The Spiritualization of Politics and the Technologies of Resistant Body

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-211
Author(s):  
Ashjan Ajour
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Political Prisoners ◽  
Decisive Factor ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Hunger Strike ◽  
Technologies Of The Self ◽  
Principal Tool ◽  
A Site

Abstract This article explores the body as a site of subjectivity production during a hunger strike in Occupied Palestine. It further explores the former political prisoners’ theory of subjectivity as it emerges through their praxis and philosophy of freedom. Although the body is the principal tool that the hunger strikers use, they don't consider it the decisive factor in attaining their goal. For that they build on the immaterial strength that develops with the deterioration of the body and from which they construct the concept of rouh (soul). This is expressed through the formation of contradictory binaries: body versus soul and body versus mind. The article shows that the hunger strike not only is a political strategy for liberation; it also moves into a spiritualization of the struggle. It uses and problematizes Foucault's “technologies of the self” to theorize the specific formation of subjectivity in the Palestinian hunger strike under colonial conditions, and it contributes to theories of subjectivation. The hunger strikers, in their interaction with the dispossession of the colonial power, invent technologies of resistance to transcend the colonial and carceral constraints on their freedom and create the capacity for the transformation from a submissive subject to a resistant one.

scholarly journals Hunger strike and the force-feeding chair: Guantanamo Bay and corporeal surrender

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 294-312 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yasmin Ibrahim ◽  
Anita Howarth
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
The Body ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Hunger Strike ◽  
Full Disclosure ◽  
Guantanamo Bay ◽  
Force Feeding ◽  
Living Dead ◽  
A Site ◽  
Corporeal Body

Through the biotechnology of the force-feeding chair and the hunger strike in Guantanamo, this paper examines the camp as a site of necropolitics where bodies inhabit the space of the Muselmann – a figure Agamben invokes in Auschwitz to capture the predicament of the living dead. Sites of incarceration produce an aesthetic of torture and the force-feeding chair embodies the disciplining of the body and the extraction of pain while imposing the biopolitics of the American empire on “terrorist bodies”. Not worthy of human rights or death, the force-fed body inhabits a realm of indistinction between animal and human. The camp as an interstitial space which is beyond closure as well as full disclosure produces an aesthetic of torture on the racialised Other through the force-feeding chair positioned between visibility and non-visibility. Through the discourse of medical ethics and the legal struggle for rights, the force-feeding chair emerges as a symbol of necropolitics where the hunger strike becomes a mechanism to impede death while possessing and violating the corporeal body.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 661-670
Author(s):  
David W. Kling
Keyword(s):  
Gender Identity ◽  
Socioeconomic Factors ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Crucial Importance ◽  
Divine Presence ◽  
A Site ◽  
Autobiographical Impulse

The concluding chapter provides summary observations of the book’s themes that highlight the complex, multifaceted dimension of conversion throughout twenty centuries of Christian history. These include the convert’s cognizance of divine presence; the crucial importance of historical context (political, religious, institutional, and socioeconomic factors); continuity and discontinuity (how much of the new displaces the old in conversion?); nominal, incomplete, and “true” conversions; personal testimonies and narratives (the autobiographical impulse attests to the converted life); the role of gender; identity and the self; agency (are converts actors or are they being acted upon?); the mechanisms behind and the motivations for conversion; the body as a site of conversion; the role of music; conversion as event and process; coercive practices; and forms of communication in the converting process.

Learning One’s Cell, Learning Oneself

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Müller
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Women Prisoners ◽  
Extreme Conditions ◽  
Adaptation Process ◽  
Hunger Strike ◽  
Cell Life ◽  
Social Visibility ◽  
A Site

This chapter is devoted to the process of adapting to cell life in an interrogation prison, the process throughout which the women were learning what their bodies could endure. It centers on how the women were recreating conditions of normalcy while adapting to the space. During even their first moments in prison, when they did not know the space or the capacity of their bodies to function under extreme conditions, women prisoners had to learn how to transform their cells into safe places to regroup and gather strength. Some women used their bodies to achieve social visibility as women. They also used their bodies to liberate themselves from the limitations prescribed by their physicality, for example, through a hunger strike, fasting, or suicide. Throughout this adaptation process, the body was becoming a site of transformation and emancipation from the state of being merely a prisoner.

Fluid bodies or bodily fluids

2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Adams-Thies
Keyword(s):  
Communities Of Practice ◽  
Gay Men ◽  
Real World ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Anal Sex ◽  
The Real ◽  
Bodily Fluids ◽  
Dichotomous Thinking ◽  
A Site

Previous researchers discussing cybersexuality have been fascinated with the body-less-ness of cybersex. They have focused on the textual productions and (re)formations of the self that are allowed in this space independent of the body. Thus, the cyber becomes the space of transformation and fluidity of the self while the ‘real’ becomes the site of the material, concrete and unchanging body. I posit that dichotomous thinking about the cyber and the real and the text and the body produces an errant concept of the body. Cybersex is rarely a disembodied experience. Text-making cannot create itself free from the constraints of linguistic communities of practice in the “real” world. I challenge the notion that cybersexuality is a sexuality without the body and that the body in the ‘real’ world is stable. I focus specifically on how gay men describe the experience of the anus and anal sex as a means to better understand how the body becomes a site for linguistic marking and reference.

scholarly journals Lifelogging: Digital technologies of the self as the practices of contemporary biopolitics

Sociologija ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 535-549
Author(s):  
Dusan Ristic ◽  
Dusan Marinkovic
Keyword(s):  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Theoretical Concept ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Social Phenomenon ◽  
The West ◽  
Technologies Of The Self ◽  
Power And Resistance ◽  
The Relationship

In the paper we apply a theoretical concept of technologies of the self developed by Michel Foucault to the field of lifelogging practices. Lifelogging is a global social phenomenon, a part of contemporary experience of everyday, especially in the developed societies of the West. Our hypothesis is that, despite different ways of quantifying self, lifelogging practices have some characteristics in common: they all belong to the field of biopolitics. This is demonstrated on the levels of the body, identity and subjectivity, since they are influenced and changed by lifelogging. At the same time, lifelogging practices blur the relationship between coercion and consent, power and resistance. The theoretical framework for addressing lifelogging is the concept of biopolitics, also developed by, since it refers to the mechanisms, techniques and technologies, as well as the forms of rationality that regulate life and its various manifestations. In conclusion, we claim that it is still not possible to explain lifelogging exclusively in the terms of biopower, since it has a potential for the ?counter-conduct? and resistance. This also makes lifelogging practices open for development of new forms of subjectivity.

Foucaulte o Poder

2006 ◽  
Vol 14 (28) ◽  
pp. 221-226
Author(s):  
José de Almeida Pereira Arêdes ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Population Policy ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Productive Force ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
Technologies Of The Self ◽  
Control Power ◽  
Mind Control

The purpose of this paper is to present some thoughts upon the ever pressing question of the role of justice in our societies, according to Michel Foucault. Centered upon Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, the paper draws the guidelines which Foucault developed about the aggiornamento of the exercise of power and its changing methods, from torture to the scientific methods which he named technologies of the self. Going from the exercise of violence centered upon the body to its submission by means of idea and mind control, power has associated itself to the scientific (psychiatric) approach of identity, leading to a controllable abnormality (present in prisons). All of this in the name of a population policy, a bio power which ensures the docility of individuals while optimizing their productive force. Hence the remaining epigraph quoted challenge where Plato provocatively States: justice is the same everywhere, it is the rule of the strongest.

Starvation and Self-Mutilation in Religious Traditions

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liz Wilson
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Hunger Strike ◽  
The West ◽  
Buddhist Studies ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Self Mutilation ◽  
The World ◽  
Bodily Practice ◽  
Self Immolation

This chapter investigates the place of destructive acts against oneself—such as starvation and self-mutilation—in the spectrum of violent actions performed in the name of religion. Self-starvation and self-mutilation share some of the ideological and performative features of violence in the name of religion. The self-sacrifice of Quang Duc was demonstrative of a time-tested Buddhist form of bodily practice known in Buddhist studies in the West as self-immolation. It is revealed that self-directed violence can be both an act of devotion and an act of protest. Self-immolation and hunger-striking employ the body as a means of resistance. Like self-conflagration, the hunger strike has become a global phenomenon used on every continent of the world.

Der Körper als Medium höfischer Kommunikation am Beispiel des Hofballets

Daphnis ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 491-513
Author(s):  
Marie-Thérèse Mourey
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Symbolic Form ◽  
A Site

Among the highly varied vehicles of communication in early modern German an European courts, the human body was both a crucial medium and symbolic form. The body of the prince was strategically used and glorified as a site of political representation, espexially in central German courts. This paper explores the performative functions of the ballets de cour as aestheticized, ritual expressions of power as well as the self-fashioning of the participating princes. Taking the representation of the prince in a ballet from 1687 as a case study, it focuses on the distinctive situation in the Court of Saxony-Gotha.

scholarly journals Bodily Schemata and Sartre's I and Me: Reflection and Awareness in Movement

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 83
Author(s):  
Jodie McNeilly
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Reflective Practices ◽  
Active Process ◽  
Bodily Awareness ◽  
Digital Representations ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
A Site

Philosophers have faced the problem of self or inner awareness since the self, itself, became something to be known and/or understood. Once dancers ‘let go of the mirror’ (Emily Claid 2006) they too began to face the problem and limits to bodily awareness, developing specific reflective practices to obtain access to their inner bodily selves. But for the phenomenologist, reflection requires an active process of perception, which problematises our grasping of the so-called hidden, organising structures of movement that are unable to be perceived (bodily schemata). For the dancer, then, how is it possible to access and have a deeper understanding of these nonconscious bodily structures? What are the limits to inner bodily awareness?In this article, I draw upon Jean-Paul Sartre’s challenge to Edmund Husserl’s pure ego with his notion of object transcendence in his essay of 1937, Transcendence of The Ego: An existentialist theory of consciousness. I do this as a possible means for understanding bodily schemata and its expression through interactive dance technologies. Using examples from dance, I suggest how bodily schemata can be accounted for if our attention is not directed towards an inner sensing of the body, but towards a site of interaction where objects or materials extend or supraextend our bodies in the form of clothing, costume and digital representations, and where the dancer becomes audience to these distally extended bodily reflections.

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