The Mexican Exception Sovereignty, Police, and Democracy [Hardcover]

This book examines the question of democracy in post-revolutionary Mexican society.? Each chapter recuperates an event or particular historical sequence that sheds light on the relation between culture and sovereign exceptionality.? Each moment or sequence stages a relation to language.? In these speech scenes there is a disagreement between social actors (for example, disputes between peasants and intellectuals over words such as democracy, equality, freedom, proletariat, worker, revolution etc.). Democracy in this book is not just a type of Constitution or a form of society that politics affirms on a daily basis.? It is the assumption and installation of egalitarian language.? Democracy is therefore the momentary interruption or suspension of the police order.Exceptionality, Autoimmunity, Incalculability Politics, Equality, Freedom The Manufactured Image:? Melodramatic Consciousness and the Disappearance of the Political Humanism Begets Good Order:? Alfonso Reyes and Police Thought 'Under the Paving Stones, the Beach!':? Chance, Passive Decision, Democracy Absolute Bio-Hostility and Ubiquitous Enmity:? The Party of the Poor and the Militarization of the Political

A very readable, engaging, well-organized discussion which, on one hand, presents powerfuland provocative counterarguments against triumphalist Mexican historiography according to which the post-revolutionary State has succeeded in redressing the rampant injustices and inequalities that plagued Mexico from the colonial period through the early 20thcentury. On the other hand, Williams also takes issue with criticalhistories which have documented how post-revolutionary Mexican regimes (and the PRI party in particular) perpetuate old inequities and/or introduce new forms of inequality. The limitation of many such alternative approaches, he argues, is found in the fact that they unthinkingly reproduce an understanding of the political that is grounded in what Foucault terms biopolitics, and which in lF