Order and danger: Surfaces of the body politic

Abstract

This essay addresses the notion of public order from the point of view of biopolitics. With that aim, it relates the authoritarian response to social protest with the moral ordering of public space, using the case of the 15-M movement in Spain. Then, it reads the notion of public order as a dispositive, in the Foucauldian sense of the term. Departing from there, it presents a brief genealogical approach to the relations among sexual and racial ordering o public space. Finally, in dialogue with Sarah Ahmed and Mary Douglas, it explores the role of the biopolitics of public order in the constitution and policing of the moral and physical, internal and external borders separating the political community from its various others.