In the opening pages of this excellent book, Banu Bargu identifies a pair of seemingly simple aims. The first is to tell the story of the mass hunger strike launched across Turkish prisons in October of 2000, converted one month later into a “fast unto death.” At its peak, the death fast struggle had 1,500 participants, protesting the removal of prisoners from communal wards (in which prisoners governed themselves) to high-security prisons (“F-type” prisons with a cellular architecture that would isolate inmates). Six years later, 122 people had died as a part of the struggle, either at the hands of the Turkish state or from self-inflicted starvation and self-immolation. Bargu’s second aim is to understand the meaning of this self-destruction, taking it seriously as political action and its participants seriously as political agents. The book is a clear success on these two aims, offering both a detailed account of the death fast struggle and giving readers a compelling theoretical framework (a dialectic of “biosovereignty” and “necroresistance”) through which to understand that struggle. In achieving these ends, Starve and Immolate goes much further and offers more profound and important claims, ultimately pushing the boundaries of how we ought to think about the aporias of political and corporeal life and death.

Bargu speaks directly to questions of sovereignty, biopower, biopolitics, and, most importantly, the (im)possibilities of resistance. Her book is both an ethnography of the “margins” of Turkish political life during the years of the death fast and an impressive work in political theory, engaging these questions in both abstract and concrete terms. Building on Michel Foucault’s analytics of power, she corrects erroneous readings of his work and offers a substantial theoretical upgrade to ahistorical accounts of bare life and sovereignty. Against a common reading of Foucault—that in the contemporary period juridical sovereignty’s power of life and death has been replaced by modes of biopolitical governmentality’s power over life itself, and that this replacement blocks the possibility of meaningful and liberatory resistance—Bargu demonstrates how sovereign power has not given way to biopower, but instead has been reconfigured as a paradoxical combination of biosovereignty. This conceptualization allows her to read the death fast struggle as a sacrificial mode of counterconduct: as necroresistance to biosovereignty. The death fast emerged in response to specific exercises of biosovereign power by the Turkish state, and the author shows how death fast participants acted not just in spite of but also through and against these exercises. By means of the weaponization of life itself, the participants in the death fast struggle provide Bargu with a model of radical resistance that challenges readers to rethink the categories of success and failure by which we usually judge political agency and radical movements.

The bulk of Starve and Immolate details the case, and in particular, the decisive introduction of the 1991 “anti-terror law,” which, Bargu argues, marks the moment when Turkish state sovereignty was redefined, through a fixation on the ‘health” and “security” of the nation, as biosovereignty (p. 104). The provision of the anti-terror law introducing F-type prisons ultimately sparked the death fast struggle inside prison wards. Because the strikes began in a place where the state’s authority should have been most absolute, members of the Turkish government interpreted the uprising as a “full-blow crisis of sovereignty” (p. 113). The author argues that the state’s response to this “crisis” hinged on three techniques: making law (drawing distinctions between “ordinary” and “political” prisoners); making war (violently invading prison wards to “save” the death fast participants under “Operation Return to Life,” transferring prisoners to isolation in high-security prisons and “resuscitating” death fasters with nonconsensual feeding); and making peace (reducing sentences and selectively offering pardons to some participants). Through each of these deployments of biosovereign power, she argues, the state reasserted itself as the only legitimate source of violence, as well as the only legitimate cause to which citizens could sacrifice their lives.

Bargu recounts these events twice, first from the perspective of the biosovereign “center” (Chapter 3) and second from that of the necroresistant “margins” of the communal prison wards (Chapter 4). She thus underscores the radicalism of participants who initially called not only for the complete reversal of transfers to F-type prisons but also for a new constitutional order, a redefinition of Turkish citizenship, and an end to all “antidemocratic laws” (p. 194). From the beginning of the struggle, Bargu argues, prisoners did not simply challenge the state’s sovereign monopoly on the use of violence, but by the choice to weaponize life itself through a death fast, they also challenged the state’s monopsony of sacrifice, thereby striking at the core of biosovereignty itself.

It was remarkable that the death fast struggle could be organized across the ideological divisions within the Turkish Left. Bargu argues that what allowed for unity was, first, a shared commitment to Marxism, and second, the specific prison experience that was common across ideological divisions. In particular, the collective life built in prison ward communes both provided space to organize protests and constituted “alternative modes of sociality” that were disrupted by the move to cellular confinement and isolation (p. 224). The unification behind death fasts as a form of necroresistance ultimately transformed Marxist politics, and a new form of sacrificial marxism emerged (p. 236) from the death fast struggle’s use of theologically inflected rituals tying self-destructive sacrifice (martyrdom) intimately to Marxist militancy.

Such unity notwithstanding, Bargu addresses the internal complexity of the death fast struggle, arguing that necroresistance itself is multifaceted, and (like the biosovereignty it challenges) even paradoxical in its deployment. Drawing from interviews and statements by death fast participants themselves, the author categorizes three strands of self-understanding expressed by participants. First, some participants saw the death fasts as an “act of resistance,” struggling within the terms of democratic rights for human dignity, focused on ending the torture of isolation. Second, some participants interpreted the fasts as an act of war against neoliberal capitalism, viewing isolation in high-security prisons as itself a class-based attack on collective life in ward communes, as well as part of broader neoliberal economic adjustments that promoted social and economic isolation and the privatization of the public. Finally, the most radical interpretation (and the one which drives the book’s central thesis) saw the death fasts as a refusal of biosovereignty and the state’s claims to manage and give meaning to life itself, what Bargu calls a “withdrawal of consent” and an attempt to “think outside the system of power that wrapped itself around individuals” (p. 299).

This radical interpretation—the rejection of the very terms of life and death offered by the state: a claim to a “different kind of sovereignty” rather than a “different sovereign”—is the only path Bargu identifies as offering an “escape” from the current order. She implies that the force of such refusal is also a deferral to a nonsovereign sovereignty to come, but which is made possible because of the space opened up by the death fasts as a counterhegemonic force. Necroresistance thus functions through all three strands and is thus “simultaneously within, against, and beyond the biosovereign assemblage, rehearsing its subversion in multiple ways, albeit without success” (p. 309). Bargu is ethically responsive to her subjects here, refusing to define for them the meaning of the death fast, and she also rightly challenges the reader’s desires for an unambiguous measurement of “success” or some redemption narrative at the close of the struggle. We would be wrong, Bargu implies, to read “without success” as the same thing as “a failure.” Rather, she claims, the death fast struggle may have opened up a possibility not simply for more “humane” prisons, or new forms of Marxism, but for a different world.

If this is a weakness in Bargu’s analysis, it is nevertheless a productive one, stemming from such evaluations of success, failure, and future horizons, forcing us to ask new questions and think differently about political agency under biosovereignty. Yet even as the author moves readers in these directions (particularly in the book’s last chapter and conclusion), I remain unsure how to read the particular tension between more radical forms of refusal of sovereignty and the human rights discourse that was ultimately “successful” in bringing the fasts to a close in 2006. Bargu recounts that when a well-known human rights attorney, Behiç Aşçi, took up the death fast in 2006, his involvement brought renewed popular support to the movement but also dramatically narrowed the movement’s demands to simply the end of cellular isolation in F-type prisons. Aşçi’s fast, in contrast to earlier participants, appealed to a liberal rights-based discourse, contesting isolation as a form of torture. A compromise was ultimately reached, but one that, as Bargu notes, necessarily consolidated the state’s ideological hegemony as the protector of human life and reified it as the legitimate arbiter of such rights. By the author’s own analysis, it seems that this interpretive strand fits uncomfortably (if at all) within necroresistance insofar as it renders the death fast as a primarily instrumental rather than expressive action (p. 330). And while this instrumentalization may have allowed the death fasts to come to an end, Bargu notes that incarceration rates are now at an all-time high in Turkey, and collective confinement continues to be replaced with “solitary or small-group confinement in cells” (p. 331).

It may have been more in keeping with Bargu’s own analysis to reject the terms of success and failure themselves and to develop instead the alternative lexicon of “escape” (a term that appears in Foucault’s own analysis of biopower but which is seldom taken up). ^{Footnote 1} Bargu provocatively gestures at several points in such a direction, analogizing the death fasts to an “exodus” or “prison escape” (p. 308) and a “line of flight” (p. 344). I hear echoes of fugitive slaves, Maroon communities, abolition democracy, and decolonization here and wish that she had carried this thread further, pushing harder on the reformist stance of the liberal rights-based discourse, as it appears that these reforms both practically and theoretically have frustrated such escapes and have foreclosed the very possibilities Bargu sees as having been opened by the death fasts. The limits of such compromises could not be more pressing, I would argue, as we have seen in the retrenchment of isolation and solitary confinement in the United States and elsewhere, even following prison hunger strikes like those which were renewed across California in the summer of 2013.

That I was left wanting more in these directions is a testament to the importance of this book, the skill of its execution, and Bargu’s insistence on fearlessly listening to her subjects. Starve and Immolate is an exemplary work of critical theory, pushing us to ask different and better questions. Moreover, it is an exemplar of the role that critical theory ought to play in political science: self-consciously bridging subfields and showing how theory is at its best when it draws on empirics and when it is animated by marginalized voices, when it takes participants in political struggles seriously as thinkers and actors, and when it broadens our conceptions of political struggles themselves.