Birth of the State

This book uses the body to peel back the layers of time and taken-for-granted ideas about the two defining political forms of modernity the state and the subject of rights. It traces under the lens of the body how the state and the subject mutually constituted each other all the way down by going all the way back to their original crafting in the seventeenth century. It considers two revolutions. The first scientific threw humanity out of the centre of the universe and transformed the very meanings of matter space and the body; while the second legal and political re-established humans as the centre-point of the framework of modern rights. <p/>The book analyses the fundamental rights to security liberty and property respectively as the initial knots where the state-subject relation was first sealed. It develops three arguments that the body served to <em>naturalise security</em>; to <em>individualise liberty</em>; and to <em>privatise property</em>. Covering a wide range of materials--from early modern Dutch painting to the canon of English political thought the Anglo-Scottish legal struggles of naturalization and medical and religious practices--it shows both how the body has operated as history's great naturaliser and how it can be mobilised instead as a critical tool that lays bare the deeply racialised and gendered constructions that made the state and the subject of rights. The book returns to the origins of constructivist and constitutive theorising to reclaim their radical and critical potential.<br>