les damnés and the born-dead
El aquelarre o El gran cabrón (1821-1823) by Francisco Goya.
Building upon the ideological Scaffoldings of Franz Fanon’s «les damnés» and Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics, “Born-dead” is a term I have coined that refers to marginalized peoples who face systemic discrimination upheld by the modern nation-state. From the perspective of the ruling unmarked, these are lives not meant to be lived, which is why their subordinates (i.e., armed federal/state forces and white-passing/mimicking vigilantes) continuously murder the born-dead for the sake of brandishing their sovereignty and upholding settler-colonialism. This theory also alludes to Giorgio Agamben’s (author of Homo Sacer) concept of bare life—as in the zoe of life has been coded through the contemporary superstructures of biopower and “the state of exception,” thus rendering the differences between the sovereign rule of the unmarked living and the judiciary/systemic persecution of the MARKED born-dead.
