{"title":"The Spiritualization of Politics and the Technologies of Resistant Body: Conceptualizing Hunger Striking Subjectivity","authors":"Ashjan Ajour","doi":"10.1215/17432197-8947893","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":35197,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Politics","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2021-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Cultural Politics","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-8947893","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"Social Sciences","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
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.
期刊介绍：
Cultural Politics is an international, refereed journal that explores the global character and effects of contemporary culture and politics. Cultural Politics explores precisely what is cultural about politics and what is political about culture. Publishing across the arts, humanities, and social sciences, the journal welcomes articles from different political positions, cultural approaches, and geographical locations. Cultural Politics publishes work that analyzes how cultural identities, agencies and actors, political issues and conflicts, and global media are linked, characterized, examined, and resolved. In so doing, the journal supports the innovative study of established, embryonic, marginalized, or unexplored regions of cultural politics. Cultural Politics, while embodying the interdisciplinary coverage and discursive critical spirit of contemporary cultural studies, emphasizes how cultural theories and practices intersect with and elucidate analyses of political power. The journal invites articles on representation and visual culture; modernism and postmodernism; media, film, and communications; popular and elite art forms; the politics of production and consumption; language; ethics and religion; desire and psychoanalysis; art and aesthetics; the culture industry; technologies; academics and the academy; cities, architecture, and the spatial; global capitalism; Marxism; value and ideology; the military, weaponry, and war; power, authority, and institutions; global governance and democracy; political parties and social movements; human rights; community and cosmopolitanism; transnational activism and change; the global public sphere; the body; identity and performance; heterosexual, transsexual, lesbian, and gay sexualities; race, blackness, whiteness, and ethnicity; the social inequalities of the global and the local; patriarchy, feminism, and gender studies; postcolonialism; and political activism.
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