Reactionary, Robo-Sacer Dystopias: Cyborg Oppression and Right-Wing Biopolitics in Francisco Laresgoiti's 2033

Abstract

Reactionary, Robo-Sacer Dystopias:Cyborg Oppression and Right-Wing Biopolitics in Francisco Laresgoiti's 2033 David Dalton A paradigmatic scene in Francisco Laresgoiti's feature film 2033 (2009) occurs when the protagonist, Pablo (Claudio Lafarga) boards a helicopter with his friend, Milo (Luis Ernesto Franco), and a coworker to hunt. As Pablo and Milo take eyedrops laced with a new drug called Tecpanol, Laresgoiti crosscuts between the men on the helicopter and several large animals, including sheep and horses, which they pursue. When Milo aims at the horse and prepares to fire, Laresgoiti cuts back to the fleeing animal and reveals the game to actually be terrified human beings dressed in clothing that evokes the dress of the early twentieth-century Cristeros (Meyer 53). Though never directly explained, the drugs seem to have altered the men's perception in some way, causing them to see people of faith as animals meant for slaughter. Indeed, this near-future dystopia imagines a conflict based on the first Cristero War but set in the twenty-first-century (1926-1929).1 Throughout the film, the military government uses different technologies to exploit its population and rid itself of religious people and customs. Nevertheless, an underground resistance challenges the dictatorship's legitimacy by using key technologies of domination in subversive ways that challenge antireligious and official narratives. In this way, the film represents a type of right-wing science-fiction dystopia that builds on the tropes of the genre to cast progressive and secularist ideals as threats to humanity. Indeed, the movie engages in a problematic, against-the-grain dialogue with Giorgio Agamben, who asserts that modern states divide their populations into two categories of life: bios and zoē (Homo Sacer 1-5). These words denote very different types of existence: bios refers to the fully human, Aristotelean good life that entails political autonomy. Zoē, a term that forms the root of zoology, refers to those whose lives exist outside the political sphere (Homo Sacer 80-83). Under normal circumstances, the zoē can live decent lives, though their lack of access to citizenship precludes them from advocating for their own interests. Nevertheless, during states of exception —a "no-man's land between public law and political fact, and between the juridical order and life" (Agamben, State 1)— the state interpellates the zoē into homo sacer status. For Agamben, homines sacri (the plural of homo sacer) are subjects who live beyond the protection of the law. As such, they, like the [End Page 91] dehumanized Christians in 2033, "may be killed and yet not sacrificed," or even murdered, because society extends no value to their "bare lives" or even to their deaths (Agamben, Homo 12). Throughout the film, the military regime ensures that religious people lead a bare existence by withholding technological privilege from them, a fact that further validates efforts to interpellate them as killable. Nevertheless, similar to the heroes of an array of cyberpunk literature, the film's oppressed protagonists frequently access technology through hacking and other subversive acts. In so doing, they engage in what I have previously theorized as robo-sacer resistance. As I have argued, the robo sacer is "a cyborg articulation of Giorgio Agamben's homo sacer" (Robo 6). What is most interesting about this theorization is not that technology can oppress people from peripheral communities but that, similar to Donna Haraway's cyborg, robo-sacer actors from marginalized communities can subversively use technologies meant for domination toward liberatory ends (Haraway 151; see also Sandoval 158-77). Laresgoiti's film proves especially problematic from this perspective because it consciously adapts the methodologies of liberation —which have originated from progressive scholarship— to a reactionary context.2 In so doing, he sheds light on theorizations of robo-sacer resistance while simultaneously undermining the egalitarian drive that this theoretical tradition purportedly promotes. The film thus poses significant questions for scholars of Latin American science fiction as it provides a clear example of how our theorizations can be used toward ends that we have likely not considered or intended. Few elements better embody the film's problematic, even fanciful, biopolitics than the military regime's systematic extermination of religious people. The danger of this...