The gangster, underworld, or the informal sovereign who has become “a law onto himself” are, in other words, central to the endeavours of governments and police forces to produce legitimacy, and to perform the sovereignty of the state. Likewise, both the underworld and the imputed amorality or corruption of state functionaries are central to the production of its opposite, “the community”, as a sovereign repository of moral values and authentic sociality. Criminality of a “zone of darkness” is, in brief, the perennial outside, an unruly and originally source of sovereign life, and thus a necessary condition for any claim to establish and defend a social order.