Trujillo's Death Machine: The Creation of a State of Exception

Since we only briefly discussed Achille Mbembe’s “Necropolitics” on Monday, I would like to provide an [hopefully] insightful analysis on the role of sovereign power (specifically examining both necropower and biopower) in the context of Junot Díaz’s portrayal of Rafael Trujillo. How do characters in The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao maintain subjectivity in the delicate state of exception? How does Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics repeat or rework the ideas of biopolitical power posited by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben? How does the role of terror in politics redefine subjectivity and autonomy? I will argue that dictatorial power hyperbolizes the state of exception and blurs the line between biopower and necropower, ultimately marginalizing and disempowering a community and the individuals within it.

First, I would like to take a moment to expand on Mbembe’s cursory mention of Giorgio Agamben¹, who, in his “The Logic of Sovereignty” from Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), raises some illuminating points about the processes of subjectivization and individualization, through which an individual “binds himself to his own identity and consciousness and, at the same time, to an external power” (5). In Díaz’s novel, a Dominican identity tethered to terror results from Trujillo’s policies, and a paradoxical state of exception² arises, because that sovereign power (Trujillo) creates an impure judiciary, in which he is both outside and inside the decreed legal order. In short, Trujillo has the legal power to suspend the validity of the law, which places him above the law itself.  Trujillo’s citizenry is simultaneously a part of and apart from Trujillo’s law. Díaz illustrates that Trujillo

acted like he owned everything and everyone, killed whomever he wanted to kill… His Eye was everywhere; he had a Secret Police that out Stasi’d the Stasi… a security apparatus so ridiculously mongoose that you could say a bad thing about El Jefe at eight-forty in the morning and before the clock struck ten you’d be in the Cuarenta having a cattleprod shoved up your ass (Díaz 225).

Thus, Trujillo epitomizes “contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death (necropolitics), [which] profoundly reconfigure the relations among resistance, sacrifice, and terror” in society (Mbembe 39). Certainly, during Trujillo’s reign, death and freedom were indissolubly interconnected, yet obviously disparate, which coincides with the logic of survival, in which “one’s horror at the sight of death turns into satisfaction that it is someone else who is dead” (i.e. that someone else has died and I remain free) (Mbembe 36) . By this very logic, an entire Secret Police, the Trujillista (citizens who professed support for Trujillo’s regime and spied on their neighbors), arose to ensure conformity among the populace and to protect themselves, which removed agency and disempowered most individuals (Díaz 226).

Furthermore, Agamben claims, through an explicitly Foucauldian lens, that “the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power” (6). However, because the homo sacer³ “may be killed and yet not sacrificed” by the juridical death machine of a dictatorial state in order to promote the ruler’s self-legitimation (analogous to Mbembe’s equating necropower with the concept of the war machine), human life has a capacity to be extinguished by the State, but can never have its sovereignty entirely snuffed (Agamben 8). I think that this concept blurs the line between necropolitics and biopolitics, because, in Mbembe’s view, sovereignty is the ability to determine who is important and who is disposable (27), but, at the same time, death is ironically the one thing which an individual has power over, “but it is also that space where freedom and negation operate” (38). Trujillo was able to intimidate the populace through fear of death (necropower); nonetheless, using biopower, he also preserved a caste of people that provided a foundation for his regime (the Secret Police). Because “it would be hard to exaggerate the power Trujillo exerted over the Dominican people and the shadow of fear he cast throughout the region” (Díaz 217), I find it hard to believe that either the oppressed members of Trujillo’s state of exception or his favored soldiers maintain any true subjectivity or real freedom in Díaz’s novel.  Trujillo controls death to a much larger extent than any single individual. Moreover, his reign of terror further solidified feelings of powerlessness and inefficacy in the community, which I believe is inherently tied to necropower, as we humans fear and deplore death at the hands of another. 

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1. Giorgio Agamben is an Italian Continental philosopher, most known for his work on the state of exception and the homo sacer. He most notably published Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998) and its sequel, State of Exception (2005).

2. See Carl Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty (“Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception”) from Die Diktatur (1921).

3.  Sacred man