Self-defense groups: between the negotiation of death and the management of life

Abstract

The bodies, through life, their forces and their administration have become the point where the exercises of power are articulated in contemporary societies. The limiting case is that where the body itself is extinguished in the production process. The conditions of violence turn the body into merchandise, the corpse into currency, and trigger processes of subjectivation in which citizens claim for themselves, through force, the position of administering justice. What is the point where this subjectivation originates? What does a person militate in an armed self-defense group? To point out possible response routes to these questions, we will elaborate the notion of life and its articulations both bio and necropolitical, by then problematize the conditions in which it becomes a subject of law in the violent conditions in Mexico, based on what we will articulate, the symptoms of a necropolitical state, the mundane virtualities shown by self-defense groups and the biopolitical efforts mobilized to capture or deactivate such virtualities.