Can the Transsexual Speak?

Abstract

Abstract: Can the Transsexual speak? I investigate this question through the case of Ella Nik Bayan who self-immolated in Berlin (Germany) on September 14, 2021. I first argue that this self-immolation is unreadable within the current frameworks of Western democracies. The case, however, paradigmatically demonstrates that emancipation within the confines of neoliberal capitalism can only be read under the pretense of a toxic protection. I then move on to claim that Ella Nik Bayan’s self-immolation calls for a completely different political order from the one we currently inhabit, which, with Namita Goswami, I call “ heterogeneous .” I argue that heterogeneous politics is a politics of radical hospitality that opposes institutions of private property in particular. Unlearning private property means to pre-enact a world without the kind of racist, transmisogynist, and antisemitic violence that killed Ella Nik Bayan. Anti-capitalist hospitality sets out to create the social and cultural resources that enable a world beyond (such) violence.