The Right to Maim (ANIMA) by Jasbir K. Puar

Author:Jasbir K. Puar [Puar, Jasbir K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2017-10-11T06:00:00+00:00

THE BIOPOLITICS OF SETTLER COLONIALISM

These practices of bodily as well as infrastructural debilitation, loosely effaced in concerns about “disproportionate force,” indicate the extension or perhaps the perversion of the “right to kill” claimed by states in warfare into what I am calling the “right to maim.” “The right to maim” supplements if not replaces “the right to kill.” Maiming as intentional practice expands biopolitics beyond simply the question of “right of death and power over life.” Maiming becomes a primary vector through which biopolitical control is deployed in colonized space and hence not easily demarcated “necro” as it is mapped in Mbembe’s reworking of biopolitics. Mbembe discusses injury as a crucial element of enslavement: “The slave is kept alive but in a state of injury … slave life, in many ways, is a form of death-in-life.”57 Sticking with the binary of life and death with his formulation of “death-in-life,” he does not pursue injury and debilitation as altering living and dying as primary poles within which populations oscillate. The four quadrants remain; death is reiterated as the ultimate loss (of life). While other scholars of biopolitics have noted the centrality of disability to the deployment of biopolitical population management, these efforts generally remain wedded to the poles of living and dying within which life is toggled. That is to say, while the distinctions between living and dying are often recognized through the “cuts” of race and the “folds” of overlapping population construction and management, maiming, debilitation, and stunting are relatively undertheorized components of these cuts and folds; centering these processes may potentially alter presumed relations to living and dying altogether. Maiming is a practice that escapes definition within both legal and biopolitical or necropolitical frameworks because it does not proceed through making live, making die, letting live, or letting die. My reframing adds a critical axis to the four quadrants, insisting that debilitation—indeed, deliberate maiming—is not merely another version of slow death or of death-in-life or of a modulation on the spectrum of life to death. Rather, it is a status unto itself, a status that triangulates the hierarchies of living and dying that are standardly deployed in theorizations of biopolitics.

Alongside examining how and why Foucault elided a theory of colonial occupation in his formulation of biopolitics, we might also ask, what is biopolitics in the twenty-first century, especially as informed by the ongoing structure of settler colonialism? Recent interventions by Alexander Weheliye and Mel Chen raise critical issues about the formulation of race in the theorization of biopolitics.58 According to Weheliye, race only became important to Foucault when it entered the realms of European state management, not through the operations of colonialism. For this, Weheliye argues that the frame of biopolitics is foundationally flawed, for even as Foucault claims that the cut of race drives biopolitical distinctions, the severing of colonial occupation from a (belated) state racism relegates race to a derivative status. Weheliye’s rather loose archival excavations of Foucault’s work notwithstanding, what his and others’ analyses lay bare

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