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at'This is a brilliant and readable book that has the great strength of bringing social and political theory together with engaging ethnography.'
Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley
How might mourning turn into an event of agonistic performativity?
Drawing on a range of philosophical, anthropological and political theories, Athena Athanasiou offers a new way of thinking about agonistic performativity with its critical connections to national and gender politics and alongside the political intricacies of affectivity, courage and justice. Through an ethnographic account of the urban feminist and antinationalist Women in Black of Belgrade movement during the Yugoslav wars she shows that we might understand their dissident politics of mourning as a means to refigure political life beyond sovereign accounts of subjectivity and agency.
Athena Athanasiou is Professor of Social Anthropology and Gender Theory at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, in Athens, Greece.
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edinburghuniversitypress.com
ISBN [PPC] 978-1-4744-2014-3
ISBN [cover] 978-1-4744-2015-0
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List of contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Undoing grief as "feminine language"
Biopolitics, sovereignty, nationalism
Researching the affective life of a political subjectivity
Towards non-sovereign agonism
1. Mourning OtherwiseFeminism at war
Emergencies and emergences
Activism of loss, loss of activism
Counter-memory, living on
Critical agency and political catachresis
"Anamnestic solidarity" and "wounded attachments"
2. Gendered Intimacies of the Nationalist Archive
Restaging the archive
Proper memories, proper names, proper victims
Claiming the dead body of the national hero
Desiring the nation, worshipping the leader
Making "women" appropriate to the nation: fairies, witches, and mothers
Demographic anxieties, gendered epidemics
Singing the nineties
Remains and spectres
3. Spectral Spaces of Counter-Memory
Ghostly emergences
In the square and beyond
Every Wednesday, at half past three in the afternoon
"Serbian Bastille" between national imaginary and performative displacements
Agonism "at a standstill"
Stasis as dissensus
Public mourning and its (gendered) discontents
(Not) Taking space as "woman"
4. Political Languages of Responsiveness and the Disquiet of Silence
Inaudible voices, disqualified discourses
Aporias of (un)speakability
Speaking for others? Relational structures of address
Activism as responsiveness
The labor of witnessing
Vocal registers of the political
Political performativity between subjugation and insurrection
Critical practices of political response-ability
Silence as an event in language
Epilogue: Agonistic re-membering of the political Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Athena Athanasiou is Professor of Social Anthropology and Gender Theory at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece. She is co-author, with Judith Butler, of Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Polity Press, 2013). She is the author of Life at the Limit: Essays on Gender, Body and Biopolitics (Athens, 2007) and Crisis as a State of Exception: Critiques and Resistances (Athens, 2012). She is editor of Feminist Theory and Cultural Critique (Athens, 2006), Rewriting Difference: Luce Irigaray and 'the Greeks' (SUNY Press, 2010) and Biosocialities: Perspectives on Medical Anthropology (Athens, 2011).
Summary
Athena Athanasiou departs from recent discussions of mourning, including in the work of Judith Butler, by raising an altogether original question which both challenges and extends the current orthodoxy: what would it be like to mourn the dead of the enemy?
