OUP has published a new book on
the place of the body in crafting modern politics.
ABOUT THE BOOK
This book uses the body to peel
back the layers of time and taken-for-granted ideas about the two defining
political forms of modernity, the state and the subject of rights. It traces,
under the lens of the body, how the state and the subject mutually constituted
each other all the way down, by going all the way back, to their original
crafting in the seventeenth century. It considers two revolutions. The first,
scientific, threw humanity out of the centre of the universe, and transformed
the very meanings of matter, space, and the body; while the second, legal and
political, re-established humans as the centre-point of the framework of modern
rights.
The book analyses the fundamental
rights to security, liberty, and property respectively as the initial knots
where the state-subject relation was first sealed. It develops three arguments,
that the body served to naturalise security; to individualise liberty; and to
privatise property. Covering a wide range of materials--from early modern Dutch
painting, to the canon of English political thought, the Anglo-Scottish legal
struggles of naturalization, and medical and religious practices--it shows both
how the body has operated as history's great naturaliser, and how it can be
mobilised instead as a critical tool that lays bare the deeply racialised and
gendered constructions that made the state and the subject of rights. The book
returns to the origins of constructivist and constitutive theorising to reclaim
their radical and critical potential.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Charlotte Epstein is Associate
Professor of International Relations at the University of Sydney.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
A Note on References
Chapter 1: Introduction
I. Security
Chapter 2: The Corporeal Ontology
of Modern Security
Chapter 3: Denaturalising
Security
II. Liberty
Chapter 4: From Liberties to
Liberty: Crafting Territory and the Law with the Body
Chapter 5: Externalising and
Internalising Liberty via Discipline
III. Property
Chapter 6: Privatising Property
Chapter 7: The Public Anatomy
Lesson
Chapter 8: Conclusion
Bibliography
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