More than ever, “the body” is today at the center of radical and
institutional politics. Feminist, antiracist, trans, ecological
movements—all look at the body in its manifold manifestations as a
ground of confrontation with the state and a vehicle for
transformative social practices. Concurrently, the body has become a
signifier for the reproduction crisis the neoliberal turn in
capitalist development has generated and for the international surge
in institutional repression and public violence. In Beyond the
Periphery of the Skin, lifelong activist and best-selling author
Silvia Federici examines these complex processes, placing them in the
context of the history of the capitalist transformation of the body
into a work-machine, expanding on one of the main subjects of her
first book, Caliban and the Witch.
Building on three
groundbreaking lectures that she delivered in San Francisco in 2015,
Federici surveys the new paradigms that today govern how the body is
conceived in the collective radical imagination, as well as the new
disciplinary regimes state and capital are deploying in response to
mounting revolt against the daily attacks on our everyday
reproduction. In this process she confronts some of the most
important questions for contemporary radical political projects. What
does “the body” mean, today, as a category of social/political
action? What are the processes by which it is constituted? How do we
dismantle the tools by which our bodies have been “enclosed” and
collectively reclaim our capacity to govern them?