In the juxtaposition of the two death-events, of Mehmet the hunger striker and Damiens the regicide, that opened chapter 1, we have seen the vivid contrast between two kinds of violence inflicted upon the insurgent’s body. The bloody and dismembering violence performed upon Damiens’s body by Samson, the king’s executioner, marks a poignant and telling distance from the silent and decomposing violence performed upon Mehmet’s body by no one other than himself. One was directed against the insurgent by the state, the other by the insurgent against the state. One was alone on the scaffold, the other, though alone in bed, not on his own—he was acting as part of a movement that involved hundreds of others. Sovereign power, or the power of life and death, is the common core that inheres in the violence in both these death-events and establishes an equivalence between them. However, these death-events are also symptomatic scenes of different power regimes and their corresponding forms of resistance.
The transformation of Damiens’s refusal to utter a confession into Mehmet’s corporeal and self-directed, though no less fatal and unyielding, refusal to give obedience to domination provides clues to the ways in which both power relations and resistance have changed. The juxtaposition between the two death-events permits us to see the movement from an absolute and monarchical sovereignty to a biopolitical and democratic sovereignty as well as the emergence of a new form of resistance based on self-destruction. The novelty of necroresistance, accordingly, is twofold: on the one hand, it usurps the power of life and death from the state, thereby constituting an active challenge to sovereign power; on the other hand, it operates on a discursive and practical terrain that is enabled by the biopoliticization of sovereignty, one that mimics its delineation of life as the object of power but responds by its inversion.
The distance between Damiens and Mehmet becomes all the more obvious by the statement that can be found in a pamphlet issued by the movement of which Mehmet was a part. The statement reads as follows: “We have nothing to lose but our bodies. But we have a great world to win!”1 This is a reiteration of the famous statement penned by Marx and Engels in “The Manifesto of the Communist Party”: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”2 Damiens hails to us from a time before the full development of capitalism and its attendant social and political antagonisms, a time before Marxism, whereas Mehmet’s movement partakes in, and, indeed, cannot but be thought against the background of a rich tradition of revolutionary struggle that finds its inspiration, guidance, and voice through Marxism.
In the “Manifesto,” Marx and Engels present a critique of the existing order from the perspective of social relations of production brought about by capitalism whose deep inequalities and differences in power and status are masked by the legal and political order that ostensibly provides freedom and equality to citizens. They call upon workers to unite in struggle and to unshackle themselves from the chains that keep them tied to the capitalist system. At the same time, Marx and Engels make a political intervention in the domain of theory by performatively staging this struggle, announcing that a “specter is haunting Europe” while becoming the very “specter” that they thereby announce.
The shift enacted by the reiteration of this statement by proponents of the death fast struggle in Turkey is important because it constitutes a direct response to the “Manifesto” while, at the same time, it reveals what is novel about this struggle. The most visible shift in this rewriting is that the statement no longer addresses proletarians as a third, external party but uses the “we” in assuming the identity of the proletariat. This identification accentuates its performative quality, enacting the proletarian perspective not only by issuing an answer to Marx and Engels’s call to action, but also by responding to that call from within action. The statement performs the coming into being of the proletariat as an active subject in struggle who has now appropriated its own voice. It equates political prisoners with the proletariat not simply as their representative but as their vanguard embodiment. Each Mehmet stands for the proletariat singly, the death fast struggle stands for it collectively.
More important, however, is that the rewriting of this famous statement, subtle and yet radical, signifies a conceptual and political transformation that can be discerned from the substitution of chains with bodies. This substitution implies that, in the current political and social order, proletarians’ own bodies have replaced the invisible chains that hold individuals in bondage. In this new call the standpoint of material production and reproduction as a point of critique of the existing order recedes into the background while a new material standpoint takes over. This standpoint is that of the individual body, from whose perspective there is a dual shift.
The first aspect of this shift is the biopolitical register. It reveals the understanding that proletarians are tied to the existing social and political order not simply by the enchainment imposed by those in power but by their own entailment in its reproduction through their biological, ideational, affective, and libidinal investment. By entrusting their material existence to the state’s biopolitical protection, by accepting the life granted to them by the existing order, they have participated in rendering their bodies the invisible chains that keep them tied to their subjection. The existing order, wherein life conceived as survival has been rendered devoid of political meaning, has given them corporeal security in exchange for their obedience.
The second element is a shift in the way the struggle to overcome proletarian subjugation to that order is now conceived. If subjugation is now lodged in the corporeal register, so is liberation. The rewritten statement announces that propelling the proletarians further on the path toward that “great world to win” will be achieved by the negation of the corporeal existence through the government of which obedience to the existing order is secured and reproduced. Implicit here is the idea that by negating bodily existence as the basis of the particular form of life that is allowed, securitized, and sanctified by the state’s political rule, a truly political life, one whose relation to justice has not been severed, can be made possible.
However, unlike the “specter haunting Europe” whose advent is so menacingly announced in the “Manifesto,” it is the withdrawal of the death fast struggle from the scene of politics that continues to haunt us today. This is because the local reiteration of Marx and Engels’s statement by Mehmet’s movement does not simply offer a new interpretation of radical politics, but it calls into being a new form of agency that permeates and indeed enables that radical politics by way of its self-destruction. Human weapons, the actors who resort to weaponizing their lives to stage their political intervention, continue to menace politics not merely by their appearance but also by their disappearance, especially after they have authored their own deaths. How, then, may we come to terms with their troubling legacy?
PRACTICAL-POLITICAL EFFECTS
Before gesturing toward an evaluation of the success and failure of human weapons in more general terms, I want to begin the assessment, once again, from the concrete case of the death fast struggle. The caveat in drawing up a balance sheet in order to evaluate a movement is that its success or failure is never completely reducible to immediate, tangible changes that it is able to effect. The equivocal status of the results is particularly pronounced for movements that resort to the weaponization of life, which is itself polyvalent.3 This is because, while there is an instrumental aspect to the battle such movements wage, which can be related to their expressed objectives (whether these are about prison conditions, rights’ violations, demands for welfare and recognition), there is also an expressive aspect, irreducible to the specific demands they make. The latter dimension, related to the independent effects of the weaponization of life as a form of political action, is much more intangible, long-term, and invisible in its political, ideological, and cultural effects. These reverberations can be rippling, difficult to assess in the immediate aftermath of the political intervention of human weapons, and highly ambiguous in their measurability.
In both practical-political and theoretical terms, it must be acknowledged that the death fast struggle presents us with a mixed record. In keeping with the practical-political goals of the death fast struggle, it would not be inaccurate to say that the movement has largely failed in securing its immediate objectives. The death fast struggle was able neither to halt the opening of F-type prisons nor to prevent the larger project of the “cellularization” of Turkey’s carceral landscape where high security prisons have now become permanent fixtures. In these prisons the disciplinary penal regime is currently enforced with utmost diligence. In addition to the F-type prisons in various provinces, now numbering fourteen, there are two other high security prisons: Diyarbakır D-type and Erzurum H-type. In total these prisons can house about six thousand people, a figure that already falls short of the number of political prisoners, whose current numbers (in 2011) are around eighty-five hundred, including both convicts and detainees.4
The total prison population itself has risen to an all-time high, reaching approximately 130,000 people. With the construction of new prisons and the renovations and adjustments made to existing ones, over 70 percent of the existing carceral capacity has been modified according to the new penal regime. Decked with different letters of the alphabet (D, E, H, L, M, and T-types), these prisons have been made or remade according to a spatial layout of small cells and modular units, in each of which a maximum of eight to ten people are allowed.5 In other words, in all the prisons across the country, collective confinement in wards is gradually being replaced by solitary or small-group confinement in cells.
Now, there is some truth to the official claim that these new prisons are much cleaner, better lit and heated, and more comfortable than the traditional ward-based prisons, whose overcrowding and poor physical conditions (involving lighting, heating, cleaning, bedding, among others) presented enormous difficulties for everyday life. Despite the improvements in material conditions brought along with the F-type prisons, however, hailed in the name of “civilization” and “modernity” by state officials, it is far from certain that the social and political conditions of prisons have become better.6 In addition to the obvious problem of social and sensory deprivation associated with cellular confinement in the new prisons, human rights defenders and legal professionals continue to report that degrading body searches on visitors, incursions on rights to health care, personal letters, journals, and books, and, more important, allegations of beatings, torture, and other human rights abuses continue, even though at a lesser intensity and frequency than before.7 The disciplinary penal regime, which initially only selectively targeted political prisoners, is now slowly expanding to take the rest of the prison population within its fold.
At the same time, access to socialization remains precarious. On this score, despite its overall failure to stop the enforcement of the disciplinary penal regime, the struggle’s success in managing to secure the right to socialization must be recognized: up to ten hours per week of social time for ten prisoners at a time, which is not conditional upon participation in prison-administered “rehabilitation programs” in the high security prisons. Even though this is hardly a great victory, particularly given the ambitious list of demands of the struggle at its inception, the impact on the everyday lives of prisoners of the relaxation of absolute isolation in conditions of cellular imprisonment cannot be underestimated. Unfortunately, however, prisoner letters to the parliament’s Human Rights Commission attest that, despite the decree of the Ministry of Justice authorizing access to socialization, its application continues to be arbitrary, fluctuating, and ridden with tensions between the prison administrations and the prisoners.8 As a result, the threat of social and sensory deprivation in the cells and the possibility of arbitrary practices and usurpations of hard-earned rights continue to be salient problems for Turkey’s prisoners.
Paradoxically, however, it is those ambitious demands initially voiced by the death fast struggle, such as the abolition of the state security courts, reforms in the criminal justice system, even changes in the constitution, i.e., demands that appeared the most unattainable, that have come true today. In the last decade the beginning of Turkey’s accession negotiations with the European Union and the changing political dynamics under the three successive Justice and Development Party (AKP) governments have greatly accelerated Turkey’s democratization process.9 The changes that have been wrought in the legal, jurisprudential, and political spheres, in line with the Copenhagen criteria of the EU and AKP’s own liberalizing mission, have curbed the entrenched role of the military in politics, led to important constitutional amendments through the referendum of September 12, 2010, and brought welcome enlargements in terms of rights and liberties (at least de jure).10 However, while the construction of a new constitution is under way, Turkey continues to be in a process of transition in which it is unclear whether a real democratization that tackles Turkey’s thorny issues (such as the Kurdish question, secularism, social justice, and reconciliation with the past) will effectively take place.
Serious questions abound regarding the fairness and impartiality of the proceedings of the trials of military officials (for having conspired in planning a coup) and those of other prominent journalists, bureaucrats, and intelligence and police officers (for colluding with criminal intent).11 Prisons now host prisoners, such as former members of the High Command, whose trial, let alone indictment, was previously simply unthinkable. At the same time, the usual suspects, namely, journalists, lawyers, human rights defenders, and activists, continue to fill up the prisons, at an unprecedented rate. On the one hand, high-profile trials of individuals and groups considered to have been related to the “deep state,” i.e., the forces that often escaped the control of democratically elected governments and acted beyond the laws with impunity in the name of the security interests of the state, signal that the “untouchables” of the authoritarian past are fast eroding. On the other hand, ongoing restrictions on the freedom of expression and assembly cast grave doubts on the commitment of the new ruling elite to democracy.12 When, for example, as recently as June 2013, the mass protests that developed in opposition to the cutting of trees in Istanbul’s Gezi Park to make way for a shopping mall styled after an Ottoman military barracks spread like wildfire across the country and brought into the open the accumulated grievances and worries concerning the authoritarian tendencies of the AKP government, they were forcefully repressed by the riot police who showed little restraint in its use of batons and plastic bullets and deployed inordinate amounts of pressured water and pepper spray on mostly nonviolent protestors. Such events serve as a mirror that reflects the dark face of the Turkish state, a face with which political prisoners, dissenters, and forces of opposition in this country have been only too familiar for many decades.
Therefore, while the Kemalist elite, with its top-down approach to society, authoritarian secularism, ethnicist construction of citizenship, and hostility toward class struggle, have suffered a big blow from the conservative, populist political Islamists brought to power by almost 50 percent of the popular vote, it would be overly optimistic to conclude that the strong state tradition has thereby entered a process of silently withering away. Overall, the question of democratization has become further complicated by the burden of “dominant-party politics,” under the hegemonic and majoritarian leadership of AKP (now celebrating its third term in government), whose increasingly authoritarian attitude toward dissent raises serious doubts about future prospects.13
While it is unclear how and to what extent the death fast struggle has contributed to the process of democratization (if at all), it still remains the case that the death fast struggle did a lot of work to raise the popular level of consciousness about the general conditions of the country’s prisons as the underside of its democracy. As an act of resistance, it pushed back against the state to secure the rights of prisoners and called public attention to the intimate connection between the isolation in prison cells and torture. Even if it was not able to expand prisoners’ rights significantly, it managed to expose the weak enforcement of the human rights regime in these marginal spaces and the Turkish state’s highly checkered history of treating dissent. The death fast struggle also performed a great service in demonstrating how the mainstream social-democratic left in Turkey has lost some of its fundamental reflexes about human rights, democracy, and justice by bringing to light the very irony that, in the face of prison unrest, the Turkish state’s responses of conducting a highly militarized security operation in the prisons, endorsing censorship and repression, the deflection of real human rights concerns to a discourse on security, and the sanctioning of medical intervention through artificial feeding were all orchestrated under a coalition government led by Ecevit’s Democratic Left Party (DSP). DSP, as the rising star of the center-left in the 1990s and the party with the highest votes in the 1999 elections (22 percent of the total), experienced a bitter defeat in the elections of 2002, receiving just above 1 percent. While its abrupt decline in popularity cannot simply be attributed to its handling of the death fast struggle (a decline that was precipitated by its failures in handling the economic recession as well as the leadership struggles within the party), its stance toward the “prisons problem” was surely another symptom of its eroding credibility. The death fast struggle was able to bring this erosion into public view, even if its ability to provide a real alternative was frustrated by its own politics and inability to stimulate the masses into large-scale collective action on its behalf.
On the other hand, when viewed as part of an ongoing class war, the movement failed to make significant strides. Most obviously, it was unable either to defend or to gain popular support for the lived experience of communism in the wards that had become the prisoners’ sanctuaries. Further, the movement’s contention that the prison was a trench of class struggle, on equivalent footing with other arenas like the factory, workshop, office, university, and the street, and even the foremost trench in the battle with the state, due to the specific political circumstances of the present, did not seem to resonate much with the masses on whose behalf the prisoners claimed to be fighting. In fact, the prominence accorded to the prison may have added to the prisoners’ alienation from popular support. While the connection between neoliberal capitalism and F-type prisons, pointing out the dual processes of the erosion of the welfare state and the refurbishing of the penal apparatus, was an important political thesis, which emphasized how the state was actively creating individualized, dispoliticized subjectivities for the smooth functioning of the market, the diffusion of this thesis as the dominant claim of the struggle remained limited. Overall, the aspirations of the movement in advancing class struggle stayed largely within the framework of vanguardist politics, whose radical and spectacular interventions into politics from marginal spaces were expected to lead to mass mobilizations and uprisings. Despite some public support generated at the beginning and ending of the movement (though less on the basis of discourse that centered on class struggle than one based on democracy and human rights), the level of mass mobilization remained far below expectations. And whatever popular support did materialize was either censored or forcefully repressed by the security forces, thus confining the death fast struggle to the margins out of which it emerged. In turn, the death fast struggle was unable to develop its counterhegemonic discourse and impose its political agenda upon a broad coalition of oppositional forces that might have been able to carry at least some of its aspirations forward.
Finally, interpreted as an act of refusal, the death fast struggle had a dramatic effect that is difficult to capture by the yardstick of success or failure precisely because of the way in which the weaponization of life defies instrumentality through its disruption of the means-ends relation. Here it is helpful to point to the fact that the repeated acts of self-destruction performed by prisoners and their supporters presented a complex challenge to the Turkish state that it could not ignore. The resort to multiple forms of violence, including conventional urban guerrilla tactics along with defensive and offensive forms of self-destruction, did not only undermine the state’s legitimate monopoly of the use of force. By usurping the power of life and death from the state through violent acts of self-destruction, which were resignified and justified as acts of political self-sacrifice necessary for bringing into being an alternative order, the movement also challenged what I have called the state’s monopsony of sacrifice, i.e., its status as the only legitimate recipient of political sacrifice.
If the weaponization of life thereby threatened the sovereign power of the state, it also challenged the ideological hegemony of the state based on the sanctification and the protection of the “right to live.” By asserting the controversial “right to die,” the participants of the death fast struggle negated the life that was permitted to them, a life they saw as profoundly unjust. Their ideological attack was to bring into view how the form of life sanctified by the increasingly biopolitical nature of the sovereignty of the state was a biological life that was stripped of politics and to deny the desirability of this form of life as the basis of obedience. Instead, they upheld the primacy of their political over their biological existence and advocated the withdrawal of consent from the existing order by way of self-destruction.
On the other hand, the dramatic impact of the weaponization of life was continuously submerged, repressed, and co-opted by the strategic choices and practices of the state (whose force and capacity the participants of the struggle significantly underestimated). The state did consider the radical left to be a real threat to its own sovereignty and, as a result, proceeded to mobilize and employ the traditional instruments of sovereign power to eliminate it, rather than ignoring this threat or addressing it only with superficial measures. However, in so doing, it consistently fused these instruments with biopolitical tools, such as the selective management of populations and interventions that target life and well-being within a rubric of humanitarian government. In order to solve the “prisons problem,” which had become a public embarrassment, the state introduced a new penal regime that became the emblem of its drive toward biopoliticization so as to strengthen and renew its sovereignty. In order to reinvent itself as a biosovereign assemblage and implement a new modality of rule, which it considered more efficient, technological, modern, cost-effective, and “humane,” it made law, waged war, and dictated its own terms for peace.
The Turkish state first expediently reduced the unruly prison “crowd” by making law, providing the conditions of possibility of implementing a disciplinary penal regime. It then put the high security prisons into immediate use, despite a public lack of confidence in and consent to them (as well as the government’s quickly reneged promise to cultivate a public consensus), by making war against the prisoners on hunger strike in existing prisons and, through the mediatized images of this war, against the public at large. The state resorted not only to ordinary forms of violence, with its military might, but also to more nuanced, symbolic, and personalized forms of violence, such as torture, inhumane treatment, and the strategic negligence of the prisoners’ needs and concerns. Extremely important among these forms of violence was nonconsensual artificial feeding, which not only enlisted medicine as a biopolitical tool of government but also, because of its improper administration, left hundreds of prisoners with disabilities. And, finally, the state secured the future of the penal regime and eliminated the recalcitrant insurgency in the cells of the new prisons by making peace, issuing reprieves and pardons, thereby ejecting prisoners out of the prisons into the care of their own families and reestablishing itself as the benevolent protector even of its unruly citizen-subjects.
These stratagems involved the instrumentalization of law, the deployment of collective and individualized violence, and the exercise of legal, medical, psychological, and other specialized knowledges upon carefully singled out populations in order to implement a biopoliticized modality of sovereignty. Not only did the prisoners incorrectly estimate the agility of the Turkish state in attending to its own wounded sovereignty, but they also failed to appreciate the cynicism with which the state was able to churn out whatever shame it was supposed to suffer as a result of the deaths of prisoners from self-starvation and self-immolation in the form of a self-righteous display of pride and strength in its struggle against “terrorism.” In the meantime, the discursive field of “terror” continued to expand exponentially, not only in Turkey but around the globe after 9/11, subsuming the already questionable tactics of the prisoners within the repertoires of “terrorist” action and the state strategies of coping with them within processes of securitization.
THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS
This book cast the death fast struggle as a concrete instance, a revealing example, that crystallizes the tensions and contradictions of a global political conjuncture in which the process of the biopoliticization of sovereignty meets the necropoliticization of resistance. Using a framework of analysis that builds on Foucault’s analysis of power relations was prompted by my effort to consider the specificity of the new form of resistance performed through self-destructive techniques. As a counterpoint to arguments in the literature addressing self-destructive practices, which focus on explanations based on religious convictions, individual motivations, psychological orientations, and histories of trauma, on the one hand, or strategic organizational choices in conditions of asymmetric warfare, on the other, I have maintained the necessity of pursuing a critical approach that also problematizes the conditions that produce these practices and attends to the power relations in response to which these self-destructive practices come into being and take on their specific form. Because of the corporeal register in which these struggles unfold, I have contended that a biopolitical approach, which accounts for how life becomes an object and objective of power relations, should be deployed in order to understand why and how death becomes constituted into a distinct vehicle of resistance.
The biopolitical framing of the narrative of the death fast struggle has several advantages over competing approaches. Most important is that it affords us the possibility of analyzing the nature of power relations in which the agents who resort to the weaponization of life are situated and through which their subjectivities and political practices are shaped as well as challenged. It allows us to venture beyond a narrow model of rational choice, because it gives us a perspective on political subjectivities as the complex products of power relations and their contestation, subjectivities whose active political choices may be based on expressive and noninstrumental as well as instrumental rationality. It offers a different view of the agency of individuals, enabling us to trace the way choices and decisions are shaped by the spaces in which individuals are situated and the experience of these spaces that they transform through their own social relations. It casts light on the ways in which individuals live through and perceive power relations as well as how they comprehend the range of possibilities available to them for their contestation. It thus helps delineate the individual in its profound political and ethical complexity: with motivations, beliefs, and commitments, with choices that are a function not simply of prior experiences of trauma, loss, or psychopathology, but also of a complex constellation of negative and positive experiences that are conditioned by a politics of space and devotion to a cause: in the Turkish example the marginality and asymmetry of the space of the prison as well as its social appropriation into ward communes where communism was put into practice.
Foucault’s analysis of the panoptic spatiality of the prison is of utmost importance for understanding how asymmetry shapes both power and resistance in such modern institutions. As such, it allows us to question the boundaries of the political by paying attention to the body not merely as the object of power and site of subjection but also, and what is more important, as a site of resistance. The body now becomes the vehicle of a desubjectivization through which a counterpolitics finds material basis. The biopolitical approach concretizes the body as the material space of contestation where opposing forces, sovereignty and resistance, intersect in a battle that takes place on a micro as well as a social scale. Finally, Foucault’s theoretical apparatus encourages us to pay attention to the particularities of each situation and struggle, the web of relations in which these struggles are situated and through which agents make their own interventions, thereby enabling us to call into question grand narratives that run from the early martyrs of the various religious traditions to contemporary human weapons as if they would seamlessly constitute a singular, trans-historical lineage that explains our world today.
While utilizing a Foucauldian perspective on power relations in order to analyze the novelty and significance of the death fast struggle, I have taken as my point of departure two theses that characterize the biopolitical argument: first, that in modern regimes of power, life itself has become the object of political rule and regulation and, second, that, with this transformation, death is pushed outside the boundaries of the political. As a result, many theorists of biopolitics have tended to argue that the transformation from sovereignty into biopolitics entails the replacement of sovereignty by biopolitical techniques of government. At the same time, the totalizing narrative of governmentality, penetrating and molding ever more spheres of life, has tended to construe a bleak potential for resistance, if any, and to theorize resistance as a residual, fragmentary, localized, and restricted response to power relations. At best, resistance has been tied to an affirmation of life as the object of biopolitics, which functions by making claims for greater rights, welfare, and recognition, mimicking the nature of power relations in their contestation.
The book provides a response to both of these arguments, both theoretically and through the in-depth study of the death fast struggle. First, through a close reading of Foucault, I have argued that, while some of the contradictions in Foucault’s own writings, and especially the ambiguities in his theorization of the problem of the articulation of sovereignty with new modalities of power, have authorized or at least lent credence to the reading that posits the disappearance of sovereignty, it is also possible to identify another strand of theorization in Foucault, which presents important clues regarding the complicated and imbricated interrelationship between sovereignty and biopolitics. The signpost of this strand in Foucault’s thought is the argument regarding the reversal of the politics of life into its opposite, the politics of death, a reversal he identifies as the paradox that profoundly shapes the Nazi and Soviet experiences in the Second World War but that also conditions the rule of every modern state more generically, if less pronouncedly and more insidiously. For Foucault, this paradox arises from the coexistence of sovereignty, discipline, and security, sharpened into a contradictory conjunction of the machinery of death and the management of life.
Extrapolating from and building on Foucault’s observations on the modulations enacted by the emergence and confluence of these different modalities of power, I have put forth the theorization of the contemporary power regime as an incipient configuration, characterized not only by this confluence but a changing structure of articulation. Biosovereignty denotes an emergent regime of power, an assemblage of discourses and practices, signs and actions, one that surfaces at the intersection of the power to kill and the power to regulate life. Its dominant characteristics, tactics, and the specific forms of violence it deploys are defined by the structure of articulation among different modalities of power in highly contextualized, historically situated forms. The theory of biosovereignty sharpens and provides the groundwork to explore the latent strand in Foucault’s writings, a strand that otherwise remains embryonic, ambiguous, and at times, incongruous.
Second, I have maintained that the same paradox of the reversal of the politics of life into the politics of death can be observed in the field of resistance. Alongside movements that demand greater rights and well-being, resources and recognition, we now find struggles that make a political intervention by staging a total rejection of domination and disrupting the political rationality of biosovereignty. In my attempt to theorize these forms of political action, especially in the absence of a sophisticated biopolitical theorization of resistance, I have found it necessary to carry out a critical reconstruction of Foucault’s writings in order to identify distinct forms of resistance as they correspond to different modalities of power relations. Providing a multifaceted portrait of resistance in Foucault, from Damiens’s refusal to confess on the scaffold to the uprisings in Iran, I have delineated different threads of theorization that can shed light on the struggles of the present based on the weaponization of life. In this inquiry I have isolated Foucault’s controversial writings on the Iranian revolution to be particularly resourceful in the conceptualization of sacrifice as a form of counterconduct that stages a complete refusal of obedience, albeit when these reflections are reconsidered in conjunction with his analysis of governmentality in light of present developments. My main contention in working through the possibilities and limitations of different instances of resistance in Foucault’s work has been the necessity to pressure the biopolitical approach to shed light on paradoxical copresence of struggles that politicize life both in affirming and negating forms as well as in their interrelationships. The latter form of struggles, which I have called necroresistance, constitutes the blind spot of Foucauldian biopolitics and the main contribution of this book.
In developing the theorization of necroresistance, I have also found it necessary to engage in detail with Agamben, one of the most influential critics of Foucault, whose thesis on “bare life” has provocatively and forcefully reconfigured the biopolitical approach. Examining Agamben’s critique of Foucault and his arguments, especially from the perspective of its implications for resistance, I have critiqued his reconfiguration of biopolitics in a metaphysical and transhistorical direction based, on the one hand, on the conceptualization of sovereignty as always already biopolitical and, on the other hand, on rendering life the abstract and disempowered function of sovereignty without any real potential for resistance. Nonetheless, exploring scholarship that utilizes both Foucault’s and Agamben’s work to analyze contemporary struggles that resort to self-destructive practices, I have contended that the questions raised by the Agambenian inflection of the biopolitical approach concerning the relationship between necroresistance and bare life cannot be satisfactorily answered without developing a concurrent grasp of how these struggles take place on the ground and how the agents that resort to the weaponization of life understand their own relation to life and death, power and resistance.
Having scrutinized the ethnographic material that constitutes the indepth study of the death fast struggle, we are now at a point to reconsider the theorization of biosovereignty and necroresistance advanced in the beginning of this book. The analysis of the death fast struggle allows us to push back against the theoretical apparatus that was deployed to frame and present it and to evaluate the extent to which the analysis demonstrates the arguments elaborated theoretically, complicates the concepts developed, and suggests directions for further development.
One of the claims of the book, and the underlying logic of its architecture, is to cast power and resistance both in a binary opposition and as complementary parts of the same story by exposing how the center appears from the point of view of those in revolt in the margins and how the margins of power appear from the point of view of the state. Each point of view, captured in situ through the narrations of a multiplicity of actors, functions to unveil a certain “truth” of the other, allowing us a glimpse into the other’s hidden reality.
From the perspective of the margins, the study of the death fast struggle lends important empirical illustration and support to the theoretical argument advanced earlier regarding the recalcitrance and ongoing vitality of sovereignty within the biopolitical problematic. This demonstration is not the simple verification of the rather obvious, continued existence of the modern state and its role in contemporary politics. Rather, it strives to make visible the continuous presence, indeed refurbishment, of the sovereign core of power, wrapped as it increasingly is, within layers of disciplinary, regulatory, and ostensibly more “humane,” benevolent, tolerant, and respectful mechanisms of domination. The permeation and modification of the supreme power of life and death by disciplinary and biopolitical tactics make it stronger and, insofar as it is able to take these tactics into the fold of its traditional prerogatives, they enable the revamping of sovereignty. However, the new, biopolitical tools of government that sovereignty deploys in order to augment itself also require reinforcement by conventional tactics of power, thereby referencing a mutual instrumentalization and interpenetration. If we revisit the contradiction between the sovereign power of life and death and the vitalist idiom of biopower (with the attendant humanitarian discourse on the sacredness of life and the supremacy of survival, with which sovereignty, and especially its extraction of corporeal loyalty, is now paradoxically justified), from the point of view of the mutual imbrication of sovereignty and biopower, we can see that the analysis of biosovereignty fundamentally problematizes the narrative of sovereignty as a progressive tale of the accumulation of freedoms, deepening self-government, and enlightened domination.
On a more specific register, the analysis evinces the process by which the biosovereign assemblage is constituted in the Turkish context as well as its specific structure of articulation. If sovereignty takes the lead in doing the work of amalgamating, incorporating, implementing, and instrumentalizing biopolitical goals and tactics, the latter also transform sovereignty from within. In light of the authoritarian impulses of the Kemalist tradition of statecraft in Turkey, that sovereign power should take the primary initiative is perhaps unsurprising. However, the result, the emergent assemblage as analyzed here, presents a contradictory ensemble of power relations that is no longer simply reducible either to sovereignty as it is classically conceived or to biopolitics in its pure form. Rather, it is a complex and evolving formation, reinventing and reconstituting itself anew in each exceptional “crisis.”
When human weapons take into their own hands the power of life and death, they challenge the core of sovereign power, latent and subdued through biopoliticization, with which they find themselves in confrontation. In the moment of their self-induced death, they wrench the power of life and death away from the apparatuses of the modern state in which sovereignty is conventionally vested. But, the analysis of the death fast struggle reminds us, this is only part of the picture. That is because their protest is in turn occasioned by the increasing biopoliticization in government, which attempted to render their lives and well-being into the practical and discursive object of power in the first place. As a result, the exercise of political agency in opposition to biosovereignty takes specific forms whose corporeality and relation to death are occasioned not only as a response to sovereignty but also as directly enabled and conditioned by biopolitics and its valorization of life. Indeed, the politicization of death appears radical and disruptive precisely because of the evolving nature of power relations and the expansion of the limits of their field of intervention, increasingly based on the politicization of life. This is what marks the distinction of the death fast struggle from a movement that simply contests the sovereignty of the state. Rather, what the analysis shows is that the movement is directed at disrupting the biopoliticization of sovereign power through death insofar as that biopoliticization renders death into a possible site of resistance at the margins of power. Consequently, biosovereignty relegates death to its margins, but it also enables the deployment of death as a challenge emerging from those margins.
In contrast, from the perspective of the center, the analysis of the death fast struggle complicates the limited and pessimistic account of resistance provided by theorists of biopolitics, according to whom the increasing penetration of power into every facet of life shapes subjectivities in ways that preclude or greatly limit the potential of resistance. Such a view should best be considered as the ultimate desire of power, though a desire that is constantly thwarted by the new forms of resistance that biosovereignty produces and encounters. For the center, acts of resistance are frustrating first because they exist at all, showing the points of weakness in the web of relations woven into the growing network of the biosovereign assemblage. However, the acts of resistance based on self-destruction appear particularly trying in comparison to more conventional forms of struggle that demand better conditions of life and greater well-being because, while struggle and negotiation with the latter are always possible, necroresistance’s negation of life and thereby the power over life makes it difficult to subsume it within the biosovereign assemblage. This is a radical challenge not only because it disrupts the functioning and reproduction of power relations but also because it puts into question the sacredness of life, that survival reigns supreme over any other value, which lies at the foundation of biosovereignty. Necroresistance thereby presents a constant line of flight that destabilizes and prevents the consolidation of the biosovereign assemblage into a stable, self-reproducing, smoothly functioning apparatus.
From this point of view, necroresistance appears to continuously frustrate the attempt of the biosovereign assemblage to produce its subjects not only as docile and obedient but also as the sources of consent to the prioritization of biological survival and the sacralization of being alive, i.e., to the values that lie at the basis of biosovereign legitimation. Translating into the terms used by Agamben, who claims that the constitutive feature of “bio-sovereignty” (which I have distinguished from what I call biosovereignty) is the biopolitical production of life as “bare,” we may say that necroresistance interrupts the forcible baring of life as such, i.e., its dispoliticization. Alternatively, we may take the study of the death fast struggle as providing a powerful counterpoint to Agamben’s claim that the production of bare life is a constitutive facet of “bio-sovereignty.” This study shows that the production of life as bare is only the utmost fantasy of power. This is because even in conditions under the most totalizing and penetrating control, such as those of the prison, power cannot prevent resistance. Furthermore, since the attempt to elude the grasp of power by death, by appropriating the power of life and death from the biosovereign assemblage, is also the assertion of a politicized understanding of life as superior to the alternative of simply being alive to which individuals are increasingly threatened to be reduced, it would be more accurate to construe this resistance not as the resistance of bare life but as resistance to bare life. Because the resistance of bare life already assumes the reduction of individual lives to the defining feature of vulnerability through the inclusive exclusion, it overlooks the very political meaning that these individuals attribute to their lives and the radical interventions they attempt to make at the cost of their lives. The assertion of a politicized life over and against survival and the prioritization of political causes and ideological convictions over biological existence do not only challenge the foundations of the existing order but also force us to reconsider the turn taken in the biopolitical approach that uses the category of bare life rather indiscriminately and uncritically and, worse, that assumes it to be a matter of fact rather than a biosovereign fantasy. It is important here to recall Foucault’s remark about revolt, whether it is carried out by one person or the masses: “no power is capable of making it absolutely impossible.”14
At the same time, the analysis of the death fast struggle complicates the unitary and internally consistent appearance of necroresistance from the point of view of the central apparatuses of power. Even though, as a movement, the death fast struggle attempted to present itself as a coherent whole, this study allows us to see the multiple and, at times, conflictual and contradictory strands within it, which make up a complex and polyvalent reality that is not reducible to one facet alone. Most significantly, the difference between the offensive and defensive forms of the weaponization of life and the varying degrees of support these modalities find among individuals who actively participate in the struggle itself present a nuanced picture of necroresistance as an emergent repertoire of political action whose internal configuration, justifications, tactical distinctions, and rituals of conduct are far from unitary or complete. The divergent self-narrations and varying interpretations of the participants depict the sphere of struggle as a differentiated amalgam, both as the dynamic intersection of different viewpoints, discourses, and practices, and as the evolving assemblage of forces that changes with the vicissitudes of the struggle itself. Such an account cautions us against reductionist interpretations of necroresistance, conveying its multifaceted reality and calling attention to its internal struggles and transformations.
On the particular register of the Turkish case, the analysis depicts the process by which different oppositional forces assemble and disassemble, as particular strands within the movement take precedence over the others, both discursively and practically. While the current that privileges the weaponization of life as the primary strategy of struggle is in ascendance, we see the assertion of the “right to die” as a radical and uncompromising stance that privileges the site of the prison as the frontline of social and political struggle, resorts to recurrent acts of self-destruction by way of escalation, and assumes a vanguardist idiom in which spectacular acts are expected to take the lead in mobilizing the masses. Given the predominantly vanguardist heritage of the extraparliamentary leftist groups in Turkey, the ascendance of this current within the struggle is not unexpected, even though this still involves a substantive reconfiguration of what vanguardism entails. On the other hand, when the more moderate current assumes dominance, we witness the transformation of the discourse of the struggle to one of human rights and opposition to isolation as torture, presenting the weaponization of life as a tactic of last resort of those whose field of political action is limited by the marginality of prison conditions. Such an approach is marshaled to seek broad alliances with the public, through mass mobilization or the deployment of figures of public stature to motivate mass mobilization, with the use of moral arguments in order to exert pressure on the government as the main means of political intervention. Both the internally fraught coalition structure of the movement and the ebbs and flows in the trajectory of the struggle as a whole have provided space for this moderate current to carve an important role for itself, alongside the hardliners’ vanguardist current. Because these currents do not necessarily replace one another chronologically but coexist in an unstable whole, they give complexity to the movement and point to the ongoing presence of multiple contentions that are never fully resolved.
At the same time, the polyvalent nature of the death fast struggle in particular and of necroresistance in general provides different opportunities for its co-optation by the biosovereign assemblage with varying degrees of efficacy. On the one hand, the repetitive authoring by individuals of their own self-destruction refuses the framework of instrumental action, functioning in effect as a conduit to convey the frustration of the oppressed under conditions of asymmetry and injustice produced through biosovereign government. When the expression of political voice takes the form of putting into question the very sanctity of life and the value of survival, and thereby the legitimacy of domination, necroresistance amounts to a defiant refusal in the face of which no government can remain untarnished. The withdrawal of consent by the irreversible act of death is, at the same time, the withdrawal of the bodies that are the vehicles and conduits of power. Such a withdrawal, through the severing of the body from subjection, also unsettles the very structure that defines what the center and margin are through their relationality. On the other hand, the simultaneous assertion of demands, ranging from the abolition of high security prisons to broader prisoner rights, from the cessation of arbitrary violations to the transformation of antidemocratic laws and the penal system, presents a framework in which negotiation and compromise are possible and indeed invited by the movement. This allows an opening for the biosovereign assemblage to take the resistance back within its fold, an opening that was initially foreclosed by the hawkish faction within the state but eventually utilized successfully to bring the movement to an end. Concurrently, what is more interesting is that the very coexistence of these different facets in the opposition has enabled the pitting of one against the other by the state. Because the discursive regime of the biosovereign assemblage prioritizes the sanctity of life but also jealously reserves to itself the power of death, it is also able to subsume the claim for a “right to die” and to use it against its own proponents, even against those who participated in the struggle with the overarching purpose of securing basic rights and deepening democracy, by using the construction of the struggle as “inhumane” and its performers as “terrorists.” It therefore becomes possible to justify the exercise of biosovereignty by virtue of the necessity of rescuing lives, against actual lives, in the name of Life itself. In the Turkish context, such justification was utilized for the large-scale violence of security operations, individualized medical resuscitation, as well as the issuing of selective pardons. However, even if the biosovereign assemblage is thereby capable of containing the lines of flight, it nonetheless suffers from the necessity to secure popular consent for its operations by making certain concessions, even if in the long run, for it must assure its further self-reproduction. The final concession of the state, relaxing isolation in high security prisons, becomes more intelligible in this light.
Consequently, the study of the death fast struggle not only illustrates the dual tendency of the biopoliticization of sovereignty and the necropoliticization of resistance but also significantly complicates the way in which these tendencies operate, how they react to one another and transform each other, how the struggle of these tendencies conceived at a metatheoretical level occasions novel consequences regarding the dynamics of resistance. Of these consequences, two are particularly relevant to conceptualizing the full import of the emergence of human weapons as a new mode of agency on the scene of politics, with the weaponization of life as a new repertoire of action for radical political resistance in the present.
First is the theologization of politics that follows from the independent effects of the self-destructive form of resistance. The study of the death fast struggle draws attention to how the weaponization of life, even when adopted by Marxist groups that are openly secular (if not atheist) paves the way for the emergence of a political spirituality in which martyrdom assumes a place of prominence and becomes the new vehicle of a sacrificial vanguardist militancy, generating a whole set of practices that can be conceptualized as counter-conduct. It is necessary to underscore the difference of this theologized politics, however, from a religious politics. It is precisely the absence of any openly held religious belief, and, further, the espousal of a materialist worldview, by the performers of the weaponization of life, at least in the Turkish context, that render the emergence of a new “secular” theology around martyrdom and sacrifice paradoxical and interesting. The militant-martyr, whose role in the history of the oppressed now reimagined as an endless chain of sacrifice is always already reserved, replaces the communist militant as the epitome of the political subjectivity emergent in and through necroresistance. Given that the political theology of human weapons exhibits itself in concrete and elaborate rituals that revolve around the marking, politicization, resignification, and remembrance of death, this emergence also suggests that such a political theology might indeed be a necessary supplement for the weaponization of life as an existentially committing form of struggle in order to ensure its reception by a community, its sustenance and further reproduction.
Second is the ambiguous nature of the form of community that is upheld as an alternative political horizon by human weapons. Even while politicizing death against the biosovereign assemblage, thus pursuing a tactic that constitutes a refusal precisely in its negation of life as the object of power relations, individuals who resort to the weaponization of life also sustain a positive political project. The ward commune is an example of this project brought to life on a small, limited scale under very difficult conditions. Although this project is never fully articulated on a theoretical register by participants of the death fast struggle, it involves an assumed commitment to the reorganization of the existing social and political order along communist lines, while also upending the asymmetry in which they find themselves and redressing the injustices that they have experienced in person and that the proletariat continues to experience as a result of authoritarian neoliberal capitalism. However, whereas the disruptive, subversive aspect of this struggle is clear, the constructive, positive aspect is more abstract and ambiguous, if not aporetic, especially in relation to how power relations would operate within the future order. While these individuals oppose the biosovereign assemblage and express a desire for nondomination and nonoppression, do they call into being another form of community founded on premises and power relations that are substantially different than those that characterize the present? Or do they tend to conform to and reproduce biosovereignty, in their own political structures and communities, discourses and practices, even as they attempt to go beyond it? Do the relationships fostered between the individuals in this movement, the political parties and organizations with which they are affiliated, and the communities that support their practices constitute the embryonic forms of an alternative form of communal power that is not based on either the sovereign power to kill or the biopolitical power to make live, but is rather inherently connected with justice? Or is it that the expressive form and apocalyptic terms in which the struggle is increasingly lodged foreclose the possibility of thinking about the future, deferring the definition and specification of the positive political project into an ever receding horizon? These questions remain open—unanswered, perhaps unanswerable in a satisfactory way, in light of the political theology that imbues the weaponization of life and the affective and corporeal nature of the spectacles of death that, on the one hand, enable a radical politics while, on the other hand, becoming the impediments of a critical contemplation about the future.
Nonetheless, the death fast struggle of Turkey leaves an important legacy, not simply for Turkish politics, nor only for the region, but also for the globe. As the long and troubling decade in which the political prisoners of Turkey hailed from their prisons to the rest of the world by staging spectacles of death comes to an end, a decade whose chronologically inaccurate but politically relevant global beginning can be traced to the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the world witnessed the self-immolation of a Tunisian man, Muhammad al-Bu‘azizi, whose self-destructive act then became the trigger for the revolutionary upheavals in North Africa and the Middle East. Forging his life into a weapon of struggle as he set himself on fire, Muhammad al-Bu‘azizi was in close kinship not only with the prisoners in Turkey but also the detainees in Guantánamo, Nafha and Beer Sheva Prisons in Israel, the migrants across detention centers and refugee camps in the United States, Australia, Greece, France, Japan, Malaysia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bahrain, and many other places, too numerous to name, where individuals, either singly or collectively, continue to resort to this emergent repertoire of political struggle. Whether by starving, immolating, exploding, or mutilating their bodies, these individuals perform violent spectacles. They exercise their moral and political agency by way of violence, either defensively, by directing violence toward their own bodies, or more offensively, by targeting others. Either way, they make their entry on the stage of politics by authoring their exit. The conduit of this exit is the destruction of the body, the real tie that connects agents to power, the “chains” of the late modern age.
This book has attempted to restore the agency of these actors by taking them seriously as interlocutors and to present an account of how and why self-destruction becomes a way to negate biosovereignty. For unlike the spectacle of Damiens’s death in the hands of the executioner on the scaffold, which is intended for the people to watch and remain in awe of the magnific, terrifying, and overwhelming power of sovereignty, the spectacle of Mehmet’s death, or of al-Bu‘azizi death, or of the nonconsensually prevented deaths of Guantánamo detainees calls upon the people in a different way. These counterspectacles ask us to become cognizant of the nature of power relations in which we live and die, the asymmetries and injustices they entail, and our own investment and complicity in them. As acts of violence they attempt to make visible the violence that is normalized and routinized and therefore rendered invisible by the existing order. By resisting power, perhaps they even seek to dispel our fear of transgression and the inertia of habituation that is easily confused with consent, thereby imploring us to build bridges of solidarity, to act collectively, to mobilize against what is unjust in our own way. This book is my response to that call. Not to excuse or justify human weapons, nor to condemn or vilify them, but to reckon with them; to engage, earnestly and critically, with their intervention into politics. For their voices are part of our common history. Or, rather, as Foucault poignantly remarked, “it is precisely because there are such voices that human time does not take the form of evolution, but that of ‘history.’”15