Author Meets Critics: “Disembodiment” by Banu Bargu

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

This author meets critics session will explore Banu Bargu's new book, Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal (Oxford University Press, in press). Disembodiment examines self-destruction, self-injury, and radical self-endangerment as forms of action that express the injustices and indignities of the life conditions of impoverished, dispossessed, and dominated peoples. Bargu troubles the dominant approach that treats these acts as individual pathologies, cries for help, and signs of despair to suggest that they should also be read as unconventional performances of resistance and refusal that are erased, marginalized, and distorted by metanarratives of history as progress and agency as freedom and intentionality. Situating these practices in a dialectic of desubjectivation and counter-subjectivation, Bargu shows how they dispel a western metaphysics of the subjecthood and invoke alternative ways of being human, of relating to one’s body and the world, as they radicalize the meaning of dignity. Pursuing the philosophical questions about the meaning of agency, the direction of history, and the limits of the political generated by the violent forfeiture of bodily integrity and the undoing of the body, the book unfolds a stark and unforgiving critique of our present.

As a work in global critical theory whose normative compass is the suffering body, Disembodiment brings together corporeal enactments of defiance and refusal from the global south with major thinkers of western modernity and prominent critical-theoretical traditions of the twentieth century. Moving from such historical precedents as the suicides of enslaved Africans during the transatlantic crossing, the hunger strikes of woman suffragists in England’s prisons, and Gandhian fasting practices in the Indian anticolonial struggle to contemporary examples that include the hunger and thirst strikes in the Maze and Guantánamo, the self-incineration of Mohammed Bouazizi, and the lip-sewing practices of migrants and asylum seekers in detention centers and border zones of the west today, Bargu takes the reader on an unsettling journey that delineates the emergence of a corporeal repertoire of contention in the modern world. While focusing primarily on performances of self-directed violence, Disembodiment proposes to view this repertoire more broadly, i.e., as encompassing the multifarious forms in which the global poor and powerless rely on the expressive agency of the body and its ability to irrupt, undoing its training in composure, when they find themselves in crisis. Putting these performances in conversation with a range of critical thinkers, including Marx, Bloch, Mauss, Plessner, Fanon, Horkheimer and Adorno, Althusser, and Foucault, the book attempts to develop a materialist approach to corporeal agency. Ultimately, Disembodiment argues for treating the body’s powers as fundamentally rebellious and undomesticatable.

The panel will feature critical responses to Bargu’s book by distinguished scholars of political theory, followed by a response from the author and discussion with attendees.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Chair

• Robert Nichols University of California, Santa Cruz

Presenters

• Silvestre Gristina University of Ferrara

• Murad Idris University of Michigan

• Karuna Mantena Columbia University

• Anne Norton University of Pennsylvania

• Banu Bargu University of California, Santa Cruz