I thank Andrew Dilts for his generous review. His reading perceptively captures the challenge of my book: to think together the abstract and the concrete. I take his thoughtful critique as an opportunity to address how this task plays out at various levels of argumentation, as well as an invitation to reflect on how our projects intersect.

My work situates the death fast movement in a dialectic between biosovereignty and necroresistance through a political ethnography that conveys the complexity of self-destructive protest. Noting the tensions among the different interpretative strands that I develop relying on the participants of such protest, Dilts first interrogates how these cohere together. The book argues that the death fast movement was an ensemble of contradictory tendencies whose unity was forged in the spatio-political experience of “communes” based in prison wards and through the practice of struggle itself. However, this unity remained internally contentious due to the coalition structure of the movement, waning participation, and the strategic mobilization of different strands in response to unfolding events.

Does the contradictory complexity of the struggle not stand in tension, Dilts asks next, with the book’s overarching interpretation? His pivotal question in fact astutely discerns the critical distance between the conglomerate of self-representations of the struggle’s participants and my intervention. While my reading is informed by the different tendencies in the movement, it is purposefully not the equivalent of their amalgamation, nor is it same as the tendency that ultimately prevailed at the movement’s end. Instead, the book stresses what is ultimately novel and distinct about necropolitical struggle in general, locating its specificity in its refusal of biosovereign domination. It is true that this reading has greater affinities with one of the existing interpretative strands, but it does not adopt its perspective to critique the other strands. Its overarching aim, rather, is to explore the import and limitations of the movement as a whole in relation to the power regime it sets out to challenge.

Finally, Dilts raises the provocative meta-theoretical question of whether it would not be more apt to abandon the narrative of success and failure while evaluating necroresistance, especially if this form annuls, as I contend, the instrumental rationality of traditional protest. I think this question effectively reveals how our conceptual arsenal often lags behind our encounter with the new. I agree with Dilts’s suggestion that we need to develop an “alternative lexicon” that would provide political and ethical criteria for assessing this repertoire in keeping with its noninstrumental, expressive character and as immanent to the form of struggle rather than as a function of its goals or effects.

In closing, I would like to note the interesting complementarity between our projects, which I have come to discover through this exchange. Geographically, culturally, and politically, there is ostensibly little that connects racialized felon disenfranchisement in the United States with the hunger strikes of political prisoners in Turkey. However, underpinning our different starting points and distinctive modes of argumentation is a problematic in common: the increasingly global reality of the carceral state, the securitization of prisons, and their deleterious impact on democracy and struggles for political emancipation. Our work is guided by a deeply shared understanding of what it means to be doing critical theory today—one that takes its cue from the margins, where the oppressive structures of our world become more poignantly visible, in order to pursue a tradition of theoretical critique, but also one that attempts to think in empirically grounded ways, experimenting with hybrid forms of research that blur disciplinary boundaries while maintaining fidelity to an emancipatory politics.