Thanatopolitics: Mutilating Autodefensas

Abstract

The state response is to capture and disband the autodefensa movement. This is thanatopolitics mutilating life, collapsing living death into institutional power. It reproduces a closed (read: mutilated) body that either confirms the state or is disbanded. Mutilation is the basis for thanatopolitical rule. It is not the result of war, or of the jailing and killing of prominent autodefensas. Rather, mutilation is the basis for order, a means of encasting living death within state power. The official response to the autodefensas is a perpetual rupturing of life as it appears, and indeed, as it must appear for thanatopolitics. Revealed is how thanatopolitics undoes and rebuilds bodies along official lines: it is the machinic enslavement of the ex-autodefensas that reduces them to state power and it is processes of subjectification that install a tending toward protocol among the newly created Fuerza Rural and later the Policía Michoacán.