Philosophy of Means: Toward a New Politics of Bodies

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 purpose