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ODYSSEUS UNBOUND Labor of Intimidation and Vengeful Violence

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ODYSSEUS UNBOUND Labor of Intimidation and Vengeful Violence ANGELAKI journal of the theoretical humanities volume 19 number 4 december 2014 n a speech delivered in Belfast on 5 March I 1981, Margaret Thatcher famously remarked: “There is no such thing as political murder, pol- itical bombing or political violence. There is only criminal murder, criminal bombing and criminal violence.”1 The visceral and deeply moving por- trait of Bobby Sands – the first of the ten men who starved themselves to death in their struggle for “political status” in the infamous Maze Prison – in Steve McQueen’s critically acclaimed movie Hunger provides an excellent exposition of the untruth of Thatcher’sstatement.2 In Hunger, we are dragged into the prison of banu bargu a liberal-democratic state, a prison where the only law is the sovereign will, performing and reproducing itself through the security forces’ ODYSSEUS UNBOUND labor of intimidation and vengeful violence. sovereignty and sacrifice in This sovereign will is donned with the legiti- macy of the law, but the law now appears like hunger and the dialectic of a bad copy of itself, a broken façade that scar- cely hides the duel between an existing sover- enlightenment eign in whose hands it is used to criminalize, discredit, and thereby neutralize its opponents, criminal. Unable to bend the prisoners to its on the one side, and a movement whose own will, the state folds back upon and crimina- violent struggle for national liberation is no lizes itself, in the face of the moral and political less than its own law, on the other. And yet, indictment put forth by the violent self-destruc- Downloaded by [Banu Bargu] at 12:14 22 December 2014 even with the help of special legislation directed tion of the prisoners themselves. If Hunger at terrorism – one of the pioneers of the kind thereby chronicles how sovereignty and democ- that has come to define securitized states in racy enter into a frontal collision in the con- the post-September 11 world – the mighty ditions of the high-security prison, its sovereign is able to punish but unable to disci- immanent critique of British politics raises the pline. The violent clash of the wills takes on a question of whether it is not democracy that decidedly corporeal form in the claustrophobic thereby self-destructs with the hunger strike atmosphere of the high-security prison, mov- and eventual death of its political prisoners. ingly depicted by Hunger, where the contrast While the movie centers on what McQueen between the repetitive violence of the forces calls “the most important event in British “upholding” the law and the self-destructive history in recent times,”3 it actually speaks to resistance of those “breaking” it is soon revealed the present: it stages a principled intervention to be the reversal of what is political and what is into our political landscape where the question ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/14/040007-16 © 2014 Taylor & Francis http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2014.984429 7 odysseus unbound of hunger strikes hovers as urgently as ever, movie, as a genuine work of art, calls for hailing most notably (but not only) from deeper philosophical reflection. Its stunning Guantanamó Bay Prison. As of 1 May 2013 (at beauty, due as much to McQueen’s keen aes- the time of writing), 100 of the 166 prisoners thetic as it is to the excellent performance of held under “indefinite detention” have been Michael Fassbender in his role as Bobby starving themselves.4 Unlike the Maze Prison, Sands, augments the force of what I take to be however, no death by self-starvation occurs in the movie’s most central question: how far are Guantanamo.́ 5 This is because prisoners are con- we willing to go in order to dominate, how far tinually resuscitated by nonconsensual medical in order to be free? Hunger thus speaks to a intervention, most notoriously by the insertion nexus defined not only by the lavish excesses of nasal feeding tubes while they are tied to of securitized state sovereignty but also by the restraint chairs.6 Even though Obama has pub- quest for freedom and the role of sacrifice in licly disowned Guantanamo,́ in contradistinc- the struggle for its attainment. Embedding us tion to the late Thatcher’s position on the in a life-and-death struggle, it forces us to recon- Maze Prison, he has not kept his long-standing sider the meaning and implications, the potenti- promise to close the prison and has turned a alities and limitations of our agency, especially blind eye to the violation of international when that agency takes a sacrificial form. human rights laws as well as the global ethical Indeed, Hunger is a movie about sacrifice as standards of medical practice that condemn much as it is about sovereignty, but it would forced feeding as “cruel, humiliating, and be wrong to conclude that it is unequivocal in degrading treatment.”7 its approach to either. The movie does not Guantanamó may be the most conspicuous equate the critique of the British state with an example of the “liberal” exceptions taken from unquestioned espousal of the Provisional IRA, fundamental human rights, but it is hardly the nor does it abstain from depicting the human only one. “Special” prisons and detainment tragedy involved in the everyday enactments centers have proliferated around the globe, a of the claim to sovereignty from either side. proliferation which lends evidence to the With great attention to the complexity of the thesis that exceptional regimes – perpetuated conflict, the movie chooses to depict it through executive decrees, counter-insurgency through individuals on opposing sides: both tactics, or the outright suspension of liberties the prison guards and the prisoners emerge as as part of counterterrorism measures – are fast non-identical to the roles that their structural becoming recurrent and normalized, if not con- positions in the asymmetry of power relations stitutive, features of liberal-democratic states.8 require them to play. On the one hand, the In parallel, hunger striking has become a recur- prison guards who are the laborers of the Downloaded by [Banu Bargu] at 12:14 22 December 2014 rently utilized form of resistance as part of an state’s security apparatus are themselves emergent necropolitical repertoire of struggle.9 without security; they live in fear of their Regrettably, the experience of Irish political lives. Meanwhile, they have to dehumanize the prisoners continues to hold important resonance prisoners in order to brutalize them on a recur- for the present, exposing the dark side of liberal- rent basis, but they too lose something of their democratic states that can no longer be written humanity in the process.11 On the other hand, off as exceptions.10 Hunger, therefore, is not the prisoners in the Dirty Protest, living in only about Bobby Sands; it is about the the midst of bodily excrements and smearing hunger strikers of our time whose names we their shit on the cell walls, reduce themselves do not even know. to “animality” in order to reclaim their human dignity.12 Meanwhile, they, too, must bear the sovereignty and sacrifice cost of their claim to sovereignty, which comes most painfully through the protracted labor of If the immediate political resonance of Hunger dying they carry out on the hunger strike. does not exhaust its power, it is because the However, it is worth noting that while pointing 8 bargu to the shared humanity of the prisoner and the goes a long way in courageously and thought- prison guard, McQueen nevertheless avoids fully portraying the wealth of troubling moral, “repeating liberal humanism’s common personal, and political dilemmas and difficulties mistake of flattening the differences in power that surround the choice of pursuing self- relations.”13 Hunger thereby sustains an uneasi- destructive acts in political struggle, without ness until the very end, which amplifies its necessarily lionizing or vilifying the endeavor, powerful effect. and they should be commended for this Like its equivocity to sovereignty, the movie achievement.16 is far from an unhesitating endorsement of sacri- As the hunger strike takes Sands to the limits fice in the struggle for freedom. While the sym- of biological existence, it also provides an pathies of the movie toward the prisoners’ cause implicit commentary on the liberal foundations is clear, Hunger is far from being a work of pol- of the Western political imaginary, which, cen- itical propaganda aiming for a crude glorifica- tered on the presupposition of the primacy of tion of self-destruction.14 Despite its realistic self-preservation, sustains a deep contradiction conveyance of the conditions of the high-secur- with self-sacrifice. This tension is most force- ity prison, the movie avoids presenting the fully recognized by Max Horkheimer and decision of the prisoners to go on hunger Theodor Adorno, who present it as a fundamen- strike as an inevitable outcome, and more trans- tal tenet of civilization as such, in their parent and obvious than it actually is. Hunger renowned Dialectic of Enlightenment: makes room for agency; in fact, an uninter- rupted twenty-two-minute sequence in the [t]he history of civilization is the history of fi middle of the movie stages a heated conversa- the introversion of sacri ce. In other words: the history of renunciation. Everyone who tion between Bobby Sands and a West Belfast practices renunciation gives away more of priest (played skillfully by Liam Cunningham), his life than is given back to him: and more in which Sands gives an account of the moral than the life that he vindicates.17 and political reasons for embarking on this journey of self-destruction, defends his decision Stated differently, the predicament of civiliza- against the priest’s effort to convince him to tion is precisely that the way to sublate the negotiate with the British government instead contradiction between self-preservation and (which, not incidentally, is also the position of self-sacrifice is the condemnation of everyone the outside leadership of the Provisional IRA), to a system of perpetual repression in which and presents a rebuttal of criticisms.
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