Banu Bargu, Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024, 504 pp. ISBN: 9780197608531
Reviewed by Iaan Reynolds, Utah Valley University
There are many things to praise about Banu Bargu’s latest book, Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal. Like her earlier Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons (Columbia University Press, 2014), this work exemplifies politically motivated scholarship, presenting a carefully argued study drawing on an extraordinary range of case studies and scholarship across the humanities and social sciences. As a further development of Bargu’s research into the political nature of self-destructive violence, Disembodiment broadens her analysis of these phenomena into philosophical and historical registers. Weaving these two levels together, the work tells the story of “disembodiment” as a neglected category in Western philosophical thought, which is simultaneously an account of the overlooked and subterranean force of bodily agency throughout history. Without losing its distinctive perspective or misrepresenting its interlocutors, Bargu’s analysis fruitfully engages with current discussions in biopolitics, Marxist critiques of political economy, anticolonial and decolonial theories, phenomenology, Frankfurt School critical theory, and more. The most impressive feature of this book is its ability to incorporate such a diverse collection of figures and methodologies. The combination of philosophical breadth and focused conceptual analysis makes Bargu’s work a key resource for ongoing attempts to develop an open and global critical theory sensitive to the changing dynamics of our world.
Bargu is interested not only in the causes of self-inflicted bodily harm, but also in the way the category of “disembodiment” unsettles our established ways of doing political and social critique. This is clear, for example, in the first chapter’s skilfully interwoven discussion of two prominent cases: the Turkish poet Nazım Hikmet’s poem about the suicide of an imagined Marxist revolutionary named Banerjee, and the self-immolation of the fruit vendor Mohammed Bouazizi, which was credited with instigating the Tunisian revolution in 2010. By modifying the title of Hikmet’s poem, “Why did Banerjee Kill Himself?” to ask about Bouazizi’s death–“Why did Bouazizi Kill Himself?”–Bargu takes up the question of our ability to make sense of acts of self-destruction. If this juxtaposition blends fiction and reality, implying that the question of self-destruction is equally about actual historical occurrences and the stories we tell about them, Banerjee and Bouazizi’s very different respective conditions also illuminate the specifically political complications that arise from a consideration of disembodiment. While Banerjee’s self-starvation is legible as the act of a self-styled revolutionary, Bouazizi’s self-immolation was apparently disconnected from any intentional political goals or commitments. Regardless of their stated political significance (or lack thereof) for the actors committing them, self-destructive acts such as that of Bouazizi himself or “the other Bouazizis of our time” (chap. 2) take place in a context in which they can be mobilised or “retrofitted” for the political purposes of mass movements. The individual act of desperation, we might say, risks being misunderstood if we fold it too easily into the dominant narratives about political struggles and their causes. Bargu thus asks: “Could Bouazizi’s act be considered an act of resistance, defiance, refusal, or revolt had there been no mass mobilizations, had he not been claimed a martyr or had the revolution failed? And if so, what would that consideration do to our conceptions of resistance, defiance, refusal, or revolt?” (21). Disembodiment answers in the affirmative: apart from the contingencies of their historical uptake, the acts of self-directed violence considered here bear an intrinsic politicality owing to their rootedness in the body’s distinctive tendency to resist, which Bargu labels corporeal agency. In order to understand how this is true, and what follows from it, it will be useful to reconstruct some of the book’s main philosophical interventions.
Bargu’s philosophical analysis of disembodiment is organised around two interrelated metaphilosophical problematics: that of the subject, and that of the telos of history. Western philosophy’s commitments to the rational subject and to a progressive historical narrative are what Gaston Bachelard and later Louis Althusser would call “epistemological obstacles,” in that they block or obscure our theoretical knowledge. The hegemonic idea of the subject serves this function “because it greatly circumscribes what counts as agency, prioritising an intentionalist-instrumentalist paradigm of rationality that sources only freely chosen, contemplated, goal-driven action as politically relevant and meaningful” (xv). According to the dominant paradigm, agency is something exercised only by actors who seek to maximize their self-preservation through rational means. Similarly, when it comes to history, the teleological orientation of progressive improvement masks “an entire realm of ‘counter-history’ or non-history,’ that is, the history…that is erased or repressed in a series as a series of contingencies, aberrations, singularities, aborted or failed experiments” (xv). In their rendering of subjective agency and history, Bargu argues, the dominant paradigms of Western philosophy have succeeded in concealing the political meaning of self-destructive acts. Following these paradigms, the diverse phenomena grouped under the label of “disembodiment” (including political and apparently apolitical acts) are understood to issue from a misuse or pathology of rationality. Relatedly, when they are studied scientifically, suicide and other forms of disembodiment are usually understood in medical or sociological terms, which tend to hide the political agency that is specific to the body (27). For this reason, Bargu sees the ensemble of categories surrounding disembodiment as an opportunity to tell the histories hidden by the dominant narrative. The result is what she calls “a violent dialectic of de-subjectivation and counter-subjectivation” (xix), as the body’s power to resist negates the dominant conceptions of agency and history, producing a subterranean and subversive history. The dialectic describes the book’s rhythmic movement from philosophical investigations to engagements with historical and empirical cases. We can get an idea of this movement by looking a bit more closely at a sequence of three chapters.
The third chapter, “Suicide and the Modern Subject,” tells a detailed story about the dominant Western notion of subjectivity (primarily developed in Hobbes, Locke, and Kant), and this philosophical tradition’s exclusion of suicide. Self-destruction in Hobbes, as Bargu tells it, “serves as a counterpoint to rationality that otherwise characterizes every subject; it can only result from unreason” (67). But Bargu goes further than this, arguing that these theoretical discourses on the modern subject “presuppose and reflect existing processes of internal and external colonization, enslavement, dispossession from the land, commodification of labor, and formation of modern gender systems” accompanying the development of colonialism, capitalism and the modern state (88). The exclusion of suicide in theoretical accounts of the modern subject is not a coincidence, according to this interpretation, but a result of the historical conditions in which these philosophical discourses developed. For this reason, the next chapter seeks to construct “an alternative political history of modernity comprised of self-destructive acts” (94). This history is in principle open-ended and composed of countless moments, but Bargu focuses her analysis on three orienting moments for modernity: the resistance of enslaved Africans during the transatlantic passage, the hunger strikes of women’s suffragists in the United Kingdom, and the practices of self-starvation in the struggle against colonialism in India. Drawing on a wealth of historical research, Bargu convincingly shows how the underground history of resistance to oppression can partially be understood as one of shared practices of disembodiment. By putting their bodies on the line, sometimes to the point of ending their lives, those who resisted in these moments demonstrated the body’s stubborn, apparently ineliminable, tendency to resist oppression by claiming its own destruction as an act of agency (100). The fifth chapter then develops this argument on the level of the philosophy of history by putting Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment into conversation with Steve McQueen’s acclaimed film, Hunger, which tells the story of IRA member Bobby Sands’ hunger strike and eventual death in 1981. Figures such as Sands and those described in the last chapter take up what Bargu now calls “corporeal critique,” through which their bodies as a non-subsumable excess to the current order enact what the Adorno and Horkheimer’s philosophical reflection on the history of the subject cannot: “opening new trajectories for enlightenment” (169), as well as new and concrete expressions of dignity through refusal. Through Bargu’s dialectic, what initially appeared as the irrational opposite of agency in modern discourses of the subject is understood, at the end of the fifth chapter, to be a form of political agency that demonstrates the untenability of progressive historical narratives and gestures – through its refusal – to the possibility of a dignified life.
The path cut by Bargu’s theoretical account moves from the philosophical to the empirical and back again, and not only in this sequence of three chapters. This dialectical trajectory partially has to do with the fact that the body, as a nonidentical or excessive “reservoir of critique” (xix), always outstrips any attempt to understand it theoretically. The body’s specific form of agency concerns its tendency to undo or push back against its determination by theoretical systems, as well as the forces of capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy that they reflect. The body is more than merely “interior” to the functioning of power, as she puts it in a chapter provocatively bringing Marx and Foucault together, but is also “anterior”: it is “not only…the first raw material and tool of social reproduction, what gets forged into a political object, and what is subject to social reproduction, but also…the source of life that constantly eludes capture, refuses docility and domestication, and acts in ways that resists its reduction to a simple cog in a well-oiled machine” (254). In one of the most theoretically original moments of the book, Bargu accounts for this expressive capacity in phenomenological terms, blending the work of Marcel Mauss, Helmuth Plessner, and Frantz Fanon (chapter 6). Plessner’s work is helpful in this regard, according to Bargu, because he describes moments of corporeal excess–such as laughter or crying–as the body taking over in response to a situation “unanswerable except by a loss of control” (188). Reading Plessner together with Fanon, Bargu shows that these moment of expressivity or corporeal excess complicate our political anthropology, as they gesture to the possibility of a new humanity. The resistance practices of those oppressed by capitalist imperialism, according to this reading, not only express the injustice and inhumanity of this order, but also work to interpellate a new collective subject or public. Since these “parrhesiastic counter-publics” are the bearers of a different conception of humanity (294), one possessing all the dignity denied by this order, the acts of disembodiment need to be understood in terms of their productive or generative capacity, rather than merely the fact of destruction.
Bargu’s work is most powerful when it highlights the possibility of dignity and affirmation even in the most desperate experiences. The idea that we ought to read self-destructive acts as “assertions of a different kind of humanity” struck me as particularly salient (317). This hopeful aspect of the work also left me with a few questions.The first had to do with the conditions that allow for this call to be answered. If disembodiment carries the possibility of producing “counter-subjects” or publics oriented towards the body’s call for dignity, it seems to me that this would also have to do with the historically formed and embodied capacities of the “audience.” Bargu’s optimism about disembodiment seems worth unpacking along these lines: the claim that disembodiment is always an expression of another kind of humanity, or that the body’s resistance is ineradicable, seems similarly to depend on the perpetual receptivity on the part of the broader society. It would be interesting to investigate how the formation of a public with its own expectations of the social world affects the theory developed here. It seems likely to me that the historical fact of indifference to the fate of those who resist through disembodiment – whether in the context of the seventeenth-century slave trade, the resistance to British colonialism, or any of the other contexts reviewed by Bargu – has to do with the construction of a public for whom certain deaths matter more than others. The book’s claim that disembodiment can rupture or de-subjectivate not only its practitioners but also this public is provocative, but it then seems important to further investigate this formation process.
This is related to another question, which concerned the kinds of resistance outlined by Bargu. She is committed, as we have seen, to understanding political struggle apart from the epistemological obstacles of the rational subject and historical progress. All the same, I found myself wondering where this leaves the book’s broader project when it comes to the question of political organization. In many of the cases reviewed here–workers’ opposition to capitalism’s lengthening of the working day, Bobby Sands’ hunger strike, the suicide of Foxconn workers–the resistance was at least partially coordinated by a group of individuals and organizations working together. But this level of the problem seems at least potentially to be obscured by a focus on the individual suffering body. Is there any possibility, I wonder, of an account of practices of disembodiment that puts them into a broader counter-history of collective struggle? How could we incorporate attention to this collective level of the organization of resistance when self-conscious political organizations seem often to draw on the “epistemological obstacles” outlined by the work–adopting, for example, an instrumental view of their aims, or a historical vision oriented by concepts of progress and regress? From this perspective, are the practices of disembodiment outlined here not somewhat at odds with the needs of political organization? If this is part of what makes them attractive, doesn’t it also limit the scope of the resistance we can imagine through such a project?
These questions are meant only to highlight this book’s ability to stimulate further philosophical investigation. Accessible without sacrificing theoretical depth, Bargu’s work is a significant contribution to contemporary critical theory. Readers from various specializations within philosophy will surely find much of interest in this careful study.
For many thought-provoking discussions on this book, I want to thank the six undergraduate students who took part in my independent study on Bargu’s book in Utah Valley University’s Department of Philosophy & Humanities: Mclain Connors, Rowan Hadlock, Clayton Hooper, Chance Martin, Ethan Montano, and Alaina Sapp.