Abstract
This paper will deploy Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy to read the political economy of contemporary Cambodia as a stratum that emerged from the deterritorializing mechanisms of the Khmer Rouge genocide and politicide. The recent documentary Enemies of the People offers a cinematic space for the unpunished and now-elderly executioners of Democratic Kampuchea to share their memories of these foundational events of mass murder, thereby forcing ruptures in the body politic of Cambodia through their revelations of the violent processes of deterritorialization that allowed the emergence of this high growth Southeast Asian economy. The paper will proceed by examining the double articulation of stratification in Cambodia, thereby excavating the bodies hidden by the processes of reterritorialization and overcoding, and will conclude with a speculative look at what these cinematic ruptures portend for becoming-Cambodia.
Highlights
The Ontology of Mass KillingThis paper will deploy Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s geophilosophy to read the political economy of contemporary Cambodia as a stratum that emerged from the deterritorializing mechanisms of the Khmer Rouge genocide and politicide
The recent documentary Enemies of the People (2010) offers a cinematic space for the unpunished and now-elderly executioners of Democratic Kampuchea to share their memories of these foundational events of mass murder, thereby forcing ruptures in the body politic of Cambodia through their revelations of the violent processes of deterritorialization that allowed the emergence of this high-growth Southeast Asian economy
The paper will proceed by examining the double articulation of stratification in Cambodia, thereby excavating the bodies hidden by the processes of reterritorialization and overcoding, and will conclude with a speculative look at what these cinematic ruptures portend for becoming-Cambodia
Summary
This paper will deploy Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s geophilosophy to read the political economy of contemporary Cambodia as a stratum that emerged from the deterritorializing mechanisms of the Khmer Rouge genocide and politicide. Insofar as countries can be seen as vast assemblages of components and forces (ranging from the individual bodies of their inhabitants and smaller-scale assemblages like societies, institutions and markets, to the natural forces of climate and geology, as well as social forces, including culture, politics and economics), they too may be abstracted to complex diagrams that map the formation of largescale structures in the physical world; for example, geological strata and meshworks. At a broader temporal level, stratification may be discerned in not just the historical formation of social hierarchies, and in the complex formation and transformation of political economies At this level of analysis, the political economy of a territory prior to colonization may be seen to constitute a stratum that is buried below that of the colonial period, and likewise, the political economy of the period of independence may be seen as being built on the stratum of the colonial political economy. The planners of Democratic Kampuchea understood this lesson, and effected social change through the brutal and rigorous elimination of hundreds of thousands of troublesome bodies
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