Usurping Suicide

The Political Resonances of Individual Deaths

Suman Gupta, Milena Katsarska, Theodoros A. Spyros, Mike Hajimichael

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781786990990
• eBook ISBN: 9781786991010
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Can an individual act of suicide be socially significant, or does it present too many imponderable features? This book examines suicide like no other. Unconcerned with the individual dispositions that lead a person to commit such an act, Usurping Suicide focuses on the reception suicides have produced – their political, social and cultural implications. How does a particular act of suicide enable a collective significance to be attached to it? And what contextual circumstances predispose a politicised public response? From Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation during regime change in Tunisia to Dimitris Christoulas's public shooting at a time of increased political upheaval in Greece, and beyond – this remarkable work examines how the individuality of the act of suicide poses a disturbing symbolic conundrum for the dominant liberal order.

four | Self-immolations in Bulgaria: a quietly accumulating record

Milena Katsarska

An interview

This chapter explores the rather large and sprawling archive of a series of suicides in Bulgaria that were performed or at least regarded as acts of protest. These started on 18 February 2013 with the self-immolation of twenty-six-year-old Trayan Marechkov in the town of Veliko Turnovo, followed soon after by that of thirty-six-year-old Plamen Goranov on 20 February 2013 in front of the municipal building in Varna (he died a few days later). Since January 2013, crowds had been demonstrating against the government in various Bulgarian cities, for reasons which I outline later – these suicides were naturally understood as coeval with those protests. Subsequently, as many as thirty-five further suicides and attempted suicides were reported and associated – albeit to varying degrees and in different ways – with political disaffection (see Table 4.1 at the end of the chapter).

Let me begin my explorations from a tangent. Incidentally, all translations from the Bulgarian in the following are by the author, unless indicated otherwise.

Here is a snippet from an exchange between cultural theorists Kamelia Spasova and Darin Tenev during an interview with journalist Irina Nedeva on Bulgarian National Radio on 11 June 2015:

Spasova: There are swift and slow gestures of revolt; of course, the swift ones are effective, but they cut short the opportunity for dialogue …

Tenev: … and the opportunity for reflection.

Spasova: … so self-immolation is such a swift, visible gesture, we can think of it as a metaphor.

Tenev: A very radical gesture which is a refusal, really, that’s it. There’s no conversation there …

The occasion was the launch of a special issue of the journal Piron (Nail), entitled “Julia Kristeva: Form and Meaning of Revolt”. This exchange took place towards the end of the segment and might misleadingly suggest that the special issue offered scholarly analyses of self-immolations as a form of revolt in Bulgaria and elsewhere. In fact, the contents of the issue revolved around Kristeva’s lecture, “New Forms of Revolt”, delivered at the Sofia Literary Theory seminar at Sofia University (26 September 2014). A Bulgarian translation of Chapter 1 from her La révolte intime (1997, English translation 2002) and some of her subsequent work were published in the journal, and various reflections and discussions by local literary and cultural theorists – such as Spasova and Tenev – were included. The questions addressed, as stated in the announcement of the journal, were about the conceptual apparatus of Kristeva’s oeuvre, and they were debated at a fitting level of abstraction:

What is the relation between the revolution in poetic language and the intimate revolt that Kristeva’s psychoanalytical perspective calls for? To what extent is a psychoanalytical reworking of the problems of youth applicable as a way of responding to grave social cataclysms? Who, from what position, where and when, has the right to pronounce on revolt and judge what true revolt is? In what way should we transform the very form in which revolt and the act of revolting are being thought of in post-socialist countries, and in the case of Bulgaria? Should we compare different types of social revolt even when both their form and their matter differ so radically? What is the role of language, of different codes – religious, social, enforced by the media and conspiracy theories – when resurrecting old and engendering new forms of revolt? (Spasova and Tenev 2015)

The level of abstraction that these questions and their answers occupied rarely allowed consideration of concrete instances or particular enactments of revolt – although revolt had been in the air recently, especially in Bulgaria throughout 2013 and well into 2014. There was hardly any public forum or everyday space where revolt wasn’t being contemplated; the air had buzzed with talk of revolt.

Of course, the scholarly discussions in the journal’s special issue were imbued with a sense of the currency of the issues in question, though in a more global than local vein. It was not fortuitous that these questions were posed at that juncture, and that a critical fervour to engage with Kristeva’s work was discovered accordingly. It is nevertheless significant that this critical fervour was more comfortable with sticking to the abstract at the expense of the concrete, with global generalities rather than local realities. In fact, even that snippet of an exchange about a particular and particularly disturbing form of protest in Bulgaria – one that was very much on the public mind – was due to an emphatic push. After ten minutes or so of on-air conversation on the journal’s contents in abstract terms, the interviewer Nedeva posed the following questions, with a comment:

Do you have analyses of the self-immolating people in this issue? Because, to my surprise, when I rewound to what’s left from the history of 1990, there was a warning about a self-immolation then too. Also by a man named Plamen, Plamen Stanchev … […] He warns that he will set himself on fire if the communist star is not taken down from the Party Building [Communist Party headquarters] […] When we talk about these different forms of revolt, can we enumerate them … occupation, sit-in, civic disobedience. Where is the end point? Is there an ultimate form? (Nedeva 2015)

Spasova and Tenev’s responses effectively answe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the authors
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• One. On suicide archives and political resonances
• Two. The irresistible rise and fall of posthumous Bouazizi
• Three. Austerity annuls the individual: Dimitris Christoulas and the Greek financial crisis
• Four. Self-immolations in Bulgaria: a quietly accumulating record
• Five. Self-effacing suicides and troubled talk
• Index