The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte

by Vicente L. Rafael

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 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.

Genres: Politics

184 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 15, 2021

Reviews

[Miles Xavier · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed Vincente’s writings here and push back against the notion that this book needs to be academic per se or that is solely a regurgitation of past theoretical positions. Vincente pushes against a notion of an all-powerful necropolitical sovereign towards one bound up in trickery and the obfuscation of truth and appearance, all while charting an ever-present and shifting biopower. The sketch-chapter format is inviting and interesting and demonstrates breadth rather than depth, though that is not to say that this book is shallow.

[Jennifer J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

More of a series of interconnected musings than an academic book, this didn't quite hit the mark in terms of political analysis of Duterte's regime or cultural/critical analysis of the drug war in the Philippines, both of which are at the center of what the book promises. Nevertheless I found Rafael's observations occasionally so insightful that I was frequently discussing them with friends and colleagues as I encountered them in the book. On that basis I bumped my reading up from three stars to four. It's a very approachable application of necropolitics and biopolitics, making this potentially useful for students, on a chapter by chapter basis. What I found most satisfying was the consideration of exactly how people who use drugs are othered and the specific features of Filipino society that shape the ways in which that othering and violence towards it come to make sense to people who live there. This is something that I study in different global contexts so it was both vindicating to see someone else observe similar patterns as I do elsewhere and illuminating to learn about the nuanced differences between the logic of the drug war in the Philippines vs. the regions where I work. I don't know if this would scratch an itch for people who are specifically interested in studying the Philippines, but if you are someone interested in the drug war and social science approaches to understanding it, this is a nice, low impact read. If medical anthropologists had non-fiction vacation reading, this would definitely be it.

[iceberg · Rating 2 out of 5]

Extremely underwhelming treatment of Duterte. Rafael tends to ramble about his thesis, failing to arrive at anything particularly significant. With the exception of the phallic and the trickster essays, a significant portion of the book leaved much to be desired in terms of novelty or relevance.

His preferred technique of expositing a previous thinker’s theoretical construction (mostly Foucault and Mbembe), and then applying it to a specific aspect of Duterte, becomes predictable to a point of being pedantic, and as a result Rafael comes off as an unoriginal thinker. As a collection of essays rather than a coherent book, many passages and sentences are also repeated to the detriment of the author’s work as a whole.