Governing “tragedies”.

Victims, devices and accountability in two compared cases

Abstract

In this paper we propose to address two Argentinean catastrophes (a fire during a rock and roll concert and the explosion of a building), analyzing the deployment of a “government of disasters”. We focus on the implementation of state and non-state devices that define who are the victims, victims, survivors, but also the users or affected consumers. These are categories that express an unequal social valuation of suffering. We argue that in order to understand the process of social production of victims, it is necessary to address the interplay of those devices with the process of causal attribution and the work of imputation of political responsibility. In doing so, we focus on the moral evaluations of agents and highlight the relative and contextual character of those forms of categorization