Foucault and Genocide

This book is a timely reflection on the role that the apparatus of area and anthropological difference plays in the discourse and politics of genocide. Drawing from Michel Foucault’s work on security as a species concept, it develops three non-speciesist strategies – the genealogical, the figural, and the fictional – for deactivating the genocidal apparatus of area. The hypothesis advanced here is that it is not just the democratic idea of the social contract nor the capitalist commodification of labor that introduces the element of fiction into the political in a self-conscious way. Rather, the configuration of the temporal imaginary drawn from the global history of settler colonialism is what ultimately introduces the element of fiction into the modern notion of political community realized in the nation-state. Yet as the historical experience of Nazism’s radicalization of the settler colonial project reveals, the “fiction of the political” is ultimately connected not just to the nation-state but to the imaginary relation known as the West. Having posited a fundamental link between genocide and the imaginary relation known as the West, the essay concludes by summarizing the two main types of methodological discontinuity practiced by Foucault: the first consists in the singular site of transition at which discontinuity is rendered into continuity; the second consists in the biopoetics of narrative metalepsis that is a stylistic trademark of Foucault’s writing.