ABSTRACT
Violence invades and perverts the social order, stripping the colonised ‘of their language, their intellectual heritage and their symbolic forms’. The ‘atmosphere of violence’ increases the potentiality of the colonisers over the colonised, but at the same time it increases the potentiality of the colonised to overthrow the colonisers. Frantz Fanon identifies an ‘atmosphere of violence’ as the affective life of both colonial relations and anti-colonial struggle. Fanon is well known as a theorist of enmity. But what is less rarely emphasised is the importance of the affective state of unrest in producing the enmity that already exists. Sebastian Pinera created a vacant faceless figure of absolute enmity in response to the school kids who were organising a fare evasion campaign to protest increases public transport fares. The racial ordering gives clarity to the politics of enmity that emerge in the struggle.
