On the Political Nature of Leftovers

This essay focuses on the London Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017 and seeks to figure out ways of reflection on this catastrophic event without exploiting it for the sake of an academic argument. I will address situations of (human and academic) un/speakability as well as the politics of grieving in the face of such catastrophes. In doing so, I am approaching the event of Grenfell Tower by investigating chosen critical theories, and the voices of (former) residents and activists, in order to shed some light on the social and political implications triggered by the figure of leftovers, shifting between discoursive contextualizations and personal perceptions. With this, I consider why and how the tower's appalling, overtly visible leftover provokes a re-thinking of biopolitics and agency, while also linking those to theatrical terminologies, namely tragedy, which is rhetorically used to downplay the level of destruction of sociality and, in it, the state's responsibility towards its citizens in the realm of neoliberalism.