Full Description
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 movement Women in Black of Belgrade 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.
Contents
Acknowledgements
IntroductionUndoing grief as "feminine language"Biopolitics, sovereignty, nationalism Researching the affective life of a political subjectivityTowards non-sovereign agonism
1. Mourning OtherwiseFeminism at warEmergencies and emergences Activism of loss, loss of activismCounter-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 heroDesiring the nation, worshipping the leaderMaking "women" appropriate to the nation: fairies, witches, and mothersDemographic anxieties, gendered epidemics Singing the ninetiesRemains and spectres
3. Spectral Spaces of Counter-MemoryGhostly emergences In the square and beyondEvery Wednesday, at half past three in the afternoon "Serbian Bastille" between national imaginary and performative displacementsAgonism "at a standstill" Stasis as dissensusPublic 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 addressActivism as responsiveness The labor of witnessingVocal 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
