The Double Life of the Dangerous Object

Very pleased to have this article published in Culture, Theory and Critique, June 2026

The Double Life of the Dangerous Object: Phobogenecity from Doctrinal to Relational Racism , 

Foucault’s genealogy of race traces the racial to the normalising functions of the biopolitical state. Thus conceived, racism is deeply invested in the doctrinal practices of racial government, while little attention is paid to racism as a relational, interpersonal phenomenon. This essay considers Foucault’s inattention to the relational character of racism by considering the contradiction between doctrinal and relational racisms. A theory of what I term racial grafting describes the overlay of doctrinal racism across the relational forms of ordinary, everyday racial resentment. Moreover, through a consideration of Frantz Fanon’s phobogenic object and Foucault’s race war, it is proposed that grafting occurs around the phobic production of dangerous objects. Dangerousness, which serves as both an ontological condition and a propensity for possible actions, describes a deeply ambivalent object that straddles racial being and racial doing, and as such serves as a pivotal point around which doctrinal and relation grafting occurs. This analysis concludes with a discussion of Foucault’s treatment of the Social Defense criminological movement (for which the course Society Must Be Defended was named) wherein criminological dangerousness provides the framework for contemporary racism. Such a discussion demonstrates Foucault’s relevance to contemporary critiques of racial civility in public life.