Survival Politics and Sacrificial Transmediation: Liu Xiaobo and Signature Event Context

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article interrogates the medial politics of 2010 Nobel Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo through a re-situation of Marc Abélès’s concept of “survival politics.” It understands Liu’s energetic self-representation in multiple media as an attempt to produce a usable Derridean signature, connections between texts and contexts that allow for cohesion inside endangered communities, as well as methods by which to contest dominant narratives. By reading Liu’s graduate thesis, “Aesthetics and Human Freedom,” alongside Derrida’s essay “Signature Event Context,” this article theorizes that minoritarian discourses that face erasure often choose vigorous transmedial production, self-sacrificially constraining their own freedoms in order to work toward the improbable appearance of signed texts. The article finishes by raising the possibility that the politics of authenticity and hypervisibility in contemporary African American intellectual culture are also interpretable through the lens of self-sacrificial hypermediation.