The Afformative Violence of Revolutionary Suicide

This paper develops a paradigm of anagrammatical liturgics as a mode of revolutionary suicide. It begins by introducing liturgy through Giorgio Agamben’s profanation of its theological economy, rendering it an inoperative praxis that puts its transfiguring potentialities to a new use. It then constellates this with Christina Sharpe’s notion of anagrammatical Blackness to theorize the way Black thought induces the collapse of one’s Human coordinates. Before elaborating this through David Marriott’s treatment of revolutionary suicide, the paper excavates his adoption of Werner Hamacher’s notion of afformative violence, yielding an im-performative praxis that destitutes the historical continuum and withdraws the singular into the multiple as the pure means of justice.