Foucault and Genocide

Michel Foucault’s seminal realization that security is a species concept opens a new path for understanding how genocide is fundamentally related to aesthetic ideology. Fueled by the settler colonial imaginary, the logic of “speciation” inevitably acquires a fictional aspect that is an enduring site of potentially catastrophic instability for transitional modernity. The genealogical source of this catastrophic instability is nothing other than the West, the template for the apparatus of area and anthropological difference. The West's quest to control political transitions throughout the world is an essential part of a larger project to control “speciation.” Inasmuch as “speciation” is tied, says Foucault, to security, and genocide is tied, according to A. Dirk Moses, to the search for permanent security, the attempt to seek permanent security through control over “speciation,” i.e., transition, lies at the root of modern genocide.

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).