"… In the extremity of an impotent despair": "Whatever Singularity," Postcolonial Ab-Use, and Erik Matti's On The Job

Abstract

This essay investigates how concepts with a European provenance may be productively utilized as tools for analysis in the postcolony without reproducing the epistemic violence characteristic of colonial discourse. More specifically, this essay examines the key ideas of Giorgio Agamben, a philosopher repeatedly accused of insufficiently addressing the role empire plays in shaping history, to determine how his political ontology might be conscripted to understand the biopolitical logic of postcolonial states. We subject Agamben's ideas to what Gayatri Spivak refers to as "ab-use" by placing them in a staged confrontation with a postcolonial text, which we argue could stand in as a generative dialectical antithesis. We argue that Erik Matti's On the Job (2013), a cinematic text about prisoners who serve as government agents, is marked by the Philippines' history of multiple colonizations, a historical legacy that serves to mark the limits of Agamben's philosophy. We examine the discourse of religion and benevolent assimilation—emblematic of Spanish and American colonization of the Philippines, respectively—which are expressed metaphorically in the film in terms of sacrifice and cleanliness. We suggest that this method of discrediting the universal address of Agamben's thought clarifies its utility as it renders legible the unique form of biopower exerted by the Philippine postcolonial state.