From the uneasy coexistence, mutual penetration, and eventual merger of sovereignty and biopolitics, there emerges a new configuration of power—the biosovereign assemblage, in which the traditional power of life and death is imbricated by new forms of power over life and death. This incipient configuration is generative of novel forms of resistance. Self-destructive practices, enveloped by martyrdom and sacrifice, respond to the dominant characteristics of this power regime, which elevates life to sacrosanct status (by killing, when necessary) through a fundamental reversal, the politicization of death. Necroresistance, then, is the most immediate product of the biosovereign assemblage that functions to destabilize and disrupt its operations and processes of reproduction.
Necroresistance is an emergent repertoire of action that is based on the appropriation of the power of life and death into the hands of those who resist. The predominant characteristic of necroresistance is its negation of life through the technique of self-destruction, transforming death into a “counterconduct,” with a whole range of rituals and discourses that theologize its politics. In its defensive and offensive forms, the weaponization of life as a tactic directly communicates with and responds to the sovereign core of the biosovereign assemblage. But it does so in ways enabled by biopolitics itself; it emerges on the field of possibilities opened up by the politicization of life and its attendant forms of corporeality. The insurgent’s body becomes the concrete battleground of domination and resistance, subjugation and subversion, sovereignty and sacrifice.
However, just as the biosovereign assemblage is a contradictory amalgam of the differential logics of biopower and sovereign power, so is necroresistance. It would be inaccurate to claim that necroresistance is free of contradictions, inconsistencies, reversals, and internal tensions. To the contrary: necroresistance is multivalent. The very antinomy of modern political reason that Foucault identifies in the realm of power, namely, the paradoxical coexistence of the politics of life and politics over life, also occurs in the field of resistance. The staging of absolute refusal that characterizes the weaponization of life coexists with its inverse, with the assertion and negotiation of demands for greater rights and privileges, better conditions and standards of well-being. On the one hand, this coexistence is literal. Alongside self-destructive practices, we can still observe conventional forms of struggle that make rights demands, ask for welfare and recognition: strikes, sit-ins, boycotts, legal actions, armed struggle all continue to take place while the new repertoire of necroresistance emerges from the margins. On the other hand, there is a different kind of coexistence that can be observed within the domain of necroresistance itself. This is the imbrication of these differential logics within the same repertoire, a situation in which necroresistance contains elements that are both life-affirming and life-negating.
The death fast struggle presents a complex picture in which individuals staging acts of necroresistance evaluated their own actions and the movement as a whole in radically different terms, evincing the copresence of differential logics. We have already explored the structure of the death fast struggle as a coalition of organizations. However, what I mean by the copresence of opposing logics cannot be explained away by the presence of different factions in this coalition, nor even by the ideological differences and tactical disagreements among the organizations that made up these factions. True, the complexity of the movement was compounded by the fact that it was formed by a coalition of organizations with differing ideological-political viewpoints. Furthermore, the ebbs and flows of the movement, varying degrees of public support, the disagreements between the two major factions of the coalition, and their reactions to changing circumstances added further complications. Nevertheless, I would like to underscore how the shifting pieces of this picture were undergirded by the multiplicity of meanings that the individual participants attributed to their own actions all along. The performers of necroresistance had a plurality of intentions, motivations, and desires, and this diversity was reflected upon the different ways in which they interpreted the objectives of the struggle, viewed different forms of self-destructive violence, and justified resorting to them. The multivalent character of necroresistance, saliently expressed in this diversity of viewpoints, belies any simple generalization about the overall structure and alleged uniformity characterizing movements that utilize the weaponization of life, and asks us to be attentive to the contentions within the emergent repertoire of necroresistance itself.
Harvesting different perspectives from oral narrations and prisoner letters, this chapter presents an analysis of the movement that captures the complexity of necroresistance. Based on a critical reconstruction of the voices of the participants of the death fast struggle, I put forth distinct and internally coherent strands of interpretation that shed light on the differential logics of necroresistance whose coexistence and articulation shape the movement as a whole. These strands, while analytically separate, tend to exist in an intermingled and amalgamated way in reality. They do not neatly correspond to the views held by different groups or to consecutive stages of the movement. Rather, they are positions I have distilled out of the highly individual stories of the participants, the overlapping, shifting, discontinuous, and, at times, inconsistent statements that reflect the divergent experiences, differing opinions, latent conflicts, and evolving collective narratives of the movement. The content of this analysis comes from the voices of the participants of the movement, but their categorization and subsequent analysis do not.
I argue that three interpretative strands best encapsulate the multifaceted nature of the death fast struggle. These depict the movement as: (1) an act of resistance, a defensive struggle against torture and oppression in the name of human dignity; (2) an act of war, a manifestation of the struggle among classes; and (3) an act of refusal, an exodus that expresses a desire to break away from the existing order. Each of these distinct strands corresponds to a different political problem that the movement sought to address: (1) democracy and human rights, (2) neoliberal capitalism, and (3) the changing nature of sovereign power and domination. Among these three strands, the negation of life coexists with the affirmation of life, the politicization of death with the politicization of life, the “right to die” with the “right to live” and to live well.
As an act of resistance, the death fast was a democratic struggle for the expansion of prisoner rights. It strove to bring the arbitrary limitations of and infringements upon those rights to an end. High security prisons represented the authoritarian state tradition, its violent treatment and criminalization of dissent, and the violations of rights that came with such authoritarianism. Accordingly, the death fast struggle asserted the demand for better conditions of imprisonment, the recognition of “political” status, and the overturning of cellular isolation as an affront to human dignity. As an act of war, the death fast was part of the struggle against neoliberal capitalism by the oppressed classes. It was a confrontation between the state, as the representative of the ruling classes and therefore the “class enemy,” and the political prisoners as the vanguard of the people. From this perspective, the introduction of high security prisons was conceived as part of the restructuring program of neoliberalism, which entailed the marriage of the punitive state with the deregulation of the capitalist economy. The death fast struggle sought to advance the proletarian cause against capitalism by asserting the proletarian right to live well, pushing back against the criminalization of class struggle, and politicizing the masses by vanguardist action. As an act of refusal, the death fast was the expression of the desire not to be oppressed and to exit the existing order whose increasingly fixed relations of oppression and injustice were being reinstated along with the refurbishment of the sovereign power of the state. It was the assertion of a “right to die” in response to the tightening grip of domination over life. By virtue of its refusal of life and the irrevocable exodus of its members, it also comprised an ideological offensive against biosovereign power whose legitimacy depended on the “sanctity” of human life.
The distinction between these different strands in the death fast struggle hinged on how the struggle’s predominant tactic, the weaponization of life, was interpreted. The latter, in turn, was dependent upon the ways in which individuals related to their bodies, how they conceived the political nature of their lives, how they interpreted the meaning of death, and the efficacy they attributed to political self-sacrifice. These reflections of the participants of the death fast struggle also give us occasion to revisit the open question of the relationship between necroresistance and what Agamben calls “bare life.” The ways in which death fasters considered their actions and interpreted their lives present us with invaluable clues regarding whether necroresistance functions as an emphatic appropriation of bare life or whether it is more akin to its rejection.
Overall, the participants’ different views regarding the questions of life, death, the body, and self-destructive violence reveal to us that the weaponization of life was not free of contestation but remained at the source of political tensions, paradoxes, and ideological deflections that rendered the movement novel and problematic at once. The different strands within the movement show that, like the biosovereign assemblage, necroresistance is best understood as a complex amalgam, one that echoes the complex structure of articulation of the power regime which produces it and to which it responds. Just as the biosovereign assemblage articulates the conjunction of different modalities of power as a becoming, necroresistance, too, is marked by a process of fluidity and flux.
HUMAN DIGNITY AGAINST TORTURE
“I would rather live a day with dignity than a dishonorable life that lasts hundreds of years. I know that if I let them trample my dignity, if I sell my dignity, I know that I will no longer be human.”1 This sentiment recapitulates the choice that some prisoners felt they were forced to make: either they would concede to imprisonment in F-type prisons or they would join the protest to protect their dignity. Punishment in high security prisons was not limited to the suspension of one’s liberty, but compounded by the violation of prisoners’ bodily and mental integrity. In other words, cellular confinement was a double confinement. The cell was a “prison inside the prison” and corresponded to an insidious and invisible form of torture.2 The disciplinary penal regime embodied in the F-type prison project meant conforming to a certain “way of life” robbed of political identity. It involved the prisoners’ reduction to a biological existence. Willfully submitting to this double confinement meant trading away their dignity simply in order to survive torture. A prisoner’s letter, written months before the hunger strike was launched, cogently expressed this position: “We have made our decision; we will not give up on it. We will not go into the cells. We will not accept a torturous death in the cells.”3
The prisoners were not alone in equating the isolation of cellular imprisonment with torture. Solitary confinement, though not officially recognized as torture by the prevalent international human rights regime, is widely considered to be a form of “inhuman treatment.”4 Its deleterious impact particularly on mental integrity (leading, for example, to feelings of emptiness, hopelessness, fear, and the loss of time/space perception) has been an area of substantial research, which shows that sensory and social deprivation can be more damaging than the experience of naked violence.5 In addition to studies focusing on solitary practices, ethnographies of high security prisons in the West have provided a valuable window on prisoner lives in “total institutions” that portend a troubling future for prisoners around the globe.6
In this light, prominent human rights organizations and advocates, in Turkey and abroad, were critical of F-type prisons, even before they were opened.7 Representatives of various civil society organizations, who were allowed to inspect a model F-type prison in the summer of 2000 as part of a public relations event organized by the Ministry of Justice, published criticisms and concerns regarding isolation if these prisons were to be put into use.8 Intellectuals, writers, legal professionals, physicians, and psychiatrists in Turkey have also been at the forefront of bringing isolation to the center of the public debate on F-type prisons, critiquing its potential negative impact on the prisoners’ physical and especially psychological well-being.9 Civil society organizations, such as the Istanbul Bar Association, the Turkish Medical Association (TTB), and the various branches of the Architects’ and Engineers’ Chambers Association of Turkey (TMMOB), were vocal critics of the F-types.10 And once these prisons were opened, human rights organizations continued to draw attention to how the actual practices of isolation violated human rights.11 For example, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly drew global attention to isolation in F-type prisons with various statements and publications.12 Human Rights Association of Turkey (İHD) went a step further and designated isolation as a form of torture, calling it “white terror” or “psychoterror.”13
For the prisoners, the equivalence established between cellular imprisonment and torture had several different sources. The first source was historical, arising out of the history of prison practices in Turkey. Cells played a central role in the brutal administration of prisons, particularly during the 1980 military coup. Throughout this period, cells were often utilized as a tool to punish prisoners’ noncompliance or disobedience, to threaten, intimidate, and break their will, and to secure their submission to authority. The prisoners called the solitary cells of military prisons coffins: small, barren, damp, and dirty holes with low ceilings, making it difficult to stand up, without windows or toilets. The leadership cadres of the left and those who could initiate and lead collective action were confined in the cells for years on end and subjected to recurrent visits by handpicked wardens sent over to give them beatings, extract confessions, or “convince” prisoners either to spy on their fellows or to show remorse for their actions. As a result, cells became arenas of fierce contestation where the individual prisoner confronted state violence while striving to keep his integrity and identity as a dissident intact. Against the cells as “exceptional” spaces of violence, the wards, reconfigured by collective organization and resistance, became the spaces of normality, signifying solidarity among prisoners and noncompliance with the state. Commanding such a history, the cells of high security prisons served as a vivid reminder of the unbridled violence of the military prisons. F-type prisons were thus conceived as vestiges of the exceptional regime and spaces where the state would shed its liberaldemocratic veneer and reveal, to each individual now isolated from other prisoners, that violence constituted its unchanging core.
A second way in which the cell was associated with torture depended on the prisoners’ understanding of human nature. The prisoners maintained that a human being was foremost a social being and that individuality could be defined only as part of a community. Taking away the possibility of collective life in prisons and depriving the individual of social ties deeply compromised and fatally injured the individual’s humanity. The solitary individualism of the cell appeared to the prisoners as a form of deindividualization imposed through a forcibly induced alienation. Strongly objecting to the state’s claim that the new “rooms” in F-type prisons, by affording prisoners private spaces, would enable independent growth and autonomy, prisoners interpreted such privacy as deprivation, both sensory and human. Against the argument that F-type prisons contained spaces for common use, prisoners pointed to the prerequisite of “successful” participation in state-run “treatment and rehabilitation programs” imposed by officials. Since these programs were ideologically driven by the state’s interest in molding them into compliant and docile citizens, participation in these programs would imply remorse for the prisoners’ political identity as dissidents, deeply conflicting with their very self-understanding as political prisoners. For a political prisoner, there would be no surer sign of being “broken” than such compliance. Prisoners therefore maintained that, since they would not participate in such programs, the common areas of F-type prisons were bound to remain unused. Furthermore, they argued, in the F-type prisons, the basic human need for sociality would constantly be held against them either as a method of intimidation or as a carrot dangled by officials for extracting individual concessions. Agreeing to make concessions in order to socialize would do nothing other than bring the prisoners dishonor and shame. These prisoners considered themselves to be fighting for a penal reform in which they would not be compelled to renounce their ideological beliefs and political identities to gain access to conditions that addressed their human needs.
A third way in which the cell was equated with torture lay in the absolute vulnerability the cell created for the prisoner inside. The solitude of the cell, the prisoners expected, would place them at the mercy of the administration, exposing them to infringements of their rights and capricious tactics of violence and intimidation: the conducting of arbitrary searches; damage, destruction, or confiscation of personal belongings; limitations on family visits; subjection of prisoners and family members to degrading treatment (such as body and cavity searches); restrictions on access to legal counsel and infringements on the confidentiality of meetings with lawyers; restrictions on and obstructions of access to health care; censorship of letters; control over the circulation of newspapers and journals; and the imposition of other arbitrary disciplinary punishments. The prisoners were only too familiar with all these tactics and thus highly skeptical that such practices would now come to an end. If anything, they argued, these practices would become more widespread with the transition from wards to cells. What the F-type prisons meant, then, was the reversal of achievements in de facto prisoner rights achieved through decades of prison struggles.
The prisoners also feared for their physical safety in the absence of other prisoners with whom they could weather the intrusions of security personnel much more effectively. In the wards, not only were the prisoners stronger (since they could act as human shields for each other), they could also rely on each other as witnesses. Conditions within the prison were already risky enough when they were housed together in wards, the prisoners reasoned, so what might happen to them when they were left on their own? Citing the security operations conducted within prisons, such as those at Buca, Burdur, Ulucanlar, and Diyarbakır Prisons, which ended with prisoner casualties, prisoners argued that they could much more easily become the victims of massacres in the high security prisons. With no one to bear witness to the actions of prison staff, going into the cell meant agreeing to endure whatever forms of inhumane treatment were inflicted on them and awarding these officials with undeserved impunity. That high security prisons were constructed away from urban centers in remote locales, difficult and expensive to reach, rendered them even more vulnerable and invisible to the public gaze. Equally important, the administrative practices within these high security prisons were shielded from outside observers by the absence of unofficial mechanisms of public scrutiny. The existing venues for expressing and inspecting prisoner grievances appeared to prisoners as far too superficial and contrived. High security prisons were the most opaque of all institutions of confinement for the general public.
After describing prisoner grievances with respect to access to lawyers, health care, visitors, letters, and physical safety, a participant of the death fast expressed prisoner sentiment this way:
Of course, F (cell) type prisons will only deepen these problems and concerns. Because even in the current form [of prisons], even while we were together with our friends, we have experienced various attacks in which tens of our friends have died. They will not be able to fool us about this so-called treatment program. Because we have seen what treatment is at Ulucanlar, Burdur, and Bergama [Prisons]. Either [be] someone without character, without identity, someone turned into dregs or [be] dead. This is what they force upon us. Our choice is, without doubt, the second. Because the bodily existence of someone whose soul has died is nothing. Having lived through these examples, we have no reason to trust the state.14
For all these reasons, political prisoners envisioned their struggle against the high security prisons as the opposition to cellular confinement defined as a form of torture. They fought to alter the conditions of their confinement and to demand recognition of their status as political prisoners. In so doing, they also acted out their political identity by taking part in the venerable tradition of prisoner resistance against torture and inhumane treatment. From this perspective, theirs was a defensive struggle against the violence of the state. It defended the “right to resist” in the face of oppression and violation. At the same time, it aimed to advance rights and deepen the liberties available to the citizens of Turkey, both inside and outside prisons. It was motivated by human rights norms and acted in the name of a humanity that transcended prison walls. These prisoners interpreted “cellularization” as a metaphor for the growing power of the state over society.15 If the death fast struggle could succeed in putting an end to arbitrary usurpations of rights in prisons, it would not only have secured an important feat for democracy but also constitute an example for other struggles. The participants of the death fast struggle therefore considered themselves to be part of a broader struggle for the deepening of democracy. The inclusion of more general concerns about Turkey’s system of criminal justice in the initial list of demands, they argued, could be considered a reflection of this motivation.
The interpretation of the death fast struggle as an act of resistance resonates with the reading advanced by Gürcan Koçan and Ahmet Öncü in one of the very few scholarly studies on the hunger strike in Turkish prisons. These authors define the hunger strike as a nonviolent form of resistance against injustice that is carried out for the public good on behalf of all citizens. While few hunger strikers considered the distinguishing quality of the hunger strike to be non-violence (in fact, most deemed hunger striking as a form of violent protest), they certainly viewed their struggle as advancing the rights of all citizens and contributing to the democratization of Turkey as a whole. However, as we shall see, this was only one facet of the death fast struggle.
The prisoners who saw themselves as taking part in the democratic struggle for the advancement of human rights invariably considered the hunger strike to be dictated as a result of the circumstances in which they found themselves. The main reason why the hunger strike became the predominant tactic of struggle was the unavailability of other means of expressing their grievances in prison.16 Whatever other means were available had already been exhausted without any effect. This is why the prisoners had to resort to the only means they had at their disposal: their bodies. The hunger strike was thus a tactic of last resort, a “final remedy” for being heard.17 A participant of the death fast argued, “The death fast is something that can be done as a last solution; it is not something that can be used all the time. It is not something we exalt. One says: I would rather die than live like this. It is not something done for the greatness of the act. They kill people slowly in the cell. This is the last solution.”18
These prisoners saw their bodies as instruments for winning concessions from the state. Through the deployment of their bodies, they could use their lives as bargaining chips to attain the right to a dignified life behind bars. In the words of a participant of the hunger strike: “We had to use our bodies as means. This method was not something that we desired very much, but it was something that we had to do because we did not have any other means.”19 The use of the body amounted to self-defense against torture and oppression, which targeted the same bodies as their objects. According to the same hunger striker:
We did not have any other means of resistance than our bodies at hand. Either our bodies would be transformed into weapons against us, through torture, or we would use those bodies as a means of resistance against the state. At the end of the day, our bodies have always been used against us as a means of torture. We only conducted a counteroffensive by transforming the same means into a means of resistance. Because in those conditions when no death fast was there, our bodies went through torture. … They were hanged. Torture up to even the flaying of skin. Many horrible things. At the Burdur massacre, Buca massacre, Ulucanlar massacre, all of them. We did this because we had no other choice but to use the same bodies against the state as a means of resistance. Now there are various claims, or misunderstandings, that we are sacralizing death here. We are not sacralizing any death, but we are sacralizing the kind of death that is shaped by resistance. Because it is really something sacred. Because there is something called a right of resistance. Everyone has a right of resistance against the policies directed toward us. We only used that right.20
From this perspective, the insurgent’s body was not something that emerged ex nihilo. It was brought into being by the relations of power that have operated upon it, violated and tortured it, forced it to submit. Insurgent bodies had been used as weapons against their bearers by the state to make them break, confess, repent, accept, yield, and surrender. The state had already victimized these bodies by subjecting them to violence, pain, and deprivation when prisoners were first taken into police custody, when they were put in the cells, or when they were attacked in the prison operations that they recalled as “massacres.” Using their bodies in this struggle meant, in effect, turning them against the state. This was a reversal of torture and an effective way to prevent further attempts of violation. Indeed, such a reversal or reappropriation of the body as a site of resistance from what it had previously been, namely, the site of domination and subjection, was a direct consequence of and response to the politicization of the body by the state.21 In order to overturn the state’s victimization of bodies, bodies had to be seized back from the state, even if this was to be achieved through the “enactment of modes of violence typically performed by the state.”22 What is noteworthy in this point of view, forcefully expressed by the hunger striker who described her experience of torture, is the stark separation between the body and the identity of its bearer. It is the body that goes through torture, that is hanged, whose skin is flayed, that experiences “many horrible things,” while the hunger striker as the bearer of this body describes this experience by dissociating herself from her body and embracing her identity as a political prisoner who resists.23 The body without the bearer’s identity is likened to dregs; it is reduced to an existence that is not worth keeping: “Because the bodily existence of someone whose soul has died is nothing.”24 The dignity of the person is not reducible to her bodily integrity; instead, it is abstracted from the body and lodged in the prisoner’s political identity. This abstraction becomes necessary for political prisoners to transform their bodies from being victims of the state to active instruments of resistance.
As Allen Feldman also argues for the dirty protest and the 1981 hunger strike of Irish political prisoners, the “counterinstrumentation” of the prisoner’s body constitutes “the principle of [the prisoners’] dissociation from the rituals of domination” under interrogation as well as in the prison cell.25 The state constructs the prisoner as its “other” and invests it with alterity. Ultimately, however, it is through the separation of the prisoner from her body, what Feldman calls “the self-bifurcation of the prisoner,” that enables the radical utilization of the body.26 The alterity is turned against the state because of the agential power of the prisoner that enables a mimetic reversal. The interiority of the prisoner, uncolonized by sovereignty precisely because of its bifurcation, provides the possibility of utilizing the body against the state in the protection of the prisoners’ political identity.
With the instrumental use of the body in the hunger strike, it is transformed from the object of violence into the subject of resistance. According to these participants, the marks and scars inscribed on their bodies by torture were not thereby erased, but they were channeled into a productive, progressive, and redeeming purpose. These bodies thereby became sources of empowerment for the prisoners, restoring their agency over their own lives, even if this empowerment was dependent on taking charge of one’s own starvation. Either way, these prisoners reasoned, they had no alternative: if they did not use their bodies, the state would seize them anyway. Conceptualizing the cell as torture, the prisoners thus resorted to the body—the former object of torture and thus the most obvious terrain of struggle—in their resistance against the torture of cellular confinement.
We can also consider the statements of these participants of the death fast struggle regarding their bodies as revealing a fundamental distinction between biological life and political life that has played a significant role in motivating their decisions to participate in the hunger strike. According to their view, since dignity resided only in a properly political identity, without which it was not possible to have a fully human life, and not in the body, keeping one’s dignity meant refusing the equivalence between the value of biological existence and that of a political life. Cellular confinement entailed a redefinition of life as biological existence, which they equated to a prolonged and torturous death through the erosion of dignity. The cells of the high security prisons threatened to reduce prisoners to nothing more than “dregs,” by subjecting their politically qualified life to sovereign violence.27 If we were to use the concept of “bare life,” we could evaluate the struggle of these prisoners as an attempt to resist the status of absolute vulnerability and dispoliticization into which sovereign power was striving to manufacture their lives, by stripping them of their political identity and situating them in a zone of “exception” where they could be violated with impunity. Hence we could surmise that, contra Agamben, the prisoners’ self-understanding involved, at the same time, resistance to being reduced to bare life. The following reflections of a death faster aptly summarized this position: “Either we were going to eat, drink, and live dishonorably or we were going to venture our bodies and protect our dignity against [the state’s] attack.”28
According to Koçan and Öncü, the hunger strike was a struggle for dignity in the Kantian sense because the hunger strikers fought for the “right to determine the circumstances of one’s own life.”29 From this perspective, the state’s pressure on physicians to resuscitate hunger strikers meant an affront to their dignity as moral and autonomous agents who could make their own decisions. It was not that hunger strikers opposed medical intervention because they wanted to die but because they wanted to be able to make the decision to live or die themselves rather than allow the state to make it for them. However, while Koçan and Öncü emphasize that the state’s treatment of the prisoners was against their dignity, because they were reduced to a “mere means,” the authors also consider the death fast to be an infringement of dignity because it meant “lessening one’s rational agency to gain some instrumental value.”30 Needless to say, such an interpretation deeply contradicts how death fasters interpreted their own actions.31
Even though these participants of the struggle viewed themselves as fighting for dignity, they were skeptical of equating the hunger strike with the “right to die.” The death fast, they contended, was conducted in order to win and not, as they were often criticized, in order to die. Their actions were not opposed to the fundamental human “right to live” but were rather an assertion of that right. In the words of Koçan and Öncü, the hunger strikers “do not mean the negation of life but, on the very contrary, the affirmation of it.”32 This statement, while misleading when generalized to the whole movement, cogently summarizes the strand within it that views the struggle as an act of resistance. We can interpret the explanations of some hunger strikers regarding how they tried to prolong their process of self-starvation as much as possible, by taking vitamins, by drinking more water, and by sheer willpower from the perspective that privileges the account of the death fast as an act of resistance. Accordingly, their commitment to life was what sustained these prisoners on the hunger strike. They thought that it was important to live longer, if only by one more day, “in spite of the enemy.”33 Instead of a willingness to die, these prisoners argued, the death fast expressed a willingness to live, an extremely great and passionate desire for life. In fact, in their opinion, the hunger strike as a tactic was predicated on the strong will to live, a “life drive” rather than a “death drive.” In this line, one participant of the death fast explained,
[A person who wants to die] cannot do what must be done in a hunger strike. [She] cannot drink that water even though the body does not want it. Only a person clinging onto life can do these things. Things that one totally dislikes. You smell horrific. You smell like a corpse. People on hunger strike smell horribly bad because their cells die. Every day is a war of the will. A person who wants to die cannot do what it takes to sustain a hunger strike: drinking water, eating salt, eating sugar, maintaining oneself on these through the day, coming face to face with wardens all the time, dealing with those who come to intervene [medically]; a person not tied to life, not wanting to live, cannot do these. A person who wants to die will kill oneself. It is very important to be in good spirits. We would always stimulate one another throughout the death fast so that we would not let ourselves go … Because you are very weak. We were constantly stimulated in order to be awake intellectually, to be tied to life. Without these, it is impossible to conduct a hunger strike. A person who wants to die cannot sustain a hunger strike even a single day. She would not have that power. It is very difficult for one to fight one’s own body. When you are on hunger strike, you are constantly fighting your body.34
Starving oneself without letting go of life: this took meticulous effort, great persistence, and stoic self-discipline. These prisoners saw themselves as carrying out an intimate struggle with their own bodies: on the one hand, the body resisted dying despite the starvation imposed upon it by the will; on the other hand, the will resisted the desires of the body to nourish itself or else to give in to death. This was a “war of the will” that had to be renewed everyday, a struggle in which only the most dedicated, disciplined, and experienced militants could succeed. If it were not for the purpose of winning, the prisoners asked, how could this be done? “In the beginning, [the death fast] goes well, but later vomiting begins. Nausea … We could not take liquids or anything. It became a torture to drink the sugary water. Our friends quit [drinking] water in order to prevent vomiting. But you don’t do this [hunger strike] to die. You have specific demands, a goal, you are doing it to win. … We took the sugary water insistently despite our reluctance.”35
Chosen because there were no other means, the prisoners could only persevere in their deep physical suffering because of their conviction in the possibility of winning their demands and thus ending their hunger strike before they lost their lives to it. Death, they assured themselves, was not a certain outcome of their tactic, only a risk to bear: “You can die while you are hanging placards, you can be shot, you can die while you are being beaten up. But the death fast is on the agenda when there is no other means left to use, when all other means are exhausted and in the last stage. Otherwise, it would not mean anything other than squandering oneself.”36
According to these participants, the death fast should not be viewed as an act of self-sacrifice. While they did consider dying in resistance sacred and glorious, they adamantly refused the criticism that they were glorifying death, which was advanced in some public discussions. The death fast struggle was not about the attainment of martyrdom but the attainment of real, concrete concessions against the F-type prisons. In the words of a participant of the death fast,
The death fast is not an act of sacrifice. … You transform your body into a weapon because there is nothing else you can do. And it is an expression of ideological strength, political development, organizational talent, [and] cultural wealth because you express your commitment to life with death. You don’t think of death, but you know that you might die. That’s why it is not an act of sacrifice. I went on the death fast saying I will not die, I said I will be on my feet even in my last moment. Even if I am in bed, my hands will be in the air, if I can’t hold my hands up, my hair will be standing. This is not an act of sacrifice. I might die, but this is not intended, it is a consequence. In an act of sacrifice, death is intended.37
Rather than an act of self-sacrifice, the hunger strike was a means to advance their self-interest. In fact, some of these participants refused to call their action a death fast at all; instead, they referred to it as a “hunger strike of indefinite duration.” The hunger strike was not sacrificial because it was not undertaken out of devotion to others, or in the name of the “people,” but for the prisoners themselves. Because the finitude of protest in the hunger strike imposed an urgency, it was the best way to inspire and mobilize the masses to act on behalf of the prisoners so that they could pressure the state to assuage the concerns of the prisoners. While they emphasized the continuity of the struggle inside and outside the prisons, they argued that social mobilization outside was central for the achievement of prisoner demands.38 From their perspective, the mobilizations outside would be more decisive in getting results than the hunger strike itself.
The protagonists of this strand of interpretation of the death fast struggle considered the hunger strike to be qualitatively different from other modalities of self-destruction. They marked their distance from suicide attacks and disowned tactics like self-immolation and varieties of self-mutilation. Among these corporeal tactics, they singled out hunger striking as the only form of action that did not have a blind, emotive devotion to the cause and that did not involve an absolute orientation toward death. The distance these individuals took from other forms of the weaponization of life was due less to a normative problem with the use of violence per se than their view that those tactics were ineffective and therefore a waste of militant life. In contrast, the hunger strike was a rational, cognitively driven method of bargaining, much like conventional forms of protest. According to a participant of the death fast who interpreted his involvement as an act of resistance,
It is wrong to my mind to call the death fast an act of sacrifice. The death fast is done for oneself, to protect oneself. You don’t think about others. The F-type threat is coming at you and you are doing this for yourself, to live better. It would be an act of sacrifice if you have devoted your life, you are walking to death, [and] there is absolutely no turning back. But there is a turning back in the death fast: how? If your demands are met or if you are subject to [medical] intervention, you turn back from death. If your demands aren’t met, you will die, but this is still not sacrifice. … The death fast is part of a long-term struggle. Suicide bombings are sacrifice because there is no turning back. One has put on the bomb. And it is wrong. Why should I kill myself with an act of sacrifice when there are better things to do? The death fast is not an act of sacrifice. Its real purpose is to trigger the masses into action.39
Among different interpretations of the death fast struggle, it was, without a doubt, this strand that resonated most with the public and that led to the most compassionate reception of the hunger strikers. The prisoners appeared as victims; the vulnerable citizens of an oppressive state. To the extent that the movement found support and instigated mobilizations in the domain of civil society, it was mainly due to the depiction of the movement as a democratic struggle and an act of rightful resistance to violations of human rights. The humanitarian discourse of the lawyer Behiç Aşçı, which emphasized the detrimental effects of isolation and the sanctity of human life, should be assessed as the movement’s ultimate convergence with this interpretation of the death fast, an interpretation that had been there all along. Without the prioritization of this interpretation vis-à-vis others, the final mobilizations that helped end the death fast struggle would probably not have taken place.
CLASS WAR AGAINST NEOLIBERALISM
If the interpretation of the struggle as an act of resistance was the most amenable to popular support, the interpretation as class struggle was the most conducive to militant support. Many prisoners saw the high security prisons as the embodiment of the interests of the ruling class with one fundamental goal: “confining dissent.”40 In this conception, the state was an instrument of capital, the cell was an instrument of the state, and therefore the cell was an instrument of capital. The function of the cell was to tame disobedient citizens and forge them (and, in their example, the masses) in the interests of capital.
At stake was not a generic capitalism, but capitalism in its neoliberal version in a neocolonial setting. These prisoners saw an intimate connection between high security prisons and the particular brand of neoliberalism put into practice in this fringe country of Europe, dependent on foreign investment and subject to the intensive extraction and exploitation of its human and natural resources. According to the prisoners, neoliberalism entailed the dismantling of the welfare state and the privatization of many of the state’s vital, protective functions. Through extensive privatizations of economic enterprises owned and operated by the state, it entailed the transfer of public wealth to private, often foreign, hands. The free reign of market forces could not be established without the intervention of the state in order to ensure the suppression of dissenting forces. The strengthening of the punitive arm of the state for the market found its expression in the implementation of high security prisons. True, this was different from the privatization of penal institutions or the utilization of prison populations as a pool of cheap and forced labor, as in the United States, but only temporarily. Such developments might follow in due time, but, for now, the looming threat was the state’s attempt to crush social opposition by confining its leaders in the cells.
These prisoners postulated that since the International Monetary Fund was fully supportive of (and partly responsible for) the matchmaking between the neoliberal economy and the authoritarian state, it must also prescribe and support the high security prisons. As they saw it, the market-friendly policies and harsh economic stabilization programs dictated by the IMF, involving the destruction of the welfare state and the curbing of rights to social security, health care, education, collective bargaining, and political expression, necessitated the high security prison cell because it promised to isolate and eventually destroy political opposition and to profit from this by lowering costs of supervision and control. In order to make this connection more obvious, these prisoners associated the F of the F-type prison project with the F in the International Monetary Fund. Referring to this connection as “IM(F),” they argued that the security interests of the state and the class interests of capital now formed a unified “historic bloc.”41 In this confrontation the state acted as the institutional agent of the unified bloc, whereas the political organizations of the prisoners (naturally outlawed by the ideologically motivated laws of the capitalist state) acted as the authentic representatives of the people.
As the radical political opposition in the country, the prisoners saw themselves as the only forces not afraid to object to the consolidation of the ideological hegemony of the neoliberal agenda and to fight for the proletarian cause (especially in the absence of mass movements and working class militancy). Their politics focused on opposing the state as the handmaiden of neoliberalism and the F-type prisons as the material embodiment of punitive neoliberalism. Their view of the state as the archenemy was reciprocated by the state, they believed, evinced by the fact that they were singled out for imprisonment in the high security prisons. The prisoners thus saw their struggle against the F-type prison not only as part of the class struggle against capitalism but as constituting its frontline.
Viewing themselves as the vanguard of the people, the prisoners believed that any submission to the state on their part would enable, if not facilitate, the submission of the rest of society. The cell attacked the community of prisoners directly, but, through them, it attacked the communal ties of the masses. Atomization in either sphere would render collective opposition impossible. “Cellularization,” then, was the ideological war launched by the state to secure its hegemonic control over the hearts and minds of the masses, breaking their ties of solidarity, robbing them of their fundamental and collective rights, frightening them through the criminalization of class struggle, and securing their consent by inducing a competitive individualism. In the words of one of the participants, “this attack, the F-type prison, with the IM(F)-type life that it forces upon workers and laborers, is a very comprehensive attack. It aims to massacre the captives in prisons, to bury them alive in the grave, leaving the working and laboring people without a vanguard (öncü).”42 The prisoners thus viewed themselves as human shields, barricading the state’s attack on the people. If the bodies of these prisoners were to be confined in the cells of the high security prisons, they contended, the “hope of the people” would be locked up with them.43 In order to prevent the state from triumphing and capturing the “people” in the person of the prisoners, the prisoners could not submit, whatever the cost: “What they desire to confine in the cell is the struggle of our people against oppression and exploitation; [they desire] to make us surrender. Calculations are being made over how much easier it would be to take over the people of a country whose revolutionary captives have been taken over in the prisons. This is why our resistance is not limited to ourselves; it is related to the liberation of our people and their future. In this frame, what is forced upon us is this: either surrender or die.”44
It is highly revealing that these prisoners called themselves “revolutionary captives” rather than prisoners or inmates. Prisoners acknowledged captivity only as a matter of fact. They rejected the legitimacy of the state’s power over them and the legitimacy of its laws, from which their imprisonment had issued. Rather, they viewed themselves as having temporarily been captured by the state in the revolutionary war. While the prison held their bodies in captivity, the prisoners maintained, their minds were free. The high security cell would not only destroy the camaraderie that nourished the revolutionaries in prison wards but would also attempt to destroy their thoughts and convictions. In the words of a death faster, “Was the problem of prisons one of sovereignty? The state was always sovereign over prisons. Whenever it wanted, it could count us, for example. From this perspective, the state had no problems, ever. But the state was never sovereign over the consciousness of those inside. Neither is it sovereign over the consciousness of those now inside F-type cells.”45 From this perspective, the state appeared to be a machine that literally captured the masses, one individual at a time. The physical captivity was only a segue into ideological captivity, making individuals consent, conform, and accept the order of things—the state’s ultimate goal. The reign of the state, however, would not be complete as long as communist prisoners continued to exist and fight. The challenge to the prisoners posed by the F-type prisons was to stay in the order, without, however, assenting to become of the order. “This is a psychological war. They are trying to finish us in the head rather than physically,”46 argued a death faster. As a result, the struggle against high security prisons was not simply a war against neoliberal capitalism but also a war to preserve the very existence of revolutionary, communist politics. In response to their impending ideological annihilation, the prisoners envisioned their struggle as a war in which one of the parties would ultimately be destroyed: “The state wants to annihilate whoever opposes its oppression, torture, and exploitation; it wants to annihilate you, us. And we don’t want to be annihilated. This is the foundation of the problem.”47
The death fast struggle, according to this conception, was much more than an act of resistance against torture and the assertion of human rights. It was an act of class warfare against the state and, through the state, against neoliberal capitalism. The prison was only one act in the theater of permanent class war, staged now in the cells, then on the streets, at the factories, and in the universities. “The beds in which we lie down are no longer normal beds,” a participant of the death fast remarked, “they are trenches.”48 In a letter to the press, one team of death fasters wrote from prison: “A war has been going on in prisons for many years. And this war does not consist of a war between us revolutionaries and the state. It is a class war between the oppressors and the oppressed, between political government and the people.”49
Envisioning the death fast as an episode of class war implied a different approach to why hunger striking became central to the struggle. Accordingly, the use of the body was a result of strictly instrumental calculations based on the needs of the struggle. Its deployment via the hunger strike was not a necessity but an option, not unavoidable but willfully chosen, not dictated by circumstances in which other means were not available but suggested by calculations in which other means were less preferable. The hunger strike was deemed to be the best, most efficient, and formidable instrument of protest that could potentially be used to confront the state’s offensive. This was predicated on the interpretation of the hunger strike as a war tactic, a proactive counterattack mounted from the trenches of the prison wards against the state. The hunger strike was not a desperate act of last resort but one of strategic choice.
The strategic nature of this approach to the hunger strike was more a reflection of the collective agency of the political organizations and parties that coordinated and conducted the struggle than of the agency of individual prisoners themselves. These organizations represented the collective will of the prisoners. While individual prisoners participated in the construction of a revolutionary collective by fatally committing their own bodies, the organizations to which they pledged allegiance made decisions based on factors such as their overall conception of strategy, the availability of mass support, organizational strength, and competition and cooperation among similar organizations. To these outlawed political parties, which viewed themselves as vanguards in the class war against the state, individual prisoners were rank-and-file militants, no different from ordinary soldiers, who constituted their political force and enacted their strategic calculations.
There were several instrumental reasons why these parties preferred the hunger strike over other forms of struggle. First of all, self-starvation carried significant moral power over and against the state, which militated against the fasters’ construction as “terrorists” by the state. Prisoners on hunger strike constituted silent yet potent indictments of the legitimacy of the capitalist state and the authoritarian tradition of political rule that manifested itself in oppressive penal practices against the revolutionaries. Each time a prisoner’s corpse would publicly emerge into the world outside the prison walls, it would starkly demonstrate the state’s failure in fulfilling its very basic duties, ensuring safety and security.50 The political parties thought they could capitalize on the embarrassment of the state before its citizens and the rest of the world, caused by prisoner deaths, and use this embarrassment to strengthen their call for concessions against high security prisons.
Second, the hunger strike had symbolic and pedagogic power over the masses, which these organizations wanted to channel into their confrontation with the state. The famished bodies of prisoners pointed to the structural violence of the capitalist economy by making its effects visible on those bodies that refused to be co-opted into it. These bodies served as a metaphor for the relation of the people to capitalism in the person of the prisoners, reinforcing the latter’s role as the vanguard of the people. The starvation of prisoners in the face of “IM(F)”-dictated prisons figuratively preempted and enacted the starvation of the people in the face of IMF-dictated neoliberal capitalism. In the image of the starving body, the communist parties could show the people the effects of capitalism in a visceral, everyday register. They could convince them that class war persisted, despite its concealment by the facade of the so-called liberal-democratic order. The suffering bodies, which materially evidenced the “truth” of capitalism, would function to educate the masses about the real intent of the state in imprisoning the whole country and annihilating radical dissent by installing high security prisons. Despite the state’s efforts at marginalizing the prisoners as “terrorists,” the parties’ deployment of self-starvation sought to reinforce the self-definition of prisoners as the committed vanguards of the people whose fate was inextricably entwined with the fate of the proletarian revolution.
A third reason for choosing the hunger strike was the parties’ expectation that it would generate social mobilization, based on the successful working out of the moral, symbolic, and educational implications of this tactic. Ideologically, the parties argued that social mobilization would arise insofar as the people could be convinced that the project of “cellularization” was not limited to prisons alone but related to the restructuring of social relations based on neoliberal capitalism. The parties tried to harness the people’s prevailing discontent against the government’s economic and social policies favoring capitalist interests with the argument for “cellularization,” inciting them to struggle together with the prisoners. Practically, however, these organizations argued for the necessity of backing up their ideological stance on “cellularization” with concrete, vanguard action, which the masses expected to see in order to decide favorably on participating in the struggle. The hunger strike was thought to have the vanguard quality necessary to fulfill this expectation. And should the radicalism and commitment of the prisoners on hunger strike not suffice to motivate the masses into action, then, the parties expected, the violent reaction of the state triggered by the hunger strike would expose its true colors. The high numbers of deaths on the prisoners’ ledgers, it was thought, would augment the persuasive power of their protest in exposing the “truth” of the Turkish state and the seriousness of the challenge these parties constituted against the state. In this light, resorting to other forms of self-destruction, such as suicide bombings and self-immolations, was also a strategically motivated intervention, chosen in order to escalate the situation and incite the masses further.
As a result of these considerations, the insurgent body of the prisoner was inserted in the matrix of rational and strategic political calculations of class warfare and resignified as an instrument of illegal political organizations. This instrumentalization stood in contrast to existential commitment of individuals, marking a significant difference between the approach to the hunger strike articulated at the level of the organizations and the level of individual participants. For individuals, the organizational calculus was perceived as duty. Each militant was motivated by a desire to fulfill the “revolutionary responsibility” assigned to them by their parties.51 Their task was to complete the mission as best as possible, for this would be their contribution to the class war. In this sense, being selected to participate in the hunger strike was an emblem of prestige. The individual militant’s reputation depended on the successful completion of this task, as any other. In the words of a participant of the death fast struggle, “Let’s imagine we are playing chess. There, in order to win, you would give away the pawn if need be. Because you don’t value each piece individually, you value winning. We can give away our life in order to win, if need be. It is not possible to understand us looking from the individualist world. Understanding is only possible if one leaves the individualist world and frees oneself of selfishness. What is important is the perpetuation of political warfare. If my death is necessary for that, I will die.”52
Participants of the death fast struggle who shared this view insisted that the gravity of the likelihood of death involved in this mission should not be exaggerated. Death could be conceived either as a risk to be born or simply as an inevitable outcome, but it should not be viewed as something extraordinary. From the perspective of warriors, which they considered themselves to be, death was to be expected. Just as they live for the communist cause, militants must be able to die for it, especially if this might advance their cause. As a participant of the death fast put it, “Everybody will die one day. Everybody will die. One must know how to die for what one lives for.”53 If a militant could ever choose and shape his or her own death, this was the moment.
While discussing their intentions for participating in the hunger strike, these participants preferred to frame them not in terms of a willingness to live or a willingness to die, but in terms of the strength of their dedication to the communist cause. “You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” they would repeat, highlighting the importance of attaining the consciousness of a true warrior.54 Such a consciousness, they contended, led them to focus not on the painful experience of self-starvation but on the goal, making sure not to fail in their revolutionary mission. Giving in to pain would mean jeopardizing the struggle’s potential gains. In this light, a participant of the death fast narrated the experience of fasting:
We had come to blows with the enemy; we weren’t even aware of [that we were on] the death fast. The target before us was clear. We concentrated on that. Was our arm dislocated, was our head smashed, was our bone broken? We could not really feel it. Because we were always subjected to torture. … We didn’t really care. Because we knew in our mind that these attacks could happen, that their goal was to make us give up, to make us surrender. That’s why our goal was not to surrender. And our attitude would determine this. Therefore, we weren’t even aware that we were thinning, that our bodies were melting.55
Instead of the desire to reclaim the body that has been subjected to torture as a site of resistance, what is more pronounced in this account is a certain nonchalance about the body and its dispensability as a function of duty. The body had already been lost to the state through torture; it had already experienced pain at the hands of the enemy. These were expected, even bound to happen, and no longer relevant. At the point of direct confrontation, the corporeal damage incurred faded in significance, leaving only a battle of wills between enemies. The individuals, narrated almost as if they had fused into a singular body with the same arm, head, and bone, were locked into not surrendering, not yielding in the struggle, and keeping their responsibility of defeating the enemy to such an extent that they even forgot they were actually dying.
This emphasis on fulfilling one’s responsibility in the communist struggle was also projected on the significations attributed to sacrifice. Participation in the death fast was viewed as a modest rendition of fighting for a larger-than-life cause rather than a great act of self-sacrifice. One participant of the death fast argued: “What we are doing is not at all a great sacrifice, even a heroic deed, as some say. In fact, we are doing this merely as a revolutionary, as a communist, acting with such consciousness. It is no different from your taking the bus to go somewhere. You would get on the bus even if the bus was too crowded because you have to go there. You take it, even though it makes you uncomfortable. For us too. The death fast has death at its end, but it has to be done because this attack can only be stopped by a death fast. And I saw myself at the forefront of this.”56 Accordingly, these participants did not see any significant differences between being a guerrilla fighter and a death faster, between a death faster and a suicide bomber. They were missions all the same. A participant of the death fast contended: “Just like a guerrilla becomes immortal by giving his last breath, there is no difference for us in essence [with the death fast]. He has a weapon around his waist, whereas our bodies are weapons.”57 They compared their acts of self-destruction to the acts of the workers of the Paris Commune: “We argue that there is no difference between our actions today and those of the workers who have died fighting at the barricades of the Paris Commune, workers who have died in any kind of class conflict.”58
Making sacrifices was part of the ordinary course of being a militant; however, sacrificial ideology was pernicious and incompatible with communism. Distinguishing acts of self-sacrifice from the exaltation of sacrifice, these participants argued against attributing a heroism and exceptionality to self-destructive performances on the grounds that such heroism would drive a wedge between the masses and the militants acting on their behalf. Communist sacrifice had to be desacralized and normalized: “It is very important that this death becomes ordinary.”59 The following account by a participant of the death fast provides a clear summary of this approach:
We never saw [participation in the hunger strike] as heroism because this means differentiating it qualitatively [from other acts], abstracting it from the masses, abstracting this even from yourself and separating those among you who are heroic, who have special talents. … Sacrifice, when defined in terms of altruism, will need to point either to privileged, particularly talented types of human beings or to something that is based on mystical powers, supernatural beliefs. … We have no belief in God; in the last instance, earth is where our bodies will go. That’s why we must separate our understanding from that of sacrifice. What we do is similar to distributing flyers in a public square; it is something we do as part of class struggle. … We believe that we have made a contribution similar to that of any one of our friends distributing flyers. These actions are the same in essence; a guerrilla, a militant who distributes flyers on the street, a death faster … these are all the same. It is necessary to routinize death.60
For these avowedly atheist participants for whom a discourse on sacrifice did not reflect their scientific Marxism, the goal of the death fast struggle was a matter of advancing the anticapitalist struggle and politically harming their “enemy.” The real victory, of course, would be the realization of the communist cause. While they were aware that the death fast struggle would not be sufficient to achieve such a feat, they nonetheless believed that it could have invaluable effects, not necessarily limited to winning immediate concessions that ameliorated prison conditions. Instead, they maintained that the death fast struggle should be evaluated as an episode in the long-term struggle toward communism, whose actual effectiveness and success could not be conjectured from the present but only assessed retrospectively, once the real victory was won. Therefore, in evaluating the death fast struggle, these prisoners contended, we must think in terms of the abysmal counterfactual in which class war had been completely suppressed: what might have happened if there had been no death fast? In the words of a participant, “At the end, this is a war. Just like in a war, sometimes a bomb is more effective, whereas at other times a single bullet is more effective. The effectiveness of this action [i.e., the hunger strike] depends on current conditions. It is wrong to say these [actions] are unsuccessful. In their absence, not a single voice will be heard.”61
Armored with such a fervent militancy, however, these participants were also aware that the war they were fighting was one that diverged from its orthodox formulations by Marx and Engels or even from its subsequent iterations by Lenin, Mao, or Che. The novelty was their extensive, repeated reliance on the weaponization of life as the primary tactic of struggle. While they wanted to distance themselves from a “politics conducted over corpses,” they also admitted that the number of corpses mattered. The increasing number of casualties, produced by self-destructive acts of militants, they believed, would have an exponential impact on their audience. “We don’t conduct politics over the death of people. But we also know that, after a point, class struggle can only secure its achievements through the death of individuals.”62 In their assessment of the current political conjuncture, with harsh repression by the state, asymmetric conditions of warfare, and little mass following, necroresistance constituted the correct strategy that would enable them to emerge victorious in the struggle. Despite the repeated comparisons they made between themselves and the generations of workers and militants who had lost their lives in class struggle to advance the claim that the prominence of the self-destructive form of their struggle was nothing out of the ordinary, they also argued that death had become the only viable path to victory. In other words, they were aware that necroresistance transformed class war into something new, even though its novelty and implications were far from fully worked out. In this instance practice was ahead of theory.
Overall, the interpretation of the death fast struggle as an act of revolutionary class warfare did help mobilize the constituencies of these outlawed parties and their supporters but did not do well in enhancing the image of the prisoners in the eyes of the broader public. Already suspect as “terrorists,” the prisoners were rendered more marginal by a narrative that coded them as the foot soldiers of party leaders who used them for their own strategic interests. The allegedly impending revolution these parties fought for found little resonance in public opinion and expectations, which became painfully obvious with the meager working-class support the death fast struggle was able to generate. The prisoners and their supporters starved, immolated, and exploded their bodies, calling out to the masses for a revolutionary uprising, but they could not reach out to the everyday concerns of the masses from their position of marginality. The strategic calculations of these parties might have worked differently in a setting marked by the ongoing presence of radical mass mobilizations, but the disconnect between these parties and the masses led these parties to misread the world outside prisons. The militants were sincere and committed to their convictions, ready to die for the communist cause, but the urgency of their struggle and demands, their political views and tactics had come to be so removed from the people that it rendered their deaths more tragic and moot. From the perspective of its participants, the struggle for communism had grown inseparable from the struggle for prison wards, but the idea that the prison was the main trench in the war between classes met only meager support among the toiling masses in whose name these militants died self-inflicted deaths. To put it another way, the stronger the disconnect between the militants and the masses, the more fervent, violent, and marginal the prisoners’ struggle became.
REFUSAL AGAINST BIOSOVEREIGNTY
A third strand of interpretation that emerges from participant narratives involves the construction of the death fast struggle as an act of refusal. This view comes out most vividly from the accounts of prisoners who considered the cell to be the vehicle of totalitarian domination, due not simply to the coercion or intimidation directed at the body but to the subtle mechanisms for the generation and cultivation of consent. Accordingly, the F-type prison cell was the instrument of containing and invading each person, in body and mind, in order to ensure total subjugation. At stake was more than obedience; the cell, more perniciously, required consent to the legitimacy of the state and turned each individual into a vehicle for reproducing its ideological hegemony. From this perspective, the cell was an embodiment of the state, which, in turn, was the institutional agent of sovereignty. Sovereignty became more biopolitical; it expanded its control over different facets of life, while, at the same time, it built its legitimacy on its ability to protect life and enhance its well-being. It enveloped individuals as it dominated them, it turned them into vehicles of their own domination. The opposition to the cell, or to the state that acted through the cell, could not therefore proceed by making demands and extracting concessions from the state. It had to target the core of its capacity to dominate, its sovereignty. The ideological delegitimization of sovereignty could only be carried out, according to these participants, through a withdrawal of consent. Withdrawal from the domain of sovereign power meant withdrawal from the life defined and promoted by the state, from life produced by biosovereign power.
To this group of participants, it was appropriate neither to demand the “right to live” in prison with human dignity nor to wage war against the neoliberal project forced upon society by their existential class enemy. While these were important and shared concerns, demanding better conditions in prisons and asking for the protection and betterment of their lives, rights, and welfare were ultimately bound to end up strengthening the legitimacy of the state, even as these demands might be won. While resistance advancing demands for rights could be effective in obtaining concrete results, nonetheless, it remained within the parameters of politics established and maintained by sovereign power itself. In other words, such resistance was reformist and compromising, even instrumental. It was therefore inadequate, if not misleading altogether.
By contrast, these prisoners argued, dramatic and incisive action was necessary in order to begin to think outside the system of power that wrapped itself around individuals like an invisible web and threatened to smother them. In light of the threat of the complete colonization of life and the stifling of opposition by the totality of power that was bound to envelop prisoners in the cells, it was necessary to fight not only the superficial manifestations of this colonization, but the core of power orchestrating this colonization. As a counterpoint to forms of resistance based on demands for better life conditions, which these prisoners interpreted as furthering their subjection to power, it was necessary to turn life itself back upon power. As such, the struggle must involve the willful usurpation of the power of life and death into their own hands. It was therefore crucial to assert (and not demand) a “right to die” as a sign of the withdrawal of consent to power. This was deemed to be the only way in which these individuals thought they could enter a frontal collision with the state, as the embodiment of sovereignty, and to refuse its grasp first on the prisoners and, through them, on the people. Against the totality of domination, “We have come to the point where death will speak, where our dead will speak,” wrote a prisoner in a letter from prison.63
Unlike the interpretations of the movement as an act of resistance or class war, the form of struggle was not incidental or instrumental but central to this third conception. The corporeality of the death fast was extremely important as the spatial medium through which the power of life and death was exercised. At the same time, corporeality was extremely insignificant in light of the ultimate meaning of the same struggle. On the one hand, the body was exalted as it was transformed from a site of subjection into the venue of a decisive, radical, and noncompromising political intervention, the medium of asserting a voice from the margins of the political sphere. On the other hand, the body was denounced as simply a vessel of life and death, one that was worthy only by way of its destruction, only insofar as its destruction was made to convey a political voice that would otherwise remain mute. Since the self-destruction of the body was the conduit of political voice, and death was fully intended, expected, and, to a certain extent, even desired in the struggle, the centrality of the body was displaced onto the centrality of death. According to this conception, the political meaning of self-destructive acts was intimately tied to the metaphysical meaning of life and death, increasingly abstracted from the body.
The meaning of life and death that nourished the self-destructive actions of these individuals resulted from the ideology of “sacrifice” that endowed them with a theological conception of militancy and an attendant investment in martyrdom. The conviction of the need to sacrifice one’s life for the political cause and that sacrifice was the (only) path to the success of the cause, equipped these participants with the determination and stamina necessary to carry out self-destructive acts. According to one death faster, “In attacks like these, what is more important than physical power is psychological power. That is, what really matters is your head … your ideology. And the resistance made us stronger. Our ideology is that we can venture death.”64 Because the destruction of the body was conducted within a matrix of meaning that valued sacrifice above all else, self-induced death was clearly demarcated from suicide. The choice involved in the weaponization of life was not between life and death but between biological death and ideological death. Real suicide was to concede to ideological death by compromising to stay alive.
In this light, the decision to participate in the death fast for these prisoners was a decision between biology and ideology. In the life that sovereignty defined, produced, and permitted in the cells, the preservation of the body meant the annihilation of the communist cause. “The state wants to strip us of our identity, to make us naked,” one participant said, encapsulating the repeated sentiment of many others.65 By contrast, for these prisoners, ideological self-preservation, at the detriment of biological survival, was the precondition for the survival and endurance of the cause. According to a participant, “I sacrifice my life so as not to sacrifice my thoughts. That’s why I don’t think that I am sacrificing anything. To the contrary, I am doing this to protect myself, for my beliefs, my thoughts. Only if I had forgone my thoughts, would I have sacrificed; I would have squandered [myself].”66 The sacrifice of one’s convictions would compromise the prisoner as a communist militant because it meant conceding to the sovereignty of the state. A communist could only concede to requisites of the political cause. As one of the death fasters put it, “Our bodies are not unsacrificeable. Society is being contaminated through our bodies. When our thoughts and our bodies contend with one another, we relinquish our bodies, not our thoughts. Because our thoughts express the free future of society. Our thoughts are important, the body is sacrificeable. We could damage our bodies, not our thoughts.”67
Since only ideological death was truly synonymous with ceasing to exist, incurring corporeal damage or losing one’s life lost their significance. Living a life without one’s political identity was like being the living dead: “They want to turn us into the living dead. … We said, we will die if necessary but will not be turned into the living dead.”68 On the hunger strike, a participant explained, “the body is finished, but you don’t feel it’s coming to an end. Because you are feeding your brain—that’s what’s important; it’s your imagination, what sustains you is your imagination.”69 The imagination she referred to was that of an alternative order based on communism. Her bodily existence could be sacrificed for the advent of the order she envisaged; that imagination nourished her while she starved her body. As another participant put it, “To give up on one’s thoughts is the real sacrifice. The body becomes worn out within the flow of life anyway. This is a choice, too. But the wearing out of the body becomes less of a problem in the death fast. We understand that death is not connected to self-preservation.”70
In this account the paradoxical severing of death from self-preservation implied a latent but prevalent logic, based on an exchange between life and death, that defined an economy of sacrifice. One’s relation to death was established neither through the idea of risk nor responsibility, but rather through the mediation of a different category: price or toll (bedel). The price of biological self-preservation was political death while the continuation of political existence could be gained at the expense of bodily existence. “I am twenty-two years old,” wrote a female prisoner in her letter to the public, “and on the death fast for over a hundred days. Death does not intimidate me. Because if I cannot live a human life when I live, death is more than welcome.”71
The sacrificial economy established a quid pro quo between different forms of life: “There are many living beings in life. Human beings have values; this distinguishes them from other living beings. Breathing, eating, drinking is not living. What we cannot give up is the fight that human beings put up for their values. In a way, we are paying for this fight.”72 At the same time, each death in the struggle called for due measure: “We have paid our price,” the common slogan of the death fast went, “and we will make them pay!” (“Bedel ödedik, bedel ödeteceğiz!”). In the economy of sacrifice, retribution meant getting back each death’s due in the form of political survival.
In this economy, corporeal violence was transformed into an exchange value abstracted from the real suffering of the concrete body. The neutralization of the violence of self-destruction in the conception of a “price to be paid” enabled the reinscription of the performance of death as the equivalent of commanding political voice. A death faster wryly summarized the dilemma of self-inflicted violence as the price of voice: “A death faster is not harming himself. This is an illusion. He is shouting with his body. Day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, he is shouting.”73 The more the body approached death, the louder politics spoke through it.
“They are trying to annihilate us,” a veteran of the movement asserted, “I understand this better [now]. ‘Revolutionism will come to an end on the soil of this country,’ this is the calculation of the sovereign. We are dying to exist as revolutionaries.”74 Being a revolutionary meant living a politically defined life, a life with values and convictions, defined not by but in opposition to sovereign power. This conception was juxtaposed against the biologically defined life that was deemed as the highest value in the state’s discourse. Biological life was not commensurate with human life, and to defend their equivalence was already a concession to an individualist, self-serving, and conformist way of life, which stood at the basis of the ideological legitimation of sovereignty. “In our country, to live a human life has a very heavy toll, unfortunately. If I avoid paying this toll just because my life will be shorter, or if I do not live as I should … this would be egoism.”75
The state upheld the “sanctity of life,” but what it sought to protect was the mere act of living. The medical interventions sanctioned by the state to resuscitate hunger strikers clearly demonstrated that it was the biological life of prisoners the state was concerned with. Moreover, this biological life was dispoliticized, one that would be stripped of its political qualities precisely because its permission to live would be granted on the basis of its letting go of the “right to die.” If we put this in Agamben’s terms, what was at stake in the attempts to feed the hunger strikers through nonconsensual medical intervention was precisely the production of “bare life” by sovereign power, which turned medicine into its instrument. The prisoners refused this reduction, both by conducting a fast unto death and by insisting on the “right to die,” fighting to continue their fast by pulling out the IV in their arms each time they became conscious and found themselves being fed against their will.76 A participant of the death fast remarked, “The doctor, the prison guard, the psychologist, they are all representatives of the state, they are part of the same grinder that tries to break the resistance. They were even trying to turn our families against us.”77 “Today, we are only a handful, our numbers are meager,” another former death faster remarked, “but we are doing what no one else was able to do.”78
Like those participants who viewed the struggle as an act of resistance, those who viewed it as an act of refusal shared the distinction between biological life and political life. They concurred that biological survival was only a travesty of a fully human life that must involve living according to one’s ideology. They similarly viewed the cell as the threat of being reduced to a life in which they were asked to trade their survival for their convictions. In this light we can observe that both groups converged in how they understood their struggle vis-à-vis the meaning of life; namely, as the opposition to the reduction of their existence to bare life or what they called the “living dead.” However, those who represented the overall movement as an act of refusal opposed bare life not simply because it indicated a life vulnerable to exceptional violence, or because it constituted an assault on their dignity as persons with a “political” identity, but, what is more important, because their opposition entailed a withdrawal from sovereignty. They viewed themselves as paying a price for securing the possibility of a political existence beyond the Turkish state and its ideological hegemony for all those left behind.
As Marx has persuasively argued, equivalent exchange in the “free” market does not prevent the creation of surplus value. Similarly, in the death fast struggle, equivalent exchange in the political market between different forms of life did not prevent the creation of a surplus spectrality—martyrdom. The growing centrality of martyrdom, especially among the proponents of the interpretation of the struggle as an act of refusal, not only celebrated death as the “price” for political existence, but elevated it into the very vehicle for bringing forth an alternative political order, beyond sovereignty. This order would be built by militant-martyrs, and, once established, it would stand upon their haunting presence. Death was the form of refusal of sovereign power, martyrdom was the form of acceding to a reconfigured sovereignty to come. Relinquishing their biological existence, militant-martyrs did not merely add to the political existence of their cause; they also asserted the possibility of a form of dissident political existence that transcended the dichotomy of biological and political life. Instead, they advanced a new form of “sacrificial” existence that would thrive on the absence of its agent. “What is forced upon us is this: ‘to die as we live.’ Our alternative is this: ‘ To become immortal as we die.’”79
The sacrificial interpretation of Marxism provided the alternative matrix of meaning that sustained this economy of exchange between different forms of death. Sacrificial ideology became a prism that established the highest value as the survival of the cause and the revolutionary collective at the expense of the survival of each individual. Class consciousness in this ideology was supplanted by a “sacrificial consciousness,” that is, the moral-political awareness that the communist vanguard must conduct “acts of sacrifice” to incite the masses into struggle. “One who does not have the consciousness to sacrifice has no chance of victory,” a participant of the death fast struggle explained.80 The spectacular acts of death had the potential to be effective on the masses because they reached out to the sacrificial consciousness that already existed in nascent form in popular morality. Acts of sacrifice spoke to the altruism of ordinary people, the participants claimed, which should be sufficient to inspire, if not compel, any individual to participate in the death fast struggle or at least to support it. This was because, they argued, in the simplicity of the act of giving one’s life for the sake of the masses, the masses could recognize and heed the righteousness of the death fasters’ cause and their selfless identification with the will of the people. The masses could also relate to the individuals giving up their lives, even without a highly sophisticated political consciousness. The noble simplicity of the act of sacrifice communicated, in abbreviated and ordinary form, the ideology of Marxism as a whole and the meaning of the communist project. Neither did the revolutionaries need an elaborate ideological formation in Marxism. It was sufficient that they had an ethical-political stance against injustice and the knowledge that they could oppose injustice through acts of sacrifice. A participant explained this position as follows: “For a socialist, a revolutionary to sacrifice oneself, it is not necessary that one has a Marxist-Leninist formation of the highest level. It is sufficient to see the fact that one’s country, one’s neighbor, one’s relatives are under repression and oppression. It is sufficient to be a democrat. In the last instance, it is sufficient to be human.”81
Popular morality, in this view, was already well disposed to sacrifice. The prevalence of Islamic values in the context of Turkey, and particularly as they were understood by Alevis, further supported an ethical consciousness in which sacrifice was one of the highest values. Because Alevi identity was built on a foundational act of sacrifice within Islam and because being an Alevi in Turkey involved the historical experience of subjugation by the Sunni majority, Alevi culture was considered to contain a subterranean sacrificial tradition, a tradition that would be more receptive to political acts of self-sacrifice. However, as these participants noted, theirs was not a struggle around Alevism, nor were they all from an Alevi background. Rather, Alevism, they argued, constituted one of the many indigenous traditions that nourished a sacrificial understanding within Turkish culture, rendering their orientation toward sacrifice more accessible to the masses on an everyday level. One of the former death fasters explained: “A sacrificial consciousness is present in the culture of our people, in the culture of the Anatolian people; it is ingrained. But the ornamentation of this consciousness with revolutionary values comes with being a revolutionary. Otherwise there are many mothers, fathers, siblings who sacrifice themselves for their children. This is common experience.”82 While sacrifice was the cement of popular morality, it needed to be revitalized, reworked with the values of communism, and transformed into a revolutionary morality, which would channel the ordinary impulse to fight against injustice into support for an insurgent politics advocated by the participants of the death fast struggle.
From this perspective, no great differences existed between various types of the weaponization of life. Suicide attack and self-immolation differed from hunger striking only with respect to form, not content. The substance of each act was much the same: sacrifice. Defending this view, a participant explained: “The death fast is sacrifice. You are sacrificing your life, you give it. There are only differences of form with other acts of sacrifice. Self-immolation is a higher form of the death fast. It is the ultimate point of sacrifice. There are also those friends who explode themselves with bombs. There is no difference [among these forms] in terms of political consequences; they are all the loftiest forms of action.”83
According to these participants, all forms of action in which life was forged into a weapon were effective, but in different ways. In the case of suicide attack, the physical damage done to the enemy was of primary importance, whereas with the hunger strike and self-immolation the damage was more ideological. In the hierarchy of sacrificial acts, the most valuable was the one that had the greatest certainty of death. However, all self-destructive acts, regardless of their specific modality, functioned to expose the “truth.” A participant of the death fast struggle stated, “Acts of sacrifice explain political realities to the people, they arouse emotions, they affect and organize the people. [The hunger strike] is a method of explaining the political realities in prisons, but the political realities in prisons are a consequence, they mirror those of the country. The political realities of the country are experienced there; this is what is explained.”84
The most important target of the death fast struggle, the “truth” it sought to expose, was that the ideological hegemony of the state was built on its role as the protector of life. By provoking the state to violence, self-destructive acts could help reveal what was actually behind this role: “The political-ideological stance of the death fast is that it reveals to the masses the mask worn by this attack [of the state].”85 Unmasking the state means showing the illegitimacy of the state’s sovereignty, which, these participants argued, could only be done by taking the power of life and death away from the state. Taking their lives into their own hands, these participants believed that they could create damage of a different caliber: “You don’t only cause actual damage against the power you are warring. … This is what you say there [in the act of sacrifice]: this life is mine, I will end it if I want, in the way that I want, it will go on if I don’t want [to end it], you [the state] cannot decide upon that, I will decide how this life must be lived.”86
The radical aspect of self-destructive violence, according to this interpretation of the movement embedded within a sacrificial ideology, lay in its capacity to delegitimize biosovereignty ideologically. Through the appropriation of the power of life and death from the state into the hands of the individuals, it rendered individuals sovereign over their own lives, if only by authoring their own deaths. But the participants were clear about not juxtaposing the individual against the state. Rather, the individual, as the representative of the revolutionary collective, facilitated the emergence of the latter as an alternative locus of sovereign power through this usurpation of the power of life and death from the state. Individual claims to sovereignty by way of sacrifice slowly brought into being the revolutionary collective as a recipient of political sacrifice alternative to the state, challenging what I have called the state’s monopsony of sacrifice.
If the death fast movement was therefore able to present itself as the harbinger of a new political order, at the basis of this order were the ward communes, which represented the future in embryonic form in the prison. The lived communism of the wards rendered these sites into the constituent spaces of an alternative order. According to one of the participants, “Unless the enemy intervenes in and silences the life in prisons in line with its own will, it knows that the people will think as follows: how can a state that cannot keep a leash on those imprisoned within its four walls keep a leash on those who are outside? Both the state and the left know that this is how the people will think and that the people will soon slide into those organizations against the state. But the state has already lost hold of its leash.”87
The proponents of this interpretation argued that their position was not simply allegiance to a different sovereign (which it was), but, more significantly, to a different kind of sovereignty. Accordingly, the “sovereignty” of the revolutionary collective was different from state sovereignty because it articulated the power of a community in which both the antagonism between social classes and the opposition between the individual and the collective had already been surpassed. Furthermore, “revolutionary sovereignty” subverted the hierarchy in the vitalism of state sovereignty, which was obsessed with self-preservation, survival, sanctity of life, and well-being at any cost. Against the exaltation of life as the supreme and sacred value of modern societies, “revolutionary sovereignty” asserted the survival of the revolutionary cause at the expense of individual and even collective survival. In other words, ideological survival (not the preservation and sanctity of biological life) was the new source of legitimation for this alternative sovereignty. It was on the basis of “revolutionary sovereignty” that the death fast struggle could gain a counter-hegemonic character.
Self-destruction enabled the withdrawal of consent from the ideological hegemony of state sovereignty by way of the withdrawal of bodies. It sought to lift the ideological veil of sovereignty—the preservation and the sanctity of life—and expose that its “truth” was grounded in violence. It asserted a “right to die,” while expressing a defiant stance against injustice, a fundamental desire not to be oppressed, and a yearning for an alternative order to come. This radical departure from the existing order necessitated death as a way of severing the bonds that kept individuals in captivity to the existing order. Death rendered the movement an exodus. Writing on the Irish hunger strike, Feldman contends, “the highly revealing proposal of the mass hunger strike, that undifferentiated rush of the collective body to the ‘edge’ and beyond, indicates the extent to which the Hunger Strike as a medium of political action was considered analogous to the prison escape.”88 This is largely true, yet incomplete in case of the death fast struggle. This “escape,” enacted by the collective staging of self-destruction, was as much out of the clasp of the state’s sovereign power as it was out of the prison. By authoring their deaths, these prisoners believed they were subtracting themselves from power and exiting the order in which their lives were being administered in a totalizing way. Moreover, this exit, when collectively performed, was expected to create the rupture that would awaken the oppressed; as a refusal, it would therefore also pave the way out of the order for the masses, by bringing into view the way to withdraw consent and by bringing into being an alternative order.
According to the participants who viewed their actions as a form of refusal, they were taking part in an ideological war without end, which was already won simply by virtue of their perspicacity in waging the war in this self-destructive form: “To make the decision for the death fast is to get ahead 1–0 against the state. This is an ideological war. [The state] wants to annihilate you; you claim that you will exist with the deaths. We are now carrying out a war upon deaths; upon deaths, disabilities, veterans. To make the decision for the death fast is our victory.”89 The victory of the death fast struggle was already won and yet always deferred because it lay in waiting for the masses to follow the prisoners in their final exodus.
Interpreted as an act of resistance, class war, and refusal, the death fast struggle was in fact the unstable and multifaceted amalgam of these different conceptions of struggle. In its advocacy of the rights of political prisoners, it sought to resist cellular confinement as torture and ward off arbitrary intrusions and usurpations of fundamental rights that had no place in an ostensibly liberal-democratic regime. As part of an anticapitalist struggle, it fought cellular penal policy as an instance of the neoliberal program and sought to advance proletarian interests against the state by acting as the vanguard of the oppressed. Finally, as an act of refusal, it waged an ideological battle against state sovereignty, especially its consensual foundations of legitimacy in the value of self-preservation and sanctity of life. By staging an exodus based on the appropriation of the power of life and death and adopting a sacrificial ideology as the legitimating source of a “revolutionary sovereignty,” it sought to rupture the existing order and expose the possibility of an alternative order worthy of loyal and existential commitment. Overall, the contested significations enveloping the weaponization of life as a tactic characterized the multifaceted nature of the movement and caused its oscillation between different logics of struggle, including the affirmation of life and the advancing of demands, on the one hand, and the negation of life and advocacy of fatal exodus, on the other. Necroresistance worked as a complex amalgam, containing within itself different interpretations of the same struggle, and internal tensions, contradictions, and even oppositions among these interpretations. As a result, necroresistance was simultaneously within, against, and beyond the biosovereign assemblage, rehearsing its subversion in multiple ways, albeit without success.
Table 6.1 MARTYRS OF THE DEATH FAST STRUGGLE, 2000–2007
