Gut_Brain 3: Destructive Desires and Other Destinies of Excess — Predatory and Omnicidal Violence
According to a report published by Forbes México two years ago, nearly eleven women are murdered in the country every day. A figure of this kind presents violence as a sum of discrete events, each of which could in principle have been prevented. What the statistic cannot register is the possibility that this violence belongs to the very conditions under which the social order reproduces itself. If that is the case, the violence that displaces and disappears women, and that is exercised upon their bodies, has to be thought as constitutive. It gives the social field its form, and capitalism is one of the names for the order it sustains.
The Epstein files can be read in this light. They document a network of billionaires and sexual predators who, over the past three decades, reached the highest spheres of global power, and within which gender violence, among other atrocities, was normalised as a form of tribal belonging. It would be tempting to treat this network as a pathological exception, a group of individuals whose moral failings set them apart from everyone else. Such a reading protects the order it claims to describe, since it locates violence in persons and leaves the structure untouched. We propose instead to read the case as a symptom, a point at which the logic of the whole becomes visible in concentrated form. What appears there is a relation to others founded on appropriation, the same relation on which Western societies were erected through the predation of nature and the omnicide of originary peoples and their territories. By omnicide we mean a violence whose object is a world, the totality of relations through which a form of life sustains itself, over and above the destruction of individual lives.
This violence, inherited from ancestral structures, expropriates the body, penetrates the skin and reaches into the affects. Emmanuela Borzacciello names it the apparatus of the “expropriation-dispossession of the body,” a mechanism that destroys affective bonds and instrumentalises feminised and dissident bodies in order to display force and to affirm power along with the very possibility of exercising it. Indifference toward this violence legitimates heteropatriarchy and erodes communal bonds, together with the capacity of communities to sustain life collectively. Gender violence and omnicidal predatory violence operate in tandem. Both are rooted in capitalism, and equally in a colonial system that was never dismantled and has instead been perpetuated and institutionalised by nation-states.
If gender violence is constitutive, it cannot be confined to the scene of its most visible acts. It implicates society as a whole, including its cultures, its systems of life and its forms of subsistence. We will examine artworks by Tracey Emin, Rebecca Belmore, Daniela Ortiz, Regina José Galindo and Lorena Wolffer, as well as literary works by Marisol García-Walls, Neige Sinno, Natacha Appanah and Ximena Santaolalla, which make perceptible what the statistic leaves unregistered. Read through these works, the individuated body afflicted by anorexia, colitis, diabetes, Crohn’s disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s, fibromyalgia and other autoimmune and inflammatory illnesses becomes a surface of inscription. It exposes the horror beneath our skin, the violence and trauma transmitted across generations, and it suggests that the hierarchy of predation extends past the boundary of the self. Slowly, predatory and omnicidal violence is draining life from our very bodies.
Bio
Irmgard Emmelhainz is an independent translator, writer and researcher based in Anahuac Valley (Mexico City). She holds a Ph.D. from the Art Department at the University of Toronto and an M.A. in Art History, Theory and Criticism from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her writings about film, the Palestine Question, art, culture and neoliberalism have been translated to 12 languages and published in an array of international publications. Her book The Tyranny of Common Sense: Mexico’s Neoliberal Conversion, published in Spanish in 2016 with a preface by Franco (Bifo) Berardi, was published by SUNY Press in 2020; The Sky is Incomplete: Travel Chronicles in Palestine was published by Taurus Mexico (2017), Vanderbilt (2023) and Siglo XXI (2025); Jean-Luc Godard’s Political Filmmaking came out with Palgrave Macmillan in 2019. Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures: Feminist Lives as Resistance (Vanderbilt, 2021; Taurus 2023), Envíos de otros mundos posibles: ejercicios de imaginación radical (2023), Contrahistoria del ‘pueblo’ mexicano (2025) are her most recent publications. Forthcoming are Neurofascismos (Siglo XXI) and Un mundo se desvanece (Canal Press). She is a holder of a National System of Creators grant for essay writing in Mexico (2025–2027).
This seminar, co-organized with Maumaus, is open to graduate and postgraduate students and the general public. Please write an email to phildoc@fcsh.unl.pt if you would like to attend. Registration is mandatory, as places are limited.