How might we represent a world that is actively coming apart? How might we depict the effects of the immense and irreversible destruction that is taking place before our very eyes\u200a\u2014\u200athe destruction of bodies, of ecosystems, of shared narratives? What if, like Michael Taussig, we tried to think our way through disfigurement not as an act of mutilation but as a paradoxical intensification of presence itself? Thomas Teurlai asks these questions with brutal sincerity in artworks that display a vitality of survival, an organic and technical abundance in which violence doesn\u2019t end life but reinvents its forms. It is in these interstices that I propose to reflect on the aesthetic potential of a biopolitics of disfigurement in Teurlai\u2019s practice: from the way apparatuses of power inscribe death onto forms of life, to\u200a\u2014\u200aconversely\u200a\u2014\u200acontemporary aesthetics that embody a thoughtful and critical response to this inscribing. For in Teurlai\u2019s work, it is not a question of saving, repairing, or even directly criticizing; instead, he fabulates through disfigurement in order to inhabit and reactivate the ruins, so that a myriad of new connectivities might be brought to life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Biopolitics of Disfigurement: An Aesthetic of the Living World in Ruins<\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As the sociologist and anthropologist Didier Fassin notes, despite what the etymology of the word suggests, biopolitics is not a politics of life. Fassin shows that for Michel Foucault, for example, biopolitics doesn\u2019t consider life an object in and of itself; its role is to examine the politics that govern life through operational techniques\u200a\u2014\u200apower apparatuses that measure, classify, and control bodies and populations.^{1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 1 <\/a> - Didier Fassin, \u201cLa biopolitique n\u2019est pas une politique de la vie,\u201c Sociologie et soci\u00e9t\u00e9s<\/em> 38, no. 2 (2006): 35-48.<\/span> Biopolitics doesn\u2019t safeguard life as such; rather, it renders life governable, and even destroys it. It may thus give rise to violence\u200a\u2014\u200anotably via death apparatuses as modes of governance such as ecocide and genocide\u200a\u2014\u200aand policies that engender necrosis, rot, decomposition, and disfigurement.^{2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 2 <\/a> - See Norman Ajari, La dignit\u00e9 ou la mort\u2009: <\/em>\u00e9thique et politique de la race<\/em> (Paris: La D\u00e9couverte, 2019), and L\u00e9opold Lambert, La politique du bulldozer\u2009: la ruine palestinienne comme projet isra\u00e9lien<\/em> (Paris: Editions B2 [Collection Territoires], 2016).<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Life itself here becomes a question of classification, erasure, and hierarchization. Nonetheless, this is indeed the site of the paradoxical vitality that I call the \u201cbiopolitics of disfigurement\u201d: a paradigm in which deterioration is a vector of transformation\u200a\u2014\u200ain which objects and living beings are no longer merely destroyed, but are also reconstituted via a form of enduring survival, despite and even because of this destruction.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Although disfigurement indeed embodies power\u2019s tangible fingerprint on forms, bodies, and matter, it contains the strength and promise of \u201coddkin\u201d as well, to borrow Donna Harraway\u2019s neologism.^{3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 3 <\/a> - Here, the term \u201cdisfigurement\u201d also evokes its polysemous use in Donna Haraway\u2019s thought. In Staying with the Trouble<\/em> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), Haraway mobilizes a threefold meaning of \u201cfigure\u201d: \u201cto figure,\u201d \u201cto figure out,\u201d and \u201cto figure on.\u201d<\/span> As such, the biopolitics of disfigurement that I explore here enables us to reflect on the violence of extractivist politics, the destruction of life forms, and the kinds of aesthetic resistance that emerge among the folds of these catastrophes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Teurlai activates this tension through sculptures and process-based artworks in which disfigurement is an aesthetic symptom of these life-death politics. His sculptures are more than mere machines; I call them \u201cvisceral mechanisms,\u201d systems in which the connections between life and death are held in place by a web of threads in fragile equilibrium. These are sensory and sensitive mechanisms that live out their own deterioration via a logic of wilful technical dysfunction. Fossile Murmure <\/em>(2022\u201324), for example, plays on the activation of a condemned body-machine: a hybrid car with engine running is placed on jack stands, and thus is unable to move. It groans, sighs, and shakes, without traction or propulsion. The interior of this dysfunctional body-machine is shown to viewers via a camera obscura, made of a dragster radiator, that projects the metallic entrails of the vehicle onto the wall. The disfigurement of the car and its status as a wreck that is somehow still running create a theatre of an existence parasitized by its own finitude.<\/p>\n\n\n\n