while simultaneously disavowing
this recognition by imagining it to be a political practice, not a
politico-ontological relation in all sites, including the oikos, even at the
moment when it is becoming more and more difficult to hide this
intensified relation.19

Expenditures and Adjustments: Welcome to the Oikos

of Slaughter
Why are such restructurings and adjustments repeatedly required in
world politics today? To understand, let us turn to the financial crisis in
Greece. In 2002, upon the neoliberal fundamentalist advice of Wall
Street powerhouse Goldman Sachs, Greece abandoned its national
currency, the drachma, in favour of the euro. Through the use of
financial technologies known as derivatives (mentioned above),
Greece was able to make large chunks of Greek public and household
debt disappear, thus making the national accounts look good to
bankers eager to lend more. Greece chose the euro debt strategy
by yielding to the temptation of structured finance, the synthetic
instruments of which were developed in the US and adopted by US
transnational financial institutions, such as Goldman Sachs, Citibank,
JP Morgan Chase, and Bank of America, to generate phenomenal
profits in deregulated global markets fuelled by dollar-denominated

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 Bodies to the Slaughter

liquidity released by the US Federal Reserve through the virtual

transaction of synthetic derivatives known as synthetic collateralised
debt obligations (CDO).
Put into use by banks, synthetic instruments expanded into the
private sector, these schemes were sold to EMU member governments
which, in turn, deposited it on their publics (immigrant workers,
women and children, and non-profit organisations) to mask public
debt levels, skirt strict EMU rules, and engage in permanent monetary
easing. Across the euro zone, obscure and opaque over-the-counter
(OTC) derivative deals took place between ‘special purpose vehicles’
(SPV) – transnational banks which provided euro zone governments
with cash up front in return for future payments. Such repayments
reduced government fiscal revenues, since the revenue from collateral
assets was pledged to CDO investors.
Set for 2004 by the Bank of International Settlement (BIS), the
Basel Capital Accord II was designed to respond to regulatory erosion
by large, complex banking organisations. ‘Synthetic securitization’
refers to structured transactions in which ‘banks use credit derivatives
to transfer the credit risk of a specified pool of assets to third parties,
such as insurance companies, other banks and unregulated entities,
known as Special Purpose Vehicles (SPV), used widely by corporations
such as Enron and GE’ (Liu 2010). The transfer may be funded
by issuing credit-linked securities with various seniorities such as
collateralised loan obligations, or unfunded by using credit default
swaps (CDS). Synthetic securitisation can replicate the economic
risk transfer characteristics of securitisation without removing assets
from the originating bank’s balance sheet or recorded banking book
exposures. Such structured finance deals are recorded as sales through
SPVs rather than collateralised loans to the government, leading many
investors and regulators to buy more bonds.
Apparently, Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, advised Greek
financial institutions to trade in derivatives (Liu 2010; Kaiser 2010),
betting on the possibility that Greece would default, thus raising the
country’s cost of borrowing but making a tidy profit for itself and local
corporations and private parties involved in these schemes. Goldman
Sachs helped the Greek government ‘cover up part of its huge
deficit via a currency swap deal named Titlos which used artificially
high exchange rates’.20 The Goldman Sachs transaction consisted of
a cross-currency swap of about 10 billion of debt issued by Greece
in dollars and yen and swapped into euros at a historical exchange
rate. This reduced the debt and added 1 billion of funding to the
EU’s Luxembourg-based statistics office for that year. Importantly,

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 Somatechnics

Bloomberg claims that rating companies were aware of the deal but did
not change credit ratings for Greece, because its risk profile had not
changed; more specifically, the additional unit risk was made invisible
through dispersion into what some have called ‘systemic risk of the
euro zone’ and through it, into ‘global systemic risk’ (Liu 2010).
Calling these thefts ‘risks’ is not only a biopolitical disciplining but
also a way of displacing violence onto the backs of migrants, working
class peoples, the unemployed, women, and children. By entering the
euro zone and borrowing money, the Greek government was able to
benefit in the short term from the strength of the euro, but the benefit
came at a high cost for the majority of its working class and migrant
people. Not just in Greece, but elsewhere, the euro has created austere
regulatory mechanisms, benefiting rich countries such as Germany and
France but with high costs to the peripheries. In Greece, the austerity
program combined with emergency loans from other EU countries
and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has choked migrants and
citizens and inflicted years of misery on the country’s households and
land. Economist Max Keiser says:

The Greek Economy has turned into the toxic ground of the USA . . . The
Greek economy has been sacrificed. Due to the corrupt bankers of Wall
Street who were in search of a ground to get rid of the toxic danger.
And simply the Greek economy constituted that ground. What I am
saying is that Greece has been sacrificed, it will die. And the death is a
very bad thing isn’t it? Death means funeral and dead people. This is
what happened with the Greek economy. It is dead. It is over. Forget it.
(quoted in Al-Jazeera TV 2010)

Keiser reminds us that imperial capital is ‘toxic’, killing anything in

its way.
Financialisation, which draws on familiar and normative
technologies of constituting the ethnos (Athanasiou 2006; Karaiskaki
1995) while also introducing anew the practice of presumed
structurally impossible species and dead flesh (Wilderson 2010), as
an approach of capital, demolishes households, states, markets, and
those bodies who challenge the new models of amputation and
accumulation. The process moves away from growth, jobs, and wages as
sources of cumulative growth. In the new productive model, ‘labour
assumes a different role . . . [This new relation reduces] the
importance of wages in as much as a fundamental macroeconomic
variable for accumulation’ and attempts to ‘annihilate . . . the inherent
conflict in wage claims’ (Lucarelli 2010: 5) by turning oikos and flesh
into objects of sale and slavery.

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 Bodies to the Slaughter

The majority of Greeks are now the slaves of speculators, paying

bonuses to Wall Street bankers. They are also enslaved to those Greeks
who have already benefited: the wealthiest households as well as banks
and major corporations who have been speculating on public debt
and pocketing the interest from national bonds. As a result, oikos and
household relations are being restructured with heavy costs to women,
children, migrants, and the unemployed. Their bodies are turned
into the ‘vital substance’ required by the emerging standards of
positionality and the capacious subject. One wonders, to echo Keiser, is
this the purpose of their lives? Keiser says:
A crime happened in Greece. It is like someone raped you and you called
the police and you said: Can you forgive my rapist? If a clique raped you
what would you do? Would you go to the police and say in what way
should I thank my rapist? Would that be the response? I don’t
understand you Greeks. They raped you. Wall Street has raped you.
How do you feel when you hear this? (quoted in Al-Jazeera TV 2010)

The rape metaphor dramatically illustrates the structural violence of

capital and highlights the gendered emasculation of the Greek in an
EU that was supposed to offer him/her power once s/he joined a
powerful Europe. Keiser proceeds by ironically stating that Greeks are
legitimate agents of a structure that murdered them some time ago:

You are asking the people who have demolished your economy to help
you. They are not going to help you. The Greeks need to go to the streets
and show with a loud way that they are not going to pay any debts.
‘We are not paying 55 cents to the dollar, or 25 cents to the dollar. We
are not giving one Euro for any of the debts. They deceived us, they
cheated us and Wall Street and Goldman Sachs have to stand in front of
Congress to be judged for deception.’ Why did they begin with Greece?
Greece was the weakest link and because it was weak they sought it out,
the ground was ripe. (quoted in Al-Jazeera TV 2010)

However, Keiser and others miss a significant point. Certainly,

neoliberal globalisation has exacerbated tensions between
corporations, rich capitalist countries, and peripheries in Europe.
But as a result of these colonising approaches, the ‘phantoms of
injurious “others” . . . are lurking to “incapacitate” the nation’
(Athanasiou 2006: 232). These ‘others’ seem to be the slave, the
black of Fanon and the slaves and the stranger of an oikos outside the
gates of the Greek polis of ‘another way of being – of an outside which,
while perhaps never present, offers us the glimpse of a potential
opening’ (Cameron 2008: 20).

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 Somatechnics

These colonising shifts are putting pressure on Greeks and

immigrants to keep themselves alive. But at the cost of whose
amputation? In the past, the Greek state managed some of the
tensions generated by capital relations through social and
microeconomic policies and by importing cheap migrant labor, but
this moment demands new technologies. Markets are now orienting
states to implement austerity policies, make job cutbacks, reduce
social welfare, criminalise women, youth, and the poor, and kill
migrants.21 These strategies, while productive for capital relations,
influence how capitalism generates itself anew, reminding us what
Fanon has already noted: the politico-ontological slaughtering and
suffocation of flesh. This affects bourgeois ethics by displacing the
structural violence onto those Greeks and immigrants who are
already being asked to work harder and sacrifice patriotically to pay
bonuses to bankers. Some suggest that Greeks are moving into a new
‘saving plan’ that consists of ‘the exploitation of public motionless
fortune [which] can create “poles of ” investments in sectors where the
country allocates comparative advantages: tourist residence for affluent
“baby boomers” who [sic] for similar time space in the European
South, green energy etc’ (Stourgaras 2010: A29).
For Keiser, these market and state strategies are both enabling
and ‘eschatologically monstrous’ (quoted in Athanasiou 2006: 239).
They will continue to prevent the absorption of debts into the global
economy and kill Greeks and migrants to save their teleological plans.
They reconstruct themselves violently by sustaining a being that is
divided among psyche, pneuma, and soma, and they generate infinite
possibilities for accumulation regimes ‘to borrow money on the cheap
in order to make profits’:
When debts accumulate these bankers call for countries like Greece to
take care of them. This is the plan! It is a controlled demolition. It is
a murder . . . It is a constructed crisis. We are talking about a globalization
of the economy where one percent of the world’s people will control
70–80 percent of economic capital. The one percent will control the
whole world. This is the action plan. (Keiser quoted in Al-Jazeera TV 2010)

Keiser calls on Greeks to disrupt these terrorist financialisation

strategies. However, he recognises that although Greece owes
300 billion euros (an amount of little impact in global government
finance), interventions will have dire costs on people’s everyday
survival.
Despite country-wide protests, Prime Minister Papandreou
(a socialist) vowed to push through draconian economic measures,

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 Bodies to the Slaughter

Fig. 1. Germany urges more austerity for the Greek Economy.

asking the people to sacrifice to save ‘our nation’. Thus, a nation

conceived as a virile fraternity looks to ‘sacrifices’ and slaughter
to keep its body alive. Greek police were sent to the streets to fire tear
gas at demonstrators, while angry protestors outside the parliament
building raised clenched fists and shouted: ‘Thieves, thieves’, an
accusatory expression for corrupt politicians and bankers. Clearly,
many Greeks fault a government ready to sacrifice women, children,
workers, and migrants to restore market viability.

As a Way of Conclusion: Already Amputated in Originary

Grabs and Slaughterings
The reconstruction of the new neoliberal absolute order requires more
than biopolitics, as the US and certain European states are turning
on the populations they govern when these populations rupture the
attempts to reconstruct a necro-economico-political order whose
foundations depend on not mere rhetorical sustenance but on
neo-colonial violence, including war and financial reconstructions.

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 Somatechnics

Fig. 2. Germany getting tough on aid to Greece.22

Many such projects are inhumane and/or illegal, featuring breath as

the site of moribundity as opposed to combat.
However, these new imperial projects cannot reassemble,
reconstruct, and generate anew without expecting those being
slaughtered to pretend to be part of the living. It seems that the
New Way Forward, the (un)making and (re)making of (neo) liberal
rule of markets, states, subjects, and being requires a forgetting of what
is drawn out of our flesh, ecologies, and bodies; this is a necessary
condition to participate in a soteriological economy of moribundity.
But is it viable to insist on a politics predicated on a daily practice of
amputation and slaughtering that steals our breath to resuscitate itself?

Acknowledgments
Thanks to Suvendrini Perera for inviting me to contribute to this
special issue. Thanks also to Angela Mitropoulos and Joseph Pugliese
for their close reading and generous feedback, and to Elizabeth
Thompson and Kyle D. Killian for reading different versions of the
article and providing feedback. Special thanks to Kristen Phillips for
her careful read of the article and her excellent suggestions for
changes.

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 Bodies to the Slaughter

Notes

1. Fanon notes the relation of violence to the problematic ‘moral’ claims of

Europeans; slave relations, colonization, and racism seem antithetical to the
Enlightenment’s espousal of liberty, equality, and brotherhood.
2. ‘Black’ and blackness are used to point to the intensified practices of violence in
the contemporary moment which require concealing the anxieties of ‘whites’ and
‘whites but not quite’ by displacing the production of their subjecthood onto a
degraded condition of Blackness, as well as new forms of slavery where bodies again
become chattel.
3. To Kupchan (2009), the American Grand Strategy was a ‘strategic mess’.
4. I do not seek to undermine Foucault’s radical interventions in the modern
humanist project but point to the ambivalence of Western revolutionaries,
including their participation in practices of imperialism and colonialism that
disavow the agency of others. See Trouillot (2005), Grovogui (2007), and Muppidi
(2009).
5. Like Fanon’s work and that of many others, this article is not limited to a
discussion of US dominance, although that certainly figures into it. I also
consider the role of newer technologies including finance capital, the shifting face
of state institutions worldwide, governmentality as a military project (Medevoi
2007), and the integration anew of countries like China and India into the world
market.
6. ‘Universal but not truly global’ here refers to that trajectory that dominant
strategies of power push to re-constitute by regulating and institutionalising those
global regions and those multiple worlds that defy it. A conjunction of events
and patterns of practices from which the nomos derives its evidence result from
contingent and ‘fundamental’ interactions between constituted subjects that either
makes possible their integration into constituted neo-liberal and imperial
structures or their complete annihilation, as they cannot be rescued through the
deployment of terror. The intensive relations, the tensions between those who are
to become slaves and colonisers, those who are already slaves and colonisers in
different regions, what sorts of problematic relations exist between the present
moment of debt and war for some groups, past practices constituted in a milieu of
global debt, and future potentials are questions to be asked in the interregnum as
it is here that the theorist can recognise the results of intensive disjunctures in the
emerging races, classes and so on, and their surrounding socio-politico historical
contexts as well as the processes constituted anew that make possible the terror of
this order.
7. As Fanon did Hegel. Fanon reads Hegel in ‘Le Negre et Hegel’ and throws into
question the ‘humanity of racist Europeans’; see Fanon (1969) and also
Honenberger (2007).
8. Anne McClintock concisely raises questions about Fanon’s non-universalisation of
‘man’ to point to Fanon’s problematic gendered framework. Critiquing the
gendered and heterosexual aspect of Fanon’s theorisations is crucial but requires a
much longer engagement with McClintock’s work regarding the idea of universal
categories, including the fetishisation of universal ‘man’, and blackness and
whiteness.
9. This requires a much longer engagement which I leave for another time.
10. Although Foucault’s argument calls for a detailed response, for the sake of brevity,
I point out that Foucault demonstrates theoretically what is already materially

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 Somatechnics

disrupted: despite normative liberal arguments that the market is a site of justice,
this was no longer viable by the end of the eighteenth century.
11. For instance, the flesh of the African slave, the colonised species that must be
reconstructed; see Mbembe (2001).
12. Part of this section is informed by my analysis in Agathangelou (2010).
13. I use the concept to refer to practical activities that affect ecologies and bodies as
they are raced and gendered to systematically modify them. I am also challenging
the idea of returning to normal; see Massumi (2009: 153). This process as I define
it differs from familiar ideas: restoring the status quo, multi-faceted development,
and the gaining of good will by dominant institutions like the military; see Etzioni
(2008).
14. The material and temporal effects that made possible the design and the desire
to remake the New World Order are articulated in this Doctrine; see also 9/11
Commission Report.
15. Fanon notes this type of capture in A Dying Colonialism (1967b) but does not
account for it. Ideally, a discussion of the tension between rereading Foucault with
Fanon could aid in understanding this capture and disclose a worldview that
Fanon’s combat breath is a major element of a being’s material life force, indeed of
the political.
16. For an excellent article on reconstruction see Sovacool and Halfon (2007).
17. I am pointing to three major processes here that may be co-constituted.
18. Cooper and Mitropoulos (2009) rightly argue that biopolitical theorisations end up
subsuming the oikos.
19. There are many reasons for this shift which I will analyse elsewhere.
20. A report commissioned by the Greek Finance Ministry, released on
1 February 2010, revealed that Greece used swaps to defer interest repayments
by several years.
21. There have been many murders in Greece of migrants in the last two years. Police
and coast guards killed five of them in 2008. More than fifty have been killed in the
last ten years because of ‘luckily gun-fires’, ‘unclear situations’, ‘health problems’,
‘unreasonable self-suicides’, and the ‘reasonable rage of citizens’. Thirteen of them
died during the Olympic Games’ constructions due to inexistent safety measures in
workplaces. Other deaths include those who died due to the land-mines at Evros
River, shipwrecks in the Aegean Sea, and gun-fire exchanges, which were filed
as ‘legal self-defense’ cases although it is certain they were planned murders.
See notes on the no-racism page: http://no-racism.net/article/3196/
22. Both cartoons by Bandura Dmitry from www.CartoonStock.com. Reproduced with
permission.

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