Bodypolitik

A question:

Who is to blame?!

A series of answers:

1. Politics?

II. Culture?

III. Religion?

IV. Science?

Defining terms:

body politic, n.:

1. A nation regarded as a corporate entity; (with the) the state. Frequently with body contrasted

with the head of state, or used in medical metaphors.

2. Law. A corporation; = body corporate n. Now rare. Such an entity typically consists of a group or

association of persons, but may occasionally consist of a single individual: cf. quots. 1641, 1642, 1952,

and corporation n 3a.

3. Any organized society or association of persons.

Bodypolitik, n.:

1. Hands and feet

2. External appendages

3. Gangrenous limbs

4. Argumentative/polemical gestures of axonic dimensions

5. Diatribes and disputes instead of debates and discourse

6. The fetishization of gesamtbevölkerung/folk culture

7. False comparisons

8. Unshared languages and customs to which we are nevertheless shackled by cultural genetics

9. The romance of the ignorant

10. The sexualization of the violent, morbid, or uncanny

11. The effects of an action applied to a body generations ago, for which, while the instigation

disappears, the results remain

12. The virality of language and the permanence of distortion

13. The societal implications of being not quite something, or too much of it

14. Simultaneity

15. Illusions as correlative or causative events

16. Moral responsibility [and the abrogation thereof]

16. Automobiles, bombs, and films (c.f.: Adorno & Horkheimer)

-Maya Miro Johnson

November 6th, 2020

Written for and premiered by Mekhi Gladden, Fall 2020."