It thus seeks to re-create a sense of community predicated on the exclusion of the accursed other, whose disposability defines the limits of one’s security.How so? Is the dialectic of fear and security an effect of the drug war or is it that which the drug war builds upon? How does violence come to structure, though not wholly determine, the making of community? What does it take to live in close proximity and comity with one’s neighbors? And do the practices of making community also bring with them the very means for its undoing?
In his classic work on nationalism, Benedict Anderson remarked on the paradoxical nature of the nation as an “imagined community,” at once limited and sovereign. It is built on the circulation of novels and newspapers as well as legal fictions of equality and inclusion that transcend local identifications, yet held together by contested symbols that seek to suppress and manage social differences. In this sense, we can think of the nationalist imaginary as constitutive of a community amid anonymity. Members of the nation will never meet each other face to face, Anderson says, but through language, print media and various other institutions, come to share a confidence in their existence within a common polity moving inexorably toward an open-ended future (Anderson 2006). Or do they?
The recent global rise of authoritarianism seems to suggest otherwise. Nationalist discourses have been used to create seemingly unbridgeable divisions, sharpening differences within the nation. The authoritarian imaginary instead views the nation as a site of perpetual struggles between the forces of good and evil understood as those who are insiders versus outsiders, lawful and deserving citizens versus poor, racialized criminals, between those who are gendered and sexualized as “normal” and those who are perverse and therefore “abnormal.” For this reason, the authoritarian vision of the nation sees it as a site of unfinished civil wars. It deploys violence in all its forms as a way of governing an irreducibly pluralized population. In the case of Duterte, the figure of the “drug personality” sums up all that threatens the integrity of the nation requiring the exercise of extreme measures. Under Duterte, death becomes a means of governing life. But how is this possible? How do people come to accept the grim terms of this authoritarian imaginary?