May 9, 2015
What frightens about the dead undocumented immigrant is not his lack of papers, because this does not matter once he is dead. Rather it is that he does not fit in to the larger logic which surrounds all of us, which identifies and places us. Even dead, he does not fit in; his biopolitical life, and indeed his death, cannot be appropriated by the state. He cannot be defined or situated, and as such poses the ultimate threat to this logic of identification, situation, and limitation: it exposes the inability of the state to fully and finally identify, situate, and limit.
Jessica Auchter, "Border monuments: memory, counter-memory, and (b)ordering practices along the US-Mexico border" (Review of International Studies, 2013, p. 310)
