The "fungible life" in “the war we have not seen”

Philosophical analysis of a work of artistic memory in Colombia

Abstract

With formidable speed, war machines, different from State apparatuses, transform the victim into the instrument of war (actionable, interchangeable and killable), until their final exhaustion. Thus, entire categories of “denied populations”, inert and precarious, are transformed into tools (useful and living) of armed violence, placed, today, at the service of those who claim the right to kill, and at the same time, in “lost realities” that leave no trace of their passage through the world. Here is the unprecedented and concrete form of power and the division of the war machines (gangs, militias, rebel groups and paramilitary structures), which, in addition to making people die and letting live, produce and reproduce hundreds of “fungible lives”, which They are used, replaced and eliminated according to the interests of violence. Hence its “disposable” nature. This critical hermeneutic composition, which cardinally uses the thought of Butler, Deleuze, Guattari, Mbembe, Arendt, Agamben and Roxin, in addition to some testimonies of Colombian ex-combatants, who painted and recounted the war, deals with defining and characterizing the notion “fungible life” (non-existent in the literature, but empirically verifiable). It is as useful as it is unprecedented to represent contemporary forms of armed violence.