Burning, with: The Conatus of the Death Fast Resistance

Spanning more than six years, with some hunger strikes lasting up to 558 days, the Death Fast Resistance in Turkey (2000–2007) unsettled the instrumental logic of politics, even as hunger strikers’ endurance surpassed medical projections for human survival. Rather than evaluating the resistance through the lens of victory or defeat, the article poses the question of duration and endurance from the perspective of the lived passage. The first section challenges readings of self-immolation as the sovereign right to death, foregrounding instead a more-than-human assemblage composed through the transindividual circulation of affect among women prisoners. The second turns to a photograph of a hunger striker, showing how her body, essentially transindividual, gathers non-contemporaneous times into the lived duration of the hunger strike, making it not merely resistance in time but resistance as time. The article argues that prevailing readings of the hunger strike remain bound to dyadic, vertical models of domination and resistance and fail to apprehend the lateral, affective compositions among bodies — relations that exceed, rather than merely invert, the grammar of domination. Attending to these assemblages of bodies and times at the limit of endurance, the article introduces a new understanding of the hunger strike, one not modeled on the sovereign power of death.