Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Affiliated Faculty Member of Race and Ethnic Studies at Texas A&M University
Decolonizing Damiens: The Coloniality of Sovereignty and Government by Terror
This paper works on the relation between spectacles and death. I start with three spectacles of death: first, Damiens, the infamous regicide of Discipline and Punish, and his public torture. Second, the slave girl on the deck of Recovery, as Saidiya Hartman describes, who was tortured and then abandoned to death, after refusing to dance. The last one Haci Lokman Birlik, whose dead body was dragged behind a Turkish security vehicle in 2015 in a Turkish town, Siirt. I start with these “terrible spectacles” as Saidiya Hartman calls them, not to bring attention to the (of course present) humanity of these three individuals, nor to condemn violence by appealing only to its most visible and visceral formations. Rather, I present a decolonial genealogy, of the relation between sovereignty and spectacle, and specifically, what coloniality does to this relation, how it shifts the very core of sovereign aesthetics of punishment. Overall, this paper demonstrates the formation of what I call ‘colonial sovereignty,’ as the emergence of a new relation between sovereignty and terror: in colonial sovereignty, terror is an inseparable element of sovereignty, formed through not the uniqueness, but rather, the repetition and proliferation of spectacles of death. The colonial/modern nation state functions as a government by terror, where death becomes meaningless, and the spectacles of dead bodies outlive death.
Ege Selin Islekel is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Affiliated Faculty Member of Race and Ethnic Studies at Texas A&M University. Her work is on Post-Foucauldian Biopolitics, Critical Theory, and Decolonial Feminisms, focusing on critical approaches to the politics of death especially in relation to collective memory, and epistemic responses to contexts of overwhelming presence of death. Her first book Nightmare Remains: The Politics of Mourning and Epistemologies of Disappearance, forthcoming with Northwestern University Press (Spring 2024), investigates epistemic and political resistances engaged through collective acts of mourning in Turkey and Latin America. She is currently working on her second book, Monstrous Visions: Mechanisms of Defense and Regimes of Visibility, which provides a decolonial genealogy of monstrosity and analyzes how the notion of danger renders racialized modes of death invisible. She is the co-editor of Foucault, Derrida, and the Biopolitics of Punishment (Northwestern University Press, 2022). Her articles in English and Turkish appear in journals such as Foucault Studies, Philosophy Compass, Theory&Event, Hypatia, CLR James Journal, philoSOPHIA, Philosophy Today, and anthologies such as Turkey’s Necropolitical Laboratory, and Cinsiyeti Yazmak (Writing Sex).