Entextualizing Thanatopolitics

About Self-Immolation, Images, and the Enunciation of Negation

Abstract

On December 17, 2010, Mohammed Bouazizi, a 27-year-old street vendor set himself on fire on the public square facing the Sidi Bouzid town hall in Tunisia. This social event became an irreversible turn in the history of the Arab World. What remains of his immolated body? Drawing from two concepts, entextualization and enunciative praxis, this article explores the semiotics of self-immolation as a critical enunciation and counter- interpellation of state biopolitical discourses. Can death, silence, martyrdom, or the burning body enunciate? The entextualization of thanatopolitics (or the politics of death) thus appears as the production of memorial traces that organize a performance of popular resistance. This also entails a process of the reverse de-/re-contextualization of infrapolitical enunciation, as exerted by institutional power in order to claim and deform emancipatory discourses for the profit of an imposed truth. Understanding the dialectics between subaltern and institutional/official modes of entextualization and perspective leads us to a better understanding of the complexity of enunciative praxis of the immolated body, of which this paper offers a fourfold analysis: enunciation, image, truth, and (artistic) trace.