The colonial clash of subjectivities

In the vast universe of decolonial critiques of violence, the names of Dussel,Footnote ⁵ Maldonado-Torres,Footnote ⁶ and MbembeFootnote ⁷ stand out. Pairing a concern for the phenomenology of colonial oppression with a critique of Eurocentric myths, their work provides a fundamental framework for revealing the hidden violence of modernity. Writing at different times and from different backgrounds, they nonetheless reach a significant common ground: a critique of Eurocentrism they identify in the opposition between violence (understood as a sign of barbarism) and civilisation (understood as the telos of development). Their work begins by rejecting traditional readings of the unfolding of civilisation as the progressive taming of violence and barbarism within the borders of Europe.Footnote ⁸ They see in this narrative, and in all representations of violence as foreign to the European modern ethos, the workings of a mythologyFootnote ⁹ or fantasy:Footnote ¹⁰ a (mis)representation of the past that hides its foundational violence and legitimises systems of subordination in the present.

Following in the footsteps of previous postcolonial/decolonial works, they endeavour to show what Lugones described as modernity's ‘intimate relation with violence’.Footnote ¹¹ They share a commitment to reveal how the development of modern civilisation is not only haunted, but was essentially preconditioned by its acts of violence.Footnote ¹² To this end, their critiques of modern violence go back to the historical experience of colonial conquest.Footnote ¹³ Disobeying the Eurocentric episteme, their work analyses the rise of the modern world as a historical process that cannot be separated from the violence of European colonialism. Instead of triggering the forward march of the global democratic revolution, the clash between conquerors and conquered inaugurated an unequal system. A world whereby the emancipation of the former (Europe) depended on the devaluation, enslavement, or annihilation of the latter (the slave, the Third World, Africa).

Dussel and Maldonado-Torres explicitly raise colonialism as opposed to the European enlightenment as the inaugural event of modernity. For them, it is the concrete historical experience of the conquest, enslavement, and brutal annihilation of non-European peoples, worlds, and cosmologies that constitutes the conditions of possibility for the rise of Europe and the modern world.Footnote ¹⁴ They link the ‘pacification’ of European nation states to a history of military expansion and violent rule overseas, beginning with the subjugation and dissolution of Al-Andalus, Anáhuac, and Tawuantinsuyu.Footnote ¹⁵ Similarly, Mbembe emphasises that the so-called ‘civilisation of mores’Footnote ¹⁶ was entirely conditioned by the appearance of slavery and new ‘forms of wealth accumulation and consumption inaugurated by the colonial adventure’.Footnote ¹⁷ He contrasts the development of democracy across the Atlantic with the incredible tolerance shown ‘for a certain political violence’Footnote ¹⁸ and the incorporation of ‘forms of brutality into their culture’.Footnote ¹⁹

Importantly, colonial conquest is more than a historical coincidence. Conquest provides two sine qua non conditions for the emergence of the M/CW: the racialised fantasy of European superiority and the experience of mastery over the world.Footnote ²⁰ Effectively, colonial conquest and the rise of a Euro-centred economic system of global proportions constituted a new reality in the European imaginary: the de facto acquisition of dominus mundi, the experience of global rule/domination previously reserved for God and the church. The establishment of empires on which the sun never set provoked a fundamental change to the ways in which individuals related to themselves and their place in the world (the question of subjectivity). The global and Euro-centred system inaugurated by colonialism broke with the inalienable distance envisioned by the medieval order between Man (a limited being) and God (an omnipresent and omnipotent deity).Footnote ²¹ More than the addition of land, cheap labour, and raw materials to European crowns, colonialism produced an exponential change in the sense of self-importance attributed to the (European) Man. The use of the masculine form is intentional throughout this work, emphasising the patriarchal nature of domination and exploitation in the M/CW, predicated on the devaluation of femininity and the violation of feminine or effeminate bodies.Footnote ²²

For Dussel and Maldonado-Torres, it is this concrete historical experience of replacing God in practiceFootnote ²³ that conditioned modern attempts to systematise God's ‘redundancy’ in theory. They refuse to see as coincidental the fact that modern science, epistemology, and phenomenology appeared from the sixteenth century onwards in the societies of the colonial centre. They connect the concerted intellectual effort to clarify the limits of what can be known to the colonial/imperial practice of differentiation between the subjects who can know (who are endowed with reason) and those who must be known (objectified, classified, studied). In the foundational works of modern philosophy, Dussel and Maldonado-Torres hear the more or less explicit echoes of colonial difference.Footnote ²⁴

In his prime example, Dussel weaves a fundamental connection between the Cartesian ego cogito and the fact of conquest. For him, Descartes’ conception of the thinking being as the condition of possibility of knowledge, independent of the materiality of his body and surroundings, is unthinkable without the ‘transformation’ of the European Man into an omnipresent and omnipotent being (empire).Footnote ²⁵ Dussel sees in the Cartesian ego cogito (and later in Hegel, Kant, and Heidegger) the legitimisation of the subjectivity of the conqueror, a mode of being authorised to speak about, and adjudicate, on anything and anybody, anywhere.

Dussel is by no means alone in criticising the universalisation of European provincialism as a trademark of modernity,Footnote ²⁶ but he provides a genuine twist to a well-known critical trope. What is at stake here is not a critique of the Cartesian ego cogito as expressing imperial drives to classify and control the subjugated others of Europe,Footnote ²⁷ but the very conditions of possibility of such reasoning. Dussel emphasises that the Cartesian leap of faith can only emerge in the realm of thinkable possibilities once the experience of universal domination has been confirmed, lived, and interiorised as a natural fact.Footnote ²⁸ The central lesson is that one can only think of the ego cogito (I think, therefore I am) from within the lived experience of the ego conquiro (I conquer, therefore I am).Footnote ²⁹

The historical birth of the subject qua conqueror is further analysed by Maldonado-Torres as a central cog in the mechanism of modern/colonial violence.Footnote ³⁰ According to Maldonado-Torres, the transgression of the abyss separating European Man from God (which he describes as trans-ontological difference) instils in modern subjectivities two profound senses of scepticism. On one hand, we have the well-known scepticism showed by the Cartesian subject, who doubts his thoughts, sensations, and very existence only to realise that the act of doubting is itself the most secure foundation for knowledge (one cannot doubt if one is not).

The gap between God and European Man (ego conquiro) can only be closed at the expense of alterity. The fact of conquest and the erasure of trans-ontological difference produce a new figure (the non-European) who is supposed to function, quite literally, as the symbolic refuse in the deification of European Man. In the M/CW, non-Europeans become the embodied repository of a series of human flaws (for example, sinfulness, laziness, immaturity, irrationality, hatred), artificially dissociated from the elevated image of the ego conquiro.Footnote ³¹ It is this accumulation of negative markers that supports the myth of European superiority by translating multiple experiences of subalternity around the world under the pretence of an essential sub-alterity:Footnote ³² the naturalisation of inequalities between colonisers and colonised as sub-ontological differences ‘between Being and what lies below Being’.Footnote ³³

This purgative process has tremendous consequences for the inter-subjective relations between colonisers and colonised. Those whom Frantz Fanon called the wretched or damnés,Footnote ³⁴ the colonised, are not seen as the coloniser's others. Effectively, the subject qua conqueror has no ‘others’; he inhabits what Césaire described as a world of ‘thingification’,Footnote ³⁵ where the value of things and beings is primarily defined by their replaceability. The ego conquiro lives as the Heideggerian dasein,Footnote ³⁶ surrounded by tools or servants/slaves who are not seen as (fully) humans or individuals, but as standardised objects that remain at his disposal. Unlike the European Man, the damnés are never recognised as individuals, but only members of a mass whose distinctiveness lies solely in what they lack in relation to the ego conquiro.Footnote ³⁷ They are relegated to live their lives in the ‘zones of non-being’,Footnote ³⁸ their possibilities foreclosed by their default position in modern/colonial order. They become ‘symbols of a vegetative, limited state … powerfully possessed by emptiness, for whom the negative had ended up penetrating all moments of existence’.Footnote ³⁹

This symbolic play of associations and disassociations that produces violent intersubjective relations cannot hold without the fantasy of race. Both Maldonado-Torres and Dussel (in his later works) engage with the concept of race via Aníbal Quijano, who situates race (alongside labour) as the central axis of articulation of forms of domination and exploitation in the M/CW.Footnote ⁴⁰ In Quijano, race appear as a classificatory principle linking fictive groups (ethnicities) to specific positions in a complex global division of labour (and, we should add, also citizenship). This principle of classification, whose function lies in naturalising unequal relations of servitude, did not end with formal processes of decolonisation (hence, Quijano's choice for the word coloniality).Footnote ⁴¹ Race has no static meaning, but it does seem to have an enduring function: the provision of a vocabulary with which to translate the inequality between colonisers and colonised in terms of a difference in degrees of humanity.Footnote ⁴²

Mbembe does not engage directly with Quijano but shows a similar understanding. Race is, for him, the ‘ultimate sign of the dissimilar’ under modernity; a fantasy that propels the so-called West into the ‘centre of the earth and the birthplace of reason, universal life, and the truth of humanity’.Footnote ⁴³ Race legitimises the circular logics of power and sovereignty in the colonies,Footnote ⁴⁴ structuring the relationship between Europeans and the colonised around ‘the very negation of the idea of … common humanity’.Footnote ⁴⁵ For Maldonado-Torres, the colonial ‘misanthropic skepticism’,Footnote ⁴⁶ or the suspension of any human semblance between the colonisers and the colonised, pre-exists and conditions modern methodological scepticism. Once again, this essential denial is what conditions the organisation of the colonial world by naturalising its inherently unequal order. It is the glue that holds the amorphous and empty idea of this non-subject (the damné) together, imprinting on the skin of the wretched multiple, contradictory, and baseless flaws associated with the Third World,Footnote ⁴⁷ the negro, or the African.Footnote ⁴⁸

Modern promises of emancipation appear in a different light when contrasted with its underlying, colonial clash of subjectivities. Colonial conquest provided Europe with dreams of masterless societies and life without scarcity that would come to reshape European progressive thought in profound ways.Footnote ⁴⁹ But it also enacted the co-optation of such dreams by normalising a ‘master morality of dominion and control’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Through conquest, the newly emancipated subject becomes free by becoming a master shaped in the image of the divine. His lived experience of unlimitedness necessarily blurs the lines separating the enjoyment of freedom from the exercise of power (the fulfilment of his potentialities) as the denial of rights to others.Footnote ⁵¹ Because, in essence, the ego conquiro can only truly emancipate himself in an environment that does not recognise alterity as a tangible limit to his desire. His emancipation is an extractivist process, to use Ramón Grosfoguel's formulation, mining the lands, bodies, lives, and cosmologies of the damné in the search for value, pleasure, and a sense of distinctiveness.Footnote ⁵² And as any extractive process, it also leaves deep marks in the landscapes of modern/colonial societies, drawing a line alongside which (in)security is distributed and accumulated at very visible ends. The fantasy of race plays no small part here, functioning as the operational principle of this distribution. The racial mark invites the humiliation and violation of racialised bodies, ‘negatively marked as dispensable’,Footnote ⁵³ anchoring the modern promise of emancipation on a tacit promise of impunity.

The triangle of violence: Conquest-dehumanisation-dispensability

As Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Freya Schiwy remind us, it is important to ‘understand they ways decolonization pushes against the building blocks of coloniality and where, at times inadvertently, decolonization recreates these’.Footnote ⁵⁴ The works of Dussel, Maldonado-Torres, and Mbembe certainly push some important blocks. Their joint refusal of the Eurocentric myth of civility is an act of epistemic disobedience that, at least in Dussel's case, is strongly committed to a praxis of commiseration:Footnote ⁵⁵ the preferential option for the perspectives and the lived experiences of the oppressed. This commitment is not a charitable act, but a decision born of the acute awareness that the oppressed stand in a privileged position; living in the space of colonial difference, they are best suited to find ‘transmodern’ alternatives to the present violent order. The effort to uncover the lives and worldviews suppressed by the forward march of modernity/coloniality is, above all, an effort to learn from these silenced voices, anchoring the practice of epistemic disobedience in the margins of the M/CW.

A closer examination of their work reveals a certain vocabulary that is strikingly at odds with this act of epistemic disobedience. At the core of their critical project, the concept of violence plays an ambiguous role. On one hand, the denunciation of modernity/colonisation as a violent historical process is a fundamental part of the decolonial rejection of narratives of civility and pacification. On the other, this very act of denunciation limits the extent of epistemic disobedience at play by mobilising representations of violence from within the Eurocentric tradition (the language of warfare and image of the camp). To put it simply, it is not always clear at which point the naming of modern/colonial violence ends, and the reproduction of the modern/colonial vocabulary begins.

The concept of violence is anything but straightforward. To being with, there is no consensus about what violence means, and little agreement on the essential characteristics that make something violent. The adjective ‘violent’ is often attached to numerous, disparate phenomena, evidencing a polysemic and fluid nature of the everyday and academic perceptions of the phenomenon.Footnote ⁵⁶ The importance attributed to the fact of conquest and the clash of subjectivities profoundly shapes the meaning of violence in Dussel, Maldonado-Torres, and Mbembe. More than interpersonal acts of injury, the experience of injustice, or the instrumental use of force,Footnote ⁵⁷ violence refers to the different degrees of elimination of the non-European world that are required by the modern promise of emancipation. By elimination I mean the more or less literal erasure of the lives, knowledges, and cosmologies of non-Europeans that seeks to purify the M/CW from perceived signs of difference (degeneration). For Dussel, Maldonado-Torres, and Mbembe, modern/colonial violence operates through multiple acts, institutions, and symbolic processes that at best impose systems of exclusions and separation (apartheid), and at worst pave the way for indiscriminate mass killing.

It is fair to say that, in their work, the elimination/erasure of the colonised assumes the form of a triangle: Conquest-Dehumanisation-Dispensability (Figure 1). Colonial conquest produces two phenomena that showcase an ‘intimate relationship’ between violence and modernity: First, the constitution of the modern, emancipated subject as a subject qua conqueror, an existence whose emancipation depends on the unlimited extraction of value, pleasure, and worth from his surroundings. Second, the fabrication of racialised myths of civility (the framing of the conquest as a moment of ‘pacification’) and superiority (the assumption of European Man as the measure of all things). At the core of these two processes lies the fantasy of race (the translation of difference as ontological deficiency). Race resignifies colonial conquest as a foretold fact, inscribed in the very ontology of the ego conquiro (a superior being). And by introducing systems of differentiation or intensifying pre-existing ones (such as the varna-jati scheme in India, reworked into the modern caste system)Footnote ⁵⁸ the act of conquest naturalised the dehumanisation of the colonised either in absolute or in gradational terms. Racial/colonial difference works by marking the bodies, lives, and cosmologies of the colonised, particularly those at the very bottom of this hierarchical system, as dispensable (as things that, having no further use, can be tossed away without further thought). To use Grosfoguel's words, this triangular logic of violence produces the conditions for the constant slippage between the ego conquiro and a genocidal ‘yo extermino, luego existo [I exterminate, therefore I am (ego extermino)]’.Footnote ⁵⁹

Figure 1. The decolonial triangle of violence.

Dussel, Maldonado-Torres, and Mbembe are not the only ones, or even the first, to see modern/colonial violence through the lenses of elimination/erasure. The theme of elimination (incorporating the meanings of negation, exclusion, and violation of the colonised) are inscribed in a longstanding tradition of activism and scholarship denouncing the genocidal nature of modernity/coloniality. As early as 1951, American civil rights activists presented the petition We Charge Genocide to the United Nations, condemning the lynching and segregation of black Americans as an instance of genocide, making use of the then fresh language of the Genocide Convention (1948). The year before, Aimé Cesáire had published Discours sur le Colonialisme in Paris, making public his famous comments on the Nazi Holocaust. For Cesáire, the crimes committed by the Nazi regime in Europe had been preceded and instructed by centuries of similar forms of violence in colonial settlements. In his understanding, the Holocaust was not rendered horrific because it constituted an offense to the very idea and essence of humanness, as Hannah Arendt would have it.Footnote ⁶⁰ The Holocaust was experienced as grotesque because, for the first time, the old colonial procedures that ‘had been reserved exclusively for’Footnote ⁶¹ the victims of European colonialism were employed on Europeans themselves.

From Cesáire onwards, the category of genocide and the image of the Holocaust have featured in numerous decolonial writings, functioning as the extreme reminder that colonisation presupposes the (more or less literal) negation of colonised lives.Footnote ⁶² In a sense, Dussel, Maldonado-Torres, and Mbembe follow in Cesáire's footsteps, seeing genocide as the ultimate consequence of the link between Conquest-Dehumanisation-Dispensability. It is at this point that their critiques of modern/colonial violence are infused with a certain ambiguity, the same ambiguity that characterised the efforts of civil rights activists in the 1950s: the difficulty of translating the phenomenon of violence under racialised oppression in the vocabulary of a Eurocentric/racist order. In the end, their critique of modern/colonial violence remains entangled in a language of warfare so often used to represent extreme violence in the Western tradition. This creates a more than uncomfortable fact; whatever ‘transmodern’ alternatives their theory helps to build, are built on solid Eurocentric foundations.

Dussel begins his Philosophy of Liberation (1977) by remarking that, within the structure of Western domination ‘la guerra es el origen de todo [war is the origin of everything]’.Footnote ⁶³ The belligerent foundations of the European world made colonisation into ‘un choque devastador, genocida, absolutamente destructor del mundo indígena [a devastating, destructive, and genocidal shock for the indigenous world]’.Footnote ⁶⁴ For Maldonado-Torres, modern/colonial violence is deeply embedded in what he sees as a specifically modern rendition of the paradigm of war. Drawing on Levinas's critique of the philosophy of Hitlerism, he attributes the logic of elimination/erasure of the damnés to the normalisation of ‘a way of conceiving humanity, knowledge, and social relations that privileges conflict or polemos’.Footnote ⁶⁵ The extreme negation of the damnés’ existence is connected to ‘the celebration of the reduction of the singularity of individual entities and subjects to the generality of the concept’.Footnote ⁶⁶ What Maldonado-Torres does here is to weave a central connection between (metaphysical or epistemological) violence,Footnote ⁶⁷ the elimination of accidental or non-essential features from the definition of what exists, and the elimination of non-essential or dispensable beings (the damnés) from the foundations of the Eurocentric polis. Just as the colour of a pen (whether it is blue or green) has no bearing in its definition (what makes a pen a pen), the ‘coloured’ bodies of the colonised have no place in the perfect vision of the polis. To reach the perfect understanding of what a pen is, one must eliminate all its accidental/non-essential features, such as colour. The singularities of existing pens, if you may, are negated for the construction of an abstract sense of generality (the theory of what a pen is). The search for perfection becomes therefore indistinguishable from these moments of elimination/negation, configured as the cleansing of impurities that stand in the way of a fulfilling experience of the ideal. The genocidal moment is inscribed in this sequence, as the ‘[t]he hyperbolic expression of coloniality’,Footnote ⁶⁸ representing ‘the paroxysm of the ego cogito’Footnote ⁶⁹ as a being that ‘exists alone’.Footnote ⁷⁰

Mbembe's work is also exemplary of the privilege attributed to representations of violence as emerging from the logics of warfare and genocide. His very choice of framing his analysis of sovereign power in terms of a necropolitics, where ‘the political takes as its primary and absolute objective the enemy's murder’Footnote ⁷¹ and power is exercised as the ‘right to kill’,Footnote ⁷² is very illustrative. Perhaps no other categories figure as prominently in his denunciation of violence in the (post)colonial world as the concept of exception, the principle of destruction, and the model of the camp.Footnote ⁷³ Expanding on Agamben's interpretation of Foucault, via a complex mix of Schmitt, Bataille, and Fanon's anticolonial critique, Mbembe sees the exception (the decision that guides the transgression of moral and legal prohibitions) as one of the central elements of the political order inaugurated by the experience of European colonialism.Footnote ⁷⁴

Following Césaire's analysis, Mbembe detaches the exception (and the death camp as its extreme expression) from its common associations with totalitarianisms and the Nazi regime, making it into the generalisable form of necropolitical sovereignty in modern times. Moving beyond the horrors of the mid-twentieth century, he identifies the workings of the exception in the very beginnings of what we can call the M/CW.

For him, colonisation constituted the (post)colony as the negative of the image of European polities in the modern symbolic order. In this inverted world, intersubjective relations were not based on the possibility of communal life, but on fear, the proclaimed necessity of apartheid, and violent fantasies of annihilation. He sees ‘the plantation world’ as a pure ‘manifestation of the state of exception’:Footnote ⁷⁵ a zone ‘where the controls and guarantees of judicial order can be suspended’Footnote ⁷⁶ and ‘“peace” is more likely to take on the face of a “war without end”’.Footnote ⁷⁷

For Mbembe, the integrity and wholeness of the societies instituted by conquest are always troubled and transgressed by the framing of intersubjective relations as potential relations of enmity. Whoever takes on the role of the subaltern (or the sub-alter, to use Maldonado-Torres's terminology) in the modern world is seen as a potential risk, someone whose very ‘existence’ is perceived as ‘an attempt on my life, as a mortal threat or absolute danger’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Pervaded by their fictionalised accounts of internal enemies, these modern societies of enmity constantly nurture and are nurtured by the paranoid fear of an imminent (race) war. In this normalised state of exception, the fantasy of the annihilation of the other as an internal enemy (the principle of destruction) becomes the only possible means to ensure the security of oneself (the principle of life). Echoing Fanon, Mbembe sustains that ‘[t]he colonial process always revolved around a genocidal drive … it was always there, in a latent state.’Footnote ⁷⁹

At this point one explanation is needed. The violence of the colonialism is an undisputable reality. The fact that the M/CW was built and is continuously rebuilt with the blood of the ‘conquered’ is a fact that I have no intention of problematising. My concern here is rather to question the focus on warfare as paradigmatic, as providing the logics, vocabulary, and metaphors for all forms that violence may take in the contemporary world.Footnote ⁸⁰ Put it differently, my argument is that the triangular relationship between Conquest-Dehumanisation-Dispensability remains incomplete as long as it is still embedded primarily in this Eurocentric template. A decolonial reading of violence must be followed by a deeper investigation of the ways in which violence is operationalised beyond the tropes of warfare and death camps, which is the main aim of this article.

The following section does not propose a critique of the scholars discussed here, as much as a suggestion for deepening and complementing their reflections. My argument is that the decolonial triangle (see Figure 1) can be expanded and qualified with two important modifications. First, I propose a shift from a template of violence that takes the paradigm of war and the figure of the camp as the measure of violent relations (predicated on the logics of elimination) towards the prism of the gated community. Second, I suggest a reworking of the colonial clash of subjectivities not as a clash between superhuman conquerors and the subhuman conquered but as a constant dialectical encounter between two subjectivities equality defined by radically different experiences of disarrangement.

The gated community (GC) and the dialects of disarrangement

Turning to gated communities (also known as condomínios fechados in Brazil and security parks or villages in South Africa) as the source of new conceptualisations of violence might seem like a detour. The proliferation of ‘residential areas with restricted access in which normally public spaces are privatized’Footnote ⁸¹ as a popular lifestyle choice of upper/middle-class urbanites in the 1980–90 decade also led to the mobilisation of war metaphors. The global boom in gated communities, high-rise condominiums, and privatised walled neighbourhoodsFootnote ⁸² was quickly explained with reference to the image of the urban fortress, as a sort of neo-medievalist turn.Footnote ⁸³ They were seen as ‘security developments with … walls or fences, and controlled entrances … intended to prevent penetration by non-residents’;Footnote ⁸⁴ the coordinated efforts to carve out ‘a safe haven for the elites’Footnote ⁸⁵ in response to increasing perceptions of crime and insecurity. That these ‘safe havens’ relied on regimes of surveillance and militarisation (for example, defensive architecture, CCTV, private security personnel) led to claims they were in fact part of ‘an open social warfare … against the welfare of the urban poor’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Gated communities were used as comparative examples of forms of ‘social segregation and defensive urban living’Footnote ⁸⁷ that could be employed even by peacekeeping forces in postconflict scenarios.

Works navigated with ease from the image of the urban fortress to the image of imperial or neocolonial conquest and finally the template of the camp. For Edward J. Blakely and Mary Gail Snyder, the ‘first’ gated community in Britain was part of an imperial policy, built by Roman settlers circa 300 bc.Footnote ⁸⁸ Mbembe himself situate gated communities within the logics of colonial and late modern forms of ‘splintering occupation’ based on the ‘control [of], surveillance and separation [from]’ undesirable populations.Footnote ⁸⁹ It is his awareness of the logics of colonial occupations that takes him to the concept of the state of siege and the use of the exception as the generalised form of sovereignty, violence, and terror in modernity (in this case, with reference to the Palestinian context). And he is not alone in picturing gated communities along the lines of the exception. In a somewhat provocative statement, Bülent Diken goes as far as to describe gated communities as ‘more “benevolent” camps’, placing them in a spectrum of sites of demarcation and separation of the good life from the bare life.Footnote ⁹⁰

In the literature on gated communities, the themes of security and segregation are often discussed in the context of responses to the transformation of the global housing market under high-paced globalisation. To use Mike Davis's example, the metaphor of enclavisation as warfare is usually oriented by the question of social welfare. When David Harvey speaks of urban enclosures as a form of neocolonial expansion, he is situating them vis-à-vis wider processes of enclosure of the commons that characterised the turn of the century.Footnote ⁹¹ Gated communities are part of processes of ‘creative destruction’ required by the capitalist imperative of growth at an ever-expanding pace and the need to find fixes to idle capital in space;Footnote ⁹² in this case, the creation of housing developments as a form of realising profits via the fencing off of public space. Importantly, depending on the stress scholars place on the themes of warfare or welfare, they open the space for rethinking or even rejecting the metaphor or the ‘urban fortress’. Far from ending insecurity, the logic of enclavisation is seen as part of the problem, reinforcing patterns of urban violence by mobilising discourses of fear, criminality and hatred for ‘marginal’ elements of society (sometimes even in the absence of any real rise in crime).Footnote ⁹³ The more one focuses on the imperative of accumulation (as opposed to the promise of protection) the more they invite a rethinking of the bellicose language of CDT, revealing the very polysemic character of claims of ‘security’. In the fierce neoliberal world, defined by the volatile mix of market deregulation plus a regime of currency fluctuation, gated communities appeared as more secure investments, assumed as they were to be hedged from the risks of financial crises and sudden devaluation.Footnote ⁹⁴

The move from warfare to welfare also clarifies how gated communities could work as templates for analysing wider sociopolitical phenomena. In their incisive critique of immigration policy in Europe, Henk van Houtum and Roos Pijpers interestingly ‘evoke the image and representation of a gated community’Footnote ⁹⁵ in opposition to the usual ‘metaphor of a hermetically sealed “Fortress Europe”’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Far from being completely segregated spaces, both communities rely on a contingency of bodies that ‘slips through the maze … and cater to the homes inside the community, sustaining the easy living’.Footnote ⁹⁷ What is at stake here is nothing other than the meaning of segregation itself. While the emphasis on warfare tends to represent segregation as the physical separation of the undesirable other (reaching its climax in the image of the camp), I argue that a focus on welfare poses a more complicated relation: the fact that the other is always already inside the community borders, and not only in the necropolitical capacity of internal enemies, but as providers of vital services.

Despite promising a world of seclusion, the gated community can only survive and thrive by constantly accommodating those who they promise to ‘keep outside’. Works on urban enclosures are well aware of this fact, always referring to the multitudes of service staff (the nannies, cleaners, chauffeurs, and private guards) who are subjected to strenuous commutes on a daily basis; those who, at the same time, must be pushed to the peripheries of the city (where they must live) and pulled back inside the gated communities (where they must work). What most accounts fail to see, however, is that this dual movement problematises descriptions of gated communities as micro-apartheid states. Even the most fervent enthusiast of their seclusive lifestyle is painfully aware that their easy life would collapse should the fantasy of complete segregation ever become a reality. The Covid-19 pandemic poses an eye-opening, if unfortunate, example. The fact that physical isolation was so fiercely opposed by so many precisely when it had become a clear health imperative should come as no surprise. Societies of segregation are also societies of enforced encounters. It is hard to miss the symbology of the case of federal states in Brazil where domestic work was legally classified as essential work, compelling maids to work on site during lockdown.Footnote ⁹⁸

It is from this fundamental observation of gated communities as sites of enforced encounters, between those who are catered for and those who cater, that our vision of the GC as a template of violence begins. The first assumption that requires rethinking is the presumed dispensability or disposability of the latter. The multitude of servants who provide the work required for the maintenance of the GC might seem disposable as individuals (by virtue of their numbers, each one of them could be easily replaced ‘without loss’). But, from the perspective of their role, they are absolutely indispensable to the GC world. Walter Mignolo is all too aware of this slippage between the ‘lives that are dispensable and as such they are either discarded or when necessary made in-dispensable as labor force and consumers’,Footnote ⁹⁹ but he starts from the wrong end. The damnés are not first disposable and later made indispensable whenever necessary. Their indispensability, their objectified and commodified existence constitutes the cornerstones of the GC.

Second, the template of the GC also raises questions regarding the concept of the ego conquiro. The subjectivity of those who enjoy the community's easy life is much less imposing than the vision of a subject qua conqueror made in the image of God. The subject who openly accepts ‘I couldn't manage without a maid’Footnote ¹⁰⁰ is hardly dreaming of existing alone. GC patronsFootnote ¹⁰¹ are often far from certain of their own ontological superiority; their sense of superiority vis-à-vis his non-others is always troubled, volatile, and uncertain, at times mediated by feelings of racial inferiority towards themselves. GC patrons can be said to lie in a non-equidistant middle ground between the ego conquiro and the damnés. The subjective place, to freely use Foucault's terminology, that constitutes a middle ground historically occupied by the global middle classes and the elites in the Global South (the national bourgeoisie, the compradorial class, and the Latin American creoles).

Third, and most importantly, the two forms of subjectivity share the lived experience of a certain alienation, translated here as disarrangement. The concept of disarrangement accepts that urban enclosures are situated in a much larger history of enclosures, processes of dispossession, and displacement that defined the birth of the modern economy.Footnote ¹⁰² It is also an effort to go back to Quijano's conceptualisation of coloniality as articulated within the scope of capitalist social relations, something that is always acknowledged but not emphasised enough in CDT. Quijano's effort shares similarities with works on racial capitalism, suggesting a close link (if not a necessary connection) between processes of capital accumulation and the differentiation of human groups.Footnote ¹⁰³ Jodi Melamed summarises the relationship by stating that ‘the antinomies of accumulation require loss, disposability, and the unequal differentiation of human value, and racism enshrines the inequalities’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This enshrining of inequalities, the mix between accumulation and differentiation, produces what I call a disarrangement in those dispossessed. Eduardo Galeano's summary of the fate of indigenous peoples in the Americas comes to mind: ‘[d]esterrados em sua propria terra, condenados ao êxodo eterno [uprooted in their own lands, condemned to an eternal exodus]’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ We could equally think of the prominence of the concept exile (diaspora) in radical black thought,Footnote ¹⁰⁶ as illustrated by the words of Brazilian, pan-Africanist intellectual Abdias do Nascimento. Due to his opposition to the military regime on issues of racial discrimination and his role in the black movement, Nascimento was forced into exile in 1968. His testimony features in an edited volume published a decade later, where he makes the disconcerting comment that his exile did not commence in 1968, but on the day he was born.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ This experience of life as exile (and not only life in exile) is at the basis of the concept of disarrangement.

Disarrangement is more than the experience of displacement; it also implies a sense of disorder. The link between exile and disorder is captured by Gloria Anzaldúa's claim that ‘el exilio’ equalled living ‘separated from our identity and our history’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Disarrangement upsets the racialised geopolitics of coloniality, transgressing the pillars of a nation-state system based on the conflation of ethnicity and territory. But this is not something that can be solved by a crude call to nativism, it is something already dictated by the order of coloniality. It is not one's birthplace, but ‘race [that] denotes certain people as being out of place’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ To live life in disarrangement (as out of place) is to become the embodiment of impurity, defilement and corruption, in the sense of Mary Douglas's seminal view of ‘dirt as matter out of place’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The association between race and regimes of purity and impurity, including colonial fears of contagion and racial mixing, has been widely documented.Footnote ¹¹¹ A disarranged existence is perceived as being, in itself, transgressive (subversive) of the sociopolitical codes that seek to anchor the M/CW in a certain order and stability. Their presence stands for a sign of corruption.

But the indispensability of the racialised workforce in the GC forces us to add a caveat here, putting emphasis on the word ‘perceived’. The proclaimed dehumanisation of the damnés (or the gated community servants) should be taken for what it is: not a statement of fact, but an announcement that produces relations of subordination (creating the very reality it represents). As the sine qua non condition for the (re)production of easy life, the racialised workforce must be misrepresented as being in the wrong place precisely where their being (presence) is essential. It is the fact that they are the right people in the right place that dehumanising practices seeks to conceal.

But disarrangement is not a one-way street; it also speaks to the forms of misrecognition and alienation so clearly outlined in Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks. There, colonial dispossession is examined not only as a system of oppression and domination, but also as a psychopathology, robbing the colonised of their very sense of self worth.Footnote ¹¹² The damnés who are born into a racist order silently introject the misrepresentation of themselves as beings out of their place. This disarrangement is masterfully captured by two anecdotes: the black Martinican child who worships Tarzan (the white hero) but is regarded as closer to his dark-skinned enemies in the eyes of the white world; and the French child who, upon sight of Fanon's black body, shouts ‘Mama, see the Negro! I'm frightened!’Footnote ¹¹³ Both anecdotes convey a painful and complex form of alienation: the experience of those who misrecognise themselves as belonging to a world that insists on misrepresenting them as out of place. It is through this painful experience that colonisation acquires its traumatic contours. Each encounter with the coloniser produces violent crashes between misrecognition and misrepresentation that, in Fanon's words, ‘flung back in my face like a slap’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Each racial slur, inappropriate joke, and impromptu comment (such as the child's) is somatised as proper physical wounds, carving out the racial regime (the colonial wound) in the flesh of the colonised. From the perspective of the colonial totality, they appear as efforts to correct the misrecognition of the damnés by putting them back in their place.Footnote ¹¹⁵ But the damnés’ location matter little here. Their place can only be an unescapable out of place.

The GC suggests that this sense of disarrangement can also be found in an unlikely place. My contention is that a closer look at the subjectivity of GC patrons points us towards a different sense of alienation that escapes a phenomenology of life under conditions of oppression. And perhaps no historical figure is better suited to clarify this particular experience of alienation than those historically constituted as subjects at the juncture of the Latin and American world. Contrary to Anglophone view of Latin Americans as non-Westerners, Latin American history is filled with melancholic longings expressing a patrilineal affinity with Europe:Footnote ¹¹⁶ ‘todos somos descendientes de europeos [We are all descendants of Europeans]’;Footnote ¹¹⁷ ‘somos los hijos de los emigrantes que salieron de Europa para hacer su Nuevo Mundo [We are the children of the immigrants who left Europe in order to make a New World]’;Footnote ¹¹⁸ ‘nuestros padres europeos [our European parents]’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ In these laments we encounter premium beneficiaries of brutal systems of exploitation who also felt the need to claim: ‘somos ainda hoje uns desterrados em nossa terra [we still are, to these days, exiled in our land]’.Footnote ¹²⁰ We could hear this melancholy in two ways: either as the simple statement of a historical fact, or as attempts to erase the role of non-Europeans in the constitution of Latin American republics. But I suggest another path: reading them, via Fanon, as the registers of a sense of disarrangement related to the experience of life fora de lugar [out of place].Footnote ¹²¹

The split between misrecognition and misrepresentation is also constitutive of the lived experience and subjectivity of the GC patrón/patrão. While enjoying privileges of the easy life at home, they are made painfully aware of their own underdevelopment everywhere they go;Footnote ¹²² the backwardness that stands as an eternal measure of the immense abyss separating Latin Americans from the divinity they worship (the European dream). And it is at the level of a dream, in the sense proposed by Freud, that their relationship with Europe is mediated by a series of wish-fulfilling mechanism:Footnote ¹²³ we could interpret the elevation of dual citizenship as a sign of social status, the seasonal trips to the ‘motherland’ (or Disneyland) and the otherwise unfathomable fascination with department stores in Miami, as signs of this worshiping. Needless to say, such reverence is, for the most part, unreciprocated. The patrón/patrão is always at risk of waking up from their dreams by the sound of ‘Mama, see the Latino! I'm frightened!’

There are many reasons to take this Latin American experience of disarrangement as the sign of a more generalisable trend. The fact that Fanon's critique, based on the French-Martinican experience, powerfully resonated throughout the world in different contexts, is one such reason.Footnote ¹²⁴ Another is that we find very similar claims concerning alleged ties of filiation with the conquistadores beyond the Latin American context. I propose to read those claims as expressing a meaning closer to Tzvetan Todorov's statement that ‘We are all the direct descents of Columbus, it is with him that our genealogy [the modern world] begins.’Footnote ¹²⁵ In other words, not as a question of lines of descent (filiation) but as an affirmation of an individual's subject position in the order of the world (affiliation). And it is fair to say that this Latin American disarrangement could also be experienced by whoever happens to claim a similar affiliation in the order of coloniality: those we could dub white, but not quite (or, not without a hint of irony, ego conquiro ma non troppo).

The literature on gated communities is of great help here. Gated communities do not only serve the demand for idiosyncratic lifestyle choices. They also serve demands for ‘a world clearly distinguishable from the surrounding city’.Footnote ¹²⁶ Richard Ballard situates the rise of gated communities in South Africa as a silent continuation of the Verwoerdian ‘diabolical project of creating Europe in Africa’.Footnote ¹²⁷ Once apartheid ended, security villages became spaces of semigration (a mix of partial immigration and segregation) of whites longing for a lost ‘Western, modern, sense of self’Footnote ¹²⁸ in the wake of democratic transition. In a similar vein, Derek Hook and Michele Vrdoljak explain the walls of the South African security parks as efforts to inscribe spatial and symbolic discontinuity in the fabrics of society. The security village constitutes ‘specific social spaces whose social meaning is out of place and unsettling within a geographical relationship of sites’.Footnote ¹²⁹ We hear echoes of such discontinuity in the Europeanised names attributed to gated communities throughout the Global South. Example such as the Place des Vosge (originally a Parisian square) and Alphaville complexes in Brazil (named after the ultra-futuristic city of Godard's 1965 film),Footnote ¹³⁰ the Lodha Belissimo condominium in Mumbai,Footnote ¹³¹ and the Heritage Park villa in the outskirts of Cape Town, present more of less overt suggestions of affiliation with whiteness/Europe/modernity/the ‘true' fatherland. They underscore a certain longing for the European/cosmopolitan dream that, in remaining elusive, must be desperately congealed in the very materiality of homes made of ‘Italian marble, Spanish wooden flooring, German bath designs’.Footnote ¹³²

Since this spatial discontinuity is not a given, the ‘global’ must be fabricated on a daily basis through the creative destruction of the ‘local’. Zones must be cleared, people evicted, and public spaces must be ravenously swallowed by private developers, this much is known. What is often forgotten is that the making of easy living, ‘a life of total and secure leisure’,Footnote ¹³³ rests on a paradox of (in)convenience: the more the world of the GC expands, the more value it accumulates by maximising convenience, the more it is forced to face the inconvenient presence of racialised bodies inside the gates. The easier the easy life becomes, the harder it is for patrons to keep the indispensability of service staff as a ‘repressed’ reality. The presence of ‘outsiders’ inside the gates is both the convenient condition for the realisation of the European dream and the reality shock that crushes the community's dreamwork; it stands as a reminder that space remains, after all, continuous and that the GC, far from being a purified space, is built on a this ‘structural corruption’.

The imperative of accumulation (the maximisation of convenience) therefore, sets in motion a dialects of disarrangement whereby accumulation can never truly resolve the patron's (in)convenience. In vain, the everyday life in the GC is organised around a series of techniques to ensure the vital presence of the damnés is never ‘misunderstood’ as a sign of belonging. Servants (and visitors) must abide by a clear set of codes of conduct and rules of prohibitions, reinforced ever more so in times of expansion (when the presence of service staff increases). They include, for example, different lunch breaks, segregated lifts and staircases, bedrooms, service areas, and bathrooms. The fact that segregated spaces (meant to keep people apart) are often located side-by-sideFootnote ¹³⁴ poses no paradox. In the GC, segregation works as a proclamation of difference in proximity; the closer and more visible segregated spaces are to non-segregated areas, the clearer their message.

The paradox of (in)convenience also resignifies the meaning of insecurity. In the GC, the outspoken fear of the barbarian outside the gates must be read as something more than the signs of misanthropic scepticism. This fear must be contrasted with a more fundamental, terrifying fear that only a life in proximity with their service staff can reveal: the disclosure of ‘the ultimate secret of any social order, the pure and simple equality of anyone and everyone’.Footnote ¹³⁵ Nothing is more unsettling to the GC world than this inescapable Rancièrian equality of all subjects of speech (logos). Proximity does not reveal the damnés’ lack of humanity, but, on the contrary, their unquestionable equality; the realisation that those following orders must be able to understand them; and if they do, there is no obvious reason why they should be the ones following orders. Equality has this double function in the GC: it is equality, and not difference, that haunts the encounter between patrons and servants; and it is also equality that provides hope for a different world, giving revolutionary contours to the most banal of interactions.

This fear caused by proximity (the relationship between humans) also spills over the sphere of proxemia (the relationship between humans and things).Footnote ¹³⁶ Those who fear the mere realisation of equality (in a political but also epistemological sense) are also anxious about the presence of those who do not belong (the dispossessed) so close to their belongings (possessions). In the GC, property is not only a tangible, secure investment, but also a secure foundation for the material and symbolic manufacturing of inequality. Here we see the coalescing of the categories of race and class in the GC, constituting the near perfect commutability between cultural (whiteness) and material (wealth) capital.Footnote ¹³⁷ In the GC, all attempts to distinguish between infra- and superstructure are highly arbitrary,Footnote ¹³⁸ both whiteness (Europeanness/cosmopolitanism) and ownership are part of the same logic of differenciation.Footnote ¹³⁹ This is why any policy of redistribution through consumption will face the ire of the GC and patrons will scorn at the mere possibility of ‘maids visiting Disneyland’.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ It is also why the pettiest of crimes against property (theft or vandalism) are so often treated on par with the most gruesome crimes against persons (murder).

The violence of this dialectics of disarrangement differs from the concepts of necropolitics and the slippage of the ego conquiro into an ego extermino. The GC does not take the genocidal act as the measure of all violence, or paint violence as a primarily destructive force. In the GC, violence appears as inherently (re)creational element, in the sense that it provides the conditions for the reproduction of easy life and is also part of an economy of leisure delineated with contours of cruelty. Even when patrons nurture the fascist fantasy of racial/criminal purification, the imperative of accumulation dictates otherwise, that is, they cannot afford to enact their fantasy. This is not to deny the reality of death and so-called disposability in the GC, but to read them always in relation to the assumption of irreplaceability. We could take Balibar's cue that the proletarian condition is characterised by insecurity Footnote ¹⁴¹ and read the damnés ‘constant encounter with violence and death’Footnote ¹⁴² as but another expression of the ‘class/race formation’: the fabrication/disciplining of bodies who must be worked to death. Once again, the Covid-19 crisis provides the stark, but nonetheless illustrative examples of so many who, like Gonçalves, lost their lives not by virtue of being disposable, but in the capacity of essential workers.

The GC problematises the assumption that ‘the remedy for a people being out of place is, after all, ethnic cleansing’. Footnote ¹⁴³ Instead it highlights cases where ‘white supremacy … is not an eliminationist project and cannot afford to be’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ If we were to keep the metaphor of dirt or refuse in our theorisation of violence, we should better join Rita Laura Segato in her portrayal of violence as a recycling plant:Footnote ¹⁴⁵ not a final solution, but a continuous response to continuously produced experiences of disarrangement; not as an endless war, but the endless misrepresentation of equality for the (re)creation of white/cosmopolitan/European Man. It is important to note, however, that this particular concept of violence does not exhaust all possible conceptualisations of the phenomenon. As Figure 2 shows, the point of the GC is not to deny the logics of elimination altogether, which would be nonsense. The point is to further the critical commitment to anchor modernity's ‘genocidal’ drives in the everyday (in the ‘recycling plants’ of enforced encounters) without conflating the everyday with an endless state of exception or a neverending war.

Figure 2. The prism of the gated community.