Since Mexican President Felipe Calderón declared ‘war on organised crime’ in 2006, both national and international media have disseminated the horrors of the violence in this country. Beheaded bodies thrown onto a dance floor, people hanged from road bridges and mass graves feed into the worst horrors of humanity. Not surprisingly, Donald Trump tapped into these images of unrestrained violence among his southern neighbours in one of his many outbursts on Mexican immigrants: ‘They are not our friend, believe me, they're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people’ (Presidential campaign announcement, June 2015).

Until now I had thought this lurid take on violence was reserved for the sensationalistic media, films and opportunistic politicians. How wrong I was. On the very first page of this Palgrave Macmillan edition, Amalendu Misra informs us that in Mexico: ‘Killings take place on an industrial scale. The cruelty surrounding this turmoil is so harrowing that other contemporary death events – for example, in civil war-affected Syria and war-torn Congo – pale by comparison’ (p. 1). On the next page we are told that: ‘The fury and sadism of the killers are of unimaginable horror. Summary execution, ritual beheading and breaking the victim's neck while raping her, as part of some perverse ghastly sadistic pleasure, are all too commonplace in this setting’ (p. 2). Indeed, Mexico must be a hell on earth, if we uncritically follow Misra's narrative. He takes us on a journey of death and voyeurism of the macabre in Mexico, from a Pre-Columbian past that ‘also was dominated by a culture of bloodshed’ (p. 10) to the current narco violence.

The point for Misra in taking up the violence in Mexico is not to further sensationalise death and assassinations in the circulating popular narratives he taps into. Rather he finds the very act of murdering sensationally gruesome and argues that the particular nature of this violence invites a philosophical interrogation and exploration of the critical conjunctions between life and death (pp. 9–10). To explore the associations between the different kinds of violence in both time and space, Misra ventures into a number of explorative ideas (necropower, necropolitics, necrospaces and necropolis) and draws on an eclectic reading of Giorgio Agamben's ‘bare life’ (Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, 1998), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's ‘machines’ (Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2: Mille plateaux, Les Éditions du Minuit, 1999), Carl Schmitt's ‘state of exception’ (Political Theology, MIT Press, 1985), René Girard's ‘sacrifice’ (Violence and the Sacred, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) and Octavio Paz's ‘solitude’ (Itinerary, Harvest, 1999), among others. Through this reading, he figures ‘death’ as a sovereign ‘necropower’ that Mexicans have become accustomed to, and which threatens the very existence of the Mexican state. He suggests therefore that the state needs to restore order through the imposition of capital punishment, ‘the necessary murder’ (Chapter 5).

The intention of conducting a philosophical exploration of the current violence in Mexico (and to connect it historically) merits respect. It is a difficult theme to investigate. Unfortunately, Misra's undertaking is let down by a misreading of scholars (e.g. Claudio Lomnitz (Death and the Idea of Mexico, Zone Books, 2008) and Stanley Brandes (‘Is There a Mexican View of Death?’, Ethos, 31: 1 (2003), pp. 127–44) are claimed to argue that the emotional impact of death is less profound on the Mexican psyche (p. 48)), an uncritical use of numbers, and a corrosive disrespect for important nuances, making this book all too messy and yet too easy to criticise. Autodefensas (self-defence groups) and lynch mobs become nearly the same, ‘Mexican’ and ‘Aztec’ are easily substituted, human sacrifice to La Santa Muerte and the Aztec gods almost interchangeable, and so on. The opportune use of numbers only exaggerates the violent narrative yet further. When Misra draws on Victor von Hagen's 1958 book Aztec: Man and Tribe (New American Library) (there is newer research!) and describes how the Aztec Ahuitzotl warrior king sacrificed 20,000 prisoners of war in an opening ceremony ‘where their hearts were cut out and held briefly to the sun’ (p. 62), he fails to mention that this number was taken from the writings of the Spanish conquistadors (and had they no reason to exaggerate?). It would have been more correct to use as a maximum number the 300 or so sacrificed bodies found by archaeologists in connection with a single Pre-Columbian sacrificial ceremony (of which there are many different kinds), which in this case took place in Teotihuacan more than a millennium before the Aztecs (Saburo Sugiyama, Human Sacrifice, Militarism, and Rulership: Materialization of State Ideology at the Feathered Serpent Pyramid, Teotihuacan, Cambridge University Press, 2005).

When Misra claims that extreme, horrific violence is mainstream, fluent, and extends as far as to dominate entire regions of Mexico today (p. 18), the scale of this massive horror seems to be an important issue to discuss. However, when he quotes the commonly circulated homicide rates in the tens of thousands, he does not specify that only a small proportion of the corpses are disfigured in the grotesque manners so vividly described in the many anecdotes he quotes from newspapers, journals and his own ethnographic research (the method, place and duration of which is never explained). It would, however, have taken him no more than a quick glance at La Reforma newspaper's statistics on organised crime-related homicides to specify more detailed percentages of the corpses that are beheaded, disfigured, etc. Reading the literature on the surge in the cult of La Santa Muerte, he would also quickly have acknowledged that human sacrifice is an extremely rare practice within this cult.

It is therefore not only ill-considered, but also incorrect to make this association between tens of thousands of homicides and to connect them so uncritically to a Pre-Columbian cultural manner of sacrificial violence, and the surge in a popular Catholic cult worshipping death as a saint. Just as clear distinctions between social and cultural phenomena are lacking (blurring the real differences), Misra is also capable of making moral distinctions that are too rigid, e.g. the cult of La Santa Muerte is for him: ‘the counteragent to a morally good righteous god’ (p. 82) because, as he asks, ‘how can the narco whose whole being consists of evil and unrighteousness parley with a righteous god?’ (p. 83). This divide between good and evil deities (and people) ignores the fact that it is perfectly normal to find images of both Christian saints and La Santa Muerte in the possession of the very same delinquents: an ambiguity also found among non-delinquents. Moreover, La Santa Muerte is rarely considered sovereign and separated from the Christian god. The same moral messiness is often found in the Mexican state. There are both good and bad cops, good and bad judges, just as there are good and bad delinquents, and all those in between, depending on when, what, where and who is speaking. Except for very confined areas there is no absence of state authorities but rather a good number of malfunctioning state institutions embracing everything from good to bad practices.

Hence among narcos, and devotees to La Santa Muerte, and many others, the distinction between good and evil, formal and informal, state and non-state, is highly problematic, since on the one hand people take their direction from religious ideas of good and evil but, on the other hand, they often find themselves forced to operate on both sides of the moral chasm. It is here, in the ambiguities of the current violence (some of it extreme), in the Janus-faced corruption, the general dispossession of large populations, and in the ambiguities of the social and cultural responses to it that Misra could have searched for philosophical answers to the killings, rather than in the parsing of scholars’ work on the Holocaust and death in general conflating ‘bare life’, ‘excesses’, ‘human sacrifices’, and a ‘state of exception’ into a ‘necropower’ reminiscent of an evil slaughterhouse floating around in grand parts of Mexico (p. 18).

Most people with some knowledge of Mexico would know that Misra's ‘necropower’ is distorted through a lack of contextual nuance and uncritical use of numbers, which is a serious error, since the current problem with rising violence and despair needs academic accuracy. Misra's cross-disciplinary and more explorative approach could have been an advantage for approaching the critical conjunctions between life and death in Mexico. Tellingly, however he does not include the huge amount of brilliant fictional literature on this subject (Roberto Bolaño, Rafael Ramírez Heredia, Juan Pablo Villalobos, Don Winslow, to name but a few); at least they explore this critical conjunction between life and death and conserve at the same time a strong sense of the complexity of the narco violence in their fictional works.