‘The Emperor of All Maladies, the King of Terrors’: The Violent Somatechnics of Cancer

This article considers the current worldwide cancer epidemic as shaped through complex somatechnical intra-actions between the intimately fleshy suffering of individual bodies and structural violence exerted through carcinogenic necrotechnologies such as pesticides. Additionally, it unpacks the epistemologies of ignorance that characterise contemporary cancer imaginaries in the west by reflecting on how they operate through the widespread deployment of warfare metaphors; metaphors that, in the twenty-first century, have morphed into ‘war against cancer-as-terror(ist)’- images. United States oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee’s bestselling book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (2011) – also the winner of the Guardian’s non-fiction book award – figures as a nodal point for the ways in which mainstream western cancer narratives and biomedical models obscure the links between cancer and what anthropologist-chemist Anastasia Karakasidou calls chemical modernity; that is, the global spread of carcinogens as a consequence of the worldwide racial capitalist transformations of agriculture and production through chemicalisation. Investigating how epistemologies of ignorance work at the levels of cancer biology, cancer treatment, and environmental carcinogenesis, this article at the same time also demonstrates how the somatechnical lens makes it possible to analyse the intertwined operations of violence, power, technologies, and bodies at all of these levels. This analysis is then complemented by a contemplation of the conative vitality of bodily matter that ontologically accounts for the chiasmatic two-way process between techné and soma that is central to a somatechnical understanding of cancerous embodiment. This article also uses autobiographical material to reflect upon the ways in which epistemologies of ignorance and their matching stories of cancer as natural pathology/enemy/doppelgänger/terrorist are nourished at the individual level of experience of cancer patients and their companions and carers.