The Body Productive

If Marx taught us that capitalist labour ‘mortifies’ the body of the worker, this book is an urgent and critical analysis of that process of mortification. The book refocuses our attention to how the body is both produced and becomes productive under capital’s strident demands upon it. But the authors urge us to consider not the passive trope of bodily resilience when it comes to the global working class, but the constant running script of bodily resistance as workers hide from, defy, or in some moments, dismantle capitalist logic. * Tithi Bhattacharya, Purdue University, USA *
This book is a bold intervention into ways of thinking about “the productive body” from Marx to twenty-first century digital capitalism. By encouraging us to reflect on bodies and the future of resistance, it is an essential text for anyone interested in contemporary regimes of power. * Joanna Bourke, Birkbeck, University of London, UK *
Taking François Guéry and Didier Deleule’s The Productive Body as a starting point, the chapters collected in this wide-ranging and critical volume show how the dynamics of capitalist social form have shaped (and continue to shape) the practical and discursive treatment of bodies. As the editors and contributors insist, bodies are not transhistorical givens, the ‘real’ or ‘natural’ counterparts to capital’s abstract forms. Rather, their varied uses and meanings appear in the course of those forms’ historical elaboration. * Seb Franklin, King’s College London, UK *