Silvia Federici - Beyond the Periphery of the Skin

In ancient Greek philosophy, kairos signifies the right time or the moment of transition. We believe that we live in such a transitional period. The most important task of social science in time of transformation is to transform itself into a force of liberation. Kairos, an editorial imprint of the Anthropology and Social Change department housed in the California Institute of Integral Studies, publishes groundbreaking works in critical social sciences, including anthropology, sociology, geography, theory of education, political ecology, political theory, and history.

Series editor: Andrej Grubai

Recent and featured Kairos books:

Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons by Silvia Federici

Birth Work as Care Work: Stories from Activist Birth Communities by Alana Apfel

Occult Features of Anarchism: With Attention to the Conspiracy of Kings and the Conspiracy of the Peoples by Erica Lagalisse

Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism edited by Jason W. Moore

We Are the Crisis of Capital: A John Holloway Reader by John Holloway

Archive That, Comrade! Left Legacies and the Counter Culture of Remembrance by Phil Cohen

Autonomy Is in Our Hearts: Zapatista Autonomous Government through the Lens of the Tsotsil Language by Dylan Eldredge Fitzwater

The Battle for the Mountain of the Kurds: Self-Determination and Ethnic Cleansing in the Afrin Region of Rojava by Thomas Schmidinger

Building Free Life: Dialogues with calan edited by International Initiative

For more information visit www.pmpress.org/blog/kairos/

Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism

Silvia Federici

2020 PM Press.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN: 9781629637068

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019933013

Cover image by Silvia Federici (1971)

Cover by John Yates / www.stealworks.com

Interior design by briandesign

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This edition first published in Canada in 2020 by Between the Lines 401 Richmond Street West, Studio 281, Toronto, Ontario, M5V 3A8, Canada

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Printed in the USA.

Beyond the Periphery of the Skin owes its existence to an invitation, in 2015, by the Anthropology and Social Change Department that is housed in the California Institute of Integral Studies, to deliver three lectures on the theme of the body that were then to be published by PM Press. This gave me the opportunity to not only rethink themes that have been central to my work but also to collect in one volume past articles devoted to this subject. My first thanks, then, go to the director of the Anthropology and Social Change Department, Andrej Grubai, and to PM Press.

I also want to thank the women creators of the Free Home University, who participated in a workshop that was held in my home town, Parma, Italy, June 1116, 2019, on the question of the body and social reproduction, with whom I read and discussed the articles forming of this book. I thank especially Gaia Alberti, Sarah Amsler, Edith Bendicente, Carla Bottiroli Greil, Claire Doyon, Daria Filardo, Jesal Kapadia, Aglaya Oleynikova, Alessandra Pomarico, Teresa Roversi, Begonia Santa Cecilia and the Art Lab social center in Parma that generously hosted our workshop.

Thanks also to Jesse Jones, Tessa Giblin, Rachel Anderson, and Cis Boyle, for their friendship, their support and the time spent together discussing body politics and sculpting Sheelagh-na-gigs. Thank you, Jesse, for your powerful Tremble,Tremble (2017), recasting the maternal body for a new political imagination.

Special thanks to Camille Barbagallo, who has edited this work, and to the publications where some of the articles included in the volume have previously appeared.

I also wish to acknowledge the contribution to my work of Feminist Research on Violence, the womens group in New York with whom I conspire to change the world and produce the website that carries this name (http://feministresearchonviolence.org). Thank you for the knowledge, affection, and enthusiasm we share at our meetings, which sustain and inspire my writing.

Finally, thanks to the editors of the books and journals in which some of the articles here collected were first published.

With Philosophy and Terror: Transforming Bodies into Labor Power was previously published in Athanasios Marvakis et al., eds., Doing Psychology under New Conditions (Concord, Ontario: Captus Press), 210.

Mormons in Space Revisited is a remake of an article published with George Caffentzis in Midnight Notes 2, no. 1 (1982): 312.

In Praise of the Dancing Body was previously published in Gods and Radicals, eds., A Beautiful Resistance no. 1 (August 22, 2016): 8386.

On Joyful Militancy is an edited extract from an interview entitled Feeling Powers Growing, published in Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times, eds. Nick Montgomery and carla bergman (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018).

Beyond the Periphery of the Skin was originally devised as a response to the questions generated in the three lectures I gave at the California Institute of Integral Studies in the winter of 2015, on the meaning of the body and body politics in the feminist movement of the 1970s and in my own theoretical work. These lectures had multiple purposes: to stress the contribution that the feminism of the 1970s has given to a theory of the body, now greatly underestimated by new generations of feminists; to acknowledge, at the same time, its incapacity to devise strategies capable of significantly changing the material conditions of womens lives; and to present the framework that I developed in Caliban and the Witch to examine the roots of the forms of exploitation to which women have been subjected in the history of capitalist society.

In this sense, my presentation was a rethinking of the lessons learned from the past. Yet the discussions that followed the lectures raised questions that exceeded the original framework, convincing me to broaden the horizon of my lectures and of this book. Four questions stand out as essential to this current volume. First, is women still a necessary category for feminist politics, considering the diversities of histories and experiences covered under this label, or should we discard it, as Butler and other poststructuralist theorists have proposed that we do? More broadly, should we reject any political identity as inevitably fictitious and opt for unities built on purely oppositional grounds? How should we evaluate the new reproductive technologies that promise to restructure our physical makeup and remake our bodies in ways that better conform to our desires? Do these technologies enhance our control over our bodies or do they turn our bodies into objects of experimentation and profit-making at the service of the capitalist market and the medical profession?