Bared and grievable: Theory impossible in No Man's Land

Pedriali capitalizes on the ambiguous operations performed in No Man’s Land during the First World War to enter into productive friction with dominant theoretical positions—namely, Agamben’s spatiality of the ban and Butler’s ungrievable lives. No Man’s Land, as Pedriali demonstrates, did not only recruit for war by becoming the spatial pointer for total mobilization. It also reinforced, in the immediate logistics of the frontline, the demarcation between civilizational space (qualified life) and unrestrained devastation (within the enclosure of the ban). As the two sides of No Man’s Land are shown feeding human capital into a shared concentrationary zone of destruction of owned blood, this culling operation on the nation by the nation allows Pedriali to explode two of the core tenets of Agamben’s and Butler’s biopolitics—that bare life is primarily and radically other (other blood), and that it will not be grieved.