NO-BODIES

LAW, RACIALITY AND VIOLENCE

Abstract

When has it become trivial – more than evidence, yet not an obvious “truth” – to have a substantial (albeit immeasurable) number of boys and girls succumbing as subjects of violence infringed to preserve the law? This article addresses this question by reflecting on a dimension of the contemporary global existence that should become a subject within the political science. It describes a political scenario in which the police and the army use total violence as a means of regulation. More specifically, it reviews the State’s occupations of economically unprivileged regions – where drug dealers compete to implement the “local law” – as representations of a different type of founding contract, as signifiers of racial violence. In this (ethical-juridical) political scenario, the dead bodies of mulatto and black adolescents do not count as urban war casualties, but rather as signifiers of the death horizon, as the existence of subordinate racial subjects derived from the raciality tools (racial and cultural difference) becomes evident in territories where the State is active only in behalf of its own preservation.