Necropolitics and Necropolice: Death, Immortality, and Art-Activism in Russia

Abstract

On February 22, 2022, a small group of activists dressed in dark, baggy winter clothes, covering their faces with skull masks, gathered at Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery in Saint Petersburg, the largest official memorial to the victims of the 1941–1944 blockade of the city (the party of the dead 2022a). After the silent walk across the cemetery, the participants stopped in front of a former floral, then a café, then a museum, then an abandoned site indefinitely shut down. Posing on camera for the documentation and social media dissemination of the protest, with their cold red hands, they held pieces of carton inscribed with concise political slogans:

Despite being located just outside the cemetery, far from the more spectacular mass graves and major monuments, the abandoned site worked well as the background to convey the activists’ message. The building is marked with the words of the Soviet poet Robert Rozhdestvensky: “It isn’t the dead—who need this! It is the living—who need that!”¹ Rozhdestvensky’s poem Requiem (1962) reflects on the relationship between the life of a soldier who perished in World War II and the world where that life is no more. It expresses the gap between time as it is lived and retrospective heroization, between the demand to remember the dead and their incapacity to witness the life unfolding as they lie in the ground. “It isn’t the dead—who need this!..” is the main motif of the poem, which, despite its single appearance in the text, underlines the key message: The dead are dead. They could have wished to be remembered when they were alive and could have wanted life to continue after their death, but those desiring, wishful bodies have perished. No work of remembering can legitimately claim to do justice toward them. It is the living who need memory.

Reiterating Rozhdestvensky’s words on the eve of the war that Russia’s authorities would justify with references to World War II and the need to defeat “Nazis” once more, the activists of “the party of the dead (partiya myortvykh)”² used the refrain of remembrance well-known to Russian audience to protest against militarism and its alliance with memory politics. Yet, they did not do that as the living. Posing as the corpses who stood up from the graves out of the need to express the needlessness of warfare, the activists criticized the appropriation of the deceased voices—all while continuing to speak for them.

Although it may appear as lacking reflexivity, the performance exemplifies the tension that “the party of the dead” has worked with for years. “An ethico-political project disguised as an artistic one” (Evstropov 2020), it was founded in 2017 as an offspring of the Saint-Petersburg-based art collective {motherland} ({rodina}), led by Maksim Evstropov and Daria Apakhonchich. “The party” has been associated with the tradition of Russian actionism—“an art of corporeal provocation” (Hanukai 2023, 114) known for its spectacular, provocative, often violent action in public spaces aimed at confrontation with the state. More specifically, it builds on the late Soviet-early Russian art movement of necrorealism, which expressed the collapse of Marxist-Leninist ideology through visual representation of death and decay, as well as violent experiments on one’s own body (Yurchak 2008). However, “the party” diverges from necrorealism and actionism more generally in at least two ways. First, it has been identified with a recent stream of projects that refuse the violent and masculine aesthetic of an actionist spectacle and instead pursue processual forms of activist art and dialogical ways of interacting with an audience without refusing a provocative style of engagement (Hanukai 2023, 126). Second, while still following the strategy of transforming a “naked,” apolitical (non)identity into a subject of resistance to the state, “the party” abandons the cynical ethos and the desire for existence outside of politics that characterized necrorealism and constituted late-Soviet “everyday aesthetic of living” more broadly (Yurchak 2005, 250).³ As the title “the party of the dead” hints, the collective does not consider the dead to be outside of politics but treats them as a distinct political subject.

In this article, I look at how “the party of the dead” articulates the dead as a political and “aesthetic subject” (Shapiro 2013, 11). I argue that “the party” challenges the operation of necropower in Russia primarily by producing a specific experience through the performance of a failure to speak as truly dead. Unlike fictional figures such as zombies (Lauro 2017) and ghosts (Derrida 2006; Auchter 2014) that figure prominently in western cultural imagination, the dead, as they are seen by “the party,” are opposed to the idea of life in or after death, to both immortality and the possibility of living in death as if it were another “land” where a person moves after dying. The dead are dead—this simple assertion is found in every slogan, gesture, and performance that “the party” makes—and it is because they are irreducible to anyone other than the dead, that their speech is impossible. Trying to speak as the dead but only able to play the dead and speculate what their impossible speech might sound like, the activists of “the party” performatively fail in their attempt. Through this failure, they mobilize an experience of an impossibility, an experience of the limit, or “the outside,” as Foucault (1998b) would put it—an experience of death as that, which puts an end to all experience.

The significance of this practice is highlighted when we consider that power does not release its grip over the dead even though death is supposed to put an end to power, as the growing field of International Relations literature that studies the visual politics of dead bodies and management of the dead shows (Campbell 2004; Gregory 2016; Heath-Kelly 2017; Shah 2017; Squire 2017; Alt 2019; Berents 2019; Papailias 2019; Duncombe 2020; Akin and Dufalla 2021; Auchter 2021). Memory and trauma studies further show that the transformation of the dead into symbolic immortal figures is a widespread practice of inciting nationalism and mobilizing trauma to legitimize repressive practices of security and warfare (Edkins 2003; Zehfuss 2003; Mälksoo 2015). The ethical imperative seems to preserve one’s personhood even when the life processes to which it is attached have collapsed. This is especially visible in cases of violence inflicted upon the dead bodies, where the horror lies “in the erasure of their individuality” (Gregory 2016, 955). However, even when memorialization challenges the closure of trauma, for instance, by foregrounding a “unique and irreplaceable person” (Edkins 2011, 9), the dead speak as someone other than the dead. On the other hand, literature on the “aesthetics of necropolitics” (Lushetich 2018) foregrounds the sensory dimension of violence and the logic used to justify it (Lushetich 2018; Alphin and Debrix 2020; Deprez 2023). As these studies show, the neutralization of sensitivity toward death—for example, through the use of more abstract language (Cohn 1987) or the framing of nonviolent death as merely the consequence of personal choices disconnected from social structures (Berlant 2007)—is an important prerequisite for the proliferation of murder. This article contributes to these strands of literature by showing how the artistic performance foregrounding the generalized, nameless dead may challenge the discursive capture of death.

I outline the politics of the “party’s” performances through two major movements. First, drawing on the literature mentioned above and Jacques Rancière’s conceptualization of the relationship between politics and frames of perception, I show the kind of sensorial order and political logic that “the party of the dead” problematizes. It is not life that “the party” posits as its political adversary but immortality, the state in which death is no more. That condition is, of course, only an illusion, the result of death’s disappearance from the horizon. The illusion has powerful effects, though—without the limit of death, in the world of immortality, life loses its value, resulting on the one hand in the proliferation of actual death and on the other, in the reign of apathy and hopelessness. The second aspect is especially important for “the party,” which exposes the connection between the erasure of death and the disappearance of the future. Taking Rancière’s concept of the “police,” which means the everyday aesthetic order that excludes the possibility of the outside (Rancière 2010, 36–7), I call the regime in which the limit of death is insensible “necropolice.”⁴

Continuing with Rancière, I reconceptualize “necropolitics” to mean a practice of bringing death back into “the distribution of the sensible” (Rancière 2010, 36) as its outside, as the limit of the sensible. I further build the notion of affirmative necropolitics by revisiting Georges Bataille’s philosophy of sovereignty and death, one of the conceptual foundations of Mbembe’s (2003) essay on necropolitics and inspirations for the emergence of “the party of the dead.”⁵ For Bataille, sovereignty famously consists in the transgression of limits, ultimately manifested in the exercise of the right to kill (Bataille 1991, 220–1). However, like Rancière’s “politics,” Bataille’s “sovereignty” is situated. It is rooted in the concept of “miraculous,” which is a moment that is impossible but real (Bataille 1991, 204–11). In the aesthetic regime of immortality, where death is nonexistent and so mass murder is normal, trying to speak as the dead only to show an impossibility of such a speech, “the party of the dead” articulates death as “a negative analogue of a miracle” (Bataille 1991, 207), an event that is impossible to endure, to embody, to experience—and yet real. To say that death is everywhere, that we will all die, is neither to fall into fatalism and succumb to despair nor to propagate killing but to embrace the process called life that exists only because it can end, that lasts as long as it cannot last forever, that is full of experience because there is a limit after which experience is no more.

By conceptualizing the politics of “the party’s” failure to speak as the dead, this paper contributes to studies of contemporary Russian protest art (Jonson 2015; Jonson and Erofeev 2018; Morozov, Reshetnikov, and Gaufman 2024). It shows the significance of necroaesthetics in redistributing the sensible as a part of what Lena Jonson calls “art of engagement” (Jonson 2015, 172–4). The paper further expands and deepens a few, mostly passing studies of “the party of the dead” (Yatsyk 2019; Hanukai 2020; Kurilla 2020, 161; Makarychev and Yatsyk 2020, 58–9; Agitatsia 2022). Methodologically, my analysis of “the party’s” performances follows and contributes to that of the research group Agitatsia (2022), who look at the spatial, temporal, bodily, and linguistic aspects of the project. My focus, however, is more limited: I concentrate on the construction of “the dead” as a distinct political subject and its juxtaposition with the immortal subject of Russian politics. Although such an analytical frame is inevitably reductive, unable to grasp the full complexity of a long-term, multifaceted art project such as “the party of the dead,” it allows me to show the precise political significance of staging “death” in today’s Russia while pointing at the broader resonance of such performances with the sovereign power to erase traces of death.

Lastly, throughout my analysis, I approach the dead in the performances and protests of “the party” as an “aesthetic subject,” defined by Michael Shapiro as “those who, through artistic genres, articulate and mobilize thinking” (2013, 11). While “the party of the dead” makes powerful critical statements on the presence and invisibility of death in Russian politics, it complements mimetic representation and critical diagnosis with creative experimentation and imaginative speculation commonly found in performance art.⁶ The participants play the dead, imagining what kind of politics they might offer. To approach the dead in its artistic practice as aesthetic subjects means that “their movements and dispositions are less significant in terms of what is revealed about their inner lives than what they tell us about the world to which they belong” (Shapiro 2013, 11). It is not the veracity of what is staged that matters but its capacity to provoke and incite imagination, to introduce “dissensus” into the sensible (Rancière 2010, 37–8).

The article proceeds along the following structure. First, I outline the connection between the politics of aesthetics and necropolitics to develop the term “necropolice.” Second, I show how “the party of the dead” interprets the work of necropolice in contemporary Russia and challenges it by articulating the experience of death as the limit of experience. In particular, I focus on three recurring elements of “the party’s” artistic practice: the visual play of the dead, the central element of which is a skull mask; parodic use of language revealing the presence of death in the state discourse; and ritualistic burials, which stage death as the singular moment enabling and ending the process of dying. Finally, I read the work of “the party” through Bataille’s theory of sovereignty to outline the notion of affirmative necropolitics.

Death and the Police Order

In her analysis of the disaster management apparatuses in the United States and the United Kingdom, Charlotte Heath-Kelly (2017)argues that sovereignty is grounded in the promise of immortality and that negation of death is at the heart of statehood. Whereas in political systems in which sovereignty is based on the transcendental religious authority, death is mastered through the promise of life after death; secular sovereignty “lacks the means to promise a heaven and to alleviate our anxieties about dying” (Heath-Kelly 2017, 2). Security is an apparatus that masks individual vulnerability, thereby establishing an accord between an individual body and the immortal collective body of the nation (Heath-Kelly 2017, 4). Importantly, the exorcism of death is practiced not only on the level of prevention and response to the threats but also retrospectively, in removing traces of violence through, for example, restoration and renovation of damaged spaces and posttraumatic therapy. Such a “retrospective security” is necessary for the state because the leftovers of violence serve as reminders of security’s failure: “a threat continues to emerge from the past—necessitating recovery actions performed upon memory” (Heath-Kelly 2017, 59). In this sense, prevention and memory politics are two kinds of sovereignty’s performance in which death is actively pushed outside the ‘normal’ life of the nation.

While Heath-Kelly distinguishes her theoretical argument from the common bio- and necropolitical approaches, which, as she argues, “begin with the state as actor, rather than the state as responsive [to mortality]” (Heath-Kelly 2017, 13), her position develops rather than challenges the argument of Achille Mbembe’s (2003) famous essay on the contemporary operation of the sovereign right to kill. Although he indeed devotes most of the text to outlining the coincidence of various apparatuses through which extermination of life becomes possible, particularly under colonial occupation, Mbembe’s concept of “necropower” is based on a negative ontological coupling of sovereignty and death where the latter is yet to be reduced to killing. According to Mbembe, before the mass production of the lying and walking dead becomes the everyday practice of sovereignty, the principle of death has to be negated (Mbembe 2003, 15–6). Reading Hegel and Bataille, he shows that the need to negate death arises from one primary attribute of sovereignty: its transgression of limits. Death is the ultimate limit, the very force of negativity only through confrontation with which a positive order can be founded (Hegel), and in transgressing which we find ourselves in the state of nothingness, the sovereign world of no need (Bataille). This first mastery of death, “the illusory rejection of a death that has already occurred” (Mbembe 2003, 35), translates into the further failure to get rid of it. The sovereign, as the immortal being immune to death, becomes immune to the death of others. The illusion of mastery over death is what makes the exercise of the sovereign right to kill so pervasive.⁷

Jessica Auchter (2021)shows how the power over death and the dead operates by analyzing the “obscenity norm,” which is a set of expectations regarding the display of dead bodies and our reaction to them. Relying on the taboo of exposing and looking at the dead, this norm directs the viewer’s response to the image, which transgresses it by evoking “a moral sense of oughtness…that the viewer ought to be horrified by the dead body image” (Auchter 2021, 33). Auchter argues that by looking at this norm’s operation, we can understand how the political communities are constructed: The “inconsistency in application of the obscenity norm, or what counts as too obscene to be viewed, can shed light on the political functioning of obscenity as a mechanism of image regulation (Auchter 2021, 4).

Auchter focuses on the spectacular instances of a corpse’s exposure—for example, photographs of dead refugees and terrorists. Besides being instances of securitization, whereby both the visibility of the corpse and the conditions of its appearance are considered exceptional events calling for exceptional response, these images are first of all images, and not the actual bodies exposed to everyone’s gaze. However, what such instances of the taboo’s transgression reveal is precisely “that dead bodies do not belong in the public sphere, and something extraordinary must be the case for them to be on display and rendered visible” (Auchter 2021, 19). In other words, the absence of death is built into the very organization of “normal” public space and the visibility it enables. After all, those of us privileged to live in countries, cities, districts, and buildings qualified with a relative lack of everyday violence do not pass by the decomposing bodies in our daily routine, even though people die all the time. It is precisely the lack of corpses lying on the streets that allows for labels like “peace” and “security” to be attached to some spaces, and for others to qualify as “death-worlds” (Mbembe 2003, 40). Even in cemeteries, human remains are firmly hidden behind the multilayered border of a coffin, soil, and a monument, demarcating the decomposing flesh and bones from the realm of its seeming opposite—lively growth. In this sense, “the obscenity norm” is constantly performed on the everyday level, in the production of spaces where the dead are hidden (mortuaries, cemeteries), and where their exposure is considered a part of everyday cartography (museums and battlefronts).

Furthermore, unequal visibility of the dead bodies attests to the differential operation of power to which they are subjected. As Vicki Squire (2017, 523–4) notes in her analysis of the treatment the dead bodies of the migrants are subjected to in the United States, “those who remain anonymous are often marked out in death on the basis of burial practices that separate the worthy from the unworthy.” These bodies are buried under the generic name, or remain completely anonymous, thus being differentiated from those whose identification is unnecessary and who can afford a proper funeral (Squire 2017, 523). Some corpses, like that of Lenin in Moscow, have become museum exhibits exposed to everyone’s gazing eye inside a modern pyramid at the heart of the contemporary imperial capital, while yet others are reduced to pieces of junk left lying in places no one can or is willing to find them. Some do not die even in death, are made live while decomposing, and become immortal while others die in oblivion—whether at the hospital, on the street, or the battlefield, buried in memorial mass graves, or never remembered by anyone. Jenny Edkins (2011, 6) calls the latter “the missing missing,” highlighting the limits to our sensory and epistemic capacity—countless persons do not become absent, do not “go missing” because they were never present in society in the first place.

Jacques Rancière, whose thought informs Edkins’ analysis of the politics of the missing people, helps us further understand the role of the sensible in the relationship between the state and mortality and to begin thinking about what a challenge to such an order might involve. As he writes, “distribution of the sensible” is “a generally implicit law that defines the forms of partaking by first defining the modes of perception in which they are inscribed” (Rancière 2010, 36). What we normally call “politics” is an order based on everything having a defined part, a recognizable category in the community, with nothing remaining outside of it (Rancière 2010). Rancière calls this order “the police.” The police order inscribes the boundary between what can be seen and what is left beyond our sensory capacities—and therefore is expendable. By contrast, politics is an action that inscribes absence, the “part of those without part” into the police order (Rancière 2010).

As this section has shown, death and the dead do not stand well with the police. Death marks not only the end of life but also the end of subjectivation. It is beyond experience, “the inexperience” (Blanchot 1995, 67), the ultimate limit of experience. Therefore, confronted with the limit of death, the police logic, which knows no concept of the “limit,” cannot incorporate it as such but can only erase or transform it into something other than death. In the order of necropolice, death is no more—and precisely because of it, dead bodies proliferate, only to be hidden, abandoned, or denied their right to die.

The question, then, is: What kind of politics might be possible in the necropolice order? Rancière (2010, 37) makes it clear that “in re-figuring space, that is in what is to be done, to be seen and to be named in it” politics puts forth a subject. That subject is articulated as a part of the community but not as yet another category. It appears as “a part of those without part, identified with the whole of the community” (Rancière 2010, 36). Politics expresses the impossibility of its subject’s belonging to this world and makes visible another world where what it says counts as speech. It is in this sense that “the essence of politics is dissensus…the demonstration (manifestation) of a gap in the sensible itself” (Rancière 2010, 38). However, how can that which is defined by its incapacity to speak, that which does not simply belong to another world but is the end of any world, be the subject of politics? The challenge here consists in making death and the dead sensible while refraining from transforming them into someone other than the dead, in making insensibility sensible. In the rest of this paper, I will show how “the party of the dead” addresses that challenge. First, however, I will outline the stakes of the necropolice logic in more detail by showing how “the party of the dead” exposes its work in contemporary Russia and seeks to challenge it.

“The Party of the Dead” and Necropolice in Contemporary Russia

The most comprehensive explanation of “the party of the dead” can be found in Maksim Evstropov’s (2020) article published in Moscow Art Journal. Evstropov writes that the basic problem that “the party” addresses is “the omnipresent capitalization of the dead” in contemporary Russian society and beyond (Evstropov 2020). They find this “capitalization,” which means a simultaneous production of the dead, appropriation of their (no longer existent) voices, and their exploitation as sources of authority, in four main fields. First, as Evstropov (2020) writes, images and voices of the dead are used as an authority in memory politics, “which, in the situation of total necronostalgy, often substitutes any politics whatsoever.”⁸ Second, “the dead are also an electoral resource,” by which Evstropov means the existence of “dead souls”—both as the persons existing only on paper and as an imagined “people” supporting the regime (Evstropov 2020). Third, “the party” perceives Russian politics in general as a politics of death, which transforms the living into the mute, lacking political agency, politically “dead.” Finally, the production of political death further leads to the actual production of corpses—a theme that has been present in “the party” since its inception but has become central since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In short, “the party” sees death as the foundation of Russian politics, used by the authorities as the main resource, which, to be used, has to be constantly produced.

Contrary to Mbembe’s (2003) conceptualization of necropower as an exceptional made everyday, for “the party of the dead” necropolice is the everyday (devoid of romantic connotations). It is a life without the exceptional, spectacular, “miraculous” to use Bataille’s term (1991, 204–11), a social regime at the end of history where the idea of “the end” has been removed and the promise of stability reigns (Malinova 2021, 2022). In this world, death is nonexistent, and the abstract, ideal political subject is neither alive nor dead but immortal—or always ready to stand up from the grave, as the title of the major pro-war poetry collection, Resurrected in the Third World War (Voskresshiye na Tretiey mirovoi), tells us. Here, death has been mastered and so can be transformed into the reigning principle, but the true death, “the death without truth” has disappeared (Blanchot 1993, 35–6). Importantly, as “the party’s” joint critique of memory politics and depoliticization suggests, this erasure concerns both spatial and temporal dimensions, everyday sensibility, and the subjective limit of experience, “mine” and others’ death conceived inseparably. In the necropolice order, everything has been interiorized, and the possibility of the unthinkable, the insensible, and the impossible, has been excluded. It is the realm where there is no more politics, including politics of death and even death of politics. Negation of the death’s possibility, however, simultaneously means devaluation of life. The production of the immortals coincides with the proliferation of dead bodies, swiftly removed—or sometimes invisible, even if lying right in front of our eyes.

The goals of “the party” are outlined in another important text—the charter, forever frozen in the “draft” version because “we (currently) see no possibility of its ratification” (the party of the dead 2019). The charter puts forward three main goals of “the party,” both as an art project and a political movement. The first goal is negative—to expose the foundational role of death in the contemporary Russian regime, or in their own words, “to criticize attempts of getting such [preferential] access [to the dead] and appropriating the voices of the dead” (the party of the dead 2019). The second goal is more affirmative—to “make the dead speak directly, on their own behalf and with no mediation” (the party of the dead 2019). This goal is articulated as impossible to achieve yet necessary, since “there can be no social or political justice without this direct speech of the dead, for the dead are the absolute and the absolutely excluded majority” (the party of the dead 2019). Lastly, “the party” has “the task of reminding the dead that they are dead, because many of them forget it or don’t even know about it (and, speaking in general, it is not only the dead who are dead)” (the party of the dead 2019).

Although the three goals posited by “the party” are inseparable and constitute the three dimensions—critical, speculative, and pedagogical—of its performances, it is the second one that I argue is most important to understand the political significance of their practice. The acknowledgment of the impossibility and the necessity of the direct speech of the dead is an example of how “the party” embraces contradiction—and the performance of that contradiction introduces “dissensus” into the necropolice. Below I show how it takes place through three major artistic practices: visual play of the dead, whose central element is a skull mask; parodic use of language revealing the presence of death in the state discourse and everyday life; and ritualistic performances, which stage death as the singular moment enabling and ending the process of dying.

The Face of the Immortal and the Skull of the Dead

“The Immortal Regiment,” the rise of which Maksim Evstropov witnessed in its birth city Tomsk, was an important agonistic inspiration for “the party.” The cornerstone of the movement, which emerged in 2012, is an annual countrywide procession of people carrying portrait photographs of their relatives who died in the Great Patriotic War (as World War II is called in Russia) across the streets of the cities. Aiming to preserve “the personal memory about the generation of the Great Patriotic War in every family” (The Immortal Regiment n.d., para. 1), the founders of the movement conceived of a photograph as a private artifact carrying a share of a person ordinarily forgotten in the official heroic narrative of the war. However, the initiative turned out to be so popular that in a few years, the state, intolerant to millions marching across the country without control, appropriated it by establishing alternative organizations having the same name and receiving financial, administrative, and marketing support from local and federal authorities (Gabowitsch 2018, 308–9). The initial anti-statist sentiment of the Regiment morphed into a performance of “the people” that included the authorities based on their capacity and desire to march along with millions of others—and enabled the exclusion of anyone problematizing this unity from the national “we” (Fedor 2017). Countless faces of the dead “immortals” ended up being overshadowed by the face of the immortal sovereign heading the widely broadcast procession in Moscow. Evstropov describes this moment this way:

At some point, all of this started to feel creepy. It seemed that people were bringing corpses onto the streets but they did not understand that they were walking with the corpses. Or maybe they did not entirely understand it, or maybe not the way I understand it. But it all seemed like a creepy action, on the part of both the organizers and the participants…In general, it’s a cool idea to do something with the dead, some kind of political co-participation with the dead. But…maybe it is precisely because of the incomprehension of that co-participation’s creepiness that the dead started to be used simply as a resource.⁹

This qualification contrasts with “vitality” that Julie Fedor identifies as one of the key themes in the pro-Kremlin discourse on the Regiment, especially in connection with the involvement of children in commemorations (2017, 331–4). For “the party” there is nothing lively about the transformation of the living and the dead into a procession of the risen immortals, and it is only an attempt to freeze both, to not let the dead die, and appropriate their voices in the illusion of collective speech. It is against this fantasy of immortality that “the party” tries to imagine the dead as a distinct political subject and the (im)possibility of their speech.

Besides the title of the project, the major element of the juxtaposition between the dead and the immortals is a substitution of a portrait photograph, the central element of the Immortal Regiment, for the image of a skull. The skull inverts and problematizes the memorial photograph’s intention to prolong and preserve the life that is no more by producing a collective, anonymous subject that lacks any distinct, recognizable features and is irreducible to anyone other than the dead. It expresses neither mourning nor the desire for immortality but the inevitability of the end, not the continuation of life in memory but its eventual passage into oblivion.

Yet, mostly used as a mask, the image of a skull also reminds us that the activists of “the party” only look like the dead and that they can only speak as the dead because they are still alive. There is a clear purpose for wearing it: to protect the participants. Especially since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Russian authorities applied social isolation regulations arbitrarily as a means of censoring public dissent, skull masks became indispensable for avoiding the identification of activists by the police through social media surveillance.¹⁰ The dead cannot speak, yet it is only by becoming dead that one can. The skull is supposed to be a symbol of the identity’s disappearance with death. Yet, it is still a mask, which, in the attempt to imitate the dead, only reveals that the activists of “the party” are fully alive, still able to die (or before that, be imprisoned). In this sense, the skull mask is one of the key elements of the party’s discourse on death and the contributor to the performative failure to speak as the dead, an instance of “dismantling the face” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) that ends up being yet another face. It shows that even our best attempts to make the dead speak, with all attentiveness to the specificity of their condition, will only expose death as the limit of speech.

This playful self-suspense, whereby a skull mask both contributes to the articulation of the dead as a distinct speaking subject and reveals its absence, resonates with the regular “necrozoopickets.” Here, the singularity of the dead and the desire to transform them into someone else is rejected too. A necrozoopicket consists of placing a small carton with a political slogan next to the corpse of a small animal found on the street—usually a bird (e.g., the party of the dead 2020b). The corpses of animals used in necrozoopickets count as trash in need of being removed—or, if not immediately visible, not even known about. Arguably, this lack of care and attachment is only reiterated in the “pickets,” as “the party” members use the dead to say whatever they want. Yet, the explicitness of such exploitation and the exposure of its inevitability achieved through the proximity between the corpse and a simple political message is precisely what makes the practice powerful. If in regular performances, the activists of the party hide and reveal their aliveness through a skull mask, in necrozoopickets it is the incapacity of the dead to speak that is revealed in the attempt to hide it. The corpses seem to speak with the text, but the appearance of hand-written slogans next to the disfigured flesh only reminds us that they cannot speak, that someone placed the pieces of carton next to them, that it is someone speaking for them. In becoming the layer of meaning that falls apart as soon as it is put forward (or side-by-side), the text performs a function similar to a skull mask. “The party” members can take off the mask and return to the realm of the living dead; the fragile cardboard accompanying dead pigeons can be taken away, revealing the silent presence of the corpse as such. Together, the failure of the skull to mask the fact that it is a mask and the failure of the carton posters to convince us that it is a corpse that speaks show that speech of the dead as dead is impossible—and that the incessant attempts to perform it will only keep revealing this impossibility.

The Speech of the Dead

If the dead could speak, impossible as it is, what would they have to say? The dead, as they are seen by “the party,” have no interest in killing. This is so because we all will join their ranks sooner or later—“death is the most common thing we have” (the party of the dead 2019). Furthermore, as Evstropov (2020) writes, “all the living are in a roughly equal position of not knowing in front of death.” This position opens up space for relativism—anyone can speak for the dead, and so anything can be said on their behalf. At the same time, it is this equality of not knowing that death communicates with the end of speech—“and hence, the dead are more likely to hate power than support yet another bloodsucker” (Evstropov 2020).

Both violence and authority, enabled by the sovereign promise of immortality, turn out to be major themes of “the party’s” protests and performances. In line with a common art-activist strategy of “subversive affirmation” (Arns and Sasse 2006), “the party’s” slogans often parody popular militarist expressions, showing that statements about saving lives carry death, expanding even though, because it is actively negated. For example, the infamous “We can repeat! (Mozhem povtorit’),” a cry used in World War II commemorations in Russia, becomes “we can’t repeat (ne mozhem povtorit’)” (the arty of the dead 2018). Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, “the party” has parodied multiple slogans that emerged to support the war, inverting or complementing them to expose their role in enabling the propagation of the dead. For instance, drawing on reports of the Russian army abandoning its dead soldiers on the battlefield or disposing of their corpses in mobile crematoria, the participants in the “z200” performance transformed slogans such as “We don’t abandon our people” (Svoikh ne brosayem) into “We don’t abandon our people (only their corpses) (Svoikh ne brosayem (tol’ko ikh trupy)” and “Russians don’t bury Russians (Russkiye russkikh ne khoronyat)” (the party of the dead 2022d).

This kind of inversion finds its utmost expression in hopelessness and despair that dominate the aesthetics of “the party” and in the diagnostic style of their slogans. Both the dead and the immortals share the lack of the future—the former because with death, it has already passed, the latter because with the absence of death, it will never come. Therefore, hope, as “the emotional modality that permits us to access futurity” (Muñoz 2009, 98), is foreign to both. The present is the time when “despair is total: it’s a sort of inescapable background of any action, the back thought of any other thought” (Evstropov 2024). Having no future and hope, the dead cannot offer a utopian alternative to it. The difference between death and immortality is that the former implies a life in such a state where there is no death, no future, and nothing sensible. In such a situation, “The possibility of overcoming the despair lies rather in despair itself: one must despair to the end (although perhaps there is no end)” (Evstropov 2024).

The “alas-parade (uvy-parad),” first organized by “the party’s” predecessor {motherland} in 2016 and then repeated a year after, is the best example of such an aesthetics and discourse on despair. “A social media flash mob” (Evstropov 2016a), the “parade” consisted of activists holding depressive slogans, many of which parodied popular affirmative expressions, in front of the gray, dull background, including train stations, abandoned buildings and cemeteries.¹¹ As Evstropov explains, “What we did with the alas-parade is that we put the common mood of despondency, which resides as if outside of politics, into the political sphere; we’ve turned it into a political statement” (Evstropov 2016a). Expressing hopelessness, the statements within “the alas-parade” articulated the atmosphere common in everyday life, where no future is in sight, and everything possible has already happened, yet an aesthetics that has no place in either the official state discourse or much activist work, which affirms the possibility and necessity of political struggle. “Alas-parades” articulated an existential crisis, a lack of potential for affirmative “yes!” within everyday life—a political death—before actual death, mirroring an everyday stasis back onto those living it, thereby trying to disturb the normality of a state that Evstropov (2016a) calls “learned insensitivity” and opening it up to potential transformation.

The refusal of “the party” to provide any alternative to the present and its intensely depressive critique is not only a strategy of challenging the state by inverting and hyperbolizing its rhetorics but also a reflexive operation of disavowing oneself as a speaking subject. Reinstalling “the dead” as the subject in control of language, seemingly elevated above discourse, boasting a firm set of moral coordinates and a precise political program, would only mean reaffirming authority as a political principle. Instead, “the party” stays true to what it tries to say: The dead are dead. Absent as a subject, the dead know no ‘I.’ Their world is “a neutral space in which no existence can take root” (Foucault 1998b, 166), the void where any subject is constantly undone, where “we can’t repeat” because there is no national “we,” because “we” the dead, are not, cannot, because death knows no repeat. The speech of the party, much like the skull mask, is an affirmation of this negation, of emptiness, of the limit. Its content shows only the impossibility of the dead having a voice.

Ritualistic Funerals and the Unburied Dead

The representation of everyday apathy is not the final goal of “the party’s” performances, though. Hopelessness in immortality and death differs—there is no end, hope, and change in the former, but the latter is the end to hope and change, their temporal limit, and as such, enables their existence. This juxtaposition between eternal stasis and movement toward the conclusion is at the heart of “the party’s” magical, ritualistic performances. When the idea of the “party” was only emerging, Evstropov (2016b) engaged the audience of his public lecture in a short exercise. Having asked the participants to build a horizontal pyramid of paper skulls representing the “pyramids of skulls” that contemporary states are built on and having requested that they write down their names, not necessarily real, on paper, Evstropov started reading those names. The idea was to use the performativity of naming in a singular act of calling the person the last time in the manner of a ritualistic burial. The participants joined the not-yet-existent party—but only potentially, for naming alone does not suffice for a person to die. The performance expressed the inevitability of death together with its impossibility. Insisting that “the past must pass,” and using pseudo-commemoration for this purpose, Evstropov articulated the inevitable, now-accepted future death as an event that enables that passage, attracting the present duration of life as dying.

Such ritualistic burials are common in “the party’s” practice. In early February 2022, they held a “necropsychoanalytic session” during which the guests could lie in the coffin, remember the past day, and tell the analyst—Evstropov, joined by an assistant—“how and why they’ve found themselves in the coffin” (the party of the dead 2022b). In late October 2020, between Halloween and the day of political repressions in Russia, they performed a public reading of the names of the repressed—the reading was polyphonic, though, and all the participants were reading their lists at the same time, representing both an impossibility of “returning the names” of everyone and the necessity of doing so while they were in the “black hole” that official memory politics is (the party of the dead 2020a). In November 2022, when some activists of “the party” fled to Georgia, they organized a “self-burial” (in Russian, samomogilizatsiia, an allusion to “self-mobilization,” samomobilizatsiia, by which a voluntary decision to kill and die in the war during the general mobilization is meant; the party of the dead 2022c). Participants had to dig graves for themselves and then be buried, while others, waiting for their turn, were watching and mourning.

While these performances play with the concept of memory, they are very different from ritualized commemorations of nation-states by being singular events that have the death of the dead rather than the return of their souls in memory as the goal. They carry the share of rituals’ “magic lure and affect” (Aalberts et al. 2020, 241) but reject ritualized repetition and formality. Against the state’s desire for immortality, where death is absent and time is frozen, the necrorituals stage death as the moment that activates time, a punctual event attracting movement toward its accomplishment. Sitting on the fringes of the performance, as an event that takes only a tiny fraction of the ritual’s duration, or as something that has already happened, is just about to happen after the end of the ritual, death becomes a productive limit, which frees the center stage for the process, the experience of dying (see Blanchot 1995, 47–8). Coextensive with living, that experience is nevertheless unavailable to the immortals, who are destined to live in a never-ending ritual, and yet, also not live.

The burials performed by “the party” have an additional ethical dimension. They powerfully resonate not only with the body of Lenin, for a hundred years exposed as a museum exhibit on Red Square in the state of eternal life (Tumarkin 1983), but also with the treatment of the dead by the Russian army at times of war.¹² Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, reports of corpses abandoned on the battlefield, unclaimed and unburied, abound (Meduza 2022; Rainsford 2022; Koshiw and Tondo 2023) and stood in stark contrast to the common motto used by the state propaganda machine to justify the invasion: “We don’t abandon our people.” While the shifting front line explains the difficulty of collecting the bodies at war, the abandoned corpses fit into the overall logic of secrecy that has dominated the official coverage of the war by Russia’s authorities, with its consistent denials of preparations for the invasion prior to its beginning, refusal to call it the war instead of a “special military operation,” the refusal of the Ministry of Defense to update the data on the number of the deceased soon after the start of the invasion, and the diminished number of funerals’ footage on the media landscape (Eremeeva 2023, 24–32). That logic of secrecy, applied to Russian soldiers in Ukraine since 2014, transforms the dead into “stories” that are never officially verified—and hence nonexistent (Timofeeva 2018, 4–5).

“The party of the dead” insists that the common call not to forget is a violent denial of the right to die in the form of not letting the dead rest in peace and mobilizing them for war, as well as dismissing countless dead who do not fall into the socially useful categories. “The party’s” ethical response is simple—the dead must not be resurrected. They must be buried. Ultimately, though, it is not the dead who need this. To bury the dead, to let them die, is to accentuate the value of life as that which is inevitably finite, possible only when it can end—and when this ending is recognized, respected, and valued.

The Miracle of Death and the Affirmative Necropolitics

So far, I have shown that in its protests and performances “the party of the dead” foregrounds death as the finitude of being and the dead as a political subject that is impossible precisely because there is no “after” death in which their existence could be grounded. Pursuing that impossibility regardless, “the party” produces the experience of the limit, the experience of insensibility. This kind of failure speaks to multiple studies of failure’s productive and disruptive power in relation to social norms, often invoked in performance studies and queer studies. However, it is irreducible to playful disobedience to the norms establishing both the value and the meaning of “success,” which constitutes a significant part of the work of theorists such as Jack Halberstam (2011) and Jose Muñoz (2009). “Queer failure” is the failure to conform to social norms; it “rejects normative ideas of value” (Muñoz 2009, 173). Its subject is “unintelligible” and “does not fit neatly into the normative framework through which it is intended to be understood” (Charrett 2020, 139).

While “the party of the dead” similarly articulates the subject that is unrecognizable by the regime of necropolice, the kind of failure they pursue is more profound. The “party’s” failure to speak as the dead in the attempt to do this is what Brian Massumi (2014, 7) calls an “effective paradox”—the coming together of two different logics in a single act. The play of the dead brings together the world where there are no limits, anything can happen, and so nothing is surprising, even the speaking corpse, and the world where death constitutes the limit, and therefore a possibility of the impossible. Bringing these two logics together—one at the level of content and another at the level of style—“the party” expresses both the speech of the dead and its negation. It is a double failure to bring into being the unrecognizable subject, and hence the performance of the dead as an unintelligible and impossible subject, a troubling nonbeing. This double failure succeeds in showing death as the limit of being, knowledge, and sensibility. It is the expression of this limit and the experience of it, the performance of impossibility rather than a possibility of another, yet unrecognized kind of speech, that constitutes the core of necropolitics under and against the necropolice.

Georges Bataille, whose thought informs Mbembe’s (2003) conceptualization of necropower, offers a nuanced concept of sovereignty intertwined with death but detached from statehood that helps further understand the politics of “the party’s” failure. While no doubt connected with the capacity to kill (an act that, sovereignty being a transgression of limits, a violation of a taboo, cannot be reduced and is even opposed to a right to kill; Bataille 1991, 220–2) and with the life beyond needs (Bataille 1991, 198), Bataille’s “sovereignty” is first and foremost grounded in the concept of “miraculous.” He summarizes the meaning of the concept in a concise phrase, which simultaneously clarifies it and confers conceptual weight upon the word “miracle”: “impossible and yet there it is” (Bataille 1991, 206). It is through a peculiar temporality that a miracle is the moment of sovereignty. As “the moment when anticipation dissolves into NOTHING” (Bataille 1991, 207), when time collapses, the miraculous occurrence brings about, however temporarily, the world of no needs. If an object becomes useful only in having a relation to a future end, it is the cut of that relation, the cut that suspends the vision of what is to come, that brings about sovereignty.

Impossible yet real, a miracle need not be a positive one: the miracle of a person’s survival despite certain death is as unexpected and impossible yet real as the unanticipated, sudden death is. Hence, Bataille writes of death as “the negative analogue of miracle” (Bataille 1991, 207). Sovereignty is strangely dubious—it is found both in the contemplation of a rising sun and in the sorrow over the deceased, both in the time of blissful forgetfulness and in the traumatic shrinking of duration to a single moment (Bataille 1991, 199–200). The precise emotional circumstances of the event matter little—instead, “what matters most from this point of view is that an unanticipated, unhoped-for aspect, considered impossible, reveals itself” (Bataille 1991, 210). The question of limits that sovereignty transgresses opens up in a different light when we consider these lines. Whereas Mbembe (as well as Agamben (1998, 112–3) in his reading of Bataille) reduces a limit to a taboo, for Bataille prohibition is only a specific case of social limits dividing the world into that of utility (or practice) and its outside. More broadly, sovereignty consists in the transgression of limits separating our understanding of possible and impossible—the limits that Rancière’s police draws and politics suspends.

Toward the end of The Schema of Sovereignty, Bataille (1991, 222–3) offers the final reflections on the connection between sovereignty and death by examining the event of the sovereign’s death. Here sovereignty is no longer connected with an exercise of power and rather becomes the deathly dissolution of authority, including that of the sovereign. An immortal being that transgresses death even in dying—through its connection with the divine or the people—the sovereign falls prey to death in the moment of himself being subjected to the practices that he instrumentalized and appropriated for himself. What a revolution does is bring death back into the social order by revealing the mortality of the king—through both the physical act of destroying the king’s body and the destruction of the divine source of authority. However, that act is at the same time “the greatest affirmation of sovereignty” (Bataille 1991, 223) because in a world where death is no longer a limit, it is the limit of immortality, “the limit of the Limitless” (Foucault 1998a, 71) that sovereignty transgresses. The death of the king becomes a miraculous event. It is in the disappearance of a sovereign where sovereignty is found.

Reading Bataille together with Rancière, the question of the relationship between politics and death opens up anew. Truly, as Mbembe writes, for Bataille, sovereignty consists in the transgression of limits. However, the world without limits, where none exist, is not a positive order. It can only appear as a non-world, that is, as nothing, absence, the void, or the outside. Hence, sovereignty, as the transgression of limits, is the moment when nothing is enacted. Yet simultaneously here power is suspended, and the new order, “the police” with its rules distributing political participation, is yet to be formed. Sovereignty appears at the end of the sovereign. It is in this sense that Bataille’s concept of sovereignty resonates with Rancière’s notion of politics—both point toward a situated, momentary clash between the two worlds: one where everyone is assigned a part and there is no outside and another where the outside makes itself visible as the outside. If necropolice is based on the negation of death, of nothingness, on the illusion of immortality, then necropolitics, in an affirmative sense, as the politics of death and the dead rather than killing, is “an affirmation that affirms nothing” (Foucault 1998a, emphasis mine). It brings death back into the sensible as death—as an event that, no matter how painful, sorrowful, or impossible it may be, is still real.

Translators between the realm outside the limit of experience and the realm where there’s nothing left to experience, not even dying, “the party of the dead” utter the simplest and yet the most impossible truth with the words “THE DEAD DON’T NEED WAR.” Their speech dissipates the moment it emerges, situated in the coincidence between death as the realm of no needs and of the need to make that needlessness sensible, between the dead as absent beings and the necessity of their silence to be audible for life to have value. By speaking as the dead and failing to speak as the truly dead, “the party” affirms the possibility of finitude, after which there is no speech, there is nothing, there is no “after.” In a world where death has been erased and so is omnipresent, where no end is in sight and hence apocalypse is imminent and that’s ok, where history is over and so things will get worse and worse, true death is akin to a miracle, however painful unendurable it is. Its articulation, an operation of affirmative necropolitics, turns out to be a powerful political statement valuing life and making space for hope—as a possibility of the future as such rather than a belief in a concrete project. The dead might not need this. But perhaps the living do.

Conclusion

In this article, I have shown how death and the dead can be mobilized as critical aesthetic resources to challenge the social order built on the desire to transgress mortality. This order, which I call necropolice, is as much macro-political as it is micro-political. On the micro-political level, it excludes death from the distribution of the sensible as the limit of sensibility. Necropolice is the regime of hopelessness and despair. On the macro-political level, the result of this exclusion is the everyday production of objectified, invisible corpses—necropolitics in Mbembe’s (2003) original conceptualization.

The ideal politics challenging such a regime would be articulating the impossible by the impossible subject—the return of death by the dead. “The party of the dead” takes up the task of making such an impossible politics palpable. Their rituals and protests, besides exposing the reliance of Putin’s Russia on the production of dead bodies, are examples of struggling with performing the dead while realizing the incompleteness of such a performance—and further turning that incompleteness into a critical aesthetic technique of expressing death as the limit of experience. Through the non-identarian and macabre visual style, the use of parodic, satiric, and self-reflexively disavowing language, and rituals reenacting a burial, the “party” weakens the boundary between the living and the dead, instead articulating their continuity and belonging to the same community of mortals, juxtaposed to the necropolice’s immortal subject. Trying to speak as the dead and failing to speak as truly dead, “the party” produces the experience of death as the limit of experience, the moment that one cannot truly experience and yet is still real. It does not make the insensible sensible, that is, incorporate it into the everyday regime of visibility as another positive category, but produces “the insensible” as the outside of that regime within it, as a non-world, the end of the world, that is only experienced in the failure to experience it. It is the production of such an experience that, in the order of necropolice constitutes the essence of necropolitics as a politics of death and the dead.

While situated in the context of late Putin’s Russia and indebted to the local art movements such as late Soviet necrorealism, “the party of the dead” positions itself as having no borders and welcomes anyone to join it if they agree with the basic principles of freedom, equality, and mortality. By doing so, they remind us that the logic of necropolice is not exclusive to any particular state. Negation of death is a more general principle upon which state sovereignty is built—and it is in the suspense of that principle where another kind of sovereignty is found.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Erzsébet Strausz, Xymena Kurowska, Hyaesin Yoon, Nicholas Gribble, and Freya Cumberlidge for their thoughtful reading of and feedback on the earlier drafts of this article. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their thorough reading of this paper and the incredibly helpful comments that significantly improved it.

Funder Information

Vladimir Ogula is a recipient of a DOC Fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Footnotes

References