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Disembodiment examines self-destruction, self-injury, and radical self-endangerment as unconventional performances of resistance and refusal. Banu Bargu troubles the dominant approach that treats these acts as individual pathologies, cries for help, and signs of despair, taking the reader on an unsettling journey that passes through the suicides of enslaved Africans, the hunger strikes of woman suffragists, Gandhian fasting practices, Bouazizi's self-incineration, and the lip-sewing practices of migrants and asylum seekers to chart a bleak repertoire of contention performed by the oppressed. As a work in global critical theory whose normative compass is the suffering body, Disembodiment offers a bold materialist theory of corporeal agency that upholds the fundamental rebelliousness of the body.
Starve and Immolate tells the story of leftist political prisoners in Turkey who waged a deadly struggle against the introduction of high security prisons by forging their lives into weapons. Through an innovative approach that weaves together contemporary and critical political theory with political ethnography, Starve and Immolate analyzes the death fast struggle as an exemplary but not exceptional instance of self-destructive practices that should be understood as a consequence of, retort to, and refusal of the increasingly biopolitical forms of sovereign power deployed as a response to terrorism around the globe. The Turkish stateÕs pursuit of high security prisons based on cellular con...
This edited collection examines the relationship between three central terms—capitalism, feminism, and critique—while critically celebrating the work and life of a thinker who has done the most to address this nexus: Nancy Fraser. In honor of her seventieth birthday, and in the spirit of her work in the tradition of critical theory, this collection brings together scholars from different disciplines and theoretical approaches to address this conjunction and evaluate Fraser’s lifelong contributions to theorizing it. Scholars from philosophy, political science, sociology, gender studies, race theory and economics come together to think through the vicissitudes of capitalism and feminism ...
Starve and Immolate tells the story of leftist political prisoners in Turkey who waged a deadly struggle against the introduction of high security prisons by forging their lives into weapons. Weaving together contemporary and critical political theory with political ethnography, Banu Bargu analyzes the death fast struggle as an exemplary though not exceptional instance of self-destructive practices that are a consequence of, retort to, and refusal of the increasingly biopolitical forms of sovereign power deployed around the globe. Bargu chronicles the experiences, rituals, values, beliefs, ideological self-representations, and contentions of the protestors who fought cellular confinement aga...
This book makes a strong case that Turkey's regime and its vicissitudes are dependent on a necropolitical undercurrent. Building on the insights of critical and contemporary theory, the essays address the multiple ways in which lives are brought into the fold of power. Once there, they are subjected to mechanisms of death and destruction, and to modalities of infrastructural violence, strategic neglect and exposure. This produces new forms of impoverishment, inequality and disposability. Bringing together historical, discursive, and ethnographic approaches from multiple disciplines, this collection offers a sobering and original analysis of contemporary Turkey.
Were the thirteen essays Michel Foucault wrote in 1978–1979 endorsing the Iranian Revolution an aberration of his earlier work or an inevitable pitfall of his stance on Enlightenment rationality, as critics have long alleged? Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi argues that the critics are wrong. He declares that Foucault recognized that Iranians were at a threshold and were considering if it were possible to think of dignity, justice, and liberty outside the cognitive maps and principles of the European Enlightenment. Foucault in Iran centers not only on the significance of the great thinker’s writings on the revolution but also on the profound mark the event left on his later lectures on ethics, sp...
Since the American Revolution, there has been broad cultural consensus that “the people” are the only legitimate ground of public authority in the United States. For just as long, there has been disagreement over who the people are and how they should be represented or institutionally embodied. In Constituent Moments, Jason Frank explores this dilemma of authorization: the grounding of democratic legitimacy in an elusive notion of the people. Frank argues that the people are not a coherent or sanctioned collective. Instead, the people exist as an effect of successful claims to speak on their behalf; the power to speak in their name can be vindicated only retrospectively. The people, and ...
In The Radical Machiavelli: Politics, Philosophy and Language, some of the finest Machiavellian scholars explore the Florentine’s thought five hundred years after the composition of his masterpiece, The Prince. Their analysis, however, goes past The Prince, extending to Machiavelli’s entire corpus and shining new light on his political, historical, and military works, with a special focus on their heritage in modern Marxist thought, the arena in which they reverberate most profoundly and originally. Rather than a neutral, comprehensive, and safe interpretation, this book offers a partial and even partisan reading of Machiavelli, the 16th-century thinker who continues to divide scholars a...
On any given day, the remains of countless deceased migrants are shipped around the world to be buried in ancestral soils. Others are laid to rest in countries of settlement, sometimes in cemeteries established for religious and ethnic minorities, where available. For immigrants and their descendants, perennial questions about the meaning of home and homeland take on a particular gravitas in death. When the boundaries of a nation and its members are contested, burial decisions are political acts. Building on multi-sited fieldwork in Berlin and Istanbul – where the author worked as an undertaker – Dying Abroad offers a moving and powerful account of migrants' end-of-life dilemmas, vividly illustrating how they are connected to ongoing political struggles over the stakes of citizenship, belonging, and collective identity in contemporary Europe.
The human body is the locus of meaning, personhood, and our sense of the possibility of sanctity. The desecration of the human corpse is a matter of universal revulsion, taboo in virtually all human cultures. Not least for this reason, the unburied corpse quickly becomes a focal point of political salience, on the one hand seeming to express the contempt of state power toward the basic claims of human dignity—while on the other hand simultaneously bringing into question the very legitimacy of that power. In Unburied Bodies: Subversive Corpses and the Authority of the Dead, James Martel surveys the power of the body left unburied to motivate resistance, to bring forth a radically new form o...