Resistance is a disruption that puts suffering at the praxis of biopolitcal neoliberalism, forcing light on injustice and othering.

In stark contrast, I would instead privilege the rhetorical agency of the city’s so-called waste products—the civilly dead, disappeared, decaying, delinquent—and suggest that they have the power to expose the biopolitical ruse, and to disrupt the system, by claiming their place not as waste products or by products of neo-liberal biopol- itics, but as its condition of possibility, its raw materials, its inclusive-exclusion. Theirs is neither a tactic nor a strategy in de Certeau’s sense; they do not make or do or make do with the tawdry products of the dominant cultural economy, but they force the fact that, in some sense, without them, there is no making or doing or living at all. The dead, disappeared, decaying, and delinquent forcibly remove la perruque and put it and its theological agencies out of work. My point here is not to propose an overarching—or, indeed, “strategic”—theory of death, but nei- ther is it to reduce the care for the dead, the dying, the decaying, the delinquent to mere symbolic action. Rather, it is to position them at the heart of neo-liberal biopolitics, to avow their centrality, not just as its waste products but also as fodder for our cannibalizing apparatus. For the cannibal is the appropriate figure for such a system, consumer culture turned, by its wicked army of tropes, on the flesh of its flesh. To struggle for life in this context is not to resort to a tactical politics of progressive living. It is to stand with and alongside the dead and disappeared— those our administrative system facelessly fucks over, those it indirectly kills in the passive voice by letting die.