ABSTRACT
Violence is a global structural ordering and sorting mechanism in world politics. In this chapter we argue this materialization reflects the ontologization of particular subjects and their ordering in distance and propinquity with respect to the hegemonic center. We de-center European narratives normalizing such violences as a neutral necessity for sovereign grounds, keeping intact a notion that modernity and capitalism self-started in Europe; we problematize the basic ontological and epistemological structures and premises of the writing of history and its affirmation. We argue that the relationship among the body, sex, violence, and the world does not speak to the materiality of the global. Defining slavery as a prehistory of capital does little analytically for understanding this violence; rather, we must understand how the total value of enslaved life and labor continues to make global capital possible. Finally, we argue the colonial and the enslaved as “objects” of knowledge short-circuit structures and promises that govern juridical and ethical programs exposing this violence that they reconfigure. As an ontological force, these colonial and enslaved subjects unshackle potentialities without the compulsion to make them generate profits.
