This paper examines Brazil’s “necropolitics” (the politics of death) that embodies the cornerstone of the Brazilian society and that has enabled the election of Jair Bolsonaro. It explores in particular the making of “necropolitical subjectivities” and how they are manipulated through the management of specific emotions and behaviours, such as racism, hate and resentment. Those subjectivities enable the constant exposure to death that defines the existences of the Brazilian Black, Brown and Indigenous citizens. Against this Brazilian necropolitical order, this paper argues historical and ongoing political resistances have been taking life and survival as the basic values of their respective struggles. Drawing on a critical theory approach, it contends those resistances have succeeded in giving birth to modes of “not being governed” through strategic uses of “collective self-defence”.