No-Bodies

When has it become a matter of fact — more than evidence, and yet not a self-evident 'truth' — that a (perhaps never to be known) number of young males and females perish as subjects of law's preserving violence? In this article, this question will guide a consideration of a dimension of contemporary global existence that should become a theme of the theorising of the political. It describes a political scene in which the arms of the state — the police and the military — deploy total violence as a regulating tactic. More specifically, it reads the state's occupations of Rio de Janeiro's economically dispossessed neighbourhoods, where drug traffickers compete to institute the 'law of the land', as enactments of a different kind of founding contract, racial violence signifies. In this account of the political (ethical-juridical) scene, the dead bodies of black and brown teenagers count not as casualties of urban wars, but as signifiers of the horizon of death. For the racial subaltern's existence as an effect of the tools of raciality (racial and cultural difference) unfolds in territories in which the state acts only in the name of its own preservation.