A Body Worth Having?: Or, A System of Natural Governance  

Oleh:

Cohen, Ed

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Theory, Culture & Society vol. 25 no. 3 (May 2008), page 103-130.
Topik: Giorgio Agamben ¦ biopolitics ¦ body ¦ individualism ¦ life ¦ John Locke ¦ modernity
Fulltext: 103.pdf (440.8KB)

Isi artikel

This article considers the historical contingencies within which ‘the body’ becomes incorporated as a legal and political metonym for ‘the person’. Extrapolating from C.B. Macpherson’s understanding of ‘possessive individualism’, it asks why we assume that to be a person means to have ‘a body’, and explores the political and ethical consequences of substantializing the living processes that subtend the human organism. Considering the English codification in the late 17th century of habeas corpus as the political ground for a rights bearing legal subject, the article argues that these legal attempts to found an effective limit to the power – and the violence – of the sovereign defined ‘the body’ as a juridicopolitical fiction that could stand as a ‘natural’ bulwark against the divine claims to sovereign prerogative. The article then considers the simultaneous reliance on and elision of ‘the body’ as a matter of personal possession (and the possessed matter of ‘the person’) in John Locke’s famous theory of personhood elaborated in Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Finally, the article addresses the implications of these historical reflections for Giorgio Agamben’s recent affirmation of ‘bare life’ as the pre-political ground upon which Western politics has built its crumbling edifice.

Opini Anda

Klik untuk menuliskan opini Anda tentang koleksi ini!

Kembali