Manhunts

A Philosophical History

Grégoire Chamayou, Steven Rendall

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780691151656
• eBook ISBN: 9781400842254
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: World History

A comprehensive history of manhunting in the West, from ancient times to the present

Touching on issues of power, authority, and domination, Manhunts takes an in-depth look at the hunting of humans in the West, from ancient Sparta, through the Middle Ages, to the modern practices of chasing undocumented migrants. Incorporating historical events and philosophical reflection, Grégoire Chamayou examines the systematic and organized search for individuals and small groups on the run because they have defied authority, committed crimes, seemed dangerous simply for existing, or been categorized as subhuman or dispensable.

Chamayou begins in ancient Greece, where young Spartans hunted and killed Helots (Sparta's serfs) as an initiation rite, and where Aristotle and other philosophers helped to justify raids to capture and enslave foreigners by creating the concept of natural slaves. He discusses the hunt for heretics in the Middle Ages; New World natives in the early modern period; vagrants, Jews, criminals, and runaway slaves in other eras; and illegal immigrants today. Exploring evolving ideas about the human and the subhuman, what we owe to enemies and people on the margins of society, and the supposed legitimacy of domination, Chamayou shows that the hunting of humans should not be treated ahistorically, and that manhunting has varied as widely in its justifications and aims as in its practices. He investigates the psychology of manhunting, noting that many people, from bounty hunters to Balzac, have written about the thrill of hunting when the prey is equally intelligent and cunning.

An unconventional history on an unconventional subject, Manhunts is an in-depth consideration of the dynamics of an age-old form of violence.

CHAPTER 1

The Hunt for Bipedal Cattle

Man is a tame animal, and I admit that he is hunted.

PLATO, SOPHIST 222C

The art of acquiring slaves, I mean of justly acquiring them, . . . [is] a species of hunting or war.

ARISTOTLE, POLITICS

A slave . . . has escaped in Alexandria, by name Hermon also called Neilos, by birth a Syrian . . . about 18 years old, of medium stature, beardless, with good legs, a dimple on the chin, a mole by the left side of the nose a scar above the left corner of the mouth, tattooed on the right wrist with two barbaric letters. . . .

Whoever brings back this slave shall receive 3 talents of copper.

ANONYMOUS PAPYRUS FROM ALEXANDRIA

GREEK PHILOSOPHY contains a warning that political thought has not taken seriously enough, despite the ancients’ insistence on it: the masters’ power is based on the violent act of capturing their subjects. Domination presupposes a kind of manhunt. This book takes this fundamental thesis as its starting point and examines its implications from the point of view of the dominated, the prey. The goal is to write a history and a philosophy of hunting powers and their technologies of capture.

For the Greeks, the manhunt is not only a metaphor of the play of seduction, hunting for lovers, or sophistical traps. It is also a very literal practice connected with the institution of slavery. The economic life of the city-state is dependent on slave labor, and hence its prior acquisition. Thus, Thucydides tells us that in the course of one of their campaigns the Athenians “captured Hyccara, a small fortified place on the coast which belonged to the Sicanians, but was at war with Egesta. They made slaves of the inhabitants.”¹ Battles and military raids were among the main sources of supply for slave labor.

In the Sophist, Plato emphasizes the fact that hunting cannot be reduced to tracking wild animals. Among the different branches of the cynegetic art there is also an art of manhunting, which is in turn subdivided into several categories: “Let us define piracy, manstealing, tyranny, the whole military art, by one name, as hunting with violence.”² Although not all these forms are equally tolerated—for example, Plato condemns piracy, “the chasing of men on the high seas,” because it transforms those who practice it into “cruel and lawless hunters”³—war appears, by contrast, to be a form of legitimate hunting that is worthy of citizens. Aristotle says much the same: “the art of war is a natural art of acquisition, for the art of acquisition includes hunting, an art which we ought to practice against wild beasts, and against men who, though intended by nature to be governed, will not submit.”⁴

Greek philosophers conceive manhunting as an “art” or technology of power. There is an “art of acquiring slaves.” From the outset, domination is examined in a technological perspective: what must masters do to be masters? On what procedures does their power depend?

The main characteristic of the manhunt as a technology of power is its nonproductivity: it does not make its object but obtains it by taking it from some external source. According to the classical dichotomy, it is a technology not of production but of acquisition.⁵ The Greek seizes his slaves as he would game in the hunt or fruits in a harvest—that is, without having had to organize the production. It is in this sense that Aristotle can describe hunting for slaves as a “natural art of acquisition.”

But although the manhunt appears to be a technology of power, it does not figure among the political arts in the full sense of the term. The cynegetic modality of power is exercised only as the condition for the master’s economic domination. As such it is not an art of the polis.

The first problem is that of its justification. What authorizes someone to engage in manhunting?

The question of the legitimacy of capture resonates with a Greek fear: that of being hunted oneself. The ancient world was haunted by the menacing specter of the andrapodistes, the manhunter who seized citizens to capture them and sell them as slaves. Plato, who it is said was himself reduced to slavery at one point, mentions this danger. Socrates, when it was suggested that he go into exile in Thessaly, a region well-known for the activities of its manstealers, refused to do so, preferring to remain the slave of the laws rather than risk being the slave of men.⁶ This is the theme of the stateless person’s insecurity: exile, inasmuch as it is equivalent to the withdrawal of law, engenders vulnerability. This relation between the departure from an order of legality and the manhunt firmly places the category of exiles and stateless persons at the center of the question of relationships of interhuman predation.

Since free humans, citizens, can be reduced to slavery, how can we distinguish between legitimate slaves and the others? Between people who can be hunted and those who cannot?

One solution would be to deny that certain people belong to humanity, to reduce them to a bestial animality in order to be able to hunt them. In Greek texts, slaves are regularly resented as nonhumans, but their minimal participation in the species is not contested on the theoretical level. The fact that they are constantly designated by oxymoronic formulas—“bipedal cattle,” “living tools”—that simultaneously deny and concede their humanity—seems to make them appear more as humanoids:⁷ beings in human form whose humanity is reduced to that of their bodies. The gap between the slave’s nature and the master’s is conceived as analogous—and not as identical—to the gap that distinguishes humans from animals. According to Aristotle’s formula, the distance between slaves and other humans is as great as that “between soul and body, or between men and animals.”⁸

What slaves are denied is thus less membership in the human race than participation in the same form of humanity that their masters enjoy. In this view, there are several categories of humans within humanity, each of which is endowed with a different social purpose: some are made to command, others to obey. Slaves by nature, who are capable of understanding reason without being able to exercise it, have to follow the orders of those who possess reason for them. The thesis is well known: there are humans whose bodies dominate their souls. These are slaves by nature. They are also prey by nature.

Slavery is thus inscribed in the ontological status of the dominated, as his natural tendency, which is that of a being-for-domination. However, this nature is merely the master’s projection of his will to power, objectified into a theory of the essence of his prey.

The principal objection to this theory resided in the facts: prey by nature stubbornly refused to be what they were supposed to be, resisting their capture and their enslavement.

In the Laws, Plato formulates this problem in a way that is original because it is independent of any question of legitimacy: if slaves are a problem, that is because “the human animal is a kittle [troublesome] beast.”⁹ The difficulty consists in slaves’ particular status as human cattle. Precisely because of this contradictory situation, they do not accept the necessary distinction between free and slave. What is peculiar to humans, we might say, resides in their ability to contest their exclusion from humanity. The solution, a practical one, thus consists in inventorying the technologies that make it possible to maintain this categorial division that the excluded reject. Although Plato does not refer on this occasion to violent capture, from antiquity onward it was nonetheless the first of these political technologies of dividing up the human race.

The case of fugitive slaves or rebellious prey produces a crisis in the order of domination. By escaping and resisting, these slaves are no longer in conformity with their supposed essence. To reestablish the ontological order that has been thus abused, there is ultimately only one recourse: force. Violent hunting will be carried out in the form of war on men who, being born to be commanded, refuse to be commanded. In other words, the only thing left to do is to subjugate by force a prey that does not want to be a prey.

Thus, in the end the answer to the theoretical problem of the manhunt is the practice of manhunting itself, with the paradox that the latter is legitimized on the basis of an allegedly natural division whose nonnaturalness is inseparable from its establishment. In fact, the natural order that is invoked here as the foundation of cynegetic power can be realized only by virtue of a whole arsenal of artifices.

But cynegetic violence does not occur only at the time of the first acquisition, but also later on, as a means of governing. The hunt continues after the capture.

In Sparta, during their long apprenticeship young warriors were sent into the countryside to engage in a hunting party of a special kind, crypteia, which Plutarch describes this way: “During the day these young people, spread out in covered places, remained hidden there and rested: when night came, they swept down on the roads and slaughtered whatever helots they could catch. Often they also went into the fields and killed the strongest and the best.”¹⁰

Numerous hypotheses have been proposed to explain this practice: military training, a way of intimidating a slave population that was superior in numbers, a secret police operation to “liquidate” the most dangerous helots, and so on. The historian Jean Ducat emphasizes above all the social and representational function of hunting helots—an initiation rite whose scope extended to the community as a whole: “cryptia was like an apprenticeship for—or a representation of—a wild hunt. . . . Every hunt presupposes a prey; the helot, whose special clothing assimilated him to an animal, is that prey.” The helot wore a dog-skin cap; the concealed hunter wore a wolf-skin: “In this nocturnal hunt, through a process of inversion that is not absent from rites of passage, it is the animal-prey that captures the animal-hunter, the wild man-beast who brings down the domestic man-animal.”¹¹ The masters’ sons turned themselves into beasts of prey to reenact in the present the primal scene of conquest. The arbitrary murder of the helots manifested the truth of power with sanguinary clarity. It was a way of reminding people who was the master.

As Thucydides wrote: “Spartan policy with regard to the helots had always been based almost entirely on the idea of security.”¹² But a revolt of the helots was less to be feared than a gradual erasure of social borderlines. Crypteia was above all intended to remind people of the absolute character of that delimitation. Here, the manhunt appears as a means of ontological policing: a violence whose aim is to maintain the dominated in correspondence with their concept, that is, with the concept that the dominant have imposed on them.

At this initial phase, cynegetic violence appears to be the condition, both originary and continuing, of the masters’ power. However, as such it remains external to the political sphere of the city-state. It presents itself as the technology of a power, but of an extrapolitical power. On this point, a major conceptual shift was to take place. Much later, in an entirely different horizon of political thought, the motifs of the manhunt and power would combine in a new way.

CHAPTER 2

Nimrod, or Cynegetic Sovereignty

History is stained with the memories of such crimes by these early kings. War and its conquests is just a kind of manhunt.

J.-J. ROUSSEAU, ESSAI SUR L’ORIGINE DES LANGUES

Look at them, they are dreadful and proud; their flaws are part of their beauty. This one is Nimrod, the man-hunter.

VICTOR HUGO, NAPOLÉON LE PETIT

IN GENESIS WE FIND THE STORY OF NIMROD, the son of Chus, the grandson of Cham, the founder of Babel and the world’s first king: “He was the first on earth to be a mighty man. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord.”¹ This very short passage has given rise to long interpretations.

In what sense is Nimrod said to be a hunter? The commentary in the Zohar explains: “By the word hunter the Scripture does not designate a hunter of animals, but a hunter of men.”² An exegete adds: “If Nimrod was a hunter properly so called, this would not concern Moses here; but for him, hunting animals serves as a transition to hunting men; it is in this sense that he is called ‘a mighty hunter’; it is thus that, in a completely opposite case, David i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Hunt for Bipedal Cattle
• Chapter 2 Nimrod, or Cynegetic Sovereignty
• Chapter 3 Diseased Sheep and Wolf-Men
• Chapter 4 Hunting Indians
• Chapter 5 Hunting Black Skins
• Chapter 6 The Dialectic of the Hunter and the Hunted
• Chapter 7 Hunting the Poor
• Chapter 8 Police Hunts
• Chapter 9 The Hunting Pack and Lynching
• Chapter 10 Hunting Foreigners
• Chapter 11 Hunting Jews
• Chapter 12 Hunting Illegals
• Conclusion
• Postscript
• Notes
• Index