The cycle of the roach. About Matiere Grise, biopolitics and Rwandan genocide

In Bios, Roberto Esposito ends the theoretical journey he started in his previous work in which he defines and analyzes the immune paradigm. In that book, he concentrates on the relationship between immunization and genocide studying Nazism. From the ideas expressed by the Italian philosopher about the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis, we asked how to think this paradigm for another case of genocide. Through the analysis of the feature film Matiere Grise by Kivu Ruhorahoza from 2011, we intend to study the underlying immunological logic in the Rwandan genocide that took place in 1994. In the film, we find that sexual rape as a narrative-visual motive appears three times: the first, in form of evocation; the second, in a metaphorical way; the third, realistically. This article tries, then, to nswer why rape occupies that primordial place in the film, and doing so we will see how to frame this action within the framework of the immune paradigm.