The Crisis of no Crisis: Neoliberalism and its So-called Wars

• In Event: States of Precariousness: Emergence and Emergencies in Contemporary Latin America (II)

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to illustrate that among the greatest crises that Latin American peoples confront today includes the creation, on the part of political regimes, of the idea of crisis. The deployment in Latin America of the rhetoric of crisis of course pertains to the more general project of biopolitics (of which counter-terrorism is the best example), in which political conflict or opposition is presented in terms of a threat, not to this or that person or community, but to the very existence of the human species. Biopolitics commences by constructing community as a group whose members share nothing more—that is how biopolitical power builds them-- than the fact of their living; the task of politics, then,, to fend off the end of man, indeed, the end of life. Herein lies the “reason” for the particular politics in the particular contect, for instance, the decision to use “extra” police force or the building of a road through this or that indigenous community. Of course, the whole problem of the actual politics in which the same community find themselves, to wit, neoliberalism, is that there is no crisis: things are not going well, but there is no crisis, none of the problems that drove former critical political projects, projects such as dictatorship, agrarian reform, or war. I want to examine these issues relative to two contemporary matters: the drug trade in Mexico and indigenous politics within Bolivia.

Author

• Brett S Levinson, State University of New York/Binghamton