The human body has often been represented suffering or glorified on the battleground. But is it not itself the battleground?Our body is an object of desire or repulsion, whether it belongs to the slave or to a simple worker, sometimes more marked or ravaged then at other times, the body exhibited to all, transformed, tortured, a willing support or victim of the commerce around appearance.
The human body is not a neutral ground, it is a political space.
Institutional violence, laws or political decisions, as abstract as they may seem, have repercussions on the human body, not in an abstract sense, but in a real physical sense. We live and suffer politics in and through our body. Politics touch us, impregnate us, and metamorphose us. Our bodies are the battlegrounds, the final recipients of all violence, real, psychological or metaphysical: simply because the body is our link to the real world.
Traces of battles, traces of life are inscribed in our bodies.
