Colonialism’s ultimate goal is reengineering the colonized subject, not acquiring territory

Evidence

Wolfe’s notion of structural genocide opens up capacious venues of investigation that potentially have the capabilities to rewrite the history of colonialism and thus of modernity. An essential requirement for such revisions in writing history is to recognize political phenomena and then go beyond their political implications and political significance. Toward that effort, we might see colonialism as a modern project of total transformation, one that perpetually aims at reengineering the subject as nature. This, not territory, is the ultimate desideratum and terminus ad quem of colonialism, in its settler form or not, in its Orientalism, secularism, or economics. Settler colonialism only intensifies the phenomenon of colonialism, but does not create a different underlying structure of thought, a structure that governs categorically. The levels of intensification determine the quantity and volume, but not the quality, of the state of extraordinarity. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 424

Categorization

• QUESTION: Hallaq claims reengineering the subject ‘as nature’ is colonialism’s terminus. Worth chasing: how does this claim relate to the settler-vs-exploitation debate (Wolfe, Veracini) that Hallaq seems to be dissolving?
• XREF: Echoes the standing thesis about small acts of decorum toward corpses vs practical logic — colonialism’s real target is the subject’s deepest form, not surface outcomes. — connects to: British colonial policy framed colonialism itself as a remedy for backwardness, not its cause. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 235
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 424