Abstract
Perhaps the most unsettling image in Banu Bargu’s extraordinary account of Turkish hunger strikes is of the funeral of a woman who had starved herself to death in a “resistance house” in a shanty-town outside Istanbul. Gülsüman Dönmez was one of sixty-seven people who died while undertaking a “hunger strike until death”—a death that, in her case, arrived after 147 days. Unlike many of her comrades, whose fasts took place within Turkey’s prisons, Dönmez joined the death fast as a member of a solidarity group outside the prison walls. Her funeral therefore provided the opportunity for a “communal gathering” in which leftist militants engaged in a highly ritualized celebration, not so much of Dönmez’s life but of her ultimate sacrifice. Her corpse was paraded through the neighbourhood by a large cortege shouting the slogan “Gülsüman Dönmez is immortal.” At the head of the parade was Dönmez’s twelve-year-old son, who carried his mother’s picture and raised his left fist in the air.
Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons offers a rich, powerful and beautifully written ethnographic account of the death fasts undertaken by Leftist prisoners in Turkey in the first decade of the new millennium. Initiated in response to the Turkish state’s proposal to move political prisoners to high-security prisons, by March of 2001 approximately five hundred prisoners had joined the death fast. By its conclusion, in 2007, sixty-seven people had starved themselves to death, while another twenty-two had self-immolated, dying engulfed in flames of their own creation. Bargu’s book is a penetrating account of the commitment to martyrdom, sacrifice and immortality that animated Dönmez’s funeral and the death fast struggle more broadly. While she recognizes that these themes are repellant to a culture that valorizes life (even as it willingly sacrifices it to the imperatives of the market), the strength of her approach is that she avoids facile condemnations. Neither the language of “terrorism” and “fanaticism” nor the psychologizing discourse of “trauma” are adequate to explaining such willingness to sacrifice one’s life for a cause, she argues, and nor can the death fast be naturalized as a self-evident response to a humanitarian condition of victimization.
Rather, Starve and Immolate treats the death fast as a provocation to interrogate the political stakes of what Bargu terms “the weaponization of life”: a strategy of “necro-resistance” whose protagonists willingly face death in struggling for something higher than “mere life.” Such a strategy takes place on the terrain of what Bargu terms “biosovereignty,” by which she means the paradoxical meshing of a power to kill with a legitimacy founded on the protection of life. Starve and Immolate offers a sophisticated interrogation of the clash between biosovereignty and necro-resistance and, in doing so, it offers an important contribution to political understandings of biopolitics, sovereignty and resistance. On the basis of interviews with state officials and with former participants in the death fasts and their supporters, Bargu develops a complex account of the death fast struggle, which she recounts twice—once from the perspective of biosovereignty, then again from the perspective of necro-resistance. Such an approach entails a certain amount of repetition, but it also has the advantage of revealing both the self-perception of the Turkish state and the diverse political stances of the political prisoners who confronted it.
The events Bargu traces emerged from a pervasive sense that, as one MP put it, “the prisons were not under the sovereignty of the Republic of Turkey.” During the period preceding the death fasts, political prisoners were held in “wards” that were self-managed by communes, which re-distributed donations from friends and families and organized daily activities, including reading groups and political education—as well as operating parallel judicial systems that tried and punished prisoners for political “crimes.” Bargu compares this self-organized structure to the Paris Commune, noting that it enabled prisoners to enact their communist politics and contained, in embryo, another form of community. The proposal to replace the ward system with high-security cellular confinement was, for the prisoners, a matter of life and death. The life at stake was not biological existence but a shared existence animated by a politics of emancipation. In initiating the death fast, the prisoners affirmed that the meaning of life lay in a political cause that exceeded any individual life.
As fasting prisoners oscillated on the border between life and death, the Turkish state responded with a spectacular show of strength, aimed at reviving life and restoring its injured sovereignty. More than eight thousand security personnel stormed the prisons, equipped with heavy artillery, machine guns, bulldozers, and gas bombs—all broadcast live on television. In some prisons, the “asymmetric warfare” lasted for three days. When it was over, two security officers and thirty prisoners were dead. Even as the state displayed itself in its murderous splendor, its rationale for what was ironically named “Operation Return to Life” was deeply biopolitical: “The purpose of this intervention is to save the lives of people,” the Justice Minister declared (149).
In theorizing this “biosovereign assemblage,” Bargu portrays her own contribution as extending and clarifying what remains “latent, contradictory, and often confused” in Michel Foucault’s own attempts to articulate the relationship between biopolitics and sovereign power. This, of course, was also the task that motivated Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series, yet Bargu distances herself from what she describes as the Italian philosopher’s excessively metaphysical, ahistorical, and juridical understanding of biopolitics. Neither Foucault nor Agamben, she argues, offer a theory of resistance adequate to the death fast. In seeking to rectify this, Starve and Immolate offers a provocative and compelling theorization of resistance that challenges the pervasive vitalism that imbues attempts to conceptualize resistance on the terrain of biopolitics.
In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault famously argued that those who sought to contest biopolitical power relied on the very forces it invested—on life and the body—turning them into the grounds of political claims. Numerous subsequent theorists have relied on this insight to develop affirmative accounts of biopolitical resistance, which presuppose the excess of life in respect to the forces that seek to control it. “Like power,” Bargu notes, “resistance, too, becomes preoccupied with life, with demands focused on prosperity and well-being” (61). Bargu’s contention is that this preoccupation is inadequate for theorizing forms of self-destructive resistance, which display a marked nonchalance about biological life that is deeply threatening to a state that grounds its legitimacy in its promise to keep its population alive. Necro-resistance, Bargu suggests, is the obscene other side of the life-affirming struggles to which Foucault devoted his own attention.
In critically engaging with Foucault’s account of biopolitical resistance, Bargu is closer to Agamben’s concerns than she seems to realize. Citing Agamben’s contention that “the ‘body’ is always already a biopolitical body and bare life and nothing it . . . seems to allow us to find solid ground on which to oppose the demands of sovereign power” (75), Bargu interprets this as evidence of an account of resistance that is always entrapped in the grasp of sovereign power. Yet, here Agamben is critiquing precisely the aspect of Foucault’s work that Bargu also criticizes: his affirmative account of biopolitics and his affirmation of a “new economy of bodies and pleasures.” Agamben’s critique is specifically of an account of resistance grounded in life, which echoes the vitalism of Xavier Bichat for whom life is “the set of functions that resist death.” 1 Such vitalist accounts of resistance, Agamben suggests, remain Aristotelian in that they rest on the separation of biological life from its form, and thus are ultimately complicit with the humanitarian management of bare life.
Although Bargu rightly criticizes the individualizing account of resistance generated by Agamben’s portrayal of Herman Melville’s titular figure “Bartleby the Scrivener” as its key exemplar, Bartleby would nonetheless have repaid further consideration in this context; after all the scrivener, like Bargu’s protagonists, starved himself to death in prison rather than submit to the imperatives of the law and sovereign power. In Bartleby, Agamben sees a challenge not only to sovereignty but also to the apparatus of the will. The question of the will is central to Bargu’s account of the death fasts, and of her attempt to rehabilitate open rebellion, which she portrays as receding along with its double—sovereign power. As she notes, however, the “clash of wills” that typified the confrontation between the Leftist prisoners and the Turkish state was a symptom of the struggle’s absence of a social base; the more disconnected and isolated the prisoners were, the more fervent and violent their struggle became—until finally it exhausted itself in a humanitarian campaign for human rights.
Against those who would celebrate the ‘realism’ of this relocation of the struggle on a humanitarian terrain, Bargu portrays this conclusion as a defeat that served to strengthen the state’s claim to secure the “sanctity of life.” “Radical political theory,” she writes, “was thereby displaced to the domain of morality” (217). But was this really a displacement, or did the pervasive moralism that imbued the campaign from the beginning ultimately leave its participants with few other options? As Bargu notes, even before the humanitarian strand of the struggle became dominant, the very choice of tactics was motivated in part by a perception of the “moral weight” of the death fast (188). From the vanguardist perspective of the participants, the exemplary sacrifice of the death fasters would bolster the claim of the left groups to lead “the masses”; accordingly, Marxism was transformed into a “moral compass” and class struggle was displaced by a ritualized form of sacrifice. While the “ultimate victory” of the struggle—ten hours a week of “social time” in high security prisons, and a relaxation of the requirement to participate in rehabilitation programs—were modest, to say the least, when set against the demands that had motivated the death fasts, the Leftist organizations claimed an “ethical and moral victory,” which consisted in demonstrating the superiority of the revolutionary will (211). In teasing out the contradictions and contentions in this willful rejection of the legitimacy of the “biosovereign assemblage,” Bargu offers an essential contribution to conceptualizing both the possibilities and the limitations of rebellion on the terrain of biopolitics—and to political theory more broadly.