The Politics of Bodies

Is it due to lack of critical agency that precarious persons opt, time and again, for political views that contribute to their marginalization? How should we understand that alleged loss of critical agency and how could it be countered? Influential perspectives in critical theory have answered these questions by highlighting how certain ideological mechanisms, incorporated thoughtlessly by the most vulnerable bodies, function to obscure their interests and the causes of the condition they find themselves in.
Through an original interpretation of Jacques Rancière's thought, but also going beyond it, The Politics of Bodies establishes a different horizon of reflection. Laura Quintana's main hypothesis is that the lack of critical agency today has more to do with a loss of the desire for transformation, fostered by neoliberal consensual dynamics, than with techniques of deceit and manipulation. In developing her interpretation of Rancière's thought, Quintana provides an analysis of certain aesthetic-political and socioeconomic conditions of the historical present, anchored mainly in Latin America. Thus, she addresses the corporeal transformations produced by emancipatory practices, the ways in which they affect configurations of power, and the manner in which they can be disseminated in and, in turn, alter the political landscape.

Laura Quintana is associate professor of philosophy at the Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia.

Introduction
Rethinking the Emancipation of Bodies Today

Part I. Mapping the Practices of Emancipation
1. A Cartography of Possibilities
2. Intellectual Emancipation and Political Subjectivization /Dissensus and Disagreement.
Part II.Intellectual Emancipation as the Torsion of a Body
1. Torsions of Bodies
2. Torsion as Conversion of a Body
3. Effects
Part III. Consensualism and the Dispossession of Bodies
1. Neoliberalism, Dispossession, and Depoliticization
2. Consensual Logic
Reinventions of the Common
Part IV. Disagreement and the Division of the Social Body in Today's World
1. Once Again, A Question of Method
2. Disagreement
3. Against the Grain of Consensus: The Demand for "buen vivir" (good living)
Part V. Institutions of Disagreement, Institutions of the Common?
1. An Unfeasible Anti-institutionalism?
2. Excessive Democracy and Autonomy of Emancipation Practices
3. Emancipatory Institutions?
4. Institutions of the Common?
5. Institution, Conflict, Violences
Part VI. Image, Times, Bodies
1. Excessive Reportage
2. Aesthetic Logic and Its Reinventions of Bodies
3. Another Image of Time: Heterochronic Bodies
Epilogue: Politics, Bodies, Affects
Bibliography
Index