Description
The growing field of IR literature that studies visual politics of death and a corpse shows that power does not release its grip over the dead even though death is supposed to put an end to power (Auchter 2021; Heath-Kelly 2017). Having escaped discourse, a corpse can be returned to it once more and transformed into a symbol – or on the contrary, never be welcomed back and left unacknowledged because it has never been visible in the first place (Otele, Gandolfo, and Galai 2021; Okoth Opondo and Shapiro 2020). This paper contributes to these studies by looking at how “the dead” are articulated in the performances of the art-activist group “the party of the dead” as an “aesthetic” (Shapiro 2013) and political subject challenging the exercise of necropower by contemporary Russia. Aiming to make the dead speak as the dead through macabre visual style, language of hopelessness, and ritualistic “burials” but inevitably failing in this task by virtue of being alive, “the party” articulates death as the limit of experience and positions it against the everyday aesthetic regime that erases the experience of life’s finitude and posits the existence of the immortal subject thereby enabling the proliferation of killing. Analyzing “the party’s” aesthetic interventions via Rancière’s notion of “politics” and Bataille’s conceptualization of sovereignty as a miraculous event, the paper puts forward the concept of affirmative necropolitics as the operation of countering the sovereign desire for immortality by articulating the experience of finitude. In a world where death has been erased and so is omnipresent, where no end is in sight and hence apocalypse is imminent, where history is over and so things will get worse and worse, true death is akin to a miracle, however painful, unendurable it is. Its articulation turns out to be a powerful political statement valuating life and making space for hope.
Bibliography
Auchter, Jessica. 2021. Global Corpse Politics: The Obscenity Taboo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heath-Kelly, Charlotte. 2017. Death and Security: Memory and Mortality at the Bombsite. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Otele, Olivette, Luisa Gandolfo, and Yoav Galai, eds. 2021. Post-Conflict Memorialization: Missing Memorials, Absent Bodies. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Okoth Opondo, Sam, and Michael Shapiro. 2020. “Cinematic Encounters and Frontiers of Precarity.” In Necrogeopolitics: On Death and Death-Making in International Relations, edited by Caroline Alphin and François Debrix, 121-41. London: Routledge.
Shapiro, Michael J. Studies in Trans-Disciplinary Method: After the Aesthetic Turn. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013.
