A Commentary on Carlos Alberto Sánchez’s A Sense of Brutality

By Lisa Stevenson

The claim of this book is that brutality is more than violence; it is a hyperviolence of a different order that, in its excess, renders us speechless (Sánchez 2020, 135).

Carlos Alberto Sánchez tells the story of an uncle who used to show up about once a month at his family home in California, each time with a new car. His uncle told him that he took the cars to Mexico to sell. That’s what Sánchez believed until one day his uncle was found dead in Mexico, his body “riddled with bullets.” This story doesn’t appear in A Sense of Brutality, perhaps because, when Sánchez talks about the violence of narco-culture he wants to get at something more general, (the “invariant kernel of truth” (Sánchez 2020, 7) that runs through all the stories about narco-violence) and perhaps also because he also wants to do philosophy and not anthropology.

And yet, the story helps me to find a path into Sánchez’s work. By taking the story about his beloved uncle into account, A Sense of Brutality becomes, at its heart, a way of attending to the speechlessness that “excessive” violence (in this case the violence associated with Mexican drug cartels) produces. Sánchez cannot get his head around why narco killings go so far beyond “the violence required to bring about human death” (2020, 7). As Sánchez writes in the chapter entitled, “On Brutality”:

The horrific acts that appear to transgress the limits of acceptable violence—those acts that are more than what we can handle and in their violence force us to utter paradoxical statements like “They didn’t have to kill him like that!” or “Hanging them would’ve been enough; they didn’t have to cut out their hearts and stuff them in their mouths!”—also call us into question. And as we struggle to answer, to respond to the questioning, we fall silent. Brutality leaves us speechless. (Sánchez 2020, 115)

Thus, it seems to me, that even more than a phenomenology of excessive violence, A Sense of Brutality clears the ground for a phenomenology of the speechlessness that violence can elicit, that moment where one (always someone in particular) says, “But this has gone too far. I no longer know what to say.” A Sense of Brutality seems to move outwards from the discombobulation and utter disorientation of a young man who finds out that his beloved uncle was embroiled in the drug trade, the speechlessness that comes from the brutality[1] of his uncle’s murder, and the corresponding brutality of how such murders are portrayed—graphically, but also impassively, as in this-is-just-the-way-is. (This seems crucial to Sánchez’s understanding of brutality—that the act is violent and the execution and response impassive).

I suppose, by turning to Sanchez’s story of his uncle, I want to bring an anthropological perspective to Sánchez’s provocative foray into the philosophy of violence. I want to ask whether it might be important, in the aftermath of violence, to understand who is speechless—and who isn’t?

This seems to me to be the strange thing about moments when words fail us. We can’t always predict when they will abandon us or even why. There is no way to prepare ourselves in advance. Neither do I think we can say that narco-violence always leaves everyone speechless. In fact, one of the central images of narcoviolence that Sánchez considers, that of “making pozole” (or the disintegration of corpses in vats of acid), is significant precisely because it is presumed that the person making pozole is impassive, unperturbed[2] (e.g. Sanchez 2020:121). Furthermore, Sánchez is moved to write the book precisely because North American audiences seem to have become inured to the everyday violence of narco-culture. The fact that not everyone, I think, is moved in the same way by narco violence, means that that speechlessness is not the diacritic of “excessive” violence (which Sánchez comes to call brutality and which he defines as violence that goes beyond what is necessary to kill) but its own experience, one that overcomes us, somewhat unpredictably. Thinking alongside Sánchez I want to ask, “What is happening when I am left speechless?”

The philosopher Cora Diamond (in a companion essay to Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals) contends that certain experiences in human life present us with a “difficulty of reality.” A difficulty of reality is an experience or situation that the mind can’t “encompass” (Diamond 2008, 44). Such difficulties provoke in us a sense of dissolution—they manage to “shoulder” us out of the immediacy of the life we are living (Diamond 2008, 58). Importantly, when faced with a difficulty of reality, “words fail us, the words don't do what we are trying to get them to do” (Diamond 2008, 68). For Diamond, this is what the animal rights activist Elizabeth Costello is up against in The Lives of Animals. She can’t fathom why others don’t see the relationship between the Holocaust and slaughtering animals for food. The whole industrial meat industry, for Costello, is a difficulty of reality. And yet many people around Costello are not bothered by it at all, which compounds her sense of alienation. Diamond comments: “And the things we take so may simply not, to others, present the kind of difficulty, of being hard or impossible or agonizing to get one's mind round” (2008, 46).

I think Cora Diamond’s text is helpful here. Narcoviolence is clearly a difficulty of reality for Sánchez. Yet Sánchez would contend (and probably rightly so) that narcoviolence does not present a difficulty of reality for much of the North American public. Nor does it seem to pose a difficulty of reality for perpetrators. Sánchez’s central argument for why this is, hinges on the concept of derealization. As Sánchez puts it, so succinctly, “The logic of brutality asks us to forget the reality of the person so that what is killed or dismembered is nothing but an object, a log of wood” (2020, 132). But again, I wonder who is the “us” that is “asked to forget.” To reiterate, in A Sense of Brutality Sánchez seems to be making two separate claims 1) that to enact brutality one must forget the reality of the person and 2) that to witness brutality and not respond one must also derealize the person. I wonder if we can tease these two claims apart. Though Sánchez draws most immediately on Judith Butler’s post 9/11 work, Precarious Life, to understand why some deaths in our globalizing world demand outrage and action and some don’t, I actually wonder if Frantz Fanon’s thoughts on the difference between colonial and other forms of violence might shed more light on the phenomenon in question. In “Colonial Wars and Mental Disorders,” a chapter in The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon wrote:

It must in any case be remembered that a colonized people is not simply a dominated people. Under the German occupation the French remained men; under the French occupation the German remained men. In Algeria there is not simply the domination but the decision to the letter not to occupy anything more than the sum total of the land. The Algerians, the veiled women, the palm trees and the camels make up the landscape, the natural background to the human presence of the French (Fanon 1966, 204).

Fanon, thinking of the military occupations of World War II, seems to be saying that it is possible to kill and not dehumanize (in Sánchez’s terms Fanon seems to be suggesting that it is possible not to turn your opponents—those you may have to kill—into logs). Fanon’s example would be a war between men considered “equals” where the opponents remain “men.” I think Sánchez’s intuition about the derealization of the victims of narcoviolence is salient in the case of North American consumers of media accounts of narcoviolence. As distant and disinterested observers, “we” become Fanon’s colonizers. But, for me, there remains a stubborn puzzle that isn’t solved by the brutality paradox: if the victims of the violence perpetrated by narcos are so susceptible to being derealized by the perpetrators themselves, why would it be necessary to kill so spectacularly? Do you macerate the log before you burn it? Beat it to a pulp? Dissolve all traces of it after the fire?[3] This seems to me to lead to an ethnographic question: are the perpetrators themselves actually objectifying, derealizing their victims or is something else going on?

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? Conversely, who seems to be immune to the difficulty of reality that narcoviolence presents? How could Sanchez’s important work on narcoviolence be extended by ethnographic attention to the voices of the perpetrators, the bystanders, the family members of victims? Given my own engagement with communities where people are engaged in forms of violence that are seen as taboo and perhaps even brutal by outsiders, (see Stevenson 2014) I tend to wonder whether what is at stake are different understandings of what it means to live a life, and whether that “life” is fully extinguished at the moment of bodily death.  

My anthropological intuition is that narcos may not be, in fact, derealizing their victims in the sense Butler lays out. Turning to Sánchez’s description of narco-culture—the stories, songs, films, and burial practices that turn specific narcos into legends and celebrates a narco form of life—it seems to me that the time of a life, (or the time of personhood), in narco culture is not limited to the physical body. “The dead rule this city,” Sánchez writes of the Jardines de Humaya, “and the only living things within its limits are the few construction workers building the next tomb, the trees that line the main avenues, and (on this day) my guide and me” (2020, 14) He adds that as “the living community of the dead” the tombs in Jardines de Humaya are actually luxurious homes “furnished with sofas, televisions, air conditioning, heating, plumbing, and even playgrounds” (2020, 15). One thing that the cartels seem to take very seriously is the “life” that the dead will live after their gruesome deaths. 

Or, to take another example from the book: the narco-corrido that celebrates the notorious narco “M1”[4] gives a further intimation of this “epic” sense of what a life-time is. Manuel Torres, a violent and powerful narco, lives on in the legend the corrido transmits.[5] Presumably many of his victims also live on in such stories, legends, and songs. Thus, according to the corrido, M1 exacts vengeance to make a point, (in this case that children should be respected) and it feels to me as if that point is made both for the witnesses of the event in Mexico and abroad, as well as to the victims—the dead who live on in such epic tales as well as in the cushy apartments created for them in places like the Jardines de Humaya. Finally, as Sánchez points out, the lay philosophy that justifies living under the constant threat of violence is expressed by a popular saying: “It is better to live five years like a king than fifty like a fool” (Sánchez 2020, 35). So perhaps it would be more accurate to say that king-time is not limited to one’s physical life, and king-time (a particular non-liberal form of personhood) may be more important than life-time (which may be cruelly short) for a narcotraficker. It is better to live and die as a king.

My intuition, drawing on the material Sánchez provides for us through his analysis of a narcocorrido and his description of the Jardines de Humaya, is that for reasons that are too complex to enter into here, narcos have eschewed the neoliberal/biopolitical version of the self that suggests that body and self are coterminous, and participate instead in a form of life that imagines personhood and even life, as extending beyond the corpse. The violence-that-goes-beyond-what-is-necessary-to-kill speaks volumes to their rejection of the norms, habitus and taboos that condition a neoliberal life. (We need to think only of the sterility and understatement of the way prisoners on death row in America are killed to get a sense of what narcos are implicitly rejecting). In fact, my hypothesis would be that narcoculture supports a kind of epic and non-secular sense of personhood in which the narco-self lives on, partially through the transgressive fame and glory that comes from the brutality of their violence.  

When, as secular neoliberal subjects, we tie personhood closely to the physical body, when we see the dismemberment of the corpse as a taboo and therefore un-human, and finally, when we refuse to objectify the lives of those involved—narcoviolence becomes a difficulty of reality. As Sánchez describes, narcoviolence actually calls “us” (in this case the non-narco witnesses) and the taboos and strictures of our way of life, into question. (Why, for example, is narcoviolence understood to be more brutal than death penalty killings?) It remains an open (and ethnographic) question for me, whether (and if so, when) narcoviolence is a difficulty of reality for those involved in the violently transgressive form of life that is—as Sánchez so compellingly outlines—narcoculture.

Lisa Stevenson is an Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar in the Department of Anthropology. Her book Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic (University of California Press, 2014) won the 2015 Victor Turner Book Prize and the 2020 Staley Prize. Her short film, Into Unknown Parts, which debuted at the Margaret Mead Film Festival (2017) concerns the Inuit experience of being forced to leave their home communities and live for an undetermined period of time in a southern tuberculosis sanatorium. Her recent work among Colombian refugees in Ecuador engages experimental theatre techniques (in collaboration with Cristiana Giordano) to find new imagistic ways of thinking and representing the violence of everyday life. 

[1] In the sense that the act of violence does more than simply kill.

[2] If speechlessness is the diacritic of excessive violence, the impassivity of those “making posol,” or killing in gruesome ways must be addressed. Sánchez has a way of understanding the perpetrator’s impassivity – see his fascinating discussion of the brutality paradox (2020: 111). As you will see, I am asking instead whether the “brutality” of narcoviolence necessarily means that the perpetrator has objectified the victim. 

[3] Sánchez argues that the violence involved in “making pozole” is not meant to be known—that the act is meant to hide both the enacted violence and the personhood of the victim. I would argue instead that “making pozole” is a classic example of the open secret—something that is understood to be simultaneously known and hidden from sight. Narcos want you to know they are “making pozole” even if they want to hide the operation and deny their involvement. In this sense it draws all other forms of spectacularity into itself (it’s what you know before knowledge itself) and thus it is in some sense the most spectacular of all of narco violence. For an anthropological take on secrets see Michael Taussig’s Defacement (1999) and “On Secrecy, Disclosure, the Public, and the Private in Anthropology (Manderson et al. 2015).

[4] that Sánchez describes in his chapter On Violence (2020, 61)

[5] See Dahlin 2016 for a description of the way narcocorridos can be read as critiques of contemporary politics.

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