Powder tattooing: A state stamp on the favelado’s body

Abstract

Taking the events of World War I as a creation fuel, comes up a literary fiction about the construction and use of a state machine that tattooed on the body of the condemned the text of his sentence until the perforations took him to the death. Written by Kafka, fiction In the penal colony (1919) shows a tattoo machine as a judicial apparatus, whose operation was in the hands of a single agent of state. Such fiction was read by Clastres (2003) as an announcement of the most contemporary of the realities. Sharing the same understanding, I bring the discussion about the fictional judicial apparatus as a reference to reflect on the production of the powder tattooing on the bodies of favelas dwellers. For the elaboration of the argument, I operate the ideas by Pierre Clastres (2003) about the triple alliance between law, writing and the body and the ideas by Letícia Ferreira (2009) about the bureaucratic trajectory of bodies.