It is impossible to face neoliberal biopolitics absent concrete action.

I conclude this article by refusing to offer concrete (strategic or tactical) examples of the kind of mortal—or perhaps even morbid—agency I have in mind. To do so risks turning this agency, in turn, into a perruque. But we need not look far to find contemporary occasions for disaffirmation or revolt, whether implicit or explicit: elegiac or wrathful rejoinders, we might say, to civil death, dispossession, degradation—the condition and the consequence, the means and, for some, the end, of neo-liberal biopolitics, of life itself. De Certeau’s nativist example of Indigenous tactics in the face of Spanish conquistadors ought to be updated in the context of American and Canadian race relations, for instance, and we might begin to reckon with the Black Lives Matter protests that garnered worldwide attention following the slaying of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Dontre Hamilton, Trayvon of Martin, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, and so many others, including, more recently, the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor—and the worldwide protests that erupted mid-pandemic in 2020. In the Canadian context, I have in mind the uncounted child victims of Indian residential schools, the response to missing and murdered Indigenous women, and #IdleNoMore, an Indigenous-led movement that began in November 2012. I am thinking, then, particularly of the kinds of rhetorical agency that must mobilize around such dying and around unmarked graves, not simply as a politics that memorializes and affirms the positive value of life itself, or even of lives in their singularity and materiality (as much as they are both singular and material)—and not simply as resistance, against killing and against injustice—but also in a struggle that hearkens death, holds it and hears it, and refuses the productive terms by which some lives are lived, valued, and exalted, while for others it is their death that is forcibly lived, valued, and exalted.

For within neo-liberal biopolitics, an abstract life itself is the ultimate perruque, the ruse, the disguise, the meme, that obscures the fact that some lives simply— still—do not matter, that some lives will be exposed to death, that some lives will be ritually dispossessed, disappeared, shot, suffocated, and systematically cannibalized. Hierarchies of racialized and gendered difference drive our economies, where difference itself is spatialized by boundaries and inscribed on the bodies of the surplus populations that live and die in obscurity. We might wonder, then, and we might feel grief and rage, as we should, when we bear witness to the city-state’s violent security and paramilitary reprisals, its efforts to “restore” order, which is to say, to spatially displace, segregate, contain, and enclose the uprising thanato/polis and not least to shore up the biopolitical privilege of “threatened” whiteness and white lives. To seek a rhetorical agency in the response to structural violence is more than to politicize death: it is to situate an aesthetics of existence, the making of (a) life, within the resonant, rhythmic, and temporizing horizons of death, and to cut across the spatial stratifications, the paratactical enclosures, of the bio/polis.