Biopolitical and Phenomenological Underpinnings of Embodied Contestation: Further Reflections on Creative Insurgency

Abstract

This chapter explains how the theoretical traditions of biopolitics and phenomenology, as expressed in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, underpin a notion of embodied contestation that I develop in The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World (2016). I identify two modalities of revolutionary activism, reflecting entangled modalities of contestation in which the human body takes a central place. The first, “Burning Man,” is a radical, biopolitical mode of contestation in which the human body self-consumes in violent, spectacular acts that interrupt daily routine. The second, “Laughing Cow,” is a gradual, transgressive, mode of contestation in which the human body is both material instrument and symbolic locus of micro-acts of contestation that fold into daily routine. In between are various acts in which the human body takes over public space, in a game of perception and experience best explained by the phenomenological tradition.