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punishments meted out for transgressions of Party rules. Through a ritualised practice of revolutionary justice called ‘People’s Trials’ (juicios populares), the Party regularly sentenced to death those deemed political or social enemies. Rural communities under Sendero control served as prime locations for staging the juicios where residents were expected to participate in the executions to show their loyalty and subjection. People’s Trials were a technique for forming a revolutionary public: both in the sense of creating a political community and transforming the people
entities within the nation-state. Lars Ove Trans follows the repatriation of the corpse of a dead Mexican migrant worker from his home in the USA to his community of origin in the state of Oaxaca. As a recent phenomenon, the federal Mexican state supports the repatriation of corpses for burial in Mexican soil, once more showing how burial may be taken as the ‘ultimate test of belonging’ (Geshiere 2005). However, migrants have multiple sites of belonging and often uphold partial membership of several political communities. Therefore the repatriation of the migrant corpse
, Bataille points to the fear of death and the attempts of authorities to ameliorate and control the powers of abjection of dead bodies as constitutive elements in relation to political communities. Unlike many other attempts at identifying the defining traits of sovereignty, Bataille understands sovereignty as an effect of practice rather than seeing a sovereign will as the source of sovereignty. He may easily be criticised for the unmistakably vitalist tenor of his fascination with the decision, excess and (disregard of) death, and his corresponding critique of the dull
in the diasporic imagination. Nevertheless, the numbers of posthumous repatriations are significant with an estimated annual average of 8,000–9,000 cadavers in recent years (Lestage 2008: 210).2 Not only do the high rates of post-mortem repatriations in themselves merit attention, the contention of this chapter is that the subject also provides a unique prism for studying the politics of identity, membership and obligation in relation to political communities. Taking my cue from Foucault’s description of the body as ‘the inscribed surface of events’ (1977b: 148
mass graves and legal persecution of the perpetrators, are important historical contexts, while small arms proliferation, organised criminal networks, drug trafficking, human trafficking and the infiltration of the state by parallel, clandestine structures are highly significant contemporary contextual factors. For this reason, the analysis here relies on the significance and gendered meanings of mutilated female bodies in the present process of state formation in Guatemala, on the role they play in the making and territorialisation of political communities and on
biodisciplinary power has never been deployed in the service of humanity’s universal interest, due to the unfortunate inexistence of a collective actor embodying such an interest. Hardt and Negri seems to be the only theoreticians of ontological biopolitics believing in the very possibility of such an actor, while the others follow Carl Schmitt in insisting on the onto logical impossibility of an all-inclusive political community (the act of exclusion as the constitutive act of political communities).21 While biodisciplinary power was never all-inclusive in its operations
-humanizing gesture.38 But were the bodies of those claimed to be terrorists reduced to mere animal matter or dead meat? Here, perhaps ironically, by staging such incidents as the deaths of ‘terrorists’ who had blown themselves up, the security police attached an identity that remained essentially human, part of a political community, even if, for some, they may have been regarded as inhumane. Indeed, what has been termed here as the routine bureaucracy of death served only to reinforce the fact that these were humans. Thus, for instance, the pieces of flesh from blown-up bodies
reburials fell outside the TRC’s purview, being the domain of family and the ANC, they constituted an important moment, in which the body handed over to the family now returned to its political community as well as to a wider nation. Reburials also had the effect of rescripting the exhumations themselves, becoming dominantly ANC moments. Through the scripts of exhumation and reburial, the absent and missing body was produced as evidence, testifying from the grave to apartheid’s atrocity, and later, individually identified, produced as the nation’s hero on whose body