Denise Ferreira da Silva, No-Bodies: Law, Raciality, Violence

Here are some quotes (and a few comments in red) taken from da Silva's "No-Bodies," which I have added to the dropbox.

Ferreira da Silva – No-Bodies: Law, Raciality, Violence

THE PROJECT

213-  What I  do here is situate these occupations of Rio's favelas  in the recent reconfiguration of the global political (ethical-juridical) stage that places the state at the frontlines of racial subjugation.

More specifically, this article introduces a formulation of racial violence that captures how raciality immediately justifies the state's decision to kill certain persons -  mostly (but not only) young men and women of colour -  in the name of self-preservation. Such killings do not unleash

an ethical crisis because these persons' bodies and the territories they inhabit always-already signify violence.

My analysis of these occupations of Rio de Janeiro's favelas highlights how, because framed as necessary for the reappropriation of these territories, they constitute a mode of racial subjugation, namely racial violence, in which the state occupies the frontlines. what these occupations exemplify, I  argue, is a moment of the political marked by the dis/appearance of the distinction between the law (as legality) and the state (as authority) that sustains the nation-state's claims to  legitimacy.

With the nation-state comes a certain account of sovereignty. State sovereignty as a concept comes into being around the time of the birth of the nation-state as concept (Treaty of Westphalia, 1648). With the birth of the nation-state, models of citizenship are also born.  A lot of Ferreira's work focuses on Hegel's role in determining who can be considered a subject - or a political subject - in the emerging territoriality of the nation-state. Without going into too much detail, two dates are very important here, the other one that which Sylvia Wynter underscores, 1492, the date she names as the beginning of the colonial period during which black life is juridically and philosophically excluded from the concept of the human. These two dates are important because they both signal active projects to disavow black life (and this of course includes indigenous life). Ferreira's project in this piece is to underscore that this disavowal is what enables the state to enter into the favelas of Rio, killing black people, without suspending the law (or enacting what Schmitt and Agamben, after Schmitt, call the state of exception, an exception imposed by the sovereign to the state of the law). Indeed, the state can and must enter the favelas to solidify not only its territory but its very universality (and with it, its concept of whiteness as universal). 

QUESTIONS/ANALYSES

219-How can this grounding of universality in necessitas, the epistemological figuring of reason as violence, sustain an account of how raciality, a social scientific signifier of human difference, fashions the juridical architectures and procedures of the global present? Is it possible to do so without rehearsing raciality's very production of the racial subaltern subject as the sole agent of violence? [H]ere I read racial and cultural difference as a political signifiers, moments of deployment of power in the naming of modes of being human -that is, in the very designing of the notion of humanity now circulating in the global vocabulary.

The move Ferreira makes here is important to underline: what she is focusing on are the power relations that produce the racialized subject. These power relations are always, for Ferreira, imbricated in juridical architectures and procedures.

291- For this is necessary if the question implicit in the opening quote is to be adequately and politically formulated; if one wishes to comprehend how is it possible that that which should happen to nobody, to 'no human being', has consistently delineated the existence of so many human beings - those whose bodies signify something that seem to escape all that should be comprehended by the Enlightenment notion of humanity, and its ontoepistemological descriptors, namely universality and historicity. [R]aciality institutes an ethico-juridical position that belongs in the stage of exteriority, one which post-Enlightenment articulations of universality and historicity fail to comprehend.

Ferreira's argument is complex here as it has to do with the question of interiority: for whom is interiority (i.e., subjectivity) a given? And whose being is excluded from that interiority (and, as can be surmised, what kinds of violent consequences become possible when interiority is excised from being). The bodies killed in the favelas can be killed without being mourned (by the state) because they do not carry the subjectifying qualities of enlightenment notions of humanity. They are neither universal (Hegel) nor do they have history (Wynter).

This analysis could of course be discussed in relation to the continued lack of consequence for the killing of black bodies in other contexts - Trayvon Martin would only name one instance.

224-I will not repeat the whole argument here except to say that my mapping of the analytics of raciality shows how, in scientific rewritings of the human body and territory, self-determination remains the exclusive attribute of the rational mind, which exists in the kingdom of freedom, where

transcendentality is realised, namely where reside the ethical-juridical things of reason, modem subjects whose thoughts, actions and territories refigure universality.

Neurotypicality rears its head here in the Kantian account of rationality. Whose knowledge makes a difference? Only universal knowledge, only knowledge already recognized as worthy of being known, counts.

231- in these territories the state's right to kill is always-already legitimate.

From that position, the one that gazes at the horizon of death, it is impossible to distinguish between the police's law-enforcing and the drug dealers' law-breaking actions. This in-difference  refigures the

particular mode though which, in the global present, the state performs its role in racial subjugation. For this reason, I  think, the dead bodies of black and brown teenagers count not as casualties of urban wars, unleashed because the state needs to recuperate the inhabitants of these spaces back into its ethical fold. In this affectable  territory the state performs in/difference; for the favelas'  residents are nobodies as their existence unfolds before  (in front of) ethical life, the ethical-juridical

territory the architectures and procedures of law enforcement are designed to protect.

This returns to the point made above about the fact that a state of exception is not necessary for the state to deploy violence against racialized bodies. 

234- What the notion of racial violence does is to capture the workings of the most insidious power effect of raciality, the logic of obliteration, which is inscribed in the very production of racial subaltern subjects as the affectable 1. Racial violence, unleashed in the in/difference that collapses administration of justice in/to law enforcement, immediately legitimating the state's deployment of its forces of self-preservation, does not require stripping off signifiers of humanity.

Universal humanity must be preserved, and for that, neurodiversity and/as the radicalized other, has to be obliterated. This ensures the preservation of the state. Universal humanity and the state thereby mirror one another. This, Ferreira underlines, continues to be the case in the more globalized era of neoliberal capital in which we live. 

235- For raciality assures that, everywhere and anywhere, across the surface of the planet, that ever-threatening 'other' exists because already named; as such, it is an endless threat because its necessary difference consistently  undermines the subject of ethical life's arrogation of self- determination.

Erin