The impact is Overkill, the temporality of violence against Black and Queer bodies that has the ultimate motive of ending life itself through ontological capture.

Overkill is a term used to indicate such excessive violence that it pushes a body beyond death. Overkill is often determined by the postmortem removal of body parts, as was the case with both Lauryn Paige and Rashawn Brazell. The temporality of violence, the biological time when the heart stops pushing and pulling blood, yet the killing is not finished, suggests the aim is not simply the end of a specific person but the ending of trans/queer life itself. This is the time of trans/queer death—when the utility of violence gives way to the pleasure in the other’s immortality. If trans/queers, along with others, approximate nothing, then the task of ending, of killing that which is constituted as already dead must go beyond normative times of life. In other words, if Lauryn Paige was dead after the first few stab wounds, then what do the remaining fifty wounds signify? The legal theory that is offered to nullify the practice of overkill often functions under the name of the trans- or gay-panic defense. Both of these defense strategies argue that the murderer became so enraged after the “discovery” of either genitalia or someone’s sexuality they were forced to protect themselves from the threat of trans/queerness. Estanislao Martinez of Fresno, California, used the trans-panic defense and received a four-year prison sentence after admittedly stabbing J. Robles, a Latina trans woman, at least twenty times with a pair of scissors. Importantly, this defense is often used, as in the case of Gwen Araujo, J. Robles, and Lauryn Paige, after the murderer and victim had engaged in sex. The logic of the trans-panic defense as an explanation for overkill, in its gory semiotics, offers us a way of understanding the place of nothingness. Overkill names the technologies necessary for, and the epistemic commitment to, doing away with that which is already gone. Here, trans/queer life is a threat that is so unimaginable that one is forced to not simply murder but to push the dead backward out of time, out of history, and into that which comes before. Yet this overkill registers as little in the social—the double bind of inhabiting the place of both menace and void.36 In thinking the overkill of Lauryn Paige Fuller and Rashawn Brazell, I return to the ontopolitical category of nothingness—the shadow of liberal democracy. The place of nothingness reemerges in its elegant precision with each case I offer—the repetitious futility of bringing into representation that which escapes it but remains in a para-vitalist order. By resituating this question in the positive, the something more often than not translated as the human is made to appear. Here the category of the human assumes generality, This content downloaded from 141.211.4.224 on Wed, 17 Jul 2024 19:10:21 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 34 Chapter One yet is activated, or more precisely weaponized, in the specificity of history and politics. To this end, the human, the something of this query, names the rightsbearing subjects or those who can stand before the law—the beneficiary of equality. The human, then, makes the nothing not only possible but necessary. Following this logic, the work of death, of the death that is already nothing, not quite human, binds the categorical (mis)recognition of humanity. The human resides in the space of life, and under the domain of Man, whereas the trans/queer inhabits the place of compromised personhood and in the zone of death. As perpetual and axiomatic threat to the human, the trans/queer is the negation, through inclusive exclusion, of democracy’s proper subject. Understanding the nothing as the unavoidable double of the human works to counter the arguments that suggest overkill and anti-trans/queer violence at large index a pathological break, and that the severe nature of these killings signals something extreme. In contrast, overkill is that which constitutes, via negation, equality’s form, which is lived by many as unfreedom. Or put another way, if the state is the enactment of a majoritarian collective unconscious, then its own intelligibility, or its own will to power, is rendered through the figure of the internal enemy and the mandatory forms of liquidation needed to face this inside/outside threat. Overkill, the calculated practice of gratuitous force, then, is the proper expression to the riddle of the trans/queer nothingness. However, the spectacular scene of overkill must not be singularly pathologized as this would, yet again, privatize violence’s epistemology under the individual while its structure remains intact. In the end, the killer never works alone. These vicious acts, therefore, must be held as an indictment of the very social worlds of which they are ambassadors. Overkill is what it means, what it must mean, to do violence to that which is nothing.