A Politeia in Besiegement: Lidiia Ginzburg on the Siege of Leningrad as a Political Paradigm

In her reading of Ginzburg's notes about the siege of Leningrad, Irina Sandomirskaia emphasizes Ginzburg's conceptualization of besiegement as the imprisonment of a polity inside a tautology. In the reality of the siege as depicted by Ginzburg, the extinction of life occurs in a self-devastating repetitiveness that dominates space, time, body, communication, action, thought, and ethics. Sandomirskaia interprets Ginzburg's conceptualization of besiegement from within in terms of Michel Foucault's biopower, when life is administered and selectively awarded as an entidement, depending on how the administration understands the usefulness of that life for the war economy. As a result, a dystrophic body politic develops, as the polis in besiegement is subject to devastation and implosion, reproducing the bodily processes of a patient dying from alimentary dystrophy. Ginzburg resolutely questions the biopolitical solution by presenting an alternative in the individual politics of “loopholes of lesser evil.“