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Gregoire Chamayou, Manhunts: A Philosophical History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. pages. $35 (hc). ISBN: 978-0691151656.
Didier Fassin, Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing. Cambridge: Polity, 2013. pages. $24.95 (pbk). $69.95 (hc). ISBN: 978-0745664804.
The representation of the banlieues as a jungle and their residents as savages calls for recourse to special teams better trained for man hunting than for police procedure, who readily represent themselves as predator animals and whom their hierarchy sometimes compares to packs.1
In our examinations of power, sovereignty and governing, the overarching focus on biopower is currently being supplemented with more theorization of death and killing.2 The hunt that precedes and sometimes takes the place of this killing, however, tends to be overlooked. Yet, as Gregoire Chamayou writes, "domination presupposes a kind of manhunt."3 This essay reviews two books that examine hunting and capture not as an exception to pastoral- or biopower, but as a form of power in itself. Chamayou presents a 3000-year philosophical history of shifting manhunting techniques and rationales, whilst Didier Fassin provides a close ethnography of everyday life with so-called "anti-crime squads" in a precinct in suburban Paris, where mostly foreigners are subjected to policing. In complementary ways, these two authors help us unravel how manhunting continues to constitute contemporary political realities. Arguably, as we shall see, this hunting-power, or as Chamayou labels it, cynegetics, is at the very heart of western political thinking, but weaved so seamlessly into the fabrics of power and governance that we fail to make notice of it. Both books describe political orders based on hunting that draws boundaries between the included and the excluded. Here, hunting as governance is a form of ontological policing, where certain humans who are viewed as dangerous and therefore not worthy of protection are captured again and again to remind them of their place as non-legitimate members of society. After discussing each book in turn, I will draw further connections between them in relation to hunting as a technique of governance.
A Genealogy of Manhunting
Chamayou's philosophical history of techniques and rationales of manhunting somehow manages to remain short and easily accessible despite being packed with multi-facetted philosophical discussions and layers of archival treasures. Initially, I read the book in what seemed like a...