Austral necropolitics: modernity, war and nation in nineteenth-century Argentina

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between the notion of biopolitics, the war against the indigenous and the national constitution of Argentina in the nineteenth century. For this, we start from the Foucualtian conception, based on the reflection of the emergence of a new technology of government, that of “making life, letting die”, and we try to compare and expand it with the writings of Giorgio Agamben and the notion of necropolitics, coined by Achille Mbembe, since it is possible to identify, in the Argentine case, the constitution of a death machine that aimed, before guaranteeing life, at the material destruction of human bodies and populations deemed as disposable and superfluous. This analysis will focus on the so-called “Desert Conquest,” a bold military plan implemented by the Argentine state against indigenous people in the pampa.