Burn Baby Burn!

What is it that some ‘unspeakable’ and ‘unimaginable’ explanations of so-called suicide bombings, if any, expose and usurp at the borders of our epistemic horizons? Which ‘political’ concerns are at stake? And what kind of ‘politics’ is put under threat? With an assumption that wrestling with many and varied philosophies of life and death may undo the universalist power-rhetoric of ‘suicide terror’, the aim of this lecture is to elaborate on how contemporary politics of life-and-death protrude our worlds of knowledge when an exercise of epistemic disobedience takes place. If “there is a clear political risk in trying to explain suicide bombings” (Ghassan Hage 2003), I openly undertake such a risk in hope it may inject some fresh ink into the existent body of narratives, either scholarly or otherwise, about one of the most controversial phenomena at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Marko Stamenkovic (1977) is an art historian born and raised in the south of Serbia. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Ghent in Belgium with the thesis entitled Suicide Cultures: Theories and Practices of Radical Withdrawal. He carried out his doctoral research between 2011 and 2014 under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Tom Claes (Center for Ethics & Value Inquiry) as the recipient of BASILEUS Scholarship funded by the European Commission. Over the last decade, he has been working primarily in the field of contemporary visual arts as a curator, critic, and lecturer focused on the intersection of visual thinking with social theories, political philosophies, and cultural practices of the oppressed. Since July 2015 he has been a post-doctoral fellow of the Archie Mafeje Research Institute (UNISA – University of South Africa, Pretoria) engaged with the subject of thanatopolitical philosophy as a decolonial epistemic option. https://ugent.academia.edu/MarkoStamenkovic