What to do with the civic body?

In the ancient world politics was taught as an art, and considered a branch of ethics. In the modern humanities academy we have divided it, in our fashion, between practice and theory, represented as an empirical science and as a particular species of speculative philosophy, respectively. In the terms of this intellectual settlement the history of citizenship, having no explicitly calculative dimension, has been largely ceded by political science to political philosophy, to be viewed as a dimension of the modern ‘problem’ of political obligation. Hence our modern presupposition that citizenship is the means by which we are attached as individual subjects to our representative political institutions. Hence also our modern species of political therapy by means of which an enhanced or truly active citizenship is applied as a balm for the wounds in the body politic, wounds which have sundered us from each other and from society as a whole. Through participation, it is urged, we can make ourselves whole again. The primary role of citizenship in the ceremony of modern formal political thought, then, is in a sense psychological and even spiritual. Active citizenship is to be prized not because of any actual concrete results which that activity achieves (which presumably may be for the better or for the worse, according to one’s particular political preferences), but for its own sake, as a kind of exorcism of the presumed modern spiritual malaise of apathy and disengagement. The characteristic modern civic heroes of this particular political imaginary are those who purge themselves and us through their commitment to political activity: Abraham Lincoln, who was martyred for his country; John Curtin, whose ascetic devotion to the nation drove him to the grave, and so on. (Conversely, the more Dionysian political figures such as Bill Clinton, who appears to find in public service a kind of aphrodisia, appear to us unworthy or even degraded.) And like all good saints, such figures represent themselves also through the asceticism of their countenance and demeanour: Lincoln’s granite-like assumption of his country’s wounds; Curtin’s almost maternal aura of silent suffering. Because of the sanctity of this political imagery it is easy to forget that the practice of citizenship has always possessed a powerful and even exuberant corporeal dimension, and that this corporeal aspect of citizenship was a crucial element in the bearing and demeanour of political individuals, whether public or private, from the ancient world onwards. We have effaced this corporeal aspect of citizenship from our modern accounts of its history—and even from our modern translations of its key classical texts—with a zeal which is little short of puritanical. And so when we try to imagine how political capacity or incapacity, as we might imagine them theoretically, inscribe themselves on the human form, we are frequently left at a loss. My purpose here is to outline a thumbnail sketch of this vast and disorderly heritage of civic body-awareness, and to suggest some consequences of its discrediting and disrepair today.