The political import of the liquidated and self-liquidating subject pervades this volume — to be liquidated is literally to be depleted of substance. This essay is concerned with the relation between substance depletion and the striking-of-the-subject as abstinence, abstention, assaulting the subject, and the striking out of the category of the subject placed under erasure. This essay asks: does insurrectionary bodily self-alteration merely play back the pathogenic authority it opposes — thereby repeating the latter's political and legal wastage of the very same body that hunger strikes? The hunger striker self-subjugates their body as an interiority lodging a truth to be surfaced like the hieroglyphics of Hortense Spillers's flesh turned and torn inside out. However, for Spillers the ripping and tearing is perpetrated by racist hierarchies with the sanctioned power to do so. The subjugated hunger striker is accorded no legal right to treat themselves in this manner, and therein lies the transgressive power of the strike that ex-appropriates for the rightless the most intimate and enigmatic right of sovereignty: to re-create itself through corporeal extractivism.
Allen Feldman (Wed,) studied this question.