The near-constant refrain at the heart of anti-hegemonic conceptualizations has been the body; as we move from book to book, tome to tome, we can see again and again the resurgence of this discourse: the Cartesian mind-body dualism, Spinoza’s eternal question on the potentialities of the body, Foucault’s analysis of the plays of power upon the body, Deleuze and Guattari’s complementary diatribes against normalized and regulated bodies, the circulations of the body and its imagery through pages of affect theory. The social is visualized as a body, and the military too. Works that we create are referred, in retrospect, as bodies. We joyously affirm the existence the body through the celebration of birth, and we revel in its deconstruction through horror cinema. The Dadaists made the body broken by the bullets and shells of World War 1 exemplars of absurd existence, a scream of rage against a renegade symbolic order; while Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, the Situationists, and the New Left of the 1960s put their demand for the fulfillment of bodily pleasures on equal footing with the class struggle, and as a rejoinder, some of the most divisive political struggles today concern themselves with ‘rights of the body’, be they over the question of homosexuality or abortion. The body itself is the physical mechanism of revolt: how many times have we heard the term “bodies in the streets” as a reference to the mobilization of the multitude? Recent critics of accelerating technology, such as Bifo, bemoan the “disappearance of the body” into the swarming void of digital abstraction, yet certain extreme forms of resistance – self-immolation or suicide bombing – almost position themselves directly against this postmodern crisis (or is it in confirmation with this crisis?).
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