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Philosophy of Means
Toward a New Politics of Bodies
This book can be opened with
Not mere biological entities, bodies are conceptual and political battlegrounds, either instruments of domination or avenues of liberation. Throughout history and across cultures, bodies have been used to express social, racial, class, and gender differences. They have also been imagined as means: means for reproducing life and labour, means understood to be inscribed within a “natural” order. This concept has run through the entire history of Western metaphysics and culture, and its persistence and development has contributed to the establishment of cultural and political dominance by Western rationality and the white men who conceived it.
This book asks us to reconsider the theoretical and political power of means in relation to bodies. Stimilli problematizes the role of means in a hypertechnological era in which politics has come to be seen merely as administration, with no pretence of elaborating higher meanings or purposes. Are means, she asks, truly instruments subordinate to purposes unrelated to them, or could they be something else?
In a philosophical investigation into the meaning of means, Stimilli elaborates the political power of bodies as means, arguing that they are never neutral and lie at the origin of collective phenomena whose potential is still to be explored. From the United States to South America and Europe, from North Africa to the Middle East and beyond, bodies are at the centre of enormous transnational and intersectional movements as non-instrumental means for new forms of social reproduction. A new sexuation of the world is now the order of the day.
“Stimilli’s book establishes means as the conceptual point of departure for new forms of resistance to the current regime of neoliberalism. Stimilli’s philosophical and feminist investigations are daring in perspective and outstanding in erudition and insight.”—Alessia Ricciardi, Northwestern University
Elettra Stimilli is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the Sapienza University of Rome. She is the author of five books in Italian, two of which have been translated into English as Debt and Guilt (Bloosmbury, 2018) and The Debt of the Living: Ascesis and Capitalism (SUNY Press, 2017).
Timothy C. Campbell (Introducer)
Timothy C. Campbell is Professor of Italian at Cornell University. His most recent book is The Techne of Giving: Cinema and the Generous Form of Life (Fordham, 2017).
Clara Pope (Translator)
Clara Pope is a translator and editor based in Bologna. She is the translator of Gigi Roggero’s Italian Operaismo: Genealogy, History, Method (MIT, 2023).
