Book Section
Özge Serin
Insistence
The Temporality of the Death Fast and the Political
Gilles Deleuze, borrowing from Maurice Blanchot’s distinctive vocabulary in The Space of Literature, offers death as the ultimate example of the event. In this paper, I propose reversing the current of concept-metaphor against a certain performance theory of sovereignty and ask, not what the concept-metaphor death does for the thought of the event, but what the concept-metaphor event does for the thought of death on the hunger strike in order to explore the divide between the space of dying and the space of politics, which are incompatibly distinct and yet inextricably linked. Revealing an irreducible anachrony between two deaths — the passage of time that separates dying as pure potentiality from death as a radically contingent event that comes either too early or too late — I argue that the political efficacy of hunger striking depends less on the consummation of death in the immediacy of an ecstatic moment than on the prolongation of this interval of time by potentially endless repetitive enactments, which imply both finality and incompletion.
Keywords: hunger strike; death; event; repetition; time; prisons; Turkey
| Title |
Insistence
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| Subtitle |
The Temporality of the Death Fast and the Political
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| Author(s) |
Özge Serin
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| Identifier | |
| Description |
Gilles Deleuze, borrowing from Maurice Blanchot’s distinctive vocabulary in The Space of Literature, offers death as the ultimate example of the event. In this paper, I propose reversing the current of concept-metaphor against a certain performance theory of sovereignty and ask, not what the concept-metaphor death does for the thought of the event, but what the concept-metaphor event does for the thought of death on the hunger strike in order to explore the divide between the space of dying and the space of politics, which are incompatibly distinct and yet inextricably linked. Revealing an irreducible anachrony between two deaths — the passage of time that separates dying as pure potentiality from death as a radically contingent event that comes either too early or too late — I argue that the political efficacy of hunger striking depends less on the consummation of death in the immediacy of an ecstatic moment than on the prolongation of this interval of time by potentially endless repetitive enactments, which imply both finality and incompletion.
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| Is Part Of | |
| Place |
Berlin
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| Publisher |
ICI Berlin Press
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| Date |
4 January 2022
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| Subject |
hunger strike
death
event
repetition
time
prisons
Turkey
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| Rights |
© by the author(s)
Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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| Language |
en-GB
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| page start |
47
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| page end |
55
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| Source |
Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory, ed. by Cristina Baldacci, Clio Nicastro, and Arianna Sforzini, Cultural Inquiry, 21 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 47–55
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References
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- ‘F Tipi Tabutluk Gerçeği’ (Truth of the F-Type Coffin), Ekmek ve Adalet, 5 June 2002, p. 5
- ‘Büyük Direniş 2000–2007 Ölüm Orucu’ (Great Resistance 2000–2007 Death Fast), Yürüyüş, 12 October 2008, p. 10
- Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998)
- Bargu, Banu, Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014) <https://doi.org/10.7312/columbia/9780231163408.001.0001>
- Blanchot, Maurice, The Space of Literature, trans. by Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989)
- Blanchot, Maurice, ‘Reading Kafka’, in Blanchot, The Work of Fire, trans. by Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 1–11
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- Derrida, Jacques, Aporias, trans. by Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993)
- Derrida, Jacques, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000)
- Feldman, Allen, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) <https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226240800.001.0001>
- Feldman, Allen, Archives of the Insensible: Of War, Photopolitics, and Dead Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015) <https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226277479.001.0001>
- Hamacher, Werner, ‘Afformative, Strike’, Cardozo Law Review, 85 (1991–1992), pp. 1133–57
Cite as:
Özge Serin, ‘Insistence: The Temporality of the Death Fast and the Political’, in Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory, ed. by Cristina Baldacci, Clio Nicastro, and Arianna Sforzini, Cultural Inquiry, 21 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 47-55 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-21_06>