Nonsovereign Agonism (or, Beyond Affirmation versus Vulnerability)

Vulnerability and its politics: Precarity and the woundedness of power

“…This means rejecting both the fantasy of omnipotent force and the politics of futility. Indeed, our critique resides precisely in between such terms: the inclination to think politics in terms of strong or weak, loud or quiet, effective or ineffective, revolutionary or supplementary, healing or harming, countering or affirmative -that is, in terms of mere doing (see also Athanasiou, 2016). It is only when we begin from a position of beholdenness, when we start with the presumption that no response is ever heroic, able or sufficient enough, that our conception of politics makes room for thinking politics in a manner that is far more sensitive to spatial and ontological differentiation than productivist, supplementalist and vitalist frameworks can measure.…”

Negotiating Colonial Violence: Spaces of Precarisation in Palestine

“…Second, the irreducibility of precariousness to any political means also allows it to operate as a source for both, governing (precarisation) and the counter‐conduct (mobilisation of the precarised). This, I argue, highlights the importance of comprehending precarity as beyond the passivising/activating and the governing/governed divides (see also Athanasiou ; Butler ). As shown by several scholars, even remarkable vulnerabilities can create new forms of solidarity (Hammami ), steadfastness (Lentin ), resistance (Joronen ), resilient family practices (Harker ), affectual capacities (Joronen and Griffiths ) and hope (Griffiths ; Joronen and Griffiths ) among the colonised, particularly when shared.…”

“…Second, even though precarisation has the power to turn the spaces and lives of the colonised even close to unliveable, it can also operate as a source of action. Induced precarities do not merely passivise those set under the precarious conditions, but engender new forms of action and social practice, ranging from the solidarity within the communities under the threat of settler colonial eviction to the counter‐conducts and counter‐visibilities against the settler colonial ways of precarisation and elimination (see Athanasiou ; Hammami ; Joronen ; Joronen and Griffiths ). Together, these two tensions—the one between the political distribution of precarities and ontological precariousness, and the other between precarity as a source of governing and counter‐conduct—also help in understanding how the corresponding spatialities between the compartmentalisation (as a tactic of spatialising colonial violence) and the negotiated precarities operate in a way that takes into account the irreducibility of Palestinian spaces to the precarities imposed by Israeli settler colonialism.…”

The Fiction of Invulnerability. Silence and Otherness in Francoist Spain

“…When those lives are dead, mourning them is not only unnecessary (since they were not even fully alive in the first place) but also a threat to national identity. Mourning outside of the normative framework of grievability can then have a powerful political impact (Athanasiou 2016).…”