ABSTRACT
Hunger striking amongst the inmates of Guantanamo Bay has been more or less continuous since 2004, involving between 80 and 100 of the 148 inmates. As an active self-mortification, 'the hunger-strike as a medium of political action was considered analogous to the prison escape'. Leveraging the inscription of the body by the prison, and thus society at large, the body becomes the register for a wider breakout. Bodily inscription moulds 'men and their organs into the parts and wheels of the social machine'. The characteristics of a political body reflect its social organisation of death. Jean Baudrillard's Symbolic Exchange and Death is read as a direct response to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus. The War on Terror did not presage the retreat of global order as Baudrillard surmised it would. Baudrillard provides a very clear account of why an inmate starving himself to death in Guantanamo might convey the terror of a revolutionary production.
