The Body in Political Imagination: Representing, Choreographing, Contesting the Body Politic

Samenvatting

The body plays a central role in our political imagination. Throughout the history of Western political thought, the body has been used as a metaphor to propagate the organicity of the political community, thereby providing the political order with legitimacy. However, feminist thinkers such as Adriana Cavarero have pointed to political theory’s obliteration of the corporality of the body, reducing it to mere symbolism. Taking the corporal aspect of the body seriously pushes us to go beyond replacing traditional imagery of the body politic with more suitable metaphors. What is needed, I argue, is to consider the body as the vehicle of imagination, as central to the way individuals actively participate in the imagination of collective existence. A democratic imagination, then, must take seriously how embodied practices reproduce, and contest, hegemonic orders.