Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal
Banu Bargu, "Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal "
English | ISBN: 0197608531 | 2024 | 504 pages | PDF | 3 MB
English | ISBN: 0197608531 | 2024 | 504 pages | PDF | 3 MB
Disembodiment examines self-destruction, self-injury, and self-endangerment as actions that express the injustices and indignities of the life conditions of impoverished, dispossessed, and dominated peoples. Author Banu Bargu troubles the dominant approach that treats these acts as individual pathologies, cries for help, and signs of despair. Instead, she suggests that they should be read as unconventional performances of resistance and refusal that are erased, marginalized, and distorted by metanarratives of history as progress and of agency as freedom and intentionality. Situating these practices in a dialectic of desubjectivation and counter-subjectivation, Bargu argues that they dispel a western metaphysics of subjecthood and invoke alternative ways of being human and of relating to one's body and the world. Pursuing philosophical questions about the meaning of agency, the direction of history, and the limits of the political generated by the forfeiture of the body, Bargu offers a stark and unforgiving critique of our present.
As a work in global critical theory whose normative compass is the suffering body,
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