The Body, Art, and Power: From Historical Representations of the Body to Crimes of the Future
A Philosophical-Hermeneutic Approach
DOI :
https://doi.org/10.36602/faj.2026.n22.10Keywords:
Body, Art, Power, Cultural Resistance, Interpretation of Artworks, Crimes of the FutureAbstract
This article examines the relationship between the body, art, and power, starting from the premise that the body appears in human history not merely as a material entity, but as a symbolic field in which meanings of identity, subjection, and resistance are produced. It seeks to clarify how philosophical, religious, political, and aesthetic conceptions have contributed to regulating the body, while exploring art’s role in representing it and questioning the mechanisms of domination imposed upon it. The study adopts a historical-philosophical and analytical approach, combining examples of bodily representation in ancient civilizations, philosophical thought, and modern art with a hermeneutic reading of David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future. The film is treated as an artistic case that condenses the body’s tensions with power, technology, and social norms. The article argues that art does not exist outside relations of power: it can support institutional order and reproduce normative images, yet it can also create possibilities for resistance and for reconfiguring the meaning of the body. Artistic resistance, however, does not secure absolute liberation; rather, it opens a contested space in which the body reasserts its presence, exposes the instability of imposed norms, and proposes alternative modes of being in the world.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Salah Eddine Jahid
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