Aswang contra aswang: Interrogating the drug war chaos through Alyx Arumpac’s Aswang (2019)

Abstract

In this research, I seek to interrogate Rodrigo Duterte’s “war-on-drugs” through the documentary film Aswang (Arumpac, 2019). In the first part of this paper, I revisit the aswang phenomenon against the backdrop of the Philippine folkloric tradition and some evolving issues in the Philippine society. Before I narrate and dissect the indispensable aspects of the film, I explain first Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theory of chaosmosis against the backdrop of the neoliberal capitalist chaos. Subsequently, I theorize the aswang as an aesthetic principle capable of traversing other worlds, disciplines, and scholarship. I use the film’s revolutionary potentials as an impetus to explore other artistic productions and community—rehabilitation initiatives critical of Duterte’s drug war. In the third part of the paper, I use the film in diagnosing the drug war’s secularized aswang­­—an authoritarian flattening and superimposition of chaos. In this vein, Aswang metamorphoses into a political principle that can antagonize the repressive configurations of Duterte’s anti-chaos chaos. Ultimately, the fusion of the aesthetic and the political seeks to transform the Aswang into a vector of transformation, resistance, and hope, which I call post-Aswang.