[csaa-forum] Symposium: Combat Breathing Bodies and State Violence

[Lara Palombo]

*You are invited to the Symposium*

COMBAT BREATHING:
BODIES AND STATE VIOLENCE
*

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

ONE DAY SYMPOSIUM

14 AUGUST 2010, 9.30 AM – 6 PM, MACQUARIE UNIVERSITY,

BLDG: THEATRE 1 (T1) Y3A, FREE ADMISSION
*

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 lifeenergies

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.
*

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: RICHARD FRANKLAND & GRACELYN SMALLWOOD

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS: KELLIE GREENE (UWS), RAY JACKSON (Indigenous Social

Justice), TAMAR HOPKINS (Flemington & Kensington Community Legal Centre)
GOLDIE

OSURI (Macquarie) JON STRATTON (Curtin) REBECCA SMITH & SHANE RESIDE

(authors of “Boys, you wanna give me some action,” Report into racialised
policing)

CONVENORS: SUVENDRINI PERERA AND JOSEPH PUGLIESE
*

Contact:
S.Perera at curtn.edu.au; Joseph.Pugliese at mq.edu.au

Sponsored by: Somatechnics Research Centre, Macquarie University, School of
Media, Culture and Creative Arts,

Curtin University; Department of Media, Music and Cultural Studies,
Macquarie University
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