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the 2011 revolution in tunisia has elicited many comments, but perhaps not enough consideration has been given to the meaning of the event that sparked it: the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi on December 17, 2010, in the small town of Sidi Bouzid (where I happened to have worked some years ago). The 24-year-old street vendor, who financially supported his mother, uncle, and siblings with his meager earnings, committed suicide after one of the numerous confiscations of his wares and wheelbarrow by the police whom he was not able to bribe, and as the immediate consequence of the public humiliation endured as he was slapped in the face by a female municipal official (a fact that was later contested). This desperate act, followed by others in Tunisia as well as Algeria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, provoked a wave of protests throughout the country, leading to the overthrow of the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia and contributed to wider civil unrest in the Arab world. How can this event be interpreted in light of the question of the state and the body?
The state has a foundational relation with violence. To paraphrase Weber (1994 [1919]), in the ideal-typical social contract that links it to individuals, the state is supposed to protect society from violence through law and law enforcement, and in exchange it is granted the monopoly of legitimate violence. The contract holds as long as individuals receive sufficient security from the state and are not overly subjected to abuse by it. When it is not respected, either because security is denied or abuse is gross, individuals may feel entitled to resist the state or even revolt against it. In the model of the moral economy via which E. P. Thompson (1971) interprets the so-called food riots of seventeenth-century England, it is when norms and obligations are not complied with that peasants rebel (in that case against landowners or grain-buyers), but the paradigm can be extended to the relationship of individuals with the state.
The foundational violence of the state as well as the potential opposition of social actors has a common site where they manifest themselves: the body. Kafka's allegory of the penal colony (1948 [1919]) is illustrative of this: the sophisticated machine used to execute...