Mourning Mitsein: Failures of Radical Life

Critical Horizons, 2016

Vulnerability is a concept with fleeting contours as much as it is an idea with assured academic success; its topicality in Europe and the United States, however, refers to different histories. In the United States, what we see is the expression of a polyform reflection on torturable, "mutilatable" and killable bodies, especially after September 11 and the ensuing bellicosity. In this way, Judith Butler points to the irreducible dimensions of human sociality, violability and affectability, on which she founds an ethics of non-violence and imagines a new form of community. The centrality that she confers to the possibility of bodily destruction is such that she reflects the unequal distribution of vulnerability through a contrast between lives that are worth mourning and those that are not. From a wholly other perspective, one developed on the basis of ethnographic surveys on mass violence and collective rapes in India after the Partition, 1 Veena Das takes up the task of thinking through the way in which forms of life are also forms of violent death, in which a form of death is born in the matrix of everyday life. Reciprocally, she considers how the distribution of violence, torture and massacres can haunt and shape everyday relations.

How political violence shapes life into a form of existence and what happens after it ends? The effects of political violence are unfathomable. Collectively disturbing, these brutal social and political conditions turn sites of lived and shared experiences into sites where the everyday of trying to make sense of what happened predominates. As do the questions of why did it happen, and how are we going to find space for pain and suffering that was left behind in the continuity of days to come. It takes a long time to appreciate, at the level of interpersonal and intersubjective relations, the undying trust of those who share their testimony of their life histories of violence and allow them to take forms of ethnographic accounts. These personal histories, full of intimate detail, spring from exactly the same sources within each individual where the ability to trust itself had been deliberately frayed. Are we living in a world inflicted by an epidemic of lovelessness, one may ask? (hooks, 1999: 7) A world where people's inherent vulnerabilities are lost in a way that pushes people to do what is ostensibly good for bad unconscious reasons, and inflict harm for the good ones? (Rechtman, 2021: 43) Where trauma spreads contagiously-without our being able to trace it consciously-violence takes on the form of a language we are forced to become fluent in as we collectively narrate its origins, escalations, and aftermath to one another, whether or not we ourselves been directly subjected to it. This essay, then, will be an attempt to follow Veena Das' approach to interrogating everyday life as "the place where the ordinary and the extraordinary fade into each other" (2020: 174) and, in so doing, testing the boundaries of ethnographic accounts that try to make sense of an experience of political violence, as well as the way they stretch and pull at the meaning of the language the brute forces utilise. I suggest that violence, even before it is expressed and enacted in the form of extended periods of

The Australian Journal of Anthropology 24 (2013) 223-235

Kalina Yordanova is a psychotherapist. She holds a MA degree in Clinical Psychology from Sofia University " St. Climent Ohridski " , a MA degree in Central and East-European Studies from UCL and a PhD in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology from UCL. In 2016, she joined Doctors without Borders (MSF). Kalina Yordanova works with victims of torture, domestic violence and trafficking in people. We live in times when the pain from the WWII is still with us. Yet, it seems we have not learnt our lessons and – despite our claims to be civilized creatures-we allow wars to rage. Why does this happen? Civilization and war are incompatible. Yet, one is not born " civilized " but learns to be such. Much earlier than that though, which is to say earlier than we learn how to live with other people according to some shared principles and laws, we possess one basic characteristic: ambivalence. Ambivalence is the tendency of every human being to love and hate the same object. This is why we hurt those we love. Ambivalence cannot be uprooted but we can become aware of it in order to control it. Yet, we refrain from such awareness because it means insights into our own cruelty and desire to use and abuse the others. The fact that the pain from the WWII is still with us does not necessarily mean learning from experience. Learning from experience means feeling responsible for the consequences of armed conflict and the condition of our planet as an interconnected system. This means an insight into the fact that everyone is responsible for both the reparation and the damaging of the world around. One explicit example of the absence of critical feedback about the way Western governments support the wars and even facilitate terrorism is their condemnation of the Islamic State along with large deals of high-tech weaponry between Great Britain and Saudi Arabia, for example. The lack of understanding of our own contribution to what is threatening us is visible also when a 9-year-old African boy is risking his life during a night hunt of endangered species and his prey reaches the table of an exquisite French restaurant for 100 EUR per meal. This state of affairs has a cost and everyone will have to pay a share. Sadly, once our reality testing is disrupted, it is difficult to restore it, because it is very convenient to project the evil onto an alleged enemy, thus adopting the feeling of having the right to act. It is true that those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it, but it is also true that facing our own responsibility for events in history means painful insights and the need to relinquish a comfortable life we have taken for granted. It seems that for contemporary people, it is almost impossible to give up on something desired, to postpone gratification and not to immediately act in order to meet their needs. How can people, societies and the world as a whole be healed in the aftermath of war? Is there some universal recipe or guidelines at least? Access to ambivalence, I think, is crucial for the healing process. From the perspective of participants in a global system of relationships, everyone must be aware of their own position in this system; 1 Bulgarian version available at

Contemporary Political Theory, 2017

This is an interesting book that makes many thought-provoking claims related to theories of biopolitics and the role of affect in the constitution of the social. Drawing on ethnographic methods, the author explores a series of case studies of what are dubbed the 'afterlife' of catastrophic mass violence, as in war and various other forms of communal and ethnic conflict. She finds that the particular form of pathos that emerges after such violence creates a system of 'emotional relationalities' that are productive of the forms of life (or bios) that live on in the afterlife of those incidents (p. 20). Pathos is defined as collective 'witnessing and alleviating' of suffering (p. 20). The concept is used to define a system of affective relations that emerge in these afterlives, structuring the kinds of subjectivities and identities that develop among the survivors. The theoretical resources invoked to establish this framework are many, but centrally the author is indebted to Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Gilles Deleuze. Foucault's notion of a dispositif is particularly important as in the final pages of the book the author reveals that what has been at stake in each chapter is an instance of the 'event-afterlife' paradigm/dispositif. For Foucault, a dispositif defines an ensemble of heterogeneous elements, such as institutions, urban designs, laws, regulatory decisions, political statements, moral and ethical ideas, that are related to each other through a certain system of relations defined by discourses of knowledge/ power. The unique feature of the event-afterlife dispositif that this book puts forward is the idea that the system of relations that connect the elements in a dispositif may not only relate to knowledge/power, but also to collective affect.

Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology, 2019

This article examines the lasting phenomenological consequences of inhabiting “spaces” of exception by rethinking the operation of sovereign violence therein. Taking as its point of departure Giorgio Agamben’s suggestion that the ‘state of exception’ is the ‘rule’ of modern politics, I argue that arbitrary sovereign violence has taken the place of the ‘sovereign decision’ of Carl Schmitt’s original theory. However, recognizing that it is neither enough simply to articulate the institutional grid of intelligibility of the state of exception nor expose the logics of sovereignty that make possible arbitrary violence, it draws on phenomenology, affect theory, and trauma studies to reorient our focus from the sovereign to the subject upon whom sovereign power is executed. Ultimately it proposes a new understanding of modern subjecthood as one of existential insecurity generated by the ‘new age of anxiety’ permeating social and political life today.

Government and Opposition, 2007

This paper examines the process by which enemies are created in the midst of conflict. Rather than accepting the premise that the parties to a conflict exist a priori and are set against one another once the 'proper' conditions exist, the paper argues that group-selves and enemy-others are created in the wake of a collective identity crisis. Under conditions of threat, collectivities may engage in a process best described by Julia Kristeva as abjection, whereby a group will cast off a familiar yet foreign part of the self and project into this severed part those unwanted or undesirable traits associated with vulnerability. This process of splitting is both trauma and response to trauma; as such the process is impossible to describe as it occurs. A proxy narrative, created to make sense of the process to the anxious and threatened group-self, presents a narrative of the conflict between the group-self and the enemy-other that does not acknowledge the previous relationship between the two. It is only through processes similar to adaptive mourning that a collectivity can come to question the content of a proxy narrative and re-evaluate the relationship with the abject-other. Through mourning, a new relationship can be forged and a new narrative of that relationship and its evolution through conflict can be created. Through mourning new futures become available, just as the past is re-evaluated and likewise created anew.