What Can a Body Do? Answers from Trablus, Cairo, Beirut and Algiers

The essay examines contemporary Arab films that express the body's forces. One strategy, common with other world cinemas, is that films carry out different operations at the molar and molecular levels, which correspond to different levels of embodiment and body politics. Another, more unique to Arab cinema, is to cultivate strategies of protecting and enfolding bodies, similar to what Foucault termed ars erotica . Third, they enlist the audience in a struggle to attain what Spinoza called 'adequate ideas', ideas that arise immanently from the body's capacities.