The Afterlives of Mere Life: In Search of a Politics of “Pure” Means

To assemble a Benjaminian theory of hunger striking requires delving into his theory of the revolutionary strike as a suspension of corporeality from a continuum of subjugation. Revolutionary strikes and divine violence both dissolve inculpation and expiation, “for the domination of law over the living ceases with mere life.” This excess of mere life to law opens the political logic of the hunger strike. Benjamin's search for a violence of pure means passes through his theory of citable gesture — the death fast. The citable death fast resonates across multiplex bodies, voices, and topologies, qualifying as a means without preassigned ends — an incalculable event. The striking gesture is manifested on a podium like the body on a death fast or the suicide bomber posed upon an explosive apparatus. It separates the actor from the audience like the dead from the living. The abyss between the podium as the locus of gestural inception, as the space of enactment, is expressed by Verschuttung that suggests “nothing as much as the filling in of a grave.” Hegel's phenomenology of the body as a philosophical anthropology of digestion and nausea is a theatrical choreography of citable gestures entangled with economies of interruption, elimination, and alienation in the form of corporeal abjection and rejection.