Extermination and excess: Martial economies of poison

Abstract

Engaging the thinking of Georges Bataille, this article examines the international politics of poison as a category of death-dealing that defies distinctions between war/not war and weapon/not weapon. Refraining from splitting poison into pesticides and chemical weapons, the article analyses political ecologies and affective economies of poison both historically and today, to illuminate which desires and strategies poison, as a technology of death, lends itself to. Taking its departure in Bataille’s writing on fascism and ending with his main theory of a general economy, the article weaves through nerve agent assassinations, fumigation, and ideas about gardening, to arrive at the conclusion that poison is not so much an excessive response as it is a response to excess. Following Bataille in viewing ecology as economies of consumption and competition, the article develops a rubric of martial economies of poison to encapsulate how poison, as mode of martial expenditure, makes spaces vacant by death, and room for organisms deemed worthy.

Introduction

Separated into a no-questions-asked contrivance on which global agriculture depends, and a tabooed, cruel and unusual mode of assassination and warfare, poison, as a broader category of death-dealing, receives little focus within the fields of critical war and security studies. Even though organophosphorus compounds act as nerve agents to people and insects whether they are labelled as Parathion, Chlorpyrifos, Diazinon, Sarin, or Novichok, ‘pesticides’ have been deemed a necessary and appropriate measure, while ‘chemical weapons’ are viewed as exceptional and unnecessary.

The Cambridge Dictionary defines pesticides as ‘a chemical substance used to kill harmful insects, small animals, wild plants, and other unwanted organisms’. ¹ Crucially, these other unwanted organisms are sometimes humans. The most straightforward response to this point is to posit that pesticides are in fact chemical weapons, and always have been. This argument has been made, and it leads to viewing agriculture as a kind of war on the environment (Pellow, 2007; Romero, 2016; Russel, 2001). In this article, I refrain from definitively defining poison as either pesticide or chemical weapon, as I find this distinction either unhelpfully exceptionalizes poison or restricts an analysis of broader political implications of poison reaching beyond such separations. I therefore here inquire into the international politics of poison by seeking to understand the political ecologies and affective economies (Ahmed, 2004) animating its use. What desires, needs and tactics does poison lend itself to? What significance does poison have in international relations of violence? Georges Bataille’s thinking, I argue, is uniquely situated for considering these questions. As Meiches (2020) has recently remarked, a Bataillian focus on excess as a fundamental aspect of sociality opens fruitful yet unexplored avenues for critical security and war studies. Coupling Bataille’s understanding of fascism and his theory of a general economy provides a unique understanding of the allure and utility of poison, not only to the fascist leader, but also to the modern state, and to an individual soldier, farmer, or gardener. Across these different scales, and across distinctions between war and peace, and weapon and technology, poison, I argue, is not primarily characterized by being an excessive response, but by being a response to excess. Viewing poison as a response to excess does not negate the cruelty expressed by its use or the unnecessary suffering caused by it. Rather, it points to the utility of poison: how it is effective and useful for achieving and maintaining orders dreamed up even before the Enlightenment and followed through into modernity and today.

Following a review of existing literature on pesticides and chemical warfare, and an introduction to the methodological choices underlying its analysis, the article proceeds in four main sections. The first section examines resonances between fascism and poison by comparing Bataille’s description of fascism with the use of nerve agents by contemporary fascist leaders, most notably Vladimir Putin. Here, I describe how poison can be a response to fascist desires for cleanliness attained via extermination of human organisms viewed as irredeemable. The focus on extermination desires continues in the second section, which presents a historical examination of fumigation as a distinct mode of pest elimination culminating in the Holocaust, which took fumigation to a new, unprecedented scale. What comes to the forefront here is how fumigation as a method of death is characterized by its utility: fumigation has historically been a practical answer to killing as a logistical issue. The third section turns to metaphors and ideas of gardening as expressed in thinking characteristic not only of the eugenics movement and Nazism, but also of modern state-building and the enclosures movement. Here, I also highlight how affective economies of poison can be similar across different scales, from nation-building to the everyday, from genocides to strawberry fields. The final section engages Bataille’s writing on a general economy to elucidate how poison comes to act as a tool in economies of growth, competition and death of organisms both flora and fauna. Focusing on responses to what Bataille calls ‘the pressure exerted in all directions by life’, this Bataillian engagement encourages an understanding of why excess demands a response and highlights a spatial aspect to resonances between desires for extermination and notions of waste and utility which animate modern liberal social orders. The conclusion articulates a rubric of martial economies of poison, which goes beyond ideas of poison as exceptional, uncovering instead its role as a ubiquitous technology for the maintenance of equally ubiquitous social orders.

The unruly parameters of poison

According to Bousquet et al. (2017), it is futile to attempt a clearcut definition of what makes a weapon. No human artefact is intrinsically a weapon, and many different objects can serve as vectors of bodily harm or lethality. Weapons are not static material objects or purely instrumental, straightforward means to an end. To Bousquet et al. (2017: 1), the question is not whether something is ‘in our out of the weapons box’, but instead how ‘objects, ideologies, practices, bodies and affects get drawn into specific assemblages of violent intentionality’. Similarly, war cannot be defined or definitively understood (Bousquet et al., 2020). Instead of discussing what war is, Bousquet et al. encourage exploration of how war becomes, to ‘trace the lines of becoming that congeal into what comes to count as war, even as it continually frays at the edges and insolently defies habituated frames of reference’ (Bousquet et al., 2020: 10). The pesticide–chemical weapon continuum is a good example of this definitory fraying at the edge: poison defies weapon/not weapon and war/not war divides, only occasionally counting as weapon or war. Suggesting a concept of ‘martial politics’ as ‘the liberal norm, not the exception’ Howell (2018: 5) has argued that:

Attaching the word ‘martial’ to ‘politics’ aids in assessing the indivisibility of war and peace, military and civilian, and national and social security. ‘Martial politics’ moves beyond the idea that ‘militarization’ is a new process by which the exception (war) encroaches on the norm (peace). ‘Normal politics’ is not overtaken by ‘militarization’; instead, martial relations inhere in liberal politics as they are enacted on those who are racialized, Indigenous, disabled, queer or otherwise constituted as a threat to civil order. (Howell, 2018: 2)

Similarly, positing poison as exception runs the risk of, as Howell suggests, overlooking how certain forms of violence are foundational, commonplace and normalized, especially towards marginalized populations. The taboo against chemical weapons invites us to exceptionalize and thereby overlook how bringing death upon others by poisoning them is part and parcel of contemporary Western–liberal societies. To pay attention to how poison comes to animate what I, following Howell and Bousquet et al., call martial economies, this article therefore opts for following ‘the trail of war wherever it leads us, as opposed to camping in the places where we already expect to find it’ (Bousquet et al., 2020: 10).

With poison, this trail leads to agriculture, which remains a dangerous occupation partly due to the risk of pesticide exposure (Moses, 1993; Rogaly, 2021). Pesticides have followed a repetitive cycle of introduction of new classes followed by slow, delayed and contested recognition of their toxicity, after which they are banned in some places while their use continues in others, often along Global North/South lines (Davis, 2014). Exploitation of ethnic minorities for agricultural work results in these populations disproportionally suffering from acute and chronic effects of pesticide exposure, such as contact and allergic dermatitis, ulceration, various cancers, neuro-psychological changes, miscarriage and stillbirth, and death (Moses, 1993; Pellow, 2007: 152–153). Pesticides thus form a main pillar in the agrarian racial capitalism characteristic of the Western capitalist food supply regime, which has roots in colonialism and slavery, and which still relies on racialization, oppression and unfree labour exploitation. Transatlantic slavery was a form of forced migration for agricultural work, and contemporary agricultural workers make references to slavery when they describe the racialized hierarchies and harshness of working and living conditions in agricultural workplaces (Moses, 1993; Pellow, 2007; Rogaly, 2021). The paradox of a household staple being deadly results in more than 25 million annual cases of pesticide poisoning being reported in the Global South alone (Pellow, 2007: 150), and pesticide ingestion is a common reason for paediatric hospital admissions in, for example, India (Varghese and Erickson, 2022). Language differences and illiteracy render people unable to read labels and warnings, resulting in pesticide containers being reused for storage or transportation (Pellow, 2007: 151, 155). At least 23 children in the Indian state of Bihar died in 2013 after their school lunch had been prepared with cooking oil stored in a container previously containing the organophosphorus insecticide monocrotophos (BBC News, 2013). Such deaths are accompanied by suicides committed by deliberate ingestion of pesticides, particularly amongst debt-ridden farmers in the Global South (Bonvoisin et al., 2020; Kaushal, 2015; Shah, 2012).

The Chemical Weapons Convention ignores the millions of tonnes of pesticides utilized in global agriculture annually. According to the convention, a toxic chemical is ‘any chemical which through its chemical action on life processes can cause death, temporary incapacitation or permanent harm to humans or animals’. A chemical weapon is ‘Munitions and devices, specifically designed to cause death or other harm through the toxic properties of those toxic chemicals’. As a workaround to the fact that pesticides fit into both these definitions, the convention defines chemical weapons via a series of exceptions, stating that toxic chemicals are not prohibited when ‘intended for . . . industrial, agricultural, research, medical, pharmaceutical or other peaceful purposes’. ² The focus on intention is important here: poison is presumably only poisonous when it is intended to be. This fiction of a natural difference between pesticides and chemical warfare requires collective denial. The convention presumes a non-violent essence of an essentially violent thing, and rests on a presumption that chemical weapons must be ‘weaponized’ and thereby set apart from ‘civilian’ pesticides. Again, rather than saying, as a response to this denial, that pesticides ought to be exceptionalized as are chemical weapons, refraining from distinguishing between the two points to how pervasive poison is, thereby helping to uncover its importance for the maintenance of equally pervasive social orders. Chemical weapons do not magically turn into pesticides when used outside of war, and pesticides do not magically turn into chemical weapons when used in war. Rather, both are poison – a deadly technology often characterized by its utility.

Much scholarship on chemical weapons is focused on the taboo that surrounds them: how this taboo arose, who is challenging and policing it, and whether it is being eroded (Bentley, 2016; Jefferson, 2014). The history of norms relating to chemical weapons is one of continuous condemnations of poison as unworthy, barbaric, inglorious and inhumane (Gillespie, 2011). Even Kant wrote in his 1795 musings on perpetual peace that poison was dishonourable and would lead to ‘a war of extermination’. Recent scholarship points to how the norm against chemical weapons is conditional and contextual, depending on a hierarchy of victims such that attacks with chemical weapons affecting civilians from the Global South receive scant or non-existent third-party reactions compared to attacks against citizens in the Global North (Tezcür and Horschig, 2021). Assessment of norm robustness, via characteristics such as third-party reactions and the behaviour of norm violators (Deitelhoff and Zimmermann, 2019), must therefore include attention to the location of an attack and the identity of the victims, and acknowledgement of the hypocrisy expressed by the actions and inactions of, for example, the United States and the UN (Hiltermann, 2007; Tezcür and Horschig, 2021). Poison kills via intricate interaction with biological matter, and this distinguishes poison from death and injury caused by the direct mechanical force of blunt objects, the penetrating trauma caused by bullets or knives, or explosion pressure. Poison is insidious: it might seem harmless – an odourless liquid, for example, which enters the body merely by being touched, inhaled, ingested, or absorbed through the skin – and there is often a delay between exposure and bodily reaction. The horror of poison is connected to the way it interacts with and hijacks the biochemical processes that keep us alive as organisms. According to Jefferson (2014: 652), the norm against chemical weapons is connected to a visceral repugnance towards suffering and dying from asphyxiation, as opposed to from ballistic munitions. The ‘psychological horror of suffocation’ is connected to ‘the prospect of a process as instinctual as breathing becoming a source of contamination and death’ (Jefferson, 2014: 652). In the words of Sloterdijk, this kind of ‘terror from the air’ forces victims, via their natural bodily mechanisms, ‘to participate in the obliteration of their own life’ (Sloterdijk, 2009: 22–23). It has been found that chemical weapons exposure leads to more long-term psychological distress that non-chemical weapons exposure (Pastor and Roger, 2007 cited in Jefferson, 2014: 656; de Bretton-Gordon, 2020). While this distress prompts a view of poison as excessive, it is also, I argue, part of its utility.

Methodologically, the analyses of this article result from a Foucauldian approach to the topic of poison as a category encompassing chemical weapons and pesticides in international politics, prompted by the fact that organophosphorus compounds straddle both categories. Foucault described his method as genealogical in that it ‘will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibilities of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think’ (Foucault 1997: 125). Thus, Foucault’s method seeks to de-familiarize objects under study (Shapiro, 1992: 41) by bringing historical research into play against existing ‘regimes of truth’ (Bonditti et al., 2015). Practically, Foucault himself noted about his method that ‘one ought to read everything, study everything’ (Foucault 1998: 263). Reading for this article expanded from literature on chemical weapons and pesticides and arrived at its topics of fascism, fumigation, waste and gardening through a particular interest in histories and locations that most clearly elaborated an implosion of a supposed distinction between these two categories of poison. This Foucauldian analysis is augmented by Bataille’s thinking which, via its focus on aspects such as excess, plants and fascism, can enrich understandings of this continuum of poison by illuminating how it hinges on intervention into economies of life and death.

Nerve agents and fascist desires

In his take on fascism, Bataille (1979) describes homogenous society as productive, useful society, where violence is in principle excluded. Here, human relations are sustained by ‘fixed rules based on the consciousness of the possible identity of delineable persons and situations’ (Bataille, 1979: 64). In opposition to the homogenous, Bataille describes heterogenous society as elements that are impossible to assimilate: the unconscious, the sacred, mobs, the warrior, ‘violent individuals or at least those who refuse the rule’ – in short, everything resulting from ‘unproductive expenditure’. A rubric of excess, the heterogenous consists of ‘the opposition of two extreme forms’ (Bataille, 1979: 72), namely the least and most valuable elements: ‘aristocratic and impoverished classes’, ‘everything rejected by homogenous society as waste or as superior transcendent value’ including ‘the waste products of the human body and certain analogous matter (trash, vermin, etc.)’ (Bataille, 1979: 69). Such heterogenous elements, moreover, will provoke affective reactions: ‘sometimes attraction, sometimes repulsion, and in certain circumstances, any object of repulsion can become an object of attraction and vice versa’ (Bataille, 1979: 69). The characteristic of fascist leaders breaking the law is one sign of their belonging to heterogenous existence (Bataille, 1979: 70). At the opposite end of the spectrum:

In a quite different sense, the lowest strata of society can equally be described as heterogenous, those who generally provoke repulsion and can in no case be assimilated by the whole of mankind. (Bataille, 1979: 71)

Here, ‘in opposition to the impoverished existence of the oppressed, political sovereignty presents itself as a clearly differentiated sadistic activity’ (Bataille, 1979: 73), and when this sadistic activity is oriented towards exclusion of valueless filth, ‘sadism attains a brilliant purity’ (Bataille, 1979: 73). Fascism is characterized by this ‘destructive passion’ (Bataille, 1979: 74), which is exclusively directed ‘either towards foreign societies or towards the impoverished classes, towards all those external or internal elements hostile to homogeneity’ (Bataille, 1979: 74). This brings Bataille to a coupling between fascist leaders and desires for cleanliness:

If the heterogenous nature of the slave is akin to that of the filth to which his material situation condemns him to live, that of the master is formed by an act excluding all filth: an act pure in direction but sadistic in form. In human terms, the ultimate imperative value presents itself in the form of royal or imperial authority in which cruel tendencies and the need, characteristic of all domination, to realize and idealize order are manifest in the highest degree. (Bataille, 1979: 73)

Such fascist attraction to order and cleanliness versus vermin has recently been articulated by Vladimir Putin, who three weeks into the war against Ukraine said the following to Russian government ministers:

Of course they will try to bet on the so-called fifth column, on traitors – on those who earn their money here, but live over there. Live, not in the geographical sense, but in the sense of their thoughts, their slavish thinking. Any people, and especially the Russian people, will always be able to distinguish the true patriots from the scum and the traitors, and just to spit them out like a midge that accidentally flew into their mouths. . . . I am convinced that this natural and necessary self-cleansing of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, cohesion and readiness to meet any challenge. (Quoted by Reuters, 2022)

The thinking expressed here ties in well with Putin’s habit of poisoning his political enemies. On 6 September 2004, Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned with a high dose of the dioxin essential to Agent Orange. The mass protests that erupted in response to widespread voter fraud in the 2004 Ukrainian election, in which Yushchenko eventually won a second runoff ordered by the Ukrainian supreme court, came to be known as ‘The Orange Revolution’, as Yushchenko’s supporters had adopted orange as the signifying colour of his election campaign, and it was the symbol of his political camp and its supporters (Karatnycky, 2005). Using Agent Orange in this instance is a symbolic act classic to the Kremlin (Karatnycky, 2005: 36). Later, the European Court of Human Rights found the Kremlin responsible for the 2006 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, who died from polonium-210-induced acute radiation syndrome. As Bellingcat (2022) has shown, the widely publicized 2018 Salisbury poisoning of the Skripals with Novichok happened after the poisoning in 2015 of the Bulgarian arms dealer Emilian Gebrev (who supported the Ukrainian military with arms in 2014). Bellingcat (2021) has also been able to match the suspicious death of three other public figures between 2014 and 2019 with activities of a clandestine FSB (Federal Security Service) poisoning unit, including the regime-critical journalist Timur Kuashev, who in 2014 was found dead with traces of an injection in the armpit, and activist Ruslan Magomedragimov, who in 2015 was found dead with traces of an injection in his neck. When anti-corruption activist Nikita Isaev went to the bathroom on a night train in 2019, he came back ‘slouching and holding his abdomen, as if someone had punched him. The last words he could utter before he collapsed to the floor in convulsions was “I got poisoned, I think”’ (Bellingcat, 2021). These events preceded the 2020 assassination attempt of Aleksei Navalnyj using Novichok. Novichok agents were designed as part of a Soviet programme codenamed Foliant beginning in the 1970s, and were specifically designed to make death appear natural, and to be undetectable for NATO’s inspectors (Roher, 2022). However, when Navalnyj was poisoned, a very different affective register was at play, as suggested by Leonid Volkov, Navalnyj’s chief of staff, who distinguishes between murdering and poisoning:

It was so crazy! It’s like Putin’s signature poison. We were actually so shocked. He didn’t just decide to murder him, but to poison him, and not just to poison him, but exactly this Novichok. This, like, really, like leaving a signature on the crime scene. (In Roher, 2022)

Navalnyj himself said the following about the use of poison:

Come on, poison? Damn it, that is so stupid! Putin is supposed to be, not so stupid to use this novichok. If you want to kill someone, just shoot him! It’s impossible to believe, it’s kind of stupid. The whole idea of poisoning with a chemical weapon, what the fuck? (In Roher, 2022)

This begs the question of why poison is attractive to a leader such as Putin. I argue that the attraction can be partially attributed to poison being useful, in that it gets the job done, sometimes allowing some assassinations to masquerade as deaths from natural causes. However, I think an affective aspect of this usefulness linked to certain desires, hinted to by the fact that Putin recently equated traitors with vermin, is equally important. As Zygmunt Bauman has written:

Declaring that a particular category of people has no room in the future order is to say that this category is beyond redemption – cannot be reformed, adapted or forced to adapt itself. The Other is not a sinner, who can still repent or mend his ways. He is a diseased organism, ‘both ill and infectious, both damaged and damaging’. He is fit only for a surgical operation; better still, for fumigation and poisoning. He must be destroyed so that the rest of the social body can retain its health. His destruction is a matter of medicine and sanitation. (Bauman, 1991: 110)

Poison can be simultaneously animated by notions of utility and affective registers of revulsion. That Putin precisely casts those he views as traitors in this category beyond redemption, and that he is unable to utter the name Navalnyj (Roher, 2022), suggests a deep fear/revulsion/desire towards his most popular political opponents (Bataille’s point that an object of repulsion can become an object of attraction and vice versa seems apt here). Bauman also notes a unilateral aspect: there is no symmetry, and no enemy, but merely a victim who has been marked for annihilation ‘because the logic of the order that the stronger side wishes to establish has no room for its presence’ (Bauman, 1991: 109). Shooting Navalnyj might have made him an enemy, giving him too much credit. Instead, Navalnyj had to be exterminated like the dangerous pest he was. When poisoning initially failed, extermination desires were temporarily steered into carceral tactics. On February 16, 2024, Navalnyj died under suspicious circumstances in a penal colony in Kharp. At the time of writing, his team suspects he was once again poisoned. For the fascist leader, poison offers a way of showcasing one’s heterogeneity, one’s transcendent superiority, expressed through one’s brilliant, pure sadism. At the same time, poison can appear rational from the perspective of the fascist, and is animated by affective desires relating to that which is deemed repulsive and excessive beyond redemption. One can ponder whether the Russian reluctance to utilize chemical weapons in Ukraine stems from a view of the Ukrainian people as subjects worthy of ‘liberation’ rather than irredeemable traitors (the discourse of ‘denazification’ suggests otherwise), or a suspicion that a norm against chemical weapons would be violently defended by NATO.

As a sidenote, poisoning is a different economy of assassination than the US one of targeted drone strikes, for example. Both are characterized by being unilateral, and by trailing the victims for days or weeks before killing them. However, there is a difference between exploding someone (including everything around them) versus making someone wither away. If any of these methods are characterized by ‘surgical precision’, it is in fact the poisoning. One could also legitimately question which method is the more excessive, ‘indiscriminate’, or psychologically distressing one.

The two aspects of fascist motivation for the use of poison coming into focus thus far – utility and extermination desire – were also at the fore of chemical weapons use by the Iraqi Ba’th regime in the Iran–Iraq war during the 1980s, such as in the 1988 Halabja massacre. Chemical weapons were highly effective against Kurdish insurgency (Hiltermann, 2007). Ba’th rulers referred to Kurds as ‘traitors’, Saddam Hussein’s regime characterized the Kurds as ‘infidels who must be eradicated’, and Ali Hasan Al-Majid, Saddam’s cousin responsible for the counterinsurgency mission, said: ‘I will kill them all with chemical weapons! Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck them!’ (quoted in Tezcür and Horschig, 2021: 375). Heterogeneity on full display. Similar fascist desires were at play in the use of poison in Vietnam, where between 1962 and 1971 the US Air Force sprayed nearly 19 million gallons of herbicides, of which at least 11 million were Agent Orange. Paul Cecil, who flew 1000 missions in the Ranch Hand Project, wrote about his experiences with the subtext ‘that the herbicide program in Vietnam was morally acceptable because it was just like the genocide of North America’s indigenous people, which he expects his readers – imagining them to be part of the dominant ideology from which he writes – to agree was justifiably necessary’ (Waugh, 2010: 119). Casting Vietnam as the American West and the Vietnamese as Indians, US Air Force pilots viewed themselves as cowboys ‘cleaning up “the ranch” by removing unwanted vegetation’ and ‘taming the wild, assisting in the eradication of the “Indian” and the “Indian country” all at once’ (Yellow Bird, 2004; Waugh 2010: 119). During the National Veterans’ Inquiry into US war crimes in Vietnam, held in December 1970 in Washington DC, 40 veterans testified that war crimes committed by US soldiers in Vietnam were the logical consequence of command policies. When former infantry captain Robert Bowie Johnson was asked what these policies were, he answered, using several racial slurs, that the ‘underlying rational policy’ was simply the death of as many Vietnamese as possible, comparable to earlier ‘policies’ related to the killing of Native American and Black people (Citizens Commission 50–51, cited in Waugh, 2010: 117). Similarly, in Syria, Assad came to view his own civilian population as riddled with ‘terrorists’, and according to British chemical weapons expert Hamish de Bretton-Gordon (cited in Sabbagh, 2022), ‘Helicopters dropping chlorine gas in residential areas of Aleppo in November and December 2016 led to the end of rebel resistance in the Syrian city after four years of fighting: “These weapons are morbidly effective and can break the will of civilians to resist.”’ These examples suggest that, in addition to being ‘morbidly effective’, poison answers to instances when death, or the threat of death, is not quite enough – when the individual or group being targeted are beyond consideration as isomorphic enemies.

Across these examples of poison use, poison offers the perpetrator a way of displaying one’s superior heterogeneity while achieving results in the name of societal cleanliness, ridding the social fabric of anything hostile or threatening to it. In the next section I turn to fumigation, which culminated in the fascist extreme of the Holocaust. As a method of pest elimination, fumigation elucidates a connection between extermination desires and genocide by being a response to mass killing as a logistical issue.

Fumigation

The Cambridge Dictionary defines fumigation as ‘the use of poisonous gas to remove harmful insects, bacteria, disease, etc. from somewhere or something’. Again, the et cetera here sometimes encompasses humans deemed to be pests. As such, the history of fumigation begins in 1802 Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti). Having arrived under Napoleon Bonaparte to re-establish slavery on the island, General Donatien de Rochambeau, a sadistic white supremacist and supporter of slavery, trapped hundreds of Black Haitians into the holds of ships and asphyxiated them by pumping in sulphur dioxide gas from burning oil (Perry, 1996). This method of killing, called ‘fumigational-sulphurous baths’ (Pachoński and Wilson, 1986: 69), ‘prison boats’, or ‘étouffoirs’ [suffocators] (Daut, 2016; Dwyer, 2008), was coupled with mass drowning and the use of bloodhounds (Girard, 2013). The practice was not only a precursor to the gas chambers of the Holocaust 140 years later, but also to fumigation as a strategy of pest control. Leading up to it, General Leclerc, also sent by Bonaparte, had in September 1802 waged a ‘war of extermination’ aimed at the entire adult Black population of Haiti (Girard, 2013: 139). As Girard (2013: 139) writes, ‘The new guidelines meant an exponential growth in the number of victims, who had to be executed on a quasi-industrial scale. Shooting and hanging were not up to the task.’ Already here, then, we see a desire for large-scale extermination of unwanted beings coupled with utility as an animating rationale for fumigation. This slaughtering aimed at only the population of colour makes Daut (2016) write that ‘revolutionary Saint-Domingue was a world in which the idea of “race war” was so well accepted that a language that reeked of genocidal imaginings was fairly ubiquitous’, making it a precursor to ‘the implementation of modern policies of eugenics and what has euphemistically been called “ethnic cleansing”’ (Daut, 2016). ³

Some 80 years later, a long history of cyanide fumigation commenced, when the practice of releasing hydrogen cyanide gas under a tented tree was developed in 1886 in Los Angeles, paving the way for an industrial citrus empire in the valleys of Southern California (Romero, 2016). Cyanide fumigation continued in El Paso, Texas, where the eugenics movement had reached Mayor Tom Lea Sr, elected in 1915, who was obsessed with cleanliness, a member of the KKK, and ‘didn’t like the Mexican people’. As Romo (2005: 231) describes, ‘The Mayor’s atavistic fear of being contaminated by the Mexicans – both bacteriologically and socially – seemed to have been an underlying motif for many of his administration policies.’ Lea wrote the following in a telegram to the Surgeon General in Washington DC:

Hundreds of dirty lousey [sic] destitute Mexicans arriving at El Paso daily. Will undoubtedly bring and spread typhus unless a quarantine is placed at once. (Quoted in Romo, 2005: 233)

Instead of getting the ‘quarantine camps’ he had suggested, Lea was granted a ‘disinfection plant’ which opened in January 1917 (Romo, 2005: 234). From then on:

Every immigrant from the interior of Mexico and every ‘2nd class’ Juárez citizen was to strip completely, turn in their clothes and baggage to be steam dried and fumigated with hydrocyanic acid and stand before a customs inspector who checked his or her ‘hairy parts’ – the scalp, armpits, chest, pubic area and anus – for lice. Those found to have lice would be required to shave their head and body hair . . . and apply a mix of kerosene and vinegar on his body. (Romo, 2005: 235)

In 1917 alone, the US Public Health Service chemically bathed and ‘deloused’ 127,173 Mexicans with hydrogen cyanide at the Santa Fe International Bridge (Romo, 2005: 229). During that year, 17-year-old Mexican maid Carmelita Torres initiated the ‘bath riots’ by refusing to take a gasoline bath (Romo, 2005).

After gas warfare had once again been pioneered by the French and British in the trenches of World War I, 1920s eugenic thinking initiated the ‘lethal chamber’ as a method for executing criminals. Technology for such a chamber was a by-product of research conducted by the US Army’s Chemical Warfare Service and the chemical industry, and the first execution gas chamber was constructed in Nevada in 1924, utilizing cyanide (Christianson, 2010). Again, fumigation was championed precisely because of its utility as:

a modern mechanism to cull the gene pool of its defective germ plasm and free civilized society from unwanted burdens. It would be a quality-control appliance that would remove society’s unwanted pests and detritus as humanely and painlessly as possible. (Christianson, 2010)

One of the companies providing hydrogen cyanide for the US gas chambers, Roessler & Hasslacher Chemical Company, had also been the main supplier of hydrogen cyanide for the LA citrus growers (Christianson, 2010; Hayes, 2004; Romo, 2005). Cyanide was an equally effective final solution for criminals and scale insects, and ‘put condemned humans in the same category as bothersome insects and rats’ (Christianson, 2010: 5). Already in 1920, chemists at German Degesch, the state-controlled German Society for Pest Control, had patented Zyklon A, which released hydrogen cyanide when exposed to water and heat, for the ‘disinfection of insect-contaminated living areas’ (Sloterdijk, 2009). During the 1920s, Zyklon A was routinely used by North German pest control services to fumigate ships, warehouses, housing blocks and barracks. In 1922 Degesch patented Zyklon B, which had improved storage and transport properties, and which from the 1930s attained a quasi-monopoly in the world insecticide market (Sloterdijk, 2009: 34–35). During this time fixed or mobile ‘demothing’ or ‘extermination chambers’ were introduced, where materials such as rugs, uniforms, furniture and textiles were brought into the gas room and then aired out (Sloterdijk, 2009: 35). Walter Heerdt, who is credited with inventing Zyklon B, had worked for Roessler & Hasslacher, the company providing cyanide to citrus growers and death chambers in the United States between 1912 and 1916 (Hayes, 2004). The chemical cartel IG Farben, of which Degesch was a subsidiary, was formed in 1925, and became the single largest donor to the election campaign of Adolf Hitler during the early 1930s (Grossman, 2016). During the mid-1920s, US officials at the Santa Fe Bridge had begun carrying out delousing with Zyklon B (Romo, 2005: 223). Fumigation took place in an area of the disinfection plant US officials called ‘the gas chambers’ (Romo, 2005). By 1929 delousing baths and mental inspections were expanded, with many border crossers being sprayed with chemical agents such as gasoline, kerosene, sodium cyanide, cyanogen, sulphuric acid, and later DDT (Romo, 2005: 240). Here, fears of infection and racial uncleanliness animated the use of poison in the separation of superior people from ‘the dirty, the dumb, the destitute, and the defective’ (Romo, 2005: 243). A 1937 article written by Dr Gerhard Peters in the German pest science journal Anzeiger fur Schädlinskunde included two photographs of El Paso delousing chambers and suggested similar use of Zyklon B in German ‘Desinfektionskammern’ – specifically praising the El Paso method of fumigating Mexican immigrants with Zyklon B (cited in Romo, 2005: 240). In Germany in 1938, and in the United States in 1939, Peters applied for a patent for a new ‘exterminating agent for vermin’, describing that ‘My invention relates to the extermination of animal pest-life of the most varied kinds, for instance, warm-blooded obnoxious animals and insects’ (cited in Christianson, 2010: 6). Peters later became the managing director of Degesch and was tried and convicted at the Nuremburg trials for his participation in the Holocaust (Romo, 2005: 243). As a sidenote, fumigation of people at the USA–Mexico border would continue into the 1960s; as late as 1958, Raul Delgado, who came to the United States as a bracero, described being deloused by US customs agents at the Eagle Pass border:

They put me and other braceros in a room and made us take off our clothes. An immigration agent with a fumigation pump would spray our whole body with insecticide, especially our rear and partes nobles. Some of us ran away from the spray and began to cough. Some even vomited from the stench of those chemical pesticides being sprayed on us and the agent would laugh at the grimacing faces we would make. He had a gas mask on, but we didn’t. Supposedly, it was to disinfect us, but I think more than anything, they damaged our health. (Quoted in Romo, 2005: 240)

At the onset of World War II in 1939, the company Tesch & Stabenow, which in 1925 had become the only distributor of Zyklon B east of the Elbe on behalf of Degesch, gave disinfection seminars, a prominent feature of which were gas chamber demonstrations. Around 1942, Tesch & Stabenow published a handbook on Zyklon for their customer base, which at the time featured the Eastern German armed forces and the SS. The booklet gave clear indications for militarizing the ‘extermination procedure’, including the possibility of using cyanide for human environments, stating that the extermination of vermin (in relation to typhus which is transmitted by clothing lice) ‘goes so far as to constitute an act of self-defense!’ (Sloterdijk, 2009: 36). Dr Bruno Tesch, the owner of Tesch & Stabenow, had been involved with gas warfare in World War I. He was sentenced to death by a British military court in 1946 (Sloterdijk, 2009: 34). In January 1942, the first gas chambers were installed at Auschwitz (Sloterdijk, 2009: 45). The ‘hygiene services’ of Auschwitz, Oranienburg and other camps were supplied, by Tesch & Stabenow, with a variant of Zyklon B without tracer warning substance, divulging its intended use for humans (Sloterdijk, 2009: 32). As Sloterdijk writes, continuing ‘The acting-out of the metaphor of “pest control” stood unmistakably at the core of the gas chamber and crematorium industry in Auschwitz and other concentration camps’ (Sloterdijk, 2009: 42). The weekly Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer wrote: ‘Bacteria, vermin and pests cannot be tolerated. For reasons of cleanliness and hygiene we must make them harmless by killing them off’ (quoted in Bauman, 1991: 110). Goebbels wrote that ‘The Jews are the lice of civilized humanity’ (cited in Sloterdijk, 2009: 44). Hitler himself described the Holocaust as ‘exterminating the pest’ (quoted in Bauman, 1991: 110). These metaphors of vermin render a distinction between pesticides and chemical warfare meaningless and point to the similarities between affective economies of poison use in and out of war. Furthermore, the above history suggests that fumigation is a mode of poisoning suited for situations when mass killing (or euphemistic ‘disinfection’) is a logistical issue. It also suggests that this industrialized, systematized killing is useful, in the eyes of the perpetrators, for the establishment and maintenance of orders central to bordering and state-building efforts. Affective intensities of fear, revulsion and disgust animated by fascist desires coalesce into desires for extermination, which, despite being animated by affect, can come to be viewed as a rationalized, scientific undertaking. As Helen Fein has noted:

To understand genocides as a class of calculated crimes, such crimes must be appreciated as goal-oriented acts from the point of view of the perpetrators: genocide is rationally instrumental to their ends, although psychopathic in terms of any universalistic ethic . . . legitimizing the existence of the state as the vehicle for the destiny of the dominant group, a group whose members share an underlying likeness from which the victim is excluded by definition. (Fein quoted in Bauman, 1991: 91)

Regardless of whether a part of war or not, fumigation is in essence an industrialized response to organisms which have been deemed as excess. In the following section, I expand on the role of poison in state-building by examining its relation to ideas of gardening.

Gardening

Concepts like ‘wilted’ or ‘degenerate stock’ proliferated in the eugenics movement in the United States and England of the early 19th century. Posters from the English Eugenics Society, for example, depict a farmer sowing seeds, or a hand cutting the stem of a plant, reading: ‘Only healthy seed must be sown! Check the seeds of hereditary disease and unfitness by eugenics’ and ‘Release the strangle-hold of hereditary disease and unfitness’ (English Heritage). Metaphors of gardening, seeds and plants were also common in 1930s Germany (Bauman, 1991: 81). In 1930 R. W. Darré, later to become the Nazi Minister of Agriculture, wrote the following:

He who leaves the plants in a garden to themselves will soon find to his surprise that the garden is overgrown by weeds and that even the basic character of the plants has changed. If therefore the garden is to remain the breeding ground for the plants, if, in other words, it is to lift itself above the harsh rule of natural forces, then the forming will of a gardener is necessary, a gardener who, by providing suitable conditions for growing, or by keeping harmful influences away, or by both together, carefully tends what needs tending, and ruthlessly eliminates the weeds which would deprive the better plants of nutrition, air, light and sun . . . Thus we are facing the realization that questions of breeding are not trivial for political thought, but that they have to be at the centre of all considerations . . . We must even assert that a people can only reach spiritual and moral equilibrium if a well-conceived breeding plan stands at the very centre of its culture. (Quoted in Bauman, 1991: 69)

Similarly, the biologist Erwin Bauer, drawing on the metaphor of ‘cultivated plants’, wrote in 1934 that ‘we must see to it that these inferior people do not procreate’ (quoted in Bauman, 1991: 70), and his colleague wrote in 1935 that ‘the task consists of safeguarding the people from an overgrowth of the weeds’ (quoted in Bauman, 1991: 70). ‘Racial hygiene’, then, is a matter of gardening. Here, IG Farben eagerly stepped in, offering chemical solutions. For example, an illustrated 1941 yearbook by IG Farben boasts, next to pictures of blonde women amongst cabbages and baskets of apples, that field mice can be controlled by using poison grains, without endangering pheasants and partridges (I. G. Farbenindustrie AG, 1941). We also see this link to plants and gardening in the verb to ‘root out’. Lindqvist (2007) notes the following about the term extermination (see also Youatt, 2023):

The Latin extermino means ‘drive over the border’, terminus, ‘exile, banish, exclude’. Hence the English exterminate, which means ‘drive over the border to death, banish from life’. Swedish has no direct equivalent. Swedes have to say utrota, although that is really quite a different word, ‘root out’, which in English is extirpate, from the Latin stirps, ‘root, tribe, family’. In both English and Swedish, the object of the action is seldom a single individual, but usually whole groups, such as quitchgrass, rats, or people.

Positing waste as a key issue of modernity, Bauman describes a ‘modern war against ambivalence, identified with chaos and lack of control, and hereby frightening and marked for extinction’, which leads to one element of the modern project being ‘the gardening ambitions of the state’ (Bauman, 1991: 59). As a ‘gardening state’, the modern state was bent on the goal of turning populations into orderly societies in accordance with the precept of reason (Bauman, 1991: 79). The population needed to be cultivated and the state distinguished between ‘useful plants to be encouraged and tenderly propagated, and weeds – to be removed or rooted out’ (Bauman, 1991: 80). Such thinking harks back to the 17th century. Neocleous (2011) argues that ‘a war on waste’ became a permanent feature of capitalist social relations, its first iteration being the violence of original accumulation. In the enclosures movement, waste was most clearly characterized by the uncultivated land and idle labour of the commons, which were thought to require elimination: wasted land needed to be ‘improved’, which is to say utilized or cultivated, and wasted labour needed to be disciplined to work. ⁴ This ideological orientation towards the wasteful versus the worthy is illuminated in Jones’ (2017: 319) remark that ‘one way of understanding the white man’s burden is as a waste management problem’. Importantly, fascist desires of gardening take place not only at the level of the state. Describing how everyone can become ‘self-appointed judge, dispenser of justice, policeman, neighborhood SS man’, Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 228) are attentive to what they call ‘micro-fascisms’, which can be evident even in individuals who are opposed to fascism at the state level (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 215). At this micro-scale, fascism is:

not only an organized political philosophy but a stifling of thought, of otherness, of difference; an aggregate destructive yearning for power here understood as manifested in the profound desire for and proliferation of homogeneity, uniformity and control. (Mohammed, 2020: 201)

Many people are undoubtedly animated by such micro-fascist desires when employing poison to keep homes and gardens neat and tidy, free from ants in the kitchen and dandelions in the driveway (can gentrification take place without poison?). Audre Lorde’s description of an experience she had in the late 1930s as a five-year-old exemplifies how such micro-fascist fears can also easily slide into attitudes towards humans:

The revulsion on the woman’s face in the subway as she moves her coat away and I think she is seeing a roach. But I see the hatred in her eyes because she wants me to see the hatred in her eyes, because she wants me to know in only the way a child can know that I don’t belong alive in her world. (Lorde, 2007: 172)

As Bauman (1991: 111) writes, ‘Defining the Other as vermin harnesses the deeply entrenched fears, revulsion and disgust in the service of extermination.’ The allure of poison, then, is how it offers a respite from this fear and revulsion, elicited by heterogenous, wasteful or excessive elements that threaten the coherence of one’s garden, be it an orchard, neighbourhood, or nation.

General economy

The preceding sections have detailed how poison can become an answer to fascist desires related to ideas of cleanliness, gardening, order, cultivation and utility, which is in essence an answer to that which has been deemed as excess. In this section, I turn to Georges Bataille’s general economy which theorizes the political implications of dealing with excess. The main tenet in Bataille’s general economy is that infinite sunlight creates a surplus, or excess, of energy on the planet, and that such a surplus, contrary to what capitalist doctrine tells us, is a problem to dispose of. Neither growth nor reproduction would be possible without excess energy allowing organisms to proliferate beyond mere preservation. Surplus energy can therefore be used for the growth of an organism or system; however once the system cannot grow any further, or if its growth cannot absorb all the surplus energy, an excess must be spent, lost without return, ‘willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically’ (Bataille, 1991: 21). At the global or general level, then, excess is in fact the main issue, and a problem of scarcity only attains to particular living beings or populations: a general economy has expenditure rather than production as the primary objective. As a perspective in which excess presents living beings with their most fundamental problems (Bataille, 1991: 29), Bataille’s general economy thus provides a theory for why excess demands a response and informs this article’s argument that poison is such a response. In a Bataillian general economy, the biosphere limits overall growth, constituting the space available to life. For an individual or group, the immediate limit to growth comes from other individuals and groups, and if one perishes, this makes room for another. Bataille thereby highlights a spatial aspect of poison as a technology of death. Generally, then, ‘the surface of the globe is invested with life to the extent possible’ (Bataille, 1991: 29). Any increase in space due to the destruction of life is taken over by other life; Bataille calls this pressure. Local conditions within the overall system determine the intensity of the ‘pressure exerted in all directions by life’ (Bataille, 1991: 30). If life disappears in one locale, it is quickly replaced. Evocative of this article’s arrival at gardening, Bataille turns to the gardener to explain pressure:

The most familiar example is that of a path that a gardener clears and maintains. Once abandoned, the pressure of the surrounding life soon covers it again with weeds and bushes swarming with animal life. (Bataille, 1991: 30)

The term ‘lebensraum’, as articulated by Nazi ideology, can thus be understood as a fascist response to precisely such pressure. To return to Bataille, he lists two main effects of this pressure, which pits unequal organisms in competition with each other. The first is extension, in which organisms extend into more space, for example, into the air (such as trees, birds and insects). The second is squander, luxury, or simply death. As Bataille writes:

The unevenness of pressure in living matter continually makes available to growth the place left vacant by death. It is not a new space, and if one considers life as a whole, there is not really growth but a maintenance of volume in general. In other words, the possible growth is reduced to a compensation for the destructions that are brought about. (Bataille, 1991: 33)

This is precisely the process poison intervenes into: rendering places vacant by death, enabling specific growth from the destruction it brings about. As such, poison achieves ‘a luxurious squandering of energy’ (Bataille, 1991: 33).

To provide another example of the role of poison in response to this pressure, we can look to the history of the US frontier. In the 19th century, US slavers ‘dealt with the limits of soil fertility by expanding into new territories, violently seized from Native Americans’, and ‘this constant expansion also limited the extent of insect damage to US cotton for much of the period prior to emancipation, since pests tend to increase when cotton is produced monoculturally season after season’ (Williams, 2018: 252). The end of slavery and the absence of new frontier land then led to the rise of new, chemical-intensive regimes of plantation production, which included an exponential rise in the use of pesticides. According to the analysis of Williams (2018), pesticides represent a central technology for pursuing racial politics by supposedly technical means. Bringing this into a Bataillian framework, at the US frontier, the combination of land theft, slavery and genocide can be viewed as responses to pressure: extension coupled with squander/death. When this response was no longer feasible, the technology of poison became a new response.

In fact, Bataille precisely adds human labour and technology as a third response to pressure in addition to extension and squander. To Bataille, what makes the human species so adept at growth and reproduction is not the utilization of a previously unused space. Rather, ‘human activity transforming the world augments the mass of living matter with supplementary apparatuses, composed of an immense quantity of inert matter, which considerably increases the resources of available energy’ (Bataille, 1991: 36). In other words, human population growth happens because of technology for things like farming, production, transportation and fossil fuel extraction. These ‘supplementary apparatuses’ terraform the earth such that ever more energy is directed towards the growth of certain human populations at the expense of everything else. ‘Through labor and technique, [man] has made possible an extension of growth beyond the given limits’ (Bataille, 1991: 37). Poison is precisely such a technique. To Bataille (1991: 37) this augmented human proliferation has a double effect. While using up portions of surplus energy, human populations also produce an ever-larger excess, making them explosive, prone for what Bataille labels ‘catastrophic expenditure’ – war beings his most prominent example of this. As Bataille (1991: 37) writes, ‘the two world wars organized the greatest orgies of wealth – and of human beings – that history has recorded.’ Bataille fails to note that this catastrophic expenditure was primarily achieved via poison gas in trenches and chambers.

Bataille seems aware of the fears and affective economies which can be elicited by this ‘pressure exerted in all directions by life’. Linking plants to ‘indefinite exuberance’, writing that ‘they are nothing but growth and reproduction’, Bataille (1991: 28) taps into the characteristics animating affective economies of plants as threats, as expressed in metaphors for eugenic thinking. In a sidenote elsewhere, Bataille (1985: 17) mentions that ‘the fear of insects is no doubt one of the most singular and most developed’ of the horrors of ‘civilized man’, referring to their abundance. However, Bataille also reverses the gaze back onto the human as an animal within this general economy, describing animals as a ‘burdensome form of life’, because animal proliferation requires comparably more squander than plants that quickly occupy available space. As opposed to plants,

Animals make it a field of slaughter, and extend its possibilities in this way; they themselves develop more slowly. In this respect, the wild beast is at the summit: Its continual depredations of depredators represent an immense squandering of energy. (Bataille, 1991: 34)

Within a general economy, the predator consumes to an extreme measure – taking the most energy-intensive route for attaining its own relatively slow growth via the luxury of eating other species. The application of pesticides in agriculture further augments this luxury, because rather than the least energy-consuming mode of growth, which would be to eat available plants, insects and rodents, humans, via pesticides, kill these ‘unwanted’ organisms, making it precisely a field of slaughter, to grow selected food, also often for raising other species for consumption. The farm workers who are harmed or die in this process are also squandered. In sum, Bataille’s theory elucidates an articulation of poison as a response to excess and invites us to view the international politics of poison as taking place within spatial economies of energy exchange.

Conclusion: Martial economies of poison

Regardless of the extent to which poison is obscured through arbitrary separations or exceptionalized through norms, taboos and chemical weapons treaties, it remains an extraordinarily pervasive technology which animates martial economies of competition and violence across varied scales. Poison is a prominent technology for interventions into the general economies resulting from ‘the pressure exerted in all directions by life’. As a technology of death for what is deemed waste or excess, poison envelopes organisms and space into the realm of ‘the useful’.

The application of millions of tonnes of poison to organisms all over the planet greatly influences the overall sphere available to different life forms, to the benefit of privileged humans who fit into dominant social orders. What can be gleaned from Bataille is an understanding of these orders as economies. As such, martial economies of poison are fuelled by desires for order, utility, cultivation and cleanliness, and by fear and revulsion towards waste, filth and excess. The utilization of poison highlights a drive for the homogenous that Bataille so eloquently captures; a drive for utility and mastery, which is also an anxious drive, animated by fear of the hordes; the piles of ants; the overtaking of a tiled terrace; the zombies; the immigrants. Poison use is also animated by repulsion towards these swarms: how they grow, multiply, and steal utility, rendering things useless by eating or soiling them. Poison offers respite from this fear and a way to act on this disgust, by swiftly eliminating repulsive, threatening, or frightening excess. The ubiquitousness of poison, and the way it has been developed and used without clear distinctions between human and non-human pests and use in or out of war, suggests that despite norms and treaties, and regardless of humanist naïveté positing that poison is exceptional or unnecessary, poison use is often animated by rationales of utility. As a mode of martial expenditure, poison makes spaces vacant by death, ridding a locale of its dirt, trash, waste, or vermin, making room for that which has been deemed worthy.