"There is not occupation of territory, on the one hand, and independence of persons on the other. It is the country as a whole, its history, its daily pulsation that are contested, disfigured … under these conditions, the individual’s breathing is an observed breathing. It is a combat breathing".
Frantz Fanon
In Fanon’s meditation on the violence of the colonial state, the subject who is on the receiving end of state violence is positioned in the fraught, traumatic and potentially fatal exercise of “combat breathing.” Combat breathing names the mobilisation of the target subject’s life energies merely in order to continue to live, to breathe and to survive the exercise of state violence. If Weber long ago drew attention to what he termed the “intimate” relation between the state and violence, it was Fanon who clearly embodied the intimate, because lived, effects of this relation.
Why does state violence still remain largely unnamed and invisibilised, even as its lived effects are only too real for its target subjects? Is it because the relation between violence and the state is so intimate that it cannot be named? What are the multiple discourses and rhetorics deployed by the state that ensure both the occlusion and the displacement of its violence –including discourses of “tolerance,” “social inclusion,” “welfare interventions,” and so on?
Are, in fact, these types of discourses and practices actually constitutive of the very violences that they purportedly are meant to attack and eliminate? The Symposium will examine state violence in the context of the multiple sites, bodies and institutions that animate and enable it.
14 AUGUST 2010, 9.30 AM – 6 PM, MACQUARIE UNIVERSITY,
BLDG: THEATRE 1 (T1) Y3A, FREE ADMISSION
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: KERRY CARRINGTON (QUT), GRACELYN SMALLWOOD (JCU)
CONFIRMED SPEAKERS: KELLIE GREENE (UWS), RAY JACKSON (Indigenous Social Justice), TAMAR HOPKINS (Flemington & Kensington Community Legal Centre) GOLDIE OSURI (Macquarie), REBECCA SMITH & SHANE RESIDE (authors of “Boys, you wanna give me some action,” Report into racialised policing), OMEIMA SUKKARIEH (Auburn Community Development Network), SAM THAMPAPILLAI (Sydney Centre for International Law)