The Restless Dead

Disappropriation, in short, describes the kind of writing that, in an era marked by the spectacular violence of the open war on populations dubbed the War on Drugs, would open itself up to include the voices of others in evident and creative ways.

Disappropriation has involved, and still involves, the critical renunciation of what capital-L Literature does and has always done: appropriating others’ voices and experiences for its own benefit and its own hierarchies of influence.

greater harmony with nomadic conceptions of space as a de-territorialized or segmented entity, necropolitical war machines recognize that “military operations and the exercise of the right to kill are no longer the sole monopoly of states and the ‘regular army’ is no longer the unique modality of carrying out these functions.”

the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who may die. . . . To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.”

Which aesthetic and ethical dialogues does the act of writing hurl us into when we are quite literally surrounded by corpses?