From death’s practices to the survival: notes for a biopolitical understanding of the military dictatorship in Chile (Abstract)

From a biopolitical viewpoint, this artide seeks to understand recent  Chilean  history  resorting  to a critique of the theoretical discourses that made the arrival of democracy possible. We argue that bio- politics, through its different authors, provide interesting analytical tools to understand this history. Particularly,  here, we argue that  during  the Chilean  military dictatorship  a type of governmentality was engendered that  was based  in a practice of survival,  related  to  three  axes: the  production of death:  the economization  of politics  understood  as a practice that  is constitutive  of neoliberalism; and the elaboration of a transitional política!  rationality that  laid the foundations for a democratic neoliberal  development. The effects of this new governmentality are reinforced by the legal excep- tionality of the period,  strengthened in its turn  by the Constitution of 1980.