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self harm is a kind of writing on the body, not as a self sovereign author over the text but a dialectic, an expiriment, transformative in a double manner since the one cutting is both marking and being marked. it is sacramental destruction, performative and productive, unfolding, and dialectical. recent scholarship concerning the theorization of why people cut, their place in the broader political context, has tended to emphasize two aspects: cutting as communication and self-regulation. though the two frameworks place distinct emphases, they have even in their differentiation become tidally locked around certain shared many of the same assumptions relating to how we imagine the self harming subject. in particular, they tend to rely on narrowly construed notions of self interest and the freedom to pursue self interest, both of which are obviously politically inflected concepts. indeed, self harm occupies a peculiar place in political thought, serving as a constituative outside or otherwise significant reference for political theorists including John Stuart Mill, Holmes, Carl Schmitt, Milton Friedman, and Michelle Foucault.

i seek to make an intervention, or series of interventions, aimed at making the discourse around self harm less overdetermined, seeking to introduce more or less novel ways to imagine and ask questions about the reasons we hurt ourselves,, and in so doing offer alternative ways of approaching more general ideas of subjectivity, self interest, and political agency.

the voices of those who self harm have been frequently suppressed or outright excluded in much of the history of it's theorization, both in the direct study and treatment of patients but also especially in the more general political theorization of it's implications. this is a mistake. those who know what is like to want to harm oneself for the sake of harming oneself have a privilege epistemic position when it comes to understanding the practice, albeit a position that has been systemically excluded from much of the formal discussions. introducing my own direct experience and highlighting the contributions of others who self harm is therefore a double corrective, on the one hand an important epistemological intervention and on the other hand an assertion of the political agency always present in self harm but which is so often simplified, when not outright denied. my personal recollections and feelings about self harm inform the way I ask questions as well as what kinds of answers I find useful.

in particular, I am interested in introducing, in addition to and against the communicative and regulative frameworks for self harm, the ideas of refuge and rupture, both of which depend on understanding self harm as a discursively rich subversive ritual, self harm as the application of political theology to everyday life. to that end, I begin this intervention first with a close reading of the story in the gospel of Mark of the exorcism of the demon possessed man, a touch point to which we can return to as easily from discussions of high theory as medical anthropology. by the end of this essay, it is my hope that axioms for a richer, wider, more liberatory reading of the bleeding text can be developed, thereby advancing the potential for creative formulation of our relationships to ourselves, the political systems we are caught up within, and the dynamic process by which they produce each other.