Introduction: Corporeal Politics

This book is the second volume of texts curated specifically for The Funambulist since 2011.1The editorial line of this second series of twenty-six essays is dedicated to philosophical and political ques-tions about bodies. This choice is informed by my own interest in the (often violent) relation between the designed environment and bodies. Corporeal politics do not exist in a void of objects, build-ings and cities; on the contrary, they operate through the continuous material encounters between living and non-living bodies. Several texts proposed in this volume examine various forms of corporeal violence (racism, gender-based violence, etc.). This examination, however, can only exist in the integration of the designed environ-ment’s conditioning of this violence. As Mimi Thi Nguyen argues in the conclusion of this book’s first chapter, “the process of attending to the body — unhooded, unveiled, unclothed — cannot be the so-lution to racism, because that body is always already an abstraction, an effect of law and its violence.