Chapter I

Biopolitical caesurae of state violence

Raciality operates, as Denise Ferreira da Silva underscores in her work, as an a priori within the state's biopolitical schemata in relation to who may be killed or left to die with impunity. 1 In the course of this chapter, I want to draw attention to yet another a priori that, in turn, inscribes and constitutes raciality in order to demarcate the figure of the killable other: the animal. As I discuss in the chapters that follow, the testimonies of the detainees, who have been captured and imprisoned by the US in the course of its war on terror, repeatedly refer to the manner in which they were categorized by their guards and torturers as non-human animals who could thus be tortured or killed with no ethical compunction. By bringing into focus the manner in which the state repeatedly marks its targeted human subject as nonhuman animal, I want to address the complex enmeshment of racism and speciesism in the context of the state's biopolitical operations, specifically by revisiting Foucault's theorization of the relation between racism and biopolitics in order to disclose what remains unspoken in his address of the biopolitical. In his Lectures at the College de France, Foucault examines the categoiy of race in an in-depth manner that is strikingly absent from his previously published corpus. Race, indeed, assumes a fundamental role in his theorizing of biopolitics. In his analysis of early nineteenth-century European culture, Foucault identifies a decisive break with the past in relation to the uses and abuses of race and the 'discourse of race struggle': It [the discourse of race struggle] will become the discourse of a centered, centralized, and centralizing power. It will become the discourse of battle that has to be waged not between races, but by a race that is portrayed as the one true race, the race that holds power and is entitled to define the norm, and against those who deviate from that norm, against those who pose a threat to the biological heritage. At this point, we have all those biological-racist discourses of degeneracy, but also all those institutions within the social body which make the discourse of race struggle function as a principle of exclusion and segregation and, ultimately, as a way of normalizing society.1* Foucault identifies the resultant 'race wars' that this discourse of race struggle nables as what is 'articulated with European policies of colonization.'3 The biopolitics of race in the context of colonialism as theorized by Foucault is, in fact, nderpinned by a governing biopolitical category that remains at once unspoken and untheorized: speciesism - understood in all of its anthropocentric dimensions. The entire apparatus of the biopolitics of race - its colonial and imperial dimensions' its discriminatory, exclusionary and necropolitical effects - are, I propose, all rendered culturally intelligible and biopolitically enabled by the category of the absolute non-human other: the animal - and I deploy the problematic definite article here precisely in order to underscore the violent operations of homogeniza-tion, totalization and genericity that are operative in the binary logic of anthropocentrism. The critical dependency of the biopolitics of racism on the category of non-human animals can be traced back to the 'prehistoricaP human enslavement ('domestication') of animals. The enslavement of animals must be seen as supplying the template for the consequent enslavement of humans as the fungibility of animals was historically transposed to human slaves - with, as I elaborate below, one critical intraspecies prohibition. Biopolitical arguments of race and 'the norm,' 'the biological heritage,' and the threats of 'degeneracy' are all premised, in the first instance, on the unspoken assumption of an anthropocentrism that has assiduously labored to construct and consolidate species hierarchies and their attendant knowledge/power effects in terms of the valuation, fungibility and governance of diverse life forms. If, as Foucault suggests, biopolitics was principally 'focused on the species body,' then what remains unsaid in his work is the critical relation between the human species and its animal others. In his reflection on the manner in which the definite article designating 'the animal' has been wielded by Western philosophers throughout history, Jacques Derrida writes that: all philosophers have judged the limit to be single and indivisible, considering that on the other side of that limit there is an immense group, a single and fundamentally homogeneous set that one has the right, the theoretical or philosophical right, to distinguish and mark as opposite, namely, the set of the Animal in general, the Animal spoken of in the general singular. It applies to the whole animal kingdom with the exception of the human.' Derrida's claim - that the general singular has been applied to the whole animal kingdom with exception of the human becomes untenable once it is historically situated within the context of European philosophy and colonial practice. In the discursive practices of colonialism, invariably informed by European philosophy, the general singular has been systematically applied to the human-animal counterpart of the animal: the Native. As with 'the Animal,' 'the Native' is the colonial figure inscribed with the knowledge/power effects of homogenization, totalization and genericity. In colonial discourse, the figure of the Native homogenizes different ethnicities, tribes and nationalities; it totalizes through racist stereotypes different cultural and phenotypical attributes; and it thereby works to make intelligible the human subjects it

captures under this descriptor in terms of a common sense genericity that establishes the Native as something alwaysalready known: the Native as serial in her sameness and fungibility. These racial operations, critically, are predicated on relegating the Native to the very animal kingdom that Derrida sees as the exclusive preserve of the Animal. Captured under the sign of non-human Animal and relegated to the savage outside of the Human, the Native can then be managed, as I discuss in the latter part of this chapter, under the same laws that govern colonial understandings of fauna and Mora as evidenced by the biopolitical governance, for example, of Native Americans and Australian Aboriginals who, at various times, have been included under the same legislative rubrics that govern the management of native fauna and flora.

'The entry of life into history*

In his mapping of the entry of the category of race, as a fundamental category in the production of nineteenth-century European biopolitical formations, Foucault offers a genealogy of race that, by definition, suggests it was a recent category in European political thought and practice: 'In the name of a biological and historical urgency, it justified the racisms of the state, which at the time were on the horizon.'1' What is erased in Foucault's locating of the racisms of the state as 'on the horizon' is a long and dense historical genealogy of the category of race as a foun-dational category in the exercise of European colonial and imperial power.7 The sheer density of this other history renders untenable Foucault's truncated genealogy. Foucault reproduces another instance of this type of foreshortened genealogy in his discussion of the forces at work in the development of European capitalism: One knows how many times the question has been raised concerning the role of an ascetic morality in the first formation of capitalism; but what occurred in the eighteenth century in some Western countries, an event bound up with the development of capitalism, was a different phenomenon having perhaps wider impact than the new morality; this was nothing less than the entry of life into history, that is, the entry of phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power, into the sphere of political techniques.8 As Robin Blackburn evidences in his history of New World slavery, the development of capitalism must be tracked back to the 1600s and to its intimate imbrication with the category of race in the context of the development of slavery: 'The slave plantation was the most distinctive product of European capitalism, colonialism and maritime power . . . with racial sentiment acting as a crucial bonding agent.''' One can effectively, if retroactively, connect this other biopoliticial (slave) history back to Foucault's critical assertion that 'biopower was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes.'1" What remains occluded here, however, is a body whose controlled insertion into biopolitical economies was instrumental in the development of capitalism: the human slave. I point to these crucial lacunae in Foucault's biopolitical genealogies as they offer a glimpse to an even more profound area of irreflection: the erasure of non-human animals from his conceptualization of biopolitics. When he enunciates 'nothing less than the entry of life into history,' as the condition of possibility for the emergence of biopolitics, Foucault immediately qualifies and reduces 'life' to 'the entry of phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power, into the sphere of political techniques.'" The racial dimensions of the term 'human species' become the object of Foucault's intensive theorization of biopolitics in his Society Must Be Defended lectures once they are grounded in the context of nineteenth-century Europe. The critical qualifier ''human species' is always-already fully racialized in terms of its biopolitical operations once it is situated within the colonial economies of the slave trade: the categoiy 'human' was, by definition, one that could only be inhabited by the European subject. The 'deference to shared values in Europe,' Blackburn notes, 'protected Europeans from enslavement, and in the course of time the descendants of the slave would also benefit from the emancipatory influence of market relations.'1" I have thus far worked to complicate Foucault's historical conceptualization of biopolitics by drawing attention to two critical categories of effacement: human slavery and non-human animals. These two categories must, indeed, be seen as inextricably linked along critical historical lines, even as they are inscribed by fundamental ruptures and discontinuities, such as is marked by Blackburn's gesturing to the 'emancipatory influence of market relations' on human slaves; in the context of enslaved animals, the role of the market cannot be seen to have exercised the same beneficial effect: quite the contrary. I want, however, before I proceed further, to do justice to Foucault by underscoring his always reflexive, nuanced and interrogative thinking. Soon after his momentous assertion regarding 'the entry of life into history' in the eighteenth century, Foucault refines and historically qualifies his argument:

It is not a question of claiming that this was the moment when the first contact between life and history was brought about. On the contrary, the pressure exerted by the biological on the historical had remained very strong for thousands of years . . . But through a circular process, the economic - and primarily agricultural - development of the eighteenth century, and an increase in productivity and resources even more rapid than the demographic growth it encouraged, allowed a measure of relief from these profound threats [of epidemics and famine]. 13 Here Foucault offers us an alternative point of entry of'life into history' - an entry point in which life and the biological, and their exertion of pressure on history, are not anthropocentrically delimited and that, crucially, open up an historical vista that stretches back for 'thousands of years.' What Foucault provocatively suggests in his opening of a long historical vista that is not reductively qualified in anthro-pocentric terms is the possibility to think through other historical conditions of emergence for his conceptualization of the biopolitical - specifically, of the pressure exerted by animals on the human historical or, more accurately, of the violent pressure exerted by the human historical on the animal biological. This violent pressure needs to be named for what it is: 'a veritable war of the species.' Reflecting soberly on this other biopolitical war, Derrida writes: 'This war is probably ageless but... it is passing through a critical phase.' Inscribed in the articulation of this critical phase is a call to assume ethical responsibility for the very terms of conduct of this war: 'To think the war we find ourselves waging is not only a duty, a responsibility, an obligation, it is also a necessity, a constraint that, like it or not, directly or indirectly, no one can escape. Henceforth more than ever.'1' Dinesh Wadiwel locates this biopolitical war in conditions of emergence that enunciate Western politics as always-already biopolitical: 'In Agamben's words: "the decisive political conflict, which governs every other conflict, is that between the animality and the humanity of man." That is to say, in its origin Western politics is also biopolitics.' 'Western politics,' Wadiwel concludes, 'expresses the fact of war between human and animal life.'10

Slave animal: a prehistory of animal tangibility

In her Ttie Dreaded Comparison: Human and Animal Slavery, Marjorie Spiegel asks the provocative question: 'Comparing speciesism with racism? At first glance, many people might feel that it is insulting to compare the suffering of non-human animals to that of the human. In fact, in our [Western] society, comparison to an animal has come to be a slur.'17 In her Foreword to Spiegel's book, Alice Walker notes that: 'It is a comparison that, even for those of us who recognize its validity, is a difficult one to face. Especially if we are the descendants of slaves. Or of slave owners. Or of both. Especially so if we are also responsible in some way for the present treatment of animals.'"1 Spiegel proceeds to stage a largely descriptive yet important articulation of the 'dreaded comparison' by evidencing how 'the domination of animals . . . was in many cases used as a prototype for the subjugation of blacks.'19 She unfolds a history of the manner in which Western societies, from the sixteenth century onwards, developed systems of human slavery that closely paralleled humans' treatment of animals, including the use of shackles, auction, branding, stalls and pens, and so on. As I

remarked above, the issue of slavery, as constitutive in the development of biopolitical formations founded on racism, is almost entirely absent from Foucault's genealogical account. Yet, in his arguing that 'the pressure exerted by the biological on the historical had remained very strong for thousands of years,' Foucault presents an alternative point of departure for the critical study and elaboration of his concept of biopolitics. In pursuing this anachronic perspective on biopolitics I am, in effect, attempting to flesh out an occluded aspect of the historical conditions of the emergence of biopolitics. Derrida identifies in Aristotle's Politics the articulation of a 'zoo-polities' that effectively 'opens the debate' on biopolitics;-" Roberto Esposito gestures to this 'prehistory' of biopolitics when he posits 'the question of the relation of modernity with its '"pre," but also that of the relation with its "post."' laid the groundwork for western hierarchical thinking and European and American racial theories that called for conquest and exploitation of "lower races," while at the same time vilifying them as animals so as to encourage and justify their subjugation.'-'Jim Mason amplifies Patterson's thesis, arguing, in his interlinking of the enslavement of animals with larger colonial formations of power, that the establishment of 'agri-culture' operated as 'a license for conquest.'2"1 The Latin etymology of the terms 'colony' and 'colonial' - colania - evidences the modalities of power over life that intertwine the concept of 'a farm' and 'a public settlement of Roman citizens in a hostile or newly conquered country.'* In the prehistory of biopolitical power, the expropriated space of a conquered country is inscribed with the genocidal extermination of the 'useless' 'wild' animals and the enslavement of those that can be put to human use; in other words, there is precisely what Foucault terms the biopolitical 'power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.'27 This colonial move, then, is informed by a biopolitics of speciesism that determines who will live and who will die according to an anthro-pocentric hierarchy of life and its attendant values of, amongst other things,

economic productivity. The non-human animal is, in this prehistorical moment, marked by an ineluctable fungibility that pre-dates the transference of this same attribute to the human slave. In figuring forth her compelling thesis that it is fungibility that characterizes the life and death of the black slave, Saidya Hartman delineates its complex dimensions: The relation between pleasure and the possession of slave property, in both figurative and literal senses, can be explained in part by the fungibility of the slave - that is, the joy made possible by virtue of the replaceability in interchangeability endemic to the commodity - and by the extensive capacities of property - that is, the augmentation of the master subject through his embodiment in external objects and persons.28 In the colonial prehistory of biopolitics, non-human animals are branded as either vermin to be exterminated so that, in Foucault's titular phrase, 'society can be defended' or, alternatively, as fungible objects that are infinitely replaceable and exchangeable. The anthropocentrism of the master subject augments the sense of embodied ownership over the enslaved animal while legitimating their right over its life/death. The archaic development of colonial regimes of governance over the life of animals pivots on a series of biopolitical technologies that include capture, enclosure, harness, enforced labour, controlled breeding, castration, branding and auctioning at markets. All of these animal technologies are invested, in their ancient inception,2'1 with the biopolitical 'power of regularization, and it . . . consists in making live and letting die.'1" Moreover, all of these animal technologies will effectively be transposed to regimes of human slavery: 'the management of livestock,' Mason notes, operated 'as a model for the management of slaves.'" Biopolitical technologies of animal enslavement were effectively drawn upon in the development of modern slave plantations, with programs of captive breeding/rape of black women by either the master or his overseers, confined spaces for quartering, controlled food rations, auctioning at markets and the use of a range of disciplinary technologies - the whip, the branding iron, shackles and the coffle, that 'train of slaves or beasts driven along together';32 the use of the conjunction 'or' testifies to a sedimented history that binds animals to slaves. Europe's prehistorical animal-slave practices are what will be later exported out to the colonies in the establishment of human slave plantations. If, as Gary Wolfe contends, 'the practices of modern biopolitics forged themselves in the common subjection and management of the 'Tactical existence" of both humans and animals - not in the least, in the practices and disciplines of breeding, eugenics, and high-efficiency killing'1' then the co-articulation between the animal farm and the slave plantation oilers another historical dimension of the biopolitical formation of power.
Europe's co-legitimation of animal and human slavery can be traced back, indeed, to its Christian values and beliefs as sourced from the Bible. Lynn White locates the licensing of the violent exploitation and domination of nature by Europeans in the Bible and the various forms of Christianity to which it gave birth: Christianity 'not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God's will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.'" Blackburn also traces Europeans' religio-moral legitimation of slavery in the Bible: 'Both Catholics and Protestants were to find in the Bible and in traditions of biblical interpretation ideas which justified enslavement . . . The Bible could also be read as furnishing a genealogy for the peoples compromising the whole of humanity, and, or so some authors claimed, hints as to which peoples were destined to slavery.'30 The Bible, in effect, offers the religio-moral impetus and underpinning of capitalist economies oriented by the conjoined categories of animal and human slavery."' The system of exchanges that constituted biopolitical economies of animal and human slavery was, however, marked by its absolute internal European limit: the transposition of the practices of slave animal farms to human slave plantations and vice-versa was, in the European context, circumscribed by the prohibition on the enslavement of white European populations. Blackburn outlines the historical dimensions of this intra-European prohibition: The traders and the New World colonists felt their way towards new systems of racial classification, inventing not one but several racisms . . . successively refining the identity of the colonial slaveholding community as 'Christian,' 'European,' and 'white.' While national identities came to mobilize one European against another, they were not thought to justify the enslavement of the subjects of another monarch or the citizens of another state. 37 The 'several racisms' that Blackburn draws attention to can, once they are situated in a biopolitical context, be seen to be intertwined with various forms of speciesism: racism and speciesism work co-extensively to articulate positions of assignation along a biopolitically determined hierarchy of life. At the apex of this hierarchy of life is the tautological European-white-Christian-man and the various intraspecies and subspecies that can be traced in a downward movement. The descent from the racio-gendered figure of 'man' articulates a vertical speciesist scale that, by degrees, divests the positioned subject of the very qualities that work to construct the figure of'the human.' This process of biopolitical descent culminates in the transmutation of human into non-human animal; the morphing of subject into object that can be

enslaved, tortured or killed with impunity: for example, blacks as 'apes' or Aboriginals as 'missing links' in the chain of evolution. By the eighteenth century, Foucault notes, 'Western man was gradually learning what it meant to be a living species in a living world'38 - precisely, I would add, by deploying a hierarchy of biopolitical divisions premised on radospeciesist schemata of differentiation that were crucial in the establishment and definition of'Western man' as the superior 'species.' Racism is predicated on speciesism. At every turn in the documentary history of racism, the spectre of speciesism has always-already inscribed the categorical naming of the racialized other. In Fanon's unforgettable articulation of the violence of embodying the 'historical-racial schema' of the 'fact of blackness - 'Look, a Negro!' - speciesism has informed this racialized facticity as an a priori. Speciesism haunts Fanon's impassioned unfolding of the moment of racist identification as subtext up until the very moment when it erupts as primal text: The Negro is an animal' - with all the attendant negative qualifiers: 'the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean, the Negro is ugly.'5'1 Racio-speciesism never operates as an autonomous couplet. On the contrary, its power and resilience testify to a history of permutations inscribed by combinatory possibilities that encompass all the other descriptors constitutive of epistemic and physical violence, including the racio-gendered-sexualized-speciesism that positioned enslaved African American women in animal nature as reproductive bodies that could be sexually violated with impunity. Situated within the relevant biopolitical matrices, the combinatory formations trace the interlacing descriptors - for example, racio-gendered-heterosexist-disabilist-speciesism that effectively colonize all those subjects excluded from the normative domain of 'the human.' In her eloquent testimonial on the transphobic violence she has had to endure as a transgender subject, Susan Stryker articulates the lived effects of a virulent specio-transphobia that has categorized her in terms of a Frankenstein-like monster: 'Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster's as well, my exclusion from human community fuels deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I must struggle.' Empowered both by rage and the embodiment of the outlaw figure of the monster, Stryker strikes a passionately anti-speciesist gesture of defiance: The affront you humans take at being called a 'creature' results from the threat the term poses to your status as 'lords of creation,' being elevated above mere material existence. As in the case of being called 'it,' being called a 'creature' suggests the lack or loss of a superior personhood. I find no shame, however, in acknowledging my egalitarian relationship with non-human material Being; everything emerges from the same matrix of possibilities. 1" The operation of these combinatory schemata of epistemic violence is perhaps most graphically materialized in the exclusionary construction of the category of citizenship, as the state's formal categorization of the human-rights-bearingsubject. The intersection of speciesism and citizenship has, for example, inscribed a number of other key identity categories, including sexuality and disability. In her work on the 'homosexual-heterosexual binary' that structured US federal citizenship policy in the course of the twentieth century, Margot Canaday tracks the manner in which homosexuals were classified by US immigration inspectors as a new species of undesirable immigrant,' and were thereby prevented from entering the country." In the field of disability studies, Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell have documented the eugenic construction of people with disabilities as embodying a degenerate species that needed to be confined, sterilized or, finally, as in Nazi Germany, exterminated, in order to protect the biopolitical health of the larger population. Snyder and Mitchell map the biopolitical mobilization of animalism and mental disability in the construction of 'wolf children' and 'feral children.' As subjects denied the status of'humans,' people with disabilities in the US were 'denied their participation in public institutions and privileges, such as marriage, reproduction, the labor market, the right to live in nonsegregated communities, and immigration.'42 The very 'factors of segregation and social hierarchization' that Foucault identifies as constitutive of the operations of biopolitics, and their attendant 'exerting of influence on the respective forces of both these movements, guarantee [d] relations of domination and effects of hegemony'13 across the speciesist divide, encompassing both enslaved animals and humans. The very biopolitical forces that Foucault locates in the eighteenth century can be seen to be operative across a longer historical period preoccupied, in both slave animal and slave human contexts, with the 'adjustment of the accumulation of men [and animals] to that of capital, the joining of the growth of human groups to the expansion of productive forces and the differential allocation of profit.' Enlarging the scope of this picture, Foucault enables this coinsertion of slave animals and slave humans within this biopolitical schema: these effects, he notes, 'were made possible in part by the exercise of bio-power in its many forms and modes of application.'" Foucault tracks the emergence of 'the question of man . . . insofar as he was a specific living being' to the 'new mode of relation between history and life: in this dual position of life that placed it at the same time outside history, in its biological environment, and inside human historicity, penetrated by the latter's techniques of knowledge and power.'15 This scene can be further elaborated: the question of 'man' arises by the marking of a dual position that places non-human animal life in its biological environment (outside history) and inside human historicity, penetrated by the latter's techniques of

knowledge and power. The twentieth century's industrialization of animal life evidences a critical dimension of biopolitics that remains unspoken in Foucault's theory. Even as he identifies and names the human body as the target of biopolitical power, the figure of the animal can be seen to shadow this same body in Foucault's tracking of the emergence of biopower and 'the proliferation of political technologies that ensued, investing the [animal] body, health, modes of subsistence and

habitation, living conditions, the whole space of existence.'"' 'The whole space of existence' succinctly describes the contemporary locus of horror to which the lives of animals are subject to in factory farming. Patterson tracks an intertwined genealogy of killing and exploitation that links the industrialization of the slaughter of animals in the Chicago cattle yards of (he nineteenth century to Henry Ford's uptake of this mechanized system of slaughter in his development of the factory assembly line and the consequent deployment of this same system by the Nazis in their human death camps. " These movements of the interlacing of seemingly disparate biopolitical systems foreground the tenuous status of those lines that are repeatedly mobilized in order to differentiate humans from animals.

The vestibularity and the culture

In his profound meditation on 'the caesura between the human and the animal' as that which establishes the condition of possibility for the emergence of "the human,' Agamben notes that the human is the result 'of ceaseless divisions and caesurae.''" 'It is more urgent to work on these divisions,' Agamben writes, 'to ask in what way within man has man been separated from the non-man, and the animal from the human, than it is to take positions on the great issues, on so-called human rights and values.'" 1 Agamben's critical devaluation of human rights in the framework of human violence against animals has been amply theorized by a number of critics who, following Foucault, have demonstrated how rights are in fact complicit with regimes of subjugation and violent governance. 50 In the course of her painstaking documentation of the scenes of violent subjection that mark the life and death of black slaves, Hartman, at one juncture in her narrative, cites the testimony of the slave Charlie Moses: 'The way us niggers was treated was awful. Master would beat, knock, kick, kill. He done ever' thing he could 'cept eat us."[ The human master can, in other words, 'beat, knock, kick, kill' the animal and the slave but they cannot eat the enslaved human. Charlie Moses' testimony evidences how the homology between human slave and enslaved animal holds right up to this interdictory limit point. The critical caesura that is evidenced here opens up the space that will enable the 'noncriminal putting to death' of animals by humans in order to enable humans' 'carno-phallogocentrism."2 Articulated in Moses' testimony is the biopolitical freedom to torture and kill enslaved forms of human life with absolute impunity and the attendant prohibition on eating the human-animal-slave. It is only due to this singular prohibition that Moses can inhabit, in the most radically qualified and fraught manner, the modality of the human. This intra-species prohibition functions to calibrate the human slave up one notch on the speciesist hierarchy of life. This interdiction, then, designates the only difference/division between human and animal available to the black slave. The difference between animal and human animal on the slave plantation hangs singularly on an intra-species prohibition that is animated by the most fragile of anthropocentric invocations: the only quarter granted to black slaves is to allow them a circumscribed space in which their fungibility encompasses everything but being served up as dinner on the master's dinner table. This intra-species, anthropocentric prohibition operates as the term that cuts animals off from human animal-slaves, while articulating the entry of human slaves into a political life constituted by only one non-negotiable claim to the human: they could not be eaten. Ante-dating Agamben's marking of the biopolitical caesura, Hortense Spillers, in her foundational work on the apparatus of colonial violence in the production of US slavery, draws attention to the manner in which this exercise of violence upon the enslaved black subject served, through 'lacerations, woundings, fissures, tears, scars, openings, ruptures, lesions, rendings, punctures of the flesh [to] create the distance between a cultural vestibularity and the culture, whose state apparatus includfed] judges, attorneys, "owners," "soul drivers," "overseers," and "men of God." ' 3 The cultural vestibularity that Spillers identifies functions as the antechamber of the human. As such, it must be seen as the racio-speciesist space of animal subjugation, enslavement, torture and execution that simultaneously guarantees the white master his status as (civilized) human. In her use of the metaphor of the vestibule, Spillers effectively spatializes 'the distance' between slave and human, thereby mapping the coordinates of the space that will quarter animal life, in contradistinction to the civic space of the culture. Once held captive in the vestibule, the slave can be exposed to a range of violent and fatal practices that are informed by the slave owner's knowledge that such practices can be exercised with absolute impunity. Spillers names here, in another key, Agamben's exterminatory camp.

Spillers' vestibularity clearly designates the biopolitical space in which non-human animals are still quartered, wounded, executed and rendered into commodities for humans. Animals' absolute fungibility is guaranteed by their onto-epistemological imprisonment within this violent biopolitical vestibularity. The 'fungibility of the commodity,' writes Hartman, 'makes the captive body an abstract and empty vessel."1 It is this making of the captive body into an abstract vessel, I would add, that enables the transcription of the specificity and lived uniqueness of animals into the definite article of the generic register - the sheep, the dog, the animal - that is epistemically instrumental in legitimating whatever violence is unleashed against them. As I discuss throughout the course of the chapters that follow, the captive body of the detainee and torture victim is at once an 'abstract' body devoid of human qualities and a very material animal body that, once housed in the vestibularity of the prison, can be tortured and killed with impunity. As abstract bodies devoid of human qualities, the detainees embody the fungibility of the commodity as they are referred to at Guantanamo as both 'property' and 'packages.' Their transmutation into property is effected immediately as they cross the threshold of the vestibularity of the prison. David Hicks, a former detainee, describes this process: 'We all remained in place [after their arrival at Guantanamo] for an hour or so before a voice boomed over a megaphone: "You are now the property of the US Marine Corps. You have reached your final destination. Welcome to Cuba." ' In the course of the shuttle between the cages and the interrogation rooms, the detainee is described as: 'The package is en route.'JJ As captive animal-body quartered in the antechamber of the human, the detainee can effectively be rendered into what I will term carcass. As I discuss in Chapter 5, as abstracted non-human animal, the captive body can be hung on its meat hook, tortured, and left to die in its freezing cell without any ethical or juridical scruples and the resulting carcass can be summarily dispatched, as was the case of Salt Pit torture victim Gul Rahman, to an unknown grave.

Genocidal caesurae and the militarization of Native American country

The articulation of a series of carceral and genocidal caesurae predicated on biopolitically separating out the human/culture from the animal/vestibule must be tracked back to those foundational moments of colonial violence that continue to shape and inform the US nation. Spillers' concept of the vestibule works to articulate a defining feature of colonial violence; specifically, a seriality of power that survives by being flexible and adaptive to different geopolitical sites and bodies. Moreover, this colonial violence must be seen, in the context of the US's ongoing war on terror, as operating at once intra- and internationally; the two categories conjoined through the concept of'relational geographies.' 'Relational geographies' is a term coined by Trevor Paglen in his detailed identification and mapping of 'black sites,' that is, secret government and military sites that are beyond public- .scrutiny and accountability.'1' One of the black sites that Paglen discusses is Nellis Range, Nevada, occupying Western Shoshone land. Created in 1940, Nellis Range has been described as 'the single largest gunnery range in the world' and 'the single largest "peacetime militarized zone on earth.'" 7 The Western Shoshone peoples, the traditional owners of this land, call the Western Shoshone nation 'the most bombed nation on earth.'58 In his analysis of Nellis Range, which houses one of the ground control centres for the international operation of drones, Paglen insistently draws attention to the past history of white colonial invasion and violent displacement of the Native Americans of the region and the contemporary relations of violence exercised by the US state in their ongoing persecution of Indigenous Americans attempting to claim back lands sequestered by the US government in their establishment of black sites and areas for nuclear weapons testing.'9 He describes being welcomed into a trailer in Crescent Valley, Nevada, that was home to the Western Shoshone Defense Project, and from this remote location, an elderly Native American woman named Carrie Dann and her staff of two full-timers and two part-timers take on the military, the Bureau of Land Management, mining and defense contractors, and the US government itself. Dann says that the United States lias been illegally occupying Western Shoshone land for 150 years and that she has the paperwork to prove it.60 Paglen documents the repeated violent raids that Dann and her people are compelled to endure. The US state has repeatedly attempted to charge Dann and her people with trespassing on government land. This a charge that Dann derisively rejects, arguing that she cannot be accused of trespassing 'land she saw as rightly belonging to her people' precisely because 'the Shoshone NEVER gave, ceded, or sold their land to the United States government, by treaty or otherwise."'' In the face of this defiance, the US government has attempted to crush Western Shoshone resistance by deploying the full arsenal of state terror, including federal agents, helicopters, a plane and a fleet of All-Terrain Vehicles: ' "I could not help but think of how this is how our ancestors felt when they saw the cavalry coming. So many of my people were killed on this land and now it's happening again." The Feds rounded up Dann's cattle and loaded them into trucks to be sold Paglen documents the repeated violent raids that Dann and her people are compelled to endure. The US state has repeatedly attempted to charge Dann and her people with trespassing on government land. This a charge that Dann derisively rejects, arguing that she cannot be accused of trespassing 'land she saw as rightly belonging to her people' precisely

because 'the Shoshone NEVER gave, ceded, or sold their land to the United States government, by treaty or otherwise."'' In the face of this defiance, the US government has attempted to crush Western Shoshone resistance by deploying the full arsenal of state terror, including federal agents, helicopters, a plane and a fleet of All-Terrain Vehicles: ' "I could not help but think of how this is how our ancestors felt when they saw the cavalry coming. So many of my people were killed on this land and now it's happening again." The Feds rounded up Dann's cattle and loaded them into trucks to be sold at auction. The ranch was devastated.'02 Paglen connects this national exercise of contemporary colonialism and stateviolence to the larger, transnational picture he has been delineating in order to underscore the system of continuities that hold between the two: 'For the collection of [Native American] activists sitting in an unmarked trailer in the recesses of Nevada's vast valleys, the black world is much more than an array of sites connected through black aircraft, encrypted communications, and classified careers. It is the power to create geographies, to create places where anything can happen, and to do it with impunity. ">! The enormity of this power to create geographies while simultaneously obliterating others is perhaps best exemplified by the Pentagon's ambitious proposal to create a virtual 'drone state' that will further expropriate large tracts of Native American land, creating 'the largest Joint Forces Future Combat Systems training site in the world': 1'1 'Under this plan, 7 million acres (or 11,000 square miles) of land in the southwest corner of Colorado, and 60 million acres of air space (or 94,000 square miles) over Colorado and New Mexico would be given over to special forces testing and training in the use of remote-controlled flying machines.*1

Paglen's concept of 'relational geographies' can be productively amplified by conjoining it with the concept of'relational temporalities,' that is, diachronic relations that establish critical connections across historical time and diverse geographies. Relational temporalities draw lines of connection between seemingly disparate temporal events: for example, the US state's genocidal history against Native Americans and the killing of civilians in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan. In her tracking of the violent history of attempted genocide against Native Americans, Andrea Smith writes: 'the US is built on a foundation of genocide, slavery, and racism."'1' Situated in this context, what becomes apparent in the scripting of the 9/11 attacks as the worst acts of terrorism perpetrated on US soil is the effective erasure of this foundational history of state-sponsored terrorism against Native Americans. This historicidal act of whitewashing effectively clears the ground for contemporary acts of violence against the United States to be chronologically positioned as the 'first' or hierarchically ranked as the 'worst' in the nation's history. The colonial nation-state deploys, in the process, a type of Nietzschean 'active forgetting' that ensures the obliteration of prior histories of massacre and terror such as the catastrophic Trail of Tears that resulted from the Indian Removal Act of 1830. This Act enabled the forced removal of a number of Native American nations and their relocation to Oklahoma; in the process, at least four thousand Native Americans died. The Trail of Tears has been described as 'the largest instance of ethnic cleansing in American history."'7 This example of state terror is what must be occluded in order to preserve the 'innocence' of the nation so that it can subsequently claim, post 9/11, to have lost the very thing it had betrayed long ago. Jimmie Durham remarks on the repetition of this national ruse: 'The US, because of its actual guilt . . . has had a nostalgia for itself since its beginnings. Even now one may read editorials almost daily about America's "loss of innocence" at some point or other, and about some time in the past when America was truly good. That self-righteousness and insistence upon innocence began, as the US began, with invasion and murder."*8 Such acts of white historicide are constituted by a double logic of taken-for-grantedness and obsessive repetition. Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton, in their forensic analysis of the operations of white supremacy, articulate the seemingly contradictory dimensions of this double logic: It is the same passive apparatus of whiteness that in its mainstream guise actively forgets that it owes its existence to the killing and terrorising of those it racialises for that purpose, expelling them from the human fold in the same gesture of forgetting. It is the passivity of bad faith that tacitly accepts as 'what goes without saying' the postulates of white supremacy. And it must do so passionately since 'what goes without saying' is empty and can be held as a 'truth' only through an obsessiveness. The truth is that the truth is on the surface, flat and repetitive, just as the law is made by the uniform. The it 'goes without saying' is the moment in which the very ideology of white supremacy is so naturalized as to become invisible: it is the given order of the world. Yet, in order to maintain this position of supremacy, a logic of tireless iteration must be deployed in order to secure the very everyday banality, and thus transparency, of white supremacy's daily acts of violence. For those in a position to exercise these daily rounds of state violence, their performative acts are banal because of their very quotidian repetition; yet, because their racialized targets continue to exercise, in turn, acts of resistance and outright contestation, these daily acts of state violence must be obsessively reiterated. Underpinning such acts of white supremacist violence and historicidal erasures is the official - government, media and academic - positioning of Native Americans as a 'permanent "present absence" ' that, in Smith's words, 'reinforces at every turn the conviction that Native peoples are indeed vanishing and that the conquest of Native lands is justified.'7" Precisely what gets erased in the process

are the contemporary Indian wars that are being fought across the body of the US nation. These are wars that fail to register as 'wars' because the triumphant non-indigenous polity controls the ensemble of institutions - legal, military, media and so on - that fundamentally determines what will count as a 'war' in the context of the nation. In her work, Smith establishes critical points of connection between the war on terror being waged in Afghanistan or Pakistan and the issue of Indigenous sovereignty within the context of the US nation: 'it is important to understand that the war against "terror" is really an attack against Native sovereignty, and that consolidating US empire abroad is predicated on consolidating US empire witliin US borders. For example, the Bush administration continues to use the war on terror as an excuse to support anti-immigration policies and the militarization of the US/Mexico border.' 71 The exercise of the war on terror becomes, in other words, another way of entrenching and legitimating the usurpation of Native American sovereignty in the name of the colonial nation-state. The militarization of the US's borders has seen the Department of Homeland Security oversee the domestic transposition of military technologies such as drones - that have been used to fight the war on terror in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and the Horn of Africa - to the borders of both Mexico and Canada. Ted Poe, Congressman, 2nd District of Texas, has introduced legislation that 'mandates the Secretary of Defense transfer 10% of eligible returning equipment from Iraq to state and local law enforcement agencies for border security purposes.'72 Operative here is what Roberto Lovato has termed 'ICE's [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] Al Qaedaization of immigrants and immigration policy: building a domestic security apparatus, one made possible by multi-billion contracts to military-industrial companies like Boeing, General Electric, and Halliburton.'73 The massive scale of this militarization of US borders becomes evident in the context of a recent US government report on border security that states that 'The Department of Homeland security (DHS) has the largest enforcement air force in the world ... As of September 2011, OAM [Office of Air and Marine] had approximately 267 aircraft, 301 marine vessels, and 1,843 personnel in 70 locations primarily on the southwest, northern and southeast borders.'71 The deployment of such militarized border technologies creates a virtual fence that effectively amplifies the securitizing effects ot the concrete and steel fence that is already in place in many sections of the US-Mexico border. Understood in Smith's terms, the militarization of the US border and the repulsion of attendant 'aliens' constitute a re-assertion of colonial sovereignty. The connection between two seemingly disconnected categories the US state's conduct of contemporary wars and Native American sovereignty over country comes into sharp focus in Winona LaDuke's delineation of the violent relational geographies and temporalities that continue to inscribe the operations of the colonial state: The modern US military has taken our lands for bombing exercises and military bases, and for the experimentation and storage of the deadliest chemical agents and toxins known to mankind . . . The military has named our communities after forts that once held our people captive and used our tribal names to link military equipment with fierce warrior imagery, such as the Blackhawk, Kiowa and Apache helicopters. As the Seventh Cavalry invaded Iraq in 2003 in the 'Shock and Awe' campaign that opened the war, one could not help note that this was the name of the cavalry division that had murdered 300 men, women and children at Wounded Knee. 7' As LaDuke notes, the colonial state continues to exercise its power of conquest and domination through the exercise of both physical - expropriation of Native American land and symbolic expropriation and misuse of Native American names violence. The war on terror has seen the names of Native American tribes and leaders violently inscribed in atrocities such as the killing of fourteen civilians (who tried twice to surrender as they were being pursued) in Iraq by two Apache helicopters known in US military jargon as Crazy Horse elements - Crazy Horse was the Oglala Lakota warrior who led his people against the colonial invasion of their lands. 71' The iterative logic of the colonial nomenclature of occupation and conquest, that has its roots in the wars against Native Americans, is evidenced by the naming of the US colonial war in the Philippines as 'Injun warfare,' and the declaration that the islands would not be secure 'until the niggers are killed off like the Indians';77 and the naming by the US military of Vietnam, at the time of the Vietnam War, as 'Indian Country,' and Vietnamese as 'Indians.'711 More recently, Iraq was termed by the US military as the 'Wild West' and the fortress in Shkin, Afghanistan, as the 'Alamo.'7'1 Perhaps the most flagrant example of this symbolic violence is the codenaming of Osama bin Laden as 'Geronimo': The president and his advisers watched Leon E. Panetta, the CIA director, on a video screen, narrating from his agency's headquarters across the Potomac River what was happening in faraway Pakistan. 'They've reached the target,' he said. Minutes passed. 'We have a visual on Geronimo,' he said. A few minutes later: 'Geronimo EKIA.' Enemy Killed in Action. There was silence in the Situation Room. Finally, the president spoke up.

'We got him.""1 Another report quotes the following: a 'Seal then shot bin Laden in the chest and again in the head with his M4 rifle, and said over his radio: "For God and country - Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo" - the code word for a hit on bin Laden.'1" In this pivotal moment of the war on terror, the Indian wars are contemporized and re-situated at the symbolic heart of this war. The visual of bin Laden is encoded as Geronimo, iconic leader of the Chiricahua Apache in the anti-colonial Apache Wars. Through this loaded act of superimposition, the Native American warrior is criminalized, conceptually recoded as a terrorist, and the Native American wars against colonial invasion of their lands are scripted as the wars of domestic terrorists. Geronimo, as enemy killed in action, is symbolically executed by the US state in the guise of a contemporary terrorist. This is the moment in which the US state reappropriates and secures its imperial sovereignty - precisely through a double death; a twin execution that topologically locates its absolute outside (Arab/ Muslim terrorist) as already inside (Native American insurgent). Geronimo, through this discursive resignification and double death, is transmuted into the trophy of a triumphant imperial power that cannot vanquish too many times its anti-colonial insurgents: even when they are long dead, as in Geronimo's case, they must be killed again. In a profound meditation on the ongoing cultural valency of Geronimo in US culture, Durham writes: 'In the American myth, Apaches are a symbol of inscrutable cruelty. Is Geronimo's name invoked because he evokes American fear - a fear that has been "conquered"? If so, then the fearsome "object" has obviously not been conquered at all.'"' Geronimo, in this latest neo-imperial reincarnation, is the revenant that cannot be killed: as ghost of a dense, unresolved history of colonial violence, he continues to reanimate the colonist's symbolic imaginary and to haunt its very claims to legitimacy. Activated in this heavily mediated moment of state assassination is a palimpsest of repetitions, slippages and collisions of signs, histories and subjects. The historically anachronistic enunciation 'we have a visual on Geronimo' violently sutures two heterogeneous faces in the process of collapsing two radically different geopolitical histories. This same enunciation, as a moment of obsessive repetition, discloses the state's tendency to homogenize its various others as interchangeably Other. It also exposes, however, the undiminished contestatory power that Geronimo still magnetizes so that he must be 'killed' once again in order to silence questions about the sovereign legitimacy of the colonial nation-state. The symbolic, colonial re-killing of Geronimo discloses yet another form of death. This other form of death refers to that living death that embodies, in Fanon's terms, the contemporary existence of the colonized: There is first of all, the fact that the colonized . . . perceives life not as a flowering or a development of an essential productiveness, but as a permanent struggle against death. This ever-menacing death is experienced as endemic famine, unemployment, a high death rate, an inferiority complex and the absence of any hope for the future. All this gnawing at the existence of the colonized tends to make life something of an incomplete death. 83

As the trophy of a triumphant colonialism, Geronimo revenant embodies the incomplete death of Native Americans surviving ongoing regimes of economic, cultural and political expropriation and ecological devastation, as a form of ecocide, that contemporizes the traditional genocidal practices of the colonial state."1 The ecocide that has been visited upon Native Americans assumes the form of weapons testing, mining and the dumping of the toxic waste of the colonizers on their lands and in their rivers. Within the ecologically devastated spaces that now constitute the lands of the Western Shoshone nation called Newe Sogobia, the biopolitical caesura of human/animal positions its captive subjects along a violent hierarchy of life and death. In the words of an Owens Valley Paiute elder, Native Americans are viewed by white authorities as 'nonpeople' and thus, through the deployment of a form of'environmental racism,' they are scripted as expendable by both the US government and the various corporations that conduct their ecocidal operations on their land."' The extensive picture of the nuclear testing program that has unfolded in the lands of Newe Sogobia includes the exposure of the Western Shoshone to the toxic fallout of the tests: the experimental use of live pigs, dressed in army uniforms to see how they would withstand the blast, filmed by 'the remote-controlled camera [that] captured the pigs writhing and squealing as they died,' and a 'herd of horses that wandered east onto the Sheahan lands with their eyes burnt out, left empty sockets by a blast.""' These haunting images of useless suffering evidence the disposable lives of those subjects violently cut off from 'the culture' and positioned in the lethal vestibule of the colonizer. In this exercise of state violence, the targets of the state's speciesism (immolated pigs and blinded horses) and racio-speciesism (Native Americans as 'nonpeople') live and die under the decree of the biopolitical caesura. For Carrie Dann and her sister Mary, the lived violence of this biopolitical categorization and partitioning is encapsulated by the fact that, as Native Americans, they are 'under the jurisdiction of a department that otherwise manages "natural resources" trees, animals, parks, and so forth.' The Dann sisters spell out the ramifications of this biopolitical assignation and its attendant caesura: 'I don't know if we're the human species or some other kind of species,' says Dann, to which her sister Mary sardonically replies: 'Endangered species.'87 The US policies of colonial appropriation of Indian lands and the sequestration of Native Americans into camps were conducted under the imprimatur of territorial laws guaranteed by what Charles Venator Santiago terms 'the antidemocratic nature of the US Constitution.' These territorial laws have enabled the US state to appropriate Indigenous lands and to legitimate the governance of the resulting 'distinct spaces in an anomalous manner' so that freedoms, rights and so on can be effectively suspended."" The US colonial state's biopolitical regime of governance was underpinned by at least three key features: imperial westward expansion, as formally proclaimed by the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, a doctrine crucially underpinned by the violence of that biopolitical caesura which effectively 'determined that natives of the world are as animals and therefore have no human rights';"'1 the consequent coercive relocation of Native Americans onto lands rejected by white America because they were arid, remote and barren; and the spectacular growth of the US military during the course of the twentieth century. As Gregory Hooks and Chad Smith note, 'This contingent intersection of Indian conquest and the rise of the Pentagon placed Native Americans at great risk of exposure to noxious military activity' 9" precisely because they were located on those very lands that were contiguous to military installations that practised the full range of toxic and environmentally destructive activities. This genocidal form of governance of Native Americans has been critically enabled by the state's deployment of a biopolitical caesura that, in its lethal human/animal division, has ensured that Indigenous peoples can be left to die within the ecocidal landscapes generated by the military-industrial complex and its economies of war.