Ghosts of Violence, the (Dead) Body in IR

Abstract

The Politics of Haunting and Memory in International Relations. By Auchter Jessica. London: Routledge, 2014. 190 pp., $119.63 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-415-72039-7). The Politics of Haunting and Memory evocatively promises to explore the unknowable moment between life and death and the affective role of memory and memorialization. Drawing on Derrida's conceptualization, Jessica Auchter defines hauntology as the blurring of the border between life and death and the living intersection between biopolitics and thanatopolitics and explores how these hauntologies interact with statecraft, providing the international relations bent to the research. She writes: Hauntology allows us to look for ghosts in places other than the marginalized interstices of international politics and acknowledges their hauntings in life, in death, and in the very ontological construction of meaning of life and death, and the power at play that is implicated in drawing these lines. (p. 25) Auchter's study fleshes out this theory, drawing primarily on Jenny Edkins' (2003) work on memory and trauma, and Brent Steele's (2013) work on the scars of violence. In many ways, Auchter's book marries the two, presenting hauntings as the memories and emotions that are evoked in confrontations with the presence of the unseeable. Auchter focuses on affective power to dislodge ontologies and to remake statecraft outside of the dominant government-sanctioned narratives in a way that demands reconciliation with memory of trauma. As such, the book is a timely contribution to work on affect in international relations (IR). Auchter presents a unique focus on human death, asking how human bodies are memorialized, made sacred, and represented when they cease to be living bodies and become corpses, which are both object and subject, human and non-human. Auchter's attention to corpses, dead bodies, and ungrievable bodies presents an original focus on work that looks to the body in IR, deriving from work by Judith Butler (⇓, ⇓), Giorgio Agamben (⇓), Henry Giroux (⇓), and anthropologist Katherine Verdery (⇓), and situated more firmly …