Overview

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. 

Full Product Details

9783032224767

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Jon Douglas Solomon, Born in the United States and trained at Cornell University, Solomon has lived in east Asia for 25 years, Europe for 15, and North America for 23. He is competent in Chinese, Japanese, French and English, enjoys backpacking and cooking, and is a devoted practitioner and student of Vajrayana Buddhism. Recent publications include: The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana: Spectral Transitions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023); The Genealogy of Defeat of the Left: Translation, Transition, and Bordering in the Hong Kong Anti-ELAB Movement (Taipei, 2022; in Chinese); and “Wynter is Coming: Black Communism, Translation, and Technics” in the exhibition catalogue Ceremony: Burial of an Undead World, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2022).

Tab Content 6

Countries Available