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In representations of violence leading to death, political agency is nearly always attributed solely to the killer, who is seen as extracting sovereign power through the enactment of objectifying violence. In contrast, the victim’s body is portrayed as an object entirely voided of any political agency of its own, silenced absolutely and definitively in the political event that is the killing itself. Agency may only be associated with the dead body when it is projected over it after the fact through processes of mythification and/or monumentalization, leading to overdetermined representations that opaque any possibilities for the ongoing political agency of the deceased. Recent representations of dying bodies in Mexico problematize this conceptualization of politicized killing as a total stripping of agency from the victims. They contest the notion of violent death as an event, portraying it rather as a transactional process that is never fully contained or complete, generating affective debts that persist in the living and obligate them to respond. This essay analyzes how dying bodies may resist reification as fetishized political objects, either by occupying a liminal position between life and death or through generat-ing a demos of their own through affective engagement.
