The Silent Exception: Hunger Striking and Lip-Sewing

I. Corporeal Politics: Practicing the Self

The scholarship that acknowledges the resistance practices of migrants and refugees often operates with restrictive assumptions about the nature of their agency. An important assumption is the view that agency is simply a means to achieve political ends. Resulting from a rather economistic conception of political action as part of an instrumental framework, such an assumption limits the ability of subsequent analyses to grasp the full range of political mobilizations that take place, thus often rendering the practices that involve self-directed violence largely invisible. Even when these practices are recognized, the instrumental conception of political action makes it difficult to appreciate their significance.

It cannot be denied that there is an essential commonality between hunger striking and lip-sewing actions of migrants and refugees and the sit-ins, demonstrations, marches, and riots they carry out. Practices of self-harm, like conventional forms of collective protest, can mobilize the powerful co-presence of bodies to make demands, and, even in the absence of explicitly articulated demands, to attain concrete political results. Like conventional forms of protest, these acts may become the means by which these actors claim legal and political recognition for their status, thereby responding to the ineffectiveness of human rights. ³⁷ They can call attention to deplorable conditions of detainment or encampment, where human beings are stored, often without running water, heat, proper nutrition, and health care. They can point out the indefinite periods of detention or waiting, which can be extended without warning or explanation and are supported by opaque regulations. They can problematize the lack of legal counsel, which makes it difficult to make effective asylum claims, and the discretionary rejection of even strong asylum claims. They can highlight the individual agreements among countries that enable fast deportations, creating a constant state of insecurity among those in transit. Hence, these protests have the capacity to show us how the securitization of borders is materially congealed, leading to more intensified forms of policing and the normalization of mass imprisonment as the dominant form of mobility management. ³⁸

When geared toward these goals, self-directed violence can appear simply as one among many tactics, perhaps even a more effective one in comparison to other forms of protest in that it is visually arresting and can better convey the gravity of the situation, often strengthening the moral force of the claims being made. The similarities with conventional forms of protest notwithstanding, however, the corporeal nature and self-direction of violence in hunger striking and lip-sewing practices suggest that there is more to these actions than simply an instrumental striving for rights, improved material conditions and welfare, and legal recognition. As much as these practices enact a plea for recognition and inclusion, the visceral and affective registers in which they are carried out stand in tension with the conventional modalities of political action understood within a rationalist, discursive, and instrumentalist framework. On display is not just the public co-presence of bodies but their transformation in violent ways, even their annihilation. In fact, the form of these actions is a cipher for the desperate terms of life in which the migrants and refugees find themselves. Insofar as these acts claim a self-destructive form, they simultaneously and perhaps contradictorily express an empowered refusal, the refusal to sustain an existence that has become fundamentally compromised, stunted, hallowed. As symbolic statements that materially enact and communicate this staunch refusal, they affect other bodies and their capacity to act, transmitting an intensity of sensory experience that entails differential relations to the self and others and alludes to different conceptions of the body. These radical practices are thus irreducible to their goals alone. As expressive acts emanating from the margins of the political, they put forth a modality of political action that critiques conventional political subjectivity. The challenge they present to the narrow contours of mainstream politics can be deciphered through a closer investigation of their form.

The form of these protests is over-determined by the confluence of self-starvation, self-mutilation, and self-muting in one and the same act. This overlapping and fusion of different modalities of protest should alert us that the resulting composite modality has a specificity of its own. This modality must be distinguished from any of its components alone or simply the sum of its parts. However, most commentators have tended to see the sewing of one’s lips as the intensification of the hunger strike. Those on hunger strike impose oral seals upon themselves, the argument goes, seals that validate and reinforce self-starvation, help fortify their self-discipline, enhance their determination, signal their commitment to others, and perhaps even deter attempts at nonconsensual medical intervention intended to resuscitate those in critical condition. ³⁹ Such a view is important in its acknowledgment of lip-sewing as a visual sign accompanying hunger striking but problematic insofar as the individual or collective willingness to uphold the hunger strike is tied to the necessary presence of a visual sign. This view is also inadequate because it approaches the confluence of different forms of action in one protest in simply additive terms.

In my view, this composite modality of protest indicates more of a transformative movement that results from the coming together of different forms of action. Self-starvation involves a slow and invisible violence that transforms the body, diminishes its existence by depriving it of nourishment, and decomposes it. Self-starvation is itself transformed by the self-imposition of silence, which not only confers visibility to the violence of self-starvation but also transposes its violence upon a symbolic register. This silence is in turn announced with the visual and visceral demarcation of suturing one’s lips, transmogrifying silence into an embodied and violent withholding of speech. Thus, in this complex form of protest, the violently embodied silence that is produced by the conjunction of hunger striking and lip-sewing and that can be viewed as marking the composite form with its distinctive stamp appears crucial to grasp the potential effects of this form of action.

One way of understanding this silence is to view it as the reenactment of being rendered voiceless. This is the compelling interpretation of Joseph Pugliese, who views the suturing of one’s lips as a form of “intextuation” that, etymologically combining the act of “weaving” with “writerly inscription,” allows the magnification of the condition of being silenced. ⁴⁰ These acts, he writes, “all silently, corporeally ventriloquise an anguish that defies the borders and limits of the prisons.” ⁴¹ In a parallel way albeit reaching opposite conclusions, Ayten Gündoğdu interprets lip-sewing as the illustration of the general “speechlessness” of refugees, which is in turn a consequence and sign of their “rightlessness” – the condition that empties their speech out of meaning and makes it dismissible in the public sphere. ⁴² Even while conceding that “lip-sewing has become one of the few means of inserting oneself in the public realm,” Gündoğdu finds this action “troubling” and remains skeptical of its role as a form of agency especially because it does not rely on speech. ⁴³ She argues, “this protest method, violently illustrating speechlessness, demonstrates how one’s exclusion from a political community also marks one’s expulsion from humanity, or from the common world of speaking beings.” ⁴⁴ However insightful into the refugees’ rightlessness, Gündoğdu views lip-sewing as simply an effect, a manifestation or an example of what is being done to the refugees (exclusion/expulsion), hence, a sign of their victimhood and lack of agency rather than its exercise. ⁴⁵

Let us look more closely at the conjunction of the abstinence from food and drink with the abstinence from speech marked by the suturing of lips. This gesture of a double withdrawal – from nourishment and from speech – is key, I submit, to a fuller appreciation of the expressive character of these protests. While the withdrawal from nourishment forms the material basis of the annulment of subjectivity, the withdrawal from speech is the symbolic mark of de-subjectivation. Speech [logos], of course, since Aristotle, is considered to be the characteristic that distinguishes a human being from other living beings, which can only express pain and pleasure by sound [phōnē]. Aristotle writes:

Nature makes nothing pointlessly, as we say, and no animal has speech except a human being […] But speech is for making clear what is beneficial or harmful, and hence also what is just or unjust. For it is peculiar to human beings, in comparison to the other animals, that they alone have perception of what is good or bad, just or unjust, and the rest. And it is community in these that makes a household and a city-state. ⁴⁶

Silence, then, is not simply the absence of sound. It is the withholding of speech. ⁴⁷ Since speech is the condition of possibility of perceiving and articulating the good and the just, the withdrawal from speech is the announcement of a refusal to participate in the articulation of the good and the just. It is a retreat from speech to the capacity to speak, choosing to withhold the action of speaking under conditions of injustice in which a shared sense of humanity has become impossible. ⁴⁸ In effect, it is to stage a retreat from the human community of speech whose distinguishing characteristic should have been its relation to justice but is not.

In contrast to viewing lip-sewing as a mere demonstration of speechlessness, the reading I am advancing views the suturing of lips as the announcement of a willed withdrawal from speech, the rejection of belonging to a common community of speech. This action makes visible not only the injustice these actors have been subjected to but also how this injustice circumscribes and reconfigures what subjectivities are possible, by redrawing the imposed boundary between the human and the nonhuman, the subject and the nonsubject. This action brings into view a condition that renders speech impossible, as much as it renders a conventional political subjectivity impossible when the conditions for a shared humanity based on justice do not exist. However, this is not simply a passive illustration of circumstances, a mechanical manifestation of structures of domination by subjects caught up in their midst. It is the expression and enactment of agency through a practice of resistance that also entails a process of counter-subjectivation. In its rejection of speech, it already contains an understanding of a different kind of community and a desire to belong to it, even if in fleeting, fragmentary, and aporetic form. Otherwise, this act would simply be commensurate with the end of the subject, whose destruction is displayed for others to see. Instead, the suturing of lips draws a visible line of demarcation that announces not only a radical deconstitution, an erasure and withering away, literally marking the break from the old political subjectivity being rejected, but also the beginning of a reconstitution of the self, insofar as the erasure is willed and a recomposition is signaled in the radical performance of embodiment as a political intervention that puts forth a new relation of self to self (and to others). ⁴⁹ Paradoxically, a new subjectivity is asserted by way of a radical de-subjectivation.

If my claim that the expressive nature of these protests, epitomized by the gesture of a double withdrawal, is not simply the announcement of the death of the subject, both physical and symbolic, but the enactment of agency that reconstitutes subjectivity is on the mark, we must next ask what mode of subjectivation is at stake in these protests. It has become highly influential to describe this subjectivity with reference to “bare life” famously proposed by Giorgio Agamben. In fact, this has become the pessimistic flipside of the position that hails the refugee as a political actor who reconfigures conventional citizenship. In Agamben’s view, refugees qua stateless subjects are the ultimate antithesis of state sovereignty, produced as “bare life” by the exceptional structure of its biopolitical operation. Bare life, accordingly, is the politicization of natural life as excluded from the political, a life that is thereby rendered dispensable, pushed outside of the law, and exposed to violence. ⁵⁰ With modernity, Agamben argues, the overlap between natural life and political life to the point of indistinction develops in parallel to the generalization of the state of exception, which also leads to the generalization of the condition of vulnerability to power. Thus, for Agamben, the camp, once the concrete space of exception, becomes the “hidden matrix of the politics in which we are still living.” ⁵¹

In their incisive contribution to the interpretation of hunger striking and lip-sewing protests, Jenny Edkins and Véronique Pin-Fat follow Agamben, concurring with him that the biopolitical operation of sovereignty produces life as naked. Drawing attention to the “radical relationality of state and refugee,” ⁵² they purport that the latter does not only embody bare life but also presents us with an affirmation of bare life through these protest actions. In their view, these practices entail an assertion of “all we have left under sovereign power,” a body whose biological and political qualities have been rendered indistinct. ⁵³ The embrace of this naked life before sovereign power, they contend, “is a re-enactment of sovereign power’s production of bare life on the body of the refugee.” ⁵⁴ They see this type of protest as having the potential to challenge and contest the sovereign order because, rather than demanding recognition as a politically qualified life, it “both acknowledges its status as nothing but life and demands recognition as such.” ⁵⁵

This line of inquiry has been pursued by many scholars who have focused on the immigrant detention center or the border zone as a “space of exception” in which the bareness of life becomes even more evident. ⁵⁶ However, defining protests that take the form of self-directed violence as the affirmation of bare life, initially proposed as a critical concept designating life that is banned from the political, obfuscates and erases the specifically political character of these actions, rendering the refugee or the detainee solely a function of state sovereignty. ⁵⁷ It obscures their capacity to resist and advance different conceptions of the political, instead defining subjects mainly by their structural position vis-à-vis power, i.e., by their vulnerability to violence. ⁵⁸ By not taking into account how subjects go to great lengths to refuse and upend the categories and conditions imposed by power, such a theoretical move perpetuates the conception of an all-encompassing, transhistorical sovereignty vis-à-vis stateless subjects, thus unwittingly affirming and repeating a fantasy of power – totalization.

In this light, it would not be wrong to conclude that a significant strand of migration scholarship, which has liberally employed Agamben’s category of “bare life” to address the victimization of refugees, has largely stumbled when it comes to interpreting their resistance practices. Considering this deficit makes it necessary to think more carefully about what these protests entail and how we may better understand their effects if we take the question of subjectivity seriously. This means, on the one hand, straying away from the tendency to naturalize agency, and, on the other, carefully attending to the political-philosophical implications of the form in which agency is exercised. The double withdrawal in which desubjectivation is performed as a contemplated and willed gesture, a gesture through which a new subjectivity irrupts on the political scene, offers a vantage point to analyze the expressive character of these protests while also complicating the relationship between nourishment and life, on the one hand, and speech and politics, on the other.

Just as it would be wrong to equate self-starvation with a “death drive” or reduce the withdrawal from nourishment to the refusal of life as such, so it would be wrong to reduce the withdrawal from speech to the refusal of politics. We should thus remain cognizant of the composite character of this political action that brings together self-starvation, self-mutilation, and self-muting. As Wendy Brown has once cogently put it, “silence and speech are not only constitutive of but also modalities of one another.” ⁵⁹ In drawing attention to how silence can be important as a political value, Brown references modalities of silence that can act as a shelter both for and from power. However, her point can be fruitfully extended to the performance of a violent and embodied silence that actively contests power. ⁶⁰ Reconceptualizing the performance of silence as a political stance and practice of resistance through which subjectivity is reconfigured necessitates that we challenge a simplistic binary between silence and speech to uncover the contours of their entwinement. ⁶¹

II. The Hermeneutics of Silence? Truth-Acts and the Political

Foucault teaches us that subjects should not be considered solely as a function of relations of power and discourses of truth in and through which they are constituted as objects, but also in relation to knowledges, practices, and techniques by which they actively constitute themselves as subjects of truth. ⁶² As is well known, Foucault’s late work turns toward the analysis of the “technologies of the self” ⁶³ in contradistinction to (and complementarity with) technologies of domination. This turn provides us with a forceful problematic in which we can chart the role of subjects in processes of subjectivation. As radical practices of the self, hunger striking and lip-sewing protests can be illuminatingly situated in Foucault’s problematic of parrhesiastic practice. Analyzing the role of parrhesiastic practice within Foucault’s genealogy of the modern subject brings into view the strong affinities of these protests with elements of the “culture of self” in antiquity that he examines in detail.

Foucault’s genealogy of modern subjectivity offers us historical modalities of subjectivation that are different from the Cartesian model, which is marked by logocentrism and a predominantly epistemological relation to truth (rather than an alethurgic one). ⁶⁴ This hegemonic model, which is later accentuated by Kant and the Enlightenment tradition, neglects the self-transformation of the subject as an essential feature of the subject’s access to truth, which is in turn crucial for the self in antiquity. ⁶⁵ The self-transformation demanded by the constitution of a relation of self to self in the Hellenistic-Roman mode of subjectivation is to be achieved by practice, training, and exercise. ⁶⁶

Foucault’s genealogy also unearths historical counterpoints to the dominant modality of the modern subject whose morality is based on the hermeneutics of the self derived in large part from Christian self-renunciation, confession, and obedience. ⁶⁷ The Hellenistic and Roman “culture of self” occupies a privileged place in this contrast especially because it involves a different conception of truth as an ethical stance related fundamentally to the subject’s courage ⁶⁸ rather than based on the Christian obligation to confess. ⁶⁹ Furthermore, unlike self-renunciation and avowal that characterize the monastic practices of early Christianity, ⁷⁰ the care of self [epimeleia heautōn] provides a positive principle of ethical conduct.

The subject’s relation to truth is the central preoccupation of Foucault’s reconstruction of antiquity, giving parrhesia its paradigmatic form. Parrhesia is the “act of telling all (frankness, open-heartedness, plain speaking, speaking openly, speaking freely)”; it is the requisite of ethical conduct. ⁷¹ Whereas ancient parrhesia is directed at pedagogically guiding conduct, the Christian pastoral transforms parrhesia into the confession of wrong-doing and the secrets of one’s soul to seek salvation. ⁷² Confession, Foucault notes, becomes the obligatory practice in order to tell the truth of the self, thus occupying a crucial role in the formation of the modern subject. ⁷³ The problem is that there is a close connection between this hermeneutics of the self and how subjection is secured. ⁷⁴ Foucault locates total obedience, especially in monastic practices, as a crucial feature that accompanies the examination of oneself and the obligation to confess. This submission to the other is markedly different from ancient guidance in which submission to the master’s pedagogy was, Foucault argues, provisional and instrumental in developing the autonomy of the one being guided.

As practices of the self, the hunger striking and lip-sewing protests in question display a prima facie resemblance to the modality of self-renunciation that Foucault locates in Christian askēsis. However, this does not hold up to scrutiny. While there is an undeniable tendency of self-mortification in these protests, they diverge from the confessional model of subjectivation and refuse the submission to the other that characterizes this model. Instead, when we analyze these practices closely, we find that they bear important resemblances to Foucault’s construction of ancient parrhesia central to the “care of the self.” This is not only because these practices cultivate self-mastery, through the self-managed starvation of the body, the infliction of self-harm, and the practice of silence, thereby constituting efforts to gain sovereignty over oneself. ⁷⁵ It is also because the relationship they establish with truth qua ethical stance is crucial to their process of subjectivation.

Foucault argues that parrhesia appears largely, though not exclusively, within the relationship between a master and a disciple, enabling the disciple to benefit from the spiritual guidance of the master. ⁷⁶ Mainly residing in the master’s discourse, parrhesia is “both a technique and an ethics, an art and a morality.” ⁷⁷ As an ēthos, the emphasis is on the avoidance of flattery, which is the enemy of true self-knowledge. As a tekhnē, it is the “naked transmission, as it were, of truth itself.” ⁷⁸ Different from rhetoric, parrhesia is “without adornment.” ⁷⁹ In its avoidance of rhetoric and flattery, parrhesia is therefore intended to generate the disciple’s independent subjectivation: “The truth, passing from one to the other in parrhēsia,” writes Foucault, “seals, ensures, and guarantees the other’s autonomy, the autonomy of the person who received the speech from the person who uttered it.” ⁸⁰ Foucault thus not only points to the strong connection between one’s self-constitution and the constitution of the “other,” but he also highlights the crucial and constitutive ethical bond forged by the honesty of one and the autonomy of the other. Even though the parrhesiastic relationship is hierarchical, Foucault puts emphasis on its pedagogical quality; it educates individuals so that they become sovereign over themselves and builds a relationship of trust and care within the parrhesiastic pair.

How does silence figure into the parrhesiastic problematic? Silence, according to Foucault, is one among many of the exercises that equip the self for its transformation, that transform a true discourse into principles of conduct in and through which the self as an ethical subject is formed, experienced, and conducted. ⁸¹ However, Foucault positions silence mainly as the passive art of the disciple, a practice necessary for receiving the truth, a pedagogical exercise in listening and learning, an openness to logos. ⁸² It is a form of askēsis, an apprenticeship in self-constitution. Hence, while silence is a necessary component or supplement to parrhesia, it is primarily a passive technique of reception.

Even though Foucault tends to present parrhesia in largely verbal terms, ⁸³ certain qualities of his conception of parrhesia allow for its reconfiguration so that the active and embodied silence of hunger striking and lip-sewing practices can be situated within the parrhesiastic problematic. First, as Foucault notes, parrhesia is a “way of telling the truth, but what defines it is not the content of the truth as such.” ⁸⁴ Therefore, parrhesia is not essentially tied to the discursive strategies it employs; it is not about debating the truth, justifying the truth or persuading the other to the truth. ⁸⁵ Second, while truth is often articulated in speech, it could also be disseminated through conduct. Parrhesia must establish an equivalence between speech and conduct, either by making sure that one’s conduct befits the requirements of the truth being told or by acting in a way that is in itself the manifestation of the truth, i.e., connected with the ability to lead one’s life as a “true life.” ⁸⁶ Finally, such parrhesia is based on dramatizing the truth, often in an exemplary, even spectacular way. ⁸⁷ In this way, we can understand certain forms of silence as the performance of truth – as truth-acts.

Reading silence as a modality of parrhesiastic practice entails moving from a conception of parrhesia as the enunciation of the truth to parrhesia as the enactment of the truth. It is crucial, however, that the silence in question is a public one. This follows from the quality of the parrhesiastic act as a public pact and public in two senses. On the one hand, the pact entails a courageous binding of the subject to the truth that one tells or performs, taking on the risks entailed by that act, before an audience. ⁸⁸ This commitment requires courage. On the other hand, this pact operates in the space brought into being between the truth-teller and the interlocutor(s). ⁸⁹ Thus, the pact not only binds the subject to the truth but also to the interlocutor(s), whose willingness to listen to and participate in the truth relies on courage as well. ⁹⁰ Silence, then, insofar as it can be considered a form of parrhesia must be a public silence that is not only performed before others as a commitment to the truth but also received by them as an alethurgic bond.

Reconceptualizing the violent and embodied silence in hunger striking and lip-sewing protests as public truth-acts is bound to remain an abstract formulation, however, if we do not consider how these practices are aligned with other modalities of parrhesiastic enactment that concretize alternative historical forms of subjectivity, modalities that we can distill from Foucault’s genealogy of the modern subject. Particularly relevant to these truth-acts is what Foucault calls the parrhesia of the weak in the political realm, especially as this kind of practice does not necessarily confine itself to verbal rituals. Unlike democratic parrhesia, which is embedded within an agonistic political sphere structured by an equal right to speak (predicated on having citizenship status), the parrhesia of the powerless is largely based on enactment, involving acts of resistance that include hunger strikes and self-killings, which Foucault also cites, albeit in passing. ⁹¹ This kind of imprecational parrhesia, which operates in a profound asymmetry, aims to tell the truth of the injustice committed by the strong and to reproach them for it. ⁹² Unlike democratic parrhesia in which the use of “true, reasonable, agonistic discourse” aims to persuade others in contention, the parrhesia of the powerless is a “remonstration” without retaliation. ⁹³ Foucault argues: “For someone who is both the victim of an injustice and completely weak, the only means of combat is a discourse which is agonistic but constructed around this unequal structure.” ⁹⁴

The parrhesia of the weak, especially when based on enactment rather than on enunciation, remains in kinship with a kind of nonverbal political refusal enacted by the philosopher. ⁹⁵ This silent modality of philosophical parrhesia diverges from most other forms of philosophical practice, such as the examination of souls through courageous questioning and encouragement of care of self. It also differs from what is reductively taken to be the dominant form of philosophical parrhesia – speaking truth to power – often concretized in the philosopher assuming the role of counselor, giving true advice to the ruler so that he can govern himself and others better in an autocratic regime. ⁹⁶ Citing the instances when Socrates silently disobeys and risks his life, mainly by abstaining from unjust political conduct, Foucault writes: “philosophical parrēsia does not necessarily or exclusively go through logos, through the great ritual of language in which one addresses the group or even an individual. After all, parrēsia may appear in the things themselves, it may appear in ways of doing things, it may appear in ways of being.” ⁹⁷ Socratic parrhesia as true conduct is accentuated with the Cynics, with whom one’s way of living becomes both the condition of possibility and the very act of truth-telling. ⁹⁸ Cynicism supercedes the simple alignment of conduct with principles, transforming one’s very form of existence to “an alethurgy, a manifestation of truth.” ⁹⁹ Often staged in a dramatic form that defies convention and traditional morality, the conduct of one’s life in poverty, humiliation, dishonor, destitution, and animality is the enactment of a “true life” [bios alēthēs] that seeks to promote an ethics based on the transvaluation of values. ¹⁰⁰ Foucault argues that this kind of philosophical existence short-circuits logos; it is conceived as the “silent way” to virtue by way of askēsis. ¹⁰¹ At work in both imprecational parrhesia and Cynic parrhesia is a subjectivity that is fundamentally expressive. ¹⁰²

The embodied silence of hunger striking and lip-sewing migrants and refugees in their withdrawal from nourishment and speech displays a strong affinity with forms of philosophical refusal practiced as expressions of disobedience as well as with the exaggerated and defiant dramaturgy of Cynic parrhesia. However, these practices do not operate using insult and derision to confront power, which is often characteristic for Cynics. While they resonate with the Cynic fashioning of life as the site of the manifestation of truth through abjection wherein “the body itself [is constituted] as the visible theater of the truth,” ¹⁰³ they are more temporary and reactive than the dedicated and sustained practices of Cynics that attempt to reorient their conduct of living as a whole. Ultimately, these protests present the greatest proximity to the parrhesia of the weak, especially insofar as they are confrontational in a steep asymmetry, they operate on a visceral and affective register, and their self-directed violence serves as an imprecation that reproaches the injustice that has come to define their conditions of life.

III. Parrhesiastic Counter-Publics

Foucault’s analysis of ancient parrhesia as both a model of ethical conduct and a counterpoint to the dominant model of subjectivity based on Cartesian rationalism, on the one hand, and Christian self-renunciation and obedience, on the other, thus offers important clues for rethinking the violently embodied silence that marks hunger striking and lip-sewing protests conducted by migrants and refugees. However, Foucault’s analysis also gives the impression that the subject in question is predominantly a solitary one. This is misleading. Parrhesia is not the act of a solitary subject, even when it might be performed by a single individual. Instead of an individualistic or solipsistic one, parrhesia cultivates a relational mode of subjectivation. Let us recall the two senses of the public nature of the parrhesiastic pact: parrhesia purports an ethical relationship that is constituted between self and self in public but also, perhaps even more fundamentally, between self and the “other” – the actual or imagined interlocutor(s) of the parrhesiastic act.

The immediate interlocutors of the parrhesiast are fellow parrhesiasts, of course, as these protests are often, though not always, carried out collectively. Silence enjoins silence in these protests, exacerbating the contemplated, coordinated, and political nature of the gesture of double withdrawal at work in them. At the same time, the collective practice of parrhesia takes as its direct interlocutors those who are not participants of the protests and who may or may not be its supporters. There are others in the detention center or the border zone who are called upon as fellow members of this nascent, precarious, and diverse community, forged together from their contingent encounter in the same space after treading different paths based on individual histories of movement and circumstance. ¹⁰⁴

There is a critical power generated in this immediate parrhesiastic space of relational subjectivation, one that thrusts it outward. Similar to what Foucault calls an “irruptive event,” ¹⁰⁵ these protests open the space for the emergence of a truth by way of its public enactment. While the performance of silence is a withdrawal from the community of speech to which these actors refuse belonging, it is also a calling forth – an interpellation – of a new community imagined as an alternative to those in existence. This community is envisioned as constituting the other pole in the parrhesiastic pact, one that is both the audience and the relational participant of parrhesiastic subjectivation. This imagination is, in turn, an integral part of its interpellation. Thus the resubjectivation of the self (of both the actors and their interlocutors) is crucially connected to the political imaginary that these practices activate and their capacity to call into being that alternative community.

The parrhesiastic space opened by these acts can be fruitfully compared to a “public sphere,” ¹⁰⁶ even though it is not commensurate to a conventional one. This space functions, I submit, as a surrogate public sphere, in two senses: first as a space that is analogous to a public sphere in which the meaning of these parrhesiastic acts is open to contestation, and second, as a conduit that translates and transmits these acts to more conventional and established public spheres. ¹⁰⁷ In both of its functions, this space is generative not only of different political opinions and debate, but also of new bonds, solidarities, and possibilities of action, both among those in the same space and across the boundaries of this space, reaching out of the detention center or border zone, toward the citizens of countries on different sides of the border and beyond them. ¹⁰⁸ Moreover, insofar as these acts cascade outward, so to speak, from immediate and proximate interlocutors toward different and more distant audiences of the conduct, this surrogate sphere functions in a contradictory way. On the one hand, it acts as a critique of the public that marginalizes or ignores its existence; on the other hand, it becomes the kernel of the alternative community forged by solidarity and parrhesiastic pedagogy. Operating as both ēthos and tekhnē, it avoids flattery and lacks embellishment; indeed, it stages a critique of the public for the ongoing practices of encampment and imprisonment supported or condoned by those who are also among the audience of this truth-act. In the vein of the parrhesia of the weak, it rebukes this public through imprecation and malediction. On the other hand, this sphere simultaneously calls upon a different public that it thereby calls into being. It functions to cultivate new modes of sociality among strangers around these truth-acts. It acts to educate the “other” – that public for the attention, solidarity, and support of which this truth-act is performed. Like ancient parrhesia, though without its pedagogical hierarchy, it aspires to augment the autonomy of the receiving subjects and calls forth their further subjectivation through ethical and political conduct.

What are the structural qualities of this surrogate sphere? This surrogate sphere is geographically dispersed, culturally, socially, and linguistically diverse, and yet connected by virtue of the relationality forged by the parrhesiastic acts. ¹⁰⁹ Insofar as these interlocutors are not necessarily tied to these actors with bonds of nationality, nor are themselves connected to a single demos, these acts intimate a more fluid, less bounded, and more transnational conception of the public sphere. ¹¹⁰ At the same time, this sphere is not necessarily a unitary whole but is perhaps more accurately conceptualized in the form of multiple, networked publics that are shifting in their contours and participants. Their participants are not predetermined; instead, they are shaped insofar as they are enjoined by their participation in the parrhesiastic pact. ¹¹¹ We already know that that the parrhesiasts that call these spheres into being are primarily “subaltern” in the sense that they lack the epistemological and political standing that would arise from national belonging and its attendant citizenship status. However, these spheres are structurally subaltern as well, in that they are sites of the production and circulation of counter-hegemonic discourses about the meaning of these acts, their ethics and politics, at a distance from and in tension with the overarching representation of these protests in the dominant public sphere. In light of these qualities, these spheres are more aptly labeled “counter-publics.” ¹¹² Since they are interpellated by practices of resistance that are embodied truth-acts, I will call these spaces parrhesiastic counter-publics.

As parrhesiastic counter-publics, these formations challenge the “opposition between the public sphere and the street, as an opposition between communicative action and corporeal action, reason and force.” ¹¹³ Given the spectacular corporeality of the protests calling these spheres into being, affect constitutes an important element in their connective tissue. ¹¹⁴ The privileging of symbolic and affective communication over rational discussion and debate broadens the disembodied characterization of the classical public sphere, doing away with the assumptions of linguistic uniformity and semiotic transparency that often also accompany its conception. ¹¹⁵

However, we should not have any illusions about the political efficacy of these nascent and fragile parrhesiastic counter-publics. Their effectivity is limited by the diffuseness of their addressee, which makes it difficult for them to attempt to hold power accountable by the force of publicity. Their effectivity is further complicated because instead of a unitary and single sovereign power that the classical conception of the public sphere aimed to hold accountable, the power formation faced by parrhesiastic counter-publics is much more complex, involving multiple scales that include local authorities, private security and border patrol companies, different sovereign states, supranational organizations, international legal institutions, and non-governmental organizations. Nonetheless, these counter-publics still have the potential to exert pressure on the authorities, a potential that arises from and can be indexed to the strength of the public pact established by the parrhesiastic act. There are no guarantees, of course, that these spheres will forge lasting bonds of solidarity as they evoke an alternative community. Indeed, the risk of being overtaken by humanitarian compassion is always there. ¹¹⁶ At the same time, these spaces are also characterized by uncertainty and danger, especially for the parrhesiasts, involving the risk of repression, deportation, and even death. These subjects take that risk, by binding themselves to the truth by a public act, thereby alerting us to the presence of an entire political landscape that otherwise escapes our vision. Their commitment is marked by courage, the courage to resist, to act ethically and politically, precisely in the absence of conditions that might permit more conventional forms of political truth-telling.

IV. The Courage of Silence

Parrhesiasts are those who, if necessary, accept death for having told the truth. ¹¹⁷

That the alethurgic reading of the hunger striking and lip-sewing protests of migrants and refugees points us to the centrality of courage as a political affect for the remaking of the self is not a coincidence, given its resonance with Kant’s dictum of the courage to think as the mark of constituting oneself as an autonomous subject. ¹¹⁸ In this spirit, that Foucault turns to Kant to open his lectures on ancient political parrhesia suggests that he, too, sees a direct line of continuity between parrhesia and the question of enlightenment, or the critical self-constitution of the subject. ¹¹⁹ Foucault interprets enlightenment as the cultivation of a theoretical relation to the present, a relation that is forged through critique. Philosophy, which seeks to articulate the meaning of the present, is a form of truth-telling, then, in the double sense: on the one hand, it is the articulation of the rules and procedures of truth, of true knowledge; on the other hand, it is the critical evaluation of the present and the role of the thinker in and upon the present. These are two different Kantian legacies that Foucault identifies: the epistemological and the alethurgic. The one leads up to positivism/analytic philosophy – let us say science; the other is the tradition of critical theory in which Foucault locates his own project. The former is the Kantian legacy that reinforces logocentrism and rationalism as characterizing the dominant form of modern subjectivity, the latter attempts to recuperate the crucial role of self-transformation in the subject’s relation to truth qua authentic conviction and moral courage. Foucauldian critique, insofar as it is the “art of voluntary insubordination,” ¹²⁰ is one that radicalizes the parrhesiastic role of philosophy, continuing the reflection on the present and its philosophical demands while problematizing the modes of subjectivation and modalities of power entailed by it. ¹²¹

Foucault’s problematic of parrhesia is his response to the dominant strand of the Kantian vision in constructing the modern subject. Foucault’s emphasis on the critical legacy of Kant makes visible the line of continuity that runs from Kant’s courage to think to Foucault’s courage to tell the truth. Situating the hunger striking and lip-sewing protests of migrants and refugees within the problematic of parrhesia casts yet a different light on this line, treading it but also transforming and augmenting it into the courage to resist. Theoretically, this move continues the critical legacy of the enlightenment by taking the political demands of the historical present as its objective and object of critical intervention in a way that deeply concerned both Kant and Foucault. ¹²² However, it also means pressing back on Kant’s privileging of reason by turning to embodiment and putting pressure on the primacy Foucault tends to accord to the spoken word over the silent work of political enactment. This move throws into sharp relief the critical power of the affective, corporeal, violent, and mute parrhesia that is insistently political, yet largely invisible to both thinkers.

Alethurgic analysis outlines the resonances of these practices with those that make up the “care of the self,” ancient practices that are considered to be long superseded by the model of the modern subject. It thereby challenges the presupposition of a teleology of the subject’s development, one that absolutizes its current hegemonic form. Modes of subjectivation counter to the dominant model of subjectivity cannot be considered to belong to the prehistory of the subject but remain dormant as possibilities showing alternatives that depend on the active role of subjects in their own processes of subjectivation.

At the same time, pursuing an alethurgic analysis focused on subjectivation enables us to extend Foucault’s genealogy by including these radical practices of the self as current counterpoints to modern subjectivity. It helps to see these practices as generative as much as they are self-destructive. On the one hand, it casts into view how these practices subvert the dominant form of the self, modeled after the rational, solitary, self-interested and self-preserving subject of modernity, by tracking the undoing of the body and the withdrawal from speech. On the other hand, it shows how a reconstitution of the self emerges from within this deconstitution through the relational subjectivation brought forth by the performance of silent truth-acts. These radical practices of the self are not merely processes of subjectivation, but they are forms of counter-conduct that develop from within structures of domination and in opposition to hegemonic practices cultivated by the “conduct of conduct.” ¹²³ As forms of counter-conduct, these political truth-acts reflect and oppose the asymmetric conditions out of which they are born. ¹²⁴ They call attention to the subject’s unconventional ways of participating in modes of counter-subjectivation.

Silence, in this analysis, presents itself as one of those unconventional ways of participating. The violent and embodied silence of these protests is far from the simple opposite of speech; it is neither a lack nor its repression. Nor is it the passive reception of the truth being imparted. ¹²⁵ It is a willed refusal, by way of which the subject begins to unravel one’s existing self. The subject thus actively participates in one’s own undoing. ¹²⁶ Viewed as a modality of parrhesia, this silence operates by dramatically acting out a truth, radically modifying the conduct of oneself, publicly binding oneself by that performance, and putting forth a new relation of self to self through practice. As the embodied dramatization of an untrue life (the opposite of what the Cynics would call a “true life” or, to put it differently, approximating what Theodor Adorno would call a “false life” ¹²⁷ ) to which the subject is condemned, the performance of silence is neither about demonstrating the conditions in which a conventional subjectivity is no longer possible, nor about attempting to persuade its interlocutors to their injustice by contending with them. Rather, the corporeal enactment of an unjust, and hence untrue, life by way of self-directed violence functions as the public indictment of those that have perpetrated that injustice. It is a remonstration, calling for a reconsideration of values that inform conventional ethics and politics. That remonstration also contains an alternative conception of a “true life,” which in fleeting iterations cites solidarity and denotes the desire for justice. Paradoxically, the space for justice is opened up by the visceral protestation of injustice, just as the space for a new subject is born upon the performative destruction of the old. Silence thus produces a site in which the self is forged in a dialectic of desubjectivation and resubjectivation. The emergent subjectivity is inseparable from the relationship it establishes to an imagined community called upon by way of parrhesiastic counterpublics.

These actors who do not have public standing, recognition, right or epistemic privilege and yet who forcefully and at great peril to themselves dramatize an untrue life and actively retreat from the human community of speech that subjects them to the injustice they experience are not only political parrhesiasts. They also continue to uphold the philosophical tradition of parrhesia that establishes a critical relation to the present and to the dominant mode of subjectivity in the present. Such a view rests on an understanding of philosophy that becomes a radical weapon insofar as it opens itself up to politics, as it meets actual resistance practices. This view also calls for the re-politicization of parrhesia, involving the rejuvenation of philosophy in the ancient sense, in which it is “really lived as the free questioning of men’s conduct by a truth-telling which accepts the risk of danger to itself.” ¹²⁸

The courage of those who resist an unjust life by way of withdrawing themselves from nourishment and speech and by putting into question our common humanity also stands as a silent indictment of the dominant form of subjectivity in which self-preservation is the foundational norm that grounds the political order and bodily integrity is the source of the self-interested subject who can use but not abuse the body. Hence, if these practices challenge both the raison d’être of the sovereignty of the state and the source of the obligation to obey it, it is important to keep in mind that they do this by asserting the sovereignty of the subject. However, instead of affirming the modern subject, this sovereignty counterposes it by referencing a counter-subjectivity that emerges by way of radical self-transformation and in ethical relation to a new community that these practices call forth. Those who are interpellated by the silent truth-acts are forcefully reminded that a just life is more worthy than self-preservation. If one were to object and say that these migrants are ultimately only seeking refuge, only pursuing a better life for themselves and their own, I do not think they would lose anything of their philosophical-political value. This is because it is their exceptional way of seeking that life which tells us something about the truth of ours.