Vivir el cuerpo como un don

Abstract

Today, in the times of the end of the patriarchy, the meaning of the body is changing quickly precisely because the patriarchy has ended, which was a power system that presented the father as the true author of bodies, usurping them from their evident author, the mother. The usurpation, which before would take place through nothing more than power, takes place through the force of the law, the law that sustains the political power and is sustained by the same. But the feminists of the last third of the twentieth century said "My body is mine", and thus began a revolution that has put democracy itself into crisis. I think that, in the present, it is important to work out and make into politics the buried conflict between democracy and the mother about the authorship and political value of the human body. Because the body is a gift from the mother. It is, then, of the one who receives it, that is, of each human being that is born and remains to live in the world. It is not of the State nor of the one who has power in a family or a land. It is a gift that is inseparably joined to the gift of language. It is in language -in the language of the media, in legislative and judicial texts- where today the political conflict between the State and the mother about the authorship of bodies is being played out. And it is in language where this conflict can become political, that is, spoken, not violent. If as women we speak and try to do so in the mother tongue, not in the language of power. The gift of the body from the mother is the beginning of the human being and it is the beginning of another economy and another politics. It is a gift that each mother hands over to the economy of the infinite (which is different to globalisation) and to the politics of language, not to the economy of money or the politics of power. By economy of the infinite I understand the practices of production, distribution and consumption given over to serving the eternal needs of the body and the eternal needs of the soul, without underestimating profit and without putting it in the place of God. By politics of language or politics of the symbolic I understand (with others) the work of the words in search of meaning, both of the work that they do in me and that which I do with them, alone or shared, in order to say the reality that is changing, without underestimating the human ambition for power and without putting it in the place of the relationship with the mother.