ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines how a ballistic body has a greater social impact than a ballistic missile, as bodies, and the risk of mixing blood and body parts, carry potent political, social, and spatial messages that are distinct. It contributes to theoretical understandings of embodied space and pollution. The chapter describes extend Long's insights, focusing on how the body, body parts and fluids communicate beyond the living integral unit of the body to gain social and spatial significance, and how this creates particular links to comprehensions between agency and suicide violence. It highlights that the blood and flesh of the suicide bomber do not just "pollute" the enemy body, but also stain the soil and disrupt the purity of the land through the polluting power of death. The bodily remains left by a suicide attack in the Israel-Palestine conflict have prompted socio-political action to reestablish authority and order over the social pollutant, to "purify" the "polluted" embodied space.
