Michel Foucault: a political history of the body

Abstract

The present work aims to elucidate the problematization of the body in the intellectual project of Michel Foucault; This implies being able to make explicit the singular persistence of corporality as a focus of experience in the thinking of the French author at his different methodological stages. Corporality was an object of study from its archaeological stage, but also in the genealogical period in the 1970s. The body is a central objective of disciplines and governmentality in western modernity, for the author the human body is objectified from a double dimension: individual and social, both in the subject-individual and in the subject-population. Their analyses do not only address a repressive dimension but more effectively conceive the body as a positive pole of the constitution of subjectivity. While the canon of western philosophy has subjected the body to a secondary and hierarchically inferior place, Foucault is one of the thinkers who has recovered the importance of corporality in his methodological work. Here we propose a revision of some of its most important hypotheses about the body as a surface for control registration and the exercise of power.