"A body politics"

Four parts make up this work of Michel Onfray. They are respectively entitled: "From real", "From the ideal," "Means" and "Forces". The author it proposes to support the thesis that politics, traditionally defined by the dictionary as "the way to govern a state, to conduct relations with other states," is acceptable only in the context of a libertarian approach that places the individual in the foreground and in a report to the irreducible social body.

Onfray, first citing the example of the concentration camps, shows that Nazi policy is in practice a monstrous human reification company, provided, can not reduce the individuality, in other words the being in its dimension consubstantial with the body: "Crippled boils, bashed by anthrax, the teeming wounds worms, flesh devoured by lice, purple skin, holes that eat the face, robbed by blood vermin, frozen and rotten members, shaved, shaved, forced every day to dance a macabre dance to exhaustion, collapse or even until death finally and permanently invade the body - these extremities, the body a man triumph impregnable place of his humanity. "

Beyond this, he described apocalyptic, the philosopher observes that, despite such lessons of history, politics and contemporary political rather always tend to subject, enter "rebel energies to alter, reduce and then destroy them. " Comparing the mechanics of power, whether that of unbridled capitalism that exists today on a global scale or that of totalitarianism, the Leviathan, which he recalls the etymological sense of "monster of primeval chaos, a kind of snake, says he, capable of swallowing the sun at once, and fomenting eclipses during which witches were throwing their spells, "Michel Onfray advocates a" mystical left "in which he sees less a panacea against hypocrisy and social inequalities caused by such a phenomenon that a decision rooted in individual position towards hedonism perpetuating the principles of Nietzsche's philosophy and radically opposed to the gregarious spirit. Just like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Roger Vailland, Louis Auguste Blanqui, Georges Sorel, Michel Foucault, Bataille or Gilles Deleuze, the man left, according to the author, is an incorruptible man, faithful to the "genius choleric revolution "described by Michelet in the History of the French Revolution I, II and part of the dynamics of an action to complete the May 68.

In this regard, the model proposed by Onfray is that of Condottiere figure of the Italian Renaissance also mentioned in another book by the same author with the title Self-sculpture, which remain in place relating to the virtues and ethics the aesthetics of a whole life focused on vitality, magnificence, whose praxis is based on a radical atheist, libertarian: "Cynics and dandies, libertines and Romantics, by their own act, have structured the ethical temperament Condottiere . To complete the description and complete it with its political dimension, I must say that the counterpoint of this conceptual character assumes the Libertarian, Anarchist least on the old way custodian of this tradition of rebellion in a modern perspective. Diogenes and Baudelaire, Wilde and Carlyle reconciled. "