Necropolitics and Necropolice: Death, Immortality, and Art-Activism in Russia

Abstract

This article explores the affirmative dimension of necropolitics by looking at the articulation of the dead as an aesthetic and political subject in the work of the art-activist collective “the party of the dead.” Since 2017, their performances have exposed and challenged an aesthetic order based on the erasure of mortality in Russia. I draw on Rancière’s distinction between “politics” and “the police” to foreground the sensory aspect of that order and call it “necropolice.” In the logic of necropolice, death is insensible, immortality reigns—and therefore life is expendable. Focusing on the visual style, political statements, and ritualistic aspects of “the party’s” artistic practice, the article shows that in trying to speak as the dead, the activists fail to speak as truly dead. That failure is productive—it affirms death as the limit of experience. I conceptualize that affirmation as necropolitical by complementing Rancière’s notion of “politics” with Georges Bataille’s theory of sovereignty, which underlies Mbembe’s formulation of necropower. If sovereignty consists in the transgression of limits, then in the aesthetic order, where death is insensible and so omnipresent, it is the suspense of the illusion of immortality that constitutes the essence of necropolitics.