Grégoire Chamayou's Manhunts: A Philosophical History, Mini-Review

I like to write small reviews - recapitulations, really - of some of the books I’ve read. Here’s one for Grégorie Chamayou’s Manhunts: A Philosophical History:

This is my favourite kind of book - enormous in scope, modest in page-count, dripping in historical anecdote, although all approached through a very specific lens: the manhunt. The first thing to be established is just how relevant the manhunt is in our own time. Far from a vestige of a primitive past now left behind, the manhunt today takes its form in the sweep for illegal immigrants, the 'bounties' on abortion and gender care seekers, the murderous buzz of Predator drones, or else the algorithmic hunt for both cybercriminals and whistleblowers. In fact, once acquainted with the workings of the manhunt, its presence becomes impossible to 'unsee’, a form of power - 'cynegetic power' - at work not only in the hunting of the Helots by ancient Spartans, but equally in every other police procedural now beamed into homes on an almost nightly basis.

As a specifically philosophical history however, Chamayou isn't content just to chart the various occasions in which manhunts come to the historical fore - although he does that too. Instead, each small chapter here functions as something of a mini-thesis in itself, with each shift of focus (from hunting Indians, to hunting the poor, to hunting Jews), offering a grim opportunity for Chamayou to shed light on the wider stakes of what manhunts have to say about some of our deepest philosophical notions. From reflections on the status of the human (was it invented so as to better invoke the 'non-human' like the slave?), to the workings of sovereignty (if the state has to delegate its hunting power to others, what does this say about its own power?), all the way to a reassessment of Hegel's famous master-slave dialectic, all of these and more are worked over from the particular angle of the manhunt, exercises as intriguing as they are chilling.

Developed then, as a series of vignettes rather than a sustained argument, Manhunts nonetheless draws out a few features that are specific to 'cynegetic power'. Perhaps most sharp is the contrast between the hunt and the duel. Where the duel involves enemies recognised as such (equal in standing, even if not equal in power, as per standard military conflict), the hunt instead begins, from the get-go, between radically asymmetrical players - between the hunter and the prey. Whence the critique of Hegel: not two ‘free’ consciousnesses struggling for recognition, but a master whose life is precisely not at stake, over and against a prey who is already a kind of living dead. For the prey, the victory over death does not guarantee the position of mastery, but simply… capture, further slavery. That this dialectic eluded Hegel, speaks too, Chamayou shows, to Hegel’s own treatment of real life slavery in his time: too unfree to even enter into the master-slave dialectic, African and Haitian slaves did not qualify, for Hegel, even for the struggle for freedom.

Hegel aside, the other major philosophical figure to be addressed here is Foucault, or more specifically, Foucault’s conception of ‘pastoral power’, which, according to Chamayou, is opposed ‘point by point’ to cynegetic power. Where Foucault traced the history of a power that was exercised by means of care and benevolence (caring for the flock in pasture), cynegetic power is, as might be guessed, entirely predatory. None too concerned with the lives of those it presides over, cynegetic sovereignty simply replaces loss by hunting anew; not the government of lives but accumulation of them is the rule under which it operates. For Chamayou, only by considering these two modes of power as operating side-by-side, ‘parallel and opposed’, can proper sense be made of the operation of politics in both the past and the present. Politics, it should be noted, not only of ‘the West’, but globally too, with the book refreshingly taking into account hunting not only in Europe, but equally in the Americas and Africa too.

Although written in neutral, scholarly tones, the cumulative effect of Chamayou’s documenting of manhunts is, once all the arguments are waded though, nothing less than horror. There is little romanticism here. These are not stories of the ‘little guy’ against the Man. These are stories of people and peoples relentlessly pursued, if not to death in harrowing ways - torn apart by hunting dogs, sent to the gas chambers - then consigned to lives of misery and loss. One of the lessons of the manhunt is that the prey loses, regularly. That said, while sharing themes with say, Giorgio Agamben’s figure of the homo sacer (the ’sacred man’ abandoned by the law, exemplified by the regime of ‘bare life’ in the Nazi concentration camp), Chamayou’s examples are both more varied and more specific in their histories, lending themselves to a richer and, I think, less inescapably suffocating model of political power than the one proposed by Agamben. That concreteness makes this a distressing book, but to recall that the distress is one whose presence in the world is ours for the reckoning, makes it all the more necessary.