Foucault and Genocide: A Genealogy of the Fantasy of the West

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.