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Abstract:
This essay provides a reading of Steve McQueen's critically acclaimed movie Hunger, which tells the story of the hunger strike of Bobby Sands in light of contemporary hunger strikes around the world and especially in Guantánamo (ongoing at the time of writing). The central concern of the essay is to read Hunger together with Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, showing how both works problematize the sacrificial subjectivity of enlightenment, its instrumental rationality, and sovereign temporality, while advancing a devastating critique of Western civilization. I argue that Hunger situates the high-security prison within the self-destructive tendency of enlightenment and depicts how self-sacrificial resistance emerges as a response to sovereign domination. Interpreting the figure of Bobby Sands as the reversal of Odysseus in the encounter with the Sirens, I explore how insurgent sacrifice interrupts the dialectic of enlightenment and points to a new configuration of subjectivity and time.
Notes
1 Thatcher.
2 Hunger, directed by Steve McQueen.
3 McQueen, “Video Interview.”
4 Savage.
5 On the adoption of force-feeding not as an ad hoc but planned tactic of the Guantánamo base clinic under the guise of a discourse on the protection of life, see Anderson 1729–36.
6 See, for example, al Hasan Moqbel.
7 World Medical Association.
8 Agamben.
9 Bargu.
10 For an in-depth account, see Feldman esp. 147–217.
11 McNamee.
12 Ibid.
13 El-Khairy 191.
14 However, the movie was chided for its political sympathies. See, for example, O'Toole; Tookey.
15 McQueen, “Director's Statement” 2.
16 However, Hunger generated mixed responses: while celebrated for its ability to provide a truthful portrait of the dirty protest and the hunger strike, the movie was also criticized for glossing over the broader historical context of the Troubles. Cf. O'Hagan; Brown 73.
17 Horkheimer and Adorno 55.
18 For a critique of Horkheimer and Adorno's reading of enlightenment in Homer exclusively as the attempt to master nature, which leads them to overlook the spiritual dimension, see Ruderman 138–61.
19 Horkheimer and Adorno 17.
20 Ibid. 22.
21 Ibid. 12.
22 Habermas 18. On Habermas's rift with Horkheimer and Adorno, see Hohendahl.
23 Habermas 13, 22. For a counterargument to Habermas claiming that the fragmentary structure of the Dialectic of Enlightenment resists the charge of “totalizing critique,” see Rocco 81–97.
24 Habermas 23.
25 Benhabib 1442.
26 Habermas 22.
27 Honneth captures this aspect of Horkheimer and Adorno's critique, which he calls “world-disclosing” and defends as a form warranted by a particularly “pathological” type of social disorder. See Honneth 116–27.
28 In this line, for example, Brunkhorst identifies an ambivalence in the text, which oscillates between utopian critique of domination and the rationality that is in line with it, and a fundamentalist critique, based on a metaphysical philosophy of history that presents the trajectory of enlightenment as one of decay. See Brunkhorst 133–40.
29 Horkheimer and Adorno xiii.
30 Bernstein 197.
31 Benhabib 1443.
32 Hullot-Kentor 23–44.
33 Horkheimer and Adorno 32.
34 For an insightful account on the role of art for Adorno, see Wellmer, “On the Dialectic of Modernism” 337–62.
35 Horkheimer and Adorno 43.
36 Ibid. 45–46.
37 On Horkheimer and Adorno's interpretation of Homer in relation to its cultural significance for the German philhellenic tradition, see Fleming 107–28.
38 Buck-Morss 61.
39 Horkheimer and Adorno xv.
40 On the allegorical dimension of their reading, see Owens. For the link between Horkheimer and Adorno's allegorical reading and that of Walter Benjamin in his The Origin of German Tragic Drama, see van Reijen.
41 Rocco 77.
42 Horkheimer and Adorno 10.
43 Ibid. 50.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid. 55.
46 Ibid. 51.
47 Much has been written on the sexual identity of the Sirens, its implications for the constitution of gender relations and the patriarchal order, which I will have to sidestep in this discussion. See, for example, Comay; Salecl; Hewitt; Love.
48 Horkheimer and Adorno 33.
49 Ibid. 32.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid. 31.
52 Ibid. 59.
53 Ibid. 58; my emphasis.
54 Ibid. 76.
55 Ibid. 54–55.
56 For an interpretation that locates the emergence of self-reflexive aesthetic contemplation in Odysseus’ encounter with the Sirens, see Wellmer, “Death of the Sirens” 5–19.
57 Hullot-Kentor 43.
58 According to Melvin, the sonic motifs of the movie, especially the rhythmic pulse (i.e., the banging of dustbins that opens the movie, the batons of the prison guards, the water in the sink, and the soft breathing of the hunger striker near his end), drive the narrative forward. See Melvin 26, 28, 29.
59 Feldman 165.
60 Adorno 281.
