Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons

by Banu Bargu

Starve and Immolate tells the story of leftist political prisoners in Turkey who waged a deadly struggle against the introduction of high security prisons by forging their lives into weapons. Weaving together contemporary and critical political theory with political ethnography, Banu Bargu analyzes the death fast struggle as an exemplary though not exceptional instance of self-destructive practices that are a consequence of, retort to, and refusal of the increasingly biopolitical forms of sovereign power deployed around the globe.

Bargu chronicles the experiences, rituals, values, beliefs, ideological self-representations, and contentions of the protestors who fought cellular confinement against the background of the history of Turkish democracy and the treatment of dissent in a country where prisons have become sites of political confrontation. A critical response to Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish , Starve and Immolate centers on new forms of struggle that arise from the asymmetric antagonism between the state and its contestants in the contemporary prison. Bargu ultimately positions the weaponization of life as a bleak, violent, and ambivalent form of insurgent politics that seeks to wrench the power of life and death away from the modern state on corporeal grounds and in increasingly theologized forms. Drawing attention to the existential commitment, sacrificial morality, and militant martyrdom that transforms these struggles into a complex amalgam of resistance, Bargu explores the global ramifications of human weapons' practices of resistance, their possibilities and limitations.

Genres: Theory, Nonfiction, Politics, Psychology, History, Sociology, Philosophy

512 pages, Paperback

First published September 9, 2014

Reviews

[Rallie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well researched and presented in a fashion that blends ethnography, theory, and analysis flawlessly. A heavy topic covered in a book that (as an anthropologist and writer) was a joy to read.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bargu deploys the example of the 2000 Turkish death fasts undergone by political prisoners against the construction of F-type prisons and in favor of prison reform in order to rethink the biopolitics (and necropolitics) of Foucault, Agamben, and Mbembe, forwarding the biopolitical assemblage and necroresistance as a new mode of thinking weaponizing one's body against the state, a rejection of the "monopsony on sacrifice" of the sovereign, before considering the hunger strike participants' own self-understanding, especially in the interrelation between Marxism and martyrdom. The title is a nod to Foucault's Discipline and Punish, and I will say it is the strongest work of biopolitical theory I have ever read, for I don't tend to find this framework useful, perhaps most so because it pushes back against and heavily revises the original works on which it comments, even if it functions more as a historiography (including going over Kemalism and the coups-every-decade in the latter half of the 20th century) than as a densely theoretical work.

[i. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bargu's Starve and Immolate looks at hunger strikes as modes of resistance intent on exposing the underlying logics of biopolitics, disposability, protection, and harm that justify the power of the state by examining Turkish prisoners and protestors whose hunger strikes defined resistance in Turkey in the 2000s. While Bargu's analysis is rich, and her case study is internally consistent, a greater historical scope might challenge the "newness" of her claims for biopolitical weaponhood. Nonetheless, Bargu's analysis is an important contribution in critiques, applications, and building-upon the field of biopolitics.