Cynegetic Fantasies: The Police Hunt, Predatory Desire, and Fugitive Flesh

Keywords: Police, desire, hunting, fugitive, prey, violence
Session Type: Virtual Paper
Day: Friday
Session Start / End Time: 4/9/2021 09:35 AM (Pacific Time (US & Canada)) - 4/9/2021 10:50 AM (Pacific Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 10

Abstract

In this paper, I take seriously the predatory desires of police as articulated and performed by cops and their admirers across a variety of representations, with a particular focus on US policing over the last few decades. In other words, I explore the politics of fugitivity through a close engagement with the work of Grégoire Chamayou, namely, Manhunts: A Philosophical History. This paper, then, reads the police power as a cynegetic power, or a hunting power, that is inevitably linked to the production of obscene desires to hunt the racialized poor as prey. As the primary guide to my argument, I focus on a line from Ernest Hemingway line that is quite popular in police circles, often adorned to police t-shirts: “There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.” Given that “fantasy is never individual” but rather always group-based, massed, and therefore thoroughly social, the celebration of Hemingway’s line puts us on the trail of how policing’s collective fantasy life traffics in a predatory desire to hunt “bad guys” as not only fugitives, but as prey. Thinking the fugitive in relation to prey, I think, offers some important lessons on questions about racist state violence and the police power.