Citation

Blair E. Estud. Polit. 2010; 36(online): 39-66.

Affiliation

(eblair@iner.udea.edu.co)

Copyright

(Copyright © 2010, Universidad de Antioquia, Instituto de Estudios Políticos)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The article intends to explore the relationship body/violence from the perspective of biopolitics, and show the importance that it assumes in terms of power, that is, its political dimension or the political nature of corporeality. As the frame of the explanations that traditionally we have been given about the wars in the macro-level of power is difficult to establish a relationship between the body and the war; in fact, they claim reasons such as the relations established between armed groups and State, for example, whether the command and control of any territory or the disputes over the control of resources and populations, among others. But in those wars the bodies would seem inexistent or, in any case, subject to a “logics” and belic presences of other kinds. But also —and this is what is intended to show— there are other micropolitical areas or some specific body technologies that, additionally, result most benefit to explain the “how” of Power. Violence on the bodies within the ambit of war is, therefore, a power device that is exercised through a series of corporal technologies used in order to dominate, through terror, individuals and populations. From this perspective, the violence on the bodies in the case of the war in Colombia —similar to what occurs in other contemporary war— would be the expression of an “Economy of Punishment” or more specifically what Foucault called a Punitive Policy of Body, the highest expression of this corporal micropolitics and an extreme form of governance.