This essay investigates how concepts with a European

provenance may be productively utilized as tools for analysis

in the postcolony without reproducing the epistemic violence

characteristic of colonial discourse. More specifically, this essay

examines the key ideas of Giorgio Agamben, a philosopher repeatedly

accused of insufficiently addressing the role empire plays

in shaping history, to determine how his political ontology might

be conscripted to understand the biopolitical logic of postcolonial

states. We subject Agamben’s ideas to what Gayatri Spivak

refers to as “ab-use” by placing them in a staged confrontation

with a postcolonial text, which we argue could stand in as a generative

dialectical antithesis. We argue that Erik Matti’s On the

Job (2013), a cinematic text about prisoners who serve as government

agents, is marked by the Philippines’ history of multiple

colonizations, a historical legacy that serves to mark the limits of

Agamben’s philosophy. We examine the discourse of religion and

benevolent assimilation—emblematic of Spanish and American

colonization of the Philippines, respectively—which are expressed

metaphorically in the film in terms of sacrifice and cleanliness.

We suggest that this method of discrediting the universal

address of Agamben’s thought clarifies its utility as it renders

legible the unique form of biopower exerted by the Philippine

postcolonial state.