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Applications: Everyday Life, the Body, and Strategies of Resistance

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The Emancipatory Power of the Body in Everyday Life

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Abstract

This chapter shows how the concepts defined in Chap. 1 work and can be analytically applied. In the first part, niches of emancipation in authoritarian regimes and liberal democracies are explored. The second part offers two extended examples: one presents emancipation through artistic pursuits in communist Poland and the other investigates what came to be called the women’s strike, that is, waves of protests against the tightening of abortion law in Poland. The last part reflects on the general role of the body in the process of emancipation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1976), 311.

  2. 2.

    Arendt, Origins, 338–9. In the footnote, Arendt adds: “The remark was made by Robert Ley.”

  3. 3.

    Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017), xii.

  4. 4.

    Slezkine, House, 953.

  5. 5.

    Slezkine, House, 953.

  6. 6.

    Slezkine, House, 952.

  7. 7.

    Leszek Koczanowicz, Politics of Time: Dynamics of Identity in Post-Communist Poland (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 83–97.

  8. 8.

    Leszek Koczanowicz, “Civil Society as an Ethical Challenge: Paradoxes of the Creation of the Public Sphere in Post-Totalitarian Poland,” Human Affairs 13(1), 2003: 20–33.

  9. 9.

    Catriona Kelly, Comrade Pavlik: The Rise and Fall of a Soviet Boy Hero (London: Granta Books, 2005).

  10. 10.

    Janos Kornai, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

  11. 11.

    Alik Ginzburg’s apartment is a perfect example of such a club in the former USSR. See Vladislav Zubok, Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).

  12. 12.

    David Ost, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics: Opposition and Reform in Poland since 1968 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 47.

  13. 13.

    Zubok, Zhivago’s Children; Leopold Tyrmand, Diary 1954, trans. Anita Shelton and Andrew Wrobel (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2014).

  14. 14.

    Ost, Solidarity.

  15. 15.

    Leszek Koczanowicz, Politics of Time, 41–50.

  16. 16.

    Ost, Solidarity, 75.

  17. 17.

    Martin Jay, Genesis and Validity: The Theory and Practice of Intellectual History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), Chapter 13 “The Weaponization of Free Speech,” 204–18.

  18. 18.

    Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (London and New York: Routledge, 1964).

  19. 19.

    Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 7.

  20. 20.

    Luc Boltanski and Ėve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007).

  21. 21.

    Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit, 419.

  22. 22.

    Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit, 420.

  23. 23.

    Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit, 467.

  24. 24.

    Sebastian Bukow, “The Green Party in Germany,” in Green Parties in Europe, ed. Emilie van Haute (Oxon: Routledge, 2016), 112–39.

  25. 25.

    Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 27.

  26. 26.

    Nancy C.M. Hartsock, The Feminist Standpoint Revisited, and Other Essays (New York: Routledge, 2019), 52.

  27. 27.

    Hartsock, Feminist Standpoint, 59–60.

  28. 28.

    Victor Klemperer, Language of the Third Reich: LTI—Lingua Tertii Imperii. A Philologist’s Notebook, trans. Martin Brady (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

  29. 29.

    Richard Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality,” in The Human Rights Reader: Major Political Essays, Speeches, and Documents from Ancient Times to the Present, ed. Micheline R. Ishay (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 413.

  30. 30.

    Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Oxford: Clarendon Press, I976), 234.

  31. 31.

    Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).

  32. 32.

    Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 1.

  33. 33.

    Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 191.

  34. 34.

    Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 202.

  35. 35.

    Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 201.

  36. 36.

    Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 202.

  37. 37.

    John Dewey, “The Theory of Emotion. I: Emotional Attitudes,” Psychological Review 1(6), 1894: 553–69, on pp. 568–9.

  38. 38.

    Dewey, “Theory,” 569.

  39. 39.

    Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 86.

  40. 40.

    Emmanuel Levinas, “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism,” trans. Sean Hand, Critical Inquiry 17(1), 1990: 62–71, on p. 70.

  41. 41.

    Joy Neumeyer, “Leonid Brezhnev and the Elixir of Life,” in Energy Culture: Work, Power, and Waste in Russia and the Soviet Union, ed. Jillian Porter and Maya Vinokour (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), 195–225, on p. 197.

  42. 42.

    Karl Schlögel, The Soviet Century: Archaeology of a Lost World, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018), 573.

  43. 43.

    Schlögel, Soviet Century, 575.

  44. 44.

    Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?, trans. Michael Katz and William Wagner (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), epub edition, 648.

  45. 45.

    Schlögel, Soviet Century, 265.

  46. 46.

    Sean Martin, Andrei Tarkovsky (Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2005), 17.

  47. 47.

    Martin, Andrei Tarkovsky, 17.

  48. 48.

    Leszek Koczanowicz, “Somaesthetics, Somapower, and the Microphysics of Emancipation,” in Shusterman’s Somaesthetics: From Hip Hop Philosophy to Politics and Performance Art, ed. Jerold J. Abrams (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2022), 61–73, on pp. 72–3.

  49. 49.

    Richard Shusterman, “The Somatic Turn: Care of the Body in Contemporary Culture,” in Shusterman, Performing Live: Aesthetic Alternatives for the Ends of Arts (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000), 154–81.

  50. 50.

    Shusterman, “Somatic Turn,” 159.

  51. 51.

    Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1977).

  52. 52.

    Paul Rabinow, Hubert Dreyfus, and Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 229–52, on p. 236.

  53. 53.

    Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

  54. 54.

    Butler, Notes, 9.

  55. 55.

    Butler, Notes, 10 (italics original).

  56. 56.

    An intriguing prefiguring of Butler’s notion can be found in Shakespeare’s King Lear, where the utter bodily deprivation of social outcasts is foregrounded as an irreducible, though animalesque, property of humankind (“Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art,” III.iv.105–6), whose humanity can be salvaged by compassionate mutuality and cooperation.

  57. 57.

    Butler, Notes, 23.

  58. 58.

    Rather suitably, Shakespeare’s King Lear proposes that “Ripeness is all,” echoing Hamlet’s “The readiness is all.” While these phrases are commonly associated with preparedness for death, the characters that utter them (Edgar and Hamlet, respectively) are actually preparing for armed duels supposed to vindicate their rights and to repair, symbolically at least, the world’s ills. The experience of physical ordeals their bodies have amassed primes them both to act and to face the unknown.

  59. 59.

    Theodor W. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” in Adorno, Notes to Literature, Volume One, ed. Rolf Tiedeman, trans. Shierry W. Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 37–54, on p. 38.

  60. 60.

    Adorno, “Lyric Poetry,” 45.

  61. 61.

    See Madeline G. Levine, “Translator’s Introduction” in Miron Białoszewski, A Memoir of Warsaw Uprising, trans. and introd. Madeline G. Levine (New York: New York Review Books, 2015), vii–xix.

  62. 62.

    Tadeusz Sobolewski, Człowiek Miron (Kraków: Znak, 2012), 91–3.

  63. 63.

    Hanna Kirchner, “Człowiek Miron,” in Miron: wspomnienia o poecie, ed. Hanna Kirchner (Warszawa: Tenten, 1996).

  64. 64.

    Quoted in Sobolewski, Człowiek, 229.

  65. 65.

    Tadeusz Sobolewski, “Człowiek Miron,” in Miron Białoszewski, Tajny dziennik (Kraków: Znak, 2012), 5-10, on p. 8.

  66. 66.

    Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 143–5, on p. 144.

  67. 67.

    Agnieszka Graff and Elżbieta Korolczuk, Anti-Gender Politics in the Populist Moment (London and New York: Routledge, 2022), 143.

  68. 68.

    Ewa Majewska, Feminist Antifascism: Counter-publics of the Common (London: Verso, 2021), 144–5.

  69. 69.

    Magdalena Chrzczonowicz, “Takiego wyniku jeszcze nie było! Rekordowe poparcie dla aborcji do 12. Tygodnia,” oko.press, 14 November 2022, https://oko.press/rekordowe-poparcie-dla-aborcji-do-12-tygodnia-sondaz-oko-press (accessed 7 May 2023).

  70. 70.

    Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981-82, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 208–9.

  71. 71.

    Foucault, Hermeneutics, 209.

  72. 72.

    Monika Frąckowiak-Sochańska and Maria Zawodna-Stephan, “Uwięzione między lękiem a gniewem? Powstanie i rozpad wspólnoty buntu w czasie protestów kobiet po wyroku Trybunału Konstytucyjnego,” Studia Socjologiczne 1(244), 2022: 9–35.

  73. 73.

    Richard Shusterman, Thinking through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 3.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Humanities, SWPS University, Warsaw, Poland

    Leszek Koczanowicz

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  1. Leszek Koczanowicz
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Koczanowicz, L. (2023). Applications: Everyday Life, the Body, and Strategies of Resistance. In: The Emancipatory Power of the Body in Everyday Life. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44833-1_2

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