The Politics of Human Weapons: Bargu’s Starve and Immolate

From 2000 to 2007, Turkey’s prisons became the center of a deadly protest that pitted the extra-parliamentary Left against the state. Political prisoners and their supporters on the outside resorted to self-starvation, self-immolations, and suicide bombings to oppose the introduction of US-style maximum-security prisons. As a result of multiple protests in the 1980s and early 1990s, political prisoners had gained the right to live apart from other detainees in communal wards where they collectively organized daily life. Turkish state officials perceived these wards as outdated and unruly and believed that cell-based prisons would reaffirm the sovereignty of the state. For political prisoners, in contrast, the wards offered some protection from torture and abuse as well as the opportunity to practice a version of communism. Their resistance to cellular confinement, known as the Death Fast Movement, left 122 protesters dead, both men and women. Most died from self-inflicted violence, though some were killed by security forces in attacks on the prison wards. In spite of the scores of casualties over the course of seven years of struggle, the protest did not halt the introduction of maximum-security prisons and won only marginal concessions from the state.

Banu Bargu’s Starve and Immolate: the Politics of Human Weapons tells the story of the Turkish Death Fast. On the basis of interviews and archival research, Bargu presents a detailed political ethnography of the protest from two perspectives: that of the Turkish state and of the protesters. She further historicizes the Death Fast by tracing the complicated relationships of the Turkish Left to Kemalism, the political ideology of the founder of modern Turkey, Atatürk Kemal. But Starve and Immolate is also a work of political theory. Through the example of the Death Fast, Bargu seeks to address questions that pertain not only to the Turkish case but also to radical politics generally. Under what conditions does self-killing amount to political resistance? Why do prisoners in particular resort to self-destructive tactics? Bargu draws on the work of Michel Foucault to argue that prisons exemplify and illuminate power relations that traverse society at large. The prison reveals the nature of contemporary state power, which seeks both to foster life and to maintain a monopoly on the right to kill. Resistance to this power, Bargu argues, takes the form of corporeal self-destruction. Through acts of self-killing or self-harm, protesters counter the state’s biopolitical mission to foster the life of the population and simultaneously claim the state’s necropolitical, sovereign power for themselves.

Bargu adapts Foucault’s work to develop a new theoretical vocabulary. Where Foucault described sovereignty as “the ancient right to take life or let live” and struggled to articulate its relationship to biopower, the modern power “to foster life or disallow it to the point of death,” Bargu conceptualizes contemporary state power as a contradictory assemblage of the two: biosovereignty.¹ Resistance to this regime of power, which both fosters life and dispenses death, takes the form of self-destruction. Necroresistance “transforms the body from a site of subjection to a site of insurgency, which by self-destruction presents death as a counterconduct to the administration of life” (85). Bargu also describes necroresistance as the weaponization of life, a term that encompasses a grim range of practices, from “amputation, maiming, infection with disease, sewing of eyes and mouth, [and] temporary starvation…to the more fatal actions of self-immolation (understood as setting oneself on fire), temporally indefinite hunger strikes, fasts unto death, self-killing…and forms of suicide attack” (15). For Bargu, all these bodily practices express political resistance. They signify at once the refusal of life as it is available to be lived and an existential commitment to another life that would be truly political.

With the concept of necroresistance, Bargu provides a new understanding of martyrdom as a radical challenge to the modern state. Martyrdom has often been understood to indicate religious fundamentalism...