Abstract
Life is inseparable from death. To live amid violent death is to have it penetrate the body. This is necropolitics as the study of life’s inherence to death, of bodies continuous with their violent environment, or better ‘death world’. Its ontology is the wounded body, drawn from the flesh as outlined by Merleau-Ponty and conatus by Spinoza. Inspired by the former, the wound inscribes death on the flesh and renders it inseparable from the death world; while, following the latter, the body stays death to go on living despite its violent surrounds. Through testimonies of inhabitants in Michoacán, necropolitics moves beyond transcendental abstraction and toward an engagement with lived experience. Testimonies are emergent reconstructions of meaning, wherein inhabitants reveal how violent death is not simply imposed on them, but how the body-as-wound is composed of, and composes, the death world.
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Notes
- 1.
Betty refers to the disappearance of 43 Normalista students in Ayotzinapa on September 26, 2014.
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Emerson, R.G. (2019). The Wounded Body: A Necropolitics of Living Death. In: Necropolitics. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12302-4_3
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