New sources of subjectivation: Towards a Political Theory of Embodiment

Abstract

The modernity establishes the basis of subjectivity from the Cartesian dualist separation of the mind as the active consciousness and subject and the body as a passive material object. This essay takes as standpoint the political philosophy of Iris Marion Young in relation to her phenomenological writings. Thus, it accepts a metaphysical approach on the body as lived body and situation which constructs subjectivity for any human being. It argues that the author gives to the body the ontological status that Cartesian tradition attributes to the consciousness alone. The essay reflects on different aspects of the social consequences of this tradition, and the new horizons that several feminist studies give in many significant ways to the embodiment political theory.