The Dark Knight in Elite Squad: archetypes, apparatus and the imaginary

Abstract

State sovereignty is a foundational paradox in jurisprudence and constitutional theory, and it has been constantly re-signified throughout history, to serve different – ​​and often contradictory – political interests. Law and State, justified by the emergence of a modern theory of sovereignty, were historically described through reason, but they have never ceased to dependent on fiction. Sovereignty has already been discussed within the categories of space and time, and described through the effects of sovereign decisions. More recently, this debate has also included a shift from spatial-temporal paradigms to a visual approach. In this paper, these issues will be discussed using methods developed in the fields of law and literature, law and psychoanalysis, and law and cinema, in order to visualize what the notion of sovereignty currently is. A visual investigation of the idea of ​​sovereignty will be developed, taking it not only as a founding concept of legal theory, but also as a “trope”: a particular kind of figure of speech, metaphorical, allegorical and illustrated; able to be modernized and keep its initial characteristics. This article will investigate the concept of “sovereignty” through evidence collected in “popular culture”. This is to look for an archetype that has repeatedly emerged in the history of Western culture, but which has never been fully debated in political and legal theory: the figure of the “dark knight”. Specifically, the article will focus on the construction of the character Capitão Nascimento, Tropa de Elite (2007), a film by José Padilha. The paper will discuss how this film updated the “dark knight” archetype, bringing it to the visual regime of the “private war” in Rio de Janeiro in the 1990s; and also how it was re-signified in the emergence(y) of the conservative turn at the beginning of the 21st century.

Keywords:
Sovereignty; Law and film; State of Exception; Embodiment; Archetypes; Apparatus