TY  - CHAP
A1  - Avramopoulou, Eirini
T1  - Claims of existence between biopolitics and thanatopolitics
T2  - De/constituting wholes : towards partiality without parts / edited by Manuele Gragnolati and Christoph F.E. Holzhey ; Cultural inquiry ; vol. 11
N2  - Eirini Avramopoulou asks the following questions in her essay 'Claims of Existence between Biopolitics and Thanatopolitics': How is the desire for existence implicated in the experience of identity as wound? Under which conditions does the demand for desire appear to confront the repetition of trauma? Or else, what echoes in the last breath of someone dying? In Istanbul, a city built upon neoliberal structures of governance and cosmopolitan aesthetics, and defined by severe policing and local histories of ethnic and gender violence, these questions reflect upon a particular historical and political period through a personal story. The essay focuses on a transgender activist named Ali, his fight against transphobia, his illness and death, while reflecting on the 2013 public uprising in Istanbul following attempts by the Turkish government to demolish Gezi park. By exploring the notion of spectral survival as a political praxis, it argues that this notion, rather than acceding to claims over a fuller subjectivity, mobilizes an aporia of de-subjectivation. De-constituting the 'I' here attests to an attempt neither to reconfigure its parts nor to merely perceive life as dismantled, but rather to speak of a loss that no familiar language can yet describe. The spectrality of this 'I' troubles and repoliticizes, then, the very notion of haunting, as it lays claims to its own differing and deferral from the constitution of a proper name, or of a 'self'-acclaimed existence, especially when the fight for existence here is also a performative assertion of loss and death connected to processes of resisting sexist, neoliberal, heteronormative, and phallogocentric representations of possession and belonging.
KW  - Biopolitics
KW  - Transgender men
KW  - Gezi movement, Turkey 2013
KW  - Queer activism
KW  - LGBT people
KW  - Death
KW  - Memory <remembrance>
KW  - Trauma
KW  - Displacement
KW  - Gezi-Park (Istanbul)
KW  - Protestbewegung
KW  - Geschichte 2013
KW  - Transgender
KW  - Transsexueller
KW  - LGBT
KW  - Aktivismus
KW  - Tod
KW  - Trauma
Y1  - 2020
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/55256
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-552560
UR  - https://www.ici-berlin.org/oa/ci-11/avramopoulou_claims-of-existence.pdf
SN  - 978-3-85132-854-7
SN  - 2627-731X
SP  - 67
EP  - 83
PB  - Turia + Kant
CY  - Wien ; Berlin
ER  -