On the Intercorporeal Depth of Colonial Violence

A phenomenological understanding of the body holds great promise for making sociological sense of violence. It shows us that all violence done onto the body cuts through it down to its intercorporeality: the extended bodily relatedness. This intercorporeal depth of the body reveals its simultaneously concrete (physical) and symbolic (mental) existence as intertwined processes of concrescence and signification that mold the materiality and ideality of social life — our practices, ideas, desires, institutions and senses. In this view, the body is always embodiment within a world and embodiment is continuously weaving the world anew, as our bodies are both dimension (a condensed singular presence) and irradiation (an inherence and openness towards others) of more general processes of becoming. Bodily violence, by virtue of this fleshy soil it sinks into, is a profound social force. This is visible in the ways that colonial violence acts as a temporal structuring in the unfolding of colonial worlds. Through the colonized body — both lived and felt in its suffering — colonial violence sows itself onward across a range of phenomenons, from our ordinary temporality to deep-seated patterns of social change and recurrence, shaping the latent possibilities enshrined in our perceptual world. A closer look at how violence takes a structural hold of the body's intercorporeal depths allows us to see ambiguous or invisible forms of colonial relations in the contemporary world, in a way that is not blinded by more hypervisible forms (past and present) but coalesced with these into a better sense of the manifold dynamism proper to colonial relations as bodily relations all the way. The corporeality of colonial violence is richly described by Frantz Fanon, himself creatively rooted in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. Both corpuses are distended here towards this understanding of the social relation between the body, violence and time.