LAUSR

Border zones and detention centers are often characterized as spaces that concretize a permanent “state of exception” where resistance is deemed unlikely. This article explores hunger striking and lip-sewing practices of migrants and refugees as a largely neglected form of protest that takes a silent exception from the exception. Focusing on their gesture of a double withdrawal – from nutrition and from speech –, I make the case for an expanded conception of agency that is non-instrumental and expressive. Pursuing an alethurgic analysis, I situate the violent and embodied silence of these protests in Foucault’s problematic of parrhesiastic practice. I examine these practices as processes of subjectivation that unmake and remake the self, call into being parrhesiastic counter-publics, and courageously critique the present.