Photo/Foto: Fran Pollitt

The Return of the Knowing Body

The unconscious repression of the knowing-body is the greatest violence of the colonial enterprise from a the micropolitical perspective. Such violence is at the marrow of the modern Western culture, which still structures us. Today, the toxic effects of this unconscious repression have reached their limit, generating the vast crisis in which we are immersed. To create the conditions for a return of the knowing-body —free from the effects of its traumas—becomes, thus, an unavoidable task in the resistance to the actual state of things. It’s not a matter of futurology: signs of this return are creeping in throughout the “Global South”; a South that is multiple, and whose borders are not geographically limited. These are blasts of oxygen at the points where thought is asphyxiated in contemporaneity, tirelessly redrawing its landscapes, in an endless work. Wouldn’t this be, precisely, the real political potency of art ?

Biography

Suely Rolnik is a psychoanalyst, arts and culture critic, and curator. She is Professor at the PUCP-SP (PhD in Clinical Psychology) and faculty member of the independent study program (PEI) at the Museo d’Art Contemporani in Barcelona (MacBa). She is author, among other books, of Micropolítica: Cartografías del deseo in collaboration with Félix Guattari, which has been published in 7 countries.