DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20448248
Transindividual and Way of Life: Contemporary Movements between Social Reproduction and Political Ecology
by Mariangela Milone
How is political subjectivity configured in contemporary struggles and forms of resistance? Is it still possible to frame practices of claimmaking and processes of subjectivation within the classical nineteenth-century schema, which identifies the party-form and the legal subject as the privileged – if not exclusive – categories through which political demands gain access and expression, as well as through which normative production is articulated? This paper proposes to revisit the perspective of the transindividual, as outlined by Étienne Balibar and Vittorio Morfino and more recently taken up by other scholars – for example within the field of eco-transfeminism – and to bring it into dialogue with Michel Foucault’s work from the 1980s on a specific theme, namely that of the “way of life”. The central thesis is that the notions of the transindividual and the way of life, although stemming from different genealogies, converge in a relational, material, and processual understanding of subjectivity. Together, they make it possible to interpret contemporary political practices as collective processes of constructing new ways of living, in which ecological tensions, transformations of labor, forms of social reproduction, and experiments in coexistence beyond anthropocentrism are condensed. The aim is to engage with the language of contemporary political movements and to grasp the political significance of grassroots practices that assert new modes of subjective composition and new forms of regulation and relationality.
INTERNO POI - 2-2024_finale rivisto-35-62