ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the checkpoint as an aspect of a militarized border. The checkpoint, I argue, is an apparatus that operates in the conjecture of two modalities of the apprehension of violence; recollection and anticipation. Put another way, the checkpoint is always adjacent to a target. Its own operation, in the first instance, is governed by a biopolitical logic that seeks to apprehend “dangerous” bodies, or perpetrating bodies, through that logic. However, as the checkpoint becomes effective in apprehending putative perpetrators, paradoxically, it becomes itself a target. Hence, the checkpoint as a fixed materiality is supplemented by dispersed mobile checkpoints which seek to apprehend perpetrators, before they reach “targets,” attempting to lodge in the person itself. The operation of these mobile points is complex, since the apparatus now seeks to apprehend an excess of the biopolitical body, which I name the “flesh.” A new militarized border is created in each such person who is subject to a check.
