Bare life on strike: Notes on the biopolitics of race and gender

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 107, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 89-105

  Ziarek, Ewa Płonowska ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 51849161150     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-2007-057     Document Type: Review

References (27)

1. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
2. Catherine Mills is one of the very few Agamben interpreters to raise the question of sexuality and sexual embodiment but in the context of Agamben's theory of testimony rather than his theory of bare life. Mills, "Linguistic Survival and Ethicality," in Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben's "Homo Sacer", ed. Andrew Norris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 215-8.
3. Even though Sidi Mohammed Bar-kat does not directly engage Agamben, his analysis of "le corps d'exception" of the colonized can be read as an illuminating "postcolonial" critique of Agamben's philosophy. Barkat, Le corps d'exception: Les artifices du pouvoir colonial et la destruction de la vie (Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2005).
4. Diane Enns's careful analysis of the ambiguities of revolt of the occupied bodies reduced to bare life is another crucial extension of Agamben's work in the colonial context. Enns, "Bare Life and the Occupied Body," Theory and Event 7.3 (2004), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory-and-event/toc/ archive.html#7.3 (accessed November 23, 2006).
5. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as SSD.
6. In Politics, Aristotle makes a famous distinction between mere life and a good life to define the function of polis: "While it comes into existence for the sake of mere life, it exists for the sake of a good life." Aristotle, Politics, trans. Ernest Barker, ed. R. F. Stalley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), book 1, ch. 2, p. 10.
7. Hannah Arendt follows the Aristotelian distinction between zoē and bios in a number of her texts, most notably in The Human Condition, where she identifies the political life not only with speech and action but most importantly with the condition of human plurality. Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 7.
8. See Michel Foucault's discussion of "the empirical and the transcendental" in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973), 318-21.
9. According to Ernesto Laclau, the absence of the theory of resistance is intertwined with the lack of the theory of hegemony. Laclau argues that Agamben fails to distinguish between totalitarian and democratic sovereignty, emerging from the hegemony of democratic movements. Laclau, "Bare Life or Social Indeterminacy?" in Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, ed. Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 11-22.
10. For a different critique of the lack of attention to resistance in the context of the body and the contingency of political struggles, see also Andreas Kalyvas, "The Sovereign Weaver," in Politics, Metaphysics, and Death, 112-3.
11. I am grateful to my colleague Kalliopi Nikolopoulou for discussing with me Aristotle's notion of slavery. For her excellent discussion of the relation between Agamben and Plato, see "Between Art and Polis: Between Agamben and Plato" (unpublished, Buffalo, NY, 2006).
12. Thomas Carl Wall, "Au Hasard," in Politics, Metaphysics, and Death, 39.
13. Aristotle, Politics, book 1, ch. 4, p. 13.
14. For a brief discussion of the history of the hunger strike, see Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973), 363-67.
15. Maud Ellmann argues that the Irish nationalists might have been inspired by suffrage, but in order to conceal this, they appealed to the medieval practice of fasting against debtors to compel them to repay their debts. Ellmann, The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 11-12.
16. Sharp, Politics of Nonviolent Action, 637.
17. Midge Mackenzie, Shoulder to Shoulder: A Documentary (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), 110.
18. Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907-1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 104.
19. According to Jane Marcus, it is "perhaps the primary image in the public imagination regarding the 'meaning' of the suffrage movement." Marcus, "Introduction: Re-reading the Pankhursts and Women's Suffrage," in Suffrage and the Pankhursts, ed. Marcus (London: Routledge, 1987), 2.
20. Kyra Marie Landzelius, "Hunger Strikes: The Dramaturgy of Starvation Politics," in Einstein Meets Magritte: Science, Nature, Human Action, and Society, vol. 3, Man and Nature: A World in Transition, ed. Diederik Aerts (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), 83.
21. Mackenzie, Shoulder to Shoulder, 135.
22. Ellmann, The Hunger Artists, 21.
23. Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp, Speeches and Trials of the Militant Suffragettes (London: Associated University Presses, 1999), 108-9.
24. Kyra Marie Landzelius, "Hunger Strikes," in Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, vol. 2, ed. Solomon H. Katz (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2003), 220.
25. Wall, "Au Hasard," 39.
26. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999).
27. In his discussion of the survivors' testimonies in Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben defines such a link as the aporetic task of witnessing. For my discussion of the ethical structure of the survivors' testimony in Remnants of Auschwitz, see "Evil and Testimony: Ethics 'after' Postmodernism," Hypatia 18 (2003): 201-3.