Abstract

This article examines the politicization of the human body focusing on the way this issue was conceived in the West. The human body has long been used as a source of metaphor for political theorists and the very notion of body politic leans on the image of a unified and discrete entity that has commanding parts and obeying parts that may be robust or ailing, strong or weak. This article suggests that aside from political theory with a rich source of metaphor, the human body also serves as the nexus where political conceptions of the universal and the particular meet.