Is the body political?

Question: I wanted to ask you a question, mainly referring to your old videos. (I apologize for my English in advance, it's not my mother tongue.) What role does the body play when it comes to figuring out what good politics is?

From my personal view (I study law and philosophy in Germany), I tend to follow Hannah Arendt when she argued in Humanity in Dark Times that there is a wrong sense of feeling connected to another person, if one does not strive for a better political system. Better implying that human interactions are more benevolent and enabling. I was also really inspired by Dryden’s essay on the role of vulnerability in Hegel’s and Fichte’s philosophy, so for me, vulnerability does play a key role in understanding and criticizing the law.

Given your background in politics and your current focus, what’s your take?

Response:

First, your English is excellent, and I adore this question.

I absolutely agree that the body is central to politics. Not just metaphorically, but experientially. We encounter law, power, and justice first and foremost through the body: what is allowed, what is punished, what is protected, what is neglected.

Hannah Arendt was famously cautious about reducing politics to empathy or emotion, but I think even she would agree that without an embodied sense of what harms or sustains others, our politics risks becoming abstract, detached from the lived realities it governs.

You mention Dryden’s reading of vulnerability in Hegel and Fichte. I see vulnerability as a political condition. To live in a society is to be exposed to one another and to have needs. And any political system worth defending should be measured by how it responds to that shared precarity.

I’ve come to believe that our relational templates (how we attune, disconnect, repair, or dominate) are rehearsed first at the micro level: between bodies. Power doesn’t only live in institutions. It lives in how we interact with one another.

So yes: I think good politics is not just about ideals or institutions, but about how we treat each other in the smallest of ways. The body reminds us what justice feels like and what its absence costs.

Thank you again for the beautiful ask.