Bodies to the Slaughter: Global Racial Reconstructions, Fanon's Combat Breath, and Wrestling for Life

• Published in: Somatechnics 2011-03, Vol.1 (1), p.209-248
• Main Author: Agathangelou, Anna M
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Biopolitics; Film, Media and Cultural Studies; Humanitarianism; Leadership; Neoliberalism; Ontology
• ISSN: 2044-0138; 2044-0146
• DOI: 10.3366/soma.2011.0014

Throughout the world, a neoliberal leadership has intensified its involvement in the name of (post) and (neo) reconstructions by focusing on ethics of suffering in so-called humanitarian regimes. These reconstructions though disclose the power of a derivative-slave-death discourse by using the vital energies of black states, slave subjects, and black ecologies even at the moment of their execution to generate capable somata (land, bodies) deserving life. In this article, I begin with Fanon's 'combat breathing' and critique Mbembe's necropolitics and Montag's necroeconomics to articulate that most of the disputed points during postwar and post financial reconstructions concern 'bringing back' (à la Bush). This 'anew' constituted imperial order's virile viability with its contingent soma is infinitely regenerated through deadly mediative practices of force, slavery, and the killing 'anew' of those already deemed ontologically dead and structurally impossible. I examine the CPA planners in Iraq and the financial derivative discourses in Greece and argue that postwar and (post) debt financial reconstructions are terrains of world political antagonisms moving to resolve global political tensions with a 'new slave soma' and a 'new place' by engineering 'anew' a global order (a nameable place). I conclude with the 'daily pulsations', which contest, disfigure and antagonise markets, states and ontological annihilations.