The violence that hangs in the air: Fanon’s sociogenics and spectres of eugenics

Abstract

This article asks questions of ambient violence, its analytic value, and how to affectively illustrate that value. Comprised of six thematically-interwoven essays, it examines Fanon's oeuvre to show how his analysis of, and claims about, (colonial) violence might be connected to eugenicist modes-ofthinking, or how a project of eugenics conditioned Fanon's work on sociogenics. If I were to title the six sections, they would be:I. A poetics of relation makes visible the social fabric of the figure of the person. II. With and on whose body colonial violence has written, despite angst over the use of violence. III. Hierarchies of social meaning. IV. 'We' seek the conditions of possibility for other relations in the face of dehumanizing ambient violence. V. 'We' read in the weave of the violence that hangs in the air. VI. A culture of eugenics, against which we accept the offer of 'sociogenics'.