Legal Heterogeneity and Foundational Violence in Todas las sangres

Abstract

This article studies the instances of State and civil violence in Arguedas’s novel Todas las sangres conceptualizing different forms of such violence with the help of Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben. The novel describes the postcolonial situation marked by the juridical heterogeneity, random and unprovoked police violence, and the reduction of the indigenous persons to the status of the absolutely vulnerable “bare life”. In this situation, the indigenous resistance emerges as the only—although also violent—possible course of action.