Inappropriable Force

In the aftermath of the global mass protests of the 2010s, democratic theorists have shown renewed interest in conceptualizing popular mobilization and “the people.” A series of provocative works have theorized assembled crowds in the streets as sources of democratic authority, legitimacy, and sovereignty. These insightful accounts nevertheless often remain detached from the full range of the situated experiences of protesters.

Inappropriable Force brings the concrete, on-the-ground practices of Turkey’s 2013 Gezi Uprising into the foreground of theoretical reflection,asking what people gathered in the streets shared, desired, or refused, and what their public experimentations with politics, language, and aesthetics made possible. Working from the empirical particularities of Gezi to political theory, the book theorizes protest as a political meaning-making enterprise that reconfigures everyday regimes of sense, speech, and engagement.

Drawing on Gezi’s archives and engaging democratic and critical theorists such as Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Rancière, Joan Copjec, and René Girard, the book identifies a surplus in protest irreducible to the categories of popular sovereignty, authorization, or legitimation. This surplus—an inappropriable force—can only be experienced in practice, through collective action. Not predicated on unified will or hegemonic claims to peoplehood, it unfolds in plural modes of thinking, sociality, affect, creativity, and imagination that emerge when people assemble out of doors.

Adopting a practice-oriented and deparochializing approach, Inappropriable Force treats the political activities and cultural artifacts of the Gezi protests as texts of political theory in their own right. In doing so, it conceptualizes popular protest as a generative reservoir of political meaning and critical insight.