Abstract

There is no era of history and thought in which bodies have not been the expression of social, race and class, sex and gender differences, even before anatomical ones. Far from being exclusively biological fields, bodies are conceptual and political battlefields, where forms of domination and, on the contrary, of liberation are at stake. Bodies are "means to". Means for the reproduction of life and work, means, in short, inscribed in a "natural" order: this concept has run through the entire history of metaphysics and Western culture. Its persistence and its developments have contributed to the definition of a cultural and political dominance, that of Western rationality and its creator white man. This book investigates, first of all, the theoretical and political strength of the means. Also in consideration of a hyper-technological world and a profound crisis of environmental ecosystems, the role of means is problematized here in the era in which politics is identified with mere administration, without any longer any claim to meaning or purpose. Are the means really instruments subordinated to purposes that are foreign to them or can they be something else? Trying to answer this question through a philosophical investigation, Elettra Stimilli reveals in these pages the political power of bodies as political means, never neutral, at the origin of collective phenomena, whose potential only asks to be questioned. From the United States to South America, from Europe to many of the countries of North Africa and the Middle East up to the Iran of women in revolt, at the center of enormous transactional and intersectional movements, bodies are today on the agenda as non-instrumental means of new forms of social reproduction. A new sexuation of the world. «If today politics is identified with administration without any longer any claim to meaning or visions to orient it, rather than a recovery of lost ends, an investigation into the means is decisive. Reflecting on the means, however, means giving centrality to bodies, not neutral, but sexual, subordinate and powerful at the same time.