Alberto Toscano

June 3, 2024

For what makes extreme violence extreme is in many ways its indissociable quotient of disutility. When, having endured accounts of extreme forms of torture to which people are subjected in ‘safe houses’ with no witnesses and in anticipation of certain death (such as we encounter in Rosi’s film) and we ask ‘Why?’ – ‘Capitalism’ is not a sufficient answer.

Darren Byler

June 7, 2024

Thinking in dialogue with Carlos Sanchez, and his examination of brutality in Mexican narco-culture, in this essay I will consider the image of the ducking detainees as a starting point from which to examine the particular scale of cruelty created in a Chinese carceral context, and how it can move into a broader life world and become a part of cultured thought.

Jorge Núñez 

June 11, 2024

Sánchez’s philosophy steps into the visual ecology of drug trafficking to interrogate the extreme goriness of cartel massacres in Mexico. He investigates how an excess of violence makes certain acts of killing “too much” to be bearable, and how the breakdown of representational violence gives way to brutality. Brutality is more than violence, according to Sánchez. Its logic is neither instrumental nor universal.

Norman Ajari

June 23, 2024

It is only through the work of culture that murder is no longer an unpleasant necessity but can become a privileged place of human creativity through which one group sends subtle messages to another. Corpses become surfaces of writing, raw materials for crafts that express the fundamental values of a given society.

Lisa Stevenson

July 9, 2024

I read A Sense of Brutality partly as a call to pay attention to, and try to unravel, the specificity of the narcoviolence in Mexico and I wonder how ethnography, with its sustained engagement with lived realities on the ground, could help us here? For instance, at what moments in a life lived in the proximity of narcoviolence is one (perpetrator, victim, or family member) rendered speechless? And who is susceptible to such speechlessness?

Basit Kareem Iqbal

July 12, 2024

As Sánchez notes over the course of the book, this is not an ethnographic account of a bounded site. Brutality is instead “a function of our global culture and the economic and political scaffolding supporting most contemporary neoliberal states” (12); this book is a philosophical response to inhabiting a world of brutality. We are called to respond, Sánchez writes, because we live in that world, whether we recognize it or not.

Carlos Alberto Sanchez

August 4, 2024

These readers come from a variety of backgrounds: anthropology, political theory, Black studies, and philosophy. What began as a worry about the innumerable dead, victims of a “form of life” that is both a reflection and a transgression of capitalist modernity, has in their reflections, interrogations, and criticisms become a gift, something that goes beyond my specific philosophical agenda.