Tracing the Ouroboros’ Tail: Paradoxical Politics against Necropolitical Binaries in Lukas Avendaño and Muxx Project’s Theory and Practice

Necropower often relies on taxonomic distinctions between self and Other, a binary structure that is associated with gender binarism, digital dualism, and negations of life’s entanglement with death. This essay discusses deployments of paradox against these necropolitical binaries by Lukas Avendaño, a Binni Zaa (Zapotec) and muxe (nonbinary gender) artist and anthropologist, and Muxx Project, an artistic collective founded in 2020 by Avendaño and multimedia artists EYIBRA, Óldo Erréve, and Nnux. The essay’s “dialogical body” traces Avendaño and Muxx Project’s understandings of how their body-based and digital performances attempt to disrupt gender binarism and digital dualism, to then focus on Avendaño’s paradoxical view of life and death forged through artistic practice, and, most importantly, his experience as an activist confronting the complexities of necropower in contemporary Mexican politics. Following Avendaño’s theorization of the ouroboros as an embodiment of life’s paradoxical entanglement with death and the artist’s prioritization of action over theory, the essay concludes by reflecting on the potential of an ouroboric, or para-paradoxical, ontopolitics that might undo emergent necropolitical dichotomizations, such as that between the digital and the virtual, as they occur, potentially laying the ground for living, and dying, outside and beyond the binaries that undergird a violent world.