PHANTASMAGORIC ATMOSPHERES OF VIOLENCE

A BODY CARRYING ANOTHER BODY

Abstract

In this article we propose the image of a body carrying another body as the fleshy image of modernity. We argue that the phantasmagorias described by Franz Fanon, or the specter described by Achille Mbembe, operate as constitutive atmospheres of bodies and of colonial modernity itself. We somehow participate in these atmospheres. We are accomplices in the production of the corpses of modernity. But, we can stop being it. Other existences are capable of reversing the sense of one body carrying another body. We wonder if there are in this spectrograph those ghosts that carry the dead to bring them to life, to the meaning of the dream and the future, thus capable of haunting whiteness, exorcising it in order to confront it. After all, in physics, the spectrum is also intensity and frequency, wave length, open possibility.