Foucault News

Vicente L. Rafael, The Sovereign Trickster. Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte, Duke University Press, 2022

In The Sovereign Trickster Vicente L. Rafael offers a prismatic view of the age of Rodrigo Duterte in the contemporary Philippines. Framing Duterte as a trickster figure who boasts, jokes, terrorizes, plays the victim, and instills terror, Rafael weaves together topics ranging from the drug war, policing, and extrajudicial killings to neoliberal citizenship, intimacy, and photojournalism. He is less concerned with defining Duterte as a fascist, populist, warlord, and traditional politician than he is with examining what Duterte does: how he rules, the rhetoric of his humor, his use of obscenity to stoke fear, and his projection of masculinity and misogyny. Locating Duterte’s rise within the context of counterinsurgency, neoliberalism, and the history of electoral violence, while drawing on Foucault’s biopower and Mbembe’s necropolitics, Rafael outlines how Duterte weaponizes death to control life. By diagnosing the symptoms of the authoritarian imaginary as it circulates in the Philippines, Rafael provides a complex account of Duterte’s regime and the social conditions that allow him to enjoy continued support.

Table of Contents
Introduction. Prismatic Histories 1
1. Electoral Dystopias 6

Sketches I: The Dream of Benevolent Dictatorship 18
2. Marcos, Duterte, and the Predicaments of Neoliberal Citizenship 21

Sketches II: Motherland and the Biopolitics of Reproductive Health 36
3. Duterte’s Phallus: On the Aesthetics of Authoritarian Vulgarity 42

Sketches III: Duterte’s Hobbesian World 57
Duterte’s Sense of Time60
4. The Sovereign Trickster 63

Sketches IV: Comparing Extrajudicial Killing 87
Death Squads 89
On Duterte’s Matrix 94
Fecal Politics 98
5. Photography and the Biopolitics of Fear: Witnessing the Philippine Drug War 103
Conclusion. Intimacy and the Autoimmune Community 131

Author

Vicente L. Rafael is Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Washington and author of Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language amid Wars of Translation; The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines; White Love and Other Events in Filipino History; and Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule, all also published by Duke University Press.