What if the body was?

Can a gesture become a scream? Can silence represent a gesture? In contemporary times, power relations inscribe a calligraphy of death on bodies.

Reality is the interplay of power relations that, in confrontation and agonistic conflict, define a discursive order. Within this reality, the everyday theater unfolds, a place where individuals recognize themselves; a territory where bodies are placed within a network of practices and signifiers that reveal their involvement in the production of identity. In other words, the body speaks by drawing upon something that has already spoken. by e through from him.

“An incomprehensible body, a penetrable and opaque body, an open and closed body, an absolutely visible body, captured by a kind of invisibility from which I can never free it,” Michel Foucault would say in The Utopian Body, The Heterotopias (book published by Editora N-1).

Each body possesses a discourse that welcomes it, that determines its customs, its uses, its memory; codes that allow it to recognize itself, marks that enable its reading, thus inscribing it in a docile alphabet. The discourse seeks to mark the territorial circumscription of the final word.

The law binds itself, and its references bind themselves, thus constituting a narcissistic form of discourse, where the relationship with the other is founded on an original flaw. In its circular space, any lapse is filled by a regulating word that crystallizes there. It is this force, this form, therefore, that is carved into bodies through the word; but as a word of a single text, without other possibilities of interpretation. A word that closes in on itself.

One cannot discover the truth of things, reality, ultimate objectivity, without putting into play, or rather, at risk, a certain power, a certain domination, a certain knowledge. To know is to dominate, and to dominate is to develop defined forms of organization and disciplining of bodies. In the complex fabric of human relations, it is a central element. It is the protagonist of a power game that seeks to subject it to a political technology through which it becomes an object-effect, subjecting it to instrumental rationalization. The body only exists within and through a political system. It is political power that gives the body space to exist and behave, and if it is a productive force, if it works, it is not by essence, but by obligation.

Moreover, the idea of ​​a social body constituted through the universality of wills is nothing more than a phantom. If this body exists, if it permeates us, it is less through consensus and more through the very materiality of political power that exerts its force over individualities; after all, nothing is more material, more physical, and more corporeal than the exercise of power; it is ingrained in us. Therefore, discourse – one of the instruments of this force – must be dense, rigid, constant, and meticulous. Its intimate relationship is what gives rise to the incalculable sum of inaudible sufferings and revolts that tear apart bodies – especially the unsubmissive bodies. The form cry It is rendered inaccessible to us, and the unspeakable takes root in its place, making silence the very matter of the body. The demand for conformity is the trace of this calligraphy of death, and despite the physiological differences that separate us, there is a deaf and invisible burden of muteness that runs through us all.

From one body to another, from one experience to another, there is a world without images, a kind of silent transparency that almost paradoxically allows something to appear – but as visibility changes, as a gesture without voice, as history without memory. We live in a regime of confinement, in a time of blind repression through which the body becomes a matter for the police, for politics. Gay body, trans body, black body, female body. Moral and economic demands exerted on a body founded on the experience of work; the experience of the docile body.

Currently, a new geography of the body is being established, and now it must submit to a not-so-recent moral landscape, under penalty of condemnation, of being considered cursed, of being humiliated and violated. Coercion today holds a privileged place in human relations; a socially and politically accepted instrument in places that are – still – legally prohibited. Coercion, materialized in language, discourse, words, and ultimately, in bodies, allows the escape of ghosts that we thought had already been eradicated. The body is the place of truth and abolition; it is the place of justice and exile; of pleasure and punishment. It is the place of a conformity as rigorous as it is susceptible to coercion, completely and absolutely alienating its freedom.

Constantly summoned to an empty role and rejected in everything that can be known about it – thus acting only on the surface of itself through a mask imposed upon it – the body is “invited” to objectify itself in the eyes of contemporary reason as a kind of perfect strangerThat is, like someone whose unknown nature refuses to reveal itself. The land of men who coerce does not welcome just any bodies; they only allow passage to those who accept the price of anonymity and submission.

So, how can we not conceive of the body as a territory of resistance? It occupies the gap that opens in this game between life and death. It opens a field of laceration that compels it to do nothing but question itself. What if the body were a work of art, more than an instrument? What if this work were, at once, the form of insubordination and the materiality of another, naked language? What if the body were...?