The Erotic of Self-harm(s): A Catastrophic Body in Daniil Kharms and Yakov Druskin

Abstract

This article addresses the biopolitics of writing and the construction of the writing body as catastrophic in the notebooks of Daniil Kharms (1905–1942) and the essays by his friend philosopher Yakov Druskin (1902–1980) from the late 1920s and 1930s. I aim to show how their personal writings work as an auto-aggressive text, an act of textual self-harm and a form of freedom in a situation where resistance is felt to be unavailable. The close reading focuses on the two tendencies in which the biological comes to be understood as political: the articulation of a social/political difference as physiological, and the centrality of sexuality to a project of self-knowledge that diary-writing offers. Narrating social exclusion in the language of ailments, this writing appears almost literally biopolitical: biologising political difference and inviting a political reading of the origins of the illness. By tracing these instances, the article shows how the failing body becomes a language in which the sense of alienation and fear can be expressed, and spiritual insights experienced.