Abstract

The argument starts out (section 1) from a description of the aesthetic encounter with Anish Kapoor’s installation Léviathan (Paris 2011), highlighting the importance of the body as the mediator of sense and senses. I take this sculpture to imagine the labour of polity-making. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of embodiment as the intertwinement of a self and its world or environment, i.e., as labour, I analyse three fault lines in the concept of labour, (section 2), indicating where Merleau-Ponty departs from Marx. I also indicate the relevance of these paradigm shifts for the idea of an embodied democratic polity, in particular its ecological commitment. In section 3 I return to Kapoor’s installation to establish in what respects it inspires such polity.