Necrobiopower: Who Can Inhabit the Nation-State?

Why can a state sustain some lives while systematically exposing others to death? Berenice Bento proposes necrobiopower to examine these processes together. This 2018 theoretical essay, published in Cadernos Pagu’s debate section, develops a research agenda through selected historical and contemporary materials. It does not present a new representative dataset or claim that every kind of violence has one cause.

Care and destruction belong in the same analysis

Bento challenges a chronological story in which sovereign killing simply gives way to modern administration of life. Her focus is the Brazilian state: the distribution of protection and the production of death can depend on one another. Naming this connection shifts attention from isolated institutional failures to the organization of whose life receives recognition, resources and legal guarantees.

The feminist question is therefore more precise than whether the state is caring or violent. Who is imagined as belonging to its population, and who is governed as expendable? Recognition is not merely an approving attitude. It is materialized through law, administrative routines, confinement and access to the conditions of survival. The Portuguese original distinguishes this state-centered inquiry from a complete explanation of violence dispersed across everyday social relations.

A formally free child and an enslaved mother

The discussion of Brazil’s Law of the Free Womb makes reproductive power central. Bento examines parliamentary arguments around a legal arrangement that could classify a child as free while leaving the mother enslaved. Mother and child were connected bodily but assigned sharply unequal legal futures. An account of population management that overlooks racialized reproduction would miss how legal recognition itself can be divided.

She also considers indefinite detention and police records that narrate killings as resistance to arrest. These are different mechanisms, not interchangeable illustrations: death can be produced through prolonged deprivation or justified through an official account of an immediate encounter. Examining the record, the institution and its timetable makes the analysis more useful than treating all suffering as a generic absence of care.

Fear, protection and the limits of one concept

Bento links these practices to a politics of fear that can make expanded repression appear necessary for collective safety. This connection invites scrutiny of demands for protection: whose security is promised, which bodies are cast as threats, and what powers become acceptable in the name of defense? These questions extend the essay’s argument; they do not establish that every public demand for safety has the same political meaning.

The text explicitly develops an unfinished research agenda. Its selected cases help build a concept but cannot, by themselves, establish the relative weight of particular mechanisms across all institutions or periods. Its historical and carceral emphasis also should not erase the specific dynamics of interpersonal violence against women and trans people. Those relations require their own evidence.

Read Are Prisons Obsolete? alongside it to compare how penal institutions organize social abandonment, and Hirata on gender, class and race to follow a different institutional terrain: the unequal allocation of care work. The comparison asks how sustaining life and distributing vulnerability are organized, without collapsing care employment and state killing into the same phenomenon.