#eve katsouraki

[arcticdementor]

It is with this in mind that I want to discuss two key features of political suicide which I consider firmly rooted in the project of radical democratic politics and antagonism. The first feature is the tendency in acts of political suicide to resemble acts of explicit theatricality that stage the violence of death in its various and unique ways as almost in an effort to reclaim a life that has been stolen which in a complex metaphorical, theological sense suggests that one can continue ‘living’ once again. Here we are confronted, I claim, with a paradoxical affirmative reversal emanating from such radical performativity that performs not only the act of death but the violence it requires in order to go past it—so that, as Bataille believes, life may again be revealed but ‘not until the moment it gives out’—in other words, not until the very moment of death. Such acts then exert a sheer theatricality that dramatises a type of extreme violence so much inwardly as outwardly, almost like being exposed for everyone to see. In this particular sense, therefore, I argue that the evident theatricality that envelops political suicides is a conscious political act of dissent and has little to do with the issues of self-hate or despair usually attributed to the event of a person taking her or his own life. And the second constitutive feature of political suicide, which is much related to the first, and which I will later attempt to explicate in more detail, is the issue of powerlessness and vulnerability, which essentially deals with issues of ‘value’ and ‘sovereignty’. Their examination will also help illuminate the first feature of the inherent violence of death in political suicide more clearly.

Eve Katsouraki, “A Life Not Worth Living: On the Economy of Vulnerability and Powerlessness in Political Suicide”

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