Biopolitics and Disposable Bodies

Biopolitics and the Disposable Body

Biopolitics has become one of the essential categories of contemporary political philosophy. Among the many who have contributed to its conception and problematization are Giorgio Agamben (1998; 1999; 2005), Antonio Negri (Hardt and Negri, 2001), and Roberto Esposito (2008; 2013). ⁴ Their analyses address in various ways the renewal of a concept developed by Michel Foucault (see, e.g., 1980; 1991). Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977) mentions biopolitics, but it is in the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1978) that the term acquires its now familiar connotations. Here the term is used to designate one of the two basic dimensions of the power that contemporary political technology has developed over life. According to Foucault, one pole of this power focuses on the body as a machine (its education, increase in skills, empowerment, usefulness, and docility), giving rise to an anatomo-politics ⁵ of the human body. The other pole focuses on the body as a species (e.g., birth, mortality, health, proliferation, life span, and all the conditions that can alter these elements) and generates a biopolitics of the population that operates from a definite set of interventions and regulatory controls (1980: 167–171).

Foucault points to modernity as the inflection point between anatomo-politics and biopolitics. According to him, sovereign power originally consisted of a right to acquisition—the power to appropriate things, time, bodies, and life and even to suppress them (1980: 164–165). The advent of modernity displaced the suppression of life with its management and maximization. Foucault points out that the seventeenth century served as the starting point: between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries a series of disciplinary technologies focused on the individual body arose as life began to take center stage in political strategies. This shift toward the human body was, in his opinion, already fully evident by the nineteenth century, when the population was naturalized and became an object of study as part of a system of production. At this new turning point what was at issue was not only pursuing the individualizing effects of anatomy, centered on the body as a machine, but governing individuals as biological entities (1980: 169–245).

While Foucault points out that the inclusion of life in politics took place in modern times, Giorgio Agamben (1998) thinks that it has been subject to sovereign power since ancient times. He examines the hidden structure of sovereignty, beginning with a linguistic analysis of the two terms that refer to “life” in Greek: zoe, life as a common feature of all beings (animals, men, and gods), and bios, the life of an individual or group. This is, therefore, not natural life but qualified life, that of the bios politikos. The distinction is essential for Agamben because it is the cornerstone of his concept of sovereignty. In his view, sovereign power can suppress the living body or, more to the point, exclude it from the legal order, fully exposed in its condition as simple life removed from any responsibility or legal obligation. Thus he defines the sovereign not as one who can suppress life first and manage it later but as one who is authorized to leave bare life ⁶ in a state of exception or suspension (2005: 4, 6):

The state of exception is not a special kind of law (like the law of war); rather, insofar as it is a suspension of the juridical order itself, it defines law’s threshold concept. . . . It is defined as a kenomatic state, an emptiness and standstill of the law, in which the bare life is subject to the arbitrariness of the powers, both legal and illegal. In this sense, the subjects remain outside of legality, they remain suspended.

For Agamben, there is something particularly modern in this exercise of power; according to him, the sovereign’s dispossession of the subject has become common practice. The exception becomes the norm in what Agamben calls the “state of exception,” giving as an example the concentration camp. Politically, those who are located in this ambiguous area are not recognized; they become disposable in terms of legal discourse because they are not even valued in their totality as life. Life is canceled, and therefore the killing of such a category of people (“nonhumans”) has no legal implications; anyone can erase these lives with impunity because they are void, and those responsible are not even condemned by traditional rituals or official law (1998: 29):

The relation of exception is a relation of ban. He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable.

The example of Auschwitz that Agamben uses clearly shows this “canceled” humanity. Referring to those who have lost everything, Agamben uses the term “Muselmann” as it was employed in the concentration camps: ⁷ “The Muselmann is a figure of limits of a special kind, in which not only categories such as dignity and respect but even the very idea of an ethical limit lose their meaning” (1999: 63). For people such as these, there is only bare life as a simple, inert body. There is nothing to negotiate; they live on the border between inclusion and exclusion, life and death. In Auschwitz, says Agamben, “people did not die; rather, corpses were produced. Corpses without death, non-humans whose decease is debased into a matter of serial production. And, according to a possible and widespread interpretation, precisely this degradation of death constitutes the specific offense of Auschwitz, the proper name of its horror” (1999: 71).

The example of Auschwitz has been refined and updated in a variety of ways in our time, not only in the strict sense of any state’s political commitment but also in transnational or regional power plays and interests that go beyond the classical mode of conceiving the limit of life within the legal order of the nation-state. Indeed, with the transit from the governmentality ⁸ of classical liberalism to that of current neoliberalism, the nation-state no longer has total control over the population and becomes part of a scenario defined by an entrepreneurial model across the social fabric, the subordination of living bodies (food, health, work, hygiene, war) to corporate development, the reduction of public benefits to contractual private services, and the extinction of any concept of collective responsibility (Hardt and Negri, 2001).

Hardt and Negri (2001) are undoubtedly two of the most important figures in the revival of Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, linking biopower to neoliberal capitalism. They believe that post-Fordist capitalism, ⁹ new information technologies, and new forms of life have led to two structural changes in the field of labor: the growing importance of “immaterial labor,” based on the biopolitical exploitation of corporal, affective, and communicative qualities, and the importance of transnational social and technological networks in an increasingly deregulated and globalized labor market, which means that the mass of the exploited includes not just the industrial proletariat but a diversity of social groups. They use Foucault’s theories to address the interweaving of infrastructure and superstructure, as defined by Marx, and to establish a historical sequence of increased sophistication in the technologies of domination employed by modern capitalism: first “sovereignty,” then “disciplines,” and, finally, biopolitics. But, at the same time, they think that one must go “beyond” Foucault because he lacks a global vision. This leads them to link biopolitics and globalization ¹⁰ as functional aspects of the great historical process of capitalist accumulation and expansion, which, they argue, has followed a path of increasing economic, political, and cultural domination—to the point that, today, it controls the most intimate strands of every living body in all corners of the world.

For Hardt and Negri, the state is no longer the single imperial political machine capable of reducing the human being to a mere disposable body or administering it as such; the global advent of neoliberalism has led to the emergence of legal or illegal economic elites so powerful that, like the state, they can transform the capital body into a superfluous body in an instant. The human body, they point out, is now exposed to violence from both the state and the economic powers. These considerations show that, as posited by Agamben, the figure of homo sacer (the individual experiencing bare life) is increasingly widespread throughout the world.

One of the elites of which Hardt and Negri speak—and the one with the greatest biopolitical potential—is undoubtedly the drug trafficking industry. This illegal industry has successfully inserted itself into the economic sphere because of its special, growth-oriented capacity to adapt to demand and internationalization, with a very strict division of labor across different locations that can adjust to the dynamics of the global economy. This is why the drug trafficking industry gives special attention to the consumer body, which is ultimately the one supplying its huge profits. There are, of course, in this body inventory of drug trafficking many more bodies: bodies of confrontation, bodies at risk, locked-up bodies, tortured bodies, and, above all, dead bodies. ¹¹ The use of bodies by the drug industry has been a Latin American reality for several decades. The cases of Guatemala, Bolivia, Peru, and, above all, Colombia (with the inclusion of guerrillas in drug trafficking, hired assassins, and the phenomenon of social cleansing) are clear examples of a political erasure of the human being that leaves the body exposed to use, abuse, and despoliation. ¹²

This residual process has become ferocious in Mexico and, in the words of Carlos Monsiváis (2004: 27), speaks of a “reduction of human life” in the context of a culture that does not correspond with civil norms or criteria. Thus death in Mexican drug trafficking seems to become a “supreme delight seasoned with the limitless torture and humiliation of the victims” (25). More than an informal state of exception in Agamben’s terms, Mexico seems to be creating a culture of exception brought about by narco-capitalist delirium. The more than 50,000 dead recorded in the past six years and the different ways in which their bodies have been abused indicate that the humanity of the victims, along with the value and sacredness of life, is in question, much as happened in the concentration camps during the second half of the twentieth century. Mexico is, then, a place where all living bodies are exposed to a double paradigm of violence: that of the police-state and that of the drug industry. The problem in this clash of forces is that not even the state can protect its citizens from drug cartel violence, nor are the latter able to seize total power. This leaves the rest of society in limbo. It is precisely in the interstices between these alternative powers and the state of exception and bare life to which Mexicans are subjected daily that Alejandro Almazán’s novel Entre perros (2009) is situated, emerging as a tool for denunciation and a representation of disposable bodies.

The Disposable Mexican

“How have we managed to build a country for amassing dead rather than for organizing a society for the living?” Bishop Raúl Vera asked this question during the presentation of País de muertos (Almazán and Osorno, 2011), a collection of newspaper articles regarding violence and impunity in Mexico. The journalist and writer Alejandro Almazán seems to ask the same question in his novel Entre perros (2009), in which we witness the world of drug trafficking: powerful drug lords, corrupt politicians, heartless gunmen, a society that lives in fear, and, above all, violence and death. Bodies and more bodies are stacked upon each other in the book’s nearly 400 pages.

The novel is structured around three friends who share a narrative at the beginning and the end. One is a Mexican reporter named Diego Zapata (the narrator), who risks his friendships to report on a story that he barely manages to survive. This is a figure who moves from physical to social agony and ends up labeled a traitor. Another is Carlos “El Rayo” Mondragón, a boxing promoter who becomes immersed in the drug world and ends up dying as one more piece in the drug trafficking chess game. Finally, there is Ramón Guerrero, a.k.a. “El Bendito,” a hit man who works for one of the most powerful cartels in Mexico and has a story full of contrasts; he is the main character in a war between powers in which his friends seem to be his greatest enemies. In his wickedness, he becomes a symbol of the daily violence that prevails in contemporary Mexico. Separated by a mass slaughter that takes place in their hometown of Diosmío, Sinaloa, these three friends meet again in Culiacán after a macabre discovery: a man is found hanging off a city bridge, and instead of his head the head of a Saint Bernard has been stitched to his body. Although the narrative covers only a few days, flashbacks allow us to see and understand the actions of the characters and the geographical locations where these take place.

Entre perros is a tour through different parts of contemporary urban Mexico: the Federal District, Culiacán, Tijuana, and Ciudad Juárez. It reveals the city as the locus par excellence of contemporary life (i.e., violence), juxtaposing it with a much more peaceful rural past (Almazán, 2009: 32–35):

In the past, life was different.

People aged with dignity because affairs could be settled with words. Grandmothers spread aromas across town when they put meat on the grill. . . . The earth was muscular, gave good harvests. . . . [Now] the guamúchiles wore a fading green and those that remained standing were scrawny, as if forced to stand against their will. The pigs encountered death. Rabbits disappeared quickly. . . . And all of us stopped aging with honor because there were no more words.

The fact that Almazán locates violence in the city is merely a historical/referential reality. As a journalist, he knows that cities are marked by the criminal fingerprints of their neoliberal destiny. But this corrupt and violent world is not particular to a social class or area, and therefore Ramón, Carlos, and Diego pass through lower-class neighborhoods, bars, and brothels but also through wealthy areas. In fact, much of the story takes place in the presidential residence, a symbol of Mexican corruption in the novel. The novel’s superbly sketched presidential couple recalls former president Vicente Fox and his wife, Marta Sahagún (2009: 240–241):

Yes, Santiago; and? We already won, right? Canaglia did not know how to explain his own situation but did not issue any recriminations either; María controlled the relationship. It was a matriarchy. The cocky cowboy persona was reduced to a simple and shy groom when his wife took the reins. Some said Canaglia was an imbecile. Those of us who came to know him have another theory: his problem was that he fell in love with someone who never loved anybody except herself. And what ties us to El Plebe?, asked Canaglia. You just have to let him work, said León as he beheaded the champagne bottle; he wanted to pass on the idea of a single cartel but, in the end, thought it unnecessary.

The narrative at the center of the novel leaves little to the imagination. It reveals, point by point and with inhuman cruelty, the key to every disposable body in the state of exception that is Almazán’s Mexico. The novel is structured around multiple perspectives. On the one hand, we have the drug cartels as seen through the memories of El Bendito and narrated in retrospect, almost in chronological order, by the narrator-journalist. On the other, the narrative voice shows the point of view of the police state via the conversations between President Santiago, his wife María, General Santana, and Lieutenant Matta. Thus the narrative delivers information from different viewpoints depending on the narrator’s view of its relevance, and this contributes to a certain textual mobility as the many stories run parallel to each other and intertwine. It is therefore possible to approach the power relations involved from different angles. The text portrays this as what Foucault (1991) called a microphysics of power—a theory that raises the possibility of understanding power as a relationship with certain specificities, including the idea that it does not merely lie with the state but rather is part of a different nucleus. ¹³ In the novel, the other center of power is the drug trafficking industry, which emerges as an economic elite capable of deciding the fate of any living body (2009: 13): “And that, said El Bendito, is a fucking pleasure, dude; it feels so nice when you waste a motherfucker in a blink, it’s as if you wielded the grace of Christ. Man, what freaking power one gets from fucking bullets!”

The act of killing as seen by El Bendito is an investiture of power, one formerly controlled by the state but now also articulated by an external power that vies with the raison d’être of the constitutional order. Rather than separate them, however, this rivalry seems to join them; in spite of their clear differences, both powers are a by-product of hegemony: one is based on political values and the other on financial and economic ones. This approach also implies a destabilization of the social contract through which the state guarantees the security of its citizens. This even has epistemological implications: if the state no longer has the monopoly of violence, then it may no longer be solely responsible for the protection and safeguarding of human beings. In Entre perros we witness this dynamic of power relations through a narrator-witness, a linking figure that reveals the intertwining and dissociation of the two machineries that have led the country to a state of exception (Almazán, 2009: 273):

Encarnación Castro. That was the name of the man who, after being beheaded, was hung on El Puente Negro with the head of a Saint Bernard. He was no older than 26 and dressed in the Italian fashion, as well as that of Beto Quintanilla. He had a passion for power that exceeded that of anyone his age: he commanded the Emes, the gunmen who looked after his father. He was the son of Alacrán Castro, head of the valley’s cartel.

The youth arrived in Culiacán some days ago, very cocky. He went around saying that he’d exterminate the cartels of the Northwest and the Sierra, commanded by El Plebe Zaragoza and Chalo Lizárraga. He wanted too much. Surely, when he felt the first blow or the first bullet, he realized that in Sinaloa luck and bluster are not enough.

It is likely that the head of the National Police, General Rafael Toledo, is in mourning: Encarnación was his godson. That is why he’s ordered a tremendous search. He wants the murderers. Perhaps he has even given his word to Alacrán that he will capture them so that the drug lord can throw them to pigs.

So far, three of the five gunmen who killed Encarnación have paid their dues: Capo, El Carnicero, and El Centenarco are dead.

Toledo could give Alacrán very bad news if he only knew that the other thugs used to belong to the Emes. Today they are no longer M26 and M27 but Cartucho and El Bendito.

This passage, presented in the form of a newspaper article, shows the power dynamics among groups that seem to join and separate depending on their own interests, crushing, in the process, thousands of Mexicans who are denied their fundamental rights. Both settings are also in a state of social breakdown that affects all the various strata of Mexican society, treating them all as “disposable.” Here, this is represented by Encarnación’s hanging body. Given the absence of the rule of law in Mexico and the possibility of canceling lives without any liability, the exception becomes the rule and we witness what Agamben (1998) calls “bare life”: life stripped of any right. The lack of legal status allows for the exclusion of the human being; placed in the concentration camp, this body can be killed by anyone without committing murder (Almazán, 2009: 171):

I can’t remember what we were talking about, but what followed can’t be erased from my eyes: some guy, riding in a gray jeep, double-parked in front of us, so Ramón had difficulty maneuvering to exit. Hey, mate, move your shit, said Ramón. . . . The man took off his sunglasses and looked at him as if issuing a warning: Shout at me again and I’ll kill you. Then I saw how my friend took a cigarette and, without lighting it, put it behind his ear. I’ll be back, Diego. Like a warrior, he got out of the truck and faced this bastard with Pablo Escobar delusions. Move it, mate, you’d better. Fuck me!, the other answered and pulled out a .22. I watched in the rear-view mirror as Ramón, always in control of himself, pulled on the Beretta and shattered the braggart’s forehead. Murder at close range.

Whether the death is that of the young drug dealer Encarnación, El Bendito’s mother, Lieutenant Matta, El Rayo, or the man who refuses to move his truck, each of their lives seems to have no value in a society that produces only corpses, “corpses without death, non-humans whose decease is debased into a matter of serial production” (Agamben, 1999: 71) From this point of view, the Mexican “no future” as presented in Entre perros is the result of a state of exception, a “zone of indistinction in which fact and law coincide” (Agamben, 2005: 26) and upon which globalization founds its sovereignty. In these ambiguous areas, the distinctions between life and death disappear, giving rise to a contemporary necro-politics that engages in the serial production of corpses.

In fact, given the everyday nature of the war, the life of these disposable subjects is no different from that of animals and, to some extent, is worse because it can be ended with impunity. Neither El Bendito, El Marlín, General Santana, Lieutenant Matta, or any other character involved in the countless murders committed in the novel seems to worry about the constitutional order, ethics, or morals. In any case, what seems to prevail is the law of the strongest (Almazán, 2009: 65):

In the purgatory of everyday life, where bullets fly and death stars glisten, these excesses painting blood apples on the asbestos, killing time, gliding through the air; sensationalism makes the gut pale, and dogs, instructed by the streets into social insubordination, tear at each other’s skin, brace themselves with pride and sacrifice their fangs to the rhythm of gunshots and friendships abused by hot air, egotism, and the ethereal struggle to know they are the baddest of the bad.

The “dog-eat-dog” view in this passage represents not only the struggle for power and monopoly of violence between the state and the cartels but also the anguish that must be borne by any individual in Mexico to avoid the worst. The terrible thing is that, despite people’s efforts—whether they hide, stay alert, demand that the state guarantee their security, or partner with the alternative power—a “fierce dog” will inevitably reach and devour them because there seems to be no place to run to.

Let us be a little more specific: Imagine that the “man” that Agamben refers to in his texts about the state of exception and the concentration camps is the reader and the “no-man” is the body hanging from the bridge, half-human and half-animal. Through this hellish image readers travel to a place—the concentration camp—that is inhabited by dogs who, as noted by Agamben, have lost everything in the strict sense of the word, “not only categories such as dignity and respect but even the very idea of an ethical limit.” Thus readers are made aware of the inhuman nature of contemporary Mexican society via the experience of those who have been arbitrarily reduced to dogs.

Entre perros intoxicates us so that we can connect our experience with that of the characters and, through them, with other people who live on the fringes of society. Thus violent death enables an exchange of fruitful experiences that removes us from that infamous bubble, allowing us to link our experiences with lived life and process information via a collective practice that restructures something that globalization has also arbitrarily fragmented: solidarity. In this sense, writers like Almazán understand that, to overcome the arbitrary effacement of the humanity of the subjects affected by this evil, they may not remain local but must seek allies in informed readers.

The relevance of the recurrent topic of drug trafficking in literature has led to controversy regarding its raison d’être and effects. Several writers who do not deal with this subject and a good number of critics take a reductionist view, arguing that this literature falls into a meaningless costumbrismo, recreating exotic postcards about the narcoculture (see Lemus, 2005). However, those who censure these books do not take into account high-quality works in this genre such as Almazán’s Entre perros.

Drug trafficking has found a space in Mexican social life because of its ability to infiltrate and mutate. The narcoculture is only one aspect of this phenomenon. The fact that writers like Almazán present death and violence does not necessarily mean that they are spreading this disease; rather, theirs appears to be a reaction—a need to expose, criticize, and denounce the effect of drug trafficking on society, especially the vast number of deaths over the past six years and the state of exception that seems to characterize Mexico today. Violent death turned into literature also offers the possibility of reconstructing a kind of solidarity founded on diversity, since it provides an encounter between people who, despite living in different social contexts, could share the same fate, given the existing legal vacuum. Amid the uncertainties and the ephemeral nature of the stories of violence we are exposed to on a daily basis, narconarrative raises the possibility of thinking about a state in which ethics and human rights are attainable.