About

Banu Bargu is a scholar, teacher, writer, and editor. She is a Professor of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is also affiliated with graduate faculty in Politics and the Center for the Middle East and North Africa. Bargu is a political theorist whose transdisciplinary research draws upon continental philosophy, anthropology, global history, and Middle East studies around questions of the body, resistance practices, exceptional regimes, violence, and carcerality. Her most recent work investigates the phenomenology of labor and the factory. She is the author of two award-winning books: Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics of Radical Refusal (Oxford UP, 2024), and Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons (Columbia UP, 2014). She currently serves as the editor of Political Theory. Additionally, Banu Bargu offers specialized developmental editing, book coaching, writing, and publishing consultations for early- to mid-career academics.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Business
• Geography
• Law and economics
• Political economy
• Law

Selected publications

• Toward a Corporeal Materialism. Response to Reviewers

  2026-05-14

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Contesting the Far Right: A Psychoanalytic and Feminist Critical Theory Approach by Claudia Leeb (review)

  Theory & Event · 2026-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Symbolic Megaprojects: Atatürk’s Mausoleum in Turkey and the Construction of Hegemony

  Middle East Critique · 2025-03-17

  article1st author
  PublisherDOI

• From the Editors

  Political Theory · 2025-11-09

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Parrhesia of the Powerless

  2024-09-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter examines hunger- and thirst-striking and lip-sewing practices through the protests of migrants and asylum seekers in the border zones of the Global North. It examines these practices as enacting the gesture of a double withdrawal—from nutrition and from speech—and explores how the confluence of these forms of disembodiment in a violent and embodied silence can be interpreted as a form of what Michel Foucault calls “parrhesiastic practice.” The chapter traces how disruptions in bodily composure through irruptive gestures and willful counter-conduct offer a mode of corporeal critique, which brings forth an expanded conception of agency that is expressive. The chapter reconstructs the meaning of bodily agency for the oppressed not simply as a form of violent de-subjectivation, but also as a form of counter-subjectivation that reconfigures the relationship between the self and the body, and between the self and others.

  PublisherDOI

• Why Did Bouazizi Kill Himself?

  2024-09-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter interprets “Why Did Banerjee Kill Himself?” by poet Nazım Hikmet to shed light on a parallel question: Why did Mohammed Bouazizi kill himself? It juxtaposes the deaths of the fictional Banerjee and real Bouazizi to reveal the radical distance between them: while both die by their own hand and have been presented as “martyrs” of revolution, Bouazizi’s context is characterized by the absence of the Hegelo-Marxist philosophy of history, which thoroughly permeates Hikmet’s representation of Banerjee. This contrast, marking a shift from an early twentieth-century moment defined by revolutionary mass mobilizations by the oppressed peoples of the “East” to contemporary self-destructive performances emanating from the “Global South,” sets the stage for the challenge of the book: to interpret the meanings and political implications of disembodiment in the absence of a teleology of history or the success of a collective movement that may vindicate it, even if retroactively.

  PublisherDOI

• The Body Anterior

  2024-09-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter explores the role of the body in Marxian materialism. It discusses the crucial contributions of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx in bringing the body into the domain of philosophy, and argues that these contributions were often overshadowed by their emphasis on the commodity form and the subsequent Marxist tradition’s embrace of a more abstract conception of productive forces and relations of production. The chapter offers a reading of Marx’s Capital that places bodily suffering at the core of his critique of capitalism. It argues that the body figures not simply as the object of exploitation, but also the site for the lived experience of suffering to be translated into elementary forms of resistance. This chapter also draws a line that connects Marx with Michel Foucault and Nicos Poulantzas on the shared premise of the irreducible anteriority of the body, its vital powers and capacities, to relations of domination.

  PublisherDOI

• Copyright Page

  2024-09-19

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• From the Maze to Guantánamo

  2024-09-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter interprets Steve McQueen’s critically acclaimed film Hunger in light of its release in a political conjuncture marked by the hunger strikes in Guantánamo Bay Prison. It reads the film’s theoretically suggestive and moving portrait of the struggles in the Maze, centering on the figure of Bobby Sands, in conversation with Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s influential book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, as a defining text of the Frankfurt School and the New Left. It distills their shared critique of Western civilization, which troubles a progressive philosophy of history, and of the sovereignty of the subject as the building block of Western modernity. Interrogating the renunciative predilections and instrumental rationality of the modern subject, the chapter presents how disembodiment emerging in carceral and colonial spaces constitutes a violent form of de-subjectivation. The chapter unpacks the temporalities of sovereignty and sacrifice to delineate the irruption of an insurgent subjectivity.

  PublisherDOI

• Corporeal Critique

  2024-09-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter moves from the metaphysics of the subject to the “underground history” of the body (i.e., the somatic history of suffering delineated by Horkheimer and Adorno as the crucial problem for materialism but left unwritten by them). Engaging a constellation of thinkers who have sought to theorize the body not only as the site of suffering but also as the source of resistance, the chapter develops the concept of “corporeal critique.” This concept denotes a broad category of embodied practices that enact defiance and refusal in response to and beyond the Eurocentric frame of subjectivity. Bringing Marcel Mauss, Helmuth Plessner, and Franz Fanon into conversation, the chapter theorizes bodily agency under conditions of crisis, especially crisis precipitated by the violence of colonial domination. It argues for a conception of expressive agency vested in the body, a conception that cannot be captured by intentional, instrumental accounts of agency.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Immolate Starve

  Secretaria de Estado de Segurança Pública

  16 shared

• Andrea Roca

  Temuco Catholic University

  4 shared

• Massimiliano Tomba

  3 shared

• Kevin Olson

  3 shared

• Chiara Bottici

  University of Edinburgh

  2 shared

• Robyn Marasco

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• David Easton Award (2025)
• Lee Ann Fujii Book Award (2026)
• Honorable Mention for the Sai Felicia Hensel Best Book Award…
• First Book Award (2015)
• Best First Book Award (2015)