Traces of Violence

In this highly original work, Robert Desjarlais and Khalil Habrih present a dialogic account of the lingering effects of the terroristic attacks that occurred in Paris in November 2015. Situating the events within broader histories of state violence in metropolitan France and its colonial geographies, the authors interweave narrative accounts and photographs to explore a range of related phenomena: governmental and journalistic discourses on terrorism, the political work of archives, police and military apparatuses of control and anti-terror deterrence, the histories of wounds, and the haunting reverberations of violence in a plurality of lives and deaths. Traces of Violence is a moving work that aids our understanding of the afterlife of violence and offers an innovative example of collaborative writing across anthropology and sociology.

Robert Desjarlais teaches anthropology at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. He is the author of numerous books, including Subject to Death: Life and Loss in a Buddhist World and The Blind Man: A Phantasmography.

Khalil Habrih is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Ottawa.

List of illustrations
Note on transcription of Arabic terms
Avant-propos: A guide to reading Traces of Violence
Preface: Blue flight terminal 
Counter-preface: Blues, flights, beginnings . . . 

1 • Névralgique 
Interruption: Neuralgia in the Goutte d’Or 

2 • Graffs
Interruption: Graffiti, traces, and disappearance

3 • Operation vigilance
Interruption: "Vigilance is double-edged, to say the least"

4 • Learning with the body
Interruption: Give me your FAMAS 

5 • Archive sorrow
Interruption: Listen to the passing of time

6 • A trace is the mark of something not there 
Interruption: 3alesh? Why?

7 • "Where wounds are barely scarred over one is cut anew"
Interruption: Paris is an apparition, sharing visions

8 • The histories of these wounds
Interruption: Nervous activity

Acknowledgments
Glossary
Notes
References
Index