I have a phobia of the police. How could I trust he who disavowed personhood to instead be a gun? He who is bullets rather than an organism capable of nurturance? To be a gun is to be against life. I want to be for life and to be against that which is against life. Living in a world where people are guns is a brutal legacy. To some, there is an incomprehensibility to this. Why divest oneself of the ethics of being a person and thus refuse to be open to the charity of those around you? A bullet is beholden to nothing, not even the barrel that births it. We can’t ask a gun for forgiveness, as its maker has already been empowered by law to shed blame, to be blameless. (The police are outside the law because they administer it, regulate and deregulate its limits.) The police are, then, differently personed; they are without souls, thus incredibly ugly. I was about to say that this made them non-beings, but no, that is our imprint. This makes them beings writ large in a colonialist sense, the apogee of an ontology of modernity. The police are at the same time deader than even those of us who are the socially dead, interminably killable because of the codes of race and gender. The police don’t live in the world or in a reality shared by others. The police are faceless, which engenders a Levinasian dilemma. With what do we signal our humanity in the line of fire of their guns? Forever isn’t an impossibility for them. In a haven of infinitude, which isn’t the world-as-it-is, the police are zombified. Zombies are at once beyond justice and its deranged progeny. Police are grievable subjects par excellence. Once the state manufactured a monopoly on grief, the marginalized went on embarrassing the privileged with our buckling, bullet-holed knees.

I have a phobia of the police. How could I trust he who disavowed personhood to instead be a gun? He who is bullets rather than an organism capable of nurturance? To be a gun is to be against life. I want to be for life and to be against that which is against life. Living in a world where people are guns is a brutal legacy. To some, there is an incomprehensibility to this. Why divest oneself of the ethics of being a person and thus refuse to be open to the charity of those around you? A bullet is beholden to nothing, not even the barrel that births it. We can't ask a gun for forgiveness, as its maker has already been empowered by law to shed blame, to be blameless. (The police are outside the law because they administer it, regulate and deregulate its limits.) The police are, then, differently personed; they are without souls, thus incredibly ugly. I was about to say that this made them non-beings, but no, that is our imprint. This makes them beings writ large in a colonialist sense, the apogee of an ontology of modernity. The police are at the same time deader than even those of us who are the socially dead, interminably killable because of the codes of race and gender. The police don't live in the world or in a reality shared by others. The police are faceless, which engenders a Levinasian dilemma. With what do we signal our humanity in the line of fire of their guns? Forever isn't an impossibility for them. In a haven of infinitude, which isn't the world-as-it-is, the police are zombified. Zombies are at once beyond justice and its deranged progeny. Police are grievable subjects par excellence. Once the state manufactured a monopoly on grief, the marginalized went on embarrassing the privileged with our buckling, bullet-holed knees.