Ethics after Liberalism: Why (Autonomous) Bodies Matter

This article pursues two trajectories of investigation: one which explores how the construct of autonomy shorn of its liberal sovereign inheritances could serve as a resource for creative enactments of ‘the political’; and the other, which takes up the problematic aspects of the absence of the body in current International Relations scholarship. It will be argued that a relational version of autonomy is what enables and sustains the shift from an ethic centred on liberal atomistic selves to an ethics of engagement between self and other. Engagement, however, involves bodily enactments and, pace Shapiro, the willingness to be afflicted by the performance of the other. Thus the crucial aspect of the body that we must consider is how we might begin to theorise the body as a surface for the resistance of sovereign power that not only operates to individuate and separate but to render docile and disciplined. In the global war on terror, sovereign power’s exercise has reached its most abstract levels yet, as bodies are disappeared within increasingly technologised and biologised forms of war. Abstraction is the key technique that sovereign power wields over fleshy, material bodies and it is our responsibility to stop empowering sovereign power by driving the discourse into ever more abstract lines of argumentation while losing site of the primary resource we wield in this struggle, the creative and relationally autonomous body.