A Body Worth Having

Or, A System of Natural Governance

Bibliographic Data

ID2352145
AuthorsEd Cohen (Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey), Edward Cohen (0000-0001-7293-3182, Gender Studies, corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume25
Issue3
Pages103-129
Publication date2008-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTheory Culture & Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0263-2764 • E-ISSN: 1460-3616
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0263276408090660
OpenAlexW2137892271
LanguageEN
Citations received16
References cited35

This article considers the historical contingencies within which 'the body' becomes incorporated as a legal and political metonym for 'the person'. Extrapolating from C.B. Macpherson's understanding of 'possessive individualism', it asks why we assume that to be a person means to have 'a body', and explores the political and ethical consequences of substantializing the living processes that subtend the human organism. Considering the English codification in the late 17th century of habeas corpus as the political ground for a rights bearing legal subject, the article argues that these legal attempts to found an effective limit to the power - and the violence - of the sovereign defined 'the body' as a juridicopolitical fiction that could stand as a 'natural' bulwark against the divine claims to sovereign prerogative. The article then considers the simultaneous reliance on and elision of'the body' as a matter of personal possession (and the possessed matter of 'the person') in John Locke's famous theory of personhood elaborated in Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Finally, the article addresses the implications of these historical reflections for Giorgio Agamben's recent affirmation of 'bare life' as the pre-political ground upon which Western politics has built its crumbling edifice

Individualism · Law and economics · Personhood · Political philosophy · Political science · Politics · Possession (linguistics · Possessive · Power (physics · Prerogative · Sociology · Sovereignty · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Law · Philosophy · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought