| Abstract: | This essay examines the case of Terri Schiavo to develop a theory of prosopopeic democratic citizenship. Prosopopeia—the tropological attribution of voice—rhetorically sutures an aporia between sovereign and biopolitical modes of democratic governance. Citizens are split by the democratic rationality of self-governance: they act as sovereign subjects to govern themselves as biopolitical objects. However, that self-governing logic begins to falter when applied to live bodies that are not speaking subjects. By projecting a live body's self-determining capacity to speak in its own voice, prosopopeia rhetorically reconstitutes that citizen's capacity for self-representation, mediating the gap in the democratic order. |
