Table Of ContentSTUDIES OF THE AMERICAS
Necropolitics
Living Death in Mexico
R. Guy Emerson
Studies of the Americas
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R. Guy Emerson
Necropolitics
Living Death in Mexico
R. Guy Emerson
International Relations and Political Science
Universidad de las Américas Puebla
San Andrés Cholula, Puebla, Mexico
Studies of the Americas
ISBN 978-3-030-12301-7 ISBN 978-3-030-12302-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12302-4
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To Mum, Dad and Brad
Preface
Move with violence. This is the mantra that guides the book. To move
with violence, it will be argued, is integral to understanding life, death and
power in an evermore deadly Mexico. Moving with violence is acknowl-
edging how it informs life, how it breaches bodies and how it disrupts
government and any pretense to rule. To move with violence is not to
isolate it, but to recognize how it is lived, how it extends bodily capacity
and, in turn, how it fractures external organization. As a mantra, moving
with violence should not be understood as coming at the expense of con-
cerns for life and death. Nor should it be interpreted as a valorization of
violence. Violence is more productively understood as intersecting with
life and death in a manner that exceeds fxed appreciations of populations
and subjects. So too does it go beyond any particular moment of death to
instead resonate in and redirect life. The book follows violence because
violence forces you to move with it. You do not pass through violence,
from one safe haven to another. You are instead drawn into it, forced to
traverse its dangerous terrain, forced to accustom yourself to its horrors.
Yet, moving with violence was not the point of departure for this proj-
ect. Instead, it was the result of conversations with people living amid
death. The project began on the bloody, and ongoing, consequences of
the 2006 launch of the war on drugs. But to reduce violence to a particu-
lar policy, no matter how ill founded, would have been a mistake. The
futility of origins, lines of causality, attributions of responsibility and even
separating the good from the bad were the frst lessons learnt. To disen-
tangle government from organized crime, the cartels from administrating
life and death, and civil society from the re/production of violence is as
vii
viii PREFACE
quixotic as it is counterproductive. Violence in Mexico is too disorientat-
ing. Rather than beginning with state institutions or criminal organiza-
tions, the project took form as a study of individuals and communities
moved by violence. It became a study of going on living not in spite of the
death that surrounds life, but more disturbingly by attuning to it. Indeed,
living death, it is argued, is the constant in this violent turbulence. This
was another lesson learnt. Not that death is similarly experienced, nor that
to live violence in rural Michoacán is the same as to live it in Morelia.
Rather, that in contemporary Mexico all life is violently moved.
To move with violence disorientates not only life but also how a politics
of life and death is typically understood. If life is located amid a violence
without locus, then disrupted is the transcendent power of the state pre-
mised on its capacity to decide who lives and who dies. So too hamstrung
are any correctional politics premised on offcial interventions into how life
should be lived or how social existence should be classifed. If there is no
institution capable of suppressing life and no single authority distinguish-
ing between the worthy and unworthy, then replace a transcendent take on
life and death with one more immanent. As will be revealed, this shift is
painfully necessary. Institutional power in contemporary Mexico—be it the
state, organized crime or an amalgam of the two—is incapable of caring for
either the living or the dead. Both undo any politics of life and death as
they continually deny the body its political and biological content.
An immanent politics of life and death, by contrast, is an affrmation of
existence. Life is recognized as continually opened up and extended amid
death, as individuals learning from death. It may not offer an escape from
violence, but an immanent approach does replace the forceful reduction of
life to external authority. Disavowed is the disposability of life in favor of
its interconnectedness with the violent-laden surrounds. Bodies are tied to
one another and the elements and relations that make up their surrounds
in a manner productive of unique relations, affnities and potentiality. This
reorientated politics of life and death is not to suppress, eliminate or aban-
don life, but to celebrate it in its radical contingency. Life amid death
becomes the infnite elements and relations possible that enable a going
on living.
To think life and death immanently is only made possible by those liv-
ing death. Their actions, insights, anxieties and hopes are what have
enabled this book. If this is a work that attempts to move with violence,
then any such endeavor would have been inconceivable without their
c ontributions. My deepest thanks are extended to them for having trusted
PREFACE ix
me, especially given the dangers of talking to outsiders. To help me in this
endeavor of gaining trust, I have been fortunate enough to count on the
invaluable assistance of a group of fellow researchers. Not only have you
helped me with conducting interviews, but you have also allowed me to
appreciate the subtleties of living death, subtleties easily missed to some-
one like myself. So, to Jose Noé De Ita Zavala, Andrea Lona Elorza and
Dilan Ortiz Granados, my deepest thanks for your tireless work. Literally
this book could not have been written without you. Thanks also to
Dinorah Ivonne Mendoza Méndez, Ivonne Araly Macías Macías, Pablo
Reynoso Mazoy, Ana Sofía Arango Marcos and Diana Xóchitl Perez
Meneses whose assistance at various stages of investigating life and death
in Michoacán has been of great support.
Finally, as a book premised on thinking through the entwined nature of
life and death, I want to thank Mum and Dad, and to honor Brad Johns.
San Andrés Cholula, Mexico R. Guy Emerson
contents
1 L ife, Death and Power 1
Part I T he Wounded Body 21
2 N ecropolitics: From Corpse to Body 23
3 T he Wounded Body: A Necropolitics of Living Death 43
4 N ecropolitics and Resistance: The Autodefensa Movement 71
Part II T he Mutilated Body 101
5 Thanatopolitics: Mutilating Autodefensas 103
6 Mutilation Extended 127
7 M aking Killable: (Pure) Violence and a Suicidal State 149
8 N ecropolitics: Governing by the Campfire 171
I ndex 189
xi
