Notes to a politics of bodies in foucauldian archaeology

Abstract

In this paper, we try to gather some notes to formulate a politic of the bodies in Foucauldian archaeology. The consolidated view in the hegemonic reception of Foucault’s works intends that both the treatment of the body, and the political inflection in his thought would only emerge in the 1970s. On the contrary, we will seek to extract from two moments of Foucault’s archaeological path in the 1960s elements of his philosophical reflection centred around the notion of the body that give rise to and subsidize the development of political implications. To do so, we mobilise The birth of the clinic, from 1963, and the conference The utopic body, from 1966, paradigmatic moments of the archaeological investigation that have in the body their central axis of articulation. In the first work, we find a reconstruction of the process of constitution of bodies through the medical gaze that culminates with the reflection on the social implications of the construction of this knowledge – what Foucault calls “tertiary spatialization” –; in the second one, utopia emerges as self-transcendent force and vector of transformation of the body, from the body and towards other bodies, which highlights the political potential of this concept.