Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons.

• Author: Bhat, Mohmad Aabid
• Position: Book review

Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons

By Banu Bargu

New York: Columbia University Press, 2014, 480 pages, $70.00, ISBN: 9780231163408

The category of political prisoners has rarely been discussed as a theoretical and philosophical concept. However, the book under review tries to fill that gap by presenting a nuanced theoretical perspective on political prisoners. Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons is a meticulous articulation of the Turkish state's checkered history of treating dissent by testing the endurance of political prisoners in supermax solitary confinement F-type prisons. Argumentatively, this work builds on Foucault's notion of power and biopolitics and Agamben's "bare life" thesis. Banu Bargu provides a critique of Fou-cault's arguments as well, particularly when the latter presents prisoners as obedient and docile members. The book traces the process of the biopoliticization of sovereignty meeting the necropoliticization of resistance (p. 27). The narrative is based on weaponization of life whereby the bodies of political prisoners are forged into human weapons (p. 14).

Divided into six chapters, the first part discusses sovereignty as a central concept in various modalities of power relations. With modernization, sovereignty has been transmutated into a new hybrid, changing its modality from politics of life (and death) to politics over life, which Bargu calls biosov-ereignty (p. 51). Resistance against the sovereign power is inevitable and is always present like a shadow (p. 54). Here, this resistance is elegantly presented as a case of self-destruction and immolation by political prisoners and is called necroresistance (p. 63).This conceptualization projects the transformation of the body from a site of subjection to a site of insurgency.

The second chapter provides an overview of the political history and contours of state tradition and ideology from Kemalism to coup d'etat to Turkey's current political scenario. Explaining how the Kemalism six arrows (p. 90) prove a mere allusion to authoritarianism, this chapter also contextualizes the utilization of biopolitics transcending through various regimes from authoritarianism to democratic government. This is presented by discussing how the Left was criminalized by the state to be considered as an "internal threat" (p. 97). The implementation of anti-terror laws since 1991 and the similar legal apparatuses are also detailed. These laws proved...