{"id":13999,"date":"2025-11-04T09:32:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-04T14:32:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/?p=13999"},"modified":"2025-11-04T09:33:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T14:33:11","slug":"banu-bargu-disembodiment-corporeal-politics-of-radical-refusal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/2025\/11\/04\/banu-bargu-disembodiment-corporeal-politics-of-radical-refusal","title":{"rendered":"Banu Bargu, Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Banu Bargu, <\/span>Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal<\/span><\/i>. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024, 504 pp. ISBN: 9780197608531<\/span><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Iaan Reynolds, Utah Valley University<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

There are many things to praise about Banu Bargu\u2019s latest book, <\/span>Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal<\/span><\/i>. Like her earlier <\/span>Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons <\/span><\/i>(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\u2019s research into the political nature of self-destructive violence, <\/span>Disembodiment <\/span><\/i>broadens her analysis of these phenomena into philosophical and historical registers. Weaving these two levels together, the work tells the story of \u201cdisembodiment\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s work a key resource for ongoing attempts to develop an open and global critical theory sensitive to the changing dynamics of our world.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Bargu is interested not only in the causes of self-inflicted bodily harm, but also in the way the category of \u201cdisembodiment\u201d unsettles our established ways of doing political and social critique. This is clear, for example, in the first chapter\u2019s skilfully interwoven discussion of two prominent cases: the Turkish poet Naz\u0131m Hikmet\u2019s 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\u2019s poem, \u201cWhy did Banerjee Kill Himself?\u201d to ask about Bouazizi\u2019s death\u2013\u201cWhy did Bouazizi Kill Himself?\u201d\u2013Bargu 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\u2019s very different respective conditions also illuminate the specifically political complications that arise from a consideration of disembodiment. While Banerjee\u2019s self-starvation is legible as the act of a self-styled revolutionary, Bouazizi\u2019s 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 \u201cthe other Bouazizis of our time\u201d (chap. 2) take place in a context in which they can be mobilised or \u201cretrofitted\u201d 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: \u201cCould Bouazizi\u2019s 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?\u201d (21). <\/span>Disembodiment<\/span><\/i> 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\u2019s distinctive tendency to resist, which Bargu labels <\/span>corporeal agency<\/span><\/i>. In order to understand how this is true, and what follows from it, it will be useful to reconstruct some of the book\u2019s main philosophical interventions.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Bargu\u2019s philosophical analysis of disembodiment is organised around two interrelated metaphilosophical problematics: that of the subject, and that of the <\/span>telos<\/span><\/i> of history. Western philosophy\u2019s commitments to the rational subject and to a progressive historical narrative are what Gaston Bachelard and later Louis Althusser would call \u201cepistemological obstacles,\u201d in that they block or obscure our theoretical knowledge. The hegemonic idea of the subject serves this function \u201cbecause 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\u201d (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 \u201can entire realm of \u2018counter-history\u2019 or non-history,\u2019 that is, the history\u2026that is erased or repressed in a series as a series of contingencies, aberrations, singularities, aborted or failed experiments\u201d (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 \u201cdisembodiment\u201d (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 \u201ca violent dialectic of de-subjectivation and counter-subjectivation\u201d (xix), as the body\u2019s power to resist negates the dominant conceptions of agency and history, producing a subterranean and subversive history. The dialectic describes the book\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The third chapter, \u201cSuicide and the Modern Subject,\u201d tells a detailed story about the dominant Western notion of subjectivity (primarily developed in Hobbes, Locke, and Kant), and this philosophical tradition\u2019s exclusion of suicide. Self-destruction in Hobbes, as Bargu tells it, \u201cserves as a counterpoint to rationality that otherwise characterizes every subject; it can only result from <\/span>unreason<\/span><\/i>\u201d (67). But Bargu goes further than this, arguing that these theoretical discourses on the modern subject \u201cpresuppose and reflect existing processes of internal and external colonization, enslavement, dispossession from the land, commodification of labor, and formation of modern gender systems\u201d 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 \u201can alternative political history of modernity comprised of self-destructive acts\u201d (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\u2019s suffragists in the United Kingdom, and the practices of self-starvation<\/span> 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\u2019s 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\u2019s <\/span>Dialectic of Enlightenment<\/span><\/i> into conversation with Steve McQueen\u2019s acclaimed film, <\/span>Hunger<\/span><\/i>, which tells the story of IRA member Bobby Sands\u2019 hunger strike and eventual death in 1981. Figures such as Sands and those described in the last chapter take up what Bargu now calls \u201ccorporeal critique,\u201d through which their bodies as a non-subsumable excess to the current order enact what the Adorno and Horkheimer\u2019s philosophical reflection on the history of the subject cannot: \u201copening new trajectories for enlightenment\u201d (169), as well as new and concrete expressions of dignity through refusal. Through Bargu\u2019s 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 \u2013 through its refusal \u2013 to the possibility of a dignified life.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The path cut by Bargu\u2019s 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 \u201creservoir of critique\u201d (xix), always outstrips any attempt to understand it theoretically. The body\u2019s 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 \u201cinterior\u201d to the functioning of power, as she puts it in a chapter provocatively bringing Marx and Foucault together, but is also \u201canterior\u201d: it is \u201cnot only\u2026the first raw material and tool of social reproduction, what gets forged into a political object, and what is subject to social reproduction, but also\u2026the 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\u201d (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\u2019s work is helpful in this regard, according to Bargu, because he describes moments of corporeal excess\u2013such as laughter or crying\u2013as the body taking over in response to a situation \u201cunanswerable except by a loss of control\u201d (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 \u201cparrhesiastic counter-publics\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bargu\u2019s 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 \u201cassertions of a different kind of humanity\u201d 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 \u201ccounter-subjects\u201d or publics oriented towards the body\u2019s call for dignity, it seems to me that this would also have to do with the historically formed and embodied capacities of the \u201caudience.\u201d Bargu\u2019s optimism about disembodiment seems worth unpacking along these lines: the claim that disembodiment is <\/span>always <\/span><\/i>an expression of another kind of humanity, or that the body\u2019s resistance is <\/span>ineradicable<\/span><\/i>, 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 \u2013 whether in the context of the seventeenth-century slave trade, the resistance to British colonialism, or any of the other contexts reviewed by Bargu \u2013 has to do with the construction of a public for whom certain deaths matter more than others. The book\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s broader project when it comes to the question of political organization. In many of the cases reviewed here\u2013workers\u2019 opposition to capitalism\u2019s lengthening of the working day, Bobby Sands\u2019 hunger strike, the suicide of Foxconn workers\u2013the 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 <\/span>collective struggle<\/span><\/i>? 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 \u201cepistemological obstacles\u201d outlined by the work\u2013adopting, 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\u2019t it also limit the scope of the resistance we can imagine through such a project?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

These questions are meant only to highlight this book\u2019s ability to stimulate further philosophical investigation. Accessible without sacrificing theoretical depth, Bargu\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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\u2019s book in Utah Valley University\u2019s Department of Philosophy & Humanities: Mclain Connors, Rowan Hadlock, Clayton Hooper, Chance Martin, Ethan Montano, and Alaina Sapp.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019s latest book, Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal. Like her earlier Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons (Columbia University […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[323,244,324,295],"class_list":["post-13999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-biopolitics","tag-marxism","tag-necropolitics","tag-social-and-political-philosophy","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-26 05:54:52","action":"Draft","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category"},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13999"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13999\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14001,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13999\/revisions\/14001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c-scp.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}